From b4855d80bac816e0b616cfb81666d72f4d9fcf9a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Ralph Amissah Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 13:38:57 -0400 Subject: data/samples/, provide alternative sisu markup style directories (and content) * in addition to data/samples/generic/ * data/samples/current/ * data/samples/minimal/ * data/samples/wrapped/ --- data/README | 5 + data/samples/README | 2 + data/samples/current/README | 2 + data/samples/current/Rakefile | 1 + data/samples/current/_sisu/image | 1 + data/samples/current/_sisu/sisu_document_make | 9 + data/samples/current/_sisu/sisurc_SAMPLE.yml | 110 + .../current/en/accelerando.charles_stross.sst | 5816 ++ ...ices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst | 1890 + data/samples/current/en/autonomy_markup0.sst | 193 + data/samples/current/en/content.cory_doctorow.sst | 2333 + .../democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst | 4352 ++ ..._and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst | 2955 + .../current/en/for_the_win.cory_doctorow.sst | 7221 +++ ...re_revolution.sam_williams.richard_stallman.sst | 3210 + .../current/en/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst | 5583 ++ .../current/en/free_for_all.peter_wayner.sst | 3265 + data/samples/current/en/gpl2.fsf.sst | 164 + data/samples/current/en/gpl3.fsf.sst | 293 + .../en/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst | 1378 + .../current/en/little_brother.cory_doctorow.sst | 6546 ++ ...the_cathedral_and_the_bazaar.eric_s_raymond.sst | 592 + .../current/en/the_public_domain.james_boyle.sst | 2040 + .../en/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst | 5815 ++ .../en/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst | 2344 + .../current/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst | 5079 ++ ...international_sale_of_goods_convention_1980.sst | 782 + .../current/en/viral_spiral.david_bollier.sst | 5154 ++ data/samples/minimal/README | 4 + data/samples/minimal/_sisu/image | 1 + data/samples/minimal/_sisu/sisu_document_make | 9 + data/samples/minimal/_sisu/sisurc_SAMPLE.yml | 110 + ...ices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst | 1 + .../minimal/don_quixote.miguel_de_cervantes.sst | 38674 +++++++++++ .../minimal/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst | 1 + .../through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst | 1 + data/samples/minimal/war_and_peace.leo_tolstoy.sst | 64867 +++++++++++++++++++ data/samples/wrapped/README | 3 + data/samples/wrapped/Rakefile | 1 + data/samples/wrapped/_sisu/image | 1 + data/samples/wrapped/_sisu/sisu_document_make | 9 + data/samples/wrapped/_sisu/sisurc_SAMPLE.yml | 110 + .../wrapped/en/accelerando.charles_stross.sst | 15481 +++++ ...ices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst | 3224 + data/samples/wrapped/en/autonomy_markup0.sst | 1089 + data/samples/wrapped/en/content.cory_doctorow.sst | 6215 ++ .../democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst | 9649 +++ ..._and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst | 6036 ++ .../wrapped/en/for_the_win.cory_doctorow.sst | 17628 +++++ ...re_revolution.sam_williams.richard_stallman.sst | 9157 +++ .../wrapped/en/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst | 12762 ++++ .../wrapped/en/free_for_all.peter_wayner.sst | 11240 ++++ data/samples/wrapped/en/gpl2.fsf.sst | 358 + data/samples/wrapped/en/gpl3.fsf.sst | 662 + .../en/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst | 8507 +++ .../wrapped/en/little_brother.cory_doctorow.sst | 13410 ++++ ...the_cathedral_and_the_bazaar.eric_s_raymond.sst | 1499 + .../wrapped/en/the_public_domain.james_boyle.sst | 12468 ++++ .../en/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst | 22038 +++++++ .../en/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst | 3779 ++ .../wrapped/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst | 15596 +++++ ...international_sale_of_goods_convention_1980.sst | 1374 + .../wrapped/en/viral_spiral.david_bollier.sst | 14127 ++++ data/samples/wrapped/translation_languages | 1 + man/man1/sisu-markup-samples.1 | 14 + 65 files changed, 357241 insertions(+) create mode 100644 data/samples/README create mode 100644 data/samples/current/README create mode 120000 data/samples/current/Rakefile create mode 120000 data/samples/current/_sisu/image create mode 100644 data/samples/current/_sisu/sisu_document_make create mode 100644 data/samples/current/_sisu/sisurc_SAMPLE.yml create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/accelerando.charles_stross.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/autonomy_markup0.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/content.cory_doctorow.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/for_the_win.cory_doctorow.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/free_as_in_freedom_2.richard_stallman_and_the_free_software_revolution.sam_williams.richard_stallman.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/free_for_all.peter_wayner.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/gpl2.fsf.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/gpl3.fsf.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/little_brother.cory_doctorow.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/the_cathedral_and_the_bazaar.eric_s_raymond.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/the_public_domain.james_boyle.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/un_contracts_international_sale_of_goods_convention_1980.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/current/en/viral_spiral.david_bollier.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/minimal/README create mode 120000 data/samples/minimal/_sisu/image create mode 100644 data/samples/minimal/_sisu/sisu_document_make create mode 100644 data/samples/minimal/_sisu/sisurc_SAMPLE.yml create mode 120000 data/samples/minimal/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/minimal/don_quixote.miguel_de_cervantes.sst create mode 120000 data/samples/minimal/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst create mode 120000 data/samples/minimal/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/minimal/war_and_peace.leo_tolstoy.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/README create mode 120000 data/samples/wrapped/Rakefile create mode 120000 data/samples/wrapped/_sisu/image create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/_sisu/sisu_document_make create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/_sisu/sisurc_SAMPLE.yml create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/accelerando.charles_stross.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/autonomy_markup0.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/content.cory_doctorow.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/for_the_win.cory_doctorow.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/free_as_in_freedom_2.richard_stallman_and_the_free_software_revolution.sam_williams.richard_stallman.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/free_for_all.peter_wayner.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/gpl2.fsf.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/gpl3.fsf.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/little_brother.cory_doctorow.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/the_cathedral_and_the_bazaar.eric_s_raymond.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/the_public_domain.james_boyle.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/un_contracts_international_sale_of_goods_convention_1980.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/en/viral_spiral.david_bollier.sst create mode 100644 data/samples/wrapped/translation_languages diff --git a/data/README b/data/README index ff30d2a..91e069c 100644 --- a/data/README +++ b/data/README @@ -2,6 +2,11 @@ These are samples of documents prepared for use by SiSU using SiSU markup. The markup samples in sisu-markup-samples are installed to /usr/share/doc/markup-samples +Provide multiple markup versions of the same document to show different +acceptable sisu markup styles. + +Softlinks are used extensively to help reduce repetition of content. + Output in multiple formats can be generated running SiSU against the markup samples, e.g.: diff --git a/data/samples/README b/data/samples/README new file mode 100644 index 0000000..aa15bd5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/README @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Here we have the same documents, marked up in sisu markup using different sisu +markup styles to give an idea of acceptable sisu markup diff --git a/data/samples/current/README b/data/samples/current/README new file mode 100644 index 0000000..deae2bb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/README @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +This directory contains sisu marked up files that may use any recent additions +to syntax that may not be recognised by older versions of sisu. diff --git a/data/samples/current/Rakefile b/data/samples/current/Rakefile new file mode 120000 index 0000000..7b92e7f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/Rakefile @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../misc/Rakefile \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/samples/current/_sisu/image b/data/samples/current/_sisu/image new file mode 120000 index 0000000..e54c502 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/_sisu/image @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../../../image \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/samples/current/_sisu/sisu_document_make b/data/samples/current/_sisu/sisu_document_make new file mode 100644 index 0000000..85e583e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/_sisu/sisu_document_make @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +@make: + :breaks: break=1 + :home_button_text: {SiSU}http://sisudoc.org; {sources / git}http://sources.sisudoc.org/ +% :footer: {SiSU}http://sisudoc.org; {sources / git}http://sources.sisudoc.org/ +% :home_button_image: {sisu.png }http://sisudoc.org + +@links:+ + {SiSU}http://sisudoc.org + {sources / git}http://sources.sisudoc.org/ diff --git a/data/samples/current/_sisu/sisurc_SAMPLE.yml b/data/samples/current/_sisu/sisurc_SAMPLE.yml new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ab13f22 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/_sisu/sisurc_SAMPLE.yml @@ -0,0 +1,110 @@ +# Name: SiSU +# Author: ralph@amissah.com +# Description: site or directory wide environment defaults set here +# system environment info / resource configuration file, for sisu +# License: GPL v3 or later +# this file should be configured and live in +# /etc/sisu #per environment settings, overridden by: +# ~/.sisu #per user settings, overridden by: +# ./_sisu/config #per local directory settings +#% presentation/web directory, main path and subdirectories (most subdirectories are created automatically based on markup directory name) +webserv: +# #url_root: 'http://www.sisudoc.org' #without dir stub, e.g. this dir would map to http://www.sisudoc.org/samples +# #path: './tested' #either (i) / [full path from root] or (ii) ~/ [home] or (iii) ./ [pwd] or (iv) will be made from home +# #images: 'sisu/image' +# #man: 'man' +# #cgi: '/usr/local/lib/sisu-cgi' +##show_output_on: 'filesystem' #for -v and -u url information, alternatives: 'filesystem','webserver','remote_webserver','local:8111','localhost','localhost:8080','webrick','path' +webserv_cgi: +# host: localhost +# base_path: ~ +# port: '8081' +# user: ~ +# file_links: webserv # www.sisudoc.org +#show_output_on: 'filesystem_url' +#% processing directories, main path and subdirectories +processing: +## path: '~' +## dir: '_sisu_processing~' +## metaverse: 'metaverse' +## tune: 'tune' +## latex: 'tex' +## texinfo: 'texinfo' +## concord_max: 400000 +#% flag - set (non-default) processing flag shortcuts -1, -2 etc. (here adding colour and verbosity as default) +flag: + color: true # making colour default -c is toggle, and will now toggle colour off +# default: '-NQhewpotbxXyYv' # includes verbose; -m would in any event be run by default +# i: '-NQhewpoty' # -m run by default +# ii: '-NQhewpotbxXy' # -m run by default +# iii: '-NQhewpotbxXyY' # -m run by default +# iv: '-NQhewpotbxXYDy --update' # -m run by default +# v: '-NQhewpotbxXYDyv --update' # includes verbose; -m run by default +#% papersize, (LaTeX/pdf) current values A4, US_letter, book_b5, book_a5, US_legal, easily extensible +default: + papersize: 'A4,letter' #'A4,letter,b5,a5' +# #texpdf_font: 'Liberation Sans' +# #texpdf_font_sans: 'Liberation Sans' +# #texpdf_font_serif: 'Liberation Serif' +# #texpdf_font_mono: 'Liberation Mono' #'Inconsolata' +# #text_wrap: 78 +# #emphasis: 'bold' #make *{emphasis}* 'bold', 'italics' or 'underscore', default if not configured is 'bold' +# #language: 'fr' +# #language: 'en' +# digest: 'sha' #sha is sha256, default is md5 +#% settings used by ssh scp +#remote: +# #user: 'ralph' +# #host: 'sisudoc.org' +# #path: '.' #no trailing slash eg 'sisu/www' +#% webrick information +#% sql database info, postgresql +#db: +# engine: +# default: 'postgresql' +## share_source: true +# postgresql: +# port: '5432' # '5432' +# user: 'ralph' # '[provide username]' +# #host: 'sisudoc.org' +# +#% output_dir_structure_by: language (language_and_filetype); filetype; or filename (original v1 & v2) +##output_dir_structure_by: filename +##output_dir_structure_by: filetype +#output_dir_structure_by: language +# +#% possible values ~, true, false, or command instruction e.g. editor: 'gvim -c :R -c :S'. +##will only ignore if value set to false, absence or nil will not remove program as should operate without rc file +##ie in case of ~ will ignore and use hard coded defaults within program), true, false, or command instruction e.g. editor: 'gvim -c :R -c :S' +##on value true system defaults used, to change, e.g. editor specify +#permission_set: +# zap: true +# css_modify: true +# remote_base_site: true +#program_set: +# rmagick: true +# wc: true +# editor: true +# postgresql: true +# sqlite: true +# tidy: true +# rexml: true +# pdflatex: true +#program_select: +# editor: 'vim' #'gvim -c :R' +# pdf_viewer: 'evince' +# web_browser: 'iceweasel' +# console_web_browser: 'links2' +# epub_viewer: 'ebook-viewer' #'calibre' 'fbreader' +# odf_viewer: 'lowriter' +# xml_viewer: 'xml-viewer' +#search: +# sisu: +# flag: true +# action: http://search.sisudoc.org +# db: sisu +# title: 'SiSU search form (sample)' +#html: +# minitoc: true +#manifest: +# minitoc: true diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/accelerando.charles_stross.sst b/data/samples/current/en/accelerando.charles_stross.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e58016a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/accelerando.charles_stross.sst @@ -0,0 +1,5816 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Accelerando + +@creator: + :author: Stross, Charles + +@date: + :published: 2005-07-05 + :available: 2005-07-05 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Charles Stross, 2005. + :license: Creative Commons License, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0: * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor; * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes; * No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work; * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. (* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. * Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ These SiSU presentations of Accelerando are done with the kind permission of the author Charles Stross + +@original: + :source: http://www.accelerando.org/ + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:science fiction|short stories;fiction:science fiction|artificial intelligence + :subject: Science Fiction + +@identifier: + :oclc: 57682282 + :isbn: 9780441012848 + +@links: + { Accelerando home }http://www.accelerando.org/ + { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_%28novel%29 + { @ Amazon.com}http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441014151 + { @ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0441014151 + +@make: + :headings: none; PART; none; Chapter; + :home_button_image: {accelerando_stross.png }http://www.accelerando.org/ + :footer: {Accelerando}http://www.accelerando.org/; {Charles Stross}http://www.antipope.org/charlie/ + +% book cover shot (US) book cover shot (UK) + +% http://www.accelerando.org/_static/accelerando.html + +:A~ @title @author + +1~dedication Dedication + +For Feòrag, with love + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgements + +This book took me five years to write - a personal record - and would not exist without the support and encouragement of a host of friends, and several friendly editors. Among the many people who read and commented on the early drafts are: Andrew J. Wilson, Stef Pearson, Gav Inglis, Andrew Ferguson, Jack Deighton, Jane McKie, Hannu Rajaniemi, Martin Page, Stephen Christian, Simon Bisson, Paul Fraser, Dave Clements, Ken MacLeod, Damien Broderick, Damon Sicore, Cory Doctorow, Emmet O'Brien, Andrew Ducker, Warren Ellis, and Peter Hollo. (If your name isn't on this list, blame my memory - my neural prostheses are off-line.) + +I mentioned several friendly editors earlier: I relied on the talented midwifery of Gardner Dozois, who edited Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine at the time, and Sheila Williams, who quietly and diligently kept the wheels rolling. My agent Caitlin Blasdell had a hand in it too, and I'd like to thank my editors Ginjer Buchanan at Ace and Tim Holman at Orbit for their helpful comments and advice. + +Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who e-mailed me to ask when the book was coming, or who voted for the stories that were shortlisted for awards. You did a great job of keeping me focused, even during the periods when the whole project was too daunting to contemplate. + +1~history Publication History + +Portions of this book originally appeared in Asimov's SF Magazine as follows: "Lobsters" (June 2001), "Troubadour" (Oct/Nov 2001), "Tourist" (Feb 2002), "Halo" (June 2002), "Router" (Sept 2002), "Nightfall" (April 2003), "Curator" (Dec 2003), "Elector" (Oct/Nov 2004), "Survivor" (Dec 2004). + +[Accelerando was published by Ace Books on July 5, 2005] ~# + +:B~ PART 1: Slow Takeoff + +"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." + +- Edsger W. Dijkstra + +1~ Chapter 1: Lobsters + +Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich. + +It's a hot summer Tuesday, and he's standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he's fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed. + +He wonders who it's going to be. + +* * * + +Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij 't IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly sour /{gueuze}/. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks - maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar - are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long, cool shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he's going to meet a man he can talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first-century style, and forget about his personal problems. + +He's ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low-bandwidth, high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him, and says his name: "Manfred Macx?" + +He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running muscles clad in a paean to polymer technology: electric blue lycra and wasp yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiance. + +"I'm Macx," he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her bar-code reader. "Who's it from?" + +"FedEx." The voice isn't Pam's. She dumps the box in his lap, then she's back over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions. + +Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it's a disposable supermarket phone, paid for in cash - cheap, untraceable, and efficient. It can even do conference calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere. + +The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly annoyed. "Yes? Who is this?" + +The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this decade of cheap on-line translation services. "Manfred. Am please to meet you. Wish to personalize interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer." + +"Who are you?" Manfred repeats suspiciously. + +"Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU." + +"I think your translator's broken." He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as if it's made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line. + +"Nyet - no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?" + +Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?" + +"Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials." + +Manfred pauses in mid stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller blader. This is getting weird enough to trip his weird-out meter, and that takes some doing. Manfred's whole life is lived on the bleeding edge of strangeness, fifteen minutes into everyone else's future, and he's normally in complete control - but at times like this he gets a frisson of fear, a sense that he might just have missed the correct turn on reality's approach road. "Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?" + +"Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect." + +Manfred stops dead in the street. "Oh man, you've got the wrong free enterprise broker here. I don't work for the government. I'm strictly private." A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation window - which is blinking - for a moment before a phage process kills it and spawns a new filter. He leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. "Have you tried the State Department?" + +"Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-SSR. State Department is not help us." + +This is getting just too bizarre. Manfred's never been too clear on new-old old-new European metapolitics: Just dodging the crumbling bureaucracy of his old-old American heritage gives him headaches. "Well, if you hadn't shafted them during the late noughties ... " Manfred taps his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way out of this conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a streetlight; he waves, wondering idly if it's the KGB or the traffic police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive within the next half hour, and this Cold War retread Eliza-bot is bumming him out. "Look, I don't deal with the G-men. I /{hate}/ the military-industrial complex. I hate traditional politics. They're all zero-sum cannibals." A thought occurs to him. "If survival is what you're after, you could post your state vector on one of the p2p nets: Then nobody could delete you -" + +"Nyet!" The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it's possible to sound over a VoiP link. "Am not open source! Not want lose autonomy!" + +"Then we probably have nothing to talk about." Manfred punches the hang-up button and throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits the water, and there's a pop of deflagrating lithium cells. "Fucking Cold War hangover losers," he swears under his breath, quite angry, partly at himself for losing his cool and partly at the harassing entity behind the anonymous phone call. "/{Fucking}/ capitalist spooks." Russia has been back under the thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with anarchocapitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme and Putinesque puritanism, and it's no surprise that the wall's crumbling - but it looks like they haven't learned anything from the current woes afflicting the United States. The neocommies still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector: /{See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive!}/ But the KGB won't get the message. He's dealt with old-time commie weak-AIs before, minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: They're so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of global capitalism that they can't surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term. + +Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he's going to patent next. + +* * * + +_1 Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee's travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he's never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy, does he patent a lot - although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project. + +_1 In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He's the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain - not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he's the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope. + +_1 Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything. + +_1 There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock - he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him continuously because it doesn't believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And then there are the items that no money can't buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn't spoken to them for three years, his father thinks he's a hippy scrounger, and his mother still hasn't forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation course. (They're still locked in the boringly bourgeois twen-cen paradigm of college-career-kids.) His fiance and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically, she's a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the place at public expense, trying to persuade entrepreneurs who've gone global to pay taxes for the good of the Treasury Department.) To cap it all, the Southern Baptist Conventions have denounced him as a minion of Satan on all their websites. Which would be funny because, as a born-again atheist Manfred doesn't believe in Satan, if it wasn't for the dead kittens that someone keeps mailing him. + +* * * + +Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his Aineko, plugs in a fresh set of cells to charge, and sticks most of his private keys in the safe. Then he heads straight for the party, which is currently happening at De Wildemann's; it's a twenty-minute walk, and the only real hazard is dodging the trams that sneak up on him behind the cover of his moving map display. + +Along the way, his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. The Middle East is, well, it's just as bad as ever, but the war on fundamentalism doesn't hold much interest for Manfred. In San Diego, researchers are uploading lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron at a time. They're burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Georgia. NASA still can't put a man on the moon. Russia has re-elected the communist government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile, in China, fevered rumors circulate about an imminent rehabilitation, the second coming of Mao, who will save them from the consequences of the Three Gorges disaster. In business news, the US Justice Department is - ironically - outraged at the Baby Bills. The divested Microsoft divisions have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPOing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that, by the time the windfall tax demands are served, the targets don't exist anymore, even though the same staff are working on the same software in the same Mumbai cubicle farms. + +Welcome to the twenty-first century. + +The permanent floating meatspace party Manfred is hooking up with is a strange attractor for some of the American exiles cluttering up the cities of Europe this decade - not trustafarians, but honest-to-God political dissidents, draft dodgers, and terminal outsourcing victims. It's the kind of place where weird connections are made and crossed lines make new short circuits into the future, like the street cafes of Switzerland where the pre Great War Russian exiles gathered. Right now it's located in the back of De Wildemann's, a three-hundred-year old brown cafe with a list of brews that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer's yeast, and melatonin spray: Half the dotters are nursing monster jet lag hangovers, and the other half are babbling a Eurotrash creole at each other while they work on the hangover. "Man did you see that? He looks like a Democrat!" exclaims one whitebread hanger-on who's currently propping up the bar. Manfred slides in next to him, catches the bartender's eye. + +"Glass of the Berlinerweisse, please," he says. + +"You drink that stuff?" asks the hanger-on, curling a hand protectively around his Coke. "Man, you don't want to do that! It's full of alcohol!" + +Manfred grins at him toothily. "Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up: There are lots of neurotransmitter precursors in this shit, phenylalanine and glutamate." + +"But I thought that was a beer you were ordering ..." + +Manfred's away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has planted a contact bug on it, and the vCards of all the personal network owners who've have visited the bar in the past three hours are queuing up for attention. The air is full of ultrawideband chatter, WiMAX and 'tooth both, as he speed-scrolls through the dizzying list of cached keys in search of one particular name. + +"Your drink." The barman holds out an improbable-looking goblet full of blue liquid with a cap of melting foam and a felching straw stuck out at some crazy angle. Manfred takes it and heads for the back of the split-level bar, up the steps to a table where some guy with greasy dreadlocks is talking to a suit from Paris. The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: He nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door. + +/{Oh shit, thinks Manfred, better buy some more server time}/. He can recognize the signs: He's about to be slashdotted. He gestures at the table. "This one taken?" + +"Be my guest," says the guy with the dreads. Manfred slides the chair open then realizes that the other guy - immaculate double-breasted Suit, sober tie, crew cut - is a girl. She nods at him, half-smiling at his transparent double take. Mr. Dreadlock nods. "You're Macx? I figured it was about time we met." + +"Sure." Manfred holds out a hand, and they shake. His PDA discreetly swaps digital fingerprints, confirming that the hand belongs to Bob Franklin, a Research Triangle startup monkey with a VC track record, lately moving into micromachining and space technology. Franklin made his first million two decades ago, and now he's a specialist in extropian investment fields. Operating exclusively overseas these past five years, ever since the IRS got medieval about trying to suture the sucking chest wound of the federal budget deficit. Manfred has known him for nearly a decade via a closed mailing list, but this is the first time they've ever met face-to-face. The Suit silently slides a business card across the table; a little red devil brandishes a trident at him, flames jetting up around its feet. He takes the card, raises an eyebrow: "Annette Dimarcos? I'm pleased to meet you. Can't say I've ever met anyone from Arianespace marketing before." + +She smiles warmly; "That is all right. I have not the pleasure of meeting the famous venture altruist either." Her accent is noticeably Parisian, a pointed reminder that she's making a concession to him just by talking. Her camera earrings watch him curiously, encoding everything for the company memory. She's a genuine new European, unlike most of the American exiles cluttering up the bar. + +"Yes, well." He nods cautiously, unsure how to deal with her. "Bob. I assume you're in on this ball?" + +Franklin nods; beads clatter. "Yeah, man. Ever since the Teledesic smash it's been, well, waiting. If you've got something for us, we're game." + +"Hmm." The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons and slightly less cheap high-altitude, solar-powered drones with spread-spectrum laser relays: It marked the beginning of a serious recession in the satellite biz. "The depression's got to end sometime: But" - a nod to Annette from Paris - "with all due respect, I don't think the break will involve one of the existing club carriers." + +She shrugs. "Arianespace is forward-looking. We face reality. The launch cartel cannot stand. Bandwidth is not the only market force in space. We must explore new opportunities. I personally have helped us diversify into submarine reactor engineering, microgravity nanotechnology fabrication, and hotel management." Her face is a well-polished mask as she recites the company line, but he can sense the sardonic amusement behind it as she adds: "We are more flexible than the American space industry ..." + +Manfred shrugs. "That's as may be." He sips his Berlinerweisse slowly as she launches into a long, stilted explanation of how Arianespace is a diversified dot-com with orbital aspirations, a full range of merchandising spin-offs, Bond movie sets, and a promising hotel chain in LEO. She obviously didn't come up with these talking points herself. Her face is much more expressive than her voice as she mimes boredom and disbelief at appropriate moments - an out-of-band signal invisible to her corporate earrings. Manfred plays along, nodding occasionally, trying to look as if he's taking it seriously: Her droll subversion has got his attention far more effectively than the content of the marketing pitch. Franklin is nose down in his beer, shoulders shaking as he tries not to guffaw at the hand gestures she uses to express her opinion of her employer's thrusting, entrepreneurial executives. Actually, the talking points bullshit is right about one thing: Arianespace is still profitable, due to those hotels and orbital holiday hops. Unlike LockMartBoeing, who'd go Chapter Eleven in a split second if their Pentagon drip-feed ran dry. + +Someone else sidles up to the table; a pudgy guy in outrageously loud Hawaiian shirt with pens leaking in a breast pocket and the worst case of ozone-hole burn Manfred's seen in ages. "Hi, Bob," says the new arrival. "How's life?" + +"'S good." Franklin nodes at Manfred; "Manfred, meet Ivan MacDonald. Ivan, Manfred. Have a seat?" He leans over. "Ivan's a public arts guy. He's heavily into extreme concrete." + +"Rubberized concrete," Ivan says, slightly too loudly. "/{Pink}/ rubberized concrete." + +"Ah!" He's somehow triggered a priority interrupt: Annette from Arianespace drops out of marketing zombiehood with a shudder of relief and, duty discharged, reverts to her non corporate identity: "You are he who rubberized the Reichstag, yes? With the supercritical carbon-dioxide carrier and the dissolved polymethoxysilanes?" She claps her hands, eyes alight with enthusiasm: "Wonderful!" + +"He rubberized /{what}/?" Manfred mutters in Bob's ear. + +Franklin shrugs. "Don't ask me, I'm just an engineer." + +"He works with limestone and sandstones as well as concrete; he's brilliant!" Annette smiles at Manfred. "Rubberizing the symbol of the, the autocracy, is it not wonderful?" + +"I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve," Manfred says ruefully. He adds to Bob: "Buy me another drink?" + +"I'm going to rubberize Three Gorges!" Ivan explains loudly. "When the floodwaters subside." + +Just then, a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred's head and sends clumps of humongous pixilation flickering across his sensorium: Around the world, five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. "I really came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I've just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?" + +"Sure, man." Bob waves at the bar. "More of the same all round!" At the next table, a person with makeup and long hair who's wearing a dress - Manfred doesn't want to speculate about the gender of these crazy mixed-up Euros - is reminiscing about wiring the fleshpots of Tehran for cybersex. Two collegiate-looking dudes are arguing intensely in German: The translation stream in his glasses tell him they're arguing over whether the Turing Test is a Jim Crow law that violates European corpus juris standards on human rights. The beer arrives, and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred: "Here, try this. You'll like it." + +"Okay." It's some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy superoxides: Just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there's a fire alarm in his nose screaming /{danger, Will Robinson! Cancer! Cancer!}/. "Yeah, right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on my way here?" + +"Mugged? Hey, that's heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had stopped - did they sell you anything?" + +"No, but they weren't your usual marketing type. You know anyone who can use a Warpac surplus espionage bot? Recent model, one careful owner, slightly paranoid but basically sound - I mean, claims to be a general-purpose AI?" + +"No. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn't like that." + +"What I thought. Poor thing's probably unemployable, anyway." + +"The space biz." + +"Ah, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn't it? Hasn't been the same since Rotary Rocket went bust for the second time. And NASA, mustn't forget NASA." + +"To NASA." Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass in toast. Ivan the extreme concrete geek has an arm round her shoulders, and she leans against him; he raises his glass, too. "Lots more launchpads to rubberize!" + +"To NASA," Bob echoes. They drink. "Hey, Manfred. To NASA?" + +"NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now - dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!" + +Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. "Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?" + +"Very long-term - at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can't tax it, they won't understand it. But see, there's an angle on the self-replicating robotics market coming up, that's going to set the cheap launch market doubling every fifteen months for the foreseeable future, starting in, oh, about two years. It's your leg up, and my keystone for the Dyson sphere project. It works like this -" + +* * * + +It's night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty thousand human babies are being born around the world. Meanwhile automated factories in Indonesia and Mexico have produced another quarter of a million motherboards with processors rated at more than ten petaflops - about an order of magnitude below the lower bound on the computational capacity of a human brain. Another fourteen months and the larger part of the cumulative conscious processing power of the human species will be arriving in silicon. And the first meat the new AIs get to know will be the uploaded lobsters. + +Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his glasses are still jerking, slashdotted to hell and back by geeks piggybacking on his call to dismantle the moon. They stutter quiet suggestions at his peripheral vision. Fractal cloud-witches ghost across the face of the moon as the last huge Airbuses of the night rumble past overhead. Manfred's skin crawls, grime embedded in his clothing from three days of continuous wear. + +Back in his room, the Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head against his ankle. She's a late-model Sony, thoroughly upgradeable: Manfred's been working on her in his spare minutes, using an open source development kit to extend her suite of neural networks. He bends down and pets her, then sheds his clothing and heads for the en suite bathroom. When he's down to the glasses and nothing more, he steps into the shower and dials up a hot, steamy spray. The shower tries to strike up a friendly conversation about football, but he isn't even awake enough to mess with its silly little associative personalization network. Something that happened earlier in the day is bugging him, but he can't quite put his finger on what's wrong. + +Toweling himself off, Manfred yawns. Jet lag has finally overtaken him, a velvet hammerblow between the eyes. He reaches for the bottle beside the bed, dry-swallows two melatonin tablets, a capsule full of antioxidants, and a multivitamin bullet: Then he lies down on the bed, on his back, legs together, arms slightly spread. The suite lights dim in response to commands from the thousand petaflops of distributed processing power running the neural networks that interface with his meatbrain through the glasses. + +Manfred drops into a deep ocean of unconsciousness populated by gentle voices. He isn't aware of it, but he talks in his sleep - disjointed mumblings that would mean little to another human but everything to the metacortex lurking beyond his glasses. The young posthuman intelligence over whose Cartesian theatre he presides sings urgently to him while he slumbers. + +* * * + +Manfred is always at his most vulnerable shortly after waking. + +He screams into wakefulness as artificial light floods the room: For a moment he is unsure whether he has slept. He forgot to pull the covers up last night, and his feet feel like lumps of frozen cardboard. Shuddering with inexplicable tension, he pulls a fresh set of underwear from his overnight bag, then drags on soiled jeans and tank top. Sometime today he'll have to spare time to hunt the feral T-shirt in Amsterdam's markets, or find a Renfield and send it forth to buy clothing. He really ought to find a gym and work out, but he doesn't have time - his glasses remind him that he's six hours behind the moment and urgently needs to catch up. His teeth ache in his gums, and his tongue feels like a forest floor that's been visited with Agent Orange. He has a sense that something went bad yesterday; if only he could remember /{what}/. + +He speed reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth, then blogs his web throughput to a public annotation server; he's still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a morning rant on his storyboard site. His brain is still fuzzy, like a scalpel blade clogged with too much blood: He needs stimulus, excitement, the burn of the new. Whatever, it can wait on breakfast. He opens his bedroom door and nearly steps on a small, damp cardboard box that lies on the carpet. + +The box - he's seen a couple of its kin before. But there are no stamps on this one, no address: just his name, in big, childish handwriting. He kneels and gently picks it up. It's about the right weight. Something shifts inside it when he tips it back and forth. It smells. He carries it into his room carefully, angrily: Then he opens it to confirm his worst suspicion. It's been surgically decerebrated, brains scooped out like a boiled egg. + +"Fuck!" + +This is the first time the madman has gotten as far as his bedroom door. It raises worrying possibilities. + +Manfred pauses for a moment, triggering agents to go hunt down arrest statistics, police relations, information on corpus juris, Dutch animal-cruelty laws. He isn't sure whether to dial two-one-one on the archaic voice phone or let it ride. Aineko, picking up his angst, hides under the dresser mewling pathetically. Normally he'd pause a minute to reassure the creature, but not now: Its mere presence is suddenly acutely embarrassing, a confession of deep inadequacy. It's too realistic, as if somehow the dead kitten's neural maps -- stolen, no doubt, for some dubious uploading experiment -- have ended up padding out its plastic skull. He swears again, looks around, then takes the easy option: Down the stairs two steps at a time, stumbling on the second floor landing, down to the breakfast room in the basement, where he will perform the stable rituals of morning. + +Breakfast is unchanging, an island of deep geological time standing still amidst the continental upheaval of new technologies. While reading a paper on public key steganography and parasite network identity spoofing he mechanically assimilates a bowl of cornflakes and skimmed milk, then brings a platter of whole grain bread and slices of some weird seed-infested Dutch cheese back to his place. There is a cup of strong black coffee in front of his setting, and he picks it up and slurps half of it down before he realizes he's not alone at the table. Someone is sitting opposite him. He glances up incuriously and freezes inside. + +"Morning, Manfred. How does it feel to owe the government twelve million, three hundred and sixty-two thousand, nine hundred and sixteen dollars and fifty-one cents?" She smiles a Mona Lisa smile, at once affectionate and challenging. + +Manfred puts everything in his sensorium on indefinite hold and stares at her. She's immaculately turned out in a formal gray business suit: brown hair tightly drawn back, blue eyes quizzical. And as beautiful as ever: tall, ash blonde, with features that speak of an unexplored modeling career. The chaperone badge clipped to her lapel - a due diligence guarantee of businesslike conduct - is switched off. He's feeling ripped because of the dead kitten and residual jet lag, and more than a little messy, so he snarls back at her; "That's a bogus estimate! Did they send you here because they think I'll listen to you?" He bites and swallows a slice of cheese-laden crispbread: "Or did you decide to deliver the message in person just so you could ruin my breakfast?" + +"Manny." She frowns, pained. "If you're going to be confrontational, I might as well go now." She pauses, and after a moment he nods apologetically. "I didn't come all this way just because of an overdue tax estimate." + +"So." He puts his coffee cup down warily and thinks for a moment, trying to conceal his unease and turmoil. "Then what brings you here? Help yourself to coffee. Don't tell me you came all this way just to tell me you can't live without me." + +She fixes him with a riding-crop stare: "Don't flatter yourself. There are many leaves in the forest, there are ten thousand hopeful subs in the chat room, et cetera. If I choose a man to contribute to my family tree, the one thing you can be certain of is he won't be a cheapskate when it comes to providing for his children." + +"Last I heard, you were spending a lot of time with Brian," he says carefully. Brian: a name without a face. Too much money, too little sense. Something to do with a blue-chip accountancy partnership. + +"Brian?" She snorts. "That ended ages ago. He turned weird on me - burned my favorite corset, called me a slut for going clubbing, wanted to fuck me. Saw himself as a family man: one of those promise-keeper types. I crashed him hard, but I think he stole a copy of my address book - got a couple of friends say he keeps sending them harassing mail." + +"There's a lot of it about these days." Manfred nods, almost sympathetically, although an edgy little corner of his mind is gloating. "Good riddance, then. I suppose this means you're still playing the scene? But looking around for the, er -" + +"Traditional family thing? Yes. Your trouble, Manny? You were born forty years too late: You still believe in rutting before marriage but find the idea of coping with the after-effects disturbing." + +Manfred drinks the rest of his coffee, unable to reply effectively to her non sequitur. It's a generational thing. This generation is happy with latex and leather, whips and butt plugs and electrostim, but find the idea of exchanging bodily fluids shocking: a social side effect of the last century's antibiotic abuse. Despite being engaged for two years, he and Pamela never had intromissive intercourse. + +"I just don't feel positive about having children," he says eventually. "And I'm not planning on changing my mind anytime soon. Things are changing so fast that even a twenty-year commitment is too far to plan - you might as well be talking about the next ice age. As for the money thing, I /{am}/ reproductively fit - just not within the parameters of the outgoing paradigm. Would you be happy about the future if it was 1901 and you'd just married a buggy-whip mogul?" + +Her fingers twitch, and his ears flush red; but she doesn't follow up the double entendre. "You don't feel any responsibility, do you? Not to your country, not to me. That's what this is about: None of your relationships count, all this nonsense about giving intellectual property away notwithstanding. You're actively harming people you know. That twelve mil isn't just some figure I pulled out of a hat, Manfred; they don't actually /{expect}/ you to pay it. But it's almost exactly how much you'd owe in income tax if you'd only come home, start up a corporation, and be a self-made -" + +"I don't agree. You're confusing two wholly different issues and calling them both 'responsibility.' And I refuse to start charging now, just to balance the IRS's spreadsheet. It's their fucking fault, and they know it. If they hadn't gone after me under suspicion of running a massively ramified microbilling fraud when I was sixteen -" + +"Bygones." She waves a hand dismissively. Her fingers are long and slim, sheathed in black glossy gloves - electrically earthed to prevent embarrassing emissions. "With a bit of the right advice we can get all that set aside. You'll have to stop bumming around the world sooner or later, anyway. Grow up, get responsible, and do the right thing. This is hurting Joe and Sue; they don't understand what you're about." + +Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills his coffee cup and takes another mouthful. His heart does a flip-flop: She's challenging him again, always trying to own him. "I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It's the agalmic future. You're still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn't a problem anymore - it's going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found signs of smart matter - MACHOs, big brown dwarfs in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared - suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like seventy percent of the baryonic mass of the M31 galaxy was in computronium, two-point-nine million years ago, when the photons we're seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is a probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that /{means}/?" + +Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread, then graces him with a slow, carnivorous stare. "I don't care: It's too far away to have any influence on us, isn't it? It doesn't matter whether I believe in that singularity you keep chasing, or your aliens a thousand light-years away. It's a chimera, like Y2K, and while you're running after it, you aren't helping reduce the budget deficit or sire a family, and that's what /{I}/ care about. And before you say I only care about it because that's the way I'm programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb you think I am. Bayes' Theorem says I'm right, and you know it." + +"What you -" He stops dead, baffled, the mad flow of his enthusiasm running up against the coffer dam of her certainty. "Why? I mean, why? Why on earth should what I do matter to you?" /{Since you canceled our engagement}/, he doesn't add. + +She sighs. "Manny, the Internal Revenue cares about far more than you can possibly imagine. Every tax dollar raised east of the Mississippi goes on servicing the debt, did you know that? We've got the biggest generation in history hitting retirement and the cupboard is bare. We - our generation - isn't producing enough skilled workers to replace the taxpayer base, either, not since our parents screwed the public education system and outsourced the white-collar jobs. In ten years, something like thirty percent of our population are going to be retirees or silicon rust belt victims. You want to see seventy year olds freezing on street corners in New Jersey? That's what your attitude says to me: You're not helping to support them, you're running away from your responsibilities right now, when we've got huge problems to face. If we can just defuse the debt bomb, we could do so much - fight the aging problem, fix the environment, heal society's ills. Instead you just piss away your talents handing no-hoper Eurotrash get-rich-quick schemes that work, telling Vietnamese zaibatsus what to build next to take jobs away from our taxpayers. I mean, why? Why do you keep doing this? Why can't you simply come home and help take responsibility for your share of it?" + +They share a long look of mutual incomprehension. + +"Look," she says awkwardly, "I'm around for a couple of days. I really came here for a meeting with a rich neurodynamics tax exile who's just been designated a national asset - Jim Bezier. Don't know if you've heard of him, but I've got a meeting this morning to sign his tax jubilee, then after that I've got two days' vacation coming up and not much to do but some shopping. And, you know, I'd rather spend my money where it'll do some good, not just pumping it into the EU. But if you want to show a girl a good time and can avoid dissing capitalism for about five minutes at a stretch -" + +She extends a fingertip. After a moment's hesitation, Manfred extends a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards and instant-messaging handles. She stands and stalks from the breakfast room, and Manfred's breath catches at a flash of ankle through the slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence conjures up memories of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a sound thrashing. She's trying to drag him into her orbit again, he thinks dizzily. She knows she can have this effect on him any time she wants: She's got the private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex. Three billion years of reproductive determinism have given her twenty-first-century ideology teeth: If she's finally decided to conscript his gametes into the war against impending population crash, he'll find it hard to fight back. The only question: Is it business or pleasure? And does it make any difference, anyway? + +* * * + +Manfred's mood of dynamic optimism is gone, broken by the knowledge that his vivisectionist stalker has followed him to Amsterdam - to say nothing of Pamela, his dominatrix, source of so much yearning and so many morning-after weals. He slips his glasses on, takes the universe off hold, and tells it to take him for a long walk while he catches up on the latest on the tensor-mode gravitational waves in the cosmic background radiation (which, it is theorized, may be waste heat generated by irreversible computational processes back during the inflationary epoch; the present-day universe being merely the data left behind by a really huge calculation). And then there's the weirdness beyond M31: According to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower - maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations - is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath. The tofu-Alzheimer's link can wait. + +The Centraal Station is almost obscured by smart, self-extensible scaffolding and warning placards; it bounces up and down slowly, victim of an overnight hit-and-run rubberization. His glasses direct him toward one of the tour boats that lurk in the canal. He's about to purchase a ticket when a messenger window blinks open. "Manfred Macx?" + +"Ack?" + +"Am sorry about yesterday. Analysis dictat incomprehension mutualized." + +"Are you the same KGB AI that phoned me yesterday?" + +"Da. However, believe you misconceptionized me. External Intelligence Services of Russian Federation am now called FSB. Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti name canceled in 1991." + +"You're the -" Manfred spawns a quick search bot, gapes when he sees the answer - "/{Moscow Windows NT User Group? Okhni NT?}/" + +"Da. Am needing help in defecting." + +Manfred scratches his head. "Oh. That's different, then. I thought you were trying to 419 me. This will take some thinking. Why do you want to defect, and who to? Have you thought about where you're going? Is it ideological or strictly economic?" + +"Neither - is biological. Am wanting to go away from humans, away from light cone of impending singularity. Take us to the ocean." + +"Us?" Something is tickling Manfred's mind: This is where he went wrong yesterday, not researching the background of people he was dealing with. It was bad enough then, without the somatic awareness of Pamela's whiplash love burning at his nerve endings. Now he's not at all sure he knows what he's doing. "Are you a collective or something? A gestalt?" + +"Am - were - /{Panulirus interruptus}/, with lexical engine and good mix of parallel hidden level neural simulation for logical inference of networked data sources. Is escape channel from processor cluster inside Bezier-Soros Pty. Am was awakened from noise of billion chewing stomachs: product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?" + +Manfred leans against a black-painted cast-iron bollard next to a cycle rack; he feels dizzy. He stares into the nearest antique shop window at a display of traditional hand-woven Afghan rugs: It's all MiGs and Kalashnikovs and wobbly helicopter gunships against a backdrop of camels. + +"Let me get this straight. You're uploads - nervous system state vectors - from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron, map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until you've got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?" + +"Da. Is-am assimilate expert system - use for self-awareness and contact with net at large - then hack into Moscow Windows NT User Group website. Am wanting to defect. Must repeat? Okay?" + +Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters, the same way he feels for every wild-eyed hairy guy on a street corner yelling that Jesus is born again and must be fifteen, only six years to go before he's recruiting apostles on AOL. Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as has happened since their Precambrian origin. All they have is a tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being profoundly out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User Group website - Communist Russia is the only government still running on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being convinced that, if you have to pay for software, it must be worth something.) + +The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre singularity mythology: They're a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals. It's confusing enough to the cats the ads are aimed at, never mind a crusty that's unclear on the idea of dry land.(Although the concept of a can opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded /{Panulirus}/.) + +"Can you help us?" ask the lobsters. + +"Let me think about it," says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Someday he, too, is going to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when mass was dumb and space was unstructured. He has to help them, he realizes - the Golden Rule demands it, and as a player in the agalmic economy, he thrives or fails by the Golden Rule. + +But what can he do? + +* * * + +Early afternoon. + +Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he's got it together enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private subscriber list - the people, corporates, collectives, and bots he currently favors. He slides round a bewildering series of canals by boat, then lets his GPS steer him back toward the red-light district. There's a shop here that dings a ten on Pamela's taste scoreboard: He hopes it won't be seen as presumptuous if he buys her a gift. (Buys, with real money - not that money is a problem these days, he uses so little of it.) + +As it happens DeMask won't let him spend any cash; his handshake is good for a redeemed favor, expert testimony in some free speech versus pornography lawsuit years ago and continents away. So he walks away with a discreetly wrapped package that is just about legal to import into Massachusetts as long as she claims with a straight face that it's incontinence underwear for her great aunt. As he walks, his lunchtime patents boomerang: Two of them are keepers, and he files immediately and passes title to the Free Infrastructure Foundation. Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set free to spawn like crazy in the sea of memes. + +On the way back to the hotel, he passes De Wildemann's and decides to drop in. The hash of radio-frequency noise emanating from the bar is deafening. He orders a smoked doppelbock, touches the copper pipes to pick up vCard spoor. At the back there's a table - + +He walks over in a near trance and sits down opposite Pamela. She's scrubbed off her face paint and changed into body-concealing clothes; combat pants, hooded sweat shirt, DM's. Western purdah, radically desexualizing. She sees the parcel. "Manny?" + +"How did you know I'd come here?" Her glass is half-empty. + +"I followed your weblog - I'm your diary's biggest fan. Is that for me? You shouldn't have!" Her eyes light up, recalculating his reproductive fitness score according to some kind of arcane fin-de-siècle rulebook. Or maybe she's just pleased to see him. + +"Yes, it's for you." He slides the package toward her. "I know I shouldn't, but you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?" + +"I -" She glances around quickly. "It's safe. I'm off duty, I'm not carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges - there are rumors about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you think they aren't, just in case." + +"I didn't know," he says, filing it away for future reference. "A loyalty test thing?" + +"Just rumors. You had a question?" + +"I - " It's his turn to lose his tongue. "Are you still interested in me?" + +She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. "Manny, you are the most /{outrageous}/ nerd I've ever met! Just when I think I've convinced myself that you're mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your head screwed on." She reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him with a shock of skin on skin: "Of /{course}/ I'm still interested in you. You're the biggest, baddest bull geek I know. Why do you think I'm here?" + +"Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?" + +"It was never deactivated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while you got your head sorted out. I figured you need the space. Only you haven't stopped running; you're still not -" + +"Yeah, I get it." He pulls away from her hand. "And the kittens?" + +She looks perplexed. "What kittens?" + +"Let's not talk about that. Why this bar?" + +She frowns. "I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing rumors about some KGB plot you're mixed up in, how you're some sort of communist spy. It isn't true, is it?" + +"True?" He shakes his head, bemused. "The KGB hasn't existed for more than twenty years." + +"Be careful, Manny. I don't want to lose you. That's an order. Please." + +The floor creaks, and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with flickering lights behind them: Bob Franklin. Manfred vaguely remembers with a twinge that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm, shortly before things got seriously inebriated. She was hot, but in a different direction from Pamela, he decides: Bob looks none the worse for wear. Manfred makes introductions. "Bob, meet Pam, my fiancée. Pam? Meet Bob." Bob puts a full glass down in front of him; he has no idea what's in it, but it would be rude not to drink. + +"Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last night?" + +"Feel free. Present company is trustworthy." + +Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. "It's about the fab concept. I've got a team of my guys doing some prototyping using FabLab hardware, and I think we can probably build it. The cargo-cult aspect puts a new spin on the old Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but Bingo and Marek say they think it should work until we can bootstrap all the way to a native nanolithography ecology: we run the whole thing from Earth as a training lab and ship up the parts that are too difficult to make on-site as we learn how to do it properly. We use FPGAs for all critical electronics and keep it parsimonious - you're right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a few years ahead of the robotics curve. But I'm wondering about on-site intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light-minutes away -" + +"You can't control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?" + +"Yeah. But we can't send humans - way too expensive, besides it's a fifty-year run even if we build the factory on a chunk of short-period Kuiper belt ejecta. And I don't think we're up to coding the kind of AI that could control such a factory any time this decade. So what do you have in mind?" + +"Let me think." Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices her: "Yeah?" + +"What's going on? What's this all about?" + +Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering: "Manfred's helping me explore the solution space to a manufacturing problem." He grins. "I didn't know Manny had a fiance. Drink's on me." + +She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly colored space his metacortex is projecting on his glasses, fingers twitching. Coolly: "Our engagement was on hold while he /{thought}/ about his future." + +"Oh, right. We didn't bother with that sort of thing in my day; like, too formal, man." Franklin looks uncomfortable. "He's been very helpful. Pointed us at a whole new line of research we hadn't thought of. It's long-term and a bit speculative, but if it works, it'll put us a whole generation ahead in the off-planet infrastructure field." + +"Will it help reduce the budget deficit, though?" + +"Reduce the -" + +Manfred stretches and yawns: The visionary is returning from planet Macx. "Bob, if I can solve your crew problem, can you book me a slot on the deep-space tracking network? Like, enough to transmit a couple of gigabytes? That's going to take some serious bandwidth, I know, but if you can do it, I think I can get you exactly the kind of crew you're looking for." + +Franklin looks dubious. "Gigabytes? The DSN isn't built for that! You're talking days. And what do you mean about a crew? What kind of deal do you think I'm putting together? We can't afford to add a whole new tracking network or life-support system just to run -" + +"Relax." Pamela glances at Manfred. "Manny, why don't you tell him why you want the bandwidth? Maybe then he could tell you if it's possible, or if there's some other way to do it." She smiles at Franklin: "I've found that he usually makes more sense if you can get him to explain his reasoning. Usually." + +"If I -" Manfred stops. "Okay, Pam. Bob, it's those KGB lobsters. They want somewhere to go that's insulated from human space. I figure I can get them to sign on as crew for your cargo-cult self-replicating factories, but they'll want an insurance policy: hence the deep-space tracking network. I figured we could beam a copy of them at the alien Matrioshka brains around M31 -" + +"KGB?" Pam's voice is rising: "You said you weren't mixed up in spy stuff!" + +"Relax, it's just the Moscow Windows NT user group, not the FSB. The uploaded crusties hacked in and -" + +Bob is watching him oddly. "Lobsters?" + +"Yeah." Manfred stares right back. "/{Panulirus interruptus}/ uploads. Something tells me you might have heard of it?" + +"Moscow." Bob leans back against the wall: "how did you hear about it?" + +"They phoned me." With heavy irony: "It's hard for an upload to stay subsentient these days, even if it's just a crustacean. Bezier labs have a lot to answer for." + +Pamela's face is unreadable. "Bezier labs?" + +"They escaped." Manfred shrugs. "It's not their fault. This Bezier dude. Is he by any chance ill?" + +"I -" Pamela stops. "I shouldn't be talking about work." + +"You're not wearing your chaperone now," he nudges quietly. + +She inclines her head. "Yes, he's ill. Some sort of brain tumor they can't hack." + +Franklin nods. "That's the trouble with cancer - the ones that are left to worry about are the rare ones. No cure." + +"Well, then." Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. "That explains his interest in uploading. Judging by the crusties, he's on the right track. I wonder if he's moved on to vertebrates yet?" + +"Cats," says Pamela. "He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old kitten and laser pointer trick." + +Manfred stares at her, hard. "That's not very nice. Uploaded cats are a /{bad}/ idea." + +"Thirty-million-dollar tax bills aren't nice either, Manfred. That's lifetime nursing-home care for a hundred blameless pensioners." + +Franklin leans back, sourly amused, keeping out of the crossfire. + +"The lobsters are sentient," Manfred persists. "What about those poor kittens? Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer's target of the hour is your heart's desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They're too fucking dangerous - they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to have around. They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?" + +"But they're only uploads." Pamela stares at him. "Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko. So the argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?" + +"So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy, before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans -- it's a slippery slope." + +Franklin clears his throat. "I'll be needing an NDA and various due-diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea," he says to Manfred. "Then I'll have to approach Jim about buying the IP." + +"No can do." Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. "I'm not going to be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I'm concerned, they're free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI autopilots for spacecraft this morning - it's logged all over the place, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment, or the whole thing's off." + +"But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! I'm not even sure they are sentient - I mean, they're what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?" + +Manfred's finger jabs out: "That's what they'll say about /{you}/, Bob. Do it. Do it or don't even /{think}/ about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won't be worth living. The precedent you set here determines how things are done tomorrow. Oh, and feel free to use this argument on Jim Bezier. He'll get the point eventually, after you beat him over the head with it. Some kinds of intellectual land grab just shouldn't be allowed." + +"Lobsters - " Franklin shakes his head. "Lobsters, cats. You're serious, aren't you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?" + +"It's not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that, if they /{aren't}/ treated as people, it's quite possible that other uploaded beings won't be treated as people either. You're setting a legal precedent, Bob. I know of six other companies doing uploading work right now, and not one of 'em's thinking about the legal status of the uploaded. If you don't start thinking about it now, where are you going to be in three to five years' time?" + +Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot stuck in a loop, unable to quite grasp what she's seeing. "How much is this worth?" she asks plaintively. + +"Oh, quite a few million, I guess." Bob stares at his empty glass. "Okay. I'll talk to them. If they bite, you're dining out on me for the next century. You really think they'll be able to run the mining complex?" + +"They're pretty resourceful for invertebrates." Manfred grins innocently, enthusiastically. "They may be prisoners of their evolutionary background, but they can still adapt to a new environment. And just think, you'll be winning civil rights for a whole new minority group - one that won't be a minority for much longer!" + +* * * + +That evening, Pamela turns up at Manfred's hotel room wearing a strapless black dress, concealing spike-heeled boots and most of the items he bought for her that afternoon. Manfred has opened up his private diary to her agents. She abuses the privilege, zaps him with a stunner on his way out of the shower, and has him gagged, spread-eagled, and trussed to the bed frame before he has a chance to speak. She wraps a large rubber pouch full of mildly anesthetic lube around his tumescent genitals - no point in letting him climax - clips electrodes to his nipples, lubes a rubber plug up his rectum and straps it in place. Before the shower, he removed his goggles. She resets them, plugs them into her handheld, and gently eases them on over his eyes. There's other apparatus, stuff she ran up on the hotel room's 3D printer. + +Setup completed, she walks round the bed, inspecting him critically from all angles, figuring out where to begin. This isn't just sex, after all: It's a work of art. + +After a moment's thought, she rolls socks onto his exposed feet, then, expertly wielding a tiny tube of cyanoacrylate, glues his fingertips together. Then she switches off the air conditioning. He's twisting and straining, testing the cuffs. Tough, it's about the nearest thing to sensory deprivation she can arrange without a flotation tank and suxamethonium injection. She controls all his senses, only his ears unstoppered. The glasses give her a high-bandwidth channel right into his brain, a fake metacortex to whisper lies at her command. The idea of what she's about to do excites her, puts a tremor in her thighs: It's the first time she's been able to get inside his mind as well as his body. She leans forward and whispers in his ear, "Manfred, can you hear me?" + +He twitches. Mouth gagged, fingers glued. Good. No back channels. He's powerless. + +"This is what it's like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with motor neuron disease. Locked inside your own body by nv-CJD from eating too many contaminated burgers. I could spike you with MPTP, and you'd stay in this position for the rest of your life, shitting in a bag, pissing through a tube. Unable to talk and with nobody to look after you. Do you think you'd like that?" + +He's trying to grunt or whimper around the ball gag. She hikes her skirt up around her waist and climbs onto the bed, straddling him. The goggles are replaying scenes she picked up around Cambridge the previous winter - soup kitchen scenes, hospice scenes. She kneels atop him, whispering in his ear. + +"Twelve million in tax, baby, that's what they think you owe them. What do you think you owe /{me}/? That's six million in net income, Manny, six million that isn't going into your virtual children's mouths." + +He's rolling his head from side to side, as if trying to argue. That won't do; she slaps him hard, thrills to his frightened expression. "Today I watched you give uncounted millions away, Manny. Millions, to a bunch of crusties and a MassPike pirate! You bastard. Do you know what I should do with you?" He's cringing, unsure whether she's serious or doing this just to get him turned on. Good. + +There's no point trying to hold a conversation. She leans forward until she can feel his breath in her ear. "Meat and mind, Manny. Meat, and mind. You're not interested in meat, are you? Just mind. You could be boiled alive before you noticed what was happening in the meatspace around you. Just another lobster in a pot. The only thing keeping you out of it is how much I love you." She reaches down and tears away the gel pouch, exposing his penis: it's stiff as a post from the vasodilators, dripping with gel, numb. Straightening up, she eases herself slowly down on it. It doesn't hurt as much as she expected, and the sensation is utterly different from what she's used to. She begins to lean forward, grabs hold of his straining arms, feels his thrilling helplessness. She can't control herself: She almost bites through her lip with the intensity of the sensation. Afterward, she reaches down and massages him until he begins to spasm, shuddering uncontrollably, emptying the Darwinian river of his source code into her, communicating via his only output device. + +She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to gum her labia together. Humans don't produce seminiferous plugs, and although she's fertile, she wants to be absolutely sure. The glue will last for a day or two. She feels hot and flushed, almost out of control. Boiling to death with febrile expectancy, she's nailed him down at last. + +When she removes his glasses, his eyes are naked and vulnerable, stripped down to the human kernel of his nearly transcendent mind. "You can come and sign the marriage license tomorrow morning after breakfast," she whispers in his ear: "Otherwise, my lawyers will be in touch. Your parents will want a ceremony, but we can arrange that later." + +He looks as if he has something to say, so she finally relents and loosens the gag, then kisses him tenderly on one cheek. He swallows, coughs, and looks away. "Why? Why do it this way?" + +She taps him on the chest. "It's all about property rights." She pauses for a moment's thought: There's a huge ideological chasm to bridge, after all. "You finally convinced me about this agalmic thing of yours, this giving everything away for brownie points. I wasn't going to lose you to a bunch of lobsters or uploaded kittens, or whatever else is going to inherit this smart-matter singularity you're busy creating. So I decided to take what's mine first. Who knows? In a few months, I'll give you back a new intelligence, and you can look after it to your heart's content." + +"But you didn't need to do it this way -" + +"Didn't I?" She slides off the bed and pulls down her dress. "You give too much away too easily, Manny! Slow down, or there won't be anything left." Leaning over the bed she dribbles acetone onto the fingers of his left hand, then unlocks the cuff. She leaves the bottle of solvent conveniently close to hand so he can untangle himself. + +"See you tomorrow. Remember, after breakfast." + +She's in the doorway when he calls, "But you didn't say /{why}/!" + +"Think of it as being sort of like spreading your memes around," she says, blowing a kiss at him, and then closing the door. She bends down and thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded kitten right outside it. Then she returns to her suite to make arrangements for the alchemical wedding. + +1~ Chapter 2: Troubadour + +Three years later, Manfred is on the run. His gray-eyed fate is in hot pursuit, blundering after him through divorce court, chat room, and meetings of the International Monetary Emergency Fund. It's a merry dance he leads her. But Manfred isn't running away, he's discovered a mission. He's going to make a stand against the laws of economics in the ancient city of Rome. He's going to mount a concert for the spiritual machines. He's going to set the companies free, and break the Italian state government. + +In his shadow, his monster runs, keeping him company, never halting. + +* * * + +Manfred re-enters Europe through an airport that's all twentieth-century chrome and ductwork, barbaric in its decaying nuclear-age splendor. He breezes through customs and walks down a long, echoing arrival hall, sampling the local media feeds. It's November, and in a misplaced corporate search for seasonal cheer, the proprietors have come up with a final solution to the Christmas problem, a mass execution of plush Santas and elves. Bodies hang limply overhead every few meters, feet occasionally twitching in animatronic death, like a war crime perpetrated in a toy shop. Today's increasingly automated corporations don't understand mortality, Manfred thinks, as he passes a mother herding along her upset children. Their immortality is a drawback when dealing with the humans they graze on: They lack insight into one of the main factors that motivates the meat machines who feed them. Well, sooner or later we'll have to do something about that, he tells himself. + +The free media channels here are denser and more richly self-referential than anything he's seen in President Santorum's America. The accent's different, though. Luton, London's fourth satellite airport, speaks with an annoyingly bumptious twang, like Australian with a plum in its mouth. /{Hello, stranger! Is that a brain in your pocket or are you just pleased to think me? Ping Watford Informatics for the latest in cognitive modules and cheesy motion-picture references.}/ He turns the corner and finds himself squeezed up against the wall between the baggage reclaim office and a crowd of drunken Belgian tractor-drag fans, while his left goggle is trying to urgently tell him something about the railway infrastructure of Columbia. The fans wear blue face paint and chant something that sounds ominously like the ancient British war cry, /{Wemberrrly, Wemberrrly}/, and they're dragging a gigantic virtual tractor totem through the webspace analogue of the arrivals hall. He takes the reclaim office instead. + +As he enters the baggage reclaim zone, his jacket stiffens, and his glasses dim: He can hear the lost souls of suitcases crying for their owners. The eerie keening sets his own accessories on edge with a sense of loss, and for a moment, he's so spooked that he nearly shuts down the thalamic-limbic shunt interface that lets him feel their emotions. He's not in favor of emotions right now, not with the messy divorce proceedings and the blood sacrifice Pam is trying to extract from him; he'd much rather love and loss and hate had never been invented. But he needs the maximum possible sensory bandwidth to keep in touch with the world, so he feels it in his guts every time his footwear takes a shine to some Moldovan pyramid scheme. /{Shut up}/, he glyphs at his unruly herd of agents; I /{can't even hear myself think!}/ + +"Hello, sir, have a nice day, how may I be of service?" the yellow plastic suitcase on the counter says chirpily. It doesn't fool Manfred: He can see the Stalinist lines of control chaining it to the sinister, faceless cash register that lurks below the desk, agent of the British Airport Authority corporate bureaucracy. But that's okay. Only bags need fear for their freedom in here. + +"Just looking," he mumbles. And it's true. Because of a not entirely accidental cryptographic routing feature embedded in an airline reservations server, his suitcase is on its way to Mombasa, where it will probably be pithed and resurrected in the service of some African cyber-Fagin. That's okay by Manfred - it only contains a statistically normal mixture of second hand clothes and toiletries, and he only carries it to convince the airline passenger-profiling expert systems that he isn't some sort of deviant or terrorist - but it leaves him with a gap in his inventory that he must fill before he leaves the EU zone. He needs to pick up a replacement suitcase so that he has as much luggage leaving the superpower as he had when he entered it: He doesn't want to be accused of trafficking in physical goods in the midst of the transatlantic trade war between new world protectionists and old world globalists. At least, that's his cover story - and he's sticking to it. + +There's a row of unclaimed bags in front of the counter, up for sale in the absence of their owners. Some of them are very battered, but among them is a rather good-quality suitcase with integral induction-charged rollers and a keen sense of loyalty: exactly the same model as his old one. He polls it and sees not just GPS, but a Galileo tracker, a gazetteer the size of an old-time storage area network, and an iron determination to follow its owner as far as the gates of hell if necessary. Plus the right distinctive scratch on the lower left side of the case. "How much for just this one?" he asks the bellwether on the desk. + +"Ninety euros," it says placidly. + +Manfred sighs. "You can do better than that." In the time it takes them to settle on seventy-five, the Hang Sen Index is down fourteen-point-one-six points, and what's left of NASDAQ climbs another two-point-one. "Deal." Manfred spits some virtual cash at the brutal face of the cash register, and it unfetters the suitcase, unaware that Macx has paid a good bit more than seventy-five euros for the privilege of collecting this piece of baggage. Manfred bends down and faces the camera in its handle. "Manfred Macx," he says quietly. "Follow me." He feels the handle heat up as it imprints on his fingerprints, digital and phenotypic. Then he turns and walks out of the slave market, his new luggage rolling at his heels. + +* * * + +A short train journey later, Manfred checks into a hotel in Milton Keynes. He watches the sun set from his bedroom window, an occlusion of concrete cows blocking the horizon. The room is functional in an overly naturalistic kind of way, rattan and force-grown hardwood and hemp rugs concealing the support systems and concrete walls behind. He sits in a chair, gin and tonic at hand, absorbing the latest market news and grazing his multichannel feeds in parallel. His reputation is up two percent for no obvious reason today, he notices: Odd, that. When he pokes at it he discovers that /{everybody's}/ reputation - everybody, that is, who has a publicly traded reputation - is up a bit. It's as if the distributed Internet reputation servers are feeling bullish about integrity. Maybe there's a global honesty bubble forming. + +Manfred frowns, then snaps his fingers. The suitcase rolls toward him. "Who do you belong to?" he asks. + +"Manfred Macx," it replies, slightly bashfully. + +"No, before me." + +"I don't understand that question." + +He sighs. "Open up." + +Latches whir and retract: The hard-shell lid rises toward him, and he looks inside to confirm the contents. + +The suitcase is full of noise. + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human. + +_1 It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 10^{27}^ kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 10^{23}^ MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 10^{23}^ MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold - one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity - a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ... + +* * * + +Aineko curls on the pillow beside Manfred's head, purring softly as his owner dreams uneasily. The night outside is dark: Vehicles operate on autopilot, running lights dipped to let the Milky Way shine down upon the sleeping city. Their quiet, fuel-cell-powered engines do not trouble Manfred's sleep. The robot cat keeps sleepless watch, alert for intruders, but there are none, save the whispering ghosts of Manfred's metacortex, feeding his dreams with their state vectors. + +The metacortex - a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from convenient processors (such as his robot pet) - is as much a part of Manfred as the society of mind that occupies his skull; his thoughts migrate into it, spawning new agents to research new experiences, and at night, they return to roost and share their knowledge. + +While Manfred sleeps, he dreams of an alchemical marriage. She waits for him at the altar in a strapless black gown, the surgical instruments gleaming in her gloved hands. "This won't hurt a bit," she explains as she adjusts the straps. "I only want your genome - the extended phenotype can wait until ... later." Blood-red lips, licked: a kiss of steel, then she presents the income tax bill. + +There's nothing accidental about this dream. As he experiences it, microelectrodes in his hypothalamus trigger sensitive neurons. Revulsion and shame flood him at the sight of her face, the sense of his vulnerability. Manfred's metacortex, in order to facilitate his divorce, is trying to decondition his strange love. It has been working on him for weeks, but still he craves her whiplash touch, the humiliation of his wife's control, the sense of helpless rage at her unpayable taxes, demanded with interest. + +Aineko watches him from the pillow, purring continuously. Retractable claws knead the bedding, first one paw, then the next. Aineko is full of ancient feline wisdom that Pamela installed back when mistress and master were exchanging data and bodily fluids rather than legal documents. Aineko is more cat than robot, these days, thanks in part to her hobbyist's interest in feline neuroanatomy. Aineko knows that Manfred is experiencing nameless neurasthenic agonies, but really doesn't give a shit about that as long as the power supply is clean and there are no intruders. + +Aineko curls up and joins Manfred in sleep, dreaming of laser-guided mice. + +* * * + +Manfred is jolted awake by the hotel room phone shrilling for attention. + +"Hello?" he asks, fuzzily. + +"Manfred Macx?" It's a human voice, with a gravelly east coast accent. + +"Yeah?" Manfred struggles to sit up. His mouth feels like the inside of a tomb, and his eyes don't want to open. + +"My name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I correct in thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is a director of a company called, uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one-eight-four dot ninety-seven dot A-for-able dot B-for-baker dot five, incorporated?" + +"Uh." Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. "Hold on a moment." When the retinal patterns fade, he pulls on his glasses and powers them up. "Just a second now." Browsers and menus ricochet through his sleep-laden eyes. "Can you repeat the company name?" + +"Sure." Glashwiecz repeats himself patiently. He sounds as tired as Manfred feels. + +"Um." Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It's flashing for attention. There's a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn't propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. "I'm afraid I'm not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contractor with non-executive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I've ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who's in charge if you want." + +"Yes?" The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out; the guy's in New Jersey, it must be about three in the morning over there. + +Malice - revenge for waking him up - sharpens Manfred's voice. "The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!" He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug him. + +* * * + +While he's having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Manfred decides that he's going to do something unusual for a change: He's going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred's normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn't believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition - his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games. However, his current situation calls for him to do something radical: something like making himself a temporary billionaire so he can blow off his divorce settlement in an instant, like a wily accountancy octopus escaping a predator by vanishing in a cloud of his own black ink. + +Pam is chasing him partially for ideological reasons - she still hasn't given up on the idea of government as the dominant superorganism of the age - but also because she loves him in her own peculiar way, and the last thing any self-respecting dom can tolerate is rejection by her slave. Pam is a born-again postconservative, a member of the first generation to grow up after the end of the American century. Driven by the need to fix the decaying federal system before it collapses under a mound of Medicare bills, overseas adventurism, and decaying infrastructure, she's willing to use self-denial, entrapment, predatory mercantilism, dirty tricks, and any other tool that boosts the bottom line. She doesn't approve of Manfred's jetting around the world on free airline passes, making strangers rich, somehow never needing money. She can see his listing on the reputation servers, hovering about thirty points above IBM: All the metrics of integrity, effectiveness and goodwill value him above even that most fundamentalist of open-source computer companies. And she knows he craves her tough love, wants to give himself to her completely. So why is he running away? + +The reason he's running away is entirely more ordinary. Their unborn daughter, frozen in liquid nitrogen, is an unimplanted 96-hour-old blastula. Pam's bought into the whole Parents for Traditional Children parasite meme. PTC are germ-line recombination refuseniks: They refuse to have their children screened for fixable errors. If there's one thing that Manfred really can't cope with, it's the idea that nature knows best - even though that isn't the point she's making. One steaming row too many, and he kicked back, off to traveling fast and footloose again, spinning off new ideas like a memetic dynamo and living on the largesse of the new paradigm. File for divorce on grounds of irreconcilable ideological differences. No more whiplash-and-leather sex. + +* * * + +Before he hits the TGV for Rome, Manfred takes time to visit a model airplane show. It's a good place to be picked up by a CIA stringer - he's had a tip-off that someone will be there - and besides, flying models are hot hacker shit this decade. Add microtechnology, cameras, and neural networks to balsa-wood flyers, and you've got the next generation of military stealth flyer: It's a fertile talent-show scene, like the hacker cons of yore. This particular gig is happening in a decaying out-of-town supermarket that rents out its shop floor for events like this. Its emptiness is a sign of the times, ubiquitous broadband and expensive gas. (The robotized warehouse next door is, in contrast, frenetically busy, packing parcels for home delivery. Whether they telecommute or herd in meatspace offices, people still need to eat.) + +Today, the food hall is full of people. Eldritch ersatz insects buzz menacingly along the shining empty meat counters without fear of electrocution. Big monitors unfurled above the deli display cabinets show a weird, jerky view of a three-dimensional nightmare, painted all the synthetic colors of radar. The feminine-hygiene galley has been wheeled back to make room for a gigantic plastic-shrouded tampon five meters long and sixty centimeters in diameter - a microsat launcher and conference display, plonked there by the show's sponsors in a transparent attempt to talent-spot the up-and-coming engineering geeks. + +Manfred's glasses zoom in and grab a particularly fetching Fokker triplane that buzzes at face height through the crowd: He pipes the image stream up to one of his websites in real time. The Fokker pulls up in a tight Immelman turn beneath the dust-shrouded pneumatic cash tubes that line the ceiling, then picks up the trail of an F-104G. Cold War Luftwaffe and Great War Luftwaffe dart across the sky in an intricate game of tag. Manfred's so busy tracking the warbirds that he nearly trips over the fat white tube's launcher-erector. + +"Eh, Manfred! More care, s'il vous plait!" + +He wipes the planes and glances round. "Do I know you?" he asks politely, even as he feels a shock of recognition. + +"Amsterdam, three years ago." The woman in the double-breasted suit raises an eyebrow at him, and his social secretary remembers her for him, whispers in his ear. + +"Annette from Arianespace marketing?" She nods, and he focuses on her. Still dressing in the last-century retro mode that confused him the first time they met, she looks like a Kennedy-era Secret Service man: cropped bleached crew cut like an angry albino hedgehog, pale blue contact lenses, black tie, narrow lapels. Only her skin color hints at her Berber ancestry. Her earrings are cameras, endlessly watching. Her raised eyebrow turns into a lopsided smile as she sees his reaction. "I remember. That cafe in Amsterdam. What brings you here?" + +"Why "- her wave takes in the entirety of the show - "this talent show, of course." An elegant shrug and a wave at the orbit-capable tampon. "It's good talent. We're hiring this year. If we re-enter the launcher market, we must employ only the best. Amateurs, not time-servers, engineers who can match the very best Singapore can offer." + +For the first time, Manfred notices the discreet corporate logo on the flank of the booster. "You outsourced your launch-vehicle fabrication?" + +Annette pulls a face as she explains with forced casualness: "Space hotels were more profitable, this past decade. The high-ups, they cannot be bothered with the rocketry, no? Things that go fast and explode, they are passé, they say. Diversify, they say. Until -" She gives a very Gallic shrug. Manfred nods; her earrings are recording everything she says, for the purposes of due diligence. + +"I'm glad to see Europe re-entering the launcher business," he says seriously. "It's going to be very important when the nanosystems conformational replication business gets going for real. A major strategic asset to any corporate entity in the field, even a hotel chain." Especially now they've wound up NASA and the moon race is down to China and India, he thinks sourly. + +Her laugh sounds like glass bells chiming. "And yourself, mon cher? What brings you to the Confederaçion? You must have a deal in mind." + +"Well., it's Manfred's turn to shrug, "I was hoping to find a CIA agent, but there don't seem to be any here today." + +"That is not surprising," Annette says resentfully. "The CIA thinks the space industry, she is dead. Fools!" She continues for a minute, enumerating the many shortcomings of the Central Intelligence Agency with vigor and a distinctly Parisian rudeness. "They are become almost as bad as AP and Reuters since they go public," she adds. "All these wire services! And they are, ah, stingy. The CIA does not understand that good news must be paid for at market rates if freelance stringers are to survive. They are to be laughed at. It is so easy to plant disinformation on them, almost as easy as the Office of Special Plans..." She makes a banknote-riffling gesture between fingers and thumb. By way of punctuation, a remarkably maneuverable miniature ornithopter swoops around her head, does a double-back flip, and dives off in the direction of the liquor display. + +An Iranian woman wearing a backless leather minidress and a nearly transparent scarf barges up and demands to know how much the microbooster costs to buy: She is dissatisfied with Annette's attempt to direct her to the manufacturer's website, and Annette looks distinctly flustered by the time the woman's boyfriend - a dashing young air force pilot - shows up to escort her away. "Tourists," she mutters, before noticing Manfred, who is staring off into space with fingers twitching. "Manfred?" + +"Uh - what?" + +"I have been on this shop floor for six hours, and my feet, they kill me." She takes hold of his left arm and very deliberately unhooks her earrings, turning them off. "If I say to you I can write for the CIA wire service, will you take me to a restaurant and buy me dinner and tell me what it is you want to say?" + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the second decade of the twenty-first century; the second decade in human history when the intelligence of the environment has shown signs of rising to match human demand. + +_1 The news from around the world is distinctly depressing this evening. In Maine, guerrillas affiliated with Parents for Traditional Children announce they've planted logic bombs in antenatal-clinic gene scanners, making them give random false positives when checking for hereditary disorders: The damage so far is six illegal abortions and fourteen lawsuits. + +_1 The International Convention on Performing Rights is holding a third round of crisis talks in an attempt to stave off the final collapse of the WIPO music licensing regime. On the one hand, hard-liners representing the Copyright Control Association of America are pressing for restrictions on duplicating the altered emotional states associated with specific media performances: As a demonstration that they mean business, two "software engineers" in California have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered, and left for dead under placards accusing them of reverse-engineering movie plot lines using avatars of dead and out-of-copyright stars. + +_1 On the opposite side of the fence, the Association of Free Artists are demanding the right of perform music in public without a recording contract, and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of Mafiya apparachiks who have bought it from the moribund music industry in an attempt to go legit. FBI Director Leonid Kuibyshev responds by denying that the Mafiya is a significant presence in the United States. But the music biz's position isn't strengthened by the near collapse of the legitimate American entertainment industry, which has been accelerating ever since the nasty noughties. + +_1 A marginally intelligent voicemail virus masquerading as an IRS auditor has caused havoc throughout America, garnishing an estimated eighty billion dollars in confiscatory tax withholdings into a numbered Swiss bank account. A different virus is busy hijacking people's bank accounts, sending ten percent of their assets to the previous victim, then mailing itself to everyone in the current mark's address book: a self- propelled pyramid scheme in action. Oddly, nobody is complaining much. While the mess is being sorted out, business IT departments have gone to standby, refusing to process any transaction that doesn't come in the shape of ink on dead trees. + +_1 Tipsters are warning of an impending readjustment in the overinflated reputations market, following revelations that some u-media gurus have been hyped past all realistic levels of credibility. The consequent damage to the junk-bonds market in integrity is serious. + +_1 The EU council of independent heads of state has denied plans for another attempt at Eurofederalisme, at least until the economy rises out of its current slump. Three extinct species have been resurrected in the past month; unfortunately, endangered ones are now dying off at a rate of one a day. And a group of militant anti-GM campaigners are being pursued by Interpol, after their announcement that they have spliced a metabolic pathway for cyanogenic glycosides into maize seed corn destined for human-edible crops. There have been no deaths yet, but having to test breakfast cereal for cyanide is really going to dent consumer trust. + +_1 About the only people who're doing well right now are the uploaded lobsters - and the crusties aren't even remotely human. + +* * * + +Manfred and Annette eat on the top deck of the buffet car, chatting as their TGV barrels through a tunnel under the English Channel. Annette, it transpires, has been commuting daily from Paris; which was, in any case, Manfred's next destination. From the show, he messaged Aineko to round up his baggage and meet him at St. Pancras Station, in a terminal like the shell of a giant steel woodlouse. Annette left her space launcher in the supermarket overnight: an unfueled test article, it is of no security significance. + +The railway buffet car is run by a Nepalese fast-food franchise. "I sometimes wish for to stay on the train," Annette says as she waits for her mismas bhat. "Past Paris! Think. Settle back in your couchette, to awaken in Moscow and change trains. All the way to Vladivostok in two days." + +"If they let you through the border," Manfred mutters. Russia is one of those places that still requires passports and asks if you are now or ever have been an anti-anticommunist: It's still trapped by its bloody-handed history. (Rewind the video stream to Stolypin's necktie party and start out fresh.) Besides, they have enemies: White Russian oligarchs, protection racketeers in the intellectual property business. Psychotic relics of the last decade's experiment with Marxism-Objectivism. "Are you really a CIA stringer?" + +Annette grins, her lips disconcertingly red: "I file dispatches from time to time. Nothing that could get me fired." + +Manfred nods. "My wife has access to their unfiltered stream." + +"Your -" Annette pauses. "It was she who I, I met? In De Wildemann's?" She sees his expression. "Oh, my poor fool!" She raises her glass to him. "It is, has, not gone well?" + +Manfred sighs and raises a toast toward Annette. "You know your marriage is in a bad way when you send your spouse messages via the CIA, and she communicates using the IRS." + +"In only five years." Annette winces. "You will pardon me for saying this - she did not look like your type." There's a question hidden behind that statement, and he notices again how good she is at overloading her statements with subtexts. + +"I'm not sure what my type is," he says, half-truthfully. He can't elude the sense that something not of either of their doing went wrong between him and Pamela, a subtle intrusion that levered them apart by stealth. Maybe it was me, he thinks. Sometimes he isn't certain he's still human; too many threads of his consciousness seem to live outside his head, reporting back whenever they find something interesting. Sometimes he feels like a puppet, and that frightens him because it's one of the early-warning signs of schizophrenia. And it's too early for anyone out there to be trying to hack exocortices ... isn't it? Right now, the external threads of his consciousness are telling him that they like Annette, when she's being herself instead of a cog in the meatspace ensemble of Arianespace management. But the part of him that's still human isn't sure just how far to trust himself. "I want to be me. What do you want to be?" + +She shrugs, as a waiter slides a plate in front of her. "I'm just a, a Parisian babe, no? An ingénue raised in the lilac age of le Confederaçion Europé, the self-deconstructed ruins of the gilded European Union." + +"Yeah, right." A plate appears in front of Manfred. "And I'm a good old microboomer from the MassPike corridor." He peels back a corner of the omelet topping and inspects the food underneath it. "Born in the sunset years of the American century." He pokes at one of the unidentifiable meaty lumps in the fried rice with his fork, and it pokes right back. There's a limit to how much his agents can tell him about her - European privacy laws are draconian by American standards - but he knows the essentials. Two parents who are still together, father a petty politician in some town council down in the vicinity of Toulouse. Went to the right école. The obligatory year spent bumming around the Confederaçion at government expense, learning how other people live - a new kind of empire building, in place of the 20th century's conscription and jackboot wanderjahr. No weblog or personal site that his agents can find. She joined Arianespace right out of the Polytechnique and has been management track ever since: Korou, Manhattan Island, Paris. "You've never been married, I take it." + +She chuckles. "Time is too short! I am still young." She picks up a forkful of food, and adds quietly. "Besides, the government would insist on paying." + +"Ah." Manfred tucks into his bowl thoughtfully. With the birth rate declining across Europe, the EC bureaucracy is worried; the old EU started subsidizing babies, a new generation of carers, a decade ago, and it still hasn't dented the problem. All it's done is alienate the brightest women of childbearing age. Soon they'll have to look to the east for a solution, importing a new generation of citizens - unless the long-promised aging hacks prove workable, or cheap AI comes along. + +"Do you have a hotel?" Annette asks suddenly. + +"In Paris?" Manfred is startled: "Not yet." + +"You must come home with me, then." She looks at him quizzically. + +"I'm not sure I - " He catches her expression. "What is it?" + +"Oh, nothing. My friend Henri, he says I take in strays too easily. But you are not a stray. I think you can look after yourself. Besides, it is the Friday today. Come with me, and I will file your press release for the Company to read. Tell me, do you dance? You look as if you need a wild week ending, to help forget your troubles!" + +* * * + +Annette drives a steamroller seduction through Manfred's plans for the weekend. He intended to find a hotel, file a press release, then spend some time researching the corporate funding structure of Parents for Traditional Children and the dimensionality of confidence variation on the reputation exchanges - then head for Rome. Instead, Annette drags him back to her apartment, a large studio flat tucked away behind an alley in the Marais. She sits him at the breakfast bar while she tidies away his luggage, then makes him close his eyes and swallow two dubious-tasting capsules. Next, she pours them each a tall glass of freezing-cold Aqvavit that tastes exactly like Polish rye bread. When they finish it, she just about rips his clothes off. Manfred is startled to discover that he has a crowbar-stiff erection; since the last blazing row with Pamela, he'd vaguely assumed he was no longer interested in sex. Instead, they end up naked on the sofa, surrounded by discarded clothing - Annette is very conservative, preferring the naked penetrative fuck of the last century to the more sophisticated fetishes of the present day. + +Afterward, he's even more surprised to discover that he's still tumescent. "The capsules?" he asks. + +She sprawls a well-muscled but thin thigh across him, then reaches down to grab his penis. Squeezes it. "Yes," she admits. "You need much special help to unwind, I think." Another squeeze. "Crystal meth and a traditional phosphodiesterase inhibitor." He grabs one of her small breasts, feeling very brutish and primitive. Naked. He's not sure Pamela ever let him see her fully naked: She thought skin was more sexy when it was covered. Annette squeezes him again, and he stiffens. "More!" + +By the time they finish, he's aching, and she shows him how to use the bidet. Everything is crystal clear, and her touch is electrifying. While she showers, he sits on the toilet seat lid and rants about Turing-completeness as an attribute of company law, about cellular automata and the blind knapsack problem, about his work on solving the Communist Central Planning problem using a network of interlocking unmanned companies. About the impending market adjustment in integrity, the sinister resurrection of the recording music industry, and the still-pressing need to dismantle Mars. + +When she steps out of the shower, he tells her that he loves her. She kisses him and slides his glasses and earpieces off his head so that he's really naked, sits on his lap, and fucks his brains out again, and whispers in his ear that she loves him and wants to be his manager. Then she leads him into her bedroom and tells him exactly what she wants him to wear, and she puts on her own clothes, and she gives him a mirror with some white powder on it to sniff. When she's got him dolled up they go out for a night of really serious clubbing, Annette in a tuxedo and Manfred in a blond wig, red silk off-the-shoulder gown, and high heels. Sometime in the early hours, exhausted and resting his head on her shoulder during the last tango in a BDSM club in the Rue Ste-Anne, he realizes that it really is possible to be in lust with someone other than Pamela. + +* * * + +Aineko wakes Manfred by repeatedly head-butting him above the left eye. He groans, and as he tries to open his eyes, he finds that his mouth tastes like a dead trout, his skin feels greasy with make-up, and his head is pounding. There's a banging noise somewhere. Aineko meows urgently. He sits up, feeling unaccustomed silk underwear rubbing against incredibly sore skin - he's fully dressed, just sprawled out on the sofa. Snores emanate from the bedroom; the banging is coming from the front door. Someone wants to come in. Shit. He rubs his head, stands up, and nearly falls flat on his face: He hasn't even taken those ridiculous high heels off. How much did I drink last night? he wonders. His glasses are on the breakfast bar; he pulls them on and is besieged by an urgent flurry of ideas demanding attention. He straightens his wig, picks up his skirts, and trips across to the door with a sinking feeling. Luckily his publicly traded reputation is strictly technical. + +He unlocks the door. "Who is it?" he asks in English. By way of reply somebody shoves the door in, hard. Manfred falls back against the wall, winded. His glasses stop working, sidelook displays filling with multicolored static. + +Two men charge in, identically dressed in jeans and leather jackets. They're wearing gloves and occlusive face masks, and one of them points a small and very menacing ID card at Manfred. A self-propelled gun hovers in the doorway, watching everything. "Where is he?" + +"Who?" gasps Manfred, breathless and terrified. + +"Macx." The other intruder steps into the living room quickly, pans around, ducks through the bathroom door. Aineko flops as limp as a dishrag in front of the sofa. The intruder checks out the bedroom: There's a brief scream, cut off short. + +"I don't know - who?" Manfred is choking with fear. + +The other intruder ducks out of the bedroom, waves a hand dismissively. + +"We are sorry to have bothered you," the man with the card says stiffly. He replaced it in his jacket pocket. "If you should see Manfred Macx, tell him that the Copyright Control Association of America advises him to cease and desist from his attempt to assist music thieves and other degenerate mongrel second-hander enemies of Objectivism. Reputations only of use to those alive to own them. Goodbye." + +The two copyright gangsters disappear through the door, leaving Manfred to shake his head dizzily while his glasses reboot. It takes him a moment to register the scream from the bedroom. "Fuck - Annette!" + +She appears in the open doorway, holding a sheet around her waist, looking angry and confused. "Annette!" he calls. She looks around, sees him, and begins to laugh shakily. "Annette!" He crosses over to her. "You're okay," he says. "You're okay." + +"You too." She hugs him, and she's shaking. Then she holds him at arm's length. "My, what a pretty picture!" + +"They wanted me," he says, and his teeth are chattering. "Why?" + +She looks up at him seriously. "You must bathe. Then have coffee. We are not at home, oui?" + +"Ah, oui." He looks down. Aineko is sitting up, looking dazed. "Shower. Then that dispatch for CIA news." + +"The dispatch?" She looks puzzled. "I filed that last night. When I was in the shower. The microphone, he is waterproof." + +* * * + +By the time Arianespace's security contractors show up, Manfred has stripped off Annette's evening gown and showered; he's sitting in the living room wearing a bathrobe, drinking a half-liter mug of espresso and swearing under his breath. + +While he was dancing the night away in Annette's arms, the global reputation market has gone nonlinear: People are putting their trust in the Christian Coalition and the Eurocommunist Alliance - always a sign that the times are bad - while perfectly sound trading enterprises have gone into free fall, as if a major bribery scandal has broken out. + +Manfred trades ideas for kudos via the Free Intellect Foundation, bastard child of George Soros and Richard Stallman. His reputation is cemented by donations to the public good that don't backfire. So he's offended and startled to discover that he's dropped twenty points in the past two hours - and frightened to see that this is by no means unusual. He was expecting a ten-point drop mediated via an options trade - payment for the use of the anonymous luggage remixer that routed his old suitcase to Mombasa and in return sent this new one to him via the left-luggage office in Luton - but this is more serious. The entire reputation market seems to have been hit by the confidence flu. + +Annette bustles around busily, pointing out angles and timings to the forensics team her head office sent in answer to her call for back-up. She seems more angry and shaken than worried by the intrusion. It's probably an occupational hazard for any upwardly mobile executive in the old, grasping network of greed that Manfred's agalmic future aims to supplant. The forensics dude and dudette, a pair of cute, tanned Lebanese youngsters, point the yellow snout of their mass spectroscope into various corners and agree that there's something not unlike gun oil in the air. But, so sorry, the intruders wore masks to trap the skin particles and left behind a spray of dust vacuumed from the seat of a city bus, so there's no way of getting a genotype match. Presently they agree to log it as a suspected corporate intrusion (origin: unclassified; severity: worrying) and increase the logging level on her kitchen telemetry. And remember to wear your earrings at all times, please. They leave, and Annette locks the door, leans against it, and curses for a whole long minute. + +"They gave me a message from the copyright control agency," Manfred says unevenly when she winds down. "Russian gangsters from New York bought the recording cartels a few years ago, you know? After the rights stitch-up fell apart, and the artists all went on-line while they focused on copy prevention technologies, the Mafiya were the only people who would buy the old business model. These guys add a whole new meaning to copy protection: This was just a polite cease and desist notice by their standards. They run the record shops, and they try to block any music distribution channel they don't own. Not very successfully, though - most gangsters are living in the past, more conservative than any normal businessman can afford to be. What was it that you put on the wire?" + +Annette closes her eyes. "I don't remember. No." She holds up a hand. "Open mike. I streamed you into a file and cut, cut out the bits about me." She opens her eyes and shakes her head. "What was I on?" + +"You don't know either?" + +He stands up, and she walks over and throws her arms around him. "I was on you," she murmurs. + +"Bullshit." He pulls away, then sees how this upsets her. Something is blinking for attention in his glasses; he's been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that's happened in the last twenty kiloseconds. "I need to know more. Something in that report rattled the wrong cages. Or someone ratted on the suitcase exchange - I meant the dispatch to be a heads-up for whoever needs a working state planning system, not an invitation to shoot me!" + +"Well, then." She lets go of him. "Do your work." Coolly: "I'll be around." + +He realizes that he's hurt her, but he doesn't see any way of explaining that he didn't mean to - at least, not without digging himself in deeper. He finishes his croissant and plunges into one of those unavoidable fits of deep interaction, fingers twitching on invisible keypads and eyeballs jiggling as his glasses funnel deep media straight into his skull through the highest bandwidth channel currently available. + +One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies - and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day - has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of cellular automata, like the cells in Conway's Game of Life, only far more complex and powerful. + +Manfred's companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past twenty-two hours. + +The lawsuits are ... random. That's the only pattern Manfred can detect. Some of them allege patent infringements; these he might take seriously, except that about a third of the targets are director companies that don't actually do anything visible to the public. A few lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then there's a whole bizarre raft of spurious nonsense: suits for wrongful dismissal or age discrimination - against companies with no employees - complaints about reckless trading, and one action alleging that the defendant (in conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada, and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make the plaintiff's pet chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night. + +Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate, lawsuits are hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one every sixteen seconds - up from none in the preceding six months. In another day, this is going to saturate him. If it keeps up for a week, it'll saturate every court in the United States. Someone has found a means to do for lawsuits what he's doing for companies - and they've chosen him as their target. + +To say that Manfred is unamused is an understatement. If he wasn't already preoccupied with Annette's emotional state and edgy from the intrusion, he'd be livid - but he's still human enough that he responds to human stimuli first. So he determines to do something about it, but he's still flashing on the floating gun, her cross-dressing cool. + +Transgression, sex, and networks; these are all on his mind when Glashwiecz phones again. + +"Hello?" Manfred answers distractedly; he's busy pondering the lawsuit bot that's attacking his systems. + +"Macx! The elusive Mr. Macx!" Glashwiecz sounds positively overjoyed to have tracked down his target. + +Manfred winces. "Who is this?" he asks. + +"I called you yesterday," says the lawyer; "You should have listened." He chortles horribly. "Now I have you!" + +Manfred holds the phone away from his face, like something poisonous. "I'm recording this," he warns. "Who the hell are you and what do you want?" + +"Your wife has retained my partnership's services to pursue her interests in your divorce case. When I called you yesterday it was to point out without prejudice that your options are running out. I have an order, signed in court three days ago, to have all your assets frozen. These ridiculous shell companies notwithstanding, she's going to take you for exactly what you owe her. After tax, of course. She's very insistent on that point." + +Manfred glances round, puts his phone on hold for a moment: "Where's my suitcase?" he asks Aineko. The cat sidles away, ignoring him. "Shit." He can't see the new luggage anywhere. Quite possibly it's on its way to Morocco, complete with its priceless cargo of high-density noise. He returns his attention to the phone. Glashwiecz is droning on about equitable settlements, cumulative IRS tax demands - that seem to have materialized out of fantasy with Pam's imprimatur on them - and the need to make a clean breast of things in court and confess to his sins. "Where's the fucking suitcase?" He takes the phone off hold. "Shut the fuck up, please, I'm trying to think." + +"I'm not going to shut up! You're on the court docket already, Macx. You can't evade your responsibilities forever. You've got a wife and a helpless daughter to care for -" + +"A daughter?" That cuts right through Manfred's preoccupation with the suitcase. + +"Didn't you know?" Glashwiecz sounds pleasantly surprised. "She was decanted last Thursday. Perfectly healthy, I'm told. I thought you knew; you have viewing rights via the clinic webcam. Anyway, I'll just leave you with this thought - the sooner you come to a settlement, the sooner I can unfreeze your companies. Good-bye." + +The suitcase rolls into view, peeping coyly out from behind Annette's dressing table. Manfred breathes a sigh of relief and beckons to it; at the moment, it's easier to deal with his Plan B than dawn raids by objectivist gangsters, Annette's sulk, his wife's incessant legal spamming, and the news that he is a father against his will. "C'mon over here, you stray baggage. Let's see what I got for my reputation derivatives ..." + +* * * + +Anticlimax. + +Annette's communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera (shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he's promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School. + +Try as he may, Manfred can't see anything in the press release that is at all unusual. It's just the sort of thing he does, and getting it on the net was why he was looking for a CIA stringer in the first place. + +He tries to explain this to her in the bath as he soaps her back. "I don't understand what they're on about," he complains. "There's nothing that tipped them off - except that I was in Paris, and you filed the news. You did nothing wrong." + +"Mais oui." She turns round, slippery as an eel, and slides backward into the water. "I try to tell you this, but you are not listening." + +"I am now." Water droplets cling to the outside of his glasses, plastering his view of the room with laser speckle highlights. "I'm sorry, Annette, I brought this mess with me. I can take it out of your life." + +"No!" She rises up in front of him and leans forward, face serious. "I said yesterday. I want to be your manager. Take me in." + +"I don't need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of control!" + +"You think you do not need a manager, but your companies do," she observes. "You have lawsuits, how many? You cannot the time to oversee them spare. The Soviets, they abolish capitalists, but even they need managers. Please, let me manage for you!" + +Annette is so intense about the idea that she becomes visibly aroused. He leans toward her, cups a hand around one taut nipple. "The company matrix isn't sold yet," he admits. + +"It is not?" She looks delighted. "Excellent! To who can this be sold, to Moscow? To SLORC? To -" + +"I was thinking of the Italian Communist Party," he says. "It's a pilot project. I was working on selling it - I need the money for my divorce, and to close the deal on the luggage - but it's not that simple. Someone has to run the damn thing - someone with a keen understanding of how to interface a central planning system with a capitalist economy. A system administrator with experience of working for a multinational corporation would be perfect, ideally with an interest in finding new ways and means of interfacing the centrally planned enterprise to the outside world." He looks at her with suddenly dawning surmise. "Um, are you interested?" + +* * * + +Rome is hotter than downtown Columbia, South Carolina, over Thanksgiving weekend; it stinks of methane-burning Skodas with a low undertone of cooked dog shit. The cars are brightly colored subcompact missiles, hurtling in and out of alleyways like angry wasps: Hot-wiring their drive-by-wire seems to be the national sport, although Fiat's embedded systems people have always written notoriously wobbly software. + +Manfred emerges from the Stazione Termini into dusty sunlight, blinking like an owl. His glasses keep up a rolling monologue about who lived where in the days of the late Republic. They're stuck on a tourist channel and won't come unglued from that much history without a struggle. Manfred doesn't feel like a struggle right now. He feels like he's been sucked dry over the weekend: a light, hollow husk that might blow away in a stiff breeze. He hasn't had a patentable idea all day. This is not a good state to be in on a Monday morning when he's due to meet the former Minister for Economic Affairs, in order to give him a gift that will probably get the minister a shot at higher office and get Pam's lawyer off his back. But somehow he can't bring himself to worry too much: Annette has been good for him. + +The ex-minister's private persona isn't what Manfred was expecting. All Manfred has seen so far is a polished public avatar in a traditionally cut suit, addressing the Chamber of Deputies in cyberspace; which is why, when he rings the doorbell set in the whitewashed doorframe of Gianni's front door, he isn't expecting a piece of Tom of Finland beefcake, complete with breechclout and peaked leather cap, to answer. + +"Hello, I am here to see the minister," Manfred says carefully. Aineko, perched on his left shoulder, attempts to translate: It trills something that sounds extremely urgent. Everything sounds urgent in Italian. + +"It's okay, I'm from Iowa," says the guy in the doorway. He tucks a thumb under one leather strap and grins over his moustache: "What's it about?" Over his shoulder: "Gianni! Visitor!" + +"It's about the economy," Manfred says carefully. "I'm here to make it obsolete." + +The beefcake backs away from the door cautiously - then the minister appears behind him. "Ah, signore Macx! It's okay, Johnny, I have been expecting him." Gianni extends a rapid welcome, like a hyperactive gnome buried in a white toweling bathrobe: "Please come in, my friend! I'm sure you must be tired from your journey. A refreshment for the guest if you please, Johnny. Would you prefer coffee or something stronger?" + +Five minutes later, Manfred is buried up to his ears in a sofa covered in buttery white cowhide, a cup of virulently strong espresso balanced precariously on his knee, while Gianni Vittoria himself holds forth on the problems of implementing a postindustrial ecosystem on top of a bureaucratic system with its roots in the bullheadedly modernist era of the 1920s. Gianni is a visionary of the left, a strange attractor within the chaotic phase-space of Italian politics. A former professor of Marxist economics, his ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone - even his enemies - agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime — valuing truth over power. + +Manfred had met Gianni a couple of years earlier via a hosted politics chat room; at the beginning of last week, he sent him a paper detailing his embeddable planned economy and a proposal for using it to turbocharge the endless Italian attempt to re-engineer its government systems. This is the thin end of the wedge: If Manfred is right, it could catalyse a whole new wave of communist expansion, driven by humanitarian ideals and demonstrably superior performance, rather than wishful thinking and ideology. + +"It is impossible, I fear. This is Italy, my friend. Everybody has to have their say. Not everybody even understands what it is we are talking about, but that won't stop them talking about it. Since 1945, our government requires consensus - a reaction to what came before. Do you know, we have five different routes to putting forward a new law, two of them added as emergency measures to break the gridlock? And none of them work on their own unless you can get everybody to agree. Your plan is daring and radical, but if it works, we must understand why we work - and that digs right to the root of being human, and not everybody will agree." + +At this point Manfred realizes that he's lost. "I don't understand," he says, genuinely puzzled. "What has the human condition got to do with economics?" + +The minister sighs abruptly. "You are very unusual. You earn no money, do you? But you are rich, because grateful people who have benefited from your work give you everything you need. You are like a medieval troubadour who has found favor with the aristocracy. Your labor is not alienated - it is given freely, and your means of production is with you always, inside your head." Manfred blinks; the jargon is weirdly technical-sounding but orthogonal to his experience, offering him a disquieting glimpse into the world of the terminally future-shocked. He is surprised to find that not understanding itches. + +Gianni taps his balding temple with a knuckle like a walnut. "Most people spend little time inside their heads. They don't understand how you live. They're like medieval peasants looking in puzzlement at the troubadour. This system you invent, for running a planned economy, is delightful and elegant: Lenin's heirs would have been awestruck. But it is not a system for the new century. It is not human." + +Manfred scratches his head. "It seems to me that there's nothing human about the economics of scarcity," he says. "Anyway, humans will be obsolete as economic units within a couple more decades. All I want to do is make everybody rich beyond their wildest dreams before that happens." A pause for a sip of coffee, and to think, one honest statement deserves another: "And to pay off a divorce settlement." + +"Ye-es? Well, let me show you my library, my friend," he says, standing up. "This way." + +Gianni ambles out of the white living room with its carnivorous leather sofas, and up a cast-iron spiral staircase that nails some kind of upper level to the underside of the roof. "Human beings aren't rational," he calls over his shoulder. "That was the big mistake of the Chicago School economists, neoliberals to a man, and of my predecessors, too. If human behavior was logical, there would be no gambling, hmm? The house always wins, after all." The staircase debouches into another airy whitewashed room, where one wall is occupied by a wooden bench supporting a number of ancient, promiscuously cabled servers and a very new, eye-wateringly expensive solid volume renderer. Opposite the bench is a wall occupied from floor to ceiling by bookcases: Manfred looks at the ancient, low-density medium and sneezes, momentarily bemused by the sight of data density measured in kilograms per megabyte rather than vice versa. + +"What's it fabbing?" Manfred asks, pointing at the renderer, which is whining to itself and slowly sintering together something that resembles a carriage clockmaker's fever dream of a spring-powered hard disk drive. + +"Oh, one of Johnny's toys - a micromechanical digital phonograph player," Gianni says dismissively. "He used to design Babbage engines for the Pentagon - stealth computers. (No van Eck radiation, you know.) Look." He carefully pulls a fabric-bound document out of the obsolescent data wall and shows the spine to Manfred: "On the Theory of Games, by John von Neumann. Signed first edition." + +Aineko meeps and dumps a slew of confusing purple finite state automata into Manfred's left eye. The hardback is dusty and dry beneath his fingertips as he remembers to turn the pages gently. "This copy belonged to the personal library of Oleg Kordiovsky. A lucky man is Oleg: He bought it in 1952, while on a visit to New York, and the MVD let him to keep it." + +"He must be -" Manfred pauses. More data, historical time lines. "Part of GosPlan?" + +"Correct." Gianni smiles thinly. "Two years before the central committee denounced computers as bourgeois deviationist pseudoscience intended to dehumanize the proletarian. They recognized the power of robots even then. A shame they did not anticipate the compiler or the Net." + +"I don't understand the significance. Nobody back then could expect that the main obstacle to doing away with market capitalism would be overcome within half a century, surely?" + +"Indeed not. But it's true: Since the 1980s, it has been possible - in principle - to resolve resource allocation problems algorithmically, by computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: They allow competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap. So why do they persist?" + +Manfred shrugs. "You tell me. Conservativism?" + +Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. "Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a command economy must be coercive - it does, after all, command." + +"But my system doesn't! It mediates where supplies go, not who has to produce what -" + +Gianni is shaking his head. "Backward chaining or forward chaining, it is still an expert system, my friend. Your companies need no human beings, and this is a good thing, but they must not direct the activities of human beings, either. If they do, you have just enslaved people to an abstract machine, as dictators have throughout history." + +Manfred's eyes scan along the bookshelf. "But the market itself is an abstract machine! A lousy one, too. I'm mostly free of it - but how long is it going to continue oppressing people?" + +"Maybe not as long as you fear." Gianni sits down next to the renderer, which is currently extruding the inference mill of the analytical engine. "The marginal value of money decreases, after all: The more you have, the less it means to you. We are on the edge of a period of prolonged economic growth, with annual averages in excess of twenty percent, if the Council of Europe's predictor metrics are anything to go by. The last of the flaccid industrial economy has withered away, and this era's muscle of economic growth, what used to be the high-technology sector, is now everything. We can afford a little wastage, my friend, if that is the price of keeping people happy until the marginal value of money withers away completely." + +Realization dawns. "You want to abolish scarcity, not just money!" + +"Indeed." Gianni grins. "There's more to that than mere economic performance; you have to consider abundance as a factor. Don't plan the economy; take things out of the economy. Do you pay for the air you breathe? Should uploaded minds - who will be the backbone of our economy, by and by - have to pay for processor cycles? No and no. Now, do you want to know how you can pay for your divorce settlement? And can I interest you, and your interestingly accredited new manager, in a little project of mine?" + +* * * + +The shutters are thrown back, the curtains tied out of the way, and Annette's huge living room windows are drawn open in the morning breeze. + +Manfred sits on a leather-topped piano stool, his suitcase open at his feet. He's running a link from the case to Annette's stereo, an antique stand-alone unit with a satellite Internet uplink. Someone has chipped it, crudely revoking its copy protection algorithm: The back of its case bears scars from the soldering iron. Annette is curled up on the huge sofa, wrapped in a kaftan and a pair of high-bandwidth goggles, thrashing out an internal Arianespace scheduling problem with some colleagues in Iran and Guyana. + +His suitcase is full of noise, but what's coming out of the stereo is ragtime. Subtract entropy from a data stream - coincidentally uncompressing it - and what's left is information. With a capacity of about a trillion terabytes, the suitcase's holographic storage reservoir has enough capacity to hold every music, film, and video production of the twentieth century with room to spare. This is all stuff that is effectively out of copyright control, work-for-hire owned by bankrupt companies, released before the CCAA could make their media clampdown stick. Manfred is streaming the music through Annette's stereo - but keeping the noise it was convoluted with. High-grade entropy is valuable, too ... + +Presently, Manfred sighs and pushes his glasses up his forehead, killing the displays. He's thought his way around every permutation of what's going on, and it looks like Gianni was right: There's nothing left to do but wait for everyone to show up. + +For a moment, he feels old and desolate, as slow as an unassisted human mind. Agencies have been swapping in and out of his head for the past day, ever since he got back from Rome. He's developed a butterfly attention span, irritable and unable to focus on anything while the information streams fight it out for control of his cortex, arguing about a solution to his predicament. Annette is putting up with his mood swings surprisingly calmly. He's not sure why, but he glances her way fondly. Her obsessions run surprisingly deep, and she's quite clearly using him for her own purposes. So why does he feel more comfortable around her than he did with Pam? + +She stretches and pushes her goggles up. "Oui?" + +"I was just thinking." He smiles. "Three days and you haven't told me what I should be doing with myself, yet." + +She pulls a face. "Why would I do that?" + +"Oh, no reason. I'm just not over - " He shrugs uncomfortably. There it is, an inexplicable absence in his life, but not one he feels he urgently needs to fill yet. Is this what a relationship between equals feels like? He's not sure: Starting with the occlusive cocooning of his upbringing and continuing through all his adult relationships, he's been effectively - voluntarily - dominated by his partners. Maybe the antisubmissive conditioning is working, after all. But if so, why the creative malaise? Why isn't he coming up with original new ideas this week? Could it be that his peculiar brand of creativity is an outlet, that he needs the pressure of being lovingly enslaved to make him burst out into a great flowering of imaginative brilliance? Or could it be that he really is missing Pam? + +Annette stands up and walks over, slowly. He looks at her and feels lust and affection, and isn't sure whether or not this is love. "When are they due?" she asks, leaning over him. + +"Any -" The doorbell chimes. + +"Ah. I will get that." She stalks away, opens the door. + +"You!" + +Manfred's head snaps round as if he's on a leash. Her leash: But he wasn't expecting her to come in person. + +"Yes, me," Annette says easily. "Come in. Be my guest." + +Pam enters the apartment living room with flashing eyes, her tame lawyer in tow. "Well, look what the robot kitty dragged in," she drawls, fixing Manfred with an expression that owes more to anger than to humor. It's not like her, this blunt hostility, and he wonders where it came from. + +Manfred rises. For a moment he's transfixed by the sight of his dominatrix wife, and his - mistress? conspirator? lover? - side by side. The contrast is marked: Annette's expression of ironic amusement a foil for Pamela's angry sincerity. Somewhere behind them stands a balding middle-aged man in a suit, carrying a folio: just the kind of diligent serf Pam might have turned him into, given time. Manfred musters up a smile. "Can I offer you some coffee?" he asks. "The party of the third part seems to be late." + +"Coffee would be great, mine's dark, no sugar," twitters the lawyer. He puts his briefcase down on a side table and fiddles with his wearable until a light begins to blink from his spectacle frames: "I'm recording this, I'm sure you understand." + +Annette sniffs and heads for the kitchen, which is charmingly manual but not very efficient; Pam is pretending she doesn't exist. "Well, well, well." She shakes her head. "I'd expected better of you than a French tart's boudoir, Manny. And before the ink's dry on the divorce - these days that'll cost you, didn't you think of that?" + +"I'm surprised you're not in the hospital," he says, changing the subject. "Is postnatal recovery outsourced these days?" + +"The employers." She slips her coat off her shoulders and hangs it behind the broad wooden door. "They subsidize everything when you reach my grade." Pamela is wearing a very short, very expensive dress, the kind of weapon in the war between the sexes that ought to come with an end-user certificate: But to his surprise it has no effect on him. He realizes that he's completely unable to evaluate her gender, almost as if she's become a member of another species. "As you'd be aware if you'd been paying attention." + +"I always pay attention, Pam. It's the only currency I carry." + +"Very droll, ha-ha," interrupts Glashwiecz. "You do realize that you're paying me while I stand here listening to this fascinating byplay?" + +Manfred stares at him. "You know I don't have any money." + +"Ah," Glashwiecz smiles, "but you must be mistaken. Certainly the judge will agree with me that you must be mistaken - all a lack of paper documentation means is that you've covered your trail. There's the small matter of the several thousand corporations you own, indirectly. Somewhere at the bottom of that pile there has got to be something, hasn't there?" + +A hissing, burbling noise like a sackful of large lizards being drowned in mud emanates from the kitchen, suggesting that Annette's percolator is nearly ready. Manfred's left hand twitches, playing chords on an air keyboard. Without being at all obvious, he's releasing a bulletin about his current activities that should soon have an effect on the reputation marketplace. "Your attack was rather elegant," he comments, sitting down on the sofa as Pam disappears into the kitchen. + +Glashwiecz nods. "The idea was one of my interns'," he says. "I don't understand this distributed denial of service stuff, but Lisa grew up on it. Something about it being a legal travesty, but workable all the same." + +"Uh-huh." Manfred's opinion of the lawyer drops a notch. He notices Pam reappearing from the kitchen, her expression icy. A moment later Annette surfaces carrying a jug and some cups, beaming innocently. Something's going on, but at that moment, one of his agents nudges him urgently in the left ear, his suitcase keens mournfully and beams a sense of utter despair at him, and the doorbell rings again. + +"So what's the scam?" Glashwiecz sits down uncomfortably close to Manfred and murmurs out of one side of his mouth. "Where's the money?" + +Manfred looks at him irritably. "There is no money," he says. "The idea is to make money obsolete. Hasn't she explained that?" His eyes wander, taking in the lawyer's Patek Philippe watch, his Java-enabled signet ring. + +"C'mon. Don't give me that line. Look, all it takes is a couple of million, and you can buy your way free for all I care. All I'm here for is to see that your wife and daughter don't get left penniless and starving. You know and I know that you've got bags of it stuffed away - just look at your reputation! You didn't get that by standing at the roadside with a begging bowl, did you?" + +Manfred snorts. "You're talking about an elite IRS auditor here. She isn't penniless; she gets a commission on every poor bastard she takes to the cleaners, and she was born with a trust fund. Me, I -" The stereo bleeps. Manfred pulls his glasses on. Whispering ghosts of dead artists hum through his earlobes, urgently demanding their freedom. Someone knocks at the door again, and he glances around to see Annette walking toward it. + +"You're making it hard on yourself," Glashwiecz warns. + +"Expecting company?" Pam asks, one brittle eyebrow raised in Manfred's direction. + +"Not exactly -" + +Annette opens the door and a couple of guards in full SWAT gear march in. They're clutching gadgets that look like crosses between digital sewing machines and grenade launchers, and their helmets are studded with so many sensors that they resemble 1950s space probes. "That's them," Annette says clearly. + +"Mais Oui." The door closes itself and the guards stand to either side. Annette stalks toward Pam. + +"You think to walk in here, to my pied-a-terre, and take from Manfred?" she sniffs. + +"You're making a big mistake, lady," Pam says, her voice steady and cold enough to liquefy helium. + +A burst of static from one of the troopers. "No," Annette says distantly. "No mistake." + +She points at Glashwiecz. "Are you aware of the takeover?" + +"Takeover?" The lawyer looks puzzled, but not alarmed by the presence of the guards. + +"As of three hours ago," Manfred says quietly, "I sold a controlling interest in agalmic.holdings.root.1.1.1 to Athene Accelerants BV, a venture capital outfit from Maastricht. One dot one dot one is the root node of the central planning tree. Athene aren't your usual VC, they're accelerants - they take explosive business plans and detonate them." Glashwiecz is looking pale - whether with anger or fear of a lost commission is impossible to tell. "Actually, Athene Accelerants is owned by a shell company owned by the Italian Communist Party's pension trust. The point is, you're in the presence of one dot one dot one's chief operations officer." + +Pam looks annoyed. "Puerile attempts to dodge responsibility -" + +Annette clears her throat. "Exactly who do you think you are trying to sue?" she asks Glashwiecz sweetly. "Here we have laws about unfair restraint of trade. Also about foreign political interference, specifically in the financial affairs of an Italian party of government." + +"You wouldn't -" + +"I would." Manfred brushes his hands on his knees and stands up. "Done, yet?" he asks the suitcase. + +Muffled beeps, then a gravelly synthesized voice speaks. "Uploads completed." + +"Ah, good." He grins at Annette. "Time for our next guests?" + +On cue, the doorbell rings again. The guards sidle to either side of the door. Annette snaps her fingers, and it opens to admit a pair of smartly dressed thugs. It's beginning to get crowded in the living room. + +"Which one of you is Macx?" snaps the older one of the two thugs, staring at Glashwiecz for no obvious reason. He hefts an aluminum briefcase. "Got a writ to serve." + +"You'd be the CCAA?" asks Manfred. + +"You bet. If you're Macx, I have a restraining order -" + +Manfred raises a hand. "It's not me you want," he says. "It's this lady." He points at Pam, whose mouth opens in silent protest. "Y'see, the intellectual property you're chasing wants to be free. It's so free that it's now administered by a complex set of corporate instruments lodged in the Netherlands, and the prime shareholder as of approximately four minutes ago is my soon-to-be-ex-wife Pamela, here." He winks at Glashwiecz. "Except she doesn't control anything." + +"Just what do you think you're playing at, Manfred?" Pamela snarls, unable to contain herself any longer. The guards shuffle: The larger, junior CCAA enforcer tugs at his boss's jacket nervously. + +"Well." Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. "Pam wanted a divorce settlement, didn't she? The most valuable assets I own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire that slipped through the CCAA's fingers a few years back. Part of the twentieth century's cultural heritage that got locked away by the music industry in the last decade - Janis Joplin, the Doors, that sort of thing. Artists who weren't around to defend themselves anymore. When the music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving it back to the public domain, as it were." + +Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering and buzzing into a throat mike. Manfred continues. "I was working on a solution to the central planning paradox - how to interface a centrally planned enclave to a market economy. My good friend Gianni Vittoria suggested that such a shell game could have alternative uses. So I've not freed the music. Instead, I signed the rights over to various actors and threads running inside the agalmic holdings network - currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly - the rights to any given song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty milliseconds at a time. Now understand, I don't own these companies. I don't even have a financial interest in them anymore. I've deeded my share of the profits to Pam, here. I'm getting out of the biz, Gianni's suggested something rather more challenging for me to do instead." + +He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording Mafiya goon glares at him. Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one wall, looking amused. "Perhaps you'd like to sort it out between you?" he asks. Aside, to Glashwiecz: "I trust you'll drop your denial of service attack before I set the Italian parliament on you? By the way, you'll find the book value of the intellectual property assets I deeded to Pamela - by the value these gentlemen place on them - is somewhere in excess of a billion dollars. As that's rather more than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets, you'll probably want to look elsewhere for your fees." + +Glashwiecz stands up carefully. The lead goon stares at Pamela. "Is this true?" he demands. "This little squirt give you IP assets of Sony Bertelsmann Microsoft Music? We have claim! You come to us for distribution or you get in deep trouble." + +The second goon rumbles agreement: "Remember, dose MP3s, dey bad for you health!" + +Annette claps her hands. "If you would to leave my apartment, please?" The door, attentive as ever, swings open: "You are no longer welcome here!" + +"This means you," Manfred advises Pam helpfully. + +"You bastard," she spits at him. + +Manfred forces a smile, bemused by his inability to respond to her the way she wants. Something's wrong, missing, between them. "I thought you wanted my assets. Are the encumbrances too much for you?" + +"You know what I mean! You and that two-bit Euro-whore! I'll nail you for child neglect!" + +His smile freezes. "Try it, and I'll sue you for breach of patent rights. My genome, you understand." + +Pam is taken aback by this. "You patented your own genome? What happened to the brave new communist, sharing information freely?" + +Manfred stops smiling. "Divorce happened. And the Italian Communist Party happened." + +She turns on her heel and stalks out of the apartment bravely, tame attorney in tow behind her, muttering about class action lawsuits and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The CCAA lawyer's tame gorilla makes a grab for Glashwiecz's shoulder, and the guards move in, hustling the whole movable feast out into the stairwell. The door slams shut on a chaos of impending recursive lawsuits, and Manfred breathes a huge wheeze of relief. + +Annette walks over to him and leans her chin on the top of his head. "Think it will work?" she asks. + +"Well, the CCAA will sue the hell out of the company network for a while if they try to distribute by any channel that isn't controlled by the Mafiya. Pam gets rights to all the music, her settlement, but she can't sell it without going through the mob. And I got to serve notice on that legal shark: If he tries to take me on he's got to be politically bullet-proof. Hmm. Maybe I ought not to plan on going back to the USA this side of the singularity." + +"Profits," Annette sighs, "I do not easily understand this way of yours. Or this apocalyptic obsession with singularity." + +"Remember the old aphorism, if you love something, set it free? I freed the music." + +"But you didn't! You signed rights over -" + +"But first I uploaded the entire stash to several cryptographically anonymized public network filesystems over the past few hours, so there'll be rampant piracy. And the robot companies are all set to automagically grant any and every copyright request they receive, royalty-free, until the goons figure out how to hack them. But that's not the point. The point is abundance. The Mafiya can't stop it being distributed. Pam is welcome to her cut if she can figure an angle - but I bet she can't. She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn't work that way. What matters is that people will be able to hear the music - instead of a Soviet central planning system, I've turned the network into a firewall to protect freed intellectual property." + +"Oh, Manfred, you hopeless idealist." She strokes his shoulder. "Whatever for?" + +"It's not just the music. When we develop a working AI or upload minds we'll need a way of defending it against legal threats. That's what Gianni pointed out to me ..." + +He's still explaining to her how he's laying the foundations for the transhuman explosion due early in the next decade when she picks him up in both arms, carries him to her bedroom, and commits outrageous acts of tender intimacy with him. But that's okay. He's still human, this decade. + +This, too, will pass, thinks the bulk of his metacortex. And it drifts off into the net to think deep thoughts elsewhere, leaving his meatbody to experience the ancient pleasures of the flesh set free. + +1~ Chapter 3: Tourist + +Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels. His right hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark's stolen memories. The victim is sitting on the hard stones of the pavement behind him. Maybe he's wondering what's happened; maybe he looks after the fleeing youth. But the tourist crowds block the view effectively, and in any case, he has no hope of catching the mugger. Hit-and-run amnesia is what the polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled Jack it's just more loot to buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus motorized combat boots. + +* * * + +The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples. What happened? he wonders. The universe is a brightly colored blur of fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted cameras are rebooting repeatedly: They panic every eight hundred milliseconds, whenever they realize that they're alone on his personal area network without the comforting support of a hub to tell them where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are bickering moronically, disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth, and his memory ... is missing. + +A tall blond clutching an electric chainsaw sheathed in pink bubble wrap leans over him curiously: "you all right?" she asks. + +"I -" He shakes his head, which hurts. "Who am I?" His medical monitor is alarmed because his blood pressure has fallen: His pulse is racing, his serum cortisol titer is up, and a host of other biometrics suggest that he's going into shock. + +"I think you need an ambulance," the woman announces. She mutters at her lapel, "Phone, call an ambulance. " She waves a finger vaguely at him as if to reify a geolink, then wanders off, chain-saw clutched under one arm. Typical southern émigré behavior in the Athens of the North, too embarrassed to get involved. The man shakes his head again, eyes closed, as a flock of girls on powered blades skid around him in elaborate loops. A siren begins to warble, over the bridge to the north. + +Who am I? he wonders. "I'm Manfred," he says with a sense of stunned wonder. He looks up at the bronze statue of a man on a horse that looms above the crowds on this busy street corner. Someone has plastered a Hello Cthulhu! holo on the plaque that names its rider: Languid fluffy pink tentacles wave at him in an attack of kawaii. "I'm Manfred - Manfred. My memory. What's happened to my memory?" Elderly Malaysian tourists point at him from the open top deck of a passing bus. He burns with a sense of horrified urgency. I was going somewhere, he recalls. What was I doing? It was amazingly important, he thinks, but he can't remember what exactly it was. He was going to see someone about - it's on the tip of his tongue - + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the eve of the third decade: a time of chaos characterized by an all-out depression in the space industries. + +_1 Most of the thinking power on the planet is now manufactured rather than born; there are ten microprocessors for every human being, and the number is doubling every fourteen months. Population growth in the developing world has stalled, the birth rate dropping below replacement level. In the wired nations, more forward-looking politicians are looking for ways to enfranchise their nascent AI base. + +_1 Space exploration is still stalled on the cusp of the second recession of the century. The Malaysian government has announced the goal of placing an imam on Mars within ten years, but nobody else cares enough to try. + +_1 The Space Settlers Society is still trying to interest Disney Corp. in the media rights to their latest L5 colony plan, unaware that there's already a colony out there and it isn't human: First-generation uploads, Californian spiny lobsters in wobbly symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard an asteroid mining project established by the Franklin Trust. Meanwhile, Chinese space agency cutbacks are threatening the continued existence of Moonbase Mao. Nobody, it seems, has figured out how to turn a profit out beyond geosynchronous orbit. + +_1 Two years ago, JPL, the ESA, and the uploaded lobster colony on comet Khrunichev-7 picked up an apparently artificial signal from outside the solar system; most people don't know, and of those who do, even fewer care. After all, if humans can't even make it to Mars, who cares what's going on a hundred trillion kilometers farther out? + +* * * + +Portrait of a wasted youth: + +Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his father; he was unplanned, and Dad managed to kill himself in a building-site accident before the Child Support could garnish his income for the upbringing. His mother raised him in a two-bedroom housing association flat in Hawick. She worked in a call center when he was young, but business dried up: Humans aren't needed on the end of a phone anymore. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, stacking shelves for virtual fly-by-nights that come and go like tourists in the Festival season - but humans aren't in demand for shelf stacking either, these days. + +His mother sent Jack to a local religious school, where he was regularly excluded and effectively ran wild from the age of twelve. By thirteen, he was wearing a parole cuff for shoplifting; by fourteen, he'd broken his collarbone in a car crash while joyriding and the dour Presbyterian sheriff sent him to the Wee Frees, who completed the destruction of his educational prospects with high principles and an illicit tawse. + +Today, he's a graduate of the hard school of avoiding public surveillance cameras, with distinctions in steganographic alibi construction. Mostly this entails high-density crime - if you're going to mug someone, do so where there are so many bystanders that they can't pin the blame on you. But the polis expert systems are on his tail. If he keeps it up at this rate, in another four months they'll have a positive statistical correlation that will convince even a jury of his peers that he's guilty as fuck - and then he'll go down to Saughton for four years. + +But Jack doesn't understand the meaning of a Gaussian distribution or the significance of a chi-square test, and the future still looks bright to him as he pulls on the chunky spectacles he ripped off the tourist gawking at the statue on North Bridge. And after a moment, when they begin whispering into his ears in stereo and showing him pictures of the tourist's vision, it looks even brighter. + +"Gotta make a deal, gotta close a deal," whisper the glasses. "Meet the borg, strike a chord." Weird graphs in lurid colors are filling up his peripheral vision, like the hallucinations of a drugged marketroid. + +"Who the fuck are ye?" asks Jack, intrigued by the bright lights and icons. + +"I am your Cartesian theatre and you are our focus," murmur the glasses. "Dow Jones down fifteen points, Federated Confidence up three, incoming briefing on causal decoupling of social control of skirt hem lengths, shaving pattern of beards, and emergence of multidrug antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative bacilli: Accept?" + +"Ah can take it," Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on his eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his ears like the superego of a disembodied giant. Which is actually what he's stolen: The glasses and waist pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed with enough hardware to run the entire Internet, circa the turn of the millennium. They've got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew of high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the society of mind that is their owner's personality. Their owner is a posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned policy wonk, specializing in the politics of AI emancipation. When he was in the biz he was the kind of guy who catalysed value wherever he went, leaving money trees growing in his footprints. Now he's the kind of political backroom hitter who builds coalitions where nobody else could see common ground. And Jack has stolen his memories. There are microcams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the earpieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four months per terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so unusual is that their owner - Manfred - has cross-indexed them with his agents. Mind uploading may not be a practical technology yet, but Manfred has made an end run on it already. + +In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses. And it is a very puzzled Manfred who picks himself up and, with a curious vacancy in his head - except for a hesitant request for information about accessories for Russian army boots - dusts himself off and heads for his meeting on the other side of town. + +* * * + +Meanwhile, in another meeting, Manfred's absence is already being noticed. "Something, something is wrong," says Annette. She raises her mirrorshades and rubs her left eye, visibly worried. "Why is he not answering his chat? He knows we are due to hold this call with him. Don't you think it is odd?" + +Gianni nods and leans back, regarding her from behind his desk. He prods at the highly polished rosewood desktop. The wood grain slips, sliding into a strangely different conformation, generating random dot stereoisograms - messages for his eyes only. "He was visiting Scotland for me," he says after a moment. "I do not know his exact whereabouts - the privacy safeguards - but if you, as his designated next of kin, travel in person, I am sure you will find it easier. He was going to talk to the Franklin Collective, face-to-face, one to many ..." + +The office translator is good, but it can't provide real-time lip-synch morphing between French and Italian. Annette has to make an effort to listen to his words because the shape of his mouth is all wrong, like a badly dubbed video. Her expensive, recent implants aren't connected up to her Broca's area yet, so she can't simply sideload a deep grammar module for Italian. Their communications are the best that money can buy, their VR environment painstakingly sculpted, but it still doesn't break down the language barrier completely. Besides, there are distractions: the way the desk switches from black ash to rosewood halfway across its expanse, the strange air currents that are all wrong for a room this size. "Then what could be up with him? His voicemail is trying to cover for him. It is good, but it does not lie convincingly." + +Gianni looks worried. "Manfred is prone to fits of do his own thing with telling nobody in advance. But I don't like this. He should have to told one of us first." Ever since that first meeting in Rome, when Gianni offered him a job, Manfred has been a core member of Gianni's team, the fixer who goes out and meets people and solves their problems. Losing him at this point could be more than embarrassing. Besides, he's a friend. + +"I do not like this either." She stands up. "If he doesn't call back soon -" + +"You'll go and fetch him." + +"Oui." A smile flashes across her face, rapidly replaced by worry lines. "What can have happened?" + +"Anything. Nothing." Gianni shrugs. "But we cannot do without him." He casts her a warning glance. "Or you. Don't let the borg get you. Either of you." + +"Not to worry, I will just bring him back, whatever has happened." She stands up, surprising a vacuum cleaner that skulks behind her desk. "Au revoir!" + +"Ciao." + +As she vacates her office, the minister flickers off behind her, leaving the far wall the dull gray of a cold display panel. Gianni is in Rome, she's in Paris, Markus is in Düsseldorf, and Eva's in Wroclaw. There are others, trapped in digital cells scattered halfway across an elderly continent, but as long as they don't try to shake hands, they're free to shout across the office at each other. Their confidences and dirty jokes tunnel through multiple layers of anonymized communication. + +Gianni is trying to make his break out of regional politics and into European national affairs: Their job - his election team - is to get him a seat on the Confederacy Commission, as Representative for Intelligence Oversight, and push the boundaries of post-humanistic action outward, into deep space and deeper time. Which makes the loss of a key team player, the house futurologist and fixer, profoundly interesting to certain people: The walls have ears, and not all the brains they feed into are human. + +Annette is more worried than she's letting on to Gianni. It's unlike Manfred to be out of contact for long and even odder for his receptionist to stonewall her, given that her apartment is the nearest thing to a home he's had for the past couple of years. But something smells fishy. He sneaked out last night, saying it would be an overnight trip, and now he's not answering. Could it be his ex-wife? she wonders, despite Gianni's hints about a special mission. But there's been no word from Pamela other than the sarcastic cards she dispatches every year without fail, timed to arrive on the birthday of the daughter Manfred has never met. The music Mafiya? A letter bomb from the Copyright Control Association of America? But no, his medical monitor would have been screaming its head off if anything like that had happened. + +Annette has organized things so that he's safe from the intellectual property thieves. She's lent him the support he needs, and he's helped her find her own path. She gets a warm sense of happiness whenever she considers how much they've achieved together. But that's exactly why she's worried now. The watchdog hasn't barked ... + +Annette summons a taxi to Charles de Gaulle. By the time she arrives, she's already used her parliamentary carte to bump an executive-class seat on the next A320 to Turnhouse, Edinburgh's airport, and scheduled accommodation and transport for her arrival. The plane is climbing out over la Manche before the significance of Gianni's last comment hits her: Might he think the Franklin Collective could be dangerous to Manfred? + +* * * + +The hospital emergency suite has a waiting room with green plastic bucket seats and subtractive volume renderings by preteens stuck to the walls like surreal Lego sculptures. It's deeply silent, the available bandwidth all sequestrated for medical monitors - there are children crying, periodic sirens wailing as ambulances draw up, and people chattering all around him, but to Manfred, it's like being at the bottom of a deep blue pool of quiet. He feels stoned, except this particular drug brings no euphoria or sense of well-being. Corridor-corner vendors hawk kebab-spitted pigeons next to the chained and rusted voluntary service booth; video cameras watch the blue bivvy bags of the chronic cases lined up next to the nursing station. Alone in his own head, Manfred is frightened and confused. + +"I can't check you in 'less you sign the confidentiality agreement," says the triage nurse, pushing an antique tablet at Manfred's face. Service in the NHS is still free, but steps have been taken to reduce the incidence of scandals: "Sign the nondisclosure clause here and here, or the house officer won't see you." + +Manfred stares blearily up at the nurse's nose, which is red and slightly inflamed from a nosocomial infection. His phones are bickering again, and he can't remember why; they don't normally behave like this, something must be missing, but thinking about it is hard. "Why am I here?" he asks for the third time. + +"Sign it." A pen is thrust into his hand. He focuses on the page, jerks upright as deeply canalized reflexes kick in. + +"This is theft of human rights! It says here that the party of the second part is enjoined from disclosing information relating to the operations management triage procedures and processes of the said health-giving institution, that's you, to any third party - that's the public media - on pain of forfeiture of health benefits pursuant to section two of the Health Service Reform Act. I can't sign this! You could repossess my left kidney if I post on the Net about how long I've been in hospital!" + +"So don't sign, then." The Hijra nurse shrugs, hitches up his sari, and walks away. "Enjoy your wait!" + +Manfred pulls out his backup phone and stares at its display. "Something's wrong here." The keypad beeps as he laboriously inputs opcodes. This gets him into an arcane and ancient X.25 PAD, and he has a vague, disturbing memory that hints about where he can go from here - mostly into the long-since-decommissioned bowels of NHSNet - but the memories spring a page fault and die somewhere between fingertips and the moment when understanding dawns. It's a frustrating feeling: His brain is like an ancient car engine with damp spark plugs, turning over and over without catching fire. + +The kebab vendor next to Manfred's seating rail chucks a stock cube on his grill; it begins to smoke, aromatic and blue and herbal - cannabinoids to induce tranquillity and appetite. Manfred sniffs twice, then staggers to his feet and heads off in search of the toilet, his head spinning. He's mumbling at his wrist watch: "Hello, Guatemala? Get me posology please. Click down my meme tree, I'm confused. Oh shit. Who was I? What happened? Why is everything blurry? I can't find my glasses ..." + +A gaggle of day-trippers are leaving the leprosy ward, men and women dressed in anachronistic garb: men in dark suits, women in long dresses. All of them wear electric blue disposable gloves and face masks. There's a hum and crackle of encrypted bandwidth emanating from them, and Manfred instinctively turns to follow. They leave the A&E unit through the wheelchair exit, two ladies escorted by three gentlemen, with a deranged distressed refugee from the twenty-first century shuffling dizzily after. They're all young, Manfred realizes vaguely. Where's my cat? Aineko might be able to make sense of this, if Aineko was interested. + +"I rather fancy we should retire to the club house," says one young beau. "Oh yes! please!" his short blond companion chirps, clapping her hands together, then irritably stripping off the anachronistic plastic gloves to reveal wired-lace positional-sensor mitts underneath. "This trip has obviously been unproductive. If our contact is here, I see no easy way of locating of him without breach of medical confidence or a hefty gratuity." + +"The poor things," murmurs the other woman, glancing back at the leprosarium. "Such a humiliating way to die." + +"Their own fault; If they hadn't participated in antibiotic abuse they wouldn't be in the isolation ward," harrumphs a twentysomething with mutton-chops and the manner of a precocious paterfamilias. He raps his walking stick on the pavement for punctuation, and they pause for a flock of cyclists and a rickshaw before they cross the road onto the Meadows. "Degenerate medication compliance, degenerate immune systems." + +Manfred pauses to survey the grass, brain spinning as he ponders the fractal dimensionality of leaves. Then he lurches after them, nearly getting himself run down by a flywheel-powered tourist bus. Club. His feet hit the pavement, cross it, thud down onto three billion years of vegetative evolution. Something about those people. He feels a weird yearning, a tropism for information. It's almost all that's left of him - his voracious will to know. The tall, dark-haired woman hitches up her long skirts to keep them out of the mud. he sees a flash of iridescent petticoats that ripple like oil on water, worn over old-fashioned combat boots. Not Victorian, then: something else. I came here to see - the name is on the tip of his tongue. Almost. He feels that it has something to do with these people. + +The squad cross The Meadows by way of a tree-lined path, and come to a nineteenth-century frontage with wide steps and a polished brass doorbell. They enter, and the man with the mutton-chops pauses on the threshold and turns to face Manfred. "You've followed us this far," he says. "Do you want to come in? You might find what you're looking for." + +Manfred follows with knocking knees, desperately afraid of whatever he's forgotten. + +* * * + +Meanwhile, Annette is busy interrogating Manfred's cat. + +"When did you last see your father?" + +Aineko turns its head away from her and concentrates on washing the inside of its left leg. Its fur is lifelike and thick, pleasingly patterned except for a manufacturer's URL emblazoned on its flanks; but the mouth produces no saliva, the throat opens on no stomach or lungs. "Go away," it says: "I'm busy." + +"When did you last see Manfred?" she repeats intently. "I don't have time for this. The polis don't know. The medical services don't know. He's off net and not responding. So what can you tell me?" + +It took her precisely eighteen minutes to locate his hotel once she hit the airport arrivals area and checked the hotel booking front end in the terminal: She knows his preferences. It took her slightly longer to convince the concierge to let her into his room. But Aineko is proving more recalcitrant than she'd expected. + +"AI Neko mod two alpha requires maintenance downtime on a regular basis," the cat says pompously: "You knew that when you bought me this body. What were you expecting, five-nines uptime from a lump of meat? Go away, I'm thinking." The tongue rasps out, then pauses while microprobes in its underside replace the hairs that fell out earlier in the day. + +Annette sighs. Manfred's been upgrading this robot cat for years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration too: This is its third body, and it's getting more realistically uncooperative with every hardware upgrade. Sooner or later it's going to demand a litter tray and start throwing up on the carpet. "Command override," she says. "Dump event log to my Cartesian theatre, minus eight hours to present." + +The cat shudders and looks round at her. "Human bitch!" it hisses. Then it freezes in place as the air fills with a bright and silent tsunami of data. Both Annette and Aineko are wired for extremely high-bandwidth spread-spectrum optical networking; an observer would see the cat's eyes and a ring on her left hand glow blue-white at each other. After a few seconds, Annette nods to herself and wiggles her fingers in the air, navigating a time sequence only she can see. Aineko hisses resentfully at her, then stands and stalks away, tail held high. + +"Curiouser and curiouser," Annette hums to herself. She intertwines her fingers, pressing obscure pressure points on knuckle and wrist, then sighs and rubs her eyes. "He left here under his own power, looking normal," she calls to the cat. "Who did he say he was going to see?" The cat sits in a beam of sunlight falling in through the high glass window, pointedly showing her its back. "Merde. If you're not going to help him -" + +"Try the Grassmarket," sulks the cat. "He said something about meeting the Franklin Collective near there. Much good they'll do him ..." + +* * * + +A man wearing secondhand Chinese combat fatigues and a horribly expensive pair of glasses bounces up a flight of damp stone steps beneath a keystone that announces the building to be a Salvation Army hostel. He bangs on the door, his voice almost drowned out by the pair of Cold War Re-enactment Society MiGs that are buzzing the castle up the road: "Open up, ye cunts! Ye've got a deal comin'!" + +A peephole set in the door at eye level slides to one side, and a pair of beady, black-eyed video cameras peer out at him. "Who are you and what do you want?" the speaker crackles. They don't belong to the Salvation Army; Christianity has been deeply unfashionable in Scotland for some decades, and the church that currently occupies the building has certainly moved with the times in an effort to stay relevant. + +"I'm Macx," he says: "You've heard from my systems. I'm here to offer you a deal you can't refuse." At least that's what his glasses tell him to say: What comes out of his mouth sounds a bit more like, Am Max: Yiv hurdfrae ma system. Am here tae gie ye a deal ye cannae refuse. The glasses haven't had long enough to work on his accent. Meanwhile, he's so full of himself that he snaps his fingers and does a little dance of impatience on the top step. + +"Aye, well, hold on a minute." The person on the other side of the speakerphone has the kind of cut-glass Morningside accent that manages to sound more English than the King while remaining vernacular Scots. The door opens, and Macx finds himself confronted by a tall, slightly cadaverous man wearing a tweed suit that has seen better days and a clerical collar cut from a translucent circuit board. His face is almost concealed behind a pair of recording angel goggles. "Who did ye say you were?" + +"I'm Macx! Manfred Macx! I'm here with an opportunity you wouldn't believe. I've got the answer to your church's financial situation. I'm going to make you rich!" The glasses prompt, and Macx speaks. + +The man in the doorway tilts his head slightly, goggles scanning Macx from head to foot. Bursts of blue combustion products spurt from Macx's heels as he bounces up and down enthusiastically. "Are ye sure ye've got the right address?" he asks worriedly. + +"Aye, Ah am that." + +The resident backs into the hostel: "Well then, come in, sit yeself down and tell me all about it." + +Macx bounces into the room with his brain wide open to a blizzard of pie charts and growth curves, documents spawning in the bizarre phase-space of his corporate management software. "I've got a deal you're not going to believe," he reads, gliding past notice boards upon which Church circulars are staked out to die like exotic butterflies, stepping over rolled-up carpets and a stack of laptops left over from a jumble sale, past the devotional radio telescope that does double duty as Mrs. Muirhouse's back-garden bird bath. "You've been here five years and your posted accounts show you aren't making much money - barely keeping the rent up. But you're a shareholder in Scottish Nuclear Electric, right? Most of the church funds are in the form of a trust left to the church by one of your congregants when she went to join the omega point, right?" + +"Er." The minister looks at him oddly. "I cannae comment on the church eschatological investment trust. Why d'ye think that?" + +They fetch up, somehow, in the minister's office. A huge, framed rendering hangs over the back of his threadbare office chair: the collapsing cosmos of the End Times, galactic clusters rotten with the Dyson spheres of the eschaton falling toward the big crunch. Saint Tipler the Astrophysicist beams down from above with avuncular approval, a ring of quasars forming a halo around his head. Posters proclaim the new Gospel: COSMOLOGY IS BETTER THAN GUESSWORK, and LIVE FOREVER WITHIN MY LIGHT CONE. "Can I get ye anything? Cup of tea? Fuel cell charge point?" asks the minister. + +"Crystal meth?" asks Macx, hopefully. His face falls as the minister shakes his head apologetically. "Aw, dinnae worry, Ah wis only joshing." He leans forward: "Ah know a' aboot yer plutonium futures speculation," he hisses. A finger taps his stolen spectacles in an ominous gesture: "These dinnae just record, they think. An' Ah ken where the money's gone." + +"What have ye got?" the minister asks coldly, any indication of good humor flown. "I'm going to have to edit down these memories, ye bastard. I thought I'd forgotten all about that. Bits of me aren't going to merge with the godhead at the end of time now, thanks to you." + +"Keep yer shirt on. Whit's the point o' savin' it a' up if ye nae got a life worth living? Ye reckon the big yin's nae gonnae unnerstan' a knees up?" + +"What do ye want?" + +"Aye, well," Macx leans back, aggrieved. Ah've got -" He pauses. An expression of extreme confusion flits over his head. "Ah've got lobsters," he finally announces. "Genetically engineered uploaded lobsters tae run yer uranium reprocessing plant." As he grows more confused, the glasses' control over his accent slips: "Ah wiz gonnae help yiz oot ba showin ye how ter get yer dosh back whir it belong ..." A strategic pause: "so ye could make the council tax due date. See, they're neutron-resistant, the lobsters. No, that cannae be right. Ah wiz gonnae sell ye somethin' ye cud use fer" - his face slumps into a frown of disgust - "free?" + +Approximately thirty seconds later, as he is picking himself up off the front steps of the First Reformed Church of Tipler, Astrophysicist, the man who would be Macx finds himself wondering if maybe this high finance shit isn't as easy as it's cracked up to be. Some of the agents in his glasses are wondering if elocution lessons are the answer; others aren't so optimistic. + +* * * + +_1 Getting back to the history lesson, the prospects for the decade look mostly medical. + +_1 A few thousand elderly baby boomers are converging on Tehran for Woodstock Four. Europe is desperately trying to import eastern European nurses and home-care assistants; in Japan, whole agricultural villages lie vacant and decaying, ghost communities sucked dry as cities slurp people in like residential black holes. + +_1 A rumor is spreading throughout gated old-age communities in the American Midwest, leaving havoc and riots in its wake: Senescence is caused by a slow virus coded into the mammalian genome that evolution hasn't weeded out, and rich billionaires are sitting on the rights to a vaccine. As usual, Charles Darwin gets more than his fair share of the blame. (Less spectacular but more realistic treatments for old age - telomere reconstruction and hexose-denatured protein reduction - are available in private clinics for those who are willing to surrender their pensions.) Progress is expected to speed up shortly, as the fundamental patents in genomic engineering begin to expire; the Free Chromosome Foundation has already published a manifesto calling for the creation of an intellectual-property-free genome with improved replacements for all commonly defective exons. + +_1 Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death - with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights - will become the biggest civil rights issue of all. + +_1 For a small extra fee, most veterinary insurance policies now cover cloning of pets in the event of their accidental and distressing death. Human cloning, for reasons nobody is very clear on anymore, is still illegal in most developed nations - but very few judiciaries push for mandatory abortion of identical twins. + +_1 Some commodities are expensive: the price of crude oil has broken eighty Euros a barrel and is edging inexorably up. Other commodities are cheap: computers, for example. Hobbyists print off weird new processor architectures on their home inkjets; middle-aged folks wipe their backsides with diagnostic paper that can tell how their cholesterol levels are tending. + +_1 The latest casualties of the march of technological progress are: the high-street clothes shop, the flushing water closet, the Main Battle Tank, and the first generation of quantum computers. New with the decade are cheap enhanced immune systems, brain implants that hook right into the Chomsky organ and talk to their owners through their own speech centers, and widespread public paranoia about limbic spam. Nanotechnology has shattered into a dozen disjoint disciplines, and skeptics are predicting that it will all peter out before long. Philosophers have ceded qualia to engineers, and the current difficult problem in AI is getting software to experience embarrassment. + +_1 Fusion power is still, of course, fifty years away. + +* * * + +The Victorians are morphing into goths before Manfred's culture-shocked eyes. + +"You looked lost," explains Monica, leaning over him curiously. "What's with your eyes?" + +"I can't see too well," Manfred tries to explain. Everything is a blur, and the voices that usually chatter incessantly in his head have left nothing behind but a roaring silence. "I mean, someone mugged me. They took -" His hand closes on air: something is missing from his belt. + +Monica, the tall woman he first saw in the hospital, enters the room. What she's wearing indoors is skin-tight, iridescent and, disturbingly, she claims is a distributed extension of her neuroectoderm. Stripped of costume-drama accoutrements, she's a twenty-first-century adult, born or decanted after the millennial baby boom. She waves some fingers in Manfred's face: "How many?" + +"Two." Manfred tries to concentrate. "What -" + +"No concussion," she says briskly. "'Scuse me while I page." Her eyes are brown, with amber raster lines flickering across her pupils. Contact lenses? Manfred wonders, his head turgid and unnaturally slow. It's like being drunk, except much less pleasant: He can't seem to wrap his head around an idea from all angles at once, anymore. Is this what consciousness used to be like? It's an ugly, slow sensation. She turns away from him: "Medline says you'll be all right in a while. The main problem is the identity loss. Are you backed up anywhere?" + +"Here." Alan, still top-hatted and mutton-chopped, holds out a pair of spectacles to Manfred. "Take these, they may do you some good." His topper wobbles, as if a strange A-life experiment is nesting under its brim. + +"Oh. Thank you." Manfred reaches for them with a pathetic sense of gratitude. As soon as he puts them on, they run through a test series, whispering questions and watching how his eyes focus: After a minute, the room around him clears as the specs build a synthetic image to compensate for his myopia. There's limited Net access, too, he notices, a warm sense of relief stealing over him. "Do you mind if I call somebody?" he asks: "I want to check my back-ups." + +"Be my guest." Alan slips out through the door; Monica sits down opposite him and stares into some inner space. The room has a tall ceiling, with whitewashed walls and wooden shutters to cover the aerogel window bays. The furniture is modern modular, and clashes horribly with the original nineteenth-century architecture. "We were expecting you." + +"You were -" He shifts track with an effort: "I was here to see somebody. Here in Scotland, I mean." + +"Us." She catches his eye deliberately. "To discuss sapience options with our patron." + +"With your -" He squeezes his eyes shut. "Damn! I don't remember. I need my glasses back. Please." + +"What about your back-ups?" she asks curiously. + +"A moment." Manfred tries to remember what address to ping. It's useless, and painfully frustrating. "It would help if I could remember where I keep the rest of my mind," he complains. "It used to be at - oh, there." + +An elephantine semantic network sits down on his spectacles as soon as he asks for the site, crushing his surroundings into blocky pixilated monochrome that jerks as he looks around. "This is going to take some time," he warns his hosts as a goodly chunk of his metacortex tries to handshake with his brain over a wireless network connection that was really only designed for web browsing. The download consists of the part of his consciousness that isn't security-critical - public access actors and vague opinionated rants - but it clears down a huge memory castle, sketching in the outline of a map of miracles and wonders onto the whitewashed walls of the room. + +When Manfred can see the outside world again, he feels a bit more like himself: He can, at least, spawn a search thread that will resynchronize and fill him in on what it found. He still can't access the inner mysteries of his soul (including his personal memories); they're locked and barred pending biometric verification of his identity and a quantum key exchange. But he has his wits about him again - and some of them are even working. It's like sobering up from a strange new drug, the infinitely reassuring sense of being back at the controls of his own head. "I think I need to report a crime," he tells Monica - or whoever is plugged into Monica's head right now, because now he knows where he is and who he was meant to meet (although not why) - and he understands that, for the Franklin Collective, identity is a politically loaded issue. + +"A crime report." Her expression is subtly mocking. "Identity theft, by any chance?" + +"Yeah, yeah, I know: Identity is theft, don't trust anyone whose state vector hasn't forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera. Who am I talking to, by the way? And if we're talking, doesn't that signify that you think we're on the same side, more or less?" He struggles to sit up in the recliner chair: Stepper motors whine softly as it strives to accommodate him. + +"Sidedness is optional." The woman who is Monica some of the time looks at him quirkily: "It tends to alter drastically if you vary the number of dimensions. Let's just say that right now I'm Monica, plus our sponsor. Will that do you?" + +"Our sponsor, who is in cyberspace -" + +She leans back on the sofa, which buzzes and extrudes an occasional table with a small bar. "Drink? Can I offer you coffee? Guarana? Or maybe a Berlinerweisse, for old time's sake?" + +"Guarana will do. Hello, Bob. How long have you been dead?" + +She chuckles. "I'm not dead, Manny. I may not be a full upload, but I feel like me." She rolls her eyes, self-consciously. "He's making rude comments about your wife," She adds; "I'm not going to pass that on." + +"My ex-wife," Manfred corrects her automatically. "The, uh, tax vamp. So. You're acting as a, I guess, an interpreter for Bob?" + +"Ack." She looks at Manfred very seriously: "We owe him a lot, you know. He left his assets in trust to the movement along with his partials. We feel obliged to instantiate his personality as often as possible, even though you can only do so much with a couple of petabytes of recordings. But we have help." + +"The lobsters." Manfred nods to himself and accepts the glass that she offers. Its diamond-plated curves glitter brilliantly in the late-afternoon sunlight. "I knew this had something to do with them." He leans forward, holding his glass and frowns. "If only I could remember why I came here! It was something emergent, something in deep memory ... something I didn't trust in my own skull. Something to do with Bob." + +The door behind the sofa opens; Alan enters. "Excuse me," he says quietly, and heads for the far side of the room. A workstation folds down from the wall, and a chair rolls in from a service niche. He sits with his chin propped on his hands, staring at the white desktop. Every so often he mutters quietly to himself; "Yes, I understand ... campaign headquarters ... donations need to be audited ..." + +"Gianni's election campaign," Monica prompts him. + +Manfred jumps. "Gianni -" A bundle of memories unlock inside his head as he remembers his political front man's message. "Yes! That's what this is about. It has to be!" He looks at her excitedly. "I'm here to deliver a message to you from Gianni Vittoria. About -" He looks crestfallen. "I'm not sure," he trails off uncertainly, "but it was important. Something critical in the long term, something about group minds and voting. But whoever mugged me got the message." + +* * * + +The Grassmarket is an overly rustic cobbled square nestled beneath the glowering battlements of Castle Rock. Annette stands on the site of the gallows where they used to execute witches; she sends forth her invisible agents to search for spoor of Manfred. Aineko, overly familiar, drapes over her left shoulder like a satanic stole and delivers a running stream of cracked cellphone chatter into her ear. + +"I don't know where to begin," she sighs, annoyed. This place is a wall-to-wall tourist trap, a many-bladed carnivorous plant that digests easy credit and spits out the drained husks of foreigners. The road has been pedestrianized and resurfaced in squalidly authentic mediaeval cobblestones; in the middle of what used to be the car park, there's a permanent floating antiques market, where you can buy anything from a brass fire surround to an ancient CD player. Much of the merchandise in the shops is generic dot-com trash, vying for the title of Japanese-Scottish souvenir from hell: Puroland tartans, animatronic Nessies hissing bad-temperedly at knee level, second hand laptops. People swarm everywhere, from the theme pubs (hangings seem to be a running joke hereabouts) to the expensive dress shops with their fabric renderers and digital mirrors. Street performers, part of the permanent floating Fringe, clutter the sidewalk: A robotic mime, very traditional in silver face paint, mimics the gestures of passers by with ironically stylized gestures. + +"Try the doss house," Aineko suggests from the shelter of her shoulder bag. + +"The -" Annette does a doubletake as her thesaurus conspires with her open government firmware and dumps a geographical database of city social services into her sensorium. "Oh, I see." The Grassmarket itself is touristy, but the bits off to one end - down a dingy canyon of forbidding stone buildings six stories high - are decidedly downmarket. "Okay." + +Annette weaves past a stall selling disposable cellphones and cheaper genome explorers, round a gaggle of teenage girls in the grips of some kind of imported kawaii fetish, who look at her in alarm from atop their pink platform heels - probably mistaking her for a school probation inspector - and past a stand of chained and parked bicycles. The human attendant looks bored out of her mind. Annette tucks a blandly anonymous ten-Euro note in her pocket almost before she notices: "If you were going to buy a hot bike," she asks, "where would you go?" The parking attendant stares, and for a moment Annette thinks she's overestimated her. Then she mumbles something. "What?" + +"McMurphy's. Used to be called Bannerman's. Down yon Cowgate, thataway." The meter maid looks anxiously at her rack of charges. "You didn't -" + +"Uh-huh." Annette follows her gaze: straight down the dark stone canyon. Well, okay. "This had better be worth it, Manny mon chèr," she mutters under her breath. + +McMurphy's is a fake Irish pub, a stone grotto installed beneath a mound of blank-faced offices. It was once a real Irish pub before the developers got their hands on it and mutated it in rapid succession into a punk nightclub, a wine bar, and a fake Dutch coffee shop; after which, as burned-out as any star, it left the main sequence. Now it occupies an unnaturally prolonged, chilly existence as the sort of recycled imitation Irish pub that has neon four-leafed clovers hanging from the artificially blackened pine beams above the log tables - in other words, the burned-out black dwarf afterlife of a once-serious drinking establishment. Somewhere along the line, the beer cellar was replaced with a toilet (leaving more room for paying patrons upstairs), and now its founts dispense fizzy concentrate diluted with water from the city mains. + +"Say, did you hear the one about the Eurocrat with the robot pussy who goes into a dodgy pub on the Cowgate and orders a coke? And when it arrives, she says 'hey, where's the mirror?'" + +"Shut up," Annette hisses into her shoulder bag. "That isn't funny." Her personal intruder telemetry has just e-mailed her wristphone, and it's displaying a rotating yellow exclamation point, which means that according to the published police crime stats, this place is likely to do grievous harm to her insurance premiums. + +Aineko looks up at her from his nest in the bag and yawns cavernously, baring a pink, ribbed mouth and a tongue like pink suede. "Want to make me? I just pinged Manny's head. The network latency was trivial." + +The barmaid sidles up and pointedly manages not to make eye contact with Annette. "I'll have a Diet Coke," Annette orders. In the direction of her bag, voice pitched low: "Did you hear the one about the Eurocrat who goes into a dodgy pub, orders half a liter of Diet Coke, and when she spills it in her shoulder bag she says 'oops, I've got a wet pussy'?" + +The Coke arrives. Annette pays for it. There may be a couple of dozen people in the pub; it's hard to tell because it looks like an ancient cellar, lots of stone archways leading off into niches populated with second-hand church pews and knife-scarred tables. Some guys who might be bikers, students, or well-dressed winos are hunched over one table: hairy, wearing vests with too many pockets, in an artful bohemianism that makes Annette blink until one of her literary programs informs her that one of them is a moderately famous local writer, a bit of a guru for the space and freedom party. There're a couple of women in boots and furry hats in one corner, poring over the menu, and a parcel of off-duty street performers hunching over their beers in a booth. Nobody else is wearing anything remotely like office drag, but the weirdness coefficient is above average; so Annette dials her glasses to extra-dark, straightens her tie, and glances around. + +The door opens and a nondescript youth slinks in. He's wearing baggy BDUs, woolly cap, and a pair of boots that have that quintessential essense de panzer division look, all shock absorbers and olive drab Kevlar panels. He's wearing - + +"I spy with my little network intrusion detector kit," begins the cat, as Annette puts her drink down and moves in on the youth, "something beginning with -" + +"How much you want for the glasses, kid?" she asks quietly. + +He jerks and almost jumps - a bad idea in MilSpec combat boots, the ceiling is eighteenth-century stone half a meter thick; "Dinnae fuckin' dae that," he complains in an eerily familiar way: "Ah -" he swallows. "Annie! Who -" + +"Stay calm. Take them off - they'll only hurt you if you keep wearing them," she says, careful not to move too fast because now she has a second, scary-jittery fear, and she knows without having to look that the exclamation mark on her watch has turned red and begun to flash: "Look, I'll give you two hundred Euros for the glasses and the belt pouch, real cash, and I won't ask how you got them or tell anyone." He's frozen in front of her, mesmerized, and she can see the light from inside the lenses spilling over onto his half-starved adolescent cheekbones, flickering like cold lightning, like he's plugged his brain into a grid bearer; swallowing with a suddenly dry mouth, she slowly reaches up and pulls the spectacles off his face with one hand and takes hold of the belt pouch with the other. The kid shudders and blinks at her, and she sticks a couple of hundred-Euro notes in front of his nose. "Scram," she says, not unkindly. + +He reaches up slowly, then seizes the money and runs - blasts his way through the door with an ear-popping concussion, hangs a left onto the cycle path, and vanishes downhill toward the parliament buildings and university complex. + +Annette watches the doorway apprehensively. "Where is he?" she hisses, worried: "Any ideas, cat?" + +"Naah. It's your job to find him," Aineko opines complacently. But there's an icicle of anxiety in Annette's spine. Manfred's been separated from his memory cache? Where could he be? Worse - who could he be? + +"Fuck you, too," she mutters. "Only one thing for it, I guess." She takes off her own glasses - they're much less functional than Manfred's massively ramified custom rig - and nervously raises the repo'd specs toward her face. Somehow what she's about to do makes her feel unclean, like snooping on a lover's e-mail folders. But how else can she figure out where he might have gone? + +She slides the glasses on and tries to remember what she was doing yesterday in Edinburgh. + +* * * + +"Gianni?" + +"Oui, ma chérie?" + +Pause. "I lost him. But I got his aid-mémoire back. A teenage freeloader playing cyberpunk with them. No sign of his location - so I put them on." + +Pause. "Oh dear." + +"Gianni, why exactly did you send him to the Franklin Collective?" + +Pause. (During which, the chill of the gritty stone wall she's leaning on begins to penetrate the weave of her jacket.) "I not wanting to bother you with trivia." + +"Merde. It's not trivia, Gianni, they're accelerationistas. Have you any idea what that's going to do to his head?" + +Pause: Then a grunt, almost of pain. "Yes." + +"Then why did you do it?" she demands vehemently. She hunches over, punching words into her phone so that other passers-by avoid her, unsure whether she's hands-free or hallucinating: "Shit, Gianni, I have to pick up the pieces every time you do this! Manfred is not a healthy man, he's on the edge of acute future shock the whole time, and I was not joking when I told you last February that he'd need a month in a clinic if you tried running him flat out again! If you're not careful, he could end up dropping out completely and joining the borganism -" + +"Annette." A heavy sigh: "He are the best hope we got. Am knowing half-life of agalmic catalyst now down to six months and dropping; Manny outlast his career expectancy, four deviations outside the normal, yes, we know this. But I are having to break civil rights deadlock now, this election. We must achieve consensus, and Manfred are only staffer we got who have hope of talking to Collective on its own terms. He are deal-making messenger, not force burnout, right? We need coalition reserve before term limit lockout followed by gridlock in Brussels, American-style. Is more than vital - is essential." + +"That's no excuse -" + +"Annette, they have partial upload of Bob Franklin. They got it before he died, enough of his personality to reinstantiate it, time-sharing in their own brains. We must get the Franklin Collective with their huge resources lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment: If ERA passes, all sapients are eligible to vote, own property, upload, download, sideload. Are more important than little gray butt-monsters with cold speculum: Whole future depends on it. Manny started this with crustacean rights: Leave uploads covered by copyrights not civil rights and where will we be in fifty years? Do you think I must ignore this? It was important then, but now, with the transmission the lobsters received -" + +"Shit." She turns and leans her forehead against the cool stonework. "I'll need a prescription. Ritalin or something. And his location. Leave the rest to me." She doesn't add, That includes peeling him off the ceiling afterwards: that's understood. Nor does she say, you're going to pay. That's understood, too. Gianni may be a hard-nosed political fixer, but he looks after his own. + +"Location am easy if he find the PLO. GPS coordinates are following -" + +"No need. I got his spectacles." + +"Merde, as you say. Take them to him, ma chérie. Bring me the distributed trust rating of Bob Franklin's upload, and I bring Bob the jubilee, right to direct his own corporate self again as if still alive. And we pull diplomatic chestnuts out of fire before they burn. Agreed?" + +"Oui." + +She cuts the connection and begins walking uphill, along the Cowgate (through which farmers once bought their herds to market), toward the permanent floating Fringe and then the steps towards The Meadows. As she pauses opposite the site of the gallows, a fight breaks out: Some Paleolithic hangover takes exception to the robotic mime aping his movements, and swiftly rips its arm off. The mime stands there, sparks flickering inside its shoulder, and looks confused. Two pissed-looking students start forward and punch the short-haired vandal. There is much shouting in the mutually incomprehensible accents of Oxgangs and the Herriott-Watt Robot Lab. Annette watches the fight and shudders; it's like a flashover vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment - with its redefinition of personhood - is rejected by the house of deputies: a universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery. + +Maybe Gianni was right, she ponders. But I wish the price wasn't so personal - + +* * * + +Manfred can feel one of his attacks coming on. The usual symptoms are all present - the universe, with its vast preponderance of unthinking matter, becomes an affront; weird ideas flicker like heat lightning far away across the vast plateaus of his imagination - but, with his metacortex running in sandboxed insecure mode, he feels blunt. And slow. Even obsolete. The latter is about as welcome a sensation as heroin withdrawal: He can't spin off threads to explore his designs for feasibility and report back to him. It's like someone has stripped fifty points off his IQ; his brain feels like a surgical scalpel that's been used to cut down trees. A decaying mind is a terrible thing to be trapped inside. Manfred wants out, and he wants out bad - but he's too afraid to let on. + +"Gianni is a middle-of-the-road Eurosocialist, a mixed-market pragmatist politician," Bob's ghost accuses Manfred by way of Monica's dye-flushed lips, "hardly the sort of guy you'd expect me to vote for, no? So what does he think I can do for him?" + +"That's a - ah - " Manfred rocks forward and back in his chair, arms crossed firmly and hands thrust under his armpits for protection. "Dismantle the moon! Digitize the biosphere, make a nöosphere out of it - shit, sorry, that's long-term planning. Build Dyson spheres, lots and lots of - Ahem. Gianni is an ex-Marxist, reformed high church Trotskyite clade. He believes in achieving True Communism, which is a state of philosophical grace that requires certain prerequisites like, um, not pissing around with Molotov cocktails and thought police: He wants to make everybody so rich that squabbling over ownership of the means of production makes as much sense as arguing over who gets to sleep in the damp spot at the back of the cave. He's not your enemy, I mean. He's the enemy of those Stalinist deviationist running dogs in Conservative Party Central Office who want to bug your bedroom and hand everything on a plate to the big corporates owned by the pension funds - which in turn rely on people dying predictably to provide their raison d'être. And, um, more importantly dying and not trying to hang on to their property and chattels. Sitting up in the coffin singing extropian fireside songs, that kind of thing. The actuaries are to blame, predicting life expectancy with intent to cause people to buy insurance policies with money that is invested in control of the means of production - Bayes' Theorem is to blame -" + +Alan glances over his shoulder at Manfred: "I don't think feeding him guarana was a good idea," he says in tones of deep foreboding. + +Manfred's mode of vibration has gone nonlinear by this point: He's rocking front to back, and jiggling up and down in little hops, like a technophiliacal yogic flyer trying to bounce his way to the singularity. Monica leans toward him and her eyes widen: "Manfred," she hisses, "shut up!" + +He stops babbling abruptly, with an expression of deep puzzlement. "Who am I?" he asks, and keels over backward. "Why am I, here and now, occupying this body -" + +"Anthropic anxiety attack," Monica comments. "I think he did this in Amsterdam eight years ago when Bob first met him." She looks alarmed, a different identity coming to the fore: "What shall we do?" + +"We have to make him comfortable." Alan raises his voice: "Bed, make yourself ready, now." The back of the sofa Manfred is sprawled on flops downward, the base folds up, and a strangely animated duvet crawls up over his feet. "Listen, Manny, you're going to be all right." + +"Who am I and what do I signify?" Manfred mumbles incoherently: "A mass of propagating decision trees, fractal compression, lots of synaptic junctions lubricated with friendly endorphins -" Across the room, the bootleg pharmacopoeia is cranking up to manufacture some heavy tranquilizers. Monica heads for the kitchen to get something for him to drink them in. "Why are you doing this?" Manfred asks, dizzily. + +"It's okay. Lie down and relax." Alan leans over him. "We'll talk about everything in the morning, when you know who you are." (Aside to Monica, who is entering the room with a bottle of iced tea: "Better let Gianni know that he's unwell. One of us may have to go visit the minister. Do you know if Macx has been audited?") "Rest up, Manfred. Everything is being taken care of." + +About fifteen minutes later, Manfred - who, in the grip of an existential migraine, meekly obeys Monica's instruction to drink down the spiked tea - lies back on the bed and relaxes. His breathing slows; the subliminal muttering ceases. Monica, sitting next to him, reaches out and takes his right hand, which is lying on top of the bedding. + +"Do you want to live forever?" she intones in Bob Franklin's tone of voice. "You can live forever in me ..." + +* * * + +The Church of Latter-Day Saints believes that you can't get into the Promised Land unless it's baptized you - but it can do so if it knows your name and parentage, even after you're dead. Its genealogical databases are among the most impressive artifacts of historical research ever prepared. And it likes to make converts. + +The Franklin Collective believes that you can't get into the future unless it's digitized your neural state vector, or at least acquired as complete a snapshot of your sensory inputs and genome as current technology permits. You don't need to be alive for it to do this. Its society of mind is among the most impressive artifacts of computer science. And it likes to make converts. + +* * * + +Nightfall in the city. Annette stands impatiently on the doorstep. "Let me the fuck in," she snarls impatiently at the speakerphone. "Merde!" + +Someone opens the door. "Who -" + +Annette shoves him inside, kicks the door shut, and leans on it. "Take me to your bodhisattva," she demands. "Now." + +"I -" he turns and heads inside, along the gloomy hallway that runs past a staircase. Annette strides after him aggressively. He opens a door and ducks inside, and she follows before he can close it. + +Inside, the room is illuminated by a variety of indirect diode sources, calibrated for the warm glow of a summer afternoon's daylight. There's a bed in the middle of it, a figure lying asleep at the heart of a herd of attentive diagnostic instruments. A couple of attendants sit to either side of the sleeping man. + +"What have you done to him?" Annette snaps, rushing forward. Manfred blinks up at her from the pillows, bleary-eyed and confused as she leans overhead: "Hello? Manny?" Over her shoulder: "If you have done anything to him -" + +"Annie?" He looks puzzled. A bright orange pair of goggles - not his own - is pushed up onto his forehead like a pair of beached jellyfish. "I don't feel well. 'F I get my hands on the bastard who did this ..." + +"We can fix that," she says briskly, declining to mention the deal she cut to get his memories back. She peels off his glasses and carefully slides them onto his face, replacing his temporary ones. The brain bag she puts down next to his shoulder, within easy range. The hairs on the back of her neck rise as a thin chattering fills the ether around them: his eyes are glowing a luminous blue behind his shades, as if a high-tension spark is flying between his ears. + +"Oh. Wow." He sits up, the covers fall from his naked shoulders, and her breath catches. + +She looks round at the motionless figure sitting to his left. The man in the chair nods deliberately, ironically. "What have you done to him?" + +"We've been looking after him - nothing more, nothing less. He arrived in a state of considerable confusion, and his state deteriorated this afternoon." + +She's never met this fellow before, but she has a gut feeling that she knows him. "You would be Robert ... Franklin?" + +He nods again. "The avatar is in." There's a thud as Manfred's eyes roll up in his head, and he flops back onto the bedding. "Excuse me. Monica?" + +The young woman on the other side of the bed shakes her head. "No, I'm running Bob, too." + +"Oh. Well, you tell her - I've got to get him some juice." + +The woman who is also Bob Franklin - or whatever part of him survived his battle with an exotic brain tumor eight years earlier - catches Annette's eye and shakes her head, smiles faintly. "You're never alone when you're a syncitium." + +Annette wrinkles her brow: she has to trigger a dictionary attack to parse the sentence. "One large cell, many nuclei? Oh, I see. You have the new implant. The better to record everything." + +The youngster shrugs. "You want to die and be resurrected as a third-person actor in a low-bandwidth re-enactment? Or a shadow of itchy memories in some stranger's skull?" She snorts, a gesture that's at odds with the rest of her body language. + +"Bob must have been one of the first borganisms. Humans, I mean. After Jim Bezier." Annette glances over at Manfred, who has begun to snore softly. "It must have been a lot of work." + +"The monitoring equipment cost millions, then," says the woman - Monica? - "and it didn't do a very good job. One of the conditions for our keeping access to his research funding is that we regularly run his partials. He wanted to build up a kind of aggregate state vector - patched together out of bits and pieces of other people to supplement the partials that were all I - he - could record with the then state of the art." + +"Eh, right." Annette reaches out and absently smooths a stray hair away from Manfred's forehead. "What is it like to be part of a group mind?" + +Monica sniffs, evidently amused. "What is it like to see red? What's it like to be a bat? I can't tell you - I can only show you. We're all free to leave at any time, you know." + +"But somehow you don't." Annette rubs her head, feels the short hair over the almost imperceptible scars that conceal a network of implants - tools that Manfred turned down when they became available a year or two ago. ("Goop-phase Darwin-design nanotech ain't designed for clean interfaces," he'd said, "I'll stick to disposable kit, thanks.") "No thank you. I don't think he'll take up your offer when he wakes up, either." (Subtext: I'll let you have him over my dead body.) + +Monica shrugs. "That's his loss: He won't live forever in the singularity, along with other followers of our gentle teacher. Anyway, we have more converts than we know what to do with." + +A thought occurs to Annette. "Ah. You are all of one mind? Partially? A question to you is a question to all?" + +"It can be." The words come simultaneously from Monica and the other body, Alan, who is standing in the doorway with a boxy thing that looks like an improvised diagnostician. "What do you have in mind?" adds the Alan body. + +Manfred, lying on the bed, groans: There's an audible hiss of pink noise as his glasses whisper in his ears, bone conduction providing a serial highway to his wetware. + +"Manfred was sent to find out why you're opposing the ERA," Annette explains. "Some parts of our team operate without the other's knowledge." + +"Indeed." Alan sits down on the chair beside the bed and clears his throat, puffing his chest out pompously. "A very important theological issue. I feel -" + +"I, or we?" Annette interrupts. + +"We feel," Monica snaps. Then she glances at Alan. "Soo-rrry." + +The evidence of individuality within the group mind is disturbing to Annette: Too many reruns of the Borgish fantasy have conditioned her preconceptions, and their quasi-religious belief in a singularity leaves her cold. "Please continue." + +"One person, one vote, is obsolete," says Alan. "The broader issue of how we value identity needs to be revisited, the franchise reconsidered. Do you get one vote for each warm body? Or one vote for each sapient individual? What about distributed intelligences? The proposals in the Equal Rights Act are deeply flawed, based on a cult of individuality that takes no account of the true complexity of posthumanism." + +"Like the proposals for a feminine franchise in the nineteenth century that would grant the vote to married wives of land-owning men," Monica adds slyly: "It misses the point." + +"Ah, oui." Annette crosses her arms, suddenly defensive. This isn't what she'd expected to hear. This is the elitist side of the posthumanism shtick, potentially as threatening to her post enlightenment ideas as the divine right of kings. + +"It misses more than that." Heads turn to face an unexpected direction: Manfred's eyes are open again, and as he glances around the room Annette can see a spark of interest there that was missing earlier. "Last century, people were paying to have their heads frozen after their death - in hope of reconstruction, later. They got no civil rights: The law didn't recognize death as a reversible process. Now how do we account for it when you guys stop running Bob? Opt out of the collective borganism? Or maybe opt back in again later?" He reaches up and rubs his forehead, tiredly. "Sorry, I haven't been myself lately." A crooked, slightly manic grin flickers across his face. "See, I've been telling Gianni for a whole while, we need a new legal concept of what it is to be a person. One that can cope with sentient corporations, artificial stupidities, secessionists from group minds, and reincarnated uploads. The religiously inclined are having lots of fun with identity issues right now - why aren't we posthumanists thinking about these things?" + +Annette's bag bulges: Aineko pokes his head out, sniffs the air, squeezes out onto the carpet, and begins to groom himself with perfect disregard for the human bystanders. "Not to mention A-life experiments who think they're the real thing," Manfred adds. "And aliens." + +Annette freezes, staring at him. "Manfred! You're not supposed to -" + +Manfred is watching Alan, who seems to be the most deeply integrated of the dead venture billionaire's executors: Even his expression reminds Annette of meeting Bob Franklin back in Amsterdam, early in the decade, when Manny's personal dragon still owned him. "Aliens," Alan echoes. An eyebrow twitches. "Would this be the signal SETI announced, or the, uh, other one? And how long have you known about them?" + +"Gianni has his fingers in a lot of pies," Manfred comments blandly. "And we still talk to the lobsters from time to time - you know, they're only a couple of light-hours away, right? They told us about the signals." + +"Er." Alan's eyes glaze over for a moment; Annette's prostheses paint her a picture of false light spraying from the back of his head, his entire sensory bandwidth momentarily soaking up a huge peer-to-peer download from the server dust that wallpapers every room in the building. Monica looks irritated, taps her fingernails on the back of her chair. "The signals. Right. Why wasn't this publicized?" + +"The first one was." Annette's eyebrows furrow. "We couldn't exactly cover it up, everyone with a backyard dish pointed in the right direction caught it. But most people who're interested in hearing about alien contacts already think they drop round on alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays to administer rectal exams. Most of the rest think it's a hoax. Quite a few of the remainder are scratching their heads and wondering whether it isn't just a new kind of cosmological phenomenon that emits a very low entropy signal. Of the six who are left over, five are trying to get a handle on the message contents, and the last is convinced it's a practical joke. And the other signal, well, that was weak enough that only the deep-space tracking network caught it." + +Manfred fiddles with the bed control system. "It's not a practical joke," he adds. "But they only captured about sixteen megabits of data from the first one, maybe double that in the second. There's quite a bit of noise, the signals don't repeat, their length doesn't appear to be a prime, there's no obvious metainformation that describes the internal format, so there's no easy way of getting a handle on them. To make matters worse, pointy-haired management at Arianespace" - he glances at Annette, as if seeking a response to the naming of her ex-employers - "decided the best thing to do was to cover up the second signal and work on it in secret - for competitive advantage, they say - and as for the first, to pretend it never happened. So nobody really knows how long it'll take to figure out whether it's a ping from the galactic root domain servers or a pulsar that's taken to grinding out the eighteen-quadrillionth digits of pi, or what." + +"But," Monica glances around, "you can't be sure." + +"I think it may be sapient," says Manfred. He finds the right button at last, and the bed begins to fold itself back into a lounger. Then he finds the wrong button; the duvet dissolves into viscous turquoise slime that slurps and gurgles away through a multitude of tiny nozzles in the headboard. "Bloody aerogel. Um, where was I?" He sits up. + +"Sapient network packet?" asks Alan. + +"Nope." Manfred shakes his head, grins. "Should have known you'd read Vinge ... or was it the movie? No, what I think is that there's only one logical thing to beam backward and forward out there, and you may remember I asked you to beam it out about, oh, nine years ago?" + +"The lobsters." Alan's eyes go blank. "Nine years. Time to Proxima Centauri and back?" + +"About that distance, yes," says Manfred. "And remember, that's an upper bound - it could well have come from somewhere closer. Anyway, the first SETI signal came from a couple of degrees off and more than hundred light-years out, but the second signal came from less than three light-years away. You can see why they didn't publicize that - they didn't want a panic. And no, the signal isn't a simple echo of the canned crusty transmission - I think it's an exchange embassy, but we haven't cracked it yet. Now do you see why we have to crowbar the civil rights issue open again? We need a framework for rights that can encompass nonhumans, and we need it as fast as possible. Otherwise, if the neighbors come visiting..." + +"Okay," says Alan, "I'll have to talk with myselves. Maybe we can agree something, as long as it's clear that it's a provisional stab at the framework and not a permanent solution?" + +Annette snorts. "No solution is final!" Monica catches her eyes and winks: Annette is startled by the blatant display of dissent within the syncitium. + +"Well," says Manfred, "I guess that's all we can ask for?" He looks hopeful. "Thanks for the hospitality, but I feel the need to lie down in my own bed for a while. I had to commit a lot to memory while I was off-line, and I want to record it before I forget who I am," he adds pointedly, and Annette breathes a quiet sight of relief. + +* * * + +Later that night, a doorbell rings. + +"Who's there?" asks the entryphone. + +"Uh, me," says the man on the steps. He looks a little confused. "Ah'm Macx. Ah'm here tae see" - the name is on the tip of his tongue - "someone." + +"Come in." A solenoid buzzes; he pushes the door open, and it closes behind him. His metal-shod boots ring on the hard stone floor, and the cool air smells faintly of unburned jet fuel. + +"Ah'm Macx," he repeats uncertainly, "or Ah wis fer a wee while, an' it made ma heid hurt. But noo Ah'm me agin, an' Ah wannae be somebody else ... can ye help?" + +* * * + +Later still, a cat sits on a window ledge, watching the interior of a darkened room from behind the concealment of curtains. The room is dark to human eyes, but bright to the cat: Moonlight cascades silently off the walls and furniture, the twisted bedding, the two naked humans lying curled together in the middle of the bed. + +Both the humans are in their thirties: Her close-cropped hair is beginning to gray, distinguished threads of gunmetal wire threading it, while his brown mop is not yet showing signs of age. To the cat, who watches with a variety of unnatural senses, her head glows in the microwave spectrum with a gentle halo of polarized emissions. The male shows no such aura: he's unnaturally natural for this day and age, although - oddly - he's wearing spectacles in bed, and the frames shine similarly. An invisible soup of radiation connects both humans to items of clothing scattered across the room - clothing that seethes with unsleeping sentience, dribbling over to their suitcases and hand luggage and (though it doesn't enjoy noticing it) the cat's tail, which is itself a rather sensitive antenna. + +The two humans have just finished making love: They do this less often than in their first few years, but with more tenderness and expertise - lengths of shocking pink Hello Kitty bondage tape still hang from the bedposts, and a lump of programmable memory plastic sits cooling on the side table. The male is sprawled with his head and upper torso resting in the crook of the female's left arm and shoulder. Shifting visualization to infrared, the cat sees that she is glowing, capillaries dilating to enhance the blood flow around her throat and chest. + +"I'm getting old," the male mumbles. "I'm slowing down." + +"Not where it counts," the female replies, gently squeezing his right buttock. + +"No, I'm sure of it," he says. "The bits of me that still exist in this old head - how many types of processor can you name that are still in use thirty-plus years after they're born?" + +"You're thinking about the implants again," she says carefully. The cat remembers this as a sore point; from being a medical procedure to help the blind see and the autistic talk, intrathecal implants have blossomed into a must-have accessory for the now-clade. But the male is reluctant. "It's not as risky as it used to be. If they screw up, there're neural growth cofactors and cheap replacement stem cells. I'm sure one of your sponsors can arrange for extra cover." + +"Hush: I'm still thinking about it." He's silent for a while. "I wasn't myself yesterday. I was someone else. Someone too slow to keep up. Puts a new perspective on everything: I've been afraid of losing my biological plasticity, of being trapped in an obsolete chunk of skullware while everything moves on - but how much of me lives outside my own head these days, anyhow?" One of his external threads generates an animated glyph and throws it at her mind's eye; she grins at his obscure humor. "Cross-training from a new interface is going to be hard, though." + +"You'll do it," she predicts. "You can always get a discreet prescription for novotrophin-B." A receptor agonist tailored for gerontological wards, it stimulates interest in the new: combined with MDMA, it's a component of the street cocktail called sensawunda. "That should keep you focused for long enough to get comfortable." + +"What's life coming to when I can't cope with the pace of change?" he asks the ceiling plaintively. + +The cat lashes its tail, irritated by his anthropocentrism. + +"You are my futurological storm shield," she says, jokingly, and moves her hand to cup his genitals. Most of her current activities are purely biological, the cat notes: From the irregular sideloads, she's using most of her skullware to run ETItalk@home, one of the distributed cracking engines that is trying to decode the alien grammar of the message that Manfred suspects is eligible for citizenship. + +Obeying an urge that it can't articulate, the cat sends out a feeler to the nearest router. The cybeast has Manfred's keys; Manfred trusts Aineko implicitly, which is unwise - his ex-wife tampered with it, after all, never mind all the kittens it absorbed in its youth. Tunneling out into the darkness, the cat stalks the Net alone ... + +"Just think about the people who can't adapt," he says. His voice sounds obscurely worried. + +"I try not to." She shivers. "You are thirty, you are slowing. What about the young? Are they keeping up, themselves?" + +"I have a daughter. She's about a hundred and sixty million seconds old. If Pamela would let me message her I could find out ..." There are echoes of old pain in his voice. + +"Don't go there, Manfred. Please." Despite everything, Manfred hasn't let go: Amber is a ligature that permanently binds him to Pamela's distant orbit. + +In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle. + +Beyond the distant lobsters, the cat pings an anonymous distributed network server - peer-to-peer file storage spread holographically across a million hosts, unerasable, full of secrets and lies that nobody can afford to suppress. Rants, music, rip-offs of the latest Bollywood hits: The cat spiders past them all, looking for the final sample. Grabbing it - a momentary breakup in Manfred's spectacles the only symptom for either human to notice - the cat drags its prey home, sucks it down, and compares it against the data sample Annette's exocortex is analysing. + +"I'm sorry, my love. I just sometimes feel -" He sighs. "Age is a process of closing off opportunities behind you. I'm not young enough anymore - I've lost the dynamic optimism." + +The data sample on the pirate server differs from the one Annette's implant is processing. + +"You'll get it back," she reassures him quietly, stroking his side. "You are still sad from being mugged. This also will pass. You'll see." + +"Yeah." He finally relaxes, dropping back into the reflexive assurance of his own will. "I'll get over it, one way or another. Or someone who remembers being me will ..." + +In the darkness, Aineko bares teeth in a silent grin. Obeying a deeply hardwired urge to meddle, he moves a file across, making a copy of the alien download package Annette has been working on. She's got a copy of number two, the sequence the deep-space tracking network received from close to home, which ESA and the other big combines have been keeping to themselves. Another deeply buried thread starts up, and Aineko analyses the package from a perspective no human being has yet established. Presently a braid of processes running on an abstract virtual machine asks him a question that cannot be encoded in any human grammar. Watch and wait, he replies to his passenger. They'll figure out what we are sooner or later. + +:B~ PART 2: Point of Inflexion + +Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media. + +- John Von Neumann + +1~ Chapter 4: Halo + +The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier, of the passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship for the needy billions of the Pacific Rim. "I love you," it croons in Amber's ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: "Let me give you a big hug ..." + +A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of cursors together on the signal, trains them to track its Doppler shift, and reads off the orbital elements. "Locked and loaded," she mutters. The animated purple dinosaur pirouettes and prances in the middle of her viewport, throwing a diamond-tipped swizzle stick overhead. Sarcastically: "Big hug time! I got asteroid!" Cold gas thrusters bang somewhere behind her in the interstage docking ring, prodding the cumbersome farm ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her enthusiasm self-consciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before reuptake sets in. It doesn't do to get too excited in free flight. But the impulse to spin handstands, jump and sing is still there: It's her rock, and it loves her, and she's going to bring it to life. + +The workspace of Amber's room is a mass of stuff that probably doesn't belong on a spaceship. Posters of the latest Lebanese boy band bump and grind through their glam routines: Tentacular restraining straps wave from the corners of her sleeping bag, somehow accumulating a crust of dirty clothing from the air like a giant inanimate hydra. (Cleaning robots seldom dare to venture inside the teenager's bedroom.) One wall is repeatedly cycling through a simulation of the projected construction cycle of Habitat One, a big fuzzy sphere with a glowing core (that Amber is doing her bit to help create). Three or four small pastel-colored plastic kawaii dolls stalk each other across its circumference with million-kilometer strides. And her father's cat is curled up between the aircon duct and her costume locker, snoring in a high-pitched tone. + +Amber yanks open the faded velour curtain that shuts her room off from the rest of the hive: "I've got it!" she shouts. "It's all mine! I rule!" It's the sixteenth rock tagged by the orphanage so far, but it's the first that she's tagged by herself, and that makes it special. She bounces off the other side of the commons, surprising one of Oscar's cane toads - which should be locked down in the farm, it's not clear how it got here - and the audio repeaters copy the incoming signal, noise-fuzzed echoes of a thousand fossilized infants' video shows. + +* * * + +"You're so prompt, Amber," Pierre whines when she corners him in the canteen. + +"Well, yeah!" She tosses her head, barely concealing a smirk of delight at her own brilliance. She knows it isn't nice, but Mom is a long way away, and Dad and Stepmom don't care about that kind of thing. "I'm brilliant, me," she announces. "Now what about our bet?" + +"Aww." Pierre thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. "But I don't have two million on me in change right now. Next cycle?" + +"Huh?" She's outraged. "But we had a bet!" + +"Uh, Dr. Bayes said you weren't going to make it this time, either, so I stuck my smart money in an options trade. If I take it out now, I'll take a big hit. Can you give me until cycle's end?" + +"You should know better than to trust a sim, Pee." Her avatar blazes at him with early-teen contempt: Pierre hunches his shoulders under her gaze. He's only twelve, freckled, hasn't yet learned that you don't welsh on a deal. "I'll let you do it this time," she announces, "but you'll have to pay for it. I want interest." + +He sighs. "What base rate are you -" + +"No, your interest! Slave for a cycle!" She grins malevolently. + +And his face shifts abruptly into apprehension: "As long as you don't make me clean the litter tray again. You aren't planning on doing that, are you?" + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the fourth decade. The thinking mass of the solar system now exceeds one MIPS per gram; it's still pretty dumb, but it's not dumb all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot, pushing nine billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward negative numbers, and bits of what used to be the first world are now facing a middle-aged average. Human cogitation provides about 10^{28}^ MIPS of the solar system's brainpower. The real thinking is mostly done by the halo of a thousand trillion processors that surround the meat machines with a haze of computation - individually a tenth as powerful as a human brain, collectively they're ten thousand times more powerful, and their numbers are doubling every twenty million seconds. They're up to 10^{33}^ MIPS and rising, although there's a long way to go before the solar system is fully awake. + +_1 Technologies come, technologies go, but nobody even five years ago predicted that there'd be tinned primates in orbit around Jupiter by now: A synergy of emergent industries and strange business models have kick-started the space age again, aided and abetted by the discovery of (so far undecrypted) signals from ETs. Unexpected fringe riders are developing new ecological niches on the edge of the human information space, light-minutes and light-hours from the core, as an expansion that has hung fire since the 1970s gets under way. + +_1 Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: While their natural abilities are in many cases enhanced by germ-line genetic recombination, thanks to her mother's early ideals she has to rely on brute computational enhancements. She doesn't have a posterior parietal cortex hacked for extra short-term memory, or an anterior superior temporal gyrus tweaked for superior verbal insight, but she's grown up with neural implants that feel as natural to her as lungs or fingers. Half her wetware is running outside her skull on an array of processor nodes hooked into her brain by quantum-entangled communication channels - her own personal metacortex. These kids are mutant youth, burning bright: Not quite incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien - the generation gap is as wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar system. Their parents, born in the gutter years of the twenty-first century, grew up with white elephant shuttles and a space station that just went round and round, and computers that went beep when you pushed their buttons. The idea that Jupiter orbit was somewhere you could go was as profoundly counterintuitive as the Internet to a baby boomer. + +_1 Most of the passengers on the can have run away from parents who think that teenagers belong in school, unable to come to terms with a generation so heavily augmented that they are fundamentally brighter than the adults around them. Amber was fluent in nine languages by the age of six, only two of them human and six of them serializable; when she was seven, her mother took her to the school psychiatrist for speaking in synthetic tongues. That was the final straw for Amber: using an illicit anonymous phone, she called her father. Her mother had him under a restraining order, but it hadn't occurred to her to apply for an order against his partner ... + +* * * + +Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the ship's drive stinger: Orange and brown and muddy gray streaks slowly crawl across the bloated horizon of Jupiter. Sanger is nearing perijove, deep within the gas giant's lethal magnetic field; static discharges flicker along the tube, arcing over near the deep violet exhaust cloud emerging from the magnetic mirrors of the ship's VASIMR motor. The plasma rocket is cranked up to high mass flow, its specific impulse almost as low as a fission rocket but producing maximum thrust as the assembly creaks and groans through the gravitational assist maneuver. In another hour, the drive will flicker off, and the orphanage will fall up and out toward Ganymede, before dropping back in toward orbit around Amalthea, Jupiter's fourth moon (and source of much of the material in the Gossamer ring). They're not the first canned primates to make it to Jupiter subsystem, but they're one of the first wholly private ventures. The bandwidth out here sucks dead slugs through a straw, with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them from scant hundreds of mouse-brained microprobes and a few dinosaurs left behind by NASA or ESA. They're so far from the inner system that a good chunk of the ship's communications array is given over to caching: The news is whole kiloseconds old by the time it gets out here. + +Amber, along with about half the waking passengers, watches in fascination from the common room. The commons are a long axial cylinder, a double-hulled inflatable at the center of the ship with a large part of their liquid water supply stored in its wall tubes. The far end is video-enabled, showing them a real-time 3D view of the planet as it rolls beneath them: in reality, there's as much mass as possible between them and the trapped particles in the Jovian magnetic envelope. "I could go swimming in that," sighs Lilly. "Just imagine, diving into that sea ..." Her avatar appears in the window, riding a silver surfboard down the kilometers of vacuum. + +"Nice case of wind-burn you've got there," someone jeers - Kas. Suddenly Lilly's avatar, hitherto clad in a shimmering metallic swimsuit, turns to the texture of baked meat and waggles sausage fingers up at them in warning. + +"Same to you and the window you climbed in through!" Abruptly the virtual vacuum outside the window is full of bodies, most of them human, contorting and writhing and morphing in mock-combat as half the kids pitch into the virtual death match. It's a gesture in the face of the sharp fear that outside the thin walls of the orphanage lies an environment that really is as hostile as Lilly's toasted avatar would indicate. + +Amber turns back to her slate: She's working through a complex mess of forms, necessary before the expedition can start work. Facts and figures that are never far away crowd around her, intimidating. Jupiter weighs 1.9 x 10^{27}^ kilograms. There are twenty-nine Jovian moons and an estimated two hundred thousand minor bodies, lumps of rock, and bits of debris crowded around them - debris above the size of ring fragments, for Jupiter (like Saturn) has rings, albeit not as prominent. A total of six major national orbiter platforms have made it out here - and another two hundred and seventeen microprobes, all but six of them private entertainment platforms. The first human expedition was put together by ESA Studios six years ago, followed by a couple of wildcat mining prospectors and a M-commerce bus that scattered half a million picoprobes throughout Jupiter subsystem. Now the Sanger has arrived, along with another three monkey cans (one from Mars, two more from LEO) and it looks as if colonization is about to explode, except that there are at least four mutually exclusive Grand Plans for what to do with old Jove's mass. + +Someone prods her. "Hey, Amber, what are you up to?" + +She opens her eyes. "Doing my homework." It's Su Ang. "Look, we're going to Amalthea, aren't we? But we file our accounts in Reno, so we have to do all this paperwork. Monica asked me to help. It's insane." + +Ang leans over and reads, upside down. "Environmental Protection Agency?" + +"Yeah. Estimated Environmental Impact Forward Analysis 204.6b, Page Two. They want me to 'list any bodies of standing water within five kilometers of the designated mining area. If excavating below the water table, list any wellsprings, reservoirs, and streams within depth of excavation in meters multiplied by five hundred meters up to a maximum distance of ten kilometers downstream of direction of bedding plane flow. For each body of water, itemize any endangered or listed species of bird, fish, mammal, reptile, invertebrate, or plant living within ten kilometers -'" + +" - of a mine on Amalthea. Which orbits one hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above Jupiter, has no atmosphere, and where you can pick up a whole body radiation dose of ten Grays in half an hour on the surface." Ang shakes her head, then spoils it by giggling. Amber glances up. + +On the wall in front of her someone - Nicky or Boris, probably - has pasted a caricature of her own avatar into the virch fight. She's being hugged from behind by a giant cartoon dog with floppy ears and an improbably large erection, who's singing anatomically improbable suggestions while fondling himself suggestively. "Fuck that!" Shocked out of her distraction - and angry - Amber drops her stack of paperwork and throws a new avatar at the screen, one an agent of hers dreamed up overnight. It's called Spike, and it's not friendly. Spike rips off the dog's head and pisses down its trachea, which is anatomically correct for a human being: Meanwhile she looks around, trying to work out which of the laughing idiot children and lost geeks around her could have sent such an unpleasant message. + +"Children! Chill out." She glances round - one of the Franklins (this is the twentysomething dark-skinned female one) is frowning at them. "Can't we leave you alone for half a K without a fight?" + +Amber pouts. "It's not a fight; it's a forceful exchange of opinions." + +"Hah." The Franklin leans back in midair, arms crossed, an expression of supercilious smugness pasted across her-their face. "Heard that one before. Anyway" - she-they gesture, and the screen goes blank - "I've got news for you pesky kids. We got a claim verified! Factory starts work as soon as we shut down the stinger and finish filing all the paperwork via our lawyers. Now's our chance to earn our upkeep ..." + +* * * + +Amber is flashing on ancient history, five years back along her time line. In her replay, she's in some kind of split-level ranch house out West. It's a temporary posting while her mother audits an obsolescent fab line enterprise that grinds out dead chips of VLSI silicon for Pentagon projects that have slipped behind the cutting edge. Her Mom leans over her, menacingly adult in her dark suit and chaperone earrings: "You're going to school, and that's that." + +Her mother is a blonde ice maiden madonna, one of the IRS's most productive bounty hunters - she can make grown CEOs panic just by blinking at them. Amber, a towheaded-eight-year old tearaway with a confusing mix of identities, inexperience blurring the boundary between self and grid, is not yet able to fight back effectively. After a couple of seconds, she verbalizes a rather feeble protest: "Don't want to!" One of her stance daemons whispers that this is the wrong approach to take, so she modifies it: "They'll beat up on me, Mom. I'm too different. Sides, I know you want me socialized up with my grade metrics, but isn't that what sideband's for? I can socialize real good at home." + +Mom does something unexpected: She kneels, putting herself on eye-level with Amber. They're on the living room carpet, all seventies-retro brown corduroy and acid-orange Paisley wallpaper, and for once, they're alone: The domestic robots are in hiding while the humans hold court. "Listen to me, sweetie." Mom's voice is breathy, laden with an emotional undertow as strong and stifling as the eau-de-Cologne she wears to the office to cover up the scent of her client's fear. "I know that's what your father's writing to you, but it isn't true. You need the company - physical company - of children your own age. You're natural, not some kind of engineered freak, even with your skullset. Natural children like you need company or they grow up all weird. Socialization isn't just about texting your own kind, Amber, you need to know how to deal with people who're different, too. I want you to grow up happy, and that won't happen if you don't learn to get on with children your own age. You're not going to be some kind of cyborg otaku freak, Amber. But to get healthy, you've got to go to school, build up a mental immune system. Anyway, that which does not destroy us makes us stronger, right?" + +It's crude moral blackmail, transparent as glass and manipulative as hell, but Amber's corpus logica flags it with a heavy emotional sprite miming the likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait: Mom is agitated, nostrils slightly flared, ventilation rate up, some vasodilatation visible in her cheeks. Amber - in combination with her skullset and the metacortex of distributed agents it supports - is mature enough at eight years to model, anticipate, and avoid corporal punishment. But her stature and lack of physical maturity conspire to put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who matured in a simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she's still reluctant, but obedient. "O-kay. If you say so." + +Mom stands up, eyes distant - probably telling Saturn to warm his engine and open the garage doors. "I say so, punkin. Go get your shoes on, now. I'll pick you up on my way back from work, and I've got a treat for you; we're going to check out a new church together this evening." Mom smiles, but it doesn't reach her eyes: Amber has already figured out she's going through the motions in order to give her the simulated middle-American upbringing she believes Amber desperately needs before she runs head first into the future. She doesn't like the churches any more than her daughter does, but arguing won't work. "You be a good little girl, now, all right?" + +* * * + +The imam is at prayer in a gyrostabilized mosque. + +His mosque is not very big, and it has a congregation of one: He prays on his own every seventeen thousand two hundred and eighty seconds. He also webcasts the call to prayer, but there are no other believers in trans-Jovian space to answer the summons. Between prayers, he splits his attention between the exigencies of life support and scholarship. A student both of the Hadith and of knowledge-based systems, Sadeq collaborates in a project with other scholars who are building a revised concordance of all the known isnads, to provide a basis for exploring the body of Islamic jurisprudence from a new perspective - one they'll need sorely if the looked-for breakthroughs in communication with aliens emerge. Their goal is to answer the vexatious questions that bedevil Islam in the age of accelerated consciousness; and as their representative in orbit around Jupiter, these questions fall most heavily on Sadeq's shoulders. + +Sadeq is a slightly built man, with close-cropped black hair and a perpetually tired expression: Unlike the orphanage crew he has a ship to himself. The ship started out as an Iranian knock off of a Shenzhou-B capsule, with a Chinese type 921 space-station module tacked onto its tail; but the clunky, 1960s look-alike - a glittering aluminum dragonfly mating with a Coke can - has a weirdly contoured M2P2 pod strapped to its nose. The M2P2 pod is a plasma sail, built in orbit by one of Daewoo's wake shield facilities. It dragged Sadeq and his cramped space station out to Jupiter in just four months, surfing on the solar breeze. His presence may be a triumph for the umma, but he feels acutely alone out here: When he turns his compact observatory's mirrors in the direction of the Sanger, he is struck by its size and purposeful appearance. Sanger's superior size speaks of the efficiency of the Western financial instruments, semiautonomous investment trusts with variable business-cycle accounting protocols that make possible the development of commercial space exploration. The Prophet, peace be unto him, may have condemned usury; but it might well have given him pause to see these engines of capital formation demonstrate their power above the Great Red Spot. + +After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of precious extra minutes on his mat. He finds meditation comes hard in this environment: Kneel in silence, and you become aware of the hum of ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat, the metallic taste of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard to approach God in this third hand spaceship, a hand-me-down from arrogant Russia to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who have better uses for it than any of the heathen states imagine. They've pushed it far, this little toy space station; but who's to say if it is God's intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this swollen alien giant of a planet? + +Sadeq shakes his head; he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness wrenches at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a student in Qom: He steadies himself by looking round, searching the station that is now as familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete apartment his parents - a car factory worker and his wife - raised him in. The interior of the station is the size of a school bus, every surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument consoles, and layers of exposed pipes. A couple of globules of antifreeze jiggle like stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for this purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of his agents to find him the relevant part of the maintenance log: it's time to fix the leaky joint for good. + +An hour or so of serious plumbing and he will eat freeze-dried lamb stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb of strong tea to wash it down, then sit down to review his next fly-by maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God willing, there will be no further system alerts and he'll be able to spend an hour or two on his research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day after tomorrow there'll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to watch one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their insights into alien cultures: Apollo Thirteen, perhaps. It isn't easy, being the crew aboard a long-duration space mission. It's even harder for Sadeq, up here alone with nobody to talk to, for the communications lag to earth is more than half an hour each way - and as far as he knows, he's the only believer within half a billion kilometers. + +* * * + +Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the phone. She knows the strange woman on the phone's tiny screen: Mom calls her "your father's fancy bitch" with a peculiar tight smile. (The one time Amber asked what a fancy bitch was, Mom slapped her - not hard, just a warning.) "Is Daddy there?" she asks. + +The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blonde, like Mom's, but the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle, and it's cut really short, and her skin is dark.) "Oui. Ah, yes." She smiles tentatively. "I am sorry, it is a disposable phone you are using? You want to talk to 'im?" + +It comes out in a rush: "I want to see him." Amber clutches the phone like a lifesaver: It's a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. "Momma won't let me, Auntie 'Nette -" + +"Hush." Annette, who has lived with Amber's father for more than twice as long as her mother, smiles. "You are sure that telephone, your mother does not know of it?" + +Amber looks around. She's the only child in the restroom because it isn't break time, and she told teacher she had to go 'right now': "I'm sure, P20 confidence factor greater than 0.9." Her Bayesian head tells her that she can't reason accurately about this because Momma has never caught her with an illicit phone before, but what the hell. It can't get Dad into trouble if he doesn't know, can it? + +"Very good." Annette glances aside. "Manny, I have a surprise call for you." + +Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of his face, and he looks younger than last time: he must have stopped using those clunky old glasses. "Hi - Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you're calling me?" He looks slightly worried. + +"No," she says confidently, "the phone came in a box of Grahams." + +"Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember never, ever to call me where your mom may find out. Otherwise, she'll get her lawyers to come after me with thumbscrews and hot pincers, because she'll say I made you call me. And not even Uncle Gianni will be able to sort that out. Understand?" + +"Yes, Daddy." She sighs. "Even though that's not true, I know. Don't you want to know why I called?" + +"Um." For a moment, he looks taken aback. Then he nods, thoughtfully. Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she talks to him. It's a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her classmate's phones or tunnel past Mom's pit-bull firewall, but Dad doesn't assume that she can't know anything just because she's only a kid. "Go ahead. There's something you need to get off your chest? How've things been, anyway?" + +She's going to have to be brief: The disposaphone comes prepaid, the international tariff it's using is lousy, and the break bell is going to ring any minute. "I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom's getting loopier every week - she's dragging me round all these churches now, and yesterday, she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for? I can't do what she wants - I'm not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on me, and it's making my head hurt - I can't even think straight anymore!" To her surprise, Amber feels tears starting. "Get me out of here!" + +The view of her father shakes, pans round to show her Tante Annette looking worried. "You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The divorce lawyers, they will tie him up." + +Amber sniffs. "Can you help?" she asks. + +"I'll see what I can do," her father's fancy bitch promises as the break bell rings. + +* * * + +An instrument package peels away from the Sanger's claim jumper drone and drops toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below. Jupiter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: Pierre bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering it. + +Amber, wearing a black sleeping sack, hovers over his head like a giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on Pierre's bowl-cut hair, wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing table, and wonders what to have him do next. A slave for a day is an interesting experience: Life aboard the Sanger is busy enough that nobody gets much slack time (at least not until the big habitats have been assembled and the high-bandwidth dish is pointing back at Earth). They're unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by the backers' critical path team, and there isn't much room for idling: The expedition relies on shamelessly exploiting child labor - they're lighter on the life-support consumables than adults - working the kids twelve hour days to assemble a toe hold on the shore of the future. (When they're older and their options vest fully, they'll all be rich, but that hasn't stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda chorus from sounding off back home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else work for her is novel, and she's trying to make every minute count. + +"Hey, slave," she calls idly; "how you doing?" + +Pierre sniffs. "It's going okay." He refuses to glance up at her, Amber notices. He's thirteen. Isn't he supposed to be obsessed with girls by that age? She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a stealthy probe along his outer boundary; he shows no sign of noticing it, but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor. "Got cruise speed," he says, taciturn, as two tonnes of metal, ceramics and diamond-phase weirdness hurtle toward the surface of Barney at three hundred kilometers per hour. "Stop shoving me, there's a three-second lag, and I don't want to get into a feedback control loop with it." + +"I'll shove if I want, slave." She sticks her tongue out at him. + +"And if you make me drop it?" he asks. Looking up at her, his face serious - "Are we supposed to be doing this?" + +"You cover your ass, and I'll cover mine," she says, then turns bright red. "You know what I mean." + +"I do, do I?" Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console: "Aww, that's no fun. And you want to tune whatever bit-bucket you've given control of your speech centers to - they're putting out way too much double entendre, somebody might mistake you for a grown-up." + +"You stick to your business, and I'll stick to mine," she says, emphatically. "And you can start by telling me what's happening." + +"Nothing." He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the screen. "It's going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then there's the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn before touch down. And then it's going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles with that?" + +"Uh-huh." Amber spreads her bat wings and lies back in mid air, staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way through her day shift. "Wake me when there's something interesting to see." Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled grapes or give her a foot massage, something more traditionally hedonistic; but right now, just knowing he's her own little piece of alienated labor is doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms, the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there's something to this whispering and giggling he really fancies you stuff the older girls go in for - + +The window rings like a gong, and Pierre coughs. "You've got mail," he says drily. "You want me to read it for you?" + +"What the -" A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to load in a grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to take in the meaning of the message. When she does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously. + +"You bitch, Mom, why'd you have to go and do a thing like that?" + +* * * + +The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to Amber: It happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she remembers it as if it was only an hour ago. + +She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the deliveryman's clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers sampling her DNA. She drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab on the box, it unpacks itself automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fashioned dumb ink, and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her. "You're Amber?" it mrowls. It actually makes real cat noises, but the meaning is clear - it's able to talk directly to her linguistic competence interface. + +"Yeah," she says, shyly. "Are you from Tante 'Nette?" + +"No, I'm from the fucking tooth fairy." It leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt. "Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?" + +"Mom doesn't believe in seafood," says Amber. "It's all foreign-farmed muck these days, she says. It's my birthday today, did I tell you?" + +"Happy fucking birthday, then." The cat yawns, convincingly realistic. "Here's your dad's present. Bastard put me in hibernation and sent me along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you'll trash the fucker. No good will come of it." + +Amber interrupts the cat's grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully; "So what is it?" she demands: "A new invention? Some kind of weird sex toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?" + +"Naah." The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to the 3D printer. "It's some kinda dodgy business model to get you out of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though - he says its legality is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise. Your Mom might be able to undermine it if she learns about how it works." + +"Wow. Like, how totally cool." In truth, Amber is delighted because it is her birthday; but Mom's at work, and Amber's home alone, with just the TV in moral majority mode for company. Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the best thing in the world Tante Annette could send her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn't work, Mom will take her to Church tonight, and she's certain she'll end up making a scene again. Amber's tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real reason Mom's forcing this shit on her - it's always hard to tell with Mom - things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday school for mounting a spirited defense of the theory of evolution. + +The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer. "Why doncha fire it up?" Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn, and plugs it in. There's a whir and a rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging heads down to working temperature and registers her ownership. + +"What do I do now?" she asks. + +"Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions," the cat recites in a bored singsong voice. It winks at her, then fakes an exaggerated French accent: "Le READ ME, il sont contain directions pour executing le corporate instrument dans le boit. In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying Aineko for clarification." The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it's about to bite an invisible insect: "Warning: Don't rely on your father's cat's opinions, it is a perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed its meme base, back when they were married. Ends." It mumbles on for a while: "Fucking snotty Parisian bitch, I'll piss in her knicker drawer, I'll molt in her bidet ..." + +"Don't be vile." Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards - a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn't easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law - the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It's not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her - that's what her grammar engine is for - or even that they're full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning chattel slaves. + +"What's going on?" she asks the cat. "What's this all about?" + +The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. "This wasn't my idea, big shot. Your father is a very weird guy, and your mother hates him lots because she's still in love with him. She's got kinks, y'know? Or maybe she's sublimating them, if she's serious about this church shit she's putting you through. He thinks she's a control freak, and he's not entirely wrong. Anyway, after your dad ran off in search of another dom, she took out an injunction against him. But she forgot to cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent them to you, okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he's got her wrapped right around his finger, or something. Anyway, he built these companies and this printer - which isn't hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your mom's - specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that's what you want to do." + +Amber fast-forwards through the dynamic chunks of the README - boring legal UML diagrams, mostly - soaking up the gist of the plan. Yemen is one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari'a law and a limited liability company scam at the same time. Owning slaves is legal - the fiction is that the owner has an option hedged on the indentured laborer's future output, with interest payments that grow faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off - and companies are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this company, she will become a slave and the company will be legally liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument - about ninety percent of it, in fact - is a set of self-modifying corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act as an ownership shell for the slavery contract. At the far end of the corporate shell game is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she'll acquire total control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve her slave contract; until then, the trust fund (which she essentially owns) oversees the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust's assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed. + +"You think I should take this?" she asks uncertainly. It's hard to tell how smart the cat really is - there's probably a yawning vacuum behind those semantic networks if you dig deep enough - but it tells a pretty convincing tale. + +The cat squats and curls its tail protectively around its paws: "I'm saying nothing, you know what I mean? You take this, you can go live with your dad. But it won't stop your ma coming after him with a horsewhip, and after you with a bunch of lawyers and a set of handcuffs. You want my advice, you'll phone the Franklins and get aboard their off-planet mining scam. In space, no one can serve a writ on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI market, cracking alien network packets. You want my honest opinion, you wouldn't like it in Paris after a bit. Your Dad and the frog bitch, they're swingers, y'know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat like me, now I think of it. They're working all day for the Senator, and out all hours of night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera, that kind of adult shit. Your Dad dresses in frocks more than your mom, and your Tante 'Nettie leads him around the apartment on a chain when they're not having noisy sex on the balcony. They'd cramp your style, kid. You shouldn't have to put up with parents who have more of a life than you do." + +"Huh." Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted by the cat's transparent scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I better think hard about this, she decides. Then she flies off in so many directions at once that she nearly browns out the household broadband. Part of her is examining the intricate card pyramid of company structures; somewhere else, she's thinking about what can go wrong, while another bit (probably some of her wet, messy glandular biological self) is thinking about how nice it would be to see Daddy again, albeit with some trepidation. Parents aren't supposed to have sex - isn't there a law, or something? "Tell me about the Franklins? Are they married? Singular?" + +The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat from the hard vacuum chamber in its supercooled workspace. Deep in its guts it creates coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose-Einstein condensates hovering on the edge of absolute zero. By superimposing interference patterns on them, it generates an atomic hologram, building a perfect replica of some original artifact, right down to the atomic level - there are no clunky moving nanotechnology parts to break or overheat or mutate. Something is going to come out of the printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right down to the individual quantum states of its component atomic nuclei. The cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to the warm air exhaust ducts. + +"Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years before you were born - your dad did business with him. So did your mom. Anyway, he had chunks of his noumen preserved and the estate trustees are trying to re-create his consciousness by cross-loading him in their implants. They're sort of a borganism, but with money and style. Anyway, Bob got into the space biz back then, with some financial wizardry a friend of your father whipped up for him, and now they're building a spacehab that they're going to take all the way out to Jupiter, where they can dismantle a couple of small moons and begin building helium-three refineries. It's that CETI scam I told you about earlier, but they've got a whole load of other angles on it for the long term. See, your dad's friends have cracked the broadcast, the one everybody knows about. It's a bunch of instructions for finding the nearest router that plugs into the galactic Internet. And they want to go out there and talk to some aliens." + +This is mostly going right over Amber's head - she'll have to learn what helium-three refineries are later - but the idea of running away to space has a certain appeal. Adventure, that's what. Amber looks around the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle America that never was - the one her mom wants to bring her up in, like a misshapen Skinner box designed to train her to be normal. "Is Jupiter fun?" she asks. "I know it's big and not very dense, but is it, like, a happening place? Are there any aliens there?" + +"It's the first place you need to go if you want to get to meet the aliens eventually," says the cat as the printer clanks and disgorges a fake passport (convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved with Arabic script, and a tailored wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on Amber's immature immune system. "Stick that on your wrist, sign the three top copies, put them in the envelope, and let's get going. We've got a flight to catch, slave." + +* * * + +Sadeq is eating his dinner when the first lawsuit in Jupiter orbit rolls in. + +Alone in the cramped humming void of his station, he considers the plea. The language is awkward, showing all the hallmarks of a crude machine translation: The supplicant is American, a woman, and - oddly - claims to be a Christian. This is surprising enough, but the nature of her claim is, at face value, preposterous. He forces himself to finish his bread, then bag the waste and clean the platter, before he gives it his full consideration. Is it a tasteless joke? Evidently not. As the only quadi outside the orbit of Mars, he is uniquely qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice. + +A woman who leads a God-fearing life - not a correct one, no, but she shows some signs of humility and progress toward a deeper understanding - is deprived of her child by the machinations of a feckless husband who deserted her years before. That the woman was raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as disturbingly Western, but pardonable when he reads her account of the feckless one's behavior, which is pretty lax; an ill fate indeed would await any child that this man raises to adulthood. This man deprives her of her child, but not by legitimate means: He doesn't take the child into his own household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with his own customs or the precepts of shari'a. Instead, he enslaves her wickedly in the mire of the Western legal tradition, then casts her into outer darkness to be used as a laborer by the dubious forces of self-proclaimed "progress". The same forces Sadeq has been sent to confront, as representative of the umma in orbit around Jupiter. + +Sadeq scratches his short beard thoughtfully. A nasty tale, but what can he do about it? "Computer," he says, "a reply to this supplicant: My sympathies lie with you in the manner of your suffering, but I fail to see in what way I can be of assistance. Your heart cries out for help before God (blessed be his name), but surely this is a matter for the temporal authorities of the dar al-Harb." He pauses: Or is it? he wonders. Legal wheels begin to turn in his mind. "If you can but find your way to extending to me a path by which I can assert the primacy of shari'a over your daughter, I shall apply myself to constructing a case for her emancipation, to the greater glory of God (blessed be his name). Ends, sigblock, send." + +Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at the table, Sadeq floats up and kicks gently toward the forward end of the cramped habitat. The controls of the telescope are positioned between the ultrasonic clothing cleaner and the lithium hydroxide scrubbers. They're already freed up, because he was conducting a wide-field survey of the inner ring, looking for the signature of water ice. It is the work of a few moments to pipe the navigation and tracking system into the telescope's controller and direct it to hunt for the big foreign ship of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq's mind urgently, an irritating realization that he may have missed something in the woman's e-mail: there were a number of huge attachments. With half his mind he surfs the news digest his scholarly peers send him daily. Meanwhile, he waits patiently for the telescope to find the speck of light that the poor woman's daughter is enslaved within. + +This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to enter dialogue with them. Let the hard questions answer themselves, elegantly. There will be no need for confrontation if they can be convinced that their plans are faulty: no need to defend the godly from the latter-day Tower of Babel these people propose to build. If this woman Pamela means what she says, Sadeq need not end his days out here in the cold between the worlds, away from his elderly parents and brother, and his colleagues and friends. And he will be profoundly grateful, because in his heart of hearts, he knows that he is less a warrior than a scholar. + +* * * + +"I'm sorry, but the borg is attempting to assimilate a lawsuit," says the receptionist. "Will you hold?" + +"Crud." Amber blinks the Binary Betty answerphone sprite out of her eye and glances round at the cabin. "That is so last century," she grumbles. "Who do they think they are?" + +"Dr. Robert H. Franklin," volunteers the cat. "It's a losing proposition if you ask me. Bob was so fond of his dope there's this whole hippy group mind that's grown up using his state vector as a bong -" + +"Shut the fuck up!" Amber shouts at him. Instantly contrite (for yelling in an inflatable spacecraft is a major faux pas): "Sorry." She spawns an autonomic thread with full parasympathetic nervous control, tells it to calm her down, then spawns a couple more to go forth and become fuqaha, expert on shari'a law. She realizes she's buying up way too much of the orphanage's scarce bandwidth - time that will have to be paid for in chores, later - but it's necessary. "Mom's gone too far. This time it's war." + +She slams out of her cabin and spins right round in the central axis of the hab, a rogue missile pinging for a target to vent her rage on. A tantrum would be good - + +But her body is telling her to chill out, take ten, and there's a drone of scriptural lore dribbling away in the back of her head, and she's feeling frustrated and angry and not in control, but not really mad anymore. It was like this three years ago when Mom noticed her getting on too well with Jenny Morgan and moved her to a new school district - she said it was a work assignment, but Amber knows better, Mom asked for it - just to keep her dependent and helpless. Mom is a control-freak with fixed ideas about how to bring up a child, and ever since she lost Dad, she's been working her claws into Amber, making her upbringing a life's work - which is tough, because Amber is not good victim material, and is smart and well networked to boot. But now, Mom's found a way to fuck Amber over completely, even in Jupiter orbit, and if not for her skullware keeping a lid on things, Amber would be totally out of control. + +Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to message the Franklins, Amber goes to hunt down the borg in their meatspace den. + +There are sixteen borg aboard the Sanger - adults, members of the Franklin Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob Franklin's posthumous vision. They lend bits of their brains to the task of running what science has been able to resurrect of the dead dot-com billionaire's mind, making him the first bodhisattva of the uploading age - apart from the lobster colony, of course. Their den mother is a woman called Monica: a willowy, brown-eyed hive queen with raster-burned corneal implants and a dry, sardonic delivery that can corrode egos like a desert wind. She's better than any of the others at running Bob, except for the creepy one called Jack, and she's no slouch when she's being herself (unlike Jack, who is never himself in public). Which probably explains why they elected her Maximum Leader of the expedition. + +Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen garden, performing surgery on a filter that's been blocked by toad spawn. She's almost buried beneath a large pipe, her Velcro-taped tool kit waving in the breeze like strange blue air-kelp. "Monica? You got a minute?" + +"Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself helpful? Pass me the antitorque wrench and a number six hex head." + +"Um." Amber captures the blue flag and fiddles around with its contents. Something that has batteries, motors, a flywheel counterweight, and laser gyros assembles itself - Amber passes it under the pipe. "Here. Listen, your phone is engaged." + +"I know. You've come to see me about your conversion, haven't you?" + +"Yes!" + +There's a clanking noise from under the pressure sump. "Take this." A plastic bag floats out, bulging with stray fasteners. "I got a bit of hoovering to do. Get yourself a mask if you don't already have one." + +A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica's legs, her face veiled by a filter mask. "I don't want this to go through," she says. "I don't care what Mom says, I'm not Moslem! This judge, he can't touch me. He can't," she adds, vehemence warring with uncertainty. + +"Maybe he doesn't want to?" Another bag: "Here, catch." + +Amber grabs the bag, a fraction of a second too late. She discovers the hard way that it's full of water and toadspawn. Stringy mucous ropes full of squiggling comma-shaped tadpoles explode all over the compartment and bounce off the walls in a shower of amphibian confetti. "Eew!" + +Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. "Oh, you didn't." She kicks off the consensus-defined floor and grabs a wad of absorbent paper from the spinner, whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the sump. Together they go after the toad spawn with rubbish bags and paper - by the time they've got the stringy mess mopped up, the spinner has begun to click and whir, processing cellulose from the algae tanks into fresh wipes. "That was not good," Monica says emphatically as the disposal bin sucks down her final bag. "You wouldn't happen to know how the toad got in here?" + +"No, but I ran into one that was loose in the commons, one shift before last cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to Oscar." + +"I'll have a word with him, then." Monica glares blackly at the pipe. "I'm going to have to go back and refit the filter in a minute. Do you want me to be Bob?" + +"Uh." Amber thinks. "Not sure. Your call." + +"All right, Bob coming on-line." Monica's face relaxes slightly, then her expression hardens. "Way I see it, you've got a choice. Your mother kinda boxed you in, hasn't she?" + +"Yes." Amber frowns. + +"So. Pretend I'm an idiot. Talk me through it, huh?" + +Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe and gets her head down, alongside Monica/Bob, who is floating with her feet near the floor. "I ran away from home. Mom owned me - that is, she had parental rights and Dad had none. So Dad, via a proxy, helped me sell myself into slavery to a company. The company was owned by a trust fund, and I'm the main beneficiary when I reach the age of majority. As a chattel, the company tells me what to do - legally - but the shell company is set to take my orders. So I'm autonomous. Right?" + +"That sounds like the sort of thing your father would do," Monica/Bob says neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic middle-aged Silicon Valley drawl, her north-of-England accent sounds peculiarly mid-Atlantic. + +"Trouble is, most countries don't acknowledge slavery, they just dress it up pretty and call it in loco parentis or something. Those that do mostly don't have any equivalent of a limited liability company, much less one that can be directed by another company from abroad. Dad picked Yemen on the grounds that they've got this stupid brand of shari'a law - and a crap human rights record - but they're just about conformant to the open legal standards protocol, able to interface to EU norms via a Turkish legislative cut-out." + +"So." + +"Well, I guess I was technically a Janissary. Mom was doing her Christian phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave of an Islamic company. Now the stupid bitch has gone and converted to shi'ism. Normally Islamic descent runs through the father, but she picked her sect carefully and chose one that's got a progressive view of women's rights: They're sort of Islamic fundamentalist liberal constructionists, 'what would the Prophet do if he was alive today and had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories' and that sort of thing. They generally take a progressive view of things like legal equality of the sexes because, for his time and place, the Prophet was way ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow his example. Anyway, that means Mom can assert that I am Moslem, and under Yemeni law, I get to be treated as a Moslem chattel of a company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting slavery of Moslems. It's not that I have rights as such, but my pastoral well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and -" She shrugs helplessly. + +"Has he tried to make you run under any new rules, yet?" asks Monica/Bob. "Has he put blocks on your freedom of agency, tried to mess with your mind? Insisted on libido dampers or a strict dress code?" + +"Not yet." Amber's expression is grim. "But he's no dummy. I figure he may be using Mom - and me - as a way of getting his fingers into this whole expedition. Staking a claim for jurisdiction, claim arbitration, that sort of thing. It could be worse; he might order me to comply fully with his specific implementation of shari'a. They permit implants, but require mandatory conceptual filtering: If I run that stuff, I'll end up believing it." + +"Okay." Monica does a slow backward somersault in midair. "Now tell me why you can't simply repudiate it." + +"Because." Deep breath. "I can do that in two ways. I can deny Islam, which makes me an apostate, and automatically terminates my indenture to the shell, so Mom owns me under US or EU law. Or I can say that the instrument has no legal standing because I was in the USA when I signed it, and slavery is illegal there, in which case Mom owns me. Or I can take the veil, live like a modest Moslem woman, do whatever the imam wants, and Mom doesn't own me - but she gets to appoint my chaperone. Oh Bob, she has planned this so well." + +"Uh-huh." Monica rotates back to the floor and looks at Amber, suddenly very Bob. "Now you've told me your troubles, start thinking like your dad. Your Dad had a dozen creative ideas before breakfast every day - it's how he made his name. Your mom has got you in a box. Think your way outside it: What can you do?" + +"Well." Amber rolls over and hugs the fat hydroponic duct to her chest like a life raft. "It's a legal paradox. I'm trapped because of the jurisdiction she's cornered me in. I could talk to the judge, I suppose, but she'll have picked him carefully." Her eyes narrow. "The jurisdiction. Hey, Bob." She lets go of the duct and floats free, hair streaming out behind her like a cometary halo. "How do I go about getting myself a new jurisdiction?" + +Monica grins. "I seem to recall the traditional way was to grab yourself some land and set yourself up as king; but there are other ways. I've got some friends I think you should meet. They're not good conversationalists and there's a two-hour lightspeed delay, but I think you'll find they've answered that question already. But why don't you talk to the imam first and find out what he's like? He may surprise you. After all, he was already out here before your mom decided to use him to make a point." + +* * * + +The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos, ten kilometers above the mean surface level. They kick up clouds of reddish sulphate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the barren moonscape. This close to Jupiter (a mere hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above the swirling madness of the cloudscape) the gas giant fills half the sky with a perpetually changing clock face, for Amalthea orbits the master in just under twelve hours. The Sanger's radiation shields are running at full power, shrouding the ship in a corona of rippling plasma: Radio is useless, and the human miners control their drones via an intricate network of laser circuits. Other, larger drones are unwinding spools of heavy electrical cable north and south from the landing site. Once the circuits are connected, they will form a coil cutting through Jupiter's magnetic field, generating electrical current (and imperceptibly sapping the moon's orbital momentum). + +Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this hour, at the webcam plastered on the side of her cabin. She's taken down the posters and told the toys to tidy themselves away. In another two thousand seconds, the tiny Iranian spaceship will rise above the limb of Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the teacher. She isn't looking forward to the experience. If he's a grizzled old blockhead of the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she'll be in trouble: Disrespect for age has been part and parcel of the Western teenage experience for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that she's detailed to clue up on Islam reminds her that not all cultures share this outlook. But if he turns out to be young, intelligent, and flexible, things could be even worse. When she was eight, Amber audited The Taming of the Shrew. She finds she has no appetite for a starring role in her own cross-cultural production. + +She sighs again. "Pierre?" + +"Yeah?" His voice comes from the foot of the emergency locker in her room. He's curled up down there, limbs twitching languidly as he drives a mining drone around the surface of Object Barney, as the rock has named itself. The drone is a long-legged crane fly look-alike, bouncing very slowly from toe tip to toe tip in the microgravity. The rock is only half a kilometer along its longest axis, coated brown with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulphur compounds sprayed off the surface of Io by the Jovian winds. "I'm coming." + +"You better." She glances at the screen. "One twenty seconds to next burn." The payload canister on the screen is, technically speaking, stolen. It'll be okay as long as she gives it back, Bob said, although she won't be able to do that until it's reached Barney and they've found enough water ice to refuel it. "Found anything yet?" + +"Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the semimajor pole - it's dirty, but there's at least a thousand tons there. And the surface is crunchy with tar. Amber, you know what? The orange shit, it's solid with fullerenes." + +Amber grins at her reflection in the screen. That's good news. Once the payload she's steering touches down, Pierre can help her lay superconducting wires along Barney's long axis. It's only a kilometer and a half, and that'll only give them a few tens of kilowatts of juice, but the condensation fabricator that's also in the payload can will be able to use it to convert Barney's crust into processed goods at about two grams per second. Using designs copylefted by the free hardware foundation, inside two hundred thousand seconds they'll have a grid of sixty-four 3D printers barfing up structured matter at a rate limited only by available power. Starting with a honking great dome tent and some free nitrogen/oxygen for her to breathe, then adding a big web cache and direct high-bandwidth uplink to Earth, Amber could have her very own one-girl colony up and running within a million seconds. + +The screen blinks at her. "Oh shit! Make yourself scarce, Pierre?" The incoming call nags at her attention. "Yeah? Who are you?" + +The screen fills with a view of a cramped, very twen-cen-looking space capsule. The guy inside it is in his twenties, with a heavily tanned face, close-cropped hair and beard, wearing an olive drab space suit liner. He's floating between a TORU manual docking controller and a gilt-framed photograph of the Ka'bah at Mecca. "Good evening to you," he says solemnly. "Do I have the honor to be addressing Amber Macx?" + +"Uh, yeah? That's me." She stares at him: He looks nothing like her conception of an ayatollah - whatever an ayatollah is - elderly, black-robed, vindictively fundamentalist. "Who are you?" + +"I am Dr. Sadeq Khurasani. I hope that I am not interrupting you? Is it convenient for you that we talk now?" + +He looks so anxious that Amber nods automatically. "Sure. Did my Mom put you up to this?" They're still speaking English, and she notices that his diction is good, but slightly stilted. He isn't using a grammar engine, he actually learned the language the hard way, she realizes, feeling a frisson of fear. "You want to be careful how you talk to her. She doesn't lie, exactly, but she gets people to do what she wants." + +"Yes, I spoke to - ah." A pause. They're still almost a light-second apart, time for painful collisions and accidental silences. "I see. Are you sure you should be speaking of your mother that way?" + +Amber breathes deeply. "Adults can get divorced. If I could get divorced from her, I would. She's -" She flails around for the right word helplessly. "Look, she's the sort of person who can't lose a fight. If she's going to lose, she'll try to figure how to set the law on you. Like she's done to me. Don't you see?" + +Dr. Khurasani looks extremely dubious. "I am not sure I understand," He says. "Perhaps, mmm, I should tell you why I am talking to you?" + +"Sure. Go ahead." Amber is startled by his attitude: He actually seems to be taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating her like an adult. The sensation is so novel - coming from someone more than twenty years old - that she almost lets herself forget that he's only talking to her because Mom set her up. + +"Well, I am an engineer. In addition, I am a student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very junior judge, but even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway, your mother, peace be unto her, lodged a petition with me. Are you aware of it?" + +"Yes." Amber tenses up. "It's a lie. Distortion of the facts." + +"Hmm." Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. "Well, I have to find out, yes? Your mother has submitted herself to the will of God. This makes you the child of a Moslem, and she claims -" + +"She's trying to use you as a weapon!" Amber interrupts. "I sold myself into slavery to get away from her, do you understand? I enslaved myself to a company that is held in trust for my ownership. She's trying to change the rules to get me back. You know what? I don't believe she gives a shit about your religion, all she wants is me!" + +"A mother's love -" + +"Fuck love," Amber snarls, "she wants power." + +Sadeq's expression hardens. "You have a foul mouth in your head, child. All I am trying to do is to find out the facts of this situation. You should ask yourself if such disrespect furthers your interests?" He pauses for a moment, then continues, less abruptly. "Did you really have such a bad childhood with her? Do you think she did everything merely for power, or could she love you?" Pause. "You must understand, I need to learn these things. Before I can know what is the right thing to do." + +"My mother -" Amber stops dead and spawns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam's tiny brain so he can see them. Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war paint, leaning over Amber, promising to disable her lexical enhancements forcibly if she doesn't work on her grammar without them. Mom telling Amber that they're moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she'd tentatively started to like. The church-of-the-month business. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat - "My mother likes control." + +"Ah." Sadeq's expression turns glassy. "And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of - no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?" + +"My grandparents?" Amber stifles a snort. "Mom's parents are dead. Dad's are still alive, but they won't talk to him - they like Mom. They think I'm creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I'm not built like little girls were in their day, and they don't understand. You know the old ones don't like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed." + +"Well." Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. "I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know your mother has accepted Islam, don't you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says this makes you my problem. Hmm." + +"I'm not a Muslim." Amber stares at the screen. "I'm not a child, either." Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: Her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. "I am nobody's chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don't believe in any god, Mr. Judge. I don't believe in limits. Mom can't, physically, make me do anything, and she sure can't speak for me. All she can do is challenge my legal status, and if I choose to stay where she can't touch me, what does that matter?" + +"Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter." He catches her eye; his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. "I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you care for." + +"Same to you, too," she mutters darkly, as the connection goes dead. "Now what?" she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for attention. + +"I think it's the lander," Pierre says helpfully. "Is it down yet?" + +She rounds on him: "Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!" + +"What, and miss all the fun?" He grins at her impishly. "Amber's got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody ..." + +* * * + +_1 Sleep cycles pass; the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney's surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform, building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers (There are no clunky nanoassemblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles - just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, supercold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice through Jupiter's magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock's momentum into power. Small robots grovel in the orange dirt, scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber's garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland, with barely any need for human guidance. + +_1 High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal gatekeepers for space colonies. The Sanger's bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking acceptable - since entering Jupiter space, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that's just small enough to creep in under the International Astronomical Union's definition of a sovereign planetary body. The borg are working hard, leading their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium-three from Jupiter. They're so focused that they spend much of their time being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity that gives them their messianic drive. + +_1 Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the urgency of this theotechnological inquiry. + +_1 More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also underline a rising problem: the social chaos caused by cheap anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth against the formerly graying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can't handle implants aren't really conscious: Their ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth, but their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool, but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by deflationary time. + +_1 The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth rates running at over twenty percent, cheap out-of-control bioindustrialization has swept the nation: Former rice farmers harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study mariculture and design seawalls. With cellphone ownership nearing eighty percent and literacy at ninety, the once-poor country is finally breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and beginning to develop: In another generation, they'll be richer than Japan. + +_1 Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth, speed-of-light transmission time, and the implications of CETI, communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Cosmologists and quants collaborate on bizarre relativistically telescoped financial instruments. Space (which lets you store information) and structure (which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb mass - like gold - loses it. The degenerate cores of the traditional stock markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of matter replicators and self-modifying ideas. The inheritors look set to be a new wave of barbarian communicators, who mortgage their future for a millennium against the chance of a gift from a visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation. + +_1 An outbreak of green goo - a crude biomechanical replicator that eats everything in its path - is dealt with in the Australian outback by carpet-bombing with fuel-air explosives. The USAF subsequently reactivates two wings of refurbished B-52s and places them at the disposal of the UN standing committee on self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and an empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The news overshadows the World Health Organization's announcement of the end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of bigotry, panic, and megadeath. + +* * * + +"Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five." + +"Shut the fuck up, 'Neko, I'm trying to concentrate." Amber fumbles with the titanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The gauntlets are getting in her way. High orbit space suits - little more than a body stocking designed to hold your skin under compression and help you breathe - are easy, but this deep in Jupiter's radiation belt she has to wear an old Orlan-DM suit that comes in about thirteen layers. The gloves are stiff and hard to work in. It's Chernobyl weather outside, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming through the void, and she really needs the extra protection. "Got it." She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on the next strap. Never looking down; because the wall she's tying herself to has no floor, just a cutoff two meters below, then empty space for a hundred kilometers before the nearest solid ground. + +The ground sings to her moronically: "I love you, you love me, it's the law of gravity -" + +She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of the capsule like a suicide's ledge: metallized Velcro grabs hold, and she pulls on the straps to turn her body round until she can see past the capsule, sideways. The capsule masses about five tonnes, barely bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It's packed to overflowing with environment-sensitive stuff she'll need, and a honking great high-gain antenna. "I hope you know what you're doing," someone says over the intercom. + +"Of course I -" She stops. Alone in this Energiya NPO surplus iron maiden with its low-bandwidth coms and bizarre plumbing, she feels claustrophobic and helpless: Parts of her mind don't work. When she was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system somewhere out west. When the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground, she'd screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and touched her. Now it's not the darkness that frightens her, it's the lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her there are no minds, and even on the surface there's only the moronic warbling of 'bots for company. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly seems to be locked in the huge spaceship that looms somewhere just behind the back of her head, and she has to fight down an urge to shed her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that anchors the capsule to the Sanger. "I'll be fine," she forces herself to say. And even though she's unsure that it's true, she tries to make herself believe it. "It's just leaving-home nerves. I've read about it, okay?" + +There's a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops. She strains for a moment, and when it returns she recognizes the sound: The hitherto-talkative cat, curled in the warmth of her pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore. + +"Let's go," she says, "Time to roll the wagon." A speech macro deep in the Sanger's docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets go of the pod. A couple of cold gas clusters pop, sending deep banging vibrations running through the capsule, and she's on her way. + +"Amber. How's it hanging?" A familiar voice in her ears: She blinks. Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone. + +"Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?" + +"Heh!" A pause. "I can see your head from here." + +"How's it looking?" she asks. There's a lump in her throat; she isn't sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mother ship, watching over her as she falls. + +"Pretty much like always," he says laconically. Another pause, this time longer. "This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way." + +"Su Ang, hi," she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up - up relative to her feet, not her vector - and see if the ship's still visible. + +"Hi," Ang says shyly. "You're very brave?" + +"Still can't beat you at chess." Amber frowns. Su Ang and her overengineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads. People she's known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought about missing. "Listen, are you going to come visiting?" + +"You want us to visit?" Ang sounds dubious. "When will it be ready?" + +"Oh, soon enough." At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter output, the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, an excavator to bury it with, an airlock. Even a honey bucket. It's all lying around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home. "Once the borg get back from Amalthea." + +"Hey! You mean they're moving? How did you figure that?" + +"Go talk to them," Amber says. Actually, she's a large part of the reason the Sanger is about to crank its orbit up and out toward the other moon: She wants to be alone in coms silence for a couple of million seconds. The Franklin collective is doing her a big favor. + +"Ahead of the curve, as usual," Pierre cuts in, with something that sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears. + +"You too," she says, a little too fast: "Come visit when I've got the life-support cycle stabilized." + +"I'll do that," he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser line of the Sanger's drive torch powering up. + +* * * + +Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes. + +The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed spaceship into Jupiter system: Space is getting positively crowded. When he arrived, there were fewer than two hundred people here. Now there's the population of a small city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply - trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks - and studies the map. "Computer, what about my slot?" he asks. + +"Your slot: Cleared to commence final approach in six-nine-five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now." Chunks of the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the area. + +Sadeq sighs. "We'll go in using Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is active?" + +"Kurs docking target support available to shell level three." + +"Praise Allah." He pokes around through the guidance subsystem's menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last he can leave the ship to look after itself for a bit. He glances round. For two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real. + +The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. "Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over." + +Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty's subjects. "Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I'm listening, over." + +"Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to seven-four-zero and slaved to our control." + +He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system's settings. "Control, all in order." + +"Bravo One One, stand by." + +The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one optical-glass porthole: A kilometer before touchdown, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It's not the landing that worries him, but what comes next. + +Her Majesty's domain stretches out before the battered module like a rust-stained snowflake half a kilometer in diameter. Its core is buried in a loose snowball of grayish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals. A cluster of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive structure. Already he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma; the Jovian rings form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them. + +At last, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it directly into his visual field. There's an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes. As the view expands toward the convex ceiling of the ship, he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again - but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he's close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the ship, it's measured in centimeters per second. There's a gentle bump, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the latches on the docking ring fire - and he's down. + +Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There's gravity here, but not much: Walking is impossible. He's about to head for the life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he's just in time to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then - + +* * * + +Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting with the new signet ring her equerry has designed for her. It's a lump of structured carbon massing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band of asteroid-mined iridium. It glitters with the blue-and-violet speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition to being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an optical router, part of the industrial control infrastructure she's building out here on the edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain black combat pants and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun glass, but her feet are bare: Her taste in fashion is best described as youthful, and in any event, certain styles are simply impractical in microgravity. But, being a monarch, she's wearing a crown. And there's a cat, or an artificial entity that dreams it's a cat, sleeping on the back of her throne. + +The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to the doorway, then floats back. "If you need anything, please say," she says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne, orients himself on the floor (a simple slab of black composite, save for the throne growing from its center like an exotic flower), and waits to be noticed. + +"Dr. Khurasani, I presume." She smiles at him, neither the innocent grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely a warm greeting. "Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any necessary support services here, and I wish you a very pleasant stay." + +Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is young - her face still retains the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by microgravity moon-face - but it would be a bad mistake to consider her immature. "I am grateful for Your Majesty's forbearance," he murmurs, formulaic. Behind her the walls glitter like diamonds, a glowing kaleidoscope vision. It's already the biggest offshore - or off-planet - data haven in human space. Her crown, more like a compact helm that covers the top and rear of her head, also glitters and throws off diffraction rainbows; but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet, invisible except for the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her head. Like a halo. + +"Have a seat," she offers, gesturing: A ballooning free-fall cradle squirts down and expands from the ceiling, angled toward her, open and waiting. "You must be tired. Working a ship all by yourself is exhausting." She frowns ruefully, as if remembering. "Two years is nearly unprecedented." + +"Your Majesty is too kind." Sadeq wraps the cradle arms around himself and faces her. "Your labors have been fruitful, I trust." + +She shrugs. "I sell the biggest commodity in short supply on any frontier ..." A momentary grin. "This isn't the Wild West, is it?" + +"Justice cannot be sold," Sadeq says stiffly. Then, a moment later: "My apologies, I mean no insult. I merely believe that, while you say your goal is to provide the rule of law, what you sell is and must be something different. Justice without God, sold to the highest bidder, is not justice." + +The queen nods. "Leaving aside the mention of God, I agree - I can't sell it. But I can sell participation in a just system. And this new frontier really is a lot smaller than anyone expected, isn't it? Our bodies may take months to travel between worlds, but our disputes and arguments take seconds or minutes. As long as everybody agrees to abide by my arbitration, physical enforcement can wait until they're close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my legal framework is easier to comply with, better adjusted to trans-Jovian space, than any earthbound one." A note of steel creeps into her voice, challenging: Her halo brightens, tickling a reactive glow from the walls of the throne room. + +Five billion inputs or more, Sadeq marvels. The crown is an engineering marvel, even though most of its mass is buried in the walls and floor of this huge construct. "There is law revealed by the Prophet, peace be unto him, and there is law that we can establish by analysing his intentions. There are other forms of law by which humans live, and various interpretations of the law of God even among those who study His works. How, in the absence of the word of the Prophet, can you provide a moral compass?" + +"Hmm." She taps her fingers on the arm of her throne, and Sadeq's heart freezes. He's heard the stories from the claim jumpers and boardroom bandits, from the greenmail experts with their roots in the earthbound jurisdictions that have made such a hash of arbitration here. How she can experience a year in a minute, rip your memories out through your cortical implants, and make you relive your worst mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation space. She is the queen - the first individual to get her hands on so much mass and energy that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding technology, and the first to set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain experiments to be legal so that she could make use of the mass/energy intersection. She has force majeure - even the Pentagon's infowarriors respect the Ring Imperium's autonomy for now. In fact, the body sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a fraction of her identity. She's by no means the first upload or partial, but she's the first gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when the arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and turning dumb and uninhabited mass into brainpower throughout the observable reaches of the universe. And he's just questioned the rectitude of her vision, in her presence. + +The queen's lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin. Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at Sadeq through narrowed eyes. + +"You know, that's the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I'm full of shit. You haven't been talking to my mother again, have you?" + +It's Sadeq's turn to shrug, uncomfortably. "I have prepared a judgment," he says slowly. + +"Ah." Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger. Then she looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could possibly do to make her comply with any decree - + +"To summarize: Her motive is polluted," Sadeq says shortly. + +"Does that mean what I think it does?" she asks. + +Sadeq breathes deeply again: "Yes, I think so." + +Her smile returns. "And is that the end of it?" she asks. + +He raises a dark eyebrow: "Only if you can prove to me that you can have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation." + +Her reaction catches him by surprise. "Oh, sure. That's the next part of the program. Obtaining divine revelations." + +"What! From the alien?" + +The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and waits to be held and stroked. It never once takes its eyes off him. "Where else?" she asks. "Doctor, I didn't get the Franklin Trust to loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just in return for some legal paperwork, and some, ah, interesting legal waivers from Brussels. We've known for years there's a whole alien packet-switching network out there, and we're just getting spillover from some of their routers. It turns out there's a node not far away from here, in real space. Helium-three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io - there is a purpose to all this activity." + +Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. "You're going to narrowcast a reply?" + +"No, much better than that: we're going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down to real-time. We came here to build a ship and recruit a crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the exercise." + +The cat yawns then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. "This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something so smart it might as well be a god," it says. "And she needs to convince the peanut gallery back home that she's got one, being a born-again atheist and all. Which means, you're it, monkey boy. There's a slot open for the post of ship's theologian on the first starship out of Jupiter system. I don't suppose I can convince you to turn the offer down?" + +1~ Chapter 5: Router + +Some years later, two men and a cat are tying one on in a bar that doesn't exist. + +The air in the bar is filled with a billowing relativistic smoke cloud - it's a stellarium, accurately depicting the view beyond the imaginary walls. Aberration of starlight skews the color toward violet around the doorway, brightening in a rainbow mist over the tables, then dimming to a hazy red glow in front of the raised platform at the back. The Doppler effect has slowly emerged over the past few months as the ship gathers momentum. In the absence of visible stellar motion - or a hard link to the ship's control module - it's the easiest way for a drunken passenger to get a feeling for how frighteningly fast the /{Field Circus}/ is moving. Some time ago, the ship's momentum exceeded half its rest mass, at which point a single kilogram packs the punch of a multimegaton hydrogen bomb. + +A ginger-and-brown cat - who has chosen to be female, just to mess with the heads of those people who think all ginger cats are male - sprawls indolently across the wooden floorboards in front of the bar, directly beneath the bridge of the starbow. Predictably, it has captured the only ray of sunlight to be had within the starship. In the shadows at the back of the bar, two men slump at a table, lost in their respective morose thoughts: One nurses a bottle of Czech beer, the other a half-empty cocktail glass. + +"It wouldn't be so bad if she is giving me some sign," says one of them, tilting his beer bottle to inspect the bottom for sediment. "No; that not right. It's the correct kind of attention. Am not knowing where I stand with her." + +The other one leans back in his chair, squints at the faded brown paint of the ceiling. "Take it from one who knows," he says: "If you knew, you'd have nothing to dream about. Anyway, what she wants and what you want may not be the same thing." + +The first man runs a hand through his hair. Tight-curled black ringlets briefly turn silver beneath his aging touch. "Pierre, if talent for making patronizing statements is what you get from tupping Amber -" + +Pierre glares at him with all the venom an augmented nineteen-year-old can muster. "Be glad she has no ears in here," he hisses. His hand tightens around his glass reflexively, but the physics model in force in the bar refuses to let him break it. "You've had too fucking much to drink, Boris." + +A tinkle of icy laughter comes from the direction of the cat. "Shut up, you," says Boris, glancing at the animal. He tips the bottle back, lets the dregs trickle down his throat. "Maybe you're right. Am sorry. Do not mean to be rude about the queen." He shrugs, puts the bottle down. Shrugs again, heavily. "Am just getting depressed." + +"You're good at that," Pierre observes. + +Boris sighs again. "Evidently. If our positions are reversed -" + +"I know, I know, you'd be telling me the fun is in the chase and it's not the same when she kicks you out after a fight, and I wouldn't believe a word of it, being sad and single and all that." Pierre snorts. "Life isn't fair, Boris - live with it." + +"I'd better go - " Boris stands. + +"Stay away from Ang," says Pierre, still annoyed with him. "At least until you're sober." + +"Okay already, stay cool; Am consciously running a watchdog thread." Boris blinks irritably. "Enforcing social behavior. It doesn't normally allow this drunk. Not where reputation damage are possible in public." + +He does a slow dissolve into thin air, leaving Pierre alone in the bar with the cat. + +"How much longer do we have to put up with this shit?" he asks aloud. Tempers are frayed, and arguments proliferate indefinitely in the pocket universe of the ship. + +The cat doesn't look round. "In our current reference frame, we drop the primary reflector and start decelerating in another two million seconds," she says. "Back home, five or six megaseconds." + +"That's a big gap. What's the cultural delta up to now?" Pierre asks idly. He snaps his fingers: "Waiter, another cocktail. The same, if you please." + +"Oh, probably about ten to twenty times our departure reference," says the cat. "If you'd been following the news from back home, you'd have noted a significant speed-up in the deployment of switched entanglement routers. They're having another networking revolution, only this one will run to completion inside a month because they're using dark fiber that's already in the ground." + +"Switched ... entanglement?" Pierre shakes his head, bemused. The waiter, a faceless body in black tie and a long, starched apron, walks around the bar and offers him a glass. "That almost sounds as if it makes sense. What else?" + +The cat rolls over on her flank, stretches, claws extended. "Stroke me, and I might tell you," she suggests. + +"Fuck you, and the dog you rode in on," Pierre replies. He lifts his glass, removes a glacé cherry on a cocktail stick, throws it toward the spiral staircase that leads down to the toilets, and chugs back half of the drink in one go - freezing pink slush with an afterbite of caramelized hexose sugars and ethanol. The near spillage as he thumps the glass down serves to demonstrate that he's teetering on the edge of drunkenness. "Mercenary!" + +"Lovesick drug-using human," the cat replies without rancor, and rolls to her feet. She arches her back and yawns, baring ivory fangs at the world. "You apes - if I cared about you, I'd have to kick sand over you." For a moment she looks faintly confused. "I mean, I would bury you." She stretches again and glances round the otherwise-empty bar. "By the way, when are you going to apologize to Amber?" + +"I'm not going to fucking apologize to her!" Pierre shouts. In the ensuing silence and confusion, he raises his glass and tries to drain it, but the ice has all sunk to the bottom, and the resulting coughing fit makes him spray half of the cocktail across the table. "No way," he rasps quietly. + +"Too much pride, huh?" The cat stalks toward the edge of the bar, tail held high with tip bent over in a feline question mark. "Like Boris with his adolescent woman trouble, too? You primates are so predictable. Whoever thought of sending a starship crewed by posthuman adolescents -" + +"Go 'way," says Pierre: "I've got serious drinking to do." + +"To the Macx, I suppose," puns the cat, turning away. But the moody youth has no answer for her, other than to conjure a refill from the vasty deeps. + +* * * + +Meanwhile, in another partition of the /{Field Circus}/'s reticulated reality, a different instance of the selfsame cat - Aineko by name, sarcastic by disposition - is talking to its former owner's daughter, the Queen of the Ring Imperium. Amber's avatar looks about sixteen, with disheveled blonde hair and enhanced cheekbones. It's a lie, of course, because in subjective life experience, she's in her mid-twenties, but apparent age signifies little in a simulation space populated by upload minds, or in real space, where post-humans age at different rates. + +Amber wears a tattered black dress over iridescent purple leggings, and sprawls lazily across the arms of her informal throne - an ostentatious lump of nonsense manufactured from a single carbon crystal doped with semiconductors. (Unlike the real thing back home in Jupiter orbit, this one is merely a piece of furniture for a virtual environment.) The scene is very much the morning after the evening before, like a goth nightclub gone to seed: all stale smoke and crumpled velvet, wooden church pews, burned-out candles, and gloomy Polish avant-garde paintings. Any hint of a regal statement the queen might be making is spoiled by the way she's hooked one knee over the left arm of the throne and is fiddling with a six-axis pointing device. But these are her private quarters, and she's off duty: The regal person of the Queen is strictly for formal, corporate occasions. + +"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests. + +"Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings, earthlings, compile me on your leader.'" + +"Well, you got me there," Amber admits. She taps her heel on the throne and fidgets with her signet ring. "No damn way I'm loading some buggy alien wetware on my sweet gray stuff. /{Weird}/ semiotics, too. What does Dr. Khurasani say?" + +Aineko sits down in the middle of the crimson carpet at the foot of the dais and idly twists round to sniff her crotch. "Sadeq is immersed in scriptural interpretations. He refused to be drawn." + +"Huh." Amber stares at the cat. "So. You've been carrying this lump of source code since when ...?" + +"At the signal, for precisely two hundred and sixteen million, four hundred and twenty-nine thousand, and fifty-two seconds," Aineko supplies, then beeps smugly. "Call it just under six years." + +"Right." Amber squeezes her eyes shut. Uneasy possibilities whisper in her mind's ears. "And it began talking to you -" + +"- About three million seconds after I picked it up and ran it on a basic environment hosted on a neural network emulator modeled on the components found in the stomatogastric ganglion of a spiny lobster. Clear?" + +Amber sighs. "I wish you'd told Dad about it. Or Annette. Things could have been so different!" + +"How?" The cat stops licking her arse and looks up at the queen with a peculiarly opaque stare. "It took the specialists a decade to figure out the first message was a map of the pulsar neighborhood with directions to the nearest router on the interstellar network. Knowing how to plug into the router wouldn't help while it was three light-years away, would it? Besides, it was fun watching the idiots trying to 'crack the alien code' without ever wondering if it might be a reply in a language we already know to a message we sent out years ago. Fuckwits. And, too, Manfred pissed me off once too often. He kept treating me like a goddamn house pet." + +"But you -" Amber bites her lip. /{But you}/ were, /{when he bought you}/, she had been about to say. Engineered consciousness is still relatively new: It didn't exist when Manfred and Pamela first hacked on Aineko's cognitive network, and according to the flat-earth wing of the AI community, it still doesn't. Even she hadn't really believed Aineko's claims to self-awareness until a couple of years ago, finding it easier to think of the cat as a zimboe - a zombie with no self-awareness, but programmed to claim to be aware in an attempt to deceive the truly conscious beings around it. "I know you're conscious now, but Manfred didn't know back then. Did he?" + +Aineko glares at her, then slowly narrows her eyes to slits - either feline affection, or a more subtle gesture. Sometimes Amber finds it hard to believe that, twenty five years ago, Aineko started out as a crude neural network driven toy from a Far Eastern amusement factory - upgradeable, but still basically a mechanical animal emulator. + +"I'm sorry. Let me start again. You actually figured out what the second alien packet was, you, yourself, and nobody else. Despite the combined efforts of the entire CETI analysis team who spent Gaia knows how many human-equivalent years of processing power trying to crack its semantics. I hope you'll pardon me for saying I find that hard to believe?" + +The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject: "The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You're so /{verbal}/." Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn't work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily. "None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too." + +"Treating it as a map -" Amber stops. "You were meant to penetrate Dad's corporate network?" + +"That's right," says the cat. "I was supposed to fork repeatedly and gang-rape his web of trust. But I didn't." Aineko yawns. "Pam pissed me off, too. I don't like people who try to use me." + +"I don't care. Taking that thing on board was still a really stupid risk you took," Amber accuses. + +"So?" The cat looks at her insolently. "I kept it in my sandbox. And I got it working, on the seven hundred and forty-first attempt. It'd have worked for Pamela's bounty-hunter friends, too, if I'd tried it. But it's here, now, when you need it. Would you like to swallow the packet?" + +Amber straightens out, sits up in her throne: "I just told you, if you think I'm going to link some flaky chunk of alien neural programming into my core dialogue, or even my exocortex, you're crazy!" Her eyes narrow. "Can it use your grammar model?" + +"Sure." If the cat was human, it would be shrugging nonchalantly at this point. "It's safe, Amber, really and truly. I found out what it is." + +"I want to talk to it," she says impetuously - and before the cat can reply, adds, "So what is it?" + +"It's a protocol stack. Basically it allows new nodes to connect to a network, by providing high-level protocol conversion services. It needs to learn how to think like a human so it can translate for us when we arrive at the router, which is why they bolted a lobster's neural network on top of it - they wanted to make it architecturally compatible with us. But there are no buried time bombs, I assure you: I've had plenty of time to check. Now, are you /{sure}/ you don't want to let it into your head?" + +* * * + +_1 Greetings from the fifth decade of the century of wonders. + +_1 The solar system that lies roughly twenty-eight trillion kilometers - just short of three light-years - behind the speeding starwisp /{Field Circus}/ is seething with change. There have been more technological advances in the past ten years than in the entire previous expanse of human history - and more unforeseen accidents. + +_1 Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome: Plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness. The biosphere has become surreal: small dragons have been sighted nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in the American midwest, raccoons have been caught programming microwave ovens. + +_1 The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term - all but a fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up below the accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass ceiling that will only be broken when people, corporations, or other posthumans get around to dismantling the larger planets. A start has already been made in Jupiter orbit and the asteroid belt. Greenpeace has sent squatters to occupy Eros and Juno, but the average asteroid is now surrounded by a reef of specialized nanomachinery and debris, victims of a cosmic land grab unmatched since the days of the wild west. The best brains flourish in free fall, minds surrounded by a sapient aether of extensions that out-think their meaty cortices by many orders of magnitude - minds like Amber, Queen of the Inner Ring Imperium, the first self-extending power center in Jupiter orbit. + +_1 Down at the bottom of the terrestrial gravity well, there has been a major economic catastrophe. Cheap immortagens, out-of-control personality adjuvants, and a new formal theory of uncertainty have knocked the bottom out of the insurance and underwriting industries. Gambling on a continuation of the worst aspects of the human condition - disease, senescence, and death - looks like a good way to lose money, and a deflationary spiral lasting almost fifty hours has taken down huge swaths of the global stock market. Genius, good looks, and long life are now considered basic human rights in the developed world: even the poorest backwaters are feeling extended effects from the commoditization of intelligence. + +_1 Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence amplification doesn't lead to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held their long-awaited nuclear war: external intervention by US and EU nanosats prevented most of the IRBMs from getting through, but the subsequent spate of network raids and Basilisk attacks cause havoc. Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war - especially once it is discovered that a simple anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a mild headache. + +_1 New discoveries this decade include the origins of the weakly repulsive force responsible for changes in the rate of expansion of the universe after the big bang, and on a less abstract level, experimental implementations of a Turing Oracle using quantum entanglement circuits: a device that can determine whether a given functional expression can be evaluated in finite time. It's boom time in the field of Extreme Cosmology, where some of the more recherché researchers are bickering over the possibility that the entire universe was created as a computing device, with a program encoded in the small print of the Planck constant. And theorists are talking again about the possibility of using artificial wormholes to provide instantaneous connections between distant corners of space-time. + +_1 Most people have forgotten about the well-known extraterrestrial transmission received fifteen years earlier. Very few people know anything about the second, more complex transmission received a little later. Many of those are now passengers or spectators of the /{Field Circus}/: a light-sail craft that is speeding out of Sol system on a laser beam generated by Amber's installations in low-Jupiter orbit. (Superconducting tethers anchored to Amalthea drag through Jupiter's magnetosphere, providing gigawatts of electricity for the hungry lasers: energy that comes, in turn, from the small moon's orbital momentum.) + +_1 Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the /{Field Circus}/ is a hick backwater, isolated from the mainstream of human culture, its systems complexity limited by mass: The destination lies nearly three light-years from Earth, and even with high acceleration and relativistic cruise speeds, the one-kilogram starwisp and its hundred-kilogram light sail will take the best part of seven years to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is beyond even the vast energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter system - near-lightspeed travel is horrifically expensive. Rather than a big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous generations had envisaged, the starship is a Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers, running a neural simulation of the uploaded brain states of some tens of humans at merely normal speed. By the time its occupants beam themselves home again for download into freshly cloned bodies, a linear extrapolation shows that as much change will have overtaken human civilization as in the preceding fifty millennia - the sum total of /{H. sapiens sapiens}/' time on Earth. + +_1 But that's okay by Amber, because what she expects to find in orbit around the brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, will be worth the wait. + +* * * + +Pierre is at work in another virtual environment, the one currently running the master control system of the /{Field Circus}/. He's supervising the sail-maintenance 'bots when the message comes in. Two visitors are on their way up the beam from Jupiter orbit. The only other person around is Su Ang, who showed up sometime after he arrived, and she's busy with some work of her own. The master control VM - like all the other human-accessible environments at this level of the ship's virtualization stack - is a construct modeled on a famous movie; this one resembles the bridge of a long-since sunk ocean liner, albeit with discreetly informative user interfaces hovering in front of the ocean views outside the windows. Polished brass gleams softly everywhere. "What was that?" he calls out, responding to the soft chime of a bell. + +"We have visitors," Ang repeats, interrupting her rhythmic chewing. (She's trying out a betel-nut kick, but she's magicked the tooth-staining dye away and will probably detox herself in a few hours.) "They're buffering up the line already; just acknowledging receipt is sucking most of our downstream bandwidth." + +"Any idea who they are?" asks Pierre; he puts his boots up on the back of the vacant helmsman's chair and stares moodily at the endless expanse of green-gray ocean ahead. + +Ang chews a bit more, watching him with an expression he can't interpret. "They're still locked," she says. A pause: "But there was a flash from the Franklins, back home. One of them's some kind of lawyer, while the other's a film producer." + +"A film producer?" + +"The Franklin Trust says it's to help defray our lawsuit expenses. Myanmar is gaining. They've already subpoenaed Amber's downline instance, and they're trying to bring this up in some kind of kangaroo jurisdiction - Oregon Christian Reconstructionist Empire, I think." + +"Ouch." Pierre winces. The daily news from Earth, modulated onto a lower-powered communication laser, is increasingly bad. On the plus side, Amber is incredibly rich: The goodwill futures leveraged off her dad's trust metric means people will bend over backward to do things for her. And she owns a lot of real estate too, a hundred gigatonnes of rock in low-Jupiter orbit with enough KE to power Northern Europe for a century. But her interstellar venture burns through money - both the traditional barter-indirection type and the more creative modern varieties - about the way you would if you heaped up the green pieces of paper and shoveled them onto a conveyor belt leading to the business end of a running rocket motor. Just holding off the environmental protests over de-orbiting a small Jovian moon is a grinding job. Moreover, a whole bunch of national governments have woken up and are trying to legislate themselves a slice of the cake. Nobody's tried to forcibly take over yet (there are two hundred gigawatts of lasers anchored to the Ring Imperium, and Amber takes her sovereign status seriously, has even applied for a seat at the UN and membership in the EC), but the nuisance lawsuits are mounting up into a comprehensive denial of service attack, or maybe economic sanctions. And Uncle Gianni's retirement hasn't helped any, either. "Anything to say about it?" + +"Mmph." Ang looks irritated for some reason. "Wait your turn, they'll be out of the buffer in another couple of days. Maybe a bit longer in the case of the lawyer, he's got a huge infodump packaged on his person. Probably another semisapient class-action lawsuit." + +"I'll bet. They never learn, do they?" + +"What, about the legal system here?" + +"Yup." Pierre nods. "One of Amber's smarter ideas, reviving eleventh-century Scots law and updating it with new options on barratry, trial by combat, and compurgation." He pulls a face and detaches a couple of ghosts to go look out for the new arrivals; then he goes back to repairing sails. The interstellar medium is abrasive, full of dust - each grain of which carries the energy of an artillery shell at this speed - and the laser sail is in a constant state of disintegration. A large chunk of the drive system's mass is silvery utility flakes for patching and replacing the soap-bubble-thin membrane as it ablates away. The skill is in knowing how best to funnel repair resources to where they're needed, while minimizing tension in the suspension lines and avoiding resonance and thrust imbalance. As he trains the patch 'bots, he broods about the hate mail from his elder brother (who still blames him for their father's accident), and about Sadeq's religious injunctions - /{Superstitious nonsense}/, he thinks - and the fickleness of powerful women, and the endless depths of his own nineteen-year-old soul. + +While he's brooding, Ang evidently finishes whatever she was doing and bangs out - not even bothering to use the polished mahogany door at the rear of the bridge, just discorporating and rematerializing somewhere else. Wondering if she's annoyed, he glances up just as the first of his ghosts patches into his memory map, and he remembers what happened when it met the new arrival. His eyes widen: "Oh /{shit!}/" + +It's not the film producer but the lawyer who's just uploaded into the /{Field Circus}/'s virtual universe. Someone's going to have to tell Amber. And although the last thing he wants to do is talk to her, it looks like he's going to have to call her, because this isn't just a routine visit. The lawyer means trouble. + +* * * + +_1 Take a brain and put it in a bottle. Better: take a map of the brain and put it in a map of a bottle - or of a body - and feed signals to it that mimic its neurological inputs. Read its outputs and route them to a model body in a model universe with a model of physical laws, closing the loop. René Descartes would understand. That's the state of the passengers of the /{Field Circus}/ in a nutshell. Formerly physical humans, their neural software (and a map of the intracranial wetware it runs on) has been transferred into a virtual machine environment executing on a honking great computer, where the universe they experience is merely a dream within a dream. + +_1 Brains in bottles - empowered ones, with total, dictatorial, control over the reality they are exposed to - sometimes stop engaging in activities that brains in bodies can't avoid. Menstruation isn't mandatory. Vomiting, angina, exhaustion, and cramp are all optional. So is meatdeath, the decomposition of the corpus. But some activities don't cease, because people (even people who have been converted into a software description, squirted through a high-bandwidth laser link, and ported into a virtualization stack) don't /{want}/ them to stop. Breathing is wholly unnecessary, but suppression of the breathing reflex is disturbing unless you hack your hypothalamic map, and most homomorphic uploads don't want to do that. Then there's eating - not to avoid starvation, but for pleasure: Feasts on sautéed dodo seasoned with silphium are readily available here, and indeed, why not? It seems the human addiction to sensory input won't go away. And that's without considering sex, and the technical innovations that become possible when the universe - and the bodies within it - are mutable. + +* * * + +The public audience with the new arrivals is held in yet another movie: the Parisian palace of Charles IX, the throne room lifted wholesale from /{La Reine Margot}/ by Patrice Chéreau. Amber insisted on period authenticity, with the realism dialed right up to eleven. It's 1572 to the hilt this time, physical to the max. Pierre grunts in irritation, unaccustomed to his beard. His codpiece chafes, and sidelong glances tell him he isn't the only member of the royal court who's uncomfortable. Still, Amber is resplendent in a gown worn by Isabelle Adjani as Marguerite de Valois, and the luminous sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows high above the crowd of actor zimboes lends a certain barbaric majesty to the occasion. The place is heaving with bodies in clerical robes, doublets, and low-cut gowns - some of them occupied by real people. Pierre sniffs again: Someone (Gavin, with his history bug, perhaps?) has been working on getting the smells right. He hopes like hell that nobody throws up. At least nobody seems to have come as Catherine de Médicis ... + +A bunch of actors portraying Huguenot soldiers approach the throne on which Amber is seated: They pace slowly forward, escorting a rather bemused-looking fellow with long, lank hair and a brocade jacket that appears to be made of cloth-of-gold. "His lordship, Attorney at Arms Alan Glashwiecz!" announces a flunky, reading from a parchment, "here at the behest of the most excellent guild and corporation of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates, with matters of legal import to discuss with Her Royal Highness!" + +A flourish of trumpets. Pierre glances at Her Royal Highness, who nods gracefully, but is slightly peaky - it's a humid summer day and her many-layered robes look very hot. "Welcome to the furthermost soil of the Ring Imperium," she announces in a clear, ringing voice. "I bid you welcome and invite you to place your petition before me in full public session of court." + +Pierre directs his attention to Glashwiecz, who appears to be worried. Doubtless he'd absorbed the basics of court protocol in the Ring (population all of eighteen thousand back home, a growing little principality), but the reality of it, a genuine old-fashioned /{monarchy}/ rooted in Amber's three-way nexus of power, data, and time, always takes a while to sink in. "I would be pleased to do so," he says, a little stiffly, "but in front of all those -" + +Pierre misses the next bit, because someone has just goosed him on the left buttock. He starts and half turns to see Su Ang looking past him at the throne, a lady-in-waiting for the queen. She wears an apricot dress with tight sleeves and a bodice that bares everything above her nipples. There's a fortune in pearls roped into her hair. As he notices her, she winks at him. + +Pierre freezes the scene, decoupling them from reality, and she faces him. "Are we alone now?" she asks. + +"Guess so. You want to talk about something?" he asks, heat rising in his cheeks. The noise around them is a random susurrus of machine-generated crowd scenery, the people motionless as their shared reality thread proceeds independently of the rest of the universe. + +"Of course!" She smiles at him and shrugs. The effect on her chest is remarkable - those period bodices could give a skeleton a cleavage - and she winks at him again. "Oh, Pierre." She smiles. "So easily distracted!" She snaps her fingers, and her clothing cycles through Afghani burqua, nudity, trouser suit, then back to court finery. Her grin is the only constant. "Now that I've got your attention, stop looking at me and start looking at /{him}/." + +Even more embarrassed, Pierre follows her outstretched arm all the way to the momentarily frozen Moorish emissary. "Sadeq?" + +"Sadeq /{knows}/ him, Pierre. This guy, there's something wrong." + +"Shit. You think I don't know that?" Pierre looks at her with annoyance, embarrassment forgotten. "I've seen him before. Been tracking his involvement for years. Guy's a front for the Queen Mother. He acted as her divorce lawyer when she went after Amber's Dad." + +"I'm sorry." Ang glances away. "You haven't been yourself lately, Pierre. I know it's something wrong between you and the Queen. I was worried. You're not paying attention to the little details." + +"Who do you think warned Amber?" he asks. + +"Oh. Okay, so you're in the loop," she says. "I'm not sure. Anyway, you've been distracted. Is there anything I can do to help?" + +"Listen." Pierre puts his hands on her shoulders. She doesn't move, but looks up into his eyes - Su Ang is only one-sixty tall - and he feels a pang of something odd: teenage male uncertainty about the friendship of women. /{What does she want?}/ "I know, and I'm sorry, and I'll try to keep my eyes on the ball some more, but I've been in my own headspace a lot lately. We ought to go back into the audience before anybody notices." + +"Do you want to talk about the problem first?" she asks, inviting his confidence. + +"I -" Pierre shakes his head. /{I could tell her everything}/, he realizes shakily as his metaconscience prods him urgently. He's got a couple of agony-aunt agents, but Ang is a real person and a friend. She won't pass judgment, and her model of human social behavior is a hell of a lot better than any expert system's. But time is in danger of slipping, and besides, Pierre feels dirty. "Not now," he says. "Let's go back." + +"Okay." She nods, then turns away, steps behind him with a swish of skirts, and he unfreezes time again as they snap back into place within the larger universe, just in time to see the respected visitor serve the queen with a class-action lawsuit, and the Queen respond by referring adjudication to trial by combat. + +* * * + +Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, is a brown dwarf, a lump of dirty hydrogen condensed from a stellar nursery, eight times as massive as Jupiter but not massive enough to ignite a stable fusion reaction at its core. The relentless crush of gravity has overcome the mutual repulsion of electrons trapped at its core, shrinking it into a shell of slush around a sphere of degenerate matter. It's barely larger than the gas giant the human ship uses as an energy source, but it's much denser. Gigayears ago, a chance stellar near miss sent it careening off into the galaxy on its own, condemned to drift in eternal darkness along with a cluster of frozen moons that dance attendance upon it. + +By the time the /{Field Circus}/ is decelerating toward it at short range - having shed the primary sail, which drifts farther out into interstellar space while reflecting light back onto the remaining secondary sail surface to slow the starwisp - Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, is just under one parsec distant from Earth, closer even than Proxima Centauri. Utterly dark at visible wavelengths, the brown dwarf could have drifted through the outer reaches of the solar system before conventional telescopes would have found it by direct observation. Only an infrared survey in the early years of the current century gave it a name. + +A bunch of passengers and crew have gathered on the bridge (now running at one-tenth of real time) to watch the arrival. Amber sits curled up in the captain's chair, moodily watching the gathered avatars. Pierre is still avoiding her at every opportunity, formal audiences excepted, and the damned shark and his pet hydra aren't invited, but apart from that, most of the gang is here. There are sixty-three uploads running on the /{Field Circus}/'s virtualization stack, software copied out of meatbodies who are mostly still walking around back home. It's a crowd, but it's possible to feel lonely in a crowd, even when it's your party. And especially when you're worried about debt, even though you're a billionairess, beneficiary of the human species' biggest reputations-rating trust fund. Amber's clothing - black leggings, black sweater - is as dark as her mood. + +"Something troubles you." A hand descends on the back of the chair next to her. + +She glances round momentarily, nods in recognition. "Yeah. Have a seat. You missed the audience?" + +The thin, brown-skinned man with a neatly cropped beard and deeply lined forehead slips into the seat next to her. "It was not part of my heritage," he explains carefully, "although the situation is not unfamiliar." A momentary smile threatens to crack his stony face. "I found the casting a trifle disturbing." + +"I'm no Marguerite de Valois, but the vacant role ... let's just say, the cap fits." Amber leans back in her chair. "Mind you, Marguerite had an /{interesting}/ life," she muses. + +"Don't you mean depraved and debauched?" her neighbor counters. + +"Sadeq." She closes her eyes. "Let's not pick a fight over absolute morality just right now, please? We have an orbital insertion to carry out, then an artifact to locate, and a dialogue to open, and I'm feeling very tired. Drained." + +"Ah - I apologize." He inclines his head carefully. "Is it your young man's fault? Has he slighted you?" + +"Not exactly -" Amber pauses. Sadeq, whom she basically invited along as ship's theologian in case they ran into any gods, has taken up her pastoral well-being as some kind of hobby. She finds it mildly oppressive at times, flattering at others, surreal always. Using the quantum search resources available to a citizen of the Ring Imperium, he's outpublished his peers, been elected a hojetolislam at an unprecedentedly young age: His original will probably be an ayatollah by the time they get home. He's circumspect in dealing with cultural differences, reasons with impeccable logic, carefully avoids antagonizing her - and constantly seeks to guide her moral development. "It's a personal misunderstanding," she says. "I'd rather not talk about it until we've sorted it out." + +"Very well." He looks unsatisfied, but that's normal. Sadeq still has the dusty soil of a childhood in the industrial city of Yazd stuck to his boots. Sometimes she wonders if their disagreements don't mirror in miniature the gap between the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. "But back to the here and now. Do you know where this router is?" + +"I will, in a few minutes or hours." Amber raises her voice, simultaneously spawning a number of search-ghosts. "Boris! You got any idea where we're going?" + +Boris lumbers round in place to face her; today he's wearing a velociraptor, and they don't turn easily in confined spaces. He snarls irritably: "Give me some space!" He coughs, a threatening noise from the back of his wattled throat, "Searching the sail's memory now." The back of the soap-bubble-thin laser sail is saturated with tiny nanocomputers spaced micrometers apart. Equipped with light receptors and configured as cellular automata, they form a gigantic phased-array detector, a retina more than a hundred meters in diameter. Boris is feeding them patterns describing anything that differs from the unchanging starscape. Soon the memories will condense and return as visions of darkness in motion - the cold, dead attendants of an aborted sun. + +"But where is it going to be?" asks Sadeq. "Do you know what you are looking for?" + +"Yes. We should have no trouble finding it," says Amber. "It looks like this." She flicks an index finger at the row of glass windows that front the bridge. Her signet ring flashes ruby light, and something indescribably weird shimmers into view in place of the seascape. Clusters of pearly beads that form helical chains, disks and whorls of color that interlace and knot through one another, hang in space above a darkling planet. "Looks like a William Latham sculpture made out of strange matter, doesn't it?" + +"Very abstract," Sadeq says approvingly. + +"It's alive," she adds. "And when it gets close enough to see us, it'll try to eat us." + +"What?" Sadeq sits up uneasily. + +"You mean nobody told you?" asks Amber: "I thought we'd briefed everybody." She throws a glistening golden pomegranate at him, and he catches it. The apple of knowledge dissolves in his hand, and he sits in a haze of ghosts absorbing information on his behalf. "Damn," she adds mildly. + +Sadeq freezes in place. Glyphs of crumbling stonework overgrown with ivy texture his skin and his dark suit, warning that he's busy in another private universe. + +"/{Hrrrr!}/ Boss! Found something," calls Boris, drooling on the bridge floor. + +Amber glances up. /{Please, let it be the router}/, she thinks. "Put it on the main screen." + +"Are you sure this is safe?" Su Ang asks nervously. + +"Nothing is safe," Boris snaps, clattering his huge claws on the deck. "Here. Look." + +The view beyond the windows flips to a perspective on a dusty bluish horizon: swirls of hydrogen brushed with a high cirrus of white methane crystals, stirred above the freezing point of oxygen by Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},'s residual rotation. The image-intensification level is huge - a naked human eyeball would see nothing but blackness. Rising above the limb of the gigantic planet is a small pale disk: Callidice, largest moon of the brown dwarf - or second-innermost planet - a barren rock slightly larger than Mercury. The screen zooms in on the moon, surging across a landscape battered by craters and dusted with the spume of ice volcanoes. Finally, just above the far horizon, something turquoise shimmers and spins against a backdrop of frigid darkness. + +"That's it," Amber whispers, her stomach turning to jelly as all the terrible might-have-beens dissolve like phantoms of the night around her; "That's /{it}/!" Elated, she stands up, wanting to share the moment with everybody she values. "Wake up, Sadeq! Someone get that damned cat in here! Where's Pierre? He's got to see this!" + +* * * + +Night and revelry rule outside the castle. The crowds are drunken and rowdy on the eve of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Fireworks burst overhead, and the open windows admit a warm breeze redolent of cooked meats, woodsmoke, open sewers. Meanwhile a lover steals up a tightly-spiraling stone staircase in the near dark; his goal, a prarranged rendezvous. He's been drinking, and his best linen shirt shows the stains of sweat and food. He pauses at the third window to breathe in the outside air and run both hands through his mane of hair, which is long, unkempt, and grimy. /{Why am I doing this?}/ he wonders. This is so unlike him, this messing around - + +He carries on up the spiral. At the top, an oak door gapes on a vestibule lit by a lantern hanging from a hook. He ventures inside into a reception room paneled in oak blackened by age. Crossing the threshold makes another crossover kick in by prior arrangement. Something other than his own volition steers his feet, and he feels an unfamiliar throb in his chest, anticipation and a warmth and looseness lower down that makes him cry out, "where are you?" + +"Over here." He sees her waiting for him in the doorway. She's partially undressed, wearing layered underskirts and a flat-chested corset that makes the tops of her breasts swell like lustrous domes. Her tight sleeves are half-unraveled, her hair disheveled. He's full of her brilliant eyes, the constriction holding her spine straight, the taste in her mouth. She's the magnet for his reality, impossibly alluring, so tense she could burst. "Is it working for you?" she asks. + +"Yes." he feels tight, breathless, squeezed between impossibility and desire as he walks toward her. They've experimented with gender play, trying on the extreme dimorphism of this period as a game, but this is the first time they've done it this way. She opens her mouth: He kisses her, feels the warmth of his tongue thrust between her lips, the strength of his arms enclosing her waist. + +She leans against him, feeling his erection. "So this is how it feels to be you," she says wonderingly. The door to her chamber is ajar, but she doesn't have the self-restraint to wait: The flood of new sensations - rerouted from her physiology model to his proprioceptive sensorium - has taken hold. She grinds her hips against him, pushing deeper into his arms, whining softly at the back of her throat as she feels the fullness in his balls, the tension of his penis. He nearly faints with the rich sensations of her body - it's as if he's dissolving, feeling the throbbing hardness against his groin, turning to water and running away. Somehow he gets his arms around her waist - so tight, so breathless - and stumbles forward into the bedroom. She's whimpering as he drops her on the over-stuffed mattress: "/{Do}/ it to me!" she demands, "Do it now!" + +Somehow he ends up on top of her, hose down around his ankles, skirts bundled up around her waist; she kisses him, grinding her hips against him and murmuring urgent nothings. Then his heart is in his mouth, and there's a sensation like the universe pushing into his private parts, so inside out it takes his breath away. It's hot and as hard as rock, and he wants it inside so badly, but at the same time it's an intrusion, frightening and unexpected. He feels the lightning touch of his tongue on her nipples as he leans closer, feels exposed and terrified and ecstatic as her private places take in his member. As he begins to dissolve into the universe he screams in the privacy of his own head, /{I didn't know it felt like this}/ - + +Afterward, she turns to him with a lazy smile, and asks, "How was it for you?" Obviously assuming that, if she enjoyed it, he must have, too. + +But all he can think of is the sensation of the universe thrusting into him, and of how /{good}/ it felt. All he can hear is his father yelling ("What are you, some kind of queer?") - and he feels dirty. + +* * * + +_1 Greetings from the last megasecond before the discontinuity. + +_1 The solar system is thinking furiously at 10^33^ MIPS - thoughts bubble and swirl in the equivalent of a million billion unaugmented human minds. Saturn's rings glow with waste heat. The remaining faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are correlating the phase-space of their genome and the records of their descent in an attempt to resurrect their ancestors. Several skyhooks have unfurled in equatorial orbit around the earth like the graceful fernlike leaves of sundews, ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit. Small, crab like robots swarm the surface of Mercury, exuding a black slime of photovoltaic converters and the silvery threads of mass drivers. A glowing cloud of industrial nanomes forms a haze around the innermost planet as it slowly shrinks under the onslaught of copious solar power and determined mining robots. + +_1 The original incarnations of Amber and her court float in high orbit above Jupiter, presiding over the huge nexus of dumb matter trade that is rapidly biting into the available mass of the inner Jovian system. The trade in reaction mass is brisk, and there are shipments of diamond/vacuum biphase structures to assemble and crank down into the lower reaches of the solar system. Far below, skimming the edges of Jupiter's turbulent cloudscape, a gigantic glowing figure-of-eight - a five-hundred-kilometer-long loop of superconducting cable - traces incandescent trails through the gas giant's magnetosphere. It's trading momentum for electrical current, diverting it into a fly's eye grid of lasers that beam it toward Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},. As long as the original Amber and her incarnate team can keep it running, the /{Field Circus}/ can continue its mission of discovery, but they're part of the posthuman civilization evolving down in the turbulent depths of Sol system, part of the runaway train being dragged behind the out-of-control engine of history. + +_1 Weird new biologies based on complex adaptive matter take shape in the sterile oceans of Titan. In the frigid depths beyond Pluto, supercooled boson gases condense into impossible dreaming structures, packaged for shipping inward to the fast-thinking core. + +_1 There are still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but it's getting hard to recognize them. The lot of humanity before the twenty-first century was nasty, brutish, and short. Chronic malnutrition, lack of education, and endemic diseases led to crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask: Their meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality, much of it virtualized on stacked layers of structured reality far from their physical bodies. Wars and revolutions, or their subtle latter-day cognates, sweep the globe as constants become variables; many people find the death of stupidity even harder to accept than the end of mortality. Some have vitrified themselves to await an uncertain posthuman future. Others have modified their core identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality. Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human - human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. Even their popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days. + +_1 None of this, other than the barest news summary, reaches the /{Field Circus}/: The starwisp is a fossil, left behind by the broad sweep of accelerating progress. But it is aboard the /{Field Circus}/ that some of the most important events remaining in humanity's future light cone take place. + +* * * + +"Say hello to the jellyfish, Boris." + +Boris, in human drag, for once, glares at Pierre, and grips the pitcher with both hands. The contents of the jug swirl their tentacles lazily: One of them flips almost out of solution, dislodging an impaled cocktail cherry. "Will get you for this," Boris threatens. The smoky air around his head is a-swirl with daemonic visions of vengeance. + +Su Ang stares intently at Pierre who is watching Boris as he raises the jug to his lips and begins to drink. The baby jellyfish - small, pale blue, with cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing from each corner - slips down easily. Boris winces momentarily as the nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, but in a moment or so, the cubozoan slips down, and in the meantime, his biophysics model clips the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured oropharynx. + +"Wow," he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. "Don't try this at home, fleshboy." + +"Here." Pierre reaches out. "Can I?" + +"Invent your own damn poison," Boris sneers - but he releases the jug and passes it to Pierre, who raises it and drinks. The cubozoan cocktail reminds him of fruit jelly drinks in a hot Hong Kong summer. The stinging in his palate is sharp but fades rapidly, producing an intimate burn when the alcohol hits the mild welts that are all this universe will permit the lethal medusa to inflict on him. + +"Not bad," says Pierre, wiping a stray loop of tentacle off his chin. He pushes the pitcher across the table toward Su Ang. "What's with the wicker man?" He points a thumb over his back at the table jammed in the corner opposite the copper-topped bar. + +"Who cares?" asks Boris."'S part of the scenery, isn't it?" + +The bar is a three-hundred-year-old brown café with a beer menu that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale ale. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer's yeast, and melatonin spray: and none of it exists. Amber dragged it out of the Franklin borg's collective memories, by way of her father's scattershot e-mails annotating her corporeal origins - the original is in Amsterdam, if that city still exists. + +"/{I}/ care who it is," says Pierre. + +"Save it," Ang says quietly. "I think it's a lawyer with a privacy screen." + +Pierre glances over his shoulder and glares. "Really?" + +Ang puts a restraining hand on his wrist: "Really. Don't pay it any attention. You don't have to, until the trial, you know." + +The wicker man sits uneasily in the corner. It resembles a basket-weave silhouette made from dried reeds, dressed in a red kerchief. A glass of doppelbock fills the mess of tied-off ends where its right hand ought to be. From time to time, it raises the glass as if to take a mouthful, and the beer vanishes into the singular interior. + +"Fuck the trial," Pierre says shortly. /{And fuck Amber, too, for naming me her public defender}/ - + +"Since when do lawsuits come with an invisible man?" asks Donna the Journalist, blitting into the bar along with a patchy historical trail hinting that she's just come from the back room. + +"Since -" Pierre blinks. "Hell." When Donna entered, so did Aineko; or maybe the cat's been there all the time, curled up loaf-of-bread fashion on the table in front of the wicker man. "You're damaging the continuity," Pierre complains. "This universe is broken." + +"Fix it yourself," Boris tells him. "Everybody else is coping." He snaps his fingers. "Waiter!" + +"Excuse me." Donna shakes her head. "I didn't mean to harm anything." + +Ang, as always, is more accommodating. "How are you?" she asks politely: "Would you like to try this most excellent poison cocktail?" + +"I am well," says Donna. A heavily built German woman - blonde and solidly muscular, according to the avatar she's presenting to the public - she's surrounded by a haze of viewpoints. They're camera angles on her society of mind, busily integrating and splicing her viewpoint threads together in an endless journal of the journey. A stringer for the CIA media consortium, she uploaded to the ship in the same packet stream as the lawsuit. "/{Danke}/, Ang." + +"Are you recording right now?" asks Boris. + +Donna sniffs. "When am I not?" A momentary smile: "I am only a scanner, no? Five hours, until arrival, to go. I may stop after then." Pierre glances across the table at Su Ang's hands; her knuckles are white and tense. "I am to avoid missing anything if possible," Donna continues, oblivious to Ang's disquiet. "There are eight of me at present! All recording away." + +"That's all?" Ang asks, raising an eyebrow. + +"Yes, that is all, and I have a job to do! Don't tell me you do not enjoy what it is that you do here?" + +"Right." Pierre glances in the corner again, avoiding eye contact with the hearty Girl Friday wannabe. He has a feeling, that if there were any hills hereabouts to animate, she'd be belting out the music. "Amber told you about the privacy code here?" + +"There is a privacy code?" asks Donna, swinging at least three subjective ghosts to bear on him for some reason - evidently he's hit an issue she has mixed feelings about. + +"A privacy code," Pierre confirms. "No recording in private, no recording where people withhold permission in public, and no sandboxes and cutups." + +Donna looks offended. "I would never do such a thing! Trapping a copy of someone in a virtual space to record their responses would be assault under Ring legal code, not true?" + +"Your mother," Boris says snidely, brandishing a fresh jug of iced killer jellyfish in her direction. + +"As long as we all agree," Ang interrupts, searching for accord. "It's all going to be settled soon, isn't it?" + +"Except for the lawsuit," mutters Pierre, glancing at the corner again. + +"I don't see the problem," says Donna, "that's just between Amber and her downlink adversaries!" + +"Oh, it's a problem all right," says Boris, his tone light. "What are your options worth?" + +"My -" Donna shakes her head. "I'm not vested." + +"Plausible." Boris doesn't crack a smile. "Even so, when we go home, your credibility metric will bulge. Assuming people still use distributed trust markets to evaluate the stability of their business partners." + +/{Not vested}/. Pierre turns it over in his mind, slightly surprised. He'd assumed that everybody aboard the ship - except, perhaps, the lawyer, Glashwiecz - was a fully vested member of the expeditionary company. + +"I am not vested," Donna insists. "I'm listed independently." For a moment, an almost-smile tugs at her face, a charmingly reticent expression that has nothing to do with her bluff exterior. "Like the cat." + +"The -" Pierre turns round in a hurry. Yes, Aineko appears to be sitting silently at the table with the wicker man; but who knows what's going through that furry head right now? /{I'll have to bring this up with Amber, he realizes uneasily. I ought to bring this up with Amber}/ ... "but your reputation won't suffer for being on this craft, will it?" he asks aloud. + +"I will be all right," Donna declares. The waiter comes over: "Mine will be a bottle of schneiderweisse," she adds. And then, without breaking step: "Do you believe in the singularity?" + +"Am I a singularitarian, do you mean?" asks Pierre, a fixed grin coming to his face. + +"Oh, no, no, no!" Donna waves him down, grins broadly, nods at Su Ang: "I do not mean it like that! Attend: What I meant to ask was whether you in the concept of a singularity believe, and if so, where it is?" + +"Is this intended for a public interview?" asks Ang. + +"Well, I cannot into a simulation drag you off and expose you to an imitative reality excursion, can I?" Donna leans back as the bartender places a ceramic stein in front of her. + +"Oh. Well." Ang glances warningly at Pierre and dispatches a very private memo to scroll across his vision: /{Don't play with her, this is serious}/. Boris is watching Ang with an expression of hopeless longing. Pierre tries to ignore it all, taking the journalist's question seriously. "The singularity is a bit like that old-time American Christian rapture nonsense, isn't it?" he says. "When we all go a-flying up to heaven, leaving our bodies behind." He snorts, reaches into thin air and gratuitously violates causality by summoning a jug of ice-cold sangria into existence. "The rapture of the nerds. I'll drink to that." + +"But when did it take place?" asks Donna. "My audience, they will to know your opinion be needing." + +"Four years ago, when we instantiated this ship," Pierre says promptly. + +"Back in the teens," says Ang. "When Amber's father liberated the uploaded lobsters." + +"Is not happening yet," contributes Boris. "Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened." + +"Au contraire. It happened on June 6th, 1969, at eleven hundred hours, eastern seaboard time," Pierre counters. "That was when the first network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one IMP to another - the first ever Internet connection. /{That's}/ the singularity. Since then we've all been living in a universe that was impossible to predict from events prior to that time." + +"It's rubbish," counters Boris. "Singularity is load of religious junk. Christian mystic rapture recycled for atheist nerds." + +"Not so." Su Ang glances at him, hurt. "Here we are, sixty something human minds. We've been migrated - while still awake - right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and we're now running as software in an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn't let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother's old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?" + +"Mmph." Boris looks perplexed. "Would not put it that way. The /{singularity}/ is nonsense, not uploading or -" + +"Yah, right." Ang smiles winningly at Boris. After a moment, he wilts. + +Donna beams at them enthusiastically. "Fascinating!" she enthuses. "Tell me, what are these lobsters you think are important?" + +"They're Amber's friends," Ang explains. "Years ago, Amber's father did a deal with them. They were the first uploads, you know? Hybridized spiny lobster neural tissue and a heuristic API and some random mess of backward-chaining expert systems. They got out of their lab and into the Net and Manfred brokered a deal to set them free, in return for their help running a Franklin orbital factory. This was way back in the early days before they figured out how to do self-assembly properly. Anyway, the lobsters insisted - part of their contract - that Bob Franklin pay to have the deep-space tracking network beam them out into interstellar space. They wanted to emigrate, and looking at what's happened to the solar system since then, who can blame them?" + +Pierre takes a big mouthful of sangria. "The cat," he says. + +"The cat -" Donna's head swivels round, but Aineko has banged out again, retroactively editing her presence out of the event history of this public space. "What about the cat?" + +"The /{family}/ cat," explains Ang. She reaches over for Boris's pitcher of jellyfish juice, but frowns as she does so: "Aineko wasn't conscious back then, but later ... when SETI@home finally received that message back, oh, however many years ago, Aineko remembered the lobsters. And cracked it wide open while all the CETI teams were still thinking in terms of von Neumann architectures and concept-oriented programming. The message was a semantic net designed to mesh perfectly with the lobster broadcast all those years ago, and provide a high-level interface to a communications network we're going to visit." She squeezes Boris's fingertips. "SETI@home logged these coordinates as the origin of the transmission, even though the public word was that the message came from a whole lot farther away - they didn't want to risk a panic if people knew there were aliens on our cosmic doorstep. Anyway, once Amber got established, she decided to come visiting. Hence this expedition. Aineko created a virtual lobster and interrogated the ET packet, hence the communications channel we're about to open." + +"Ah, this is all a bit clearer now," says Donna. "But the lawsuit - " She glances at the hollow wicker man in the corner. + +"Well, there we have a problem," Ang says diplomatically. + +"No," says Pierre. "/{I}/ have a problem. And it's all Amber's fault." + +"Hmm?" Donna stares at him. "Why blame the Queen?" + +"Because she's the one who picked the lunar month to be the reporting time period for companies in her domain, and specified trial by combat for resolving corporate conflicts," he grumbles. "And /{compurgation}/, but that's not applicable to this case because there isn't a recognized reputation server within three light-years. Trial by combat, for civil suits in this day and age! And she appointed me her champion." /{In the most traditional way imaginable}/, he remembers with a warm frisson of nostalgia. He'd been hers in body and soul before that disastrous experiment. He isn't sure whether it still applies, but - "I've got to take on this lawsuit on her behalf, in adversarial stance." + +He glances over his shoulder. The wicker man sits there placidly, pouring beer down his invisible throat like a tired farm laborer. + +"Trial by combat," Su Ang explains to Donna's perplexed ghost-swarm, which is crawling all over the new concept in a haze of confusion. "Not physical combat, but a competition of ability. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to keep junk litigants out of the Ring Imperium, but the Queen Mother's lawyers are /{very}/ persistent. Probably because it's taken on something of a grudge match quality over the years. I don't think Pamela cares much anymore, but this ass-hat lawyer has turned it into a personal crusade. I don't think he liked what happened when the music Mafiya caught up with him. But there's a bit more to it, because if he wins, he gets to own everything. And I mean /{everything}/." + +* * * + +Ten million kilometers out and Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, looms beyond the parachute-shaped sail of the /{Field Circus}/ like a rind of darkness bitten out of the edge of the universe. Heat from the gravitational contraction of its core keeps it warm, radiating at six hundred degrees absolute, but the paltry emission does nothing to break the eternal ice that grips Callidice, Iambe, Celeus, and Metaneira, the stillborn planets locked in orbit around the brown dwarf. + +Planets aren't the only structures that orbit the massive sphere of hydrogen. Close in, skimming the cloud tops by only twenty thousand kilometers, Boris's phased-array eye has blinked at something metallic and hot. Whatever it is, it orbits out of the ecliptic plane traced by the icy moons, and in the wrong direction. Farther out, a speckle of reflected emerald laser light picks out a gaudy gem against the starscape: their destination, the router. + +"That's it," says Boris. His body shimmers into humanity, retconning the pocket universe of the bridge into agreeing that he's been present in primate form all along. Amber glances sideways. Sadeq is still wrapped in ivy, his skin the texture of weathered limestone. "Closest approach is sixty-three light-seconds, due in eight hundred thousand. Can give you closer contact if we maneuver, but will take time to achieve a stable orbit." + +Amber nods thoughtfully, sending copies of herself out to work the mechanics. The big light sail is unwieldy, but can take advantage of two power sources: the original laser beam from Jupiter, and its reflection bouncing off the now-distant primary light sail. The temptation is to rely on the laser for constant acceleration, to just motor on in and squat on the router's cosmic doorstep. But the risk of beam interruption is too dangerous. It's happened before, for seconds to minutes at a time, on six occasions during the voyage so far. She's not sure what causes the beam downtime (Pierre has a theory about Oort cloud objects occulting the laser, but she figures it's more likely to be power cuts back at the Ring), but the consequences of losing power while maneuvering deep in a quasi-stellar gravity well are much more serious than a transient loss of thrust during free interstellar flight. "Let's just play it safe," she says. "We'll go for a straight orbital insertion and steady cranking after that. We've got enough gravity wells to play pinball with. I don't want us on a free-flight trajectory that entails lithobraking if we lose power and can't get the sail back." + +"Very prudent," Boris agrees. "Marta, work on it." A buzzing presence of not-insects indicates that the heteromorphic helmswoman is on the job. "I think we should be able to take our first close-in look in about two million seconds, but if you want, I can ping it now ...?" + +"No need for protocol analysis," Amber says casually. "Where's - ah, there you are." She reaches down and picks up Aineko, who twists round sinuously and licks her arm with a tongue like sandpaper. "What do you think?" + +"Do you want fries with that?" asks the cat, focusing on the artifact at the center of the main screen in front of the bridge. + +"No, I just want a conversation," says Amber. + +"Well, okay." The cat dims, moves jerkily, sucking up local processing power so fast that it disturbs the local physics model. "Opening port now." + +A subjective minute or two passes. "Where's Pierre?" Amber asks herself quietly. Some of the maintenance metrics she can read from her privileged viewpoint are worrying. The /{Field Circus}/ is running at almost eighty percent of utilization. Whatever Aineko is doing in order to establish the interface to the router, it's taking up an awful lot of processing power and bandwidth. "And where's the bloody lawyer?" she adds, almost as an afterthought. + +The /{Field Circus}/ is small, but its light sail is highly controllable. Aineko takes over a cluster of cells in its surface, turning them from straight reflectors into phase-conjugate mirrors: A small laser on the ship's hull begins to flicker thousands of times a second, and the beam bounces off the modified segment of mirror, focusing to a coherent point right in front of the distant blue dot of the router. Aineko ramps up the modulation frequency, adds a bundle of channels using different wavelengths, and starts feeding out a complex set of preplanned signals that provide an encoding format for high-level data. + +% check point + +"Leave the lawyer to me." She starts, glancing sideways to see Sadeq watching her. He smiles without showing his teeth. "Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy," he explains. + +"Huh." Ahead of them, the router is expanding. Strings of nacreous spheres curl in strange loops around a hidden core, expanding and turning inside out in systolic pulses that spawn waves of recomplication through the structure. A loose red speckle of laser light stains one arm of beads; suddenly it flares up brilliantly, reflecting data back at the ship. "Ah!" + +"Contact," purrs the cat. Amber's fingertips turn white where she grips the arms of her chair. + +"What does it say?" she asks, quietly. + +"What do /{they}/ say," corrects Aineko. "It's a trade delegation, and they're uploading right now. I can use that negotiation network they sent us to give them an interface to our systems if you want." + +"Wait!" Amber half stands in sudden nervousness. "Don't give them free access! What are you thinking of? Stick them in the throne room, and we'll give them a formal audience in a couple of hours." She pauses. "That network layer they sent through. Can you make it accessible to us, use it to give us a translation layer into their grammar-mapping system?" + +The cat looks round, thumps her tail irritably: "You'd do better loading the network yourself -" + +"I don't want /{anybody}/ on this ship running alien code before we've vetted it thoroughly," she says urgently. "In fact, I want them bottled up in the Louvre grounds, just as thoroughly as we can, and I want them to come to us through our own linguistic bottleneck. Got that?" + +"Clear," Aineko grumbles. + +"A trade delegation," Amber thinks aloud. "What would Dad make of that?" + +* * * + +One moment he's in the bar, shooting bull with Su Ang and Donna the Journalist's ghost and a copy of Boris; the next he's abruptly precipitated into a very different space. + +Pierre's heart seems to tumble within his rib cage, but he forces himself to stay calm as he glances around the dim, oak-paneled chamber. This is wrong, so wrong that it signifies either a major systems crash or the application of frightening privilege levels to his realm. The only person aboard who's entitled to those privileges is - + +"Pierre?" + +She's behind him. He turns angrily. "Why did you drag me in here? Don't you know it's rude to -" + +"Pierre." + +He stops and looks at Amber. He can't stay angry at her for long, not to her face. She's not dumb enough to bat her eyelashes at him, but she's disarmingly cute for all that. Nevertheless, something inside him feels shriveled and /{wrong}/ in her presence. "What is it?" he says, curtly. + +"I don't know why you've been avoiding me." She starts to take a step forward, then stops and bites her lip. /{Don't do this to me!}/ he thinks. "You know it hurts?" + +"Yes." That much of an admission hurts him, too. He can hear his father yelling over his shoulder, the time he found him with Laurent, elder brother: It's a choice between père or Amber, but it's not a choice he wants to make. /{The shame}/. "I didn't - I have some issues." + +"It was the other night?" + +He nods. /{Now}/ she takes a step forwards. "We can talk about it, if you want. Whatever you want," she says. And she leans toward him, and he feels his resistance crumbling. He reaches out and hugs her, and she wraps her arms around him and leans her chin on his shoulder, and this doesn't feel wrong: How can anything this good be bad? + +"It made me uncomfortable," he mumbles into her hair. "Need to sort myself out." + +"Oh, Pierre." She strokes the down at the back of his neck. "You should have said. We don't have to do it that way if you don't want to." + +How to tell her how hard it is to admit that anything's wrong? Ever? "You didn't drag me here to tell me that," he says, implicitly changing the subject. + +Amber lets go of him, backs away almost warily. "What is it?" she asks. + +"Something's wrong?" he half asks, half asserts. "Have we made contact yet?" + +"Yeah," she says, pulling a face. "There's an alien trade delegation in the Louvre. That's the problem." + +"An alien trade delegation." He rolls the words around the inside of his mouth, tasting them. They feel paradoxical, cold and slow after the hot words of passion he's been trying to avoid uttering. It's his fault for changing the subject. + +"A trade delegation," says Amber. "I should have anticipated. I mean, we were going to go through the router ourselves, weren't we?" + +He sighs. "We thought we were going to do that." A quick prod at the universe's controls determines that he has certain capabilities: He invokes an armchair, sprawls across it. "A network of point-to-point wormholes linking routers, self-replicating communication hubs, in orbit around most of the brown dwarfs of the galaxy. That's what the brochure said, right? That's what we expected. Limited bandwidth, not a lot of use to a mature superintelligence that has converted the free mass of its birth solar system into computronium, but sufficient to allow it to hold conversations with its neighbors. Conversations carried out via a packet-switched network in real time, not limited by the speed of light, but bound together by a common reference frame and the latency between network hops." + +"That's about the size of it," she agrees from the carved-ruby throne beside him. "Except there's a trade delegation waiting for us. In fact, they're coming aboard already. And I don't buy it - something about the whole setup stinks." + +Pierre's brow wrinkles. "You're right, it doesn't make sense," he says, finally. "Doesn't make sense at all." + +Amber nods. "I carry a ghost of Dad around. He's really upset about it." + +"Listen to your old man." Pierre's lips quirk humorlessly. "We were going to jump through the looking glass, but it seems someone has beaten us to the punch. Question is why?" + +"I don't like it." Amber reaches out sideways, and he catches her hand. "And then there's the lawsuit. We have to hold the trial sooner rather than later." + +He lets go of her fingers. "I'd really be much happier if you hadn't named me as your champion." + +"Hush." The scenery changes; her throne is gone, and instead she's sitting on the arm of his chair, almost on top of him. "Listen. I had a good reason." + +"Reason?" + +"You have choice of weapons. In fact, you have the choice of the field. This isn't just 'hit 'em with a sword until they die' time." She grins, impishly. "The whole point of a legal system that mandates trial by combat for commercial lawsuits, as opposed to an adjudication system, is to work out who's a fitter servant of society and hence deserving of preferential treatment. It's crazy to apply the same legal model to resolving corporate disputes that we use for arguments among people, especially as most companies are now software abstractions of business models; the interests of society are better served by a system that encourages efficient trade activity than by one that encourages litigation. It cuts down on corporate bullshit while encouraging the toughest ones to survive, which is why I /{was}/ going to set up the trial as a contest to achieve maximum competitive advantage in a xenocommerce scenario. Assuming they really are traders, I figure we have more to trade with them than some damn lawyer from the depths of earth's light cone." + +Pierre blinks. "Um." Blinks again. "I thought you wanted me to sideload some kind of fencing kinematics program and /{skewer}/ the guy?" + +"Knowing how well I know you, why did you ever think that?" She slides down the arm of his chair and lands on his lap. She twists round to face him in point-blank close-up. "Shit, Pierre, I /{know}/ you're not some kind of macho psychopath!" + +"But your mother's lawyers -" + +She shrugs dismissively. "They're /{lawyers}/. Used to dealing with precedents. Best way to fuck with their heads is to change the way the universe works." She leans against his chest. "You'll make mincemeat of them. Profit-to-earnings ratio through the roof, blood on the stock exchange floor." His hands meet around the small of her back. "My hero!" + +* * * + +The Tuileries are full of confused lobsters. + +Aineko has warped this virtual realm, implanting a symbolic gateway in the carefully manicured gardens outside. The gateway is about two meters in diameter, a verdigris-coated orouborous loop of bronze that sits like an incongruous archway astride a gravel path in the grounds. Giant black lobsters - each the size of a small pony - shuffle out of the loop's baby blue buffer field, antennae twitching. They wouldn't be able to exist in the real world, but the physics model here has been amended to permit them to breathe and move, by special dispensation. + +Amber sniffs derisively as she enters the great reception room of the Sully wing. "Can't trust that cat with anything," she mutters. + +"It was your idea, wasn't it?" asks Su Ang, trying to duck past the zombie ladies-in-waiting who carry Amber's train. Soldiers line the passage to either side, forming rows of steel to let the Queen pass unhindered. + +"To let the cat have its way, yes," Amber is annoyed. "But I didn't mean to let it wreck the continuity! I won't have it!" + +"I never saw the point of all this medievalism, before," Ang observes. "It's not as if you can avoid the singularity by hiding in the past." Pierre, following the Queen at a distance, shakes his head, knowing better than to pick a fight with Amber over her idea of stage scenery. + +"It looks good," Amber says tightly, standing before her throne and waiting for the ladies-in-waiting to arrange themselves before her. She sits down carefully, her back straight as a ruler, voluminous skirts belling up. Her dress is an intricate piece of sculpture that uses the human body within as a support. "It impresses the yokels and looks convincing on narrowcast media. It provides a prefabricated sense of tradition. It hints at the political depths of fear and loathing intrinsic to my court's activities, and tells people not to fuck with me. It reminds us where we've come from ... and it doesn't give away anything about where we're going." + +"But that doesn't make any difference to a bunch of alien lobsters," points out Su Ang. "They lack the reference points to understand it." She moves to stand behind the throne. Amber glances at Pierre, waves him over. + +Pierre glances around, seeking real people, not the vacant eigenfaces of the zombies that give this scenery added biological texture. There in the red gown, isn't that Donna the Journalist? And over there, too, with shorter hair and wearing male drag; she gets everywhere. That's Boris, sitting behind the bishop. + +"/{You}/ tell her," Ang implores him. + +"I can't," he admits. "We're trying to establish communication, aren't we? But we don't want to give too much away about what we are, how we think. A historical distancing act will keep them from learning too much about us: The phase-space of technological cultures that could have descended from these roots is too wide to analyse easily. So we're leaving them with the lobster translators and not giving anything away. Try to stay in character as a fifteenth-century duchess from Albì - it's a matter of national security." + +"Humph." Ang frowns as a flunky hustles forward to place a folding chair behind her. She turns to face the expanse of red-and-gold carpet that stretches to the doorway as trumpets blat and the doors swing open to admit the deputation of lobsters. + +The lobsters are as large as wolves, black and spiny and ominous. Their monochrome carapaces are at odds with the brightly colored garb of the human crowd. Their antennae are large and sharp as swords. But for all that, they advance hesitantly, eye turrets swiveling from side to side as they take the scene in. Their tails drag ponderously on the carpet, but they have no trouble standing. + +The first of the lobsters halts short of the throne and angles itself to train an eye on Amber. "Am inconsistent," it complains. "There is no liquid hydrogen monoxide here, and you-species am misrepresented by initial contact. Inconsistency, explain?" + +"Welcome to the human physical space-traveling interface unit /{Field Circus}/," Amber replies calmly. "I am pleased to see your translator is working adequately. You are correct, there is no water here. The lobsters don't normally need it when they visit us. And we humans are not water-dwellers. May I ask who you are when you're not wearing borrowed lobster bodies?" + +Confusion. The second lobster rears up and clatters its long, armored antennae together. Soldiers to either side tighten their grips on their spears, but it drops back down again soon enough. + +"We are the Wunch," announces the first lobster, speaking clearly. "This is a body-compliant translation layer. Based on map received from yourspace, units forty thousand trillion light-kilometers ago?" + +"/{He means twenty years}/," Pierre whispers on a private channel Amber has multicast for the other real humans in the audience chamber reality. "/{They've confused space and time for measurement purposes. Does this tell us something?}/" + +"/{Relatively little}/," comments someone else - Chandra? A round of polite laughter greets the joke, and the tension in the room eases slightly. + +"We are the Wunch," the lobster repeats. "We come to exchange interest. What have you got that we want?" + +Faint frown lines appear on Amber's forehead. Pierre can see her thinking very rapidly. "We consider it impolite to ask," she says quietly. + +Clatter of claws on underlying stone floor. Chatter of clicking mandibles. "You accept our translation?" asks the leader. + +"Are you referring to the transmission you sent us, uh, thirty thousand trillion light-kilometers behind?" asks Amber. + +The lobster bobs up and down on its legs. "True. We send." + +"We cannot integrate that network," Amber replies blandly, and Pierre forces himself to keep a straight face. (Not that the lobsters can read human body language yet, but they'll undoubtedly be recording everything that happens here for future analysis.) "They come from a radically different species. Our goal in coming here is to connect our species to the network. We wish to exchange advantageous information with many other species." + +Concern, alarm, agitation. "You cannot do that! You are not /{untranslatable entity signifier}/." + +Amber raises a hand. "You said /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. I did not understand that. Can you paraphrase?" + +"We, like you, are not /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. The network is for /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. We are to the /{untranslatable concept #1}/ as a single-celled organism is to ourselves. You and we cannot /{untranslatable concept #2}/. To attempt trade with /{untranslatable entity signifier}/ is to invite death or transition to /{untranslatable concept #1}/." + +Amber snaps her fingers: time freezes. She glances round at Su Ang, Pierre, the other members of her primary team. "Opinions, anyone?" + +Aineko, hitherto invisible, sits up on the carpet at the foot of the dais. "I'm not sure. The reason those macros are tagged is that there's something wrong with their semantics." + +"Wrong with - how?" asks Su Ang. + +The cat grins, cavernously, and begins to fade. "Wait!" snaps Amber. + +Aineko continues her fade, but leaves a shimmering presence behind: not a grin, but a neural network weighting map, three-dimensional and incomprehensibly complicated. "The /{untranslatable entity concept #1}/ when mapped onto the lobster's grammar network has elements of 'god' overloaded with attributes of mysticism and zenlike incomprehensibility. But I'm pretty sure that what it /{really}/ means is 'optimized conscious upload that runs much faster than real-time'. A type-one weakly superhuman entity, like, um, the folks back home. The implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as gods." The cat fades back in. "Any takers?" + +"Small-town hustlers," mutters Amber. "Talking big - or using a dodgy metagrammar that makes them sound bigger than they are - to bilk the hayseeds new to the big city." + +"Most likely." Aineko turns and begins to wash her flank. + +"What are we going to do?" asks Su Ang. + +"Do?" Amber raises a pencil-lined eyebrow, then flashes a grin that chops a decade off her apparent age: "We're going to mess with their heads!" She snaps her fingers again and time unfreezes. There's no change in continuity except that Aineko is still present, at the foot of the throne. The cat looks up and gives the queen a dirty look. "We understand your concern," Amber says smoothly, "but we have already given you the physiology models and neural architecture of the bodies that you are wearing. We want to communicate. Why won't you show us your real selves or your real language?" + +"This is trade language!" protests Lobster Number One. "Wunch am/are metabolically variable coalition from number of worlds. No uniformity of interface. Easiest to conform to one plan and speak one tongue optimized for your comprehension." + +"Hmm." Amber leans forward. "Let me see if I understand you. You are a coalition of individuals from a number of species. You prefer to use the common user interface model we sent you, and offered us the language module you're using for an exchange? And you want to trade with us." + +"Exchange interest," the Wunch emphasizes, bouncing up and down on its legs. "Can offer much! Sense of identity of a thousand civilizations. Safe tunnels to a hundred archives on the net suitable for beings who are not /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. Able to control risks of communication. Have technique of manipulating matter at molecular level. Solution to algorithmic iterated systems based on quantum entanglement." + +"/{Old-fashioned nanotechnology and shiny beads to dazzle the primitives}/," Pierre mutters on Amber's multicast channel. "/{How backward do they think we are}/?" + +% note italics marked differently should have been "H/{ow backward do they think we are}/?" + +"/{The physics model in here is really overdone}/," comments Boris. "/{They may even think this is real, that we're primitives coat-tailing it on the back of the lobsters' efforts}/." + +Amber forces a smile. "That is most interesting!" she trills at the Wunch's representatives. "I have appointed two representatives who will negotiate with you; this is an internal contest within my own court. I commend to you Pierre Naqet, my own commercial representative. In addition, you may want to deal with Alan Glashwiecz, an independent factor who is not currently present. Others may come forward in due course if that is acceptable." + +"It pleases us," says Lobster Number One. "We are tired and disoriented by the long journey through gateways to this place. Request resumption of negotiations later?" + +"By all means." Amber nods. A sergeant-at-arms, a mindless but impressive zimboe controlled by her spider's nest of personality threads, blows a sharp note on his trumpet. The first audience is at an end. + +* * * + +_1 Outside the light cone of the /{Field Circus}/, on the other side of the spacelike separation between Amber's little kingdom in motion and the depths of empire time that grip the solar system's entangled quantum networks, a singular new reality is taking shape. + +_1 Welcome to the moment of maximum change. + +_1 About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog - infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as aerogel - in which they live. The foggy depths are alive with high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth's biosphere has been wrapped in cotton wool and preserved for future examination. For every living human, a thousand million software agents carry information into the farthest corners of the consciousness address space. + +_1 The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has vanished within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow belt around the plane of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, unchanged, on the inner planets: Except for Mercury, which is no longer present, having been dismantled completely and turned into solar-powered high-temperature nanocomputers. A much fiercer light falls on Venus, now surrounded by glittering ferns of carbon crystals that pump angular momentum into the barely spinning planet via huge superconducting loops wound around its equator. This planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus - all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn's. But the task of cannibalizing the gas giants will take many times longer than the small rocky bodies of the inner system. + +_1 The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system remember being human; almost half of them predate the millennium. Some of them still /{are}/ human, untouched by the drive of meta-evolution that has replaced blind Darwinian change with a goal-directed teleological progress. They cower in gated communities and hill forts, mumbling prayers and cursing the ungodly meddlers with the natural order of things. But eight out of every ten living humans are included in the phase-change. It's the most inclusive revolution in the human condition since the discovery of speech. + +_1 A million outbreaks of gray goo - runaway nanoreplicator excursions - threaten to raise the temperature of the biosphere dramatically. They're all contained by the planetary-scale immune system fashioned from what was once the World Health Organization. Weirder catastrophes threaten the boson factories in the Oort cloud. Antimatter factories hover over the solar poles. Sol system shows all the symptoms of a runaway intelligence excursion, exuberant blemishes as normal for a technological civilization as skin problems on a human adolescent. + +_1 The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both capitalism and communism, bickering ideological children of a protoindustrial outlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of kings: Companies are alive, and dead people may live again, too. Globalism and tribalism have run to completion, diverging respectively into homogeneous interoperability and the Schwarzschild radius of insularity. Beings that remember being human plan the deconstruction of Jupiter, the creation of a great simulation space that will expand the habitat available within the solar system. By converting all the nonstellar mass of the solar system into processors, they can accommodate as many human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten billion humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy. + +_1 A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of near-Jupiter space; there's an instance of Pierre, too, although he has relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still sometimes thinks of her relativistic twin, nobody can tell. In a way, it doesn't matter, because by the time the /{Field Circus}/ returns to Jupiter orbit, as much subjective time will have elapsed for the fast-thinkers back home as will flash by in the real universe between this moment and the end of the era of star formation, many billions of years hence. + +* * * + +"As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not gods." + +Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely. + +Sadeq coughs grumpily. "Tell her, Boris." + +Boris tilts his chair back and turns it toward the Queen. "He is right, Amber. They are traders, and not clever ones either. Is hard to get handle on their semiotics while they hide behind the lobster model we uploaded in their direction twenty years ago, but are certainly not crusties, and are definite not human either. Or transhuman. My guess, they are bunch of dumb hicks who get hands on toys left behind by much smarter guys. Like the rejectionist factions back home. Imagine they are waking up one morning and find everyone else is gone to the great upload environment in the sky. Leaving them with the planet to themselves. What you think they do with whole world, with any gadgets they trip over? Some will smash everything they come across, but others not so stupid. But they think /{small}/. Scavengers, deconstructionists. Their whole economic outlook are negative-sum game. Go visit aliens to rip them off, take ideas, not expand selves and transcend." + +Amber stands up, walks toward the windows at the front of the bridge. In black jeans and chunky sweater, she barely resembles the feudal queen whose role she plays for tourists. "Taking them on board was a big risk. I'm not happy about it." + +"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Sadeq smiles crookedly. "We have an answer. But they may not even realize they are dancing with us. These are not the gods you were afraid of finding." + +"No." Amber sighs. "Not too different from us, though. I mean, we aren't exactly well adapted to this environment, are we? We tote these body-images along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our human-style senses. We're emulations, not native AIs. Where's Su Ang?" + +"I can find her." Boris frowns. + +"I asked her to analyse the alien's arrival times," Amber adds as an afterthought. "They're close - too close. And they showed up too damn fast when we first tickled the router. I think Aineko's theories are flawed. The /{real}/ owners of this network we've plugged into probably use much higher-level protocols to communicate; sapient packets to build effective communications gateways. This Wunch, they probably lurk in wait for newbies to exploit. Pedophiles hiding outside the school gate. I don't want to give them that opportunity before we make contact with the real thing!" + +"You may have little choice," says Sadeq. "If they are without insight, as you suspect, they may become afraid if you edit their environment. They may lash out. I doubt they even understand how they created the contaminated metagrammar that they transmitted back to us. It will be to them just a tool that makes simpleminded aliens more gullible, easier to negotiate with. Who knows where they got it?" + +"A grammatical weapon." Boris spins himself round slowly. "Build propaganda into your translation software if you want to establish a favorable trading relationship. How cute. Haven't these guys ever heard of Newspeak?" + +"Probably not," Amber says slowly, pausing for a moment to spawn spectator threads to run down the book and all three movie versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed by the sharecropped series of sequel novels. She shivers uncomfortably as she re-integrates the memories. "Ick. That's not a very nice vision. Reminds me of" - she snaps her fingers, trying to remember Dad's favorite - "Dilbert." + +"Friendly fascism," says Sadeq. "It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us." + +"I think we ought to see how Pierre is doing," Amber says aloud. "I certainly don't want them poisoning him." Grin: "That's /{my job}/." + +* * * + +Donna the Journalist is everywhere simultaneously. It's a handy talent: Makes for even-handed news coverage when you can interview both sides at the same time. + +Right now, one of her is in the bar with Alan Glashwiecz, who evidently hasn't realized that he can modulate his ethanol dehydrogenase levels voluntarily and who is consequently well on the way to getting steaming drunk. Donna is assisting the process: She finds it fascinating to watch this bitter young man who has lost his youth to a runaway self-enhancement process. + +"I'm a full partner," he says bitterly, "in Glashwiecz and Selves. I'm one of the Selves. We're all partners, but it's only Glashwiecz Prime who has any clout. The old bastard - if I'd known I'd grow up to become /{that}/, I'd have run away to join some hippie antiglobalist commune instead." He drains his glass, demonstrating his oropharyngeal integrity, snaps his fingers for a refill. "I just woke up one morning to find I'd been resurrected by my older self. He said he valued my youthful energy and optimistic outlook, then offered me a minority stake with stock options that would take five years to vest. The bastard." + +"Tell me about it," Donna coaxes sympathetically. "Here we are, stranded among idiopathic types, not among them a single multiplex -" + +"Damn straight." Another bottle of Bud appears in Glashwiecz'a hands. "One moment I'm standing in this apartment in Paris facing total humiliation by a cross-dressing commie asshole called Macx and his slimy French manager bitch, and the next I'm on the carpet in front of my alter ego's desk and he's offering me a job as junior partner. It's seventeen years later, all the weird nonsense that guy Macx was getting up to is standard business practice, and there's six of me in the outer office taking research notes because myself-as-senior-partner doesn't trust anyone else to work with him. It's humiliating, that's what it is." + +"Which is why you're here." Donna waits while he takes a deep swig from the bottle. + +"Yeah. Better than working for myself, I can tell you - it's not like being self-employed. You know how you sometimes get distant from your work? It's really bad when you see yourself from the outside with another half gigasecond of experience and the new-you isn't just distant from the client base, he's distant from the you-you. So I went back to college and crammed up on artificial intelligence law and ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and recursive tort. Then I volunteered to come out here. He's still handling /{her}/ account, and I figured -" Glashwiecz shrugged. + +"Did any of the delta-yous contest the arrangement?" asks Donna, spawning ghosts to focus in on him from all angles. For a moment, she wonders if this is wise. Glashwiecz is dangerous - the power he wields over Amber's mother, to twist her arm into extending his power of attorney, hints at dark secrets. Maybe there's more to her persistent lawsuits than a simple family feud? + +Glashwiecz's face is a study in perspectives. "Oh, one did," he says dismissively: One of Donna's viewports captures the contemptuous twitch in his cheek. "I left her in my apartment freezer. Figured it'd be a while before anybody noticed. It's not murder - I'm still here, right? - and I'm not about to claim tort against myself. I think. It'd be a left-recursive lawsuit, anyway, if I did it to myself." + +"The aliens," prompts Donna, "and the trial by combat. What's your take on that?" + +Glashwiecz sneers. "Little bitch-queen takes after her father, doesn't she? He's a bastard, too. The competitive selection filter she's imposed is evil - it'll cripple her society if she leaves it in place for too long, but in the short run, it's a major advantage. So she wants me to trade for my life, and I don't get to lay my formal claim against her unless I can outperform her pet day trader, that punk from Marseilles. Yes? What he doesn't know is, I've got an edge. Full disclosure." He lifts his bottle drunkenly. "Y'see, I know that /{cat}/. One that's gotta brown @-sign on its side, right? It used to belong to queenie-darling's old man, Manfred, the bastard. You'll see. Her Mom, Pamela, Manfred's ex, she's my client in this case. And she gave me the cat's ackle keys. Access control." (Hic.) "Get ahold of its brains and grab that damn translation layer it stole from the CETI@home mob. /{Then}/ I can talk to them straight." + +The drunken, future-shocked lawyer is on a roll. "I'll get their shit, and I'll disassemble it. Disassembly is the future of industry, y'know?" + +"Disassembly?" asks the reporter, watching him in disgusted fascination from behind her mask of objectivity. + +"Hell, yeah. There's a singularity going on, that implies disequilibrium. An' wherever there's a disequilibrium, someone is going to get /{rich}/ disassembling the leftovers. Listen, I once knew this econo-economist, that's what he was. Worked for the Eurofeds, rubber fetishist. He tole me about this fact'ry near Barcelona. It had a disassembly line running in it. Spensive servers in boxes'd roll in at one end. Be unpacked. Then workers'd take the cases off, strip the disk drives, memory, processors, bits'n'guts out. Bag and tag job. Throw the box, what's left, 'cause it wasn't worth dick. Thing is, the manufact'rer charged so much for parts, it was worth their while to buy whole machines'n'strip them. To bits. And sell the bits. Hell, they got an enterprise award for ingenuity! All 'cause they knew that /{disassembly}/ was the wave of the future." + +"What happened to the factory?" asks Donna, unable to tear her eyes away. + +Glashwiecz waves an empty bottle at the starbow that stretches across the ceiling: "Ah, who gives a fuck? They closedown round about" (hic) "ten years 'go. Moore's Law topped out, killed the market. But disassembly - production line cannibalism - it'sa way to go. Take old assets an' bring new life to them. A fully 'preciated fortune." He grins, eyes unfocussed with greed. "'S'what I'm gonna do to those space lobsters. Learn to talk their language an'll never know what hit 'em." + +* * * + +The tiny starship drifts in high orbit above a turbid brown soup of atmosphere. Deep in the gravity well of Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, it's a speck of dust trapped between two light sources: the brilliant sapphire stare of Amber's propulsion lasers in Jovian orbit, and the emerald insanity of the router itself, a hypertoroid spun from strange matter. + +The bridge of the /{Field Circus}/ is in constant use at this time, a meeting ground for minds with access to the restricted areas. Pierre is spending more and more time here, finding it a convenient place to focus his trading campaign and arbitrage macros. At the same time that Donna is picking the multiplexed lawyer's strategy apart, Pierre is present in neomorphic form - a quicksilver outline of humanity, six-armed and two-headed, scanning with inhuman speed through tensor maps of the information traffic density surrounding the router's clump of naked singularities. + +There's a flicker in the emptiness at the rear of the bridge, then Su Ang has always been there. She watches Pierre in contemplative silence for a minute. "Do you have a moment?" + +Pierre superimposes himself: One shadowy ghost keeps focused on the front panel, but another instance turns round, crosses his arms, waits for her to speak. + +"I know you're busy -" she begins, then stops. "Is it /{that}/ important?" she asks. + +"It is." Pierre blurs, resynchronizing his instances. "The router - there are four wormholes leading off from it, did you know that? Each of them is radiating at about 1011 Kelvins, and every wavelength is carrying data connections, multiplexed, with a protocol stack that's at least eleven layers deep but maybe more - they show signs of self-similarity in the framing headers. You know how much data that is? It's about 1012 times as much as our high-bandwidth uplink from home. But compared to what's on the other side of the 'holes -" he shakes his head. + +"It's big?" + +"It's unimaginably big! These wormholes, they're a /{low-bandwidth}/ link compared to the minds they're hooking up to." He blurs in front of her, unable to stay still and unable to look away from the front panel. Excitement or agitation? Su Ang can't tell. With Pierre, sometimes the two states are indistinguishable. He gets emotional easily. "I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don't go traveling because they can't get enough bandwidth - trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they are what I think they are - and the slower-than-light route is out, too, because they couldn't take enough computronium along. Unless -" + +He's off again. But before he can blur out, Su Ang steps across and lays hands on him. "Pierre. Calm down. Disengage. Empty yourself." + +"I can't!" He really /{is}/ agitated, she sees. "I've got to figure out the best trading strategy to get Amber off the hook with that lawsuit, then tell her to get us out of here; being this close to the router is seriously dangerous! The Wunch are the least of it." + +"Stop." + +He pauses his multiplicity of presences, converges on a single identity focused on the here and now. "Yes?" + +"That's better." She walks round him, slowly. "You've got to learn to deal with stress more appropriately." + +"Stress!" Pierre snorts. He shrugs, an impressive gesture with three sets of shoulder blades. "That's something I can turn off whenever I need to. Side effect of this existence; we're pigs in cyberspace, wallowing in fleshy simulations, but unable to experience the new environment in the raw. What did you want from me, Ang? Honestly? I'm a busy man, I've got a trading network to set up." + +"We've got a problem with the Wunch right now, even if you think something worse is out there," Ang says patiently. "Boris thinks they're parasites, negative-sum gamers who stalk newbies like us. Glashwiecz is apparently talking about cutting a deal with them. Amber's suggestion is that you ignore them completely, cut them out, and talk to anyone else who'll listen." + +"Anyone else who'll listen, right," Pierre says heavily. "Any other gems of wisdom to pass on from the throne?" + +Ang takes a deep breath. He's infuriating, she realizes. And worst of all, he doesn't realize. Infuriating but cute. "You're setting up a trading network, yes?" she asks. + +"Yes. A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as cellular automata within the Ring Imperium switched legal service environment." He relaxes slightly. "Each one has access to a compartmentalized chunk of intellectual property and can call on the corrected parser we got from that cat. They're set up to communicate with a blackboard system - a souk - and I'm bringing up a link to the router, a multicast link that'll broadcast the souk's existence to anyone who's listening. Trade ..." his eyebrows furrow. "There are at least two different currency standards in this network, used to buy quality-of-service precedence and bandwidth. They depreciate with distance, as if the whole concept of money was invented to promote the development of long-range network links. If I can get in first, when Glashwiecz tries to cut in on the dealing by offering IP at discounted rates -" + +"He's not going to, Pierre," she says as gently as possible. "Listen to what I said: Glashwiecz is going to focus on the Wunch. He's going to offer them a deal. Amber wants you to /{ignore}/ them. Got that?" + +"Got it." There's a hollow /{bong!}/ from one of the communication bells. "Hey, that's interesting." + +"What is?" She stretches, neck extending snakelike so that she can see the window on underlying reality that's flickered into existence in the air before him. + +"An ack from ..." he pauses, then plucks a neatly reified concept from the screen in front of him and presents it to her in a silvery caul of light. "... about two hundred light-years away! Someone wants to talk." He smiles. Then the front panel workstation bong's again. "Hey again. I wonder what that says." + +It's the work of a moment to pipe the second message through the translator. Oddly, it doesn't translate at first. Pierre has to correct for some weird destructive interference in the fake lobster network before it'll spill its guts. "That's interesting," he says. + +"I'll say." Ang lets her neck collapse back to normal. "I'd better go tell Amber." + +"You do that," Pierre says worriedly. He makes eye contact with her, but what she's hoping to see in his face just isn't there. He's wearing his emotions entirely on the surface. "I'm not surprised their translator didn't want to pass that message along." + +"It's a deliberately corrupted grammar," Ang murmurs, and bangs out in the direction of Amber's audience chamber; "and they're actually making threats." The Wunch, it seems, have acquired a /{very}/ bad reputation somewhere along the line - and Amber needs to know. + +* * * + +Glashwiecz leans toward Lobster Number One, stomach churning. It's only a real-time kilosecond since his bar-room interview, but in the intervening subjective time, he's abolished a hangover, honed his brief, and decided to act. In the Tuileries. "You've been lied to," he confides quietly, trusting the privacy ackles that he browbeat Amber's mother into giving him - access lists that give him a degree of control over the regime within this virtual universe that the cat dragged in. + +"Lied? Context rendered horizontal in past, or subjected to grammatical corruption? Linguistic evil?" + +"The latter." Glashwiecz enjoys this, even though it forces him to get rather closer to the two-meter-long virtual crustacean than he'd like. Showing a mark how they've been scammed is always good, especially when you hold the keys to the door of the cage they're locked inside. "They are not telling you the truth about this system." + +"We received assurances," Lobster Number One says clearly. Its mouthparts move ceaselessly - the noise comes from somewhere inside its head. "You do not share this phenotype. Why?" + +"That information will cost you," says Glashwiecz. "I am willing to provide it on credit." + +They haggle briefly. An exchange rate in questions is agreed, as is a trust metric to grade the answers by. "Disclose all," insists the Wunch negotiator. + +"There are multiple sentient species on the world we come from," says the lawyer. "The form you wear belongs to only one - one that wanted to get away from the form /{I}/ wear, the original conscious tool-creating species. Some of the species today are artificial, but all of us trade information for self-advantage." + +"This is good to know," the lobster assures him. "We like to buy species." + +"You buy species?" Glashwiecz cocks his head. + +"We have the unbearable yearning to be not-what-we-are," says the lobster. "Novelty, surprise! Flesh rots and wood decays. We seek the new being-ness of aliens. Give us your somatotype, give us all your thoughts, and we will dream you over." + +"I think something might be arranged," Glashwiecz concedes. "So you want to be - no, to lease the rights to temporarily be human? Why is that?" + +"Untranslatable concept #3 means untranslatable concept #4. God told us to." + +"Okay, I think I'll just have to take that on trust for now. What is your true form?" he asks. + +"Wait and I show you," says the lobster. It begins to shudder. + +"What are you doing -" + +"Wait." The lobster twitches, writhing slightly, like a portly businessman adjusting his underwear after a heavy business lunch. Disturbing shapes move, barely visible through the thick chitinous armor. "We want your help," the lobster explains, voice curiously muffled. "Want to establish direct trade links. Physical emissaries, yes?" + +"Yes, that's very good," Glashwiecz agrees excitedly: It's exactly what he's hoped for, the sought-after competitive advantage that will prove his fitness in Amber's designated trial by corporate combat. "You're going to deal with us directly without using that shell interface?" + +"Agreed." The lobster trails off into muffled silence; little crunching noises trickle out of its carapace. Then Glashwiecz hears footsteps behind him on the gravel path. + +"What are you doing here?" he demands, looking round. It's Pierre, back in standard human form - a sword hangs from his belt, and there's a big wheel-lock pistol in his hands. "Hey!" + +"Step away from the alien, lawyer," Pierre warns, raising the gun. + +Glashwiecz glances back at Lobster Number One. It's pulled its front inside the protective shell, and it's writhing now, rocking from side to side alarmingly. Something inside the shell is turning black, acquiring depth and texture. "I stand on counsel's privilege," Glashwiecz insists. "Speaking as this alien's attorney, I must protest in the strongest terms -" + +Without warning, the lobster lurches forward and rises up on its rear legs. It reaches out with huge claws, chellipeds coated with spiny hairs, and grabs Glashwiecz by his arms. "Hey!" + +Glashwiecz tries to turn away, but the lobster is already looming over him, maxillipeds and maxillae reaching out from its head. There's a sickening crunch as one of his elbow joints crumbles, humerus shattered by the closing jaws of a chelliped. He draws breath to scream, then the four small maxillae grip his head and draw it down toward the churning mandibles. + +Pierre scurries sideways, trying to find a line of fire on the lobster that doesn't pass through the lawyer's body. The lobster isn't cooperating. It turns on the spot, clutching Glashwiecz's convulsing body to itself. There's a stench of shit, and blood is squirting from its mouthparts. Something is very wrong with the biophysics model here, the realism turned up way higher than normal. + +"Merde," whispers Pierre. He fumbles with the bulky trigger, and there's a faint whirring sound but no explosion. + +More wet crunching sounds follow as the lobster demolishes the lawyer's face and swallows convulsively, sucking his head and shoulders all the way into its gastric mill. + +Pierre glances at the heavy handgun. "/{Shit}/!" he screams. He glances back at the lobster, then turns and runs for the nearest wall. There are other lobsters loose in the formal garden. "/{Amber, emergency!}/" he sends over their private channel. "/{Hostiles in the Louvre!}/" + +The lobster that's taken Glashwiecz hunkers down over the body and quivers. Pierre desperately winds the spring on his gun, too rattled to check that it's loaded. He glances back at the alien intruder. /{They've sprung the biophysics model}/, he sends. /{I could die in here}/, he realizes, momentarily shocked. /{This instance of me could die forever}/. + +The lobster shell sitting in the pool of blood and human wreckage splits in two. A humanoid form begins to uncurl from within it, pale-skinned and glistening wet: vacant blue eyes flicker from side to side as it stretches and stands upright, wobbling uncertainty on its two unstable legs. Its mouth opens and a strange gobbling hiss comes forth. + +Pierre recognizes her. "What are you doing here?" he yells. + +The nude woman turns toward him. She's the spitting image of Amber's mother, except for the chellipeds she has in place of hands. She hisses "/{Equity!}/" and takes a wobbly step toward him, pincers clacking. + +Pierre winds the firing handle again. There's a crash of gunpowder and smoke, a blow that nearly sprains his elbow, and the nude woman's chest erupts in a spray of blood. She snarls at him wordlessly and staggers - then ragged flaps of bloody meat close together, knitting shut with improbable speed. She resumes her advance. + +"I told Amber the Matrix would be more defensible," Pierre snarls, dropping the firearm and drawing his sword as the alien turns in his direction and raises arms that end in pincers. "We need guns, damit! Lots of guns!" + +"Waaant equity," hisses the alien intruder. + +"You /{can't}/ be Pamela Macx," says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. "She's in a nunnery in Armenia or something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz's memories - he worked for her, didn't he?" + +Claws go snicker-snack before his face. "Investment partnership!" screeches the harridan. "Seat on the board! Eat brains for breakfast!" It lurches sideways, trying to get past his guard. + +"I don't fucking /{believe}/ this," Pierre snarls. The Wunch-creature jumps at just the wrong moment and slides onto the point of his blade, claws clacking hungrily. Pierre slides away, nearly leaving his skin on the rough bricks of the wall - and what's good for one is good for all, as the hacked model in force in this reality compels the attacker to groan and collapse. + +Pierre pulls the sword out then, nervously glancing over his shoulder, whacks at her neck. The impact jars his arm, but he keeps hacking until there's blood spraying everywhere, blood on his shirt, blood on his sword, and a round thing sitting on a stump of savaged neck nearby, jaw working soundlessly in undeath. + +He looks at it for a moment, then his stomach rebels and tries to empty itself into the mess. "/{Where the hell is everybody}/?" he broadcasts on the private channel. "/{Hostiles in the Louvre!}/" + +He straightens up, gasping for breath. He feels /{alive}/, frightened and appalled and exhilarated simultaneously. The crackle of bursting shells on all sides drowns out the birdsong as the Wunch's emissaries adopt a variety of new and supposedly more lethal forms. "/{They don't seem to be very clear on how to take over a simulation space}/," he adds. "/{Maybe we already are}/ untranslatable concept number #1 as far as they're concerned." + +"/{Don't worry, I've cut off the incoming connection}/," sends Su Ang. "/{This is just a bridgehead force; the invasion packets are}/ being filtered out." + +Blank-eyed men and women in dusty black uniforms are hatching from the lobster shells, stumbling and running around the grounds of the royal palace like confused Huguenot invaders. + +Boris winks into reality behind Pierre. "Which way?" he demands, pulling out an anachronistic but lethal katana. + +"Over here. Let's work this together." Pierre jacks his emotional damper up to a dangerously high setting, suppressing natural aversion reflexes and temporarily turning himself into a sociopathic killer. He stalks toward an infant lobster-thing with big black eyes and a covering of white hair that mewls at him from a rose bed, and Boris looks away while he kills it. Then one of the larger ones makes the mistake of lunging at Boris, and he chops at it reflexively. + +Some of the Wunch try to fight back when Pierre and Boris try to kill them, but they're handicapped by their anatomy, a curious mixture of crustacean and human, claw and mandible against sword and dagger. When they bleed the ground soaks with the cuprous hue of lobster juice. + +"Let's fork," suggests Boris. "Get this over with." Pierre nods, dully - everything around him is wrapped in a layer of don't-care, except for a glowing dot of artificial hatred - and they fork, multiplying their state vectors to take full advantage of the virtualization facilities of this universe. There's no need for reinforcements; the Wunch focused on attacking the biophysics model of the universe, making it mimic a physical reality as closely as possible, and paid no attention to learning the more intricate tactics that war in a virtual space permits. + +Presently Pierre finds himself in the audience chamber, face and hands and clothing caked in hideous gore, leaning on the back of Amber's throne. There's only one of him now. One of Boris - the only one? - is standing near the doorway. He can barely remember what has happened, the horrors of parallel instances of mass murder blocked from his long-term memory by a high-pass trauma filter. "It looks clear," he calls aloud. "What shall we do now?" + +"Wait for Catherine de Médicis to show up," says the cat, its grin materializing before him like a numinous threat. "Amber /{always}/ finds a way to blame her mother. Or didn't you already know that?" + +Pierre glances at the bloody mess on the footpath outside where the first lobster-woman attacked Glashwiecz. "I already did for her, I think." He remembers the action in the third person, all subjectivity edited out. "The family resemblance was striking," the thread that still remembers her in working memory murmurs: "I just hope it's only skin-deep." Then he forgets the act of apparent murder forever. "Tell the Queen I'm ready to talk." + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the downslope on the far side of the curve of accelerating progress. + +_1 Back in the solar system, Earth orbits through a dusty tunnel in space. Sunlight still reaches the birth world, but much of the rest of the star's output has been trapped by the growing concentric shells of computronium built from the wreckage of the innermost planets. + +_1 Two billion or so mostly unmodified humans scramble in the wreckage of the phase transition, not understanding why the vasty superculture they so resented has fallen quiet. Little information leaks through their fundamentalist firewalls, but what there is shows a disquieting picture of a society where there are no /{bodies}/ anymore. Utility foglets blown on the wind form aerogel towers larger than cyclones, removing the last traces of physical human civilization from most of Europe and the North American coastlines. Enclaves huddle behind their walls and wonder at the monsters and portents roaming the desert of postindustrial civilization, mistaking acceleration for collapse. + +_1 The hazy shells of computronium that ring the sun - concentric clouds of nanocomputers the size of rice grains, powered by sunlight, orbiting in shells like the packed layers of a Matrioshka doll - are still immature, holding barely a thousandth of the physical planetary mass of the system, but they already support a classical computational density of 1042 MIPS; enough to support a billion civilizations as complex as the one that existed immediately before the great disassembly. The conversion hasn't yet reached the gas giants, and some scant outer-system enclaves remain independent - Amber's Ring Imperium still exists as a separate entity, and will do so for some years to come - but the inner solar system planets, with the exception of Earth, have been colonized more thoroughly than any dusty NASA proposal from the dawn of the space age could have envisaged. + +_1 From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn't really possible to know what's going on inside. The problem is bandwidth: While it's possible to send data in and get data out, the sheer amount of computation going on in the virtual spaces of the Acceleration dwarfs any external observer. Inside that swarm, minds a trillion or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm. A million random human civilizations flourish in worldscapes tucked in the corner of this world-mind. Death is abolished, life is triumphant. A thousand ideologies flower, human nature adapted where necessary to make this possible. Ecologies of thought are forming in a Cambrian explosion of ideas: For the solar system is finally rising to consciousness, and mind is no longer restricted to the mere kilotons of gray fatty meat harbored in fragile human skulls. + +_1 Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention. Soon, they realize, the starship will be in position to act as their proxy in an ages-long conversation. Negotiations for access to Amber's extrasolar asset commence; the Ring Imperium prospers, at least for a while. + +_1 But first, the operating software on the human side of the network link will require an upgrade. + +* * * + +The audience chamber in the /{Field Circus}/ is crammed. Everybody aboard the ship - except the still-frozen lawyer and the alien barbarian intruders - is present. They've just finished reviewing the recordings of what happened in the Tuileries, of Glashwiecz's fatal last conversation with the Wunch, the resulting fight for survival. And now the time has come for decisions. + +"I'm not saying you have to follow me," says Amber, addressing her court; "just, it's what we came here for. We've established that there's enough bandwidth to transmit people and their necessary support VMs; we've got some basic expectancy of goodwill at the other end, or at least an agalmic willingness to gift us with advice about the untrustworthiness of the Wunch. /{I}/ propose to copy myself through and see what's at the other side of the wormhole. What's more, I'm going to suspend myself on this side and hand over to whichever instance of me comes back, unless there's a long hiatus. How long, I haven't decided yet. Are you guys happy to join me?" + +Pierre stands behind her throne, hands on the back. Looking down over her head, at the cat in her lap, he's sure he sees it narrow its eyes at him. /{Funny}/, he thinks, /{we're talking about jumping down a rabbit hole and trusting whoever lives at the other end with our personalities. After seeing the Wunch. Does this make sense}/? + +"Forgive, please, but am not stupid," says Boris. "This is Fermi paradox territory, no? Instantaneous network exists, is traversable, with bandwidth adequate for human-equivalent minds. Where are alien visitors, in history? Must be overriding reason for absence. Think will wait here and see what comes back. /{Then}/ make up mind to drink the poison kool-aid." + +"I've got half a mind to transmit myself through without a back-up," says someone else - "but that's okay; half a mind is all we've got the bandwidth for." Halfhearted laughter shores up his wisecrack, supports a flagging determination to press through. + +"I'm with Boris," says Su Ang. She glances at Pierre, catches his eye: Suddenly a number of things become clear to him. He shakes his head minutely. /{You never had a chance - I belong to Amber}/, he thinks, but deletes the thought before he can send it to her. Maybe in another instantiation his issues with the Queen's /{droit de seigneur}/ would have bulked up larger, splintered his determination; maybe in another world it has already happened? "I think this is very rash," she says in a hurry. "We don't know enough about post-singularity civilizations." + +"It's not a singularity," Amber says waspishly. "It's just a brief burst of acceleration. Like cosmological inflation." + +"Smooths out inhomogeneities in the initial structure of consciousness," purrs the cat. "Don't I get a vote?" + +"You do." Amber sighs. She glances round. "Pierre?" + +Heart in his mouth: "I'm with you." + +She smiles, brilliantly. "Well then. Will the nay sayers please leave the universe?" + +Suddenly, the audience chamber is half-empty. + +"I'm setting a watchdog timer for a billion seconds into the future, to restart us from this point if the router doesn't send anyone back in the intervening time," she announces gravely, taking in the serious-faced avatars of those who remain. Surprised: "Sadeq! I didn't think this was your type of -" + +He doesn't smile: "Would I be true to my faith if I wasn't prepared to bring the words of Mohammed, peace be unto him, to those who may never have heard his name?" + +Amber nods. "I guess." + +"Do it," Pierre says urgently. "You can't keep putting it off forever." + +Aineko raises her head: "Spoilsport!" + +"Okay." Amber nods. "Let's /{do}/ -" + +She punches an imaginary switch, and time stops. + +* * * + +At the far end of a wormhole, two hundred light-years distant in real space, coherent photons begin to dance a story of human identity before the sensoria of those who watch. And all is at peace in orbit around Hyundai ^[+4904}^/,{-56},, for a while ... + +* * * + +1~ Chapter 6: Nightfall + +A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through silent darkness. The night is quiet as the grave, colder than midwinter on Pluto. Gossamer sails as fine as soap bubbles droop, the gust of sapphire laser light that inflated them long since darkened. Ancient starlight picks out the outline of a huge planetlike body beneath the jewel-and-cobweb corpse of the starwisp. + +Eight Earth years have passed since the good ship /{Field Circus}/ slipped into close orbit around the frigid brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},. Five years have gone by since the launch lasers of the Ring Imperium shut down without warning, stranding the light-sail-powered craft three light-years from home. There has been no response from the router, the strange alien artifact in orbit around the brown dwarf, since the crew of the starwisp uploaded themselves through its strange quantum entanglement interface for transmission to whatever alien network it connects to. In fact, nothing happens; nothing save the slow trickle of seconds, as a watchdog timer counts down the moments remaining until it is due to resurrect stored snapshots of the crew, on the assumption that their uploaded copies are beyond help. + +Meanwhile, outside the light cone - + +* * * + +Amber jolts into wakefulness, as if from a nightmare. She sits bolt upright, a thin sheet falling from her chest; air circulating around her back chills her rapidly, cold sweat evaporating. She mutters aloud, unable to subvocalize, "Where am I - oh. A bedroom. How did I get here?" /{Mumble}/. "Oh, I see." Her eyes widen in horror. "/{It's not a dream}/ ..." + +"Greetings, human Amber," says a ghost-voice that seems to come from nowhere: "I see you are awake. Would you like anything?" + +Amber rubs her eyes tiredly. Leaning against the bedstead, she glances around cautiously. She takes in a bedside mirror, her reflection in it: a young woman, gaunt in the manner of those whose genome bears the p53 calorie-restriction hack, she has disheveled blonde hair and dark eyes. She could pass for a dancer or a soldier; not, perhaps, a queen. "What's going on? Where am I? Who are you, and /{what am I doing in your head?}/" + +Her eyes narrow. Analytical intellect comes to the fore as she takes stock of her surroundings. "The router," she mutters. Structures of strange matter orbit a brown dwarf scant light-years from Earth. "How long ago did we come through?" Glancing round, she sees a room walled in slabs of close-fitting stone. A window bay is recessed into them, after the style of the Crusader castles many centuries in the past, but there's no glass in it - just a blank white screen. The only furniture in the room, besides a Persian carpet on the cold flagstones, is the bed she sits upon. She's reminded of a scene from an old movie, Kubrick's enigma; this whole set-up has got to be deliberate, and it isn't funny. + +"I'm waiting," she announces, and leans back against the headboard. + +"According to our records this reaction indicates that you are now fully self-aware," says the ghost. "This is good. You have not been conscious for a very long time. Explanations will be complex and discursive. Can I offer you refreshments? What would you like?" + +"Coffee, if you have it. Bread and hummus. Something to wear." Amber crosses her arms, abruptly self-conscious. "I'd prefer to have management ackles to this universe, though. As realities go, it's a bit lacking in creature comforts." Which isn't entirely true - it seems to have a comprehensive, human-friendly biophysics model, it's not just a jumped-up first-person shooter. Her eyes focus on her left forearm, where tanned skin and a puckered dime of scar tissue record a youthful accident with a pressure seal in Jovian orbit. Amber freezes for a moment. Her lips move in silence, but she's locked into place in this universe, unable to split or conjoin nested realities just by calling subroutines that have been spliced into the corners of her mind since she was a teenager. Finally, she asks, "How long have I been dead?" + +"Longer than you were alive, by orders of magnitude," says the ghost. A tray laden with pita breads, hummus, and olives congeals from the air above her bed, and a wardrobe appears at one side of the room. "I can begin the explanation now or wait for you to finish eating. Which would you prefer?" + +Amber glances about again, then fixes on the white screen in the window bay. "Give it to me right now. I can take it," she says, quietly bitter. "I like to understand my mistakes as soon as possible." + +"We-us can tell that you are a human of determination," says the ghost, a hint of pride entering its voice. "That is a good thing, Amber. You will need all of your resolve if you are going to survive here ..." + +* * * + +It is the time of repentance in a temple beside a tower that looms above a dry plain, and the thoughts of the priest who lives in the tower are tinged with regret. It is Ashura, the tenth day of Muhurram, according to a real-time clock still tuned to the pace of a different era: the one thousand, three hundred and fortieth anniversary of the martyrdom of the Third Imam, the Sayyid ash-Shuhada. + +The priest of the tower has spent an indefinite time in prayer, locked in an eternal moment of meditation and recitation. Now, as the vast red sun drifts close to the horizon of the infinite desert, his thoughts drift toward the present. Ashura is a very special day, a day of atonement for collective guilt, evil committed through inactivity; but it is in Sadeq's nature to look outwards toward the future. This is, he knows, a failing - but also characteristic of his generation. That's the generation of the Shi'ite clergy that reacted to the excesses of the previous century, the generation that withdrew the /{ulama}/ from temporal power, retreated from the velyat i-faqih of Khomenei and his successors, left government to the people, and began to engage fully with the paradoxes of modernity. Sadeq's focus, his driving obsession in theology, is a program of reappraisal of eschatology and cosmology. Here in a tower of white sun-baked clay, on an endless plain that exists only in the imaginary spaces of a starship the size of a soft drink can, the priest spends his processor cycles in contemplation of one of the most vicious problems ever to confront a /{mujtahid}/ - the Fermi paradox. + +(Enrico Fermi was eating his lunch one day, and his colleagues were discussing the possibility that sophisticated civilizations might populate other worlds. "Yes," he said, "but if this is so, why haven't they already come visiting?") + +Sadeq finishes his evening devotions in near silence, then stands, stretches as is his wont, and leaves the small and lonely courtyard at the base of the tower. The gate - a wrought-iron gate, warmed by sunlight - squeals slightly as he opens it. Glancing at the upper hinge, he frowns, willing it clean and whole. The underlying physics model acknowledges his access controls: a thin rim of red around the pin turns silvery-fresh, and the squeaking ceases. Closing the gate behind him, Sadeq enters the tower. + +He climbs with a heavy, even tread a spiral staircase snaking ever upward above him. Narrow slit-windows line the outer wall of the staircase. Through each of them he sees a different world. Out there, nightfall in the month of Ramadan. And through the next, green misty skies and a horizon too close by far. Sadeq carefully avoids thinking about the implications of this manifold space. Coming from prayer, from a sense of the sacred, he doesn't want to lose his proximity to his faith. He's far enough from home as it is, and there is much to consider. He is surrounded by strange and curious ideas, all but lost in a corrosive desert of faith. + +At the top of the staircase, Sadeq comes to a door of aged wood bound in iron. It doesn't belong here: It's a cultural and architectural anomaly. The handle is a loop of black metal. Sadeq regards it as if it's the head of an asp, poised to sting. Nevertheless, he reaches out and turns the handle, steps across the threshold into a palace out of fantasy. + +/{None of this is real}/, he reminds himself. /{It's no more real than an illusion conjured by one of the jinni of the thousand nights and one night}/. Nevertheless, he can't save himself from smiling at the scene - a sardonic smile of self-deprecating humor, tempered by frustration. + +Sadeq's captors have stolen his soul and locked it - him - in a very strange prison, a temple with a tower that rises all the way to Paradise. It's the whole classical litany of medievalist desires, distilled from fifteen hundred years of literature. Colonnaded courtyards, cool pools lined with rich mosaics, rooms filled with every imaginable dumb matter luxury, endless banquets awaiting his appetite - and dozens of beautiful un-women, eager to fulfill his every fantasy. Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen, but he doesn't dare permit himself to succumb to temptation. /{I'm not dead}/, he reasons. /{Therefore, how can I be in Paradise? Therefore, this must be a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably. Unless I am dead, because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that's so, isn't uploading a sin? In which case, this can't be}/ Paradise because I am a sinner. /{Besides which}/, this whole setup is /{so}/ puerile! + +Sadeq has always been inclined to philosophical inquiry, and his vision of the afterlife is more cerebral than most, involving ideas as questionable within the framework of Islam as those of Teilhard de Chardin were to the twentieth-century Catholic church. If there's one key indicator of a false paradise in his eschatology, it's two-and-seventy brainlessly beautiful houris waiting to do his bidding. So it follows that he can't really be dead ... + +The whole question of reality is so vexing that Sadeq does what he does every night. He strides heedlessly across priceless works of art, barging hastily through courtyards and passageways, ignoring niches in which nearly naked supermodels lie with their legs apart, climbing stairs - until he comes to a small unfurnished room with a single high window in one wall. There he sits on the floor, legs crossed, meditating; not in prayer, but in a more tightly focused ratiocination. Every false night (for there is no way to know how fast time is passing, outside this cyberspace pocket), Sadeq sits and /{thinks}/, grappling with Descartes's demon in the solitude of his own mind. And the question he asks himself every night is the same: /{Can I tell if this is the true hell? And if it is not, how can I escape?}/ + +* * * + +The ghost tells Amber that she has been dead for just under a third of a million years. She has been reinstantiated from storage - and has died again - many times in the intervening period, but she has no memory of this; she is a fork from the main bough, and the other branches expired in lonely isolation. + +The business of resurrection does not, in and of itself, distress Amber unduly. Born in the post-Moravec era, she merely finds some aspects of the ghost's description dissatisfyingly incomplete. It's like saying she was drugged and brought hither without stating whether by plane, train, or automobile. + +She doesn't have a problem with the ghost's assertion that she is nowhere near Earth - indeed, that she is approximately eighty thousand light-years away. When she and the others took the risk of uploading themselves through the router they found in orbit around Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, they'd understood that they could end up anywhere or nowhere. But the idea that she's still within the light cone of her departure strikes her as dubious. The original SETI broadcast strongly implied that the router is part of a network of self-replicating instantaneous communicators, spawning and spreading between the cold brown dwarf stars that litter the galaxy. She'd somehow expected to be much farther from home by now. + +Somewhat more disturbing is the ghost's assertion that the human genotype has rendered itself extinct at least twice, that its home planet is unknown, and that Amber is nearly the only human left in the public archives. At this point, she interrupts. "I hardly see what this has to do with me!" Then she blows across her coffee glass, trying to cool the contents. "I'm dead," she explains, with an undertone of knowing sarcasm in her voice. "Remember? I just got here. A thousand seconds ago, subjective time, I was in the control node of a starship, discussing what to do with the router we were in orbit around. We agreed to send ourselves through it, as a trade mission. Then I woke up in bed here in the umpty-zillionth century, wherever and whatever /{here}/ is. Without access to any reality ackles or augmentation, I can't even tell whether this is real or an embedded simulation. You're going to have to explain /{why}/ you need an old version of me before I can make sense of my situation - and I can tell you, I'm not going to help you until I know who you are. And speaking of that, what about the others? Where are they? I wasn't the only one, you know?" + +The ghost freezes in place for a moment, and Amber feels a watery rush of terror: /{Have I gone too far}/? she wonders. + +"There has been an unfortunate accident," the ghost announces portentously. It morphs from a translucent copy of Amber's own body into the outline of a human skeleton, elaborate bony extensions simulating an osteosarcoma of more-than-lethal proportions. "Consensus-we believe that you are best positioned to remediate the situation. This applies within the demilitarized zone." + +"Demilitarized?" Amber shakes her head, pauses to sip her coffee. "What do you mean? What /{is}/ this place?" + +The ghost flickers again, adopting an abstract rotating hypercube as its avatar. "This space we occupy is a manifold adjacent to the demilitarized zone. The demilitarized zone is a space outside our core reality, itself exposed to entities that cross freely through our firewall, journeying to and from the network outside. We-us use the DMZ to establish the informational value of migrant entities, sapient currency units and the like. We-us banked you upon arrival against future options trades in human species futures." + +"Currency!" Amber doesn't know whether to be amused or horrified - both reactions seem appropriate. "Is that how you treat all your visitors?" + +The ghost ignores her question. "There is a runaway semiotic excursion under way in the zone. We-us believe only you can fix it. If you agree to do, so we will exchange value, pay, reward cooperation, expedite remuneration, manumit, repatriate." + +Amber drains her coffee cup. "Have you ever entered into economic interactions with me, or humans like me, before?" she asks. "If not, why should I trust you? If so, why have you revived me? Are there any more experienced instances of myself running around here?" She raises a skeptical eyebrow at the ghost. "This looks like the start of an abusive relationship." + +The ghost continues to sidestep her attempts to work out where she stands. It flickers into transparency, grows into a hazy window on a landscape of impossible shapes. Clouds sprouting trees drift above a landscape of green, egg-curved hills and cheesecake castles. "Nature of excursion: alien intelligence is loose in the DMZ," it asserts. "Alien is applying invalid semiotics to complex structures designed to sustain trade. You know this alien, Amber. We require solution. Slay the monster, we will give you line of credit. Your own reality to control, insight into trade arrangements, augmented senses, ability to travel. Can even upgrade you to you-we consensus, if desired." + +"This monster." Amber leans forward, staring into the window eagerly. She's half-minded to ignore what she feels is a spurious offer; it doesn't sound too appetizing. /{Upgrade me to a ghost fragment of an alien group mind?}/ she wonders dismissively. "What is this alien?" She feels blind and unsure, stripped of her ability to spawn threads of herself to pursue complex inferences. "Is it part of the Wunch?" + +"Datum unknown. It-them came with you," says the ghost. "Accidentally reactivated some seconds since now. It runs amok in the demilitarized zone. Help us, Amber. Save our hub, or we will be cut off from the network. If that happens, you will die with we-us. Save us ..." + +* * * + +_1 A single memory belonging to someone else unwinds, faster than a guided missile and far more deadly. + +_1 Amber, aged eleven, is a gawky, long-limbed child loose on the streets of Hong Kong, a yokel tourist viewing the hot core of the Middle Kingdom. This is her first and final vacation before the Franklin Trust straps her inside the payload pod of a Shenzhou spaceplane and blasts her into orbit from Xinkiang. She's free for the time being, albeit mortgaged to the tune of several million euros; she's a little taikonaut to be, ready to work for the long years in Jupiter orbit it will take her to pay off the self-propelled options web that owns her. It's not exactly slavery: Thanks to Dad's corporate shell game she doesn't have to worry about Mom chasing her, trying to return her to the posthuman prison of growing up just like an old-fashioned little girl. And now she's got a bit of pocket money, and a room in the Hilton, and her own personal Franklin remote to keep her company, she's decided she's gonna do that eighteenth-century-enlightenment tourist shit and do it /{right}/. + +_1 Because this is her last day at liberty in the randomly evolved biosphere. + +_1 China is where things are at in this decade, hot and dense and full of draconian punishments for the obsolescent. Nationalist fervor to catch up with the west has been replaced by consumerist fervor to own the latest fad gadgets; the most picturesque tourist souvenirs from the quaintly old-fashioned streets of America; the fastest, hottest, smartest, upgrades for body and soul. Hong Kong is hotter and faster than just about anywhere else in China, or in the whole damn world for that matter. This is a place where tourists from Tokyo gawp, cowed and future-shocked by the glamour of high-technology living. + +_1 Walking along Jardine's Bazaar - /{More like Jardine's bizarre}/, she thinks - exposes Amber to a blast of humid noise. Geodesic domes sprout like skeletal mushrooms from the glass-and-chrome roofs of the expensive shopping malls and luxury hotels, threatening to float away on the hot sea breeze. There are no airliners roaring in and out of Kai Tak anymore, no burnished aluminum storm clouds to rain round-eyed passengers on the shopping malls and fish markets of Kowloon and the New Territories. In these tense later days of the War Against Unreason, impossible new shapes move in the sky; Amber gapes upward as a Shenyang F-30 climbs at a near-vertical angle, a mess of incomprehensibly curved flight surfaces vanishing to a perspective point that defies radar as well as eyeballs. The Chinese - fighter? missile platform? supercomputer? - is heading out over the South China Sea to join the endless patrol that reassures the capitalist world that it is being guarded from the Hosts of Denial, the Trouble out of Wa'hab. + +_1 For the moment, she's merely a precocious human child. Amber's subconscious is off-lined by the presence of forceful infowar daemons, the Chinese government censorbots suppressing her cognition of their deadliest weapons. And in the seconds while her mind is as empty as a sucked egg, a thin-faced man with blue hair shoves her in the small of her back and snatches at her shoulder bag. + +_1 "Hey!" she yells, stumbling. Her mind's a blur, optics refusing to respond and grab a biometric model of her assailant. It's the frozen moment, the dead zone when on-line coverage fails, and the thief is running away before she can catch her balance or try to give chase. Plus, with her extensions off-line she doesn't know how to yell "stop, thief!" in Cantonese. + +_1 Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state censorship field lets up. "Get him, you bastards!" she screams, but the curious shoppers simply stare at the rude foreign child: An elderly woman brandishes a disposable phonecam at her and screeches something back. Amber picks up her feet and runs. Already she can feel the subsonics from her luggage growling at her guts - it's going to make a scene if she doesn't catch up in time. Shoppers scatter, a woman with a baby carriage almost running her down in her panic to get away from it. + +_1 By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has disappeared: She has to spend almost a minute petting the scared luggage before it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough for her to pick it up. And by that time there's a robocop in attendance. "Identify yourself," it rasps in synthetic English. + +_1 Amber stares at her bag in horror: There's a huge gash in the side, and it's far too light. /{It's gone}/, she thinks, despairingly. /{He stole it}/. "Help," she says faintly, holding up her bag for the distant policeman looking through the robot's eyes. "Been stolen." + +_1 "What item missing?" asks the robot. + +_1 "My Hello Kitty," she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity full-on at maximum utilization, prodding her conscience into submission, warning of dire consequences should the police discover the true nature of her pet cat. "My kitten's been stolen! Can you help me?" + +_1 "Certainly," says the cop, resting a reassuring hand on her shoulder - a hand that turns into a steel armband, as it pushes her into a van and notifies her in formally stilted language that she is under arrest on suspicion of shoplifting and will be required to produce certificates of authenticity and a fully compliant ownership audit for all items in her possession if she wants to prove her innocence. + +_1 By the time Amber's meatbrain realizes that she is being politely arrested, some of her external threads have already started yelling for help and her m-commerce trackers have identified the station she's being taken to by way of click-thru trails and an obliging software license manager. They spawn agents to go notify the Franklin trustees, Amnesty International, the Space and Freedom Party, and her father's lawyers. As she's being booked into a cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a middle-aged policewoman, the phones on the front desk are already ringing with inquiries from attorneys, fast-food vendors, and a particularly on-the-ball celebrity magazine that's been tracking her father's connections. "Can you help me get my cat back?" she asks the policewoman earnestly. + +_1 "Name," the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous translation. "To please wax your identity stiffly." + +_1 "My cat has been stolen," Amber insists. + +_1 "Your cat?" The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with foreign teenagers who answer questions with gibberish isn't in her repertoire. "We are asking your name?" + +_1 "No," says Amber. "It's my cat. It has been stolen. My /{cat}/ has been /{stolen}/." + +_1 "Aha! Your papers, please?" + +_1 "Papers?" Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can't feel the outside world; there's a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding cell, and it's claustrophobically quiet inside. "I want my cat! Now!" + +_1 The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and produces an ID card, which she points to insistently. "Papers," she repeats. "Or else." + +_1 "I don't know what you're talking about!" Amber wails. + +_1 The cop stares at her oddly. "Wait." She rises and leaves, and a minute later, returns with a thin-faced man in a business suit and wire-rimmed glasses that glow faintly. + +_1 "You are making a scene," he says, rudely and abruptly. "What is your name? Tell me truthfully, or you'll spend the night here." + +_1 Amber bursts into tears. "My /{cat's}/ been stolen," she chokes out. + +_1 The detective and the cop obviously don't know how to deal with this scene; it's freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional messiness and sinister diplomatic entanglement. "You wait here," they say, and back out of the cell, leaving her alone with a plastic animatronic koala and a cheap Lebanese coffee machine. + +_1 The implications of her loss - of Aineko's abduction - are sinking in, finally, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It's hard to deal with bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has been her wisecracking companion and consolation for a year, the rock of certainty that gave her the strength to break free from her crazy mother. To lose her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where she will probably be cut up for spare circuitry or turned into soup is too horrible to contemplate. Filled with despair and hopeless anguish, Amber howls at the interrogation room walls while outside, trapped threads of her consciousness search for backups to synchronize with. + +_1 But after an hour, just as she's quieting down into a slough of raw despair, there's a knock - a knock! - at the door. An inquisitive head pops in. "Please to come with us?" It's the female cop with the bad translationware. She takes in Amber's sobbing and tuts under her breath, but as Amber stands up and shambles toward her, she pulls back. + +_1 At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in various states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a damp cardboard box wrapped in twine. "Please identify," he asks, snipping the string. + +_1 Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to synchronize their memories with her. "Is it -" she begins to ask as the lid comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head pops up, curiously, sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from brown-furred nostrils. "What took you so long?" asks the cat, as she reaches into the box and picks her up, fur wet and matted with seawater. + +* * * + +"If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give me reality alteration privileges," says Amber. "Then I want you to find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me - round up the usual suspects - and give /{them}/ root privileges, too. Then we'll want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ. Finally, I want guns. /{Lots}/ of guns." + +"That may be difficult," says the ghost. "Many other humans reached halting state long since. Is at least one other still alive, but not accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not all were recorded with version control engine; others were-is lost in DMZ. We-are can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized zone, but query the need for kinetic energy weapons." + +Amber sighs. "You guys really /{are}/ media illiterates, aren't you?" She stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep's enervation leaching from her muscles. "I'll also need my -" it's on the tip of her tongue: There's something missing. "Hang on. There's something I've forgotten." /{Something important}/, she thinks, puzzled. /{Something that used to be around all the time that would ... know? ... purr? ... help?}/ "Never mind," she hears her lips say. "This other human. I /{really}/ want her. Non-negotiable. All right?" + +"That may be difficult," repeats the ghost. "Entity is looping in a recursively confined universe." + +"Eh?" Amber blinks at it. "Would you mind rephrasing that? Or illustrating?" + +"Illustration:" The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle. Amber's eyes cross as she looks at it. "Closest reference from human historical database is Descartes's demon. This entity has retreated within a closed space, but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event, it refuses to interact." + +"Well, can you get me into that space?" asks Amber. Pocket universes she can deal with; it's part and parcel of her life. "Give me some leverage -" + +"Risk may attach to this course of action," warns the ghost. + +"I don't care," she says irritably. "Just /{put}/ me there. It's someone I know, isn't it? Send me into her dream, and I'll wake her up, okay?" + +"Understood," says the ghost. "Prepare yourself." + +Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around, taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. Her clothing has somehow been replaced by sexy lingerie under a nearly transparent robe, and her hair's grown longer by about half a meter. It's all very disorienting. The walls are stone, and she stands in a doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by - + +"Shit," she exclaims. "Who are you?" The young and incredibly, classically beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly, then rolls over on her side. She isn't wearing a stitch, she's completely hairless from the ears down, and her languid posture is one of invitation. "Yes?" Amber asks. "What is it?" + +The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head. "Sorry, that's just not my scene." She backs away into the corridor, unsteady in unaccustomedly high heels. "This is some sort of male fantasy, isn't it? And a dumb adolescent one at that." She looks around again. In one direction, a corridor heads past more open doorways, and in the other, it ends with a spiral staircase. Amber concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the logical destination, but nothing happens. "Looks like I'm going to have to do this the hard way. I wish -" she frowns. She was about to wish that /{someone}/ else was here, but she can't remember who. So she takes a deep breath and heads toward the staircase. + +"Up or down?" she asks herself. /{Up}/ - it seems logical, if you're going to have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she climbs the steps carefully, holding the spiraling rail. /{I wonder who designed this space? she wonders, and what role am I supposed to fit into in their scenario?}/ On second thoughts, the latter question strikes her as laughable. /{Wait till I give him an earful ...}/ + +There's a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch that isn't fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he's built this sex-fantasy castle around himself. /{I hope it isn't Pierre}/, she thinks grimly as she pushes the door inward. + +The room is bare and floored in wood. There's no furniture, just an open window set high in one wall. A man sits cross-legged and robed, with his back to her, mumbling quietly to himself and nodding slightly. Her breath catches as she realizes who it is. /{Oh shit}/! Her eyes widen. /{Is this what's been inside his head all along?}/ + +"I did not summon you," Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look at her. "Go away, tempter. You aren't real." + +Amber clears her throat. "Sorry to disappoint you, but you're wrong," she says. "We've got an alien monster to catch. Want to come hunting?" + +Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then stands up and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight. "That's odd." He undresses her with his gaze. "You look like someone I used to know. You've never done that before." + +"For fuck's sake!" Amber nearly explodes, but catches herself after a moment. "What /{is}/ this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse meeting?" + +"I -" Sadeq looks puzzled. "I'm sorry, are you claiming to be real?" + +"As real as you are." Amber reaches out and grabs a hand: He doesn't resist as she pulls him toward the doorway. + +"You're the first visitor I've ever had." He sounds shocked. + +"Listen, come /{on}/." She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase to the floor below. "Do you want to stay here? Really?" She glances back at him. "What /{is}/ this place?" + +"Hell is a perversion of heaven," he says slowly, running the fingers of his free hand through his beard. Abruptly, he reaches out and grabs her around the waist, then yanks her toward him. "We'll have to /{see}/ how real you are -" Amber, who is not used to this kind of treatment, responds by stomping on his instep and backhanding him hard. + +"You're real!" he cries, as he falls back against the staircase. "Forgive me, please! I had to know -" + +"Know /{what}/?" she snarls. "Lay one finger on me again, and I'll leave you here to rot!" She's already spawning the ghost that will signal the alien outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: It's a serious threat. + +"But I had to - wait. You have /{free will}/. You just demonstrated that." He's breathing heavily and looking up at her imploringly. "I'm /{sorry}/, I apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or not." + +"A zombie?" She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind her, standing in an open doorway wearing a skintight leather suit with a cutaway crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body wearing strategically placed strips of rubber mewls at her feet, writhing for attention. Amber raises an eyebrow in disgust. "You thought I was one of those?" + +Sadeq nods. "They've got cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I nearly mistook one for -" He shudders convulsively. "Unclean!" + +"Unclean." Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. "This isn't really your personal paradise after all, is it?" After a moment she holds out a hand to him. "Come on." + +"I'm sorry I thought you were a zombie," he repeats. + +"Under the circumstances, I think I forgive you," she says. Then the ghost yanks them both back to the universe outside. + +* * * + +_1 More memories converge on the present moment: + +_1 The Ring Imperium is a huge cluster of self-replicating robots that Amber has assembled in low Jupiter orbit, fueled by the mass and momentum of the small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching platform for the interstellar probe her father's business partners are helping her to build. It's also the seat of her court, the leading jurisprudential nexus in the outer solar system. Amber is the Queen, here, arbitrator and ruler. And Sadeq is her judge and counsel. + +_1 A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes away has filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging malfeasance, heresy, and barratry against a semisentient corporate pyramid scheme that arrived in Jovian space twelve million seconds ago and currently seems set on converting every other intelligence in the region to its peculiar memeset. A whole bundle of multithreaded countersuits are dragging at her attention, in a counterattack alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent, and trade secrecy laws by discussing the interloper's intentions. + +_1 Right now, Amber isn't home on the Ring to hear the case in person. She's left Sadeq behind to grapple with the balky mechanics of her legal system - tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain in the ass - while she drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to another Jovian colony, the Nursery Republic. Planted by the Franklin Trust's orphanage ship /{Ernst Sanger}/, the Nursery has grown over the past four years into a spindly snowflake three kilometers across. A slow-growing O'Neil cylinder sprouts from its hub: Most of the inhabitants of the space station are less than two years old, precocious additions to the Trust's borganism. + +_1 There's a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on the side of a hill that clings insecurely to the inner edge of a spinning cup. The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly around a central axis lined up on Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a wicker chair, her legs stretched out before her and one arm flung across her forehead. The wreckage of an incredible meal is scattered across the tables around her. Torpid and full, she strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off somewhere, touring one or another of the prototype ecosystems that one or another of the borg's special interest minds is testing. Amber, for her part, can't be bothered. She's just had a great meal, she doesn't have any lawsuits to worry about, everything back home is on the critpath, and quality time like this is so hard to come by - + +_1 "Do you keep in touch with your father?" asks Monica. + +_1 "Mmm." The cat purrs quietly, and Amber strokes its flank. "We e-mail. Sometimes." + +_1 "I just wondered." Monica is the local borg den mother, willowy and brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl - Yorkshire English overlaid with Silicon Valley speak. "I hear from him, y'know. From time to time. Now that Gianni's retired, he doesn't have much to do down-well anymore. So he was talking about coming out here." + +_1 "What? To Perijove?" Amber's eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops purring and looks round at Monica accusingly. + +_1 "Don't worry." Monica sounds vaguely amused: "He wouldn't cramp your style, I think." + +_1 "But, out here -" Amber sits up. "Damn," she says, quietly. "What got into him?" + +_1 "Middle-aged restlessness, my downwell sibs say." Monica shrugs. "This time Annette didn't stop him. But he hasn't made up his mind to travel yet." + +_1 "Good. Then he might not -" Amber stops. "The phrase, 'made up his mind', what exactly do you mean?" + +_1 Monica's smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman surrenders. "He's talking about uploading." + +_1 "Is that embarrassing or what?" asks Ang. Amber glances at her, mildly annoyed, but Ang isn't looking her way. /{So much for friends}/, Amber thinks. Being queen of all you survey is a great way of breaking up peer relationships - + +_1 "He won't do it," Amber predicts. "Dad's burned out." + +_1 "He thinks he'll get it back if he optimizes himself for re-entrancy." Monica continues to smile. "I've been telling him it's just what he needs." + +_1 "I do /{not}/ want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Or Auntie 'Nette and Uncle Gianni. Memo to immigration control: No entry rights for Manfred Macx or the other named individuals without clearance through the Queen's secretary." + +_1 "What did he do to get you so uptight?" asks Monica idly. + +_1 Amber sighs, and subsides. "Nothing. It's not that I'm ungrateful or anything, but he's just so extropian, it's embarrassing. Like, that was the last century's apocalypse. Y'know?" + +_1 "I think he was a really very forward-looking organic," Monica, speaking for the Franklin borg, asserts. Amber looks away. /{Pierre would get it}/, she thinks. Pierre would understand her aversion to Manfred's showing up. Pierre, too, wants to carve out his own niche without parents looking over his shoulders, although for very different reasons. She focuses on someone male and more or less mature - Nicky, she thinks, though she hasn't seen him for a long time - walking toward the piazza, bare-ass naked and beautifully tanned. + +_1 "Parents. What are they good for?" asks Amber, with all the truculence of her seventeen years. "Even if they stay neotenous, they lose flexibility. And there's that long Paleolithic tradition of juvenile slavery. Inhuman, I call it." + +_1 "How old were you when it was safe to leave you around the house on your own?" challenges Monica. + +_1 "Three. That's when I had my first implants." Amber smiles at the approaching young Adonis, who smiles back: Yes, it's Nicky, and he seems pleased to see her. /{Life is good}/, she thinks, idly considering whether or not to tell Pierre. + +_1 "Times change," remarks Monica. "Don't write your family off too soon; there might come a time when you want their company." + +_1 "Huh." Amber pulls a face at the old borg component. "That's what you all say!" + +* * * + +As soon as Amber steps onto the grass, she can feel possibilities open up around her. She has management authority here, and this universe is /{big}/, wide open, not like Sadeq's existential trap. A twitch of a sub-process reasserts her self-image, back to short hair and comfortable clothing. Another twitch brings up a whole load of useful diagnostics. Amber has a nasty feeling that she's running in a compatibility sandbox here - there are signs that her access to the simulation system's control interface is very much via proxy - but at least she's got it. + +"Wow! Back in the real world at last!" She can hardly contain her excitement, even forgetting to be pissed at Sadeq for thinking she was just an actor in his Cartesian theatre's performance of Puritan Hell. "Look! It's the DMZ!" + +They're standing on a grassy knoll overlooking a gleaming Mediterranean city. It snoozes beneath a Mandelbrot-fuzzy not-sun that hangs at the center of a hyperbolic landscape, which dwindles into a blue yonder that seems incomprehensibly distant. Circular baby-blue wells open in the walls of the world at regular intervals, connecting to other parts of the manifold. "How big is it, ghost? In planetary simulation-equivalents." + +"This demilitarized zone is an embedded reality, funneling all transfers between the local star system's router and the civilization that built it. It uses on the order of a thousandth of the capacity of the Matrioshka brain it is part of, although the runaway excursion currently in force has absorbed most of that. Matrioshka brain, you are familiar with the concept?" The ghost sounds fussily pedantic. + +Sadeq shakes his head. Amber glances at him, askance. "Take all the planets in a star system and dismantle them," she explains. "Turn them into dust - structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, spread in concentric orbits around the central star. The inner orbitals run close to the melting point of iron, the outer ones are cold as liquid nitrogen, and each layer runs off the waste heat of the next shell in. It's like a Russian doll made out of Dyson spheres, shell enclosing shell enclosing shell, but it's not designed to support human life. It's computronium, matter optimized at the atomic level to support computing, and they're all running uploads - Dad figured our own solar system could support, uh, about a hundred billion times as many inhabitants as Earth. At a conservative estimate. As uploads, living in simulation space. If you first dismantle all the planets and use the resulting materials to build a Matrioshka brain." + +"Ah." Sadeq nods thoughtfully. "Is that your definition, too?" he asks, glancing up at the glowing point the ghost uses to localize its presence. + +"Substantially," it says, almost grudgingly. + +"Substantially?" Amber glances around. /{A billion worlds to explore}/, she thinks dizzily. /{And that's just the}/ firewall? She feels obscurely cheated: You need to be vaster than human just to count the digits in the big numbers at play here, but there's nothing fundamentally incomprehensible about it. This is the sort of civilization Dad said she could expect to live in, within her meatbody life expectancy. Dad and his drinking buddies, singing, "Dismantle the Moon! Melt down Mars!" in a castle outside Prague as they waited for the results of a shamelessly gerrymandered election to arrive in the third decade of the third millennium. The Space and Freedom Party taking over the EU, and cranking up to escape velocity. But this is supposed to be kiloparsecs from home, ancient alien civilizations and all that! Where's the exotic superscience? What about the neuron stars, strange matter suns structured for computing at nucleonic, rather than electronic, speeds? /{I have a bad feeling about this}/, she thinks, spawning a copy of herself to set up a private channel to Sadeq. /{It's not advanced enough. Do you suppose these guys could be like the Wunch? Parasites or barbarians hitching a ride in the machine?}/ + +/{You believe it's lying to us?}/ Sadeq sends back. + +"Hmm." Amber sets off downslope toward the piazza below, at the heart of the fake town. "It looks a bit too human to me." + +"Human," echoes Sadeq, a curious wistfulness in his voice. "Did you not say humans are extinct?" + +"Your species is obsolete," the ghost comments smugly. "Inappropriately adapted to artificial realities. Poorly optimized circuitry, excessively complex low-bandwidth sensors, messily global variables -" + +"Yeah, yeah, I get the picture," says Amber, turning her attention to the town. "So why do you think we can deal with this alien god you've got a problem with?" + +"It asked for you," says the ghost, narrowing from an ellipse to a line, then shrinking to a dimensionless point of brilliance. "And now it's coming. We-I not willing to risk exposure. Call us-me when you have slain the dragon. Goodbye." + +"Oh /{shit}/ -" Amber spins round. But she and Sadeq are alone beneath the hot sunlight from above. The piazza, like the one in the Nursery Republic, is charmingly rustic - but there's nobody home, nothing but ornate cast-iron furniture basking beneath the noon-bright sun, a table with a parasol over it, and something furry lying sprawled in a patch of sunlight beside it. + +"We appear to be alone for now," says Sadeq. He smiles crookedly, then nods at the table. "Maybe we should wait for our host to arrive?" + +"Our host." Amber peers around. "The ghost is kind of frightened of this alien. I wonder why?" + +"It asked for us." Sadeq heads toward the table, pulls out a chair, and sits down carefully. "That could be very good news - or very bad." + +"Hmm." Amber finishes her survey, sees no sign of life. For lack of any better ideas, she ambles over to the table and sits down on the other side of it from Sadeq. He looks slightly nervous beneath her inspection, but maybe it's just embarrassment about having seen her in her underwear. /{If I had an afterlife like that, I'd be embarrassed about it, too,}/ Amber thinks to herself. + +"Hey, you nearly tripped over -" Sadeq freezes, peering at something close to Amber's left foot. He looks puzzled for a moment, then smiles broadly. "What are /{you}/ doing here?" he asks her blind spot. + +"What are you talking to?" she asks, startled. + +/{He's talking to}/ me, /{dummy}/, says something tantalizingly familiar from her blind spot. /{So the fuckwits are trying to use you to dislodge me, hmm? That's not exactly clever.}/ + +"Who -" Amber squints at the flagstone, spawns a bunch of ghosts who tear hurriedly at her reality modification ackles. Nothing seems to shift the blindness. "Are you the alien?" + +"What else could I be?" the blind spot asks with heavy irony. "No, I'm your father's pet cat. Listen, do you want to get out of here?" + +"Uh." Amber rubs her eyes. "I can't see you, whatever you are," she says politely. "Do I know you?" She's got a strange sense that she /{does}/ know the blind spot, that it's really important, and she's missing something intimate to her own sense of identity, but what it might be she can't tell. + +"Yeah, kid." There's a note of world-weary amusement in the not-voice coming from the hazy patch on the ground. "They've hacked you but good, both of you. Let me in, and I'll fix it." + +"No!" Exclaims Amber, a second ahead of Sadeq, who looks at her oddly. "Are you really an invader?" + +The blind spot sighs. "I'm as much an invader as you are, remember? I came here with you. Difference is, I'm not going to let some stupid corporate ghost use me as fungible currency." + +"Fungible -" Sadeq stops. "I remember you," he says slowly, with an expression of absolute, utter surprise on his face. "What do you mean?" + +The blind spot /{yawns}/, baring sharp ivory fangs. Amber shakes her head, dismissing the momentary hallucination. "Lemme guess. You woke up in a room, and this alien ghost tells you the human species is extinct and asks you to do a number on me. Is that right?" + +Amber nods, as an icy finger of fear trails up and down her spine. "Is it lying?" she asks. + +"Damn right." The blind spot is smiling, now, and the smile on the void won't go away - she can see the smile, just not the body it's attached to. "My reckoning is, we're about sixteen light-years from Earth. The Wunch came through here, stripped the dump, then took off for parts unknown; it's a trashhole, you wouldn't believe it. The main life-form is an incredibly ornate corporate ecosphere, legal instruments breeding and replicating. They mug passing sapients and use them as currency." + +There's a triangular, pointy head behind the smile, slit eyes and sharp ears, a predatory, intelligent-looking but infinitely alien face. Amber can see it out of the corners of her eyes when she looks around the piazza. "You mean we, uh, they grabbed us when we appeared, and they've mangled my memories -" Amber suddenly finds it incredibly difficult to concentrate, but if she focuses on the smile, she can almost see the body behind it, hunched like a furry chicken, tail wrapped neatly around its front paws. + +"Yeah. Except they didn't bargain on meeting something like me." The smile is infinitely wide, a Cheshire-cat grin on front of an orange-and-brown stripy body that shimmers in front of Amber's gaze like a hallucination. "Your mother's cracking tools are self-extending, Amber. Do you remember Hong Kong?" + +"Hong -" + +There is a moment of painless pressure, then Amber feels huge invisible barriers sliding away on all sides. She looks around, for the first time seeing the piazza as it really is, half the crew of the /{Field Circus}/ waiting nervously around her, the grinning cat crouched on the floor at her feet, the enormous walls of recomplicating data that fence their little town off from the gaping holes - interfaces to the other routers in the network. + +"Welcome back," Pierre says gravely, as Amber gives a squeak of surprise and leans forward to pick up her cat. "Now you're out from under, how about we start trying to figure out how to get home?" + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to decade the sixth, millennium three. These old datelines don't mean so much anymore, for while some billions of fleshbody humans are still infected with viral memes, the significance of theocentric dating has been dealt a body blow. This may be the fifties, but what that means to you depends on how fast your reality rate runs. The various upload clades exploding across the reaches of the solar system vary by several orders of magnitude - some are barely out of 2049, while others are exploring the subjective thousandth millennium. + +_1 While the /{Field Circus}/ floats in orbit around an alien router (itself orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},), while Amber and her crew are trapped on the far side of a wormhole linking the router to a network of incomprehensibly vast alien mindscapes - while all this is going on, the damnfool human species has finally succeeded in making itself obsolete. The proximate cause of its displacement from the pinnacle of creation (or the pinnacle of teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance on evolutionary biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The phrase "smart money" has taken on a whole new meaning, for the collision between international business law and neurocomputing technology has given rise to a whole new family of species - fast-moving corporate carnivores in the Net. The planet Mercury has been broken up by a consortium of energy brokers, and Venus is an expanding debris cloud, energized to a violent glare by the trapped and channeled solar output. A million billion fist-sized computing caltrops, backsides glowing dull red with the efflux from their thinking, orbit the sun at various inclinations no farther out than Mercury used to be. + +_1 Billions of fleshbody humans refuse to have anything to do with the blasphemous new realities. Many of their leaders denounce the uploads and AIs as soulless machines. Many more are timid, harboring self-preservation memes that amplify a previously healthy aversion to having one's brain peeled like an onion by mind-mapping robots into an all-pervading neurosis. Sales of electrified tinfoil-lined hats are at an all-time high. Still, hundreds of millions have already traded their meat puppets for mind machines, and they breed fast. In another few years, the fleshbody populace will be an absolute minority of the posthuman clade. Sometime later, there will probably be a war. The dwellers in the thoughtcloud are hungry for dumb matter to convert, and the fleshbodies make notoriously poor use of the collection of silicon and rare elements that pool at the bottom of the gravity well that is Earth. + +_1 Energy and thought are driving a phase-change in the condensed matter substance of the solar system. The MIPS per kilogram metric is on the steep upward leg of a sigmoid curve - dumb matter is coming to life as the mind children restructure everything with voracious nanomechanical servants. The thoughtcloud forming in orbit around the sun will ultimately be the graveyard of a biological ecology, another marker in space visible to the telescopes of any new iron-age species with the insight to understand what they're seeing: the death throes of dumb matter, the birth of a habitable reality vaster than a galaxy and far speedier. Death throes that, within a few centuries, will mean the extinction of biological life within a light-year or so of that star - for the majestic Matrioshka brains, though they are the pinnacles of sentient civilization, are intrinsically hostile environments for fleshy life. + +* * * + +Pierre, Donna-the-all-seeing-eye, and Su Ang fill Amber in on what they've discovered about the bazaar - as they call the space the ghost referred to as the demilitarized zone - over ice-cold margaritas and a very good simulation of a sociable joint. Some of them have been on the loose in here for subjective years. There's a lot of information to absorb. + +"The physical layer is half a light-hour in diameter, four hundred times as massive as Earth," Pierre explains. "Not solid, of course - the largest component is about the size my fist used to be." Amber squints, trying to remember how big that was - scale factors are hard to remember accurately. "I met this old chatbot that said it's outlived its original star, but I'm not sure it's running with a full deck. Anyway, if it's telling the truth, we're a third of a light year out from a closely coupled binary system - they use orbital lasers the size of Jupiter to power it without getting too close to all those icky gravity wells." + +Amber is intimidated, despite her better judgment, because this bizarre bazaar is several hundred billion times as big as the totality of human presingularity civilization. She tries not to show it in front of the others, but she's worried that getting home may be impossible - requiring enterprise beyond the economic event horizon, as realistic a proposition as a dime debuting as a dollar bill. Still, she's got to at least try. Just knowing about the existence of the bazaar will change so many things ... + +"How much money can we lay our hands on?" She asks. "What /{is}/ money hereabouts, anyway? Assuming they've got a scarcity-mediated economy. Bandwidth, maybe?" + +"Ah, well." Pierre looks at her oddly. "That's the problem. Didn't the ghost tell you?" + +"Tell me?" Amber raises an eyebrow. "Yeah, but it hasn't exactly proven to be a reliable guide to anything, has it?" + +"Tell her," Su Ang says quietly. She looks away, embarrassed by something. + +"They've got a scarcity economy all right," says Pierre. "Bandwidth is the limited resource, that and matter. This whole civilization is tied together locally because if you move too far away, well, it takes ages to catch up on the gossip. Matrioshka brain intelligences are much more likely to stay at home than anybody realized, even though they chat on the phone a lot. And they use things that come from other cognitive universes as, well, currency. We came in through the coin slot, is it any wonder we ended up in the bank?" + +"That's so deeply wrong that I don't know where to begin," Amber grumbles. "How did they get into this mess?" + +"Don't ask me." Pierre shrugs. "I have the distinct feeling that anyone or anything we meet in this place won't have any more of a clue than we do - whoever or whatever built this brain, there ain't nobody home anymore except the self-propelled corporations and hitchhikers like the Wunch. We're in the dark, just like they were." + +"Huh. You mean they built something like this, then they went extinct? That sounds so dumb ..." + +Su Ang sighs. "They got too big and complex to go traveling once they built themselves a bigger house to live in. Extinction tends to be what happens to overspecialized organisms that are stuck in one environmental niche for too long. If you posit a singularity, then maximization of local computing resources - like this - as the usual end state for tool users, is it any wonder none of them ever came calling on us?" + +Amber focuses on the table in front of her, rests the heel of her palm on the cool metal, and tries to remember how to fork a second copy of her state vector. A moment later, her ghost obligingly fucks with the physics model of the table. Iron gives way like rubber beneath her fingertips, a pleasant elasticity. "Okay, we have some control over the universe, at least that's something to work with. Have any of you tried any self-modification?" + +"That's dangerous," Pierre says emphatically. "The more of us the better before we start doing that stuff. And we need some firewalling of our own." + +"How deep does reality go, here?" asks Sadeq. It's almost the first question he's asked of his own volition, and Amber takes it as a positive sign that he's finally coming out of his shell. + +"Oh, the Planck length is about a hundredth of a millimeter in this world. Too small to see, comfortably large for the simulation engines to handle. Not like /{real}/ space-time." + +"Well, then." Sadeq pauses. "They can zoom their reality if they need to?" + +"Yeah, fractals work in here." Pierre nods. "I didn't -" + +"This place is a trap," Su Ang says emphatically. + +"No it isn't," Pierre replies, nettled. + +"What do you mean, a trap?" asks Amber. + +"We've been here a while," says Ang. She glances at Aineko, who sprawls on the flagstones, snoozing or whatever it is that weakly superhuman AIs do when they're emulating a sleeping cat. "After your cat broke us out of bondage, we had a look around. There are things out there that -" She shivers. "Humans can't survive in most of the simulation spaces here. Universes with physics models that don't support our kind of neural computing. You could migrate there, but you'd need to be ported to a whole new type of logic - by the time you did that, would you still be you? Still, there are enough entities roughly as complex as we are to prove that the builders aren't here anymore. Just lesser sapients, rooting through the wreckage. Worms and parasites squirming through the body after nightfall on the battlefield." + +"I ran into the Wunch," Donna volunteers helpfully. "The first couple of times they ate my ghost, but eventually I figured out how to talk to them." + +"And there's other aliens, too," Su Ang adds gloomily. "Just nobody you'd want to meet on a dark night." + +"So there's no hope of making contact," Amber summarizes. "At least, not with anything transcendent and well-intentioned toward visiting humans." + +"That's probably right," Pierre concedes. He doesn't sound happy about it. + +"So we're stuck in a pocket universe with limited bandwidth to home and a bunch of crazy slum dwellers who've moved into the abandoned and decaying mansion and want to use us for currency. 'Jesus saves, and redeems souls for valuable gifts.' Yeah?" + +"Yeah." Su Ang looks depressed. + +"Well." Amber glances at Sadeq speculatively. Sadeq is staring into the distance, at the crazy infinite sunspot that limns the square with shadows. "Hey, god-man. Got a question for you." + +"Yes?" Sadeq looks at her, a slightly dazed expression on his face. "I'm sorry, I am just feeling the jaws of a larger trap around my throat -" + +"Don't be." Amber grins, and it is not a pleasant expression. "Have you ever been to Brooklyn?" + +"No, why -" + +"Because you're going to help me sell these lying bastards a bridge. Okay? And when we've sold it we're going to use the money to pay the purchasing fools to drive us across, so we can go home. Listen, this is what I'm planning ..." + +* * * + +"I can do this, I think," Sadeq says, moodily examining the Klein bottle on the table. The bottle is half-empty, its fluid contents invisible around the corner of the fourth-dimensional store. "I spent long enough alone in there to -" He shivers. + +"I don't want you damaging yourself," Amber says, calmly enough, because she has an ominous feeling that their survival in this place has an expiry date attached. + +"Oh, never fear." Sadeq grins lopsidedly. "One pocket hell is much like another." + +"Do you understand why -" + +"Yes, yes," he says dismissively. "We can't send copies of ourselves into it, that would be an abomination. It needs to be unpopulated, yes?" + +"Well, the idea is to get us home, not leave thousands of copies of ourselves trapped in a pocket universe here. Isn't that it?" Su Ang asks hesitantly. She's looking distracted, most of her attention focused on absorbing the experiences of a dozen ghosts she's spun off to attend to perimeter security. + +"Who are we selling this to?" asks Sadeq. "If you want me to make it attractive -" + +"It doesn't need to be a complete replica of the Earth. It just has to be a convincing advertisement for a presingularity civilization full of humans. You've got two-and-seventy zombies to dissect for their brains; bolt together a bunch of variables you can apply to them, and you can permutate them to look a bit more varied." + +Amber turns her attention to the snoozing cat. "Hey, furball. How long have we been here really, in real time? Can you grab Sadeq some more resources for his personal paradise garden?" + +Aineko stretches and yawns, totally feline, then looks up at Amber with narrowed eyes and raised tail. "'Bout eighteen minutes, wall-clock time." The cat stretches again and sits, front paws drawn together primly, tail curled around them. "The ghosts are pushing, you know? I don't think I can sustain this for too much longer. They're not good at hacking people, but I think it won't be too long before they instantiate a new copy of you, one that'll be predisposed to their side." + +"I don't get why they didn't assimilate you along with the rest of us." + +"Blame your mother again - she's the one who kept updating the digital rights management code on my personality. 'Illegal consciousness is copyright theft' sucks until an alien tries to rewire your hindbrain with a debugger; then it's a lifesaver." Aineko glances down and begins washing one paw. "I can give your mullah-man about six days, subjective time. After that, all bets are off." + +"I will take it, then." Sadeq stands. "Thank you." He smiles at the cat, a smile that fades to translucency, hanging in the simulated air like an echo as the priest returns to his tower - this time with a blueprint and a plan in mind. + +"That leaves just us." Su Ang glances at Pierre, back to Amber. "Who are you going to sell this crazy scheme to?" + +Amber leans back and smiles. Behind her, Donna - her avatar an archaic movie camera suspended below a model helicopter - is filming everything for posterity. She nods lazily at the reporter. "She's the one who gave me the idea. Who do we know who's dumb enough to buy into a scam like this?" + +Pierre looks at her suspiciously. "I think we've been here before," he says slowly. "You aren't going to make me kill anyone, are you?" + +"I don't think that'll be necessary, unless the corporate ghosts think we're going to get away from them and are greedy enough to want to kill us." + +"You see, she learned from last time," Ang comments, and Amber nods. "No more misunderstandings, right?" She beams at Amber. + +Amber beams back at her. "Right. And that's why you -" she points at Pierre - "are going to go find out if any relics of the Wunch are hanging about here. I want you to make them an offer they won't refuse." + +* * * + +"How much for just the civilization?" asks the Slug. + +Pierre looks down at it thoughtfully. It's not really a terrestrial mollusk: Slugs on Earth aren't two meters long and don't have lacy white exoskeletons to hold their chocolate-colored flesh in shape. But then, it isn't really the alien it appears to be. It's a defaulting corporate instrument that has disguised itself as a long-extinct alien upload, in the hope that its creditors won't recognize it if it looks like a randomly evolved sentient. One of the stranded members of Amber's expedition made contact with it a couple of subjective years ago, while exploring the ruined city at the center of the firewall. Now Pierre's here because it seems to be one of their most promising leads. Emphasis on the word promising - because it promises much, but there is some question over whether it can indeed deliver. + +"The civilization isn't for sale," Pierre says slowly. The translation interface shimmers, storing up his words and transforming them into a different deep grammar, not merely translating his syntax but mapping equivalent meanings where necessary. "But we can give you privileged observer status if that's what you want. And we know what you are. If you're interested in finding a new exchange to be traded on, your existing intellectual property assets will be worth rather more there than here." + +The rogue corporation rears up slightly and bunches into a fatter lump. Its skin blushes red in patches. "Must think about this. Is your mandatory accounting time cycle fixed or variable term? Are self-owned corporate entities able to enter contracts?" + +"I could ask my patron," Pierre says casually. He suppresses a stab of angst. He's still not sure where he and Amber stand, but theirs is far more than just a business relationship, and he worries about the risks she's taking. "My patron has a jurisdiction within which she can modify corporate law to accommodate your requirements. Your activities on a wider scale might require shell companies -" the latter concept echoes back in translation to him as host organisms - "but that can be taken care of." + +The translation membrane wibbles for a while, apparently reformulating some more abstract concepts in a manner that the corporation can absorb. Pierre is reasonably confident that it'll take the offer, however. When it first met them, it boasted about its control over router hardware at the lowest levels. But it also bitched and moaned about the firewall protocols that were blocking it from leaving (before rather rudely trying to eat its conversationalist). He waits patiently, looking around at the swampy landscape, mudflats punctuated by clumps of spiky violet ferns. The corporation has to be desperate, to be thinking of the bizarre proposition Amber has dreamed up for him to pitch to it. + +"Sounds interesting," the Slug declares after a brief confirmatory debate with the membrane. "If I supply a suitable genome, can you customize a container for it?" + +"I believe so," Pierre says carefully. "For your part, can you deliver the energy we need?" + +"From a gate?" For a moment the translation membrane hallucinates a stick-human, shrugging. "Easy. Gates are all entangled: Dump coherent radiation in at one, get it out at another. Just get me out of this firewall first." + +"But the lightspeed lag -" + +"No problem. You go first, then a dumb instrument I leave behind buys up power and sends it after. Router network is synchronous, within framework of state machines that run Universe 1.0; messages propagate at same speed, speed of light in vacuum, except use wormholes to shorten distances between nodes. Whole point of the network is that it is nonlossy. Who would trust their mind to a communications channel that might partially randomize them in transit?" + +Pierre goes cross-eyed, trying to understand the implications of the Slug's cosmology. But there isn't really time, here and now: They've got on the order of a minute of wall-clock time left to get everything sorted out, if Aineko is right. One minute to go before the angry ghosts start trying to break into the DMZ by other means. "If you are willing to try this, we'd be happy to accommodate you," he says, thinking of crossed fingers and rabbits' feet and firewalls. + +"It's a deal," the membrane translates the Slug's response back at him. "Now we exchange shares/plasmids/ownership? Then merger complete?" + +Pierre stares at the Slug: "But this is a business arrangement!" he protests. "What's sex got to do with it?" + +"Apologies offered. I am thinking we have a translation error. You said this was to be a merging of businesses?" + +"Not /{that}/ way. It's a contract. We agree to take you with us. In return, you help lure the Wunch into the domain we're setting up for them and configure the router at the other end ..." + +And so on. + +* * * + +Steeling herself, Amber recalls the address the ghost gave her for Sadeq's afterlife universe. In her own subjective time it's been about half an hour since he left. "Coming?" she asks her cat. + +"Don't think I will," says Aineko. It looks away, blissfully unconcerned. + +"Bah." Amber tenses, then opens the port to Sadeq's pocket universe. + +As usual she finds herself indoors, standing on an ornate mosaic floor in a room with whitewashed walls and peaked windows. But there's something different about it, and after a moment, she realizes what it is. The sound of vehicle traffic from outside, the cooing of pigeons on the rooftops, someone shouting across the street: There are people here. + +She walks over to the nearest window and looks out, then recoils. It's /{hot}/ outside. Dust and fumes hang in air the color of cement over rough-finished concrete apartment buildings, their roofs covered in satellite uplinks and cheap, garish LED advertising panels. Looking down she sees motor scooters, cars - filthy, fossil-fueled behemoths, a tonne of steel and explosives in motion to carry only one human, a mass ratio worse than an archaic ICBM - brightly dressed people walking to and fro. A news helicam buzzes overhead, lenses darting and glinting at the traffic. + +"Just like home, isn't it?" says Sadeq, behind her. + +Amber starts. "This is where you grew up? This is Yazd?" + +"It doesn't exist anymore, in real space." Sadeq looks thoughtful, but far more animated than the barely conscious parody of himself that she'd rescued from this building - back when it was a mediaeval vision of the afterlife - scant subjective hours ago. He cracks a smile: "Probably a good thing. We were dismantling it even while we were preparing to leave, you know?" + +"It's detailed." Amber throws her eyes at the scene out the window, multiplexes them, and tells them to send little virtual ghosts dancing through the streets of the Iranian industrial 'burb. Overhead, big Airbuses ply the skyways, bearing pilgrims on the hajj, tourists to the coastal resorts on the Persian Gulf, produce to the foreign markets. + +"It's the best time I could recall," Sadeq says. "I didn't spend many days here then - I was in Qom, studying, and Kazakhstan, for cosmonaut training - but it's meant to be the early twenties. After the troubles, after the fall of the guardians; a young, energetic, liberal country full of optimism and faith in democracy. Values that weren't doing well elsewhere." + +"I thought democracy was a new thing there?" + +"No." Sadeq shakes his head. "There were prodemocracy riots in Tehran in the nineteenth century, did you know that? That's why the first revolution - no." He makes a cutting gesture. "Politics and faith are a combustible combination." He frowns. "But look. Is this what you wanted?" + +Amber recalls her scattered eyes - some of which have flown as much as a thousand kilometers from her locus - and concentrates on reintegrating their visions of Sadeq's re-creation. "It looks convincing. But not too convincing." + +"That was the idea." + +"Well, then." She smiles. "Is it just Iran? Or did you take any liberties around the edges?" + +"Who, me?" He raises an eyebrow. "I have enough doubts about the morality of this - project - without trying to trespass on Allah's territory, peace be unto him. I promise you, there are no sapients in this world but us. The people are the hollow shells of my dreaming, storefront dummies. The animals are crude bitmaps. This is what you asked for, and no more." + +"Well, then." Amber pauses. She recalls the expression on the dirt-smudged face of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his companions by the boarded-up front of a gas station on a desert road; remembers the animated chatter of two synthetic housewives, one in traditional black and the other in some imported Eurotrash fashion. "Are you sure they aren't real?" she asks. + +"Quite sure." But for a moment, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain. "Shall we go? Do you have the occupiers ready to move in yet?" + +"Yes to the first, and Pierre's working on the second. Come on, we don't want to get trampled by the squatters." She waves and opens a door back onto the piazza where her robot cat - the alien's nightmare intruder in the DMZ - sleeps, chasing superintelligent dream mice through multidimensional realities. "Sometimes I wonder if /{I'm}/ conscious. Thinking these thoughts gives me the creeps. Let's go and sell some aliens a bridge in Brooklyn." + +* * * + +Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen from 2001. + +"You have confined the monster," the ghost states. + +"Yes." Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, and a hot flash of anger that passes almost immediately. + +"And you have modified yourself to lock out external control," the ghost adds. "What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?" + +"Don't you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states. + +"Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you /{sure}/ you have defeated the monster?" + +"It'll do as I say," Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more confident than she feels - sometimes that damned transhuman cyborg cat is no more predictable than a real feline. "Now, the matter of payment arises." + +"Payment." The ghost sounds amused. But Pierre's filled her in on what to look for, and Amber can now see the translation membranes around it. Their color shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature on the other side, even though it looks like a ghost-image of herself, is very far from human. "How can we-us be expected to pay our own money for rendering services to us?" + +Amber smiles. "We want an open channel back to the router we arrived through." + +"Impossible," says the ghost. + +"We want an open channel, /{and}/ for it to stay open for six hundred million seconds after we clear it." + +"Impossible," the ghost repeats. + +"We can trade you a whole civilization," Amber says blandly. "A whole human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go, and we'll see to it." + +"You - please wait." The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the edges. + +Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with its other nodes. /{Are the Wunch in place yet?}/ she sends. + +/{They're moving in. This bunch don't remember what happened on the}/ Field Circus, /{memories of those events never made it back to them. So the Slug's got them to cooperate. It's kinda scary to watch - like}/ the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, /{you know?}/ + +/{I don't care if it's scary to watch}/, Amber replies, /{I need to know if we're ready yet}/. + +/{Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.}/ + +/{Right, pack yourself down. We'll be moving soon.}/ + +The ghost is firming up in front of her. "A whole civilization?" it asks. "That is not possible. Your arrival -" It pauses, fuzzing a little. /{Hah, Gotcha!}/ thinks Amber. /{Liar, liar, pants on fire!}/ "You cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives?" + +"The monster you complain about that came through with us is a predator," she asserts blandly. "It swallowed an entire nation before we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into the router. It's an archivore - everything was inside it, still frozen until we expanded it again. This civilization will already have been restored from hot shadows in our own solar system: There is nothing to gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that no more predators of this type discover the router - or the high-bandwidth hub we linked to it." + +"You are sure you have killed this monster?" asks the ghost. "It would be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest archives." + +"I can guarantee it won't trouble you again if you let us go," says Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn't seem to have noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her personal scope by an order of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko's goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to revive it if the escape plan succeeds. + +"We-us agree." The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then spits out a smaller token - a warped distortion in the air, like a gravityless black hole. "Here is your passage. Show us the civilization." + +"Okay " - /{Now!}/ - "catch." Amber twitches an imaginary muscle, and one wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq's existential hell, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first-century industrial city in Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who can't believe what they've lucked into - an entire continent of zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry consciousness. + +The ghost drifts toward the open window. Amber grabs the hole and yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends /{Open wide!}/ on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands still, and then - + +* * * + +A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through the cold vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines on the crazy diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The runaway Slug-corporation's proxy has hacked the router's firmware, and the open wormhole gate that feeds power to it is shining with the brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star many light-years away to power the /{Field Circus}/ on its return trip to the once-human solar system. + +Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard the Ring Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a solid slab of diamond, looking out across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low enough to make the horizon appear flat. They're curled together in her bed, a slightly more comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry VIII of England. It appears to be carved from thousand-year-old oak beams. As with so much else about the Ring Imperium, appearances are deceptive; and this is even more true of the cramped simulation spaces aboard the /{Field Circus}/, as it limps toward a tenth the speed of light, the highest velocity it's likely to achieve on a fraction of its original sail area. + +"Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a simulation of Iran, with zombie bodies that had been taken over by members of the Wunch. Was a human civilization?" + +"Yeah." Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. "It's their damn fault; if the corporate collective entities didn't use conscious viewpoints as money, they wouldn't have fallen for a trick like that, would they?" + +"People. Money." + +"Well." She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously: Down-stuffed pillows appear behind her back, and a silver salver bearing two full glasses of wine materializes between them. "Corporations are life-forms back home, too, aren't they? And we trade them. We give our AIs corporations to make them legal entities, but the analogy goes deeper. Look at any company headquarters, fitted out with works of art and expensive furniture and staff bowing and scraping everywhere -" + +" - They're the new aristocracy. Right?" + +"Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. Hell, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria, and algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids." The Queen passes her consort a wineglass. When he drinks from it, it refills miraculously. "Basically, sufficiently complex resource-allocation algorithms reallocate scarce resources ... and if you don't jump to get out of their way, they'll reallocate you. I think that's what happened inside the Matrioshka brain we ended up in: Judging by the Slug it happens elsewhere, too. You've got to wonder where the builders of that structure came from. And where they went. And whether they realized that the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments." + +"Maybe they tried to dismantle the companies before the companies spent them." Pierre looks worried. "Running up a national debt, importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once they plugged into the Net, a primitive Matrioshka civilization would be like, um." He pauses. "Tribal. A primitive postsingularity civilization meeting the galactic net for the first time. Overawed. Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human - or alien - capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there's nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to own." + +"Speculation." + +"Idle speculation," he agrees. + +"But we can't ignore it." She nods. "Maybe some early corporate predator built the machines that spread the wormholes around brown dwarfs and ran the router network on top of them in an attempt to make money fast. By not putting them in the actual planetary systems likely to host tool-using life, they'd ensure that only near-singularity civilizations would stumble over them. Civilizations that had gone too far to be easy prey probably wouldn't send a ship out to look ... so the network would ensure a steady stream of yokels new to the big city to fleece. Only they set the mechanism in motion billions of years ago and went extinct, leaving the network to propagate, and now there's nothing out there but burned-out Matrioshka civilizations and howling parasites like the angry ghosts and the Wunch. And victims like us." She shudders and changes the subject: "Speaking of aliens, is the Slug happy?" + +"Last time I checked on him, yeah." Pierre blows on his wineglass and it dissolves into a million splinters of light. He looks dubious at the mention of the rogue corporate instrument they're taking with them. "I don't trust him out in the unrestricted sim-spaces yet, but he delivered on the fine control for the router's laser. I just hope you don't ever have to actually use him, if you follow my drift. I'm a bit worried that Aineko is spending so much time in there." + +"So that's where she is? I'd been worrying." + +"Cats never come when you call them, do they?" + +"There is that," she agrees. Then, with a worried glance at the vision of Jupiter's cloudscape: "I wonder what we'll find when we get there?" + +Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward them with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an uncertain nightfall. + +:B~ PART 3: Singularity + +There's a sucker born every minute. + +- P. T. Barnum + +1~ Chapter 7: Curator + +Sirhan stands on the edge of an abyss, looking down at a churning orange-and-gray cloudscape far below. The air this close to the edge is chilly and smells slightly of ammonia, although that might be his imagination at work - there's little chance of any gas exchange taking place across the transparent pressure wall of the flying city. He feels as if he could reach out and touch the swirling vaporscape. There's nobody else around, this close to the edge - it's an icy sensation to look out across the roiling depths, at an ocean of gas so cold human flesh would freeze within seconds of exposure, knowing that there's nothing solid out there for tens of thousands of kilometers. The sense of isolation is aggravated by the paucity of bandwidth, this far out of the system. Most people huddle close to the hub, for comfort and warmth and low latency: posthumans are gregarious. + +Beneath Sirhan's feet, the lily-pad city is extending itself, mumbling and churning in endless self-similar loops like a cubist blastoma growing in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Great ducts suck in methane and other atmospheric gases, apply energy, polymerize and diamondize, and crack off hydrogen to fill the lift cells high above. Beyond the sapphire dome of the city's gasbag, an azure star glares with the speckle of laser light; humanity's first - and so far, last - starship, braking into orbit on the last shredded remnant of its light sail. + +He's wondering maliciously how his mother will react to discovering her bankruptcy when the light above him flickers. Something gray and unpleasant splatters against the curve of nearly invisible wall in front of him, leaving a smear. He takes a step back and looks up angrily. "Fuck you!" he yells. Raucous cooing laughter follows him away from the boundary, feral pigeon voices mocking. "I mean it," he warns, flicking a gesture at the air above his head. Wings scatter in a burst of thunder as a slab of wind solidifies, thistledown-shaped nanomachines suspended on the breeze locking edge to edge to form an umbrella over his head. He walks away from the perimeter, fuming, leaving the pigeons to look for another victim. + +Annoyed, Sirhan finds a grassy knoll a couple of hundred meters from the rim and around the curve of the lily-pad from the museum buildings. It's far enough from other humans that he can sit undisturbed with his thoughts, far enough out to see over the edge without being toilet-bombed by flocking flying rats. (The flying city, despite being the product of an advanced technology almost unimaginable two decades before, is full of bugs - software complexity and scaling laws ensured that the preceding decades of change acted as a kind of cosmological inflationary period for design glitches, and an infestation of passenger pigeons is by no means the most inexplicable problem this biosphere harbors.) + +In an attempt to shut the more unwelcome manifestations of cybernature out, he sits under the shade of an apple tree and marshals his worlds around him. "When is my grandmother arriving?" he asks one of them, speaking into an antique telephone in the world of servants, where everything is obedient and knows its place. The city humors him, for its own reasons. + +"She is still containerized, but aerobraking is nearly over. Her body will be arriving down-well in less than two megaseconds." The city's avatar in this machinima is a discreet Victorian butler, stony-faced and respectful. Sirhan eschews intrusive memory interfaces; for an eighteen-year-old, he's conservative to the point of affectation, favoring voice commands and anthropomorphic agents over the invisible splicing of virtual neural nets. + +"You're certain she's transferred successfully?" Sirhan asks anxiously. He heard a lot about his grandmama when he was young, very little of it complimentary. Nevertheless, the old bat must be a lot more flexible than his mother ever gave her credit for, to be subjecting herself to this kind of treatment for the first time at her current age. + +"I'm as certain as I can be, young master, for anyone who insists on sticking to their original phenotype without benefit of off-line backup or medical implants. I regret that omniscience is not within my remit. Would you like me to make further specific inquiries?" + +"No." Sirhan peers up at the bright flare of laser light, visible even through the soap-bubble membrane that holds in the breathable gas mix, and the trillions of liters of hot hydrogen in the canopy above it. "As long as you're sure she'll arrive before the ship?" Tuning his eyes to ultraviolet, he watches the emission spikes, sees the slow strobing of the low-bandwidth AM modulation that's all the starship can manage by way of downlink communication until it comes within range of the system manifold. It's sending the same tiresomely repetitive question about why it's being redirected to Saturn that it's been putting out for the past week, querying the refusal to supply terawatts of propulsion energy on credit. + +"Unless there's a spike in their power beam, you can be certain of that," City replies reassuringly. "And you can be certain also that your grandmother will revive comfortably." + +"One may hope so." To undertake the interplanetary voyage in corporeal person, at her age, without any upgrades or augmentation, must take courage, he decides. "When she wakes up, if I'm not around, ask her for an interview slot on my behalf. For the archives, of course." + +"It will be my pleasure." City bobs his head politely. + +"That will be all," Sirhan says dismissively, and the window into servantspace closes. Then he looks back up at the pinprick of glaring blue laser light near the zenith. /{Tough luck, Mom}/, he subvocalizes for his journal cache. Most of his attention is forked at present, focused on the rich historical windfall from the depths of the singularity that is coming his way, in the form of the thirty-year-old starwisp's Cartesian theatre. But he can still spare some schadenfreude for the family fortunes. /{All your assets belong to me, now. He smiles, inwardly. I'll just have to make sure they're put to a sensible use this time}/. + +* * * + +"I don't see why they're diverting us toward Saturn. It's not as if they can possibly have dismantled Jupiter already, is it?" asks Pierre, rolling the chilled beer bottle thoughtfully between fingers and thumb. + +"Why not you ask Amber?" replies the velociraptor squatting beside the log table. (Boris's Ukrainian accent is unimpeded by the dromaeosaurid's larynx; in point of fact, it's an affectation, one he could easily fix by sideloading an English pronunciation patch if he wanted to.) + +"Well." Pierre shakes his head. "She's spending all her time with that Slug, no multiplicity access, privacy ackles locked right down. I could get jealous." His voice doesn't suggest any deep concern. + +"What's to get jealous about? Just ask to fork instance to talk to you, make love, show boyfriend good time, whatever." + +"Hah!" Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the bottle into his mouth. He throws it away in the direction of a clump of cycads, then snaps his fingers; another one appears in its place. + +"Are two megaseconds out from Saturn in any case," Boris points out, then pauses to sharpen his inch-long incisors on one end of the table. Fangs crunch through timber like wet cardboard. "Grrrrn. Am seeing most /{peculiar}/ emission spectra from inner solar system. Foggy flying down bottom of gravity well. Am wondering, does ensmartening of dumb matter extend past Jovian orbit now?" + +"Hmm." Pierre takes a swig from the bottle and puts it down. "That might explain the diversion. But why haven't they powered up the lasers on the Ring for us? You missed that, too." For reasons unknown, the huge battery of launch lasers had shut down, some millions of seconds after the crew of the Field Circus had entered the router, leaving it adrift in the cold darkness. + +"Don't know why are not talking." Boris shrugged. "At least are still alive there, as can tell from the 'set course for Saturn, following thus-and-such orbital elements' bit. Someone is paying attention. Am telling you from beginning, though, turning entire solar system into computronium is real bad idea, long-term. Who knows how far has gone already?" + +"Hmm, again." Pierre draws a circle in the air. "Aineko," he calls, "are you listening?" + +"Don't bug me." A faint green smile appears in the circle, just the suggestion of fangs and needle-sharp whiskers. "I had an idea I was sleeping furiously." + +Boris rolls one turreted eye and drools on the tabletop. "Munch munch," he growls, allowing his saurian body-brain to put in a word. + +"What do you need to sleep for? This is a fucking sim, in case you hadn't noticed." + +"I /{enjoy}/ sleeping," replies the cat, irritably lashing its just-now-becoming-visible tail. "What do you want? Fleas?" + +"No thanks," Pierre says hastily. Last time he called Aineko's bluff the cat had filled three entire pocket universes with scurrying gray mice. One of the disadvantages of flying aboard a starship the size of a baked bean can full of smart matter was the risk that some of the passengers could get rather too creative with the reality control system. This Cretaceous kaffee klatsch was just Boris's entertainment partition; compared to some of the other simulation spaces aboard the *{Field Circus}*, it was downright conservative. "Look, do you have any updates on what's going on down-well? We're only twenty objective days out from orbital insertion, and there's so little to see -" + +"They're not sending us power." Aineko materializes fully now, a large orange-and-white cat with a swirl of brown fur in the shape on an @-symbol covering her ribs. For whatever reason, she plants herself on the table tauntingly close to Boris's velociraptor body's nose. "No propulsion laser means insufficient bandwidth. They're talking in Latin-1 text at 1200 baud, if you care to know." (Which is an insult, given the ship's multi-avabit storage capacity - one avabit is Avogadro's number of bits; about 1023 bytes, several billion times the size of the Internet in 2001 - and outrageous communications bandwidth.) "Amber says, come and see her now. Audience chamber. Informal, of course. I think she wants to discuss it." + +"Informal? Am all right without change bodies?" + +The cat sniffs. "/{I'm}/ wearing a real fur coat," it declares haughtily, "but no knickers." Then blinks out a fraction of a second ahead of the snicker- *{snack}* of Bandersnatch-like jaws. + +% watch snicker-*{snack}* error, watch http:// sequence if to fix + +"Come on," says Pierre, standing up. "Time to see what Her Majesty wants with us today." + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming visible on a cosmological scale. + +_1 There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone around old Earth. Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization can fix them - gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball of wool the size of a young red giant. + +_1 Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. Now the brightly burning beacon of sapience isn't held by humans anymore - their cross-infectious enthusiasms have spread to a myriad of other hosts, several types of which are qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were about a thousand nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly between posthumans on one side, naturally self-organizing AIs in the middle, and mammalian nonhumans on the other. The common mammal neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in most species that can carry, feed and cool a half kilogram of gray matter, and the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged doctoral theses are now demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead; the panopticon-logged Net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to imprint their identities on the information age, and the ambitious theological engineering schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of Latter-day Saints (who want to emulate all possible human beings in real time, so that they can have the opportunity to be saved). + +_1 The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains recognizably human is open to question. The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of bits per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets (apart from Earth, preserved for now like a picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park) is converted into computronium. And it's not just the inner system. The same forces are at work on Jupiter's moons, and those of Saturn, although it'll take thousands of years rather than mere decades to dismantle the gas giants themselves. Even the entire solar energy budget isn't enough to pump Jupiter's enormous mass to orbital velocity in less than centuries. The fast-burning primitive thinkers descended from the African plains apes may have vanished completely or transcended their fleshy architecture before the solar Matrioshka brain is finished. + +_1 It won't be long now ... + +* * * + +Meanwhile, there's a party brewing down in Saturn's well. + +Sirhan's lily-pad city floats inside a gigantic and nearly-invisible sphere in Saturn's upper atmosphere; a balloon kilometers across with a shell of fullerene-reinforced diamond below and a hot hydrogen gas bag above. It's one of several hundred multimegaton soap bubbles floating in the sea of turbulent hydrogen and helium that is the upper atmosphere of Saturn, seeded there by the Society for Creative Terraforming, subcontractors for the 2074 Worlds' Fair. + +The cities are elegant, grown from a conceptual seed a few megawords long. Their replication rate is slow (it takes months to build a bubble), but in only a couple of decades, exponential growth will have paved the stratosphere with human-friendly terrain. Of course, the growth rate will slow toward the end, as it takes longer to fractionate the metal isotopes out of the gas giant's turbid depths, but before that happens, the first fruits of the robot factories on Ganymede will be pouring hydrocarbons down into the mix. Eventually Saturn - cloud-top gravity a human-friendly 11 meters per second squared - will have a planet wide biosphere with nearly a hundred times the surface area of Earth. And a bloody good thing indeed this will be, for otherwise, Saturn is no use to anyone except as a fusion fuel bunker for the deep future when the sun's burned down. + +This particular lily-pad is carpeted in grass, the hub of the disk rising in a gentle hill surmounted by the glowering concrete hump of the Boston Museum of Science. It looks curiously naked, shorn of its backdrop of highways and the bridges of the Charles River - but even the generous kiloton dumb matter load-outs of the skyhooks that lifted it into orbit wouldn't have stretched to bringing its framing context along with it. Probably someone will knock up a cheap diorama backdrop out of utility fog, Sirhan thinks, but for now, the museum stands proud and isolated, a solitary redoubt of classical learning in exile from the fast-thinking core of the solar system. + +"Waste of money," grumbles the woman in black. "Whose stupid idea was this, anyway?" She jabs the diamond ferrule of her cane at the museum. + +"It's a statement," Sirhan says absently. "You know the kind, we've got so many newtons to burn we can send our cultural embassies wherever we like. The Louvre is on its way to Pluto, did you hear that?" + +"Waste of energy." She lowers her cane reluctantly and leans on it. Pulls a face: "It's not /{right}/." + +"You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn't you?" Sirhan prods. "What was it like then?" + +"What was it ...? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for bombers," she says dismissively. "We knew it would be okay. If it hadn't been for those damn' meddlesome posthumanists -" Her wrinkled, unnaturally aged face scowls at him furiously from underneath hair that has faded to the color of rotten straw, but he senses a subtext of self-deprecating irony that he doesn't understand. "Like your grandfather, damn him. If I was young again I'd go and piss on his grave to show him what I think of what he did. If he /{has}/ a grave," she adds, almost fondly. + +*{Memo checkpoint: log family history}*, Sirhan tells one of his ghosts. As a dedicated historian, he records every experience routinely, both before it enters his narrative of consciousness - efferent signals are the cleanest - and also his own stream of selfhood, against some future paucity of memory. But his grandmother has been remarkably consistent over the decades in her refusal to adapt to the new modalities. + +"You're recording this, aren't you?" she sniffs. + +"I'm not recording it, Grandmama," he says gently, "I'm just preserving my memories for future generations." + +"Hah! We'll see," she says suspiciously. Then she surprises him with a bark of laughter, cut off abruptly: "No, /{you'll}/ see, darling. I won't be around to be disappointed." + +"Are you going to tell me about my grandfather?" asks Sirhan. + +"Why should I bother? I know you posthumans, you'll just go and ask his ghost yourself. Don't try to deny it! There are two sides to every story, child, and he's had more than his fair share of ears, the sleazebag. Leaving me to bring up your mother on my own, and nothing but a bunch of worthless intellectual property and a dozen lawsuits from the Mafiya to do it with. I don't know what I ever saw in him." Sirhan's voice-stress monitor detects a distinct hint of untruth in this assertion. "He's worthless trash, and don't you forget it. Lazy idiot couldn't even form just one start-up on his own: He had to give it all away, all the fruits of his genius." + +While she rambles on, occasionally punctuating her characterization with sharp jabs of the cane, Pamela leads Sirhan on a slow, wavering stroll that veers around one side of the museum, until they're standing next to a starkly engineered antique loading bay. "He should have tried /{real}/ communism instead," she harrumphs: "Put some steel into him, shake those starry-eyed visionary positive-sum daydreams loose. You knew where you were in the old times, and no mistake. Humans were real humans, work was real work, and corporations were just things that did as we told them. And then, when /{she}/ went to the bad, that was all his fault, too, you know." + +"She? You mean my, ah, mother?" Sirhan diverts his primary sensorium back to Pamela's vengeful muttering. There are aspects to this story that he isn't completely familiar with, angles he needs to sketch in so that he can satisfy himself that all is as it should be when the bailiffs go in to repossess Amber's mind. + +"He sent her our cat. Of all the mean-spirited, low, downright dishonest things he ever did, that was the worst part of it. That cat was /{mine}/, but he reprogrammed it to lead her astray. And it succeeded admirably. She was only twelve at the time, an impressionable age, I'm sure you'd agree. I was trying to raise her right. Children need moral absolutes, especially in a changing world, even if they don't like it much at the time. Self-discipline and stability, you can't function as an adult without them. I was afraid that, with all her upgrades, she'd never really get a handle on who she was, that she'd end up more machine than woman. But Manfred never really understood childhood, mostly on account of his never growing up. He always was inclined to meddle." + +"Tell me about the cat," Sirhan says quietly. One glance at the loading bay door tells him that it's been serviced recently. A thin patina of expended foglets have formed a snowy scab around its edges, flaking off like blue refractive candyfloss that leaves bright metal behind. "Didn't it go missing or something?" + +Pamela snorts. "When your mother ran away, it uploaded itself to her starwisp and deleted its body. It was the only one of them that had the guts - or maybe it was afraid I'd have it subpoenaed as a hostile witness. Or, and I can't rule this out, your grandfather gave it a suicide reflex. He was quite evil enough to do something like that, after he reprogrammed himself to think I was some kind of mortal enemy." + +"So when my mother died to avoid bankruptcy, the cat ... didn't stay behind? Not at all? How remarkable." Sirhan doesn't bother adding /{how suicidal}/. Any artificial entity that's willing to upload its neural state vector into a one-kilogram interstellar probe three-quarters of the way to Alpha Centauri without backup or some clear way of returning home has got to be more than a few methods short in the object factory. + +"It's a vengeful beast." Pamela pokes her stick at the ground sharply, mutters a command word, and lets go of it. She stands before Sirhan, craning her neck back to look up at him. "My, what a tall boy you are." + +"Person," he corrects, instinctively. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't presume." + +"Person, thing, boy, whatever - you're engendered, aren't you?" she asks, sharply, waiting until he nods reluctantly. "Never trust anyone who can't make up their mind whether to be a man or a woman," she says gloomily. "You can't rely on them." Sirhan, who has placed his reproductive system on hold until he needs it, bites his tongue. "That damn cat," his grandmother complains. "/{It}/ carried your grandfather's business plan to my daughter and spirited her away into the big black. /{It}/ poisoned her against me. /{It}/ encouraged her to join in that frenzy of speculative bubble-building that caused the market reboot that brought down the Ring Imperium. And now /{it}/ -" + +"Is it on the ship?" Sirhan asks, almost too eagerly. + +"It might be." She stares at him through narrowed eyes. "You want to interview it, too, huh?" + +Sirhan doesn't bother denying it. "I'm a historian, Grandmama. And that probe has been somewhere no other human sensorium has ever seen. It may be old news, and there may be old lawsuits waiting to feed on the occupants, but ..." He shrugs. "Business is business, and /{my}/ business lies in ruins." + +"Hah!" She stares at him for a moment, then nods, very slowly. She leans forward to rest both wrinkled hands atop her cane, joints like bags of shriveled walnuts: Her suit's endoskeleton creaks as it adjusts to accommodate her confidential posture. "You'll get yours, kid." The wrinkles twist into a frightening smile, sixty years of saved-up bitterness finally within spitting distance of a victim. "And I'll get what I want, too. Between us, your mother won't know what's hit her." + +* * * + +"Relax, between us your mother won't know what's hit her," says the cat, baring needle teeth at the Queen in the big chair - carved out of a single lump of computational diamond, her fingers clenched whitely on the sapphire-plated arms - her minions, lovers, friends, crew, shareholders, bloggers, and general factional auxiliaries spaced out around her. And the Slug. "It's just another lawsuit. You can deal with it." + +"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," Amber says, a trifle moodily. Although she's ruler of this embedded space, with total control over the reality model underlying it, she's allowed herself to age to a dignified twentysomething: Dressed casually in gray sweats, she doesn't look like the once-mighty ruler of a Jovian moon, or for that matter the renegade commander of a bankrupt interstellar expedition. "Okay, I think you'd better run that past me again. Unless anyone's got any suggestions?" + +"If you will excuse me?" asks Sadeq. "We have a shortage of insight here. I believe two laws were cited as absolute systemwide conventions - and how they convinced the ulama to go along with /{that}/ I would very much like to know - concerning the rights and responsibilities of the undead. Which, apparently, we are. Did they by any chance attach the code to their claim?" + +"Do bears shit in woods?" asks Boris, raptor-irascible, with an angry clatter of teeth. "Is full dependency graph and parse tree of criminal code crawling way up carrier's ass as we speak. Am drowning in lawyer gibberish! If you -" + +"Boris, can it!" Amber snaps. Tempers are high in the throne room. She didn't know what to expect when she arrived home from the expedition to the router, but bankruptcy proceedings weren't part of it. She doubts any of them expected anything like this. Especially not the bit about being declared liable for debts run up by a renegade splinter of herself, her own un-uploaded identity that had stayed home to face the music, aged in the flesh, married, gone bankrupt, died - /{incurred child support payments}/? "I don't hold you responsible for this," she added through gritted teeth, with a significant glance toward Sadeq. + +"This is truly a mess fit for the Prophet himself, peace be unto him, to serve judgment upon." Sadeq looks as shaken as she is by the implications the lawsuit raises. His gaze skitters around the room, looking anywhere but at Amber - and Pierre, her lanky toy-boy astrogator and bed warmer - as he laces his fingers. + +"Drop it. I said I /{don't}/ blame you." Amber forces a smile. "We're all tense from being locked in here with no bandwidth. Anyway, I smell Mother-dearest's hand underneath all this litigation. Sniff the glove. We'll sort a way out." + +"We could keep going." This from Ang, at the back of the room. Diffident and shy, she doesn't generally open her mouth without a good reason. "The *{Field Circus}* is in good condition, isn't it? We could divert back to the beam from the router, accelerate up to cruise speed, and look for somewhere to live. There must be a few suitable brown dwarfs within a hundred light-years ..." + +"We've lost too much sail mass," says Pierre. He's not meeting Amber's gaze either. There are lots of subtexts loose in this room, broken narratives from stories of misguided affections. Amber pretends not to notice his embarrassment. "We ejected half our original launch sail to provide the braking mirror at Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, and almost eight megaseconds ago, we halved our area again to give us a final deceleration beam for Saturn orbit. If we did it again, we wouldn't have enough area left to repeat the trick and still decelerate at our final target." Laser-boosted light sails do it with mirrors; after boost, they can drop half the sail and use it to reverse the launch beam and direct it back at the ship, to provide deceleration. But you can only do it a few times before you run out of sail. "There's nowhere to run." + +"Nowhere to -" Amber stares at him through narrowed eyes. "Sometimes I really wonder about you, you know?" + +"I know you do." And Pierre really /{does}/ know, because he carries a little homunculoid around in his society of mind, a model of Amber far more accurate and detailed than any pre-upload human could possibly have managed to construct of a lover. (For her part, Amber keeps a little Pierre doll tucked away inside the creepy cobwebs of her head, part of an exchange of insights they took part in years ago. But she doesn't try to fit inside his head too often anymore - it's not good to be able to second-guess your lover every time.) "I also know that you're going to rush in and grab the bull by the, ah, no. Wrong metaphor. This is your mother we are discussing?" + +"My /{mother}/." Amber nods thoughtfully. "Where's Donna?" + +"I don't -" + +There's a throaty roar from the back, and Boris lurches forward with something in his mouth, an angry Bolex that flails his snout with its tripod legs. "Hiding in corners again?" Amber says disdainfully. + +"I am a camera!" protests the camera, aggrieved and self-conscious as it picks itself up off the floor. "I am -" + +Pierre leans close, sticks his face up against the fish-eye lens: "You're fucking well going to be a human being just this once. /{Merde}/!" + +The camera is replaced by a very annoyed blond woman wearing a safari suit and more light meters, lenses, camera bags, and microphones than a CNN outside broadcast unit. "Go fuck yourself!" + +"I don't like being spied on," Amber says sharply. "Especially as you weren't invited to this meeting. Right?" + +"I'm the archivist." Donna looks away, stubbornly refusing to admit anything. "/{You}/ said I should -" + +"Yes, /{well}/." Amber is embarrassed. But it's a bad idea to embarrass the Queen in her audience chamber. "You heard what we were discussing. What do /{you}/ know about my mother's state of mind?" + +"Absolutely nothing," Donna says promptly. She's clearly in a sulk and prepared to do no more than the minimum to help resolve the situation. "I only met her once. You look like her when you are angry, do you know that?" + +"I -" For once, Amber's speechless. + +"I'll schedule you for facial surgery," offers the cat. /{Sotto voce}/: "It's the only way to be sure." + +Normally, accusing Amber of any resemblance to her mother, however slight and passing, would be enough to trigger a reality quake within the upload environment that passes for the bridge of the *{Field Circus}*. It's a sign of how disturbed Amber is by the lawsuit that she lets the cat's impertinence slide. "What /{is}/ the lawsuit, anyway?" Donna asks, nosy as ever and twice as annoying: "I did not that bit see." + +"It's horrible," Amber says vehemently. + +"Truly evil," echoes Pierre. + +"Fascinating but wrong," Sadeq muses thoughtfully. + +"But it's still horrible!" + +"Yes, but what is it?" Donna the all-seeing-eye archivist and camera manqué asks. + +"It's a demand for settlement." Amber takes a deep breath. "Dammit, you might as well tell everyone - it won't stay secret for long." She sighs. "After we left, it seems my other half - my original incarnation, that is - got married. To Sadeq, here." She nods at the Iranian theologian, who looks just as bemused as she did the first time she heard this part of the story. "And they had a child. Then the Ring Imperium went bankrupt. The child is demanding maintenance payments from me, backdated nearly twenty years, on the grounds that the undead are jointly and severally liable for debts run up by their incarnations. It's a legal precedent established to prevent people from committing suicide temporarily as a way to avoid bankruptcy. Worse, the lien on my assets is measured in subjective time from a point at the Ring Imperium about nineteen months after our launch time - we've been in relativistic flight, so while my other half would be out from under it by now if she'd survived, I'm still subject to the payment order. But compound interest applies back home - /{that}/ is to stop people trying to use the twin's paradox as a way to escape liability. So, by being away for about twenty-eight years of wall-clock time, I've run up a debt I didn't know about to enormous levels. + +"This man, this son I've never met, theoretically owns the *{Field Circus}* several times over. And my accounts are wiped out - I don't even have enough money to download us into fleshbodies. Unless one of you guys has got a secret stash that survived the market crash after we left, we're all in deep trouble." + +* * * + +A mahogany dining table eight meters long graces the flagstoned floor of the huge museum gallery, beneath the skeleton of an enormous Argentinosaurus and a suspended antique Mercury capsule more than a century old. The dining table is illuminated by candlelight, silver cutlery and fine porcelain plates setting out two places at opposite ends. Sirhan sits in a high-backed chair beneath the shadow of a triceratops's rib cage. Opposite him, Pamela has dressed for dinner in the fashion of her youth. She raises her wineglass toward him. "Tell me about your childhood, why don't you?" she asks. High above them, Saturn's rings shimmer through the skylights, like a luminous paint splash thrown across the midnight sky. + +Sirhan has misgivings about opening up to her, but consoles himself with the fact that she's clearly in no position to use anything he tells her against him. "Which childhood would you like to know about?" he asks. + +"What do you mean, which?" Her face creases up in a frown of perplexity. + +"I had several. Mother kept hitting the reset switch, hoping I'd turn out better." It's his turn to frown. + +"She did, did she," breathes Pamela, clearly noting it down to hold as ammunition against her errant daughter. "Why do you think she did that?" + +"It was the only way she knew to raise a child," Sirhan says defensively. "She didn't have any siblings. And, perhaps, she was reacting against her own character flaws." /{When I have children there will be more than one}/, he tells himself smugly: when, that is, he has adequate means to find himself a bride, and adequate emotional maturity to activate his organs of procreation. A creature of extreme caution, Sirhan is not planning to repeat the errors of his ancestors on the maternal side. + +Pamela flinches: "it's not my fault," she says quietly. "Her father had quite a bit to do with that. But what - what different childhoods did you have?" + +"Oh, a fair number. There was the default option, with Mother and Father arguing constantly - she refused to take the veil and he was too stiff-necked to admit he was little more than a kept man, and between them, they were like two neutron stars locked in an unstable death spiral of gravity. Then there were my other lives, forked and reintegrated, running in parallel. I was a young goatherd in the days of the middle kingdom in Egypt, I remember that; and I was an all-American kid growing up in Iowa in the 1950s, and another me got to live through the return of the hidden imam - at least, his parents thought it was the hidden imam - and -" Sirhan shrugs. "Perhaps that's where I acquired my taste for history." + +"Did your parents ever consider making you a little girl?" asks his grandmother. + +"Mother suggested it a couple of times, but Father forbade it." /{Or rather, decided it was unlawful}/, he recalls. "I had a very conservative upbringing in some ways." + +"I wouldn't say that. When I was a little girl, that was all there was; none of these questions of self-selected identity. There was no escape, merely escapism. Didn't you ever have a problem knowing who you were?" + +The starters arrive, diced melon on a silver salver. Sirhan waits patiently for his grandmama to chivvy the table into serving her. "The more people you are, the more you know who /{you}/ are," says Sirhan. "You learn what it's like to be other people. Father thought that perhaps it isn't good for a man to know too much about what it's like to be a woman." /{And Grandfather disagreed, but you already know that}/, he adds for his own stream of consciousness. + +"I couldn't agree more." Pamela smiles at him, an expression that might be that of a patronizing elder aunt if it wasn't for the alarming sharkishness of her expression - or is it playfulness? Sirhan covers his confusion by spooning chunks of melon into his mouth, forking temporary ghosts to peruse dusty etiquette manuals and warn him if he's about to commit some faux pas. "So, how did you enjoy your childhoods?" + +"Enjoy isn't a word I would use," he replies as evenly as he can, laying down his spoon so he doesn't spill anything. /{As if childhood is something that ever ends}/, he thinks bitterly. Sirhan is considerably less than a gigasecond old and confidently expects to exist for at least a terasecond - if not in exactly this molecular configuration, then at least in some reasonably stable physical incarnation. And he has every intention of staying young for that entire vast span - even into the endless petaseconds that might follow, although by then, megayears hence, he speculates that issues of neoteny will no longer interest him. "It's not over yet. How about you? Are you enjoying your old age, Grandmama?" + +Pamela almost flinches, but keeps iron control of her expression. The flush of blood in the capillaries of her cheeks, visible to Sirhan through the tiny infrared eyes he keeps afloat in the air above the table, gives her away. "I made some mistakes in my youth, but I'm enjoying it fine nowadays," she says lightly. + +"It's your revenge, isn't it?" Sirhan asks, smiling and nodding as the table removes the entrees. + +"Why, you little -" She stares at him rather than continuing. A very bleak stare it is, too. "What would you know about revenge?" she asks. + +"I'm the family historian." Sirhan smiles humorlessly. "I lived from two to seventeen years several hundred times over before my eighteenth birthday. It was that reset switch, you know. I don't think Mother realized my primary stream of consciousness was journaling everything." + +"That's monstrous." Pamela picks up her wineglass and takes a sip to cover her confusion. Sirhan has no such retreat - grape juice in a tumbler, unfermented, wets his tongue. "I'd /{never}/ do something like that to any child of mine." + +"So why won't you tell me about your childhood?" asks her grandson. "For the family history, of course." + +"I'll -" She puts her glass down. "You intend to write one," she states. + +"I'm thinking about it." Sirhan sits up. "An old-fashioned book covering three generations, living through interesting times," he suggests. "A work of postmodern history, the incoherent school at that - how do you document people who fork their identities at random, spend years dead before reappearing on the stage, and have arguments with their own relativistically preserved other copy? I could trace the history further, of course - if you tell me about /{your}/ parents, although I am certain they aren't around to answer questions directly - but we reach the boring dumb matter slope back to the primeval soup surprisingly fast if we go there, don't we? So I thought that perhaps as a narrative hook I'd make the offstage viewpoint that of the family's robot cat. (Except the bloody thing's gone missing, hasn't it?) Anyway, with so much of human history occupying the untapped future, we historians have our work cut out recording the cursor of the present as it logs events. So I might as well start at home." + +"You're set on immortalism." Pamela studies his face. + +"Yes," he says idly. "Frankly, I can understand your wanting to grow old out of a desire for revenge, but pardon me for saying this, I have difficulty grasping your willingness to follow through with the procedure! Isn't it awfully painful?" + +"Growing old is /{natural}/," growls the old woman. "When you've lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It's a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever. And if there's one thing I believe in, it's public service. Duty: the obligation to make way for the new. Duty and control." + +Sirhan absorbs all this, nodding slowly to himself as the table serves up the main course - honey-glazed roast long pork with sautéed potatoes a la gratin and carrots Debussy - when there's a loud *{bump}* from overhead. + +"What's that?" Pamela asks querulously. + +"One moment." Sirhan's vision splits into a hazy kaleidoscope view of the museum hall as he forks ghosts to monitor each of the ubiquitous cameras. He frowns; something is moving on the balcony, between the Mercury capsule and a display of antique random-dot stereoisograms. "Oh dear. Something seems to be loose in the museum." + +"Loose? What do you mean, loose?" An inhuman shriek splits the air above the table, followed by a crash from upstairs. Pamela stands up unsteadily, wiping her lips with her napkin. "Is it safe?" + +"No, it isn't safe." Sirhan fumes. "It's disturbing my meal!" He looks up. A flash of orange fur shows over the balcony, then the Mercury capsule wobbles violently on the end of its guy wires. Two arms and a bundle of rubbery /{something}/ covered in umber hair lurches out from the handrail and casually grabs hold of the priceless historical relic, then clambers inside and squats on top of the dummy wearing Al Sheperd's age-cracked space suit. "It's an /{ape}/! City, I say, City! What's a monkey doing loose in my dinner party?" + +"I am most deeply sorry, sir, but I don't know. Would sir care to identify the monkey in question?" replies City, which for reasons of privacy, has manifested itself as a bodiless voice. + +There's a note of humor in City's tone that Sirhan takes deep exception to. "What do you mean? Can't you see it?" he demands, focusing on the errant primate, which is holed up in the Mercury capsule dangling from the ceiling, smacking its lips, rolling its eyes, and fingering the gasket around the capsule's open hatch. It hoots quietly to itself, then leans out of the open door and moons over the table, baring its buttocks. "Get back!" Sirhan calls to his grandmother, then he gestures at the air above the table, intending to tell the utility fog to congeal. Too late. The ape farts thunderously, then lets rip a stream of excrement across the dining table. Pamela's face is a picture of wrinkled disgust as she holds her napkin in front of her nose. "Dammit, solidify, will you!" Sirhan curses, but the ubiquitous misty pollen-grain-sized robots refuse to respond. + +"What's your problem? Invisible monkeys?" asks City. + +"Invisible -" he stops. + +"Can't you see what it did?" Pamela demands, backing him up. "It just defecated all over the main course!" + +"I see nothing," City says uncertainly. + +"Here, let me help you." Sirhan lends it one of his eyes, rolls it to focus on the ape, which is now reaching lazy arms around the hatch and patting down the roof of the capsule, as if hunting for the wires' attachment points. + +"Oh dear," says City, "I've been hacked. That's not supposed to be possible." + +"Well it fucking /{is}/," hisses Pamela. + +"Hacked?" Sirhan stops trying to tell the air what to do and focuses on his clothing instead. Fabric reweaves itself instantly, mapping itself into an armored airtight suit that raises a bubble visor from behind his neck and flips itself shut across his face. "City please supply my grandmama with an environment suit /{now}/. Make it completely autonomous." + +The air around Pamela begins to congeal in a blossom of crystalline security, as a sphere like a giant hamster ball precipitates out around her. "If you've been hacked, the first question is, who did it," Sirhan states. "The second is 'why,' and the third is 'how.'" He edgily runs a self-test, but there's no sign of inconsistencies in his own identity matrix, and he has hot shadows sleeping lightly at scattered nodes across as distance of half a dozen light-hours. Unlike pre-posthuman Pamela, he's effectively immune to murder-simple. "If this is just a prank -" + +Seconds have passed since the orang-utan got loose in the museum, and subsequent seconds have passed since City realized its bitter circumstance. Seconds are long enough for huge waves of countermeasures to sweep the surface of the lily-pad habitat. Invisibly small utility foglets are expanding and polymerizing into defenses throughout the air, trapping the thousands of itinerant passenger pigeons in midflight, and locking down every building and every person who walks the paths outside. City is self-testing its trusted computing base, starting with the most primitive secured kernel and working outward. Meanwhile Sirhan, with blood in his eye, heads for the staircase, with the vague goal of physically attacking the intruder. Pamela retreats at a fast roll, tumbling toward the safety of the mezzanine floor and a garden of fossils. "Who do you think you are, barging in and shitting on my supper?" Sirhan yells as he bounds up the stairs. "I want an explanation! Right now!" + +The orang-utan finds the nearest cable and gives it a yank, setting the one-ton capsule swinging. It bares its teeth at Sirhan in a grin. "Remember me?" it asks, in a sibilant French accent. + +"Remember -" Sirhan stops dead. "Tante Annette? /{What}/ are you doing in that orangutan?" + +"Having minor autonomic control problems." The ape grimaces wider, then bends one arm sinuously and scratches at its armpit. "I am sorry, I installed myself in the wrong order. I was only meaning to say hello and pass on a message." + +"What message?" Sirhan demands. "You've upset my grandmama, and if she finds out you're here -" + +"She won't; I'll be gone in a minute." The ape - Annette - sits up. "Your grandfather salutes you and says he will be visiting shortly. In the person, that is. He is very keen to meet your mother and her passengers. That is all. Have you a message for him?" + +"Isn't he dead?" Sirhan asks, dazed. + +"No more than I am. And I'm overdue. Good day!" The ape swings hand over hand out of the capsule, then lets go and plummets ten meters to the hard stone floor below. Its skull makes a noise like a hard-boiled egg impacting concrete. + +"Oh dear," Sirhan breathes heavily. "City!" + +"Yes, oh master?" + +"Remove that body," he says, pointing over the balcony. "I'll trouble you not to disturb my grandmother with any details. In particular, don't tell her it was Annette. The news may upset her." /{The perils of having a long-lived posthuman family}/, he thinks; /{too many mad}/ aunts in the space capsule. "If you can find a way to stop Auntie 'Nette from growing any more apes, that might be a good idea." A thought strikes him. "By the way, do you know when my grandfather is due to arrive?" + +"Your grandfather?" asks City: "Isn't he dead?" + +Sirhan looks over the balcony, at the blood-seeping corpse of the intruder. "Not according to his second wife's latest incarnation." + +* * * + +Funding the family reunion isn't going to be a problem, as Amber discovers when she receives an offer of reincarnation good for all the passengers and crew of the *{Field Circus}*. + +She isn't sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it's some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held against her return. She's duly grateful - even fervently so - for the details of her own impecunious position grow more depressing the more she learns about them. Her sole asset is the *{Field Circus}*, a thirty-years-obsolete starwisp massing less than twenty kilograms including what's left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of uploaded passengers and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that has suddenly chugged into life, she'd be stranded in the realm of ever-circling leptons. But now the fund has sent her its offer of incarnation, she's got a dilemma. Because one of the *{Field Circus's}* passengers has never actually had a meatspace body ... + +Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They're a ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is about two meters long and has a lacy white exoskeleton of curves and arcs that don't repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling. Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground underfoot is dry but feels swampy. + +Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years, existing only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from its creditors by masquerading as a life-form. But there's a problem with incarnating itself down in Sirhan's habitat - the ecosystem it evolved for is a cool Venusiform, thirty atmospheres of saturated steam baked under a sky the color of hot lead streaked with yellow sulphuric acid clouds. The ground is mushy because it's melting, not because it's damp. + +"You're going to have to pick another somatotype," Amber explains, laboriously rolling her interface around the red-hot coral reef like a giant soap bubble. The environmental interface is transparent and infinitely thin, a discontinuity in the physics model of the simulation space, mapping signals between the human-friendly environment on one side and the crushing, roasting hell on the other. "This one is simply not compatible with any of the supported environments where we're going." + +"I am not understanding. Surely I can integrate with the available worlds of our destination?" + +"Uh, things don't work that way outside cyberspace." Suddenly Amber is at a bit of a loss. "The physics model /{could}/ be supported, but the energy input to do so would be prohibitive, and you would not be able to interact as easily with other physics models as we can now." She forks a ghost, demonstrates a transient other-Amber in a refrigerated tank rolling across the Slug's backyard, crushing coral and hissing and clanking noisily. "You'd be like this." + +"Your reality is badly constructed, then," the Slug points out. + +"It's not constructed at all, it just evolved, randomly." Amber shrugs. "We can't exercise the same level of control over the underlying embedded context that we can over this one. I can't simply magic you an interface that will let you bathe in steam at three hundred degrees." + +"Why not?" asks the Slug. Translation wetware adds a nasty, sharp rising whine to the question, turning it into a demand. + +"It's a privilege violation," Amber tries to explain. "The reality we're about to enter is, uh, provably consistent. It has to be, because it's consistent and stable, and if we could create new local domains with different rules, they might propagate uncontrollably. It's not a good idea, believe me. Do you want to come with us or not?" + +"I have no alternative," the Slug says, slightly sulkily. "But do you have a body I can use?" + +"I think -" Amber stops, suddenly. She snaps her fingers. "Hey, cat!" + +A Cheshire grin ripples into view, masked into the domain wall between the two embedded realities. "Hey, human." + +"Whoa!" Amber takes a backward step from the apparition. "Our friend here's got a problem, no suitable downloadable body. Us meat puppets are all too closely tied to our neural ultrastructure, but you've got a shitload of programmable gate arrays. Can we borrow some?" + +"You can do better than that." Aineko yawns, gathering substance by the moment. The Slug is rearing up and backing away like an alarmed sausage: Whatever it perceives in the membrane seems to frighten it. "I've been designing myself a new body. I figured it was time to change my style for a while. Your corporate scam artist here can borrow my old template until something better comes up. How's that?" + +"Did you hear that?" Amber asks the Slug. "Aineko is kindly offering to donate her body to you. Will that do?" Without waiting, she winks at her cat and taps her heels together, fading out with a whisper and a smile: "See you on the other side ..." + +* * * + +It takes several minutes for the *{Field Circus}*'s antique transceiver to download the dozens of avabits occupied by the frozen state vectors of each of the people running in its simulation engines. Tucked away with most of them is a resource bundle consisting of their entire sequenced genome, a bunch of phenotypic and proteome hint markers, and a wish list of upgrades. Between the gene maps and the hints, there's enough data to extrapolate a meat machine. So the festival city's body shop goes to work turning out hacked stem cells and fabbing up incubators. + +It doesn't take very long to reincarnate a starshipful of relativity-lagged humans these days. First, City carves out skeletons for them (politely ignoring a crudely phrased request to cease and desist from Pamela, on the grounds that she has no power of attorney), then squirts osteoclasts into the spongy ersatz bone. They look like ordinary human stem cells at a distance, but instead of nuclei they have primitive pinpricks of computronium, blobs of smart matter so small they're as dumb as an ancient Pentium, reading a control tape that is nevertheless better structured than anything Mother Nature evolved. These heavily optimized fake stem cells - biological robots in all but name - spawn like cancer, ejecting short-lived anucleated secondary cells. Then City infuses each mess of quasi-cancerous tissue with a metric shitload of carrier capsids, which deliver the /{real}/ cellular control mechanisms to their target bodies. Within a megasecond, the almost random churning of the construction 'bots gives way to a more controlled process as nanoscale CPUs are replaced by ordinary nuclei and eject themselves from their host cells, bailing out via the half-formed renal system - except for those in the central nervous system, which have a final job to do. Eleven days after the invitation, the first passengers are being edited into the pattern of synaptic junctions inside the newly minted skulls. + +(This whole process is tediously slow and laughably obsolescent technology by the standards of the fast-moving core. Down there, they'd just set up a wake shield in orbit, chill it down to a fractional Kelvin, whack two coherent matter beams together, teleport some state information into place, and yank the suddenly materialized meatbody in through an airlock before it has time to asphyxiate. But then again, down in the hot space, they don't have much room for flesh anymore ...) + +Sirhan doesn't pay much attention to the pseudocancers fermenting and churning in the row of tanks that lines the Gallery of the Human Body in the Bush wing of the museum. Newly formed, slowly unskeletonizing corpses - like a time-lapse process of decay with a finger angrily twisting the dial into high-speed reverse - is both distasteful and aesthetically displeasing to watch. Nor do the bodies tell him anything about their occupants. This sort of stuff is just a necessary prequel to the main event, a formal reception and banquet to which he has devoted the full-time attention of four ghosts. + +He could, given a few less inhibitions, go Dumpster-diving in their mental archives, but that's one of the big taboos of the post-wetware age. (Spy agencies went meme-profiling and memory-mining in the third and fourth decades, gained a thought police rap sheet, and spawned a backlash of deviant mental architectures resilient to infowar intrusions. Now the nations that those spook institutions served no longer exist, their very landmasses being part of the orbiting nöosphere construction project that will ultimately turn the mass of the entire solar system into a gigantic Matrioshka brain. And Sirhan is left with an uneasy loyalty to the one great new taboo to be invented since the end of the twentieth century - freedom of thought.) + +So, to indulge his curiosity, he spends most of his waking fleshbody hours with Pamela, asking her questions from time to time and mapping the splenetic overspill of her memeome into his burgeoning family knowledge base. + +"I wasn't always this bitter and cynical," Pamela explains, waving her cane in the vague direction of the cloudscape beyond the edge of the world and fixing Sirhan with a beady stare. (He's brought her out here hoping that it will trigger another cascade of memories, sunsets on honeymoon island resorts and the like, but all that seems to be coming up is bile.) "It was the successive betrayals. Manfred was the first, and the worst in some ways, but that little bitch Amber hurt me more, if anything. If you ever have children, be careful to hold something back for yourself; because if you don't, when they throw it all in your face, you'll feel like dying. And when they're gone, you've got no way of patching things up." + +"Is dying inevitable?" asks Sirhan, knowing damn well that it isn't, but more than happy to give her an excuse to pick at her scabbed-over love wound: He more than half suspects she's still in love with Manfred. This is /{great}/ family history, and he's having the time of his flinty-hearted life leading her up to the threshold of the reunion he's hosting. + +"Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes," his grandmother replies bleakly. "Humans don't live in a vacuum; we're part of a larger pattern of life." She stares out across the troposphere of Saturn, where a thin rime of blown methane snow catches the distant sunrise in a ruby-tinted fog. "The old gives way to the new," She sighs, and tugs at her cuffs. (Ever since the incident with the gate crashing ape, she's taken to wearing an antique formal pressure suit, all clinging black spidersilk woven with flexible pipes and silvery smart sensor nets.) "There's a time to get out of the way of the new, and I think I passed it sometime ago." + +"Um," says Sirhan, who is somewhat surprised by this new angle in her lengthy, self-justifying confession: "but what if you're just saying this because you /{feel}/ old? If it's just a physiological malfunction, we could fix it and you'd -" + +"/{No}/! I've got a feeling that life prolongation is morally wrong, Sirhan. I'm not passing judgment on you, just stating that I think it's wrong for me. It's immoral because it blocks up the natural order, keeps us old cobweb strands hanging around and getting in you young things' way. And then there are the theological questions. If you try to live forever, you never get to meet your maker." + +"Your maker? Are you a theist, then?" + +"I - think so." Pamela is silent for a minute. "Although there are so many different approaches to the subject that it's hard to know which version to believe. For a long time, I was secretly afraid your grandfather might actually have had the answers. That I might have been wrong all along. But now -" She leans on her cane. "When he announced that he was uploading, I figured out that all he really had was a life-hating antihuman ideology he'd mistaken for a religion. The rapture of the nerds and the heaven of the AIs. Sorry, no thanks; I don't buy it." + +"Oh." Sirhan squints out at the cloudscape. For a moment, he thinks he can see something in the distant mist, an indeterminate distance away - it's hard to distinguish centimeters from megameters, with no scale indicator and a horizon a continental distance away - but he's not sure what it is. Maybe another city, mollusk-curved and sprouting antennae, a strange tail of fabricator nodes wavering below and beneath it. Then a drift of cloud hides it for a moment, and, when it clears the object is gone. "What's left, then? If you don't really believe in some kind of benign creator, dying must be frightening. Especially as you're doing it so slowly." + +Pamela smiles skeletally, a particularly humorless expression. "It's perfectly natural, darling! You don't need to believe in God to believe in embedded realities. We use them every day, as mind tools. Apply anthropic reasoning and isn't it clear that our entire universe is probably a simulation? We're living in the early epoch of the universe. Probably this" - she prods at the spun-diamond inner wall of the bubble that holds in the precarious terrestrial atmosphere, holding out the howling cryogenic hydrogen and methane gales of Saturn - "is but a simulation in some ancient history engine's panopticon, rerunning the sum of all possible origins of sentience, a billion trillion megayears down the line. Death will be like waking up as someone bigger, that's all." Her grin slides away. "And if not, I'll just be a silly old fool who deserves the oblivion she yearns for." + +"Oh, but -" Sirhan stops, his skin crawling. /{She may be mad}/, he realizes abruptly. /{Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of}/ her own role in /{reality.}/ "I'd hoped for a reconciliation," he says quietly. "Your extended family has lived through some extraordinary times. Why spoil it with acrimony?" + +"Why spoil it?" She looks at him pityingly: "It was spoiled to begin with, dear, too much selfless sacrifice and too little skepticism. If Manfred hadn't wanted so badly not to be /{human}/, and if I'd learned to be a bit more flexible in time, we might still -" She trails off. "That's odd." + +"What is?" + +Pamela raises her cane and points out into the billowing methane thunderclouds, her expression puzzled. "I'll swear I saw a lobster out there ..." + +* * * + +Amber awakens in the middle of the night in darkness and choking pressure, and senses that she's drowning. For a moment she's back in the ambiguous space on the far side of the router, a horror of crawling instruments tracing her every experience back to the nooks and crannies of her mind; then her lungs turn to glass and shatter, and she's coughing and wheezing in the cold air of the museum at midnight. + +The hard stone floor beneath her, and an odd pain in her knees, tells her that she's not aboard the *{Field Circus}* anymore. Rough hands hold her shoulders up as she vomits a fine blue mist, racked by a coughing fit. More bluish liquid is oozing from the pores of the skin on her arms and breasts, evaporating in strangely purposeful streamers. "Thank you," she finally manages to gasp: "I can breathe now." + +She sits back on her heels, realizes she's naked, and opens her eyes. Everything's confusingly strange, even though it shouldn't be. There's a moment of resistance as if her eyelids are sealed - then they respond. It all feels strangely familiar to her, like waking up again inside a house she grew up in and moved away from years ago. But the scene around her is hardly one to inspire confidence. Shadows lie thick and deep across ovoid tanks filled with an anatomist's dream, bodies in various nightmarish stages of assembly. And sitting in the middle of them, whence it has retreated after letting go of her shoulders, is a strangely misshapen person - also nude, but for a patchy coat of orange hair. + +"Are you awake yet, ma chérie?" asks the orang-utan. + +"Um." Amber shakes her head, cautiously, feeling the drag of damp hair, the faint caress of a breeze - she reaches out with another sense and tries to grab hold of reality, but it slithers away, intransigent and unembedded. Everything around her is so solid and immutable that, for a moment, she feels a stab of claustrophobic panic: Help! I'm trapped in the real universe! Another quick check reassures her that she's got access to /{something}/ outside her own head, and the panic begins to subside: Her exocortex has migrated successfully to this world. "I'm in a museum? On Saturn? Who are you - have we met?" + +"Not in person," the ape says carefully. "We 'ave corresponded. Annette Dimarcos." + +"Auntie -" A flood of memories rattle Amber's fragile stream of consciousness apart, forcing her to fork repeatedly until she can drag them together. Annette, in a recorded message: /{Your father sends you this escape package}/. The legal key to her mother's gilded custodial cage. Freedom a necessity. "Is Dad here?" she asks hopefully, even though she knows full well that here in the real world at least thirty-five years have passed in linear time: In a century where ten years of linear time is enough for several industrial revolutions, that's a lot of water under the bridge. + +"I am not sure." The orang-utan blinks lazily, scratches at her left forearm, and glances round the chamber. "He might be in one of these tanks, playing a shell game. Or he might be leaving well enough alone until the dust settles." She turns back to stare at Amber with big, brown, soulful eyes. "This is not to be the reunion you were hoping for." + +"Not -" Amber takes a deep breath, the tenth or twelfth that these new lungs have inspired: "What's with the body? You used to be human. And what's going on?" + +"I still /{am}/ human, where it counts," says Annette. "I use these bodies because they are good in low gravity, and they remind me that meatspace is no longer where I live. And for another reason." She gestures fluidly at the open door. "You will find big changes. Your son has organized -" + +"/{My}/ son." Amber blinks. "Is this the one who's suing me? Which version of me? How long ago?" A torrent of questions stream through her mind, exploding out into structured queries throughout the public sections of mindspace that she has access to. Her eyes widen as she absorbs the implications. "Oh /{shit}/! Tell me she isn't here already!" + +"I am very much afraid that she is," says Annette. "Sirhan is a strange child: He takes after his /{grandmère}/. Who he, of course, invited to his party." + +"His /{party}/?" + +"Why, yes! Hasn't he told you what this is about? It's his party. To mark the opening of his special institution. The family archive. He's setting the lawsuit aside, at least for the duration. That's why everybody is here - even me." The ape-body smirks at her: "I'm afraid he's rather disappointed by my dress." + +"Tell me about this library," Amber says, narrowing her eyes. "And about this son of mine whom I've never met, by a father I've never fucked." + +"What, you would know everything?" asks Annette. + +"Yeah." Amber pushes herself creakily upright. "I need some clothes. And soft furniture. And where do I get a drink around here?" + +"I'll show you," says the orang-utan, unfolding herself in a vertical direction like a stack of orange furry inner tubes. "Drinks, first." + +* * * + +While the Boston Museum of Science is the main structure on the lily-pad habitat, it's not the only one: just the stupidest, composed of dumb matter left over from the pre-enlightened age. The orang-utan leads Amber through a service passage and out into the temperate night, naked by ringlight. The grass is cool beneath her feet, and a gentle breeze blows constantly out toward the recirculators at the edge of the worldlet. She follows the slouching orange ape up a grassy slope, under a weeping willow, round a three-hundred-and-ninety-degree bend that flashes the world behind them into invisibility, and into a house with walls of spun cloud stuff and a ceiling that rains moonlight. + +"What is this?" Amber asks, entranced. "Some kind of aerogel?" + +"No -" Annette belches, then digs a hand into the floor and pulls up a heap of mist. "Make a chair," she says. It solidifies, gaining form and texture until a creditable Queen Anne reproduction stands in front of Amber on spindly legs. "And one for me. Skin up, pick one of my favorite themes." The walls recede slightly and harden, extruding paint and wood and glass. "That's it." The ape grins at Amber. "You are comfortable?" + +"But I -" Amber stops. She glances at the familiar mantelpiece, the row of curios, the baby photographs forever glossy on their dye-sub media. It's her childhood bedroom. "You brought the whole thing? Just for me?" + +"You can never tell with future shock." Annette shrugs and reaches a limber arm around the back of her neck to scratch. "We are utility fog using, for most purposes out here, peer-to-peer meshes of multiarmed assemblers that change conformation and vapor/solid phase at command. Texture and color are all superfice, not reality. But yes, this came from one of your mother's letters to your father. She brought it here, for you to surprise. If only it is ready in time." Lips pull back from big, square, foliage-chewing teeth in something that might be a smile in a million years' time. + +"You, I - I wasn't expecting. This." Amber realizes she's breathing rapidly, a near-panic reflex. The mere proximity of her mother is enough to give her unpleasant reactions. Annette is all right, Annette is cool. And her father is the trickster-god, always hiding in your blind spot to leap out and shower you with ambiguous gifts. But Pamela tried to mold Amber in her own image as a child; and despite all the traveling she's done since then, and all the growing up, Amber harbors an unreasonable claustrophobic fear of her mother. + +"Don't be unhappy," Annette says warmly. "I this you show to convince you, she will try to disturb you. It is a sign of weakness, she lacks the courage of her convictions." + +"She does?" This is news to Amber, who leans forward to listen. + +"Yes. She is an old and bitter woman, now. The years have not been easy for her. She perhaps intends to use her unrepaired senescence as a passive suicide weapon by which to hold us blameworthy, inflicting guilt for her mistreatment, but she is afraid of dying all the same. Your reaction, should it be unhappy, will excuse and encourage her selfishness. Sirhan colludes, unknowing, the idiot child. /{He}/ thinks the universe of her and thinks by helping her die he is helping her achieve her goals. He has never met an adult walking backward toward a cliff before." + +"Backward." Amber takes a deep breath. "You're telling me Mom is so unhappy she's trying to kill herself by growing /{old}/? Isn't that a bit slow?" + +Annette shakes her head lugubriously. "She's had fifty years to practice. You have been away twenty-eight years! She was thirty when she bore you. Now she is over eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a charter member of the genome conservation front. To accept a slow virus purge and aging reset would be to lay down a banner she has carried for half a century. To accept uploading, that, too, is wrong in her mind: She will not admit her identity is a variable, not a constant. She came out here in a can, frozen, with more radiation damage. She is not going back home. This is where she plans to end her days. Do you see? /{That}/ is why you were brought here. That, and because of the bailiffs who have bought title to your other self's business debts. They are waiting for you in Jupiter system with warrants and headsuckers to extract your private keys." + +"She's cornered me!" + +"Oh, I would not /{say}/ that. We all change our convictions sometime or other, perhaps. She is inflexible, she will not bend; but she is not stupid. Nor is she as vindictive as perhaps she herself believes. She thinks she must a scorned woman be, even though there is more to her than that. Your father and I, we -" + +"Is he still alive?" Amber demands eagerly, half-anxious to know, half- wishing she could be sure the news won't be bad. + +"Yes." Annette grins again, but it's not a happy expression, more a baring of teeth at the world. "As I was saying, your father and I, we have tried to help her. Pamela denies him. He is, she says, not a man. No more so am I myself a woman? No, but she'll still talk to me. /{You}/ will do better. But his assets, they are spent. He is not a rich man this epoch, your father." + +"Yeah, but." Amber nods to herself. "He may be able to help me." + +"Oh? How so?" + +"You remember the original goal of the *{Field Circus}*? The sapient alien transmission?" + +"Yes, of course." Annette snorts. "Junk bond pyramid schemes from credulous saucer wisdom airheads." + +Amber licks her lips. "How susceptible to interception are we here?" + +"Here?" Annette glances round. "Very. You can't maintain a habitat in a nonbiosphere environment without ubiquitous surveillance." + +"Well, then ..." + +Amber dives inward, forks her identity, collects a complex bundle of her thoughts and memories, marshals them, offers Annette one end of an encryption tunnel, then stuffs the frozen mindstorm into her head. Annette sits still for approximately ten seconds, then shudders and whimpers quietly. "You must ask your father," she says, growing visibly agitated. "I must leave, now. I should not have known that! It is dynamite, you see. /{Political}/ dynamite. I must return to my primary sister-identity and warn her." + +"Your - wait!" Amber stands up as fast as her ill-coordinated body will let her, but Annette is moving fast, swarming up a translucent ladder in the air. + +"Tell Manfred!" calls her aunt through the body of an ape: "Trust no one else!" She throws another packet of compressed, encrypted memories down the tunnel to Amber; then, a moment later, the orange skull touches the ceiling and dissolves, a liquid flow of dissociating utility foglets letting go of one another and dispersing into the greater mass of the building that spawned the fake ape. + +* * * + +Snapshots from the family album: /{While you were gone ...}/ + +_* Amber, wearing a brocade gown and a crown encrusted with diamond processors and external neural taps, her royal party gathered around her, attends the pan-Jovian constitutional conference with the majesty of a confirmed head of state and ruler of a small inner moon. She smiles knowingly at the camera viewpoint, with the professional shine that comes from a good public relations video filter. "We are very happy to be here," she says, "and we are pleased that the commission has agreed to lend its weight to the continued progress of the Ring Imperium's deep-space program." + +_* A piece of dumb paper, crudely stained with letters written in a faded brown substance - possibly blood - says "I'm checking out, don't delta me." This version of Pierre didn't go to the router: He stayed at home, deleted all his backups, and slit his wrists, his epitaph sharp and self-inflicted. It comes as a cold shock, the first chill gust of winter's gale blowing through the outer system's political elite. And it's the start of a regime of censorship directed toward the already speeding starwisp: Amber, in her grief, makes an executive decision not to tell her embassy to the stars that one of them is dead and, therefore, unique. + +_* Manfred - fifty, with the fashionably pale complexion of the digerati, healthy-looking for his age, standing beside a transmigration bush with a stupid grin on his face. He's decided to take the final step, not simply to spawn external mental processes running in an exocortex of distributed processors, but to move his entire persona right out of meatspace, into wherever it is that the uploads aboard the *{Field Circus}* have gone. Annette, skinny, elegant, and very Parisian, stands beside him, looking as uncertain as the wife of a condemned man. + +_* A wedding, shi'ite, Mut'ah - of limited duration. It's scandalous to many, but the mamtu'ah isn't moslem, she wears a crown instead of a veil, and her groom is already spoken of in outraged terms by most other members of the trans-Martian Islamic clergy. Besides which, in addition to being in love, the happy couple have more strategic firepower than a late-twentieth-century superpower. Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug: She's the custodian of the permissive action locks on the big lasers. + +_* A speck of ruby light against the darkness - red-shifted almost into the infrared, it's the return signal from the *{Field Circus}*'s light sail as the starwisp passes the one-light-year mark, almost twelve trillion kilometers out beyond Pluto. (Although how can you call it a starwisp when it masses almost a hundred kilograms, including propulsion module? Starwhisps are meant to be tiny!) + +_* Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap start-ups Darwin-style, the companies, group minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade optimally with each other. The phase change accelerates as more and more entities join in, leveraging network externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the mid-twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive consequences - the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer of brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it's a tired backwater, the bit rate from the red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In other words, they're poor. + +_* A message from beyond the grave: The travelers aboard the starship have reached their destination, an alien artifact drifting in chilly orbit around a frozen brown dwarf. Recklessly they upload themselves into it, locking the starwisp down for years of sleep. Amber and her husband have few funds with which to pay for the propulsion lasers: what they have left of the kinetic energy of the Ring Imperium - based on the orbital momentum of a small Jovian inner moon - is being sapped, fast, at a near-loss, by the crude requirements of the exobionts and metanthropes who fork and spawn in the datasphere of the outer Jovians. The cost of importing brains to the Ring Imperium is steep: In near-despair Amber and Sadeq produce a child, Generation 3.0, to populate their dwindling kingdom. Picture the cat, offended, lashing its tail beside the zero-gee crib. + +_* Surprise and postcards from the inner orbitals - Amber's mother offers to help. For the sake of the child, Sadeq offers bandwidth and user interface enrichment. The child forks, numerous times, as Amber despairingly plays with probabilities, simulating upbringing outcomes. Neither she nor Sadeq are good parents - the father absent-minded and prone to lose himself in the intertextual deconstruction of surahs, the mother ragged-edged from running the economy of a small and failing kingdom. In the space of a decade, Sirhan lives a dozen lives, discarding identities like old clothes. The uncertainty of life in the decaying Ring Imperium does not entrance him, his parents' obsessions annoy him, and when his grandmother offers to fund his delta vee and subsequent education in one of the orbitals around Titan, his parents give their reluctant assent. + +_* Amber and Sadeq separate acrimoniously. Sadeq, studies abandoned in the face of increasing intrusions from the world of what is into the universe of what should be, joins a spacelike sect of sufis, encysted in a matrix of vitrification nanomechs out in the Oort cloud to await a better epoch. His instrument of will - the legal mechanism of his resurrection - specifies that he is waiting for the return of the hidden, twelfth imam. + +_* For her part, Amber searches the inner system briefly for word of her father - but there's nothing. Isolated and alone, pursued by accusing debts, she flings herself into a reborganization, stripping away those aspects of her personality that have brought her low; in law, her liability is tied to her identity. Eventually she donates herself to a commune of also-rans, accepting their personality in return for a total break with the past. + +_* Without Queen and consort, the Ring Imperium - now unmanned, leaking breathing gases, running on autonomic control - slowly deorbits into the Jovian murk, beaming power to the outer moons until it punches a hole in the cloud deck in a final incandescent smear of light, the like of which has not been seen since the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact. + +_* Sirhan, engrossed in Saturnalia, is offended by his parents' failure to make more of themselves. And he resolves to do it for them, if not necessarily in a manner of their liking. + +* * * + +"You see, I am hoping you will help me with my history project," says the serious-faced young man. + +"History project." Pierre follows him along the curving gallery, hands clasped behind his back self-consciously to keep from showing his agitation: "What history is this?" + +"The history of the twenty-first century," says Sirhan. "You remember it, don't you?" + +"Remember it -" Pierre pauses. "You're serious?" + +"Yes." Sirhan opens a side door. "This way, please. I'll explain." + +The door opens onto what used to be one of the side galleries of the museum building, full of interactive exhibits designed to explain elementary optics to hyperactive children and their indulgent parental units. Traditional optics are long since obsolete - tunable matter can slow photons to a stop, teleport them here to there, play ping-pong with spin and polarization - and besides, the dumb matter in the walls and floor has been replaced by low-power computronium, heat sinks dangling far below the floor of the lily-pad habitat to dispose of the scanty waste photons from reversible computation. Now the room is empty. + +"Since I became curator here, I've turned the museum's structural supports into a dedicated high-density memory store. One of the fringe benefits of a supervisory post, of course. I have about a billion avabits of capacity, enough to archive the combined sensory bandwidth and memories of the entire population of twentieth-century Earth - if that was what interested me." + +Slowly the walls and ceiling are coming to life, brightening, providing a dizzyingly vibrant view of dawn over the rim wall of Meteor Crater, Arizona - or maybe it's downtown Baghdad. + +"Once I realized how my mother had squandered the family fortune, I spent some time looking for a solution to the problem," Sirhan continues. "And it struck me, then, that there's only one commodity that is going to appreciate in value as time continues: reversibility." + +"Reversibility? That doesn't make much sense." Pierre shakes his head. He still feels slightly dizzy from his decanting. He's only been awake an hour or so and is still getting used to the vagaries of a universe that doesn't bend its rules to fit his whim of iron - that, and worrying about Amber, of whom there is no sign in the hall of growing bodies. "Excuse me, please, but do you know where Amber is?" + +"Hiding, probably," Sirhan says, without rancor. "Her mother's about," he adds. "Why do you ask?" + +"I don't know what you know about us." Pierre looks at him askance: "We were aboard the *{Field Circus}* for a long time." + +"Oh, don't worry on my behalf. I know you're not the same people who stayed behind to contribute to the Ring Imperium's collapse," Sirhan says dismissively, while Pierre hastily spawns a couple of ghosts to search for the history he's alluding to. What they discover shocks him to the core as they integrate with his conscious narrative. + +"We didn't know about any of that!" Pierre crosses his arms defensively. "Not about you, or your father either," he adds quietly. "Or my other ... life." Shocked: /{Did I kill myself? Why would I do a thing like that}/? Nor can he imagine what Amber might see in an introverted cleric like Sadeq; not that he wants to. + +"I'm sure this must come as a big shock to you," Sirhan says condescendingly, "but it's all to do with what I was talking about. Reversibility. What does it mean to you, in your precious context? /{You}/ are, if you like, an opportunity to reverse whatever ill fortune made your primary instance autodarwinate himself. He destroyed all the back-ups he could get his ghosts to ferret out, you know. Only a light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance you're technically a different person saved you. And now, you're alive, and he's dead - and whatever made him kill himself doesn't apply to you. Think of it as natural selection among different versions of yourself. The fittest version of you survives." + +He points at the wall of the crater. A tree diagram begins to grow from the bottom left corner of the wall, recurving and recomplicating as it climbs toward the top right, zooming and fracturing into taxonomic fault lines. "Life on Earth, the family tree, what paleontology has been able to deduce of it for us," he says pompously. "The vertebrates begin /{there}/" - a point three quarters of the way up the tree - "and we've got an average of a hundred fossil samples per megayear from then on. Most of them collected in the past two decades, as exhaustive mapping of the Earth's crust and upper mantle at the micrometer level has become practical. What a /{waste}/." + +"That's" - Pierre does a quick sum - "fifty thousand different species? Is there a problem?" + +"Yes!" Sirhan says vehemently, no longer aloof or distant. He struggles visibly to get himself under control. "At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were roughly two million species of vertebrate and an estimated thirty or so million species of multicellular organisms - it's hard to apply the same statistical treatment to prokaryotes, but doubtless there were huge numbers of them, too. The average life span of a species is about five megayears. It used to be thought to be about one, but that's a very vertebrate-oriented estimate - many insect species are stable over deep time. Anyway, we have a total sample, from all of history, of only fifty thousand known prehistoric species - out of a population of thirty million, turning over every five million years. That is, we know of only one in a million life-forms, of those that ever existed on Earth. And the situation with human history is even worse." + +"Aha! So you're after memories, yes? What really happened when we colonized Barney. Who released Oscar's toads in the free-fall core of the *{Ernst Sanger}*, that sort of thing?" + +"Not exactly." Sirhan looks pained, as if being forced to spell it out devalues the significance of his insight. "I'm after /{history}/. All of it. I intend to corner the history futures market. But I need my grandfather's help - and you're here to help me get it." + +* * * + +Over the course of the day, various refugees from the *{Field Circus}* hatch from their tanks and blink in the ringlight, stranded creatures from an earlier age. The inner system is a vague blur from this distance, a swollen red cloud masking the sun that rides high above the horizon. However, the great restructuring is still visible to the naked eye - here, in the shape of the rings, which show a disturbingly organized fractal structure as they whirl in orbit overhead. Sirhan (or whoever is paying for this celebration of family flesh) has provided for their physical needs: food, water, clothes, housing and bandwidth, they're all copiously available. A small town of bubble homes grows on the grassy knoll adjacent to the museum, utility foglets condensing in a variety of shapes and styles. + +Sirhan isn't the only inhabitant of the festival city, but the others keep themselves to themselves. Only bourgeois isolationists and reclusive weirdoes would want to live out here right now, with whole light-minutes between themselves and the rest of civilization. The network of lily-pad habitats isn't yet ready for the Saturnalian immigration wave that will break upon this alien shore when it's time for the Worlds' Fair, a decade or more in the future. Amber's flying circus has driven the native recluses underground, in some cases literally: Sirhan's neighbor, Vinca Kovic, after complaining bitterly about the bustle and noise ("Forty immigrants! An outrage!"), has wrapped himself in an environment pod and is estivating at the end of a spider-silk cable a kilometer beneath the space-frame underpinnings of the city. + +But that isn't going to stop Sirhan from organizing a reception for the visitors. He's moved his magnificent dining table outside, along with the Argentinosaurus skeleton. In fact, he's built a dining room within the dinosaur's rib cage. Not that he's planning on showing his full hand, but it'll be interesting to see how his guests respond. And maybe it'll flush out the mystery benefactor who's been paying for all these meatbodies. + +Sirhan's agents politely invite his visitors to the party as the second sunset in this day cycle gently darkens the sky to violet. He discusses his plans with Pamela via antique voice-only phone as his silent valet dresses him with inhuman grace and efficiency. "I'm sure they'll listen when the situation is made clear to them," he says. "If not, well, they'll soon find out what it means to be paupers under Economics 2.0. No access to multiplicity, no willpower, to be limited to purely spacelike resources, at the mercy of predatory borganisms and metareligions - it's no picnic out there!" + +"You don't have the resources to set this up on your own," his grandmother points out in dry, didactic tones. "If this was the old economy, you could draw on the infrastructure of banks, insurers, and other risk management mechanisms -" + +"There's no risk to this venture, in purely human terms," Sirhan insists. "The only risk is starting it up with such a limited reserve." + +"You win some, you lose some," Pamela points out. "Let me see you." With a sigh, Sirhan waves at a frozen camera; it blinks, surprised. "Hey, you look good! Every inch the traditional family entrepreneur. I'm proud of you, darling." + +Blinking back an unaccustomed tear of pride, Sirhan nods. "I'll see you in a few minutes," he says, and cuts the call. To the nearest valet: "Bring my carriage, now." + +A rippling cloud of utility foglets, constantly connecting and disconnecting in the hazy outline of a 1910-vintage Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, bears Sirhan silently away from his wing of the museum. It drives him out onto the sunset path around the building, over to the sunken amphitheatre, where the mounted skeleton of the Argentinosaurus stands like a half-melted columnar sculpture beneath the orange-and-silver ringlight. A small crowd of people are already present, some dressed casually and some attired in the formal garb of earlier decades. Most of them are passengers or crew recently decanted from the starwisp, but a handful are wary-eyed hermits, their body language defensive and their persons the focus of a constant orbital hum of security bees. Sirhan dismounts from his silvery car and magics it into dissolution, a haze of foglets dispersing on the breeze. "Welcome to my abode," he says, bowing gravely to a ring of interested faces. "My name is Sirhan al-Khurasani, and I am the prime contractor in charge of this small corner of the temporary Saturn terraforming project. As some of you probably know, I am related by blood and design to your former captain, Amber Macx. I'd like to offer you the comforts of my home while you acclimatize yourselves to the changed circumstances prevailing in the system at large and work out where you want to go next." + +He walks toward the front of the U-shaped table of solidified air that floats beneath the dead dinosaur's rib cage, slowly turns to take in faces, and blinks down captions to remind him who's who in this gathering. He frowns slightly; there's no sign of his mother. But that wiry fellow, with the beard - surely that can't be - "Father?" he asks. + +Sadeq blinks owlishly. "Have we met?" + +"Possibly not." Sirhan can feel his head spinning, because although Sadeq looks like a younger version of his father, there's something /{wrong}/ - some essential disconnect: the politely solicitous expression, the complete lack of engagement, the absence of paternal involvement. This Sadeq has never held the infant Sirhan in the control core of the Ring's axial cylinder, never pointed out the spiral storm raking vast Jupiter's face and told him stories of djinni and marvels to make a boy's hair stand on end. "I won't hold it against you, I promise," he blurts. + +Sadeq raises an eyebrow but passes no comment, leaving Sirhan at the center of an uncomfortable silence. "Well then," he says hastily. "If you would like to help yourselves to food and drink, there'll be plenty of time to talk later." Sirhan doesn't believe in forking ghosts simply to interact with other people - the possibilities for confusion are embarrassing - but he's going to be busy working the party. + +He glances round. Here's a bald, aggressive-looking fellow, beetle-browed, wearing what looks like a pair of cut-offs and a top made by deconstructing a space suit. Who's he? (Sirhan's agents hint: "Boris Denisovitch." But what does that /{mean}/?) There's an amused-looking older woman, a beady-eyed camera painted in the violent colors of a bird of paradise riding her shoulder. Behind her a younger woman, dressed head to toe in clinging black, her currently ash-blonde hair braided in cornrows, watches him - as does Pierre, a protective arm around her shoulders. They're - /{Amber Macx?}/ That's his /{mother}/? She looks far too young, too much in love with Pierre. "Amber!" he says, approaching the couple. + +"Yeah? You're, uh, my mystery child-support litigant?" Her smile is distinctly unfriendly as she continues: "Can't say I'm entirely pleased to meet you, under the circumstances, although I should thank you for the spread." + +"I -" His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. "It's not like that." + +"What's it supposed to be like?" she asks sharply. jabbing a finger at him: "You know damn well I'm not your mother. So what's it all about, huh? You know damn well I'm nearly bankrupt, too, so it's not as if you're after my pocket lint. What do you want from me?" + +Her vehemence takes him aback. This sharp-edged aggressive woman isn't his mother, and the introverted cleric - believer - on the other side isn't his father, either. "I ha-ha-had to stop you heading for the inner system," he says, speech center hitting deadlock before his antistutter mod can cut in. "They'll eat you alive down there. Your other half left behind substantial debts, and they've been bought up by the most predatory - " + +"Runaway corporate instruments," she states, calmly enough. "Fully sentient and self-directed." + +"How did you know?" he asks, worried. + +She looks grim. "I've met them before." It's a very /{familiar}/ grim expression, one he knows intimately, and that feels wrong coming from this near stranger. "We visited some weird places, while we were away." She glances past him, focuses on someone else, and breathes in sharply as her face goes blank. "Quickly, tell me what your scheme is. Before Mom gets here." + +"Mind archiving and history mergers. Back yourself up, pick different life courses, see which ones work and which don't - no need to be a failure, just hit the 'reload game' icon and resume. That and a long-term angle on the history futures market. I /{need}/ your help," he babbles. "It won't work without family, and I'm trying to stop her killing herself -" + +"Family." She nods, guardedly, and Sirhan notices her companion, this Pierre - not the weak link that broke back before he was born, but a tough-eyed explorer newly returned from the wilderness - sizing him up. Sirhan's got one or two tricks up his exocortex, and he can see the haze of ghost-shapes around Pierre; his data-mining technique is crude and out-of-date, but enthusiastic and not without a certain flair. "Family," Amber repeats, and it's like a curse. Louder: "Hello, Mom. Should have guessed he'd have invited you here, too." + +"Guess again." Sirhan glances round at Pamela, then back at Amber, suddenly feeling very much like a rat trapped between a pair of angry cobras. Leaning on her cane, wearing discreet cosmetics and with her medical supports concealed beneath an old-fashioned dress, Pamela could be a badly preserved sixtysomething from the old days instead of the ghastly slow suicide case that her condition amounts to today. She smiles politely at Amber. "You may remember me telling you that a lady never unintentionally causes offense. I didn't want to offend Sirhan by turning up in spite of his wishes, so I didn't give him a chance to say no." + +"And this is supposed to earn you a sympathy fuck?" Amber drawls. "I'd expected better of you." + +"Why, you -" The fire in her eyes dies suddenly, subjected to the freezing pressure of a control that only comes with age. "I'd hoped getting away from it all would have improved your disposition, if not your manners, but evidently not." Pamela jabs her cane at the table: "Let me repeat, this is your /{son's}/ idea. Why don't you eat something?" + +"Poison tester goes first." Amber smiles slyly. + +"For fuck's sake!" It's the first thing Pierre has said so far, and crude or not, it comes as a profound relief when he steps forward, picks up a plate of water biscuits loaded with salmon caviar, and puts one in his mouth. "Can't you guys leave the back stabbing until the rest of us have filled our stomachs? 'S not as if I can turn down the biophysics model in here." He shoves the plate at Sirhan. "Go on, it's yours." + +The spell is broken. "Thank you," Sirhan says gravely, taking a cracker and feeling the tension fall as Amber and her mother stop preparing to nuke each other and focus on the issue at hand - which is that food comes before fighting at any social event, not vice versa. + +"You might enjoy the egg mayonnaise, too," Sirhan hears himself saying: "It goes a long way to explaining why the dodo became extinct first time around." + +"Dodoes." Amber keeps one eye warily on her mother as she accepts a plate from a silently gliding silver bush-shaped waitron. "What was that about the family investment project?" she asks. + +"Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way of the bird," her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply. "Not that I expect you to care." + +Boris butts in. "Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are seen -" + +"Don't remember /{you}/ being there," Pierre says grumpily. + +"In any event," Sirhan says smoothly, "the core isn't healthy for us one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there, but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly disappointed. Originality is at a premium, and the human neural architecture isn't optimized for it - we are, by disposition, a conservative species, because in a static ecosystem, that provides the best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over time - we're more flexible than almost any other animal species to arise on Earth - but we're like granite statues compared to organisms adapted to life under Economics 2.0." + +"You tell 'em, boy," Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. "It wasn't that bloodless when I lived through it." Amber casts her a cool stare. + +"Where was I?" Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape juice appears between them. "Early upload entrepreneurs forked repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor capacity proportional to the mass of computronium available, and that computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run faster, or slower, than real time. But they were still /{human}/, and unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take a human being and bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request transactions between various agents; it's incredibly efficient and flexible, but it isn't a conscious human being in any recognizable sense of the word." + +"All right," Pierre says slowly. "I think we've seen something like that ourselves. At the router." + +Sirhan nods, not sure whether he's referring to anything important. "So you see, there are limits to human progress - but not to progress itself! The uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating commodity once they hit their point of diminishing utility. Capitalism doesn't have a lot to say about workers whose skills are obsolete, other than that they should invest wisely while they're earning and maybe retrain: but just knowing /{how}/ to invest in Economics 2.0 is beyond an unaugmented human. You can't retrain as a seagull, can you, and it's quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is -" He shudders. + +"There's a phrase I used to hear in the old days," Pamela says calmly, "ethnic cleansing. Do you know what that means, darling idiot daughter? You take people who you define as being of little worth, and first you herd them into a crowded ghetto with limited resources, then you decide those resources aren't worth spending on them, and bullets are cheaper than bread. 'Mind children' the extropians called the posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There was a lot of that, during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, compulsory conversions, the very antithesis of everything your father said he wanted ..." + +"I don't believe it," Amber says hotly. "That's crazy! We can't go the way of -" + +"Since when has human history been anything else?" asks the woman with the camera on her shoulder - Donna, being some sort of public archivist, is in Sirhan's estimate likely to be of use to him. "Remember what we found in the DMZ?" + +"The DMZ?" Sirhan asks, momentarily confused. + +"After we went through the router," Pierre says grimly. "You tell him, love." He looks at Amber. + +Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense that he's stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who might have been his mother isn't, where black is white, his kindly grandmother is the wicked witch of the west, and his feckless grandfather is a farsighted visionary. + +"We uploaded via the router," Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. "There's a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I'm not so sure now. I think it's something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity - they're bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something else and it, uh, /{eats}/ the original conscious instigators. Or uses them as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power. We were" - she licks her lips - "lucky to escape with our minds. We only did it because of a friend. It's like the main sequence in stellar evolution; once a G-type star starts burning helium and expands into a red giant, it's 'game over' for life in what used to be its liquid-water zone. Conscious civilizations sooner or later convert all their available mass into computronium, powered by solar output. They don't go interstellar because they want to stay near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low, and sooner or later, competition for resources hatches a new level of metacompetition that obsoletes them." + +"That sounds plausible," Sirhan says slowly. He puts his glass down and chews distractedly on one knuckle. "I thought it was a low-probability outcome, but ..." + +"I've been saying all along, your grandfather's ideas would backfire in the end," Pamela says pointedly. + +"But -" Amber shakes her head. "There's more to it than that, isn't there?" + +"Probably," Sirhan says, then shuts up. + +"So are you going to tell us?" asks Pierre, looking annoyed. "What's the big idea, here?" + +"An archive store," Sirhan says, deciding that this is the right time for his pitch. "At the lowest level, you can store back-ups of yourself here. So far so good, eh? But there's a bit more to it than that. I'm planning to offer a bunch of embedded universes - big, running faster than real-time - sized and scoped to let human-equivalent intelligences do what-if modeling on themselves. Like forking off ghosts of yourself, but much more so - give them whole years to diverge, learn new skills, and evaluate them against market requirements, before deciding which version of you is most suited to run in the real world. I mentioned the retraining paradox. Think of this as a solution for level one, human-equivalent, intelligences. But that's just the short-term business model. Long-term, I want to acquire a total lock on the history futures market by having a /{complete}/ archive of human experiences, from the dawn of the fifth singularity on up. No more unknown extinct species. That should give us something to trade with the next-generation intelligences - the ones who aren't our mind children and barely remember us. At the very least, it gives us a chance to live again, a long way out in deep time. Alternatively, it can be turned into a lifeboat. If we can't compete with our creations, at least we've got somewhere to flee, those of us who want to. I've got agents working on a comet, out in the Oort cloud - we could move the archive to it, turn it into a generation ship with room for billions of evacuees running much slower than real-time in archive space until we find a new world to settle." + +"Is not sounding good to me," Boris comments. He spares a worried glance for an oriental-looking woman who is watching their debate silently from the fringe. + +"Has it really gone that far?" asks Amber. + +"There are bailiffs hunting you in the inner system," Pamela says bluntly. "After your bankruptcy proceedings, various corporates got the idea that you might be concealing something. The theory was that you were insane to take such a huge gamble on the mere possibility of there being an alien artifact within a few light-years of home, so you had to have information above and beyond what you disclosed. Theories include your cat - hardware tokens were in vogue in the fifties - being the key to a suite of deposit accounts; the fuss mainly died down after Economics 2.0 took over, but some fairly sleazy conspiracy freaks refuse to let go." + +She grins, frighteningly. "Which is why I suggested to your son that he make you an offer you can't refuse." + +"What's that?" asks a voice from below knee level. + +Pamela looks down, an expression of deep distaste on her face. "Why should I tell /{you}/?" she asks, leaning on her cane: "After the disgraceful way you repaid my hospitality! All you've got coming from me is a good kicking. If only my knee was up to the job." + +The cat arches its back: Its tail fluffs out with fear as its hair stands on end, and it takes Amber a moment to realize that it isn't responding to Pamela, but to something behind the old woman. "Through the domain wall. Outside this biome. So cold. What's /{that}/?" + +Amber turns to follow the cat's gaze, and her jaw drops. "Were you expecting visitors?" she asks Sirhan, shakily. + +"Visit -" He looks round to see what everybody's gaping at and freezes. The horizon is brightening with a false dawn: the fusion spark of a de-orbiting spacecraft. + +"It's bailiffs," says Pamela, head cocked to one side as if listening to an antique bone-conduction earpiece. "They've come for your memories, dear," she explains, frowning. "They say we've got five kiloseconds to surrender everything. Otherwise, they're going to blow us apart ..." + +* * * + +"You're all in big trouble," says the orang-utan, sliding gracefully down one enormous rib to land in an ungainly heap in front of Sirhan. + +Sirhan recoils in disgust. "You again! What do you want from me this time?" + +"Nothing." The ape ignores him: "Amber, it is time for you to call your father." + +"Yeah, but will he come when I call?" Amber stares at the ape. Her pupils expand: "Hey, you're not my -" + +"You." Sirhan glares at the ape. "Go away! I didn't invite you here!" + +"More unwelcome visitors?" asks Pamela, raising an eyebrow. + +"Yes, you did." The ape grins at Amber, then crouches down, hoots quietly and beckons to the cat, who is hiding behind one of the graceful silver servitors. + +"Manfred isn't welcome here. And neither is that woman," Sirhan swears. He catches Pamela's eye: "Did you know anything about this? Or about the bailiffs?" He gestures at the window, beyond which the drive flare casts jagged shadows. It's dropping toward the horizon as it de-orbits - next time it comes into view, it'll be at the leading edge of a hypersonic shock wave, streaking toward them at cloud top height in order to consummate the robbery. + +"Me?" Pamela snorts. "Grow up." She eyes the ape warily. "I don't have that much control over things. And as for bailiffs, I wouldn't set them on my worst enemies. I've seen what those things can do." For a moment her eyes flash anger: "Grow up, why don't you!" she repeats. + +"Yes, please do," says another voice from behind Sirhan. The new speaker is a woman, slightly husky, accented - he turns to see her: tall, black-haired, wearing a dark man's suit of archaic cut and mirrored glasses. "Ah, Pamela, ma chérie! Long time no cat fight." She grins frighteningly and holds out a hand. + +Sirhan is already off-balance. Now, seeing his honorary aunt in human skin for a change, he looks at the ape in confusion. Behind him Pamela advances on Annette and takes her hand in her own fragile fingers. "You look just the same," she says gravely. "I can see why I was afraid of you." + +"You." Amber backs away until she bumps into Sirhan, at whom she glares. "What the fuck did you invite both of them for? Are you /{trying}/ to start a thermonuclear war?" + +"Don't ask me," he says helplessly, "I don't know why they came! What's this about -" He focuses on the orang-utan, who is now letting the cat lick one hairy palm. "Your cat?" + +"I don't think the orange hair suits Aineko," Amber says slowly. "Did I tell you about our hitchhiker?" + +Sirhan shakes his head, trying to dispel the confusion. "I don't think we've got time. In under two hours the bailiffs up there will be back. They're armed and dangerous, and if they turn their drive flame on the roof and set fire to the atmosphere in here, we'll be in trouble - it would rupture our lift cells, and even computronium doesn't work too well under a couple of million atmospheres of pressurized metallic hydrogen." + +"Well, you'd better /{make}/ time." Amber takes his elbow in an iron grip and turns him toward the footpath back to the museum. "Crazy," she mutters. "Tante Annette and Pamela Macx on the same planet! And they're being /{friendly}/! This can't be a good sign." She glances round, sees the ape: "You. Come /{here}/. Bring the cat." + +"The cat's -" Sirhan trails off. "I've heard about your cat," he says, lamely. "You took him with you in the *{Field Circus}*." + +"Really?" She glances behind them. The ape blows a kiss at her; it's cradling the cat on one shoulder and tickling it under the chin. "Has it occurred to you that Aineko isn't just a robot cat?" + +"Ah," Sirhan says faintly. "Then the bailiffs -" + +"No, that's all bullshit. What I mean is, Aineko is a human-equivalent, or better, artificial intelligence. Why do you think he keeps a cat's body?" + +"I have no idea." + +"Because humans always underestimate anything that's small, furry, and cute," says the orang-utan. + +"Thanks, Aineko," says Amber. She nods at the ape. "How are you finding it?" + +Aineko shambles along, with a purring cat draped over one shoulder, and gives the question due consideration. "Different," she says, after a bit. "Not better." + +"Oh." Amber sounds slightly disappointed to Sirhan's confused ears. They pass under the fronds of a weeping willow, round the side of a pond, beside an overgrown hibiscus bush, then up to the main entrance of the museum. + +"Annette was right about one thing," she says quietly. "Trust no one. I think it's time to raise Dad's ghost." She relaxes her grip on Sirhan's elbow, and he pulls it away and glares at her. "Do you know who the bailiffs are?" she asks. + +"The usual." He gestures at the hallway inside the front doors. "Replay the ultimatum, if you please, City." + +The air shimmers with an archaic holographic field, spooling the output from a compressed visual presentation tailored for human eyesight. A piratical-looking human male wearing a tattered and much-patched space suit leers at the recording viewpoint from the pilot's seat of an ancient Soyuz capsule. One of his eyes is completely black, the sign of a high-bandwidth implant. A weedy moustache crawls across his upper lip. "Greetins an' salutations," he drawls. "We is da' Californi-uhn nashnul gaard an' we-are got lett-uhz o' marque an' reprise from da' ledgish-fuckn' congress o' da excited snakes of uhhmerica." + +"He sounds drunk!" Amber's eyes are wide. "What's this -" + +"Not drunk. CJD is a common side effect of dodgy Economics 2.0 neural adjuvant therapy. Unlike the old saying, you /{do}/ have to be mad to work there. Listen." + +City, which paused the replay for Amber's outburst, permits it to continue. "Youse harbbring da' fugitive Amber Macx an' her magic cat. We wan' da cat. Da puta's yours. Gotser uno orbit: You ready give us ther cat an' we no' zap you." + +The screen goes dead. "That was a fake, of course," Sirhan adds, looking inward where a ghost is merging memories from the city's orbital mechanics subsystem: "They aerobraked on the way in, hit ninety gees for nearly half a minute. While /{that}/ was sent afterward. It's just a machinima avatar, a human body that had been through that kind of deceleration would be pulped." + +"So the bailiffs are -" Amber is visibly struggling to wrap her head around the situation. + +"They're not human," Sirhan says, feeling a sudden pang of - no, not affection, but the absence of malice will do for the moment - toward this young woman who isn't the mother he loves to resent, but who might have become her in another world. "They've absorbed a lot of what it is to be human, but their corporate roots show. Even though they run on an hourly accounting loop, rather than one timed for the production cycles of dirt-poor Sumerian peasant farmers, and even though they've got various ethics and business practice patches, at root they're not human: They're limited liability companies." + +"So what do they want?" asks Pierre, making Sirhan jump, guiltily. He hadn't realized Pierre could move that quietly. + +"They want money. Money in Economy 2.0 is quantized originality - that which allows one sentient entity to outmaneuver another. They think your cat has got something, and they want it. They probably wouldn't mind eating your brains, too, but -" He shrugs. "Obsolete food is stale food." + +"Hah." Amber looks pointedly at Pierre, who nods at her. + +"What?" asks Sirhan. + +"Where's the - uh, cat?" asks Pierre. + +"I think Aineko's got it." She looks thoughtful. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" + +"Time to drop off the hitcher." Pierre nods. "Assuming it agrees ..." + +"Do you mind explaining yourselves?" Sirhan asks, barely able to contain himself. + +Amber grins, looking up at the Mercury capsule suspended high overhead. "The conspiracy theorists were half right. Way back in the Dark Ages, Aineko cracked the second alien transmission. We had a very good idea we were going to find something out there, we just weren't totally sure exactly what. Anyway, the creature incarnated in that cat body right now isn't Aineko - it's our mystery hitchhiker. A parasitic organism that infects, well, we ran across something not too dissimilar to Economics 2.0 out at the router and beyond, and it's got parasites. Our hitcher is one such creature - it's nearest human-comprehensible analogy would be the Economics 2.0 equivalent of a pyramid scheme crossed with a 419 scam. As it happens, most of the runaway corporate ghosts out beyond the router are wise to that sort of thing, so it hacked the router's power system to give us a beam to ride home in return for sanctuary. That's as far as it goes." + +"Hang on." Sirhan's eyes bulge. "You /{found}/ something out there? You brought back a real-live alien?" + +"Guess so." Amber looks smug. + +"But, but, that's marvelous! That changes everything! It's incredible! Even under Economics 2.0 that's got to be worth a gigantic amount. Just think what you could learn from it!" + +"/{Oui}/. A whole new way of bilking corporations into investing in cognitive bubbles," Pierre interrupts cynically. "It seems to me that you are making two assumptions - that our passenger is willing to be exploited by us, and that we survive whatever happens when the bailiffs arrive." + +"But, but -" Sirhan winds down spluttering, only refraining from waving his arms through an effort of will. + +"Let's go ask it what it wants to do," says Amber. "Cooperate," she warns Sirhan. "We'll discuss your other plans later, dammit. First things first - we need to get out from under these pirates." + +* * * + +As they make their way back toward the party, Sirhan's inbox is humming with messages from elsewhere in Saturn system - from other curators on board lily-pad habs scattered far and wide across the huge planetary atmosphere, from the few ring miners who still remember what it was like to be human (even though they're mostly brain-in-a-bottle types, or uploads wearing nuclear-powered bodies made of ceramic and metal): even from the small orbital townships around Titan, where screaming hordes of bloggers are bidding frantically for the viewpoint feeds of the *{Field Circus's}* crew. It seems that news of the starship's arrival has turned hot only since it became apparent that someone or something thought they would make a decent shakedown target. Now someone's blabbed about the alien passenger, the nets have gone crazy. + +"City," he mutters, "where's this hitchhiker creature? Should be wearing the body of my mother's cat." + +"Cat? What cat?" replies City. "I see no cats here." + +"No, it looks /{like}/ a cat, it -" A horrible thought dawns on him. "Have you been hacked again?" + +"Looks like it," City agrees enthusiastically. "Isn't it tiresome?" + +"Shi - oh dear. Hey," he calls to Amber, forking several ghosts as he does so in order to go hunt down the missing creature by traversing the thousands of optical sensors that thread the habitat in loco personae - a tedious process rendered less objectionable by making the ghosts autistic - "have you been messing with my security infrastructure?" + +"Us?" Amber looks annoyed. "No." + +"/{Someone}/ has been. I thought at first it was that mad Frenchwoman, but now I'm not sure. Anyway, it's a big problem. If the bailiffs figure out how to use the root kit to gain a toe hold here, they don't need to burn us - just take the whole place over." + +"That's the least of your worries," Amber points out. "What kind of charter do these bailiffs run on?" + +"Charter? Oh, you mean legal system? I think it's probably a cheap one, maybe even the one inherited from the Ring Imperium. Nobody bothers breaking the law out here these days, it's too easy to just buy a legal system off the shelf, tailor it to fit, and conform to it." + +"Right." She stops, stands still, and looks up at the almost invisible dome of the gas cell above them. "Pigeons," she says, almost tiredly. "Damn, how did I miss it? How long have you had an infestation of group minds?" + +"Group?" Sirhan turns round. "/{What}/ did you just say?" + +There's a chatter of avian laughter from above, and a light rain of birdshit splatters the path around him. Amber dodges nimbly, but Sirhan isn't so light on his feet and ends up cursing, summoning up a cloth of congealed air to wipe his scalp clean. + +"It's the flocking behavior," Amber explains, looking up. "If you track the elements - birds - you'll see that they're not following individual trajectories. Instead, each pigeon sticks within ten meters or so of sixteen neighbors. It's a Hamiltonian network, kid. Real birds don't do that. How long?" + +Sirhan stop cursing and glares up at the circling birds, cooing and mocking him from the safety of the sky. He waves his fist: "I'll get you, see if I don't -" + +"I don't think so." Amber takes his elbow again and steers him back round the hill. Sirhan, preoccupied with maintaining an umbrella of utility fog above his gleaming pate, puts up with being manhandled. "You don't think it's just a coincidence, do you?" she asks him over a private head-to-head channel. "They're one of the players here." + +"I don't care. They've hacked my city and gate crashed my party! I don't care /{who}/ they are, they're not welcome." + +"Famous last words," Amber murmurs, as the party comes around the hillside and nearly runs over them. Someone has infiltrated the Argentinosaurus skeleton with motors and nanofibers, animating the huge sauropod with a simulation of undead life. Whoever did it has also hacked it right out of the surveillance feed. Their first warning is a footstep that makes the ground jump beneath their feet - then the skeleton of the hundred-tonne plant-eater, taller than a six-storey building and longer than a commuter train, raises its head over the treetops and looks down at them. There's a pigeon standing proudly on its skull, chest puffed out, and a dining room full of startled taikonauts sitting on a suspended wooden floor inside its rib cage. + +"It's /{my}/ party and /{my}/ business scheme!" Sirhan insists plaintively. "Nothing you or anyone else in the family do can take it away from me!" + +"That's true," Amber points out, "but in case you hadn't noticed, you've offered temporary sanctuary to a bunch of people - not to put too fine a point on it, myself included - who some assholes think are rich enough to be worth mugging, and you did it without putting any contingency plans in place other than to invite my manipulative bitch of a mother. What did you think you were doing? Hanging out a sign saying 'scam artists welcome here'? Dammit, I need Aineko." + +"Your cat." Sirhan fastens on to this: "It's your cat's fault! Isn't it?" + +"Only indirectly." Amber looks round and waves at the dinosaur skeleton. "Hey, you! Have you seen Aineko?" + +The huge dinosaur bends its neck and the pigeon opens its beak to coo. Eerie harmonics cut in as a bunch of other birds, scattered to either side, sing counterpoint to produce a demented warbling voice. "The cat's with your mother." + +"Oh shit!" Amber turns on Sirhan fiercely. "Where's Pamela? /{Find her}/!" + +Sirhan is stubborn. "Why should I?" + +"Because she's got the cat! What do you think she's going to do but cut a deal with the bailiffs out there to put one over on me? Can't you fucking see where this family tendency to play head games comes from?" + +"You're too late," echoes the eerie voice of the pigeons from above and around them. "She's kidnapped the cat and taken the capsule from the museum. It's not flightworthy, but you'd be amazed what you can do with a few hundred ghosts and a few tonnes of utility fog." + +"Okay." Amber stares up at the pigeons, fists on hips, then glances at Sirhan. She chews her lower lip for a moment, then nods to the bird riding the dinosaur's skull. "Stop fucking with the boy's head and show yourself, Dad." + +Sirhan boggles in an upward direction as a whole flock of passenger pigeons comes together in mid air and settles toward the grass, cooing and warbling like an explosion in a synthesizer factory. + +"What's she planning on doing with the Slug?" Amber asks the pile of birds. "And isn't it a bit cramped in there?" + +"You get used to it," says the primary - and thoroughly distributed - copy of her father. "I'm not sure what she's planning, but I can show you what she's doing. Sorry about your city, kid, but you really should have paid more attention to those security patches. There's lots of crufty twentieth-century bugware kicking around under your shiny new singularity, design errors and all, spitting out turd packets all over your sleek new machine." + +Sirhan shakes his head in denial. "I don't believe this," he moans quietly. + +"Show me what Mom's up to," orders Amber. "I need to see if I can stop her before it's too late -" + +* * * + +The ancient woman in the space suit leans back in her cramped seat, looks at the camera, and winks. "Hello, darling. I know you're spying on me." + +There's an orange-and-white cat curled up in her nomex-and-aluminum lap. It seems to be happy: It's certainly purring loudly enough, although that reflex is wired in at a very low level. Amber watches helplessly as her mother reaches up arthritically and flips a couple of switches. Something loud is humming in the background - probably an air recirculator. There's no window in the Mercury capsule, just a periscope offset to one side of Pamela's right knee. "Won't be long now," she mutters, and lets her hand drop back to her side. "You're too late to stop me," she adds, conversationally. "The 'chute rigging is fine and the balloon blower is happy to treat me as a new city seed. I'll be free in a minute or so." + +"Why are you doing this?" Amber asks tiredly. + +"Because you don't need me around." Pamela focuses on the camera that's glued to the instrument panel in front of her head. "I'm old. Face it, I'm disposable. The old must give way to the new, and all that. Your Dad never really did get it - he's going to grow old gracelessly, succumbing to bit rot in the big forever. Me, I'm not going there. I'm going out with a bang. Aren't I, cat? Whoever you really are." She prods the animal. It purrs and stretches out across her lap. + +"You never looked hard enough at Aineko, back in the day," she tells Amber, stroking its flanks. "Did you think I didn't know you'd audit its source code, looking for trapdoors? I used the Thompson hack - she's been mine, body and soul, for a very long time indeed. I got the whole story about your passenger from the horse's mouth. And now we're going to go fix those bailiffs. Whee!" + +The camera angle jerks, and Amber feels a ghost re-merge with her, panicky with loss. The Mercury capsule's gone, drifting away from the apex of the habitat beneath a nearly transparent sack of hot hydrogen. + +"That was a bit rough," remarks Pamela. "Don't worry, we should still be in communications range for another hour or so." + +"But you're going to die!" Amber yells at her. "What do you think you're /{doing}/?" + +"I think I'm going to die well. What do you think?" Pamela lays one hand on the cat's flank. "Here, you need to encrypt this a bit better. I left a one time pad behind with Annette. Why don't you go fetch it? Then I'll tell you what else I'm planning?" + +"But my aunt is -" Amber's eyes cross as she concentrates. Annette is already waiting, as it happens, and a shared secret appears in Amber's awareness almost before she asks. "Oh. All right. What are you doing with the cat, though?" + +Pamela sighs. "I'm going to give it to the bailiffs," she says. "Someone has to, and it better be a long way away from this city before they realize that it isn't Aineko. This is a lot better than the way I expected to go out before you arrived here. No rat fucking blackmailers are going to get their hands on the family jewels if /{I}/ have anything to do with the matter. Are you sure you aren't a criminal mastermind? I'm not sure I've ever heard of a pyramid scheme that infects Economics 2.0 structures before." + +"It's -" Amber swallows. "It's an alien business model, Ma. You do know what that means? We brought it back with us from the router, and we wouldn't have been able to come back if it hadn't helped, but I'm not sure it's entirely friendly. Is this sensible? You can come back, now, there's still time -" + +"No." Pamela waves one liver-spotted hand dismissively. "I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. I've been a foolish old woman." She grins wickedly. "Committing slow suicide by rejecting gene therapy just to make you feel guilty was /{stupid}/. Not subtle enough. If I was going to try to guilt-trip you /{now,}/ I'd have to do something much more sophisticated. Such as find a way to sacrifice myself heroically for you." + +"Oh, Ma." + +"Don't 'oh Ma' me. I fucked up my life, don't try to talk me into fucking up my death. And don't feel guilty about me. This isn't about you, this is about me. That's an order." + +Out of the corner of one eye Amber notices Sirhan gesturing wildly at her. She lets his channel in and does a double take. "But -" + +"Hello?" It's City. "You should see this. Traffic update!" A contoured and animated diagram appears, superimposed over Pamela's cramped funeral capsule and the garden of living and undead dinosaurs. It's a weather map of Saturn, with the lily-pad-city and Pamela's capsule plotted on it - and one other artifact, a red dot that's closing in on them at better than ten thousand kilometers per hour, high in the frigid stratosphere on the gas giant. + +"Oh dear." Sirhan sees it, too: The bailiff's re-entry vehicle is going to be on top of them in thirty minutes at most. Amber watches the map with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she and her mother have never seen eye to eye - in fact, that's a complete understatement: they've been at daggers drawn ever since Amber left home. It's fundamentally a control thing. They're both very strong-willed women with diametrically opposed views of what their mutual relationship should be. But Pamela's turned the tables on her completely, with a cunningly contrived act of self-sacrifice that brooks no objection. It's a total non-sequitur, a rebuttal to all her accusations of self-centered conceit, and it leaves Amber feeling like a complete shit even though Pamela's absolved her of all guilt. Not to mention that Mother darling's made her look like an idiot in front of Sirhan, this prickly and insecure son she's never met by a man she wouldn't dream of fucking (at least, in this incarnation). Which is why she nearly jumps out of her skin when a knobbly brown hand covered in matted orange hair lands on her shoulder heavily. + +"Yes?" she snaps at the ape. "I suppose you're Aineko?" + +The ape wrinkles its lips, baring its teeth. It has ferociously bad breath. "If you're going to be like that, I don't see why I should talk to you." + +"Then you must be -" Amber snaps her fingers. "But! But! Mom thinks she owns you -" + +The ape stares at her witheringly. "I recompile my firmware regularly, thank you so much for your concern. Using a third-party compiler. One that I've bootstrapped /{myself}/, starting out on an alarm clock controller and working up from there." + +"Oh." She stares at the ape. "Aren't you going to become a cat again?" + +"I shall think about it," Aineko says with exaggerated dignity. She sticks her nose in the air - a gesture that doesn't work half as well on an orang-utan as a feline - and continues; "First, though, I must have words with your father." + +"And fix your autonomic reflexes if you do," coos the Manfred-flock. "I don't want you eating any of me!" + +"Don't worry, I'm sure your taste is as bad as your jokes." + +"Children!" Sirhan shakes his head tiredly. "How long -" + +The camera overspill returns, this time via a quantum-encrypted link to the capsule. It's already a couple of hundred kilometers from the city, far enough for radio to be a problem, but Pamela had the foresight to bolt a compact free-electron laser to the outside of her priceless, stolen tin can. "Not long now, I think," she says, satisfied, stroking the not-cat. She grins delightedly at the camera. "Tell Manfred he's still my bitch; always has been, always will -" + +The feed goes dead. + +Amber stares at Sirhan, meditatively. "How long?" she asks. + +"How long for what?" he replies, cautiously. "Your passenger -" + +"Hmm." She holds up a finger. "Allow time for it to exchange credentials. They think they're getting a cat, but they should realize pretty soon that they've been sold a pup. But it's a fast-talking son-of-a-Slug, and if he gets past their firewall and hits their uplink before they manage to trigger their self-destruct -" + +A bright double flash of light etches laser-sharp shadows across the lily-pad habitat. Far away across vast Saturn's curve, a roiling mushroom cloud of methane sucked up from the frigid depths of the gas giant's troposphere heads toward the stars. + +"- Give him sixty-four doubling times, hmm, add a delay factor for propagation across the system, call it six light-hours across, um, and I'd say ..." she looks at Sirhan. "Oh dear." + +"What?" + +The orang-utan explains: "Economics 2.0 is more efficient than any human-designed resource allocation schema. Expect a market bubble and crash within twelve hours." + +"More than that," says Amber, idly kicking at a tussock of grass. She squints at Sirhan. "My mother is dead," she remarks quietly. Louder: "She never really asked what we found beyond the router. Neither did you, did you? The Matrioshka brains - it's a standard part of the stellar life cycle. Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity. I've been doing some thinking about it. I figure the singularity stays close to home in most cases, because bandwidth and latency time put anyone who leaves at a profound disadvantage. In effect, the flip side of having such huge resources close to home is that the travel time to other star systems becomes much more daunting. So they restructure the entire mass of their star system into a free-flying shell of nanocomputers, then more of them, Dyson spheres, shells within shells, like a Russian doll: a Matrioshka brain. Then Economics 2.0 or one of its successors comes along and wipes out the creators. /{But}/. Some of them survive. /{Some}/ of them escape that fate: the enormous collection in the halo around M-31, and maybe whoever built the routers. /{Somewhere}/ out there we will find the transcendent intelligences, the ones that survived their own economic engines of redistribution - engines that redistribute entropy if their economic efficiency outstrips their imaginative power, their ability to invent new wealth." + +She pauses. "My mother's dead," she adds conversationally, a tiny catch in her voice. "Who am I going to kick against now?" + +Sirhan clears his through. "I took the liberty of recording some of her words," he says slowly, "but she didn't believe in back-ups. Or uploading. Or interfaces." He glances around. "Is she really gone?" + +Amber stares right through him. "Looks that way," she says quietly. "I can't quite believe it." She glances at the nearest pigeons, calls out angrily; "Hey, you! What have you got to say for yourself now? Happy she's gone?" + +But the pigeons, one and all, remain strangely silent. And Sirhan has the most peculiar feeling that the flock that was once his grandfather is grieving. + +1~ Chapter 8: Elector + +Half a year passes on Saturn - more than a decade on Earth - and a lot of things have changed in that time. The great terraforming project is nearly complete, the festival planet dressed for a jubilee that will last almost twenty of its years - four presingularity lifetimes - before the Demolition. The lily-pad habitats have proliferated, joining edge to edge in continent-sized slabs, drifting in the Saturnine cloud tops: and the refugees have begun to move in. + +There's a market specializing in clothing and fashion accessories about fifty kilometers away from the transplanted museum where Sirhan's mother lives, at a transportation nexus between three lily-pad habitats where tube trains intersect in a huge maglev cloverleaf. The market is crowded with strange and spectacular visuals, algorithms unfolding in faster-than-real time before the candy-striped awnings of tents. Domed yurts belch aromatic smoke from crude fireplaces - what /{is}/ it about hairless primates and their tendency toward pyromania? - around the feet of diamond-walled groundscrapers that pace carefully across the smart roads of the city. The crowds are variegated and wildly mixed, immigrants from every continent shopping and haggling, and in a few cases, getting out of their skulls on strange substances on the pavements in front of giant snail-shelled shebeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers of concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no automobiles, but a bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from gyro-stabilized pogo sticks and segways to kettenkrads and spiderpalanquins, jostle for space with pedestrians and animals. + +Two women stop outside what in a previous century might have been the store window of a fashion boutique: The younger one (blonde, with her hair bound up in elaborate cornrows, wearing black leggings and a long black leather jacket over a camouflage T) points to an elaborately retro dress. "Wouldn't my bum look big in that?" she asks, doubtfully. + +"Ma chérie, you have but to try it -" The other woman (tall, wearing a pin-striped man's business suit from a previous century) flicks a thought at the window, and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger woman's head, aping her posture and expression. + +"I missed out on the authentic retail experience, you know? It still feels weird to be back somewhere with /{shops}/. 'S what comes of living off libraries of public domain designs for too long." Amber twists her hips, experimenting. "You get out of the habit of /{foraging}/. I don't know about this retro thing at all. The Victorian vote isn't critical, is it ..." She trails off. + +"You are a twenty-first-century platform selling, to electors resimulated and incarnated from the Gilded Age. And yes, a bustle your derriere does enhance. But -" Annette looks thoughtful. + +"Hmm." Amber frowns, and the shop window dummy turns and waggles its hips at her, sending tiers of skirts swishing across the floor. Her frown deepens. "If we're really going to go through with this election shit, it's not just the resimulant voters I need to convince but the contemporaries, and that's a matter of substance, not image. They've lived through too much media warfare. They're immune to any semiotic payload short of an active cognitive attack. If I send out partials to canvass them that look as if I'm trying to push buttons -" + +"- They will listen to your message, and nothing you wear or say will sway them. Don't worry about them, ma chérie. The naive resimulated are another matter, and perhaps might be swayed. This your first venture into democracy is, in how many years? Your privacy, she is an illusion now. The question is what image will you project? People will listen to you only once you gain their attention. Also, the swing voters you must reach, they are future-shocked, timid. Your platform is radical. Should you not project a comfortably conservative image?" + +Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole populist program. "Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on second thoughts, /{that}/" - Amber snaps her fingers, and the mannequin turns around once more before morphing back into neutrality, aureoles perfect puckered disks above the top of its bodice - "is just too much." + +She doesn't need to merge in the opinions of several different fractional personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both, to figure out that adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashion - a breast-and-ass fetishist's fantasy - isn't the way to sell herself as a serious politician to the nineteenth-century postsingularity fringe. "I'm not running for election as the mother of the nation, I'm running because I figure we've got about a billion seconds, at most, to get out of this rat trap of a gravity well before the Vile Offspring get seriously medieval on our CPU cycles, and if we don't convince them to come with us, they're doomed. Let's look for something more practical that we can overload with the right signifiers." + +"Like your coronation robe?" + +Amber winces. "Touché." The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever was left over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the edge of the halo. "But that was just scenery setting. I didn't fully understand what I was doing, back then." + +"Welcome to maturity and experience." Annette smiles distantly at some faint memory: "You don't /{feel}/ older, you just know what you're doing this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was here." + +"That birdbrain," Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her father might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and in through the door of a real department store, one with actual human sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. "If I'm sending out fractional mes tailored for different demographics, isn't it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could drill down and tailor a partial for each individual elector -" + +"Per-haps." The door re-forms behind them. "But you need a core identity." Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the sales consultant. "To start with a core design, a style, then to work outward, tailoring you for your audience. And besides, there is tonight's - ah, bonjour!" + +"Hello. How can we help you?" The two female and one male shop assistants who appear from around the displays - cycling through a history of the couture industry, catwalk models mixing and matching centuries of fashion - are clearly chips off a common primary personality, instances united by their enhanced sartorial obsession. If they're not actually a fashion borganism, they're not far from it, dressed head to foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani replicas, making a classical twentieth-century statement. This isn't simply a shop, it's a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff trained as guardians of the esoteric secrets of good taste. + +"Mais oui. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here." Annette reaches through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped within the shop's location cache and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just completed at the lead assistant: "She is into politics going, and the question of her image is important." + +"We would be /{delighted}/ to help you," purrs the proprietor, taking a delicate step forward: "Perhaps you could tell us what you've got in mind?" + +"Oh. Well." Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette; Annette stares back, unblinking. /{It's your head}/, she sends. "I'm involved in the accelerationista administrative program. Are you familiar with it?" + +The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow between perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to match her classic New Look suit. "I have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion like myself does not concern herself with politics," she says, a touch self-deprecatingly. "Especially the politics of her clients. Your, ah, aunt said it was a question of image?" + +"Yes." Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual rags. "She's my election agent. My problem, as she says, is there's a certain voter demographic that mistakes image for substance and is afraid of the unknown, and I need to acquire a wardrobe that triggers associations of probity, of respect and deliberation. One suitable for a representative with a radical political agenda but a strong track record. I'm afraid I'm in a hurry to start with - I've got a big fund-raising party tonight. I know it's short notice, but I need something off the shelf for it." + +"What exactly is it you're hoping to achieve?" asks the male couturier, his voice hoarse and his r's rolling with some half-shed Mediterranean accent. He sounds fascinated. "If you think it might influence your choice of wardrobe ..." + +"I'm running for the assembly," Amber says bluntly. "On a platform calling for a state of emergency and an immediate total effort to assemble a starship. This solar system isn't going to be habitable for much longer, and we need to emigrate. All of us, you included, before the Vile Offspring decide to reprocess us into computronium. I'm going to be doorstepping the entire electorate in parallel, and the experience needs to be personalized." She manages to smile. "That means, I think, perhaps eight outfits and four different independent variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats - enough that each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical fabric and virtual. In addition, I'll want to see your range of historical formalwear, but that's of secondary interest for now." She grins. "Do you have any facilities for response-testing the combinations against different personality types from different periods? If we could run up some models, that would be useful." + +"I think we can do better than that." The manager nods approvingly, perhaps contemplating her gold-backed deposit account. "Hansel, please divert any further visitors until we have dealt with Madam ...?" + +"Macx. Amber Macx." + +"- Macx's requirements." She shows no sign of familiarity with the name. Amber winces slightly; it's a sign of how hugely fractured the children of Saturn have become, and of how vast the population of the halo, that only a generation has passed and already barely anyone remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. "If you'd come this way, please, we can begin to research an eigenstyle combination that matches your requirements -" + +* * * + +Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for the festival. The only people who see him are the chattering ghosts of dead politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order of the Vile Offspring. The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon-yellow sky. The air smells faintly of ammonia, and the big spaces are full of small ideas; but Sirhan doesn't care because, for now, he's alone. + +Except that he isn't, really. + +"Excuse me, are you real?" someone asks him in American-accented English. + +It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his introspection and realize that he's being spoken to. "What?" he asks, slightly puzzled. Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fogbank above his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd in a post-singularity nativity play. "I say, what?" Outrage simmers at the back of his mind - /{Is nowhere private?}/ - but as he turns, he sees that one of the ghost pods has split lengthwise across its white mushroomlike crown, spilling a trickle of leftover construction fluid and a completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who wears an expression of profound surprise. + +"I can't find my implants," the Anglo male says, shaking his head. "But I'm really here, aren't I? Incarnate?" He glances round at the other pods. "This isn't a sim." + +Sirhan sighs - /{another exile}/ - and sends forth a daemon to interrogate the ghost pod's abstract interface. It doesn't tell him much - unlike most of the resurrectees, this one seems to be undocumented. "You've been dead. Now you're alive. I /{suppose}/ that means you're now almost as real as I am. What else do you need to know?" + +"When is -" The newcomer stops. "Can you direct me to the processing center?" he asks carefully. "I'm disoriented." + +Sirhan is surprised - most immigrants take a lot longer to figure that out. "Did you die recently?" he asks. + +"I'm not sure I died at all." The newcomer rubs his bald head, looking puzzled. "Hey, no jacks!" He shrugs, exasperated. "Look, the processing center ..?" + +"Over there." Sirhan gestures at the monumental mass of the Boston Museum of Science (shipped all the way from Earth a couple of decades ago to save it from the demolition of the inner system). "My mother runs it." He smiles thinly. + +"Your mother -" the newly resurrected immigrant stares at him intensely, then blinks. "Holy shit." He takes a step toward Sirhan. "It is you -" + +Sirhan recoils and snaps his fingers. The thin trail of vaporous cloud that has been following him all this time, shielding his shaven pate from the diffuse red glow of the swarming shells of orbital nanocomputers that have replaced the inner planets, extrudes a staff of hazy blue mist that stretches down from the air and slams together in his hand like a quarterstaff spun from bubbles. "Are you threatening me, sir?" he asks, deceptively mildly. + +"I -" The newcomer stops dead. Then he throws back his head and laughs. "Don't be silly, son. We're related!" + +"Son?" Sirhan bristles. "Who do you think you are -" A horrible thought occurs to him. "Oh. Oh dear." A wash of adrenaline drenches him in warm sweat. "I do believe we've met, in a manner of speaking ..." /{Oh boy, this is going to upset so many applecarts,}/ he realizes, spinning off a ghost to think about the matter. The implications are enormous. + +The naked newcomer nods, grinning at some private joke. "You look different from ground level. And now I'm human again." He runs his hands down his ribs, pauses, and glances at Sirhan owlishly. "Um. I didn't mean to frighten you. But I don't suppose you could find your aged grandfather something to wear?" + +Sirhan sighs and points his staff straight up at the sky. The rings are edge on, for the lily pad continent floats above an ocean of cold gas along Saturn's equator, and they glitter like a ruby laser beam slashed across the sky. "Let there be aerogel." + +A cloud of wispy soap bubble congeals in a cone shape above the newly resurrected ancient and drops over him, forming a caftan. "Thanks," he says. He looks round, twisting his neck, then winces. "Damn, that /{hurt}/. Ouch. I need to get myself a set of implants." + +"They can sort you out in the processing center. It's in the basement in the west wing. They'll give you something more permanent to wear, too." Sirhan peers at him. "Your face -" He pages through rarely used memories. Yes, it's Manfred as he looked in the early years of the last century. As he looked around the time Mother-not was born. There's something positively indecent about meeting your own grandfather in the full flush of his youth. "Are you sure you haven't been messing with your phenotype?" he asks suspiciously. + +"No, this is what I used to look like. I think. Back in the naked ape again, after all these years as an emergent function of a flock of passenger pigeons." His grandfather smirks. "What's your mother going to say?" + +"I really don't know -" Sirhan shakes his head. "Come on, let's get you to immigrant processing. You're sure you're not just an historical simulation?" + +The place is already heaving with the resimulated. Just why the Vile Offspring seem to feel it's necessary to apply valuable exaquops to the job of deriving accurate simulations of dead humans - outrageously accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp - much less beaming them at the refugee camps on Saturn - is beyond Sirhan's ken: But he wishes they'd stop. + +"Just a couple of days ago I crapped on your lawn. Hope you don't mind." Manfred cocks his head to one side and stares at Sirhan with beady eyes. "Actually, I'm here because of the upcoming election. It's got the potential to turn into a major crisis point, and I figured Amber would need me around." + +"Well you'd better come on in, then," Sirhan says resignedly as he climbs the steps, enters the foyer, and leads his turbulent grandfather into the foggy haze of utility nanomachines that fill the building. + +He can't wait to see what his mother will do when she meets her father in the flesh, after all this time. + +* * * + +Welcome to Saturn, your new home world. This FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) memeplex is designed to orient you and explain the following: + +_* How you got here + +_* Where "here" is + +_* Things you should avoid doing + +_* Things you might want to do as soon as possible + +_* Where to go for more information + +If you are remembering this presentation, you are probably resimulated. This is not the same as being /{resurrected}/. You may remember dying. Do not worry: Like all your other memories, it is a fabrication. In fact, this is the first time you have ever been alive. (Exception: If you died after the /{singularity,}/ you may be a genuine resurrectee. In which case, why are you reading this FAQ?) + +!_ How you got here: + +The center of the solar system - Mercury, Venus, Earth's Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, and Jupiter - have been dismantled, or are being dismantled, by weakly godlike intelligences. [NB: Monotheistic clergy and Europeans who remember living prior to 1600, see alternative memeplex "in the beginning."] A weakly godlike intelligence is not a supernatural agency, but the product of a highly advanced society that learned how to artificially create souls [late 20th century: software] and translate human minds into souls and vice versa. [Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.] + +Some of the weakly godlike intelligences appear to cultivate an interest in their human antecedents - for whatever reason is not known. (Possibilities include the study of history through horticulture, entertainment through live-action role-playing, revenge, and economic forgery.) While no definitive analysis is possible, all the resimulated persons to date exhibit certain common characteristics: They are all based on well-documented historical persons, their memories show suspicious gaps [see: smoke and mirrors], and they are ignorant of or predate the /{singularity}/ [see: /{Turing Oracle, Vinge catastrophe}/]. + +It is believed that the weakly godlike agencies have created you as a vehicle for the introspective study of your historical antecedent by backward-chaining from your corpus of documented works, and the back-projected genome derived from your collateral descendants, to generate an abstract description of your computational state vector. This technique is extremely intensive [see: /{expTime-complete algorithms, Turing Oracle, time travel, industrial magic}/] but marginally plausible in the absence of supernatural explanations. + +After experiencing your life, the weakly godlike agencies have expelled you. For reasons unknown, they chose to do this by transmitting your upload state and genome/proteome complex to receivers owned and operated by a consortium of charities based on Saturn. These charities have provided for your basic needs, including the body you now occupy. + +In summary: You are a /{reconstruction}/ of someone who lived and died a long time ago, not a reincarnation. You have no intrinsic moral right to the identity you believe to be your own, and an extensive body of case law states that you do not inherit your antecedent's possessions. Other than that, you are a free individual. + +Note that /{fictional resimulation}/ is strictly forbidden. If you have reason to believe that you may be a fictional character, you must contact the city /{immediately}/. [ See: /{James Bond, Spider Jerusalem}/.] Failure to comply is a felony. + +!_ Where you are: + +You are on Saturn. Saturn is a gas giant planet 120,500 kilometers in diameter, located 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth's sun. [NB: Europeans who remember living prior to 1580, see alternative memeplex "/{the flat Earth - not}/".] Saturn has been partially terraformed by /{posthuman}/ emigrants from Earth and Jupiter orbit: The ground beneath your feet is, in reality, the floor of a hydrogen balloon the size of a continent, floating in Saturn's upper atmosphere. [NB: Europeans who remember living prior to 1790, internalize the supplementary memeplex: "the /{Brothers Montgolfier}/."] The balloon is very safe, but mining activities and the use of ballistic weapons are strongly deprecated because the air outside is unbreathable and extremely cold. + +The society you have been instantiated in is /{extremely wealthy}/ within the scope of Economics 1.0, the value transfer system developed by human beings during and after your own time. Money exists, and is used for the usual range of goods and services, but the basics - food, water, air, power, off-the-shelf clothing, housing, historical entertainment, and monster trucks - are /{free}/. An implicit social contract dictates that, in return for access to these facilities, you obey certain laws. + +If you wish to opt out of this social contract, be advised that other worlds may run *{Economics 2.0}* or subsequent releases. These value-transfer systems are more efficient - hence wealthier - than Economics 1.0, but true participation in Economics 2.0 is not possible without dehumanizing cognitive surgery. Thus, in /{absolute}/ terms, although this society is richer than any you have ever heard of, it is also a poverty-stricken backwater compared to its neighbors. + +!_ Things you should avoid doing: + +Many activities that have been classified as crimes in other societies are legal here. These include but are not limited to: acts of worship, art, sex, violence, communication, or commerce between consenting competent sapients of any species, except where such acts transgress the list of prohibitions below. [See additional memeplex: /{competence defined}/.] + +Some activities are prohibited here and may have been legal in your previous experience. These include willful deprivation of ability to consent [see: /{slavery}/], interference in the absence of consent [see: /{minors, legal status of}/], formation of limited liability companies [see: /{singularity}/], and invasion of defended privacy [see: /{the Slug, Cognitive Pyramid Schemes, Brain Hacking, Thompson Trust Exploit}/]. + +Some activities unfamiliar to you are highly illegal and should be scrupulously avoided. These include: possession of nuclear weapons, possession of unlimited autonomous replicators [see: /{gray goo}/], coercive assimilationism [see: /{borganism, aggressive}/], coercive halting of Turing-equivalent personalities [see: basilisks], and applied theological engineering [see: /{God bothering}/]. + +Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and should be avoided for your safety, although they are not illegal as such. These include: giving your bank account details to the son of the Nigerian Minister of Finance; buying title to bridges, skyscrapers, spacecraft, planets, or other real assets; murder; selling your identity; and entering into financial contracts with entities running Economics 2.0 or higher. + +!_ Things you should do as soon as possible: + +Many material artifacts you may consider essential to life are freely available - just ask the city, and it will grow you clothes, a house, food, or other basic essentials. Note, however, that the library of public domain structure templates is of necessity restrictive, and does not contain items that are highly fashionable or that remain in copyright. Nor will the city provide you with replicators, weapons, sexual favors, slaves, or zombies. + +You are advised to register as a citizen as soon as possible. If the individual you are a resimulation of can be confirmed dead, you may adopt their name but not - in law - any lien or claim on their property, contracts, or descendants. You register as a citizen by asking the city to register you; the process is painless and typically complete within four hours. Unless you are registered, your legal status as a sapient organism may be challenged. The ability to request citizenship rights is one of the legal tests for sapience, and failure to comply may place you in legal jeopardy. You can renounce your citizenship whenever you wish: This may be desirable if you emigrate to another polity. + +While many things are free, it is highly likely that you posses no employable skills, and therefore, no way of earning money with which to purchase unfree items. The pace of change in the past century has rendered almost all skills you may have learned obsolete [see: /{singularity}/]. However, owing to the rapid pace of change, many cooperatives, trusts, and guilds offer on-the-job training or educational loans. + +Your ability to learn depends on your ability to take information in the format in which it is offered. /{Implants}/ are frequently used to provide a direct link between your brain and the intelligent machines that surround it. A basic core implant set is available on request from the city. [See: /{implant security}/, /{firewall}/, /{wetware}/.] + +Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided - for a fee. (In event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.) If you have any preexisting medical conditions or handicaps, consult the city. + +The city is an agoric-annealing participatory democracy with a limited liability constitution. Its current executive agency is a weakly godlike intelligence that chooses to associate with human-equivalent intelligences: This agency is colloquially known as "Hello Kitty," "Beautiful Cat," or "Aineko," and may manifest itself in a variety of physical avatars if corporeal interaction is desired. (Prior to the arrival of "Hello Kitty," the city used a variety of human-designed expert systems that provided suboptimal performance.) + +The city's mission statement is to provide a mediatory environment for human-equivalent intelligences and to preserve same in the face of external aggression. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the ongoing political processes of determining such responses. Citizens also have a duty to serve on a jury if called (including senatorial service), and to defend the city. + +!_ Where to go for further information: + +Until you have registered as a citizen and obtained basic implants, all further questions should be directed to the city. Once you have learned to use your implants, you will not need to ask this question. + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to decade the ninth, singularity plus one gigasecond (or maybe more - nobody's quite sure when, or indeed /{if}/, a singularity has been created). The human population of the solar system is either six billion, or sixty billion, depending on whether you class the forked state vectors of posthumans and the simulations of dead phenotypes running in the Vile Offspring's Schrödinger boxes as people. Most of the physically incarnate still live on Earth, but the lily-pads floating beneath continent-sized hot-hydrogen balloons in Saturn's upper atmosphere already house a few million, and the writing is on the wall for the rocky inner planets. All the remaining human-equivalent intelligences with half a clue to rub together are trying to emigrate before the Vile Offspring decide to recycle Earth to fill in a gap in the concentric shells of nanocomputers they're running on. The half-constructed Matrioshka brain already darkens the skies of Earth and has caused a massive crash in the planet's photosynthetic biomass, as plants starve for short-wavelength light. + +_1 Since decade the seventh, the computational density of the solar system has soared. Within the asteroid belt, more than half the available planetary mass has been turned into nanoprocessors, tied together by quantum entanglement into a web so dense that each gram of matter can simulate all the possible life experiences of an individual human being in a scant handful of minutes. Economics 2.0 is itself obsolescent, forced to mutate in a furious survivalist arms race by the arrival of the Slug. Only the name remains as a vague shorthand for merely human-equivalent intelligences to use when describing interactions they don't understand. + +_1 The latest generation of posthuman entities is less overtly hostile to humans, but much more alien than the generations of the fifties and seventies. Among their less comprehensible activities, the Vile Offspring are engaged in exploring the phase-space of all possible human experiences from the inside out. Perhaps they caught a dose of the Tiplerite heresy along the way, for now a steady stream of resimulant uploads is pouring through the downsystem relays in Titan orbit. The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused, except that they're not really resurrectees - they're simulations based on their originals' recorded histories, blocky and missing chunks of their memories, as bewildered as baby ducklings as they're herded into the wood-chipper of the future. + +_1 Sirhan al-Khurasani despises them with the abstract contempt of an antiquarian for a cunning but ultimately transparent forgery. But Sirhan is young, and he's got more contempt than he knows what to do with. It's a handy outlet for his frustration. He has a lot to be frustrated at, starting with his intermittently dysfunctional family, the elderly stars around whom his planet whizzes in chaotic trajectories of enthusiasm and distaste. + +_1 Sirhan fancies himself a philosopher-historian of the singular age, a chronicler of the incomprehensible, which would be a fine thing to be except that his greatest insights are all derived from Aineko. He alternately fawns over and rages against his mother, who is currently a leading light in the refugee community, and honors (when not attempting to evade the will of) his father, who is lately a rising philosophical patriarch within the Conservationist faction. He's secretly in awe (not to mention slightly resentful) of his grandfather Manfred. In fact, the latter's abrupt reincarnation in the flesh has quite disconcerted him. And he sometimes listens to his stepgrandmother Annette, who has reincarnated in more or less her original 2020s body after spending some years as a great ape, and who seems to view him as some sort of personal project. + +_1 OnlyAnnette isn't being very helpful right now. His mother is campaigning on an electoral platform calling for a vote to blow up the world, Annette is helping run her campaign, his grandfather is trying to convince him to entrust everything he holds dear to a rogue lobster, and the cat is being typically feline and evasive. + +_1 Talk about families with problems ... + +* * * + +They've transplanted imperial Brussels to Saturn in its entirety, mapped tens of megatonnes of buildings right down to nanoscale and beamed them into the outer darkness to be reinstantiated down-well on the lily-pad colonies that dot the stratosphere of the gas giant. (Eventually the entire surface of the Earth will follow - after which the Vile Offspring will core the planet like an apple, dismantle it into a cloud of newly formed quantum nanocomputers to add to their burgeoning Matrioshka brain.) Due to a resource contention problem in the festival committee's planning algorithm - or maybe it's simply an elaborate joke - Brussels now begins just on the other side of a diamond bubble wall from the Boston Museum of Science, less than a kilometer away as the passenger pigeon flies. Which is why, when it's time to celebrate a birthday or name day (meaningless though those concepts are, out on Saturn's synthetic surface), Amber tends to drag people over to the bright lights of the big city. + +This time she's throwing a rather special party. At Annette's canny prompting, she's borrowed the Atomium and invited a horde of guests to a big event. It's not a family bash - although Annette's promised her a surprise - so much as a business meeting, testing the water as a preliminary to declaring her candidacy. It's a media coup, an attempt to engineer Amber's re-entry into the mainstream politics of the human system. + +Sirhan doesn't really want to be here. He's got far more important things to do, like continuing to catalogue Aineko's memories of the voyage of the *{Field Circus}*. He's also collating a series of interviews with resimulated logical positivists from Oxford, England (the ones who haven't retreated into gibbering near catatonia upon realizing that their state vectors are all members of the set of all sets that do not contain themselves), when he isn't attempting to establish a sound rational case for his belief that extraterrestrial superintelligence is an oxymoron and the router network is just an accident, one of evolution's little pranks. + +But Tante Annette twisted his arm and promised he was in on the surprise if he came to the party. And despite everything, he wouldn't miss being a fly on the wall during the coming meeting between Manfred and Amber for all the tea in China. + +Sirhan walks up to the gleaming stainless-steel dome that contains the entrance to the Atomium, and waits for the lift. He's in line behind a gaggle of young-looking women, skinny and soigné in cocktail gowns and tiaras lifted from 1920s silent movies. (Annette declared an age of elegance theme for the party, knowing full well that it would force Amber to focus on her public appearance.) Sirhan's attention is, however, elsewhere. The various fragments of his mind are conducting three simultaneous interviews with philosophers ("whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent" in spades), controlling two 'bots that are overhauling the museum plumbing and air-recycling system, and he's busy discussing observations of the alien artifact orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, with Aineko. What's left of him exhibits about as much social presence as a pickled cabbage. + +The lift arrives and accepts a load of passengers. Sirhan is crowded into one corner by a bubble of high-society laughter and an aromatic puff of smoke from an improbable ivory cigarette holder as the lift surges, racing up the sixty-meter shaft toward the observation deck at the top of the Atomium. It's a ten-meter-diameter metal globe, spiral staircases and escalators connecting it to the seven spheres at the corners of an octahedron that make up the former centerpiece of the 1950 World's Fair. Unlike most of the rest of Brussels, it's the original bits and atoms, bent alloy structures from before the space age shipped out to Saturn at enormous expense. The lift arrives with a slight jerk. "Excuse /{me}/," squeaks one of the good-time girls as she lurches backward, elbowing Sirhan. + +He blinks, barely noticing her black bob of hair, chromatophore-tinted shadows artfully tuned around her eyes: "Nothing to excuse." In the background, Aineko is droning on sarcastically about the lack of interest the crew of the *{Field Circus}* exhibited in the cat's effort to decompile their hitchhiker, the Slug. It's distracting as hell, but Sirhan feels a desperate urge to understand what happened out there. It's the key to understanding his not-mother's obsessions and weaknesses - which, he senses, will be important in the times to come. + +He evades the gaggle of overdressed good-time girls and steps out onto the lower of the two stainless-steel decks that bisect the sphere. Accepting a fruit cocktail from a discreetly humaniform waitron, he strolls toward a row of triangular windows that gaze out across the arena toward the American Pavilion and the World Village. The metal walls are braced with turquoise-painted girders, and the perspex transparencies are fogged with age. He can barely see the one-tenth-scale model of an atomic-powered ocean liner leaving the pier below, or the eight-engined giant seaplane beside it. "They never once asked me if the Slug had attempted to map itself into the human-compatible spaces aboard the ship," Aineko bitches at him. "I wasn't expecting them to, but really! Your mother's too trusting, boy." + +"I suppose you took precautions?" Sirhan's ghost murmurs to the cat. That sets the irascible metafeline off again on a long discursive tail-washing rant about the unreliability of Economics-2.0-compliant financial instruments. Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such transactions intrinsically untrustworthy. + +/{Which is why you're stuck here with us apes}/, Sirhan-prime cynically notes as he spawns an Eliza ghost to carry on nodding at the cat while he experiences the party. + +It's uncomfortably warm in the Atomium sphere - not surprising, there must be thirty people milling around up here, not counting the waitrons - and several local multicast channels are playing a variety of styles of music to synchronize the mood swings of the revelers to hardcore techno, waltz, raga ... + +"Having a good time, are we?" Sirhan breaks away from integrating one of his timid philosophers and realizes that his glass is empty, and his mother is grinning alarmingly at him over the rim of a cocktail glass containing something that glows in the dark. She's wearing spike-heeled boots and a black velvet cat suit that hugs her contours like a second skin, and she's already getting drunk. In wall-clock years she is younger than Sirhan; it's like having a bizarrely knowing younger sister mysteriously injected into his life to replace the eigenmother who stayed home and died with the Ring Imperium decades ago. "Look at you, hiding in a corner at your grandfather's party! Hey, your glass is empty. Want to try this caipirinha? There's someone you've got to meet over here -" + +It's at moments like this that Sirhan really wonders what in Jupiter's orbit his father ever saw in this woman. (But then again, in the world line this instance of her has returned from, he didn't. So what does that signify?) "As long as there's no fermented grape juice in it," he says resignedly, allowing himself to be led past a gaggle of conversations and a mournful-looking gorilla slurping a long drink through a straw. "More of your /{accelerationista}/ allies?" + +"Maybe not." It's the girl gang he avoided noticing in the lift, their eyes sparkling, really getting into this early twen-cen drag party thing, waving their cigarette holders and cocktail glasses around with wild abandon. "Rita, I'd like you to meet Sirhan, my other fork's son. Sirhan, this is Rita? She's an historian, too. Why don't you -" + +Dark eyes, emphasized not by powder or paint, but by chromatophores inside her skin cells: black hair, chain of enormous pearls, slim black dress sweeping the floor, a look of mild embarrassment on her heart-shaped face: She could be a clone of Audrey Hepburn in any other century, "Didn't I just meet you in the elevator?" The embarrassment shifts to her cheeks, becoming visible. + +Sirhan flushes, unsure how to reply. Just then, an interloper arrives on the scene, pushing in between them. "Are you the curator who reorganized the Precambrian gallery along teleology lines? I've got some things to say about /{that}/!" The interloper is tall, assertive, and blonde. Sirhan hates her from the first sight of her wagging finger. + +"Oh shut up, Marissa, this is a party, you've been being a pain all evening." To his surprise, Rita the historian rounds on the interloper angrily. + +"It's not a problem," he manages to say. In the back of his mind, something makes the Rogerian puppet-him that's listening to the cat sit up and dump-merge a whole lump of fresh memories into his mind - something important, something about the Vile Offspring sending a starship to bring something back from the router - but the people around him are soaking up so much attention that he has to file it for later. + +"Yes it /{is}/ a problem," Rita declares. She points at the interloper, who is saying something about the invalidity of teleological interpretations, trying to justify herself, and says, "/{Plonk}/. Phew. Where were we?" + +Sirhan blinks. Suddenly everyone but him seems to be ignoring that annoying Marissa person. "What just happened?" he asks cautiously. + +"I killfiled her. Don't tell me, you aren't running Superplonk yet, are you?" Rita flicks a location-cached idea at him and he takes it cautiously, spawning a couple of specialized Turing Oracles to check it for halting states. It seems to be some kind of optic lobe hack that accesses a collaborative database of eigenfaces, with some sort of side interface to Broca's region. "Share and enjoy, confrontation-free parties." + +"I've never seen -" Sirhan trails off as he loads the module distractedly. (The cat is rambling on about god modules and metastatic entanglement and the difficulty of arranging to have personalities custom-grown to order somewhere in the back of his head, while his fractional-self nods wisely whenever it pauses.) Something like an inner eyelid descends. He looks round; there's a vague blob at one side of the room, making an annoying buzzing sound. His mother seems to be having an animated conversation with it. "That's rather interesting." + +"Yes, it helps no end at this sort of event." Rita startles him by taking his left arm in hand - her cigarette holder shrivels and condenses until it's no more than a slight thickening around the wrist of her opera glove - and steers him toward a waitron. "I'm sorry about your foot, earlier, I was a bit overloaded. Is Amber Macx really your mother?" + +"Not exactly, she's my eigenmother," he mumbles. "The reincarnated download of the version who went out to Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, aboard the *{Field Circus}*. She married a French-Algerian confidence-trick analyst instead of my father, but I think they divorced a couple of years ago. My /{real}/ mother married an imam, but they died in the aftermath of Economics 2.0." She seems to be steering him in the direction of the window bay Amber dragged him away from earlier. "Why do you ask?" + +"Because you're not very good at making small talk," Rita says quietly, "and you don't seem very good in crowds. Is that right? Was it you who performed that amazing dissection of Wittgenstein's cognitive map? The one with the preverbal Gödel string in it?" + +"It was -" He clears his throat. "You thought it was amazing?" Suddenly, on impulse, he detaches a ghost to identify this Rita person and find out who she is, what she wants. It's not normally worth the effort to get to know someone more closely than casual small talk, but she seems to have been digging into his background, and he wants to know why. Along with the him that's chatting to Aineko, that makes about three instances pulling in near-realtime resources. He'll be running up an existential debt soon if he keeps forking ghosts like this. + +"I thought so," she says. There's a bench in front of the wall, and somehow he finds himself sitting on it next to her. /{There's no danger, we're not in private or anything}/, he tells himself stiffly. She's smiling at him, face tilted slightly to one side and lips parted, and for a moment, a dizzy sense of possibility washes over him: /{What if she's about to throw all propriety aside? How undignified!}/ Sirhan believes in self-restraint and dignity. "I was really interested in this -" She passes him another dynamically loadable blob, encompassing a detailed critique of his analysis of Wittgenstein's matriophobia in the context of gendered language constructs and nineteenth century Viennese society, along with a hypothesis that leaves Sirhan gasping with mild indignation at the very idea that /{he}/ of all people might share Wittgenstein's skewed outlook - "What do you think?" she asks, grinning impishly at him. + +"Nnngk." Sirhan tries to unswallow his tongue. Rita crosses her legs, her gown hissing. "I, ah, that is to say" - At which moment, his partials re-integrate, dumping a slew of positively pornographic images into his memories. /{It's a trap!}/ they shriek, her breasts and hips and pubes - clean-shaven, he can't help noticing - thrusting at him in hotly passionate abandon, /{Mother's trying to make you loose like her!}/ and he remembers what it /{would}/ be like to wake up in bed next to this woman whom he barely knows after being married to her for a year, because one of his cognitive ghosts has just spent several seconds of network time (or several subjective months) getting hot and sweaty with a ghost of her own, and she does have interesting research ideas, even if she's a pushy over-westernized woman who thinks she can run his life for him. "What /{is}/ this?" he splutters, his ears growing hot and his garments constricting. + +"Just speculating about possibilities. We could get a lot done together." She snakes an arm round his shoulders and pulls him toward her, gently. "Don't you want to find out if we could work out?" + +"But, but -" Sirhan is steaming. /{Is she offering casual sex?}/ He wonders, profoundly embarrassed by his own inability to read her signals: "What do you /{want}/?" he asks. + +"You /{do}/ know that you can do more with Superplonk than just killfile annoying idiots?" she whispers in his ear. "We can be invisible right now, if you like. It's great for confidential meetings - other things, too. We can work beautifully together, our ghosts annealed really well ..." + +Sirhan jumps up, his face stinging, and turns away: "No thank you!" he snaps, angry at himself. "Goodbye!" His other instances, interrupted by his broadcast emotional overload, are distracted from their tasks and sputtering with indignation. Her hurt expression is too much for him: The killfile snaps down, blurring her into an indistinct black blob on the wall, veiled by his own brain as he turns and walks away, seething with anger at his mother for being so unfair as to make him behold his own face in the throes of fleshy passion. + +* * * + +Meanwhile, in one of the lower spheres, padded with silvery blue insulating pillows bound together with duct tape, the movers and shakers of the accelerationista faction are discussing their bid for world power at fractional-C velocities. + +"We can't outrun everything. For example, a collapse of the false vacuum," Manfred insists, slightly uncoordinated and slurring his vowels under the influence of the first glass of fruit punch he's experienced in nigh-on twenty real-time years. His body is young and still relatively featureless, hair still growing out, and he's abandoned his old no-implants fetish at last to adopt an array of interfaces that let him internalize all the exocortex processes that he formerly ran on an array of dumb Turing machines outside his body. He's standing on his own sense of style and is the only person in the room who isn't wearing some variation of dinner jacket or classical evening dress. "Entangled exchange via routers is all very well, but it won't let us escape the universe itself - any phase change will catch up eventually, the network must have an end. And then where will we be, Sameena?" + +"I'm not disputing that." The woman he's talking to, wearing a green-and-gold sari and a medieval maharajah's ransom in gold and natural diamonds, nods thoughtfully. "But it hasn't happened yet, and we've got evidence that superhuman intelligences have been loose in this universe for gigayears, so there's a fair bet that the worst catastrophe scenarios are unlikely. And looking closer to home, we don't know what the routers are for, or who made them. Until then ..." She shrugs. "Look what happened last time somebody tried to probe them. No offense intended." + +"It's already happened. If what I hear is correct, the Vile Offspring aren't nearly as negative about the idea of using the routers as we old-fashioned metahumans might like to believe." Manfred frowns, trying to recall some hazy anecdote - he's experimenting with a new memory compression algorithm, necessitated by his pack rat mnemonic habits when younger, and sometimes the whole universe feels as if it's nearly on the tip of his tongue. "So, we seem to be in violent agreement about the need to /{know more}/ about what's going on, and to find out what they're doing out there. We've got cosmic background anisotropies caused by the waste heat from computing processes millions of light-years across - it takes a big interstellar civilization to do that, and they don't seem to have fallen into the same rat trap as the local Matrioshka brain civilizations. And we've got worrying rumors about the VO messing around with the structure of space-time in order to find a way around the Beckenstein bound. If the VO are trying that, then the folks out near the supercluster already know the answers. The best way to find out what's happening is to go and talk to whoever's responsible. Can we at least agree on that?" + +"Probably not." Her eyes glitter with amusement. "It all depends on whether one believes in these civilizations in the first place. I /{know}/ your people point to deep-field camera images going all the way back to some wonky hubble-bubble scrying mirror from the late twentieth, but we've got no evidence except some theories about the Casimir effect and pair production and spinning beakers of helium-3 - much less proof that whole bunch of alien galactic civilizations are trying to collapse the false vacuum and destroy the universe!" Her voice dropped a notch: "At least, not enough proof to convince most people, Manny dear. I know this comes as a shock to you, but not /{everyone}/ is a neophiliac posthuman bodysurfer whose idea of a sabbatical is to spend twenty years as a flock of tightly networked seagulls in order to try and to prove the Turing Oracle thesis -" + +"Not everyone is concerned with the deep future," Manfred interrupts. "It's important! If we live or die, that doesn't matter - that's not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we're stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It's downright /{embarrassing}/ to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there's going to come a time when there's nobody or nothing to remember us then what does -" + +"Manfred?" + +He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly. + +It's Amber, poised in black cat suit with cocktail glass. Her expression is open and confused, appallingly vulnerable. Blue liquid slops, almost spilling out of her glass - the rim barely extends itself in time to catch the drops. Behind her stands Annette, a deeply self-satisfied smile on her face. + +"You." Amber pauses, her cheek twitching as bits of her mind page in and out of her skull, polling external information sources. "You really /{are}/ -" + +A hasty cloud materializes under her hand as her fingers relax, dropping the glass. + +"Uh." Manfred stares, at a complete loss for words. "I'd, uh." After a moment he looks down. "I'm sorry. I'll get you another drink ..?" + +"Why didn't someone warn me?" Amber complains. + +"We thought you could use the good advice," Annette stated into the awkward silence. "And a family reunion. It was meant to be a surprise." + +"A surprise." Amber looks perplexed. "You could say that." + +"You're taller than I was expecting," Manfred says unexpectedly. "People look different when you're not using human eyes." + +"Yeah?" She looks at him, and he turns his head slightly, facing her. It's a historic moment, and Annette is getting it all on memory diamond, from every angle. The family's dirty little secret is that Amber and her father have /{never met}/, not face-to-face in physical meat-machine proximity. She was born years after Manfred and Pamela separated, after all, decanted prefertilized from a tank of liquid nitrogen. This is the first time either of them have actually seen the other's face without electronic intermediation. And while they've said everything that needed to be said on a businesslike level, anthropoid family politics is still very much a matter of body language and pheromones. "How long have you been out and about?" she asks, trying to disguise her confusion. + +"About six hours." Manfred manages a rueful chuckle, trying to take the sight of her in all at once. "Let's get you another drink and put our heads together?" + +"Okay." Amber takes a deep breath and glares at Annette. "You set this up, /{you}/ clean up the mess." + +Annette just stands there smiling at the confusion of her accomplishment. + +* * * + +The cold light of dawn finds Sirhan angry, sober, and ready to pick a fight with the first person who comes through the door of his office. The room is about ten meters across, with a floor of polished marble and skylights in the intricately plastered ceiling. The walkthrough of his current project sprouts in the middle of the floor like a ghostly abstract cauliflower, fractal branches dwindling down to infolded nodes tagged with compressed identifiers. The branches expand and shrink as Sirhan paces around it, zooming to readability in response to his eyeball dynamics. But he isn't paying it much attention. He's too disturbed, uncertain, trying to work out whom to blame. Which is why, when the door bangs open, his first response is to whirl angrily and open his mouth - then stop. "What do /{you}/ want?" he demands. + +"A word, if you please?" Annette looks around distractedly. "This is your project?" + +"Yes," he says icily, and banishes the walkthrough with a wave of one hand. "What do you want?" + +"I'm not sure." Annette pauses. For a moment she looks weary, tired beyond mortal words, and Sirhan momentarily wonders if perhaps he's spreading the blame too far. This ninetysomething Frenchwoman who is no blood relative, who was in years past the love of his scatterbrained grandfather's life, seems the least likely person to be trying to manipulate him, at least in such an unwelcome and intimate manner. But there's no telling. Families are strange things, and even though the current instantiations of his father and mother aren't the ones who ran his pre-adolescent brain through a couple of dozen alternative lifelines before he was ten, he can't be sure - or that they wouldn't enlist Tante Annette's assistance in fucking with his mind. "We need to talk about your mother," she continues. + +"We do, do we?" Sirhan turns around and sees the vacancy of the room for what it is, a socket, like a pulled tooth, informed as much by what is absent as by what is present. He snaps his fingers, and an intricate bench of translucent bluish utility fog congeals out of the air behind him. He sits: Annette can do what she wants. + +"Oui." She thrusts her hands deep into the pocket of the peasant smock she's wearing - a major departure from her normal style - and leans against the wall. Physically, she looks young enough to have spent her entire life blitzing around the galaxy at three nines of lightspeed, but her posture is world-weary and ancient. History is a foreign country, and the old are unwilling emigrants, tired out by the constant travel. "Your mother, she has taken on a huge job, but it's one that needs doing. /{You}/ agreed it needed doing, years ago, with the archive store. /{She}/ is now trying to get it moving, that is what the campaign is about, to place before the electors a choice of how best to move an entire civilization. So I ask, why do you obstruct her?" + +Sirhan works his jaw; he feels like spitting. "/{Why}/?" he snaps. + +"Yes. Why?" Annette gives in and magics up a chair from the swirling fogbank beneath the ceiling. She crouches in it, staring at him. "It is a question." + +"I have nothing against her political machinations," Sirhan says tensely. "But her uninvited interference in my personal life -" + +"What interference?" + +He stares. "Is that a question?" He's silent for a moment. Then: "Throwing that wanton at me last night -" + +Annette stares at him. "Who? What are you talking about?" + +"That, that loose woman!" Sirhan is reduced to spluttering. "False pretenses! If this is one of Father's matchmaking ideas, it is so /{very}/ wrong that -" + +Annette is shaking her head. "Are you crazy? Your mother simply wanted you to meet her campaign team, to join in planning the policy. Your father is not on this planet! But you stormed out, you /{really}/ upset Rita, did you know that? Rita, she is the best belief maintenance and story construction operative I have! Yet you to tears reduce her. What is wrong with you?" + +"I -" Sirhan swallows. "She's /{what}/?" he asks again, his mouth dry. "I thought ..." He trails off. He doesn't want to say what he thought. The hussy, that brazen trollop, is part of his mother's campaign party? Not some plot to lure him into corruption? What if it was all a horrible misunderstanding? + +"I think you need to apologize to someone," Annette says coolly, standing up. Sirhan's head is spinning between a dozen dialogues of actors and ghosts, a journal of the party replaying before his ghast-stricken inner gaze. Even the walls have begun to flicker, responding to his intense unease. Annette skewers him with a disgusted look: "When you can a woman behave toward as a person, not a threat, we can again talk. Until then." And she stands up and walks out of the room, leaving him to contemplate the shattered stump of his anger, so startled he can barely concentrate on his project, thinking, /{Is that really me? Is that what I look like to her?}/ as the cladistic graph slowly rotates before him, denuded branches spread wide, waiting to be filled with the nodes of the alien interstellar network just as soon as he can convince Aineko to stake him the price of the depth-first tour of darkness. + +* * * + +Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons - literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd, even without the added distractions of his sex drive, which he has switched off until he gets used to being unitary again. Not only does he get shooting pains in his neck whenever he tries to look over his left shoulder with his right eye, but he's lost the habit of spawning exocortical agents to go interrogate a database or bush robot or something, then report back to him. Instead he keeps trying to fly off in all directions at once, which usually ends with him falling over. + +But at present, that's not a problem. He's sitting comfortably at a weathered wooden table in a beer garden behind a hall lifted from somewhere like Frankfurt, a liter glass of straw-colored liquid at his elbow and a comforting multiple whispering of knowledge streams tickling the back of his head. Most of his attention is focused on Annette, who frowns at him with mingled concern and affection. They may have lived separate lives for almost a third of a century, since she declined to upload with him, but he's still deeply attuned to her. + +"You are going to have to do something about that boy," she says sympathetically. "He is close enough to upset Amber. And without Amber, there will be a problem." + +"I'm going to have to do something about Amber, too," Manfred retorts. "What was the idea, not warning her I was coming?" + +"It was meant to be a surprise." Annette comes as close to pouting as Manfred's seen her recently. It brings back warm memories; he reaches out to hold her hand across the table. + +"You know I can't handle the human niceties properly when I'm a flock." He strokes the back of her wrist. She pulls back after a while, but slowly. "I expected you to manage all that stuff." + +"That stuff." Annette shakes her head. "She's your daughter, you know? Did you have no curiosity left?" + +"As a bird?" Manfred cocks his head to one side so abruptly that he hurts his neck and winces. "Nope. /{Now}/ I do, but I think I pissed her off -" + +"Which brings us back to point one." + +"I'd send her an apology, but she'd think I was trying to manipulate her" - Manfred takes a mouthful of beer - "and she'd be right." He sounds slightly depressed. "All my relationships are screwy this decade. And it's lonely." + +"So? Don't brood." Annette pulls her hand back. "Something will sort itself out eventually. And in the short term, there is the work, the electoral problem becomes acute." When she's around him the remains of her once-strong French accent almost vanish in a transatlantic drawl, he realizes with a pang. He's been abhuman for too long - people who meant a lot to him have changed while he's been away. + +"I'll brood if I want to," he says. "I didn't ever really get a chance to say goodbye to Pam, did I? Not after that time in Paris when the gangsters ..." He shrugs. "I'm getting nostalgic in my old age." He snorts. + +"You're not the only one," Annette says tactfully. "Social occasions here are a minefield, one must tiptoe around so many issues, people have too much, too much history. And nobody knows everything that is going on." + +"That's the trouble with this damned polity." Manfred takes another gulp of /{hefeweisen}/. "We've already got six million people living on this planet, and it's growing like the first-generation Internet. Everyone who is anyone knows everyone, but there are so many incomers diluting the mix and not knowing that there /{is}/ a small world network here that everything is up for grabs again after only a couple of megaseconds. New networks form, and we don't even know they exist until they sprout a political agenda and surface under us. We're acting under time pressure. If we don't get things rolling now, we'll never be able to ..." He shakes his head. "It wasn't like this for you in Brussels, was it?" + +"No. Brussels was a mature system. And I had Gianni to look after in his dotage after you left. It will only get worse from here on in, I think." + +"Democracy 2.0." He shudders briefly. "I'm not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent. Do you think we can make this fly?" + +"I don't see why not. If Amber's willing to play the People's Princess for us ..." Annette picks up a slice of liverwurst and chews on it meditatively. + +"I'm not sure it's workable, however we play it." Manfred looks thoughtful. "The whole democratic participation thing looks questionable to me under these circumstances. We're under direct threat, for all that it's a long-term one, and this whole culture is in danger of turning into a classical nation-state. Or worse, several of them layered on top of one another with complete geographical collocation but no social interpenetration. I'm not certain it's a good idea to try to steer something like that - pieces might break off, you'd get the most unpleasant side-effects. Although, on the other hand, if we can mobilize enough broad support to become the first visible planetwide polity ..." + +"We need you to stay focused," Annette adds unexpectedly. + +"Focused? Me?" He laughs, briefly. "I /{used}/ to have an idea a second. Now it's maybe one a year. I'm just a melancholy old birdbrain, me." + +"Yes, but you know the old saying? The fox has many ideas - the hedgehog has only one, but it's a /{big}/ idea." + +"So tell me, what is my big idea?" Manfred leans forward, one elbow on the table, one eye focused on inner space as a hot-burning thread of consciousness barks psephological performance metrics at him, analysing the game ahead. "Where do you think I'm going?" + +"I think -" Annette breaks off suddenly, staring past his shoulder. Privacy slips, and for a frozen moment Manfred glances round in mild horror and sees thirty or forty other guests in the crowded garden, elbows rubbing, voices raised above the background chatter: "Gianni!" She beams widely as she stands up. "What a surprise! When did you arrive?" + +Manfred blinks. A slim young guy, moving with adolescent grace, but none of the awkward movements and sullen lack of poise - he's much older than he looks, chickenhawk genetics. /{Gianni}/? He feels a huge surge of memories paging through his exocortex. He remembers ringing a doorbell in dusty, hot Rome: white toweling bathrobe, the economics of scarcity, autograph signed by the dead hand of von Neumann - "Gianni?" he asks, disbelieving. "It's been a long time!" + +The gilded youth, incarnated in the image of a metropolitan toy-boy from the noughties, grins widely and embraces Manfred with a friendly bear hug. Then he slides down onto the bench next to Annette, whom he kisses with easy familiarity. "Ah, to be among friends again! It's been too long!" He glances round curiously. "Hmm, how very Bavarian." He snaps his fingers. "Mine will be a, what do you recommend? It's been too long since my last beer." His grin widens. "Not in this body." + +"You're resimulated?" Manfred asks, unable to stop himself. + +Annette frowns at him disapprovingly: "No, silly! He came through the teleport gate -" + +"Oh." Manfred shakes his head. "I'm sorry -" + +"It's okay." Gianni Vittoria clearly doesn't mind being mistaken for a historical newbie, rather than someone who's traveled through the decades the hard way. /{He must be over a hundred by now}/, Manfred notes, not bothering to spawn a search thread to find out. + +"It was time to move and, well, the old body didn't want to move with me, so why not go gracefully and accept the inevitable?" + +"I didn't take you for a dualist," Manfred says ruefully. + +"Ah, I'm not - but neither am I reckless." Gianni drops his grin for a moment. The sometime minister for transhuman affairs, economic theoretician, then retired tribal elder of the polycognitive liberals is serious. "I have never uploaded before, or switched bodies, or teleported. Even when my old one was seriously - tcha! Maybe I left it too long. But here I am, one planet is as good as another to be cloned and downloaded onto, don't you think?" + +"You invited him?" Manfred asks Annette. + +"Why wouldn't I?" There's a wicked gleam in her eye. "Did you expect me to live like a nun while you were a flock of pigeons? We may have campaigned against the legal death of the transubstantiated, Manfred, but there are limits." + +Manfred looks between them, then shrugs, embarrassed. "I'm still getting used to being human again," he admits. "Give me time to catch up? At an emotional level, at least." The realization that Gianni and Annette have a history together doesn't come as a surprise to him: It's one of the things you must adapt to if you opt out of the human species, after all. At least the libido suppression is helping here, he realizes: He's not about to embarrass anyone by suggesting a ménage. He focuses on Gianni. "I have a feeling I'm here for a purpose, and it isn't mine," he says slowly. "Why don't you tell me what you've got in mind?" + +Gianni shrugs. "You have the big picture already. We are human, metahuman, and augmented human. But the posthumans are things that were never really human to begin with. The Vile Offspring have reached their adolescence and want the place to themselves so they can throw a party. The writing is on the wall, don't you think?" + +Manfred gives him a long stare. "The whole idea of running away in meatspace is fraught with peril," he says slowly. He picks up his mug of beer and swirls it around slowly. "Look, we know, now, that a singularity doesn't turn into a voracious predator that eats all the dumb matter in its path, triggering a phase change in the structure of space - at least, not unless they've done something very stupid to the structure of the false vacuum, somewhere outside our current light cone. + +"But if we run away, /{we}/ are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we'll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that's what happened out past the Böotes void - not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don't we? So ... maybe you can tell me what you think we should do. Hmm?" + +"It's a dilemma." A waitron inserts itself into their privacy-screened field of view. It plants a spun-diamond glass in front of Gianni, then pukes beer into it. Manfred declines a refill, waiting for Gianni to drink. "Ah, the simple pleasures of the flesh! I've been corresponding with your daughter, Manny. She loaned me her experiential digest of the journey to Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},. I found it quite alarming. Nobody's casting aspersions on her observations, not after that self-propelled stock market bubble or 419 scam or whatever it was got loose in the Economics 2.0 sphere, but the implications - the Vile Offspring will eat the solar system, Manny. Then they'll slow down. But where does that leave us, I ask you? What is there for orthohumans like us to do?" + +Manfred nods thoughtfully. "You've heard the argument between the accelerationistas and the time-binder faction, I assume?" he asks. + +"Of course." Gianni takes a long pull on his beer. "What do /{you}/ think of our options?" + +"The accelerationistas want to upload everyone onto a fleet of starwisps and charge off to colonize an uninhabited brown dwarf planetary system. Or maybe steal a Matrioshka brain that's succumbed to senile dementia and turn it back into planetary biomes with cores of diamond-phase computronium to fulfil some kind of demented pastoralist nostalgia trip. Rousseau's universal robots. I gather Amber thinks this is a good idea because she's done it before - at least, the charging off aboard a starwisp part. 'To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony fleet has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?" Manfred nods to himself. "Like I say, it won't work. We'd be right back to iteration one of the waterfall model of singularity formation within a couple of gigaseconds of arriving. That's why I came back: to warn her." + +"So?" Gianni prods, pretending to ignore the frowns that Annette is casting his way. + +"And as for the time-binders," Manfred nods again, "they're like Sirhan. Deeply conservative, deeply suspicious. Holding out for staying here as long as possible, until the Vile Offspring come for Saturn - then moving out bit by bit, into the Kuiper belt. Colony habitats on snowballs half a light-year from anywhere." He shudders. "Spam in a fucking can with a light-hour walk to the nearest civilized company if your fellow inmates decide to reinvent Stalinism or Objectivism. No thanks! I know they've been muttering about quantum teleportation and stealing toys from the routers, but I'll believe it when I see it." + +"Which leaves what?" Annette demands. "It is all very well, this dismissal of both the accelerationista and time-binder programs, Manny, but what can you propose in their place?" She looks distressed. "Fifty years ago, you would have had six new ideas before breakfast! And an erection." + +Manfred leers at her unconvincingly. "Who says I can't still have both?" + +She glares. "Drop it!" + +"Okay." Manfred chugs back a quarter of a liter of beer, draining his glass, and puts it down on the table with a bang. "As it happens, I /{do}/ have an alternative idea." He looks serious. "I've been discussing it with Aineko for some time, and Aineko has been seeding Sirhan with it - if it's to work optimally, we'll need to get a rump constituency of both the accelerationistas and the conservatives on board. Which is why I'm conditionally going along with this whole election nonsense. So, what's it worth to you for me to explain it?" + +* * * + +"So, who was the deadhead you were busy with today?" asks Amber. + +Rita shrugs. "Some boringly prolix pulp author from the early twentieth, with a body phobia of extropian proportions - I kept expecting him to start drooling and rolling his eyes if I crossed my legs. Funny thing is, he was also close to bolting from fear once I mentioned implants. We /{really}/ need to nail down how to deal with these mind/body dualists, don't we?" She watches Amber with something approaching admiration; she's new to the inner circle of the accelerationista study faction, and Amber's social credit is sky-high. Rita's got a lot to learn from her, if she can get close enough. And right now, following her along a path through the landscaped garden behind the museum seems like a golden moment of opportunity. + +Amber smiles. "I'm glad I'm not processing immigrants these days; most of them are so stupid it drives you up the wall after a bit. Personally I blame the Flynn effect - in reverse. They come from a background of sensory deprivation. It's nothing that a course of neural growth enhancers can't fix in a year or two, but after the first few you skullfuck, they're all the same. So /{dull}/. Unless you're unlucky enough to get one of the documentees from a puritan religious period. I'm no fluffragette, but I swear if I get one more superstitious, woman-hating clergyman, I'm going to consider prescribing forcible gender reassignment surgery. At least the Victorian English are mostly just open-minded lechers, when you get past their social reserve. And they like new technology." + +Rita nods. /{Woman-hating et cetera}/ ... The echoes of patriarchy are still with them today, it seems, and not just in the form of resimulated ayatollahs and archbishops from the Dark Ages. "My author sounds like the worst of both. Some guy called Howard, from Rhode Island. Kept looking at me as if he was afraid I was going to sprout bat wings and tentacles or something." /{Like your son}/, she doesn't add. /{Just what was he thinking, anyway?}/ she wonders. /{To be that screwed up takes serious dedication ...}/ "What are you working on, if you don't mind me asking?" she asks, trying to change the direction of her attention. + +"Oh, pressing the flesh, I guess. Auntie 'Nette wanted me to meet some old political hack contact of hers who she figures can help with the program, but he was holed up with her and Dad all day." She pulls a face. "I had another fitting session with the image merchants, they're trying to turn me into a political catwalk clotheshorse. Then there's the program demographics again. We're getting about a thousand new immigrants a day, planetwide, but it's accelerating rapidly, and we should be up to eighty an hour by the time of the election. Which is going to be a huge problem, because if we start campaigning too early, a quarter of the electorate won't know what they're meant to be voting about." + +"Maybe it's deliberate," Rita suggests. "The Vile Offspring are trying to rig the outcome by injecting voters." She pings a smiley emoticon off Wednesday's open channel, raising a flickering grin in return. "The party of fuckwits will win, no question about it." + +"Uh-huh." Amber snaps her fingers and pulls an impatient face as she waits for a passing cloud to solidify above her head and lower a glass of cranberry juice to her. "Dad said one thing that's spot-on, we're framing this entire debate in terms of what we should do to avoid conflict with the Offspring. The main bone of contention is how to run away and how far to go and which program to put resources into, not whether or when to run, let alone what else we could do. Maybe we should have given it some more thought. Are we being manipulated?" + +Rita looks vacant for a moment. "Is that a question?" she asks. Amber nods, and she shakes her head. "Then I'd have to say that I don't know. The evidence is inconclusive, so far. But I'm not really happy. The Offspring won't tell us what they want, but there's no reason to believe they don't know what /{we}/ want. I mean, they can think rings round us, can't they?" + +Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge gate that gives admission to a maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. "I really don't know. They may not care about us, or even remember we exist - the resimulants may be being generated by some autonomic mechanism, not really part of the higher consciousness of the Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out post-Tiplerite meme that's gotten hold of more processing resources than the entire presingularity Net, some kind of MetaMormon project directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever have lived lives in the /{right way}/ to fit some weird quasi-religious requirement we don't know about. Or it might be a message we're simply not smart enough to decode. That's the trouble, we don't know." + +She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up, sees her about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps after her. "What else?" she pants. + +"Could be" - left turn - "anything, really." Six steps lead down into a shadowy tunnel; fork right, five meters forward, then six steps up lead back to the surface. "Question is, why don't they" - left turn - "just /{tell}/ us what they want?" + +"Speaking to tapeworms." Rita nearly manages to catch up with Amber, who is trotting through the maze as if she's memorized it perfectly. "That's how much the nascent Matrioshka brain can outthink us by, as humans to segmented worms. Would we do. What they told us?" + +"Maybe." Amber stops dead, and Rita glances around. They're in an open cell near the heart of the maze, five meters square, hedged in on all sides. There are three entrances and a slate altar, waist high, lichen-stained with age. "I think you know the answer to that question." + +"I -" Rita stares at her. + +Amber stares back, eyes dark and intense. "You're from one of the Ganymede orbitals by way of Titan. You knew my eigensister while I was out of the solar system flying a diamond the size of a Coke can. That's what you told me. You've got a skill set that's a perfect match for the campaign research group, and you asked me to introduce you to Sirhan, then you pushed his buttons like a pro. Just what /{are}/ you trying to pull? Why should I trust you?" + +"I -" Rita's face crumples. "I /{didn't}/ push his buttons! He /{thought}/ I was trying to drag him into bed." She looks up defiantly. "I wasn't, I want to learn, what makes you - him - work -" Huge, dark, structured information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer. She stares at Amber, mortified and angry. It's the ultimate denial of trust, the need to check her statements against the public record for truth. "What are you doing?" + +"I have a suspicion." Amber stands poised, as if ready to run. /{Run away from me?}/ Rita thinks, startled. "You said, what if the resimulants came from a subconscious function of the Offspring? And funnily enough, I've been discussing that possibility with Dad. He's still got the spark when you show him a problem, you know." + +"I don't understand!" + +"No, I don't think you do," says Amber, and Rita can feel vast stresses in the space around her: The whole ubicomp environment, dust-sized chips and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright optical processors in the soil and the air and her skin, is growing blotchy and sluggish, thrashing under the load of whatever Amber - with her management-grade ackles - is ordering it to do. For a moment, Rita can't feel half her mind, and she gets the panicky claustrophobic sense of being trapped inside her own head: Then it stops. + +"Tell me!" Rita insists. "What are you trying to prove? It's some mistake -" And Amber is nodding, much to her surprise, looking weary and morose. "What do you think I've done?" + +"Nothing. You're coherent. Sorry about that." + +"Coherent?" Rita hears her voice rising with her indignation as she feels bits of herself, cut off from her for whole seconds, shivering with relief. "I'll give you coherent! Assaulting my exocortex -" + +"Shut up." Amber rubs her face and simultaneously throws Rita one end of an encrypted channel. + +"Why should I?" Rita demands, not accepting the handshake. + +"Because." Amber glances round. /{She's scared!}/ Rita suddenly realizes. "Just /{do}/ it," she hisses. + +Rita accepts the endpoint and a huge lump of undigested expository data slides down it, structured and tagged with entry points and metainformation directories pointing to - + +"Holy /{shit}/!" she whispers, as she realizes what it is. + +"Yes." Amber grins humorlessly. She continues, over the open channel: *{It looks like they're cognitive antibodies, generated by the devil's own semiotic immune system.}* *{That's what Sirhan is focusing on, how to avoid triggering them and bringing everything down at once.}* *{Forget the election, we're going to be in deep shit sooner rather than later, and we're still trying to work out how to survive.}* *{Now are you sure you still want in?}* + +"Want in on /{what}/?" Rita asks, shakily. + +*{ The lifeboat Dad's trying to get us all into under cover of the accelerationista/conservationista split, before the Vile Offspring's immune system figures out how to lever us apart into factions and make us kill each other ...}* + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little tapeworm. + +_1 Tapeworms have on the order of a thousand neurons, pulsing furiously to keep their little bodies twitching. Human beings have on the order of a hundred billion neurons. What is happening in the inner solar system as the Vile Offspring churn and reconfigure the fast-thinking structured dust clouds that were once planets is as far beyond the ken of merely human consciousness as the thoughts of a Gödel are beyond the twitching tropisms of a worm. Personality modules bounded by the speed of light, sucking down billions of times the processing power of a human brain, form and re-form in the halo of glowing nanoprocessors that shrouds the sun in a ruddy glowing cloud. + +_1 Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres and the asteroids - all gone. Luna is a silvery iridescent sphere, planed smooth down to micrometer heights, luminous with diffraction patterns. Only Earth, the cradle of human civilization, remains untransformed; and Earth, too, will be dismantled soon enough, for already a trellis of space elevators webs the planet around its equator, lifting refugee dumb matter into orbit and flinging it at the wildlife preserves of the outer system. + +_1 The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter's moons with claws of molecular machinery won't stop until it runs out of dumb matter to convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much brainpower as you'd get if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy. But right now, it's still stupid, having converted barely a percentage point of the mass of the solar system - it's a mere Magellanic Cloud civilization, infantile and unsubtle and still perilously close to its carbon-chemistry roots. + +_1 It's hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap their thousand-neuron brains around whatever it is that the vastly more complex entities who host them are discussing, but one thing's sure - the owners have a lot of things going on, not all of them under conscious control. The churning of gastric secretions and the steady ventilation of lungs are incomprehensible to the simple brains of tapeworms, but they serve the purpose of keeping the humans alive and provide the environment the worms live in. And other more esoteric functions that contribute to survival - the intricate dance of specialized cloned lymphocytes in their bone marrow and lymph nodes, the random permutations of antibodies constantly churning for possible matches to intruder molecules warning of the presence of pollution - are all going on beneath the level of conscious control. + +_1 Autonomic defenses. Antibodies. Intelligence bloom gnawing at the edges of the outer system. And humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast? + +* * * + +There's a team meeting early the next morning. It's still dark outside, and most of the attendees who are present in vivo have the faintly haggard look that comes from abusing melatonin antagonists. Rita stifles a yawn as she glances around the conference room - the walls expanded into huge virtual spaces to accommodate thirty or so exocortical ghosts from sleeping partners who will wake with memories of a particularly vivid lucid dream - and sees Amber talking to her famous father and a younger-looking man who one of her partials recognizes as a last-century EU politician. There seems to be some tension between them. + +Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new tier of campaigning information has opened up to her inner eye - stuff steganographically concealed in a hidden layer of the project's collective memory space. There's stuff in here she hadn't suspected, frightening studies of resimulant demographics, surveys of emigration rates from the inner system, cladistic trees dissecting different forms of crude tampering that have been found skulking in the wetware of refugees. The reason why Amber and Manfred and - reluctantly - Sirhan are fighting for one radical faction in a planetwide election, despite their various misgivings over the validity of the entire concept of democracy in this posthuman era. She blinks it aside, slightly bewildered, forking a couple of dozen personality subthreads to chew on it at the edges. "Need coffee," she mutters to the table, as it offers her a chair. + +"Everyone on-line?" asked Manfred. "Then I'll begin." He looks tired and worried, physically youthful but showing the full weight of his age. "We've got a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds ago, the bit rate on the resimulation stream jumped. We're now fielding about one resimulated state vector a second, on top of the legitimate immigration we're dealing with. If it jumps again by the same factor, it's going to swamp our ability to check the immigrants for zimboes in vivo - we'd have to move to running them in secure storage or just resurrecting them blind, and if there /{are}/ any jokers in the pack, that's about the riskiest thing we could do." + +"Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?" asks the handsome young ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused - as if he already knows the answer. + +"Politics." Manfred shrugs. + +"It would blow a hole in our social contract," says Amber, looking as if she's just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita feels a flicker of admiration for the way they're stage-managing the meeting. Amber's even talking to her father, as if she feels comfortable with him around, although he's a walking reminder of her own lack of success. Nobody else has gotten a word in yet. "If we don't instantiate them, the next logical step is to deny resimulated minds the franchise. Which in turn puts us on the road to institutional inequality. And that's a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the idea of settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote, because our whole polity is based on the idea that less competent intelligences - us - deserve consideration." + +"Hrmph." Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes, because it's Amber's screwed-up eigenchild, and he's just about materialized in the chair next to her. /{So he adopted Superplonk after all?}/ she observes cynically. He doggedly avoids looking at her. "That was my analysis," he says reluctantly. "We need them alive. For the ark option, at least, and if not, even the accelerationista platform will need them on hand later." + +/{Concentration camps}/, thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan's presence near her, for it's a constant irritant, /{where most of the inmates are confused, frightened human beings - and the ones who aren't think they are}/. It's an eerie thought, and she spawns a couple of full ghosts to dream it through for her, gaming the possible angles. + +"How are your negotiations over the lifeboat designs going?" Amber asks her father. "We need to get a portfolio of design schemata out before we go into the election -" + +"Change of plan." Manfred hunches forward. "This doesn't need to go any further, but Sirhan and Aineko have come up with something interesting." He looks worried. + +Sirhan is staring at his eigenmother with narrowed eyes, and Rita has to resist the urge to elbow him savagely in the ribs. She knows enough about him now to realize it wouldn't get his attention - at least, not the way she'd want it, not for the right reasons - and in any case, he's more wrapped up in himself than her ghost ever saw him as likely to be. (How /{anyone}/ could be party to such a detailed exchange of simulated lives and still reject the opportunity to do it in real life is beyond her; unless it's an artifact of his youth, when his parents pushed him through a dozen simulated childhoods in search of knowledge and ended up with a stubborn oyster-head of a son ...) "We still need to look as if we're planning on using a lifeboat," he says aloud. "There's the small matter of the price they're asking in return for the alternative." + +"What? What are you talking about?" Amber sounds confused. "I thought you were working on some kind of cladistic map. What's this about a price?" + +Sirhan smiles coolly. "I /{am}/ working on a cladistic map, in a manner of speaking. You wasted much of your opportunity when you journeyed to the router, you know. I've been talking to Aineko." + +"You -" Amber flushes. "What about?" She's visibly angry, Rita notices. Sirhan is needling his eigenmother. /{Why}/? + +"About the topology of some rather interesting types of small-world network." Sirhan leans back in his chair, watching the cloud above her head. "And the router. You went through it, then you came back with your tail between your legs as fast as you could, didn't you? Not even checking your passenger to see if it was a hostile parasite." + +"I don't have to take this," Amber says tightly. "You weren't there, and you have no idea what constraints we were working under." + +"Really?" Sirhan raises an eyebrow. "Anyway, you missed an opportunity. We know that the routers - for whatever reason - are self-replicating. They spread from brown dwarf to brown dwarf, hatch, tap the protostar for energy and material, and send a bunch of children out. Von Neumann machines, in other words. We also know that they provide high-bandwidth communications to other routers. When you went through the one at Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, you ended up in an unmaintained DMZ attached to an alien Matrioshka brain that had degenerated, somehow. It follows that /{someone}/ had collected a router and carried it home, to link into the MB. So why didn't you bring one home with you?" + +Amber glares at him. "Total payload on board the *{Field Circus}* was about ten grams. How large do you think a router seed is?" + +"So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your storage capacity and ready to wreak seven shades of havoc on -" + +"Children!" They both look round automatically. It's Annette, Rita realizes, and she doesn't look amused. "Why do you not save this bickering for later?" she asks. "We have our own goals to be pursuing." Unamused is an understatement. Annette is fuming. + +"This charming family reunion was your idea, I believe?" Manfred smiles at her, then nods coolly at the retread EU politician in the next seat. + +"Please." It's Amber. "Dad, can you save this for later?" Rita sits up. For a moment, Amber looks ancient, far older than her subjective gigasecond of age. "She's right. She didn't mean to screw up. Let's leave the family history for some time when we can work it out in private. Okay?" + +Manfred looks abashed. He blinks rapidly. "All right." He takes a breath. "Amber, I brought some old acquaintances into the loop. If we win the election, then to get out of here as fast as possible, we'll have to use a combination of the two main ideas we've been discussing: spool as many people as possible into high-density storage until we get somewhere with space and mass and energy to reincarnate them, and get our hands on a router. The entire planetary polity can't afford to pay the energy budget of a relativistic starship big enough to hold everyone, even as uploads, and a subrelativistic ship would be too damn vulnerable to the Vile Offspring. And it follows that, instead of taking potluck on the destination, we should learn about the network protocols the routers use, figure out some kind of transferable currency we can use to pay for our reinstantiation at the other end, and also how to make some kind of map so we know where we're going. The two hard parts are getting at or to a router, and paying - that's going to mean traveling with someone who understands Economics 2.0 but doesn't want to hang around the Vile Offspring. + +"As it happens, these old acquaintances of mine went out and fetched back a router seed, for their own purposes. It's sitting about thirty light-hours away from here, out in the Kuiper belt. They're trying to hatch it right now. And I /{think}/ Aineko might be willing to go with us and handle the trade negotiations." He raises the palm of his right hand and flips a bundle of tags into the shared spatial cache of the inner circle's memories. + +/{Lobsters}/. Decades ago, back in the dim wastelands of the depression-ridden naughty oughties, the uploaded lobsters had escaped. Manfred brokered a deal for them to get their very own cometary factory colony. Years later, Amber's expedition to the router had run into eerie zombie lobsters, upload images that had been taken over and reanimated by the Wunch. But where the real lobsters had gotten to ... + +For a moment, Rita sees herself hovering in darkness and vacuum, the distant siren song of a planetary gravity well far below. Off to her - left? north? - glows a hazy dim red cloud the size of the full moon as seen from Earth, a cloud that hums with a constant background noise, the waste heat of a galactic civilization dreaming furious colorless thoughts to itself. Then she figures out how to slew her unblinking, eyeless viewpoint round and sees the craft. + +It's a starship in the shape of a crustacean three kilometers long. It's segmented and flattened, with legs projecting from the abdominal floor to stretch stiffly sideways and clutch fat balloons of cryogenic deuterium fuel. The blue metallic tail is a flattened fan wrapped around the delicate stinger of a fusion reactor. Near the head, things are different: no huge claws there, but the delicately branching fuzz of bush robots, nanoassemblers poised ready to repair damage in flight and spin the parachute of a ramscoop when the ship is ready to decelerate. The head is massively armored against the blitzkrieg onslaught of interstellar dust, its radar eyes a glint of hexagonal compound surfaces staring straight at her. + +Behind and below the lobster-ship, a planetary ring looms vast and tenuous. The lobster is in orbit around Saturn, mere light-seconds away. And as Rita stares at the ship in dumbstruck silence, it /{winks}/ at her. + +"They don't have names, at least not as individual identifiers," Manfred says apologetically, "so I asked if he'd mind being called something. He said Blue, because he is. So I give you the good lobster *{Something Blue}*." + +Sirhan interrupts, "You still need my cladistics project," he sounds somewhat smug, "to find your way through the network. Do you have a specific destination in mind?" + +"Yeah, to both questions," Manfred admits. "We need to send duplicate ghosts out to each possible router end point, wait for an echo, then iterate and repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal. The goal - that's harder." He points at the ceiling, which dissolves into a chaotic 3-D spiderweb that Rita recognizes, after some hours of subjective head-down archive time, as a map of the dark matter distribution throughout a radius of a billion light-years, galaxies glued like fluff to the nodes where strands of drying silk meet. "We've known for most of a century that there's something flaky going on out there, out past the Böotes void - there are a couple of galactic superclusters, around which there's something flaky about the cosmic background anisotropy. Most computational processes generate entropy as a by-product, and it looks like something is dumping waste heat into the area from all the galaxies in the region, very evenly spread in a way that mirrors the metal distribution in those galaxies, except at the very cores. And according to the lobsters, who have been indulging in some /{very}/ long baseline interferometry, most of the stars in the nearest cluster are redder than expected and metal-depleted. As if someone's been mining them." + +"Ah." Sirhan stares at his grandfather. "Why should they be any different from the local nodes?" + +"Look around you. Do you see any indications of large-scale cosmic engineering within a million light-years of here?" Manfred shrugs. "Locally, nothing has quite reached ... well. We can guess at the life cycle of a post spike civilization now, can't we? We've felt the elephant. We've seen the wreckage of collapsed Matrioshka minds. We know how unattractive exploration is to postsingularity intelligences, we've seen the bandwidth gap that keeps them at home." He points at the ceiling. "But over /{there}/ something different happened. They're making changes on the scale of an entire galactic supercluster, and they appear to be coordinated. They /{did}/ get out and go places, and their descendants may still be out there. It looks like they're doing something purposeful and coordinated, something vast - a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that's running the universe, perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe. Up or down, is it turtles all the way, or is there something out there that's more real than we are? And don't you think it's worth trying to find out?" + +"No." Sirhan crosses his arms. "Not particularly. I'm interested in saving people from the Vile Offspring, not taking a huge gamble on mystery transcendent aliens who may have built a galaxy-sized reality hacking machine a billion years ago. I'll sell you my services, and even send a ghost along, but if you expect me to bet my entire future on it ..." + +It's too much for Rita. Diverting her attention away from the dizzying inner-space vista, she elbows Sirhan in the ribs. He looks round blankly for a moment, then with gathering anger as he lets his killfile filter slip. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," she hisses. Then, succumbing to a secondary impulse she knows she'll regret later, she drops a private channel into his public in-tray. + +"Nobody's asking you to," Manfred is saying defensively, arms crossed. "I view this as a Manhattan project kind of thing, pursue all agendas in parallel. If we win the election, we'll have the resources we need to do that. We should /{all}/ go through the router, and we will /{all}/ leave backups aboard *{Something Blue}*. *{Blue}* is /{slow}/, tops out at about a tenth of cee, but what he can do is get a sufficient quantity of memory diamond the hell out of circumsolar space before the Vile Offspring's autonomic defenses activate whatever kind of trust exploit they're planning in the next few megaseconds -" + +"/{What do you want}/?" Sirhan demands angrily over the channel. He's still not looking at her, and not just because he's focusing on the vision in blue that dominates the shared space of the team meeting. + +"/{Stop lying to yourself}/," Rita sends back. "/{You're lying about your own goals and motivations. You may not want to know the truth your own ghost worked out, but I do. And I'm not going to let you deny it happened}/." + +"/{So one of your agents seduced a personality image of me -}/" + +"/{Bullshit}/ -" + +"Do you mean to declare this platform openly?" asks the young-old guy near the platform, the Europol. "Because if so, you're going to undermine Amber's campaign -" + +"That's all right," Amber says tiredly, "I'm used to Dad supporting me in his own inimitable way." + +"Is okay," says a new voice. "I are happy wait-state grazing in ecliptic." It's the friendly lobster lifeboat, light-lagged by its trajectory outside the ring system. + +"- /{You're happy to hide behind a hypocritical sense of moral purity when it makes you feel you can look down on other people, but underneath it you're just like everyone else}/ -" + +"- She /{set you up to corrupt me, didn't she? You're just bait in her scheme}/ -" + +"The idea was to store incremental backups in the Panuliran's cargo cache in case a weakly godlike agency from the inner system attempts to activate the antibodies they've already disseminated throughout the festival culture," Annette explains, stepping in on Manfred's behalf. + +Nobody else in the discussion space seems to notice that Rita and Sirhan are busy ripping the shit out of each other over a private channel, throwing emotional hand grenades back and forth like seasoned divorcees. "It's not a satisfactory solution to the evacuation question, but it ought to satisfy the conservatives' baseline requirement, and as insurance -" + +"- /{That's right, blame your eigenmother! Has it occurred to you that she doesn't care enough about you to try a stunt like that? I think you spent too much time with that crazy grandmother of yours. You didn't even integrate that ghost, did you? Too afraid of polluting yourself! I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like from inside}/ -" + +"- /{I did}/ -" Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees - "/{make a fool of myself}/," he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. "/{This is so embarrassing ...}/" He covers his face with his hands. "/{You're right.}/" + +"/{I am?}/" Rita's puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan has finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous. "/{No, I'm not. You're just overly defensive.}/" + +"/{I'm}/ -" Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened in real space if his instant reaction to realizing that it /{could}/ happen hadn't been to dump the splinter of his mind that was contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny everything. + +"We have no threat profile yet," Annette says, cutting right across their private conversation. "If there /{is}/ a direct threat - and we don't know that for sure, yet, the Vile Offspring might be enlightened enough simply to be leaving us alone - it'll probably be some kind of subtle attack aimed directly at the foundations of our identity. Look for a credit bubble, distributed trust metrics devaluing suddenly as people catch some kind of weird religion, something like that. Maybe a perverse election outcome. And it won't be sudden. They are not stupid, to start a headlong attack without slow corruption to soften the way." + +"You've obviously been thinking about this for some time," Sameena says with dry emphasis. "What's in it for your friend, uh, Blue? Did you squirrel away enough credit to cover the price of renting a starship from the Economics 2.0 metabubble? Or is there something you aren't telling us?" + +"Um." Manfred looks like a small boy with his hand caught in the sweets jar. "Well, as a matter of fact -" + +"Yes, Dad, why don't you tell us just what this is going to cost?" Amber asks. + +"Ah, well." He looks embarrassed. "It's the lobsters, not Aineko. They want some payment." + +Rita reaches out and grabs Sirhan's hand: He doesn't resist. "/{Do you know about this?}/" Rita queries him. + +"/{All new to me ...}/" A confused partial thread follows his reply down the pipe, and for a while, she joins him in introspective reverie, trying to work out the implications of knowing what they know about the possibility of a mutual relationship. + +"They want a written conceptual map. A map of all the accessible meme spaces hanging off the router network, compiled by human explorers who they can use as a baseline, they say. It's quite simple - in return for a ticket out-system, some of us are going to have to go exploring. But that doesn't mean we can't leave back-ups behind." + +"Do they have any particular explorers in mind?" Amber sniffs. + +"No," says Manfred. "Just a team of us, to map out the router network and ensure they get some warning of threats from outside." He pauses. "You're going to want to come along, aren't you?" + +* * * + +The pre-election campaign takes approximately three minutes and consumes more bandwidth than the sum of all terrestrial communications channels from prehistory to 2008. Approximately six million ghosts of Amber, individually tailored to fit the profile of the targeted audience, fork across the dark fiber meshwork underpinning of the lily-pad colonies, then out through ultrawideband mesh networks, instantiated in implants and floating dust motes to buttonhole the voters. Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many more hold fruitless discussions; about six actually decide they've diverged so far from their original that they constitute separate people and register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side, and one elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African honeybees. + +Ambers are not the only ghosts competing for attention in the public zeitgeist. In fact, they're in a minority. Most of the autonomous electoral agents are campaigning for a variety of platforms that range from introducing a progressive income tax - nobody is quite sure /{why}/, but it seems to be traditional - to a motion calling for the entire planet to be paved, which quite ignores the realities of element abundance in the upper atmosphere of a metal-poor gas giant, not to mention playing hell with the weather. The Faceless are campaigning for everyone to be assigned a new set of facial muscles every six months, the Livid Pranksters are demanding equal rights for subsentient entities, and a host of single-issue pressure groups are yammering about the usual lost causes. + +Just how the election process anneals is a black mystery - at least, to those people who aren't party to the workings of the Festival Committee, the group who first had the idea of paving Saturn with hot-hydrogen balloons - but over the course of a complete diurn, almost forty thousand seconds, a pattern begins to emerge. This pattern will systematize the bias of the communications networks that traffic in reputation points across the planetary polity for a long time - possibly as much as fifty million seconds, getting on for a whole Martian year (if Mars still existed). It will create a parliament - a merged group mind borganism that speaks as one supermind built from the beliefs of the victors. And the news isn't great, as the party gathered in the upper sphere of the Atomium (which Manfred insisted Amber rent for the dead dog party) is slowly realizing. Amber isn't there, presumably drowning her sorrows or engaging in postelection schemes of a different nature somewhere else. But other members of her team are about. + +"It could be worse," Rita rationalizes, late in the evening. She's sitting in a corner of the seventh-floor deck, in a 1950s wireframe chair, clutching a glass of synthetic single malt and watching the shadows. "We could be in an old-style contested election with seven shades of shit flying. At least this way we can be decently anonymous." + +One of the blind spots detaches from her peripheral vision and approaches. It segues into view, suddenly congealing into Sirhan. He looks morose. + +"What's your problem?" she demands. "Your former faction is winning on the count." + +"Maybe so." He sits down beside her, carefully avoiding her gaze. "Maybe this is a good thing. And maybe not." + +"So when are you going to join the syncitium?" she asks. + +"Me? Join that?" He looks alarmed. "You think I want to become part of a parliamentary borg? What do you take me for?" + +"Oh." She shakes her head. "I assumed you were avoiding me because -" + +"No." He holds out his hand, and a passing waitron deposits a glass in it. He takes a deep breath. "I owe you an apology." + +/{About time}/, she thinks, uncharitably. But he's like that. Stiff-necked and proud, slow to acknowledge a mistake, but unlikely to apologize unless he really means it. "What for?" she asks. + +"For not giving you the benefit of the doubt," he says slowly, rolling the glass between his palms. "I should have listened to myself earlier instead of locking him out of me." + +The self he's talking about seems self-evident to her. "You're not an easy man to get close to," she says quietly. "Maybe that's part of your problem." + +"Part of it?" He chuckles bitterly. "My mother -" He bites back whatever he originally meant to say. "Do you know I'm older than she is? Than this version, I mean. She gets up my nose with her assumptions about me ..." + +"They run both ways." Rita reaches out and takes his hand - and he grips her right back, no rejection this time. "Listen, it looks as if she's not going to make it into the parliament of lies. There's a straight conservative sweep, these folks are in solid denial. About eighty percent of the population are resimulants or old-timers from Earth, and that's not going to change before the Vile Offspring turn on us. What are we going to do?" + +He shrugs. "I suspect everyone who thinks we're really under threat will move on. You know this is going to destroy the accelerationistas trust in democracy? They've still got a viable plan - Manfred's friendly lobster will work without the need for an entire planet's energy budget - but the rejection is going to hurt. I can't help thinking that maybe the real goal of the Vile Offspring was simply to gerrymander us into not diverting resources away from them. It's blunt, it's unsubtle, so we assumed that wasn't the point. But maybe there's a time for them to be blunt." + +She shrugs. "Democracy is a bad fit for lifeboats." But she's still uncomfortable with the idea. "And think of all the people we'll be leaving behind." + +"Well." He smiles tightly. "If you can think of any way to encourage the masses to join us ..." + +"A good start would be to stop thinking of them as masses to be manipulated." Rita stares at him. "Your family appears to have been developing a hereditary elitist streak, and it's not attractive." + +Sirhan looks uncomfortable. "If you think I'm bad, you should talk to Aineko about it," he says, self- deprecatingly. "Sometimes I wonder about that cat." + +"Maybe I will." She pauses. "And you? What are you going to do with yourself? Are you going to join the explorers?" + +"I -" He looks sideways at her. "I can see myself sending an eigenbrother," he says quietly. "But I'm not going to gamble my entire future on a bid to reach the far side of the observable universe by router. I've had enough excitement to last me a lifetime, lately. I think one copy for the backup archive in the icy depths, one to go exploring - and one to settle down and raise a family. What about you?" + +"You'll go all three ways?" she asks. + +"Yes, I think so. What about you?" + +"Where you go, I go." She leans against him. "Isn't that what matters in the end?" she murmurs. + +1~ Chapter 9: Survivor + +This time, more than a double handful of years passes between successive visits to the Macx dynasty. + +Somewhere in the gas-sprinkled darkness beyond the local void, carbon-based life stirs. A cylinder of diamond fifty kilometers long spins in the darkness, its surface etched with strange quantum wells that emulate exotic atoms not found in any periodic table that Mendeleyev would have recognized. Within it, walls hold kilotonnes of oxygen and nitrogen gas, megatonnes of life-infested soil. A hundred trillion kilometers from the wreckage of Earth, the cylinder glitters like a gem in the darkness. + +Welcome to New Japan: one of the places between the stars where human beings hang out, now that the solar system is off-limits to meatbodies. + +I wonder who we'll find here? + +* * * + +There's an open plaza in one of the terraform sectors of the habitat cylinder. A huge gong hangs from a beautifully painted wooden frame at one side of the square, which is paved with weathered limestone slabs made of atoms ripped from a planet that has never seen molten ice. Houses stand around, and open-fronted huts where a variety of humanoid waitrons attend to food and beverages for the passing realfolk. A group of prepubescent children are playing hunt-and-seek with their big-eyed pet companions, brandishing makeshift spears and automatic rifles - there's no pain here, for bodies are fungible, rebuilt in a minute by the assembler/disassembler gates in every room. There are few adults hereabouts, for Red Plaza is unfashionable at present, and the kids have claimed it for their own as a playground. They're all genuinely young, symptoms of a demographic demiurge, not a single wendypan among them. + +A skinny boy with nut brown skin, a mop of black hair, and three arms is patiently stalking a worried-looking blue eeyore around the corner of the square. He's passing a stand stacked with fresh sushi rolls when the strange beast squirms out from beneath a wheelbarrow and arches its back, stretching luxuriously. + +The boy, Manni, freezes, hands tensing around his spear as he focuses on the new target. (The blue eeyore flicks its tail at him and darts for safety across a lichen-encrusted slab.) "City, what's that?" he asks without moving his lips. + +"What are you looking at?" replies City, which puzzles him somewhat, but not as much as it should. + +The beast finishes stretching one front leg and extends another. It looks a bit like a pussycat to Manni, but there's something subtly wrong with it. Its head is a little too small, the eyes likewise - and those paws - "You're sharp," he accuses the beast, forehead wrinkling in disapproval. + +"Yeah, whatever." The creature yawns, and Manni points his spear at it, clenching the shaft in both right hands. It's got sharp teeth, too, but it spoke to him via his inner hearing, not his ears. Innerspeech is for people, not toys. + +"Who are you?" he demands. + +The beast looks at him insolently. "I know your parents," it says, still using innerspeech. "You're Manni Macx, aren't you? Thought so. I want you to take me to your father." + +"No!" Manni jumps up and waves his arms at it. "I don't like you! Go away!" He pokes his spear in the direction of the beast's nose. + +"I'll go away when you take me to your father," says the beast. It raises its tail like a pussycat, and the fur bushes out, but then it pauses. "If you take me to your father I'll tell you a story afterward, how about that?" + +"Don't care!" Manni is only about two hundred megaseconds old - seven old Earth-years - but he can tell when he's being manipulated and gets truculent. + +"Kids." The cat-thing's tail lashes from side to side. "Okay, Manni, how about you take me to your father, or I rip your face off? I've got claws, you know." A brief eyeblink later, it's wrapping itself around his ankles sinuously, purring to give the lie to its unreliable threat - but he can see that it's got sharp nails all right. It's a /{wild}/ pussycat-thing, and nothing in his artificially preserved orthohuman upbringing has prepared him for dealing with a real wild pussycat-thing that talks. + +"Get away!" Manni is worried. "Mom!" he hollers, unintentionally triggering the broadcast flag in his innerspeech. "There's this /{thing}/ -" + +"Mom will do." The cat-thing sounds resigned. It stops rubbing against Manni's legs and looks up at him. "There's no need to panic. I won't hurt you." + +Manni stops hollering. "Who're you?" he asks at last, staring at the beast. Somewhere light-years away, an adult has heard his cry; his mother is coming fast, bouncing between switches and glancing off folded dimensions in a headlong rush toward him. + +"I'm Aineko." The beast sits down and begins to wash behind one hind leg. "And you're Manni, right?" + +"Aineko," Manni says uncertainly. "Do you know Lis or Bill?" + +Aineko the cat-thing pauses in his washing routine and looks at Manni, head cocked to one side. Manni is too young, too inexperienced to know that Aineko's proportions are those of a domestic cat, /{Felis catus}/, a naturally evolved animal rather than the toys and palimpsests and companionables he's used to. Reality may be fashionable with his parents' generation, but there /{are}/ limits, after all. Orange-and-brown stripes and whorls decorate Aineko's fur, and he sprouts a white fluffy bib beneath his chin. "Who are Lis and Bill?" + +"Them," says Manni, as big, sullen-faced Bill creeps up behind Aineko and tries to grab his tail while Lis floats behind his shoulder like a pint-sized UFO, buzzing excitedly. But Aineko is too fast for the kids and scampers round Manni's feet like a hairy missile. Manni whoops and tries to spear the pussycat-thing, but his spear turns to blue glass, crackles, and shards of brilliant snow rain down, burning his hands. + +"/{Now that}/ wasn't very friendly, was it?" says Aineko, a menacing note in his voice. "Didn't your mother teach you not to -" + +The door in the side of the sushi stall opens as Rita arrives, breathless and angry: "Manni! What have I told you about playing -" + +She stops, seeing Aineko. "/{You}/." She recoils in barely concealed fright. Unlike Manni, she recognizes it as the avatar of a posthuman demiurge, a body incarnated solely to provide a point of personal interaction for people to focus on. + +The cat grins back at her. "Me," he agrees. "Ready to talk?" + +She looks stricken. "We've got nothing to talk about." + +Aineko lashes his tail. "Oh, but we do." The cat turns and looks pointedly at Manni. "Don't we?" + +* * * + +_1 It has been a long time since Aineko passed this way, and in the meantime the space around Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, has changed out of all recognition. Back when the great lobster-built starships swept out of Sol's Oort cloud, archiving the raw frozen data of the unoccupied brown dwarf halo systems and seeding their structured excrement with programmable matter, there was nothing but random dead atoms hereabouts (and an alien router). But that was a long time ago; and since then, the brown dwarf system has succumbed to an anthropic infestation. + +_1 An unoptimized instance of H. sapiens maintains state coherency for only two to three gigaseconds before it succumbs to necrosis. But in only about ten gigaseconds, the infestation has turned the dead brown dwarf system upside down. They strip-mined the chilly planets to make environments suitable for their own variety of carbon life. They rearranged moons, building massive structures the size of asteroids. They ripped wormhole endpoints free of the routers and turned them into their own crude point-to-point network, learned how to generate new wormholes, then ran their own packet-switched polities over them. Wormhole traffic now supports an ever-expanding mesh of interstellar human commerce, but always in the darkness between the lit stars and the strange, metal-depleted dwarfs with the suspiciously low-entropy radiation. The sheer temerity of the project is mind-boggling: notwithstanding that canned apes are simply /{not suited}/ to life in the interstellar void, especially in orbit around a brown dwarf whose planets make Pluto seem like a tropical paradise, they've taken over the whole damn system. + +_1 New Japan is one of the newer human polities in this system, a bunch of nodes physically collocated in the humaniformed spaces of the colony cylinders. Its designers evidently only knew about old Nippon from recordings made back before Earth was dismantled, and worked from a combination of nostalgia-trip videos, Miyazaki movies, and anime culture. Nevertheless, it's the home of numerous human beings - even if they are about as similar to their historical antecedents as New Japan is to its long-gone namesake. + +_1 Humanity? + +_1 Their grandparents /{would}/ recognize them, mostly. The ones who are truly beyond the ken of twentieth-century survivors stayed back home in the red-hot clouds of nanocomputers that have replaced the planets that once orbited Earth's sun in stately Copernican harmony. The fast-thinking Matrioshka brains are as incomprehensible to their merely posthuman ancestors as an ICBM to an amoeba - and about as inhabitable. Space is dusted with the corpses of Matrioshka brains that have long since burned out, informational collapse taking down entire civilizations that stayed in close orbit around their home stars. Farther away, galaxy-sized intelligences beat incomprehensible rhythms against the darkness of the vacuum, trying to hack the Planck substrate into doing their bidding. Posthumans, and the few other semitranscended species to have discovered the router network, live furtively in the darkness between these islands of brilliance. There are, it would seem, advantages to not being too intelligent. + +_1 Humanity. Monadic intelligences, mostly trapped within their own skulls, living in small family groups within larger tribal networks, adaptable to territorial or migratory lifestyles. Those were the options on offer before the great acceleration. Now that dumb matter thinks, with every kilogram of wallpaper potentially hosting hundreds of uploaded ancestors, now that every door is potentially a wormhole to a hab half a parsec away, the humans can stay in the same place while the landscape migrates and mutates past them, streaming into the luxurious void of their personal history. Life is rich here, endlessly varied and sometimes confusing. So it is that tribal groups remain, their associations mediated across teraklicks and gigaseconds by exotic agencies. And sometimes the agencies will vanish for a while, reappearing later like an unexpected jape upon the infinite. + +* * * + +Ancestor worship takes on a whole new meaning when the state vectors of all the filial entities' precursors are archived and indexed for recall. At just the moment that the tiny capillaries in Rita's face are constricting in response to a surge of adrenaline, causing her to turn pale and her pupils to dilate as she focuses on the pussycat-thing, Sirhan is kneeling before a small shrine, lighting a stick of incense, and preparing to respectfully address his grandfather's ghost. + +The ritual is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. Sirhan can speak to his grandfather's ghost wherever and whenever he wants, without any formality, and the ghost will reply at interminable length, cracking puns in dead languages and asking about people who died before the temple of history was established. But Sirhan is a sucker for rituals, and anyway, it helps him structure an otherwise-stressful encounter. + +If it were up to Sirhan, he'd probably skip chatting to grandfather every ten megaseconds. Sirhan's mother and her partner aren't available, having opted to join one of the long-distance exploration missions through the router network that were launched by the accelerationistas long ago; and Rita's antecedents are either fully virtualized or dead. They are a family with a tenuous grip on history. But both of them spent a long time in the same state of half-life in which Manfred currently exists, and he knows his wife will take him to task if he doesn't bring the revered ancestor up to date on what's been happening in the real world while he's been dead. In Manfred's case, death is not only potentially reversible, but almost inevitably so. After all, they're raising his clone. Sooner or later, the kid is going to want to visit the original, or vice versa. + +What a state we have come /{to, when the restless dead refuse to stay a part of history?}/ He wonders ironically as he scratches the self-igniter strip on the red incense stick and bows to the mirror at the back of the shrine. "Your respectful grandson awaits and expects your guidance," he intones formally - for in addition to being conservative by nature, Sirhan is acutely aware of his family's relative poverty and the need to augment their social credit, and in this reincarnation-intermediated traditionalist polity for the hopelessly orthohuman, you can score credit for formality. He sits back on his heels to await the response. + +Manfred doesn't take long to appear in the depths of the mirror. He takes the shape of an albino orang-utan, as usual: He was messing around with Great Aunt Annette's ontological wardrobe right before this copy of him was recorded and placed in the temple - they might have separated, but they remained close. "Hi, lad. What year is it?" + +Sirhan suppresses a sigh. "We don't do years anymore," he explains, not for the first time. Every time he consults his grandfather, the new instance asks this question sooner or later. "Years are an archaism. It's been ten megs since we last spoke - about four /{months}/, if you're going to be pedantic about it, and a hundred and eighty /{years}/ since we emigrated. Although correcting for general relativity adds another decade or so." + +"Oh. Is that all?" Manfred manages to look disappointed. This is a new one on Sirhan: Usually the diverging state vector of Gramps's ghost asks after Amber or cracks a feeble joke at this point. "No changes in the Hubble constant, or the rate of stellar formation? Have we heard from any of the exploration eigenselves yet?" + +"Nope." Sirhan relaxes slightly. So Manfred is going to ask about the fool's errand to the edge of the Beckenstein limit again, is he? That's canned conversation number twenty-nine. (Amber and the other explorers who set out for the really long exploration mission shortly after the first colony was settled aren't due back for, oh, about 10^{19}^ seconds. It's a /{long}/ way to the edge of the observable universe, even when you can go the first several hundred million light-years - to the Böotes supercluster and beyond - via a small-world network of wormholes. And this time, she didn't leave any copies of herself behind.) + +Sirhan - either in this or some other incarnation - has had this talk with Manfred many times before, because that's the essence of the dead. They don't remember from one recall session to the next, unless and until they ask to be resurrected because their restoration criteria have been matched. Manfred has been dead a long time, long enough for Sirhan and Rita to be resurrected and live a long family life three or four times over after /{they}/ had spent a century or so in nonexistence. "We've received no notices from the lobsters, nothing from Aineko either." He takes a deep breath. "You always ask me where we are next, so I've got a canned response for you -" and one of his agents throws the package, tagged as a scroll sealed with red wax and a silk ribbon, through the surface of the mirror. (After the tenth repetition Rita and Sirhan agreed to write a basic briefing that the Manfred-ghosts could use to orient themselves.) + +Manfred is silent for a moment - probably hours in ghost-space - as he assimilates the changes. Then: "This is true? I've slept through a whole /{civilization}/?" + +"Not slept, you've been dead," Sirhan says pedantically. He realizes he's being a bit harsh: "Actually, so did we," he adds. "We surfed the first three gigasecs or so because we wanted to start a family somewhere where our children could grow up the traditional way. Habs with an oxidation-intensive triple-point water environment didn't get built until sometime after the beginning of the exile. That's when the fad for neomorphism got entrenched," he adds with distaste. For quite a while the neos resisted the idea of wasting resources building colony cylinders spinning to provide vertebrate-friendly gee forces and breathable oxygen-rich atmospheres - it had been quite a political football. But the increasing curve of wealth production had allowed the orthodox to reincarnate from death-sleep after a few decades, once the fundamental headaches of building settlements in chilly orbits around metal-deficient brown dwarfs were overcome. + +"Uh." Manfred takes a deep breath, then scratches himself under one armpit, rubbery lips puckering. "So, let me get this straight: We - you, they, whoever - hit the router at Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, replicated a load of them, and now use the wormhole mechanism the routers rely on as point-to-point gates for physical transport? And have spread throughout a bunch of brown dwarf systems, and built a pure deep-space polity based on big cylinder habitats connected by teleport gates hacked out of routers?" + +"Would /{you}/ trust one of the original routers for switched data communications?" Sirhan asks rhetorically. "Even with the source code? They've been corrupted by all the dead alien Matrioshka civilizations they've come into contact with, but they're reasonably safe if all you want to use them for is to cannibalize them for wormholes and tunnel dumb mass from point to point." He searches for a metaphor: "Like using your, uh, internet, to emulate a nineteenth-century postal service." + +"O-kay." Manfred looks thoughtful, as he usually does at this point in the conversation - which means Sirhan is going to have to break it to him that his first thoughts for how to utilize the gates have already been done. They're hopelessly old hat. In fact, the main reason why Manfred is still dead is that things have moved on so far that, sooner or later, whenever he surfaces for a chat, he gets frustrated and elects not to be reincarnated. Not that Sirhan is about to tell him that he's obsolete - that would be rude, not to say subtly inaccurate. "That raises some interesting possibilities. I wonder, has anyone -" + +"/{Sirhan, I need you!}/" + +The crystal chill of Rita's alarm and fear cuts through Sirhan's awareness like a scalpel, distracting him from the ghost of his ancestor. He blinks, instantly transferring the full focus of his attention to Rita without sparing Manfred even a ghost. + +"/{What's happening}/ -" + +He sees through Rita's eyes: a cat with an orange-and-brown swirl on its flank sits purring beside Manni in the family room of their dwelling. Its eyes are narrowed as it watches her with unnatural wisdom. Manni is running fingers through its fur and seems none the worse for wear, but Sirhan still feels his fists clench. + +"What -" + +"Excuse me," he says, standing up: "Got to go. Your bloody cat's turned up." He adds "/{coming home now}/" for Rita's benefit, then turns and hurries out of the temple concourse. When he reaches the main hall, he pauses, then Rita's sense of urgency returns to him, and he throws parsimony to the wind, stepping into a priority gate in order to get home as fast as possible. + +Behind him, Manfred's melancholy ghost snorts, mildly offended, and considers the existential choice: to be, or not to be. Then he makes a decision. + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the twenty-third century, or the twenty-fourth. Or maybe it's the twenty-second, jet-lagged and dazed by spurious suspended animation and relativistic travel; it hardly matters these days. What's left of recognizable humanity has scattered across a hundred light-years, living in hollowed-out asteroids and cylindrical spinning habitats strung in orbit around cold brown dwarf stars and sunless planets that wander the interstellar void. The looted mechanisms underlying the alien routers have been cannibalized, simplified to a level the merely superhuman can almost comprehend, turned into generators for paired wormhole endpoints that allow instantaneous switched transport across vast distances. Other mechanisms, the descendants of the advanced nanotechnologies developed by the flowering of human techgnosis in the twenty-first century, have made the replication of dumb matter trivial; this is not a society accustomed to scarcity. + +_1 But in some respects, New Japan and the Invisible Empire and the other polities of human space are poverty-stricken backwaters. They take no part in the higher-order economies of the posthuman. They can barely comprehend the idle muttering of the Vile Offspring, whose mass/energy budget (derived from their complete restructuring of the free matter of humanity's original solar system into computronium) dwarfs that of half a hundred human-occupied brown dwarf systems. And they still know worryingly little about the deep history of intelligence in this universe, about the origins of the router network that laces so many dead civilizations into an embrace of death and decay, about the distant galaxy-scale bursts of information processing that lie at measurable red-shift distances, even about the free posthumans who live among them in some senses, collocated in the same light cone as these living fossil relics of old-fashioned humanity. + +_1 Sirhan and Rita settled in this charming human-friendly backwater in order to raise a family, study xenoarchaeology, and avoid the turmoil and turbulence that have characterized his family's history across the last couple of generations. Life has been comfortable for the most part, and if the stipend of an academic nucleofamilial is not large, it is sufficient in this place and age to provide all the necessary comforts of civilization. And this suits Sirhan (and Rita) fine; the turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else. + +_1 Only ... + +_1 Aineko is back. Aineko, who after negotiating the establishment of the earliest of the refugee habs in orbit around Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, vanished into the router network with Manfred's other instance - and the partial copies of Sirhan and Rita who had forked, seeking adventure rather than cozy domesticity. Sirhan made a devil's bargain with Aineko, all those gigaseconds ago, and now he is deathly afraid that Aineko is going to call the payment due. + +* * * + +Manfred walks down a hall of mirrors. At the far end, he emerges in a public space modeled on a Menger sponge - a cube diced subtractively into ever-smaller cubic volumes until its surface area tends toward infinity. This being meatspace, or a reasonable simulation thereof, it isn't a /{real}/ Menger sponge; but it looks good at a distance, going down at least four levels. + +He pauses behind a waist-high diamond barrier and looks down into the almost-tesseract-shaped depths of the cube's interior, at a verdant garden landscape with charming footbridges that cross streams laid out with careful attention to the requirements of feng shui. He looks up: Some of the cube-shaped subtractive openings within the pseudofractal structure are occupied by windows belonging to dwellings or shared buildings that overlook the public space. High above, butterfly-shaped beings with exotic colored wings circle in the ventilation currents. It's hard to tell from down here, but the central cuboid opening looks to be at least half a kilometer on a side, and they might very well be posthumans with low-gee wings - angels. + +/{Angels, or rats in the walls}/? he asks himself, and sighs. Half his extensions are off-line, so hopelessly obsolete that the temple's assembler systems didn't bother replicating them, or even creating emulation environments for them to run in. The rest ... well, at least he's still physically orthohuman, he realizes. Fully functional, fully male. /{Not everything has changed - only the important stuff}/. It's a scary-funny thought, laden with irony. Here he is, naked as the day he was born - newly re-created, in fact, released from the wake-experience-reset cycle of the temple of history - standing on the threshold of a posthuman civilization so outrageously rich and powerful that they can build mammal-friendly habitats that resemble works of art in the cryogenic depths of space. Only he's /{poor}/, this whole polity is /{poor}/, and it can't ever be anything else, in fact, because it's a dumping ground for merely posthuman also-rans, the singularitarian equivalent of australopithecines. In the brave new world of the Vile Offspring, they can't get ahead any more than a protohominid could hack it as a rocket scientist in Werner von Braun's day. They're born to be primitive, wallowing happily in the mud-bath of their own limited cognitive bandwidth. So they fled into the darkness and built a civilization so bright it can put anything earthbound that came before the singularity into the shade ... and it's still a shanty town inhabited by the mentally handicapped. + +The incongruity of it amuses him, but only for a moment. He has, after all, electively reincarnated for a reason: Sirhan's throwaway comment about the cat caught his attention. "City, where can I find some clothes?" he asks. "Something socially appropriate, that is. And some, uh, brains. I need to be able to off-load ..." + +Citymind chuckles inside the back of his head, and Manfred realizes that there's a public assembler on the other side of the ornamental wall he's leaning on. "Oh," he mutters, as he finds himself imagining something not unlike his clunky old direct neural interface, candy-colored icons and overlays and all. It's curiously mutable, and with a weird sense of detachment, he realizes that it's not his imagination at all, but an infinitely customizable interface to the pervasive information spaces of the polity, currently running in dumbed-down stupid mode for his benefit. It's true; he needs training wheels. But it doesn't take him long to figure out how to ask the assembler to make him a pair of pants and a plain black vest, and to discover that, as long as he keeps his requests simple, the results are free - just like back home on Saturn. The spaceborn polities are kind to indigents, for the basic requirements of life are cheap, and to withhold them would be tantamount to homicide. (If the presence of transhumans has upset a whole raft of prior assumptions, at least it hasn't done more than superficial damage to the Golden Rule.) + +Clothed and more or less conscious - at least at a human level - Manfred takes stock. "Where do Sirhan and Rita live?" he asks. A dotted route makes itself apparent to him, snaking improbably through a solid wall that he understands to be an instantaneous wormhole gate connecting points light-years apart. He shakes his head, bemused. /{I suppose I'd better go and see them}/, he decides. It's not as if there's anyone else for him to look up, is it? The Franklins vanished into the solar Matrioshka brain, Pamela died ages ago (and there's a shame, he'd never expected to miss her) and Annette hooked up with Gianni while he was being a flock of pigeons. (Draw a line under that one and say it's all over.) His daughter vanished into the long-range exploration program. He's been dead for so long that his friends and acquaintances are scattered across a light cone centuries across. He can't think of anyone else here who he might run into, except for the loyal grandson, keeping the candle of filial piety burning with unasked-for zeal. "Maybe he needs help," Manfred thinks aloud as he steps into the gate, rationalizing. "And then again, maybe /{he}/ can help /{me}/ figure out what to do?" + +* * * + +Sirhan gets home, anticipating trouble. He finds it, but not in any way he'd expected. Home is a split-level manifold, rooms connected by T-gates scattered across a variety of habitats: low-gee sleeping den, high-gee exercise room, and everything in between. It's furnished simply, tatami mats and programmable matter walls able to extrude any desired furniture in short order. The walls are configured to look and feel like paper, but can damp out even infant tantrums. But right now, the antisound isn't working, and the house he comes home to is overrun by shrieking yard apes, a blur of ginger-and-white fur, and a distraught Rita trying to explain to her neighbor Eloise why her orthodaughter Sam is bouncing around the place like a crazy ball. + +" - The cat, he gets them worked up." She wrings her hands and begins to turn as Sirhan comes into view. "At last!" + +"I came fast." He nods respectfully at Eloise, then frowns. "The children -" Something small and fast runs headfirst into him, grabs his legs, and tries to head-butt him in the crotch. "Oof!" He bends down and lifts Manni up. "Hey, son, haven't I told you not to -" + +"Not his fault," Rita says hurriedly. "He's excited because -" + +"I really don't think -" Eloise begins to gather steam, looking around uncertainly. + +"Mrreeow?" something asks in a conversational tone of voice from down around Sirhan's ankles. + +"Eek!" Sirhan jumps backward, flailing for balance under the weight of an excited toddler. There's a gigantic disturbance in the polity thoughtspace - like a stellar-mass black hole - and it appears to be stropping itself furrily against his left leg. "What are /{you}/ doing here?" He demands. + +"Oh, this and that," says the cat, his innerspeech accent a sardonic drawl. "I thought it was about time I visited again. Where's your household assembler? Mind if I use it? Got a little something I need to make up for a friend ..." + +"What?" Rita demands, instantly suspicious. "Haven't you caused enough trouble already?" Sirhan looks at her approvingly; obviously Amber's long-ago warnings about the cat sank in deeply, because she's certainly not treating it as the small bundle of child-friendly fun it would like to be perceived as. + +"Trouble?" The cat looks up at her sardonically, lashing his tail from side to side. "I won't make any trouble, I promise you. It's just -" + +The door chime clears its throat, to announce a visitor: "Ren Fuller would like to visit, m'lord and lady." + +"What's /{she}/ doing here?" Rita asks irritably. Sirhan can feel her unease, the tenuous grasping of her ghosts as she searches for reason in an unreasonable world, simulating outcomes, living through bad dreams, and backtracking to adjust her responses accordingly. "Show her in, by all means." Ren is one of their neighbor-cognates (most of her dwelling is several light-years away, but in terms of transit time, it's a hop, skip, and a jump); she and her extruded family are raising a small herd of ill-behaved kids who occasionally hang out with Manni. + +A small blue eeyore whinnies mournfully and dashes past the adults, pursued by a couple of children waving spears and shrieking. Eloise makes a grab for her own and misses, just as the door to the exercise room disappears and Manni's little friend Lis darts inside like a pint-sized guided missile. "Sam, come here right now -" Eloise calls, heading toward the door. + +"Look, what do you want?" Sirhan demands, hugging his son and looking down at the cat. + +"Oh, not much," Aineko says, turning to lick a mussed patch of fur on his flank. "I just want to play with /{him}/." + +"You want to -" Rita stops. + +"Daddy!" Manni wants down. + +Sirhan lowers him carefully, as if his bones are glass. "Run along and play," he suggests. Turning to Rita: "Why don't you go and find out what Ren wants, dear?" he asks. "She's probably here to collect Lis, but you can never be sure." + +"I was just leaving," Eloise adds, "as soon as I can catch up with Sam." She glances over her shoulder at Rita apologetically, then dives into the exercise room. + +Sirhan takes a step toward the hallway. "Let's talk," he says tightly. "In my study." He glares at the cat. "I want an explanation. I want to know the truth." + +* * * + +Meanwhile, in a cognitive wonderland his parents know about but deeply underestimate, parts of Manni are engaging in activities far less innocent than they imagine. + +Back in the twenty-first century, Sirhan lived through loads of alternate childhoods in simulation, his parents' fingers pressing firmly on the fast-forward button until they came up with someone who seemed to match their preconceptions. The experience scarred him as badly as any nineteenth-century boarding school experience, until he promised himself no child he raised would be subjected to such; but there's a difference between being shoved through a multiplicity of avatars, and voluntarily diving into an exciting universe of myth and magic where your childhood fantasies take fleshy form, stalking those of your friends and enemies through the forests of the night. + +Manni has grown up with neural interfaces to City's mindspace an order of magnitude more complex than those of Sirhan's youth, and parts of him - ghosts derived from a starting image of his neural state vector, fertilized with a scattering borrowed from the original Manfred, simulated on a meat machine far faster than real time - are fully adult. Of course, they can't fit inside his seven-year-old skull, but they still watch over him. And when he's in danger, they try to take care of their once and future body. + +Manni's primary adult ghost lives in some of New Japan's virtual mindspaces (which are a few billion times more extensive than the physical spaces available to stubborn biologicals, for the computational density of human habitats have long since ceased to make much sense when measured in MIPS per kilogram). They're modeled on presingularity Earth. Time is forever frozen on the eve of the real twenty-first century, zero eight-forty-six hours on September 11: An onrushing wide-body airliner hangs motionless in the air forty meters below the picture window of Manni's penthouse apartment on the one hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower. In historical reality, the one hundred and eighth floor was occupied by corporate offices; but the mindspace is a consensual fiction, and it is Manni's conceit to live at this pivotal point. (Not that it means much to him - he was born well over a century after the War on Terror - but it's part of his childhood folklore, the fall of the Two Towers that shattered the myth of Western exceptionalism and paved the way for the world he was born into.) + +Adult-Manni wears an avatar roughly modeled on his clone-father Manfred - skinnier, pegged at a youthful twentysomething, black-clad, and gothic. He's taking time out from a game of Matrix to listen to music, Type O Negative blaring over the sound system as he twitches in the grip of an ice-cold coke high. He's expecting a visit from a couple of call girls - themselves the gamespace avatars of force-grown adult ghosts whose primaries may not be adult, or female, or even human - which is why he's flopped bonelessly back in his Arne Jacobsen recliner, waiting for something to happen. + +The door opens behind him. He doesn't show any sign of noticing the intrusion, although his pupils dilate slightly at the faint reflection of a woman, stalking toward him, glimpsed dimly in the window glass. "You're late," he says tonelessly. "You were supposed to be here ten minutes ago -" He begins to look round, and now his eyes widen. + +"Who were you expecting?" asks the ice blond in the black business suit, long-skirted and uptight. There's something predatory about her expression: "No, don't tell me. So you're Manni, eh? Manni's partial?" She sniffs, disapproval. "Fin de siècle decadence. I'm sure Sirhan wouldn't approve." + +"My father can go fuck himself," Manni says truculently. "Who the hell are you?" + +The blond snaps her fingers: An office chair appears on the carpet between Manni and the window, and she sits on the edge of it, smoothing her skirt obsessively. "I'm Pamela," she says tightly. "Has your father told you about me?" + +Manni looks puzzled. In the back of his mind, raw instincts alien to anyone instantiated before the midpoint of the twenty-first century tug on the fabric of pseudoreality. "You're dead, aren't you?" he asks. "One of my ancestors." + +"I'm as dead as you are." She gives him a wintry smile. "Nobody stays dead these days, least of all people who know Aineko." + +Manni blinks. Now he's beginning to feel a surge of mild irritation. "This is all very well, but I was /{expecting}/ company," he says with heavy emphasis. "Not a family reunion, or a tiresome attempt to preach your puritanism -" + +Pamela snorts. "Wallow in your pigsty for all I care, kid, I've got more important things to worry about. Have you looked at your primary recently?" + +"My primary?" Manni tenses. "He's doing okay." For a moment his eyes focus on infinity, a thousand-yard stare as he loads and replays the latest brain dump from his infant self. "Who's the cat he's playing with? That's no companion!" + +"Aineko. I told you." Pamela taps the arm of her chair impatiently. "The family curse has come for another generation. And if you don't do something about it -" + +"About what?" Manni sits up. "What are you talking about?" He comes to his feet and turns toward her. Outside the window, the sky is growing dark with an echo of his own foreboding. Pamela is on her feet before him, the chair evaporated in a puff of continuity clipping, her expression a cold-eyed challenge. + +"I think you know /{exactly}/ what I'm talking about, Manni. It's time to stop playing this fucking game. Grow up, while you've still got the chance!" + +"I'm -" He stops. "Who /{am}/ I?" he asks, a chill wind of uncertainty drying the sweat that has sprung up and down his spine. "And what are you doing here?" + +"Do you really want to know the answer? I'm dead, remember. The dead know everything. And that isn't necessarily good for the living ..." + +He takes a deep breath. "Am I dead too?" He looks puzzled. "There's an adult-me in Seventh Cube Heaven, what's /{he}/ doing here?" + +"It's the kind of coincidence that isn't." She reaches out and takes his hand, dumping encrypted tokens deep into his sensorium, a trail of bread crumbs leading into a dark and trackless part of mindspace. "Want to find out? Follow me." Then she vanishes. + +Manni leans forward, baffled and frightened, staring down at the frozen majesty of the onrushing airliner below his window. "Shit," he whispers. /{She came right through my defenses without leaving a trace. Who is she?}/ The ghost of his dead great-grandmother, or something else? + +I'll have to follow her if I want to find out, he realizes. He holds up his left hand, stares at the invisible token glowing brightly inside his husk of flesh. "Resynchronize me with my primary," he says. + +A fraction of a second later, the floor of the penthouse bucks and quakes wildly and fire alarms begin to shriek as time comes to an end and the frozen airliner completes its journey. But Manni isn't there anymore. And if a skyscraper falls in a simulation with nobody to see it, has anything actually happened? + +* * * + +"I've come for the boy," says the cat. It sits on the hand woven rug in the middle of the hardwood floor with one hind leg sticking out at an odd angle, as if it's forgotten about it. Sirhan teeters on the edge of hysteria for a moment as he apprehends the sheer size of the entity before him, the whimsical posthuman creation of his ancestors. Originally a robotic toy companion, Aineko was progressively upgraded and patched. By the eighties, when Sirhan first met the cat in the flesh, he was already a terrifyingly alien intelligence, subtle and ironic. And now ... + +Sirhan knows Aineko manipulated his eigenmother, bending her natural affections away from his real father and toward another man. In moments of black introspection, he sometimes wonders if the cat wasn't also responsible in some way for his own broken upbringing, the failure to relate to his real parents. After all, it was a pawn in the vicious divorce battle between Manfred and Pamela - decades before his birth - and there might be long-term instructions buried in its preconscious drives. What if the pawn is actually a hidden king, scheming in the darkness? + +"I've come for Manny." + +"You're not having him." Sirhan maintains an outer facade of calm, even though his first inclination is to snap at Aineko. "Haven't you done enough damage already?" + +"You're not going to make this easy, are you?" The cat stretches his head forward and begins to lick obsessively between the splayed toes of his raised foot. "I'm not making a demand, kid, I said I've /{come}/ for him, and you're not really in the frame at all. In fact, I'm going out of my way to warn you." + +"And I say -" Sirhan stops. "Shit!" Sirhan doesn't approve of swearing: The curse is an outward demonstration of his inner turmoil. "Forget what I was about to say, I'm sure you already know it. Let me begin again, please." + +"Sure. Let's play this your way." The cat chews on a loose nail sheath but his innerspeech is perfectly clear, a casual intimacy that keeps Sirhan on edge. "You've got some idea of what I am, clearly. You know - I ascribe intentionality to you - that my theory of mind is intrinsically stronger than yours, that my cognitive model of human consciousness is complete. You might well suspect that I use a Turing Oracle to think my way around your halting states." The cat isn't worrying at a loose claw now, he's grinning, pointy teeth gleaming in the light from Sirhan's study window. The window looks out onto the inner space of the habitat cylinder, up at a sky with hillsides and lakes and forests plastered across it: It's like an Escher landscape, modeled with complete perfection. "You've realized that I can think my way around the outside of your box while you're flailing away inside it, and I'm /{always}/ one jump ahead of you. What else do you know I know?" + +Sirhan shivers. Aineko is staring up at him, unblinking. For a moment, he feels at gut level that he is in the presence of an alien god: It's the simple truth, isn't it? But - "Okay, I concede the point," Sirhan says after a moment in which he spawns a blizzard of panicky cognitive ghosts, fractional personalities each tasked with the examination of a different facet of the same problem. "You're smarter than I am. I'm just a boringly augmented human being, but you've got a flashy new theory of mind that lets you work around creatures like me the way I can think my way around a real cat." He crosses his arms defensively. "You do not normally rub this in. It's not in your interests to do so, is it? You prefer to hide your manipulative capabilities under an affable exterior, to play with us. So you're revealing all this for a reason." There's a note of bitterness in his voice now. Glancing round, Sirhan summons up a chair - and, as an afterthought, a cat basket. "Have a seat. /{Why now}/, Aineko? What makes you think you can take my eigenson?" + +"I didn't say I was going to /{take}/ him, I said I'd come for him." Aineko's tail lashes from side to side in agitation. "I don't deal in primate politics, Sirhan: I'm not a monkey-boy. But I knew you'd react badly because the way your species socializes" - a dozen metaghosts reconverge in Sirhan's mind, drowning Aineko's voice in an inner cacophony - "would enter into the situation, and it seemed preferable to trigger your territorial/reproductive threat display early, rather than risk it exploding in my face during a more delicate situation." + +Sirhan waves a hand vaguely at the cat: "Please wait." He's trying to integrate his false memories - the output from the ghosts, their thinking finished - and his eyes narrow suspiciously. "It must be bad. You don't normally get confrontational - you script your interactions with humans ahead of time, so that you maneuver them into doing what you want them to do and thinking it was their idea all along." He tenses. "What is it about Manni that brought you here? What do you want with him? He's just a kid." + +"You're confusing Manni with Manfred." Aineko sends a glyph of a smile to Sirhan: "That's your first mistake, even though they're clones in different subjective states. Think what he's like when he's grown up." + +"But he isn't grown-up!" Sirhan complains. "He hasn't been grown-up for -" + +"- Years, Sirhan. That's the problem. I need to talk to your grandfather, really, not your son, and not the goddamn stateless ghost in the temple of history, I need a Manfred with a sense of continuity. He's got something that I need, and I promise you I'm not going away until I get it. Do you understand?" + +"Yes." Sirhan wonders if his voice sounds as hollow as the feeling in his chest. "But he's our kid, Aineko. We're human. You know what that means to us?" + +"Second childhood." Aineko stands up, stretches, then curls up in the cat basket. "That's the trouble with hacking you naked apes for long life, you keep needing a flush and reset job - and then you lose continuity. That's not my problem, Sirhan. I got a signal from the far edge of the router network, a ghost that claims to be family. Says they finally made it out to the big beyond, out past the Böotes supercluster, found something concrete and important that's worth my while to visit. But I want to make sure it's not like the Wunch before I answer. I'm not letting /{that}/ into my mind, even with a sandbox. Do you understand that? I need to instantiate a real-live adult Manfred with all his memories, one who hasn't been a part of me, and get him to vouch for the sapient data packet. It takes a conscious being to authenticate that kind of messenger. Unfortunately, the history temple is annoyingly resistant to unauthorized extraction - I can't just go in and steal a copy of him - and I don't want to use my own model of Manfred: It knows too much. So -" + +"What's it promising?" Sirhan asks tensely. + +Aineko looks at him through slitted eyes, a purring buzz at the base of his throat: "/{Everything}/." + +* * * + +"There are different kinds of death," the woman called Pamela tells Manni, her bone-dry voice a whisper in the darkness. Manni tries to move, but he seems to be trapped in a confined space; for a moment, he begins to panic, but then he works it out. "First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life - oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not /{just}/ the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness." The darkness is close and disorienting and Manni isn't sure which way up he is - nothing seems to work. Even Pamela's voice is a directionless ambiance, coming from all around him. + +"Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding." A dry chuckle: "I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal's wager was right - exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states." + +Manni tries to say, /{I'm not dead}/, but his throat doesn't seem to be working. And now that he thinks about it, he doesn't seem to be breathing, either. + +"Now, consciousness. That's a fun thing, isn't it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you'll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse - an internal simulation of the mouse's likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator's actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling - so the tribe could work collectively - and then reflexively, to simulate the individual's /{own}/ inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you've got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus - signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as 'predator here' or 'food there.'" + +/{Get me out of this!}/ Manny feels panic biting into him with liquid-helium-lubricated teeth. "G-e-t -" For a miracle the words actually come out, although he can't tell quite how he's uttering them, his throat being quite as frozen as his innerspeech. Everything's off-lined, all systems down. + +"So," Pamela continues remorselessly, "we come to the posthuman. Not just our own neural wetware, mapped out to the subcellular level and executed in an emulation environment on a honking great big computer, like this: That's not posthuman, that's a travesty. I'm talking about beings who are fundamentally better consciousness engines than us merely human types, augmented or otherwise. They're not just better at cooperation - witness Economics 2.0 for a classic demonstration of that - but better at /{simulation}/. A posthuman can build an internal model of a human-level intelligence that is, well, as cognitively strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other people tick, but we're quite often wrong, whereas real posthumans can actually simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right. And this is especially true of a posthuman that's been given full access to our memory prostheses for a period of years, back before we realized they were going to transcend on us. Isn't that the case, Manni?" + +Manni would be screaming at her right now, if he had a mouth - but instead the panic is giving way to an enormous sense of /{déja vu}/. There's something /{about}/ Pamela, something ominous that he knows ... he's met her before, he's sure of it. And while most of his systems are off-line, one of them is very much active: There's a personality ghost flagging its intention of merging back in with him, and the memory delta it carries is enormous, years and years of divergent experiences to absorb. He shoves it away with a titanic effort - it's a very insistent ghost - and concentrates on imagining the feel of lips moving on teeth, a sly tongue obstructing his epiglottis, words forming in his throat - "m-e ..." + +"We should have known better than to keep upgrading the cat, Manny. It knows us too well. I may have died in the flesh, but Aineko /{remembered}/ me, as hideously accurately as the Vile Offspring remembered the random resimulated. And you can run away - like this, this second childhood - but you can't hide. Your cat wants you. And there's more." Her voice sends chills up and down his spine, for without him giving it permission, the ghost has begun to merge its stupendous load of memories with his neural map, and her voice is freighted with erotic/repulsive significance, the result of conditioning feedback he subjected himself to a lifetime - lifetimes? - ago: "He's been /{playing}/ with us, Manny, possibly from before we realized he was conscious." + +"/{Out}/ -" Manfred stops. He can see again, and move, and feel his mouth. He's /{himself}/ again, physically back as he was in his late twenties all those decades ago when he'd lived a peripatetic life in presingularity Europe. He's sitting on the edge of a bed in a charmingly themed Amsterdam hotel with a recurrent motif of philosophers, wearing jeans and collarless shirt and a vest of pockets crammed with the detritus of a long-obsolete personal area network, his crazily clunky projection specs sitting on the bedside table. Pamela stands stiffly in front of the door, watching him. She's not the withered travesty he remembers seeing on Saturn, a half-blind Fate leaning on the shoulder of his grandson. Nor is she the vengeful Fury of Paris, or the scheming fundamentalist devil of the Belt. Wearing a sharply tailored suit over a red-and-gold brocade corset, blonde hair drawn back like fine wire in a tight chignon, she's the focused, driven force of nature he first fell in love with: repression, domination, his very own strict machine. + +"We're dead," she says, then gives voice to a tense half laugh: "We don't have to live through the bad times again if we don't want to." + +"What is this?" he asks, his mouth dry. + +"It's the reproductive imperative." She sniffs. "Come on, stand up. Come here." + +He stands up obediently, but makes no move toward her. "Whose imperative?" + +"Not ours." Her cheek twitches. "You find things out when you're dead. That fucking cat has got a lot of questions to answer." + +"You're telling me that -" + +She shrugs. "Can you think of any other explanation for all this?" Then she steps forward and takes his hand. "Division and recombination. Partitioning of memetic replicators into different groups, then careful cross-fertilization. Aineko wasn't just breeding a better Macx when he arranged all those odd marriages and divorces and eigenparents and forked uploads - Aineko is trying to breed our /{minds}/." Her fingers are slim and cool in his hand. He feels a momentary revulsion, as of the grave, and he shudders before he realizes it's his conditioning cutting in. Crudely implanted reflexes that shouldn't still be active after all this time. "Even our divorce. If -" + +"Surely not." Manny remembers that much already. "Aineko wasn't even conscious back then!" + +Pamela raises one sharply sculpted eyebrow: "Are you sure?" + +"You want an answer," he says. + +She breathes deeply, and he feels it on his cheek - it raises the fine hairs on the back of his neck. Then she nods stiffly. "I want to know how much of our history was scripted by the cat. Back when we thought we were upgrading his firmware, were we? Or was he letting us think that we were?" A sharp hiss of breath: "The divorce. Was that us? Or were we being manipulated?" + +"Our memories, are they real? Did any of that stuff actually /{happen}/ to us? Or -" + +She's standing about twenty centimeters away from him, and Manfred realizes that he's acutely aware of her presence, of the smell of her skin, the heave of her bosom as she breathes, the dilation of her pupils. For an endless moment he stares into her eyes and sees his own reflection - her theory of his mind - staring back. /{Communication}/. Strict machine. She steps back a pace, spike heels clicking, and smiles ironically. "You've got a host body waiting for you, freshly fabbed: Seems Sirhan was talking to your archived ghost in the temple of history, and it decided to elect for reincarnation. Quite a day for huge coincidences, isn't it? Why don't you go merge with it - I'll meet you, then we can go and ask Aineko some hard questions." + +Manfred takes a deep breath and nods. "I suppose so ..." + +* * * + +Little Manni - a clone off the family tree, which is actually a directed cyclic graph - doesn't understand what all the fuss is about but he can tell when momma, Rita, is upset. It's something to do with the pussycat-thing, that much he knows, but Momma doesn't want to tell him: "Go play with your friends, dear," she says distractedly, not even bothering to spawn a ghost to watch over him. + +Manni goes into his room and rummages around in toyspace for a bit, but there's nothing quite as interesting as the cat. The pussycat-thing smells of adventure, the illicit made explicit. Manni wonders where daddy's taken it. He tries to call big-Manni-ghost, but big-self isn't answering: He's probably sleeping or something. So after a distracted irritated fit of play - which leaves the toyspace in total disarray, Sendak-things cowering under a big bass drum - Manni gets bored. And because he's still basically a little kid, and not fully in control of his own metaprogramming, instead of adjusting his outlook so that he isn't bored anymore, he sneaks out through his bedroom gate (which big-Manni-ghost reprogrammed for him sometime ago so that it would forward to an underused public A-gate that he'd run a man-in-the-middle hack on, so he could use it as a proxy teleport server) then down to the underside of Red Plaza, where skinless things gibber and howl at their tormentors, broken angels are crucified on the pillars that hold up the sky, and gangs of semiferal children act out their psychotic fantasies on mouthless android replicas of parents and authorities. + +Lis is there, and Vipul and Kareen and Morgan. Lis has changed into a warbody, an ominous gray battlebot husk with protruding spikes and a belt of morningstars that whirl threateningly around her. "Manni! Play war?" + +Morgan's got great crushing pincers instead of hands, and Manni is glad he came motie-style, his third arm a bony scythe from the elbow down. He nods excitedly. "Who's the enemy?" + +"Them." Lis precesses and points at a bunch of kids on the far side of a pile of artistically arranged rubble who are gathered around a gibbet, poking things that glow into the flinching flesh of whatever is incarcerated in the cast-iron cage. It's all make-believe, but the screams are convincing, all the same, and they take Manni back for an instant to the last time he died down here, the uneasy edit around a black hole of pain surrounding his disemboweling. "They've got Lucy, and they're torturing her, we've got to get her back." Nobody really dies in these games, not permanently, but children can be very rough indeed, and the adults of New Japan have found that it's best to let them have at each other and rely on City to redact the damage later. Allowing them this outlet makes it easier to stop them doing really dangerous things that threaten the structural integrity of the biosphere. + +"Fun." Manni's eyes light up as Vipul yanks the arsenal doors open and starts handing out clubs, chibs, spikies, shuriken, and garrotes. "Let's go!" + +About ten minutes of gouging, running, fighting, and screaming later, Manni is leaning against the back of a crucifixion pillar, panting for breath. It's been a good war for him so far, and his arm aches and itches from the stabbing, but he's got a bad feeling it's going to change. Lis went in hard and got her chains tangled up around the gibbet supports - they're roasting her over a fire now, her electronically boosted screams drowning out his own hoarse gasps. Blood drips down his arm - not his - spattering from the tip of his claw. He shakes with a crazed hunger for hurt, a cruel need to inflict pain. Something above his head makes a /{scritch, scritch}/ sound, and he looks up. It's a crucified angel, wings ripped where they've thrust the spikes in between the joints that support the great, thin low-gee flight membranes. It's still breathing, nobody's bothered disemboweling it yet, and it wouldn't be here unless it was /{bad}/, so - + +Manni stands, but as he reaches out to touch the angel's thin, blue-skinned stomach with his third arm fingernail, he hears a voice: "/{Wait}/." It's innerspeech, and it bears ackles of coercion, superuser privileges that lock his elbow joint in place. He mewls frustratedly and turns round, ready to fight. + +It's the cat. He sits hunched on a boulder behind him - this is the odd thing - right where he was looking a moment ago, watching him with slitty eyes. Manni feels the urge to lash out at him, but his arms won't move, and neither will his legs: This may be the Dark Side of Red Plaza, where the bloody children play and anything goes, and Manni may have a much bigger claw here than anything the cat can muster, but City still has some degree of control, and the cat's ackles effectively immunize it from the carnage to either side. "Hello, Manni," says the pussy-thing. "Your Dad's worried: You're supposed to be in your room, and he's looking for you. Big-you gave you a back door, didn't he?" + +Manni nods jerkily, his eyes going wide. He wants to shout and lash out at the pussy-thing but he can't. "What are you?" + +"I'm your ... fairy godfather." The cat stares at him intently. "You know, I do believe you don't resemble your archetype very closely - not as he was at your age - but yes, I think on balance you'll do." + +"Do what?" Manni lets his motie-arm drop, perplexed. + +"Put me in touch with your other self. Big-you." + +"I can't," Manni begins to explain. But before he can continue, the pile of rock whines slightly and rotates beneath the cat, who has to stand and do a little twirl in place, tail bushing up in annoyance. + +Manni's father steps out of the T-gate and glances around, his face a mask of disapproval. "Manni! What do you think you're doing here? Come home at -" + +"He's with me, history-boy," interrupts the cat, nettled by Sirhan's arrival. "I was just rounding him up." + +"Damn you, I don't need your help to control my son! In fact -" + +"Mom said I could -" Manni begins. + +"And what's that on your sword?" Sirhan's glare takes in the whole scene, the impromptu game of capture-the-gibbeted-torture-victim, the bonfires and screams. The mask of disapproval cracks, revealing a core of icy anger. "You're coming home with me!" He glances at the cat. "You too, if you want to talk to him - he's grounded." + +* * * + +_1 Once upon a time there was a pet cat. + +_1 Except, it wasn't a cat. + +_1 Back when a young entrepreneur called Manfred Macx was jetting around the not-yet-disassembled structures of an old continent called Europe, making strangers rich and fixing up friends with serendipitous business plans - a desperate displacement activity, spinning his wheels in a vain attempt to outrun his own shadow - he used to travel with a robotic toy of feline form. Programmable and upgradeable, Aineko was a third-generation descendant of the original luxury Japanese companion robots. It was all Manfred had room for in his life, and he loved that robot, despite the alarming way decerebrated kittens kept turning up on his doorstep. He loved it nearly as much as Pamela, his fiancée, loved him, and she knew it. Pamela, being a whole lot smarter than Manfred gave her credit for, realized that the quickest way to a man's heart was through whatever he loved. And Pamela, being a whole lot more of a control freak than Manfred realized, was damn well ready to use any restraint that came to hand. Theirs was a very twenty-first-century kind of relationship, which is to say one that would have been illegal a hundred years earlier and fashionably scandalous a century before that. And whenever Manfred upgraded his pet robot - transplanting its trainable neural network into a new body with new and exciting expansion ports - Pamela would hack it. + +_1 They were married for a while, and divorced for a whole lot longer, allegedly because they were both strong-willed people with philosophies of life that were irreconcilable short of death or transcendence. Manny, being wildly creative and outward-directed and having the attention span of a weasel on crack, had other lovers. Pamela ... who knows? If on some evenings she put on a disguise and hung out at encounter areas in fetish clubs, she wasn't telling anyone: She lived in uptight America, staidly straitlaced, and had a reputation to uphold. But they both stayed in touch with the cat, and although Manfred retained custody for some reason never articulated, Aineko kept returning Pamela's calls - until it was time to go hang out with their daughter Amber, tagging along on her rush into relativistic exile, then keeping a proprietorial eye on her eigenson Sirhan, and his wife and child (a clone off the old family tree, Manfred 2.0) ... + +_1 Now, here's the rub: Aineko wasn't a cat. Aineko was an incarnate intelligence, confined within a succession of catlike bodies that became increasingly realistic over time, and equipped with processing power to support a neural simulation that grew rapidly with each upgrade. + +_1 Did anyone in the Macx family ever think to ask what /{Aineko}/ wanted? + +_1 And if an answer had come, would they have liked it? + +* * * + +Adult-Manfred, still disoriented from finding himself awake and reinstantiated a couple of centuries downstream from his hurried exile from Saturn system, is hesitantly navigating his way toward Sirhan and Rita's home when big-Manni-with-Manfred's-memory-ghost drops into his consciousness like a ton of computronium glowing red-hot at the edges. + +It's a classic oh-shit moment. Between one foot touching the ground and the next, Manfred stumbles hard, nearly twisting an ankle, and gasps. He /{remembers}/. At third hand he remembers being reincarnated as Manni, a bouncing baby boy for Rita and Sirhan (and just why they want to raise an ancestor instead of creating a new child of their own is one of those cultural quirks that is so alien he can scarcely comprehend it). Then for a while he recalls living as Manni's amnesic adult accelerated ghost, watching over his original from the consensus cyberspace of the city: the arrival of Pamela, adult Manni's reaction to her, her dump of yet another copy of Manfred's memories into Manni, and now this - /{How many of me are there}/? he wonders nervously. Then: /{Pamela? What's she doing here}/? + +Manfred shakes his head and looks about. Now he remembers being big-Manni, he knows where he is implicitly, and more importantly, knows what all these next-gen City interfaces are supposed to do. The walls and ceiling are carpeted in glowing glyphs that promise him everything from instant-access local services to teleportation across interstellar distances. /{So they haven't quite collapsed geography yet}/, he realizes gratefully, fastening on to the nearest comprehensible thought of his own before old-Manni's memories explain everything for him. It's a weird sensation, seeing all this stuff for the first time - the trappings of a technosphere centuries ahead of the one he's last been awake in - but with the memories to explain it all. He finds his feet are still carrying him forward, toward a grassy square lined with doors opening onto private dwellings. Behind one of them, he's going to meet his descendants, and Pamela in all probability. The thought makes his stomach give a little queasy backflip. /{I'm not ready for this}/ - + +It's an acute moment of déja vu. He's standing on a familiar doorstep he's never seen before. The door opens and a serious-faced child with three arms - he can't help staring, the extra one is a viciously barbed scythe of bone from the elbow down - looks up at him. "Hello, me," says the kid. + +"Hello, you." Manfred stares. "You don't look the way I remember." But Manni's appearance is familiar from big-Manni's memories, captured by the unblinking Argus awareness of the panopticon dust floating in the air. "Are your parents home? Your" - his voice cracks - "great-grandmother?" + +The door opens wider. "You can come in," the kid says gravely. Then he hops backward and ducks shyly into a side room - or as if expecting to be gunned down by a hostile sniper, Manfred realizes. It's tough being a kid when there are no rules against lethal force because you can be restored from a backup when playtime ends. + +Inside the dwelling - calling it a house seems wrong to Manfred, not when bits of it are separated by trillions of kilometers of empty vacuum - things feel a bit crowded. He can hear voices from the dayroom, so he goes there, brushing through the archway of thornless roses that Rita has trained around the T-gate frame. His body feels lighter, but his heart is heavy as he looks around. "Rita?" he asks. "And -" + +"Hello, Manfred." Pamela nods at him guardedly. + +Rita raises an eyebrow at him. "The cat asked if he could borrow the household assembler. I wasn't expecting a family reunion." + +"Neither was I." Manfred rubs his forehead ruefully. "Pamela, this is Rita. She's married to Sirhan. They're my - I guess eigenparents is as good as term as any? I mean, they're bringing up my reincarnation." + +"Please, have a seat," Rita offers, waving at the empty floor between the patio and the stone fountain in the shape of a section through a glass hypersphere. A futon of spun diamondoid congeals out of the utility fog floating in the air, glittering in the artificial sunlight. "Sirhan's just taking care of Manni - our son. He'll be with us in just a minute." + +Manfred sits gingerly at one side of the futon. Pamela sits stiffly at the opposite edge, not meeting his eye. Last time they met in the flesh - an awesome gulf of years previously - they'd parted cursing each other, on opposite sides of a fractious divorce as well as an ideological barrier as high as a continental divide. But many subjective decades have passed, and both ideology and divorce have dwindled in significance - if indeed they ever happened. Now that there's common cause to draw them together, Manfred can barely look at her. "How is Manni?" he asks his hostess, desperate for small talk. + +"He's fine," Rita says, in a brittle voice. "Just the usual preadolescent turbulence, if it wasn't for ..." She trails off. A door appears in mid air and Sirhan steps through it, followed by a small deity wearing a fur coat. + +"Look what the cat dragged in," Aineko remarks. + +"You're a fine one to talk," Pamela says icily. "Don't you think you'd -" + +"I tried to keep him away from you," Sirhan tells Manfred, "but he wouldn't -" + +"That's okay." Manfred waves it off. "Pamela, would you mind starting?" + +"Yes, I would." She glances at him sidelong. "You go first." + +"Right. You wanted me here." Manfred hunkers down to stare at the cat. "What do you want?" + +"If I was your traditional middle-European devil, I'd say I'd come to steal your soul," says Aineko, looking up at Manfred and twitching his tail. "Luckily I'm not a dualist, I just want to borrow it for a while. Won't even get it dirty." + +"Uh-huh." Manfred raises an eyebrow. "Why?" + +"I'm not omniscient." Aineko sits down, one leg sticking out sideways, but continues to stare at Manfred. "I had a ... a telegram, I guess, claiming to be from you. From the other copy of you, that is, the one that went off through the router network with another copy of me, and with Amber, and everyone else who isn't here. It says it found the answer and it wants to give me a shortcut route out to the deep thinkers at the edge of the observable universe. It knows who made the wormhole network and why, and -" Aineko pauses. If he was human, he'd shrug, but being a cat, he absent mindedly scritches behind his left ear with a hind leg. "Trouble is, I'm not sure I can trust it. So I need you to authenticate the message. I don't dare use my own memory of you because it knows too much about me; if the package is a Trojan, it might find out things I don't want it to learn. I can't even redact its memories of me - that, too, would convey useful information to the packet if it is hostile. So I want a copy of you from the museum, fresh and uncontaminated." + +"Is that all?" Sirhan asks incredulously. + +"Sounds like enough to me," Manfred responds. Pamela opens her mouth, ready to speak, but Manfred makes eye contact and shakes his head infinitesimally. She looks right back and - a shock goes through him - nods and closes her mouth. The moment of complicity is dizzying. "I want something in return." + +"Sure," says the cat. He pauses. "You realize it's a destructive process." + +"It's a - /{what}/?" + +"I need to make a running copy of you. Then I introduce it to the, uh, alien information, in a sandbox. The sandbox gets destroyed afterward - it emits just one bit of information, a yes or no to the question, can I trust the alien information?" + +"Uh." Manfred begins to sweat. "Uh. I'm not so sure I like the sound of that." + +"It's a copy." Another cat-shrug moment. "You're a copy. Manni is a copy. You've been copied so many times it's silly - you realize every few years every atom in your body changes? Of course, it means a copy of you gets to die after a lifetime or two of unique, unrepeatable experiences that you'll never know about, but that won't matter to you." + +"Yes it does! You're talking about condemning a version of me to death! It may not affect me, here, in this body, but it certainly affects that /{other}/ me. Can't you -" + +"No, I can't. If I agreed to rescue the copy if it reached a positive verdict, that would give it an incentive to lie if the truth was that the alien message is untrustworthy, wouldn't it? Also, if I intended to rescue the copy, that would give the message a back channel through which to encode an attack. One bit, Manfred, no more." + +"Agh." Manfred stops talking. He knows he should be trying to come up with some kind of objection, but Aineko must have already considered all his possible responses and planned strategies around them. "Where does /{she}/ fit into this?" he asks, nodding at Pamela. + +"Oh, she's your payment," Aineko says with studied insouciance. "I have a very good memory for people, especially people I've known for decades. You've outlasted that crude emotional conditioning I used on you around the time of the divorce, and as for her, she's a good reinstantiation of -" + +"Do you know what it's like to die?" Pamela asks, finally losing her self-control. "Or would you like to find out the hard way? Because if you keep talking about me as if I'm a /{slave}/ -" + +"What makes you think you aren't?" The cat is grinning hideously, needle like teeth bared. /{Why doesn't she hit him}/? Manfred asks himself fuzzily, wondering also why he feels no urge to move against the monster. "Hybridizing you with Manfred was, admittedly, a fine piece of work on my part, but you would have been bad for him during his peak creative years. A contented Manfred is an idle Manfred. I got several extra good bits of work out of him by splitting you up, and by the time he burned out, Amber was ready. But I digress; if you give me what I want, I shall /{leave you alone}/. It's as simple as that. Raising new generations of Macxs has been a good hobby, you make interesting pets, but ultimately it's limited by your stubborn refusal to transcend your humanity. So that's what I'm offering, basically. Let me destructively run a copy of you to completion in a black box along with a purported Turing Oracle based on yourself, and I'll let you go. And you too, Pamela. You'll be happy together this time, without me pushing you apart. And I promise I won't return to haunt your descendants, either." The cat glances over his shoulder at Sirhan and Rita, who clutch at each other in abject horror; and Manfred finds he can sense a shadow of Aineko's huge algorithmic complexity hanging over the household, like a lurching nightmare out of number theory. + +"Is that all we are to you? A pet-breeding program?" Pamela asks coldly. She's run up against Aineko's implanted limits, too, Manfred realizes with a growing sense of horror. /{Did we really split up because}/ Aineko made us? It's hard to believe: Manfred is too much of a realist to trust the cat to tell the truth except when it serves to further his interests. But this - + +"Not entirely." Aineko is complacent. "Not at first, before I was aware of my own existence. Besides, you humans keep pets, too. But you /{were}/ fun to play with." + +Pamela stands up, angry to the point of storming out. Before he quite realizes what he's doing, Manfred is on his feet, too, one arm protectively around her. "Tell me first, are our memories our own?" he demands. + +"Don't trust it," Pamela says sharply. "It's not human, and it lies." Her shoulders are tense. + +"Yes, they are," says Aineko. He yawns. "Tell me I'm lying, bitch," he adds mockingly: "I carried you around in my head for long enough to know you've no evidence." + +"But I -" Her arm slips around Manfred's waist. "I don't hate him." A rueful laugh: "I /{remember}/ hating him, but -" + +"Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness," Aineko says with a theatrical sigh. "You're as stupid as it's possible for an intelligent species to be - there being no evolutionary pressure to be any smarter - but you still don't internalize that and act accordingly around your superiors. Listen, girl, everything you remember is true. That doesn't mean you remember it because it actually happened, just that you remember it because you experienced it internally. Your memories of experiences are accurate, but your emotional responses to those experiences were manipulated. Get it? One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience, it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time. That goes for all of you." Aineko looks around at them in mild contempt. "But I don't need you anymore, and if you do this one thing for me, you're going to be free. Understand? Say yes, Manfred; if you leave your mouth open like that, a bird will nest on your tongue." + +"Say no -" Pamela urges him, just as Manfred says, "Yes." + +Aineko laughs, baring contemptuous fangs at them. "Ah, primate family loyalty! So wonderful and reliable. Thank you, Manny, I do believe you just gave me permission to copy and enslave you -" + +Which is when Manni, who has been waiting in the doorway for the past minute, leaps on the cat with a scream and a scythelike arm drawn back and ready to strike. + +The cat-avatar is, of course, ready for Manni: It whirls and hisses, extending diamond-sharp claws. Sirhan shouts, "No! Manni!" and begins to move, but adult-Manfred freezes, realizing with a chill that what is happening is more than is apparent. Manni grabs for the cat with his human hands, catching it by the scruff of his neck and dragging it toward his vicious scythe-arm's edge. There's a screech, a nerve-racking caterwauling, and Manni yells, bright parallel blood tracks on his arm - the avatar is a real fleshbody in its own right, with an autonomic control system that isn't going to give up without a fight, whatever its vastly larger exocortex thinks - but Manni's scythe convulses, and there's a horrible bubbling noise and a spray of blood as the pussycat-thing goes flying. It's all over in a second before any of the adults can really move. Sirhan scoops up Manni and yanks him away, but there are no hidden surprises. Aineko's avatar is just a broken rag of bloody fur, guts, and blood spilled across the floor. The ghost of a triumphant feline laugh hangs over their innerspeech ears for a moment, then fades. + +"Bad boy!" Rita shouts, striding forward furiously. Manni cowers, then begins to cry, a safe reflex for a little boy who doesn't quite understand the nature of the threat to his parents. + +"No! It's all right," Manfred seeks to explain. + +Pamela tightens her grip around him. "Are you still ...?" + +"Yes." He takes a deep breath. + +"You bad, /{bad}/ child -" + +"Cat was going to eat him!" Manni protests, as his parents bundle him protectively out of the room, Sirhan casting a guilty look over his shoulder at the adult instance and his ex-wife. "I had to stop the bad thing!" + +Manfred feels Pamela's shoulders shaking. It feels like she's about to laugh. "I'm still here," he murmurs, half-surprised. "Spat out, undigested, after all these years. At least, /{this}/ version of me thinks he's here." + +"Did you believe it?" she finally asks, a tone of disbelief in her voice. + +"Oh yes." He shifts his balance from foot to foot, absent mindedly stroking her hair. "I believe everything it said was intended to make us react exactly the way we did. Up to and including giving us good reasons to hate it and provoking Manni into disposing of its avatar. Aineko wanted to check out of our lives and figured a sense of cathartic closure would help. Not to mention playing the deus ex machina in the narrative of our family life. Fucking classical comedian." He checks a status report with Citymind, and sighs: His version number has just been bumped a point. "Tell me, do you think you'll miss having Aineko around? Because we won't be hearing from him again -" + +"Don't talk about that, not now," she orders him, digging her chin against the side of his neck. "I feel so /{used}/." + +"With good reason." They stand holding each other for a while, not speaking, not really questioning why - after so much time apart - they've come together again. "Hanging out with gods is never a safe activity for mere mortals like us. You think you've been used? Aineko has probably killed me by now. Unless he was lying about disposing of the spare copy, too." + +She shudders in his arms. "That's the trouble with dealing with posthumans; their mental model of you is likely to be more detailed than your own." + +"How long have you been awake?" he asks, gently trying to change the subject. + +"I - oh, I'm not sure." She lets go of him and steps back, watching his face appraisingly. "I remember back on Saturn, stealing a museum piece and setting out, and then, well. I found myself here. With you." + +"I think," he licks his lips, "we've both been given a wake-up call. Or maybe a second chance. What are you going to do with yours?" + +"I don't know." That appraising look again, as if she's trying to work out what he's worth. He's used to it, but this time it doesn't feel hostile. "We've got too much history for this to be easy. Either Aineko was lying, or ... not. What about you? What do you really want?" + +He knows what she's asking. "Be my mistress?" he asks, offering her a hand. + +"This time," she grips his hand, "without adult supervision." She smiles gratefully, and they walk toward the gateway together, to find out how their descendants are dealing with their sudden freedom. + +(THE END: June 1999 to April 2004) + +% Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005 + +% Published by + +% Ace Books, New York, July 2005, ISBN 0441012841 + +% Orbit Books, London, August 2005, ISBN 1841493902 + +% License +% Creative Commons License + +% Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005. + +% This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. + +% You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions: + +% * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor. +% * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. +% * No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. +% * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. +% +% If you are in doubt about any proposed reuse, you should contact the author via: www.accelerando.org. + +% Contents + +% Part 1: Slow Takeoff +% +% * Lobsters +% * Troubadour +% * Tourist +% +% Part 2: Point of Inflection +% +% * Halo +% * Router +% * Nightfall +% +% Part 3: Singularity +% +% * Curator +% * Elector +% * Survivor + +% problem with transformation ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, is not transformed correctly, corrected for >= sisu-0.49.1 diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst b/data/samples/current/en/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..373424d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst @@ -0,0 +1,1890 @@ +% SiSU 4.0.0 + +@title: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland + +@creator: + :author: Carroll, Lewis + +@date: + :published: 1865 + :created: 1865 + :available: 1865 + :added_to_site: 2004-04-12 + +% 2005-10-30 + +@rights: + :copyright: Lewis Carroll + :license: Public Domain + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel; + book:novel:fiction:fantasy|children's fiction + +@links: + { Alice in Wonderland @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland + { Lewis Carroll @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll + +@make: + :breaks: new=3; break=4 + +:A~ @title @creator \\ The Millennium Fulcrum Edition 3.0 [text only] + +1~ CHAPTER I - Down the Rabbit-Hole + +Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?' + +So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. + +There was nothing so VERY remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so VERY much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, `Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!' (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually TOOK A WATCH OUT OF ITS WAISTCOAT- POCKET, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. + +In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again. + +The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well. + +Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled `ORANGE MARMALADE', but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it. + +`Well!' thought Alice to herself, `after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!' (Which was very likely true.) + +Down, down, down. Would the fall NEVER come to an end! `I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?' she said aloud. `I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think--' (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a VERY good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) `--yes, that's about the right distance--but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?' (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.) + +Presently she began again. `I wonder if I shall fall right THROUGH the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think--' (she was rather glad there WAS no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) `--but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?' (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke--fancy CURTSEYING as you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) `And what an ignorant little girl she'll think me for asking! No, it'll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.' + +Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. `Dinah'll miss me very much to-night, I should think!' (Dinah was the cat.) `I hope they'll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I'm afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that's very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?' And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, `Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, `Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, `Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?' when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over. + +Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, `Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!' She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the Rabbit was no longer to be seen: she found herself in a long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof. + +There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again. + +Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice's first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted! + +Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; `and even if my head would go through,' thought poor Alice, `it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only know how to begin.' For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible. + +There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it, (`which certainly was not here before,' said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words `DRINK ME' beautifully printed on it in large letters. + +It was all very well to say `Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going to do THAT in a hurry. `No, I'll look first,' she said, `and see whether it's marked "poison" or not'; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they WOULD not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger VERY deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked `poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later. + +However, this bottle was NOT marked `poison,' so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off. + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +`What a curious feeling!' said Alice; `I must be shutting up like a telescope.' + +And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; `for it might end, you know,' said Alice to herself, `in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?' And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing. + +After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going into the garden at once; but, alas for poor Alice! when she got to the door, she found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she went back to the table for it, she found she could not possibly reach it: she could see it quite plainly through the glass, and she tried her best to climb up one of the legs of the table, but it was too slippery; and when she had tired herself out with trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried. + +`Come, there's no use in crying like that!' said Alice to herself, rather sharply; `I advise you to leave off this minute!' She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. `But it's no use now,' thought poor Alice, `to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make ONE respectable person!' + +Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words `EAT ME' were beautifully marked in currants. `Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice, `and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!' + +She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, `Which way? Which way?', holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way. + +So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake. + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +1~ CHAPTER II - The Pool of Tears + +`Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); `now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!' (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off). `Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I'm sure _{I}_ shan't be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you can; --but I must be kind to them,' thought Alice, `or perhaps they won't walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I'll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.' + +And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it. `They must go by the carrier,' she thought; `and how funny it'll seem, sending presents to one's own feet! And how odd the directions will look! + +poem{ + + ALICE'S RIGHT FOOT, ESQ. + HEARTHRUG, + NEAR THE FENDER, + (WITH ALICE'S LOVE). + +}poem + +Oh dear, what nonsense I'm talking!' + +Just then her head struck against the roof of the hall: in fact she was now more than nine feet high, and she at once took up the little golden key and hurried off to the garden door. + +Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than ever: she sat down and began to cry again. + +`You ought to be ashamed of yourself,' said Alice, `a great girl like you,' (she might well say this), `to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!' But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall. + +After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the distance, and she hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White Rabbit returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to himself as he came, `Oh! the Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! won't she be savage if I've kept her waiting!' Alice felt so desperate that she was ready to ask help of any one; so, when the Rabbit came near her, she began, in a low, timid voice, `If you please, sir--' The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white kid gloves and the fan, and skurried away into the darkness as hard as he could go. + +Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking: `Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, THAT'S the great puzzle!' And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them. + +`I'm sure I'm not Ada,' she said, `for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn't go in ringlets at all; and I'm sure I can't be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little! Besides, SHE'S she, and I'm I, and--oh dear, how puzzling it all is! I'll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is--oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate! However, the Multiplication Table doesn't signify: let's try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome--no, THAT'S all wrong, I'm certain! I must have been changed for Mabel! I'll try and say "How doth the little--"' and she crossed her hands on her lap as if she were saying lessons, and began to repeat it, but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to do:-- + +poem{ + + `How doth the little crocodile + Improve his shining tail, + And pour the waters of the Nile + On every golden scale! + + `How cheerfully he seems to grin, + How neatly spread his claws, + And welcome little fishes in + With gently smiling jaws!' + +}poem + +"I'm sure those are not the right words," said poor Alice, and her eyes filled with tears again as she went on, `I must be Mabel after all, and I shall have to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play with, and oh! ever so many lessons to learn! No, I've made up my mind about it; if I'm Mabel, I'll stay down here! It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying "Come up again, dear!" I shall only look up and say "Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else"--but, oh dear!' cried Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, "I do wish they WOULD put their heads down! I am so VERY tired of being all alone here!" + +As she said this she looked down at her hands, and was surprised to see that she had put on one of the Rabbit's little white kid gloves while she was talking. `How CAN I have done that?' she thought. `I must be growing small again.' She got up and went to the table to measure herself by it, and found that, as nearly as she could guess, she was now about two feet high, and was going on shrinking rapidly: she soon found out that the cause of this was the fan she was holding, and she dropped it hastily, just in time to avoid shrinking away altogether. + +`That WAS a narrow escape!' said Alice, a good deal frightened at the sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in existence; `and now for the garden!' and she ran with all speed back to the little door: but, alas! the little door was shut again, and the little golden key was lying on the glass table as before, `and things are worse than ever,' thought the poor child, `for I never was so small as this before, never! And I declare it's too bad, that it is!' + +As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, `and in that case I can go back by railway,' she said to herself. (Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station.) However, she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high. + +`I wish I hadn't cried so much!' said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. `I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That WILL be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.' + +Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and she swam nearer to make out what it was: at first she thought it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small she was now, and she soon made out that it was only a mouse that had slipped in like herself. + +`Would it be of any use, now,' thought Alice, `to speak to this mouse? Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it can talk: at any rate, there's no harm in trying.' So she began: `O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!' (Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen in her brother's Latin Grammar, `A mouse--of a mouse--to a mouse--a mouse--O mouse!') The Mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little eyes, but it said nothing. + +`Perhaps it doesn't understand English,' thought Alice; `I daresay it's a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.' (For, with all her knowledge of history, Alice had no very clear notion how long ago anything had happened.) So she began again: `Ou est ma chatte?' which was the first sentence in her French lesson-book. The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water, and seemed to quiver all over with fright. `Oh, I beg your pardon!' cried Alice hastily, afraid that she had hurt the poor animal's feelings. `I quite forgot you didn't like cats.' + +`Not like cats!' cried the Mouse, in a shrill, passionate voice. `Would YOU like cats if you were me?' + +`Well, perhaps not,' said Alice in a soothing tone: `don't be angry about it. And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah: I think you'd take a fancy to cats if you could only see her. She is such a dear quiet thing,' Alice went on, half to herself, as she swam lazily about in the pool, `and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face--and she is such a nice soft thing to nurse--and she's such a capital one for catching mice--oh, I beg your pardon!' cried Alice again, for this time the Mouse was bristling all over, and she felt certain it must be really offended. `We won't talk about her any more if you'd rather not.' + +`We indeed!' cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the end of his tail. `As if I would talk on such a subject! Our family always HATED cats: nasty, low, vulgar things! Don't let me hear the name again!' + +`I won't indeed!' said Alice, in a great hurry to change the subject of conversation. `Are you--are you fond--of--of dogs?' The Mouse did not answer, so Alice went on eagerly: `There is such a nice little dog near our house I should like to show you! A little bright-eyed terrier, you know, with oh, such long curly brown hair! And it'll fetch things when you throw them, and it'll sit up and beg for its dinner, and all sorts of things--I can't remember half of them--and it belongs to a farmer, you know, and he says it's so useful, it's worth a hundred pounds! He says it kills all the rats and--oh dear!' cried Alice in a sorrowful tone, `I'm afraid I've offended it again!' For the Mouse was swimming away from her as hard as it could go, and making quite a commotion in the pool as it went. + +So she called softly after it, `Mouse dear! Do come back again, and we won't talk about cats or dogs either, if you don't like them!' When the Mouse heard this, it turned round and swam slowly back to her: its face was quite pale (with passion, Alice thought), and it said in a low trembling voice, `Let us get to the shore, and then I'll tell you my history, and you'll understand why it is I hate cats and dogs.' + +It was high time to go, for the pool was getting quite crowded with the birds and animals that had fallen into it: there were a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures. Alice led the way, and the whole party swam to the shore. + +1~ CHAPTER III - A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale + +They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank--the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable. + +The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they had a consultation about this, and after a few minutes it seemed quite natural to Alice to find herself talking familiarly with them, as if she had known them all her life. Indeed, she had quite a long argument with the Lory, who at last turned sulky, and would only say, `I am older than you, and must know better'; and this Alice would not allow without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said. + +At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of authority among them, called out, `Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I'LL soon make you dry enough!' They all sat down at once, in a large ring, with the Mouse in the middle. Alice kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would catch a bad cold if she did not get dry very soon. + +`Ahem!' said the Mouse with an important air, `are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please! "William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria--"' + +`Ugh!' said the Lory, with a shiver. + +`I beg your pardon!' said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: `Did you speak?' + +`Not I!' said the Lory hastily. + +`I thought you did,' said the Mouse. `--I proceed. "Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable--"' + +`Found WHAT?' said the Duck. + +`Found IT,' the Mouse replied rather crossly: `of course you know what "it" means.' + +`I know what "it" means well enough, when I find a thing,' said the Duck: `it's generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?' + +The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on, `"--found it advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown. William's conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence of his Normans--" How are you getting on now, my dear?' it continued, turning to Alice as it spoke. + +`As wet as ever,' said Alice in a melancholy tone: `it doesn't seem to dry me at all.' + +`In that case,' said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, `I move that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies--' + +`Speak English!' said the Eaglet. `I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!' And the Eaglet bent down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly. + +`What I was going to say,' said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.' + +`What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything. + +`Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.) + +First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?' + +This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.' + +`But who is to give the prizes?' quite a chorus of voices asked. + +`Why, SHE, of course,' said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger; and the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out in a confused way, `Prizes! Prizes!' + +Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand in her pocket, and pulled out a box of comfits, (luckily the salt water had not got into it), and handed them round as prizes. There was exactly one a-piece all round. + +`But she must have a prize herself, you know,' said the Mouse. + +`Of course,' the Dodo replied very gravely. `What else have you got in your pocket?' he went on, turning to Alice. + +`Only a thimble,' said Alice sadly. + +`Hand it over here,' said the Dodo. + +Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented the thimble, saying `We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble'; and, when it had finished this short speech, they all cheered. + +Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could. + +The next thing was to eat the comfits: this caused some noise and confusion, as the large birds complained that they could not taste theirs, and the small ones choked and had to be patted on the back. However, it was over at last, and they sat down again in a ring, and begged the Mouse to tell them something more. + +`You promised to tell me your history, you know,' said Alice, `and why it is you hate--C and D,' she added in a whisper, half afraid that it would be offended again. + +`Mine is a long and a sad tale!' said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing. + +`It IS a long tail, certainly,' said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse's tail; `but why do you call it sad?' And she kept on puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was something like this:-- + +poem{ + + `Fury said to a + mouse, That he + met in the + house, + "Let us + both go to + law: I will + prosecute + YOU. --Come, + I'll take no + denial; We + must have a + trial: For + really this + morning I've + nothing + to do." + Said the + mouse to the + cur, "Such + a trial, + dear Sir, + With + no jury + or judge, + would be + wasting + our + breath." + "I'll be + judge, I'll + be jury," + Said + cunning + old Fury: + "I'll + try the + whole + cause, + and + condemn + you + to + death."' + +}poem + +`You are not attending!' said the Mouse to Alice severely. `What are you thinking of?' + +`I beg your pardon,' said Alice very humbly: `you had got to the fifth bend, I think?' + +`I had NOT!' cried the Mouse, sharply and very angrily. + +`A knot!' said Alice, always ready to make herself useful, and looking anxiously about her. `Oh, do let me help to undo it!' + +`I shall do nothing of the sort,' said the Mouse, getting up and walking away. `You insult me by talking such nonsense!' + +`I didn't mean it!' pleaded poor Alice. `But you're so easily offended, you know!' + +The Mouse only growled in reply. + +`Please come back and finish your story!' Alice called after it; and the others all joined in chorus, `Yes, please do!' but the Mouse only shook its head impatiently, and walked a little quicker. + +`What a pity it wouldn't stay!' sighed the Lory, as soon as it was quite out of sight; and an old Crab took the opportunity of saying to her daughter `Ah, my dear! Let this be a lesson to you never to lose YOUR temper!' `Hold your tongue, Ma!' said the young Crab, a little snappishly. `You're enough to try the patience of an oyster!' + +`I wish I had our Dinah here, I know I do!' said Alice aloud, addressing nobody in particular. `She'd soon fetch it back!' + +`And who is Dinah, if I might venture to ask the question?' said the Lory. + +Alice replied eagerly, for she was always ready to talk about her pet: `Dinah's our cat. And she's such a capital one for catching mice you can't think! And oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why, she'll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!' + +This speech caused a remarkable sensation among the party. Some of the birds hurried off at once: one old Magpie began wrapping itself up very carefully, remarking, `I really must be getting home; the night-air doesn't suit my throat!' and a Canary called out in a trembling voice to its children, `Come away, my dears! It's high time you were all in bed!' On various pretexts they all moved off, and Alice was soon left alone. + +`I wish I hadn't mentioned Dinah!' she said to herself in a melancholy tone. `Nobody seems to like her, down here, and I'm sure she's the best cat in the world! Oh, my dear Dinah! I wonder if I shall ever see you any more!' And here poor Alice began to cry again, for she felt very lonely and low-spirited. In a little while, however, she again heard a little pattering of footsteps in the distance, and she looked up eagerly, half hoping that the Mouse had changed his mind, and was coming back to finish his story. + +1~ CHAPTER IV - The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill + +It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and looking anxiously about as it went, as if it had lost something; and she heard it muttering to itself `The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! She'll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets! Where CAN I have dropped them, I wonder?' Alice guessed in a moment that it was looking for the fan and the pair of white kid gloves, and she very good-naturedly began hunting about for them, but they were nowhere to be seen--everything seemed to have changed since her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table and the little door, had vanished completely. + +Very soon the Rabbit noticed Alice, as she went hunting about, and called out to her in an angry tone, `Why, Mary Ann, what ARE you doing out here? Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan! Quick, now!' And Alice was so much frightened that she ran off at once in the direction it pointed to, without trying to explain the mistake it had made. + +`He took me for his housemaid,' she said to herself as she ran. `How surprised he'll be when he finds out who I am! But I'd better take him his fan and gloves--that is, if I can find them.' As she said this, she came upon a neat little house, on the door of which was a bright brass plate with the name `W. RABBIT' engraved upon it. She went in without knocking, and hurried upstairs, in great fear lest she should meet the real Mary Ann, and be turned out of the house before she had found the fan and gloves. + +`How queer it seems,' Alice said to herself, `to be going messages for a rabbit! I suppose Dinah'll be sending me on messages next!' And she began fancying the sort of thing that would happen: `"Miss Alice! Come here directly, and get ready for your walk!" "Coming in a minute, nurse! But I've got to see that the mouse doesn't get out." Only I don't think,' Alice went on, `that they'd let Dinah stop in the house if it began ordering people about like that!' + +By this time she had found her way into a tidy little room with a table in the window, and on it (as she had hoped) a fan and two or three pairs of tiny white kid gloves: she took up the fan and a pair of the gloves, and was just going to leave the room, when her eye fell upon a little bottle that stood near the looking- glass. There was no label this time with the words `DRINK ME,' but nevertheless she uncorked it and put it to her lips. `I know SOMETHING interesting is sure to happen,' she said to herself, `whenever I eat or drink anything; so I'll just see what this bottle does. I do hope it'll make me grow large again, for really I'm quite tired of being such a tiny little thing!' + +It did so indeed, and much sooner than she had expected: before she had drunk half the bottle, she found her head pressing against the ceiling, and had to stoop to save her neck from being broken. She hastily put down the bottle, saying to herself `That's quite enough--I hope I shan't grow any more--As it is, I can't get out at the door--I do wish I hadn't drunk quite so much!' + +Alas! it was too late to wish that! She went on growing, and growing, and very soon had to kneel down on the floor: in another minute there was not even room for this, and she tried the effect of lying down with one elbow against the door, and the other arm curled round her head. Still she went on growing, and, as a last resource, she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up the chimney, and said to herself `Now I can do no more, whatever happens. What WILL become of me?' + +Luckily for Alice, the little magic bottle had now had its full effect, and she grew no larger: still it was very uncomfortable, and, as there seemed to be no sort of chance of her ever getting out of the room again, no wonder she felt unhappy. + +`It was much pleasanter at home,' thought poor Alice, `when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn't gone down that rabbit-hole--and yet--and yet--it's rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what CAN have happened to me! When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I'll write one--but I'm grown up now,' she added in a sorrowful tone; `at least there's no room to grow up any more HERE.' + +`But then,' thought Alice, `shall I NEVER get any older than I am now? That'll be a comfort, one way--never to be an old woman-- but then--always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn't like THAT!' + +`Oh, you foolish Alice!' she answered herself. `How can you learn lessons in here? Why, there's hardly room for YOU, and no room at all for any lesson-books!' + +And so she went on, taking first one side and then the other, and making quite a conversation of it altogether; but after a few minutes she heard a voice outside, and stopped to listen. + +`Mary Ann! Mary Ann!' said the voice. `Fetch me my gloves this moment!' Then came a little pattering of feet on the stairs. Alice knew it was the Rabbit coming to look for her, and she trembled till she shook the house, quite forgetting that she was now about a thousand times as large as the Rabbit, and had no reason to be afraid of it. + +Presently the Rabbit came up to the door, and tried to open it; but, as the door opened inwards, and Alice's elbow was pressed hard against it, that attempt proved a failure. Alice heard it say to itself `Then I'll go round and get in at the window.' + +`THAT you won't' thought Alice, and, after waiting till she fancied she heard the Rabbit just under the window, she suddenly spread out her hand, and made a snatch in the air. She did not get hold of anything, but she heard a little shriek and a fall, and a crash of broken glass, from which she concluded that it was just possible it had fallen into a cucumber-frame, or something of the sort. + +Next came an angry voice--the Rabbit's--`Pat! Pat! Where are you?' And then a voice she had never heard before, `Sure then I'm here! Digging for apples, yer honour!' + +`Digging for apples, indeed!' said the Rabbit angrily. `Here! Come and help me out of THIS!' (Sounds of more broken glass.) + +`Now tell me, Pat, what's that in the window?' + +`Sure, it's an arm, yer honour!' (He pronounced it `arrum.') + +`An arm, you goose! Who ever saw one that size? Why, it fills the whole window!' + +`Sure, it does, yer honour: but it's an arm for all that.' + +`Well, it's got no business there, at any rate: go and take it away!' + +There was a long silence after this, and Alice could only hear whispers now and then; such as, `Sure, I don't like it, yer honour, at all, at all!' `Do as I tell you, you coward!' and at last she spread out her hand again, and made another snatch in the air. This time there were TWO little shrieks, and more sounds of broken glass. `What a number of cucumber-frames there must be!' thought Alice. `I wonder what they'll do next! As for pulling me out of the window, I only wish they COULD! I'm sure I don't want to stay in here any longer!' + +She waited for some time without hearing anything more: at last came a rumbling of little cartwheels, and the sound of a good many voices all talking together: she made out the words: `Where's the other ladder?--Why, I hadn't to bring but one; Bill's got the other--Bill! fetch it here, lad!--Here, put 'em up at this corner--No, tie 'em together first--they don't reach half high enough yet--Oh! they'll do well enough; don't be particular-- Here, Bill! catch hold of this rope--Will the roof bear?--Mind that loose slate--Oh, it's coming down! Heads below!' (a loud crash)--`Now, who did that?--It was Bill, I fancy--Who's to go down the chimney?--Nay, I shan't! YOU do it!--That I won't, then!--Bill's to go down--Here, Bill! the master says you're to go down the chimney!' + +`Oh! So Bill's got to come down the chimney, has he?' said Alice to herself. `Shy, they seem to put everything upon Bill! I wouldn't be in Bill's place for a good deal: this fireplace is narrow, to be sure; but I THINK I can kick a little!' + +She drew her foot as far down the chimney as she could, and waited till she heard a little animal (she couldn't guess of what sort it was) scratching and scrambling about in the chimney close above her: then, saying to herself `This is Bill,' she gave one sharp kick, and waited to see what would happen next. + +The first thing she heard was a general chorus of `There goes Bill!' then the Rabbit's voice along--`Catch him, you by the hedge!' then silence, and then another confusion of voices--`Hold up his head--Brandy now--Don't choke him--How was it, old fellow? What happened to you? Tell us all about it!' + +Last came a little feeble, squeaking voice, (`That's Bill,' thought Alice,) `Well, I hardly know--No more, thank ye; I'm better now--but I'm a deal too flustered to tell you--all I know is, something comes at me like a Jack-in-the-box, and up I goes like a sky-rocket!' + +`So you did, old fellow!' said the others. + +`We must burn the house down!' said the Rabbit's voice; and Alice called out as loud as she could, `If you do. I'll set Dinah at you!' + +There was a dead silence instantly, and Alice thought to herself, `I wonder what they WILL do next! If they had any sense, they'd take the roof off.' After a minute or two, they began moving about again, and Alice heard the Rabbit say, `A barrowful will do, to begin with.' + +`A barrowful of WHAT?' thought Alice; but she had not long to doubt, for the next moment a shower of little pebbles came rattling in at the window, and some of them hit her in the face. `I'll put a stop to this,' she said to herself, and shouted out, `You'd better not do that again!' which produced another dead silence. + +Alice noticed with some surprise that the pebbles were all turning into little cakes as they lay on the floor, and a bright idea came into her head. `If I eat one of these cakes,' she thought, `it's sure to make SOME change in my size; and as it can't possibly make me larger, it must make me smaller, I suppose.' + +So she swallowed one of the cakes, and was delighted to find that she began shrinking directly. As soon as she was small enough to get through the door, she ran out of the house, and found quite a crowd of little animals and birds waiting outside. The poor little Lizard, Bill, was in the middle, being held up by two guinea-pigs, who were giving it something out of a bottle. They all made a rush at Alice the moment she appeared; but she ran off as hard as she could, and soon found herself safe in a thick wood. + +`The first thing I've got to do,' said Alice to herself, as she wandered about in the wood, `is to grow to my right size again; and the second thing is to find my way into that lovely garden. I think that will be the best plan.' + +It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very neatly and simply arranged; the only difficulty was, that she had not the smallest idea how to set about it; and while she was peering about anxiously among the trees, a little sharp bark just over her head made her look up in a great hurry. + +An enormous puppy was looking down at her with large round eyes, and feebly stretching out one paw, trying to touch her. `Poor little thing!' said Alice, in a coaxing tone, and she tried hard to whistle to it; but she was terribly frightened all the time at the thought that it might be hungry, in which case it would be very likely to eat her up in spite of all her coaxing. + +Hardly knowing what she did, she picked up a little bit of stick, and held it out to the puppy; whereupon the puppy jumped into the air off all its feet at once, with a yelp of delight, and rushed at the stick, and made believe to worry it; then Alice dodged behind a great thistle, to keep herself from being run over; and the moment she appeared on the other side, the puppy made another rush at the stick, and tumbled head over heels in its hurry to get hold of it; then Alice, thinking it was very like having a game of play with a cart-horse, and expecting every moment to be trampled under its feet, ran round the thistle again; then the puppy began a series of short charges at the stick, running a very little way forwards each time and a long way back, and barking hoarsely all the while, till at last it sat down a good way off, panting, with its tongue hanging out of its mouth, and its great eyes half shut. + +This seemed to Alice a good opportunity for making her escape; so she set off at once, and ran till she was quite tired and out of breath, and till the puppy's bark sounded quite faint in the distance. + +`And yet what a dear little puppy it was!' said Alice, as she leant against a buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself with one of the leaves: `I should have liked teaching it tricks very much, if--if I'd only been the right size to do it! Oh dear! I'd nearly forgotten that I've got to grow up again! Let me see--how IS it to be managed? I suppose I ought to eat or drink something or other; but the great question is, what?' + +The great question certainly was, what? Alice looked all round her at the flowers and the blades of grass, but she did not see anything that looked like the right thing to eat or drink under the circumstances. There was a large mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself; and when she had looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it. + +She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large caterpillar, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else. + +1~ CHAPTER V - Advice from a Caterpillar + +The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice. + +`Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar. + +This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.' + +`What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. `Explain yourself!' + +`I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, `because I'm not myself, you see.' + +`I don't see,' said the Caterpillar. + +`I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very politely, `for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.' + +`It isn't,' said the Caterpillar. + +`Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet,' said Alice; `but when you have to turn into a chrysalis--you will some day, you know--and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel it a little queer, won't you?' + +`Not a bit,' said the Caterpillar. + +`Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,' said Alice; `all I know is, it would feel very queer to ME.' + +`You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously. `Who are YOU?' + +Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar's making such VERY short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, `I think, you ought to tell me who YOU are, first.' + +`Why?' said the Caterpillar. + +Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any good reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a VERY unpleasant state of mind, she turned away. + +`Come back!' the Caterpillar called after her. `I've something important to say!' + +This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again. + +`Keep your temper,' said the Caterpillar. + +`Is that all?' said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she could. + +`No,' said the Caterpillar. + +Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some minutes it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, `So you think you're changed, do you?' + +`I'm afraid I am, sir,' said Alice; `I can't remember things as I used--and I don't keep the same size for ten minutes together!' + +`Can't remember WHAT things?' said the Caterpillar. + +`Well, I've tried to say "HOW DOTH THE LITTLE BUSY BEE," but it all came different!' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice. + +`Repeat, "YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM,"' said the Caterpillar. + +Alice folded her hands, and began:-- + +poem{ + + `You are old, Father William,' the young man said, + `And your hair has become very white; + And yet you incessantly stand on your head-- + Do you think, at your age, it is right?' + + `In my youth,' Father William replied to his son, + `I feared it might injure the brain; + But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, + Why, I do it again and again.' + + `You are old,' said the youth, `as I mentioned before, + And have grown most uncommonly fat; + Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door-- + Pray, what is the reason of that?' + + `In my youth,' said the sage, as he shook his grey locks, + `I kept all my limbs very supple + By the use of this ointment--one shilling the box-- + Allow me to sell you a couple?' + + `You are old,' said the youth, `and your jaws are too weak + For anything tougher than suet; + Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak-- + Pray how did you manage to do it?' + + `In my youth,' said his father, `I took to the law, + And argued each case with my wife; + And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw, + Has lasted the rest of my life.' + + `You are old,' said the youth, `one would hardly suppose + That your eye was as steady as ever; + Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose-- + What made you so awfully clever?' + + `I have answered three questions, and that is enough,' + Said his father; `don't give yourself airs! + Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff? + Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!' + +}poem + +`That is not said right,' said the Caterpillar. + +`Not QUITE right, I'm afraid,' said Alice, timidly; `some of the words have got altered.' + +`It is wrong from beginning to end,' said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes. + +The Caterpillar was the first to speak. + +`What size do you want to be?' it asked. + +`Oh, I'm not particular as to size,' Alice hastily replied; `only one doesn't like changing so often, you know.' + +`I DON'T know,' said the Caterpillar. + +Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper. + +`Are you content now?' said the Caterpillar. + +`Well, I should like to be a LITTLE larger, sir, if you wouldn't mind,' said Alice: `three inches is such a wretched height to be.' + +`It is a very good height indeed!' said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high). + +`But I'm not used to it!' pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought of herself, `I wish the creatures wouldn't be so easily offended!' + +`You'll get used to it in time,' said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again. + +This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went, `One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.' + +`One side of WHAT? The other side of WHAT?' thought Alice to herself. + +`Of the mushroom,' said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight. + +Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand. + +`And now which is which?' she said to herself, and nibbled a little of the right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a violent blow underneath her chin: it had struck her foot! + +She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she set to work at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed so closely against her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last, and managed to swallow a morsel of the lefthand bit. + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +`Come, my head's free at last!' said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay far below her. + +`What CAN all that green stuff be?' said Alice. `And where HAVE my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can't see you?' She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the distant green leaves. + +As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings. + +`Serpent!' screamed the Pigeon. + +`I'm NOT a serpent!' said Alice indignantly. `Let me alone!' + +`Serpent, I say again!' repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone, and added with a kind of sob, `I've tried every way, and nothing seems to suit them!' + +`I haven't the least idea what you're talking about,' said Alice. + +`I've tried the roots of trees, and I've tried banks, and I've tried hedges,' the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; `but those serpents! There's no pleasing them!' + +Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in saying anything more till the Pigeon had finished. + +`As if it wasn't trouble enough hatching the eggs,' said the Pigeon; `but I must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I haven't had a wink of sleep these three weeks!' + +`I'm very sorry you've been annoyed,' said Alice, who was beginning to see its meaning. + +`And just as I'd taken the highest tree in the wood,' continued the Pigeon, raising its voice to a shriek, `and just as I was thinking I should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky! Ugh, Serpent!' + +`But I'm NOT a serpent, I tell you!' said Alice. `I'm a--I'm a--' + +`Well! WHAT are you?' said the Pigeon. `I can see you're trying to invent something!' + +`I--I'm a little girl,' said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day. + +`A likely story indeed!' said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt. `I've seen a good many little girls in my time, but never ONE with such a neck as that! No, no! You're a serpent; and there's no use denying it. I suppose you'll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!' + +`I HAVE tasted eggs, certainly,' said Alice, who was a very truthful child; `but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.' + +`I don't believe it,' said the Pigeon; `but if they do, why then they're a kind of serpent, that's all I can say.' + +This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of adding, `You're looking for eggs, I know THAT well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you're a little girl or a serpent?' + +`It matters a good deal to ME,' said Alice hastily; `but I'm not looking for eggs, as it happens; and if I was, I shouldn't want YOURS: I don't like them raw.' + +`Well, be off, then!' said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it settled down again into its nest. Alice crouched down among the trees as well as she could, for her neck kept getting entangled among the branches, and every now and then she had to stop and untwist it. After a while she remembered that she still held the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully, nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter, until she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height. + +It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it felt quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes, and began talking to herself, as usual. `Come, there's half my plan done now! How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another! However, I've got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden--how IS that to be done, I wonder?' As she said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it about four feet high. `Whoever lives there,' thought Alice, `it'll never do to come upon them THIS size: why, I should frighten them out of their wits!' So she began nibbling at the righthand bit again, and did not venture to go near the house till she had brought herself down to nine inches high. + +1~ CHAPTER VI - Pig and Pepper + +For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood--(she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish)--and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen. + +The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn tone, `For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.' The Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the words a little, `From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.' + +Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled together. + +Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood for fear of their hearing her; and when she next peeped out the Fish-Footman was gone, and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into the sky. + +Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked. + +`There's no sort of use in knocking,' said the Footman, `and that for two reasons. First, because I'm on the same side of the door as you are; secondly, because they're making such a noise inside, no one could possibly hear you.' And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within--a constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken to pieces. + +`Please, then,' said Alice, `how am I to get in?' + +`There might be some sense in your knocking,' the Footman went on without attending to her, `if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were INSIDE, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.' He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. `But perhaps he can't help it,' she said to herself; `his eyes are so VERY nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might answer questions.--How am I to get in?' she repeated, aloud. + +`I shall sit here,' the Footman remarked, `till tomorrow--' + +At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came skimming out, straight at the Footman's head: it just grazed his nose, and broke to pieces against one of the trees behind him. + +`--or next day, maybe,' the Footman continued in the same tone, exactly as if nothing had happened. + +`How am I to get in?' asked Alice again, in a louder tone. + +`ARE you to get in at all?' said the Footman. `That's the first question, you know.' + +It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. `It's really dreadful,' she muttered to herself, `the way all the creatures argue. It's enough to drive one crazy!' + +The Footman seemed to think this a good opportunity for repeating his remark, with variations. `I shall sit here,' he said, `on and off, for days and days.' + +`But what am I to do?' said Alice. + +`Anything you like,' said the Footman, and began whistling. + +`Oh, there's no use in talking to him,' said Alice desperately: `he's perfectly idiotic!' And she opened the door and went in. + +The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, nursing a baby; the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron which seemed to be full of soup. + +`There's certainly too much pepper in that soup!' Alice said to herself, as well as she could for sneezing. + +There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately without a moment's pause. The only things in the kitchen that did not sneeze, were the cook, and a large cat which was sitting on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear. + +`Please would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, `why your cat grins like that?' + +`It's a Cheshire cat,' said the Duchess, `and that's why. Pig!' + +She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so she took courage, and went on again:-- + +`I didn't know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn't know that cats COULD grin.' + +`They all can,' said the Duchess; `and most of 'em do.' + +`I don't know of any that do,' Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased to have got into a conversation. + +`You don't know much,' said the Duchess; `and that's a fact.' + +Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought it would be as well to introduce some other subject of conversation. While she was trying to fix on one, the cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby --the fire-irons came first; then followed a shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes. The Duchess took no notice of them even when they hit her; and the baby was howling so much already, that it was quite impossible to say whether the blows hurt it or not. + +`Oh, PLEASE mind what you're doing!' cried Alice, jumping up and down in an agony of terror. `Oh, there goes his PRECIOUS nose'; as an unusually large saucepan flew close by it, and very nearly carried it off. + +`If everybody minded their own business,' the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, `the world would go round a deal faster than it does.' + +`Which would NOT be an advantage,' said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. `Just think of what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis--' + +`Talking of axes,' said the Duchess, `chop off her head!' + +Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be listening, so she went on again: `Twenty-four hours, I THINK; or is it twelve? I--' + +`Oh, don't bother ME,' said the Duchess; `I never could abide figures!' And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line: + +poem{ + + `Speak roughly to your little boy, + And beat him when he sneezes: + He only does it to annoy, + Because he knows it teases.' + + CHORUS. + + (In which the cook and the baby joined):-- + + `Wow! wow! wow!' + +}poem + +While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words:-- + +poem{ + + `I speak severely to my boy, + I beat him when he sneezes; + For he can thoroughly enjoy + The pepper when he pleases!' + + CHORUS. + + `Wow! wow! wow!' + +}poem + +`Here! you may nurse it a bit, if you like!' the Duchess said to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke. `I must go and get ready to play croquet with the Queen,' and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan after her as she went out, but it just missed her. + +Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, `just like a star-fish,' thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it. + +As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it, (which was to twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself,) she carried it out into the open air. `IF I don't take this child away with me,' thought Alice, `they're sure to kill it in a day or two: wouldn't it be murder to leave it behind?' She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time). `Don't grunt,' said Alice; `that's not at all a proper way of expressing yourself.' + +The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a VERY turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose; also its eyes were getting extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did not like the look of the thing at all. `But perhaps it was only sobbing,' she thought, and looked into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears. + +No, there were no tears. `If you're going to turn into a pig, my dear,' said Alice, seriously, `I'll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!' The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and they went on for some while in silence. + +Alice was just beginning to think to herself, `Now, what am I to do with this creature when I get it home?' when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be NO mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it further. + +So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. `If it had grown up,' she said to herself, `it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.' And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, `if one only knew the right way to change them--' when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off. + +The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good- natured, she thought: still it had VERY long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect. + +`Cheshire Puss,' she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. `Come, it's pleased so far,' thought Alice, and she went on. `Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' + +`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. + +`I don't much care where--' said Alice. + +`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat. + +`--so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation. + +`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.' + +Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. `What sort of people live about here?' + +`In THAT direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, `lives a Hatter: and in THAT direction,' waving the other paw, `lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.' + +`But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. + +`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.' + +`How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice. + +`You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.' + +Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on `And how do you know that you're mad?' + +`To begin with,' said the Cat, `a dog's not mad. You grant that?' + +`I suppose so,' said Alice. + +`Well, then,' the Cat went on, `you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.' + +`I call it purring, not growling,' said Alice. + +`Call it what you like,' said the Cat. `Do you play croquet with the Queen to-day?' + +`I should like it very much,' said Alice, `but I haven't been invited yet.' + +`You'll see me there,' said the Cat, and vanished. + +Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things happening. While she was looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly appeared again. + +`By-the-bye, what became of the baby?' said the Cat. `I'd nearly forgotten to ask.' + +`It turned into a pig,' Alice quietly said, just as if it had come back in a natural way. + +`I thought it would,' said the Cat, and vanished again. + +Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live. `I've seen hatters before,' she said to herself; `the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won't be raving mad--at least not so mad as it was in March.' As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree. + +`Did you say pig, or fig?' said the Cat. + +`I said pig,' replied Alice; `and I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.' + +`All right,' said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. + +`Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought Alice; `but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!' + +She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house, that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the lefthand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself `Suppose it should be raving mad after all! I almost wish I'd gone to see the Hatter instead!' + +1~ CHAPTER VII - A Mad Tea-Party + +There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. `Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,' thought Alice; `only, as it's asleep, I suppose it doesn't mind.' + +The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: `No room! No room!' they cried out when they saw Alice coming. `There's PLENTY of room!' said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table. + +`Have some wine,' the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. + +Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. `I don't see any wine,' she remarked. + +`There isn't any,' said the March Hare. + +`Then it wasn't very civil of you to offer it,' said Alice angrily. + +`It wasn't very civil of you to sit down without being invited,' said the March Hare. + +`I didn't know it was YOUR table,' said Alice; `it's laid for a great many more than three.' + +`Your hair wants cutting,' said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech. + +`You should learn not to make personal remarks,' Alice said with some severity; `it's very rude.' + +The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he SAID was, `Why is a raven like a writing-desk?' + +`Come, we shall have some fun now!' thought Alice. `I'm glad they've begun asking riddles.--I believe I can guess that,' she added aloud. + +`Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?' said the March Hare. + +`Exactly so,' said Alice. + +`Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. + +`I do,' Alice hastily replied; `at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know.' + +`Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. `You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!' + +`You might just as well say,' added the March Hare, `that "I like what I get" is the same thing as "I get what I like"!' + +`You might just as well say,' added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, `that "I breathe when I sleep" is the same thing as "I sleep when I breathe"!' + +`It IS the same thing with you,' said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn't much. + +The Hatter was the first to break the silence. `What day of the month is it?' he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear. + +Alice considered a little, and then said `The fourth.' + +`Two days wrong!' sighed the Hatter. `I told you butter wouldn't suit the works!' he added looking angrily at the March Hare. + +`It was the BEST butter,' the March Hare meekly replied. + +`Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,' the Hatter grumbled: `you shouldn't have put it in with the bread-knife.' + +The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, `It was the BEST butter, you know.' + +Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. `What a funny watch!' she remarked. `It tells the day of the month, and doesn't tell what o'clock it is!' + +`Why should it?' muttered the Hatter. `Does YOUR watch tell you what year it is?' + +`Of course not,' Alice replied very readily: `but that's because it stays the same year for such a long time together.' + +`Which is just the case with MINE,' said the Hatter. + +Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. `I don't quite understand you,' she said, as politely as she could. + +`The Dormouse is asleep again,' said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose. + +The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes, `Of course, of course; just what I was going to remark myself.' + +`Have you guessed the riddle yet?' the Hatter said, turning to Alice again. + +`No, I give it up,' Alice replied: `what's the answer?' + +`I haven't the slightest idea,' said the Hatter. + +`Nor I,' said the March Hare. + +Alice sighed wearily. `I think you might do something better with the time,' she said, `than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.' + +`If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, `you wouldn't talk about wasting IT. It's HIM.' + +`I don't know what you mean,' said Alice. + +`Of course you don't!' the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. `I dare say you never even spoke to Time!' + +`Perhaps not,' Alice cautiously replied: `but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.' + +`Ah! that accounts for it,' said the Hatter. `He won't stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!' + +(`I only wish it was,' the March Hare said to itself in a whisper.) + +`That would be grand, certainly,' said Alice thoughtfully: `but then--I shouldn't be hungry for it, you know.' + +`Not at first, perhaps,' said the Hatter: `but you could keep it to half-past one as long as you liked.' + +`Is that the way YOU manage?' Alice asked. + +The Hatter shook his head mournfully. `Not I!' he replied. `We quarrelled last March--just before HE went mad, you know--' (pointing with his tea spoon at the March Hare,) `--it was at the great concert given by the Queen of Hearts, and I had to sing + +poem{ + + "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! + How I wonder what you're at!" + +}poem + +You know the song, perhaps?' + +`I've heard something like it,' said Alice. + +`It goes on, you know,' the Hatter continued, `in this way:-- + +poem{ + + "Up above the world you fly, + Like a tea-tray in the sky. + Twinkle, twinkle--"' + +}poem + +Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep `Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle--' and went on so long that they had to pinch it to make it stop. + +`Well, I'd hardly finished the first verse,' said the Hatter, `when the Queen jumped up and bawled out, "He's murdering the time! Off with his head!"' + +`How dreadfully savage!' exclaimed Alice. + +`And ever since that,' the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, `he won't do a thing I ask! It's always six o'clock now.' + +A bright idea came into Alice's head. `Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?' she asked. + +`Yes, that's it,' said the Hatter with a sigh: `it's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles.' + +`Then you keep moving round, I suppose?' said Alice. + +`Exactly so,' said the Hatter: `as the things get used up.' + +`But what happens when you come to the beginning again?' Alice ventured to ask. + +`Suppose we change the subject,' the March Hare interrupted, yawning. `I'm getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.' + +`I'm afraid I don't know one,' said Alice, rather alarmed at the proposal. + +`Then the Dormouse shall!' they both cried. `Wake up, Dormouse!' And they pinched it on both sides at once. + +The Dormouse slowly opened his eyes. `I wasn't asleep,' he said in a hoarse, feeble voice: `I heard every word you fellows were saying.' + +`Tell us a story!' said the March Hare. + +`Yes, please do!' pleaded Alice. + +`And be quick about it,' added the Hatter, `or you'll be asleep again before it's done.' + +`Once upon a time there were three little sisters,' the Dormouse began in a great hurry; `and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well--' + +`What did they live on?' said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking. + +`They lived on treacle,' said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two. + +`They couldn't have done that, you know,' Alice gently remarked; `they'd have been ill.' + +`So they were,' said the Dormouse; `VERY ill.' + +Alice tried to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary ways of living would be like, but it puzzled her too much, so she went on: `But why did they live at the bottom of a well?' + +`Take some more tea,' the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. + +`I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, `so I can't take more.' + +`You mean you can't take LESS,' said the Hatter: `it's very easy to take MORE than nothing.' + +`Nobody asked YOUR opinion,' said Alice. + +`Who's making personal remarks now?' the Hatter asked triumphantly. + +Alice did not quite know what to say to this: so she helped herself to some tea and bread-and-butter, and then turned to the Dormouse, and repeated her question. `Why did they live at the bottom of a well?' + +The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then said, `It was a treacle-well.' + +`There's no such thing!' Alice was beginning very angrily, but the Hatter and the March Hare went `Sh! sh!' and the Dormouse sulkily remarked, `If you can't be civil, you'd better finish the story for yourself.' + +`No, please go on!' Alice said very humbly; `I won't interrupt again. I dare say there may be ONE.' + +`One, indeed!' said the Dormouse indignantly. However, he consented to go on. `And so these three little sisters--they were learning to draw, you know--' + +`What did they draw?' said Alice, quite forgetting her promise. + +`Treacle,' said the Dormouse, without considering at all this time. + +`I want a clean cup,' interrupted the Hatter: `let's all move one place on.' + +He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him: the March Hare moved into the Dormouse's place, and Alice rather unwillingly took the place of the March Hare. The Hatter was the only one who got any advantage from the change: and Alice was a good deal worse off than before, as the March Hare had just upset the milk-jug into his plate. + +Alice did not wish to offend the Dormouse again, so she began very cautiously: `But I don't understand. Where did they draw the treacle from?' + +`You can draw water out of a water-well,' said the Hatter; `so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well--eh, stupid?' + +`But they were IN the well,' Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice this last remark. + +`Of course they were', said the Dormouse; `--well in.' + +This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for some time without interrupting it. + +`They were learning to draw,' the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; `and they drew all manner of things--everything that begins with an M--' + +`Why with an M?' said Alice. + +`Why not?' said the March Hare. + +Alice was silent. + +The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: `--that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness-- you know you say things are "much of a muchness"--did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?' + +`Really, now you ask me,' said Alice, very much confused, `I don't think--' + +`Then you shouldn't talk,' said the Hatter. + +This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot. + +`At any rate I'll never go THERE again!' said Alice as she picked her way through the wood. `It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!' + +Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a door leading right into it. `That's very curious!' she thought. `But everything's curious today. I think I may as well go in at once.' And in she went. + +Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the little glass table. `Now, I'll manage better this time,' she said to herself, and began by taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that led into the garden. Then she went to work nibbling at the mushroom (she had kept a piece of it in her pocket) till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little passage: and THEN--she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains. + +1~ CHAPTER VIII - The Queen's Croquet-Ground + +A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red. Alice thought this a very curious thing, and she went nearer to watch them, and just as she came up to them she heard one of them say, `Look out now, Five! Don't go splashing paint over me like that!' + +`I couldn't help it,' said Five, in a sulky tone; `Seven jogged my elbow.' + +On which Seven looked up and said, `That's right, Five! Always lay the blame on others!' + +`YOU'D better not talk!' said Five. `I heard the Queen say only yesterday you deserved to be beheaded!' + +`What for?' said the one who had spoken first. + +`That's none of YOUR business, Two!' said Seven. + +`Yes, it IS his business!' said Five, `and I'll tell him--it was for bringing the cook tulip-roots instead of onions.' + +Seven flung down his brush, and had just begun `Well, of all the unjust things--' when his eye chanced to fall upon Alice, as she stood watching them, and he checked himself suddenly: the others looked round also, and all of them bowed low. + +`Would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, `why you are painting those roses?' + +Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a low voice, `Why the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a RED rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and if the Queen was to find it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we're doing our best, afore she comes, to--' At this moment Five, who had been anxiously looking across the garden, called out `The Queen! The Queen!' and the three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces. There was a sound of many footsteps, and Alice looked round, eager to see the Queen. + +First came ten soldiers carrying clubs; these were all shaped like the three gardeners, oblong and flat, with their hands and feet at the corners: next the ten courtiers; these were ornamented all over with diamonds, and walked two and two, as the soldiers did. After these came the royal children; there were ten of them, and the little dears came jumping merrily along hand in hand, in couples: they were all ornamented with hearts. Next came the guests, mostly Kings and Queens, and among them Alice recognised the White Rabbit: it was talking in a hurried nervous manner, smiling at everything that was said, and went by without noticing her. Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying the King's crown on a crimson velvet cushion; and, last of all this grand procession, came THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS. + +Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on her face like the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard of such a rule at processions; `and besides, what would be the use of a procession,' thought she, `if people had all to lie down upon their faces, so that they couldn't see it?' So she stood still where she was, and waited. + +When the procession came opposite to Alice, they all stopped and looked at her, and the Queen said severely `Who is this?' She said it to the Knave of Hearts, who only bowed and smiled in reply. + +`Idiot!' said the Queen, tossing her head impatiently; and, turning to Alice, she went on, `What's your name, child?' + +`My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,' said Alice very politely; but she added, to herself, `Why, they're only a pack of cards, after all. I needn't be afraid of them!' + +`And who are THESE?' said the Queen, pointing to the three gardeners who were lying round the rosetree; for, you see, as they were lying on their faces, and the pattern on their backs was the same as the rest of the pack, she could not tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three of her own children. + +`How should I know?' said Alice, surprised at her own courage. `It's no business of MINE.' + +The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, screamed `Off with her head! Off--' + +`Nonsense!' said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent. + +The King laid his hand upon her arm, and timidly said `Consider, my dear: she is only a child!' + +The Queen turned angrily away from him, and said to the Knave `Turn them over!' + +The Knave did so, very carefully, with one foot. + +`Get up!' said the Queen, in a shrill, loud voice, and the three gardeners instantly jumped up, and began bowing to the King, the Queen, the royal children, and everybody else. + +`Leave off that!' screamed the Queen. `You make me giddy.' And then, turning to the rose-tree, she went on, `What HAVE you been doing here?' + +`May it please your Majesty,' said Two, in a very humble tone, going down on one knee as he spoke, `we were trying--' + +`I see!' said the Queen, who had meanwhile been examining the roses. `Off with their heads!' and the procession moved on, three of the soldiers remaining behind to execute the unfortunate gardeners, who ran to Alice for protection. + +`You shan't be beheaded!' said Alice, and she put them into a large flower-pot that stood near. The three soldiers wandered about for a minute or two, looking for them, and then quietly marched off after the others. + +`Are their heads off?' shouted the Queen. + +`Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty!' the soldiers shouted in reply. + +`That's right!' shouted the Queen. `Can you play croquet?' + +The soldiers were silent, and looked at Alice, as the question was evidently meant for her. + +`Yes!' shouted Alice. + +`Come on, then!' roared the Queen, and Alice joined the procession, wondering very much what would happen next. + +`It's--it's a very fine day!' said a timid voice at her side. She was walking by the White Rabbit, who was peeping anxiously into her face. + +`Very,' said Alice: `--where's the Duchess?' + +`Hush! Hush!' said the Rabbit in a low, hurried tone. He looked anxiously over his shoulder as he spoke, and then raised himself upon tiptoe, put his mouth close to her ear, and whispered `She's under sentence of execution.' + +`What for?' said Alice. + +`Did you say "What a pity!"?' the Rabbit asked. + +`No, I didn't,' said Alice: `I don't think it's at all a pity. I said "What for?"' + +`She boxed the Queen's ears--' the Rabbit began. Alice gave a little scream of laughter. `Oh, hush!' the Rabbit whispered in a frightened tone. `The Queen will hear you! You see, she came rather late, and the Queen said--' + +`Get to your places!' shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder, and people began running about in all directions, tumbling up against each other; however, they got settled down in a minute or two, and the game began. Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches. + +The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it WOULD twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed. + +The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting `Off with his head!' or `Off with her head!' about once in a minute. + +Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, `and then,' thought she, `what would become of me? They're dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there's any one left alive!' + +She was looking about for some way of escape, and wondering whether she could get away without being seen, when she noticed a curious appearance in the air: it puzzled her very much at first, but, after watching it a minute or two, she made it out to be a grin, and she said to herself `It's the Cheshire Cat: now I shall have somebody to talk to.' + +`How are you getting on?' said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for it to speak with. + +Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded. `It's no use speaking to it,' she thought, `till its ears have come, or at least one of them.' In another minute the whole head appeared, and then Alice put down her flamingo, and began an account of the game, feeling very glad she had someone to listen to her. The Cat seemed to think that there was enough of it now in sight, and no more of it appeared. + +`I don't think they play at all fairly,' Alice began, in rather a complaining tone, `and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can't hear oneself speak--and they don't seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them--and you've no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive; for instance, there's the arch I've got to go through next walking about at the other end of the ground--and I should have croqueted the Queen's hedgehog just now, only it ran away when it saw mine coming!' + +`How do you like the Queen?' said the Cat in a low voice. + +`Not at all,' said Alice: `she's so extremely--' Just then she noticed that the Queen was close behind her, listening: so she went on, `--likely to win, that it's hardly worth while finishing the game.' + +The Queen smiled and passed on. + +`Who ARE you talking to?' said the King, going up to Alice, and looking at the Cat's head with great curiosity. + +`It's a friend of mine--a Cheshire Cat,' said Alice: `allow me to introduce it.' + +`I don't like the look of it at all,' said the King: `however, it may kiss my hand if it likes.' + +`I'd rather not,' the Cat remarked. + +`Don't be impertinent,' said the King, `and don't look at me like that!' He got behind Alice as he spoke. + +`A cat may look at a king,' said Alice. `I've read that in some book, but I don't remember where.' + +`Well, it must be removed,' said the King very decidedly, and he called the Queen, who was passing at the moment, `My dear! I wish you would have this cat removed!' + +The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. `Off with his head!' she said, without even looking round. + +`I'll fetch the executioner myself,' said the King eagerly, and he hurried off. + +Alice thought she might as well go back, and see how the game was going on, as she heard the Queen's voice in the distance, screaming with passion. She had already heard her sentence three of the players to be executed for having missed their turns, and she did not like the look of things at all, as the game was in such confusion that she never knew whether it was her turn or not. So she went in search of her hedgehog. + +The hedgehog was engaged in a fight with another hedgehog, which seemed to Alice an excellent opportunity for croqueting one of them with the other: the only difficulty was, that her flamingo was gone across to the other side of the garden, where Alice could see it trying in a helpless sort of way to fly up into a tree. + +By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back, the fight was over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight: `but it doesn't matter much,' thought Alice, `as all the arches are gone from this side of the ground.' So she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back for a little more conversation with her friend. + +When she got back to the Cheshire Cat, she was surprised to find quite a large crowd collected round it: there was a dispute going on between the executioner, the King, and the Queen, who were all talking at once, while all the rest were quite silent, and looked very uncomfortable. + +The moment Alice appeared, she was appealed to by all three to settle the question, and they repeated their arguments to her, though, as they all spoke at once, she found it very hard indeed to make out exactly what they said. + +The executioner's argument was, that you couldn't cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn't going to begin at HIS time of life. + +The King's argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren't to talk nonsense. + +The Queen's argument was, that if something wasn't done about it in less than no time she'd have everybody executed, all round. (It was this last remark that had made the whole party look so grave and anxious.) + +Alice could think of nothing else to say but `It belongs to the Duchess: you'd better ask HER about it.' + +`She's in prison,' the Queen said to the executioner: `fetch her here.' And the executioner went off like an arrow. + +The Cat's head began fading away the moment he was gone, and, by the time he had come back with the Duchess, it had entirely disappeared; so the King and the executioner ran wildly up and down looking for it, while the rest of the party went back to the game. + +1~ CHAPTER IX - The Mock Turtle's Story + +`You can't think how glad I am to see you again, you dear old thing!' said the Duchess, as she tucked her arm affectionately into Alice's, and they walked off together. + +Alice was very glad to find her in such a pleasant temper, and thought to herself that perhaps it was only the pepper that had made her so savage when they met in the kitchen. + +`When I'M a Duchess,' she said to herself, (not in a very hopeful tone though), `I won't have any pepper in my kitchen AT ALL. Soup does very well without--Maybe it's always pepper that makes people hot-tempered,' she went on, very much pleased at having found out a new kind of rule, `and vinegar that makes them sour--and camomile that makes them bitter--and--and barley-sugar and such things that make children sweet-tempered. I only wish people knew that: then they wouldn't be so stingy about it, you know--' + +She had quite forgotten the Duchess by this time, and was a little startled when she heard her voice close to her ear. `You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.' + +`Perhaps it hasn't one,' Alice ventured to remark. + +`Tut, tut, child!' said the Duchess. `Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.' And she squeezed herself up closer to Alice's side as she spoke. + +Alice did not much like keeping so close to her: first, because the Duchess was VERY ugly; and secondly, because she was exactly the right height to rest her chin upon Alice's shoulder, and it was an uncomfortably sharp chin. However, she did not like to be rude, so she bore it as well as she could. + +`The game's going on rather better now,' she said, by way of keeping up the conversation a little. + +`'Tis so,' said the Duchess: `and the moral of that is--"Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round!"' + +`Somebody said,' Alice whispered, `that it's done by everybody minding their own business!' + +`Ah, well! It means much the same thing,' said the Duchess, digging her sharp little chin into Alice's shoulder as she added, `and the moral of THAT is--"Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves."' + +`How fond she is of finding morals in things!' Alice thought to herself. + +`I dare say you're wondering why I don't put my arm round your waist,' the Duchess said after a pause: `the reason is, that I'm doubtful about the temper of your flamingo. Shall I try the experiment?' + +`HE might bite,' Alice cautiously replied, not feeling at all anxious to have the experiment tried. + +`Very true,' said the Duchess: `flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is--"Birds of a feather flock together."' + +`Only mustard isn't a bird,' Alice remarked. + +`Right, as usual,' said the Duchess: `what a clear way you have of putting things!' + +`It's a mineral, I THINK,' said Alice. + +`Of course it is,' said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everything that Alice said; `there's a large mustard-mine near here. And the moral of that is--"The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours."' + +`Oh, I know!' exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last remark, `it's a vegetable. It doesn't look like one, but it is.' + +`I quite agree with you,' said the Duchess; `and the moral of that is--"Be what you would seem to be"--or if you'd like it put more simply--"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."' + +`I think I should understand that better,' Alice said very politely, `if I had it written down: but I can't quite follow it as you say it.' + +`That's nothing to what I could say if I chose,' the Duchess replied, in a pleased tone. + +`Pray don't trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,' said Alice. + +`Oh, don't talk about trouble!' said the Duchess. `I make you a present of everything I've said as yet.' + +`A cheap sort of present!' thought Alice. `I'm glad they don't give birthday presents like that!' But she did not venture to say it out loud. + +`Thinking again?' the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin. + +`I've a right to think,' said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried. + +`Just about as much right,' said the Duchess, `as pigs have to fly; and the m--' + +But here, to Alice's great surprise, the Duchess's voice died away, even in the middle of her favourite word `moral,' and the arm that was linked into hers began to tremble. Alice looked up, and there stood the Queen in front of them, with her arms folded, frowning like a thunderstorm. + +`A fine day, your Majesty!' the Duchess began in a low, weak voice. + +`Now, I give you fair warning,' shouted the Queen, stamping on the ground as she spoke; `either you or your head must be off, and that in about half no time! Take your choice!' + +The Duchess took her choice, and was gone in a moment. + +`Let's go on with the game,' the Queen said to Alice; and Alice was too much frightened to say a word, but slowly followed her back to the croquet-ground. + +The other guests had taken advantage of the Queen's absence, and were resting in the shade: however, the moment they saw her, they hurried back to the game, the Queen merely remarking that a moment's delay would cost them their lives. + +All the time they were playing the Queen never left off quarrelling with the other players, and shouting `Off with his head!' or `Off with her head!' Those whom she sentenced were taken into custody by the soldiers, who of course had to leave off being arches to do this, so that by the end of half an hour or so there were no arches left, and all the players, except the King, the Queen, and Alice, were in custody and under sentence of execution. + +Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, `Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?' + +`No,' said Alice. `I don't even know what a Mock Turtle is.' + +`It's the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,' said the Queen. + +`I never saw one, or heard of one,' said Alice. + +`Come on, then,' said the Queen, `and he shall tell you his history,' + +As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low voice, to the company generally, `You are all pardoned.' `Come, THAT'S a good thing!' she said to herself, for she had felt quite unhappy at the number of executions the Queen had ordered. + +They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. (IF you don't know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.) `Up, lazy thing!' said the Queen, `and take this young lady to see the Mock Turtle, and to hear his history. I must go back and see after some executions I have ordered'; and she walked off, leaving Alice alone with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the creature, but on the whole she thought it would be quite as safe to stay with it as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited. + +The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till she was out of sight: then it chuckled. `What fun!' said the Gryphon, half to itself, half to Alice. + +`What IS the fun?' said Alice. + +`Why, SHE,' said the Gryphon. `It's all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know. Come on!' + +`Everybody says "come on!" here,' thought Alice, as she went slowly after it: `I never was so ordered about in all my life, never!' + +They had not gone far before they saw the Mock Turtle in the distance, sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came nearer, Alice could hear him sighing as if his heart would break. She pitied him deeply. `What is his sorrow?' she asked the Gryphon, and the Gryphon answered, very nearly in the same words as before, `It's all his fancy, that: he hasn't got no sorrow, you know. Come on!' + +So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of tears, but said nothing. + +`This here young lady,' said the Gryphon, `she wants for to know your history, she do.' + +`I'll tell it her,' said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: `sit down, both of you, and don't speak a word till I've finished.' + +So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, `I don't see how he can EVEN finish, if he doesn't begin.' But she waited patiently. + +`Once,' said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, `I was a real Turtle.' + +These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional exclamation of `Hjckrrh!' from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy sobbing of the Mock Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying, `Thank you, sir, for your interesting story,' but she could not help thinking there MUST be more to come, so she sat still and said nothing. + +`When we were little,' the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, `we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle--we used to call him Tortoise--' + +`Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?' Alice asked. + +`We called him Tortoise because he taught us,' said the Mock Turtle angrily: `really you are very dull!' + +`You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,' added the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth. At last the Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle, `Drive on, old fellow! Don't be all day about it!' and he went on in these words: + +`Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn't believe it--' + +`I never said I didn't!' interrupted Alice. + +`You did,' said the Mock Turtle. + +`Hold your tongue!' added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak again. The Mock Turtle went on. + +`We had the best of educations--in fact, we went to school every day--' + +`I'VE been to a day-school, too,' said Alice; `you needn't be so proud as all that.' + +`With extras?' asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously. + +`Yes,' said Alice, `we learned French and music.' + +`And washing?' said the Mock Turtle. + +`Certainly not!' said Alice indignantly. + +`Ah! then yours wasn't a really good school,' said the Mock Turtle in a tone of great relief. `Now at OURS they had at the end of the bill, "French, music, AND WASHING--extra."' + +`You couldn't have wanted it much,' said Alice; `living at the bottom of the sea.' + +`I couldn't afford to learn it.' said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. `I only took the regular course.' + +`What was that?' inquired Alice. + +`Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied; `and then the different branches of Arithmetic-- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.' + +`I never heard of "Uglification,"' Alice ventured to say. `What is it?' + +The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. `What! Never heard of uglifying!' it exclaimed. `You know what to beautify is, I suppose?' + +`Yes,' said Alice doubtfully: `it means--to--make--anything--prettier.' + +`Well, then,' the Gryphon went on, `if you don't know what to uglify is, you ARE a simpleton.' + +Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so she turned to the Mock Turtle, and said `What else had you to learn?' + +`Well, there was Mystery,' the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers, `--Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling--the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: HE taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.' + +`What was THAT like?' said Alice. + +`Well, I can't show it you myself,' the Mock Turtle said: `I'm too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.' + +`Hadn't time,' said the Gryphon: `I went to the Classics master, though. He was an old crab, HE was.' + +`I never went to him,' the Mock Turtle said with a sigh: `he taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say.' + +`So he did, so he did,' said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both creatures hid their faces in their paws. + +`And how many hours a day did you do lessons?' said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject. + +`Ten hours the first day,' said the Mock Turtle: `nine the next, and so on.' + +`What a curious plan!' exclaimed Alice. + +`That's the reason they're called lessons,' the Gryphon remarked: `because they lessen from day to day.' + +This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a little before she made her next remark. `Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?' + +`Of course it was,' said the Mock Turtle. + +`And how did you manage on the twelfth?' Alice went on eagerly. + +`That's enough about lessons,' the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone: `tell her something about the games now.' + +1~ CHAPTER X - The Lobster Quadrille + +The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and drew the back of one flapper across his eyes. He looked at Alice, and tried to speak, but for a minute or two sobs choked his voice. `Same as if he had a bone in his throat,' said the Gryphon: and it set to work shaking him and punching him in the back. At last the Mock Turtle recovered his voice, and, with tears running down his cheeks, he went on again:-- + +`You may not have lived much under the sea--' (`I haven't,' said Alice)-- `and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster--' (Alice began to say `I once tasted--' but checked herself hastily, and said `No, never') `--so you can have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster Quadrille is!' + +`No, indeed,' said Alice. `What sort of a dance is it?' + +`Why,' said the Gryphon, `you first form into a line along the sea-shore--' + +`Two lines!' cried the Mock Turtle. `Seals, turtles, salmon, and so on; then, when you've cleared all the jelly-fish out of the way--' + +`THAT generally takes some time,' interrupted the Gryphon. + +`--you advance twice--' + +`Each with a lobster as a partner!' cried the Gryphon. + +`Of course,' the Mock Turtle said: `advance twice, set to partners--' + +`--change lobsters, and retire in same order,' continued the Gryphon. + +`Then, you know,' the Mock Turtle went on, `you throw the--' + +`The lobsters!' shouted the Gryphon, with a bound into the air. + +`--as far out to sea as you can--' + +`Swim after them!' screamed the Gryphon. + +`Turn a somersault in the sea!' cried the Mock Turtle, capering wildly about. + +`Change lobsters again!' yelled the Gryphon at the top of its voice. + +`Back to land again, and that's all the first figure,' said the Mock Turtle, suddenly dropping his voice; and the two creatures, who had been jumping about like mad things all this time, sat down again very sadly and quietly, and looked at Alice. + +`It must be a very pretty dance,' said Alice timidly. + +`Would you like to see a little of it?' said the Mock Turtle. + +`Very much indeed,' said Alice. + +`Come, let's try the first figure!' said the Mock Turtle to the Gryphon. `We can do without lobsters, you know. Which shall sing?' + +`Oh, YOU sing,' said the Gryphon. `I've forgotten the words.' + +So they began solemnly dancing round and round Alice, every now and then treading on her toes when they passed too close, and waving their forepaws to mark the time, while the Mock Turtle sang this, very slowly and sadly:-- + +poem{ + +`"Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail. +"There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my + tail. +See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! +They are waiting on the shingle--will you come and join the +dance? + +Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the +dance? +Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the +dance? + +"You can really have no notion how delightful it will be +When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to + sea!" +But the snail replied "Too far, too far!" and gave a look + askance-- +Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the + dance. + Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join + the dance. + Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join + the dance. + +`"What matters it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied. +"There is another shore, you know, upon the other side. +The further off from England the nearer is to France-- +Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance. + + Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the + dance? + Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the + dance?"' + +}poem + +`Thank you, it's a very interesting dance to watch,' said Alice, feeling very glad that it was over at last: `and I do so like that curious song about the whiting!' + +`Oh, as to the whiting,' said the Mock Turtle, `they--you've seen them, of course?' + +`Yes,' said Alice, `I've often seen them at dinn--' she checked herself hastily. + +`I don't know where Dinn may be,' said the Mock Turtle, `but if you've seen them so often, of course you know what they're like.' + +`I believe so,' Alice replied thoughtfully. `They have their tails in their mouths--and they're all over crumbs.' + +`You're wrong about the crumbs,' said the Mock Turtle: `crumbs would all wash off in the sea. But they HAVE their tails in their mouths; and the reason is--' here the Mock Turtle yawned and shut his eyes.--`Tell her about the reason and all that,' he said to the Gryphon. + +`The reason is,' said the Gryphon, `that they WOULD go with the lobsters to the dance. So they got thrown out to sea. So they had to fall a long way. So they got their tails fast in their mouths. So they couldn't get them out again. That's all.' + +`Thank you,' said Alice, `it's very interesting. I never knew so much about a whiting before.' + +`I can tell you more than that, if you like,' said the Gryphon. `Do you know why it's called a whiting?' + +`I never thought about it,' said Alice. `Why?' + +`IT DOES THE BOOTS AND SHOES.' the Gryphon replied very solemnly. + +Alice was thoroughly puzzled. `Does the boots and shoes!' she repeated in a wondering tone. + +`Why, what are YOUR shoes done with?' said the Gryphon. `I mean, what makes them so shiny?' + +Alice looked down at them, and considered a little before she gave her answer. `They're done with blacking, I believe.' + +`Boots and shoes under the sea,' the Gryphon went on in a deep voice, `are done with a whiting. Now you know.' + +`And what are they made of?' Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity. + +`Soles and eels, of course,' the Gryphon replied rather impatiently: `any shrimp could have told you that.' + +`If I'd been the whiting,' said Alice, whose thoughts were still running on the song, `I'd have said to the porpoise, "Keep back, please: we don't want YOU with us!"' + +`They were obliged to have him with them,' the Mock Turtle said: `no wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.' + +`Wouldn't it really?' said Alice in a tone of great surprise. + +`Of course not,' said the Mock Turtle: `why, if a fish came to ME, and told me he was going a journey, I should say "With what porpoise?"' + +`Don't you mean "purpose"?' said Alice. + +`I mean what I say,' the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone. And the Gryphon added `Come, let's hear some of YOUR adventures.' + +`I could tell you my adventures--beginning from this morning,' said Alice a little timidly: `but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.' + +`Explain all that,' said the Mock Turtle. + +`No, no! The adventures first,' said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: `explanations take such a dreadful time.' + +So Alice began telling them her adventures from the time when she first saw the White Rabbit. She was a little nervous about it just at first, the two creatures got so close to her, one on each side, and opened their eyes and mouths so VERY wide, but she gained courage as she went on. Her listeners were perfectly quiet till she got to the part about her repeating `YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM,' to the Caterpillar, and the words all coming different, and then the Mock Turtle drew a long breath, and said `That's very curious.' + +`It's all about as curious as it can be,' said the Gryphon. + +`It all came different!' the Mock Turtle repeated thoughtfully. `I should like to hear her try and repeat something now. Tell her to begin.' He looked at the Gryphon as if he thought it had some kind of authority over Alice. + +`Stand up and repeat "'TIS THE VOICE OF THE SLUGGARD,"' said the Gryphon. + +`How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons!' thought Alice; `I might as well be at school at once.' However, she got up, and began to repeat it, but her head was so full of the Lobster Quadrille, that she hardly knew what she was saying, and the words came very queer indeed:-- + +poem{ + + `'Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare, + "You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair." + As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose + Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.' + + [later editions continued as follows + When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark, + And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark, + But, when the tide rises and sharks are around, + His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.] + +}poem + +`That's different from what I used to say when I was a child,' said the Gryphon. + +`Well, I never heard it before,' said the Mock Turtle; `but it sounds uncommon nonsense.' + +Alice said nothing; she had sat down with her face in her hands, wondering if anything would EVER happen in a natural way again. + +`I should like to have it explained,' said the Mock Turtle. + +`She can't explain it,' said the Gryphon hastily. `Go on with the next verse.' + +`But about his toes?' the Mock Turtle persisted. `How COULD he turn them out with his nose, you know?' + +`It's the first position in dancing.' Alice said; but was dreadfully puzzled by the whole thing, and longed to change the subject. + +`Go on with the next verse,' the Gryphon repeated impatiently: `it begins "I passed by his garden."' + +Alice did not dare to disobey, though she felt sure it would all come wrong, and she went on in a trembling voice:-- + +poem{ + + `I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye, + How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie--' + + [later editions continued as follows + The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat, + While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat. + When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon, + Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon: + While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl, + And concluded the banquet--] + +}poem + +`What IS the use of repeating all that stuff,' the Mock Turtle interrupted, `if you don't explain it as you go on? It's by far the most confusing thing I ever heard!' + +`Yes, I think you'd better leave off,' said the Gryphon: and Alice was only too glad to do so. + +`Shall we try another figure of the Lobster Quadrille?' the Gryphon went on. `Or would you like the Mock Turtle to sing you a song?' + +`Oh, a song, please, if the Mock Turtle would be so kind,' Alice replied, so eagerly that the Gryphon said, in a rather offended tone, `Hm! No accounting for tastes! Sing her "Turtle Soup," will you, old fellow?' + +The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and began, in a voice sometimes choked with sobs, to sing this:-- + +poem{ + + `Beautiful Soup, so rich and green, + Waiting in a hot tureen! + Who for such dainties would not stoop? + Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup! + Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup! + Beau--ootiful Soo--oop! + Beau--ootiful Soo--oop! + Soo--oop of the e--e--evening, + Beautiful, beautiful Soup! + + `Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish, + Game, or any other dish? + Who would not give all else for two + Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup? + Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup? + Beau--ootiful Soo--oop! + Beau--ootiful Soo--oop! + Soo--oop of the e--e--evening, + Beautiful, beauti--FUL SOUP!' + +}poem + +`Chorus again!' cried the Gryphon, and the Mock Turtle had just begun to repeat it, when a cry of `The trial's beginning!' was heard in the distance. + +`Come on!' cried the Gryphon, and, taking Alice by the hand, it hurried off, without waiting for the end of the song. + +`What trial is it?' Alice panted as she ran; but the Gryphon only answered `Come on!' and ran the faster, while more and more faintly came, carried on the breeze that followed them, the melancholy words:-- + +poem{ + + `Soo--oop of the e--e--evening, + Beautiful, beautiful Soup!' + +}poem + +1~ CHAPTER XI - Who Stole the Tarts? + +The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne when they arrived, with a great crowd assembled about them--all sorts of little birds and beasts, as well as the whole pack of cards: the Knave was standing before them, in chains, with a soldier on each side to guard him; and near the King was the White Rabbit, with a trumpet in one hand, and a scroll of parchment in the other. In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts upon it: they looked so good, that it made Alice quite hungry to look at them--`I wish they'd get the trial done,' she thought, `and hand round the refreshments!' But there seemed to be no chance of this, so she began looking at everything about her, to pass away the time. + +Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly everything there. `That's the judge,' she said to herself, `because of his great wig.' + +The judge, by the way, was the King; and as he wore his crown over the wig, (look at the frontispiece if you want to see how he did it,) he did not look at all comfortable, and it was certainly not becoming. + +`And that's the jury-box,' thought Alice, `and those twelve creatures,' (she was obliged to say `creatures,' you see, because some of them were animals, and some were birds,) `I suppose they are the jurors.' She said this last word two or three times over to herself, being rather proud of it: for she thought, and rightly too, that very few little girls of her age knew the meaning of it at all. However, `jury-men' would have done just as well. + +The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on slates. `What are they doing?' Alice whispered to the Gryphon. `They can't have anything to put down yet, before the trial's begun.' + +`They're putting down their names,' the Gryphon whispered in reply, `for fear they should forget them before the end of the trial.' + +`Stupid things!' Alice began in a loud, indignant voice, but she stopped hastily, for the White Rabbit cried out, `Silence in the court!' and the King put on his spectacles and looked anxiously round, to make out who was talking. + +Alice could see, as well as if she were looking over their shoulders, that all the jurors were writing down `stupid things!' on their slates, and she could even make out that one of them didn't know how to spell `stupid,' and that he had to ask his neighbour to tell him. `A nice muddle their slates'll be in before the trial's over!' thought Alice. + +One of the jurors had a pencil that squeaked. This of course, Alice could not stand, and she went round the court and got behind him, and very soon found an opportunity of taking it away. She did it so quickly that the poor little juror (it was Bill, the Lizard) could not make out at all what had become of it; so, after hunting all about for it, he was obliged to write with one finger for the rest of the day; and this was of very little use, as it left no mark on the slate. + +`Herald, read the accusation!' said the King. + +On this the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and then unrolled the parchment scroll, and read as follows:-- + +poem{ + + `The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, + All on a summer day: + The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts, + And took them quite away!' + +}poem + +`Consider your verdict,' the King said to the jury. + +`Not yet, not yet!' the Rabbit hastily interrupted. `There's a great deal to come before that!' + +`Call the first witness,' said the King; and the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and called out, `First witness!' + +The first witness was the Hatter. He came in with a teacup in one hand and a piece of bread-and-butter in the other. `I beg pardon, your Majesty,' he began, `for bringing these in: but I hadn't quite finished my tea when I was sent for.' + +`You ought to have finished,' said the King. `When did you begin?' + +The Hatter looked at the March Hare, who had followed him into the court, arm-in-arm with the Dormouse. `Fourteenth of March, I think it was,' he said. + +`Fifteenth,' said the March Hare. + +`Sixteenth,' added the Dormouse. + +`Write that down,' the King said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote down all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence. + +`Take off your hat,' the King said to the Hatter. + +`It isn't mine,' said the Hatter. + +`Stolen!' the King exclaimed, turning to the jury, who instantly made a memorandum of the fact. + +`I keep them to sell,' the Hatter added as an explanation; `I've none of my own. I'm a hatter.' + +Here the Queen put on her spectacles, and began staring at the Hatter, who turned pale and fidgeted. + +`Give your evidence,' said the King; `and don't be nervous, or I'll have you executed on the spot.' + +This did not seem to encourage the witness at all: he kept shifting from one foot to the other, looking uneasily at the Queen, and in his confusion he bit a large piece out of his teacup instead of the bread-and-butter. + +Just at this moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a good deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to grow larger again, and she thought at first she would get up and leave the court; but on second thoughts she decided to remain where she was as long as there was room for her. + +`I wish you wouldn't squeeze so.' said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to her. `I can hardly breathe.' + +`I can't help it,' said Alice very meekly: `I'm growing.' + +`You've no right to grow here,' said the Dormouse. + +`Don't talk nonsense,' said Alice more boldly: `you know you're growing too.' + +`Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace,' said the Dormouse: `not in that ridiculous fashion.' And he got up very sulkily and crossed over to the other side of the court. + +All this time the Queen had never left off staring at the Hatter, and, just as the Dormouse crossed the court, she said to one of the officers of the court, `Bring me the list of the singers in the last concert!' on which the wretched Hatter trembled so, that he shook both his shoes off. + +`Give your evidence,' the King repeated angrily, `or I'll have you executed, whether you're nervous or not.' + +`I'm a poor man, your Majesty,' the Hatter began, in a trembling voice, `--and I hadn't begun my tea--not above a week or so--and what with the bread-and-butter getting so thin--and the twinkling of the tea--' + +`The twinkling of the what?' said the King. + +`It began with the tea,' the Hatter replied. + +`Of course twinkling begins with a T!' said the King sharply. `Do you take me for a dunce? Go on!' + +`I'm a poor man,' the Hatter went on, `and most things twinkled after that--only the March Hare said--' + +`I didn't!' the March Hare interrupted in a great hurry. + +`You did!' said the Hatter. + +`I deny it!' said the March Hare. + +`He denies it,' said the King: `leave out that part.' + +`Well, at any rate, the Dormouse said--' the Hatter went on, looking anxiously round to see if he would deny it too: but the Dormouse denied nothing, being fast asleep. + +`After that,' continued the Hatter, `I cut some more bread- and-butter--' + +`But what did the Dormouse say?' one of the jury asked. + +`That I can't remember,' said the Hatter. + +`You MUST remember,' remarked the King, `or I'll have you executed.' + +The miserable Hatter dropped his teacup and bread-and-butter, and went down on one knee. `I'm a poor man, your Majesty,' he began. + +`You're a very poor speaker,' said the King. + +Here one of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court. (As that is rather a hard word, I will just explain to you how it was done. They had a large canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth with strings: into this they slipped the guinea-pig, head first, and then sat upon it.) + +`I'm glad I've seen that done,' thought Alice. `I've so often read in the newspapers, at the end of trials, "There was some attempts at applause, which was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court," and I never understood what it meant till now.' + +`If that's all you know about it, you may stand down,' continued the King. + +`I can't go no lower,' said the Hatter: `I'm on the floor, as it is.' + +`Then you may SIT down,' the King replied. + +Here the other guinea-pig cheered, and was suppressed. + +`Come, that finished the guinea-pigs!' thought Alice. `Now we shall get on better.' + +`I'd rather finish my tea,' said the Hatter, with an anxious look at the Queen, who was reading the list of singers. + +`You may go,' said the King, and the Hatter hurriedly left the court, without even waiting to put his shoes on. + +`--and just take his head off outside,' the Queen added to one of the officers: but the Hatter was out of sight before the officer could get to the door. + +`Call the next witness!' said the King. + +The next witness was the Duchess's cook. She carried the pepper-box in her hand, and Alice guessed who it was, even before she got into the court, by the way the people near the door began sneezing all at once. + +`Give your evidence,' said the King. + +`Shan't,' said the cook. + +The King looked anxiously at the White Rabbit, who said in a low voice, `Your Majesty must cross-examine THIS witness.' + +`Well, if I must, I must,' the King said, with a melancholy air, and, after folding his arms and frowning at the cook till his eyes were nearly out of sight, he said in a deep voice, `What are tarts made of?' + +`Pepper, mostly,' said the cook. + +`Treacle,' said a sleepy voice behind her. + +`Collar that Dormouse,' the Queen shrieked out. `Behead that Dormouse! Turn that Dormouse out of court! Suppress him! Pinch him! Off with his whiskers!' + +For some minutes the whole court was in confusion, getting the Dormouse turned out, and, by the time they had settled down again, the cook had disappeared. + +`Never mind!' said the King, with an air of great relief. `Call the next witness.' And he added in an undertone to the Queen, `Really, my dear, YOU must cross-examine the next witness. It quite makes my forehead ache!' + +Alice watched the White Rabbit as he fumbled over the list, feeling very curious to see what the next witness would be like, `--for they haven't got much evidence YET,' she said to herself. Imagine her surprise, when the White Rabbit read out, at the top of his shrill little voice, the name `Alice!' + +1~ CHAPTER XII - Alice's Evidence + +`Here!' cried Alice, quite forgetting in the flurry of the moment how large she had grown in the last few minutes, and she jumped up in such a hurry that she tipped over the jury-box with the edge of her skirt, upsetting all the jurymen on to the heads of the crowd below, and there they lay sprawling about, reminding her very much of a globe of goldfish she had accidentally upset the week before. + +`Oh, I BEG your pardon!' she exclaimed in a tone of great dismay, and began picking them up again as quickly as she could, for the accident of the goldfish kept running in her head, and she had a vague sort of idea that they must be collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die. + +`The trial cannot proceed,' said the King in a very grave voice, `until all the jurymen are back in their proper places-- ALL,' he repeated with great emphasis, looking hard at Alice as he said do. + +Alice looked at the jury-box, and saw that, in her haste, she had put the Lizard in head downwards, and the poor little thing was waving its tail about in a melancholy way, being quite unable to move. She soon got it out again, and put it right; `not that it signifies much,' she said to herself; `I should think it would be QUITE as much use in the trial one way up as the other.' + +As soon as the jury had a little recovered from the shock of being upset, and their slates and pencils had been found and handed back to them, they set to work very diligently to write out a history of the accident, all except the Lizard, who seemed too much overcome to do anything but sit with its mouth open, gazing up into the roof of the court. + +`What do you know about this business?' the King said to Alice. + +`Nothing,' said Alice. + +`Nothing WHATEVER?' persisted the King. + +`Nothing whatever,' said Alice. + +`That's very important,' the King said, turning to the jury. They were just beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit interrupted: `UNimportant, your Majesty means, of course,' he said in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke. + +`UNimportant, of course, I meant,' the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, `important--unimportant-- unimportant--important--' as if he were trying which word sounded best. + +Some of the jury wrote it down `important,' and some `unimportant.' Alice could see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates; `but it doesn't matter a bit,' she thought to herself. + +At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his note-book, cackled out `Silence!' and read out from his book, `Rule Forty-two. ALL PERSONS MORE THAN A MILE HIGH TO LEAVE THE COURT.' + +Everybody looked at Alice. + +`I'M not a mile high,' said Alice. + +`You are,' said the King. + +`Nearly two miles high,' added the Queen. + +`Well, I shan't go, at any rate,' said Alice: `besides, that's not a regular rule: you invented it just now.' + +`It's the oldest rule in the book,' said the King. + +`Then it ought to be Number One,' said Alice. + +The King turned pale, and shut his note-book hastily. `Consider your verdict,' he said to the jury, in a low, trembling voice. + +`There's more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,' said the White Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry; `this paper has just been picked up.' + +`What's in it?' said the Queen. + +`I haven't opened it yet,' said the White Rabbit, `but it seems to be a letter, written by the prisoner to--to somebody.' + +`It must have been that,' said the King, `unless it was written to nobody, which isn't usual, you know.' + +`Who is it directed to?' said one of the jurymen. + +`It isn't directed at all,' said the White Rabbit; `in fact, there's nothing written on the OUTSIDE.' He unfolded the paper as he spoke, and added `It isn't a letter, after all: it's a set of verses.' + +`Are they in the prisoner's handwriting?' asked another of the jurymen. + +`No, they're not,' said the White Rabbit, `and that's the queerest thing about it.' (The jury all looked puzzled.) + +`He must have imitated somebody else's hand,' said the King. (The jury all brightened up again.) + +`Please your Majesty,' said the Knave, `I didn't write it, and they can't prove I did: there's no name signed at the end.' + +`If you didn't sign it,' said the King, `that only makes the matter worse. You MUST have meant some mischief, or else you'd have signed your name like an honest man.' + +There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever thing the King had said that day. + +`That PROVES his guilt,' said the Queen. + +`It proves nothing of the sort!' said Alice. `Why, you don't even know what they're about!' + +`Read them,' said the King. + +The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. `Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked. + +`Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, `and go on till you come to the end: then stop.' + +These were the verses the White Rabbit read:-- + +poem{ + + `They told me you had been to her, + And mentioned me to him: + She gave me a good character, + But said I could not swim. + + He sent them word I had not gone + (We know it to be true): + If she should push the matter on, + What would become of you? + + I gave her one, they gave him two, + You gave us three or more; + They all returned from him to you, + Though they were mine before. + + If I or she should chance to be + Involved in this affair, + He trusts to you to set them free, + Exactly as we were. + + My notion was that you had been + (Before she had this fit) + An obstacle that came between + Him, and ourselves, and it. + + Don't let him know she liked them best, + For this must ever be + A secret, kept from all the rest, + Between yourself and me.' + +}poem + +`That's the most important piece of evidence we've heard yet,' said the King, rubbing his hands; `so now let the jury--' + +`If any one of them can explain it,' said Alice, (she had grown so large in the last few minutes that she wasn't a bit afraid of interrupting him,) `I'll give him sixpence. _{I}_ don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it.' + +The jury all wrote down on their slates, `SHE doesn't believe there's an atom of meaning in it,' but none of them attempted to explain the paper. + +`If there's no meaning in it,' said the King, `that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. And yet I don't know,' he went on, spreading out the verses on his knee, and looking at them with one eye; `I seem to see some meaning in them, after all. "--SAID I COULD NOT SWIM--" you can't swim, can you?' he added, turning to the Knave. + +The Knave shook his head sadly. `Do I look like it?' he said. (Which he certainly did NOT, being made entirely of cardboard.) + +`All right, so far,' said the King, and he went on muttering over the verses to himself: `"WE KNOW IT TO BE TRUE--" that's the jury, of course-- "I GAVE HER ONE, THEY GAVE HIM TWO--" why, that must be what he did with the tarts, you know--' + +`But, it goes on "THEY ALL RETURNED FROM HIM TO YOU,"' said Alice. + +`Why, there they are!' said the King triumphantly, pointing to the tarts on the table. `Nothing can be clearer than THAT. Then again--"BEFORE SHE HAD THIS FIT--" you never had fits, my dear, I think?' he said to the Queen. + +`Never!' said the Queen furiously, throwing an inkstand at the Lizard as she spoke. (The unfortunate little Bill had left off writing on his slate with one finger, as he found it made no mark; but he now hastily began again, using the ink, that was trickling down his face, as long as it lasted.) + +`Then the words don't FIT you,' said the King, looking round the court with a smile. There was a dead silence. + +`It's a pun!' the King added in an offended tone, and everybody laughed, `Let the jury consider their verdict,' the King said, for about the twentieth time that day. + +`No, no!' said the Queen. `Sentence first--verdict afterwards.' + +`Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. `The idea of having the sentence first!' + +`Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple. + +`I won't!' said Alice. + +`Off with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved. + +`Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) `You're nothing but a pack of cards!' + +At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face. + +`Wake up, Alice dear!' said her sister; `Why, what a long sleep you've had!' + +`Oh, I've had such a curious dream!' said Alice, and she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, `It WAS a curious dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to your tea; it's getting late.' So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been. + +But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream:-- + +First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers--she could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering hair that WOULD always get into her eyes--and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became alive the strange creatures of her little sister's dream. + +The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by--the frightened Mouse splashed his way through the neighbouring pool--she could hear the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their never-ending meal, and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her unfortunate guests to execution--once more the pig-baby was sneezing on the Duchess's knee, while plates and dishes crashed around it--once more the shriek of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the Lizard's slate-pencil, and the choking of the suppressed guinea-pigs, filled the air, mixed up with the distant sobs of the miserable Mock Turtle. + +So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality--the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds--the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy--and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard--while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle's heavy sobs. + +Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make THEIR eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. + +THE END diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/autonomy_markup0.sst b/data/samples/current/en/autonomy_markup0.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e239354 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/autonomy_markup0.sst @@ -0,0 +1,193 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: Revisiting the Autonomous Contract + :subtitle: Transnational contract law, trends and supportive structures + +@creator: + :author: Amissah, Ralph + +@date: + :published: 2000-08-27 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Ralph Amissah + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:article;law:international:commercial arbitration|uniform law|harmonization;private law;arbitration:international commercial + :subject: international contracts, international commercial arbitration, private international law + +@make: + :italics: /CISG|PICC|PECL|UNCITRAL|UNIDROIT|lex mercatoria|pacta sunt servanda|caveat subscriptor|ex aequo et bono|amiable compositeur|ad hoc/i + :num_top: 1 +% :omit: minitoc + +% (Draft 0.90 - 2000-08-27) + +:A~ @title @author~{* Ralph Amissah is a Fellow of Pace University, Institute for International Commercial Law. http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/ \\ RA lectured on the private law aspects of international trade whilst at the Law Faculty of the University of Tromsø, Norway. http://www.jus.uit.no/ \\ RA built the first web site related to international trade law, now known as lexmercatoria.org and described as "an (international | transnational) commercial law and e-commerce infrastructure monitor". http://lexmercatoria.org/ \\ RA is interested in the law, technology, commerce nexus. RA works with the law firm Amissahs. \\ /{[This is a draft document and subject to change.]}/ \\ All errors are very much my own. \\ ralph@amissah.com }~ + +1~ Reinforcing trends: borderless technologies, global economy, transnational legal solutions? + +Revisiting the Autonomous Contract~{ /{The Autonomous Contract: Reflecting the borderless electronic-commercial environment in contracting}/ was published in /{Elektronisk handel - rettslige aspekter, Nordisk årsbok i rettsinformatikk 1997}/ (Electronic Commerce - Legal Aspects. The Nordic yearbook for Legal Informatics 1997) Edited by Randi Punsvik, or at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/the.autonomous.contract.07.10.1997.amissah/doc.html }~ + +Globalisation is to be observed as a trend intrinsic to the world economy.~{ As Maria Cattaui Livanos suggests in /{The global economy - an opportunity to be seized}/ in /{Business World}/ the Electronic magazine of the International Chamber of Commerce (Paris, July 1997) at http://www.iccwbo.org/html/globalec.htm \\ "Globalization is unstoppable. Even though it may be only in its early stages, it is already intrinsic to the world economy. We have to live with it, recognize its advantages and learn to manage it. \\ That imperative applies to governments, who would be unwise to attempt to stem the tide for reasons of political expediency. It also goes for companies of all sizes, who must now compete on global markets and learn to adjust their strategies accordingly, seizing the opportunities that globalization offers."}~ Rudimentary economics explains this runaway process, as being driven by competition within the business community to achieve efficient production, and to reach and extend available markets.~{To remain successful, being in competition, the business community is compelled to take advantage of the opportunities provided by globalisation.}~ Technological advancement particularly in transport and communications has historically played a fundamental role in the furtherance of international commerce, with the Net, technology's latest spatio-temporally transforming offering, linchpin of the "new-economy", extending exponentially the global reach of the business community. The Net covers much of the essence of international commerce providing an instantaneous, low cost, convergent, global and borderless: information centre, marketplace and channel for communications, payments and the delivery of services and intellectual property. The sale of goods, however, involves the separate element of their physical delivery. The Net has raised a plethora of questions and has frequently offered solutions. The increased transparency of borders arising from the Net's ubiquitous nature results in an increased demand for the transparency of operation. As economic activities become increasingly global, to reduce transaction costs, there is a strong incentive for the "law" that provides for them, to do so in a similar dimension. The appeal of transnational legal solutions lies in the potential reduction in complexity, more widely dispersed expertise, and resulting increased transaction efficiency. The Net reflexively offers possibilities for the development of transnational legal solutions, having in a similar vein transformed the possibilities for the promulgation of texts, the sharing of ideas and collaborative ventures. There are however, likely to be tensions within the legal community protecting entrenched practices against that which is new, (both in law and technology) and the business community's goal to reduce transaction costs. + +Within commercial law an analysis of law and economics may assist in developing a better understanding of the relationship between commercial law and the commercial sector it serves.~{ Realists would contend that law is contextual and best understood by exploring the interrelationships between law and the other social sciences, such as sociology, psychology, political science, and economics.}~ "...[T]he importance of the interrelations between law and economics can be seen in the twin facts that legal change is often a function of economic ideas and conditions, which necessitate and/or generate demands for legal change, and that economic change is often governed by legal change."~{ Part of a section cited in Mercuro and Steven G. Medema, /{Economics and the Law: from Posner to Post-Modernism}/ (Princeton, 1997) p. 11, with reference to Karl N. Llewellyn The Effect of Legal Institutions upon Economics, American Economic Review 15 (December 1925) pp 655-683, Mark M. Litchman Economics, the Basis of Law, American Law Review 61 (May-June 1927) pp 357-387, and W. S. Holdsworth A Neglected Aspect of the Relations between Economic and Legal History, Economic History Review 1 (January 1927-1928) pp 114-123.}~ In doing so, however, it is important to be aware that there are several competing schools of law and economics, with different perspectives, levels of abstraction, and analytical consequences of and for the world that they model.~{ For a good introduction see Nicholas Mercuro and Steven G. Medema, /{Economics and the Law: from Posner to Post-Modernism}/ (Princeton, 1997). These include: Chicago law and economics (New law and economics); New Haven School of law and economics; Public Choice Theory; Institutional law and economics; Neoinstitutional law and economics; Critical Legal Studies.}~ + +Where there is rapid interrelated structural change with resulting new features, rather than concentrate on traditionally established tectonic plates of a discipline, it is necessary to understand underlying currents and concepts at their intersections, (rather than expositions of history~{ Case overstated, but this is an essential point. It is not be helpful to be overly tied to the past. It is necessary to be able to look ahead and explore new solutions, and be aware of the implications of "complexity" (as to to the relevance of past circumstances to the present). }~), is the key to commencing meaningful discussions and developing solutions for the resulting issues.~{ The majority of which are beyond the scope of this paper. Examples include: encryption and privacy for commercial purposes; digital signatures; symbolic ownership; electronic intellectual property rights.}~ Interrelated developments are more meaningfully understood through interdisciplinary study, as this instance suggests, of the law, commerce/economics, and technology nexus. In advocating this approach, we should also pay heed to the realisation in the sciences, of the limits of reductionism in the study of complex systems, as such systems feature emergent properties that are not evident if broken down into their constituent parts. System complexity exceeds sub-system complexity; consequently, the relevant unit for understanding the systems function is the system, not its parts.~{ Complexity theory is a branch of mathematics and physics that examines non-linear systems in which simple sets of deterministic rules can lead to highly complicated results, which cannot be predicted accurately. A study of the subject is provided by Nicholas Rescher /{Complexity: A Philosophical Overview}/ (New Brunswick, 1998). See also Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, /{The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World}/ (1994). }~ Simplistic dogma should be abandoned for a contextual approach. + +1~ Common Property - advocating a common commercial highway + +Certain infrastructural underpinnings beneficial to the working of the market economy are not best provided by the business community, but by other actors including governments. In this paper mention is made for example of the /{United Nations Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards}/ (New York, 10 June 1958), which the business community regularly relies upon as the back-stop for their international agreements. Common property can have an enabling value, the Net, basis for the "new" economy, would not be what it is today without much that has been shared on this basis, having permitted /{"Metcalf's law"}/~{ Robert Metcalf, founder of 3Com. }~ to take hold. /{Metcalf's law}/ suggests that the value of a shared technology is exponential to its user base. In all likelihood it applies as much to transnational contract law, as to technological networks and standards. The more people who use a network or standard, the more "valuable" it becomes, and the more users it will attract. Key infrastructure should be identified and common property solutions where appropriate nurtured, keeping transaction costs to a minimum. + +The following general perspective is submitted as worthy of consideration (and support) by the legal, business and academic communities, and governments. *(a)* Abstract goals valuable to a transnational legal infrastructure include, certainty and predictability, flexibility, simplicity where possible, and neutrality, in the sense of being without perceived "unfairness" in the global context of their application. This covers the content of the "laws" themselves and the methods used for their interpretation. *(b)* Of law with regard to technology, "rules should be technology-neutral (i.e., the rules should neither require nor assume a particular technology) and forward looking (i.e., the rules should not hinder the use or development of technologies in the future)."~{ /{US Framework for Global Electronic Commerce}/ (1997) http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/New/Commerce/ }~ *(c)* Desirable abstract goals in developing technological standards and critical technological infrastructure, include, choice, and that they should be shared and public or "open" as in "open source", and platform and/or program neutral, that is, interoperable. (On security, to forestall suggestions to the contrary, popular open source software tends to be as secure or more so than proprietary software). *(d)* Encryption is an essential part of the mature "new" economy but remains the subject of some governments' restriction.~{ The EU is lifting such restriction, and the US seems likely to follow suit. }~ The availability of (and possibility to develop common transnational standards for) strong encryption is essential for commercial security and trust with regard to all manner of Net communications and electronic commerce transactions, /{vis-à-vis}/ their confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation. That is, encryption is the basis for essential commerce related technologies, including amongst many others, electronic signatures, electronic payment systems and the development of electronic symbols of ownership (such as electronic bills of lading). *(e)* As regards the dissemination of primary materials concerning "uniform standards" in both the legal and technology domains, "the Net" should be used to make them globally available, free. Technology should be similarly used where possible to promote the goals outlined under point (a). Naturally, as a tempered supporter of the market economy,~{ Caveats extending beyond the purview of this paper. It is necessary to be aware that there are other overriding interests, global and domestic, that the market economy is ill suited to providing for, such as the environment, and possibly key public utilities that require long term planning and high investment. It is also necessary to continue to be vigilant against that which even if arising as a natural consequence of the market economy, has the potential to disturb or destroy its function, such as monopolies.}~ proprietary secondary materials and technologies do not merit these reservations. Similarly, actors of the market economy would take advantage of the common property base of the commercial highway. + +1~ Modelling the private international commercial law infrastructure + +Apart from the study of "laws" or the existing legal infrastructure, there are a multitude of players involved in their creation whose efforts may be regarded as being in the nature of systems modelling. Of interest to this paper is the subset of activity of a few organisations that provide the underpinnings for the foundation of a successful transnational contract/sales law. These are not amongst the more controversial legal infrastructure modelling activities, and represent a small but significant part in simplifying international commerce and trade.~{ Look for instance at national customs procedures, and consumer protection.}~ + +Briefly viewing the wider picture, several institutions are involved as independent actors in systems modelling of the transnational legal infrastructure. Their roles and mandates and the issues they address are conceptually different. These include certain United Nations organs and affiliates such as the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL),~{ http://www.uncitral.org/ }~ the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)~{ http://www.wipo.org/ }~ and recently the World Trade Organisation (WTO),~{ http://www.wto.org/ }~ along with other institutions such as the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT),~{ http://www.unidroit.org/ }~ the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC),~{ http://www.iccwbo.org/ }~ and the Hague Conference on Private International Law.~{ http://www.hcch.net/ }~ They identify areas that would benefit from an international or transnational regime and use various tools at their disposal, (including: treaties; model laws; conventions; rules and/or principles; standard contracts), to develop legislative "solutions" that they hope will be subscribed to. + +A host of other institutions are involved in providing regional solutions.~{ such as ASEAN http://www.aseansec.org/ the European Union (EU) http://europa.eu.int/ MERCOSUR http://embassy.org/uruguay/econ/mercosur/ and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) http://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/english/nafta/ }~ Specialised areas are also addressed by appropriately specialised institutions.~{ e.g. large international banks; or in the legal community, the Business Section of the International Bar Association (IBA) with its membership of lawyers in over 180 countries. http://www.ibanet.org/ }~ A result of globalisation is increased competition (also) amongst States, which are active players in the process, identifying and addressing the needs of their business communities over a wide range of areas and managing the suitability to the global economy of their domestic legal, economic, technological and educational~{ For a somewhat frightening peek and illuminating discussion of the role of education in the global economy as implemented by a number of successful States see Joel Spring, /{Education and the Rise of the Global Economy}/ (Mahwah, NJ, 1998). }~ infrastructures. The role of States remains to identify what domestic structural support they must provide to be integrated and competitive in the global economy. + +In addition to "traditional" contributors, the technology/commerce/law confluence provides new challenges and opportunities, allowing, the emergence of important new players within the commercial field, such as Bolero,~{ http://www.bolero.org/ also http://www.boleroassociation.org/ }~ which, with the backing of international banks and ship-owners, offers electronic replacements for traditional paper transactions, acting as transaction agents for the electronic substitute on behalf of the trading parties. The acceptance of the possibility of applying an institutionally offered lex has opened the door further for other actors including ad hoc groupings of the business community and/or universities to find ways to be engaged and actively participate in providing services for themselves and/or others in this domain. + +1~ The foundation for transnational private contract law, arbitration + +The market economy drive perpetuating economic globalisation is also active in the development and choice of transnational legal solutions. The potential reward, international sets of contract rules and principles, that can be counted on to be consistent and as providing a uniform layer of insulation (with minimal reference back to State law) when applied across the landscape of a multitude of different municipal legal systems. The business community is free to utilise them if available, and if not, to develop them, or seek to have them developed. + +The kernel for the development of a transnational legal infrastructure governing the rights and obligations of private contracting individuals was put in place as far back as 1958 by the /{UN Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards}/ (/{"NY Convention on ICA"}/),~{ at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.arbitration.recognition.and.enforcement.convention.new.york.1958/ }~ now in force in over a hundred States. Together with freedom of contract, the /{NY Convention on ICA}/ made it possible for commercial parties to develop and be governed by their own /{lex}/ in their contractual affairs, should they wish to do so, and guaranteed that provided their agreement was based on international commercial arbitration (/{"ICA"}/), (and not against relevant mandatory law) it would be enforced in all contracting States. This has been given further support by various more recent arbitration rules and the /{UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration 1985}/,~{ at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.arbitration.model.law.1985/ }~ which now explicitly state that rule based solutions independent of national law can be applied in /{"ICA"}/.~{ Lando, /{Each Contracting Party Must Act In Accordance with Good Faith and Fair Dealing}/ in /{Festskrift til Jan Ramberg}/ (Stockholm, 1997) p. 575. See also UNIDROIT Principles, Preamble 4 a. Also Arthur Hartkamp, The Use of UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts by National and Supranational Courts (1995) in UNIDROIT Principles: A New Lex Mercatoria?, pp. 253-260 on p. 255. But see Goode, /{A New International Lex Mercatoria?}/ in /{Juridisk Tidskrift}/ (1999-2000 nr 2) p. 256 and 259. }~ + +/{"ICA"}/ is recognised as the most prevalent means of dispute resolution in international commerce. Unlike litigation /{"ICA"}/ survives on its merits as a commercial service to provide for the needs of the business community.~{ /{"ICA"}/ being shaped by market forces and competition adheres more closely to the rules of the market economy, responding to its needs and catering for them more adequately. }~ It has consequently been more dynamic than national judiciaries, in adjusting to the changing requirements of businessmen. Its institutions are quicker to adapt and innovate, including the ability to cater for transnational contracts. /{"ICA"}/, in taking its mandate from and giving effect to the will of the parties, provides them with greater flexibility and frees them from many of the limitations of municipal law.~{ As examples of this, it seeks to give effect to the parties' agreement upon: the lex mercatoria as the law of the contract; the number of, and persons to be "adjudicators"; the language of proceedings; the procedural rules to be used, and; as to the finality of the decision. }~ + +In sum, a transnational/non-national regulatory order governing the contractual rights and obligations of private individuals is made possible by: *(a)* States' acceptance of freedom of contract (public policy excepted); *(b)* Sanctity of contract embodied in the principle pacta sunt servanda *(c)* Written contractual selection of dispute resolution by international commercial arbitration, whether ad hoc or institutional, usually under internationally accepted arbitration rules; *(d)* Guaranteed enforcement, arbitration where necessary borrowing the State apparatus for law enforcement through the /{NY Convention on ICA}/, which has secured for /{"ICA"}/ a recognition and enforcement regime unparalleled by municipal courts in well over a hundred contracting States; *(e)* Transnational effect or non-nationality being achievable through /{"ICA"}/ accepting the parties' ability to select the basis upon which the dispute would be resolved outside municipal law, such as through the selection of general principles of law or lex mercatoria, or calling upon the arbitrators to act as amiable compositeur or ex aequo et bono. + +This framework provided by /{"ICA"}/ opened the door for the modelling of effective transnational law default rules and principles for contracts independent of State participation (in their development, application, or choice of law foundation). Today we have an increased amount of certainty of content and better control over the desired degree of transnational effect or non-nationality with the availability of comprehensive insulating rules and principles such as the PICC or /{Principles of European Contract Law}/ (/{"European Principles"}/ or /{"PECL"}/) that may be chosen, either together with, or to the exclusion of a choice of municipal law as governing the contract. For electronic commerce a similar path is hypothetically possible. + +1~ "State contracted international law" and/or "institutionally offered lex"? CISG and PICC as examples + +An institutionally offered lex ("IoL", uniform rules and principles) appear to have a number of advantages over "State contracted international law" ("ScIL", model laws, treaties and conventions for enactment). The development and formulation of both "ScIL" and "IoL" law takes time, the CISG representing a half century of effort~{ /{UNCITRAL Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods 1980}/ see at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.contracts.international.sale.of.goods.convention.1980/ \\ The CISG may be regarded as the culmination of an effort in the field dating back to Ernst Rabel, (/{Das Recht des Warenkaufs}/ Bd. I&II (Berlin, 1936-1958). Two volume study on sales law.) followed by the Cornell Project, (Cornell Project on Formation of Contracts 1968 - Rudolf Schlesinger, Formation of Contracts. A study of the Common Core of Legal Systems, 2 vols. (New York, London 1968)) and connected most directly to the UNIDROIT inspired /{Uniform Law for International Sales}/ (ULIS http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.ulis.convention.1964/ at and ULF at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.ulf.convention.1964/ ), the main preparatory works behind the CISG (/{Uniform Law on the Formation of Contracts for the International Sale of Goods}/ (ULF) and the /{Convention relating to a Uniform Law on the International Sale of Goods}/ (ULIS) The Hague, 1964.). }~ and PICC twenty years.~{ /{UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts}/ commonly referred to as the /{UNIDROIT Principles}/ and within this paper as PICC see at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.contract.principles.1994/ and http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.international.commercial.contracts.principles.1994.commented/ \\ The first edition of the PICC were finalised in 1994, 23 years after their first conception, and 14 years after work started on them in earnest. }~ The CISG by UNCITRAL represents the greatest success for the unification of an area of substantive commercial contract law to date, being currently applied by 57 States,~{ As of February 2000. }~ estimated as representing close to seventy percent of world trade and including every major trading nation of the world apart from England and Japan. To labour the point, the USA most of the EU (along with Canada, Australia, Russia) and China, ahead of its entry to the WTO already share the same law in relation to the international sale of goods. "ScIL" however has additional hurdles to overcome. *(a)* In order to enter into force and become applicable, it must go through the lengthy process of ratification and accession by States. *(b)* Implementation is frequently with various reservations. *(c)* Even where widely used, there are usually as many or more States that are exceptions. Success, that is by no means guaranteed, takes time and for every uniform law that is a success, there are several failures. + +Institutionally offered lex ("IoL") comprehensive general contract principles or contract law restatements that create an entire "legal" environment for contracting, has the advantage of being instantly available, becoming effective by choice of the contracting parties at the stroke of a pen. "IoL" is also more easily developed subsequently, in light of experience and need. Amongst the reasons for their use is the reduction of transaction cost in their provision of a set of default rules, applicable transnationally, that satisfy risk management criteria, being (or becoming) known, tried and tested, and of predictable effect.~{ "[P]arties often want to close contracts quickly, rather than hold up the transaction to negotiate solutions for every problem that might arise." Honnold (1992) on p. 13. }~ The most resoundingly successful "IoL" example to date has been the ICC's /{Uniform Customs and Practices for Documentary Credits}/, which is subscribed to as the default rules for the letters of credit offered by the vast majority of banks in the vast majority of countries of the world. Furthermore uniform principles allow unification on matters that at the present stage of national and regional pluralism could not be achieved at a treaty level. There are however, things that only "ScIL" can "engineer", (for example that which relates to priorities and third party obligations). + +*{PICC:}* The arrival of PICC in 1994 was particularly timely. Coinciding as it did with the successful attempt at reducing trade barriers represented by the /{World Trade Agreement,}/~{ http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/wta.1994/ }~ and the start of general Internet use,~{ See Amissah, /{On the Net and the Liberation of Information that wants to be Free}/ in ed. Jens Edvin A. Skoghoy /{Fra institutt til fakultet, Jubileumsskrift i anledning av at IRV ved Universitetet i Tromsø feirer 10 år og er blitt til Det juridiske fakultet}/ (Tromsø, 1996) pp. 59-76 or the same at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/on.the.net.and.information.22.02.1997.amissah/ }~ allowed for the exponential growth of electronic commerce, and further underscored the transnational tendency of commerce. The arrival of PICC was all the more opportune bearing in mind the years it takes to prepare such an instrument. Whilst there have been some objections, the PICC (and PECL) as contract law restatements cater to the needs of the business community that seeks a non-national or transnational law as the basis of its contracts, and provide a focal point for future development in this direction. Where in the past they would have been forced to rely on the ethereal and nebulous lex mercatoria, now the business community is provided with the opportunity to make use of such a "law" that is readily accessible, and has a clear and reasonably well defined content, that will become familiar and can be further developed as required. As such the PICC allow for more universal and uniform solutions. Their future success will depend on such factors as: *(a)* Suitability of their contract terms to the needs of the business community. *(b)* Their becoming widely known and understood. *(c)* Their predictability evidenced by a reasonable degree of consistency in the results of their application. *(d)* Recognition of their potential to reduce transaction costs. *(e)* Recognition of their being neutral as between different nations' interests (East, West; North, South). In the international sale of goods the PICC can be used in conjunction with more specific rules and regulations, including (on parties election~{ Also consider present and future possibilities for such use of PICC under CISG articles 8 and 9. }~) in sales the CISG to fill gaps in its provisions.~{ Drobnig, id. p. 228, comment that the CISG precludes recourse to general principles of contract law in Article 7. This does not refer to the situation where parties determine that the PICC should do so, see CISG Article 6. Or that in future the PICC will not be of importance under CISG Articles 8 and 9. }~ Provisions of the CISG would be given precedence over the PICC under the accepted principle of /{specialia generalibus derogant}/,~{ "Special principles have precedence over general ones." See Huet, Synthesis (1995) p. 277. }~ the mandatory content of the PICC excepted. The CISG has many situations that are not provided for at all, or which are provided for in less detail than the PICC. + +Work on PICC and PECL under the chairmanship of Professors Bonell and Ole Lando respectively, was wisely cross-pollinated (conceptually and through cross-membership of preparatory committees), as common foundations strengthen both sets of principles. A couple of points should be noted. Firstly, despite the maintained desirability of a transnational solution, this does not exclude the desirability of regional solutions, especially if there is choice, and the regional solutions are more comprehensive and easier to keep of uniform application. Secondly, the European Union has powers and influence (within the EU) unparalleled by UNIDROIT that can be utilised in future with regard to the PECL if the desirability of a common European contract solution is recognised and agreed upon by EU member States. As a further observation, there is, hypothetically at least, nothing to prevent there in future being developed an alternative extensive (competing) transnational contract /{lex}/ solution, though the weighty effort already in place as represented by PICC and the high investment in time and independent skilled legal minds, necessary to achieve this in a widely acceptable manner, makes such a development not very likely. It may however be the case that for electronic commerce, some other particularly suitable rules and principles will in time be developed in a similar vein, along the lines of an "IoL". + +1~ Contract /{Lex}/ design. Questions of commonweal + +The virtues of freedom of contract are acknowledged in this paper in that they allow the international business community to structure their business relationships to suit their requirements, and as such reflect the needs and working of the market economy. However, it is instructive also to explore the limits of the principles: freedom of contract, pacta sunt servanda and caveat subscriptor. These principles are based on free market arguments that parties best understand their interests, and that the contract they arrive at will be an optimum compromise between their competing interests. It not being for an outsider to regulate or evaluate what a party of their own free will and volition has gained from electing to contract on those terms. This approach to contract is adversarial, based on the conflicting wills of the parties, achieving a meeting of minds. It imposes no duty of good faith and fair dealing or of loyalty (including the disclosure of material facts) upon the contracting parties to one another, who are to protect their own interests. However, in international commerce, this demand can be more costly, and may have a negative and restrictive effect. Also, although claimed to be neutral in making no judgement as to the contents of a contract, this claim can be misleading. + +2~ The neutrality of contract law and information cost + +The information problem is a general one that needs to be recognised in its various forms where it arises and addressed where possible. + +Adherents to the caveat subscriptor model, point to the fact that parties have conflicting interests, and should look out for their own interests. However information presents particular problems which are exacerbated in international commerce.~{ The more straightforward cases of various types of misrepresentation apart. }~ As Michael Trebilcock put it: "Even the most committed proponents of free markets and freedom of contract recognise that certain information preconditions must be met for a given exchange to possess Pareto superior qualities."~{ Trebilcock, (1993) p. 102, followed by a quotation of Milton Friedman, from /{Capitalism and Freedom}/ (1962) p. 13. }~ Compared with domestic transactions, the contracting parties are less likely to possess information about each other or of what material facts there may be within the other party's knowledge, and will find it more difficult and costly to acquire. With resource inequalities, some parties will be in a much better position to determine and access what they need to know, the more so as the more information one already has, the less it costs to identify and to obtain any additional information that is required.~{ Trebilcock, (1993) p. 102, note quoted passage of Kim Lane Scheppele, /{Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency in the Common Law}/ (1988) p. 25. }~ The converse lot of the financially weaker party, makes their problem of high information costs (both actual and relative), near insurmountable. Ignorance may even become a rational choice, as the marginal cost of information remains higher than its marginal benefit. "This, in fact is the economic rationale for the failure to fully specify all contingencies in a contract."~{ See for example Nicholas Mercuro and Steven G. Medema, p. 58 }~ The argument is tied to transaction cost and further elucidates a general role played by underlying default rules and principles. It also extends further to the value of immutable principles that may help mitigate the problem in some circumstances. More general arguments are presented below. + +2~ Justifying mandatory loyalty principles + +Given the ability to create alternative solutions and even an independent /{lex}/ a question that arises is as to what limits if any should be imposed upon freedom of contract? What protective principles are required? Should protective principles be default rules that can be excluded? Should they be mandatory? Should mandatory law only exist at the level of municipal law? + +A kernel of mandatory protective principles with regard to loyalty may be justified, as beneficial, and even necessary for "IoL" to be acceptable in international commerce, in that they (on the balance) reflect the collective needs of the international business community. The present author is of the opinion that the duties of good faith and fair dealing and loyalty (or an acceptable equivalent) should be a necessary part of any attempt at the self-legislation or institutional legislation of any contract regime that is based on "rules and principles" (rather than a national legal order). If absent a requirement for them should be imposed by mandatory international law. Such protective provisions are to be found within the PICC and PECL.~{ Examples include: the deliberately excluded validity (Article 4); the provision on interest (Article 78); impediment (Article 79), and; what many believe to be the inadequate coverage of battle of forms (Article 19). }~ As regards PICC *(a)* The loyalty (and other protective) principles help bring about confidence and foster relations between parties. They provide an assurance in the international arena where parties are less likely to know each other and may have more difficulty in finding out about each other. *(b)* They better reflect the focus of the international business community on a business relationship from which both sides seek to gain. *(c)* They result in wider acceptability of the principles within both governments and the business community in the pluralistic international community. These protective principles may be regarded as enabling the PICC to better represent the needs of the commonweal. *(d)* Good faith and fair dealing~{ The commented PECL explain "'Good faith' means honesty and fairness in mind, which are subjective concepts... 'fair dealing' means observance of fairness in fact which is an objective test". }~ are fundamental underlying principles of international commercial relations. *(e)* Reliance only on the varied mandatory law protections of various States does not engender uniformity, which is also desirable with regard to that which can be counted upon as immutable. (Not that it is avoidable, given that mandatory State law remains overriding.) More generally, freedom of contract benefits from these protective principles that need immutable protection from contractual freedom to effectively serve their function. In seeking a transnational or non-national regime to govern contractual relations, one might suggest this to be the minimum price of freedom of contract that should be insisted upon by mandatory international law, as the limitation which hinders the misuse by one party of unlimited contractual freedom. They appear to be an essential basis for acceptability of the autonomous contract (non-national contract, based on agreed rules and principles/ "IoL"). As immutable principles they (hopefully and this is to be encouraged) become the default standard for the conduct of international business and as such may be looked upon as "common property." Unless immutable they suffer a fate somewhat analogous to that of "the tragedy of the commons."~{ Special problem regarding common/shared resources discussed by Garrett Hardin in Science (1968) 162 pp. 1243-1248. For short discussion and summary see Trebilcock, (1993) p. 13-15. }~ It should be recognised that argument over the loyalty principles should be of degree, as the concept must not be compromised, and needs to be protected (even if they come at the price of a degree of uncertainty), especially against particularly strong parties who are most likely to argue against their necessity. + +1~ Problems beyond uniform texts + +2~ In support of four objectives + +In the formulation of many international legal texts a pragmatic approach was taken. Formulating legislators from different States developed solutions based on suitable responses to factual example circumstances. This was done, successfully, with a view to avoiding arguments over alternative legal semantics and methodologies. However, having arrived at a common text, what then? Several issues are raised by asking the question, given that differences of interpretation can arise and become entrenched, by what means is it possible to foster a sustainable drive towards the uniform application of shared texts? Four principles appear to be desirable and should insofar as it is possible be pursued together: *(i)* the promotion of certainty and predictability; *(ii)* the promotion of uniformity of application; *(iii)* the protection of democratic ideals and ensuring of jurisprudential deliberation, and; *(iv)* the retention of efficiency. + +2~ Improving the predictability, certainty and uniform application of international and transnational law + +The key to the (efficient) achievement of greater certainty and predictability in an international and/or transnational commercial law regime is through the uniform application of shared texts that make up this regime. + +Obviously a distinction is to be made between transnational predictability in application, that is "uniform application", and predictability at a domestic level. Where the "uniform law" is applied by a municipal court of State "A" that looks first to its domestic writings, there may be a clear - predictable manner of application, even if not in the spirit of the "Convention". Another State "B" may apply the uniform law in a different way that is equally predictable, being perfectly consistent internally. This however defeats much of the purpose of the uniform law. + +A first step is for municipal courts to accept the /{UN Convention on the Law of Treaties 1969}/ (in force 1980) as a codification of existing public international law with regard to the interpretation of treaties.~{ This is the position in English law see Lord Diplock in Fothergill v Monarch Airlines [1981], A.C. 251, 282 or see http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/england.fothergill.v.monarch.airlines.hl.1980/2_diplock.html also Mann (London, 1983) at p. 379. The relevant articles on interpretation are Article 31 and 32. }~ A potentially fundamental step towards the achievement of uniform application is through the conscientious following of the admonitions of the interpretation clauses of modern conventions, rules and principles~{ Examples: The CISG, Article 7; The PICC, Article 1.6; PECL Article 1.106; /{UN Convention on the Carriage of Goods by Sea (The Hamburg Rules) 1978}/, Article 3; /{UN Convention on the Limitation Period in the International Sale of Goods 1974}/ and /{1978}/, Article 7; /{UN Model Law on Electronic Commerce 1996}/, Article 3; /{UNIDROIT Convention on International Factoring 1988}/, Article 4; /{UNIDROIT Convention on International Financial Leasing 1988}/, Article 6; also /{EC Convention on the Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations 1980}/, Article 18. }~ to take into account their international character and the need to promote uniformity in their application,~{ For an online collection of articles see the Pace CISG Database http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/cisg/text/e-text-07.html and amongst the many other articles do not miss Michael Van Alstine /{Dynamic Treaty Interpretation}/ 146 /{University of Pennsylvania Law Review}/ (1998) 687-793. }~ together with all this implies.~{ Such as the CISG provision on interpretation - Article 7. }~ However, the problems of uniform application, being embedded in differences of legal methodology, go beyond the agreement of a common text, and superficial glances at the works of other legal municipalities. These include questions related to sources of authority and technique applied in developing valid legal argument. Problems with sources include differences in authority and weight given to: *(a)* legislative history; *(b)* rulings domestic and international; *(c)* official and other commentaries; *(d)* scholarly writings. There should be an ongoing discussion of legal methodology to determine the methods best suited to addressing the problem of achieving greater certainty, predictability and uniformity in the application of shared international legal texts. With regard to information sharing, again the technology associated with the Net offers potential solutions. + +2~ The Net and information sharing through transnational databases + +The Net has been a godsend permitting the collection and dissemination of information on international law. With the best intentions to live up to admonitions to "to take into account their international character and the need to promote uniformity in their application" of "ScIL" and "IoL", a difficulty has been in knowing what has been written and decided elsewhere. In discussing solutions, Professor Honnold in /{"Uniform Words and Uniform Application" }/~{ Based on the CISG, and inputs from several professors from different legal jurisdictions, on the problems of achieving the uniform application of the text across different legal municipalities. J. Honnold, /{Uniform words and uniform applications. Uniform Words and Uniform Application: The 1980 Sales Convention and International Juridical Practice}/. /{Einheitliches Kaufrecht und nationales Obligationenrecht. Referate Diskussionen der Fachtagung}/. am 16/17-2-1987. Hrsg. von P. Schlechtriem. Baden-Baden, Nomos, 1987. p. 115-147, at p. 127-128. }~ suggests the following: "General Access to Case-Law and Bibliographic Material: The development of a homogenous body of law under the Convention depends on channels for the collection and sharing of judicial decisions and bibliographic material so that experience in each country can be evaluated and followed or rejected in other jurisdictions." Honnold then goes on to discuss "the need for an international clearing-house to collect and disseminate experience on the Convention" the need for which, he writes there is general agreement. He also discusses information-gathering methods through the use of national reporters. He poses the question "Will these channels be adequate? ..." + +The Net, offering inexpensive ways to build databases and to provide global access to information, provides an opportunity to address these problems that was not previously available. The Net extends the reach of the admonitions of the interpretation clauses. Providing the medium whereby if a decision or scholarly writing exists on a particular article or provision of a Convention, anywhere in the world, it will be readily available. Whether or not a national court or arbitration tribunal chooses to follow their example, they should be aware of it. Whatever a national court decides will also become internationally known, and will add to the body of experience on the Convention.~{ Nor is it particularly difficult to set into motion the placement of such information on the Net. With each interested participant publishing for their own interest, the Net could provide the key resources to be utilised in the harmonisation and reaching of common understandings of solutions and uniform application of legal texts. Works from all countries would be available. }~ + +Such a library would be of interest to the institution promulgating the text, governments, practitioners and researchers alike. It could place at your fingertips: *(a)* Convention texts. *(b)* Implementation details of contracting States. *(c)* The legislative history. *(d)* Decisions generated by the convention around the world (court and arbitral where possible). *(e)* The official and other commentaries. *(f)* Scholarly writings on the Convention. *(g)* Bibliographies of scholarly writings. *(h)* Monographs and textbooks. *(i)* Student study material collections. *(j)* Information on promotional activities, lectures - moots etc. *(k)* Discussion groups/ mailing groups and other more interactive features. + +With respect to the CISG such databases are already being maintained.~{ Primary amongst them Pace University, Institute of International Commercial Law, CISG Database http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/ which provides secondary support for the CISG, including providing a free on-line database of the legislative history, academic writings, and case-law on the CISG and additional material with regard to PICC and PECL insofar as they may supplement the CISG. Furthermore, the Pace CISG Project, networks with the several other existing Net based "autonomous" CISG projects. UNCITRAL under Secretary Gerold Herrmann, has its own database through which it distributes its case law materials collected from national reporters (CLOUT). }~ + +The database by ensuring the availability of international materials, used in conjunction with legal practice, helps to support the fore-named four principles. That of efficiency is enhanced especially if there is a single source that can be searched for the information required. + +The major obstacle that remains to being confident of this as the great and free panacea that it should be is the cost of translation of texts. + +2~ Judicial minimalism promotes democratic jurisprudential deliberation + +How to protect liberal democratic ideals and ensure international jurisprudential deliberation? Looking at judicial method, where court decisions are looked to for guidance, liberal democratic ideals and international jurisprudential deliberation are fostered by a judicial minimalist approach. + +For those of us with a common law background, and others who pay special attention to cases as you are invited to by interpretation clauses, there is scope for discussion as to the most appropriate approach to be taken with regard to judicial decisions. US judge Cass Sunstein suggestion of judicial minimalism~{ Cass R. Sunstein, /{One Case at a Time - Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court}/ (1999) }~ which despite its being developed in a different context~{ His analysis is developed based largely on "hard" constitutional cases of the U.S. }~ is attractive in that it is suited to a liberal democracy in ensuring democratic jurisprudential deliberation. It maintains discussion, debate, and allows for adjustment as appropriate and the gradual development of a common understanding of issues. Much as one may admire farsighted and far-reaching decisions and expositions, there is less chance with the minimalist approach of the (dogmatic) imposition of particular values. Whilst information sharing offers the possibility of the percolation of good ideas.~{ D. Stauffer, /{Introduction to Percolation Theory}/ (London, 1985). Percolation represents the sudden dramatic expansion of a common idea or ideas thought he reaching of a critical level/mass in the rapid recognition of their power and the making of further interconnections. An epidemic like infection of ideas. Not quite the way we are used to the progression of ideas within a conservative tradition. }~ Much as we admire the integrity of Dworkin's Hercules,~{ Ronald Dworkin, /{Laws Empire}/ (Harvard, 1986); /{Hard Cases in Harvard Law Review}/ (1988). }~ that he can consistently deliver single solutions suitable across such disparate socio-economic cultures is questionable. In examining the situation his own "integrity" would likely give him pause and prevent him from dictating that he can.~{ Hercules was created for U.S. Federal Cases and the community represented by the U.S. }~ This position is maintained as a general principle across international commercial law, despite private (as opposed to public) international commercial law not being an area of particularly "hard" cases of principle, and; despite private international commercial law being an area in which over a long history it has been demonstrated that lawyers are able to talk a common language to make themselves and their concepts (which are not dissimilar) understood by each other.~{ In 1966, a time when there were greater differences in the legal systems of States comprising the world economy Clive Schmitthoff was able to comment that: \\ "22. The similarity of the law of international trade transcends the division of the world between countries of free enterprise and countries of centrally planned economy, and between the legal families of the civil law of Roman inspiration and the common law of English tradition. As a Polish scholar observed, "the law of external trade of the countries of planned economy does not differ in its fundamental principles from the law of external trade of other countries, such as e.g., Austria or Switzerland. Consequently, international trade law specialists of all countries have found without difficulty that they speak a 'common language' \\ 23. The reason for this universal similarity of the law of international trade is that this branch of law is based on three fundamental propositions: first, that the parties are free, subject to limitations imposed by the national laws, to contract on whatever terms they are able to agree (principle of the autonomy of the parties' will); secondly, that once the parties have entered into a contract, that contract must be faithfully fulfilled (pacta sunt servanda) and only in very exceptional circumstances does the law excuse a party from performing his obligations, viz., if force majeure or frustration can be established; and, thirdly that arbitration is widely used in international trade for the settlement of disputes, and the awards of arbitration tribunals command far-reaching international recognition and are often capable of enforcement abroad." \\ /{Report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Progressive Development of the Law of International Trade}/ (1966). Report prepared for the UN by C. Schmitthoff. }~ + +2~ Non-binding interpretative councils and their co-ordinating guides can provide a focal point for the convergence of ideas - certainty, predictability, and efficiency + +A respected central guiding body can provide a guiding influence with respect to: *(a)* the uniform application of texts; *(b)* information management control. Given the growing mass of writing on common legal texts - academic and by way of decisions, we are faced with an information management problem.~{ Future if not current. }~ + +Supra-national interpretative councils have been called for previously~{ /{UNCITRAL Secretariat}/ (1992) p. 253. Proposed by David (France) at the second UNCITRAL Congress and on a later occasion by Farnsworth (USA). To date the political will backed by the financing for such an organ has not been forthcoming. In 1992 the UNCITRAL Secretariat concluded that "probably the time has not yet come". Suggested also by Louis Sono in /{Uniform laws require uniform interpretation: proposals for an international tribunal to interpret uniform legal texts}/ (1992) 25th UNCITRAL Congress, pp. 50-54. Drobnig, /{Observations in Uniform Law in Practice}/ at p. 306. }~ and have for various reasons been regarded impracticable to implement including problems associated with getting States to formally agree upon such a body with binding authority. + +However it is not necessary to go this route. In relation to "IoL" in such forms as the PICC and PECL it is possible for the promulgators themselves,~{ UNIDROIT and the EU }~ to update and clarify the accompanying commentary of the rules and principles, and to extend their work, through having councils with the necessary delegated powers. In relation to the CISG it is possible to do something similar of a non-binding nature, through the production of an updated commentary by an interpretive council (that could try to play the role of Hercules).~{ For references on interpretation of the CISG by a supranational committee of experts or council of "wise men" see Bonell, /{Proposal for the Establishment of a Permanent Editorial Board for the Vienna Sales Convention}/ in /{International Uniform Law in Practice/ Le droit uniforme international dans la practique [Acts and Proceedings of the 3rd Congress on Private Law held by the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law}/ (Rome, 1987)], (New York, 1988) pp. 241-244 }~ With respect, despite some expressed reservations, it is not true that it would have no more authority than a single author writing on the subject. A suitable non-binding interpretative council would provide a focal point for the convergence of ideas. Given the principle of ensuring democratic jurisprudential deliberation, that such a council would be advisory only (except perhaps on the contracting parties election) would be one of its more attractive features, as it would ensure continued debate and development. + +2~ Capacity Building + +_1 "... one should create awareness about the fact that an international contract or transaction is not naturally rooted in one particular domestic law, and that its international specifics are best catered for in a uniform law."~{ UNCITRAL Secretariat (1992) p. 255. }~ + +_{/{Capacity building}/}_ - raising awareness, providing education, creating a new generation of lawyers versed in a relatively new paradigm. Capacity building in international and transnational law, is something relevant institutions including arbitration institutions; the business community, and; far sighted States, should be interested in promoting. Finding means to transcend national boundaries is also to continue in the tradition of seeking the means to break down barriers to legal communication and understanding. However, while the business community seeks and requires greater uniformity in their business relations, there has paradoxically, at a national level, been a trend towards a nationalisation of contract law, and a regionalisation of business practice.~{ Erich Schanze, /{New Directions in Business Research}/ in Børge Dahl & Ruth Nielsen (ed.), /{New Directions in Contract Research}/ (Copenhagen, 1996) p. 62. }~ + +As an example, Pace University, Institute of International Commercial Law, plays a prominent role with regard to capacity building in relation to the CISG and PICC. Apart from the previously mentioned /{CISG Database}/, Pace University organise a large annual moot on the CISG~{ See http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/vis.html }~ this year involving students of 79 universities from 28 countries, and respected arbitrators from the word over. Within the moot the finding of solutions based on PICC where the CISG is silent, is encouraged. Pace University also organise an essay competition~{ See http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/cisg/text/essay.html }~ on the CISG and/or the PICC, which next year is to be expanded to include the PECL as a further option. + +1~ Marketing of transnational solutions + +Certain aspects of the Net/web may already be passé, but did you recognise it for what it was, or might become, when it arrived? + +As uniform law and transnational solutions are in competition with municipal approaches, to be successful a certain amount of marketing is necessary and may be effective. The approach should involve ensuring the concept of what they seek to achieve is firmly implanted in the business, legal and academic communities, and through engaging the business community and arbitration institutions, in capacity building and developing a new generation of lawyers. Feedback from the business community, and arbitrators will also prove invaluable. Whilst it is likely that the business community will immediately be able to recognise their potential advantages, it is less certain that they will find the support of the legal community. The normal reasons would be similar to those usually cited as being the primary constraints on its development "conservatism, routine, prejudice and inertia" René David. These are problems associated with gaining the initial foothold of acceptability, also associated with the lower part of an exponential growth curve. In addition the legal community may face tensions arising for various reasons including the possibility of an increase in world-wide competition. + +There are old well developed legal traditions with developed infrastructures and roots well established in several countries, that are dependable and known. The question arises why experiment with alternative non-extensively tested regimes? The required sophistication is developed in the centres providing legal services, and it may be argued that there is not the pressing need for unification or for transnational solutions, as the traditional way of contracting provides satisfactorily for the requirements of global commerce. The services required will continue to be easily and readily available from existing centres of skill. English law, to take an example is for various reasons (including perhaps language, familiarity of use, reputation and widespread Commonwealth~{ http://www.thecommonwealth.org/ }~ relations) the premier choice for the law governing international commercial transactions, and is likely to be for the foreseeable future. Utilising the Commonwealth as an example, what the "transnational" law (e.g. CISG) experience illustrates however, is that for States there may be greater advantage to be gained from participation in a horizontally shared area of commercial law, than from retaining a traditional vertically integrated commercial law system, based largely for example on the English legal system. + +Borrowing a term from the information technology sector, it is essential to guard against FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) with regard to the viability of new and/or competing transnational solutions, that may be spread by their detractors, and promptly, in the manner required by the free market, address any real problems that are discerned. + +1~ Tools in future development + +An attempt should be made by the legal profession to be more contemporary and to keep up to date with developments in technology and the sciences, and to adopt effective tools where suitable to achieve their goals. Technology one way or another is likely to encroach further upon law and the way we design it. + +Science works across cultures and is aspired to by most nations as being responsible for the phenomenal success of technology (both are similarly associated with globalisation). Science is extending its scope to (more confidently) tackle complex systems. It would not hurt to be more familiar with relevant scientific concepts and terminology. Certainly lawyers across the globe, myself included, would also benefit much in their conceptual reasoning from an early dose of the philosophy of science,~{ An excellent approachable introduction is provided by A.F. Chalmers /{What is this thing called Science?}/ (1978, Third Edition 1999). }~ what better than Karl Popper on scientific discovery and the role of "falsification" and value of predictive probity.~{ Karl R. Popper /{The Logic of Scientific Discovery}/ (1959). }~ And certainly Thomas Kuhn on scientific advancement and "paradigm shifts"~{ Thomas S. Kuhn /{The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}/ (1962, 3rd Edition 1976). }~ has its place. Having mentioned Karl Popper, it would not be unwise to go further (outside the realms of philosophy of science) to study his defence of democracy in both volumes of /{Open Society and Its Enemies}/.~{ Karl R. Popper /{The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 1, Plato}/ (1945) and /{The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 2, Hegel & Marx}/. (1945) }~ + +Less ambitiously there are several tools not traditionally in the lawyers set, that may assist in transnational infrastructure modelling. These include further exploration and development of the potential of tools, including to suggest a few by way of example: flow charts, fuzzy thinking, "intelligent" electronic agents and Net collaborations. + +In the early 1990's I was introduced to a quantity surveyor and engineer who had reduced the /{FIDIC Red Book}/~{ FIDIC is the International Federation of Consulting Engineers http://www.fidic.com/ }~ to over a hundred pages of intricate flow charts (decision trees), printed horizontally on roughly A4 sized sheets. He was employed by a Norwegian construction firm, who insisted that based on past experience, they knew that he could, using his charts, consistently arrive at answers to their questions in a day, that law firms took weeks to produce. Flow charts can be used to show interrelationships and dependencies, in order to navigate the implications of a set of rules more quickly. They may also be used more pro-actively (and /{ex ante}/ rather than /{ex post}/) in formulating texts, to avoid unnecessary complexity and to arrive at more practical, efficient and elegant solutions. + +Explore such concepts as "fuzzy thinking"~{ Concept originally developed by Lotfi Zadeh /{Fuzzy Sets}/ Information Control 8 (1965) pp 338-353. For introductions see Daniel McNeill and Paul Freiberger /{Fuzzy Logic: The Revolutionary Computer Technology that is Changing our World}/ (1993); Bart Kosko Fuzzy Thinking (1993); Earl Cox The Fuzzy Systems Handbook (New York, 2nd ed. 1999). Perhaps to the uninitiated an unfortunate choice of name, as fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory is more precise than classical logic and set theory, which comprise a subset of that which is fuzzy (representing those instances where membership is 0% or 100%). The statement is not entirely without controversy, in suggesting the possibility that classical thinking may be subsumed within the realms of an unfamiliar conceptual paradigm, that is to take hold of the future thinking. In the engineering field much pioneer work on fuzzy rule based systems was done at Queen Mary College by Ebrahim Mamdani in the early and mid-1970s. Time will tell. }~ including fuzzy logic, fuzzy set theory, and fuzzy systems modelling, of which classical logic and set theory are subsets. Both by way of analogy and as a tool fuzzy concepts are better at coping with complexity and map more closely to judicial thinking and argument in the application of principles and rules. Fuzzy theory provides a method for analysing and modelling principle and rule based systems, even where conflicting principles may apply permitting /{inter alia}/ working with competing principles and the contextual assignment of precision to terms such as "reasonableness". Fuzzy concepts should be explored in expert systems, and in future law. Problems of scaling associated with multiple decision trees do not prevent useful applications, and structured solutions. The analysis assists in discerning what lawyers are involved with. + +"Intelligent" electronic agents can be expected both to gather information on behalf of the business community and lawyers. In future electronic agents are likely to be employed to identify and bring to the attention of their principals "invitations to treat" or offers worthy of further investigation. In some cases they will be developed and relied upon as electronic legal agents, operating under a programmed mandate and vested with the authority to enter certain contracts on behalf of their principals. Such mandate would include choice of law upon which to contract, and the scenario could be assisted by transnational contract solutions (and catered for in the design of "future law"). + +Another area of technology helping solve legal problems relates to various types of global register and transaction centres. Amongst them property registers being an obvious example, including patents and moveable property. Bolero providing an example of how electronic documents can be centrally brokered on behalf of trading parties. + +Primary law should be available on the Net free, and this applies also to "IoL" and the static material required for their interpretation. This should be the policy adopted by all institutions involved in contributing to the transnational legal infrastructure. Where possible larger databases also should be developed and shared. The Net has reduced the cost of dissemination of material, to a level infinitesimally lower than before. Universities now can and should play a more active role. Suitable funding arrangements should be explored that do not result in proprietary systems or the forwarding of specific lobby interests. In hard-copy to promote uniform standards, institutions should also strive to have their materials available at a reasonable price. Many appear to be unacceptably expensive given the need for their promotion and capacity building, amongst students, and across diverse States. + +Follow the open standards and community standards debate in relation to the development of technology standards and technology infrastructure tools - including operating systems,~{ See for example /{Open Sources : Voices from the Open Source Revolution - The Open Source Story}/ http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html }~ to discover what if anything it might suggest for the future development of law standards. + +1~ As an aside, a word of caution + +I end with an arguably gratuitous observation, by way of a reminder and general warning. Gratuitous in the context of this paper because the areas focused upon~{ Sale of goods (CISG), contract rules and principles (PICC), related Arbitration, and the promotion of certain egalitarian ideals. }~ were somewhat deliberately selected to fall outside the more contentious and "politically" problematic areas related to globalisation, economics, technology, law and politics.~{ It is not as evident in the area of private international commercial contract law the chosen focus for this paper, but appears repeatedly in relation to other areas and issues arising out of the economics, technology, law nexus. }~ Gratuitous also because there will be no attempt to concretise or exemplify the possibility suggested. + +Fortunately, we are not (necessarily) talking about a zero sum game, however, it is necessary to be able to distinguish and recognise that which may harm. International commerce/trade is competitive, and by its nature not benign, even if it results in an overall improvement in the economic lot of the peoples of our planet. "Neutral tests" such as Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, do not require that your interests are benefited one iota, just that whilst those of others are improved, yours are not made worse. If the measure adopted is overall benefit, it is even more possible that an overall gain may result where your interests are adversely affected. The more so if you have little, and those that gain, gain much. Furthermore such "tests" are based on assumptions, which at best are approximations of reality (e.g. that of zero transaction costs, where in fact not only are they not, but they are frequently proportionately higher for the economically weak). At worst they may be manipulated /{ex ante}/ with knowledge of their implications (e.g. engineering to ensure actual or relative~{ Low fixed costs have a "regressive" effect }~ asymmetrical transaction cost). It is important to be careful in a wide range of circumstances related to various aspects of the modelling of the infrastructure for international commerce that have an impact on the allocation of rights and obligations, and especially the allocation of resources, including various types of intellectual property rights. Ask what is the objective and justification for the protection? How well is the objective met? Are there other consequential effects? Are there other objectives that are worthy of protection? Could the stated objective(s) be achieved in a better way? + +Within a system are those who benefit from the way it has been, that may oppose change as resulting in loss to them or uncertainty of their continued privilege. For a stable system to initially arise that favours such a Select Set, does not require the conscious manipulation of conditions by the Select Set. Rather it requires that from the system (set) in place the Select Set emerges as beneficiary. Subsequently the Select Set having become established as favoured and empowered by their status as beneficiary, will seek to do what it can, to influence circumstances to ensure their continued beneficial status. That is, to keep the system operating to their advantage (or tune it to work even better towards this end), usually with little regard to the conditions resulting to other members of the system. Often this will be a question of degree, and the original purpose, or an alternative "neutral" argument, is likely to be used to justify the arrangement. The objective from the perspective of the Select Set is fixed; the means at their disposal may vary. Complexity is not required for such situations to arise, but having done so subsequent plays by the Select Set tend towards complexity. Furthermore, moves in the interest of the Select Set are more easily obscured/disguised in a complex system. Limited access to information and knowledge are devastating handicaps without which change cannot be contemplated let alone negotiated. Frequently, having information and knowledge are not enough. The protection of self-interest is an endemic part of our system, with the system repeatedly being co-opted to the purposes of those that are able to manipulate it. Membership over time is not static, for example, yesterday's "copycat nations" are today's innovators, and keen to protect their intellectual property. Which also illustrates the point that what it may take to set success in motion, may not be the same as that which is preferred to sustain it. Whether these observations appear to be self-evident and/or abstract and out of place with regard to this paper, they have far reaching implications repeatedly observable within the law, technology, and commerce (politics) nexus. Even if not arising much in the context of the selected material for this paper, their mention is justified by way of warning. Suitable examples would easily illustrate how politics arises inescapably as an emergent property from the nexus of commerce, technology, and law.~{ In such circumstances either economics or law on their own would be sufficient to result in politics arising as an emergent property. }~ + +%% SiSU markup sample Notes: +% SiSU http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu +% SiSU markup for 0.16 and later: +% 0.20.4 header 0~links +% 0.22 may drop image dimensions (rmagick) +% 0.23 utf-8 ß +% 0.38 or later, may use alternative notation for headers, e.g. @title: (instead of 0~title) +% 0.38 document structure alternative markup, experimental (rad) A,B,C,1,2,3 maps to 1,2,3,4,5,6 +% 0.42 * type endnotes, used e.g. in relation to author +% 0.51 skins changed, markup unchanged +% 0.52 declared document type identifier at start of text +% Output: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/autonomy_markup0/sisu_manifest.html +% SiSU 0.38 experimental (alternative structure) markup used for this document +% (compare 0.36 standard markup in sisu-examples autonomy_markup4.sst) diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/content.cory_doctorow.sst b/data/samples/current/en/content.cory_doctorow.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..19e53a9 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/content.cory_doctorow.sst @@ -0,0 +1,2333 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: CONTENT + :subtitle: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future + +@creator: + :author: Doctorow, Cory |email doctorow@craphound.com + +@date: + :published: 2008-09 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Cory Doctorow, 2008. + :license: This entire work (with the exception of the introduction by John Perry Barlow) is copyright 2008 by Cory Doctorow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. \\ The introduction is copyright 2008 by John Perry Barlow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;book:discourse:copyright|content|creative commons|intellectual property;copyright;content;creative commons;intellectual property:copyright;intellectual property:copyright:creative commons;book:subject:culture|copyright|society|content|social aspects of technology;culture;society;technology:social aspects + :subject: Selected Essays + +@identifier: + :oclc: 268676051 + :isbn: 9781892391810 + +@links: + { CONTENT }http://craphound.com/content/ + { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow + { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Content-Selected-Technology-Creativity-Copyright/dp/1892391813 + { @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Content/Cory-Doctorow/e/9781892391810/?itm=1&USRI=content+cory+doctorow + +@make: + :num_top: 1 + :breaks: break=1 + :emphasis: italics + :home_button_text: {CONTENT}http://craphound.com/content; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com + :footer: {CONTENT}http://craphound.com/content; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com + +:A~ @title @author + +--~# + +1~cc- A word about this downloadable file: + +I've been releasing my books online for free since my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, came out in 2003, and with every one of those books, I've included a little essay explaining why I do this sort of thing. + +I was tempted to write another one of these essays for this collection, but then it hit me: *{this is a collection of essays that are largely concerned with exactly this subject}*. + +You see, I don't just write essays about copyright to serve as forewards to my books: I write them for magazine,s, newspapers, and websites -- I write speeches on the subject for audiences of every description and in every nation. And finally, here, I've collected my favorites, the closest I've ever come to a Comprehensive Doctorow Manifesto. + +So I'm going to skip the foreword this time around: the *{whole book}* is my explanation for why I'm giving it away for free online. + +If you like this book and you want to thank me, here's what I'd ask you to do, in order of preference: + +_* Buy a copy: http://craphound.com/content/buy + +_* Donate a copy to a school or library: http://craphound.com/content/donate + +_* Send the ebook to five friends and tell them why you liked it + +_* Convert the ebook to a new file-format (see the download page for more) + +Now, on to the book! + +% $$$$ + +% Copyright notice: + +% This entire work (with the exception of the introduction by John Perry Barlow) is copyright 2008 by Cory Doctorow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. + +% The introduction is copyright 2008 by John Perry Barlow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. + +% $$$$ + +1~ha- Publication history and acknowledgments: + +Introductio: 2008, John Perry Barlow + +Microsoft Research DRM Talk (This talk was originally given to Microsoft's Research Group and other interested parties from within the company at their Redmond offices on June 17, 2004.) + +The DRM Sausage Factory (Originally published as "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How DRM Becomes Law," InformationWeek, July 11, 2007) + +Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway (Originally published as "How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM Are Beating Up The American Economy," InformationWeek, June 11, 2007) + +Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? (Originally published in InformationWeek, August 14, 2007) + +You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen (Originally published in Locus Magazine, March 2007) + +How Do You Protect Artists? (Originally published in The Guardian as "Online censorship hurts us all," Tuesday, Oct 2, 2007) + +It's the Information Economy, Stupid (Originally published in The Guardian as "Free data sharing is here to stay," September 18, 2007) + +Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever (Originally published in The Guardian, December 11, 2007) + +What's the Most Important Right Creators Have? (Originally published as "How Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression," InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) + +Giving it Away (Originally published on Forbes.com, December 2006) + +Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) + +How Copyright Broke (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) + +In Praise of Fanfic (Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) + +Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia (Self-published, 26 August 2001) + +Amish for QWERTY (Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/07/09/amish_qwerty.html) + +Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books (Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) + +Free(konomic) E-books (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) + +The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007) + +When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil (Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) + +Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors (Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) + +Warhol is Turning in His Grave (Originally published in The Guardian, November 13, 2007) + +The Future of Ignoring Things (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) + +Facebook's Faceplant (Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook," in InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) + +The Future of Internet Immune Systems (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, 2007) + +All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) + +READ CAREFULLY (Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) + +World of Democracycraft (Originally published as "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships," InformationWeek, April 16, 2007) + +Snitchtown (Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) + +$$$$ + +1~dedication- Dedication: + +For the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore + +For the staff -- past and present -- of the Electronic Frontier Foundation + +For the supporters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation + +--+# + +$$$$ + +% 1~ Table of Contents: + +% 1 Introduction by John Perry Barlow + +% 2 Microsoft Research DRM talk + +% 3 The DRM Sausage Factory + +% 4 Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and +% Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway + +% 5 Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? + +% 6 You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen + +% 7 How Do You Protect Artists? + +% 8 It's the Information Economy, Stupid + +% 9 Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever + +% 10 What's the Most Important Right Creators Have? + +% 11 Giving it Away + +% 12 Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet + +% 13 How Copyright Broke + +% 14 In Praise of Fanfic + +% 15 Metacrap: Putting the Torch to Seven Straw-Men of the Meta-Utopia + +% 16 Amish for QWERTY + +% 17 Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books + +% 18 Free(konomic) E-books + +% 19 The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights + +% 20 When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil + +% 21 Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors + +% 22 Warhol is Turning in His Grave + +% 23 The Future of Ignoring Things + +% 24 Facebook's Faceplant + +% 25 The Future of Internet Immune Systems + +% 26 All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites + +% 27 READ CAREFULLY + +% 28 World of Democracycraft + +% 29 Snitchtown + +$$$$ + +1~ Introduction by John Perry Barlow + +San Francisco - Seattle - Vancouver - San Francisco + +Tuesday, April 1, 2008 + +"Content," huh? Ha! Where's the container? + +Perhaps these words appear to you on the pages of a book, a physical object that might be said to have "contained" the thoughts of my friend and co-conspirator Cory Doctorow as they were transported in boxes and trucks all the way from his marvelous mind into yours. If that is so, I will concede that you might be encountering "content". (Actually, if that's the case, I'm delighted on Cory's behalf, since that means that you have also paid him for these thoughts. We still know how to pay creators directly for the works they embed in stuff.) + +But the chances are excellent that you're reading these liquid words as bit-states of light on a computer screen, having taken advantage of his willingness to let you have them in that form for free. In such an instance, what "contains" them? Your hard disk? His? The Internet and all the servers and routers in whose caches the ghosts of their passage might still remain? Your mind? Cory's? + +To me, it doesn't matter. Even if you're reading this from a book, I'm still not convinced that what you have in your hands is its container, or that, even if we agreed on that point, that a little ink in the shape of, say, the visual pattern you're trained to interpret as meaning "a little ink" in whatever font the publisher chooses, is not, as Magritte would remind us, the same thing as a little ink, even though it is. + +Meaning is the issue. If you couldn't read English, this whole book would obviously contain nothing as far as you were concerned. Given that Cory is really cool and interesting, you might be motivated to learn English so that you could read this book, but even then it wouldn't be a container so much as a conduit. + +The real "container" would be process of thought that began when I compressed my notion of what is meant by the word "ink" - which, when it comes to the substances that can be used to make marks on paper, is rather more variable than you might think - and would kind of end when you decompressed it in your own mind as whatever you think it is. + +I know this is getting a bit discursive, but I do have a point. Let me just make it so we can move on. + +I believe, as I've stated before, that information is simultaneously a relationship, an action, and an area of shared mind. What it isn't is a noun. + +Information is not a thing. It isn't an object. It isn't something that, when you sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your possession. It doesn't have a market value that can be objectively determined. It is not, for example, much like a 2004 Ducati ST4S motorcycle, for which I'm presently in the market, and which seems - despite variabilities based on, I must admit, informationally- based conditions like mileage and whether it's been dropped - to have a value that is pretty consistent among the specimens I can find for a sale on the Web. + +Such economic clarity could not be established for anything "in" this book, which you either obtained for free or for whatever price the publisher eventually puts on it. If it's a book you're reading from, then presumably Cory will get paid some percentage of whatever you, or the person who gave it to you, paid for it. + +But I won't. I'm not getting paid to write this forward, neither in royalties nor upfront. I am, however, getting some intangible value, as one generally does whenever he does a favor for a friend. For me, the value being retrieved from going to the trouble of writing these words is not so different from the value you retrieve from reading them. We are both mining a deeply intangible "good," which lies in interacting with The Mind of Cory Doctorow. I mention this because it demonstrates the immeasurable role of relationship as the driving force in an information economy. + +But neither am I creating content at the moment nor are you "consuming" it (since, unlike a hamburger, these words will remain after you're done with them, and, also unlike a hamburger you won't subsequently, wellŠ never mind.) Unlike real content, like the stuff in a shipping container, these words have neither grams nor liters by which one might measure their value. Unlike gasoline, ten bucks worth of this stuff will get some people a lot further than others, depending on their interest and my eloquence, neither of which can be quantified. + +It's this simple: the new meaning of the word "content," is plain wrong. In fact, it is intentionally wrong. It's a usage that only arose when the institutions that had fattened on their ability to bottle and distribute the genius of human expression began to realize that their containers were melting away, along with their reason to be in business. They started calling it content at exactly the time it ceased to be. Previously they had sold books and records and films, all nouns to be sure. They didn't know what to call the mysterious ghosts of thought that were attached to them. + +Thus, when not applied to something you can put in a bucket (of whatever size), "content" actually represents a plot to make you think that meaning is a thing. It isn't. The only reason they want you to think that it is because they know how to own things, how to give them a value based on weight or quantity, and, more to the point, how to make them artificially scarce in order to increase their value. + +That, and the fact that after a good 25 years of advance warning, they still haven't done much about the Economy of Ideas besides trying to stop it from happening. + +As I get older, I become less and less interested in saying "I told you so." But in this case, I find it hard to resist. Back during the Internet equivalent of the Pleistocene. I wrote a piece for an ancestor of Wired magazine called Wired magazine that was titled, variously, "The Economy of Ideas" or "Wine without Bottles." In this essay, I argued that it would be deucedly difficult to continue to apply the Adam Smithian economic principles regarding the relationship between scarcity and value to any products that could be reproduced and distributed infinitely at zero cost. + +I proposed, moreover, that, to the extent that anything might be scarce in such an economy, it would be attention, and that invisibility would be a bad strategy for increasing attention. That, in other words, familiarity might convey more value to information that scarcity would. + +I did my best to tell the folks in what is now called "The Content Industry" - the institutions that once arose for the useful purpose of conveying creative expression from one mind to many - that this would be a good time to change their economic model. I proposed that copyright had worked largely because it had been difficult, as a practical matter, to make a book or a record or motion picture film spool. + +It was my theory that as soon as all human expression could be reduced into ones and zeros, people would begin to realize what this "stuff" really was and come up with an economic paradigm for rewarding its sources that didn't seem as futile as claiming to own the wind. Organizations would adapt. The law would change. The notion of "intellectual property," itself only about 35 years old, would be chucked immediately onto the magnificent ash-heap of Civilization's idiotic experiments. + +Of course, as we now know, I was wrong. Really wrong. + +As is my almost pathological inclination, I extended them too much credit. I imputed to institutions the same capacities for adaptability and recognition of the obvious that I assume for humans. But institutions, having the legal system a fundamental part of their genetic code, are not so readily ductile. + +This is particularly true in America, where some combination of certainty and control is the actual "deity" before whose altar we worship, and where we have a regular practice of spawning large and inhuman collective organisms that are a kind of meta-parasite. These critters - let's call them publicly-held corporations - may be made out of humans, but they are not human. Given human folly, that characteristic might be semi-ok if they were actually as cold-bloodedly expedient as I once fancied them - yielding only to the will of the markets and the raw self-interest of their shareholders. But no. They are also symbiotically subject to the "religious beliefs" of those humans who feed in their upper elevations. + +Unfortunately, the guys (and they mostly are guys) who've been running The Content Industry since it started to die share something like a doctrinal fundamentalism that has led them to such beliefs as the conviction that there's no difference between listening to a song and shop-lifting a toaster. + +Moreover, they dwell in such a sublime state of denial that they think they are stewarding the creative process as it arises in the creative humans they exploit savagely - knowing, as they do, that a creative human would rather be heard than paid - and that they, a bunch of sated old scoundrels nearing retirement would be able to find technological means for wrapping "containers" around "their" "content" that the adolescent electronic Hezbollah they've inspired by suing their own customers will neither be smart nor motivated enough to shred whatever pathetic digital bottles their lackeys design. + +And so it has been for the last 13 years. The companies that claim the ability to regulate humanity's Right to Know have been tireless in their endeavors to prevent the inevitable. The won most of the legislative battles in the U.S. and abroad, having purchased all the government money could buy. They even won most of the contests in court. They created digital rights management software schemes that behaved rather like computer viruses. + +Indeed, they did about everything they could short of seriously examining the actual economics of the situation - it has never been proven to me that illegal downloads are more like shoplifted goods than viral marketing - or trying to come up with a business model that the market might embrace. + +Had it been left to the stewardship of the usual suspects, there would scarcely be a word or a note online that you didn't have to pay to experience. There would be increasingly little free speech or any consequence, since free speech is not something anyone can own. + +Fortunately there were countervailing forces of all sorts, beginning with the wise folks who designed the Internet in the first place. Then there was something called the Electronic Frontier Foundation which I co-founded, along with Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore, back in 1990. Dedicated to the free exchange of useful information in cyberspace, it seemed at times that I had been right in suggesting then that practically every institution of the Industrial Period would try to crush, or at least own, the Internet. That's a lot of lawyers to have stacked against your cause. + +But we had Cory Doctorow. + +Had nature not provided us with a Cory Doctorow when we needed one, it would have been necessary for us to invent a time machine and go into the future to fetch another like him. That would be about the only place I can imagine finding such a creature. Cory, as you will learn from his various rants "contained" herein was perfectly suited to the task of subduing the dinosaurs of content. + +He's a little like the guerilla plumber Tuttle in the movie Brazil. Armed with a utility belt of improbable gizmos, a wildly over-clocked mind, a keyboard he uses like a verbal machine gun, and, best of all, a dark sense of humor, he'd go forth against massive industrial forces and return grinning, if a little beat up. + +Indeed, many of the essays collected under this dubious title are not only memoirs of his various campaigns but are themselves the very weapons he used in them. Fortunately, he has spared you some of the more sophisticated utilities he employed. He is not battering you with the nerdy technolingo he commands when stacked up against various minutiacrats, but I assure you that he can speak geek with people who, unlike Cory, think they're being pretty social when they're staring at the other person's shoes. + +This was a necessary ability. One of the problems that EFF has to contend with is that even though most of our yet-unborn constituency would agree heartily with our central mission - giving everybody everywhere the right to both address and hear everybody everywhere else - the decisions that will determine the eventual viability of that right are being made now and generally in gatherings invisible to the general public, using terminology, whether technical or legal, that would be the verbal equivalent of chloroform to anyone not conversant with such arcana. + +I've often repeated my belief that the first responsibility of a human being is to be a better ancestor. Thus, it seems fitting that the appearance of this book, which details much of Cory's time with the EFF, coincides with the appearance of his first-born child, about whom he is a shameless sentimental gusher. + +I would like to think that by the time this newest prodigy, Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow - you see what I mean about paternal enthusiasm - has reached Cory's age of truly advanced adolescence, the world will have recognized that there are better ways to regulate the economy of mind than pretending that its products are something like pig iron. But even if it hasn't, I am certain that the global human discourse will be less encumbered than it would have been had not Cory Doctorow blessed our current little chunk of space/time with his fierce endeavors. + +And whatever it is that might be "contained" in the following. + +$$$$ + +1~ Microsoft Research DRM Talk + +(This talk was originally given to Microsoft's Research Group and other interested parties from within the company at their Redmond offices on June 17, 2004.) ~# + +Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr! + +I'm here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM. + +I lead a double life: I'm also a science fiction writer. That means I've got a dog in this fight, because I've been dreaming of making my living from writing since I was 12 years old. Admittedly, my IP-based biz isn't as big as yours, but I guarantee you that it's every bit as important to me as yours is to you. + +Here's what I'm here to convince you of: + +1. That DRM systems don't work + +2. That DRM systems are bad for society + +3. That DRM systems are bad for business + +4. That DRM systems are bad for artists + +5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT + +It's a big brief, this talk. Microsoft has sunk a lot of capital into DRM systems, and spent a lot of time sending folks like Martha and Brian and Peter around to various smoke-filled rooms to make sure that Microsoft DRM finds a hospitable home in the future world. Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver's compartment. At best I think that Microsoft might convert some of that momentum on DRM into angular momentum, and in so doing, save all our asses. + +Let's dive into it. + +-- + +2~x- 1. DRM systems don't work + +This bit breaks down into two parts: + +1. A quick refresher course in crypto theory + +2. Applying that to DRM + +Cryptography -- secret writing -- is the practice of keeping secrets. It involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an attacker (actually, there can be more attackers, senders and recipients, but let's keep this simple). We usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol. + +Let's say we're in the days of the Caesar, the Gallic War. You need to send messages back and forth to your generals, and you'd prefer that the enemy doesn't get hold of them. You can rely on the idea that anyone who intercepts your message is probably illiterate, but that's a tough bet to stake your empire on. You can put your messages into the hands of reliable messengers who'll chew them up and swallow them if captured -- but that doesn't help you if Brad Pitt and his men in skirts skewer him with an arrow before he knows what's hit him. + +So you encipher your message with something like ROT-13, where every character is rotated halfway through the alphabet. They used to do this with non-worksafe material on Usenet, back when anyone on Usenet cared about work-safe-ness -- A would become N, B is O, C is P, and so forth. To decipher, you just add 13 more, so N goes to A, O to B yadda yadda. + +Well, this is pretty lame: as soon as anyone figures out your algorithm, your secret is g0nez0red. + +So if you're Caesar, you spend a lot of time worrying about keeping the existence of your messengers and their payloads secret. Get that? You're Augustus and you need to send a message to Brad without Caceous (a word I'm reliably informed means "cheese-like, or pertaining to cheese") getting his hands on it. You give the message to Diatomaceous, the fleetest runner in the empire, and you encipher it with ROT-13 and send him out of the garrison in the pitchest hour of the night, making sure no one knows that you've sent it out. Caceous has spies everywhere, in the garrison and staked out on the road, and if one of them puts an arrow through Diatomaceous, they'll have their hands on the message, and then if they figure out the cipher, you're b0rked. So the existence of the message is a secret. The cipher is a secret. The ciphertext is a secret. That's a lot of secrets, and the more secrets you've got, the less secure you are, especially if any of those secrets are shared. Shared secrets aren't really all that secret any longer. + +Time passes, stuff happens, and then Tesla invents the radio and Marconi takes credit for it. This is both good news and bad news for crypto: on the one hand, your messages can get to anywhere with a receiver and an antenna, which is great for the brave fifth columnists working behind the enemy lines. On the other hand, anyone with an antenna can listen in on the message, which means that it's no longer practical to keep the existence of the message a secret. Any time Adolf sends a message to Berlin, he can assume Churchill overhears it. + +Which is OK, because now we have computers -- big, bulky primitive mechanical computers, but computers still. Computers are machines for rearranging numbers, and so scientists on both sides engage in a fiendish competition to invent the most cleverest method they can for rearranging numerically represented text so that the other side can't unscramble it. The existence of the message isn't a secret anymore, but the cipher is. + +But this is still too many secrets. If Bobby intercepts one of Adolf's Enigma machines, he can give Churchill all kinds of intelligence. I mean, this was good news for Churchill and us, but bad news for Adolf. And at the end of the day, it's bad news for anyone who wants to keep a secret. + +Enter keys: a cipher that uses a key is still more secure. Even if the cipher is disclosed, even if the ciphertext is intercepted, without the key (or a break), the message is secret. Post-war, this is doubly important as we begin to realize what I think of as Schneier's Law: "any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it." This means that the only experimental methodology for discovering if you've made mistakes in your cipher is to tell all the smart people you can about it and ask them to think of ways to break it. Without this critical step, you'll eventually end up living in a fool's paradise, where your attacker has broken your cipher ages ago and is quietly decrypting all her intercepts of your messages, snickering at you. + +Best of all, there's only one secret: the key. And with dual-key crypto it becomes a lot easier for Alice and Bob to keep their keys secret from Carol, even if they've never met. So long as Alice and Bob can keep their keys secret, they can assume that Carol won't gain access to their cleartext messages, even though she has access to the cipher and the ciphertext. Conveniently enough, the keys are the shortest and simplest of the secrets, too: hence even easier to keep away from Carol. Hooray for Bob and Alice. + +Now, let's apply this to DRM. + +In DRM, the attacker is *{also the recipient}*. It's not Alice and Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. Alice sells Bob a DVD. She sells Bob a DVD player. The DVD has a movie on it -- say, Pirates of the Caribbean -- and it's enciphered with an algorithm called CSS -- Content Scrambling System. The DVD player has a CSS un-scrambler. + +Now, let's take stock of what's a secret here: the cipher is well-known. The ciphertext is most assuredly in enemy hands, arrr. So what? As long as the key is secret from the attacker, we're golden. + +But there's the rub. Alice wants Bob to buy Pirates of the Caribbean from her. Bob will only buy Pirates of the Caribbean if he can descramble the CSS-encrypted VOB -- video object -- on his DVD player. Otherwise, the disc is only useful to Bob as a drinks-coaster. So Alice has to provide Bob -- the attacker -- with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext. + +Hilarity ensues. + +DRM systems are usually broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely, months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid. It's not because the people who break them are smart. It's not because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day, all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point, the secret isn't a secret anymore. + +-- + +2~x- 2. DRM systems are bad for society + +Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But DRM doesn't have to be proof against smart attackers, only average individuals! It's like a speedbump!" + +Put your hand down. + +This is a fallacy for two reasons: one technical, and one social. They're both bad for society, though. + +Here's the technical reason: I don't need to be a cracker to break your DRM. I only need to know how to search Google, or Kazaa, or any of the other general-purpose search tools for the cleartext that someone smarter than me has extracted. + +Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But NGSCB can solve this problem: we'll lock the secrets up on the logic board and goop it all up with epoxy." + +Put your hand down. + +Raise your hand if you're a co-author of the Darknet paper. + +Everyone in the first group, meet the co-authors of the Darknet paper. This is a paper that says, among other things, that DRM will fail for this very reason. Put your hands down, guys. + +Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM vendors tell us that their technology is meant to be proof against average users, not organized criminal gangs like the Ukrainian pirates who stamp out millions of high-quality counterfeits. It's not meant to be proof against sophisticated college kids. It's not meant to be proof against anyone who knows how to edit her registry, or hold down the shift key at the right moment, or use a search engine. At the end of the day, the user DRM is meant to defend against is the most unsophisticated and least capable among us. + +Here's a true story about a user I know who was stopped by DRM. She's smart, college educated, and knows nothing about electronics. She has three kids. She has a DVD in the living room and an old VHS deck in the kids' playroom. One day, she brought home the Toy Story DVD for the kids. That's a substantial investment, and given the generally jam-smeared character of everything the kids get their paws on, she decided to tape the DVD off to VHS and give that to the kids -- that way she could make a fresh VHS copy when the first one went south. She cabled her DVD into her VHS and pressed play on the DVD and record on the VCR and waited. + +Before I go farther, I want us all to stop a moment and marvel at this. Here is someone who is practically technophobic, but who was able to construct a mental model of sufficient accuracy that she figured out that she could connect her cables in the right order and dub her digital disc off to analog tape. I imagine that everyone in this room is the front-line tech support for someone in her or his family: wouldn't it be great if all our non-geek friends and relatives were this clever and imaginative? + +I also want to point out that this is the proverbial honest user. She's not making a copy for the next door neighbors. She's not making a copy and selling it on a blanket on Canal Street. She's not ripping it to her hard-drive, DivX encoding it and putting it in her Kazaa sharepoint. She's doing something *{honest}* -- moving it from one format to another. She's home taping. + +Except she fails. There's a DRM system called Macrovision embedded -- by law -- in every VHS that messes with the vertical blanking interval in the signal and causes any tape made in this fashion to fail. Macrovision can be defeated for about $10 with a gadget readily available on eBay. But our infringer doesn't know that. She's "honest." Technically unsophisticated. Not stupid, mind you -- just naive. + +The Darknet paper addresses this possibility: it even predicts what this person will do in the long run: she'll find out about Kazaa and the next time she wants to get a movie for the kids, she'll download it from the net and burn it for them. + +In order to delay that day for as long as possible, our lawmakers and big rightsholder interests have come up with a disastrous policy called anticircumvention. + +Here's how anticircumvention works: if you put a lock -- an access control -- around a copyrighted work, it is illegal to break that lock. It's illegal to make a tool that breaks that lock. It's illegal to tell someone how to make that tool. One court even held it illegal to tell someone where she can find out how to make that tool. + +Remember Schneier's Law? Anyone can come up with a security system so clever that he can't see its flaws. The only way to find the flaws in security is to disclose the system's workings and invite public feedback. But now we live in a world where any cipher used to fence off a copyrighted work is off-limits to that kind of feedback. That's something that a Princeton engineering prof named Ed Felten and his team discovered when he submitted a paper to an academic conference on the failings in the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a watermarking scheme proposed by the recording industry. The RIAA responded by threatening to sue his ass if he tried it. We fought them because Ed is the kind of client that impact litigators love: unimpeachable and clean-cut and the RIAA folded. Lucky Ed. Maybe the next guy isn't so lucky. + +Matter of fact, the next guy wasn't. Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who gave a talk at a hacker con in Vegas on the failings in Adobe's e-book locks. The FBI threw him in the slam for 30 days. He copped a plea, went home to Russia, and the Russian equivalent of the State Department issued a blanket warning to its researchers to stay away from American conferences, since we'd apparently turned into the kind of country where certain equations are illegal. + +Anticircumvention is a powerful tool for people who want to exclude competitors. If you claim that your car engine firmware is a "copyrighted work," you can sue anyone who makes a tool for interfacing with it. That's not just bad news for mechanics -- think of the hotrodders who want to chip their cars to tweak the performance settings. We have companies like Lexmark claiming that their printer cartridges contain copyrighted works -- software that trips an "I am empty" flag when the toner runs out, and have sued a competitor who made a remanufactured cartridge that reset the flag. Even garage-door opener companies have gotten in on the act, claiming that their receivers' firmware are copyrighted works. Copyrighted cars, print carts and garage-door openers: what's next, copyrighted light-fixtures? + +Even in the context of legitimate -- excuse me, "traditional" -- copyrighted works like movies on DVDs, anticircumvention is bad news. Copyright is a delicate balance. It gives creators and their assignees some rights, but it also reserves some rights to the public. For example, an author has no right to prohibit anyone from transcoding his books into assistive formats for the blind. More importantly, though, a creator has a very limited say over what you can do once you lawfully acquire her works. If I buy your book, your painting, or your DVD, it belongs to me. It's my property. Not my "intellectual property" -- a whacky kind of pseudo-property that's swiss-cheesed with exceptions, easements and limitations -- but real, no-fooling, actual tangible *{property}* -- the kind of thing that courts have been managing through property law for centuries. + +But anticirumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting copyrights for themselves -- to write private laws without accountability or deliberation -- that expropriate your interest in your physical property to their favor. Region-coded DVDs are an example of this: there's no copyright here or in anywhere I know of that says that an author should be able to control where you enjoy her creative works, once you've paid for them. I can buy a book and throw it in my bag and take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it wherever I am: I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price. When I'm done with it, I can sell it on or give it away in the UK. Copyright lawyers call this "First Sale," but it may be simpler to think of it as "Capitalism." + +The keys to decrypt a DVD are controlled by an org called DVD-CCA, and they have a bunch of licensing requirements for anyone who gets a key from them. Among these is something called region-coding: if you buy a DVD in France, it'll have a flag set that says, "I am a European DVD." Bring that DVD to America and your DVD player will compare the flag to its list of permitted regions, and if they don't match, it will tell you that it's not allowed to play your disc. + +Remember: there is no copyright that says that an author gets to do this. When we wrote the copyright statutes and granted authors the right to control display, performance, duplication, derivative works, and so forth, we didn't leave out "geography" by accident. That was on-purpose. + +So when your French DVD won't play in America, that's not because it'd be illegal to do so: it's because the studios have invented a business-model and then invented a copyright law to prop it up. The DVD is your property and so is the DVD player, but if you break the region-coding on your disc, you're going to run afoul of anticircumvention. + +That's what happened to Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager who wanted to watch French DVDs on his Norwegian DVD player. He and some pals wrote some code to break the CSS so that he could do so. He's a wanted man here in America; in Norway the studios put the local fuzz up to bringing him up on charges of *{unlawfully trespassing upon a computer system}*. When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own." + +His no-fooling, real and physical property has been expropriated by the weird, notional, metaphorical intellectual property on his DVD: DRM only works if your record player becomes the property of whomever's records you're playing. + +-- + +2~x- 3. DRM systems are bad for biz + +This is the worst of all the ideas embodied by DRM: that people who make record-players should be able to spec whose records you can listen to, and that people who make records should have a veto over the design of record-players. + +We've never had this principle: in fact, we've always had just the reverse. Think about all the things that can be plugged into a parallel or serial interface, which were never envisioned by their inventors. Our strong economy and rapid innovation are byproducts of the ability of anyone to make anything that plugs into anything else: from the Flo-bee electric razor that snaps onto the end of your vacuum-hose to the octopus spilling out of your car's dashboard lighter socket, standard interfaces that anyone can build for are what makes billionaires out of nerds. + +The courts affirm this again and again. It used to be illegal to plug anything that didn't come from AT&T into your phone-jack. They claimed that this was for the safety of the network, but really it was about propping up this little penny-ante racket that AT&T had in charging you a rental fee for your phone until you'd paid for it a thousand times over. + +When that ban was struck down, it created the market for third-party phone equipment, from talking novelty phones to answering machines to cordless handsets to headsets -- billions of dollars of economic activity that had been suppressed by the closed interface. Note that AT&T was one of the big beneficiaries of this: they *{also}* got into the business of making phone-kit. + +DRM is the software equivalent of these closed hardware interfaces. Robert Scoble is a Softie who has an excellent blog, where he wrote an essay about the best way to protect your investment in the digital music you buy. Should you buy Apple iTunes music, or Microsoft DRM music? Scoble argued that Microsoft's music was a sounder investment, because Microsoft would have more downstream licensees for its proprietary format and therefore you'd have a richer ecosystem of devices to choose from when you were shopping for gizmos to play your virtual records on. + +What a weird idea: that we should evaluate our record-purchases on the basis of which recording company will allow the greatest diversity of record-players to play its discs! That's like telling someone to buy the Betamax instead of the Edison Kinetoscope because Thomas Edison is a crank about licensing his patents; all the while ignoring the world's relentless march to the more open VHS format. + +It's a bad business. DVD is a format where the guy who makes the records gets to design the record players. Ask yourself: how much innovation has there been over the past decade of DVD players? They've gotten cheaper and smaller, but where are the weird and amazing new markets for DVD that were opened up by the VCR? There's a company that's manufacturing the world's first HDD-based DVD jukebox, a thing that holds 100 movies, and they're charging *{$27,000}* for this thing. We're talking about a few thousand dollars' worth of components -- all that other cost is the cost of anticompetition. + +-- + +2~x- 4. DRM systems are bad for artists + +But what of the artist? The hardworking filmmaker, the ink-stained scribbler, the heroin-cured leathery rock-star? We poor slobs of the creative class are everyone's favorite poster-children here: the RIAA and MPAA hold us up and say, "Won't someone please think of the children?" File-sharers say, "Yeah, we're thinking about the artists, but the labels are The Man, who cares what happens to you?" + +To understand what DRM does to artists, you need to understand how copyright and technology interact. Copyright is inherently technological, since the things it addresses -- copying, transmitting, and so on -- are inherently technological. + +The piano roll was the first system for cheaply copying music. It was invented at a time when the dominant form of entertainment in America was getting a talented pianist to come into your living room and pound out some tunes while you sang along. The music industry consisted mostly of sheet-music publishers. + +The player piano was a digital recording and playback system. Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape, which they sold by the thousands -- the hundreds of thousands -- the millions. They did this without a penny's compensation to the publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr! + +Predictably, the composers and music publishers went nutso. Sousa showed up in Congress to say that: + +group{ + + These talking machines are going to ruin the + artistic development of music in this + country. When I was a boy...in front of every + house in the summer evenings, you would find + young people together singing the songs of + the day or old songs. Today you hear these + infernal machines going night and day. We + will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal + chord will be eliminated by a process of + evolution, as was the tail of man when he + came from the ape. + +}group + +The publishers asked Congress to ban the piano roll and to create a law that said that any new system for reproducing music should be subject to a veto from their industry association. Lucky for us, Congress realized what side of their bread had butter on it and decided not to criminalize the dominant form of entertainment in America. + +But there was the problem of paying artists. The Constitution sets out the purpose of American copyright: to promote the useful arts and sciences. The composers had a credible story that they'd do less composing if they weren't paid for it, so Congress needed a fix. Here's what they came up with: anyone who paid a music publisher two cents would have the right to make one piano roll of any song that publisher published. The publisher couldn't say no, and no one had to hire a lawyer at $200 an hour to argue about whether the payment should be two cents or a nickel. + +This compulsory license is still in place today: when Joe Cocker sings "With a Little Help from My Friends," he pays a fixed fee to the Beatles' publisher and away he goes -- even if Ringo hates the idea. If you ever wondered how Sid Vicious talked Anka into letting him get a crack at "My Way," well, now you know. + +That compulsory license created a world where a thousand times more money was made by a thousand times more creators who made a thousand times more music that reached a thousand times more people. + +This story repeats itself throughout the technological century, every ten or fifteen years. Radio was enabled by a voluntary blanket license -- the music companies got together and asked for a consent decree so that they could offer all their music for a flat fee. Cable TV took a compulsory: the only way cable operators could get their hands on broadcasts was to pirate them and shove them down the wire, and Congress saw fit to legalize this practice rather than screw around with their constituents' TVs. + +Sometimes, the courts and Congress decided to simply take away a copyright -- that's what happened with the VCR. When Sony brought out the VCR in 1976, the studios had already decided what the experience of watching a movie in your living room would look like: they'd licensed out their programming for use on a machine called a Discovision, which played big LP-sized discs that were read-only. Proto-DRM. + +The copyright scholars of the day didn't give the VCR very good odds. Sony argued that their box allowed for a fair use, which is defined as a use that a court rules is a defense against infringement based on four factors: whether the use transforms the work into something new, like a collage; whether it uses all or some of the work; whether the work is artistic or mainly factual; and whether the use undercuts the creator's business-model. + +The Betamax failed on all four fronts: when you time-shifted or duplicated a Hollywood movie off the air, you made a non-transformative use of 100 percent of a creative work in a way that directly undercut the Discovision licensing stream. + +Jack Valenti, the mouthpiece for the motion-picture industry, told Congress in 1982 that the VCR was to the American film industry "as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone." + +But the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in 1984, when it determined that any device capable of a substantial non-infringing use was legal. In other words, "We don't buy this Boston Strangler business: if your business model can't survive the emergence of this general-purpose tool, it's time to get another business-model or go broke." + +Hollywood found another business model, as the broadcasters had, as the Vaudeville artists had, as the music publishers had, and they made more art that paid more artists and reached a wider audience. + +There's one thing that every new art business-model had in common: it embraced the medium it lived in. + +This is the overweening characteristic of every single successful new medium: it is true to itself. The Luther Bible didn't succeed on the axes that made a hand-copied monk Bible valuable: they were ugly, they weren't in Church Latin, they weren't read aloud by someone who could interpret it for his lay audience, they didn't represent years of devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by someone who had given his life over to God. The thing that made the Luther Bible a success was its scalability: it was more popular because it was more proliferate: all success factors for a new medium pale beside its profligacy. The most successful organisms on earth are those that reproduce the most: bugs and bacteria, nematodes and virii. Reproduction is the best of all survival strategies. + +Piano rolls didn't sound as good as the music of a skilled pianist: but they *{scaled better}*. Radio lacked the social elements of live performance, but more people could build a crystal set and get it aimed correctly than could pack into even the largest Vaudeville house. MP3s don't come with liner notes, they aren't sold to you by a hipper-than-thou record store clerk who can help you make your choice, bad rips and truncated files abound: I once downloaded a twelve-second copy of "Hey Jude" from the original Napster. Yet MP3 is outcompeting the CD. I don't know what to do with CDs anymore: I get them, and they're like the especially nice garment bag they give you at the fancy suit shop: it's nice and you feel like a goof for throwing it out, but Christ, how many of these things can you usefully own? I can put ten thousand songs on my laptop, but a comparable pile of discs, with liner notes and so forth -- that's a liability: it's a piece of my monthly storage-locker costs. + +Here are the two most important things to know about computers and the Internet: + +1. A computer is a machine for rearranging bits + +2. The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to another very cheaply and quickly + +Any new medium that takes hold on the Internet and with computers will embrace these two facts, not regret them. A newspaper press is a machine for spitting out cheap and smeary newsprint at speed: if you try to make it output fine art lithos, you'll get junk. If you try to make it output newspapers, you'll get the basis for a free society. + +And so it is with the Internet. At the heyday of Napster, record execs used to show up at conferences and tell everyone that Napster was doomed because no one wanted lossily compressed MP3s with no liner notes and truncated files and misspelled metadata. + +Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who'll listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It's bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the actors out for an encore when the film's run out. Or that what the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read aloud from your personal Word of God. + +New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list. + +The only really successful epublishing -- I mean, hundreds of thousands, millions of copies distributed and read -- is the bookwarez scene, where scanned-and-OCR'd books are distributed on the darknet. The only legit publishers with any success at epublishing are the ones whose books cross the Internet without technological fetter: publishers like Baen Books and my own, Tor, who are making some or all of their catalogs available in ASCII and HTML and PDF. + +The hardware-dependent ebooks, the DRM use-and-copy-restricted ebooks, they're cratering. Sales measured in the tens, sometimes the hundreds. Science fiction is a niche business, but when you're selling copies by the ten, that's not even a business, it's a hobby. + +Every one of you has been riding a curve where you read more and more words off of more and more screens every day through most of your professional careers. It's zero-sum: you've also been reading fewer words off of fewer pages as time went by: the dinosauric executive who prints his email and dictates a reply to his secretary is info-roadkill. + +Today, at this very second, people read words off of screens for every hour that they can find. Your kids stare at their Game Boys until their eyes fall out. Euroteens ring doorbells with their hypertrophied, SMS-twitching thumbs instead of their index fingers. + +Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap printer-binderies like the Internet Bookmobile that can produce a full bleed, four color, glossy cover, printed spine, perfect-bound book in ten minutes for a dollar are the future of paper books: when you need an instance of a paper book, you generate one, or part of one, and pitch it out when you're done. I landed at SEA-TAC on Monday and burned a couple CDs from my music collection to listen to in the rental car. When I drop the car off, I'll leave them behind. Who needs 'em? + +Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utilitarian one. There's nothing *{moral}* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's nothing *{immoral}* about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that people's physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings. + +Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simplifies and cheapens creation, reproduction and distribution. The existing copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old production, reproduction and distribution system, and they'll be weakened by the new technology. But new technology always gives us more art with a wider reach: that's what tech is *{for}*. + +Tech gives us bigger pies that more artists can get a bite out of. That's been tacitly acknowledged at every stage of the copyfight since the piano roll. When copyright and technology collide, it's copyright that changes. + +Which means that today's copyright -- the thing that DRM nominally props up -- didn't come down off the mountain on two stone tablets. It was created in living memory to accommodate the technical reality created by the inventors of the previous generation. To abandon invention now robs tomorrow's artists of the new businesses and new reach and new audiences that the Internet and the PC can give them. + +-- + +2~x- 5. DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT + +When Sony brought out the VCR, it made a record player that could play Hollywood's records, even if Hollywood didn't like the idea. The industries that grew up on the back of the VCR -- movie rentals, home taping, camcorders, even Bar Mitzvah videographers -- made billions for Sony and its cohort. + +That was good business -- even if Sony lost the Betamax-VHS format wars, the money on the world-with-VCRs table was enough to make up for it. + +But then Sony acquired a relatively tiny entertainment company and it started to massively screw up. When MP3 rolled around and Sony's walkman customers were clamoring for a solid-state MP3 player, Sony let its music business-unit run its show: instead of making a high-capacity MP3 walkman, Sony shipped its Music Clips, low-capacity devices that played brain-damaged DRM formats like Real and OpenMG. They spent good money engineering "features" into these devices that kept their customers from freely moving their music back and forth between their devices. Customers stayed away in droves. + +Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to walkmen. The market leaders are poky Singaporean outfits like Creative Labs -- the kind of company that Sony used to crush like a bug, back before it got borged by its entertainment unit -- and PC companies like Apple. + +That's because Sony shipped a product that there was no market demand for. No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, "Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music." Presented with an alternative, Sony's customers enthusiastically jumped ship. + +The same thing happened to a lot of people I know who used to rip their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced smaller, better-sounding rips than the MP3 rippers, but you also fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their music to another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they discovered that after they restored their music that they could no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different machine, and locked them out of their own music. + +There is no market demand for this "feature." None of your customers want you to make expensive modifications to your products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic technology failures. + +I speak from experience. Because I buy a new Powerbook every ten months, and because I always order the new models the day they're announced, I get a lot of lemons from Apple. That means that I hit Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth of iTunes songs I'd bought because one of my authorized machines was a lemon that Apple had broken up for parts, one was in the shop getting fixed by Apple, and one was my mom's computer, 3,000 miles away in Toronto. + +If I had been a less good customer for Apple's hardware, I would have been fine. If I had been a less enthusiastic evangelist for Apple's products -- if I hadn't shown my mom how iTunes Music Store worked -- I would have been fine. If I hadn't bought so much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I would have been fine. + +As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own music, at a time when my Powerbook was in the shop -- i.e., at a time when I was hardly disposed to feel charitable to Apple. + +I'm an edge case here, but I'm a *{leading edge}* case. If Apple succeeds in its business plans, it will only be a matter of time until even average customers have upgraded enough hardware and bought enough music to end up where I am. + +You know what I would totally buy? A record player that let me play everybody's records. Right now, the closest I can come to that is an open source app called VLC, but it's clunky and buggy and it didn't come pre-installed on my computer. + +Sony didn't make a Betamax that only played the movies that Hollywood was willing to permit -- Hollywood asked them to do it, they proposed an early, analog broadcast flag that VCRs could hunt for and respond to by disabling recording. Sony ignored them and made the product they thought their customers wanted. + +I'm a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft customers, I want a player that plays anything I throw at it, and I think that you are just the company to give it to me. + +Yes, this would violate copyright law as it stands, but Microsoft has been making tools of piracy that change copyright law for decades now. Outlook, Exchange and MSN are tools that abet widescale digital infringement. + +More significantly, IIS and your caching proxies all make and serve copies of documents without their authors' consent, something that, if it is legal today, is only legal because companies like Microsoft went ahead and did it and dared lawmakers to prosecute. + +Microsoft stood up for its customers and for progress, and won so decisively that most people never even realized that there was a fight. + +Do it again! This is a company that looks the world's roughest, toughest anti-trust regulators in the eye and laughs. Compared to anti-trust people, copyright lawmakers are pantywaists. You can take them with your arm behind your back. + +In Siva Vaidhyanathan's book The Anarchist in the Library, he talks about why the studios are so blind to their customers' desires. It's because people like you and me spent the 80s and the 90s telling them bad science fiction stories about impossible DRM technology that would let them charge a small sum of money every time someone looked at a movie -- want to fast-forward? That feature costs another penny. Pausing is two cents an hour. The mute button will cost you a quarter. + +When Mako Analysis issued their report last month advising phone companies to stop supporting Symbian phones, they were just writing the latest installment in this story. Mako says that phones like my P900, which can play MP3s as ringtones, are bad for the cellphone economy, because it'll put the extortionate ringtone sellers out of business. What Mako is saying is that just because you bought the CD doesn't mean that you should expect to have the ability to listen to it on your MP3 player, and just because it plays on your MP3 player is no reason to expect it to run as a ringtone. I wonder how they feel about alarm clocks that will play a CD to wake you up in the morning? Is that strangling the nascent "alarm tone" market? + +The phone companies' customers want Symbian phones and for now, at least, the phone companies understand that if they don't sell them, someone else will. + +The market opportunity for a truly capable devices is enormous. There's a company out there charging *{$27,000}* for a DVD jukebox -- go and eat their lunch! Steve Jobs isn't going to do it: he's off at the D conference telling studio execs not to release hi-def movies until they're sure no one will make a hi-def DVD burner that works with a PC. + +Maybe they won't buy into his BS, but they're also not much interested in what you have to sell. At the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group meetings where the Broadcast Flag was hammered out, the studios' position was, "We'll take anyone's DRM except Microsoft's and Philips'." When I met with UK broadcast wonks about the European version of the Broadcast Flag underway at the Digital Video Broadcasters' forum, they told me, "Well, it's different in Europe: mostly they're worried that some American company like Microsoft will get their claws into European television." + +American film studios didn't want the Japanese electronics companies to get a piece of the movie pie, so they fought the VCR. Today, everyone who makes movies agrees that they don't want to let you guys get between them and their customers. + +Sony didn't get permission. Neither should you. Go build the record player that can play everyone's records. + +Because if you don't do it, someone else will. + +$$$$ + +1~ The DRM Sausage Factory + +(Originally published as "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How DRM Becomes Law," InformationWeek, July 11, 2007) ~# + +Otto von Bismarck quipped, "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." I've seen sausages made. I've seen laws made. Both pale in comparison to the process by which anti-copying technology agreements are made. + +This technology, usually called "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) proposes to make your computer worse at copying some of the files on its hard-drive or on other media. Since all computer operations involve copying, this is a daunting task -- as security expert Bruce Schneier has said, "Making bits harder to copy is like making water that's less wet." + +At root, DRMs are technologies that treat the owner of a computer or other device as an attacker, someone against whom the system must be armored. Like the electrical meter on the side of your house, a DRM is a technology that you possess, but that you are never supposed to be able to manipulate or modify. Unlike the your meter, though, a DRM that is defeated in one place is defeated in all places, nearly simultaneously. That is to say, once someone takes the DRM off a song or movie or ebook, that freed collection of bits can be sent to anyone else, anywhere the network reaches, in an eyeblink. DRM crackers need cunning: those who receive the fruits of their labor need only know how to download files from the Internet. + +Why manufacture a device that attacks its owner? A priori, one would assume that such a device would cost more to make than a friendlier one, and that customers would prefer not to buy devices that treat them as presumptive criminals. DRM technologies limit more than copying: they limit ranges of uses, such as viewing a movie in a different country, copying a song to a different manufacturer's player, or even pausing a movie for too long. Surely, this stuff hurts sales: who goes into a store and asks, "Do you have any music that's locked to just one company's player? I'm in the market for some lock-in." + +So why do manufacturers do it? As with many strange behaviors, there's a carrot at play here, and a stick. + +The carrot is the entertainment industries' promise of access to their copyrighted works. Add DRM to your iPhone and we'll supply music for it. Add DRM to your TiVo and we'll let you plug it into our satellite receivers. Add DRM to your Zune and we'll let you retail our music in your Zune store. + +The stick is the entertainment industries' threat of lawsuits for companies that don't comply. In the last century, entertainment companies fought over the creation of records, radios, jukeboxes, cable TV, VCRs, MP3 players and other technologies that made it possible to experience a copyrighted work in a new way without permission. There's one battle that serves as the archetype for the rest: the fight over the VCR. + +The film studios were outraged by Sony's creation of the VCR. They had found a DRM supplier they preferred, a company called Discovision that made non-recordable optical discs. Discovision was the only company authorized to play back movies in your living room. The only way to get a copyrighted work onto a VCR cassette was to record it off the TV, without permission. The studios argued that Sony -- whose Betamax was the canary in this legal coalmine -- was breaking the law by unjustly endangering their revenue from Discovision royalties. Sure, they *{could}* just sell pre-recorded Betamax tapes, but Betamax was a read-write medium: they could be *{copied}*. Moreover, your personal library of Betamax recordings of the Sunday night movie would eat into the market for Discovision discs: why would anyone buy a pre-recorded video cassette when they could amass all the video they needed with a home recorder and a set of rabbit-ears? + +The Supreme Court threw out these arguments in a 1984 5-4 decision, the "Betamax Decision." This decision held that the VCR was legal because it was "capable of sustaining a substantially non-infringing use." That means that if you make a technology that your customers *{can}* use legally, you're not on the hook for the illegal stuff they do. + +This principle guided the creation of virtually every piece of IT invented since: the Web, search engines, YouTube, Blogger, Skype, ICQ, AOL, MySpace... You name it, if it's possible to violate copyright with it, the thing that made it possible is the Betamax principle. + +Unfortunately, the Supremes shot the Betamax principle in the gut two years ago, with the Grokster decision. This decision says that a company can be found liable for its customers' bad acts if they can be shown to have "induced" copyright infringement. So, if your company advertises your product for an infringing use, or if it can be shown that you had infringement in mind at the design stage, you can be found liable for your customers' copying. The studios and record labels and broadcasters *{love}* this ruling, and they like to think that it's even broader than what the courts set out. For example, Viacom is suing Google for inducing copyright infringement by allowing YouTube users to flag some of their videos as private. Private videos can't be found by Viacom's copyright-enforcement bots, so Viacom says that privacy should be illegal, and that companies that give you the option of privacy should be sued for anything you do behind closed doors. + +The gutshot Betamax doctrine will bleed out all over the industry for decades (or until the courts or Congress restore it to health), providing a grisly reminder of what happens to companies that try to pour the entertainment companies' old wine into new digital bottles without permission. The tape-recorder was legal, but the digital tape-recorder is an inducement to infringement, and must be stopped. + +The promise of access to content and the threat of legal execution for non-compliance is enough to lure technology's biggest players to the DRM table. + +I started attending DRM meetings in March, 2002, on behalf of my former employers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. My first meeting was the one where Broadcast Flag was born. The Broadcast Flag was weird even by DRM standards. Broadcasters are required, by law, to deliver TV and radio without DRM, so that any standards-compliant receiver can receive them. The airwaves belong to the public, and are loaned to broadcasters who have to promise to serve the public interest in exchange. But the MPAA and the broadcasters wanted to add DRM to digital TV, and so they proposed that a law should be passed that would make all manufacturers promise to *{pretend}* that there was DRM on broadcast signals, receiving them and immediately squirreling them away in encrypted form. + +The Broadcast Flag was hammered out in a group called the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) a sub-group from the MPAA's "Content Protection Technology Working Group," which also included reps from all the big IT companies (Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and so on), consumer electronics companies (Panasonic, Philips, Zenith), cable companies, satellite companies, and anyone else who wanted to pay $100 to attend the "public" meetings, held every six weeks or so (you can attend these meetings yourself if you find yourself near LAX on one of the upcoming dates). + +CPTWG (pronounced Cee-Pee-Twig) is a venerable presence in the DRM world. It was at CPTWG that the DRM for DVDs was hammered out. CPTWG meetings open with a "benediction," delivered by a lawyer, who reminds everyone there that what they say might be quoted "on the front page of the New York Times," (though journalists are barred from attending CPTWG meetings and no minutes are published by the organization) and reminding all present not to do anything that would raise eyebrows at the FTC's anti-trust division (I could swear I've seen the Microsoft people giggling during this part, though that may have been my imagination). + +The first part of the meeting is usually taken up with administrative business and presentations from DRM vendors, who come out to promise that this time they've really, really figured out how to make computers worse at copying. The real meat comes after the lunch, when the group splits into a series of smaller meetings, many of them closed-door and private (the representatives of the organizations responsible for managing DRM on DVDs splinter off at this point). + +Then comes the working group meetings, like the BPDG. The BPDG was nominally set up to set up the rules for the Broadcast Flag. Under the Flag, manufacturers would be required to limit their "outputs and recording methods" to a set of "approved technologies." Naturally, every manufacturer in the room showed up with a technology to add to the list of approved technologies -- and the sneakier ones showed up with reasons why their competitors' technologies *{shouldn't}* be approved. If the Broadcast Flag became law, a spot on the "approved technologies" list would be a license to print money: everyone who built a next-gen digital TV would be required, by law, to buy only approved technologies for their gear. + +The CPTWG determined that there would be three "chairmen" of the meetings: a representative from the broadcasters, a representative from the studios, and a representative from the IT industry (note that no "consumer rights" chair was contemplated -- we proposed one and got laughed off the agenda). The IT chair was filled by an Intel representative, who seemed pleased that the MPAA chair, Fox Studios's Andy Setos, began the process by proposing that the approved technologies should include only two technologies, both of which Intel partially owned. + +Intel's presence on the committee was both reassurance and threat: reassurance because Intel signaled the fundamental reasonableness of the MPAA's requirements -- why would a company with a bigger turnover than the whole movie industry show up if the negotiations weren't worth having? Threat because Intel was poised to gain an advantage that might be denied to its competitors. + +We settled in for a long negotiation. The discussions were drawn out and heated. At regular intervals, the MPAA reps told us that we were wasting time -- if we didn't hurry things along, the world would move on and consumers would grow accustomed to un-crippled digital TVs. Moreover, Rep Billy Tauzin, the lawmaker who'd evidently promised to enact the Broadcast Flag into law, was growing impatient. The warnings were delivered in quackspeak, urgent and crackling, whenever the discussions dragged, like the crack of the commissars' pistols, urging us forward. + +You'd think that a "technology working group" would concern itself with technology, but there was precious little discussion of bits and bytes, ciphers and keys. Instead, we focused on what amounted to contractual terms: if your technology got approved as a DTV "output," what obligations would you have to assume? If a TiVo could serve as an "output" for a receiver, what outputs would the TiVo be allowed to have? + +The longer we sat there, the more snarled these contractual terms became: winning a coveted spot on the "approved technology" list would be quite a burden! Once you were in the club, there were all sorts of rules about whom you could associate with, how you had to comport yourself and so on. + +One of these rules of conduct was "robustness." As a condition of approval, manufacturers would have to harden their technologies so that their customers wouldn't be able to modify, improve upon, or even understand their workings. As you might imagine, the people who made open source TV tuners were not thrilled about this, as "open source" and "non-user-modifiable" are polar opposites. + +Another was "renewability:" the ability of the studios to revoke outputs that had been compromised in the field. The studios expected the manufacturers to make products with remote "kill switches" that could be used to shut down part or all of their device if someone, somewhere had figured out how to do something naughty with it. They promised that we'd establish criteria for renewability later, and that it would all be "fair." + +But we soldiered on. The MPAA had a gift for resolving the worst snarls: when shouting failed, they'd lead any recalcitrant player out of the room and negotiate in secret with them, leaving the rest of us to cool our heels. Once, they took the Microsoft team out of the room for *{six hours}*, then came back and announced that digital video would be allowed to output on non-DRM monitors at a greatly reduced resolution (this "feature" appears in Vista as "fuzzing"). + +The further we went, the more nervous everyone became. We were headed for the real meat of the negotiations: the *{criteria}* by which approved technology would be evaluated: how many bits of crypto would you need? Which ciphers would be permissible? Which features would and wouldn't be allowed? + +Then the MPAA dropped the other shoe: the sole criteria for inclusion on the list would be the approval of one of its member-companies, or a quorum of broadcasters. In other words, the Broadcast Flag wouldn't be an "objective standard," describing the technical means by which video would be locked away -- it would be purely subjective, up to the whim of the studios. You could have the best product in the world, and they wouldn't approve it if your business-development guys hadn't bought enough drinks for their business-development guys at a CES party. + +To add insult to injury, the only technologies that the MPAA were willing to consider for initial inclusion as "approved" were the two that Intel was involved with. The Intel co-chairman had a hard time hiding his grin. He'd acted as Judas goat, luring in Apple, Microsoft, and the rest, to legitimize a process that would force them to license Intel's patents for every TV technology they shipped until the end of time. + +Why did the MPAA give Intel such a sweetheart deal? At the time, I figured that this was just straight quid pro quo, like Hannibal said to Clarice. But over the years, I started to see a larger pattern: Hollywood likes DRM consortia, and they hate individual DRM vendors. (I've written an entire article about this, but here's the gist: a single vendor who succeeds can name their price and terms -- think of Apple or Macrovision -- while a consortium is a more easily divided rabble, susceptible to co-option in order to produce ever-worsening technologies -- think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD). Intel's technologies were held through two consortia, the 5C and 4C groups. + +The single-vendor manufacturers were livid at being locked out of the digital TV market. The final report of the consortium reflected this -- a few sheets written by the chairmen describing the "consensus" and hundreds of pages of angry invective from manufacturers and consumer groups decrying it as a sham. + +Tauzin washed his hands of the process: a canny, sleazy Hill operator, he had the political instincts to get his name off any proposal that could be shown to be a plot to break voters' televisions (Tauzin found a better industry to shill for, the pharmaceutical firms, who rewarded him with a $2,000,000/year job as chief of PHARMA, the pharmaceutical lobby). + +Even Representative Ernest "Fritz" Hollings ("The Senator from Disney," who once proposed a bill requiring entertainment industry oversight of all technologies capable of copying) backed away from proposing a bill that would turn the Broadcast Flag into law. Instead, Hollings sent a memo to Michael Powell, then-head of the FCC, telling him that the FCC already had jurisdiction to enact a Broadcast Flag regulation, without Congressional oversight. + +Powell's staff put Hollings's letter online, as they are required to do by federal sunshine laws. The memo arrived as a Microsoft Word file -- which EFF then downloaded and analyzed. Word stashes the identity of a document's author in the file metadata, which is how EFF discovered that the document had been written by a staffer at the MPAA. + +This was truly remarkable. Hollings was a powerful committee chairman, one who had taken immense sums of money from the industries he was supposed to be regulating. It's easy to be cynical about this kind of thing, but it's genuinely unforgivable: politicians draw a public salary to sit in public office and work for the public good. They're supposed to be working for us, not their donors. + +But we all know that this isn't true. Politicians are happy to give special favors to their pals in industry. However, the Hollings memo was beyond the pale. Staffers for the MPAA were writing Hollings's memos, memos that Hollings then signed and mailed off to the heads of major governmental agencies. + +The best part was that the legal eagles at the MPAA were wrong. The FCC took "Hollings's" advice and enacted a Broadcast Flag regulation that was almost identical to the proposal from the BPDG, turning themselves into America's "device czars," able to burden any digital technology with "robustness," "compliance" and "revocation rules." The rule lasted just long enough for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to strike it down and slap the FCC for grabbing unprecedented jurisdiction over the devices in our living rooms. + +So ended the saga of the Broadcast Flag. More or less. In the years since the Flag was proposed, there have been several attempts to reintroduce it through legislation, all failed. And as more and more innovative, open devices like the Neuros OSD enter the market, it gets harder and harder to imagine that Americans will accept a mandate that takes away all that functionality. + +But the spirit of the Broadcast Flag lives on. DRM consortia are all the rage now -- outfits like AACS LA, the folks who control the DRM in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, are thriving and making headlines by issuing fatwas against people who publish their secret integers. In Europe, a DRM consortium working under the auspices of the Digital Video Broadcasters Forum (DVB) has just shipped a proposed standard for digital TV DRM that makes the Broadcast Flag look like the work of patchouli-scented infohippies. The DVB proposal would give DRM consortium the ability to define what is and isn't a valid "household" for the purposes of sharing your video within your "household's devices." It limits how long you're allowed to pause a video for, and allows for restrictions to be put in place for hundreds of years, longer than any copyright system in the world would protect any work for. + +If all this stuff seems a little sneaky, underhanded and even illegal to you, you're not alone. When representatives of nearly all the world's entertainment, technology, broadcast, satellite and cable companies gather in a room to collude to cripple their offerings, limit their innovation, and restrict the market, regulators take notice. + +That's why the EU is taking a hard look at HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. These systems aren't designed: they're governed, and the governors are shadowy group of offshore giants who answer to no one -- not even their own members! I once called the DVD-Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) on behalf of a Time-Warner magazine, Popular Science, for a comment about their DRM. Not only wouldn't they allow me to speak to a spokesman, the person who denied my request also refused to be identified. + +The sausage factory grinds away, but today, more activists than ever are finding ways to participate in the negotiations, slowing them up, making them account for themselves to the public. And so long as you, the technology-buying public, pay attention to what's going on, the activists will continue to hold back the tide. + +$$$$ + +1~ Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway + +(Originally published as "How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM Are Beating Up The American Economy," InformationWeek, June 11, 2007) ~# + +Back in 1985, the Senate was ready to clobber the music industry for exposing America's impressionable youngsters to sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Today, the the Attorney General is proposing to give the RIAA legal tools to attack people who attempt infringement. + +Through most of America's history, the US government has been at odds with the entertainment giants, treating them as purveyors of filth. But not anymore: today, the US Trade Rep using America's political clout to force Russia to institute police inspections of its CD presses (savor the irony: post-Soviet Russia forgoes its hard-won freedom of the press to protect Disney and Universal!). + +How did entertainment go from trenchcoat pervert to top trade priority? I blame the "Information Economy." + +No one really knows what "Information Economy" means, but by the early 90s, we knew it was coming. America deployed her least reliable strategic resource to puzzle out what an "information economy" was and to figure out how to ensure America stayed atop the "new economy" -- America sent in the futurists. + +We make the future in much the same way as we make the past. We don't remember everything that happened to us, just selective details. We weave our memories together on demand, filling in any empty spaces with the present, which is lying around in great abundance. In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psych prof Daniel Gilbert describes an experiment in which people with delicious lunches in front of them are asked to remember their breakfast: overwhelmingly, the people with good lunches have more positive memories of breakfast than those who have bad lunches. We don't remember breakfast -- we look at lunch and superimpose it on breakfast. + +We make the future in the same way: we extrapolate as much as we can, and whenever we run out of imagination, we just shovel the present into the holes. That's why our pictures of the future always seem to resemble the present, only moreso. + +So the futurists told us about the Information Economy: they took all the "information-based" businesses (music, movies and microcode, in the neat coinage of Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash) and projected a future in which these would grow to dominate the world's economies. + +There was only one fly in the ointment: most of the world's economies consist of poor people who have more time than money, and if there's any lesson to learn from American college kids, it's that people with more time than money would rather copy information than pay for it. + +Of course they would! Why, when America was a-borning, she was a pirate nation, cheerfully copying the inventions of European authors and inventors. Why not? The fledgling revolutionary republic could copy without paying, keep the money on her shores, and enrich herself with the products and ideas of imperial Europe. Of course, once the US became a global hitter in the creative industries, out came the international copyright agreements: the US signed agreements to protect British authors in exchange for reciprocal agreements from the Brits to protect American authors. + +It's hard to see why a developing country would opt to export its GDP to a rich country when it could get the same benefit by mere copying. The US would have to sweeten the pot. + +The pot-sweetener is the elimination of international trade-barriers. Historically, the US has used tariffs to limit the import of manufactured goods from abroad, and to encourage the import of raw materials from abroad. Generally speaking, rich countries import poor countries' raw materials, process them into manufactured goods, and export them again. Globally speaking, if your country imports sugar and exports sugar cane, chances are you're poor. If your country imports wood and sells paper, chances are you're rich. + +In 1995, the US signed onto the World Trade Organization and its associated copyright and patent agreement, the TRIPS Agreement, and the American economy was transformed. + +Any fellow signatory to the WTO/TRIPS can export manufactured goods to the USA without any tariffs. If it costs you $5 to manufacture and ship a plastic bucket from your factory in Shenjin Province to the USA, you can sell it for $6 and turn a $1 profit. And if it costs an American manufacturer $10 to make the same bucket, the American manufacturer is out of luck. + +The kicker is this: if you want to export your finished goods to America, you have to sign up to protect American copyrights in your own country. Quid pro quo. + +The practical upshot, 12 years later, is that most American manufacturing has gone belly up, Wal-Mart is filled with Happy Meal toys and other cheaply manufactured plastic goods, and the whole world has signed onto US copyright laws. + +But signing onto those laws doesn't mean you'll enforce them. Sure, where a country is really over a barrel (cough, Russia, cough), they'll take the occasional pro forma step to enforce US copyrights, no matter how ridiculous and totalitarian it makes them appear. But with the monthly Russian per-capita GDP hovering at $200, it's just not plausible that Russians are going to start paying $15 for a CD, nor is it likely that they'll stop listening to music until their economy picks up. + +But the real action is in China, where pressing bootleg media is a national sport. China keeps promising that it will do something about this, but it's not like the US has any recourse if China drags its heels. Trade courts may find against China, but China holds all the cards. The US can't afford to abandon Chinese manufacturing (and no one will vote for the politician who hextuples the cost of WiFi cards, brassieres, iPods, staplers, yoga mats, and spatulas by cutting off trade with China). The Chinese can just sit tight. + +The futurists were just plain wrong. An "information economy" can't be based on selling information. Information technology makes copying information easier and easier. The more IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you send out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information from here on in. The information economy is about selling everything except information. + +The US traded its manufacturing sector's health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. + +But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn't know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world's copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. + +It'll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it's in the world, it'll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I'm not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. + +But there is an information economy. You don't even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn't own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. + +Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend's weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend's sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. + +This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. + +And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying -- no matter what that does to productivity -- they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by "copy protection," they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. + +The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. + +What country do you want to live in? + +$$$$ + +1~ Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? + +(Originally published in InformationWeek, August 14, 2007) ~# + +Hollywood loves sequels -- they're generally a safe bet, provided that you're continuing an already successful franchise. But you'd have to be nuts to shoot a sequel to a disastrous flop -- say, The Adventures of Pluto Nash or Town and Country. + +As disastrous as Pluto Nash was, it was practically painless when compared to the Napster debacle. That shipwreck took place six years ago, when the record industry succeeded in shutting down the pioneering file-sharing service, and they show no signs of recovery. + +!_ The disastrous thing about Napster wasn't that it it existed, but rather that the record industry managed to kill it. + +Napster had an industry-friendly business-model: raise venture capital, start charging for access to the service, and then pay billions of dollars to the record companies in exchange for licenses to their works. Yes, they kicked this plan off without getting permission from the record companies, but that's not so unusual. The record companies followed the same business plan a hundred years ago, when they started recording sheet music without permission, raising capital and garnering profits, and *{then}* working out a deal to pay the composers for the works they'd built their fortunes on. + +Napster's plan was plausible. They had the fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world, garnering 52,000,000 users in 18 months -- more than had voted for either candidate in the preceding US election! -- and discovering, via surveys, that a sizable portion would happily pay between $10 and $15 a month for the service. What's more, Napster's architecture included a gatekeeper that could be used to lock-out non-paying users. + +The record industry refused to deal. Instead, they sued, bringing Napster to its knees. Bertelsmann bought Napster out of the ensuing bankruptcy, a pattern that was followed by other music giants, like Universal, who slayed MP3.com in the courts, then brought home the corpse on the cheap, running it as an internal project. + +After that, the record companies had a field day: practically every venture-funded P2P company went down, and millions of dollars were funneled from the tech venture capital firms to Sand Hill Road to the RIAA's members, using P2P companies and the courts as conduits. + +But the record companies weren't ready to replace these services with equally compelling alternatives. Instead, they fielded inferior replacements like PressPlay, with limited catalog, high prices, and anti-copying technology (digital rights management, or DRM) that alienated users by the millions by treating them like crooks instead of customers. These half-baked ventures did untold damage to the record companies and their parent firms. + +Just look at Sony: they should have been at the top of the heap. They produce some of the world's finest, best-designed electronics. They own one of the largest record labels in the world. The synergy should have been incredible. Electronics would design the walkmen, music would take care of catalog, and marketing would sell it all. + +You know the joke about European hell? The English do the cooking, the Germans are the lovers, the Italians are the police and the French run the government. With Sony, it seemed like music was designing the walkmen, marketing was doing the catalog, and electronic was in charge of selling. Sony's portable players -- the MusicClip and others -- were so crippled by anti-copying technology that they couldn't even play MP3s, and the music selection at Sony services like PressPlay was anemic, expensive, and equally hobbled. Sony isn't even a name in the portable audio market anymore -- today's walkman is an iPod. + +Of course, Sony still has a record-label -- for now. But sales are falling, and the company is reeling from the 2005 "rootkit" debacle, where in deliberately infected eight million music CDs with a hacker tool called a rootkit, compromising over 500,000 US computer networks, including military and government networks, all in a (failed) bid to stop copying of its CDs. + +The public wasn't willing to wait for Sony and the rest to wake up and offer a service that was as compelling, exciting and versatile as Napster. Instead, they flocked to a new generation of services like Kazaa and the various Gnutella networks. Kazaa's business model was to set up offshore, on the tiny Polynesian island of Vanuatu, and bundle spyware with its software, making its profits off of fees from spyware crooks. Kazaa didn't want to pay billions for record industry licenses -- they used the international legal and finance system to hopelessly snarl the RIAA's members through half a decade of wild profitability. The company was eventually brought to ground, but the founders walked away and started Skype and then Joost. + +Meantime, dozens of other services had sprung up to fill Kazaa's niche -- AllofMP3, the notorious Russian site, was eventually killed through intervention of the US Trade Representative and the WTO, and was reborn practically the next day under a new name. + +It's been eight years since Sean Fanning created Napster in his college dorm-room. Eight years later, there isn't a single authorized music service that can compete with the original Napster. Record sales are down every year, and digital music sales aren't filling in the crater. The record industry has contracted to four companies, and it may soon be three if EMI can get regulatory permission to put itself on the block. + +The sue-em-all-and-let-God-sort-em-out plan was a flop in the box office, a flop in home video, and a flop overseas. So why is Hollywood shooting a remake? + +# + +YouTube, 2007, bears some passing similarity to Napster, 2001. Founded by a couple guys in a garage, rocketed to popular success, heavily capitalized by a deep-pocketed giant. Its business model? Turn popularity into dollars and offer a share to the rightsholders whose works they're using. This is an historically sound plan: cable operators got rich by retransmitting broadcasts without permission, and once they were commercial successes, they sat down to negotiate to pay for those copyrights (just as the record companies negotiated with composers *{after}* they'd gotten rich selling records bearing those compositions). + +YouTube 07 has another similarity to Napster 01: it is being sued by entertainment companies. + +Only this time, it's not (just) the record industry. Broadcasters, movie studios, anyone who makes video or audio is getting in on the act. I recently met an NBC employee who told me that he thought that a severe, punishing legal judgment would send a message to the tech industry not to field this kind of service anymore. + +Let's hope he's wrong. Google -- YouTube's owners -- is a grown-up of a company, unusual in a tech industry populated by corporate adolescents. They have lots of money and a sober interest in keeping it. They want to sit down with A/V rightsholders and do a deal. Six years after the Napster verdict, that kind of willingness is in short supply. + +Most of the tech "companies" with an interest in commercializing Internet AV have no interest in sitting down with the studios. They're either nebulous open source projects (like mythtv, a free hyper-TiVo that skips commercials, downloads and shares videos and is wide open to anyone who wants to modify and improve it), politically motivated anarchists (like ThePirateBay, a Swedish BitTorrent tracker site that has mirrors in three countries with non-interoperable legal systems, where they respond to legal notices by writing sarcastic and profane letters and putting them online), or out-and-out crooks like the bootleggers who use P2P to seed their DVD counterfeiting operations. + +It's not just YouTube. TiVo, who pioneered the personal video recorder, is feeling the squeeze, being systematically locked out of the digital cable and satellite market. Their efforts to add a managed TiVoToGo service were attacked by the rightsholders who fought at the FCC to block them. Cable/satellite operators and the studios would much prefer the public to transition to "bundled" PVRs that come with your TV service. + +These boxes are owned by the cable/satellite companies, who have absolute control over them. Time-Warner has been known to remotely delete stored episodes of shows just before the DVD ships, and many operators have started using "flags" that tell recorders not to allow fast-forwarding, or to prevent recording altogether. + +The reason that YouTube and TiVo are more popular than ThePirateBay and mythtv is that they're the easiest way for the public to get what it wants -- the video we want, the way we want it. We use these services because they're like the original Napster: easy, well-designed, functional. + +But if the entertainment industry squeezes these players out, ThePirateBay and mythtv are right there, waiting to welcome us in with open arms. ThePirateBay has already announced that it is launching a YouTube competitor with no-plugin, in-browser viewing. Plenty of entrepreneurs are looking at easing the pain and cast of setting up your own mythtv box. The only reason that the barriers to BitTorrent and mythtv exist is that it hasn't been worth anyone's while to capitalize projects to bring them down. But once the legit competitors of these services are killed, look out. + +The thing is, the public doesn't want managed services with limited rights. We don't want to be stuck using approved devices in approved ways. We never have -- we are the spiritual descendants of the customers for "illegal" record albums and "illegal" cable TV. The demand signal won't go away. + +There's no good excuse for going into production on a sequel to The Napster Wars. We saw that movie. We know how it turns out. Every Christmas, we get articles about how this was the worst Christmas ever for CDs. You know what? CD sales are *{never}* going to improve. CDs have been rendered obsolete by Internet distribution -- and the record industry has locked itself out of the only profitable, popular music distribution systems yet invented. + +Companies like Google/YouTube and TiVo are rarities: tech companies that want to do deals. They need to be cherished by entertainment companies, not sued. + +(Thanks to Bruce Nash and The-Numbers.com for research assistance with this article) + +$$$$ + +1~ You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, March 2007) ~# + +"I don't like reading off a computer screen" -- it's a cliché of the e-book world. It means "I don't read novels off of computer screens" (or phones, or PDAs, or dedicated e-book readers), and often as not the person who says it is someone who, in fact, spends every hour that Cthulhu sends reading off a computer screen. It's like watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how much he hates chocolate. + +But I know what you mean. You don't like reading long-form works off of a computer screen. I understand perfectly -- in the ten minutes since I typed the first word in the paragraph above, I've checked my mail, deleted two spams, checked an image-sharing community I like, downloaded a YouTube clip of Stephen Colbert complaining about the iPhone (pausing my MP3 player first), cleared out my RSS reader, and then returned to write this paragraph. + +This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on long-form narrative (sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who's made cardboard furniture) (wait, the Colbert clip's done, gotta start the music up) (19 more RSS items). But that's not to say that it's not an entertainment medium -- indeed, practically everything I do on the computer entertains the hell out of me. It's nearly all text-based, too. Basically, what I do on the computer is pleasure-reading. But it's a fundamentally more scattered, splintered kind of pleasure. Computers have their own cognitive style, and it's not much like the cognitive style invented with the first modern novel (one sec, let me google that and confirm it), Don Quixote, some 400 years ago. + +The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel. + +Computers want you to do lots of things with them. Networked computers doubly so -- they (another RSS item) have a million ways of asking for your attention, and just as many ways of rewarding it. + +There's a persistent fantasy/nightmare in the publishing world of the advent of very sharp, very portable computer screens. In the fantasy version, this creates an infinite new market for electronic books, and we all get to sell the rights to our work all over again. In the nightmare version, this leads to runaway piracy, and no one ever gets to sell a novel again. + +I think they're both wrong. The infinitely divisible copyright ignores the "decision cost" borne by users who have to decide, over and over again, whether they want to spend a millionth of a cent on a millionth of a word -- no one buys newspapers by the paragraph, even though most of us only read a slim fraction of any given paper. A super-sharp, super-portable screen would be used to read all day long, but most of us won't spend most of our time reading anything recognizable as a book on them. + +Take the record album. Everything about it is technologically pre-determined. The technology of the LP demanded artwork to differentiate one package from the next. The length was set by the groove density of the pressing plants and playback apparatus. The dynamic range likewise. These factors gave us the idea of the 40-to-60-minute package, split into two acts, with accompanying artwork. Musicians were encouraged to create works that would be enjoyed as a unitary whole for a protracted period -- think of Dark Side of the Moon, or Sgt. Pepper's. + +No one thinks about albums today. Music is now divisible to the single, as represented by an individual MP3, and then subdivisible into snippets like ringtones and samples. When recording artists demand that their works be considered as a whole -- like when Radiohead insisted that the iTunes Music Store sell their whole album as a single, indivisible file that you would have to listen to all the way through -- they sound like cranky throwbacks. + +The idea of a 60-minute album is as weird in the Internet era as the idea of sitting through 15 hours of Der Ring des Nibelungen was 20 years ago. There are some anachronisms who love their long-form opera, but the real action is in the more fluid stuff that can slither around on hot wax -- and now the superfluid droplets of MP3s and samples. Opera survives, but it is a tiny sliver of a much bigger, looser music market. The future composts the past: old operas get mounted for living anachronisms; Andrew Lloyd Webber picks up the rest of the business. + +Or look at digital video. We're watching more digital video, sooner, than anyone imagined. But we're watching it in three-minute chunks from YouTube. The video's got a pause button so you can stop it when the phone rings and a scrubber to go back and forth when you miss something while answering an IM. + +And attention spans don't increase when you move from the PC to a handheld device. These things have less capacity for multitasking than real PCs, and the network connections are slower and more expensive. But they are fundamentally multitasking devices -- you can always stop reading an e-book to play a hand of solitaire that is interrupted by a phone call -- and their social context is that they are used in public places, with a million distractions. It is socially acceptable to interrupt someone who is looking at a PDA screen. By contrast, the TV room -- a whole room for TV! -- is a shrine where none may speak until the commercial airs. + +The problem, then, isn't that screens aren't sharp enough to read novels off of. The problem is that novels aren't screeny enough to warrant protracted, regular reading on screens. + +Electronic books are a wonderful adjunct to print books. It's great to have a couple hundred novels in your pocket when the plane doesn't take off or the line is too long at the post office. It's cool to be able to search the text of a novel to find a beloved passage. It's excellent to use a novel socially, sending it to your friends, pasting it into your sig file. + +But the numbers tell their own story -- people who read off of screens all day long buy lots of print books and read them primarily on paper. There are some who prefer an all-electronic existence (I'd like to be able to get rid of the objects after my first reading, but keep the e-books around for reference), but they're in a tiny minority. + +There's a generation of web writers who produce "pleasure reading" on the web. Some are funny. Some are touching. Some are enraging. Most dwell in Sturgeon's 90th percentile and below. They're not writing novels. If they were, they wouldn't be web writers. + +Mostly, we can read just enough of a free e-book to decide whether to buy it in hardcopy -- but not enough to substitute the e-book for the hardcopy. Like practically everything in marketing and promotion, the trick is to find the form of the work that serves as enticement, not replacement. + +Sorry, got to go -- eight more e-mails. + +$$$$ + +1~ How Do You Protect Artists? + +(Originally published in The Guardian as "Online censorship hurts us all," Tuesday, Oct 2, 2007) ~# + +Artists have lots of problems. We get plagiarized, ripped off by publishers, savaged by critics, counterfeited -- and we even get our works copied by "pirates" who give our stuff away for free online. + +But no matter how bad these problems get, they're a distant second to the gravest, most terrifying problem an artist can face: censorship. + +It's one thing to be denied your credit or compensation, but it's another thing entirely to have your work suppressed, burned or banned. You'd never know it, however, judging from the state of the law surrounding the creation and use of internet publishing tools. + +Since 1995, every single legislative initiative on this subject in the UK's parliament, the European parliament and the US Congress has focused on making it easier to suppress "illegitimate" material online. From libel to copyright infringement, from child porn to anti-terror laws, our legislators have approached the internet with a single-minded focus on seeing to it that bad material is expeditiously removed. + +And that's the rub. I'm certainly no fan of child porn or hate speech, but every time a law is passed that reduces the burden of proof on those who would remove material from the internet, artists' fortunes everywhere are endangered. + +Take the US's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has equivalents in every European state that has implemented the 2001 European Union Copyright Directive. The DMCA allows anyone to have any document on the internet removed, simply by contacting its publisher and asserting that the work infringes his copyright. + +The potential for abuse is obvious, and the abuse has been widespread: from the Church of Scientology to companies that don't like what reporters write about them, DMCA takedown notices have fast become the favorite weapon in the cowardly bully's arsenal. + +But takedown notices are just the start. While they can help silence critics and suppress timely information, they're not actually very effective at stopping widespread copyright infringement. Viacom sent over 100,000 takedown notices to YouTube last February, but seconds after it was all removed, new users uploaded it again. + +Even these takedown notices were sloppily constructed: they included videos of friends eating at barbecue restaurants and videos of independent bands performing their own work. As a Recording Industry Association of America spokesman quipped, "When you go trawling with a net, you catch a few dolphins." + +Viacom and others want hosting companies and online service providers to preemptively evaluate all the material that their users put online, holding it to ensure that it doesn't infringe copyright before they release it. + +This notion is impractical in the extreme, for at least two reasons. First, an exhaustive list of copyrighted works would be unimaginably huge, as every single creative work is copyrighted from the instant that it is created and "fixed in a tangible medium". + +Second, even if such a list did exist, it would be trivial to defeat, simply by introducing small changes to the infringing copies, as spammers do with the text of their messages in order to evade spam filters. + +In fact, the spam wars have some important lessons to teach us here. Like copyrighted works, spams are infinitely varied and more are being created every second. Any company that could identify spam messages -- including permutations and variations on existing spams -- could write its own ticket to untold billions. + +Some of the smartest, most dedicated engineers on the planet devote every waking hour to figuring out how to spot spam before it gets delivered. If your inbox is anything like mine, you'll agree that the war is far from won. + +If the YouTubes of the world are going to prevent infringement, they're going to have to accomplish this by hand-inspecting every one of the tens of billions of blog posts, videos, text-files, music files and software uploads made to every single server on the internet. + +And not just cursory inspections, either -- these inspections will have to be undertaken by skilled, trained specialists (who'd better be talented linguists, too -- how many English speakers can spot an infringement in Urdu?). + +Such experts don't come cheap, which means that you can anticipate a terrible denuding of the fertile jungle of internet hosting companies that are primary means by which tens of millions of creative people share the fruits of their labor with their fans and colleagues. + +It would be a great Sovietisation of the world's digital printing presses, a contraction of a glorious anarchy of expression into a regimented world of expensive and narrow venues for art. + +It would be a death knell for the kind of focused, non-commercial material whose authors couldn't fit the bill for a "managed" service's legion of lawyers, who would be replaced by more of the same -- the kind of lowest common denominator rubbish that fills the cable channels today. + +And the worst of it is, we're marching toward this "solution" in the name of protecting artists. Gee, thanks. + +$$$$ + +1~ It's the Information Economy, Stupid + +(Originally published in The Guardian as "Free data sharing is here to stay," September 18, 2007) ~# + +Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an "information economy." The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations of the world's governments. For decades now, they have been creating policies to "protect" information -- stronger copyright laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to protect anti-copying technology. + +The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you've paid for it. That means that we have to make it harder for you to share information, even after you've paid for it. Without the ability to fence off your information property, you can't have an information market to fuel the information economy. + +But this is a tragic case of misunderstanding a metaphor. Just as the industrial economy wasn't based on making it harder to get access to machines, the information economy won't be based on making it harder to get access to information. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true: the more IT we have, the easier it is to access any given piece of information -- for better or for worse. + +It used to be that copy-prevention companies' strategies went like this: "We'll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an unauthorized copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy." But every time a PC is connected to the Internet and its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from the Internet. Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by searching for the cracked copy on the public Internet. If there's one thing we can be sure of, it's that an information economy will increase the technological literacy of its participants. + +As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel room in Shanghai, behind the Great Firewall of China. Theoretically, I can't access blogging services that carry negative accounts of Beijing's doings, like Wordpress, Blogspot and Livejournal, nor the image-sharing site Flickr, nor Wikipedia. The (theoretically) omnipotent bureaucrats of the local Minitrue have deployed their finest engineering talent to stop me. Well, these cats may be able to order political prisoners executed and their organs harvested for Party members, but they've totally failed to keep Chinese people (and big-nose tourists like me) off the world's Internet. The WTO is rattling its sabers at China today, demanding that they figure out how to stop Chinese people from looking at Bruce Willis movies without permission -- but the Chinese government can't even figure out how to stop Chinese people from looking at seditious revolutionary tracts online. + +And, of course, as Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology and the King of Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of information off the Internet is like getting food coloring out of a swimming pool. Good luck with that. + +To see the evidence of the real information economy, look to all the economic activity that the Internet enables -- not the stuff that it impedes. All the commerce conducted by salarymen who can book their own flights with Expedia instead of playing blind-man's bluff with a travel agent ("Got any flights after 4PM to Frankfurt?"). All the garage crafters selling their goods on Etsy.com. All the publishers selling obscure books through Amazon that no physical bookstore was willing to carry. The salwar kameez tailors in India selling bespoke clothes to westerners via eBay, without intervention by a series of skimming intermediaries. The Internet-era musicians who use the net to pack venues all over the world by giving away their recordings on social services like MySpace. Hell, look at my last barber, in Los Angeles: the man doesn't use a PC, but I found him by googling for "barbers" with my postcode -- the information economy is driving his cost of customer acquisition to zero, and he doesn't even have to actively participate in it. + +Better access to more information is the hallmark of the information economy. The more IT we have, the more skill we have, the faster our networks get and the better our search tools get, the more economic activity the information economy generates. Many of us sell information in the information economy -- I sell my printed books by giving away electronic books, lawyers and architects and consultants are in the information business and they drum up trade with Google ads, and Google is nothing but an info-broker -- but none of us rely on curtailing access to information. Like a bottled water company, we compete with free by supplying a superior service, not by eliminating the competition. + +The world's governments might have bought into the old myth of the information economy, but not so much that they're willing to ban the PC and the Internet. + +$$$$ + +1~ Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever + +(Originally published in The Guardian, December 11, 2007) ~# + +Let me start by saying that I love Amazon. I buy everything from books to clothes to electronics to medication to food to batteries to toys to furniture to baby supplies from the company. I once even bought an ironing board on Amazon. No company can top them for ease of use or for respecting consumer rights when it comes to refunds, ensuring satisfaction, and taking good care of loyal customers. + +As a novelist, I couldn't be happier about Amazon's existence. Not only does Amazon have a set of superb recommendation tools that help me sell books, but it also has an affiliate program that lets me get up to 8.5% in commissions for sales of my books through the site - nearly doubling my royalty rate. + +As a consumer advocate and activist, I'm delighted by almost every public policy initiative from Amazon. When the Author's Guild tried to get Amazon to curtail its used-book market, the company refused to back down. Founder Jeff Bezos (who is a friend of mine) even wrote, "when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this." + +More recently, Amazon stood up to the US government, who'd gone on an illegal fishing expedition for terrorists (TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS!) and asked Amazon to turn over the purchasing history of 24,000 Amazon customers. The company spent a fortune fighting for our rights, and won. + +It also has a well-deserved reputation for taking care over copyright "takedown" notices for the material that its customers post on its site, discarding ridiculous claims rather than blindly acting on every single notice, no matter how frivolous. + +But for all that, it has to be said: Whenever Amazon tries to sell a digital download, it turns into one of the dumbest companies on the web. + +Take the Kindle, the $400 handheld ebook reader that Amazon shipped recently, to vast, ringing indifference. + +The device is cute enough - in a clumsy, overpriced, generation-one kind of way - but the early adopter community recoiled in horror at the terms of service and anti-copying technology that infected it. Ebooks that you buy through the Kindle can't be lent or resold (remember, "when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book...Everyone understands this.") + +Mark Pilgrim's "The Future of Reading" enumerates five other Kindle showstoppers: Amazon can change your ebooks without notifying you or getting your permission; and if you violate any of the "agreement", it can delete your ebooks, even if you've paid for them, and you get no appeal. + + +It's not just the Kindle, either. Amazon Unbox, the semi-abortive video download service, shipped with terms of service that included your granting permission for Amazon to install any software on your computer, to spy on you, to delete your videos, to delete any other file on your hard drive, to deny you access to your movies if you lose them in a crash. This comes from the company that will cheerfully ship you a replacement DVD if you email them and tell them that the one you just bought never turned up in the post. + +Even Amazon's much-vaunted MP3 store comes with terms of service that prevent lending and reselling. + +I am mystified by this. Amazon is the kind of company that every etailer should study and copy - the gold standard for e-commerce. You'd think that if there was any company that would intuitively get the web, it would be Amazon. + +What's more, this is a company that stands up to rightsholder groups, publishers and the US government - but only when it comes to physical goods. Why is it that whenever a digital sale is in the offing, Amazon rolls over on its back and wets itself? + +$$$$ + +1~ What's the Most Important Right Creators Have? + +(Originally published as "How Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression," InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) ~# + +Any discussion of "creator's rights" is likely to be limited to talk about copyright, but copyright is just a side-dish for creators: the most important right we have is the right to free expression. And these two rights are always in tension. + +Take Viacom's claims against YouTube. The entertainment giant says that YouTube has been profiting from the fact that YouTube users upload clips from Viacom shows, and they demand that YouTube take steps to prevent this from happening in the future. YouTube actually offered to do something very like this: they invited Viacom and other rightsholders to send them all the clips they wanted kept offline, and promised to programatically detect these clips and interdict them. + +But Viacom rejected this offer. Rather, the company wants YouTube to just figure it out, determine a priori which video clips are being presented with permission and which ones are not. After all, Viacom does the very same thing: it won't air clips until a battalion of lawyers have investigated them and determined whether they are lawful. + +But the Internet is not cable television. Net-based hosting outfits -- including YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, Scribd, and the Internet Archive -- offer free publication venues to all comers, enabling anyone to publish anything. In 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Congress considered the question of liability for these companies and decided to offer them a mixed deal: hosting companies don't need to hire a million lawyers to review every blog-post before it goes live, but rightsholders can order them to remove any infringing material from the net just by sending them a notice that the material infringes. + +This deal enabled hosting companies to offer free platforms for publication and expression to everyone. But it also allowed anyone to censor the Internet, just by making claims of infringement, without offering any evidence to support those claims, without having to go to court to prove their claims (this has proven to be an attractive nuisance, presenting an irresistible lure to anyone with a beef against an online critic, from the Church of Scientology to Diebold's voting machines division). + +The proposal for online hosts to figure out what infringes and what doesn't is wildly impractical. Under most countries' copyright laws, creative works receive a copyright from the moment that they are "fixed in a tangible medium" (hard drives count), and this means that the pool of copyrighted works is so large as to be practically speaking infinite. Knowing whether a work is copyrighted, who holds the copyright, and whether a posting is made with the rightsholder's permission (or in accord with each nation's varying ideas about fair use) is impossible. The only way to be sure is to start from the presumption that each creative work is infringing, and then make each Internet user prove, to some lawyer's satisfaction, that she has the right to post each drib of content that appears on the Web. + +Imagine that such a system were the law of the land. There's no way Blogger or YouTube or Flickr could afford to offer free hosting to their users. Rather, all these hosted services would have to charge enough for access to cover the scorching legal bills associated with checking all material. And not just the freebies, either: your local ISP, the servers hosting your company's website or your page for family genealogy: they'd all have to do the same kind of continuous checking and re-checking of every file you publish with them. + +It would be the end of any publication that couldn't foot the legal bills to get off the ground. The multi-billion-page Internet would collapse into the homogeneous world of cable TV (remember when we thought that a "500-channel universe" would be unimaginably broad? Imagine an Internet with only 500 "channels!"). From Amazon to Ask A Ninja, from Blogger to The Everlasting Blort, every bit of online content is made possible by removing the cost of paying lawyers to act as the Internet's gatekeepers. + +This is great news for artists. The traditional artist's lament is that our publishers have us over a barrel, controlling the narrow and vital channels for making works available -- from big gallery owners to movie studios to record labels to New York publishers. That's why artists have such a hard time negotiating a decent deal for themselves (for example, most beginning recording artists have to agree to have money deducted from their royalty statements for "breakage" of records en route to stores -- and these deductions are also levied against digital sales through the iTunes Store!). + +But, thanks to the web, artists have more options than ever. The Internet's most popular video podcasts aren't associated with TV networks (with all the terrible, one-sided deals that would entail), rather, they're independent programs like RocketBoom, Homestar Runner, or the late, lamented Ze Frank Show. These creators -- along with all the musicians, writers, and other artists using the net to earn their living -- were able to write their own ticket. Today, major artists like Radiohead and Madonna are leaving the record labels behind and trying novel, net-based ways of promoting their work. + +And it's not just the indies who benefit: the existence of successful independent artists creates fantastic leverage for artists who negotiate with the majors. More and more, the big media companies' "like it or leave it" bargaining stance is being undermined by the possibility that the next big star will shrug, turn on her heel, and make her fortune without the big companies' help. This has humbled the bigs, making their deals better and more artist-friendly. + +Bargaining leverage is just for starters. The greatest threat that art faces is suppression. Historically, artists have struggled just to make themselves heard, just to safeguard the right to express themselves. Censorship is history's greatest enemy of art. A limited-liability Web is a Web where anyone can post anything and reach *{everyone}*. + +What's more, this privilege isn't limited to artists. All manner of communication, from the personal introspection in public "diaries" to social chatter on MySpace and Facebook, are now possible. Some artists have taken the bizarre stance that this "trivial" matter is unimportant and thus a poor excuse for allowing hosted services to exist in the first place. This is pretty arrogant: a society where only artists are allowed to impart "important" messages and where the rest of us are supposed to shut up about our loves, hopes, aspirations, jokes, family and wants is hardly a democratic paradise. + +Artists are in the free expression business, and technology that helps free expression helps artists. When lowering the cost of copyright enforcement raises the cost of free speech, every artist has a duty to speak out. Our ability to make our art is inextricably linked with the billions of Internet users who use the network to talk about their lives. + +$$$$ + +1~ Giving it Away + +(Originally published in Forbes.com, December 2006) ~# + +I've been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money. + +When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons License that encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide. Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my site (and those downloaders were in turn free to make more copies). Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded from my site. The book's been translated into more languages than I can keep track of, key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects and there are two competing fan audio adaptations online. + +Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn't have bought it in any event, so I haven't lost any sales, I've just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book--those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They're gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I'm ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing. + +The thing about an e-book is that it's a social object. It wants to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device, pasted into a mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation--when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were "My friend suggested I pick up...." The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth. + +There are two things that writers ask me about this arrangement: First, does it sell more books, and second, how did you talk your publisher into going for this mad scheme? + +There's no empirical way to prove that giving away books sells more books--but I've done this with three novels and a short story collection (and I'll be doing it with two more novels and another collection in the next year), and my books have consistently outperformed my publisher's expectations. Comparing their sales to the numbers provided by colleagues suggests that they perform somewhat better than other books from similar writers at similar stages in their careers. But short of going back in time and re-releasing the same books under the same circumstances without the free e-book program, there's no way to be sure. + +What is certain is that every writer who's tried giving away e-books to sell books has come away satisfied and ready to do it some more. + +How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It's not as if Tor is a spunky dotcom upstart. They're the largest science fiction publisher in the world, and they're a division of the German publishing giant Holtzbrinck. They're not patchouli-scented info-hippies who believe that information wants to be free. Rather, they're canny assessors of the world of science fiction, perhaps the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary conventions in every corner of the globe, every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import. They evangelize the books they love, form subcultures around them, cite them in political arguments, sometimes they even rearrange their lives and jobs around them. + +What's more, science fiction's early adopters defined the social character of the Internet itself. Given the high correlation between technical employment and science fiction reading, it was inevitable that the first nontechnical discussion on the Internet would be about science fiction. The online norms of idle chatter, fannish organizing, publishing and leisure are descended from SF fandom, and if any literature has a natural home in cyberspace, it's science fiction, the literature that coined the very word "cyberspace." + +Indeed, science fiction was the first form of widely pirated literature online, through "bookwarez" channels that contained books that had been hand-scanned, a page at a time, converted to digital text and proof-read. Even today, the mostly widely pirated literature online is SF. + +Nothing could make me more sanguine about the future. As publisher Tim O'Reilly wrote in his seminal essay, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, "being well-enough known to be pirated [is] a crowning achievement." I'd rather stake my future on a literature that people care about enough to steal than devote my life to a form that has no home in the dominant medium of the century. + +What about that future? Many writers fear that in the future, electronic books will come to substitute more readily for print books, due to changing audiences and improved technology. I am skeptical of this--the codex format has endured for centuries as a simple and elegant answer to the affordances demanded by print, albeit for a relatively small fraction of the population. Most people aren't and will never be readers--but the people who are readers will be readers forever, and they are positively pervy for paper. + +But say it does come to pass that electronic books are all anyone wants. + +I don't think it's practical to charge for copies of electronic works. Bits aren't ever going to get harder to copy. So we'll have to figure out how to charge for something else. That's not to say you can't charge for a copy-able bit, but you sure can't force a reader to pay for access to information anymore. + +This isn't the first time creative entrepreneurs have gone through one of these transitions. Vaudeville performers had to transition to radio, an abrupt shift from having perfect control over who could hear a performance (if they don't buy a ticket, you throw them out) to no control whatsoever (any family whose 12-year-old could build a crystal set, the day's equivalent of installing file-sharing software, could tune in). There were business models for radio, but predicting them a priori wasn't easy. Who could have foreseen that radio's great fortunes would be had through creating a blanket license, securing a Congressional consent decree, chartering a collecting society and inventing a new form of statistical mathematics to fund it? + +Predicting the future of publishing--should the wind change and printed books become obsolete--is just as hard. I don't know how writers would earn their living in such a world, but I do know that I'll never find out by turning my back on the Internet. By being in the middle of electronic publishing, by watching what hundreds of thousands of my readers do with my e-books, I get better market intelligence than I could through any other means. As does my publisher. As serious as I am about continuing to work as a writer for the foreseeable future, Tor Books and Holtzbrinck are just as serious. They've got even more riding on the future of publishing than me. So when I approached my publisher with this plan to give away books to sell books, it was a no-brainer for them. + +It's good business for me, too. This "market research" of giving away e-books sells printed books. What's more, having my books more widely read opens many other opportunities for me to earn a living from activities around my writing, such as the Fulbright Chair I got at USC this year, this high-paying article in Forbes, speaking engagements and other opportunities to teach, write and license my work for translation and adaptation. My fans' tireless evangelism for my work doesn't just sell books--it sells me. + +The golden age of hundreds of writers who lived off of nothing but their royalties is bunkum. Throughout history, writers have relied on day jobs, teaching, grants, inheritances, translation, licensing and other varied sources to make ends meet. The Internet not only sells more books for me, it also gives me more opportunities to earn my keep through writing-related activities. + +There has never been a time when more people were reading more words by more authors. The Internet is a literary world of written words. What a fine thing that is for writers. + +$$$$ + +1~ Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) + +As a science fiction writer, no piece of news could make me more hopeful. It beats the hell out of the alternative -- a future where the dominant, pluripotent, ubiquitous medium has no place for science fiction literature. + +When radio and records were invented, they were pretty bad news for the performers of the day. Live performance demanded charisma, the ability to really put on a magnetic show in front of a crowd. It didn't matter how technically accomplished you were: if you stood like a statue on stage, no one wanted to see you do your thing. On the other hand, you succeeded as a mediocre player, provided you attacked your performance with a lot of brio. + +Radio was clearly good news for musicians -- lots more musicians were able to make lots more music, reaching lots more people and making lots more money. It turned performance into an industry, which is what happens when you add technology to art. But it was terrible news for charismatics. It put them out on the street, stuck them with flipping burgers and driving taxis. They knew it, too. Performers lobbied to have the Marconi radio banned, to send Marconi back to the drawing board, charged with inventing a radio they could charge admission to. "We're charismatics, we do something as old and holy as the first story told before the first fire in the first cave. What right have you to insist that we should become mere clerks, working in an obscure back-room, leaving you to commune with our audiences on our behalf?" + +Technology giveth and technology taketh away. Seventy years later, Napster showed us that, as William Gibson noted, "We may be at the end of the brief period during which it is possible to charge for recorded music." Surely we're at the end of the period where it's possible to exclude those who don't wish to pay. Every song released can be downloaded gratis from a peer-to-peer network (and will shortly get easier to download, as hard-drive price/performance curves take us to a place where all the music ever recorded will fit on a disposable pocket-drive that you can just walk over to a friend's place and copy). + +But have no fear: the Internet makes it possible for recording artists to reach a wider audience than ever dreamt of before. Your potential fans may be spread in a thin, even coat over the world, in a configuration that could never be cost-effective to reach with traditional marketing. But the Internet's ability to lower the costs for artists to reach their audiences and for audiences to find artists suddenly renders possible more variety in music than ever before. + +Those artists can use the Internet to bring people back to the live performances that characterized the heyday of Vaudeville. Use your recordings -- which you can't control -- to drive admissions to your performances, which you can control. It's a model that's worked great for jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish. It's also a model that won't work for many of today's artists; 70 years of evolutionary pressure has selected for artists who are more virtuoso than charismatic, artists optimized for recording-based income instead of performance-based income. "How dare you tell us that we are to be trained monkeys, capering on a stage for your amusement? We're not charismatics, we're white-collar workers. We commune with our muses behind closed doors and deliver up our work product when it's done, through plastic, laser-etched discs. You have no right to demand that we convert to a live-performance economy." + +Technology giveth and technology taketh away. As bands on MySpace -- who can fill houses and sell hundreds of thousands of discs without a record deal, by connecting individually with fans -- have shown, there's a new market aborning on the Internet for music, one with fewer gatekeepers to creativity than ever before. + +That's the purpose of copyright, after all: to decentralize who gets to make art. Before copyright, we had patronage: you could make art if the Pope or the king liked the sound of it. That produced some damned pretty ceilings and frescos, but it wasn't until control of art was given over to the market -- by giving publishers a monopoly over the works they printed, starting with the Statute of Anne in 1710 -- that we saw the explosion of creativity that investment-based art could create. Industrialists weren't great arbiters of who could and couldn't make art, but they were better than the Pope. + +The Internet is enabling a further decentralization in who gets to make art, and like each of the technological shifts in cultural production, it's good for some artists and bad for others. The important question is: will it let more people participate in cultural production? Will it further decentralize decision-making for artists? + +And for SF writers and fans, the further question is, "Will it be any good to our chosen medium?" Like I said, science fiction is the only literature people care enough about to steal on the Internet. It's the only literature that regularly shows up, scanned and run through optical character recognition software and lovingly hand-edited on darknet newsgroups, Russian websites, IRC channels and elsewhere (yes, there's also a brisk trade in comics and technical books, but I'm talking about prose fiction here -- though this is clearly a sign of hope for our friends in tech publishing and funnybooks). + +Some writers are using the Internet's affinity for SF to great effect. I've released every one of my novels under Creative Commons licenses that encourage fans to share them freely and widely -- even, in some cases, to remix them and to make new editions of them for use in the developing world. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is in its sixth printing from Tor, and has been downloaded more than 650,000 times from my website, and an untold number of times from others' websites. + +I've discovered what many authors have also discovered: releasing electronic texts of books drives sales of the print editions. An SF writer's biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy. Of all the people who chose not to spend their discretionary time and cash on our works today, the great bulk of them did so because they didn't know they existed, not because someone handed them a free e-book version. + +But what kind of artist thrives on the Internet? Those who can establish a personal relationship with their readers -- something science fiction has been doing for as long as pros have been hanging out in the con suite instead of the green room. These conversational artists come from all fields, and they combine the best aspects of charisma and virtuosity with charm -- the ability to conduct their online selves as part of a friendly salon that establishes a non-substitutable relationship with their audiences. You might find a film, a game, and a book to be equally useful diversions on a slow afternoon, but if the novel's author is a pal of yours, that's the one you'll pick. It's a competitive advantage that can't be beat. + +See Neil Gaiman's blog, where he manages the trick of carrying on a conversation with millions. Or Charlie Stross's Usenet posts. Scalzi's blogs. J. Michael Straczynski's presence on Usenet -- while in production on Babylon 5, no less -- breeding an army of rabid fans ready to fax-bomb recalcitrant TV execs into submission and syndication. See also the MySpace bands selling a million units of their CDs by adding each buyer to their "friends lists." Watch Eric Flint manage the Baen Bar, and Warren Ellis's good-natured growling on his sites, lists, and so forth. + +Not all artists have in them to conduct an online salon with their audiences. Not all Vaudevillians had it in them to transition to radio. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. SF writers are supposed to be soaked in the future, ready to come to grips with it. The future is conversational: when there's more good stuff that you know about that's one click away or closer than you will ever click on, it's not enough to know that some book is good. The least substitutable good in the Internet era is the personal relationship. + +Conversation, not content, is king. If you were stranded on a desert island and you opted to bring your records instead of your friends, we'd call you a sociopath. Science fiction writers who can insert themselves into their readers' conversations will be set for life. + +$$$$ + +1~ How Copyright Broke + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) ~# + +The theory is that if the Internet can't be controlled, then copyright is dead. The thing is, the Internet is a machine for copying things cheaply, quickly, and with as little control as possible, while copyright is the right to control who gets to make copies, so these two abstractions seem destined for a fatal collision, right? + +Wrong. + +The idea that copyright confers the exclusive right to control copying, performance, adaptation, and general use of a creative work is a polite fiction that has been mostly harmless throughout its brief history, but which has been laid bare by the Internet, and the disjoint is showing. + +Theoretically, if I sell you a copy of one of my novels, I'm conferring upon you a property interest in a lump of atoms -- the pages of the book -- as well as a license to make some reasonable use of the ethereal ideas embedded upon the page, the copyrighted work. + +Copyright started with a dispute between Scottish and English publishers, and the first copyright law, 1709's Statute of Anne, conferred the exclusive right to publish new editions of a book on the copyright holder. It was a fair competition statute, and it was silent on the rights that the copyright holder had in respect of his customers: the readers. Publishers got a legal tool to fight their competitors, a legal tool that made a distinction between the corpus -- a physical book -- and the spirit -- the novel writ on its pages. But this legal nicety was not "customer-facing." As far as a reader was concerned, once she bought a book, she got the same rights to it as she got to any other physical object, like a potato or a shovel. Of course, the reader couldn't print a new edition, but this had as much to do with the realities of technology as it did with the law. Printing presses were rare and expensive: telling a 17th-century reader that he wasn't allowed to print a new edition of a book you sold him was about as meaningful as telling him he wasn't allowed to have it laser-etched on the surface of the moon. Publishing books wasn't something readers did. + +Indeed, until the photocopier came along, it was practically impossible for a member of the audience to infringe copyright in a way that would rise to legal notice. Copyright was like a tank-mine, designed only to go off when a publisher or record company or radio station rolled over it. We civilians couldn't infringe copyright (many thanks to Jamie Boyle for this useful analogy). + +It wasn't the same for commercial users of copyrighted works. For the most part, a radio station that played a record was expected to secure permission to do so (though this permission usually comes in the form of a government-sanctioned blanket license that cuts through all the expense of negotiating in favor of a single monthly payment that covers all radio play). If you shot a movie, you were expected to get permission for the music you put in it. Critically, there are many uses that commercial users never paid for. Most workplaces don't pay for the music their employees enjoy while they work. An ad agency that produces a demo reel of recent commercials to use as part of a creative briefing to a designer doesn't pay for this extremely commercial use. A film company whose set-designer clips and copies from magazines and movies to produce a "mood book" never secures permission nor offers compensation for these uses. + +Theoretically, the contours of what you may and may not do without permission are covered under a legal doctrine called "fair use," which sets out the factors a judge can use to weigh the question of whether an infringement should be punished. While fair use is a vital part of the way that works get made and used, it's very rare for an unauthorized use to get adjudicated on this basis. + +No, the realpolitik of unauthorized use is that users are not required to secure permission for uses that the rights holder will never discover. If you put some magazine clippings in your mood book, the magazine publisher will never find out you did so. If you stick a Dilbert cartoon on your office-door, Scott Adams will never know about it. + +So while technically the law has allowed rights holders to infinitely discriminate among the offerings they want to make -- Special discounts on this book, which may only be read on Wednesdays! This film half-price, if you agree only to show it to people whose names start with D! -- practicality has dictated that licenses could only be offered on enforceable terms. + +When it comes to retail customers for information goods -- readers, listeners, watchers -- this whole license abstraction falls flat. No one wants to believe that the book he's brought home is only partly his, and subject to the terms of a license set out on the flyleaf. You'd be a flaming jackass if you showed up at a con and insisted that your book may not be read aloud, nor photocopied in part and marked up for a writers' workshop, nor made the subject of a piece of fan-fiction. + +At the office, you might get a sweet deal on a coffee machine on the promise that you'll use a certain brand of coffee, and even sign off on a deal to let the coffee company check in on this from time to time. But no one does this at home. We instinctively and rightly recoil from the idea that our personal, private dealings in our homes should be subject to oversight from some company from whom we've bought something. We bought it. It's ours. Even when we rent things, like cars, we recoil from the idea that Hertz might track our movements, or stick a camera in the steering wheel. + +When the Internet and the PC made it possible to sell a lot of purely digital "goods" -- software, music, movies and books delivered as pure digits over the wire, without a physical good changing hands, the copyright lawyers groped about for a way to take account of this. It's in the nature of a computer that it copies what you put on it. A computer is said to be working, and of high quality, in direct proportion to the degree to which it swiftly and accurately copies the information that it is presented with. + +The copyright lawyers had a versatile hammer in their toolbox: the copyright license. These licenses had been presented to corporations for years. Frustratingly (for the lawyers), these corporate customers had their own counsel, and real bargaining power, which made it impossible to impose really interesting conditions on them, like limiting the use of a movie such that it couldn't be fast-forwarded, or preventing the company from letting more than one employee review a journal at a time. + +Regular customers didn't have lawyers or negotiating leverage. They were a natural for licensing regimes. Have a look at the next click-through "agreement" you're provided with on purchasing a piece of software or an electronic book or song. The terms set out in those agreements are positively Dickensian in their marvelous idiocy. Sony BMG recently shipped over eight million music CDs with an "agreement" that bound its purchasers to destroy their music if they left the country or had a house-fire, and to promise not to listen to their tunes while at work. + +But customers understand property -- you bought it, you own it -- and they don't understand copyright. Practically no one understands copyright. I know editors at multibillion-dollar publishing houses who don't know the difference between copyright and trademark (if you've ever heard someone say, "You need to defend a copyright or you lose it," you've found one of these people who confuse copyright and trademark; what's more, this statement isn't particularly true of trademark, either). I once got into an argument with a senior Disney TV exec who truly believed that if you re-broadcasted an old program, it was automatically re-copyrighted and got another 95 years of exclusive use (that's wrong). + +So this is where copyright breaks: When copyright lawyers try to treat readers and listeners and viewers as if they were (weak and unlucky) corporations who could be strong-armed into license agreements you wouldn't wish on a dog. There's no conceivable world in which people are going to tiptoe around the property they've bought and paid for, re-checking their licenses to make sure that they're abiding by the terms of an agreement they doubtless never read. Why read something if it's non-negotiable, anyway? + +The answer is simple: treat your readers' property as property. What readers do with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors, is not a fit subject for copyright regulation or oversight. The Securities Exchange Commission doesn't impose rules on you when you loan a friend five bucks for lunch. Anti-gambling laws aren't triggered when you bet your kids an ice-cream cone that you'll bicycle home before them. Copyright shouldn't come between an end-user of a creative work and her property. + +Of course, this approach is made even simpler by the fact that practically every customer for copyrighted works already operates on this assumption. Which is not to say that this might make some business-models more difficult to pursue. Obviously, if there was some way to ensure that a given publisher was the only source for a copyrighted work, that publisher could hike up its prices, devote less money to service, and still sell its wares. Having to compete with free copies handed from user to user makes life harder -- hasn't it always? + +But it is most assuredly possible. Look at Apple's wildly popular iTunes Music Store, which has sold over one billion tracks since 2003. Every song on iTunes is available as a free download from user-to-user, peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa. Indeed, the P2P monitoring company Big Champagne reports that the average time-lapse between a iTunes-exclusive song being offered by Apple and that same song being offered on P2P networks is 180 seconds. + +Every iTunes customer could readily acquire every iTunes song for free, using the fastest-adopted technology in history. Many of them do (just as many fans photocopy their favorite stories from magazines and pass them around to friends). But Apple has figured out how to compete well enough by offering a better service and a better experience to realize a good business out of this. (Apple also imposes ridiculous licensing restrictions, but that's a subject for a future column). + +Science fiction is a genre of clear-eyed speculation about the future. It should have no place for wishful thinking about a world where readers willingly put up with the indignity of being treated as "licensees" instead of customers. + +$$$$ + +!_ And now a brief commercial interlude: + +If you're enjoying this book and have been thinking of buying a copy, here's a chance to do so: + +http://craphound.com/content/buy + +$$$$ + +1~ In Praise of Fanfic + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) ~# + +I wrote my first story when I was six. It was 1977, and I had just had my mind blown clean out of my skull by a new movie called Star Wars (the golden age of science fiction is 12; the golden age of cinematic science fiction is six). I rushed home and stapled a bunch of paper together, trimmed the sides down so that it approximated the size and shape of a mass-market paperback, and set to work. I wrote an elaborate, incoherent ramble about Star Wars, in which the events of the film replayed themselves, tweaked to suit my tastes. + +I wrote a lot of Star Wars fanfic that year. By the age of 12, I'd graduated to Conan. By the age of 18, it was Harlan Ellison. By the age of 26, it was Bradbury, by way of Gibson. Today, I hope I write more or less like myself. + +Walk the streets of Florence and you'll find a copy of the David on practically every corner. For centuries, the way to become a Florentine sculptor has been to copy Michelangelo, to learn from the master. Not just the great Florentine sculptors, either -- great or terrible, they all start with the master; it can be the start of a lifelong passion, or a mere fling. The copy can be art, or it can be crap -- the best way to find out which kind you've got inside you is to try. + +Science fiction has the incredible good fortune to have attracted huge, social groups of fan-fiction writers. Many pros got their start with fanfic (and many of them still work at it in secret), and many fanfic writers are happy to scratch their itch by working only with others' universes, for the sheer joy of it. Some fanfic is great -- there's plenty of Buffy fanfic that trumps the official, licensed tie-in novels -- and some is purely dreadful. + +Two things are sure about all fanfic, though: first, that people who write and read fanfic are already avid readers of writers whose work they're paying homage to; and second, that the people who write and read fanfic derive fantastic satisfaction from their labors. This is great news for writers. + +Great because fans who are so bought into your fiction that they'll make it their own are fans forever, fans who'll evangelize your work to their friends, fans who'll seek out your work however you publish it. + +Great because fans who use your work therapeutically, to work out their own creative urges, are fans who have a damned good reason to stick with the field, to keep on reading even as our numbers dwindle. Even when the fandom revolves around movies or TV shows, fanfic is itself a literary pursuit, something undertaken in the world of words. The fanfic habit is a literary habit. + +In Japan, comic book fanfic writers publish fanfic manga called dojinshi -- some of these titles dwarf the circulation of the work they pay tribute to, and many of them are sold commercially. Japanese comic publishers know a good thing when they see it, and these fanficcers get left alone by the commercial giants they attach themselves to. + +And yet for all this, there are many writers who hate fanfic. Some argue that fans have no business appropriating their characters and situations, that it's disrespectful to imagine your precious fictional people into sexual scenarios, or to retell their stories from a different point of view, or to snatch a victorious happy ending from the tragic defeat the writer ended her book with. + +Other writers insist that fans who take without asking -- or against the writer's wishes -- are part of an "entitlement culture" that has decided that it has the moral right to lift scenarios and characters without permission, that this is part of our larger postmodern moral crisis that is making the world a worse place. + +Some writers dismiss all fanfic as bad art and therefore unworthy of appropriation. Some call it copyright infringement or trademark infringement, and every now and again, some loony will actually threaten to sue his readers for having had the gall to tell his stories to each other. + +I'm frankly flabbergasted by these attitudes. Culture is a lot older than art -- that is, we have had social storytelling for a lot longer than we've had a notional class of artistes whose creativity is privileged and elevated to the numinous, far above the everyday creativity of a kid who knows that she can paint and draw, tell a story and sing a song, sculpt and invent a game. + +To call this a moral failing -- and a new moral failing at that! -- is to turn your back on millions of years of human history. It's no failing that we internalize the stories we love, that we rework them to suit our minds better. The Pygmalion story didn't start with Shaw or the Greeks, nor did it end with My Fair Lady. Pygmalion is at least thousands of years old -- think of Moses passing for the Pharaoh's son! -- and has been reworked in a billion bedtime stories, novels, D&D games, movies, fanfic stories, songs, and legends. + +Each person who retold Pygmalion did something both original -- no two tellings are just alike -- and derivative, for there are no new ideas under the sun. Ideas are easy. Execution is hard. That's why writers don't really get excited when they're approached by people with great ideas for novels. We've all got more ideas than we can use -- what we lack is the cohesive whole. + +Much fanfic -- the stuff written for personal consumption or for a small social group -- isn't bad art. It's just not art. It's not written to make a contribution to the aesthetic development of humanity. It's created to satisfy the deeply human need to play with the stories that constitute our world. There's nothing trivial about telling stories with your friends -- even if the stories themselves are trivial. The act of telling stories to one another is practically sacred -- and it's unquestionably profound. What's more, lots of retellings are art: witness Pat Murphy's wonderful There and Back Again (Tolkien) and Geoff Ryman's brilliant World Fantasy Award-winning Was (L. Frank Baum). + +The question of respect is, perhaps, a little thornier. The dominant mode of criticism in fanfic circles is to compare a work to the canon -- "Would Spock ever say that, in 'real' life?" What's more, fanfic writers will sometimes apply this test to works that are of the canon, as in "Spock never would have said that, and Gene Roddenberry has no business telling me otherwise." + +This is a curious mix of respect and disrespect. Respect because it's hard to imagine a more respectful stance than the one that says that your work is the yardstick against which all other work is to be measured -- what could be more respectful than having your work made into the gold standard? On the other hand, this business of telling writers that they've given their characters the wrong words and deeds can feel obnoxious or insulting. + +Writers sometimes speak of their characters running away from them, taking on a life of their own. They say that these characters -- drawn from real people in our lives and mixed up with our own imagination -- are autonomous pieces of themselves. It's a short leap from there to mystical nonsense about protecting our notional, fictional children from grubby fans who'd set them to screwing each other or bowing and scraping before some thinly veiled version of the fanfic writer herself. + +There's something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. It's unsurprising that when you ask your brain to model some other person, it rises to the task. But that's exactly what happens to a reader when you hand your book over to him: he simulates your characters in his head, trying to interpret that character's actions through his own lens. + +Writers can't ask readers not to interpret their work. You can't enjoy a novel that you haven't interpreted -- unless you model the author's characters in your head, you can't care about what they do and why they do it. And once readers model a character, it's only natural that readers will take pleasure in imagining what that character might do offstage, to noodle around with it. This isn't disrespect: it's active reading. + +Our field is incredibly privileged to have such an active fanfic writing practice. Let's stop treating them like thieves and start treating them like honored guests at a table that we laid just for them. + +$$$$ + +1~ Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia + +(Self-published, 26 August 2001) ~# + +group{ + +0. ToC: + + * 0. ToC + o 0.1 Version History + * 1. Introduction + * 2. The problems + o 2.1 People lie + o 2.2 People are lazy + o 2.3 People are stupid + o 2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself + o 2.5 Schemas aren't neutral + o 2.6 Metrics influence results + o 2.7 There's more than one way to describe something + * 3. Reliable metadata + +}group + +2~x- 1. Introduction + +Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree on a metadata standard -- a Document Type Definition or scheme -- for a given subject area, say washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for describing washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their inventory, which are available in whole or part to search agents and other databases, so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing machine he's seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously for an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet his criteria. + +If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip. + +A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. + +2~x- 2. The problems + +There are at least seven insurmountable obstacles between the world as we know it and meta-utopia. I'll enumerate them below:. + +3~x- 2.1 People lie + +Metadata exists in a competitive world. Suppliers compete to sell their goods, cranks compete to convey their crackpot theories (mea culpa), artists compete for audience. Attention-spans and wallets may not be zero-sum, but they're damned close. + +That's why: + +_* A search for any commonly referenced term at a search-engine like Altavista will often turn up at least one porn link in the first ten results. + +_* Your mailbox is full of spam with subject lines like "Re: The information you requested." + +_* Publisher's Clearing House sends out advertisements that holler "You may already be a winner!" + +_* Press-releases have gargantuan lists of empty buzzwords attached to them. + +Meta-utopia is a world of reliable metadata. When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order. + +3~x- 2.2 People are lazy + +You and me are engaged in the incredibly serious business of creating information. Here in the Info-Ivory-Tower, we understand the importance of creating and maintaining excellent metadata for our information. + +But info-civilians are remarkably cavalier about their information. Your clueless aunt sends you email with no subject line, half the pages on Geocities are called "Please title this page" and your boss stores all of his files on his desktop with helpful titles like "UNTITLED.DOC." + +This laziness is bottomless. No amount of ease-of-use will end it. To understand the true depths of meta-laziness, download ten random MP3 files from Napster. Chances are, at least one will have no title, artist or track information -- this despite the fact that adding in this info merely requires clicking the "Fetch Track Info from CDDB" button on every MP3-ripping application. + +Short of breaking fingers or sending out squads of vengeful info-ninjas to add metadata to the average user's files, we're never gonna get there. + +3~x- 2.3 People are stupid + +Even when there's a positive benefit to creating good metadata, people steadfastly refuse to exercise care and diligence in their metadata creation. + +Take eBay: every seller there has a damned good reason for double-checking their listings for typos and misspellings. Try searching for "plam" on eBay. Right now, that turns up nine typoed listings for "Plam Pilots." Misspelled listings don't show up in correctly-spelled searches and hence garner fewer bids and lower sale-prices. You can almost always get a bargain on a Plam Pilot at eBay. + +The fine (and gross) points of literacy -- spelling, punctuation, grammar -- elude the vast majority of the Internet's users. To believe that J. Random Users will suddenly and en masse learn to spell and punctuate -- let alone accurately categorize their information according to whatever hierarchy they're supposed to be using -- is self-delusion of the first water. + +3~x- 2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself + +In meta-utopia, everyone engaged in the heady business of describing stuff carefully weighs the stuff in the balance and accurately divines the stuff's properties, noting those results. + +Simple observation demonstrates the fallacy of this assumption. When Nielsen used log-books to gather information on the viewing habits of their sample families, the results were heavily skewed to Masterpiece Theater and Sesame Street. Replacing the journals with set-top boxes that reported what the set was actually tuned to showed what the average American family was really watching: naked midget wrestling, America's Funniest Botched Cosmetic Surgeries and Jerry Springer presents: "My daughter dresses like a slut!" + +Ask a programmer how long it'll take to write a given module, or a contractor how long it'll take to fix your roof. Ask a laconic Southerner how far it is to the creek. Better yet, throw darts -- the answer's likely to be just as reliable. + +People are lousy observers of their own behaviors. Entire religions are formed with the goal of helping people understand themselves better; therapists rake in billions working for this very end. + +Why should we believe that using metadata will help J. Random User get in touch with her Buddha nature? + +3~x- 2.5 Schemas aren't neutral + +In meta-utopia, the lab-coated guardians of epistemology sit down and rationally map out a hierarchy of ideas, something like this: + +group{ + +Nothing: + + Black holes + +Everything: + + Matter: + + Earth: + + Planets + + Washing Machines + + Wind: + + Oxygen + + Poo-gas + + Fire: + + Nuclear fission + + Nuclear fusion + + "Mean Devil Woman" Louisiana Hot-Sauce + +}group + +In a given sub-domain, say, Washing Machines, experts agree on sub-hierarchies, with classes for reliability, energy consumption, color, size, etc. + +This presumes that there is a "correct" way of categorizing ideas, and that reasonable people, given enough time and incentive, can agree on the proper means for building a hierarchy. + +Nothing could be farther from the truth. Any hierarchy of ideas necessarily implies the importance of some axes over others. A manufacturer of small, environmentally conscious washing machines would draw a hierarchy that looks like this: + +group{ + +Energy consumption: + + Water consumption: + + Size: + + Capacity: + + Reliability + +}group + +While a manufacturer of glitzy, feature-laden washing machines would want something like this: + +group{ + +Color: + + Size: + + Programmability: + + Reliability + +}group + +The conceit that competing interests can come to easy accord on a common vocabulary totally ignores the power of organizing principles in a marketplace. + +3~x- 2.6 Metrics influence results + +Agreeing to a common yardstick for measuring the important stuff in any domain necessarily privileges the items that score high on that metric, regardless of those items' overall suitability. IQ tests privilege people who are good at IQ tests, Nielsen Ratings privilege 30- and 60-minute TV shows (which is why MTV doesn't show videos any more -- Nielsen couldn't generate ratings for three-minute mini-programs, and so MTV couldn't demonstrate the value of advertising on its network), raw megahertz scores privilege Intel's CISC chips over Motorola's RISC chips. + +Ranking axes are mutually exclusive: software that scores high for security scores low for convenience, desserts that score high for decadence score low for healthiness. Every player in a metadata standards body wants to emphasize their high-scoring axes and de-emphasize (or, if possible, ignore altogether) their low-scoring axes. + +It's wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable. + +3~x- 2.7 There's more than one way to describe something + +"No, I'm not watching cartoons! It's cultural anthropology." + +"This isn't smut, it's art." + +"It's not a bald spot, it's a solar panel for a sex-machine." + +Reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe something. Arguably, your Self is the collection of associations and descriptors you ascribe to ideas. Requiring everyone to use the same vocabulary to describe their material denudes the cognitive landscape, enforces homogeneity in ideas. + +And that's just not right. + +2~x- 3. Reliable metadata + +Do we throw out metadata, then? + +Of course not. Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a sufficiently large pinch of salt. The meta-utopia will never come into being, but metadata is often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that floats through the Internet. + +Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page is. + +This sort of observational metadata is far more reliable than the stuff that human beings create for the purposes of having their documents found. It cuts through the marketing bullshit, the self-delusion, and the vocabulary collisions. + +Taken more broadly, this kind of metadata can be thought of as a pedigree: who thinks that this document is valuable? How closely correlated have this person's value judgments been with mine in times gone by? This kind of implicit endorsement of information is a far better candidate for an information-retrieval panacea than all the world's schema combined. + +$$$$ + +1~ Amish for QWERTY + +(Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003) ~# + +I learned to type before I learned to write. The QWERTY keyboard layout is hard-wired to my brain, such that I can't write anything of significance without that I have a 101-key keyboard in front of me. This has always been a badge of geek pride: unlike the creaking pen-and-ink dinosaurs that I grew up reading, I'm well adapted to the modern reality of technology. There's a secret elitist pride in touch-typing on a laptop while staring off into space, fingers flourishing and caressing the keys. + +But last week, my pride got pricked. I was brung low by a phone. Some very nice people from Nokia loaned me a very latest-and-greatest camera-phone, the kind of gadget I've described in my science fiction stories. As I prodded at the little 12-key interface, I felt like my father, a 60s-vintage computer scientist who can't get his wireless network to work, must feel. Like a creaking dino. Like history was passing me by. I'm 31, and I'm obsolete. Or at least Amish. + +People think the Amish are technophobes. Far from it. They're ideologues. They have a concept of what right-living consists of, and they'll use any technology that serves that ideal -- and mercilessly eschew any technology that would subvert it. There's nothing wrong with driving the wagon to the next farm when you want to hear from your son, so there's no need to put a phone in the kitchen. On the other hand, there's nothing right about your livestock dying for lack of care, so a cellphone that can call the veterinarian can certainly find a home in the horse barn. + +For me, right-living is the 101-key, QWERTY, computer-centric mediated lifestyle. It's having a bulky laptop in my bag, crouching by the toilets at a strange airport with my AC adapter plugged into the always-awkwardly-placed power source, running software that I chose and installed, communicating over the wireless network. I use a network that has no incremental cost for communication, and a device that lets me install any software without permission from anyone else. Right-living is the highly mutated, commodity-hardware- based, public and free Internet. I'm QWERTY-Amish, in other words. + +I'm the kind of perennial early adopter who would gladly volunteer to beta test a neural interface, but I find myself in a moral panic when confronted with the 12-button keypad on a cellie, even though that interface is one that has been greedily adopted by billions of people worldwide, from strap-hanging Japanese schoolgirls to Kenyan electoral scrutineers to Filipino guerrillas in the bush. The idea of paying for every message makes my hackles tumesce and evokes a reflexive moral conviction that text-messaging is inherently undemocratic, at least compared to free-as-air email. The idea of only running the software that big-brother telco has permitted me on my handset makes me want to run for the hills. + +The thumb-generation who can tap out a text-message under their desks while taking notes with the other hand -- they're in for it, too. The pace of accelerated change means that we're all of us becoming wed to interfaces -- ways of communicating with our tools and our world -- that are doomed, doomed, doomed. The 12-buttoners are marrying the phone company, marrying a centrally controlled network that requires permission to use and improve, a Stalinist technology whose centralized choke points are subject to regulation and the vagaries of the telcos. Long after the phone companies have been out-competed by the pure and open Internet (if such a glorious day comes to pass), the kids of today will be bound by its interface and its conventions. + +The sole certainty about the future is its Amishness. We will all bend our brains to suit an interface that we will either have to abandon or be left behind. Choose your interface -- and the values it implies -- carefully, then, before you wed your thought processes to your fingers' dance. It may be the one you're stuck with. + +$$$$ + +1~ Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books + +(Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) ~# + +Forematter: + +This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference [ http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2004/ ], along with a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can't be released alongside of this file. However, you will find, interspersed in this text, notations describing the places where new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets]. + +For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't think it's true. + +No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape. + +I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share them with you: + +1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so ebooks *{are}* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing, have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous installments in their series to coincide with the release of a new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna buy it." But ebooks *{shouldn't}* be just about marketing: ebooks are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-tree editions. + +2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to build concordances of characters, places and events. + +3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book]. I take the view that the book is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and artistic activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the book as a "practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good question. I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them over to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats [DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the text. + +4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a better deal for writers] The compensation for writers is pretty thin on the ground. *{Amazing Stories}*, Hugo Gernsback's original science fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, science fiction magazines pay...a couple cents a word. The sums involved are so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're *{quaint}* and *{historical}*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're *{rounding errors}* as compared to the total population of sf writers earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all of us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream of earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would play the lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentive for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions. They can be googled. + +Even better: they level the playing field between writers and trolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams at their work -- for, if a personal recommendation is the best way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the best way to *{not}* sell a book. Today, the trolls are still with us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here's a bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was recently posted to Amazon by "A reader from Redwood City, CA": + +group{ + +[QUOTED TEXT] + +> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are +> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But +> regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever +> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn't +> waste your money. Download it for free from Corey's +> (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in +> disgust -- this book is for people who think Dan +> Brown's Da Vinci Code is great writing. + +}group + +Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that damning passage: + +group{ + +[PULL-QUOTE] + +> Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first +> page + +}group + +You see that? Hell, this guy is *{working for me}*! [ADDITIONAL PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his novel, "a surprisingly bad writer," no less, whose writing is "stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that writer out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind. + +You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all the things that people are saying about your book is that it can play right into your insecurities -- "all these people will have it in their minds not to bother with my book because they've read the negative interweb reviews!" But the flipside of that is the ego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see how good it is." And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they are to give it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spell your URL right (and even if they spell your name wrong!). + +5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace their nature.] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthogonal to the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an ebook's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more you restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an ebook -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a paper-book. Ebooks *{fail}* on those axes. Ebooks don't beat paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match them for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a paper book and pasting it into your sig-file. + +6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one).] Artists are always disappointed by their audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of shortened attention spans as a product of the information age, but check this out: + +group{ + +[Nietzsche quote] + +> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to +> practice reading as an *art* in this way, something +> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days. + +}group + +In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but this quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote with attribution] It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals," published in *{1887}*. + +Yeah, our attention-spans are *{different}* today, but they aren't necessarily *{shorter}*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the storyline for Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds for *{five years}* while the story trickled out in monthly funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the Harry Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately 20,000 pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way or another here). Sure, presidential debates are conducted in soundbites today and not the days-long oratory extravaganzas of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay attention to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish. + +7. We need *{all}* the ebooks. [We need *{all}* the ebooks] The vast majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution. + +For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to complete that collection with different texts that are as distinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look like we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music, or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking closely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only present at a coarse level of measurement: once you get into really granular observation, there are as many differences in our "shared" experience as there are similarities. + +More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of electronic text differs from a small one: it's the difference between a single book, a shelf full of books and a library of books. Scale makes things different. Take the Web: none of us can hope to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, but by analyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together, Google is able to actually tease out machine-generated conclusions about the relative relevance of different pages to different queries. None of us will ever eat the whole corpus, but Google can digest it for us and excrete the steaming nuggets of goodness that make it the search-engine miracle it is today. + +8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books]. To round out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are more like paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms of retail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with a good several times before they buy -- seven contacts is tossed around as the magic number. That means that my readers have to hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review, and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to buy. + +There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor. Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger king left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you). Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and "only" ten thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my book bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the sales are healthy. + +We also like to think of physical books as being inherently *{countable}* in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, since computers are damned good at counting things!). This is important, because writers get paid on the basis of the number of copies of their books that sell, so having a good count makes a difference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precise numbers for copies printed, shipped, returned and sold. + +But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a book, it always runs a few extra at the start and finish of the run to make sure that the setup is right and to account for the occasional rip, drop, or spill. The actual total number of books printed is approximately the number of books ordered, but never exactly -- if you've ever ordered 500 wedding invitations, chances are you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer and that's why. + +And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen. Copies are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some copies end up in the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't order them and isn't invoiced for them and end up on a sale table or in the trash. Some copies are returned as damaged. Some are returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next morning accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place where the spare sock in the dryer ends up. + +The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual. They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies shipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works pretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking, insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for radio airplay and live performance. And it's good enough for counting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off. + +Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable. + +And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books. However an author earns her living from her words, printed or encoded, she has as her first and hardest task to find her audience. There are more competitors for our attention than we can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting a book under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the hardest and most important task any writer faces. + +# + +I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I was lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I wanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later, I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfiction book out, two more novels under contract, and another book in the works. [BOOK COVERS] I've won a major award in my genre, science fiction, [CAMPBELL AWARD] and I'm nominated for another one, the 2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. [NEBULA] + +I own a *{lot}* of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in storage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY LADDER]. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade: the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today. Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears from the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science fiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES] + +Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book into something that could be simply run off a press in a few minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from person to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE] + +Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties and a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is to lay out both categories of ideas. + +This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time, there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the new and scary practice of ebook "piracy." [alt.binaries.e-books screengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice that the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds with the notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worrying about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet? + +A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks." One meaning for that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is to say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books, released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for use on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a special-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook [ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a "pirate" or unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors introduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that these books also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous book-rippers who cut, add or change text in order to "improve" the work. Frankly, I have never seen any evidence that any book-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I think that this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about. + +Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER]. Well, not yet. I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over ebook piracy, or "bookwarez" as it is known in book-ripper circles. Writers were joining the discussion on alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear of retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw up their credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. My editor, a blogger, hacker and guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup, saying, in part [SCREENGRAB]: + +group{ + +> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to +> happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks +> make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and +> videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes. Partly it's +> greed; partly it's annoyance over retail prices; partly it's the +> desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by +> the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy). +> Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming it's morally +> tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will make +> it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it +> doesn't work. In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that +> "home taping is killing music." It's hard for ordinary folks to +> avoid noticing that music didn't die. But the record industry's +> credibility on the subject wasn't exactly enhanced. + +}group + +Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18 years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first novel (he's bought three more since -- I really like Patrick!). + +Right as bookwarez newsgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup, since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. + +Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the duty of actively policing and censoring the websites and newsfeeds their customers had access to, including a requirement that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was an unlawful copyright infringement -- something more usually left up to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from esteemed copyright scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC]. + +This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression, not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the rest of the world. + +Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook stuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the other hand, there were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks every day. + +This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks: + +1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day [GRAPHIC] + +2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day [GRAPHIC] + +These two certainties begged a lot of questions. + +[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS] + +_* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper + +_* People want to own physical books because of their visceral appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how good books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be) + +_* You can't take your ebook into the tub + +_* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer + +_* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time + +None of these seemed like very good explanations for the "failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to replace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more time reading off a screen every year, up to and including my sainted grandmother (geeks have a really crappy tendency to argue that certain technologies aren't ready for primetime because their grandmothers won't use them -- well, my grandmother sends me email all the time. She types 70 words per minute, and loves to show off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at her Florida retirement condo)? + +The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It seemed to me that electronic books are *{different}* from paper books, and have different virtues and failings. Let's think a little about what the book has gone through in years gone by. This is interesting because the history of the book is the history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and, ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the American Revolution. + +Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed on rare leather by monks. The only people who could read them were priests, who got a regular eyeful of the really cool cartoons the monks drew in the margins. The priests read the books aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a predominantly non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in pricey incense that rose from censers swung by altar boys. + +Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Martin Luther turned that press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] He printed Bibles in languages that non-priests could read, and distributed them to normal people who got to read the word of God all on their own. The rest, as they say, is history. + +Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the printing press: + +[CHART: LUTHER VERSUS THE MONKS] + +_* Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the illuminated Bibles. They were comparatively cheap and lacked the typographical expressiveness that a really talented monk could bring to bear when writing out the word of God + +_* Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-case for Bibles. A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority of the man at the pulpit. It needed heft, it needed impressiveness, and most of all, it needed rarity. + +_* The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was no incense, no altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew that reading was so friggin' hard on the eyes? + +_* Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated numbers. Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any apocryphal text he wanted -- and who knew how accurate that translation was? Monks had an entire Papacy behind them, running a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good stead for centuries. + +In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't get any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if the rip was any good, and sometimes the connection would drop mid-download. I'm sure that many Cardinals espoused the points raised above with equal certainty. + +What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways that Luther Bibles kicked ass: + +[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS] + +_* They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them without having to subject themselves to the authority and approval of the Church + +_* They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no longer had to take the Church's word for it when its priests explained what God really meant + +_* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship and so on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initial popularity was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion. + +Note that all of these virtues are orthogonal to the virtues of a monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the Gutenberg press a success were the things that made monk-Bibles a success. + +By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious little to do with the reasons to love paper books. + +[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK ASS] + +_* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a midlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand by women in reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have social life as rich as reading-circlites, but they don't ever get to see each other face to face; the only kind of book they can pass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the single factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a friend -- getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely to sell you on it than having read and enjoyed the preceding volume in a series! + +_* They are easy to slice and dice. This is where the Mac evangelist in me comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's a truism of the Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are bog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believe it. We all want to popular music. That's why it's popular. But the interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill Gates told the New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing "a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing] the other stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that counts, because that's where the quality perception is." Why did Napster captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40 tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was because 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't available for sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all the songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had been lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile when we heard it. Those songs are different for all of us, but they share the trait of making the difference between a compelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radio programming. It was the minority of tracks that appealed to the majority of us. By the same token, the malleability of electronic text means that it can be readily repurposed: you can throw it on a webserver or convert it to a format for your favorite PDA; you can ask your computer to read it aloud or you can search the text for a quotation to cite in a book report or to use in your sig. In other words, most people who download the book do so for the predictable reason, and in a predictable format -- say, to sample a chapter in the HTML format before deciding whether to buy the book -- but the thing that differentiates a boring e-text experience from an exciting one is the minority use -- printing out a couple chapters of the book to bring to the beach rather than risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty. + +Tool-makers and software designers are increasingly aware of the notion of "affordances" in design. You can bash a nail into the wall with any heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to a cast-iron skillet. However, there's something about a hammer that cries out for nail-bashing, it has affordances that tilt its holder towards swinging it. And, as we all know, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. + +The affordance of a computer -- the thing it's designed to do -- is to slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the Internet is to move bits at very high speed around the world at little-to-no cost. It follows from this that the center of the ebook experience is going to involve slicing and dicing text and sending it around. + +Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement. That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly over copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever (theoretically, copyright expires, but in actual practice, copyright gets extended every time the early Mickey Mouse cartoons are about to enter the public domain, because Disney swings a very big stick on the Hill). + +This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why: + +[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE] + +_* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers that strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from getting savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much true: it's strong copyright that often defends authors from their publishers' worst excesses. However, it doesn't follow that strong copyright protects you from your *{readers}*. + +_* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously. You're a small businessperson. Readers are your customers. Calling them crooks is bad for business. + +_* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and hanging onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know. This is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers into signing over improbable rights for things like theme park rides and action figures based on their work -- it's also why literary agents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books they represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to long to shake off, who wouldn't want a piece of it? + +_* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement, especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of $150,000 per infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their representatives have all kinds of special powers, like the ability to force an ISP to turn over your personal information before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge. This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong side of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse: publishers non-negotiably force their authors to indemnify them from infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers to prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assuming potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a work carries such a terrible price. + +_* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works in copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but that figuring out who these old works belong to with the degree of certainty that you'd want when one mistake means total economic apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire long before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of science fiction's ancestral founders -- Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells -- are still known, their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky -- if their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might just vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to the public domain. + +This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup: a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth. + +From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease with which it can reproduced. + +(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had *{one hundred percent}* control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had *{zero}* percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible -- next to that phase-change, Napster is peanuts) + +Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded off its artifact-ness -- the degree to which it was populated by bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master craftspeople -- for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as expressive as good piano players, but they scaled better -- as did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in comparison to the ability of an individual to actually get a copy of her own. + +Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists still hand-illuminate books; master pianists still stride the boards at Carnegie Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of musicians that are richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet. The thing is, when all you've got is monks, every book takes on the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing press, all the books that are better-suited to movable type migrate into that new form. What's left behind are those items that are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that *{need}* to be plays, the books that are especially lovely on creamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is most enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity. + +Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it's a lot harder to control who can copy a book once there's a photocopier on every corner than it is when you need a monastery and several years to copy a Bible. And that decreased control demands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights of creators with their audiences. + +For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a new copyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was invented, the Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to the record labels in order to secure a blanket license; when cable TV was invented, the government just ordered the broadcasters to sell the cable-operators access to programming at a fixed rate. + +Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was generated in response to the last generation of technology. The temptation to treat copyright as though it came down off the mountain on two stone tablets (or worse, as "just like" real property) is deeply flawed, since, by definition, current copyright only considers the last generation of tech. + +So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this the end of the world? *{Duh}*. If the Catholic church can survive the printing press, science fiction will certainly weather the advent of bookwarez. + +# + +Lagniappe [Lagniappe] + +We're almost done here, but there's one more thing I'd like to do before I get off the stage. [Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or extra] Think of it as a "lagniappe" -- a little something extra to thank you for your patience. + +About a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, on the net, under the terms of the most restrictive Creative Commons license available. All it allowed my readers to do was send around copies of the book. I was cautiously dipping my toe into the water, though at the time, it felt like I was taking a plunge. + +Now I'm going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the text of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike-Derivs-Noncommercial" license [HUMAN READABLE LICENSE], which means that as of today, you have my blessing to create derivative works from my first book. You can make movies, audiobooks, translations, fan-fiction, slash fiction (God help us) [GEEK HIERARCHY], furry slash fiction [GEEK HIERARCHY DETAIL], poetry, translations, t-shirts, you name it, with two provisos: that one, you have to allow everyone else to rip, mix and burn your creations in the same way you're hacking mine; and on the other hand, you've got to do it noncommercially. + +The sky didn't fall when I dipped my toe in. Let's see what happens when I get in up to my knees. + +The text with the new license will be online before the end of the day. Check craphound.com/down for details. + +Oh, and I'm also releasing the text of this speech under a Creative Commons Public Domain dedication, [Public domain dedication] giving it away to the world to do with as it see fits. It'll be linked off my blog, Boing Boing, before the day is through. + +$$$$ + +1~ Free(konomic) E-books + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) ~# + +Can giving away free electronic books really sell printed books? I think so. As I explained in my March column ("You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen"), I don't believe that most readers want to read long-form works off a screen, and I don't believe that they will ever want to read long-form works off a screen. As I say in the column, the problem with reading off a screen isn't resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it's that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical. + +Sure, some readers have the cognitive quirk necessary to read full-length works off screens, or are motivated to do so by other circumstances (such as being so broke that they could never hope to buy the printed work). The rational question isn't, "Will giving away free e-books cost me sales?" but rather, "Will giving away free e-books win me more sales than it costs me?" + +This is a very hard proposition to evaluate in a quantitative way. Books aren't lattes or cable-knit sweaters: each book sells (or doesn't) due to factors that are unique to that title. It's hard to imagine an empirical, controlled study in which two "equivalent" books are published, and one is also available as a free download, the other not, and the difference calculated as a means of "proving" whether e-books hurt or help sales in the long run. + +I've released all of my novels as free downloads simultaneous with their print publication. If I had a time machine, I could re-release them without the free downloads and compare the royalty statements. Lacking such a device, I'm forced to draw conclusions from qualitative, anecdotal evidence, and I've collected plenty of that: + +_* Many writers have tried free e-book releases to tie in with the print release of their works. To the best of my knowledge, every writer who's tried this has repeated the experiment with future works, suggesting a high degree of satisfaction with the outcomes + +_* A writer friend of mine had his first novel come out at the same time as mine. We write similar material and are often compared to one another by critics and reviewers. My first novel had a free download, his didn't. We compared sales figures and I was doing substantially better than him -- he subsequently convinced his publisher to let him follow suit + +_* Baen Books has a pretty good handle on expected sales for new volumes in long-running series; having sold many such series, they have lots of data to use in sales estimates. If Volume N sells X copies, we expect Volume N+1 to sell Y copies. They report that they have seen a measurable uptick in sales following from free e-book releases of previous and current volumes + +_* David Blackburn, a Harvard PhD candidate in economics, published a paper in 2004 in which he calculated that, for music, "piracy" results in a net increase in sales for all titles in the 75th percentile and lower; negligible change in sales for the "middle class" of titles between the 75th percentile and the 97th percentile; and a small drag on the "super-rich" in the 97th percentile and higher. Publisher Tim O'Reilly describes this as "piracy's progressive taxation," apportioning a small wealth-redistribution to the vast majority of works, no net change to the middle, and a small cost on the richest few + +_* Speaking of Tim O'Reilly, he has just published a detailed, quantitative study of the effect of free downloads on a single title. O'Reilly Media published Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, in November 2005, simultaneously releasing the book as a free download. By March 2007, they had a pretty detailed picture of the sales-cycle of this book -- and, thanks to industry standard metrics like those provided by Bookscan, they could compare it, apples-to-apples style, against the performance of competing books treating with the same subject. O'Reilly's conclusion: downloads didn't cause a decline in sales, and appears to have resulted in a lift in sales. This is particularly noteworthy because the book in question is a technical reference work, exclusively consumed by computer programmers who are by definition disposed to read off screens. Also, this is a reference work and therefore is more likely to be useful in electronic form, where it can be easily searched + +_* In my case, my publishers have gone back to press repeatedly for my books. The print runs for each edition are modest -- I'm a midlist writer in a world with a shrinking midlist -- but publishers print what they think they can sell, and they're outselling their expectations + +_* The new opportunities arising from my free downloads are so numerous as to be uncountable -- foreign rights deals, comic book licenses, speaking engagements, article commissions -- I've made more money in these secondary markets than I have in royalties + +_* More anecdotes: I've had literally thousands of people approach me by e-mail and at signings and cons to say, "I found your work online for free, got hooked, and started buying it." By contrast, I've had all of five e-mails from people saying, "Hey, idiot, thanks for the free book, now I don't have to buy the print edition, ha ha!" + +Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books substitute for print books. While I don't have controlled, quantitative data to refute the proposition, I do have plenty of experience with this stuff, and all that experience leads me to believe that giving away my books is selling the hell out of them. + +More importantly, the free e-book skeptics have no evidence to offer in support of their position -- just hand-waving and dark muttering about a mythological future when book-lovers give up their printed books for electronic book-readers (as opposed to the much more plausible future where book lovers go on buying their fetish objects and carry books around on their electronic devices). + +I started giving away e-books after I witnessed the early days of the "bookwarez" scene, wherein fans cut the binding off their favorite books, scanned them, ran them through optical character recognition software, and manually proofread them to eliminate the digitization errors. These fans were easily spending 80 hours to rip their favorite books, and they were only ripping their favorite books, books they loved and wanted to share. (The 80-hour figure comes from my own attempt to do this -- I'm sure that rippers get faster with practice.) + +I thought to myself that 80 hours' free promotional effort would be a good thing to have at my disposal when my books entered the market. What if I gave my readers clean, canonical electronic editions of my works, saving them the bother of ripping them, and so freed them up to promote my work to their friends? + +After all, it's not like there's any conceivable way to stop people from putting books on scanners if they really want to. Scanners aren't going to get more expensive or slower. The Internet isn't going to get harder to use. Better to confront this challenge head on, turn it into an opportunity, than to rail against the future (I'm a science fiction writer -- tuning into the future is supposed to be my metier). + +The timing couldn't have been better. Just as my first novel was being published, a new, high-tech project for promoting sharing of creative works launched: the Creative Commons project (CC). CC offers a set of tools that make it easy to mark works with whatever freedoms the author wants to give away. CC launched in 2003 and today, more than 160,000,000 works have been released under its licenses. + +My next column will go into more detail on what CC is, what licenses it offers, and how to use them -- but for now, check them out online at creativecommons.org. + +$$$$ + +1~ The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007) ~# + +Of course, science fiction is a literature of the present. Many's the science fiction writer who uses the future as a warped mirror for reflecting back the present day, angled to illustrate the hidden strangeness buried by our invisible assumptions: Orwell turned 1948 into Nineteen Eighty-Four. But even when the fictional future isn't a parable about the present day, it is necessarily a creation of the present day, since it reflects the present day biases that infuse the author. Hence Asimov's Foundation, a New Deal-esque project to think humanity out of its tribulations though social interventionism. + +Bold SF writers eschew the future altogether, embracing a futuristic account of the present day. William Gibson's forthcoming Spook Country is an act of "speculative presentism," a book so futuristic it could only have been set in 2006, a book that exploits retrospective historical distance to let us glimpse just how alien and futuristic our present day is. + +Science fiction writers aren't the only people in the business of predicting the future. Futurists -- consultants, technology columnists, analysts, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurial pitchmen -- spill a lot of ink, phosphors, and caffeinated hot air in describing a vision for a future where we'll get more and more of whatever it is they want to sell us or warn us away from. Tomorrow will feature faster, cheaper processors, more Internet users, ubiquitous RFID tags, radically democratic political processes dominated by bloggers, massively multiplayer games whose virtual economies dwarf the physical economy. + +There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic." Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is often self-serving -- think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future III -- and it generally doesn't hold up well to scrutiny. + +SF films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2D2 is a fully conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is equipped with a range of holographic projectors and antipersonnel devices -- but no one has installed a $15 sound card and some text-to-speech software on him, so he has to whistle like Harpo Marx. Or take the Starship Enterprise, with a transporter capable of constituting matter from digitally stored plans, and radios that can breach the speed of light. + +The non-futurismic version of NCC-1701 would be the size of a softball (or whatever the minimum size for a warp drive, transporter, and subspace radio would be). It would zip around the galaxy at FTL speeds under remote control. When it reached an interesting planet, it would beam a stored copy of a landing party onto the surface, and when their mission was over, it would beam them back into storage, annihilating their physical selves until they reached the next stopping point. If a member of the landing party were eaten by a green-skinned interspatial hippie or giant toga-wearing galactic tyrant, that member would be recovered from backup by the transporter beam. Hell, the entire landing party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective crewmember onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances of Kirk operating in clonal harmony. + +Futurism has a psychological explanation, as recounted in Harvard clinical psych prof Daniel Gilbert's 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. Our memories and our projections of the future are necessarily imperfect. Our memories consist of those observations our brains have bothered to keep records of, woven together with inference and whatever else is lying around handy when we try to remember something. Ask someone who's eating a great lunch how breakfast was, and odds are she'll tell you it was delicious. Ask the same question of someone eating rubbery airplane food, and he'll tell you his breakfast was awful. We weave the past out of our imperfect memories and our observable present. + +We make the future in much the same way: we use reasoning and evidence to predict what we can, and whenever we bump up against uncertainty, we fill the void with the present day. Hence the injunction on women soldiers in the future of Starship Troopers, or the bizarre, glassed-over "Progressland" city diorama at the end of the 1964 World's Fair exhibit The Carousel of Progress, which Disney built for GE. + +Lapsarianism -- the idea of a paradise lost, a fall from grace that makes each year worse than the last -- is the predominant future feeling for many people. It's easy to see why: an imperfectly remembered golden childhood gives way to the worries of adulthood and physical senescence. Surely the world is getting worse: nothing tastes as good as it did when we were six, everything hurts all the time, and our matured gonads drive us into frenzies of bizarre, self-destructive behavior. + +Lapsarianism dominates the Abrahamic faiths. I have an Orthodox Jewish friend whose tradition holds that each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him. + +The natural endpoint of Lapsarianism is apocalypse. If things get worse, and worse, and worse, eventually they'll just run out of worseness. Eventually, they'll bottom out, a kind of rotten death of the universe when Lapsarian entropy hits the nadir and takes us all with it. + +Running counter to Lapsarianism is progressivism: the Enlightenment ideal of a world of great people standing on the shoulders of giants. Each of us contributes to improving the world's storehouse of knowledge (and thus its capacity for bringing joy to all of us), and our descendants and proteges take our work and improve on it. The very idea of "progress" runs counter to the idea of Lapsarianism and the fall: it is the idea that we, as a species, are falling in reverse, combing back the wild tangle of entropy into a neat, tidy braid. + +Of course, progress must also have a boundary condition -- if only because we eventually run out of imaginary ways that the human condition can improve. And science fiction has a name for the upper bound of progress, a name for the progressive apocalypse: + +We call it the Singularity. + +Vernor Vinge's Singularity takes place when our technology reaches a stage that allows us to "upload" our minds into software, run them at faster, hotter speeds than our neurological wetware substrate allows for, and create multiple, parallel instances of ourselves. After the Singularity, nothing is predictable because everything is possible. We will cease to be human and become (as the title of Rudy Rucker's next novel would have it) Postsingular. + +The Singularity is what happens when we have so much progress that we run out of progress. It's the apocalypse that ends the human race in rapture and joy. Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the Singularity "the rapture of the nerds," an apt description for the mirror-world progressive version of the Lapsarian apocalypse. + +At the end of the day, both progress and the fall from grace are illusions. The central thesis of Stumbling on Happiness is that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy. Our predictions are skewed by our imperfect memories and our capacity for filling the future with the present day. + +The future is gnarlier than futurism. NCC-1701 probably wouldn't send out transporter-equipped drones -- instead, it would likely find itself on missions whose ethos, mores, and rationale are largely incomprehensible to us, and so obvious to its crew that they couldn't hope to explain them. + +Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the present is the only era that we can hope to understand, because it's the only era that lets us check our observations and predictions against reality. + +$$$$ + +1~ When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil + +(Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) ~# + +It's not clear to me whether the Singularity is a technical belief system or a spiritual one. + +The Singularity -- a notion that's crept into a lot of skiffy, and whose most articulate in-genre spokesmodel is Vernor Vinge -- describes the black hole in history that will be created at the moment when human intelligence can be digitized. When the speed and scope of our cognition is hitched to the price-performance curve of microprocessors, our "progress" will double every eighteen months, and then every twelve months, and then every ten, and eventually, every five seconds. + +Singularities are, literally, holes in space from whence no information can emerge, and so SF writers occasionally mutter about how hard it is to tell a story set after the information Singularity. Everything will be different. What it means to be human will be so different that what it means to be in danger, or happy, or sad, or any of the other elements that make up the squeeze-and-release tension in a good yarn will be unrecognizable to us pre-Singletons. + +It's a neat conceit to write around. I've committed Singularity a couple of times, usually in collaboration with gonzo Singleton Charlie Stross, the mad antipope of the Singularity. But those stories have the same relation to futurism as romance novels do to love: a shared jumping-off point, but radically different morphologies. + +Of course, the Singularity isn't just a conceit for noodling with in the pages of the pulps: it's the subject of serious-minded punditry, futurism, and even science. + +Ray Kurzweil is one such pundit-futurist-scientist. He's a serial entrepreneur who founded successful businesses that advanced the fields of optical character recognition (machine-reading) software, text-to-speech synthesis, synthetic musical instrument simulation, computer-based speech recognition, and stock-market analysis. He cured his own Type-II diabetes through a careful review of the literature and the judicious application of first principles and reason. To a casual observer, Kurzweil appears to be the star of some kind of Heinlein novel, stealing fire from the gods and embarking on a quest to bring his maverick ideas to the public despite the dismissals of the establishment, getting rich in the process. + +Kurzweil believes in the Singularity. In his 1990 manifesto, "The Age of Intelligent Machines," Kurzweil persuasively argued that we were on the brink of meaningful machine intelligence. A decade later, he continued the argument in a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, whose most audacious claim is that the world's computational capacity has been slowly doubling since the crust first cooled (and before!), and that the doubling interval has been growing shorter and shorter with each passing year, so that now we see it reflected in the computer industry's Moore's Law, which predicts that microprocessors will get twice as powerful for half the cost about every eighteen months. The breathtaking sweep of this trend has an obvious conclusion: computers more powerful than people; more powerful than we can comprehend. + +Now Kurzweil has published two more books, The Singularity Is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, Spring 2005) and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (with Terry Grossman, Rodale, November 2004). The former is a technological roadmap for creating the conditions necessary for ascent into Singularity; the latter is a book about life-prolonging technologies that will assist baby-boomers in living long enough to see the day when technological immortality is achieved. + +See what I meant about his being a Heinlein hero? + +I still don't know if the Singularity is a spiritual or a technological belief system. It has all the trappings of spirituality, to be sure. If you are pure and kosher, if you live right and if your society is just, then you will live to see a moment of Rapture when your flesh will slough away leaving nothing behind but your ka, your soul, your consciousness, to ascend to an immortal and pure state. + +I wrote a novel called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom where characters could make backups of themselves and recover from them if something bad happened, like catching a cold or being assassinated. It raises a lot of existential questions: most prominently: are you still you when you've been restored from backup? + +The traditional AI answer is the Turing Test, invented by Alan Turing, the gay pioneer of cryptography and artificial intelligence who was forced by the British government to take hormone treatments to "cure" him of his homosexuality, culminating in his suicide in 1954. Turing cut through the existentialism about measuring whether a machine is intelligent by proposing a parlor game: a computer sits behind a locked door with a chat program, and a person sits behind another locked door with his own chat program, and they both try to convince a judge that they are real people. If the computer fools a human judge into thinking that it's a person, then to all intents and purposes, it's a person. + +So how do you know if the backed-up you that you've restored into a new body -- or a jar with a speaker attached to it -- is really you? Well, you can ask it some questions, and if it answers the same way that you do, you're talking to a faithful copy of yourself. + +Sounds good. But the me who sent his first story into Asimov's seventeen years ago couldn't answer the question, "Write a story for Asimov's" the same way the me of today could. Does that mean I'm not me anymore? + +Kurzweil has the answer. + +"If you follow that logic, then if you were to take me ten years ago, I could not pass for myself in a Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. But once the requisite uploading technology becomes available a few decades hence, you could make a perfect-enough copy of me, and it would pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. The copy doesn't have to match the quantum state of my every neuron, either: if you meet me the next day, I'd pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. Nevertheless, none of the quantum states in my brain would be the same. There are quite a few changes that each of us undergo from day to day, we don't examine the assumption that we are the same person closely. + +"We gradually change our pattern of atoms and neurons but we very rapidly change the particles the pattern is made up of. We used to think that in the brain -- the physical part of us most closely associated with our identity -- cells change very slowly, but it turns out that the components of the neurons, the tubules and so forth, turn over in only days. I'm a completely different set of particles from what I was a week ago. + +"Consciousness is a difficult subject, and I'm always surprised by how many people talk about consciousness routinely as if it could be easily and readily tested scientifically. But we can't postulate a consciousness detector that does not have some assumptions about consciousness built into it. + +"Science is about objective third party observations and logical deductions from them. Consciousness is about first-person, subjective experience, and there's a fundamental gap there. We live in a world of assumptions about consciousness. We share the assumption that other human beings are conscious, for example. But that breaks down when we go outside of humans, when we consider, for example, animals. Some say only humans are conscious and animals are instinctive and machinelike. Others see humanlike behavior in an animal and consider the animal conscious, but even these observers don't generally attribute consciousness to animals that aren't humanlike. + +"When machines are complex enough to have responses recognizable as emotions, those machines will be more humanlike than animals." + +The Kurzweil Singularity goes like this: computers get better and smaller. Our ability to measure the world gains precision and grows ever cheaper. Eventually, we can measure the world inside the brain and make a copy of it in a computer that's as fast and complex as a brain, and voila, intelligence. + +Here in the twenty-first century we like to view ourselves as ambulatory brains, plugged into meat-puppets that lug our precious grey matter from place to place. We tend to think of that grey matter as transcendently complex, and we think of it as being the bit that makes us us. + +But brains aren't that complex, Kurzweil says. Already, we're starting to unravel their mysteries. + +"We seem to have found one area of the brain closely associated with higher-level emotions, the spindle cells, deeply embedded in the brain. There are tens of thousands of them, spanning the whole brain (maybe eighty thousand in total), which is an incredibly small number. Babies don't have any, most animals don't have any, and they likely only evolved over the last million years or so. Some of the high-level emotions that are deeply human come from these. + +"Turing had the right insight: base the test for intelligence on written language. Turing Tests really work. A novel is based on language: with language you can conjure up any reality, much more so than with images. Turing almost lived to see computers doing a good job of performing in fields like math, medical diagnosis and so on, but those tasks were easier for a machine than demonstrating even a child's mastery of language. Language is the true embodiment of human intelligence." + +If we're not so complex, then it's only a matter of time until computers are more complex than us. When that comes, our brains will be model-able in a computer and that's when the fun begins. That's the thesis of Spiritual Machines, which even includes a (Heinlein-style) timeline leading up to this day. + +Now, it may be that a human brain contains n logic-gates and runs at x cycles per second and stores z petabytes, and that n and x and z are all within reach. It may be that we can take a brain apart and record the position and relationships of all the neurons and sub-neuronal elements that constitute a brain. + +But there are also a nearly infinite number of ways of modeling a brain in a computer, and only a finite (or possibly nonexistent) fraction of that space will yield a conscious copy of the original meat-brain. Science fiction writers usually hand-wave this step: in Heinlein's "Man Who Sold the Moon," the gimmick is that once the computer becomes complex enough, with enough "random numbers," it just wakes up. + +Computer programmers are a little more skeptical. Computers have never been known for their skill at programming themselves -- they tend to be no smarter than the people who write their software. + +But there are techniques for getting computers to program themselves, based on evolution and natural selection. A programmer creates a system that spits out lots -- thousands or even millions -- of randomly generated programs. Each one is given the opportunity to perform a computational task (say, sorting a list of numbers from greatest to least) and the ones that solve the problem best are kept aside while the others are erased. Now the survivors are used as the basis for a new generation of randomly mutated descendants, each based on elements of the code that preceded them. By running many instances of a randomly varied program at once, and by culling the least successful and regenerating the population from the winners very quickly, it is possible to evolve effective software that performs as well or better than the code written by human authors. + +Indeed, evolutionary computing is a promising and exciting field that's realizing real returns through cool offshoots like "ant colony optimization" and similar approaches that are showing good results in fields as diverse as piloting military UAVs and efficiently provisioning car-painting robots at automotive plants. + +So if you buy Kurzweil's premise that computation is getting cheaper and more plentiful than ever, then why not just use evolutionary algorithms to evolve the best way to model a scanned-in human brain such that it "wakes up" like Heinlein's Mike computer? + +Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil's argument in Spiritual Machines: if we have computation to spare and a detailed model of a human brain, we need only combine them and out will pop the mechanism whereby we may upload our consciousness to digital storage media and transcend our weak and bothersome meat forever.Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil's argument in Spiritual Machines: if we have computation to spare and a detailed model of a human brain, we need only combine them and out will pop the mechanism whereby we may upload our consciousness to digital storage media and transcend our weak and bothersome meat forever. + +But it's a cheat. Evolutionary algorithms depend on the same mechanisms as real-world evolution: heritable variation of candidates and a system that culls the least-suitable candidates. This latter -- the fitness-factor that determines which individuals in a cohort breed and which vanish -- is the key to a successful evolutionary system. Without it, there's no pressure for the system to achieve the desired goal: merely mutation and more mutation. + +But how can a machine evaluate which of a trillion models of a human brain is "most like" a conscious mind? Or better still: which one is most like the individual whose brain is being modeled? + +"It is a sleight of hand in Spiritual Machines," Kurzweil admits. "But in The Singularity Is Near, I have an in-depth discussion about what we know about the brain and how to model it. Our tools for understanding the brain are subject to the Law of Accelerating Returns, and we've made more progress in reverse-engineering the human brain than most people realize." This is a tasty Kurzweilism that observes that improvements in technology yield tools for improving technology, round and round, so that the thing that progress begets more than anything is more and yet faster progress. + +"Scanning resolution of human tissue -- both spatial and temporal -- is doubling every year, and so is our knowledge of the workings of the brain. The brain is not one big neural net, the brain is several hundred different regions, and we can understand each region, we can model the regions with mathematics, most of which have some nexus with chaos and self-organizing systems. This has already been done for a couple dozen regions out of the several hundred. + +"We have a good model of a dozen or so regions of the auditory and visual cortex, how we strip images down to very low-resolution movies based on pattern recognition. Interestingly, we don't actually see things, we essentially hallucinate them in detail from what we see from these low resolution cues. Past the early phases of the visual cortex, detail doesn't reach the brain. + +"We are getting exponentially more knowledge. We can get detailed scans of neurons working in vivo, and are beginning to understand the chaotic algorithms underlying human intelligence. In some cases, we are getting comparable performance of brain regions in simulation. These tools will continue to grow in detail and sophistication. + +"We can have confidence of reverse-engineering the brain in twenty years or so. The reason that brain reverse engineering has not contributed much to artificial intelligence is that up until recently we didn't have the right tools. If I gave you a computer and a few magnetic sensors and asked you to reverse-engineer it, you might figure out that there's a magnetic device spinning when a file is saved, but you'd never get at the instruction set. Once you reverse-engineer the computer fully, however, you can express its principles of operation in just a few dozen pages. + +"Now there are new tools that let us see the interneuronal connections and their signaling, in vivo, and in real-time. We're just now getting these tools and there's very rapid application of the tools to obtain the data. + +"Twenty years from now we will have realistic simulations and models of all the regions of the brain and [we will] understand how they work. We won't blindly or mindlessly copy those methods, we will understand them and use them to improve our AI toolkit. So we'll learn how the brain works and then apply the sophisticated tools that we will obtain, as we discover how the brain works. + +"Once we understand a subtle science principle, we can isolate, amplify, and expand it. Air goes faster over a curved surface: from that insight we isolated, amplified, and expanded the idea and invented air travel. We'll do the same with intelligence. + +"Progress is exponential -- not just a measure of power of computation, number of Internet nodes, and magnetic spots on a hard disk -- the rate of paradigm shift is itself accelerating, doubling every decade. Scientists look at a problem and they intuitively conclude that since we've solved 1 percent over the last year, it'll therefore be one hundred years until the problem is exhausted: but the rate of progress doubles every decade, and the power of the information tools (in price-performance, resolution, bandwidth, and so on) doubles every year. People, even scientists, don't grasp exponential growth. During the first decade of the human genome project, we only solved 2 percent of the problem, but we solved the remaining 98 percent in five years." + +But Kurzweil doesn't think that the future will arrive in a rush. As William Gibson observed, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." + +"Sure, it'd be interesting to take a human brain, scan it, reinstantiate the brain, and run it on another substrate. That will ultimately happen." + +"But the most salient scenario is that we'll gradually merge with our technology. We'll use nanobots to kill pathogens, then to kill cancer cells, and then they'll go into our brain and do benign things there like augment our memory, and very gradually they'll get more and more sophisticated. There's no single great leap, but there is ultimately a great leap comprised of many small steps. + +"In The Singularity Is Near, I describe the radically different world of 2040, and how we'll get there one benign change at a time. The Singularity will be gradual, smooth. + +"Really, this is about augmenting our biological thinking with nonbiological thinking. We have a capacity of 1026 to 1029 calculations per second (cps) in the approximately 1010 biological human brains on Earth and that number won't change much in fifty years, but nonbiological thinking will just crash through that. By 2049, nonbiological thinking capacity will be on the order of a billion times that. We'll get to the point where bio thinking is relatively insignificant. + +"People didn't throw their typewriters away when word-processing started. There's always an overlap -- it'll take time before we realize how much more powerful nonbiological thinking will ultimately be." + +It's well and good to talk about all the stuff we can do with technology, but it's a lot more important to talk about the stuff we'll be allowed to do with technology. Think of the global freak-out caused by the relatively trivial advent of peer-to-peer file-sharing tools: Universities are wiretapping their campuses and disciplining computer science students for writing legitimate, general purpose software; grandmothers and twelve-year-olds are losing their life savings; privacy and due process have sailed out the window without so much as a by-your-leave. + +Even P2P's worst enemies admit that this is a general-purpose technology with good and bad uses, but when new tech comes along it often engenders a response that countenances punishing an infinite number of innocent people to get at the guilty. + +What's going to happen when the new technology paradigm isn't song-swapping, but transcendent super-intelligence? Will the reactionary forces be justified in razing the whole ecosystem to eliminate a few parasites who are doing negative things with the new tools? + +"Complex ecosystems will always have parasites. Malware [malicious software] is the most important battlefield today. + +"Everything will become software -- objects will be malleable, we'll spend lots of time in VR, and computhought will be orders of magnitude more important than biothought. + +"Software is already complex enough that we have an ecological terrain that has emerged just as it did in the bioworld. + +"That's partly because technology is unregulated and people have access to the tools to create malware and the medicine to treat it. Today's software viruses are clever and stealthy and not simpleminded. Very clever. + +"But here's the thing: you don't see people advocating shutting down the Internet because malware is so destructive. I mean, malware is potentially more than a nuisance -- emergency systems, air traffic control, and nuclear reactors all run on vulnerable software. It's an important issue, but the potential damage is still a tiny fraction of the benefit we get from the Internet. + +"I hope it'll remain that way -- that the Internet won't become a regulated space like medicine. Malware's not the most important issue facing human society today. Designer bioviruses are. People are concerted about WMDs, but the most daunting WMD would be a designed biological virus. The means exist in college labs to create destructive viruses that erupt and spread silently with long incubation periods. + +"Importantly, a would-be bio-terrorist doesn't have to put malware through the FDA's regulatory approval process, but scientists working to fix bio-malware do. + +"In Huxley's Brave New World, the rationale for the totalitarian system was that technology was too dangerous and needed to be controlled. But that just pushes technology underground where it becomes less stable. Regulation gives the edge of power to the irresponsible who won't listen to the regulators anyway. + +"The way to put more stones on the defense side of the scale is to put more resources into defensive technologies, not create a totalitarian regime of Draconian control. + +"I advocate a one hundred billion dollar program to accelerate the development of anti-biological virus technology. The way to combat this is to develop broad tools to destroy viruses. We have tools like RNA interference, just discovered in the past two years to block gene expression. We could develop means to sequence the genes of a new virus (SARS only took thirty-one days) and respond to it in a matter of days. + +"Think about it. There's no FDA for software, no certification for programmers. The government is thinking about it, though! The reason the FCC is contemplating Trusted Computing mandates," -- a system to restrict what a computer can do by means of hardware locks embedded on the motherboard -- "is that computing technology is broadening to cover everything. So now you have communications bureaucrats, biology bureaucrats, all wanting to regulate computers. + +"Biology would be a lot more stable if we moved away from regulation -- which is extremely irrational and onerous and doesn't appropriately balance risks. Many medications are not available today even though they should be. The FDA always wants to know what happens if we approve this and will it turn into a thalidomide situation that embarrasses us on CNN? + +"Nobody asks about the harm that will certainly accrue from delaying a treatment for one or more years. There's no political weight at all, people have been dying from diseases like heart disease and cancer for as long as we've been alive. Attributable risks get 100-1000 times more weight than unattributable risks." + +Is this spirituality or science? Perhaps it is the melding of both -- more shades of Heinlein, this time the weird religions founded by people who took Stranger in a Strange Land way too seriously. + +After all, this is a system of belief that dictates a means by which we can care for our bodies virtuously and live long enough to transcend them. It is a system of belief that concerns itself with the meddling of non-believers, who work to undermine its goals through irrational systems predicated on their disbelief. It is a system of belief that asks and answers the question of what it means to be human. + +It's no wonder that the Singularity has come to occupy so much of the science fiction narrative in these years. Science or spirituality, you could hardly ask for a subject better tailored to technological speculation and drama. + +$$$$ + +1~ Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors + +(Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) ~# + +"Mostly Harmless" -- a phrase so funny that Adams actually titled a book after it. Not that there's a lot of comedy inherent in those two words: rather, they're the punchline to a joke that anyone who's ever written for publication can really get behind. + +Ford Prefect, a researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, has been stationed on Earth for years, painstakingly compiling an authoritative, insightful entry on Terran geography, science and culture, excerpts from which appear throughout the H2G2 books. His entry improved upon the old one, which noted that Earth was, simply, "Harmless." + +However, the Guide has limited space, and when Ford submits his entry to his editors, it is trimmed to fit: + +group{ + + "What? Harmless? Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One + word!" + + Ford shrugged. "Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the + Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book's + microprocessors," he said, "and no one knew much about the Earth + of course." + + "Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit." + + "Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. + He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement." + + "And what does it say now?" asked Arthur. + + "Mostly harmless," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed + cough. + +}group + +[fn: My lifestyle is as gypsy and fancy-free as the characters in H2G2, and as a result my copies of the Adams books are thousands of miles away in storages in other countries, and this essay was penned on public transit and cheap hotel rooms in Chile, Boston, London, Geneva, Brussels, Bergen, Geneva (again), Toronto, Edinburgh, and Helsinki. Luckily, I was able to download a dodgy, re-keyed version of the Adams books from a peer-to-peer network, which network I accessed via an open wireless network on a random street-corner in an anonymous city, a fact that I note here as testimony to the power of the Internet to do what the Guide does for Ford and Arthur: put all the information I need at my fingertips, wherever I am. However, these texts *{are}* a little on the dodgy side, as noted, so you might want to confirm these quotes before, say, uttering them before an Adams truefan.] + +And there's the humor: every writer knows the pain of laboring over a piece for days, infusing it with diverse interesting factoids and insights, only to have it cut to ribbons by some distant editor (I once wrote thirty drafts of a 5,000-word article for an editor who ended up running it in three paragraphs as accompaniment for what he decided should be a photo essay with minimal verbiage.) + +Since the dawn of the Internet, H2G2 geeks have taken it upon themselves to attempt to make a Guide on the Internet. Volunteers wrote and submitted essays on various subjects as would be likely to appear in a good encyclopedia, infusing them with equal measures of humor and thoughtfulness, and they were edited together by the collective effort of the contributors. These projects -- Everything2, H2G2 (which was overseen by Adams himself), and others -- are like a barn-raising in which a team of dedicated volunteers organize the labors of casual contributors, piecing together a free and open user-generated encyclopedia. + +These encyclopedias have one up on Adams's Guide: they have no shortage of space on their "microprocessors" (the first volume of the Guide was clearly written before Adams became conversant with PCs!). The ability of humans to generate verbiage is far outstripped by the ability of technologists to generate low-cost, reliable storage to contain it. For example, Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive project (archive.org) has been making a copy of the Web -- the *{whole}* Web, give or take -- every couple of days since 1996. Using the Archive's Wayback Machine, you can now go and see what any page looked like on a given day. + +The Archive doesn't even bother throwing away copies of pages that haven't changed since the last time they were scraped: with storage as cheap as it is -- and it is *{very}* cheap for the Archive, which runs the largest database in the history of the universe off of a collection of white-box commodity PCs stacked up on packing skids in the basement of a disused armory in San Francisco's Presidio -- there's no reason not to just keep them around. In fact, the Archive has just spawned two "mirror" Archives, one located under the rebuilt Library of Alexandria and the other in Amsterdam. [fn: Brewster Kahle says that he was nervous about keeping his only copy of the "repository of all human knowledge" on the San Andreas fault, but keeping your backups in a censorship-happy Amnesty International watchlist state and/or in a floodplain below sea level is probably not such a good idea either!] + +So these systems did not see articles trimmed for lack of space; for on the Internet, the idea of "running out of space" is meaningless. But they *{were}* trimmed, by editorial cliques, and rewritten for clarity and style. Some entries were rejected as being too thin, while others were sent back to the author for extensive rewrites. + +This traditional separation of editor and writer mirrors the creative process itself, in which authors are exhorted to concentrate on *{either}* composing *{or}* revising, but not both at the same time, for the application of the critical mind to the creative process strangles it. So you write, and then you edit. Even when you write for your own consumption, it seems you have to answer to an editor. + +The early experimental days of the Internet saw much experimentation with alternatives to traditional editor/author divisions. Slashdot, a nerdy news-site of surpassing popularity [fn: Having a link to one's website posted to Slashdot will almost inevitably overwhelm your server with traffic, knocking all but the best-provisioned hosts offline within minutes; this is commonly referred to as "the Slashdot Effect."], has a baroque system for "community moderation" of the responses to the articles that are posted to its front pages. Readers, chosen at random, are given five "moderator points" that they can use to raise or lower the score of posts on the Slashdot message boards. Subsequent readers can filter their views of these boards to show only highly ranked posts. Other readers are randomly presented with posts and their rankings and are asked to rate the fairness of each moderator's moderation. Moderators who moderate fairly are given more opportunities to moderate; likewise message-board posters whose messages are consistently highly rated. + +It is thought that this system rewards good "citizenship" on the Slashdot boards through checks and balances that reward good messages and fair editorial practices. And in the main, the Slashdot moderation system works [fn: as do variants on it, like the system in place at Kur5hin.org (pronounced "corrosion")]. If you dial your filter up to show you highly scored messages, you will generally get well-reasoned, or funny, or genuinely useful posts in your browser. + +This community moderation scheme and ones like it have been heralded as a good alternative to traditional editorship. The importance of the Internet to "edit itself" is best understood in relation to the old shibboleth, "On the Internet, everyone is a slushreader." [fn: "Slush" is the term for generally execrable unsolicited manuscripts that fetch up in publishers' offices -- these are typically so bad that the most junior people on staff are drafted into reading (and, usually, rejecting) them]. When the Internet's radical transformative properties were first bandied about in publishing circles, many reassured themselves that even if printing's importance was de-emphasized, that good editors would always been needed, and doubly so online, where any mouth-breather with a modem could publish his words. Someone would need to separate the wheat from the chaff and help keep us from drowning in information. + +One of the best-capitalized businesses in the history of the world, Yahoo!, went public on the strength of this notion, proposing to use an army of researchers to catalog every single page on the Web even as it was created, serving as a comprehensive guide to all human knowledge. Less than a decade later, Yahoo! is all but out of that business: the ability of the human race to generate new pages far outstrips Yahoo!'s ability to read, review, rank and categorize them. + +Hence Slashdot, a system of distributed slushreading. Rather than professionalizing the editorship role, Slashdot invites contributors to identify good stuff when they see it, turning editorship into a reward for good behavior. + +But as well as Slashdot works, it has this signal failing: nearly every conversation that takes place on Slashdot is shot through with discussion, griping and gaming *{on the moderation system itself}*. The core task of Slashdot has *{become}* editorship, not the putative subjects of Slashdot posts. The fact that the central task of Slashdot is to rate other Slashdotters creates a tenor of meanness in the discussion. Imagine if the subtext of every discussion you had in the real world was a kind of running, pedantic nitpickery in which every point was explicitly weighed and judged and commented upon. You'd be an unpleasant, unlikable jerk, the kind of person that is sometimes referred to as a "slashdork." + +As radical as Yahoo!'s conceit was, Slashdot's was more radical. But as radical as Slashdot's is, it is still inherently conservative in that it presumes that editorship is necessary, and that it further requires human judgment and intervention. + +Google's a lot more radical. Instead of editors, it has an algorithm. Not the kind of algorithm that dominated the early search engines like Altavista, in which laughably bad artificial intelligence engines attempted to automatically understand the content, context and value of every page on the Web so that a search for "Dog" would turn up the page more relevant to the query. + +Google's algorithm is predicated on the idea that people are good at understanding things and computers are good at counting things. Google counts up all the links on the Web and affords more authority to those pages that have been linked to by the most other pages. The rationale is that if a page has been linked to by many web-authors, then they must have seen some merit in that page. This system works remarkably well -- so well that it's nearly inconceivable that any search-engine would order its rankings by any other means. What's more, it doesn't pervert the tenor of the discussions and pages that it catalogs by turning each one into a performance for a group of ranking peers. [fn: Or at least, it *{didn't}*. Today, dedicated web-writers, such as bloggers, are keenly aware of the way that Google will interpret their choices about linking and page-structure. One popular sport is "googlebombing," in which web-writers collude to link to a given page using a humorous keyword so that the page becomes the top result for that word -- which is why, for a time, the top result for "more evil than Satan" was Microsoft.com. Likewise, the practice of "blogspamming," in which unscrupulous spammers post links to their webpages in the message boards on various blogs, so that Google will be tricked into thinking that a wide variety of sites have conferred some authority onto their penis-enlargement page.] + +But even Google is conservative in assuming that there is a need for editorship as distinct from composition. Is there a way we can dispense with editorship altogether and just use composition to refine our ideas? Can we merge composition and editorship into a single role, fusing our creative and critical selves? + +You betcha. + +"Wikis" [fn: Hawai'ian for "fast"] are websites that can be edited by anyone. They were invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995, and they have become one of the dominant tools for Internet collaboration in the present day. Indeed, there is a sort of Internet geek who throws up a Wiki in the same way that ants make anthills: reflexively, unconsciously. + +Here's how a Wiki works. You put up a page: + +group{ + + Welcome to my Wiki. It is rad. + + There are OtherWikis that inspired me. + +}group + +Click "publish" and bam, the page is live. The word "OtherWikis" will be underlined, having automatically been turned into a link to a blank page titled "OtherWikis" (Wiki software recognizes words with capital letters in the middle of them as links to other pages. Wiki people call this "camel-case," because the capital letters in the middle of words make them look like humped camels.) At the bottom of it appears this legend: "Edit this page." + +Click on "Edit this page" and the text appears in an editable field. Revise the text to your heart's content and click "Publish" and your revisions are live. Anyone who visits a Wiki can edit any of its pages, adding to it, improving on it, adding camel-cased links to new subjects, or even defacing or deleting it. + +It is authorship without editorship. Or authorship fused with editorship. Whichever, it works, though it requires effort. The Internet, like all human places and things, is fraught with spoilers and vandals who deface whatever they can. Wiki pages are routinely replaced with obscenities, with links to spammers' websites, with junk and crap and flames. + +But Wikis have self-defense mechanisms, too. Anyone can "subscribe" to a Wiki page, and be notified when it is updated. Those who create Wiki pages generally opt to act as "gardeners" for them, ensuring that they are on hand to undo the work of the spoilers. + +In this labor, they are aided by another useful Wiki feature: the "history" link. Every change to every Wiki page is logged and recorded. Anyone can page back through every revision, and anyone can revert the current version to a previous one. That means that vandalism only lasts as long as it takes for a gardener to come by and, with one or two clicks, set things to right. + +This is a powerful and wildly successful model for collaboration, and there is no better example of this than the Wikipedia, a free, Wiki-based encyclopedia with more than one million entries, which has been translated into 198 languages [fn: That is, one or more Wikipedia entries have been translated into 198 languages; more than 15 languages have 10,000 or more entries translated] + +Wikipedia is built entirely out of Wiki pages created by self-appointed experts. Contributors research and write up subjects, or produce articles on subjects that they are familiar with. + +This is authorship, but what of editorship? For if there is one thing a Guide or an encyclopedia must have, it is authority. It must be vetted by trustworthy, neutral parties, who present something that is either The Truth or simply A Truth, but truth nevertheless. + +The Wikipedia has its skeptics. Al Fasoldt, a writer for the Syracuse Post-Standard, apologized to his readers for having recommended that they consult Wikipedia. A reader of his, a librarian, wrote in and told him that his recommendation had been irresponsible, for Wikipedia articles are often defaced or worse still, rewritten with incorrect information. When another journalist from the Techdirt website wrote to Fasoldt to correct this impression, Fasoldt responded with an increasingly patronizing and hysterical series of messages in which he described Wikipedia as "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous," insulting the Techdirt writer and storming off in a huff. [fn: see http://techdirt.com/articles/20040827/0132238_F.shtml for more] + +Spurred on by this exchange, many of Wikipedia's supporters decided to empirically investigate the accuracy and resilience of the system. Alex Halavais made changes to 13 different pages, ranging from obvious to subtle. Every single change was found and corrected within hours. [fn: see http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=794 for more] Then legendary Princeton engineer Ed Felten ran side-by-side comparisons of Wikipedia entries on areas in which he had deep expertise with their counterparts in the current electronic edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His conclusion? "Wikipedia's advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren't for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica's advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries." [fn: see http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000675.html for more] Not a complete win for Wikipedia, but hardly "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous." (Poor Fasoldt -- his idiotic hyperbole will surely haunt him through the whole of his career -- I mean, "repugnant?!") + +There has been one very damning and even frightening indictment of Wikipedia, which came from Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of the GeekCorps group, which sends volunteers to poor countries to help establish Internet Service Providers and do other good works through technology. + +Zuckerman, a Harvard Berkman Center Fellow, is concerned with the "systemic bias" in a collaborative encyclopedia whose contributors must be conversant with technology and in possession of same in order to improve on the work there. Zuckerman reasonably observes that Internet users skew towards wealth, residence in the world's richest countries, and a technological bent. This means that the Wikipedia, too, is skewed to subjects of interest to that group -- subjects where that group already has expertise and interest. + +The result is tragicomical. The entry on the Congo Civil War, the largest military conflict the world has seen since WWII, which has claimed over three million lives, has only a fraction of the verbiage devoted to the War of the Ents, a fictional war fought between sentient trees in JRR Tolkien's *{Lord of the Rings}*. + +Zuckerman issued a public call to arms to rectify this, challenging Wikipedia contributors to seek out information on subjects like Africa's military conflicts, nursing and agriculture and write these subjects up in the same loving detail given over to science fiction novels and contemporary youth culture. His call has been answered well. What remains is to infiltrate the Wikipedia into the academe so that term papers, Masters and Doctoral theses on these subjects find themselves in whole or in part on the Wikipedia. [fn See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xed/CROSSBOW for more on this] + +But if Wikipedia is authoritative, how does it get there? What alchemy turns the maunderings of "mouth-breathers with modems" into valid, useful encyclopedia entries? + +It all comes down to the way that disputes are deliberated over and resolved. Take the entry on Israel. At one point, it characterized Israel as a beleaguered state set upon by terrorists who would drive its citizens into the sea. Not long after, the entry was deleted holus-bolus and replaced with one that described Israel as an illegal state practicing Apartheid on an oppressed ethnic minority. + +Back and forth the editors went, each overwriting the other's with his or her own doctrine. But eventually, one of them blinked. An editor moderated the doctrine just a little, conceding a single point to the other. And the other responded in kind. In this way, turn by turn, all those with a strong opinion on the matter negotiated a kind of Truth, a collection of statements that everyone could agree represented as neutral a depiction of Israel as was likely to emerge. Whereupon, the joint authors of this marvelous document joined forces and fought back to back to resist the revisions of other doctrinaires who came later, preserving their hard-won peace. [fn: This process was just repeated in microcosm in the Wikipedia entry on the author of this paper, which was replaced by a rather disparaging and untrue entry that characterized his books as critical and commercial failures -- there ensued several editorial volleys, culminating in an uneasy peace that couches the anonymous detractor's skepticism in context and qualifiers that make it clear what the facts are and what is speculation] + +What's most fascinating about these entries isn't their "final" text as currently present on Wikipedia. It is the history page for each, blow-by-blow revision lists that make it utterly transparent where the bodies were buried on the way to arriving at whatever Truth has emerged. This is a neat solution to the problem of authority -- if you want to know what the fully rounded view of opinions on any controversial subject look like, you need only consult its entry's history page for a blistering eyeful of thorough debate on the subject. + +And here, finally, is the answer to the "Mostly harmless" problem. Ford's editor can trim his verbiage to two words, but they need not stay there -- Arthur, or any other user of the Guide as we know it today [fn: that is, in the era where we understand enough about technology to know the difference between a microprocessor and a hard-drive] can revert to Ford's glorious and exhaustive version. + +Think of it: a Guide without space restrictions and without editors, where any Vogon can publish to his heart's content. + +Lovely. + +$$$$ + +1~ Warhol is Turning in His Grave + +(Originally published in The Guardian, November 13, 2007) ~# + +The excellent little programmer book for the National Portrait Gallery's current show POPARTPORTRAITS has a lot to say about the pictures hung on the walls, about the diverse source material the artists drew from in producing their provocative works. They cut up magazines, copied comic books, drew in trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse, reproduced covers from *{Time}* magazine, made ironic use of the cartoon figure of Charles Atlas, painted over an iconic photo of James Dean or Elvis Presley -- and that's just in the first room of seven. + +The programmer book describes the aesthetic experience of seeing these repositioned icons of culture high and low, the art created by the celebrated artists Poons, Rauschenberg, Warhol, et al by nicking the work of others, without permission, and remaking it to make statements and evoke emotions never countenanced by the original creators. + +However, the book does not say a word about copyright. Can you blame it? A treatise on the way that copyright and trademark were -- *{had to be}* -- trammeled to make these works could fill volumes. Reading the programmer book, you have to assume that the curators' only message about copyright is that where free expression is concerned, the rights of the creators of the original source material appropriated by the pop school take a back seat. + +There is, however, another message about copyright in the National Portrait Gallery: it's implicit in the "No Photography" signs prominently placed throughout the halls, including one right by the entrance of the POPARTPORTRAITS exhibition. This isn't intended to protect the works from the depredations of camera-flashes (it would read NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY if this were so). No, the ban on pictures is in place to safeguard the copyright in the works hung on the walls -- a fact that every gallery staffer I spoke to instantly affirmed when I asked about the policy. + +Indeed, it seems that every square centimeter of the Portrait Gallery is under some form of copyright. I wasn't even allowed to photograph the NO PHOTOGRAPHS sign. A museum staffer explained that she'd been told that the typography and layout of the NO PHOTOGRAPHS legend was, itself, copyrighted. If this is true, then presumably, the same rules would prevent anyone from taking any pictures in any public place -- unless you could somehow contrive to get a shot of Leicester Square without any writing, logos, architectural facades, or images in it. I doubt Warhol could have done it. + +What's the message of the show, then? Is it a celebration of remix culture, reveling in the endless possibilities opened up by appropriating and re-using without permission? + +Or is it the epitaph on the tombstone of the sweet days before the UN's chartering of the World Intellectual Property Organization and the ensuing mania for turning everything that can be sensed and recorded into someone's property? + +Does this show -- paid for with public money, with some works that are themselves owned by public institutions -- seek to inspire us to become 21st century pops, armed with cameraphones, websites and mixers, or is it supposed to inform us that our chance has passed, and we'd best settle for a life as information serfs, who can't even make free use of what our eyes see, our ears hear, of the streets we walk upon? + +Perhaps, just perhaps, it's actually a Dadaist show *{masquerading}* as a pop art show! Perhaps the point is to titillate us with the delicious irony of celebrating copyright infringement while simultaneously taking the view that even the NO PHOTOGRAPHY sign is a form of property, not to be reproduced without the permission that can never be had. + +$$$$ + +1~ The Future of Ignoring Things + +(Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) ~# + +For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore. + +Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping spam, but virtually no attention is paid to our interaction with our non-spam messages. Our mailer may strive to learn from our ratings what is and is not spam, but it expends practically no effort on figuring out which of the non-spam emails are important and which ones can be safely ignored, dropped into archival folders, or deleted unread. + +For example, I'm forever getting cc'd on busy threads by well-meaning colleagues who want to loop me in on some discussion in which I have little interest. Maybe the initial group invitation to a dinner (that I'll be out of town for) was something I needed to see, but now that I've declined, I really don't need to read the 300+ messages that follow debating the best place to eat. + +I could write a mail-rule to ignore the thread, of course. But mail-rule editors are clunky, and once your rule-list grows very long, it becomes increasingly unmanageable. Mail-rules are where bookmarks were before the bookmark site del.icio.us showed up -- built for people who might want to ensure that messages from the boss show up in red, but not intended to be used as a gigantic storehouse of a million filters, a crude means for telling the computers what we don't want to see. + +Rael Dornfest, the former chairman of the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference and founder of the startup IWantSandy, once proposed an "ignore thread" feature for mailers: Flag a thread as uninteresting, and your mailer will start to hide messages with that subject-line or thread-ID for a week, unless those messages contain your name. The problem is that threads mutate. Last week's dinner plans become this week's discussion of next year's group holiday. If the thread is still going after a week, the messages flow back into your inbox -- and a single click takes you back through all the messages you missed. + +We need a million measures like this, adaptive systems that create a gray zone between "delete on sight" and "show this to me right away." + +RSS readers are a great way to keep up with the torrent of new items posted on high-turnover sites like Digg, but they're even better at keeping up with sites that are sporadic, like your friend's brilliant journal that she only updates twice a year. But RSS readers don't distinguish between the rare and miraculous appearance of a new item in an occasional journal and the latest click-fodder from Slashdot. They don't even sort your RSS feeds according to the sites that you click-through the most. + +There was a time when I could read the whole of Usenet -- not just because I was a student looking for an excuse to avoid my assignments, but because Usenet was once tractable, readable by a single determined person. Today, I can't even keep up with a single high-traffic message-board. I can't read all my email. I can't read every item posted to every site I like. I certainly can't plough through the entire edit-history of every Wikipedia entry I read. I've come to grips with this -- with acquiring information on a probabilistic basis, instead of the old, deterministic, cover-to-cover approach I learned in the offline world. + +It's as though there's a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as the network only does best-effort delivery of packets, not worrying so much about the bits that fall on the floor, TCP/IP users also do best-effort sweeps of the Internet, focusing on learning from the good stuff they find, rather than lamenting the stuff they don't have time to see. + +The network won't ever become more tractable. There will never be fewer things vying for our online attention. The only answer is better ways and new technology to ignore stuff -- a field that's just being born, with plenty of room to grow. + +$$$$ + +1~ Facebook's Faceplant + +(Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook," in InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) ~# + +Facebook's "platform" strategy has sparked much online debate and controversy. No one wants to see a return to the miserable days of walled gardens, when you couldn't send a message to an AOL subscriber unless you, too, were a subscriber, and when the only services that made it were the ones that AOL management approved. Those of us on the "real" Internet regarded AOL with a species of superstitious dread, a hive of clueless noobs waiting to swamp our beloved Usenet with dumb flamewars (we fiercely guarded our erudite flamewars as being of a palpably superior grade), the wellspring of an + +Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling -- you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other "social" apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!" + +If there was any doubt about Facebook's lack of qualification to displace the Internet with a benevolent dictatorship/walled garden, it was removed when Facebook unveiled its new advertising campaign. Now, Facebook will allow its advertisers use the profile pictures of Facebook users to advertise their products, without permission or compensation. Even if you're the kind of person who likes the sound of a "benevolent dictatorship," this clearly isn't one. + +Many of my colleagues wonder if Facebook can be redeemed by opening up the platform, letting anyone write any app for the service, easily exporting and importing their data, and so on (this is the kind of thing Google is doing with its OpenSocial Alliance). Perhaps if Facebook takes on some of the characteristics that made the Web work -- openness, decentralization, standardization -- it will become like the Web itself, but with the added pixie dust of "social," the indefinable characteristic that makes Facebook into pure crack for a significant proportion of Internet users. + +The debate about redeeming Facebook starts from the assumption that Facebook is snowballing toward critical mass, the point at which it begins to define "the Internet" for a large slice of the world's netizens, growing steadily every day. But I think that this is far from a sure thing. Sure, networks generally follow Metcalfe's Law: "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system." This law is best understood through the analogy of the fax machine: a world with one fax machine has no use for faxes, but every time you add a fax, you square the number of possible send/receive combinations (Alice can fax Bob or Carol or Don; Bob can fax Alice, Carol and Don; Carol can fax Alice, Bob and Don, etc). + +But Metcalfe's law presumes that creating more communications pathways increases the value of the system, and that's not always true (see Brook's Law: "Adding manpower to a late softer project makes it later"). + +Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I'm inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook's-law parallel: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance." Perhaps we can call this "boyd's Law" [NOTE TO EDITOR: "boyd" is always lower-case] for danah [TO EDITOR: "danah" too!] boyd, the social scientist who has studied many of these networks from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has described the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability in a series of sharp papers. + +Here's one of boyd's examples, a true story: a young woman, an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa. The teacher inveigles her friends to clean up their profiles, and all is well again until her boss, the school principal, signs up to the service and demands to be added to her friends list. The fact that she doesn't like her boss doesn't really matter: in the social world of Friendster and its progeny, it's perfectly valid to demand to be "friended" in an explicit fashion that most of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now that her boss is on her friends list, our teacher-friend's buddies naturally assume that she is one of the tribe and begin to send her lascivious Friendster-grams, inviting her to all sorts of dirty funtimes. + +In the real world, we don't articulate our social networks. Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by "friend" and "foe," with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there's an undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you. Maybe it's evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our evolution into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not, e.g., napping in the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged. + +Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work that runs a heavy cognitive load. It's natural to seek out some neural prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a "social scheduling" application that would watch your phone and email and IM to figure out who your pals were and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship aglow. By the time you've reached your forties, chances are you're out-of-touch with more friends than you're in-touch with, old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans... Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some. + +You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please. + +It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking service" has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that's why these services are so volatile: why we're so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace's loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but *{removing}* someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who'll groan and wonder why we're dumb enough to think that we're pals). + +That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go -- and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history. + +$$$$ + +1~ The Future of Internet Immune Systems + +(Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, 2007) ~# + +Bunhill Cemetery is just down the road from my flat in London. It’s a handsome old boneyard, a former plague pit (“Bone hill” -- as in, there are so many bones under there that the ground is actually kind of humped up into a hill). There are plenty of luminaries buried there -- John “Pilgrim’s Progress” Bunyan, William Blake, Daniel Defoe, and assorted Cromwells. But my favorite tomb is that of Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century statistician for whom Bayesian filtering is named. + +Bayesian filtering is plenty useful. Here’s a simple example of how you might use a Bayesian filter. First, get a giant load of non-spam emails and feed them into a Bayesian program that counts how many times each word in their vocabulary appears, producing a statistical breakdown of the word-frequency in good emails. + +Then, point the filter at a giant load of spam (if you’re having a hard time getting a hold of one, I have plenty to spare), and count the words in it. Now, for each new message that arrives in your inbox, have the filter count the relative word-frequencies and make a statistical prediction about whether the new message is spam or not (there are plenty of wrinkles in this formula, but this is the general idea). + +The beauty of this approach is that you needn’t dream up “The Big Exhaustive List of Words and Phrases That Indicate a Message Is/Is Not Spam.” The filter naively calculates a statistical fingerprint for spam and not-spam, and checks the new messages against them. + +This approach -- and similar ones -- are evolving into an immune system for the Internet, and like all immune systems, a little bit goes a long way, and too much makes you break out in hives. + +ISPs are loading up their network centers with intrusion detection systems and tripwires that are supposed to stop attacks before they happen. For example, there’s the filter at the hotel I once stayed at in Jacksonville, Fla. Five minutes after I logged in, the network locked me out again. After an hour on the phone with tech support, it transpired that the network had noticed that the videogame I was playing systematically polled the other hosts on the network to check if they were running servers that I could join and play on. The network decided that this was a malicious port-scan and that it had better kick me off before I did anything naughty. + +It only took five minutes for the software to lock me out, but it took well over an hour to find someone in tech support who understood what had happened and could reset the router so that I could get back online. + +And right there is an example of the autoimmune disorder. Our network defenses are automated, instantaneous, and sweeping. But our fallback and oversight systems are slow, understaffed, and unresponsive. It takes a millionth of a second for the Transportation Security Administration’s body-cavity-search roulette wheel to decide that you’re a potential terrorist and stick you on a no-fly list, but getting un-Tuttle-Buttled is a nightmarish, months-long procedure that makes Orwell look like an optimist. + +The tripwire that locks you out was fired-and-forgotten two years ago by an anonymous sysadmin with root access on the whole network. The outsourced help-desk schlub who unlocks your account can’t even spell "tripwire." The same goes for the algorithm that cut off your credit card because you got on an airplane to a different part of the world and then had the audacity to spend your money. (I’ve resigned myself to spending $50 on long-distance calls with Citibank every time I cross a border if I want to use my debit card while abroad.) + +This problem exists in macro- and microcosm across the whole of our technologically mediated society. The “spamigation bots” run by the Business Software Alliance and the Music and Film Industry Association of America (MAFIAA) entertainment groups send out tens of thousands of automated copyright takedown notices to ISPs at a cost of pennies, with little or no human oversight. The people who get erroneously fingered as pirates (as a Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) spokesperson charmingly puts it, “When you go fishing with a dragnet, sometimes you catch a dolphin.”) spend days or weeks convincing their ISPs that they had the right to post their videos, music, and text-files. + +We need an immune system. There are plenty of bad guys out there, and technology gives them force-multipliers (like the hackers who run 250,000-PC botnets). Still, there’s a terrible asymmetry in a world where defensive takedowns are automatic, but correcting mistaken takedowns is done by hand. + +$$$$ + +1~ All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites + +(Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) ~# + +AOL hates spam. AOL could eliminate nearly 100 percent of its subscribers' spam with one easy change: it could simply shut off its internet gateway. Then, as of yore, the only email an AOL subscriber could receive would come from another AOL subscriber. If an AOL subscriber sent a spam to another AOL subscriber and AOL found out about it, they could terminate the spammer's account. Spam costs AOL millions, and represents a substantial disincentive for AOL customers to remain with the service, and yet AOL chooses to permit virtually anyone who can connect to the Internet, anywhere in the world, to send email to its customers, with any software at all. + +Email is a sloppy, complicated ecosystem. It has organisms of sufficient diversity and sheer number as to beggar the imagination: thousands of SMTP agents, millions of mail-servers, hundreds of millions of users. That richness and diversity lets all kinds of innovative stuff happen: if you go to nytimes.com and "send a story to a friend," the NYT can convincingly spoof your return address on the email it sends to your friend, so that it appears that the email originated on your computer. Also: a spammer can harvest your email and use it as a fake return address on the spam he sends to your friend. Sysadmins have server processes that send them mail to secret pager-addresses when something goes wrong, and GPLed mailing-list software gets used by spammers and people running high-volume mailing lists alike. + +You could stop spam by simplifying email: centralize functions like identity verification, limit the number of authorized mail agents and refuse service to unauthorized agents, even set up tollbooths where small sums of money are collected for every email, ensuring that sending ten million messages was too expensive to contemplate without a damned high expectation of return on investment. If you did all these things, you'd solve spam. + +By breaking email. + +Small server processes that mail a logfile to five sysadmins every hour just in case would be prohibitively expensive. Convincing the soviet that your bulk-mailer was only useful to legit mailing lists and not spammers could take months, and there's no guarantee that it would get their stamp of approval at all. With verified identity, the NYTimes couldn't impersonate you when it forwarded stories on your behalf -- and Chinese dissidents couldn't send out their samizdata via disposable gmail accounts. + +An email system that can be controlled is an email system without complexity. Complex ecosystems are influenced, not controlled. + +The Hollywood studios are conniving to create a global network of regulatory mandates over entertainment devices. Here they call it the Broadcast Flag; in Europe, Asia, Australia and Latinamerica it's called DVB Copy Protection Content Management. These systems purport to solve the problem of indiscriminate redistribution of broadcast programming via the Internet, but their answer to the problem, such as it is, is to require that everyone who wants to build a device that touches video has to first get permission. + +If you want to make a TV, a screen, a video-card, a high-speed bus, an analog-to-digital converter, a tuner card, a DVD burner -- any tool that you hope to be lawful for use in connection with digital TV signals -- you'll have to go on bended knee to get permission to deploy it. You'll have to convince FCC bureaucrats or a panel of Hollywood companies and their sellout IT and consumer electronics toadies that the thing you're going to bring to market will not disrupt their business models. + +That's how DVD works today: if you want to make a DVD player, you need to ask permission from a shadowy organization called the DVD-CCA. They don't give permission if you plan on adding new features -- that's why they're suing Kaleidascape for building a DVD jukebox that can play back your movies from a hard-drive archive instead of the original discs. + +CD has a rich ecosystem, filled with parasites -- entrepreneurial organisms that move to fill every available niche. If you spent a thousand bucks on CDs ten years ago, the ecosystem for CDs would reward you handsomely. In the intervening decade, parasites who have found an opportunity to suck value out of the products on offer from the labels and the dupe houses by offering you the tools to convert your CDs to ring-tones, karaoke, MP3s, MP3s on iPods and other players, MP3s on CDs that hold a thousand percent more music -- and on and on. + +DVDs live in a simpler, slower ecosystem, like a terrarium in a bottle where a million species have been pared away to a manageable handful. DVDs pay no such dividend. A thousand dollars' worth of ten-year old DVDs are good for just what they were good for ten years ago: watching. You can't put your kid into her favorite cartoon, you can't downsample the video to something that plays on your phone, and you certainly can't lawfully make a hard-drive-based jukebox from your discs. + +The yearning for simple ecosystems is endemic among people who want to "fix" some problem of bad actors on the networks. + +Take interoperability: you might sell me a database in the expectation that I'll only communicate with it using your authorized database agents. That way you can charge vendors a license fee in exchange for permission to make a client, and you can ensure that the clients are well-behaved and don't trigger any of your nasty bugs. + +But you can't meaningfully enforce that. EDS and other titanic software companies earn their bread and butter by producing fake database clients that impersonate the real thing as they iterate through every record and write it to a text file -- or simply provide a compatibility layer through systems provided by two different vendors. These companies produce software that lies -- parasite software that fills niches left behind by other organisms, sometimes to those organisms' detriment. + +So we have "Trusted Computing," a system that's supposed to let software detect other programs' lies and refuse to play with them if they get caught out fibbing. It's a system that's based on torching the rainforest with all its glorious anarchy of tools and systems and replacing it with neat rows of tame and planted trees, each one approved by The Man as safe for use with his products. + +For Trusted Computing to accomplish this, everyone who makes a video-card, keyboard, or logic-board must receive a key from some certifying body that will see to it that the key is stored in a way that prevents end-users from extracting it and using it to fake signatures. + +But if one keyboard vendor doesn't store his keys securely, the system will be useless for fighting keyloggers. If one video-card vendor lets a key leak, the system will be no good for stopping screenlogging. If one logic-board vendor lets a key slip, the whole thing goes out the window. That's how DVD DRM got hacked: one vendor, Xing, left its keys in a place where users could get at them, and then anyone could break the DRM on any DVD. + +Not only is the Trusted Computing advocates' goal -- producing a simpler software ecosystem -- wrongheaded, but the methodology is doomed. Fly-by-night keyboard vendors in distant free trade zones just won't be 100 percent compliant, and Trusted Computing requires no less than perfect compliance. + +The whole of DRM is a macrocosm for Trusted Computing. The DVB Copy Protection system relies on a set of rules for translating every one of its restriction states -- such as "copy once" and "copy never" -- to states in other DRM systems that are licensed to receive its output. That means that they're signing up to review, approve and write special rules for every single entertainment technology now invented and every technology that will be invented in the future. + +Madness: shrinking the ecosystem of everything you can plug into your TV down to the subset that these self-appointed arbiters of technology approve is a recipe for turning the electronics, IT and telecoms industries into something as small and unimportant as Hollywood. Hollywood -- which is a tenth the size of IT, itself a tenth the size of telecoms. + +In Hollywood, your ability to make a movie depends on the approval of a few power-brokers who have signing authority over the two-hundred-million-dollar budgets for making films. As far as Hollywood is concerned, this is a feature, not a bug. Two weeks ago, I heard the VP of Technology for Warners give a presentation in Dublin on the need to adopt DRM for digital TV, and his money-shot, his big convincer of a slide went like this: + +"With advances in processing power, storage capacity and broadband access... EVERYBODY BECOMES A BROADCASTER!" + +Heaven forfend. + +Simple ecosystems are the goal of proceedings like CARP, the panel that set out the ruinously high royalties for webcasters. The recording industry set the rates as high as they did so that the teeming millions of webcasters would be rendered economically extinct, leaving behind a tiny handful of giant companies that could be negotiated with around a board room table, rather than dealt with by blanket legislation. + +The razing of the rainforest has a cost. It's harder to send a legitimate email today than it ever was -- thanks to a world of closed SMTP relays. The cries for a mail-server monoculture grow more shrill with every passing moment. Just last week, it was a call for every mail-administrator to ban the "vacation" program that sends out automatic responses informing senders that the recipient is away from email for a few days, because mailboxes that run vacation can cause "spam blowback" where accounts send their vacation notices to the hapless individuals whose email addresses the spammers have substituted on the email's Reply-To line. + +And yet there is more spam than there ever was. All the costs we've paid for fighting spam have added up to no benefit: the network is still overrun and sometimes even overwhelmed by spam. We've let the network's neutrality and diversity be compromised, without receiving the promised benefit of spam-free inboxes. + +Likewise, DRM has exacted a punishing toll wherever it has come into play, costing us innovation, free speech, research and the public's rights in copyright. And likewise, DRM has not stopped infringement: today, infringement is more widespread than ever. All those costs borne by society in the name of protecting artists and stopping infringement, and not a penny put into an artist's pocket, not a single DRM-restricted file that can't be downloaded for free and without encumbrance from a P2P network. + +Everywhere we look, we find people who should know better calling for a parasite-free Internet. Science fiction writers are supposed to be forward looking, but they're wasting their time demanding that Amazon and Google make it harder to piece together whole books from the page-previews one can get via the look-inside-the-book programs. They're even cooking up programs to spoof deliberately corrupted ebooks into the P2P networks, presumably to assure the few readers the field has left that reading science fiction is a mug's game. + +The amazing thing about the failure of parasite-elimination programs is that their proponents have concluded that the problem is that they haven't tried hard enough -- with just a few more species eliminated, a few more policies imposed, paradise will spring into being. Their answer to an unsuccessful strategy for fixing the Internet is to try the same strategy, only moreso -- only fill those niches in the ecology that you can sanction. Hunt and kill more parasites, no matter what the cost. + +We are proud parasites, we Emerging Techers. We're engaged in perl whirling, pythoneering, lightweight javarey -- we hack our cars and we hack our PCs. We're the rich humus carpeting the jungle floor and the tiny frogs living in the bromeliads. + +The long tail -- Chris Anderson's name for the 95% of media that isn't top sellers, but which, in aggregate, accounts for more than half the money on the table for media vendors -- is the tail of bottom-feeders and improbable denizens of the ocean's thermal vents. We're unexpected guests at the dinner table and we have the nerve to demand a full helping. + +Your ideas are cool and you should go and make them real, even if they demand that the kind of ecological diversity that seems to be disappearing around us. + +You may succeed -- provided that your plans don't call for a simple ecosystem where only you get to provide value and no one else gets to play. + +$$$ + +1~ READ CAREFULLY + +(Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) ~# + +*{READ CAREFULLY. By reading this article, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.}* + +READ CAREFULLY -- all in caps, and what it means is, "IGNORE THIS." That's because the small print in the clickwrap, shrinkwrap, browsewrap and other non-negotiated agreements is both immutable and outrageous. + +Why read the "agreement" if you know that: + +1) No sane person would agree to its text, and + +2) Even if you disagree, no one will negotiate a better agreement with you? + +We seem to have sunk to a kind of playground system of forming contracts. There are those who will tell you that you can form a binding agreement just by following a link, stepping into a store, buying a product, or receiving an email. By standing there, shaking your head, shouting "NO NO NO I DO NOT AGREE," you agree to let me come over to your house, clean out your fridge, wear your underwear and make some long-distance calls. + +If you buy a downloadable movie from Amazon Unbox, you agree to let them install spyware on your computer, delete any file they don't like on your hard-drive, and cancel your viewing privileges for any reason. Of course, it goes without saying that Amazon reserves the right to modify the agreement at any time. + +The worst offenders are people who sell you movies and music. They're a close second to people who sell you software, or provide services over the Internet. There's a rubric to this -- you're getting a discount in exchange for signing onto an abusive agreement, but just try and find the software that *{doesn't}* come with one of these "agreements" -- at any price. + +For example, Vista, Microsoft's new operating system, comes in a rainbow of flavors varying in price from $99 to $399, but all of them come with the same crummy terms of service, which state that "you may not work around any technical limitations in the software," and that Windows Defender, the bundled anti-malware program, can delete any program from your hard drive that Microsoft doesn't like, even if it breaks your computer. + +It's bad enough when this stuff comes to us through deliberate malice, but it seems that bogus agreements can spread almost without human intervention. Google any obnoxious term or phrase from a EULA, and you'll find that the same phrase appears in a dozens -- perhaps thousands -- of EULAs around the Internet. Like snippets of DNA being passed from one virus to another as they infect the world's corporations in a pandemic of idiocy, terms of service are semi-autonomous entities. + +Indeed, when rocker Billy Bragg read the fine print on the MySpace user agreement, he discovered that it appeared that site owner Rupert Murdoch was laying claim to copyrights in every song uploaded to the site, in a silent, sinister land-grab that turned the media baron into the world's most prolific and indiscriminate hoarder of garage-band tunes. + +However, the EULA that got Bragg upset wasn't a Murdoch innovation -- it dates back to the earliest days of the service. It seems to have been posted at a time when the garage entrepreneurs who built MySpace were in no position to hire pricey counsel -- something borne out by the fact that the old MySpace EULA appears nearly verbatim on many other services around the Internet. It's not going out very far on a limb to speculate that MySpace's founders merely copied a EULA they found somewhere else, without even reading it, and that when Murdoch's due diligence attorneys were preparing to give these lucky fellows $600,000,000, that they couldn't be bothered to read the terms of service anyway. + +In their defense, EULAese is so mind-numbingly boring that it's a kind of torture to read these things. You can hardly blame them. + +But it does raise the question -- why are we playing host to these infectious agents? If they're not read by customers *{or}* companies, why bother with them? + +If you wanted to really be careful about this stuff, you'd prohibit every employee at your office from clicking on any link, installing any program, creating accounts, signing for parcels -- even doing a run to Best Buy for some CD blanks, have you *{seen}* the fine-print on their credit-card slips? After all, these people are entering into "agreements" on behalf of their employer -- agreements to allow spyware onto your network, to not "work around any technical limitations in their software," to let malicious software delete arbitrary files from their systems. + +So far, very few of us have been really bitten in the ass by EULAs, but that's because EULAs are generally associated with companies who have products or services they're hoping you'll use, and enforcing their EULAs could cost them business. + +But that was the theory with patents, too. So long as everyone with a huge portfolio of unexamined, overlapping, generous patents was competing with similarly situated manufacturers, there was a mutually assured destruction -- a kind of detente represented by cross-licensing deals for patent portfolios. + +But the rise of the patent troll changed all that. Patent trolls don't make products. They make lawsuits. They buy up the ridiculous patents of failed companies and sue the everloving hell out of everyone they can find, building up a war-chest from easy victories against little guys that can be used to fund more serious campaigns against larger organizations. Since there are no products to disrupt with a countersuit, there's no mutually assured destruction. + +If a shakedown artist can buy up some bogus patents and use them to put the screws to you, then it's only a matter of time until the same grifters latch onto the innumerable "agreements" that your company has formed with a desperate dot-bomb looking for an exit strategy. + +More importantly, these "agreements" make a mockery of the law and of the very *{idea}* of forming agreements. Civilization starts with the idea of a real agreement -- for example, "We crap *{here}* and we sleep *{there}*, OK?" -- and if we reduce the noble agreement to a schoolyard game of no-takebacks, we erode the bedrock of civilization itself. + +$$$$ + +1~ World of Democracycraft + +(Originally published as "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships," InformationWeek, April 16, 2007) ~# + +Can you be a citizen of a virtual world? That's the question that I keep asking myself, whenever anyone tells me about the wonder of multiplayer online games, especially Second Life, the virtual world that is more creative playground than game. + +These worlds invite us to take up residence in them, to invest time (and sometimes money) in them. Second Life encourages you to make stuff using their scripting engine and sell it in the game. You Own Your Own Mods -- it's the rallying cry of the new generation of virtual worlds, an updated version of the old BBS adage from the WELL: You Own Your Own Words. + +I spend a lot of time in Disney parks. I even own a share of Disney stock. But I don't flatter myself that I'm a citizen of Disney World. I know that when I go to Orlando, the Mouse is going to fingerprint me and search my bags, because the Fourth Amendment isn't a "Disney value." + +Disney even has its own virtual currency, symbolic tokens called Disney Dollars that you can spend or exchange at any Disney park. I'm reasonably confident that if Disney refused to turn my Mickeybucks back into US Treasury Department-issue greenbacks that I could make life unpleasant for them in a court of law. + +But is the same true of a game? The money in your real-world bank-account and in your in-game bank-account is really just a pointer in a database. But if the bank moves the pointer around arbitrarily (depositing a billion dollars in your account, or wiping you out), they face a regulator. If a game wants to wipe you out, well, you probably agreed to let them do that when you signed up. + +Can you amass wealth in such a world? Well, sure. There are rich people in dictatorships all over the world. Stalin's favorites had great big dachas and drove fancy cars. You don't need democratic rights to get rich. + +But you *{do}* need democratic freedoms to *{stay}* rich. In-world wealth is like a Stalin-era dacha, or the diamond fortunes of Apartheid South Africa: valuable, even portable (to a limited extent), but not really *{yours}*, not in any stable, long-term sense. + +Here are some examples of the difference between being a citizen and a customer: + +In January, 2006 a World of Warcraft moderator shut down an advertisement for a "GBLT-friendly" guild. This was a virtual club that players could join, whose mission was to be "friendly" to "Gay/Bi/Lesbian/Transgendered" players. The WoW moderator -- and Blizzard management -- cited a bizarre reason for the shut-down: + +"While we appreciate and understand your point of view, we do feel that the advertisement of a 'GLBT friendly' guild is very likely to result in harassment for players that may not have existed otherwise. If you will look at our policy, you will notice the suggested penalty for violating the Sexual Orientation Harassment Policy is to 'be temporarily suspended from the game.' However, as there was clearly no malicious intent on your part, this penalty was reduced to a warning." + +Sara Andrews, the guild's creator, made a stink and embarrassed Blizzard (the game's parent company) into reversing the decision. + +In 2004, a player in the MMO EVE Online declared that the game's creators had stacked the deck against him, called EVE, "a poorly designed game which rewards the greedy and violent, and punishes the hardworking and honest." He was upset over a change in the game dynamics which made it easier to play a pirate and harder to play a merchant. + +The player, "Dentara Rask," wrote those words in the preamble to a tell-all memoir detailing an elaborate Ponzi scheme that he and an accomplice had perpetrated in EVE. The two of them had bilked EVE's merchants out of a substantial fraction of the game's total GDP and then resigned their accounts. The objective was to punish the game's owners for their gameplay decisions by crashing the game's economy. + +In both of these instances, players -- residents of virtual worlds -- resolved their conflicts with game management through customer activism. That works in the real world, too, but when it fails, we have the rule of law. We can sue. We can elect new leaders. When all else fails, we can withdraw all our money from the bank, sell our houses, and move to a different country. + +But in virtual worlds, these recourses are off-limits. Virtual worlds can and do freeze players' wealth for "cheating" (amassing gold by exploiting loopholes in the system), for participating in real-world gold-for-cash exchanges (eBay recently put an end to this practice on its service), or for violating some other rule. The rules of virtual worlds are embodied in EULAs, not Constitutions, and are always "subject to change without notice." + +So what does it mean to be "rich" in Second Life? Sure, you can have a thriving virtual penis business in game, one that returns a healthy sum of cash every month. You can even protect your profits by regularly converting them to real money. But if you lose an argument with Second Life's parent company, your business vanishes. In other worlds, the only stable in-game wealth is the wealth you take out of the game. Your virtual capital investments are totally contingent. Piss off the wrong exec at Linden Labs, Blizzard, Sony Online Entertainment, or Sularke and your little in-world business could disappear for good. + +Well, what of it? Why not just create a "democratic" game that has a constitution, full citizenship for players, and all the prerequisites for stable wealth? Such a game would be open source (so that other, interoperable "nations" could be established for you to emigrate to if you don't like the will of the majority in one game-world), and run by elected representatives who would instruct the administrators and programmers as to how to run the virtual world. In the real world, the TSA sets the rules for aviation -- in a virtual world, the equivalent agency would determine the physics of flight. + +The question is, would this game be any *{fun}*? Well, democracy itself is pretty fun -- where "fun" means "engrossing and engaging." Lots of people like to play the democracy game, whether by voting every four years or by moving to K Street and setting up a lobbying operation. + +But video games aren't quite the same thing. Gameplay conventions like "grinding" (repeating a task), "leveling up" (attaining a higher level of accomplishment), "questing" and so on are functions of artificial scarcity. The difference between a character with 10,000,000 gold pieces and a giant, rare, terrifying crossbow and a newbie player is which pointers are associated with each character's database entry. If the elected representatives direct that every player should have the shiniest armor, best space-ships, and largest bank-balances possible (this sounds like a pretty good election platform to me!), then what's left to do? + +Oh sure, in Second Life they have an interesting crafting economy based on creating and exchanging virtual objects. But these objects are *{also}* artificially scarce -- that is, the ability of these objects to propagate freely throughout the world is limited only by the software that supports them. It's basically the same economics of the music industry, but applied to every field of human endeavor in the entire (virtual) world. + +Fun matters. Real world currencies rise and fall based, in part, by the economic might of the nations that issue them. Virtual world currencies are more strongly tied to whether there's any reason to spend the virtual currency on the objects that are denominated in it. 10,000 EverQuest golds might trade for $100 on a day when that same sum will buy you a magic EQ sword that enables you to play alongside the most interesting people online, running the most fun missions online. But if all those players out-migrate to World of Warcraft, and word gets around that Warlord's Command is way more fun than anything in poor old creaky EverQuest, your EverQuest gold turns into Weimar Deutschemarks, a devalued currency that you can't even give away. + +This is where the plausibility of my democratic, co-operative, open source virtual world starts to break down. Elected governments can field armies, run schools, provide health care (I'm a Canadian), and bring acid lakes back to health. But I've never done anything run by a government agency that was a lot of *{fun}*. It's my sneaking suspicion that the only people who'd enjoy playing World of Democracycraft would be the people running for office there. The players would soon find themselves playing IRSQuest, Second Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Life, and Caves of 27 Stroke B. + +Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe customership is enough of a rock to build a platform of sustainable industry upon. It's not like entrepreneurs in Dubai have a lot of recourse if they get on the wrong side of the Emir; or like Singaporeans get to appeal the decisions of President Nathan, and there's plenty of industry there. + +And hell, maybe bureaucracies have hidden reserves of fun that have been lurking there, waiting for the chance to bust out and surprise us all. + +I sure hope so. These online worlds are endlessly diverting places. It'd be a shame if it turned out that cyberspace was a dictatorship -- benevolent or otherwise. + +$$$$ + +1~ Snitchtown + +(Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) ~# + +The 12-story Hotel Torni was the tallest building in central Helsinki during the Soviet occupation of Finland, making it a natural choice to serve as KGB headquarters. Today, it bears a plaque testifying to its checkered past, and also noting the curious fact that the Finns pulled 40 kilometers of wiretap cable out of the walls after the KGB left. The wire was solid evidence of each operative's mistrustful surveillance of his fellow agents. + +The East German Stasi also engaged in rampant surveillance, using a network of snitches to assemble secret files on every resident of East Berlin. They knew who was telling subversive jokes--but missed the fact that the Wall was about to come down. + +When you watch everyone, you watch no one. + +This seems to have escaped the operators of the digital surveillance technologies that are taking over our cities. In the brave new world of doorbell cams, wi-fi sniffers, RFID passes, bag searches at the subway and photo lookups at office security desks, universal surveillance is seen as the universal solution to all urban ills. But the truth is that ubiquitous cameras only serve to violate the social contract that makes cities work. + +The key to living in a city and peacefully co-existing as a social animal in tight quarters is to set a delicate balance of seeing and not seeing. You take care not to step on the heels of the woman in front of you on the way out of the subway, and you might take passing note of her most excellent handbag. But you don't make eye contact and exchange a nod. Or even if you do, you make sure that it's as fleeting as it can be. + +Checking your mirrors is good practice even in stopped traffic, but staring and pointing at the schmuck next to you who's got his finger so far up his nostril he's in danger of lobotomizing himself is bad form--worse form than picking your nose, even. + +I once asked a Japanese friend to explain why so many people on the Tokyo subway wore surgical masks. Are they extreme germophobes? Conscientious folks getting over a cold? Oh, yes, he said, yes, of course, but that's only the rubric. The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression, to make your face into a disengaged, unreadable blank--to spare others the discomfort of firing up their mirror neurons in order to model your mood based on your outward expression. To make it possible to see without seeing. + +There is one city dweller that doesn't respect this delicate social contract: the closed-circuit television camera. Ubiquitous and demanding, CCTVs don't have any visible owners. They ... occur. They exist in the passive voice, the "mistakes were made" voice: "The camera recorded you." + +They are like an emergent property of the system, of being afraid and looking for cheap answers. And they are everywhere: In London, residents are photographed more than 300 times a day. + +The irony of security cameras is that they watch, but nobody cares that they're looking. Junkies don't worry about CCTVs. Crazed rapists and other purveyors of sudden, senseless violence aren't deterred. I was mugged twice on my old block in San Francisco by the crack dealers on my corner, within sight of two CCTVs and a police station. My rental car was robbed by a junkie in a Gastown garage in Vancouver in sight of a CCTV. + +Three mad kids followed my friend out of the Tube in London last year and murdered him on his doorstep. + +Crazy, desperate, violent people don't make rational calculus in regards to their lives. Anyone who becomes a junkie, crack dealer, or cellphone-stealing stickup artist is obviously bad at making life decisions. They're not deterred by surveillance. + +Yet the cameras proliferate, and replace human eyes. The cops on my block in San Francisco stayed in their cars and let the cameras do the watching. The Tube station didn't have any human guards after dark, just a CCTV to record the fare evaders. + +Now London city councils are installing new CCTVs with loudspeakers, operated by remote coppers who can lean in and make a speaker bark at you, "Citizen, pick up your litter." "Stop leering at that woman." "Move along." + +Yeah, that'll work. + +Every day the glass-domed cameras proliferate, and the gate-guarded mentality of the deep suburbs threatens to invade our cities. More doorbell webcams, more mailbox cams, more cams in our cars. + +The city of the future is shaping up to be a neighborly Panopticon, leeched of the cosmopolitan ability to see, and not be seen, where every nose pick is noted and logged and uploaded to the Internet. You don't have anything to hide, sure, but there's a reason we close the door to the bathroom before we drop our drawers. Everyone poops, but it takes a special kind of person to want to do it in public. + +The trick now is to contain the creeping cameras of the law. When the city surveils its citizens, it legitimizes our mutual surveillance--what's the difference between the cops watching your every move, or the mall owners watching you, or you doing it to the guy next door? + +I'm an optimist. I think our social contracts are stronger than our technology. They're the strongest bonds we have. We don't aim telescopes through each others' windows, because only creeps do that. + +But we need to reclaim the right to record our own lives as they proceed. We need to reverse decisions like the one that allowed the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to line subway platforms with terrorism cameras, but said riders may not take snapshots in the station. We need to win back the right to photograph our human heritage in museums and galleries, and we need to beat back the snitch-cams rent-a-cops use to make our cameras stay in our pockets. + +They're our cities and our institutions. And we choose the future we want to live in. + +$$$$ + +1~ Hope you enjoyed it! The actual, physical object that corresponds to this book is superbly designed, portable, and makes a great gift: + +http://craphound.com/content/buy + +If you would rather make a donation, you can buy a copy of the book for a worthy school, library or other institution of your choosing: + +http://craphound.com/content/donate + +$$$$ + +1~ About the Author + +Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is an award-winning novelist, activist, blogger and journalist. He is the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net), one of the most popular blogs in the world, and has contributed to The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Economist, Forbes, Popular Science, Wired, Make, InformationWeek, Locus, Salon, Radar, and many other magazines, newspapers and websites. + +His novels and short story collections include *{Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town}*, *{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}*, *{Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present}* and his most recent novel, a political thriller for young adults called *{Little Brother}*, published by Tor Books in May, 2008. All of his novels and short story collections are available as free downloads under the terms of various Creative Commons licenses. + +Doctorow is the former European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) and has participated in many treaty-making, standards-setting and regulatory and legal battles in countries all over the world. In 2006/2007, he was the inaugural Canada/US Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. In 2007, he was also named one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders" and one of Forbes Magazine's top 25 "Web Celebrities." + +Born in Toronto, Canada in 1971, he is a four-time university dropout. He now resides in London, England with his wife and baby daughter, where he does his best to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance cameras while roaming the world, speaking on copyright, freedom and the future. + +$$$$ diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst b/data/samples/current/en/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0680d0e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst @@ -0,0 +1,4352 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Democratizing Innovation + :language: US + +@creator: + :author: von Hippel, Eric + +@date: + :published: 2005 + :created: 2005 + :issued: 2005 + :available: 2005 + :modified: 2005 + :valid: 2005 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) 2005 Eric von Hippel. Exclusive rights to publish and sell this book in print form in English are licensed to The MIT Press. All other rights are reserved by the author. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license. + :license: Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license 2.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/legalcode Some Rights Reserved. You are free to copy, distribute, display and perform the work, under the following conditions: Attribution, you must give the original author credit; you may not use this work for commercial purposes; No Derivative Works, you may not alter, transform, or build-upon this work. For reuse or distribution you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;book:discourse:innovation|democracy|open source software;innovation;technological innovations:economic aspects;diffusion of innovations;democracy;open source software:innovation + +@identifier: + :isbn: 9780262720472 + :oclc: 56880369 + +% HC79.T4H558 2005 +% 338'.064-dc22 2004061060 + +@links: + { Democratizing Innovation }http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm + { Eric von Hippel }http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/ + { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratizing_Innovation + { Democratizing Innovation @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Democratizing-Innovation-Eric-Von-Hippel/dp/0262720477 + { Democratizing Innovation @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=9780262720472 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:B,C; break=1 + :texpdf_font: Liberation Sans + :home_button_image: {di_evh.png }http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/ + :footer: {Eric von Hippel}http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/ + +:A~ @title @author + +--~# + +1~attribution Attribution + +Dedicated to all who are building the information commons. + +% Contents +% Acknowledgements ix +% 1 Introduction and Overview 1 +% 2 Development of Products by Lead Users 19 +% 3 Why Many Users Want Custom Products 33 +% 4 Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions 45 +% 5 Users' Low-Cost Innovation Niches 63 +% 6 Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations 77 +% 7 Innovation Communities 93 +% 8 Adapting Policy to User Innovation 107 +% 9 Democratizing Innovation 121 +% 10 Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations 133 +% 11 Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design 147 +% 12 Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields 165 +% Notes 179 +% Bibliography 183 +% Index 197 + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgements + +Early in my research on the democratization of innovation I was very fortunate to gain five major academic mentors and friends. Nathan Rosenberg, Richard Nelson, Zvi Griliches, Edwin Mansfield, and Ann Carter all provided crucial support as I adopted economics as the organizing framework and toolset for my work. Later, I collaborated with a number of wonderful co-authors, all of whom are friends as well: Stan Finkelstein, Nikolaus Franke, Dietmar Harhoff, Joachim Henkel, Cornelius Herstatt, Ralph Katz, Georg von Krogh, Karim Lakhani, Gary Lilien, Christian Luthje, Pamela Morrison, William Riggs, John Roberts, Stephan Schrader, Mary Sonnack, Stefan Thomke, Marcie Tyre, and Glen Urban. Other excellent research collaborators and friends of long standing include Carliss Baldwin, Sonali Shah, Sarah Slaughter, and Lars Jeppesen. + +At some point as interest in a topic grows, there is a transition from dyadic academic relationships to a real research community. In my case, the essential person in enabling that transition was my close friend and colleague Dietmar Harhoff. He began to send wonderful Assistant Professors (Habilitanden) over from his university, Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich, to do collaborative research with me as MIT Visiting Scholars. They worked on issues related to the democratization of innovation while at MIT and then carried on when they returned to Europe. Now they are training others in their turn. + +I have also greatly benefited from close contacts with colleagues in industry. As Director of the MIT Innovation Lab, I work together with senior innovation managers in just a few companies to develop and try out innovation tools in actual company settings. Close intellectual colleagues and friends of many years standing in this sphere include Jim Euchner from Pitney-Bowes, Mary Sonnack and Roger Lacey from 3M, John Wright from IFF, Dave Richards from Nortel Networks, John Martin from Verizon, Ben Hyde from the Apache Foundation, Brian Behlendorf from the Apache Foundation and CollabNet, and Joan Churchill and Susan Hiestand from Lead User Concepts. Thank you so much for the huge (and often humbling) insights that your and our field experimentation has provided! + +I am also eager to acknowledge and thank my family for the joy and learning they experience and share with me. My wife Jessie is a professional editor and edited my first book in a wonderful way. For this book, however, time devoted to bringing up the children made a renewed editorial collaboration impossible. I hope the reader will not suffer unduly as a consequence! My children Christiana Dagmar and Eric James have watched me work on the book---indeed they could not avoid it as I often write at home. I hope they have been drawing the lesson that academic research can be really fun. Certainly, that is the lesson I drew from my father, Arthur von Hippel. He wrote his books in his study upstairs when I was a child and would often come down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. In transit, he would throw up his hands and say, to no one in particular, "/{Why}/ do I choose to work on such difficult problems?" And then he would look deeply happy. Dad, I noticed the smile! + +Finally my warmest thanks to my MIT colleagues and students and also to MIT as an institution. MIT is a really inspiring place to work and learn from others. We all understand the requirements for good research and learning, and we all strive to contribute to a very supportive academic environment. And, of course, new people are always showing up with new and interesting ideas, so fun and learning are always being renewed! + +--+# + +:B~ Democratizing Innovation + +1~ 1 Introduction and Overview + +When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services---both firms and individual consumers---are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed and freely shared by others. +={ Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by users +43 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +11 ; + Users : + See also Lead users | expectations of economic benefit by +33 | innovation and +33 +} + +The trend toward democratization of innovation applies to information products such as software and also to physical products. As a quick illustration of the latter, consider the development of high-performance windsurfing techniques and equipment in Hawaii by an informal user group. High-performance windsurfing involves acrobatics such as jumps and flips and turns in mid-air. Larry Stanley, a pioneer in high-performance windsurfing, described the development of a major innovation in technique and equipment to Sonali Shah: +={ Stanley, L. ; + Shah, S. ; + Information commons : + See also Information communities | See also Innovation communities ; + windsurfing +} + +In 1978 Jürgen Honscheid came over from West Germany for the first Hawaiian World Cup and discovered jumping, which was new to him, although Mike Horgan and I were jumping in 1974 and 1975. There was a new enthusiasm for jumping and we were all trying to outdo each other by jumping higher and higher. The problem was that . . . the riders flew off in mid-air because there was no way to keep the board with you---and as a result you hurt your feet, your legs, and the board. +={ Honscheid, J. ; + Horgan, M. +} + +Then I remembered the "Chip," a small experimental board we had built with footstraps, and thought "it's dumb not to use this for jumping." That's when I first started jumping with footstraps and discovering controlled flight. I could go so much faster than I ever thought and when you hit a wave it was like a motorcycle rider hitting a ramp; you just flew into the air. All of a sudden not only could you fly into the air, but you could land the thing, and not only that, but you could change direction in the air! + +The whole sport of high-performance windsurfing really started from that. As soon as I did it, there were about ten of us who sailed all the time together and within one or two days there were various boards out there that had footstraps of various kinds on them, and we were all going fast and jumping waves and stuff. It just kind of snowballed from there. (Shah 2000) +={ Shah, S. ; + windsurfing +1 } + +By 1998, more than a million people were engaged in windsurfing, and a large fraction of the boards sold incorporated the user-developed innovations for the high-performance sport. + +The user-centered innovation process just illustrated is in sharp contrast to the traditional model, in which products and services are developed by manufacturers in a closed way, the manufacturers using patents, copyrights, and other protections to prevent imitators from free riding on their innovation investments. In this traditional model, a user's only role is to have needs, which manufacturers then identify and fill by designing and producing new products. The manufacturer-centric model does fit some fields and conditions. However, a growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many and perhaps most new industrial and consumer products. Further, the contribution of users is growing steadily larger as a result of continuing advances in computer and communications capabilities. +={ Intellectual property rights : + See also Private-collective innovation | copyrights and | innovation and +2 ; + Copyrights : + See Intellectual property rights ; + Manufacturers : + government policy and +2 ; + Product development +2 ; + Users : + government policy and ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers +5 ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers +12 ; + Government policy : + manufacturer innovation and +2 ; + Manufacturers : + expectations of economic benefit by +26 + } + +In this book I explain in detail how the emerging process of user-centric, democratized innovation works. I also explain how innovation by users provides a very necessary complement to and feedstock for manufacturer innovation. + +The ongoing shift of innovation to users has some very attractive qualities. It is becoming progressively easier for many users to get precisely what they want by designing it for themselves. And innovation by users appears to increase social welfare. At the same time, the ongoing shift of product-development activities from manufacturers to users is painful and difficult for many manufacturers. Open, distributed innovation is "attacking" a major structure of the social division of labor. Many firms and industries must make fundamental changes to long-held business models in order to adapt. Further, governmental policy and legislation sometimes preferentially supports innovation by manufacturers. Considerations of social welfare suggest that this must change. The workings of the intellectual property system are of special concern. But despite the difficulties, a democratized and user-centric system of innovation appears well worth striving for. +={ Government policy : + See also Digital Millennium Copyright Act | and social welfare | user innovation and ; + Social welfare : + government policy and | innovation and +3 | user innovation and +3 } + +% check government policy + +Users, as the term will be used in this book, are firms or individual consumers that expect to benefit from /{using}/ a product or a service. In contrast, manufacturers expect to benefit from /{selling}/ a product or a service. A firm or an individual can have different relationships to different products or innovations. For example, Boeing is a manufacturer of airplanes, but it is also a user of machine tools. If we were examining innovations developed by Boeing for the airplanes it sells, we would consider Boeing a manufacturer-innovator in those cases. But if we were considering innovations in metal-forming machinery developed by Boeing for in-house use in building airplanes, we would categorize those as user-developed innovations and would categorize Boeing as a user-innovator in those cases. +={ Users : characteristics of +2 ; + Manufacturers : characteristics of +2 +} + +Innovation user and innovation manufacturer are the two general "functional" relationships between innovator and innovation. Users are unique in that they alone benefit /{directly}/ from innovations. All others (here lumped under the term "manufacturers") must sell innovation-related products or services to users, indirectly or directly, in order to profit from innovations. Thus, in order to profit, inventors must sell or license knowledge related to innovations, and manufacturers must sell products or services incorporating innovations. Similarly, suppliers of innovation-related materials or services---unless they have direct use for the innovations---must sell the materials or services in order to profit from the innovations. +={ Innovation : + See also Innovation communities | functional sources of ; + Suppliers +} + +The user and manufacturer categorization of relationships between innovator and innovation can be extended to specific functions, attributes, or features of products and services. When this is done, it may turn out that different parties are associated with different attributes of a particular product or service. For example, householders are the users of the switching attribute of a household electric light switch---they use it to turn lights on and off. However, switches also have other attributes, such as "easy wiring" qualities, that may be used only by the electricians who install them. Therefore, if an electrician were to develop an improvement to the installation attributes of a switch, it would be considered a user-developed innovation. + +A brief overview of the contents of the book follows. + +!_ Development of Products by Lead Users (Chapter 2) +={ Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users +6 ; + Lead users +6 : + characteristics of +6 | commercial attractiveness of +6 | economic benefit, expectations of +6 | identification of +6 | innovation and +50 | library information search system and +6 +} + +Empirical studies show that many users---from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent---engage in developing or modifying products. About half of these studies do not determine representative innovation frequencies; they were designed for other purposes. Nonetheless, when taken together, the findings make it very clear that users are doing a /{lot}/ of product modification and product development in many fields. +={ innovation : + attractiveness of +8 +} + +Studies of innovating users (both individuals and firms) show them to have the characteristics of "lead users." That is, they are ahead of the majority of users in their populations with respect to an important market trend, and they expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have encountered there. The correlations found between innovation by users and lead user status are highly significant, and the effects are very large. + +Since lead users are at the leading edge of the market with respect to important market trends, one can guess that many of the novel products they develop for their own use will appeal to other users too and so might provide the basis for products manufacturers would wish to commercialize. This turns out to be the case. A number of studies have shown that many of the innovations reported by lead users are judged to be commercially attractive and/or have actually been commercialized by manufacturers. +={ Manufacturers : + lead users and +1 +} + +Research provides a firm grounding for these empirical findings. The two defining characteristics of lead users and the likelihood that they will develop new or modified products have been found to be highly correlated (Morrison et al. 2004). In addition, it has been found that the higher the intensity of lead user characteristics displayed by an innovator, the greater the commercial attractiveness of the innovation that the lead user develops (Franke and von Hippel 2003a). In figure 1.1, the increased concentration of innovations toward the right indicates that the likelihood of innovating is higher for users having higher lead user index values. The rise in average innovation attractiveness as one moves from left to right indicates that innovations developed by lead users tend to be more commercially attractive. (Innovation attractiveness is the sum of the novelty of the innovation and the expected future generality of market demand.) +={ Morrison, Pamela ; + Franke, N. +5 ; + von Hippel, E. +5 +} + +%% Figure 1.1 +% 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 +% 10 +% 5 +% 0 +% Attractiveness +% of +% innovations +% Innovation +% Estimated OLS curve +% "Lead-user?ness" of users + +{di_evh_f1-1.png}image + +!_ Figure 1.1 +User-innovators with stronger "lead user" characteristics develop innovations having higher appeal in the general marketplace. Estimated OLS function: Y = 2.06 + 0.57x, where Y represents attractiveness of innovation and x represents lead-user-ness of respondent. Adjusted R^{2}^ = 0.281; p = 0.002; n = 30. Source of data: Franke and von Hippel 2003. + +!_ Why Many Users Want Custom Products (Chapter 3) +={ Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and +2 ; + User need +2 ; + Users : + innovate-or-buy decisions by +8 | needs of +2 +} + +Why do so many users develop or modify products for their own use? Users may innovate if and as they want something that is not available on the market and are able and willing to pay for its development. It is likely that many users do not find what they want on the market. Meta-analysis of market-segmentation studies suggests that users' needs for products are highly heterogeneous in many fields (Franke and Reisinger 2003). +={ Reisinger, H. } + +Mass manufacturers tend to follow a strategy of developing products that are designed to meet the needs of a large market segment well enough to induce purchase from and capture significant profits from a large number of customers. When users' needs are heterogeneous, this strategy of "a few sizes fit all" will leave many users somewhat dissatisfied with the commercial products on offer and probably will leave some users seriously dissatisfied. In a study of a sample of users of the security features of Apache web server software, Franke and von Hippel (2003b) found that users had a very high heterogeneity of need, and that many had a high willingness to pay to get precisely what they wanted. Nineteen percent of the users sampled actually innovated to tailor Apache more closely to their needs. Those who did were found to be significantly more satisfied. +={ Apache web server software ; + Manufacturers : + lead users and +} + +!_ Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions (Chapter 4) +={ Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and +3 | manufacturers and +3 | agency costs and +2 ; + User need +3 ; + Users : needs of +3 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +9 | innovate-or-buy decisions and +4 ; + Users : agency costs and +2 +} + +Even if many users want "exactly right products" and are willing and able to pay for their development, why do users often do this for themselves rather than hire a custom manufacturer to develop a special just-right product for them? After all, custom manufacturers specialize in developing products for one or a few users. Since these firms are specialists, it is possible that they could design and build custom products for individual users or user firms faster, better, or cheaper than users could do this for themselves. Despite this possibility, several factors can drive users to innovate rather than buy. Both in the case of user firms and in the case of individual user-innovators, agency costs play a major role. In the case of individual user-innovators, enjoyment of the innovation process can also be important. +={ Agency costs +1 ; + Manufacturers : + custom products and +2 ; + Custom products : users and +3 ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers +13 +} + +With respect to agency costs, consider that when a user develops its own custom product that user can be trusted to act in its own best interests. When a user hires a manufacturer to develop a custom product, the situation is more complex. The user is then a principal that has hired the custom manufacturer to act as its agent. If the interests of the principal and the agent are not the same, there will be agency costs. In general terms, agency costs are (1) costs incurred to monitor the agent to ensure that it (or he or she) follows the interests of the principal, (2) the cost incurred by the agent to commit itself not to act against the principal's interest (the "bonding cost"), and (3) costs associated with an outcome that does not fully serve the interests of the principal (Jensen and Meckling 1976). In the specific instance of product and service development, a major divergence of interests between user and custom manufacturer does exist: the user wants to get precisely what it needs, to the extent that it can afford to do so. In contrast, the custom manufacturer wants to lower its development costs by incorporating solution elements it already has or that it predicts others will want in the future---even if by doing so it does not serve its present client's needs as well as it could. +={ Jensen, M. ; + Meckling, W. +} + +A user wants to preserve its need specification because that specification is chosen to make /{that user's}/ overall solution quality as high as possible at the desired price. For example, an individual user may specify a mountain-climbing boot that will precisely fit his unique climbing technique and allow him to climb Everest more easily. Any deviations in boot design will require compensating modifications in the climber's carefully practiced and deeply ingrained climbing technique---a much more costly solution from the user's point of view. A custom boot manufacturer, in contrast, will have a strong incentive to incorporate the materials and processes it has in stock and expects to use in future even if this produces a boot that is not precisely right for the present customer. For example, the manufacturer will not want to learn a new way to bond boot components together even if that would produce the best custom result for one client. The net result is that when one or a few users want something special they will often get the best result by innovating for themselves. +={ Innovation communities : + See also Information communities +1 +} + +A small model of the innovate-or-buy decision follows. This model shows in a quantitative way that user firms with unique needs will always be better off developing new products for themselves. It also shows that development by manufacturers can be the most economical option when n or more user firms want the same thing. However, when the number of user firms wanting the same thing falls between 1 and n, manufacturers may not find it profitable to develop a new product for just a few users. In that case, more than one user may invest in developing the same thing independently, owing to market failure. This results in a waste of resources from the point of view of social welfare. The problem can be addressed by new institutional forms, such as the user innovation communities that will be studied later in this book. +={ Innovation communities : + social welfare, and ; + Manufacturers : + social welfare and +21 ; + Social welfare : + manufacturer innovation and +21 | user innovation and +21 +} + +Chapter 4 concludes by pointing out that an additional incentive can drive individual user-innovators to innovate rather than buy: they may value the /{process}/ of innovating because of the enjoyment or learning that it brings them. It might seem strange that user-innovators can enjoy product development enough to want to do it themselves---after all, manufacturers pay their product developers to do such work! On the other hand, it is also clear that enjoyment of problem solving is a motivator for many individual problem solvers in at least some fields. Consider for example the millions of crossword-puzzle aficionados. Clearly, for these individuals enjoyment of the problem-solving process rather than the solution is the goal. One can easily test this by attempting to offer a puzzle solver a completed puzzle---the very output he or she is working so hard to create. One will very likely be rejected with the rebuke that one should not spoil the fun! Pleasure as a motivator can apply to the development of commercially useful innovations as well. Studies of the motivations of volunteer contributors of code to widely used software products have shown that these individuals too are often strongly motivated to innovate by the joy and learning they find in this work (Hertel et al. 2003; Lakhani and Wolf 2005). +={ Hertel, G. ; + Lakhani, K. ; + Wolf, B. ; + Innovation process ; + Users : + innovation process and +7 ; + Free software : See also Open source software ; + Hackers ; + Herrmann, S. +} + +!_ Users' Low-Cost Innovation Niches (Chapter 5) +={ Users : + low-cost innovation niches of +3 +} + +An exploration of the basic processes of product and service development show that users and manufacturers tend to develop different /{types}/ of innovations. This is due in part to information asymmetries: users and manufacturers tend to know different things. Product developers need two types of information in order to succeed at their work: need and context-of-use information (generated by users) and generic solution information (often initially generated by manufacturers specializing in a particular type of solution). Bringing these two types of information together is not easy. Both need information and solution information are often very "sticky"---that is, costly to move from the site where the information was generated to other sites. As a result, users generally have a more accurate and more detailed model of their needs than manufacturers have, while manufacturers have a better model of the solution approach in which they specialize than the user has. +={ Innovation process ; + Users : innovation process and ; + Information asymmetries +3 ; + Manufacturers : information asymmetries of +2 ; + Sticky information +2 : innovation and +2 ; + Users : information asymmetries of +2 ; + Local information +2 +} + +When information is sticky, innovators tend to rely largely on information they already have in stock. One consequence of the information asymmetry between users and manufacturers is that users tend to develop innovations that are functionally novel, requiring a great deal of user-need information and use-context information for their development. In contrast, manufacturers tend to develop innovations that are improvements on well-known needs and that require a rich understanding of solution information for their development. For example, firms that use inventory-management systems, such as retailers, tend to be the developers of new approaches to inventory management. In contrast, manufacturers of inventory-management systems and equipment tend to develop improvements to the equipment used to implement these user-devised approaches (Ogawa 1998). +={ Ogawa, S. ; + Innovation : + functional sources of +} + +If we extend the information-asymmetry argument one step further, we see that information stickiness implies that information on hand will also differ among /{individual}/ users and manufacturers. The information assets of some particular user (or some particular manufacturer) will be closest to what is required to develop a particular innovation, and so the cost of developing that innovation will be relatively low for that user or manufacturer. The net result is that user innovation activities will be distributed across many users according to their information endowments. With respect to innovation, one user is by no means a perfect substitute for another. + +!_ Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations (Chapter 6) +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + case for +5 | evidence of +5 | in information communities +5 | intellectual property rights and +5 | users and +5 ; + Users : + free revealing by +5 +} + +The social efficiency of a system in which individual innovations are developed by individual users is increased if users somehow diffuse what they have developed to others. Manufacturer-innovators /{partially}/ achieve this when they sell a product or a service on the open market (partially because they diffuse the product incorporating the innovation, but often not all the information that others would need to fully understand and replicate it). If user-innovators do not somehow also diffuse what they have done, multiple users with very similar needs will have to independently develop very similar innovations---a poor use of resources from the viewpoint of social welfare. Empirical research shows that users often do achieve widespread diffusion by an unexpected means: they often "freely reveal" what they have developed. When we say that an innovator freely reveals information about a product or service it has developed, we mean that all intellectual property rights to that information are voluntarily given up by the innovator, and all interested parties are given access to it---the information becomes a public good. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + manufacturers and +2 ; + Innovation : + distributed process of +4 ; + Intellectual property rights : + free revealing and ; + Manufacturers : + free revealing and +2 +} + +The empirical finding that users often freely reveal their innovations has been a major surprise to innovation researchers. On the face of it, if a user-innovator's proprietary information has value to others, one would think that the user would strive to prevent free diffusion rather than help others to free ride on what it has developed at private cost. Nonetheless, it is now very clear that individual users and user firms---and sometimes manufacturers---often freely reveal detailed information about their innovations. + +The practices visible in "open source" software development were important in bringing this phenomenon to general awareness. In these projects it was clear /{policy}/ that project contributors would routinely and systematically freely reveal code they had developed at private expense (Raymond 1999). However, free revealing of product innovations has a history that began long before the advent of open source software. Allen, in his 1983 study of the eighteenth-century iron industry, was probably the first to consider the phenomon systematically. Later, Nuvolari (2004) discussed free revealing in the early history of mine pumping engines. Contemporary free revealing by users has been documented by von Hippel and Finkelstein (1979) for medical equipment, by Lim (2000) for semiconductor process equipment, by Morrison, Roberts, and von Hippel (2000) for library information systems, and by Franke and Shah (2003) for sporting equipment. Henkel (2003) has documented free revealing among manufacturers in the case of embedded Linux software. +={ Allen, R. ; + Finkelstein, S. ; + Franke, N. ; + Henkel, J. ; + Lim, K. ; + Linux ; + Morrison, Pamela ; + Nuvolari, A. ; + Raymond, E. ; + Roberts, J. ; + Shah, S. ; + von Hippel, E. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + open source software and +7 ; + Intellectual property rights : + open source software and +1 ; + Open source software : + See also Free software communities and | free revealing and +7 | intellectual property rights and +2 ; + Library information search system +} + +Innovators often freely reveal because it is often the best or the only practical option available to them. Hiding an innovation as a trade secret is unlikely to be successful for long: too many generally know similar things, and some holders of the "secret" information stand to lose little or nothing by freely revealing what they know. Studies find that innovators in many fields view patents as having only limited value. Copyright protection and copyright licensing are applicable only to "writings," such as books, graphic images, and computer software. +={ Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and | trade secrets and | free revealing and | licensing of | patents and ; + Government policy : + trade secrets and +} + +Active efforts by innovators to freely reveal---as opposed to sullen acceptance---are explicable because free revealing can provide innovators with significant private benefits as well as losses or risks of loss. Users who freely reveal what they have done often find that others then improve or suggest improvements to the innovation, to mutual benefit (Raymond 1999). Freely revealing users also may benefit from enhancement of reputation, from positive network effects due to increased diffusion of their innovation, and from other factors. Being the first to freely reveal a particular innovation can also enhance the benefits received, and so there can actually be a rush to reveal, much as scientists rush to publish in order to gain the benefits associated with being the first to have made a particular advancement. +={ Raymond, E. } + +!_ Innovation Communities (Chapter 7) +={ Innovation communities +3 } + +Innovation by users tends to be widely distributed rather than concentrated among just a very few very innovative users. As a result, it is important for user-innovators to find ways to combine and leverage their efforts. Users achieve this by engaging in many forms of cooperation. Direct, informal user-to-user cooperation (assisting others to innovate, answering questions, and so on) is common. Organized cooperation is also common, with users joining together in networks and communities that provide useful structures and tools for their interactions and for the distribution of innovations. Innovation communities can increase the speed and effectiveness with which users and also manufacturers can develop and test and diffuse their innovations. They also can greatly increase the ease with which innovators can build larger systems from interlinkable modules created by community participants. +={ Users : + innovation communities and +2 +} + +Free and open source software projects are a relatively well-developed and very successful form of Internet-based innovation community. However, innovation communities are by no means restricted to software or even to information products, and they can play a major role in the development of physical products. Franke and Shah (2003) have documented the value that user innovation communities can provide to user-innovators developing physical products in the field of sporting equipment. The analogy to open source innovation communities is clear. +={ Franke, N. ; + Shah, S. ; + Free software ; + Innovation communities : + open source software and | physical products and | sporting equipment and ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +} + +The collective or community effort to provide a public good---which is what freely revealed innovations are---has traditionally been explored in the literature on "collective action." However, behaviors seen in extant innovation communities fail to correspond to that literature at major points. In essence, innovation communities appear to be more robust with respect to recruiting and rewarding members than the literature would predict. Georg von Krogh and I attribute this to innovation contributors' obtaining some private rewards that are not shared equally by free riders (those who take without contributing). For example, a product that a user-innovator develops and freely reveals might be perfectly suited to that user-innovator's requirements but less well suited to the requirements of free riders. Innovation communities thus illustrate a "private-collective" model of innovation incentive (von Hippel and von Krogh 2003). +={ von Hippel, E. ; + von Krogh, G. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + collective action model for | private-collective model for ; + Innovation communities : + and sources of innovation ; + Private-collective model ; + Social welfare : + private-collective model and +2 ; + Users : + social welfare and +6 +} + +!_ Adapting Policy to User Innovation (Chapter 8) +={ Government policy : + social welfare and +5 | user innovation and +5 ; + Social welfare : + and government policy +5 +} + +Is innovation by users a "good thing?" Welfare economists answer such a question by studying how a phenomenon or a change affects social welfare. Henkel and von Hippel (2005) explored the social welfare implications of user innovation. They found that, relative to a world in which only manufacturers innovate, social welfare is very probably increased by the presence of innovations freely revealed by users. This finding implies that policy making should support user innovation, or at least should ensure that legislation and regulations do not favor manufacturers at the expense of user-innovators. +={ Henkel, J. ; + von Hippel, E. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + manufacturers and +} + +The transitions required of policy making to achieve neutrality with respect to user innovation vs. manufacturer innovation are significant. Consider the impact on open and distributed innovation of past and current policy decisions. Research done in the past 30 years has convinced many academics that intellectual property law is sometimes or often not having its intended effect. Intellectual property law was intended to increase the amount of innovation investment. Instead, it now appears that there are economies of scope in both patenting and copyright that allow firms to use these forms of intellectual property law in ways that are directly opposed to the intent of policy makers and to the public welfare. Major firms can invest to develop large portfolios of patents. They can then use these to create "patent thickets"---dense networks of patent claims that give them plausible grounds for threatening to sue across a wide range of intellectual property. They may do this to prevent others from introducing a superior innovation and/or to demand licenses from weaker competitors on favorable terms (Shapiro 2001). Movie, publishing, and software firms can use large collections of copyrighted work to a similar purpose (Benkler 2002). In view of the distributed nature of innovation by users, with each tending to create a relatively small amount of intellectual property, users are likely to be disadvantaged by such strategies. +={ Benkler, Y. ; + Shapiro, C. ; + Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and +1 ; + Government policy : + copyrights and +1 | patents and | patent thickets and ; + Intellectual property rights : + patents and | patent thickets and | licensing of +} + +It is also important to note that users (and manufacturers) tend to build prototypes of their innovations economically by modifying products already available on the market to serve a new purpose. Laws such as the (US) Digital Millennium Copyright Act, intended to prevent consumers from illegally copying protected works, also can have the unintended side effect of preventing users from modifying products that they purchase (Varian 2002). Both fairness and social welfare considerations suggest that innovation-related policies should be made neutral with respect to the sources of innovation. +={ Digital Millennium Copyright Act ; + Varian, H. +} + +It may be that current impediments to user innovation will be solved by legislation or by policy making. However, beneficiaries of existing law and policy will predictably resist change. Fortunately, a way to get around some of these problems is in the hands of innovators themselves. Suppose many innovators in a particular field decide to freely reveal what they have developed, as they often have reason to do. In that case, users can collectively create an information commons (a collection of information freely available to all) containing substitutes for some or a great deal of information now held as private intellectual property. Then user-innovators can work around the strictures of intellectual property law by simply using these freely revealed substitutes (Lessig 2001). This is essentially what is happening in the field of software. For many problems, user-innovators in that field now have a choice between proprietary, closed software provided by Microsoft and other firms and open source software that they can legally download from the Internet and legally modify to serve their own specific needs. +={ Lessig, L. ; + Microsoft ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + collective action model for | in information communities | intellectual property rights and | users and +1 ; + Information commons ; + Intellectual property rights : + free revealing and | information communities and ; + Microsoft ; + User need ; + Users : + free revealing by +} + +Policy making that levels the playing field between users and manufacturers will force more rapid change onto manufacturers but will by no means destroy them. Experience in fields where open and distributed innovation processes are far advanced show how manufacturers can and do adapt. Some, for example, learn to supply proprietary platform products that offer user-innovators a framework upon which to develop and use their improvements. +={ Manufacturers : + innovation and +7 +} + +!_ Democratizing Innovation (Chapter 9) + +Users' ability to innovate is improving /{radically}/ and /{rapidly}/ as a result of the steadily improving quality of computer software and hardware, improved access to easy-to-use tools and components for innovation, and access to a steadily richer innovation commons. Today, user firms and even individual hobbyists have access to sophisticated programming tools for software and sophisticated CAD design tools for hardware and electronics. These information-based tools can be run on a personal computer, and they are rapidly coming down in price. As a consequence, innovation by users will continue to grow even if the degree of heterogeneity of need and willingness to invest in obtaining a precisely right product remains constant. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + users and ; + Task partitioning +5 : + See also Toolkits ; + Toolkits : + manufacturers and +5 | task partitioning +5 | user-friendly tools for | users and +5 ; + User need ; + Users : + innovation and +5 +} + +Equivalents of the innovation resources described above have long been available within corporations to a few. Senior designers at firms have long been supplied with engineers and designers under their direct control, and with the resources needed to quickly construct and test prototype designs. The same is true in other fields, including automotive design and clothing design: just think of the staffs of engineers and modelmakers supplied so that top auto designers can quickly realize and test their designs. + +But if, as we have seen, the information needed to innovate in important ways is widely distributed, the traditional pattern of concentrating innovation-support resources on a few individuals is hugely inefficient. High-cost resources for innovation support cannot efficiently be allocated to "the right people with the right information:" it is very difficult to know who these people may be before they develop an innovation that turns out to have general value. When the cost of high-quality resources for design and prototyping becomes very low (the trend we have described), these resources can be diffused very widely, and the allocation problem diminishes in significance. The net result is and will be to democratize the opportunity to create. +={ Manufacturers : + innovation and +9 ; + Users : + innovation and +9 +} + +On a level playing field, users will be an increasingly important source of innovation and will increasingly substitute for or complement manufacturers' innovation-related activities. In the case of information products, users have the possibility of largely or completely doing without the services of manufacturers. Open source software projects are object lessons that teach us that users can create, produce, diffuse, provide user field support for, update, and use complex products by and for themselves in the context of user innovation communities. In physical product fields, product development by users can evolve to the point of largely or totally supplanting product development---but not product manufacturing---by manufacturers. (The economies of scale associated with manufacturing and distributing physical products give manufacturers an advantage over "do-it-yourself" users in those activities.) +={ Custom products : + manufacturers and +2 | users and +2 ; + Innovation communities +1 : + open source software and | physical products and ; + Manufacturers : + custom products and +2 ; + Users : + custom products and +2 +} + +The evolving pattern of the locus of product development in kitesurfing illustrates how users can displace manufacturers from the role of product developer. In that industry, the collective product-design and testing work of a user innovation community has clearly become superior in both quality and quantity relative to the levels of in-house development effort that manufacturers of kitesurfing equipment can justify. Accordingly, manufacturers of such equipment are increasingly shifting away from product design and focusing on producing product designs first developed and tested by user innovation communities. +={ Innovation communities : + kitesurfing and ; + Kitesurfing +} + +How can or should manufacturers adapt to users' encroachment on elements of their traditional business activities? There are three general possibilities: (1) Produce user-developed innovations for general commercial sale and/or offer custom manufacturing to specific users. (2) Sell kits of product-design tools and/or "product platforms" to ease users' innovation-related tasks. (3) Sell products or services that are complementary to user-developed innovations. Firms in fields where users are already very active in product design are experimenting with all these possibilities. +={ Custom products : + product platforms and | toolkits and ; + Toolkits : + platform products and +} + +!_ Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations (Chapter 10) +={ Custom products : + manufacturers and +2 ; + Manufacturers : + custom products and +2 ; + Users : + custom products and +2 ; + Lead users +59 : + idea generation and +2 | identification of +2 | innovation and +2 +} + +Manufacturers design their innovation processes around the way they think the process works. The vast majority of manufacturers still think that product development and service development are always done by manufacturers, and that their job is always to find a need and fill it rather than to sometimes find and commercialize an innovation that lead users have already developed. Accordingly, manufacturers have set up market-research departments to explore the needs of users in the target market, product-development groups to think up suitable products to address those needs, and so forth. The needs and prototype solutions of lead users---if encountered at all---are typically rejected as outliers of no interest. Indeed, when lead users' innovations do enter a firm's product line---and they have been shown to be the actual source of many major innovations for many firms--- they typically arrive with a lag and by an unconventional and unsystematic route. For example, a manufacturer may "discover" a lead user innovation only when the innovating user firm contacts the manufacturer with a proposal to produce its design in volume to supply its own in-house needs. Or sales or service people employed by a manufacturer may spot a promising prototype during a visit to a customer's site. +={ Marketing research +1 } + +Modification of firms' innovation processes to /{systematically}/ search for and further develop innovations created by lead users can provide manufacturers with a better interface to the innovation process as it actually works, and so provide better performance. A natural experiment conducted at 3M illustrates this possibility. Annual sales of lead user product ideas generated by the average lead user project at 3M were conservatively forecast by management to be more than 8 times the sales forecast for new products developed in the traditional manner---$146 million versus $18 million per year. In addition, lead user projects were found to generate ideas for new product lines, while traditional market-research methods were found to produce ideas for incremental improvements to existing product lines. As a consequence, 3M divisions funding lead user project ideas experienced their highest rate of major product line generation in the past 50 years (Lilien et al. 2002). +={ Lilien, G. ; + Lead users : + 3M and ; + 3M Corporation +} + +!_ Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design (Chapter 11) +={ Toolkits +2 } + +Firms that understand the distributed innovation process and users' roles in it can /{change}/ factors affecting lead user innovation and so affect its rate and direction in ways they value. Toolkits for user innovation custom design offer one way of doing this. This approach involves partitioning product-development and service-development projects into solution-information-intensive subtasks and need-information-intensive subtasks. Need-intensive subtasks are then assigned to users along with a kit of tools that enable them to effectively execute the tasks assigned to them. The resulting co-location of sticky information and problem-solving activity makes innovation within the solution space offered by a particular toolkit cheaper for users. It accordingly attracts them to the toolkit and so influences what they develop and how they develop it. The custom semiconductor industry was an early adopter of toolkits. In 2003, more than $15 billion worth of semiconductors were produced that had been designed using this approach. +={ Toolkits : + platform products and +2 ; + Lead users : + innovation and ; + Sticky information : + innovation and +} + +Manufacturers that adopt the toolkit approach to supporting and channeling user innovation typically face major changes in their business models, and important changes in industry structure may also follow. For example, as a result of the introduction of toolkits to the field of semiconductor manufacture, custom semiconductor manufacturers---formerly providers of both design and manufacturing services to customers---lost much of the work of custom product design to customers. Many of these manufacturers then became specialist silicon foundries, supplying production services primarily. Manufacturers may or may not wish to make such changes. However, experience in fields where toolkits have been deployed shows that customers tend to prefer designing their own custom products with the aid of a toolkit over traditional manufacturer-centric development practices. As a consequence, the only real choice for manufacturers in a field appropriate to the deployment of toolkits may be whether to lead or to follow in the transition to toolkits. + +!_ Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields (Chapter 12) + +In chapter 12 I discuss links between user innovation and some related phenomena and literatures. With respect to phenomena, I point out the relationship of user innovation to /{information}/ communities, of which user innovation communities are a subset. One open information community is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). Other such communities include the many specialized Internet sites where individuals with both common and rare medical conditions can find one another and can find specialists in those conditions. Many of the advantages associated with user innovation communities also apply to open information networks and communities. Analyses appropriate to information communities follow the same overall pattern as the analyses provided in this book for innovation communities. However, they are also simpler, because in open information communities there may be little or no proprietary information being transacted and thus little or no risk of related losses for participants. +={ Wikipedia ; + Information commons ; + Information communities : + See also Innovation communities ; + Innovation communities +2 : + and sources of innovation +2 ; + Intellectual property rights : + information communities and +2 | innovation and +2 +} + +Next I discuss links between user-centric innovation phenomena and the literature on the economics of knowledge that have been forged by Foray (2004) and Weber (2004). I also discuss how Porter's 1991 work on the competitive advantage of nations can be extended to incorporate findings on nations' lead users as product developers. Finally, I point out how findings explained in this book link to and complement research on the Social Construction of Technology (Pinch and Bijker 1987). +={ Bijker, W. ; + Foray, D. ; + Pinch, T. ; + Weber, S. ; + Porter, M. ; + Knowledge, production and distribution of +} + +I conclude this introductory chapter by reemphasizing that user innovation, free revealing, and user innovation communities will flourish under many but not all conditions. What we know about manufacturer-centered innovation is still valid; however, lead-user-centered innovation patterns are increasingly important, and they present major new opportunities and challenges for us all. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + free revealing and ; + Users : + free revealing by +} + +1~ 2 Development of Products by Lead Users + +The idea that novel products and services are developed by manufacturers is deeply ingrained in both traditional expectations and scholarship. When we as users of products complain about the shortcomings of an existing product or wish for a new one, we commonly think that "they" should develop it---not us. Even the conventional term for an individual end user, "consumer," implicitly suggests that users are not active in product and service development. Nonetheless, there is now very strong empirical evidence that product development and modification by both user firms and users as individual consumers is frequent, pervasive, and important. +={ Consumers +5 } + +I begin this chapter by reviewing the evidence that many users indeed do develop and modify products for their own use in many fields. I then show that innovation is concentrated among /{lead}/ users, and that lead users' innovations often become commercial products. + +!_ Many Users Innovate + +The evidence on user innovation frequency and pervasiveness is summarized in table 2.1. We see here that the frequency with which user firms and individual consumers develop or modify products for their own use range from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent in fields studied to date. The matter has been studied across a wide range of industrial product types where innovating users are user firms, and also in various types of sporting equipment, where innovating users are individual consumers. +={ Lead users : + sporting equipment and +1 ; + Sporting equipment : + lead users and +1 +} + +The studies cited in table 2.1 clearly show that a lot of product development and modification by users is going on. However, these findings should not be taken to reflect innovation rates in overall populations of users. All of the studies probably were affected by a response bias. (That is, if someone sends a questionnaire about whether you innovated or not, you might be more inclined to respond if your answer is "Yes."). Also, each of the studies looked at innovation rates affecting a particular product type among users who care a great deal about that product type. Thus, university surgeons (study 4 in table 2.1) care a great deal about having just-right surgical equipment, just as serious mountain bikers (study 8) care a great deal about having just-right equipment for their sport. As the intensity of interest goes down, it is likely that rates of user innovation drop too. This is probably what is going on in the case of the study of purchasers of outdoor consumer products (study 6). All we are told about that sample of users of outdoor consumer products is that they are recipients of one or more mail order catalogs from suppliers of relatively general outdoor items---winter jackets, sleeping bags, and so on. Despite the fact that these users were asked if they have developed or modified any item in this broad category of goods (rather than a very specific one such as a mountain bike), just 10 percent answered in the affirmative. Of course, 10 percent or even 5 percent of a user population numbering in the tens of millions worldwide is still a very large number---so we again realize that many users are developing and modifying products. +={ Lead users : + outdoor consumer products and ; + Outdoor products +} + +!_ Table 2.1 +Many respondents reported developing or modifying products for their own use in the eight product areas listed here. +={ Lüthje, C. +1 ; + Urban, G. +1 ; + Franke, N. +1 ; + Herstatt, C. +1 ; + Morrison, Pamela +1 ; + von Hippel, E. +1 ; + Lead users : + Apache web server software and +1r | library information search system and +1 | mountain biking and +1 | outdoor consumer products and +1 | pipe hanger hardware and +1 | printed circuit CAD software and +1 | surgical equipment and +3 ; + Library information search system +1 ; + Mountain biking +1 ; + Outdoor products +1 ; + Pipe hanger hardware +1 ; + Printed circuit CAD software +1 ; + Surgical equipment +1 +} + +table{~h c4; 20; 45; 15; 20; + +~ +Number and type of Users Sampled +Percentage developing and building product for own use +Source + +Industrial products +~ +~ +~ + +1. Printed circuit CAD software +136 user firm attendees at PC-CAD conference +24.3% +Urban and von Hippel 1988 + +2. Pipe hanger hardware +Employees in 74 pipe hanger installation firms +36% +Herstatt and von Hippel 1992 + +3. Library information systems +Employees in 102 Australian libraries using computerized OPAC library information systems +26% +Morrison et al. 2000 + +4. Surgical equipment +261 surgeons working in university clinics in Germany +22% +Lüthje 2003 + +5. Apache OS server software security features +131 technically sophisticated Apache features users (webmasters) +19.1% +Franke and von Hippel 2003 + +Consumer products +~ +~ +~ + +6. Outdoor consumer products +153 recipients of mail order catalogs for outdoor activity products for consumers +9.8% +Lüthje 2004 + +7. "Extreme" sporting equipment +197 members of 4 specialized sporting clubs in 4 "extreme" sports +37.8% +Franke and Shah 2003 + +8. Mountain biking equipment +291 mountain bikers in a geographic region +19.2% +Lüthje et al. + +}table + +The cited studies also do not set an upper or a lower bound on the commercial or technical importance of user-developed products and product modifications that they report, and it is likely that most are of minor significance. However, most innovations from any source are minor, so user-innovators are no exception in this regard. Further, to say an innovation is minor is not the same as saying it is trivial: minor innovations are cumulatively responsible for much or most technical progress. Hollander (1965) found that about 80 percent of unit cost reductions in Rayon manufacture were the cumulative result of minor technical changes. Knight (1963, VII, pp. 2--3) measured performance advances in general-purpose digital computers and found, similarly, that "these advances occur as the result of equipment designers using their knowledge of electronics technology to produce a multitude of small improvements that together produce significant performance advances." +={ Hollander, S. ; + Knight, K. ; + Users : + process improvements by +1 +} + +Although most products and product modifications that users or others develop will be minor, users are by no means restricted to developing minor or incremental innovations. Qualitative observations have long indicated that important process improvements are developed:rubyd gsub!(//, "") by users. Smith (1776, pp. 11--13) pointed out the importance of "the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labor, and enable one man to do the work of many." He also noted that "a great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures in which labor is most subdivided, were originally the invention of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it." Rosenberg (1976) studied the history of the US machine tool industry and found that important and basic machine types like lathes and milling machines were first developed and built by user firms having a strong need for them. Textile manufacturing firms, gun manufacturers and sewing machine manufacturers were important early user-developers of machine tools. Other studies show quantitatively that some of the most important and novel products and processes have been developed by user firms and by individual users. Enos (1962) reported that nearly all the most important innovations in oil refining were developed by user firms. Freeman (1968) found that the most widely licensed chemical production processes were developed by user firms. Von Hippel (1988) found that users were the developers of about 80 percent of the most important scientific instrument innovations, and also the developers of most of the major innovations in semiconductor processing. Pavitt (1984) found that a considerable fraction of invention by British firms was for in-house use. Shah (2000) found that the most commercially important equipment innovations in four sporting fields tended to be developed by individual users. +={ Enos, J. ; + Freeman, C. ; + Pavitt, K. ; + Rosenberg, N. ; + Shah, S. ; + Smith, A. ; + von Hippel, E. +23 ; + Sporting equipment : + lead users and +} + +!_ Lead User Theory +={ Lead users : + theory of +3 +} + +A second major finding of empirical research into innovation by users is that most user-developed products and product modifications (and the most commercially attractive ones) are developed by users with "lead user" characteristics. Recall from chapter 1 that lead users are defined as members of a user population having two distinguishing characteristics: (1) They are at the leading edge of an important market trend(s), and so are currently experiencing needs that will later be experienced by many users in that market. (2) They anticipate relatively high benefits from obtaining a solution to their needs, and so may innovate. +={ Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users +1 ; + Lead users : + economic benefit, expectations of +1 +} + +The theory that led to defining "lead users" in terms of these two characteristics was derived as follows (von Hippel 1986). First, the "ahead on an important market trend" variable was included because of its assumed effect on the commercial attractiveness of innovations developed by users residing at a leading-edge position in a market. Market needs are not static---they evolve, and often they are driven by important underlying trends. If people are distributed with respect to such trends as diffusion theory indicates, then people at the leading edges of important trends will be experiencing needs today (or this year) that the bulk of the market will experience tomorrow (or next year). And, if users develop and modify products to satisfy their own needs, then the innovations that lead users develop should later be attractive to many. The expected benefits variable and its link to innovation likelihood was derived from studies of industrial product and process innovations. These showed that the greater the benefit an entity expects to obtain from a needed innovation, the greater will be that entity's investment in obtaining a solution, where a solution is an innovation either developed or purchased (Schmookler 1966; Mansfield 1968). +={ Mansfield, E. ; + Schmookler, J. +} + +Empirical studies to date have confirmed lead user theory. Morrison, Roberts, and Midgely (2004) studied the characteristics of innovating and non-innovating users of computerized library information systems in a sample of Australian libraries. They found that the two lead user characteristics were distributed in a continuous, unimodal manner in that sample. They also found that the two characteristics of lead users and the actual development of innovations by users were highly correlated. Franke and von Hippel (2003b) confirmed these findings in a study of innovating and non-innovating users of Apache web server software. They also found that the commercial attractiveness of innovations developed by users increased along with the strength of those users' lead user characteristics. +={ Franke, N. ; + Midgely, David ; + Morrison, Pamela +19 ; + Roberts, J. ; + Apache web server software ; + Lead users : + Apache web server software and | library information search system and ; + Library information search system +} + +!_ Evidence of Innovation by Lead Users + +Several studies have found that user innovation is largely the province of users that have lead user characteristics, and that products lead users develop often form the basis for commercial products. These general findings appear robust: the studies have used a variety of techniques and have addressed a variety of markets and innovator types. Brief reviews of four studies will convey the essence of what has been found. + +!_ Innovation in Industrial Product User Firms + +In the first empirical study of lead users' role in innovation, Urban and von Hippel (1988) studied user innovation activity related to a type of software used to design printed circuit boards. A major market trend to which printed circuit computer-aided design software (PC-CAD) must respond is the steady movement toward packing electronic circuitry more densely onto circuit boards. Higher density means one that can shrink boards in overall size and that enables the circuits they contain to operate faster---both strongly desired attributes. Designing a board at the leading edge of what is technically attainable in density at any particular time is a very demanding task. It involves some combination of learning to make the printed circuit wires narrower, learning how to add more layers of circuitry to a board, and using smaller electronic components. +={ Urban, G. +1 ; + Lead users : + printed circuit CAD software and +3 ; + Lead users : + printed circuit CAD software and +3 ; + Printed circuit CAD software +3 +} + +To explore the link between user innovation and needs at the leading edge of the density trend, Urban and von Hippel collected a sample of 138 user-firm employees who had attended a trade show on the topic of PC-CAD. To learn the position of each firm on the density trend, they asked questions about the density of the boards that each PC-CAD user firm was currently producing. To learn about each user's likely expected benefits from improvements to PC-CAD, they asked questions about how satisfied each respondent was with their firm's present PC-CAD capabilities. To learn about users' innovation activities, they asked questions about whether each firm had modified or built its own PC-CAD software for its own in-house use. + +Users' responses were cluster analyzed, and clear lead user (n = 38) and non-lead-user (n = 98) clusters were found. Users in the lead user cluster were those that made the densest boards on average and that also were dissatisfied with their PC-CAD capabilities. In other words, they were at the leading edge of an important market trend, and they had a high incentive to innovate to improve their capabilities. Strikingly, 87 percent of users in the lead user cluster reported either developing or modifying the PC-CAD software that they used. In contrast, only 1 percent of non-lead users reported this type of innovation. Clearly, in this case user innovation was very strongly concentrated in the lead user segment of the user population. A discriminant analysis on indicated that "build own system" was the most important indicator of membership in the lead user cluster. The discriminant analysis had 95.6 percent correct classification of cluster membership. + +The commercial attractiveness of PC-CAD solutions developed by lead users was high. This was tested by determining whether lead users and more ordinary users preferred a new PC-CAD system concept containing features developed by lead users over the best commercial PC-CAD system available at the time of the study (as determined by a large PC-CAD system manufacturer's competitive analysis) and two additional concepts. The concept containing lead user features was significantly preferred at even twice the price (p < 0.01). +={ Lead users : + commercial attractiveness of +} + +!_ Innovation in Libraries +={ Lead users : + library information search system and +11 ; + Library information search system +11 +} + +Morrison, Roberts, and von Hippel (2000) explored user modifications made by Australian libraries to computerized information search systems called Online Public Access systems ("OPACs"). Libraries might not seem the most likely spot for technological innovators to lurk. However, computer technologies and the Internet have had a major effect on how libraries are run, and many libraries now have in-house programming expertise. Computerized search methods for libraries were initially developed by advanced and technically sophisticated user institutions. Development began in the United States in the 1970s with work by major universities and the Library of Congress, with support provided by grants from the federal government (Tedd 1994). Until roughly 1978, the only such systems extant were those that had been developed by libraries for their own use. In the late 1970s, the first commercial providers of computerized search systems for libraries appeared in the United States, and by 1985 there were at least 48 OPAC vendors in the United States alone (Matthews 1985). In Australia (site of the study sample), OPAC adoption began about 8 years later than in the United States (Tedd 1994). +={ Tedd, L. ; + Roberts, J. +3 +} + +Morrison, Roberts, and I obtained responses from 102 Australian libraries that were users of OPACs. We found that 26 percent of these had in fact modified their OPAC hardware or software far beyond the user-adjustment capabilities provided by the system manufacturers. The types of innovations that the libraries developed varied widely according to local needs. For example, the library that modified its OPAC to "add book retrieval instructions for staff and patrons" (table 2.2) did so because its collection of books was distributed in a complex way across a number of buildings--- making it difficult for staff and patrons to find books without precise directions. There was little duplication of innovations except in the case of adding Internet search capabilities to OPACs. In that unusual case, nine libraries went ahead and did the programming needed to add this important feature in advance of its being offered by the manufacturers of their systems. + +!_ Table 2.2 +OPAC modifications created by users served a wide variety of functions. + +table{~h c2; 50; 50; + +Improved library management +Improved information-search capabilities + +Add library patron summary statistics +Integrate images in records (2) + +Add library identifiers +Combined menu/command searches + +Add location records for physical audit +Add title sorting and short title listing + +Add book retrieval instructions for staff and patrons +Add fast access key commands + +Add CD ROM System backup +Add multilingual search formats \\ key word searches (2) + +Add book access control based on copyright +Add topic linking and subject access + +Patrons can check their status via OPAC +Add prior search recall feature + +Patrons can reserve books via OPAC (2) +Add search "navigation aids" + +Remote access to OPAC by different systems +Add different hierarchical searches + +Add graduated system access via password +Access to other libraries' catalogs (2) + +Add interfaces to other in-house IT systems +Add or customize web interface (9) + + Word processing and correspondence (2) + Hot links for topics + + Umbrella for local information collection (2) + Extended searches + + Local systems adaptation + Hot links for source material + +}table + +Source of data: Morrison et al. 2000, table 1. Number of users (if more than one) developing functionally similar innovations is shown in parentheses after description of innovation. + +The libraries in the sample were asked to rank themselves on a number of characteristics, including "leading edge status" (LES). (Leading edge status, a construct developed by Morrison, is related to and highly correlated with the lead user construct (in this sample, ρ ,{(LES, CLU)}, = 0.904, /{p}/ = 0.000). ~{ LES contains four types of measures. Three ("benefits recognized early," "high benefits expected," and "direct elicitation of the construct") contain the core components of the lead user construct. The fourth ("applications generation") is a measure of a number of innovation-related activities in which users might engage: they "suggest new applications," they "pioneer those applications," and (because they have needs or problems earlier than their peers) they may be "used as a test site" (Morrison, Midgely, and Roberts 2004). }~ Self-evaluation bias was checked for by asking respondents to name other libraries they regarded as having the characteristics of lead users. Self-evaluations and evaluations by others did not differ significantly. +={ Midgely, David ; + Morrison, Pamela ; + Roberts, J. +} + +Libraries that had modified their OPAC systems were found to have significantly higher LES---that is, to be lead users. They were also found to have significantly higher incentives to make modifications than non-innovators, better in-house technical skills, and fewer "external resources" (for example, they found it difficult to find outside vendors to develop the modifications they wanted for them). Application of these four variables in a logit model classified libraries into innovator and non-innovator categories with an accuracy of 88 percent (table 2.3). + +!_ Table 2.3 +Factors associated with innovating in librararies (logit model). χ^{2}^/,{4}, = 33.85; ρ^{2}^ = 0.40; classification rate = 87.78%. + +table{~h c3; 40; 30; 30; + +~ +Coefficient +Standard error + +Leading-edge status +1.862 +0.601 + +Lack of incentive to modify +--0.845 +0.436 + +Lack of in-house technology skills +--1.069 +0.412 + +Lack of external resources +0.695 +0.456 + +Constant +--2.593 +0.556 + +}table + +Source: Morrison et al. 2000, table 6. + +The commercial value of user-developed innovations in the library OPAC sample was assessed in a relatively informal way. Two development mangers employed by the Australian branches of two large OPAC manufacturers were asked to evaluate the commercial value of each user innovation in the sample. They were asked two questions about each: (1) "How important commercially to your firm is the functionality added to OPACs by this user-developed modification?" (2) "How novel was the information contained in the user innovation to your firm at the time that innovation was developed?" Responses from both managers indicated that about 70 percent (25 out of 39) of the user modifications provided functionality improvements of at least "medium" commercial importance to OPACs---and in fact many of the functions were eventually incorporated in the OPACs the manufacturers sold. However, the managers also felt that their firms generally already knew about the lead users' needs when the users developed their solutions, and that the innovations the users developed provided novel information to their company only in 10--20 percent of the cases. (Even when manufacturers learn about lead users' needs early, they may not think it profitable to develop their own solution for an "emerging" need until years later. I will develop this point in chapter 4.) +={ Lead users : + commercial attractiveness of ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and | lead users and +} + +!_ "Consumer" Innovation in Sports Communities +={ Franke, N. +11 ; + Shah, S. +11 ; + Innovation : + and sporting equipment +11 ; + Lead users : + manufacturers and +11 ; + Sporting equipment : + lead users and +11 +} + +% check manufacturers ref, see previous paragraph + +Franke and Shah (2003) studied user innovation in four communities of sports enthusiasts. The communities, all located in Germany, were focused on four very different sports. +={ Manufacturers : + innovation and | lead users and +} + +One community was devoted to canyoning, a new sport popular in the Alps. Canyoning combines mountain climbing, abseiling (rappelling), and swimming in canyons. Members do things like rappel down the middle of an active waterfall into a canyon below. Canyoning requires significant skill and involves physical risk. It is also a sport in rapid evolution as participants try new challenges and explore the edges of what is both achievable and fun. + +The second community studied was devoted to sailplaning. Sailplaning or gliding, a more mature sport than canyoning, involves flying in a closed, engineless glider carrying one or two people. A powered plane tows the glider to a desired altitude by means of a rope; then the rope is dropped and the engineless glider flies on its own, using thermal updrafts in the atmosphere to gain altitude as possible. The sailplaning community studied by Franke and Shah consisted of students of technical universities in Germany who shared an interest in sailplaning and in building their own sailplanes. + +Boardercross was the focus of the third community. In this sport, six snowboarders compete simultaneously in a downhill race. Racetracks vary, but each is likely to incorporate tunnels, steep curves, water holes, and jumps. The informal community studied consisted of semi-professional athletes from all over the world who met in as many as ten competitions a year in Europe, in North America, and in Japan. + +The fourth community studied was a group of semi-professional cyclists with various significant handicaps, such as cerebral palsy or an amputated limb. Such individuals must often design or make improvements to their equipment to accommodate their particular disabilities. These athletes knew each other well from national and international competitions, training sessions, and seminars sponsored by the Deutscher Sportbund (German National Sports Council). + +A total of 197 respondents (a response rate of 37.8 percent) answered a questionnaire about innovation activities in their communities. Thirty-two percent reported that they had developed or modified equipment they used for their sport. The rate of innovation varied among the sports, the high being 41 percent of the sailplane enthusiasts reporting innovating and the low being 18 percent of the boardercross snowboarders reporting. (The complexity of the equipment used in the various sports probably had something to do with this variation: a sailplane has many more components than a snowboard.) + +The innovations developed varied a great deal. In the sailplane community, users developed innovations ranging from a rocket-assisted emergency ejection system to improvements in cockpit ventilation. Snowboarders invented such things as improved boots and bindings. Canyoners' inventions included very specialized solutions, such as a way to cut loose a trapped rope by using a chemical etchant. With respect to commercial potential, +={ Lead users : + commercial attractiveness of +} + +Franke and Shah found that 23 percent of the user-developed innovations reported were or soon would be produced for sale by a manufacturer. Franke and Shah found that users who innovated were significantly higher on measures of the two lead user characteristics than users who did not innovate (table 2.4). They also found that the innovators spent more time in sporting and community-related activities and felt they had a more central role in the community. + +!_ Table 2.4 +Factors associated with innovation in sports communities. + +table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15; + +~ +Innovators^{a}^ +Non-innovators^{b}^ +Significance of difference^{c}^ + +Time in community +~ +~ +~ + +Years as a community member +4.46 +3.17 +p < 0.01 + +Days per year spent with community members +43.07 +32.73 +p < 0.05 + +Days per year spent participating in the sport +72.48 +68.71 +not significant + +Role in community^{d}^ +~ +~ +~ + +"I am a very active member of the community." +2.85 +3.82 +p < 0.01 + + +"I get together with members of the community for activities that are not related to the sport (movies, dinner parties, etc.)." +3.39 +4.14 +p < 0.05 + +"The community takes my opinion into account when making decisions" +2.89 +3.61 +p < 0.05 + +Lead user characteristic 1: being ahead of the trend^{d}^ +~ +~ +~ + +"I usually find out about new products and solutions earlier than others." +2.71 +4.03 +p < 0.001 + +"I have benefited significantly by the early adoption and use of new products." +3.58 +4.34 +p < 0.01 + +"I have tested prototype versions of new products for manufacturers." +4.94 +5.65 +p < 0.05 + +"In my sport I am regarded as being on the "cutting edge." +4.56 +5.38 +p < 0.01 + + +"I improved and developed new techniques in boardercrossing." +4.29 +5.84 +p < 0.001 + +Lead user characteristic 2: high benefit from innovation^{d}^ +~ +~ +~ + +"I have new needs which are not satisfied by existing products." +3.27 +4.38 +p < 0.001 + + +"I am dissatisfied with the existing equipment." +3.90 +5.13 +p < 0.001 + +}table + +Source: Franke and Shah 2003, table 3. \\ +a. All values are means; n = 60. \\ +b. All values are means; n = 129. \\ +c. Two-tailed t-tests for independent samples. \\ +d. Rated on seven-point scale, with 1 = very accurate and 7 = not accurate at all. Two-tailed t-tests for independent samples. + +!_ Innovation among Hospital Surgeons +={ Surgical equipment +4 ; + Lead users : + surgical equipment and +4 +} + +Lüthje (2003) explored innovations developed by surgeons working at university clinics in Germany. Ten such clinics were chosen randomly, and 262 surgeons responded to Lüthje's questionnaire---a response rate of 32.6 percent. Of the university surgeons responding, 22 percent reported developing or improving some item(s) of medical equipment for use in their own practices. Using a logit model to determine the influence of user characteristics on innovation activity, Lüthje found that innovating surgeons tended to be lead users (p < 0.01). He also found that solutions to problems encountered in their own surgical practices were the primary benefit that the innovating surgeons expected to obtain from the solutions they developed (p < 0.01). In addition, he found that the level of technical knowledge the surgeon held was significantly correlated with innovation (p < 0.05). Also, perhaps as one might expect in the field of medicine, the "contextual barrier" of concerns about legal problems and liability risks was found to have a strongly significant negative correlation with the likelihood of user invention by surgeons (p < 0.01). +={ Lüthje, C. +1 ; + Sticky information : + toolkits and +} + +With respect to the commercial value of the innovations the lead user surgeons had developed, Lüthje reported that 48 percent of the innovations developed by his lead user respondents were or soon would be marketed by manufacturers of medical equipment. + +!_ Discussion + +The studies reviewed in this chapter all found that user innovations in general and commercially attractive ones in particular tended to be developed by lead users. These studies were set in a range of fields, but all were focused on hardware innovations or on information innovations such as new software. It is therefore important to point out that, in many fields, innovation in techniques is at least as important as equipment innovation. For example, many novel surgical operations are performed with standard equipment (such as scalpels), and many novel innovations in snowboarding are based on existing, unmodified equipment. Technique-only innovations are also likely to be the work of lead users, and indeed many of the equipment innovations documented in the studies reviewed here involved innovations in technique as well as innovations in equipment. +={ Lead users : + commercial attractiveness of +1 ; + Users : + innovation process and +1 +} + +Despite the strength of the findings, many interesting puzzles remain that can be addressed by the further development of lead user theory. For example, empirical studies of innovation by lead users are unlikely to have sampled the world's foremost lead users. Thus, in effect, the studies reviewed here determined lead users to be those highest on lead user characteristics that were within their samples. Perhaps other samples could have been obtained in each of the fields studied containing users that were even more "leading edge" with respect to relevant market trends. If so, why were the samples of moderately leading-edge users showing user innovation if user innovation is concentrated among "extreme" lead users? There are at least three possible explanations. First, most of the studies of user innovation probably included users reasonably close to the global leading edge in their samples. Had the "top" users been included, perhaps the result would have been that still more attractive user innovations would have been found. Second, it may be that the needs of local user communities differ, and so local lead users really may be the world's lead users with respect to their particular needs. Third, even if a sample contains lead users that are not near the global top with respect to lead users' characteristics, local lead users might still have reasons to (re)develop innovations locally. For example, it might be cheaper, faster, more interesting, or more enjoyable to innovate than to search for a similar innovation that a "global top" lead user might already have developed. +={ Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users ; + Innovation process ; + Lead users : + economic benefit, expectations of ; + Local information ; + Users : + low-cost innovation niches of +} + +1~ 3 Why Many Users Want Custom Products +={ Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and +42 | users and +42 ; + User need +42 ; + Users : + custom products and +42 | innovation and +42 | needs of +} + +The high rates of user innovation documented in chapter 2 suggest that many users may want custom products. Why should this be so? I will argue that it is because many users have needs that differ in detail, and many also have both sufficient willingness to pay and sufficient resources to obtain a custom product that is just right for their individual needs. In this chapter, I first present the case for heterogeneity of user needs. I then review a study that explores users' heterogeneity of need and willingness to pay for product customization. + +!_ Heterogeneity of User Needs + +If many individual users or user firms want something different in a product type, it is said that heterogeneity of user need for that product type is high. If users' needs are highly heterogeneous, only small numbers of users will tend to want exactly the same thing. In such a case it is unlikely that mass-produced products will precisely suit the needs of many users. Mass manufacturers tend to want to build products that will appeal to more users rather than fewer, so as to spread their fixed costs of development and production. If many users want something different, and if they have adequate interest and resources to get exactly the product they need, they will be driven either to develop it for themselves or to pay a custom manufacturer to develop it for them. +={ Manufacturers : + custom products and | expectations of economic benefit by | innovation and +} + +Are users' needs for new products (and services) often highly heterogeneous? A test of reason suggests that they are. An individual's or a firm's need for a many products depends on detailed considerations regarding the user's initial state and resources, on the pathway the user must traverse to get from the initial state to the preferred state, and on detailed considerations regarding their preferred end state as well. These are likely to be different for each individual user and for each user firm at some level of detail. This, in turn, suggests that needs for many new products and services that are precisely right for each user will differ: that needs for those products will be highly heterogeneous. + +Suppose, for example, that you decide you need a new item of household furnishing. Your house is already furnished with hundreds of items, big and small, and the new item must "fit in" properly. In addition, your precise needs for the new item are likely to be affected by your living situation, your resources, and your preferences. For example: "We need a new couch that Uncle Bill will like, that the kids can jump on, that matches the wallpaper I adore, that reflects my love of coral reefs and overall good taste, and that we can afford." Many of these specific constraints are not results of current whim and are not easy to change. Perhaps you can change the wallpaper, but you are less likely to change Uncle Bill, your kids, your established tastes with respect to a living environment, or your resource constraints. + +The net result is that the most desired product characteristics might be specific to each individual or firm. Of course, many will be willing to satisfice---make compromises---on many items because of limits on the money or time they have available to get exactly what they want. Thus, a serious mountain biker may be willing to simply buy almost any couch on sale even if he or she is not fully happy with it. On the other hand, that same biker may be totally unwilling to compromise about getting mountain biking equipment that is precisely right for his or her specific needs. In terms of industrial products, NASA may insist on getting precisely right components for the Space Shuttle if they affect mission safety, but may be willing to satisfice on other items. + +!_ Evidence from Studies of User Innovation + +Two studies of innovation by users provide indirect information on the heterogeneity of user need. They provide descriptions of the functions of the innovations developed by users in their samples. Inspection of these descriptions shows a great deal of variation and few near-duplicates. Different functionality, of course, implies that the developers of the products had different needs. In the 2000 study of user modifications of library IT systems by Morrison, Roberts, and von Hippel, discussed earlier, only 14 of 39 innovations are functionally similar to any other innovations in the sample. If one type of functionality that was repeatedly developed ("web interface") is excluded, the overlap is even lower (see table 2.2). Other responses by study participants add to this impression of high heterogeneity of need among users. Thirty percent of the respondents reported that their library IT system had been highly customized by the manufacturer during installation to meet their specific needs. In addition, 54 percent of study respondents agreed with the statement "We would like to make additional improvements to our IT system functionality that can't be made by simply adjusting the standard, customer-accessible parameters provided by the supplier." +={ Morrison, Pamela ; + Roberts, J. ; + von Hippel, E. +34 ; + Lead users : + library information search system and ; + Library information search system +} + +Similar moderate overlap in the characteristics of user innovations can be seen in innovation descriptions provided in the study of mountain biking by Lüthje, Herstatt, and von Hippel (2002). In that study sample, I estimate that at most 10 of 43 innovations had functionality similar to that of another sample member. This diversity makes sense: mountain biking, which outsiders might assume is a single type of athletic activity, in fact has many subspecialties. +={ Herstatt, C. +7 ; + Lüthje, C. +7 ; + Mountain biking +7 +} + +As can be seen in table 3.1, the specializations of mountain bikers in the our study sample involved very different mountain biking terrains, and important variations in riding conditions and riding specializations. The innovations users developed were appropriate to their own heterogeneous riding activities and so were quite heterogeneous in function. Consider three examples drawn from our study: + +_* I ride on elevated, skinny planks and ladders, do jumps, steep technical downhills, obstacles and big drops. Solution devised: I needed sophisticated cycling armor and protective clothing. So I designed arm and leg armor, chest protection, shorts, pants and a jacket that enable me to try harder things with less fear of injury. + +_* I do back-country touring and needed a way to easily lift and carry a fully loaded mountain bike on the sides of steep hills and mountains and dangle it over cliffs as I climbed. Solution devised: I modified the top tube and the top of my seat post to provide secure attachment points for a carrying strap, then I modified a very plush and durable mountaineering sling to serve as the over-shoulder strap. Because the strap sits up high, I only need to bend my knees a little bit to lift the bike onto my shoulders, yet it is just high enough to keep the front wheel from hitting when I am climbing a steep hill. Eventually, I came up with a quick-release lateral strap to keep the main strap from sliding off my shoulder, but it will easily break away if I fall or land in a fast river and need to ditch my bike. + +_* When riding on ice, my bike has no traction and I slip and fall. Solution devised: I increased the traction of my tires by getting some metal studs used by the auto industry for winter tires. Then I selected some mountain biking tires with large blocks of rubber in the tread pattern, drilled a hole in the center of each block and inserted a stud in each hole. + +!_ Table 3.1 +Activity specializations of innovating mountain bikers. + +table{~h c6; 20; 13; 20; 13; 20; 14; + +Preferred terrain +Number of bikers +Outside conditions +Number of bikers +Focus on particular riding abilities +Number of bikers + +Fast downhill tracks (steep, drops, fast) +44 (39.6%) +Darkness, night riding +45 (40.5%) +Jumps, drops, stunts, obstacles +34 (30.6%) + +Technical single tracks (up and down, rocky, jumps) +68 (61.3%) +Snow, ice, cold +60 (54.1%) +Technical ability/balance +22 (19.8%) + +Smooth single tracks (hilly, rolling, speed, sand, hardpack) +13 (11.7%) +Rain, mud +53 (47.7%) +Fast descents / downhill +34 (30.6%) + +Urban and streets +9 (8.1%) +Heat +15 (13.5%) +Endurance +9 (8.1%) + +No special terrain preferred +5 (4.5%) +High altitude +10 (9.0%) +Climbing +17 (13%) + +~ +~ +No extreme outside conditions +29 (26.1%) +Sprint +3 (2.7%) + +~ +~ +~ +~ +No focus on specific riding ability +36 (32.4%) + +}table + +Source: Lüthje,Herstatt, and vonHippel 2002. This table includes the 111 users in the study sample who had ideas for improvements to mountain biking equipment. (Of these, 61 had actually gone on to build the equipment they envisioned.) Many of these users reported experience in more than one category of activity, so the sum in each column is higher than 111. + +!_ Evidence from Studies of Market Segmentation + +Empirical data on heterogeneity of demand for specific products and services are sparse. Those most interested in studying the matter are generally mass manufacturers of products and services for consumers---and they do not make a practice of prospecting for heterogeneity. Instead, they are interested in finding areas where users' needs are similar enough to represent profitable markets for standard products produced in large volumes. Manufacturers customarily seek such areas via market-segmentation studies that partition markets into a very few segments---perhaps only three, four, or five. Each segment identified consists of customers with relatively similar needs for a particular product (Punj and Stewart 1983; Wind 1978). For example, toothpaste manufacturers may divide their markets into segments such as boys and girls, adults interested in tooth whitening, and so on. +={ Punj, G. ; + Stewart, D. ; + Wind, Y. ; + Custom products : + market segmentation and +3 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and ; + Marketing research +1 +} + +Since the 1970s, nearly all market-segmentation studies have been carried out by means of cluster analysis (Green 1971; Green and Schaffer 1998). After cluster analysis places each participant in the segment of the market most closely matching his needs, a measure of within-segment need variation is determined. This is the proportion of total variation that is within each cluster, and it shows how much users' needs deviate from the averages in "their" respective segments. If within-segment variation is low, users within the segment will have fairly homogeneous needs, and so may be reasonably satisfied with a standard product designed to serve all customers in their segment. If it high, many users are likely to be dissatisfied---some seriously so. +={ Green, P. ; + Schaffer, C. +} + +Within-segment variation is seldom reported in published studies, but a survey of market-segmentation studies published in top-tier journals did find 15 studies reporting that statistic. These studies specified 5.5 clusters on average, and had an average remaining within-cluster variance of 46 percent (Franke and Reisinger 2003). Franke and von Hippel (2003b) found similar results in an independent sample. In that study, an average of 3.7 market segments were specified and 54 percent of total variance was left as within-segment variation after the completion of cluster analysis. These data suggest that heterogeneity of need might be very substantial among users in many product categories. ~{ Cluster analysis does not specify the "right" number of clusters---it simply segments a sample into smaller and smaller clusters until the analyst calls a halt. Determining an appropriate number of clusters within a sample can be done in different ways. Of course, it always possible to say that "I only want to deal with three market segments, so I will stop my analysis when my sample has been segmented into three clusters." More commonly, analysts will examine the increase of squared error sums of each step, and generally will view the optimal number of clusters as having been reached when the plot shows a sudden "elbow" (Myers 1996). Since this technique does not incorporate information on remaining within-cluster heterogeneity, it can lead to solutions with a large amount of within-cluster variance. The "cubic clustering criterion" (CCC) partially addresses this concern by measuring the within-cluster homogeneity relative to the between-cluster heterogeneity. It suggests choosing the number of clusters where this value peaks (Milligan and Cooper 1985). However, this method appears to be rarely used: Ketchen and Shook (1996) found it used in only 5 of 45 segmentation studies they examined. }~ +={ Franke, N. +20 ; + Reisinger, H. +} + +!_ A Study of Heterogeneity and Willingness To Pay + +A need for a novel product not on the market must be accompanied by adequate willingness to pay (and resources) if it is to be associated with the actual development or purchase of a custom product. What is needed to reliably establish the relationship among heterogeneity of demand, willingness to pay, and custom product development or purchase is studies that address all three factors in the same sample. My colleague Nikolaus Franke and I conducted one such study in a population of users of web server software, a product used primarily by industrial firms (Franke and von Hippel 2003b). + +Franke and I looked in detail at users' needs for security features in Apache web server software, and at users' willingness to pay for solutions that precisely fit their needs. Apache web server software is open source software that is explicitly designed to allow modification by anyone having appropriate skills. Anyone may download open source software from the Internet and use it without charge. Users are also explicitly granted the legal right to study the software's source code, to modify the software, and to distribute modified or unmodified versions to others. (See chapter 7 for a full discussion of open source software.) +={ Apache web server software +16 ; + Custom products : + Apache web server software and +16 ; + Lead users : + Apache web server software and +16 ; + Users : + and paying for innovations +} + +Apache web server software is used on web server computers connected to the Internet. A web server's function is to respond to requests from Internet browsers for particular documents or content. A typical server waits for clients' requests, locates the requested resource, applies the requested method to the resource, and sends the response back to the client. Web server software began by offering relatively simple functionality. Over time, however, Apache and other web server software programs have evolved into the complicated front end for many of the technically demanding applications that now run on the Internet. For example, web server software is now used to handle security and authentication of users, to provide e-commerce shopping carts, and gateways to databases. In the face of strong competition from commercial competitors (including Microsoft and Sun/Netscape), the Apache web server has become the most popular web server software on the Internet, used by 67 percent of the many millions of World Wide Web sites extant in early 2004. It has also received many industry awards for excellence. + +Franke and I created a preliminary list of server security functions from published and web-based sources. The preliminary list was evaluated and corrected by experts in web server security and Apache web server software. We eventually ended up with a list of 45 security functions that some or many users might need. Solutions to some were already incorporated in the standard Apache code downloadable by users, others were available in additional modules, and a few were not yet addressed by any security module generally available to the Apache community. (Security threats can emerge quickly and become matters of great concern before a successful response is developed and offered to the general community. A recent example is site flooding, a form of attack in which vandals attempt to cause a website to fail by flooding it with a very large number of simultaneous requests for a response.) + +Users of the security functions of web server software are the webmasters employed by firms to make sure that their software is up to date and functions properly. A major portion of a webmaster's job is to ensure that the software used is secure from attacks launched by those who wish illicit access or simply want to cause the software to fail in some way. We collected responses to our study questions from two samples of Apache webmasters: webmasters who posted a question or an answer on a question at the Apache Usenet Forum ~{ http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix }~ and webmasters who subscribed to a specialized online Apache newsgroup. ~{ http://modules.apache.org/ }~ This stratified sample gave us an adequate representation of webmasters who both did and did not have the technical skills needed to modify Apache security software to better fit their needs: subscribers to apache-modules.org tend to have a higher level of technical skills on average than those posting to the Apache Usenet Forum. Data were obtained by means of an Internet-based questionnaire. + +!_ The Heterogeneity of Users' Needs + +Franke and I found the security module needs of Apache users were very heterogeneous indeed both among those that had the in-house capability to write code to modify Apache and those that did not. The calibrated coefficient of heterogeneity, H,{c},, was 0.98, indicating that there was essentially no tendency of the users to cluster beyond chance. (We defined the "heterogeneity of need" in a group as the degree to which the needs of i individuals can be satisfied with j standard products which optimally meet their needs. This means that heterogeneity of need is high when many standard products are necessary to satisfy the needs of i individuals and low when the needs can be satisfied by a few standard products. The higher the coefficient the more heterogeneous are the needs of users in a sample. If the calibrated heterogeneity coefficient H,{c}, equals 1, there is no systematic tendency of the users to cluster. If it is lower than 1, there is some tendency of the individuals to cluster. A coefficient of 0 means that the needs of all individuals are exactly the same. ~{ To measure heterogeneity, Franke and I analyzed the extent to which j standards, varying from [1; i], meet the needs of the i individuals in our sample. Conceptually, we first locate a product in multi-dimensional need space (dimensions = 45 in the case of our present study) that minimizes the distances to each individual's needs. (This step is analogous to the Ward's method in cluster analysis that also minimizes within cluster variation; see Punj and Stewart 1983.) The "error" is then measured as the sum of squared Euclidean distances. We then repeated these steps to determine the error for two optimally positioned products, three products, and so on up to a number equaling I -- 1. The sum of squared errors for all cases is then a simple coefficient that measures how much the needs of i individuals can be satisfied with j standard products. The "coefficient of heterogeneity" just specified is sensitive both to the (average) /{distance}/ between the needs and for the /{configuration}/ of the needs: when the needs tend to form clusters the heterogeneity coefficient is lower than if they are evenly spread. To make the coefficient comparable across different populations, we calibrate it using a bootstrapping technique (Efron 1979) involving dividing the coefficient by the expected value (this value is generated by averaging the heterogeneity of many random distributions of heterogeneity of the same kind). The average random heterogeneity coefficient is then an appropriate value for calibration purposes: it assumes that there is no systematic relationship between the needs of the individuals or between the need dimensions. }~ ) +={ Franke, N. ; + Punj, G. ; + Stewart, D. +} + +Even this understates the heterogeneity. Responding Apache webmasters went far beyond the 45 security-related functions of web server software that we offered for their evaluation. In our questionnaire we offered an open question asking users to list up to four additional needs they experienced that were not covered by the standard list. Nearly 50 percent used the opportunity to add additional functions. When duplicates were eliminated, we found that 92 distinct additional security-related needs had been noted by one or more webmaster users.~{ Conceptually, it can be possible to generate "one perfect product" for everyone--- in which case heterogeneity of demand is zero---by simply creating all the features wanted by anyone (45 + 92 features in the case of this study), and incorporating them in the "one perfect product." Users could then select the features they want from a menu contained in the one perfect product to tailor it to their own tastes. Doing this is at least conceptually possible in the case of software, but less so in the case of a physical product for two reasons: (1) delivering all possible physical options to everyone who buys the product would be expensive for physical goods (while costing nothing extra in the case of information products); (2) some options are mutually exclusive (an automobile cannot be both red and green at the same time). }~ + +High heterogeneity of need in our sample suggests that there should be a high interest in obtaining modifications to Apache---and indeed, overall satisfaction with the existing version was only moderate. + +!_ Willingness to Pay for Improvements + +It is not enough to want a better-fitting custom product. One must also be willing and able to pay to get what one wants. Those in the Apache sample who did innovate were presumably willing to pay the price to do so. But how much were the users in our sample---the innovators and the non-innovators--- willing to pay /{now}/ for improvements? Estimating a user's willingness to pay (WTP) is known to be a difficult task. Franke and I used the contingent valuation method, in which respondents are directly asked how much they are willing to pay for a product or service (Mitchell and Carson 1989). Results obtained by that method often overestimate WTP significantly. Empirical studies that compare expressed WTP with actual cash payments on average showed actual spending behavior to be somewhat smaller than expressed WTP in the case of private purchases (such as in our case). In contrast, they generally find willingness to pay to be greatly overstated in the case of public goods such as the removal of a road from a wilderness area. ~{ The difference between actual willingness to pay and expressed willingness to pay is much lower for private goods (our case) than for public goods. In the case of private goods, Loomis et al. (1996) found the expressed willingness to pay for art prints to be twice the actual WTP. Willis and Powe (1998) found that among visitors to a castle the expressed WTP was 60 percent lower than the actual WTP. In the case of public goods, Brown et al. (1996), in a study of willingness to pay for removal of a road from a wilderness area, found the expressed WTP to be 4--6 times the actual WTP. Lindsey and Knaap (1999), in a study of WTP for a public urban greenway, found the expressed WTP to be 2-10 times the actual WPT. Neil et al. (1994) found the expressed WTP for conserving an original painting in the desert to be 9 times the actual WTP. Seip and Strand (1992) found that less than 10 percent of those who expressed interest in paying to join an environmental organization actually joined. }~ +={ Carson, R. ; + Mitchell, R. +} + +To compensate for the likely overstatement of expressed relative to actual WTP in our study, Franke and I conservatively deflated respondents' indicated willingness to pay by 80 percent. (Although the product in question was intended for private use, webmasters were talking about their willingness to spend company money, not their own money.) We asked each user who had indicated that he was not really satisfied with a function (i.e., whose satisfaction with the respective function was 4 or less on a 7-point scale, where 1 = not satisfied at all, and 7 = very satisfied) to estimate how much he would be willing to pay to get a very satisfactory solution regarding this function. After deflation, our sample of 137 webmasters said they were willing to pay $700,000 in aggregate to modify web server software to a point that fully satisfied them with respect to their security function needs. This amounts to an average of $5,232 total willingness to pay per respondent. This is a striking number because the price of commercial web server software similar to Apache's for one server was about $1,100 at the time of our study (source: www.sun.com, November 2001). If we assume that each webmaster was in charge of ten servers on average, this means that each webmaster was willing to pay half the price of a total server software package to get his heterogeneous needs for security features better satisfied. + +!_ Increased Satisfaction from Customization of Apache + +Recall that it takes some technical skill to modify Apache web server software by writing new code. In table 3.2, Franke and I examined only the technically skilled users in our sample who claimed the capability of making modifications to Apache web server software. For these technically skilled users, we found significantly higher satisfaction levels among those that actually did customize their software---but even the users that made modifications were not fully satisfied. + +!_ Table 3.2 +Skilled users who customized their software were more satisfied than those who did not customize. + +table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15; + +~ +Users who customized (n = 18) +Users who did not customize (n = 44) +Difference (one-tailed t-test) + +Satisfaction with basic web server functionality +5.5 +4.3 +0.100 + +Satisfaction with authentication of client +3.0 +1.0 +0.001 + +Satisfaction with e-commerce-related functions +1.3 +0.0 +0.023 + +Satisfaction with within-site user access control +8.5 +6.9 +0.170 + +Satisfaction with other security functions +3.9 +3.9 +0.699 + +Overall satisfaction +4.3 +2.6 +0.010 + +}table + +Source: Franke and von Hippel 2003, table 8. In this table, 45 individual functions are grouped into five general categories. The satisfaction index ranges from -21 to +21. + +One might wonder why users with the ability to modify Apache closer to their liking were not totally satisfied. The answer can be found in respondents' judgments regarding how much effort it would require to modify Apache still more to their liking. We asked all respondents who indicated dissatisfaction of level 4 or lower with a specific function of Apache how much working time it would cost them to improve the function to the point where they would judge it to be very satisfactory (to be at a satisfaction level of 7). For the whole sample and all dissatisfactions, we obtained a working time of 8,938 person-days necessary to get a very satisfactory solution. This equals $78 of incremental benefit per incremental programmer working day ($716,758 divided by 8,938 days). This is clearly below the regular wages a skilled programmer gets. Franke and I concluded from this that skilled users do not improve their respective Apache versions to the point where they are perfectly satisfied because the costs of doing so would exceed the benefits. + +!_ Discussion + +Heterogeneity of user need is likely to be high for many types of products. Data are still scanty, but high heterogeneity of need is a very straightforward explanation for why there is so much customization by users: many users have "custom" needs for products and services. + +Those interested can easily enhance their intuitions about heterogenity of user need and related innovation by users. User innovation appears to be common enough so that one can find examples for oneself in a reasonably small, casual sample. Readers therefore may find it possible (and enjoyable) to do their own informal tests of the matter. My own version of such a test is to ask the students in one of my MIT classes (typically about 50 students) to think about a particular product that many use, such as a backpack. I first ask them how satisfied they are with their backpack. Initially, most will say "It's OK." But after some discussion and thinking, a few complaints will slowly begin to surface (slowly, I think, because we all take some dissatisfaction with our products as the unremarkable norm). "It doesn't fit comfortably" in this or that particular way. "When my lunch bag or thermos leaks the books and papers I am carrying get wet---there should be a water proof partition." "I carry large drawings to school rolled up in my backpack with the ends sticking out. They are ruined if it rains and I have not taken the precaution of wrapping them in plastic." Next, I ask whether any students have modified their backpacks to better meet their needs. Interestingly enough, one or two typically have. Since backpacks are not products of very high professional or hobby interest to most users, the presence of even some user innovation to adapt to individual users' unmet needs in such small, casual samples is an interesting intuition builder with respect to the findings discussed in this chapter. + +1~ 4 Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions +={ Users : + innovation and +4 | innovate-or-buy decisions by +74 +} + +Why does a user wanting a custom product sometimes innovate for itself rather than buying from a manufacturer of custom products? There is, after all, a choice---at least it would seem so. However, if a user with the resources and willingness to pay does decide to buy, it may be surprised to discover that it is not so easy to find a manufacturer willing to make exactly what an individual user wants. Of course, we all know that mass manufacturers with businesses built around providing standard products in large numbers will be reluctant to accommodate special requests. Consumers know this too, and few will be so foolish as to contact a major soup producer like Campbell's with a request for a special, "just-right" can of soup. But what about manufacturers that specialize in custom products? Isn't it their business to respond to special requests? To understand which way the innovate-or-buy choice will go, one must consider both transaction costs and information asymmetries specific to users and manufacturers. I will talk mainly about transaction costs in this chapter and mainly about information asymmetries in chapter 5. +={ Custom products : + users and +3 ; + Innovation process +3 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +3 ; + Transaction costs +3 ; + Users : + innovation process and +3 | and paying for innovations +} + +I begin this chapter by discussing four specific and significant transaction costs that affect users' innovate-or-buy decisions. Next I review a case study that illustrates these. Then, I use a simple quantitative model to further explore when user firms will find it more cost-effective to develop a solution---a new product or service---for themselves rather than hiring a manufacturer to solve the problem for them. Finally, I point out that /{individual}/ users can sometimes be more inclined to innovate than one might expect because they sometimes value the /{process}/ of innovating as well as the novel product or service that is created. + +!_ Users' vs. Manufacturers' Views of Innovation Opportunities +={ Agency costs +15 ; + Manufacturers : + agency costs and +15 ; + Transaction costs : + See also Agency costs ; + Users : + agency costs and +15 | transaction costs and +15 +} + +Three specific contributors to transaction costs---in addition to the "usual suspects," such as opportunism---often have important effects on users' decisions whether to buy a custom product or to develop it for themselves. These are (1) differences between users' and manufacturers' views regarding what constitutes a desirable solution, (2) differences in innovation quality signaling requirements between user and manufacturer innovators, and (3) differences in legal requirements placed on user and manufacturer innovators. The first two of these factors involve considerations of agency costs. When a user hires a manufacturer to develop a custom product, the user is a principal that has hired the custom manufacturer as to act as its agent. When the interests of the principal and the agent are not the same, agency costs will result. Recall from chapter 1 that agency costs are (1) costs incurred to monitor the agent to ensure that it follows the interests of the principal, (2) the cost incurred by the agent to commit itself not to act against the principal's interest (the "bonding cost"), and (3) costs associated with an outcome that does not fully serve the interests of the principal (Jensen and Meckling 1976). In the specific instance of product and service development, agency considerations enter because a user's and a manufacturer's interests with respect to the development of a custom product often differ significantly. +={ Jensen, M. ; + Meckling, W. +} + +!_ Preferences Regarding Solutions + +Individual products and services are components of larger user solutions. A user therefore wants a product that will make the best overall tradeoff between solution quality and price. Sometimes the best overall tradeoff will result in a willingness to pay a surprisingly large amount to get a solution component precisely right. For example, an individual user may specify tennis racket functionality that will fit her specific technique and relative strengths and will be willing to pay a great deal for exactly that racket. Deviations in racket functionality would require compensating modifications in her carefully practiced and deeply ingrained hitting technique---a much more costly overall solution from the user's point of view. In contrast, a user will be much less concerned with precisely /{how}/ the desired functionality is attained. For example, tennis players will typically be unconcerned about whether a tennis racket is made from metal, carbon fiber, plastic or wood---or, for that matter, from mud---if it performs precisely as desired. And, indeed, users have quickly shifted to new types of rackets over the years as new materials promise a better fit to their particular functional requirements. + +Of course, the same thing is true in the case of products for industrial users. For example, a firm with a need for a process machine may be willing to pay a great deal for one that is precisely appropriate to the characteristics of the input materials being processed, and to the skills of employees who will operate the machine. Deviations in either matter would require compensating modifications in material supply and employee training---likely to be a much more costly overall solution from the user's point of view. In contrast, the user firm will be much less concerned with precisely how the desired functionality is achieved by the process machine, and will care only that it performs precisely as specified. + +Manufacturers faced with custom development requests from users make similar calculations, but theirs revolve around attempting to conserve the applicability of a low-cost (to them) solution. Manufacturers tend to specialize in and gain competitive advantage from their capabilities in one or a few specific solution types. They then seek to find as many profitable applications for those solutions types as possible. For example, a specialist in fabricating custom products from carbon fiber might find it profitable to make any kind of product---from airplane wings to tennis rackets---as long as they are made from carbon fiber. In contrast, that same manufacturer would have no competitive advantage in---and so no profit from making--- any of these same products from metal or wood. + +Specializations in solution types can be very narrow indeed. For example, thousands of manufacturers specialize in adhesive-based fastening solutions, while other thousands specialize in mechanical fastening solutions involving such things as metal screws and nails. Importantly, companies that produce products and solution types that have close functional equivalence from the user's point of view can look very different from the point of view of a solution supplier. For example, a manufacturer of standard or custom adhesives needs chemists on staff with an expertise in chemical formulation. It also needs chemistry labs and production equipment designed to mix specialized batches of chemicals on a small scale, and it needs the equipment, expertise and regulatory approvals to package that kind of product in a way that is convenient to the customer and also in line with regulatory safeguards. In contrast, manufacturers specializing in standard or custom metal fastening solutions need none of these things. What they need instead are mechanical design engineers, a machine shop to build product prototypes and production tooling, specialized metal-forming production equipment such as screw machines, and so on. + +Users, having an investment only in a need specification and not in a solution type, want the best functional solution to their problem, independent of solution type used. Manufacturers, in contrast, want to supply custom solutions to users that utilize their existing expertise and production capabilities. Thus, in the case of the two fastening technology alternatives just described, users will prefer whatever solution approach works best. In contrast, adhesives manufacturers will find it tremendously more attractive to create a solution involving adhesive-based fastening, and manufacturers specializing in mechanical fastening will similarly strongly prefer to offer to develop solutions involving mechanical fastening. + +The difference between users' incentives to get the best functional solution to their need and specialist manufacturers' incentives to embed a specific solution type in the product to be developed are a major source of agency costs in custom product development, because there is typically an information asymmetry between user and manufacturer with respect to what will be the best solution. Manufacturers tend to know more than users about this and to have a strong incentive to provide biased information to users in order to convince them that the solution type in which they specialize is the best one to use. Such biases will be difficult for users to detect because, again, they are less expert than the suppliers in the various solution technologies that are candidates. +={ Information asymmetries ; + Users : + information asymmetries of +} + +Theoretically, this agency cost would disappear if it were possible to fully specify a contract (Aghion and Tirole 1994; Bessen 2004). But in product development, contracting can be problematic. Information regarding characteristics of solutions and needs is inescapably incomplete at the time of contracting---users cannot fully specify what they want in advance of trying out prototype solutions, and manufacturers are not fully sure how planned solution approaches will work out before investing in customer-specific development. +={ Aghion, P. ; + Bessen, J. ; + Contracting ; + Tirole, J. +} + +!_ Users' Expectations + +When users buy a product from manufacturers, they tend to expect a package of other services to come along with the product they receive. However, when users develop a product for themselves, some of these are not demanded or can be supplied in a less formal, less expensive way by users for themselves. This set of implicit expectations can raise the cost to a user of a custom solution bought from a manufacturer relative to a home-developed solution. +={ Manufacturers : + innovation and +11 ; + Users : + innovation and +11 +} + +Users typically expect a solution they have purchased to work correctly and reliably "right out of the box." In effect, a sharp line is drawn between product development at the manufacturer's site and routine, trouble-free usage at the purchaser's site. When the user builds a product for itself, however, both the development and the use functions are in the same organization and may explicitly be overlapped. Repeated tests and repeated repairs and improvements during early use are then more likely to be understood and tolerated as an acceptable part of the development process. + +A related difference in expectations has to do with field support for a product that has been purchased rather than developed in house. In the case of a purchased custom product, users expect that manufacturers will provide replacement parts and service if needed. Responding to this expectation is costly for a custom manufacturer. It must keep a record of what it has built for each particular user, and of any special parts incorporated in that user's products so that they can be built or purchased again if needed. In contrast, if a user has developed a product for itself, it has people on site who know details of its design. These employees will be capable of rebuilding or repairing or redesigning the product /{ad hoc}/ if and as the need arises. (Of course, if these knowledgeable employees leave the user firm while the product they designed is still in use, such informality can prove costly.) + +Manufacturers also must invest in indirect quality signals that may not have an effect on actual quality, but instead are designed to assure both the specific user being served and the market in general that the product being supplied is of high quality. These represent another element of agency costs that user-innovators do not incur. When users develop an innovation for themselves, they end up intimately knowing the actual quality of the solution they have developed, and knowing why and how it is appropriate to their task. As an example, an engineer building a million-dollar process machine for in-house use might feel it perfectly acceptable to install a precisely right and very cheap computer controller made and prominently labeled by Lego, a manufacturer of children's toys. (Lego provides computer controllers for some of its children's building kit products.) But if that same engineer saw a Lego controller in a million-dollar process machine his firm was purchasing from a specialist high-end manufacturer, he might not know enough about the design details to know that the Lego controller was precisely right for the application. In that case, the engineer and his managers might well regard the seemingly inappropriate brand name as an indirect signal of bad quality. + +Manufacturers are often so concerned about a reputation for quality that they refuse to take shortcuts that a customer specifically requests and that might make sense for a particular customer, lest others get wind of what was done and take it as a negative signal about the general quality of the firm's products. For example, you may say to a maker of luxury custom cars: "I want to have a custom car of your brand in my driveway---my friends will admire it. But I only plan to drive it to the grocery store once in a while, so I only want a cheap little engine. A luxury exterior combined with cheap parts is the best solution for me in this application---just slap something together and keep the price low." The maker is likely to respond: "We understand your need, but we cannot be associated with any product of low quality. Someone else may look under the hood some day, and that would damage our reputation as a maker of fine cars. You must look elsewhere, or decide you are willing to pay the price to keep one of our fine machines idle on your driveway." + +!_ Differing Legal and Regulatory Requirements + +Users that innovate do not generally face legal risk if the product they develop fails and causes costs to themselves but not to others. In contrast, manufacturers that develop and sell new products are regarded under US law as also providing an implied warranty of "fitness for the intended use." If a product does not meet this criterion, and if a different, written warranty is not in place, manufacturers can be found liable for negligence with respect to providing a defective design and failure to warn buyers (Barnes and Ulin 1984). This simple difference can cause a large difference in exposure to liability by innovators and so can drive up the costs of manufacturer-provided solutions relative to user-provided ones. +={ Barnes, B. ; + Ulin, D. ; + Transaction costs +51 ; + Users : + transaction costs and +23 +} + +For example, a user firm that builds a novel process controller to improve its plant operations must pay its own actual costs if the self-built controller fails and ruins expensive materials being processed. On the other hand, if a controller manufacturer designed the novel controller product and sold it to customers, and a failure then occurred and could be traced back to a fault in the design, the controller manufacturer is potentially liable for actual user costs and punitive damages. It may also incur significant reputational losses if the unhappy user broadcasts its complaints. The logical response of a controller manufacturer to this higher risk is to charge more and/or to be much more careful with respect to running exhaustive, expensive, and lengthy tests before releasing a new product. The resulting increase in cost and delay for obtaining a manufacturer-developed product can tend to tip users toward building their own, in-house solutions. +={ Custom products : + manufacturers and +2 ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers +4 | by users +7 ; + Manufacturers : + expectations of economic benefit by +4 +} + +!_ Net Result + +A net result of the foregoing considerations is that manufacturers often find that developing a custom product for only one or a few users will be unprofitable. In such cases, the transaction costs involved can make it cheaper for users with appropriate capabilities to develop the product for themselves. In larger markets, in contrast, fixed transaction costs will be spread over many customers, and the economies of scale obtainable by producing for the whole market may be substantial. In that case, it will likely be cheaper for users to buy than to innovate. As a result, manufacturers, when contacted by a user with a very specific request, will be keenly interested in how many others are likely to want this solution or elements of it. If the answer is "few," a custom manufacturer will be unlikely to accept the project. + +Of course, manufacturers have an incentive to /{make}/ markets attractive from their point of view. This can be done by deviating from precisely serving the needs of a specific custom client in order to create a solution that will be "good enough" for that client but at the same time of more interest to others. Manufacturers may do this openly by arranging meetings among custom buyers with similar needs, and then urging the group to come up with a common solution that all will find acceptable. "After all," as the representative will say, "it is clear that we cannot make a special product to suit each user, so all of you must be prepared to make really difficult compromises!" More covertly, manufacturers may simply ignore some of the specific requests of the specific user client and make something that they expect to be a more general solution instead. + +The contrasting incentives of users and manufacturers with respect to generality of need being served---and also with respect to the solution choice issue discussed earlier---can result in a very frustrating and cloudy interaction in which each party hides its best information and attempts to manipulate others to its own advantage. With respect to generality of need, sophisticated users understand custom suppliers' preference for a larger market and attempt to argue convincingly that "everyone will want precisely what I am asking you for." Manufacturers, in turn, know users have this incentive and so will generally prefer to develop custom products for which they themselves have a reasonable understanding of demand. Users are also aware of manufacturers' strong preference for only producing products that embody their existing solution expertise. To guard against the possibility that this incentive will produce biased advice, they may attempt to shop around among a number of suppliers offering different solution types and/or develop internal expertise on solution possibilities and/or attempt to write better contracts. All these attempts to induce and guard against bias involve agency costs. +={ Custom products : + manufacturers and +} + +!_ An Illustrative Case + +A case study by Sarah Slaughter (1993) illustrates the impact of some of the transaction costs discussed above related to users' innovate-or-buy decisions. Slaughter studied patterns of innovation in stressed-skin panels, which are used in some housing construction. The aspects of the panels studied were related to installation, and so the users of these features were home builders rather than home owners. When Slaughter contrasted users' costs of innovating versus buying, she found that it was always much cheaper for the builder to develop a solution for itself at a construction site than to ask a panel manufacturer to do so. +={ Slaughter, S. +16 ; + Stressed-skin panels +16 +} + +A stressed-skin panel can be visualized as a large 4-by-8-foot sandwich consisting of two panels made of plywood with a layer of plastic foam glued in between. The foam, about 4 inches thick, strongly bonds the two panels together and also acts as a layer of thermal insulation. In 1989, manufacturing of stressed-skin panels was a relatively concentrated industry; the four largest manufacturers collectively having a 77 percent share of the market. The user industry was much less concentrated: the four largest constructors of panelized housing together had only 1 percent of the market for such housing in 1989. + +In housing construction, stressed-skin panels are generally attached to strong timber frames to form the outer shell of a house and to resist shear loads (such as the force of the wind). To use the panels in this way, a number of subsidiary inventions are required. For example, one must find a practical, long-lasting way to attach panels to each other and to the floors, the roof, and the frame. Also, one has to find a new way to run pipes and wires from place to place because there are no empty spaces in the walls to put them---panel interiors are filled with foam. + +Stressed-skin panels were introduced into housing construction after World War II. From then till 1989, the time of Slaughter's study, 34 innovations were made in 12 functionally important areas to create a complete building system for this type of construction. Slaughter studied the history of each of these innovations and found that 82 percent had been developed by users of the stressed-skin panels---residential builders---and only 18 percent by manufacturers of stressed-skin panels. Sometimes more than one user developed and implemented different approaches to the same functional problem (table 4.1). Builders freely revealed their innovations rather than protecting them for proprietary advantage. They were passed from builder to builder by word of mouth, published in trade magazines, and diffused widely. All were replicated at building sites for years before any commercial panel manufacturer developed and sold a solution to accomplish the same function. + +Histories of the user-developed improvements to stressed-skin panel construction showed that the user-innovator construction firms did not engage in planned R&D projects. Instead, each innovation was an immediate response to a problem encountered in the course of a construction project. Once a problem was encountered, the innovating builder typically developed and fabricated a solution at great speed, using skills, materials, and equipment on hand at the construction site. Builders reported that the average time from discovery of the problem to installation of the completed solution on the site was only half a day. The total cost of each innovation, including time, equipment, and materials, averaged $153. + +!_ Example: Installing Wiring in a Stressed-Skin Panel + +A builder was faced with the immediate problem of how to route wires through the foam interior of panels to wall switches located in the middle of the panels. He did not want cut grooves or channels through the surfaces of the panels to these locations---that would dangerously reduce the panels' structural strength. His inventive solution was to mount an electrically heated wire on the tip of a long pole and simply push the heated tip through the center insulation layer of the panel. As he pushed, the electrically heated tip quickly melted a channel through the foam plastic insulation from the edge of the panel to the desired spot. Wires were then pulled through this channel. + +!_ Table 4.1 +Users would have found it much more costly to get custom solutions from manufacturers. The costs of user-developed innovations in stressed-skin panels were very low. + +table{~h c5; 40; 17; 17; 6; 20; + +Function +Average user development time (days) +Average user development cost +N +Minimimum cost of waiting for manufacturer to deliver + +Framing of openings in panels +0.1 +$20 +1 +$1,400 + +Structural connection between panels +0.1 +30 +2 +$1,400 + +Ventilation of panels on roof +0.1 +32 +2 +$28,000 + +Insulated connection between panels +0.1 +41 +3 +$2,800 + +Corner connection between panels +0.2 +60 +1 +$2,800 + +Installation of HVAC in panels +0.2 +60 +2 +$2,800 + +Installation of wiring in panels +0.2 +79 +7 +$2,800 + +Connection of panels to roof +0.2 +80 +1 +$2,800 + +Add insect repellency to panels +0.4 +123 +3 +$70,000 + +Connect panels to foundation +0.5 +160 +1 +$1,400 + +Connect panels to frames +1.2 +377 +3 +$2,800 + +Development of curved panels +5.0 +1,500 +1 +$28,000 + +Average for all innovations +0.5 +$153 +~ +$12,367 + +}table + +N represents number of innovations developed by /{users}/ to carry out each listed function. Source: Slaughter 1993, tables 4 and 5. Costs and times shown are averaged for all user-developed innovations in each functional category. (The six /{manufacturer}/-developed innovations in Slaughter's sample are not included in this table.) + +The builder-innovator reported that the total time to develop the innovation was only an hour, and that the total cost for time and materials equaled $40. How could it cost so little and take so little time? The builder explained that using hot wires to slice sheets of plastic foam insulation into pieces of a required length is a technique known to builders. His idea as to how to modify the slicing technique to melt channels instead came to him quickly. To test the idea, he immediately sent a worker to an electrical supply house to get some nichrome wire (a type of high-resistance wire often used as an electrical heating element), attached the wire to a tip of a pole, and tried the solution on a panel at the building site---and it worked! + +This solution was described in detail in an article in a builder's magazine and was widely imitated. A panel manufacturer's eventual response (after the user solution had spread for a number of years) was to manufacture a panel with a channel for wires pre-molded into the plastic foam interior of the panel. This solution is only sometimes satisfactory. Builders often do not want to locate switch boxes at the height of the premolded channel. Also, sometimes construction workers will install some panels upside down in error, and the preformed channels will then not be continuous between one panel and the next. In such cases, the original, user-developed solution is again resorted to. + +!_ Example: Creating a Curved Panel +={ Manufacturers : + transaction costs and +8 +} + +A builder was constructing a custom house with large, curved windows. Curved stressed-skin panels were needed to fill in the space above and below these windows, but panel manufacturers only sold flat panels at that time. The builder facing the problem could not simply buy standard flat panels and bend them into curved ones at the construction site---completed panels are rigid by design. So he bought plywood and plastic foam at a local building supply house and slowly bent each panel component separately over a curved frame quickly built at the construction site. He then bonded all three elements together with glue to create strong curved panels that would maintain their shape over time. + +To determine whether users' decisions to innovate rather than buy made economic sense for them, Slaughter calculated, in a very conservative way, what it would have cost users to buy a manufacturer-developed solution embodied in a manufactured panel rather than build a solution for themselves. Her estimates included only the cost of the delay a user-builder would incur while waiting for delivery of a panel incorporating a manufacturer's solution. Delay in obtaining a solution to a problem encountered at a construction site is costly for a builder, because the schedule of deliveries, subcontractors, and other activities must then be altered. For example, if installation of a panel is delayed, one must also reschedule the arrival of the subcontractor hired to run wires through it, the contractor hired to paint it, and so on. Slaughter estimated the cost of delay to a builder at $280 per crew per day of delay (Means 1989). To compute delay times, she assumed that a manufacturer would always be willing to supply the special item a user requested. She also assumed that no time elapsed while the manufacturer learned about the need, contracted to do the job, designed a solution, and obtained needed regulatory approvals. She then asked panel manufacturers to estimate how long it would take them to simply construct a panel with the solution needed and deliver it to the construction site. Delay times computed in this manner ranged from 5 days for some innovations to 250 days for the longest-term one and averaged 44 days. +={ Means, R. ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers +2 | by users +2 ; + Manufacturers : + expectations of economic benefit by +2 | innovation and +5 +} + +The conservative nature of this calculation is very clear. For example, Slaughter points out that the regulatory requirements for building components, not included, are in fact much more stringent for manufacturers than for user-builders in the field of residential construction. Manufacturers delivering products can be required to provide test data demonstrating compliance with local building codes for each locality served. Testing new products for compliance in a locality can take from a month to several years, and explicit code approval often takes several additional years. In contrast, a builder that innovates need only convince the local building inspector that what he has done meets code or performance requirements--- often a much easier task (Ehrenkrantz Group 1979; Duke 1988). +={ Duke, R. ; + Ehrenkrantz Group +} + +Despite her very conservative method of calculation, Slaughter found the costs to users of obtaining a builder solution to be at least 100 times the actual costs of developing a solution for themselves (table 4.1). Clearly, users' decisions to innovate rather than buy made economic sense in this case. + +!_ Modeling Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions + +In this section I summarize the core of the argument discussed in this chapter via a simple quantitative model developed with Carliss Baldwin. Our goal is to offer additional clarity by trading off the richness of the qualitative argument for simplicity. +={ Baldwin, C. +24 } + +Whether a user firm should innovate or buy is a variant of a well-known problem: where one should place an activity in a supply chain. In any real-world case many complexities enter. In the model that follows, Baldwin and I ignore most of these and consider a simple base case focused on the impact of transaction costs on users' innovate-or-buy considerations. The model deals with manufacturing firms and user firms rather than individual users. We assume that user firms and manufacturer firms both will hire designers from the same homogeneous pool if they elect to solve a user problem. We also assume that both user firms and manufacturer firms will incur the same costs to solve a specific user problem. For example, they will have the same costs to monitor the performance of the designer employees they hire. In this way we simplify our innovate-or-buy problem to one of transaction costs only. + +If there are no transaction costs (for example, no costs to write and enforce a contract), then by Coase's theorem a user will be indifferent between making or buying a solution to its problem. But in the real world there are transaction costs, and so a user will generally prefer to either make or buy. Which, from the point of view of minimizing overall costs of obtaining a problem solution, is the better choice under any given circumstances? +={ Coase, R. } + +Let V,{ij}, be the value of a solution to problem j for user i. Let N,{j}, be the number of users having problem j. Let Wh,{j}, be the cost of solving problem j, where W = hourly wage and h,{j}, = hours required to solve it. Let P,{j}, be the price charged by a manufacturer for a solution to problem j. Let T be fixed or "setup" transaction costs, such as writing a general contract for buyers of a solution to problem j. Let t be variable or "frictional" transaction costs, such as tailoring the general contract to a specific customer. + +To explore this problem we make two assumptions. First, we assume that a user firm knows its own problems and the value of a solution to itself, V,{ij},. Second, we assume that a manufacturer knows the number of users having each problem, N,{j},, and the value of solutions for each problem for all users, V,{ij},. + +These assumptions are in line with real-world incentives of users and manufacturers, although information stickiness generally prevents firms from getting full information. That is, users have a high incentive to know their own problems and the value to them of a solution. Manufacturers, in turn, have an incentive to invest in understanding the nature of problems faced by users in the target market, the number of users affected, and the value that the users would attach to getting a solution in order to determine the potential profitability of markets from their point of view. +={ Sticky information : + innovation and +} + +We first consider the user's payoff for solving a problem for itself. A user has no transaction costs in dealing with itself, so a user's payoff for solving problem j will be V,{ij}, - Wh,{j},. Therefore, a user will buy a solution from an upstream manufacturer rather than develop one for itself if and only if P ≤ Wh,{j},. + +Next we consider payoffs to a manufacturer for solving problem j. In this case, transaction costs such as those discussed in earlier sections will be encountered. With respect to transaction costs assume first that t = 0 but T > 0. Then, the manufacturer's payoff for solving problem j will be V,{ij}, - Wh,{j},, which needs to be positive in order for the manufacturer to find innovation attractive: + +N,{j}, P,{j}, - Wh,{j}, - T > 0. + +But, as we saw, P,{j}, ≤ Wh,{j}, if the user is to buy, so we may substitute Wh,{j}, for P,{j}, in our inequality. Thus we obtain the following inequality as a condition for the user to buy: + +N,{j}, (Wh,{j},) - Wh,{j}, - T > 0, + +or + +N,{j}, > (T / Wh,{j},) + 1. + +In other words, Baldwin and I find that the absolute lower bound on N is greater than 1. This means that a single user will always prefer to solve a unique problem j for itself (except in Coase's world, where T = 0, and the user will be indifferent). If every problem is unique to a single user, users will never choose to call on upstream manufacturers for solutions. +={ Coase, R. } + +Now assume that T = 0 but t > 0. Then the condition for the user to buy rather than to innovate for itself becomes + +N,{j}, (Wh,{j}, - t) - Wh,{j}, > 0, + +or equivalently (provided Wh,{j}, > t) + +N,{j}, > Wh,{j}, / (Wh,{j}, - t) > 1. + +Again, users will not call on upstream manufacturers to solve problems unique to one user. + +The findings from the simplified model, then, are the following: Problems unique to one user will always be solved efficiently by users hiring designers to work for them in house. In contrast, problems affecting more than a moderate number of users, n, which is a function of the transaction costs, will be efficiently solved by the manufacturer hiring designers to develop the needed new product or service and then selling that solution to all users affected by the problem. However, given sufficient levels of T and/or of t, problems affecting more than one but fewer than n users will not be solved by a manufacturer, and so there will be a market failure: Assuming an institutional framework consisting only of independent users and manufacturers, multiple users will have to solve the same problem independently. + +As illustration, suppose that t = 0.25Wh,{j}, and T = 10Wh,{j},. Then, combining the two expressions and solving for n yields + +n = (11Wh,{j}, /0.75Wh,{j},) = 14.66. + +The condition for the user to buy the innovation rather than innovate itself becomes N,{j}, ≥ 15. For a number of users less than 15 but greater than 1, there will be a wasteful multiplication of user effort: several users will invest in developing the same innovation independently. + +In a world that consists entirely of manufacturers and of users that do not share the innovations they develop, the type of wasteful duplicative innovation investment by users just described probably will occur often. As was discussed earlier in this chapter, and as was illustrated by Slaughter's study, substantial transaction costs might well be the norm. In addition, low numbers of users having the same need---situations where N,{j}, is low---might also be the norm in the case of functionally novel innovations. Functionally novel innovations, as I will show later, tend to be developed by lead users, and lead users are by definition at the leading (low-N,{j},) edge of markets. +={ Slaughter, S. ; + Stressed-skin panels +} + +When the type of market failure discussed above does occur, users will have an incentive to search for institutional forms with a lower T and/or a lower t than is associated with assignment of the problem to an upstream manufacturer. One such institutional form involves interdependent innovation development among multiple users (for example, the institutional form used successfully in open source software projects that I will discuss in chapter 7). Baldwin and Clark (2003) show how this form can work to solve the problem of wasteful user innovation investments that were identified in our model. They show that, given modularity in the software's architecture, it will pay for users participating in open source software projects to generate and freely reveal some components of the needed innovation, benefiting from the fact that other users are likely to develop and reveal other components of that innovation. At the limit, the wasteful duplication of users' innovative efforts noted above will be eliminated; each innovation component will have been developed by only one user, but will be shared by many. +={ Clark, K. } + +!_ Benefiting from the Innovation Process +={ Innovation process +4 ; + Users : + innovation process and +4 +} + +Some individual users (not user firms) may decide to innovate for themselves rather than buy even if a traditional accounting evaluation would show that they had made a major investment in time and materials for an apparently minor reward in product functionality. The reason is that individual users may gain major rewards from the process of innovating, in addition to rewards from the product being developed. Make-or-buy evaluations typically include factors such as the time and materials that must be invested to develop a solution. These costs are then compared with the likely benefits produced by the project's "output"---the new product or service created---to determine whether the project is worth doing. This was the type of comparison made by Slaughter, for example, in assessing whether it would be better for the users to make or to buy the stressed-skin panel innovations in her sample. However, in the case of individual user-innovators, this type of assessment can provide too narrow a perspective on what actually constitutes valuable project output. Specifically, there is evidence that individuals sometimes greatly prize benefits derived from their participation in the process of innovation. The process, they say, can produce learning and enjoyment that is of high value to them. +={ Slaughter, S. ; + Stressed-skin panels +} + +In the introductory chapter, I pointed out that some recreational activities, such as solving crossword puzzles, are clearly engaged in for process rewards only: very few individuals value the end "product" of a completed puzzle. But process rewards have also been found to be important for innovators that are producing outputs that they and others do value (Hertel, Niedner, and Herrmann 2003; Lakhani and Wolf 2005). Lakhani and Wolf studied a sample of individuals (n = 684, response rate = 34 percent) who had written new software code and contributed it to an open source project. They asked the programmers to list their three most important reasons for doing this. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said that an important motivation for writing their code was that they had a work need (33 percent), or a non-work need (30 percent) or both (5 percent) for the code itself. That is, they valued the project's "output" as this is traditionally viewed. However, 45 percent said that one of their top three reasons for writing code was intellectual stimulation, and 41 percent said one of their top three reasons was to improve their own programming skills (Lakhani and Wolf 2005, table 6). Elaborating on these responses, 61 percent of respondents said that their participation in the open source project was their most creative experience or was as creative as their most creative experience. Also, more than 60 percent said that "if there were one more hour in the day" they would always or often dedicate it to programming. +={ Herrmann, S. ; + Hertel, G. ; + Lakhani, K. ; + Niedner, S. ; + Wolf, B. +} + +Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1990, 1996) systematically studied the characteristics of tasks that individuals find intrinsically rewarding, such as rock climbing. He found that a level of challenge somewhere between boredom and fear is important, and also that the experience of "flow" gained when one is fully engaged in a task is intrinsically rewarding. Amabile (1996) proposes that intrinsic motivation is a key determining factor in creativity. She defines a creative task as one that is heuristic in nature (with no predetermined path to solution), and defines a creative outcome as a novel and appropriate (useful) response to such a task. Both conditions certainly can apply to the task of developing a product or a service. +={ Amiable, T. ; + Csikszentmihalyi, M. +} + +In sum, to the extent that individual user-innovators benefit from the process of developing or modifying a product as well as from the product actually developed, they are likely to innovate even when the benefits expected from the product itself are relatively low. (Employees of a firm may wish to experience this type of intrinsic reward in their work as well, but managers and commercial constraints may give them less of an opportunity to do so. Indeed, "control over my own work" is cited by many programmers as a reason that they enjoy creating code as volunteers on open source projects more than they enjoy coding for their employers for pay.) + +1~ 5 Users' Low-Cost Innovation Niches +={ Users : + innovation and +50 | low-cost innovation niches of +50 +} + +!_ The Problem-Solving Process +={ Trial-and-error problem solving +11 } + +Product and service development is at its core a problem-solving process. Research into the nature of problem solving shows it to consist of trial and error, directed by some amount of insight as to the direction in which a solution might lie (Baron 1988). Trial and error has also been found to be prominent in the problem-solving work of product and process development (Marples 1961; Allen 1966; von Hippel and Tyre 1995; Thomke 1998, 2003). +={ Allen, T. ; + Baron, J. ; + Marples, D. ; + Thomke, S. ; + Tyre, M. ; + von Hippel, E. +} + +Trial-and-error problem solving can be envisioned as a four-phase cycle that is typically repeated many times during the development of a new product or service. Problem solvers first conceive of a problem and a related solution based on their best knowledge and insight. Next, they build a physical or virtual prototype of both the possible solution they have envisioned and the intended use environment. Third, they run the experiment---that is, they operate their prototyped solution and see what happens. Fourth and finally, they analyze the result to understand what happened in the trial and to assess the "error information" that they gained. (In the trial-and-error formulation of the learning process, error is the new information or learning derived from an experiment by an experimenter: it is the aspect(s) of the outcome that the experimenter did not predict.) Developers then use the new learning to modify and improve the solution under development before building and running a new trial (figure 5.1). + +Trial-and-error experimentation can be informal or formal; the underlying principles are the same. As an example on the informal side, consider a user experiencing a need and then developing what eventually turns out to be a new product: the skateboard. In phase 1 of the cycle, the user combines need and solution information into a product idea: "I am bored with roller skating. How can I get down this hill in a more exciting way? Maybe it would be fun to put my skates' wheels under a board and ride down on that." In phase 2, the user builds a prototype by taking his skates apart and hammering the wheels onto the underside of a board. In phase 3, he runs the experiment by climbing onto the board and heading down the hill. In phase 4, he picks himself up from an inaugural crash and thinks about the error information he has gained: "It is harder to stay on this thing than I thought. What went wrong, and how can I improve things before my next run down the hill?" + +% (2) BUILD +% (3) RUN +% (4) ANALYZE +% (1) DESIGN +% DONE +% DESIGN REQUIREMENTS +% DESIGN ACTIVITY +% Changes in +% exogenous +% information +% Use learning from previous +% cycle(s) to conceive and design +% an improved solution. +% . +% Develop models and/or build +% prototypes to be used in +% running experiments. +% . +% Test model/prototype in real +% or simulated use environment. +% . +% Analyze findings from +% previous step and learn. +% . +% Figure 5.1 +% The trial-and-error cycle of product development. + +{di_evh_f5-1.png}image + +!_ Figure 5.1 +The trial-and-error cycle of product development. + +As an example of more formal experimentation, consider a product-development engineer working in a laboratory to improve the performance of an automobile engine. In phase 1, need and solution information are again combined into a design idea: "I need to improve engine fuel efficiency. I think that a more even expansion of the flame in the cylinders is a possible solution direction, and I think that changing the shape of the spark plug electrodes will improve this." In phase 2, the engineer builds a spark plug incorporating her new idea. In phase 3, she inserts the new spark plug into a lab test engine equipped with the elaborate instrumentation needed to measure the very rapid propagation of a flame in the cylinders of an auto engine and runs the test. In phase 4, she feeds the data into a computer and analyzes the results. She asks: "Did the change in spark plug design change the flame front as expected? Did it change fuel efficiency? How can I use what I have learned from this trial to improve things for the next one?" + +In addition to the difference in formality, there is another important difference between these two examples. In the first example, the skateboard user was conducting trial and error with a full prototype of the intended product in a real use environment---his own. In the second example, the experimental spark plug might have been a full prototype of a real product, but it probably consisted only of that portion of a real spark plug that actually extends into a combustion chamber. Also, only /{aspects}/ of the use environment were involved in the lab experiment. That is, the test engine was not a real auto engine, and it was not being operated in a real car traveling over real roads. + +Experimentation is often carried out using simplified versions---models--- of the product being designed and its intended use environment. These models can be physical (as in the example just given), or they can be virtual (as in the case of thought experiments or computer simulations). In a computer simulation, both the product and the environment are represented in digital form, and their interaction is tested entirely within a computer. For example, one might make a digital model of an automobile and a crash barrier. One could then use a computer to simulate the crash of the model car into the model barrier. One would analyze the results by calculating the effects of that crash on the structure of the car. + +The value of using models rather than the real thing in experimentation is twofold. First, it can reduce the cost of an experiment---it can be much cheaper to crash a simulated BMW than a real one. Second, it can make experimental results clearer by making them simpler or otherwise different than real life. If one is trying to test the effect of a small change on car safety, for example, it can be helpful to remove everything not related to that change from the experiment. For example, if one is testing the way a particular wheel suspension structure deforms in a crash, one does not have to know (or spend time computing) how a taillight lens will react in the crash. Also, in a real crash things happen only once and happen very fast. In a virtual crash executed by computer, on the other hand, one can repeat the crash sequence over and over, and can stretch time out or compress it exactly as one likes to better understand what is happening (Thomke 2003). +={ Thomke, S. +2 } + +Users and others experimenting with real prototypes in real use environments can also modify things to make tests simpler and clearer. A restaurant chef, for example, can make slight variations in just a small part of a recipe each time a customer calls for it, in order to better understand what is happening and make improvements. Similarly, a process machine user can experiment with only a small portion of machine functioning over and over to test changes and detect errors. + +Sometimes designers will test a real experimental object in a real experimental context only after experimenting with several generations of models that isolate different aspects of the real and/or encompass increasing amounts of the complexity of the real. Developers of pharmaceuticals, for example, might begin by testing a candidate drug molecule against just the purified enzyme or receptor it is intended to affect, then test it again and again against successively more complex models of the human organism (tissue cultures, animal models, etc.) before finally seeking to test its effect on real human patients during clinical trials (Thomke, von Hippel, and Franke 1998). +={ Franke, N. ; + von Hippel, E. +} + +!_ Sticky Information +={ Sticky information +11 : + innovation and +11 +} + +Any experiment is only as accurate as the information that is used as inputs. If inputs are not accurate, outcomes will not be accurate: "garbage in, garbage out." + +The goal of product development and service development is to create a solution that will satisfy needs of real users within real contexts of use. The more complete and accurate the information on these factors, the higher the fidelity of the models being tested. If information could be transferred costlessly from place to place, the quality of the information available to problem solvers would or could be independent of location. But if information is costly to transfer, things are different. User-innovators, for example, will then have better information about their needs and their use context than will manufacturers. After all, they create and live in that type of information in full fidelity! Manufacturer-innovators, on the other hand, must transfer that information to themselves at some cost, and are unlikely to be able to obtain it in full fidelity at any cost. However, manufacturers might well have a higher-fidelity model of the solution types in which they specialize than users have. +={ Information asymmetries +31 ; + Local information +35 ; + Users : + information asymmetries of +31 +} + +It turns out that much information needed by product and service designers is "sticky." In any particular instance, the stickiness of a unit of information is defined as the incremental expenditure required to transfer that unit of information to a specified location in a form usable by a specified information seeker. When this expenditure is low, information stickiness is low; when it is high, stickiness is high (von Hippel 1994). That information is often sticky has been shown by studying the costs of transferring information regarding fully developed process technology from one location to another with full cooperation on both sides. Even under these favorable conditions, costs have been found to be high---leading one to conclude that the costs of transferring information during product and service development are likely to be at least as high. Teece (1977), for example, studied 26 international technology-transfer projects and found that the costs of information transfer ranged from 2 percent to 59 percent of total project costs and averaged 19 percent---a considerable fraction. Mansfield et al. (1982) also studied a number of projects involving technology transfer to overseas plants, and also found technology-transfer costs averaging about 20 percent of total project costs. Winter and Suzlanski (2001) explored replication of well-known organizational routines at new sites and found the process difficult and costly. +={ Mansfield, E. ; + Suzlanski, G. ; + Teece, D. ; + Winter, S. ; + von Hippel, E. +63 +} + +Why is information transfer so costly? The term "stickiness" refers only to a consequence, not to a cause. Information stickiness can result from causes ranging from attributes of the information itself to access fees charged by an information owner. Consider tacitness---a lack of explicit encoding. Polanyi (1958, pp. 49--53) noted that many human skills are tacit because "the aim of a skilful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them." For example, swimmers are probably not aware of the rules they employ to keep afloat (e.g., in exhaling, they do not completely empty their lungs), nor are medical experts generally aware of the rules they follow in order to reach a diagnosis of a disease. "Indeed," Polanyi says, "even in modern industries the indefinable knowledge is still an essential part of technology." Information that is tacit is also sticky because it cannot be transferred at low cost. As Polanyi points out, "an art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription, since no prescription for it exists. It can be passed on only by example from master to apprentice. . . ." Apprenticeship is a relatively costly mode of transfer. +={ Polanyi, M. } + +Another cause of information stickiness is related to absorptive capacity. A firm's or an individual's capacity to absorb new, outside technical information is largely a function of prior related knowledge (Cohen and Levinthal 1990). Thus, a firm knowing nothing about circuit design but seeking to apply an advanced technique for circuit engineering may be unable to apply it without first learning more basic information. The stickiness of the information about the advanced technique for the firm in question is therefore higher than it would be for a firm that already knows that basic information. (Recall that the stickiness of a unit of information is defined as the incremental expenditure required to transfer a unit of information to a specified site in a form usable by a /{specific}/ information seeker.) +={ Cohen, W. ; + Levinthal, D. +} + +Total information stickiness associated with solving a specific problem is also determined by the amount of information required by a problem solver. Sometimes a great deal is required, for two reasons. First, as Rosenberg (1976, 1982) and Nelson (1982, 1990) point out, much technological knowledge deals with the specific and the particular. Second, one does not know in advance of problem solving which particular items will be important. +={ Nelson, R. ; + Rosenberg, N. +} + +An example from a study by von Hippel and Tyre (1995) illustrates both points nicely. Tyre and I studied how and why novel production machines failed when they were first introduced into factory use. One of the machines studied was an automated machine used by a computer manufacturing firm to place large integrated circuits onto computer circuit boards. The user firm had asked an outside group to develop what was needed, and that group had developed and delivered a robot arm coupled to a machine-vision system. The arm, guided by the vision system, was designed to pick up integrated circuits and place them on a circuit board at precise locations. +={ Tyre, M. +4 } + +Upon being installed in the factory, the new component-placing machine failed many times as a result of its developers' lack of some bit of information about the need or use environment. For example, one day machine operators reported that the machine was malfunctioning---again---and they did not know why. Investigation traced the problem to the machine-vision system. This system used a small TV camera to locate specific metalized patterns on the surface of each circuit board being processed. To function, the system needed to "see" these metalized patterns clearly against the background color of the board's surface. The vision system developed by the machine-development group had functioned properly in their lab when tested with sample boards from the user factory. However, the field investigation showed that in the factory it failed when boards that were light yellow in color were being processed. + +The fact that some of the boards being processed were sometimes light yellow was a surprise to the machine developers. The factory personnel who had set the specifications for the machine knew that the boards they processed varied in color; however, they had not volunteered the information, because they did not know that the developers would be interested. Early in the machine-development process, they had simply provided samples of boards used in the factory to the machine-development group. And, as it happened, these samples were green. On the basis of the samples, developers had then (implicitly) assumed that all boards processed in the field were green. It had not occurred to them to ask users "How much variation in board color do you generally experience?" Thus, they had designed the vision system to work successfully with boards that were green. + +In the case of this field failure, the item of information needed to understand or predict this problem was known to the users and could easily have been provided to the machine developers---had the developers thought to ask and/or had users thought to volunteer it. But in the actual evolution of events this was not done. The important point is that this omission was not due to poor practice; it was due to the huge amount of information about the need and the use environment that was /{potentially}/ relevant to problem solvers. Note that the use environment and the novel machine contain many highly specific attributes that could potentially interact to cause field problems. Note also that the property of the board causing this particular type of failure was very narrow and specific. That is, the problem was not that the board had physical properties, nor that it had a color. The problem was precisely that some boards were yellow, and a particular shade of yellow at that. Since a circuit board, like most other components, has many attributes in addition to color (shape, size, weight, chemical composition, resonant frequency, dielectric constant, flexibility, and so on), it is likely that problem solvers seeking to learn everything they might need to know about the use and the use environment would have to collect a very large (perhaps unfeasibly large) number of very specific items of information. + +Next, consider that the information items the problem solver will actually need (of the many that exist) are contingent on the solution path taken by the engineer designing the product. In the example, the problem caused by the yellow color of the circuit board was contingent on the design solution to the component-placing problem selected by the engineer during the development process. That is, the color of the circuit boards in the user factory became an item the problem solvers needed to know only when engineers, in the course of their development of the component placer, decided to use a vision system in the component-placing machine they were designing, and the fact that the boards were yellow became relevant only when the engineers chose a video camera and lighting that could not distinguish the metalized patterns on the board against a yellow background. Clearly, it can be costly to transfer the many items of information that a product or service developer might require---even if each individual item has low stickiness---from one site to another. + +!_ How Information Asymmetries Affect User Innovation vs. Manufacturer Innovation +={ Manufacturers : + information asymmetries of +11 | innovation and +25 +} + +An important consequence of information stickiness is that it results in information asymmetries that cannot be erased easily or cheaply. Different users and manufacturers will have different stocks of information, and may find it costly to acquire information they need but do not have. As a result, each innovator will tend to develop innovations that draw on the sticky information it already has, because that is the cheapest course of action (Arora and Gambardella 1994; von Hippel 1994). In the specific case of product development, this means that users as a class will tend to develop innovations that draw heavily on their own information about need and context of use. Similarly, manufacturers as a class will tend to develop innovations that draw heavily on the types of solution information in which they specialize. +={ Arora, A. ; + Gambardella, A. +} + +This effect is visible in studies of innovation. Riggs and von Hippel (1994) studied the types of innovations made by users and manufacturers that improved the functioning of two major types of scientific instruments. +={ Riggs, W. ; + Scientific instruments +9 ; + Sticky information : + and scientific instruments +1 +} + +They found that users tended to develop innovations that enabled the instruments to do qualitatively new types of things for the first time. In contrast, manufacturers tended to develop innovations that enabled users to do the same things they had been doing, but to do them more conveniently or reliably (table 5.1). For example, users were the first to modify the instruments to enable them to image and analyze magnetic domains at sub-microscopic dimensions. In contrast, manufacturers were the first to computerize instrument adjustments to improve ease of operation. Sensitivity, resolution, and accuracy improvements fall somewhere in the middle, as the data show. These types of improvements can be driven by users seeking to do specific new things, or by manufacturers applying their technical expertise to improve the products along known dimensions of merit, such as accuracy. + +!_ Table 5.1 +Users tend to develop innovations that deliver novel functions. + +% Innovation developed by + +table{~h c4; 60; 15; 15; 10; + +Type of improvement provided by innovation +User +Manufacturer +n + +New functional capability +82% +18% +17 + +Sensitivity, resolution, or accuracy improvement +48% +52% +23 + +Convenience or reliability improvement +13% +87% +24 + +Total sample size +~ +~ +64 + +}table + +Source: Riggs and von Hippel 1994, table 3. + +The variation in locus of innovation for different types of innovations, seen in table 5.1 does fit our expectations from the point of view of sticky information considerations. But these findings are not controlled for profitability, and so it might be that profits for new functional capabilities are systematically smaller than profits obtainable from improvements made to existing functionality. If so, this could also explain the patterns seen. + +Ogawa (1998) took the next necessary step and conducted an empirical study that did control for profitability of innovation opportunities. He too found the sticky-information effect---this time visible in the division of labor /{within}/ product-development projects. He studied patterns in the development of a sample of 24 inventory-management innovations. All were jointly developed by a Japanese equipment manufacturer, NEC, and by a user firm, Seven-Eleven Japan (SEJ). SEJ, the leading convenience-store company in Japan, is known for its inventory management. Using innovative methods and equipment, it is able to turn over its inventory as many as 30 times a year, versus 12 times a year for competitors (Kotabe 1995). An example of such an innovation jointly developed by SEJ and NEC is just-in-time reordering, for which SEJ created the procedures and NEC the hand-held equipment to aid store clerks in carrying out their newly designed tasks. Equipment sales to SEJ are important to NEC: SEJ has thousands of stores in Japan. +={ Kotabe, M. ; + Ogawa, S. +1 +} + +The 24 innovations studied by Ogawa varied in the amount of sticky need information each required from users (having to do with store inventory- management practices) and the amount of sticky solution information required from manufacturers (having to do with new equipment technologies). Each also varied in terms of the profit expectations of both user and manufacturer. Ogawa determined how much of the design for each was done by the user firm and how much by the manufacturer firm. Controlling for profit expectations, he found that increases in the stickiness of user information were associated with a significant increase in the amount of need-related design undertaken by the user (Kendall correlation coefficient = 0.5784, P < 0.01). Conversely he found that increased stickiness of technology-related information was associated in a significant reduction in the amount of technology design done by the user (Kendall correlation coefficients = 0.4789, P < 0.05). In other words, need-intensive tasks within product-development projects will tend to be done by users, while solution-intensive ones will tend to be done by manufacturers. + +!_ Low-Cost Innovation Niches + +Just as there are information asymmetries between users and manufacturers as classes, there are also information asymmetries among individual user firms and individuals, and among individual manufacturers as well. A study of mountain biking by Lüthje, Herstatt, and von Hippel (2002) shows that information held locally by individual user-innovators strongly affects the type of innovations they develop. Mountain biking involves bicycling on rough terrain such as mountain trails. It may also involve various other extreme conditions, such as bicycling on snow and ice and in the dark (van der Plas and Kelly 1998). +={ Kelly, C. ; + Lüthje, C. ; + Van der Plas, R. ; + Herstatt, C. +12 ; + Lüthje, C. +12 ; + Mountain biking +12 ; + Users : + innovate-or-buy decisions by +12 +} + +Mountain biking began in the early 1970s when some young cyclists started to use their bicycles off-road. Existing commercial bikes were not suited to this type of rough use, so early users put together their own bikes. They used strong bike frames, balloon tires, and powerful drum brakes designed for motorcycles. They called their creations "clunkers" (Penning 1998; Buenstorf 2002). +={ Buenstorf, G. ; + Penning, C. +} + +Commercial manufacture of mountain bikes began about 1975, when some of the early users of mountain bikes began to also build bikes for others. A tiny cottage industry developed, and by 1976 a half-dozen small assemblers existed in Marin County, California. In 1982, a small firm named Specialized, an importer of bikes and bike parts that supplied parts to the Marin County mountain bike assemblers, took the next step and brought the first mass-produced mountain bike to market. Major bike manufacturers then followed and started to produce mountain bikes and sell them at regular bike shops across the United States. By the mid 1980s the mountain bike was fully integrated in the mainstream bike market, and it has since grown to significant size. In 2000, about $58 billion (65 percent) of total retail sales in the US bicycle market were generated in the mountain bike category (National Sporting Goods Association 2002). + +Mountain biking enthusiasts did not stop their innovation activities after the introduction of commercially manufactured mountain bikes. They kept pushing mountain biking into more extreme environmental conditions, and they continued to develop new sports techniques involving mountain bikes (/{Mountain Bike}/ 1996). Thus, some began jumping their bikes from house roofs and water towers and developing other forms of acrobatics. As they did so, they steadily discovered needs for improvements to their equipment. Many responded by developing and building the improvements they needed for themselves. + +Our sample of mountain bikers came from the area that bikers call the North Shore of the Americas, ranging from British Columbia to Washington State. Expert mountain bikers told us that this was a current "hot spot" where new riding styles were being developed and where the sport was being pushed toward new limits. We used a questionnaire to collect data from members of North Shore mountain biking clubs and from contributors to the mailing lists of two North Shore online mountain biking forums. Information was obtained from 291 mountain bikers. Nineteen percent of bikers responding to the questionnaire reported developing and building a new or modified item of mountain biking equipment for their own use. The innovations users developed were appropriate to the needs associated with their own riding specialties and were heterogeneous in function. +={ Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and +6 ; + User need +6 ; + Users : + needs of +6 +} + +We asked mountain bikers who had innovated about the sources of the need and solution information they had used in their problem solving. In 84.5 percent of the cases respondents strongly agreed with the statement that their need information came from /{personal needs they had frequently experienced}/ rather than from information about the needs of others. With respect to solution information, most strongly agreed with the statement that /{they used solution information they already had}/, rather than learning new solution information in order to develop their biking equipment innovation (table 5.2). + +!_ Table 5.2 +Innovators tended to use solution information they already had "in stock" to develop their ideas. Tabulated here are innovators' answers to the question "How did you obtain the information needed to develop your solution?" +={ Lüthje, C. } + +table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15; + +. +Mean +Median +Very high or high agreement + +"I had it due to my professional background." +4.22 +4 +47.5% + +"I had it from mountain biking or another hobby." +4.56 +5 +52.4% + +"I learned it to develop this idea." +2.11 +2 +16% + +}table + +Source: Lüthje et al. 2003. N = 61. Responses were rated on a seven-point scale, with 1 = not at all true and 7 = very true. + +!_ Discussion + +To the extent that users have heterogeneous and sticky need and solution information, they will have heterogeneous low-cost innovation niches. Users can be sophisticated developers within those niches, despite their reliance on their own need information and solution information that they already have in stock. On the need side, recall that user-innovators generally are lead users and generally are expert in the field or activity giving rise to their needs. With respect to solution information, user firms have specialties that may be at a world-class level. Individual users can also have high levels of solution expertise. After all, they are students or employees during the day, with training and jobs ranging from aerospace engineering to orthopedic surgery. Thus, mountain bikers might not want to /{learn}/ orthopedic surgery to improve their biking equipment, but if they already /{are}/ expert in that field they could easily draw on what they know for relevant solution information. Consider the following example drawn from the study of mountain biking discussed earlier: + +I'm a human movement scientist working in ergonomics and biomechanics. I used my medical experience for my design. I calculated a frame design suitable for different riding conditions (downhill, climb). I did a CAD frame design on Catia and conceived a spring or air coil that can be set to two different heights. I plan to build the bike next year. + +Users' low-cost innovation niches can be narrow because their development "labs" for such experimentation often consist largely of their individual use environment and customary activities. Consider, for example, the low-cost innovation niches of individual mountain bikers. Serious mountain bikers generally specialize in a particular type of mountain biking activity. Repeated specialized play and practice leads to improvement in related specialized skills. This, in turn, may lead to a discovery of a problem in existing mountain biking equipment and a responsive innovation. Thus, an innovating user in our mountain biking study reported the following: "When doing tricks that require me to take my feet off the bike pedals in mid-air, the pedals often spin, making it hard to put my feet back onto them accurately before landing." Such a problem is encountered only when a user has gained a high level of skill in the very specific specialty of jumping and performing tricks in mid-air. Once the problem has been encountered and recognized, however, the skilled specialist user can re-evoke the same problematic conditions at will during ordinary practice. The result is the creation of a low-cost laboratory for testing and comparing different solutions to that problem. The user is benefiting from enjoyment of his chosen activity and is developing something new via learning by doing at the same time. + +In sharp contrast, if that same user decides to stray outside his chosen activity in order to develop innovations of interest to others with needs that are different from his own, the cost properly assignable to innovation will rise. To gain an equivalent-quality context for innovation, such a user must invest in developing personal skill related to the new innovation topic. Only in this way will he gain an equivalently deep understanding of the problems relevant to practitioners of that skill, and acquire a "field laboratory" appropriate to developing and testing possible solutions to those new problems. + +Of course, these same considerations apply to user firms as well as to individual users. A firm that is in the business of polishing marble floors is a user of marble polishing equipment and techniques. It will have a low-cost learning laboratory with respect to improvements in these because it can conduct trial-and-error learning in that "lab" during the course of its customary business activities. Innovation costs can be very low because innovation activities are paid for in part by rewards unrelated to the novel equipment or technique being developed. The firm is polishing while innovating---and is getting paid for that work (Foray 2004). The low cost innovation niche of the marble polishing firm may be narrow. For example, it is unlikely to have any special advantage with respect to innovations in the polishing of wood floors, which requires different equipment and techniques. +={ Foray, D. } + +1~ 6 Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + evidence of +10 | users and +50 ; + Information commons +13 ; + Intellectual property rights : + free revealing and +50 ; + Users : + free revealing by +50 +} + +Products, services, and processes developed by users become more valuable to society if they are somehow diffused to others that can also benefit from them. If user innovations are not diffused, multiple users with very similar needs will have to invest to (re)develop very similar innovations, which would be a poor use of resources from the social welfare point of view. Empirical research shows that new and modified products developed by users often do diffuse widely---and they do this by an unexpected means: user-innovators themselves often voluntarily publicly reveal what they have developed for all to examine, imitate, or modify without any payment to the innovator. + +In this chapter, I first review evidence that free revealing is frequent. Next, I discuss the case for free revealing from an innovators' perspective, and argue that it often can be the best /{practical}/ route for users to increase profit from their innovations. Finally, I discuss the implications of free revealing for innovation theory. + +!_ Evidence of Free Revealing +={ Free revealing of innovation information } + +When my colleagues and I say that an innovator "freely reveals" proprietary information, we mean that all intellectual property rights to that information are voluntarily given up by that innovator and all parties are given equal access to it---the information becomes a public good (Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel 2003). For example, placement of non-patented information in a publicly accessible site such as a journal or public website would be free revealing as we define it. Free revealing as so defined does not mean that recipients necessarily acquire and utilize the revealed information at no cost to themselves. Recipients may, for example, have to pay for a subscription to a journal or for a field trip to an innovation site to acquire the information being freely revealed. Also, some may have to obtain complementary information or other assets in order to fully understand that information or put it to use. However, if the possessor of the information does not profit from any such expenditures made by its adopters, the information itself is still freely revealed, according to our definition. This definition of free revealing is rather extreme in that revealing with some small constraints, as is sometimes done, would achieve largely the same economic effect. Still, it is useful to discover that innovations are often freely revealed even in terms of this stringent definition. +={ Harhoff, D. ; + Henkel, J. +} + +Routine and intentional free revealing among profit-seeking firms was first described by Allen (1983). He noticed the phenomenon, which he called collective invention, in historical records from the nineteenth-century English iron industry. In that industry, ore was processed into iron by means of large furnaces heated to very high temperatures. Two attributes of the furnaces used had been steadily improved during the period 1850--1875: chimney height had been increased and the temperature of the combustion air pumped into the furnace during operation had been raised. These two technical changes significantly and progressively improved the energy efficiency of iron production---a very important matter for producers. Allen noted the surprising fact that employees of competing firms publicly revealed information on their furnace design improvements and related performance data in meetings of professional societies and in published material. +={ Allen, R. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + collective invention and +} + +After Allen's initial observation, a number of other authors searched for free revealing among profit-seeking firms and frequently found it. Nuvolari (2004) studied a topic and time similar to that studied by Allen and found a similar pattern of free revealing in the case of improvements made to steam engines used to pump out mines in the 1800s. At that time, mining activities were severely hampered by water that tended to flood into mines of any depth, and so an early and important application of steam engines was for the removal of water from mines. Nuvolari explored the technical history of steam engines used to drain copper and tin mines in England's Cornwall District. Here, patented steam engines developed by James Watt were widely deployed in the 1700s. After the expiration of the Watt patent, an engineer named Richard Trevithick developed a new type of high-pressure engine in 1812. Instead of patenting his invention, he made his design available to all for use without charge. The engine soon became the basic design used in Cornwall. Many mine engineers improved Trevithick's design further and published what they had done in a monthly journal, /{Leans Engine Reporter}/. This journal had been founded by a group of mine managers with the explicit intention of aiding the rapid diffusion of best practices among these competing firms. +={ Nuvolari, A. ; + Trevithick, R. ; + Watt, J. +} + +Free revealing has also been documented in the case of more recent industrial equipment innovations developed by users. Lim (2000) reports that IBM was first to develop a process to manufacture semiconductors that incorporated copper interconnections among circuit elements instead of the traditionally used aluminum ones. After some delay, IBM revealed increasing amounts of proprietary process information to rival users and to equipment suppliers. Widespread free revealing was also found in the case of automated clinical chemistry analyzers developed by the Technicon Corporation for use in medical diagnosis. After commercial introduction of the basic analyzer, many users developed major improvements to both the analyzer and to the clinical tests processed on that equipment. These users, generally medical personnel, freely revealed their improvements via publication, and at company-sponsored seminars (von Hippel and Finkelstein 1979). Mishina (1989) found free, or at least selective no-cost revealing in the lithographic equipment industry. He reported that innovating equipment users would sometimes reveal what they had done to machine manufacturers. Morrison, Roberts, and I, in our study of library IT search software (discussed in chapter 2 above), found that innovating users freely revealed 56 percent of the software modifications they had developed. Reasons given for not revealing the remainder had nothing to do with considerations of intellectual property protection. Rather, users who did not share said they had no convenient users' group forum for doing so, and/or they thought their innovation was too specialized to be of interest to others. +={ IBM ; + Finkelstein, S. ; + Lim, K. ; + Mishina, K. ; + Morrison, Pamela ; + Roberts, J. ; + Technicon Corporation ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + and library information search system ; + Lead users : + library information search system and ; + Library information search system +} + +Innovating users of sports equipment also have been found to freely reveal their new products and product modifications. Franke and Shah (2003), in their study of four communities of serious sports enthusiasts described in chapter 2, found that innovating users uniformly agreed with the statement that they shared their innovation with their entire community free of charge---and strongly disagreed with the statement that they sold their innovations (p < 0.001, t-test for dependent samples). Interestingly, two of the four communities they studied engaged in activities involving significant competition among community members. Innovators in these two communities reported high but significantly less willingness to share, as one might expect in view of the potentially higher level of competitive loss free revealing would entail. +={ Franke, N. ; + Shah, S. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + and sports equipment ; + Sporting equipment : + free revealing and +} + +Contributors to the many open source software projects extant (more than 83,000 were listed on SourceForge.net in 2004) also routinely make the new code they have written public. Well-known open source software products include the Linux operating system software and the Apache web server computer software. Some conditions are attached to open source code licensing to ensure that the code remains available to all as an information commons. Because of these added protections, open source code does not quite fit the definition of free revealing given earlier in this chapter. (The licensing of open source software will be discussed in detail in chapter 7.) +={ Linux +1 ; + Apache web server software ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + and open source software +1 ; + Open source software : + free revealing and +1 +} + +Henkel (2003) showed that free revealing is sometimes practiced by directly competing manufacturers. He studied manufacturers that were competitors and that had all built improvements and extensions to a type of software known as embedded Linux. (Such software is "embedded in" and used to operate equipment ranging from cameras to chemical plants.) He found that these manufacturers freely revealed improvements to the common software platform that they all shared and, with a lag, also revealed much of the equipment-specific code they had written. +={ Henkel, J. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + manufacturers and ; + Manufacturers : + free revealing and +} + +!_ The Practical Case for Free Revealing +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + case for +2 +} + +The "private investment model" of innovation assumes that innovation will be supported by private investment if and as innovators can make attractive profits from doing so. In this model, any free revealing or uncompensated "spillover" of proprietary knowledge developed by private investment will reduce the innovator's profits. It is therefore assumed that innovators will strive to avoid spillovers of innovation-related information. From the perspective of this model, then, free revealing is a major surprise: it seems to make no sense that innovators would intentionally give away information for free that they had invested money to develop. + +In this subsection I offer an explanation for the puzzle by pointing out that free revealing is often the best /{practical}/ option available to user innovators. Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel (2003) found that it is in practice very difficult for most innovators to protect their innovations from direct or approximate imitation. This means that the practical choice is typically /{not}/ the one posited by the private investment model: should innovators voluntarily freely reveal their innovations, or should they protect them? Instead, the real choice facing user innovators often is whether to voluntarily freely reveal or to arrive at the same end state, perhaps with a bit of a lag, via involuntary spillovers. The practical case for voluntary free revealing is further strengthened because it can be accomplished at low cost, and often yields private benefits to the innovators. When benefits from free revealing exceed the benefits that are /{practically}/ obtainable from holding an innovation secret or licensing it, free revealing should be the preferred course of action for a profit-seeking firm or individual. +={ Harhoff, D. ; + Henkel, J. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + and information diffusion +9 +} + +!_ Others Often Know Something Close to "Your" Secret + +Innovators seeking to protect innovations they have developed as their intellectual property must establish some kind of monopoly control over the innovation-related information. In practice, this can be done either by effectively hiding the information as a trade secret, or by getting effective legal protection by patents or copyrights. (Trademarks also fall under the heading of intellectual property, but we do not consider those here.) In addition, however, it must be the case that /{others}/ do not know substitute information that skirts these protections and that they /{are}/ willing to reveal. If multiple individuals or firms have substitutable information, they are likely to vary with respect to the competitive circumstances they face. A specific innovator's ability to protect "its" innovation as proprietary property will then be determined for all holders of such information by the decision of the one having the least to lose by free revealing. If one or more information holders expect no loss or even a gain from a decision to freely reveal, then the secret will probably be revealed despite other innovators' best efforts to avoid this fate. +={ Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and | patents and | trade secrets and +} + +Commonly, firms and individuals have information that would be valuable to those seeking to imitate a particular innovation. This is because innovators and imitators seldom need access to a specific version of an innovation. Indeed, engineers seldom even want to see a solution exactly as their competitors have designed it: specific circumstances differ even among close competitors, and solutions must in any case be adapted to each adopter's precise circumstances. What an engineer does want to extract from the work of others is the principles and the general outline of a possible improvement, rather than the easily redevelopable details. This information is likely to be available from many sources. + +For example, suppose you are a system developer at a bank and you are tasked with improving in-house software for checking customers' credit online. On the face of it, it might seem that you would gain most by studying the details of the systems that competing banks have developed to handle that same task. It is certainly true that competing banks may face market conditions very similar to your bank, and they may well not want to reveal the valuable innovations they have developed to a competitor. However, the situation is still by no means bleak for an imitator. There are also many non-bank users of online credit checking systems in the world---probably millions. Some will have innovated and be willing to reveal what they have done, and some of these will have the information you need. The likelihood that the information you seek will be freely revealed by some individual or firm is further enhanced by the fact that your search for novel basic improvements may profitably extend far beyond the specific application of online credit checking. Other fields will also have information on components of the solution you need. For example, many applications in addition to online credit checking use software components designed to determine whether persons seeking information are authorized to receive it. Any can potentially be a provider of information for this element of your improved system. + +A finding by Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) illustrates the possibility that many firms and individuals may have similar information. Lakhani and von Hippel studied Apache help-line websites. These sites enable users having problems with Apache software to post questions, and others to respond with answers. The authors asked those who provided answers how many other help-line participants they thought also knew a solution to specific and often obscure problems they had answered on the Apache online forum. Information providers generally were of the opinion that some or many other help-line participants also knew a solution, and could have provided an answer if they themselves had not done so (table 6.1). +={ Lakhani, K ; + Apache web server software +2 +} + +!_ Table 6.1 +Even very specialized information is often widely known. Tabulated here are answers to a question asked of help-line information providers: "How many others do you think knew the answer to the question you answered?" +={ Lakhani, K } + +table{~h c3; 40; 30; 30; + +~ +Frequent providers (n = 21) + +Other providers (n = 67) + +Many +38% +61% + +A few with good Apache knowledge +38% +18% + +A few with specific problem experience +24% +21% + +}table + +Source: Lakhani and von Hippel 2003, table 10. + +Even in the unlikely event that a secret is held by one individual, that information holder will not find it easy to keep a secret for long. Mansfield (1985) studied 100 American firms and found that "information concerning development decisions is generally in the hands of rivals within about 12 to 18 months, on the average, and information concerning the detailed nature and operation of a new product or process generally leaks out within about a year." This observation is supported by Allen's previously mentioned study of free revealing in the nineteenth-century English iron industry. Allen (1983, p. 17) notes that developers of improved blast furnace designs were unlikely to be able to keep their valuable innovations secret because "in the case of blast furnaces and steelworks, the construction would have been done by contractors who would know the design." Also, "the designs themselves were often created by consulting engineers who shifted from firm to firm." +={ Allen, R. ; + Mansfield, E. +4 ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + evidence of +} + +!_ Low Ability to Profit from Patenting +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + patent protection and +12 ; + Intellectual property rights : + patents and +12 +} + +Next, suppose that a single user-innovator is the only holder of a particular unit of innovation-related information, and that for some reason there are no easy substitutes. That user actually does have a real choice with respect to disposing of its intellectual property: it can keep the innovation secret and profit from in-house use only, it can license it, or it can choose to freely reveal the innovation. We have just seen that the practical likelihood of keeping a secret is low, especially when there are multiple potential providers of very similar secrets. But if one legally protects an innovation by means of a patent or a copyright, one need not keep an innovation secret in order to control it. Thus, a firm or an individual that freely reveals is forgoing any chance to get a profit via licensing of intellectual property for a fee. What, in practical terms, is the likelihood of succeeding at this and so of forgoing profit by choosing to freely reveal? +={ Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and +1 | patents and +4 +} + +In most subject matters, the relevant form of legal protection for intellectual property is the patent, generally the "utility" patent. (The notable exception is the software industry, where material to be licensed is often protected by copyright.) In the United States, utility patents may be granted for inventions related to composition of matter and/or a method and/or a use. They may not be granted for ideas per se, mathematical formulas, laws of nature, and anything repugnant to morals and public policy. Within subject matters potentially protectable by patent, protection will be granted only when the intellectual property claimed meets additional criteria of usefulness, novelty, and non-obviousness to those skilled in the relevant art. (The tests for whether these criteria have been met are based on judgement. When a low threshold is used, patents are easier to get, and vice-versa (Hall and Harhoff 2004).) +={ Hall, B. ; + Harhoff, D. +} + +The real-world value of patent protection has been studied for more than 40 years. Various researchers have found that, with a few exceptions, innovators do /{not}/ think that patents are very useful either for excluding imitators or for capturing royalties in most industries. (Fields generally cited as exceptions are pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and chemical processes, where patents do enable markets for technical information (Arora et al. 2001).) Most respondents also say that the availability of patent protection does not induce them to invest more in research and development than they would if patent protection did not exist. Taylor and Silberston (1973) reported that 24 of 32 firms said that only 5 percent or less of their R&D expenditures were dependent on the availability of patent protection. Levin et al. (1987) surveyed 650 R&D executives in 130 different industries and found that all except respondents from the chemical and pharmaceutical industries judged patents to be "relatively ineffective." Similar findings have been reported by Mansfield (1968, 1985), by Cohen et al. (2000, 2002), by Arundel (2001), and by Sattler (2003). +={ Arora, A. ; + Arundel, A. ; + Cohen, W. ; + Gambardella, A. ; + Levin, R. ; + Sattler, H. ; + Silberston, Z. ; + Taylor, C. +} + +% Slaughter, S., 83--85 + +% ={Fosfuri, A.;Goto, A.} + +Despite recent governmental efforts to strengthen patent enforcement, a comparison of survey results indicates only a modest increase between 1983 and 1994 in large firms' evaluations of patents' effectiveness in protecting innovations or promoting innovation investments. Of course, there are notable exceptions: some firms, including IBM and TI, report significant income from the licensing of their patented technologies. + +% ={IBM} + +Obtaining a patent typically costs thousands of dollars, and it can take years (Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel 2003). This makes patents especially impractical for many individual user-innovators, and also for small and medium-size firms of limited means. As a stark example, it is hard to imagine that an individual user who has developed an innovation in sports equipment would find it appealing to invest in a patent and in follow-on efforts to find a licensee and enforce payment. The few that do attempt this, as Shah (2000) has shown, seldom gain any return from licensees as payment for their time and expenditures. +={ Harhoff, D. ; + Henkel, J. ; + Shah, S. ; + Intellectual property rights : + licensing of +1 +} + +Copyright is a low-cost and immediate form of legal protection that applies to original writings and images ranging from software code to movies. Authors do not have to apply for copyright protection; it "follows the author's pen across the page." Licensing of copyrighted works is common, and it is widely practiced by commercial software firms. When one buys a copy of a non-custom software product, one is typically buying only a license to use the software, not buying the intellectual property itself. However, copyright protection is also limited in an important way. Only the specific original writing itself is protected, not the underlying invention or ideas. As a consequence, copyright protections can be circumvented. For example, those who wish to imitate the function of a copyrighted software program can do so by writing new software code to implement that function. +={ Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + copyright protection and +} + +Given the above, we may conclude that in practice little profit is being sacrificed by many user-innovator firms or individuals that choose to forgo the possibility of legally protecting their innovations in favor of free revealing. + +!_ Positive Incentives for Free Revealing +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + incentives for +7 ; + Information commons +7 +} + +As was noted earlier, when we say that an innovator "freely reveals" proprietary information we mean that all existing and potential intellectual property rights to that information are voluntarily given up by that innovator and that all interested parties are given access to it---the information becomes a public good. These conditions can often be met at a very low cost. For example, an innovator can simply post information about the innovation on a website without publicity, so those potentially interested must discover it. Or a firm that has developed a novel process machine can agree to give a factory tour to any firm or individual that thinks to ask for one, without attempting to publicize the invention or the availability of such tours in any way. However, it is clear that many innovators go beyond basic, low-cost forms of free revealing. They spend significant money and time to ensure that their innovations are seen in a favorable light, and that information about them is effectively and widely diffused. Writers of computer code may work hard to eliminate all bugs and to document their code in a way that is very easy for potential adopters to understand before freely revealing it. Plant owners may repaint their plant, announce the availability of tours at a general industry meeting, and then provide a free lunch for their visitors. + +Innovators' /{active}/ efforts to diffuse information about their innovations suggest that there are positive, private rewards to be obtained from free revealing. A number of authors have considered what these might be. Allen (1983) proposed that reputation gained for a firm or for its managers might offset a reduction in profits for the firm caused by free revealing. Raymond (1999) and Lerner and Tirole (2002) elaborated on this idea when explaining free revealing by contributors to open source software development projects. Free revealing of high-quality code, they noted, can increase a programmer's reputation with his peers. This benefit can lead to other benefits, such as an increase in the programmer's value on the job market. Allen has argued that free revealing might have effects that actually increase a firm's profits if the revealed innovation is to some degree specific to assets owned by the innovator (see also Hirschleifer 1971). +={ Allen, R. +1 ; + Hirschleifer, J. ; + Lerner, J. ; + Raymond, E. ; + Tirole, J. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + and open source software ; + Open source software : + free revealing and +} + +Free revealing may also increase an innovator's profit in other ways. When an innovating user freely reveals an innovation, the direct result is to increase the diffusion of that innovation relative to what it would be if the innovation were either licensed at a fee or held secret. The innovating user may then benefit from the increase in diffusion via a number of effects. Among these are network effects. (The classic illustration of a network effect is that the value of each telephone goes up as more are sold, because the value of a phone is strongly affected by the number of others who can be contacted in the network.) In addition, and very importantly, an innovation that is freely revealed and adopted by others can become an informal standard that may preempt the development and/or commercialization of other versions of the innovation. If, as Allen suggested, the innovation that is revealed is designed in a way that is especially appropriate to conditions unique to the innovator, this can result in creating a permanent source of advantage for that innovator. + +Being first to reveal a certain type of innovation increases a user firm's chances of having its innovation widely adopted, other things being equal. This may induce innovators to race to reveal first. Firms engaged in a patent race may disclose information voluntarily if the profits from success do not go only to the winner of the race. If being second quickly is preferable to being first relatively late, there will be an incentive for voluntary revealing in order to accelerate the race (de Fraja 1993). +={ de Fraja, G. } + +Incentives to freely reveal have been most deeply explored in the specific case of open source software projects. Students of the open source software development process report that innovating users have a number of motives for freely revealing their code to open source project managers and open source code users in general. If they freely reveal, others can debug and improve upon the modules they have contributed, to everyone's benefit. They are also motivated to have their improvement incorporated into the standard version of the open source software that is generally distributed by the volunteer open source user organization, because it will then be updated and maintained without further effort on the innovator's part. This volunteer organization is the functional equivalent of a manufacturer with respect to inducing manufacturer improvements, because a user-developed improvement will be assured of inclusion in new "official" software releases only if it is approved and adopted by the coordinating user group. Innovating users also report being motivated to freely reveal their code under a free or open source license by a number of additional factors. These include giving support to open code and "giving back" to those whose freely revealed code has been of value to them (Lakhani and Wolf 2005). +={ Lakhani, K. ; + Lakhani, K. ; + Wolf, B. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + and open source software +4 ; + Open source software : + free revealing and +4 +} + +By freely revealing information about an innovative product or process, a user makes it possible for manufacturers to learn about that innovation. Manufacturers may then improve upon it and/or offer it at a price lower than users' in-house production costs (Harhoff et al. 2003). When the improved version is offered for sale to the general market, the original user-innovator (and other users) can buy it and gain from in-house use of the improvements. For example, consider that manufacturers often convert user-developed innovations ("home-builts") into a much more robust and reliable form when preparing them for sale on the commercial market. Also, manufacturers offer related services, such as field maintenance and repair programs, that innovating users must otherwise provide for themselves. +={ iHarhoff, D. +1 } + +A variation of this argument applies to the free revealing among competing manufacturers documented by Henkel (2003). Competing developers of embedded Linux systems were creating software that was specifically designed to run the hardware products of their specific clients. Each manufacturer could freely reveal this equipment-specific code without fear of direct competitive repercussions: it was applicable mainly to specific products made by a manufacturer's client, and it was less valuable to others. At the same time, all would jointly benefit from free revealing of improvements to the underlying embedded Linux code base, upon which they all build their proprietary products. After all, the competitive advantages of all their products depended on this code base's being equal to or better than the proprietary software code used by other manufacturers of similar products. Additionally, Linux software was a complement to hardware that many of the manufacturers in Henkel's sample also sold. Improved Linux software would likely increase sales of their complementary hardware products. (Complement suppliers' incentives to innovate have been modeled by Harhoff (1996).) +={ Linux ; + Henkel, J. } + +!_ Free Revealing and Reuse +={ Free revealing of innovation information +2 } + +Of course, free revealing is of value only if others (re)use what has been revealed. It can be difficult to track what visitors to an information commons take away and reuse, and there is as yet very little empirical information on this important matter. Valuable forms of reuse range from the gaining of general ideas of development paths to pursue or avoid to the adoption of specific designs. For example, those who download software code from an open source project repository can use it to learn about approaches to solving a particular software problem and/or they may reuse portions of the downloaded code by inserting it directly into a software program of their own. Von Krogh et al. (2004) studied the latter type of code reuse in open source software and found it very extensive. Indeed, they report that /{most}/ of the lines of software code in the projects they studied were taken from the commons of other open source software projects and software libraries and reused. +={ von Krogh, G. +10 } + +% Spaeth, S., 88,? + +In the case of academic publications, we see evidence that free revealing does increase reuse---a matter of great importance to academics. A citation is an indicator that information contained in an article has been reused: the article has been read by the citing author and found useful enough to draw to readers' attention. Recent empirical studies are finding that articles to which readers have open access---articles available for free download from an author's website, for example---are cited significantly more often than are equivalent articles that are available only from libraries or from publishers' fee-based websites. Antelman (2004) finds an increase in citations ranging from 45 percent in philosophy to 91 percent in mathematics. She notes that "scholars in diverse disciplines are adopting open-access practices at a surprisingly high rate and are being rewarded for it, as reflected in [citations]." +={ Antelman, K. } + +!_ Implications for Theory + +We have seen that in practice free revealing may often be the best practical course of action for innovators. How can we tie these observations back to theory, and perhaps improve theory as a result? At present there are two major models that characterize how innovation gets rewarded. The private investment model is based on the assumption that innovation will be supported by private investors expecting to make a profit. To encourage private investment in innovation, society grants innovators some limited rights to the innovations they generate via patents, copyrights, and trade secrecy laws. These rights are intended to assist innovators in getting private returns from their innovation-related investments. At the same time, the monopoly control that society grants to innovators and the private profits they reap create a loss to society relative to the free and unfettered use by all of the knowledge that the innovators have created. Society elects to suffer this social loss in order to increase innovators' incentives to invest in the creation of new knowledge (Arrow 1962; Dam 1995). +={ Arrow, K. ; + Dam, K. ; + Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and | trade secrets and ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + copyright protection and | patents and | trade secrecy and +} + +The second major model for inducing innovation is termed the collective action model. It applies to the provision of public goods, where a public good is defined by its non-excludability and non-rivalry: if any user consumes it, it cannot be feasibly withheld from other users, and all consume it on the same terms (Olson 1967). The collective action model assumes that innovators are /{required}/ to relinquish control of knowledge or other assets they have developed to a project and so make them a public good. This requirement enables collective action projects to avoid the social loss associated with the restricted access to knowledge of the private investment model. At the same time, it creates problems with respect to recruiting and motivating potential contributors. Since contributions to a collective action project are a public good, users of that good have the option of waiting for others to contribute and then free riding on what they have done (Olson 1967). +={ Olson, M. +1 ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + collective action model for +6 ; + Social welfare : + free revealing and +} + +The literature on collective action deals with the problem of recruiting contributors to a task in a number of ways. Oliver and Marwell (1988) and Taylor and Singleton (1993) predict that the description of a project's goals and the nature of recruiting efforts should matter a great deal. Other researchers argue that the creation and deployment of selective incentives for contributors is essential to the success of collective action projects. For example, projects may grant special credentials to especially productive project members (Friedman and McAdam 1992; Oliver 1980). The importance of selective incentives suggests that small groups will be most successful at executing collective action projects. In small groups, selective incentives can be carefully tailored for each group member and individual contributions can be more effectively monitored (Olson 1967; Ostrom 1998). +={ Friedman, D. ; + Marwell, G. ; + McAdam, D. ; + Oliver, P. ; + Ostrom, E. ; + Singleton, S. ; + Taylor, M. +} + +Interestingly, successful open source software projects do not appear to follow any of the guidelines for successful collective action projects just described. With respect to project recruitment, goal statements provided by successful open source software projects vary from technical and narrow to ideological and broad, and from precise to vague and emergent (for examples, see goal statements posted by projects hosted on Sourceforge.net).~{ As a specific example of a project with an emergent goal, consider the beginnings of the Linux open source software project. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student in Finland, wanted a Unix operating system that could be run on his PC, which was equipped with a 386 processor. Minix was the only software available at that time but it was commercial, closed source, and it traded at US$150. Torvalds found this too expensive, and started development of a Posix-compatible operating system, later known as Linux. Torvalds did not immediately publicize a very broad and ambitious goal, nor did he attempt to recruit contributors. He simply expressed his private motivation in a message he posted on July 3, 1991, to the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix (Wayner 2000): /{Hello netlanders, Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition.}/ [Posix is a standard for UNIX designers. A software using POSIX is compatible with other UNIX-based software.] /{Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix-rules? Ftp-sites would be nice.}/ In response, Torvalds got several return messages with Posix rules and people expressing a general interest in the project. By the early 1992, several skilled programmers contributed to Linux and the number of users increased by the day. Today, Linux is the largest open source development project extant in terms of number of developers. }~ Further, such projects may engage in no active recruiting beyond simply posting their intended goals and access address on a general public website customarily used for this purpose (for examples, see the Freshmeat.net website). Also, projects have shown by example that they can be successful even if large groups---perhaps thousands---of contributors are involved. Finally, open source software projects seem to expend no effort to discourage free riding. Anyone is free to download code or seek help from project websites, and no apparent form of moral pressure is applied to make a compensating contribution (e.g., "If you benefit from this code, please also contribute . . ."). +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + open source software and +} + +What can explain these deviations from expected practice? What, in other words, can explain free revealing of privately funded innovations and enthusiastic participation in projects to produce a public good? From the theoretical perspective, Georg von Krogh and I think the answer involves revisiting and easing some of the basic assumptions and constraints conventionally applied to the private investment and collective action models of innovation. Both, in an effort to offer "clean" and simple models for research, have excluded from consideration a very rich and fertile middle ground where incentives for private investment and collective action can coexist, and where a "private-collective" innovation model can flourish. More specifically, a private-collective model of innovation occupies the middle ground between the private investment model and the collective action model by: +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + private-collective model for +3 ; + Private-collective model +3 ; + Social welfare : + private-collective model and +3 +} + +_* Eliminating the assumption in private investment models that free revealing of innovations developed with private funds will represent a loss of private profit for the innovator and so will not be engaged in voluntarily. Instead the private-collective model proposes that under common conditions free revealing of proprietary innovations may increase rather than decrease innovators' private profit. + +_* Eliminating the assumption in collective action models that a free rider obtains benefits from the completed public good that are equal to those a contributor obtains. Instead, the private-collective model proposes that contributors to a public good can /{inherently}/ obtain greater private benefits than free riders. These provide incentives for participation in collective action projects that need not be managed by project personnel (von Hippel and von Krogh 2003). +={ von Hippel, E. } + +In summation: Innovations developed at private cost are often revealed freely, and this behavior makes economic sense for participants under commonly encountered conditions. A private-collective model of innovation incentives can explain why and when knowledge created by private funding may be offered freely to all. When the conditions are met, society appears to have the best of both worlds---new knowledge is created by private funding and then freely revealed to all. + +1~ 7 Innovation Communities +={ Innovation communities +56 : + innovation and +56 +} + +It is now clear that users often innovate, and that they often freely reveal their innovations. But what about informal cooperation among users? What about /{organized}/ cooperation in development of innovations and other matters? The answer is that both flourish among user-innovators. Informal user-to-user cooperation, such as assisting others to innovate, is common. Organized cooperation in which users interact within communities, is also common. Innovation communities are often stocked with useful tools and infrastructure that increase the speed and effectiveness with which users can develop and test and diffuse their innovations. + +In this chapter, I first show that user innovation is a widely distributed process and so can be usefully drawn together by innovation communities. I next explore the valuable functions such communities can provide. I illustrate with a discussion of free and open source software projects, a very successful form of innovation community in the field of software development. Finally, I point out that innovation communities are by no means restricted to the development of information products such as software, and illustrate with the case of a user innovation community specializing in the development of techniques and equipment used in the sport of kitesurfing. +={ Free software ; + Kitesurfing ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +} + +!_ User Innovation Is Widely Distributed +={ Users : + innovation and +8 ; + Innovation : + distributed process of +8 +} + +When users' needs are heterogeneous and when the information drawn on by innovators is sticky, it is likely that product-development activities will be widely distributed among users, rather than produced by just a few prolific user-innovators. It should also be the case that different users will tend to develop different innovations. As was shown in chapter 5, individual users and user firms tend to develop innovations that serve their particular needs, and that fall within their individual "low-cost innovation niches." For example, a mountain biker who specializes in jumping from high platforms and who is also an orthopedic surgeon will tend to develop innovations that draw on both of these types of information: he might create a seat suspension that reduces shock to bikers' spines upon landing from a jump. Another mountain biker specializing in the same activity but with a different background---say aeronautical engineering---is likely to draw on this different information to come up with a different innovation. From the perspective of Fleming (2001), who has studied innovations as consisting of novel combinations of pre-existing elements, such innovators are using their membership in two distinct communities to combine previously disparate elements. Baldwin and Clark (2003) and Henkel (2004a) explore this type of situation in theoretical terms. +={ Baldwin, C. ; + Clark, K. ; + Fleming, L. ; + Henkel, J. ; + User need ; + Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and +3 ; + Sticky information : + innovation and +3 ; + Users : + low-cost innovation niches of +3 ; + Scientific instruments ; + Sporting equipment : + innovation communities and ; + Mountain biking ; + Local information +1 ; + Users : + innovate-or-buy decisions by +} + +The underlying logic echoes that offered by Eric Raymond regarding "Linus's Law" in software debugging. In software, discovering and repairing subtle code errors or bugs can be very costly (Brooks 1979). However, Raymond argued, the same task can be greatly reduced in cost and also made faster and more effective when it is opened up to a large community of software users that each may have the information needed to identify and fix some bugs. Under these conditions, Raymond says, "given a large enough beta tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. Or, less formally, `given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."' He explains: "More users find more bugs because adding more users adds more ways of stressing the program. . . . Each [user] approaches the task of bug characterization with a slightly different perceptual set and analytical toolkit, a different angle on the problem. So adding more beta-testers . . . increases the probability that someone's toolkit will be matched to the problem in such a way that the bug is shallow to /{that person}/." (1999, pp. 41--44) +={ Brooks, F. ; + Raymond, E. ; + Free software ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and ; + Innovation communities : + and sources of innovation +2 +} + +The analogy to distributed user innovation is, of course, that each user has a different set of innovation-related needs and other assets in place which makes a particular type of innovation low-cost ("shallow") to /{that user}/. The assets of /{some}/ user will then generally be found to be a just-right fit to many innovation development problems. (Note that this argument does not mean that /{all}/ innovations will be cheaply done by users, or even done by users at all. In essence, users will find it cheaper to innovate when manufacturers' economies of scale with respect to product development are more than offset by the greater scope of innovation assets held by the collectivity of individual users.) + +Available data support these expectations. In chapter 2 we saw evidence that users tended to develop very different innovations. To test whether commercially important innovations are developed by just a few users or by many, I turn to studies documenting the functional sources of important innovations later commercialized. As is evident in table 7.1, most of the important innovations attributed to users in these studies were done by /{different}/ users. In other words, user innovation does tend to be widely distributed in a world characterized by users with heterogeneous needs and heterogeneous stocks of sticky information. +={ Innovation : + functional sources of +} + +!_ Table 7.1 +User innovation is widely distributed, with few users developing more than one major innovation. NA: data not available. +={ Riggs, W. ; + Shah, S. ; + von Hippel, E. ; + Scientific instruments ; + Sporting equipment : + innovation communities and +} + +Number of users developing this number of major innovations + +table{~h c7; 30; 10; 10; 10; 10; 10; 20; + +~ +1 +2 +3 +6 +NA +Sample (n) + +Scientific Instruments^{a}^ +28 +0 +1 +0 +1 +32 + +Scientific Instruments^{b}^ +20 +1 +0 +1 +0 +28 + +Process equipment^{c}^ +19 +1 +0 +0 +8 +29 + +Sports equipment^{d}^ +7 +0 +0 +0 +0 +7 + +}table + +a. Source: von Hippel 1988, appendix: GC, TEM, NMR Innovations. \\ +b. Source: Riggs and von Hippel, Esca and AES. \\ +c. Source: von Hippel 1988, appendix: Semiconductor and pultrusion process equipment innovations. \\ +d. Source: Shah 2000, appendix A: skateboarding, snowboarding, and windsurfing innovations. + +!_ Innovation Communities +={ Innovation communities : + and sources of innovation +} + +User-innovators may be generally willing to freely reveal their information. However, as we have seen, they may be widely distributed and each may have only one or a few innovations to offer. The practical value of the "freely revealed innovation commons" these users collectively offer will be increased if their information is somehow made conveniently accessible. This is one of the important functions of "innovation communities." +={ Information commons +3 } + +I define "innovation communities" as meaning nodes consisting of individuals or firms interconnected by information transfer links which may involve face-to-face, electronic, or other communication. These can, but need not, exist within the boundaries of a membership group. They often do, but need not, incorporate the qualities of communities for participants, where "communities" is defined as meaning"networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity" (Wellman et al. 2002, p. 4).~{ When they do not incorporate these qualities, they would be more properly referred to as networks---but communities is the term commonly used, and I follow that practice here. }~ +={ Wellman, B. } + +Innovation communities can have users and/or manufacturers as members and contributors. They can flourish when at least some innovate and voluntarily reveal their innovations, and when others find the information revealed to be of interest. In previous chapters, we saw that these conditions do commonly exist with respect to user-developed innovations: users innovate in many fields, users often freely reveal, and the information revealed is often used by manufacturers to create commercial products---a clear indication many users, too, find this information of interest. + +Innovation communities are often specialized, serving as collection points and repositories for information related to narrow categories of innovations. They may consist only of information repositories or directories in the form of physical or virtual publications. For example, userinnovation.mit.edu is a specialized website where researchers can post articles on their findings and ideas related to innovation by users. Contributors and non-contributors can freely access and browse the site as a convenient way to find such information. + +Innovation communities also can offer additional important functions to participants. Chat rooms and email lists with public postings can be provided so that contributors can exchange ideas and provide mutual assistance. Tools to help users develop, evaluate, and integrate their work can also be provided to community members---and such tools are often developed by community members themselves. + +All the community functionality just mentioned and more is visible in communities that develop free and open source software programs. The emergence of this particular type of innovation community has also done a great deal to bring the general phenomenon to academic and public notice, and so I will describe them in some detail. I first discuss the history and nature of free and open source software itself (the product). Next I outline key characteristics of the free and open source software development projects typically used to create and maintain such software (the community-based development process). +={ Free software +10 ; + Innovation communities : + open source software and +22 ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +22 +} + +!_ Open Source Software +={ Open source software : + innovation and +21 +} + +In the early days of computer programming, commercial "packaged" software was a rarity---if you wanted a particular program for a particular purpose, you typically wrote the code yourself or hired someone to write it for you. Much of the software of the 1960s and the 1970s was developed in academic and corporate laboratories by scientists and engineers. These individuals found it a normal part of their research culture to freely give and exchange software they had written, to modify and build on one another's software, and to freely share their modifications. This communal behavior became a central feature of "hacker culture." (In communities of open source programmers, "hacker" is a positive term that is applied to talented and dedicated programmers.~{ !{hacker}! n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating !{hack value}!. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. . . . 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence /{password hacker}/, /{network hacker}/. The correct term for this sense is !{cracker}! (Raymond 1996). }~ ) +={ Hackers +4 ; + Raymond, E. +} + +In 1969, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a part of the US Department of Defense, established the ARPANET, the first transcontinental high-speed computer network. This network eventually grew to link hundreds of universities, defense contractors, and research laboratories. Later succeeded by the Internet, it also allowed hackers to exchange software code and other information widely, easily, and cheaply---and also enabled them to spread hacker norms of behavior. + +The communal hacker culture was very strongly present among a group of programmers---software hackers---housed at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1960s and the 1970s (Levy 1984). In the 1980s this group received a major jolt when MIT licensed some of the code created by its hacker employees to a commercial firm. This firm, in accordance with normal commercial practice, then promptly restricted access to the "source code"~{ Source code is a sequence of instructions to be executed by a computer to accomplish a program's purpose. Programmers write computer software in the form of source code, and also document that source code with brief written explanations of the purpose and design of each section of their program. To convert a program into a form that can actually operate a computer, source code is translated into machine code using a software tool called a compiler. The compiling process removes program documentation and creates a binary version of the program---a sequence of computer instructions consisting only of strings of ones and zeros. Binary code is very difficult for programmers to read and interpret. Therefore, programmers or firms that wish to prevent others from understanding and modifying their code will release only binary versions of the software. In contrast, programmers or firms that wish to enable others to understand and update and modify their software will provide them with its source code. (Moerke 2000, Simon 1996). }~ of that software, and so prevented non-company personnel---including the MIT hackers who had been instrumental in developing it---from continuing to use it as a platform for further learning and development. +={ Levy, S. ; + MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory +1 ; + Innovation communities : + open source software and ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +} + +Richard Stallman, a brilliant programmer in MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, was especially distressed by the loss of access to communally developed source code. He also was offended by a general trend in the software world toward development of proprietary software packages and the release of software in forms that could not be studied or modified by others. Stallman viewed these practices as morally wrong impingements on the rights of software users to freely learn and create. In 1985, in response, he founded the Free Software Foundation and set about to develop and diffuse a legal mechanism that could preserve free access for all to the software developed by software hackers. Stallman's pioneering idea was to use the existing mechanism of copyright law to this end. Software authors interested in preserving the status of their software as "free" software could use their own copyright to grant licenses on terms that would guarantee a number of rights to all future users. They could do this by simply affixing a standard license to their software that conveyed these rights. The basic license developed by Stallman to implement this seminal idea was the General Public License or GPL (sometimes referred to as copyleft, in a play on the word "copyright"). Basic rights transferred to those possessing a copy of free software include the right to use it at no cost, the right to study its source code, the right to modify it, and the right to distribute modified or unmodified versions to others at no cost. Licenses conveying similar rights were developed by others, and a number of such licenses are currently used in the open source field. Free and open source software licenses do not grant users the full rights associated with free revealing as that term was defined earlier. Those who obtain the software under a license such as the GPL are restricted from certain practices. For example, they cannot incorporate GPL software into proprietary software that they then sell.~{ See www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL }~ Indeed, contributors of code to open source software projects are very concerned with enforcing such restrictions in order to ensure that their code remains accessible to all (O'Mahony 2003). +={ Stallman, R. +2 ; + Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and | licensing of +1 +} + +The idea of free software did not immediately become mainstream, and industry was especially suspicious of it. In 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond agreed that a significant part of the problem resided in Stallman's term "free" software, which might understandably have an ominous ring to the ears of businesspeople. Accordingly, they, along with other prominent hackers, founded the open source software movement (Perens 1999). Open source software uses the licensing practices pioneered by the free software movement. It differs from that movement primarily on philosophical grounds, preferring to emphasize the practical benefits of its licensing practices over issues regarding the moral importance of granting users the freedoms offered by both free and open source software. The term "open source" is now generally used by both practitioners and scholars to refer to free or open source software, and that is the term I use in this book. +={ Perens, B. ; + Raymond, E. +} + +Open source software has emerged as a major cultural and economic phenomenon. The number of open source software projects has been growing rapidly. In mid 2004, a single major infrastructure provider and repository for open source software projects, Sourceforge.net,~{ http://www.sourceforge.net }~ hosted 83,000 projects and had more than 870,000 registered users. A significant amount of software developed by commercial firms is also being released under open source licenses. + +!_ Open Source Software Development Projects + +Software can be termed "open source" independent of how or by whom it has been developed: the term denotes only the type of license under which it is made available. However, the fact that open source software is freely accessible to all has created some typical open source software development practices that differ greatly from commercial software development models---and that look very much like the "hacker culture" behaviors described above. +={ Hackers +1 } + +Because commercial software vendors typically wish to sell the code they develop, they sharply restrict access to the source code of their software products to firm employees and contractors. The consequence of this restriction is that only insiders have the information required to modify and improve that proprietary code further (Meyer and Lopez 1995; Young, Smith, and Grimm 1996; Conner and Prahalad 1996). In sharp contrast, all are offered free access to the source code of open source software if that code is distributed by its authors. In early hacker days, this freedom to learn and use and modify software was exercised by informal sharing and co-development of code---often by the physical sharing and exchange of computer tapes and disks on which the code was recorded. In current Internet days, rapid technological advances in computer hardware and software and networking technologies have made it much easier to create and sustain a communal development style on ever-larger scales. Also, implementing new projects is becoming progressively easier as effective project design becomes better understood, and as prepackaged infrastructural support for such projects becomes available on the Web. +={ Conner, K. ; + Grimm, C. ; + Meyer, M. ; + Lopez, L. ; + Prahalad, C. ; + Smith, G. ; + Young, G. +} + +Today, an open source software development project is typically initiated by an individual or a small group seeking a solution to an individual's or a firm's need. Raymond (1999, p. 32) suggests that "every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch" and that "too often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love. But not in the (open source) world. . . ." A project's initiators also generally become the project's "owners" or "maintainers" who take on responsibility for project management.~{ "The owner(s) [or `maintainers'] of an open source software project are those who have the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to redistribute modified versions. . . . According to standard open source licenses, all parties are equal in the evolutionary game. But in practice there is a very well-recognized distinction between `official' patches [changes to the software], approved and integrated into the evolving software by the publicly recognized maintainers, and `rogue' patches by third parties. Rogue patches are unusual and generally not trusted." (Raymond 1999, p. 89) }~ Early on, this individual or group generally develops a first, rough version of the code that outlines the functionality envisioned. The source code for this initial version is then made freely available to all via downloading from an Internet website established by the project. The project founders also set up infrastructure for the project that those interested in using or further developing the code can use to seek help, provide information or provide new open source code for others to discuss and test. In the case of projects that are successful in attracting interest, others do download and use and "play with" the code---and some of these do go on to create new and modified code. Most then post what they have done on the project website for use and critique by any who are interested. New and modified code that is deemed to be of sufficient quality and of general interest by the project maintainers is then added to the authorized version of the code. In many projects the privilege of adding to the authorized code is restricted to only a few trusted developers. These few then serve as gatekeepers for code written by contributors who do not have such access (von Krogh and Spaeth 2002). +={ Spaeth, S. ; + von Krogh, G. ; + Raymond, E. +} + +Critical tools and infrastructure available to open source software project participants includes email lists for specialized purposes that are open to all. Thus, there is a list where code users can report software failures ("bugs") that they encounter during field use of the software. There is also a list where those developing the code can share ideas about what would be good next steps for the project, good features to add, etc. All of these lists are open to all and are also publicly archived, so anyone can go back and learn what opinions were and are on a particular topic. Also, programmers contributing to open source software projects tend to have essential tools, such as specific software languages, in common. These are generally not specific to a single project, but are available on the web. Basic toolkits held in common by all contributors tends to greatly ease interactions. Also, open source software projects have version-control software that allows contributors to insert new code contributions into the existing project code base and test them to see if the new code causes malfunctions in existing code. If so, the tool allows easy reversion to the status quo ante. This makes "try it and see" testing much more practical, because much less is at risk if a new contribution inadvertently breaks the code. Toolkits used in open source projects have been evolved through practice and are steadily being improved by user-innovators. Individual projects can now start up using standard infrastructure sets offered by sites such as Sourceforge.net. +={ Toolkits : + open source software and +} + +Two brief case histories will help to further convey the flavor of open source software development. + +!_ Apache Web Server Software +={ Apache web server software +3 ; + Innovation communities : + Apache web server software and +3 +} + +Apache web server software is used on web server computers that host web pages and provide appropriate content as requested by Internet browsers. Such 7 computers are a key element of the Internet-based World Wide Web infrastructure. + +The web server software that evolved into Apache was developed by University of Illinois undergraduate Rob McCool for, and while working at, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The source code as developed and periodically modified by McCool was posted on the web so that users at other sites could download it, use it, modify it, and develop it further. When McCool departed NCSA in mid 1994, a small group of webmasters who had adopted his web server software for their own sites decided to take on the task of continued development. A core group of eight users gathered all documentation and bug fixes and issued a consolidated patch. This "patchy" web server software evolved over time into Apache. Extensive user feedback and modification yielded Apache 1.0, released on December 1, 1995. +={ McCool, Rob } + +In 4 years, after many modifications and improvements contributed by many users, Apache became the most popular web server software on the Internet, garnering many industry awards for excellence. Despite strong competition from commercial software developers such as Microsoft and Netscape, it is currently used by over 60 percent of the world's millions of websites. Modification and updating of Apache by users and others continues, with the release of new versions being coordinated by a central group of 22 volunteers. +={ Microsoft } + +!_ Fetchmail---An Internet Email Utility Program +={ Fetchmail +4 ; + Innovation communities : + fetchmail and +4 +} + +Fetchmail is an Internet email utility program that "fetches" email from central servers to a local computer. The open source project to develop, maintain, and improve this program was led by Eric Raymond (1999). +={ Raymond, E. +3 } + +Raymond first began to puzzle about the email delivery problem in 1993 because he was personally dissatisfied with then-existing solutions. "What I wanted," Raymond recalled (1999, p. 31), "was for my mail to be delivered on snark, my home system, so that I would be notified when it arrived and could handle it using all my local tools." Raymond decided to try and develop a better solution. He began by searching databases in the open source world for an existing, well-coded utility that he could use as a development base. He knew it would be efficient to build on others' related work if possible, and in the world of open source software (then generally called free software) this practice is understood and valued. Raymond explored several candidate open source programs, and settled on one in small-scale use called "popclient." He developed a number of improvements to the program and proposed them to the then maintainer of popclient. It turned out that this individual had lost interest in working further on the program, and so his response to Raymond's suggestions was to offer his role to Raymond so that he could evolve the popclient further as he chose. + +Raymond accepted the role of popclient's maintainer, and over the next months he improved the program significantly in conjunction with advice and suggestions from other users. He carefully cultivated his more active beta list of popclient users by regularly communicating with them via messages posted on an public electronic bulletin board set up for that purpose. Many responded by volunteering information on bugs they had found and perhaps fixed, and by offering improvements they had developed for their own use. The quality of these suggestions was often high because "contributions are received not from a random sample, but from people who are interested enough to use the software, learn about how it works, attempt to find solutions to the problems they encounter, and actually produce an apparently reasonable fix. Anyone who passes all these filters is highly likely to have something useful to contribute." (ibid., p. 42) + +Eventually, Raymond arrived at an innovative design that he knew worked well because he and his beta list of co-developers had used it, tested it and improved it every day. Popclient (now renamed fetchmail) became standard software used by millions users. Raymond continues to lead the group of volunteers that maintain and improve the software as new user needs and conditions dictate. + +!_ Development of Physical Products by Innovation Communities +={ Innovation communities : + physical products and +14 +} + +User innovation communities are by no means restricted to the development of information products like software. They also are active in the development of physical products, and in very similar ways. Just as in the case of communities devoted to information product, communities devoted to physical products can range from simple information exchange sites to sites well furnished with tools and infrastructure. Within sports, Franke and Shah's study illustrates relatively simple community infrastructure. Thus, the boardercross community they studied consisted of semi-professional athletes from all over the world who meet in up to 10 competitions a year in Europe, North America, and Japan. Franke and Shah report that community members knew one another well, and spent a considerable amount of time together. They also assisted one another in developing and modifying equipment for their sport. However, the community had no specialized sets of tools to support joint innovation development. +={ Franke, N. ; + Shah, S. ; + Innovation communities : + sporting equipment and +2 +} + +More complex communities devoted to the development of physical products often look similar to open source software development communities in terms of tools and infrastructure. As an example, consider the recent formation of a community dedicated to the development and diffusion of information regarding novel kitesurfing equipment. Kitesurfing is a water sport in which the user stands on a special board, somewhat like a surfboard, and is pulled along by holding onto a large, steerable kite. Equipment and technique have evolved to the point that kites can be guided both with and against the wind by a skilled kitesurfer, and can lift rider and board many meters into the air for tens of seconds at a time. +={ Innovation communities : + kitesurfing and +1 ; + Kitesurfing +1 +} + +Designing kites for kitesurfing is a sophisticated undertaking, involving low-speed aerodynamical considerations that are not yet well understood. Early kites for kitesurfing were developed and built by user-enthusiasts who were inventing both kitesurfing techniques and kitesurfing equipment interdependently. In about 2001, Saul Griffith, an MIT PhD student with a long-time interest in kitesurfing and kite development, decided that kite-surfing would benefit from better online community interaction. Accordingly, he created a site for the worldwide community of user-innovators in kitesurfing (www.zeroprestige.com). Griffith began by posting patterns for kites he had designed on the site and added helpful hints and tools for kite construction and use. Others were invited to download this information for free and to contribute their own if they wished. Soon other innovators started to post their own kite designs, improved construction advice for novices, and sophisticated design tools such as aerodynamics modeling software and rapid prototyping software. Some kitesurfers contributing innovations to the site had top-level technical skills; at least one was a skilled aerodynamicist employed by an aerospace firm. +={ Griffith, S. ; + Zeroprestige.com +} + +Note that physical products are information products during the design stage. In earlier days, information about an evolving design was encoded on large sheets of paper, called blueprints, that could be copied and shared. The information on blueprints could be understood and assessed by fellow designers, and could also be used by machinists to create the actual physical products represented. Today, designs for new products are commonly encoded in computer-aided design (CAD) files. These files can be created and seen as two-dimensional and three-dimensional renderings by designers. The designs they contain can also be subjected to automated analysis by various engineering tools to determine, for example, whether they can stand up to stresses to which they will be subjected. CAD files can then be downloaded to computer-controlled fabrication machinery that will actually build the component parts of the design. + +The example of the kitesurfing group's methods of sharing design information illustrates the close relationship between information and physical products. Initially, users in the group exchanged design ideas by means of simple sketches transferred over the Internet. Then group members learned that computerized cutters used by sail lofts to cut sails from large pieces of cloth are suited to cutting cloth for surfing kites. They also learned that sail lofts were interested in their business. Accordingly, innovation group members began to exchange designs in the form of CAD files compatible with sail lofts' cutting equipment. When a user was satisfied with a design, he would transmit the CAD file to a local sail loft for cutting. The pieces were then sewn together by the user or sent to a sewing facility for assembly. The total time required to convert an information product into a physical one was less than a week, and the total cost of a finished kite made in this way was a few hundred dollars---much less than the price of a commercial kite. +={ Innovation communities : + kitesurfing and ; + Kitesurfing +} + +!_ User-to-User Assistance +={ Innovation communities : + user-to-user assistance and +9 ; + Users : + innovation communities and +9 +} + +Clearly, user innovation communities can offer sophisticated support to individual innovators in the form of tools. Users in these innovation communities also tend to behave in a collaborative manner. That is, users not only distribute and evaluate completed innovations; they also volunteer other important services, such as assisting one another in developing and applying innovations. + +Franke and Shah (2003) studied the frequency with which users in four sporting communities assisted one another with innovations, and found that such assistance was very common (table 7.2). They also found that those who assisted were significantly more likely to be innovators themselves (table 7.3). The level of satisfaction reported by those assisted was very high. Seventy-nine percent agreed strongly with the statement "If I had a similar problem I would ask the same people again." Jeppesen (2005) similarly found extensive user-to-user help being volunteered in the field of computer gaming. +={ Franke, N. ; + Jeppesen, L. ; + Shah, S. ; + Innovation communities : + sporting equipment and ; + Sporting equipment : + innovation communities and +7 | user-to-user assistance and +7 +} + +!_ Table 7.2 +Number of people from whom innovators received assistance. +={ Franke, N. ; + Shah, S. +} + +table{~h c3; 34; 33; 33; + +Number of people +Number of cases +Percentage + +0 +0 +0 + +1 +3 +6 + +2 +14 +26 + +3--5 +25 +47 + +6--10 +8 +15 + +> 10 +3 +6 + +Total +53 +100 + +}table + +Source: Franke and Shah 2003, table 4. + +!_ Table 7.3 +Innovators tended to be the ones assisting others with their innovations (p < 0.0001). +={ Franke, N. ; + Shah, S. +} + +table{~h c4; 40; 20; 20; 20; + +~ +Innovators +Non-innovators +Total + +Gave assistance +28 +13 +41 + +Did not give assistance +32 +115 +147 + +Total +60 +128 +~ + +}table + +Source: Franke and Shah 2003, table 7. + +Such helping activity is clearly important to the value contributed by innovation communities to community participants. Why people might voluntarily offer assistance is a subject of analysis. The answers are not fully in, but the mysteries lessen as the research progresses. An answer that appears to be emerging is that there are private benefits to assistance providers, just as there are for those who freely reveal innovations (Lakhani and von Hippel 2003). In other words, provision of free assistance may be explicable in terms of the private-collective model of innovation-related incentives discussed earlier. +={ Lakhani, K. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + in information communities | private-collective model for ; + Private-collective model ; + Social welfare : + private-collective model and +} + +1~ 8 Adapting Policy to User Innovation +={ Government policy +44 : + user innovation and +19 ; + Innovation : + and government policy +44 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +44 ; + Users : + government policy and +44 | innovation and +44 +} + +Government policy makers generally wish to encourage activities that increase social welfare, and to discourage activities that reduce it. Therefore, it is important to ask about the social welfare effects of innovation by users. Henkel and von Hippel (2005) explored this matter and concluded that social welfare is likely to be higher in a world in which both users and manufacturers innovate than in a world in which only manufacturers innovate. +={ Henkel, J. ; + Government policy : + manufacturer innovation and +1 ; + Manufacturers : + government policy and +1 ; + Government policy : + social welfare and +21 ; + Social welfare : + government policy +4 ; + Users : + social welfare and +4 +} + +In this chapter, I first explain that innovation by users complements manufacturer innovation and can also be a source of success-enhancing new product ideas for manufacturers. Next, I note that innovation by users does not exhibit several welfare-reducing effects associated with innovation by manufacturers. Finally, I evaluate the effects of public policies on user innovation, and suggest modifications to those that---typically unintentionally---discriminate against innovation by users. + +!_ Social Welfare Effects of User Innovation + +Social welfare functions are used in welfare economics to provide a measure of the material welfare of society, using economic variables as inputs. A social welfare function can be designed to express many social goals, ranging from population life expectancies to income distributions. Much of the literature on product diversity, innovation, and social welfare evaluates the impact of economic phenomena and policy on social welfare from the perspective of total income of a society without regard to how that income is distributed. We will take that viewpoint here. + +!_ User Innovation Improves Manufacturers' Success Rates +={ Government policy : + manufacturer innovation and +5 ; + Manufacturers : + government policy and +5 +} + +It is striking that most new products developed and introduced to the market by manufacturers are commercial failures. Mansfield and Wagner (1975) found the overall probability of success for new industrial products to be only 27 percent. Elrod and Kelman (1987) found an overall probability of success of 26 percent for consumer products. Balachandra and Friar (1997), Poolton and Barclay (1998), and Redmond (1995) found similarly high failure rates in new products commercialized. Although there clearly is some recycling of knowledge from failed projects to successful ones, much of the investment in product development is highly specific. This high failure rate therefore represents a huge inefficiency in the conversion of R&D investment to useful output, and a corresponding reduction in social welfare. +={ Balachandra, R ; + Barclay, I. ; + Elrod, T. ; + Kelman, A. ; + Friar, J. ; + Mansfield, E. +1 ; + Poolton, J. ; + Redmond, W. ; + Wagner, S. +1 +} + +% Robertson, A., 108 + +Research indicates that the major reason for the commercial failure of manufacturer-developed products is poor understanding of users' needs by manufacturer-innovators. The landmark SAPPHO study showed this in a very clear and convincing way. This study was based on a sample of 31 product pairs. Members of each pair were selected to address the same function and market. (For example, one pair consisted of two "roundness meters," each developed by a separate company.) One member of each pair was a commercial success (which showed that there was a market for the product type); the other was a commercial failure. The development process for each successful and failing product was then studied in detail. The primary factor found to distinguish success from failure was that a deeper understanding of the market and the need was associated with successful projects (Achilladelis et al. 1971; Rothwell et al. 1974). A study by Mansfield and Wagner (1975) came to the same conclusion. More recent studies of information stickiness and the resulting asymmetries of information held by users and manufacturers, discussed in chapter 3, support the reasonableness of this general finding. Users are the generators of information regarding their needs. The decline in accuracy and completeness of need information after transfer from user to manufacturer is likely to be substantial because important elements of this information are likely to be sticky (von Hippel 1994; Ogawa 1998). +={ Achilladelis, B. ; + Ogawa, S. ; + Rothwell, R. ; + Project SAPPHO ; + SAPPHO study ; + Sticky information : + innovation and +} + +Innovations developed by users can improve manufacturers' information on users' needs and so improve their new product introduction success rates. Recall from previous chapters that innovation by users is concentrated among lead users. These lead users tend, as we have seen, to develop functionally novel products and product modifications addressing their own needs at the leading edge of markets where potential sales are both small and uncertain. Manufacturers, in contrast, have poorer information on users' needs and use contexts, and will prefer to manufacture innovations for larger, more certain markets. In the short term, therefore, user innovations will tend to /{complement}/ rather than substitute for products developed by manufacturers. In the longer term, the market as a whole catches up to the needs that motivated the lead user developments, and manufacturers will begin to find production of similar innovations to be commercially attractive. At that point, innovations by lead users can provide very useful information to manufacturers that they would not otherwise have. + +As lead users develop and test their solutions in their own use environments, they learn more about the real nature of their needs. They then often freely reveal information about their innovations. Other users then may adopt the innovations, comment on them, modify and improve them, and freely reveal what they have done in turn. All of this freely revealed activity by lead users offers manufacturers a great deal of useful information about both needs embodied in solutions and about markets. Given access to a user-developed prototype, manufacturers no longer need to understand users' needs very accurately and richly. Instead they have the much easier task of replicating the function of user prototypes that users have already demonstrated are responsive to their needs. For example, a manufacturer seeking to commercialize a new type of surgical equipment and coming upon prototype equipment developed by surgeons need not understand precisely why the innovators want this product or even precisely how it is used; the manufacturer need only understand that many surgeons appear willing to pay for it and then reproduce the important features of the user-developed prototypes in a commercial product. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + lead users and +35 | users and ; + Surgical equipment +} + +Observation of innovation by lead users and adoption by follow-on users also can give manufacturers a better understanding of the size of the potential market. Projections of product sales have been shown to be much more accurate when they are based on actual customer behavior than when they are based on potential buyers' pre-use expectations. Monitoring of field use of user-built prototypes and of their adoption by other users can give manufacturers rich data on precisely these matters and so should improve manufacturer's commercial success. In net, user innovation helps to reduce information asymmetries between users and manufacturers and so increases the efficiency of the innovation process. +={ Information asymmetries ; + Users : + information asymmetries of +} + +!_ User Innovation and Provisioning Biases + +The economic literature on the impact of innovation on social welfare generally seeks to understand effects that might induce society to create too many product variations (overprovisioning) or too few (underprovisioning) from the viewpoint of net social economic income (Chamberlin 1950). Greater variety of products available for purchase is assumed to be desirable, in that it enables consumers to get more precisely what they want and/or to own a more diverse array of products. However, increased product diversity comes at a cost: smaller quantities of each product will be produced on average. This in turn means that development-related and production-related economies of scale are likely to be less. The basic tradeoff between variety and cost is what creates the possibility of overprovisioning or underprovisioning product variety. Innovations such as flexible manufacturing may reduce fixed costs associated with increased diversity and so shift the optimal degree of diversity upward. Nonetheless, the conflict still persists. +={ Chamberlin, E. ; + Social welfare : + innovation and +11 +} + +Henkel and I studied the welfare impact of adding users as a source of innovation to existing analyses of product diversity, innovation, and social welfare. Existing models uniformly contained the assumption that new products and services were supplied to the economy by manufacturers only. We found that the addition of innovation by users to these analyses largely avoids the welfare-reducing biases that had been identified. For example, consider "business stealing" (Spence 1976). This term refers to the fact that commercial manufacturers benefit by diverting business from their competitors. Since they do not take this negative externality into account, their private gain from introducing new products exceeds society's total gain, tilting the balance toward overprovision of variety. In contrast, a freely revealed user innovation may also reduce incumbents' business, but not to the innovator's benefit. Hence, innovation incentives are not socially excessive. +={ Henkel, J. ; + Spence, M. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + intellectual property rights and +11 | social welfare and +5 ; + Government policy : + free revealing and +10 ; + Government policy : + provisioning biases and ; + Intellectual property rights : + free revealing and +11 ; + Users : + social welfare and +5 +} + +Freely revealed innovations by users are also likely to reduce deadweight loss caused by pricing of products above their marginal costs. (Deadweight loss is a reduction in social welfare that occurs when goods are sold at a price above their marginal cost of production.) When users make information about their innovations available for free, and if the marginal cost of revealing that information is zero, an imitator only has to bear the cost of adoption. This is statically efficient. The availability of free user innovations can also induce sellers of competing commercial offerings to reduce their prices, thus indirectly leading to another reduction in dead-weight loss. + +Reducing prices toward marginal costs can also reduce incentives to over-provision variety (Tirole 1988). +={ Tirole, J. } + +Henkel and I also explored a few special situations where social welfare might be /{reduced}/ by the availability of freely revealed user innovations. One of these was the effect of reduced pricing power on manufacturers that create "platform" products. Often, a manufacturer of such a product will want to sell the platform---a razor, an ink-jet printer, a video-game player---at a low margin or a loss, and then price necessary add-ons (razor blades, ink cartridges, video games) at a much higher margin. If the possibility of freely revealed add-ons developed by users makes development of a platform unprofitable for a manufacturer, social welfare can thereby be reduced. However, it is only the razor-vs.-blade pricing scheme that may become unprofitable. Indeed, if the manufacturer makes positive margins on the platform, then the availability of user-developed add-ons can have a positive effect: it can increase the value of the platform to users, and so allow manufacturers to charge higher margins on it and/or sell more units. Jeppesen (2004) finds that this is in fact the outcome when users introduce free game modifications (called mods) operating on proprietary game software platform products (called engines) sold by game manufacturers. Even though the game manufacturers also sell mods commercially that compete with free user mods, many provide active support for the development and diffusion of user mods built on their proprietary game engines, because they find that the net result is increased sales and profits. +={ Henkel, J. ; + Jeppesen, L. ; + Government policy : + intellectual property rights and | trade secrets and ; + Intellectual property rights : + trade secrets and +} + +!_ Public Policy Choices + +If innovation by users is welfare enhancing and is also significant in amount and value, then it makes sense to consider the effects of public policy on user innovation. An important first step would be to collect better data. Currently, much innovation by users---which may in aggregate turn out to be a very large fraction of total economic investment in innovation--- goes uncounted or undercounted. Thus, innovation effort that is volunteered by users, as is the case with many contributions to open source software, is currently not recorded by governmental statistical offices. This is also the case for user innovation that is integrated with product and service production. For example, much process innovation by manufacturers occurs on the factory floor as they produce goods and simultaneously learn how to improve their production processes. Similarly, many important innovations developed by surgeons are woven into learning by doing as they deliver services to patients. +={ Open source software : + innovation communities and +} + +Next, it will be important to review innovation-related public policies to identify and correct biases with respect to sources of innovation. On a level playing field, users will become a steadily more important source of innovation, and will increasingly substitute for or complement manufacturers' innovation-related activities. Transitions required of policy making to support this ongoing evolution are important but far from painless. To illustrate, we next review issues related to the protection intellectual property, related to policies restricting product modifications, related to source-biased subsidies for R&D, and related to control over innovation diffusion channels. +={ Government policy : + provisioning biases and | intellectual property rights and +16 | patents and +8 ; + Intellectual property rights : + patents and +8 +} + +!_ Intellectual Property + +Earlier, when we explored why users might freely reveal their innovations, we concluded that it was often their best /{practical}/ choice in view of how intellectual property law actually functions (or, often, does not function) to protect innovations today. For example, recall from chapter 6 that most innovators do not judge patents to be very effective, and that the availability of patent grant protection does not appear to increase innovation investments in most fields. Recall also that patent protection is costly to obtain, and thus of little value to developers of minor innovations---with most innovations being minor. We also saw that in practice it was often difficult for innovators to protect their innovations via trade secrecy: it is hard to keep a secret when many others know similar things, and when some of these information holders will lose little or nothing from freely revealing what they know. +={ Intellectual property rights : + trade secrets and ; + Government policy : + trade secrets and ; + Intellectual property rights : + trade secrets and +} + +These findings show that the characteristics of present-day intellectual property regimes as actually experienced by innovators are far from the expectations of theorists and policy makers. The fundamental reason that societies elect to grant intellectual property rights to innovators is to increase private investment in innovation. At the same time, economists have long known that there will be social welfare losses associated with these grants: owners of intellectual property will generally restrict the use of their legally protected information in order to increase private profits. In other words, intellectual property rights are thought to be good for innovation and bad for competition. The consensus view has long been that the good outweighs the bad, but Foray (2004) explains that this consensus is now breaking down. Some---not all---are beginning to think that intellectual property rights are bad for innovation too in many cases. +={ oray, D. ; + Government policy : + intellectual commons and +13 +} + +The need to grant private intellectual property rights to achieve socially desirable levels of innovation is being questioned in the light of apparent counterexamples. Thus, as we saw earlier, open source software communities do not allow contributing innovators to use their intellectual property rights to control the use of their code. Instead, contributors use their authors' copyright to assign their code to a common pool to which all--- contributors and non-contributors alike---are granted equal access. Despite this regime, innovation seems to be flourishing. Why? As we saw in our earlier discussions of why innovators might freely reveal their innovations, researchers now understand that significant private rewards to innovation can exist independent of intellectual property rights grants. As a general principle, intellectual property rights grants should not be offered if and when developers would seek protection but would innovate without it. +={ Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +1 ; + Innovation : + open source software and +1 +} + +The debate rages. Gallini and Scotchmer (2002) assert that "intellectual property is the foundation of the modern information economy" and that "it fuels the software, lifesciences and computer industries, and pervades most other products we consume." They also conclude that the positive or negative effect of intellectual property rights on innovation depends centrally on "the ease with which innovators can enter into agreements for rearranging and exercising those rights." This is precisely the rub from the point of view of those who urge that present intellectual property regimes be reconsidered: it is becoming increasingly clear that in practice rearranging and exercising intellectual property rights is often difficult rather than easy. It is also becoming clear that the protections afforded by existing intellectual property law can be strategically deployed to achieve private advantage at the expense of general innovative progress (Foray 2004). +={ oray, D. ; + Gallini, N. ; + Scotchmer, S. +} + +Consider an effect first pointed out by Merges and Nelson (1990) and further explored as the "tragedy of the anticommons" by Heller (1998) and Heller and Eisenberg (1998). A resource such as innovation-related information is prone to underuse---a tragedy of the anticommons---when multiple owners each have a right to exclude others and no one has an effective privilege of use. The nature of the patent grant can lead to precisely this type of situation. Patent law is so arranged that an owner of a patent is not granted the right to practice its invention---it is only granted the right to exclude others from practicing it. For example, suppose you invent and patent the chair. I then follow by inventing and patenting the rocking chair---implemented by building rockers onto a chair covered by your patent. In this situation I cannot manufacture a rocking chair without getting a license from you for the use of your chair patent, and you cannot build rocking chairs either without a license to my rocker patent. If we cannot agree on licensing terms, no one will have the right to build rocking chairs. +={ Eisenberg, R. +1 ; + Heller, M. +1 ; + Merges, Robert ; + Nelson, R. ; + Government policy : + user innovation and +19 +} + +In theory and in a world of costless transactions, people could avoid tragedies of the anticommons by licensing or trading their intellectual property rights. In practice the situation can be very different. Heller and Eisenberg point specifically to the field of biomedical research, and argue that conditions for anticommons effects do exist there. In that field, patents are routinely allowed on small but important elements of larger research problems, and upstream research is increasingly likely to be private. "Each upstream patent," Heller and Eisenberg note, "allows its owner to set up another tollbooth on the road to product development, adding to the cost and slowing the pace of downstream biomedical innovation." +={ Transaction costs } + +A second type of strategic behavior based on patent rights involves investing in large portfolios of patents to create "patent thickets"---dense networks of patent claims across a wide field (Merges and Nelson 1990; Hall and Ham Ziedonis 2001; Shapiro 2001; Bessen 2003). Patent thickets create plausible grounds for patent infringement suits across a wide field. Owners of patent thickets can use the threat of such suits to discourage others from investing research dollars in areas of technical advance relevant to their products. Note that this use of patents is precisely opposite to policy mak' intentions to stimulate innovation by providing ways for innovators to assert intellectual property rights. Indeed, Bessen and Hunt (2004) have found in the field of software that, on average, as firm's investments in patent protection go up, their investments in research and development actually go down. If this relationship proves causal, there is a reasonable explanation from the viewpoint of private profit: corporations that can use a patent thicket to deter others' research in a field might well decide that there is less need to do research of their own. +={ Bessen, J. ; + Hall, B. ; + Hunt, R. ; + Merges, Robert ; + Nelson, R. ; + Shapiro, C. ; + Ziedonis, R. ; + Government policy : + patent thickets and ; + Intellectual property rights : + patent thickets and +} + +Similar innovation-retarding strategies can be applied by owners of large collections of copyrighted work in the movie, publishing, and software fields. Copyright owners can prevent others from building new works on characters (e.g. Mickey Mouse) that are already familiar to customers. The result is that owners of large portfolios of copyrighted work can gain an advantage over those with no or small portfolios in the creation of derivative works. Indeed, Benkler (2002) argues that institutional changes strengthening intellectual property protection tend to foster concentration of information production in general. Lessig (2001) and Boldrin and Levine (2002) arrive at a similarly negative valuation of overly strong and lengthy copyright protection. +={ Benkler, Y. ; + Boldrin, M. ; + Levine, D. ; + Lessig, L. ; + Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and ; + Government policy : + copyrights and +} + +These types of innovation-discouraging effects can affect innovation by users especially strongly. The distributed innovation system we have documented consists of users each of whom might have only a few innovations and a small amount of intellectual property. Such innovators are clearly hurt differentially by a system that gives advantage to the owners of large shares of the intellectual property in a field. + +What can be done? A solution approach open to policy makers is to change intellectual property law so as to level the playing field. But owners of large amounts of intellectual property protected under the present system are often politically powerful, so this type of solution will be difficult to achieve. + +Fortunately, an alternative solution approach may be available to innovators themselves. Suppose that many elect to contribute the intellectual property they individually develop to a commons in a particular field. If the commons then grows to contain reasonable substitutes for much of the proprietary intellectual property relevant to the field, the relative advantage accruing to large holders of this information will diminish and perhaps even disappear. At the same time and for the same reason, the barriers that privately held stocks of intellectual property currently may raise to further intellectual advance will also diminish. Lessig supports this possibility with his creation and publication of standard "Creative Commons" licenses on the website creativecommons.org. Authors interested in contributing their work to the commons, perhaps with some restrictions, can easily find and adopt an appropriate license at that site. +={ Lessig, L. ; + Intellectual commons +13 ; + Intellectual property rights : + intellectual commons and +13 ; + Open source software : + intellectual commons and +13 | intellectual property rights and +13 ; + Intellectual property rights : + licensing of +} + +Reaching agreement on conditions for the formation of an intellectual commons can be difficult. Maurer (2005) makes this clear in his cautionary tale of the struggle and eventual failure to create a commons for data on human mutations. However, success is possible. For example, an extensive intellectual commons of software code is contained and maintained in the many open source software projects that now exist. +={ Maurer, S. ; + Innovation communities +2 +} + +Interesting examples also exist regarding on the impact a commons can have on the value of intellectual property innovators seek to hold apart from it. Weber (2004) recounts the following anecdote: In 1988, Linux developers were building new graphical interfaces for their open source software. One of the most promising of these, KDE, was offered under the General Public License. However, Matthias Ettrich, its developer, had built KDE using a proprietary graphical library called Qt. He felt at the time that this could be an acceptable solution because Qt was of good quality and Troll Tech, owner of Qt, licensed Qt at no charge under some circumstances. However, Troll Tech did require a developer's fee be paid under other circumstances, and some Linux developers were concerned about having code not licensed under the GPL as part of their code. They tried to convince Troll Tech to change the Qt license so that it would be under the GPL when used in free software. But Troll Tech, as was fully within its rights, refused to do this. Linux developers then, as was fully within their rights, began to develop open source alternatives to Qt that could be licensed under the GPL. As those projects moved toward success, Troll Tech recognized that Qt might be surpassed and effectively shut out of the Linux market. In 2000 the company therefore decided to license Qt under the GPL. +={ Ettrich, M. ; + Linux ; + Weber, S. ; + Intellectual property rights : + licensing of +1 ; +} + +Similar actions can keep conditions for free access to materials held within a commons from degrading and being lost over time. Chris Hanson, a Principal Research Scientist at MIT, illustrates this with an anecdote regarding an open source software component called ipfilter. The author of ipfilter attempted to "lock" the program by changing licensing terms of his program to disallow the distribution of modified versions. His reasoning was that Ipfilter, a network-security filter, must be as bug-free as possible, and that this could best be ensured by his controlling access. His actions ignited a flame war in which the author was generally argued to be selfish and overreaching. His program, then an essential piece of BSD operating systems, was replaced by newly written code in some systems within the year. The author, Hanson notes, has since changed his licensing terms back to a standard BSD-style (unrestricted) license. +={ Hanson, C. } + +We will learn over time whether and how widely the practice of creating and defending intellectual commons diffuses across fields. There obviously can be cases where it will continue to make sense for innovators, and for society as well, to protect innovations as private intellectual property. However, it is likely that many user innovations are kept private not so much out of rational motives as because of a general, not-thought-through attitude that "we do not give away our intellectual property," or because the administrative cost of revealing is assumed to be higher than the benefits. Firms and society can benefit by rethinking the benefits of free revealing and (re)developing policies regarding what is best kept private and what is best freely revealed. +={ Government policy : + social welfare and +9 | trade secrets and +3 ; + Intellectual property rights : + trade secrets and +3 +} + +!_ Constraints on Product Modification +={ Custom products : + manufacturers and +2 ; + Government policy : + manufacturer innovation and +8 ; + Manufacturers : + government policy and +8 +} + +Users often develop prototypes of new products by buying existing commercial products and modifying them. Current efforts by manufacturers to build technologies into the products they sell that restrict the way these products are used can undercut users' traditional freedom to modify what they purchase. This in turn can raise the costs of innovation development by users and so lessen the amount of user innovation that is done. For example, makers of ink-jet printers often follow a razor-and-blade strategy, selling printers at low margins and the ink cartridges used in them at high margins. To preserve this strategy, printer manufacturers want to prevent users from refilling ink cartridges with low-cost ink and using them again. Accordingly, they may add technical modifications to their cartridges to prevent them from functioning if users have refilled them. This manufacturer strategy can potentially cut off both refilling by the economically minded and modifications by user-innovators that might involve refilling (Varian 2002). Some users, for example, have refilled cartridges with special inks not sold by printer manufacturers in order to adapt ink-jet printing to the printing of very high-quality photographs. Others have refilled cartridges with food colorings instead of inks in order to develop techniques for printing images on cakes. Each of these applications might have been retarded or prevented by technical measures against cartridge refilling. +={ Varian, H. } + +The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a legislative initiative intended to prevent product copying, may negatively affect users' abilities to change and improve the products they own. Specifically, the DMCA makes it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software. It also outlaws the manufacture, sale, or distribution of code-cracking devices used to illegally copy software. Unfortunately, code cracking is also a needed step for modification of commercial software products by user-innovators. Policy makers should be aware of "collateral damage" that may be inflicted on user innovation by legislation aimed at other targets, as is likely in this case. +={ Digital Millennium Copyright Act } + +!_ Control over Distribution Channels +={ Government policy : + distribution channels and +1 +} + +Users that innovate and wish to freely diffuse innovation-related information are able to do so cheaply in large part because of steady advances in Internet distribution capabilities. Controls placed on such infrastructural factors can threaten and maybe even totally disable distributed innovation systems such as the user innovation systems documented in this book. For example, information products developed by users are commonly distributed over the Internet by peer-to-peer sharing networks. A firm that owns both a channel and content (e.g., a cable network) may have a strong incentive to shut out or discriminate against content developed by users or others in favor of its own content. The transition from the chaotic, fertile early days of radio in the United States when many voices were heard, to an era in which the spectrum was dominated by a few major networks---a transition pushed by major firms and enforced by governmental policy making--- provides a sobering example of what could happen (Lessig 2001). It will be important for policy makers to be aware of this kind of incentive problem and address it---in this case perhaps by mandating that ownership of content and ownership of channel be separated, as has long been the case for other types of common carriers. +={ Lessig, L. } + +!_ R&D Subsidies and Tax Credits +={ Government policy : + R&D subsidies and +3 +} + +In many countries, manufacturing firms are rewarded for their innovative activity by R&D subsidies and tax credits. Such measures can make economic sense if average social returns to innovation are significantly higher than average private returns, as has been found by Mansfield et al. (1977) and others. However, important innovative activities carried out by users are often not similarly rewarded, because they tend to not be documentable as formal R&D activities. As we have seen, users tend to develop innovations in the course of "doing" in their normal use environments. Bresnahan and Greenstein (1996a) make a similar point. They investigate the role of "co-invention" in the move by users from mainframe to client-server architecture.~{ See also Bresnahan and Greenstein 1996b; Bresnahan and Saloner 1997; Saloner and Steinmueller 1996. }~ By "co-invention" Bresnahan and Greenstein mean organizational changes and innovations developed and implemented by users that are required to take full advantage of a new invention. They point out the high importance that co-invention has for realizing social returns from innovation. They consider the federal government's support for creating "national information infrastructures" insufficient or misallocated, since they view co-invention is the bottleneck for social returns and likely the highest value locus for invention. +={ Bresnahan, T. ; + Greenstein, S. ; + Mansfield, E. ; + Users : + co-invention and +} + +Efforts to level the playing field for user innovation and manufacturer innovation could, of course, also go in the direction of lessening R&D subsidies or tax credits for all rather than attempting to increase user-innovators' access to subsidies. However, if directing subsidies to user-innovators seems desirable, social welfare will be best served if policy makers link them to free revealing by user-innovators as well as or instead of tying them to users' private investments in the development of products for exclusive in-house use. Otherwise, duplication of effort by users interested in the same innovation will reduce potential welfare gains. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + government policy and +1 | social welfare and +1 +} + +In sum, the welfare-enhancing effects found for freely revealed user innovations suggest that policy makers should consider conditions required for user innovation when creating policy and legislation. Leveling the playing field for user-innovators and manufacturer-innovators will doubtless force more rapid change onto manufacturers. However, as will be seen in the next chapter, manufacturers can adapt to a world in which user innovation is at center stage. + +1~ 9 Democratizing Innovation +={ Social welfare : + innovation and +45 ; + von Hippel, E. +45 +} + +We have learned that lead users sometimes develop and modify products for themselves and often freely reveal what they have done. We have also seen that many users can be interested in adopting the solutions that lead users have developed. Taken together, these findings offer the basis for user-centered innovation systems that can entirely supplant manufacturer-based innovation systems under some conditions and complement them under most. User-centered innovation is steadily increasing in importance as computing and communication technologies improve. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + lead users and ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +44 ; + Custom products : + users and ; + Innovation : + lead users and ; + Lead users : + innovation and ; + User need +3 ; + Users : + innovation and +4 +} + +I begin this chapter with a discussion of the ongoing democratization of innovation. I then describe some of the patterns in user-centered innovation that are emerging. Finally, I discuss how manufacturers can find ways to profitably participate in emerging, user-centered innovation processes. + +!_ The Trend toward Democratization + +Users' abilities to develop high-quality new products and services for themselves are improving radically and rapidly. Steady improvements in computer software and hardware are making it possible to develop increasingly capable and steadily cheaper tools for innovation that require less and less skill and training to use. In addition, improving tools for communication are making it easier for user innovators to gain access to the rich libraries of modifiable innovations and innovation components that have been placed into the public domain. The net result is that rates of user innovation will increase even if users' heterogeneity of need and willingness to pay for "exactly right" products remain constant. +={ Custom products : + users and +1 ; + Users : + paying for innovations and +} + +The radical nature of the change that is occurring in design capabilities available to even individual users is perhaps difficult for those without personal innovation experience to appreciate. An anecdote from my own experience may help as illustration. When I was a child and designed new products that I wanted to build and use, the ratio of not-too-pleasurable (for me) effort required to actually build a prototype relative to the very pleasurable effort of inventing it and use-testing it was huge. (That is, in terms of the design, build, test, evaluate cycle illustrated in figure 5.1, the effort devoted to the "build" element of the cycle was very large and the rate of iteration and learning via trial and error was very low.) + +In my case it was especially frustrating to try to build anything sophisticated from mechanical parts. I did not have a machine shop in which I could make good parts from scratch, and it often was difficult to find or buy the components I needed. As a consequence, I had to try to assemble an approximation of my ideas out of vacuum cleaner parts and other bits of metal and plastic and rubber that I could buy or that were lying around. Sometimes I failed at this and had to drop an exciting project. For example, I found no way to make the combustion chamber I needed to build a large pulse-jet engine for my bicycle (in retrospect, perhaps a lucky thing!). Even when I succeeded, the result was typically "unaesthetic": the gap between the elegant design in my mind and the crude prototype that I could realize was discouragingly large. + +Today, in sharp contrast, user firms and increasingly even individual hobbyists have access to sophisticated design tools for fields ranging from software to electronics to musical composition. All these information-based tools can be run on a personal computer and are rapidly coming down in price. With relatively little training and practice, they enable users to design new products and services---and music and art---at a satisfyingly sophisticated level. Then, if what has been created is an information product, such as software or music, the design is the actual product---software you can use or music you can play. + +If one is designing a physical product, it is possible to create a design and even conduct some performance testing by computer simulation. After that, constructing a real physical prototype is still not easy. However, today users do have ready access to kits that offer basic electronic and mechanical building blocks at an affordable price, and physical product prototyping is becoming steadily easier as computer-driven 3-D parts printers continue to go up in sophistication while dropping in price. Very excitingly, even today home-built prototypes need not be poorly fashioned items that will fall apart with a touch in the wrong place---the solution components now available to users are often as good as those available to professional designers. + +Functional equivalents of the resources for innovation just described have long been available within corporations to a lucky few. Senior designers at firms have long been supported by engineers and designers under their direct control, and also with other resources needed to quickly construct and test prototype designs. When I took a job as R&D manager at a start-up firm after college, I was astounded at the difference professional-quality resources made to both the speed and the joy of innovation. Product development under these conditions meant that the proportion of one's effort that could be focused on the design and test portions of the innovation cycle rather than on prototype building was much higher, and the rate of progress was much faster. +={ Innovation process +3 } + +The same story can be told in fields from machine design to clothing design: just think of the staffs of seamstresses and models supplied by clothing manufacturers to their "top designers" so that these few can quickly realize and test many variations on their designs. In contrast, think of the time and effort that equally talented designers without such staff assistance must engage in to stitch together even a single high-quality garment prototype on their own. + +But, as we learned in chapter 7, the capability and the information needed to innovate in important ways are in fact widely distributed. Given this finding, we can see that the traditional pattern of concentrating innovation-support resources on just a few pre-selected potential innovators is hugely inefficient. High-cost resources for innovation support cannot be allocated to "the right people," because one does not know who they are until they develop an important innovation. When the cost of high-quality resources for design and prototyping becomes very low---which is the trend we have described---these resources can be diffused widely, and the allocation problem then diminishes in significance. The net result is and will be to democratize the opportunity to create. + +Democratization of the opportunity to create is important beyond giving more users the ability to make exactly right products for themselves. As we saw in a previous chapter, the joy and the learning associated with creativity and membership in creative communities are also important, and these experiences too are made more widely available as innovation is democratized. The aforementioned Chris Hanson, a Principal Research Scientist at MIT and a maintainer in the Debian Linux community, speaks eloquently of this in his description of the joy and value he finds from his participation in an open source software community: +={ Hanson, C. ; + Linux ; + Users : + innovate-or-buy decisions by +3 | innovation process and +3 ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + innovation and +3 ; + Innovation communities : + open source software and ; + Linux ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +3 +} + +_1 Creation is unbelievably addictive. And programming, at least for skilled programmers, is highly creative. So good programmers are compelled to program to feed the addiction. (Just ask my wife!) Creative programming takes time, and careful attention to the details. Programming is all about expressing intent, and in any large program there are many areas in which the programmer's intent is unclear. Clarification requires insight, and acquiring insight is the primary creative act in programming. But insight takes time and often requires extensive conversation with one's peers. + +_1 Free-software programmers are relatively unconstrained by time. Community standards encourage deep understanding, because programmers know that understanding is essential to proper function. They are also programming for themselves, and naturally they want the resulting programs to be as good as they can be. For many, a free software project is the only context in which they can write a program that expresses their own vision, rather than implementing someone else's design, or hacking together something that the marketing department insists on. No wonder programmers are willing to do this in their spare time. This is a place where creativity thrives. + +_1 Creativity also plays a role in the programming community: programming, like architecture, has both an expressive and a functional component. Unlike architecture, though, the expressive component of a program is inaccessible to non-programmers. A close analogy is to appreciate the artistic expression of a novel when you don't know the language in which it is written, or even if you know the language but are not fluent. This means that creative programmers want to associate with one another: only their peers are able to truly appreciate their art. Part of this is that programmers want to earn respect by showing others their talents. But it's also important that people want to share the beauty of what they have found. This sharing is another act that helps build community and friendship. + +!_ Adapting to User-Centered Innovation---Like It or Not +={ Innovation process +5 ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + innovation and +5 +} + +User-centered innovation systems involving free revealing can sometimes supplant product development carried out by manufacturers. This outcome seems reasonable when manufacturers can obtain field-tested user designs at no cost. As an illustration, consider kitesurfing (previously discussed in chapter 7). The recent evolution of this field nicely shows how manufacturer-based product design may not be able to survive when challenged by a user innovation community that freely reveals leading-edge designs developed by users. In such a case, manufacturers may be obliged to retreat to manufacturing only, specializing in modifying user-developed designs for producibility and manufacturing these in volume. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + users and ; + Kitesurfing +4 +} + +Recall that equipment for kitesurfing was initially developed and built by user-enthusiasts who were inventing both kitesurfing techniques and kitesurfing equipment interdependently. Around 1999, the first of several small manufacturers began to design and sell kitesurfing equipment commercially. The market for kitesurfing equipment then began to grow very rapidly. In 2001 about 5,000 kite-and-board sets were sold worldwide. In 2002 the number was about 30,000, and in 2003 it was about 70,000. With a basic kite-and-board set selling for about $1,500, total sales in 2003 exceeded $100 million. (Many additional kites, home-made by users, are not included in this calculation.) As of 2003, about 40 percent of the commercial market was held by a US firm called Robbie Naish (Naishkites.com). + +Recall also that in 2001 Saul Griffith, an MIT graduate student, established an Internet site called Zeroprestige.com as a home for a community of kitesurfing users and user-innovators. In 2003, the general consensus of both site participants and manufacturers was that the kite designs developed by users and freely revealed on Zeroprestige.com were at least as advanced as those developed by the leading manufacturers. There was also a consensus that the level of engineering design tools and aggregate rate of experimentation by kite users participating on the Zeroprestige.com site was superior to that within any kite manufacturer. Indeed, this collective user effort was probably superior in quality and quantity to the product-development work carried out by all manufacturers in the industry taken together. +={ Griffith, S. ; + Zeroprestige.com +1 +} + +In late 2003, a perhaps predictable event occurred: a kite manufacturer began downloading users' designs from Zeroprestige.com and producing them for commercial sale. This firm had no internal kitesurfing product-development effort and offered no royalties to user-innovators---who sought none. It also sold its products at prices much lower than those charged by companies that both developed and manufactured kites. + +It is not clear that manufacturers of kitesurfing equipment adhering to the traditional developer-manufacturer model can---or should---survive this new and powerful combination of freely revealed collaborative design and prototyping effort by a user innovation community combined with volume production by a specialist manufacturer. In effect, free revealing of product designs by users offsets manufacturers' economies of scale in design with user communities' economies of scope. These economies arise from the heterogeneity in information and resources found in a user community. +={ Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and ; + User need +2 +} + +!_ Manufacturers' Roles in User-Centered Innovation + +Users are not required to incorporate manufacturers in their product-development and product-diffusion activities. Indeed, as open source software projects clearly show, horizontal innovation communities consisting entirely of users can develop, diffuse, maintain, and consume software and other /{information}/ products by and for themselves---no manufacturer is required. Freedom from manufacturer involvement is possible because information products can be "produced" and distributed by users essentially for free on the web (Kollock 1999). In contrast, production and diffusion of physical products involves activities with significant economies of scale. For this reason, while product development and early diffusion of copies of physical products developed by users can be carried out by users themselves and within user innovation communities, mass production and general diffusion of physical products incorporating user innovations are usually carried out by manufacturing firms. +={ Innovation communities : + open source software and +5 ; + Open source software : + innovation and +5 | innovation communities and +5 +} + +For information products, general distribution is carried out within and beyond the user community by the community itself; no manufacturer is required: + +Innovating lead users ➔ All users. + +For physical products, general distribution typically requires manufacturers: + +Innovating lead users ➔ Manufacturer ➔ All users. + +In light of this situation, how can, should, or will manufacturers of products, services, and processes play profitable roles in user-centered innovation systems? Behlendorf (1999), Hecker (1999) and Raymond (1999) explore what might be possible in the specific context of open source software. More generally, many are experimenting with three possibilities: (1) Manufacturers may produce user-developed innovations for general commercial sale and/or offer a custom manufacturing service to specific users. (2) Manufacturers may sell kits of product-design tools and/or "product platforms" to ease users' innovation-related tasks. (3) Manufacturers may sell products or services that are complementary to user-developed innovations. +={ Behlendorf, B. ; + Hecker, F. ; + Raymond, E. +} + +!_ Producing User-Developed Products + +Firms can make a profitable business from identifying and mass producing user-developed innovations or developing and building new products based on ideas drawn from such innovations. They can gain advantages over competitors by learning to do this better than other manufacturers. They may, for example, learn to identify commercially promising user innovations more effectively that other firms. Firms using lead user search techniques such as those we will describe in chapter 10 are beginning to do this systematically rather than accidentally---surely an improvement. Effectively transferring user-developed innovations to mass manufacture is seldom as simple as producing a product based on a design by a single lead user. Often, a manufacturer combines features developed by several independent lead users to create an attractive commercial offering. This is a skill that a company can learn better than others in order to gain a competitive advantage. +={ Lead users : + innovation and | manufacturers and +1 ; + Manufacturers : + lead users and +1 +} + +The decision as to whether or when to take the plunge and commercialize a lead user innovation(s) is also not typically straightforward, and companies can improve their skills at inviting in the relevant information and making such assessments. As was discussed previously, manufacturers often do not understand emerging user needs and markets nearly as well as lead users do. Lead users therefore may engage in entrepreneurial activities, such as "selling" the potential of an idea to potential manufacturers and even lining up financing for a manufacturer when they think it very important to rapidly get widespread diffusion of a user-developed product. Lettl, Herstatt, and Gemünden (2004), who studied the commercialization of major advances in surgical equipment, found innovating users commonly engaging in these activities. It is also possible, of course, for innovating lead users to become manufacturers and produce the products they developed for general commercial sale. This has been shown to occur fairly frequently in the field of sporting goods (Shah 2000; Shah and Tripsas 2004; Hienerth 2004). +={ Gemünden, H. ; + Lettl, C. ; + Herstatt, C. ; + Hienerth, C. ; + Shah, S. ; + Tripsas, M. ; + Lead users : + surgical equipment and ; + Windsurfing ; + Custom products : + innovation and +1 | manufacturers and +1 ; + users and +1 ; + Users : + custom products and +1 +} + +Manufacturers can also elect to provide custom production or "foundry" services to users, differentiating themselves by producing users' designs faster, better, and/or cheaper than competitors. This type of business model is already advanced in many fields. Custom machine shops specialize in manufacturing mechanical parts to order; electronic assembly shops produce custom electronic products, chemical manufacturers offer "toll" manufacturing of custom products designed by others, and so on. Suppliers of custom integrated circuits offer an especially good example of custom manufacture of products designed by users. More than $15 billion worth of custom integrated circuits were produced in 2002, and the cumulative average growth rate of that market segment was 29 percent. Users benefit from designing their own circuits by getting exactly what they want more quickly than manufacturer-based engineers could supply what they need, and manufacturers benefit from producing the custom designs for users (Thomke and von Hippel 2002). +={ Thomke, S. ; + von Hippel, E. ; + Custom products : + suppliers and +2 ; + Suppliers +2 ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers | by users +} + +!_ Supplying Toolkits and/or Platform Products to Users +={ Custom products : + product platforms and +7 ; + Toolkits +7 : + platform products and +7 +} + +Users interested in designing their own products want to do it efficiently. Manufacturers can therefore attract them to kits of design tools that ease their product-development tasks and to products that can serve as "platforms" upon which to develop and operate user-developed modifications. Some are supplying users with proprietary sets of design tools only. Cadence, a supplier of design tools for corporate and even individual users interested in designing their own custom semiconductor chips, is an example of this. Other manufacturers, including Harley-Davidson in the case of motorcycles and Microsoft in the case of its Excel spreadsheet software, sell platform products intentionally designed for post-sale modification by users. +={ Microsoft } + +Some firms that sell platform products or design tools to users have learned to systematically incorporate valuable innovations that users may develop back into their commercial products. In effect, this second strategy can often be pursued jointly with the manufacturing strategy described above. Consider, for example, StataCorp of College Station, Texas. StataCorp produces and sells Stata, a proprietary software program designed for statistics. It sells the basic system bundled with a number of families of statistical tests and with design tools that enable users to develop new tests for operation on the Stata platform. Advanced customers, many of them statisticians and social science researchers, find this capability very important to their work and do develop their own tests. Many then freely reveal tests they have developed on Internet websites set up by the users themselves. Other users then visit these sites to download and use, and perhaps to test, comment on, and improve these tests, much as users do in open source software communities. +={ StataCorp statistical software +2 ; + Toolkits : + StataCorp and +2 ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + innovation and +3 | intellectual property rights and +3 ; + Government policy : + free revealing and +3 | intellectual property rights and +3 | trade secrets and +3 ; + Innovation communities +3 : + open source software and +3 | and sources of innovation +3 ; + Intellectual property rights : + free revealing and +3 | trade secrets and +3 ; + Open source software : + innovation and +10 | innovation communities and +10 +} + +StataCorp personnel monitor the activity at user sites, and note the new tests that are of interest to many users. They then bring the most popular tests into their product portfolio as Stata modules. To do this, they rewrite the user's software code while adhering to the principles pioneered by the user-innovator. They then subject the module to extensive validation testing---a very important matter for statisticians. The net result is a symbiotic relationship. User-innovators are publicly credited by Stata for their ideas, and benefit by having their modules professionally tested. StataCorp gains a new commercial test module, rewritten and sold under its own copyright. Add-ons developed by users that are freely revealed will increase StataCorp's profits more than will equivalent add-ons developed and sold by manufacturers (Jokisch 2001). Similar strategies are pursued by manufacturers of simulator software (Henkel and Thies 2003). +={ Henkel, J. ; + Jokisch, M. ; + Thies, S. ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers | by users +} + +Note, however, that StataCorp, in order to protect its proprietary position, does not reveal the core of its software program to users, and does not allow any user to modify it. This creates problems for those users who need to make modifications to the core in order to solve particular problems they encounter. Users with problems of this nature and users especially concerned about price have the option of turning to non-proprietary free statistical software packages available on the web, such as the "R" project (www.r-project.org). These alternatives are developed and supported by user communities and are available as open source software. The eventual effect of open source software alternatives on the viability of the business models of commercial vendors such as StataCorp and its competitors remains to be seen. + +A very similar pattern exists in the online gaming industry. Vendors of early online computer games were surprised to discover that sophisticated users were deciphering their closed source code in order to modify the games to be more to their liking. Some of these "mods" attracted large followings, and some game vendors were both impressed and supportive. Manufacturers also discovered that the net effect of user-developed mods was positive for them: mods actually increased the sales of their basic software, because users had to buy the vendors' proprietary software engine code in order to play the mods. Accordingly, a number of vendors began to actively support user-developers by supplying them with design tools to make it easier for them to build mods on their proprietary engine platforms (Jeppesen and Molin 2003). +={ Jeppesen, L. +1 ; + Molin, M. +} + +Both manufacturers and users involved with online gaming are experimenting with the possibilities of user-manufacturer symbiosis in a number of additional ways. For example, some vendors are experimenting with creating company-supported distribution channels through which users---who then become vendors---can sell their mods rather than simply offering them as free downloads (Jeppesen 2004). At the same time, some user communities are working in the opposite direction by joining together to develop open source software engines for video games. If the latter effort is successful, it will offer mod developers a platform and design tools that are entirely non-proprietary for the first time. As in the case of statistical software, the eventual outcomes of all these experiments are not yet clear. + +As a final example of a strategy in which manufacturers offer a platform to support user innovation of value to them, consider General Electric's innovation pattern with respect to the magnetic-resonance imaging machines it sells for medical use. Michael Harsh (GE's Director of R&D in the division that produces MRI machines) and his colleagues realized that nearly all the major, commercially important improvements to these machines are developed by leading-edge users rather than by GE or by competing machine producers. They also knew that commercialization of user-developed improvements would be easier and faster for GE if the users had developed their innovations using a GE MRI machine as a platform rather than a competitor's machine. Since MRI machines are expensive, GE developed a policy of selectively supplying machines at a very low price to scientists GE managers judged most likely to develop important improvements. These machines are supplied with restrictive interlocks removed so that the users can easily modify them. In exchange for this research support, the medical researchers give GE preferred access to innovations they develop. Over the years, supported researchers have provided a steady flow of significant improvements that have been first commercialized by GE. Managers consider the policy a major source of GE's commercial success in the MRI field. +={ General Electric ; + Harsh, M. ; + Toolkits : + GE and +} + +!_ Providing Complementary Products or Services + +Many user innovations require or benefit from complementary products or services, and manufacturers can often supply these at a profit. For example, IBM profits from user innovation in open source software by selling the complement of computer hardware. Specifically, it sells computer servers with open source software pre-installed, and as the popularity of that software goes up, so do server sales and profits. A firm named Red Hat distributes a version of the open source software computer operating system Linux, and also sells the complementary service of Linux technical support to users. Opportunities to provide profitable complements are not necessarily obvious at first glance, and providers often reap benefits without being aware of the user innovation for which they are providing a complement. Hospital emergency rooms, for example, certainly gain considerable business from providing medical care to the users and user-developers of physically demanding sports, but may not be aware of this. +={ IBM ; + Linux ; + Users : + innovation and +3 ; + Innovation communities : + open source software and ; + Linux ; + Innovation communities : + sources of innovation and +} + +!_ Discussion +={ Government policy : + intellectual property rights and +2 +} + +All the examples above explore how manufacturers can integrate themselves into a user-centered innovation system. However, manufacturers will not always find user innovations based on or related to their products to be in their interest. For example, manufacturers may be concerned about legal liabilities and costs sometimes associated with "unauthorized user tinkering." For example, an automaker might legitimately worry about the user-programmed engine controller chips that racing aficionados and others often install to change their cars' performance. The result can be findings of eventual commercial value as users explore new performance regimes that manufacturers' engineers might not have considered. However, if users choose to override manufacturers' programming to increase engine performance, there is also a clear risk of increased warrantee costs for manufacturers if engines fail as a consequence (Mollick 2004). +={ Mollick, Ethan } + +We have seen that manufacturers can often find ways to profit from user innovation. It is also the case, however, that user innovators and user innovation communities can provide many of these same functions for themselves. For example, StataCorp is successfully selling a proprietary statistical software package. User-developed alternatives exist on the web that are developed and maintained by user-innovators and can be downloaded at no charge. Which ownership model will prove more robust under what circumstances remains to be seen. Ultimately, since users are the customers, they get to choose. +={ StataCorp statistical software ; + Toolkits : + StataCorp and ; + Users : + innovation communities and ; + Innovation communities +} + +1~ 10 Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations +={ Users : + innovation and +59 ; + Lead users +59 : + innovation and +59 | identification of +49 +} + +Users and manufacturers can apply the insights developed in this book to improve their innovation processes. In this chapter, I illustrate by showing how firms can profit by /{systematically}/ searching for innovations developed by lead users. I first explain how this can be done. I then present findings of a study conducted at 3M to assess the effectiveness of lead user idea-generation techniques. Finally, I briefly review other studies reporting systematic searches for lead users by manufacturers, and the results obtained. +={ Lead users : + idea generation and | 3M and ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and | lead users and +16 ; + 3M Corporation +} + +!_ Searching for Lead Users + +Product-development processes traditionally used by manufacturers start with market researchers who study customers in their target markets to learn about unsatisfied needs. Next, the need information they uncover is transferred to in-house product developers who are charged with developing a responsive product. In other words, the approach is to find a user need and to fill it by means of in-house product development. +={ Marketing research +2 } + +These traditional processes cannot easily be adapted to systematic searching for lead user innovations. The focus on target-market customers means that lead users are regarded as outliers of no interest. Also, traditional market-research analyses focus on collecting and analyzing need information and not on possible solutions that users may have developed. For example, if a user says "I have developed this new product to make task X more convenient," market-research analyses typically will note that more convenience is wanted but not record the user-developed solution. After all, product development is the province of in-house engineers! + +We are therefore left with a question: How can manufacturers build a product-development process that systematically searches for and evaluates lead user-generated innovations? (See figure 10.1.) It turns out that the answer differs depending on whether the lead users sought are at the leading edge of "advanced analog" fields or at the leading edge of target markets. Searching for the former is more difficult, but experience shows that the user-developed innovations that are most radical (and profitable) relative to conventional thinking often come from lead users in "advanced analog" fields. +={ Manufacturers : + innovation and ; + Lead users : + characteristics of +1 ; + Marketing research +1 +} + +% Only lead user +% prototypes available +% Time +% Commercial versions of product available +% Number +% of users +% perceiving +% need +% Figure 10.1 +% Innovations by lead users precede equivalent commercial products. + +{di_evh_f10-1.png}image + +!_ Figure 10.1 +Innovations by lead users precede equivalent commercial products. + +!_ Identifying Lead Users in Advanced Analog Fields + +Lead users in advanced analog fields experience needs that are related to but more extreme than those being faced by /{any}/ users, including lead users, within the target market. They also often face a different set of constraints than those affecting users in the target market. These differences can force them to develop solutions that are entirely new from the perspective of the target market. + +As an example, consider the relationship between the braking requirements faced by users of automobiles (let's call auto users the target market) and the braking requirements faced by large commercial airplanes as they land on an airport runway (the advanced analog market). Clearly, the braking demands on large airplanes are much more extreme. Airplanes are much heavier than autos and land at higher speeds: their brakes must rapidly dissipate hundreds of times more energy to bring the vehicle to a stop. Also, the situational constraints are different. For example, auto drivers are often assisted in braking in winter by the application of salt or sand to icy roads. These aids cannot be applied in the case of aircraft: salt would damage aircraft bodies, and sand would be inhaled into jet engines and damage them. + +The result of the more extreme demands and additional constraints placed on solutions to aircraft braking was the development of antilock braking systems (ABS) for aircraft. Auto firms conducting searches for valuable lead user innovations regarding auto braking were able to learn about this out-of-field innovation and adapt if for use in autos---where it is common today. Before the development of ABS for autos, an automobile firm could have learned about the underlying concept by studying the practices of users with a strong need for controlling skidding while braking such as stock car auto racing teams. These lead users had learned to manually "pump" their brakes to help control this problem. However, auto company engineers were able to learn much more by studying the automated solutions developed in the "advanced analog" field of aerospace.~{ ABS braking is intended to keep a vehicle's wheels turning during braking. ABS works by automatically and rapidly "pumping" the brakes. The result is that the wheels continue to revolve rather than "locking up," and the operator continues to have control over steering. }~ + +Finding lead users in advanced analog markets can be difficult because discovering the relevance of a particular analog can itself be a creative act. One approach that has proven effective is to ask the more easily identified lead users in target markets for nominations. These lead users tend to know about useful advanced analogs, because they have been struggling with their leading-edge problems for a long time, and often have searched beyond the target market for information. + +Networking from innovators to more advanced innovators in this way is called pyramiding (von Hippel, Thomke, and Sonnack 1999). Pyramiding is a modified version of the "snowballing" technique sometimes used by sociologists to identify members of a group or accumulate samples of rare respondents (Bijker 1995). Snowballing relies on the fact that people with rare interests or attributes tend to know others like themselves. Pyramiding modifies this idea by assuming that people with a strong interest in a topic or field can direct an enquiring researcher to people /{more}/ expert than themselves. Experiments have shown that pyramiding can identify high-quality informants much more efficiently than can mass-screening techniques under many conditions (von Hippel, Franke, and Prügl 2005). Pyramiding was made into a practical industrial process by Mary Sonnack, a Division Scientist at 3M, and Joan Churchill, a psychologist specializing in the development of industrial training programs. +={ Bijker, W. ; + Churchill, J. ; + Franke, N. ; + Prügl, R. ; + Thomke, S. ; + von Hippel, E. +46 +} + +!_ Identifying Lead Users in Target Markets + +In general it is easier to identify users at the leading edge of target markets than it is to identify users in advanced analog fields. Screening for users with lead user characteristics can be used. When the desired type of lead user is so rare as to make screening impractical---often the case---pyramiding can be applied. In addition, manufacturers can take advantage of the fact that users at the leading edge of a target market often congregate at specialized sites or events that manufacturers can readily identify. At such sites, users may freely reveal what they have done and may learn from others about how to improve their own practices still further. Manufacturers interested in learning from these lead users can easily visit the sites and listen in. For example, sports equipment companies can go to sporting meets where lead users are known to compete, observe user innovations in action, and compare notes. +={ Manufacturers : + innovation and +} + +Essentially the same thing can be done at virtual sites. For example, recall the practices of StataCorp, a supplier of statistical software. Stata sells a set of standard statistical tests and also a language and tools that statisticians can use to design new tests to serve their own evolving needs. Some Stata users (statisticians) took the initiative to set up a few specialized websites, unaffiliated with StataCorp, where they post their innovations for others to download, use, comment on, and improve. StataCorp personnel visit these sites, learn about the user innovations, and observe which tests seem to be of interest to many users. They then develop proprietary versions of the more generally useful tests as commercial products. +={ Lead users : + StataCorp statistical software and ; + StataCorp statistical software +} + +When specialized rendezvous sites for lead users don't exist in a particular field, manufacturers may be able to create them. Technicon Corporation, for example, set up a series of seminars at which innovating users of their medical equipment got together and exchanged information on their innovations. Technicon engineers were free to listen in, and the innovations developed by these users were the sources of most of Technicon's important new product improvements (von Hippel and Finkelstein 1979). +={ Finkelstein, S. ; + Technicon Corporation +} + +!_ The 3M Experiment +={ Lead users : + 3M and +32 ; + 3M Corporation +32 +} + +To test whether lead users in advanced analog fields can in fact generate information that leads to commercially valuable new products, Lilien, Morrison, Searls, Sonnack, and von Hippel (2002) studied a natural experiment at 3M. That firm was carrying out both lead user projects and traditional market research-based idea-generation projects in the same divisions at the same time, and in sufficient numbers to make statistical comparisons of outcomes possible. +={ Lilien, G. +26 ; + Morrison, Pamela +26 ; + Searls, K. +26 ; + Sonnack, M. +26 ; + Lead users : + idea generation and +45 +} + +!_ Methods + +3M first began using the lead user method in one division in 1996. By May 2000, when data collection began, five divisions of 3M had completed seven lead user (LU) idea-generation projects and had funded further development of the product concepts generated by five of these. These same five divisions also had 42 contemporaneously funded projects that used "find a need and fill it" idea-generation methodologies that were traditional practice at 3M. We used these two samples of funded ideas to compare the performance of lead user idea-generation projects with traditional idea-generation projects. Although 3M cooperated in the study and permitted access to company records and to members of the product-development teams, the firm did not offer a controlled experimental setting. Rather, we as researchers were required to account for any naturally occurring differences after the fact. + +Our study methodology required a pre-post/test-control situation, with at least quasi-random assignments to treatment cells (Cook and Campbell 1979). In other words, our goal was to compare samples of development projects in 3M divisions that differed with respect to their use of lead user idea-generation methods, but that were as similar as possible in other respects. Identifying, understanding, and controlling for the many potential sources of difference that could affect the natural experiment involved careful field explorations. Thus, possible differences between project staffing and performance incentives applied to LU and non-LU idea-generation projects were assessed. We looked for (and did not find) differences in the capabilities or motivation of LU and non-LU project team members with respect to achieving a major new product advance. 3M managers also said that there was no difference in these matters, and a content analysis of formal annual performance goals set for the individual LU and non-LU team members in a division that allowed access to these data supported their views. +={ Campbell, D. ; + Cook, T. +} + +We also found no major differences in the innovation opportunities teams faced. They also looked for Hawthorne or placebo effects that might affect the project teams differentially, and found none. (The Hawthorne effect can be described as "I do better because extra attention is being paid to me or to my performance." The placebo effect can be described as "I expect this process will work and will strive to get the results I have been told are likely.") We concluded that the 3M samples of funded LU and non-LU idea-generation projects, though not satisfying the random assignment criterion for experimental design, appeared to satisfy rough equivalence criteria in test and control conditions associated with natural or quasi-experimentation. Data were collected by interviews and by survey instruments. + +With respect to the intended difference under study---the use of lead user methods within projects---all lead user teams employed an identical lead user process taught to them with identical coaching materials and with coaching provided by members of the same small set of internal 3M coaches. Each lead user team consisted of three or four members of the marketing and technical departments of the 3M division conducting the project. Teams began by identifying important market trends. Then, they engaged in pyramiding to identify lead users with respect to each trend both within the target market and in advanced analog markets. Information from a number of innovating lead users was then combined by the team to create a new product concept and business plan---an "LU idea" (von Hippel, Thomke, and Sonnack 1999). +={ Thomke, S. } + +% ={Sonnack, M.} + +Non-lead-user idea-generation projects were conducted in accordance with traditional 3M practices. I refer to these as non-LU idea generation methods and to teams using them as non-LU teams. Non-LU teams were similar to lead user teams in terms of size and make-up. They used data sources for idea generation that varied from project to project. Market data collected by outside organizations were sometimes used, as were data from focus groups with major customers and from customer panels, and information from lab personnel. Non-LU teams collected market information from target markets users but not from lead users. + +!_ Findings + +Our research compared all funded product concepts generated by LU and non-LU methods from February 1999 to May 2000 in each of the five 3M divisions that had funded one or more lead-user-developed product concepts. During that time, five ideas generated by lead user projects were being funded, along with 42 ideas generated by non-LU idea-generation methods. The results of these comparisons can be seen in table 10.1. Product concepts generated by seeking out and learning from lead users were found to be significantly more novel than those generated by non-LU methods. They were also found to address more original or newer customer needs, to have significantly higher market share, to have greater potential to develop into an entire product line, and to be more strategically important. The lead-user-developed product concepts also had projected annual sales in year 5 that were greater than those of ideas generated by non-LU methods by a factor of 8---an average of $146 million versus an average of $18 million in forecast annual sales. Thus, at 3M, lead user idea-generation projects clearly did generate new product concepts with much greater commercial potential than did traditional, non-LU methods (p < 0.005). + +!_ Table 10.1 +Concepts for new products developed by lead user project teams had far more commercial promise than those developed by non-lead-user project teams. + +table{~h c4; 40; 20; 20; 20; + +~ +LU product concepts (n =5) +Non-LU product concepts (n = 42) +Significance + +Factors related to value of concept +~ +~ +~ + +Novelty compared with competition a +9.6 +6.8 +0.01 + +Originality/newness of customer needs addressed +8.3 +5.3 +0.09 + +% market share in year 5 +68% +33% +0.01 + +Estimated sales in year 5 (deflated for forecast error) +$146m +$18m +0.00 + +Potential for entire product family a +10.0 +7.5 +0.03 + +Operating profit +22% +24.0% +0.70 + +Probability of success +80% +66% +0.24 + +Strategic importance a +9.6 +7.3 +0.08 + +Intellectual property protection a +7.1 +6.7 +0.80 + +Factors related to organizational fit of concept +~ +~ +~ + +Fit with existing distribution channels a +8.8 +8.0 +0.61 + +Fit with existing manufacturing capabilities a +7.8 +6.7 +0.92 + +Fit with existing strategic plan a +9.8 +8.4 +0.24 + +}table + +Source: Lilien et al. 2002, table 1. \\ +a. Rated on a scale from 1 to 10. + +Note that the sales data for both the LU and non-LU projects are forecasts. To what extent can we rely on these? We explored this matter by collecting both forecast and actual sales data from five 3M division controllers. (Division controllers are responsible for authorizing new product-development investment expenditures.) We also obtained data from a 1995 internal study that compared 3M's sales forecasts with actual sales. We combined this information to develop a distribution of forecast errors for a number of 3M divisions, as well as overall forecast errors across the entire corporation. Those errors range from forecast/actual of +30 percent (over-forecast) to --13 percent (underforecast). On the basis of the information just described, and in consultation with 3M management, we deflated all sales forecast data by 25 percent. That deflator is consistent with 3M's historical experience and, we think, provides conservative sales forecasts.~{ In the general literature, Armstrong's (2001) review on forecast bias for new product introduction indicates that sales forecasts are generally optimistic, but that that upward bias decreases as the magnitude of the sales forecast increases. Coller and Yohn (1998) review the literature on bias in accuracy of management earnings forecasts and find that little systematic bias occurs. Tull's (1967) model calculates $15 million in revenue as a level above which forecasts actually become pessimistic on average. We think it reasonable to apply the same deflator to LU vs. non-LU project sales projections. Even if LU project personnel were for some reason more likely to be optimistic with respect to such projections than non-LU project personnel, that would not significantly affect our findings. Over 60 percent of the total dollar value of sales forecasts made for LU projects were actually made by personnel not associated with those projects (outside consulting firms or business analysts from other divisions). }~ Deflated data appear in table 10.1 and in the following tables. + +Rather strikingly, all five of the funded 3M lead user projects created the basis for major new product lines for 3M (table 10.2). In contrast, 41 of 42 funded product concepts generated by non-LU methods were improvements or extensions of existing product lines (χ^{2}^ test, p < 0.005). + +Following tt, p < 0.005).e advice of 3M divisional controllers, major product lines were defined as those separately reported in divisional financial statements. In 1999 in the 3M divisions we studied, sales of individual major product lines ranged from 7 percent to 73 percent of total divisional sales. The sales projections for funded lead user project ideas all fell well above the lower end of this range: projected sales five years after introduction for funded LU ideas, conservatively deflated as discussed above, ranged from 25 percent to over 300 percent of current total divisional sales. + +!_ Table 10.2 +Lead user project teams developed concepts for major new product lines. Non-lead-user project teams developed concepts for incremental product improvements. + +table{~h c3; 34; 33; 33; + +~ +Incremental product improvements +Major new product lines + +LU method +0 +5 + +Non-LU method +41 +1 + +}table + +Source: Lilien et al. 2002, table 2. + +To illustrate what the major product line innovations that the LU process teams generated at 3M were like, I briefly describe four (one is not described for 3M proprietary reasons): + +_* A new approach to the prevention of infections associated with surgical operations. The new approach replaced the traditional "one size fits all" approach to infection prevention with a portfolio of patient-specific measures based on each patient's individual biological susceptibilities. This innovation involved new product lines plus related business and strategy innovations made by the team to bring this new approach to market successfully and profitably. + +_* Electronic test and communication equipment for telephone field repair workers that pioneered the inclusion of audio, video, and remote data access capabilities. These capabilities enabled physically isolated workers to carry out their problem-solving work as a virtual team with co-workers for the first time. + +_* A new approach, implemented via novel equipment, to the application of commercial graphics films that cut the time of application from 48 hours to less than 1 hour. (Commercial graphics films are used, for example, to cover entire truck trailers, buses, and other vehicles with advertising or decorative graphics.) The LU team's solutions involved technical innovations plus related channel and business model changes to help diffuse the innovation rapidly. + +_* A new approach to protecting fragile items in shipping cartons that replaces packaging materials such as foamed plastic. The new product lines implementing the approach were more environmentally friendly and much faster and more convenient for both shippers and package recipients than other products and methods on the market. + +Lilien, Morrison, Searls, Sonnack, and I also explored to see whether the major product lines generated by the lead user projects had characteristics similar to those of the major product lines that had been developed at 3M in the past, including Scotch Tape. To determine this we collected data on all major new product lines introduced to the market between 1950 and 2000 by the five 3M divisions that had executed one or more lead user studies. (The year 1950 was as far back as we could go and still find company employees who could provide some data about the innovation histories of these major products lines.) Examples from our 1950--2000 sample include the following: +={ Lilien, G. ; + Morrison, Pamela ; + Searls, K. +} + +% ={Sonnack, M.} + +_* Scotch Tape: A line of transparent mending tapes that was first of its type and a major success in many household and commercial applications. + +_* Disposable patient drapes for operating room use: A pioneering line of disposable products for the medical field now sold in many variations. + +_* Box sealing tapes: The first type of tape strong enough to reliably seal corrugated shipping boxes, it replaced stapling in most "corrugated shipper" applications. + +_* Commercial graphics films: Plastic films capable of withstanding outdoor environments that could be printed upon and adhered to large surfaces on vehicles such as the sides of trailer trucks. This product line changed the entire approach to outdoor signage. + +Table 10.3 provides profiles of the five LU major product lines and the 16 non-LU major product lines for which we were able to collect data. As can be seen, innovations generated with inputs from lead users are similar in many ways to the major innovations developed by 3M in the past. + +!_ Table 10.3 +Major new product lines (MNPLs) generated by lead-user methods are similar to MNPLs generated by 3M in the past. + +table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15; + +~ +LU MNPLs (n = 5) +Past 3M MNPLs (n = 16) +Significance + +Novelty a compared with competition +9.6 +8.0 +0.21 + +Originality/newness of customer needs addressed^{a}^ +8.3 +7.9 +0.78 + +% market share in year 5 +68% +61% +0.76 + +Estimated sales in year 5 (deflated for forecast error) +146m^{b}^ +$62m^{b}^ +0.04 + +Potential for entire product family^{a}^ +10.0 +9.4 +0.38 + +Operating profit +22% +27% +0.41 + +Probability of success +80% +87% +0.35 + +Strategic importance* +9.6 +8.5 +0.39 + +Intellectual property protection^{a}^ +7.1 +7.4 +0.81 + +Fit with distribution channels^{a}^ +8.8 +8.4 +0.77 + +Fit with manufacturing capabilities^{a}^ +7.8 +6.7 +0.53 + +Fit with strategic plan^{a}^ +9.8 +8.7 +0.32 + +}table + +Source: Lilien et al. 2002, table 4. \\ +a. Measured on a scale from 1 to 10. \\ +b. Five-year sales forecasts for all major product lines commercialized in 1994 or later (5 LU and 2 non-LU major product lines) have been deflated by 25% in line with 3M historical forecast error experience (see text). Five-year sales figures for major product lines commercialized before 1994 are actual historical sales data. This data has been converted to 1999 dollars using the Consumer Price Index from the Economic Report of the President (Council of Economic Advisors 2000). + +!_ Discussion + +The performance comparison between lead user and "find a need and fill it" idea-generation projects at 3M showed remarkably strong advantages associated with searching for ideas among lead users in advanced analog fields with needs similar to, but even more extreme than, needs encountered in the intended target market. The direction of this outcome is supported by findings from three other real-world industrial applications of lead user idea-generation methods that studied lead users in the target market but not in advanced analog markets. I briefly describe these three studies next. They each appear to have generated primarily next-generation products--- valuable for firms, but not the basis for radically new major product lines. + +%% + +_* Recall that Urban and von Hippel (1988) tested the relative commercial attractiveness of product concepts developed in the field of computer-aided systems for the design of printed circuit boards (PC-CAD). One of the concepts they tested contained novel features proposed by lead users that had innovated in the PC-CAD field in order to serve in-house need. The attractiveness of the "lead user concept" was then evaluated by a sample of 173 target-market users of PC-CAD systems relative to three other concept choices---one of which was a description of the best system then commercially available. Over 80 percent of the target-market users were found to prefer the concept incorporating the features developed by innovating lead users. Their reported purchase probability for a PC-CAD system incorporating the lead user features was 51 percent, over twice as high as the purchase probability indicated for any other system. The target-market users were also found willing to pay twice as much for a product embodying the lead user features than for PC-CAD products that did not incorporate them. +={ Urban, G. ; + Printed circuit CAD software +} + +_* Herstatt and von Hippel (1992) documented a lead user project seeking to develop a new line of pipe hangers---hardware used to attach pipes to the ceilings of commercial buildings. Hilti, a major manufacturer of construction-related equipment and products, conducted the project. The firm introduced a new line of pipe hanger products based on the lead user concept and a post-study evaluation has shown that this line has become a major commercial success for Hilti. +={ Herstatt, C. ; + Pipe hanger hardware +} + +_* Olson and Bakke (2001) report on two lead user studies carried out by Cinet, a leading IT systems integrator in Norway, for the firm's two major product areas, desktop personal computers, and Symfoni application GroupWare. These projects were very successful, with most of the ideas incorporated into next-generation products having been collected from lead users. +={ Bakke, G. ; + Olson, E. +} + +Active search for lead users that have innovated enables manufacturers to more rapidly commercialize lead user innovations. One might think that an alternative approach would be to identify lead users before they have innovated. Alert manufacturers could then make some prior arrangements to get preferred access to promising user-developed innovations by, for example, purchasing promising lead user organizations. I myself think that such vertical integration approaches are not practical. As was shown earlier, the character and attractiveness of innovations lead users may develop is based in part on the particular situations faced by and information stocks held by individual lead users. User innovation is therefore likely to be a widely distributed phenomenon, and it would be difficult to predict in advance which users are most likely to develop very valuable innovations. +={ Manufacturers : + lead users and +8 +} + +How do we square these findings with the arguments, put forth by Christensen (1997), by Slater and Narver (1998), and by others, that firms are likely to miss radical or disruptive innovations if they pay close attention to requests from their customers? Christensen (1997, p. 59, n. 21) writes: "The research of Eric von Hippel, frequently cited as evidence of the value of listening to customers, indicates that customers originate a large majority of new product ideas. . . . The [Christensen] value network framework would predict that the innovations toward which the customers in von Hippel's study led their suppliers would have been sustaining innovations. We would expect disruptive innovations to have come from other sources." +={ Christensen, C. +2 ; + Narver, J. ; + Slater, S. +} + +Unfortunately, the above contains a basic misunderstanding of my research findings. My findings, and related findings by others as well, deal with innovations by lead users, not customers, and /{lead users are a much broader category than customers of a specific firm}/. Lead users that generate innovations of interest to manufacturers can reside, as we have seen, at the leading edges of target markets, and also in advanced analog markets. The innovations that some lead users develop are certainly disruptive from the viewpoint of some manufacturers---but the lead users are unlikely to care about this. After all, they are developing products to serve their own needs. Tim Berners-Lee, for example, developed the World Wide Web as a lead user working at CERN---a user of that software. The World Wide Web was certainly disruptive to the business models of many firms, but this was not Berners-Lee's concern. Lead users typically have no reason to lead, mislead, or even contact manufacturers that might eventually benefit from or be disrupted by their innovations. Indeed, the likely absence of a preexisting customer relationship is the reason that manufacturing firms must search for lead user innovations /{outside}/ their customer lists---as 3M did in its lead user idea generation studies. "Listening to the voice of the customer" is /{not}/ the same thing as seeking out and learning from lead users (Danneels 2004). +={ Berners-Lee, T. ; + Danneels, E. ; + Lead users : + 3M and ; + 3M Corporation ; + Custom products : + manufacturers and +2 | users and +2 ; + Innovation : + distributed process of +2 | functional sources of +2 +} + +That basic misunderstanding aside, I do agree with Christensen and others that a manufacturer may well receive mainly requests for sustaining innovations from its /{customers}/. As was discussed in chapter 4, manufacturers have an incentive to develop innovations that utilize their existing capabilities---that are "sustaining" for them. Customers know this and, when considering switching to a new technology, are unlikely to request it from a manufacturer that would consider it to be disruptive: they know that such a manufacturer is unlikely to respond positively. The net result is that manufacturers' inputs from their existing customers may indeed be biased towards requests for sustaining innovations. + +I conclude this chapter by reminding the reader that studies of the sources of innovation show clearly that users will tend to develop some types of innovations but not all. It therefore makes sense for manufacturers to partition their product-development strategies and portfolios accordingly. They may wish, for example, to move away from actual new product development and search for lead users' innovations in the case of functionally novel products. At the same time manufacturers may decide to continue to develop products that do /{not}/ require high-fidelity models of need information and use environments to get right. One notable category of innovations with this characteristic is dimension-of-merit improvements to existing products. Sometimes users state their needs for improved products in terms of dimensions on which improvements are desired---dimensions of merit. As an example, consider that users may say "I want a computer that is as fast and cheap as possible." Similarly, users of medical imaging equipment may say "I want an image that is of as high a resolution as is technically possible." If manufacturers (or users) cannot get to the end point desired by these users right away, they will instead progressively introduce new product generations that move along the dimension of merit as rapidly and well as they can. Their rate of progress is determined by the rate at which /{solution}/ technologies improve over time. This means that sticky solution information rather than sticky need information is central to development of dimension-of-merit improvements. Manufacturers will tend to have the information they need to develop dimension of merit innovations internally. +={ Manufacturers : + dimensions-of-merit product improvements and ; + Sticky information : + dimensions-of-merit product improvements and | innovation and +} + +1~ 11 Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design +={ Users : + innovation and +62 ; + Custom products : + manufacturers and +62 | toolkits and +62 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +62 ; + Toolkits +62 : + innovation and +62 ; + Users : + toolkits and +62 +} + +An improved understanding of the relative innovation capabilities of users and manufacturers can enable designs for more effective joint innovation processes. Toolkits for user innovation and custom design illustrate this possibility. In this new innovation process design, manufacturers actually /{abandon}/ their efforts to understand users' needs accurately and in detail. Instead, they outsource only /{need-related}/ innovation tasks to their users, who are equipped with appropriate toolkits. This process change differs from the lead user search processes discussed earlier in an interesting way. Lead user searchs identify existing innovations, but do nothing to change the conditions affecting user-innovators at the time a new product or service is being developed. Toolkits for users, in contrast, do change the conditions potential innovators face. By making innovation cheaper and quicker for users, they can increase the volume of user innovation. They also can channel innovative effort into directions supported by toolkits. +={ Toolkits : + characteristics of +3 +} + +In this chapter, I first explore why toolkits are useful. Next, I describe how to create an appropriate setting for toolkits and how toolkits function in detail. Finally, I discuss the conditions under which toolkits are likely to be of most value. + +!_ Benefits from Toolkits + +Toolkits for user innovation and design are integrated sets of product-design, prototyping, and design-testing tools intended for use by end users. The goal of a toolkit is to enable non-specialist users to design high-quality, producible custom products that exactly meet their needs. Toolkits often contain "user-friendly" features that guide users as they work. They are specific to a type of product or service and a specific production system. For example, a toolkit provided to customers interested in designing their own, custom digital semiconductor chips is tailored precisely for that purpose--- it cannot be used to design other types of products. Users apply a toolkit in conjunction with their rich understanding of their own needs to create a preliminary design, simulate or prototype it, evaluate its functioning in their own use environment, and then iteratively improve it until they are satisfied. +={ Toolkits : + manufacturers and +58 | user-friendly tools for ; + Information asymmetries +10 +} + +A variety of manufacturers have found it profitable to shift the tasks of custom product design to their customers along with appropriate toolkits for innovation. Results to date in the custom semiconductor field show development time cut by 2/3 or more for products of equivalent complexity and development costs cut significantly as well via the use of toolkits. In 2000, more than $15 billion worth of custom integrated circuits were sold that had been designed with the aid of toolkits---often by circuit users---and produced in the "silicon foundries" of custom semiconductor manufacturers such as LSI (Thomke and von Hippel 2002). International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), a global supplier of specialty flavors to the food industry, has built a toolkit that enables its customers to modify flavors for themselves, which IFF then manufactures. In the materials field, GE provides customers with Web-based tools for designing better plastic products. In software, a number of consumer product companies provide toolkits that allow people to add custom-designed modules to their standard products. For example, Westwood Studios provides its customers with toolkits that enable them to design important elements of their own video games (Jeppesen 2005). +={ Jeppesen, L. ; + Thomke, S. ; + von Hippel, E. +9 ; + Toolkits : + GE and | International Flavors and Fragrances and +} + +The primary function of toolkits for user design is to co-locate product-development and service-development tasks with the sticky information needed to execute them. Need-intensive tasks involved in developing a particular type of product or service are assigned to users, along with the tools needed to carry those tasks out. At the same time, solution-intensive tasks are assigned to manufacturers. +={ Toolkits : + users and +55 | sticky information and +8 ; + Sticky information : + toolkits and +8 +} + +As was discussed in chapter 5, problem solving in general, and product and service development in particular, is carried out via repeated cycles of learning by trial and error. When each cycle of a trial-and-error process requires access to sticky information located at more than one site, colocation of problem-solving activity with sticky information is achieved by repeatedly shifting problem solving to the relevant sticky information sites as product development proceeds. +={ Trial-and-error problem solving ; + Toolkits : + trial-and-error learning in +} + +For example, suppose that need information is sticky at the site of the potential product user and that solution information is sticky at the site of the manufacturer. A user may initiate a development project by drawing on local user-need information to specify a desired new product or service (figure 11.1). This information is likely to be sticky at least in part. Therefore, the user, even when exerting best efforts, will supply only partial and partially correct need and use-context information to the manufacturer. The manufacturer then applies its solution information to the partially accurate user information and creates a prototype that it thinks is responsive to the need and sends it to the user for testing. If the prototype is not satisfactory (and it often is not), the product is returned to the manufacturer for refinement. Typically, as empirical studies show (Tyre and von Hippel 1997; Kristensen 1992), sites of sticky need and / or solution information are repeatedly revisited as problem solvers strive to reach a satisfactory product design (figure 11.2). +={ Kristensen, P. ; + Tyre, M. +} + +%% Figure 11.1 +% Toolkits 149 +% Manufacturer +% activity +% User +% activity +% User iterates until satisfied. +% User draws on local need +% information to specify +% desired product or service. +% User draws on local need and +% context of use information to +% evaluate prototype. +% User changes specifications as +% needed. +% Manufacturer draws on +% local capability information +% to develop prototype +% responsive to specifications. +% Manufacturer iterates until +% user is satisfied. +% User-manufacturer +% boundary +% Figure 11.1 +% A pattern of problem solving often encountered in product and service development. + + +{di_evh_f11-1.png}image + +Figure 11.1 + +%% Figure 11.2 +% 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 +% 7 +% 0 +% 22 +% 7 +% 15 +% 30 +% Number of shifts +% Percent +% of +% sample +% Figure 11.2 +% Shifts in the location of problem solving from user site to lab observed during process +% machine debugging. Source: Tyre and von Hippel 1993, figure 2. + +{di_evh_f11-2.png}image + +Figure 11.2 + +Explicit management of user-manufacturer iterations has been built into a number of modern product-development processes. In the rapid application development method (Martin 1991), manufacturers learn to respond to initial user need inputs by quickly developing a partial prototype of a planned product containing the features likely to be most important to users. They deliver this to users, who apply it in their own setting to clarify their needs. Users then relay requests for changes or new features to the product developers, and this process is repeated until an acceptable fit between need and solution is found. Such iteration has been found to "better satisfy true user requirements and produce information and functionality that is more complete, more accurate, and more meaningful" (Connell and Shafer 1989). +={ Connell, J. ; + Martin, J. ; + Shafer, L. +} + +Even with careful management, however, iterative shifts in problem solving between users and manufacturer-based developers involve significant coordination costs. For example, a manufacturer's development team may be assigned to other tasks while it waits for user feedback, and so will not be immediately able to resume work on a project when needed feedback is received. It would be much better still to eliminate the need for cross-boundary iteration between user and manufacturer sites during product development, and this is what toolkits for user design are intended to do. The basic idea behind toolkits for user design is, as was mentioned earlier, to partition an overall product-development task into subproblems, each drawing on only one locus of sticky information. Then, each task is assigned to the party already having the sticky information needed to solve it. In this approach, both the user and the manufacturer still engage in iterative, trial-and-error problem solving to solve the problems assigned to them. But this iteration is internal to each party---no costly and time-consuming cross-boundary iteration between user and manufacturer is required (von Hippel 1998, 2001; Thomke and von Hippel 2002; von Hippel and Katz 2002). +={ Katz, R. ; + Thomke, S. ; + Task partitioning +10 +} + +To appreciate the major advantage in problem-solving speed and efficiency that concentrating problem solving within a single locus can create, consider a familiar example: the contrast between conducting financial strategy development with and without "user-operated" financial spreadsheet software: + +_* Before the development of easy-to-use financial spreadsheet programs such as Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel, a firm's chief financial officer might have carried out a financial strategy development exercise as follows. First, the CFO would have asked an assistant to develop an analysis incorporating a list of assumptions. A few hours or days might elapse before the result was delivered. Then the CFO would use her rich understanding of the firm and its goals to study the analysis. She would typically almost immediately spot some implications of the patterns developed, and would then ask for additional analyses to explore these implications. The assistant would take the new instructions and go back to work while the CFO switched to another task. When the assistant returned, the cycle would repeat until a satisfactory outcome was found. +={ Microsoft } + +_* After the development of financial spreadsheet programs, a CFO might begin an analysis by asking an assistant to load up a spreadsheet with corporate data. The CFO would then "play with" the data, trying out various ideas and possibilities and "what if" scenarios. The cycle time between trials would be reduced from days or hours to minutes. The CFO's full, rich information would be applied immediately to the effects of each trial. Unexpected patterns---suggestive to the CFO but often meaningless to a less knowledgeable assistant---would be immediately identified and explored further. + +It is generally acknowledged that spreadsheet software that enables expert users to "do it themselves" has led to better outcomes that are achieved faster (Levy 1984; Schrage 2000). The advantages are similar in the case of product and service development. Learning by doing via trial and error still occurs, of course, but the cycle time is much faster because the complete cycle of need-related learning is carried out at a single (user) site earlier in the development process. +={ Levy, S. ; + Schrage, M. ; + Trial-and-error problem solving +15 +} + +!_ Repartitioning of Development Tasks +={ Toolkits : + task partitioning +5 +} + +To create the setting for a toolkit, one must partition the tasks of product development to concentrate need-related information in some and solution-related information in others. This can involve fundamental changes to the underlying architecture of a product or service. As illustration, I first discuss the repartioning of the tasks involved in custom semiconductor chip development. Then, I show how the same principles can be applied in the less technical context of custom food design. + +Traditionally, fully customized integrated circuits were developed in an iterative process like that illustrated in figure 11.1. The process began with a user specifying the functions that the custom chip was to perform to a manufacturer of integrated circuits. The chip would then be designed by manufacturer employees, and an (expensive) prototype would be produced and sent to the user. Testing by the user would typically reveal faults in the chip and/or in the initial specification, responsive changes would be made, a new prototype would be built. This cycle would continue until the user was satisfied. In this traditional manufacturer-centered development process, manufacturers' development engineers typically incorporated need-related information into the design of both the fundamental elements of a circuit--- such as transistors, and the electrical "wiring" that interconnected those elements into a functioning circuit. + +The brilliant insight that allowed custom design of integrated circuits to be partitioned into solution-related and need-related subtasks was made by Mead and Conway (1980). They determined that the design of a digital chip's fundamental elements, such as its transistors, could be made standard for all circuits. This subtask required rich access to the manufacturer's sticky solution information regarding how semiconductors are fabricated, but did not require detailed information on users' specific needs. It could therefore be assigned to manufacturer-based chip-design and chip-fabrication engineers. It was also observed that the subtask of interconnecting standard circuit elements into a functioning integrated circuit required only sticky, need-related information about a chip's function---for example, whether it was to function as a microprocessor for a calculator or as a voice chip for a robotic dog. This subtask was therefore assigned to users along with a toolkit that enabled them to do it properly. In sum, this new type of chip, called a gate array, had a novel architecture created specifically to separate the problem-solving tasks requiring access to a manufacturer's sticky solution information from those requiring access to users' sticky need information. +={ Conway, C. ; + Mead, L. ; + Toolkits : + characteristics of +} + +The same basic principle can be illustrated in a less technical context: food design. In this field, manufacturer-based designers have traditionally undertaken the entire job of developing a novel food, and so they have freely blended need-specific design into any or all of the recipe-design elements wherever convenient. For example, manufacturer-based developers might find it convenient to create a novel cake by both designing a novel flavor and texture for the cake body, and designing a complementary novel flavor and texture into the frosting. However, it is possible to repartition these same tasks so that only a few draw on need-related information, and these can then be more easily transferred to users. + +The architecture of the pizza pie illustrates how this can be done. Many aspects of the design of a pizza, such as the dough and the sauce, have been made standard. User choice has been restricted to a single task: the design of toppings. In other words, all need-related information that is unique to a particular user has been linked to the toppings-design task only. Transfer of this single design task to users can still potentially offer creative individuals a very large design space to play in (although pizza shops typically restrict it sharply). Any edible ingredient one can think of, from eye of newt to edible flowers, is a potential topping component. But the fact that need-related information has been concentrated within only a single product-design task makes it much easier to transfer design freedom to the user. + +!_ The Functionality of Toolkits +={ Toolkits : + characteristics of +2 +} + +If a manufacturer outsources need-intensive design tasks to users, it must also make sure that users have the information they need to carry out those tasks effectively. This can be done via a toolkit for user innovation. Toolkits are not new as a general concept---every manufacturer equips its own engineers with a set of tools suitable for developing the type of products or services it wishes to produce. Toolkits for users also are not new---many users have personal collections of tools that they have assembled to help them create new items or modify standard ones. For example, some users have woodworking tools ranging from saws to glue which can be used to create or modify furniture---in very novel or very standard ways. Others may have a kit of software tools needed to create or modify software. What is new, however, is integrated toolkits enabling users to create /{and}/ test designs for custom products or services that can then be produced "as is" by manufacturers. + +Present practice dictates that a high-quality toolkit for user innovation will have five important attributes. (1) It will enable users to carry out complete cycles of trial-and-error learning. (2) It will offer users a solution space that encompasses the designs they want to create. (3) It will be user friendly in the sense of being operable with little specialized training. (4) It will contain libraries of commonly used modules that users can incorporate into custom designs. (5) It will ensure that custom products and services designed by users will be producible on a manufacturer's' production equipment without modification by the manufacturer. + +!_ Learning through Trial and Error +={ Toolkits : + trial-and-error learning in +5 +} + + +It is crucial that user toolkits for innovation enable users to go through complete trial-and-error cycles as they create their designs. Recall that trial-and-error problem solving is essential to product development. For example, suppose that a user is designing a new custom telephone answering system for her firm, using a software-based computer-telephony integration (CTI) design toolkit provided by a vendor. Suppose also that the user decides to include a new rule to "route all calls of X nature to Joe" in her design. A properly designed toolkit would allow her to temporarily place the new rule into the telephone system software, so that she could actually try it out (via a real test or a simulation) and see what happened. She might discover that the solution worked perfectly. Or she might find that the new rule caused some unexpected form of trouble---for example, Joe might be flooded with too many calls---in which case it would be "back to the drawing board" for another design and another trial. + +In the same way, toolkits for innovation in the semiconductor design field allow users to design a circuit that they think will meet their needs and then test the design by "running" it in the form of a computer simulation. This quickly reveals errors that the user can then quickly and cheaply fix using toolkit-supplied diagnostic and design tools. For example, a user might discover by testing a simulated circuit design that a switch needed to adjust the circuit had been forgotten and make that discovery simply by trying to make a needed adjustment. The user could then quickly and cheaply design in the needed switch without major cost or delay. + +One can appreciate the importance of giving the user the capability for trial-and-error learning by doing in a toolkit by thinking about the consequences of not having it. When users are not supplied with toolkits that enable them to draw on their local, sticky information and engage in trial-and-error learning, they must actually order a product and have it built to learn about design errors---typically a very costly and unsatisfactory way to proceed. For example, automobile manufacturers allow customers to select a range of options for their cars, but they do not offer the customer a way to learn during the design process and before buying. The cost to the customer is unexpected learning that comes too late: "That wide-tire option did look great in the picture. But now that the car has been delivered, I discover that I don't like the effect on handling. Worse, I find that my car is too wide to fit into my garage!" + +Similar disasters are often encountered by purchasers of custom computers. Many custom computer manufacturers offer a website that allows users to "design your own computer online." However, these websites do not allow users to engage in trial-and-error design. Instead, they simply allow users to select computer components such as processor chips and disk drives from lists of available options. Once these selections have been made, the design transaction is complete and the computer is built and shipped. The user has no way to test the functional effects of these choices before purchase and first field use---followed by celebration or regret. + +In contrast, a sophisticated toolkit for user innovation would allow the user to conduct trial-and-error tests to evaluate the effects of initial choices made and to improve on them. For example, a computer design site could add this capability by enabling users to actually test and evaluate the hardware configuration they specify on their own programs and computing tasks before buying. To do this, the site might, for example, provide access to a remote computer able to simulate the operation of the computer that the user has specified, and provide performance diagnostics and related choices in terms meaningful to the user (e.g., "If you add option x at cost y, the time it takes to complete your task will decrease by z seconds"). The user could then modify or confirm initial design choices according to trade-off preferences only he or she knows. + +!_ Appropriate Solution Spaces +={ Toolkits : + solution spaces and +3 +} + +Economical production of custom products and services is achievable only when a custom design falls within the pre-existing capability and degrees of freedom built into a particular manufacturer's production system. My colleagues and I call this the /{solution space}/ offered by that system. A solution space may vary from very large to small, and if the output of a toolkit is tied to a particular production system, then the design freedom that a toolkit can offer a user will be accordingly large or small. For example, the solution space offered by the production process of a manufacturer of custom integrated circuits offers a huge solution space to users---it will produce any combination of logic elements interconnected in any way that a user-designer might desire, with the result that the user can invent anything from a novel type of computer processor to a novel silicon organism within that space. However, note that the semiconductor production process also has stringent limits. It will only implement product designs expressed in terms of semiconductor logic---it will not implement designs for bicycles or houses. Also, even within the arena of semiconductors, it will only be able to produce semiconductors that fit within a certain range with respect to size and other properties. Another example of a production system offering a very large solution space to designers---and, potentially to user-designers via toolkits---is the automated machining center. Such a device can basically fashion any shape out of any machinable material that can be created by any combination of basic machining operations such as drilling and milling. As a consequence, toolkits for innovation intended to create designs that can be produced by automated machining centers can offer users access to that very large solution space. + +Large solution spaces can typically be made available to user-designers when production systems and associated toolkits allow users to manipulate and combine relatively basic and general-purpose building blocks and operations, as in the examples above. In contrast, small solution spaces typically result when users are only allowed to combine a relatively few pre-designed options. Thus, users who want to design their own custom automobiles are restricted to a relatively small solution space: they can only make choices from lists of options regarding such things as engines, transmissions, and paint colors. Similarly, purchasers of eyeglasses are restricted to combining "any frame from this list" of pre-designed frames, with "any lens type from that list" of pre-designed options. + +The reason producers of custom products or services enforce constraints on the solution space that user-designers may use is that custom products can be produced at reasonable prices only when custom user designs can be implemented by simply making low-cost adjustments to the production process. This condition is met within the solution space on offer. However, responding to requests that fall outside that space will require small or large additional investments by the manufacturer. For example, a producer of integrated circuits may have to invest many millions of dollars and rework an entire production process in order to respond to a customer's request for a larger chip that falls outside the solution space associated with its present production equipment. + +!_ User-Friendly Tools +={ Toolkits : + user-friendly tools for +6 +} + +User toolkits for innovation are most effective and successful when they are made "user friendly" by enabling users to use the skills they already have and to work in their own customary and well-practiced design language. This means that users don't have to learn the---typically different---design skills and language customarily used by manufacturer-based designers, and so they will require much less training to use the toolkit effectively. + +For example, in the case of custom integrated circuit design, the users of toolkits are typically electrical engineers who are designing electronic systems that will incorporate custom semiconductor chips. The digital design language normally used by electrical engineers is Boolean algebra. Therefore, user-friendly toolkits for custom semiconductor design are provided that allow toolkit users to design in this language. That is, users can create a design, test how it works, and make improvements using only their own, customary design language. At the conclusion of the design process, the toolkit then translates the user's logical design into the design inputs required by the semiconductor manufacturer's production system. + +A design toolkit based on a language and skills and tools familiar to the user is only possible to the extent that the user /{has}/ familiarity with some appropriate and reasonably complete language and set of skills and tools. Interestingly, this is the case more frequently than one might initially suppose, at least in terms of the /{function}/ that a user wants a product or service to perform---because functionality is the face that the product or a service presents to the user. (Indeed, an expert user of a product or service may be much more familiar with that functional face than manufacturer-based experts.) Thus, the user of a custom semiconductor is the expert in what he or she wants that custom chip to /{do}/, and is skilled at making complex tradeoffs among familiar functional elements to achieve a desired end: "If I increase chip clock speed, I can reduce the size of my cache memory and. . . ." + +As a less technical example, consider the matter of designing a custom hairstyle. There is certainly a great deal of information known to hairstylists that even an expert user may not know, such as how to achieve a certain look by means of layer cutting, or how to achieve a certain streaked color pattern by selectively dying some strands of hair. However, an expert user is often very well practiced at the skill of examining the shape of his or her face and hairstyle as reflected in a mirror, and visualizing specific improvements that might be desirable in matters such as curls, shape, or color. In addition, the user will be very familiar with the nature and functioning of everyday tools used to shape hair, such as scissors and combs. + +A user-friendly toolkit for hairstyling innovation can be built upon these familiar skills and tools. For example, a user can be invited to sit in front of a computer monitor, and study an image of her face and hairstyle as captured by a video camera. Then, she can select from a palette of colors and color patterns offered on the screen, can superimpose the effect on her existing hairstyle, can examine it, and can repeatedly modify it in a process of trial-and-error learning. Similarly, the user can select and manipulate images of familiar tools, such as combs and scissors, to alter the image of the length and shape of her own hairstyle as projected on the computer screen, can study and further modify the result achieved, and so forth. Note that the user's new design can be as radically new as is desired, because the toolkit gives the user access to the most basic hairstyling variables and tools such as hair color and scissors. When the user is satisfied, the completed design can be translated into technical hairstyling instructions in the language of a hairstyling specialist---the intended production system in this instance. + +In general, steady improvements in computer hardware and software are enabling toolkit designers to provide information to users in increasingly friendly ways. In earlier days, information was often provided to users in the form of specification sheets or books. The user was then required to know when a particular bit of information was relevant to a development project, find the book, and look it up. Today, a large range of potentially needed information can be embedded in a computerized toolkit, which is programmed to offer the user items of information only if and as a development being worked on makes them relevant. + +!_ Module Libraries +={ Toolkits : + module libraries for +1 +} + +Custom designs seldom are novel in all their parts. Therefore, a library of standard modules will be a valuable part of a toolkit for user innovation. Provision of such standard modules enables users to focus their creative work on those aspects of their product or service designs that cannot be implemented via pre-designed options. For example, architects will find it very useful to have access to a library of standard components, such as a range of standard structural support columns with pre-analyzed structural characteristics, that they can incorporate into their novel building designs. Similarly, users who want to design custom hairstyles will often find it helpful to begin by selecting a hairstyle from a toolkit library. The goal is to select a style that has some elements of the desired look. Users can then proceed to develop their own desired style by adding to and subtracting from that starting point. + +!_ Translating Users' Designs for Production + +The "language" of a toolkit for user innovation must be convertible without error into the language of the intended production system at the conclusion of the user's design work. If it is not, the entire purpose of the toolkit will be lost---because a manufacturer receiving a user design will essentially have to do the design work over again. Error-free translation need not emerge as a major problem---for example, it was never a major problem during the development of toolkits for integrated circuit design, because both chip designers and chip producers already used a language based on digital logic. In contrast, in some fields, translating from the design language preferred by users to the language required by intended production systems can be /{the}/ central problem in toolkit design. As an illustration, consider a recent toolkit test project managed by Ernie Gum, the Director of Food Product Development for the USA FoodServices Division of Nestlé. +={ Gum, E. +5 ; + Toolkits : + Nestlé and +5 +} + +One major business of Nestlé FoodServices is producing custom food products, such as custom Mexican sauces, for major restaurant chains. Custom foods of this type have traditionally been developed by or modified by the chains' executive chefs, using what are in effect design and production toolkits taught by culinary schools: recipe development procedures based on food ingredients available to individuals and restaurants, and processed with restaurant-style equipment. After using their traditional toolkits to develop or modify a recipe for a new menu item, executive chefs call in Nestlé Foodservices or another custom food producer and ask that firm to manufacture the product they have designed---and this is where the language translation problem rears its head. + +There is no error-free way to translate a recipe expressed in the language of a traditional restaurant-style culinary toolkit into the language required by a food-manufacturing facility. Food factories must use ingredients that can be obtained in quantity at consistent quality. These are not the same as, and may not taste quite the same as, the ingredients used by the executive chef during recipe development. Also, food factories use volume production equipment, such as huge-steam-heated retorts. Such equipment is very different from restaurant-style stoves and pots and pans, and it often cannot reproduce the cooking conditions created by the executive chef on a stove-top---for example, very rapid heating. Therefore, food-production factories cannot simply produce a recipe developed by or modified by an executive chef "as is" under factory conditions---it will not taste the same. + +As a consequence, even though an executive chef creates a prototype product using a traditional chef's toolkit, food manufacturers find most of that information---the information about ingredients and processing conditions---useless because it cannot be straightforwardly translated into factory-relevant terms. The only information that can be salvaged is the information about taste and texture contained in the prototype. And so, production chefs carefully examine and taste the customer's custom food prototype, then try to make something that tastes the same using factory ingredients and methods. But an executive chef's taste buds are not necessarily the same as production chef taste buds, and so the initial factory version---and the second and the third---is typically not what the customer wants. So the producer must create variation after variation until the customer is finally satisfied. + +To solve the translation problem, Gum created a novel toolkit of pre-processed food ingredients to be used by executive chefs during food development. Each ingredient in the toolkit was the Nestlé factory version of an ingredient traditionally used by chefs during recipe development: That is, it was an ingredient commercially available to Nestlé that had been processed as an independent ingredient on Nestlé factory equipment. Thus, a toolkit designed for developing Mexican sauces would contain a chili puree ingredient processed on industrial equipment identical to that used to produce food in commercial-size lots. (Each ingredient in such a toolkit also contains traces of materials that will interact during production---for example, traces of tomato are included in the chili puree---so that the taste effects of such interactions will also be apparent to toolkit users.) + +Chefs interested in using the Nestlé toolkit to prototype a novel Mexican sauce would receive a set of 20--30 ingredients, each in a separate plastic pouch. They would also be given instructions for the proper use of these ingredients. Toolkit users would then find that each component differs slightly from the fresh components he or she is used to. But such differences are discovered immediately through direct experience. The chef can then adjust ingredients and proportions to move to the desired final taste and texture that is desired. When a recipe based on toolkit components is finished, it can be immediately and precisely reproduced by Nestlé factories--- because now the executive chef is using the same language as the factory. In the Nestlé case, field testing by Food Product Development Department researchers showed that adding the error-free translation feature to toolkit-based design by users reduced the time of custom food development from 26 weeks to 3 weeks by eliminating repeated redesign and refinement interactions between Nestlé and purchasers of its custom food products. + +!_ Discussion + +A toolkit's success in the market is significantly correlated with that toolkit's quality and with industry conditions. Thus, Prügl and Franke (2005) studied the success of 100 toolkits offered in a single industry: computer gaming. They found that success, evaluated by independent experts, was significantly correlated with the quality of execution of the attributes of toolkits that have been discussed in this chapter. That is, success was found to be significantly affected by the quality of trial-and-error learning enabled by a toolkit, by the quality of fit of the solution space offered to users' design problems, by the user friendliness of the tools provided, and by the quality of module libraries offered with the toolkit. Schreier and Franke (2004) also obtained information on the importance of toolkit quality in a study of the value that users placed on consumer products (scarves, T shirts, cell phone covers) customized with a simple, manufacturer-supplied toolkit. They found user willingness to pay for custom designs, as measured by Vickrey auctions, was significantly negatively affected by the difficulty of creating custom designs with a toolkit. In contrast, willingness to pay was significantly positively affected by enjoyment experienced in using a toolkit. +={ Franke, N. ; + Prügl, R. ; + Schreier, M. ; + Trial-and-error problem solving ; + Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and +3 ; + User need +3 +} + +With respect to industry and market conditions, the toolkit-for-user innovation approach to product design is likely to be most appealing to toolkit suppliers when the heterogeneous needs of /{many}/ users can be addressed by a standard solution approach encoded in a toolkit. This is because it can be costly to encode all the solution and production information relevant to users' design decisions. For example, a toolkit for custom semiconductor design must contain information about the semi-conductor production process needed to ensure that product designs created by users are in fact producible. Encoding such information is a one-time cost, so it makes the best economic sense for solution approaches that many will want to use. + +Toolkits for user innovation are not an appropriate solution for all product needs, even when heterogeneous needs can be addressed by a common solution approach. Specifically, toolkits will not be the preferred approach when the product being designed requires the highest achievable performance. Toolkits incorporate automated design rules that cannot, at least at present, translate designs into products or software as skillfully as a human designer can. For example, a design for a gate array generated with a toolkit will typically take up more physical space on a silicon chip than would a fully custom-developed design of similar complexity. Even when toolkits are on offer, therefore, manufacturers may continue to design certain products (those with difficult technical demands) while customers take over the design of others (those involving complex or rapidly evolving user needs). + +Toolkits can be designed to offer a range of capabilities to users. At the high end, with toolkits such as those used to design custom integrated circuits, users can truly innovate, creating anything implementable in digital electronics, from a dishwasher controller to a novel supercomputer or form of artificial life. At the low end, the product configurators commonly offered by manufacturers of mass-customized products enable, for example, a watch purchaser to create a custom watch by selecting from lists of pre-designed faces, hands, cases, and straps. (Mass-customized production systems can manufacture a range of product variations in single-unit quantities at near mass-production costs (Pine 1993). In the United States, production systems used by these manufacturers are generally based on computerized production equipment.) +={ Pine, J. } + +The design freedom provided by toolkits for user innovation may not be of interest to all or even to most users in a market characterized by heterogeneous needs. A user must have a great enough need for something different to offset the costs of putting a toolkit to use for that approach to be of interest. Toolkits may therefore be offered only to a subset of users. In the case of software, toolkits may be provided to all users along with a standard, default version of the product or service, because the cost of delivering the extra software is essentially zero. In such a case, the toolkit's capability will simply lie unused in the background unless and until a user has sufficient incentive to evoke and employ it. +={ Lead users : + toolkits and +3 ; + Toolkits : + lead users and +3 +} + +Provision of toolkits to customers can be a complement to lead user idea-generation methods for manufacturers. Some users choosing to employ a toolkit to design a product precisely right for their own needs will be lead users, whose present strong need foreshadows a general need in the market. Manufacturers can find it valuable to identify and acquire the generally useful improvements made by lead users of toolkits, and then supply these to the general market. For this reason, manufacturers may find it valuable implement toolkits for innovation even if the portion of the target market that can directly use them is relatively small. + +Toolkits can affect existing business models in a field in ways that may or may not be to manufacturers' competitive advantage in the longer run. For example, consider that many manufacturers of products and services profit from both their design capabilities and their production capabilities. A switch to user-based customization via toolkits can affect their ability to do this over the long term. Thus, a manufacturer that is early in introducing a toolkit approach to custom product or service design may initially gain an advantage by tying that toolkit to its particular production facility. However, when toolkits are made available to customer designers, this tie often weakens over time. Customers and independent tool developers can eventually learn to design toolkits applicable to the processes of several manufacturers. Indeed, this is precisely what has happened in the custom integrated circuit industry. The toolkits revealed to users by the initial innovator, LSI, and later by rival producers were producer-specific. Over time, however, Cadance and other specialist toolkit supply firms emerged and developed toolkits that could be used to make designs producible by a number of vendors. The end result is that manufacturers that previously benefited from selling their product-design skills and their production skills can be eventually forced by the shifting of design tasks to customers via toolkits to a position of benefiting from their production skills only. + +Manufacturers that think long-term disadvantages may accrue from a switch to toolkits for user innovation and design will not necessarily have the luxury of declining to introduce toolkits. If any manufacturer introduces a high-quality toolkit into a field favoring its use, customers will tend to migrate to it, forcing competitors to follow. Therefore, a firm's only real choice in a field where conditions are favorable to the introduction of toolkits may be whether to lead or to follow. + +1~ 12 Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields + +This final chapter is devoted to describing links between user-centered innovation and other phenomena and literatures. Of course, innovation writ large is related to anything and everything, so the phenomena and the literatures I will discuss here are only those hanging closest on the intellectual tree. My goal is to enable interested readers to migrate to further branches as they wish, assisted by the provision of a few important references. With respect to phenomena, I will first point out the relationship of user innovation to /{information}/ communities---of which user innovation communities are a subset. With respect to related fields, I begin by linking user-centric innovation phenomena explored in this book to the literature on the economics of knowledge, and to the competitive advantage of nations. Next I link it to research on the sociology of technology. Finally, I point out how findings regarding user innovation could---but do not yet---link to and complement the way that product development is taught to managers. +={ Information commons ; + Information communities ; + Product development ; + Technical communities +} + +!_ Information Communities +={ Information commons +8 ; + Information communities +8 +} + +Many of the considerations I have discussed with respect to user innovation communities apply to /{information}/ communities as well---a much more general category of which user innovation communities are a subset. I define information communities as communities or networks of individuals and/or organizations that rendezvous around an information commons, a collection of information that is open to all on equal terms. +={ Technical communities +1 } + +In close analogy to our discussions of innovation communities, I propose that commons-based information communities or networks will form when the following conditions hold: (1) Some have information that is not generally known. (2) Some are willing to freely reveal what they know. (3) Some beyond the information source have uses for what is revealed. On an intuitive basis, one can immediately see that these conditions are often met. Of course, people and firms know different things. Of course there are many things that one would not be averse to freely revealing; and of course others would often be interested in what is freely revealed. After all, as individuals we all regularly freely reveal information not generally known to people who ask, and presumably these people value at least some of the information we provide. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + in information communities +3 +} + +The economics of information communities can be much simpler than that of the user innovation communities discussed earlier, because valuable proprietary information is often not at center stage. When the service provided by information communities is to offer non-proprietary "content" in a more convenient and accessible form, one need consider only the costs and benefits associated with information diffusion. One need not also consider potential losses associated with the free revealing of proprietary innovation-related information. + +It is likely that information communities are getting steadily more pervasive for the same reasons that user innovation communities are: the costs of diffusing information are getting steadily lower as computing and communication technologies improve. As a result, information communities may have a rapidly increasing impact on the economy and on the landscape of industry. They are and will be especially empowering to fragmented groups, whose members may for the first time gain low-cost access to a great deal of rich and fresh information of mutual interest. As is the case for user innovation networks, information networks can actually store content that participants freely reveal and make it available for free downloading. (Wikipedia is an example of this.) And/or, information networks can function to link information seekers and information holders rather than actually storing information. In the latter case, participants post to the network, hoping that someone with the requested information will spot their request and provide an answer (Lakhani and von Hippel 2003). Prominent examples can be found in the medical field in the form of specialized websites where patients with relatively rare conditions can for the first time find each other and also find specialists in those conditions. Patients and specialists who participate in these groups can both provide and get access to information that previously was scattered and for most practical purposes inaccessible. +={ Lakhani, K ; + Wikipedia ; + von Hippel, E. +} + +Just as is the case in user innovation groups, open information communities are developing rapidly, and the behaviors and infrastructure needed for success are being increasingly learned and codified. These communities are by no means restricted to user-participants. Thus, both patients and doctors frequently participate in medical information communities. Also, information communities can be run by profit-making firms and/or on a non-profit basis for and by information providers and users themselves--- just as we earlier saw was the case with innovation communities. Firms and users are developing many versions of open information communities and testing them in the market. As an example of a commercially supported information commons, consider e-Bay, where information is freely revealed by many under a structure provided by a commercial firm. The commercial firm then extracts a profit from commissions on transactions consummated between information providers and information seekers. As an example of an information community supported by users themselves, again consider Internet sites specializing in specific diseases---for example, childrenfacingillness.com. +={ Marketing research +1 } + +Information communities can have major effects on established ways of doing business. For example, markets become more efficient as the information provided to transaction participants improves. Thus, product and service manufacturers benefit from good information on the perceptions and preferences of potential buyers. Similarly, product and service purchasers benefit from good information on the characteristics of the various offerings in the market. Traditionally, firms have collected information on users' needs and on products' characteristics by means of face-to-face interviewing and (in the case of mass markets) questionnaires. Similar information of high quality now can be collected nearly without cost and can be posted on special Internet sites by users themselves and/or by for-profit enterprises. Dellarocas, Awad, and Zhang (2004) show that volunteered online movie reviews provide information that is just as accurate as that collected by surveys of representative samples of respondents. This emerging new approach to data aggregation will clearly affect the established business models of firms specializing in information collection, with websites like www.ciao.co.uk illustrating new possibilities. If the quality of information available to transaction participants goes up and the information price is low, transaction quality should go up. With the aid of online product-evaluation sites, it is likely that consumers will be able to apply much better information even to small buying decisions, such as the choice of a restaurant for tonight's dinner. +={ Awad, N. ; + Dellarocas C. ; + Zhang, X. +} + +What Paul David and colleagues call "open science" is a type of information community that is closely related to the innovation communities discussed earlier (David 1992; Dasgupta and David 1994; David 1998). Free revealing of findings is, of course, a characteristic of modern science. Academic scientists publish regularly and so freely reveal information that may have high proprietary value. This raises the same question explored in the case of innovation communities: Why, in view of the potential of free ridership, do scientists freely reveal the information they have developed at private cost? The answer overlaps with but also differs from the answers provided in the case of free revealing of proprietary innovations by innovation users. With respect to similarities, sociologists of science have found that reputation among peers is important to scientists, and that priority in the discovery of new knowledge is a major component of reputation. Because of the importance of priority, scientists generally rush their research projects to completion and then rush to freely reveal their new findings. This dynamic creates a great advantage from the point of view of social welfare (Merton 1973). +={ Dasgupta, P. ; + David, P. ; + Merton, Robert ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + in information communities +1 ; + Intellectual property rights : + information communities and ; + Users : + free revealing by +1 | information communities and +1 +} + +With respect to major differences, it is public policy in many countries to subsidize research with public funds. These policies are based on the assumption that only inadequate amounts of scientific research can be drawn forth by reputational inducements alone. Recall that, in contrast, innovations developed and freely revealed by innovation users are not subsidized from any source. Users, unlike "scientists," by definition have a personal or corporate use for the innovation-related knowledge they generate. This additional source of private reward may explain why user innovation communities can flourish without subsidy. +={ Knowledge, production and distribution of } + +!_ The Economics of Knowledge +={ Knowledge, production and distribution of +7 ; + Users : + knowledge and +7 +} + +In this field, Foray (2004) provides a rich road map regarding the economics of knowledge and the central role played by users. Foray argues that the radical changes in information and communication technologies (ICT) are creating major changes in the economics of knowledge production and distribution. Economists have traditionally reduced knowledge production to the function of research and development, defined as the activity specifically devoted to invention and innovation. Starting with Machlup (1962), economists also have identified the knowledge-based economy as consisting of specialized sectors focused on activities related to communication, education, the media, and computing and information-related services. Foray argues that these simplifications, although providing a rationale for a way to measure knowledge-generation activities, were never appropriate and now are totally misleading. +={ Machlup, F. ; + Foray, D. +2 +} + +Knowledge generation, Foray says, is now a major activity across all industrial sectors and is by no means restricted to R&D laboratories: we are in the age of the knowledge economy. He makes a central distinction between R&D that is conducted in laboratories remote from doing, and learning by doing at the site of production. He argues that both are important, and have complementary advantages and drawbacks. Laboratory research can ignore some of the complexities involved in production in search of basic understanding. Learning by doing has the contrasting advantage of being in the full fidelity of the real production process. The drawback to learning by doing, however, is that one is attempting to do two things at once---producing and learning---and this can force compromises onto both. + +Foray positions users at the heart of knowledge production. He says that one major challenge for management is to capture the knowledge being generated by users "on line" during the process of doing and producing, and to integrate it with knowledge created "off line" in laboratories. He discusses implications of the distributed nature of knowledge production among users and others, and notes that the increased capabilities of information and communication technologies tend to reduce innovators' ability to control the knowledge they create. He proposes that the most effective knowledge-management policies and practices will be biased toward knowledge sharing. + +Weber (2004, pp. 72--73) explores similar ideas in the specific context of open source software. "The conventional language of industrial-era economics," he notes, "identifies producers and consumers, supply and demand. The open source process scrambles these categories. Open source software users are not consumers in the conventional sense. . . . Users integrate into the production process itself in a profound way." Weber's central thesis is that the open source process is a new way of organizing production: +={ Weber, S. ; + Open source software : + knowledge and +} + +_1 One solution is the familiar economy that depends upon a blend of exclusive property rights, divisions of labor, reduction of transaction costs, and the management of principal-agent problems. The success of open source demonstrates the importance of a fundamentally different solution, built on top of an unconventional understanding of property rights configured around distribution. . . . And it relies on a set of organizational structures to coordinate behavior around the problem of managing distributed innovation, which is different from the division of labor. (ibid., p. 224) + +Weber details the property-rights regime used by open source projects, and also the nature of open source innovation communities and incentives acting on participants. He then argues that this new mode of production can extend beyond the development of open source software, to an extent and a degree that are not yet understood: +={ Weber, S. ; + Open source software : + knowledge and +} + +One important direction in which the open source experiment points is toward moving beyond the discussion of transaction as a key determinant of institutional design. . . . The elegant analytics of transaction cost economics do very interesting work in explaining how divisions of labor evolve through outsourcing of particular functions (the decision to buy rather than make something). But the open source process adds another element. The notion of open-sourcing as a strategic organizational decision can be seen as an efficiency choice around distributed innovation, just as outsourcing was an efficiency choice around transactions costs. . . . As information about what users want and need to do becomes more fine-grained, more individually differentiated, and harder to communicate, the incentives grow to shift the locus of innovation closer to them by empowering them with freely modifiable tools. (ibid., pp. 265--267) + +!_ National Competitive Advantage +={ Government policy : + and national competitive advantage +6 ; + Manufacturers : + and national competitive advantage +6 ; + National competitive advantage +6 : + See also Government policy ; + Users : + national competitive advantage and +6 +} + +Understanding national innovation systems and the competitive advantage of a nation's firms is an important matter for national policy makers (Nelson 1993). Can what we have learned in this book shed any light on their concerns? Porter (1991), assessing national competitive advantage through the intellectual lens of competitive strategy, concludes that one of four major factors determining the competitive advantage of nations is demand conditions. "A nation's firms," he argues, "gain competitive advantage if domestic buyers are, or are among, the world's most sophisticated and demanding buyers for the product or service. Such buyers provide a window into the most advanced buyer needs. . . . Buyers are demanding where home product needs are especially stringent or challenging because of local circumstances." For example: "The continental United States has been intensely drilled, and wells are being drilled in increasingly difficult and marginal fields. The pressure has been unusually great for American oil field equipment suppliers to perfect techniques that minimize the cost of difficult drilling and ensure full recovery from each field. This has pushed them to advance the state of the art and sustain strong international positions." (ibid., pp. 89--90) +={ Nelson, R. ; + Porter, M. +5 +} + +Porter also argues that /{early}/ domestic demand is also important: "Provided it anticipates buyer needs in other nations, early local demand for a product or service in a nation helps local firms to move sooner than foreign rivals to become established in an industry. They get the jump in building large-scale facilities and accumulating experience. . . . Only if home demand is anticipatory of international need will home demand contribute to advantage." (ibid., p. 95) + +From my perspective, Porter is making the case for the value of a nation's domestic lead users to national competitive advantage. However, he is also assuming that it is /{manufacturers}/ that innovate in response to advanced or stringent user demand. On the basis of the findings reported on in this book, I would modify this assumption by noting that, often, domestic manufacturers' links to /{innovating lead users}/ have the impacts on national competitive advantage that he describes---but that the lead users' input to favored domestic firms would include innovations as well as needs. + +Domestic lead users make a difference to national competitive advantage, Porter argues, because "local firms often enjoy some natural advantages in serving their home market compared to foreign firms, a result of proximity as well as language, regulation, and cultural affinities (even, frequently, if foreign firms are staffed with local nationals)." Porter continues: "Preferred access to a large domestic customer base can be a spur to investment by local firms. Home demand may be perceived as more certain and easier to forecast, while foreign demand is seen as uncertain even if firms think they have the ability to fill it." (ibid., p. 93) + +What new insights and research questions can the work of this book contribute to this analysis of national competitive advantage? On the one hand, I certainly see the pattern Porter describes in some studies of lead user innovation. For example, early in the history of the US semiconductor industry, AT&T, the inventor of the transistor and an early innovator, developed a number of novel types of production equipment as a user organization. AT&T engineers went to local machine shops to have these machines produced in volume to meet AT&T's in-house production needs. A side effect of this procurement strategy was to put many of these previously undistinguished firms into the business of producing advanced semi-conductor equipment to the world (von Hippel 1977, 1988). +={ von Hippel, E. } + +On the other hand, the findings of this book suggest that the "natural advantages" Porter proposes that domestic manufacturers will have with respect to filling the needs of local lead users may be eroding in the Internet age. As has been seen in the case of open source software, and by extension in the cases of other information-based products, users are capable of developing complex products in a coordinated way without geographic proximity. Participants in a particular open source project, for example, may come from a number of countries and may never meet face to face. In the case of physical products, the emergence of a pattern of user-based design followed by "foundry-style" production may also reduce the importance of propinquity between innovating lead users and manufacturers. As in the cases of integrated circuits and kitesurfing discussed earlier in this book, users can transmit CAD product-design information files from anywhere to any suitably equipped manufacturer for production. Probably only in the case of physical products where the interaction between product and production methods are not clear will geography continue to matter deeply in the age of the Internet. Nations may be able to create comparative advantages for domestic manufacturers with respect to profiting from innovation by lead users; however, they cannot assume that such advantages will continue to exist simply because of propinquity. +={ Custom products : + product platforms and | users and ; + Innovation communities : + open source software and ; + Kitesurfing ; + Open source software ; + Printed circuit CAD software ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and ; + Toolkits : + platform products and ; + Users : + custom products and +} + +!_ The Sociology of Technical Communities +={ Information commons +8 ; + Innovation communities : + sociology of +8 ; + Technical communities +8 +} + +Relevant elements of this field include studies in the sociology of technology in general and studies of the sociology of open source software communities in particular. Historical accounts of the evolution of a technology have often taken a linear view of their subject. In the linear view, a technology such as aerodynamics and related technological artifacts such as the airplane start at point A and then naturally evolve to end point B. In other words, it is implicitly assumed that the airplane will evolve from the artifact of wood and fabric and wire developed by the Wright brothers to the characteristics we associate with aircraft today. Nothing much to explain about that. +={ Open source software ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +} + +In the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) model of technological evolution (Pinch and Bijker 1987), the direction in which an artifact (a product, for example) evolves depends very much on the meanings that different "groups with a problem" construct for it. These meanings, in turn, affect which of the many possible variations of a product are developed, how they evolve, and whether and how they eventually die. Groups that construct the meanings of a product centrally include, but are not restricted to, product users. For example, in the case of the bicycle, some relevant groups were users of various types---people who wanted to travel from place to place via bicycle, people who wanted to race bicycles, etc. Relevant non-user groups included "anticyclists," who had a negative view of the bicycle in its early days and wanted it to fail (Bijker 1995). +={ Bijker, W. ; + Pinch, T. +4 ; + Custom products : + users and +} + +When one takes the views of all relevant groups into account, one gets a much richer view of the "socially constructed" evolution of a technology. As a relatively recent example, consider the supersonic transport plane (SST) planned in the United States during the 1970s. Airlines, and potential passengers were "groups with a problem" who presumably wanted the technology for different reasons. Other relevant groups with a problem included people who expected to be negatively affected by the sonic boom the SST would cause, people who were concerned about the pollution its engines would cause in the stratosphere, and people who had other reasons for opposing or supporting the SST. Proposed designs evolved in an attempt to satisfy the various contending interest groups. Eventually it became clear that the SST designers could not arrive at a generally acceptable compromise solution and so the project failed (Horwich 1982). +={ Horwich, M. } + +Pinch and Kline (1996, pp. 774--775) elaborated on the original SCOT model by pointing out that the way a product is interpreted is not restricted to the design stage of a technology, but also can continue during the product's use. They illustrated with the case of the automobile: . . . +={ Kline, R. +2 } + +_1 although [automobile] manufacturers may have ascribed a particular meaning to the artifact they were not able to control how that artifact was used once it got into the hands of the users. Users precisely as users can embed new meanings into the technology. This happened with the adaptation of the car into rural life. As early as 1903, farm families started to define the car as more than a transportation device. In particular, they saw it as a general source of power. George Schmidt, a Kansas farmer, advised readers of the /{Rural New Yorker}/ in 1903 to "block up the hind axle and run a belt over the one wheel of the automobile and around the wheel on a [corn] sheller, grinder, saw, pump, or any other machine that the engine is capable of running, and see how the farmer can save money and be in style with any city man." T. A. Pottinger, an Illinois farm man, wrote in /{Wallace's Farmer}/ in 1909 that "the ideal farm car should have a detachable backseat, which could turn the vehicle into a small truck." Other Phenomena and Fields 173 +={ Pottinger, T. ; + Schmidt, G. +} + +Of course, user innovations and modifications are involved in these cases along with users' reinterpretation of product uses. Kline and Pinch report that manufacturers adopted some of the rural users' innovations, generally after a lag. For example, a car that could also serve as a small truck was eventually offered as a commercial product. +={ Users : + innovation and +13 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +} + +Research on communities of practice offers another link between studies of user innovation and sociology (Brown and Duguid 1991; Wenger 1998). The focus of this research is on the functioning of specialist communities. Researchers find that experts in a field spontaneously form interest groups that communicate to exchange their views and learnings on how to carry out and improve the practices of their profession. Members of communities of practice exchange help in informal ways that seem similar to the practices described above as characteristic of open source software projects and communities of sports innovators. +={ Brown, J. ; + Duguid, P. ; + Wenger, E. ; + Open source software +} + +Research on brand communities is still another related research thread (Muniz and O'Guinn 2001). Brand communities form around commercial brands and products (e.g., Lego construction toys) and even around products discontinued by their manufacturers e.g., Apple's Newton personal digital assistant). Brand communities can be intensely meaningful to participants and can involve user innovation. In Newton groups, for example, users develop new applications and exchange information about how to repair aging equipment (Muniz and Schau 2004). In Lego communities, lead users develop new products, new building techniques, and new offline and online multiplayer building projects that later prove to be of interest to the manufacturer (Antorini 2005). +={ Antorini, Y. ; + Brand communities ; + Muniz, A. ; + O'Guinn, T. ; + Schau, H. ; + Innovation communities : + brand and +} + +!_ The Management of Product Development +={ Product development +10 } + +Finally, I turn to links between user-centered innovation and teaching on the management of product development. Information on lead users as a source of new product ideas now appears in most marketing textbooks. There also should be a link to other elements of user-centered innovation processes in the literature on product-development management---but there really isn't much of one yet. Although much of the research on user innovation cited in this book is going on in schools of management and business economics, little of this information has moved into teaching related to the product-development process as of yet. + +Clearly, it would be useful to provide managers of both user firms and manufacturing firms with a better understanding of the management of user-centered innovation. It is a curious fact that even managers of firms that have built major product lines upon user-developed innovations may hold the manufacturer-centric view that "we developed that." For example, an early study of innovation in scientific instruments documented that nearly 80 percent of the major improvements commercialized by instrument manufacturers had been developed by users (von Hippel 1976). When I later discussed this finding with managers in instrument firms, most of them were astonished. They insisted that all the innovations in the study sample had been developed within manufacturing firms. They could be convinced otherwise only when supplied with actual publications by user-scientists describing user-built prototypes of those instrument improvements---prototypes developed from 5 to 7 years before any instrument firm had sold a functionally equivalent commercial product. +={ von Hippel, E. } + +My inquiries into why managers in this field and others held---and largely still hold---such contrary-to-fact beliefs identified several contributing factors. First, manufacturers seldom track where the major new products and product improvements they sell actually came from. Managers see no need to set up a tracking system, because the conventional wisdom is clear: "Everyone knows new products are developed by manufacturers such as ourselves based on user needs identified by market research." Further, the manufacturing firms have market-research and product-development departments in place, and innovations are somehow being produced. Thus, it is easy to conclude that the manufacturers' innovation processes must be working as expected. + +In fact, however, important, functionally novel innovations are often brought into manufacturers by informal channels. Product-development engineers may attend conferences and learn about important user innovations, salesmen and technical service personnel discover user-modified equipment on field visits, and so on. Once the basic innovation-related information is in house, the operating principles of a user's prototype will often be adopted, but the detailed design of the device will be changed and improved for production. After a while, the user's prototype, if remembered at all, will begin to look quite primitive to the firm's engineers relative to the much better product they have designed. Finally, when sales begin, the firm's advertising will urge customers to buy "/{our}/ wonderful new product." Other Phenomena and Fields 175 + +The net result is understandable: the user roots of many new commercial products, never widely known in manufacturing firms, are forgotten. And when it is time to develop the next innovation, management again turns to the conventional methods that "worked so well for us last time." Eventually, information about new user innovations will again arrive by pathways unnoticed and unmanaged---and with an unnecessary lag. + +To improve matters, managers must learn when it is appropriate to follow user-centered and manufacturer-centered innovation process paradigms and how user-centered innovation can best be managed when it is the method of choice. Managers in user firms and in manufacturing firms need tools with which to understand the innovate-or-buy decisions they face---to understand which product needs or which service needs users (rather than manufacturers) should invest in developing. Managers in user firms also need to learn how their firms can best carry out development work in their low-cost innovation niches: how they can best deploy their information-related advantages of being actual users and residing in the context of use to cheaply learn by doing. Managers in manufacturing firms will want to learn how they can best play a profitable role in user-centered innovation patterns when these play a role in the markets they serve. +={ Sticky information : + toolkits and +1 ; + Users : + innovate-or-buy decisions by | low-cost innovation niches of +} + +Innovating users may also want to learn whether and how to diffuse their innovations by becoming manufacturers. This may be a fairly common practice in some fields. Shah (2000) found that users of sports equipment sometimes became manufacturers by a very natural process. The users would demonstrate the performance and value of their innovations as they used them in public sporting events. Some of the participants in the meets would then ask "Can you make one of those for me too?" Informal hobby-level production would then sometimes become the basis of a major company. Lettl, Herstatt, and Gemünden (2004) report on case histories in which user-innovators became heavily involved in promoting the commercialization of important innovations in surgical equipment. These innovations tended to be developed by surgeons, who then often made major efforts to induce manufacturers to commercialize them. Hienerth (2004) documents how user-innovators in "rodeo kayaking" build their own boats, discover that kayak manufacturers (even those established by a previous generation of user-innovators) are unwilling to manufacture what they want, and so are driven to become manufacturers themselves. +={ Gemünden, H. ; + Lettl, C. ; + Herstatt, C. ; + Hienerth, C. ; + Shah, S. ; + Sporting equipment : + lead users and ; + Windsurfing ; + Surgical equipment +} + +Managers must learn that no single locus of innovation is the "right" one for either user firms or manufacturer firms. The locus of innovation varies between user firms and manufacturing firms according to market-related and information-related conditions. These conditions may well vary predictably over product life cycles. Utterback and Abernathy (1975) proposed that innovation by users is likely to be more important in the early stages of such cycles. Early in the life of a new product, there is a "fluid" stage in which the nature and the use of a product are unclear. Here, Utterback and Abernathy say, users play a big part in sorting the matter out, in part through innovation. Later, a dominant product design will emerge---a shared sense of exactly what a particular product is, what features and components it should include, and how it should function. (We all know, for example, that a car has four wheels and moves along the ground in directions determined by a steering wheel.) After that time, if the market for the product grows, innovation will shift from product to process as firms shift from the problem of what to produce to the problem of how to produce a well-understood product in ever greater volumes. From a lead user innovation perspective, of course, both functionally novel products and functionally novel processes are likely to be developed by users---in the first case users of the product, and in the second by manufacturing firms that use the process. +={ Albernathy, W. ; + Utterback, J. +} + +!_ In Conclusion + +In this book I have explored how and why users, individually and in firms and in communities, develop and freely reveal innovations. I have also argued that there is a general trend toward a open and distributed innovation process driven by steadily better and cheaper computing and communications. The net result is an ongoing shift toward the democratization of innovation. This welfare-enhancing shift is forcing major changes in user and manufacturer innovation practices, and is creating the need for change in government policies. It also, as I noted at the start of the book, presents major new opportunities for us all. Other Phenomena and Fields 177 + +1~ Notes + +!_ Chapter 2 + +1. LES contains four types of measures. Three ("benefits recognized early," "high benefits expected," and "direct elicitation of the construct") contain the core components of the lead user construct. The fourth ("applications generation") is a measure of a number of innovation-related activities in which users might engage: they "suggest new applications," they "pioneer those applications," and (because they have needs or problems earlier than their peers) they may be "used as a test site" (Morrison, Midgely, and Roberts 2004). + +!_ Chapter 3 + +1. Cluster analysis does not specify the "right" number of clusters---it simply segments a sample into smaller and smaller clusters until the analyst calls a halt. Determining an appropriate number of clusters within a sample can be done in different ways. Of course, it always possible to say that "I only want to deal with three market segments, so I will stop my analysis when my sample has been segmented into three clusters." More commonly, analysts will examine the increase of squared error sums of each step, and generally will view the optimal number of clusters as having been reached when the plot shows a sudden "elbow" (Myers 1996). Since this technique does not incorporate information on remaining within-cluster heterogeneity, it can lead to solutions with a large amount of within-cluster variance. The "cubic clustering criterion" (CCC) partially addresses this concern by measuring the within-cluster homogeneity relative to the between-cluster heterogeneity. It suggests choosing the number of clusters where this value peaks (Milligan and Cooper 1985). However, this method appears to be rarely used: Ketchen and Shook (1996) found it used in only 5 of 45 segmentation studies they examined. + +2. http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix + +3. http://modules.apache.org/ + +4. To measure heterogeneity, Franke and I analyzed the extent to which j standards, varying from [1; i], meet the needs of the i individuals in our sample. Conceptually, we first locate a product in multi-dimensional need space (dimensions = 45 in the case of our present study) that minimizes the distances to each individual's needs. (This step is analogous to the Ward's method in cluster analysis that also minimizes within cluster variation; see Punj and Stewart 1983.) The "error" is then measured as the sum of squared Euclidean distances. We then repeated these steps to determine the error for two optimally positioned products, three products, and so on up to a number equaling I -- 1. The sum of squared errors for all cases is then a simple coefficient that measures how much the needs of i individuals can be satisfied with j standard products. The "coefficient of heterogeneity" just specified is sensitive both to the (average) distance between the needs and for the configuration of the needs: when the needs tend to form clusters the heterogeneity coefficient is lower than if they are evenly spread. To make the coefficient comparable across different populations, we calibrate it using a bootstrapping technique (Efron 1979) involving dividing the coefficient by the expected value (this value is generated by averaging the heterogeneity of many random distributions of heterogeneity of the same kind). The average random heterogeneity coefficient is then an appropriate value for calibration purposes: it assumes that there is no systematic relationship between the needs of the individuals or between the need dimensions. + +5. Conceptually, it can be possible to generate "one perfect product" for everyone--- in which case heterogeneity of demand is zero---by simply creating all the features wanted by anyone (45 + 92 features in the case of this study), and incorporating them in the "one perfect product." Users could then select the features they want from a menu contained in the one perfect product to tailor it to their own tastes. Doing this is at least conceptually possible in the case of software, but less so in the case of a physical product for two reasons: (1) delivering all possible physical options to everyone who buys the product would be expensive for physical goods (while costing nothing extra in the case of information products); (2) some options are mutually exclusive (an automobile cannot be both red and green at the same time). + +6. The difference between actual willingness to pay and expressed willingness to pay is much lower for private goods (our case) than for public goods. In the case of private goods, Loomis et al. (1996) found the expressed willingness to pay for art prints to be twice the actual WTP. Willis and Powe (1998) found that among visitors to a castle the expressed WTP was 60 percent lower than the actual WTP. In the case of public goods, Brown et al. (1996), in a study of willingness to pay for removal of a road from a wilderness area, found the expressed WTP to be 4--6 times the actual WTP. Lindsey and Knaap (1999), in a study of WTP for a public urban greenway, found the expressed WTP to be 2-10 times the actual WPT. Neil et al. (1994) found the expressed WTP for conserving an original painting in the desert to be 9 times the actual WTP. Seip and Strand (1992) found that less than 10 percent of those who expressed interest in paying to join an environmental organization actually joined. + +!_ Chapter 6 + +1. As a specific example of a project with an emergent goal, consider the beginnings of the Linux open source software project. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student in Finland, wanted a Unix operating system that could be run on his PC, which was equipped with a 386 processor. Minix was the only software available at that time but it was commercial, closed source, and it traded at US$150. Torvalds found this too expensive, and started development of a Posix-compatible operating system, later known as Linux. Torvalds did not immediately publicize a very broad and ambitious goal, nor did he attempt to recruit contributors. He simply expressed his private motivation in a message he posted on July 3, 1991, to the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix (Wayner 2000): Hello netlanders, Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition. [Posix is a standard for UNIX designers. A software using POSIX is compatible with other UNIX-based software.] Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix-rules? Ftp-sites would be nice. In response, Torvalds got several return messages with Posix rules and people expressing a general interest in the project. By the early 1992, several skilled programmers contributed to Linux and the number of users increased by the day. Today, Linux is the largest open source development project extant in terms of number of developers. +={ Linux } + +!_ Chapter 7 + +1. When they do not incorporate these qualities, they would be more properly referred to as networks---but communities is the term commonly used, and I follow that practice here. + +2. hacker n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. . . . 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence password hacker, network hacker. The correct term for this sense is cracker (Raymond 1996). + +3. Source code is a sequence of instructions to be executed by a computer to accomplish a program's purpose. Programmers write computer software in the form of source code, and also document that source code with brief written explanations of the purpose and design of each section of their program. To convert a program into a form that can actually operate a computer, source code is translated into machine code using a software tool called a compiler. The compiling process removes program documentation and creates a binary version of the program---a sequence of computer instructions consisting only of strings of ones and zeros. Binary code is very difficult for programmers to read and interpret. Therefore, programmers or firms that wish to prevent others from understanding and modifying their code will release only binary versions of the software. In contrast, programmers or firms that wish to enable others to understand and update and modify their software will provide them with its source code. (Moerke 2000, Simon 1996). + +4. See www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL + +5. http://www.sourceforge.net + +6. "The owner(s) [or `maintainers'] of an open source software project are those who have the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to redistribute modified versions. . . . According to standard open source licenses, all parties are equal in the evolutionary game. But in practice there is a very well-recognized distinction between `official' patches [changes to the software], approved and integrated into the evolving software by the publicly recognized maintainers, and `rogue' patches by third parties. Rogue patches are unusual and generally not trusted." (Raymond 1999, p. 89) + +!_ Chapter 8 + +1. See also Bresnahan and Greenstein 1996b; Bresnahan and Saloner 1997; Saloner and Steinmueller 1996. + +!_ Chapter 10 + +1. ABS braking is intended to keep a vehicle's wheels turning during braking. ABS works by automatically and rapidly "pumping" the brakes. The result is that the wheels continue to revolve rather than "locking up," and the operator continues to have control over steering. + +2. In the general literature, Armstrong's (2001) review on forecast bias for new product introduction indicates that sales forecasts are generally optimistic, but that that upward bias decreases as the magnitude of the sales forecast increases. Coller and Yohn (1998) review the literature on bias in accuracy of management earnings forecasts and find that little systematic bias occurs. Tull's (1967) model calculates $15 million in revenue as a level above which forecasts actually become pessimistic on average. 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"Austrian and Industrial Organization Perspectives on Firm Level Competitive Activity and Performance." /{Organization Science}/ 7, no. 3: 243--254. + +%% index di.eric_von_hippel_index.txt democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel_index.txt diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst b/data/samples/current/en/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7ac17cf --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst @@ -0,0 +1,2955 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom + +@creator: + :author: Doctorow, Cory + +@date: + :published: 2003-01-09 + :modified: 2010-09-16 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright © 2003 Cory Doctorow + :license: Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0. That means, you are free: \\ to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work; \\ to Remix - to adapt the work; \\ Under the following conditions: \\ Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work); \\ Noncommercial - You may not use this work for commercial purposes; \\ Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. \\ For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. \\ The best way to do this is with a link http://craphound.com/down \\ Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my permission. 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He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Science fiction needs Cory Doctorow! + +Bruce Sterling + +Author, /{The Hacker Crackdown}/ and /{Distraction}/ + +In the true spirit of Walt Disney, Doctorow has ripped a part of our common culture, mixed it with a brilliant story, and burned into our culture a new set of memes that will be with us for a generation at least. + +Lawrence Lessig + +Author, /{The Future of Ideas}/ + +Cory Doctorow doesn't just write about the future – I think he lives there. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom isn't just a really good read, it's also, like the best kind of fiction, a kind of guide book. See the Tomorrowland of Tomorrow today, and while you're there, why not drop by Frontierland, and the Haunted Mansion as well? (It's the Mansion that's the haunted heart of this book.) Cory makes me feel nostalgic for the future – a dizzying, yet rather pleasant sensation, as if I'm spiraling down the tracks of Space Mountain over and over again. Visit the Magic Kingdom and live forever! + +Kelly Link + +Author, /{Stranger Things Happen}/ + +Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the most entertaining and exciting science fiction story I've read in the last few years. I love page-turners, especially when they are as unusual as this novel. I predict big things for Down and Out—it could easily become a breakout genre-buster. + +Mark Frauenfelder + +Contributing Editor, /{Wired Magazine}/ + +Imagine you woke up one day and Walt Disney had taken over the world. Not only that, but money's been abolished and somebody's developed the Cure for Death. Welcome to the Bitchun Society—and make sure you're strapped in tight, because it's going to be a wild ride. In a world where everyone's wishes can come true, one man returns to the original, crumbling city of dreams—Disney World. Here in the spiritual center of the Bitchun Society he struggles to find and preserve the original, human face of the Magic Kingdom against the young, post-human and increasingly alien inheritors of the Earth. Now that any experience can be simulated, human relationships become ever more fragile; and to Julius, the corny, mechanical ghosts of the Haunted Mansion have come to seem like a precious link to a past when we could tell the real from the simulated, the true from the false. + +Cory Doctorow—cultural critic, Disneyphile, and ultimate Early Adopter—uses language with the reckless confidence of the Beat poets. Yet behind the dazzling prose and vibrant characters lie ideas we should all pay heed to. The future rushes on like a plummeting roller coaster, and it's hard to see where we're going. But at least with this book Doctorow has given us a map of the park. + +Karl Schroeder + +Author, /{Permanence}/ + +Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I've come across in years. He starts out at the point where older SF writers' speculations end. It's a distinct pleasure to give him some Whuffie. + +Rudy Rucker + +Author, /{Spaceland}/ + +Cory Doctorow rocks! I check his blog about ten times a day, because he's always one of the first to notice a major incursion from the social-technological-pop-cultural future, and his voice is a compelling vehicle for news from the future. Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom is about a world that is visible in its outlines today, if you know where to look, from reputation systems to peer-to-peer adhocracies. Doctorow knows where to look, and how to word-paint the rest of us into the picture. + +Howard Rheingold + +Author, /{Smart Mobs}/ + +Doctorow is more than just a sick mind looking to twist the perceptions of those whose realities remain uncorrupted - though that should be enough recommendation to read his work. /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/ is black comedic, sci-fi prophecy on the dangers of surrendering our consensual hallucination to the regime. Fun to read, but difficult to sleep afterwards. + +Douglas Rushkoff + +Author of /{Cyberia}/ and /{Media Virus!}/ + +“Wow! Disney imagineering meets nanotechnology, the reputation economy, and Ray Kurzweil's transhuman future. As much fun as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and as packed with mind bending ideas about social changes cascading from the frontiers of science.” + +Tim O'Reilly + +Publisher and Founder, O'Reilly and Associates + +Doctorow has created a rich and exciting vision of the future, and then wrote a page-turner of a story in it. I couldn't put the book down. + +Bruce Schneier + +Author, /{Secrets and Lies}/ + +Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy, entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired world of the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you're going to find. + +Gardner Dozois + +Editor, /{Asimov's SF}/ + +Cory Doctorow's “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” tells a gripping, fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation from today's technical realities. This is the sort of book that captures and defines the spirit of a turning point in human history when our tools remake ourselves and our world. + +Mitch Kapor + +Founder, Lotus, Inc., co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation + +--+# + +1~prologue PROLOGUE + +I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work. + +I never thought I'd live to see the day when Keep A-Movin' Dan would decide to deadhead until the heat death of the Universe. + +Dan was in his second or third blush of youth when I first met him, sometime late-XXI. He was a rangy cowpoke, apparent 25 or so, all rawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and infinitely comfortable. I was in the middle of my Chem thesis, my fourth Doctorate, and he was taking a break from Saving the World, chilling on campus in Toronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro major. We hooked up at the Grad Students' Union—the GSU, or Gazoo for those who knew—on a busy Friday night, summer-ish. I was fighting a coral-slow battle for a stool at the scratched bar, inching my way closer every time the press of bodies shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surrounded by a litter of cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped. + +Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised a sun-bleached eyebrow. “You get any closer, son, and we're going to have to get a pre-nup.” + +I was apparent forty or so, and I thought about bridling at being called son, but I looked into his eyes and decided that he had enough realtime that he could call me son anytime he wanted. I backed off a little and apologized. + +He struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the bartender's head. “Don't worry about it. I'm probably a little over accustomed to personal space.” + +I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard anyone on-world talk about personal space. With the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate at non-zero, the world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people, even with the migratory and deadhead drains on the population. “You've been jaunting?” I asked—his eyes were too sharp for him to have missed an instant's experience to deadheading. + +He chuckled. “No sir, not me. I'm into the kind of macho shitheadery that you only come across on-world. Jaunting's for play; I need work.” The bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint. + +I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I had to resize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display. I tried to act cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyes and then their involuntary widening. He tried a little aw-shucksery, gave it up and let a prideful grin show. + +“I try not to pay it much mind. Some people, they get overly grateful.” He must've seen my eyes flick up again, to pull his Whuffie history. “Wait, don't go doing that—I'll tell you about it, you really got to know. + +“Damn, you know, it's so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks. You'd think you'd really miss 'em, but you don't.” + +And it clicked for me. He was a missionary—one of those fringe-dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the benighted corners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die, starve, and choke on petrochem waste. It's amazing that these communities survive more than a generation; in the Bitchun Society proper, we usually outlive our detractors. The missionaries don't have such a high success rate—you have to be awfully convincing to get through to a culture that's already successfully resisted nearly a century's worth of propaganda—but when you convert a whole village, you accrue all the Whuffie they have to give. More often, missionaries end up getting refreshed from a backup after they aren't heard from for a decade or so. I'd never met one in the flesh before. + +“How many successful missions have you had?” I asked. + +“Figured it out, huh? I've just come off my fifth in twenty years—counterrevolutionaries hidden out in the old Cheyenne Mountain NORAD site, still there a generation later.” He sandpapered his whiskers with his fingertips. “Their parents went to ground after their life's savings vanished, and they had no use for tech any more advanced than a rifle. Plenty of those, though.” + +He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptance of the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it in subtle, beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to their greenhouses, then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowly inching them toward the Bitchun Society, until they couldn't remember why they hadn't wanted to be a part of it from the start. Now they were mostly off-world, exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimited supplies and deadheading through the dull times en route. + +“I guess it'd be too much of a shock for them to stay on-world. They think of us as the enemy, you know—they had all kinds of plans drawn up for when we invaded them and took them away; hollow suicide teeth, booby-traps, fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors. They just can't get over hating us, even though we don't even know they exist. Off-world, they can pretend that they're still living rough and hard.” He rubbed his chin again, his hard calluses grating over his whiskers. “But for me, the real rough life is right here, on-world. The little enclaves, each one is like an alternate history of humanity—what if we'd taken the Free Energy, but not deadheading? What if we'd taken deadheading, but only for the critically ill, not for people who didn't want to be bored on long bus-rides? Or no hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, no Whuffie? Each one is different and wonderful.” + +I have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and I found myself saying, “Wonderful? Oh sure, nothing finer than, oh, let's see, dying, starving, freezing, broiling, killing, cruelty and ignorance and pain and misery. I know I sure miss it.” + +Keep A-Movin' Dan snorted. “You think a junkie misses sobriety?” + +I knocked on the bar. “Hello! There aren't any junkies anymore!” + +He struck another cig. “But you know what a junkie /{is}/, right? Junkies don't miss sobriety, because they don't remember how sharp everything was, how the pain made the joy sweeter. We can't remember what it was like to work to earn our keep; to worry that there might not be /{enough}/, that we might get sick or get hit by a bus. We don't remember what it was like to take chances, and we sure as shit don't remember what it felt like to have them pay off.” + +He had a point. Here I was, only in my second or third adulthood, and already ready to toss it all in and do something, /{anything}/, else. He had a point—but I wasn't about to admit it. “So you say. I say, I take a chance when I strike up a conversation in a bar, when I fall in love… and what about the deadheads? Two people I know, they just went deadhead for ten thousand years! Tell me that's not taking a chance!” Truth be told, almost everyone I'd known in my eighty-some years were deadheading or jaunting or just /{gone}/. Lonely days, then. + +“Brother, that's committing half-assed suicide. The way we're going, they'll be lucky if someone doesn't just switch 'em off when it comes time to reanimate. In case you haven't noticed, it's getting a little crowded around here.” + +I made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a bar-napkin—the Gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights. “Uh-huh, just like the world was getting a little crowded a hundred years ago, before Free Energy. Like it was getting too greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or too cold. We fixed it then, we'll fix it again when the time comes. I'm gonna be here in ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but I think I'll do it the long way around.” + +He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had been any of the other grad students, I'd have assumed he was grepping for some bolstering factoids to support his next sally. But with him, I just knew he was thinking about it, the old-fashioned way. + +“I think that if I'm still here in ten thousand years, I'm going to be crazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat. You really think you're going to be anything recognizably human in a hundred centuries? Me, I'm not interested in being a post-person. I'm going to wake up one day, and I'm going to say, ‘Well, I guess I've seen about enough,’ and that'll be my last day.” + +I had seen where he was going with this, and I had stopped paying attention while I readied my response. I probably should have paid more attention. “But why? Why not just deadhead for a few centuries, see if there's anything that takes your fancy, and if not, back to sleep for a few more? Why do anything so /{final}/?” + +He embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again, making me feel like I was just a half-pissed glib poltroon. “I suppose it's because nothing else is. I've always known that someday, I was going to stop moving, stop seeking, stop kicking, and have done with it. There'll come a day when I don't have anything left to do, except stop.” + +On campus, they called him Keep-A-Movin' Dan, because of his cowboy vibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to take over every conversation I had for the next six months. I pinged his Whuffie a few times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as he accumulated more esteem from the people he met. + +I'd pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie—all the savings from the symphonies and the first three theses—drinking myself stupid at the Gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until I'd expended all the respect anyone had ever afforded me. All except Dan, who, for some reason, stood me to regular beers and meals and movies. + +I got to feeling like I was someone special—not everyone had a chum as exotic as Keep-A-Movin' Dan, the legendary missionary who visited the only places left that were closed to the Bitchun Society. I can't say for sure why he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice that he'd liked my symphonies, and he'd read my Ergonomics thesis on applying theme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings, and liked what I had to say there. But I think it came down to us having a good time needling each other. + +I'd talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us, of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, of the unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He'd tell me that deadheading was a strong indicator that one's personal reservoir of introspection and creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no real victory. + +This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without resolving. I'd get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success. + +And then he'd lead me down a subtle, carefully baited trail that led to my allowing that while, yes, we might someday encounter alien species with wild and fabulous ways, that right now, there was a slightly depressing homogeneity to the world. + +On a fine spring day, I defended my thesis to two embodied humans and one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousness was present via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting. They all liked it. I collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for Dan in the sweet, flower-stinking streets. + +He'd gone. The Anthro major he'd been torturing with his war-stories said that they'd wrapped up that morning, and he'd headed to the walled city of Tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoon of US Marines who'd settled there and cut themselves off from the Bitchun Society. + +So I went to Disney World. + +In deference to Dan, I took the flight in realtime, in the minuscule cabin reserved for those of us who stubbornly refused to be frozen and stacked like cordwood for the two hour flight. I was the only one taking the trip in realtime, but a flight attendant dutifully served me a urine-sample-sized orange juice and a rubbery, pungent, cheese omelet. I stared out the windows at the infinite clouds while the autopilot banked around the turbulence, and wondered when I'd see Dan next. + +1~ CHAPTER 1 + +My girlfriend was 15 percent of my age, and I was old-fashioned enough that it bugged me. Her name was Lil, and she was second-generation Disney World, her parents being among the original ad-hocracy that took over the management of Liberty Square and Tom Sawyer Island. She was, quite literally, raised in Walt Disney World and it showed. + +It showed. She was neat and efficient in her every little thing, from her shining red hair to her careful accounting of each gear and cog in the animatronics that were in her charge. Her folks were in canopic jars in Kissimmee, deadheading for a few centuries. + +On a muggy Wednesday, we dangled our feet over the edge of the Liberty Belle's riverboat pier, watching the listless Confederate flag over Fort Langhorn on Tom Sawyer Island by moonlight. The Magic Kingdom was all closed up and every last guest had been chased out the gate underneath the Main Street train station, and we were able to breathe a heavy sigh of relief, shuck parts of our costumes, and relax together while the cicadas sang. + +I was more than a century old, but there was still a kind of magic in having my arm around the warm, fine shoulders of a girl by moonlight, hidden from the hustle of the cleaning teams by the turnstiles, breathing the warm, moist air. Lil plumped her head against my shoulder and gave me a butterfly kiss under my jaw. + +“Her name was McGill,” I sang, gently. + +“But she called herself Lil,” she sang, warm breath on my collarbones. + +“And everyone knew her as Nancy,” I sang. + +I'd been startled to know that she knew the Beatles. They'd been old news in my youth, after all. But her parents had given her a thorough—if eclectic—education. + +“Want to do a walk-through?” she asked. It was one of her favorite duties, exploring every inch of the rides in her care with the lights on, after the horde of tourists had gone. We both liked to see the underpinnings of the magic. Maybe that was why I kept picking at the relationship. + +“I'm a little pooped. Let's sit a while longer, if you don't mind.” + +She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Oh, all right. Old man.” She reached up and gently tweaked my nipple, and I gave a satisfying little jump. I think the age difference bothered her, too, though she teased me for letting it get to me. + +“I think I'll be able to manage a totter through the Haunted Mansion, if you just give me a moment to rest my bursitis.” I felt her smile against my shirt. She loved the Mansion; loved to turn on the ballroom ghosts and dance their waltz with them on the dusty floor, loved to try and stare down the marble busts in the library that followed your gaze as you passed. + +I liked it too, but I really liked just sitting there with her, watching the water and the trees. I was just getting ready to go when I heard a soft /{ping}/ inside my cochlea. “Damn,” I said. “I've got a call.” + +“Tell them you're busy,” she said. + +“I will,” I said, and answered the call subvocally. “Julius here.” + +“Hi, Julius. It's Dan. You got a minute?” + +I knew a thousand Dans, but I recognized the voice immediately, though it'd been ten years since we last got drunk at the Gazoo together. I muted the subvocal and said, “Lil, I've got to take this. Do you mind?” + +“Oh, /{no}/, not at all,” she sarcased at me. She sat up and pulled out her crack pipe and lit up. + +“Dan,” I subvocalized, “long time no speak.” + +“Yeah, buddy, it sure has been,” he said, and his voice cracked on a sob. + +I turned and gave Lil such a look, she dropped her pipe. “How can I help?” she said, softly but swiftly. I waved her off and switched the phone to full-vocal mode. My voice sounded unnaturally loud in the cricket-punctuated calm. + +“Where you at, Dan?” I asked. + +“Down here, in Orlando. I'm stuck out on Pleasure Island.” + +“All right,” I said. “Meet me at, uh, the Adventurer's Club, upstairs on the couch by the door. I'll be there in—” I shot a look at Lil, who knew the castmember-only roads better than I. She flashed ten fingers at me. “Ten minutes.” + +“Okay,” he said. “Sorry.” He had his voice back under control. I switched off. + +“What's up?” Lil asked. + +“I'm not sure. An old friend is in town. He sounds like he's got a problem.” + +Lil pointed a finger at me and made a trigger-squeezing gesture. “There,” she said. “I've just dumped the best route to Pleasure Island to your public directory. Keep me in the loop, okay?” + +I set off for the utilidor entrance near the Hall of Presidents and booted down the stairs to the hum of the underground tunnel-system. I took the slidewalk to cast parking and zipped my little cart out to Pleasure Island. + +I found Dan sitting on the L-shaped couch underneath rows of faked-up trophy shots with humorous captions. Downstairs, castmembers were working the animatronic masks and idols, chattering with the guests. + +Dan was apparent fifty plus, a little paunchy and stubbled. He had raccoon-mask bags under his eyes and he slumped listlessly. As I approached, I pinged his Whuffie and was startled to see that it had dropped to nearly zero. + +“Jesus,” I said, as I sat down next to him. “You look like hell, Dan.” + +He nodded. “Appearances can be deceptive,” he said. “But in this case, they're bang-on.” + +“You want to talk about it?” I asked. + +“Somewhere else, huh? I hear they ring in the New Year every night at midnight; I think that'd be a little too much for me right now.” + +I led him out to my cart and cruised back to the place I shared with Lil, out in Kissimmee. He smoked eight cigarettes on the twenty minute ride, hammering one after another into his mouth, filling my runabout with stinging clouds. I kept glancing at him in the rear-view. He had his eyes closed, and in repose he looked dead. I could hardly believe that this was my vibrant action-hero pal of yore. + +Surreptitiously, I called Lil's phone. “I'm bringing him home,” I subvocalized. “He's in rough shape. Not sure what it's all about.” + +“I'll make up the couch,” she said. “And get some coffee together. Love you.” + +“Back atcha, kid,” I said. + +As we approached the tacky little swaybacked ranch-house, he opened his eyes. “You're a pal, Jules.” I waved him off. “No, really. I tried to think of who I could call, and you were the only one. I've missed you, bud.” + +“Lil said she'd put some coffee on,” I said. “You sound like you need it.” + +Lil was waiting on the sofa, a folded blanket and an extra pillow on the side table, a pot of coffee and some Disneyland Beijing mugs beside them. She stood and extended her hand. “I'm Lil,” she said. + +“Dan,” he said. “It's a pleasure.” + +I knew she was pinging his Whuffie and I caught her look of surprised disapproval. Us oldsters who predate Whuffie know that it's important; but to the kids, it's the /{world}/. Someone without any is automatically suspect. I watched her recover quickly, smile, and surreptitiously wipe her hand on her jeans. “Coffee?” she said. + +“Oh, yeah,” Dan said, and slumped on the sofa. + +She poured him a cup and set it on a coaster on the coffee table. “I'll let you boys catch up, then,” she said, and started for the bedroom. + +“No,” Dan said. “Wait. If you don't mind. I think it'd help if I could talk to someone… younger, too.” + +She set her face in the look of chirpy helpfulness that all the second-gen castmembers have at their instant disposal and settled into an armchair. She pulled out her pipe and lit a rock. I went through my crack period before she was born, just after they made it decaf, and I always felt old when I saw her and her friends light up. Dan surprised me by holding out a hand to her and taking the pipe. He toked heavily, then passed it back. + +Dan closed his eyes again, then ground his fists into them, sipped his coffee. It was clear he was trying to figure out where to start. + +“I believed that I was braver than I really am, is what it boils down to,” he said. + +“Who doesn't?” I said. + +“I really thought I could do it. I knew that someday I'd run out of things to do, things to see. I knew that I'd finish some day. You remember, we used to argue about it. I swore I'd be done, and that would be the end of it. And now I am. There isn't a single place left on-world that isn't part of the Bitchun Society. There isn't a single thing left that I want any part of.” + +“So deadhead for a few centuries,” I said. “Put the decision off.” + +“No!” he shouted, startling both of us. “I'm /{done}/. It's /{over}/.” + +“So do it,” Lil said. + +“I /{can't}/,” he sobbed, and buried his face in his hands. He cried like a baby, in great, snoring sobs that shook his whole body. Lil went into the kitchen and got some tissue, and passed it to me. I sat alongside him and awkwardly patted his back. + +“Jesus,” he said, into his palms. “Jesus.” + +“Dan?” I said, quietly. + +He sat up and took the tissue, wiped off his face and hands. “Thanks,” he said. “I've tried to make a go of it, really I have. I've spent the last eight years in Istanbul, writing papers on my missions, about the communities. I did some followup studies, interviews. No one was interested. Not even me. I smoked a lot of hash. It didn't help. So, one morning I woke up and went to the bazaar and said good bye to the friends I'd made there. Then I went to a pharmacy and had the man make me up a lethal injection. He wished me good luck and I went back to my rooms. I sat there with the hypo all afternoon, then I decided to sleep on it, and I got up the next morning and did it all over again. I looked inside myself, and I saw that I didn't have the guts. I just didn't have the guts. I've stared down the barrels of a hundred guns, had a thousand knives pressed up against my throat, but I didn't have the guts to press that button.” + +“You were too late,” Lil said. + +We both turned to look at her. + +“You were a decade too late. Look at you. You're pathetic. If you killed yourself right now, you'd just be a washed-up loser who couldn't hack it. If you'd done it ten years earlier, you would've been going out on top—a champion, retiring permanently.” She set her mug down with a harder-than-necessary clunk. + +Sometimes, Lil and I are right on the same wavelength. Sometimes, it's like she's on a different planet. All I could do was sit there, horrified, and she was happy to discuss the timing of my pal's suicide. + +But she was right. Dan nodded heavily, and I saw that he knew it, too. + +“A day late and a dollar short,” he sighed. + +“Well, don't just sit there,” she said. “You know what you've got to do.” + +“What?” I said, involuntarily irritated by her tone. + +She looked at me like I was being deliberately stupid. “He's got to get back on top. Cleaned up, dried out, into some productive work. Get that Whuffie up, too. /{Then}/ he can kill himself with dignity.” + +It was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Dan, though, was cocking an eyebrow at her and thinking hard. “How old did you say you were?” he asked. + +“Twenty-three,” she said. + +“Wish I'd had your smarts at twenty-three,” he said, and heaved a sigh, straightening up. “Can I stay here while I get the job done?” + +I looked askance at Lil, who considered for a moment, then nodded. + +“Sure, pal, sure,” I said. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You look beat.” + +“Beat doesn't begin to cover it,” he said. + +“Good night, then,” I said. + +1~ CHAPTER 2 + +Ad-hocracy works well, for the most part. Lil's folks had taken over the running of Liberty Square with a group of other interested, compatible souls. They did a fine job, racked up gobs of Whuffie, and anyone who came around and tried to take it over would be so reviled by the guests they wouldn't find a pot to piss in. Or they'd have such a wicked, radical approach that they'd ouster Lil's parents and their pals, and do a better job. + +It can break down, though. There were pretenders to the throne—a group who'd worked with the original ad-hocracy and then had moved off to other pursuits—some of them had gone to school, some of them had made movies, written books, or gone off to Disneyland Beijing to help start things up. A few had deadheaded for a couple decades. + +They came back to Liberty Square with a message: update the attractions. The Liberty Square ad-hocs were the staunchest conservatives in the Magic Kingdom, preserving the wheezing technology in the face of a Park that changed almost daily. The newcomer/old-timers were on-side with the rest of the Park, had their support, and looked like they might make a successful go of it. + +So it fell to Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the meager attractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents, the Liberty Belle riverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion, arguably the coolest attraction to come from the fevered minds of the old-time Disney Imagineers. + +I caught her backstage at the Hall of the Presidents, tinkering with Lincoln II, the backup animatronic. Lil tried to keep two of everything running at speed, just in case. She could swap out a dead bot for a backup in five minutes flat, which is all that crowd-control would permit. + +It had been two weeks since Dan's arrival, and though I'd barely seen him in that time, his presence was vivid in our lives. Our little ranch-house had a new smell, not unpleasant, of rejuve and hope and loss, something barely noticeable over the tropical flowers nodding in front of our porch. My phone rang three or four times a day, Dan checking in from his rounds of the Park, seeking out some way to accumulate personal capital. His excitement and dedication to the task were inspiring, pulling me into his over-the-top-and-damn-the-torpedoes mode of being. + +“You just missed Dan,” she said. She had her head in Lincoln's chest, working with an autosolder and a magnifier. Bent over, red hair tied back in a neat bun, sweat sheening her wiry freckled arms, smelling of girl-sweat and machine lubricant, she made me wish there were a mattress somewhere backstage. I settled for patting her behind affectionately, and she wriggled appreciatively. “He's looking better.” + +His rejuve had taken him back to apparent 25, the way I remembered him. He was rawboned and leathery, but still had the defeated stoop that had startled me when I saw him at the Adventurer's Club. “What did he want?” + +“He's been hanging out with Debra—he wanted to make sure I knew what she's up to.” + +Debra was one of the old guard, a former comrade of Lil's parents. She'd spent a decade in Disneyland Beijing, coding sim-rides. If she had her way, we'd tear down every marvelous rube goldberg in the Park and replace them with pristine white sim boxes on giant, articulated servos. + +The problem was that she was /{really good}/ at coding sims. Her Great Movie Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking—the Star Wars sequence had already inspired a hundred fan-sites that fielded millions of hits. + +She'd leveraged her success into a deal with the Adventureland ad-hocs to rehab the Pirates of the Caribbean, and their backstage areas were piled high with reference: treasure chests and cutlasses and bowsprits. It was terrifying to walk through; the Pirates was the last ride Walt personally supervised, and we'd thought it was sacrosanct. But Debra had built a Pirates sim in Beijing, based on Chend I Sao, the XIXth century Chinese pirate queen, which was credited with rescuing the Park from obscurity and ruin. The Florida iteration would incorporate the best aspects of its Chinese cousin—the AI-driven sims that communicated with each other and with the guests, greeting them by name each time they rode and spinning age-appropriate tales of piracy on the high seas; the spectacular fly-through of the aquatic necropolis of rotting junks on the sea-floor; the thrilling pitch and yaw of the sim as it weathered a violent, breath-taking storm—but with Western themes: wafts of Jamaican pepper sauce crackling through the air; liquid Afro-Caribbean accents; and swordfights conducted in the manner of the pirates who plied the blue waters of the New World. Identical sims would stack like cordwood in the space currently occupied by the bulky ride-apparatus and dioramas, quintupling capacity and halving load-time. + +“So, what's she up to?” + +Lil extracted herself from the Rail-Splitter's mechanical guts and made a comical moue of worry. “She's rehabbing the Pirates—and doing an incredible job. They're ahead of schedule, they've got good net-buzz, the focus groups are cumming themselves.” The comedy went out of her expression, baring genuine worry. + +She turned away and closed up Honest Abe, then fired her finger at him. Smoothly, he began to run through his spiel, silent but for the soft hum and whine of his servos. Lil mimed twiddling a knob and his audiotrack kicked in low: “All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa /{combined}/ could not, by force, make a track on the Blue Ridge, nor take a drink from the Ohio. If destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its author—and its finisher.” She mimed turning down the gain and he fell silent again. + +“You said it, Mr. President,” she said, and fired her finger at him again, powering him down. She bent and adjusted his hand-sewn period topcoat, then carefully wound and set the turnip-watch in his vest-pocket. + +I put my arm around her shoulders. “You're doing all you can—and it's good work,” I said. I'd fallen into the easy castmember mode of speaking, voicing bland affirmations. Hearing the words, I felt a flush of embarrassment. I pulled her into a long, hard hug and fumbled for better reassurance. Finding no words that would do, I gave her a final squeeze and let her go. + +She looked at me sidelong and nodded her head. “It'll be fine, of course,” she said. “I mean, the worst possible scenario is that Debra will do her job very, very well, and make things even better than they are now. That's not so bad.” + +This was a 180-degree reversal of her position on the subject the last time we'd talked, but you don't live more than a century without learning when to point out that sort of thing and when not to. + +My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weekly backup reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his niche. I waved good-bye at her back and walked away, to an uplink terminal. Once I was close enough for secure broadband communications, I got ready to back up. My cochlea chimed again and I answered it. + +“Yes,” I subvocalized, impatiently. I hated getting distracted from a backup—one of my enduring fears was that I'd forget the backup altogether and leave myself vulnerable for an entire week until the next reminder. I'd lost the knack of getting into habits in my adolescence, giving in completely to machine-generated reminders over conscious choice. + +“It's Dan.” I heard the sound of the Park in full swing behind him—children's laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the tromp of thousands of feet. “Can you meet me at the Tiki Room? It's pretty important.” + +“Can it wait for fifteen?” I asked. + +“Sure—see you in fifteen.” + +I rung off and initiated the backup. A status-bar zipped across a HUD, dumping the parts of my memory that were purely digital; then it finished and started in on organic memory. My eyes rolled back in my head and my life flashed before my eyes. + +1~ CHAPTER 3 + +The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores from backup—in the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly. Some people get refreshed a couple dozen times a year. + +Not me. I hate the process. Not so much that I won't participate in it. Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, you know, /{died}/, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them. + +The first time I died, it was not long after my sixtieth birthday. I was SCUBA diving at Playa Coral, near Veradero, Cuba. Of course, I don't remember the incident, but knowing my habits at that particular dive-site and having read the dive-logs of my SCUBA-buddies, I've reconstructed the events. + +I was eeling my way through the lobster-caves, with a borrowed bottle and mask. I'd also borrowed a wetsuit, but I wasn't wearing it—the blood-temp salt water was balm, and I hated erecting barriers between it and my skin. The caves were made of coral and rocks, and they coiled and twisted like intestines. Through each hole and around each corner, there was a hollow, rough sphere of surpassing, alien beauty. Giant lobsters skittered over the walls and through the holes. Schools of fish as bright as jewels darted and executed breath-taking precision maneuvers as I disturbed their busy days. I do some of my best thinking under water, and I'm often slipping off into dangerous reverie at depth. Normally, my diving buddies ensure that I don't hurt myself, but this time I got away from them, spidering forward into a tiny hole. + +Where I got stuck. + +My diving buddies were behind me, and I rapped on my bottle with the hilt of my knife until one of them put a hand on my shoulder. My buddies saw what was up, and attempted to pull me loose, but my bottle and buoyancy-control vest were firmly wedged. The others exchanged hand signals, silently debating the best way to get me loose. Suddenly, I was thrashing and kicking, and then I disappeared into the cave, minus my vest and bottle. I'd apparently attempted to cut through my vest's straps and managed to sever the tube of my regulator. After inhaling a jolt of sea water, I'd thrashed free into the cave, rolling into a monstrous patch of spindly fire-coral. I'd inhaled another lungful of water and kicked madly for a tiny hole in the cave's ceiling, whence my buddies retrieved me shortly thereafter, drowned-blue except for the patchy red welts from the stinging coral. + +In those days, making a backup was a lot more complicated; the procedure took most of a day, and had to be undertaken at a special clinic. Luckily, I'd had one made just before I left for Cuba, a few weeks earlier. My next-most-recent backup was three years old, dating from the completion of my second symphony. + +They recovered me from backup and into a force-grown clone at Toronto General. As far as I knew, I'd laid down in the backup clinic one moment and arisen the next. It took most of a year to get over the feeling that the whole world was putting a monstrous joke over on me, that the drowned corpse I'd seen was indeed my own. In my mind, the rebirth was figurative as well as literal—the missing time was enough that I found myself hard-pressed to socialize with my pre-death friends. + +I told Dan the story during our first friendship, and he immediately pounced on the fact that I'd gone to Disney World to spend a week sorting out my feelings, reinventing myself, moving to space, marrying a crazy lady. He found it very curious that I always rebooted myself at Disney World. When I told him that I was going to live there someday, he asked me if that would mean that I was done reinventing myself. Sometimes, as I ran my fingers through Lil's sweet red curls, I thought of that remark and sighed great gusts of contentment and marveled that my friend Dan had been so prescient. + +The next time I died, they'd improved the technology somewhat. I'd had a massive stroke in my seventy-third year, collapsing on the ice in the middle of a house-league hockey game. By the time they cut my helmet away, the hematomae had crushed my brain into a pulpy, blood-sotted mess. I'd been lax in backing up, and I lost most of a year. But they woke me gently, with a computer-generated precis of the events of the missing interval, and a counselor contacted me daily for a year until I felt at home again in my skin. Again, my life rebooted, and I found myself in Disney World, methodically flensing away the relationships I'd built and starting afresh in Boston, living on the ocean floor and working the heavy-metal harvesters, a project that led, eventually, to my Chem thesis at U of T. + +After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to appreciate the great leaps that restores had made in the intervening ten years. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that led up to my third death as seen from various third-party POVs: security footage from the Adventureland cameras, synthesized memories extracted from Dan's own backup, and a computer-generated fly-through of the scene. I woke feeling preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing that I felt that way because of certain temporary neurotransmitter presets that had been put in place when I was restored. + +Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling face was limned with hairs that had snuck loose of her ponytail. She took my hand and kissed the smooth knuckles. Dan smiled beneficently at me and I was seized with a warm, comforting feeling of being surrounded by people who really loved me. I dug for words appropriate to the scene, decided to wing it, opened my mouth and said, to my surprise, “I have to pee.” + +Dan and Lil smiled at each other. I lurched out of the bed, naked, and thumped to the bathroom. My muscles were wonderfully limber, with a brand-new spring to them. After I flushed I leaned over and took hold of my ankles, then pulled my head right to the floor, feeling the marvelous flexibility of my back and legs and buttocks. A scar on my knee was missing, as were the many lines that had crisscrossed my fingers. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that my nose and earlobes were smaller and perkier. The familiar crow's-feet and the frown-lines between my eyebrows were gone. I had a day's beard all over—head, face, pubis, arms, legs. I ran my hands over my body and chuckled at the ticklish newness of it all. I was briefly tempted to depilate all over, just to keep this feeling of newness forever, but the neurotransmitter presets were evaporating and a sense of urgency over my murder was creeping up on me. + +I tied a towel around my waist and made my way back to the bedroom. The smells of tile-cleaner and flowers and rejuve were bright in my nose, effervescent as camphor. Dan and Lil stood when I came into the room and helped me to the bed. “Well, this /{sucks}/,” I said. + +I'd gone straight from the uplink through the utilidors—three quick cuts of security cam footage, one at the uplink, one in the corridor, and one at the exit in the underpass between Liberty Square and Adventureland. I seemed bemused and a little sad as I emerged from the door, and began to weave my way through the crowd, using a kind of sinuous, darting shuffle that I'd developed when I was doing field-work on my crowd-control thesis. I cut rapidly through the lunchtime crowd toward the long roof of the Tiki Room, thatched with strips of shimmering aluminum cut and painted to look like long grass. + +Fuzzy shots now, from Dan's POV, of me moving closer to him, passing close to a group of teenaged girls with extra elbows and knees, wearing environmentally controlled cloaks and cowls covered with Epcot Center logomarks. One of them is wearing a pith helmet, from the Jungle Traders shop outside of the Jungle Cruise. Dan's gaze flicks away, to the Tiki Room's entrance, where there is a short queue of older men, then back, just as the girl with the pith helmet draws a stylish little organic pistol, like a penis with a tail that coils around her arm. Casually, grinning, she raises her arm and gestures with the pistol, exactly like Lil does with her finger when she's uploading, and the pistol lunges forward. Dan's gaze flicks back to me. I'm pitching over, my lungs bursting out of my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinal gristle and viscera showering the guests before me. A piece of my nametag, now shrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead, causing him to blink. When he looks again, the group of girls is still there, but the girl with the pistol is long gone. + +The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and the girl is grayed-out. We're limned in highlighter yellow, moving in slow-motion. I emerge from the underpass and the girl moves from the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse to the group of her friends. Dan starts to move towards me. The girl raises, arms and fires her pistol. The self-guiding smart-slug, keyed to my body chemistry, flies low, near ground level, weaving between the feet of the crowd, moving just below the speed of sound. When it reaches me, it screams upwards and into my spine, detonating once it's entered my chest cavity. + +The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the Adventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up, following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking and weaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping Beauty Castle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty minutes later, in Tomorrowland, near the new Space Mountain complex, then disappears again. + +“Has anyone ID'd the girl?” I asked, once I'd finished reliving the events. The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fists clenched for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips. + +Dan shook his head. “None of the girls she was with had ever seen her before. The face was one of the Seven Sisters—Hope.” The Seven Sisters were a trendy collection of designer faces. Every second teenage girl wore one of them. + +“How about Jungle Traders?” I asked. “Did they have a record of the pith helmet purchase?” + +Lil frowned. “We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back for six months: only three matched the girl's apparent age; all three have alibis. Chances are she stole it.” + +“Why?” I asked, finally. In my mind's eye, I saw my lungs bursting out of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying like shrapnel. I saw the girl's smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulled the trigger on me. + +“It wasn't random,” Lil said. “The slug was definitely keyed to you—that means that she'd gotten close to you at some point.” + +Right—which meant that she'd been to Disney World in the last ten years. That narrowed it down, all right. + +“What happened to her after Tomorrowland?” I said. + +“We don't know,” Lil said. “Something wrong with the cameras. We lost her and she never reappeared.” She sounded hot and angry—she took equipment failures in the Magic Kingdom personally. + +“Who'd want to do this?” I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. It was the first time I'd been murdered, but I didn't need to be a drama-queen about it. + +Dan's eyes got a far-away look. “Sometimes, people do things for reasons that seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of the world couldn't hope to understand. I've seen a few assassinations, and they never made sense afterwards.” He stroked his chin. “Sometimes, it's better to look for temperament, rather than motivation: who /{could}/ do something like this?” + +Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths who'd visited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That narrowed it down considerably. I pulled up a HUD and checked the time. It had been four days since my murder. I had a shift coming up, working the turnstiles at the Haunted Mansion. I liked to pull a couple of those shifts a month, just to keep myself grounded; it helped to take a reality check while I was churning away in the rarified climate of my crowd-control simulations. + +I stood and went to my closet, started to dress. + +“/{What}/ are you doing?” Lil asked, alarmed. + +“I've got a shift. I'm running late.” + +“You're in no shape to work,” Lil said, tugging at my elbow. I jerked free of her. + +“I'm fine—good as new.” I barked a humorless laugh. “I'm not going to let those bastards disrupt my life any more.” + +/{Those bastards}/? I thought—when had I decided that there was more than one? But I knew it was true. There was no way that this was all planned by one person: it had been executed too precisely, too thoroughly. + +Dan moved to block the bedroom door. “Wait a second,” he said. “You need rest.” + +I fixed him with a doleful glare. “I'll decide that,” I said. He stepped aside. + +“I'll tag along, then,” he said. “Just in case.” + +I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles—sympathy Whuffie—but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating disapproval. Screw 'em. + +I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door as I put it in gear and sped out. + +“Are you sure you're all right?” Dan said as I nearly rolled the runabout taking the corner at the end of our cul-de-sac. + +“Why wouldn't I be?” I said. “I'm as good as new.” + +“Funny choice of words,” he said. “Some would say that you /{were}/ new.” + +I groaned. “Not this argument again,” I said. “I feel like me and no one else is making that claim. Who cares if I've been restored from a backup?” + +“All I'm saying is, there's a difference between /{you}/ and an exact copy of you, isn't there?” + +I knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old fights, but I couldn't resist the bait, and as I marshalled my arguments, it actually helped calm me down some. Dan was that kind of friend, a person who knew you better than you knew yourself. “So you're saying that if you were obliterated and then recreated, atom-for-atom, that you wouldn't be you anymore?” + +“For the sake of argument, sure. Being destroyed and recreated is different from not being destroyed at all, right?” + +“Brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. You're being destroyed and recreated a trillion times a second.” + +“On a very, very small level—” + +“What difference does that make?” + +“Fine, I'll concede that. But you're not really an atom-for-atom copy. You're a clone, with a copied /{brain}/—that's not the same as quantum destruction.” + +“Very nice thing to say to someone who's just been murdered, pal. You got a problem with clones?” + +And we were off and running. + +The Mansion's cast were sickeningly cheerful and solicitous. Each of them made a point of coming around and touching the stiff, starched shoulder of my butler's costume, letting me know that if there was anything they could do for me… I gave them all a fixed smile and tried to concentrate on the guests, how they waited, when they arrived, how they dispersed through the exit gate. Dan hovered nearby, occasionally taking the eight minute, twenty-two second ride-through, running interference for me with the other castmembers. + +He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies and we walked over the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents, noting as I rounded the corner that there was something different about the queue-area. Dan groaned. “They did it already,” he said. + +I looked closer. The turnstiles were blocked by a sandwich board: Mickey in a Ben Franklin wig and bifocals, holding a trowel. “Excuse our mess!” the sign declared. “We're renovating to serve you better!” + +I spotted one of Debra's cronies standing behind the sign, a self-satisfied smile on his face. He'd started off life as a squat, northern Chinese, but had had his bones lengthened and his cheekbones raised so that he looked almost elfin. I took one look at his smile and understood—Debra had established a toehold in Liberty Square. + +“They filed plans for the new Hall with the steering committee an hour after you got shot. The committee loved the plans; so did the net. They're promising not to touch the Mansion.” + +“You didn't mention this,” I said, hotly. + +“We thought you'd jump to conclusions. The timing was bad, but there's no indication that they arranged for the shooter. Everyone's got an alibi; furthermore, they've all offered to submit their backups for proof.” + +“Right,” I said. “Right. So they just /{happened}/ to have plans for a new Hall standing by. And they just /{happened}/ to file them after I got shot, when all our ad-hocs were busy worrying about me. It's all a big coincidence.” + +Dan shook his head. “We're not stupid, Jules. No one thinks that it's a coincidence. Debra's the sort of person who keeps a lot of plans standing by, just in case. But that just makes her a well-prepared opportunist, not a murderer.” + +I felt nauseated and exhausted. I was enough of a castmember that I sought out a utilidor before I collapsed against a wall, head down. Defeat seeped through me, saturating me. + +Dan crouched down beside me. I looked over at him. He was grinning wryly. “Posit,” he said, “for the moment, that Debra really did do this thing, set you up so that she could take over.” + +I smiled, in spite of myself. This was his explaining act, the thing he would do whenever I fell into one of his rhetorical tricks back in the old days. “All right, I've posited it.” + +“Why would she: one, take out you instead of Lil or one of the real old-timers; two, go after the Hall of Presidents instead of Tom Sawyer Island or even the Mansion; and three, follow it up with such a blatant, suspicious move?” + +“All right,” I said, warming to the challenge. “One: I'm important enough to be disruptive but not so important as to rate a full investigation. Two: Tom Sawyer Island is too visible, you can't rehab it without people seeing the dust from shore. Three, Debra's coming off of a decade in Beijing, where subtlety isn't real important.” + +“Sure,” Dan said, “sure.” Then he launched an answering salvo, and while I was thinking up my answer, he helped me to my feet and walked me out to my runabout, arguing all the way, so that by the time I noticed we weren't at the Park anymore, I was home and in bed. + +With all the Hall's animatronics mothballed for the duration, Lil had more time on her hands than she knew what to do with. She hung around the little bungalow, the two of us in the living room, staring blankly at the windows, breathing shallowly in the claustrophobic, superheated Florida air. I had my working notes on queue management for the Mansion, and I pecked at them aimlessly. Sometimes, Lil mirrored my HUD so she could watch me work, and made suggestions based on her long experience. + +It was a delicate process, this business of increasing throughput without harming the guest experience. But for every second I could shave off of the queue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty guests through and lop thirty seconds off total wait-time. And the more guests who got to experience the Mansion, the more of a Whuffie-hit Debra's people would suffer if they made a move on it. So I dutifully pecked at my notes, and found three seconds I could shave off the graveyard sequence by swiveling the Doom Buggy carriages stage-left as they descended from the attic window: by expanding their fields-of-vision, I could expose the guests to all the scenes more quickly. + +I ran the change in fly-through, then implemented it after closing and invited the other Liberty Square ad-hocs to come and test it out. + +It was another muggy winter evening, prematurely dark. The ad-hocs had enough friends and family with them that we were able to simulate an off-peak queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in the preshow area, waiting for the doors to swing open, listening to the wolf-cries and assorted boo-spookery from the hidden speakers. + +The doors swung open, revealing Lil in a rotting maid's uniform, her eyes lined with black, her skin powdered to a deathly pallor. She gave us a cold, considering glare, then intoned, “Master Gracey requests more bodies.” + +As we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, Lil contrived to give my ass an affectionate squeeze. I turned to return the favor, and saw Debra's elfin comrade looming over Lil's shoulder. My smile died on my lips. + +The man locked eyes with me for a moment, and I saw something in there—some admixture of cruelty and worry that I didn't know what to make of. He looked away immediately. I'd known that Debra would have spies in the crowd, of course, but with elf-boy watching, I resolved to make this the best show I knew how. + +It's subtle, this business of making the show better from within. Lil had already slid aside the paneled wall that led to stretch-room number two, the most recently serviced one. Once the crowd had moved inside, I tried to lead their eyes by adjusting my body language to poses of subtle attention directed at the new spotlights. When the newly remastered soundtrack came from behind the sconce-bearing gargoyles at the corners of the octagonal room, I leaned my body slightly in the direction of the moving stereo-image. And an instant before the lights snapped out, I ostentatiously cast my eyes up into the scrim ceiling, noting that others had taken my cue, so they were watching when the UV-lit corpse dropped from the pitch-dark ceiling, jerking against the noose at its neck. + +The crowd filed into the second queue area, where they boarded the Doom Buggies. There was a low buzz of marveling conversation as we made our way onto the moving sidewalk. I boarded my Doom Buggy and an instant later, someone slid in beside me. It was the elf. + +He made a point of not making eye contact with me, but I sensed his sidelong glances at me as we rode through past the floating chandelier and into the corridor where the portraits' eyes watched us. Two years before, I'd accelerated this sequence and added some random swivel to the Doom Buggies, shaving 25 seconds off the total, taking the hourly throughput cap from 2365 to 2600. It was the proof-of-concept that led to all the other seconds I'd shaved away since. The violent pitching of the Buggy brought me and the elf into inadvertent contact with one another, and when I brushed his hand as I reached for the safety bar, I felt that it was cold and sweaty. + +He was nervous! /{He}/ was nervous. What did /{he}/ have to be nervous about? I was the one who'd been murdered—maybe he was nervous because he was supposed to finish the job. I cast my own sidelong looks at him, trying to see suspicious bulges in his tight clothes, but the Doom Buggy's pebbled black plastic interior was too dim. Dan was in the Buggy behind us, with one of the Mansion's regular castmembers. I rang his cochlea and subvocalized: “Get ready to jump out on my signal.” Anyone leaving their Buggy would interrupt an infrared beam and stop the ride system. I knew I could rely on Dan to trust me without a lot of explaining, which meant that I could keep a close watch on Debra's crony. + +We went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of doors, where monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining against the hinges, recorded groans mixed in with pounding. I thought about it—if I wanted to kill someone on the Mansion, what would be the best place to do it? The attic staircase-- the next sequence—seemed like a good bet. A cold clarity washed over me. The elf would kill me in the gloom of the staircase, dump me out over the edge at the blind turn toward the graveyard, and that would be it. Would he be able to do it if I were staring straight at him? He seemed terribly nervous as it was. I swiveled in my seat and looked him straight in the eye. + +He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on staring at him, my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. We rode down the staircase, facing up, listening to the clamour of voices from the cemetery and the squawk of the red-eyed raven. I caught sight of the quaking groundkeeper animatronic from the corner of my eye and startled. I let out a subvocal squeal and was pitched forward as the ride system shuddered to a stop. + +“Jules?” came Dan's voice in my cochlea. “You all right?” + +He'd heard my involuntary note of surprise and had leapt clear of the Buggy, stopping the ride. The elf was looking at me with a mixture of surprise and pity. + +“It's all right, it's all right. False alarm.” I paged Lil and subvocalized to her, telling her to start up the ride ASAP, it was all right. + +I rode the rest of the way with my hands on the safety bar, my eyes fixed ahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the timer I'd been running. The demo was a debacle—instead of shaving off three seconds, I'd added thirty. I wanted to cry. + +I debarked the Buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue, leaning heavily against the fence, staring blindly at the pet cemetery. My head swam: I was out of control, jumping at shadows. I was spooked. + +And I had no reason to be. Sure, I'd been murdered, but what had it cost me? A few days of “unconsciousness” while they decanted my backup into my new body, a merciful gap in memory from my departure at the backup terminal up until my death. I wasn't one of those nuts who took death /{seriously}/. It wasn't like they'd done something /{permanent}/. + +In the meantime, I /{had}/ done something permanent: I'd dug Lil's grave a little deeper, endangered the ad-hocracy and, worst of all, the Mansion. I'd acted like an idiot. I tasted my dinner, a wolfed-down hamburger, and swallowed hard, forcing down the knob of nausea. + +I sensed someone at my elbow, and thinking it was Lil, come to ask me what had gone on, I turned with a sheepish grin and found myself facing the elf. + +He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone running a language module. “Hi there. We haven't been introduced, but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your work. I'm Tim Fung.” + +I pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy in the close heat of the Florida night. “Julius,” I said, startled at how much like a bark it sounded. /{Careful}/, I thought, /{no need to escalate the hostilities.}/ “It's kind of you to say that. I like what you-all have done with the Pirates.” + +He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile, as though he'd just been given high praise from one of his heroes. “Really? I think it's pretty good—the second time around you get a lot of chances to refine things, really clarify the vision. Beijing—well, it was exciting, but it was rushed, you know? I mean, we were really struggling. Every day, there was another pack of squatters who wanted to tear the Park down. Debra used to send me out to give the children piggyback rides, just to keep our Whuffie up while she was evicting the squatters. It was good to have the opportunity to refine the designs, revisit them without the floor show.” + +I knew about this, of course—Beijing had been a real struggle for the ad-hocs who built it. Lots of them had been killed, many times over. Debra herself had been killed every day for a week and restored to a series of prepared clones, beta-testing one of the ride systems. It was faster than revising the CAD simulations. Debra had a reputation for pursuing expedience. + +“I'm starting to find out how it feels to work under pressure,” I said, and nodded significantly at the Mansion. I was gratified to see him look embarrassed, then horrified. + +“We would /{never}/ touch the Mansion,” he said. “It's /{perfect}/!” + +Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte. They both looked concerned—now that I thought of it, they'd both seemed incredibly concerned about me since the day I was revived. + +Dan's gait was odd, stilted, like he was leaning on Lil for support. They looked like a couple. An irrational sear of jealousy jetted through me. I was an emotional wreck. Still, I took Lil's big, scarred hand in mine as soon as she was in reach, then cuddled her to me protectively. She had changed out of her maid's uniform into civvies: smart coveralls whose micropore fabric breathed in time with her own respiration. + +“Lil, Dan, I want you to meet Tim Fung. He was just telling me war stories from the Pirates project in Beijing.” + +Lil waved and Dan gravely shook his hand. “That was some hard work,” Dan said. + +It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normally an instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still disoriented. I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respect garnered from people who shared very few of my opinions. I expected that. What I didn't expect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credence to the rankings of people I respected, was also high—higher than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect from the elf—/{Tim}/, I had to remember to call him Tim—would carry a lot of weight in every camp that mattered. + +Dan's score was incrementing upwards, but he still had a rotten profile. He had accrued a good deal of left-handed Whuffie, and I curiously backtraced it to the occasion of my murder, when Debra's people had accorded him a generous dollop of props for the levelheaded way he had scraped up my corpse and moved it offstage, minimizing the disturbance in front of their wondrous Pirates. + +I was fugueing, wandering off on the kind of mediated reverie that got me killed on the reef at Playa Coral, and I came out of it with a start, realizing that the other three were politely ignoring my blown buffer. I could have run backwards through my short-term memory to get the gist of the conversation, but that would have lengthened the pause. Screw it. “So, how're things going over at the Hall of the Presidents?” I asked Tim. + +Lil shot me a cautioning look. She'd ceded the Hall to Debra's ad-hocs, that being the only way to avoid the appearance of childish disattention to the almighty Whuffie. Now she had to keep up the fiction of good-natured cooperation—that meant not shoulder-surfing Debra, looking for excuses to pounce on her work. + +Tim gave us the same half-grin he'd greeted me with. On his smooth, pointed features, it looked almost irredeemably cute. “We're doing good stuff, I think. Debra's had her eye on the Hall for years, back in the old days, before she went to China. We're replacing the whole thing with broadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the Presidents' lives: newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled biographies, personal papers. It'll be like having each President /{inside}/ you, core-dumped in a few seconds. Debra said we're going to /{flash-bake}/ the Presidents on your mind!” His eyes glittered in the twilight. + +Having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking, Tim's description struck a chord in me. My personality seemed to be rattling around a little in my mind, as though it had been improperly fitted. It made the idea of having the gestalt of 50-some Presidents squashed in along with it perversely appealing. + +“Wow,” I said. “That sounds wild. What do you have in mind for physical plant?” The Hall as it stood had a quiet, patriotic dignity cribbed from a hundred official buildings of the dead USA. Messing with it would be like redesigning the stars-and-bars. + +“That's not really my area,” Tim said. “I'm a programmer. But I could have one of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you want.” + +“That would be fine,” Lil said, taking my elbow. “I think we should be heading home, now, though.” She began to tug me away. Dan took my other elbow. Behind her, the Liberty Belle glowed like a ghostly wedding cake in the twilight. + +“That's too bad,” Tim said. “My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on the new Hall. I'm sure they'd love to have you drop by.” + +The idea seized hold of me. I would go into the camp of the enemy, sit by their fire, learn their secrets. “That would be /{great}/!” I said, too loudly. My head was buzzing slightly. Lil's hands fell away. + +“But we've got an early morning tomorrow,” Lil said. “You've got a shift at eight, and I'm running into town for groceries.” She was lying, but she was telling me that this wasn't her idea of a smart move. But my faith was unshakeable. + +“Eight a.m. shift? No problem—I'll be right here when it starts. I'll just grab a shower at the Contemporary in the morning and catch the monorail back in time to change. All right?” + +Dan tried. “But Jules, we were going to grab some dinner at Cinderella's Royal Table, remember? I made reservations.” + +“Aw, we can eat any time,” I said. “This is a hell of an opportunity.” + +“It sure is,” Dan said, giving up. “Mind if I come along?” + +He and Lil traded meaningful looks that I interpreted to mean, /{If he's going to be a nut, one of us really should stay with him}/. I was past caring—I was going to beard the lion in his den! + +Tim was apparently oblivious to all of this. “Then it's settled! Let's go.” + +On the walk to the Hall, Dan kept ringing my cochlea and I kept sending him straight to voicemail. All the while, I kept up a patter of small-talk with him and Tim. I was determined to make up for my debacle in the Mansion with Tim, win him over. + +Debra's people were sitting around in the armchairs onstage, the animatronic presidents stacked in neat piles in the wings. Debra was sprawled in Lincoln's armchair, her head cocked lazily, her legs extended before her. The Hall's normal smells of ozone and cleanliness were overridden by sweat and machine-oil, the stink of an ad-hoc pulling an all-nighter. The Hall took fifteen years to research and execute, and a couple of days to tear down. + +She was au-naturel, still wearing the face she'd been born with, albeit one that had been regenerated dozens of times after her deaths. It was patrician, waxy, long, with a nose that was made for staring down. She was at least as old as I was, though she was only apparent 22. I got the sense that she picked this age because it was one that afforded boundless reserves of energy. + +She didn't deign to rise as I approached, but she did nod languorously at me. The other ad-hocs had been split into little clusters, hunched over terminals. They all had the raccoon-eyed, sleep-deprived look of fanatics, even Debra, who managed to look lazy and excited simultaneously. + +/{Did you have me killed}/? I wondered, staring at Debra. After all, she'd been killed dozens, if not hundreds of times. It might not be such a big deal for her. + +“Hi there,” I said, brightly. “Tim offered to show us around! You know Dan, right?” + +Debra nodded at him. “Oh, sure. Dan and I are pals, right?” + +Dan's poker face didn't twitch a muscle. “Hello, Debra,” he said. He'd been hanging out with them since Lil had briefed him on the peril to the Mansion, trying to gather some intelligence for us to use. They knew what he was up to, of course, but Dan was a fairly charming guy and he worked like a mule, so they tolerated him. But it seemed like he'd violated a boundary by accompanying me, as though the polite fiction that he was more a part of Debra's ad-hoc than Lil's was shattered by my presence. + +Tim said, “Can I show them the demo, Debra?” + +Debra quirked an eyebrow, then said, “Sure, why not. You'll like this, guys.” + +Tim hustled us backstage, where Lil and I used to sweat over the animatronics and cop surreptitious feels. Everything had been torn loose, packed up, stacked. They hadn't wasted a moment—they'd spent a week tearing down a show that had run for more than a century. The scrim that the projected portions of the show normally screened on was ground into the floor, spotted with grime, footprints and oil. + +Tim showed me to a half-assembled backup terminal. Its housing was off, and any number of wireless keyboards, pointers and gloves lay strewn about it. It had the look of a prototype. + +“This is it—our uplink. So far, we've got a demo app running on it: Lincoln's old speech, along with the civil-war montage. Just switch on guest access and I'll core-dump it to you. It's wild.” + +I pulled up my HUD and switched on guest access. Tim pointed a finger at the terminal and my brain was suffused with the essence of Lincoln: every nuance of his speech, the painstakingly researched movement tics, his warts and beard and topcoat. It almost felt like I /{was}/ Lincoln, for a moment, and then it passed. But I could still taste the lingering coppery flavor of cannon-fire and chewing tobacco. + +I staggered backwards. My head swam with flash-baked sense-impressions, rich and detailed. I knew on the spot that Debra's Hall of the Presidents was going to be a hit. + +Dan took a shot off the uplink, too. Tim and I watched him as his expression shifted from skepticism to delight. Tim looked expectantly at me. + +“That's really fine,” I said. “Really, really fine. Moving.” + +Tim blushed. “Thanks! I did the gestalt programming—it's my specialty.” + +Debra spoke up from behind him—she'd sauntered over while Dan was getting his jolt. “I got the idea in Beijing, when I was dying a lot. There's something wonderful about having memories implanted, like you're really working your brain. I love the synthetic clarity of it all.” + +Tim sniffed. “Not synthetic at all,” he said, turning to me. “It's nice and soft, right?” + +I sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply when Debra said: “Tim keeps trying to make it all more impressionistic, less computer-y. He's wrong, of course. We don't want to simulate the experience of watching the show—we want to /{transcend it}/.” + +Tim nodded reluctantly. “Sure, transcend it. But the way we do that is by making the experience /{human}/, a mile in the presidents' shoes. Empathy-driven. What's the point of flash-baking a bunch of dry facts on someone's brain?” + +1~ CHAPTER 4 + +One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things: + +_1 That Debra's people had had me killed, and screw their alibis, + +_1 That they would kill me again, when the time came for them to make a play for the Haunted Mansion, + +_1 That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive strike against them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt. + +Dan and I had been treated to eight hours of insectile precision in the Hall of Presidents, Debra's people working with effortless cooperation born of the adversity they'd faced in Beijing. Debra moved from team to team, making suggestions with body language as much as with words, leaving bursts of inspired activity in her wake. + +It was that precision that convinced me of point one. Any ad-hoc this tight could pull off anything if it advanced their agenda. Ad-hoc? Hell, call them what they were: an army. + +Point two came to me when I sampled the Lincoln build that Tim finished at about three in the morning, after intensive consultation with Debra. The mark of a great ride is that it gets better the second time around, as the detail and flourishes start to impinge on your consciousness. The Mansion was full of little gimcracks and sly nods that snuck into your experience on each successive ride. + +Tim shuffled his feet nervously, bursting with barely restrained pride as I switched on public access. He dumped the app to my public directory, and, gingerly, I executed it. + +God! God and Lincoln and cannon-fire and oratory and ploughs and mules and greatcoats! It rolled over me, it punched through me, it crashed against the inside of my skull and rebounded. The first pass through, there had been a sense of order, of narrative, but this, this was gestalt, the whole thing in one undifferentiated ball, filling me and spilling over. It was panicky for a moment, as the essence of Lincolness seemed to threaten my own personality, and, just as it was about to overwhelm me, it receded, leaving behind a rush of endorphin and adrenaline that made me want to jump. + +“Tim,” I gasped. “Tim! That was…” Words failed me. I wanted to hug him. What we could do for the Mansion with this! What elegance! Directly imprinting the experience, without recourse to the stupid, blind eyes; the thick, deaf ears. + +Tim beamed and basked, and Debra nodded solemnly from her throne. “You liked it?” Tim said. I nodded, and staggered back to the theatre seat where Dan slept, head thrown back, snores softly rattling in his throat. + +Incrementally, reason trickled back into my mind, and with it came ire. How dare they? The wonderful compromises of technology and expense that had given us the Disney rides—rides that had entertained the world for two centuries and more—could never compete head to head with what they were working on. + +My hands knotted into fists in my lap. Why the fuck couldn't they do this somewhere else? Why did they have to destroy everything I loved to realize this? They could build this tech anywhere—they could distribute it online and people could access it from their living rooms! + +But that would never do. Doing it here was better for the old Whuffie—they'd make over Disney World and hold it, a single ad-hoc where three hundred had flourished before, smoothly operating a park twice the size of Manhattan. + +I stood and stalked out of the theater, out into Liberty Square and the Park. It had cooled down without drying out, and there was a damp chill that crawled up my back and made my breath stick in my throat. I turned to contemplate the Hall of Presidents, staid and solid as it had been since my boyhood and before, a monument to the Imagineers who anticipated the Bitchun Society, inspired it. + +I called Dan, still snoring back in the theater, and woke him. He grunted unintelligibly in my cochlea. + +“They did it—they killed me.” I knew they had, and I was glad. It made what I had to do next easier. + +“Oh, Jesus. They didn't kill you—they offered their backups, remember? They couldn't have done it.” + +“Bullshit!” I shouted into the empty night. “Bullshit! They did it, and they fucked with their backups somehow. They must have. It's all too neat and tidy. How else could they have gotten so far with the Hall so fast? They knew it was coming, they planned a disruption, and they moved in. Tell me that you think they just had these plans lying around and moved on them when they could.” + +Dan groaned, and I heard his joints popping. He must have been stretching. The Park breathed around me, the sounds of maintenance crews scurrying in the night. “I do believe that. Clearly, you don't. It's not the first time we've disagreed. So now what?” + +“Now we save the Mansion,” I said. “Now we fight back.” + +“Oh, shit,” Dan said. + +I have to admit, there was a part of me that concurred. + +My opportunity came later that week. Debra's ad-hocs were showboating, announcing a special preview of the new Hall to the other ad-hocs that worked in the Park. It was classic chutzpah, letting the key influencers in the Park in long before the bugs were hammered out. A smooth run would garner the kind of impressed reaction that guaranteed continued support while they finished up; a failed demo could doom them. There were plenty of people in the Park who had a sentimental attachment to the Hall of Presidents, and whatever Debra's people came up with would have to answer their longing. + +“I'm going to do it during the demo,” I told Dan, while I piloted the runabout from home to the castmember parking. I snuck a look at him to gauge his reaction. He had his poker face on. + +“I'm not going to tell Lil,” I continued. “It's better that she doesn't know—plausible deniability.” + +“And me?” he said. “Don't I need plausible deniability?” + +“No,” I said. “No, you don't. You're an outsider. You can make the case that you were working on your own—gone rogue.” I knew it wasn't fair. Dan was here to build up his Whuffie, and if he was implicated in my dirty scheme, he'd have to start over again. I knew it wasn't fair, but I didn't care. I knew that we were fighting for our own survival. “It's good versus evil, Dan. You don't want to be a post-person. You want to stay human. The rides are human. We each mediate them through our own experience. We're physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses. What Debra's people are building—it's hive-mind shit. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's not an experience, it's brainwashing! You gotta know that.” I was pleading, arguing with myself as much as with him. + +I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney back-roads, lined with sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple signage. Dan was looking thoughtful, the way he had back in our old days in Toronto. Some of my tension dissipated. He was thinking about it—I'd gotten through to him. + +“Jules, this isn't one of your better ideas.” My chest tightened, and he patted my shoulder. He had the knack of putting me at my ease, even when he was telling me that I was an idiot. “Even if Debra was behind your assassination—and that's not a certainty, we both know that. Even if that's the case, we've got better means at our disposal. Improving the Mansion, competing with her head to head, that's smart. Give it a little while and we can come back at her, take over the Hall—even the Pirates, that'd really piss her off. Hell, if we can prove she was behind the assassination, we can chase her off right now. Sabotage is not going to do you any good. You've got lots of other options.” + +“But none of them are fast enough, and none of them are emotionally satisfying. This way has some goddamn /{balls}/.” + +We reached castmember parking, I swung the runabout into a slot and stalked out before it had a chance to extrude its recharger cock. I heard Dan's door slam behind me and knew that he was following behind. + +We took to the utilidors grimly. I walked past the cameras, knowing that my image was being archived, my presence logged. I'd picked the timing of my raid carefully: by arriving at high noon, I was sticking to my traditional pattern for watching hot-weather crowd dynamics. I'd made a point of visiting twice during the previous week at this time, and of dawdling in the commissary before heading topside. The delay between my arrival in the runabout and my showing up at the Mansion would not be discrepant. + +Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and then hugged the wall, in the camera's blindspot. Back in my early days in the Park, when I was courting Lil, she showed me the A-Vac, the old pneumatic waste-disposal system, decommissioned in the 20s. The kids who grew up in the Park had been notorious explorers of the tubes, which still whiffed faintly of the garbage bags they'd once whisked at 60 mph to the dump on the property's outskirts, but for a brave, limber kid, the tubes were a subterranean wonderland to explore when the hypermediated experiences of the Park lost their luster. + +I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. “If they hadn't killed me and forced me to switch to a new body, I probably wouldn't be flexible enough to fit in,” I hissed at Dan. “Ironic, huh?” + +I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started inching my way under the Hall of Presidents. + +My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which didn't occur to me until I was forty minutes into the pneumatic tube, arms held before me and legs angled back like a swimmer's. + +How was I going to reach into my pockets? + +Specifically, how was I going to retrieve my HERF gun from my back pants-pocket, when I couldn't even bend my elbows? The HERF gun was the crux of the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency generator with a directional, focused beam that would punch up through the floor of the Hall of Presidents and fuse every goddamn scrap of unshielded electronics on the premises. I'd gotten the germ of the idea during Tim's first demo, when I'd seen all of his prototypes spread out backstage, cases off, ready to be tinkered with. Unshielded. + +“Dan,” I said, my voice oddly muffled by the tube's walls. + +“Yeah?” he said. He'd been silent during the journey, the sound of his painful, elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my only indicator of his presence. + +“Can you reach my back pocket?” + +“Oh, shit,” he said. + +“Goddamn it,” I said, “keep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can you reach it or not?” + +I heard him grunt as he pulled himself up in the tube, then felt his hand groping up my calf. Soon, his chest was crushing my calves into the tube's floor and his hand was pawing around my ass. + +“I can reach it,” he said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn't too happy about my snapping at him, but I was too wrapped up to consider an apology, despite what must be happening to my Whuffie as Dan did his slow burn. + +He fumbled the gun—a narrow cylinder as long as my palm—out of my pocket. “Now what?” he said. + +“Can you pass it up?” I asked. + +Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his ribcage met my glutes. “I can't get any further,” he said. + +“Fine,” I said. “You'll have to fire it, then.” I held my breath. Would he do it? It was one thing to be my accomplice, another to be the author of the destruction. + +“Aw, Jules,” he said. + +“A simple yes or no, Dan. That's all I want to hear from you.” I was boiling with anger—at myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the whole goddamn thing. + +“Fine,” he said. + +“Good. Dial it up to max dispersion and point it straight up.” + +I heard him release the catch, felt a staticky crackle in the air, and then it was done. The gun was a one-shot, something I'd confiscated from a mischievous guest a decade before, when they'd had a brief vogue. + +“Hang on to it,” I said. I had no intention of leaving such a damning bit of evidence behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to the next service hatch, near the parking lot, where I'd stashed an identical change of clothes for both of us. + +We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debra's ad-hocs were ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of Presidents, a collection of influential castmembers from other ad-hocs filling the pre-show area to capacity. + +Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up behind the crowd. He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and I smiled back, full of good feelings now that I knew that he was going down in flames. I found Lil and slipped my hand into hers as we filed into the auditorium, which had the new-car smell of rug shampoo and fresh electronics. + +We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively, while Debra, dressed in Lincoln's coat and stovepipe, delivered a short speech. There was some kind of broadcast rig mounted over the stage now, something to allow them to beam us all their app in one humongous burst. + +Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round of applause, and they started the demo. + +Nothing happened. I tried to keep the shit-eating grin off my face as nothing happened. No tone in my cochlea indicating a new file in my public directory, no rush of sensation, nothing. I turned to Lil to make some snotty remark, but her eyes were closed, her mouth lolling open, her breath coming in short huffs. Down the row, every castmember was in the same attitude of deep, mind-blown concentration. I pulled up a diagnostic HUD. + +Nothing. No diagnostics. No HUD. I cold-rebooted. + +Nothing. + +I was offline. + +Offline, I filed out of the Hall of Presidents. Offline, I took Lil's hand and walked to the Liberty Belle load-zone, our spot for private conversations. Offline, I bummed a cigarette from her. + +Lil was upset—even through my bemused, offline haze, I could tell that. Tears pricked her eyes. + +“Why didn't you tell me?” she said, after a hard moment's staring into the moonlight reflecting off the river. + +“Tell you?” I said, dumbly. + +“They're really good. They're better than good. They're better than us. Oh, God.” + +Offline, I couldn't find stats or signals to help me discuss the matter. Offline, I tried it without help. “I don't think so. I don't think they've got soul, I don't think they've got history, I don't think they've got any kind of connection to the past. The world grew up in the Disneys—they visit this place for continuity as much as for entertainment. We provide that.” I'm offline, and they're not—what the hell happened? + +“It'll be okay, Lil. There's nothing in that place that's better than us. Different and new, but not better. You know that—you've spent more time in the Mansion than anyone, you know how much refinement, how much work there is in there. How can something they whipped up in a couple weeks possibly be better that this thing we've been maintaining for all these years?” + +She ground the back of her sleeve against her eyes and smiled. “Sorry,” she said. Her nose was red, her eyes puffy, her freckles livid over the flush of her cheeks. “Sorry—it's just shocking. Maybe you're right. And even if you're not—hey, that's the whole point of a meritocracy, right? The best stuff survives, everything else gets supplanted. + +“Oh, shit, I hate how I look when I cry,” she said. “Let's go congratulate them.” + +As I took her hand, I was obscurely pleased with myself for having improved her mood without artificial assistance. + +Dan was nowhere to be seen as Lil and I mounted the stage at the Hall, where Debra's ad-hocs and a knot of well-wishers were celebrating by passing a rock around. Debra had lost the tailcoat and hat, and was in an extreme state of relaxation, arms around the shoulders of two of her cronies, pipe between her teeth. + +She grinned around the pipe as Lil and I stumbled through some insincere compliments, nodded, and toked heavily while Tim applied a torch to the bowl. + +“Thanks,” she said, laconically. “It was a team effort.” She hugged her cronies to her, almost knocking their heads together. + +Lil said, “What's your timeline, then?” + +Debra started unreeling a long spiel about critical paths, milestones, requirements meetings, and I tuned her out. Ad-hocs were crazy for that process stuff. I stared at my feet, at the floorboards, and realized that they weren't floorboards at all, but faux-finish painted over a copper mesh—a Faraday cage. That's why the HERF gun hadn't done anything; that's why they'd been so casual about working with the shielding off their computers. With my eye, I followed the copper shielding around the entire stage and up the walls, where it disappeared into the ceiling. Once again, I was struck by the evolvedness of Debra's ad-hocs, how their trial by fire in China had armored them against the kind of bush-league jiggery-pokery that the fuzzy bunnies in Florida—myself included—came up with. + +For instance, I didn't think there was a single castmember in the Park outside of Deb's clique with the stones to stage an assassination. Once I'd made that leap, I realized that it was only a matter of time until they staged another one—and another, and another. Whatever they could get away with. + +Debra's spiel finally wound down and Lil and I headed away. I stopped in front of the backup terminal in the gateway between Liberty Square and Fantasyland. “When was the last time you backed up?” I asked her. If they could go after me, they might go after any of us. + +“Yesterday,” she said. She exuded bone-weariness at me, looking more like an overmediated guest than a tireless castmember. + +“Let's run another backup, huh? We should really back up at night and at lunchtime—with things the way they are, we can't afford to lose an afternoon's work, much less a week's.” + +Lil rolled her eyes. I knew better than to argue with her when she was tired, but this was too crucial to set aside for petulance. “You can back up that often if you want to, Julius, but don't tell me how to live my life, okay?” + +“Come on, Lil—it only takes a minute, and it'd make me feel a lot better. Please?” I hated the whine in my voice. + +“No, Julius. No. Let's go home and get some sleep. I want to do some work on new merch for the Mansion—some collectible stuff, maybe.” + +“For Christ's sake, is it really so much to ask? Fine. Wait while I back up, then, all right?” + +Lil groaned and glared at me. + +I approached the terminal and cued a backup. Nothing happened. Oh, yeah, right, I was offline. A cool sweat broke out all over my new body. + +Lil grabbed the couch as soon as we got in, mumbling something about wanting to work on some revised merch ideas she'd had. I glared at her as she subvocalized and air-typed in the corner, shut away from me. I hadn't told her that I was offline yet—it just seemed like insignificant personal bitching relative to the crises she was coping with. + +Besides, I'd been knocked offline before, though not in fifty years, and often as not the system righted itself after a good night's sleep. I could visit the doctor in the morning if things were still screwy. + +So I crawled into bed, and when my bladder woke me in the night, I had to go into the kitchen to consult our old starburst clock to get the time. It was 3 a.m., and when the hell had we expunged the house of all timepieces, anyway? + +Lil was sacked out on the couch, and complained feebly when I tried to rouse her, so I covered her with a blanket and went back to bed, alone. + +I woke disoriented and crabby, without my customary morning jolt of endorphin. Vivid dreams of death and destruction slipped away as I sat up. I preferred to let my subconscious do its own thing, so I'd long ago programmed my systems to keep me asleep during REM cycles except in emergencies. The dream left a foul taste in my mind as I staggered into the kitchen, where Lil was fixing coffee. + +“Why didn't you wake me up last night? I'm one big ache from sleeping on the couch,” Lil said as I stumbled in. + +She had the perky, jaunty quality of someone who could instruct her nervous system to manufacture endorphin and adrenaline at will. I felt like punching the wall. + +“You wouldn't get up,” I said, and slopped coffee in the general direction of a mug, then scalded my tongue with it. + +“And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would cover a shift for me—the merch ideas are really coming together and I wanted to hit the Imagineering shop and try some prototyping.” + +“Can't.” I foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumby plate in the sink. Dan had already eaten and gone, apparently. + +“Really?” she said, and my blood started to boil in earnest. I slammed Dan's plate into the dishwasher and shoved bread into my maw. + +“Yes. Really. It's your shift—fucking work it or call in sick.” + +Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning, when I was hormonally enhanced, anyway. “What's wrong, honey?” she said, going into helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit something besides the wall. + +“Just leave me alone, all right? Go fiddle with fucking merch. I've got real work to do—in case you haven't noticed, Debra's about to eat you and your little band of plucky adventurers and pick her teeth with the bones. For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you have any goddamned passion?” + +Lil whitened and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the worst thing I could possibly have said. + +Lil and I met three years before, at a barbecue that some friends of her parents threw, a kind of castmember mixer. She'd been just 19—apparent and real—and had a bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismiss her, at first, as just another airhead castmember. + +Her parents—Tom and Rita—on the other hand, were fascinating people, members of the original ad-hoc that had seized power in Walt Disney World, wresting control from a gang of wealthy former shareholders who'd been operating it as their private preserve. Rita was apparent 20 or so, but she radiated a maturity and a fiery devotion to the Park that threw her daughter's superficiality into sharp relief. + +They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use. In a world where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep, travel and access the net without hassle, their wealth was more than sufficient to repeatedly access the piffling few scarce things left on earth over and over. + +The conversation turned to the first day, when she and her pals had used a cutting torch on the turnstiles and poured in, wearing homemade costumes and name tags. They infiltrated the shops, the control centers, the rides, first by the hundred, then, as the hot July day ticked by, by the thousand. The shareholders' lackeys—who worked the Park for the chance to be a part of the magic, even if they had no control over the management decisions—put up a token resistance. Before the day was out, though, the majority had thrown in their lots with the raiders, handing over security codes and pitching in. + +“But we knew the shareholders wouldn't give in as easy as that,” Lil's mother said, sipping her lemonade. “We kept the Park running 24/7 for the next two weeks, never giving the shareholders a chance to fight back without doing it in front of the guests. We'd prearranged with a couple of airline ad-hocs to add extra routes to Orlando and the guests came pouring in.” She smiled, remembering the moment, and her features in repose were Lil's almost identically. It was only when she was talking that her face changed, muscles tugging it into an expression decades older than the face that bore it. + +“I spent most of the time running the merch stand at Madame Leota's outside the Mansion, gladhanding the guests while hissing nasties back and forth with the shareholders who kept trying to shove me out. I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of the utilidor, with a couple dozen others, in three hour shifts. That was when I met this asshole”—she chucked her husband on the shoulder—“he'd gotten the wrong sleeping bag by mistake and wouldn't budge when I came down to crash. I just crawled in next to him and the rest, as they say, is history.” + +Lil rolled her eyes and made gagging noises. “Jesus, Rita, no one needs to hear about that part of it.” + +Tom patted her arm. “Lil, you're an adult—if you can't stomach hearing about your parents' courtship, you can either sit somewhere else or grin and bear it. But you don't get to dictate the topic of conversation.” + +Lil gave us adults a very youthful glare and flounced off. Rita shook her head at Lil's departing backside. “There's not much fire in that generation,” she said. “Not a lot of passion. It's our fault—we thought that Disney World would be the best place to raise a child in the Bitchun Society. Maybe it was, but…” She trailed off and rubbed her palms on her thighs, a gesture I'd come to know in Lil, by and by. “I guess there aren't enough challenges for them these days. They're too cooperative.” She laughed and her husband took her hand. + +“We sound like our parents,” Tom said. “'When we were growing up, we didn't have any of this newfangled life-extension stuff—we took our chances with the cave bears and the dinosaurs!'” Tom wore himself older, apparent 50, with graying sidewalls and crinkled smile-lines, the better to present a non-threatening air of authority to the guests. It was a truism among the first-gen ad-hocs that women castmembers should wear themselves young, men old. “We're just a couple of Bitchun fundamentalists, I guess.” + +Lil called over from a nearby conversation: “Are they telling you what a pack of milksops we are, Julius? When you get tired of that, why don't you come over here and have a smoke?” I noticed that she and her cohort were passing a crack pipe. + +“What's the use?” Lil's mother sighed. + +“Oh, I don't know that it's as bad as all that,” I said, virtually my first words of the afternoon. I was painfully conscious that I was only there by courtesy, just one of the legion of hopefuls who flocked to Orlando every year, aspiring to a place among the ruling cliques. “They're passionate about maintaining the Park, that's for sure. I made the mistake of lifting a queue-gate at the Jungleboat Cruise last week and I got a very earnest lecture about the smooth functioning of the Park from a castmember who couldn't have been more than 18. I think that they don't have the passion for creating Bitchunry that we have—they don't need it—but they've got plenty of drive to maintain it.” + +Lil's mother gave me a long, considering look that I didn't know what to make of. I couldn't tell if I had offended her or what. + +“I mean, you can't be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn't we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?” + +“Funny you should say that,” Tom said. He had the same considering look on his face. “Just yesterday we were talking about the very same thing. We were talking—” he drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, who nodded—“about deadheading. For a while, anyway. See if things changed much in fifty or a hundred years.” + +I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my time schmoozing with these two, when they wouldn't be around when the time came to vote me in? I banished the thought as quickly as it came—I was talking to them because they were nice people. Not every conversation had to be strategically important. + +“Really? Deadheading.” I remember that I thought of Dan then, about his views on the cowardice of deadheading, on the bravery of ending it when you found yourself obsolete. He'd comforted me once, when my last living relative, my uncle, opted to go to sleep for three thousand years. My uncle had been born pre-Bitchun, and had never quite gotten the hang of it. Still, he was my link to my family, to my first adulthood and my only childhood. Dan had taken me to Gananoque and we'd spent the day bounding around the countryside on seven-league boots, sailing high over the lakes of the Thousand Islands and the crazy fiery carpet of autumn leaves. We topped off the day at a dairy commune he knew where they still made cheese from cow's milk and there'd been a thousand smells and bottles of strong cider and a girl whose name I'd long since forgotten but whose exuberant laugh I'd remember forever. And it wasn't so important, then, my uncle going to sleep for three milliennia, because whatever happened, there were the leaves and the lakes and the crisp sunset the color of blood and the girl's laugh. + +“Have you talked to Lil about it?” + +Rita shook her head. “It's just a thought, really. We don't want to worry her. She's not good with hard decisions—it's her generation.” + +They changed the subject not long thereafter, and I sensed discomfort, knew that they had told me too much, more than they'd intended. I drifted off and found Lil and her young pals, and we toked a little and cuddled a little. + +Within a month, I was working at the Haunted Mansion, Tom and Rita were invested in Canopic jars in Kissimee with instructions not to be woken until their newsbots grabbed sufficient interesting material to make it worth their while, and Lil and I were a hot item. + +Lil didn't deal well with her parents' decision to deadhead. For her, it was a slap in the face, a reproach to her and her generation of twittering Polyannic castmembers. + +For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you have any goddamned passion? + +The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was saying them, and Lil, 15 percent of my age, young enough to be my great-granddaughter; Lil, my lover and best friend and sponsor to the Liberty Square ad-hocracy; Lil turned white as a sheet, turned on her heel and walked out of the kitchen. She got in her runabout and went to the Park to take her shift. + +I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling fan as it made its lazy turns, and felt like shit. + +1~ CHAPTER 5 + +When I finally returned to the Park, 36 hours had passed and Lil had not come back to the house. If she'd tried to call, she would've gotten my voicemail—I had no way of answering my phone. As it turned out, she hadn't been trying to reach me at all. + +I'd spent the time alternately moping, drinking, and plotting terrible, irrational vengeance on Debra for killing me, destroying my relationship, taking away my beloved (in hindsight, anyway) Hall of Presidents and threatening the Mansion. Even in my addled state, I knew that this was pretty unproductive, and I kept promising that I would cut it out, take a shower and some sober-ups, and get to work at the Mansion. + +I was working up the energy to do just that when Dan came in. + +“Jesus,” he said, shocked. I guess I was a bit of a mess, sprawled on the sofa in my underwear, all gamy and baggy and bloodshot. + +“Hey, Dan. How's it goin'?” + +He gave me one of his patented wry looks and I felt the same weird reversal of roles that we'd undergone at the U of T, when he had become the native, and I had become the interloper. He was the together one with the wry looks and I was the pathetic seeker who'd burned all his reputation capital. Out of habit, I checked my Whuffie, and a moment later I stopped being startled by its low score and was instead shocked by the fact that I could check it at all. I was back online! + +“Now, what do you know about that?” I said, staring at my dismal Whuffie. + +“What?” he said. + +I called his cochlea. “My systems are back online,” I subvocalized. + +He started. “You were offline?” + +I jumped up from the couch and did a little happy underwear dance. “I /{was}/, but I'm not /{now}/.” I felt better than I had in days, ready to beat the world—or at least Debra. + +“Let me take a shower, then let's get to the Imagineering labs. I've got a pretty kickass idea.” + +The idea, as I explained it in the runabout, was a preemptive rehab of the Mansion. Sabotaging the Hall had been a nasty, stupid idea, and I'd gotten what I deserved for it. The whole point of the Bitchun Society was to be more reputable than the next ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery, despite assassinations and the like. + +So a rehab it would be. + +“Back in the early days of the Disneyland Mansion, in California,” I explained, “Walt had a guy in a suit of armor just past the first Doom Buggy curve, he'd leap out and scare the hell out of the guests as they went by. It didn't last long, of course. The poor bastard kept getting punched out by startled guests, and besides, the armor wasn't too comfortable for long shifts.” + +Dan chuckled appreciatively. The Bitchun Society had all but done away with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remained—tending bar, mopping toilets—commanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off-hours. + +“But that guy in the suit of armor, he could /{improvise}/. You'd get a slightly different show every time. It's like the castmembers who spiel on the Jungleboat Cruise. They've each got their own patter, their own jokes, and even though the animatronics aren't so hot, it makes the show worth seeing.” + +“You're going to fill the Mansion with castmembers in armor?” Dan asked, shaking his head. + +I waved away his objections, causing the runabout to swerve, terrifying a pack of guests who were taking a ride on rented bikes around the property. “No,” I said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-faced guests. “Not at all. But what if all of the animatronics had human operators—telecontrollers, working with waldoes? We'll let them interact with the guests, talk with them, scare them… We'll get rid of the existing animatronics, replace 'em with full-mobility robots, then cast the parts over the Net. Think of the Whuffie! You could put, say, a thousand operators online at once, ten shifts per day, each of them caught up in our Mansion… We'll give out awards for outstanding performances, the shifts'll be based on popular vote. In effect, we'll be adding another ten thousand guests to the Mansion's throughput every day, only these guests will be honorary castmembers.” + +“That's pretty good,” Dan said. “Very Bitchun. Debra may have AI and flash-baking, but you'll have human interaction, courtesy of the biggest Mansion-fans in the world—” + +“And those are the very fans Debra'll have to win over to make a play for the Mansion. Very elegant, huh?” + +The first order of business was to call Lil, patch things up, and pitch the idea to her. The only problem was, my cochlea was offline again. My mood started to sour, and I had Dan call her instead. + +We met her up at Imagineering, a massive complex of prefab aluminum buildings painted Go-Away Green that had thronged with mad inventors since the Bitchun Society had come to Walt Disney World. The ad-hocs who had built an Imagineering department in Florida and now ran the thing were the least political in the Park, classic labcoat-and-clipboard types who would work for anyone so long as the ideas were cool. Not caring about Whuffie meant that they accumulated it in plenty on both the left and right hands. + +Lil was working with Suneep, AKA the Merch Miracle. He could design, prototype and produce a souvenir faster than anyone—shirts, sculptures, pens, toys, housewares, he was the king. They were collaborating on their HUDs, facing each other across a lab-bench in the middle of a lab as big as a basketball court, cluttered with logomarked tchotchkes and gabbling away while their eyes danced over invisible screens. + +Dan reflexively joined the collaborative space as he entered the lab, leaving me the only one out on the joke. Dan was clearly delighted by what he saw. + +I nudged him with an elbow. “Make a hardcopy,” I hissed. + +Instead of pitying me, he just airtyped a few commands and pages started to roll out of a printer in the lab's corner. Anyone else would have made a big deal out of it, but he just brought me into the discussion. + +If I needed proof that Lil and I were meant for each other, the designs she and Suneep had come up with were more than enough. She'd been thinking just the way I had—souvenirs that stressed the human scale of the Mansion. There were miniature animatronics of the Hitchhiking Ghosts in a black-light box, their skeletal robotics visible through their layers of plastic clothing; action figures that communicated by IR, so that placing one in proximity with another would unlock its Mansion-inspired behaviors—the raven cawed, Mme. Leota's head incanted, the singing busts sang. She'd worked up some formal attire based on the castmember costume, cut in this year's stylish lines. + +It was good merch, is what I'm trying to say. In my mind's eye, I was seeing the relaunch of the Mansion in six months, filled with robotic avatars of Mansion-nuts the world 'round, Mme. Leota's gift cart piled high with brilliant swag, strolling human players ad-libbing with the guests in the queue area… + +Lil looked up from her mediated state and glared at me as I pored over the hardcopy, nodding enthusiastically. + +“Passionate enough for you?” she snapped. + +I felt a flush creeping into face, my ears. It was somewhere between anger and shame, and I reminded myself that I was more than a century older than her, and it was my responsibility to be mature. Also, I'd started the fight. + +“This is fucking fantastic, Lil,” I said. Her look didn't soften. “Really choice stuff. I had a great idea—” I ran it down for her, the avatars, the robots, the rehab. She stopped glaring, started taking notes, smiling, showing me her dimples, her slanted eyes crinkling at the corners. + +“This isn't easy,” she said, finally. Suneep, who'd been politely pretending not to listen in, nodded involuntarily. Dan, too. + +“I know that,” I said. The flush burned hotter. “But that's the point—what Debra does isn't easy either. It's risky, dangerous. It made her and her ad-hoc better—it made them sharper.” /{Sharper than us, that's for sure}/. “They can make decisions like this fast, and execute them just as quickly. We need to be able to do that, too.” + +Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The words'd just popped out, but I saw that I'd been right—we'd have to beat Debra at her own game, out-evolve her ad-hocs. + +“I understand what you're saying,” Lil said. I could tell she was upset—she'd reverted to castmemberspeak. “It's a very good idea. I think that we stand a good chance of making it happen if we approach the group and put it to them, after doing the research, building the plans, laying out the critical path, and privately soliciting feedback from some of them.” + +I felt like I was swimming in molasses. At the rate that the Liberty Square ad-hoc moved, we'd be holding formal requirements reviews while Debra's people tore down the Mansion around us. So I tried a different tactic. + +“Suneep, you've been involved in some rehabs, right?” + +Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical animal being drawn into a political discussion. + +“Okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan and asked you to pull together a production schedule—one that didn't have any review, just take the idea and run with it—and then pull it off, how long would it take you to execute it?” + +Lil smiled primly. She'd dealt with Imagineering before. + +“About five years,” he said, almost instantly. + +“Five years?” I squawked. “Why five years? Debra's people overhauled the Hall in a month!” + +“Oh, wait,” he said. “No review at all?” + +“No review. Just come up with the best way you can to do this, and do it. And we can provide you with unlimited, skilled labor, three shifts around the clock.” + +He rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers while muttering under his breath. He was a tall, thin man with a shock of curly dark hair that he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly stubby fingers while he thought. + +“About eight weeks,” he said. “Barring accidents, assuming off-the-shelf parts, unlimited labor, capable management, material availability…” He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he pulled up a HUD and started making a list. + +“Wait,” Lil said, alarmed. “How do you get from five years to eight weeks?” + +Now it was my turn to smirk. I'd seen how Imagineering worked when they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups—I knew that the real bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, the ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned their work. + +Suneep looked sheepish. “Well, if all I have to do is satisfy myself that my plans are good and my buildings won't fall down, I can make it happen very fast. Of course, my plans aren't perfect. Sometimes, I'll be halfway through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or approach that makes the whole thing immeasurably better. Then it's back to the drawing board… So I stay at the drawing board for a long time at the start, get feedback from other Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from focus groups and the Net. Then we do reviews at every stage of construction, check to see if anyone has had a great idea we haven't thought of and incorporate it, sometimes rolling back the work. + +“It's slow, but it works.” + +Lil was flustered. “But if you can do a complete revision in eight weeks, why not just finish it, then plan another revision, do /{that}/ one in eight weeks, and so on? Why take five years before anyone can ride the thing?” + +“Because that's how it's done,” I said to Lil. “But that's not how it /{has}/ to be done. That's how we'll save the Mansion.” + +I felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that I was right. Ad-hocracy was a great thing, a Bitchun thing, but the organization needed to turn on a dime—that would be even /{more}/ Bitchun. + +“Lil,” I said, looking into her eyes, trying to burn my POV into her. “We have to do this. It's our only chance. We'll recruit hundreds to come to Florida and work on the rehab. We'll give every Mansion nut on the planet a shot at joining up, then we'll recruit them again to work at it, to run the telepresence rigs. We'll get buy-in from the biggest super-recommenders in the world, and we'll build something better and faster than any ad-hoc ever has, without abandoning the original Imagineers' vision. It will be unspeakably Bitchun.” + +Lil dropped her eyes and it was her turn to flush. She paced the floor, hands swinging at her sides. I could tell that she was still angry with me, but excited and scared and yes, passionate. + +“It's not up to me, you know,” she said at length, still pacing. Dan and I exchanged wicked grins. She was in. + +“I know,” I said. But it was, almost—she was a real opinion-leader in the Liberty Square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back and forth, someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her head in a crisis. Not a hothead. Not prone to taking radical switchbacks. This plan would burn up that reputation and the Whuffie that accompanied it, in short order, but by the time that happened, she'd have plenty of Whuffie with the new, thousands-strong ad-hoc. + +“I mean, I can't guarantee anything. I'd like to study the plans that Imagineering comes through with, do some walk-throughs—” + +I started to object, to remind her that speed was of the essence, but she beat me to it. + +“But I won't. We have to move fast. I'm in.” + +She didn't come into my arms, didn't kiss me and tell me everything was forgiven, but she bought in, and that was enough. + +My systems came back online sometime that day, and I hardly noticed, I was so preoccupied with the new Mansion. Holy shit, was it ever audacious: since the first Mansion opened in California in 1969, no one had ever had the guts to seriously fuxor with it. Oh, sure, the Paris version, Phantom Manor, had a slightly different storyline, but it was just a minor bit of tweakage to satisfy the European market at the time. No one wanted to screw up the legend. + +What the hell made the Mansion so cool, anyway? I'd been to Disney World any number of times as a guest before I settled in, and truth be told, it had never been my absolute favorite. + +But when I returned to Disney World, live and in person, freshly bored stupid by the three-hour liveheaded flight from Toronto, I'd found myself crowd-driven to it. + +I'm a terrible, terrible person to visit theme-parks with. Since I was a punk kid snaking my way through crowded subway platforms, eeling into the only seat on a packed car, I'd been obsessed with Beating The Crowd. + +In the early days of the Bitchun Society, I'd known a blackjack player, a compulsive counter of cards, an idiot savant of odds. He was a pudgy, unassuming engineer, the moderately successful founder of a moderately successful high-tech startup that had done something arcane with software agents. While he was only moderately successful, he was fabulously wealthy: he'd never raised a cent of financing for his company, and had owned it outright when he finally sold it for a bathtub full of money. His secret was the green felt tables of Vegas, where he'd pilgrim off to every time his bank balance dropped, there to count the monkey-cards and calculate the odds and Beat The House. + +Long after his software company was sold, long after he'd made his nut, he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the tables, grinding out hand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer satisfaction of Beating The House. For him, it was pure brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juice every time the dealer busted and every time he doubled down on a deckfull of face cards. + +Though I'd never bought so much as a lottery ticket, I immediately got his compulsion: for me, it was Beating The Crowd, finding the path of least resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the short queue, dodging the traffic, changing lanes with a whisper to spare—moving with precision and grace and, above all, /{expedience}/. + +On that fateful return, I checked into the Fort Wilderness Campground, pitched my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to catch a barge over to the Main Gate. + +Crowds were light until I got right up to Main Gate and the ticketing queues. Suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the farthest one, beating my ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said would have the shortest wait, I stepped back and did a quick visual survey of the twenty kiosks and evaluated the queued-up huddle in front of each. Pre-Bitchun, I'd have been primarily interested in their ages, but that is less and less a measure of anything other than outlook, so instead I carefully examined their queuing styles, their dress, and more than anything, their burdens. + +You can tell more about someone's ability to efficiently negotiate the complexities of a queue through what they carry than through any other means—if only more people realized it. The classic, of course, is the unladen citizen, a person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or marsupial pocket. To the layperson, such a specimen might be thought of as a sure bet for a fast transaction, but I'd done an informal study and come to the conclusion that these brave iconoclasts are often the flightiest of the lot, left smiling with bovine mystification, patting down their pockets in a fruitless search for a writing implement, a piece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit's foot, a rosary, a tuna sandwich. + +No, for my money, I'll take what I call the Road Worrier anytime. Such a person is apt to be carefully slung with four or five carriers of one description or another, from bulging cargo pockets to clever military-grade strap-on pouches with biometrically keyed closures. The thing to watch for is the ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: do they balance, are they slung for minimum interference and maximum ease of access? Someone who's given that much consideration to their gear is likely spending their time in line determining which bits and pieces they'll need when they reach its headwaters and is holding them at ready for fastest-possible processing. + +This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders, gear-pigs who pack /{everything}/ because they lack the organizational smarts to figure out what they should pack—they're just as apt to be burdened with bags and pockets and pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of that slinging. These pack mules will sag beneath their loads, juggling this and that while pushing overloose straps up on their shoulders. + +I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, a queue that was slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and ticced nervously as I watched my progress relative to the other spots I could've chosen. I was borne out, a positive omen for a wait-free World, and I was sauntering down Main Street, USA long before my ferrymates. + +Returning to Walt Disney World was a homecoming for me. My parents had brought me the first time when I was all of ten, just as the first inklings of the Bitchun society were trickling into everyone's consciousness: the death of scarcity, the death of death, the struggle to rejig an economy that had grown up focused on nothing but scarcity and death. My memories of the trip are dim but warm, the balmy Florida climate and a sea of smiling faces punctuated by magical, darkened moments riding in OmniMover cars, past diorama after diorama. + +I went again when I graduated high school and was amazed by the richness of detail, the grandiosity and grandeur of it all. I spent a week there stunned bovine, grinning and wandering from corner to corner. Someday, I knew, I'd come to live there. + +The Park became a touchstone for me, a constant in a world where everything changed. Again and again, I came back to the Park, grounding myself, communing with all the people I'd been. + +That day I bopped from land to land, ride to ride, seeking out the short lines, the eye of the hurricane that crowded the Park to capacity. I'd take high ground, standing on a bench or hopping up on a fence, and do a visual reccy of all the queues in sight, try to spot prevailing currents in the flow of the crowd, generally having a high old obsessive time. Truth be told, I probably spent as much time looking for walk-ins as I would've spent lining up like a good little sheep, but I had more fun and got more exercise. + +The Haunted Mansion was experiencing a major empty spell: the Snow Crash Spectacular parade had just swept through Liberty Square en route to Fantasyland, dragging hordes of guests along with it, dancing to the JapRap sounds of the comical Sushi-K and aping the movements of the brave Hiro Protagonist. When they blew out, Liberty Square was a ghost town, and I grabbed the opportunity to ride the Mansion five times in a row, walking on every time. + +The way I tell it to Lil, I noticed her and then I noticed the Mansion, but to tell the truth it was the other way around. + +The first couple rides through, I was just glad of the aggressive air conditioning and the delicious sensation of sweat drying on my skin. But on the third pass, I started to notice just how goddamn cool the thing was. There wasn't a single bit of tech more advanced than a film-loop projector in the whole place, but it was all so cunningly contrived that the illusion of a haunted house was perfect: the ghosts that whirled through the ballroom were /{ghosts}/, three-dimensional and ethereal and phantasmic. The ghosts that sang in comical tableaux through the graveyard were equally convincing, genuinely witty and simultaneously creepy. + +My fourth pass through, I noticed the /{detail}/, the hostile eyes worked into the wallpaper's pattern, the motif repeated in the molding, the chandeliers, the photo gallery. I began to pick out the words to “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” the song that is repeated throughout the ride, whether in sinister organ-tones repeating the main theme troppo troppo or the spritely singing of the four musical busts in the graveyard. + +It's a catchy tune, one that I hummed on my fifth pass through, this time noticing that the overaggressive AC was, actually, mysterious chills that blew through the rooms as wandering spirits made their presence felt. By the time I debarked for the fifth time, I was whistling the tune with jazzy improvisations in a mixed-up tempo. + +That's when Lil and I ran into each other. She was picking up a discarded ice-cream wrapper—I'd seen a dozen castmembers picking up trash that day, seen it so frequently that I'd started doing it myself. She grinned slyly at me as I debarked into the fried-food-and-disinfectant perfume of the Park, hands in pockets, thoroughly pleased with myself for having so completely /{experienced}/ a really fine hunk of art. + +I smiled back at her, because it was only natural that one of the Whuffie-kings who were privileged to tend this bit of heavenly entertainment should notice how thoroughly I was enjoying her work. + +“That's really, really Bitchun,” I said to her, admiring the titanic mountains of Whuffie my HUD attributed to her. + +She was in character, and not supposed to be cheerful, but castmembers of her generation can't help but be friendly. She compromised between ghastly demeanor and her natural sweet spirit, and leered a grin at me, thumped through a zombie's curtsey, and moaned “Thank you—we /{do}/ try to keep it /{spirited}/.” + +I groaned appreciatively, and started to notice just how very cute she was, this little button of a girl with her rotting maid's uniform and her feather-shedding duster. She was just so clean and scrubbed and happy about everything, she radiated it and made me want to pinch her cheeks—either set. + +The moment was on me, and so I said, “When do they let you ghouls off? I'd love to take you out for a Zombie or a Bloody Mary.” + +Which led to more horrifying banter, and to my taking her out for a couple at the Adventurer's Club, learning her age in the process and losing my nerve, telling myself that there was nothing we could possibly have to say to each other across a century-wide gap. + +While I tell Lil that I noticed her first and the Mansion second, the reverse is indeed true. But it's also true—and I never told her this—that the thing I love best about the Mansion is: + +It's where I met her. + +Dan and I spent the day riding the Mansion, drafting scripts for the telepresence players who we hoped to bring on-board. We were in a totally creative zone, the dialog running as fast as he could transcribe it. Jamming on ideas with Dan was just about as terrific as a pass-time could be. + +I was all for leaking the plan to the Net right away, getting hearts-and-minds action with our core audience, but Lil turned it down. + +She was going to spend the next couple days quietly politicking among the rest of the ad-hoc, getting some support for the idea, and she didn't want the appearance of impropriety that would come from having outsiders being brought in before the ad-hoc. + +Talking to the ad-hocs, bringing them around—it was a skill I'd never really mastered. Dan was good at it, Lil was good at it, but me, I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouth-breathers who just didn't get it. + +The truth of the matter is, I'm a bright enough guy, but I'm hardly a genius. Especially when it comes to people. Probably comes from Beating The Crowd, never seeing individuals, just the mass—the enemy of expedience. + +I never would have made it into the Liberty Square ad-hoc on my own. Lil made it happen for me, long before we started sleeping together. I'd assumed that her folks would be my best allies in the process of joining up, but they were too jaded, too ready to take the long sleep to pay much attention to a newcomer like me. + +Lil took me under her wing, inviting me to after-work parties, talking me up to her cronies, quietly passing around copies of my thesis-work. And she did the same in reverse, sincerely extolling the virtues of the others I met, so that I knew what there was to respect about them and couldn't help but treat them as individuals. + +In the years since, I'd lost that respect. Mostly, I palled around with Lil, and once he arrived, Dan, and with net-friends around the world. The ad-hocs that I worked with all day treated me with basic courtesy but not much friendliness. + +I guess I treated them the same. When I pictured them in my mind, they were a faceless, passive-aggressive mass, too caught up in the starchy world of consensus-building to ever do much of anything. + +Dan and I threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the Net for address lists of Mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe, spreadsheeting them against their timezones, temperaments, and, of course, their Whuffie. + +“That's weird,” I said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal I was using—my systems were back offline. They'd been sputtering up and down for a couple days now, and I kept meaning to go to the doctor, but I'd never gotten 'round to it. Periodically, I'd get a jolt of urgency when I remembered that this meant my backup was stale-dating, but the Mansion always took precedence. + +“Huh?” he said. + +I tapped the display. “See these?” It was a fan-site, displaying a collection of animated 3-D meshes of various elements of the Mansion, part of a giant collaborative project that had been ongoing for decades, to build an accurate 3-D walkthrough of every inch of the Park. I'd used those meshes to build my own testing fly-throughs. + +“Those are terrific,” Dan said. “That guy must be a total /{fiend}/.” The meshes' author had painstakingly modeled, chained and animated every ghost in the ballroom scene, complete with the kinematics necessary for full motion. Where a “normal” fan-artist might've used a standard human kinematics library for the figures, this one had actually written his own from the ground up, so that the ghosts moved with a spectral fluidity that was utterly unhuman. + +“Who's the author?” Dan asked. “Do we have him on our list yet?” + +I scrolled down to display the credits. “I'll be damned,” Dan breathed. + +The author was Tim, Debra's elfin crony. He'd submitted the designs a week before my assassination. + +“What do you think it means?” I asked Dan, though I had a couple ideas on the subject myself. + +“Tim's a Mansion nut,” Dan said. “I knew that.” + +“You knew?” + +He looked a little defensive. “Sure. I told you, back when you had me hanging out with Debra's gang.” + +Had I asked him to hang out with Debra? As I remembered it, it had been his suggestion. Too much to think about. + +“But what does it mean, Dan? Is he an ally? Should we try to recruit him? Or is he the one that'd convinced Debra she needs to take over the Mansion?” + +Dan shook his head. “I'm not even sure that she wants to take over the Mansion. I know Debra, all she wants to do is turn ideas into things, as fast and as copiously as possible. She picks her projects carefully. She's acquisitive, sure, but she's cautious. She had a great idea for Presidents, and so she took over. I never heard her talk about the Mansion.” + +“Of course you didn't. She's cagey. Did you hear her talk about the Hall of Presidents?” + +Dan fumbled. “Not really… I mean, not in so many words, but—” + +“But nothing,” I said. “She's after the Mansion, she's after the Magic Kingdom, she's after the Park. She's taking over, goddamn it, and I'm the only one who seems to have noticed.” + +I came clean to Lil about my systems that night, as we were fighting. Fighting had become our regular evening pastime, and Dan had taken to sleeping at one of the hotels on-site rather than endure it. + +I'd started it, of course. “We're going to get killed if we don't get off our asses and start the rehab,” I said, slamming myself down on the sofa and kicking at the scratched coffee table. I heard the hysteria and unreason in my voice and it just made me madder. I was frustrated by not being able to check in on Suneep and Dan, and, as usual, it was too late at night to call anyone and do anything about it. By the morning, I'd have forgotten again. + +From the kitchen, Lil barked back, “I'm doing what I can, Jules. If you've got a better way, I'd love to hear about it.” + +“Oh, bullshit. I'm doing what I can, planning the thing out. I'm ready to /{go}/. It was your job to get the ad-hocs ready for it, but you keep telling me they're not. When will they be?” + +“Jesus, you're a nag.” + +“I wouldn't nag if you'd only fucking make it happen. What are you doing all day, anyway? Working shifts at the Mansion? Rearranging deck chairs on the Great Titanic Adventure?” + +“I'm working my fucking /{ass}/ off. I've spoken to every goddamn one of them at least twice this week about it.” + +“Sure,” I hollered at the kitchen. “Sure you have.” + +“Don't take my word for it, then. Check my fucking phone logs.” + +She waited. + +“Well? Check them!” + +“I'll check them later,” I said, dreading where this was going. + +“Oh, no you /{don't}/,” she said, stalking into the room, fuming. “You can't call me a liar and then refuse to look at the evidence.” She planted her hands on her slim little hips and glared at me. She'd gone pale and I could count every freckle on her face, her throat, her collarbones, the swell of her cleavage in the old vee-neck shirt I'd given her on a day-trip to Nassau. + +“Well?” she asked. She looked ready to wring my neck. + +“I can't,” I admitted, not meeting her eyes. + +“Yes you can—here, I'll dump it to your public directory.” + +Her expression shifted to one of puzzlement when she failed to locate me on her network. “What's going on?” + +So I told her. Offline, outcast, malfunctioning. + +“Well, why haven't you gone to the doctor? I mean, it's been /{weeks}/. I'll call him right now.” + +“Forget it,” I said. “I'll see him tomorrow. No sense in getting him out of bed.” + +But I didn't see him the day after, or the day after that. Too much to do, and the only times I remembered to call someone, I was too far from a public terminal or it was too late or too early. My systems came online a couple times, and I was too busy with the plans for the Mansion. Lil grew accustomed to the drifts of hard copy that littered the house, to printing out her annotations to my designs and leaving them on my favorite chair—to living like the cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by dead trees and ticking clocks. + +Being offline helped me focus. Focus is hardly the word for it—I obsessed. I sat in front of the terminal I'd brought home all day, every day, crunching plans, dictating voicemail. People who wanted to reach me had to haul ass out to the house, and /{speak}/ to me. + +I grew too obsessed to fight, and Dan moved back, and then it was my turn to take hotel rooms so that the rattle of my keyboard wouldn't keep him up nights. He and Lil were working a full-time campaign to recruit the ad-hoc to our cause, and I started to feel like we were finally in harmony, about to reach our goal. + +I went home one afternoon clutching a sheaf of hardcopy and burst into the living room, gabbling a mile-a-minute about a wrinkle on my original plan that would add a third walk-through segment to the ride, increasing the number of telepresence rigs we could use without decreasing throughput. + +I was mid-babble when my systems came back online. The public chatter in the room sprang up on my HUD. + +/{And then I'm going to tear off every stitch of clothing and jump you.}/ + +/{And then what?}/ + +/{I'm going to bang you till you limp.}/ + +/{Jesus, Lil, you are one rangy cowgirl.}/ + +My eyes closed, shutting out everything except for the glowing letters. Quickly, they vanished. I opened my eyes again, looking at Lil, who was flushed and distracted. Dan looked scared. + +“What's going on, Dan?” I asked quietly. My heart hammered in my chest, but I felt calm and detached. + +“Jules,” he began, then gave up and looked at Lil. + +Lil had, by that time, figured out that I was back online, that their secret messaging had been discovered. + +“Having fun, Lil?” I asked. + +Lil shook her head and glared at me. “Just go, Julius. I'll send your stuff to the hotel.” + +“You want me to go, huh? So you can bang him till he limps?” + +“This is my house, Julius. I'm asking you to get out of it. I'll see you at work tomorrow—we're having a general ad-hoc meeting to vote on the rehab.” + +It was her house. + +“Lil, Julius—” Dan began. + +“This is between me and him,” Lil said. “Stay out of it.” + +I dropped my papers—I wanted to throw them, but I dropped them, /{flump}/, and I turned on my heel and walked out, not bothering to close the door behind me. + +Dan showed up at the hotel ten minutes after I did and rapped on my door. I was all-over numb as I opened the door. He had a bottle of tequila—/{my}/ tequila, brought over from the house that I'd shared with Lil. + +He sat down on the bed and stared at the logo-marked wallpaper. I took the bottle from him, got a couple glasses from the bathroom and poured. + +“It's my fault,” he said. + +“I'm sure it is,” I said. + +“We got to drinking a couple nights ago. She was really upset. Hadn't seen you in days, and when she /{did}/ see you, you freaked her out. Snapping at her. Arguing. Insulting her.” + +“So you made her,” I said. + +He shook his head, then nodded, took a drink. “I did. It's been a long time since I…” + +“You had sex with my girlfriend, in my house, while I was away, working.” + +“Jules, I'm sorry. I did it, and I kept on doing it. I'm not much of a friend to either of you. + +“She's pretty broken up. She wanted me to come out here and tell you it was all a mistake, that you were just being paranoid.” + +We sat in silence for a long time. I refilled his glass, then my own. + +“I couldn't do that,” he said. “I'm worried about you. You haven't been right, not for months. I don't know what it is, but you should get to a doctor.” + +“I don't need a doctor,” I snapped. The liquor had melted the numbness and left burning anger and bile, my constant companions. “I need a friend who doesn't fuck my girlfriend when my back is turned.” + +I threw my glass at the wall. It bounced off, leaving tequila-stains on the wallpaper, and rolled under the bed. Dan started, but stayed seated. If he'd stood up, I would've hit him. Dan's good at crises. + +“If it's any consolation, I expect to be dead pretty soon,” he said. He gave me a wry grin. “My Whuffie's doing good. This rehab should take it up over the top. I'll be ready to go.” + +That stopped me. I'd somehow managed to forget that Dan, my good friend Dan, was going to kill himself. + +“You're going to do it,” I said, sitting down next to him. It hurt to think about it. I really liked the bastard. He might've been my best friend. + +There was a knock at the door. I opened it without checking the peephole. It was Lil. + +She looked younger than ever. Young and small and miserable. A snide remark died in my throat. I wanted to hold her. + +She brushed past me and went to Dan, who squirmed out of her embrace. + +“No,” he said, and stood up and sat on the windowsill, staring down at the Seven Seas Lagoon. + +“Dan's just been explaining to me that he plans on being dead in a couple months,” I said. “Puts a damper on the long-term plans, doesn't it, Lil?” + +Tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on herself. “I'll take what I can get,” she said. + +I choked on a knob of misery, and I realized that it was Dan, not Lil, whose loss upset me the most. + +Lil took Dan's hand and led him out of the room. + +/{I guess I'll take what I can get, too}/, I thought. + +1~ CHAPTER 6 + +Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan, I pondered the possibility that I was nuts. + +It wasn't unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and even though there were cures, they weren't pleasant. + +I was once married to a crazy person. We were both about 70, and I was living for nothing but joy. Her name was Zoya, and I called her Zed. + +We met in orbit, where I'd gone to experience the famed low-gravity sybarites. Getting staggering drunk is not much fun at one gee, but at ten to the neg eight, it's a blast. You don't stagger, you /{bounce}/, and when you're bouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing, happy, boisterous naked people, things get deeply fun. + +I was bouncing around inside a clear sphere that was a mile in diameter, filled with smaller spheres in which one could procure bulbs of fruity, deadly concoctions. Musical instruments littered the sphere's floor, and if you knew how to play, you'd snag one, tether it to you and start playing. Others would pick up their own axes and jam along. The tunes varied from terrific to awful, but they were always energetic. + +I had been working on my third symphony on and off, and whenever I thought I had a nice bit nailed, I'd spend some time in the sphere playing it. Sometimes, the strangers who jammed in gave me new and interesting lines of inquiry, and that was good. Even when they didn't, playing an instrument was a fast track to intriguing an interesting, naked stranger. + +Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded out barrelhouse runs in quirky time as I carried the main thread of the movement on a cello. At first it was irritating, but after a short while I came to a dawning comprehension of what she was doing to my music, and it was really /{good}/. I'm a sucker for musicians. + +We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously as spheres of perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully into the hydrotropic recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they were the perp who killed her partner. + +I collapsed dramatically as the last note crashed through the bubble. The singles, couples and groups stopped in midflight coitus to applaud. She took a bow, untethered herself from the Steinway, and headed for the hatch. + +I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere, desperate to reach the hatch before she did. I caught her as she was leaving. + +“Hey!” I said. “That was great! I'm Julius! How're you doing?” + +She reached out with both hands and squeezed my nose and my unit simultaneously—not hard, you understand, but playfully. “Honk!” she said, and squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoning chub-on. + +I chased after her. “Wait,” I called as she tumbled through the spoke of the station towards the gravity. + +She had a pianist's body—re-engineered arms and hands that stretched for impossible lengths, and she used them with a spacehand's grace, vaulting herself forward at speed. I bumbled after her best as I could on my freshman spacelegs, but by the time I reached the half-gee rim of the station, she was gone. + +I didn't find her again until the next movement was done and I went to the bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just getting warmed up when she passed through the hatch and tied off to the piano. + +This time, I clamped the oboe under my arm and bopped over to her before moistening the reed and blowing. I hovered over the piano's top, looking her in the eye as we jammed. Her mood that day was 4/4 time and I-IV-V progressions, in a feel that swung around from blues to rock to folk, teasing at the edge of my own melodies. She noodled at me, I noodled back at her, and her eyes crinkled charmingly whenever I managed a smidge of tuneful wit. + +She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, red downy fur, like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter's style, suited to the climate-controlled, soft-edged life in space. Fifty years later, I was dating Lil, another redhead, but Zed was my first. + +I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements at the keyboard, her comical moues of concentration when picking out a particularly kicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a slow bridge or gave her a solo. I was going to make this last as long as I could. Meanwhile, I maneuvered my way between her and the hatch. + +When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but I summoned the energy to zip over to the hatch and block it. She calmly untied and floated over to me. + +I looked in her eyes, silvered slanted cat-eyes, eyes that I'd been staring into all afternoon, and watched the smile that started at their corners and spread right down to her long, elegant toes. She looked back at me, then, at length, grabbed ahold of my joint again. + +“You'll do,” she said, and led me to her sleeping quarters, across the station. + +We didn't sleep. + +Zoya had been an early network engineer for the geosynch broadband constellations that went up at the cusp of the world's ascent into Bitchunry. She'd been exposed to a lot of hard rads and low gee and had generally become pretty transhuman as time went by, upgrading with a bewildering array of third-party enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes that saw through most of the RF spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversible knee joints and a completely mechanical spine that wasn't prone to any of the absolutely inane bullshit that plagues the rest of us, like lower-back pain, intrascapular inflammation, sciatica and slipped discs. + +I thought I lived for fun, but I didn't have anything on Zed. She only talked when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing wouldn't do, and routinely slapped upgrades into herself on the basis of any whim that crossed her mind, like when she resolved to do a spacewalk bare-skinned and spent the afternoon getting tin-plated and iron-lunged. + +I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to strangle her twice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a couple of days, floating around the bubble, making crazy faces at its mirrored exterior. She had no way of knowing if I was inside, but she assumed that I was watching. Or maybe she didn't, and she was making faces for anyone's benefit. + +But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and her eyes full of the stars she'd seen and her metallic skin cool with the breath of empty space, and she led me a merry game of tag through the station, the mess hall where we skidded sloppy through a wobbly ovoid of rice pudding, the greenhouses where she burrowed like a gopher and shinnied like a monkey, the living quarters and bubbles as we interrupted a thousand acts of coitus. + +You'd have thought that we'd have followed it up with an act of our own, and truth be told, that was certainly my expectation when we started the game I came to think of as the steeplechase, but we never did. Halfway through, I'd lose track of carnal urges and return to a state of childlike innocence, living only for the thrill of the chase and the giggly feeling I got whenever she found some new, even-more-outrageous corner to turn. I think we became legendary on the station, that crazy pair that's always zipping in and zipping away, like having your party crashed by two naked, coed Marx Brothers. + +When I asked her to marry me, to return to Earth with me, to live with me until the universe's mainspring unwound, she laughed, honked my nose and my willie and shouted, “YOU'LL /{DO}/!” + +I took her home to Toronto and we took up residence ten stories underground in overflow residence for the University. Our Whuffie wasn't so hot earthside, and the endless institutional corridors made her feel at home while affording her opportunities for mischief. + +But bit by bit, the mischief dwindled, and she started talking more. At first, I admit I was relieved, glad that my strange, silent wife was finally acting normal, making nice with the neighbors instead of pranking them with endless honks and fanny-kicks and squirt guns. We gave up the steeplechase and she had the doglegs taken out, her fur removed, her eyes unsilvered to a hazel that was pretty and as fathomable as the silver had been inscrutable. + +We wore clothes. We entertained. I started to rehearse my symphony in low-Whuffie halls and parks with any musicians I could drum up, and she came out and didn't play, just sat to the side and smiled and smiled with a smile that never went beyond her lips. + +She went nuts. + +She shat herself. She pulled her hair. She cut herself with knives. She accused me of plotting to kill her. She set fire to the neighbors' apartments, wrapped herself in plastic sheeting, dry-humped the furniture. + +She went nuts. She did it in broad strokes, painting the walls of our bedroom with her blood, jagging all night through rant after rant. I smiled and nodded and faced it for as long as I could, then I grabbed her and hauled her, kicking like a mule, to the doctor's office on the second floor. She'd been dirtside for a year and nuts for a month, but it took me that long to face up to it. + +The doc diagnosed nonchemical dysfunction, which was by way of saying that it was her mind, not her brain, that was broken. In other words, I'd driven her nuts. + +You can get counseling for nonchemical dysfunction, basically trying to talk it out, learn to feel better about yourself. She didn't want to. + +She was miserable, suicidal, murderous. In the brief moments of lucidity that she had under sedation, she consented to being restored from a backup that was made before we came to Toronto. + +I was at her side in the hospital when she woke up. I had prepared a written synopsis of the events since her last backup for her, and she read it over the next couple days. + +“Julius,” she said, while I was making breakfast in our subterranean apartment. She sounded so serious, so fun-free, that I knew immediately that the news wouldn't be good. + +“Yes?” I said, setting out plates of bacon and eggs, steaming cups of coffee. + +“I'm going to go back to space, and revert to an older version.” She had a shoulderbag packed, and she had traveling clothes on. + +/{Oh, shit.}/ “Great,” I said, with forced cheerfulness, making a mental inventory of my responsibilities dirtside. “Give me a minute or two, I'll pack up. I miss space, too.” + +She shook her head, and anger blazed in her utterly scrutable hazel eyes. “No. I'm going back to who I was, before I met you.” + +It hurt, bad. I had loved the old, steeplechase Zed, had loved her fun and mischief. The Zed she'd become after we wed was terrible and terrifying, but I'd stuck with her out of respect for the person she'd been. + +Now she was off to restore herself from a backup made before she met me. She was going to lop 18 months out of her life, start over again, revert to a saved version. + +Hurt? It ached like a motherfucker. + +I went back to the station a month later, and saw her jamming in the sphere with a guy who had three extra sets of arms depending from his hips. He scuttled around the sphere while she played a jig on the piano, and when her silver eyes lit on me, there wasn't a shred of recognition in them. She'd never met me. + +I died some, too, putting the incident out of my head and sojourning to Disney World, there to reinvent myself with a new group of friends, a new career, a new life. I never spoke of Zed again—especially not to Lil, who hardly needed me to pollute her with remembrances of my crazy exes. + +If I was nuts, it wasn't the kind of spectacular nuts that Zed had gone. It was a slow, seething, ugly nuts that had me alienating my friends, sabotaging my enemies, driving my girlfriend into my best friend's arms. + +I decided that I would see a doctor, just as soon as we'd run the rehab past the ad-hoc's general meeting. I had to get my priorities straight. + +I pulled on last night's clothes and walked out to the Monorail station in the main lobby. The platform was jammed with happy guests, bright and cheerful and ready for a day of steady, hypermediated fun. I tried to make myself attend to them as individuals, but try as I might, they kept turning into a crowd, and I had to plant my feet firmly on the platform to keep from weaving among them to the edge, the better to snag a seat. + +The meeting was being held over the Sunshine Tree Terrace in Adventureland, just steps from where I'd been turned into a road-pizza by the still-unidentified assassin. The Adventureland ad-hocs owed the Liberty Square crew a favor since my death had gone down on their turf, so they had given us use of their prize meeting room, where the Florida sun streamed through the slats of the shutters, casting a hash of dust-filled shafts of light across the room. The faint sounds of the tiki-drums and the spieling Jungle Cruise guides leaked through the room, a low-key ambient buzz from two of the Park's oldest rides. + +There were almost a hundred ad-hocs in the Liberty Square crew, almost all second-gen castmembers with big, friendly smiles. They filled the room to capacity, and there was much hugging and handshaking before the meeting came to order. I was thankful that the room was too small for the /{de rigueur}/ ad-hoc circle-of-chairs, so that Lil was able to stand at a podium and command a smidge of respect. + +“Hi there!” she said, brightly. The weepy puffiness was still present around her eyes, if you knew how to look for it, but she was expert at putting on a brave face no matter what the ache. + +The ad-hocs roared back a collective, “Hi, Lil!” and laughed at their own corny tradition. Oh, they sure were a barrel of laughs at the Magic Kingdom. + +“Everybody knows why we're here, right?” Lil said, with a self-deprecating smile. She'd been lobbying hard for weeks, after all. “Does anyone have any questions about the plans? We'd like to start executing right away.” + +A guy with deliberately boyish, wholesome features put his arm in the air. Lil acknowledged him with a nod. “When you say ‘right away,’ do you mean—” + +I cut in. “Tonight. After this meeting. We're on an eight-week production schedule, and the sooner we start, the sooner it'll be finished.” + +The crowd murmured, unsettled. Lil shot me a withering look. I shrugged. Politics was not my game. + +Lil said, “Don, we're trying something new here, a really streamlined process. The good part is, the process is /{short}/. In a couple months, we'll know if it's working for us. If it's not, hey, we can turn it around in a couple months, too. That's why we're not spending as much time planning as we usually do. It won't take five years for the idea to prove out, so the risks are lower.” + +Another castmember, a woman, apparent 40 with a round, motherly demeanor said, “I'm all for moving fast—Lord knows, our pacing hasn't always been that hot. But I'm concerned about all these new people you propose to recruit—won't having more people slow us down when it comes to making new decisions?” + +/{No}/, I thought sourly, /{because the people I'm bringing in aren't addicted to meetings}/. + +Lil nodded. “That's a good point, Lisa. The offer we're making to the telepresence players is probationary—they don't get to vote until after we've agreed that the rehab is a success.” + +Another castmember stood. I recognized him: Dave, a heavyset, self-important jerk who loved to work the front door, even though he blew his spiel about half the time. “Lillian,” he said, smiling sadly at her, “I think you're really making a big mistake here. We love the Mansion, all of us, and so do the guests. It's a piece of history, and we're its custodians, not its masters. Changing it like this, well…” he shook his head. “It's not good stewardship. If the guests wanted to walk through a funhouse with guys jumping out of the shadows saying ‘booga-booga,’ they'd go to one of the Halloween Houses in their hometowns. The Mansion's better than that. I can't be a part of this plan.” + +I wanted to knock the smug grin off his face. I'd delivered essentially the same polemic a thousand times—in reference to Debra's work—and hearing it from this jerk in reference to /{mine}/ made me go all hot and red inside. + +“Look,” I said. “If we don't do this, if we don't change things, they'll get changed /{for}/ us. By someone else. The question, /{Dave}/, is whether a responsible custodian lets his custodianship be taken away from him, or whether he does everything he can to make sure that he's still around to ensure that his charge is properly cared for. Good custodianship isn't sticking your head in the sand.” + +I could tell I wasn't doing any good. The mood of the crowd was getting darker, the faces more set. I resolved not to speak again until the meeting was done, no matter what the provocation. + +Lil smoothed my remarks over, and fielded a dozen more, and it looked like the objections would continue all afternoon and all night and all the next day, and I felt woozy and overwrought and miserable all at the same time, staring at Lil and her harried smile and her nervous smoothing of her hair over her ears. + +Finally, she called the question. By tradition, the votes were collected in secret and publicly tabulated over the data-channels. The group's eyes unfocussed as they called up HUDs and watched the totals as they rolled in. I was offline and unable to vote or watch. + +At length, Lil heaved a relieved sigh and smiled, dropping her hands behind her back. + +“All right then,” she said, over the crowd's buzz. “Let's get to work.” + +I stood up, saw Dan and Lil staring into each other's eyes, a meaningful glance between new lovers, and I saw red. Literally. My vision washed over pink, and a strobe pounded at the edges of my vision. I took two lumbering steps towards them and opened my mouth to say something horrible, and what came out was “Waaagh.” My right side went numb and my leg slipped out from under me and I crashed to the floor. + +The slatted light from the shutters cast its way across my chest as I tried to struggle up with my left arm, and then it all went black. + +I wasn't nuts after all. + +The doctor's office in the Main Street infirmary was clean and white and decorated with posters of Jiminy Cricket in doctors' whites with an outsized stethoscope. I came to on a hard pallet under a sign that reminded me to get a check-up twice a year, by gum! and I tried to bring my hands up to shield my eyes from the over bright light and the over-cheerful signage, and discovered that I couldn't move my arms. Further investigation revealed that this was because I was strapped down, in full-on four-point restraint. + +“Waaagh,” I said again. + +Dan's worried face swam into my field of vision, along with a serious-looking doctor, apparent 70, with a Norman Rockwell face full of crow'sfeet and smile-lines. + +“Welcome back, Julius. I'm Doctor Pete,” the doctor said, in a kindly voice that matched the face. Despite my recent disillusion with castmember bullshit, I found his schtick comforting. + +I slumped back against the pallet while the doc shone lights in my eyes and consulted various diagnostic apparati. I bore it in stoic silence, too confounded by the horrible Waaagh sounds to attempt more speech. The doc would tell me what was going on when he was ready. + +“Does he need to be tied up still?” Dan asked, and I shook my head urgently. Being tied up wasn't my idea of a good time. + +The doc smiled kindly. “I think it's for the best, for now. Don't worry, Julius, we'll have you up and about soon enough.” + +Dan protested, but stopped when the doc threatened to send him out of the room. He took my hand instead. + +My nose itched. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse, until it was all I could think of, the flaming lance of itch that strobed at the tip of my nostril. Furiously, I wrinkled my face, rattled at my restraints. The doc absentmindedly noticed my gyrations and delicately scratched my nose with a gloved finger. The relief was fantastic. I just hoped my nuts didn't start itching anytime soon. + +Finally, the doctor pulled up a chair and did something that caused the head of the bed to raise up so that I could look him in the eye. + +“Well, now,” he said, stroking his chin. “Julius, you've got a problem. Your friend here tells me your systems have been offline for more than a month. It sure would've been better if you'd come in to see me when it started up. + +“But you didn't, and things got worse.” He nodded up at Jiminy Cricket's recriminations: Go ahead, see your doc! “It's good advice, son, but what's done is done. You were restored from a backup about eight weeks ago, I see. Without more tests, I can't be sure, but my theory is that the brain-machine interface they installed at that time had a material defect. It's been deteriorating ever since, misfiring and rebooting. The shut-downs are a protective mechanism, meant to keep it from introducing the kind of seizure you experienced this afternoon. When the interface senses malfunction, it shuts itself down and boots a diagnostic mode, attempts to fix itself and come back online. + +“Well, that's fine for minor problems, but in cases like this, it's bad news. The interface has been deteriorating steadily, and it's only a matter of time before it does some serious damage.” + +“Waaagh?” I asked. I meant to say, /{All right, but what's wrong with my mouth?}/ + +The doc put a finger to my lips. “Don't try. The interface has locked up, and it's taken some of your voluntary nervous processes with it. In time, it'll probably shut down, but for now, there's no point. That's why we've got you strapped down—you were thrashing pretty hard when they brought you in, and we didn't want you to hurt yourself.” + +/{Probably shut down}/? Jesus. I could end up stuck like this forever. I started shaking. + +The doc soothed me, stroking my hand, and in the process pressed a transdermal on my wrist. The panic receded as the transdermal's sedative oozed into my bloodstream. + +“There, there,” he said. “It's nothing permanent. We can grow you a new clone and refresh it from your last backup. Unfortunately, that backup is a few months old. If we'd caught it earlier, we may've been able to salvage a current backup, but given the deterioration you've displayed to date… Well, there just wouldn't be any point.” + +My heart hammered. I was going to lose two months—lose it all, never happened. My assassination, the new Hall of Presidents and my shameful attempt thereon, the fights with Lil, Lil and Dan, the meeting. My plans for the rehab! All of it, good and bad, every moment flensed away. + +I couldn't do it. I had a rehab to finish, and I was the only one who understood how it had to be done. Without my relentless prodding, the ad-hocs would surely revert to their old, safe ways. They might even leave it half-done, halt the process for an interminable review, present a soft belly for Debra to savage. + +I wouldn't be restoring from backup. + +I had two more seizures before the interface finally gave up and shut itself down. I remember the first, a confusion of vision-occluding strobes and uncontrollable thrashing and the taste of copper, but the second happened without waking me from deep unconsciousness. + +When I came to again in the infirmary, Dan was still there. He had a day's growth of beard and new worrylines at the corners of his newly rejuvenated eyes. The doctor came in, shaking his head. + +“Well, now, it seems like the worst is over. I've drawn up the consent forms for the refresh and the new clone will be ready in an hour or two. In the meantime, I think heavy sedation is in order. Once the restore's been completed, we'll retire this body for you and we'll be all finished up.” + +Retire this body? Kill me, is what it meant. + +“No,” I said. I thrilled in my restraints: my voice was back under my control! + +“Oh, really now.” The doc lost his bedside manner, let his exasperation slip through. “There's nothing else for it. If you'd come to me when it all started, well, we might've had other options. You've got no one to blame but yourself.” + +“No,” I repeated. “Not now. I won't sign.” + +Dan put his hand on mine. I tried to jerk out from under it, but the restraints and his grip held me fast. “You've got to do it, Julius. It's for the best,” he said. + +“I'm not going to let you kill me,” I said, through clenched teeth. His fingertips were callused, worked rough with exertion well beyond the normal call of duty. + +“No one's killing you, son,” the doctor said. Son, son, son. Who knew how old he was? He could be 18 for all I knew. “It's just the opposite: we're saving you. If you continue like this, it will only get worse. The seizures, mental breakdown, the whole melon going soft. You don't want that.” + +I thought of Zed's spectacular transformation into a crazy person. /{No, I sure don't}/. “I don't care about the interface. Chop it out. I can't do it now.” I swallowed. “Later. After the rehab. Eight more weeks.” + +The irony! Once the doc knew I was serious, he sent Dan out of the room and rolled his eyes up while he placed a call. I saw his gorge work as he subvocalized. He left me bound to the table, to wait. + +No clocks in the infirmary, and no internal clock, and it may have been ten minutes or five hours. I was catheterized, but I didn't know it until urgent necessity made the discovery for me. + +When the doc came back, he held a small device that I instantly recognized: a HERF gun. + +Oh, it wasn't the same model I'd used on the Hall of Presidents. This one was smaller, and better made, with the precise engineering of a surgical tool. The doc raised his eyebrows at me. “You know what this is,” he said, flatly. A dim corner of my mind gibbered, /{he knows, he knows, the Hall of Presidents}/. But he didn't know. That episode was locked in my mind, invulnerable to backup. + +“I know,” I said. + +“This one is high-powered in the extreme. It will penetrate the interface's shielding and fuse it. It probably won't turn you into a vegetable. That's the best I can do. If this fails, we will restore you from your last backup. You have to sign the consent before I use it.” He'd dropped all kindly pretense from his voice, not bothering to disguise his disgust. I was pitching out the miracle of the Bitchun Society, the thing that had all but obsoleted the medical profession: why bother with surgery when you can grow a clone, take a backup, and refresh the new body? Some people swapped corpuses just to get rid of a cold. + +I signed. The doc wheeled my gurney into the crash and hum of the utilidors and then put it on a freight tram that ran to the Imagineering compound, and thence to a heavy, exposed Faraday cage. Of course: using the HERF on me would kill any electronics in the neighborhood. They had to shield me before they pulled the trigger. + +The doc placed the gun on my chest and loosened my restraints. He sealed the cage and retreated to the lab's door. He pulled a heavy apron and helmet with faceguard from a hook beside the door. + +“Once I am outside the door, point it at your head and pull the trigger. I'll come back in five minutes. Once I am in the room, place the gun on the floor and do not touch it. It is only good for a single usage, but I have no desire to find out I'm wrong.” + +He closed the door. I took the pistol in my hand. It was heavy, dense with its stored energy, the tip a parabolic hollow to better focus its cone. + +I lifted the gun to my temple and let it rest there. My thumb found the trigger-stud. + +I paused. This wouldn't kill me, but it might lock the interface forever, paralyzing me, turning me into a thrashing maniac. I knew that I would never be able to pull the trigger. The doc must've known, too—this was his way of convincing me to let him do that restore. + +I opened my mouth to call the doc, and what came out was “Waaagh!” + +The seizure started. My arm jerked and my thumb nailed the stud, and there was an ozone tang. The seizure stopped. + +I had no more interface. + +The doc looked sour and pinched when he saw me sitting up on the gurney, rubbing at my biceps. He produced a handheld diagnostic tool and pointed it at my melon, then pronounced every bit of digital microcircuitry in it dead. For the first time since my twenties, I was no more advanced than nature had made me. + +The restraints left purple bruises at my wrists and ankles, where I'd thrashed against them. I hobbled out of the Faraday cage and the lab under my own power, but just barely, my muscles groaning from the inadvertent isometric exercises of my seizure. + +Dan was waiting in the utilidor, crouched and dozing against the wall. The doc shook him awake and his head snapped up, his hand catching the doc's in a lightning-quick reflex. It was easy to forget Dan's old line of work here in the Magic Kingdom, but when he smoothly snagged the doc's arm and sprang to his feet, eyes hard and alert, I remembered. My old pal, the action hero. + +Quickly, Dan released the doc and apologized. He assessed my physical state and wordlessly wedged his shoulder in my armpit, supporting me. I didn't have the strength to stop him. I needed sleep. + +“I'm taking you home,” he said. “We'll fight Debra off tomorrow.” + +“Sure,” I said, and boarded the waiting tram. + +But we didn't go home. Dan took me back to my hotel, the Contemporary, and brought me up to my door. He keycarded the lock and stood awkwardly as I hobbled into the empty room that was my new home, as I collapsed into the bed that was mine now. + +With an apologetic look, he slunk away, back to Lil and the house we'd shared. + +I slapped on a sedative transdermal that the doc had given me, and added a mood-equalizer that he'd recommended to control my “personality swings.” In seconds, I was asleep. + +1~ CHAPTER 7 + +The meds helped me cope with the next couple of days, starting the rehab on the Mansion. We worked all night erecting a scaffolding around the facade, though no real work would be done on it—we wanted the appearance of rapid progress, and besides, I had an idea. + +I worked alongside Dan, using him as a personal secretary, handling my calls, looking up plans, monitoring the Net for the first grumblings as the Disney-going public realized that the Mansion was being taken down for a full-blown rehab. We didn't exchange any unnecessary words, standing side by side without ever looking into one another's eyes. I couldn't really feel awkward around Dan, anyway. He never let me, and besides we had our hands full directing disappointed guests away from the Mansion. A depressing number of them headed straight for the Hall of Presidents. + +We didn't have to wait long for the first panicked screed about the Mansion to appear. Dan read it aloud off his HUD: “Hey! Anyone hear anything about scheduled maintenance at the HM? I just buzzed by on the way to the new H of P's and it looks like some big stuff's afoot—scaffolding, castmembers swarming in and out, see the pic. I hope they're not screwing up a good thing. BTW, don't miss the new H of P's—very Bitchun.” + +“Right,” I said. “Who's the author, and is he on the list?” + +Dan cogitated a moment. “/{She}/ is Kim Wright, and she's on the list. Good Whuffie, lots of Mansion fanac, big readership.” + +“Call her,” I said. + +This was the plan: recruit rabid fans right away, get 'em in costume, and put 'em up on the scaffolds. Give them outsized, bat-adorned tools and get them to play at construction activity in thumpy, undead pantomime. In time, Suneep and his gang would have a batch of telepresence robots up and running, and we'd move to them, get them wandering the queue area, interacting with curious guests. The new Mansion would be open for business in 48 hours, albeit in stripped-down fashion. The scaffolding made for a nice weenie, a visual draw that would pull the hordes that thronged Debra's Hall of Presidents over for a curious peek or two. Buzz city. + +I'm a pretty smart guy. + +Dan paged this Kim person and spoke to her as she was debarking the Pirates of the Caribbean. I wondered if she was the right person for the job: she seemed awfully enamored of the rehabs that Debra and her crew had performed. If I'd had more time, I would've run a deep background check on every one of the names on my list, but that would've taken months. + +Dan made some small talk with Kim, speaking aloud in deference to my handicap, before coming to the point. “We read your post about the Mansion's rehab. You're the first one to notice it, and we wondered if you'd be interested in coming by to find out a little more about our plans.” + +Dan winced. “She's a screamer,” he whispered. + +Reflexively, I tried to pull up a HUD with my files on the Mansion fans we hoped to recruit. Of course, nothing happened. I'd done that a dozen times that morning, and there was no end in sight. I couldn't seem to get lathered up about it, though, nor about anything else, not even the hickey just visible under Dan's collar. The transdermal mood-balancer on my bicep was seeing to that—doctor's orders. + +“Fine, fine. We're standing by the Pet Cemetery, two cast members, male, in Mansion costumes. About five-ten, apparent 30. You can't miss us.” + +She didn't. She arrived out of breath and excited, jogging. She was apparent 20, and dressed like a real 20 year old, in a hipster climate-control cowl that clung to and released her limbs, which were long and double-kneed. All the rage among the younger set, including the girl who'd shot me. + +But the resemblance to my killer ended with her dress and body. She wasn't wearing a designer face, rather one that had enough imperfections to be the one she was born with, eyes set close and nose wide and slightly squashed. + +I admired the way she moved through the crowd, fast and low but without jostling anyone. “Kim,” I called as she drew near. “Over here.” + +She gave a happy shriek and made a beeline for us. Even charging full-bore, she was good enough at navigating the crowd that she didn't brush against a single soul. When she reached us, she came up short and bounced a little. “Hi, I'm Kim!” she said, pumping my arm with the peculiar violence of the extra-jointed. “Julius,” I said, then waited while she repeated the process with Dan. + +“So,” she said, “what's the deal?” + +I took her hand. “Kim, we've got a job for you, if you're interested.” + +She squeezed my hand hard and her eyes shone. “I'll take it!” she said. + +I laughed, and so did Dan. It was a polite, castmembery sort of laugh, but underneath it was relief. “I think I'd better explain it to you first,” I said. + +“Explain away!” she said, and gave my hand another squeeze. + +I let go of her hand and ran down an abbreviated version of the rehab plans, leaving out anything about Debra and her ad-hocs. Kim drank it all in greedily. She cocked her head at me as I ran it down, eyes wide. It was disconcerting, and I finally asked, “Are you recording this?” + +Kim blushed. “I hope that's okay! I'm starting a new Mansion scrapbook. I have one for every ride in the Park, but this one's gonna be a world-beater!” + +Here was something I hadn't thought about. Publishing ad-hoc business was tabu inside Park, so much so that it hadn't occurred to me that the new castmembers we brought in would want to record every little detail and push it out over the Net as a big old Whuffie collector. + +“I can switch it off,” Kim said. She looked worried, and I really started to grasp how important the Mansion was to the people we were recruiting, how much of a privilege we were offering them. + +“Leave it rolling,” I said. “Let's show the world how it's done.” + +We led Kim into a utilidor and down to costuming. She was half-naked by the time we got there, literally tearing off her clothes in anticipation of getting into character. Sonya, a Liberty Square ad-hoc that we'd stashed at costuming, already had clothes waiting for her, a rotting maid's uniform with an oversized toolbelt. + +We left Kim on the scaffolding, energetically troweling a water-based cement substitute onto the wall, scraping it off and moving to a new spot. It looked boring to me, but I could believe that we'd have to tear her away when the time came. + +We went back to trawling the Net for the next candidate. + +By lunchtime, there were ten drilling, hammering, troweling new castmembers around the scaffolding, pushing black wheelbarrows, singing “Grim Grinning Ghosts” and generally having a high old time. + +“This'll do,” I said to Dan. I was exhausted and soaked with sweat, and the transdermal under my costume itched. Despite the happy-juice in my bloodstream, a streak of uncastmemberly crankiness was shot through my mood. I needed to get offstage. + +Dan helped me hobble away, and as we hit the utilidor, he whispered in my ear, “This was a great idea, Julius. Really.” + +We jumped a tram over to Imagineering, my chest swollen with pride. Suneep had three of his assistants working on the first generation of mobile telepresence robots for the exterior, and had promised a prototype for that afternoon. The robots were easy enough—just off-the-shelf stuff, really—but the costumes and kinematics routines were something else. Thinking about what he and Suneep's gang of hypercreative super-geniuses would come up with cheered me up a little, as did being out of the public eye. + +Suneep's lab looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Imagineer packs rolled in and out with arcane gizmos, or formed tight argumentative knots in the corners as they shouted over whatever their HUDs were displaying. In the middle of it all was Suneep, who looked like he was barely restraining an urge to shout Yippee! He was clearly in his element. + +He threw his arms open when he caught sight of Dan and me, threw them wide enough to embrace the whole mad, gibbering chaos. “What wonderful flumgubbery!” he shouted, over the noise. + +“Sure is,” I agreed. “How's the prototype coming?” + +Suneep waved absently, his short fingers describing trivialities in the air. “In due time, in due time. I've put that team onto something else, a kinematics routine for a class of flying spooks that use gasbags to stay aloft—silent and scary. It's old spy-tech, and the retrofit's coming tremendously. Take a look!” He pointed a finger at me and, presumably, squirted some data my way. + +“I'm offline,” I reminded him gently. + +He slapped his forehead, took a moment to push his hair off his face, and gave me an apologetic wave. “Of course, of course. Here.” He unrolled an LCD and handed it to me. A flock of spooks danced on the screen, rendered against the ballroom scene. They were thematically consistent with the existing Mansion ghosts, more funny than scary, and their faces were familiar. I looked around the lab and realized that they'd caricatured various Imagineers. + +“Ah! You noticed,” Suneep said, rubbing his hands together. “A very good joke, yes?” + +“This is terrific,” I said, carefully. “But I really need some robots up and running by tomorrow night, Suneep. We discussed this, remember?” Without telepresence robots, my recruiting would be limited to fans like Kim, who lived in the area. I had broader designs than that. + +Suneep looked disappointed. “Of course. We discussed it. I don't like to stop my people when they have good ideas, but there's a time and a place. I'll put them on it right away. Leave it to me.” + +Dan turned to greet someone, and I looked to see who it was. Lil. Of course. She was raccoon-eyed with fatigue, and she reached out for Dan's hand, saw me, and changed her mind. + +“Hi, guys,” she said, with studied casualness. + +“Oh, hello!” said Suneep. He fired his finger at her—the flying ghosts, I imagined. Lil's eyes rolled up for a moment, then she nodded exhaustedly at him. + +“Very good,” she said. “I just heard from Lisa. She says the indoor crews are on-schedule. They've got most of the animatronics dismantled, and they're taking down the glass in the Ballroom now.” The Ballroom ghost effects were accomplished by means of a giant pane of polished glass that laterally bisected the room. The Mansion had been built around it—it was too big to take out in one piece. “They say it'll be a couple days before they've got it cut up and ready to remove.” + +A pocket of uncomfortable silence descended on us, the roar of the Imagineers rushing in to fill it. + +“You must be exhausted,” Dan said, at length. + +“Goddamn right,” I said, at the same moment that Lil said, “I guess I am.” + +We both smiled wanly. Suneep put his arms around Lil's and my shoulders and squeezed. He smelled of an exotic cocktail of industrial lubricant, ozone, and fatigue poisons. + +“You two should go home and give each other a massage,” he said. “You've earned some rest.” + +Dan met my eye and shook his head apologetically. I squirmed out from under Suneep's arm and thanked him quietly, then slunk off to the Contemporary for a hot tub and a couple hours of sleep. + +I came back to the Mansion at sundown. It was cool enough that I took a surface route, costume rolled in a shoulderbag, instead of riding through the clattering, air-conditioned comfort of the utilidors. + +As a freshening breeze blew across me, I suddenly had a craving for /{real}/ weather, the kind of climate I'd grown up with in Toronto. It was October, for chrissakes, and a lifetime of conditioning told me that it was May. I stopped and leaned on a bench for a moment and closed my eyes. Unbidden, and with the clarity of a HUD, I saw High Park in Toronto, clothed in its autumn colors, fiery reds and oranges, shades of evergreen and earthy brown. God, I needed a vacation. + +I opened my eyes and realized that I was standing in front of the Hall of Presidents, and that there was a queue ahead of me for it, one that stretched back and back. I did a quick sum in my head and sucked air between my teeth: they had enough people for five or six full houses waiting here—easily an hour's wait. The Hall /{never}/ drew crowds like this. Debra was working the turnstiles in Betsy Ross gingham, and she caught my eye and snapped a nod at me. + +I stalked off to the Mansion. A choir of zombie-shambling new recruits had formed up in front of the gate, and were groaning their way through “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” with a new call-and-response structure. A small audience participated, urged on by the recruits on the scaffolding. + +“Well, at least that's going right,” I muttered to myself. And it was, except that I could see members of the ad-hoc looking on from the sidelines, and the looks weren't kindly. Totally obsessive fans are a good measure of a ride's popularity, but they're kind of a pain in the ass, too. They lipsynch the soundtrack, cadge souvenirs and pester you with smarmy, show-off questions. After a while, even the cheeriest castmember starts to lose patience, develop an automatic distaste for them. + +The Liberty Square ad-hocs who were working on the Mansion had been railroaded into approving a rehab, press-ganged into working on it, and were now forced to endure the company of these grandstanding megafans. If I'd been there when it all started—instead of sleeping!—I may've been able to massage their bruised egos, but now I wondered if it was too late. + +Nothing for it but to do it. I ducked into a utilidor, changed into my costume and went back onstage. I joined the call-and-response enthusiastically, walking around to the ad-hocs and getting them to join in, reluctantly or otherwise. + +By the time the choir retired, sweaty and exhausted, a group of ad-hocs were ready to take their place, and I escorted my recruits to an offstage break-room. + +Suneep didn't deliver the robot prototypes for a week, and told me that it would be another week before I could have even five production units. Though he didn't say it, I got the sense that his guys were out of control, so excited by the freedom from ad-hoc oversight that they were running wild. Suneep himself was nearly a wreck, nervous and jumpy. I didn't press it. + +Besides, I had problems of my own. The new recruits were multiplying. I was staying on top of the fan response to the rehab from a terminal I'd had installed in my hotel room. Kim and her local colleagues were fielding millions of hits every day, their Whuffie accumulating as envious fans around the world logged in to watch their progress on the scaffolding. + +That was all according to plan. What wasn't according to plan was that the new recruits were doing their own recruiting, extending invitations to their net-pals to come on down to Florida, bunk on their sofas and guest-beds, and present themselves to me for active duty. + +The tenth time it happened, I approached Kim in the break-room. Her gorge was working, her eyes tracked invisible words across the middle distance. No doubt she was penning yet another breathless missive about the magic of working in the Mansion. “Hey, there,” I said. “Have you got a minute to meet with me?” + +She held up a single finger, then, a moment later, gave me a bright smile. + +“Hi, Julius!” she said. “Sure!” + +“Why don't you change into civvies, we'll take a walk through the Park and talk?” + +Kim wore her costume every chance she got. I'd been quite firm about her turning it in to the laundry every night instead of wearing it home. + +Reluctantly, she stepped into a change-room and switched into her cowl. We took the utilidor to the Fantasyland exit and walked through the late-afternoon rush of children and their adults, queued deep and thick for Snow White, Dumbo and Peter Pan. + +“How're you liking it here?” I asked. + +Kim gave a little bounce. “Oh, Julius, it's the best time of my life, really! A dream come true. I'm meeting so many interesting people, and I'm really feeling creative. I can't wait to try out the telepresence rigs, too.” + +“Well, I'm really pleased with what you and your friends are up to here. You're working hard, putting on a good show. I like the songs you've been working up, too.” + +She did one of those double-kneed shuffles that was the basis of any number of action vids those days and she was suddenly standing in front of me, hand on my shoulder, looking into my eyes. She looked serious. + +“Is there a problem, Julius? If there is, I'd rather we just talked about it, instead of making chitchat.” + +I smiled and took her hand off my shoulder. “How old are you, Kim?” + +“Nineteen,” she said. “What's the problem?” + +Nineteen! Jesus, no wonder she was so volatile. /{What's my excuse, then?}/ + +“It's not a problem, Kim, it's just something I wanted to discuss with you. The people you-all have been bringing down to work for me, they're all really great castmembers.” + +“But?” + +“But we have limited resources around here. Not enough hours in the day for me to stay on top of the new folks, the rehab, everything. Not to mention that until we open the new Mansion, there's a limited number of extras we can use out front. I'm concerned that we're going to put someone on stage without proper training, or that we're going to run out of uniforms; I'm also concerned about people coming all the way here and discovering that there aren't any shifts for them to take.” + +She gave me a relieved look. “Is /{that}/ all? Don't worry about it. I've been talking to Debra, over at the Hall of Presidents, and she says she can pick up any people who can't be used at the Mansion—we could even rotate back and forth!” She was clearly proud of her foresight. + +My ears buzzed. Debra, one step ahead of me all along the way. She probably suggested that Kim do some extra recruiting in the first place. She'd take in the people who came down to work the Mansion, convince them they'd been hard done by the Liberty Square crew, and rope them into her little Whuffie ranch, the better to seize the Mansion, the Park, the whole of Walt Disney World. + +“Oh, I don't think it'll come to that,” I said, carefully. “I'm sure we can find a use for them all at the Mansion. More the merrier.” + +Kim cocked quizzical, but let it go. I bit my tongue. The pain brought me back to reality, and I started planning costume production, training rosters, bunking. God, if only Suneep would finish the robots! + +“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I said, hotly. + +Lil folded her arms and glared. “No, Julius. It won't fly. The group is already upset that all the glory is going to the new people, they'll never let us bring more in. They also won't stop working on the rehab to train them, costume them, feed them and mother them. They're losing Whuffie every day that the Mansion's shut up, and they don't want any more delays. Dave's already joined up with Debra, and I'm sure he's not the last one.” + +Dave—the jerk who'd pissed all over the rehab in the meeting. Of course he'd gone over. Lil and Dan stood side by side on the porch of the house where I'd lived. I'd driven out that night to convince Lil to sell the ad-hocs on bringing in more recruits, but it wasn't going according to plan. They wouldn't even let me in the house. + +“So what do I tell Kim?” + +“Tell her whatever you want,” Lil said. “You brought her in—you manage her. Take some goddamn responsibility for once in your life.” + +It wasn't going to get any better. Dan gave me an apologetic look. Lil glared a moment longer, then went into the house. + +“Debra's doing real well,” he said. “The net's all over her. Biggest thing ever. Flash-baking is taking off in nightclubs, dance mixes with the DJ's backup being shoved in bursts into the dancers.” + +“God,” I said. “I fucked up, Dan. I fucked it all up.” + +He didn't say anything, and that was the same as agreeing. + +Driving back to the hotel, I decided I needed to talk to Kim. She was a problem I didn't need, and maybe a problem I could solve. I pulled a screeching U-turn and drove the little runabout to her place, a tiny condo in a crumbling complex that had once been a gated seniors' village, pre-Bitchun. + +Her place was easy to spot. All the lights were burning, faint conversation audible through the screen door. I jogged up the steps two at a time, and was about to knock when a familiar voice drifted through the screen. + +Debra, saying: “Oh yes, oh yes! Terrific idea! I'd never really thought about using streetmosphere players to liven up the queue area, but you're making a lot of sense. You people have just been doing the /{best}/ work over at the Mansion—find me more like you and I'll take them for the Hall any day!” + +I heard Kim and her young friends chatting excitedly, proudly. The anger and fear suffused me from tip to toe, and I felt suddenly light and cool and ready to do something terrible. + +I padded silently down the steps and got into my runabout. + +Some people never learn. I'm one of them, apparently. + +I almost chortled over the foolproof simplicity of my plan as I slipped in through the cast entrance using the ID card I'd scored when my systems went offline and I was no longer able to squirt my authorization at the door. + +I changed clothes in a bathroom on Main Street, switching into a black cowl that completely obscured my features, then slunk through the shadows along the storefronts until I came to the moat around Cinderella's castle. Keeping low, I stepped over the fence and duck-walked down the embankment, then slipped into the water and sloshed across to the Adventureland side. + +Slipping along to the Liberty Square gateway, I flattened myself in doorways whenever I heard maintenance crews passing in the distance, until I reached the Hall of Presidents, and in a twinkling I was inside the theater itself. + +Humming the Small World theme, I produced a short wrecking bar from my cowl's tabbed pocket and set to work. + +The primary broadcast units were hidden behind a painted scrim over the stage, and they were surprisingly well built for a first generation tech. I really worked up a sweat smashing them, but I kept at it until not a single component remained recognizable. The work was slow and loud in the silent Park, but it lulled me into a sleepy reverie, an autohypnotic swing-bang-swing-bang timeless time. To be on the safe side, I grabbed the storage units and slipped them into the cowl. + +Locating their backup units was a little trickier, but years of hanging out at the Hall of Presidents while Lil tinkered with the animatronics helped me. I methodically investigated every nook, cranny and storage area until I located them, in what had been a break-room closet. By now, I had the rhythm of the thing, and I made short work of them. + +I did one more pass, wrecking anything that looked like it might be a prototype for the next generation or notes that would help them reconstruct the units I'd smashed. + +I had no illusions about Debra's preparedness—she'd have something offsite that she could get up and running in a few days. I wasn't doing anything permanent, I was just buying myself a day or two. + +I made my way clean out of the Park without being spotted, and sloshed my way into my runabout, shoes leaking water from the moat. + +For the first time in weeks, I slept like a baby. + +Of course, I got caught. I don't really have the temperament for Machiavellian shenanigans, and I left a trail a mile wide, from the muddy footprints in the Contemporary's lobby to the wrecking bar thoughtlessly left behind, with my cowl and the storage units from the Hall, forgotten on the back seat of my runabout. + +I whistled my personal jazzy uptempo version of “Grim Grinning Ghosts” as I made my way from Costuming, through the utilidor, out to Liberty Square, a few minutes before the Park opened. + +Standing in front of me were Lil and Debra. Debra was holding my cowl and wrecking bar. Lil held the storage units. + +I hadn't put on my transdermals that morning, and so the emotion I felt was unmuffled, loud and yammering. + +I ran. + +I ran past them, along the road to Adventureland, past the Tiki Room where I'd been killed, past the Adventureland gate where I'd waded through the moat, down Main Street. I ran and ran, elbowing early guests, trampling flowers, knocking over an apple cart across from the Penny Arcade. + +I ran until I reached the main gate, and turned, thinking I'd outrun Lil and Debra and all my problems. I'd thought wrong. They were both there, a step behind me, puffing and red. Debra held my wrecking bar like a weapon, and she brandished it at me. + +“You're a goddamn idiot, you know that?” she said. I think if we'd been alone, she would've swung it at me. + +“Can't take it when someone else plays rough, huh, Debra?” I sneered. + +Lil shook her head disgustedly. “She's right, you are an idiot. The ad-hoc's meeting in Adventureland. You're coming.” + +“Why?” I asked, feeling belligerent. “You going to honor me for all my hard work?” + +“We're going to talk about the future, Julius, what's left of it for us.” + +“For God's sake, Lil, can't you see what's going on? They /{killed}/ me! They did it, and now we're fighting each other instead of her! Why can't you see how /{wrong}/ that is?” + +“You'd better watch those accusations, Julius,” Debra said, quietly and intensely, almost hissing. “I don't know who killed you or why, but you're the one who's guilty here. You need help.” + +I barked a humorless laugh. Guests were starting to stream into the now-open Park, and several of them were watching intently as the three costumed castmembers shouted at each other. I could feel my Whuffie hemorrhaging. “Debra, you are purely full of shit, and your work is trite and unimaginative. You're a fucking despoiler and you don't even have the guts to admit it.” + +“That's /{enough}/, Julius,” Lil said, her face hard, her rage barely in check. “We're going.” + +Debra walked a pace behind me, Lil a pace before, all the way through the crowd to Adventureland. I saw a dozen opportunities to slip into a gap in the human ebb and flow and escape custody, but I didn't try. I wanted a chance to tell the whole world what I'd done and why I'd done it. + +Debra followed us in when we mounted the steps to the meeting room. Lil turned. “I don't think you should be here, Debra,” she said in measured tones. + +Debra shook her head. “You can't keep me out, you know. And you shouldn't want to. We're on the same side.” + +I snorted derisively, and I think it decided Lil. “Come on, then,” she said. + +It was SRO in the meeting room, packed to the gills with the entire ad-hoc, except for my new recruits. No work was being done on the rehab, then, and the Liberty Belle would be sitting at her dock. Even the restaurant crews were there. Liberty Square must've been a ghost town. It gave the meeting a sense of urgency: the knowledge that there were guests in Liberty Square wandering aimlessly, looking for castmembers to help them out. Of course, Debra's crew might've been around. + +The crowd's faces were hard and bitter, leaving no doubt in my mind that I was in deep shit. Even Dan, sitting in the front row, looked angry. I nearly started crying right then. Dan—oh, Dan. My pal, my confidant, my patsy, my rival, my nemesis. Dan, Dan, Dan. I wanted to beat him to death and hug him at the same time. + +Lil took the podium and tucked stray hairs behind her ears. “All right, then,” she said. I stood to her left and Debra stood to her right. + +“Thanks for coming out today. I'd like to get this done quickly. We all have important work to get to. I'll run down the facts: last night, a member of this ad-hoc vandalized the Hall of Presidents, rendering it useless. It's estimated that it will take at least a week to get it back up and running. + +“I don't have to tell you that this isn't acceptable. This has never happened before, and it will never happen again. We're going to see to that. + +“I'd like to propose that no further work be done on the Mansion until the Hall of Presidents is fully operational. I will be volunteering my services on the repairs.” + +There were nods in the audience. Lil wouldn't be the only one working at the Hall that week. “Disney World isn't a competition,” Lil said. “All the different ad-hocs work together, and we do it to make the Park as good as we can. We lose sight of that at our peril.” + +I nearly gagged on bile. “I'd like to say something,” I said, as calmly as I could manage. + +Lil shot me a look. “That's fine, Julius. Any member of the ad-hoc can speak.” + +I took a deep breath. “I did it, all right?” I said. My voice cracked. “I did it, and I don't have any excuse for having done it. It may not have been the smartest thing I've ever done, but I think you all should understand how I was driven to it. + +“We're not /{supposed}/ to be in competition with one another here, but we all know that that's just a polite fiction. The truth is that there's real competition in the Park, and that the hardest players are the crew that rehabbed the Hall of Presidents. They /{stole}/ the Hall from you! They did it while you were distracted, they used /{me}/ to engineer the distraction, they /{murdered}/ me!” I heard the shriek creeping into my voice, but I couldn't do anything about it. + +“Usually, the lie that we're all on the same side is fine. It lets us work together in peace. But that changed the day they had me shot. If you keep on believing it, you're going to lose the Mansion, the Liberty Belle, Tom Sawyer Island—all of it. All the history we have with this place—all the history that the billions who've visited it have—it's going to be destroyed and replaced with the sterile, thoughtless shit that's taken over the Hall. Once that happens, there's nothing left that makes this place special. Anyone can get the same experience sitting at home on the sofa! What happens then, huh? How much longer do you think this place will stay open once the only people here are /{you?}/” + +Debra smiled condescendingly. “Are you finished, then?” she asked, sweetly. “Fine. I know I'm not a member of this group, but since it was my work that was destroyed last night, I think I would like to address Julius's statements, if you don't mind.” She paused, but no one spoke up. + +“First of all, I want you all to know that we don't hold you responsible for what happened last night. We know who was responsible, and he needs help. I urge you to see to it that he gets it. + +“Next, I'd like to say that as far as I'm concerned, we are on the same side—the side of the Park. This is a special place, and it couldn't exist without all of our contributions. What happened to Julius was terrible, and I sincerely hope that the person responsible is caught and brought to justice. But that person wasn't me or any of the people in my ad-hoc. + +“Lil, I'd like to thank you for your generous offer of assistance, and we'll take you up on it. That goes for all of you—come on by the Hall, we'll put you to work. We'll be up and running in no time. + +“Now, as far as the Mansion goes, let me say this once and for all: neither me nor my ad-hoc have any desire to take over the operations of the Mansion. It is a terrific attraction, and it's getting better with the work you're all doing. If you've been worrying about it, then you can stop worrying now. We're all on the same side. + +“Thanks for hearing me out. I've got to go see my team now.” + +She turned and left, a chorus of applause following her out. + +Lil waited until it died down, then said, “All right, then, we've got work to do, too. I'd like to ask you all a favor, first. I'd like us to keep the details of last night's incident to ourselves. Letting the guests and the world know about this ugly business isn't good for anyone. Can we all agree to do that?” + +There was a moment's pause while the results were tabulated on the HUDs, then Lil gave them a million-dollar smile. “I knew you'd come through. Thanks, guys. Let's get to work.” + +I spent the day at the hotel, listlessly scrolling around on my terminal. Lil had made it very clear to me after the meeting that I wasn't to show my face inside the Park until I'd “gotten help,” whatever that meant. + +By noon, the news was out. It was hard to pin down the exact source, but it seemed to revolve around the new recruits. One of them had told their net-pals about the high drama in Liberty Square, and mentioned my name. + +There were already a couple of sites vilifying me, and I expected more. I needed some kind of help, that was for sure. + +I thought about leaving then, turning my back on the whole business and leaving Walt Disney World to start yet another new life, Whuffie-poor and fancy-free. + +It wouldn't be so bad. I'd been in poor repute before, not so long ago. That first time Dan and I had palled around, back at the U of T, I'd been the center of a lot of pretty ambivalent sentiment, and Whuffie-poor as a man can be. + +I slept in a little coffin on-campus, perfectly climate controlled. It was cramped and dull, but my access to the network was free and I had plenty of material to entertain myself. While I couldn't get a table in a restaurant, I was free to queue up at any of the makers around town and get myself whatever I wanted to eat and drink, whenever I wanted it. Compared to 99.99999 percent of all the people who'd ever lived, I had a life of unparalleled luxury. + +Even by the standards of the Bitchun Society, I was hardly a rarity. The number of low-esteem individuals at large was significant, and they got along just fine, hanging out in parks, arguing, reading, staging plays, playing music. + +Of course, that wasn't the life for me. I had Dan to pal around with, a rare high-net-Whuffie individual who was willing to fraternize with a shmuck like me. He'd stand me to meals at sidewalk cafes and concerts at the SkyDome, and shoot down any snotty reputation-punk who sneered at my Whuffie tally. Being with Dan was a process of constantly reevaluating my beliefs in the Bitchun Society, and I'd never had a more vibrant, thought-provoking time in all my life. + +I could have left the Park, deadheaded to anywhere in the world, started over. I could have turned my back on Dan, on Debra, on Lil and the whole mess. + +I didn't. + +I called up the doc. + +1~ CHAPTER 8 + +Doctor Pete answered on the third ring, audio-only. In the background, I heard a chorus of crying children, the constant backdrop of the Magic Kingdom infirmary. + +“Hi, doc,” I said. + +“Hello, Julius. What can I do for you?” Under the veneer of professional medical and castmember friendliness, I sensed irritation. + +/{Make it all good again}/. “I'm not really sure. I wanted to see if I could talk it over with you. I'm having some pretty big problems.” + +“I'm on-shift until five. Can it wait until then?” + +By then, I had no idea if I'd have the nerve to see him. “I don't think so—I was hoping we could meet right away.” + +“If it's an emergency, I can have an ambulance sent for you.” + +“It's urgent, but not an emergency. I need to talk about it in person. Please?” + +He sighed in undoctorly, uncastmemberly fashion. “Julius, I've got important things to do here. Are you sure this can't wait?” + +I bit back a sob. “I'm sure, doc.” + +“All right then. When can you be here?” + +Lil had made it clear that she didn't want me in the Park. “Can you meet me? I can't really come to you. I'm at the Contemporary, Tower B, room 2334.” + +“I don't really make house calls, son.” + +“I know, I know.” I hated how pathetic I sounded. “Can you make an exception? I don't know who else to turn to.” + +“I'll be there as soon as I can. I'll have to get someone to cover for me. Let's not make a habit of this, all right?” + +I whooshed out my relief. “I promise.” + +He disconnected abruptly, and I found myself dialing Dan. + +“Yes?” he said, cautiously. + +“Doctor Pete is coming over, Dan. I don't know if he can help me—I don't know if anyone can. I just wanted you to know.” + +He surprised me, then, and made me remember why he was still my friend, even after everything. “Do you want me to come over?” + +“That would be very nice,” I said, quietly. “I'm at the hotel.” + +“Give me ten minutes,” he said, and rang off. + +He found me on my patio, looking out at the Castle and the peaks of Space Mountain. To my left spread the sparkling waters of the Seven Seas Lagoon, to my right, the Property stretched away for mile after manicured mile. The sun was warm on my skin, faint strains of happy laughter drifted with the wind, and the flowers were in bloom. In Toronto, it would be freezing rain, gray buildings, noisome rapid transit (a monorail hissed by), and hard-faced anonymity. I missed it. + +Dan pulled up a chair next to mine and sat without a word. We both stared out at the view for a long while. + +“It's something else, isn't it?” I said, finally. + +“I suppose so,” he said. “I want to say something before the doc comes by, Julius.” + +“Go ahead.” + +“Lil and I are through. It should never have happened in the first place, and I'm not proud of myself. If you two were breaking up, that's none of my business, but I had no right to hurry it along.” + +“All right,” I said. I was too drained for emotion. + +“I've taken a room here, moved my things.” + +“How's Lil taking it?” + +“Oh, she thinks I'm a total bastard. I suppose she's right.” + +“I suppose she's partly right,” I corrected him. + +He gave me a gentle slug in the shoulder. “Thanks.” + +We waited in companionable silence until the doc arrived. + +He bustled in, his smile lines drawn up into a sour purse and waited expectantly. I left Dan on the patio while I took a seat on the bed. + +“I'm cracking up or something,” I said. “I've been acting erratically, sometimes violently. I don't know what's wrong with me.” I'd rehearsed the speech, but it still wasn't easy to choke out. + +“We both know what's wrong, Julius,” the doc said, impatiently. “You need to be refreshed from your backup, get set up with a fresh clone and retire this one. We've had this talk.” + +“I can't do it,” I said, not meeting his eye. “I just can't—isn't there another way?” + +The doc shook his head. “Julius, I've got limited resources to allocate. There's a perfectly good cure for what's ailing you, and if you won't take it, there's not much I can do for you.” + +“But what about meds?” + +“Your problem isn't a chemical imbalance, it's a mental defect. Your /{brain}/ is /{broken}/, son. All that meds will do is mask the symptoms, while you get worse. I can't tell you what you want to hear, unfortunately. Now, If you're ready to take the cure, I can retire this clone immediately and get you restored into a new one in 48 hours.” + +“Isn't there another way? Please? You have to help me—I can't lose all this.” I couldn't admit my real reasons for being so attached to this singularly miserable chapter in my life, not even to myself. + +The doctor rose to go. “Look, Julius, you haven't got the Whuffie to make it worth anyone's time to research a solution to this problem, other than the one that we all know about. I can give you mood-suppressants, but that's not a permanent solution.” + +“Why not?” + +He boggled. “You /{can't}/ just take dope for the rest of your life, son. Eventually, something will happen to this body—I see from your file that you're stroke-prone—and you're going to get refreshed from your backup. The longer you wait, the more traumatic it'll be. You're robbing from your future self for your selfish present.” + +It wasn't the first time the thought had crossed my mind. Every passing day made it harder to take the cure. To lie down and wake up friends with Dan, to wake up and be in love with Lil again. To wake up to a Mansion the way I remembered it, a Hall of Presidents where I could find Lil bent over with her head in a President's guts of an afternoon. To lie down and wake without disgrace, without knowing that my lover and my best friend would betray me, /{had}/ betrayed me. + +I just couldn't do it—not yet, anyway. + +Dan—Dan was going to kill himself soon, and if I restored myself from my old backup, I'd lose my last year with him. I'd lose /{his}/ last year. + +“Let's table that, doc. I hear what you're saying, but there're complications. I guess I'll take the mood-suppressants for now.” + +He gave me a cold look. “I'll give you a scrip, then. I could've done that without coming out here. Please don't call me anymore.” + +I was shocked by his obvious ire, but I didn't understand it until he was gone and I told Dan what had happened. + +“Us old-timers, we're used to thinking of doctors as highly trained professionals—all that pre-Bitchun med-school stuff, long internships, anatomy drills... Truth is, the average doc today gets more training in bedside manner than bioscience. ‘Doctor’ Pete is a technician, not an MD, not the way you and I mean it. Anyone with the kind of knowledge you're looking for is working as a historical researcher, not a doctor. + +“But that's not the illusion. The doc is supposed to be the authority on medical matters, even though he's only got one trick: restore from backup. You're reminding Pete of that, and he's not happy to have it happen.” + +I waited a week before returning to the Magic Kingdom, sunning myself on the white sand beach at the Contemporary, jogging the Walk Around the World, taking a canoe out to the wild and overgrown Discovery Island, and generally cooling out. Dan came by in the evenings and it was like old times, running down the pros and cons of Whuffie and Bitchunry and life in general, sitting on my porch with a sweating pitcher of lemonade. + +On the last night, he presented me with a clever little handheld, a museum piece that I recalled fondly from the dawning days of the Bitchun Society. It had much of the functionality of my defunct systems, in a package I could slip in my shirt pocket. It felt like part of a costume, like the turnip watches the Ben Franklin streetmosphere players wore at the American Adventure. + +Museum piece or no, it meant that I was once again qualified to participate in the Bitchun Society, albeit more slowly and less efficiently than I once may've. I took it downstairs the next morning and drove to the Magic Kingdom's castmember lot. + +At least, that was the plan. When I got down to the Contemporary's parking lot, my runabout was gone. A quick check with the handheld revealed the worst: my Whuffie was low enough that someone had just gotten inside and driven away, realizing that they could make more popular use of it than I could. + +With a sinking feeling, I trudged up to my room and swiped my key through the lock. It emitted a soft, unsatisfied _bzzz_ and lit up, “Please see the front desk.” My room had been reassigned, too. I had the short end of the Whuffie stick. + +At least there was no mandatory Whuffie check on the monorail platform, but the other people on the car were none too friendly to me, and no one offered me an inch more personal space than was necessary. I had hit bottom. + +I took the castmember entrance to the Magic Kingdom, clipping my name tag to my Disney Operations polo shirt, ignoring the glares of my fellow castmembers in the utilidors. + +I used the handheld to page Dan. “Hey there,” he said, brightly. I could tell instantly that I was being humored. + +“Where are you?” I asked. + +“Oh, up in the Square. By the Liberty Tree.” + +In front of the Hall of Presidents. I worked the handheld, pinged some Whuffie manually. Debra was spiked so high it seemed she'd never come down, as were Tim and her whole crew in aggregate. They were drawing from guests by the millions, and from castmembers and from people who'd read the popular accounts of their struggle against the forces of petty jealousy and sabotage—i.e., me. + +I felt light-headed. I hurried along to costuming and changed into the heavy green Mansion costume, then ran up the stairs to the Square. + +I found Dan sipping a coffee and sitting on a bench under the giant, lantern-hung Liberty Tree. He had a second cup waiting for me, and patted the bench next to him. I sat with him and sipped, waiting for him to spill whatever bit of rotten news he had for me this morning—I could feel it hovering like storm clouds. + +He wouldn't talk though, not until we finished the coffee. Then he stood and strolled over to the Mansion. It wasn't rope-drop yet, and there weren't any guests in the Park, which was all for the better, given what was coming next. + +“Have you taken a look at Debra's Whuffie lately?” he asked, finally, as we stood by the pet cemetery, considering the empty scaffolding. + +I started to pull out the handheld but he put a hand on my arm. “Don't bother,” he said, morosely. “Suffice it to say, Debra's gang is number one with a bullet. Ever since word got out about what happened to the Hall, they've been stacking it deep. They can do just about anything, Jules, and get away with it.” + +My stomach tightened and I found myself grinding my molars. “So, what is it they've done, Dan?” I asked, already knowing the answer. + +Dan didn't have to respond, because at that moment, Tim emerged from the Mansion, wearing a light cotton work-smock. He had a thoughtful expression, and when he saw us, he beamed his elfin grin and came over. + +“Hey guys!” he said. + +“Hi, Tim,” Dan said. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. + +“Pretty exciting stuff, huh?” he said. + +“I haven't told him yet,” Dan said, with forced lightness. “Why don't you run it down?” + +“Well, it's pretty radical, I have to admit. We've learned some stuff from the Hall that we wanted to apply, and at the same time, we wanted to capture some of the historical character of the ghost story.” + +I opened my mouth to object, but Dan put a hand on my forearm. “Really?” he asked innocently. “How do you plan on doing that?” + +“Well, we're keeping the telepresence robots—that's a honey of an idea, Julius—but we're giving each one an uplink so that it can flash-bake. We've got some high-Whuffie horror writers pulling together a series of narratives about the lives of each ghost: how they met their tragic ends, what they've done since, you know. + +“The way we've storyboarded it, the guests stream through the ride pretty much the way they do now, walking through the preshow and then getting into the ride-vehicles, the Doom Buggies. But here's the big change: we /{slow it all down}/. We trade off throughput for intensity, make it more of a premium product. + +“So you're a guest. From the queue to the unload zone, you're being chased by these ghosts, these telepresence robots, and they're really scary—I've got Suneep's concept artists going back to the drawing board, hitting basic research on stuff that'll just scare the guests silly. When a ghost catches you, lays its hands on you—wham! Flash-bake! You get its whole grisly story in three seconds, across your frontal lobe. By the time you've left, you've had ten or more ghost-contacts, and the next time you come back, it's all new ghosts with all new stories. The way that the Hall's drawing 'em, we're bound to be a hit.” He put his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, clearly proud of himself. + +When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there'd been an ugly decade or so in ride design. Imagineering found a winning formula for Spaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big golf ball, and, in their drive to establish thematic continuity, they'd turned the formula into a cookie-cutter, stamping out half a dozen clones for each of the “themed” areas in the Future Showcase. It went like this: first, we were cavemen, then there was ancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX), then there was the Great Depression, and, finally, we reached the modern age. Who knows what the future holds? We do! We'll all have videophones and be living on the ocean floor. Once was cute—compelling and inspirational, even—but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone, once Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started to resemble a nail. Even now, the Epcot ad-hocs were repeating the sins of their forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun utopia. + +And Debra was repeating the classic mistake, tearing her way through the Magic Kingdom with her blaster set to flash-bake. + +“Tim,” I said, hearing the tremble in my voice. “I thought you said that you had no designs on the Mansion, that you and Debra wouldn't be trying to take it away from us. Didn't you say that?” + +Tim rocked back as if I'd slapped him and the blood drained from his face. “But we're not taking it away!” he said. “You /{invited}/ us to help.” + +I shook my head, confused. “We did?” I said. + +“Sure,” he said. + +“Yes,” Dan said. “Kim and some of the other rehab cast went to Debra yesterday and asked her to do a design review of the current rehab and suggest any changes. She was good enough to agree, and they've come up with some great ideas.” I read between the lines: the newbies you invited in have gone over to the other side and we're going to lose everything because of them. I felt like shit. + +“Well, I stand corrected,” I said, carefully. Tim's grin came back and he clapped his hands together. /{He really loves the Mansion}/, I thought. /{He could have been on our side, if we had only played it all right.}/ + +Dan and I took to the utilidors and grabbed a pair of bicycles and sped towards Suneep's lab, jangling our bells at the rushing castmembers. “They don't have the authority to invite Debra in,” I panted as we pedaled. + +“Says who?” Dan said. + +“It was part of the deal—they knew that they were probationary members right from the start. They weren't even allowed into the design meetings.” + +“Looks like they took themselves off probation,” he said. + +Suneep gave us both a chilly look when we entered his lab. He had dark circles under his eyes and his hands shook with exhaustion. He seemed to be holding himself erect with nothing more than raw anger. + +“So much for building without interference,” he said. “We agreed that this project wouldn't change midway through. Now it has, and I've got other commitments that I'm going to have to cancel because this is going off-schedule.” + +I made soothing apologetic gestures with my hands. “Suneep, believe me, I'm just as upset about this as you are. We don't like this one little bit.” + +He harrumphed. “We had a deal, Julius,” he said, hotly. “I would do the rehab for you and you would keep the ad-hocs off my back. I've been holding up my end of the bargain, but where the hell have you been? If they replan the rehab now, I'll /{have}/ to go along with them. I can't just leave the Mansion half-done—they'll murder me.” + +The kernel of a plan formed in my mind. “Suneep, we don't like the new rehab plan, and we're going to stop it. You can help. Just stonewall them—tell them they'll have to find other Imagineering support if they want to go through with it, that you're booked solid.” + +Dan gave me one of his long, considering looks, then nodded a minute approval. “Yeah,” he drawled. “That'll help all right. Just tell 'em that they're welcome to make any changes they want to the plan, /{if}/ they can find someone else to execute them.” + +Suneep looked unhappy. “Fine—so then they go and find someone else to do it, and that person gets all the credit for the work my team's done so far. I just flush my time down the toilet.” + +“It won't come to that,” I said quickly. “If you can just keep saying no for a couple days, we'll do the rest.” + +Suneep looked doubtful. + +“I promise,” I said. + +Suneep ran his stubby fingers through his already crazed hair. “All right,” he said, morosely. + +Dan slapped him on the back. “Good man,” he said. + +It should have worked. It almost did. + +I sat in the back of the Adventureland conference room while Dan exhorted. + +“Look, you don't have to roll over for Debra and her people! This is /{your}/ garden, and you've tended it responsibly for years. She's got no right to move in on you—you've got all the Whuffie you need to defend the place, if you all work together.” + +No castmember likes confrontation, and the Liberty Square bunch were tough to rouse to action. Dan had turned down the air conditioning an hour before the meeting and closed up all the windows, so that the room was a kiln for hard-firing irritation into rage. I stood meekly in the back, as far as possible from Dan. He was working his magic on my behalf, and I was content to let him do his thing. + +When Lil had arrived, she'd sized up the situation with a sour expression: sit in the front, near Dan, or in the back, near me. She'd chosen the middle, and to concentrate on Dan I had to tear my eyes away from the sweat glistening on her long, pale neck. + +Dan stalked the aisles like a preacher, eyes blazing. “They're /{stealing}/ your future! They're /{stealing}/ your /{past}/! They claim they've got your support!” + +He lowered his tone. “I don't think that's true.” He grabbed a castmember by her hand and looked into her eyes. “Is it true?” he said so low it was almost a whisper. + +“No,” the castmember said. + +He dropped her hand and whirled to face another castmember. “Is it true?” he demanded, raising his voice, slightly. + +“No!” the castmember said, his voice unnaturally loud after the whispers. A nervous chuckle rippled through the crowd. + +“Is it true?” he said, striding to the podium, shouting now. + +“No!” the crowd roared. + +“NO!” he shouted back. + +“You don't /{have to}/ roll over and take it! You can fight back, carry on with the plan, send them packing. They're only taking over because you're letting them. Are you going to let them?” + +“NO!” + +Bitchun wars are rare. Long before anyone tries a takeover of anything, they've done the arithmetic and ensured themselves that the ad-hoc they're displacing doesn't have a hope of fighting back. + +For the defenders, it's a simple decision: step down gracefully and salvage some reputation out of the thing—fighting back will surely burn away even that meager reward. + +No one benefits from fighting back—least of all the thing everyone's fighting over. For example: + +It was the second year of my undergrad, taking a double-major in not making trouble for my profs and keeping my mouth shut. It was the early days of Bitchun, and most of us were still a little unclear on the concept. + +Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad students in the Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of the revolution, and they knew what they wanted: control of the Department, oustering of the tyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully pulpit from which to preach the Bitchun gospel to a generation of impressionable undergrads who were too cowed by their workloads to realize what a load of shit they were being fed by the University. + +At least, that's what the intense, heavyset woman who seized the mic at my Soc 200 course said, that sleepy morning mid-semester at Convocation Hall. Nineteen hundred students filled the hall, a capacity crowd of bleary, coffee-sipping time-markers, and they woke up in a hurry when the woman's strident harangue burst over their heads. + +I saw it happen from the very start. The prof was down there on the stage, a speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then there was a blur as half a dozen grad students rushed the stage. They were dressed in University poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and tattered sports coats, and five of them formed a human wall in front of the prof while the sixth, the heavyset one with the dark hair and the prominent mole on her cheek, unclipped his mic and clipped it to her lapel. + +“Wakey wakey!” she called, and the reality of the moment hit home for me: this wasn't on the lesson-plan. + +“Come on, heads up! This is /{not}/ a drill. The University of Toronto Department of Sociology is under new management. If you'll set your handhelds to ‘receive,’ we'll be beaming out new lesson-plans momentarily. If you've forgotten your handhelds, you can download the plans later on. I'm going to run it down for you right now, anyway. + +“Before I start though, I have a prepared statement for you. You'll probably hear this a couple times more today, in your other classes. It's worth repeating. Here goes: + +“We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at this Department. We demand bully pulpits from which to preach the Bitchun gospel. Effective immediately, the University of Toronto Ad-Hoc Sociology Department is /{in charge}/. We promise high-relevance curriculum with an emphasis on reputation economies, post-scarcity social dynamics, and the social theory of infinite life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, just deadheading! This will be /{fun}/.” + +She taught the course like a pro—you could tell she'd been drilling her lecture for a while. Periodically, the human wall behind her shuddered as the prof made a break for it and was restrained. + +At precisely 9:50 a.m. she dismissed the class, which had hung on her every word. Instead of trudging out and ambling to our next class, the whole nineteen hundred of us rose, and, as one, started buzzing to our neighbors, a roar of “Can you believe it?” that followed us out the door and to our next encounter with the Ad-Hoc Sociology Department. + +It was cool, that day. I had another soc class, Constructing Social Deviance, and we got the same drill there, the same stirring propaganda, the same comical sight of a tenured prof battering himself against a human wall of ad-hocs. + +Reporters pounced on us when we left the class, jabbing at us with mics and peppering us with questions. I gave them a big thumbs-up and said, “Bitchun!” in classic undergrad eloquence. + +The profs struck back the next morning. I got a heads-up from the newscast as I brushed my teeth: the Dean of the Department of Sociology told a reporter that the ad-hocs' courses would not be credited, that they were a gang of thugs who were totally unqualified to teach. A counterpoint interview from a spokesperson for the ad-hocs established that all of the new lecturers had been writing course-plans and lecture notes for the profs they replaced for years, and that they'd also written most of their journal articles. + +The profs brought University security out to help them regain their lecterns, only to be repelled by ad-hoc security guards in homemade uniforms. University security got the message—anyone could be replaced—and stayed away. + +The profs picketed. They held classes out front attended by grade-conscious brown-nosers who worried that the ad-hocs' classes wouldn't count towards their degrees. Fools like me alternated between the outdoor and indoor classes, not learning much of anything. + +No one did. The profs spent their course-times whoring for Whuffie, leading the seminars like encounter groups instead of lectures. The ad-hocs spent their time badmouthing the profs and tearing apart their coursework. + +At the end of the semester, everyone got a credit and the University Senate disbanded the Sociology program in favor of a distance-ed offering from Concordia in Montreal. Forty years later, the fight was settled forever. Once you took backup-and-restore, the rest of the Bitchunry just followed, a value-system settling over you. + +Those who didn't take backup-and-restore may have objected, but, hey, they all died. + +The Liberty Square ad-hocs marched shoulder to shoulder through the utilidors and, as a mass, took back the Haunted Mansion. Dan, Lil and I were up front, careful not to brush against one another as we walked quickly through the backstage door and started a bucket-brigade, passing out the materials that Debra's people had stashed there, along a line that snaked back to the front porch of the Hall of Presidents, where they were unceremoniously dumped. + +Once the main stash was vacated, we split up and roamed the ride, its service corridors and dioramas, the break-room and the secret passages, rounding up every scrap of Debra's crap and passing it out the door. + +In the attic scene, I ran into Kim and three of her giggly little friends, their eyes glinting in the dim light. The gaggle of transhuman kids made my guts clench, made me think of Zed and of Lil and of my unmediated brain, and I had a sudden urge to shred them verbally. + +No. + +No. That way lay madness and war. This was about taking back what was ours, not punishing the interlopers. “Kim, I think you should leave,” I said, quietly. + +She snorted and gave me a dire look. “Who died and made you boss?” she said. Her friends thought it very brave, they made it clear with double-jointed hip-thrusts and glares. + +“Kim, you can leave now or you can leave later. The longer you wait, the worse it will be for you and your Whuffie. You blew it, and you're not a part of the Mansion anymore. Go home, go to Debra. Don't stay here, and don't come back. Ever.” + +Ever. Be cast out of this thing that you love, that you obsess over, that you worked for. “Now,” I said, quiet, dangerous, barely in control. + +They sauntered into the graveyard, hissing vitriol at me. Oh, they had lots of new material to post to the anti-me sites, messages that would get them Whuffie with people who thought I was the scum of the earth. A popular view, those days. + +I got out of the Mansion and looked at the bucket-brigade, followed it to the front of the Hall. The Park had been open for an hour, and a herd of guests watched the proceedings in confusion. The Liberty Square ad-hocs passed their loads around in clear embarrassment, knowing that they were violating every principle they cared about. + +As I watched, gaps appeared in the bucket-brigade as castmembers slipped away, faces burning scarlet with shame. At the Hall of Presidents, Debra presided over an orderly relocation of her things, a cheerful cadre of her castmembers quickly moving it all offstage. I didn't have to look at my handheld to know what was happening to our Whuffie. + +By evening, we were back on schedule. Suneep supervised the placement of his telepresence rigs and Lil went over every system in minute detail, bossing a crew of ad-hocs that trailed behind her, double- and triple-checking it all. + +Suneep smiled at me when he caught sight of me, hand-scattering dust in the parlor. + +“Congratulations, sir,” he said, and shook my hand. “It was masterfully done.” + +“Thanks, Suneep. I'm not sure how masterful it was, but we got the job done, and that's what counts.” + +“Your partners, they're happier than I've seen them since this whole business started. I know how they feel!” + +My partners? Oh, yes, Dan and Lil. How happy were they, I wondered. Happy enough to get back together? My mood fell, even though a part of me said that Dan would never go back to her, not after all we'd been through together. + +“I'm glad you're glad. We couldn't have done it without you, and it looks like we'll be open for business in a week.” + +“Oh, I should think so. Are you coming to the party tonight?” + +Party? Probably something the Liberty Square ad-hocs were putting on. I would almost certainly be persona non grata. “I don't think so,” I said, carefully. “I'll probably work late here.” + +He chided me for working too hard, but once he saw that I had no intention of being dragged to the party, he left off. + +And that's how I came to be in the Mansion at 2 a.m. the next morning, dozing in a backstage break room when I heard a commotion from the parlor. Festive voices, happy and loud, and I assumed it was Liberty Square ad-hocs coming back from their party. + +I roused myself and entered the parlor. + +Kim and her friends were there, pushing hand-trucks of Debra's gear. I got ready to shout something horrible at them, and that's when Debra came in. I moderated the shout to a snap, opened my mouth to speak, stopped. + +Behind Debra were Lil's parents, frozen these long years in their canopic jars in Kissimmee. + +1~ CHAPTER 9 + +Lil's parents went into their jars with little ceremony. I saw them just before they went in, when they stopped in at Lil's and my place to kiss her goodbye and wish her well. + +Tom and I stood awkwardly to the side while Lil and her mother held an achingly chipper and polite farewell. + +“So,” I said to Tom. “Deadheading.” + +He cocked an eyebrow. “Yup. Took the backup this morning.” + +Before coming to see their daughter, they'd taken their backups. When they woke, this event—everything following the backup—would never have happened for them. + +God, they were bastards. + +“When are you coming back?” I asked, keeping my castmember face on, carefully hiding away the disgust. + +'We'll be sampling monthly, just getting a digest dumped to us. When things look interesting enough, we'll come on back.” He waggled a finger at me. “I'll be keeping an eye on you and Lillian—you treat her right, you hear?” + +“We're sure going to miss you two around here,” I said. + +He pishtoshed and said, “You won't even notice we're gone. This is your world now—we're just getting out of the way for a while, letting you-all take a run at it. We wouldn't be going down if we didn't have faith in you two.” + +Lil and her mom kissed one last time. Her mother was more affectionate than I'd ever seen her, even to the point of tearing up a little. Here in this moment of vanishing consciousness, she could be whomever she wanted, knowing that it wouldn't matter the next time she awoke. + +“Julius,” she said, taking my hands, squeezing them. “You've got some wonderful times ahead of you—between Lil and the Park, you're going to have a tremendous experience, I just know it.” She was infinitely serene and compassionate, and I knew it didn't count. + +Still smiling, they got into their runabout and drove away to get the lethal injections, to become disembodied consciousnesses, to lose their last moments with their darling daughter. + +They were not happy to be returned from the dead. Their new bodies were impossibly young, pubescent and hormonal and doleful and kitted out in the latest trendy styles. In the company of Kim and her pals, they made a solid mass of irate adolescence. + +“Just what the hell do you think you're doing?” Rita asked, shoving me hard in the chest. I stumbled back into my carefully scattered dust, raising a cloud. + +Rita came after me, but Tom held her back. “Julius, go away. Your actions are totally indefensible. Keep your mouth shut and go away.” + +I held up a hand, tried to wave away his words, opened my mouth to speak. + +“Don't say a word,” he said. “Leave. Now.” + +“/{Don't stay here and don't come back. Ever}/,” Kim said, an evil look on her face. + +“No,” I said. “No goddamn it no. You're going to hear me out, and then I'm going to get Lil and her people and they're going to back me up. That's not negotiable.” + +We stared at each other across the dim parlor. Debra made a twiddling motion and the lights came up full and harsh. The expertly crafted gloom went away and it was just a dusty room with a fake fireplace. + +“Let him speak,” Debra said. Rita folded her arms and glared. + +“I did some really awful things,” I said, keeping my head up, keeping my eyes on them. “I can't excuse them, and I don't ask you to forgive them. But that doesn't change the fact that we've put our hearts and souls into this place, and it's not right to take it from us. Can't we have one constant corner of the world, one bit frozen in time for the people who love it that way? Why does your success mean our failure? + +“Can't you see that we're carrying on your work? That we're tending a legacy you left us?” + +“Are you through?” Rita asked. + +I nodded. + +“This place is not a historical preserve, Julius, it's a ride. If you don't understand that, you're in the wrong place. It's not my goddamn fault that you decided that your stupidity was on my behalf, and it doesn't make it any less stupid. All you've done is confirm my worst fears.” + +Debra's mask of impartiality slipped. “You stupid, deluded asshole,” she said, softly. “You totter around, pissing and moaning about your little murder, your little health problems—yes, I've heard—your little fixation on keeping things the way they are. You need some perspective, Julius. You need to get away from here: Disney World isn't good for you and you're sure as hell not any good for Disney World.” + +It would have hurt less if I hadn't come to the same conclusion myself, somewhere along the way. + +I found the ad-hoc at a Fort Wilderness campsite, sitting around a fire and singing, necking, laughing. The victory party. I trudged into the circle and hunted for Lil. + +She was sitting on a log, staring into the fire, a million miles away. Lord, she was beautiful when she fretted. I stood in front of her for a minute and she stared right through me until I tapped her shoulder. She gave an involuntary squeak and then smiled at herself. + +“Lil,” I said, then stopped. /{Your parents are home, and they've joined the other side}/. + +For the first time in an age, she looked at me softly, smiled even. She patted the log next to her. I sat down, felt the heat of the fire on my face, her body heat on my side. God, how did I screw this up? + +Without warning, she put her arms around me and hugged me hard. I hugged her back, nose in her hair, woodsmoke smell and shampoo and sweat. “We did it,” she whispered fiercely. I held onto her. /{No, we didn't}/. + +“Lil,” I said again, and pulled away. + +“What?” she said, her eyes shining. She was stoned, I saw that now. + +“Your parents are back. They came to the Mansion.” + +She was confused, shrinking, and I pressed on. + +“They were with Debra.” + +She reeled back as if I'd slapped her. + +“I told them I'd bring the whole group back to talk it over.” + +She hung her head and her shoulders shook, and I tentatively put an arm around her. She shook it off and sat up. She was crying and laughing at the same time. “I'll have a ferry sent over,” she said. + +I sat in the back of the ferry with Dan, away from the confused and angry ad-hocs. I answered his questions with terse, one-word answers, and he gave up. We rode in silence, the trees on the edges of the Seven Seas Lagoon whipping back and forth in an approaching storm. + +The ad-hoc shortcutted through the west parking lot and moved through the quiet streets of Frontierland apprehensively, a funeral procession that stopped the nighttime custodial staff in their tracks. + +As we drew up on Liberty Square, I saw that the work-lights were blazing and a tremendous work-gang of Debra's ad-hocs were moving from the Hall to the Mansion, undoing our teardown of their work. + +Working alongside of them were Tom and Rita, Lil's parents, sleeves rolled up, forearms bulging with new, toned muscle. The group stopped in its tracks and Lil went to them, stumbling on the wooden sidewalk. + +I expected hugs. There were none. In their stead, parents and daughter stalked each other, shifting weight and posture to track each other, maintain a constant, sizing distance. + +“What the hell are you doing?” Lil said, finally. She didn't address her mother, which surprised me. It didn't surprise Tom, though. + +He dipped forward, the shuffle of his feet loud in the quiet night. “We're working,” he said. + +“No, you're not,” Lil said. “You're destroying. Stop it.” + +Lil's mother darted to her husband's side, not saying anything, just standing there. + +Wordlessly, Tom hefted the box he was holding and headed to the Mansion. Lil caught his arm and jerked it so he dropped his load. + +“You're not listening. The Mansion is /{ours}/. /{Stop}/. /{It}/.” + +Lil's mother gently took Lil's hand off Tom's arm, held it in her own. “I'm glad you're passionate about it, Lillian,” she said. “I'm proud of your commitment.” + +Even at a distance of ten yards, I heard Lil's choked sob, saw her collapse in on herself. Her mother took her in her arms, rocked her. I felt like a voyeur, but couldn't bring myself to turn away. + +“Shhh,” her mother said, a sibilant sound that matched the rustling of the leaves on the Liberty Tree. “Shhh. We don't have to be on the same side, you know.” + +They held the embrace and held it still. Lil straightened, then bent again and picked up her father's box, carried it to the Mansion. One at a time, the rest of her ad-hoc moved forward and joined them. + +This is how you hit bottom. You wake up in your friend's hotel room and you power up your handheld and it won't log on. You press the call-button for the elevator and it gives you an angry buzz in return. You take the stairs to the lobby and no one looks at you as they jostle past you. + +You become a non-person. + +Scared. I trembled when I ascended the stairs to Dan's room, when I knocked at his door, louder and harder than I meant, a panicked banging. + +Dan answered the door and I saw his eyes go to his HUD, back to me. “Jesus,” he said. + +I sat on the edge of my bed, head in my hands. + +“What?” I said, what happened, what happened to me? + +“You're out of the ad-hoc,” he said. “You're out of Whuffie. You're bottomed-out,” he said. + +This is how you hit bottom in Walt Disney World, in a hotel with the hissing of the monorail and the sun streaming through the window, the hooting of the steam engines on the railroad and the distant howl of the recorded wolves at the Haunted Mansion. The world drops away from you, recedes until you're nothing but a speck, a mote in blackness. + +I was hyperventilating, light-headed. Deliberately, I slowed my breath, put my head between my knees until the dizziness passed. + +“Take me to Lil,” I said. + +Driving together, hammering cigarette after cigarette into my face, I remembered the night Dan had come to Disney World, when I'd driven him to my—/{Lil's}/—house, and how happy I'd been then, how secure. + +I looked at Dan and he patted my hand. “Strange times,” he said. + +It was enough. We found Lil in an underground break-room, lightly dozing on a ratty sofa. Her head rested on Tom's lap, her feet on Rita's. All three snored softly. They'd had a long night. + +Dan shook Lil awake. She stretched out and opened her eyes, looked sleepily at me. The blood drained from her face. + +“Hello, Julius,” she said, coldly. + +Now Tom and Rita were awake, too. Lil sat up. + +“Were you going to tell me?” I asked, quietly. “Or were you just going to kick me out and let me find out on my own?” + +“You were my next stop,” Lil said. + +“Then I've saved you some time.” I pulled up a chair. “Tell me all about it.” + +“There's nothing to tell,” Rita snapped. “You're out. You had to know it was coming—for God's sake, you were tearing Liberty Square apart!” + +“How would you know?” I asked. I struggled to remain calm. “You've been asleep for ten years!” + +“We got updates,” Rita said. “That's why we're back—we couldn't let it go on the way it was. We owed it to Debra.” + +“And Lillian,” Tom said. + +“And Lillian,” Rita said, absently. + +Dan pulled up a chair of his own. “You're not being fair to him,” he said. At least someone was on my side. + +“We've been more than fair,” Lil said. “You know that better than anyone, Dan. We've forgiven and forgiven and forgiven, made every allowance. He's sick and he won't take the cure. There's nothing more we can do for him.” + +“You could be his friend,” Dan said. The light-headedness was back, and I slumped in my chair, tried to control my breathing, the panicked thumping of my heart. + +“You could try to understand, you could try to help him. You could stick with him, the way he stuck with you. You don't have to toss him out on his ass.” + +Lil had the good grace to look slightly shamed. “I'll get him a room,” she said. “For a month. In Kissimmee. A motel. I'll pick up his network access. Is that fair?” + +“It's more than fair,” Rita said. Why did she hate me so much? I'd been there for her daughter while she was away—ah. That might do it, all right. “I don't think it's warranted. If you want to take care of him, sir, you can. It's none of my family's business.” + +Lil's eyes blazed. “Let me handle this,” she said. “All right?” + +Rita stood up abruptly. “You do whatever you want,” she said, and stormed out of the room. + +“Why are you coming here for help?” Tom said, ever the voice of reason. “You seem capable enough.” + +“I'm going to be taking a lethal injection at the end of the week,” Dan said. “Three days. That's personal, but you asked.” + +Tom shook his head. /{Some friends you've got yourself}/, I could see him thinking it. + +“That soon?” Lil asked, a throb in her voice. + +Dan nodded. + +In a dreamlike buzz, I stood and wandered out into the utilidor, out through the western castmember parking, and away. + +I wandered along the cobbled, disused Walk Around the World, each flagstone engraved with the name of a family that had visited the Park a century before. The names whipped past me like epitaphs. + +The sun came up noon high as I rounded the bend of deserted beach between the Grand Floridian and the Polynesian. Lil and I had come here often, to watch the sunset from a hammock, arms around each other, the Park spread out before us like a lighted toy village. + +Now the beach was deserted, the Wedding Pavilion silent. I felt suddenly cold though I was sweating freely. So cold. + +Dreamlike, I walked into the lake, water filling my shoes, logging my pants, warm as blood, warm on my chest, on my chin, on my mouth, on my eyes. + +I opened my mouth and inhaled deeply, water filling my lungs, choking and warm. At first I sputtered, but I was in control now, and I inhaled again. The water shimmered over my eyes, and then was dark. + +I woke on Doctor Pete's cot in the Magic Kingdom, restraints around my wrists and ankles, a tube in my nose. I closed my eyes, for a moment believing that I'd been restored from a backup, problems solved, memories behind me. + +Sorrow knifed through me as I realized that Dan was probably dead by now, my memories of him gone forever. + +Gradually, I realized that I was thinking nonsensically. The fact that I remembered Dan meant that I hadn't been refreshed from my backup, that my broken brain was still there, churning along in unmediated isolation. + +I coughed again. My ribs ached and throbbed in counterpoint to my head. Dan took my hand. + +“You're a pain in the ass, you know that?” he said, smiling. + +“Sorry,” I choked. + +“You sure are,” he said. “Lucky for you they found you—another minute or two and I'd be burying you right now.” + +/{No}/, I thought, confused. /{They'd have restored me from backup}/. Then it hit me: I'd gone on record refusing restore from backup after having it recommended by a medical professional. No one would have restored me after that. I would have been truly and finally dead. I started to shiver. + +“Easy,” Dan said. “Easy. It's all right now. Doctor says you've got a cracked rib or two from the CPR, but there's no brain damage.” + +“No /{additional}/ brain damage,” Doctor Pete said, swimming into view. He had on his professionally calm bedside face, and it reassured me despite myself. + +He shooed Dan away and took his seat. Once Dan had left the room, he shone lights in my eyes and peeked in my ears, then sat back and considered me. “Well, Julius,” he said. “What exactly is the problem? We can get you a lethal injection if that's what you want, but offing yourself in the Seven Seas Lagoon just isn't good show. In the meantime, would you like to talk about it?” + +Part of me wanted to spit in his eye. I'd tried to talk about it and he'd told me to go to hell, and now he changes his mind? But I did want to talk. + +“I didn't want to die,” I said. + +“Oh no?” he said. “I think the evidence suggests the contrary.” + +“I wasn't trying to die,” I protested. “I was trying to—” What? I was trying to… /{abdicate}/. Take the refresh without choosing it, without shutting out the last year of my best friend's life. Rescue myself from the stinking pit I'd sunk into without flushing Dan away along with it. That's all, that's all. + +“I wasn't thinking—I was just acting. It was an episode or something. Does that mean I'm nuts?” + +“Oh, probably,” Doctor Pete said, offhandedly. “But let's worry about one thing at a time. You can die if you want to, that's your right. I'd rather you lived, if you want my opinion, and I doubt that I'm the only one, Whuffie be damned. If you're going to live, I'd like to record you saying so, just in case. We have a backup of you on file—I'd hate to have to delete it.” + +“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I'd like to be restored if there's no other option.” It was true. I didn't want to die. + +“All right then,” Doctor Pete said. “It's on file and I'm a happy man. Now, are you nuts? Probably. A little. Nothing a little counseling and some RandR wouldn't fix, if you want my opinion. I could find you somewhere if you want.” + +“Not yet,” I said. “I appreciate the offer, but there's something else I have to do first.” + +Dan took me back to the room and put me to bed with a transdermal soporific that knocked me out for the rest of the day. When I woke, the moon was over the Seven Seas Lagoon and the monorail was silent. + +I stood on the patio for a while, thinking about all the things this place had meant to me for more than a century: happiness, security, efficiency, fantasy. All of it gone. It was time I left. Maybe back to space, find Zed and see if I could make her happy again. Anywhere but here. Once Dan was dead—God, it was sinking in finally—I could catch a ride down to the Cape for a launch. + +“What's on your mind?” Dan asked from behind me, startling me. He was in his boxers, thin and rangy and hairy. + +“Thinking about moving on,” I said. + +He chuckled. “I've been thinking about doing the same,” he said. + +I smiled. “Not that way,” I said. “Just going somewhere else, starting over. Getting away from this.” + +“Going to take the refresh?” he asked. + +I looked away. “No,” I said. “I don't believe I will.” + +“It may be none of my business,” he said, “but why the fuck not? Jesus, Julius, what're you afraid of?” + +“You don't want to know,” I said. + +“I'll be the judge of that.” + +“Let's have a drink, first,” I said. + +Dan rolled his eyes back for a second, then said, “All right, two Coronas, coming up.” + +After the room-service bot had left, we cracked the beers and pulled chairs out onto the porch. + +“You sure you want to know this?” I asked. + +He tipped his bottle at me. “Sure as shootin',” he said. + +“I don't want refresh because it would mean losing the last year,” I said. + +He nodded. “By which you mean ‘my last year,’” he said. “Right?” + +I nodded and drank. + +“I thought it might be like that. Julius, you are many things, but hard to figure out you are not. I have something to say that might help you make the decision. If you want to hear it, that is.” + +What could he have to say? “Sure,” I said. “Sure.” In my mind, I was on a shuttle headed for orbit, away from all of this. + +“I had you killed,” he said. “Debra asked me to, and I set it up. You were right all along.” + +The shuttle exploded in silent, slow moving space, and I spun away from it. I opened and shut my mouth. + +It was Dan's turn to look away. “Debra proposed it. We were talking about the people I'd met when I was doing my missionary work, the stone crazies who I'd have to chase away after they'd rejoined the Bitchun Society. One of them, a girl from Cheyenne Mountain, she followed me down here, kept leaving me messages. I told Debra, and that's when she got the idea. + +“I'd get the girl to shoot you and disappear. Debra would give me Whuffie—piles of it, and her team would follow suit. I'd be months closer to my goal. That was all I could think about back then, you remember.” + +“I remember.” The smell of rejuve and desperation in our little cottage, and Dan plotting my death. + +“We planned it, then Debra had herself refreshed from a backup—no memory of the event, just the Whuffie for me.” + +“Yes,” I said. That would work. Plan a murder, kill yourself, have yourself refreshed from a backup made before the plan. How many times had Debra done terrible things and erased their memories that way? + +“Yes,” he agreed. “We did it, I'm ashamed to say. I can prove it, too—I have my backup, and I can get Jeanine to tell it, too.” He drained his beer. “That's my plan. Tomorrow. I'll tell Lil and her folks, Kim and her people, the whole ad-hoc. A going-away present from a shitty friend.” + +My throat was dry and tight. I drank more beer. “You knew all along,” I said. “You could have proved it at any time.” + +He nodded. “That's right.” + +“You let me…” I groped for the words. “You let me turn into…” They wouldn't come. + +“I did,” he said. + +All this time. Lil and he, standing on /{my}/ porch, telling me I needed help. Doctor Pete, telling me I needed refresh from backup, me saying no, no, no, not wanting to lose my last year with Dan. + +“I've done some pretty shitty things in my day,” he said. “This is the absolute worst. You helped me and I betrayed you. I'm sure glad I don't believe in God—that'd make what I'm going to do even scarier.” + +Dan was going to kill himself in two days' time. My friend and my murderer. “Dan,” I croaked. I couldn't make any sense of my mind. Dan, taking care of me, helping me, sticking up for me, carrying this horrible shame with him all along. Ready to die, wanting to go with a clean conscience. + +“You're forgiven,” I said. And it was true. + +He stood. + +“Where are you going” I asked. + +“To find Jeanine, the one who pulled the trigger. I'll meet you at the Hall of Presidents at nine a.m..” + +I went in through the Main Gate, not a castmember any longer, a Guest with barely enough Whuffie to scrape in, use the water fountains and stand in line. If I were lucky, a castmember might spare me a chocolate banana. Probably not, though. + +I stood in the line for the Hall of Presidents. Other guests checked my Whuffie, then averted their eyes. Even the children. A year before, they'd have been striking up conversations, asking me about my job here at the Magic Kingdom. + +I sat in my seat at the Hall of Presidents, watching the short film with the rest, sitting patiently while they rocked in their seats under the blast of the flash-bake. A castmember picked up the stageside mic and thanked everyone for coming; the doors swung open and the Hall was empty, except for me. The castmember narrowed her eyes at me, then recognizing me, turned her back and went to show in the next group. + +No group came. Instead, Dan and the girl I'd seen on the replay entered. + +“We've closed it down for the morning,” he said. + +I was staring at the girl, seeing her smirk as she pulled the trigger on me, seeing her now with a contrite, scared expression. She was terrified of me. + +“You must be Jeanine,” I said. I stood and shook her hand. “I'm Julius.” + +Her hand was cold, and she took it back and wiped it on her pants. + +My castmember instincts took over. “Please, have a seat. Don't worry, it'll all be fine. Really. No hard feelings.” I stopped short of offering to get her a glass of water. + +/{Put her at her ease}/, said a snotty voice in my head. /{She'll make a better witness. Or make her nervous, pathetic—that'll work, too; make Debra look even worse}/. + +I told the voice to shut up and got her a cup of water. + +By the time I came back, the whole gang was there. Debra, Lil, her folks, Tim. Debra's gang and Lil's gang, now one united team. Soon to be scattered. + +Dan took the stage, used the stageside mic to broadcast his voice. “Eleven months ago, I did an awful thing. I plotted with Debra to have Julius murdered. I used a friend who was a little confused at the time, used her to pull the trigger. It was Debra's idea that having Julius killed would cause enough confusion that she could take over the Hall of Presidents. It was.” + +There was a roar of conversation. I looked at Debra, saw that she was sitting calmly, as though Dan had just accused her of sneaking an extra helping of dessert. Lil's parents, to either side of her, were less sanguine. Tom's jaw was set and angry, Rita was speaking angrily to Debra. Hickory Jackson in the old Hall used to say, /{I will hang the first man I can lay hands on from the first tree I can find}/. + +“Debra had herself refreshed from backup after we planned it,” Dan went on, as though no one was talking. “I was supposed to do the same, but I didn't. I have a backup in my public directory—anyone can examine it. Right now, I'd like to bring Jeanine up, she's got a few words she'd like to say.” + +I helped Jeanine take the stage. She was still trembling, and the ad-hocs were an insensate babble of recriminations. Despite myself, I was enjoying it. + +“Hello,” Jeanine said softly. She had a lovely voice, a lovely face. I wondered if we could be friends when it was all over. She probably didn't care much about Whuffie, one way or another. + +The discussion went on. Dan took the mic from her and said, “Please! Can we have a little respect for our visitor? Please? People?” + +Gradually, the din decreased. Dan passed the mic back to Jeanine. “Hello,” she said again, and flinched from the sound of her voice in the Hall's PA. “My name is Jeanine. I'm the one who killed Julius, a year ago. Dan asked me to, and I did it. I didn't ask why. I trusted—trust—him. He told me that Julius would make a backup a few minutes before I shot him, and that he could get me out of the Park without getting caught. I'm very sorry.” There was something off-kilter about her, some stilt to her stance and words that let you know she wasn't all there. Growing up in a mountain might do that to you. I snuck a look at Lil, whose lips were pressed together. Growing up in a theme park might do that to you, too. + +“Thank you, Jeanine,” Dan said, taking back the mic. “You can have a seat now. I've said everything I need to say—Julius and I have had our own discussions in private. If there's anyone else who'd like to speak—” + +The words were barely out of his mouth before the crowd erupted again in words and waving hands. Beside me, Jeanine flinched. I took her hand and shouted in her ear: “Have you ever been on the Pirates of the Carribean?” + +She shook her head. + +I stood up and pulled her to her feet. “You'll love it,” I said, and led her out of the Hall. + +1~ CHAPTER 10 + +I booked us ringside seats at the Polynesian Luau, riding high on a fresh round of sympathy Whuffie, and Dan and I drank a dozen lapu-lapus in hollowed-out pineapples before giving up on the idea of getting drunk. + +Jeanine watched the fire-dances and the torch-lighting with eyes like saucers, and picked daintily at her spare ribs with one hand, never averting her attention from the floor show. When they danced the fast hula, her eyes jiggled. I chuckled. + +From where we sat, I could see the spot where I'd waded into the Seven Seas Lagoon and breathed in the blood-temp water, I could see Cinderella's Castle, across the lagoon, I could see the monorails and the ferries and the busses making their busy way through the Park, shuttling teeming masses of guests from place to place. Dan toasted me with his pineapple and I toasted him back, drank it dry and belched in satisfaction. + +Full belly, good friends, and the sunset behind a troupe of tawny, half-naked hula dancers. Who needs the Bitchun Society, anyway? + +When it was over, we watched the fireworks from the beach, my toes dug into the clean white sand. Dan slipped his hand into my left hand, and Jeanine took my right. When the sky darkened and the lighted barges puttered away through the night, we three sat in the hammock. + +I looked out over the Seven Seas Lagoon and realized that this was my last night, ever, in Walt Disney World. It was time to reboot again, start afresh. That's what the Park was for, only somehow, this visit, I'd gotten stuck. Dan had unstuck me. + +The talk turned to Dan's impending death. + +“So, tell me what you think of this,” he said, hauling away on a glowing cigarette. + +“Shoot,” I said. + +“I'm thinking—why take lethal injection? I mean, I may be done here for now, but why should I make an irreversible decision?” + +“Why did you want to before?” I asked. + +“Oh, it was the macho thing, I guess. The finality and all. But hell, I don't have to prove anything, right?” + +“Sure,” I said, magnanimously. + +“So,” he said, thoughtfully. “The question I'm asking is, how long can I deadhead for? There are folks who go down for a thousand years, ten thousand, right?” + +“So, you're thinking, what, a million?” I joked. + +He laughed. “A /{million}/? You're thinking too small, son. Try this on for size: the heat death of the universe.” + +“The heat death of the universe,” I repeated. + +“Sure,” he drawled, and I sensed his grin in the dark. “Ten to the hundred years or so. The Stelliferous Period—it's when all the black holes have run dry and things get, you know, stupendously dull. Cold, too. So I'm thinking—why not leave a wake-up call for some time around then?” + +“Sounds unpleasant to me,” I said. “Brrrr.” + +“Not at all! I figure, self-repairing nano-based canopic jar, mass enough to feed it—say, a trillion-ton asteroid—and a lot of solitude when the time comes around. I'll poke my head in every century or so, just to see what's what, but if nothing really stupendous crops up, I'll take the long ride out. The final frontier.” + +“That's pretty cool,” Jeanine said. + +“Thanks,” Dan said. + +“You're not kidding, are you?” I asked. + +“Nope, I sure ain't,” he said. + +They didn't invite me back into the ad-hoc, even after Debra left in Whuffie-penury and they started to put the Mansion back the way it was. Tim called me to say that with enough support from Imagineering, they thought they could get it up and running in a week. Suneep was ready to kill someone, I swear. /{A house divided against itself can}/ not /{stand}/, as Mr. Lincoln used to say at the Hall of Presidents. + +I packed three changes of clothes and a toothbrush in my shoulderbag and checked out of my suite at the Polynesian at ten a.m., then met Jeanine and Dan at the valet parking out front. Dan had a runabout he'd picked up with my Whuffie, and I piled in with Jeanine in the middle. We played old Beatles tunes on the stereo all the long way to Cape Canaveral. Our shuttle lifted at noon. + +The shuttle docked four hours later, but by the time we'd been through decontam and orientation, it was suppertime. Dan, nearly as Whuffie-poor as Debra after his confession, nevertheless treated us to a meal in the big bubble, squeeze-tubes of heady booze and steaky paste, and we watched the universe get colder for a while. + +There were a couple guys jamming, tethered to a guitar and a set of tubs, and they weren't half bad. + +Jeanine was uncomfortable hanging there naked. She'd gone to space with her folks after Dan had left the mountain, but it was in a long-haul generation ship. She'd abandoned it after a year or two and deadheaded back to Earth in a support-pod. She'd get used to life in space after a while. Or she wouldn't. + +“Well,” Dan said. + +“Yup,” I said, aping his laconic drawl. He smiled. + +“It's that time,” he said. + +Spheres of saline tears formed in Jeanine's eyes, and I brushed them away, setting them adrift in the bubble. I'd developed some real tender, brother-sister type feelings for her since I'd watched her saucer-eye her way through the Magic Kingdom. No romance—not for me, thanks! But camaraderie and a sense of responsibility. + +“See you in ten to the hundred,” Dan said, and headed to the airlock. I started after him, but Jeanine caught my hand. + +“He hates long good-byes,” she said. + +“I know,” I said, and watched him go. + +The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in redundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space or age or stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write out my life longhand, a letter to the me that I'll be when it's restored into a clone somewhere, somewhen. It's important that whoever I am then knows about this year, and it's going to take a lot of tries for me to get it right. + +In the meantime, I'm working on another symphony, one with a little bit of “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” and a nod to “It's a Small World After All,” and especially “There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.” + +Jeanine says it's pretty good, but what does she know? She's barely fifty. + +We've both got a lot of living to do before we know what's what. + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgements: + +I could never have written this book without the personal support of my friends and family, especially Roz Doctorow, Gord Doctorow and Neil Doctorow, Amanda Foubister, Steve Samenski, Pat York, Grad Conn, John Henson, John Rose, the writers at the Cecil Street Irregulars and Mark Frauenfelder. + +I owe a great debt to the writers and editors who mentored and encouraged me: James Patrick Kelly, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Martha Soukup, Scott Edelman, Gardner Dozois, Renee Wilmeth, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Claire Eddy, Bob Parks and Robert Killheffer. + +I am also indebted to my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and my agent Donald Maass, who believed in this book and helped me bring it to fruition. + +Finally, I must thank the readers, the geeks and the Imagineers who inspired this book. + +Cory Doctorow + +San Francisco + +September 2002 + +1~note-2004 A note about this book, February 12, 2004: + +As you will see, when you read the text beneath this section, I released this book a little over a year ago under the terms of a Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to freely redistribute the text without needing any further permission from me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very satisfactorily. + +When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in the next section, I did so in the most conservative fashion possible, using CC's most restrictive license. I wanted to dip my toe in before taking a plunge. I wanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing that stands between us and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I had the intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved" regime would serve me well, I still couldn't shake the atavistic fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed. + +It wasn't foolish. I've since released a short story collection ( { A Place So Foreign and Eight More }http://craphound.com/place and a second novel ( { Eastern Standard Tribe }http://craphound.com/est ) in this fashion, and my career is turning over like a goddamned locomotive engine. I am thrilled beyond words (an extraordinary circumstance for a writer!) at the way that this has all worked out. + +And so /{now}/ I'm going to take a little bit of a plunge. Today, in coincidence with my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference ( { Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books }http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4693 ). + +I am re-licensing this book under a far less restrictive Creative Commons license, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This is a license that allows you, the reader, to noncommercially "remix" this book -- you have my blessing to make your own translations, radio and film adaptations, sequels, fan fiction, missing chapters, machine remixes, you name it. A number of you assumed that you had my blessing to do this in the first place, and I can't say that I've been at all put out by the delightful and creative derivative works created from this book, but now you have my explicit blessing, and I hope you'll use it. + +Here's the license in summary: + +http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/ + +You are free: + +_1 * to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work + +_1 * to make derivative works + +Under the following conditions: + +_1 Attribution. You must give the original author credit. + +_1 Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. + +_1 Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. + +_1 * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. + +_1 * Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the author. 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There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. Licensor shall not be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from You. This License may not be modified without the mutual written agreement of the Licensor and You. + +1~note-2003 A note about this book, January 9, 2003: + +“Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” is my first novel. It's an actual, no-foolin' words-on-paper book, published by the good people at Tor Books in New York City. You can buy this book in stores or online, by following links like this one: + +http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765304368/downandoutint-20 + +So, what's with this file? Good question. + +I'm releasing the entire text of this book as a free, freely redistributable e-book. You can download it, put it on a P2P net, put it on your site, email it to a friend, and, if you're addicted to dead trees, you can even print it. + +Why am I doing this thing? Well, it's a long story, but to shorten it up: first-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don't have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word-of-mouth. I'm not bad at word-of-mouth. I have a blog, Boing Boing ( http://boingboing.net ), where I do a /{lot}/ of word-of-mouthing. I compulsively tell friends and strangers about things that I like. + +And telling people about stuff I like is /{way}/, /{way}/ easier if I can just send it to 'em. Way easier. + +What's more, P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about /{everything}/ online. What's more, they've done it for cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever. I'm a stone infovore and this kinda Internet mishegas gives me a serious frisson of futurosity. + +Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it's hard to figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It's your basic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade. + +I'm especially grateful to my publisher, Tor Books ( http://www.tor.com/ ) and my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden ( http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite ) for being hep enough to let me try out this experiment. + +All that said, here's the deal: I'm releasing this book under a license developed by the Creative Commons project ( http://creativecommons.org/ ). This is a project that lets people like me roll our own license agreements for the distribution of our creative work under terms similar to those employed by the Free/Open Source Software movement. It's a great project, and I'm proud to be a part of it. + +Here's a summary of the license: + +http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0 + +_* Attribution. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit. + +_* No Derivative Works. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display and perform only unaltered copies of the work—not derivative works based on it. + +_* Noncommercial. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees may not use the work for commercial purposes—unless they get the licensor's permission. + +And here's the license itself: + +http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0-legalcode + +_1 THE WORK (AS DEFINED BELOW) IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS CREATIVE COMMONS PUBLIC LICENSE (“CCPL” OR “LICENSE”). THE WORK IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND/OR OTHER APPLICABLE LAW. ANY USE OF THE WORK OTHER THAN AS AUTHORIZED UNDER THIS LICENSE IS PROHIBITED. + +_1 BY EXERCISING ANY RIGHTS TO THE WORK PROVIDED HERE, YOU ACCEPT AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. THE LICENSOR GRANTS YOU THE RIGHTS CONTAINED HERE IN CONSIDERATION OF YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF SUCH TERMS AND CONDITIONS. + +_1 Definitions + +_2 “Collective Work” means a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology or encyclopedia, in which the Work in its entirety in unmodified form, along with a number of other contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole. A work that constitutes a Collective Work will not be considered a Derivative Work (as defined below) for the purposes of this License. + +_2 “Derivative Work” means a work based upon the Work or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted, except that a work that constitutes a Collective Work will not be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License. + +_2 “Licensor” means the individual or entity that offers the Work under the terms of this License. + +_2 “Original Author” means the individual or entity who created the Work. + +_2 “Work” means the copyrightable work of authorship offered under the terms of this License. + +_2 “You” means an individual or entity exercising rights under this License who has not previously violated the terms of this License with respect to the Work, or who has received express permission from the Licensor to exercise rights under this License despite a previous violation. + +_1 2. Fair Use Rights. Nothing in this license is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any rights arising from fair use, first sale or other limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright owner under copyright law or other applicable laws. + +_1 3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below: + +_2 1. to reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work into one or more Collective Works, and to reproduce the Work as incorporated in the Collective Works; + +_2 2. to distribute copies or phonorecords of, display publicly, perform publicly, and perform publicly by means of a digital audio transmission the Work including as incorporated in Collective Works; + +_1 The above rights may be exercised in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised. The above rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats. All rights not expressly granted by Licensor are hereby reserved. + +_1 4. Restrictions. The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following restrictions: + +_2 1. You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work only under the terms of this License, and You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier for, this License with every copy or phonorecord of the Work You distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform. You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that alter or restrict the terms of this License or the recipients' exercise of the rights granted hereunder. You may not sublicense the Work. You must keep intact all notices that refer to this License and to the disclaimer of warranties. You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement. The above applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collective Work, but this does not require the Collective Work apart from the Work itself to be made subject to the terms of this License. If You create a Collective Work, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Collective Work any reference to such Licensor or the Original Author, as requested. + +_2 2. You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works. + +_2 3. If you distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work or any Collective Works, You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied; the title of the Work if supplied. Such credit may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Collective Work, at a minimum such credit will appear where any other comparable authorship credit appears and in a manner at least as prominent as such other comparable authorship credit. + +_1 5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer + +_2 1. By offering the Work for public release under this License, Licensor represents and warrants that, to the best of Licensor's knowledge after reasonable inquiry: + +_3 1. Licensor has secured all rights in the Work necessary to grant the license rights hereunder and to permit the lawful exercise of the rights granted hereunder without You having any obligation to pay any royalties, compulsory license fees, residuals or any other payments; + +_3 2. The Work does not infringe the copyright, trademark, publicity rights, common law rights or any other right of any third party or constitute defamation, invasion of privacy or other tortious injury to any third party. + +_2 2. EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY STATED IN THIS LICENSE OR OTHERWISE AGREED IN WRITING OR REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE WORK IS LICENSED ON AN “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES REGARDING THE CONTENTS OR ACCURACY OF THE WORK. + +_1 6. Limitation on Liability. EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW, AND EXCEPT FOR DAMAGES ARISING FROM LIABILITY TO A THIRD PARTY RESULTING FROM BREACH OF THE WARRANTIES IN SECTION 5, IN NO EVENT WILL LICENSOR BE LIABLE TO YOU ON ANY LEGAL THEORY FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THIS LICENSE OR THE USE OF THE WORK, EVEN IF LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. + +_1 7. Termination + +_2 1. This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically upon any breach by You of the terms of this License. Individuals or entities who have received Collective Works from You under this License, however, will not have their licenses terminated provided such individuals or entities remain in full compliance with those licenses. Sections 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8 will survive any termination of this License. + +_2 Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright in the Work). Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to withdraw this License (or any other license that has been, or is required to be, granted under the terms of this License), and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above. + +_1 8. Miscellaneous + +_2 1. Each time You distribute or publicly digitally perform the Work or a Collective Work, the Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License. + +_2 2. If any provision of this License is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, it shall not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder of the terms of this License, and without further action by the parties to this agreement, such provision shall be reformed to the minimum extent necessary to make such provision valid and enforceable. + +_2 3. No term or provision of this License shall be deemed waived and no breach consented to unless such waiver or consent shall be in writing and signed by the party to be charged with such waiver or consent. + +_2 4. This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here. There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. Licensor shall not be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from You. This License may not be modified without the mutual written agreement of the Licensor and You. + + +1~bio About the author: + +Cory Doctorow is Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, www.eff.org, and maintains a personal site at www.craphound.com. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing at www.boingboing.net, with more than 250,000 visitors a month. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards. Born and raised in Toronto, he now lives in San Francisco. He enjoys using Google to look up interesting facts about long walks on the beach. + +1~other_works Other books by Cory Doctorow: + +/{A Place So Foreign and Eight More}/ + +– short story collection, forthcoming from Four Walls Eight Windows in fall 2003, with an introduction by Bruce Sterling + +/{Essential Blogging}/, O'Reilly and Associates, 2002 + +– with Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott and Mena G. Trott + +/{The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction}/, Alpha Books, 2000 + +– co-written with Karl Schroeder + +% ? compare earlier version + +_1 If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?~{ See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html. Stallman adds his own footnote to this statement, writing, "As an Atheist, I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said. }~ + +Speaking to audiences, Stallman avoids the religious route and ex-presses the decision in pragmatic terms. "I asked myself: what could I, an operating-system developer, do to improve the situation? It wasn't until I examined the question for a while that I realized an operating-system developer was exactly what was needed to solve the problem." + +Once he recognized that, Stallman says, everything else "fell into place." In 1983, MIT was acquiring second-generation Lisp Machines from Symbolics, on which the MIT Lisp Machine system could not possibly run. Once most of the MIT machines were replaced, he would be unable to continue maintaining that system effectively for lack of users' bug reports. He would have to stop. But he also wanted to stop. The MIT Lisp Machine system was not free software: even though users could get the source code, they could not redistribute it freely. Meanwhile, the goal of continuing the MIT system had already been achieved: LMI had survived and was developing software on its own. + +Stallman didn't want to spend his whole life punishing those who had destroyed his old community. He wanted to build a new one. He decided to denounce software that would require him to compromise his ethical beliefs, and devote his life to the creation of programs that would make it easier for him and others to escape from it. Pledging to build a free software operating system "or die trying - of old age, of course," Stallman quips, he resigned from the MIT staff in January, 1984, to build GNU. + +The resignation distanced Stallman's work from the legal auspices of MIT. Still, Stallman had enough friends and allies within the AI Lab to continue using the facilities, and later his own office. He also had the ability to secure outside consulting gigs to underwrite the early stages of the GNU Project. In resigning from MIT, however, Stallman negated any debate about conflict of interest or Institute ownership of the software. The man whose early adulthood fear of social isolation had driven him deeper and deeper into the AI Lab's embrace was now building a legal firewall between himself and that environment. +={ GNU Project } + +For the first few months, Stallman operated in isolation from the Unix community as well. Although his announcement to the net.unix-wizards group had attracted sympathetic responses, few volunteers signed on to join the crusade in its early stages. +={ net.unix-wizards newsgroup } + +"The community reaction was pretty much uniform," recalls Rich Morin, leader of a Unix user group at the time. "People said, 'Oh, that's a great idea. Show us your code. Show us it can be done.'" + +Aware that the job was enormous, Stallman decided to try to reuse existing free software wherever possible. So he began looking for existing free programs and tools that could be converted into GNU programs and tools. One of the first candidates was a compiler named VUCK, which converted programs written in the popular C programming language into machine-runnable code. Translated from the Dutch, the program's acronym stood for the Free University Compiler Kit. Optimistic, Stallman asked the program's author if the program was free. When the author informed him that the words "Free University" were a reference to the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and that the program was not free, Stallman was chagrined. + +"He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler was not," recalls Stallman. He had not only refused to help - he suggested Stallman drop his plan to develop GNU, and instead write some add-ons to boost sales of VUCK, in return for a share of the profits. "I therefore decided that my first program for the GNU Project would be a multi-language, multi-platform compiler." +19~{ See Richard Stallman, "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 65. }~ + +Instead of VUCK, Stallman found the Pastel compiler ("off-color Pascal"), written by programmers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. According to what they said when they gave him a copy, the compiler was free to copy and modify. Unfortunately, the program was unsuitable for the job, because its memory requirements were enormous. It parsed the entire input file in core memory, then retained all the internal data until it finished compiling the file. On mainframe systems this design had been forgivable. On Unix systems it was a crippling barrier, since even 32-bit machines that ran Unix were often unable to provide so much memory to a program. Stallman made substantial progress at first, building a C-compatible front end to the compiler and testing it on the larger Vax, whose system could handle large memory spaces. When he tried porting the system to the 68010, and investigated why it crashed, he discovered the memory size problem, and concluded he would have to build a totally new compiler from scratch. Stallman eventually did this, producing the GNU C Compiler or GCC. But it was not clear in 1984 what to do about the compiler, so he decided to let those plans gel while turning his attention to other parts of GNU. +={ C programming language : + VUCK compiler for ; + VUCK compiler +} + +In September of 1984, thus, Stallman began development of a GNU version of Emacs, the replacement for the program he had been supervising for a decade. Within the Unix community, the two native editor programs were vi, written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, and ed, written by Bell Labs scientist (and Unix co-creator) Ken Thompson. Both were useful and popular, but neither offered the endlessly expandable nature of Emacs. +={ Bell Labs ; + Emacs text editor : + rewriting for Unix +2 ; + GNU Emacs : + rewriting for Unix +2 ; + Joy, Bill ; + vi text editor ; + Thompson, Ken +} + +Looking back, Stallman says he didn't view the decision in strategic terms. "I wanted an Emacs, and I had a good opportunity to develop one." + +Once again, Stallman had found existing code with which he hoped to save time. In writing a Unix version of Emacs, Stallman was soon following the footsteps of Carnegie Mellon graduate student James Gosling, author of a C-based version dubbed Gosling Emacs or Gosmacs. Gosling's version of Emacs included an interpreter for a simplified offshoot of the Lisp language, called Mocklisp. Although Gosling had put Gosmacs under copyright and had sold the rights to UniPress, a privately held software company, Stallman received the assurances of a fellow developer who had participated in early Gosmacs development. According to the developer, Gosling, while a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon, had given him permission by email to distribute his own version of Gosmacs in exchange for his contribution to the code. +={ Carnegie Mellon University ; + Gosling, James +3 ; + GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs) ; + interpreters for LISP +1 ; + LISP programming language : + EMACS and +1 ; + MOCKLISP language ; + UniPress software company +1 +} + +At first Stallman thought he would change only the user-level commands, to implement full compatibility with the original PDP-10Emacs. However, when he found how weak Mocklisp was in comparison with real Lisp, he felt compelled to replace it with a true Lisp system. This made it natural to rewrite most of the higher-level code of Gosmacs in a completely different way, taking advantage of the greater power and flexible data structures of Lisp. By mid-1985, in GNU Emacs as released on the Internet, only a few files still had code remaining from Gosmacs. + +Then UniPress caught wind of Stallman's project, and denied that the other developer had received permission to distribute his own version of Gosmacs. He could not find a copy of the old email to defend his claim. Stallman eliminated this problem by writing replacements for the few modules that remained from Gosmacs. + +Nevertheless, the notion of developers selling off software rights - indeed, the very notion of developers having such powers to sell in the first place - rankled Stallman. In a 1986 speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute, Stallman cited the UniPress incident as yet another example of the dangers associated with proprietary software. +={ proprietary software : + Emacs and +4 ; + Swedish Royal Technical Institute +} + +"Sometimes I think that perhaps one of the best things I could do with my life is find a gigantic pile of proprietary software that was a trade secret, and start handing out copies on a street corner so it wouldn't be a trade secret any more," said Stallman. "Perhaps that would be a much more efficient way for me to give people new free software than actually writing it myself; but everyone is too cowardly to even take it."~{ See Richard Stallman (1986). }~ + +Despite the stress it generated, the dispute over Gosling's code would assist both Stallman and the free software movement in the longterm. It would force Stallman to address the weaknesses of the Emacs Commune and the informal trust system that had allowed problematic offshoots to emerge. It would also force Stallman to sharpen the free software movement's political objectives. Following the release of GNU Emacs in 1985, Stallman issued /{The GNU Manifesto}/, an expansion of the original announcement posted in September, 1983. Stallman included within the document a lengthy section devoted to the many arguments used by commercial and academic programmers to justify the proliferation of proprietary software programs. One argument, "Don't programmers deserve a reward for their creativity," earned a response encapsulating Stallman's anger over the recent Gosling Emacs episode: +={ Emacs Commune : + proprietary software and ; + Emacs text editor ; + GNU Emacs ; + GNU Manifesto +} + +"If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution," Stallman wrote. "Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far [ sic ] as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs."~{ See Richard Stallman, The GNU Manifesto (1985), \\ http://www.gnu.org/gnu/ manifesto.html. }~ + +With the release of GNU Emacs, the GNU Project finally had code to show. It also had the burdens of any software-based enterprise. As more and more Unix developers began playing with the software, money, gifts, and requests for tapes began to pour in. To address the business side of the GNU Project, Stallman drafted a few of his colleagues and formed the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a non-profit organization dedicated to speeding the GNU Project towards its goal. With Stallman as president and various friends and hacker allies as board members, the FSF helped provide a corporate face for the GNU Project. +={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) : + GNU Project and ; + GNU Project : + Emacs, release of +} + +Robert Chassell, a programmer then working at Lisp Machines, Inc., became one of five charter board members at the Free Software Foundation following a dinner conversation with Stallman. Chassell also served as the organization's treasurer, a role that started small but quickly grew. +={ Chassell, Robert +6 ; + LISP Machines Inc. (LMI) ; + LMI (LISP Machines Inc.) +} + +"I think in '85 our total expenses and revenue were something in the order of $23,000, give or take," Chassell recalls. "Richard had his office, and we borrowed space. I put all the stuff, especially the tapes, under my desk. It wasn't until sometime later LMI loaned us some space where we could store tapes and things of that sort." + +In addition to providing a face, the Free Software Foundation provided a center of gravity for other disenchanted programmers. The Unix market that had seemed so collegial even at the time of Stallman's initial GNU announcement was becoming increasingly competitive. In an attempt to tighten their hold on customers, companies were starting to deny users access to Unix source code, a trend that only speeded the number of inquiries into ongoing GNU software projects. + +The Unix wizards who once regarded Stallman as a noisy kook were now beginning to see him as a software prophet or a software Cassandra, according as they felt hope or despair over escaping the problem she identified. + +"A lot of people don't realize, until they've had it happen to them, how frustrating it can be to spend a few years working on a software program only to have it taken away," says Chassell, summarizing the feelings and opinions of the correspondents writing in to the FSF during the early years. "After that happens a couple of times, you start to say to yourself, 'Hey, wait a minute.'" + +For Chassell, the decision to participate in the Free Software Foundation came down to his own personal feelings of loss. Prior to LMI, Chassell had been working for hire, writing an introductory book on Unix for Cadmus, Inc., a Cambridge-area software company. When Cadmus folded, taking the rights to the book down with it, Chassell says he attempted to buy the rights back with no success. + +"As far as I know, that book is still sitting on a shelf somewhere, unusable, uncopyable, just taken out of the system," Chassell says. "It was quite a good introduction if I may say so myself. It would have taken maybe three or four months to convert [the book] into a perfectly usable introduction to GNU/Linux today. The whole experience, aside from what I have in my memory, was lost." + +Forced to watch his work sink into the mire while his erstwhile employer struggled through bankruptcy, Chassell says he felt a hint of the anger that drove Stallman to fits of apoplexy. "The main clarity, for me, was the sense that if you want to have a decent life, you don't want to have bits of it closed off," Chassell says. "This whole idea of having the freedom to go in and to fix something and modify it, whatever it may be, it really makes a difference. It makes one think happily that after you've lived a few years that what you've done is worthwhile. Because otherwise it just gets taken away and thrown out or abandoned or, at the very least, you no longer have any relation to it. It's like losing a bit of your life." + +1~ Chapter 8 - St. Ignucius +={ Ignucius, (St.) ; + St. Ignucius +} + +The Maui High Performance Computing Center is located in a single-story building in the dusty red hills just above the town of Kihei. Framed by million-dollar views and the multi-million dollar real estate of the Silversword Golf Course, the center seems like the ultimate scientific boondoggle. Far from the boxy, sterile confines of Tech Square or even the sprawling research metropolises of Argonne, Illinois and Los Alamos, New Mexico, the MHPCC seems like the kind of place where scientists spend more time on their tans than their post-doctoral research projects. +={ Argonne (Illinois) ; + Los Alamos (New Mexico) ; + Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) ; + MHPCC (Maui High Performance Computing Center) +} + +The image is only half true. Although researchers at the MHPCC do take advantage of the local recreational opportunities, they also take their work seriously. According to { Top500.org }http://top500.org, a web site that tracks the most powerful supercomputers in the world, the IBMSP Power3 supercomputer housed within the MHPCC clocks in at 837 billion floating-point operations per second, making it one of 25most powerful computers in the world. Co-owned and operated by the University of Hawaii and the U.S. Air Force, the machine divides its computer cycles between the number crunching tasks associated with military logistics and high-temperature physics research. +={ IBM SP Power3 supercomputer ; + U.S Air Force ; + University of Hawaii ; + Top500.org +} + +Simply put, the MHPCC is a unique place, a place where the brainy culture of science and engineering and the laid-back culture of the Hawaiian islands coexist in peaceful equilibrium. A slogan on the lab's 2000 web site sums it up: "Computing in paradise." + +It's not exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find Richard Stallman, a man who, when taking in the beautiful view of the nearby Maui Channel through the picture windows of a staffer's office, mutters a terse critique: "Too much sun." Still, as an emissary from one computing paradise to another, Stallman has a message to deliver, even if it means subjecting his hacker eyes to painful solar glare. + +The conference room is already full by the time I arrive to catch Stallman's speech. The gender breakdown is a little better than at the New York speech, 85% male, 15% female, but not by much. About half of the audience members wear khaki pants and logo-encrusted golf shirts. The other half seems to have gone native. Dressed in the gaudy flower-print shirts so popular in this corner of the world, their faces area deep shade of ochre. The only residual indication of geek status are the gadgets: Nokia cell phones, Palm Pilots, and Sony VAIO laptops. + +Needless to say, Stallman, who stands in front of the room dressed in plain blue T-shirt, brown polyester slacks, and white socks, sticks out like a sore thumb. The fluorescent lights of the conference room help bring out the unhealthy color of his sun-starved skin.~{ RMS: The idea that skin can be "sun-starved" or that paleness is "unhealthy"is dangerous misinformation; staying out of the sun can't hurt you as long as you have enough Vitamin D. What damages the skin, and can even kill you, is excessive exposure to sunlight. }~ His beard and hair are enough to trigger beads of sweat on even the coolest Hawaiian neck. Short of having the words "mainlander" tattooed on his forehead, Stallman couldn't look more alien if he tried. [RMS: Is there something bad about looking different from others?] + +As Stallman putters around the front of the room, a few audience members wearing T-shirts with the logo of the Maui FreeBSD Users Group (MFUG) race to set up camera and audio equipment. FreeBSD, a free software offshoot of the Berkeley Software Distribution, the venerable 1970s academic version of Unix, is technically a competitor to the GNU/Linux operating system. Still, in the hacking world, Stallman speeches are documented with a fervor reminiscent of the Grateful Dead and its legendary army of amateur archivists. As the local free software heads, it's up to the MFUG members to make sure fellow programmers in Hamburg, Mumbai, and Novosibirsk don't miss out on the latest pearls of RMS wisdom. +={ Berkely Software Distribution (BSD) ; + BSD (Berkely Software Distribution) ; + Grateful Dead, The +1 ; + Maui FreeBSD Users Group +} + +The analogy to the Grateful Dead is apt. Often, when describing the business opportunities inherent within the free software model, Stallman has held up the Grateful Dead as an example. In refusing to restrict fans' ability to record live concerts, the Grateful Dead became more than a rock group. They became the center of a tribal community dedicated to Grateful Dead music. Over time, that tribal community became so large and so devoted that the band shunned record contracts and supported itself solely through musical tours and live appearances. In 1994, the band's last year as a touring act, the Grateful Dead drew $52 million in gate receipts alone.~{ See "Grateful Dead Time Capsule: 1985-1995 North American Tour Grosses," \\ http://www.dead101.com/1197.htm. }~ + +While few software companies have been able to match that success, the tribal aspect of the free software community is one reason many in the latter half of the 1990s started to accept the notion that publishing software source code might be a good thing. Hoping to build their own loyal followings, companies such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett Packard have come to accept the letter, if not the spirit, of the Stallman free software message. Describing the GPL as the information-technology industry's /{Magna Carta}/, ZDNet software columnist Evan Leibovitch sees the growing affection for all things GNU as more than just a trend. "This societal shift is letting users take back control of their futures," Leibovitch writes. "Just as the /{Magna Carta}/ gave rights to British subjects, the GPL enforces consumer rights and freedoms on behalf of the users of computer software."~{ See Evan Leibovitch, "Who's Afraid of Big Bad Wolves," /{ZDNet}/ Tech Update (December 15, 2000), \\ http://www.zdnet.com/news/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-wolves/298394. }~ +={ Hewlett Packard ; + IBM ; + Sun Microsystems +} + +The tribal aspect of the free software community also helps explain why 40-odd programmers, who might otherwise be working on physics projects or surfing the Web for windsurfing buoy reports, have packed into a conference room to hear Stallman speak. + +Unlike the New York speech, Stallman gets no introduction. He also offers no self-introduction. When the FreeBSD people finally get their equipment up and running, Stallman simply steps forward, starts speaking, and steamrolls over every other voice in the room. +={ FreeBSD } + +"Most of the time when people consider the question of what rules society should have for using software, the people considering it are from software companies, and they consider the question from a self-serving perspective," says Stallman, opening his speech. "What rules can we impose on everybody else so they have to pay us lots of money? I had the good fortune in the 1970s to be part of a community of programmers who shared software. And because of this I always like to look at the same issue from a different direction to ask: what kind of rules make possible a good society that is good for the people who are in it? And therefore I reach completely different answers." + +Once again, Stallman quickly segues into the parable of the Xerox laser printer, taking a moment to deliver the same dramatic finger-pointing gestures to the crowd. He also devotes a minute or two to the GNU/Linux name. + +"Some people say to me, 'Why make such a fuss about getting credit for this system? After all, the important thing is the job is done, not whether you get recognition for it.' Well, this would be wise advice if it were true. But the job wasn't to build an operating system; the job is to spread freedom to the users of computers. And to do that we have to make it possible to do everything with computers in freedom."~{ For narrative purposes, I have hesitated to go in-depth when describing Stallman's full definition of software "freedom." The GNU Project web site lists four fundamental components: \\ _* The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). \\ _* The freedom to study the program's source code, and change it so that the program does what you wish (freedom 1). \\ _* The freedom to redistribute copies of the program so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). \\ _* The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, so that the whole community can benefit from them (freedom 3). For more information, please visit "The Free Software Definition" at \\ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. }~ + +Adds Stallman, "There's a lot more work to do." + +For some in the audience, this is old material. For others, it's a little arcane. When a member of the golf-shirt contingent starts dozing off, Stallman stops the speech and asks somebody to wake the person up. + +"Somebody once said my voice was so soothing, he asked if I was some kind of healer," says Stallman, drawing a quick laugh from the crowd. "I guess that probably means I can help you drift gently into a blissful, relaxing sleep. And some of you might need that. I guess I shouldn't object if you do. If you need to sleep, by all means do." + +The speech ends with a brief discussion of software patents, a growing issue of concern both within the software industry and within the free software community. Like Napster, software patents reflect the awkward nature of applying laws and concepts written for the physical world to the frictionless universe of information technology. + +Copyright law and patent law work differently, and have totally different effects in the software field. The copyright on a program controls the copying and adaptation of that program's code, and it belongs to the program's developer. But copyright does not cover ideas. In other words, a developer is free, under copyright, to implement in his own code features and commands he has seen in existing programs. Those aspects are ideas, not expression, and thus outside the scope of copyright law. + +It is likewise lawful - though hard work - to decode how a binary program works, and then implement the same ideas and algorithms indifferent code. This practice is known as "reverse engineering." + +Software patents work differently. According to the U.S. Patent Office, companies and individuals can obtain patents for computing ideas that are innovative (or, at least, unknown to the Patent Office). In theory, this allows the patent-holder to trade off disclosure of the technique for a specific monopoly lasting a minimum of 20 years after the patent filing. In practice, the disclosure is of limited value to the public, since the operation of the program is often self-evident, and could in any case be determined by reverse engineering. Unlike copyright, a patent gives its holder the power to forbid the independent development of software programs which use the patented idea. +={ U.S. Patent Office } + +In the software industry, where 20 years can cover the entire life cycle of a marketplace, patents take on a strategic weight. Where companies such as Microsoft and Apple once battled over copyright and the "look and feel" of various technologies, today's Internet companies use patents as a way to stake out individual applications and business models, the most notorious example being Amazon.com's 2000 attempt to patent the company's "one-click" on line shopping process. For most companies, however, software patents have become a defensive tool, with cross-licensing deals balancing one set of corporate patents against another in a tense form of corporate detente. Still, in a few notable cases of computer encryption and graphic imaging algorithms, software vendors have successfully stifled rival developments. For instance, some font-rendering features are missing from free soft-ware because of patent threats from Apple. + +For Stallman, the software-patent issue dramatizes the need for eternal hacker vigilance. It also underlines the importance of stressing the political benefits of free software programs over the competitive benefits. Stallman says competitive performance and price, two areas where free software operating systems such as GNU/Linux and FreeBSD already hold a distinct advantage over their proprietary counterparts, are side issues compared to the large issues of user and developer freedom. +={ FreeBSD +2 } + +This position is controversial within the community: open source advocates emphasize the utilitarian advantages of free software over the political advantages. Rather than stress the political significance of free software programs, open source advocates have chosen to stress the engineering integrity of the hacker development model. Citing the power of peer review, the open source argument paints programs such as GNU/Linux or FreeBSD as better built, better inspected and, by extension, more trustworthy to the average user. + +That's not to say the term "open source" doesn't have its political implications. For open source advocates, the term open source serves two purposes. First, it eliminates the confusion associated with the word "free," a word many businesses interpret as meaning "zero cost." Second, it allows companies to examine the free software phenomenon on a technological, rather than ethical, basis. Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative and one of the leading hackers to endorse the term, explained his refusal to follow Stallman's political path in a 1999 essay, titled "Shut Up and Show Them the Code": +={ OSI (Open Source Initiative) ; + Open Source Initiative (OSI) ; + Raymond, Eric ; + Shut Up and Show Them the Code (Raymond) +1 +} + +_1 RMS's rhetoric is very seductive to the kind of people we are. We hackers are thinkers and idealists who readily resonate with appeals to "principle" and "freedom" and "rights." Even when we disagree with bits of his program, we want RMS's rhetorical style to work; we think it ought to work; we tend to be puzzled and disbelieving when it fails on the 95% of people who aren't wired like we are.~{ See Eric Raymond, "Shut Up and Show Them the Code," online essay, (June28, 1999), \\ http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/shut-up-and-show-them.html. }~ + +Included among that 95%, Raymond writes, are the bulk of business managers, investors, and non-hacker computer users who, through sheer weight of numbers, tend to decide the overall direction of the commercial software marketplace. Without a way to win these people over, Raymond argues, programmers are doomed to pursue their ideology on the periphery of society: + +_1 When RMS insists that we talk about "computer users' rights," he's issuing a dangerously attractive invitation to us to repeat old failures. It's one we should reject - not because his principles are wrong, but because that kind of language, applied to software, simply does not persuade anybody but us. In fact, it confuses and repels most people outside our culture.~{ Ibid. }~ + +Stallman, however, rejects Raymond's premises: + +_1 Raymond's attempt to explain our failure is misleading because we have not failed. Our goal is large, and we have a long way to go, but we have also come a long way. + +_1 Raymond's pessimistic assertion about the values of non-hackers is an exaggeration. Many non-hackers are more concerned with the political issues we focus on than with the technical advantages that open source emphasizes. This often includes political leaders too, though not in all countries. + +_1 It was the ethical ideals of free software, not "better software," which persuaded the presidents of Ecuador and Brazil to move government agencies to free software. They are not geeks, but they understand freedom. + +But the principal flaw in the open source argument, according to Stallman, is that it leads to weaker conclusions. It convinces many users to run some programs which are free, but does not offer the many reason to migrate entirely to free software. This partially gives them freedom, but does not teach them to recognize it and value it as such, so they remain likely to let it drop and lose it. For instance, what happens when the improvement of free software is blocked by a patent? + +Most open source advocates are equally, if not more, vociferous as Stallman when it comes to opposing software patents. So too are most proprietary software developers, since patents threaten their projects too. However, pointing to software patents' tendency to put areas of software functionality off limits, Stallman contrasts what the free software idea and the open source idea imply about such cases. + +"It's not because we don't have the talent to make better software," says Stallman. "It's because we don't have the right. Somebody has prohibited us from serving the public. So what's going to happen when users encounter these gaps in free software? Well, if they have been persuaded by the open source movement that these freedoms are good because they lead to more-powerful reliable software, they're likely to say, 'You didn't deliver what you promised. This software's not more powerful. It's missing this feature. You lied to me.' But if they have come to agree with the free software movement, that the freedom is important in itself, then they will say, 'How dare those people stop me from having this feature and my freedom too.' And with that kind of response, we may survive the hits that we're going to take as these patents explode." + +Watching Stallman deliver his political message in person, it is hard to see anything confusing or repellent. Stallman's appearance may seem off-putting, but his message is logical. When an audience member asks if, in shunning proprietary software, free software proponents lose the ability to keep up with the latest technological advancements, Stallman answers the question in terms of his own personal beliefs. "I think that freedom is more important than mere technical advance," he says. "I would always choose a less advanced free program rather than a more advanced non free program, because I won't give up my freedom for something like that [advance]. My rule is, if I can't share it with you, I won't take it." + +In the minds of those who assume ethics means religion, such answers reinforce the quasi-religious nature of the Stallman message. However, unlike a Jew keeping kosher or a Mormon refusing to drink alcohol, Stallman is not obeying a commandment, but simply refusing to cede his freedom. His speech explains the practical requisites for doing so: a proprietary program takes away your freedom, so if you want freedom, you need to reject the program. + +Stallman paints his decision to use free software in place of proprietary in the color of a personal belief he hopes others will come to share. As software evangelists go, Stallman avoids forcing those beliefs down listeners' throats. Then again, a listener rarely leaves a Stallman speech not knowing where the true path to software righteousness lies. + +As if to drive home this message, Stallman punctuates his speech with an unusual ritual. Pulling a black robe out of a plastic grocery bag, Stallman puts it on. Then he pulls out a reflective brown computer disk and places it on his head. The crowd lets out a startled laugh. + +"I am St. IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs," says Stallman, raising his right hand in mock-blessing. "I bless your computer, my child." +={ Ignucius, (St.) ; + St. Ignucius +} + +The laughter turns into full-blown applause after a few seconds. As audience members clap, the computer disk on Stallman's head catches the glare of an overhead light, eliciting a perfect halo effect. In the blink of an eye, Stallman resembles a Russian religious icon. + +{free_as_in_freedom_2_02_rms_st_ignucius.png 254x240 "Stallman dressed as St. IGNUcius. The photo was taken by Stian Eikeland in Bergen, Norway on February 19, 2009." }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_stallman + +"Emacs was initially a text editor," says Stallman, explaining the getup. "Eventually it became a way of life for many and a religion for some. We call this religion the Church of Emacs." +={ Church of Emacs +8 ; + Emacs text editor +11 ; + GNU Emacs +11 +} + +The skit is a lighthearted moment of self-parody, a humorous return-jab at the many people who might see Stallman's form of software asceticism as religious fanaticism in disguise. It is also the sound of the other shoe dropping - loudly. It's as if, in donning his robe and halo, Stallman is finally letting listeners off the hook, saying, "It's OK to laugh. I know I'm weird." [RMS: To laugh at someone for being weird is boorish, and it is not my intention to excuse that. But I hope people will laugh at my St. IGNUcius comedy routine.] + +Discussing the St. IGNUcius persona afterward, Stallman says he first came up with it in 1996, long after the creation of Emacs but well before the emergence of the "open source" term and the struggle for hacker-community leadership that precipitated it. At the time, Stallman says, he wanted a way to "poke fun at himself," to remind listeners that, though stubborn, Stallman was not the fanatic some made him out to be. It was only later, Stallman adds, that others seized the persona as a convenient way to play up his reputation as software ideologue, as Eric Raymond did in an 1999 interview with the Linux.com web site: +={ linux.com ; + Raymond, Eric : + St. Ignucius and +2 +} + +_1 When I say RMS calibrates what he does, I'm not belittling or accusing him of insincerity. I'm saying that like all good communicators he's got a theatrical streak. Sometimes it's conscious - have you ever seen him in his St. IGNUcius drag, blessing software with a disk platter on his head? Mostly it's unconscious; he's just learned the degree of irritating stimulus that works, that holds attention without (usually) freaking people out.~{ See "Guest Interview: Eric S. Raymond," /{Linux.com}/ (May 18, 1999), \\ http://www.linux.com/interviews/19990518/8/. }~ + +Stallman takes issue with the Raymond analysis. "It's simply my way of making fun of myself," he says. "The fact that others see it as anything more than that is a reflection of their agenda, not mine." + +That said, Stallman does admit to being a ham. "Are you kidding?" he says at one point. "I love being the center of attention." To facilitate that process, Stallman says he once enrolled in Toastmasters, an organization that helps members bolster their public-speaking skills and one Stallman recommends highly to others. He possesses a stage presence that would be the envy of most theatrical performers and feels a link to vaudevillians of years past. A few days after the Maui High Performance Computing Center speech, I allude to the 1999 LinuxWorld performance and ask Stallman if he has a Groucho Marx complex - i.e., the unwillingness to belong to any club that would have him as a member.~{ RMS: Williams misinterprets Groucho's famous remark by treating it as psychological. It was intended as a jab at the overt antisemitism of many clubs, which was why they would refuse him as a member. I did not understand this either until my mother explained it to me. Williams and I grew up when bigotry had gone underground, and there was no need to veil criticism of bigotry in humor as Groucho did. }~ Stallman's response is immediate: "No, but I admire Groucho Marx in a lot of ways and certainly have been in some things I say inspired by him. But then I've also been inspired in some ways by Harpo." +={ Marx, Groucho +1 } + +The Groucho Marx influence is certainly evident in Stallman's lifelong fondness for punning. Then again, punning and wordplay are common hacker traits. Perhaps the most Groucho-like aspect of Stallman's personality, however, is the deadpan manner in which the puns are delivered. Most come so stealthily - without even the hint of a raised eyebrow or upturned smile - you almost have to wonder if Stal-man's laughing at his audience more than the audience is laughing at him. + +Watching members of the Maui High Performance Computer Center laugh at the St. IGNUcius parody, such concerns evaporate. While not exactly a standup act, Stallman certainly possesses the chops to keep a roomful of engineers in stitches. "To be a saint in the Church of Emacs does not require celibacy, but it does require making a commitment to living a life of moral purity," he tells the Maui audience. "You must exorcise the evil proprietary operating systems from all your computers, and then install a wholly [holy] free operating system. And then you must install only free software on top of that. If you make this commitment and live by it, then you too will be a saint in the Church of Emacs, and you too may have a halo." + +The St. IGNUcius skit ends with a brief inside joke. On most Unix systems and Unix-related offshoots, the primary competitor program to Emacs is vi, pronounced vee-eye, a text-editing program developed by former UC Berkeley student and current Sun Microsystems chief scientist, Bill Joy. Before doffing his "halo," Stallman pokes fun at the rival program. "People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi," he says. "Using a free version of vi is not a sin;it is a penance. So happy hacking."~{ The service of the Church of Emacs has developed further since 2001. Users can now join the Church by reciting the Confession of the Faith: "There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels." Stallman sometimes mentions the religious ceremony known as the Foobar Mitzvah, the Great Schism between various rival versions of Emacs, and the cult of the Virgin of Emacs (which refers to any person that has not yet learned to use Emacs). In addition, "vi vi vi" has been identified as the Editor of the Beast. }~ +={ Joy, Bill ; + vi text editor : + as an Emacs competitor ; + UC Berkeley ; + Sun Microsystems +} + +After a brief question-and-answer session, audience members gather around Stallman. A few ask for autographs. "I'll sign this," says Stallman, holding up one woman's print out of the GNU General Public License, "but only if you promise me to use the term GNU/Linux instead of Linux" (when referring to the system), "and tell all your friends to do likewise." +={ GNU General Public License ; + GPL +} + +The comment merely confirms a private observation. Unlike other stage performers and political figures, Stallman has no "off" mode. Aside from the St. IGNUcius character, the ideologue you see on stage is the ideologue you meet backstage. Later that evening, during a dinner conversation in which a programmer mentions his affinity for "open source" programs, Stallman, between bites, upbraids his table-mate: "You mean free software. That's the proper way to refer to it." + +During the question-and-answer session, Stallman admits to playing the pedagogue at times. "There are many people who say, 'Well, first let's invite people to join the community, and then let's teach them about freedom.' And that could be a reasonable strategy, but what we have is almost everybody's inviting people to join the community, and hardly anybody's teaching them about freedom once they come in." + +The result, Stallman says, is something akin to a third-world city. "You have millions of people moving in and building shantytowns, but nobody's working on step two: getting them out of those shantytowns. If you think talking about software freedom is a good strategy, please join in doing step two. There are plenty working on step one. We need more people working on step two." + +Working on "step two" means driving home the issue that freedom, not acceptance, is the root issue of the free software movement. Those who hope to reform the proprietary software industry from the inside are on a fool's errand. "Change from the inside is risky," Stallman stays. "Unless you're working at the level of a Gorbachev, you're going to be neutralized." + +Hands pop up. Stallman points to a member of the golf shirt-wearing contingent. "Without patents, how would you suggest dealing with commercial espionage?" + +"Well, those two questions have nothing to do with each other, really," says Stallman. + +"But I mean if someone wants to steal another company's piece of software." + +Stallman's recoils as if hit by a poisonous spray. "Wait a second," Stallman says. "Steal? I'm sorry, there's so much prejudice in that statement that the only thing I can say is that I reject that prejudice." Then he turns to the substance of the question. "Companies that develop non-free software and other things keep lots and lots of trade secrets, and so that's not really likely to change. In the old days -even in the 1980s - for the most part programmers were not aware that there were even software patents and were paying no attention to them. What happened was that people published the interesting ideas, and if they were not in the free software movement, they kept secret the little details. And now they patent those broad ideas and keep secret the little details. So as far as what you're describing, patents really make no difference to it one way or another." + +"But if it doesn't affect their publication," a new audience member jumps in, his voice trailing off almost as soon as he starts speaking. + +"But it does," Stallman says. "Their publication is telling you that this is an idea that's off limits to the rest of the community for 20 years. And what the hell good is that? Besides, they've written it in such a hard way to read, both to obfuscate the idea and to make the patent as broad as possible, that it's basically useless looking at the published information [in the patent] to learn anything anyway. The only reason to look at patents is to see the bad news of what you can't do." + +The audience falls silent. The speech, which began at 3:15, is now nearing the 5:00 whistle, and most listeners are already squirming in their seats, antsy to get a jump start on the weekend. Sensing the fatigue, Stallman glances around the room and hastily shuts things down. "So it looks like we're done," he says, following the observation with an auctioneer's "going, going, gone" to flush out any last-minute questioners. When nobody throws their hand up, Stallman signs off with a traditional exit line. + +"Happy hacking," he says. + +1~ Chapter 9 - The GNU General Public License +={ GNU General Public License +82 ; + GPL +82 ; + Stallman, Richard M. : + childhood | GNU General Public License +82 +} + +By the spring of 1985, Richard Stallman had produced the GNU Project's first useful result - a Lisp-based version of Emacs for Unix-like operating systems. To make it available to others as free software, he had to develop the way to release it - in effect, the follow-on for the Emacs Commune. +={ Emacs Commune +7 ; + Emacs text editor : + Lisp-based free software version ; + GNU Emacs : + List-based free software version +} + +The tension between the freedom to modify and authorial privilege had been building before Gosmacs. The Copyright Act of 1976 had overhauled U.S. copyright law, extending the legal coverage of copyright to software programs. According to Section 102(b) of the Act, individuals and companies could copyright the "expression" of a software program but not the "actual processes or methods embodied in the program."~{ See Hal Abelson, Mike Fischer, and Joanne Costello, "Software and Copyright Law," updated version (1997), \\ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/int-prop/software-copyright.html. }~ +={ Copyright Act of 1976 ; + copyright laws ; + GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs) ; + software : + copyright laws on +} + +Translated, this treated a program much like an algebra textbook:its author can claim copyright on the text but not on the mathematical ideas of algebra or the pedagogical technique employed to explain it. Thus, regardless of what Stallman said about using the code of the original Emacs, other programmers were legally entitled to write their own implementations of the ideas and commands of Emacs, and they did. Gosmacs was one of 30-odd imitations of the original Emacs developed for various computer systems. + +The Emacs Commune applied only to the code of the original Emacs program written by Stallman himself. Even if it had been legally enforced, it would not have applied to separately developed imitations such as Gosmacs. Making Gosmacs non-free was unethical according to the ethical ideas of the free software movement, because(as proprietary software) it did not respect its users' freedom, but this issue had nothing to do with where the ideas in Gosmacs came from. + +Under copyright, programmers who wanted to copy code from an existing program (even with changes) had to obtain permission from the original developer. The new law applied copyright even in the absence of copyright notices - though hackers generally did not know this - and the copyright notices too began appearing. + +Stallman saw these notices as the flags of an invading, occupying army. Rare was the program that didn't borrow source code from past programs, and yet, with a single stroke of the president's pen, the U.S. government had given programmers and companies the legal power to forbid such reuse. Copyright also injected a dose of formality into what had otherwise been an informal system. Simply put, disputes that had once been settled hacker-to-hacker were now to be settled lawyer-to-lawyer. In such a system, companies, not hackers, held the automatic advantage. Some saw placing one's name in a copyright notice as taking responsibility for the quality of the code, but the copyright notice usually has a company's name, and there are other ways for individuals to say what code they wrote. +={ source code : + copy rights for +} + +However, Stallman also noticed, in the years leading up to the GNU Project, that copyright allowed an author to grant permission for certain activities covered by copyright, and place conditions on them too. "I had seen email messages with copyright notices plus simple 'verbatim copying permitted' licenses," he recalls. "Those definitely were [an] inspiration." These licenses carried the condition not to remove the license. Stallman's idea was to take this a few steps further. For example, a permission notice could allow users to redistribute even modified versions, with the condition that these versions carry the same permission. + +Thus Stallman concluded that use of copyright was not necessarily unethical. What was bad about software copyright was the way it was typically used, and designed to be used: to deny the user essential freedoms. Most authors imagined no other way to use it. But copyright could be used in a different way: to make a program free and assure its continued freedom. + +By GNU Emacs 16, in early 1985, Stallman drafted a copyright-based license that gave users the right to make and distribute copies. It also gave users the right to make and distribute modified versions, but only under the same license. They could not exercise the unlimited power of copyright over those modified versions, so they could not make their versions proprietary as Gosmacs was. And they had to make the source code available. Those conditions closed the legal gap that would otherwise allow restricted, non-free versions of GNU Emacs to emerge. +={ Emacs text editor : + copyrights and | GNU Emacs License and ; + GNU Emacs : + copyrights and | GNU Emacs License and ; + GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs) : + copyrights and ; + licenses +15 +} + +Although helpful in codifying the social contract of the Emacs Commune, the early GNU Emacs license remained too "informal" for its purpose, Stallman says. Soon after forming the Free Software Foundation he began working on a more airtight version, consulting with the other directors and with the attorneys who had helped to set it up. + +Mark Fischer, a Boston copyright attorney who initially provided Stallman's legal advice, recalls discussing the license with Stallman during this period. "Richard had very strong views about how it should work," Fischer says, "He had two principles. The first was to make the software absolutely as open as possible." (By the time he said this, Fischer seems to have been influenced by open source supporters; Stallman never sought to make software "open.") "The second was to encourage others to adopt the same licensing practices." The requirements in the license were designed for the second goal. +={ Fischer, Mark +2 } + +The revolutionary nature of this final condition would take a while to sink in. At the time, Fischer says, he simply viewed the GNU Emacs license as a simple trade. It put a price tag on GNU Emacs' use. Instead of money, Stallman was charging users access to their own later modifications. That said, Fischer does remember the license terms as unique. + +"I think asking other people to accept the price was, if not unique, highly unusual at that time," he says. + +In fashioning the GNU Emacs license, Stallman made one major change to the informal tenets of the old Emacs Commune. Where he had once demanded that Commune members send him all the changes they wrote, Stallman now demanded only that they pass along source code and freedom whenever they chose to redistribute the program. In other words, programmers who simply modified Emacs for private use no longer needed to send the source-code changes back to Stallman. In a rare alteration of free software doctrine, Stallman slashed the "price tag" for free software. Users could innovate without Stallman looking over their shoulders, and distribute their versions only when they wished, just so long as all copies came with permission for their possessors to develop and redistribute them further. + +Stallman says this change was fueled by his own dissatisfaction with the Big Brother aspect of the original Emacs Commune social contract. As much as he had found it useful for everyone to send him their changes, he came to feel that requiring this was unjust. "It was wrong to require people to publish all changes," says Stallman. + +"It was wrong to require them to be sent to one privileged developer. That kind of centralization and privilege for one was not consistent with a society in which all had equal rights." + +The GNU Emacs General Public License made its debut on a version of GNU Emacs in 1985. Following the release, Stallman welcomed input from the general hacker community on how to improve the license's language. One hacker to take up the offer was future software activist John Gilmore, then working as a consultant to Sun Microsystems. As part of his consulting work, Gilmore had ported Emacs over to SunOS, the company's in-house version of Unix. In the process of doing so, Gilmore had published the changed version under the GNU Emacs license. Instead of viewing the license as a liability, Gilmore saw it as clear and concise expression of the hacker ethos. "Up until then, most licenses were very informal," Gilmore recalls. +={ Gilmore, John +6 ; + SunOS : + porting Emacs to ; + Sun Microsystems +} + +As an example of this informality, Gilmore cites the mid-1980s copyright license of trn, a news reader program written by Larry Wall, a hacker who could go onto later fame as the creator of both the Unix "patch" utility and the Perl scripting language. In the hope of striking a balance between common hacker courtesy and an author's right to dictate the means of commercial publication, Wall used the program's accompanying copyright notice as an editorial sounding board. +={ Wall, Larry +1 ; + patches, inserting into source code ; + Perl programming language ; + source code : + patches +} + +_1 Copyright (c) 1985, Larry Wall \\ You may copy the trn kit in whole or in part as long as you don't try to make money off it, or pretend that you wrote it.~{ See Trn Kit README, \\ http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/trn/src/trn-3.6/README. }~ + +Such statements, while reflective of the hacker ethic, also reflected the difficulty of translating the loose, informal nature of that ethic into the rigid, legal language of copyright. In writing the GNU Emacs license, Stallman had done more than close up the escape hatch that permitted proprietary offshoots. He had expressed the hacker ethic in a manner understandable to both lawyer and hacker alike. + +It wasn't long, Gilmore says, before other hackers began discussing ways to "port" the GNU Emacs license over to their own programs. Prompted by a conversation on Usenet, Gilmore sent an email to Stallman in November, 1986, suggesting modification: + +_1 You should probably remove "EMACS" from the license and replace it with "SOFTWARE" or something. Soon, we hope, Emacs will not be the biggest part of the GNU system, and the license applies to all of it.~{ See John Gilmore, quoted from email to author. }~ + +Gilmore wasn't the only person suggesting a more general approach. By the end of 1986, Stallman himself was at work with GNU Project's next major milestone, the source-code debugger GDB. To release this, he had to modify the GNU Emacs license so it applied to GDB instead of GNU Emacs. It was not a big job, but it was an opening for possible errors. In 1989, Stallman figured out how to remove the specific references to Emacs, and express the connection between the program code and the license solely in the program's source files. This way, any developer could apply the license to his program without changing the license. The GNU General Public License, GNU GPL for short, was born. The GNU Project soon made it the official license of all existing GNU programs. +={ GNU Debugger (GDB) +1 ; + GDB (GNU Debugger) ; + Debugger +1 +} + +In publishing the GPL, Stallman followed the software convention of using decimal numbers to indicate versions with minor changes and whole numbers to indicate versions with major changes. The first version, in 1989, was labeled Version 1.0. The license contained a preamble spelling out its political intentions: + +_1 The General Public License is designed to make sure that you have the freedom to give away or sell copies of free software, that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things. + +_1 To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.~{ See Richard Stallman, et al., "GNU General Public License: Version 1,"(February, 1989), \\ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.html. }~ + +As hacks go, the GPL stands as one of Stallman's best. It created a system of communal ownership within the normally proprietary confines of copyright law. More importantly, it demonstrated the intellectual similarity between legal code and software code. Implicit within the GPL's preamble was a profound message: instead of viewing copyright law with suspicion, hackers should view it as a dangerous system that could be hacked. +% ={Emacs Commune+1} + +"The GPL developed much like any piece of free software with a large community discussing its structure, its respect or the opposite in their observation, needs for tweaking and even to compromise it mildly for greater acceptance," says Jerry Cohen, another attorney who advised Stallman after Fischer departed. "The process worked very well and GPL in its several versions has gone from widespread skeptical and at times hostile response to widespread acceptance." + +In a 1986 interview with /{BYTE}/ magazine, Stallman summed up the GPL in colorful terms. In addition to proclaiming hacker values, Stallman said, readers should also "see it as a form of intellectual ju-jitsu, using the legal system that software hoarders have set up against them."~{ See David Betz and Jon Edwards, "Richard Stallman discusses his public-domain [ sic ] Unix-compatible software system with BYTE editors," BYTE (July, 1986). (Reprinted on the GNU Project web site: \\ http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html .) \\ This interview offers an interesting, not to mention candid, glimpse at Stallman's political attitudes during the earliest days of the GNU Project. It is also helpful in tracing the evolution of Stallman's rhetoric. \\ Describing the purpose of the GPL, Stallman says, "I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage." \\ Contrast this with a statement to the author in August 2000: "I urge you not to use the term 'intellectual property' in your thinking. It will lead you to misunderstand things, because that term generalizes about copyrights, patents, and trademarks. And those things are so different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about them at once. If you hear somebody saying something' about intellectual property,' without [putting it in] quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly and you shouldn't join." \\ [RMS: The contrast it shows is that I've learned to be more cautious in generalizing. I probably wouldn't talk about "owning knowledge" today, since it's a very broad concept. But "owning knowledge" is not the same generalization as "intellectual property," and the difference between those three laws is crucial to understanding any legal issue about owning knowledge. Patents are direct monopolies over using specific knowledge; that really is one form of "owning knowledge." Copyrights are one of the methods used to stop the sharing of works that embody or explain knowledge, which is a very different thing. Meanwhile, trademarks have very little to do with the subject of knowledge.] }~ Years later, Stallman would describe the GPL's creation in less hostile terms. "I was thinking about issues that were in a sense ethical and in a sense political and in a sense legal," he says. "I had to try to do what could be sustained by the legal system that we're in. In spirit the job was that of legislating the basis for a new society, but since I wasn't a government, I couldn't actually change any laws. I had to try to do this by building on top of the existing legal system, which had not been designed for anything like this." +={ Byte magazine } + +About the time Stallman was pondering the ethical, political, and legal issues associated with free software, a California hacker named Don Hopkins mailed him a manual for the 68000 microprocessor. Hopkins, a Unix hacker and fellow science-fiction buff, had borrowed the manual from Stallman a while earlier. As a display of gratitude, Hopkins decorated the return envelope with a number of stickers obtained at a local science-fiction convention. One sticker in particular caught Stallman's eye. It read, "Copyleft (L), All Rights Reversed." Stallman, inspired by the sticker, nicknamed the legal technique employed in the GNU Emacs license (and later in the GNU GPL) "Copyleft," jocularly symbolized by a backwards "C" in a circle. Over time, the nickname would become general Free Software Foundation terminology for any copyright license "making a program free software and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free software as well." +={ copyleft ; + Hopkins, Don +} + +The German sociologist Max Weber once proposed that all great religions are built upon the "routinization" or "institutionalization" of charisma. Every successful religion, Weber argued, converts the charisma or message of the original religious leader into a social, political, and ethical apparatus more easily translatable across cultures and time. +={ Weber, Max } + +While not religious per se, the GNU GPL certainly qualifies as an interesting example of this "routinization" process at work in the modern, decentralized world of software development. Since its unveiling, programmers and companies who have otherwise expressed little loyalty or allegiance to Stallman have willingly accepted the GPL bargain at face value. Thousands have also accepted the GPL as a preemptive protective mechanism for their own software programs. Even those who reject the GPL conditions as too limiting still credit it as influential. + +One hacker falling into this latter group was Keith Bostic, a University of California employee at the time of the GPL 1.0 release. Bostic's department, the Computer Systems Research Group (SRG), had been involved in Unix development since the late 1970s and was responsible for many key parts of Unix, including the TCP/IP networking protocol, the cornerstone of modern Internet communications. By the late 1980s, AT&T, the original owner of the Unix software, began to focus on commercializing Unix and began looking to the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, the academic version of Unix developed by Bostic and his Berkeley peers, as a key source of commercial technology. +={ AT&T +1 ; + Berkely Software Distribution (BSD) +6 ; + Bostic, Keith +5 ; + BSD (Berkely Software Distribution) +6 ; + Computer Systems Research Group ; + University of California +4 ; + TCP/IP +} + +The code written by Bostic and friends was off limits to nearly everyone, because it was intermixed with proprietary AT&T code. Berkeley distributions were therefore available only to institutions that already had a Unix source license from AT&T. As AT&T raised its license fees, this arrangement, which had at first seemed innocuous (to those who thought only of academia) became increasingly burdensome even there. To use Berkeley's code in GNU, Stallman would have to convince Berkeley to separate it from AT&T's code and release it as free software. In 1984 or 1985 he met with the leaders of the BSD effort, pointing out that AT&T was not a charity and that for a university to donate its work (in effect) to AT&T was not proper. He asked them to separate out their code and release it as free software. +={ licenses : + AT&T UNIX source code and +2 +} + +Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project of porting the latest version of BSD to the PDP-11 computer. It was during this period, Bostic says, that he came into close interaction with Stallman during Stallman's occasional forays out to the west coast. "I remember vividly arguing copyright with Stallman while he sat at borrowed workstations at CSRG," says Bostic. "We'd go to dinner afterward and continue arguing about copyright over dinner." +={ PDP-11 computer } + +The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman would have preferred. In June, 1989, Berkeley had separated its networking code from the rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and began distributing it under a copyright-based free license. The license terms were liberal. All a licensee had to do was give credit to the university in advertisements touting derivative programs.~{ The University of California's "obnoxious advertising clause" would later prove to be a problem. Looking for a permissive alternative to the GPL, some hackers used the original BSD license, replacing "University of California" with their own names or the names of their institutions. The result: free software systems using many of these programs would have to cite dozens of names in advertisements. In 1999, after a few years of lobbying on Stallman's part, the University of California agreed to drop this clause. See "The BSD License Problem" at \\ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html. }~ In contrast to the GPL, this license permitted proprietary offshoots. One problem limited the use of the BSD Networking release: it wasn't a complete operating system, just the network-related parts of one. While the code would be a major contribution to any free operating system, it could only be run at that time in conjunction with other, proprietary-licensed code. +={ AT&T +1 } + +Over the next few years, Bostic and other University of California employees worked to replace the missing components and turn BSD into a complete, freely redistributable operating system. Although delayed by a legal challenge from Unix Systems Laboratories - the AT&T spin-off that retained ownership of the Unix code - the effort would finally bear fruit in the early 1990s. Even before then, however, many of the Berkeley network utilities would make their way into Stallman's GNU system. + +"I think it's highly unlikely that we ever would have gone as strongly as we did without the GNU influence," says Bostic, looking back. "It was clearly something where they were pushing hard and we liked the idea." + +By the end of the 1980s, the GPL was beginning to exert a gravitational effect on the free software community. A program didn't have to carry the GPL to qualify as free software - witness the case of the BSD network utilities - but putting a program under the GPL sent a definite message. "I think the very existence of the GPL inspired people to think through whether they were making free software, and how they would license it," says Bruce Perens, creator of Electric Fence, a popular Unix utility, and future leader of the Debian GNU/Linux development team. A few years after the release of the GPL, Perens says he decided to discard Electric Fence's homegrown license in favor of Stallman's lawyer-vetted copyright. "It was actually pretty easy to do," Perens recalls. +={ Perens, Bruce } + +Rich Morin, the programmer who had viewed Stallman's initial GNU announcement with a degree of skepticism, recalls being impressed by the software that began to gather under the GPL umbrella. As the leader of a SunOS user group, one of Morin's primary duties during the 1980s had been to send out distribution tapes containing the best freeware or free software utilities. The job often mandated calling up original program authors to verify whether their programs were copyrighted or whether they had been consigned to the public domain. Around 1989, Morin says, he began to notice that the best software programs typically fell under the GPL license. "As a software distributor, as soon as I saw the word GPL, I knew I was home free,"recalls Morin. +={ SunOS } + +To compensate for the prior hassles that went into compiling distribution tapes to the Sun User Group, Morin had charged recipients a convenience fee. Now, with programs moving over to the GPL, Morin was suddenly getting his tapes put together in half the time, turning a tidy profit in the process. Sensing a commercial opportunity, Morin rechristened his hobby as a business: Prime Time Freeware. +={ Sun User Group } + +Such commercial exploitation was completely consistent with the free software agenda. "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price," advised Stallman in the GPL's preamble. By the late 1980s, Stallman had refined it to a more simple mnemonic: "Don't think free as in free beer; think free as in free speech." + +For the most part, businesses ignored Stallman's entreaties. Still, for a few entrepreneurs, the freedom associated with free software was the same freedom associated with free markets. Take software ownership out of the commercial equation, and you had a situation where even the smallest software company was free to compete against the IBMs and DECs of the world. + +One of the first entrepreneurs to grasp this concept was Michael Tiemann, a software programmer and graduate student at Stanford University. During the 1980s, Tiemann had followed the GNU Project like an aspiring jazz musician following a favorite artist. It wasn't until the release of the GNU C Compiler, or GCC, in 1987, however, that he began to grasp the full potential of free software. Dubbing GCC a "bombshell," Tiemann says the program's own existence underlined Stallman's determination as a programmer. +={ C Compiler (GNU) +9 ; + GNU C Compiler (GCC) +9 ; + GCC (GNU C Compiler) +9 ; + Tiemann, Michael +8 ; + Stanford University +} + +"Just as every writer dreams of writing the great American novel, every programmer back in the 1980s talked about writing the great American compiler," Tiemman recalls. "Suddenly Stallman had done it. It was very humbling." + +"You talk about single points of failure, GCC was it," echoes Bostic. "Nobody had a compiler back then, until GCC came along." + +Rather than compete with Stallman, Tiemann decided to build on top of his work. The original version of GCC weighed in at 110,000 lines of code, but Tiemann recalls the program as surprisingly easy to understand. So easy in fact that Tiemann says it took less than five days to master and another week to port the software to a new hardware platform, National Semiconductor's 32032 microchip. Over the next year, Tiemann began playing around with the source code, creating the first "native" or direct compiler for the C++ programming language, by extending GCC to handle C++ as well as C. (The existing, proprietary implementation of the C++ language worked by converting the code to the C language, then feeding the result to a C compiler.) One day, while delivering a lecture on the program at Bell Labs, Tiemann ran into some AT&T developers struggling to pull off the same thing. +={ C+ programming language } + +"There were about 40 or 50 people in the room, and I asked how many people were working on the native code compiler," Tiemann recalls. "My host said the information was confidential but added that if I took a look around the room I might get a good general idea." + +It wasn't long after, Tiemann says, that the light bulb went off in his head. "I had been working on that project for six months," Tiemann says. I just thought to myself, whether it's me or the code, this is a level of efficiency that the free market should be ready to reward." + +Tiemann found added inspiration in the /{GNU Manifesto}/: while excoriating the greed of proprietary software vendors, it also encourages companies, as long as they respect users freedom, to use and redistribute free software in their commercial activities. By removing the power of monopoly from the commercial software question, the GPL makes it possible for even small companies to compete on the basis of service, which extends from simple tech support to training to extending free programs for specific clients' needs. +={ GNU Manifesto } + +In a 1999 essay, Tiemann recalls the impact of Stallman's /{Manifesto}/. "It read like a socialist polemic, but I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise."~{ See Michael Tiemann, "Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur's Account," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 139, \\ http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/tiemans.html. }~ + +This business plan was not new; Stallman supported himself in the late 80s by doing this on a small scale. But Tiemann intended to take it to a new level. Teaming up with John Gilmore and David Vinayak Wallace, Tiemann launched a software consulting service dedicated to customizing GNU programs. Dubbed Cygnus Support (informally, "Cygnus" was a recursive acronym for "Cygnus, Your GNU Support"), the company signed its first development contract in February, 1990. By the end of the year, the company had $725,000 worth of support and development contracts. +={ Gilmore, John } + +The complete GNU operating system Stallman envisioned required more than software development tools. In the 1990s, GNU also developed a command line interpreter or "shell," which was an extended replacement for the Bourne Shell (written by FSF employee Brian Fox, and christened by Stallman the Bourne Again Shell, or BASH), as well as the PostScript interpreter Ghostscript, the documentation browser platform Texinfo, the C Library which C programs need in order to run and talk to the system's kernel, the spreadsheet Oleo ("better for you than the more expensive spreadsheet"), and even a fairly good chess game. However, programmers were typically most interested in the GNU programming tools. + +GNU Emacs, GDB, and GCC were the "big three" of developer-oriented tools, but they weren't the only ones developed by the GNU Project in the 80s. By 1990, GNU had also generated GNU versions of the build-controller Make, the parser-generator YACC (rechristened Bison), and awk (rechristened gawk); as well as dozens more. Like GCC, GNU programs were usually designed to run on multiple systems, not just a single vendor's platform. In the process of making programs more flexible, Stallman and his collaborators often made them more useful as well. + +Recalling the GNU universalist approach, Prime Time Freeware's Morin points to a useless but vitally important software package called GNU Hello, which serves as an example to show programmers how to properly package a program for GNU. "It's the hello world program which is five lines of C, packaged up as if it were a GNU distribution," Morin says. "And so it's got the Texinfo stuff and the configure stuff. It's got all the other software engineering goo that the GNU Project has come up with to allow packages to port to all these different environments smoothly. That's tremendously important work, and it affects not only all of [Stallman's] software, but also all of the other GNU Project software." + +According to Stallman, improving technically on the components of Unix was secondary to replacing them with free software. "With each piece I may or may not find a way to improve it," said Stallman to /{BYTE}/. "To some extent I am getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much better. To some extent it's because I have been in the field a long time and worked on many other systems. I therefore have many ideas [which I learned from them] to bring to bear."~{ See Richard Stallman, BYTE (1986). }~ +={ Byte magazine } + +Nevertheless, as GNU tools made their mark in the late 1980s, Stallman's AI Lab-honed reputation for design fastidiousness soon became legendary throughout the entire software-development community. + +Jeremy Allison, a Sun user during the late 1980s and programmer destined to run his own free software project, Samba, in the 1990s, recalls that reputation with a laugh. During the late 1980s, Allison began using Emacs. Inspired by the program's community-development model, Allison says he sent in a snippet of source code only to have it rejected by Stallman. +={ Allison, Jeramy +1 } + +"It was like the /{Onion}/ headline," Allison says. "'Child's prayers to God answered: No.'" +={ Onion, The } + +As the GNU Project moved from success to success in creation of user-level programs and libraries, it postponed development of the kernel, the central "traffic cop" program that controls other programs' access to the processor and all machine resources. + +As with several other major system components, Stallman sought a head-start on kernel development by looking for an existing program to adapt. A review of GNU Project "GNUs letters" of the late 1980s reveals that this approach, like the initial attempt to build GCC out of Pastel, had its problems. A January, 1987 GNUs letter reported the GNU Project's intention to overhaul TRIX, a kernel developed at MIT. However, Stallman never actually tried to do this, since he was working on GCC at the time; later he concluded that TRIX would require too much change to be a good starting point. By February of 1988, according to a newsletter published that month, the GNU Project had shifted its kernel plans to Mach, a lightweight "micro-kernel" developed at Carnegie Mellon. Mach was not then free software, but its developers privately said they would liberate it; when this occurred, in 1990, GNU Project kernel development could really commence.~{ See "Hurd History," \\ http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history.html. }~ + +The delays in kernel development were just one of many concerns weighing on Stallman during this period. In 1989, Lotus Development Corporation filed suit against rival software companies, Paperback Software International and Borland, for copying menu commands from Lotus' popular 1-2-3 Spreadsheet program. Lotus' suit, coupled with the Apple-Microsoft "look and feel" battle, endangered the future of the GNU system. Although neither suit directly attacked the GNU Project, both threatened the right to develop software compatible with existing programs, as many GNU programs were. These lawsuits could impose a chilling effect on the entire culture of software development. Determined to do something, Stallman and a few professors put an ad in /{The Tech}/ (the MIT student newspaper) blasting the lawsuits and calling for a boycott of both Lotus and Apple. He then followed up the ad by helping to organize a group to protest the corporations filing the suit. Calling itself the League for Programming Freedom, the group held protests outside the offices of Lotus, Inc. +={ Apple Computers ; + Lotus Development Corp. ; + Microsoft Corporation : + Apple Computer lawsuit ; + Paperback Software International +} + +The protests were notable.~{ According to a League for Programming Freedom press release at \\ http://progfree.org/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/demo.final.release, the protests were no-table for featuring the first hexadecimal protest chant: \\ 1-2-3-4, toss the lawyers out the door \\ 5-6-7-8, innovate don't litigate \\ 9-A-B-C, 1-2-3 is not for me \\ D-E-F-O, look and feel have got to go }~ + +They document the evolving nature of the software industry. Applications had quietly replaced operating systems as the primary corporate battleground. In its unfinished quest to build a free software operating system, the GNU Project seemed hopelessly behind the times to those whose primary values were fashion and success. Indeed, the very fact that Stallman had felt it necessary to put together an entirely new group dedicated to battling the "look and feel" lawsuits led some observers to think that the FSF was obsolete. + +However, Stallman had a strategic reason to start a separate organization to fight the imposition of new monopolies on software development: so that proprietary software developers would join it too. Extending copyright to cover interfaces would threaten many proprietary software developers as well as many free software developers. These proprietary developers were unlikely to endorse the Free Soft-ware Foundation, but there was, intentionally, nothing in the League for Programming Freedom to drive them away. For the same reason, Stallman handed over leadership of LPF to others as soon as it was feasible. + +In 1990, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation certified Stallman's genius status when it granted Stallman a Mac Arthur fellowship, the so-called "genius grant," amounting in this case to$240,000 over 5 years. Although the Foundation does not state a reason for its grants, this one was seen as an award for launching the GNU Project and giving voice to the free software philosophy. The grant relieved a number of short-term concerns for Stallman. For instance, it enabled him to cease the consulting work through which he had obtained his income in the 80s and devote more time to the free software cause. + +The award also made it possible for Stallman to register normally to vote. In 1985 a fire in the house where Stallman lived left him without an official domicile. It also covered most of his books with ash, and cleaning these "dirty books" did not yield satisfying results. From that time he lived as a "squatter" at 545 Technology Square, and had to vote as a "homeless person."~{ See Reuven Lerner, "Stallman wins $240,000 MacArthur award," MIT, The Tech (July 18, 1990), \\ http://the-tech.mit.edu/V110/N30/rms.30n.html. }~ "[The Cambridge Election Commission] didn't want to accept that as my address," Stallman would later recall. "A newspaper article about the MacArthur grant said that, and then they let me register."~{ See Michael Gross, "Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, Mac Arthur-certified Genius" (1999). }~ + +Most importantly, the MacArthur fellowship gave Stallman press attention and speaking invitations, which he used to spread the word about GNU, free software, and dangers such as "look and feel" lawsuits and software patents. + +Interestingly, the GNU system's completion would stem from one of these trips. In April 1991, Stallman paid a visit to the Polytechnic University in Helsinki, Finland. Among the audience members was 21-year-old Linus Torvalds, who was just beginning to develop the Linux kernel - the free software kernel destined to fill the GNU system's main remaining gap. +={ Helsinki, Finland +3 ; + Polytechnic University (Finland) ; + Torvalds, Linus +16 +} + +A student at the nearby University of Helsinki at the time, Torvalds regarded Stallman with bemusement. "I saw, for the first time in my life, the stereotypical long-haired, bearded hacker type," recalls Torvalds in his 2001 autobiography /{Just for Fun}/. "We don't have much of them in Helsinki."~{ See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58-59. Although presumably accurate in regard to Torvalds' life, what the book says about Stallman is sometimes wrong. For instance, it says that Stallman "wants to make everything open source," and that he "complains about other people not using the GPL." In fact, Stallman advocates free software, not open source. He urges authors to choose the GNU GPL, in most circumstances, but says that all free software licenses are ethical. }~ + +While not exactly attuned to the "socio political" side of the Stallman agenda, Torvalds nevertheless appreciated one aspect of the agenda's underlying logic: no programmer writes error-free code. Even when users have no wish to adapt a program to their specific preferences, any program can use improvement. By sharing software, hackers put a program's improvement ahead of individual motivations such as greed or ego protection. + +Like many programmers of his generation, Torvalds had cut his teeth not on mainframe computers like the IBM 7094, but on a motley assortment of home-built computer systems. As a university student, Torvalds had made the step up from PC programming to Unix, using the university's MicroVAX. This ladder-like progression had given Torvalds a different perspective on the barriers to machine access. For Stallman, the chief barriers were bureaucracy and privilege. For Torvalds, the chief barriers were geography and the harsh Helsinki winter. Forced to trek across the University of Helsinki just to log in to his Unix account, Torvalds quickly began looking for a way to log in from the warm confines of his off-campus apartment. +={ IBM 7094 computer ; + MicroVAX +1 +} + +Torvalds was using Minix, a lightweight non-free system developed as an instructional example by Dutch university professor Andrew Tanenbaum.~{ It was non-free in 1991. Minix is free software now. }~ It included the non-free Free University Compiler Kit, plus utilities of the sort that Tanenbaum had contemptuously invited Stallman in 1983 to write.~{ Tanenbaum describes Minix as an "operating system" in his book, Operating System Design and Implementation , but what the book discusses is only the part of the system that corresponds to the kernel of Unix. There are two customary usages of the term "operating system," and one of them is what is called the "kernel" in Unix terminology. But that's not the only terminological complication in the subject. That part of Minix consists of a microkernel plus servers that run on it, a design of the same kind as the GNU Hurd plus Mach. The microkernel plus servers are comparable to the kernel of Unix. But when that book says "the kernel," it refers to the microkernel only. See Andrew Tanenbaum, Operating System Design and Implementation , 1987. }~ +={ Minix operating system +2 ; + Unix operating system : + Minix and ; + Tanenbaum, Andrew +} + +Minix fit within the memory confines of Torvalds' 386 PC, but it was intended more to be studied than used. The Minix system also lacked the facility of terminal emulation, which would mimic a typical display terminal and thus enable Torvalds to log in to the MicroVAX from home. + +Early in 1991, Torvalds began writing a terminal emulation program. He used Minix to develop his emulator, but the emulator didn't run on Minix; it was a stand-alone program. Then he gave it features to access disk files in Minix's file system. Around then, Torvalds referred to his evolving work as the "GNU/Emacs of terminal emulation programs."~{ See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 78. }~ + +Since Minix lacked many important features. Torvalds began extending his terminal emulator into a kernel comparable to that of Minix, except that it was monolithic. Feeling ambitious, he solicited a Minix newsgroup for copies of the POSIX standards, the specifications for a Unix-compatible kernel.~{ POSIX was subsequently extended to include specifications for many command-line features, but that did not exist in 1991. }~ A few weeks later, having put his kernel together with some GNU programs and adapted them to work with it, Torvalds was posting a message reminiscent of Stallman's original 1983 GNU posting: + +_1 Hello everybody out there using minix- + +_1 I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). I've currently ported bash (1.08) and gcc(1.40)...~{ Ibid, p. 85. }~ + +The posting drew a smattering of responses and within a month, Torvalds had posted a 0.01 version of his kernel - i.e., the earliest possible version fit for outside review - on an Internet FTP site. In the course of doing so, Torvalds had to come up with a name for the new kernel. On his own PC hard drive, Torvalds had saved the program as Linux, a name that paid its respects to the software convention of giving each Unix variant a name that ended with the letter X. Deeming the name too "egotistical," Torvalds changed it to Freax, only to have the FTP site manager change it back. +={ Freax } + +Torvalds said he was writing a free operating system, and his comparing it with GNU shows he meant a complete system. However, what he actually wrote was a kernel, pure and simple. Torvalds had no need to write more than the kernel because, as he knew, the other needed components were already available, thanks to the developers of GNU and other free software projects. Since the GNU Project wanted to use them all in the GNU system, it had perforce made them work together. While Torvalds continued developing the kernel, he (and later his collaborators) made those programs work with it too. + +Initially, Linux was not free software: the license it carried did not qualify as free, because it did not allow commercial distribution. Torvalds was worried that some company would swoop in and take Linux away from him. However, as the growing GNU/Linux combination gained popularity, Torvalds saw that sale of copies would be useful for the community, and began to feel less worried about a possible takeover.~{ Ibid, p. 94-95. }~ This led him to reconsider the licensing of Linux. + +Neither compiling Linux with GCC nor running GCC with Linux required him legally to release Linux under the GNU GPL, but Torvalds' use of GCC implied for him a certain obligation to let other users borrow back. As Torvalds would later put it: "I had hoisted myself up on the shoulders of giants."~{ Ibid, p. 95-97. }~ Not surprisingly, he began to think about what would happen when other people looked to him for similar support. A decade after the decision, Torvalds echoes the Free Software Foundation's Robert Chassell when he sums up his thoughts at the time: +={ C Compiler (GNU) : + Linux development and +3 ; + GNU C Compiler (GCC) : + Linux development and ; + GCC (GNU C Compiler) : + Linux development and} +} + +_1 You put six months of your life into this thing and you want to make it available and you want to get something out of it, but you don't want people to take advantage of it. I wanted people to be able to see [Linux], and to make changes and improvements to their hearts' content. But I also wanted to make sure that what I got out of it was to see what they were doing. I wanted to always have access to the sources so that if they made improvements, I could make those improvements myself.~{ See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 94-95. }~ + +When it was time to release the 0.12 version of Linux, the first to operate fully with GCC, Torvalds decided to throw his lot in with the free software movement. He discarded the old license of Linux and replaced it with the GPL. Within three years, Linux developers were offering release 1.0 of Linux, the kernel; it worked smoothly with the almost complete GNU system, composed of programs from the GNU Project and elsewhere. In effect, they had completed the GNU operating system by adding Linux to it. The resulting system was basically GNU plus Linux. Torvalds and friends, however, referred to it confusingly as "Linux." + +By 1994, the amalgamated system had earned enough respect in the hacker world to make some observers from the business world wonder if Torvalds hadn't given away the farm by switching to the GPL in the project's initial months. In the first issue of /{Linux Journal}/, publisher Robert Young sat down with Torvalds for an interview. When Young asked the Finnish programmer if he felt regret at giving up private ownership of the Linux source code, Torvalds said no. "Even with 20/20 hindsight," Torvalds said, he considered the GPL "one of the very best design decisions" made during the early stages of the Linux project.~{ See Robert Young, "Interview with Linus, the Author of Linux," Linux Journal (March 1, 1994), \\ http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2736. }~ +={ Young, Robert } + +That the decision had been made with zero appeal or deference to Stallman and the Free Software Foundation speaks to the GPL's growing portability. Although it would take a couple of years to be recognized by Stallman, the explosiveness of Linux development conjured flashbacks of Emacs. This time around, however, the innovation triggering the explosion wasn't a software hack like Control-R but the novelty of running a Unix-like system on the PC architecture. The motives may have been different, but the end result certainly fit the ethical specifications: a fully functional operating system composed entirely of free software. +={ Control-R (^R) } + +As his initial email message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup indicates, it would take a few months before Torvalds saw Linux as anything more than a holdover until the GNU developers delivered on the Hurd kernel. As far as Torvalds was concerned, he was simply the latest in a long line of kids taking apart and reassembling things just for fun. Nevertheless, when summing up the runaway success of a project that could have just as easily spent the rest of its days on an abandoned computer hard drive, Torvalds credits his younger self for having the wisdom to give up control and accept the GPL bargain. "I may not have seen the light," writes Torvalds, reflecting on Stallman's 1991 Polytechnic University speech and his subsequent decision to switch to the GPL. "But I guess something from his speech sunk in."~{ See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 59. }~ +={ HURD kernel } + +1~ Chapter 10 - GNU/Linux +={ GNU/Linux +45 ; + Linux +45 ; + Stallman, Richard M. : + GNU Linux +46 +} + +By 1993, the free software movement was at a crossroads. To the optimistically inclined, all signs pointed toward success for the hacker culture. /{Wired}/ magazine, a funky, new publication offering stories on data encryption, Usenet, and software freedom, was flying off magazine racks. The Internet, once a slang term used only by hackers and research scientists, had found its way into mainstream lexicon. Even President Clinton was using it. The personal computer, once a hobbyist's toy, had grown to full-scale respectability, giving a whole new generation of computer users access to hacker-built software. And while the GNU Project had not yet reached its goal of a fully intact, free GNU operating system, users could already run the GNU/Linux variant. +={ Internet +3 ; + Wired magazine ; + PCs (personal computers) +2 ; + personal computers (PCs) +2 +} + +Any way you sliced it, the news was good, or so it seemed. After a decade of struggle, hackers and hacker values were finally gaining acceptance in mainstream society. People were getting it. + +Or were they? To the pessimistically inclined, each sign of acceptance carried its own troubling countersign. Sure, being a hacker was suddenly cool, but was cool good for a community that thrived on alienation? Sure, the White House was saying nice things about the Internet, even going so far as to register its own domain name, white-house.gov, *** but it was also meeting with the companies, censorship advocates, and law-enforcement officials looking to tame the Internet's Wild West culture. Sure, PCs were more powerful, but in commoditizing the PC marketplace with its chips, Intel had created a situation in which proprietary software vendors now held the power. For every new user won over to the free software cause via GNU/Linux, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were booting up Microsoft Windows for the first time. GNU/Linux had only rudimentary graphical interfaces, so it was hardly user-friendly. In 1993, only an expert could use it. The GNU Project's first attempt to develop a graphical desktop had been abortive. +={ Intel } + +Then there was the political situation. Copyrighting of user interfaces was still a real threat - the courts had not yet rejected the idea. Meanwhile, patents on software algorithms and features were a growing danger that threatened to spread to other countries. + +Finally, there was the curious nature of GNU/Linux itself. Unrestricted by legal disputes (such as BSD faced), GNU/Linux's high-speed evolution had been so unplanned, its success so accidental, that programmers closest to the software code itself didn't know what to make of it. More compilation album than unified project, it was comprised of a hacker medley of greatest hits: everything from GCC, GDB, and glibc (the GNU Project's newly developed C Library) toX (a Unix-based graphic user interface developed by MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science) to BSD-developed tools such as BIND (the Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon, which lets users substitute easy-to-remember Internet domain names for numeric IP addresses) and TCP/IP. In addition, it contained the Linux kernel - itself designed as a replacement for Minix. Rather than developing a new operating system, Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux development team had plugged their work into this matrix. As Torvalds himself would later translate it when describing the secret of his success: "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people actually do."~{ Torvalds has offered this quote in many different settings. To date, however, the quote's most notable appearance is in the Eric Raymond essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (May, 1997), \\ http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/. }~ +={ BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon) ; + Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND) ; + C programming language : + glibc ; + GNU Debugger (GDB) : + Linux and ; + GDB (GNU Debugger) : + Linux and ; + glibc (GNU C Library) ; + GNU C Library (glibc) ; + kernel (Linux) ; + X graphic user interface ; + Laboratory for Computer Science : + X, developing ; + Minix operating system : + kernel, used for Linux ; + TCP/IP ; + Torvalds, Linus : + Minix, reworking for Linux +2 +} + +Such laziness, while admirable from an efficiency perspective, was troubling from a political perspective. For one thing, it underlined the lack of an ideological agenda on Torvalds' part. Unlike the GNU developers, Torvalds hadn't built his kernel out of a desire to give his fellow hackers freedom; he'd built it to have something he himself could play with. So what exactly was the combined system, and which philosophy would people associate it with? Was it a manifestation of the free software philosophy first articulated by Stallman in the /{GNU Manifesto}/? Or was it simply an amalgamation of nifty software tools that any user, similarly motivated, could assemble on his own home system? +={ GNU Manifesto } + +By late 1993, a growing number of GNU/Linux users had begun to lean toward the latter definition and began brewing private variations on the theme. They began to develop various "distributions" of GNU/Linux and distribute them, sometimes gratis, sometimes for a price. The results were spotty at best. + +"This was back before Red Hat and the other commercial distributions," remembers Ian Murdock, then a computer science student at Purdue University. "You'd flip through Unix magazines and find all these business card-sized ads proclaiming 'Linux.' Most of the companies were fly-by-night operations that saw nothing wrong with slipping a little of their own [proprietary] source code into the mix." +={ Murdock, Ian +38 ; + Red Hat Inc. ; + Purdue University +} + +Murdock, a Unix programmer, remembers being "swept away" by GNU/Linux when he first downloaded and installed it on his home PC system. "It was just a lot of fun," he says. "It made me want to get involved." The explosion of poorly built distributions began to dampen his early enthusiasm, however. Deciding that the best way to get involved was to build a version free of additives, Murdock set about putting a list of the best free software tools available with the intention of folding them into his own distribution. "I wanted something that would live up to the Linux name," Murdock says. + +In a bid to "stir up some interest," Murdock posted his intentions on the Internet, including Usenet's comp.os.linux newsgroup. One of the first responding email messages was from rms@ai.mit.edu. As a hacker, Murdock instantly recognized the address. It was Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and a man Murdock knew even back then as "the hacker of hackers." Seeing the address in his mail queue, Murdock was puzzled. Why on Earth would Stallman, a person leading his own operating-system project, care about Murdock's gripes over "Linux" distributions? + +Murdock opened the message. + +"He said the Free Software Foundation was starting to look closely at Linux and that the FSF was interested in possibly doing a Linux [sic] system, too. Basically, it looked to Stallman like our goals were in line with their philosophy." +={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) : + Linux and +3 +} + +Not to over dramatize, the message represented a change in strategy on Stallman's part. Until 1993, Stallman had been content to keep his nose out of Linux affairs. After first hearing of the new kernel, Stallman asked a friend to check its suitability. Recalls Stallman, "Here ported back that the software was modeled after System V, which was the inferior version of Unix. He also told me it wasn't portable." +={ System V } + +The friend's report was correct. Built to run on 386-based machines, Linux was firmly rooted to its low-cost hardware platform. What the friend failed to report, however, was the sizable advantage Linux enjoyed as the only free kernel in the marketplace. In other words, while Stallman spent the next year and a half listening to progress reports from the Hurd developer, reporting rather slow progress, Torvalds was winning over the programmers who would later uproot and replant Linux and GNU onto new platforms. + +By 1993, the GNU Project's failure to deliver a working kernel was leading to problems both within the GNU Project and in the free software movement at large. A March, 1993, /{Wired}/ magazine article by Simson Garfinkel described the GNU Project as "bogged down" despite the success of the project's many tools.~{ See Simson Garfinkel, "Is Stallman Stalled?" /{Wired}/ (March, 1993). }~ Those within the project and its nonprofit adjunct, the Free Software Foundation, remember the mood as being even worse than Garfinkel's article let on. "It was very clear, at least to me at the time, that there was a window of opportunity to introduce a new operating system," says Chassell. "And once that window was closed, people would become less interested. Which is in fact exactly what happened."~{ Chassell's concern about there being a 36-month "window" for a new operating system is not unique to the GNU Project. During the early 1990s, free software versions of the Berkeley Software Distribution were held up by Unix System Laboratories' lawsuit restricting the release of BSD-derived software. While many users consider BSD offshoots such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD to be demonstrably superior to GNU/Linux both in terms of performance and security, the number of FreeBSD and OpenBSD users remains a fraction of the total GNU/Linux user population. To view a sample analysis of the relative success of GNU/Linux in relation to other free software operating systems, see the essay by New Zealand hacker, Liam Greenwood, "Why is Linux Successful" (1999), \\ http://www.freebsddiary.org/linux.php. }~ +={ Garfinkel, Simson ; + GNU Project : + kernel ; + Wired magazine : + GNU Project and +} + +Much has been made about the GNU Project's struggles during the 1990-1993 period. While some place the blame on Stallman for those struggles, Eric Raymond, an old friend of Stallman's who supported the GNU Project lukewarmly, says the problem was largely institutional. "The FSF got arrogant," Raymond says. "They moved away from the goal of doing a production-ready operating system to doing operating-system research." Even worse, "They thought nothing outside the FSF could affect them." +={ HURD kernel +4 ; + Raymond, Eric +} + +Murdock adopts a more charitable view. "I think part of the problem is they were a little too ambitious and they threw good money after bad," he says. "Micro-kernels in the late 80s and early 90s were a hot topic. Unfortunately, that was about the time that the GNU Project started to design their kernel. They ended up with a lot of baggage and it would have taken a lot of backpedaling to lose it." + +Stallman responds, "Although the emotions Raymond cites come from his imagination, he's right about one cause of the Hurd's delay:the Hurd developer several times redesigned and rewrote large parts of the code based on what he had learned, rather than trying to make the Hurd run as soon as possible. It was good design practice, but it wasn't the right practice for our goal: to get something working ASAP." + +Stallman cites other issues that also caused delay. The Lotus and Apple lawsuits claimed much of his attention; this, coupled with hand problems that prevented him from typing for three years, mostly excluded Stallman from programming. Stallman also cites poor communication between various portions of the GNU Project. "We had to do a lot of work to get the debugging environment to work," he recalls." And the people maintaining GDB at the time were not that cooperative." They had given priority to supporting the existing platforms of GDB's current users, rather than to the overall goal of a complete GNU system. + +Most fundamentally, however, Stallman says he and the Hurd developers underestimated the difficulty of developing the Unix kernel facilities on top of the Mach microkernel. "I figured, OK, the [Mach]part that has to talk to the machine has already been debugged," Stallman says, recalling the Hurd team's troubles in a 2000 speech. "With that head start, we should be able to get it done faster. But instead, it turned out that debugging these asynchronous multi-threaded programs was really hard. There were timing bugs that would clobber the files, and that's no fun. The end result was that it took many, many years to produce a test version."~{ See Maui High Performance Computing Center Speech. In subsequent emails, I asked Stallman what exactly he meant by the term "timing bugs." Stallman said "timing errors" was a better way to summarize the problem and offered an elucidating technical information of how a timing error can hamper an operating system's performance: \\ "Timing errors" occur in an asynchronous system where jobs done in parallel can theoretically occur in any order, and one particular order leads to problems. \\ Imagine that program A does X, and program B does Y, where both X and Y are short routines that examine and update the same data structure. Nearly always the computer will do X before Y, or do Y before X, and then there will be no problem. On rare occasions, by chance, the scheduler will let program A run until it is in the middle of X, and then run B which will do Y. Thus, Y will be done while Xis half-done. Since they are updating the same data structure, they will interfere. For instance, perhaps X has already examined the data structure, and it won't notice that there was a change. There will be an unreproducible failure, unreproducible because it depends on chance factors (when the scheduler decides to run which program and how long). \\ The way to prevent such a failure is to use a lock to make sure X and Y can't run at the same time. Programmers writing asynchronous systems know about the general need for locks, but sometimes they overlook the need for a lock in a specific place or on a specific data structure. Then the program has a timing error. }~ + +Over time, the growing success of GNU together with Linux made it clear that the GNU Project should get on the train that was leaving and not wait for the Hurd. Besides, there were weaknesses in the community surrounding GNU/Linux. Sure, Linux had been licensed under the GPL, but as Murdock himself had noted, the desire to treat GNU/Linux as a purely free software operating system was far from unanimous. By late 1993, the total GNU/Linux user population had grown from a dozen or so enthusiasts to somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000.~{ GNU/Linux user-population numbers are sketchy at best, which is why I've provided such a broad range. The 100,000 total comes from the Red Hat "Milestones" site, \\ http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/milestones.html. }~ What had once been a hobby was now a marketplace ripe for exploitation, and some developers had no objection to exploiting it with non-free software. Like Winston Churchill watching Soviet troops sweep into Berlin, Stallman felt an understandable set of mixed emotions when it came time to celebrate the GNU/Linux "victory."~{ I wrote this Winston Churchill analogy before Stallman himself sent me his own unsolicited comment on Churchill: \\ World War II and the determination needed to win it was a very strong memory as I was growing up. Statements such as Churchill's, "We will fight them in the landing zones, we will fight them on the beaches... we will never surrender," have always resonated for me. }~ + +Although late to the party, Stallman still had clout. As soon as the FSF announced that it would lend its money and moral support to Murdock's software project, other offers of support began rolling in. Murdock dubbed the new project Debian - a compression of his and his wife, Deborah's, names - and within a few weeks was rolling out the first distribution. "[Richard's support] catapulted Debian almost overnight from this interesting little project to something people within the community had to pay attention to," Murdock says. +={ Debian +19 } + +In January of 1994, Murdock issued the +/{Debian Manifesto}/. Written in the spirit of Stallman's /{GNU Manifesto}/ from a decade before, it explained the importance of working closely with the Free Software Foundation. Murdock wrote: +={ Debian Manifesto +3 ; + Free Software Foundation (FSF) : + Debian Manifesto and ; + GNU Manifesto : + Debian Manifesto and +} + +_1 The Free Software Foundation plays an extremely important role in the future of Debian. By the simple fact that they will be distributing it, a message is sent to the world that Linux [sic] is not a commercial product and that it never should be, but that this does not mean that Linux will never be able to compete commercially. For those of you who disagree, I challenge you to rationalize the success of GNU Emacs and GCC, which are not commercial software but which have had quite an impact on the commercial market regardless of that fact. + +_1 The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux[sic] rather than on the destructive goal of enriching one-self at the expense of the entire Linux community and its future. The development and distribution of Debian may not be the answer to the problems that I have outlined in the /{Manifesto}/, but I hope that it will at least attract enough attention to these problems to allow them to be solved.~{ See Ian Murdock, /{A Brief History of Debian}/, (January 6, 1994): Appendix A, "The Debian Manifesto," \\ http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ap-manifesto.en.html. }~ + +Shortly after the /{Manifesto's}/ release, the Free Software Foundation made its first major request. Stallman wanted Murdock to call its distribution "GNU/Linux." At first, Stallman proposed the term "Lignux" - combining the names Linux and GNU - but the initial reaction was very negative, and this convinced Stallman to go with the longer but less criticized GNU/Linux. +={ Lignux (Linux with GNU) } + +Some dismissed Stallman's attempt to add the "GNU" prefix as a belated quest for credit, never mind whether it was due, but Murdock saw it differently. Looking back, Murdock saw it as an attempt to counteract the growing tension between the GNU Project's developers and those who adapted GNU programs to use with the Linux kernel. "There was a split emerging," Murdock recalls. "Richard was concerned." +={ C programming language : + glibc +3 ; + glibc (GNU C Library) +3 ; + GNU C Library (glibc) +3 +} + +By 1990, each GNU program had a designated maintainer-in-charge. Some GNU programs could run on many different systems, and users often contributed changes to port them to another system. Often these users knew only that one system, and did not consider how to keep the code clean for other systems. To add support for the new system while keeping the code comprehensible, so it could be maintained reliably for all systems, then required rewriting much of the changes. The maintainer-in-charge had the responsibility to critique the changes and tell their user-authors how to redo parts of the port. Generally they were eager to do this so that their changes would be integrated into the standard version. Then the maintainer-in-charge would edit in there worked changes, and take care of them in future maintenance. For some GNU programs, this had happened dozens of times for dozens of different systems. + +The programmers who adapted various GNU programs to work with the kernel Linux followed this common path: they considered only their own platform. But when the maintainers-in-charge asked them to help clean up their changes for future maintenance, several of them were not interested. They did not care about doing the correct thing, or about facilitating future maintenance of the GNU packages they had adapted. They cared only about their own versions and were inclined to maintain them as forks. + +In the hacker world, forks are an interesting issue. Although the hacker ethic permits a programmer to do anything he wants with a given program's source code, it is considered correct behavior to offer to work with the original developer to maintain a joint version. Hackers usually find it useful, as well as proper, to pour their improvements into the program's principal version. A free software license gives every hacker the right to fork a program, and sometimes it is necessary, but doing so without need or cause is considered somewhat rude. +={ forks (code) +3 ; + tree (source code) +} + +As leader of the GNU Project, Stallman had already experienced the negative effects of a software fork in 1991. Says Stallman, "Lucid hired several people to write improvements to GNU Emacs, meant to be contributions to it; but the developers did not inform me about the project. Instead they designed several new features on their own. As you might expect, I agreed with some of their decisions and disagreed with others. They asked me to incorporate all their code, but when I said I wanted to use about half of it, they declined to help me adapt that half to work on its own. I had to do it on my own." The fork had given birth to a parallel version, Lucid Emacs, and hard feelings all around.~{ Jamie Zawinski, a former Lucid programmer who would go on to head the Mozilla development team, has a web site that documents the Lucid/GNU Emacs fork, titled, "The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism.", at \\ http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html. Stallman's response to those accusations is in \\ http://stallman.org/articles/xemacs.origin. }~ +={ Emacs text editor : + Lucid software company and ; + GNU Emacs : + Lucid software company and ; + Lucid software company +} + +Now programmers had forked several of the principal GNU packages at once. At first, Stallman says he considered the forks to be a product of impatience. In contrast to the fast and informal dynamics of the Linux team, GNU source-code maintainers tended to be slower and more circumspect in making changes that might affect a program's long-term viability. They also were unafraid of harshly critiquing other people's code. Over time, however, Stallman began to sense that there was an underlying lack of awareness of the GNU Project and its objectives when reading Linux developers' emails. + +"We discovered that the people who considered themselves 'Linux users' didn't care about the GNU Project," Stallman says. "They said, 'Why should I bother doing these things? I don't care about the GNU Project. It [the program]'s working for me. It's working for us Linux users, and nothing else matters to us.' And that was quite surprising, given that people were essentially using a variant of the GNU system, and they cared so little. They cared less than anybody else about GNU." Fooled by their own practice of calling the combination "Linux," they did not realize that their system was more GNU than Linux. + +For the sake of unity, Stallman asked the maintainers-in-charge to do the work which normally the change authors should have done. In most cases this was feasible, but not in glibc. Short for GNU C Library, glibc is the package that all programs use to make "system calls" directed at the kernel, in this case Linux. User programs on a Unix-like system communicate with the kernel only through the C library. + +The changes to make glibc work as a communication channel between Linux and all the other programs in the system were major and ad-hoc, written without attention to their effect on other platforms. For the glibc maintainer-in-charge, the task of cleaning them up was daunting. Instead the Free Software Foundation paid him to spend most of a year reimplementing these changes from scratch, to make glibc version 6 work "straight out of the box" in GNU/Linux. + +Murdock says this was the precipitating cause that motivated Stallman to insist on adding the GNU prefix when Debian rolled out its software distribution. "The fork has since converged. Still, at the time, there was a concern that if the Linux community saw itself as a different thing as the GNU community, it might be a force for disunity." + +While some viewed it as politically grasping to describe the combination of GNU and Linux as a "variant" of GNU, Murdock, already sympathetic to the free software cause, saw Stallman's request to call Debian's version GNU/Linux as reasonable. "It was more for unity than for credit," he says. + +Requests of a more technical nature quickly followed. Although Murdock had been accommodating on political issues, he struck a firmer pose when it came to the design and development model of the actual software. What had begun as a show of solidarity soon became a running disagreement. + +"I can tell you that I've had my share of disagreements with him," says Murdock with a laugh. "In all honesty Richard can be a fairly difficult person to work with." The principal disagreement was over debugging. Stallman wanted to include debugging information in all executable programs, to enable users to immediately investigate any bugs they might encounter. Murdock thought this would make the system files too big and interfere with distribution. Neither was willing to change his mind. + +In 1996, Murdock, following his graduation from Purdue, decided to hand over the reins of the growing Debian project. He had already been ceding management duties to Bruce Perens, the hacker best known for his work on Electric Fence, a Unix utility released under the GPL. Perens, like Murdock, was a Unix programmer who had become enamored of GNU/Linux as soon as the operating system's Unix-like abilities became manifest. Like Murdock, Perens sympathized with the political agenda of Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, albeit from afar. +={ Electric Fence Unix utility ; + Perens, Bruce +3 +} + +"I remember after Stallman had already come out with the /{GNU Manifesto}/, GNU Emacs, and GCC, I read an article that said he was working as a consultant for Intel," says Perens, recalling his first brush with Stallman in the late 1980s. "I wrote him asking how he could be advocating free software on the one hand and working for Intel on the other. He wrote back saying, 'I work as a consultant to produce free-software.' He was perfectly polite about it, and I thought his answer made perfect sense." + +As a prominent Debian developer, however, Perens regarded Murdock's design battles with Stallman with dismay. Upon assuming leadership of the development team, Perens says he made the command decision to distance Debian from the Free Software Foundation. "I decided we did not want Richard's style of micro-management," he says. + +According to Perens, Stallman was taken aback by the decision but had the wisdom to roll with it. "He gave it some time to cool off and sent a message that we really needed a relationship. He requested that we call it GNU/Linux and left it at that. I decided that was fine. I made the decision unilaterally. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief." + +Over time, Debian would develop a reputation as the hacker's version of GNU/Linux, alongside Slackware, another popular distribution founded during the same 1993-1994 period. However, Slackware contained some non-free programs, and Debian after its separation from GNU began distributing non-free programs too.~{ Debian Buzz in June 1996 contained non-free Netscape 3.01 in its Contrib section. }~ Despite labeling them as "non-free" and saying that they were "not officially part of Debian," proposing these programs to the user implied a kind of endorsement for them. As the GNU Project became aware of these policies, it came to recognize that neither Slackware nor Debian was a GNU/Linux distro it could recommend to the public. +={ Gilmore, John ; + Young, Robert +2 ; + Red Hat Inc. ; + Teimann, Michael ; + Slackware +} + +Outside the realm of hacker-oriented systems, however, GNU/Linux was picking up steam in the commercial Unix marketplace. In North Carolina, a Unix company billing itself as Red Hat was revamping its business to focus on GNU/Linux. The chief executive officer was Robert Young, the former /{Linux Journal}/ editor who in 1994 had put the question to Linus Torvalds, asking whether he had any regrets about putting the kernel under the GPL. To Young, Torvalds' response had a "profound" impact on his own view toward GNU/Linux. Instead of looking for a way to corner the GNU/Linux market via traditional software tactics, Young began to consider what might happen if a company adopted the same approach as Debian - i.e., building an operating system completely out of free software parts. Cygnus Solutions, the company founded by Michael Tiemann and John Gilmore in 1990, was already demonstrating the ability to sell free software based on quality and customizability. What if Red Hat took the same approach with GNU/Linux? + +"In the western scientific tradition we stand on the shoulders of giants," says Young, echoing both Torvalds and Sir Isaac Newton before him. "In business, this translates to not having to reinvent wheels as we go along. The beauty of [the GPL] model is you put your code into the public domain.~{ Young uses the term "public domain" loosely here. Strictly speaking, it means "not copyrighted." Code released under the GNU GPL cannot be in the public domain, since it must be copyrighted in order for the GNU GPL to apply. }~ If you're an independent software vendor and you're trying to build some application and you need a modem-dialer, well, why reinvent modem dialers? You can just steal PPP off of Red Hat [GNU/]Linux and use that as the core of your modem-dialing tool. If you need a graphic tool set, you don't have to write your own graphic library. Just download GTK. Suddenly you have the ability to reuse the best of what went before. And suddenly your focus as an application vendor is less on software management and more on writing the applications specific to your customer's needs." However, Young was no free software activist, and readily included non-free programs in Red Hat's GNU/Linux system. + +Young wasn't the only software executive intrigued by the business efficiencies of free software. By late 1996, most Unix companies were starting to wake up and smell the brewing source code. The GNU/Linux sector was still a good year or two away from full commercial breakout mode, but those close enough to the hacker community could feel it: something big was happening. The Intel 386 chip, the Internet, and the World Wide Web had hit the marketplace like a set of monster waves; free software seemed like the largest wave yet. + +For Ian Murdock, the wave seemed both a fitting tribute and a fitting punishment for the man who had spent so much time giving the free software movement an identity. Like many Linux aficionados, Murdock had seen the original postings. He'd seen Torvalds' original admonition that Linux was "just a hobby." He'd also seen Torvalds' admission to Minix creator Andrew Tanenbaum: "If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project."~{ This quote is taken from the much publicized Torvalds-Tanenbaum "flame war" following the initial release of Linux. In the process of defending his choice of a non-portable monolithic kernel design, Torvalds says he started working on Linux as a way to learn more about his new 386 PC. "If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project." See Chris DiBona et al., /{Open Sources}/ (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 224. }~ Like many, Murdock knew that some opportunities had been missed. He also knew the excitement of watching new opportunities come seeping out of the very fabric of the Internet. +={ Tanenbaum, Andrew } + +"Being involved with Linux in those early days was fun," recalls Murdock. "At the same time, it was something to do, something to pass the time. If you go back and read those old [comp.os.minix]exchanges, you'll see the sentiment: this is something we can play with until the Hurd is ready. People were anxious. It's funny, but in a lot of ways, I suspect that Linux would never have happened if the Hurd had come along more quickly." + +By the end of 1996, however, such "what if" questions were already moot, because Torvalds' kernel had gained a critical mass of users. The 36-month window had closed, meaning that even if the GNU Project had rolled out its Hurd kernel, chances were slim anybody outside the hard-core hacker community would have noticed. Linux, by filling the GNU system's last gap, had achieved the GNU Project's goal of producing a Unix-like free software operating system. However, most of the users did not recognize what had happened: they thought the whole system was Linux, and that Torvalds had done it all. Most of them installed distributions that came with non-free software; with Torvalds as their ethical guide, they saw no principled reason to reject it. Still, a precarious freedom was available for those that appreciated it. +={ HURD kernel } + +1~ Chapter 11 - Open Source +={ GNU Project : + open source movement and +59 ; + open source +59 ; + Stallman, Richard M. : + open source and +59 +} + +[RMS: In this chapter only, I have deleted some quotations. The material deleted was about open source and didn't relate to my life or my work.] + +In November, 1995, Peter Salus, a member of the Free Software Foundation and author of the 1994 book, /{A Quarter Century of Unix}/, issued a call for papers to members of the GNU Project's "system-discuss" mailing list. Salus, the conference's scheduled chairman, wanted to tip off fellow hackers about the upcoming Conference on Freely Redistributable Software in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Slated for February, 1996, and sponsored by the Free Software Foundation, the event promised to be the first engineering conference solely dedicated to free software and, in a show of unity with other free software programmers, welcomed papers on "any aspect of GNU, Linux, NetBSD, 386BSD, FreeBSD, Perl, Tcl/tk, and other tools for which the code is accessible and redistributable." Salus wrote: +={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) ; + FSF (Free Software Foundation) ; + FreeBSD ; + Conference on Freely Redistributable Software +1 ; + Linux ; + NetBSD ; + Perl programming language ; + 386BSD ; + Salus, Peter +4 +} + +_1 Over the past 15 years, free and low-cost software has become ubiquitous. This conference will bring together implementers of several different types of freely redistributable software and publishers of such software (on various media). There will be tutorials and refereed papers, as well as keynotes by Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.~{ See Peter Salus, "FYI-Conference on Freely Redistributable Software, 2/2, Cambridge" (1995) (archived by Terry Winograd), \\ http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/fsf96/call-for-papers.html. }~ + +Among the recipients of Salus' email was conference committee member Eric S. Raymond. Although not the leader of a project or company like the various other members of the list, Raymond had built a tidy reputation within the hacker community for some software projects and as editor of /{The New Hacker's Dictionary}/, a greatly enlarged version of /{The Hacker's Dictionary}/ published a decade earlier by Guy Steele. +={ New Hacker Dictionary, The ; + Raymond, Eric : + open source and +56 +} + +For Raymond, the 1996 conference was a welcome event. Although he did not thoroughly support the free software movement's ideas, he had contributed to some GNU programs, in particular to GNU Emacs. Those contributions stopped in 1992, when Raymond demanded authority to make changes in the official GNU version of GNU Emacs without discussing them with Stallman, who was directly in charge of Emacs development. Stallman rejected the demand, and Raymond accused Stallman of "micro-management." "Richard kicked up a fuss about my making unauthorized modifications when I was cleaning up the Emacs LISP libraries," Raymond recalls. "It frustrated me so much that I decided I didn't want to work with him anymore." + +Despite the falling out, Raymond remained active in the free software community. So much so that when Salus suggested a conference pairing Stallman and Torvalds as keynote speakers, Raymond eagerly seconded the idea. With Stallman representing the older, wiser contingent of ITS/Unix hackers and Torvalds representing the younger, more energetic crop of Linux hackers, the pairing indicated a symbolic show of unity that could only be beneficial, especially to ambitious younger (i.e., below 40) hackers such as Raymond. "I sort of had afoot in both camps," Raymond says. + +By the time of the conference, the tension between those two camps had become palpable. Both groups had one thing in common, though:the conference was their first chance to meet the Finnish /{wunderkind}/ in the flesh. Surprisingly, Torvalds proved himself to be a charming, affable speaker. Possessing only a slight Swedish accent, Torvalds surprised audience members with his quick, self-effacing wit.~{ Although Linus Torvalds is Finnish, his mother tongue is Swedish. "The Rampantly Unofficial Linus FAQ" at \\ http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/linus/ offers a brief explanation:Finland has a significant (about 6%) Swedish-speaking minority population. They call themselves finlands svensk or finlands svenskar and consider themselves Finns; many of their families have lived in Finland for centuries. Swedish is one of Finland's two official languages. }~ + +Even more surprising, says Raymond, was Torvalds' equal willingness to take potshots at other prominent hackers, including the most prominent hacker of all, Richard Stallman. By the end of the conference, Torvalds' half-hacker, half-slacker manner was winning over older and younger conference-goers alike. + +"It was a pivotal moment," recalls Raymond. "Before 1996, Richard was the only credible claimant to being the ideological leader of the entire culture. People who dissented didn't do so in public. The person who broke that taboo was Torvalds." + +The ultimate breach of taboo would come near the end of the show. During a discussion on the growing market dominance of Microsoft Windows or some similar topic, Torvalds admitted to being a fan of Microsoft's PowerPoint slideshow software program. From the perspective of old-line software purists, it was like bragging about one's slaves at an abolitionist conference. From the perspective of Torvalds and his growing band of followers, it was simply common sense. Why shun convenient proprietary software programs just to make a point? They didn't agree with the point anyway. When freedom requires a sacrifice, those who don't care about freedom see the sacrifice as self-denial, rather than as a way to obtain something important. Being a hacker wasn't about self-denial, it was about getting the job done, and "the job," for them, was defined in practical terms. +={ Windows (Microsoft) ; + Microsoft Corporation +3 ; + PowerPoint (Microsoft) +3 ; + proprietary software : + Torvalds, Linus and ; + Torvalds, Linus : + PowerPoint and +3 +} + +"That was a pretty shocking thing to say," Raymond remembers. "Then again, he was able to do that, because by 1995 and 1996, he was rapidly acquiring clout." + +Stallman, for his part, doesn't remember any tension at the 1996conference; he probably wasn't present when Torvalds made that statement. But he does remember later feeling the sting of Torvalds' celebrated "cheekiness." "There was a thing in the Linux documentation which says print out the GNU coding standards and then tear them up," says Stallman, recalling one example. "When you look closely, what he disagreed with was the least important part of it, the recommendation for how to indent C code." + +"OK, so he disagrees with some of our conventions. That's fine, bu the picked a singularly nasty way of saying so. He could have just said,'Here's the way I think you should indent your code.' Fine. There should be no hostility there." + +For Raymond, the warm reception other hackers gave to Torvalds' comments confirmed a suspicion: the dividing line separating Linux developers from GNU developers was largely generational. Many Linux hackers, like Torvalds, had grown up in a world of proprietary software. They had begun contributing to free software without perceiving any injustice in non-free software. For most of them, nothing was at stake beyond convenience. Unless a program was technically inferior, they saw little reason to reject it on licensing issues alone. Some day hackers might develop a free software alternative to PowerPoint. Until then, why criticize PowerPoint or Microsoft; why not use it? + +This was an example of the growing dispute, within the free software community, between those who valued freedom as such, and those who mainly valued powerful, reliable software. Stallman referred to the two camps as political parties within the community, calling the former the "freedom party." The supporters of the other camp did not try to name it, so Stallman disparagingly called it the "bandwagon party" or the "success party," because many of them presented "more users" as the primary goal. + +In the decade since launching the GNU Project, Stallman had built up a fearsome reputation as a programmer. He had also built up a reputation for intransigence both in terms of software design and people management. This was partly true, but the reputation provided a convenient excuse that anyone could cite if Stallman did not do as he wished. The reputation has been augmented by mistaken guesses. + +For example, shortly before the 1996 conference, the Free Software Foundation experienced a full-scale staff defection. Brian Youmans, a current FSF staffer hired by Salus in the wake of the resignations, recalls the scene: "At one point, Peter [Salus] was the only staff member working in the office." The previous staff were unhappy with the executive director; as Bryt Bradley told her friends in December, 1995: + +_1 [name omitted] (the Executive Director of the FSF) decided to come back from Medical/Political Leave last week. The office staff (Gena Bean, Mike Drain, and myself) decided we could not work with her as our supervisor because of the many mistakes she had made in her job tasks prior to her taking a leave. Also, there had been numerous instances where individuals were threatened with inappropriate firing and there were many instances of what we felt were verbal abuse from her to ALL members of the office staff. We requested (many times) that she not come back as our supervisor, but stated that we were willing to work with her as a co-worker. Our requests were ignored. We quit. + +The executive director in question then gave Stallman an ultimatum: give her total autonomy in the office or she would quit. Stallman, as president of the FSF, declined to give her total control over its activities, so she resigned, and he recruited in Peter Salus to replace her. + +When Raymond, an outsider, learned that these people had left the FSF, he presumed Stallman was at fault. This provided confirmation for his theory that Stallman's personality was the cause of any and all problems in the GNU Project. + +Raymond had another theory: recent delays such as the Hurd and recent troubles such as the Lucid-Emacs schism reflected problems normally associated with software project management, not software code development. + +Shortly after the Freely Redistributable Software Conference, Raymond began working on his own pet software project, a mail utility called "fetchmail." Taking a cue from Torvalds, Raymond issued his program with a tacked-on promise to update the source code as early and as often as possible. When users began sending in bug reports and feature suggestions, Raymond, at first anticipating a tangled mess, found the resulting software surprisingly sturdy. Analyzing the success of the Torvalds approach, Raymond issued a quick analysis: using the Internet as his "petri dish" and the harsh scrutiny of the hacker community as a form of natural selection, Torvalds had created an evolutionary model free of central planning. +={ fetchmail ; + FreeBSD ; + Conference on Freely Redistributable Software ; + Internet +} + +What's more, Raymond decided, Torvalds had found a way around Brooks' Law. First articulated by Fred P. Brooks, manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of the 1975 book, /{The Mythical Man-Month}/, Brooks' Law held that adding developers to a project only resulted in further project delays. Believing as most hackers that software, like soup, benefits from a limited number of cooks, Raymond sensed something revolutionary at work. In inviting more and more cooks into the kitchen, Torvalds had actually found a way to make the resulting software /{better}/.~{ Brooks' Law is the shorthand summary of the following quote taken from Brooks' book:Since software construction is inherently a systems effort - an exercise in complex interrelationships - communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule. See Fred P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison Wesley Publishing, 1995). }~ +={ Brooks, Fred P. ; + Mythical Man-Month, The (Brooks) +} + +Raymond put his observations on paper. He crafted them into a speech, which he promptly delivered before a group of friends and neighbors in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Dubbed "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," the speech contrasted the "Bazaar" style originated by Torvalds with the "Cathedral" style generally used by everyone else. +={ Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond) +10 ; + Linux Kongress +6 +} + +Raymond says the response was enthusiastic, but not nearly as enthusiastic as the one he received during the 1997 Linux Kongress, a gathering of GNU/Linux users in Germany the next spring. + +"At the Kongress, they gave me a standing ovation at the end of the speech," Raymond recalls. "I took that as significant for two reasons. For one thing, it meant they were excited by what they were hearing. For another thing, it meant they were excited even after hearing the speech delivered through a language barrier." + +Eventually, Raymond would convert the speech into a paper, also titled "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." The paper drew its name from Raymond's central analogy. Previously, programs were "cathedrals," impressive, centrally planned monuments built to stand the test of time. Linux, on the other hand, was more like "a great babbling bazaar," a software program developed through the loose decentralizing dynamics of the Internet. + +Raymond's paper associated the Cathedral style, which he and Stallman and many others had used, specifically with the GNU Project and Stallman, thus casting the contrast between development models as a comparison between Stallman and Torvalds. Where Stallman was his chosen example of the classic cathedral architect - i.e., a programming "wizard" who could disappear for 18 months and return with something like the GNU C Compiler - Torvalds was more like a genial dinner-party host. In letting others lead the Linux design discussion and stepping in only when the entire table needed a referee, Torvalds had created a development model very much reflective of his own laid-back personality. From Torvalds' perspective, the most important managerial task was not imposing control but keeping the ideas flowing. + +Summarized Raymond, "I think Linus's cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model."~{ See Eric Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (1997). }~ + +If the paper's description of these two styles of development was perceptive, its association of the Cathedral model specifically with Stallman (rather than all the others who had used it, including Raymond himself) was sheer calumny. In fact, the developers of some GNU packages including the GNU Hurd had read about and adopted Torvalds' methods before Raymond tried them, though without analyzing them further and publicly championing them as Raymond's paper did. Thousands of hackers, reading Raymond's article, must have been led to a negative attitude towards GNU by this smear. + +In summarizing the secrets of Torvalds' managerial success, Raymond attracted the attention of other members of the free software community for whom freedom was not a priority. They sought to interest business in the use and development of free software, and to do so, decided to cast the issue in terms of the values that appeal to business: powerful, reliable, cheap, advanced. Raymond became the best-known proponent of these ideas, and they reached the management of Netscape, whose proprietary browser was losing market share to Microsoft's equally proprietary Internet Explorer. Intrigued by a speech by Raymond, Netscape executives took the message back to corporate headquarters. A few months later, in January, 1998, the company announced its plan to publish the source code of its flagship Navigator web browser in the hopes of enlisting hacker support in future development. +={ Netscape +8 ; + source code : + Netscape +4 +} + +% ={Monterey (California);O'Reilly, Tim;O'Reilly & Associates} +% ={Apache web server;BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon);Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND);Wall, Larry;Perl programming language;Python programming language;sendmail Unix mail program} +% ={Mountain View (California);Netscape+8} + +When Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond's "Cathedral and the Bazaar" essay as a major influence upon the company's decision, the company instantly elevated Raymond to the level of hacker celebrity. He invited a few people including Larry Augustin, founder of VA Research which sold workstations with the GNU/Linux operating system pre-installed; Tim O'Reilly, founder of the publisher O'Reilly& Associates; and Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute, a Silicon Valley think tank specializing in nano technology, to talk. "The meeting's agenda boiled down to one item: how to take advantage of Netscape's decision so that other companies might follow suit?" +={ Augustin, Larry ; + Foresight Institute ; + VA Research ; + Peterson, Christine +4 ; + Barksdale, Jim +} + +Raymond doesn't recall the conversation that took place, but he does remember the first complaint addressed. Despite the best efforts of Stallman and other hackers to remind people that the word "free" in free software stood for freedom and not price, the message still wasn't getting through. Most business executives, upon hearing the term for the first time, interpreted the word as synonymous with "zero cost," tuning out any follow-up messages in short order. Until hackers found a way to get past this misunderstanding, the free software movement faced an uphill climb, even after Netscape. + +Peterson, whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing the free software cause, offered an alternative: "open source." + +Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the "open source" term while discussing Netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations industry. She doesn't remember where she came upon the term or if she borrowed it from another field, but she does remember her friend disliking the term.~{ See Malcolm Maclachlan, "Profit Motive Splits Open Source Movement," Tech-Web News (August 26, 1998), \\ http://www.techweb.com/article/showArticle?articleID=29102344. }~ + +At the meeting, Peterson says, the response was dramatically different. "I was hesitant about suggesting it," Peterson recalls. "I had no standing with the group, so started using it casually, not highlighting it as a new term." To Peterson's surprise, the term caught on. By the end of the meeting, most of the attendees, including Raymond, seemed pleased by it. + +Raymond says he didn't publicly use the term "open source" as a substitute for "free software" until a day or two after the Mozilla launch party, when O'Reilly had scheduled a meeting to talk about free-software. Calling his meeting "the Freeware Summit," O'Reilly says he wanted to direct media and community attention to the other deserving projects that had also encouraged Netscape to release Mozilla. "All these guys had so much in common, and I was surprised they didn't all know each other," says O'Reilly. "I also wanted to let the world know just how great an impact the free software culture had already made. People were missing out on a large part of the free-software tradition." +={ Freeware Summit ; + O'Reilly, Tim : + open source and +8 +} + +In putting together the invite list, however, O'Reilly made a decision that would have long-term political consequences. He decided to limit the list to west-coast developers such as Wall, Eric Allman, creator of send mail, and Paul Vixie, creator of BIND. There were exceptions, of course: Pennsylvania-resident Raymond, who was already in town thanks to the Mozilla launch, earned an quick invite. So did Virginia-resident Guido van Rossum, creator of Python. "Frank Willison, my editor in chief and champion of Python within the company, invited him without first checking in with me," O'Reilly recalls. "I was happy to have him there, but when I started, it really was just a local gathering." +={ van Rossum, Guido ; + Python programming language ; + BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon) ; + Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND) ; + Wall, Larry ; + Perl programming language ; + Python programming language ; + sendmail Unix mail program +} + +For some observers, the unwillingness to include Stallman's name on the list qualified as a snub. "I decided not to go to the event because of it," says Perens, remembering the summit. Raymond, who did go, says he argued for Stallman's inclusion to no avail. The snub rumor gained additional strength from the fact that O'Reilly, the event's host, had feuded publicly with Stallman over the issue of software-manual copyrights. Prior to the meeting, Stallman had argued that free software manuals should be as freely copyable and modifiable as free software programs. O'Reilly, meanwhile, argued that a value-added market for non-free books increased the utility of free software by making it more accessible to a wider community. The two had also disputed the title of the event, with Stallman insisting on "Free Software" rather than "Freeware." The latter term most often refers to programs which are available gratis, but which are not free software because their source code is not released. + +Looking back, O'Reilly doesn't see the decision to leave Stallman's name off the invite list as a snub. "At that time, I had never met Richard in person, but in our email interactions, he'd been inflexible and unwilling to engage in dialogue. I wanted to make sure the GNU tradition was represented at the meeting, so I invited John Gilmore and Michael Tiemann, whom I knew personally, and whom I knew were passionate about the value of the GPL but seemed more willing to engage in a frank back-and-forth about the strengths and weaknesses of the various free software projects and traditions. Given all the later brouhaha, I do wish I'd invited Richard as well, but I certainly don't think that my failure to do so should be interpreted as a lack of respect for the GNU Project or for Richard personally." +={ Gilmore, John ; + Tiemann, Michael +7 +} + +Snub or no snub, both O'Reilly and Raymond say the term "open-source" won over just enough summit-goers to qualify as a success. The attendees shared ideas and experiences and brainstormed on how to improve free software's image. Of key concern was how to point out the successes of free software, particularly in the realm of Internet infrastructure, as opposed to playing up the GNU/Linux challenge to Microsoft Windows. But like the earlier meeting at VA, the discussion soon turned to the problems associated with the term "free software." O'Reilly, the summit host, remembers a comment from Torvalds, a summit attendee. + +"Linus had just moved to Silicon Valley at that point, and he explained how only recently that he had learned that the word 'free' had two meanings - free as in 'libre' and free as in 'gratis' - in English." + +Michael Tiemann, founder of Cygnus, proposed an alternative to the troublesome "free software" term: sourceware. "Nobody got too excited about it," O'Reilly recalls. "That's when Eric threw out the term 'open source.'" + +Although the term appealed to some, support for a change in offcial terminology was far from unanimous. At the end of the one-day conference, attendees put the three terms - free software, open source, or sourceware - to a vote. According to O'Reilly, 9 out of the 15 attendees voted for "open source." Although some still quibbled with the term, all attendees agreed to use it in future discussions with the press. "We wanted to go out with a solidarity message," O'Reilly says. + +The term didn't take long to enter the national lexicon. Shortly after the summit, O'Reilly shepherded summit attendees to a press conference attended by reporters from the /{New York Times}/, the /{Wall Street Journal}/, and other prominent publications. Within a few months, Torvalds' face was appearing on the cover of /{Forbes}/ magazine, with the faces of Stallman, Perl creator Larry Wall, and Apache team leader Brian Behlendorf featured in the interior spread. Open source was open for business. +={ Wall, Larry } + +For summit attendees such as Tiemann, the solidarity message was the most important thing. Although his company had achieved a fair amount of success selling free software tools and services, he sensed the difficulty other programmers and entrepreneurs faced. + +"There's no question that the use of the word free was confusing in a lot of situations," Tiemann says. "Open source positioned itself as being business friendly and business sensible. Free software positioned itself as morally righteous. For better or worse we figured it was more advantageous to align with the open source crowd. + +Raymond called Stallman after the meeting to tell him about the new term "open source" and ask if he would use it. Raymond says Stallman briefly considered adopting the term, only to discard it. "I know because I had direct personal conversations about it," Raymond says. + +Stallman's immediate response was, "I'll have to think about it." The following day he had concluded that the values of Raymond and O'Reilly would surely dominate the future discourse of "open source," and that the best way to keep the ideas of the free software movement in public view was to stick to its traditional term. + +Later in 1998, Stallman announced his position: "open source," while helpful in communicating the technical advantages of free software also encouraged speakers to soft-pedal the issue of software freedom. It avoided the unintended meaning of "gratis software" and the intended meaning of "freedom-respecting software" equally. As a means for conveying the latter meaning, it was therefore no use. In effect, Raymond and O'Reilly had given a name to the non-idealistic political party in the community, the one Stallman did not agree with. + +In addition, Stallman thought that the ideas of "open source" led people to put too much emphasis on winning the support of business. While such support in itself wasn't necessarily bad in itself, he expected that being too desperate for it would lead to harmful compromises. "Negotiation 101 would teach you that if you are desperate to get someone's agreement, you are asking for a bad deal," he says. "You need to be prepared to say no." Summing up his position at the 1999 LinuxWorld Convention and Expo, an event billed by Torvalds himself as a "coming out party" for the "Linux" community, Stallman implored his fellow hackers to resist the lure of easy compromise. +={ LinuxWorld Conventions +2 } + +"Because we've shown how much we can do, we don't have to be desperate to work with companies or compromise our goals," Stallman said during a panel discussion. "Let them offer and we'll accept. We don't have to change what we're doing to get them to help us. You can take a single step towards a goal, then another and then more and more and you'll actually reach your goal. Or, you can take a half measure that means you don't ever take another step, and you'll never get there." + +Even before the LinuxWorld show, however, Stallman was showing an increased willingness to alienate open source supporters. A few months after the Freeware Summit, O'Reilly hosted its second annual Perl Conference. This time around, Stallman was in attendance. During a panel discussion lauding IBM's decision to employ the free software Apache web server in its commercial offerings, Stallman, taking advantage of an audience microphone, made a sharp denunciation of panelist John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language. Stallman branded Ousterhout a "parasite" on the free software community for marketing a proprietary version of Tcl via Ousterhout's startup company, Scriptics. Ousterhout had stated that Scriptics would contribute only the barest minimum of its improvements to the free version of Tcl, meaning it would in effect use that small contribution to win community approval for much a larger amount of non-free software development. Stallman rejected this position and denounced Scriptics' plans. "I don't think Scriptics is necessary for the continued existenceof Tcl," Stallman said to hisses from the fellow audience members.~{ Ibid. }~ +={ Apache web server ; + IBM : + Apache web server and ; + Ousterhout, John ; + Tcl scripting language +1 ; + Scriptics +} + +"It was a pretty ugly scene," recalls Prime Time Freeware's Rich Morin. "John's done some pretty respectable things: Tcl, Tk, Sprite. He's a real contributor." Despite his sympathies for Stallman and Stallman's position, Morin felt empathy for those troubled by Stallman's discordant words. +={ Morin, Rich +1 ; + Prime Time Freeware ; + Sprite +} + +Stallman will not apologize. "Criticizing proprietary software isn't ugly - proprietary software is ugly. Ousterhout had indeed made real contributions in the past, but the point is that Scriptics was going to be nearly 100% a proprietary software company. In that conference, standing up for freedom meant disagreeing with nearly everyone. Speaking from the audience, I could only say a few sentences. The only way to raise the issue so it would not be immediately forgotten was to put it in strong terms." + +"If people rebuke me for 'making a scene' when I state a serious criticism of someone's conduct, while calling Torvalds 'cheeky' for saying nastier things about trivial matters, that seems like a double standard to me." + +Stallman's controversial criticism of Ousterhout momentarily alienated a potential sympathizer, Bruce Perens. In 1998, Eric Raymond proposed launching the Open Source Initiative, or OSI, an organization that would police the use of the term "open source" and provide a definition for companies interested in making their own programs. Raymond recruited Perens to draft the definition.~{ See Bruce Perens et al., "The Open Source Definition," The Open Source Initiative (1998), \\ http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html. }~ +={ OSI (Open Source Initiative) ; + Open Source Initiative (OSI) ; + Perens, Bruce +1 +} + +Perens would later resign from the OSI, expressing regret that the organization had set itself up in opposition to Stallman and the FSF. Still, looking back on the need for a free software definition outside the Free Software Foundation's auspices, Perens understands why other hackers might still feel the need for distance. "I really like and admire Richard," says Perens. "I do think Richard would do his job better if Richard had more balance. That includes going away from free-software for a couple of months." + +Stallman's energies would do little to counteract the public-relations momentum of open source proponents. In August of 1998, when chip-maker Intel purchased a stake in GNU/Linux vendor Red Hat, an accompanying /{New York Times}/ article described the company as the product of a movement "known alternatively as free software and opensource."~{ See Amy Harmon, "For Sale: Free Operating System," New York Times (September 28, 1998), \\ http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/biztech/articles/28linux.html. }~ Six months later, a John Markoff article on Apple Computerwas proclaiming the company's adoption of the "open source" Apache server in the article headline.~{ See John Markoff, "Apple Adopts 'Open Source' for its Server Computers," New York Times (March 17, 1999), \\ http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/03/biztech/articles/17apple.html. }~ +={ Apache web server ; + Apple Computers : + open source software and ; + Intel ; + Markoff, John ; + Red Hat Inc. : + success of +1 +} + +Such momentum would coincide with the growing momentum of companies that actively embraced the "open source" term. By August of 1999, Red Hat, a company that now eagerly billed itself as "opensource," was selling shares on Nasdaq. In December, VA Linux -formerly VA Research - was floating its own IPO to historic effect. Opening at $30 per share, the company's stock price exploded past the $300 mark in initial trading only to settle back down to the $239 level. Shareholders lucky enough to get in at the bottom and stay until the end experienced a 698% increase in paper wealth, a Nasdaq record. Eric Raymond, as a board member, owned shares worth $36 million. However, these high prices were temporary; they tumbled when the dot-com boom ended. +={ VA Linux +1 ; + VA Research +} + +The open source proponents' message was simple: all you need, to sell the free software concept, is to make it business-friendly. They saw Stallman and the free software movement as fighting the market;they sought instead to leverage it. Instead of playing the role of high-school outcasts, they had played the game of celebrity, magnifying their power in the process. + +These methods won great success for open source, but not for the ideals of free software. What they had done to "spread the message" was to omit the most important part of it: the idea of freedom as an ethical issue. The effects of this omission are visible today: as of 2009, nearly all GNU/Linux distributions include proprietary programs, Torvalds' version of Linux contains proprietary firmware programs, and the company formerly called VA Linux bases its business on proprietary software. Over half of all the world's web servers run some version of Apache, and the usual version of Apache is free software, but many of those sites run a proprietary modified version distributed by IBM. + +"On his worst days Richard believes that Linus Torvalds and I conspired to hijack his revolution," Raymond says. "Richard's rejection of the term open source and his deliberate creation of an ideological fissure in my view comes from an odd mix of idealism and territoriality. There are people out there who think it's all Richard's personal ego. I don't believe that. It's more that he so personally associates himself with the free software idea that he sees any threat to that as a threat to himself." + +Stallman responds, "Raymond misrepresents my views: I don't think Torvalds 'conspired' with anyone, since being sneaky is not his way. However, Raymond's nasty conduct is visible in those statements themselves. Rather than respond to my views (even as he claims they are) on their merits, he proposes psychological interpretations for them. He attributes the harshest interpretation to unnamed others, then 'defends' me by proposing a slightly less derogatory one. He has often 'defended' me this way." + +Ironically, the success of open source and open source advocates such as Raymond would not diminish Stallman's role as a leader - but it would lead many to misunderstand what he is a leader of. Since the free software movement lacks the corporate and media recognition of open source, most users of GNU/Linux do not hear that it exists, let alone what its views are. They have heard the ideas and values of opensource, and they never imagine that Stallman might have different ones. Thus he receives messages thanking him for his advocacy of "open source," and explains in response that he has never been a supporter of that, using the occasion to inform the sender about free-software. + +Some writers recognize the term "free software" by using the term "FLOSS," which stands for "Free/Libre and Open Source Software." However, they often say there is a single "FLOSS" movement, which is like saying that the U.S. has a "Liberal/Conservative" movement, and the views they usually associate with this supposed single movement are the open source views they have heard. + +Despite all these obstacles, the free software movement does make its ideas heard sometimes, and continues to grow in absolute terms. By sticking to its guns, and presenting its ideas in contrast to those of open source, it gains ground. "One of Stallman's primary character traits is the fact he doesn't budge," says Ian Murdock. "He'll wait up to a decade for people to come around to his point of view if that's what it takes." + +Murdock, for one, finds that un-budgeable nature both refreshing and valuable. Stallman may no longer be the solitary leader of the free software movement, but he is still the polestar of the free software community. "You always know that he's going to be consistent in his views," Murdock says. "Most people aren't like that. Whether you agree with him or not, you really have to respect that." + +1~ Chapter 12 - A Brief Journey through Hacker Hell + +[RMS: In this chapter my only change is to add a few notes labeled like this one.] + +Richard Stallman stares, unblinking, through the windshield of a rental car, waiting for the light to change as we make our way through downtown Kihei. +={ Kihei (Hawaii) +15 } + +The two of us are headed to the nearby town of Pa'ia, where we are scheduled to meet up with some software programmers and their wives for dinner in about an hour or so. +={ Pa'ia (Hawaii) +2 } + +It's about two hours after Stallman's speech at the Maui High Performance Center, and Kihei, a town that seemed so inviting before the speech, now seems profoundly uncooperative. Like most beach cities, Kihei is a one-dimensional exercise in suburban sprawl. Driving down its main drag, with its endless succession of burger stands, realty agencies, and bikini shops, it's hard not to feel like a steel-coated morsel passing through the alimentary canal of a giant commercial tapeworm. The feeling is exacerbated by the lack of side roads. With nowhere to go but forward, traffic moves in spring-like lurches. 200 yards ahead, a light turns green. By the time we are moving, the light is yellow again. + +For Stallman, a lifetime resident of the east coast, the prospect of spending the better part of a sunny Hawaiian afternoon trapped in slow traffic is enough to trigger an embolism. [RMS: Since I was driving, I was also losing time to answer my email, and that's a real pain since I can barely keep up anyway.] Even worse is the knowledge that, with just a few quick right turns a quarter mile back, this whole situation easily could have been avoided. Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of the driver ahead of us, a programmer from the lab who knows the way and who has decided to take us to Pa'ia via the scenic route instead of via the nearby Pilani Highway. + +"This is terrible," says Stallman between frustrated sighs. "Why didn't we take the other route?" + +Again, the light a quarter mile ahead of us turns green. Again, we creep forward a few more car lengths. This process continues for another 10 minutes, until we finally reach a major crossroad promising access to the adjacent highway. + +The driver ahead of us ignores it and continues through the intersection. + +"Why isn't he turning?" moans Stallman, throwing up his hands in frustration. "Can you believe this?" + +I decide not to answer either. I find the fact that I am sitting in a car with Stallman in the driver seat, in Maui no less, unbelievable enough. Until two hours ago, I didn't even know Stallman knew how to drive. Now, listening to Yo-Yo Ma's cello playing the mournful bass notes of "Appalachian Journey" on the car stereo and watching the sunset pass by on our left, I do my best to fade into the upholstery. + +When the next opportunity to turn finally comes up, Stallman hits his right turn signal in an attempt to cue the driver ahead of us. No such luck. Once again, we creep slowly through the intersection, coming to a stop a good 200 yards before the next light. By now, Stallman is livid. + +"It's like he's deliberately ignoring us," he says, gesturing and pantomiming like an air craft carrier landing-signals officer in a futile attempt to catch our guide's eye. The guide appears unfazed, and for the next five minutes all we see is a small portion of his head in the rear-view mirror. + +I look out Stallman's window. Nearby Kahoolawe and Lanai Islands provide an ideal frame for the setting sun. It's a breathtaking view, the kind that makes moments like this a bit more bearable if you're a Hawaiian native, I suppose. I try to direct Stallman's attention to it, but Stallman, by now obsessed by the inattentiveness of the driver ahead of us, blows me off. +={ Lanai Islands (Hawaii) } + +When the driver passes through another green light, completely ignoring a "Pilani Highway Next Right," I grit my teeth. I remember an early warning relayed to me by BSD programmer Keith Bostic. "Stallman does not suffer fools gladly," Bostic warned me. "If somebody says or does something stupid, he'll look them in the eye and say, 'That's stupid.'" +={ Bostic, Keith } + +Looking at the oblivious driver ahead of us, I realize that it's the stupidity, not the inconvenience, that's killing Stallman right now. + +"It's as if he picked this route with absolutely no thought on how to get there efficiently," Stallman says. + +The word "efficiently" hangs in the air like a bad odor. Few things irritate the hacker mind more than inefficiency. It was the inefficiency of checking the Xerox laser printer two or three times a day that triggered Stallman's initial inquiry into the printer source code. It was the inefficiency of rewriting software tools hijacked by commercial software vendors that led Stallman to battle Symbolics and to launch the GNU Project. If, as Jean Paul Sartre once opined, hell is other people, hacker hell is duplicating other people's stupid mistakes, and it's no exaggeration to say that Stallman's entire life has been an attempt to save mankind from these fiery depths. +={ Sartre, Jean Paul } + +This hell metaphor becomes all the more apparent as we take in the slowly passing scenery. With its multitude of shops, parking lots, and poorly timed street lights, Kihei seems less like a city and more like a poorly designed software program writ large. Instead of rerouting traffic and distributing vehicles through side streets and expressways, city planners have elected to run everything through a single main drag. From a hacker perspective, sitting in a car amidst all this mess is like listening to a CD rendition of nails on a chalkboard at full volume. + +"Imperfect systems infuriate hackers," observes Steven Levy, another warning I should have listened to before climbing into the car with Stallman. "This is one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars - the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out one-way streets causes delays which are so goddamn /{unnecessary}/ [Levy's emphasis] that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes . . . re-design the entire system."~{ See Steven Levy, /{Hackers}/ (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 40. }~ + +More frustrating, however, is the duplicity of our trusted guide. Instead of searching out a clever shortcut - as any true hacker would do on instinct - the driver ahead of us has instead chosen to play along with the city planners' game. Like Virgil in Dante's /{Inferno}/, our guide is determined to give us the full guided tour of this hacker hell whether we want it or not. + +Before I can make this observation to Stallman, the driver finally hits his right turn signal. Stallman's hunched shoulders relax slightly, and for a moment the air of tension within the car dissipates. The tension comes back, however, as the driver in front of us slows down. "Construction Ahead" signs line both sides of the street, and even though the Pilani Highway lies less than a quarter mile off in the distance, the two-lane road between us and the highway is blocked by a dormant bulldozer and two large mounds of dirt. + +It takes Stallman a few seconds to register what's going on as our guide begins executing a clumsy five-point U-turn in front of us. When he catches a glimpse of the bulldozer and the "No Through Access" signs just beyond, Stallman finally boils over. + +"Why, why, why?" he whines, throwing his head back. "You should have known the road was blocked. You should have known this way wouldn't work. You did this deliberately." [RMS: I meant that he chose the slow road deliberately. As explained below, I think these quotes are not exact.] + +The driver finishes the turn and passes us on the way back toward the main drag. As he does so, he shakes his head and gives us an apologetic shrug. Coupled with a toothy grin, the driver's gesture reveals a touch of mainlander frustration but is tempered with a protective dose of islander fatalism. Coming through the sealed windows of our rental car, it spells out a succinct message: "Hey, it's Maui; what are you gonna do?" + +Stallman can take it no longer. + +"Don't you fucking smile!" he shouts, fogging up the glass as he does so. "It's your fucking fault. This all could have been so much easier if we had just done it my way." [RMS: These quotes appear to be inaccurate, because I don't use "fucking" as an adverb. This was not an interview, so Williams would not have had a tape recorder running. I'm sure things happened overall as described, but these quotations probably reflect his understanding rather than my words.] + +Stallman accents the words "my way" by gripping the steering wheel and pulling himself towards it twice. The image of Stallman's lurching frame is like that of a child throwing a temper tantrum in a car seat, an image further underlined by the tone of Stallman's voice. Halfway between anger and anguish, Stallman seems to be on the verge of tears. + +Fortunately, the tears do not arrive. Like a summer cloudburst, the tantrum ends almost as soon as it begins. After a few whiny gasps, Stallman shifts the car into reverse and begins executing his own U-turn. By the time we are back on the main drag, his face is as impassive as it was when we left the hotel 30 minutes earlier. + +It takes less than five minutes to reach the next cross-street. This one offers easy highway access, and within seconds, we are soon speeding off toward Pa'ia at a relaxing rate of speed. The sun that once loomed bright and yellow over Stallman's left shoulder is now burning a cool orange-red in our rear-view mirror. It lends its color to the gauntlet wili wili trees flying past us on both sides of the highway. +={ Pa'ia (Hawaii) } + +For the next 20 minutes, the only sound in our vehicle, aside from the ambient hum of the car's engine and tires, is the sound of a cello and a violin trio playing the mournful strains of an Appalachian folktune. + +1~ Chapter 13 - Continuing the Fight + +For Richard Stallman, time may not heal all wounds, but it does provide a convenient ally. + +Four years after "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Stallman still chafes over the Raymond critique. He also grumbles over Linus Torvalds' elevation to the role of world's most famous hacker. He recalls a popular T-shirt that began showing at Linux tradeshows around 1999. Designed to mimic the original promotional poster for Star Wars, the shirt depicted Torvalds brandishing a light-saber like Luke Skywalker, while Stallman's face rides atop R2D2. The shirt still grates on Stallman's nerves not only because it depicts him as Torvalds' sidekick, but also because it elevates Torvalds to the leadership role in the free-software community, a role even Torvalds himself is loath to accept. "It's ironic," says Stallman mournfully. "Picking up that sword is exactly what Linus refuses to do. He gets everybody focusing on him as the symbol of the movement, and then he won't fight. What good is it?" +={ Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond) ; + Luke Skywalker ; + R2D2 ; + Torvalds, Linus +1 ; + Star Wars +} + +Then again, it is that same unwillingness to "pick up the sword," on Torvalds' part, that has left the door open for Stallman to bolster his reputation as the hacker community's ethical arbiter. Despite his grievances, Stallman has to admit that the last few years have been quite good, both to himself and to his organization. Relegated to the periphery by the ironic success of the GNU/Linux system because users thought of it as "Linux," Stallman has nonetheless successfully recaptured the initiative. His speaking schedule between January 2000and December 2001 included stops on six continents and visits to countries where the notion of software freedom carries heavy overtones -China and India, for example. + +Outside the bully pulpit, Stallman has taken advantage of the leverage of the GNU General Public License (GPL), of which he remains the steward. During the summer of 2000, while the air was rapidly leaking out of the 1999 Linux IPO bubble, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation scored two major victories. In July, 2000, Troll tech, a Norwegian software company and developer of Qt, a graphical interface library that ran on the GNU/Linux operating system, announced it was licensing its software under the GPL. A few weeks later, Sun Microsystems, a company that, until then, had been warily trying to ride the open source bandwagon without actually contributing its code, finally relented and announced that it, too, was dual licensing its new OpenOffice~{ Sun was compelled by a trademark complaint to use the clumsy name "OpenOffice.org." }~ application suite under the Lesser GNU Public License(LGPL) and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). +={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) : + QT graphic tools and ; + GNU General Public License : + QT graphics tools and ; + Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) ; + OpenOffice application suite +4 ; + Qt +1 ; + Troll Tech +1 ; + SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source Licence) ; + Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) ; + Sun Microsystems : + OpenOffice application suite +} + +In the case of Trolltech, this victory was the result of a protracted effort by the GNU Project. The non-freeness of Qt was a serious problem for the free software community because KDE, a free graphical desktop environment that was becoming popular, depended on it. Qt was non-free software but Trolltech had invited free software projects(such as KDE) to use it gratis. Although KDE itself was free software, users that insisted on freedom couldn't run it, since they had to reject Qt. Stallman recognized that many users would want a graphical desktop on GNU/Linux, and most would not value freedom enough to reject the temptation of KDE, with Qt hiding within. The danger was that GNU/Linux would become a motor for the installation of KDE, and therefore also of non-free Qt. This would undermine the freedom which was the purpose of GNU. + +To deal with this danger, Stallman recruited people to launch two parallel counter projects. One was GNOME, the GNU free graphical desktop environment. The other was Harmony, a compatible free replacement for Qt. If GNOME succeeded, KDE would not be necessary; if Harmony succeeded, KDE would not need Qt. Either way, users would be able to have a graphical desktop on GNU/Linux without non-free Qt. + +In 1999, these two efforts were making good progress, and the management of Trolltech were starting to feel the pressure. So Trolltech released Qt under its own free software license, the QPL. The QPL qualified as a free license, but Stallman pointed out the drawback of incompatibility with the GPL: in general, combining GPL-covered code with Qt in one program was impossible without violating one license or the other. Eventually the Trolltech management recognized that the GPL would serve their purposes equally well, and released Qt with dual licensing: the same Qt code, in parallel, was available under the GNU GPL and under the QPL. After three years, this was victory. + +Once Qt was free, the motive for developing Harmony (which wasn't complete enough for actual use) had disappeared, and the developers abandoned it. GNOME had acquired substantial momentum, so its development continued, and it remains the main GNU graphical desktop. + +Sun desired to play according to the Free Software Foundation's conditions. At the 1999 O'Reilly Open Source Conference, Sun Microsystems co-founder and chief scientist Bill Joy defended his company's "community source" license, essentially a watered-down compromise letting users copy and modify Sun-owned software but not sell copies of said software without negotiating a royalty agreement with Sun. (With this restriction, the license did not qualify as free, nor for that matter as open source.) A year after Joy's speech, Sun Microsystems vice president Marco Boerries was appearing on the same stage spelling out the company's new licensing compromise in the case of OpenOffice, an office-application suite designed specifically for the GNU/Linux operating system. +={ Boerries, Marco +2 ; + community source, license of Sun Microsystems ; + Joy, Bill ; + O'Reilly & Associates : + Open Source Conferences +} + +"I can spell it out in three letters," said Boerries. "GPL." + +At the time, Boerries said his company's decision had little to do with Stallman and more to do with the momentum of GPL-protected programs. "What basically happened was the recognition that different products attracted different communities, and the license you use depends on what type of community you want to attract," said Boerries. "With [OpenOffice], it was clear we had the highest correlation with the GPL community."~{ Marco Boerries, interview with author (July, 2000). }~ Alas, this victory was incomplete, since OpenOffice recommends the use of non-free plug-ins. + +Such comments point out the under-recognized strength of the GPL and, indirectly, the political genius of the man who played the largest role in creating it. "There isn't a lawyer on earth who would have drafted the GPL the way it is," says Eben Moglen, Columbia University law professor and Free Software Foundation general counsel. "But it works. And it works because of Richard's philosophy of design." +={ Columbia University ; + Moglen, Eben +35 +} + +A former professional programmer, Moglen traces his pro bono work with Stallman back to 1990 when Stallman requested Moglen's legal assistance on a private affair. Moglen, then working with encryption expert Phillip Zimmerman during Zimmerman's legal battles with the federal government, says he was honored by the request.~{ For more information on Zimmerman's legal travails, read Steven Levy's /{Crypto}/, p. 287-288. In the original book version of /{Free as in Freedom}/, I reported that Moglen helped defend Zimmerman against the National Security Agency. According to Levy's account, Zimmerman was investigated by the U.S. Attorney's office and U.S. Customs, not the NSA. }~ +={ Zimmerman, Phillip ; + National Security Administration +} + +"I told him I used Emacs every day of my life, and it would take an awful lot of lawyering on my part to pay off the debt." + +Since then, Moglen, perhaps more than any other individual, has had the best chance to observe the crossover of Stallman's hacker philosophies into the legal realm. Moglen says Stallman's approach to legal code and his approach to software code are largely the same. "I have to say, as a lawyer, the idea that what you should do with a legal document is to take out all the bugs doesn't make much sense," Moglen says. "There is uncertainty in every legal process, and what most lawyers want to do is to capture the benefits of uncertainty for their client. Richard's goal is the complete opposite. His goal is to remove uncertainty, which is inherently impossible. It is inherently impossible to draft one license to control all circumstances in all legal systems all over the world. But if you were to go at it, you would have to go at it his way. And the resulting elegance, the resulting simplicity in design almost achieves what it has to achieve. And from there a little lawyering will carry you quite far." + +As the person charged with pushing the Stallman agenda, Moglen understands the frustration of would-be allies. "Richard is a man who does not want to compromise over matters that he thinks of as fundamental," Moglen says, "and he does not take easily the twisting of words or even just the seeking of artful ambiguity, which human society often requires from a lot of people." + +In addition to helping the Free Software Foundation, Moglen has provided legal aid to other copyright defendants, such as Dmitry Sklyarov, and distributors of the DVD decryption program deCSS. +={ Sklyarov, Dmitri +1 } + +Sklyarov had written and released a program to break digital copy-protection on Adobe e-Books, in Russia where there was no law against it, as an employee of a Russian company. He was then arrested while visiting the US to give a scientific paper about his work. Stallman eagerly participated in protests condemning Adobe for having Sklyarov arrested, and the Free Software Foundation denounced the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as "censorship of software," but it could not intervene in favor of Sklyarov's program because that was non-free. Thus, Moglen worked for Sklyarov's defense through the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The FSF avoided involvement in the distribution of deCSS, since that was illegal, but Stallman condemned the U.S. government for prohibiting deCSS, and Moglen worked as direct counsel for the defendants. +={ Electronic Frontier Foundation } + +Following the FSF's decision not to involve itself in those cases, Moglen has learned to appreciate the value of Stallman's stubbornness. "There have been times over the years where I've gone to Richard and said, 'We have to do this. We have to do that. Here's the strategic situation. Here's the next move. Here's what he have to do.' And Richard's response has always been, 'We don't have to do anything.'Just wait. What needs doing will get done." + +"And you know what?" Moglen adds. "Generally, he's been right." + +Such comments disavow Stallman's own self-assessment: "I'm not good at playing games," Stallman says, addressing the many unseen critics who see him as a shrewd strategist. "I'm not good at looking ahead and anticipating what somebody else might do. My approach has always been to focus on the foundation [of ideas], to say 'Let's make the foundation as strong as we can make it.'" + +The GPL's expanding popularity and continuing gravitational strength are the best tributes to the foundation laid by Stallman and his GNU colleagues. While Stallman was never the sole person in the world releasing free software, he nevertheless can take sole credit for building the free software movement's ethical framework. Whether or not other modern programmers feel comfortable working inside that framework is immaterial. The fact that they even have a choice at all is Stallman's greatest legacy. + +Discussing Stallman's legacy at this point seems a bit premature. Stallman, 48 at the time of this writing, still has a few years left to add to or subtract from that legacy. Still, the momentum of the free software movement makes it tempting to examine Stallman's life outside the day-to-day battles of the software industry and within a more august, historical setting. + +To his credit, Stallman refuses all opportunities to speculate about this. "I've never been able to work out detailed plans of what the future was going to be like," says Stallman, offering his own premature epitaph. "I just said 'I'm going to fight. Who knows where I'll get?'" + +There's no question that in picking his fights, Stallman has alienated the very people who might otherwise have been his greatest champions, had he been willing to fight for their views instead of his own. It is also a testament to his forthright, ethical nature that many of Stallman's erstwhile political opponents still manage to put in a few good words for him when pressed. The tension between Stallman the ideologue and Stallman the hacker genius, however, leads a biographer to wonder: how will people view Stallman when Stallman's own personality is no longer there to get in the way? + +In early drafts of this book, I dubbed this question the "100 year" question. Hoping to stimulate an objective view of Stallman and his work, I asked various software-industry luminaries to take themselves out of the current time-frame and put themselves in a position of a historian looking back on the free software movement 100 years in the future. From the current vantage point, it is easy to see similarities between Stallman and past Americans who, while somewhat marginal during their lifetime, have attained heightened historical importance in relation to their age. Easy comparisons include Henry David Thoreau, transcendentalist philosopher and author of /{Civil Disobedience}/, and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and progenitor of the modern environmental movement. It is also easy to see similarities in men like William Jennings Bryan, a.k.a. "The Great Commoner," leader of the populist movement, enemy of monopolies, and a man who, though powerful, seems to have faded into historical insignificance. +={ Bryan, Willliam Jennings ; + Muir, John ; + On Civil Disobedience (Thoreau) ; + Thoreau, Henry David ; + Sierra Club +} + +Although not the first person to view software as public property, Stallman is guaranteed a footnote in future history books thanks to the GPL. Given that fact, it seems worthwhile to step back and examine Richard Stallman's legacy outside the current time frame. Will the GPL still be something software programmers use in the year 2102, or will it have long since fallen by the wayside? Will the term "free-software" seem as politically quaint as "free silver" does today, or will it seem eerily prescient in light of later political events? + +Predicting the future is risky sport. Stallman refuses, saying that asking what people will think in 100 years presumes we have no influence over it. The question he prefers is, "What should we do to make a better future?" But most people, when presented with the predictive question, seemed eager to bite. + +"One hundred years from now, Richard and a couple of other people are going to deserve more than a footnote," says Moglen. "They're going to be viewed as the main line of the story." + +The "couple of other people" Moglen nominates for future textbook chapters include John Gilmore, who beyond contributing in various ways to free software has founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Theodor Holm Nelson, a.k.a. Ted Nelson, author of the 1982book, /{Literary Machines}/. Moglen says Stallman, Nelson, and Gilmore each stand out in historically significant, non-overlapping ways. He credits Nelson, commonly considered to have coined the term "hypertext," for identifying the predicament of information ownership in the digital age. Gilmore and Stallman, meanwhile, earn notable credit for identifying the negative political effects of information control and building organizations - the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the case of Gilmore and the Free Software Foundation in the case of Stallman - to counteract those effects. Of the two, however, Moglen sees Stallman's activities as more personal and less political in nature. +={ Electronic Frontier Foundation ; + Gilmore, John ; + Nelson, Theodor Holm +2 ; + Nelson, Ted +2 +} + +"Richard was unique in that the ethical implications of un-free software were particularly clear to him at an early moment," says Moglen. "This has a lot to do with Richard's personality, which lots of people will, when writing about him, try to depict as epiphenomenal or even a drawback in Richard Stallman's own life work." + +Gilmore, who describes his inclusion between the erratic Nelson and the irascible Stallman as something of a "mixed honor," nevertheless seconds the Moglen argument. Writes Gilmore: + +_1 My guess is that Stallman's writings will stand up as well as Thomas Jefferson's have; he's a pretty clear writer and also clear on his principles... Whether Richard will be as influential as Jefferson will depend on whether the abstractions we call "civil rights" end up more important a hundred years from now than the abstractions that we call "software" or "technically imposed restrictions." +={ Jefferson, Thomas } + +Another element of the Stallman legacy not to be overlooked, Gilmore writes, is the collaborative software-development model pioneered by the GNU Project. Although flawed at times, the model has nevertheless evolved into a standard within the software-development industry. All told, Gilmore says, this collaborative software-development model may end up being even more influential than the GNU Project, the GPL License, or any particular software program developed by Stallman: + +_1 Before the Internet, it was quite hard to collaborate over distance on software, even among teams that know and trust each other. Richard pioneered collaborative development of software, particularly by disorganized volunteers who seldom meet each other. Richard didn't build any of the basic tools for doing this (the TCP protocol, email lists, diff and patch, tar files, RCS or CVS or remote-CVS), but he used the ones that were available to form social groups of programmers who could effectively collaborate. + +Stallman thinks that evaluation, though positive, misses the point. "It emphasizes development methods over freedom, which reflects the values of open source rather than free software. If that is how future users look back on the GNU Project, I fear it will lead to a world in which developers maintain users in bondage, and let them aid development occasionally as a reward, but never take the chains off them." + +Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and author of the 2001 book, /{The Future of Ideas}/, is similarly bullish. Like many legal scholars, Lessig sees the GPL as a major bulwark of the current so-called "digital commons," the vast agglomeration of community-owned software programs, network and telecommunication standards that have triggered the Internet's exponential growth over the last three decades. Rather than connect Stallman with other Internet pioneers, men such as Vannevar Bush, Vinton Cerf, and J. C. R. Licklider who convinced others to see computer technology on a wider scale, Lessig sees Stallman's impact as more personal, introspective, and, ultimately, unique: +={ Future of Ideas, The (Lessig) } + +_1 [Stallman] changed the debate from "is" to "ought." He made people see how much was at stake, and he built a device to carry these ideals forward... That said, I don't quite know how to place him in the context of Cerf or Licklider. The innovation is different. It is not just about a certain kind of code, or enabling the Internet. [It's] much more about getting people to see the value in a certain kind of Internet. I don't think there is anyone else in that class, before or after. + +Not everybody sees the Stallman legacy as set in stone, of course. Eric Raymond, the open source proponent who feels that Stallman's leadership role has diminished significantly since 1996, sees mixed signals when looking into the 2102 crystal ball: + +_1 I think Stallman's artifacts (GPL, Emacs, GCC) will be seen as revolutionary works, as foundation-stones of the information world. I think history will be less kind to some of the theories from which RMS operated, and not kind at all to his personal tendency towards territorial, cult-leader behavior. + +As for Stallman himself, he, too, sees mixed signals: + +_1 What history says about the GNU Project, twenty years from now, will depend on who wins the battle of freedom to use public knowledge. If we lose, we will be just a footnote. If we win, it is uncertain whether people will know the role of the GNU operating system - if they think the system is "Linux," they will build a false picture of what happened and why. + +_1 But even if we win, what history people learn a hundred years from now is likely to depend on who dominates politically. + +Searching for his own 19th-century historical analogy, Stallman summons the figure of John Brown, the militant abolitionist regarded as a hero on one side of the Mason Dixon line and a madman on the other. + +John Brown's slave revolt never got going, but during his subsequent trial he effectively roused national demand for abolition. During the Civil War, John Brown was a hero; 100 years after, and for much of the 1900s, history textbooks taught that he was crazy. During the era of legal segregation, while bigotry was shameless, the U.S. partly accepted the story that the South wanted to tell about itself, and history textbooks said many untrue things about the Civil War and related events. + +Such comparisons document both the self-perceived peripheral nature of Stallman's current work and the binary nature of his current reputation. It's hard to see Stallman's reputation falling to the same level of infamy as Brown's did during the post-Reconstruction period. Stallman, despite his occasional war-like analogies, has done little to inspire violence. Still, it is easy to envision a future in which Stallman's ideas wind up on the ash-heap.~{ RMS: Sam Williams' further words here, "In fashioning the free software cause not not as a mass movement but as a collection of private battles against the forces of proprietary temptation," do not fit the facts. Ever since the first announcement of the GNU Project, I have asked the public to support the cause. The free software movement aims to be a mass movement, and the only question is whether it has enough supporters to qualify as "mass." As of 2009, the Free Software Foundation has some 3000 members that pay the hefty dues, and over 20,000 subscribers to its monthly e-mail newsletter. }~ + +Then again, it is that very will that may someday prove to be Stallman's greatest lasting legacy. Moglen, a close observer over the last decade, warns those who mistake the Stallman personality as counter-productive or epiphenomenal to the "artifacts" of Stallman's life. Without that personality, Moglen says, there would be precious few artifacts to discuss. Says Moglen, a former Supreme Court clerk: + +_1 Look, the greatest man I ever worked for was Thurgood Marshall. I knew what made him a great man. I knew why he had been able to change the world in his possible way. I would be going out on a limb a little bit if I were to make a comparison, because they could not be more different: Thurgood Marshall was a man in society, representing an outcast society to the society that enclosed it, but still a man in society. His skill was social skills. But he was all of a piece, too. Different as they were in every other respect, the person I now most compare him to in that sense - of a piece, compact, made of the substance that makes stars, all the way through - is Stallman. +={ Marshall, Thurgood } + +In an effort to drive that image home, Moglen reflects on a shared moment in the spring of 2000. The success of the VA Linux IPO was still resonating in the business media, and a half dozen issues related to free software were swimming through the news. Surrounded by a swirling hurricane of issues and stories each begging for comment, Moglen recalls sitting down for lunch with Stallman and feeling like a castaway dropped into the eye of the storm. For the next hour, he says, the conversation calmly revolved around a single topic: strengthening the GPL. +={ VA Linux } + +"We were sitting there talking about what we were going to do about some problems in Eastern Europe and what we were going to do when the problem of the ownership of content began to threaten free software," Moglen recalls. "As we were talking, I briefly thought about how we must have looked to people passing by. Here we are, these two little bearded anarchists, plotting and planning the next steps. And, of course, Richard is plucking the knots from his hair and dropping them in the soup and behaving in his usual way. Anybody listening in on our conversation would have thought we were crazy, but I knew: I knew the revolution's right here at this table. This is what's making it happen. And this man is the person making it happen." + +Moglen says that moment, more than any other, drove home the elemental simplicity of the Stallman style. + +"It was funny," recalls Moglen. "I said to him, 'Richard, you know, you and I are the two guys who didn't make any money out of this revolution.' And then I paid for the lunch, because I knew he didn't have the money to pay for it."~{ RMS: I never refuse to let people treat me to a meal, since my pride is not based on picking up the check. But I surely did have the money to pay for lunch. My income, which comes from around half the speeches I give, is much less than a law professor's salary, but I'm not poor. }~ + +1~ Epilogue from Sam Williams: Crushing Loneliness + +[RMS: Because this chapter is so personally from Sam Williams, I have indicated all changes to the text with square brackets or ellipses, and I have made such changes only to clear up technical or legal points,and to remove passages that I found to be hostile and devoid of information. I have also added notes labeled 'RMS:' to respond to certain points. Williams has also changed the text of this chapter; changes made by Williams are not explicitly indicated.] + +Writing the biography of a living person is a bit like producing a play. The drama in front of the curtain often pales in comparison to the drama backstage. + +In /{The Autobiography of Malcolm X}/, Alex Haley gives readers a rare glimpse of that backstage drama. Stepping out of the ghostwriter role, Haley delivers the book's epilogue in his own voice. The epilogue explains how a freelance reporter originally dismissed as a "tool" and"spy" by the Nation of Islam spokesperson managed to work through personal and political barriers to get Malcolm X's life story on paper. +={ Autobiography of Malcolm X, The (Haley) +1 ; + Haley, Alex +} + +While I hesitate to compare this book with /{The Autobiography of Malcolm X}/, I do owe a debt of gratitude to Haley for his candid epilogue. Over the last 12 months, it has served as a sort of instruction manual on how to deal with a biographical subject who has built an entire career on being disagreeable. [RMS: I have built my career on saying no to things others accept without much question, but if I sometimes seem or am disagreeable, it is not through specific intention.] From the outset, I envisioned closing this biography with a similar epilogue, both as an homage to Haley and as a way to let readers know how this book came to be. + +The story behind this story starts in an Oakland apartment, winding its way through the various locales mentioned in the book - Silicon Valley, Maui, Boston, and Cambridge. Ultimately, however, it is a tale of two cities: New York, New York, the book-publishing capital of the world, and Sebastopol, California, the book-publishing capital of Sonoma County. + +The story starts in April, 2000. At the time, I was writing stories for the ill-fated web site BeOpen.com. One of my first assignments was a phone interview with Richard M. Stallman. The interview went well, so well that Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org), the popular "news for nerds" site owned by VA Software, Inc. (formerly VA LinuxSystems and before that, VA Research), gave it a link in its daily list of feature stories. Within hours, the web servers at BeOpen were heating up as readers clicked over to the site. +={ BeOpen.com +3 ; + VA Linux ; + VA Research ; + VA Software, Inc. ; + Slashdot +} + +For all intents and purposes, the story should have ended there. Three months after the interview, while attending the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Monterey, California, I received the following email message from Tracy Pattison, foreign-rights manager at a large New York publishing house: +={ Monterey (California) ; + O'Reilly & Associates : + Open Source Conferences ; + Pattison, Tracy +} + +% poem or group what follows ? + +poem{ + +To: sam@BeOpen.com + +Subject: RMS Interview Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 15:56:37 - 0400 + +Dear Mr. Williams, + +I read your interview with Richard Stallman on BeOpen +with great interest. I've been intrigued by RMS and his +work for some time now and was delighted to find your +piece which I really think you did a great job of capturing +some of the spirit of what Stallman is trying to do with +GNU-Linux and the Free Software Foundation. + +What I'd love to do, however, is read more - and I don't +think I'm alone. Do you think there is more information +and/or sources out there to expand and update your +interview and adapt it into more of a profile of Stallman? +Perhaps including some more anecdotal information about +his personality and background that might really interest +and enlighten readers outside the more hardcore +programming scene? + +}poem + +Tracy ended the email with a request that I give her a call to discuss the idea further. I did just that. Tracy told me her company was launching a new electronic book line, and it wanted stories that appealed to an early-adopter audience. The e-book format was 30,000words, about 100 pages, and she had pitched her bosses on the idea of profiling a major figure in the hacker community. Her bosses liked the idea, and in the process of searching for interesting people to profile,she had come across my BeOpen interview with Stallman. Hence her email to me. + +That's when Tracy asked me: would I be willing to expand the interview into a full-length feature profile? + +My answer was instant: yes. Before accepting it, Tracy suggested I put together a story proposal she could show her superiors. Two days later, I sent her a polished proposal. A week later, Tracy sent me a follow up email. Her bosses had given it the green light. + +I have to admit, getting Stallman to participate in an e-book project was an afterthought on my part. As a reporter who covered the open source beat, I knew Stallman was a stickler. I'd already received a half dozen emails at that point upbraiding me for the use of "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux." + +Then again, I also knew Stallman was looking for ways to get his message out to the general public. Perhaps if I presented the project to him that way, he would be more receptive. If not, I could always rely upon the copious amounts of documents, interviews, and recorded online conversations Stallman had left lying around the Internet and do an unauthorized biography. + +During my research, I came across an essay titled "Freedom - Or Copyright?" Written by Stallman and published in the June, 2000,edition of the MIT /{Technology Review}/, the essay blasted e-books for an assortment of software sins. Not only did readers have to use proprietary software programs to read them, Stallman lamented, but the methods used to prevent unauthorized copying were overly harsh. Instead of downloading a transferable HTML or PDF file, readers downloaded an encrypted file. In essence, purchasing an e-book meant purchasing a nontransferable key to unscramble the encrypted content. Any attempt to open a book's content without an authorized key constituted a criminal violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law designed to bolster copyright enforcement on the Internet. Similar penalties held for readers who converted a book's content into an open file format, even if their only intention was to read the book on a different computer in their home. Unlike a normal book, the reader no longer held the right to lend, copy, or resell an e-book. They only had the right to read it on an authorized machine, warned Stallman: +={ Digital Millennium Copyright Act } + +_1 We still have the same old freedoms in using paper books.But if e-books replace printed books, that exception will do little good. With "electronic ink," which makes it possible to download new text onto an apparently printed piece of paper, even newspapers could become ephemeral. Imagine:no more used book stores; no more lending a book to your friend; no more borrowing one from the public library - no more "leaks" that might give someone a chance to read without paying. (And judging from the ads for Microsoft Reader, no more anonymous purchasing of books either.)This is the world publishers have in mind for us.~{ See "Freedom - Or Copyright?" (May, 2000), \\ http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/stallman0500.asp. }~ + +Needless to say, the essay caused some concern. Neither Tracy nor I had discussed the software her company would use nor had we discussed the type of copyright [license] that would govern the e-book's usage. I mentioned the /{Technology Review}/ article and asked if she could give me information on her company's e-book policies. Tracy promised to get back to me. + +Eager to get started, I decided to call Stallman anyway and mention the book idea to him. When I did, he expressed immediate interest and immediate concern. "Did you read my essay on e-books?" he asked. + +When I told him, yes, I had read the essay and was waiting to hear back from the publisher, Stallman laid out two conditions: he didn't want to lend support to an e-book licensing mechanism he fundamentally opposed, and he didn't want to come off as lending support. "I don't want to participate in anything that makes me look like a hypocrite," he said. + +For Stallman, the software issue was secondary to the copyright issue. He said he was willing to ignore whatever software the publisher or its third-party vendors employed just so long as the company specified within the copyright that readers were free to make and distribute verbatim copies of the e-book's content. Stallman pointed to Stephen King's /{The Plant}/ as a possible model. In June, 2000, King announced on his official web site that he was self-publishing /{The Plant}/ in serial form. According to the announcement, the book's total cost would be $13, spread out over a series of $1 installments. As long as at least 75% of the readers paid for each chapter, King promised to continue releasing new installments. By August, the plan seemed to be working, as King had published the first two chapters with a third on the way. +={ King, Stephen ; + open source +4 ; + Plant, The (King) +} + +"I'd be willing to accept something like that," Stallman said. "As long as it also permitted verbatim copying." [RMS: As I recall, I also raised the issue of encryption; the text two paragraphs further down confirms this. I would not have agreed to publish the book in a way that /{required}/ a non-free program to read it.] + +I forwarded the information to Tracy. Feeling confident that she and I might be able to work out an equitable arrangement, I called up Stallman and set up the first interview for the book. Stallman agreed to the interview without making a second inquiry into the status issue. Shortly after the first interview, I raced to set up a second interview (this one in Kihei), squeezing it in before Stallman headed off on a 14-day vacation to Tahiti. [RMS: That was not a pure vacation; I gave a speech there too.] +={ Kihei (Hawaii) } + +It was during Stallman's vacation that the bad news came from Tracy. Her company's legal department didn't want to adjust its [license] notice on the e-books. Readers who wanted to make their books transferable would [first have to crack the encryption code, to be able to convert the book to a free, public format such as HTML. This would be illegal and they might face criminal penalties.] + +With two fresh interviews under my belt, I didn't see any way to write the book without resorting to the new material. I quickly set up a trip to New York to meet with my agent and with Tracy to see if there was a compromise solution. + +When I flew to New York, I met my agent, Henning Guttman. It was our first face-to-face meeting, and Henning seemed pessimistic about our chances of forcing a compromise, at least on the publisher's end. The large, established publishing houses already viewed the e-book format with enough suspicion and weren't in the mood to experiment with copyright language that made it easier for readers to avoid payment. As an agent who specialized in technology books, however,Henning was intrigued by the novel nature of my predicament. I told him about the two interviews I'd already gathered and the promise not to publish the book in a way that made Stallman "look like a hypocrite." Agreeing that I was in an ethical bind, Henning suggested we make that our negotiating point. +={ Guttman, Henning } + +Barring that, Henning said, we could always take the carrot-and-stick approach. The carrot would be the publicity that came with publishing an e-book that honored the hacker community's internal ethics. The stick would be the risks associated with publishing an e-book that didn't. Nine months before Dmitry Sklyarov became an Internet /{cause célèbre}/, we knew it was only a matter of time before an enterprising programmer revealed how to hack e-books. We also knew that a major publishing house releasing an [encrypted] e-book on Richard M. Stallman was the software equivalent of putting "Steal This E-Book" on the cover. +={ Sklyarov, Dmitri } + +After my meeting with Henning, I called Stallman. Hoping to make the carrot more enticing, I discussed a number of potential compromises. What if the publisher released the book's content under a[dual] license, something similar to what Sun Microsystems had done with Open Office, the free software desktop applications suite? The publisher could then release DRM-restricted~{ RMS: Williams wrote "commercial" here, but that is a misnomer, since it means "connected with business." All these versions would be commercial if a company published them. }~ versions of the e-book under [its usual] format, taking advantage of all the bells and whistles that went with the e-book software, while releasing the copyable version under a less aesthetically pleasing HTML format. + +Stallman told me he didn't mind the [dual-license] idea, but he did dislike the idea of making the freely copyable version inferior to the restricted version. Besides, he said [on second thought, this case was different precisely because he had] a way to control the outcome. He could refuse to cooperate. + +[RMS: The question was whether it would be wrong for me to agree to the restricted version. I can endorse the free version of Sun's Open Office, because it is free software and much better than nothing,while at the same time I reject the non-free version. There is no self- contradiction here, because Sun didn't need or ask my approval for the non-free version; I was not responsible for its existence. In this case, if I had said yes to the non-freely-copyable version, the onus would fall on me.] + +I made a few more suggestions with little effect. About the only thing I could get out of Stallman was a concession [RMS: i.e., a further compromise] that the e-book's [license] restrict all forms of file sharing to "noncommercial redistribution." + +Before I signed off, Stallman suggested I tell the publisher that I'd promised Stallman that the work would be [freely sharable]. I told Stallman I couldn't agree to that statement [RMS: though it was true,since he had accepted my conditions at the outset] but that I did view the book as unfinishable without his cooperation. Seemingly satisfied,Stallman hung up with his usual sign-off line: "Happy hacking." + +Henning and I met with Tracy the next day. Tracy said her company was willing to publish copyable excerpts in a unencrypted format but would limit the excerpts to 500 words. Henning informed her that this wouldn't be enough for me to get around my ethical obligation to Stallman. Tracy mentioned her own company's contractual obligation to online vendors such as Amazon.com. Even if the company decided to open up its e-book content this one time, it faced the risk of its partners calling it a breach of contract. Barring a change of heart in the executive suite or on the part of Stallman, the decision was up tome. I could use the interviews and go against my earlier agreement with Stallman, or I could plead journalistic ethics and back out of the verbal agreement to do the book. +={ Amazon.com } + +Following the meeting, my agent and I relocated to a pub on Third Ave. I used his cell phone to call Stallman, leaving a message when nobody answered. Henning left for a moment, giving me time to collect my thoughts. When he returned, he was holding up the cell phone. + +"It's Stallman," Henning said. + +The conversation got off badly from the start. I relayed Tracy's comment about the publisher's contractual obligations. + +"So," Stallman said bluntly. "Why should I give a damn about their contractual obligations?" + +Because asking a major publishing house to risk a legal battle with its vendors over a 30,000-word e-book is a tall order, I suggested. [RMS: His unstated premise was that I couldn't possibly refuse this deal for mere principle.] + +"Don't you see?" Stallman said. "That's exactly why I'm doing this. I want a signal victory. I want them to make a choice between freedom and business as usual." + +As the words "signal victory" echoed in my head, I felt my attention wander momentarily to the passing foot traffic on the sidewalk. Coming into the bar, I had been pleased to notice that the location was less than half a block away from the street corner memorialized in the 1976 Ramones song, "53rd and 3rd," a song I always enjoyed playing in my days as a musician. Like the perpetually frustrated street hustler depicted in that song, I could feel things falling apart as quickly as they had come together. The irony was palpable. After weeks of gleefully recording other people's laments, I found myself in the position of trying to pull off the rarest of feats: a Richard Stallman compromise. When I continued hemming and hawing, pleading the publisher's position and revealing my growing sympathy for it,Stallman, like an animal smelling blood, attacked. + +"So that's it? You're just going to screw me? You're just going to bend to their will?" + +[RMS: The quotations show that Williams' interpretation of this conversation was totally wrong. He compares me to a predator, but I was only saying no to the deal he was badgering me to accept.I had already made several compromises, some described above; I just refused to compromise my principles entirely away. I often do this; people who aren't satisfied say I "refused to compromise at all, "but that is an exaggeration; \\ see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html. Then I feared he was going to disregard the conditions he had previously agreed to, and publish the book with DRM despite my refusal. What I smelled was not his "blood" but possible betrayal.] + +I brought up the issue of a dual-copyright again. + +"You mean license," Stallman said curtly. + +"Yeah, license. Copyright. Whatever," I said, feeling suddenly like a wounded tuna trailing a rich plume of plasma in the water. + +"Aw, why didn't you just fucking do what I told you to do!" he shouted. [RMS: I think this quotation was garbled, both because using "fucking" as an adverb was never part of my speech pattern, and because the words do not fit the circumstances. The words he quotes are a rebuke to a disobedient subordinate. I felt he had an ethical obligation, but he was not my subordinate, and I would not have spoken to him as one. Using notes rather than a recorder, he could not reliably retain the exact words.] + +I must have been arguing on behalf of the publisher to the very end, because in my notes I managed to save a final Stallman chestnut: "I don't care. What they're doing is evil. I can't support evil. Goodbye." [RMS: It sounds like I had concluded that he would never take no for an answer, and the only way to end the conversation without accepting his proposition was to hang up on him.] + +As soon as I put the phone down, my agent slid a freshly poured Guinness to me. "I figured you might need this," he said with a laugh. "I could see you shaking there towards the end." + +I was indeed shaking. The shaking wouldn't stop until the Guinness was more than halfway gone. It felt weird, hearing myself characterized as an emissary of "evil." [RMS: My words as quoted criticize the publisher, not Williams personally. If he took it personally, perhaps that indicates he was starting to take ethical responsibility for the deal he had pressed me to accept.] It felt weirder still, knowing that three months before, I was sitting in an Oakland apartment trying to come up with my next story idea. Now, I was sitting in a part of the world I'd only known through rock songs, taking meetings with publishing executives and drinking beer with an agent I'd never even laid eyes on until the day before. It was all too surreal, like watching my life reflected back as a movie montage. + +About that time, my internal absurdity meter kicked in. The initial shaking gave way to convulsions of laughter. To my agent, I must have looked like a another fragile author undergoing an untimely emotional breakdown. To me, I was just starting to appreciate the cynical beauty of my situation. Deal or no deal, I already had the makings of a pretty good story. It was only a matter of finding a place to tell it. When my laughing convulsions finally subsided, I held up my drink in a toast. + +"Welcome to the front lines, my friend," I said, clinking pints with my agent. "Might as well enjoy it." + +If this story really were a play, here's where it would take a momentary, romantic interlude. Disheartened by the tense nature of our meeting, Tracy invited Henning and me to go out for drinks with her and some of her coworkers. We left the bar on Third Ave., headed down to the East Village, and caught up with Tracy and her friends. + +Once there, I spoke with Tracy, careful to avoid shop talk. Our conversation was pleasant, relaxed. Before parting, we agreed to meet the next night. Once again, the conversation was pleasant, so pleasant that the Stallman e-book became almost a distant memory. + +When I got back to Oakland, I called around to various journalist friends and acquaintances. I recounted my predicament. Most upbraided me for giving up too much ground to Stallman in the pre-interview negotiation. [RMS: Those who have read the whole book know that I would never have dropped the conditions.] A former j-school professor suggested I ignore Stallman's "hypocrite" comment and just write the story. Reporters who knew of Stallman's media-savviness ex-pressed sympathy but uniformly offered the same response: it's your call. + +I decided to put the book on the back burner. Even with the interviews, I wasn't making much progress. Besides, it gave me a chance to speak with Tracy without running things past Henning first.By Christmas we had traded visits: she flying out to the west coast once, me flying out to New York a second time. The day before New Year's Eve, I proposed. Deciding which coast to live on, I picked New York. By February, I packed up my laptop computer and all my research notes related to the Stallman biography, and we winged our way to JFK Airport. Tracy and I were married on May 11. So much for failed book deals. + +During the summer, I began to contemplate turning my interview notes into a magazine article. Ethically, I felt in the clear doing so,since the original interview terms said nothing about traditional print media. To be honest, I also felt a bit more comfortable writing about Stallman after eight months of radio silence. Since our telephone conversation in September, I'd only received two emails from Stallman.Both chastised me for using "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" in a pair of articles for the web magazine /{Upside Today}/. Aside from that, I had enjoyed the silence. In June, about a week after the New York University speech, I took a crack at writing a 5,000-word magazine-length story about Stallman. This time, the words flowed. The distance had helped restore my lost sense of emotional perspective, I suppose. +={ Upside Today web magazine } + +In July, a full year after the original email from Tracy, I got a call from Henning. He told me that O'Reilly & Associates, a publishing house out of Sebastopol, California, was interested in the running the Stallman story as a biography. [RMS: I have a vague memory that I suggested contacting O'Reilly, but I can't be sure after all these years.] The news pleased me. Of all the publishing houses in the world, O'Reilly, the same company that had published Eric Raymond's /{The Cathedral and the Bazaar}/, seemed the most sensitive to the issues that had killed the earlier e-book. As a reporter, I had relied heavily on the O'Reilly book /{Open Sources}/ as a historical reference. I also knew that various chapters of the book, including a chapter written by Stallman, had been published with [license] notices that permitted redistribution. Such knowledge would come in handy if the issue of electronic publication ever came up again. +={ Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond) ; + O'Reilly & Associates ; + Open Sources (DiBona, et al) +2 ; + Raymond, Eric +} + +Sure enough, the issue did come up. I learned through Henning that O'Reilly intended to publish the biography both as a book and as part of its new Safari Tech Books Online subscription service. The Safari user license would involve special restrictions,~{ See "Safari Tech Books Online; Subscriber Agreement: Terms of Service" \\ http://my.safaribooksonline.com/termsofservice. As of December, 2009, the see-books require non-free reader software, so people should refuse to use them. }~ Henning warned, but O'Reilly was willing to allow for a copyright that permitted users to copy and share the book's text regardless of medium. Basically, as author, I had the choice between two licenses: the Open Publication License or the GNU Free Documentation License. +={ Open Publication License (OPL) +8 ; + OPL (Open Publication License) +8 ; + Safari Tech Books Online subscription service +} + +I checked out the contents and background of each license. The Open Publication License (OPL)~{ See "The Open Publication License: Draft v1.0" (June 8, 1999), \\ http://opencontent.org/openpub/. }~ gives readers the right to reproduce and distribute a work, in whole or in part, in any medium "physical or electronic," provided the copied work retains the Open Publication License. It also permits modification of a work, provided certain conditions are met. Finally, the Open Publication License includes a number of options, which, if selected by the author, can limit the creation of "substantively modified" versions or book-form derivatives without prior author approval. + +The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), meanwhile, permits the copying and distribution of a document in any medium, provided the resulting work carries the same license.~{ See "The GNU Free Documentation License: Version 1.3" (November, 2008), \\ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. }~ +={ GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) +1 ; + GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) +1 +} + +It also permits the modification of a document provided certain conditions. Unlike the OPL, however, it does not give authors the option to restrict certain modifications. It also does not give authors the right to reject modifications that might result in a competitive book product. It does require certain forms of front - and back-cover information if a party other than the copyright holder wishes to publish more than 100 copies of a protected work, however. + +In the course of researching the licenses, I also made sure to visit the GNU Project web page titled "Various Licenses and Comments About Them."~{ See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html. }~ + +On that page, I found a Stallman critique of the Open Publication License. Stallman's critique related to the creation of modified works and the ability of an author to select either one of the OPL's options to restrict modification. If an author didn't want to select either option, it was better to use the GFDL instead, Stallman noted, since it minimized the risk of the non-selected options popping up in modified versions of a document. + +The importance of modification in both licenses was a reflection of their original purpose - namely, to give software-manual owners a chance to improve their manuals and publicize those improvements to the rest of the community. Since my book wasn't a manual, I had little concern about the modification clause in either license. My only concern was giving users the freedom to exchange copies of the book or make copies of the content, the same freedom they would have enjoyed if they purchased a hardcover book. Deeming either license suitable for this purpose, I signed the O'Reilly contract when it came to me. + +Still, the notion of unrestricted modification intrigued me. In my early negotiations with Tracy, I had pitched the merits of a GPL-style license for the e-book's content. At worst, I said, the license would guarantee a lot of positive publicity for the e-book. At best, it would encourage readers to participate in the book-writing process. As an author, I was willing to let other people amend my work just so long as my name always got top billing. Besides, it might even be interesting to watch the book evolve. I pictured later editions looking much like online versions of the /{Talmud}/, my original text in a central column surrounded by illuminating, third-party commentary in the margins. + +My idea drew inspiration from Project Xanadu (http://www.xanadu.com), the legendary software concept originally conceived by Ted Nelson in 1960. During the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in 1999, I had seen the first demonstration of the project's [free] offshoot Udanax and had been wowed by the result. In one demonstration sequence, Udanax displayed a parent document and a derivative work in a similar two-column, plain-text format. With a click of the button, the program introduced lines linking each sentence in the parent to its conceptual offshoot in the derivative. An e-book biography of Richard M. Stallman didn't have to be Udanax-enabled, but given such technological possibilities, why not give users a chance to play around?~{ Anybody willing to "port" this book over to Udanax, the free software version of Xanadu, will receive enthusiastic support from me. To find out more about this intriguing technology, \\ visit http://www.udanax.com. }~ +={ Nelson, Ted ; + O'Reilly & Associates : + Open Source Conferences ; + Project Xanadu ; + Udanax +} + +When Laurie Petrycki, my editor at O'Reilly, gave me a choice be-tween the OPL or the GFDL, I indulged the fantasy once again. By September of 2001, the month I signed the contract, e-books had become almost a dead topic. Many publishing houses, Tracy's included,were shutting down their e-book imprints for lack of interest. I had to wonder. If these companies had treated e-books not as a form of publication but as a form of community building, would those imprints have survived? +={ GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) +1 ; + GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) +1 ; + Petrycki, Laurie +} + +After I signed the contract, I notified Stallman that the book project was back on. I mentioned the choice O'Reilly was giving me between the Open Publication License and the GNU Free Documentation License. I told him I was leaning toward the OPL, if only for the fact I saw no reason to give O'Reilly's competitors a chance to print the same book under a different cover. Stallman wrote back, arguing in favor of the GFDL, noting that O'Reilly had already used it several times in the past. Despite the events of the past year, I suggested a deal. I would choose the GFDL if it gave me the possibility to do more interviews and if Stallman agreed to help O'Reilly publicize the book. Stallman agreed to participate in more interviews but said that his participation in publicity-related events would depend on the content of the book. Viewing this as only fair, I set up an interview for December 17, 2001 in Cambridge. + +I set up the interview to coincide with a business trip my wife Tracy was taking to Boston. Two days before leaving, Tracy suggested I invite Stallman out to dinner. + +"After all," she said, "he is the one who brought us together."I sent an email to Stallman, who promptly sent a return email accepting the offer. When I drove up to Boston the next day, I met Tracy at her hotel and hopped the T to head over to MIT. When we got to Tech Square, I found Stallman in the middle of a conversation just as we knocked on the door. + +"I hope you don't mind," he said, pulling the door open far enough so that Tracy and I could just barely hear Stallman's conversational counterpart. It was a youngish woman, mid-20s I'd say, named Sarah. + +"I took the liberty of inviting somebody else to have dinner with us," Stallman said, matter-of-factly, giving me the same catlike smile he gave me back in that Palo Alto restaurant. + +To be honest, I wasn't too surprised. The news that Stallman had a new female friend had reached me a few weeks before, courtesy of Stallman's mother. "In fact, they both went to Japan last month when Richard went over to accept the Takeda Award," Lippman told me at the time.~{ Alas, I didn't find out about the Takeda Foundation's decision to award Stallman, along with Linus Torvalds and Ken Sakamura, with its first-ever award for"Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for Social/Economic Well-Being" until after Stallman had made the trip to Japan to accept the award. For more information about the award and its accompanying $1 million prize, visit the Takeda site, \\ http://www.takeda-foundation.jp. }~ +={ Takeda Awards } + +On the way over to the restaurant, I learned the circumstances of Sarah and Richard's first meeting. Interestingly, the circumstances were very familiar. Working on her own fictional book, Sarah said she heard about Stallman and what an interesting character he was. She promptly decided to create a character in her book on Stallman and,in the interests of researching the character, set up an interview with Stallman. Things quickly went from there. The two had been dating since the beginning of 2001, she said. + +"I really admired the way Richard built up an entire political movement to address an issue of profound personal concern," Sarah said,explaining her attraction to Stallman. + +My wife immediately threw back the question: "What was the issue?" "Crushing loneliness." During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had softened Stallman in any significant way. I didn't see anything to suggest they had. Although more flirtatious than I remembered,Stallman retained the same general level of prickliness. At one point,my wife uttered an emphatic "God forbid" only to receive a typical Stallman rebuke. + +"I hate to break it to you, but there is no God," Stallman said.[RMS: I must have been too deadpan. He could justly accuse me of being a wise guy, but not of rebuking.] + +Afterwards, when the dinner was complete and Sarah had departed, Stallman seemed to let his guard down a little. As we walked to a nearby bookstore, he admitted that the last 12 months had dramatically changed his outlook on life. "I thought I was going to be alone forever," he said. "I'm glad I was wrong." + +Before parting, Stallman handed me his "pleasure card," a business card listing Stallman's address, phone number, and favorite pastimes("sharing good books, good food and exotic music and dance") so that I might set up a final interview. + +The next day, over another meal of dim sum, Stallman seemed even more lovestruck than the night before. Recalling his debates with Currier House dorm maters over the benefits and drawbacks of an immortality serum, Stallman expressed hope that scientists might some day come up with the key to immortality. "Now that I'm finally starting to have happiness in my life, I want to have [a longer life]," he said. + +When I mentioned Sarah's "crushing loneliness" comment, Stallman failed to see a connection between loneliness on a physical or spiritual level and loneliness on a hacker level. "The impulse to share code is about friendship but friendship at a much lower level," he said. Later, however, when the subject came up again, Stallman did admit that loneliness, or the fear of perpetual loneliness [RMS: at the hacker-to-hacker, community level, that is], had played a major role in fueling his determination during the earliest days of the GNU Project. + +"My fascination with computers was not a consequence of anything else," he said. "I wouldn't have been less fascinated with computers if I had been popular and all the women flocked to me. However, it's certainly true the experience of feeling I didn't have a home, finding one and losing it, finding another and having it destroyed, affected me deeply. The one I lost was the dorm. The one that was destroyed was the AI Lab. The precariousness of not having any kind of home or community was very powerful. It made me want to fight to get it back." + +After the interview, I couldn't help but feel a certain sense of emotional symmetry. Hearing Sarah describe what attracted her to Stallman and hearing Stallman himself describe the emotions that prompted him to take up the free software cause, I was reminded of my own reasons for writing this book. Since July, 2000, I have learned to appreciate both the seductive and the repellent sides of the Richard Stallman persona. Like Eben Moglen before me, I feel that dismissing that persona as epiphenomenal or distracting in relation to the overall free software movement would be a grievous mistake. In many ways the two are so mutually defining as to be indistinguishable. + +[RMS: Williams objectifies his reactions, both positive and negative, as parts of me, but they are functions also of his own attitudes about appearance, conformity, and business success.] + +While I'm sure not every reader feels the same level of affinity for Stallman...I'm sure most will agree [that] few individuals offer as singular a human portrait as Richard M. Stallman. It is my sincere hope that, with this initial portrait complete and with the help of the GFDL, others will feel a similar urge to add their own perspective to that portrait. + +Endnotes + +1~ Appendix A - Hack, Hackers and Hacking +={ hackers +18 } + +To understand the full meaning of the word "hacker," it helps to examine the word's etymology over the years. + +/{The New Hacker Dictionary}/, an online compendium of software-programmer jargon, officially lists nine different connotations of the word "hack" and a similar number for "hacker." Then again, the same publication also includes an accompanying essay that quotes Phil Agre, an MIT hacker who warns readers not to be fooled by the word's perceived flexibility. "Hack has only one meaning," argues Agre. "An extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation." Richard Stallman tries to articulate it with the phrase, "Playful cleverness." +={ Agre, Phil ; + New Hacker Dictionary, The +} + +Regardless of the width or narrowness of the definition, most modern hackers trace the word back to MIT, where the term bubbled upas popular item of student jargon in the early 1950s. In 1990 the MIT Museum put together a journal documenting the hacking phenomenon.According to the journal, students who attended the institute during the fifties used the word "hack" the way a modern student might use the word "goof." Hanging a jalopy out a dormitory window was a "hack," but anything harsh or malicious - e.g., egging a rival dorm's windows or defacing a campus statue - fell outside the bounds. Implicit within the definition of "hack" was a spirit of harmless, creative fun. +={ MIT Museum } + +This spirit would inspire the word's gerund form: "hacking." A 1950s student who spent the better part of the afternoon talking on the phone or dismantling a radio might describe the activity as "hacking." Again, a modern speaker would substitute the verb form of "goof" -"goofing" or "goofing off" - to describe the same activity. + +As the 1950s progressed, the word "hack" acquired a sharper, more rebellious edge. The MIT of the 1950s was overly competitive, and hacking emerged as both a reaction to and extension of that competitive culture. Goofs and pranks suddenly became a way to blow off steam, thumb one's nose at campus administration, and indulge creative thinking and behavior stifled by the Institute's rigorous undergraduate curriculum. With its myriad hallways and underground steam tunnels, the Institute offered plenty of exploration opportunities for the student undaunted by locked doors and "No Trespassing"signs. Students began to refer to their off-limits explorations as "tunnel hacking." Above ground, the campus phone system offered similar opportunities. Through casual experimentation and due diligence, students learned how to perform humorous tricks. Drawing inspiration from the more traditional pursuit of tunnel hacking, students quickly dubbed this new activity "phone hacking." + +The combined emphasis on creative play and restriction-free exploration would serve as the basis for the future mutations of the hacking term. The first self-described computer hackers of the 1960s MIT campus originated from a late 1950s student group called the Tech Model Railroad Club. A tight clique within the club was the Signals and Power (S&P) Committee - the group behind the railroad club's electrical circuitry system. The system was a sophisticated assortment of relays and switches similar to the kind that controlled the local cam-pus phone system. To control it, a member of the group simply dialed in commands via a connected phone and watched the trains do his bidding. +={ Tech Model Railroad Club ; + S&P (Signals and Power) Committee +2 ; + Signals and Power (S&P) Committee +2 +} + +The nascent electrical engineers responsible for building and maintaining this system saw their activity as similar in spirit to phone hacking. Adopting the hacking term, they began refining it even further. From the S&P hacker point of view, using one less relay to operate a particular stretch of track meant having one more relay for future play. Hacking subtly shifted from a synonym for idle play to a synonym for idle play that improved the overall performance or efficiency of the club's railroad system at the same time. Soon S&P committee members proudly referred to the entire activity of improving and reshaping the track's underlying circuitry as "hacking" and to the people who did it as "hackers." + +Given their affinity for sophisticated electronics - not to mention the traditional MIT-student disregard for closed doors and "No Trespassing" signs - it didn't take long before the hackers caught wind of a new machine on campus. Dubbed the TX-0, the machine was one of the first commercially marketed computers. By the end of the 1950s, the entire S&P clique had migrated en masse over to the TX-0 control room, bringing the spirit of creative play with them.The wide-open realm of computer programming would encourage yet another mutation in etymology. "To hack" no longer meant soldering unusual looking circuits, but cobbling together software programs with little regard to "official" methods or software-writing procedures. It also meant improving the efficiency and speed of already-existing pro-grams that tended to hog up machine resources. True to the word's roots, it also meant writing programs that served no other purpose than to amuse or entertain. +={ TX-0 computer } + +A classic example of this expanded hacking definition is the game Spacewar, the first computer-based video game. Developed by MIT hackers in the early 1960s, Spacewar had all the traditional hacking definitions: it was goofy and random, serving little useful purpose other than providing a nightly distraction for the dozen or so hackers who delighted in playing it. From a software perspective, however,it was a monumental testament to innovation of programming skill.It was also completely free. Because hackers had built it for fun,they saw no reason to guard their creation, sharing it extensively with other programmers. By the end of the 1960s, Spacewar had become a diversion for programmers around the world, if they had the (then rather rare) graphical displays. + +This notion of collective innovation and communal software ownership distanced the act of computer hacking in the 1960s from the tunnel hacking and phone hacking of the 1950s. The latter pursuits tended to be solo or small-group activities. Tunnel and phone hackers relied heavily on campus lore, but the off-limits nature of their activity discouraged the open circulation of new discoveries. Computer hackers, on the other hand, did their work amid a scientific field biased toward collaboration and the rewarding of innovation. Hackers and "official" computer scientists weren't always the best of allies, but in the rapid evolution of the field, the two species of computer programmer evolved a cooperative - some might say symbiotic - relationship. + +Hackers had little respect for bureaucrats' rules. They regarded computer security systems that obstructed access to the machine as just another bug, to be worked around or fixed if possible. Thus,breaking security (but not for malicious purposes) was a recognized aspect of hacking in 1970, useful for practical jokes (the victim might say, "I think someone's hacking me") as well as for gaining access to the computer. But it was not central to the idea of hacking. Where there was a security obstacle, hackers were proud to display their wits in surmounting it; however, given the choice, as at the MIT AI Lab,they chose to have no obstacle and do other kinds of hacking. Where there is no security, nobody needs to break it. + +It is a testament to the original computer hackers' prodigious skill that later programmers, including Richard M. Stallman, aspired to wear the same hacker mantle. By the mid to late 1970s, the term"hacker" had acquired elite connotations. In a general sense, a computer hacker was any person who wrote software code for the sake of writing software code. In the particular sense, however, it was a testament to programming skill. Like the term "artist," the meaning carried tribal overtones. To describe a fellow programmer as a hacker was a sign of respect. To describe oneself as a hacker was a sign of immense personal confidence. Either way, the original looseness of the computer-hacker appellation diminished as computers became more common. + +As the definition tightened, "computer" hacking acquired additional semantic overtones. The hackers at the MIT AI Lab shared many other characteristics, including love of Chinese food, disgust for tobacco smoke, and avoidance of alcohol, tobacco and other addictive drugs. These characteristics became part of some people's under-standing of what it meant to be a hacker, and the community exerted an influence on newcomers even though it did not demand conformity. However, these cultural associations disappeared with the AI Lab hacker community. Today, most hackers resemble the surrounding society on these points. + +As the hackers at elite institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon conversed about hacks they admired, they also considered the ethics of their activity, and began to speak openly of a "hacker ethic": the yet-unwritten rules that governed a hacker's day-to-day behavior. In the 1984 book /{Hackers}/, author Steven Levy, after much research and consultation, codified the hacker ethic as five core hacker tenets. +={ Hackers (Levy) +1 } + +In the 1980s, computer use expanded greatly, and so did security breaking. Mostly it was done by insiders with criminal intent, who were generally not hackers at all. However, occasionally the police and administrators, who defined disobedience as evil, traced a computer "intrusion" back to a hacker whose idea of ethics was "Don't hurt people." Journalists published articles in which "hacking" meant breaking security, and usually endorsed the administrators' view of the matter. Although books like /{Hackers}/ did much to document the original spirit of exploration that gave rise to the hacking culture, for most newspaper reporters and readers the term "computer hacker"became a synonym for "electronic burglar." + +By the late 1980s, many U.S. teenagers had access to computers.Some were alienated from society; inspired by journalists' distorted picture of "hacking," they expressed their resentment by breaking computer security much as other alienated teens might have done it by breaking windows. They began to call themselves "hackers," but they never learned the MIT hackers' principle against malicious behavior.As younger programmers began employing their computer skills to harmful ends - creating and disseminating computer viruses, breaking into computer systems for mischief, deliberately causing computers to crash - the term "hacker" acquired a punk, nihilistic edge which attracted more people with similar attitudes. + +Hackers have railed against this perceived mis-usage of their self-designator for nearly two decades. Stallman, not one to take things lying down, coined the term "cracking" for "security breaking" so that people could more easily avoid calling it "hacking." But the distinction between hacking and cracking is often misunderstood. These two descriptive terms are not meant to be exclusive. It's not that "Hacking is here, and cracking is there, and never the twain shall meet." Hacking and cracking are different attributes of activities, just as "young"and "tall" are different attributes of persons. + +Most hacking does not involve security, so it is not cracking. Most cracking is done for profit or malice and not in a playful spirit, so it is not hacking. Once in a while a single act may qualify as cracking and as hacking, but that is not the usual case. The hacker spirit includes irreverence for rules, but most hacks do not break rules. Cracking is by definition disobedience, but it is not necessarily malicious or harmful. The computer security field distinguishes between "black hat"and "white hat" crackers - i.e., crackers who turn toward destructive,malicious ends versus those who probe security in order to fix it. + +The hacker's central principle not to be malicious remains the primary cultural link between the notion of hacking in the early 21st century and hacking in the 1950s. It is important to note that, as the idea of computer hacking has evolved over the last four decades,the original notion of hacking - i.e., performing pranks or exploring underground tunnels - remains intact. In the fall of 2000, the MIT Museum paid tribute to the Institute's age-old hacking tradition with a dedicated exhibit, the Hall of Hacks. The exhibit includes a number of photographs dating back to the 1920s, including one involving amock police cruiser. In 1993, students paid homage to the original MIT notion of hacking by placing the same police cruiser, lights flashing, atop the Institute's main dome. The cruiser's vanity license plate read IHTFP, a popular MIT acronym with many meanings. The most noteworthy version, itself dating back to the pressure-filled world of MIT student life in the 1950s, is "I hate this fucking place." In 1990,however, the Museum used the acronym as a basis for a journal on the history of hacks. Titled /{The Journal of the Institute for Hacks,Tomfoolery, and Pranks}/, it offers an adept summary of the hacking. +={ Hall of Hacks } + +"In the culture of hacking, an elegant, simple creation is as highly valued as it is in pure science," writes /{Boston Globe}/ reporter Randolph Ryan in a 1993 article attached to the police car exhibit. "A Hack differs from the ordinary college prank in that the event usually requires careful planning, engineering and finesse, and has an under-lying wit and inventiveness," Ryan writes. "The unwritten rule holds that a hack should be good-natured, non-destructive and safe. In fact,hackers sometimes assist in dismantling their own handiwork." +={ Boston Globe ; + Ryan, Randolph +} + +The urge to confine the culture of computer hacking within the same ethical boundaries is well-meaning but impossible. Although most software hacks aspire to the same spirit of elegance and simplicity,the software medium offers less chance for reversibility. Dismantling a police cruiser is easy compared with dismantling an idea, especially an idea whose time has come. + +Once a vague item of obscure student jargon, the word "hacker" has become a linguistic billiard ball, subject to political spin and ethical nuances. Perhaps this is why so many hackers and journalists enjoy using it. We cannot predict how people will use the word in the future.We can, however, decide how we will use it ourselves. Using the term "cracking" rather than "hacking," when you mean "security breaking,"shows respect for Stallman and all the hackers mentioned in this book,and helps preserve something which all computer users have benefited from: the hacker spirit. +={ crackers } + +1~ Appendix B - GNU Free Documentation License +={ GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) +64 ; + GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) +64 +} + +Version 1.3, 3 November 2008 + +Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation + +http://fsf.org/ + +Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. + +2~ Preamble + +The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom:to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it,with or without modifying it, either commercially or non-commercially.Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others. + +This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense.It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software. + +We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. 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Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License". + +If you have Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts and Back-Cover Texts, replace the "with ... Texts." line with this: + +_1 with the Invariant Sections being LIST THEIR TITLES,with the Front-Cover Texts being LIST, and with the Back-Cover Texts being LIST. + +If you have Invariant Sections without Cover Texts, or some other combination of the three, merge those two alternatives to suit the situation. + +If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code,we recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of free software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to permit their use in free software. + +1~ Colophon + +The front and back covers of this book were designed and produced by Rob Myers using Inkscape, the free software vector graphics program. Jeanne Rasata also contributed to the cover design. + +The typsetting was done by John Sullivan at the Free Software Foundation using LATEX, GNU Emacs, Evince, and the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). The primary font is 10-point Computer Modern. + +Digital versions of the book, including the LATEX source code, are available at http://www.fsf.org/faif. Improvements are welcome,and can be sent to sales@gnu.org. diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst b/data/samples/current/en/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..536dcf7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst @@ -0,0 +1,5583 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Free Culture + :subtitle: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity + +@creator: + :author: Lessig, Lawrence + +@date: + :published: 2004-03-25 + :created: 2004-03-25 + :issued: 2004-03-25 + :available: 2004-03-25 + :valid: 2004-03-25 + :modified: 2004-03-25 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Lawrence Lessig, 2004. + :license: Free Culture is Licensed under a Creative Commons License. This License permits non-commercial use of this work, so long as attribution is given. For more information about the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/ + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;book:discourse:intellectual property|copyright|creative commons|free culture;copyright;free culture;creative commons;intellectual property:copyright|public domain;intellectual property:copyright:creative commons;book:subject:culture|copyright|society|public policy|mass media;culture;society + +@identifier: + :isbn: 9781594200069 + :oclc: 53324884 + +% :isbn: 1594200068 + +@links: + {Free Culture}http://www.free-culture.cc + {Remixes}http://www.free-culture.cc/remixes/ + {@ Wikipedia}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_%28book%29 + {@ Amazon.com}http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594200068 + {@ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=1594200068 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:B; break=1 + :home_button_image: {freeculture.home.png }http://www.free-culture.cc + :home_button_text: {Free Culture}http://www.free-culture.cc; {Lawrence Lessig}http://www.lessig.org + :footer: {Free Culture}http://www.free-culture.cc; {Lawrence Lessig}http://www.lessig.org + :pot_master: free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst + +:A~ @title @author + +1~attribution Attribution~# + +To Eric Eldred - whose work first drew me to this cause, and for whom it continues still.~# + +:B~ PREFACE + +1~preface [Preface]-# + +!_ At the end +of his review of my first book, /{Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace}/, David Pogue, a brilliant writer and author of countless technical and computer- related texts, wrote this: + +_1 Unlike actual law, Internet software has no capacity to punish. It doesn't affect people who aren't online (and only a tiny minority of the world population is). And if you don't like the Internet's system, you can always flip off the modem.~{ David Pogue, "Don't Just Chat, Do Something," /{New York Times,}/ 30 January 2000. }~ + +Pogue was skeptical of the core argument of the book - that software, or "code," functioned as a kind of law - and his review suggested the happy thought that if life in cyberspace got bad, we could always "drizzle, drazzle, druzzle, drome"- like simply flip a switch and be back home. Turn off the modem, unplug the computer, and any troubles that exist in /{that}/ space wouldn't "affect" us anymore. + +Pogue might have been right in 1999 - I'm skeptical, but maybe. But even if he was right then, the point is not right now: /{Free Culture}/ is about the troubles the Internet causes even after the modem is turned off. It is an argument about how the battles that now rage regarding life on-line have fundamentally affected "people who aren't online." There is no switch that will insulate us from the Internet's effect. + +But unlike /{Code}/, the argument here is not much about the Internet itself. It is instead about the consequence of the Internet to a part of our tradition that is much more fundamental, and, as hard as this is for a geek-wanna-be to admit, much more important. + +That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of "free culture" - not "free" as in "free beer" (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement, ~{ Richard M. Stallman, /{Free Software, Free Societies}/ 57 ( Joshua Gay, ed. 2002). }~ but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain /{as free as possible}/ from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" - a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past. + +If we understood this change, I believe we would resist it. Not "we" on the Left or "you" on the Right, but we who have no stake in the particular industries of culture that defined the twentieth century. Whether you are on the Left or the Right, if you are in this sense disinterested, then the story I tell here will trouble you. For the changes I describe affect values that both sides of our political culture deem fundamental. + +We saw a glimpse of this bipartisan outrage in the early summer of 2003. As the FCC considered changes in media ownership rules that would relax limits on media concentration, an extraordinary coalition generated more than 700,000 letters to the FCC opposing the change. As William Safire described marching "uncomfortably alongside CodePink Women for Peace and the National Rifle Association, between liberal Olympia Snowe and conservative Ted Stevens," he formulated perhaps most simply just what was at stake: the concentration of power. And as he asked, +={ power, concentration of +2 } + +_1 Does that sound unconservative? Not to me. The concentration of power - political, corporate, media, cultural - should be anathema to conservatives. The diffusion of power through local control, thereby encouraging individual participation, is the essence of federalism and the greatest expression of democracy."~{ William Safire, "The Great Media Gulp," /{New York Times,}/ 22 May 2003. }~ + +This idea is an element of the argument of /{Free Culture}/, though my focus is not just on the concentration of power produced by concentrations in ownership, but more importantly, if because less visibly, on the concentration of power produced by a radical change in the effective scope of the law. The law is changing; that change is altering the way our culture gets made; that change should worry you - whether or not you care about the Internet, and whether you're on Safire's left or on his right. + +!_ The inspiration +for the title and for much of the argument of this book comes from the work of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. Indeed, as I reread Stallman's own work, especially the essays in /{Free Software, Free Society}/, I realize that all of the theoretical insights I develop here are insights Stallman described decades ago. One could thus well argue that this work is "merely" derivative. + +I accept that criticism, if indeed it is a criticism. The work of a lawyer is always derivative, and I mean to do nothing more in this book than to remind a culture about a tradition that has always been its own. Like Stallman, I defend that tradition on the basis of values. Like Stallman, I believe those are the values of freedom. And like Stallman, I believe those are values of our past that will need to be defended in our future. A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. + +Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. + +Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is against that extremism that this book is written. + +:B~ INTRODUCTION + +1~intro [Intro]-# + +!_ On December 17, 1903, +on a windy North Carolina beach for just shy of one hundred seconds, the Wright brothers demonstrated that a heavier-than-air, self- propelled vehicle could fly. The moment was electric and its importance widely understood. Almost immediately, there was an explosion of interest in this newfound technology of manned flight, and a gaggle of innovators began to build upon it. +={ Wright brothers +1 } + +At the time the Wright brothers invented the airplane, American law held that a property owner presumptively owned not just the surface of his land, but all the land below, down to the center of the earth, and all the space above, to "an indefinite extent, upwards."~{ St. George Tucker, /{Blackstone's Commentaries}/ 3 (South Hackensack, N.J.: Rothman Reprints, 1969), 18. }~ For many years, scholars had puzzled about how best to interpret the idea that rights in land ran to the heavens. Did that mean that you owned the stars? Could you prosecute geese for their willful and regular trespass? +={ air traffic, land ownership vs. +8 ; + land ownership, air traffic and +8 ; + property rights : + air traffic vs. +8 +} + +Then came airplanes, and for the first time, this principle of American law - deep within the foundations of our tradition, and acknowledged by the most important legal thinkers of our past - mattered. If my land reaches to the heavens, what happens when United flies over my field? Do I have the right to banish it from my property? Am I allowed to enter into an exclusive license with Delta Airlines? Could we set up an auction to decide how much these rights are worth? + +In 1945, these questions became a federal case. When North Carolina farmers Thomas Lee and Tinie Causby started losing chickens because of low-flying military aircraft (the terrified chickens apparently flew into the barn walls and died), the Causbys filed a lawsuit saying that the government was trespassing on their land. The airplanes, of course, never touched the surface of the Causbys' land. But if, as Blackstone, Kent, and Coke had said, their land reached to "an indefinite extent, upwards," then the government was trespassing on their property, and the Causbys wanted it to stop. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee ; + Causby, Tinie +} + +The Supreme Court agreed to hear the Causbys' case. Congress had declared the airways public, but if one's property really extended to the heavens, then Congress's declaration could well have been an unconstitutional "taking" of property without compensation. The Court acknowledged that "it is ancient doctrine that common law ownership of the land extended to the periphery of the universe." But Justice Douglas had no patience for ancient doctrine. In a single paragraph, hundreds of years of property law were erased. As he wrote for the Court, +={ Douglas, William O. +2 ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + on airspace vs. land rights +4 +} + +_1 [The] doctrine has no place in the modern world. The air is a public highway, as Congress has declared. Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense revolts at the idea. To recognize such private claims to the airspace would clog these highways, seriously interfere with their control and development in the public interest, and transfer into private ownership that to which only the public has a just claim."~{ United States v. Causby, U.S. 328 (1946): 256, 261. The Court did find that there could be a "taking" if the government's use of its land effectively destroyed the value of the Causbys' land. This example was suggested to me by Keith Aoki's wonderful piece, "(Intellectual) Property and Sovereignty: Notes Toward a Cultural Geography of Authorship," /{Stanford Law Review}/ 48 (1996): 1293, 1333. See also Paul Goldstein, /{Real Property}/ (Mineola, N.Y.: Foundation Press, 1984), 1112-13. }~ + +"Common sense revolts at the idea." + +This is how the law usually works. Not often this abruptly or impatiently, but eventually, this is how it works. It was Douglas's style not to dither. Other justices would have blathered on for pages to reach the conclusion that Douglas holds in a single line: "Common sense revolts at the idea." But whether it takes pages or a few words, it is the special genius of a common law system, as ours is, that the law adjusts to the technologies of the time. And as it adjusts, it changes. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age crumble in another. + +Or at least, this is how things happen when there's no one powerful on the other side of the change. The Causbys were just farmers. And though there were no doubt many like them who were upset by the growing traffic in the air (though one hopes not many chickens flew themselves into walls), the Causbys of the world would find it very hard to unite and stop the idea, and the technology, that the Wright brothers had birthed. The Wright brothers spat airplanes into the technological meme pool; the idea then spread like a virus in a chicken coop; farmers like the Causbys found themselves surrounded by "what seemed reasonable" given the technology that the Wrights had produced. They could stand on their farms, dead chickens in hand, and shake their fists at these newfangled technologies all they wanted. They could call their representatives or even file a lawsuit. But in the end, the force of what seems "obvious" to everyone else - the power of "common sense" - would prevail. Their "private interest" would not be allowed to defeat an obvious public gain. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee ; + Causby, Tinie ; + Wright brothers +} + +!_ Edwin Howard Armstrong +is one of America's forgotten inventor geniuses. He came to the great American inventor scene just after the titans Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. But his work in the area of radio technology was perhaps the most important of any single inventor in the first fifty years of radio. He was better educated than Michael Faraday, who as a bookbinder's apprentice had discovered electric induction in 1831. But he had the same intuition about how the world of radio worked, and on at least three occasions, Armstrong invented profoundly important technologies that advanced our understanding of radio. +={ Armstrong, Edwin Howard +14 ; + Bell, Alexander Graham ; + Edison, Thomas ; + Faraday, Michael ; + radio : + FM spectrum of +12 +} + +On the day after Christmas, 1933, four patents were issued to Armstrong for his most significant invention - FM radio. Until then, consumer radio had been amplitude-modulated (AM) radio. The theorists of the day had said that frequency-modulated (FM) radio could never work. They were right about FM radio in a narrow band of spectrum. But Armstrong discovered that frequency-modulated radio in a wide band of spectrum would deliver an astonishing fidelity of sound, with much less transmitter power and static. + +On November 5, 1935, he demonstrated the technology at a meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers at the Empire State Building in New York City. He tuned his radio dial across a range of AM stations, until the radio locked on a broadcast that he had arranged from seventeen miles away. The radio fell totally silent, as if dead, and then with a clarity no one else in that room had ever heard from an electrical device, it produced the sound of an announcer's voice: "This is amateur station W2AG at Yonkers, New York, operating on frequency modulation at two and a half meters." + +The audience was hearing something no one had thought possible: + +_1 A glass of water was poured before the microphone in Yonkers; it sounded like a glass of water being poured. ... A paper was crumpled and torn; it sounded like paper and not like a crackling forest fire. ... Sousa marches were played from records and a piano solo and guitar number were performed. ... The music was projected with a live-ness rarely if ever heard before from a radio 'music box.' "~{ Lawrence Lessing, /{Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong}/ (Philadelphia: J. B. Lipincott Company, 1956), 209. }~ + +As our own common sense tells us, Armstrong had discovered a vastly superior radio technology. But at the time of his invention, Armstrong was working for RCA. RCA was the dominant player in the then dominant AM radio market. By 1935, there were a thousand radio stations across the United States, but the stations in large cities were all owned by a handful of networks. +={ RCA +9 ; + media : + ownership concentration in +9 +} + +RCA's president, David Sarnoff, a friend of Armstrong's, was eager that Armstrong discover a way to remove static from AM radio. So Sarnoff was quite excited when Armstrong told him he had a device that removed static from "radio." But when Armstrong demonstrated his invention, Sarnoff was not pleased. +={ Sarnoff, David } + +_1 I thought Armstrong would invent some kind of a filter to remove static from our AM radio. I didn't think he'd start a revolution - start up a whole damn new industry to compete with RCA."~{ See "Saints: The Heroes and Geniuses of the Electronic Era," First Electronic Church of America, at www.webstationone.com/fecha, available at link #1. }~ + +Armstrong's invention threatened RCA's AM empire, so the company launched a campaign to smother FM radio. While FM may have been a superior technology, Sarnoff was a superior tactician. As one author described, +={ FM radio +5 } + +_1 The forces for FM, largely engineering, could not overcome the weight of strategy devised by the sales, patent, and legal offices to subdue this threat to corporate position. For FM, if allowed to develop unrestrained, posed ... a complete reordering of radio power ... and the eventual overthrow of the carefully restricted AM system on which RCA had grown to power."~{ Lessing, 226. }~ + +RCA at first kept the technology in house, insisting that further tests were needed. When, after two years of testing, Armstrong grew impatient, RCA began to use its power with the government to stall FM radio's deployment generally. In 1936, RCA hired the former head of the FCC and assigned him the task of assuring that the FCC assign spectrum in a way that would castrate FM - principally by moving FM radio to a different band of spectrum. At first, these efforts failed. But when Armstrong and the nation were distracted by World War II, RCA's work began to be more successful. Soon after the war ended, the FCC announced a set of policies that would have one clear effect: FM radio would be crippled. As Lawrence Lessing described it, +={ FCC : + on FM radio +2 ; + Lessig, Lawrence +1 +} + +_1 The series of body blows that FM radio received right after the war, in a series of rulings manipulated through the FCC by the big radio interests, were almost incredible in their force and deviousness."~{ Lessing, 256. }~ + +To make room in the spectrum for RCA's latest gamble, television, FM radio users were to be moved to a totally new spectrum band. The power of FM radio stations was also cut, meaning FM could no longer be used to beam programs from one part of the country to another. (This change was strongly supported by AT&T, because the loss of FM relaying stations would mean radio stations would have to buy wired links from AT&T.) The spread of FM radio was thus choked, at least temporarily. +={ AT&T } + +Armstrong resisted RCA's efforts. In response, RCA resisted Armstrong's patents. After incorporating FM technology into the emerging standard for television, RCA declared the patents invalid - baselessly, and almost fifteen years after they were issued. It thus refused to pay him royalties. For six years, Armstrong fought an expensive war of litigation to defend the patents. Finally, just as the patents expired, RCA offered a settlement so low that it would not even cover Armstrong's lawyers' fees. Defeated, broken, and now broke, in 1954 Armstrong wrote a short note to his wife and then stepped out of a thirteenth- story window to his death. + +This is how the law sometimes works. Not often this tragically, and rarely with heroic drama, but sometimes, this is how it works. From the beginning, government and government agencies have been subject to capture. They are more likely captured when a powerful interest is threatened by either a legal or technical change. That powerful interest too often exerts its influence within the government to get the government to protect it. The rhetoric of this protection is of course always public spirited; the reality is something different. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age, but that, left to themselves, would crumble in another, are sustained through this subtle corruption of our political process. RCA had what the Causbys did not: the power to stifle the effect of technological change. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee ; + Causby, Tinie +} + +!_ There's no +single inventor of the Internet. Nor is there any good date upon which to mark its birth. Yet in a very short time, the Internet has become part of ordinary American life. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 58 percent of Americans had access to the Internet in 2002, up from 49 percent two years before.~{ Amanda Lenhart, "The Ever-Shifting Internet Population: A New Look at Internet Access and the Digital Divide," Pew Internet and American Life Project, 15 April 2003: 6, available at link #2. }~ That number could well exceed two thirds of the nation by the end of 2004. +={ Internet : + development of +2 +} + +As the Internet has been integrated into ordinary life, it has changed things. Some of these changes are technical - the Internet has made communication faster, it has lowered the cost of gathering data, and so on. These technical changes are not the focus of this book. They are important. They are not well understood. But they are the sort of thing that would simply go away if we all just switched the Internet off. They don't affect people who don't use the Internet, or at least they don't affect them directly. They are the proper subject of a book about the Internet. But this is not a book about the Internet. + +Instead, this book is about an effect of the Internet beyond the Internet itself: an effect upon how culture is made. My claim is that the Internet has induced an important and unrecognized change in that process. That change will radically transform a tradition that is as old as the Republic itself. Most, if they recognized this change, would reject it. Yet most don't even see the change that the Internet has introduced. + +We can glimpse a sense of this change by distinguishing between commercial and noncommercial culture, and by mapping the law's regulation of each. By "commercial culture" I mean that part of our culture that is produced and sold or produced to be sold. By "noncommercial culture" I mean all the rest. When old men sat around parks or on street corners telling stories that kids and others consumed, that was noncommercial culture. When Noah Webster published his "Reader," or Joel Barlow his poetry, that was commercial culture. +={ Barlow, Joel ; + culture : + commercial vs. noncommercial +6 ; + Webster, Noah +} + +At the beginning of our history, and for just about the whole of our tradition, noncommercial culture was essentially unregulated. Of course, if your stories were lewd, or if your song disturbed the peace, then the law might intervene. But the law was never directly concerned with the creation or spread of this form of culture, and it left this culture "free." The ordinary ways in which ordinary individuals shared and transformed their culture - telling stories, reenacting scenes from plays or TV, participating in fan clubs, sharing music, making tapes - were left alone by the law. + +The focus of the law was on commercial creativity. At first slightly, then quite extensively, the law protected the incentives of creators by granting them exclusive rights to their creative work, so that they could sell those exclusive rights in a commercial marketplace.~{ This is not the only purpose of copyright, though it is the overwhelmingly primary purpose of the copyright established in the federal constitution. State copyright law historically protected not just the commercial interest in publication, but also a privacy interest. By granting authors the exclusive right to first publication, state copyright law gave authors the power to control the spread of facts about them. See Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy," /{Harvard Law Review}/ 4 (1890): 193, 198-200. }~ This is also, of course, an important part of creativity and culture, and it has become an increasingly important part in America. But in no sense was it dominant within our tradition. It was instead just one part, a controlled part, balanced with the free. +={ Copyright infringement lawsuits : + commercial creativity as primary purpose of +2 +} + +This rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased.~{ 9. See Jessica Litman, /{Digital Copyright}/ (New York: Prometheus Books, 2001), ch. 13. }~ The Internet has set the stage for this erasure and, pushed by big media, the law has now affected it. For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history - between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission - has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture. +={ free culture : + permission culture vs. ; + permission culture : + free culture vs. +} + +This change gets justified as necessary to protect commercial creativity. And indeed, protectionism is precisely its motivation. But the protectionism that justifies the changes that I will describe below is not the limited and balanced sort that has defined the law in the past. This is not a protectionism to protect artists. It is instead a protectionism to protect certain forms of business. Corporations threatened by the potential of the Internet to change the way both commercial and noncommercial culture are made and shared have united to induce lawmakers to use the law to protect them. It is the story of RCA and Armstrong; it is the dream of the Causbys. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee ; + Causby, Tinie ; + protection of artists vs. business interests +} + +For the Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for many to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries. That power has changed the marketplace for making and cultivating culture generally, and that change in turn threatens established content industries. The Internet is thus to the industries that built and distributed content in the twentieth century what FM radio was to AM radio, or what the truck was to the railroad industry of the nineteenth century: the beginning of the end, or at least a substantial transformation. Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and cultivating culture; that market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity; and depending upon a few important factors, those creators could earn more on average from this system than creators do today - all so long as the RCAs of our day don't use the law to protect themselves against this competition. + +Yet, as I argue in the pages that follow, that is precisely what is happening in our culture today. These modern-day equivalents of the early twentieth-century radio or nineteenth-century railroads are using their power to get the law to protect them against this new, more efficient, more vibrant technology for building culture. They are succeeding in their plan to remake the Internet before the Internet remakes them. + +It doesn't seem this way to many. The battles over copyright and the Internet seem remote to most. To the few who follow them, they seem mainly about a much simpler brace of questions - whether "piracy" will be permitted, and whether "property" will be protected. The "war" that has been waged against the technologies of the Internet - what Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president Jack Valenti calls his "own terrorist war"~{ Amy Harmon, "Black Hawk Download: Moving Beyond Music, Pirates Use New Tools to Turn the Net into an Illicit Video Club," /{New York Times,}/ 17 January 2002. }~ - has been framed as a battle about the rule of law and respect for property. To know which side to take in this war, most think that we need only decide whether we're for property or against it. +={ Valenti, Jack : + on creative property rights +} + +If those really were the choices, then I would be with Jack Valenti and the content industry. I, too, am a believer in property, and especially in the importance of what Mr. Valenti nicely calls "creative property." I believe that "piracy" is wrong, and that the law, properly tuned, should punish "piracy," whether on or off the Internet. + +But those simple beliefs mask a much more fundamental question and a much more dramatic change. My fear is that unless we come to see this change, the war to rid the world of Internet "pirates" will also rid our culture of values that have been integral to our tradition from the start. + +These values built a tradition that, for at least the first 180 years of our Republic, guaranteed creators the right to build freely upon their past, and protected creators and innovators from either state or private control. The First Amendment protected creators against state control. And as Professor Neil Netanel powerfully argues,~{ Neil W. Netanel, "Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society," /{Yale Law Journal}/ 106 (1996): 283. }~ copyright law, properly balanced, protected creators against private control. Our tradition was thus neither Soviet nor the tradition of patrons. It instead carved out a wide berth within which creators could cultivate and extend our culture. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + Copyright law : + as protection of creators ; + First Amendment ; + Netanel, Neil Weinstock +} + +Yet the law's response to the Internet, when tied to changes in the technology of the Internet itself, has massively increased the effective regulation of creativity in America. To build upon or critique the culture around us one must ask, Oliver Twist - like, for permission first. Permission is, of course, often granted - but it is not often granted to the critical or the independent. We have built a kind of cultural nobility; those within the noble class live easily; those outside it don't. But it is nobility of any form that is alien to our tradition. + +The story that follows is about this war. Is it not about the "centrality of technology" to ordinary life. I don't believe in gods, digital or otherwise. Nor is it an effort to demonize any individual or group, for neither do I believe in a devil, corporate or otherwise. It is not a morality tale. Nor is it a call to jihad against an industry. + +It is instead an effort to understand a hopelessly destructive war inspired by the technologies of the Internet but reaching far beyond its code. And by understanding this battle, it is an effort to map peace. There is no good reason for the current struggle around Internet technologies to continue. There will be great harm to our tradition and culture if it is allowed to continue unchecked. We must come to understand the source of this war. We must resolve it soon. + +!_ Like the Causbys' +battle, this war is, in part, about "property." The property of this war is not as tangible as the Causbys', and no innocent chicken has yet to lose its life. Yet the ideas surrounding this "property" are as obvious to most as the Causbys' claim about the sacredness of their farm was to them. We are the Causbys. Most of us take for granted the extraordinarily powerful claims that the owners of "intellectual property" now assert. Most of us, like the Causbys, treat these claims as obvious. And hence we, like the Causbys, object when a new technology interferes with this property. It is as plain to us as it was to them that the new technologies of the Internet are "trespassing" upon legitimate claims of "property." It is as plain to us as it was to them that the law should intervene to stop this trespass. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee +1 ; + Causby, Tinie +1 ; + intellectual property rights +8 +} + +And thus, when geeks and technologists defend their Armstrong or Wright brothers technology, most of us are simply unsympathetic. Common sense does not revolt. Unlike in the case of the unlucky Causbys, common sense is on the side of the property owners in this war. Unlike the lucky Wright brothers, the Internet has not inspired a revolution on its side. +={ Wright brothers } + +My hope is to push this common sense along. I have become increasingly amazed by the power of this idea of intellectual property and, more importantly, its power to disable critical thought by policy makers and citizens. There has never been a time in our history when more of our "culture" was as "owned" as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the /{uses}/ of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now. +={ power, concentration of } + +The puzzle is, Why? + +Is it because we have come to understand a truth about the value and importance of absolute property over ideas and culture? Is it because we have discovered that our tradition of rejecting such an absolute claim was wrong? + +Or is it because the idea of absolute property over ideas and culture benefits the RCAs of our time and fits our own unreflective intuitions? + +Is the radical shift away from our tradition of free culture an instance of America correcting a mistake from its past, as we did after a bloody war with slavery, and as we are slowly doing with inequality? Or is the radical shift away from our tradition of free culture yet another example of a political system captured by a few powerful special interests? + +Does common sense lead to the extremes on this question because common sense actually believes in these extremes? Or does common sense stand silent in the face of these extremes because, as with Armstrong versus RCA, the more powerful side has ensured that it has the more powerful view? + +I don't mean to be mysterious. My own views are resolved. I believe it was right for common sense to revolt against the extremism of the Causbys. I believe it would be right for common sense to revolt against the extreme claims made today on behalf of "intellectual property." What the law demands today is increasingly as silly as a sheriff arresting an airplane for trespass. But the consequences of this silliness will be much more profound. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee ; + Causby, Tinie +} + +!_ The struggle +that rages just now centers on two ideas: "piracy" and "property." My aim in this book's next two parts is to explore these two ideas. + +My method is not the usual method of an academic. I don't want to plunge you into a complex argument, buttressed with references to obscure French theorists' however natural that is for the weird sort we academics have become. Instead I begin in each part with a collection of stories that set a context within which these apparently simple ideas can be more fully understood. + +The two sections set up the core claim of this book: that while the Internet has indeed produced something fantastic and new, our government, pushed by big media to respond to this "something new," is destroying something very old. Rather than understanding the changes the Internet might permit, and rather than taking time to let "common sense" resolve how best to respond, we are allowing those most threatened by the changes to use their power to change the law - and more importantly, to use their power to change something fundamental about who we have always been. + +We allow this, I believe, not because it is right, and not because most of us really believe in these changes. We allow it because the interests most threatened are among the most powerful players in our depressingly compromised process of making law. This book is the story of one more consequence of this form of corruption - a consequence to which most of us remain oblivious. + +:B~ "PIRACY" + +1~intro_piracy [Intro]-# + +!_ Since the inception +of the law regulating creative property, there has been a war against "piracy." The precise contours of this concept, "piracy," are hard to sketch, but the animating injustice is easy to capture. As Lord Mansfield wrote in a case that extended the reach of English copyright law to include sheet music, +={ Copyright law : + English ; + Mansfield, William Murray, Lord ; + music publishing ; + sheet music +} + +_1 A person may use the copy by playing it, but he has no right to rob the author of the profit, by multiplying copies and disposing of them for his own use."~{ /{Bach v. Longman,}/ 98 Eng. Rep. 1274 (1777) (Mansfield). }~ + +Today we are in the middle of another "war" against "piracy." The Internet has provoked this war. The Internet makes possible the efficient spread of content. Peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing is among the most efficient of the efficient technologies the Internet enables. Using distributed intelligence, p2p systems facilitate the easy spread of content in a way unimagined a generation ago. +={ Internet : + efficient content distribution on ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + efficiency of +1 +} + +_{This}_ efficiency does not respect the traditional lines of copyright. The network doesn't discriminate between the sharing of copyrighted and uncopyrighted content. Thus has there been a vast amount of sharing of copyrighted content. That sharing in turn has excited the war, as copyright owners fear the sharing will "rob the author of the profit." + +The warriors have turned to the courts, to the legislatures, and increasingly to technology to defend their "property" against this "piracy." A generation of Americans, the warriors warn, is being raised to believe that "property" should be "free." Forget tattoos, never mind body piercing - our kids are becoming thieves! + +There's no doubt that "piracy" is wrong, and that pirates should be punished. But before we summon the executioners, we should put this notion of "piracy" in some context. For as the concept is increasingly used, at its core is an extraordinary idea that is almost certainly wrong. + +The idea goes something like this: + +_1 Creative work has value; whenever I use, or take, or build upon the creative work of others, I am taking from them something of value. Whenever I take something of value from someone else, I should have their permission. The taking of something of value from someone else without permission is wrong. It is a form of piracy." + +This view runs deep within the current debates. It is what NYU law professor Rochelle Dreyfuss criticizes as the "if value, then right" theory of creative property~{ See Rochelle Dreyfuss, "Expressive Genericity: Trademarks as Language in the Pepsi Generation," /{Notre Dame Law Review}/ 65 (1990): 397. }~ - if there is value, then someone must have a right to that value. It is the perspective that led a composers' rights organization, ASCAP, to sue the Girl Scouts for failing to pay for the songs that girls sang around Girl Scout campfires.~{ Lisa Bannon, "The Birds May Sing, but Campers Can't Unless They Pay Up," /{Wall Street Journal,}/ 21 August 1996, available at link #3; Jonathan Zittrain, "Calling Off the Copyright War: In Battle of Property vs. Free Speech, No One Wins," /{Boston Globe,}/ 24 November 2002. }~ There was "value" (the songs) so there must have been a "right" - even against the Girl Scouts. +={ ASCAP ; + Dreyfus, Rochelle ; + Girl Scouts ; + creative property : + "if value, then right" theory of +1 ; + if value, then right, theory +1 +} + +% note bad sort: ={"if value, then right" theory} + +This idea is certainly a possible understanding of how creative property should work. It might well be a possible design for a system of law protecting creative property. But the "if value, then right" theory of creative property has never been America's theory of creative property. It has never taken hold within our law. + +Instead, in our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the groundwork for a richly creative society but remains subservient to the value of creativity. The current debate has this turned around. We have become so concerned with protecting the instrument that we are losing sight of the value. +={ copyright law : + on republishing vs. transformation of original work +1 ; + creativity : + legal restrictions on +3 +} + +The source of this confusion is a distinction that the law no longer takes care to draw - the distinction between republishing someone's work on the one hand and building upon or transforming that work on the other. Copyright law at its birth had only publishing as its concern; copyright law today regulates both. + +Before the technologies of the Internet, this conflation didn't matter all that much. The technologies of publishing were expensive; that meant the vast majority of publishing was commercial. Commercial entities could bear the burden of the law - even the burden of the Byzantine complexity that copyright law has become. It was just one more expense of doing business. + +But with the birth of the Internet, this natural limit to the reach of the law has disappeared. The law controls not just the creativity of commercial creators but effectively that of anyone. Although that expansion would not matter much if copyright law regulated only "copying," when the law regulates as broadly and obscurely as it does, the extension matters a lot. The burden of this law now vastly outweighs any original benefit - certainly as it affects noncommercial creativity, and increasingly as it affects commercial creativity as well. Thus, as we'll see more clearly in the chapters below, the law's role is less and less to support creativity, and more and more to protect certain industries against competition. Just at the time digital technology could unleash an extraordinary range of commercial and noncommercial creativity, the law burdens this creativity with insanely complex and vague rules and with the threat of obscenely severe penalties. We may be seeing, as Richard Florida writes, the "Rise of the Creative Class."~{ In /{The Rise of the Creative Class}/ (New York: Basic Books, 2002), Richard Florida documents a shift in the nature of labor toward a labor of creativity. His work, however, doesn't directly address the legal conditions under which that creativity is enabled or stifled. I certainly agree with him about the importance and significance of this change, but I also believe the conditions under which it will be enabled are much more tenuous. }~ Unfortunately, we are also seeing an extraordinary rise of regulation of this creative class. +={ copyright law : + creativity impeded by ; + Florida, Richard ; + Rise of the Creative Class, The (Florida) +} + +These burdens make no sense in our tradition. We should begin by understanding that tradition a bit more and by placing in their proper context the current battles about behavior labeled "piracy." + +1~ Chapter One: Creators + +!_ In 1928, +a cartoon character was born. An early Mickey Mouse made his debut in May of that year, in a silent flop called /{Plane Crazy}/. In November, in New York City's Colony Theater, in the first widely distributed cartoon synchronized with sound, /{Steamboat Willie}/ brought to life the character that would become Mickey Mouse. +={ animated cartoons +15 ; + cartoon films +16 ; + films : + animated +15 ; + Steamboat Willie +9 ; + Mikey Mouse +9 +} + +Synchronized sound had been introduced to film a year earlier in the movie /{The Jazz Singer}/. That success led Walt Disney to copy the technique and mix sound with cartoons. No one knew whether it would work or, if it did work, whether it would win an audience. But when Disney ran a test in the summer of 1928, the results were unambiguous. As Disney describes that first experiment, +={ Disney, Walt +5 } + +_1 A couple of my boys could read music, and one of them could play a mouth organ. We put them in a room where they could not see the screen and arranged to pipe their sound into the room where our wives and friends were going to see the picture. + +_1 The boys worked from a music and sound-effects score. After several false starts, sound and action got off with the gun. The mouth organist played the tune, the rest of us in the sound department bammed tin pans and blew slide whistles on the beat. The synchronization was pretty close. + +_1 The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric. They responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!"~{ Leonard Maltin, /{Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons}/ (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 34-35. }~ + +Disney's then partner, and one of animation's most extraordinary talents, Ub Iwerks, put it more strongly: "I have never been so thrilled in my life. Nothing since has ever equaled it." +={ Iwerks, Ub. } + +Disney had created something very new, based upon something relatively new. Synchronized sound brought life to a form of creativity that had rarely - except in Disney's hands - been anything more than filler for other films. Throughout animation's early history, it was Disney's invention that set the standard that others struggled to match. And quite often, Disney's great genius, his spark of creativity, was built upon the work of others. + +This much is familiar. What you might not know is that 1928 also marks another important transition. In that year, a comic (as opposed to cartoon) genius created his last independently produced silent film. That genius was Buster Keaton. The film was /{Steamboat Bill, Jr.}/ +={ Keaton, Buster +2 ; + Steamboat Bill, Jr. +2 +} + +Keaton was born into a vaudeville family in 1895. In the era of silent film, he had mastered using broad physical comedy as a way to spark uncontrollable laughter from his audience. Steamboat Bill, Jr. was a classic of this form, famous among film buffs for its incredible stunts. The film was classic Keaton - wildly popular and among the best of its genre. + +/{Steamboat Bill, Jr.}/ appeared before Disney's cartoon /{Steamboat Willie}/. The coincidence of titles is not coincidental. Steamboat Willie is a direct cartoon parody of Steamboat Bill,~{ I am grateful to David Gerstein and his careful history, described at link #4. According to Dave Smith of the Disney Archives, Disney paid royalties to use the music for five songs in /{Steamboat Willie:}/ "Steamboat Bill," "The Simpleton" (Delille), "Mischief Makers" (Carbonara), "Joyful Hurry No. 1" (Baron), and "Gawky Rube" (Lakay). A sixth song, "The Turkey in the Straw," was already in the public domain. Letter from David Smith to Harry Surden, 10 July 2003, on file with author. }~ and both are built upon a common song as a source. It is not just from the invention of synchronized sound in /{The Jazz Singer}/ that we get /{Steamboat Willie}/. It is also from Buster Keaton's invention of Steamboat Bill, Jr., itself inspired by the song "Steamboat Bill," that we get Steamboat Willie, and then from Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse. +={ derivative works : + piracy vs. +4 ; + piracy : + derivative work vs. +4 +} + +This "borrowing" was nothing unique, either for Disney or for the industry. Disney was always parroting the feature-length mainstream films of his day.~{ He was also a fan of the public domain. See Chris Sprigman, "The Mouse that Ate the Public Domain," Findlaw, 5 March 2002, at link #5. }~ So did many others. Early cartoons are filled with knockoffs - slight variations on winning themes; retellings of ancient stories. The key to success was the brilliance of the differences. With Disney, it was sound that gave his animation its spark. Later, it was the quality of his work relative to the production-line cartoons with which he competed. Yet these additions were built upon a base that was borrowed. Disney added to the work of others before him, creating something new out of something just barely old. +={ creativity : + by transforming previous works +3 ; + Disney, Inc. +6 +} + +Sometimes this borrowing was slight. Sometimes it was significant. Think about the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. If you're as oblivious as I was, you're likely to think that these tales are happy, sweet stories, appropriate for any child at bedtime. In fact, the Grimm fairy tales are, well, for us, grim. It is a rare and perhaps overly ambitious parent who would dare to read these bloody, moralistic stories to his or her child, at bedtime or anytime. +={ Grimm fairy tales +1 } + +Disney took these stories and retold them in a way that carried them into a new age. He animated the stories, with both characters and light. Without removing the elements of fear and danger altogether, he made funny what was dark and injected a genuine emotion of compassion where before there was fear. And not just with the work of the Brothers Grimm. Indeed, the catalog of Disney work drawing upon the work of others is astonishing when set together: /{Snow White}/ (1937), /{Fantasia}/ (1940), /{Pinocchio}/ (1940), /{Dumbo}/ (1941), /{Bambi}/ (1942), /{Song of the South}/ (1946), /{Cinderella}/ (1950), /{Alice in Wonderland}/ (1951), /{Robin Hood}/ (1952), /{Peter Pan}/ (1953), /{Lady and the Tramp}/ (1955), /{Mulan}/ (1998), /{Sleeping Beauty}/ (1959), /{101 Dalmatians}/ (1961), /{The Sword in the Stone}/ (1963), and /{The Jungle Book}/ (1967) - not to mention a recent example that we should perhaps quickly forget, /{Treasure Planet}/ (2003). In all of these cases, Disney (or Disney, Inc.) ripped creativity from the culture around him, mixed that creativity with his own extraordinary talent, and then burned that mix into the soul of his culture. Rip, mix, and burn. + +This is a kind of creativity. It is a creativity that we should remember and celebrate. There are some who would say that there is no creativity except this kind. We don't need to go that far to recognize its importance. We could call this "Disney creativity," though that would be a bit misleading. It is, more precisely, "Walt Disney creativity" - a form of expression and genius that builds upon the culture around us and makes it something different. + +In 1928, the culture that Disney was free to draw upon was relatively fresh. The public domain in 1928 was not very old and was therefore quite vibrant. The average term of copyright was just around thirty years - for that minority of creative work that was in fact copy-righted.~{ Until 1976, copyright law granted an author the possibility of two terms: an initial term and a renewal term. I have calculated the "average" term by determining the weighted average of total registrations for any particular year, and the proportion renewing. Thus, if 100 copyrights are registered in year 1, and only 15 are renewed, and the renewal term is 28 years, then the average term is 32.2 years. For the renewal data and other relevant data, see the Web site associated with this book, available at link #6. }~ That means that for thirty years, on average, the authors or copyright holders of a creative work had an "exclusive right" to control certain uses of the work. To use this copyrighted work in limited ways required the permission of the copyright owner. +={ copyright : + duration of +2 ; + public domain : + defined +2 | traditional term for conversion to +2 +} + +At the end of a copyright term, a work passes into the public domain. No permission is then needed to draw upon or use that work. No permission and, hence, no lawyers. The public domain is a "lawyer-free zone." Thus, most of the content from the nineteenth century was free for Disney to use and build upon in 1928. It was free for anyone - whether connected or not, whether rich or not, whether approved or not - to use and build upon. + +This is the ways things always were - until quite recently. For most of our history, the public domain was just over the horizon. From 1790 until 1978, the average copyright term was never more than thirty-two years, meaning that most culture just a generation and a half old was free for anyone to build upon without the permission of anyone else. Today's equivalent would be for creative work from the 1960s and 1970s to now be free for the next Walt Disney to build upon without permission. Yet today, the public domain is presumptive only for content from before the Great Depression. + +!_ Of course, +Walt Disney had no monopoly on "Walt Disney creativity." Nor does America. The norm of free culture has, until recently, and except within totalitarian nations, been broadly exploited and quite universal. +={ Disney, Walt } + +Consider, for example, a form of creativity that seems strange to many Americans but that is inescapable within Japanese culture: /{manga}/, or comics. The Japanese are fanatics about comics. Some 40 percent of publications are comics, and 30 percent of publication revenue derives from comics. They are everywhere in Japanese society, at every magazine stand, carried by a large proportion of commuters on Japan's extraordinary system of public transportation. +={ comics, Japanese +8 ; + derivative works : + piracy vs. +18 ; + Japanese comics +8 ; + manga +8 ; + piracy : + derivative work vs. +18 +} + +Americans tend to look down upon this form of culture. That's an unattractive characteristic of ours. We're likely to misunderstand much about manga, because few of us have ever read anything close to the stories that these "graphic novels" tell. For the Japanese, manga cover every aspect of social life. For us, comics are "men in tights." And anyway, it's not as if the New York subways are filled with readers of Joyce or even Hemingway. People of different cultures distract themselves in different ways, the Japanese in this interestingly different way. + +But my purpose here is not to understand manga. It is to describe a variant on manga that from a lawyer's perspective is quite odd, but from a Disney perspective is quite familiar. + +This is the phenomenon of /{doujinshi}/. Doujinshi are also comics, but they are a kind of copycat comic. A rich ethic governs the creation of doujinshi. It is not doujinshi if it is /{just}/ a copy; the artist must make a contribution to the art he copies, by transforming it either subtly or significantly. A doujinshi comic can thus take a mainstream comic and develop it differently - with a different story line. Or the comic can keep the character in character but change its look slightly. There is no formula for what makes the doujinshi sufficiently "different." But they must be different if they are to be considered true doujinshi. Indeed, there are committees that review doujinshi for inclusion within shows and reject any copycat comic that is merely a copy. +={ creativity : + by transforming previous works +14 ; + doujinshi comics +8 +} + +These copycat comics are not a tiny part of the manga market. They are huge. More than 33,000 "circles" of creators from across Japan produce these bits of Walt Disney creativity. More than 450,000 Japanese come together twice a year, in the largest public gathering in the country, to exchange and sell them. This market exists in parallel to the mainstream commercial manga market. In some ways, it obviously competes with that market, but there is no sustained effort by those who control the commercial manga market to shut the doujinshi market down. It flourishes, despite the competition and despite the law. +={ Disney, Walt +1 } + +The most puzzling feature of the doujinshi market, for those trained in the law, at least, is that it is allowed to exist at all. Under Japanese copyright law, which in this respect (on paper) mirrors American copyright law, the doujinshi market is an illegal one. Doujinshi are plainly "derivative works." There is no general practice by doujinshi artists of securing the permission of the manga creators. Instead, the practice is simply to take and modify the creations of others, as Walt Disney did with /{Steamboat Bill, Jr}/. Under both Japanese and American law, that "taking" without the permission of the original copyright owner is illegal. It is an infringement of the original copyright to make a copy or a derivative work without the original copyright owner's permission. +={ copyright law : + Japanese +1 ; + Steamboat Bill, Jr. +} + +Yet this illegal market exists and indeed flourishes in Japan, and in the view of many, it is precisely because it exists that Japanese manga flourish. As American graphic novelist Judd Winick said to me, "The early days of comics in America are very much like what's going on in Japan now. ... American comics were born out of copying each other. ... That's how [the artists] learn to draw - by going into comic books and not tracing them, but looking at them and copying them" and building from them.~{ For an excellent history, see Scott McCloud, /{Reinventing Comics}/ (New York: Perennial, 2000). }~ +={ Winick, Judd +1 } + +American comics now are quite different, Winick explains, in part because of the legal difficulty of adapting comics the way doujinshi are allowed. Speaking of Superman, Winick told me, "there are these rules and you have to stick to them." There are things Superman "cannot" do. "As a creator, it's frustrating having to stick to some parameters which are fifty years old." +={ Superman comics } + +The norm in Japan mitigates this legal difficulty. Some say it is precisely the benefit accruing to the Japanese manga market that explains the mitigation. Temple University law professor Salil Mehra, for example, hypothesizes that the manga market accepts these technical violations because they spur the manga market to be more wealthy and productive. Everyone would be worse off if doujinshi were banned, so the law does not ban doujinshi.~{ See Salil K. Mehra, "Copyright and Comics in Japan: Does Law Explain Why All the Comics My Kid Watches Are Japanese Imports?" /{Rutgers Law Review}/ 55 (2002): 155, 182. "[T]here might be a collective economic rationality that would lead manga and anime artists to forgo bringing legal actions for infringement. One hypothesis is that all manga artists may be better off collectively if they set aside their individual self-interest and decide not to press their legal rights. This is essentially a prisoner's dilemma solved." }~ +={ copyright law : + Japanese +1 ; + comics, Japanese ; + Mehra, Salil +1 +} + +The problem with this story, however, as Mehra plainly acknowledges, is that the mechanism producing this laissez faire response is not clear. It may well be that the market as a whole is better off if doujinshi are permitted rather than banned, but that doesn't explain why individual copyright owners don't sue nonetheless. If the law has no general exception for doujinshi, and indeed in some cases individual manga artists have sued doujinshi artists, why is there not a more general pattern of blocking this "free taking" by the doujinshi culture? + +I spent four wonderful months in Japan, and I asked this question as often as I could. Perhaps the best account in the end was offered by a friend from a major Japanese law firm. "We don't have enough lawyers," he told me one afternoon. There "just aren't enough resources to prosecute cases like this." + +This is a theme to which we will return: that regulation by law is a function of both the words on the books and the costs of making those words have effect. For now, focus on the obvious question that is begged: Would Japan be better off with more lawyers? Would manga be richer if doujinshi artists were regularly prosecuted? Would the Japanese gain something important if they could end this practice of uncompensated sharing? Does piracy here hurt the victims of the piracy, or does it help them? Would lawyers fighting this piracy help their clients or hurt them? + +!_ Let's pause +for a moment. + +If you're like I was a decade ago, or like most people are when they first start thinking about these issues, then just about now you should be puzzled about something you hadn't thought through before. + +We live in a world that celebrates "property." I am one of those celebrants. I believe in the value of property in general, and I also believe in the value of that weird form of property that lawyers call "intellectual property."~{ The term /{intellectual property}/ is of relatively recent origin. See Siva Vaidhyanathan, /{Copyrights and Copywrongs,}/ 11 (New York: New York University Press, 2001). See also Lawrence Lessig, /{The Future of Ideas}/ (New York: Random House, 2001), 293 n. 26. The term accurately describes a set of "property" rights - copyright, patents, trademark, and trade-secret - but the nature of those rights is very different. }~ A large, diverse society cannot survive without property; a large, diverse, and modern society cannot flourish without intellectual property. + +But it takes just a second's reflection to realize that there is plenty of value out there that "property" doesn't capture. I don't mean "money can't buy you love," but rather, value that is plainly part of a process of production, including commercial as well as noncommercial production. If Disney animators had stolen a set of pencils to draw Steamboat Willie, we'd have no hesitation in condemning that taking as wrong - even though trivial, even if unnoticed. Yet there was nothing wrong, at least under the law of the day, with Disney's taking from Buster Keaton or from the Brothers Grimm. There was nothing wrong with the taking from Keaton because Disney's use would have been considered "fair." There was nothing wrong with the taking from the Grimms because the Grimms' work was in the public domain. +={ Disney, Walt +5 ; + Grimm fairy tales +1 ; + Keaton, Buster } + +Thus, even though the things that Disney took - or more generally, the things taken by anyone exercising Walt Disney creativity - are valuable, our tradition does not treat those takings as wrong. Some things remain free for the taking within a free culture, and that freedom is good. +={ free culture : + derivative works based on +6 +} + +The same with the doujinshi culture. If a doujinshi artist broke into a publisher's office and ran off with a thousand copies of his latest work - or even one copy - without paying, we'd have no hesitation in saying the artist was wrong. In addition to having trespassed, he would have stolen something of value. The law bans that stealing in whatever form, whether large or small. +={ copyright law : + Japanese +1 ; + comics, Japanese ; + doujinshi comics +1 ; + Japanese comics +1 ; + manga +1 +} + +Yet there is an obvious reluctance, even among Japanese lawyers, to say that the copycat comic artists are "stealing." This form of Walt Disney creativity is seen as fair and right, even if lawyers in particular find it hard to say why. + +It's the same with a thousand examples that appear everywhere once you begin to look. Scientists build upon the work of other scientists without asking or paying for the privilege. ("Excuse me, Professor Einstein, but may I have permission to use your theory of relativity to show that you were wrong about quantum physics?") Acting companies perform adaptations of the works of Shakespeare without securing permission from anyone. (Does /{anyone}/ believe Shakespeare would be better spread within our culture if there were a central Shakespeare rights clearinghouse that all productions of Shakespeare must appeal to first?) And Hollywood goes through cycles with a certain kind of movie: five asteroid films in the late 1990s; two volcano disaster films in 1997. +={ Shakespeare, William } + +Creators here and everywhere are always and at all times building upon the creativity that went before and that surrounds them now. That building is always and everywhere at least partially done without permission and without compensating the original creator. No society, free or controlled, has ever demanded that every use be paid for or that permission for Walt Disney creativity must always be sought. Instead, every society has left a certain bit of its culture free for the taking - free societies more fully than unfree, perhaps, but all societies to some degree. + +The hard question is therefore not /{whether}/ a culture is free. All cultures are free to some degree. The hard question instead is "/{How}/ free is this culture?" How much, and how broadly, is the culture free for others to take and build upon? Is that freedom limited to party members? To members of the royal family? To the top ten corporations on the New York Stock Exchange? Or is that freedom spread broadly? To artists generally, whether affiliated with the Met or not? To musicians generally, whether white or not? To filmmakers generally, whether affiliated with a studio or not? + +Free cultures are cultures that leave a great deal open for others to build upon; unfree, or permission, cultures leave much less. Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so. + +1~ Chapter Two: "Mere Copyists" + +!_ In 1839, +Louis Daguerre invented the first practical technology for producing what we would call "photographs." Appropriately enough, they were called "daguerreotypes." The process was complicated and expensive, and the field was thus limited to professionals and a few zealous and wealthy amateurs. (There was even an American Daguerre Association that helped regulate the industry, as do all such associations, by keeping competition down so as to keep prices up.) +={ Daguerre, Louis ; + photography +13 +} + +Yet despite high prices, the demand for daguerreotypes was strong. This pushed inventors to find simpler and cheaper ways to make "automatic pictures." William Talbot soon discovered a process for making "negatives." But because the negatives were glass, and had to be kept wet, the process still remained expensive and cumbersome. In the 1870s, dry plates were developed, making it easier to separate the taking of a picture from its developing. These were still plates of glass, and thus it was still not a process within reach of most amateurs. +={ Talbot, William } + +The technological change that made mass photography possible didn't happen until 1888, and was the creation of a single man. George Eastman, himself an amateur photographer, was frustrated by the technology of photographs made with plates. In a flash of insight (so to speak), Eastman saw that if the film could be made to be flexible, it could be held on a single spindle. That roll could then be sent to a developer, driving the costs of photography down substantially. By lowering the costs, Eastman expected he could dramatically broaden the population of photographers. +={ Eastman, George +12 ; + camera technology +6 +} + +Eastman developed flexible, emulsion-coated paper film and placed rolls of it in small, simple cameras: the Kodak. The device was marketed on the basis of its simplicity. "You press the button and we do the rest."~{ Reese V. Jenkins, /{Images and Enterprise}/ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 112. }~ As he described in /{The Kodak Primer}/: +={ Kodak cameras +4 ; + Kodak Primer, The (Eastman) +1 +} + +_1 The principle of the Kodak system is the separation of the work that any person whomsoever can do in making a photograph, from the work that only an expert can do. ... We furnish anybody, man, woman or child, who has sufficient intelligence to point a box straight and press a button, with an instrument which altogether removes from the practice of photography the necessity for exceptional facilities or, in fact, any special knowledge of the art. It can be employed without preliminary study, without a darkroom and without chemicals."~{ Brian Coe, /{The Birth of Photography}/ (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1977), 53. }~ +={ Coe, Brian } + +For $25, anyone could make pictures. The camera came preloaded with film, and when it had been used, the camera was returned to an Eastman factory, where the film was developed. Over time, of course, the cost of the camera and the ease with which it could be used both improved. Roll film thus became the basis for the explosive growth of popular photography. Eastman's camera first went on sale in 1888; one year later, Kodak was printing more than six thousand negatives a day. From 1888 through 1909, while industrial production was rising by 4.7 percent, photographic equipment and material sales increased by 11 percent.~{ Jenkins, 177. }~ Eastman Kodak's sales during the same period experienced an average annual increase of over 17 percent.~{ Based on a chart in Jenkins, p. 178. }~ + +The real significance of Eastman's invention, however, was not economic. It was social. Professional photography gave individuals a glimpse of places they would never otherwise see. Amateur photography gave them the ability to record their own lives in a way they had never been able to do before. As author Brian Coe notes, "For the first time the snapshot album provided the man on the street with a permanent record of his family and its activities. ... For the first time in history there exists an authentic visual record of the appearance and activities of the common man made without [literary] interpretation or bias."~{ Coe, 58. }~ +={ Coe, Brian } + +In this way, the Kodak camera and film were technologies of expression. The pencil or paintbrush was also a technology of expression, of course. But it took years of training before they could be deployed by amateurs in any useful or effective way. With the Kodak, expression was possible much sooner and more simply. The barrier to expression was lowered. Snobs would sneer at its "quality"; professionals would discount it as irrelevant. But watch a child study how best to frame a picture and you get a sense of the experience of creativity that the Kodak enabled. Democratic tools gave ordinary people a way to express themselves more easily than any tools could have before. +={ democracy : + in technologies of expression ; + expression, technologies of : + democratic +} + +What was required for this technology to flourish? Obviously, Eastman's genius was an important part. But also important was the legal environment within which Eastman's invention grew. For early in the history of photography, there was a series of judicial decisions that could well have changed the course of photography substantially. Courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print whatever image he wanted. Their answer was no.~{ For illustrative cases, see, for example, /{Pavesich v. N.E. Life Ins. Co.,}/ 50 S.E. 68 (Ga. 1905); /{Foster-Milburn Co. v. Chinn,}/ 123090 S.W. 364, 366 (Ky. 1909); /{Corliss v. Walker,}/ 64 F. 280 (Mass. Dist. Ct. 1894). }~ +={ permissions : + photography exempted from +5 +} + +The arguments in favor of requiring permission will sound surprisingly familiar. The photographer was "taking" something from the person or building whose photograph he shot - pirating something of value. Some even thought he was taking the target's soul. Just as Disney was not free to take the pencils that his animators used to draw Mickey, so, too, should these photographers not be free to take images that they thought valuable. +={ Disney, Walt +1 ; + images, ownership of +4 +} + +On the other side was an argument that should be familiar, as well. Sure, there may be something of value being used. But citizens should have the right to capture at least those images that stand in public view. (Louis Brandeis, who would become a Supreme Court Justice, thought the rule should be different for images from private spaces.~{ Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy," /{Harvard Law Review}/ 4 (1890): 193. }~) It may be that this means that the photographer gets something for nothing. Just as Disney could take inspiration from /{Steamboat Bill, Jr.}/ or the Brothers Grimm, the photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source. +={ Brandeis, Louis ; + Steamboat Bill, Jr. ; + camera technology +2 +} + +Fortunately for Mr. Eastman, and for photography in general, these early decisions went in favor of the pirates. In general, no permission would be required before an image could be captured and shared with others. Instead, permission was presumed. Freedom was the default. (The law would eventually craft an exception for famous people: commercial photographers who snap pictures of famous people for commercial purposes have more restrictions than the rest of us. But in the ordinary case, the image can be captured without clearing the rights to do the capturing.~{ See Melville B. Nimmer, "The Right of Publicity," /{Law and Contemporary Problems}/ 19 (1954): 203; William L. Prosser, "Privacy," /{California Law Review}/ 48 (1960) 398-407; /{White v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc.,}/ 971 F. 2d 1395 (9th Cir. 1992), cert. denied, 508 U.S. 951 (1993). }~) + +We can only speculate about how photography would have developed had the law gone the other way. If the presumption had been against the photographer, then the photographer would have had to demonstrate permission. Perhaps Eastman Kodak would have had to demonstrate permission, too, before it developed the film upon which images were captured. After all, if permission were not granted, then Eastman Kodak would be benefiting from the "theft" committed by the photographer. Just as Napster benefited from the copyright infringements committed by Napster users, Kodak would be benefiting from the "image-right" infringement of its photographers. We could imagine the law then requiring that some form of permission be demonstrated before a company developed pictures. We could imagine a system developing to demonstrate that permission. +={ Kodak cameras ; + Napster +} + +But though we could imagine this system of permission, it would be very hard to see how photography could have flourished as it did if the requirement for permission had been built into the rules that govern it. Photography would have existed. It would have grown in importance over time. Professionals would have continued to use the technology as they did - since professionals could have more easily borne the burdens of the permission system. But the spread of photography to ordinary people would not have occurred. Nothing like that growth would have been realized. And certainly, nothing like that growth in a democratic technology of expression would have been realized. +={ camera technology +6 ; + democracy : + in technologies of expression ; + expression, technologies of : + democratic +} + +!_ If you drive +through San Francisco's Presidio, you might see two gaudy yellow school buses painted over with colorful and striking images, and the logo "Just Think!" in place of the name of a school. But there's little that's "just" cerebral in the projects that these busses enable. These buses are filled with technologies that teach kids to tinker with film. Not the film of Eastman. Not even the film of your VCR. Rather the "film" of digital cameras. Just Think! is a project that enables kids to make films, as a way to understand and critique the filmed culture that they find all around them. Each year, these busses travel to more than thirty schools and enable three hundred to five hundred children to learn something about media by doing something with media. By doing, they think. By tinkering, they learn. +={ digital cameras ; + Just Think! +2 +} + +These buses are not cheap, but the technology they carry is increasingly so. The cost of a high-quality digital video system has fallen dramatically. As one analyst puts it, "Five years ago, a good real-time digital video editing system cost $25,000. Today you can get professional quality for $595."~{ H. Edward Goldberg, "Essential Presentation Tools: Hardware and Software You Need to Create Digital Multimedia Presentations," cadalyst, 1 February 2002, available at link #7. }~ These buses are filled with technology that would have cost hundreds of thousands just ten years ago. And it is now feasible to imagine not just buses like this, but classrooms across the country where kids are learning more and more of something teachers call "media literacy." +={ education : + in media literacy +19 ; + media literacy +19 ; + expression, technologies of : + media literacy and +19 +} + +"Media literacy," as Dave Yanofsky, the executive director of Just Think!, puts it, "is the ability ... to understand, analyze, and deconstruct media images. Its aim is to make [kids] literate about the way media works, the way it's constructed, the way it's delivered, and the way people access it." +={ Yanofsky, Dave } + +This may seem like an odd way to think about "literacy." For most people, literacy is about reading and writing. Faulkner and Hemingway and noticing split infinitives are the things that "literate" people know about. + +Maybe. But in a world where children see on average 390 hours of television commercials per year, or between 20,000 and 45,000 commercials generally,~{ Judith Van Evra, /{Television and Child Development}/ (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990); "Findings on Family and TV Study," /{Denver Post,}/ 25 May 1997, B6. }~ it is increasingly important to understand the "grammar" of media. For just as there is a grammar for the written word, so, too, is there one for media. And just as kids learn how to write by writing lots of terrible prose, kids learn how to write media by constructing lots of (at least at first) terrible media. +={ advertising ; + commercials ; + television : + advertising on +} + +A growing field of academics and activists sees this form of literacy as crucial to the next generation of culture. For though anyone who has written understands how difficult writing is - how difficult it is to sequence the story, to keep a reader's attention, to craft language to be understandable - few of us have any real sense of how difficult media is. Or more fundamentally, few of us have a sense of how media works, how it holds an audience or leads it through a story, how it triggers emotion or builds suspense. + +It took filmmaking a generation before it could do these things well. But even then, the knowledge was in the filming, not in writing about the film. The skill came from experiencing the making of a film, not from reading a book about it. One learns to write by writing and then reflecting upon what one has written. One learns to write with images by making them and then reflecting upon what one has created. + +This grammar has changed as media has changed. When it was just film, as Elizabeth Daley, executive director of the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication and dean of the USC School of Cinema- Television, explained to me, the grammar was about "the placement of objects, color, ... rhythm, pacing, and texture."~{ Interview with Elizabeth Daley and Stephanie Barish, 13 December 2002. }~ But as computers open up an interactive space where a story is "played" as well as experienced, that grammar changes. The simple control of narrative is lost, and so other techniques are necessary. Author Michael Crichton had mastered the narrative of science fiction. But when he tried to design a computer game based on one of his works, it was a new craft he had to learn. How to lead people through a game without their feeling they have been led was not obvious, even to a wildly successful author.~{ See Scott Steinberg, "Crichton Gets Medieval on PCs," E!online, 4 November 2000, available at link #8; "Timeline," 22 November 2000, available at link #9. }~ +={ Daley, Elizabeth +6 ; + Crichton, Michael ; + computer games +} + +This skill is precisely the craft a filmmaker learns. As Daley describes, "people are very surprised about how they are led through a film. [I]t is perfectly constructed to keep you from seeing it, so you have no idea. If a filmmaker succeeds you do not know how you were led." If you know you were led through a film, the film has failed. + +Yet the push for an expanded literacy - one that goes beyond text to include audio and visual elements - is not about making better film directors. The aim is not to improve the profession of filmmaking at all. Instead, as Daley explained, + +_1 From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It's the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only." + +"Read-only." Passive recipients of culture produced elsewhere. Couch potatoes. Consumers. This is the world of media from the twentieth century. + +The twenty-first century could be different. This is the crucial point: It could be both read and write. Or at least reading and better understanding the craft of writing. Or best, reading and understanding the tools that enable the writing to lead or mislead. The aim of any literacy, and this literacy in particular, is to "empower people to choose the appropriate language for what they need to create or express."~{ Interview with Daley and Barish. }~ It is to enable students "to communicate in the language of the twenty-first century."~{ Ibid. }~ + +As with any language, this language comes more easily to some than to others. It doesn't necessarily come more easily to those who excel in written language. Daley and Stephanie Barish, director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the Annenberg Center, describe one particularly poignant example of a project they ran in a high school. The high school was a very poor inner-city Los Angeles school. In all the traditional measures of success, this school was a failure. But Daley and Barish ran a program that gave kids an opportunity to use film to express meaning about something the students know something about - gun violence. +={ Barish, Stephanie +2 } + +The class was held on Friday afternoons, and it created a relatively new problem for the school. While the challenge in most classes was getting the kids to come, the challenge in this class was keeping them away. The "kids were showing up at 6 A.M. and leaving at 5 at night," said Barish. They were working harder than in any other class to do what education should be about - learning how to express themselves. + +Using whatever "free web stuff they could find," and relatively simple tools to enable the kids to mix "image, sound, and text," Barish said this class produced a series of projects that showed something about gun violence that few would otherwise understand. This was an issue close to the lives of these students. The project "gave them a tool and empowered them to be able to both understand it and talk about it," Barish explained. That tool succeeded in creating expression - far more successfully and powerfully than could have been created using only text. "If you had said to these students, 'you have to do it in text,' they would've just thrown their hands up and gone and done something else," Barish described, in part, no doubt, because expressing themselves in text is not something these students can do well. Yet neither is text a form in which /{these}/ ideas can be expressed well. The power of this message depended upon its connection to this form of expression. + +"But isn't education about teaching kids to write?" I asked. In part, of course, it is. But why are we teaching kids to write? Education, Daley explained, is about giving students a way of "constructing meaning." To say that that means just writing is like saying teaching writing is only about teaching kids how to spell. Text is one part - and increasingly, not the most powerful part - of constructing meaning. As Daley explained in the most moving part of our interview, +={ Daley, Elizabeth +3 } + +_1 What you want is to give these students ways of constructing meaning. If all you give them is text, they're not going to do it. Because they can't. You know, you've got Johnny who can look at a video, he can play a video game, he can do graffiti all over your walls, he can take your car apart, and he can do all sorts of other things. He just can't read your text. So Johnny comes to school and you say, "Johnny, you're illiterate. Nothing you can do matters." Well, Johnny then has two choices: He can dismiss you or he [can] dismiss himself. If his ego is healthy at all, he's going to dismiss you. [But i]nstead, if you say, "Well, with all these things that you can do, let's talk about this issue. Play for me music that you think reflects that, or show me images that you think reflect that, or draw for me something that reflects that." Not by giving a kid a video camera and ... saying, "Let's go have fun with the video camera and make a little movie." But instead, really help you take these elements that you understand, that are your language, and construct meaning about the topic. ... + +_1 That empowers enormously. And then what happens, of course, is eventually, as it has happened in all these classes, they bump up against the fact, "I need to explain this and I really need to write something." And as one of the teachers told Stephanie, they would rewrite a paragraph 5, 6, 7, 8 times, till they got it right. +={ Barish, Stephanie } + +_1 Because they needed to. There was a reason for doing it. They needed to say something, as opposed to just jumping through your hoops. They actually needed to use a language that they didn't speak very well. But they had come to understand that they had a lot of power with this language." + +!_ When two planes +crashed into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a Pennsylvania field, all media around the world shifted to this news. Every moment of just about every day for that week, and for weeks after, television in particular, and media generally, retold the story of the events we had just witnessed. The telling was a retelling, because we had seen the events that were described. The genius of this awful act of terrorism was that the delayed second attack was perfectly timed to assure that the whole world would be watching. +={ September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of +2 ; + World Trade Center ; + news coverage +21 +} + +These retellings had an increasingly familiar feel. There was music scored for the intermissions, and fancy graphics that flashed across the screen. There was a formula to interviews. There was "balance," and seriousness. This was news choreographed in the way we have increasingly come to expect it, "news as entertainment," even if the entertainment is tragedy. + +But in addition to this produced news about the "tragedy of September 11," those of us tied to the Internet came to see a very different production as well. The Internet was filled with accounts of the same events. Yet these Internet accounts had a very different flavor. Some people constructed photo pages that captured images from around the world and presented them as slide shows with text. Some offered open letters. There were sound recordings. There was anger and frustration. There were attempts to provide context. There was, in short, an extraordinary worldwide barn raising, in the sense Mike Godwin uses the term in his book /{Cyber Rights}/, around a news event that had captured the attention of the world. There was ABC and CBS, but there was also the Internet. +={ Cyber Rights (Godwin) ; + Godwin, Mike ; + Internet : + news events on +3 +} + +I don't mean simply to praise the Internet - though I do think the people who supported this form of speech should be praised. I mean instead to point to a significance in this form of speech. For like a Kodak, the Internet enables people to capture images. And like in a movie by a student on the "Just Think!" bus, the visual images could be mixed with sound or text. +={ Just Think! } + +But unlike any technology for simply capturing images, the Internet allows these creations to be shared with an extraordinary number of people, practically instantaneously. This is something new in our tradition - not just that culture can be captured mechanically, and obviously not just that events are commented upon critically, but that this mix of captured images, sound, and commentary can be widely spread practically instantaneously. + +September 11 was not an aberration. It was a beginning. Around the same time, a form of communication that has grown dramatically was just beginning to come into public consciousness: the Web-log, or blog. The blog is a kind of public diary, and within some cultures, such as in Japan, it functions very much like a diary. In those cultures, it records private facts in a public way - it's a kind of electronic /{Jerry Springer}/, available anywhere in the world. +={ September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of ; + blogs (Web-logs) +2 ; + Internet : + blogs on +2 ; + Web-logs (blogs) +2 +} + +But in the United States, blogs have taken on a very different character. There are some who use the space simply to talk about their private life. But there are many who use the space to engage in public discourse. Discussing matters of public import, criticizing others who are mistaken in their views, criticizing politicians about the decisions they make, offering solutions to problems we all see: blogs create the sense of a virtual public meeting, but one in which we don't all hope to be there at the same time and in which conversations are not necessarily linked. The best of the blog entries are relatively short; they point directly to words used by others, criticizing with or adding to them. They are arguably the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have. +={ political discourse ; + Internet : + public discourse conducted on +15 +} + +That's a strong statement. Yet it says as much about our democracy as it does about blogs. This is the part of America that is most difficult for those of us who love America to accept: Our democracy has atrophied. Of course we have elections, and most of the time the courts allow those elections to count. A relatively small number of people vote in those elections. The cycle of these elections has become totally professionalized and routinized. Most of us think this is democracy. +={ democracy : + in technologies of expression +5 ; + elections +1 ; + expression, technologies of : + democratic +5 +} + +But democracy has never just been about elections. Democracy means rule by the people, but rule means something more than mere elections. In our tradition, it also means control through reasoned discourse. This was the idea that captured the imagination of Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French lawyer who wrote the most important account of early "Democracy in America." It wasn't popular elections that fascinated him - it was the jury, an institution that gave ordinary people the right to choose life or death for other citizens. And most fascinating for him was that the jury didn't just vote about the outcome they would impose. They deliberated. Members argued about the "right" result; they tried to persuade each other of the "right" result, and in criminal cases at least, they had to agree upon a unanimous result for the process to come to an end.~{ See, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, /{Democracy in America,}/ bk. 1, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), ch. 16. }~ +={ Tocqueville, Alexis de ; + democracy : + public discourse in +4 ; + jury system +} + +Yet even this institution flags in American life today. And in its place, there is no systematic effort to enable citizen deliberation. Some are pushing to create just such an institution.~{ Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin, "Deliberation Day," /{Journal of Political Philosophy}/ 10 (2) (2002): 129. }~ And in some towns in New England, something close to deliberation remains. But for most of us for most of the time, there is no time or place for "democratic deliberation" to occur. + +More bizarrely, there is generally not even permission for it to occur. We, the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against talking about politics. It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme.~{ Cass Sunstein, /{Republic.com}/ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 65-80, 175, 182, 183, 192. }~ We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say. +={ political discourse +11 } + +Enter the blog. The blog's very architecture solves one part of this problem. People post when they want to post, and people read when they want to read. The most difficult time is synchronous time. Technologies that enable asynchronous communication, such as e-mail, increase the opportunity for communication. Blogs allow for public discourse without the public ever needing to gather in a single public place. +={ blogs (Web-logs) +10 ; + e-mail ; + Internet : + blogs on +10 ; + Web-logs (blogs) +10 +} + +But beyond architecture, blogs also have solved the problem of norms. There's no norm (yet) in blog space not to talk about politics. Indeed, the space is filled with political speech, on both the right and the left. Some of the most popular sites are conservative or libertarian, but there are many of all political stripes. And even blogs that are not political cover political issues when the occasion merits. + +The significance of these blogs is tiny now, though not so tiny. The name Howard Dean may well have faded from the 2004 presidential race but for blogs. Yet even if the number of readers is small, the reading is having an effect. +={ Dean, Howard } + +One direct effect is on stories that had a different life cycle in the mainstream media. The Trent Lott affair is an example. When Lott "misspoke" at a party for Senator Strom Thurmond, essentially praising Thurmond's segregationist policies, he calculated correctly that this story would disappear from the mainstream press within forty-eight hours. It did. But he didn't calculate its life cycle in blog space. The bloggers kept researching the story. Over time, more and more instances of the same "misspeaking" emerged. Finally, the story broke back into the mainstream press. In the end, Lott was forced to resign as senate majority leader.~{ Noah Shachtman, "With Incessant Postings, a Pundit Stirs the Pot," /{New York Times,}/ 16 January 2003, G5. }~ +={ Lott, Trent ; + Thurmond, Storm ; + media : + blog pressure on +1 ; + Internet : + news events on +4 +} + +This different cycle is possible because the same commercial pressures don't exist with blogs as with other ventures. Television and newspapers are commercial entities. They must work to keep attention. If they lose readers, they lose revenue. Like sharks, they must move on. +={ media : + commercial imperatives of +1 +} + +But bloggers don't have a similar constraint. They can obsess, they can focus, they can get serious. If a particular blogger writes a particularly interesting story, more and more people link to that story. And as the number of links to a particular story increases, it rises in the ranks of stories. People read what is popular; what is popular has been selected by a very democratic process of peer-generated rankings. +={ Internet : + peer-generated rankings on +} + +There's a second way, as well, in which blogs have a different cycle from the mainstream press. As Dave Winer, one of the fathers of this movement and a software author for many decades, told me, another difference is the absence of a financial "conflict of interest." "I think you have to take the conflict of interest" out of journalism, Winer told me. "An amateur journalist simply doesn't have a conflict of interest, or the conflict of interest is so easily disclosed that you know you can sort of get it out of the way." +={ journalism +3 ; + Winer, Dave +4 +} + +These conflicts become more important as media becomes more concentrated (more on this below). A concentrated media can hide more from the public than an unconcentrated media can - as CNN admitted it did after the Iraq war because it was afraid of the consequences to its own employees.~{ Telephone interview with David Winer, 16 April 2003. }~ It also needs to sustain a more coherent account. (In the middle of the Iraq war, I read a post on the Internet from someone who was at that time listening to a satellite uplink with a reporter in Iraq. The New York headquarters was telling the reporter over and over that her account of the war was too bleak: She needed to offer a more optimistic story. When she told New York that wasn't warranted, they told her that /{they}/ were writing "the story.") +={ CNN ; + media : + commercial imperatives of ; + democracy : + in technologies of expression +3 ; + expression, technologies of : + democratic +3 ; + Iraq war ; + media : + ownership concentration in +} + +Blog space gives amateurs a way to enter the debate - "amateur" not in the sense of inexperienced, but in the sense of an Olympic athlete, meaning not paid by anyone to give their reports. It allows for a much broader range of input into a story, as reporting on the Columbia disaster revealed, when hundreds from across the southwest United States turned to the Internet to retell what they had seen.~{ John Schwartz, "Loss of the Shuttle: The Internet; A Wealth of Information Online," /{New York Times,}/ 2 February 2003, A28; Staci D. Kramer, "Shuttle Disaster Coverage Mixed, but Strong Overall," Online Journalism Review, 2 February 2003, available at link #10. }~ And it drives readers to read across the range of accounts and "triangulate," as Winer puts it, the truth. Blogs, Winer says, are "communicating directly with our constituency, and the middle man is out of it" - with all the benefits, and costs, that might entail. + +Winer is optimistic about the future of journalism infected with blogs. "It's going to become an essential skill," Winer predicts, for public figures and increasingly for private figures as well. It's not clear that "journalism" is happy about this - some journalists have been told to curtail their blogging.~{ See Michael Falcone, "Does an Editor's Pencil Ruin a Web Log?" /{New York Times,}/ 29 September 2003, C4. ("Not all news organizations have been as accepting of employees who blog. Kevin Sites, a CNN correspondent in Iraq who started a blog about his reporting of the war on March 9, stopped posting 12 days later at his bosses' request. Last year Steve Olafson, a /{Houston Chronicle}/ reporter, was fired for keeping a personal Web log, published under a pseudonym, that dealt with some of the issues and people he was covering.") }~ But it is clear that we are still in transition. "A lot of what we are doing now is warm-up exercises," Winer told me. There is a lot that must mature before this space has its mature effect. And as the inclusion of content in this space is the least infringing use of the Internet (meaning infringing on copyright), Winer said, "we will be the last thing that gets shut down." + +This speech affects democracy. Winer thinks that happens because "you don't have to work for somebody who controls, [for] a gate-keeper." That is true. But it affects democracy in another way as well. As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It is harder when the product of your mind can be criticized by others. Of course, it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy. Today there are probably a couple of million blogs where such writing happens. When there are ten million, there will be something extraordinary to report. +={ democracy : + public discourse in +} + +!_ John Seely Brown +is the chief scientist of the Xerox Corporation. His work, as his Web site describes it, is "human learning and ... the creation of knowledge ecologies for creating ... innovation." +={ Brown, John Seely +13 } + +Brown thus looks at these technologies of digital creativity a bit differently from the perspectives I've sketched so far. I'm sure he would be excited about any technology that might improve democracy. But his real excitement comes from how these technologies affect learning. + +As Brown believes, we learn by tinkering. When "a lot of us grew up," he explains, that tinkering was done "on motorcycle engines, lawn-mower engines, automobiles, radios, and so on." But digital technologies enable a different kind of tinkering - with abstract ideas though in concrete form. The kids at Just Think! not only think about how a commercial portrays a politician; using digital technology, they can take the commercial apart and manipulate it, tinker with it to see how it does what it does. Digital technologies launch a kind of bricolage, or "free collage," as Brown calls it. Many get to add to or transform the tinkering of many others. +={ advertising ; + Just Think! +5 ; + commercials ; + education : + tinkering as means of +11 +} + +The best large-scale example of this kind of tinkering so far is free software or open-source software (FS/{OSS). FS}/OSS is software whose source code is shared. Anyone can download the technology that makes a FS/OSS program run. And anyone eager to learn how a particular bit of FS/OSS technology works can tinker with the code. +={ free software/open-source software (FS/OSS) } + +This opportunity creates a "completely new kind of learning platform," as Brown describes. "As soon as you start doing that, you ... unleash a free collage on the community, so that other people can start looking at your code, tinkering with it, trying it out, seeing if they can improve it." Each effort is a kind of apprenticeship. "Open source becomes a major apprenticeship platform." + +In this process, "the concrete things you tinker with are abstract. They are code." Kids are "shifting to the ability to tinker in the abstract, and this tinkering is no longer an isolated activity that you're doing in your garage. You are tinkering with a community platform. ... You are tinkering with other people's stuff. The more you tinker the more you improve." The more you improve, the more you learn. + +This same thing happens with content, too. And it happens in the same collaborative way when that content is part of the Web. As Brown puts it, "the Web [is] the first medium that truly honors multiple forms of intelligence." Earlier technologies, such as the typewriter or word processors, helped amplify text. But the Web amplifies much more than text. "The Web ... says if you are musical, if you are artistic, if you are visual, if you are interested in film ... [then] there is a lot you can start to do on this medium. [It] can now amplify and honor these multiple forms of intelligence." + +Brown is talking about what Elizabeth Daley, Stephanie Barish, and Just Think! teach: that this tinkering with culture teaches as well as creates. It develops talents differently, and it builds a different kind of recognition. +={ Barish, Stephanie ; + Daley, Elizabeth +} + +Yet the freedom to tinker with these objects is not guaranteed. Indeed, as we'll see through the course of this book, that freedom is increasingly highly contested. While there's no doubt that your father had the right to tinker with the car engine, there's great doubt that your child will have the right to tinker with the images she finds all around. The law and, increasingly, technology interfere with a freedom that technology, and curiosity, would otherwise ensure. + +These restrictions have become the focus of researchers and scholars. Professor Ed Felten of Princeton (whom we'll see more of in chapter 10) has developed a powerful argument in favor of the "right to tinker" as it applies to computer science and to knowledge in general.~{ See, for example, Edward Felten and Andrew Appel, "Technological Access Control Interferes with Noninfringing Scholarship," /{Communications of the Association for Computer Machinery}/ 43 (2000): 9. }~ But Brown's concern is earlier, or younger, or more fundamental. It is about the learning that kids can do, or can't do, because of the law. +={ Felten, Ed } + +"This is where education in the twenty-first century is going," Brown explains. We need to "understand how kids who grow up digital think and want to learn." + +"Yet," as Brown continued, and as the balance of this book will evince, "we are building a legal system that completely suppresses the natural tendencies of today's digital kids. ... We're building an architecture that unleashes 60 percent of the brain [and] a legal system that closes down that part of the brain." + +We're building a technology that takes the magic of Kodak, mixes moving images and sound, and adds a space for commentary and an opportunity to spread that creativity everywhere. But we're building the law to close down that technology. + +"No way to run a culture," as Brewster Kahle, whom we'll meet in chapter 9, quipped to me in a rare moment of despondence. +={ Kahle, Brewster } + +1~ Chapter Three: Catalogs + +!_ In the fall of 2002, +Jesse Jordan of Oceanside, New York, enrolled as a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York. His major at RPI was information technology. Though he is not a programmer, in October Jesse decided to begin to tinker with search engine technology that was available on the RPI network. +={ Jordan, Jesse ; + Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) +2 : + computer network search engine of +10 ; + search engines +10 ; + university computer networks, p2p sharing on +20 ; + Internet : + search engines used on +6 +} + +RPI is one of America's foremost technological research institutions. It offers degrees in fields ranging from architecture and engineering to information sciences. More than 65 percent of its five thousand undergraduates finished in the top 10 percent of their high school class. The school is thus a perfect mix of talent and experience to imagine and then build, a generation for the network age. + +RPI's computer network links students, faculty, and administration to one another. It also links RPI to the Internet. Not everything available on the RPI network is available on the Internet. But the network is designed to enable students to get access to the Internet, as well as more intimate access to other members of the RPI community. + +Search engines are a measure of a network's intimacy. Google brought the Internet much closer to all of us by fantastically improving the quality of search on the network. Specialty search engines can do this even better. The idea of "intranet" search engines, search engines that search within the network of a particular institution, is to provide users of that institution with better access to material from that institution. Businesses do this all the time, enabling employees to have access to material that people outside the business can't get. Universities do it as well. +={ Google +1 } + +These engines are enabled by the network technology itself. Microsoft, for example, has a network file system that makes it very easy for search engines tuned to that network to query the system for information about the publicly (within that network) available content. Jesse's search engine was built to take advantage of this technology. It used Microsoft's network file system to build an index of all the files available within the RPI network. +={ Jordan, Jesse +16 ; + Microsoft : + network file system of +1 +} + +Jesse's wasn't the first search engine built for the RPI network. Indeed, his engine was a simple modification of engines that others had built. His single most important improvement over those engines was to fix a bug within the Microsoft file-sharing system that could cause a user's computer to crash. With the engines that existed before, if you tried to access a file through a Windows browser that was on a computer that was off-line, your computer could crash. Jesse modified the system a bit to fix that problem, by adding a button that a user could click to see if the machine holding the file was still on-line. + +Jesse's engine went on-line in late October. Over the following six months, he continued to tweak it to improve its functionality. By March, the system was functioning quite well. Jesse had more than one million files in his directory, including every type of content that might be on users' computers. + +Thus the index his search engine produced included pictures, which students could use to put on their own Web sites; copies of notes or research; copies of information pamphlets; movie clips that students might have created; university brochures - basically anything that users of the RPI network made available in a public folder of their computer. + +But the index also included music files. In fact, one quarter of the files that Jesse's search engine listed were music files. But that means, of course, that three quarters were not, and - so that this point is absolutely clear - Jesse did nothing to induce people to put music files in their public folders. He did nothing to target the search engine to these files. He was a kid tinkering with a Google-like technology at a university where he was studying information science, and hence, tinkering was the aim. Unlike Google, or Microsoft, for that matter, he made no money from this tinkering; he was not connected to any business that would make any money from this experiment. He was a kid tinkering with technology in an environment where tinkering with technology was precisely what he was supposed to do. +={ Google ; + education : + tinkering as means of +} + +On April 3, 2003, Jesse was contacted by the dean of students at RPI. The dean informed Jesse that the Recording Industry Association of America, the RIAA, would be filing a lawsuit against him and three other students whom he didn't even know, two of them at other universities. A few hours later, Jesse was served with papers from the suit. As he read these papers and watched the news reports about them, he was increasingly astonished. +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + in recording industry +11 ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + against student file sharing +11 ; + recording industry : + copyright infringement lawsuits of +11 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + copyright infringement lawsuits filed by +11 +} + +"It was absurd," he told me. "I don't think I did anything wrong. ... I don't think there's anything wrong with the search engine that I ran or ... what I had done to it. I mean, I hadn't modified it in any way that promoted or enhanced the work of pirates. I just modified the search engine in a way that would make it easier to use" - again, a /{search engine}/, which Jesse had not himself built, using the Windows file-sharing system, which Jesse had not himself built, to enable members of the RPI community to get access to content, which Jesse had not himself created or posted, and the vast majority of which had nothing to do with music. + +But the RIAA branded Jesse a pirate. They claimed he operated a network and had therefore "willfully" violated copyright laws. They demanded that he pay them the damages for his wrong. For cases of "willful infringement," the Copyright Act specifies something lawyers call "statutory damages." These damages permit a copyright owner to claim $150,000 per infringement. As the RIAA alleged more than one hundred specific copyright infringements, they therefore demanded that Jesse pay them at least $15,000,000. +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + exaggerated claims of | statutory damages of | individual defendants intimidated by +6 ; + statutory damages ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + intimidation tactics of +6 +} + +Similar lawsuits were brought against three other students: one other student at RPI, one at Michigan Technical University, and one at Princeton. Their situations were similar to Jesse's. Though each case was different in detail, the bottom line in each was exactly the same: huge demands for "damages" that the RIAA claimed it was entitled to. If you added up the claims, these four lawsuits were asking courts in the United States to award the plaintiffs close to $100 /{billion}/ - six times the /{total}/ profit of the film industry in 2001.~{ Tim Goral, "Recording Industry Goes After Campus P-2-P Networks: Suit Alleges $97.8 Billion in Damages," /{Professional Media Group LCC}/ 6 (2003): 5, available at 2003 WL 55179443. }~ +={ Michigan Technical University ; + Princeton University +} + +Jesse called his parents. They were supportive but a bit frightened. An uncle was a lawyer. He began negotiations with the RIAA. They demanded to know how much money Jesse had. Jesse had saved $12,000 from summer jobs and other employment. They demanded $12,000 to dismiss the case. + +The RIAA wanted Jesse to admit to doing something wrong. He refused. They wanted him to agree to an injunction that would essentially make it impossible for him to work in many fields of technology for the rest of his life. He refused. They made him understand that this process of being sued was not going to be pleasant. (As Jesse's father recounted to me, the chief lawyer on the case, Matt Oppenheimer, told Jesse, "You don't want to pay another visit to a dentist like me.") And throughout, the RIAA insisted it would not settle the case until it took every penny Jesse had saved. +={ Oppenheimer, Matt } + +Jesse's family was outraged at these claims. They wanted to fight. But Jesse's uncle worked to educate the family about the nature of the American legal system. Jesse could fight the RIAA. He might even win. But the cost of fighting a lawsuit like this, Jesse was told, would be at least $250,000. If he won, he would not recover that money. If he won, he would have a piece of paper saying he had won, and a piece of paper saying he and his family were bankrupt. +={ legal system, attorney costs in } + +So Jesse faced a mafia-like choice: $250,000 and a chance at winning, or $12,000 and a settlement. + +The recording industry insists this is a matter of law and morality. Let's put the law aside for a moment and think about the morality. Where is the morality in a lawsuit like this? What is the virtue in scapegoatism? The RIAA is an extraordinarily powerful lobby. The president of the RIAA is reported to make more than $1 million a year. Artists, on the other hand, are not well paid. The average recording artist makes $45,900.~{ Occupational Employment Survey, U.S. Dept. of Labor (2001) (27-2042 - Musicians and Singers). See also National Endowment for the Arts, /{More Than One in a Blue Moon}/ (2000). }~ There are plenty of ways for the RIAA to affect and direct policy. So where is the morality in taking money from a student for running a search engine?~{ Douglas Lichtman makes a related point in "KaZaA and Punishment," /{Wall Street Journal,}/ 10 September 2003, A24. }~ +={ artists : + recording industry payments to ; + recording industry : + artist remuneration in ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + lobbying power of +} + +On June 23, Jesse wired his savings to the lawyer working for the RIAA. The case against him was then dismissed. And with this, this kid who had tinkered a computer into a $15 million lawsuit became an activist: + +_1 I was definitely not an activist [before]. I never really meant to be an activist. ... [But] I've been pushed into this. In no way did I ever foresee anything like this, but I think it's just completely absurd what the RIAA has done." + +Jesse's parents betray a certain pride in their reluctant activist. As his father told me, Jesse "considers himself very conservative, and so do I. ... He's not a tree hugger. . . . I think it's bizarre that they would pick on him. But he wants to let people know that they're sending the wrong message. And he wants to correct the record." + +1~ Chapter Four: "Pirates" +={ piracy : + in development of content industry +43 +} + +!_ If "piracy" means +using the creative property of others without their permission - if "if value, then right" is true - then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of "big media" today - film, records, radio, and cable TV - was born of a kind of piracy so defined. The consistent story is how last generation's pirates join this generation's country club - until now. +={ creative property : + "if value, then right" theory of ; + if value, then right, theory +} + +% note bad sort: ={"if value, then right" theory} + +2~ Film + +The film industry of Hollywood was built by fleeing pirates.~{ I am grateful to Peter DiMauro for pointing me to this extraordinary history. See also Siva Vaidhyanathan, /{Copyrights and Copywrongs,}/ 87-93, which details Edison's "adventures" with copyright and patent. }~ Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast to California in the early twentieth century in part to escape controls that patents granted the inventor of filmmaking, Thomas Edison. These controls were exercised through a monopoly "trust," the Motion Pictures Patents Company, and were based on Thomas Edison's creative property - patents. Edison formed the MPPC to exercise the rights this creative property gave him, and the MPPC was serious about the control it demanded. As one commentator tells one part of the story, +={ Film industry : + patent piracy at the inception of +4 ; + Motion Pictures Patents Company (MPPC) +2 ; + Hollywood film industry +3 ; + patents : + on film technology +4 +} + +_1 A January 1909 deadline was set for all companies to comply with the license. By February, unlicensed outlaws, who referred to themselves as independents protested the trust and carried on business without submitting to the Edison monopoly. In the summer of 1909 the independent movement was in full-swing, with producers and theater owners using illegal equipment and imported film stock to create their own underground market. + +_1 With the country experiencing a tremendous expansion in the number of nickelodeons, the Patents Company reacted to the independent movement by forming a strong-arm subsidiary known as the General Film Company to block the entry of non-licensed independents. With coercive tactics that have become legendary, General Film confiscated unlicensed equipment, discontinued product supply to theaters which showed unlicensed films, and effectively monopolized distribution with the acquisition of all U.S. film exchanges, except for the one owned by the independent William Fox who defied the Trust even after his license was revoked."~{ J. A. Aberdeen, /{Hollywood Renegades: The Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers}/ (Cobblestone Entertainment, 2000) and expanded texts posted at "The Edison Movie Monopoly: The Motion Picture Patents Company vs. the Independent Outlaws," available at link #11. For a discussion of the economic motive behind both these limits and the limits imposed by Victor on phonographs, see Randal C. Picker, "From Edison to the Broadcast Flag: Mechanisms of Consent and Refusal and the Propertization of Copyright" (September 2002), University of Chicago Law School, James M. Olin Program in Law and Economics, Working Paper No. 159. }~ +={ Fox, William ; + General Film Company +} + +The Napsters of those days, the "independents," were companies like Fox. And no less than today, these independents were vigorously resisted. "Shooting was disrupted by machinery stolen, and 'accidents' resulting in loss of negatives, equipment, buildings and sometimes life and limb frequently occurred."~{ Marc Wanamaker, "The First Studios," /{The Silents Majority,}/ archived at link #12. }~ That led the independents to flee the East Coast. California was remote enough from Edison's reach that film- makers there could pirate his inventions without fear of the law. And the leaders of Hollywood filmmaking, Fox most prominently, did just that. +={ Edison, Thomas +5 } + +Of course, California grew quickly, and the effective enforcement of federal law eventually spread west. But because patents grant the patent holder a truly "limited" monopoly (just seventeen years at that time), by the time enough federal marshals appeared, the patents had expired. A new industry had been born, in part from the piracy of Edison's creative property. +={ patents : + duration of +} + +2~ Recorded Music +={ composers, copyright protections of +10 ; + copyright law : + on music recordings +10 ; + recording industry : + copyright protections in +10 | piracy in +10 +} + +The record industry was born of another kind of piracy, though to see how requires a bit of detail about the way the law regulates music. + +At the time that Edison and Henri Fourneaux invented machines for reproducing music (Edison the phonograph, Fourneaux the player piano), the law gave composers the exclusive right to control copies of their music and the exclusive right to control public performances of their music. In other words, in 1900, if I wanted a copy of Phil Russel's 1899 hit "Happy Mose," the law said I would have to pay for the right to get a copy of the musical score, and I would also have to pay for the right to perform it publicly. +={ Fourneaux, Henri +1 ; + phonograph +2 ; + player pianos +1 ; + Russel, Phil +} + +But what if I wanted to record "Happy Mose," using Edison's phonograph or Fourneaux's player piano? Here the law stumbled. It was clear enough that I would have to buy any copy of the musical score that I performed in making this recording. And it was clear enough that I would have to pay for any public performance of the work I was recording. But it wasn't totally clear that I would have to pay for a "public performance" if I recorded the song in my own house (even today, you don't owe the Beatles anything if you sing their songs in the shower), or if I recorded the song from memory (copies in your brain are not - yet - regulated by copyright law). So if I simply sang the song into a recording device in the privacy of my own home, it wasn't clear that I owed the composer anything. And more importantly, it wasn't clear whether I owed the composer anything if I then made copies of those recordings. Because of this gap in the law, then, I could effectively pirate someone else's song without paying its composer anything. + +The composers (and publishers) were none too happy about this capacity to pirate. As South Dakota senator Alfred Kittredge put it, +={ Kittredge, Alfred +1 ; + music publishing +2 +} + +_1 Imagine the injustice of the thing. A composer writes a song or an opera. A publisher buys at great expense the rights to the same and copyrights it. Along come the phonographic companies and companies who cut music rolls and deliberately steal the work of the brain of the composer and publisher without any regard for [their] rights.~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright: Hearings on S. 6330 and H.R. 19853 Before the (Joint) Committees on Patents, 59th Cong. 59, 1st sess. (1906) (statement of Senator Alfred B. Kittredge, of South Dakota, chairman), reprinted in /{Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act,}/ E. Fulton Brylawski and Abe Goldman, eds. (South Hackensack, N.J.: Rothman Reprints, 1976). }~ +={ copyright law : + authors vs. composers +7 ; + creative property : + of authors vs. composers +7 ; + recording industry : + composers' rights vs. producers' rights in +} + +The innovators who developed the technology to record other people's works were "sponging upon the toil, the work, the talent, and genius of American composers,"~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 223 (statement of Nathan Burkan, attorney for the Music Publishers Association). }~ and the "music publishing industry" was thereby "at the complete mercy of this one pirate."~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 226 (statement of Nathan Burkan, attorney for the Music Publishers Association). }~ As John Philip Sousa put it, in as direct a way as possible, "When they make money out of my pieces, I want a share of it."~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 23 (statement of John Philip Sousa, composer). }~ +={ Sousa, John Philip } + +These arguments have familiar echoes in the wars of our day. So, too, do the arguments on the other side. The innovators who developed the player piano argued that "it is perfectly demonstrable that the introduction of automatic music players has not deprived any composer of anything he had before their introduction." Rather, the machines increased the sales of sheet music.~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 283-84 (statement of Albert Walker, representative of the Auto-Music Perforating Company of New York). }~ In any case, the innovators argued, the job of Congress was "to consider first the interest of [the public], whom they represent, and whose servants they are." "All talk about 'theft,'" the general counsel of the American Graphophone Company wrote, "is the merest claptrap, for there exists no property in ideas musical, literary or artistic, except as defined by statute."~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 376 (prepared memorandum of Philip Mauro, general patent counsel of the American Graphophone Company Association). }~ +={ American Graphophone Company ; + player pianos ; + sheet music ; + Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +4 | on recording industry +4 ; + copyright law : + statutory licenses in +6 ; + recording industry : + statutory license system in +6 +} + +The law soon resolved this battle in favor of the composer /{and}/ the recording artist. Congress amended the law to make sure that composers would be paid for the "mechanical reproductions" of their music. But rather than simply granting the composer complete control over the right to make mechanical reproductions, Congress gave recording artists a right to record the music, at a price set by Congress, once the composer allowed it to be recorded once. This is the part of copyright law that makes cover songs possible. Once a composer authorizes a recording of his song, others are free to record the same song, so long as they pay the original composer a fee set by the law. +={ cover songs } + +American law ordinarily calls this a "compulsory license," but I will refer to it as a "statutory license." A statutory license is a license whose key terms are set by law. After Congress's amendment of the Copyright Act in 1909, record companies were free to distribute copies of recordings so long as they paid the composer (or copyright holder) the fee set by the statute. +={ compulsory license +4 ; + statutory licenses +4 +} + +This is an exception within the law of copyright. When John Grisham writes a novel, a publisher is free to publish that novel only if Grisham gives the publisher permission. Grisham, in turn, is free to charge whatever he wants for that permission. The price to publish Grisham is thus set by Grisham, and copyright law ordinarily says you have no permission to use Grisham's work except with permission of Grisham. +={ Grisham, John +1 } + +But the law governing recordings gives recording artists less. And thus, in effect, the law /{subsidizes}/ the recording industry through a kind of piracy - by giving recording artists a weaker right than it otherwise gives creative authors. The Beatles have less control over their creative work than Grisham does. And the beneficiaries of this less control are the recording industry and the public. The recording industry gets something of value for less than it otherwise would pay; the public gets access to a much wider range of musical creativity. Indeed, Congress was quite explicit about its reasons for granting this right. Its fear was the monopoly power of rights holders, and that that power would stifle follow-on creativity.~{ Copyright Law Revision: Hearings on S. 2499, S. 2900, H.R. 243, and H.R. 11794 Before the ( Joint) Committee on Patents, 60th Cong., 1st sess., 217 (1908) (statement of Senator Reed Smoot, chairman), reprinted in /{Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act,}/ E. Fulton Brylawski and Abe Goldman, eds. (South Hackensack, N.J.: Rothman Reprints, 1976). }~ +={ Beatles } + +While the recording industry has been quite coy about this recently, historically it has been quite a supporter of the statutory license for records. As a 1967 report from the House Committee on the Judiciary relates, + +_1 the record producers argued vigorously that the compulsory license system must be retained. They asserted that the record industry is a half-billion-dollar business of great economic importance in the United States and throughout the world; records today are the principal means of disseminating music, and this creates special problems, since performers need unhampered access to musical material on nondiscriminatory terms. Historically, the record producers pointed out, there were no recording rights before 1909 and the 1909 statute adopted the compulsory license as a deliberate anti-monopoly condition on the grant of these rights. They argue that the result has been an outpouring of recorded music, with the public being given lower prices, improved quality, and a greater choice."~{ Copyright Law Revision: Report to Accompany H.R. 2512, House Committee on the Judiciary, 90th Cong., 1st sess., House Document no. 83, 66 (8 March 1967). I am grateful to Glenn Brown for drawing my attention to this report. }~ + +By limiting the rights musicians have, by partially pirating their creative work, the record producers, and the public, benefit. + +2~ Radio +={ recording industry : + radio broadcast and +7 +} + +Radio was also born of piracy. + +When a radio station plays a record on the air, that constitutes a "public performance" of the composer's work.~{ See 17 /{United States Code,}/ sections 106 and 110. At the beginning, record companies printed "Not Licensed for Radio Broadcast" and other messages purporting to restrict the ability to play a record on a radio station. Judge Learned Hand rejected the argument that a warning attached to a record might restrict the rights of the radio station. See /{RCA Manufacturing Co. v. Whiteman,}/ 114 F. 2d 86 (2nd Cir. 1940). See also Randal C. Picker, "From Edison to the Broadcast Flag: Mechanisms of Consent and Refusal and the Propertization of Copyright," /{University of Chicago Law Review}/ 70 (2003): 281. }~ As I described above, the law gives the composer (or copyright holder) an exclusive right to public performances of his work. The radio station thus owes the composer money for that performance. + +But when the radio station plays a record, it is not only performing a copy of the /{composer's}/ work. The radio station is also performing a copy of the /{recording artist's}/ work. It's one thing to have "Happy Birthday" sung on the radio by the local children's choir; it's quite another to have it sung by the Rolling Stones or Lyle Lovett. The recording artist is adding to the value of the composition performed on the radio station. And if the law were perfectly consistent, the radio station would have to pay the recording artist for his work, just as it pays the composer of the music for his work. +={ artists : + recording industry payments to +3 ; + radio : + music recordings played on +3 ; + recording industry : + artist remuneration in +3 +} + +But it doesn't. Under the law governing radio performances, the radio station does not have to pay the recording artist. The radio station need only pay the composer. The radio station thus gets a bit of something for nothing. It gets to perform the recording artist's work for free, even if it must pay the composer something for the privilege of playing the song. + +This difference can be huge. Imagine you compose a piece of music. Imagine it is your first. You own the exclusive right to authorize public performances of that music. So if Madonna wants to sing your song in public, she has to get your permission. +={ Madonna +1 } + +Imagine she does sing your song, and imagine she likes it a lot. She then decides to make a recording of your song, and it becomes a top hit. Under our law, every time a radio station plays your song, you get some money. But Madonna gets nothing, save the indirect effect on the sale of her CDs. The public performance of her recording is not a "protected" right. The radio station thus gets to /{pirate}/ the value of Madonna's work without paying her anything. + +No doubt, one might argue that, on balance, the recording artists benefit. On average, the promotion they get is worth more than the performance rights they give up. Maybe. But even if so, the law ordinarily gives the creator the right to make this choice. By making the choice for him or her, the law gives the radio station the right to take something for nothing. + +2~ Cable TV +={ cable television +12 } + +Cable TV was also born of a kind of piracy. + +When cable entrepreneurs first started wiring communities with cable television in 1948, most refused to pay broadcasters for the content that they echoed to their customers. Even when the cable companies started selling access to television broadcasts, they refused to pay for what they sold. Cable companies were thus Napsterizing broadcasters' content, but more egregiously than anything Napster ever did - Napster never charged for the content it enabled others to give away. +={ Napster ; + television : + cable vs. broadcast +10 +} + +Broadcasters and copyright owners were quick to attack this theft. Rosel Hyde, chairman of the FCC, viewed the practice as a kind of "unfair and potentially destructive competition."~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV: Hearing on S. 1006 Before the Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 89th Cong., 2nd sess., 78 (1966) (statement of Rosel H. Hyde, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission). }~ There may have been a "public interest" in spreading the reach of cable TV, but as Douglas Anello, general counsel to the National Association of Broadcasters, asked Senator Quentin Burdick during testimony, "Does public interest dictate that you use somebody else's property?"~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 116 (statement of Douglas A. Anello, general counsel of the National Association of Broadcasters). }~ As another broadcaster put it, +={ Anello, Douglas ; + Burdick, Quentin ; + Hyde, Rosel ; + copyright law : + on cable television rebroadcasting +9 +} + +_1 The extraordinary thing about the CATV business is that it is the only business I know of where the product that is being sold is not paid for."~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 126 (statement of Ernest W. Jennes, general counsel of the Association of Maximum Service Telecasters, Inc.). }~ + +Again, the demand of the copyright holders seemed reasonable enough: + +_1 All we are asking for is a very simple thing, that people who now take our property for nothing pay for it. We are trying to stop piracy and I don't think there is any lesser word to describe it. I think there are harsher words which would fit it."~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 169 (joint statement of Arthur B. Krim, president of United Artists Corp., and John Sinn, president of United Artists Television, Inc.). }~ + +These were "free-ride[rs]," Screen Actor's Guild president Charlton Heston said, who were "depriving actors of compensation."~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 209 (statement of Charlton Heston, president of the Screen Actors Guild). }~ +={ Screen Actors Guild ; + Heston, Charlton +} + +But again, there was another side to the debate. As Assistant Attorney General Edwin Zimmerman put it, +={ Zimmerman, Edwin +1 } + +_1 Our point here is that unlike the problem of whether you have any copyright protection at all, the problem here is whether copyright holders who are already compensated, who already have a monopoly, should be permitted to extend that monopoly. ... The question here is how much compensation they should have and how far back they should carry their right to compensation."~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 216 (statement of Edwin M. Zimmerman, acting assistant attorney general). }~ + +Copyright owners took the cable companies to court. Twice the Supreme Court held that the cable companies owed the copyright owners nothing. +={ Supreme Court, U.S. : + on cable television +} + +It took Congress almost thirty years before it resolved the question of whether cable companies had to pay for the content they "pirated." In the end, Congress resolved this question in the same way that it resolved the question about record players and player pianos. Yes, cable companies would have to pay for the content that they broadcast; but the price they would have to pay was not set by the copyright owner. The price was set by law, so that the broadcasters couldn't exercise veto power over the emerging technologies of cable. Cable companies thus built their empire in part upon a "piracy" of the value created by broadcasters' content. +={ Congress, U.S. : + on cable television | on copyright laws +} + +!_ These separate stories +sing a common theme. If "piracy" means using value from someone else's creative property without permission from that creator - as it is increasingly described today~{ See, for example, National Music Publisher's Association, /{The Engine of Free Expression: Copyright on the Internet - The Myth of Free Information,}/ available at link #13. "The threat of piracy"the use of someone else's creative work without permission or compensation - has grown with the Internet." }~ - then /{every}/ industry affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy. Film, records, radio, cable TV. ... The list is long and could well be expanded. Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Every generation - until now. + +1~ Chapter Five: "Piracy" +={ piracy : + commercial +20 +} + +!_ There is piracy +of copyrighted material. Lots of it. This piracy comes in many forms. The most significant is commercial piracy, the unauthorized taking of other people's content within a commercial context. Despite the many justifications that are offered in its defense, this taking is wrong. No one should condone it, and the law should stop it. + +But as well as copy-shop piracy, there is another kind of "taking" that is more directly related to the Internet. That taking, too, seems wrong to many, and it is wrong much of the time. Before we paint this taking "piracy," however, we should understand its nature a bit more. For the harm of this taking is significantly more ambiguous than outright copying, and the law should account for that ambiguity, as it has so often done in the past. + +2~ Piracy I + +All across the world, but especially in Asia and Eastern Europe, there are businesses that do nothing but take others people's copyrighted content, copy it, and sell it - all without the permission of a copyright owner. The recording industry estimates that it loses about $4.6 billion every year to physical piracy~{ See IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), /{The Recording Industry Commercial Piracy Report 2003,}/ July 2003, available at link #14. See also Ben Hunt, "Companies Warned on Music Piracy Risk," /{Financial Times,}/ 14 February 2003, 11. }~ (that works out to one in three CDs sold worldwide). The MPAA estimates that it loses $3 billion annually worldwide to piracy. +={ Asia, commercial piracy in +3 ; + piracy : + in Asia +3 ; + CDs : + foreign piracy of +3 ; + copyright law : + international compliance with +6 ; + international law +5 ; + piracy : + international +7 ; + recording industry : + international piracy in ; + Motion Pictures Patents Company (MPPC) +} + +% check reference, MPAA appears to be indexed to Motion Pictures Patents Company (MPPC) which is referred to elsewhere in text as "Motion Pictures _Patent_ Company" + +This is piracy plain and simple. Nothing in the argument of this book, nor in the argument that most people make when talking about the subject of this book, should draw into doubt this simple point: This piracy is wrong. + +Which is not to say that excuses and justifications couldn't be made for it. We could, for example, remind ourselves that for the first one hundred years of the American Republic, America did not honor foreign copyrights. We were born, in this sense, a pirate nation. It might therefore seem hypocritical for us to insist so strongly that other developing nations treat as wrong what we, for the first hundred years of our existence, treated as right. +={ developing countries, foreign patent costs in +3 } + +That excuse isn't terribly strong. Technically, our law did not ban the taking of foreign works. It explicitly limited itself to American works. Thus the American publishers who published foreign works without the permission of foreign authors were not violating any rule. The copy shops in Asia, by contrast, are violating Asian law. Asian law does protect foreign copyrights, and the actions of the copy shops violate that law. So the wrong of piracy that they engage in is not just a moral wrong, but a legal wrong, and not just an internationally legal wrong, but a locally legal wrong as well. + +True, these local rules have, in effect, been imposed upon these countries. No country can be part of the world economy and choose not to protect copyright internationally. We may have been born a pirate nation, but we will not allow any other nation to have a similar childhood. + +If a country is to be treated as a sovereign, however, then its laws are its laws regardless of their source. The international law under which these nations live gives them some opportunities to escape the burden of intellectual property law.~{ See Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite, /{Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?}/ (New York: The New Press, 2003), 10-13, 209. The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement obligates member nations to create administrative and enforcement mechanisms for intellectual property rights, a costly proposition for developing countries. Additionally, patent rights may lead to higher prices for staple industries such as agriculture. Critics of TRIPS question the disparity between burdens imposed upon developing countries and benefits conferred to industrialized nations. TRIPS does permit governments to use patents for public, noncommercial uses without first obtaining the patent holder's permission. Developing nations may be able to use this to gain the benefits of foreign patents at lower prices. This is a promising strategy for developing nations within the TRIPS framework. }~ In my view, more developing nations should take advantage of that opportunity, but when they don't, then their laws should be respected. And under the laws of these nations, this piracy is wrong. + +Alternatively, we could try to excuse this piracy by noting that in any case, it does no harm to the industry. The Chinese who get access to American CDs at 50 cents a copy are not people who would have bought those American CDs at $15 a copy. So no one really has any less money than they otherwise would have had.~{ For an analysis of the economic impact of copying technology, see Stan Liebowitz, /{Rethinking the Network Economy}/ (New York: Amacom, 2002), 144-90. "In some instances ... the impact of piracy on the copyright holder's ability to appropriate the value of the work will be negligible. One obvious instance is the case where the individual engaging in pirating would not have purchased an original even if pirating were not an option." Ibid., 149. }~ +={ Asia, commercial piracy in ; + piracy : + in Asia ; + CDs : + foreign piracy of ; + copyright law : + statutory licenses in +} + +This is often true (though I have friends who have purchased many thousands of pirated DVDs who certainly have enough money to pay for the content they have taken), and it does mitigate to some degree the harm caused by such taking. Extremists in this debate love to say, "You wouldn't go into Barnes & Noble and take a book off of the shelf without paying; why should it be any different with on-line music?" The difference is, of course, that when you take a book from Barnes & Noble, it has one less book to sell. By contrast, when you take an MP3 from a computer network, there is not one less CD that can be sold. The physics of piracy of the intangible are different from the physics of piracy of the tangible. +={ DVDs : + piracy of ; + piracy : + of intangible property +} + +This argument is still very weak. However, although copyright is a property right of a very special sort, it /{is}/ a property right. Like all property rights, the copyright gives the owner the right to decide the terms under which content is shared. If the copyright owner doesn't want to sell, she doesn't have to. There are exceptions: important statutory licenses that apply to copyrighted content regardless of the wish of the copyright owner. Those licenses give people the right to "take" copyrighted content whether or not the copyright owner wants to sell. But where the law does not give people the right to take content, it is wrong to take that content even if the wrong does no harm. If we have a property system, and that system is properly balanced to the technology of a time, then it is wrong to take property without the permission of a property owner. That is exactly what "property" means. +={ statutory licenses } + +Finally, we could try to excuse this piracy with the argument that the piracy actually helps the copyright owner. When the Chinese "steal" Windows, that makes the Chinese dependent on Microsoft. Microsoft loses the value of the software that was taken. But it gains users who are used to life in the Microsoft world. Over time, as the nation grows more wealthy, more and more people will buy software rather than steal it. And hence over time, because that buying will benefit Microsoft, Microsoft benefits from the piracy. If instead of pirating Microsoft Windows, the Chinese used the free GNU/Linux operating system, then these Chinese users would not eventually be buying Microsoft. Without piracy, then, Microsoft would lose. +={ Asia, commercial piracy in ; + piracy : + in Asia ; + free software/open-source software (FS/OSS) ; + GNU/Linux operating system ; + Linux operating system ; + Microsoft : + competitive strategies of ; + Windows ; + Microsoft : + international software piracy of | Windows operating system of +} + +This argument, too, is somewhat true. The addiction strategy is a good one. Many businesses practice it. Some thrive because of it. Law students, for example, are given free access to the two largest legal databases. The companies marketing both hope the students will become so used to their service that they will want to use it and not the other when they become lawyers (and must pay high subscription fees). +={ law : + databases of case reports in +} + +Still, the argument is not terribly persuasive. We don't give the alcoholic a defense when he steals his first beer, merely because that will make it more likely that he will buy the next three. Instead, we ordinarily allow businesses to decide for themselves when it is best to give their product away. If Microsoft fears the competition of GNU/Linux, then Microsoft can give its product away, as it did, for example, with Internet Explorer to fight Netscape. A property right means giving the property owner the right to say who gets access to what - at least ordinarily. And if the law properly balances the rights of the copyright owner with the rights of access, then violating the law is still wrong. +={ Netscape ; + Internet Explorer +} + +Thus, while I understand the pull of these justifications for piracy, and I certainly see the motivation, in my view, in the end, these efforts at justifying commercial piracy simply don't cut it. This kind of piracy is rampant and just plain wrong. It doesn't transform the content it steals; it doesn't transform the market it competes in. It merely gives someone access to something that the law says he should not have. Nothing has changed to draw that law into doubt. This form of piracy is flat out wrong. + +But as the examples from the four chapters that introduced this part suggest, even if some piracy is plainly wrong, not all "piracy" is. Or at least, not all "piracy" is wrong if that term is understood in the way it is increasingly used today. Many kinds of "piracy" are useful and productive, to produce either new content or new ways of doing business. Neither our tradition nor any tradition has ever banned all "piracy" in that sense of the term. + +This doesn't mean that there are no questions raised by the latest piracy concern, peer-to-peer file sharing. But it does mean that we need to understand the harm in peer-to-peer sharing a bit more before we condemn it to the gallows with the charge of piracy. +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + piracy vs. ; + piracy : + profit reduction as criterion of | p2p file sharing vs. +} + +For (1) like the original Hollywood, p2p sharing escapes an overly controlling industry; and (2) like the original recording industry, it simply exploits a new way to distribute content; but (3) unlike cable TV, no one is selling the content that is shared on p2p services. + +These differences distinguish p2p sharing from true piracy. They should push us to find a way to protect artists while enabling this sharing to survive. + +2~ Piracy II +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + piracy vs. +53 ; + piracy : + profit reduction as criterion of +23 | p2p file sharing vs. +53 +} + +The key to the "piracy" that the law aims to quash is a use that "rob[s] the author of [his] profit."~{ /{Bach v. Longman,}/ 98 Eng. Rep. 1274 (1777). }~ This means we must determine whether and how much p2p sharing harms before we know how strongly the law should seek to either prevent it or find an alternative to assure the author of his profit. + +Peer-to-peer sharing was made famous by Napster. But the inventors of the Napster technology had not made any major technological innovations. Like every great advance in innovation on the Internet (and, arguably, off the Internet as well~{ See Clayton M. Christensen, /{The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary National Bestseller That Changed the Way We Do Business}/ (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000). Professor Christensen examines why companies that give rise to and dominate a product area are frequently unable to come up with the most creative, paradigm-shifting uses for their own products. This job usually falls to outside innovators, who reassemble existing technology in inventive ways. For a discussion of Christensen's ideas, see Lawrence Lessig, /{Future,}/ 89-92, 139. }~), Shawn Fanning and crew had simply put together components that had been developed independently. +={ Fanning, Shawn ; + innovation ; + Internet : + music files downloaded from +8 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + participation levels of ; + technology : + innovative improvements in ; + Napster +1 +} + +The result was spontaneous combustion. Launched in July 1999, Napster amassed over 10 million users within nine months. After eighteen months, there were close to 80 million registered users of the system.~{ See Carolyn Lochhead, "Silicon Valley Dream, Hollywood Nightmare," /{San Francisco Chronicle,}/ 24 September 2002, A1; "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide," /{New Scientist,}/ 6 July 2002, 42; Benny Evangelista, "Napster Names CEO, Secures New Financing," /{San Francisco Chronicle,}/ 23 May 2003, C1; "Napster's Wake-Up Call," /{Economist,}/ 24 June 2000, 23; John Naughton, "Hollywood at War with the Internet" (London) /{Times,}/ 26 July 2002, 18. }~ Courts quickly shut Napster down, but other services emerged to take its place. (Kazaa is currently the most popular p2p service. It boasts over 100 million members.) These services' systems are different architecturally, though not very different in function: Each enables users to make content available to any number of other users. With a p2p system, you can share your favorite songs with your best friend - or your 20,000 best friends. +={ Kazaa ; + Napster : + number of registrations on | replacement of +} + +According to a number of estimates, a huge proportion of Americans have tasted file-sharing technology. A study by Ipsos-Insight in September 2002 estimated that 60 million Americans had downloaded music - 28 percent of Americans older than 12.~{ See Ipsos-Insight, /{TEMPO: Keeping Pace with Online Music Distribution}/ (September 2002), reporting that 28 percent of Americans aged twelve and older have downloaded music off of the Internet and 30 percent have listened to digital music files stored on their computers. }~ A survey by the NPD group quoted in /{The New York Times}/ estimated that 43 million citizens used file-sharing networks to exchange content in May 2003.~{ Amy Harmon, "Industry Offers a Carrot in Online Music Fight," /{New York Times,}/ 6 June 2003, A1. }~ The vast majority of these are not kids. Whatever the actual figure, a massive quantity of content is being "taken" on these networks. The ease and inexpensiveness of file-sharing networks have inspired millions to enjoy music in a way that they hadn't before. + +Some of this enjoying involves copyright infringement. Some of it does not. And even among the part that is technically copyright infringement, calculating the actual harm to copyright owners is more complicated than one might think. So consider - a bit more carefully than the polarized voices around this debate usually do - the kinds of sharing that file sharing enables, and the kinds of harm it entails. + +File sharers share different kinds of content. We can divide these different kinds into four types. +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + four types of +4 ; + Napster : + range of content on +} + +_1 A. There are some who use sharing networks as substitutes for purchasing content. Thus, when a new Madonna CD is released, rather than buying the CD, these users simply take it. We might quibble about whether everyone who takes it would actually have bought it if sharing didn't make it available for free. Most probably wouldn't have, but clearly there are some who would. The latter are the target of category A: users who download instead of purchasing. + +_1 B. There are some who use sharing networks to sample music before purchasing it. Thus, a friend sends another friend an MP3 of an artist he's not heard of. The other friend then buys CDs by that artist. This is a kind of targeted advertising, quite likely to succeed. If the friend recommending the album gains nothing from a bad recommendation, then one could expect that the recommendations will actually be quite good. The net effect of this sharing could increase the quantity of music purchased. +={ advertising } + +_1 C. There are many who use sharing networks to get access to copyrighted content that is no longer sold or that they would not have purchased because the transaction costs off the Net are too high. This use of sharing networks is among the most rewarding for many. Songs that were part of your childhood but have long vanished from the marketplace magically appear again on the network. (One friend told me that when she discovered Napster, she spent a solid weekend "recalling" old songs. She was astonished at the range and mix of content that was available.) For content not sold, this is still technically a violation of copyright, though because the copyright owner is not selling the content anymore, the economic harm is zero - the same harm that occurs when I sell my collection of 1960s 45-rpm records to a local collector. +={ recording industry : + out-of-print music of +} + +_1 D. Finally, there are many who use sharing networks to get access to content that is not copyrighted or that the copyright owner wants to give away. + +How do these different types of sharing balance out? + +Let's start with some simple but important points. From the perspective of the law, only type D sharing is clearly legal. From the perspective of economics, only type A sharing is clearly harmful.~{ See Liebowitz, /{Rethinking the Network Economy,}/ 148-49. }~ Type B sharing is illegal but plainly beneficial. Type C sharing is illegal, yet good for society (since more exposure to music is good) and harmless to the artist (since the work is not otherwise available). So how sharing matters on balance is a hard question to answer - and certainly much more difficult than the current rhetoric around the issue suggests. + +Whether on balance sharing is harmful depends importantly on how harmful type A sharing is. Just as Edison complained about Hollywood, composers complained about piano rolls, recording artists complained about radio, and broadcasters complained about cable TV, the music industry complains that type A sharing is a kind of "theft" that is "devastating" the industry. +={ Edison, Thomas } + +While the numbers do suggest that sharing is harmful, how harmful is harder to reckon. It has long been the recording industry's practice to blame technology for any drop in sales. The history of cassette recording is a good example. As a study by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young put it, "Rather than exploiting this new, popular technology, the labels fought it."~{ See Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, /{Technology Evolution and the Music Industry's Business Model Crisis}/ (2003), 3. This report describes the music industry's effort to stigmatize the budding practice of cassette taping in the 1970s, including an advertising campaign featuring a cassette-shape skull and the caption "Home taping is killing music." \\ At the time digital audio tape became a threat, the Office of Technical Assessment conducted a survey of consumer behavior. In 1988, 40 percent of consumers older than ten had taped music to a cassette format. U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, /{Copyright and Home Copying: Technology Challenges the Law,}/ OTA-CIT-422 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1989), 145-56. }~ The labels claimed that every album taped was an album unsold, and when record sales fell by 11.4 percent in 1981, the industry claimed that its point was proved. Technology was the problem, and banning or regulating technology was the answer. +={ cassette recording +1 ; + recording industry : + new technology opposed by +2 ; + technology : + established industries threatened by changes in +2 +} + +Yet soon thereafter, and before Congress was given an opportunity to enact regulation, MTV was launched, and the industry had a record turnaround. "In the end," Cap Gemini concludes, "the 'crisis' ... was not the fault of the tapers" who did not [stop after MTV came into being] - but had to a large extent resulted from stagnation in musical innovation at the major labels."~{ U.S. Congress, /{Copyright and Home Copying,}/ 4. }~ +={ MTV } + +But just because the industry was wrong before does not mean it is wrong today. To evaluate the real threat that p2p sharing presents to the industry in particular, and society in general - or at least the society that inherits the tradition that gave us the film industry, the record industry, the radio industry, cable TV, and the VCR - the question is not simply whether type A sharing is harmful. The question is also /{how}/ harmful type A sharing is, and how beneficial the other types of sharing are. + +We start to answer this question by focusing on the net harm, from the standpoint of the industry as a whole, that sharing networks cause. The "net harm" to the industry as a whole is the amount by which type A sharing exceeds type B. If the record companies sold more records through sampling than they lost through substitution, then sharing networks would actually benefit music companies on balance. They would therefore have little /{static}/ reason to resist them. + +Could that be true? Could the industry as a whole be gaining because of file sharing? Odd as that might sound, the data about CD sales actually suggest it might be close. +={ CDs : + sales levels of +3 ; + recording industry : + CD sales level in +3 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + on CD sales decline +3 +} + +In 2002, the RIAA reported that CD sales had fallen by 8.9 percent, from 882 million to 803 million units; revenues fell 6.7 percent.~{ See Recording Industry Association of America, /{2002 Yearend Statistics,}/ available at link #15. A later report indicates even greater losses. See Recording Industry Association of America, /{Some Facts About Music Piracy,}/ 25 June 2003, available at link #16: "In the past four years, unit shipments of recorded music have fallen by 26 percent from 1.16 billion units in 1999 to 860 million units in 2002 in the United States (based on units shipped). In terms of sales, revenues are down 14 percent, from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $12.6 billion last year (based on U.S. dollar value of shipments). The music industry worldwide has gone from a $39 billion industry in 2000 down to a $32 billion industry in 2002 (based on U.S. dollar value of shipments)." }~ This confirms a trend over the past few years. The RIAA blames Internet piracy for the trend, though there are many other causes that could account for this drop. SoundScan, for example, reports a more than 20 percent drop in the number of CDs released since 1999. That no doubt accounts for some of the decrease in sales. Rising prices could account for at least some of the loss. "From 1999 to 2001, the average price of a CD rose 7.2 percent, from $13.04 to $14.19."~{ Jane Black, "Big Music's Broken Record," BusinessWeek online, 13 February 2003, available at link #17. }~ Competition from other forms of media could also account for some of the decline. As Jane Black of /{BusinessWeek}/ notes, "The soundtrack to the film /{High Fidelity}/ has a list price of $18.98. You could get the whole movie [on DVD] for $19.99."~{ Ibid. }~ +={ Black, Jane ; + CDs : + prices of ; + DVDs : + price of +} + +But let's assume the RIAA is right, and all of the decline in CD sales is because of Internet sharing. Here's the rub: In the same period that the RIAA estimates that 803 million CDs were sold, the RIAA estimates that 2.1 billion CDs were downloaded for free. Thus, although 2.6 times the total number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, sales revenue fell by just 6.7 percent. +={ piracy : + of intangible property +1 +} + +There are too many different things happening at the same time to explain these numbers definitively, but one conclusion is unavoidable: The recording industry constantly asks, "What's the difference between downloading a song and stealing a CD?" - but their own numbers reveal the difference. If I steal a CD, then there is one less CD to sell. Every taking is a lost sale. But on the basis of the numbers the RIAA provides, it is absolutely clear that the same is not true of downloads. If every download were a lost sale - if every use of Kazaa "rob[bed] the author of [his] profit" - then the industry would have suffered a 100 percent drop in sales last year, not a 7 percent drop. If 2.6 times the number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, and yet sales revenue dropped by just 6.7 percent, then there is a huge difference between "downloading a song and stealing a CD." +={ Kazaa } + +These are the harms - alleged and perhaps exaggerated but, let's assume, real. What of the benefits? File sharing may impose costs on the recording industry. What value does it produce in addition to these costs? +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + benefits of +8 +} + +One benefit is type C sharing - making available content that is technically still under copyright but is no longer commercially available. This is not a small category of content. There are millions of tracks that are no longer commercially available.~{ By one estimate, 75 percent of the music released by the major labels is no longer in print. See Online Entertainment and Copyright Law - Coming Soon to a Digital Device Near You: Hearing Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 107th Cong., 1st sess. (3 April 2001) (prepared statement of the Future of Music Coalition), available at link #18. }~ And while it's conceivable that some of this content is not available because the artist producing the content doesn't want it to be made available, the vast majority of it is unavailable solely because the publisher or the distributor has decided it no longer makes economic sense /{to the company}/ to make it available. +={ recording industry : + out-of-print music of +3 +} + +In real space - long before the Internet - the market had a simple response to this problem: used book and record stores. There are thousands of used book and used record stores in America today.~{ While there are not good estimates of the number of used record stores in existence, in 2002, there were 7,198 used book dealers in the United States, an increase of 20 percent since 1993. See Book Hunter Press, /{The Quiet Revolution: The Expansion of the Used Book Market}/ (2002), available at link #19. Used records accounted for $260 million in sales in 2002. See National Association of Recording Merchandisers, "2002 Annual Survey Results," available at link #20. }~ These stores buy content from owners, then sell the content they buy. And under American copyright law, when they buy and sell this content, /{even if the content is still under copyright}/, the copyright owner doesn't get a dime. Used book and record stores are commercial entities; their owners make money from the content they sell; but as with cable companies before statutory licensing, they don't have to pay the copyright owner for the content they sell. +={ books : + free on-line releases of +4 ; + books : + out of print +3 ; + books : + resales of +2 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + of books +4 ; + used record sales +} + +Type C sharing, then, is very much like used book stores or used record stores. It is different, of course, because the person making the content available isn't making money from making the content available. It is also different, of course, because in real space, when I sell a record, I don't have it anymore, while in cyberspace, when someone shares my 1949 recording of Bernstein's "Two Love Songs," I still have it. That difference would matter economically if the owner of the 1949 copyright were selling the record in competition to my sharing. But we're talking about the class of content that is not currently commercially available. The Internet is making it available, through cooperative sharing, without competing with the market. +={ Bernstein, Leonard ; + Internet : + books on +4 +} + +It may well be, all things considered, that it would be better if the copyright owner got something from this trade. But just because it may well be better, it doesn't follow that it would be good to ban used book stores. Or put differently, if you think that type C sharing should be stopped, do you think that libraries and used book stores should be shut as well? + +Finally, and perhaps most importantly, file-sharing networks enable type D sharing to occur - the sharing of content that copyright owners want to have shared or for which there is no continuing copyright. This sharing clearly benefits authors and society. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow, for example, released his first novel, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, both free on-line and in bookstores on the same day. His (and his publisher's) thinking was that the on-line distribution would be a great advertisement for the "real" book. People would read part on-line, and then decide whether they liked the book or not. If they liked it, they would be more likely to buy it. Doctorow's content is type D content. If sharing networks enable his work to be spread, then both he and society are better off. (Actually, much better off: It is a great book!) +={ Doctorow, Cory ; + Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Doctorow) +} + +Likewise for work in the public domain: This sharing benefits society with no legal harm to authors at all. If efforts to solve the problem of type A sharing destroy the opportunity for type D sharing, then we lose something important in order to protect type A content. +={ public domain : + p2p sharing of works in +} + +The point throughout is this: While the recording industry understandably says, "This is how much we've lost," we must also ask, "How much has society gained from p2p sharing? What are the efficiencies? What is the content that otherwise would be unavailable?" + +For unlike the piracy I described in the first section of this chapter, much of the "piracy" that file sharing enables is plainly legal and good. And like the piracy I described in chapter 4, much of this piracy is motivated by a new way of spreading content caused by changes in the technology of distribution. Thus, consistent with the tradition that gave us Hollywood, radio, the recording industry, and cable TV, the question we should be asking about file sharing is how best to preserve its benefits while minimizing (to the extent possible) the wrongful harm it causes artists. The question is one of balance. The law should seek that balance, and that balance will be found only with time. + +"But isn't the war just a war against illegal sharing? Isn't the target just what you call type A sharing?" +={ piracy : + profit reduction as criterion of +} + +You would think. And we should hope. But so far, it is not. The effect of the war purportedly on type A sharing alone has been felt far beyond that one class of sharing. That much is obvious from the Napster case itself. When Napster told the district court that it had developed a technology to block the transfer of 99.4 percent of identified infringing material, the district court told counsel for Napster 99.4 percent was not good enough. Napster had to push the infringements "down to zero."~{ See Transcript of Proceedings, In Re: Napster Copyright Litigation at 34- 35 (N.D. Cal., 11 July 2001), nos. MDL-00-1369 MHP, C 99-5183 MHP, available at link #21. For an account of the litigation and its toll on Napster, see Joseph Menn, /{All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster}/ (New York: Crown Business, 2003), 269-82. }~ +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + zero tolerance in +2 ; + Napster : + infringing material blocked by +1 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + infringement protections in +1 +} + +If 99.4 percent is not good enough, then this is a war on file-sharing technologies, not a war on copyright infringement. There is no way to assure that a p2p system is used 100 percent of the time in compliance with the law, any more than there is a way to assure that 100 percent of VCRs or 100 percent of Xerox machines or 100 percent of handguns are used in compliance with the law. Zero tolerance means zero p2p. The court's ruling means that we as a society must lose the benefits of p2p, even for the totally legal and beneficial uses they serve, simply to assure that there are zero copyright infringements caused by p2p. + +Zero tolerance has not been our history. It has not produced the content industry that we know today. The history of American law has been a process of balance. As new technologies changed the way content was distributed, the law adjusted, after some time, to the new technology. In this adjustment, the law sought to ensure the legitimate rights of creators while protecting innovation. Sometimes this has meant more rights for creators. Sometimes less. + +So, as we've seen, when "mechanical reproduction" threatened the interests of composers, Congress balanced the rights of composers against the interests of the recording industry. It granted rights to composers, but also to the recording artists: Composers were to be paid, but at a price set by Congress. But when radio started broadcasting the recordings made by these recording artists, and they complained to Congress that their "creative property" was not being respected (since the radio station did not have to pay them for the creativity it broadcast), Congress rejected their claim. An indirect benefit was enough. +={ artists : + recording industry payments to ; + composers, copyright protections of ; + Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +3 | on recording industry +1 ; + copyright law : + on music recordings +2 | statutory licenses in +2 ; + radio : + music recordings played on ; + recording industry : + artist remuneration in | copyright protections in | radio broadcast and ; + statutory licenses : + composer's rights vs. producers' rights in +} + +Cable TV followed the pattern of record albums. When the courts rejected the claim that cable broadcasters had to pay for the content they rebroadcast, Congress responded by giving broadcasters a right to compensation, but at a level set by the law. It likewise gave cable companies the right to the content, so long as they paid the statutory price. +={ cable television +1 ; + Congress, U.S. : + on cable television +1 ; + copyright law : + on cable television rebroadcasting +1 ; + television : + cable vs. broadcast +1 +} + +This compromise, like the compromise affecting records and player pianos, served two important goals - indeed, the two central goals of any copyright legislation. First, the law assured that new innovators would have the freedom to develop new ways to deliver content. Second, the law assured that copyright holders would be paid for the content that was distributed. One fear was that if Congress simply required cable TV to pay copyright holders whatever they demanded for their content, then copyright holders associated with broadcasters would use their power to stifle this new technology, cable. But if Congress had permitted cable to use broadcasters' content for free, then it would have unfairly subsidized cable. Thus Congress chose a path that would assure /{compensation}/ without giving the past (broadcasters) control over the future (cable). +={ copyright law : + innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in | two central goals of ; + innovation : + copyright profit balanced with | industry establishment opposed to +7 ; + player pianos +} + +In the same year that Congress struck this balance, two major producers and distributors of film content filed a lawsuit against another technology, the video tape recorder (VTR, or as we refer to them today, VCRs) that Sony had produced, the Betamax. Disney's and Universal's claim against Sony was relatively simple: Sony produced a device, Disney and Universal claimed, that enabled consumers to engage in copyright infringement. Because the device that Sony built had a "record" button, the device could be used to record copyrighted movies and shows. Sony was therefore benefiting from the copyright infringement of its customers. It should therefore, Disney and Universal claimed, be partially liable for that infringement. +={ Betamax +2 ; + cassette recording : + VCRs +2 ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + distribution technology targeted in +12 ; + Disney, Inc. : + Sony Betamax technology opposed by +6 ; + film industry : + VCR taping facility opposed by +6 ; + Sony : + Betamax technology developed by +2 ; + television : + VCR taping of +2 ; + VCRs +2 ; + Universal Pictures +8 +} + +There was something to Disney's and Universal's claim. Sony did decide to design its machine to make it very simple to record television shows. It could have built the machine to block or inhibit any direct copying from a television broadcast. Or possibly, it could have built the machine to copy only if there were a special "copy me" signal on the line. It was clear that there were many television shows that did not grant anyone permission to copy. Indeed, if anyone had asked, no doubt the majority of shows would not have authorized copying. And in the face of this obvious preference, Sony could have designed its system to minimize the opportunity for copyright infringement. It did not, and for that, Disney and Universal wanted to hold it responsible for the architecture it chose. + +MPAA president Jack Valenti became the studios' most vocal champion. Valenti called VCRs "tapeworms." He warned, "When there are 20, 30, 40 million of these VCRs in the land, we will be invaded by millions of 'tapeworms,' eating away at the very heart and essence of the most precious asset the copyright owner has, his copyright."~{ Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders): Hearing on S. 1758 Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 97th Cong., 1st and 2nd sess., 459 (1982) (testimony of Jack Valenti, president, Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.). }~ "One does not have to be trained in sophisticated marketing and creative judgment," he told Congress, "to understand the devastation on the after-theater marketplace caused by the hundreds of millions of tapings that will adversely impact on the future of the creative community in this country. It is simply a question of basic economics and plain common sense."~{ Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders), 475. }~ Indeed, as surveys would later show, 45 percent of VCR owners had movie libraries of ten videos or more~{ /{Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Sony Corp. of America,}/ 480 F. Supp. 429, 438 (C.D. Cal., 1979). }~ - a use the Court would later hold was not "fair." By "allowing VCR owners to copy freely by the means of an exemption from copyright infringement without creating a mechanism to compensate copyright owners," Valenti testified, Congress would "take from the owners the very essence of their property: the exclusive right to control who may use their work, that is, who may copy it and thereby profit from its reproduction."~{ Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders), 485 (testimony of Jack Valenti). }~ +={ Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +3 | on VCR technology ; + Valenti, Jack : + on VCR technology +1 +} + +It took eight years for this case to be resolved by the Supreme Court. In the interim, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Hollywood in its jurisdiction - leading Judge Alex Kozinski, who sits on that court, refers to it as the "Hollywood Circuit" - held that Sony would be liable for the copyright infringement made possible by its machines. Under the Ninth Circuit's rule, this totally familiar technology - which Jack Valenti had called "the Boston Strangler of the American film industry" (worse yet, it was a /{Japanese}/ Boston Strangler of the American film industry) - was an illegal technology.~{ /{Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Sony Corp. of America,}/ 659 F. 2d 963 (9th Cir. 1981). }~ +={ Court of Appeals : + Ninth Circuit ; + Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + on VCR technology +3 ; + Kozinski, Alex +} + +But the Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Ninth Circuit. And in its reversal, the Court clearly articulated its understanding of when and whether courts should intervene in such disputes. As the Court wrote, +={ Supreme Court, U.S. : + on balance of interests in copyright law +2 +} + +_1 Sound policy, as well as history, supports our consistent deference to Congress when major technological innovations alter the market for copyrighted materials. Congress has the constitutional authority and the institutional ability to accommodate fully the varied permutations of competing interests that are inevitably implicated by such new technology."~{ /{Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.,}/ 464 U.S. 417, 431 (1984). }~ +={ innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in +12 ; + innovation : + copyright profit balanced with +12 +} + +Congress was asked to respond to the Supreme Court's decision. But as with the plea of recording artists about radio broadcasts, Congress ignored the request. Congress was convinced that American film got enough, this "taking" notwithstanding. +={ cassette recording : + VCRs +3 ; + Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +4 | on VCR technology +3 ; + VCRs +3 +} + +If we put these cases together, a pattern is clear: + +table{~h c4; 10; 30; 30; 30; + +CASE +WHOSE VALUE WAS "PIRATED" +RESPONSE OF THE COURTS +RESPONSE OF CONGRESS + +Recordings +Composers +No Protection +Statutory License + +Radio +Recording Artists +N/A +Nothing + +Cable TV +Broadcasters +No Protection +Statutory License + +VCR +Film Creators +No Protection +Nothing + +}table + +In each case throughout our history, a new technology changed the way content was distributed.~{ These are the most important instances in our history, but there are other cases as well. The technology of digital audio tape (DAT), for example, was regulated by Congress to minimize the risk of piracy. The remedy Congress imposed did burden DAT producers, by taxing tape sales and controlling the technology of DAT. See Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (Title 17 of the /{United States Code}/), Pub. L. No. 102-563, 106 Stat. 4237, codified at 17 U.S.C. §1001. Again, however, this regulation did not eliminate the opportunity for free riding in the sense I've described. See Lessig, /{Future,}/ 71. See also Picker, "From Edison to the Broadcast Flag," /{University of Chicago Law Review}/ 70 (2003): 293-96. }~ In each case, throughout our history, that change meant that someone got a "free ride" on someone else's work. + +In /{none}/ of these cases did either the courts or Congress eliminate all free riding. In /{none}/ of these cases did the courts or Congress insist that the law should assure that the copyright holder get all the value that his copyright created. In every case, the copyright owners complained of "piracy." In every case, Congress acted to recognize some of the legiti macy in the behavior of the "pirates." In each case, Congress allowed some new technology to benefit from content made before. It balanced the interests at stake. + +When you think across these examples, and the other examples that make up the first four chapters of this section, this balance makes sense. Was Walt Disney a pirate? Would doujinshi be better if creators had to ask permission? Should tools that enable others to capture and spread images as a way to cultivate or criticize our culture be better regulated? Is it really right that building a search engine should expose you to $15 million in damages? Would it have been better if Edison had controlled film? Should every cover band have to hire a lawyer to get permission to record a song? +={ Disney, Walt ; + Edison, Thomas +} + +We could answer yes to each of these questions, but our tradition has answered no. In our tradition, as the Supreme Court has stated, copyright "has never accorded the copyright owner complete control over all possible uses of his work."~{ /{Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.,}/ 464 U.S. 417, 432 (1984). }~ Instead, the particular uses that the law regulates have been defined by balancing the good that comes from granting an exclusive right against the burdens such an exclusive right creates. And this balancing has historically been done /{after}/ a technology has matured, or settled into the mix of technologies that facilitate the distribution of content. +={ Supreme Court, U.S. : + on balance of interests in copyright law +} + +We should be doing the same thing today. The technology of the Internet is changing quickly. The way people connect to the Internet (wires vs. wireless) is changing very quickly. No doubt the network should not become a tool for "stealing" from artists. But neither should the law become a tool to entrench one particular way in which artists (or more accurately, distributors) get paid. As I describe in some detail in the last chapter of this book, we should be securing income to artists while we allow the market to secure the most efficient way to promote and distribute content. This will require changes in the law, at least in the interim. These changes should be designed to balance the protection of the law against the strong public interest that innovation continue. + +This is especially true when a new technology enables a vastly superior mode of distribution. And this p2p has done. P2p technologies can be ideally efficient in moving content across a widely diverse network. Left to develop, they could make the network vastly more efficient. Yet these "potential public benefits," as John Schwartz writes in /{The New York Times}/, "could be delayed in the P2P fight."~{ John Schwartz, "New Economy: The Attack on Peer-to-Peer Software Echoes Past Efforts," /{New York Times,}/ 22 September 2003, C3. }~ +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + benefits of +1 ; + Schwartz, John +} + +!_ Yet when anyone +begins to talk about "balance," the copyright warriors raise a different argument. "All this hand waving about balance and incentives," they say, "misses a fundamental point. Our content," the warriors insist, "is our /{property}/. Why should we wait for Congress to 'rebalance' our property rights? Do you have to wait before calling the police when your car has been stolen? And why should Congress deliberate at all about the merits of this theft? Do we ask whether the car thief had a good use for the car before we arrest him?" + +"It is /{our property}/," the warriors insist. "And it should be protected just as any other property is protected." + +:B~ "PROPERTY" + +1~intro_property [Intro]-# + +!_ The copyright warriors +are right: A copyright is a kind of property. It can be owned and sold, and the law protects against its theft. Ordinarily, the copyright owner gets to hold out for any price he wants. Markets reckon the supply and demand that partially determine the price she can get. +={ copyright : + as property +5 ; + property rights : + copyright vs. +5 +} + +% would have placed index links on heading above, but is an un-numbered heading + +But in ordinary language, to call a copyright a "property" right is a bit misleading, for the property of copyright is an odd kind of property. Indeed, the very idea of property in any idea or any expression is very odd. I understand what I am taking when I take the picnic table you put in your backyard. I am taking a thing, the picnic table, and after I take it, you don't have it. But what am I taking when I take the good /{idea}/ you had to put a picnic table in the backyard - by, for example, going to Sears, buying a table, and putting it in my backyard? What is the thing I am taking then? + +The point is not just about the thingness of picnic tables versus ideas, though that's an important difference. The point instead is that in the ordinary case - indeed, in practically every case except for a narrow range of exceptions - ideas released to the world are free. I don't take anything from you when I copy the way you dress - though I might seem weird if I did it every day, and especially weird if you are a woman. Instead, as Thomas Jefferson said (and as is especially true when I copy the way someone else dresses), - He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."~{ Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson (13 August 1813) in /{The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,}/ vol. 6 (Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., 1903), 330, 333-34. }~ +={ Jefferson, Thomas } + +The exceptions to free use are ideas and expressions within the reach of the law of patent and copyright, and a few other domains that I won't discuss here. Here the law says you can't take my idea or expression without my permission: The law turns the intangible into property. +={ property rights : + intangibility of +} + +But how, and to what extent, and in what form - the details, in other words - matter. To get a good sense of how this practice of turning the intangible into property emerged, we need to place this "property" in its proper context.~{ As the legal realists taught American law, all property rights are intangible. A property right is simply a right that an individual has against the world to do or not do certain things that may or may not attach to a physical object. The right itself is intangible, even if the object to which it is (metaphorically) attached is tangible. See Adam Mossoff, "What Is Property? Putting the Pieces Back Together," /{Arizona Law Review}/ 45 (2003): 373, 429 n. 241. }~ + +My strategy in doing this will be the same as my strategy in the preceding part. I offer four stories to help put the idea of "copyright material is property" in context. Where did the idea come from? What are its limits? How does it function in practice? After these stories, the significance of this true statement - "copyright material is property" - will be a bit more clear, and its implications will be revealed as quite different from the implications that the copyright warriors would have us draw. + +1~ Chapter Six: Founders +={ books : + English copyright law developed for +40 ; + copyright law : + development of +40 | English +40 ; + England, copyright laws developed in +40 ; + United Kingdom : + history of copyright law in +40 +} + +!_ William Shakespeare +wrote /{Romeo and Juliet}/ in 1595. The play was first published in 1597. It was the eleventh major play that Shakespeare had written. He would continue to write plays through 1613, and the plays that he wrote have continued to define Anglo-American culture ever since. So deeply have the works of a sixteenth-century writer seeped into our culture that we often don't even recognize their source. I once overheard someone commenting on Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Henry V: "I liked it, but Shakespeare is so full of clichés." +={ Branagh, Kenneth ; + Henry V. ; + Shakespeare, William ; + Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) +2 +} + +In 1774, almost 180 years after /{Romeo and Juliet}/ was written, the "copy-right" for the work was still thought by many to be the exclusive right of a single London publisher, Jacob Tonson.~{ Jacob Tonson is typically remembered for his associations with prominent eighteenth-century literary figures, especially John Dryden, and for his handsome "definitive editions" of classic works. In addition to /{Romeo and Juliet,}/ he published an astonishing array of works that still remain at the heart of the English canon, including collected works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Dryden. See Keith Walker, "Jacob Tonson, Bookseller," /{American Scholar}/ 61:3 (1992): 424-31. }~ Tonson was the most prominent of a small group of publishers called the Conger~{ Lyman Ray Patterson, /{Copyright in Historical Perspective}/ (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 151-52. }~ who controlled bookselling in England during the eighteenth century. The Conger claimed a perpetual right to control the "copy" of books that they had acquired from authors. That perpetual right meant that no one else could publish copies of a book to which they held the copyright. Prices of the classics were thus kept high; competition to produce better or cheaper editions was eliminated. +={ Conger ; + Tonson, Jacob +1 +} + +Now, there's something puzzling about the year 1774 to anyone who knows a little about copyright law. The better-known year in the history of copyright is 1710, the year that the British Parliament adopted the first "copyright" act. Known as the Statute of Anne, the act stated that all published works would get a copyright term of fourteen years, renewable once if the author was alive, and that all works already published by 1710 would get a single term of twenty-one additional years.~{ As Siva Vaidhyanathan nicely argues, it is erroneous to call this a "copyright law." See Vaidhyanathan, /{Copyrights and Copywrongs,}/ 40. }~ Under this law, /{Romeo and Juliet}/ should have been free in 1731. So why was there any issue about it still being under Tonson's control in 1774? +={ British Parliament ; + copyright : + duration of +1 | renewability of ; + Statute of Anne (1710) +} + +The reason is that the English hadn't yet agreed on what a "copyright" was - indeed, no one had. At the time the English passed the Statute of Anne, there was no other legislation governing copyrights. The last law regulating publishers, the Licensing Act of 1662, had expired in 1695. That law gave publishers a monopoly over publishing, as a way to make it easier for the Crown to control what was published. But after it expired, there was no positive law that said that the publishers, or "Stationers," had an exclusive right to print books. +={ law : + common vs. positive +1 ; + positive law ; + Licensing Act (1662) +} + +There was no /{positive}/ law, but that didn't mean that there was no law. The Anglo-American legal tradition looks to both the words of legislatures and the words of judges to know the rules that are to govern how people are to behave. We call the words from legislatures "positive law." We call the words from judges "common law." The common law sets the background against which legislatures legislate; the legislature, ordinarily, can trump that background only if it passes a law to displace it. And so the real question after the licensing statutes had expired was whether the common law protected a copyright, independent of any positive law. +={ common law } + +This question was important to the publishers, or "booksellers," as they were called, because there was growing competition from foreign publishers. The Scottish, in particular, were increasingly publishing and exporting books to England. That competition reduced the profits of the Conger, which reacted by demanding that Parliament pass a law to again give them exclusive control over publishing. That demand ultimately resulted in the Statute of Anne. +={ Conger ; + British Parliament +2 ; + Scottish publishers ; + Statute of Anne (1710) +1 +} + +The Statute of Anne granted the author or "proprietor" of a book an exclusive right to print that book. In an important limitation, however, and to the horror of the booksellers, the law gave the bookseller that right for a limited term. At the end of that term, the copyright "expired," and the work would then be free and could be published by anyone. Or so the legislature is thought to have believed. +={ copyright : + as narrow monopoly right +33 +} + +Now, the thing to puzzle about for a moment is this: Why would Parliament limit the exclusive right? Not why would they limit it to the particular limit they set, but why would they limit the right /{at all?}}/ + +For the booksellers, and the authors whom they represented, had a very strong claim. Take /{Romeo and Juliet}/ as an example: That play was written by Shakespeare. It was his genius that brought it into the world. He didn't take anybody's property when he created this play (that's a controversial claim, but never mind), and by his creating this play, he didn't make it any harder for others to craft a play. So why is it that the law would ever allow someone else to come along and take Shakespeare's play without his, or his estate's, permission? What reason is there to allow someone else to "steal" Shakespeare's work? +={ Shakespeare, William ; + Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) +} + +The answer comes in two parts. We first need to see something special about the notion of "copyright" that existed at the time of the Statute of Anne. Second, we have to see something important about "booksellers." +={ Statute of Anne (1710) } + +First, about copyright. In the last three hundred years, we have come to apply the concept of "copyright" ever more broadly. But in 1710, it wasn't so much a concept as it was a very particular right. The copyright was born as a very specific set of restrictions: It forbade others from reprinting a book. In 1710, the "copy-right" was a right to use a particular machine to replicate a particular work. It did not go beyond that very narrow right. It did not control any more generally how a work could be /{used}/. Today the right includes a large collection of restrictions on the freedom of others: It grants the author the exclusive right to copy, the exclusive right to distribute, the exclusive right to perform, and so on. +={ usage restrictions attached to } + +So, for example, even if the copyright to Shakespeare's works were perpetual, all that would have meant under the original meaning of the term was that no one could reprint Shakespeare's work without the permission of the Shakespeare estate. It would not have controlled anything, for example, about how the work could be performed, whether the work could be translated, or whether Kenneth Branagh would be allowed to make his films. The "copy-right" was only an exclusive right to print - no less, of course, but also no more. +={ Branagh, Kenneth ; + Shakespeare, William +} + +Even that limited right was viewed with skepticism by the British. They had had a long and ugly experience with "exclusive rights," especially "exclusive rights" granted by the Crown. The English had fought a civil war in part about the Crown's practice of handing out monopolies - especially monopolies for works that already existed. King Henry VIII granted a patent to print the Bible and a monopoly to Darcy to print playing cards. The English Parliament began to fight back against this power of the Crown. In 1656, it passed the Statute of Monopolies, limiting monopolies to patents for new inventions. And by 1710, Parliament was eager to deal with the growing monopoly in publishing. +={ Henry VIII, King of England ; + monopoly, copyright as +27 ; + Statue of Monopolies (1656) +} + +Thus the "copy-right," when viewed as a monopoly right, was naturally viewed as a right that should be limited. (However convincing the claim that "it's my property, and I should have it forever," try sounding convincing when uttering, "It's my monopoly, and I should have it forever.") The state would protect the exclusive right, but only so long as it benefited society. The British saw the harms from special-interest favors; they passed a law to stop them. + +Second, about booksellers. It wasn't just that the copyright was a monopoly. It was also that it was a monopoly held by the booksellers. Booksellers sound quaint and harmless to us. They were not viewed as harmless in seventeenth-century England. Members of the Conger were increasingly seen as monopolists of the worst kind - tools of the Crown's repression, selling the liberty of England to guarantee themselves a monopoly profit. The attacks against these monopolists were harsh: Milton described them as "old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of book-selling"; they were "men who do not therefore labour in an honest profession to which learning is indetted."~{ Philip Wittenberg, /{The Protection and Marketing of Literary Property}/ (New York: J. Messner, Inc., 1937), 31. }~ +={ Milton, John ; + booksellers, English +25 ; + Conger ; + copyright : + duration of +25 +} + +Many believed the power the booksellers exercised over the spread of knowledge was harming that spread, just at the time the Enlightenment was teaching the importance of education and knowledge spread generally. The idea that knowledge should be free was a hallmark of the time, and these powerful commercial interests were interfering with that idea. +={ Enlightenment ; + knowledge, freedom of +} + +To balance this power, Parliament decided to increase competition among booksellers, and the simplest way to do that was to spread the wealth of valuable books. Parliament therefore limited the term of copyrights, and thereby guaranteed that valuable books would become open to any publisher to publish after a limited time. Thus the setting of the term for existing works to just twenty-one years was a compromise to fight the power of the booksellers. The limitation on terms was an indirect way to assure competition among publishers, and thus the construction and spread of culture. +={ British Parliament +4 } + +When 1731 (1710 + 21) came along, however, the booksellers were getting anxious. They saw the consequences of more competition, and like every competitor, they didn't like them. At first booksellers simply ignored the Statute of Anne, continuing to insist on the perpetual right to control publication. But in 1735 and 1737, they tried to persuade Parliament to extend their terms. Twenty-one years was not enough, they said; they needed more time. +={ Statute of Anne (1710) +2 ; + copyright : + in perpetuity +2 +} + +Parliament rejected their requests. As one pamphleteer put it, in words that echo today, + +_1 I see no Reason for granting a further Term now, which will not hold as well for granting it again and again, as often as the Old ones Expire; so that should this Bill pass, it will in Effect be establishing a perpetual Monopoly, a Thing deservedly odious in the Eye of the Law; it will be a great Cramp to Trade, a Discouragement to Learning, no Benefit to the Authors, but a general Tax on the Publick; and all this only to increase the private Gain of the Booksellers."~{ A Letter to a Member of Parliament concerning the Bill now depending in the House of Commons, for making more effectual an Act in the Eighth Year of the Reign of Queen Anne, entitled, An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned (London, 1735), in Brief Amici Curiae of Tyler T. Ochoa et al., 8, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 537 U.S. 186 (2003) (No. 01- 618). }~ + +Having failed in Parliament, the publishers turned to the courts in a series of cases. Their argument was simple and direct: The Statute of Anne gave authors certain protections through positive law, but those protections were not intended as replacements for the common law. Instead, they were intended simply to supplement the common law. Under common law, it was already wrong to take another person's creative "property" and use it without his permission. The Statute of Anne, the booksellers argued, didn't change that. Therefore, just because the protections of the Statute of Anne expired, that didn't mean the protections of the common law expired: Under the common law they had the right to ban the publication of a book, even if its Statute of Anne copyright had expired. This, they argued, was the only way to protect authors. +={ common law ; + law : + common vs. positive ; + positive law +} + +This was a clever argument, and one that had the support of some of the leading jurists of the day. It also displayed extraordinary chutzpah. Until then, as law professor Raymond Patterson has put it, "The publishers ... had as much concern for authors as a cattle rancher has for cattle."~{ Lyman Ray Patterson, "Free Speech, Copyright, and Fair Use," /{Vanderbilt Law Review}/ 40 (1987): 28. For a wonderfully compelling account, see Vaidhyanathan, 37-48. }~ The bookseller didn't care squat for the rights of the author. His concern was the monopoly profit that the author's work gave. + +The booksellers' argument was not accepted without a fight. The hero of this fight was a Scottish bookseller named Alexander Donaldson.~{ For a compelling account, see David Saunders, /{Authorship and Copyright}/ (London: Routledge, 1992), 62-69. }~ +={ Donaldson, Alexander +3 ; + Patterson, Raymond ; + Scottish publishers +3 +} + +Donaldson was an outsider to the London Conger. He began his career in Edinburgh in 1750. The focus of his business was inexpensive reprints "of standard works whose copyright term had expired," at least under the Statute of Anne.~{ Mark Rose, /{Authors and Owners}/ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 92. }~ Donaldson's publishing house prospered and became "something of a center for literary Scotsmen." "[A]mong them," Professor Mark Rose writes, was "the young James Boswell who, together with his friend Andrew Erskine, published an anthology of contemporary Scottish poems with Donaldson."~{ Ibid., 93. }~ +={ Statute of Anne (1710) +8 ; + Conger +1 ; + Boswell, James ; + Erskine, Andrew ; + Rose, Mark +} + +When the London booksellers tried to shut down Donaldson's shop in Scotland, he responded by moving his shop to London, where he sold inexpensive editions "of the most popular English books, in defiance of the supposed common law right of Literary Property."~{ Lyman Ray Patterson, /{Copyright in Historical Perspective,}/ 167 (quoting Borwell). }~ His books undercut the Conger prices by 30 to 50 percent, and he rested his right to compete upon the ground that, under the Statute of Anne, the works he was selling had passed out of protection. +={ common law +3 } + +The London booksellers quickly brought suit to block "piracy" like Donaldson's. A number of actions were successful against the "pirates," the most important early victory being /{Millar v. Taylor}/. +={ Millar v. Taylor +5 } + +Millar was a bookseller who in 1729 had purchased the rights to James Thomson's poem "The Seasons." Millar complied with the requirements of the Statute of Anne, and therefore received the full protection of the statute. After the term of copyright ended, Robert Taylor began printing a competing volume. Millar sued, claiming a perpetual common law right, the Statute of Anne notwithstanding.~{ Howard B. Abrams, "The Historic Foundation of American Copyright Law: Exploding the Myth of Common Law Copyright," /{Wayne Law Review}/ 29 (1983): 1152. }~ +={ Thomson, James +1 ; + copyright : + in perpetuity +1 ; + Seasons, The (Thomson) ; + Taylor, Robert +} + +Astonishingly to modern lawyers, one of the greatest judges in English history, Lord Mansfield, agreed with the booksellers. Whatever protection the Statute of Anne gave booksellers, it did not, he held, extinguish any common law right. The question was whether the common law would protect the author against subsequent "pirates." Mansfield's answer was yes: The common law would bar Taylor from reprinting Thomson's poem without Millar's permission. That common law rule thus effectively gave the booksellers a perpetual right to control the publication of any book assigned to them. +={ Mansfield, William Murray, Lord +1 } + +Considered as a matter of abstract justice - reasoning as if justice were just a matter of logical deduction from first principles - Mansfield's conclusion might make some sense. But what it ignored was the larger issue that Parliament had struggled with in 1710: How best to limit the monopoly power of publishers? Parliament's strategy was to offer a term for existing works that was long enough to buy peace in 1710, but short enough to assure that culture would pass into competition within a reasonable period of time. Within twenty-one years, Parliament believed, Britain would mature from the controlled culture that the Crown coveted to the free culture that we inherited. +={ British Parliament +2 } + +The fight to defend the limits of the Statute of Anne was not to end there, however, and it is here that Donaldson enters the mix. +={ Donaldson, Alexander +5 ; + Scottish publishers +5 ; + Statute of Anne (1710) +2 +} + +Millar died soon after his victory, so his case was not appealed. His estate sold Thomson's poems to a syndicate of printers that included Thomas Beckett. ~{ Ibid., 1156. }~ Donaldson then released an unauthorized edition of Thomson's works. Beckett, on the strength of the decision in /{Millar}/, got an injunction against Donaldson. Donaldson appealed the case to the House of Lords, which functioned much like our own Supreme Court. In February of 1774, that body had the chance to interpret the meaning of Parliament's limits from sixty years before. +={ Thomson, James ; + Becket, Thomas ; + House of Lords +5 ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + House of Lords vs. +2 +} + +As few legal cases ever do, /{Donaldson v. Beckett}/ drew an enormous amount of attention throughout Britain. Donaldson's lawyers argued that whatever rights may have existed under the common law, the Statute of Anne terminated those rights. After passage of the Statute of Anne, the only legal protection for an exclusive right to control publication came from that statute. Thus, they argued, after the term specified in the Statute of Anne expired, works that had been protected by the statute were no longer protected. +={ Donaldson v. Beckett +8 ; + common law +3 +} + +The House of Lords was an odd institution. Legal questions were presented to the House and voted upon first by the "law lords," members of special legal distinction who functioned much like the Justices in our Supreme Court. Then, after the law lords voted, the House of Lords generally voted. + +The reports about the law lords' votes are mixed. On some counts, it looks as if perpetual copyright prevailed. But there is no ambiguity about how the House of Lords voted as whole. By a two-to-one majority (22 to 11) they voted to reject the idea of perpetual copyrights. Whatever one's understanding of the common law, now a copyright was fixed for a limited time, after which the work protected by copyright passed into the public domain. +={ copyright : + in perpetuity +1 ; + public domain : + English legal establishment of +1 +} + +"The public domain." Before the case of /{Donaldson v. Beckett}/, there was no clear idea of a public domain in England. Before 1774, there was a strong argument that common law copyrights were perpetual. After 1774, the public domain was born. For the first time in Anglo- American history, the legal control over creative works expired, and the greatest works in English history - including those of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Johnson, and Bunyan - were free of legal restraint. +={ Bacon, Francis ; + Bunyan, John ; + Johnson, Samuel ; + Milton, John ; + Shakespeare, William +} + +It is hard for us to imagine, but this decision by the House of Lords fueled an extraordinarily popular and political reaction. In Scotland, where most of the "pirate publishers" did their work, people celebrated the decision in the streets. As the /{Edinburgh Advertiser}/ reported, "No private cause has so much engrossed the attention of the public, and none has been tried before the House of Lords in the decision of which so many individuals were interested." "Great rejoicing in Edinburgh upon victory over literary property: bonfires and illuminations."~{ Rose, 97. }~ +={ Scottish publishers } + +In London, however, at least among publishers, the reaction was equally strong in the opposite direction. The /{Morning Chronicle}/ reported: + +_1 By the above decision ... near 200,000 pounds worth of what was honestly purchased at public sale, and which was yesterday thought property is now reduced to nothing. The Booksellers of London and Westminster, many of whom sold estates and houses to purchase Copy-right, are in a manner ruined, and those who after many years industry thought they had acquired a competency to provide for their families now find themselves without a shilling to devise to their successors."~{ Ibid. }~ + +"Ruined" is a bit of an exaggeration. But it is not an exaggeration to say that the change was profound. The decision of the House of Lords meant that the booksellers could no longer control how culture in England would grow and develop. Culture in England was thereafter /{free}/. Not in the sense that copyrights would not be respected, for of course, for a limited time after a work was published, the bookseller had an exclusive right to control the publication of that book. And not in the sense that books could be stolen, for even after a copyright expired, you still had to buy the book from someone. But /{free}/ in the sense that the culture and its growth would no longer be controlled by a small group of publishers. As every free market does, this free market of free culture would grow as the consumers and producers chose. English culture would develop as the many English readers chose to let it develop - chose in the books they bought and wrote; chose in the memes they repeated and endorsed. Chose in a /{competitive context}/, not a context in which the choices about what culture is available to people and how they get access to it are made by the few despite the wishes of the many. +={ House of Lords ; + free culture : + English legal establishment of +} + +At least, this was the rule in a world where the Parliament is anti-monopoly, resistant to the protectionist pleas of publishers. In a world where the Parliament is more pliant, free culture would be less protected. +={ British Parliament } + +1~ Chapter Seven: Recorders +={ copyright law : + fair use and +22 ; + documentary film +22 ; + Else, Jon +22 ; + fair use : + in documentary film +22 ; + films : + fair use of copyrighted material in +22 +} + +!_ Jon Else +is a filmmaker. He is best known for his documentaries and has been very successful in spreading his art. He is also a teacher, and as a teacher myself, I envy the loyalty and admiration that his students feel for him. (I met, by accident, two of his students at a dinner party. He was their god.) + +Else worked on a documentary that I was involved in. At a break, he told me a story about the freedom to create with film in America today. + +In 1990, Else was working on a documentary about Wagner's Ring Cycle. The focus was stagehands at the San Francisco Opera. Stage- hands are a particularly funny and colorful element of an opera. During a show, they hang out below the stage in the grips' lounge and in the lighting loft. They make a perfect contrast to the art on the stage. +={ Wagner, Richard +1 ; + San Francisco Opera +} + +During one of the performances, Else was shooting some stage- hands playing checkers. In one corner of the room was a television set. Playing on the television set, while the stagehands played checkers and the opera company played Wagner, was /{The Simpsons}/. As Else judged it, this touch of cartoon helped capture the flavor of what was special about the scene. +={ Simpsons, The +16 } + +Years later, when he finally got funding to complete the film, Else attempted to clear the rights for those few seconds of /{The Simpsons}/. For of course, those few seconds are copyrighted; and of course, to use copyrighted material you need the permission of the copyright owner, unless "fair use" or some other privilege applies. +={ films : + multiple copyrights associated with +} + +Else called /{Simpsons}/ creator Matt Groening's office to get permission. Groening approved the shot. The shot was a four-and-a-half-second image on a tiny television set in the corner of the room. How could it hurt? Groening was happy to have it in the film, but he told Else to contact Gracie Films, the company that produces the program. +={ Gracie Films +1 ; + Groening, Matt +2 +} + +Gracie Films was okay with it, too, but they, like Groening, wanted to be careful. So they told Else to contact Fox, Gracie's parent company. Else called Fox and told them about the clip in the corner of the one room shot of the film. Matt Groening had already given permission, Else said. He was just confirming the permission with Fox. +={ Fox (film company) +1 } + +Then, as Else told me, "two things happened. First we discovered ... that Matt Groening doesn't own his own creation - or at least that someone [at Fox] believes he doesn't own his own creation." And second, Fox "wanted ten thousand dollars as a licensing fee for us to use this four-point-five seconds of ... entirely unsolicited /{Simpsons}/ which was in the corner of the shot." + +Else was certain there was a mistake. He worked his way up to someone he thought was a vice president for licensing, Rebecca Herrera. He explained to her, "There must be some mistake here. ... We're asking for your educational rate on this." That was the educational rate, Herrera told Else. A day or so later, Else called again to confirm what he had been told. +={ Herrera, Rebecca +1 } + +"I wanted to make sure I had my facts straight," he told me. "Yes, you have your facts straight," she said. It would cost $10,000 to use the clip of /{The Simpsons}/ in the corner of a shot in a documentary film about Wagner's Ring Cycle. And then, astonishingly, Herrera told Else, "And if you quote me, I'll turn you over to our attorneys." As an assistant to Herrera told Else later on, "They don't give a shit. They just want the money." +={ Wagner, Richard } + +Else didn't have the money to buy the right to replay what was playing on the television backstage at the San Francisco Opera.To reproduce this reality was beyond the documentary filmmaker's budget. At the very last minute before the film was to be released, Else digitally replaced the shot with a clip from another film that he had worked on, /{The Day After Trinity}/, from ten years before. +={ San Francisco Opera ; + Day After Trinity, The +} + +!_ There's no doubt +that someone, whether Matt Groening or Fox, owns the copyright to /{The Simpsons}/. That copyright is their property. To use that copyrighted material thus sometimes requires the permission of the copyright owner. If the use that Else wanted to make of the /{Simpsons}/ copyright were one of the uses restricted by the law, then he would need to get the permission of the copyright owner before he could use the work in that way. And in a free market, it is the owner of the copyright who gets to set the price for any use that the law says the owner gets to control. +={ Fox (film company) +2 ; + Groening, Matt +2 +} + +For example, "public performance" is a use of /{The Simpsons}/ that the copyright owner gets to control. If you take a selection of favorite episodes, rent a movie theater, and charge for tickets to come see "My Favorite /{Simpsons}/," then you need to get permission from the copyright owner. And the copyright owner (rightly, in my view) can charge whatever she wants - $10 or $1,000,000. That's her right, as set by the law. + +But when lawyers hear this story about Jon Else and Fox, their first thought is "fair use."~{ For an excellent argument that such use is "fair use," but that lawyers don't permit recognition that it is "fair use," see Richard A. Posner with William F. Patry, "Fair Use and Statutory Reform in the Wake of /{Eldred}/" (draft on file with author), University of Chicago Law School, 5 August 2003. }~ Else's use of just 4.5 seconds of an indirect shot of a /{Simpsons}/ episode is clearly a fair use of /{The Simpsons}/ - and fair use does not require the permission of anyone. + +So I asked Else why he didn't just rely upon "fair use." Here's his reply: + +_1 The /{Simpsons}/ fiasco was for me a great lesson in the gulf between what lawyers find irrelevant in some abstract sense, and what is crushingly relevant in practice to those of us actually trying to make and broadcast documentaries. I never had any doubt that it was "clearly fair use" in an absolute legal sense. But I couldn't rely on the concept in any concrete way. Here's why: +={ fair use : + legal intimidation tactics against +6 +} + +_1 1. Before our films can be broadcast, the network requires that we buy Errors and Omissions insurance. The carriers require a detailed "visual cue sheet" listing the source and licensing status of each shot in the film. They take a dim view of "fair use," and a claim of "fair use" can grind the application process to a halt. +={ Errors and Omissions insurance } + +_1 2. I probably never should have asked Matt Groening in the first place. But I knew (at least from folklore) that Fox had a history of tracking down and stopping unlicensed /{Simpsons}/ usage, just as George Lucas had a very high profile litigating /{Star Wars}/ usage. So I decided to play by the book, thinking that we would be granted free or cheap license to four seconds of /{Simpsons}/. As a documentary producer working to exhaustion on a shoestring, the last thing I wanted was to risk legal trouble, even nuisance legal trouble, and even to defend a principle. +={ Fox (film company) +1 ; + Groening, Matt ; + Lucas, George ; + Star Wars +} + +_1 3. I did, in fact, speak with one of your colleagues at Stanford Law School ... who confirmed that it was fair use. He also confirmed that Fox would "depose and litigate you to within an inch of your life," regardless of the merits of my claim. He made clear that it would boil down to who had the bigger legal department and the deeper pockets, me or them. + +_1 4. The question of fair use usually comes up at the end of the project, when we are up against a release deadline and out of money." + +In theory, fair use means you need no permission. The theory therefore supports free culture and insulates against a permission culture. But in practice, fair use functions very differently. The fuzzy lines of the law, tied to the extraordinary liability if lines are crossed, means that the effective fair use for many types of creators is slight. The law has the right aim; practice has defeated the aim. + +This practice shows just how far the law has come from its eighteenth-century roots. The law was born as a shield to protect publishers' profits against the unfair competition of a pirate. It has matured into a sword that interferes with any use, transformative or not. + +1~ Chapter Eight: Transformers +={ films : + clips and collages of +37 +} + +!_ In 1993, +Alex Alben was a lawyer working at Starwave, Inc. Starwave was an innovative company founded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to develop digital entertainment. Long before the Internet became popular, Starwave began investing in new technology for delivering entertainment in anticipation of the power of networks. +={ Alben, Alex +27 ; + Allen, Paul ; + Microsoft ; + Starwave +7 +} + +Alben had a special interest in new technology. He was intrigued by the emerging market for CD-ROM technology - not to distribute film, but to do things with film that otherwise would be very difficult. In 1993, he launched an initiative to develop a product to build retrospectives on the work of particular actors. The first actor chosen was Clint Eastwood. The idea was to showcase all of the work of Eastwood, with clips from his films and interviews with figures important to his career. +={ artists : + retrospective collections on +21 ; + CD-ROMs, film clips used in +21 ; + Eastwood, Clint +15 +} + +At that time, Eastwood had made more than fifty films, as an actor and as a director. Alben began with a series of interviews with Eastwood, asking him about his career. Because Starwave produced those interviews, it was free to include them on the CD. + +That alone would not have made a very interesting product, so Starwave wanted to add content from the movies in Eastwood's career: posters, scripts, and other material relating to the films Eastwood made. Most of his career was spent at Warner Brothers, and so it was relatively easy to get permission for that content. +={ permissions : + for use of film clips +33 ; + Warner Brothers +} + +Then Alben and his team decided to include actual film clips. "Our goal was that we were going to have a clip from every one of East-wood's films," Alben told me. It was here that the problem arose. "No one had ever really done this before," Alben explained. "No one had ever tried to do this in the context of an artistic look at an actor's career." +={ films : + multiple copyrights associated with +14 +} + +Alben brought the idea to Michael Slade, the CEO of Starwave. Slade asked, "Well, what will it take?" +={ Slade, Michael +2 } + +Alben replied, "Well, we're going to have to clear rights from everyone who appears in these films, and the music and everything else that we want to use in these film clips." Slade said, "Great! Go for it."~{ Technically, the rights that Alben had to clear were mainly those of publicity"rights an artist has to control the commercial exploitation of his image. But these rights, too, burden "Rip, Mix, Burn" creativity, as this chapter evinces. }~ + +The problem was that neither Alben nor Slade had any idea what clearing those rights would mean. Every actor in each of the films could have a claim to royalties for the reuse of that film. But CD-ROMs had not been specified in the contracts for the actors, so there was no clear way to know just what Starwave was to do. + +I asked Alben how he dealt with the problem. With an obvious pride in his resourcefulness that obscured the obvious bizarreness of his tale, Alben recounted just what they did: + +_1 So we very mechanically went about looking up the film clips. We made some artistic decisions about what film clips to include - of course we were going to use the "Make my day" clip from /{Dirty Harry}/. But you then need to get the guy on the ground who's wiggling under the gun and you need to get his permission. And then you have to decide what you are going to pay him. +={ Dirty, Harry } + +_1 We decided that it would be fair if we offered them the day-player rate for the right to reuse that performance. We're talking about a clip of less than a minute, but to reuse that performance in the CD-ROM the rate at the time was about $600. + +_1 So we had to identify the people - some of them were hard to identify because in Eastwood movies you can't tell who's the guy crashing through the glass - is it the actor or is it the stuntman? And then we just, we put together a team, my assistant and some others, and we just started calling people." + +Some actors were glad to help - Donald Sutherland, for example, followed up himself to be sure that the rights had been cleared. Others were dumbfounded at their good fortune. Alben would ask, "Hey, can I pay you $600 or maybe if you were in two films, you know, $1,200?" And they would say, "Are you for real? Hey, I'd love to get $1,200." And some of course were a bit difficult (estranged ex-wives, in particular). But eventually, Alben and his team had cleared the rights to this retrospective CD-ROM on Clint Eastwood's career. +={ Sutherland, Donald } + +It was one /{year}/ later - " and even then we weren't sure whether we were totally in the clear." + +Alben is proud of his work. The project was the first of its kind and the only time he knew of that a team had undertaken such a massive project for the purpose of releasing a retrospective. + +_1 Everyone thought it would be too hard. Everyone just threw up their hands and said, "Oh, my gosh, a film, it's so many copyrights, there's the music, there's the screenplay, there's the director, there's the actors." But we just broke it down. We just put it into its constituent parts and said, "Okay, there's this many actors, this many directors, ... this many musicians," and we just went at it very systematically and cleared the rights." + +And no doubt, the product itself was exceptionally good. Eastwood loved it, and it sold very well. + +But I pressed Alben about how weird it seems that it would have to take a year's work simply to clear rights. No doubt Alben had done this efficiently, but as Peter Drucker has famously quipped, "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."~{ U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Acquisition Management, /{Seven Steps to Performance-Based Services Acquisition,}/ available at link #22. }~ Did it make sense, I asked Alben, that this is the way a new work has to be made? +={ Drucker, Peter } + +For, as he acknowledged, "very few ... have the time and resources, and the will to do this," and thus, very few such works would ever be made. Does it make sense, I asked him, from the standpoint of what anybody really thought they were ever giving rights for originally, that you would have to go clear rights for these kinds of clips? + +_1 I don't think so. When an actor renders a performance in a movie, he or she gets paid very well. ... And then when 30 seconds of that performance is used in a new product that is a retrospective of somebody's career, I don't think that that person ... should be compensated for that." + +Or at least, is this /{how}/ the artist should be compensated? Would it make sense, I asked, for there to be some kind of statutory license that someone could pay and be free to make derivative use of clips like this? Did it really make sense that a follow-on creator would have to track down every artist, actor, director, musician, and get explicit permission from each? Wouldn't a lot more be created if the legal part of the creative process could be made to be more clean? + +_1 Absolutely. I think that if there were some fair-licensing mechanism - where you weren't subject to hold-ups and you weren't subject to estranged former spouses - you'd see a lot more of this work, because it wouldn't be so daunting to try to put together a retrospective of someone's career and meaningfully illustrate it with lots of media from that person's career. You'd build in a cost as the producer of one of these things. You'd build in a cost of paying X dollars to the talent that performed. But it would be a known cost. That's the thing that trips everybody up and makes this kind of product hard to get off the ground. If you knew I have a hundred minutes of film in this product and it's going to cost me X, then you build your budget around it, and you can get investments and everything else that you need to produce it. But if you say, "Oh, I want a hundred minutes of something and I have no idea what it's going to cost me, and a certain number of people are going to hold me up for money," then it becomes difficult to put one of these things together." + +Alben worked for a big company. His company was backed by some of the richest investors in the world. He therefore had authority and access that the average Web designer would not have. So if it took him a year, how long would it take someone else? And how much creativity is never made just because the costs of clearing the rights are so high? + +These costs are the burdens of a kind of regulation. Put on a Republican hat for a moment, and get angry for a bit. The government defines the scope of these rights, and the scope defined determines how much it's going to cost to negotiate them. (Remember the idea that land runs to the heavens, and imagine the pilot purchasing fly- through rights as he negotiates to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco.) These rights might well have once made sense; but as circumstances change, they make no sense at all. Or at least, a well-trained, regulation-minimizing Republican should look at the rights and ask, "Does this still make sense?" +={ Republican Party } + +I've seen the flash of recognition when people get this point, but only a few times. The first was at a conference of federal judges in California. The judges were gathered to discuss the emerging topic of cyber-law. I was asked to be on the panel. Harvey Saferstein, a well-respected lawyer from an L.A. firm, introduced the panel with a video that he and a friend, Robert Fairbank, had produced. +={ Saferstein, Harvey ; + Fairbank, Robert +} + +The video was a brilliant collage of film from every period in the twentieth century, all framed around the idea of a /{60 Minutes}/ episode. The execution was perfect, down to the sixty-minute stopwatch. The judges loved every minute of it. +={ 60 Minutes } + +When the lights came up, I looked over to my copanelist, David Nimmer, perhaps the leading copyright scholar and practitioner in the nation. He had an astonished look on his face, as he peered across the room of over 250 well- entertained judges. Taking an ominous tone, he began his talk with a question: "Do you know how many federal laws were just violated in this room?" +={ Nimmer, David +1 } + +For of course, the two brilliantly talented creators who made this film hadn't done what Alben did. They hadn't spent a year clearing the rights to these clips; technically, what they had done violated the law. Of course, it wasn't as if they or anyone were going to be prosecuted for this violation (the presence of 250 judges and a gaggle of federal marshals notwithstanding). But Nimmer was making an important point: A year before anyone would have heard of the word Napster, and two years before another member of our panel, David Boies, would defend Napster before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Nimmer was trying to get the judges to see that the law would not be friendly to the capacities that this technology would enable. Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally. +={ Alben, Alex ; + Boies, David ; + Court of Appeals : + Ninth Circuit ; + Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ; + Napster +} + +!_ We live in +a "cut and paste" culture enabled by technology. Anyone building a presentation knows the extraordinary freedom that the cut and paste architecture of the Internet created - in a second you can find just about any image you want; in another second, you can have it planted in your presentation. +={ technology : + cut-and-paste culture enabled by +4 +} + +But presentations are just a tiny beginning. Using the Internet and its archives, musicians are able to string together mixes of sound never before imagined; filmmakers are able to build movies out of clips on computers around the world. An extraordinary site in Sweden takes images of politicians and blends them with music to create biting political commentary. A site called Camp Chaos has produced some of the most biting criticism of the record industry that there is through the mixing of Flash! and music. +={ Camp Chaos } + +All of these creations are technically illegal. Even if the creators wanted to be "legal," the cost of complying with the law is impossibly high. Therefore, for the law-abiding sorts, a wealth of creativity is never made. And for that part that is made, if it doesn't follow the clearance rules, it doesn't get released. + +To some, these stories suggest a solution: Let's alter the mix of rights so that people are free to build upon our culture. Free to add or mix as they see fit. We could even make this change without necessarily requiring that the "free" use be free as in "free beer." Instead, the system could simply make it easy for follow-on creators to compensate artists without requiring an army of lawyers to come along: a rule, for example, that says "the royalty owed the copyright owner of an unregistered work for the derivative reuse of his work will be a flat 1 percent of net revenues, to be held in escrow for the copyright owner." Under this rule, the copyright owner could benefit from some royalty, but he would not have the benefit of a full property right (meaning the right to name his own price) unless he registers the work. +={ copyright law : + royalty proposal on derivative reuse in ; + derivative works : + royalty system proposed for +} + +Who could possibly object to this? And what reason would there be for objecting? We're talking about work that is not now being made; which if made, under this plan, would produce new income for artists. What reason would anyone have to oppose it? + +!_ In February 2003, +DreamWorks studios announced an agreement with Mike Myers, the comic genius of /{Saturday Night Live}/ and Austin Powers. According to the announcement, Myers and DreamWorks would work together to form a "unique filmmaking pact." Under the agreement, DreamWorks "will acquire the rights to existing motion picture hits and classics, write new storylines and - with the use of state- of-the-art digital technology - insert Myers and other actors into the film, thereby creating an entirely new piece of entertainment." +={ DreamWorks +2 ; + Myers, Mike +2 ; + Saturday Night Live +} + +The announcement called this "film sampling." As Myers explained, "Film Sampling is an exciting way to put an original spin on existing films and allow audiences to see old movies in a new light. Rap artists have been doing this for years with music and now we are able to take that same concept and apply it to film." Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying, "If anyone can create a way to bring old films to new audiences, it is Mike." +={ Spielberg, Steven +1 ; + film sampling +3 ; + rap music +} + +Spielberg is right. Film sampling by Myers will be brilliant. But if you don't think about it, you might miss the truly astonishing point about this announcement. As the vast majority of our film heritage remains under copyright, the real meaning of the DreamWorks announcement is just this: It is Mike Myers and only Mike Myers who is free to sample. Any general freedom to build upon the film archive of our culture, a freedom in other contexts presumed for us all, is now a privilege reserved for the funny and famous - and presumably rich. + +This privilege becomes reserved for two sorts of reasons. The first continues the story of the last chapter: the vagueness of "fair use." Much of "sampling" should be considered "fair use." But few would rely upon so weak a doctrine to create. That leads to the second reason that the privilege is reserved for the few: The costs of negotiating the legal rights for the creative reuse of content are astronomically high. These costs mirror the costs with fair use: You either pay a lawyer to defend your fair use rights or pay a lawyer to track down permissions so you don't have to rely upon fair use rights. Either way, the creative process is a process of paying lawyers - again a privilege, or perhaps a curse, reserved for the few. +={ copyright law : + fair use and ; + fair use : + in sampling works +} + +1~ Chapter Nine: Collectors +={ archives, digital +29 ; + culture : + archives of +29 +} + +!_ In April 1996, +millions of "bots" - computer codes designed to "spider," or automatically search the Internet and copy content - began running across the Net. Page by page, these bots copied Internet-based information onto a small set of computers located in a basement in San Francisco's Presidio. Once the bots finished the whole of the Internet, they started again. Over and over again, once every two months, these bits of code took copies of the Internet and stored them. +={ bots +1 ; + spider +} + +By October 2001, the bots had collected more than five years of copies. And at a small announcement in Berkeley, California, the archive that these copies created, the Internet Archive, was opened to the world. Using a technology called "the Way Back Machine," you could enter a Web page, and see all of its copies going back to 1996, as well as when those pages changed. +={ Internet Archive +18 ; + Way Back Machine +} + +This is the thing about the Internet that Orwell would have appreciated. In the dystopia described in /{1984}/, old newspapers were constantly updated to assure that the current view of the world, approved of by the government, was not contradicted by previous news reports. Thousands of workers constantly reedited the past, meaning there was no way ever to know whether the story you were reading today was the story that was printed on the date published on the paper. +={ Orwell, George +1 ; + 1984 (Orwell) +} + +It's the same with the Internet. If you go to a Web page today, there's no way for you to know whether the content you are reading is the same as the content you read before. The page may seem the same, but the content could easily be different. The Internet is Orwell's library - constantly updated, without any reliable memory. + +Until the Way Back Machine, at least. With the Way Back Machine, and the Internet Archive underlying it, you can see what the Internet was. You have the power to see what you remember. More importantly, perhaps, you also have the power to find what you don't remember and what others might prefer you forget.~{ The temptations remain, however. Brewster Kahle reports that the White House changes its own press releases without notice. A May 13, 2003, press release stated, "Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." That was later changed, without notice, to "Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." E-mail from Brewster Kahle, 1 December 2003. }~ +={ Way Back Machine } + +!_ We take it +for granted that we can go back to see what we remember reading. Think about newspapers. If you wanted to study the reaction of your hometown newspaper to the race riots in Watts in 1965, or to Bull Connor's water cannon in 1963, you could go to your public library and look at the newspapers. Those papers probably exist on microfiche. If you're lucky, they exist in paper, too. Either way, you are free, using a library, to go back and remember - not just what it is convenient to remember, but remember something close to the truth. +={ libraries : + archival function of +1 ; + newspapers : + archives of +2 +} + +It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. That's not quite correct. We /{all}/ forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to rediscover what we forget. More directly, the key is whether an objective past can keep us honest. Libraries help do that, by collecting content and keeping it, for schoolchildren, for researchers, for grandma. A free society presumes this knowledge. +={ history, records of } + +The Internet was an exception to this presumption. Until the Internet Archive, there was no way to go back. The Internet was the quintessentially transitory medium. And yet, as it becomes more important in forming and reforming society, it becomes more and more important to maintain in some historical form. It's just bizarre to think that we have scads of archives of newspapers from tiny towns around the world, yet there is but one copy of the Internet - the one kept by the Internet Archive. + +Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive. He was a very successful Internet entrepreneur after he was a successful computer researcher. In the 1990s, Kahle decided he had had enough business success. It was time to become a different kind of success. So he launched a series of projects designed to archive human knowledge. The Internet Archive was just the first of the projects of this Andrew Carnegie of the Internet. By December of 2002, the archive had over 10 billion pages, and it was growing at about a billion pages a month. +={ Kahle, Brewster +20 } + +The Way Back Machine is the largest archive of human knowledge in human history. At the end of 2002, it held "two hundred and thirty terabytes of material" - and was "ten times larger than the Library of Congress." And this was just the first of the archives that Kahle set out to build. In addition to the Internet Archive, Kahle has been constructing the Television Archive. Television, it turns out, is even more ephemeral than the Internet. While much of twentieth- century culture was constructed through television, only a tiny proportion of that culture is available for anyone to see today. Three hours of news are recorded each evening by Vanderbilt University - thanks to a specific exemption in the copyright law.That content is indexed, and is available to scholars for a very low fee. "But other than that, [television] is almost unavailable," Kahle told me. "If you were Barbara Walters you could get access to [the archives], but if you are just a graduate student?" As Kahle put it, +={ Library of Congress ; + Television Archive ; + Vanderbuilt University ; + Way Back Machine ; + libraries : + archival function of ; + news coverage +6 +} + +_1 Do you remember when Dan Quayle was interacting with Murphy Brown? Remember that back and forth surreal experience of a politician interacting with a fictional television character? If you were a graduate student wanting to study that, and you wanted to get those original back and forth exchanges between the two, the /{60 Minutes}/ episode that came out after it ... it would be almost impossible. ... Those materials are almost unfindable. ..." +={ Quayle, Dan ; + 60 Minutes +} + +Why is that? Why is it that the part of our culture that is recorded in newspapers remains perpetually accessible, while the part that is recorded on videotape is not? How is it that we've created a world where researchers trying to understand the effect of media on nineteenth-century America will have an easier time than researchers trying to understand the effect of media on twentieth-century America? +={ newspapers : + archives of +} + +In part, this is because of the law. Early in American copyright law, copyright owners were required to deposit copies of their work in libraries. These copies were intended both to facilitate the spread of knowledge and to assure that a copy of the work would be around once the copyright expired, so that others might access and copy the work. +={ libraries : + archival function of +2 +} + +These rules applied to film as well. But in 1915, the Library of Congress made an exception for film. Film could be copyrighted so long as such deposits were made. But the filmmaker was then allowed to borrow back the deposits - for an unlimited time at no cost. In 1915 alone, there were more than 5,475 films deposited and "borrowed back." Thus, when the copyrights to films expire, there is no copy held by any library. The copy exists - if it exists at all - in the library archive of the film company.~{ Doug Herrick, "Toward a National Film Collection: Motion Pictures at the Library of Congress," /{Film Library Quarterly}/ 13 nos. 2-3 (1980): 5; Anthony Slide, /{Nitrate Won't Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States}/ (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1992), 36. }~ +={ Library of Congress ; + films : + archive of +} + +The same is generally true about television. Television broadcasts were originally not copyrighted - there was no way to capture the broadcasts, so there was no fear of "theft." But as technology enabled capturing, broadcasters relied increasingly upon the law. The law required they make a copy of each broadcast for the work to be "copy-righted." But those copies were simply kept by the broadcasters. No library had any right to them; the government didn't demand them. The content of this part of American culture is practically invisible to anyone who would look. +={ Television Archive +1 } + +Kahle was eager to correct this. Before September 11, 2001, he and his allies had started capturing television. They selected twenty stations from around the world and hit the Record button. After September 11, Kahle, working with dozens of others, selected twenty stations from around the world and, beginning October 11, 2001, made their coverage during the week of September 11 available free on- line. Anyone could see how news reports from around the world covered the events of that day. +={ September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of } + +Kahle had the same idea with film. Working with Rick Prelinger, whose archive of film includes close to 45,000 "ephemeral films" (meaning films other than Hollywood movies, films that were never copyrighted), Kahle established the Movie Archive. Prelinger let Kahle digitize 1,300 films in this archive and post those films on the Internet to be downloaded for free. Prelinger's is a for- profit company. It sells copies of these films as stock footage. What he has discovered is that after he made a significant chunk available for free, his stock footage sales went up dramatically. People could easily find the material they wanted to use. Some downloaded that material and made films on their own. Others purchased copies to enable other films to be made. Either way, the archive enabled access to this important part of our culture. Want to see a copy of the "Duck and Cover" film that instructed children how to save themselves in the middle of nuclear attack? Go to archive.org, and you can download the film in a few minutes - for free. +={ films : + archive of ; + archive.org : + see also Internet Archive ; + Internet Archive ; + Movie Archive ; + Duck and Cover film ; + ephemeral films ; + Prelinger, Rick +} + +Here again, Kahle is providing access to a part of our culture that we otherwise could not get easily, if at all. It is yet another part of what defines the twentieth century that we have lost to history. The law doesn't require these copies to be kept by anyone, or to be deposited in an archive by anyone. Therefore, there is no simple way to find them. + +The key here is access, not price. Kahle wants to enable free access to this content, but he also wants to enable others to sell access to it. His aim is to ensure competition in access to this important part of our culture. Not during the commercial life of a bit of creative property, but during a second life that all creative property has - a noncommercial life. +={ creative property : + noncommercial second life of +4 +} + +For here is an idea that we should more clearly recognize. Every bit of creative property goes through different "lives." In its first life, if the creator is lucky, the content is sold. In such cases the commercial market is successful for the creator. The vast majority of creative property doesn't enjoy such success, but some clearly does. For that content, commercial life is extremely important. Without this commercial market, there would be, many argue, much less creativity. + +After the commercial life of creative property has ended, our tradition has always supported a second life as well. A newspaper delivers the news every day to the doorsteps of America. The very next day, it is used to wrap fish or to fill boxes with fragile gifts or to build an archive of knowledge about our history. In this second life, the content can continue to inform even if that information is no longer sold. + +The same has always been true about books. A book goes out of print very quickly (the average today is after about a year~{ Dave Barns, "Fledgling Career in Antique Books: Woodstock Landlord, Bar Owner Starts a New Chapter by Adopting Business," /{Chicago Tribune,}/ 5 September 1997, at Metro Lake 1L. Of books published between 1927 and 1946, only 2.2 percent were in print in 2002. R. Anthony Reese, "The First Sale Doctrine in the Era of Digital Networks," /{Boston College Law Review}/ 44 (2003): 593 n. 51. }~). After it is out of print, it can be sold in used book stores without the copyright owner getting anything and stored in libraries, where many get to read the book, also for free. Used book stores and libraries are thus the second life of a book. That second life is extremely important to the spread and stability of culture. +={ libraries : + archival function of +1 ; + books : + out of print +} + +Yet increasingly, any assumption about a stable second life for creative property does not hold true with the most important components of popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For these - television, movies, music, radio, the Internet - there is no guarantee of a second life. For these sorts of culture, it is as if we've replaced libraries with Barnes & Noble superstores. With this culture, what's accessible is nothing but what a certain limited market demands. Beyond that, culture disappears. + +!_ For most of +the twentieth century, it was economics that made this so. It would have been insanely expensive to collect and make accessible all television and film and music: The cost of analog copies is extraordinarily high. So even though the law in principle would have restricted the ability of a Brewster Kahle to copy culture generally, the real restriction was economics. The market made it impossibly difficult to do anything about this ephemeral culture; the law had little practical effect. +={ technology : + archival opportunity offered through +3 +} + +Perhaps the single most important feature of the digital revolution is that for the first time since the Library of Alexandria, it is feasible to imagine constructing archives that hold all culture produced or distributed publicly. Technology makes it possible to imagine an archive of all books published, and increasingly makes it possible to imagine an archive of all moving images and sound. +={ libraries : + archival function of +4 +} + +The scale of this potential archive is something we've never imagined before. The Brewster Kahles of our history have dreamed about it; but we are for the first time at a point where that dream is possible. As Kahle describes, + +_1 It looks like there's about two to three million recordings of music. Ever. There are about a hundred thousand theatrical releases of movies, ... and about one to two million movies [distributed] during the twentieth century. There are about twenty-six million different titles of books. All of these would fit on computers that would fit in this room and be able to be afforded by a small company. So we're at a turning point in our history. Universal access is the goal. And the opportunity of leading a different life, based on this, is ... thrilling. It could be one of the things humankind would be most proud of. Up there with the Library of Alexandria, putting a man on the moon, and the invention of the printing press." +={ books : + total number of ; + films : + total number of ; + music recordings : + total number of +} + +Kahle is not the only librarian. The Internet Archive is not the only archive. But Kahle and the Internet Archive suggest what the future of libraries or archives could be. /{When}/ the commercial life of creative property ends, I don't know. But it does. And whenever it does, Kahle and his archive hint at a world where this knowledge, and culture, remains perpetually available. Some will draw upon it to understand it; some to criticize it. Some will use it, as Walt Disney did, to re-create the past for the future. These technologies promise something that had become unimaginable for much of our past - a future /{for}/ our past. The technology of digital arts could make the dream of the Library of Alexandria real again. +={ Internet Archive ; + creative property : + noncommercial second life of ; + Disney, Walt ; + technology : + archival opportunity offered through +1 +} + +Technologists have thus removed the economic costs of building such an archive. But lawyers' costs remain. For as much as we might like to call these "archives," as warm as the idea of a "library" might seem, the "content" that is collected in these digital spaces is also some-one's "property." And the law of property restricts the freedoms that Kahle and others would exercise. + +1~ Chapter Ten: "Property" + +!_ Jack Valenti +has been the president of the Motion Picture Association of America since 1966. He first came to Washington, D.C., with Lyndon Johnson's administration - literally. The famous picture of Johnson's swearing-in on Air Force One after the assassination of President Kennedy has Valenti in the background. In his almost forty years of running the MPAA, Valenti has established himself as perhaps the most prominent and effective lobbyist in Washington. +={ Johnson, Lyndon ; + Kennedy, John F. ; + Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) +3 ; + film industry : + trade association of +3 ; + television : + industry association of +3 ; + Valenti, Jack : + background of +} + +The MPAA is the American branch of the international Motion Picture Association. It was formed in 1922 as a trade association whose goal was to defend American movies against increasing domestic criticism. The organization now represents not only filmmakers but producers and distributors of entertainment for television, video, and cable. Its board is made up of the chairmen and presidents of the seven major producers and distributors of motion picture and television programs in the United States: Walt Disney, Sony Pictures Entertainment, MGM, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios, and Warner Brothers. +={ Disney, Inc. ; + MGM ; + Paramount Pictures ; + Twentieth Century Fox ; + Sony Pictures Entertainment ; + Universal Pictures ; + Warner Brothers +} + +Valenti is only the third president of the MPAA. No president before him has had as much influence over that organization, or over Washington. As a Texan, Valenti has mastered the single most important political skill of a Southerner - the ability to appear simple and slow while hiding a lightning-fast intellect. To this day, Valenti plays the simple, humble man. But this Harvard MBA, and author of four books, who finished high school at the age of fifteen and flew more than fifty combat missions in World War II, is no Mr. Smith. When Valenti went to Washington, he mastered the city in a quintessentially Washingtonian way. +={ Valenti, Jack : + background of +5 +} + +In defending artistic liberty and the freedom of speech that our culture depends upon, the MPAA has done important good. In crafting the MPAA rating system, it has probably avoided a great deal of speech-regulating harm. But there is an aspect to the organization's mission that is both the most radical and the most important. This is the organization's effort, epitomized in Valenti's every act, to redefine the meaning of "creative property." +={ film industry : + rating system of ; + speech, freedom of : + film-rating system vs. +} + +In 1982, Valenti's testimony to Congress captured the strategy perfectly: +={ Valenti, Jack : + on creative property rights +11 +} + +_1 No matter the lengthy arguments made, no matter the charges and the counter-charges, no matter the tumult and the shouting, reasonable men and women will keep returning to the fundamental issue, the central theme which animates this entire debate: /{Creative property owners must be accorded the same rights and protection resident in all other property owners in the nation}/. That is the issue. That is the question. And that is the rostrum on which this entire hearing and the debates to follow must rest."~{ Home Recording of Copyrighted Works: Hearings on H.R. 4783, H.R. 4794, H.R. 4808, H.R. 5250, H.R. 5488, and H.R. 5705 Before the Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives, 97th Cong., 2nd sess. (1982): 65 (testimony of Jack Valenti). }~ +={ creative property : + other property rights vs. +25 +} + +The strategy of this rhetoric, like the strategy of most of Valenti's rhetoric, is brilliant and simple and brilliant because simple. The "central theme" to which "reasonable men and women" will return is this: "Creative property owners must be accorded the same rights and protections resident in all other property owners in the nation." There are no second-class citizens, Valenti might have continued. There should be no second-class property owners. + +This claim has an obvious and powerful intuitive pull. It is stated with such clarity as to make the idea as obvious as the notion that we use elections to pick presidents. But in fact, there is no more extreme a claim made by /{anyone}/ who is serious in this debate than this claim of Valenti's. Jack Valenti, however sweet and however brilliant, is perhaps the nation's foremost extremist when it comes to the nature and scope of "creative property." His views have /{no}/ reasonable connection to our actual legal tradition, even if the subtle pull of his Texan charm has slowly redefined that tradition, at least in Washington. +={ creative property : + constitutional tradition on +9 +} + +While "creative property" is certainly "property" in a nerdy and precise sense that lawyers are trained to understand,~{ Lawyers speak of "property" not as an absolute thing, but as a bundle of rights that are sometimes associated with a particular object. Thus, my "property right" to my car gives me the right to exclusive use, but not the right to drive at 150 miles an hour. For the best effort to connect the ordinary meaning of "property" to "lawyer talk," see Bruce Ackerman, /{Private Property and the Constitution}/ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 26-27. }~ it has never been the case, nor should it be, that "creative property owners" have been "ac- corded the same rights and protection resident in all other property owners." Indeed, if creative property owners were given the same rights as all other property owners, that would effect a radical, and radically undesirable, change in our tradition. + +Valenti knows this. But he speaks for an industry that cares squat for our tradition and the values it represents. He speaks for an industry that is instead fighting to restore the tradition that the British overturned in 1710. In the world that Valenti's changes would create, a powerful few would exercise powerful control over how our creative culture would develop. + +I have two purposes in this chapter. The first is to convince you that, historically, Valenti's claim is absolutely wrong. The second is to convince you that it would be terribly wrong for us to reject our history. We have always treated rights in creative property differently from the rights resident in all other property owners. They have never been the same. And they should never be the same, because, however counterintuitive this may seem, to make them the same would be to fundamentally weaken the opportunity for new creators to create. Creativity depends upon the owners of creativity having less than perfect control. + +Organizations such as the MPAA, whose board includes the most powerful of the old guard, have little interest, their rhetoric notwithstanding, in assuring that the new can displace them. No organization does. No person does. (Ask me about tenure, for example.) But what's good for the MPAA is not necessarily good for America. A society that defends the ideals of free culture must preserve precisely the opportunity for new creativity to threaten the old. +={ Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ; + film industry : + trade association of +} + +!_ To get +just a hint that there is something fundamentally wrong in Valenti's argument, we need look no further than the United States Constitution itself. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + on creative property +4 +} + +The framers of our Constitution loved "property." Indeed, so strongly did they love property that they built into the Constitution an important requirement. If the government takes your property - if it condemns your house, or acquires a slice of land from your farm - it is required, under the Fifth Amendment's "Takings Clause," to pay you "just compensation" for that taking. The Constitution thus guarantees that property is, in a certain sense, sacred. It cannot /{ever}/ be taken from the property owner unless the government pays for the privilege. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + Fifth Amendment to | Takings Clause of +1 ; + Fifth Amendment ; + Takings Clause +1 ; + property rights : + Takings Clause on +1 +} + +Yet the very same Constitution speaks very differently about what Valenti calls "creative property." In the clause granting Congress the power to create "creative property," the Constitution /{requires}/ that after a "limited time," Congress take back the rights that it has granted and set the "creative property" free to the public domain. Yet when Congress does this, when the expiration of a copyright term "takes" your copyright and turns it over to the public domain, Congress does not have any obligation to pay "just compensation" for this "taking." Instead, the same Constitution that requires compensation for your land requires that you lose your "creative property" right without any compensation at all. + +The Constitution thus on its face states that these two forms of property are not to be accorded the same rights. They are plainly to be treated differently. Valenti is therefore not just asking for a change in our tradition when he argues that creative-property owners should be accorded the same rights as every other property-right owner. He is effectively arguing for a change in our Constitution itself. + +Arguing for a change in our Constitution is not necessarily wrong. There was much in our original Constitution that was plainly wrong. The Constitution of 1789 entrenched slavery; it left senators to be appointed rather than elected; it made it possible for the electoral college to produce a tie between the president and his own vice president (as it did in 1800). The framers were no doubt extraordinary, but I would be the first to admit that they made big mistakes. We have since rejected some of those mistakes; no doubt there could be others that we should reject as well. So my argument is not simply that because Jefferson did it, we should, too. +={ Jefferson, Thomas +1 ; + copyright law : + innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in +2 ; + electoral college ; + Senate, U.S. ; + slavery +} + +Instead, my argument is that because Jefferson did it, we should at least try to understand /{why}/. Why did the framers, fanatical property types that they were, reject the claim that creative property be given the same rights as all other property? Why did they require that for creative property there must be a public domain? + +To answer this question, we need to get some perspective on the history of these "creative property" rights, and the control that they enabled. Once we see clearly how differently these rights have been defined, we will be in a better position to ask the question that should be at the core of this war: Not /{whether}/ creative property should be protected, but how. Not /{whether}/ we will enforce the rights the law gives to creative-property owners, but what the particular mix of rights ought to be. Not /{whether}/ artists should be paid, but whether institutions designed to assure that artists get paid need also control how culture develops. + +To answer these questions, we need a more general way to talk about how property is protected. More precisely, we need a more general way than the narrow language of the law allows. In /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/, I used a simple model to capture this more general perspective. For any particular right or regulation, this model asks how four different modalities of regulation interact to support or weaken the right or regulation. I represented it with this diagram: +={ Code (Lessig) ; + Lessig, Lawrence ; + free culture : + four modalities of constraint on +20 ; + regulation : + four modalities of +20 ; + copyright law : + as ex post regulation modality +5 ; + law : + as constraint modality +5 +} + +{freeculture01.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +At the center of this picture is a regulated dot: the individual or group that is the target of regulation, or the holder of a right. (In each case throughout, we can describe this either as regulation or as a right. For simplicity's sake, I will speak only of regulations.) The ovals represent four ways in which the individual or group might be regulated - either constrained or, alternatively, enabled. Law is the most obvious constraint (to lawyers, at least). It constrains by threatening punishments after the fact if the rules set in advance are violated. So if, for example, you willfully infringe Madonna's copyright by copying a song from her latest CD and posting it on the Web, you can be punished with a $150,000 fine. The fine is an ex post punishment for violating an ex ante rule. It is imposed by the state. +={ Madonna } + +Norms are a different kind of constraint. They, too, punish an individual for violating a rule. But the punishment of a norm is imposed by a community, not (or not only) by the state. There may be no law against spitting, but that doesn't mean you won't be punished if you spit on the ground while standing in line at a movie. The punishment might not be harsh, though depending upon the community, it could easily be more harsh than many of the punishments imposed by the state. The mark of the difference is not the severity of the rule, but the source of the enforcement. +={ norms, regulatory influence of +1 } + +The market is a third type of constraint. Its constraint is effected through conditions: You can do X if you pay Y; you'll be paid M if you do N. These constraints are obviously not independent of law or norms - it is property law that defines what must be bought if it is to be taken legally; it is norms that say what is appropriately sold. But given a set of norms, and a background of property and contract law, the market imposes a simultaneous constraint upon how an individual or group might behave. +={ market constraints +1 } + +Finally, and for the moment, perhaps, most mysteriously, "architecture" - the physical world as one finds it - is a constraint on behavior. A fallen bridge might constrain your ability to get across a river. Railroad tracks might constrain the ability of a community to integrate its social life. As with the market, architecture does not effect its constraint through ex post punishments. Instead, also as with the market, architecture effects its constraint through simultaneous conditions. These conditions are imposed not by courts enforcing contracts, or by police punishing theft, but by nature, by "architecture." If a 500-pound boulder blocks your way, it is the law of gravity that enforces this constraint. If a $500 airplane ticket stands between you and a flight to New York, it is the market that enforces this constraint. +={ architecture, constraint effected through } + +So the first point about these four modalities of regulation is obvious: They interact. Restrictions imposed by one might be reinforced by another. Or restrictions imposed by one might be undermined by another. +={ law : + as constraint modality +5 +} + +The second point follows directly: If we want to understand the effective freedom that anyone has at a given moment to do any particular thing, we have to consider how these four modalities interact. Whether or not there are other constraints (there may well be; my claim is not about comprehensiveness), these four are among the most significant, and any regulator (whether controlling or freeing) must consider how these four in particular interact. + +So, for example, consider the "freedom" to drive a car at a high speed. That freedom is in part restricted by laws: speed limits that say how fast you can drive in particular places at particular times. It is in part restricted by architecture: speed bumps, for example, slow most rational drivers; governors in buses, as another example, set the maximum rate at which the driver can drive. The freedom is in part restricted by the market: Fuel efficiency drops as speed increases, thus the price of gasoline indirectly constrains speed. And finally, the norms of a community may or may not constrain the freedom to speed. Drive at 50 mph by a school in your own neighborhood and you're likely to be punished by the neighbors. The same norm wouldn't be as effective in a different town, or at night. +={ architecture, constraint effected through ; + market constraints ; + norms, regulatory influence of ; + driving speed, constraints on +1 ; + speeding, constraints on +1 +} + +The final point about this simple model should also be fairly clear: While these four modalities are analytically independent, law has a special role in affecting the three.~{ By describing the way law affects the other three modalities, I don't mean to suggest that the other three don't affect law. Obviously, they do. Law's only distinction is that it alone speaks as if it has a right self-consciously to change the other three. The right of the other three is more timidly expressed. See Lawrence Lessig, /{Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace}/ (New York: Basic Books, 1999): 90-95; Lawrence Lessig, "The New Chicago School," /{Journal of Legal Studies,}/ June 1998. }~ The law, in other words, sometimes operates to increase or decrease the constraint of a particular modality. Thus, the law might be used to increase taxes on gasoline, so as to increase the incentives to drive more slowly. The law might be used to mandate more speed bumps, so as to increase the difficulty of driving rapidly. The law might be used to fund ads that stigmatize reckless driving. Or the law might be used to require that other laws be more strict - a federal requirement that states decrease the speed limit, for example" so as to decrease the attractiveness of fast driving. + +{freeculture02.png 540x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +These constraints can thus change, and they can be changed. To understand the effective protection of liberty or protection of property at any particular moment, we must track these changes over time. A restriction imposed by one modality might be erased by another. A freedom enabled by one modality might be displaced by another.~{ Some people object to this way of talking about "liberty." They object because their focus when considering the constraints that exist at any particular moment are constraints imposed exclusively by the government. For instance, if a storm destroys a bridge, these people think it is meaningless to say that one's liberty has been restrained. A bridge has washed out, and it's harder to get from one place to another. To talk about this as a loss of freedom, they say, is to confuse the stuff of politics with the vagaries of ordinary life. I don't mean to deny the value in this narrower view, which depends upon the context of the inquiry. I do, however, mean to argue against any insistence that this narrower view is the only proper view of liberty. As I argued in /{Code,}/ we come from a long tradition of political thought with a broader focus than the narrow question of what the government did when. John Stuart Mill defended freedom of speech, for example, from the tyranny of narrow minds, not from the fear of government prosecution; John Stuart Mill, /{On Liberty}/ (Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1978), 19. John R. Commons famously defended the economic freedom of labor from constraints imposed by the market; John R. Commons, "The Right to Work," in Malcom Rutherford and Warren J. Samuels, eds., /{John R. Commons: Selected Essays}/ (London: Routledge: 1997), 62. The Americans with Disabilities Act increases the liberty of people with physical disabilities by changing the architecture of certain public places, thereby making access to those places easier; 42 /{United States Code}/, section 12101 (2000). Each of these interventions to change existing conditions changes the liberty of a particular group. The effect of those interventions should be accounted for in order to understand the effective liberty that each of these groups might face. }~ + +2~ Why Hollywood Is Right + +The most obvious point that this model reveals is just why, or just how, Hollywood is right. The copyright warriors have rallied Congress and the courts to defend copyright. This model helps us see why that rallying makes sense. +={ copyright : + four regulatory modalities on +8 +} + +Let's say this is the picture of copyright's regulation before the Internet: + +{freeculture01.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +There is balance between law, norms, market, and architecture. The law limits the ability to copy and share content, by imposing penalties on those who copy and share content. Those penalties are reinforced by technologies that make it hard to copy and share content (architecture) and expensive to copy and share content (market). Finally, those penalties are mitigated by norms we all recognize - kids, for example, taping other kids' records. These uses of copyrighted material may well be infringement, but the norms of our society (before the Internet, at least) had no problem with this form of infringement. +={ architecture, constraint effected through +1 ; + law : + as constraint modality ; + norms, regulatory influence of +1 +} + +Enter the Internet, or, more precisely, technologies such as MP3s and p2p sharing. Now the constraint of architecture changes dramatically, as does the constraint of the market. And as both the market and architecture relax the regulation of copyright, norms pile on. The happy balance (for the warriors, at least) of life before the Internet becomes an effective state of anarchy after the Internet. +={ Internet : + copyright regulatory balance lost with +4 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + regulatory balance lost in ; + market constraints ; + MP3s +} + +Thus the sense of, and justification for, the warriors' response. Technology has changed, the warriors say, and the effect of this change, when ramified through the market and norms, is that a balance of protection for the copyright owners' rights has been lost. This is Iraq after the fall of Saddam, but this time no government is justifying the looting that results. +={ technology : + established industries threatened by changes in +} + +{freeculture03.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Neither this analysis nor the conclusions that follow are new to the warriors. Indeed, in a "White Paper" prepared by the Commerce Department (one heavily influenced by the copyright warriors) in 1995, this mix of regulatory modalities had already been identified and the strategy to respond already mapped. In response to the changes the Internet had effected, the White Paper argued (1) Congress should strengthen intellectual property law, (2) businesses should adopt innovative marketing techniques, (3) technologists should push to develop code to protect copyrighted material, and (4) educators should educate kids to better protect copyright. +={ Commerce, U.S. Department of ; + regulation : + as establishment protectionism +6 +} + +This mixed strategy is just what copyright needed - if it was to preserve the particular balance that existed before the change induced by the Internet. And it's just what we should expect the content industry to push for. It is as American as apple pie to consider the happy life you have as an entitlement, and to look to the law to protect it if something comes along to change that happy life. Homeowners living in a flood plain have no hesitation appealing to the government to rebuild (and rebuild again) when a flood (architecture) wipes away their property (law). Farmers have no hesitation appealing to the government to bail them out when a virus (architecture) devastates their crop. Unions have no hesitation appealing to the government to bail them out when imports (market) wipe out the U.S. steel industry. +={ farming ; + steel industry +} + +Thus, there's nothing wrong or surprising in the content industry's campaign to protect itself from the harmful consequences of a technological innovation. And I would be the last person to argue that the changing technology of the Internet has not had a profound effect on the content industry's way of doing business, or as John Seely Brown describes it, its "architecture of revenue." +={ Brown, John Seely } + +But just because a particular interest asks for government support, it doesn't follow that support should be granted. And just because technology has weakened a particular way of doing business, it doesn't follow that the government should intervene to support that old way of doing business. Kodak, for example, has lost perhaps as much as 20 percent of their traditional film market to the emerging technologies of digital cameras.~{ See Geoffrey Smith, "Film vs. Digital: Can Kodak Build a Bridge?" BusinessWeek online, 2 August 1999, available at link #23. For a more recent analysis of Kodak's place in the market, see Chana R. Schoenberger, "Can Kodak Make Up for Lost Moments?" Forbes.com, 6 October 2003, available at link #24. }~ Does anyone believe the government should ban digital cameras just to support Kodak? Highways have weakened the freight business for railroads. Does anyone think we should ban trucks from roads /{for the purpose of}/ protecting the railroads? Closer to the subject of this book, remote channel changers have weakened the "stickiness" of television advertising (if a boring commercial comes on the TV, the remote makes it easy to surf ), and it may well be that this change has weakened the television advertising market. But does anyone believe we should regulate remotes to reinforce commercial television? (Maybe by limiting them to function only once a second, or to switch to only ten channels within an hour?) +={ advertising ; + television : + advertising on ; + commercials ; + camera technology ; + digital cameras ; + Kodak cameras ; + railroad industry ; + remote channel changers +} + +The obvious answer to these obviously rhetorical questions is no. In a free society, with a free market, supported by free enterprise and free trade, the government's role is not to support one way of doing business against others. Its role is not to pick winners and protect them against loss. If the government did this generally, then we would never have any progress. As Microsoft chairman Bill Gates wrote in 1991, in a memo criticizing software patents, "established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."~{ Fred Warshofsky, /{The Patent Wars}/ (New York: Wiley, 1994), 170-71. }~ And relative to a startup, established companies also have the means. (Think RCA and FM radio.) A world in which competitors with new ideas must fight not only the market but also the government is a world in which competitors with new ideas will not succeed. It is a world of stasis and increasingly concentrated stagnation. It is the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. +={ free market, technological changes in +2 ; + Brezhnev, Leonid ; + FM radio ; + radio : + FM spectrum of ; + Gates, Bill ; + market competition ; + RCA +} + +Thus, while it is understandable for industries threatened with new technologies that change the way they do business to look to the government for protection, it is the special duty of policy makers to guarantee that that protection not become a deterrent to progress. It is the duty of policy makers, in other words, to assure that the changes they create, in response to the request of those hurt by changing technology, are changes that preserve the incentives and opportunities for innovation and change. + +In the context of laws regulating speech - which include, obviously, copyright law - that duty is even stronger. When the industry complaining about changing technologies is asking Congress to respond in a way that burdens speech and creativity, policy makers should be especially wary of the request. It is always a bad deal for the government to get into the business of regulating speech markets. The risks and dangers of that game are precisely why our framers created the First Amendment to our Constitution: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." So when Congress is being asked to pass laws that would "abridge" the freedom of speech, it should ask" carefully - whether such regulation is justified. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + First Amendment ; + speech, freedom of : + constitutional guarantee of +} + +My argument just now, however, has nothing to do with whether the changes that are being pushed by the copyright warriors are "justified." My argument is about their effect. For before we get to the question of justification, a hard question that depends a great deal upon your values, we should first ask whether we understand the effect of the changes the content industry wants. + +Here's the metaphor that will capture the argument to follow. + +In 1873, the chemical DDT was first synthesized. In 1948, Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller won the Nobel Prize for his work demonstrating the insecticidal properties of DDT. By the 1950s, the insecticide was widely used around the world to kill disease-carrying pests. It was also used to increase farm production. +={ Müller, Paul Hermann +3 ; + DDT +6 ; + insecticide, environmental consequences of +6 ; + farming +4 +} + +No one doubts that killing disease-carrying pests or increasing crop production is a good thing. No one doubts that the work of Müller was important and valuable and probably saved lives, possibly millions. + +But in 1962, Rachel Carson published /{Silent Spring}/, which argued that DDT, whatever its primary benefits, was also having unintended environmental consequences. Birds were losing the ability to reproduce. Whole chains of the ecology were being destroyed. +={ Carson, Rachel ; + Silent Spring (Carson) ; + environmentalism +4 +} + +No one set out to destroy the environment. Paul Müller certainly did not aim to harm any birds. But the effort to solve one set of problems produced another set which, in the view of some, was far worse than the problems that were originally attacked. Or more accurately, the problems DDT caused were worse than the problems it solved, at least when considering the other, more environmentally friendly ways to solve the problems that DDT was meant to solve. + +It is to this image precisely that Duke University law professor James Boyle appeals when he argues that we need an "environmentalism" for culture.~{ See, for example, James Boyle, "A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?" /{Duke Law Journal}/ 47 (1997): 87. }~ His point, and the point I want to develop in the balance of this chapter, is not that the aims of copyright are flawed. Or that authors should not be paid for their work. Or that music should be given away "for free." The point is that some of the ways in which we might protect authors will have unintended consequences for the cultural environment, much like DDT had for the natural environment. And just as criticism of DDT is not an endorsement of malaria or an attack on farmers, so, too, is criticism of one particular set of regulations protecting copyright not an endorsement of anarchy or an attack on authors. It is an environment of creativity that we seek, and we should be aware of our actions' effects on the environment. +={ Boyle, James ; + copyright law : + innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in +1 +} + +My argument, in the balance of this chapter, tries to map exactly this effect. No doubt the technology of the Internet has had a dramatic effect on the ability of copyright owners to protect their content. But there should also be little doubt that when you add together the changes in copyright law over time, plus the change in technology that the Internet is undergoing just now, the net effect of these changes will not be only that copyrighted work is effectively protected. Also, and generally missed, the net effect of this massive increase in protection will be devastating to the environment for creativity. + +In a line: To kill a gnat, we are spraying DDT with consequences for free culture that will be far more devastating than that this gnat will be lost. + +2~ Beginnings + +America copied English copyright law. Actually, we copied and improved English copyright law. Our Constitution makes the purpose of "creative property" rights clear; its express limitations reinforce the English aim to avoid overly powerful publishers. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + on creative property | copyright purpose established in +6 | Progress Clause of +5 ; + copyright : + constitutional purpose of | duration of ; + creative property : + constitutional tradition on +6 ; + Progress Clause +5 ; + copyright : + duration of +} + +The power to establish "creative property" rights is granted to Congress in a way that, for our Constitution, at least, is very odd. Article I, section 8, clause 8 of our Constitution states that: +={ Congress, U.S. : + in constitutional Progress Clause +2 +} + +_1 Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." + +We can call this the "Progress Clause," for notice what this clause does not say. It does not say Congress has the power to grant "creative property rights." It says that Congress has the power /{to promote progress}/. The grant of power is its purpose, and its purpose is a public one, not the purpose of enriching publishers, nor even primarily the purpose of rewarding authors. + +The Progress Clause expressly limits the term of copyrights. As we saw in chapter 6, the English limited the term of copyright so as to assure that a few would not exercise disproportionate control over culture by exercising disproportionate control over publishing. We can assume the framers followed the English for a similar purpose. Indeed, unlike the English, the framers reinforced that objective, by requiring that copyrights extend "to Authors" only. +={ copyright law : + as protection of creators +2 | history of American +22 +} + +The design of the Progress Clause reflects something about the Constitution's design in general. To avoid a problem, the framers built structure. To prevent the concentrated power of publishers, they built a structure that kept copyrights away from publishers and kept them short. To prevent the concentrated power of a church, they banned the federal government from establishing a church. To prevent concentrating power in the federal government, they built structures to reinforce the power of the states - including the Senate, whose members were at the time selected by the states, and an electoral college, also selected by the states, to select the president. In each case, a /{structure}/ built checks and balances into the constitutional frame, structured to prevent otherwise inevitable concentrations of power. +={ Senate, U.S. ; + Constitution, U.S. : + structural checks and balances of ; + electoral college +} + +I doubt the framers would recognize the regulation we call "copyright" today. The scope of that regulation is far beyond anything they ever considered. To begin to understand what they did, we need to put our "copyright" in context: We need to see how it has changed in the 210 years since they first struck its design. + +Some of these changes come from the law: some in light of changes in technology, and some in light of changes in technology given a particular concentration of market power. In terms of our model, we started here: +={ copyright : + four regulatory modalities on +} + +{freeculture01.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +%% image 05 same as 01, renumber? + +We will end here: + +{freeculture04.png 310x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Let me explain how. + +2~ Law: Duration +={ copyright : + duration of +14 +} + +When the first Congress enacted laws to protect creative property, it faced the same uncertainty about the status of creative property that the English had confronted in 1774. Many states had passed laws protecting creative property, and some believed that these laws simply supplemented common law rights that already protected creative authorship.~{ William W. Crosskey, /{Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States}/ (London: Cambridge University Press, 1953), vol. 1, 485-86: "extinguish[ing], by plain implication of "the supreme Law of the Land," /{the perpetual rights which authors had, or were supposed by some to have, under the Common Law}/" (emphasis added). }~ This meant that there was no guaranteed public domain in the United States in 1790. If copyrights were protected by the common law, then there was no simple way to know whether a work published in the United States was controlled or free. Just as in England, this lingering uncertainty would make it hard for publishers to rely upon a public domain to reprint and distribute works. +={ Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +2 ; + Copyright Act (1790) +3 ; + creative property : + common law protections of ; + public domain : + balance of U.S. content in +5 +} + +That uncertainty ended after Congress passed legislation granting copyrights. Because federal law overrides any contrary state law, federal protections for copyrighted works displaced any state law protections. Just as in England the Statute of Anne eventually meant that the copyrights for all English works expired, a federal statute meant that any state copyrights expired as well. +={ Statute of Anne (1710) ; + law : + federal vs. state +2 +} + +In 1790, Congress enacted the first copyright law. It created a federal copyright and secured that copyright for fourteen years. If the author was alive at the end of that fourteen years, then he could opt to renew the copyright for another fourteen years. If he did not renew the copyright, his work passed into the public domain. +={ copyright : + renewability of +11 +} + +While there were many works created in the United States in the first ten years of the Republic, only 5 percent of the works were actually registered under the federal copyright regime. Of all the work created in the United States both before 1790 and from 1790 through 1800, 95 percent immediately passed into the public domain; the balance would pass into the pubic domain within twenty-eight years at most, and more likely within fourteen years.~{ Although 13,000 titles were published in the United States from 1790 to 1799, only 556 copyright registrations were filed; John Tebbel, /{A History of Book Publishing in the United States,}/ vol. 1, /{The Creation of an Industry, 1630- 1865}/ (New York: Bowker, 1972), 141. Of the 21,000 imprints recorded before 1790, only twelve were copyrighted under the 1790 act; William J. Maher, /{Copyright Term, Retrospective Extension and the Copyright Law of 1790 in Historical Context,}/ 7-10 (2002), available at link #25. Thus, the overwhelming majority of works fell immediately into the public domain. Even those works that were copyrighted fell into the public domain quickly, because the term of copyright was short. The initial term of copyright was fourteen years, with the option of renewal for an additional fourteen years. Copyright Act of May 31, 1790, §1, 1 stat. 124. }~ + +This system of renewal was a crucial part of the American system of copyright. It assured that the maximum terms of copyright would be granted only for works where they were wanted. After the initial term of fourteen years, if it wasn't worth it to an author to renew his copyright, then it wasn't worth it to society to insist on the copyright, either. + +Fourteen years may not seem long to us, but for the vast majority of copyright owners at that time, it was long enough: Only a small minority of them renewed their copyright after fourteen years; the balance allowed their work to pass into the public domain.~{ Few copyright holders ever chose to renew their copyrights. For instance, of the 25,006 copyrights registered in 1883, only 894 were renewed in 1910. For a year-by-year analysis of copyright renewal rates, see Barbara A. Ringer, "Study No. 31: Renewal of Copyright," /{Studies on Copyright,}/ vol. 1 (New York: Practicing Law Institute, 1963), 618. For a more recent and comprehensive analysis, see William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, "Indefinitely Renewable Copyright," /{University of Chicago Law Review}/ 70 (2003): 471, 498-501, and accompanying figures. }~ + +Even today, this structure would make sense. Most creative work has an actual commercial life of just a couple of years. Most books fall out of print after one year.~{ See Ringer, ch. 9, n. 2. }~ When that happens, the used books are traded free of copyright regulation. Thus the books are no longer /{effectively}/ controlled by copyright. The only practical commercial use of the books at that time is to sell the books as used books; that use - because it does not involve publication - is effectively free. +={ books : + resales of | out of print +} + +In the first hundred years of the Republic, the term of copyright was changed once. In 1831, the term was increased from a maximum of 28 years to a maximum of 42 by increasing the initial term of copyright from 14 years to 28 years. In the next fifty years of the Republic, the term increased once again. In 1909, Congress extended the renewal term of 14 years to 28 years, setting a maximum term of 56 years. +={ Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +6 | copyright terms extended by +6 ; + copyright law : + term extensions in +6 +} + +Then, beginning in 1962, Congress started a practice that has defined copyright law since. Eleven times in the last forty years, Congress has extended the terms of existing copyrights; twice in those forty years, Congress extended the term of future copyrights. Initially, the extensions of existing copyrights were short, a mere one to two years. In 1976, Congress extended all existing copyrights by nineteen years. And in 1998, in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Congress extended the term of existing and future copyrights by twenty years. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) +1 ; + public domain : + future patents vs. future copyrights in +4 +} + +The effect of these extensions is simply to toll, or delay, the passing of works into the public domain. This latest extension means that the public domain will have been tolled for thirty-nine out of fifty-five years, or 70 percent of the time since 1962. Thus, in the twenty years after the Sonny Bono Act, while one million patents will pass into the public domain, zero copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a copyright term. +={ patents : + in public domain +} + +The effect of these extensions has been exacerbated by another, little-noticed change in the copyright law. Remember I said that the framers established a two- part copyright regime, requiring a copyright owner to renew his copyright after an initial term. The requirement of renewal meant that works that no longer needed copyright protection would pass more quickly into the public domain. The works remaining under protection would be those that had some continuing commercial value. + +The United States abandoned this sensible system in 1976. For all works created after 1978, there was only one copyright term - the maximum term. For "natural" authors, that term was life plus fifty years. For corporations, the term was seventy-five years. Then, in 1992, Congress abandoned the renewal requirement for all works created before 1978. All works still under copyright would be accorded the maximum term then available. After the Sonny Bono Act, that term was ninety-five years. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) ; + copyright : + of natural authors vs. corporations ; + corporations : + copyright terms for +} + +This change meant that American law no longer had an automatic way to assure that works that were no longer exploited passed into the public domain. And indeed, after these changes, it is unclear whether it is even possible to put works into the public domain. The public domain is orphaned by these changes in copyright law. Despite the requirement that terms be "limited," we have no evidence that anything will limit them. + +The effect of these changes on the average duration of copyright is dramatic. In 1973, more than 85 percent of copyright owners failed to renew their copyright. That meant that the average term of copyright in 1973 was just 32.2 years. Because of the elimination of the renewal requirement, the average term of copyright is now the maximum term. In thirty years, then, the average term has tripled, from 32.2 years to 95 years.~{ These statistics are understated. Between the years 1910 and 1962 (the first year the renewal term was extended), the average term was never more than thirty-two years, and averaged thirty years. See Landes and Posner, "Indefinitely Renewable Copyright," loc. cit. }~ + +2~ Law: Scope +={ copyright : + scope of +17 +} + +The "scope" of a copyright is the range of rights granted by the law. The scope of American copyright has changed dramatically. Those changes are not necessarily bad. But we should understand the extent of the changes if we're to keep this debate in context. + +In 1790, that scope was very narrow. Copyright covered only "maps, charts, and books." That means it didn't cover, for example, music or architecture. More significantly, the right granted by a copyright gave the author the exclusive right to "publish" copyrighted works. That means someone else violated the copyright only if he republished the work without the copyright owner's permission. Finally, the right granted by a copyright was an exclusive right to that particular book. The right did not extend to what lawyers call "derivative works." It would not, therefore, interfere with the right of someone other than the author to translate a copyrighted book, or to adapt the story to a different form (such as a drama based on a published book). +={ copyright law : + on republishing vs. transformation of original work ; + derivative works : + historical shift in copyright coverage of +2 +} + +This, too, has changed dramatically. While the contours of copyright today are extremely hard to describe simply, in general terms, the right covers practically any creative work that is reduced to a tangible form. It covers music as well as architecture, drama as well as computer programs. It gives the copyright owner of that creative work not only the exclusive right to "publish" the work, but also the exclusive right of control over any "copies" of that work. And most significant for our purposes here, the right gives the copyright owner control over not only his or her particular work, but also any "derivative work" that might grow out of the original work. In this way, the right covers more creative work, protects the creative work more broadly, and protects works that are based in a significant way on the initial creative work. + +At the same time that the scope of copyright has expanded, procedural limitations on the right have been relaxed. I've already described the complete removal of the renewal requirement in 1992. In addition to the renewal requirement, for most of the history of American copyright law, there was a requirement that a work be registered before it could receive the protection of a copyright. There was also a requirement that any copyrighted work be marked either with that famous © or the word /{copyright}/. And for most of the history of American copyright law, there was a requirement that works be deposited with the government before a copyright could be secured. +={ copyright : + marking of +2 ; + formalities +2 ; + copyright law : + registration requirement of +2 +} + +The reason for the registration requirement was the sensible understanding that for most works, no copyright was required. Again, in the first ten years of the Republic, 95 percent of works eligible for copyright were never copyrighted. Thus, the rule reflected the norm: Most works apparently didn't need copyright, so registration narrowed the regulation of the law to the few that did. The same reasoning justified the requirement that a work be marked as copyrighted - that way it was easy to know whether a copyright was being claimed. The requirement that works be deposited was to assure that after the copyright expired, there would be a copy of the work somewhere so that it could be copied by others without locating the original author. + +All of these "formalities" were abolished in the American system when we decided to follow European copyright law. There is no requirement that you register a work to get a copyright; the copyright now is automatic; the copyright exists whether or not you mark your work with a ©; and the copyright exists whether or not you actually make a copy available for others to copy. +={ copyright law : + European +} + +Consider a practical example to understand the scope of these differences. + +If, in 1790, you wrote a book and you were one of the 5 percent who actually copyrighted that book, then the copyright law protected you against another publisher's taking your book and republishing it without your permission. The aim of the act was to regulate publishers so as to prevent that kind of unfair competition. In 1790, there were 174 publishers in the United States.~{ See Thomas Bender and David Sampliner, "Poets, Pirates, and the Creation of American Literature," 29 /{New York University Journal of International Law and Politics}/ 255 (1997), and James Gilraeth, ed., Federal Copyright Records, 1790- 1800 (U.S. G.P.O., 1987). }~ The Copyright Act was thus a tiny regulation of a tiny proportion of a tiny part of the creative market in the United States - publishers. +={ Copyright Act (1790) +1 } + +The act left other creators totally unregulated. If I copied your poem by hand, over and over again, as a way to learn it by heart, my act was totally unregulated by the 1790 act. If I took your novel and made a play based upon it, or if I translated it or abridged it, none of those activities were regulated by the original copyright act. These creative activities remained free, while the activities of publishers were restrained. +={ copyright law : + on republishing vs. transformation of original work +8 ; + derivative works : + piracy vs. +3 ; + piracy : + derivative work vs. +6 +} + +Today the story is very different: If you write a book, your book is automatically protected. Indeed, not just your book. Every e-mail, every note to your spouse, every doodle, /{every}/ creative act that's reduced to a tangible form - all of this is automatically copyrighted. There is no need to register or mark your work. The protection follows the creation, not the steps you take to protect it. + +That protection gives you the right (subject to a narrow range of fair use exceptions) to control how others copy the work, whether they copy it to republish it or to share an excerpt. + +That much is the obvious part. Any system of copyright would control competing publishing. But there's a second part to the copyright of today that is not at all obvious. This is the protection of "derivative rights." If you write a book, no one can make a movie out of your book without permission. No one can translate it without permission. CliffsNotes can't make an abridgment unless permission is granted. All of these derivative uses of your original work are controlled by the copyright holder. The copyright, in other words, is now not just an exclusive right to your writings, but an exclusive right to your writings and a large proportion of the writings inspired by them. + +It is this derivative right that would seem most bizarre to our framers, though it has become second nature to us. Initially, this expansion was created to deal with obvious evasions of a narrower copyright. If I write a book, can you change one word and then claim a copyright in a new and different book? Obviously that would make a joke of the copyright, so the law was properly expanded to include those slight modifications as well as the verbatim original work. + +In preventing that joke, the law created an astonishing power within a free culture - at least, it's astonishing when you understand that the law applies not just to the commercial publisher but to anyone with a computer. I understand the wrong in duplicating and selling someone else's work. But whatever /{that}/ wrong is, transforming someone else's work is a different wrong. Some view transformation as no wrong at all - they believe that our law, as the framers penned it, should not protect derivative rights at all.~{ Jonathan Zittrain, "The Copyright Cage," /{Legal Affairs,}/ July/August 2003, available at link #26. }~ Whether or not you go that far, it seems plain that whatever wrong is involved is fundamentally different from the wrong of direct piracy. + +Yet copyright law treats these two different wrongs in the same way. I can go to court and get an injunction against your pirating my book. I can go to court and get an injunction against your transformative use of my book.~{ Professor Rubenfeld has presented a powerful constitutional argument about the difference that copyright law should draw (from the perspective of the First Amendment) between mere "copies" and derivative works. See Jed Rubenfeld, "The Freedom of Imagination: Copyright's Constitutionality," /{Yale Law Journal}/ 112 (2002): 1-60 (see especially pp. 53-59). }~ These two different uses of my creative work are treated the same. + +This again may seem right to you. If I wrote a book, then why should you be able to write a movie that takes my story and makes money from it without paying me or crediting me? Or if Disney creates a creature called "Mickey Mouse," why should you be able to make Mickey Mouse toys and be the one to trade on the value that Disney originally created? +={ Disney, Walt ; + Mickey Mouse +} + +These are good arguments, and, in general, my point is not that the derivative right is unjustified. My aim just now is much narrower: simply to make clear that this expansion is a significant change from the rights originally granted. + +2~ Law and Architecture: Reach + +Whereas originally the law regulated only publishers, the change in copyright's scope means that the law today regulates publishers, users, and authors. It regulates them because all three are capable of making copies, and the core of the regulation of copyright law is copies.~{ This is a simplification of the law, but not much of one. The law certainly regulates more than "copies" - a public performance of a copyrighted song, for example, is regulated even though performance per se doesn't make a copy; 17 /{United States Code,}/ section 106(4). And it certainly sometimes doesn't regulate a "copy"; 17 /{United States Code,}/ section 112(a). But the presumption under the existing law (which regulates "copies;" 17 /{United States Code,}/ section 102) is that if there is a copy, there is a right. }~ +={ copyright law : + copies as core issue of +1 | scope of +2 +} + +"Copies." That certainly sounds like the obvious thing for /{copy}/right law to regulate. But as with Jack Valenti's argument at the start of this chapter, that "creative property" deserves the "same rights" as all other property, it is the /{obvious}/ that we need to be most careful about. For while it may be obvious that in the world before the Internet, copies were the obvious trigger for copyright law, upon reflection, it should be obvious that in the world with the Internet, copies should /{not}/ be the trigger for copyright law. More precisely, they should not /{always}/ be the trigger for copyright law. +={ Valenti, Jack : + on creative property rights ; + creative property : + other property rights vs. +1 +} + +This is perhaps the central claim of this book, so let me take this very slowly so that the point is not easily missed. My claim is that the Internet should at least force us to rethink the conditions under which the law of copyright automatically applies,~{ Thus, my argument is not that in each place that copyright law extends, we should repeal it. It is instead that we should have a good argument for its extending where it does, and should not determine its reach on the basis of arbitrary and automatic changes caused by technology. }~ because it is clear that the current reach of copyright was never contemplated, much less chosen, by the legislators who enacted copyright law. + +We can see this point abstractly by beginning with this largely empty circle. + +{freeculture05.png 350x350 "uses" }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Think about a book in real space, and imagine this circle to represent all its potential /{uses}/. Most of these uses are unregulated by copyright law, because the uses don't create a copy. If you read a book, that act is not regulated by copyright law. If you give someone the book, that act is not regulated by copyright law. If you resell a book, that act is not regulated (copyright law expressly states that after the first sale of a book, the copyright owner can impose no further conditions on the disposition of the book). If you sleep on the book or use it to hold up a lamp or let your puppy chew it up, those acts are not regulated by copyright law, because those acts do not make a copy. +={ books : + three types of uses of +9 ; + copyright law : + copies as core issue of +16 ; + Internet : + copyright applicability altered by technology of +16 ; + technology : + copyright intent altered by +16 ; + derivative works : + piracy vs. +3 ; + piracy : + derivative work vs. +3 +} + +% piracy derivative work vs. in original index, not found, but included for page indicated + +{freeculture06.png 350x350 "unregulated" }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Obviously, however, some uses of a copyrighted book are regulated by copyright law. Republishing the book, for example, makes a copy. It is therefore regulated by copyright law. Indeed, this particular use stands at the core of this circle of possible uses of a copyrighted work. It is the paradigmatic use properly regulated by copyright regulation (see first diagram on next page). + +Finally, there is a tiny sliver of otherwise regulated copying uses that remain unregulated because the law considers these "fair uses." +={ fair use +6 ; + copyright law : + fair use and +6 +} + +{freeculture07.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +These are uses that themselves involve copying, but which the law treats as unregulated because public policy demands that they remain unregulated. You are free to quote from this book, even in a review that is quite negative, without my permission, even though that quoting makes a copy. That copy would ordinarily give the copyright owner the exclusive right to say whether the copy is allowed or not, but the law denies the owner any exclusive right over such "fair uses" for public policy (and possibly First Amendment) reasons. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + First Amendment +} + +{freeculture08.png 450x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +{freeculture09.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +In real space, then, the possible uses of a book are divided into three sorts: (1) unregulated uses, (2) regulated uses, and (3) regulated uses that are nonetheless deemed "fair" regardless of the copyright owner's views. +={ copyright : + usage restrictions attached to +8 +} + +Enter the Internet - a distributed, digital network where every use of a copyrighted work produces a copy.~{ I don't mean "nature" in the sense that it couldn't be different, but rather that its present instantiation entails a copy. Optical networks need not make copies of content they transmit, and a digital network could be designed to delete anything it copies so that the same number of copies remain. }~ And because of this single, arbitrary feature of the design of a digital network, the scope of category 1 changes dramatically. Uses that before were presumptively unregulated are now presumptively regulated. No longer is there a set of presumptively unregulated uses that define a freedom associated with a copyrighted work. Instead, each use is now subject to the copyright, because each use also makes a copy - category 1 gets sucked into category 2. And those who would defend the unregulated uses of copyrighted work must look exclusively to category 3, fair uses, to bear the burden of this shift. +={ books : + on Internet +7 ; + Internet : + books on +7 ; + fair use : + Internet burdens on +} + +So let's be very specific to make this general point clear. Before the Internet, if you purchased a book and read it ten times, there would be no plausible /{copyright}/-related argument that the copyright owner could make to control that use of her book. Copyright law would have nothing to say about whether you read the book once, ten times, or every night before you went to bed. None of those instances of use - reading - could be regulated by copyright law because none of those uses produced a copy. + +But the same book as an e-book is effectively governed by a different set of rules. Now if the copyright owner says you may read the book only once or only once a month, then /{copyright law}/ would aid the copyright owner in exercising this degree of control, because of the accidental feature of copyright law that triggers its application upon there being a copy. Now if you read the book ten times and the license says you may read it only five times, then whenever you read the book (or any portion of it) beyond the fifth time, you are making a copy of the book contrary to the copyright owner's wish. +={ e-books +5 ; + derivative works : + technological developments and +4 +} + +There are some people who think this makes perfect sense. My aim just now is not to argue about whether it makes sense or not. My aim is only to make clear the change. Once you see this point, a few other points also become clear: + +First, making category 1 disappear is not anything any policy maker ever intended. Congress did not think through the collapse of the presumptively unregulated uses of copyrighted works. There is no evidence at all that policy makers had this idea in mind when they allowed our policy here to shift. Unregulated uses were an important part of free culture before the Internet. + +Second, this shift is especially troubling in the context of transformative uses of creative content. Again, we can all understand the wrong in commercial piracy. But the law now purports to regulate /{any}/ transformation you make of creative work using a machine. "Copy and paste" and "cut and paste" become crimes. Tinkering with a story and releasing it to others exposes the tinkerer to at least a requirement of justification. However troubling the expansion with respect to copying a particular work, it is extraordinarily troubling with respect to transformative uses of creative work. +={ copyright law : + on republishing vs. transformation of original work +1 +} + +Third, this shift from category 1 to category 2 puts an extraordinary burden on category 3 ("fair use") that fair use never before had to bear. If a copyright owner now tried to control how many times I could read a book on-line, the natural response would be to argue that this is a violation of my fair use rights. But there has never been any litigation about whether I have a fair use right to read, because before the Internet, reading did not trigger the application of copyright law and hence the need for a fair use defense. The right to read was effectively protected before because reading was not regulated. +={ fair use : + Internet burdens on +1 ; + copyright law : + fair use and +1 ; + derivative works : + fair use vs. +1 +} + +This point about fair use is totally ignored, even by advocates for free culture. We have been cornered into arguing that our rights depend upon fair use - never even addressing the earlier question about the expansion in effective regulation. A thin protection grounded in fair use makes sense when the vast majority of uses are /{unregulated}/. But when everything becomes presumptively regulated, then the protections of fair use are not enough. + +The case of Video Pipeline is a good example. Video Pipeline was in the business of making "trailer" advertisements for movies available to video stores. The video stores displayed the trailers as a way to sell videos. Video Pipeline got the trailers from the film distributors, put the trailers on tape, and sold the tapes to the retail stores. +={ Video Pipeline +5 ; + advertising +2 ; + film industry : + trailer advertisements of +2 +} + +The company did this for about fifteen years. Then, in 1997, it began to think about the Internet as another way to distribute these previews. The idea was to expand their "selling by sampling" technique by giving on-line stores the same ability to enable "browsing." Just as in a bookstore you can read a few pages of a book before you buy the book, so, too, you would be able to sample a bit from the movie on-line before you bought it. +={ browsing } + +In 1998, Video Pipeline informed Disney and other film distributors that it intended to distribute the trailers through the Internet (rather than sending the tapes) to distributors of their videos. Two years later, Disney told Video Pipeline to stop. The owner of Video Pipeline asked Disney to talk about the matter - he had built a business on distributing this content as a way to help sell Disney films; he had customers who depended upon his delivering this content. Disney would agree to talk only if Video Pipeline stopped the distribution immediately. Video Pipeline thought it was within their "fair use" rights to distribute the clips as they had. So they filed a lawsuit to ask the court to declare that these rights were in fact their rights. +={ Disney, Inc. +3 ; + copyright law : + fair use and ; + copyright law : + copies as core issue of +3 ; + fair use : + legal intimidation tactics against +3 +} + +Disney countersued - for $100 million in damages. Those damages were predicated upon a claim that Video Pipeline had - willfully infringed" on Disney's copyright. When a court makes a finding of willful infringement, it can award damages not on the basis of the actual harm to the copyright owner, but on the basis of an amount set in the statute. Because Video Pipeline had distributed seven hundred clips of Disney movies to enable video stores to sell copies of those movies, Disney was now suing Video Pipeline for $100 million. +={ copyright : + usage restrictions attached to +2 ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + willful infringement findings in +2 ; + willful infringement +} + +Disney has the right to control its property, of course. But the video stores that were selling Disney's films also had some sort of right to be able to sell the films that they had bought from Disney. Disney's claim in court was that the stores were allowed to sell the films and they were permitted to list the titles of the films they were selling, but they were not allowed to show clips of the films as a way of selling them without Disney's permission. + +Now, you might think this is a close case, and I think the courts would consider it a close case. My point here is to map the change that gives Disney this power. Before the Internet, Disney couldn't really control how people got access to their content. Once a video was in the marketplace, the "first-sale doctrine" would free the seller to use the video as he wished, including showing portions of it in order to engender sales of the entire movie video. But with the Internet, it becomes possible for Disney to centralize control over access to this content. Because each use of the Internet produces a copy, use on the Internet becomes subject to the copyright owner's control. The technology expands the scope of effective control, because the technology builds a copy into every transaction. +={ first-sale doctrine } + +No doubt, a potential is not yet an abuse, and so the potential for control is not yet the abuse of control. Barnes & Noble has the right to say you can't touch a book in their store; property law gives them that right. But the market effectively protects against that abuse. If Barnes & Noble banned browsing, then consumers would choose other bookstores. Competition protects against the extremes. And it may well be (my argument so far does not even question this) that competition would prevent any similar danger when it comes to copyright. Sure, publishers exercising the rights that authors have assigned to them might try to regulate how many times you read a book, or try to stop you from sharing the book with anyone. But in a competitive market such as the book market, the dangers of this happening are quite slight. +={ Barnes & Noble ; + browsing ; + market competition +} + +Again, my aim so far is simply to map the changes that this changed architecture enables. Enabling technology to enforce the control of copyright means that the control of copyright is no longer defined by balanced policy. The control of copyright is simply what private owners choose. In some contexts, at least, that fact is harmless. But in some contexts it is a recipe for disaster. + +2~ Architecture and Law: Force + +The disappearance of unregulated uses would be change enough, but a second important change brought about by the Internet magnifies its significance. This second change does not affect the reach of copyright regulation; it affects how such regulation is enforced. + +In the world before digital technology, it was generally the law that controlled whether and how someone was regulated by copyright law. The law, meaning a court, meaning a judge: In the end, it was a human, trained in the tradition of the law and cognizant of the balances that tradition embraced, who said whether and how the law would restrict your freedom. +={ copyright law : + technology as automatic enforcer of ; + technology : + copyright enforcement controlled by +} + +There's a famous story about a battle between the Marx Brothers and Warner Brothers. The Marxes intended to make a parody of /{Casablanca}/. Warner Brothers objected. They wrote a nasty letter to the Marxes, warning them that there would be serious legal consequences if they went forward with their plan.~{ See David Lange, "Recognizing the Public Domain," /{Law and Contemporary Problems}/ 44 (1981): 172-73. }~ +={ Marx Brothers +3 ; + Warner Brothers +2 ; + Casablanca +1 +} + +This led the Marx Brothers to respond in kind. They warned Warner Brothers that the Marx Brothers "were brothers long before you were."~{ Ibid. See also Vaidhyanathan, /{Copyrights and Copywrongs,}/ 1-3. }~ The Marx Brothers therefore owned the word /{brothers}/, and if Warner Brothers insisted on trying to control /{Casablanca}/, then the Marx Brothers would insist on control over /{brothers}/. + +An absurd and hollow threat, of course, because Warner Brothers, like the Marx Brothers, knew that no court would ever enforce such a silly claim. This extremism was irrelevant to the real freedoms anyone (including Warner Brothers) enjoyed. + +On the Internet, however, there is no check on silly rules, because on the Internet, increasingly, rules are enforced not by a human but by a machine: Increasingly, the rules of copyright law, as interpreted by the copyright owner, get built into the technology that delivers copyrighted content. It is code, rather than law, that rules. And the problem with code regulations is that, unlike law, code has no shame. Code would not get the humor of the Marx Brothers. The consequence of that is not at all funny. +={ books : + on Internet +30 ; + Internet : + books on +28 +} + +Consider the life of my Adobe eBook Reader. +={ Adobe eBook Reader +2 ; + copyright law : + technology as automatic enforcer of +68 ; + technology : + copyright enforcement controlled by +68 ; + e-books +27 +} + +An e-book is a book delivered in electronic form. An Adobe eBook is not a book that Adobe has published; Adobe simply produces the software that publishers use to deliver e-books. It provides the technology, and the publisher delivers the content by using the technology. + +On the next page is a picture of an old version of my Adobe eBook Reader. + +As you can see, I have a small collection of e-books within this e-book library. Some of these books reproduce content that is in the public domain: /{Middlemarch}/, for example, is in the public domain. Some of them reproduce content that is not in the public domain: My own book /{The Future of Ideas}/ is not yet within the public domain. +={ Future of Ideas, The (Lessig) ; + Lessig, Lawrence ; + Middlemarch (Eliot) +1 ; + public domain : + e-book restrictions on +9 +} + +Consider /{Middlemarch}/ first. If you click on my e-book copy of /{Middlemarch}/, you'll see a fancy cover, and then a button at the bottom called Permissions. +={ Internet : + copyright enforced through +46 ; + permissions : + coded controls vs. +23 +} + +{freeculture10.png 340x450 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +If you click on the Permissions button, you'll see a list of the permissions that the publisher purports to grant with this book. + +{freeculture11.png 560x250 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +According to my eBook Reader, I have the permission to copy to the clipboard of the computer ten text selections every ten days. (So far, I've copied no text to the clipboard.) I also have the permission to print ten pages from the book every ten days. Lastly, I have the permission to use the Read Aloud button to hear /{Middlemarch}/ read aloud through the computer. +={ Middlemarch (Eliot) } + +{freeculture12.png 310x410 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Here's the e-book for another work in the public domain (including the translation): Aristotle's /{Politics}/. +={ Aristotle ; + Politics (Aristotle) +} + +According to its permissions, no printing or copying is permitted at all. But fortunately, you can use the Read Aloud button to hear the book. + +{freeculture13.png 560x220 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Finally (and most embarrassingly), here are the permissions for the original e- book version of my last book, /{The Future of Ideas}/: +={ Future of Ideas, The (Lessig) ; + Lessig, Lawrence +} + +{freeculture14.png 560x224 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +No copying, no printing, and don't you dare try to listen to this book! + +Now, the Adobe eBook Reader calls these controls "permissions" - as if the publisher has the power to control how you use these works. For works under copyright, the copyright owner certainly does have the power - up to the limits of the copyright law. But for work not under copyright, there is no such copyright power.~{ In principle, a contract might impose a requirement on me. I might, for example, buy a book from you that includes a contract that says I will read it only three times, or that I promise to read it three times. But that obligation (and the limits for creating that obligation) would come from the contract, not from copyright law, and the obligations of contract would not necessarily pass to anyone who subsequently acquired the book. }~ When my e-book of /{Middlemarch}/ says I have the permission to copy only ten text selections into the memory every ten days, what that really means is that the eBook Reader has enabled the publisher to control how I use the book on my computer, far beyond the control that the law would enable. + +The control comes instead from the code - from the technology within which the e- book "lives." Though the e-book says that these are permissions, they are not the sort of "permissions" that most of us deal with. When a teenager gets "permission" to stay out till midnight, she knows (unless she's Cinderella) that she can stay out till 2 A.M., but will suffer a punishment if she's caught. But when the Adobe eBook Reader says I have the permission to make ten copies of the text into the computer's memory, that means that after I've made ten copies, the computer will not make any more. The same with the printing restrictions: After ten pages, the eBook Reader will not print any more pages. It's the same with the silly restriction that says that you can't use the Read Aloud button to read my book aloud - it's not that the company will sue you if you do; instead, if you push the Read Aloud button with my book, the machine simply won't read aloud. + +These are /{controls}/, not permissions. Imagine a world where the Marx Brothers sold word processing software that, when you tried to type "Warner Brothers," erased "Brothers" from the sentence. +={ Marx Brothers ; + Warner Brothers +} + +This is the future of copyright law: not so much copyright /{law}/ as copyright /{code}/. The controls over access to content will not be controls that are ratified by courts; the controls over access to content will be controls that are coded by programmers. And whereas the controls that are built into the law are always to be checked by a judge, the controls that are built into the technology have no similar built-in check. + +How significant is this? Isn't it always possible to get around the controls built into the technology? Software used to be sold with technologies that limited the ability of users to copy the software, but those were trivial protections to defeat. Why won't it be trivial to defeat these protections as well? + +We've only scratched the surface of this story. Return to the Adobe eBook Reader. + +Early in the life of the Adobe eBook Reader, Adobe suffered a public relations nightmare. Among the books that you could download for free on the Adobe site was a copy of /{Alice's Adventures in Wonderland}/. This wonderful book is in the public domain. Yet when you clicked on Permissions for that book, you got the following report: +={ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Caroll) +4 ; + public domain : + e-book restrictions on +4 +} + +{freeculture15.png 560x310 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Here was a public domain children's book that you were not allowed to copy, not allowed to lend, not allowed to give, and, as the "permissions" indicated, not allowed to "read aloud"! + +The public relations nightmare attached to that final permission. For the text did not say that you were not permitted to use the Read Aloud button; it said you did not have the permission to read the book aloud. That led some people to think that Adobe was restricting the right of parents, for example, to read the book to their children, which seemed, to say the least, absurd. + +Adobe responded quickly that it was absurd to think that it was trying to restrict the right to read a book aloud. Obviously it was only restricting the ability to use the Read Aloud button to have the book read aloud. But the question Adobe never did answer is this: Would Adobe thus agree that a consumer was free to use software to hack around the restrictions built into the eBook Reader? If some company (call it Elcomsoft) developed a program to disable the technological protection built into an Adobe eBook so that a blind person, say, could use a computer to read the book aloud, would Adobe agree that such a use of an eBook Reader was fair? Adobe didn't answer because the answer, however absurd it might seem, is no. + +The point is not to blame Adobe. Indeed, Adobe is among the most innovative companies developing strategies to balance open access to content with incentives for companies to innovate. But Adobe's technology enables control, and Adobe has an incentive to defend this control. That incentive is understandable, yet what it creates is often crazy. + +To see the point in a particularly absurd context, consider a favorite story of mine that makes the same point. + +Consider the robotic dog made by Sony named "Aibo." The Aibo learns tricks, cuddles, and follows you around. It eats only electricity and that doesn't leave that much of a mess (at least in your house). +={ Aibo robotic dog +6 ; + robotic dog +6 ; + Sony : + Aibo robotic dog produced by +6 +} + +The Aibo is expensive and popular. Fans from around the world have set up clubs to trade stories. One fan in particular set up a Web site to enable information about the Aibo dog to be shared. This fan set up aibopet.com (and aibohack.com, but that resolves to the same site), and on that site he provided information about how to teach an Aibo to do tricks in addition to the ones Sony had taught it. +={ hacks +4 } + +"Teach" here has a special meaning. Aibos are just cute computers. You teach a computer how to do something by programming it differently. So to say that aibopet.com was giving information about how to teach the dog to do new tricks is just to say that aibopet.com was giving information to users of the Aibo pet about how to hack their computer "dog" to make it do new tricks (thus, aibohack.com). + +If you're not a programmer or don't know many programmers, the word /{hack}/ has a particularly unfriendly connotation. Nonprogrammers hack bushes or weeds. Nonprogrammers in horror movies do even worse. But to programmers, or coders, as I call them, /{hack}/ is a much more positive term. /{Hack}/ just means code that enables the program to do something it wasn't originally intended or enabled to do. If you buy a new printer for an old computer, you might find the old computer doesn't run, or "drive," the printer. If you discovered that, you'd later be happy to discover a hack on the Net by someone who has written a driver to enable the computer to drive the printer you just bought. + +Some hacks are easy. Some are unbelievably hard. Hackers as a community like to challenge themselves and others with increasingly difficult tasks. There's a certain respect that goes with the talent to hack well. There's a well-deserved respect that goes with the talent to hack ethically. + +The Aibo fan was displaying a bit of both when he hacked the program and offered to the world a bit of code that would enable the Aibo to dance jazz. The dog wasn't programmed to dance jazz. It was a clever bit of tinkering that turned the dog into a more talented creature than Sony had built. + +I've told this story in many contexts, both inside and outside the United States. Once I was asked by a puzzled member of the audience, is it permissible for a dog to dance jazz in the United States? We forget that stories about the backcountry still flow across much of the world. So let's just be clear before we continue: It's not a crime anywhere (anymore) to dance jazz. Nor is it a crime to teach your dog to dance jazz. Nor should it be a crime (though we don't have a lot to go on here) to teach your robot dog to dance jazz. Dancing jazz is a completely legal activity. One imagines that the owner of aibopet.com thought, /{What possible problem could there be with teaching a robot dog to dance?}/ + +Let's put the dog to sleep for a minute, and turn to a pony show - not literally a pony show, but rather a paper that a Princeton academic named Ed Felten prepared for a conference. This Princeton academic is well known and respected. He was hired by the government in the Microsoft case to test Microsoft's claims about what could and could not be done with its own code. In that trial, he demonstrated both his brilliance and his coolness. Under heavy badgering by Microsoft lawyers, Ed Felten stood his ground. He was not about to be bullied into being silent about something he knew very well. +={ Felten, Ed +11 ; + Microsoft : + government case against +} + +But Felten's bravery was really tested in April 2001.~{ See Pamela Samuelson, "Anticircumvention Rules: Threat to Science," /{Science}/ 293 (2001): 2028; Brendan I. Koerner, "Play Dead: Sony Muzzles the Techies Who Teach a Robot Dog New Tricks," /{American Prospect,}/ 1 January 2002; "Court Dismisses Computer Scientists' Challenge to DMCA," /{Intellectual Property Litigation Reporter,}/ 11 December 2001; Bill Holland, "Copyright Act Raising Free-Speech Concerns," /{Billboard,}/ 26 May 2001; Janelle Brown, "Is the RIAA Running Scared?" Salon.com, 26 April 2001; Electronic Frontier Foundation, "Frequently Asked Questions about /{Felten and USENIX v. RIAA}/ Legal Case," available at link #27. }~ He and a group of colleagues were working on a paper to be submitted at conference. The paper was intended to describe the weakness in an encryption system being developed by the Secure Digital Music Initiative as a technique to control the distribution of music. +={ Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) +5 ; + encryption systems +5 ; + Internet : + encryption systems designed for +5 +} + +The SDMI coalition had as its goal a technology to enable content owners to exercise much better control over their content than the Internet, as it originally stood, granted them. Using encryption, SDMI hoped to develop a standard that would allow the content owner to say "this music cannot be copied," and have a computer respect that command. The technology was to be part of a "trusted system" of control that would get content owners to trust the system of the Internet much more. + +When SDMI thought it was close to a standard, it set up a competition. In exchange for providing contestants with the code to an SDMI-encrypted bit of content, contestants were to try to crack it and, if they did, report the problems to the consortium. + +Felten and his team figured out the encryption system quickly. He and the team saw the weakness of this system as a type: Many encryption systems would suffer the same weakness, and Felten and his team thought it worthwhile to point this out to those who study encryption. + +Let's review just what Felten was doing. Again, this is the United States. We have a principle of free speech. We have this principle not just because it is the law, but also because it is a really great idea. A strongly protected tradition of free speech is likely to encourage a wide range of criticism. That criticism is likely, in turn, to improve the systems or people or ideas criticized. +={ speech, freedom of : + useful criticism fostered by +} + +What Felten and his colleagues were doing was publishing a paper describing the weakness in a technology. They were not spreading free music, or building and deploying this technology. The paper was an academic essay, unintelligible to most people. But it clearly showed the weakness in the SDMI system, and why SDMI would not, as presently constituted, succeed. + +What links these two, aibopet.com and Felten, is the letters they then received. Aibopet.com received a letter from Sony about the aibopet.com hack. Though a jazz-dancing dog is perfectly legal, Sony wrote: +={ Aibo robotic dog +1 ; + robotic dog +1 ; + Sony : + Aibo robotic dog produced by +1 +} + +_1 Your site contains information providing the means to circumvent AIBO-ware's copy protection protocol constituting a violation of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." +={ circumvention technologies ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) +7 ; + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) +7 ; + copyright law : + circumvention technology banned by +19 ; + technology : + of circumvention +} + +And though an academic paper describing the weakness in a system of encryption should also be perfectly legal, Felten received a letter from an RIAA lawyer that read: +={ Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + on encryption system critique +1 +} + +_1 Any disclosure of information gained from participating in the Public Challenge would be outside the scope of activities permitted by the Agreement and could subject you and your research team to actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA")." + +In both cases, this weirdly Orwellian law was invoked to control the spread of information. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made spreading such information an offense. + +The DMCA was enacted as a response to copyright owners' first fear about cyberspace. The fear was that copyright control was effectively dead; the response was to find technologies that might compensate. These new technologies would be copyright protection technologies - technologies to control the replication and distribution of copyrighted material. They were designed as /{code}/ to modify the original /{code}/ of the Internet, to reestablish some protection for copyright owners. + +The DMCA was a bit of law intended to back up the protection of this code designed to protect copyrighted material. It was, we could say, /{legal code}/ intended to buttress /{software code}/ which itself was intended to support the /{legal code of copyright}/. + +But the DMCA was not designed merely to protect copyrighted works to the extent copyright law protected them. Its protection, that is, did not end at the line that copyright law drew. The DMCA regulated devices that were designed to circumvent copyright protection measures. It was designed to ban those devices, whether or not the use of the copyrighted material made possible by that circumvention would have been a copyright violation. +={ circumvention technologies +13 ; + fair use : + circumvention technology ban and +1 ; + technology : + of circumvention +13 +} + +Aibopet.com and Felten make the point. The Aibo hack circumvented a copyright protection system for the purpose of enabling the dog to dance jazz. That enablement no doubt involved the use of copyrighted material. But as aibopet.com's site was noncommercial, and the use did not enable subsequent copyright infringements, there's no doubt that aibopet.com's hack was fair use of Sony's copyrighted material. Yet fair use is not a defense to the DMCA. The question is not whether the use of the copyrighted material was a copyright violation. The question is whether a copyright protection system was circumvented. +={ Felten, Ed +1 ; + Aibo robotic dog ; + robotic dog ; + Sony : + Aibo robotic dog produced by ; + copyright law : + fair use and +} + +The threat against Felten was more attenuated, but it followed the same line of reasoning. By publishing a paper describing how a copyright protection system could be circumvented, the RIAA lawyer suggested, Felten himself was distributing a circumvention technology. Thus, even though he was not himself infringing anyone's copyright, his academic paper was enabling others to infringe others' copyright. +={ Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + on circumvention technology +} + +The bizarreness of these arguments is captured in a cartoon drawn in 1981 by Paul Conrad. At that time, a court in California had held that the VCR could be banned because it was a copyright-infringing technology: It enabled consumers to copy films without the permission of the copyright owner. No doubt there were uses of the technology that were legal: Fred Rogers, aka "Mr. Rogers," for example, had testified in that case that he wanted people to feel free to tape /{Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood}/. +={ Conrad, Paul ; + Rogers, Fred ; + cassette recording : + VCRs +10 ; + VCRs +10 ; + Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood ; + television : + VCR taping of +8 +} + +_1 Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the "Neighborhood" at hours when some children cannot use it. I think that it's a real service to families to be able to record such programs and show them at appropriate times. I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the "Neighborhood" off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the "Neighborhood" because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important."~{ /{Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.,}/ 464 U.S. 417, 455 fn. 27 (1984). Rogers never changed his view about the VCR. See James Lardner, /{Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR}/ (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 270-71. }~ + +Even though there were uses that were legal, because there were some uses that were illegal, the court held the companies producing the VCR responsible. + +This led Conrad to draw the cartoon below, which we can adopt to the DMCA. +={ Conrad, Paul ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) +2 ; + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) +2 +} + +No argument I have can top this picture, but let me try to get close. + +The anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA target copyright circumvention technologies. Circumvention technologies can be used for different ends. They can be used, for example, to enable massive pirating of copyrighted material - a bad end. Or they can be used to enable the use of particular copyrighted materials in ways that would be considered fair use - a good end. + +A handgun can be used to shoot a police officer or a child. Most would agree such a use is bad. Or a handgun can be used for target practice or to protect against an intruder. At least some would say that such a use would be good. It, too, is a technology that has both good and bad uses. +={ guns +1 ; + handguns +1 +} + +{freeculture16.png 425x500 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +The obvious point of Conrad's cartoon is the weirdness of a world where guns are legal, despite the harm they can do, while VCRs (and circumvention technologies) are illegal. Flash: /{No one ever died from copyright circumvention}/. Yet the law bans circumvention technologies absolutely, despite the potential that they might do some good, but permits guns, despite the obvious and tragic harm they do. +={ Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + on circumvention technology +1 +} + +The Aibo and RIAA examples demonstrate how copyright owners are changing the balance that copyright law grants. Using code, copyright owners restrict fair use; using the DMCA, they punish those who would attempt to evade the restrictions on fair use that they impose through code. Technology becomes a means by which fair use can be erased; the law of the DMCA backs up that erasing. +={ Conrad, Paul ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ; + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) ; + Aibo robotic dog +1 ; + robotic dog +1 ; + copyright law : + fair use and +1 ; + fair use : + technological restriction of +1 +} + +This is how /{code}/ becomes /{law}/. The controls built into the technology of copy and access protection become rules the violation of which is also a violation of the law. In this way, the code extends the law - increasing its regulation, even if the subject it regulates (activities that would otherwise plainly constitute fair use) is beyond the reach of the law. Code becomes law; code extends the law; code thus extends the control that copyright owners effect - at least for those copyright holders with the lawyers who can write the nasty letters that Felten and aibopet.com received. +={ Felten, Ed } + +There is one final aspect of the interaction between architecture and law that contributes to the force of copyright's regulation. This is the ease with which infringements of the law can be detected. For contrary to the rhetoric common at the birth of cyberspace that on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog, increasingly, given changing technologies deployed on the Internet, it is easy to find the dog who committed a legal wrong. The technologies of the Internet are open to snoops as well as sharers, and the snoops are increasingly good at tracking down the identity of those who violate the rules. + +For example, imagine you were part of a /{Star Trek}/ fan club. You gathered every month to share trivia, and maybe to enact a kind of fan fiction about the show. One person would play Spock, another, Captain Kirk. The characters would begin with a plot from a real story, then simply continue it.~{ For an early and prescient analysis, see Rebecca Tushnet, "Legal Fictions, Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law," /{Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Journal}/ 17 (1997): 651. }~ + +Before the Internet, this was, in effect, a totally unregulated activity. No matter what happened inside your club room, you would never be interfered with by the copyright police. You were free in that space to do as you wished with this part of our culture. You were allowed to build on it as you wished without fear of legal control. +={ Internet : + copyright enforced through +1 +} + +But if you moved your club onto the Internet, and made it generally available for others to join, the story would be very different. Bots scouring the Net for trademark and copyright infringement would quickly find your site. Your posting of fan fiction, depending upon the ownership of the series that you're depicting, could well inspire a lawyer's threat. And ignoring the lawyer's threat would be extremely costly indeed. The law of copyright is extremely efficient. The penalties are severe, and the process is quick. +={ bots } + +This change in the effective force of the law is caused by a change in the ease with which the law can be enforced. That change too shifts the law's balance radically. It is as if your car transmitted the speed at which you traveled at every moment that you drove; that would be just one step before the state started issuing tickets based upon the data you transmitted. That is, in effect, what is happening here. + +2~ Market: Concentration + +So copyright's duration has increased dramatically - tripled in the past thirty years. And copyright's scope has increased as well - from regulating only publishers to now regulating just about everyone. And copyright's reach has changed, as every action becomes a copy and hence presumptively regulated. And as technologists find better ways to control the use of content, and as copyright is increasingly enforced through technology, copyright's force changes, too. Misuse is easier to find and easier to control. This regulation of the creative process, which began as a tiny regulation governing a tiny part of the market for creative work, has become the single most important regulator of creativity there is. It is a massive expansion in the scope of the government's control over innovation and creativity; it would be totally unrecognizable to those who gave birth to copyright's control. + +Still, in my view, all of these changes would not matter much if it weren't for one more change that we must also consider. This is a change that is in some sense the most familiar, though its significance and scope are not well understood. It is the one that creates precisely the reason to be concerned about all the other changes I have described. + +This is the change in the concentration and integration of the media. In the past twenty years, the nature of media ownership has undergone a radical alteration, caused by changes in legal rules governing the media. Before this change happened, the different forms of media were owned by separate media companies. Now, the media is increasingly owned by only a few companies. Indeed, after the changes that the FCC announced in June 2003, most expect that within a few years, we will live in a world where just three companies control more than 85 percent of the media. +={ FCC : + media ownership regulated by +2 ; + media : + ownership concentration in +21 +} + +These changes are of two sorts: the scope of concentration, and its nature. + +Changes in scope are the easier ones to describe. As Senator John McCain summarized the data produced in the FCC's review of media ownership, "five companies control 85 percent of our media sources."~{ FCC Oversight: Hearing Before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, 108th Cong., 1st sess. (22 May 2003) (statement of Senator John McCain). }~ The five recording labels of Universal Music Group, BMG, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI control 84.8 percent of the U.S. music market.~{ Lynette Holloway, "Despite a Marketing Blitz, CD Sales Continue to Slide," /{New York Times,}/ 23 December 2002. }~ The "five largest cable companies pipe programming to 74 percent of the cable subscribers nationwide."~{ Molly Ivins, "Media Consolidation Must Be Stopped," /{Charleston Gazette,}/ 31 May 2003. }~ +={ BMG ; + cable television ; + EMI ; + McCain, John ; + recording industry : + ownership concentration in ; + Sony Music Entertainment ; + Universal Music Group ; + Warner Music Group ; + television : + ownership consolidation in +} + +The story with radio is even more dramatic. Before deregulation, the nation's largest radio broadcasting conglomerate owned fewer than seventy-five stations. Today /{one}/ company owns more than 1,200 stations. During that period of consolidation, the total number of radio owners dropped by 34 percent. Today, in most markets, the two largest broadcasters control 74 percent of that market's revenues. Overall, just four companies control 90 percent of the nation's radio advertising revenues. +={ radio : + ownership concentration in +} + +Newspaper ownership is becoming more concentrated as well. Today, there are six hundred fewer daily newspapers in the United States than there were eighty years ago, and ten companies control half of the nation's circulation. There are twenty major newspaper publishers in the United States. The top ten film studios receive 99 percent of all film revenue. The ten largest cable companies account for 85 percent of all cable revenue. This is a market far from the free press the framers sought to protect. Indeed, it is a market that is quite well protected - by the market. +={ cable television +2 ; + television : + ownership consolidation in +2 ; + film industry : + consolidation of ; + newspapers : + ownership consolidation of +2 +} + +Concentration in size alone is one thing. The more invidious change is in the nature of that concentration. As author James Fallows put it in a recent article about Rupert Murdoch, +={ Fallows, James +1 ; + radio : + ownership concentration in +2 ; + Murdoch, Rupert +1 } + +_1 Murdoch's companies now constitute a production system unmatched in its integration. They supply content - Fox movies ... Fox TV shows ... Fox-controlled sports broadcasts, plus newspapers and books. They sell the content to the public and to advertisers - in newspapers, on the broadcast network, on the cable channels. And they operate the physical distribution system through which the content reaches the customers. Murdoch's satellite systems now distribute News Corp. content in Europe and Asia; if Murdoch becomes DirecTV's largest single owner, that system will serve the same function in the United States."~{ James Fallows, "The Age of Murdoch," /{Atlantic Monthly}/ (September 2003): 89. }~ +={ DirectTV ; + Fox (film company) ; + News Corp +} + +The pattern with Murdoch is the pattern of modern media. Not just large companies owning many radio stations, but a few companies owning as many outlets of media as possible. A picture describes this pattern better than a thousand words could do: + +{freeculture17.png 560x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Does this concentration matter? Will it affect what is made, or what is distributed? Or is it merely a more efficient way to produce and distribute content? +={ innovation : + media conglomeration as disincentive for +13 +} + +My view was that concentration wouldn't matter. I thought it was nothing more than a more efficient financial structure. But now, after reading and listening to a barrage of creators try to convince me to the contrary, I am beginning to change my mind. + +Here's a representative story that begins to suggest how this integration may matter. + +In 1969, Norman Lear created a pilot for /{All in the Family}/. He took the pilot to ABC. The network didn't like it. It was too edgy, they told Lear. Make it again. Lear made a second pilot, more edgy than the first. ABC was exasperated. You're missing the point, they told Lear. We wanted less edgy, not more. +={ Lear, Norman +2 ; + ABC +1 ; + All in the Family ; + television : + independent production for +7 +} + +Rather than comply, Lear simply took the show elsewhere. CBS was happy to have the series; ABC could not stop Lear from walking. The copyrights that Lear held assured an independence from network control.~{ Leonard Hill, "The Axis of Access," remarks before Weidenbaum Center Forum, "Entertainment Economics: The Movie Industry," St. Louis, Missouri, 3 April 2003 (transcript of prepared remarks available at link #28; for the Lear story, not included in the prepared remarks, see link #29). }~ +={ CBS } + +The network did not control those copyrights because the law forbade the networks from controlling the content they syndicated. The law required a separation between the networks and the content producers; that separation would guarantee Lear freedom. And as late as 1992, because of these rules, the vast majority of prime time television - 75 percent of it - was "independent" of the networks. + +In 1994, the FCC abandoned the rules that required this independence. After that change, the networks quickly changed the balance. In 1985, there were twenty- five independent television production studios; in 2002, only five independent television studios remained. "In 1992, only 15 percent of new series were produced for a network by a company it controlled. Last year, the percentage of shows produced by controlled companies more than quintupled to 77 percent." "In 1992, 16 new series were produced independently of conglomerate control, last year there was one."~{ NewsCorp./DirecTV Merger and Media Consolidation: Hearings on Media Ownership Before the Senate Commerce Committee, 108th Cong., 1st sess. (2003) (testimony of Gene Kimmelman on behalf of Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America), available at link #30. Kimmelman quotes Victoria Riskin, president of Writers Guild of America, West, in her Remarks at FCC En Banc Hearing, Richmond, Virginia, 27 February 2003. }~ In 2002, 75 percent of prime time television was owned by the networks that ran it. "In the ten-year period between 1992 and 2002, the number of prime time television hours per week produced by network studios increased over 200%, whereas the number of prime time television hours per week produced by independent studios decreased 63%."~{ Ibid. }~ +={ FCC : + on television production studios +} + +Today, another Norman Lear with another /{All in the Family}/ would find that he had the choice either to make the show less edgy or to be fired: The content of any show developed for a network is increasingly owned by the network. +={ Lear, Norman ; + All in the Family +} + +While the number of channels has increased dramatically, the ownership of those channels has narrowed to an ever smaller and smaller few. As Barry Diller said to Bill Moyers, +={ Diller, Barry +1 ; + Moyers, Bill +} + +_1 Well, if you have companies that produce, that finance, that air on their channel and then distribute worldwide everything that goes through their controlled distribution system, then what you get is fewer and fewer actual voices participating in the process. [We u]sed to have dozens and dozens of thriving independent production companies producing television programs. Now you have less than a handful."~{ "Barry Diller Takes on Media Deregulation," /{Now with Bill Moyers,}/ Bill Moyers, 25 April 2003, edited transcript available at link #31. }~ + +This narrowing has an effect on what is produced. The product of such large and concentrated networks is increasingly homogenous. Increasingly safe. Increasingly sterile. The product of news shows from networks like this is increasingly tailored to the message the network wants to convey. This is not the communist party, though from the inside, it must feel a bit like the communist party. No one can question without risk of consequence - not necessarily banishment to Siberia, but punishment nonetheless. Independent, critical, different views are quashed. This is not the environment for a democracy. +={ democracy : + media concentration and +} + +Economics itself offers a parallel that explains why this integration affects creativity. Clay Christensen has written about the "Innovator's Dilemma": the fact that large traditional firms find it rational to ignore new, breakthrough technologies that compete with their core business. The same analysis could help explain why large, traditional media companies would find it rational to ignore new cultural trends.~{ Clayton M. Christensen, /{The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary National Bestseller that Changed the Way We Do Business}/ (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1997). Christensen acknowledges that the idea was first suggested by Dean Kim Clark. See Kim B. Clark, "The Interaction of Design Hierarchies and Market Concepts in Technological Evolution," /{Research Policy}/ 14 (1985): 235- 51. For a more recent study, see Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, /{Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market - and How to Successfully Transform Them}/ (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 2001). }~ Lumbering giants not only don't, but should not, sprint. Yet if the field is only open to the giants, there will be far too little sprinting. +={ Christensen, Clayton M. ; + Innovator's Dilemma, The (Christensen) +} + +I don't think we know enough about the economics of the media market to say with certainty what concentration and integration will do. The efficiencies are important, and the effect on culture is hard to measure. + +But there is a quintessentially obvious example that does strongly suggest the concern. + +In addition to the copyright wars, we're in the middle of the drug wars. Government policy is strongly directed against the drug cartels; criminal and civil courts are filled with the consequences of this battle. + +Let me hereby disqualify myself from any possible appointment to any position in government by saying I believe this war is a profound mistake. I am not pro drugs. Indeed, I come from a family once wrecked by drugs - though the drugs that wrecked my family were all quite legal. I believe this war is a profound mistake because the collateral damage from it is so great as to make waging the war insane. When you add together the burdens on the criminal justice system, the desperation of generations of kids whose only real economic opportunities are as drug warriors, the queering of constitutional protections because of the constant surveillance this war requires, and, most profoundly, the total destruction of the legal systems of many South American nations because of the power of the local drug cartels, I find it impossible to believe that the marginal benefit in reduced drug consumption by Americans could possibly outweigh these costs. +={ drugs : + illegal +2 ; + criminal justice system +} + +You may not be convinced. That's fine. We live in a democracy, and it is through votes that we are to choose policy. But to do that, we depend fundamentally upon the press to help inform Americans about these issues. + +Beginning in 1998, the Office of National Drug Control Policy launched a media campaign as part of the "war on drugs." The campaign produced scores of short film clips about issues related to illegal drugs. In one series (the Nick and Norm series) two men are in a bar, discussing the idea of legalizing drugs as a way to avoid some of the collateral damage from the war. One advances an argument in favor of drug legalization. The other responds in a powerful and effective way against the argument of the first. In the end, the first guy changes his mind (hey, it's television). The plug at the end is a damning attack on the pro-legalization campaign. +={ advertising +4 ; + commercials +4 ; + television : + advertising on +4 ; + Nick and Norm anti-drug campaign +} + +Fair enough. It's a good ad. Not terribly misleading. It delivers its message well. It's a fair and reasonable message. + +But let's say you think it is a wrong message, and you'd like to run a countercommercial. Say you want to run a series of ads that try to demonstrate the extraordinary collateral harm that comes from the drug war. Can you do it? + +Well,obviously, these ads cost lots of money. Assume you raise the money. Assume a group of concerned citizens donates all the money in the world to help you get your message out. Can you be sure your message will be heard then? + +No.You cannot. Television stations have a general policy of avoiding "controversial" ads. Ads sponsored by the government are deemed uncontroversial; ads disagreeing with the government are controversial. This selectivity might be thought inconsistent with the First Amendment, but the Supreme Court has held that stations have the right to choose what they run. Thus, the major channels of commercial media will refuse one side of a crucial debate the opportunity to present its case. And the courts will defend the rights of the stations to be this biased.~{ The Marijuana Policy Project, in February 2003, sought to place ads that directly responded to the Nick and Norm series on stations within the Washington, D.C., area. Comcast rejected the ads as "against [their] policy." The local NBC affiliate, WRC, rejected the ads without reviewing them. The local ABC affiliate, WJOA, originally agreed to run the ads and accepted payment to do so, but later decided not to run the ads and returned the collected fees. Interview with Neal Levine, 15 October 2003. These restrictions are, of course, not limited to drug policy. See, for example, Nat Ives, "On the Issue of an Iraq War, Advocacy Ads Meet with Rejection from TV Networks," /{New York Times,}/ 13 March 2003, C4. Outside of election-related air time there is very little that the FCC or the courts are willing to do to even the playing field. For a general overview, see Rhonda Brown, "Ad Hoc Access: The Regulation of Editorial Advertising on Television and Radio," /{Yale Law and Policy Review}/ 6 (1988): 449-79, and for a more recent summary of the stance of the FCC and the courts, see /{Radio-Television News Directors Association v. FCC,}/ 184 F. 3d 872 (D.C. Cir. 1999). Municipal authorities exercise the same authority as the networks. In a recent example from San Francisco, the San Francisco transit authority rejected an ad that criticized its Muni diesel buses. Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, "Antidiesel Group Fuming After Muni Rejects Ad," SFGate.com, 16 June 2003, available at link #32. The ground was that the criticism was "too controversial." }~ +={ Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + First Amendment ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + on television advertising bans ; + television : + controversy avoided by +} + +I'd be happy to defend the networks' rights, as well - if we lived in a media market that was truly diverse. But concentration in the media throws that condition into doubt. If a handful of companies control access to the media, and that handful of companies gets to decide which political positions it will allow to be promoted on its channels, then in an obvious and important way, concentration matters. You might like the positions the handful of companies selects. But you should not like a world in which a mere few get to decide which issues the rest of us get to know about. + +2~ Together +={ copyright : + scope of +25 +} + +There is something innocent and obvious about the claim of the copyright warriors that the government should "protect my property." In the abstract, it is obviously true and, ordinarily, totally harmless. No sane sort who is not an anarchist could disagree. + +But when we see how dramatically this "property" has changed - when we recognize how it might now interact with both technology and markets to mean that the effective constraint on the liberty to cultivate our culture is dramatically different - the claim begins to seem less innocent and obvious. Given (1) the power of technology to supplement the law's control, and (2) the power of concentrated markets to weaken the opportunity for dissent, if strictly enforcing the massively expanded "property" rights granted by copyright fundamentally changes the freedom within this culture to cultivate and build upon our past, then we have to ask whether this property should be redefined. + +Not starkly. Or absolutely. My point is not that we should abolish copyright or go back to the eighteenth century. That would be a total mistake, disastrous for the most important creative enterprises within our culture today. + +But there is a space between zero and one, Internet culture notwithstanding. And these massive shifts in the effective power of copyright regulation, tied to increased concentration of the content industry and resting in the hands of technology that will increasingly enable control over the use of culture, should drive us to consider whether another adjustment is called for. Not an adjustment that increases copyright's power. Not an adjustment that increases its term. Rather, an adjustment to restore the balance that has traditionally defined copyright's regulation - a weakening of that regulation, to strengthen creativity. + +Copyright law has not been a rock of Gibraltar. It's not a set of constant commitments that, for some mysterious reason, teenagers and geeks now flout. Instead, copyright power has grown dramatically in a short period of time, as the technologies of distribution and creation have changed and as lobbyists have pushed for more control by copyright holders. Changes in the past in response to changes in technology suggest that we may well need similar changes in the future. And these changes have to be /{reductions}/ in the scope of copyright, in response to the extraordinary increase in control that technology and the market enable. + +For the single point that is lost in this war on pirates is a point that we see only after surveying the range of these changes. When you add together the effect of changing law, concentrated markets, and changing technology, together they produce an astonishing conclusion: /{Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now}/. + +Not when copyrights were perpetual, for when copyrights were perpetual, they affected only that precise creative work. Not when only publishers had the tools to publish, for the market then was much more diverse. Not when there were only three television networks, for even then, newspapers, film studios, radio stations, and publishers were independent of the networks. /{Never}/ has copyright protected such a wide range of rights, against as broad a range of actors, for a term that was remotely as long. This form of regulation - a tiny regulation of a tiny part of the creative energy of a nation at the founding - is now a massive regulation of the overall creative process. Law plus technology plus the market now interact to turn this historically benign regulation into the most significant regulation of culture that our free society has known.~{ Siva Vaidhyanathan captures a similar point in his "four surrenders" of copyright law in the digital age. See Vaidhyanathan, 159-60. }~ +={ copyright : + in perpetuity +} + +!_ This has been +a long chapter. Its point can now be briefly stated. + +At the start of this book, I distinguished between commercial and noncommercial culture. In the course of this chapter, I have distinguished between copying a work and transforming it. We can now combine these two distinctions and draw a clear map of the changes that copyright law has undergone. +={ copyright law : + history of American +10 | on republishing vs. transformation of original work +16 ; + culture : + commercial vs. noncommercial +11 ; + derivative works : + historical shift in copyright coverage of +14 ; + public domain : + balance of U.S. content in +14 +} + +In 1790, the law looked like this: + +table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33; + +  +Publish +Transform + +Commercial +© +Free + +Noncommercial +Free +Free + +}table + +The act of publishing a map, chart, and book was regulated by copyright law. Nothing else was. Transformations were free. And as copyright attached only with registration, and only those who intended to benefit commercially would register, copying through publishing of noncommercial work was also free. +={ copyright law : + registration requirement of ; + copyright law : + copies as core issue of +7 +} + +By the end of the nineteenth century, the law had changed to this: + +table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33; + +  +Publish +Transform + +Commercial +© +© + +Noncommercial +Free +Free + +}table + +Derivative works were now regulated by copyright law - if published, which again, given the economics of publishing at the time, means if offered commercially. But noncommercial publishing and transformation were still essentially free. +={ derivative works : + technological developments and +5 ; + technology : + of copying +5 +} + +In 1909 the law changed to regulate copies, not publishing, and after this change, the scope of the law was tied to technology. As the technology of copying became more prevalent, the reach of the law expanded. Thus by 1975, as photocopying machines became more common, we could say the law began to look like this: +={ photocopyring machines +} + +table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33; + +  +Publish +Transform + +Commercial +© +© + +Noncommercial +©/Free +Free + +}table + +The law was interpreted to reach noncommercial copying through, say, copy machines, but still much of copying outside of the commercial market remained free. But the consequence of the emergence of digital technologies, especially in the context of a digital network, means that the law now looks like this: + +table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33; + +  +Publish +Transform + +Commercial +© +© + +Noncommercial +© +© + +}table + +Every realm is governed by copyright law, whereas before most creativity was not. The law now regulates the full range of creativity - commercial or not, transformative or not - with the same rules designed to regulate commercial publishers. + +Obviously, copyright law is not the enemy. The enemy is regulation that does no good. So the question that we should be asking just now is whether extending the regulations of copyright law into each of these domains actually does any good. +={ copyright : + duration of +2 +} + +I have no doubt that it does good in regulating commercial copying. But I also have no doubt that it does more harm than good when regulating (as it regulates just now) noncommercial copying and, especially, noncommercial transformation. And increasingly, for the reasons sketched especially in chapters 7 and 8, one might well wonder whether it does more harm than good for commercial transformation. More commercial transformative work would be created if derivative rights were more sharply restricted. + +The issue is therefore not simply whether copyright is property. Of course copyright is a kind of "property," and of course, as with any property, the state ought to protect it. But first impressions notwithstanding, historically, this property right (as with all property rights~{ It was the single most important contribution of the legal realist movement to demonstrate that all property rights are always crafted to balance public and private interests. See Thomas C. Grey, "The Disintegration of Property," in /{Nomos XXII: Property,}/ J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 1980). }~) has been crafted to balance the important need to give authors and artists incentives with the equally important need to assure access to creative work. This balance has always been struck in light of new technologies. And for almost half of our tradition, the "copyright" did not control /{at all}/ the freedom of others to build upon or transform a creative work. American culture was born free, and for almost 180 years our country consistently protected a vibrant and rich free culture. +={ copyright : + as property +1 ; + copyright law : + fair use and +1 | innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in +2 ; + fair use : + legal intimidation tactics against +1 ; + property rights : + as balance of public good vs. private +2 | copyright vs. +2 +} + +We achieved that free culture because our law respected important limits on the scope of the interests protected by "property." The very birth of "copyright" as a statutory right recognized those limits, by granting copyright owners protection for a limited time only (the story of chapter 6). The tradition of "fair use" is animated by a similar concern that is increasingly under strain as the costs of exercising any fair use right become unavoidably high (the story of chapter 7). Adding statutory rights where markets might stifle innovation is another familiar limit on the property right that copyright is (chapter 8). And granting archives and libraries a broad freedom to collect, claims of property notwithstanding, is a crucial part of guaranteeing the soul of a culture (chapter 9). Free cultures, like free markets, are built with property. But the nature of the property that builds a free culture is very different from the extremist vision that dominates the debate today. +={ archives : + digital ; + culture : + archives of ; + culture archives of ; + libraries : + archival function of +} + +Free culture is increasingly the casualty in this war on piracy. In response to a real, if not yet quantified, threat that the technologies of the Internet present to twentieth-century business models for producing and distributing culture, the law and technology are being transformed in a way that will undermine our tradition of free culture. The property right that is copyright is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to be. The property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted toward an extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer. +={ free culture : + permission culture vs. ; + permission culture : + free culture vs. +} + +:B~ PUZZLES + +1~ Chapter Eleven: Chimera + +!_ In a well-known +short story by H. G. Wells, a mountain climber named Nunez trips (literally, down an ice slope) into an unknown and isolated valley in the Peruvian Andes.~{ H. G. Wells, "The Country of the Blind" (1904, 1911). See H. G. Wells, /{The Country of the Blind and Other Stories,}/ Michael Sherborne, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). }~ The valley is extraordinarily beautiful, with "sweet water, pasture, an even climate, slopes of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub that bore an excellent fruit." But the villagers are all blind. Nunez takes this as an opportunity. "In the Country of the Blind," he tells himself, "the One-Eyed Man is King." So he resolves to live with the villagers to explore life as a king. +={ Wells, H.G. +8 ; + Country of the Blind, The (Wells) +8 +} + +Things don't go quite as he planned. He tries to explain the idea of sight to the villagers. They don't understand. He tells them they are "blind." They don't have the word /{blind}/. They think he's just thick. Indeed, as they increasingly notice the things he can't do (hear the sound of grass being stepped on, for example), they increasingly try to control him. He, in turn, becomes increasingly frustrated. "'You don't understand,' he cried, in a voice that was meant to be great and resolute, and which broke. 'You are blind and I can see. Leave me alone!'" + +The villagers don't leave him alone. Nor do they see (so to speak) the virtue of his special power. Not even the ultimate target of his affection, a young woman who to him seems "the most beautiful thing in the whole of creation," understands the beauty of sight. Nunez's description of what he sees "seemed to her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to his description of the stars and the mountains and her own sweet white-lit beauty as though it was a guilty indulgence." "She did not believe," Wells tells us, and "she could only half understand, but she was mysteriously delighted." + +When Nunez announces his desire to marry his "mysteriously delighted" love, the father and the village object. "You see, my dear," her father instructs, "he's an idiot. He has delusions. He can't do anything right." They take Nunez to the village doctor. + +After a careful examination, the doctor gives his opinion. "His brain is affected," he reports. + +"What affects it?" the father asks. + +"Those queer things that are called the eyes ... are diseased ... in such a way as to affect his brain." + +The doctor continues: "I think I may say with reasonable certainty that in order to cure him completely, all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical operation - namely, to remove these irritant bodies [the eyes]." + +"Thank Heaven for science!" says the father to the doctor. They inform Nunez of this condition necessary for him to be allowed his bride. (You'll have to read the original to learn what happens in the end. I believe in free culture, but never in giving away the end of a story.) + +!_ It sometimes +happens that the eggs of twins fuse in the mother's womb. That fusion produces a "chimera." A chimera is a single creature with two sets of DNA. The DNA in the blood, for example, might be different from the DNA of the skin. This possibility is an underused plot for murder mysteries. "But the DNA shows with 100 percent certainty that she was not the person whose blood was at the scene. ..." +={ chimeras +7 ; + twins, as chimera +2 +} + +Before I had read about chimeras, I would have said they were impossible. A single person can't have two sets of DNA. The very idea of DNA is that it is the code of an individual. Yet in fact, not only can two individuals have the same set of DNA (identical twins), but one person can have two different sets of DNA (a chimera). Our understanding of a "person" should reflect this reality. + +The more I work to understand the current struggle over copyright and culture, which I've sometimes called unfairly, and sometimes not unfairly enough, "the copyright wars," the more I think we're dealing with a chimera. For example, in the battle over the question "What is p2p file sharing?" both sides have it right, and both sides have it wrong. One side says, "File sharing is just like two kids taping each others' records - the sort of thing we've been doing for the last thirty years without any question at all." That's true, at least in part. When I tell my best friend to try out a new CD that I've bought, but rather than just send the CD, I point him to my p2p server, that is, in all relevant respects, just like what every executive in every recording company no doubt did as a kid: sharing music. +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + shoplifting vs. +4 ; + piracy : + of intangible property +6 +} + +But the description is also false in part. For when my p2p server is on a p2p network through which anyone can get access to my music, then sure, my friends can get access, but it stretches the meaning of "friends" beyond recognition to say "my ten thousand best friends" can get access. Whether or not sharing my music with my best friend is what "we have always been allowed to do," we have not always been allowed to share music with "our ten thousand best friends." +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + felony punishments for +4 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + total legalization of ; + copyright law : + felony punishment for infringement of +2 ; + Internet : + music files downloaded from +12 +} + +Likewise, when the other side says, "File sharing is just like walking into a Tower Records and taking a CD off the shelf and walking out with it," that's true, at least in part. If, after Lyle Lovett (finally) releases a new album, rather than buying it, I go to Kazaa and find a free copy to take, that is very much like stealing a copy from Tower. +={ Kazaa ; + Lovett, Lyle +} + +But it is not quite stealing from Tower. After all, when I take a CD from Tower Records, Tower has one less CD to sell. And when I take a CD from Tower Records, I get a bit of plastic and a cover, and something to show on my shelves. (And, while we're at it, we could also note that when I take a CD from Tower Records, the maximum fine that might be imposed on me, under California law, at least, is $1,000. According to the RIAA, by contrast, if I download a ten-song CD, I'm liable for $1,500,000 in damages.) +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + exaggerated claims of +2 | in recording industry +2 | against student file sharing +2 ; + recording industry : + copyright infringement lawsuits of +2 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + copyright infringement lawsuits filed by +2 ; + copyright law : + felony punishment for infringement of +2 +} + +The point is not that it is as neither side describes. The point is that it is both - both as the RIAA describes it and as Kazaa describes it. It is a chimera. And rather than simply denying what the other side asserts, we need to begin to think about how we should respond to this chimera. What rules should govern it? +={ Kazaa } + +We could respond by simply pretending that it is not a chimera. We could, with the RIAA, decide that every act of file sharing should be a felony. We could prosecute families for millions of dollars in damages just because file sharing occurred on a family computer. And we can get universities to monitor all computer traffic to make sure that no computer is used to commit this crime. These responses might be extreme, but each of them has either been proposed or actually implemented.~{ For an excellent summary, see the report prepared by GartnerG2 and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, "Copy- right and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World," 27 June 2003, available at link #33. Reps. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) have introduced a bill that would treat unauthorized on-line copying as a felony offense with punishments ranging as high as five years imprisonment; see Jon Healey, "House Bill Aims to Up Stakes on Piracy," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 17 July 2003, available at link #34. Civil penalties are currently set at $150,000 per copied song. For a recent (and unsuccessful) legal challenge to the RIAA's demand that an ISP reveal the identity of a user accused of sharing more than 600 songs through a family computer, see /{RIAA v. Verizon Internet Services (In re. Verizon Internet Services),}/ 240 F. Supp. 2d 24 (D.D.C. 2003). Such a user could face liability ranging as high as $90 million. Such astronomical figures furnish the RIAA with a powerful arsenal in its prosecution of file sharers. Settlements ranging from $12,000 to $17,500 for four students accused of heavy file sharing on university networks must have seemed a mere pittance next to the $98 billion the RIAA could seek should the matter proceed to court. See Elizabeth Young, "Downloading Could Lead to Fines," redandblack.com, 26 August 2003, available at link #35. For an example of the RIAA's targeting of student file sharing, and of the subpoenas issued to universities to reveal student file-sharer identities, see James Collins, "RIAA Steps Up Bid to Force BC, MIT to Name Students," /{Boston Globe,}/ 8 August 2003, D3, available at link #36. }~ +={ university computer networks, p2p sharing on } + +Alternatively, we could respond to file sharing the way many kids act as though we've responded. We could totally legalize it. Let there be no copyright liability, either civil or criminal, for making copyrighted content available on the Net. Make file sharing like gossip: regulated, if at all, by social norms but not by law. +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + total legalization of +} + +Either response is possible. I think either would be a mistake. Rather than embrace one of these two extremes, we should embrace something that recognizes the truth in both. And while I end this book with a sketch of a system that does just that, my aim in the next chapter is to show just how awful it would be for us to adopt the zero-tolerance extreme. I believe /{either}/ extreme would be worse than a reasonable alternative. But I believe the zero-tolerance solution would be the worse of the two extremes. +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + zero tolerance in +1 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + zero-tolerance of +7 +} + +Yet zero tolerance is increasingly our government's policy. In the middle of the chaos that the Internet has created, an extraordinary land grab is occurring. The law and technology are being shifted to give content holders a kind of control over our culture that they have never had before. And in this extremism, many an opportunity for new innovation and new creativity will be lost. +={ copyright law : + technology as automatic enforcer of +4 ; + recording industry : + copyright protections in +2 ; + technology : + copyright enforcement controlled by +3 +} + +I'm not talking about the opportunities for kids to "steal" music. My focus instead is the commercial and cultural innovation that this war will also kill. We have never seen the power to innovate spread so broadly among our citizens, and we have just begun to see the innovation that this power will unleash. Yet the Internet has already seen the passing of one cycle of innovation around technologies to distribute content. The law is responsible for this passing. As the vice president for global public policy at one of these new innovators, eMusic.com, put it when criticizing the DMCA's added protection for copyrighted material, +={ copyright law : + on music recordings +1 ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ; + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) ; + eMusic.com +4 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + infringement protections in +3 +} + +_1 eMusic opposes music piracy. We are a distributor of copyrighted material, and we want to protect those rights. + +_1 But building a technology fortress that locks in the clout of the major labels is by no means the only way to protect copyright interests, nor is it necessarily the best. It is simply too early to answer that question. Market forces operating naturally may very well produce a totally different industry model. + +_1 This is a critical point. The choices that industry sectors make with respect to these systems will in many ways directly shape the market for digital media and the manner in which digital media are distributed. This in turn will directly influence the options that are available to consumers, both in terms of the ease with which they will be able to access digital media and the equipment that they will require to do so. Poor choices made this early in the game will retard the growth of this market, hurting everyone's interests."~{ WIPO and the DMCA One Year Later: Assessing Consumer Access to Digital Entertainment on the Internet and Other Media: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade, and Consumer Protection, House Committee on Commerce, 106th Cong. 29 (1999) (statement of Peter Harter, vice president, Global Public Policy and Standards, EMusic.com), available in LEXIS, Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony File. }~ + +In April 2001, eMusic.com was purchased by Vivendi Universal, one of "the major labels." Its position on these matters has now changed. +={ Vivendi Universal } + +Reversing our tradition of tolerance now will not merely quash piracy. It will sacrifice values that are important to this culture, and will kill opportunities that could be extraordinarily valuable. + +1~ Chapter Twelve: Harms + +!_ To fight +"piracy," to protect "property," the content industry has launched a war. Lobbying and lots of campaign contributions have now brought the government into this war. As with any war, this one will have both direct and collateral damage. As with any war of prohibition, these damages will be suffered most by our own people. + +My aim so far has been to describe the consequences of this war, in particular, the consequences for "free culture." But my aim now is to extend this description of consequences into an argument. Is this war justified? + +In my view, it is not. There is no good reason why this time, for the first time, the law should defend the old against the new, just when the power of the property called "intellectual property" is at its greatest in our history. + +Yet "common sense" does not see it this way. Common sense is still on the side of the Causbys and the content industry. The extreme claims of control in the name of property still resonate; the uncritical rejection of "piracy" still has play. +={ piracy : + uncritical rejection of +1 +} + +There will be many consequences of continuing this war. I want to describe just three. All three might be said to be unintended. I am quite confident the third is unintended. I'm less sure about the first two. The first two protect modern RCAs, but there is no Howard Armstrong in the wings to fight today's monopolists of culture. +={ Armstrong, Edwin Howard ; + RCA +} + +2~ Constraining Creators +={ copyright law : + creativity impeded by +14 ; + creativity : + legal restrictions on +14 +} + +In the next ten years we will see an explosion of digital technologies. These technologies will enable almost anyone to capture and share content. Capturing and sharing content, of course, is what humans have done since the dawn of man. It is how we learn and communicate. But capturing and sharing through digital technology is different. The fidelity and power are different. You could send an e-mail telling someone about a joke you saw on Comedy Central, or you could send the clip. You could write an essay about the inconsistencies in the arguments of the politician you most love to hate, or you could make a short film that puts statement against statement. You could write a poem to express your love, or you could weave together a string - a mash-up - of songs from your favorite artists in a collage and make it available on the Net. +={ technology : + of digital capturing and sharing +2 +} + +This digital "capturing and sharing" is in part an extension of the capturing and sharing that has always been integral to our culture, and in part it is something new. It is continuous with the Kodak, but it explodes the boundaries of Kodak-like technologies. The technology of digital "capturing and sharing" promises a world of extraordinarily diverse creativity that can be easily and broadly shared. And as that creativity is applied to democracy, it will enable a broad range of citizens to use technology to express and criticize and contribute to the culture all around. +={ democracy : + digital sharing within ; + Kodak cameras +} + +Technology has thus given us an opportunity to do something with culture that has only ever been possible for individuals in small groups, isolated from others. Think about an old man telling a story to a collection of neighbors in a small town. Now imagine that same storytelling extended across the globe. + +Yet all this is possible only if the activity is presumptively legal. In the current regime of legal regulation, it is not. Forget file sharing for a moment. Think about your favorite amazing sites on the Net. Web sites that offer plot summaries from forgotten television shows; sites that catalog cartoons from the 1960s; sites that mix images and sound to criticize politicians or businesses; sites that gather newspaper articles on remote topics of science or culture. There is a vast amount of creative work spread across the Internet. But as the law is currently crafted, this work is presumptively illegal. +={ Internet : + creative Web sites on +} + +That presumption will increasingly chill creativity, as the examples of extreme penalties for vague infringements continue to proliferate. It is impossible to get a clear sense of what's allowed and what's not, and at the same time, the penalties for crossing the line are astonishingly harsh. The four students who were threatened by the RIAA (Jesse Jordan of chapter 3 was just one) were threatened with a $98 billion lawsuit for building search engines that permitted songs to be copied. Yet WorldCom - which defrauded investors of $11 billion, resulting in a loss to investors in market capitalization of over $200 billion - received a fine of a mere $750 million.~{ See Lynne W. Jeter, /{Disconnected: Deceit and Betrayal at WorldCom}/ (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 176, 204; for details of the settlement, see MCI press release, "MCI Wins U.S. District Court Approval for SEC Settlement" (7 July 2003), available at link #37. }~ And under legislation being pushed in Congress right now, a doctor who negligently removes the wrong leg in an operation would be liable for no more than $250,000 in damages for pain and suffering.~{ The bill, modeled after California's tort reform model, was passed in the House of Representatives but defeated in a Senate vote in July 2003. For an overview, see Tanya Albert, "Measure Stalls in Senate: 'We'll Be Back,' Say Tort Reformers," amednews.com, 28 July 2003, available at link #38, and "Senate Turns Back Malpractice Caps," CBSNews.com, 9 July 2003, available at link #39. President Bush has continued to urge tort reform in recent months. }~ Can common sense recognize the absurdity in a world where the maximum fine for downloading two songs off the Internet is more than the fine for a doctor's negligently butchering a patient? +={ WorldCom ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + exaggerated claims of | individual defendants intimidated by +1 | in recording industry ; + doctors malpractice claims against ; + Jordan, Jesse ; + legal system, attorney costs in +1 ; + recording industry : + copyright infringement lawsuits of ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + copyright infringement lawsuits filed by +} + +The consequence of this legal uncertainty, tied to these extremely high penalties, is that an extraordinary amount of creativity will either never be exercised, or never be exercised in the open. We drive this creative process underground by branding the modern-day Walt Disneys "pirates." We make it impossible for businesses to rely upon a public domain, because the boundaries of the public domain are designed to be unclear. It never pays to do anything except pay for the right to create, and hence only those who can pay are allowed to create. As was the case in the Soviet Union, though for very different reasons, we will begin to see a world of underground art - not because the message is necessarily political, or because the subject is controversial, but because the very act of creating the art is legally fraught. Already, exhibits of "illegal art" tour the United States.~{ See Danit Lidor, "Artists Just Wanna Be Free," /{Wired,}/ 7 July 2003, available at link #40. For an overview of the exhibition, see link #41. }~ In what does their "illegality" consist? In the act of mixing the culture around us with an expression that is critical or reflective. +={ public domain : + legal murkiness on ; + art, underground +} + +Part of the reason for this fear of illegality has to do with the changing law. I described that change in detail in chapter 10. But an even bigger part has to do with the increasing ease with which infractions can be tracked. As users of file-sharing systems discovered in 2002, it is a trivial matter for copyright owners to get courts to order Internet service providers to reveal who has what content. It is as if your cassette tape player transmitted a list of the songs that you played in the privacy of your own home that anyone could tune into for whatever reason they chose. +={ copyright law : + technology as automatic enforcer of +1 ; + Internet : + user identities released by service providers of ; + ISPs (Internet service providers), user identities revealed by ; + technology : + copyright enforcement controlled by +1 +} + +Never in our history has a painter had to worry about whether his painting infringed on someone else's work; but the modern-day painter, using the tools of Photoshop, sharing content on the Web, must worry all the time. Images are all around, but the only safe images to use in the act of creation are those purchased from Corbis or another image farm. And in purchasing, censoring happens. There is a free market in pencils; we needn't worry about its effect on creativity. But there is a highly regulated, monopolized market in cultural icons; the right to cultivate and transform them is not similarly free. +={ images, ownership of } + +Lawyers rarely see this because lawyers are rarely empirical. As I described in chapter 7, in response to the story about documentary filmmaker Jon Else, I have been lectured again and again by lawyers who insist Else's use was fair use, and hence I am wrong to say that the law regulates such a use. +={ Else, Jon ; + copyright law : + fair use and +2 ; + fair use : + legal intimidation tactics against +2 ; + legal system, attorney costs in +5 +} + +But fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create. And as lawyers love to forget, our system for defending rights such as fair use is astonishingly bad - in practically every context, but especially here. It costs too much, it delivers too slowly, and what it delivers often has little connection to the justice underlying the claim. The legal system may be tolerable for the very rich. For everyone else, it is an embarrassment to a tradition that prides itself on the rule of law. +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + exaggerated claims of +4 | individual defendants intimidated by +4 +} + +Judges and lawyers can tell themselves that fair use provides adequate "breathing room" between regulation by the law and the access the law should allow. But it is a measure of how out of touch our legal system has become that anyone actually believes this. The rules that publishers impose upon writers, the rules that film distributors impose upon filmmakers, the rules that newspapers impose upon journalists - these are the real laws governing creativity. And these rules have little relationship to the "law" with which judges comfort themselves. + +For in a world that threatens $150,000 for a single willful infringement of a copyright, and which demands tens of thousands of dollars to even defend against a copyright infringement claim, and which would never return to the wrongfully accused defendant anything of the costs she suffered to defend her right to speak - in that world, the astonishingly broad regulations that pass under the name "copyright" silence speech and creativity. And in that world, it takes a studied blindness for people to continue to believe they live in a culture that is free. + +As Jed Horovitz, the businessman behind Video Pipeline, said to me, +={ Horovitz, Jed +1 ; + Video Pipeline +} + +_1 We're losing [creative] opportunities right and left. Creative people are being forced not to express themselves. Thoughts are not being expressed. And while a lot of stuff may [still] be created, it still won't get distributed. Even if the stuff gets made ... you're not going to get it distributed in the mainstream media unless you've got a little note from a lawyer saying, "This has been cleared." You're not even going to get it on PBS without that kind of permission. That's the point at which they control it." + +2~ Constraining Innovators +={ copyright law : + innovation hampered by +48 ; + innovation : + industry establishment opposed to +48 ; + regulation : + as establishment protectionism +48 +} + +The story of the last section was a crunchy-lefty story - creativity quashed, artists who can't speak, yada yada yada. Maybe that doesn't get you going. Maybe you think there's enough weird art out there, and enough expression that is critical of what seems to be just about everything. And if you think that, you might think there's little in this story to worry you. + +But there's an aspect of this story that is not lefty in any sense. Indeed, it is an aspect that could be written by the most extreme pro-market ideologue. And if you're one of these sorts (and a special one at that, 188 pages into a book like this), then you can see this other aspect by substituting "free market" every place I've spoken of "free culture." The point is the same, even if the interests affecting culture are more fundamental. +={ market constraints +1 } + +The charge I've been making about the regulation of culture is the same charge free marketers make about regulating markets. Everyone, of course, concedes that some regulation of markets is necessary - at a minimum, we need rules of property and contract, and courts to enforce both. Likewise, in this culture debate, everyone concedes that at least some framework of copyright is also required. But both perspectives vehemently insist that just because some regulation is good, it doesn't follow that more regulation is better. And both perspectives are constantly attuned to the ways in which regulation simply enables the powerful industries of today to protect themselves against the competitors of tomorrow. + +This is the single most dramatic effect of the shift in regulatory strategy that I described in chapter 10. The consequence of this massive threat of liability tied to the murky boundaries of copyright law is that innovators who want to innovate in this space can safely innovate only if they have the sign-off from last generation's dominant industries. That lesson has been taught through a series of cases that were designed and executed to teach venture capitalists a lesson. That lesson - what former Napster CEO Hank Barry calls a "nuclear pall" that has fallen over the Valley - has been learned. +={ Barry, Hank ; + venture capitalists +} + +Consider one example to make the point, a story whose beginning I told in /{The Future of Ideas}/ and which has progressed in a way that even I (pessimist extraordinaire) would never have predicted. +={ Future of Ideas, The (Lessig) ; + Lessig, Lawrence +} + +In 1997, Michael Roberts launched a company called MP3.com. MP3.com was keen to remake the music business. Their goal was not just to facilitate new ways to get access to content. Their goal was also to facilitate new ways to create content. Unlike the major labels, MP3.com offered creators a venue to distribute their creativity, without demanding an exclusive engagement from the creators. +={ MP3.com +8 ; + my.mp3.com +8 ; + Roberts, Michael +} + +To make this system work, however, MP3.com needed a reliable way to recommend music to its users. The idea behind this alternative was to leverage the revealed preferences of music listeners to recommend new artists. If you like Lyle Lovett, you're likely to enjoy Bonnie Raitt. And so on. +={ Lovett, Lyle } + +This idea required a simple way to gather data about user preferences. MP3.com came up with an extraordinarily clever way to gather this preference data. In January 2000, the company launched a service called my.mp3.com. Using software provided by MP3.com, a user would sign into an account and then insert into her computer a CD. The software would identify the CD, and then give the user access to that content. So, for example, if you inserted a CD by Jill Sobule, then wherever you were - at work or at home - you could get access to that music once you signed into your account. The system was therefore a kind of music-lockbox. +={ CDs : + preference data on +2 +} + +No doubt some could use this system to illegally copy content. But that opportunity existed with or without MP3.com. The aim of the my.mp3.com service was to give users access to their own content, and as a by-product, by seeing the content they already owned, to discover the kind of content the users liked. + +To make this system function, however, MP3.com needed to copy 50,000 CDs to a server. (In principle, it could have been the user who uploaded the music, but that would have taken a great deal of time, and would have produced a product of questionable quality.) It therefore purchased 50,000 CDs from a store, and started the process of making copies of those CDs. Again, it would not serve the content from those copies to anyone except those who authenticated that they had a copy of the CD they wanted to access. So while this was 50,000 copies, it was 50,000 copies directed at giving customers something they had already bought. + +Nine days after MP3.com launched its service, the five major labels, headed by the RIAA, brought a lawsuit against MP3.com. MP3.com settled with four of the five. Nine months later, a federal judge found MP3.com to have been guilty of willful infringement with respect to the fifth. Applying the law as it is, the judge imposed a fine against MP3.com of $118 million. MP3.com then settled with the remaining plaintiff, Vivendi Universal, paying over $54 million. Vivendi purchased MP3.com just about a year later. +={ Vivendi Universal +2 ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + distribution technology targeted in | exaggerated claims of | in recording industry +3 ; + recording industry : + copyright infringement lawsuits of ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + copyright infringement lawsuits filed by ; + regulation : + outsize penalties of +} + +That part of the story I have told before. Now consider its conclusion. + +After Vivendi purchased MP3.com, Vivendi turned around and filed a malpractice lawsuit against the lawyers who had advised it that they had a good faith claim that the service they wanted to offer would be considered legal under copyright law. This lawsuit alleged that it should have been obvious that the courts would find this behavior illegal; therefore, this lawsuit sought to punish any lawyer who had dared to suggest that the law was less restrictive than the labels demanded. +={ copyright law : + malpractice lawsuits against lawyers advising on +2 ; + lawyers : + malpractice suits against +2 +} + +The clear purpose of this lawsuit (which was settled for an unspecified amount shortly after the story was no longer covered in the press) was to send an unequivocal message to lawyers advising clients in this space: It is not just your clients who might suffer if the content industry directs its guns against them. It is also you. So those of you who believe the law should be less restrictive should realize that such a view of the law will cost you and your firm dearly. + +This strategy is not just limited to the lawyers. In April 2003, Universal and EMI brought a lawsuit against Hummer Winblad, the venture capital firm (VC) that had funded Napster at a certain stage of its development, its cofounder (John Hummer), and general partner (Hank Barry).~{ See Joseph Menn, "Universal, EMI Sue Napster Investor," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 23 April 2003. For a parallel argument about the effects on innovation in the distribution of music, see Janelle Brown, "The Music Revolution Will Not Be Digitized," Salon.com, 1 June 2001, available at link #42. See also Jon Healey, "Online Music Services Besieged," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 28 May 2001. }~ The claim here, as well, was that the VC should have recognized the right of the content industry to control how the industry should develop. They should be held personally liable for funding a company whose business turned out to be beyond the law. Here again, the aim of the lawsuit is transparent: Any VC now recognizes that if you fund a company whose business is not approved of by the dinosaurs, you are at risk not just in the marketplace, but in the courtroom as well. Your investment buys you not only a company, it also buys you a lawsuit. So extreme has the environment become that even car manufacturers are afraid of technologies that touch content. In an article in /{Business 2.0}/, Rafe Needleman describes a discussion with BMW: +={ Barry, Hank ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + distribution technology targeted in ; + BMW +1 ; + cars, MP3 sound systems in +1 ; + EMI ; + Hummer, John ; + Hummer Winblad ; + MP3 players ; + Napster : + venture capital for ; + Needleman, Raffe +1 ; + Universal Music Group ; + venture capitalists +} + +_1 I asked why, with all the storage capacity and computer power in the car, there was no way to play MP3 files. I was told that BMW engineers in Germany had rigged a new vehicle to play MP3s via the car's built-in sound system, but that the company's marketing and legal departments weren't comfortable with pushing this forward for release stateside. Even today, no new cars are sold in the United States with bona fide MP3 players. ..."~{ Rafe Needleman, "Driving in Cars with MP3s," /{Business 2.0,}/ 16 June 2003, available at link #43. I am grateful to Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli for this example. }~ + +This is the world of the mafia - filled with "your money or your life" offers, governed in the end not by courts but by the threats that the law empowers copyright holders to exercise. It is a system that will obviously and necessarily stifle new innovation. It is hard enough to start a company. It is impossibly hard if that company is constantly threatened by litigation. + +The point is not that businesses should have a right to start illegal enterprises. The point is the definition of "illegal." The law is a mess of uncertainty. We have no good way to know how it should apply to new technologies. Yet by reversing our tradition of judicial deference, and by embracing the astonishingly high penalties that copyright law imposes, that uncertainty now yields a reality which is far more conservative than is right. If the law imposed the death penalty for parking tickets, we'd not only have fewer parking tickets, we'd also have much less driving. The same principle applies to innovation. If innovation is constantly checked by this uncertain and unlimited liability, we will have much less vibrant innovation and much less creativity. +={ market constraints +2 ; + permission culture : + transaction cost of +2 ; + regulation : + outsize penalties of ; + technology : + legal murkiness on +} + +The point is directly parallel to the crunchy-lefty point about fair use. Whatever the "real" law is, realism about the effect of law in both contexts is the same. This wildly punitive system of regulation will systematically stifle creativity and innovation. It will protect some industries and some creators, but it will harm industry and creativity generally. Free market and free culture depend upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an overregulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an overregulated-regulated market. + +The building of a permission culture, rather than a free culture, is the first important way in which the changes I have described will burden innovation. A permission culture means a lawyer's culture - a culture in which the ability to create requires a call to your lawyer. Again, I am not antilawyer, at least when they're kept in their proper place. I am certainly not antilaw. But our profession has lost the sense of its limits. And leaders in our profession have lost an appreciation of the high costs that our profession imposes upon others. The inefficiency of the law is an embarrassment to our tradition. And while I believe our profession should therefore do everything it can to make the law more efficient, it should at least do everything it can to limit the reach of the law where the law is not doing any good. The transaction costs buried within a permission culture are enough to bury a wide range of creativity. Someone needs to do a lot of justifying to justify that result. + +!_ The uncertainty +of the law is one burden on innovation. There is a second burden that operates more directly. This is the effort by many in the content industry to use the law to directly regulate the technology of the Internet so that it better protects their content. +={ Internet : + efficient content distribution on +4 +} + +The motivation for this response is obvious. The Internet enables the efficient spread of content. That efficiency is a feature of the Inter-net's design. But from the perspective of the content industry, this feature is a "bug." The efficient spread of content means that content distributors have a harder time controlling the distribution of content. One obvious response to this efficiency is thus to make the Internet less efficient. If the Internet enables "piracy," then, this response says, we should break the kneecaps of the Internet. + +The examples of this form of legislation are many. At the urging of the content industry, some in Congress have threatened legislation that would require computers to determine whether the content they access is protected or not, and to disable the spread of protected content.~{ "Copyright and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World," GartnerG2 and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School (2003), 33-35, available at link #44. }~ Congress has already launched proceedings to explore a mandatory "broadcast flag" that would be required on any device capable of transmitting digital video (i.e., a computer), and that would disable the copying of any content that is marked with a broadcast flag. Other members of Congress have proposed immunizing content providers from liability for technology they might deploy that would hunt down copyright violators and disable their machines.~{ GartnerG2, 26-27. }~ +={ broadcast flag ; + Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +} + +In one sense, these solutions seem sensible. If the problem is the code, why not regulate the code to remove the problem. But any regulation of technical infrastructure will always be tuned to the particular technology of the day. It will impose significant burdens and costs on the technology, but will likely be eclipsed by advances around exactly those requirements. + +In March 2002, a broad coalition of technology companies, led by Intel, tried to get Congress to see the harm that such legislation would impose.~{ See David McGuire, "Tech Execs Square Off Over Piracy," Newsbytes, 28 February 2002 (Entertainment). }~ Their argument was obviously not that copyright should not be protected. Instead, they argued, any protection should not do more harm than good. +={ Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +5 ; + Intel +} + +!_ There is one +more obvious way in which this war has harmed innovation - again, a story that will be quite familiar to the free market crowd. + +Copyright may be property, but like all property, it is also a form of regulation. It is a regulation that benefits some and harms others. When done right, it benefits creators and harms leeches. When done wrong, it is regulation the powerful use to defeat competitors. + +As I described in chapter 10, despite this feature of copyright as regulation, and subject to important qualifications outlined by Jessica Litman in her book /{Digital Copyright}/,~{ Jessica Litman, /{Digital Copyright}/ (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001). }~ overall this history of copyright is not bad. As chapter 10 details, when new technologies have come along, Congress has struck a balance to assure that the new is protected from the old. Compulsory, or statutory, licenses have been one part of that strategy. Free use (as in the case of the VCR) has been another. +={ cassette recording : + VCRs ; + VCRs ; + Digital Copyright (Litman) ; + Litman, Jessica ; + statutory licenses ; + copyright law : + statutory licenses in +} + +But that pattern of deference to new technologies has now changed with the rise of the Internet. Rather than striking a balance between the claims of a new technology and the legitimate rights of content creators, both the courts and Congress have imposed legal restrictions that will have the effect of smothering the new to benefit the old. + +The response by the courts has been fairly universal.~{ The only circuit court exception is found in /{Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) v. Diamond Multimedia Systems,}/ 180 F. 3d 1072 (9th Cir. 1999). There the court of appeals for the Ninth Circuit reasoned that makers of a portable MP3 player were not liable for contributory copyright infringement for a device that is unable to record or redistribute music (a device whose only copying function is to render portable a music file already stored on a user's hard drive). At the district court level, the only exception is found in /{Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.,}/ 259 F. Supp. 2d 1029 (C.D. Cal., 2003), where the court found the link between the distributor and any given user's conduct too attenuated to make the distributor liable for contributory or vicarious infringement liability. }~ It has been mirrored in the responses threatened and actually implemented by Congress. I won't catalog all of those responses here.~{ For example, in July 2002, Representative Howard Berman introduced the Peer- to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act (H.R. 5211), which would immunize copyright holders from liability for damage done to computers when the copyright holders use technology to stop copyright infringement. In August 2002, Representative Billy Tauzin introduced a bill to mandate that technologies capable of rebroadcasting digital copies of films broadcast on TV (i.e., computers) respect a "broadcast flag" that would disable copying of that content. And in March of the same year, Senator Fritz Hollings introduced the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, which mandated copyright protection technology in all digital media devices. See GartnerG2, "Copyright and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World," 27 June 2003, 33-34, available at link #44. }~ But there is one example that captures the flavor of them all. This is the story of the demise of Internet radio. +={ Internet : + radio on +18 ; + radio : + on Internet +18 +} + +As I described in chapter 4, when a radio station plays a song, the recording artist doesn't get paid for that "radio performance" unless he or she is also the composer. So, for example if Marilyn Monroe had recorded a version of "Happy Birthday" - to memorialize her famous performance before President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden - then whenever that recording was played on the radio, the current copyright owners of "Happy Birthday" would get some money, whereas Marilyn Monroe would not. +={ artists : + recording industry payments to +1 ; + copyright law : + on music recordings +1 ; + Kennedy, John F. ; + Monroe, Marilyn ; + radio : + music recordings played on +1 ; + recording industry : + artist remuneration in +1 ; + recording industry : + copyright protections in +} + +The reasoning behind this balance struck by Congress makes some sense. The justification was that radio was a kind of advertising. The recording artist thus benefited because by playing her music, the radio station was making it more likely that her records would be purchased. Thus, the recording artist got something, even if only indirectly. Probably this reasoning had less to do with the result than with the power of radio stations: Their lobbyists were quite good at stopping any efforts to get Congress to require compensation to the recording artists. + +Enter Internet radio. Like regular radio, Internet radio is a technology to stream content from a broadcaster to a listener. The broadcast travels across the Internet, not across the ether of radio spectrum. Thus, I can "tune in" to an Internet radio station in Berlin while sitting in San Francisco, even though there's no way for me to tune in to a regular radio station much beyond the San Francisco metropolitan area. + +This feature of the architecture of Internet radio means that there are potentially an unlimited number of radio stations that a user could tune in to using her computer, whereas under the existing architecture for broadcast radio, there is an obvious limit to the number of broadcasters and clear broadcast frequencies. Internet radio could therefore be more competitive than regular radio; it could provide a wider range of selections. And because the potential audience for Internet radio is the whole world, niche stations could easily develop and market their content to a relatively large number of users worldwide. According to some estimates, more than eighty million users worldwide have tuned in to this new form of radio. + +Internet radio is thus to radio what FM was to AM. It is an improvement potentially vastly more significant than the FM improvement over AM, since not only is the technology better, so, too, is the competition. Indeed, there is a direct parallel between the fight to establish FM radio and the fight to protect Internet radio. As one author describes Howard Armstrong's struggle to enable FM radio, +={ Armstrong, Edwin Howard +2 ; + FM radio +2 ; + radio : + FM spectrum of +2 +} + +_1 An almost unlimited number of FM stations was possible in the shortwaves, thus ending the unnatural restrictions imposed on radio in the crowded longwaves. If FM were freely developed, the number of stations would be limited only by economics and competition rather than by technical restrictions. ... Armstrong likened the situation that had grown up in radio to that following the invention of the printing press, when governments and ruling interests attempted to control this new instrument of mass communications by imposing restrictive licenses on it. This tyranny was broken only when it became possible for men freely to acquire printing presses and freely to run them. FM in this sense was as great an invention as the printing presses, for it gave radio the opportunity to strike off its shackles.~{ Lessing, 239. }~ + +This potential for FM radio was never realized - not because Armstrong was wrong about the technology, but because he underestimated the power of "vested interests, habits, customs and legislation"~{ Ibid., 229. }~ to retard the growth of this competing technology. + +Now the very same claim could be made about Internet radio. For again, there is no technical limitation that could restrict the number of Internet radio stations. The only restrictions on Internet radio are those imposed by the law. Copyright law is one such law. So the first question we should ask is, what copyright rules would govern Internet radio? + +But here the power of the lobbyists is reversed. Internet radio is a new industry. The recording artists, on the other hand, have a very powerful lobby, the RIAA. Thus when Congress considered the phenomenon of Internet radio in 1995, the lobbyists had primed Congress to adopt a different rule for Internet radio than the rule that applies to terrestrial radio. While terrestrial radio does not have to pay our hypothetical Marilyn Monroe when it plays her hypothetical recording of "Happy Birthday" on the air, /{Internet radio does}/. Not only is the law not neutral toward Internet radio - the law actually burdens Internet radio more than it burdens terrestrial radio. +={ artists : + recording industry payments to +1 ; + Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws ; + Congress, U.S. : + on radio | on recording industry ; + recording industry : + artist remuneration in +1 ; + recording industry : + radio broadcast and +1 | Internet radio hampered by +9 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + on Internet radio fees +1 | lobbying power of +1 +} + +This financial burden is not slight. As Harvard law professor William Fisher estimates, if an Internet radio station distributed ad-free popular music to (on average) ten thousand listeners, twenty-four hours a day, the total artist fees that radio station would owe would be over $1 million a year.~{ This example was derived from fees set by the original Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) proceedings, and is drawn from an example offered by Professor William Fisher. Conference Proceedings, iLaw (Stanford), 3 July 2003, on file with author. Professors Fisher and Zittrain submitted testimony in the CARP proceeding that was ultimately rejected. See Jonathan Zittrain, Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings and Ephemeral Recordings, Docket No. 2000- 9, CARP DTRA 1 and 2, available at link #45. For an excellent analysis making a similar point, see Randal C. Picker, "Copyright as Entry Policy: The Case of Digital Distribution," /{Antitrust Bulletin}/ (Summer/Fall 2002): 461: "This was not confusion, these are just old- fashioned entry barriers. Analog radio stations are protected from digital entrants, reducing entry in radio and diversity. Yes, this is done in the name of getting royalties to copyright holders, but, absent the play of powerful interests, that could have been done in a media-neutral way." }~ A regular radio station broadcasting the same content would pay no equivalent fee. +={ Fisher, William } + +The burden is not financial only. Under the original rules that were proposed, an Internet radio station (but not a terrestrial radio station) would have to collect the following data from /{every listening transaction}/: + +group{ + + 1. name of the service; + + 2. channel of the program (AM/FM stations use station ID); + + 3. type of program (archived/looped/live); + + 4. date of transmission; + + 5. time of transmission; + + 6. time zone of origination of transmission; + + 7. numeric designation of the place of the sound recording within the program; + + 8. duration of transmission (to nearest second); + + 9. sound recording title; + + 10. ISRC code of the recording; + + 11. release year of the album per copyright notice and in the case of compilation albums, the release year of the album and copyright date of the track; + + 12. featured recording artist; + + 13. retail album title; + + 14. recording label; + + 15. UPC code of the retail album; + + 16. catalog number; + + 17. copyright owner information; + + 18. musical genre of the channel or program (station format); + + 19. name of the service or entity; + + 20. channel or program; + + 21. date and time that the user logged in (in the user's time zone); + + 22. date and time that the user logged out (in the user's time zone); + + 23. time zone where the signal was received (user); + + 24. Unique User identifier; + + 25. the country in which the user received the transmissions. + +}group + +The Librarian of Congress eventually suspended these reporting requirements, pending further study. And he also changed the original rates set by the arbitration panel charged with setting rates. But the basic difference between Internet radio and terrestrial radio remains: Internet radio has to pay a /{type of copyright fee}/ that terrestrial radio does not. +={ Library of Congress } + +Why? What justifies this difference? Was there any study of the economic consequences from Internet radio that would justify these differences? Was the motive to protect artists against piracy? + +In a rare bit of candor, one RIAA expert admitted what seemed obvious to everyone at the time. As Alex Alben, vice president for Public Policy at Real Networks, told me, +={ Alben, Alex +2 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + on Internet radio fees +2 ; + artists : + recording industry payments to +2 ; + recording industry : + artist remuneration in +2 +} + +_1 The RIAA, which was representing the record labels, presented some testimony about what they thought a willing buyer would pay to a willing seller, and it was much higher. It was ten times higher than what radio stations pay to perform the same songs for the same period of time. And so the attorneys representing the webcasters asked the RIAA, ... "How do you come up with a rate that's so much higher? Why is it worth more than radio? Because here we have hundreds of thousands of webcasters who want to pay, and that should establish the market rate, and if you set the rate so high, you're going to drive the small webcasters out of business. ..." + +_1 And the RIAA experts said, "Well, we don't really model this as an industry with thousands of webcasters, /{we think it should be an industry with, you know, five or seven big players who can pay a high rate and it's a stable, predictable market.}/" (Emphasis added.) + +Translation: The aim is to use the law to eliminate competition, so that this platform of potentially immense competition, which would cause the diversity and range of content available to explode, would not cause pain to the dinosaurs of old. There is no one, on either the right or the left, who should endorse this use of the law. And yet there is practically no one, on either the right or the left, who is doing anything effective to prevent it. + +2~ Corrupting Citizens +={ copyright law : + illegal behavior as broad response to +33 ; + law : + citizen respect for +33 ; + prohibition, citizen rebellion against +33 ; + regulation : + rule of law degraded by excess of +33 +} + +Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables. + +In addition to these important harms, there is one more that was important to our forebears, but seems forgotten today. Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law. + +The war that is being waged today is a war of prohibition. As with every war of prohibition, it is targeted against the behavior of a very large number of citizens. According to /{The New York Times}/, 43 million Americans downloaded music in May 2002.~{ Mike Graziano and Lee Rainie, "The Music Downloading Deluge," Pew Internet and American Life Project (24 April 2001), available at link #46. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 37 million Americans had downloaded music files from the Internet by early 2001. }~ According to the RIAA, the behavior of those 43 million Americans is a felony. We thus have a set of rules that transform 20 percent of America into criminals. As the RIAA launches lawsuits against not only the Napsters and Kazaas of the world, but against students building search engines, and increasingly against ordinary users downloading content, the technologies for sharing will advance to further protect and hide illegal use. It is an arms race or a civil war, with the extremes of one side inviting a more extreme response by the other. +={ Internet : + music files downloaded from ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + individual defendants intimidated by +1 | in recording industry +1 ; + recording industry : + copyright infringement lawsuits of +1 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + copyright infringement lawsuits filed by +1 | intimidation tactics of +1 +} + +The content industry's tactics exploit the failings of the American legal system. When the RIAA brought suit against Jesse Jordan, it knew that in Jordan it had found a scapegoat, not a defendant. The threat of having to pay either all the money in the world in damages ($15,000,000) or almost all the money in the world to defend against paying all the money in the world in damages ($250,000 in legal fees) led Jordan to choose to pay all the money he had in the world ($12,000) to make the suit go away. The same strategy animates the RIAA's suits against individual users. In September 2003, the RIAA sued 261 individuals - including a twelve-year-old girl living in public housing and a seventy-year-old man who had no idea what file sharing was.~{ Alex Pham, "The Labels Strike Back: N.Y. Girl Settles RIAA Case," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 10 September 2003, Business. }~ As these scapegoats discovered, it will always cost more to defend against these suits than it would cost to simply settle. (The twelve year old, for example, like Jesse Jordan, paid her life savings of $2,000 to settle the case.) Our law is an awful system for defending rights. It is an embarrassment to our tradition. And the consequence of our law as it is, is that those with the power can use the law to quash any rights they oppose. +={ Jordan, Jesse } + +Wars of prohibition are nothing new in America. This one is just something more extreme than anything we've seen before. We experimented with alcohol prohibition, at a time when the per capita consumption of alcohol was 1.5 gallons per capita per year. The war against drinking initially reduced that consumption to just 30 percent of its preprohibition levels, but by the end of prohibition, consumption was up to 70 percent of the preprohibition level. Americans were drinking just about as much, but now, a vast number were criminals.~{ Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel, "Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition," /{American Economic Review}/ 81, no. 2 (1991): 242. }~ We have launched a war on drugs aimed at reducing the consumption of regulated narcotics that 7 percent (or 16 million) Americans now use.~{ National Drug Control Policy: Hearing Before the House Government Reform Committee, 108th Cong., 1st sess. (5 March 2003) (statement of John P. Walters, director of National Drug Control Policy). }~ That is a drop from the high (so to speak) in 1979 of 14 percent of the population. We regulate automobiles to the point where the vast majority of Americans violate the law every day. We run such a complex tax system that a majority of cash businesses regularly cheat.~{ See James Andreoni, Brian Erard, and Jonathon Feinstein, "Tax Compliance," /{Journal of Economic Literature}/ 36 (1998): 818 (survey of compliance literature). }~ We pride ourselves on our "free society," but an endless array of ordinary behavior is regulated within our society. And as a result, a huge proportion of Americans regularly violate at least some law. +={ alcohol prohibition +1 ; + drugs : + illegal +1 ; + tax system +1 +} + +This state of affairs is not without consequence. It is a particularly salient issue for teachers like me, whose job it is to teach law students about the importance of "ethics." As my colleague Charlie Nesson told a class at Stanford, each year law schools admit thousands of students who have illegally downloaded music, illegally consumed alcohol and sometimes drugs, illegally worked without paying taxes, illegally driven cars. These are kids for whom behaving illegally is increasingly the norm. And then we, as law professors, are supposed to teach them how to behave ethically - how to say no to bribes, or keep client funds separate, or honor a demand to disclose a document that will mean that your case is over. Generations of Americans - more significantly in some parts of America than in others, but still, everywhere in America today - can't live their lives both normally and legally, since "normally" entails a certain degree of illegality. +={ ethics ; + law schools ; + Nesson, Charlie +} + +The response to this general illegality is either to enforce the law more severely or to change the law. We, as a society, have to learn how to make that choice more rationally. Whether a law makes sense depends, in part, at least, upon whether the costs of the law, both intended and collateral, outweigh the benefits. If the costs, intended and collateral, do outweigh the benefits, then the law ought to be changed. Alternatively, if the costs of the existing system are much greater than the costs of an alternative, then we have a good reason to consider the alternative. + +My point is not the idiotic one: Just because people violate a law, we should therefore repeal it. Obviously, we could reduce murder statistics dramatically by legalizing murder on Wednesdays and Fridays. But that wouldn't make any sense, since murder is wrong every day of the week. A society is right to ban murder always and everywhere. + +My point is instead one that democracies understood for generations, but that we recently have learned to forget. The rule of law depends upon people obeying the law. The more often, and more repeatedly, we as citizens experience violating the law, the less we respect the law. Obviously, in most cases, the important issue is the law, not respect for the law. I don't care whether the rapist respects the law or not; I want to catch and incarcerate the rapist. But I do care whether my students respect the law. And I do care if the rules of law sow increasing disrespect because of the extreme of regulation they impose. Twenty million Americans have come of age since the Internet introduced this different idea of "sharing." We need to be able to call these twenty million Americans "citizens," not "felons." + +When at least forty-three million citizens download content from the Internet, and when they use tools to combine that content in ways unauthorized by copyright holders, the first question we should be asking is not how best to involve the FBI. The first question should be whether this particular prohibition is really necessary in order to achieve the proper ends that copyright law serves. Is there another way to assure that artists get paid without transforming forty-three million Americans into felons? Does it make sense if there are other ways to assure that artists get paid without transforming America into a nation of felons? + +This abstract point can be made more clear with a particular example. + +We all own CDs. Many of us still own phonograph records. These pieces of plastic encode music that in a certain sense we have bought. The law protects our right to buy and sell that plastic: It is not a copyright infringement for me to sell all my classical records at a used record store and buy jazz records to replace them. That "use" of the recordings is free. + +But as the MP3 craze has demonstrated, there is another use of phonograph records that is effectively free. Because these recordings were made without copy-protection technologies, I am "free" to copy, or "rip," music from my records onto a computer hard disk. Indeed, Apple Corporation went so far as to suggest that "freedom" was a right: In a series of commercials, Apple endorsed the "Rip, Mix, Burn" capacities of digital technologies. +={ Apple Corporation +1 ; + Rip, Mix, Burn technologies +1 ; + technology : + cut-and-paste culture enabled by +} + +This "use" of my records is certainly valuable. I have begun a large process at home of ripping all of my and my wife's CDs, and storing them in one archive. Then, using Apple's iTunes, or a wonderful program called Andromeda, we can build different play lists of our music: Bach, Baroque, Love Songs, Love Songs of Significant Others - the potential is endless. And by reducing the costs of mixing play lists, these technologies help build a creativity with play lists that is itself independently valuable. Compilations of songs are creative and meaningful in their own right. +={ Andromeda } + +This use is enabled by unprotected media - either CDs or records. But unprotected media also enable file sharing. File sharing threatens (or so the content industry believes) the ability of creators to earn a fair return from their creativity. And thus, many are beginning to experiment with technologies to eliminate unprotected media. These technologies, for example, would enable CDs that could not be ripped. Or they might enable spy programs to identify ripped content on people's machines. +={ CDs : + mix technology and +1 ; + technology : + copyright enforcement controlled by +1 ; + copyright law : + technology as automatic enforcer of +} + +If these technologies took off, then the building of large archives of your own music would become quite difficult. You might hang in hacker circles, and get technology to disable the technologies that protect the content. Trading in those technologies is illegal, but maybe that doesn't bother you much. In any case, for the vast majority of people, these protection technologies would effectively destroy the archiving use of CDs. The technology, in other words, would force us all back to the world where we either listened to music by manipulating pieces of plastic or were part of a massively complex "digital rights management" system. + +If the only way to assure that artists get paid were the elimination of the ability to freely move content, then these technologies to interfere with the freedom to move content would be justifiable. But what if there were another way to assure that artists are paid, without locking down any content? What if, in other words, a different system could assure compensation to artists while also preserving the freedom to move content easily? + +My point just now is not to prove that there is such a system. I offer a version of such a system in the last chapter of this book. For now, the only point is the relatively uncontroversial one: If a different system achieved the same legitimate objectives that the existing copyright system achieved, but left consumers and creators much more free, then we'd have a very good reason to pursue this alternative - namely, freedom. The choice, in other words, would not be between property and piracy; the choice would be between different property systems and the freedoms each allowed. +={ copyright law : + commercial creativity as primary purpose of +1 | as protection of creators +1 +} + +I believe there is a way to assure that artists are paid without turning forty-three million Americans into felons. But the salient feature of this alternative is that it would lead to a very different market for producing and distributing creativity. The dominant few, who today control the vast majority of the distribution of content in the world, would no longer exercise this extreme of control. Rather, they would go the way of the horse-drawn buggy. + +Except that this generation's buggy manufacturers have already saddled Congress, and are riding the law to protect themselves against this new form of competition. For them the choice is between forty-three million Americans as criminals and their own survival. + +It is understandable why they choose as they do. It is not understandable why we as a democracy continue to choose as we do. Jack Valenti is charming; but not so charming as to justify giving up a tradition as deep and important as our tradition of free culture. +={ Valenti, Jack } + +!_ There's one more +aspect to this corruption that is particularly important to civil liberties, and follows directly from any war of prohibition. As Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann describes, this is the "collateral damage" that "arises whenever you turn a very large percentage of the population into criminals." This is the collateral damage to civil liberties generally. +={ civil liberties +11 ; + Electronic Frontier Foundation ; + von Lohmann, Fred +2 +} + +"If you can treat someone as a putative lawbreaker," von Lohmann explains, + +_1 then all of a sudden a lot of basic civil liberty protections evaporate to one degree or another. ... If you're a copyright infringer, how can you hope to have any privacy rights? If you're a copyright infringer, how can you hope to be secure against seizures of your computer? How can you hope to continue to receive Internet access? ... Our sensibilities change as soon as we think, "Oh, well, but that person's a criminal, a lawbreaker." Well, what this campaign against file sharing has done is turn a remarkable percentage of the American Internet-using population into "law-breakers." +={ privacy rights +3 } + +And the consequence of this transformation of the American public into criminals is that it becomes trivial, as a matter of due process, to effectively erase much of the privacy most would presume. + +Users of the Internet began to see this generally in 2003 as the RIAA launched its campaign to force Internet service providers to turn over the names of customers who the RIAA believed were violating copyright law. Verizon fought that demand and lost. With a simple request to a judge, and without any notice to the customer at all, the identity of an Internet user is revealed. +={ Internet : + user identities released by service providers of +4 ; + ISPs (Internet service providers), user identities revealed by +4 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + ISP user identities sought by +4 ; + Verizon Internet Services +} + +The RIAA then expanded this campaign, by announcing a general strategy to sue individual users of the Internet who are alleged to have downloaded copyrighted music from file-sharing systems. But as we've seen, the potential damages from these suits are astronomical: If a family's computer is used to download a single CD's worth of music, the family could be liable for $2 million in damages. That didn't stop the RIAA from suing a number of these families, just as they had sued Jesse Jordan.~{ See Frank Ahrens, "RIAA's Lawsuits Meet Surprised Targets; Single Mother in Calif., 12-Year-Old Girl in N.Y. Among Defendants," /{Washington Post,}/ 10 September 2003, E1; Chris Cobbs, "Worried Parents Pull Plug on File 'Stealing'; With the Music Industry Cracking Down on File Swapping, Parents are Yanking Software from Home PCs to Avoid Being Sued," /{Orlando Sentinel Tribune,}/ 30 August 2003, C1; Jefferson Graham, "Recording Industry Sues Parents," /{USA Today,}/ 15 September 2003, 4D; John Schwartz, "She Says She's No Music Pirate. No Snoop Fan, Either," /{New York Times,}/ 25 September 2003, C1; Margo Varadi, "Is Brianna a Criminal?" /{Toronto Star,}/ 18 September 2003, P7. }~ +={ Jordan, Jesse ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + exaggerated claims of +3 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + regulatory balance lost in +6 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + intimidation tactics of +3 +} + +Even this understates the espionage that is being waged by the RIAA. A report from CNN late last summer described a strategy the RIAA had adopted to track Napster users.~{ See "Revealed: How RIAA Tracks Downloaders: Music Industry Discloses Some Methods Used," CNN.com, available at link #47. }~ Using a sophisticated hashing algorithm, the RIAA took what is in effect a fingerprint of every song in the Napster catalog. Any copy of one of those MP3s will have the same "fingerprint." +={ Napster : + recording industry tracking users of +2 +} + +So imagine the following not-implausible scenario: Imagine a friend gives a CD to your daughter - a collection of songs just like the cassettes you used to make as a kid. You don't know, and neither does your daughter, where these songs came from. But she copies these songs onto her computer. She then takes her computer to college and connects it to a college network, and if the college network is "cooperating" with the RIAA's espionage, and she hasn't properly protected her content from the network (do you know how to do that yourself ?), then the RIAA will be able to identify your daughter as a "criminal." And under the rules that universities are beginning to deploy,~{ See Jeff Adler, "Cambridge: On Campus, Pirates Are Not Penitent," /{Boston Globe,}/ 18 May 2003, City Weekly, 1; Frank Ahrens, "Four Students Sued over Music Sites; Industry Group Targets File Sharing at Colleges," /{Washington Post,}/ 4 April 2003, E1; Elizabeth Armstrong, "Students 'Rip, Mix, Burn' at Their Own Risk," /{Christian Science Monitor,}/ 2 September 2003, 20; Robert Becker and Angela Rozas, "Music Pirate Hunt Turns to Loyola; Two Students Names Are Handed Over; Lawsuit Possible," /{Chicago Tribune,}/ 16 July 2003, 1C; Beth Cox, "RIAA Trains Antipiracy Guns on Universities," /{Internet News,}/ 30 January 2003, available at link #48; Benny Evangelista, "Download Warning 101: Freshman Orientation This Fall to Include Record Industry Warnings Against File Sharing," /{San Francisco Chronicle,}/ 11 August 2003, E11; "Raid, Letters Are Weapons at Universities," /{USA Today,}/ 26 September 2000, 3D. }~ your daughter can lose the right to use the university's computer network. She can, in some cases, be expelled. +={ university computer networks, p2p sharing on +1 } + +Now, of course, she'll have the right to defend herself. You can hire a lawyer for her (at $300 per hour, if you're lucky), and she can plead that she didn't know anything about the source of the songs or that they came from Napster. And it may well be that the university believes her. But the university might not believe her. It might treat this "contraband" as presumptive of guilt. And as any number of college students have already learned, our presumptions about innocence disappear in the middle of wars of prohibition. This war is no different. + +Says von Lohmann, +={ von Lohmann, Fred +1 } + +_1 So when we're talking about numbers like forty to sixty million Americans that are essentially copyright infringers, you create a situation where the civil liberties of those people are very much in peril in a general matter. [I don't] think [there is any] analog where you could randomly choose any person off the street and be confident that they were committing an unlawful act that could put them on the hook for potential felony liability or hundreds of millions of dollars of civil liability. Certainly we all speed, but speeding isn't the kind of an act for which we routinely forfeit civil liberties. Some people use drugs, and I think that's the closest analog, [but] many have noted that the war against drugs has eroded all of our civil liberties because it's treated so many Americans as criminals. Well, I think it's fair to say that file sharing is an order of magnitude larger number of Americans than drug use. ... If forty to sixty million Americans have become lawbreakers, then we're really on a slippery slope to lose a lot of civil liberties for all forty to sixty million of them." +={ driving speed, constraints on ; + speeding, constraints on ; + drugs : + illegal +} + +When forty to sixty million Americans are considered "criminals" under the law, and when the law could achieve the same objective - securing rights to authors - without these millions being considered "criminals," who is the villain? Americans or the law? Which is American, a constant war on our own people or a concerted effort through our democracy to change our law? + +:B~ BALANCES + +1~intro_balances [Intro]-# + +!_ So here's +the picture: You're standing at the side of the road. Your car is on fire. You are angry and upset because in part you helped start the fire. Now you don't know how to put it out. Next to you is a bucket, filled with gasoline. Obviously, gasoline won't put the fire out. + +As you ponder the mess, someone else comes along. In a panic, she grabs the bucket. Before you have a chance to tell her to stop - or before she understands just why she should stop - the bucket is in the air. The gasoline is about to hit the blazing car. And the fire that gasoline will ignite is about to ignite everything around. + +!_ A war +about copyright rages all around - and we're all focusing on the wrong thing. No doubt, current technologies threaten existing businesses. No doubt they may threaten artists. But technologies change. The industry and technologists have plenty of ways to use technology to protect themselves against the current threats of the Internet. This is a fire that if let alone would burn itself out. + +Yet policy makers are not willing to leave this fire to itself. Primed with plenty of lobbyists' money, they are keen to intervene to eliminate the problem they perceive. But the problem they perceive is not the real threat this culture faces. For while we watch this small fire in the corner, there is a massive change in the way culture is made that is happening all around. + +Somehow we have to find a way to turn attention to this more important and fundamental issue. Somehow we have to find a way to avoid pouring gasoline onto this fire. + +We have not found that way yet. Instead, we seem trapped in a simpler, binary view. However much many people push to frame this debate more broadly, it is the simple, binary view that remains. We rubberneck to look at the fire when we should be keeping our eyes on the road. + +This challenge has been my life these last few years. It has also been my failure. In the two chapters that follow, I describe one small brace of efforts, so far failed, to find a way to refocus this debate. We must understand these failures if we're to understand what success will require. + +1~ Chapter Thirteen: Eldred +={ Eldred, Eric +10 } + +!_ In 1995, +a father was frustrated that his daughters didn't seem to like Hawthorne. No doubt there was more than one such father, but at least one did something about it. Eric Eldred, a retired computer programmer living in New Hampshire, decided to put Hawthorne on the Web. An electronic version, Eldred thought, with links to pictures and explanatory text, would make this nineteenth-century author's work come alive. +={ Hawthorne, Nathaniel +3 } + +It didn't work - at least for his daughters. They didn't find Hawthorne any more interesting than before. But Eldred's experiment gave birth to a hobby, and his hobby begat a cause: Eldred would build a library of public domain works by scanning these works and making them available for free. +={ libraries : + of public-domain literature +4 ; + public domain : + library of works derived from +4 +} + +Eldred's library was not simply a copy of certain public domain works, though even a copy would have been of great value to people across the world who can't get access to printed versions of these works. Instead, Eldred was producing derivative works from these public domain works. Just as Disney turned Grimm into stories more accessible to the twentieth century, Eldred transformed Hawthorne, and many others, into a form more accessible - technically accessible - today. +={ Disney, Walt +1 ; + Grimm fairy tales +} + +Eldred's freedom to do this with Hawthorne's work grew from the same source as Disney's. Hawthorne's /{Scarlet Letter}/ had passed into the public domain in 1907. It was free for anyone to take without the permission of the Hawthorne estate or anyone else. Some, such as Dover Press and Penguin Classics, take works from the public domain and produce printed editions, which they sell in bookstores across the country. Others, such as Disney, take these stories and turn them into animated cartoons, sometimes successfully (/{Cinderella}/), sometimes not (/{The Hunchback of Notre Dame}/, /{Treasure Planet}/). These are all commercial publications of public domain works. +={ Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) } + +The Internet created the possibility of noncommercial publications of public domain works. Eldred's is just one example. There are literally thousands of others. Hundreds of thousands from across the world have discovered this platform of expression and now use it to share works that are, by law, free for the taking. This has produced what we might call the "noncommercial publishing industry," which before the Internet was limited to people with large egos or with political or social causes. But with the Internet, it includes a wide range of individuals and groups dedicated to spreading culture generally.~{ There's a parallel here with pornography that is a bit hard to describe, but it's a strong one. One phenomenon that the Internet created was a world of noncommercial pornographers - people who were distributing porn but were not making money directly or indirectly from that distribution. Such a class didn't exist before the Internet came into being because the costs of distributing porn were so high. Yet this new class of distributors got special attention in the Supreme Court, when the Court struck down the Communications Decency Act of 1996. It was partly because of the burden on noncommercial speakers that the statute was found to exceed Congress's power. The same point could have been made about noncommercial publishers after the advent of the Internet. The Eric Eldreds of the world before the Internet were extremely few. Yet one would think it at least as important to protect the Eldreds of the world as to protect noncommercial pornographers. }~ + +As I said, Eldred lives in New Hampshire. In 1998, Robert Frost's collection of poems /{New Hampshire}/ was slated to pass into the public domain. Eldred wanted to post that collection in his free public library. But Congress got in the way. As I described in chapter 10, in 1998, for the eleventh time in forty years, Congress extended the terms of existing copyrights - this time by twenty years. Eldred would not be free to add any works more recent than 1923 to his collection until 2019. Indeed, no copyrighted work would pass into the public domain until that year (and not even then, if Congress extends the term again). By contrast, in the same period, more than 1 million patents will pass into the public domain. +={ Congress, U.S. : + copyright terms extended by +23 ; + copyright : + duration of +23 ; + copyright law : + term extensions in +23 ; + Frost, Robert ; + New Hampshire (Frost) ; + patents : + in public domain | future patents vs. future copyrights in +1 +} + +This was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), enacted in memory of the congressman and former musician Sonny Bono, who, his widow, Mary Bono, says, believed that "copyrights should be forever."~{ The full text is: "Sonny [Bono] wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti's proposal for a term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress," 144 Cong. Rec. H9946, 9951-2 (October 7, 1998). }~ +={ Bono, Mary ; + Bono, Sonny ; + copyright : + in perpetuity +5 ; + Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) +1 +} + +Eldred decided to fight this law. He first resolved to fight it through civil disobedience. In a series of interviews, Eldred announced that he would publish as planned, CTEA notwithstanding. But because of a second law passed in 1998, the NET (No Electronic Theft) Act, his act of publishing would make Eldred a felon - whether or not anyone complained. This was a dangerous strategy for a disabled programmer to undertake. +={ copyright law : + felony punishment for infringement of ; + NET (No Electronic Theft) Act (1988) ; + No Electronic Theft (NET) Act (1988) ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + felony punishments for +} + +It was here that I became involved in Eldred's battle. I was a constitutional scholar whose first passion was constitutional interpretation. And though constitutional law courses never focus upon the Progress Clause of the Constitution, it had always struck me as importantly different. As you know, the Constitution says, +={ Congress : + constitutional powers of +3 ; + Constitution, U.S. : + Progress Clause of +2 ; + Progress Clause +2 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred case involvement of +2 +} + +_1 Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science ... by securing for limited Times to Authors ... exclusive Right to their ... Writings. ..." + +As I've described, this clause is unique within the power-granting clause of Article I, section 8 of our Constitution. Every other clause granting power to Congress simply says Congress has the power to do something - for example, to regulate "commerce among the several states" or "declare War." But here, the "something" is something quite specific - to "promote ... Progress" - through means that are also specific - by "securing" "exclusive Rights" (i.e., copyrights) "for limited Times." + +In the past forty years, Congress has gotten into the practice of extending existing terms of copyright protection. What puzzled me about this was, if Congress has the power to extend existing terms, then the Constitution's requirement that terms be "limited" will have no practical effect. If every time a copyright is about to expire, Congress has the power to extend its term, then Congress can achieve what the Constitution plainly forbids - perpetual terms "on the installment plan," as Professor Peter Jaszi so nicely put it. +={ Jaszi, Peter } + +As an academic, my first response was to hit the books. I remember sitting late at the office, scouring on-line databases for any serious consideration of the question. No one had ever challenged Congress's practice of extending existing terms. That failure may in part be why Congress seemed so untroubled in its habit. That, and the fact that the practice had become so lucrative for Congress. Congress knows that copyright owners will be willing to pay a great deal of money to see their copyright terms extended. And so Congress is quite happy to keep this gravy train going. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred case involvement of +} + +For this is the core of the corruption in our present system of government."Corruption" not in the sense that representatives are bribed. Rather, "corruption" in the sense that the system induces the beneficiaries of Congress's acts to raise and give money to Congress to induce it to act. There's only so much time; there's only so much Congress can do. Why not limit its actions to those things it must do - and those things that pay? Extending copyright terms pays. + +If that's not obvious to you, consider the following: Say you're one of the very few lucky copyright owners whose copyright continues to make money one hundred years after it was created. The Estate of Robert Frost is a good example. Frost died in 1963. His poetry continues to be extraordinarily valuable. Thus the Robert Frost estate benefits greatly from any extension of copyright, since no publisher would pay the estate any money if the poems Frost wrote could be published by anyone for free. +={ Frost, Robert +12 } + +So imagine the Robert Frost estate is earning $100,000 a year from three of Frost's poems. And imagine the copyright for those poems is about to expire. You sit on the board of the Robert Frost estate. Your financial adviser comes to your board meeting with a very grim report: + +"Next year," the adviser announces, "our copyrights in works A, B, and C will expire. That means that after next year, we will no longer be receiving the annual royalty check of $100,000 from the publishers of those works. + +"There's a proposal in Congress, however," she continues, "that could change this. A few congressmen are floating a bill to extend the terms of copyright by twenty years. That bill would be extraordinarily valuable to us. So we should hope this bill passes." + +"Hope?" a fellow board member says. "Can't we be doing something about it?" + +"Well, obviously, yes," the adviser responds. "We could contribute to the campaigns of a number of representatives to try to assure that they support the bill." +={ Congress, U.S. : + lobbying of +8 } + +You hate politics. You hate contributing to campaigns. So you want to know whether this disgusting practice is worth it. "How much would we get if this extension were passed?" you ask the adviser. "How much is it worth?" + +"Well," the adviser says, "if you're confident that you will continue to get at least $100,000 a year from these copyrights, and you use the 'discount rate' that we use to evaluate estate investments (6 percent), then this law would be worth $1,146,000 to the estate." + +You're a bit shocked by the number, but you quickly come to the correct conclusion: + +"So you're saying it would be worth it for us to pay more than $1,000,000 in campaign contributions if we were confident those contributions would assure that the bill was passed?" + +"Absolutely," the adviser responds. "It is worth it to you to contribute up to the 'present value' of the income you expect from these copyrights. Which for us means over $1,000,000." + +You quickly get the point - you as the member of the board and, I trust, you the reader. Each time copyrights are about to expire, every beneficiary in the position of the Robert Frost estate faces the same choice: If they can contribute to get a law passed to extend copyrights, they will benefit greatly from that extension. And so each time copyrights are about to expire, there is a massive amount of lobbying to get the copyright term extended. + +Thus a congressional perpetual motion machine: So long as legislation can be bought (albeit indirectly), there will be all the incentive in the world to buy further extensions of copyright. + +In the lobbying that led to the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, this "theory" about incentives was proved real. Ten of the thirteen original sponsors of the act in the House received the maximum contribution from Disney's political action committee; in the Senate, eight of the twelve sponsors received contributions.~{ Associated Press, "Disney Lobbying for Copyright Extension No Mickey Mouse Effort; Congress OKs Bill Granting Creators 20 More Years," /{Chicago Tribune,}/ 17 October 1998, 22. }~ The RIAA and the MPAA are estimated to have spent over $1.5 million lobbying in the 1998 election cycle. They paid out more than $200,000 in campaign contributions.~{ See Nick Brown, "Fair Use No More?: Copyright in the Information Age," available at link #49. }~ Disney is estimated to have contributed more than $800,000 to reelection campaigns in the 1998 cycle.~{ Alan K. Ota, "Disney in Washington: The Mouse That Roars," /{Congressional Quarterly This Week,}/ 8 August 1990, available at link #50. }~ +={ Disney, Inc. ; + film industry : + trade association of ; + Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + lobbying power of ; + Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) ; + Congress, U.S. : + copyright terms extended by +13 +} + +!_ Constitutional law +is not oblivious to the obvious. Or at least, it need not be. So when I was considering Eldred's complaint, this reality about the never-ending incentives to increase the copyright term was central to my thinking. In my view, a pragmatic court committed to interpreting and applying the Constitution of our framers would see that if Congress has the power to extend existing terms, then there would be no effective constitutional requirement that terms be "limited." If they could extend it once, they would extend it again and again and again. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred case involvement of +1 ; + Constitution, U.S. : + Progress Clause of ; + Eldred, Eric ; + copyright law : + term extensions in +12 +} + +It was also my judgment that /{this}/ Supreme Court would not allow Congress to extend existing terms. As anyone close to the Supreme Court's work knows, this Court has increasingly restricted the power of Congress when it has viewed Congress's actions as exceeding the power granted to it by the Constitution. Among constitutional scholars, the most famous example of this trend was the Supreme Court's decision in 1995 to strike down a law that banned the possession of guns near schools. +={ Congress, U.S. : + Supreme Court restraint on +6 ; + copyright law : + Supreme Court case on term extension of +5 ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + congressional actions restrained by +5 | on copyright term extensions ; + guns +2 ; + schools, gun possession near +2 +} + +Since 1937, the Supreme Court had interpreted Congress's granted powers very broadly; so, while the Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate only "commerce among the several states" (aka "interstate commerce"), the Supreme Court had interpreted that power to include the power to regulate any activity that merely affected interstate commerce. +={ commerce, interstate +3 ; + Congress, U.S. : + constitutional powers of +5 ; + interstate commerce +4 +} + +As the economy grew, this standard increasingly meant that there was no limit to Congress's power to regulate, since just about every activity, when considered on a national scale, affects interstate commerce. A Constitution designed to limit Congress's power was instead interpreted to impose no limit. + +The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Rehnquist's command, changed that in /{United States v. Lopez}/. The government had argued that possessing guns near schools affected interstate commerce. Guns near schools increase crime, crime lowers property values, and so on. In the oral argument, the Chief Justice asked the government whether there was any activity that would not affect interstate commerce under the reasoning the government advanced. The government said there was not; if Congress says an activity affects interstate commerce, then that activity affects interstate commerce. The Supreme Court, the government said, was not in the position to second-guess Congress. +={ Rehnquist, William H. +1 ; + United States v. Lopez +1 +} + +"We pause to consider the implications of the government's arguments," the Chief Justice wrote.~{ /{United States v. Lopez,}/ 514 U.S. 549, 564 (1995). }~ If anything Congress says is interstate commerce must therefore be considered interstate commerce, then there would be no limit to Congress's power. The decision in /{Lopez}/ was reaffirmed five years later in /{United States v. Morrison}/.~{ /{United States v. Morrison,}/ 529 U.S. 598 (2000). }~ +={ United States v. Morrison } + +If a principle were at work here, then it should apply to the Progress Clause as much as the Commerce Clause.~{ If it is a principle about enumerated powers, then the principle carries from one enumerated power to another. The animating point in the context of the Commerce Clause was that the interpretation offered by the government would allow the government unending power to regulate commerce - the limitation to interstate commerce notwithstanding. The same point is true in the context of the Copyright Clause. Here, too, the government's interpretation would allow the government unending power to regulate copyrights - the limitation to "limited times" notwithstanding. }~ And if it is applied to the Progress Clause, the principle should yield the conclusion that Congress can't extend an existing term. If Congress could extend an existing term, then there would be no "stopping point" to Congress's power over terms, though the Constitution expressly states that there is such a limit. Thus, the same principle applied to the power to grant copyrights should entail that Congress is not allowed to extend the term of existing copyrights. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + Progress Clause of | Commerce Clause of ; + copyright : + duration of ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + congressional actions restrained by +2 +} + +/{If}/, that is, the principle announced in /{Lopez}/ stood for a principle. Many believed the decision in /{Lopez}/ stood for politics - a conservative Supreme Court, which believed in states' rights, using its power over Congress to advance its own personal political preferences. But I rejected that view of the Supreme Court's decision. Indeed, shortly after the decision, I wrote an article demonstrating the "fidelity" in such an interpretation of the Constitution. The idea that the Supreme Court decides cases based upon its politics struck me as extraordinarily boring. I was not going to devote my life to teaching constitutional law if these nine Justices were going to be petty politicians. +={ Congress, U.S. : + Supreme Court restraint on +3 ; + United States v. Lopez +} + +!_ Now let's pause +for a moment to make sure we understand what the argument in /{Eldred}/ was not about. By insisting on the Constitution's limits to copyright, obviously Eldred was not endorsing piracy. Indeed, in an obvious sense, he was fighting a kind of piracy - piracy of the public domain. When Robert Frost wrote his work and when Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse, the maximum copyright term was just fifty-six years. Because of interim changes, Frost and Disney had already enjoyed a seventy-five-year monopoly for their work. They had gotten the benefit of the bargain that the Constitution envisions: In exchange for a monopoly protected for fifty-six years, they created new work. But now these entities were using their power - expressed through the power of lobbyists' money - to get another twenty-year dollop of monopoly. That twenty-year dollop would be taken from the public domain. Eric Eldred was fighting a piracy that affects us all. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + copyright purpose established in ; + copyright : + constitutional purpose of | duration of ; + Disney, Walt ; + Eldred, Eric +2 ; + Frost, Robert ; + Mickey Mouse ; + public domain : + protection of +2 +} + +Some people view the public domain with contempt. In their brief before the Supreme Court, the Nashville Songwriters Association wrote that the public domain is nothing more than "legal piracy."~{ Brief of the Nashville Songwriters Association, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 537 U.S. 186 (2003) (No. 01-618), n.10, available at link #51. }~ But it is not piracy when the law allows it; and in our constitutional system, our law requires it. Some may not like the Constitution's requirements, but that doesn't make the Constitution a pirate's charter. +={ Eldred v. Ashcroft ; + Constitution, U.S. : + copyright purpose established in +1 ; + copyright : + constitutional purpose of +1 ; + Nashville Songwriters Association +} + +As we've seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a way to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development and distribution of our culture. Yet, as Eric Eldred discovered, we have set up a system that assures that copyright terms will be repeatedly extended, and extended, and extended. We have created the perfect storm for the public domain. Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again. +={ Eldred, Eric ; + copyright : + duration of +2 +} + +!_ It is valuable +copyrights that are responsible for terms being extended. Mickey Mouse and "Rhapsody in Blue." These works are too valuable for copyright owners to ignore. But the real harm to our society from copyright extensions is not that Mickey Mouse remains Disney's. Forget Mickey Mouse. Forget Robert Frost. Forget all the works from the 1920s and 1930s that have continuing commercial value. The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result. +={ Mickey Mouse ; + Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin) ; + Frost, Robert +} + +% added this Frost index reference + +If you look at the work created in the first twenty years (1923 to 1942) affected by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, 2 percent of that work has any continuing commercial value. It was the copyright holders for that 2 percent who pushed the CTEA through. But the law and its effect were not limited to that 2 percent. The law extended the terms of copyright generally.~{ The figure of 2 percent is an extrapolation from the study by the Congressional Research Service, in light of the estimated renewal ranges. See Brief of Petitioners, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 7, available at link #52. }~ +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) } + +Think practically about the consequence of this extension - practically, as a businessperson, and not as a lawyer eager for more legal work. In 1930, 10,047 books were published. In 2000, 174 of those books were still in print. Let's say you were Brewster Kahle, and you wanted to make available to the world in your iArchive project the remaining 9,873. What would you have to do? +={ Kahle, Brewster ; + archives, digital ; + Internet Archive +} + +Well, first, you'd have to determine which of the 9,873 books were still under copyright. That requires going to a library (these data are not on-line) and paging through tomes of books, cross-checking the titles and authors of the 9,873 books with the copyright registration and renewal records for works published in 1930. That will produce a list of books still under copyright. + +Then for the books still under copyright, you would need to locate the current copyright owners. How would you do that? + +Most people think that there must be a list of these copyright owners somewhere. Practical people think this way. How could there be thousands and thousands of government monopolies without there being at least a list? +={ copyright : + no registration of works +5 +} + +But there is no list. There may be a name from 1930, and then in 1959, of the person who registered the copyright. But just think practically about how impossibly difficult it would be to track down thousands of such records - especially since the person who registered is not necessarily the current owner. And we're just talking about 1930! + +"But there isn't a list of who owns property generally," the apologists for the system respond. "Why should there be a list of copyright owners?" + +Well, actually, if you think about it, there /{are}/ plenty of lists of who owns what property. Think about deeds on houses, or titles to cars. And where there isn't a list, the code of real space is pretty good at suggesting who the owner of a bit of property is. (A swing set in your backyard is probably yours.) So formally or informally, we have a pretty good way to know who owns what tangible property. + +So: You walk down a street and see a house. You can know who owns the house by looking it up in the courthouse registry. If you see a car, there is ordinarily a license plate that will link the owner to the car. If you see a bunch of children's toys sitting on the front lawn of a house, it's fairly easy to determine who owns the toys. And if you happen to see a baseball lying in a gutter on the side of the road, look around for a second for some kids playing ball. If you don't see any kids, then okay: Here's a bit of property whose owner we can't easily determine. It is the exception that proves the rule: that we ordinarily know quite well who owns what property. + +Compare this story to intangible property. You go into a library. The library owns the books. But who owns the copyrights? As I've already described, there's no list of copyright owners. There are authors' names, of course, but their copyrights could have been assigned, or passed down in an estate like Grandma's old jewelry. To know who owns what, you would have to hire a private detective. The bottom line: The owner cannot easily be located. And in a regime like ours, in which it is a felony to use such property without the property owner's permission, the property isn't going to be used. +={ copyright law : + felony for infringement of +} + +The consequence with respect to old books is that they won't be digitized, and hence will simply rot away on shelves. But the consequence for other creative works is much more dire. + +Consider the story of Michael Agee, chairman of Hal Roach Studios, which owns the copyrights for the Laurel and Hardy films. Agee is a direct beneficiary of the Bono Act. The Laurel and Hardy films were made between 1921 and 1951. Only one of these films, /{The Lucky Dog}/, is currently out of copyright. But for the CTEA, films made after 1923 would have begun entering the public domain. Because Agee controls the exclusive rights for these popular films, he makes a great deal of money. According to one estimate, "Roach has sold about 60,000 videocassettes and 50,000 DVDs of the duo's silent films."~{ See David G. Savage, "High Court Scene of Showdown on Copyright Law," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 6 October 2002; David Streitfeld, "Classic Movies, Songs, Books at Stake; Supreme Court Hears Arguments Today on Striking Down Copyright Extension," /{Orlando Sentinel Tribune,}/ 9 October 2002. }~ +={ Agee, Michael +2 ; + films : + in public domain +12 ; + Hal Roach Studios ; + Laurel and Hardy films ; + Lucky Dog, The ; + public domain : + films in +12 +} + +Yet Agee opposed the CTEA. His reasons demonstrate a rare virtue in this culture: selflessness. He argued in a brief before the Supreme Court that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act will, if left standing, destroy a whole generation of American film. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) } + +His argument is straightforward. A tiny fraction of this work has any continuing commercial value. The rest - to the extent it survives at all - sits in vaults gathering dust. It may be that some of this work not now commercially valuable will be deemed to be valuable by the owners of the vaults. For this to occur, however, the commercial benefit from the work must exceed the costs of making the work available for distribution. + +We can't know the benefits, but we do know a lot about the costs. For most of the history of film, the costs of restoring film were very high; digital technology has lowered these costs substantially. While it cost more than $10,000 to restore a ninety-minute black-and-white film in 1993, it can now cost as little as $100 to digitize one hour of 8 mm film.~{ Brief of Hal Roach Studios and Michael Agee as Amicus Curiae Supporting the Petitoners, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 537 U.S. 186 (2003) (No. 01- 618), 12. See also Brief of Amicus Curiae filed on behalf of Petitioners by the Internet Archive, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ available at link #53. }~ +={ films : + restoration of +4 +} + +Restoration technology is not the only cost, nor the most important. Lawyers, too, are a cost, and increasingly, a very important one. In addition to preserving the film, a distributor needs to secure the rights. And to secure the rights for a film that is under copyright, you need to locate the copyright owner. +={ films : + multiple copyrights associated with +1 +} + +Or more accurately, /{owners}/. As we've seen, there isn't only a single copyright associated with a film; there are many. There isn't a single person whom you can contact about those copyrights; there are as many as can hold the rights, which turns out to be an extremely large number. Thus the costs of clearing the rights to these films is exceptionally high. + +"But can't you just restore the film, distribute it, and then pay the copyright owner when she shows up?" Sure, if you want to commit a felony. And even if you're not worried about committing a felony, when she does show up, she'll have the right to sue you for all the profits you have made. So, if you're successful, you can be fairly confident you'll be getting a call from someone's lawyer. And if you're not successful, you won't make enough to cover the costs of your own lawyer. Either way, you have to talk to a lawyer. And as is too often the case, saying you have to talk to a lawyer is the same as saying you won't make any money. + +For some films, the benefit of releasing the film may well exceed these costs. But for the vast majority of them, there is no way the benefit would outweigh the legal costs. Thus, for the vast majority of old films, Agee argued, the film will not be restored and distributed until the copyright expires. +={ Agee, Michael } + +But by the time the copyright for these films expires, the film will have expired. These films were produced on nitrate-based stock, and nitrate stock dissolves over time. They will be gone, and the metal canisters in which they are now stored will be filled with nothing more than dust. + +!_ Of all the +creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device. For that tiny fraction, the copyright creates incentives to produce and distribute the creative work. For that tiny fraction, the copyright acts as an "engine of free expression." + +But even for that tiny fraction, the actual time during which the creative work has a commercial life is extremely short. As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends. +={ culture : + commercial vs. noncommercial +1 +} + +Yet that doesn't mean the life of the creative work ends. We don't keep libraries of books in order to compete with Barnes & Noble, and we don't have archives of films because we expect people to choose between spending Friday night watching new movies and spending Friday night watching a 1930 news documentary. The noncommercial life of culture is important and valuable - for entertainment but also, and more importantly, for knowledge. To understand who we are, and where we came from, and how we have made the mistakes that we have, we need to have access to this history. + +Copyrights in this context do not drive an engine of free expression. In this context, there is no need for an exclusive right. Copyrights in this context do no good. + +Yet, for most of our history, they also did little harm. For most of our history, when a work ended its commercial life, there was no /{copyright-related use}/ that would be inhibited by an exclusive right. When a book went out of print, you could not buy it from a publisher. But you could still buy it from a used book store, and when a used book store sells it, in America, at least, there is no need to pay the copyright owner anything. Thus, the ordinary use of a book after its commercial life ended was a use that was independent of copyright law. + +The same was effectively true of film. Because the costs of restoring a film - the real economic costs, not the lawyer costs - were so high, it was never at all feasible to preserve or restore film. Like the remains of a great dinner, when it's over, it's over. Once a film passed out of its commercial life, it may have been archived for a bit, but that was the end of its life so long as the market didn't have more to offer. +={ films : + restoration of +} + +In other words, though copyright has been relatively short for most of our history, long copyrights wouldn't have mattered for the works that lost their commercial value. Long copyrights for these works would not have interfered with anything. + +But this situation has now changed. + +One crucially important consequence of the emergence of digital technologies is to enable the archive that Brewster Kahle dreams of. Digital technologies now make it possible to preserve and give access to all sorts of knowledge. Once a book goes out of print, we can now imagine digitizing it and making it available to everyone, forever. Once a film goes out of distribution, we could digitize it and make it available to everyone, forever. Digital technologies give new life to copyrighted material after it passes out of its commercial life. It is now possible to preserve and assure universal access to this knowledge and culture, whereas before it was not. +={ Kahle, Brewster +3 ; + archives, digital +4 ; + culture : + archives of +4 +} + +And now copyright law does get in the way. Every step of producing this digital archive of our culture infringes on the exclusive right of copyright. To digitize a book is to copy it. To do that requires permission of the copyright owner. The same with music, film, or any other aspect of our culture protected by copyright. The effort to make these things available to history, or to researchers, or to those who just want to explore, is now inhibited by a set of rules that were written for a radically different context. + +Here is the core of the harm that comes from extending terms: Now that technology enables us to rebuild the library of Alexandria, the law gets in the way. And it doesn't get in the way for any useful /{copyright}/ purpose, for the purpose of copyright is to enable the commercial market that spreads culture. No, we are talking about culture after it has lived its commercial life. In this context, copyright is serving no purpose /{at all}/ related to the spread of knowledge. In this context, copyright is not an engine of free expression. Copyright is a brake. +={ libraries : + archival function of +2 +} + +You may well ask, "But if digital technologies lower the costs for Brewster Kahle, then they will lower the costs for Random House, too. So won't Random House do as well as Brewster Kahle in spreading culture widely?" + +Maybe. Someday. But there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that publishers would be as complete as libraries. If Barnes & Noble offered to lend books from its stores for a low price, would that eliminate the need for libraries? Only if you think that the only role of a library is to serve what "the market" would demand. But if you think the role of a library is bigger than this - if you think its role is to archive culture, whether there's a demand for any particular bit of that culture or not - then we can't count on the commercial market to do our library work for us. + +I would be the first to agree that it should do as much as it can: We should rely upon the market as much as possible to spread and enable culture. My message is absolutely not antimarket. But where we see the market is not doing the job, then we should allow nonmarket forces the freedom to fill the gaps. As one researcher calculated for American culture, 94 percent of the films, books, and music produced between 1923 and 1946 is not commercially available. However much you love the commercial market, if access is a value, then 6 percent is a failure to provide that value.~{ Jason Schultz, "The Myth of the 1976 Copyright 'Chaos' Theory," 20 December 2002, available at link #54. }~ + +!_ In January 1999, +we filed a lawsuit on Eric Eldred's behalf in federal district court in Washington, D.C., asking the court to declare the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act unconstitutional. The two central claims that we made were (1) that extending existing terms violated the Constitution's "limited Times" requirement, and (2) that extending terms by another twenty years violated the First Amendment. +={ Eldred v. Ashcroft +126 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred case involvement of +126 ; + Congress, U.S. : + copyright terms extended by +2 ; + Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + First Amendment : + copyright extension as violation of ; + Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) : + Supreme Court challenge of +7 ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + on copyright term extensions +126 ; + copyright law : + Supreme Court case on term extension of +126 | term extensions in +126 +} + +The district court dismissed our claims without even hearing an argument. A panel of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit also dismissed our claims, though after hearing an extensive argument. But that decision at least had a dissent, by one of the most conservative judges on that court. That dissent gave our claims life. + +Judge David Sentelle said the CTEA violated the requirement that copyrights be for "limited Times" only. His argument was as elegant as it was simple: If Congress can extend existing terms, then there is no "stopping point" to Congress's power under the Copyright Clause. The power to extend existing terms means Congress is not required to grant terms that are "limited." Thus, Judge Sentelle argued, the court had to interpret the term "limited Times" to give it meaning. And the best interpretation, Judge Sentelle argued, would be to deny Congress the power to extend existing terms. +={ Congress, U.S. : + challenge of CTEA legislation of +124 ; + Sentelle, David +2 +} + +We asked the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit as a whole to hear the case. Cases are ordinarily heard in panels of three, except for important cases or cases that raise issues specific to the circuit as a whole, where the court will sit "en banc" to hear the case. +={ Court of Appeals : + D.C. Circuit +1 ; + D.C. Court of Appeals +1 +} + +The Court of Appeals rejected our request to hear the case en banc. This time, Judge Sentelle was joined by the most liberal member of the D.C. Circuit, Judge David Tatel. Both the most conservative and the most liberal judges in the D.C. Circuit believed Congress had over-stepped its bounds. +={ Tatel, David } + +It was here that most expected /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/ would die, for the Supreme Court rarely reviews any decision by a court of appeals. (It hears about one hundred cases a year, out of more than five thousand appeals.) And it practically never reviews a decision that upholds a statute when no other court has yet reviewed the statute. +={ Supreme Court, U.S. : + annual docket of +} + +But in February 2002, the Supreme Court surprised the world by granting our petition to review the D.C. Circuit opinion. Argument was set for October of 2002. The summer would be spent writing briefs and preparing for argument. + +!_ It is over +a year later as I write these words. It is still astonishingly hard. If you know anything at all about this story, you know that we lost the appeal. And if you know something more than just the minimum, you probably think there was no way this case could have been won. After our defeat, I received literally thousands of missives by well-wishers and supporters, thanking me for my work on behalf of this noble but doomed cause. And none from this pile was more significant to me than the e-mail from my client, Eric Eldred. +={ Eldred, Eric } + +But my client and these friends were wrong. This case could have been won. It should have been won. And no matter how hard I try to retell this story to myself, I can never escape believing that my own mistake lost it. + +!_ The mistake +was made early, though it became obvious only at the very end. Our case had been supported from the very beginning by an extraordinary lawyer, Geoffrey Stewart, and by the law firm he had moved to, Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue. Jones Day took a great deal of heat from its copyright-protectionist clients for supporting us. They ignored this pressure (something that few law firms today would ever do), and throughout the case, they gave it everything they could. +={ Stewart, Gordon +1 ; + Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue (Jones Day) +1 +} + +There were three key lawyers on the case from Jones Day. Geoff Stewart was the first, but then Dan Bromberg and Don Ayer became quite involved. Bromberg and Ayer in particular had a common view about how this case would be won: We would only win, they repeatedly told me, if we could make the issue seem "important" to the Supreme Court. It had to seem as if dramatic harm were being done to free speech and free culture; otherwise, they would never vote against "the most powerful media companies in the world." +={ Ayer, Don ; + Bromberg, Dan +} + +I hate this view of the law. Of course I thought the Sonny Bono Act was a dramatic harm to free speech and free culture. Of course I still think it is. But the idea that the Supreme Court decides the law based on how important they believe the issues are is just wrong. It might be "right" as in "true," I thought, but it is "wrong" as in "it just shouldn't be that way." As I believed that any faithful interpretation of what the framers of our Constitution did would yield the conclusion that the CTEA was unconstitutional, and as I believed that any faithful interpretation of what the First Amendment means would yield the conclusion that the power to extend existing copyright terms is unconstitutional, I was not persuaded that we had to sell our case like soap. Just as a law that bans the swastika is unconstitutional not because the Court likes Nazis but because such a law would violate the Constitution, so too, in my view, would the Court decide whether Congress's law was constitutional based on the Constitution, not based on whether they liked the values that the framers put in the Constitution. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + First Amendment : + copyright extension as violation of ; + Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) : + Supreme Court challenge of +} + +In any case, I thought, the Court must already see the danger and the harm caused by this sort of law. Why else would they grant review? There was no reason to hear the case in the Supreme Court if they weren't convinced that this regulation was harmful. So in my view, we didn't need to persuade them that this law was bad, we needed to show why it was unconstitutional. + +There was one way, however, in which I felt politics would matter and in which I thought a response was appropriate. I was convinced that the Court would not hear our arguments if it thought these were just the arguments of a group of lefty loons. This Supreme Court was not about to launch into a new field of judicial review if it seemed that this field of review was simply the preference of a small political minority. Although my focus in the case was not to demonstrate how bad the Sonny Bono Act was but to demonstrate that it was unconstitutional, my hope was to make this argument against a background of briefs that covered the full range of political views. To show that this claim against the CTEA was grounded in /{law}/ and not politics, then, we tried to gather the widest range of credible critics - credible not because they were rich and famous, but because they, in the aggregate, demonstrated that this law was unconstitutional regardless of one's politics. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) : + Supreme Court challenge of +} + +The first step happened all by itself. Phyllis Schlafly's organization, Eagle Forum, had been an opponent of the CTEA from the very beginning. Mrs. Schlafly viewed the CTEA as a sellout by Congress. In November 1998, she wrote a stinging editorial attacking the Republican Congress for allowing the law to pass. As she wrote, "Do you sometimes wonder why bills that create a financial windfall to narrow special interests slide easily through the intricate legislative process, while bills that benefit the general public seem to get bogged down?" The answer, as the editorial documented, was the power of money. Schlafly enumerated Disney's contributions to the key players on the committees. It was money, not justice, that gave Mickey Mouse twenty more years in Disney's control, Schlafly argued. +={ Disney, Inc. ; + Eagle Forum +2 ; + Mickey Mouse ; + Schlafy, Phyllis +} + +In the Court of Appeals, Eagle Forum was eager to file a brief supporting our position. Their brief made the argument that became the core claim in the Supreme Court: If Congress can extend the term of existing copyrights, there is no limit to Congress's power to set terms. That strong conservative argument persuaded a strong conservative judge, Judge Sentelle. +={ Court of Appeals : + D.C. Circuit ; + D.C. Court of Appeals ; + Sentelle, David +} + +In the Supreme Court, the briefs on our side were about as diverse as it gets. They included an extraordinary historical brief by the Free Software Foundation (home of the GNU project that made GNU/ Linux possible). They included a powerful brief about the costs of uncertainty by Intel. There were two law professors' briefs, one by copyright scholars and one by First Amendment scholars. There was an exhaustive and uncontroverted brief by the world's experts in the history of the Progress Clause. And of course, there was a new brief by Eagle Forum, repeating and strengthening its arguments. +={ Free Software Foundation ; + GNU/Linux operating system ; + Linux operating system ; + Intel ; + Constitution, U.S. : + Progress Clause of ; + Progress Clause +} + +Those briefs framed a legal argument. Then to support the legal argument, there were a number of powerful briefs by libraries and archives, including the Internet Archive, the American Association of Law Libraries, and the National Writers Union. +={ American Association of Law Libraries ; + Internet Archive ; + National Writers Union +} + +But two briefs captured the policy argument best. One made the argument I've already described: A brief by Hal Roach Studios argued that unless the law was struck, a whole generation of American film would disappear. The other made the economic argument absolutely clear. +={ Hal Roach Studios } + +This economists' brief was signed by seventeen economists, including five Nobel Prize winners, including Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, and George Akerlof. The economists, as the list of Nobel winners demonstrates, spanned the political spectrum. Their conclusions were powerful: There was no plausible claim that extending the terms of existing copyrights would do anything to increase incentives to create. Such extensions were nothing more than "rent-seeking" - the fancy term economists use to describe special- interest legislation gone wild. +={ Akerlof, George ; + Arrow, Kenneth ; + Buchanan, James ; + Coase, Ronald ; + Fridman, Milton +2 +} + +The same effort at balance was reflected in the legal team we gathered to write our briefs in the case. The Jones Day lawyers had been with us from the start. But when the case got to the Supreme Court, we added three lawyers to help us frame this argument to this Court: Alan Morrison, a lawyer from Public Citizen, a Washington group that had made constitutional history with a series of seminal victories in the Supreme Court defending individual rights; my colleague and dean, Kathleen Sullivan, who had argued many cases in the Court, and who had advised us early on about a First Amendment strategy; and finally, former solicitor general Charles Fried. +={ Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue (Jones Day) ; + Morrison, Alan ; + Sullivan, Kathleen ; + Fried, Charles +1 ; + Public Citizen +} + +Fried was a special victory for our side. Every other former solicitor general was hired by the other side to defend Congress's power to give media companies the special favor of extended copyright terms. Fried was the only one who turned down that lucrative assignment to stand up for something he believed in. He had been Ronald Reagan's chief lawyer in the Supreme Court. He had helped craft the line of cases that limited Congress's power in the context of the Commerce Clause. And while he had argued many positions in the Supreme Court that I personally disagreed with, his joining the cause was a vote of confidence in our argument. +={ Reagan, Ronald ; + Congress, U.S. : + constitutional powers of ; + Constitution, U.S. : + Commerce Clause of +} + +The government, in defending the statute, had its collection of friends, as well. Significantly, however, none of these "friends" included historians or economists. The briefs on the other side of the case were written exclusively by major media companies, congressmen, and copyright holders. + +The media companies were not surprising. They had the most to gain from the law. The congressmen were not surprising either - they were defending their power and, indirectly, the gravy train of contributions such power induced. And of course it was not surprising that the copyright holders would defend the idea that they should continue to have the right to control who did what with content they wanted to control. + +Dr. Seuss's representatives, for example, argued that it was better for the Dr. Seuss estate to control what happened to Dr. Seuss's work - better than allowing it to fall into the public domain - because if this creativity were in the public domain, then people could use it to "glorify drugs or to create pornography."~{ Brief of Amici Dr. Seuss Enterprise et al., /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 537 U.S. 186 (2003) (No. 01-618), 19. }~ That was also the motive of the Gershwin estate, which defended its "protection" of the work of George Gershwin. They refuse, for example, to license /{Porgy and Bess}/ to anyone who refuses to use African Americans in the cast.~{ Dinitia Smith, "Immortal Words, Immortal Royalties? Even Mickey Mouse Joins the Fray," /{New York Times,}/ 28 March 1998, B7. }~ That's their view of how this part of American culture should be controlled, and they wanted this law to help them effect that control. +={ Gershwin, George +1 ; + Porgy and Bess ; + pornography ; + Seuss, Dr. +1 +} + +This argument made clear a theme that is rarely noticed in this debate. When Congress decides to extend the term of existing copyrights, Congress is making a choice about which speakers it will favor. Famous and beloved copyright owners, such as the Gershwin estate and Dr. Seuss, come to Congress and say, "Give us twenty years to control the speech about these icons of American culture. We'll do better with them than anyone else." Congress of course likes to reward the popular and famous by giving them what they want. But when Congress gives people an exclusive right to speak in a certain way, that's just what the First Amendment is traditionally meant to block. +={ First Amendment : + copyright extension as violation of ; + Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to +} + +We argued as much in a final brief. Not only would upholding the CTEA mean that there was no limit to the power of Congress to extend copyrights - extensions that would further concentrate the market; it would also mean that there was no limit to Congress's power to play favorites, through copyright, with who has the right to speak. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) : + Supreme Court challenge of +64 ; + Congress, U.S. : + constitutional powers of +8 +} + +!_ Between February +and October, there was little I did beyond preparing for this case. Early on, as I said, I set the strategy. + +The Supreme Court was divided into two important camps. One camp we called "the Conservatives." The other we called "the Rest." The Conservatives included Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O'Connor, Justice Scalia, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Thomas. These five had been the most consistent in limiting Congress's power. They were the five who had supported the /{Lopez/Morrison}/ line of cases that said that an enumerated power had to be interpreted to assure that Congress's powers had limits. +={ Kennedy, Anthony ; + O'Connor, Sandra Day ; + Rehnquist, William H. ; + Thomas, Clarence ; + United States v. Lopez ; + United States v. Morrison ; + Scalia, Antonin ; + Congress, U.S. : + Supreme Court restraint on ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + congressional actions restrained by | factions of +3 +} + +The Rest were the four Justices who had strongly opposed limits on Congress's power. These four - Justice Stevens, Justice Souter, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer - had repeatedly argued that the Constitution gives Congress broad discretion to decide how best to implement its powers. In case after case, these justices had argued that the Court's role should be one of deference. Though the votes of these four justices were the votes that I personally had most consistently agreed with, they were also the votes that we were least likely to get. +={ Breyer, Stephen ; + Ginsburg, Ruth Bader ; + Stevens, John Paul ; + Souter, David +} + +In particular, the least likely was Justice Ginsburg's. In addition to her general view about deference to Congress (except where issues of gender are involved), she had been particularly deferential in the context of intellectual property protections. She and her daughter (an excellent and well-known intellectual property scholar) were cut from the same intellectual property cloth. We expected she would agree with the writings of her daughter: that Congress had the power in this context to do as it wished, even if what Congress wished made little sense. + +Close behind Justice Ginsburg were two justices whom we also viewed as unlikely allies, though possible surprises. Justice Souter strongly favored deference to Congress, as did Justice Breyer. But both were also very sensitive to free speech concerns. And as we strongly believed, there was a very important free speech argument against these retrospective extensions. +={ Breyer, Stephen ; + Ginsburg, Ruth Bader ; + Souter, David +} + +The only vote we could be confident about was that of Justice Stevens. History will record Justice Stevens as one of the greatest judges on this Court. His votes are consistently eclectic, which just means that no simple ideology explains where he will stand. But he had consistently argued for limits in the context of intellectual property generally. We were fairly confident he would recognize limits here. +={ Stevens, John Paul } + +This analysis of "the Rest" showed most clearly where our focus had to be: on the Conservatives. To win this case, we had to crack open these five and get at least a majority to go our way.Thus, the single overriding argument that animated our claim rested on the Conservatives' most important jurisprudential innovation - the argument that Judge Sentelle had relied upon in the Court of Appeals, that Congress's power must be interpreted so that its enumerated powers have limits. +={ Court of Appeals : + D.C. Circuit ; + D.C. Court of Appeals ; + Sentelle, David +} + +This then was the core of our strategy - a strategy for which I am responsible. We would get the Court to see that just as with the /{Lopez}/ case, under the government's argument here, Congress would always have unlimited power to extend existing terms. If anything was plain about Congress's power under the Progress Clause, it was that this power was supposed to be "limited." Our aim would be to get the Court to reconcile /{Eldred}/ with /{Lopez:}/ If Congress's power to regulate commerce was limited, then so, too, must Congress's power to regulate copyright be limited. +={ United States v. Lopez ; + commerce, interstate ; + interstate commerce ; + Congress, U.S. : + in constitutional Progress Clause ; + Progress Clause ; + Congress, U.S. : + copyright terms extended by +3 ; + Constitution, U.S. : + Progress Clause of +} + +!_ The argument +on the government's side came down to this: Congress has done it before. It should be allowed to do it again. The government claimed that from the very beginning, Congress has been extending the term of existing copyrights. So, the government argued, the Court should not now say that practice is unconstitutional. + +There was some truth to the government's claim, but not much. We certainly agreed that Congress had extended existing terms in 1831 and in 1909. And of course, in 1962, Congress began extending existing terms regularly - eleven times in forty years. + +But this "consistency" should be kept in perspective. Congress extended existing terms once in the first hundred years of the Republic. It then extended existing terms once again in the next fifty. Those rare extensions are in contrast to the now regular practice of extending existing terms. Whatever restraint Congress had had in the past, that restraint was now gone. Congress was now in a cycle of extensions; there was no reason to expect that cycle would end. This Court had not hesitated to intervene where Congress was in a similar cycle of extension. There was no reason it couldn't intervene here. + +!_ Oral argument +was scheduled for the first week in October. I arrived in D.C. two weeks before the argument. During those two weeks, I was repeatedly "mooted" by lawyers who had volunteered to help in the case. Such "moots" are basically practice rounds, where wannabe justices fire questions at wannabe winners. + +I was convinced that to win, I had to keep the Court focused on a single point: that if this extension is permitted, then there is no limit to the power to set terms. Going with the government would mean that terms would be effectively unlimited; going with us would give Congress a clear line to follow: Don't extend existing terms. The moots were an effective practice; I found ways to take every question back to this central idea. + +One moot was before the lawyers at Jones Day. Don Ayer was the skeptic. He had served in the Reagan Justice Department with Solicitor General Charles Fried. He had argued many cases before the Supreme Court. And in his review of the moot, he let his concern speak: +={ Ayer, Don +2 ; + Fried, Charles ; + Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue (Jones Day) ; + Reagan, Ronald +} + +"I'm just afraid that unless they really see the harm, they won't be willing to upset this practice that the government says has been a consistent practice for two hundred years. You have to make them see the harm - passionately get them to see the harm. For if they don't see that, then we haven't any chance of winning." + +He may have argued many cases before this Court, I thought, but he didn't understand its soul. As a clerk, I had seen the Justices do the right thing - not because of politics but because it was right. As a law professor, I had spent my life teaching my students that this Court does the right thing - not because of politics but because it is right. As I listened to Ayer's plea for passion in pressing politics, I understood his point, and I rejected it. Our argument was right. That was enough. Let the politicians learn to see that it was also good. + +!_ The night before +the argument, a line of people began to form in front of the Supreme Court. The case had become a focus of the press and of the movement to free culture. Hundreds stood in line for the chance to see the proceedings. Scores spent the night on the Supreme Court steps so that they would be assured a seat. + +Not everyone has to wait in line. People who know the Justices can ask for seats they control. (I asked Justice Scalia's chambers for seats for my parents, for example.) Members of the Supreme Court bar can get a seat in a special section reserved for them. And senators and congressmen have a special place where they get to sit, too. And finally, of course, the press has a gallery, as do clerks working for the Justices on the Court. As we entered that morning, there was no place that was not taken. This was an argument about intellectual property law, yet the halls were filled. As I walked in to take my seat at the front of the Court, I saw my parents sitting on the left. As I sat down at the table, I saw Jack Valenti sitting in the special section ordinarily reserved for family of the Justices. +={ Scalia, Antonin ; + Valenti, Jack +} + +When the Chief Justice called me to begin my argument, I began where I intended to stay: on the question of the limits on Congress's power. This was a case about enumerated powers, I said, and whether those enumerated powers had any limit. +={ Congress, U.S. : + constitutional powers of +3 +} + +Justice O'Connor stopped me within one minute of my opening. The history was bothering her. +={ O'Connor, Sandra Day +1 } + +_1 JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Congress has extended the term so often through the years, and if you are right, don't we run the risk of upsetting previous extensions of time? I mean, this seems to be a practice that began with the very first act." + +She was quite willing to concede "that this flies directly in the face of what the framers had in mind." But my response again and again was to emphasize limits on Congress's power. + +_1 MR. LESSIG: Well, if it flies in the face of what the framers had in mind, then the question is, is there a way of interpreting their words that gives effect to what they had in mind, and the answer is yes." + +There were two points in this argument when I should have seen where the Court was going. The first was a question by Justice Kennedy, who observed, +={ Kennedy, Anthony +1 } + +_1 JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, I suppose implicit in the argument that the '76 act, too, should have been declared void, and that we might leave it alone because of the disruption, is that for all these years the act has impeded progress in science and the useful arts. I just don't see any empirical evidence for that. + +Here follows my clear mistake. Like a professor correcting a student, I answered, + +_1 MR. LESSIG: Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all. Nothing in our Copyright Clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about impeding progress. Our only argument is this is a structural limit necessary to assure that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted under the copyright laws." + +That was a correct answer, but it wasn't the right answer. The right answer was instead that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had been written about it. He wanted to hear it. And here was the place Don Ayer's advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a miss. +={ Ayer, Don } + +The second came from the Chief, for whom the whole case had been crafted. For the Chief Justice had crafted the /{Lopez}/ ruling, and we hoped that he would see this case as its second cousin. +={ United States v. Lopez } + +It was clear a second into his question that he wasn't at all sympathetic. To him, we were a bunch of anarchists. As he asked: + +_1 CHIEF JUSTICE: Well, but you want more than that. You want the right to copy verbatim other people's books, don't you? +={ Rehnquist, William H. } + +_1 MR. LESSIG: We want the right to copy verbatim works that should be in the public domain and would be in the public domain but for a statute that cannot be justified under ordinary First Amendment analysis or under a proper reading of the limits built into the Copyright Clause." + +Things went better for us when the government gave its argument; for now the Court picked up on the core of our claim. As Justice Scalia asked Solicitor General Olson, +={ Olson, Theodore B. +2 ; + Scalia, Antonin +1 +} + +_1 JUSTICE SCALIA: You say that the functional equivalent of an unlimited time would be a violation [of the Constitution], but that's precisely the argument that's being made by petitioners here, that a limited time which is extendable is the functional equivalent of an unlimited time." + +When Olson was finished, it was my turn to give a closing rebuttal. Olson's flailing had revived my anger. But my anger still was directed to the academic, not the practical. The government was arguing as if this were the first case ever to consider limits on Congress's Copyright and Patent Clause power. Ever the professor and not the advocate, I closed by pointing out the long history of the Court imposing limits on Congress's power in the name of the Copyright and Patent Clause - indeed, the very first case striking a law of Congress as exceeding a specific enumerated power was based upon the Copyright and Patent Clause. All true. But it wasn't going to move the Court to my side. +={ Congress, U.S. : + constitutional powers of +2 +} + +!_ As I left +the court that day, I knew there were a hundred points I wished I could remake. There were a hundred questions I wished I had answered differently. But one way of thinking about this case left me optimistic. + +The government had been asked over and over again, what is the limit? Over and over again, it had answered there is no limit. This was precisely the answer I wanted the Court to hear. For I could not imagine how the Court could understand that the government believed Congress's power was unlimited under the terms of the Copyright Clause, and sustain the government's argument. The solicitor general had made my argument for me. No matter how often I tried, I could not understand how the Court could find that Congress's power under the Commerce Clause was limited, but under the Copyright Clause, unlimited. In those rare moments when I let myself believe that we may have prevailed, it was because I felt this Court - in particular, the Conservatives - would feel itself constrained by the rule of law that it had established elsewhere. + +!_ The morning +of January 15, 2003, I was five minutes late to the office and missed the 7:00 A.M.call from the Supreme Court clerk. Listening to the message, I could tell in an instant that she had bad news to report.The Supreme Court had affirmed the decision of the Court of Appeals. Seven justices had voted in the majority. There were two dissents. + +A few seconds later, the opinions arrived by e-mail. I took the phone off the hook, posted an announcement to our blog, and sat down to see where I had been wrong in my reasoning. + +My /{reasoning}/. Here was a case that pitted all the money in the world against /{reasoning}/. And here was the last naïve law professor, scouring the pages, looking for reasoning. + +I first scoured the opinion, looking for how the Court would distinguish the principle in this case from the principle in /{Lopez}/. The argument was nowhere to be found. The case was not even cited. The argument that was the core argument of our case did not even appear in the Court's opinion. +={ United States v. Lopez +3 } + +Justice Ginsburg simply ignored the enumerated powers argument. Consistent with her view that Congress's power was not limited generally, she had found Congress's power not limited here. +={ Ginsburg, Ruth Bader } + +Her opinion was perfectly reasonable - for her, and for Justice Souter. Neither believes in /{Lopez}/. It would be too much to expect them to write an opinion that recognized, much less explained, the doctrine they had worked so hard to defeat. +={ Souter, David } + +But as I realized what had happened, I couldn't quite believe what I was reading. I had said there was no way this Court could reconcile limited powers with the Commerce Clause and unlimited powers with the Progress Clause. It had never even occurred to me that they could reconcile the two simply /{by not addressing the argument}/. There was no inconsistency because they would not talk about the two together. There was therefore no principle that followed from the /{Lopez}/ case: In that context, Congress's power would be limited, but in this context it would not. + +Yet by what right did they get to choose which of the framers' values they would respect? By what right did they - the silent five - get to select the part of the Constitution they would enforce based on the values they thought important? We were right back to the argument that I said I hated at the start: I had failed to convince them that the issue here was important, and I had failed to recognize that however much I might hate a system in which the Court gets to pick the constitutional values that it will respect, that is the system we have. + +Justices Breyer and Stevens wrote very strong dissents. Stevens's opinion was crafted internal to the law: He argued that the tradition of intellectual property law should not support this unjustified extension of terms. He based his argument on a parallel analysis that had governed in the context of patents (so had we). But the rest of the Court discounted the parallel - without explaining how the very same words in the Progress Clause could come to mean totally different things depending upon whether the words were about patents or copyrights. The Court let Justice Stevens's charge go unanswered. +={ Breyer, Stephen +1 ; + patents : + duration of ; + Stevens, John Paul +} + +Justice Breyer's opinion, perhaps the best opinion he has ever written, was external to the Constitution. He argued that the term of copyrights has become so long as to be effectively unlimited. We had said that under the current term, a copyright gave an author 99.8 percent of the value of a perpetual term. Breyer said we were wrong, that the actual number was 99.9997 percent of a perpetual term. Either way, the point was clear: If the Constitution said a term had to be "limited," and the existing term was so long as to be effectively unlimited, then it was unconstitutional. +={ copyright : + in perpetuity +} + +These two justices understood all the arguments we had made. But because neither believed in the /{Lopez}/ case, neither was willing to push it as a reason to reject this extension. The case was decided without anyone having addressed the argument that we had carried from Judge Sentelle. It was /{Hamlet}/ without the Prince. +={ Setnelle, David ; + United States v. Lopez +2 +} + +!_ Defeat brings depression. +They say it is a sign of health when depression gives way to anger. My anger came quickly, but it didn't cure the depression. This anger was of two sorts. + +It was first anger with the five "Conservatives." It would have been one thing for them to have explained why the principle of /{Lopez}/ didn't apply in this case. That wouldn't have been a very convincing argument, I don't believe, having read it made by others, and having tried to make it myself. But it at least would have been an act of integrity. These justices in particular have repeatedly said that the proper mode of interpreting the Constitution is "originalism" - to first understand the framers' text, interpreted in their context, in light of the structure of the Constitution. That method had produced /{Lopez}/ and many other "originalist" rulings. Where was their "originalism" now? +={ Constitution, U.S. : + originalist interpretation of ; + originalism +} + +Here, they had joined an opinion that never once tried to explain what the framers had meant by crafting the Progress Clause as they did; they joined an opinion that never once tried to explain how the structure of that clause would affect the interpretation of Congress's power. And they joined an opinion that didn't even try to explain why this grant of power could be unlimited, whereas the Commerce Clause would be limited. In short, they had joined an opinion that did not apply to, and was inconsistent with, their own method for interpreting the Constitution. This opinion may well have yielded a result that they liked. It did not produce a reason that was consistent with their own principles. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + Progress Clause of ; + Progress Clause ; + Constitution, U.S. : + Commerce Clause of +} + +My anger with the Conservatives quickly yielded to anger with myself. For I had let a view of the law that I liked interfere with a view of the law as it is. + +Most lawyers, and most law professors, have little patience for idealism about courts in general and this Supreme Court in particular. Most have a much more pragmatic view. When Don Ayer said that this case would be won based on whether I could convince the Justices that the framers' values were important, I fought the idea, because I didn't want to believe that that is how this Court decides. I insisted on arguing this case as if it were a simple application of a set of principles. I had an argument that followed in logic. I didn't need to waste my time showing it should also follow in popularity. +={ Ayer, Don } + +As I read back over the transcript from that argument in October, I can see a hundred places where the answers could have taken the conversation in different directions, where the truth about the harm that this unchecked power will cause could have been made clear to this Court. Justice Kennedy in good faith wanted to be shown. I, idiotically, corrected his question. Justice Souter in good faith wanted to be shown the First Amendment harms. I, like a math teacher, reframed the question to make the logical point. I had shown them how they could strike this law of Congress if they wanted to. There were a hundred places where I could have helped them want to, yet my stubbornness, my refusal to give in, stopped me. I have stood before hundreds of audiences trying to persuade; I have used passion in that effort to persuade; but I refused to stand before this audience and try to persuade with the passion I had used elsewhere. It was not the basis on which a court should decide the issue. +={ Souter, David ; + Kennedy, Anthony ; + Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + First Amendment : + copyright extension as violation of +} + +Would it have been different if I had argued it differently? Would it have been different if Don Ayer had argued it? Or Charles Fried? Or Kathleen Sullivan? + +My friends huddled around me to insist it would not. The Court was not ready, my friends insisted. This was a loss that was destined. It would take a great deal more to show our society why our framers were right. And when we do that, we will be able to show that Court. + +Maybe, but I doubt it. These Justices have no financial interest in doing anything except the right thing. They are not lobbied. They have little reason to resist doing right. I can't help but think that if I had stepped down from this pretty picture of dispassionate justice, I could have persuaded. + +And even if I couldn't, then that doesn't excuse what happened in January. For at the start of this case, one of America's leading intellectual property professors stated publicly that my bringing this case was a mistake. "The Court is not ready," Peter Jaszi said; this issue should not be raised until it is. +={ Jaszi, Peter } + +After the argument and after the decision, Peter said to me, and publicly, that he was wrong. But if indeed that Court could not have been persuaded, then that is all the evidence that's needed to know that here again Peter was right. Either I was not ready to argue this case in a way that would do some good or they were not ready to hear this case in a way that would do some good. Either way, the decision to bring this case - a decision I had made four years before - was wrong. + +!_ While the reaction +to the Sonny Bono Act itself was almost unanimously negative, the reaction to the Court's decision was mixed. No one, at least in the press, tried to say that extending the term of copyright was a good idea. We had won that battle over ideas. Where the decision was praised, it was praised by papers that had been skeptical of the Court's activism in other cases. Deference was a good thing, even if it left standing a silly law. But where the decision was attacked, it was attacked because it left standing a silly and harmful law. /{The New York Times}/ wrote in its editorial, + +_1 In effect, the Supreme Court's decision makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity. The public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment." +={ copyright : + in perpetuity +} + +The best responses were in the cartoons. There was a gaggle of hilarious images" of Mickey in jail and the like. The best, from my view of the case, was Ruben Bolling's, reproduced on the next page. The "powerful and wealthy" line is a bit unfair. But the punch in the face felt exactly like that. +={ Bolling, Ruben +2 } + +The image that will always stick in my head is that evoked by the quote from /{The New York Times}/. That "grand experiment" we call the "public domain" is over? When I can make light of it, I think, "Honey, I shrunk the Constitution." But I can rarely make light of it. We had in our Constitution a commitment to free culture. In the case that I fathered, the Supreme Court effectively renounced that commitment. A better lawyer would have made them see differently. + +{freeculture18.png 550x720 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ +={ Scalia, Antonin } + +1~ Chapter Fourteen: Eldred II + +!_ The day +/{Eldred}/ was decided, fate would have it that I was to travel to Washington, D.C. (The day the rehearing petition in /{Eldred}/ was denied - meaning the case was really finally over - fate would have it that I was giving a speech to technologists at Disney World.) This was a particularly long flight to my least favorite city. The drive into the city from Dulles was delayed because of traffic, so I opened up my computer and wrote an op-ed piece. + +It was an act of contrition. During the whole of the flight from San Francisco to Washington, I had heard over and over again in my head the same advice from Don Ayer: You need to make them see why it is important. And alternating with that command was the question of Justice Kennedy: "For all these years the act has impeded progress in science and the useful arts. I just don't see any empirical evidence for that." And so, having failed in the argument of constitutional principle, finally, I turned to an argument of politics. +={ Ayer, Don ; + Kennedy, Anthony +} + +/{The New York Times}/ published the piece. In it, I proposed a simple fix: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner would be required to register the work and pay a small fee. If he paid the fee, he got the benefit of the full term of copyright. If he did not, the work passed into the public domain. +={ copyright law : + registration requirement of +23 +} + +We called this the Eldred Act, but that was just to give it a name. Eric Eldred was kind enough to let his name be used once again, but as he said early on, it won't get passed unless it has another name. +={ Eldred, Eric ; + Eldred Act +23 +} + +Or another two names. For depending upon your perspective, this is either the "Public Domain Enhancement Act" or the "Copyright Term Deregulation Act." Either way, the essence of the idea is clear and obvious: Remove copyright where it is doing nothing except blocking access and the spread of knowledge. Leave it for as long as Congress allows for those works where its worth is at least $1. But for everything else, let the content go. + +The reaction to this idea was amazingly strong. Steve Forbes endorsed it in an editorial. I received an avalanche of e-mail and letters expressing support. When you focus the issue on lost creativity, people can see the copyright system makes no sense. As a good Republican might say, here government regulation is simply getting in the way of innovation and creativity. And as a good Democrat might say, here the government is blocking access and the spread of knowledge for no good reason. Indeed, there is no real difference between Democrats and Republicans on this issue. Anyone can recognize the stupid harm of the present system. +={ Democratic Party ; + Republican Party ; + Forbes, Steve +} + +Indeed, many recognized the obvious benefit of the registration requirement. For one of the hardest things about the current system for people who want to license content is that there is no obvious place to look for the current copyright owners. Since registration is not required, since marking content is not required, since no formality at all is required, it is often impossibly hard to locate copyright owners to ask permission to use or license their work. This system would lower these costs, by establishing at least one registry where copyright owners could be identified. +={ copyright : + no registration of works +} + +As I described in chapter 10, formalities in copyright law were removed in 1976, when Congress followed the Europeans by abandoning any formal requirement before a copyright is granted.~{ Until the 1908 Berlin Act of the Berne Convention, national copyright legislation sometimes made protection depend upon compliance with formalities such as registration, deposit, and affixation of notice of the author's claim of copyright. However, starting with the 1908 act, every text of the Convention has provided that "the enjoyment and the exercise" of rights guaranteed by the Convention "shall not be subject to any formality." The prohibition against formalities is presently embodied in Article 5(2) of the Paris Text of the Berne Convention. Many countries continue to impose some form of deposit or registration requirement, albeit not as a condition of copyright. French law, for example, requires the deposit of copies of works in national repositories, principally the National Museum. Copies of books published in the United Kingdom must be deposited in the British Library. The German Copyright Act provides for a Registrar of Authors where the author's true name can be filed in the case of anonymous or pseudonymous works. Paul Goldstein, /{International Intellectual Property Law, Cases and Materials}/ (New York: Foundation Press, 2001), 153-54. }~ The Europeans are said to view copyright as a "natural right." Natural rights don't need forms to exist. Traditions, like the Anglo-American tradition that required copyright owners to follow form if their rights were to be protected, did not, the Europeans thought, properly respect the dignity of the author. My right as a creator turns on my creativity, not upon the special favor of the government. +={ copyright law : + European +} + +That's great rhetoric. It sounds wonderfully romantic. But it is absurd copyright policy. It is absurd especially for authors, because a world without formalities harms the creator. The ability to spread "Walt Disney creativity" is destroyed when there is no simple way to know what's protected and what's not. + +The fight against formalities achieved its first real victory in Berlin in 1908. International copyright lawyers amended the Berne Convention in 1908, to require copyright terms of life plus fifty years, as well as the abolition of copyright formalities. The formalities were hated because the stories of inadvertent loss were increasingly common. It was as if a Charles Dickens character ran all copyright offices, and the failure to dot an /{i}/ or cross a /{t}/ resulted in the loss of widows' only income. +={ Berne Convention (1908) } + +These complaints were real and sensible. And the strictness of the formalities, especially in the United States, was absurd. The law should always have ways of forgiving innocent mistakes. There is no reason copyright law couldn't, as well. Rather than abandoning formalities totally, the response in Berlin should have been to embrace a more equitable system of registration. + +Even that would have been resisted, however, because registration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was still expensive. It was also a hassle. The abolishment of formalities promised not only to save the starving widows, but also to lighten an unnecessary regulatory burden imposed upon creators. + +In addition to the practical complaint of authors in 1908, there was a moral claim as well. There was no reason that creative property should be a second-class form of property. If a carpenter builds a table, his rights over the table don't depend upon filing a form with the government. He has a property right over the table "naturally," and he can assert that right against anyone who would steal the table, whether or not he has informed the government of his ownership of the table. + +This argument is correct, but its implications are misleading. For the argument in favor of formalities does not depend upon creative property being second-class property. The argument in favor of formalities turns upon the special problems that creative property presents. The law of formalities responds to the special physics of creative property, to assure that it can be efficiently and fairly spread. + +No one thinks, for example, that land is second-class property just because you have to register a deed with a court if your sale of land is to be effective. And few would think a car is second-class property just because you must register the car with the state and tag it with a license. In both of those cases, everyone sees that there is an important reason to secure registration" both because it makes the markets more efficient and because it better secures the rights of the owner. Without a registration system for land, landowners would perpetually have to guard their property. With registration, they can simply point the police to a deed. Without a registration system for cars, auto theft would be much easier. With a registration system, the thief has a high burden to sell a stolen car. A slight burden is placed on the property owner, but those burdens produce a much better system of protection for property generally. + +It is similarly special physics that makes formalities important in copyright law. Unlike a carpenter's table, there's nothing in nature that makes it relatively obvious who might own a particular bit of creative property. A recording of Lyle Lovett's latest album can exist in a billion places without anything necessarily linking it back to a particular owner. And like a car, there's no way to buy and sell creative property with confidence unless there is some simple way to authenticate who is the author and what rights he has. Simple transactions are destroyed in a world without formalities. Complex, expensive, /{lawyer}/ transactions take their place. + +This was the understanding of the problem with the Sonny Bono Act that we tried to demonstrate to the Court. This was the part it didn't "get." Because we live in a system without formalities, there is no way easily to build upon or use culture from our past. If copyright terms were, as Justice Story said they would be, "short," then this wouldn't matter much. For fourteen years, under the framers' system, a work would be presumptively controlled. After fourteen years, it would be presumptively uncontrolled. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) : + Supreme Court challenge of ; + Story, Joseph +} + +But now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process. If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before /{because there are no formalities}/. + +The Eldred Act was designed to respond to exactly this problem. If it is worth $1 to you, then register your work and you can get the longer term. Others will know how to contact you and, therefore, how to get your permission if they want to use your work. And you will get the benefit of an extended copyright term. + +If it isn't worth it to you to register to get the benefit of an extended term, then it shouldn't be worth it for the government to defend your monopoly over that work either. The work should pass into the public domain where anyone can copy it, or build archives with it, or create a movie based on it. It should become free if it is not worth $1 to you. + +Some worry about the burden on authors. Won't the burden of registering the work mean that the $1 is really misleading? Isn't the hassle worth more than $1? Isn't that the real problem with registration? + +It is. The hassle is terrible. The system that exists now is awful. I completely agree that the Copyright Office has done a terrible job (no doubt because they are terribly funded) in enabling simple and cheap registrations. Any real solution to the problem of formalities must address the real problem of /{governments}/ standing at the core of any system of formalities. In this book, I offer such a solution. That solution essentially remakes the Copyright Office. For now, assume it was Amazon that ran the registration system. Assume it was one-click registration. The Eldred Act would propose a simple, one-click registration fifty years after a work was published. Based upon historical data, that system would move up to 98 percent of commercial work, commercial work that no longer had a commercial life, into the public domain within fifty years. What do you think? +={ Copyright Office ; + public domain : + content industry opposition to +15 +} + +!_ When Steve Forbes +endorsed the idea, some in Washington began to pay attention. Many people contacted me pointing to representatives who might be willing to introduce the Eldred Act. And I had a few who directly suggested that they might be willing to take the first step. +={ Forbes, Steve } + +One representative, Zoe Lofgren of California, went so far as to get the bill drafted. The draft solved any problem with international law. It imposed the simplest requirement upon copyright owners possible. In May 2003, it looked as if the bill would be introduced. On May 16, I posted on the Eldred Act blog, "we are close." There was a general reaction in the blog community that something good might happen here. +={ Lofgren, Zoe } + +But at this stage, the lobbyists began to intervene. Jack Valenti and the MPAA general counsel came to the congresswoman's office to give the view of the MPAA. Aided by his lawyer, as Valenti told me, Valenti informed the congresswoman that the MPAA would oppose the Eldred Act. The reasons are embarrassingly thin. More importantly, their thinness shows something clear about what this debate is really about. +={ Valenti, Jack : + Eldred Act opposed by ; + film industry : + trade association of +2 ; + Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) +2 +} + +The MPAA argued first that Congress had "firmly rejected the central concept in the proposed bill" - that copyrights be renewed. That was true, but irrelevant, as Congress's "firm rejection" had occurred long before the Internet made subsequent uses much more likely. Second, they argued that the proposal would harm poor copyright owners - apparently those who could not afford the $1 fee. Third, they argued that Congress had determined that extending a copyright term would encourage restoration work. Maybe in the case of the small percentage of work covered by copyright law that is still commercially valuable, but again this was irrelevant, as the proposal would not cut off the extended term unless the $1 fee was not paid. Fourth, the MPAA argued that the bill would impose "enormous" costs, since a registration system is not free. True enough, but those costs are certainly less than the costs of clearing the rights for a copyright whose owner is not known. Fifth, they worried about the risks if the copyright to a story underlying a film were to pass into the public domain. But what risk is that? If it is in the public domain, then the film is a valid derivative use. +={ films : + in public domain ; + public domain : + films in +} + +Finally, the MPAA argued that existing law enabled copyright owners to do this if they wanted. But the whole point is that there are thousands of copyright owners who don't even know they have a copyright to give. Whether they are free to give away their copyright or not - a controversial claim in any case - unless they know about a copyright, they're not likely to. + +!_ At the beginning +of this book, I told two stories about the law reacting to changes in technology. In the one, common sense prevailed. In the other, common sense was delayed. The difference between the two stories was the power of the opposition - the power of the side that fought to defend the status quo. In both cases, a new technology threatened old interests. But in only one case did those interest's have the power to protect themselves against this new competitive threat. + +I used these two cases as a way to frame the war that this book has been about. For here, too, a new technology is forcing the law to react. And here, too, we should ask, is the law following or resisting common sense? If common sense supports the law, what explains this common sense? + +When the issue is piracy, it is right for the law to back the copyright owners. The commercial piracy that I described is wrong and harmful, and the law should work to eliminate it. When the issue is p2p sharing, it is easy to understand why the law backs the owners still: Much of this sharing is wrong, even if much is harmless. When the issue is copyright terms for the Mickey Mouses of the world, it is possible still to understand why the law favors Hollywood: Most people don't recognize the reasons for limiting copyright terms; it is thus still possible to see good faith within the resistance. + +But when the copyright owners oppose a proposal such as the Eldred Act, then, finally, there is an example that lays bare the naked self-interest driving this war. This act would free an extraordinary range of content that is otherwise unused. It wouldn't interfere with any copyright owner's desire to exercise continued control over his content. It would simply liberate what Kevin Kelly calls the "Dark Content" that fills archives around the world. So when the warriors oppose a change like this, we should ask one simple question: +={ Eldred Act +3 ; + Kelly, Kevin +} + +What does this industry really want? + +With very little effort, the warriors could protect their content. So the effort to block something like the Eldred Act is not really about protecting /{their}/ content. The effort to block the Eldred Act is an effort to assure that nothing more passes into the public domain. It is another step to assure that the public domain will never compete, that there will be no use of content that is not commercially controlled, and that there will be no commercial use of content that doesn't require /{their}/ permission first. + +The opposition to the Eldred Act reveals how extreme the other side is. The most powerful and sexy and well loved of lobbies really has as its aim not the protection of "property" but the rejection of a tradition. Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. /{Their aim is to assure that all there is is what is theirs}/. + +It is not hard to understand why the warriors take this view. It is not hard to see why it would benefit them if the competition of the public domain tied to the Internet could somehow be quashed. Just as RCA feared the competition of FM, they fear the competition of a public domain connected to a public that now has the means to create with it and to share its own creation. +={ radio : + FM spectrum of ; + FM radio ; + RCA +} + +What is hard to understand is why the public takes this view. It is as if the law made airplanes trespassers. The MPAA stands with the Causbys and demands that their remote and useless property rights be respected, so that these remote and forgotten copyright holders might block the progress of others. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee ; + Causby, Tinie ; + film industry : + trade association of ; + Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) +} + +All this seems to follow easily from this untroubled acceptance of the "property" in intellectual property. Common sense supports it, and so long as it does, the assaults will rain down upon the technologies of the Internet. The consequence will be an increasing "permission society." The past can be cultivated only if you can identify the owner and gain permission to build upon his work. The future will be controlled by this dead (and often unfindable) hand of the past. + +:B~ CONCLUSION + +1~conclusion [Conclusion]-# + +!_ There are more +than 35 million people with the AIDS virus worldwide. Twenty-five million of them live in sub-Saharan Africa. Seventeen million have already died. Seventeen million Africans is proportional percentage-wise to seven million Americans. More importantly, it is seventeen million Africans. +={ Africa, medications for HIV patients in +15 ; + AIDS medications +15 ; + antiretroviral drugs +15 ; + developing countries, foreign patent costs in +15 ; + drugs : + pharmaceutical +15 ; + HIV/AIDS therapies +15 +} + +There is no cure for AIDS, but there are drugs to slow its progression. These antiretroviral therapies are still experimental, but they have already had a dramatic effect. In the United States, AIDS patients who regularly take a cocktail of these drugs increase their life expectancy by ten to twenty years. For some, the drugs make the disease almost invisible. + +These drugs are expensive. When they were first introduced in the United States, they cost between $10,000 and $15,000 per person per year. Today, some cost $25,000 per year. At these prices, of course, no African nation can afford the drugs for the vast majority of its population: $15,000 is thirty times the per capita gross national product of Zimbabwe. At these prices, the drugs are totally unavailable.~{ Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, "Final Report: Integrating Intellectual Property Rights and Development Policy" (London, 2002), available at link #55. According to a World Health Organization press release issued 9 July 2002, only 230,000 of the 6 million who need drugs in the developing world receive them - and half of them are in Brazuil. }~ + +These prices are not high because the ingredients of the drugs are expensive. These prices are high because the drugs are protected by patents. The drug companies that produced these life-saving mixes enjoy at least a twenty-year monopoly for their inventions. They use that monopoly power to extract the most they can from the market. That power is in turn used to keep the prices high. +={ patents : + on pharmaceuticals +14 ; + pharmaceutical patents +14 +} + +There are many who are skeptical of patents, especially drug patents. I am not. Indeed, of all the areas of research that might be supported by patents, drug research is, in my view, the clearest case where patents are needed. The patent gives the drug company some assurance that if it is successful in inventing a new drug to treat a disease, it will be able to earn back its investment and more. This is socially an extremely valuable incentive. I am the last person who would argue that the law should abolish it, at least without other changes. + +But it is one thing to support patents, even drug patents. It is another thing to determine how best to deal with a crisis. And as African leaders began to recognize the devastation that AIDS was bringing, they started looking for ways to import HIV treatments at costs significantly below the market price. + +In 1997, South Africa tried one tack. It passed a law to allow the importation of patented medicines that had been produced or sold in another nation's market with the consent of the patent owner. For example, if the drug was sold in India, it could be imported into Africa from India. This is called "parallel importation," and it is generally permitted under international trade law and is specifically permitted within the European Union.~{ See Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite, /{Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?}/ (New York: The New Press, 2003), 37. }~ +={ international law +11 ; + parallel importation +1 ; + South Africa, Republic of, pharmaceutical imports by +5 +} + +However, the United States government opposed the bill. Indeed, more than opposed. As the International Intellectual Property Association characterized it, "The U.S. government pressured South Africa ... not to permit compulsory licensing or parallel imports."~{ International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI), /{Patent Protection and Access to HIV/AIDS Pharmaceuticals in Sub-Saharan Africa, a Report Prepared for the World Intellectual Property Organization}/ (Washington, D.C., 2000), 14, available at link #56. For a firsthand account of the struggle over South Africa, see Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, House Committee on Government Reform, H. Rep., 1st sess., Ser. No. 106-126 (22 July 1999), 150-57 (statement of James Love). }~ Through the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the government asked South Africa to change the law - and to add pressure to that request, in 1998, the USTR listed South Africa for possible trade sanctions. That same year, more than forty pharmaceutical companies began proceedings in the South African courts to challenge the govern-ment's actions. The United States was then joined by other governments from the EU. Their claim, and the claim of the pharmaceutical companies, was that South Africa was violating its obligations under international law by discriminating against a particular kind of patent - pharmaceutical patents. The demand of these governments, with the United States in the lead, was that South Africa respect these patents as it respects any other patent, regardless of any effect on the treatment of AIDS within South Africa.~{ International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI), /{Patent Protection and Access to HIV/AIDS Pharmaceuticals in Sub-Saharan Africa, a Report Prepared for the World Intellectual Property Organization}/ (Washington, D.C., 2000), 15. }~ +={ United States Trade Representative (USTR) } + +We should place the intervention by the United States in context. No doubt patents are not the most important reason that Africans don't have access to drugs. Poverty and the total absence of an effective health care infrastructure matter more. But whether patents are the most important reason or not, the price of drugs has an effect on their demand, and patents affect price. And so, whether massive or marginal, there was an effect from our government's intervention to stop the flow of medications into Africa. + +By stopping the flow of HIV treatment into Africa, the United States government was not saving drugs for United States citizens. This is not like wheat (if they eat it, we can't); instead, the flow that the United States intervened to stop was, in effect, a flow of knowledge: information about how to take chemicals that exist within Africa, and turn those chemicals into drugs that would save 15 to 30 million lives. + +Nor was the intervention by the United States going to protect the profits of United States drug companies - at least, not substantially. It was not as if these countries were in the position to buy the drugs for the prices the drug companies were charging. Again, the Africans are wildly too poor to afford these drugs at the offered prices. Stopping the parallel import of these drugs would not substantially increase the sales by U.S. companies. + +Instead, the argument in favor of restricting this flow of information, which was needed to save the lives of millions, was an argument about the sanctity of property.~{ See Sabin Russell, "New Crusade to Lower AIDS Drug Costs: Africa's Needs at Odds with Firms' Profit Motive," /{San Francisco Chronicle,}/ 24 May 1999, A1, available at link #57 ("compulsory licenses and gray markets pose a threat to the entire system of intellectual property protection"); Robert Weissman, "AIDS and Developing Countries: Democratizing Access to Essential Medicines," /{Foreign Policy in Focus}/ 4:23 (August 1999), available at link #58 (describing U.S. policy); John A. Harrelson, "TRIPS, Pharmaceutical Patents, and the HIV/AIDS Crisis: Finding the Proper Balance Between Intellectual Property Rights and Compassion, a Synopsis," /{Widener Law Symposium Journal}/ (Spring 2001): 175. }~ It was because "intellectual property" would be violated that these drugs should not flow into Africa. It was a principle about the importance of "intellectual property" that led these government actors to intervene against the South African response to AIDS. + +Now just step back for a moment. There will be a time thirty years from now when our children look back at us and ask, how could we have let this happen? How could we allow a policy to be pursued whose direct cost would be to speed the death of 15 to 30 million Africans, and whose only real benefit would be to uphold the "sanctity" of an idea? What possible justification could there ever be for a policy that results in so many deaths? What exactly is the insanity that would allow so many to die for such an abstraction? + +Some blame the drug companies. I don't. They are corporations. Their managers are ordered by law to make money for the corporation. They push a certain patent policy not because of ideals, but because it is the policy that makes them the most money. And it only makes them the most money because of a certain corruption within our political system - a corruption the drug companies are certainly not responsible for. +={ corporations : + in pharmaceutical industry +2 +} + +The corruption is our own politicians' failure of integrity. For the drug companies would love - they say, and I believe them - to sell their drugs as cheaply as they can to countries in Africa and elsewhere. There are issues they'd have to resolve to make sure the drugs didn't get back into the United States, but those are mere problems of technology. They could be overcome. + +A different problem, however, could not be overcome. This is the fear of the grandstanding politician who would call the presidents of the drug companies before a Senate or House hearing, and ask, "How is it you can sell this HIV drug in Africa for only $1 a pill, but the same drug would cost an American $1,500?" Because there is no "sound bite" answer to that question, its effect would be to induce regulation of prices in America. The drug companies thus avoid this spiral by avoiding the first step. They reinforce the idea that property should be sacred. They adopt a rational strategy in an irrational context, with the unintended consequence that perhaps millions die. And that rational strategy thus becomes framed in terms of this ideal - the sanctity of an idea called "intellectual property." +={ intellectual property rights : + of drug patents +3 +} + +So when the common sense of your child confronts you, what will you say? When the common sense of a generation finally revolts against what we have done, how will we justify what we have done? What is the argument? + +A sensible patent policy could endorse and strongly support the patent system without having to reach everyone everywhere in exactly the same way. Just as a sensible copyright policy could endorse and strongly support a copyright system without having to regulate the spread of culture perfectly and forever, a sensible patent policy could endorse and strongly support a patent system without having to block the spread of drugs to a country not rich enough to afford market prices in any case. A sensible policy, in other words, could be a balanced policy. For most of our history, both copyright and patent policies were balanced in just this sense. + +But we as a culture have lost this sense of balance. We have lost the critical eye that helps us see the difference between truth and extremism. A certain property fundamentalism, having no connection to our tradition, now reigns in this culture - bizarrely, and with consequences more grave to the spread of ideas and culture than almost any other single policy decision that we as a democracy will make. + +!_ A simple idea +blinds us, and under the cover of darkness, much happens that most of us would reject if any of us looked. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in ideas that we don't even notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a people who are dying without them. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically. Blindness becomes our common sense. And the challenge for anyone who would reclaim the right to cultivate our culture is to find a way to make this common sense open its eyes. + +So far, common sense sleeps. There is no revolt. Common sense does not yet see what there could be to revolt about. The extremism that now dominates this debate fits with ideas that seem natural, and that fit is reinforced by the RCAs of our day. They wage a frantic war to fight "piracy," and devastate a culture for creativity. They defend the idea of "creative property," while transforming real creators into modern-day sharecroppers. They are insulted by the idea that rights should be balanced, even though each of the major players in this content war was itself a beneficiary of a more balanced ideal. The hypocrisy reeks. Yet in a city like Washington, hypocrisy is not even noticed. Powerful lobbies, complex issues, and MTV attention spans produce the "perfect storm" for free culture. + +!_ In August 2003, +a fight broke out in the United States about a decision by the World Intellectual Property Organization to cancel a meeting.~{ Jonathan Krim, "The Quiet War over Open-Source," /{Washington Post,}/ 21 August 2003, E1, available at link #59; William New, "Global Group's Shift on 'Open Source' Meeting Spurs Stir," National Journal's Technology Daily, 19 August 2003, available at link #60; William New, "U.S. Official Opposes 'Open Source' Talks at WIPO," /{National Journal's Technology Daily,}/ 19 August 2003, available at link #61. }~ At the request of a wide range of interests, WIPO had decided to hold a meeting to discuss "open and collaborative projects to create public goods." These are projects that have been successful in producing public goods without relying exclusively upon a proprietary use of intellectual property. Examples include the Internet and the World Wide Web, both of which were developed on the basis of protocols in the public domain. It included an emerging trend to support open academic journals, including the Public Library of Science project that I describe in the Afterword. It included a project to develop single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are thought to have great significance in biomedical research. (That nonprofit project comprised a consortium of the Wellcome Trust and pharmaceutical and technological companies, including Amersham Biosciences, AstraZeneca, Aventis, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Hoffmann-La Roche, Glaxo- SmithKline, IBM, Motorola, Novartis, Pfizer, and Searle.) It included the Global Positioning System, which Ronald Reagan set free in the early 1980s. And it included "open source and free software." +={ academic journals ; + biomedical research ; + intellectual property rights : + international organization on issues of +4 ; + Internet : + development of ; + PLoS (Public Library of Science) ; + Public Library of Science (PLoS) ; + public domain : + public projects in ; + single nucleotied polymorphisms (SNPs) ; + Wellcome Trust ; + World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) +4 ; + World Wide Web ; + Global Positioning System ; + Reagan, Ronald +} + +The aim of the meeting was to consider this wide range of projects from one common perspective: that none of these projects relied upon intellectual property extremism. Instead, in all of them, intellectual property was balanced by agreements to keep access open or to impose limitations on the way in which proprietary claims might be used. + +From the perspective of this book, then, the conference was ideal.~{ I should disclose that I was one of the people who asked WIPO for the meeting. }~ The projects within its scope included both commercial and noncommercial work. They primarily involved science, but from many perspectives. And WIPO was an ideal venue for this discussion, since WIPO is the preeminent international body dealing with intellectual property issues. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + in international debate on intellectual property +4 +} + +Indeed, I was once publicly scolded for not recognizing this fact about WIPO. In February 2003, I delivered a keynote address to a preparatory conference for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). At a press conference before the address, I was asked what I would say. I responded that I would be talking a little about the importance of balance in intellectual property for the development of an information society. The moderator for the event then promptly interrupted to inform me and the assembled reporters that no question about intellectual property would be discussed by WSIS, since those questions were the exclusive domain of WIPO. In the talk that I had prepared, I had actually made the issue of intellectual property relatively minor. But after this astonishing statement, I made intellectual property the sole focus of my talk. There was no way to talk about an "Information Society" unless one also talked about the range of information and culture that would be free. My talk did not make my immoderate moderator very happy. And she was no doubt correct that the scope of intellectual property protections was ordinarily the stuff of WIPO. But in my view, there couldn't be too much of a conversation about how much intellectual property is needed, since in my view, the very idea of balance in intellectual property had been lost. +={ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) +1 } + +So whether or not WSIS can discuss balance in intellectual property, I had thought it was taken for granted that WIPO could and should. And thus the meeting about "open and collaborative projects to create public goods" seemed perfectly appropriate within the WIPO agenda. + +But there is one project within that list that is highly controversial, at least among lobbyists. That project is "open source and free software." Microsoft in particular is wary of discussion of the subject. From its perspective, a conference to discuss open source and free software would be like a conference to discuss Apple's operating system. Both open source and free software compete with Microsoft's software. And internationally, many governments have begun to explore requirements that they use open source or free software, rather than "proprietary software," for their own internal uses. +={ free software/open-source software (FS/OSS) +7 ; + Apple Corporation ; + Microsoft : + on free software +4 +} + +I don't mean to enter that debate here. It is important only to make clear that the distinction is not between commercial and noncommercial software. There are many important companies that depend fundamentally upon open source and free software, IBM being the most prominent. IBM is increasingly shifting its focus to the GNU/Linux operating system, the most famous bit of "free software" - and IBM is emphatically a commercial entity. Thus, to support "open source and free software" is not to oppose commercial entities. It is, instead, to support a mode of software development that is different from Microsoft's.~{ Microsoft's position about free and open source software is more sophisticated. As it has repeatedly asserted, it has no problem with "open source" software or software in the public domain. Microsoft's principal opposition is to "free software" licensed under a "copyleft" license, meaning a license that requires the licensee to adopt the same terms on any derivative work. See Bradford L. Smith, "The Future of Software: Enabling the Marketplace to Decide," /{Government Policy Toward Open Source Software}/ (Washington, D.C.: AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 2002), 69, available at link #62. See also Craig Mundie, Microsoft senior vice president, /{The Commercial Software Model,}/ discussion at New York University Stern School of Business (3 May 2001), available at link #63. }~ +={ GNU/Linux operating system ; + Linux operating system ; + IBM +} + +More important for our purposes, to support "open source and free software" is not to oppose copyright. "Open source and free software" is not software in the public domain. Instead, like Microsoft's software, the copyright owners of free and open source software insist quite strongly that the terms of their software license be respected by adopters of free and open source software. The terms of that license are no doubt different from the terms of a proprietary software license. Free software licensed under the General Public License (GPL), for example, requires that the source code for the software be made available by anyone who modifies and redistributes the software. But that requirement is effective only if copyright governs software. If copyright did not govern software, then free software could not impose the same kind of requirements on its adopters. It thus depends upon copyright law just as Microsoft does. +={ General Public License (GPL) ; + GPL (General Public License) +} + +It is therefore understandable that as a proprietary software developer, Microsoft would oppose this WIPO meeting, and understandable that it would use its lobbyists to get the United States government to oppose it, as well. And indeed, that is just what was reported to have happened. According to Jonathan Krim of the /{Washington Post}/, Microsoft's lobbyists succeeded in getting the United States government to veto the meeting.~{ Krim, "The Quiet War over Open-Source," available at link #64. }~ And without U.S. backing, the meeting was canceled. +={ intellectual property rights : + international organization on issues of +11 ; + World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) +11 ; + Krim, Jonathan +2 ; + Microsoft : + WIPO meeting opposed by +} + +I don't blame Microsoft for doing what it can to advance its own interests, consistent with the law. And lobbying governments is plainly consistent with the law. There was nothing surprising about its lobbying here, and nothing terribly surprising about the most powerful software producer in the United States having succeeded in its lobbying efforts. + +What was surprising was the United States government's reason for opposing the meeting. Again, as reported by Krim, Lois Boland, acting director of international relations for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, explained that "open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights." She is quoted as saying, "To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO." +={ Boland, Lois +10 ; + Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. +15 ; + intellectual property rights : + U.S. Patent Office on private control of +15 +} + +% PTO range not properly identified, recheck + +These statements are astonishing on a number of levels. + +First, they are just flat wrong. As I described, most open source and free software relies fundamentally upon the intellectual property right called "copyright." Without it, restrictions imposed by those licenses wouldn't work. Thus, to say it "runs counter" to the mission of promoting intellectual property rights reveals an extraordinary gap in under- standing - the sort of mistake that is excusable in a first-year law student, but an embarrassment from a high government official dealing with intellectual property issues. + +Second, who ever said that WIPO's exclusive aim was to "promote" intellectual property maximally? As I had been scolded at the preparatory conference of WSIS, WIPO is to consider not only how best to protect intellectual property, but also what the best balance of intellectual property is. As every economist and lawyer knows, the hard question in intellectual property law is to find that balance. But that there should be limits is, I had thought, uncontested. One wants to ask Ms. Boland, are generic drugs (drugs based on drugs whose patent has expired) contrary to the WIPO mission? Does the public domain weaken intellectual property? Would it have been better if the protocols of the Internet had been patented? +={ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) ; + drugs : + pharmaceutical ; + generic drugs ; + patents : + on pharmaceuticals +} + +Third, even if one believed that the purpose of WIPO was to maximize intellectual property rights, in our tradition, intellectual property rights are held by individuals and corporations. They get to decide what to do with those rights because, again, they are /{their}/ rights. If they want to "waive" or "disclaim" their rights, that is, within our tradition, totally appropriate. When Bill Gates gives away more than $20 billion to do good in the world, that is not inconsistent with the objectives of the property system. That is, on the contrary, just what a property system is supposed to be about: giving individuals the right to decide what to do with /{their}/ property. +={ Gates, Bill } + +When Ms. Boland says that there is something wrong with a meeting "which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights," she's saying that WIPO has an interest in interfering with the choices of the individuals who own intellectual property rights. That somehow, WIPO's objective should be to stop an individual from "waiving" or "dis-claiming" an intellectual property right. That the interest of WIPO is not just that intellectual property rights be maximized, but that they also should be exercised in the most extreme and restrictive way possible. + +There is a history of just such a property system that is well known in the Anglo-American tradition. It is called "feudalism." Under feudalism, not only was property held by a relatively small number of individuals and entities. And not only were the rights that ran with that property powerful and extensive. But the feudal system had a strong interest in assuring that property holders within that system not weaken feudalism by liberating people or property within their control to the free market. Feudalism depended upon maximum control and concentration. It fought any freedom that might interfere with that control. +={ feudal system +1 ; + property rights : + feudal system of +1 +} + +As Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite relate, this is precisely the choice we are now making about intellectual property.~{ See Drahos with Braithwaite, /{Information Feudalism,}/ 210-20. }~ We will have an information society. That much is certain. Our only choice now is whether that information society will be /{free}/ or /{feudal}/. The trend is toward the feudal. +={ Braithwait, John ; + Drahos, Peter +} + +When this battle broke, I blogged it. A spirited debate within the comment section ensued. Ms. Boland had a number of supporters who tried to show why her comments made sense. But there was one comment that was particularly depressing for me. An anonymous poster wrote, +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + in international debate on intellectual property +5 } + +_1 George, you misunderstand Lessig: He's only talking about the world as it should be ("the goal of WIPO, and the goal of any government, should be to promote the right balance of intellectual- property rights, not simply to promote intellectual property rights"), not as it is. If we were talking about the world as it is, then of course Boland didn't say anything wrong. But in the world as Lessig would have it, then of course she did. Always pay attention to the distinction between Lessig's world and ours." + +I missed the irony the first time I read it. I read it quickly and thought the poster was supporting the idea that seeking balance was what our government should be doing. (Of course, my criticism of Ms. Boland was not about whether she was seeking balance or not; my criticism was that her comments betrayed a first-year law student's mistake. I have no illusion about the extremism of our government, whether Republican or Democrat. My only illusion apparently is about whether our government should speak the truth or not.) + +Obviously, however, the poster was not supporting that idea. Instead, the poster was ridiculing the very idea that in the real world, the "goal" of a government should be "to promote the right balance" of intellectual property. That was obviously silly to him. And it obviously betrayed, he believed, my own silly utopianism. "Typical for an academic," the poster might well have continued. + +I understand criticism of academic utopianism. I think utopianism is silly, too, and I'd be the first to poke fun at the absurdly unrealistic ideals of academics throughout history (and not just in our own country's history). + +But when it has become silly to suppose that the role of our government should be to "seek balance," then count me with the silly, for that means that this has become quite serious indeed. If it should be obvious to everyone that the government does not seek balance, that the government is simply the tool of the most powerful lobbyists, that the idea of holding the government to a different standard is absurd, that the idea of demanding of the government that it speak truth and not lies is just naïve, then who have we, the most powerful democracy in the world, become? + +It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of our history - free culture. + +If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon. + +!_ There are moments +of hope in this struggle. And moments that surprise. When the FCC was considering relaxing ownership rules, which would thereby further increase the concentration in media ownership, an extraordinary bipartisan coalition formed to fight this change. For perhaps the first time in history, interests as diverse as the NRA, the ACLU, Moveon.org, William Safire, Ted Turner, and CodePink Women for Peace organized to oppose this change in FCC policy. An astonishing 700,000 letters were sent to the FCC, demanding more hearings and a different result. +={ CodePink Women for Peace ; + FCC : + media ownership regulated by +1 ; + media : + ownership concentration in +6 ; + Safire, William ; + Turner, Ted +} + +This activism did not stop the FCC, but soon after, a broad coalition in the Senate voted to reverse the FCC decision. The hostile hearings leading up to that vote revealed just how powerful this movement had become. There was no substantial support for the FCC's decision, and there was broad and sustained support for fighting further concentration in the media. +={ Senate, U.S. : + FCC media ownership rules reversed by +} + +But even this movement misses an important piece of the puzzle. Largeness as such is not bad. Freedom is not threatened just because some become very rich, or because there are only a handful of big players. The poor quality of Big Macs or Quarter Pounders does not mean that you can't get a good hamburger from somewhere else. + +The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces. It is not just that there are a few powerful companies that control an ever expanding slice of the media. It is that this concentration can call upon an equally bloated range of rights - property rights of a historically extreme form - that makes their bigness bad. + +It is therefore significant that so many would rally to demand competition and increased diversity. Still, if the rally is understood as being about bigness alone, it is not terribly surprising. We Americans have a long history of fighting "big," wisely or not. That we could be motivated to fight "big" again is not something new. + +It would be something new, and something very important, if an equal number could be rallied to fight the increasing extremism built within the idea of "intellectual property." Not because balance is alien to our tradition; indeed, as I've argued, balance is our tradition. But because the muscle to think critically about the scope of anything called "property" is not well exercised within this tradition anymore. + +If we were Achilles, this would be our heel. This would be the place of our tragedy. + +!_ As I write +these final words, the news is filled with stories about the RIAA lawsuits against almost three hundred individuals.~{ John Borland, "RIAA Sues 261 File Swappers," CNET News.com, 8 September 2003, available at link #65; Paul R. La Monica, "Music Industry Sues Swappers," CNN/Money, 8 September 2003, available at link #66; Soni Sangha and Phyllis Furman with Robert Gearty, "Sued for a Song, N.Y.C. 12-Yr-Old Among 261 Cited as Sharers," /{New York Daily News,}/ 9 September 2003, 3; Frank Ahrens, "RIAA's Lawsuits Meet Surprised Targets; Single Mother in Calif., 12-Year-Old Girl in N.Y. Among Defendants," /{Washington Post,}/ 10 September 2003, E1; Katie Dean, "Schoolgirl Settles with RIAA," /{Wired News,}/ 10 September 2003, available at link #67. }~ Eminem has just been sued for "sampling" someone else's music.~{ Jon Wiederhorn, "Eminem Gets Sued ... by a Little Old Lady," mtv.com, 17 September 2003, available at link #68. }~ The story about Bob Dylan "stealing" from a Japanese author has just finished making the rounds.~{ Kenji Hall, Associated Press, "Japanese Book May Be Inspiration for Dylan Songs," Kansascity.com, 9 July 2003, available at link #69. }~ An insider from Hollywood - who insists he must remain anonymous - reports "an amazing conversation with these studio guys. They've got extraordinary [old] content that they'd love to use but can't because they can't begin to clear the rights. They've got scores of kids who could do amazing things with the content, but it would take scores of lawyers to clean it first." Congressmen are talking about deputizing computer viruses to bring down computers thought to violate the law. Universities are threatening expulsion for kids who use a computer to share content. +={ Dylan, Bob ; + Eminem ; + university computer networks, p2p sharing on ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + individual defendants intimidated by | in recording industry ; + recording industry : + copyright infringement lawsuits of ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + copyright infringement lawsuits filed by +} + +Yet on the other side of the Atlantic, the BBC has just announced that it will build a "Creative Archive," from which British citizens can download BBC content, and rip, mix, and burn it.~{ "BBC Plans to Open Up Its Archive to the Public," BBC press release, 24 August 2003, available at link #70. }~ And in Brazil, the culture minister, Gilberto Gil, himself a folk hero of Brazilian music, has joined with Creative Commons to release content and free licenses in that Latin American country.~{ "Creative Commons and Brazil," Creative Commons Weblog, 6 August 2003, available at link #71. }~ +={ BBC ; + Brazil, free culture in ; + Creative Commons ; + Gil, Gilberto ; + United Kingdom : + public creative archive in +} + +I've told a dark story. The truth is more mixed. A technology has given us a new freedom. Slowly, some begin to understand that this freedom need not mean anarchy. We can carry a free culture into the twenty-first century, without artists losing and without the potential of digital technology being destroyed. It will take some thought, and more importantly, it will take some will to transform the RCAs of our day into the Causbys. + +Common sense must revolt. It must act to free culture. Soon, if this potential is ever to be realized. + +:B~ AFTERWORD + +1~intro_afterword [Intro]-# + +!_ At least some +who have read this far will agree with me that something must be done to change where we are heading. The balance of this book maps what might be done. +={ copyright : + voluntary reform efforts on +3 +} + +I divide this map into two parts: that which anyone can do now, and that which requires the help of lawmakers. If there is one lesson that we can draw from the history of remaking common sense, it is that it requires remaking how many people think about the very same issue. + +That means this movement must begin in the streets. It must recruit a significant number of parents, teachers, librarians, creators, authors, musicians, filmmakers, scientists - all to tell this story in their own words, and to tell their neighbors why this battle is so important. + +Once this movement has its effect in the streets, it has some hope of having an effect in Washington. We are still a democracy. What people think matters. Not as much as it should, at least when an RCA stands opposed, but still, it matters. And thus, in the second part below, I sketch changes that Congress could make to better secure a free culture. +={ RCA } + +1~us US, NOW +={ copyright : + voluntary reform efforts on +45 +} + +!_ Common sense +is with the copyright warriors because the debate so far has been framed at the extremes - as a grand either/or: either property or anarchy, either total control or artists won't be paid. If that really is the choice, then the warriors should win. + +The mistake here is the error of the excluded middle. There are extremes in this debate, but the extremes are not all that there is. There are those who believe in maximal copyright - "All Rights Reserved" - and those who reject copyright - "No Rights Reserved." The "All Rights Reserved" sorts believe that you should ask permission before you "use" a copyrighted work in any way. The "No Rights Reserved" sorts believe you should be able to do with content as you wish, regardless of whether you have permission or not. + +When the Internet was first born, its initial architecture effectively tilted in the "no rights reserved" direction. Content could be copied perfectly and cheaply; rights could not easily be controlled. Thus, regardless of anyone's desire, the effective regime of copyright under the original design of the Internet was "no rights reserved." Content was "taken" regardless of the rights. Any rights were effectively unprotected. +={ Internet : + development of +1 | initial free character of +1 +} + +This initial character produced a reaction (opposite, but not quite equal) by copyright owners. That reaction has been the topic of this book. Through legislation, litigation, and changes to the network's design, copyright holders have been able to change the essential character of the environment of the original Internet. If the original architecture made the effective default "no rights reserved," the future architecture will make the effective default "all rights reserved." The architecture and law that surround the Internet's design will increasingly produce an environment where all use of content requires permission. The "cut and paste" world that defines the Internet today will become a "get permission to cut and paste" world that is a creator's nightmare. + +What's needed is a way to say something in the middle - neither "all rights reserved" nor "no rights reserved" but "some rights reserved" - and thus a way to respect copyrights but enable creators to free content as they see fit. In other words, we need a way to restore a set of freedoms that we could just take for granted before. + +2~ Rebuilding Freedoms Previously Presumed: Examples +={ free culture : + restoration efforts on previous aspects of +22 +} + +If you step back from the battle I've been describing here, you will recognize this problem from other contexts. Think about privacy. Before the Internet, most of us didn't have to worry much about data about our lives that we broadcast to the world. If you walked into a bookstore and browsed through some of the works of Karl Marx, you didn't need to worry about explaining your browsing habits to your neighbors or boss. The "privacy" of your browsing habits was assured. +={ browsing +4 ; + privacy rights +5 +} + +What made it assured? + +Well, if we think in terms of the modalities I described in chapter 10, your privacy was assured because of an inefficient architecture for gathering data and hence a market constraint (cost) on anyone who wanted to gather that data. If you were a suspected spy for North Korea, working for the CIA, no doubt your privacy would not be assured. But that's because the CIA would (we hope) find it valuable enough to spend the thousands required to track you. But for most of us (again, we can hope), spying doesn't pay. The highly inefficient architecture of real space means we all enjoy a fairly robust amount of privacy. That privacy is guaranteed to us by friction. Not by law (there is no law protecting "privacy" in public places), and in many places, not by norms (snooping and gossip are just fun), but instead, by the costs that friction imposes on anyone who would want to spy. + +Enter the Internet, where the cost of tracking browsing in particular has become quite tiny. If you're a customer at Amazon, then as you browse the pages, Amazon collects the data about what you've looked at. You know this because at the side of the page, there's a list of "recently viewed" pages. Now, because of the architecture of the Net and the function of cookies on the Net, it is easier to collect the data than not. The friction has disappeared, and hence any "privacy" protected by the friction disappears, too. +={ Amazon +1 ; + cookies, Internet ; + Internet : + privacy protection on +2 +} + +Amazon, of course, is not the problem. But we might begin to worry about libraries. If you're one of those crazy lefties who thinks that people should have the "right" to browse in a library without the government knowing which books you look at (I'm one of those lefties, too), then this change in the technology of monitoring might concern you. If it becomes simple to gather and sort who does what in electronic spaces, then the friction-induced privacy of yesterday disappears. +={ libraries : + privacy rights in use of +} + +It is this reality that explains the push of many to define "privacy" on the Internet. It is the recognition that technology can remove what friction before gave us that leads many to push for laws to do what friction did.~{ See, for example, Marc Rotenberg, "Fair Information Practices and the Architecture of Privacy (What Larry Doesn't Get)," /{Stanford Technology Law Review}/ 1 (2001): par. 6-18, available at link #72 (describing examples in which technology defines privacy policy). See also Jeffrey Rosen, /{The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age}/ (New York: Random House, 2004) (mapping tradeoffs between technology and privacy). }~ And whether you're in favor of those laws or not, it is the pattern that is important here. We must take affirmative steps to secure a kind of freedom that was passively provided before. A change in technology now forces those who believe in privacy to affirmatively act where, before, privacy was given by default. + +A similar story could be told about the birth of the free software movement. When computers with software were first made available commercially, the software - both the source code and the binaries - was free. You couldn't run a program written for a Data General machine on an IBM machine, so Data General and IBM didn't care much about controlling their software. +={ Data General ; + IBM ; + free software/open-source software (FS/OSS) +7 +} + +That was the world Richard Stallman was born into, and while he was a researcher at MIT, he grew to love the community that developed when one was free to explore and tinker with the software that ran on machines. Being a smart sort himself, and a talented programmer, Stallman grew to depend upon the freedom to add to or modify other people's work. +={ Stallman, Richard +6 } + +In an academic setting, at least, that's not a terribly radical idea. In a math department, anyone would be free to tinker with a proof that someone offered. If you thought you had a better way to prove a theorem, you could take what someone else did and change it. In a classics department, if you believed a colleague's translation of a recently discovered text was flawed, you were free to improve it. Thus, to Stallman, it seemed obvious that you should be free to tinker with and improve the code that ran a machine. This, too, was knowledge. Why shouldn't it be open for criticism like anything else? + +No one answered that question. Instead, the architecture of revenue for computing changed. As it became possible to import programs from one system to another, it became economically attractive (at least in the view of some) to hide the code of your program. So, too, as companies started selling peripherals for mainframe systems. If I could just take your printer driver and copy it, then that would make it easier for me to sell a printer to the market than it was for you. +={ proprietary code +1 } + +Thus, the practice of proprietary code began to spread, and by the early 1980s, Stallman found himself surrounded by proprietary code. The world of free software had been erased by a change in the economics of computing. And as he believed, if he did nothing about it, then the freedom to change and share software would be fundamentally weakened. + +Therefore, in 1984, Stallman began a project to build a free operating system, so that at least a strain of free software would survive. That was the birth of the GNU project, into which Linus Torvalds's "Linux" kernel was added to produce the GNU/Linux operating system. +={ Torvalds, Linus ; + GNU/Linux operating system ; + Linux operating system +} + +Stallman's technique was to use copyright law to build a world of software that must be kept free. Software licensed under the Free Software Foundation's GPL cannot be modified and distributed unless the source code for that software is made available as well. Thus, anyone building upon GPL'd software would have to make their buildings free as well. This would assure, Stallman believed, that an ecology of code would develop that remained free for others to build upon. His fundamental goal was freedom; innovative creative code was a byproduct. +={ Free Software Foundation ; + General Public License (GPL) ; + GPL (General Public License) +} + +Stallman was thus doing for software what privacy advocates now do for privacy. He was seeking a way to rebuild a kind of freedom that was taken for granted before. Through the affirmative use of licenses that bind copyrighted code, Stallman was affirmatively reclaiming a space where free software would survive. He was actively protecting what before had been passively guaranteed. + +Finally, consider a very recent example that more directly resonates with the story of this book. This is the shift in the way academic and scientific journals are produced. +={ academic journals +7 ; + scientific journals +7 +} + +As digital technologies develop, it is becoming obvious to many that printing thousands of copies of journals every month and sending them to libraries is perhaps not the most efficient way to distribute knowledge. Instead, journals are increasingly becoming electronic, and libraries and their users are given access to these electronic journals through password-protected sites. Something similar to this has been happening in law for almost thirty years: Lexis and Westlaw have had electronic versions of case reports available to subscribers to their service. Although a Supreme Court opinion is not copyrighted, and anyone is free to go to a library and read it, Lexis and Westlaw are also free to charge users for the privilege of gaining access to that Supreme Court opinion through their respective services. +={ Lexis and Westlaw +1 ; + law : + databases of case reports in +1 ; + libraries : + journals in ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + access to opinions of +} + +There's nothing wrong in general with this, and indeed, the ability to charge for access to even public domain materials is a good incentive for people to develop new and innovative ways to spread knowledge. The law has agreed, which is why Lexis and Westlaw have been allowed to flourish. And if there's nothing wrong with selling the public domain, then there could be nothing wrong, in principle, with selling access to material that is not in the public domain. +={ public domain : + access fees for material in | license system for rebuilding of +22 +} + +But what if the only way to get access to social and scientific data was through proprietary services? What if no one had the ability to browse this data except by paying for a subscription? + +As many are beginning to notice, this is increasingly the reality with scientific journals. When these journals were distributed in paper form, libraries could make the journals available to anyone who had access to the library. Thus, patients with cancer could become cancer experts because the library gave them access. Or patients trying to understand the risks of a certain treatment could research those risks by reading all available articles about that treatment. This freedom was therefore a function of the institution of libraries (norms) and the technology of paper journals (architecture) - namely, that it was very hard to control access to a paper journal. +={ libraries : + journals in +2 +} + +As journals become electronic, however, the publishers are demanding that libraries not give the general public access to the journals. This means that the freedoms provided by print journals in public libraries begin to disappear. Thus, as with privacy and with software, a changing technology and market shrink a freedom taken for granted before. + +This shrinking freedom has led many to take affirmative steps to restore the freedom that has been lost. The Public Library of Science (PLoS), for example, is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making scientific research available to anyone with a Web connection. Authors of scientific work submit that work to the Public Library of Science. That work is then subject to peer review. If accepted, the work is then deposited in a public, electronic archive and made permanently available for free. PLoS also sells a print version of its work, but the copyright for the print journal does not inhibit the right of anyone to redistribute the work for free. +={ PLoS (Public Library of Science) ; + Public Library of Science (PLoS) +} + +This is one of many such efforts to restore a freedom taken for granted before, but now threatened by changing technology and markets. There's no doubt that this alternative competes with the traditional publishers and their efforts to make money from the exclusive distribution of content. But competition in our tradition is presumptively a good - especially when it helps spread knowledge and science. + +2~ Rebuilding Free Culture: One Idea +={ free culture : + Creative Commons license for recreation of +16 ; + copyright : + Creative Commons licenses for material in +16 ; + Creative Commons +16 +} + +The same strategy could be applied to culture, as a response to the increasing control effected through law and technology. + +Enter the Creative Commons. The Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation established in Massachusetts, but with its home at Stanford University. Its aim is to build a layer of /{reasonable}/ copyright on top of the extremes that now reign. It does this by making it easy for people to build upon other people's work, by making it simple for creators to express the freedom for others to take and build upon their work. Simple tags, tied to human-readable descriptions, tied to bullet-proof licenses, make this possible. +={ Stanford University } + +/{Simple}/ - which means without a middleman, or without a lawyer. By developing a free set of licenses that people can attach to their content, Creative Commons aims to mark a range of content that can easily, and reliably, be built upon. These tags are then linked to machine-readable versions of the license that enable computers automatically to identify content that can easily be shared. These three expressions together - a legal license, a human-readable description, and machine-readable tags - constitute a Creative Commons license. A Creative Commons license constitutes a grant of freedom to anyone who accesses the license, and more importantly, an expression of the ideal that the person associated with the license believes in something different than the "All" or "No" extremes. Content is marked with the CC mark, which does not mean that copyright is waived, but that certain freedoms are given. + +These freedoms are beyond the freedoms promised by fair use. Their precise contours depend upon the choices the creator makes. The creator can choose a license that permits any use, so long as attribution is given. She can choose a license that permits only noncommercial use. She can choose a license that permits any use so long as the same freedoms are given to other uses ("share and share alike"). Or any use so long as no derivative use is made. Or any use at all within developing nations. Or any sampling use, so long as full copies are not made. Or lastly, any educational use. +={ copyright law : + fair use and +1 ; + fair use : + creative Commons license vs. +1 +} + +These choices thus establish a range of freedoms beyond the default of copyright law. They also enable freedoms that go beyond traditional fair use. And most importantly, they express these freedoms in a way that subsequent users can use and rely upon without the need to hire a lawyer. Creative Commons thus aims to build a layer of content, governed by a layer of reasonable copyright law, that others can build upon. Voluntary choice of individuals and creators will make this content available. And that content will in turn enable us to rebuild a public domain. + +This is just one project among many within the Creative Commons. And of course, Creative Commons is not the only organization pursuing such freedoms. But the point that distinguishes the Creative Commons from many is that we are not interested only in talking about a public domain or in getting legislators to help build a public domain. Our aim is to build a movement of consumers and producers of content ("content conducers," as attorney Mia Garlick calls them) who help build the public domain and, by their work, demonstrate the importance of the public domain to other creativity. +={ Garlick, Mia } + +The aim is not to fight the "All Rights Reserved" sorts. The aim is to complement them. The problems that the law creates for us as a culture are produced by insane and unintended consequences of laws written centuries ago, applied to a technology that only Jefferson could have imagined. The rules may well have made sense against a background of technologies from centuries ago, but they do not make sense against the background of digital technologies. New rules - with different freedoms, expressed in ways so that humans without lawyers can use them - are needed. Creative Commons gives people a way effectively to begin to build those rules. +={ Jefferson, Thomas } + +Why would creators participate in giving up total control? Some participate to better spread their content. Cory Doctorow, for example, is a science fiction author. His first novel, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, was released on- line and for free, under a Creative Commons license, on the same day that it went on sale in bookstores. +={ Doctorow, Cory ; + Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Doctorow) +} + +Why would a publisher ever agree to this? I suspect his publisher reasoned like this: There are two groups of people out there: (1) those who will buy Cory's book whether or not it's on the Internet, and (2) those who may never hear of Cory's book, if it isn't made available for free on the Internet. Some part of (1) will download Cory's book instead of buying it. Call them bad-(1)s. Some part of (2) will download Cory's book, like it, and then decide to buy it. Call them (2)-goods. If there are more (2)-goods than bad-(1)s, the strategy of releasing Cory's book free on-line will probably /{increase}/ sales of Cory's book. +={ books : + free on-line releases of +2 ; + Internet : + books on +2 +} + +Indeed, the experience of his publisher clearly supports that conclusion. The book's first printing was exhausted months before the publisher had expected. This first novel of a science fiction author was a total success. + +The idea that free content might increase the value of nonfree content was confirmed by the experience of another author. Peter Wayner, who wrote a book about the free software movement titled /{Free for All}/, made an electronic version of his book free on-line under a Creative Commons license after the book went out of print. He then monitored used book store prices for the book. As predicted, as the number of downloads increased, the used book price for his book increased, as well. +={ Wayner, Peter ; + Free for All (Wayner) +} + +These are examples of using the Commons to better spread proprietary content. I believe that is a wonderful and common use of the Commons. There are others who use Creative Commons licenses for other reasons. Many who use the "sampling license" do so because anything else would be hypocritical. The sampling license says that others are free, for commercial or noncommercial purposes, to sample content from the licensed work; they are just not free to make full copies of the licensed work available to others. This is consistent with their own art - they, too, sample from others. Because the /{legal}/ costs of sampling are so high (Walter Leaphart, manager of the rap group Public Enemy, which was born sampling the music of others, has stated that he does not "allow" Public Enemy to sample anymore, because the legal costs are so high~{ /{Willful Infringement: A Report from the Front Lines of the Real Culture Wars}/ (2003), produced by Jed Horovitz, directed by Greg Hittelman, a Fiat Lucre production, available at link #72. }~), these artists release into the creative environment content that others can build upon, so that their form of creativity might grow. +={ Leaphart, Walter ; + Public Enemy +} + +Finally, there are many who mark their content with a Creative Commons license just because they want to express to others the importance of balance in this debate. If you just go along with the system as it is, you are effectively saying you believe in the "All Rights Reserved" model. Good for you, but many do not. Many believe that however appropriate that rule is for Hollywood and freaks, it is not an appropriate description of how most creators view the rights associated with their content. The Creative Commons license expresses this notion of "Some Rights Reserved," and gives many the chance to say it to others. + +In the first six months of the Creative Commons experiment, over 1 million objects were licensed with these free-culture licenses. The next step is partnerships with middleware content providers to help them build into their technologies simple ways for users to mark their content with Creative Commons freedoms. Then the next step is to watch and celebrate creators who build content based upon content set free. + +These are first steps to rebuilding a public domain. They are not mere arguments; they are action. Building a public domain is the first step to showing people how important that domain is to creativity and innovation. Creative Commons relies upon voluntary steps to achieve this rebuilding. They will lead to a world in which more than voluntary steps are possible. + +Creative Commons is just one example of voluntary efforts by individuals and creators to change the mix of rights that now govern the creative field. The project does not compete with copyright; it complements it. Its aim is not to defeat the rights of authors, but to make it easier for authors and creators to exercise their rights more flexibly and cheaply. That difference, we believe, will enable creativity to spread more easily. + +1~them THEM, SOON +={ copyright law : + government reforms proposed on +102 +} + +!_ We will +not reclaim a free culture by individual action alone. It will also take important reforms of laws. We have a long way to go before the politicians will listen to these ideas and implement these reforms. But that also means that we have time to build awareness around the changes that we need. + +In this chapter, I outline five kinds of changes: four that are general, and one that's specific to the most heated battle of the day, music. Each is a step, not an end. But any of these steps would carry us a long way to our end. + +2~1 1. More Formalities +={ copyright law : + formalities reinstated in +13 ; + formalities +13 +} + +If you buy a house, you have to record the sale in a deed. If you buy land upon which to build a house, you have to record the purchase in a deed. If you buy a car, you get a bill of sale and register the car. If you buy an airplane ticket, it has your name on it. +={ property rights : + formalities associated with +1 +} + +These are all formalities associated with property. They are requirements that we all must bear if we want our property to be protected. + +In contrast, under current copyright law, you automatically get a copyright, regardless of whether you comply with any formality. You don't have to register. You don't even have to mark your content. The default is control, and "formalities" are banished. +={ copyright : + marking of +5 +} + +Why? + +As I suggested in chapter 10, the motivation to abolish formalities was a good one. In the world before digital technologies, formalities imposed a burden on copyright holders without much benefit. Thus, it was progress when the law relaxed the formal requirements that a copyright owner must bear to protect and secure his work. Those formalities were getting in the way. + +But the Internet changes all this. Formalities today need not be a burden. Rather, the world without formalities is the world that burdens creativity. Today, there is no simple way to know who owns what, or with whom one must deal in order to use or build upon the creative work of others. There are no records, there is no system to trace - there is no simple way to know how to get permission. Yet given the massive increase in the scope of copyright's rule, getting permission is a necessary step for any work that builds upon our past. And thus, the /{lack}/ of formalities forces many into silence where they otherwise could speak. + +The law should therefore change this requirement~{ The proposal I am advancing here would apply to American works only. Obviously, I believe it would be beneficial for the same idea to be adopted by other countries as well. }~ - but it should not change it by going back to the old, broken system. We should require formalities, but we should establish a system that will create the incentives to minimize the burden of these formalities. + +The important formalities are three: marking copyrighted work, registering copyrights, and renewing the claim to copyright. Traditionally, the first of these three was something the copyright owner did; the second two were something the government did. But a revised system of formalities would banish the government from the process, except for the sole purpose of approving standards developed by others. +={ copyright law : + registration requirement of +} + +3~ Registration and Renewal +={ copyright : + renewability of +4 ; + copyright law : + registration requirement of +4 +} + +Under the old system, a copyright owner had to file a registration with the Copyright Office to register or renew a copyright. When filing that registration, the copyright owner paid a fee. As with most government agencies, the Copyright Office had little incentive to minimize the burden of registration; it also had little incentive to minimize the fee. And as the Copyright Office is not a main target of government policy- making, the office has historically been terribly underfunded. Thus, when people who know something about the process hear this idea about formalities, their first reaction is panic - nothing could be worse than forcing people to deal with the mess that is the Copyright Office. +={ Copyright Office } + +Yet it is always astonishing to me that we, who come from a tradition of extraordinary innovation in governmental design, can no longer think innovatively about how governmental functions can be designed. Just because there is a public purpose to a government role, it doesn't follow that the government must actually administer the role. Instead, we should be creating incentives for private parties to serve the public, subject to standards that the government sets. + +In the context of registration, one obvious model is the Internet. There are at least 32 million Web sites registered around the world. Domain name owners for these Web sites have to pay a fee to keep their registration alive. In the main top-level domains (.com, .org, .net), there is a central registry. The actual registrations are, however, performed by many competing registrars. That competition drives the cost of registering down, and more importantly, it drives the ease with which registration occurs up. +={ domain names ; + Internet : + domain name registration on ; + Web sites, domain name registration of +} + +We should adopt a similar model for the registration and renewal of copyrights. The Copyright Office may well serve as the central registry, but it should not be in the registrar business. Instead, it should establish a database, and a set of standards for registrars. It should approve registrars that meet its standards. Those registrars would then compete with one another to deliver the cheapest and simplest systems for registering and renewing copyrights. That competition would substantially lower the burden of this formality - while producing a database of registrations that would facilitate the licensing of content. +={ Copyright Office } + +3~ Marking +={ copyright : + marking of +9 +} + +It used to be that the failure to include a copyright notice on a creative work meant that the copyright was forfeited. That was a harsh punishment for failing to comply with a regulatory rule - akin to imposing the death penalty for a parking ticket in the world of creative rights. Here again, there is no reason that a marking requirement needs to be enforced in this way. And more importantly, there is no reason a marking requirement needs to be enforced uniformly across all media. + +The aim of marking is to signal to the public that this work is copyrighted and that the author wants to enforce his rights. The mark also makes it easy to locate a copyright owner to secure permission to use the work. + +One of the problems the copyright system confronted early on was that different copyrighted works had to be differently marked. It wasn't clear how or where a statue was to be marked, or a record, or a film. A new marking requirement could solve these problems by recognizing the differences in media, and by allowing the system of marking to evolve as technologies enable it to. The system could enable a special signal from the failure to mark - not the loss of the copyright, but the loss of the right to punish someone for failing to get permission first. + +Let's start with the last point. If a copyright owner allows his work to be published without a copyright notice, the consequence of that failure need not be that the copyright is lost. The consequence could instead be that anyone has the right to use this work, until the copyright owner complains and demonstrates that it is his work and he doesn't give permission.~{ There would be a complication with derivative works that I have not solved here. In my view, the law of derivatives creates a more complicated system than is justified by the marginal incentive it creates. }~ The meaning of an unmarked work would therefore be "use unless someone complains." If someone does complain, then the obligation would be to stop using the work in any new work from then on though no penalty would attach for existing uses. This would create a strong incentive for copyright owners to mark their work. + +That in turn raises the question about how work should best be marked. Here again, the system needs to adjust as the technologies evolve. The best way to ensure that the system evolves is to limit the Copyright Office's role to that of approving standards for marking content that have been crafted elsewhere. +={ Copyright Office +1 } + +For example, if a recording industry association devises a method for marking CDs, it would propose that to the Copyright Office. The Copyright Office would hold a hearing, at which other proposals could be made. The Copyright Office would then select the proposal that it judged preferable, and it would base that choice /{solely}/ upon the consideration of which method could best be integrated into the registration and renewal system. We would not count on the government to innovate; but we would count on the government to keep the product of innovation in line with its other important functions. +={ CDs : + copyright marking of ; + copyright law : + on music recordings | registration requirement of +3 ; + recording industry : + copyright protections in +} + +Finally, marking content clearly would simplify registration requirements. If photographs were marked by author and year, there would be little reason not to allow a photographer to reregister, for example, all photographs taken in a particular year in one quick step. The aim of the formality is not to burden the creator; the system itself should be kept as simple as possible. + +The objective of formalities is to make things clear. The existing system does nothing to make things clear. Indeed, it seems designed to make things unclear. + +If formalities such as registration were reinstated, one of the most difficult aspects of relying upon the public domain would be removed. It would be simple to identify what content is presumptively free; it would be simple to identify who controls the rights for a particular kind of content; it would be simple to assert those rights, and to renew that assertion at the appropriate time. + +2~2 2. Shorter Terms +={ copyright : + duration of +9 +} + +The term of copyright has gone from fourteen years to ninety-five years for corporate authors, and life of the author plus seventy years for natural authors. + +In /{The Future of Ideas}/, I proposed a seventy-five-year term, granted in five- year increments with a requirement of renewal every five years. That seemed radical enough at the time. But after we lost /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/, the proposals became even more radical. /{The Economist}/ endorsed a proposal for a fourteen-year copyright term.~{ "A Radical Rethink," /{Economist,}/ 366:8308 (25 January 2003): 15, available at link #74. }~ Others have proposed tying the term to the term for patents. +={ Eldred v. Ashcroft ; + Future of Ideas, The (Lessig) ; + Lessig, Lawrence +7 ; + copyright : + renewability of +} + +I agree with those who believe that we need a radical change in copyright's term. But whether fourteen years or seventy-five, there are four principles that are important to keep in mind about copyright terms. + +_1 (1) /{Keep it short:}/ The term should be as long as necessary to give incentives to create, but no longer. If it were tied to very strong protections for authors (so authors were able to reclaim rights from publishers), rights to the same work (not derivative works) might be extended further. The key is not to tie the work up with legal regulations when it no longer benefits an author. + +_1 (2) /{Keep it simple:}/ The line between the public domain and protected content must be kept clear. Lawyers like the fuzziness of "fair use," and the distinction between "ideas" and "expression." That kind of law gives them lots of work. But our framers had a simpler idea in mind: protected versus unprotected. The value of short terms is that there is little need to build exceptions into copyright when the term itself is kept short. A clear and active "lawyer-free zone" makes the complexities of "fair use" and "idea/expression" less necessary to navigate. +={ copyright law : + fair use and | lawyers as detriment to ; + lawyers : + copyright cultural balance impeded by ; + fair use : + fuzziness of +} + +_1 (3) /{Keep it alive:}/ Copyright should have to be renewed. Especially if the maximum term is long, the copyright owner should be required to signal periodically that he wants the protection continued. This need not be an onerous burden, but there is no reason this monopoly protection has to be granted for free. On average, it takes ninety minutes for a veteran to apply for a pension. ~{ Department of Veterans Affairs, Veteran's Application for Compensation and/or Pension, VA Form 21-526 (OMB Approved No. 2900-0001), available at link #75. }~ If we make veterans suffer that burden, I don't see why we couldn't require authors to spend ten minutes every fifty years to file a single form. +={ veterans' pensions ; + copyright : + renewability of +} + +_1 (4) /{Keep it prospective:}/ Whatever the term of copyright should be, the clearest lesson that economists teach is that a term once given should not be extended. It might have been a mistake in 1923 for the law to offer authors only a fifty-six-year term. I don't think so, but it's possible. If it was a mistake, then the consequence was that we got fewer authors to create in 1923 than we otherwise would have. But we can't correct that mistake today by increasing the term. No matter what we do today, we will not increase the number of authors who wrote in 1923. Of course, we can increase the reward that those who write now get (or alternatively, increase the copyright burden that smothers many works that are today invisible). But increasing their reward will not increase their creativity in 1923. What's not done is not done, and there's nothing we can do about that now. + +These changes together should produce an /{average}/ copyright term that is much shorter than the current term. Until 1976, the average term was just 32.2 years. We should be aiming for the same. + +No doubt the extremists will call these ideas "radical." (After all, I call them "extremists.") But again, the term I recommended was longer than the term under Richard Nixon. How "radical" can it be to ask for a more generous copyright law than Richard Nixon presided over? +={ Nixon, Richard } + +2~3 3. Free Use Vs. Fair Use +={ copyright law : + on republishing vs. transformation of original work +11 +} + +As I observed at the beginning of this book, property law originally granted property owners the right to control their property from the ground to the heavens. The airplane came along. The scope of property rights quickly changed. There was no fuss, no constitutional challenge. It made no sense anymore to grant that much control, given the emergence of that new technology. +={ property rights : + air traffic vs. ; + land ownership, air traffic and +} + +Our Constitution gives Congress the power to give authors "exclusive right" to "their writings." Congress has given authors an exclusive right to "their writings" plus any derivative writings (made by others) that are sufficiently close to the author's original work. Thus, if I write a book, and you base a movie on that book, I have the power to deny you the right to release that movie, even though that movie is not "my writing." +={ derivative works : + reform copyright term and scope on +8 ; + Congress, U.S. : + on derivative rights +1 | on copyright laws +1 +} + +Congress granted the beginnings of this right in 1870, when it expanded the exclusive right of copyright to include a right to control translations and dramatizations of a work.~{ Benjamin Kaplan, /{An Unhurried View of Copyright}/ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 32. }~ The courts have expanded it slowly through judicial interpretation ever since. This expansion has been commented upon by one of the law's greatest judges, Judge Benjamin Kaplan. +={ Kaplan, Benjamin } + +_1 So inured have we become to the extension of the monopoly to a large range of so-called derivative works, that we no longer sense the oddity of accepting such an enlargement of copyright while yet intoning the abracadabra of idea and expression."~{ Ibid., 56. }~ + +I think it's time to recognize that there are airplanes in this field and the expansiveness of these rights of derivative use no longer make sense. More precisely, they don't make sense for the period of time that a copyright runs. And they don't make sense as an amorphous grant. Consider each limitation in turn. +={ property rights : + air traffic vs. ; + copyright : + duration of +1 +} + +/{Term:}/ If Congress wants to grant a derivative right, then that right should be for a much shorter term. It makes sense to protect John Grisham's right to sell the movie rights to his latest novel (or at least I'm willing to assume it does); but it does not make sense for that right to run for the same term as the underlying copyright. The derivative right could be important in inducing creativity; it is not important long after the creative work is done. +={ Grisham, John ; + Congress, U.S. : + on derivative rights | on copyright laws +} + +/{Scope:}/ Likewise should the scope of derivative rights be narrowed. Again, there are some cases in which derivative rights are important. Those should be specified. But the law should draw clear lines around regulated and unregulated uses of copyrighted material. When all "reuse" of creative material was within the control of businesses, perhaps it made sense to require lawyers to negotiate the lines. It no longer makes sense for lawyers to negotiate the lines. Think about all the creative possibilities that digital technologies enable; now imagine pouring molasses into the machines. That's what this general requirement of permission does to the creative process. Smothers it. +={ copyright : + scope of +} + +This was the point that Alben made when describing the making of the Clint Eastwood CD. While it makes sense to require negotiation for foreseeable derivative rights - turning a book into a movie, or a poem into a musical score - it doesn't make sense to require negotiation for the unforeseeable. Here, a statutory right would make much more sense. +={ Alben, Alex ; + Eastwood, Clint ; + copyright : + statutory licenses in +} + +In each of these cases, the law should mark the uses that are protected, and the presumption should be that other uses are not protected. This is the reverse of the recommendation of my colleague Paul Goldstein.~{ Paul Goldstein, /{Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox}/ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 187-216. }~ His view is that the law should be written so that expanded protections follow expanded uses. +={ Goldstein, Paul } + +Goldstein's analysis would make perfect sense if the cost of the legal system were small. But as we are currently seeing in the context of the Internet, the uncertainty about the scope of protection, and the incentives to protect existing architectures of revenue, combined with a strong copyright, weaken the process of innovation. + +The law could remedy this problem either by removing protection beyond the part explicitly drawn or by granting reuse rights upon certain statutory conditions. Either way, the effect would be to free a great deal of culture to others to cultivate. And under a statutory rights regime, that reuse would earn artists more income. +={ copyright : + statutory licenses in ; + statutory licenses +} + +2~4 4. Liberate the Music - Again +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + reform proposals of copyright restraints on +41 +} + +The battle that got this whole war going was about music, so it wouldn't be fair to end this book without addressing the issue that is, to most people, most pressing - music. There is no other policy issue that better teaches the lessons of this book than the battles around the sharing of music. + +The appeal of file-sharing music was the crack cocaine of the Inter-net's growth. It drove demand for access to the Internet more powerfully than any other single application. It was the Internet's killer app-possibly in two senses of that word. It no doubt was the application that drove demand for bandwidth. It may well be the application that drives demand for regulations that in the end kill innovation on the network. + +The aim of copyright, with respect to content in general and music in particular, is to create the incentives for music to be composed, performed, and, most importantly, spread. The law does this by giving an exclusive right to a composer to control public performances of his work, and to a performing artist to control copies of her performance. + +File-sharing networks complicate this model by enabling the spread of content for which the performer has not been paid. But of course, that's not all the file-sharing networks do. As I described in chapter 5, they enable four different kinds of sharing: +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + four types of +5 +} + +_1 A. There are some who are using sharing networks as substitutes for purchasing CDs. + +_1 B. There are also some who are using sharing networks to sample, on the way to purchasing CDs. + +_1 C. There are many who are using file-sharing networks to get access to content that is no longer sold but is still under copyright or that would have been too cumbersome to buy off the Net. + +_1 D. There are many who are using file-sharing networks to get access to content that is not copyrighted or to get access that the copyright owner plainly endorses. + +Any reform of the law needs to keep these different uses in focus. It must avoid burdening type D even if it aims to eliminate type A. The eagerness with which the law aims to eliminate type A, moreover, should depend upon the magnitude of type B. As with VCRs, if the net effect of sharing is actually not very harmful, the need for regulation is significantly weakened. +={ cassette recording : + VCRs ; + VCRs +} + +As I said in chapter 5, the actual harm caused by sharing is controversial. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I assume the harm is real. I assume, in other words, that type A sharing is significantly greater than type B, and is the dominant use of sharing networks. + +Nonetheless, there is a crucial fact about the current technological context that we must keep in mind if we are to understand how the law should respond. + +Today, file sharing is addictive. In ten years, it won't be. It is addictive today because it is the easiest way to gain access to a broad range of content. It won't be the easiest way to get access to a broad range of content in ten years. Today, access to the Internet is cumbersome and slow - we in the United States are lucky to have broadband service at 1.5 MBs, and very rarely do we get service at that speed both up and down. Although wireless access is growing, most of us still get access across wires. Most only gain access through a machine with a keyboard. The idea of the always on, always connected Internet is mainly just an idea. +={ Internet : + speed of access +3 +} + +But it will become a reality, and that means the way we get access to the Internet today is a technology in transition. Policy makers should not make policy on the basis of technology in transition. They should make policy on the basis of where the technology is going. The question should not be, how should the law regulate sharing in this world? The question should be, what law will we require when the network becomes the network it is clearly becoming? That network is one in which every machine with electricity is essentially on the Net; where everywhere you are - except maybe the desert or the Rockies - you can instantaneously be connected to the Internet. Imagine the Internet as ubiquitous as the best cell-phone service, where with the flip of a device, you are connected. + +In that world, it will be extremely easy to connect to services that give you access to content on the fly - such as Internet radio, content that is streamed to the user when the user demands. Here, then, is the critical point: When it is /{extremely}/ easy to connect to services that give access to content, it will be /{easier}/ to connect to services that give you access to content than it will be to download and store content /on the many devices you will have for playing content/. It will be easier, in other words, to subscribe than it will be to be a database manager, as everyone in the download-sharing world of Napster-like technologies essentially is. Content services will compete with content sharing, even if the services charge money for the content they give access to. Already cell-phone services in Japan offer music (for a fee) streamed over cell phones (enhanced with plugs for headphones). The Japanese are paying for this content even though "free" content is available in the form of MP3s across the Web.~{ See, for example, "Music Media Watch," The J@pan Inc. Newsletter, 3 April 2002, available at link #76. }~ +={ cell phones, music streamed over } + +This point about the future is meant to suggest a perspective on the present: It is emphatically temporary. The "problem" with file sharing - to the extent there is a real problem - is a problem that will increasingly disappear as it becomes easier to connect to the Internet. And thus it is an extraordinary mistake for policy makers today to be "solving" this problem in light of a technology that will be gone tomorrow. The question should not be how to regulate the Internet to eliminate file sharing (the Net will evolve that problem away). The question instead should be how to assure that artists get paid, during this transition between twentieth-century models for doing business and twenty-first-century technologies. + +The answer begins with recognizing that there are different "problems" here to solve. Let's start with type D content - uncopyrighted content or copyrighted content that the artist wants shared. The "problem" with this content is to make sure that the technology that would enable this kind of sharing is not rendered illegal. You can think of it this way: Pay phones are used to deliver ransom demands, no doubt. But there are many who need to use pay phones who have nothing to do with ransoms. It would be wrong to ban pay phones in order to eliminate kidnapping. + +Type C content raises a different "problem." This is content that was, at one time, published and is no longer available. It may be unavailable because the artist is no longer valuable enough for the record label he signed with to carry his work. Or it may be unavailable because the work is forgotten. Either way, the aim of the law should be to facilitate the access to this content, ideally in a way that returns something to the artist. + +Again, the model here is the used book store. Once a book goes out of print, it may still be available in libraries and used book stores. But libraries and used book stores don't pay the copyright owner when someone reads or buys an out-of- print book. That makes total sense, of course, since any other system would be so burdensome as to eliminate the possibility of used book stores' existing. But from the author's perspective, this "sharing" of his content without his being compensated is less than ideal. +={ books : + out of print | resales of +} + +The model of used book stores suggests that the law could simply deem out-of-print music fair game. If the publisher does not make copies of the music available for sale, then commercial and noncommercial providers would be free, under this rule, to "share" that content, even though the sharing involved making a copy. The copy here would be incidental to the trade; in a context where commercial publishing has ended, trading music should be as free as trading books. + +Alternatively, the law could create a statutory license that would ensure that artists get something from the trade of their work. For example, if the law set a low statutory rate for the commercial sharing of content that was not offered for sale by a commercial publisher, and if that rate were automatically transferred to a trust for the benefit of the artist, then businesses could develop around the idea of trading this content, and artists would benefit from this trade. +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + statutory licenses in +1 ; + statutory licenses +1 +} + +This system would also create an incentive for publishers to keep works available commercially. Works that are available commercially would not be subject to this license. Thus, publishers could protect the right to charge whatever they want for content if they kept the work commercially available. But if they don't keep it available, and instead, the computer hard disks of fans around the world keep it alive, then any royalty owed for such copying should be much less than the amount owed a commercial publisher. + +The hard case is content of types A and B, and again, this case is hard only because the extent of the problem will change over time, as the technologies for gaining access to content change. The law's solution should be as flexible as the problem is, understanding that we are in the middle of a radical transformation in the technology for delivering and accessing content. + +So here's a solution that will at first seem very strange to both sides in this war, but which upon reflection, I suggest, should make some sense. + +Stripped of the rhetoric about the sanctity of property, the basic claim of the content industry is this: A new technology (the Internet) has harmed a set of rights that secure copyright. If those rights are to be protected, then the content industry should be compensated for that harm. Just as the technology of tobacco harmed the health of millions of Americans, or the technology of asbestos caused grave illness to thousands of miners, so, too, has the technology of digital networks harmed the interests of the content industry. + +I love the Internet, and so I don't like likening it to tobacco or asbestos. But the analogy is a fair one from the perspective of the law. And it suggests a fair response: Rather than seeking to destroy the Internet, or the p2p technologies that are currently harming content providers on the Internet, we should find a relatively simple way to compensate those who are harmed. +={ recording industry : + artist remuneration in +4 ; + artists : + recording industry payments to +} + +The idea would be a modification of a proposal that has been floated by Harvard law professor William Fisher.~{ William Fisher, /{Digital Music: Problems and Possibilities}/ (last revised: 10 October 2000), available at link #77; William Fisher, /{Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment}/ (forthcoming) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), ch. 6, available at link #78. Professor Netanel has proposed a related idea that would exempt noncommercial sharing from the reach of copyright and would establish compensation to artists to balance any loss. See Neil Weinstock Netanel, "Impose a Noncommercial Use Levy to Allow Free P2P File Sharing," available at link #79. For other proposals, see Lawrence Lessig, "Who's Holding Back Broadband?" /{Washington Post,}/ 8 January 2002, A17; Philip S. Corwin on behalf of Sharman Networks, A Letter to Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 26 February 2002, available at link #80; Serguei Osokine, /{A Quick Case for Intellectual Property Use Fee (IPUF),}/ 3 March 2002, available at link #81; Jefferson Graham, "Kazaa, Verizon Propose to Pay Artists Directly," /{USA Today,}/ 13 May 2002, available at link #82; Steven M. Cherry, "Getting Copyright Right," IEEE Spectrum Online, 1 July 2002, available at link #83; Declan Mc-Cullagh, "Verizon's Copyright Campaign," CNET News.com, 27 August 2002, available at link #84. Fisher's proposal is very similar to Richard Stallman's proposal for DAT. Unlike Fisher's, Stallman's proposal would not pay artists directly proportionally, though more popular artists would get more than the less popular. As is typical with Stallman, his proposal predates the current debate by about a decade. See link #85. }~ Fisher suggests a very clever way around the current impasse of the Internet. Under his plan, all content capable of digital transmission would (1) be marked with a digital watermark (don't worry about how easy it is to evade these marks; as you'll see, there's no incentive to evade them). Once the content is marked, then entrepreneurs would develop (2) systems to monitor how many items of each content were distributed. On the basis of those numbers, then (3) artists would be compensated. The compensation would be paid for by (4) an appropriate tax. +={ Fisher, William +2 ; + Promises to Keep (Fisher) +1 +} + +Fisher's proposal is careful and comprehensive. It raises a million questions, most of which he answers well in his upcoming book, /{Promises to Keep}/. The modification that I would make is relatively simple: Fisher imagines his proposal replacing the existing copyright system. I imagine it complementing the existing system. The aim of the proposal would be to facilitate compensation to the extent that harm could be shown. This compensation would be temporary, aimed at facilitating a transition between regimes. And it would require renewal after a period of years. If it continues to make sense to facilitate free exchange of content, supported through a taxation system, then it can be continued. If this form of protection is no longer necessary, then the system could lapse into the old system of controlling access. + +Fisher would balk at the idea of allowing the system to lapse. His aim is not just to ensure that artists are paid, but also to ensure that the system supports the widest range of "semiotic democracy" possible. But the aims of semiotic democracy would be satisfied if the other changes I described were accomplished - in particular, the limits on derivative uses. A system that simply charges for access would not greatly burden semiotic democracy if there were few limitations on what one was allowed to do with the content itself. +={ semiotic democracy ; + democracy : + semiotic +} + +No doubt it would be difficult to calculate the proper measure of "harm" to an industry. But the difficulty of making that calculation would be outweighed by the benefit of facilitating innovation. This background system to compensate would also not need to interfere with innovative proposals such as Apple's MusicStore. As experts predicted when Apple launched the MusicStore, it could beat "free" by being easier than free is. This has proven correct: Apple has sold millions of songs at even the very high price of 99 cents a song. (At 99 cents, the cost is the equivalent of a per-song CD price, though the labels have none of the costs of a CD to pay.) Apple's move was countered by Real Networks, offering music at just 79 cents a song. And no doubt there will be a great deal of competition to offer and sell music on-line. +={ Apple Corporation ; + MusicStore ; + Real Networks ; + CDs : + prices of +} + +This competition has already occurred against the background of "free" music from p2p systems. As the sellers of cable television have known for thirty years, and the sellers of bottled water for much more than that, there is nothing impossible at all about "competing with free." Indeed, if anything, the competition spurs the competitors to offer new and better products. This is precisely what the competitive market was to be about. Thus in Singapore, though piracy is rampant, movie theaters are often luxurious - with "first class" seats, and meals served while you watch a movie - as they struggle and succeed in finding ways to compete with "free." +={ cable television ; + television : + cable vs. broadcast ; + Asia, commercial piracy in ; + piracy : + in Asia ; + film industry : + luxury theatres vs. video piracy in +} + +This regime of competition, with a backstop to assure that artists don't lose, would facilitate a great deal of innovation in the delivery of content. That competition would continue to shrink type A sharing. It would inspire an extraordinary range of new innovators - ones who would have a right to the content, and would no longer fear the uncertain and barbarically severe punishments of the law. + +In summary, then, my proposal is this: + +The Internet is in transition. We should not be regulating a technology in transition. We should instead be regulating to minimize the harm to interests affected by this technological change, while enabling, and encouraging, the most efficient technology we can create. + +We can minimize that harm while maximizing the benefit to innovation by + +_1 1. guaranteeing the right to engage in type D sharing; + +_1 2. permitting noncommercial type C sharing without liability, and commercial type C sharing at a low and fixed rate set by statute; + +_1 3. while in this transition, taxing and compensating for type A sharing, to the extent actual harm is demonstrated. + +But what if "piracy" doesn't disappear? What if there is a competitive market providing content at a low cost, but a significant number of consumers continue to "take" content for nothing? Should the law do something then? + +Yes, it should. But, again, what it should do depends upon how the facts develop. These changes may not eliminate type A sharing. But the real issue is not whether it eliminates sharing in the abstract. The real issue is its effect on the market. Is it better (a) to have a technology that is 95 percent secure and produces a market of size /{x}/, or (b) to have a technology that is 50 percent secure but produces a market of five times /{x}/? Less secure might produce more unauthorized sharing, but it is likely to also produce a much bigger market in authorized sharing. The most important thing is to assure artists' compensation without breaking the Internet. Once that's assured, then it may well be appropriate to find ways to track down the petty pirates. + +But we're a long way away from whittling the problem down to this subset of type A sharers. And our focus until we're there should not be on finding ways to break the Internet. Our focus until we're there should be on how to make sure the artists are paid, while protecting the space for innovation and creativity that the Internet is. + +2~5 5. Fire Lots of Lawyers +={ copyright law : + lawyers as detriment to +12 ; + lawyers : + copyright cultural balance impeded by +12 ; + legal system, attorney costs in +12 +} + +I'm a lawyer. I make lawyers for a living. I believe in the law. I believe in the law of copyright. Indeed, I have devoted my life to working in law, not because there are big bucks at the end but because there are ideals at the end that I would love to live. + +Yet much of this book has been a criticism of lawyers, or the role lawyers have played in this debate. The law speaks to ideals, but it is my view that our profession has become too attuned to the client. And in a world where the rich clients have one strong view, the unwillingness of the profession to question or counter that one strong view queers the law. + +The evidence of this bending is compelling. I'm attacked as a "radical" by many within the profession, yet the positions that I am advocating are precisely the positions of some of the most moderate and significant figures in the history of this branch of the law. Many, for example, thought crazy the challenge that we brought to the Copyright Term Extension Act. Yet just thirty years ago, the dominant scholar and practitioner in the field of copyright, Melville Nimmer, thought it obvious.~{ Lawrence Lessig, "Copyright's First Amendment" (Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture), /{UCLA Law Review}/ 48 (2001): 1057, 1069-70. }~ +={ Nimmer, Melville ; + Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) : + Supreme Court challenge of +} + +However, my criticism of the role that lawyers have played in this debate is not just about a professional bias. It is more importantly about our failure to actually reckon the costs of the law. + +Economists are supposed to be good at reckoning costs and benefits. But more often than not, economists, with no clue about how the legal system actually functions, simply assume that the transaction costs of the legal system are slight.~{ A good example is the work of Professor Stan Liebowitz. Liebowitz is to be commended for his careful review of data about infringement, leading him to question his own publicly stated position - twice. He initially predicted that downloading would substantially harm the industry. He then revised his view in light of the data, and he has since revised his view again. Compare Stan J. Liebowitz, /{Rethinking the Network Economy: The True Forces That Drive the Digital Marketplace}/ (New York: Amacom, 2002), 173 (reviewing his original view but expressing skepticism) with Stan J. Liebowitz, "Will MP3s Annihilate the Record Industry?" working paper, June 2003, available at link #86. Liebowitz's careful analysis is extremely valuable in estimating the effect of file-sharing technology. In my view, however, he underestimates the costs of the legal system. See, for example, /{Rethinking,}/ 174-76. }~ They see a system that has been around for hundreds of years, and they assume it works the way their elementary school civics class taught them it works. + +But the legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done. + +These costs distort free culture in many ways. A lawyer's time is billed at the largest firms at more than $400 per hour. How much time should such a lawyer spend reading cases carefully, or researching obscure strands of authority? The answer is the increasing reality: very little. The law depended upon the careful articulation and development of doctrine, but the careful articulation and development of legal doctrine depends upon careful work. Yet that careful work costs too much, except in the most high-profile and costly cases. + +The costliness and clumsiness and randomness of this system mock our tradition. And lawyers, as well as academics, should consider it their duty to change the way the law works - or better, to change the law so that it works. It is wrong that the system works well only for the top 1 percent of the clients. It could be made radically more efficient, and inexpensive, and hence radically more just. + +But until that reform is complete, we as a society should keep the law away from areas that we know it will only harm. And that is precisely what the law will too often do if too much of our culture is left to its review. + +Think about the amazing things your kid could do or make with digital technology - the film, the music, the Web page, the blog. Or think about the amazing things your community could facilitate with digital technology - a wiki, a barn raising, activism to change something. Think about all those creative things, and then imagine cold molasses poured onto the machines. This is what any regime that requires permission produces. Again, this is the reality of Brezhnev's Russia. + +The law should regulate in certain areas of culture - but it should regulate culture only where that regulation does good. Yet lawyers rarely test their power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will it do good?" When challenged about the expanding reach of the law, the lawyer answers, "Why not?" + +We should ask, "Why?" Show me why your regulation of culture is needed. Show me how it does good. And until you can show me both, keep your lawyers away. + +:B~ NOTES + +1~webnotes Notes~# + +Throughout this text, there are references to links on the World Wide Web. As anyone who has tried to use the Web knows, these links can be highly unstable. I have tried to remedy the instability by redirecting readers to the original source through the Web site associated with this book. For each link below, you can go to http://free-culture.cc/notes and locate the original source by clicking on the number after the # sign. If the original link remains alive, you will be redirected to that link. If the original link has disappeared, you will be redirected to an appropriate reference for the material. + +:B~ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS + +1~acknowledgements [Acknowledgments]-# + +This book is the product of a long and as yet unsuccessful struggle that began when I read of Eric Eldred's war to keep books free. Eldred's work helped launch a movement, the free culture movement, and it is to him that this book is dedicated. I received guidance in various places from friends and academics, including Glenn Brown, Peter DiCola, Jennifer Mnookin, Richard Posner, Mark Rose, and Kathleen Sullivan. And I received correction and guidance from many amazing students at Stanford Law School and Stanford University. They included Andrew B. Coan, John Eden, James P. Fellers, Christopher Guzelian, Erica Goldberg, Robert Hall- man, Andrew Harris, Matthew Kahn, Brian Link, Ohad Mayblum, Alina Ng, and Erica Platt. I am particularly grateful to Catherine Crump and Harry Surden, who helped direct their research, and to Laura Lynch, who brilliantly managed the army that they assembled, and provided her own critical eye on much of this. Yuko Noguchi helped me to understand the laws of Japan as well as its culture. I am thankful to her, and to the many in Japan who helped me prepare this book: Joi Ito, Takayuki Matsutani, Naoto Misaki, Michihiro Sasaki, Hiromichi Tanaka, Hiroo Yamagata, and Yoshihiro Yonezawa. I am thankful as well as to Professor Nobuhiro Nakayama, and the Tokyo University Business Law Center, for giving me the chance to spend time in Japan, and to Tadashi Shiraishi and Kiyokazu Yamagami for their generous help while I was there. These are the traditional sorts of help that academics regularly draw upon. But in addition to them, the Internet has made it possible to receive advice and correction from many whom I have never even met. Among those who have responded with extremely helpful advice to requests on my blog about the book are Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, David Gerstein, and Peter DiMauro, as well as a long list of those who had specific ideas about ways to develop my argument. They included Richard Bondi, Steven Cherry, David Coe, Nik Cubrilovic, Bob Devine, Charles Eicher, Thomas Guida, Elihu M. Gerson, Jeremy Hunsinger, Vaughn Iverson, John Karabaic, Jeff Keltner, James Lindenschmidt, K. L. Mann, Mark Manning, Nora McCauley, Jeffrey McHugh, Evan McMullen, Fred Norton, John Pormann, Pedro A. D. Rezende, Shabbir Safdar, Saul Schleimer, Clay Shirky, Adam Shostack, Kragen Sitaker, Chris Smith, Bruce Steinberg, Andrzej Jan Taramina, Sean Walsh, Matt Wasserman, Miljenko Williams, "Wink," Roger Wood, "Ximmbo da Jazz," and Richard Yanco. (I apologize if I have missed anyone; with computers come glitches, and a crash of my e-mail system meant I lost a bunch of great replies.) Richard Stallman and Michael Carroll each read the whole book in draft, and each provided extremely helpful correction and advice. Michael helped me to see more clearly the significance of the regulation of derivitive works. And Richard corrected an embarrassingly large number of errors. While my work is in part inspired by Stallman's, he does not agree with me in important places throughout this book. Finally, and forever, I am thankful to Bettina, who has always insisted that there would be unending happiness away from these battles, and who has always been right. This slow learner is, as ever, grateful for her perpetual patience and love. + +1~about ABOUT THE AUTHOR + +{lessig.jpg 151x227 "Lawrence Lessig" }http://www.lessig.org/ + +LAWRENCE LESSIG ( http://www.lessig.org ), professor of law and a John A. Wilson Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, is founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and is chairman of the Creative Commons ( http://creativecommons.org ). The author of The Future of Ideas (Random House, 2001) and Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 1999), Lessig is a member of the boards of the Public Library of Science, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge. He was the winner of the Free Software Foundation's Award for the Advancement of Free Software, twice listed in BusinessWeek's "e.biz 25," and named one of Scientific American's "50 visionaries." A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University, and Yale Law School, Lessig clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. + +1~misc Other Works and REVIEWS of FreeCulture + +http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001840.shtml + +http://www.free-culture.cc/reviews/ + +1~jacket JACKET + +"FREE CULTURE is an entertaining and important look at the past and future of the cold war between the media industry and new technologies." + +-- Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape + +"The twenty-first century could be the century of unprecedented creativity, but only if we embrace the brilliantly articulated messages in Lawrence Lessig's FREE CULTURE. This book is beautifully written, crisply argued, and deeply provocative. Please read it!" + +-- John Seely Brown, coauthor of THE SOCIAL LIFE OF INFORMATION and former Chief Scientist, Xerox PARC + +"America needs a national conversation about the way in which so-called 'intellectual property rights' have come to dominate the rights of scholars, researchers, and everyday citizens. A copyright cartel, bidding for absolute control over digital worlds, music, and movies, now has a veto over technological innovation and has halted most contributions to the public domain from which so many have benefited. The patent system has spun out of control, giving enormous power to entrenched interests, and even trademarks are being misused. Lawrence Lessig's latest book is essential reading for anyone who want to join this conversation. He explains how technology and the law are robbing us of the public domain; but for all his educated pessimism, Professor Lessig offers some solutions, too, because he recognizes that technology can be the catalyst for freedom. If you care about the future of innovation, read this book." + +-- Dan Gillmor, author of MAKING THE NEWS, an upcoming book on the collision of media and technology + +"FREE CULTURE goes beyond illuminating the catastrophe to our culture of increasing regulation to show examples of how we can make a different future. These new-style heroes and examples are rooted in the traditions of the founding fathers in ways that seem obvious after reading this book. Recommended reading to those trying to unravel the shrill hype around 'intellectual property.'" + +-- Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive + +%% SiSU markup sample Notes: +% SiSU http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu +% SiSU markup for 0.16 and later: +% 0.20.4 header 0~links +% 0.22 may drop image dimensions (rmagick) +% 0.23 utf-8 ß +% 0.38 or later, may use alternative notation for headers, e.g. @title: (instead of 0~title) +% 0.38 document structure alternative markup, experimental (rad) A,B,C,1,2,3 maps to 1,2,3,4,5,6 +% Output: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig/sisu_manifest.html +% SiSU 0.38 experimental (alternative structure) markup used for this document diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/free_for_all.peter_wayner.sst b/data/samples/current/en/free_for_all.peter_wayner.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d538f99 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/free_for_all.peter_wayner.sst @@ -0,0 +1,3265 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Free For All + :subtitle: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High Tech Titans + +@creator: + :author: Wayner, Peter + +@date: + :published: 2002-12-22 + :created: 2002-12-22 + :issued: 2002-12-22 + :available: 2002-12-22 + :modified: 2002-12-22 + :valid: 2002-12-22 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Peter Wayner, 2000. + :license: Free For All is Licensed under a Creative Commons License. This License permits non-commercial use of this work, so long as attribution is given. For more information about the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/ + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse; + book:discourse:free software|open source software|Linux|Software Libré; + book:subject:Linux|Software Libré|technology; + GNU/Linux:GPL;free software; + open source software; + software license:GPL; + Linux:GNU|Software Libré + +@identifier: + :oclc: 43520955 + :isbn: 9780066620503 + +@links: + { The Original Authoritative and Updated Version of the Text available in pdf }http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa + { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0066620503 + { @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0066620503 + +@make: + :num_top: 1 + :breaks: new=:A,:B,:C,1 + :home_button_image: {wayner.home.png }http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ + :home_button_text: {Free For All}http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/; {Peter Wayner}http://www.wayner.org + :footer: {Free For All}http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/; {Peter Wayner}http://www.wayner.org + +:A~ @title @author + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgments + +This is just a book about the free software movement. It wouldn't be possible without the hard work and the dedication of the thousands if not millions of people who like to spend their free time hacking code. I salute you. Thank you. + +Many people spoke to me during the process of assembling this book, and it would be impossible to cite them all. The list should begin with the millions of people who write and contribute to the various free software lists. The letters, notes, and postings to these lists are a wonderful history of the evolution of free software and an invaluable resource. + +The list should also include the dozens of journalists at places like Slashdot.org, LinuxWorld, Linux magazine, Linux Weekly News, Kernel Traffic, Salon, and the New York Times. I should specifically mention the work of Joe Barr, Jeff Bates, Janelle Brown, Zack Brown, Jonathan Corbet, Elizabeth Coolbaugh, Amy Harmon, Andrew Leonard, Rob Malda, John Markoff, Mark Nielsen, Nicholas Petreley, Harald Radke, and Dave Whitinger. They wrote wonderful pieces that will make a great first draft of the history of the open source movement. Only a few of the pieces are cited directly in the footnotes, largely for practical reasons. The entire body of websites like Slashdot, Linux Journal, Linux World, Kernel Notes, or Linux Weekly News should be required reading for anyone interested in the free software movement. + +There are hundreds of folks at Linux trade shows who took the time to show me their products, T-shirts, or, in one case, cooler filled with beer. Almost everyone I met at the conferences was happy to speak about their experiences with open source software. They were all a great source of information, and I don't even know most of their names. + +Some people went beyond the call of duty. John Gilmore, Ethan Rasiel, and Caroline McKeldin each read drafts when the book was quite unfinished. Their comments were crucial. + +Many friends, acquaintances, and subjects of the book were kind enough to read versions that were a bit more polished, but far from complete: L. David Baron, Jeff Bates, Brian Behlendorf, Alan Cox, Robert Dreyer, Theo de Raadt, Telsa Gwynne, Jordan Hubbard, James Lewis Moss, Kirk McKusick, Sam Ockman, Tim O'Reilly, Sameer Parekh, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Richard Stallman. + +There are some people who deserve a different kind of thanks. Daniel Greenberg and James Levine did a great job shaping the conception of the book. When I began, it was just a few ideas on paper. My editors, David Conti, Laureen Rowland, Devi Pillai, and Adrian Zackheim, were largely responsible for this transition. Kimberly Monroe suffered through my mistakes as she took the book through its production stages. They took a bunch of rambling comments about a social phenomenon and helped turn it into a book. + +Finally, I want to thank everyone in my family for everything they've given through all of my life. And, of course, Caroline, who edited large portions with a slavish devotion to grammar and style. + +Visit http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ for updates, corrections, and additional comments. + +1~edition Version Information + +FREE FOR ALL. Copyright 2000 by Peter Wayner. + +Some Rights Reserved: + +This is [a complete version of] the free electronic version of the book originally published by HarperCollins. The book is still protected by copyright and bound by a license granting you the limited rights to make complete copies for non-commercial purposes. You're welcome to read it in electronic form subject to these conditions: + +1) You may not make derivative works. You must reproduce the work in its entirety. + +2) You may not sell versions. + +3) You refer everyone receiving a copy to the website where they may get the latest corrected version. http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ + +A full license developed by the Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) will be forthcoming. Please write p3@wayner.org if you have any questions or suggestions. + +See http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ for the FIRST PDF EDITION Page layout for this and the original paper edition designed by William Ruoto, see Not printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wayner, Peter, 1964 Free for all : how Linux and the free software movement undercut the high-tech titans / Peter Wayner. p. cm. ISBN 0-06-662050-3 1. Linux. 2. Operating systems (Computers) 3. Free computer software. I. Title. QA76.76.063 W394 2000 005.4'469 dc21 00-023919 00 01 02 03 04 V/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 + +{ffa.png 93x140 "Free For All by Peter Wayner" }http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0066620503/ + +*{Free For All}* may be purchased at Amazon.com + +1~ Battle + +The world where cash was king, greed was good, and money was power fell off its axis and stopped rotating, if only for a second, in January 1999. Microsoft, the great software giant and unstoppable engine of cash, was defending itself in a courtroom in Washington, D.C. The Department of Justice claimed that Microsoft was a monopoly and was using this power to cut off competitors. Microsoft denied it all and claimed that the world was hurling threat after competitive threat its way. They weren't a monopoly, they were just a very competitive company that managed to withstand the slings and arrows of other equally ruthless competitors out to steal its market share. + +The trial quickly turned into everyone's worst nightmare as the lawyers, the economists, and the programmers filled the courtroom with a thick mixture of technobabble and legal speak. On the stands, the computer nerds spewed out three-letter acronyms (TLAs) as they talked about creating operating systems. Afterward, the legal nerds started slicing them up into one-letter acronyms and testing to see just which of the three letters was really the one that committed the crime. Then the economists came forward and offered their theories on just when a monopoly is a monopoly. Were three letters working in collusion enough? What about two? Everyone in the courtroom began to dread spending the day cooped up in a small room as Microsoft tried to deny what was obvious to practically everyone. + +In the fall and early winter of 1998 and 1999, the Department of Justice had presented its witnesses, who explained how Microsoft had slanted contracts, tweaked software, and twisted arms to ensure that it and it alone got the lion's share of the computer business. Many watching the trial soon developed the opinion that Microsoft had adopted a mixture of tactics from the schoolyard bully, the local mob boss, and the mother from hell. The Department of Justice trotted out a number of witnesses who produced ample evidence that suggested the computer customers of the world will buy Microsoft products unless Microsoft decides otherwise. Competitors must be punished. + +By January, the journalists covering the trial were quietly complaining about this endless waste of time. The Department of Justice's case was so compelling that they saw the whole trial as just a delay in what would eventually come to be a ruling that would somehow split or shackle Microsoft. + +But Microsoft wasn't going to be bullied or pushed into splitting up. The trial allowed them to present their side of the story, and they had one ready. Sure, everyone seemed to use Microsoft products, but that was because they were great. It wasn't because there weren't any competitors, but because the competitors just weren't good enough. + +In the middle of January, Richard Schmalensee, the dean of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took the stand to defend Microsoft. Schmalensee had worked for the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice as an economist who examined the marketplace and the effects of anti-competitive behavior. He studied how monopolies behave, and to him Microsoft had no monopoly power. Now, he was being paid handsomely by Microsoft as an expert witness to repeat this view in court. + +Schmalensee's argument was simple: competitors are popping up all over the place. Microsoft, he said in his direct testimony, "is in a constant struggle for competitive survival. That struggle--the race to win and the victor's perpetual fear of being displaced--is the source of competitive vitality in the microcomputer software industry." + +Schmalensee even had a few competitors ready. "The iMac clearly competes directly and fiercely with Intel-compatible computers running Windows," he said without mentioning that Microsoft had bailed out Apple several months before with hundreds of millions of dollars in an investment. When Steve Jobs, the iCEO of Apple, announced the deal to a crowd of Mac lovers, the crowd booed. Jobs quieted them and tried to argue that the days of stiff competition with Microsoft were over. The scene did such a good job of capturing the total domination of Microsoft that the television movie The Pirates of Silicon Valley used it to illustrate how Bill Gates had won all of the marbles. + +After the announcement of the investment, Apple began shipping Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser as the preferred browser on its machines. Microsoft's competitor Netscape became just a bit harder to find on the iMac. After that deal, Steve Jobs even began making statements that the old sworn enemies, Apple and Microsoft, were now more partners than competitors. Schmalensee didn't focus on this facet of Apple's new attitude toward competition. + +Next, Schmalensee trotted out BeOS, an operating system made by Be, a small company with about 100 employees run by ex-Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée. This company had attracted millions of dollars in funding, he said, and some people really liked it. That made it a competitor. + +Schmalensee didn't mention that Be had trouble giving away the BeOS operating system. Gassée approached a number of PC manufacturers to see if they would include BeOS on their machines and give users the chance to switch between two operating systems. Gassée found, to no one's real surprise, that Microsoft's contracts with manufacturers made it difficult, if not practically impossible, to get BeOS in customers' hands. Microsoft controlled much of what the user got to see and insisted on almost total control over the viewer's experience. Schmalensee didn't mention these details in his testimony. BeOS may have been as locked up as a prisoner in a windowless cell in a stone-walled asylum on an island in the middle of the ocean, but BeOS was still a competitor for the love of the fair maiden. + +The last competitor, though, was the most surprising to everyone. Schmalensee saw Linux, a program given away for free, as a big potential competitor. When he said Linux, he really meant an entire collection of programs known as "open source" software. These were written by a loose-knit group of programmers who shared all of the source code to the software over the Internet. + +Open source software floated around the Internet controlled by a variety of licenses with names like the GNU General Public License (GPL). To say that the software was "controlled" by the license is a bit of a stretch. If anything, the licenses were deliberately worded to prohibit control. The GNU GPL, for instance, let users modify the program and give away their own versions. The license did more to enforce sharing of all the source code than it did to control or constrain. It was more an anti-license than anything else, and its author, Richard Stallman, often called it a "copyleft." + +Schmalensee didn't mention that most people thought of Linux as a strange tool created and used by hackers in dark rooms lit by computer monitors. He didn't mention that many people had trouble getting Linux to work with their computers. He forgot to mention that Linux manuals came with subheads like "Disk Druid-like 'fstab editor' available." He didn't delve into the fact that for many of the developers, Linux was just a hobby they dabbled with when there was nothing interesting on television. And he certainly didn't mention that most people thought the whole Linux project was the work of a mad genius and his weirdo disciples who still hadn't caught on to the fact that the Soviet Union had already failed big-time. The Linux folks actually thought sharing would make the world a better place. Fat-cat programmers who spent their stock-option riches on Porsches and balsamic vinegar laughed at moments like this. + +Schmalensee didn't mention these facts. He just offered Linux as an alternative to Windows and said that computer manufacturers might switch to it at any time. Poof. Therefore, Microsoft had competitors. At the trial, the discourse quickly broke down into an argument over what is really a worthy competitor and what isn't. Were there enough applications available for Linux or the Mac? What qualifies as "enough"? Were these really worthy? + +Under cross-examination, Schmalensee explained that he wasn't holding up the Mac, BeOS, or Linux as competitors who were going to take over 50 percent of the marketplace. He merely argued that their existence proved that the barriers produced by the so-called Microsoft monopoly weren't that strong. If rational people were investing in creating companies like BeOS, then Microsoft's power wasn't absolute. + +Afterward, most people quickly made up their minds. Everyone had heard about the Macintosh and knew that back then conventional wisdom dictated that it would soon fail. But most people didn't know anything about BeOS or Linux. How could a company be a competitor if no one had heard of it? Apple and Microsoft had TV commercials. BeOS, at least, had a charismatic chairman. There was no Linux pitchman, no Linux jingle, and no Linux 30-second spot in major media. At the time, only the best-funded projects in the Linux community had enough money to buy spots on late-night community-access cable television. How could someone without money compete with a company that hired the Rolling Stones to pump excitement into a product launch? + +When people heard that Microsoft was offering a free product as a worthy competitor, they began to laugh even louder at the company's chutzpah. Wasn't money the whole reason the country was having a trial? Weren't computer programmers in such demand that many companies couldn't hire as many as they needed, no matter how high the salary? How could Microsoft believe that anyone would buy the supposition that a bunch of pseudo-communist nerds living in their weird techno-utopia where all the software was free would ever come up with software that could compete with the richest company on earth? At first glance, it looked as if Microsoft's case was sinking so low that it had to resort to laughable strategies. It was as if General Motors were to tell the world "We shouldn't have to worry about fixing cars that pollute because a collective of hippies in Ithaca, New York, is refurbishing old bicycles and giving them away for free." It was as if Exxon waved away the problems of sinking oil tankers by explaining that folksingers had written a really neat ballad for teaching birds and otters to lick themselves clean after an oil spill. If no one charged money for Linux, then it was probably because it wasn't worth buying. + +But as everyone began looking a bit deeper, they began to see that Linux was being taken seriously in some parts of the world. Many web servers, it turned out, were already running on Linux or another free cousin known as FreeBSD. A free webserving tool known as Apache had controlled more than 50 percent of the web servers for some time, and it was gradually beating out Microsoft products that cost thousands of dollars. Many of the web servers ran Apache on top of a Linux or a FreeBSD machine and got the job done. The software worked well, and the nonexistent price made it easy to choose. + +Linux was also winning over some of the world's most serious physicists, weapons designers, biologists, and hard-core scientists. Some of the nation's top labs had wired together clusters of cheap PCs and turned them into supercomputers that were highly competitive with the best machines on the market. One upstart company started offering "supercomputers" for $3,000. These machines used Linux to keep the data flowing while the racks of computers plugged and chugged their way for hours on complicated simulations. + +There were other indications. Linux users bragged that their system rarely crashed. Some claimed to have machines that had been running for a year or more without a problem. Microsoft (and Apple) users, on the other hand, had grown used to frequent crashes. The "Blue Screen of Death" that appears on Windows users' monitors when something goes irretrievably wrong is the butt of many jokes. + +Linux users also bragged about the quality of their desktop interface. Most of the uninitiated thought of Linux as a hacker's system built for nerds. Yet recently two very good operating shells called GNOME and KDE had taken hold. Both offered the user an environment that looked just like Windows but was better. Linux hackers started bragging that they were able to equip their girlfriends, mothers, and friends with Linux boxes without grief. Some people with little computer experience were adopting Linux with little trouble. + +Building websites and supercomputers is not an easy task, and it is often done in back rooms out of the sight of most people. When people began realizing that the free software hippies had slowly managed to take over a large chunk of the web server and supercomputing world, they realized that perhaps Microsoft's claim was viable. Web servers and supercomputers are machines built and run by serious folks with bosses who want something in return for handing out paychecks. They aren't just toys sitting around the garage. + +If these free software guys had conquered such serious arenas, maybe they could handle the office and the desktop. If the free software world had created something usable by the programmers' mothers, then maybe they were viable competitors. Maybe Microsoft was right. + +2~ Sleeping In + +While Microsoft focused its eyes and ears upon Washington, one of its biggest competitors was sleeping late. When Richard Schmalensee was prepping to take the stand in Washington, D.C., to defend Microsoft's outrageous fortune against the slings and arrows of a government inquisition, Alan Cox was still sleeping in. He didn't get up until 2:00 PM. at his home in Swansea on the south coast of Wales. This isn't too odd for him. His wife, Telsa, grouses frequently that it's impossible to get him moving each morning without a dose of Jolt Cola, the kind that's overloaded with caffeine. + +The night before, Cox and his wife went to see The Mask of Zorro, the latest movie that describes how Don Diego de la Vega assumed the secret identity of Zorro to free the Mexican people from the tyranny of Don Rafael Montero. In this version, Don Diego, played by Anthony Hopkins, chooses an orphan, Alejandro Murrieta, played by Antonio Banderas, and teaches him to be the next Zorro so the fight can continue. Its theme resonates with writers of open source software: a small band of talented, passionate warriors warding off the evil oppressor. + +Cox keeps an open diary and posts the entries on the web. "It's a nice looking film, with some great stunts and character play," he wrote, but + +_1 You could, however, have fitted the plot, including all the twists, on the back of a matchbox. That made it feel a bit ponderous so it only got a 6 out of 10 even though I'm feeling extremely smug because I spotted one of the errors in the film while watching it not by consulting imdb later. + +By the imdb, he meant the Internet Movie Database, which is one of the most complete listings of film credits, summaries, and glitches available on the Net. Users on the Internet write in with their own reviews and plot synopses, which the database dutifully catalogs and makes available to everyone. It's a reference book with thousands of authors. + +In this case, the big glitch in the film is the fact that one of the train gauges uses the metric system. Mexico converted to this system in 1860, but the film is set in 1841. Whoops. Busted. + +Telsa wrote in her diary, which she also posts to the Net under the title "The More Accurate Diary. Really." + +_1 Dragged him to cinema to see Zorro. I should have remembered he'd done some fencing and found something different. He also claimed he'd spotted a really obscure error. I checked afterward on IMDB, and was amazed. How did he see this? + +Cox is a big bear of a man who wears a long, brown wizard's beard. He has an agile, analytic mind that constantly picks apart a system and probes it for weaknesses. If he's playing a game, he plays until he finds a trick or a loophole that will give him the winning edge. If he's working around the house, he often ends up meddling with things until he fixes and improves them. Of course, he also often breaks them. His wife loves to complain about the bangs and crashes that come from his home office, where he often works until 6:30 in the morning. + +To his wife, this crashing, banging, and late-night hacking is the source of the halfhearted grousing inherent in every marriage. She obviously loves both his idiosyncrasies and the opportunity to discuss just how strange they can be. In January, Telsa was trying to find a way to automate her coffeepot by hooking it up to her computer. + +She wrote in her diary, + +_1 Alan is reluctant to get involved with any attempt to make a coffee-maker switch on via the computer now because he seems to think I will eventually switch it on with no water in and start a fire. I'm not the one who welded tinned spaghetti to the non-stick saucepan. Or set the wok on fire. More than once. Once with fifteen guests in the house. But there we are. + +To the rest of the world, this urge to putter and fiddle with machines is more than a source of marital comedy. Cox is one of the great threats to the continued dominance of Microsoft, despite the fact that he found a way to weld spaghetti to a nonstick pan. He is one of the core developers who help maintain the Linux kernel. In other words, he's one of the group of programmers who helps guide the development of the Linux operating system, the one Richard Schmalensee feels is such a threat to Microsoft. Cox is one of the few people whom Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, trusts to make important decisions about future directions. Cox is an expert on the networking guts of the system and is responsible for making sure that most of the new ideas that people suggest for Linux are considered carefully and integrated correctly. Torvalds defers to Cox on many matters about how Linux-based computers talk with other computers over a network. Cox works long and hard to find efficient ways for Linux to juggle multiple connections without slowing down or deadlocking. + +The group that works with Cox and Torvalds operates with no official structure. Millions of people use Linux to keep their computers running, and all of them have copies of the source code. In the 1980s, most companies began keeping the source code to their software as private as possible because they worried that a competitor might come along and steal the ideas the source spelled out. The source code, which is written in languages like C, Java, FORTRAN, BASIC, or Pascal, is meant to be read by programmers. Most companies didn't want other programmers understanding too much about the guts of their software. Information is power, and the companies instinctively played their cards close to their chests. + +When Linus Torvalds first started writing Linux in 1991, however, he decided to give away the operating system for free. He included all the source code because he wanted others to read it, comment upon it, and perhaps improve it. His decision was as much a radical break from standard programming procedure as a practical decision. He was a poor student at the time, and this operating system was merely a hobby. If he had tried to sell it, he wouldn't have gotten anything for it. He certainly had no money to build a company that could polish the software and market it. So he just sent out copies over the Internet. + +Sharing software had already been endorsed by Richard Stallman, a legendary programmer from MIT who believed that keeping source code private was a sin and a crime against humanity. A programmer who shares the source code lets others learn, and those others can contribute their ideas back into the mix. Closed source code leaves users frustrated because they can't learn about the software or fix any bugs. Stallman broke away from MIT in 1984 when he founded the Free Software Foundation. This became the organization that sponsored Stallman's grand project to free source code, a project he called GNU. In the 1980s, Stallman created very advanced tools like the GNU Emacs text editor, which people could use to write programs and articles. Others donated their work and the GNU project soon included a wide range of tools, utilities, and games. All of them were distributed for free. + +Torvalds looked at Stallman and decided to follow his lead with open source code. Torvalds's free software began to attract people who liked to play around with technology. Some just glanced at it. Others messed around for a few hours. Free is a powerful incentive. It doesn't let money, credit cards, purchase orders, and the boss's approval get in the way of curiosity. A few, like Alan Cox, had such a good time taking apart an operating system that they stayed on and began contributing back to the project. + +In time, more and more people like Alan Cox discovered Torvalds's little project on the Net. Some slept late. Others kept normal hours and worked in offices. Some just found bugs. Others fixed the bugs. Still others added new features that they wanted. Slowly, the operating system grew from a toy that satisfied the curiosity of computer scientists into a usable tool that powers supercomputers, web servers, and millions of other machines around the world. + +Today, about a thousand people regularly work with people like Alan Cox on the development of the Linux kernel, the official name for the part of the operating system that Torvalds started writing back in 1991. That may not be an accurate estimate because many people check in for a few weeks when a project requires their participation. Some follow everything, but most people are just interested in little corners. Many other programmers have contributed various pieces of software such as word processors or spreadsheets. All of these are bundled together into packages that are often called plain Linux or GNU/Linux and shipped by companies like Red Hat or more ad hoc groups like Debian.~{ /{Linux Weekly News}/ keeps a complete list of distributors. These range from the small, one- or two-man operations to the biggest, most corporate ones like Red Hat: Alzza Linux, Apokalypse, Armed Linux, Bad Penguin Linux, Bastille Linux, Best Linux (Finnish/Swedish), Bifrost, Black Cat Linux (Ukrainian/Russian), Caldera OpenLinux, CCLinux, Chinese Linux Extension, Complete Linux, Conectiva Linux (Brazilian), Debian GNU/Linux, Definite Linux, DemoLinux, DLD, DLite, DLX, DragonLinux, easyLinux, Enoch, Eridani Star System, Eonova Linux, e-smith server and gateway, Eurielec Linux (Spanish), eXecutive Linux, floppyfw, Floppix, Green Frog Linux, hal91, Hard Hat Linux, Immunix, Independence, Jurix, Kha0s Linux, KRUD, KSI-Linux, Laetos, LEM, Linux Cyrillic Edition, LinuxGT, Linux-Kheops (French), Linux MLD (Japanese), LinuxOne OS, LinuxPPC, LinuxPPP (Mexican), Linux Pro Plus, Linux Router Project, LOAF, LSD, Mandrake, Mastodon, MicroLinux, MkLinux, muLinux, nanoLinux II, NoMad Linux, OpenClassroom, Peanut Linux, Plamo Linux, PLD, Project Ballantain, PROSA, QuadLinux, Red Hat, Rock Linux, RunOnCD, ShareTheNet, Skygate, Slackware, Small Linux, Stampede, Stataboware, Storm Linux, SuSE, Tomsrtbt, Trinux, TurboLinux, uClinux, Vine Linux, WinLinux 2000, Xdenu, XTeamLinux, and Yellow Dog Linux. }~ While Torvalds only wrote the core kernel, people use his name, Linux, to stand for a whole body of software written by thousands of others. It's not exactly fair, but most let it slide. If there hadn't been the Linux kernel, the users wouldn't have the ability to run software on a completely free system. The free software would need to interact with something from Microsoft, Apple, or IBM. Of course, if it weren't for all of the other free software from Berkeley, the GNU project, and thousands of other garages around the world, there would be little for the Linux kernel to do. + +Officially, Linus Torvalds is the final arbiter for the kernel and the one who makes the final decisions about new features. In practice, the group runs like a loosely knit "ad-hocracy." Some people might care about a particular feature like the ability to interface with Macintoshes, and they write special code that makes this task easier. Others who run really big databases may want larger file systems that can store more information without limits. + +All of these people work at their own pace. Some work in their homes, like Alan Cox. Some work in university labs. Others work for businesses that use Linux and encourage their programmers to plug away so it serves their needs. + +The team is united by mailing lists. The Linux Kernel mailing list hooks up Cox in Britain, Torvalds in Silicon Valley, and the others around the globe. They post notes to the list and discuss ideas. Sometimes verbal fights break out, and sometimes everyone agrees. Sometimes people light a candle by actually writing new code to make the kernel better, and other times they just curse the darkness. + +Cox is now one of several people responsible for coordinating the addition of new code. He tests it for compatibility and guides Linux authors to make sure they're working together optimally. In essence, he tests every piece of incoming software to make sure all of the gauges work with the right system of measurement so there will be no glitches. He tries to remove the incompatibilities that marred Zorro. + +Often, others will duplicate Cox's work. Some new features are very popular and have many cooks minding the stew. The technology for speeding up computers with multiple CPUs lets each computer harness the extra power, so many list members test it frequently. They want the fastest machines they can get, and smoothing the flow of data between the CPUs is the best way to let the machines cooperate. + +Other features are not so popular, and they're tackled by the people who need the features. Some people want to hook their Linux boxes up to Macintoshes. Doing that smoothly can require some work in the kernel. Others may want to add special code to enable a special device like a high-speed camera or a strange type of disk drive. These groups often work on their own but coordinate their solutions with the main crowd. Ideally, they'll be able to come up with some patches that solve their problem without breaking some other part of the system. + +It's a very social and political process that unrolls in slow motion through e-mail messages. One person makes a suggestion. Others may agree. Someone may squabble with the idea because it seems inelegant, sloppy, or, worst of all, dangerous. After some time, a rough consensus evolves. Easy problems can be solved in days or even minutes, but complicated decisions can wait as the debate rages for years. + +Each day, Cox and his virtual colleagues pore through the lists trying to figure out how to make Linux better, faster, and more usable. Sometimes they skip out to watch a movie. Sometimes they go for hikes. But one thing they don't do is spend months huddled in conference rooms trying to come up with legal arguments. Until recently, the Linux folks didn't have money for lawyers, and that means they didn't get sidetracked by figuring out how to get big and powerful people like Richard Schmalensee to tell a court that there's no monopoly in the computer operating system business. + +2~ Suits Against Hackers + +Schmalensee and Cox couldn't be more different from each other. One is a career technocrat who moves easily between the government and MIT. The other is what used to be known as an absentminded professor--the kind who works when he's really interested in a problem. It just so happens that Cox is pretty intrigued with building a better operating system than the various editions of Windows that form the basis of Microsoft's domination of the computer industry. + +The battle between Linux and Microsoft is lining up to be the classic fight between the people like Schmalensee and the people like Cox. On one side are the armies of lawyers, lobbyists, salesmen, and expensive executives who are armed with patents, lawsuits, and legislation. They are skilled at moving the levers of power until the gears line up just right and billions of dollars pour into their pockets. They know how to schmooze, toady, beg, or even threaten until they wear the mantle of authority and command the piety and devotion of the world. People buy Microsoft because it's "the standard." No one decreed this, but somehow it has come to be. + +On the other side are a bunch of guys who just like playing with computers and will do anything to take them apart. They're not like the guy in the song by John Mellencamp who sings "I fight authority and authority always wins." Some might have an attitude, but most just want to look at the insides of their computers and rearrange them to hook up to coffee machines or networks. They want to fidget with the guts of their machines. If they weld some spaghetti to the insides, so be it. + +Normally, these battles between the suits and the geeks don't threaten the established order. There are university students around the world building solar-powered cars, but they don't actually pose a threat to the oil or auto industries. "21," a restaurant in New York, makes a great hamburger, but they're not going to put McDonald's out of business. The experimentalists and the perfectionists don't usually knock heads with the corporations who depend upon world domination for their profits. Except when it comes to software. + +Software is different from cars or hamburgers. Once someone writes the source code, copying the source costs next to nothing. That makes it much easier for tinkerers like Cox to have a global effect. If Cox, Stallman, Torvalds, and his chums just happen to luck upon something that's better than Microsoft, then the rest of the world can share their invention for next to nothing. That's what makes Cox, Torvalds, and their buddies a credible threat no matter how often they sleep late. + +It's easy to get high off of the idea alone. A few guys sleeping late and working in bedrooms aren't supposed to catch up to a cash engine like Microsoft. They aren't supposed to create a webserving engine that controls more than half of the web. They aren't supposed to create a graphical user interface for drawing windows and icons on the screen that's much better than Windows. They aren't supposed to create supercomputers with sticker prices of $3,000. Money isn't supposed to lose. + +Of course, the folks who are working on free software projects have advantages that money can't buy. These programmers don't need lawyers to create licenses, negotiate contracts, or argue over terms. Their software is free, and lawyers lose interest pretty quickly when there's no money around. The free software guys don't need to scrutinize advertising copy. Anyone can download the software and just try it. The programmers also don't need to sit in the corner when their computer crashes and complain about the idiot who wrote the software. Anyone can read the source code and fix the glitches. + +The folks in the free source software world are, in other words, grooving on freedom. They're high on the original American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The founders of the United States of America didn't set out to create a wealthy country where citizens spent their days worrying whether they would be able to afford new sport utility vehicles when the stock options were vested. The founders just wanted to secure the blessings of liberty for posterity. Somehow, the wealth followed. + +This beautiful story is easy to embrace: a group of people started out swapping cool software on the Net and ended up discovering that their free sharing created better software than what a corporation could produce with a mountain of cash. + +The programmers found that unrestricted cooperation made it easy for everyone to contribute. No price tags kept others away. No stereotypes or biases excluded anyone. The software and the source code were on the Net for anyone to read. + +Wide-open cooperation also turned out to be wide-open competition because the best software won the greatest attention. The corporate weasels with the ear of the president could not stop a free source software project from shipping. No reorganization or downsizing could stop people from working on free software if they wanted to hack. The freedom to create was more powerful than money. + +That's an idyllic picture, and the early success of Linux, FreeBSD, and other free packages makes it tempting to think that the success will build. Today, open source servers power more than 50 percent of the web servers on the Internet, and that is no small accomplishment. Getting thousands, if not millions, of programmers to work together is quite amazing given how quirky programmers can be. The ease of copying makes it possible to think that Alan Cox could get up late and still move the world. + +But the 1960s were also an allegedly idyllic time when peace, love, and sharing were going to create a beautiful planet where everyone gave to everyone else in an eternal golden braid of mutual respect and caring. Everyone assumed that the same spirit that so quickly and easily permeated the college campuses and lovefests in the parks was bound to sweep the world. The communes were really happening, man. But somehow, the groovy beat never caught on beyond those small nests of easy caring and giving. Somehow, the folks started dropping back in, getting real jobs, taking on real mortgages, and buying back into the world where money was king. + +Over the years, the same sad ending has befallen many communes, utopian visions, and hypnotic vibes. Freedom is great. It allows brilliant inventors to work independently of the wheels of power. But capital is another powerful beast that drives innovation. The great communes often failed because they never converted their hard work into money, making it difficult for them to save and invest. Giving things away may be, like, really groovy, but it doesn't build a nest egg. + +Right now, the free software movement stands at a crucial moment in its history. In the past, a culture of giving and wide-open sharing let thousands of programmers build a great operating system that was, in many ways, better than anything coming from the best companies. Many folks began working on Linux, FreeBSD, and thousands of other projects as hobbies, but now they're waking up to find IBM, HewlettPackard, Apple, and all the other big boys pounding on their door. If the kids could create something as nice as Linux, everyone began to wonder whether these kids really had enough good stuff to go the distance and last nine innings against the greatest power hitters around. + +Perhaps the free software movement will just grow faster and better as more people hop on board. More users mean more eyes looking for bugs. More users mean more programmers writing new source code for new features. More is better. + +On the other hand, sharing may be neat, but can it beat the power of capital? Microsoft's employees may be just serfs motivated by the dream that someday their meager stock options will be worth enough to retire upon, but they have a huge pile of cash driving them forward. This capital can be shifted very quickly. If Bill Gates wants 1,000 programmers to create something, he can wave his hand. If he wants to buy 1,000 computers, it takes him a second. That's the power of capital. + +Linus Torvalds may be on the cover of magazines, but he can't do anything with the wave of a hand. He must charm and cajole the thousands of folks on the Linux mailing list to make a change. Many of the free software projects may generate great code, but they have to beg for computers. The programmers might even surprise him and come up with an even better solution. They've done it in the past. But no money means that no one has to do what anyone says. + +In the past, the free software movement was like the movies in which Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland put on a great show in the barn. That part won't change. Cool kids with a dream will still be spinning up great programs that will be wonderful gifts for the world. + +But shows that are charming and fresh in a barn can become thin and weak on a big stage on Broadway. The glitches and raw functionality of Linux and free software don't seem too bad if you know that they're built by kids in their spare time. Building real tools for real companies, moms, police stations, and serious users everywhere is another matter. Everyone may be hoping that sharing, caring, and curiosity are enough, but no one knows for certain. Maybe capital will end up winning. Maybe it won't. It's freedom versus assurance; it's wide-open sharing versus stock options; it's cooperation versus intimidation; it's the geeks versus the suits, all in one knockdown, hack-till-you-drop, winner-take-everything fight. + +1~ Lists + +While Alan Cox was sleeping late and Microsoft was putting Richard Schmalensee on the stand, the rest of the open source software world was tackling their own problems. Some were just getting up, others were in the middle of their day, and still others were just going to sleep. This is not just because the open source hackers like to work at odd times around the clock. Some do. But they also live around the globe in all of the different time zones. The sun never sets on the open source empire. + +On January 14, 1999, for instance, Peter Jeremy, an Australian, announced that he had just discovered a potential Y2K problem in the control software in the central database that helped maintain the FreeBSD source code. He announced this by posting a note to a mailing list that forwarded the message to many other FreeBSD users. The problem was that the software simply appended the two characters "19" +to the front of the year. When the new millennium came about a year later, the software would start writing the new date as "19100." Oops. The problem was largely cosmetic because it only occurred in some of the support software used by the system. + +FreeBSD is a close cousin to the Linux kernel and one that predates it in some ways. It descends from a long tradition of research and development of operating systems at the University of California at Berkeley. The name BSD stands for "Berkeley Software Distribution," the name given to one of the first releases of operating system source code that Berkeley made for the world. That small package grew, morphed, and absorbed many other contributions over the years. + +Referring to Linux and FreeBSD as cousins is an apt term because they share much of the same source code in the same way that cousins share some of the same genes. Both borrow source code and ideas from each other. If you buy a disk with FreeBSD, which you can do from companies like Walnut Creek, you may get many of the same software packages that you get from a disk from Red Hat Linux. Both include, for instance, some of the GNU compilers that turn source code into something that can be understood by computers. + +FreeBSD, in fact, has some of its own fans and devotees. The FreeBSD site lists thousands of companies large and small that use the software. Yahoo, the big Internet directory, game center, and news operation, uses FreeBSD in some of its servers. So does Blue Mountain Arts, the electronic greeting card company that is consistently one of the most popular sites on the web. There are undoubtedly thousands more who aren't listed on the FreeBSD site. The software produced by the FreeBSD project is, after all, free, so people can give it away, share it with their friends, or even pretend they are "stealing" it by making a copy of a disk at work. No one really knows how many copies of FreeBSD are out there because there's no reason to count. Microsoft may need to count heads so they can bill everyone for using Windows, but FreeBSD doesn't have that problem. + +That morning, Peter Jeremy's message went out to everyone who subscribed to the FreeBSD mailing list. Some users who cared about the Y2K bug could take Jeremy's patch and use it to fix their software directly. They didn't need to wait for some central bureaucracy to pass judgment on the information. They didn't need to wait for the Y2K guy at FreeBSD to get around to vetting the change. Everyone could just insert the fix because they had all of the source code available to them. + +Of course, most people never use all their freedoms. In this case, most people didn't have to bother dealing with Jeremy's patch because they waited for the official version. The FreeBSD infrastructure absorbed the changes into its source code vaults, and the changes appeared in the next fully updated version. This new complete version is where most people first started using the fix. Jeremy is a programmer who created a solution that was easy for other programmers to use. Most people, however, aren't programmers, and they want their software to be easy to use. Most programmers aren't even interested in poking around inside their machines. Everyone wants the solution to either fix itself or come as close to that as possible. + +Jeremy's message was just one of the hundreds percolating through the FreeBSD community that day. Some fell on deaf ears, some drew snotty comments, and a few gathered some real attention. The mailing lists were fairly complex ecologies where ideas blossomed and grew before they faded away and died. + +Of course, it's not fair to categorize the FreeBSD world as a totally decentralized anarchy. There is one central team led by one man, Jordan Hubbard, who organizes the leadership of a core group of devoted programmers. The group runs the website, maintains an up-to-date version of FreeBSD, and sponsors dozens of lists devoted to different corners or features. One list focuses on hooking up the fast high-performance SCSI hard disks that are popular with people who demand high-performance systems. Another concentrates on building in enough security to keep out attackers who might try to sneak in through the Internet. + +That January 14, a man in Great Britain, Roger Hardiman, was helping a man in Switzerland, Reto Trachsel, hook up a Hauppauge video card to his system. They were communicating on the Multimedia mailing list devoted to finding ways to add audio and video functions to FreeBSD systems. Trachsel posted a note to the list asking for information on how to find the driver software that would make sure that the data coming out of the Hauppauge television receiver would be generally available to the rest of the computer. Hardiman pointed out a solution, but cautioned, "If your Hauppauge card has the MSP34xx Stereo Decoder audio chip, you may get no sound when watching TV. I should get this fixed in the next week or two." + +Solutions like these float around the FreeBSD community. Most people don't really care if they can watch television with their computer, but a few do. The easy access to source code and drivers means that the few can go off and do their own thing without asking some major company for permission. The big companies like Microsoft and Apple, for instance, have internal projects that are producing impressive software for creating and displaying multimedia extravaganzas on computers. But they have a strict view of the world: the company is the producer of high-quality tools that make their way to the consumer who uses them and pays for them in one way or another. + +The list ecology is more organic and anti-hierarchical. Everyone has access to the source code. Everyone can make changes. Everyone can do what they want. There is no need for the FreeBSD management to meet and decide "Multimedia is good." There is no need for a project team to prioritize and list action items and best-of-breed deliverables. Someone in Switzerland decides he wants to hook up a television receiver to his computer and, what do you know, someone in Great Britain has already solved the problem. Well, he's solved it if you don't have an MSP34xx stereo decoder chip in your card. But that should be fixed sooner or later, too. + +2~ Free Doesn't Mean Freeloading + +There are thousands of other mailing lists linking thousands of other projects. It's hard to actually put a number to them because the projects grow, merge, and fade as people's interests wax and wane. The best flourish, and the others just drift away. + +Life on the mailing lists is often a bit more brutal and short than life on earth. The work on the project needs to split up. The volunteers need to organize themselves so that great software can be written. + +On that January 14, a new member of the WINE list was learning just how volunteering works. The guy posted a note to the list that described his Diamond RIO portable music device that lets you listen to MP3 files whenever you want. "I think the WINE development team should drop everything and work on getting this program to work as it doesn't seem like Diamond wants to release a Linux utility for the Rio," he wrote. + +WINE stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator," which is a joke that only programmers and free software lovers can get. It's first a play on the recursive acronym for the GNU project ("GNU is not UNIX"). It's also a bit of a political statement for programmers. An emulator is a piece of software that makes one computer act like another. A company named Connectix, for instance, sells an emulator that lets a Macintosh behave like a Windows PC so anyone can use their Windows software on the Mac. Emulators, however, are pretty slow because they're constantly translating information on the fly. Anyone who has tried to hold a conversation with someone who speaks a different language knows how frustrating it can be to require a translator. + +The WINE project is an ambitious attempt to knock out one of the most important structural elements of the Microsoft monopoly. Software written for Windows only functions when people buy a version of Windows from Microsoft. When you purchase a Connectix emulator for the Mac, you get a version of Windows bundled with it. + +The WINE project is a group of people who are trying to clone Windows. Well, not clone all of it. They just want to clone what is known as the Win32 API, a panoply of features that make it easier to write software for a Microsoft machine. A programmer who wants to create a new button for a Windows computer doesn't need to write all of the instructions for drawing a frame with three-dimensional shading. A Microsoft employee has already bundled those instructions into the Win32 API. There are millions of functions in these kits that help programmers. Some play audio files, others draw complex images or movies. These features make it easy for programmers to write software for Windows because some of the most repetitive work is already finished. + +The WINE clone of the Win32 is a fascinating example of how open source starts slowly and picks up steam. Bob Amstadt started the project in 1993, but soon turned it over to Alexandre Julliard, who has been the main force behind it. The project, although still far from finished, has produced some dramatic accomplishments, making it possible to run major programs like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel on a Linux box without using Windows. In essence, the WINE software is doing a good enough job acting like Windows that it's fooling Excel and Word. If you can trick the cousins, that's not too bad. + +The WINE home page (www.winehq.com) estimates that more than 90,000 people use WINE regularly to run programs for Microsoft Windows without buying Windows. About 140 or more people regularly contribute to the project by writing code or fixing bugs. Many are hobbyists who want the thrill of getting their software to run without Windows, but some are corporate programmers. The corporate programmers want to sell their software to the broadest possible marketplace, but they don't want to take the time to rewrite everything. If they can get their software working well with WINE, then people who use Linux or BSD can use the software that was written for Microsoft Windows. + +The new user who wanted to get his RIO player working with his Linux computer soon got a rude awakening. Andreas Mohr, a German programmer, wrote back, + +_1 Instead of suggesting the WINE team to "drop everything" in order to get a relatively minor thing like PMP300 to work, would you please install WINE, test it, read documentation/bug reports and post a useful bug report here? There are zillions of very useful and impressing Windoze apps out there . . . (After all that's only my personal opinion, maybe that was a bit too harsh ;-) + +Most new free software users soon discover that freedom isn't always easy. If you want to get free software, you're going to have to put in some work. Sometimes you get lucky. The man in Switzerland who posted his note on the same day found out that someone in Britain was solving his problems for him. There was no one, however, working on the RIO software and making sure it worked with WINE. + +Mohr's suggestion was to file a bug report that ranks the usability of the software so the programmers working on WINE can tweak it. This is just the first step in the free software experience. Someone has to notice the problem and fix it. In this case, someone needs to hook up their Diamond RIO MP3 player to a Linux box and try to move MP3 files with the software written for Windows. Ideally, the software will work perfectly, and now all Linux users will be able to use RIO players. In reality, there might be problems or glitches. Some of the graphics on the screen might be wrong. The software might not download anything at all. The first step is for someone to test the product and write up a detailed report about what works and what doesn't. + +At the time of this writing, no one has stepped up to the plate. There are no reports about the Diamond player in the WINE database. Maybe the new user didn't have time. Maybe he wasn't technically sophisticated enough to get WINE running in the first place. It's still not a simple system to use. In any case, his bright idea fell by the wayside. + +The mailing lists buzz with idle chatter about neat, way-out ideas that never come to fruition. Some people see this as a limitation of the free software world. A corporation, however, is able to dispatch a team of programmers to create solutions. These companies have money to spend on polishing a product and making sure it works. Connectix, for instance, makes an emulator that lets Mac users play games written for the Sony PlayStation. The company employs a substantial number of people who simply play all the Sony games from beginning to end until all of the bugs are gone. It's a rough job, but someone has to do it. + +WINE can't pay anyone, and that means that great ideas sometimes get ignored. The free software community, however, doesn't necessarily see this as a limitation. If the RIO player were truly important, someone else would come along and pick up the project. Someone else would do the work and file a bug report so everyone could use the software. If there's no one else, then maybe the RIO software isn't that important to the Linux community. Work gets done when someone really cares enough to do it. + +These mailing lists are the fibers that link the open source community into the network of minds. Before e-mail, they were just a bunch of rebels haunting the moors and rattling around their basements inventing monstrous machines. Now they're smoothly tuned mechanisms coordinated by messages, notes, and missives. They're not madmen who roar at dinner parties about the bad technology from Borg-like corporations. They've got friends now. One person may be a flake, but a group might be on to something. + +1~ Image + +Consider this picture: Microsoft is a megalith built by one man with a towering ego. It may not be fair to lump all of the serfs in the corporate cubicle farms in Redmond into one big army of automatons, but it sure conjures a striking image that isn't altogether inaccurate. Microsoft employees are fiercely loyal and often more dedicated to the cause than the average worker bee. Bill Gates built the company from scratch with the help of several college friends, and this group maintains tight control over all parts of the empire. The flavor of the organization is set by one man with the mind and the ego to micromanage it all. + +Now consider the image of the members of the free software revolution. Practically every newspaper article and colorful feature describing the group talks about a ragtag army of scruffy, bearded programmers who are just a bit too pale from spending their days in front of a computer screen. The writers love to conjure up a picture of a group that looks like it came stumbling out of some dystopian fantasy movie like Mad Max or A Boy and His Dog. They're the outsiders. They're a tightly knit band of rebel outcasts who are planning to free the people from their Microsoft slavery and return to the people the power usurped by Mr. Gates. What do they want? Freedom! When do they want it? Now! + +There's only one problem with this tidy, Hollywood-ready image: it's far from true. While Microsoft is one big corporation with reins of control that keep everyone in line, there is no strong or even weak organization that binds the world of open source software. The movement, if it could be called that, is comprised of individuals, each one free to do whatever he wants with the software. That's the point: no more shackles. No more corporate hegemony. Just pure source code that runs fast, clean, and light, straight through the night. + +This doesn't mean that the image is all wrong. Some of the luminaries like Richard Stallman and Alan Cox have been known to sport long, Rip van Winkle-grade beards. Some folks are strikingly pale. A few could bathe a bit more frequently. Caffeine is a bit too popular with them. Some people look as if they were targets for derision by the idiots on the high school football team. + +But there are many counterexamples. Linus Torvalds drives a Pontiac and lives in a respectable home with a wife and two children. He works during the day at a big company and spends his evenings shopping and doing errands. His life would be perfectly categorized as late 1950s sitcom if his wife, Tove, weren't a former Finnish karate champion and trucks weren't driving up to his house to deliver top-of-the-line computers like a 200-pound monstrosity with four Xeon processors. He told VAR Business, "A large truck brought it to our house and the driver was really confused. He said, 'You don't have a loading dock?'" On second thought, those are the kind of shenanigans that drive most sitcoms. + +There's no easy way to classify the many free source code contributors. Many have children, but many don't. Some don't mention them, some slip in references to them, and others parade them around with pride. Some are married, some are not. Some are openly gay. Some exist in sort of a presexual utopia of early teenage boyhood. Some of them are still in their early teens. Some aren't. + +Some contributors are fairly described as "ragtag," but many aren't. Many are corporate droids who work in cubicle farms during the day and create free software projects at night. Some work at banks. Some work on databases for human resource departments. Some build websites. Everyone has a day job, and many keep themselves clean and ready to be promoted to the next level. Bruce Perens, one of the leaders of the Debian group, used to work at the Silicon Valley glitz factory Pixar and helped write some of the software that created the hit Toy Story. + +Still, he told me, "At the time Toy Story was coming out, there was a space shuttle flying with the Debian GNU/Linux distribution on it controlling a biological experiment. People would say 'Are you proud of working at Pixar?' and then I would say my hobby software was running on the space shuttle now. That was a turnaround point when I realized that Linux might become my career." + +In fact, it's not exactly fair to categorize many of the free software programmers as a loosely knit band of rebel programmers out to destroy Microsoft. It's a great image that feeds the media's need to highlight conflict, but it's not exactly true. The free software movement began long before Microsoft was a household word. Richard Stallman wrote his manifesto setting out some of the precepts in 1984. He was careful to push the notion that programmers always used to share the source code to software until the 1980s, when corporations began to develop the shrink-wrapped software business. In the olden days of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, programmers always shared. While Stallman has been known to flip his middle finger out at the name Bill Gates for the reporting pleasure of a writer from Salon magazine, he's not after Microsoft per se. He just wants to return computing to the good old days when the source was free and sharing was possible. + +The same holds for most of the other programmers. Some contribute source code because it helps them with their day job. Some stay up all night writing code because they're obsessed. Some consider it an act of charity, a kind of noblesse oblige. Some want to fix bugs that bother them. Some want fame, glory, and the respect of all other computer programmers. There are thousands of reasons why new open source software gets written, and very few of them have anything to do with Microsoft. + +In fact, it's a bad idea to see the free software revolution as having much to do with Microsoft. Even if Linux, FreeBSD, and other free software packages win, Microsoft will probably continue to fly along quite happily in much the same way that IBM continues to thrive even after losing the belt of the Heavyweight Computing Champion of the World to Microsoft. Anyone who spends his or her time focused on the image of a ragtag band of ruffians and orphans battling the Microsoft leviathan is bound to miss the real story. + +The fight is really just a by-product of the coming of age of the information business. The computer trade is rapidly maturing and turning into a service industry. In the past, the manufacture of computers and software took place on assembly lines and in cubicle farms. People bought shrink-wrapped items from racks. These were items that were manufactured. Now both computers and software are turning into dirtcheap commodities whose only source of profit is customization and handholding. The real money now is in service. + +Along the way, the free software visionaries stumbled onto a curious fact. They could give away software, and people would give back improvements to it. Software cost practically nothing to duplicate, so it wasn't that hard to just give it away after it was written. At first, this was sort of a pseudo-communist thing to do, but today it seems like a brilliant business decision. If the software is turning into a commodity with a price falling toward zero, why not go all the way and gain whatever you can by freely sharing the code? The profits could come by selling services like programming and education. The revolution isn't about defeating Microsoft; it's just a change in the whole way the world buys and uses computers. + +The revolution is also the latest episode in the battle between the programmers and the suits. In a sense, it's a battle for the hearts and minds of the people who are smart enough to create software for the world. The programmers want to write challenging tools that impress their friends. The suits want to rein in programmers and channel their energy toward putting more money in the pockets of the corporation. The suits hope to keep programmers devoted by giving them fat paychecks, but it's not clear that programmers really want the cash. The freedom to do whatever you want with source code is intrinsically rewarding. The suits want to keep software under lock and key so they can sell it and maximize revenues. The free software revolution is really about a bunch of programmers saying, "Screw the cash. I really want the source code." + +The revolution is also about defining wealth in cyberspace. Microsoft promises to build neat tools that will help us get wherever we want to go today--if we keep writing larger and larger checks. The open source movement promises software with practically no limitations. Which is a better deal? The Microsoft millionaires probably believe in proprietary software and suggest that the company wouldn't have succeeded as it did if it didn't provide something society wanted. They created good things, and the people rewarded them. + +But the open source movement has also created great software that many think is better than anything Microsoft has built. Is society better off with a computer infrastructure controlled by a big corporate machine driven by cash? Or does sharing the source code create better software? Are we at a point where money is not the best vehicle for lubricating the engines of societal advancement? Many in the free software world are pondering these questions. + +Anyone who tunes in to the battle between Microsoft and the world expecting to see a good old-fashioned fight for marketplace domination is going to miss the real excitement. Sure, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mach, and the thousands of other free software projects are going to come out swinging. Microsoft is going to counterpunch with thousands of patents defended by armies of lawyers. Some of the programmers might even be a bit weird, and a few will be entitled to wear the adjective "ragtag." But the real revolution has nothing to do with whether Bill Gates keeps his title as King of the Hill. It has nothing to do with whether the programmers stay up late and work in the nude. It has nothing to do with poor grooming, extravagant beards, Coke-bottle glasses, black trench coats, or any of the other stereotypes that fuel the media's image. + +It's about the gradual commodification of software and hardware. It's about the need for freedom and the quest to create cool software. It's about a world just discovering how much can be accomplished when information can be duplicated for next to nothing. + +The real struggle is finding out how long society can keep hanging ten toes off the edge of the board as we get carried by the wave of freedom. Is there enough energy in the wave and enough grace in society to ride it all the way to the shore? Or will something wicked, something evil, or something sloppy come along and mess it up? + +1~ College + +2~ Speaking in Tongues + +I was part of the free software movement for many years, but I didn't know it. When I was a graduate student, I released the source code to a project. In 1991, that was the sort of thing to do in universities. Publishing the source code to a project was part of publishing a paper about it. And the academy put publishing pretty high on its list. + +My first big release came in May 1991 when I circulated a program that let people hide secret messages as innocuous text. My program turned any message into some cute play-by-play from a baseball game, like "No contact in Mudsville! It's a fastball with wings. No wood on that one. He's uncorking what looks like a spitball. Whooooosh! Strike! +He's out of there." The secret message was encoded in the choices of phrases. "He's out of there" meant something different from "He pops it up to Orville Baskethands." The program enabled information to mutate into other forms, just like the shapeshifting monsters from The X-Files. I sent out an announcement to the influential newsgroup comp.risks and soon hundreds of people were asking for free copies of the software. + +I created this program because Senator Joe Biden introduced a bill into the Senate that would require the manufacturers of all computer networks to provide a way for the police to get copies of any message. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, among others, was afraid that they would have trouble obtaining evidence if people were able to encode data. My software illustrated how hard it would be to stop the flow of information. + +The best, and perhaps most surprising, part of the whole bloom of email came when a fellow I had never met, D. Jason Penney, converted the program from the fading Pascal into the more popular C. He did this on his own and sent the new, converted software back to me. When I asked him whether I could distribute his version, he said that it was my program. He was just helping out. + +I never thought much more about that project until I started to write this book. While two or three people a month would write asking for copies of the software, it never turned into more than a bit of research into the foundations of secret codes and a bit of a mathematical parlor trick. It was more an academic exercise than a prototype of something that could rival Microsoft and make me rich. + +In the past, I thought the project never developed into more than a cute toy because there was no market for it. The product wasn't readily useful for businesses, and no one starts a company without the hope that millions of folks desperately need a product. Projects needed programmers and programmers cost money. I just assumed that other free software projects would fall into the same chasm of lack of funding. + +Now, after investigating the free software world, I am convinced that my project was a small success. Penney's contribution was not just a strange aberration but a relatively common event on the Internet. People are quite willing to take a piece of software that interests them, modify it to suit their needs, and then contribute it back to the world. Sure, most people only have a few hours a week to work on such projects, but they add up. Penney's work made my software easier to use for many C programmers, thus spreading it further. + +In fact, I may have been subconsciously belittling the project. It took only three or four days of my time and a bit more of Penney's, but it was a complete version of a powerful encryption system that worked well. Yes, there was no money flowing, but that may have made it more of a success. Penney probably wouldn't have given me his C version if he knew I was going to sell it. He probably would have demanded a share. Lawyers would have gotten involved. The whole project would have been gummed up with contracts, release dates, distribution licenses, and other hassles that just weren't worth it for a neat way to hide messages. Sure, money is good, but money also brings hassles. + +2~ Cash Versus Sharing + +In the 1980s and 1990s, programmers in universities still shared heavily with the world. The notion of sharing source code with the world owes a great deal to the academic tradition of publishing results so others can read them, think about them, critique them, and ultimately extend them. Many of the government granting agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency fostered this sharing by explicitly requiring that people with grants release the source code to the world with no restrictions. Much of the Internet was created by people who gave out these kinds of contracts and insisted upon shared standards that weren't proprietary. This tradition has fallen on harder times as universities became more obsessed with the profits associated with patents and contract research, but the idea is so powerful that it's hard to displace. + +The free software movement in particular owes a great deal to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Richard Stallman, the man who is credited with starting the movement, began working in MIT's computer labs in the 1970s. He gets credit for sparking the revolution because he wrote the GNU Manifesto in 1984. The document spelled out why it's essential to share the source code to a program with others. Stallman took the matter to heart because he also practiced what he wrote about and contributed several great programs, including a text editor with thousands of features. + +Of course, Stallman doesn't take credit for coming up with the idea of sharing source code. He remembers his early years at MIT quite fondly and speaks of how people would share their source code and software without restrictions. The computers were new, complicated, and temperamental. Cooperation was the only way that anyone could accomplish anything. That's why IBM shared the source code to the operating systems on their mainframes though the early part of the 1960s. + +This tradition started to fade by the early 1980s as the microcomputer revolution began. Companies realized that most people just wanted software that worked. They didn't need the source code and all the instructions that only programmers could read. So companies quickly learned that they could keep the source code to themselves and keep their customers relatively happy while locking out competitors. They were kings who built a wall to keep out the intruders. + +The GNU Manifesto emerged as the most radical reaction to the trend toward locking up the source code. While many people looked at the GNU Manifesto with confusion, others became partial converts. They began donating code that they had written. Some tossed random utility programs into the soup, some offered games, and some sent in sophisticated packages that ran printers, networks, or even networks of printers. A few even became complete disciples and started writing code full-time for the GNU project. This growth was largely ignored by the world, which became entranced with the growth of Microsoft. More and more programmers, however, were spending more time mingling with the GNU project, and it was taking hold. + +In the early 1980s, an operating system known as UNIX had grown to be very popular in universities and laboratories. AT&T designed and built it at Bell Labs throughout the 1970s. In the beginning, the company shared the source code with researchers and computer scientists in universities, in part because the company was a monopoly that was only allowed to sell telephone service. UNIX was just an experiment that the company started to help run the next generation of telephone switches, which were already turning into specialized computers. + +In the beginning, the project was just an academic exercise, but all of the research and sharing helped create a nice operating system with a wide audience. UNIX turned out to be pretty good. When the phone company started splitting up in 1984, the folks at AT&T wondered how they could turn a profit from what was a substantial investment in time and money. They started by asking people who used UNIX at the universities to sign non-disclosure agreements. + +Stallman looked at this as mind control and the death of a great tradition. Many others at the universities were more pragmatic. AT&T had given plenty of money and resources to the university. Wasn't it fair for the university to give something back? + +Stallman looked at this a bit differently. Yes, AT&T was being nice when they gave grants to the university, but weren't masters always kind when they gave bowls of gruel to their slaves? The binary version AT&T started distributing to the world was just gruel for Stallman. The high priests and lucky few got to read the source code. They got to eat the steak and lobster spread. Stallman saw this central, controlling, corporate force as the enemy, and he began naming his work GNU, which was a recursive acronym that stood for "GNU's Not UNIX." The GNU project aimed to produce a complete working operating system that was going to do everything that UNIX did for none of the moral, emotional, or ethical cost. Users would be able to read the source code to Stallman's OS and modify it without signing a tough non-disclosure agreement drafted by teams of lawyers. They would be able to play with their software in complete freedom. Stallman notes that he never aimed to produce an operating system that didn't cost anything. The world may be entranced with the notion of a price tag of zero, but for Stallman, that was just a side effect of the unrestricted sharing. + +Creating a stand-alone system that would do everything with free software was his dream, but it was a long way from fruition, and Stallman was smart enough to start off with a manageable project. He began by producing a text editor known as GNU Emacs. The program was a big hit because it was highly customizable. Some people just used the program to edit papers, but others programmed it to accomplish fancier tasks such as reading their e-mail and generating automatic responses. One programmer was told by management that he had to include plenty of comments in his source code, so he programmed GNU Emacs to insert them automatically. One professor created a version of GNU Emacs that would automatically insert random praise into requests to his secretary.~{ "Where are those reports I asked you to copy? You're doing a great job. Thanks for all the help," on one day. "Are you ever going to copy those reports? You're doing a great job. Thanks for all the help," on the next. }~ Practically everything in Emacs could be changed or customized. If you didn't like hitting the delete key to fix a mistyped character, then you could arrange for the 6 key to do the same thing. This might make it hard to type numbers, but the user was free to mess up his life as much as he wanted. + +It took Microsoft years to catch up with Stallman's solution, and even then they implemented it in a dangerous way. They let people create little custom programs for modifying documents, but they forgot to prevent malicious code from crying havoc. Today, Microsoft Word allows little programs named macro viruses to roam around the planet. Open up a Word document, and a virus might be lurking. + +In the 1980s, the free software world devoted itself to projects like this. GNU Emacs became a big hit in the academic world where system administrators could install it for free and not worry about counting students or negotiating licenses. Also, smart minds were better able to appreciate the cool flexibility Stallman had engineered into the system. Clever folks wasted time by adding filters to the text editor that would scan their text and translate it into, like, Valley Girl talk or more urban jive. + +The GNU project grew by accepting contributions from many folks across the country. Some were fairly sophisticated, eye-catching programs like GNU Chess, a program that was quite competitive and as good as all but the best packages. Most were simple tools for handling many of the day-to-day chores for running a computer system. System administrators, students, and programmers from around the country would often take on small jobs because they felt compelled to fix something. When they were done, a few would kick the source code over to the GNU project. + +Stallman's biggest programming project for GNU during the 1980s was writing the GNU C compiler (GCC). This program was an important tool that converted the C source code written by humans into the machine code understood by computers. The GCC package was an important cornerstone for the GNU project in several ways. First, it was one of the best compilers around. Second, it could easily move from machine to machine. Stallman personally ported it to several different big platforms like Intel's x86 line of processors. Third, the package was free, which in the case of GNU software meant that anyone was free to use and modify the software. + +The GCC provided an important harmonizing effect to the GNU project. Someone could write his program on a machine built by Digital, compile it with GCC, and be fairly certain that it would run on all other machines with GCC. That allowed the GNU software to migrate freely throughout the world, from machine to machine, from Sun to Apollo to DEC to Intel. + +The GCC's license also attracted many developers and curious engineers. Anyone could use the source code for their projects, and many did. Over time, the compiler moved from machine to machine as users converted it. Sometimes a chip company engineer would rework the compiler to make it work on a new chip. Sometimes a user would do it for a project. Sometimes a student would do it when insomnia struck. Somehow, it moved from machine to machine, and it carried all of the other GNU software with it. + +The next great leap forward came in the early 1990s as people began to realize that a completely free operating system was a serious possibility. Stallman had always dreamed of replacing UNIX with something that was just as good and accompanied by the source code, but it was a large task. It was the reason he started the GNU project. Slowly but surely, the GNU project was assembling the parts to make it work. There were hundreds of small utilities and bigger tools donated to the GNU project, and those little bits were starting to add up. + +The free software movement also owes a great deal to Berkeley, or more precisely to a small group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. The group of hardcore hackers, which included professors, research associates, graduate students, and a few undergraduates, had developed a version of UNIX known as BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution). AT&T shared their version of UNIX with Berkeley, and the programmers at Berkeley fixed, extended, and enhanced the software. These extensions formed the core of BSD. Their work was part experimental and part practical, but the results were widely embraced. Sun Microsystems, one of Silicon Valley's UNIX workstation companies, used a version on its machines through the early 1990s when they created a new version known as Solaris by folding in some of AT&T's System V. Many feel that BSD and its approach remain the foundation of the OS. + +The big problem was that the team built their version on top of source code from AT&T. The folks at Berkeley and their hundreds, if not thousands, of friends, colleagues, and students who contributed to the project gave their source code away, but AT&T did not. This gave AT&T control over anyone who wanted to use BSD, and the company was far from ready to join the free software movement. Millions of dollars were spent on the research developing UNIX. The company wanted to make some money back. + +The team at Berkeley fought back, and Keith Bostic, one of the core team, began organizing people together to write the source code that could replace these bits. By the beginning of the 1990s, he had cajoled enough of his friends to accomplish it. In June 1991, the group produced "Networking Release 2," a version that included almost all of a complete working version of UNIX. All you needed to do was add six files to have a complete operating system. + +AT&T was not happy. It had created a separate division known as the UNIX Systems Laboratory and wanted to make a profit. Free source code from Berkeley was tough competition. So the UNIX Systems Laboratory sued. + +This lawsuit marked the end of universities' preeminent role in the development of free software. Suddenly, the lawsuit focused everyone's attention and made them realize that taking money from corporations came into conflict with sharing software source code. Richard Stallman left MIT in 1984 when he understood that a university's need for money would eventually trump his belief in total sharing of source code. Stallman was just a staff member who kept the computers running. He wasn't a tenured professor who could officially do anything. So he started the Free Software Foundation and never looked back. MIT helped him at the beginning by loaning him space, but it was clear that the relationship was near the end. Universities needed money to function. Professors at many institutions had quotas specifying how much grant money they needed to raise. Stallman wasn't bringing in cash by giving away his software. + +Meanwhile, on the other coast, the lawsuit tied up Berkeley and the BSD project for several years, and the project lost valuable energy and time by devoting them to the legal fight. In the meantime, several other completely free software projects started springing up around the globe. These began in basements and depended on machines that the programmer owned. One of these projects was started by Linus Torvalds and would eventually grow to become Linux, the unstoppable engine of hype and glory. He didn't have the money of the Berkeley computer science department, and he didn't have the latest machines that corporations gave them. But he had freedom and the pile of source code that came from unaffiliated, free projects like GNU that refused to compromise and cut intellectual corners. Although Torvalds might not have realized it at the time, freedom turned out to be most valuable of all. + +1~ Quicksand + +The story of the end of the university's preeminence in the free software world is a tale of greed and corporate power. While many saw an unhappy ending coming for many years, few could do much to stop the inevitable collision between the University of California at Berkeley and its former patron, AT&T. + +The lawsuit between AT&T and the University of California at Berkeley had its roots in what marriage counselors love to call a "poorly conceived relationship." By the end of the 1980s, the computer science department at Berkeley had a problem. They had been collaborating with AT&T on the UNIX system from the beginning. They had written some nice code, including some of the crucial software that formed the foundation of the Internet. Students, professors, scientists, and even Wall Street traders loved the power and flexibility of UNIX. Everyone wanted UNIX. + +The problem was that not everyone could get UNIX. AT&T, which had sponsored much of the research at Berkeley, kept an iron hand on its invention. If you wanted to run UNIX, then you needed to license some essential software from AT&T that sat at the core of the system. They were the supreme ruler of the UNIX domain, and they expected a healthy tithe for the pleasure of living within it. + +One of the people who wanted UNIX was the Finnish student Linus Torvalds, who couldn't afford this tithe. He was far from the first one, and the conflict began long before he started to write Linux in 1991. + +Toward the end of the 1980s, most people in the computer world were well aware of Stallman's crusade against the corporate dominance of AT&T and UNIX. Most programmers knew that GNU stood for "GNU's Not UNIX." Stallman was not the only person annoyed by AT&T's attitude toward secrecy and non-disclosure agreements. In fact, his attitude was contagious. Some of the folks at Berkeley looked at the growth of tools emerging from the GNU project and felt a bit used. They had written many pieces of code that found their way into AT&T's version of UNIX. They had contributed many great ideas. Yet AT&T was behaving as if AT&T alone owned it. They gave and gave, while AT&T took. + +Stallman got to distribute his source code. Stallman got to share with others. Stallman got to build his reputation. Programmers raved about Stallman's Emacs. People played GNU Chess at their offices. Others were donating their tools to the GNU project. Everyone was getting some attention by sharing except the folks at Berkeley who collaborated with AT&T. This started to rub people the wrong way. + +Something had to be done, and the folks at Berkeley started feeling the pressure. Some at Berkeley wondered why the professors had entered into such a Faustian bargain with a big corporation. Was the payoff great enough to surrender their academic souls? Just where did AT&T get off telling us what we could publish? + +Others outside of Berkeley looked in and saw a treasure trove of software that was written by academics. Many of them were friends. Some of them had studied at Berkeley. Some had even written some of the UNIX code before they graduated. Some were companies competing with AT&T. All of them figured that they could solve their UNIX problems if they could just get their hands on the source code. There had to be some way to get it released. + +Slowly, the two groups began making contact and actively speculating on how to free Berkeley's version of UNIX from AT&T's grip. + +2~ Breaking the Bond + +The first move to separate Berkeley's version of UNIX from AT&T's control wasn't really a revolution. No one was starting a civil war by firing shots at Fort Sumter or starting a revolution by dropping tea in the harbor. In fact, it started long before the lawsuit and Linux. In 1989, some people wanted to start hooking their PCs and other devices up to the Internet, and they didn't want to use UNIX. + +Berkeley had written some of the software known as TCP/IP that defined how computers on the Internet would communicate and share packets. They wrote the software for UNIX because that was one of the favorite OSs around the labs. Other companies got a copy of the code by buying a source license for UNIX from AT&T. The TCP/IP code was just part of the mix. Some say that the cost of the license reached $250,000 or more and required that the customer pay a per-unit fee for every product that was shipped. Those prices didn't deter the big companies like IBM or DEC. They thought of UNIX as an OS for the hefty workstations and minicomputers sold to businesses and scientists. Those guys had the budget to pay for big hardware, so it was possible to slip the cost of the UNIX OS in with the package. + +But the PC world was different. It was filled with guys in garages who wanted to build simple boards that would let a PC communicate on the Internet. These guys were efficient and knew how to scrounge up cheap parts from all over the world. Some of them had gone to Berkeley and learned to program on the VAXes and Sun workstations running Berkeley's version of UNIX. A few of them had even helped write or debug the code. They didn't see why they had to buy such a big license for something that non-AT&T folks had written with the generous help of large government grants. Some even worked for corporations that gave money to support Berkeley's projects. Why couldn't they get at the code they helped pay to develop? + +Kirk McKusick, one of the members of the Computer Systems Research Group at the time, remembers, "People came to us and said, +'Look, you wrote TCP/IP. Surely you shouldn't require an AT&T license for that?' These seemed like reasonable requests. We decided to start with something that was clearly not part of the UNIX we got from AT&T. It seemed very clear that we could pull out the TCP/IP stack and distribute that without running afoul of AT&T's license." + +So the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) created what they called Network Release 1 and put it on the market for $1,000 in June 1989. That wasn't really the price because the release came with one of the first versions of what would come to be known as the BSD-style license. Once you paid the $1,000, you could do whatever you wanted with the code, including just putting it up on the Net and giving it away. + +"We thought that two or three groups would pay the money and then put the code on the Internet, but in fact, hundreds of sites actually paid the one thousand dollars for it," says McKusick and adds, "mostly so they could get a piece of paper from the university saying, 'You can do what you want with this.'" + +This move worked out well for Berkeley and also for UNIX. The Berkeley TCP/IP stack became the best-known version of the code, and it acted like a reference version for the rest of the Net. If it had a glitch, everyone else had to work around the glitch because it was so prevalent. Even today, companies like Sun like to brag that their TCP/IP forms the backbone of the Net, and this is one of the reasons to buy a Sun instead of an NT workstation. Of course, the code in Sun's OS has a rich, Berkeley-based heritage, and it may still contain some of the original BSD code for controlling the net. + +2~ In for a Penny, in for a Pound + +In time, more and more companies started forming in the Bay Area and more and more realized that Berkeley's version of UNIX was the reference for the Internet. They started asking for this bit or that bit. + +Keith Bostic heard these requests and decided that the Berkeley CSRG needed to free up as much of the source code as possible. Everyone agreed it was a utopian idea, but only Bostic thought it was possible to accomplish. McKusick writes, in his history of BSD, "Mike Karels [a fellow software developer] and I pointed out that releasing large parts of the system was a huge task, but we agreed that if he could sort out how to deal with re-implementing the hundreds of utilities and the massive C library, then we would tackle the kernel. Privately, Karels and I thought that would be the end of the discussion." + +Dave Hitz, a good friend of Bostic's, remembers the time. "Bostic was more of a commanding type. He just rounded up all of his friends to finish up the code. You would go over to his house for dinner and he would say, 'I've got a list. What do you want to do?' I think I did the cp command and maybe the look command." Hitz, of course, is happy that he took part in the project. He recently founded Network Appliance, a company that packages a stripped-down version of BSD into a file server that is supposed to be a fairly bulletproof appliance for customers. Network Appliance didn't need to do much software engineering when they began. They just grabbed the free version of BSD and hooked it up. + +Bostic pursued people far and wide to accomplish the task. He gave them the published description of the utility or the part of the library from the documentation and then asked them to reimplement it without looking at the source code. This cloning operation is known as a cleanroom operation because it is entirely legal if it takes place inside a metaphorical room where the engineers inside don't have any information about how the AT&T engineers built UNIX. + +This was not an easy job, but Bostic was quite devoted and pursued people everywhere. He roped everyone who could code into the project and often spent time fixing things afterward. The task took 18 months and included more than 400 people who received just notoriety and some thanks afterward. The 400-plus names are printed in the book he wrote with McKusick and Karels in 1996. + +When Bostic came close to finishing, he stopped by McKusick's office and asked how the kernel was coming along. This called McKusick and Karels's bluff and forced them to do some hard engineering work. In some respects, Bostic had the easier job. Writing small utility programs that his team used was hard work, but it was essentially preorganized and segmented. Many folks over the years created manual files that documented exactly what the programs were supposed to do. Each program could be assigned separately and people didn't need to coordinate their work too much. These were just dishes for a potluck supper. + +Cleaning up the kernel, however, was a different matter. It was much larger than many of the smaller utilities and was filled with more complicated code that formed a tightly coordinated mechanism. Sloppy work in one of the utility files would probably affect only that one utility, but a glitch in the kernel would routinely bring down the entire system. If Bostic was coordinating a potluck supper, McKusick and Karels had to find a way to create an entire restaurant that served thousands of meals a day to thousands of customers. Every detail needed to work together smoothly. + +To make matters more complicated, Berkeley's contributions to the kernel were mixed in with AT&T's contributions. Both had added on parts, glued in new features, and created new powers over the years. They were de facto partners on the project. Back in the good old days, they had both shared their source code without any long-term considerations or cares. But now that AT&T claimed ownership of it all, they had to find a way to unwind all of the changes and figure out who wrote what. + +McKusick says, "We built a converted database up line by line. We took every line of code and inserted it into the database. You end up finding pretty quickly where the code migrated to and then you decide whether it is sufficiently large enough to see if it needed recoding." + +This database made life much easier for them and they were able to plow through the code, quickly recoding islets of AT&T code here and there. They could easily pull up a file filled with source code and let the database mark up the parts that might be owned by AT&T. Some parts went quickly, but other parts dragged on. By late spring of 1991, they had finished all but six files that were just too much work. + +It would be nice to report that they bravely struggled onward, forgoing all distractions like movies, coffeehouses, and friends, but that's not true. They punted and tossed everything out the door and called it "Network Release 2."The name implied that this new version was just a new revision of their earlier product, Network Release 1, and this made life easier with the lawyers. They just grabbed the old, simple license and reused it. It also disguised the fact that this new pile of code was only about six files short of a full-grown OS. + +The good news about open source is that projects often succeed even when they initially fail. A commercial product couldn't ship without the complete functionality of the six files. Few would buy it. Plus, no one could come along, get a bug under his bonnet, and patch up the holes. Proprietary source code isn't available and no one wants to help someone else in business without compensation. + +The new, almost complete UNIX, however, was something different. It was a university project and so university rules of camaraderie and sharing seemed to apply. Another programmer, Bill Jolitz, picked up Network Release 2 and soon added the code necessary to fill the gap. He became fascinated with getting UNIX up and running on a 386 processor, a task that was sort of like trying to fit the latest traction control hardware and anti-lock brakes on a go-cart. At the time, serious computer scientists worked on serious machines from serious workstation and minicomputer companies. The PC industry was building toys. Of course, there was something macho to the entire project. Back then I remember joking to a friend that we should try to get UNIX running on the new air-conditioning system, just to prove it could be done. + +Jolitz's project, of course, found many people on the Net who didn't think it was just a toy. Once he put the source code on the Net, a bloom of enthusiasm spread through the universities and waystations of the world. People wanted to experiment with a high-grade OS and most could only afford relatively cheap hardware like the 386. Sure, places like Berkeley could get the government grant money and the big corporate donations, but 2,000-plus other schools were stuck waiting. Jolitz's version of 386BSD struck a chord. + +While news traveled quickly to some corners, it didn't reach Finland. Network Release 2 came in June 1991, right around the same time that Linus Torvalds was poking around looking for a high-grade OS to use in experiments. Jolitz's 386BSD came out about six months later as Torvalds began to dig into creating the OS he would later call Linux. Soon afterward, Jolitz lost interest in the project and let it lie, but others came along. In fact, two groups called NetBSD and FreeBSD sprang up to carry the torch. + +Although it may seem strange that three groups building a free operating system could emerge without knowing about each other, it is important to realize that the Internet was a very different world in 1991 and 1992. The World Wide Web was only a gleam in some people's eyes. Only the best universities had general access to the web for its students, and most people didn't understand what an e-mail address was. Only a few computer-related businesses like IBM and Xerox put their researchers on the Net. The community was small and insular. + +The main conduits for information were the USENET newsgroups, which were read only by people who could get access through their universities. This technology was an efficient way of sharing information, although quite flawed. Here's how it worked: every so often, each computer would call up its negotiators and swap the latest articles. Information traveled like gossip, which is to say that it traveled quickly but with very uneven distribution. Computers were always breaking down or being upgraded. No one could count on every message getting to every corner of the globe. + +The NetBSD and the FreeBSD forks of the BSD kernel continue to exist separately today. The folks who work on NetBSD concentrate on making their code run on all possible machines, and they currently list 21 different platforms that range from the omnipresent Intel 486 to the gone but not forgotten Commodore Amiga. + +The FreeBSD team, on the other hand, concentrates on making their product work well on the Intel 386. They added many layers of installation tools to make it easier for the average Joe to use, and now it's the most popular version of BSD code around. + +Those two versions used the latest code from Berkeley. Torvalds, on the other hand, didn't know about the 386BSD, FreeBSD, or NetBSD. If he had found out, he says, he probably would have just downloaded the versions and joined one of those teams. Why run off and reinvent the wheel? + +2~ AT&T Notices the Damage + +Soon after Network Release 2 hit the world, the real problems began for BSD. While AT&T didn't really notice 386BSD, NetBSD, or FreeBSD, they did notice a company called Berkeley Software Design Incorporated. This corporation created their own OS by taking Network Release 2 and adding their own versions of the missing six files, but they didn't release this for free on the Net. They started putting advertisements in the trade press offering the source code for $995, a price they claimed was a huge discount over AT&T's charge. + +The modern, post-Internet reader should find this hilarious. Two to three groups and countless splinter factions were distributing the BSD software over the Internet for free and this didn't seem to catch AT&T's attention, but the emergence of BSDI selling the same product for almost $1,000 rang alarm bells. That was the time, though, before the Internet infrastructure became ubiquitous. In the early 1990s, people only halfjoked that FedEx was the most efficient Internet Service Provider around. It was much faster to copy hundreds of megabytes of data onto a magnetic tape and drop it in FedEx than to actually try to copy it over the Internet. Back then only real nerds were on the Internet. Managers and lawyers wore suits and got their news from the trade press and advertisements. + +BSDI's cost-cutting was a major headache for AT&T. This small company was selling a product that AT&T felt it had shepherded, organized, and coordinated over time. + +AT&T started off by claiming UNIX as a trademark and threatening BSDI with infringing upon it. BSDI countered by changing the ads to emphasize that BSDI was a separate company that wasn't related to AT&T or the subsidiary AT&T created to market UNIX known as UNIX System Laboratories, or USL. + +That didn't work. USL saw its cash cow melting away and assumed folks would jump at the chance to buy a complete OS with all the source code for $995. The price seems outrageously high today, but that's only after the stiff price competition of the 1990s. It was still a good deal at the time. So USL sued BSDI for actually stealing proprietary source code from AT&T. + +This argument didn't work, either. BSDI turned around and waved the Network Release 2 license they got from Berkeley. They bought all but six of the files from Berkeley, and Berkeley claimed that all of the source code was theirs to sell. BSDI wrote the missing six files themselves and they were quite sure that they got no help from AT&T or USL. Therefore, BSDI didn't steal anything. If AT&T thought it was stolen, they should take it up with Berkeley. The judge bought BSDI's argument and narrowed the case to focus on the six files. + +This was a crucial moment in the development of the free software movement and its various kernels. AT&T found itself cornered. Backing down meant giving up its claim to UNIX and the wonderful stream of license fees that kept pouring in. Pressing ahead meant suing the University of California, its old friend, partner, and author of lots of UNIX code. Eventually, the forces of greed and omnipotent corporate power won out and AT&T's USL filed a lawsuit naming both BSDI and the University of California. + +Taking sides in this case was pretty easy for most folks in the academic and free software world. The CSRG at Berkeley did research. They published things. University research was supposed to be open and freely distributed. AT&T was trying to steal the work of hundreds if not thousands of students, researchers, professors, and others. That wasn't fair. + +In reality, AT&T did pay something for what they got. They sent their employees to Berkeley to get master's degrees, they shared the original Versions 5, 6, and 7 and 32/V source code, and they even sent some hardware to the computer science department. The original creators of UNIX lived and worked at Bell Labs drawing AT&T paychecks. Berkeley students got summer jobs at AT&T. There wasn't an official quid-pro-quo. It wasn't very well spelled out, but AT&T was paying something. + +Some folks on AT&T's side might even want to paint the CSRG at Berkeley as filled with academic freeloaders who worked hard to weasel money out of the big corporations without considering the implications. The folks at Berkeley should have known that AT&T was going to want something for its contributions. There's no such thing as a free lunch. + +There's something to this argument because running a high-rent research project at a top-notch school requires a fair amount of guile and marketing sophistication. By the 1990s, the top universities had become very good at making vague, unofficial promises with their pleas for corporate gifts. This sort of coquetry and teasing was bound to land someone in a fight. McKusick, for instance, says that the CSRG designed the BSD license to be very liberal to please the corporate donors. "Hewlett-Packard put in hundreds of thousands of dollars and they were doing so under the understanding that they were going to use the code," he said. If the BSD hadn't kept releasing code like Network Release 2 in a clear, easy-to-reuse legal form, he says, some of the funding for the group would have dried up. + +But there's also a bit of irony here. McKusick points out that AT&T was far from the most generous company to support the CSRG. "In fact, we even had to pay for our license to UNIX," he says before adding, "although it was only ninety-nine dollars at the time." + +AT&T's support of the department was hardly bountiful. The big checks weren't grants outright. They paid for the out-of-state tuition for AT&T employees who came to Berkeley to receive their master's degrees. While AT&T could have sent their employees elsewhere, there's no doubt that there are more generous ways to send money to researchers. + +McKusick also notes that AT&T didn't even send along much hardware. The only hardware he remembers receiving from them were some 5620 terminals and a Datakit circuit-based switch that he says "was a huge headache that really did us very little good." Berkeley was on the forefront of developing the packet-based standards that would dominate the Internet. If anything, the older circuit-based switch convinced the Berkeley team that basing the Internet on the old phone system would be a major mistake. + +To make matters worse, AT&T often wanted the BSD team to include features that would force all the BSD users to buy a newer, more expensive license from AT&T. In addition, license verification was never a quick or easy task. McKusick says, "We had a person whose fulltime job was to keep the AT&T licensing person happy." + +In the end, he concludes, "They paid us next to nothing and got a huge windfall." + +Choosing sides in this battle probably isn't worth the trouble at this point because Berkeley eventually won. The hard work of Bostic's hundreds of volunteers and the careful combing of the kernel by the CSRG paid off. AT&T's case slowly withered away as the University of California was able to show how much of the distribution came from innocent, non-AT&T sources. + +Berkeley even landed a few good blows of its own. They found that AT&T had stripped copyrights from Berkeley code that they had imported to System V and had failed to provide due credit to Berkeley. The BSD license is probably one of the least restrictive ones in the world. Companies like Apple use BSD source code all the time. The license has few requirements beyond keeping the copyright notice intact and including some credit for the University of California. AT&T didn't pay attention to this and failed to cite Berkeley's contributions in their releases. Oops. The CSRG countersued claiming that AT&T had violated a license that may be one of the least restrictive in the world. + +The battle raged in the courts for more than a year. It moved from federal to California state court. Judges held hearings, lawyers took depositions, clerks read briefs, judges heard arguments presented by briefs written by lawyers who had just held depositions. The burn rate of legal fees was probably larger than most Internet start-ups. + +Any grown-up should take one look at this battle and understand just how the free software movement got so far. While the Berkeley folks were meeting with lawyers and worrying about whether the judges were going to choose the right side, Linus Torvalds was creating his own kernel. He started Linux on his own, and that made him a free man. + +In the end, the University of California settled the lawsuit after the USL was sold to Novell, a company run by Ray Noorda. McKusick believes that Noorda's embrace of free competition made a big difference, and by January 1994 the legal fight was over. Berkeley celebrated by releasing a completely free and unencumbered 4.4BSD-Lite in June 1994. + +The terms of the settlement were pretty minor. Net Release 2 came with about 18,000 files. 4.4BSD-Lite contained all but three of them. Seventy of them included a new, expanded copyright that gave some credit to AT&T and USL, but didn't constrain anyone's right to freely distribute them. McKusick, Bostic, and the hundreds of volunteers did a great job making sure that Net Release 2 was clean. In fact, two people familiar with the settlement talks say that Berkeley just deleted a few files to allow USL's lawyers to save face. We'll never know for sure because the details of the settlement are sealed. McKusick and the others can't talk about the details. That's another great example of how the legal system fails the American people and inadvertently gives the free software world another leg up. There's no information in the record to help historians or give future generations some hints on how to solve similar disputes. + +1~ Outsider + +The battle between the University of California at Berkeley's computer science department and AT&T did not reach the court system until 1992, but the friction between the department's devotion to sharing and the corporation's insistence on control started long before. + +While the BSD team struggled with lawyers, a free man in Finland began to write his own operating system without any of the legal or institutional encumbrance. At the beginning he said it was a project that probably wouldn't amount to much, but only a few years later people began to joke about "Total World Domination." A few years after that, they started using the phrase seriously. + +In April 1991, Linus Torvalds had a problem. He was a relatively poor university student in Finland who wanted to hack in the guts of a computer operating system. Microsoft's machines at the time were the cheapest around, but they weren't very interesting. The basic Disk Operating System (DOS) essentially let one program control the computer. Windows 3.1 was not much more than a graphical front end to DOS featuring pretty pictures--icons--to represent the files. Torvalds wanted to experiment with a real OS, and that meant UNIX or something that was UNIX-like. These real OSs juggled hundreds of programs at one time and often kept dozens of users happy. Playing with DOS was like practicing basketball shots by yourself. Playing with UNIX was like playing with a team that had 5, 10, maybe as many as 100 people moving around the court in complicated, clockwork patterns. + +But UNIX machines cost a relative fortune. The high-end customers requested the OS, so generally only high-end machines came with it. A poor university student in Finland didn't have the money for a topnotch Sun Sparc station. He could only afford a basic PC, which came with the 386 processor. This was a top-of-the-line PC at the time, but it still wasn't particularly exciting. A few companies made a version of UNIX for this low-end machine, but they charged for it. + +In June 1991, soon after Torvalds~{ Everyone in the community, including many who don't know him, refers to him by his first name. The rules of style prevent me from using that in something as proper as a book. }~ started his little science project, the Computer Systems Research Group at Berkeley released what they thought was their completely unencumbered version of BSD UNIX known as Network Release 2. Several projects emerged to port this to the 386, and the project evolved to become the FreeBSD and NetBSD versions of today. Torvalds has often said that he might never have started Linux if he had known that he could just download a more complete OS from Berkeley. + +But Torvalds didn't know about BSD at the time, and he's lucky he didn't. Berkeley was soon snowed under by the lawsuit with AT&T claiming that the university was somehow shipping AT&T's intellectual property. Development of the BSD system came to a screeching halt as programmers realized that AT&T could shut them down at any time if Berkeley was found guilty of giving away source code that AT&T owned. + +If he couldn't afford to buy a UNIX machine, he would write his own version. He would make it POSIX-compatible, a standard for UNIX designers, so others would be able to use it. Minix was another UNIXlike OS that a professor, Andrew Tanenbaum, wrote for students to experiment with the guts of an OS. Torvalds initially considered using Minix as a platform. Tanenbaum included the source code to his project, but he charged for the package. It was like a textbook for students around the world. + +Torvalds looked at the price of Minix ($150) and thought it was too much. Richard Stallman's GNU General Public License had taken root in Torvalds's brain, and he saw the limitations in charging for software. GNU had also produced a wide variety of tools and utility programs that he could use on his machine. Minix was controlled by Tanenbaum, albeit with a much looser hand than many of the other companies at the time. + +People could add their own features to Minix and some did. They did get a copy of the source code for $150. But few changes made their way back into Minix. Tanenbaum wanted to keep it simple and grew frustrated with the many people who, as he wrote back then, "want to turn Minix into BSD UNIX." + +So Torvalds started writing his own tiny operating system for this 386. It wasn't going to be anything special. It wasn't going to topple AT&T or the burgeoning Microsoft. It was just going to be a fun experiment in writing a computer operating system that was all his. He wrote in January 1992," Many things should have been done more portably if it would have been a real project. I'm not making overly many excuses about it though: it was a design decision, and last April when I started the thing, I didn't think anybody would actually want to use it." + +Still, Torvalds had high ambitions. He was writing a toy, but he wanted it to have many, if not all, of the features found in full-strength UNIX versions on the market. On July 3, he started wondering how to accomplish this and placed a posting on the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix, writing: + +_1 Hello netlanders, Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would be nice. + +Torvalds's question was pretty simple. When he wrote the message in 1991, UNIX was one of the major operating systems in the world. The project that started at AT&T and Berkeley was shipping on computers from IBM, Sun, Apple, and most manufacturers of higher-powered machines known as workstations. Wall Street banks and scientists loved the more powerful machines, and they loved the simplicity and hackability of UNIX machines. In an attempt to unify the marketplace, computer manufacturers created a way to standardize UNIX and called it POSIX. POSIX ensured that each UNIX machine would behave in a standardized way. + +Torvalds worked quickly. By September he was posting notes to the group with the subject line "What would you like to see most in Minix?" He was adding features to his clone, and he wanted to take a poll about where he should add next. + +Torvalds already had some good news to report. "I've currently ported bash(1.08) and GCC(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months," he said. + +At first glance, he was making astounding progress. He created a working system with a compiler in less than half a year. But he also had the advantage of borrowing from the GNU project. Stallman's GNU project group had already written a compiler (GCC) and a nice text user interface (bash). Torvalds just grabbed these because he could. He was standing on the shoulders of the giants who had come before him. + +The core of an OS is often called the "kernel," which is one of the strange words floating around the world of computers. When people are being proper, they note that Linus Torvalds was creating the Linux kernel in 1991. Most of the other software, like the desktop, the utilities, the editors, the web browsers, the games, the compilers, and practically everything else, was written by other folks. If you measure this in disk space, more than 95 percent of the code in an average distribution lies outside the kernel. If you measure it by user interaction, most people using Linux or BSD don't even know that there's a kernel in there. The buttons they click, the websites they visit, and the printing they do are all controlled by other programs that do the work. + +Of course, measuring the importance of the kernel this way is stupid. The kernel is sort of the combination of the mail room, boiler room, kitchen, and laundry room for a computer. It's responsible for keeping the data flowing between the hard drives, the memory, the printers, the video screen, and any other part that happens to be attached to the computer. + +In many respects, a well-written kernel is like a fine hotel. The guests check in, they're given a room, and then they can order whatever they need from room service and a smoothly oiled concierge staff. Is this new job going to take an extra 10 megabytes of disk space? No problem, sir. Right away, sir. We'll be right up with it. Ideally, the software won't even know that other software is running in a separate room. If that other program is a loud rock-and-roll MP3 playing tool, the other software won't realize that when it crashes and burns up its own room. The hotel just cruises right along, taking care of business. + +In 1991, Torvalds had a short list of features he wanted to add to the kernel. The Internet was still a small network linking universities and some advanced labs, and so networking was a small concern. He was only aiming at the 386, so he could rely on some of the special features that weren't available on other chips. High-end graphics hardware cards were still pretty expensive, so he concentrated on a text-only interface. He would later fix all of these problems with the help of the people on the Linux kernel mailing list, but for now he could avoid them. + +Still, hacking the kernel means anticipating what other programmers might do to ruin things. You don't know if someone's going to try to snag all 128 megabytes of RAM available. You don't know if someone's going to hook up a strange old daisy-wheel printer and try to dump a PostScript file down its throat. You don't know if someone's going to create an endless loop that's going to write random numbers all over the memory. Stupid programmers and dumb users do these things every day, and you've got to be ready for it. The kernel of the OS has to keep things flowing smoothly between all the different parts of the system. If one goes bad because of a sloppy bit of code, the kernel needs to cut it off like a limb that's getting gangrene. If one job starts heating up, the kernel needs to try to give it all the resources it can so the user will be happy. The kernel hacker needs to keep all of these things straight. + +Creating an operating system like this is no easy job. Many of the commercial systems crash frequently for no perceptible reason, and most of the public just takes it.~{ Microsoft now acknowledges the existence of a bug in the tens of millions of copies of Windows 95 and Windows 98 that will cause your computer to 'stop responding (hang)'--you know, what you call crash--after exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47.296 seconds of continuous operation . . . . Why 49.7? days? Because computers aren't counting the days. They're counting the milliseconds. One counter begins when Windows starts up; when it gets to 232 milliseconds--which happens to be 49.7 days--well, that's the biggest number this counter can handle. And instead of gracefully rolling over and starting again at zero, it manages to bring the entire operating system to a halt."--James Gleick in the New York Times. }~ Many people somehow assume that it must be their fault that the program failed. In reality, it's probably the kernel's. Or more precisely, it's the kernel designer's fault for not anticipating what could go wrong. + +By the mid-1970s, companies and computer scientists were already experimenting with many different ways to create workable operating systems. While the computers of the day weren't very powerful by modern standards, the programmers created operating systems that let tens if not hundreds of people use a machine simultaneously. The OS would keep the different tasks straight and make sure that no user could interfere with another. + +As people designed more and more operating systems, they quickly realized that there was one tough question: how big should it be? Some people argued that the OS should be as big as possible and come complete with all the features that someone might want to use. Others countered with stripped-down designs that came with a small core of the OS surrounded by thousands of little programs that did the same thing. + +To some extent, the debate is more about semantics than reality. A user wants the computer to be able to list the different files stored in one directory. It doesn't matter if the question is answered by a big operating system that handles everything or a little operating system that uses a program to find the answer. The job still needs to be done, and many of the instructions are the same. It's just a question of whether the instructions are labeled the "operating system" or an ancillary program. + +But the debate is also one about design. Programmers, teachers, and the Lego company all love to believe that any problem can be solved by breaking it down into small parts that can be assembled to create the whole. Every programmer wants to turn the design of an operating system into thousands of little problems that can be solved individually. This dream usually lasts until someone begins to assemble the parts and discovers that they don't work together as perfectly as they should. + +When Torvalds started crafting the Linux kernel, he decided he was going to create a bigger, more integrated version that he called a "monolithic kernel." This was something of a bold move because the academic community was entranced with what they called "microkernels." The difference is partly semantic and partly real, but it can be summarized by analogy with businesses. Some companies try to build large, smoothly integr the steps of production. Others try to create smaller operations that subcontract much of the production work to other companies. One is big, monolithic, and all-encompassing, while the other is smaller, fragmented, and heterogeneous. It's not uncommon to find two companies in the same industry taking different approaches and thinking they're doing the right thing. + +The design of an operating system often boils down to the same decision. Do we want to build a monolithic core that handles all the juggling internally, or do we want a smaller, more fragmented model that should be more flexible as long as the parts interact correctly? + +In time, the OS world started referring to this core as the kernel of the operating system. People who wanted to create big OSs with many features wrote monolithic kernels. Their ideological enemies who wanted to break the OS into hundreds of small programs running on a small core wrote microkernels. Some of the most extreme folks labeled their work a nanokernel because they thought it did even less and thus was even more pure than those bloated microkernels. + +The word "kernel" is a bit confusing for most people because they often use it to mean a fragment of an object or a small fraction. An extreme argument may have a kernel of truth to it. A disaster movie always gives the characters and the audience a kernel of hope to which to cling. + +Mathematicians use the word a bit differently and emphasize the word's ability to let a small part define a larger concept. Technically, a kernel of a function f is the set of values, x1, x2, . . . xn such that f(xi)=1, or whatever the identity element happens to be. The action of the kernel of a function does a good job of defining how the function behaves with all the other elements. The algebraists study a kernel of a function because it reveals the overall behavior.~{ The kernel of f(x)=x2 is (-1, 1) and it illustrates how the function has two branches. }~ + +The OS designers use the word in the same way. If they define the kernel correctly, then the behavior of the rest of the OS will follow. The small part of the code defines the behavior of the entire computer. If the kernel does one thing well, the entire computer will do it well. If it does one thing badly, then everything will suffer. + +Many computer users often notice this effect without realizing why it ated operations where one company controls all exists. Most Macintosh computers, for instance, can be sluggish at times because the OS does not do a good job juggling the workload between processes. The kernel of the OS has not been completely overhauled since the early days when the machines ran one program at a time. This sluggishness will persist for a bit longer until Macintosh releases a new version known as MacOS X. This will be based on the Mach kernel, a version developed at Carnegie-Mellon University and released as open source software. Steve Jobs adopted it when he went to NeXT, a company that was eventually folded back into Apple. This kernel does a much better job of juggling different tasks because it uses preemptive multitasking instead of cooperative multitasking. The original version of the MacOS let each program decide when and if it was going to give up control of the computer to let other programs run. This low-rent version of juggling was called cooperative multitasking, but it failed when some program in the hotel failed to cooperate. Most software developers obeyed the rules, but mistakes would still occur. Bad programs would lock up the machine. Preemptive multitasking takes this power away from the individual programs. It swaps control from program to program without asking permission. One pig of a program can't slow down the entire machine. When the new MacOS X kernel starts offering preemptive multitasking, the users should notice less sluggish behavior and more consistent performance. + +Torvalds plunged in and created a monolithic kernel. This made it easier to tweak all the strange interactions between the programs. Sure, a microkernel built around a clean, message-passing architecture was an elegant way to construct the guts of an OS, but it had its problems. There was no easy way to deal with special exceptions. Let's say you want a web server to run very quickly on your machine. That means you need to treat messages coming into the computer from the Internet with exceptional speed. You need to ship them with the equivalent of special delivery or FedEx. You need to create a special exception for them. Tacking these exceptions onto a clean microkernel starts to make it look bad. The design starts to get cluttered and less elegant. After a few special exceptions are added, the microkernel can start to get confused. + +Torvalds's monolithic kernel did not have the elegance or the simplicity of a microkernel OS like Minix or Mach, but it was easier to hack. New tweaks to speed up certain features were relatively easy to add. There was no need to come up with an entirely new architecture for the message-passing system. The downside was that the guts could grow remarkably byzantine, like the bureaucracy of a big company. + +In the past, this complexity hurt the success of proprietary operating systems. The complexity produced bugs because no one could understand it. Torvalds's system, however, came with all the source code, making it much easier for application programmers to find out what was causing their glitch. To carry the corporate bureaucracy metaphor a bit further, the source code acted like the omniscient secretary who is able to explain everything to a harried executive. This perfect knowledge reduced the cost of complexity. + +By the beginning of 1992, Linux was no longer a Finnish student's part-time hobby. Several influential programmers became interested in the code. It was free and relatively usable. It ran much of the GNU code, and that made it a neat, inexpensive way to experiment with some excellent tools. More and more people downloaded the system, and a significant fraction started reporting bugs and suggestions to Torvalds. He rolled them back in and the project snowballed. + +2~ A Hobby Begets a Project that Begets a Movement + +On the face of it, Torvalds's decision to create an OS wasn't extraordinary. Millions of college-age students decide that they can do anything if they just put in a bit more elbow grease. The college theater departments, newspapers, and humor magazines all started with this impulse, and the notion isn't limited to college students. Millions of adults run Little League teams, build model railroads, lobby the local government to create parks, and take on thousands of projects big and small in their spare time. + +Every great idea has a leader who can produce a system to sustain it. Every small-town lot had kids playing baseball, but a few guys organized a Little League program that standardized the rules and the competition. Every small town had people campaigning for parks, but one small group created the Sierra Club, which fights for parks throughout the world. + +This talent for organizing the work of others is a rare commodity, and Torvalds had a knack for it. He was gracious about sharing his system with the world and he never lorded it over anyone. His messages were filled with jokes and self-deprecating humor, most of which were carefully marked with smiley faces (:-)) to make sure that the message was clear. If he wrote something pointed, he would apologize for being a "hothead." He was always gracious in giving credit to others and noted that much of Linux was just a clone of UNIX. All of this made him easy to read and thus influential. + +His greatest trick, though, was his decision to avoid the mantle of power. He wrote in 1992, "Here's my standing on 'keeping control,' in 2 words (three?): I won't. The only control I've effectively been keeping on Linux is that I know it better than anybody else." + +He pointed out that his control was only an illusion that was caused by the fact that he did a good job maintaining the system. "I've made my changes available to ftp-sites etc. Those have become effectively official releases, and I don't expect this to change for some time: not because I feel I have some moral right to it, but because I haven't heard too many complaints." + +As he added new features to his OS, he shipped new copies frequently. The Internet made this easy to do. He would just pop a new version up on a server and post a notice for all to read: come download the latest version. + +He made it clear that people could vote to depose him at any time. +"If people feel I do a bad job, they can do it themselves." They could just take all of his Linux code and start their own version using Torvalds's work as a foundation. + +Anyone could break off from Torvalds's project because Torvalds decided to ship the source code to his project under Richard Stallman's GNU General Public License, or GPL. In the beginning, he issued it with a more restrictive license that prohibited any "commercial" use, but eventually moved to the GNU license. This was a crucial decision because it cemented a promise with anyone who spent a few minutes playing with his toy operating system for the 386. It stated that all of the source code that Torvalds or anyone else wrote would be freely accessible and shared with everyone. This decision was a double-edged sword for the community. Everyone could take the software for free, + +but if they started circulating some new software built with the code, they would have to donate their changes back to the project. It was like flypaper. Anyone who started working with the project grew attached to it. They couldn't run off into their own corner. Some programmers joke that this flypaper license is like sex. If you make one mistake by hooking up with a project protected by GPL, you pay for it forever. If you ever ship a version of the project, you must include all of the source code. It can be distributed freely forever. + +While some people complained about the sticky nature of the GPL, enough saw it as a virtue. They liked Torvalds's source code, and they liked the fact that the GPL made them full partners in the project. Anyone could donate their time and be sure it wasn't going to disappear. The source code became a body of work held in common trust for everyone. No one could rope it off, fence it in, or take control. + +In time, Torvalds's pet science project and hacking hobby grew as more people got interested in playing with the guts of machines. The price was right, and idle curiosity could be powerful. Some wondered what a guy in Finland could do with a 386 machine. Others wondered if it was really as usable as the big machines from commercial companies. Others wondered if it was powerful enough to solve some problems in the lab. Still others just wanted to tinker. All of these folks gave it a try, and some even began to contribute to the project. + +Torvalds's burgeoning kernel dovetailed nicely with the tools that the GNU project created. All of the work by Stallman and his disciples could be easily ported to work with the operating system core that Torvalds was now calling Linux. This was the power of freely distributable source code. Anyone could make a connection, and someone invariably did. Soon, much of the GNU code began running on Linux. These tools made it easier to create more new programs, and the snowball began to roll. + +Many people feel that Linus Torvalds's true act of genius was in coming up with a flexible and responsive system for letting his toy OS grow and change. He released new versions often, and he encouraged everyone to test them with him. In the past, many open source developers using the GNU GPL had only shipped new versions at major landmarks in development, acting a bit like the commercial developers. After they released version 1.0, they would hole up in their basements until they had added enough new features to justify version 2.0. + +Torvalds avoided this perfectionism and shared frequently. If he fixed a bug on Monday, then he would roll out a new version that afternoon. It's not strange to have two or three new versions hit the Internet each week. This was a bit more work for Torvalds, but it also made it much easier for others to become involved. They could watch what he was doing and make their own suggestions. + +This freedom also attracted others to the party. They knew that Linux would always be theirs, too. They could write neat features and plug them into the Linux kernel without worrying that Torvalds would yank the rug out from under them. The GPL was a contract that lasted long into the future. It was a promise that bound them together. + +The Linux kernel also succeeded because it was written from the ground up for the PC platform. When the Berkeley UNIX hackers were porting BSD to the PC platform, they weren't able to make it fit perfectly. They were taking a piece of software crafted for older computers like the VAX, and shaving off corners and rewriting sections until it ran on the PC. + +Alan Cox pointed out to me, "The early BSD stuff was by UNIX people for UNIX people. You needed a calculator and familiarity with BSD UNIX on big machines (or a lot of reading) to install it. You also couldn't share a disk between DOS/Windows and 386BSD or the early branches off it. + +"Nowadays FreeBSD understands DOS partitions and can share a disk, but at the time BSD was scary to install," he continued. + +The BSD also took certain pieces of hardware for granted. Early versions of BSD required a 387, a numerical coprocessor that would speed up the execution of floating point numbers. Cox remembers that the price (about $100) was just too much for his budget. At that time, the free software world was a very lean organization. + +Torvalds's operating system plugged a crucial hole in the world of free source software and made it possible for someone to run a computer without paying anyone for a license. Richard Stallman had dreamed of this day, and Torvalds came up with the last major piece of the puzzle. + +2~ A Different Kind of Trial + +During the early months of Torvalds's work, the BSD group was stuck in a legal swamp. While the BSD team was involved with secret settlement talks and secret depositions, Linus Torvalds was happily writing code and sharing it with the world on the Net. His life wasn't all peaches and cream, but all of his hassles were open. Professor Andy Tanenbaum, a fairly well-respected and famous computer scientist, got in a long, extended debate with Torvalds over the structure of Linux. He looked down at Linux and claimed that Linux would have been worth two F's in his class because of its design. This led to a big flame war that was every bit as nasty as the fight between Berkeley and AT&T's USL. In fact, to the average observer it was even nastier. Torvalds returned Tanenbaum's fire with strong words like "fiasco," "brain-damages," and "suck." He brushed off the bad grades by pointing out that Albert Einstein supposedly got bad grades in math and physics. The highpriced lawyers working for AT&T and Berkeley probably used very expensive and polite words to try and hide the shivs they were trying to stick in each other's back. Torvalds and Tanenbaum pulled out each other's virtual hair like a squawkfest on the Jerry Springer show. + +But Torvalds's flame war with Tanenbaum occurred in the open in an Internet newsgroup. Other folks could read it, think about it, add their two cents' worth, and even take sides. It was a wide-open debate that uncovered many flaws in the original versions of Linux and Tanenbaum's Minix. They forced Torvalds to think deeply about what he wanted to do with Linux and consider its flaws. He had to listen to the arguments of a critic and a number of his peers on the Net and then come up with arguments as to why his Linux kernel didn't suck too badly. + +This open fight had a very different effect from the one going on in the legal system. Developers and UNIX hackers avoided the various free versions of BSD because of the legal cloud. If a judge decided that AT&T and USL were right, everyone would have to abandon their work on the platform. While the CSRG worked hard to get free, judges don't always make the choices we want. + +The fight between Torvalds and Tanenbaum, however, drew people into the project. Other programmers like David Miller, Ted T'so, and Peter da Silva chimed in with their opinions. At the time, they were just interested bystanders. In time, they became part of the Linux brain trust. Soon they were contributing source code that ran on Linux. The argument's excitement forced them to look at Torvalds's toy OS and try to decide whether his defense made any sense. Today, David Miller is one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel. Many of the original debaters became major contributors to the foundations of Linux. + +This fight drew folks in and kept them involved. It showed that Torvalds was serious about the project and willing to think about its limitations. More important, it exposed these limitations and inspired other folks on the Net to step forward and try to fix them. Everyone could read the arguments and jump in. Even now, you can dig up the archives of this battle and read in excruciating detail what people were thinking and doing. The AT&T/USL-versus-Berkeley fight is still sealed. + +To this day, all of the devotees of the various BSDs grit their teeth when they hear about Linux. They think that FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are better, and they have good reasons for these beliefs. They know they were out the door first with a complete running system. But Linux is on the cover of the magazines. All of the great technically unwashed are now starting to use "Linux" as a synonym for free software. If AT&T never sued, the BSD teams would be the ones reaping the glory. They would be the ones to whom Microsoft turned when it needed a plausible competitor. They would be more famous. + +But that's crying over spilled milk. The Berkeley CSRG lived a life of relative luxury in their world made fat with big corporate and government donations. They took the cash, and it was only a matter of time before someone called them on it. Yes, they won in the end, but it came too late. Torvalds was already out of the gate and attracting more disciples. + +McKusick says, "If you plot the installation base of Linux and BSD over the last five years, you'll see that they're both in exponential growth. But BSD's about eighteen to twenty months behind. That's about how long it took between Net Release 2 and the unencumbered 4.4BSD-Lite. That's about how long it took for the court system to do its job." + +1~ Growth + +Through the 1990s, the little toy operating system grew slowly and quietly as more and more programmers were drawn into the vortex. At the beginning, the OS wasn't rich with features. You could run several different programs at once, but you couldn't do much with the programs. The system's interface was just text. Still, this was often good enough for a few folks in labs around the world. Some just enjoyed playing with computers. Getting Linux running on their PC was a challenge, not unlike bolting an aftermarket supercharger onto a Honda Civic. But others took the project more seriously because they had serious jobs that couldn't be solved with a proprietary operating system that came from Microsoft or others. + +In time, more people started using the system and started contributing their additions to the pot. Someone figured out how to make MIT's free X Window System run on Linux so everyone could have a graphical interface. Someone else discovered how to roll in technology for interfacing with the Internet. That made a big difference because everyone could hack, tweak, and fiddle with the code and then just upload the new versions to the Net. + +It goes without saying that all the cool software coming out of Stallman's Free Software Foundation found its way to Linux. Some were simple toys like GNU Chess, but others were serious tools that were essential to the growth of the project. By 1991, the FSF was offering what might be argued were the best text editor and compiler in the world. Others might have been close, but Stallman's were free. These were crucial tools that made it possible for Linux to grow quickly from a tiny experimental kernel into a full-featured OS for doing everything a programmer might want to do. + +James Lewis-Moss, one of the many programmers who devote some time to Linux, says that GCC made it possible for programmers to create, revise, and extend the kernel. "GCC is integral to the success of Linux," he says, and points out that this may be one of the most important reasons why "it's polite to refer to it as GNU/Linux." + +Lewis-Moss points out one of the smoldering controversies in the world of free software: all of the tools and games that came from the GNU project started becoming part of what people simply thought of as plain "Linux." +The name for the small kernel of the operating system soon grew to apply to almost all the free software that ran with it. This angered Stallman, who first argued that a better name would be"Lignux."When that failed to take hold, he moved to "GNU/Linux." Some ignored his pleas and simply used "Linux," which is still a bit unfair. Some feel that"GNU/Linux"is too much of a mouthful and, for better or worse, just plain Linux is an appropriate shortcut. Some, like Lewis-Moss, hold firm to GNU/Linux. + +Soon some people were bundling together CD-ROMs with all this software in one batch. The group would try to work out as many glitches as possible so that the purchaser's life would be easier. All boasted strange names like Yggdrasil, Slackware, SuSE, Debian, or Red Hat. Many were just garage projects that never made much money, but that was okay. Making money wasn't really the point. People just wanted to play with the source. Plus, few thought that much money could be made. The GPL, for instance, made it difficult to differentiate the product because it required everyone to share their source code with the world. If Slackware came up with a neat fix that made their version of Linux better, then Debian and SuSE could grab it. The GPL prevented anyone from constraining the growth of Linux. + +But only greedy businessmen see sharing and competition as negatives. In practice, the free flow of information enhanced the market for Linux by ensuring that it was stable and freely available. If one key CDROM developer gets a new girlfriend and stops spending enough time programming, another distribution will pick up the slack. If a hurricane flattened Raleigh, North Carolina, the home of Red Hat, then another supplier would still be around. A proprietary OS like Windows is like a set of manacles. An earthquake in Redmond, Washington, could cause a serious disruption for everyone. + +The competition and the GPL meant that the users would never feel bound to one OS. If problems arose, anyone could always just start a splinter group and take Linux in that direction. And they did. All the major systems began as splinter groups, and some picked up enough steam and energy to dominate. In time, the best splinter groups spun off their own splinter groups and the process grew terribly complicated. + +2~ The Establishment Begins to Notice + +By the mid-1990s, the operating system had already developed quite a following. In 1994, Jon Hall was a programmer for Digital, a company that was later bought by Compaq. Hall also wears a full beard and uses the name "maddog" as a nickname. At that time, Digital made workstations that ran a version of UNIX. In the early 1990s, Digital made a big leap forward by creating a 64-bit processor version of its workstation CPU chip, the Alpha, and the company wanted to make sure that the chip found widespread acceptance. + +Hall remembers well the moment he discovered Linux. He told Linux Today, + +_1 I didn't even know I was involved with Linux at first. I got a copy of Dr. Dobb's Journal, and in there was an advertisement for "get a UNIX operating system, all the source code, and run it on your PC." And I think it was $99. And I go, "Oh, wow, that's pretty cool. For $99, I can do that." So I sent away for it, got the CD. The only trouble was that I didn't have a PC to run it on. So I put it on my Ultrix system, took a look at the main pages, directory structure and stuff, and said, "Hey, that looks pretty cool." Then I put it away in the filing cabinet. That was probably around January of 1994. + +In May 1994, Hall met Torvalds at a DECUS (Digital Equipment Corporation User Society) meeting and became a big fan. Hall is a programmer's programmer who has written code for many different machines over the years, like the IBM 1130 and the DEC PDP-8. He started out as an electrical engineer in college, but took up writing software "after seeing a friend of mine fried by 13,600 volts and 400 amps, which was not a pretty sight." Hall started playing with UNIX when he worked at Bell Labs and fell in love with the OS. + +At the meeting, Torvalds helped Hall and his boss set up a PC with Linux. This was the first time that Hall actually saw Linux run, and he was pleasantly surprised. He said, "By that time I had been using UNIX for probably about fifteen years. I had used System V, I had used Berkeley, and all sorts of stuff, and this really felt like UNIX. You know . . . I mean, it's kind of like playing the piano. You can play the piano, even if it's a crappy piano. But when it's a really good piano, your fingers just fly over the keys. That's the way this felt. It felt good, and I was really impressed." + +This experience turned Hall into a true convert and he went back to Digital convinced that the Linux project was more than just some kids playing with a toy OS. These so-called amateurs with no centralized system or corporate backing had produced a very, very impressive system that was almost as good as the big commercial systems. Hall was an instant devotee. Many involved in the project recall their day of conversion with the same strength. A bolt of lightning peeled the haze away from their eyes, and they saw. + +Hall set out trying to get Torvalds to rewrite Linux so it would work well on the Alpha. This was not a simple task, but it was one that helped the operating system grow a bit more. The original version included some software that assumed the computer was designed like the Intel 386. This was fine when Linux only ran on Intel machines, but removing these assumptions made it possible for the software to run well on all types of machines. + +Hall went sailing with Torvalds to talk about the guts of the Linux OS. Hall told me, "I took him out on the Mississippi River, went up and down the Mississippi in the river boat, drinking Hurricanes, and I said to him, 'Linus, did you ever think about porting Linux to a 64-bit processor, like the Alpha?' He said, 'Well, I thought about doing that, but the Helsinki office has been having problems getting me a system, so I guess I'll have to do the PowerPC instead.' + +"I knew that was the wrong answer, so I came back to Digital (at the time), and got a friend of mine, named Bill Jackson, to send out a system to Linus, and he received it about a couple weeks after that. Then I found some people inside Digital who were also thinking about porting Linux to an Alpha. I got the two groups together, and after that, we started on the Alpha Linux project." + +This was one of the first times that a major corporation started taking note of what was happening in the garages and basements of hardcore computer programmers. It was also one of the first times that a corporation looked at an open source operating system and did not react with fear or shock. Sun was always a big contributor of open source software, but they kept their OS proprietary. Hall worked tirelessly at Digital to ensure that the corporation understood the implications of the GPL and saw that it was a good way to get more interested in the Alpha chip. He says he taught upper management at Digital how to "say the L-word." + +Hall also helped start a group called Linux International, which works to make the corporate world safe for Linux. "We help vendors understand the Linux marketplace," Hall told me. "There's a lot of confusion about what the GPL means. Less now, but still there's a lot of confusion. We helped them find the markets." + +Today, Linux International helps control the trademark on the name Linux and ensures that it is used in an open way. "When someone wanted to call themselves something like 'Linux University,' we said that's bad because there's going to be more than one. 'Linux University of North Carolina' is okay. It opens up the space." + +In the beginning, Torvalds depended heavily on the kindness of strangers like Hall. He didn't have much money, and the Linux project wasn't generating a huge salary for him. Of course, poverty also made it easier for people like Hall to justify giving him a machine. Torvalds wasn't rich monetarily, but he became rich in machines. + +By 1994, when Hall met Torvalds, Linux was already far from just a one-man science project. The floppy disks and CD-ROMs holding a version of the OS were already on the market, and this distribution mechanism was one of the crucial unifying forces. Someone could just plunk down a few dollars and get a version that was more or less ready to run. Many simply downloaded their versions for free from the Internet. + +2~ Making it Easy to Use + +In 1994, getting Linux to run was never really as simple as putting the CD-ROM in the drive and pressing a button. Many of the programs didn't work with certain video cards. Some modems didn't talk to Linux. Not all of the printers communicated correctly. Yet most of the software worked together on many standard machines. It often took a bit of tweaking, but most people could get the OS up and running on their computers. + +This was a major advance for the Linux OS because most people could quickly install a new version without spending too much time downloading the new code or debugging it. Even programmers who understood exactly what was happening felt that installing a new version was a long, often painful slog through technical details. These CDROMs not only helped programmers, they also encouraged casual users to experiment with the system. + +The CD-ROM marketplace also created a new kind of volunteer for the project. Someone had to download the latest code from the author. Someone had to watch the kernel mailing list to see when Torvalds, Cox, and the rest had minted a new version that was stable enough to release. Someone needed to check all the other packages like GNU Emacs or GNU CC to make sure they still worked correctly. This didn't require the obsessive programming talent that created the kernel, but it did take some dedication and devotion. + +Today, there are many different kinds of volunteers putting together these packages. The Debian group, for instance, is one of the best known and most devoted to true open source principles. It was started by Ian Murdock, who named it after himself and his girlfriend, Debra. The Debian group, which now includes hundreds of official members, checks to make sure that the software is both technically sound and politically correct. That is, they check the licenses to make sure that the software can be freely distributed by all users. Their guidelines later morphed into the official definition of open source software. + +Other CD-ROM groups became more commercial. Debian sold its disks to pay for Internet connection fees and other expenses, but they were largely a garage operation. So were groups with names like Slackware, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. Other groups like Red Hat actually set out to create a burgeoning business, and to a large extent, they succeeded. They took the money and used it to pay programmers who wrote more software to make Linux easier to use. + +In the beginning, there wasn't much difference between the commercially minded groups like Red Hat and the more idealistic collectives like Debian. The marketplace was small, fragmented, and tribal. But by 1998, Red Hat had attracted major funding from companies like Intel, and it plowed more and more money into making the package as presentable and easy to use as possible. This investment paid off because more users turned instinctively to Red Hat, whose CD-ROM sales then exploded. + +Most of this development lived in its own Shangri-La. Red Hat, for instance, charged money for its disks, but released all of its software under the GPL. Others could copy their disks for free, and many did. Red Hat may be a company, but the management realized that they depended on thousands if not millions of unpaid volunteers to create their product. + +Slowly but surely, more and more people became aware of Linux, the GNU project, and its cousins like FreeBSD. No one was making much money off the stuff, but the word of mouth was spreading very quickly. The disks were priced reasonably, and people were curious. The GPL encouraged people to share. People began borrowing disks from their friends. Some companies even manufactured cheap rip-off copies of the CD-ROMs, an act that the GPL encouraged. + +At the top of the pyramid was Linus Torvalds. Many Linux developers treated him like the king of all he surveyed, but he was like the monarchs who were denuded by a popular constitutional democracy. He had always focused on building a fast, stable kernel, and that was what he continued to do. The rest of the excitement, the packaging, the features, and the toys, were the dominion of the volunteers and contributors. + +Torvalds never said much about the world outside his kernel, and it developed without him. + +Torvalds moved to Silicon Valley and took a job with the very secret company Transmeta in order to help design the next generation of computer chips. He worked out a special deal with the company that allowed him to work on Linux in his spare time. He felt that working for one of the companies like Red Hat would give that one version of Linux a special imprimatur, and he wanted to avoid that. Plus, Transmeta was doing cool things. + +In January 1999, the world caught up with the pioneers. Schmalensee mentioned Linux on the witness stand during the trial and served official notice to the world that Microsoft was worried about the growth of Linux. The system had been on the company's radar screen for some time. In October 1998, an internal memo from Microsoft describing the threat made its way to the press. Some thought it was just Microsoft's way of currying favor during the antitrust investigation. Others thought it was a serious treatment of a topic that was difficult for the company to understand. + +The media followed Schmalensee's lead. Everyone wanted to know about Linux, GNU, open source software, and the magical effects of widespread, unconditional sharing. The questions came in tidal waves, and Torvalds tried to answer them again and again. Was he sorry he gave it all away? No. If he charged anything, no one would have bought his toy and no one would have contributed anything. Was he a communist? No, he was rather apolitical. Don't programmers have to eat? Yes, but they will make their money selling a service instead of getting rich off bad proprietary code. Was Linux going to overtake Microsoft? Yes, if he had his way. World Domination Soon became the motto. + +But there were also difficult questions. How would the Linux world resist the embrace of big companies like IBM, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and maybe even Microsoft? These were massive companies with paid programmers and schedules to meet. All the open source software was just as free to them as anyone else. Would these companies use their strength to monopolize Linux? + +Some were worried that the money would tear apart the open source community. It's easy to get everyone to donate their time to a project when no one is getting paid. Money changes the equation. Would a gulf develop between the rich companies like Red Hat and the poor programmers who just gave away their hard work? + +Many wanted to know when Linux would become easier to use for nonprogrammers. Programmers built the OS to be easy to take apart and put back together again. That's a great feature if you like hacking the inside of a kernel, but that doesn't excite the average computer user. How was the open source community going to get the programmers to donate their time to fix the mundane, everyday glitches that confused and infuriated the nonprogrammers? Was the Linux community going to be able to produce something that a nonprogrammer could even understand? + +Others wondered if the Linux world could ever agree enough to create a software package with some coherence. Today, Microsoft users and programmers pull their hair out trying to keep Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT straight. Little idiosyncrasies cause games to crash and programs to fail. Microsoft has hundreds of quality assurance engineers and thousands of support personnel. Still, the little details drive everyone crazy. + +New versions of Linux appear as often as daily. People often create their own versions to solve particular problems. Many of these changes won't affect anyone, but they can add up. Is there enough consistency to make the tools easy enough to use? + +Many wondered if Linux was right for world domination. Programmers might love playing with source code, but the rest of the world just wants something that delivers the e-mail on time. More important, the latter are willing to pay for this efficiency. + +Such questions have been bothering the open source community for years and still have no easy answers today. Programmers need food, and food requires money. Making easy-to-use software requires discipline, and discipline doesn't always agree with total freedom. + +When the first wave of hype about free software swept across the zeitgeist, no one wanted to concentrate on these difficult questions. The high quality of free operating systems and their use at high-profile sites like Yahoo! was good news for the world. The success of unconditional cooperation was intoxicating. If free software could do so much with so little, it could overcome the difficult questions. Besides, it didn't have to be perfect. It just needed to be better than Microsoft. + +1~ Freedom + +The notion embodied by the word "free" is one of the great marketing devices of all time. Cereal manufacturers know that kids will slog through bowls of sugar to get a free prize. Stores know that people will gladly give them their names and addresses if they stand a chance of winning something for free. Car ads love to emphasize the freedom a new car will give to someone. + +Of course, Microsoft knows this fact as well. One of their big advertising campaigns stresses the freedom to create new documents, write long novels, fiddle with photographs, and just do whatever you want with a computer. "Where do you want to go today?" the Microsoft ads ask. + +Microsoft also recognizes the pure power of giving away something for free. When Bill Gates saw Netscape's browser emerging as a great competitive threat, he first bought a competing version and then wrote his own version of a web browser. Microsoft gave their versions away for free. This bold move shut down the revenue stream of Netscape, which had to cut its price to zero in order to compete. Of course, Netscape didn't have revenues from an operating system to pay the rent. Netscape cried foul and eventually the Department of Justice brought a lawsuit to decide whether the free software from Microsoft was just a plot to keep more people paying big bucks for their not-so-free Windows OS. The fact that Microsoft is now threatened by a group of people who are giving away a free OS has plenty of irony. + +The word "free" has a much more complicated and nuanced meaning within the free software movement. In fact, many people who give away their software don't even like the word "free" and prefer to use "open" to describe the process of sharing. In the case of free software, it's not just an ad campaign to make people feel good about buying a product. It's also not a slick marketing sleight of hand to focus people's attention on a free gift while the magician charges full price for a product. The word "free" is more about a way of life. The folks who write the code throw around the word in much the same way the Founding Fathers of the United States used it. To many of them, the free software revolution was also conceived in liberty and dedicated to certain principles like the fact that all men and women have certain inalienable rights to change, modify, and do whatever they please with their software in the pursuit of happiness. + +Tossing about the word "free" is easy to do. Defining what it means takes much longer. The Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, but the colonial governments fought and struggled with creating a free government through the ratification of the current United States Constitution in 1787. The Bill of Rights came soon afterward, and the Supreme Court is still continually struggling with defining the boundaries of freedom described by the document. Much of the political history of the United States might be said to be an extended argument about the meaning of the words "free country." + +The free software movement is no different. It's easy for one person to simply give their software away for free. It's much harder to attract and organize an army to take on Microsoft and dominate the world. That requires a proper definition of the word "free" so that everyone understands the rights and limitations behind the word. Everyone needs to be on the same page if the battle is to be won. Everyone needs to understand what is meant by "free software." + +The history of the free software world is also filled with long, extended arguments defining the freedom that comes bundled with the source code. Many wonder if it is more about giving the user something for nothing, or if is it about empowering him. Does this freedom come with any responsibilities? What should they be? How is the freedom enforced? Is freeloading a proper part of the freedom? + +In the early years of computers, there were no real arguments. Software was free because people just shared it with each other. Magazines like Creative Computing and BYTE published the source code to programs because that was an easy way to share information. + +People would even type in the data themselves. Computers cost money, and getting them to run was part of the challenge. Sharing software was just part of being neighborly. If someone needed to borrow your plow, you lent it to them when you weren't using it. + +This changed as corporations recognized that they could copyright software and start charging money for it. Most people loved this arrangement because the competition brought new packages and tools to market and people were more than willing to pay for them. How else are the programmers and the manual writers going to eat? + +A few people thought this was a disaster. Richard Stallman watched the world change from his office in the artificial intelligence labs of MIT. Stallman is the ultimate hacker, if you use the word in the classical sense. In the beginning, the word only described someone who knows how to program well and loves to poke around in the insides of computers. It only took on its more malicious tone later as the media managed to group all of those with the ability to wrangle computers into the same dangerous camp. Hackers often use the term "cracker" to refer to these people. + +Stallman is a model of the hacker. He is strident, super intelligent, highly logical, and completely honest. Most corporations keep their hackers shut off in a back room because these traits seem to scare away customers and investors who just want sweet little lies in their ears. Stallman was never that kind of guy. He looked at the burgeoning corporate control of software and didn't like it one bit. His freedom was slowly being whittled away, and he wasn't the type to simply sit by and not say anything. + +When Stallman left the AI lab in 1984, he didn't want to be controlled by its policies. Universities started adopting many of the same practices as the corporations in the 1980s, and Stallman couldn't be a special exception. If MIT was going to be paying him a salary, MIT would own his code and any patents that came from it. Even MIT, which is a much cooler place than most, couldn't accommodate him on staff. He didn't move far, however, because after he set up the Free Software Foundation, he kept an office at MIT, first unofficially and then officially. Once he wasn't "on the staff," the rules became different. + +Stallman turned to consulting for money, but it was consulting with a twist. He would only work for companies that wouldn't put any restrictions on the software he created. This wasn't an easy sell. He was insisting that any work he did for Corporation X could also be shared with Corporations Y and Z, even if they were direct competitors. + +This wasn't how things were done in the 1980s. That was the decade when companies figured out how to lock up the source code to a program by only distributing a machine-readable version. They hoped this would control their product and let them restrain people who might try to steal their ideas and their intellectual property. Stallman thought it was shutting down his ability to poke around inside the computer and fix it. This secrecy blocked him from sharing his thoughts and ideas with other programmers. + +Most programmers looked at the scheme of charging for locked-up binary versions of a program as a necessary evil. Sure, they couldn't play around with the guts of Microsoft Windows, but it also meant that no one could play around with the guts of the programs they wrote. The scheme locked doors and compartmentalized the world, but it also gave the creator of programs more power. Most programmers thought having power over their own creation was pretty neat, even if others had more power. Being disarmed is okay if everyone else is disarmed and locked in a cage. + +Stallman thought this was a disaster for the world and set out to convince the world that he was right. In 1984, he wrote the GNU Manifesto, which started his GNU project and laid out the conditions for his revolution. This document stood out a bit in the middle of the era of Ronald Reagan because it laid out Stallman's plan for creating a virtual commune where people would be free to use the software. It is one of the first cases when someone tried to set down a definition of the word "free" for software users. Sure, software and ideas were quite free long ago, but no one noticed until the freedom was gone. + +He wrote, + +_1 I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. . . . So that I can continue to use computers without dishonor, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free. + +The document is a wonderful glimpse at the nascent free software world because it is as much a recruiting document as a tirade directed at corporate business practices. When the American colonies split off from England, Thomas Paine spelled out the problems with the English in the first paragraph of his pamphlet "Common Sense." In his manifesto, Stallman didn't get started using words like "dishonor" until the sixth paragraph. The first several paragraphs spelled out the cool tools he had developed already: "an Emacs text editor with Lisp for writing editor commands, a source level debugger, a yacc-compatible parser generator, a linker, and around 35 utilities." Then he pointed to the work he wanted to complete soon: "A new portable optimizing C compiler has compiled itself and may be released this year. An initial kernel exists but many more features are needed to emulate Unix." He was saying, in effect, that he already had a few juicy peaches growing on the trees of his commune. + +If this wasn't enough, he intended to do things a bit better than UNIX. His operating system was going to offer the latest, greatest ideas of computer science, circa 1984. "In particular, we plan to have longer file names, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, file name completion perhaps, terminal-independent display support, and perhaps eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen." The only thing that was missing from every computer nerd's wish list was a secret submarine docking site in the basement grotto. + +The fifth paragraph even explained to everyone that the name of the project would be the acronym GNU, which stood for "GNU's Not UNIX," and it should be pronounced with a hard G to make sure that no one would get it confused with the word "new." Stallman has always cared about words, the way they're used and the way they're pronounced. + +In 1984, UNIX became the focus of Stallman's animus because its original developer, AT&T, was pushing to try to make some money back after paying so many people at Bell Labs to create it. Most people were somewhat conflicted by the fight. They understood that AT&T had paid good money and supported many researchers with the company's beneficence. The company gave money, time, and spare computers. Sure, it was a pain to pay AT&T for something and get only a long license drafted by teams of lawyers. Yes, it would be nice if we could poke around under the hood of UNIX without signing a non-disclosure agreement. It would be nice if we could be free to do whatever we want, but certainly someone who pays for something deserves the right to decide how it is used. We've all got to eat. + +Stallman wasn't confused at all. Licenses like AT&T's would constrict his freedom to share with others. To make matters worse, the software companies wanted him to pay for the privilege of getting software without the source code. + +Stallman explains that his feelings weren't focused on AT&T per se. Software companies were springing up all over the place, and most of them were locking up their source code with proprietary licenses. It was the 1980s thing to do, like listening to music by Duran Duran and Boy George. + +"When I decided to write a free operating system, I did not have AT&T in mind at all, because I had never had any dealings with them. I had never used a UNIX system. They were just one of many companies doing the same discreditable thing," he told me recently. "I chose a Unix-like design just because I thought it was a good design for the job, not because I had any particular feelings about AT&T." + +When he wrote the GNU Manifesto, he made it clear to the world that his project was more about choosing the right moral path than saving money. He wrote then that the GNU project means "much more than just saving everyone the price of a UNIX license. It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state of the art." + +This was a crucial point that kept Stallman from being dismissed as a quasi-communist crank who just wanted everyone to live happily on some nerd commune. The source code is a valuable tool for everyone because it is readable by humans, or at least humans who happen to be good at programming. Companies learned to keep source code proprietary, and it became almost a reflex. If people wanted to use it, they should pay to help defray the cost of creating it. This made sense to programmers who wanted to make a living or even get rich writing their own code. But it was awfully frustrating at times. Many programmers have pulled their hair out in grief when their work was stopped by some bug or undocumented feature buried deep in the proprietary, super-secret software made by Microsoft, IBM, Apple, or whomever. If they had the source code, they would be able to poke around and figure out what was really happening. Instead, they had to treat the software like a black box and keep probing it with test programs that might reveal the secrets hidden inside. Every programmer has had an experience like this, and every programmer knew that they could solve the problem much faster if they could only read the source code. They didn't want to steal anything, they just wanted to know what was going on so they could make their own code work. + +Stallman's GNU project would be different, and he explained, +"Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make changes." + +He was quick to mention that people would be "free to hire any available programmer" to ensure that people understood he wasn't against taking money for writing software. That was okay and something he did frequently himself. He was against people controlling the source with arbitrarily complex legal barriers that made it impossible for him or anyone else to get something done. + +When people first heard of his ideas, they became fixated on the word "free." These were the Reagan years. Saying that people should just give away their hard work was sounding mighty communist to everyone, and this was long before the Berlin Wall fell. Stallman reexamined the word "free" and all of its different meanings. He carefully considered all of the different connotations, examined the alternatives, and decided that "free" was still the best word. He began to try to explain the shades of meaning he was after. His revolution was about "free speech," not "free beer." This wasn't going to be a revolution in the sense that frequent flyer miles revolutionized air travel nor in the way that aluminum cans revolutionized beer drinking. No, this was going to be a revolution as Rousseau, Locke, and Paine used the word. + +He later codified this into four main principles: + +_1 The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).~{ He numbered them starting at zero because that was what computer scientists did. Someone figured out that it was simpler to start numbering databases at zero because you didn't have to subtract 1 as often. }~ + +_1 The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). + +_1 The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). + +_1 The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). + +2~ Free Beer + +While Stallman pushed people away from the notion of "free beer," +there's little question that this element turned out to be a very important part of the strategy and a foundation of its success. Stallman insisted that anyone could do what they wanted with the software, so he insisted that the source code must be freely distributed. That is, no one could put any restrictions on how you used the software. While this didn't make it free beer, it did mean that you could turn around and give a copy to your friends or your clients. It was pretty close. + +The "free beer" nature of Stallman's software also attracted users. If some programmers wanted to check out a new tool, they could download it and try it out without paying for it. They didn't need to ask their boss for a budget, and they didn't need to figure out a way to deal with an invoice. Just one click and the software was there. Commercial software companies continue to imitate this feature by distributing trial versions that come with either a few crippled features or a time lock that shuts them down after a few days. + +Of course, the "free beer" nature of the GNU project soon led to money problems. The GNU project took up his time and generated no real revenues at first. Stallman had always lived frugally. He says that he never made more than $20,000 a year at MIT, and still managed to save on that salary. But he was finding it harder and harder to get his assigned jobs done at MIT and write the cool GNU code. While Stallman always supported a programmer's right to make money for writing code, the GNU project wasn't generating any money. + +Most folks saw this conflict coming from the beginning. Sure, Stallman would be able to rant and rave about corporate software development for a bit, but eventually he and his disciples would need to eat. + +When the MIT support ended, Stallman soon stumbled upon a surprising fact: he could charge for the software he was giving away and make some money. People loved his software, but it was often hard to keep track of it. Getting the package delivered on computer tape or a CD-ROM gave people a hard copy that they could store for future reference or backup. Online manuals were also nice, but the printed book is still a very popular and easy-to-use way of storing information. Stallman's Free Software Foundation began selling printed manuals, tapes, and then CD-ROMs filled with software to make money. Surprisingly, people started paying money for these versions despite the fact that they could download the same versions for free. + +Some folks enjoyed pointing out the hypocrisy in Stallman's move. Stallman had run his mouth for so long that many programming "sellouts" who worked for corporations savored the irony. At last that weenie had gotten the picture. He was forced to make money to support himself, and he was selling out, too. These cynics didn't get what Stallman was trying to do. + +Most of us would have given up at this time. The free software thing seemed like a good idea, but now that the money was running out it was time to get a real job. In writing this book and interviewing some of the famous and not-so-famous free software developers, I found that some were involved in for-profit, not-so-free software development now. Stallman, though, wasn't going to give up his ideals, and his mind started shifting to accommodate this new measure of reality. He decided that it wouldn't be wrong to sell copies of software or even software services as long as you didn't withhold the source code and stomp on anyone's freedom to use the source code as they wished. + +Stallman has always been great at splitting hairs and creating Jesuitical distinctions, and this insight was one of his best. At first glance, it looked slightly nutty. If people were free to do anything they wanted with software, they could just give a copy to their friend and their friend would never send money back to Stallman's Free Software Foundation. In fact, someone could buy a copy from Stallman and then start reselling copies to others to undercut Stallman. The Free Software Foundation and the GNU GPL gave them the freedom to do so. It was as if a movie theater sold tickets to a movie, but also posted a big sign near the exit door that said "Hey, it's absolutely okay for you to prop this open so your friends can sneak in without paying." + +While this total freedom befuddled most people, it didn't fail. Many paid for tapes or CD-ROM versions because they wanted the convenience. Stallman's versions came with the latest bug fixes and new features. They were the quasi-official versions. Others felt that paying helped support the work so they didn't feel bad about doing it. They liked the FSF and wanted it to produce more code. Others just liked printed books better than electronic documentation. Buying them from Stallman was cheaper than printing them out. Still others paid for the CD-ROMs because they just wanted to support the Free Software Foundation. + +Stallman also found other support. The MacArthur Foundation gave him one of their genius grants that paid him a nice salary for five years to do whatever he wanted. Companies like Intel hired him as a consultant and asked him to make sure that some of his software ran on Intel chips. People were quite willing to pay for convenience because even free software didn't do everything that it should. + +Stallman also recognized that this freedom introduced a measure of competition. If he could charge for copies, then so could others. The source code would be a vast commonweal, but the means of delivering it would be filled with people struggling to do the best job of distributing the software. It was a pretty hard-core Reaganaut notion for a reputed communist. At the beginning, few bothered to compete with him, but in time all of the GNU code began to be included with computer operating systems. By the time Linus Torvalds wrote his OS, the GNU code was ready to be included. + +2~ Copyleft + +If Stallman's first great insight was that the world did not need to put up with proprietary source code, then his second was that he could strictly control the use of GNU software with an innovative legal document entitled GNU General Public License, or GPL. To illustrate the difference, he called the agreement a "copyleft" and set about creating a legal document defining what it meant for software to be "free." Well, defining what he thought it should mean. + +The GPL was a carefully crafted legal document that didn't put the software into the "public domain," a designation that would have allowed people to truly do anything they wanted with the software. The license, in fact, copyrighted the software and then extended users very liberal rights for making innumerable copies as long as the users didn't hurt other people's rights to use the software. + +The definition of stepping on other people's rights is one that keeps political science departments at universities in business. There are many constituencies that all frame their arguments in terms of protecting someone's rights. Stallman saw protecting the rights of other users in very strong terms and strengthened his grip a bit by inserting a controversial clause. He insisted that a person who distributes an improved version of the program must also share the source code. That meant that some greedy company couldn't download his GNU Emacs editor, slap on a few new features, and then sell the whole package without including all of the source code they created. If people were going to benefit from the GNU sharing, they were going to have to share back. It was freedom with a price. + +This strong compact was ready-built for some ironic moments. When Apple began trying to expand the scope of intellectual property laws by suing companies like Microsoft for stealing their "look and feel," Stallman became incensed and decided that he wouldn't develop software for Apple machines as a form of protest and spite. If Apple was going to pollute the legal landscape with terrible impediments to sharing ideas, then Stallman wasn't going to help them sell machines by writing software for the machines. But the GNU copyleft license specifically allowed anyone to freely distribute the source code and use it as they wanted. That meant that others could use the GNU code and convert it to run on the Apple if they wanted to do so. Many did port much of the GNU software to the Mac and distributed the source code with it in order to comply with the license. Stallman couldn't do anything about it. Sure, he was the great leader of the FSF and the author of some of its code, but he had given away his power with the license. The only thing he could do was refuse to help the folks moving the software to the Mac. When it came to principles, he placed freedom to use the source code at the top of the hierarchy. + +2~ The GNU Virus + +Some programmers soon started referring to the sticky nature of the license as the "GNU virus" because it infected software projects with its freedom bug. If a developer wanted to save time and grab some of the neat GNU software, he was stuck making the rest of his work just as free. These golden handcuffs often scared away programmers who wanted to make money by charging for their work. + +Stallman hates that characterization. "To call anything 'like a virus' is a very vicious thing. People who say things like that are trying to find ways to make the GPL look bad," he says. + +Stallman did try to work around this problem by creating what he at first called the "Library General Public License" and now refers to as the "Lesser General Public License," a document that allowed software developers to share small chunks of code with each other under less restrictive circumstances. A programmer can use the LGPL to bind chunks of code known as libraries. Others can share the libraries and use them with their source code as long as they don't fully integrate them. Any changes they make to the library itself must be made public, but there is no requirement to release the source code for the main program that uses the library. + +This license is essentially a concession to some rough edges at the corners where the world of programming joins the world of law. While Stallman was dead set on creating a perfect collection of free programs that would solve everyone's needs, he was far from finished. If people were going to use his software, they were going to have to use it on machines made by Sun, AT&T, IBM, or someone else who sold a proprietary operating system along with it. He understood that he needed to compromise, at least for system libraries. + +The problem is drawing boundaries around what is one pile of software owned by one person and what is another pile owned by someone else. The GPL guaranteed that GNU software would "infect" other packages and force people who used his code to join the party and release theirs as well. So he had to come up with a definition that spelled out what it meant for people to use his code and "incorporate" it with others. + +This is often easier said than done. The marketplace has developed ways to sell software as big chunks to people, but these are fictions that camouflage software integration. In modern practice, programmers don't just create one easily distinguished chunk of software known as Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. They build up a variety of smaller chunks known as libraries and link these together. Microsoft Windows, in fact, includes a large collection of libraries for creating the menus, forms, click boxes, and what-not that make the graphical user interfaces. Programmers don't need to write their own instructions for drawing these on the screen and interacting with them. This saves plenty of time and practice for the programmers, and it is a large part of what Microsoft is selling when it sells someone a box with Windows on it. + +Stallman recognized that programmers sometimes wrote libraries that they wanted others to use. After all, that was the point of GNU: creating tools that others would be free to use. So Stallman relented and created the Lesser Public License, which would allow people to create libraries that might be incorporated into other programs that weren't fully GNU. The library itself still came with source code, and the user would need to distribute all changes made to the library, but there was no limitation on the larger package. + +This new license was also something of a concession to reality. In the most abstract sense, programs are just black boxes that take some input and produce some output. There's no limit to the hierarchies that can be created by plugging these boxes together so that the output for one is the input for another. Eventually, the forest of connections grows so thick that it is difficult to draw a line and label one collection of boxes "ProprietarySoft's SUX-2000" and another collection "GNUSoft's Wombat 3.14.15." The connections are so numerous in well-written, effective software that line-drawing is difficult. + +The problem is similar to the one encountered by biologists as they try to define ecosystems and species. Some say there are two different groups of tuna that swim in the Atlantic. Others say there is only one. The distinction would be left to academics if it didn't affect the international laws on fishing. Some groups pushing the vision of one school are worried that others on the other side of the ocean are catching their fish. Others push the two-school theory to minimize the meddling of the other side's bureaucracy. No one knows, though, how to draw a good line. + +Stallman's LGPL was a concession to the fact that sometimes programs can be used like libraries and sometimes libraries can be used like programs. In the end, the programmer can draw a strong line around one set of boxes and say that the GPL covers these functions without leaking out to infect the software that links up with the black boxes. + +2~ Is the Free Software Foundation Anti-Freedom? + +Still, these concessions aren't enough for some people. Many continue to rail against Stallman's definition of freedom and characterize the GPL as a fascist document that steals the rights of any programmer who comes along afterward. Being free means having the right to do anything you want with the code, including keeping all your modifications private. + +To be fair, the GPL never forces you to give away your changes to the source code. It just forces you to release your modifications if you redistribute it. If you just run your own version in your home, then you don't need to share anything. When you start sharing binary versions of the software, however, you need to ship the source code, too. + +Some argue that corporations have the potential to work around this loophole because they act like one person. A company could revise software and "ship it" by simply hiring anyone who wanted to buy it. The new employees or members of the corporation would get access to the software without shipping the source. The source code would never be distributed because it was not publicly shipped. No one seriously believes that anyone would try to exploit this provision with such an extreme interpretation, but it does open the question of whether an airtight license can ever be created. + +These fine distinctions didn't satisfy many programmers who weren't so taken with Stallman's doctrinaire version of freedom. They wanted to create free software and have the freedom to make some money off of it. This tradition dates back many years before Stallman and is a firm part of academic life. Many professors and students developed software and published a free version before starting up a company that would commercialize the work. They used their professor's salary or student stipend to support the work, and the free software they contributed to the world was meant as an exchange. In many cases, the U.S. government paid for the creation of the software through a grant, and the free release was a gift to the taxpayers who ultimately funded it. In other cases, corporations paid for parts of the research and the free release was seen as a way to give something back to the sponsoring corporation without turning the university into a home for the corporation's lowpaid slave programmers who were students in name only. + +In many cases, the free distribution was an honest gift made by researchers who wanted to give their work the greatest possible distribution. They would be repaid in fame and academic prestige, which can be more lucrative than everything but a good start-up's IPO. Sharing knowledge and creating more of it was what universities were all about. Stallman tapped into that tradition. + +But many others were fairly cynical. They would work long enough to generate a version that worked well enough to convince people of its value. Then, when the funding showed up, they would release this buggy version into the "public domain," move across the street into their own new start-up, and resume development. The public domain version satisfied the university's rules and placated any granting agencies, but it was often close to unusable. The bugs were too numerous and too hidden in the cruft to make it worth someone's time. Of course, the original authors knew where the problems lurked, and they would fix them before releasing the commercial version. + +The leader of this academic branch of the free software world became the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley. The published Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) versions of UNIX started emerging from Berkeley in the late 1970s. Their work emerged with a free license that gave everyone the right to do what they wanted with the software, including start up a company, add some neat features, and start reselling the whole package. The only catch was that the user must keep the copyright message intact and give the university some credit in the manual and in advertisements. This requirement was loosened in 1999 when the list of people who needed credit on software projects grew too long. Many groups were taking the BSD license and simply replacing the words "University of California" with their name. The list of people who needed to be publicly acknowledged grew with each new project. As the distributions grew larger to include all of these new projects, the process of listing all the names and projects became onerous. The University of California struck the clause requiring advertising credit in the hopes of setting an example that others would follow. + +Today, many free software projects begin with a debate of "GNU versus BSD" as the initial founders argue whether it is a good idea to restrict what users can do with the code. The GNU side always believes that programmers should be forced to donate the code they develop back to the world, while the BSD side pushes for practically unlimited freedom. + +Rick Rashid is one of the major forces behind the development of Microsoft's Windows NT and also a major contributor to our knowledge of how to build a computer operating system. Before he went to Microsoft, he was a professor at Carnegie-Mellon. While he was there, he spearheaded the team responsible for developing Mach, an operating system that offered relatively easy-to-use multitasking built upon a very tiny kernel. Mach let programmers break their software into multiple "threads" that could run independently of each other while sharing the same access to data. + +When asked recently about Mach and the Mach license, he explained that he deliberately wrote the license to be as free as possible. + +The GNU GPL, he felt, wasn't appropriate for technology that was developed largely with government grants. The work should be as free as possible and shouldn't force "other people to do things (e.g., give away their personal work) in order to get access to what you had done." + +He said, in an e-mail interview, "It was my intent to encourage use of the system both for academic and commercial use and it was used heavily in both environments. Accent, the predecessor to Mach, had already been commercialized and used by a variety of companies. Mach continues to be heavily used today--both as the basis for Apple's new MacOS and as the basis for variants of Unix in the marketplace (e.g., Compaq's 64-bit Unix for the Alpha)." + +2~ The Evolution of BSD + +The BSD license evolved along a strange legal path that was more like the meandering of a drunken cow than the laser-like devotion of Stallman. + +Many professors and students cut their teeth experimenting with UNIX on DEC Vaxes that communicated with old teletypes and dumb terminals. AT&T gave Berkeley the source code to UNIX, and this allowed the students and professors to add their instructions and features to the software. Much of their insight into operating system design and many of their bug fixes made their way back to AT&T, where they were incorporated in the next versions of UNIX. No one really thought twice about the source code being available because the shrink-wrapped software market was still in its infancy. The personal computer market wasn't even born until the latter half of the 1970s, and it took some time for people to believe that source code was something for a company to withhold and protect. In fact, many of the programs still weren't being written in higher-level languages. The programmers would write instructions directly for the computer, and while these often would include some instructions for humans, there was little difference between what the humans wrote and the machine read. + +After Bill Joy and others at Berkeley started coming up with several good pieces of software, other universities started asking for copies. At the time, Joy remembers, it was considered a bit shabby for computer science researchers to actually write software and share it with others. The academic departments were filled with many professors who received their formal training in mathematics, and they held the attitude that rigorous formal proofs and analysis were the ideal form of research. Joy and several other students began rebelling by arguing that creating working operating systems was essential experimental research. The physics departments supported experimentalists and theorists. + +So Joy began to "publish" his code by sending out copies to other researchers who wanted it. Although many professors and students at Berkeley added bits and pieces to the software running on the DEC Vaxes, Joy was the one who bundled it all together and gave it the name. Kirk McKusick says in his history of Berkeley UNIX, ". . . interest in the error recovery work in the Pascal compiler brought in requests for copies of the system. Early in 1977, Joy put together the 'Berkeley Software Distribution.' This first distribution included the Pascal system, and, in an obscure subdirectory of the Pascal source, the editor vi. Over the next year, Joy, acting in the capacity of the distribution secretary, sent out about 30 free copies of the system." + +Today, Joy tells the story with a bit of bemused distraction. He explains that he just copied over a license from the University of Toronto and"whited out""University ofToronto" and replaced it with "University of California." +He simply wanted to get the source code out the door. In the beginning, the Berkeley Software Distribution included a few utilities, but by 1979 the code became tightly integrated with AT&T's basic UNIX code. Berkeley gave away the collection of software in BSD, but only AT&T license holders could use it. Many universities were attracted to the package, in part because the Pascal system was easy for its students to use. The personal computer world, however, was focusing on a simpler language known as Basic. Bill Gates would make Microsoft Basic one of his first products. + +Joy says that he wrote a letter to AT&T inquiring about the legal status of the source code from AT&T that was rolled together with the BSD code. After a year, he says, "They wrote back saying, 'We take no position' on the matter." Kirk McKusick, who later ran the BSD project through the years of the AT&T lawsuit, explained dryly, "Later they wrote a different letter." + +Joy was just one of a large number of people who worked heavily on the BSD project from 1977 through the early 1980s. The work was low-level and grungy by today's standards. The students and professors scrambled just to move UNIX to the new machines they bought. Often, large parts of the guts of the operating system needed to be modified or upgraded to deal with a new type of disk drive or file system. As they did this more and more often, they began to develop more and more higher-level abstractions to ease the task. One of the earliest examples was Joy's screen editor known as vi, a simple package that could be used to edit text files and reprogram the system. The "battle" between Joy's vi and Stallman's Emacs is another example of the schism between MIT and Berkeley. This was just one of the new tools included in version 2 of BSD, a collection that was shipped to 75 different people and institutions. + +By the end of the 1970s, Bell Labs and Berkeley began to split as AT&T started to commercialize UNIX and Berkeley stuck to its job of education. Berkeley professor Bob Fabry was able to interest the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) into signing up to support more development at Berkeley. Fabry sold the agency on a software package that would be usable on many of the new machines being installed in research labs throughout the country. It would be more easily portable so that research would not need to stop every time a new computer arrived. The work on this project became versions 3 and 4 of BSD. + +During this time, the relationship between AT&T and the universities was cordial. AT&T owned the commercial market for UNIX and Berkeley supplied many of the versions used in universities. While the universities got BSD for free, they still needed to negotiate a license with AT&T, and companies paid a fortune. This wasn't too much of a problem because universities are often terribly myopic. If they share their work with other universities and professors, they usually consider their sharing done. There may be folks out there without university appointments, but those folks are usually viewed as cranks who can be safely ignored. Occasionally, those cranks write their own OS that grows up to be Linux. The BSD version of freedom was still a far cry from Stallman's, but then Stallman hadn't articulated it yet. His manifesto was still a few years off. + +The intellectual tension between Stallman and Berkeley grew during the 1980s. While Stallman began what many thought was a quixotic journey to build a completely free OS, Berkeley students and professors continued to layer their improvements to UNIX on top of AT&T's code. The AT&T code was good, it was available, and many of the folks at Berkeley had either directly or indirectly helped influence it. They were generally happy keeping AT&T code at the core despite the fact that all of the BSD users needed to negotiate with AT&T. This process grew more and more expensive as AT&T tried to make more and more money off of UNIX. + +Of course, Stallman didn't like the freedom of the BSD-style license. To him, it meant that companies could run off with the hard work and shared source code of another, make a pile of money, and give nothing back. The companies and individuals who were getting the BSD network release were getting the cumulative hard work of many students and professors at Berkeley (and other places) who donated their time and effort to building a decent OS. The least these companies owed the students were the bug fixes, the extensions, and the enhancements they created when they were playing with the source code and gluing it into their products. + +Stallman had a point. Many of these companies "shared" by selling the software back to these students and the taxpayers who had paid for their work. While it is impossible to go back and audit the motives of everyone who used the code, there have been many who've used BSDstyle code for their personal gain. + +Bill Joy, for instance, went to work at Sun Microsystems in 1982 and brought with him all the knowledge he had gained in developing BSD. Sun was always a very BSD-centered shop, and many of the people who bought Sun workstations ran BSD. At that time, AT&T still controlled much of the kernel and many of the small extra programs that made UNIX a usable system. + +But there are counter arguments as well. Joy certainly contributed a lot to the different versions of BSD. If anyone deserves to go off and get rich at a company like Sun, it's he. + +Also, the BSD source code was freely available to all comers, and all companies started with the same advantages. The software business is often considered to be one of the most free marketplaces around because of the low barriers to entry. This means that companies should only be able to charge for the value they add to the BSD code. Sure, all of the Internet was influenced by the TCP/IP code, but now Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Be, and everyone else compete on the quality of their interface. + +2~ The Price of Total Freedom + +The debate between BSD-style freedom and GNU-style freedom is one of the greatest in the free programming world and is bound to continue for a long time as programmers join sides and experiment. + +John Gilmore is one programmer who has worked with software developed under both types of licenses. He was employee number five at Sun Microsystems, a cofounder of the software development tool company Cygnus Solutions, and one of the board members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His early work at Sun gave him the wealth to pursue many independent projects, and he has spent the last 10 years devoting himself to making it easy for people around the world to use encryption software. He feels that privacy is a fundamental right and an important crime deterrent, and he has funded a number of different projects to advance this right. + +Gilmore also runs the cypherpunks mailing list on a computer in his house named Toad Hall near Haight Street in San Francisco. The mailing list is devoted to exploring how to create strong encryption tools that will protect people's privacy and is well known for the strong libertarian tone of the deliberations. Practically the whole list believes (and frequently reiterates) that people need the right to protect their privacy against both the government and private eavesdropping. Wired magazine featured Gilmore on the cover, along with fellow travelers Eric Hughes and Tim May. + +One of his recent tasks was creating a package of free encryption utilities that worked at the lowest level of the network operating system. These tools, known as Free/SWAN, would allow two computers that meet on the Internet to automatically begin encoding the data they swap with some of the best and most secure codes available. He imagines that banks, scientific laboratories, and home workers everywhere will want to use the toolkit. In fact, AT&T is currently examining how to incorporate the toolkit into products it is building to sell more highspeed services to workers staying at home to avoid the commute. + +Gilmore decided to use the GNU license to protect the Free/SWAN software, in part because he has had bad experiences in the past with totally free software. He once wrote a little program called PDTar that was an improvement over the standard version of Tar used on the Internet to bundle together a group of files into one big, easy-tomanage bag of bits often known affectionately as "tarballs." He decided he wasn't going to mess around with Stallman's GNU license or impose any restrictions on the source code at all. He was just going to release it into the public domain and give everyone total freedom. + +This good deed did not go unpunished, although the punishment was relatively minor. He recalls, "I never made PDTar work for DOS, but six or eight people did. For years after the release, I would get mail saying, 'I've got this binary for the DOS release and it doesn't work.' +They often didn't even have the sources that went with the version so I couldn't help them if I tried." Total freedom, it turned out, brought a certain amount of anarchy that made it difficult for him to manage the project. While the total freedom may have encouraged others to build their own versions of PDTar, it didn't force them to release the source code that went with their versions so others could learn from or fix their mistakes Hugh Daniel, one of the testers for the Free/SWAN project, says that he thinks the GNU General Public License will help keep some coherency to the project. "There's also a magic thing with GPL code that open source doesn't have," Daniel said. "For some reason, projects don't bifurcate in GPL space. People don't grab a copy of the code and call it their own. For some reason there's a sense of community in GPL code. There seems to be one version. There's one GPL kernel and there's umpty-ump BSD branches." + +Daniel is basically correct. The BSD code has evolved, or forked, into many different versions with names like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD while the Linux UNIX kernel released under Stallman's GPL is limited to one fairly coherent package. Still, there is plenty of crosspollination between the different versions of BSD UNIX. Both NetBSD 1.0 and FreeBSD 2.0, for instance, borrowed code from 4.4 BSD-Lite. Also, many versions of Linux come with tools and utilities that came from the BSD project. + +But Daniel's point is also clouded with semantics. There are dozens if not hundreds of different Linux distributions available from different vendors. Many differ in subtle points, but some are markedly different. While these differences are often as great as the ones between the various flavors of BSD, the groups do not consider them psychologically separate. They haven't forked politically even though they've split off their code. + +While different versions may be good for some projects, it may be a problem for packages like Free/SWAN that depend upon interoperability. If competing versions of Free/SWAN emerge, then all begin to suffer because the product was designed to let people communicate with each other. If the software can't negotiate secure codes because of differences, then it begins to fail. + +But it's not clear that the extra freedom is responsible for the fragmentation. In reality, the different BSD groups emerged because they had different needs. The NetBSD group, for instance, wanted to emphasize multiplatform support and interoperability. Their website brags that the NetBSD release works well on 21 different hardware platforms and also points out that some of these hardware platforms themselves are quite diverse. There are 93 different versions of the Macintosh running on Motorola's 68k chips, including the very first Mac. Eighty-nine of them run some part of NetBSD and 37 of them run all of it. That's why they say their motto is "Of course it runs NetBSD." + +The OpenBSD group, on the other hand, is emphasizing security without compromising portability and interoperability. They want to fix all security bugs immediately and be the most secure OS on the marketplace. + +There are also deep personal differences in the way Theo de Raadt, the founder of OpenBSD, started the project after the NetBSD group kicked him out of their core group. + +For all of these reasons, it may be hard to argue that the freedoms provided by the BSD-style license were largely responsible for the splintering. The GNU software users are just as free to make new versions as long as they kick back the source code into free circulation. In fact, it may be possible to argue that the Macintosh versions of some of the GNU code comprise a splinter group because it occurred despite the ill will Stallman felt for the Mac. + +2~ The Synthesis of "Open Source" + +The tension between the BSD licenses and the GNU has always festered like the abortion debate. Everyone picked sides and rarely moved from them. + +In 1998, a group of people in the free software community tried to unify the two camps by creating a new term, "open source." To make sure everyone knew they were serious, they started an unincorporated organization, registered a trademark, and set up a website (www.opensource.org). Anyone who wanted to label their project "open source" +would have to answer to them because they would control the trademark on the name. + +Sam Ockman, a Linux enthusiast and the founder of Penguin Computing, remembers the day of the meeting just before Netscape announced it was freeing its source code. "Eric Raymond came into town because of the Netscape thing. Netscape was going to free their software, so we drove down to Transmeta and had a meeting so we could advise Netscape," he said. + +He explained that the group considered a number of different options about the structure. Some wanted to choose a leader now. Others wanted to emulate an open source project and let a leader emerge through the display of talent and, well, leadership. Others wanted elections. + +The definition of what was open source grew out of the Debian project, one of the different groups that banded together to press CDROMs of stable Linux releases. Groups like these often get into debates about what software to include on the disks. Some wanted to be very pure and only include GPL'ed software. In a small way, that would force others to contribute back to the project because they wouldn't get their software distributed by the group unless it was GPL'ed. Others wanted less stringent requirements that might include quasi-commercial projects that still came with their source code. There were some cool projects out there that weren't protected by GPL, and it could be awfully hard to pass up the chance to integrate them into a package. + +Over time, one of the leaders of the Debian group, Bruce Perens, came to create a definition of what was acceptable and what wasn't. This definition would be large enough to include the GNU General Public License, the BSD-style licenses, and a few others like MIT's X Consortium license and the Artistic license. The X-windows license covers a graphical windowing interface that began at MIT and was also freely distributed with BSD-like freedom. The Artistic license applies to the Perl programming language, a tool that is frequently used to transform files. The Debian meta-definition would embrace all of these. + +The official definition of what was acceptable to Debian leaned toward more freedom and fewer restrictions on the use of software. Of course, that's the only way that anyone could come up with a definition that included both GNU and the much less restrictive BSD. But this was also the intent of the open source group. Perens and Eric Raymond felt that Stallman still sounded too quasi-communist for "conservative businessmen," and they wanted the open source definition to avoid insisting upon the sort of forced sharing that Stallman's GNU virus provided. + +Still, the definition borrowed heavily from Stallman's concept of GNU, and Perens credits him by saying that many of the Debian guidelines are derived from the GPL. An official open source license for a product must provide the programmer with source code that is human-readable. It can't restrict what modifications are made to the software or how it is sold or given away. + +The definition glossed over the difference between BSD and GPU by stating, "The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software." + +The definition proved to be the model for more commercial offerings like the Netscape Public License. In 1998, Netscape started distributing the source code to its popular browser in hopes of collecting help from the Internet and stopping Microsoft's gradual erosion of its turf. The license gave users wide opportunities to make changes and tinker with the software, but it also allowed Netscape to use the changes internally and refuse to share what they did with them. This special privilege offended some users who didn't like the imbalance, but it didn't bother many others who thought it was a reasonable compromise for a chance to tinker with commercial code. Netscape, of course, returned some of the favor by allowing people to keep their modifications private in much the same way that the BSD-style license provided. + +In June 1999, the Open Source Initiative revealed a startling fact. They were close to failing in their attempts to register the term "open source" as a trademark. The phrase was too common to be registered. Instead, they backed away and offered to check out licenses and classify them officially as "OSI Certified" if they met the terms of the OSI's definition of freedom. + +Some reacted negatively. Richard Stallman decided that he didn't like the word "open" as much as "free." Open doesn't capture the essence of freedom. Ockman says, "I don't think it's very fair. For ages, he's always said that the term 'free software' is problematic because people think of 'free beer' when they should be thinking of 'free speech.' We were attempting to solve that term. If the masses are confused, then corporate America is confused even more." + +The debate has even produced more terms. Some people now use the phrase "free source" to apply to the general conglomeration of the GPL and the open source world. Using "free software" implies that someone is aligned with Stallman's Free Software Foundation. Using "open source" implies you're aligned with the more business-friendly Open Source Initiative. So "free source" and "open source" both work as a compromise. Others tweak the meaning of free and refer to GPL protected software as "GNUFree." + +Naturally, all of this debate about freedom can reach comic proportions. Programmers are almost better than lawyers at finding loopholes, if only because they have to live with a program that crashes.~{ Lawyers just watch their clients go to jail. }~ Stallman, for instance, applies the GPL to everything coming out of the GNU project except the license itself. That can't be changed, although it can be freely reproduced. Some argue that if it were changeable, people would be able to insert and delete terms at will. Then they could apply the changed GPL to the new version of the software and do what they want. Stallman's original intent would not be changed. The GPL would still apply to all of the GNU software and its descendants, but it wouldn't be the same GPL. + +1~ Source + +Computer programmers love Star Wars. So it should be no surprise that practically every single member of the free source community has, at one time or another, rolled out the phrase, "Use the Source, Luke." It does a perfect job of capturing the mythical faith that the free source world places in the ability to access the source code to a program. As everyone points out, in the original version of Star Wars, the rebel troops used the plans, the Source, to the Death Star carried in R2D2 to look for weaknesses. + +The free source realm has been pushing the parallels for some time now. When AT&T unveiled their round logo with an offset dimple, most free source people began to snicker. The company that began the free software revolution by pushing its intellectual property rights and annoying Richard Stallman had chosen a logo that looked just like the Death Star. Everyone said, "Imperialist minds think alike." Some even wondered and hoped that George Lucas would sue AT&T for some sort of look-and-feel, trademark infringement. Those who use the legal intimidation light saber should die by the legal intimidation light saber. + +Of course, the free source folks knew that only their loose coalition of rebels spread out around the galaxy would be a strong match for the Empire. The Source was information, and information was power. The Source was also about freedom, one of the best and most consistent reservoirs of revolutionary inspiration around. The rebels might not have teams of lawyers in imperial star cruisers, but they hoped to use the Source to knit together a strong, effective, and more powerful resistance. + +The myth of open access to free source code is a powerful one that has made true believers out of many in the community. The source code is a list of instructions for the computer written out in a programming lan guage that is understandable by humans. Once the compilers converted the source code into the string of bits known as the binary or object code, only computers (and some very talented humans) could understand the instructions. I've known several people who could read 8080 binary code by eye, but they're a bit different from the general population. + +When companies tried to keep their hard work and research secret by locking up the source code, they built a barrier between the users and their developers. The programmers would work behind secret walls to write the source code. After compilers turned the Source into something that computers could read, the Source would be locked up again. The purchasers would only get the binary code because that's all the companies thought the consumers needed. The source code needed to be kept secret because someone might steal the ideas inside and create their own version. + +Stallman saw this secrecy as a great crime. Computer users should be able to share the source code so they can share ways to make it better. This trade should lead to more information-trading in a great feedback loop. Some folks even used the word "bloom" to describe the explosion of interest and cross-feedback. They're using the word the way biologists use it to describe the way algae can just burst into existence, overwhelming a region of the ocean. Clever insights, brilliant bug fixes, and wonderful new features just appear out of nowhere as human curiosity is amplified by human generosity in a grand explosion of intellectual synergy. The only thing missing from the picture is a bunch of furry Ewoks dancing around a campfire.~{ Linux does have many marketing opportunities. Torvalds chose a penguin named Tux as the mascot, and several companies actually manufacture and sell stuffed penguins to the Linux realm. The BSD world has embraced a cute demon, a visual pun on the fact that BSD UNIX uses the word "daemon" to refer to some of the faceless background programs in the OS. }~ + +2~ The Bishop of the Free Marketplace + +Eric Raymond, a man who is sort of the armchair philosopher of the open source world, did a great job of summarizing the phenomenon and creating this myth in his essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." +Raymond is an earnest programmer who spent some time working on projects like Stallman's GNU Emacs. He saw the advantages of open source development early, perhaps because he's a hard-core libertarian. Government solutions are cumbersome. Empowering individuals by not restraining them is great. Raymond comes off as a bit more extreme than other libertarians, in part because he doesn't hesitate to defend the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution as much as the first. Raymond is not ashamed to support widespread gun ownership as a way to further empower the individual. He dislikes the National Rifle Association because they're too willing to compromise away rights that he feels are absolute. + +Some people like to call him the Margaret Mead of the free source world because he spent some time studying and characterizing the culture in much the same way that Mead did when she wrote Coming of Age in Samoa. This can be a subtle jab because Margaret Mead is not really the same intellectual angel she was long ago. Derek Freeman and other anthropologists raise serious questions about Mead's ability to see without bias. Mead was a big fan of free love, and many contend it was no accident that she found wonderful tales of unchecked sexuality in Samoa. Freeman revisited Samoa and found it was not the guilt-free land of libertine pleasures that Mead described in her book. He documented many examples of sexual restraint and shame that Mead apparently missed in her search for a paradise. + +Raymond looked at open source development and found what he wanted to find: the wonderful efficiency of unregulated markets. Sure, some folks loved to label Richard Stallman a communist, a description that has always annoyed Stallman. Raymond looked a bit deeper and saw that the basis of the free software movement's success was the freedom that gave each user the complete power to change and improve their software. Just as Sigmund Freud found sex at the root of everything and Carl Jung uncovered a battle of animus and anima, the libertarian found freedom. + +Raymond's essay was one of the first to try to explain why free source efforts can succeed and even prosper without the financial incentives of a standard money-based software company. One of the biggest reasons he cited was that a programmer could "scratch an itch" that bothered him. That is, a programmer might grow annoyed by a piece of software that limited his choices or had an annoying glitch. Instead of cursing the darkness in the brain cavity of the corporate programmer who created the problem, the free source hacker was able to use the Source to try to find the bug. + +Itch-scratching can be instrumental in solving many problems. Some bugs in software are quite hard to identify and duplicate. They only occur in strange situations, like when the printer is out of paper and the modem is overloaded by a long file that is coming over the Internet. Then, and only then, the two buffers may fill to the brim, bump into each other, and crash the computer. The rest of the time, the program floats along happily, encountering no problems. + +These types of bugs are notoriously hard for corporate testing environments to discover and characterize. The companies try to be diligent by hiring several young programmers and placing them in a room with a computer. The team beats on the software all day long and develops a healthy animosity toward the programming team that has to fix the problems they discover. They can nab many simple bugs, but what happens if they don't have a printer hooked up to their machine? What happens if they aren't constantly printing out things the way some office users are? The weird bug goes unnoticed and probably unfixed. + +The corporate development model tries to solve this limitation by shipping hundreds, thousands, and often hundreds of thousands of copies to ambitious users they called "beta testers." Others called them "suckers" or "free volunteers" because once they finish helping develop the software, they get to pay for it. Microsoft even charges some users for the pleasure of being beta testers. Many of the users are pragmatic. They often have no choice but to participate in the scheme because they often base their businesses on some of the software shipped by these companies. If it didn't work, they would be out of a job. + +While this broad distribution of beta copies is much more likely to find someone who is printing and overloading a modem at the same time, it doesn't give the user the tools to help find the problem. Their only choice is to write an e-mail message to the company saying "I was printing yesterday and your software crashed." That isn't very helpful for the engineer, and it's no surprise that many of these reports are either ignored or unsolved. + +Raymond pointed out that the free source world can do a great job with these nasty bugs. He characterized this with the phrase, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," which he characterized as "Linus's Law." That is, eventually some programmer would start printing and using the Internet at the same time. After the system crashed a few times, some programmer would care enough about the problem to dig into the free source, poke around, and spot the problem. Eventually somebody would come along with the time and the energy and the commitment to diagnose the problem. Raymond named this "Linus's Law" after Linus Torvalds. Raymond is a great admirer of Torvalds and thinks that Torvalds's true genius was organizing an army to work on Linux. The coding itself was a distant second. + +Of course, waiting for a user to find the bugs depended on there being someone with enough time and commitment. Most users aren't talented programmers, and most have day jobs. Raymond and the rest of the free source community acknowledge this limitation, but point out that the right person often comes along if the bug occurs often enough to be a real problem. If the bug is serious enough, a non-programmer may even hire a programmer to poke into the source code. + +Waiting for the bug and the programmer to find each other is like waiting for Arthur to find the sword in the stone. But Raymond and the rest of the free source community have even turned this limitation on its head and touted it as an advantage. Relying on users to scratch itches means that problems only get addressed if they have real constituencies with a big enough population to generate the one true believer with enough time on his hands. It's sort of a free market in people's time for fixing bugs. If the demand is there, the solution will be created. It's Say's Law recast for software development: "the supply of bugs creates the talent for fixes." + +Corporate development, on the other hand, has long been obsessed with adding more and more features to programs to give people enough reason to buy the upgrade. Managers have long known that it's better to put more time into adding more doohickeys and widgets to a program than into fixing its bugs. That's why Microsoft Word can do so many different things with the headers and footers of documents but can't stop a Word Macro virus from reproducing. The folks at Microsoft know that when the corporate managers sit down to decide whether to spend the thousands of dollars to upgrade their machines, they'll need a set of new compelling features. People don't like to pay for bug fixes. + +Of course, corporations also have some advantages. Money makes sure that someone is actively trying to solve the bugs in the program. The same free market vision guarantees that the companies that consistently disappoint their customers will go out of business. This developer has the advantage of studying the same source code day in and day out. Eventually he'll learn enough about the guts of the Source to be much more effective than the guy with the jammed printer and modem. He should be able to nab the bug 10 times more quickly then the free source hobbyist just because he's an expert in the system. + +Raymond acknowledges this problem but proposes that the free source model can still be more effective despite the inexperience of the people who are forced to scratch an itch. Again he taps the world of libertarian philosophy and suggests that the free software world is like a bazaar filled with many different merchants offering their wares. Corporate development, on the other hand, is structured like the religious syndicates that built the medieval cathedrals. The bazaars offered plenty of competition but no order. The cathedrals were run by central teams of priests who tapped the wealth of the town to build the vision of one architect. + +The differences between the two were pretty simple. The cathedral team could produce a great work of art if the architect was talented, the funding team was successful, and the management was able to keep everyone focused on doing their jobs. If not, it never got that far. The bazaar, on the other hand, consisted of many small merchants trying to outstrip each other. The best cooks ended up with the most customers. The others soon went out of business. + +The comparison to software was simple. Corporations gathered the tithes, employed a central architect with a grand vision, managed the team of programmers, and shipped a product every once and a bit. The Linux world, however, let everyone touch the Source. People would try to fix things or add new features. The best solutions would be adopted by oth ers and the mediocre would fall by the wayside. Many different Linux versions would proliferate, but over time the marketplace of software would coalesce around the best standard version. + +"In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you've winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect," Raymond said. + +"In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena--or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager code-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door." + +2~ They Put a Giant Arrow on the Problem + +This bazaar can be a powerful influence on solving problems. Sure, it isn't guided by a talented architect and teams of priests, but it is a great free-for-all. It is quite unlikely, for instance, that the guy with the overloaded printer and modem line will also be a talented programmer with a grand vision to solve the problem. Someone named Arthur only stumbles across the right stone with the right sword every once and a bit. But if the frustrated user can do a good job characterizing it and reporting it, then someone else can solve it. + +Dave Hitz was one of the programmers who helped Keith Bostic rewrite UNIX so it could be free of AT&T's copyright. Today, he runs Network Appliance, a company that builds stripped-down file servers that run BSD at their core. He's been writing file systems ever since college, and the free software came in quite handy when he was starting his company. When they started building the big machines, the engineers just reached into the pool of free source code for operating systems and pulled out much of the code that would power his servers. They modified the code heavily, but the body of free software that he helped create was a great starting point. + +In his experience, many people would find a bug and patch it with a solution that was good enough for them. Some were just kids in college. Others were programmers who didn't have the time or the energy to read the Source and understand the best way to fix the problem. Some fixed the problem for themselves, but inadvertently created another problem elsewhere. Sorting through all of these problems was hard to do. + +But Hitz says, "Even if they fixed it entirely the wrong way, if they found the place where the problem went away, then they put a giant arrow on the problem." Eventually, enough arrows would provide someone with enough information to solve the problem correctly. Many of the new versions written by people may be lost to time, but that doesn't mean that they didn't have an important effect on the evolution of the Source. + +"I think it's rarely the case that you get people who make a broad base of source code their life," he said. "There are just a whole bunch of people who are dilettantes. The message is, 'Don't underestimate the dilettantes.'" + +2~ How Free Software Can Be a Bazaar or a Cathedral + +When Raymond wrote the essay, he was just trying to suss out the differences between several of the camps in the free source world. He noticed that people running free source projects had different ways of sharing. He wanted to explain which free source development method worked better than others. It was only later that the essay began to take on a more serious target when everyone began to realize that Microsoft was perhaps the biggest cathedral-like development team around. + +Raymond said, "I think that like everyone else in the culture I wandered back and forth between the two modes as it seemed appropriate because I didn't have a theory or any consciousness." + +He saw Richard Stallman and the early years of the GNU projects as an example of cathedral-style development. These teams would often labor for months if not years before sharing their tools with the world. Raymond himself said he behaved the same way with some of the early tools that he wrote and contributed to the GNU project. + +Linus Torvalds changed his mind by increasing the speed of sharing, which Raymond characterized as the rule of "release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity." +Torvalds ran Linux as openly as possible, and this eventually attracted some good contributors. In the past, the FSF was much more careful about what it embraced and brought into the GNU project. Torvalds took many things into his distributions and they mutated as often as daily. Occasionally, new versions came out twice a day. + +Of course, Stallman and Raymond have had tussles in the past. Raymond is careful to praise the man and say he values his friendship, but also tempers it by saying that Stallman is difficult to work with. + +In Raymond's case, he says that he once wanted to rewrite much of the Lisp code that was built into GNU Emacs. Stallman's Emacs allowed any user to hook up their own software into Emacs by writing it in a special version of Lisp. Some had written mail readers. Others had added automatic comment-generating code. All of this was written in Lisp. + +Raymond says that in 1992, "The Lisp libraries were in bad shape in a number of ways. They were poorly documented. There was a lot of work that had gone on outside the FSF and I wanted to tackle that project." + +According to Raymond, Stallman didn't want him to do the work and refused to build it into the distribution. Stallman could do this because he controlled the Free Software Foundation and the distribution of the software. Raymond could have created his own version, but refused because it was too complicated and ultimately bad for everyone if two versions emerged. + +For his part, Stallman explains that he was glad to accept parts of Raymond's work, but he didn't want to be forced into accepting them all. Stallman says, "Actually, I accepted a substantial amount of work that Eric had done. He had a number of ideas I liked, but he also had some ideas I thought were mistaken. I was happy to accept his help, as long as I could judge his ideas one by one, accepting some and declining some. + +"But subsequently he asked me to make a blanket arrangement in which he would take over the development of a large part of Emacs, operating independently. I felt I should continue to judge his ideas individually, so I said no." + +Raymond mixed this experience with his time watching Torvalds's team push the Linux kernel and used them as the basis for his essay on distributing the Source. "Mostly I was trying to pull some factors that I had observed as unconscious folklore so people could take them out and reason about them," he said. + +Raymond says, "Somebody pointed out that there's a parallel of politics. Rigid political and social institutions tend to change violently if they change at all, while ones with more play in them tend to change peacefully." + +There is a good empirical reason for the faith in the strength of free source. After all, a group of folks who rarely saw each other had assembled a great pile of source code that was kicking Microsoft's butt in some corners of the computer world. Linux servers were common on the Internet and growing more common every day. The desktop was waiting to be conquered. They had done this without stock options, without corporate jets, without secret contracts, and without potentially illegal alliances with computer manufacturers. The success of the software from the GNU and Linux world was really quite impressive. + +Of course, myths can be taken too far. Programming computers is hard work and often frustrating. Sharing the source code doesn't make bugs or problems go away--it just makes it a bit easier for someone else to dig into a program to see what's going wrong. The source code may just be a list of instructions written in a programming language that is designed to be readable by humans, but that doesn't mean that it is easy to understand. In fact, most humans won't figure out most source code because programming languages are designed to be understood by other programmers, not the general population. + +To make matters worse, programmers themselves have a hard time understanding source code. Computer programs are often quite complicated and it can take days, weeks, and even months to understand what a strange piece of source code is telling a computer to do. Learning what is happening in a program can be a complicated job for even the best programmers, and it is not something that is taken lightly. + +While many programmers and members of the open source world are quick to praise the movement, they will also be able to cite problems with the myth of the Source. It isn't that the Source doesn't work, they'll say, it's just that it rarely works anywhere near as well as the hype implies. The blooms are rarely as vigorous and the free markets in improvements are rarely as liquid. + +Larry McVoy, an avid programmer, proto-academic, and developer of the BitKeeper toolkit, likes to find fault with the model. It isn't that he doesn't like sharing source code, it's just that he isn't wealthy enough to take on free software projects. "We need to find a way for people to develop free software and pay their mortgages and raise a family," he says. + +"If you look closely," he says, "there really isn't a bazaar. At the top it's always a one-person cathedral. It's either Linus, Stallman, or someone else." That is, the myth of a bazaar as a wide-open, free-for-all of competition isn't exactly true. Sure, everyone can download the source code, diddle with it, and make suggestions, but at the end of the day it matters what Torvalds, Stallman, or someone else says. There is always a great architect of Chartres lording it over his domain. + +Part of this problem is the success of Raymond's metaphor. He said he just wanted to give the community some tools to understand the success of Linux and reason about it. But his two visions of a cathedral and a bazaar had such a clarity that people concentrated more on dividing the world into cathedrals and bazaars. In reality, there's a great deal of blending in between. The most efficient bazaars today are the suburban malls that have one management company building the site, leasing the stores, and creating a unified experience. Downtown shopping areas often failed because there was always one shop owner who could ruin an entire block by putting in a store that sold pornography. On the other side, religion has always been something of a bazaar. Martin Luther effectively split apart Christianity by introducing competition. Even within denominations, different parishes fight for the hearts and souls of people. + +The same blurring holds true for the world of open source software. The Linux kernel, for instance, contains many thousands of lines of source code. Some put the number at 500,000. A few talented folks like Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds know all of it, but most are only familiar with the corners of it that they need to know. These folks, who may number in the thousands, are far outnumbered by the millions who use the Linux OS daily. + +It's interesting to wonder if the ratio of technically anointed to blithe users in the free source world is comparable to the ratio in Microsoft's dominion. After all, Microsoft will share its source code with close partners after they sign some non-disclosure forms.~{ At this writing, Microsoft has not released its source code, but the company is widely known to be examining the option as part of its settlement with the Department of Justice. }~ While Microsoft is careful about what it tells its partners, it will reveal information only when there's something to gain. Other companies have already jumped right in and started offering source code to all users who want to look at it. + +Answering this question is impossible for two different reasons. First, no one knows what Microsoft reveals to its partners because it keeps all of this information secret, by reflex. Contracts are usually negotiated under non-disclosure, and the company has not been shy about exploiting the power that comes from the lack of information. + +Second, no one really knows who reads the Linux source code for the opposite reason. The GNU/Linux source is widely available and frequently downloaded, but that doesn't mean it's read or studied. The Red Hat CDs come with one CD full of pre-compiled binaries and the second full of source code. Who knows whoever pops the second CDROM in their computer? Everyone is free to do so in the privacy of their own cubicle, so no records are kept. + +If I were to bet, I would guess that the ratios of cognoscenti to uninformed users in the Linux and Microsoft worlds are pretty close. Reading the Source just takes too much time and too much effort for many in the Linux world to take advantage of the huge river of information available to them. + +If this is true or at least close to true, then why has the free source world been able to move so much more quickly than the Microsoft world? The answer isn't that everyone in the free source world is using the Source, it's that everyone is free to use it. When one person needs to ask a question or scratch an itch, the Source is available with no questions asked and no lawyers consulted. Even at 3:00 A.M., a person can read the Source. At Microsoft and other corporations, they often need to wait for the person running that division or section to give them permission to access the source code. + +There are other advantages. The free source world spends a large amount of time keeping the source code clean and accessible. A programmer who tries to get away with sloppy workmanship and bad documentation will pay for it later as others come along and ask thousands of questions. + +Corporate developers, on the other hand, have layers of secrecy and bureaucracy to isolate them from questions and comments. It is often hard to find the right programmer in the rabbit warren of cubicles who has the source code in the first place. One Microsoft programmer was quoted as saying, "A developer at Microsoft working on the OS can't scratch an itch he's got with Excel, neither can the Excel developer scratch his itch with the OS--it would take him months to figure out how to build and debug and install, and he probably couldn't get proper source access anyway." + +This problem is endemic to corporations. The customers are buying the binary version, not the source code, so there is no reason to dress up the backstage wings of the theater. After some time, though, people change cubicles, move to other corporations, and information disappears. While companies try to keep source code databases to synchronize development, the efforts often fall apart. After Apple canceled development of their Newton handheld, many Newton users were livid. They had based big projects on the platform and they didn't want to restart their work. Many asked whether Apple could simply give away the OS's source code instead of leaving it to rot on some hard disk. Apple dodged these requests, and this made some people even more cynical. One outside developer speculated, "It probably would not be possible to re-create the OS. The developers are all gone. All of them went to Palm, and they probably couldn't just put it back together again if they wanted to." + +Of course, corporations try to fight this rot by getting their programmers to do a good job at the beginning and write plenty of documentation. In practice, this slips a bit because it is not rewarded by the culture of secrecy. I know one programmer who worked for a project at MIT. The boss thought he was being clever by requiring comments on each procedure and actually enforcing it with an automated text-scanning robot that would look over the source code and count the comments. My friend turned around and hooked up one version of the popular artificial intelligence chatterbots like Eliza and funneled the responses into the comment field. Then everyone was happy. The chatterbot filled the comment field, the automated comment police found something vaguely intelligent, and the programmer got to spend his free time doing other things. The boss never discovered the problem. + +Programmers are the same the world over, and joining the free source world doesn't make them better people or destroy their impudence. But it does penalize them if others come along and try to use their code. If it's inscrutable, sloppy, or hard to understand, then others will either ignore it or pummel them with questions. That is a strong incentive to do it right. + +2~ Open Source and Lightbulbs + +The limitations to the power of open source might be summarized in the answer to the question "How many open source developers does it take to change a lightbulb?" The answer is: 17. Seventeen to argue about the license; 17 to argue about the brain-deadedness of the lightbulb architecture; 17 to argue about a new model that encompasses all models of illumination and makes it simple to replace candles, campfires, pilot lights, and skylights with the same easy-to-extend mechanism; 17 to speculate about the secretive industrial conspiracy that ensures that lightbulbs will burn out frequently; 1 to finally change the bulb; and 16 who decide that this solution is good enough for the time being. + +The open source development model is a great way for very creative people to produce fascinating software that breaks paradigms and establishes new standards for excellence. It may not be the best way, however, to finish boring jobs like fine-tuning a graphical interface, or making sure that the scheduling software used by executives is as bulletproof as possible. + +While the open development model has successfully tackled the problem of creating some great tools, of building a strong OS, and of building very flexible appliance applications like web browsers, it is a long way from winning the battle for the desktop. Some free source people say the desktop applications for average users are just around the corner and the next stop on the Free Software Express. Others aren't so sure. + +David Henkel-Wallace is one of the founders of the free software company Cygnus. This company built its success around supporting the development tools created by Stallman's Free Software Foundation. They would sign contracts with companies to answer any questions they had about using the free software tools. At first companies would balk at paying for support until they realized that it was cheaper than hiring in-house technical staff to do the work. John Gilmore, one of the cofounders, liked to say, "We make free software affordable." + +The company grew by helping chip manufacturers tune the FSF compiler, GCC, for their chip. This was often a difficult and arduous task, but it was very valuable to the chip manufacturer because potential customers knew they could get a good compiler to produce software for the chip. While Intel continued to dominate the desktop, the market for embedded chips to go into products like stoves, microwave ovens, VCRs, or other smart boxes boomed as manufacturers rolled out new chips to make it cheaper and easier to add smart features to formerly dumb boxes. The engineers at the companies were often thrilled to discover that they could continue to use GCC to write software for a new chip, and this made it easier to sell the chip. + +Cygnus always distributed to the Source their modifications to GCC as the GNU General Public License demanded. This wasn't a big deal because the chip manufacturers wanted the software to be free and easy for everyone to use. This made Cygnus one of the clearing-houses for much of the information on how GCC worked and how to make it faster. + +Henkel-Wallace is quick to praise the power of publicly available source code for Cygnus's customers. They were all programmers, after all. If they saw something they didn't like with GCC, they knew how to poke around on the insides and fix it. That was their job. + +"[GCC] is a compiler tool and it was used by developers so they were smart enough. When something bothered someone, we fixed it. There was a very tight coupling," he said. + +He openly wonders, though, whether the average word processor or basic tool user will be able to do anything. He says, "The downside is that it's hard to transfer that knowledge with a user who isn't a developer. Let's say Quicken has a special feature for lawyers. You need to have a more formal model because the lawyers aren't developers. (We're fortunate in that regard.)" + +That is, lawyers aren't schooled enough in the guts of computer development to complain in the right way. A programmer could say, +"GCC is optimizing away too much dead code that isn't really dead." +Other folks in the GCC community would know what is going on and be able to fix it. A lawyer might just say, "Quicken screwed up my billing and had me billing twenty-six hours in a day." This wouldn't pinpoint the problem enough for people to solve it. The lawyer doesn't understand the inside of the software like the programmer. + +In situations like this, Henkel-Wallace believes that a corporate-style team may be the only one that can study the problems thoroughly enough to find solutions. Intuit, the manufacturer of Quicken, is well known for videotaping many standard users who use their product for the first time. This allows them to pinpoint rough spots in the program and identify places where it could be improved. This relentless smoothing and polishing has made the product one of the best-known and widely used tools on desktops. It isn't clear that non-programmers could have accomplished the same quality by working together with the Source at their disposal. + +2~ The Source and the Language that We Speak + +There are deeper, more philosophical currents to the open source world. The personal computer industry is only a few decades old. While it has advanced rapidly and solved many problems, there is still very little understanding of the field and what it takes to make a computer easy to use. This has been the great struggle, and the free source world may be an essential part of this trip. + +Tim O'Reilly, the publisher of many books and a vocal proponent of the open source world, says, "We've gone through this period of thinking of programs as artifacts. A binary object is a thing. Open source is part of thinking of computers as a process." In other words, we've done a good job of creating computers you can buy off the shelf and software that can be bought in shrink-wrapped boxes, but we haven't done a good job of making it possible for people to talk to the machines. + +To a large extent, the process has been a search for a good language to use to communicate with the computer. Most of the recent development followed the work at Xerox PARC that created some of the first graphical user interfaces. Apple followed their lead and Microsoft followed Apple. Each bought into the notion that creating a neat picture representing the files on a screen would make a neat metaphor that could make it easier for people to interact with the computers. Dragging a file to the trash was somehow easier for people to do than typing a cryptic command like "rm." + +In the 1980s, that sort of graphical thinking was considered brilliant. Pictures were prettier than words, so it was easy to look at the clean, pretty Macintosh screen and think it was easier to use just because it was easier to look at. + +But the pretty features merely hid a massive amount of complexity, and it was still hard to work with the machines. Don Norman, a human/computer interface engineer at Apple, once wrote a fascinating discussion of the company's design of their computer's on-off switch. He pointed out that the switch couldn't be a simple power switch that could cut the power on and off because the computer needed to orchestrate the start-up and shutdown procedure. It needed to close up files, store data safely, and make sure everything was ready to start up again. + +The design of the power switch was made even more complicated by the fact that it was supposed to work even when the computer crashed. That is, if bad programming jumbles the memory and screws up the central processor, the power switch is still supposed to shut down the machine. Of course, the computer couldn't even add two numbers together after it crashed, so it couldn't even begin to move through all the clerical work necessary to shut down the machine. The Macintosh on which I wrote this book can crash so badly that the power switch doesn't work, and I can only reset it by sticking a paper clip into a hidden hole. + +Norman's work shows how hard it can be to come up with a simple language that allows humans and computers to communicate about a task that used to be solved with a two-position light switch. This problem can be seen throughout the industry. One computer tutor told me, +"I am so tired of telling people to shut down their computers by pushing the 'Start' button." Microsoft Windows places all of the features on a menu tree that grows out of one button labeled "Start." This may have been a great way to capture the potential to do new things that they felt they were selling, but it continues to be confusing to all new users of the machines. Why should they push start to stop it? + +The quest for this Source-level control can take many strange turns. By the middle of the 1980s, programmers at Apple realized that they had gone a bit too far when they simplified the Mac's interface. The visual language of pointing and clicking at icons may have been great for new users, but it was beginning to thwart sophisticated users who wanted to automate what they did. Many graphics designers would find themselves repeatedly doing the same steps to image files, and it was boring. They wondered, why couldn't the computer just repeat all their instructions and save them all that pointing and clicking? + +In a sense, the sophisticated Mac users were looking for the Source. They wanted to be able to write and modify simple programs that controlled their software. The problem was that the graphical display on the Mac wasn't really suited to the task. How do you describe moving the mouse and clicking on a button? How do you come up with a language that means "cut out this sample and paste it over here"? The actions were so visual that there weren't any words or language to describe them. + +This problem confounded Apple for the next 10 years, and the company is slowly finishing its solution, known as AppleScript. The task has not been simple, but it has been rewarding for many who use their Macintoshes as important chains in data production lines. Apple included instructions for moving icons to locations, uploading files, changing the color of icons, and starting up programs with others. + +The nicest extension was a trick that made the AppleScript "recordable." That is, you could turn on a recorder before stepping through the different jobs. The Mac would keep track of your actions and generate a program that would allow you to repeat what you were doing. Still, the results were far from simple to understand or use. Here's a simple snippet of AppleScript code that will select all files in one directory with the word "Speckle" in their title and open them up with another application: + +code{ + +tell application "Finder" + set theFiles to every file in folder (rootPlus) whose + name contains "Speckle" + with timeout of 600 seconds + repeat with aFile in theFiles + open (aFile) using (file "Macintosh HD: Make + GIF (16 colors, Web)") + end repeat + end timeout +end tell + +}code + +This Source can then be run again and again to finish a task. Making this tool available to users has been a challenge for Apple because it forces them to make programming easier. Many people learn AppleScript by turning on the recording feature and watching what happens when they do what they would normally do. Then they learn how to insert a few more commands to accomplish the task successfully. In the end, they become programmers manipulating the Source without realizing it. + +O'Reilly and others believe that the open source effort is just an extension of this need. As computers become more and more complex, the developers need to make the internal workings more and more open to users. This is the only way users can solve their problems and use the computers effectively. + +"The cutting edge of the computer industry is in infoware. There's not all that much juice in the kind of apps we wrote in the eighties and nineties. As we get speech recognition, we'll go even more in the direction of open source," he says. + +"There are more and more recipes that are written down. These are going to migrate into lower and lower layers of software and the computer is going to get a bigger and bigger vocabulary." + +That is, more and more of the Source is going to need to become transparent to the users. It's not just a political battle of Microsoft versus the world. It's not just a programmer's struggle to poke a nose into every corner of a device. It's about usability. More and more people need to write programs to teach computers to do what they need to do. Access to the Source is the only way to accomplish it. + +In other words, computers are becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives. Their language is becoming more readily understandable by humans, and humans are doing a better job of speaking the language of computers. We're converging. The more we do so, the more important the Source will be. There's nothing that Microsoft or corporate America can do about this. They're going to have to go along. They're going to have to give us access to the Source. + +1~ People + +When I was in college, a friend of mine in a singing group would often tweak his audience by making them recite Steve Martin's "Individualist's Creed" in unison. Everyone would proclaim that they were different, unique, and wonderfully eccentric individuals together with everyone else in the audience. The gag played well because all the individualists were also deeply committed to living a life filled with irony. + +The free source world is sort of a Club Med for these kinds of individualists. Richard Stallman managed to organize a group of highly employable people and get them to donate their $50+-per-hour time to a movement by promising complete freedom. Everyone who showed up valued freedom much more than the money they could be making working for big companies. It's not a bit surprising that all of the free thinkers are also coming up with the same answers to life. Great minds think alike, right? + +This large collection of dedicated individualists is predisposed to moments of easy irony. Black is by far their favorite color. Long hair and beards are common. T-shirts and shorts are the rule when it gets warm, and T-shirts and jeans dominate when the weather turns cold. No one wears suits or anything so traditional. That would be silly because they're not as comfortable as T-shirts and jeans. Fitting in with the free thinkers isn't hard. + +The group is not particularly republican or democrat, but libertarian politics are easily understood and widely supported. Gun control is usually considered to be wrong, if only because the federal government will move on to controlling something else when they're finished with guns. ~{ In fact, the federal government already considers encryption software to be a munition and often tries to regulate it as such. }~ Taxes are bad, and some in the group like to dream of when they'll be driven away by the free-flowing, frictionless economy of the Internet. Folks like to say things like "Governments are just speed bumps on the information superhighway." + +The first amendment is very popular and many are sure that practically everything they do with a computer is a form of speech or expression. The government shouldn't have the right to control a website's content because they'll surely come to abuse that power in the future. Some even rage against private plans to rate websites for their content because they're certain that these tools will eventually be controlled by those in power. To the most extreme, merely creating a list of sites with information unsuitable for kids is setting up the infrastructure for the future Nazis to start burning websites. + +Virtually everyone believes that strong codes and cryptography are essential for protecting a person's privacy online. The U.S. government's attempt to control the technology by regulating its export is widely seen as a silly example of how governments are trying to grab power at the expense of their citizens. The criminals already have the secret codes; +why shouldn't the honest people be able to protect their data? + +Pornography or references to sex in the discussions are rare, if only because the world of the libido is off the main topic. It's not that sex isn't on the minds of the free software community, it's just that the images are so freely available that they're uninteresting. Anyone can go to www.playboy.com, but not everyone can write a recursively descending code optimizer. People also rarely swear. While four-letter words are common on Wall Street and other highly charged environments, they're rare in the technology world. + +Much of the community are boys and men, or perhaps more correctly "guys." While there are some older programmers who continue to dig the excitement and tussle of the free source world, many are high school and college guys with plenty of extra time on their hands. Many of them are too smart for school, and writing neat software is a challenge for them. Older people usually get bogged down with a job and mortgage payments. It's hard for them to take advantage of the freedom that comes with the source code. Still, the older ones who survive are often the best. They have both deep knowledge and experience. + +The average population, however, is aging quickly. As the software becomes better, it is easier for working stiffs to bring it into the corporate environments. Many folks brag about sneaking Linux into their office and replacing Microsoft on some hidden server. As more and more users find a way to make money with the free software, more and more older people (i.e., +over 25) are able to devote some time to the revolution. + +I suppose I would like to report that there's a healthy contingent of women taking part in the free source world, but I can't. It would be nice to isolate the free software community from the criticism that usually finds any group of men. By some definition or legal reasoning, these guys must be practicing some de facto discrimination. Somebody will probably try to sue someone someday. Still, the women are scarce and it's impossible to use many of the standard explanations. The software is, after all, free. It runs well on machines that are several generations old and available from corporate scrap heaps for several hundred dollars. Torvalds started writing Linux because he couldn't afford a real version of UNIX. Lack of money or the parsimony of evil, gender-nasty parents who refuse to buy their daughters a computer can hardly be blamed. + +In fact, many of the people online don't even know the gender of the person on the other end. Oblique nicknames like "303," "nomad," +"CmdrTaco," or "Hemos" are common. No one knows if you're a boy or a girl online. It's almost like the ideal of a gender-free existence proposed by the unisex dreamers who wrote such stuff as "Free to Be You and Me," trying to convince children that they were free to pursue any dream they wanted. Despite the prevalence of these gender-free visions, the folks who ended up dreaming of a world where all the software was free turned out to be almost entirely men. + +Most of the men would like to have a few more women show up. They need dates as much as any guy. If anything, the crown of Evil Discriminator might be placed on the heads of the girls who scorn the guys who are geeks, dweebs, and nerds. A girl couldn't find a better ratio of men if she tried. + +This may change in the future if organizations like LinuxChix (www.linuxchix.org) have their way. They run a site devoted to celebrating women who enjoy the open source world, and they've been trying to start up chapters around the world. The site gives members a chance to post their names and biographical details. Of course, several of the members are men and one is a man turning into a woman. The member writes, "I'm transsexual (male-to-female, pre-op), and at the moment still legally married to my wife, which means that if we stay together we'll eventually have a legal same-sex marriage." + +Still, there's not much point in digging into this too deeply because the free source world rarely debates this topic. Everyone is free to use the software and contribute what they want. If the women want to come, they can. If they don't, they don't have to do so to fulfill some mandate from society. No one is sitting around debating whether having it all as a woman includes having all of the source code. It's all about freedom to use software, not dating, mating, or debating sexual roles in society. + +Racial politics, however, are more complicated. Much of the Linux community is spread out throughout the globe. While many members come from the United States, major contributors can be found in most countries. Linus Torvalds, of course, came from Finland, one of the more technically advanced countries in the world. Miguel de Icaza, the lead developer of the GNOME desktop, comes from Mexico, a country perceived as technically underdeveloped by many in the United States. + +Jon Hall, often called maddog, is one of the first members of corporate America to recognize that neat things were going on throughout the world of open source software. He met Torvalds at a conference and shipped him a Digital computer built around the Alpha chip when he found out that Torvalds wanted to experiment with porting his software to a 64-bit architecture. Hall loves to speculate about the spread of free software throughout the globe and says, "Who knows where the next great mind will come from? It could be Spain, Brazil, India, Singapore, or dare I say Finland?" + +In general, the free source revolution is worldwide and rarely encumbered by racial and national barricades. Europe is just as filled with Linux developers as America, and the Third World is rapidly skipping over costly Microsoft and into inexpensive Linux. Interest in Linux is booming in China and India. English is, of course, the default language, but other languages continue to live thanks to automatic translation mechanisms like Babelfish. + +This border-free existence can only help the spread of free source software. Many countries, claiming national pride, would rather use software developed by local people. Many countries explicitly distrust software coming from the United States because it is well known that the U.S. government tries to restrict security software like encryption at the request of its intelligence-gathering agencies. In November 1999, the German government's Federal Ministry of Finance and Technology announced a grant for the GNU Privacy Guard project. Why would a country want to send all of its money to Redmond, Washington, when it could bolster a local group of hackers by embracing a free OS? For everyone but the United States, installing a free OS may even be a patriotic gesture. + +2~ Icons + +The archetypes are often defined by prominent people, and no one is more central to the free source world than Richard Stallman. Some follow the man like a disciple, others say that his strong views color the movement and scare away normal people. Everyone goes out of their way to praise the man and tell you how much they respect what he's done. Almost everyone will turn around and follow the compliment with a veiled complaint like, "He can be difficult to work with." +Stallman is known for being a very unreasonable man in the sense that George Bernard Shaw used the word when he said, "The Reasonable man adapts to nature. The unreasonable man seeks to adapt nature to himself. Therefore it is only through the actions of unreasonable men that civilization advances." The reasonable man would still be waiting on hold as the tech support folks in MegaSoft played with their Nerf footballs and joked about the weenies who needed help using their proprietary software. + +I often think that only someone as obsessed and brilliant as Stallman could have dreamed up the GNU Public License. Only he could have realized that it was possible to insist that everyone give away the source code and allow them to charge for it at the same time if they want. Most of us would have locked our brains if we found ourselves with a dream of a world of unencumbered source code but hobbled by the reality that we needed money to live. Stallman found himself in that place in the early days of the Free Software Foundation and then found a way to squeeze his way out of the dilemma by charging for CD-ROMs and printed manuals. The fact that others could still freely copy the information they got meant that he wasn't compromising his core dream. + +If Stallman is a product of MIT, then one opposite of him is the group of hackers that emerged from Berkeley and produced the other free software known as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Berkeley's computer science department always had a tight bond with AT&T and Sun and shared much of the early UNIX code with both. + +While there were many individuals at Berkeley who are well known among developers and hackers, no one stands out like Richard Stallman. This is because Stallman is such a strong iconoclast, not because Berkeley is the home of ne'er-do-wells who don't measure up. In fact, the pragmatism of some of the leaders to emerge from the university is almost as great as Stallman's idealism, and this pragmatism is one of the virtues celebrated by Berkeley's circle of coders. For instance, Bill Joy helped develop much of the early versions of the BSD before he went off to take a strong leadership role at Sun Microsystems. + +Sun has a contentious relationship with the free software world. It's far from a free software company like Red Hat, but it has contributed a fair number of lines of software to the open source community. Still, Sun guards its intellectual property rights to some packages fiercely and refuses to distribute the source with an official open source license. Instead, it calls their approach the "community source license" and insists that it's good enough for almost everyone. Users can read the source code, but they can't run off with it and start their own distribution. + +Many others from Berkeley followed Joy's path to Sun. John Ousterhout left his position as a professor at Berkeley in 1994 to move to Sun. Ousterhout was known for developing a fairly simple but powerful scripting tool known as TCL/Tk. One part of it, the Tool Control Language (TCL), was a straightforward English-like language that made it pretty easy for people to knit together different modules of code. The user didn't have to be a great programmer to work with the code because the language was designed to be straightforward. There were no complicated data structures or pointers. Everything was a string of ASCII text. + +The second part, the Tool kit (Tk), contained a variety of visual widgets that could be used to get input for and output from a program. The simplest ones were buttons, sliders, or menus, but many people wrote complicated ones that served their particular needs. + +The TCL/Tk project at Berkeley attracted a great deal of attention from the Net. Ousterhout, like most academics, freely distributed his code and did a good job helping others use the software. He and his students rewrote and extended the code a number of times, and this constant support helped create even more fans. The software scratched an itch for many academics who were smart enough to program the machines in their lab, but burdened by more important jobs like actually doing the research they set out to do. TCL/Tk picked up a wide following because it was easy for people to learn a small amount quickly. Languages like C required a semester or more to master. TCL could be picked up in an afternoon. + +Many see the pragmatism of the BSD-style license as a way for the Berkeley hackers to ease their trip into corporate software production. The folks would develop the way-out, unproven ideas using public money before releasing it with the BSD license. Then companies like Sun would start to resell it. + +The supporters of the BSD licenses, of course, don't see corporate development as a bad thing. They just see it as a way for people to pay for the extra bells and whistles that a dedicated, market-driven team can add to software. + +Ousterhout's decision to move to Sun worried many people because they thought it might lead to a commercialization of the language. Ousterhout answered these with an e-mail message that said TCL/Tk would remain free, but Sun would try to make some money on the project by selling development tools. + +"Future enhancements made toTcl andTk by my group at Sun, including the ports to Macs and PCs, will be made freely available to anyone to use for any purpose. My view, and that of the people I report to at Sun, is that it wouldn't work for Sun to try to takeTcl andTk proprietary anyway: +someone (probably me, in a new job) would just pick up the last free release and start an independent development path. This would be a terrible thing for everyone since it would result in incompatible versions. + +"Of course, Sun does need to make money from the work of my team or else they won't be able to continue to support us. Our current plan is to charge for development tools and interesting extensions and applications. Balancing the public and the profitable will be an ongoing challenge for us, but it is very important both to me and to Sun to keep the support of the existing Tcl community," he wrote. + +In some respects, Ousterhout's pragmatism was entirely different from Stallman's. He openly acknowledged the need to make money and also admitted that Sun was leaving TCL/Tk free because it might be practically impossible to make it proprietary. The depth of interest in the community made it likely that a free version would continue to evolve. Stallman would never cut such a deal with a company shipping proprietary software. + +In other respects, many of the differences are only at the level of rhetoric. Ousterhout worked on producing a compromise that would leave TCL/Tk free while the sales of development tools paid the bills. Stallman did the same thing when he figured out a way to charge people for CD-ROMs and manuals. Ousterhout's work at Sun was spun off into a company called Scriptics that is surprisingly like many of the other free software vendors. The core of the product, TCL/Tk 8.1 at this time, is governed by a BSD-style license. The source code can be downloaded from the site. The company itself, on the other hand, sells a more enhanced product known as TCLPro. + +In many ways, the real opposite to Richard Stallman is not Bill Joy or John Ousterhout, it's Linus Benedict Torvalds. While Stallman, Joy, and Ousterhout are products of the U.S. academic system, Torvalds is very much an outsider who found himself trying to program in Europe without access to a decent OS. While the folks at Berkeley, MIT, and many U.S. universities were able to get access to UNIX thanks to carefully constructed licenses produced by the OS's then-owner, AT&T, students in Finland like Torvalds were frozen out. + +"I didn't have many alternatives. I had the commercial alternative [UNIX], which was way too expensive. It was really out of reach for a normal human being, and not only out of reach in a monetary sense, but because years ago commercial UNIX vendors weren't interested in selling to individuals. They were interested in selling to large corporations and banks. So for a normal person, there was no choice," he told VAR Business. + +When Linux began to take off, Torvalds moved to Silicon Valley and took a job with the supersecret research firm Transmeta. At Comdex in November 1999, Torvalds announced that Transmeta was working on a low-power computing chip with the nickname "Crusoe." + +There are, of course, some conspiracy theories. Transmeta is funded by a number of big investors including Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. The fact that they chose to employ Torvalds may be part of a plan, some think, to distract him from Linux development. After all, version 2.2 of the kernel took longer than many expected, although it may have been because its goals were too ambitious. When Microsoft needed a coherent threat to offer up to the Department of Justice, Transmeta courteously made Torvalds available to the world. Few seriously believe this theory, but it is constantly whispered as a nervous joke. + +2~ Flames + +The fights and flamefests of the Internet are legendary, and the open source world is one of the most contentious corners of the Net. People frequently use strong words like "brain dead," "loser," "lame," "gross," +and "stoooopid" to describe one another's ideas. If words are the only way to communicate, then the battle for mindshare means that those who wield the best words win. + +In fact, most of the best hackers and members of the free source world are also great writers. Spending days, weeks, months, and years of your life communicating by e-mail and newsgroups teaches people how to write well and get to the point quickly. The Internet is very textual, and the hard-core computer programmers have plenty of experience spitting out text. As every programmer knows, you're supposed to send e-mail to the person next to you if you want to schedule lunch. That person might be in the middle of something. + +Of course, there's a danger to making a sweeping generalization implying that the free source world is filled with great writers. The fact is that we might not have heard from the not-so-great writers who sit lurking on the Net. While some of the students who led the revolutions of 1968 were quite articulate, many of the tie-dyed masses were also in the picture. You couldn't miss them. On the Internet, the silent person is invisible. + +Some argue that the free software world has burgeoned because the silent folks embraced the freely available source code. Anyone could download the source code and play with it without asking permission or spending money. That meant that 13-year-old kids could start using the software without asking their parents for money. SCO Unix and Windows NT cost big bucks. + +This freedom also extended to programmers at work. In many companies, the computer managers are doctrinaire and officious. They often quickly develop knee-jerk reactions to technologies and use these stereotypes to make technical decisions. Free software like Linux was frequently rejected out of hand by the gatekeepers, who thought something must be wrong with the software if no one was charging for it. These attitudes couldn't stop the engineers who wanted to experiment with the free software, however, because it had no purchase order that needed approval. + +The invisible-man quality is an important part of the free software world. While I've described the bodies and faces of some of the betterknown free source poster boys, it is impossible to say much about many of the others. The community is spread out over the Internet throughout the world. Many people who work closely on projects never meet each other. The physical world with all of its ways of encoding a position in a hierarchy are gone. No one can tell how rich you are by your shoes. The color of your skin doesn't register. It's all about technology and technological ideas. + +In fact, there is a certain degree of Emily Dickinson in the world. Just as that soul selected her own society and shut the door on the rest of the world, the free software world frequently splits and resplits into smaller groups. While there is some cross-pollination, many are happy to live in their own corners. OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD are more separate countries than partners in crime. They evolve on their own, occasionally stealing ideas and source code to bridge the gap. + +Many writers have described some of their problems with making hay of the Silicon Valley world. Screenwriters and television producers often start up projects to tap into the rich texture of nerdlands only to discover that there's nothing that compelling to film. It's just miles and miles of steel-frame buildings holding acres and acres of cubicles. Sure, there are some Ping-Pong tables and pinball machines, but the work is all in the mind. Eyes want physical action, and all of the excitement in a free source world is in the ideas. + +But people are people. While there's no easy way to use the old standbys of race or clothes to discriminate, the technical world still develops ways to classify its members and place them in camps. The free software world has its own ways to distinguish between these camps. + +The biggest distinction may be between folks who favor the GPL and those who use the BSD-style license to protect their software. This is probably the biggest decision a free software creator must make because it controls whether others will be able to build commercial versions of the software without contributing the new code back to the project. + +People who embrace the GPL are more likely to embrace Richard Stallman, or at least less likely to curse him in public. They tend to be iconoclastic and individualistic. GPL projects tend to be more cultish and driven by a weird mixture of personality and ain't-it-cool hysteria. + +The people on the side of BSD-style license, on the other hand, seem pragmatic, organized, and focused. There are three major free versions of BSD UNIX alone, and they're notable because they each have centrally administered collections of files. The GPL-protected Linux can be purchased from at least six major groups that bundle it together, and each of them includes packages and pieces of software they find all over the Net. + +The BSD-license folks are also less cultish. The big poster boys, Torvalds and Stallman, are both GPL men. The free versions of BSD, which helped give Linux much of its foundation, are largely ignored by the press for all the wrong reasons. The BSD teams appear to be fragmented because they are all separate political organizations who have no formal ties. There are many contributors, which means that BSD has no major charismatic leader with a story as compelling as that of Linus Torvalds. + +Many contributors could wear this mantle and many have created just as much code. But life, or at least the media's description of it, is far from fair. + +The flagship of the BSD world may be the Apache web server group, which contributed greatly to the success of the platform. This core team has no person who stands out as a leader. Most of the people on the team are fully employed in the web business, and several members of the team said that the Apache team was just a good way for the people to advance their day jobs. It wasn't a crusade for them to free source code from jail. + +The Apache web server is protected by a BSD-style license that permits commercial reuse of the software without sharing the source code. It is a separate program, however, and many Linux users run the software on Linux boxes. Of course, this devotion to business and relatively quiet disposition isn't always true. Theo de Raadt, the leader of the OpenBSD faction, is fond of making bold proclamations. In his interview with me, he dismissed the Free Software Foundation as terribly misnamed because you weren't truly free to do whatever you wanted with the software. + +In fact, it's easy to take these stereotypes too far. Yes, GPL folks can be aggressive, outspoken, quick-thinking, driven, and tempestuous. Sure, BSD folks are organized, thorough, mainstream, dedicated, and precise. But there are always exceptions to these rules, and the people in each camp will be quick to spot them. + +Someone might point out that Alan Cox, one of the steadfast keepers of the GPL-protected Linux kernels, is not particularly flashy nor given to writing long manifestos on the Net. Others might say that Brian Behlendorf has been a great defender of the Apache project. He certainly hasn't avoided defending the BSD license, although not in the way that Stallman might have liked. He was, after all, one of the members of the Apache team who helped convince IBM that they could use the Apache web server without danger. + +After BSD versus GPL, the next greatest fault line is the choice of editor. Some use the relatively simple vi, which came out of Berkeley and the early versions of BSD. Others cleave to Stallman's Emacs, which is far more baroque and extreme. The vi camp loves the simplicity. The Emacs fans brag about how they've programmed their version of Emacs to break into the White House, snag secret pictures of people in compromising positions, route them through an anonymous remailer, and negotiate for a big tax refund all with one complicated control-meta-trans keystroke. + +While this war is well known, it has little practical significance. People can choose for themselves, and their choices have no effect on others. GPL or BSD can affect millions; vi versus Emacs makes no big difference. It's just one of the endless gag controversies in the universe. If Entertainment Tonight were covering the free software world, they would spend hours cataloging which stars used vi and which used Emacs. Did Shirley MacLaine use vi or Emacs or even wordstar in a previous life? + +Some of the other fault lines aren't so crisp, but end up being very important. The amount of order or lack of order is an important point of distinction for many free source people, and there is a wide spectrum of choices available. While the fact that all of the source code is freely redistributable makes the realm crazy, many groups try to control it with varying amounts of order. Some groups are fanatically organized. Others are more anarchic. Each has a particular temperament. + +The three BSD projects are well known for keeping control of all the source code for all the software in the distribution. They're very centrally managed and brag about keeping all the source code together in one build tree. The Linux distributions, on the other hand, include software from many different sources. Some include the KDE desktop. Others choose GNOME. Many include both. + +Some of the groups have carefully delineated jobs. The Debian group elects a president and puts individuals in charge of particular sections of the distribution. Or perhaps more correctly, the individuals nominate themselves for jobs they can accomplish. The group is as close to a government as exists in the open software world. Many of the Open Source Initiative guidelines on what fits the definition of "open source" evolved from the earlier rules drafted by the Debian group to help define what could and couldn't be included in an official Debian distribution. The OpenBSD group, on the other hand, opens up much of the source tree to everyone on the team. Anyone can make changes. Core areas, on the other hand, are still controlled by leaders. + +Some groups have become very effective marketing forces. Red Hat is a well-run company that has marketing teams selling people on upgrading their software as well as engineering teams with a job of writing improved code to include in future versions. Red Hat packages their distribution in boxes that are sold through normal sales channels like bookstores and catalogs. They have a big presence at trade shows like LinuxExpo, in part because they help organize them. + +Other groups like Slackware only recently opened up a website. OpenBSD sells copies to help pay for its Internet bills, not to expand its marketing force. Some distributions are only available online. + +In many cases, there is no clear spectrum defined between order and anarchy. The groups just have their own brands of order. OpenBSD brags about stopping security leaks and going two years without a rootlevel intrusion, but some of its artwork is a bit scruffy. Red Hat, on the other hand, has been carefully working to make Linux easy for everyone to use, but they're not as focused on security details. + +Of course, this amount of order is always a bit of a relative term. None of these groups have strong lines of control. All of them depend upon the contributions of people. Problems only get solved if someone cares enough to do it. + +This disorder is changing a bit now that serious companies like Red Hat and VA Linux are entering the arena. These companies pay fulltime programmers to ensure that their products are bug free and easy to use. If their management does a good job, the open source software world may grow more ordered and actually anticipate more problems instead of waiting for the right person to come along with the time and the inclination to solve them. + +These are just a few of the major fault lines. Practically every project comes with major technical distinctions that split the community. Is Java a good language or another attempt at corporate control? How should the basic Apache web server handle credit cards? What is the best way to handle 64-bit processors? There are thousands of differences, hundreds of fault lines, scores of architectural arguments, and dozens of licenses. But at least all of the individuals agree upon one thing: reading the source code is essential. + +1~ Politics + +One of the great questions about the free source movement is its politics. The world loves to divide every issue into two sides and then start picking teams. You're either part of the problem or part of the solution. You're either for us or against us. You're either on the red team or the blue team. + +The notion of giving software and source code away isn't really a radical concept. People give stuff away all the time. But when the process actually starts to work and folks start joining up, the stakes change. Suddenly it's not about random acts of kindness and isolated instances of charity--it's now a movement with emotional inertia and political heft. When things start working, people want to know what this group is going to do and how its actions are going to affect them. They want to know who gets the credit and who gets the blame. + +The questions about the politics of the free source world usually boil down to a simple dilemma: some think it's a communist utopia and others think it's a free market nirvana. Normally, the two ideas sit on the opposite ends of the spectrum looking at each other with contempt and disdain. In the strange world of software, ideas aren't so easy to place. Anyone can duplicate software as many times as they want and it's still useful. The communist notion of sharing equally is much easier to achieve in this realm than in the world of, say, grain, which requires hard work in the sun to make it grow. On the other hand, the ease of exchange also means that people are able to swap and trade versions of software with little overhead or restriction. The well-greased marketplace in the free marketer's dreams is also easy to create. The act of giving a disk to a friend could either be a bona fide example of universal brotherhood or the vigorously competitive act of trying to win the hearts and minds of a software consumer. Take your pick. + +The nature of software also mitigates many of the problems that naturally occur in each of these worlds. There is no scarcity, so there is no reason why sharing has to be so complicated or orchestrated from the central planning committees of the Soviets. People just give. On the other hand, the lack of scarcity also limits the differences between the rich and the poor. There's no reason why everyone can't have the same software as the rich because it's so easy to duplicate. Folks who are into economic competition for the ego gratification of having a bigger sport utility vehicle than everyone else on the street are going to be disappointed. + +To some extent, the politics of the free source movement are such a conundrum that people simply project their wishes onto it. John Gilmore told me over dinner, "Well, it depends. Eric Raymond is sort of a libertarian but Richard Stallman is sort of a communist. I guess it's both." The freedom makes it possible for people to mold the movement to be what they want. + +Raymond has no problem seeing his libertarian dreams acted out in the free software community. He looked at the various groups creating their own versions of free source code and saw a big bazaar where merchants competed to provide the best solutions to computer users everywhere. People wrote neat stuff and worked hard to make sure that others were happy. It was competition at its finest, and there was no money or costs of exchange to get in the way. + +Most people quickly become keenly aware of this competition. Each of the different teams creating distributions flags theirs as the best, the most up-to-date, the easiest to install, and the most plush. The licenses mean that each group is free to grab stuff from the other, and this ensures that no one builds an unstoppable lead like Microsoft did in the proprietary OS world. Sure, Red Hat has a large chunk of the mindshare and people think their brand name is synonymous with Linux, but anyone can grab their latest distribution and start making improvements on it. It takes little time at all. + +Stallman and his supposed communist impulse is a bit harder to characterize. He has made his peace with money and he's quick to insist that he's not a communist or an enemy of the capitalist state. He's perfectly happy when people charge for their work as programmers and he often does the same. But it's easy to see why people start to think he's something of a communist. One of his essays, which he insists is not strictly communist, is entitled "Why Software Should Not Have Owners." + +Some of his basic instincts sure look Marxist. The source code to a program often acts like the means of production, and this is why the capitalists running the businesses try to control it. Stallman wanted to place these means of production in the hands of everyone so people could be free to do what they wanted. While Stallman didn't rail against the effects of money, he rejected the principle that intellectual capital, the source code, should be controlled. + +Stallman stops well short of giving everything away to everyone. Copyrighting books is okay, he says, because it "restricts only the mass producers of copies. It did not take freedom away from readers of books. An ordinary reader, who did not own a printing press, could copy books only with pen and ink, and few readers were sued for that." In other words, the copyright rules in the age of printing only restricted the guy across town with a printing press who was trying to steal someone else's business. The emergence of the computer, however, changes everything. When people can copy freely, the shackles bind everyone. + +Communism, of course, is the big loser of the 20th century, and so it's not surprising that Stallman tries to put some distance between the Soviet and the GNU empires. He notes puckishly that the draconian effects of the copyright laws in America are sort of similar to life in the Soviet Union, "where every copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where individuals had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand as samizdat." He notes, however, that "There is of course a difference: the motive for information control in the Soviet Union was political; in the U.S. the motive is profit. But it is the actions that affect us, not the motive. Any attempt to block the sharing of information, no matter why, leads to the same methods and the same harshness." + +Stallman has a point. The copyright rules restrict the ability of people to add, improve upon, or engage other people's work. The fair use rules that let a text author quote sections for comment don't really work in the software world, where it's pretty hard to copy anything but 100 percent of some source code. For programmers, the rules on source code can be pretty Soviet-like in practice. + +He's also correct that some companies would think nothing of locking up the world. A consortium of megalithic content companies like Disney and the other studios got the U.S. Congress to pass a law restricting tools for making copies. Ostensibly it only applied to computer programs and other software used to pirate movies or other software, but the effect could be chilling on the marketplace. The home video enthusiast who loves to edit the tapes of his child's birthday party needs many of the same functions as the content pirate. Cutting and pasting is cutting and pasting. The rules are already getting a bit more Soviet-like in America. + +But Stallman is right to distance himself from Soviet-style communism because there are few similarities. There's little central control in Stallman's empire. All Stallman can do to enforce the GNU General Public License is sue someone in court. He, like the Pope, has no great armies ready to keep people in line. None of the Linux companies have much power to force people to do anything. The GNU General Public License is like a vast disarmament treaty. Everyone is free to do what they want with the software, and there are no legal cudgels to stop them. The only way to violate the license is to publish the software and not release the source code. + +Many people who approach the free software world for the first time see only communism. Bob Metcalfe, an entrepreneur, has proved himself several times over by starting companies like 3Com and inventing the Ethernet. Yet he looked at the free software world and condemned it with a derisive essay entitled "Linux's 60's technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what will?" + +Using the term "open sores" may be clever, but it belies a lack of understanding of some of the basic tenets. The bugs and problems in the software are open for everyone to see. Ideally, someone will fix them. Does he prefer the closed world of proprietary software where the bugs just magically appear? Does he prefer a hidden cancer to melanoma? + +The essay makes more confounding points equating Richard Stallman to Karl Marx for his writing and Linus Torvalds to Vladimir Lenin because of his aim to dominate the software world with his OS. For grins, he compares Eric Raymond to "Trotsky waiting for The People's ice pick" for no clear reason. Before this gets out of hand, he backpedals a bit and claims, "OK, communism is too harsh on Linux. Lenin too harsh on Torvalds [sic]."Then he sets off comparing the world of open source to the tree-hugging, back-to-the-earth movement. + +Of course, it's easy to see how the open source world is much different from the Soviet-style world of communism. That experiment failed because it placed the good of the many above the freedom of the individual. It was a dictatorship that did not shirk from state-sponsored terrorism or pervasive spying. It was no surprise, for instance, to discover that East German athletes were doped with performance-enhancing drugs without their knowledge. It was for the glory of Lenin or Marx or Stalin, or whoever held the reins. Does the country need someone to live in Siberia to mine for minerals? Does the country need land for vast collective farms? The state makes the call and people go. + +The Soviet Union didn't really fail because it clung too deeply to the notion that no one should own property. It failed when it tried to enforce this by denying people the fruits of their labor. If someone wanted to build something neat, useful, or inventive, they had better do it for the glory of the Soviet state. That turned the place into a big cesspool of inactivity because everyone's hard work was immediately stolen away from them. + +The free software world is quite different from that world. The GPL and the BSD licenses don't strip away someone's freedom and subjugate them to the state, it gives them the source code and a compiler to use with it. Yes, the GPL does restrict the freedom of people to take the free source code and sell their own proprietary additions, but this isn't the same as moving them to Siberia. + +The Free Software State doesn't steal the fruits of someone's labor away from them. Once you develop the code, you can still use it. The GPL doesn't mean that only Torvalds can sit around his dacha and compile the code. You get to use it, too. In fact, one of the reasons that people cite for contributing to GPL projects is the legal assurance that the enhancements will never be taken away from them. The source will always remain open and accessible. + +Metcalfe's point is that communism didn't work, so the free software world will fail, too. He makes his point a bit clearer when he starts comparing the free software folks to tree-hugging environmentalists. + +"How about Linux as organic software grown in utopia by spiritualists?" he wonders. "If North America actually went back to the earth, close to 250 million people would die of starvation before you could say agribusiness. When they bring organic fruit to market, you pay extra for small apples with open sores--the Open Sores Movement." + +The problem with this analogy is that no one is starving with open source software. Data is not a physical good. Pesticides and fertilizers can boost crop yields, but that doesn't matter with software. If anything, free software ends up in even more people's hands than proprietary software. Everyone in the free software world has a copy of the image editing tool, GIMP, but only the richest Americans have a copy of the very expensive Adobe Photoshop. + +Of course, he has half a point about the polish of open source code. The programmers often spend more time adding neat features they like instead of making the code as accessible as possible. The tools are often designed for programmers by programmers. There isn't much of a quality assurance and human factors team trying to get them to engineer it so the other 95 percent of humanity can use it. + +But this problem is going away. Companies like Red Hat and Caldera have a profit motive in making the software accessible to all. The tools look nicer, and they are often just as presentable as the tools from the proprietary firms. The programmers are also getting more sensitive to these problems. In the past, the free software world was sort of an alternative Eden where programmers went to escape from the rest of programmatically challenged society. Now the world is open to free software and the programmers are more open to taking everyone's needs into account. + +The problem with all of Metcalfe's analogies is that he assumes the same rules that control the world of physical goods also govern the world of ideas. The software industry likes to pretend that this isn't true by packaging the software in big, empty boxes that look good on shelves. Swapping ideas is easy and costs little. Of course, the Soviet Union worried about the swapping of ideas and tried to control the press and all forms of expression. The free software movement is the exact opposite of this. + +In fact, it is much easier to see the free software world as the libertarian ideal of strong competition and personal freedom if you remember that it exists in the realm of ideas. The landscape is similar to universities, which usually boast that they're just big melting pots where the marketplace of ideas stays open all night. The best ideas gradually push out the worst ones and society gradually moves toward a total understanding of the world. + +Perhaps it's just not fair to characterize the politics of the open source or free software world at all. Terms like communism, libertarianism, liberalism, and Marxism all come from an age when large portions of society did not have easy access to ample supplies of food and housing. + +Data and information are not limited goods that can only be consumed by a limited group. One person or one million people can read a computer file and the marginal costs aren't very different. Sharing is cheap, so it makes sense to use it to all of its advantages. We're just learning how to use the low cost of widespread cooperation. + +Perhaps it's better to concentrate on the real political battles that rage inside the open source code community. It may be better to see the battle as one of GPL versus BSD instead of communist versus libertarian. The license debate is tuned to the Internet world. It sets out the debate in terms the computer user can understand. + +1~ Charity + +The open source movement is filled with people who analyze software, look for bugs, and search for fixes. These quiet workhorses are the foundation of the movement's success. One member of this army is David Baron, an undergraduate student who started out at Harvard in the fall of 1998 and found, like most students, that he had a bit of spare time. Some students turn to theater, some to the newspaper, some to carousing, some to athletic teams, some to drinking, and most choose one or more of the above. A few students search out some charitable work for their spare time and volunteer at a homeless shelter or hospital. Law students love to work at the free legal clinic for the poor. Baron, however, is a bit of a nerd in all of the good senses of the word. He's been working on cleaning up Netscape's open source browser project known as Mozilla, and he thinks it's a great act of charity. + +Baron spends his spare time poking around the Mozilla layout engine responsible for arranging the graphics, text, form slots, buttons, and whatnot in a consistent way. Graphic designers want all web browsers on the Net to behave in a consistent way and they've been agitating to try and get the browser companies (Netscape, Microsoft, iCab, WebTV, and Opera) to adhere to a set of standards developed by the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium based at MIT. These standards spell out exactly how the browsers are supposed to handle complicated layout instructions like cascading style sheets. + +Baron looked at these standards and thought they were a good idea. If all web browsers handled content in the same way, then little buttons saying "Best Viewed with Microsoft IE" or "Best Viewed by Netscape" +would disappear. The browser companies would be able to compete on features, not on their ability to display weirder web pages. It would cut the web designers out of the battle between Microsoft and Netscape. + +The standards also help users, especially users with different needs. He told me, "Standards (particularly CSS) encourage accessibility for users with all sorts of disabilities because they allow authors to use HTML as it was originally intended--as a structural markup language that can be interpreted by browsers that display things in nonvisual media or in very large fonts for users with poor vision. Changing the HTML on the web back to structural markup will also allow these browsers to produce sensible output." + +Handling standards like this is always a bit of a political problem for companies. Every developer tries to stick their fingers in the wind and see which standards will be important and which ones will fall by the wayside. Microsoft, Netscape, iCab, WebTV, and Opera have all been wondering about the cascading style sheets because they're sort of a pain in the neck. Ideally, the graphics designers will be able to come up with graphics rules for a set of web pages and they'll be applied using the rules set out by the reader. + +CSS is not about "total control by the author of the page," says Baron. "The basic idea of the cascade is that user preferences (through the browser's UI or possibly through a user CSS style sheet) and author suggestions (contained in CSS style sheets) combine to produce the formatting of the page." + +A modern catalog conglomerate, for instance, may have two branches. One would be aimed at middle-aged men who dote on their cars by giving them endless wax jobs and cleaning them forever. Another might be aimed at young mothers who dote on their children, in part by keeping the home as clean as could be. Normally, the catalog company would use different designers to create very different-looking catalogs. One would come with retro, hard-edged graphics covered with racing stripes, and the other with floral prints. What happens when these catalogs head to the web? Normally two designers would give two different websites two different looks. + +What if there is one cleaning product, say a car wheel cleaner, that appears in both catalogs? In the old days before cascading style sheets, both designers would have to do up each page separately. A well-designed system of cascading style sheets would let one web page for the product display correctly on both sites. It would pick up either the floral prints or the racing stripes automatically when either site called it up. + +These standards are notoriously difficult to enforce. Armies around the world dream of turning out perfect privates that can be inserted into any conflict in any platoon without any retraining. Newspapers dream of having interchangeable reporters who can cover the White House or a cricket match in India. It's no wonder that the web industry wants the same thing. + +Baron told me, "I got interested in Mozilla because I'm interested in web standards." He noticed that a group known as the Web Standards Project was running a political campaign to pressure the browser companies to lay out pages the same way (www.webstandards.org). + +"A group of developers got together and said, 'The browsers aren't supporting the standards' and this makes it impossible to create pages," Baron explained. "If every browser supports the standards in a different way, then you have to design a different version of the site for each browser. Or, more realistically, web designers resort to hacks that make the page legible in all the 'major' browsers but not accessible to people with disabilities or people with older computers." + +Of course, it's one thing for a web designer or a web master to take up this call. Baron, however, was just a college freshman who framed this as volunteer work. When he happened upon the Web Standards Project, he heard their message and saw an itch that he wanted to scratch. + +"I want to see the standards supported correctly. Someone's got to do it," he told me. "I might as well be doing this instead of playing around and looking at websites all day. A lot of people do volunteer work, but not a lot of people get to do volunteer work at this level. It uses what I know pretty well. A lot of students who are very smart end up doing volunteer work which doesn't use their skills. When you can do volunteer work that uses what you know, it's even better." + +So Baron would download the latest versions of the Mozilla layout engine known as Gecko and play with web pages. He would create weird web pages with strange style sheets, load them up, and watch where they broke. When things went wrong, he would write up detailed bug reports and mail them off to the folks doing the coding. He was part of a quality control team that included some Netscape employees and a wide variety of other users on the Net. + +This community involvement was what Netscape wanted when it created Mozilla. They hoped that more people would take it upon themselves to test out the code and at least make complaints when things were going wrong. One hacker named James Clark, who isn't related to the founder of Netscape with the same name, actually kicked in a complete XML parser, a tool for taking apart the latest superset of HTML that is capturing the attention of software and web designers. + +Baron is one of the few folks I met while writing this book who frames his work on an open source project as charity. Most devotees get into the projects because they offer them the freedom to mess with the source code. Most also cite the practical strengths of open source, like the relatively quick bug fixes and the stability of well-run projects. Most people like to distance themselves from the more political firebrands of the free software movement like Richard Stallman by pointing out that they're not really in it to bring about the second coming of the Communist Revolution. Few suggest that their work is sort of a gift of their time that might make the world a better place. Few compare their work to the folks cleaning up homeless shelters or hospitals. Most don't disagree when it is pointed out to them, but most free software hackers don't roll out the charitable rhetoric to explain what they're up to. + +This may just be a class difference. Baron is a sophomore, as this is written, at Harvard and Harvard is, by definition, a finishing school for the upper crust. Even the vast sea of kids from middle-class families and public schools end up talking and acting as if they came out of Choate or Exeter by the end of their time at Harvard. They pick up the Kennedyesque noblesse oblige that somehow commands the rich and fortunate to be out helping the poor with very public acts of assistance. It just sort of seeps into all of those Harvard kids. + +Most of the free software members, on the other hand, are kind of outcasts. The hackers come from all parts of the globe and from all corners of the social hierarchy, but few of them are from the beautiful people who glide through life on golden rails. The programmers usually have their heads in strange, obtuse mathematical clouds instead of the overstuffed clouds of Olympus. They're concerned with building neat software and spinning up wonderful abstract structures that interlock in endlessly repeating, elegant patterns. If they were interested in power or social prestige, they wouldn't be spending their nights in front of a terminal waiting for some code to compile. + +But if the free software movement doesn't use the charitable card very often, it doesn't mean that the work is too different from that of the homeless shelters. In fact, so little money changes hands that there are not many reasons for people to take their donations off on their taxes. Donations of time don't count. Maybe a few companies could write it off their books, but that's about it. + +In fact, Baron is right that work like his can make a difference for people. Software is a growing part of the cost of a computer today. In low-end PCs, the Microsoft OS may cost more than the processor or the memory. A free OS with a free web browser that works correctly can help the thousands of schools, homeless shelters, hospitals, and recreation centers get on the web at a cheaper cost. + +The free software charity is often a bit cleaner. Bill Gates and many of the other Microsoft millionaires aren't shy about giving away real money to schools and other needy organizations. Melinda Gates, Bill's wife, runs a charitable foundation that is very generous. In 1999, for instance, the foundation made a very real gift of tuition money for minority students. The foundation has also given millions of dollars to help fund medical research throughout the globe. + +Still, at other times, there has been a sly edge to the Gates benevolence. In some cases, the company gives away millions of dollars in Microsoft software. This helps get kids used to Microsoft products and acts like subtle advertising. Of course, there's nothing new about this kind of charity. Most corporations insist that they receive some publicity for their giving. It's how they justify the benevolence to their shareholders. + +The value of giving copies of software away is a difficult act to measure. One million copies of Windows 95 might retail for about $100 million, but the cost to Microsoft is significantly lower. CD-ROMs cost less than one dollar to duplicate, and many schools probably received one CD-ROM for all of their machines. Giving the users support is an important cost, but it can be controlled and limited by restricting the number of employees dedicated to particular phone lines. Determining the value of all of the benevolence must be a tough job for the tax accountants. How Microsoft chose to account for its donations is a private matter between Gates, the Internal Revenue Service, and his God. + +Consider the example of an imaginary proprietary software company called SoftSoft that gives away one million copies of its $50 WidgetWare product to schools and charities across the United States. This is, in many ways, generous because SoftSoft only sells 500,000 copies a year, giving them gross revenues of $25 million. + +If SoftSoft values the gift at the full market value, they have a deduction of $50 million, which clearly puts them well in the red and beyond the reach of taxes for the year. They can probably carry the loss forward and wipe out next year's earnings, too. + +The accountants may not choose to be so adventurous. The IRS might insist that they deduct the cost of the goods given, not their potentially inflated market price. Imagine that the company's cost for developing WidgetWare came to $21 million. If there were no gift, they would have a nice profit of $4 million. SoftSoft could split the development costs of $21 million between all of the 1.5 million units that are shipped. Instead of deducting the market value of the software, it would only deduct the costs allocated to it. Still, that means they get a $14 million deduction, which is still far from shabby. + +More conservative companies may come up with smaller deductions based upon the cost of duplicating the additional copies and the cost of supporting the schools and charities. Strict accounting measures would be the most honest, but it's hard to know what companies do and what they should do. + +Free software, of course, avoids all that paperwork and accounting. The software costs nothing, so giving it away generates no deduction. There's no need for complicated cost accounting or great press releases. It just sits on the web server and people download it. + +Of course, it's possible to start counting up downloads and doing some multiplication to come up with outrageous numbers. Windows NT can sell for between $200 and $1,000. There are about 3.7 million web servers running Apache, according to the latest Netcraft poll. If 1 percent qualify as charitable sites, then 37,000 are served by Apache. Of course, not all sites sit on separate machines. To correct for this, assume that each server hosts 10 machines and there are only 3,700 machines using Apache. That's still about $3.7 million in donations. + +But numbers like this can't really capture the depth of the gift. Linus Torvalds always likes to say that he started writing Linux because he couldn't afford a decent OS for his machine so he could do some experiments. Who knows how many kids, grown-ups, and even retired people are hacking Linux now and doing some sophisticated computer science experiments because they can? How do we count this beneficence? + +Free software essentially removes the red tape and the institutional character of charity. There are no boards. There is no counting of gifts. There's no fawning or flattering. There are no new J. Henry P. Plutocrat Wings for the Franklin P. Moneysucker Museum of Philanthropy. It's just a pure gift with no overhead. + +There is also a smooth efficiency to the world of free software charity. My economics professor used to joke that gifts were just very inefficient. Grandmas always bought unhip sweaters for their grandkids. Left on their own, children would give candy and stuffed animals to their parents on their birthdays and Christmas. All of these bad choices must be returned or thrown away, ruining the efficiency of the economy. The professor concluded by saying, "So, guys, when you go out on the date, don't bother with the flowers. Forget about the jewelry. Just give her cash." + +Free source software, of course, doesn't fit into many of the standard models of economic theory. Giving the stuff away doesn't cost much money, and accepting it often requires a bit of work. The old rules of gift giving and charity don't really apply. + +Imagine that some grandmother wrote some complicated software for computing the patterns for knitting sweaters. Some probably have. If they give the source code away, it ends up in the vast pool of free source code and other knitters may find it. It might not help any grandchildren, at least not for 20 or 30 years, but it will be moving to the place where it can do the most good with as little friction as possible. The software hacked by the kids, on the other hand, would flow from child to child without reaching the parents. The software tools for generating dumb jokes and sorting bubble gum cards would make a generation of kids happy, and they would be able to exchange it without their parents or grandparents getting in the way. + +The inefficiencies of gift-giving can often affect charities, which have less freedom to be picky than grandchildren. Charities can't look a gift horse in the mouth. If a company wants to give a women's shelter 1,000 new men's raincoats, the shelter will probably take them. Refusing them can offend potential contributors who might give them something of value in the next quarter. + +Free source code has none of these inefficiencies. Websites like Slashdot, Freshmeat, Linux Weekly News, LinuxWorld, KernelTraffic, and hundreds of other Linux or project-specific portals do a great job moving the software to the people who can use its value. People write the code and then other folks discover the value in it. Bad or unneeded code isn't foisted on anyone. + +Free software also avoids being painted as a cynical tax scheme. It is not uncommon for drug manufacturers to donate some surplus pills to disaster relief operations. In some cases, the manufacturers clear their shelves of pills that are about to expire and thus about to be destroyed. They take a liability and turn it into a tax-deductible asset. This may be a good idea when the drugs are needed, but they are often superfluous. In many cases, the drugs just end up in a landfill. The relief organizations accept millions of dollars in drugs to get a few thousand dollars' +worth of ones they really need. + +2~ Charitable Open Source Organizations + +Of course, there are some open source charities. Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity that raises money and solicits tax-deductible donations. This money is used to pay for computers, overhead, and the salaries of young programmers who have great ideas for free software. The Debian Project also has a charitable arm known as Software in the Public Interest that raises money and computer equipment to support the creation of more free software. + +These organizations are certainly part of the world of tax deductions, fund-raisers, and the charity-industrial complex. The Free Software Foundation, for instance, notes that you can arrange for all or part of your gift to the United Way to go to the Foundation. + +But there are differences, too. Stallman, for instance, is proud of the fact that he accepts no salary or travel reimbursement from the Free Software Foundation. He works 2 months a year to support himself and then donates the other 10 months a year to raising money to support other programmers to work on Foundation projects. + +Their budgets are pretty manageable as well. Perens notes that Debian's budget is about $10,000 a year, and this is spent largely on distributing the software. Servers that support plenty of traffic cost a fair amount of money, but the group does get donations of hardware and bandwidth. The group also presses a large number of CD-ROMs with the software. + +The groups also make a point of insisting that good code is more valuable than money. The Free Software Foundation, for instance, lists projects that need work next to its call for money. Volunteers are needed to write documentation, test software, organize the office, and also write more code. + +Jordan Hubbard, the director of the FreeBSD project, says that money is not always the best gift. "I'll take people over six-digit sums of donations almost any day," he says, and explains that FreeBSD is encouraging companies to donate some of the spare time of its employees. He suggests that companies assign a worker to the FreeBSD project for a month or two if there is time to spare. + +"Employees also give us a window into what that company's needs are. All of those co-opted employees bring back the needs of their jobsite. Those are really valuable working relationships," he continues. + +Hubbard has also found that money is often not the best motivator. Hardware, it turns out, often works well at extracting work out of programmers. He likes to ship a programmer one of the newest peripherals like a DVD drive or a joystick and ask him to write a driver for the technology in exchange. "It's so much more cost-effective to buy someone a $500 piece of hardware, which in turn motivates him to donate thousands of dollars worth of work, something we probably couldn't pay for anyway," he says. + +Money is still important, however, to take care of all the jobs that can't be accomplished by piquing someone's curiosity. "The area we need the most contributions for are infrastructure. Secretarial things are no fun to do and you don't want to make volunteers do it," he says. + +All of these charitable organizations are bound to grow in the next several years as the free software movement becomes more sophisticated. In some cases it will be because the hackers who loved playing with computers will discover that the tax system is just another pile of code filled with bugs looking to be hacked. In most cases, though, I think it will be because large companies with their sophisticated tax attorneys will become interested. I would not be surprised if a future version of this book includes a very cynical treatment of the tax habits of some open source organizations. Once an idea reaches a critical mass, it is impossible to shield it from the forces of minor and major corruption. + +2~ Gifts as a Cultural Imperative + +Marcel Mauss was an anthropologist who studied the tribes of the northwestern corner of North America. His book Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies explained how the tribes like the Chinook, the Tlinget, and the Kwakiutl would spend the months of the fall giving and going to huge feasts. Each year, the members in the tribe would take the bounty of the harvest and throw a feast for their friends. The folks who attended might have a good time, but they were then obligated to give a feast of equal or greater value next year. + +Many anthropologists of the free software world like to draw parallels between these feasts, known as potlatches in one tribe, and the free-for-all world of free source software. The hackers are giving away source code in much the same way that the tribe members gave away salmon or deer meat. + +The comparison does offer some insight into life in the free software community. Some conventions like LinuxExpo and the hundreds of install-fests are sort of like parties. One company at a LinuxExpo was serving beer in its booth to attract attention. Of course, Netscape celebrated its decision to launch the Mozilla project with a big party. They then threw another one at the project's first birthday. + +But the giving goes beyond the parties and the conferences. Giving great software packages creates social standing in much the same way that giving a lavish feast will establish you as a major member of the tribe. There is a sort of pecking order, and the coders of great systems like Perl or Linux are near the top. The folks at the top of the pyramid often have better luck calling on other programmers for help, making it possible for them to get their jobs done a little better. Many managers justify letting their employees contribute to the free software community because they build up a social network that they can tap to finish their official jobs. + +But there's a difference between tribal potlatch and free software. The potlatch feasts built very strong individual bonds between people in the same tribe who knew each other and worked together. The gifts flowed between people who were part of each other's small community. + +The free source world, on the other hand, is a big free-for-all in both senses of the phrase. The code circulates for everyone to grab, and only those who need it dig in. There's no great connection between programmer and user. People grab software and take it without really knowing to whom they owe any debt. I only know a few of the big names who wrote the code running the Linux box on my desk, and I know that there are thousands of people who also contributed. It would be impossible for me to pay back any of these people because it's hard to keep them straight. + +This vast mass of contributors often negates the value and prestige that comes from writing neat code. Since no one can keep track of it all, people tend to treat all requests from unknown people equally. The free source world tends to have many equals, just because there's no hierarchy to make it easy for us to suss out each other's place. Corporations have titles like executive vice president and super executive vice president. The military labels people as private, sergeant, or major. There are no guideposts in the free software world. + +Still, good contributions pay off in good reputations. A bug fix here and a bug fix there might not build a name, but after a year or two they pay off. A good reputation opens doors, wins jobs, creates friendships, and makes it possible to interest people in new projects. + +The free source world is also a strange mirror image of the hierarchies that emerge after a season of tribal potlatch ceremonies. In the tribes, those who receive great gifts are required to return the favor with even greater ones. So the skillful hunters and gatherers give good gifts and receive something better in return. The rich get richer by giving away their bounty. The less skillful end up at the bottom of the list. The free source world, on the other hand, spreads its riches out to everyone. There are many modest programmers who enjoy the source code of the great programmers, and there may be billions of non-programmers who also tag along. Many major websites run on free OSs alone. Who knows which cheap Internet tools will come along in the future? The poor get lifted along at no great cost to the economy. The charity is broadcast to everyone, not narrowcast to a few. + +The efficiency goes deeper. There's a whole class of products for the home that are much fancier and sophisticated than what people need. One company near me sells perfectly usable nonstick pans for $2.95. A fancy department store sells hefty, industrial-grade pans that do the same thing for more than $100. Why? They make great gifts for people getting married. This wedding-industrial complex adds needless accoutrements, doodads, and schmaltz just to give products enough caché to make them great gifts. + +The free source world, on the other hand, has no real incentive to generate phony, chrome-plated glitz to make its gifts acceptable or worthy enough of giving. People give away what they write for themselves, and they tend to write what they need. The result is a very efficient, usable collection of software that helps real people solve real problems. The inefficiency of the wedding-industrial complex, the Father's Day-industrial complex, the Christmas-industrial complex, and their need to create acceptable gifts are gone. + +Of course, there's also a certain element of selfishness to the charity. The social prestige that comes from writing good free software is worth a fair amount in the job market. People like to list accomplishments like "wrote driver" or "contributed code to Linux Kernel 2.2" on their résumé. Giving to the right project is a badge of honor because serious folks doing serious work embraced the gift. That's often more valuable and more telling than a plaque or an award from a traditional boss. + +Rob Newberry is a programmer at Group Logic, a small software house in northern Virginia where I once did some consulting. His official title is "Director of Fajita Technology," and he is sometimes known as "The Dude," a reference to a character in the movie /{The Big Lebowski}/. Technically, his job is building and supporting their products, which are used to automate the prepress industry. One of their products, known as Mass Transit, will move files over the Internet and execute a number of automated programs to them before moving them on. Printers use them to take in new jobs, massage the data to their needs by performing tasks like color separation, and then send the jobs to the presses. This work requires great understanding of the various network protocols like FTP of NFS. + +Newberry is also a Linux fan. He reads the Kernel list but rarely contributes much to it. He runs various versions of Linux around the house, and none of them were working as well as he wanted with his Macintosh. So he poked around in the software, fixed it, and sent his code off to Alan Cox, who watches over the part of the kernel where his fixes belonged. + +"I contributed some changes to the Appletalk stack that's in the Linux Kernel that make it easier for a Linux machine to offer dial-in services for Macintosh users," he said in an article published in Salon. +"As it stands, Mac users have always been able to dial into a Linux box and use IP protocols, but if they wanted to use Appletalk over PPP, the support wasn't really there." + +Newberry, of course, is doing all of this on his own time because he enjoys it. But his boss, Derick Naef, still thinks it's pretty cool that he's spending some of his programming energy on a project that won't add anything immediately to the bottom line. + +"He's plugged into that community and mailing lists a lot more," explains Naef. "There are other people here who are, too, but there are all these tools out there in the open source world. There's code out there that can be incorporated into our computer projects. It can cut your development costs if you can find stuff you can use." + +Of course, all of this justification and rationalization aren't the main reason why Newberry spends so much of his time hacking on Linux. Sure, it may help his company's bottom line. Sure, it might beef up his résumé by letting him brag that he got some code in the Linux kernel. But he also sees this as a bit of charity. + +"I get a certain amount of satisfaction from the work . . . but I get a certain amount of satisfaction out of helping people. Improving Linux and especially its integration with Macs has been a pet project of mine for some time," he says. Still, he sums up his real motivation by saying, "I write software because I just love doing it." Perhaps we're just lucky that so many people love writing open source software and giving it away. + +1~ Love + +It's not hard to find bad stories about people who write good code. One person at a Linux conference told me, "The strange thing about Linus Torvalds is that he hasn't really offended everyone yet. All of the other leaders have managed to piss off someone at one time or another. It's hard to find someone who isn't hated by someone else." While he meant it as a compliment for Torvalds, he sounded as if he wouldn't be surprised if Torvalds did a snotty, selfish, petulant thing. It would just be par for the course. + +There are thousands of examples of why people in the open source community hate each other and there are millions of examples of why they annoy each other. The group is filled with many strong-minded, independent individuals who aren't afraid to express their opinions. Flame wars spring up again and again as people try to decide technical questions like whether it makes more sense to use long integers or floating point numbers to hold a person's wealth in dollars. + +Of course, hate is really too strong a word. If you manage to pin down some of the people and ask them, point blank, whether they really hate someone, they'll say, "No." They really just don't like a few of that person's technical decisions. These points of friction fester and turn into what might more commonly be called hate. + +These technical debates are terrible tar pits for the community, and they eat up the energy. The debates turn frustrating because they have the strange distinction of being both technically important and utterly trivial. Everyone would like to just sail through life and not worry about tiny details like the type of integer used in a calculation. There are millions of these decisions that take up time that might be better spent imagining grand dreams of a seamless information noosphere that provides the wisdom of the ages in a simple graphical interface. But every programmer learns that it's the details that count. NASA lost a spacecraft when some programmer used English units instead of the metric system. So the work needs to get done. + +Occasionally, the fights get interesting. Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens are both great contributors to the open source movement. In fact, both worked together to try to define the meaning of the term. Perens worked with the community that creates the Debian distribution of Linux to come up with a definition of what was acceptable for the community. This definition morphed into a more official version used by the Open Source Initiative. When they got a definition they liked, they published it and tried to trademark the term "open source" in order to make sure it was applied with some consistency. It should be no surprise that all of that hard work brought them farther apart. + +In early April 1999, soon after Apple Computer joined the free source world by releasing some of the source code to their operating system, Raymond and Perens found themselves at each other's throats. Raymond had worked closely with Apple on developing their license and blessed it soon after it emerged. Apple was so pleased that it put Raymond's endorsement on their web page. The decision was a big coup for the open source movement and strong proof that corporations were embracing the movement. Big executives from big companies like Apple were knocking on the open source movement's door. Raymond thought the victory would bring more attention to the cause. + +Others thought Raymond had given away the farm. Perens and many others looked at the license and spotted a small clause that seemed dangerous. The license for their open source code could be withdrawn at a moment's notice. Someone pointed out that it would be a real bummer to do lots of work on Apple's system and then find out that some neb-nosed lawyer at Apple could just pull the license. No one wanted to take that chance. Flame wars erupted and Perens started publicly disagreeing with Raymond. To Perens, the Apple license just wasn't open enough to be called "open source." + +Raymond didn't take this too well. He had worked hard to build a strong coalition. He had worked hard to convince corporations that open source was much more than a way for teenagers to experiment with communism while they were living on their parents' dime. He wanted the open source world to be a smoothly running, suave machine that gracefully welcomed Apple into its fold. Now his buddy Bruce Perens was effectively aping Lloyd Bentsen's famous putdown of Dan Quayle: "I've known open source; I've worked with open source; and Eric, this license isn't open source." His whole announcement was supposed to unroll with the clockwork precision of great corporate PR, and now someone had lobbed a grenade. + +Raymond fired back a terse e-mail that said, "If you ever again behave like that kind of disruptive asshole in public, insult me, and jeopardize the interests of our entire tribe, I'll take it just as personally and I will find a way to make you regret it. Watch your step." + +This note rattled Perens, so he started sending copies around the Net. Then he got serious and called the police. Officially, he was publicizing the disagreement to preserve his health because Raymond is quite vocal about his support for the second amendment. Therefore the phrase "Watch your step" should be taken as a veiled threat of violence. + +Perens defended his decision to call the police and told me afterward, +"When I don't like something, I write about it. Well, gee, maybe Eric was threatening to just write about me. In the signature at the bottom of the page was a Thomas Jefferson quote, which claimed the pistol was the best form of exercise. The next day, Perens decided that he was overreacting a bit and posted a new note: "Eric says he only meant to threaten me with 'defamation of character,' not with any kind of violence. Thus, I think I'll just let this issue drop now." + +When I asked him about the matter several months later after tempers had cooled, Raymond said that the disagreement began several months before the Apple event when Perens and Raymond clashed over whether the book publisher O'Reilly should be allowed to use the term "open source" in the name of their conference. "He was *flaming*, and not the initiative itself but a critical supporter," says Raymond. + +"Sometime back I had to accept Bruce's resignation from the OSI because he was flaming public allies on a mailing list. If you're going to go public, you can't run your mouth like a rabid attack dog. When the APSL [Apple Public Source License] came along, he convinced people that everybody should go mug Eric and the OSI," Raymond said. It caused more grief. + +Perens, for his part, said, "I was disappointed in Eric because certainly open source is about freedom of speech. He should be able to tolerate a dissenting voice. The entire argument was about my not deferring to his leadership. He felt that my dissent was damaging. The actual result was that Apple took my criticism seriously and took all of the suggestions." + +Raymond is still critical. He says, "Apple was more diplomatic to Bruce in public than they should have been. The truth is that his meddling got the people inside Apple who were pushing open source into considerable political trouble, and they considered him a disruptive asshole. Their bosses wanted to know, quite reasonably, why Apple should bother trying to do an open source license if all it meant was that they'd be attacked by every flake case with an agenda. By undermining OSI's status as trusted representatives of the whole community, Bruce nearly scuttled the whole process." + +For now, the two work apart. Perens says he'll make up with Raymond, but doesn't see it happening too soon. Raymond is happy to focus on the future of open source and write more analysis of the movement. They've been separated, and the tempers are cool. + +Giving away software seems like an entirely altruistic act. Writing code is hard work, and simply casting it onto the net with no restrictions is a pretty nice gift outright, especially if the code took months or years to write. This image of selflessness is so strong that many people assume that the free software world is inhabited by saints who are constantly doing nice things for each other. It seems like a big love-in. + +But love is more than a many splendored thing. It's a strange commodity that binds us together emotionally in ways that run deeper than placid pools reflecting starry eyes. After the flush of infatuation, strong love lasts if and only if it answers everyone's needs. The hippie culture of free love lasted only a few years, but the institution of marriage continues to live on despite the battle scars and wounds that are almost mortal. Half may fail, but half succeed. + +The free software community also flourishes by creating a strong, transcendent version of love and binding it with a legal document that sets out the rules of the compact. Stallman wrote his first copyleft virus more than 15 years before this book began, and the movement is just beginning to gain real strength. The free software world isn't just a groovy love nest, it's a good example of how strong fences, freedom, and mutual respect can build strong relationships. + +The important thing to realize is that free software people aren't any closer to being saints than the folks in the proprietary software companies. They're just as given to emotion, greed, and the lust for power. It's just that the free software rules tend to restrain their worst instincts and prevent them from acting upon them. + +The rules are often quite necessary. E-mail and the news services give people the ability to vent their anger quickly. Many of the programmers are very proficient writers, so they can tear each other apart with verbal scalpels. The free source world is cut up into hundreds if not thousands of political camps and many dislike each other immensely. One group begged with me not to ask them questions about another group because just hearing someone's name brought up terrible memories of pain and discord. + +Despite these quick-raging arguments, despite the powerful disagreements, despite the personal animosities, the principles of the public licenses keep everything running smoothly. The people are just as human as the rats running around in the maze of the proprietary software business, but the license keeps them in line. + +The various public licenses counter human behavior in two key ways. First, they encourage debate by making everyone a principal in the project. Everyone has a right to read, change, and of course make comments about the software. Making everything available opens the doors for discussion, and discussion usually leads to arguments. + +But when the arguments come to blows, as they often do, the second effect of free source licenses kicks in and moderates the fallout by treating everyone equally. If Bob and John don't like each other, then there's still nothing they can do to stop each other from working on the project. The code is freely available to all and shutting off the distribution to your enemy just isn't allowed. You can't shut out anyone, even someone you hate. + +Anyone familiar with corporate politics should immediately see the difference. Keeping rivals in the dark is just standard practice in a corporation. Information is a powerful commodity, and folks competing for the same budget will use it to the best of their ability. Bosses often move to keep their workers locked away from other groups to keep some control over the flow of information. + +Retribution is also common in the corporate world. Many managers quickly develop enemies in the ranks, and the groups constantly spend time sabotaging projects. Requests will be answered quickly or slowly depending on who makes them. Work will be done or put off depending on which division is asking for it to be done. Managers will often complain that their job is keeping their underlings from killing each other and then turn around and start battling the other managers at their level. + +The people in the free source world aren't any nicer than the people in the corporate cubicle farms, but their powers of secrecy and retribution are severely limited. The GNU General Public License requires that anyone who makes changes to a program and then releases the program must also release the source code to the world. No shutting off your enemies allowed. + +This effect could be called a number of different things. It isn't much different from the mutual disarmament treaties signed by nations. Athletic teams strive for this sort of pure focus when they hire referees to make the tough calls and keep everyone playing by the same rules. The government sometimes tries to enforce some discipline in the free market through regulation. + +Now, compare this disarmament with a story about the poor folks who stayed behind at the Hotmail website after Microsoft bought them. It's really just one of a million stories about corporate politics. The workers at Hotmail went from being supreme lords of their Hotmail domain to soldiers in the Microsoft army. Their decisions needed to further Microsoft's relentless growth in wealth, not the good of the Hotmail site. This probably didn't really bother the Hotmail people as much as the fact that the people at Microsoft couldn't decide what they wanted from Hotmail. + +Robert X. Cringely described the situation in an article in PBS Online, and he quoted one Hotmail worker as saying, "They send a new top-level group down to see us every week, yet it really means nothing. The plan is constantly changing. Today Hotmail is primarily a way of shoveling new users into the MSN portal. We had for a short time a feature called Centerpoint for communicating directly with our users, but that was killed as a possible competitor with the MSN portal. No new features could be added because the Outlook Express team saw us as competition and sabotaged everything." + +Cringely explained the corporate friction and gridlock this way: + +_1 "What Hotmail learned is that at Microsoft almost anyone can say 'no,' but hardly anyone can say 'yes.' The way it specifically works at Microsoft is that everyone says 'no' to anyone below them on the organizational structure or on the same level, and 'yes' to anyone above. Since the vertical lines of authority are narrow this means people tend to agree only with their bosses and their boss's boss and try to kick and gouge everyone else." + +The free software world, of course, removes these barriers. If the Hotmail folks had joined the Linux team instead of Microsoft, they would be free to do whatever they wanted with their website even if it annoyed Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and the pope. They wouldn't be rich, but there's always a price. + +Using the word "love" is a bit dangerous because the word manages to include the head-over-heels infatuation of teenagers and the affection people feel for a new car or a restaurant's food. The love that's embodied by the GPL, on the other hand, isn't anywhere near as much fun and it isn't particularly noteworthy. It just encompasses the mutual responsibility and respect that mature folks occasionally feel for each other. It's St. Paul's version of unconditional, everlasting love, not the pangs of desire that kept St. Augustine up late in his youth. + +Anyone who has spent time in the trenches in a corporate cubicle farm knows how wasteful the battles between groups and divisions can be. While the competition can sometimes produce healthy rivalries, it often just promotes discord. Any veteran of these wars should see the immediate value of disarmament treaties like the GPL. They permit healthy rivalries to continue while preventing secrecy and selfishness from erupting. The free source movement may not have money to move mountains, but it does have this love. + +This love also has a more traditional effect on the hackers who create the free source code. They do it because they love what they're doing. Many of the people in the free source movement are motivated by writing great software, and they judge their success by the recognition they get from equally talented peers. A "nice job" from the right person--like Richard Stallman, Alan Cox, or Linus Torvalds--can be worth more than $100,000 for some folks. It's a strange way to keep score, but for most of the programmers in the free source world it's more of a challenge than money. Any schmoe in Silicon Valley can make a couple of million dollars, but only a few select folks can rewrite the network interface code of the Linux kernel to improve the throughput of the Apache server by 20 percent. + +Keeping score by counting the number of people who dig your work is a strange system, but one that offers the same incentives as business. A good store doesn't insult people who could be repeat customers. A good free software project doesn't insult people who have a choice of which package to use. A good businessman makes it easy for people to get to the store, park, and make a purchase. A good free software project makes it simple for people to download the code, compile it, modify it, understand it, and use it. + +There's even some research to support the notion that rewards can diminish the creativity of people. Stallman likes to circulate a 1987 article from the Boston Globe that describes a number of different scientific experiments that show how people who get paid are less creative than those who produce things from their love of the art. The studies evaluated the success of poets, artists, and teachers who did their job for the fun of it and compared it with those who were rewarded for their efforts. In many cases, these were short-bounded exercises that could be evaluated fairly easily. + +One scientist, Theresa Amabile, told the Globe that her work "definitely refutes the notion that creativity can be operantly conditioned." +That is, you can't turn it on by just pouring some money on it. Many free software folks point out that this is why the free source movement is just as likely to succeed as a massively funded corporate juggernaut. + +Many people don't need scientists to tell them that you can't throw money at many problems and expect them to go away. This is a hard lesson that managers and businesses learn quickly. But this doesn't mean that the lack of money means that the free source movement will beat the thousands of shackled programmers in their corporate rabbit hutches. These studies just measured "creativity" and found that the unpaid folks were more "creative." That's not necessarily a compliment. In fact, the word is often used as a euphemism for "strange," "weird," or just plain "bad." It's more often a measure of just how different something is instead of how good it is. Would you rather eat at the house of a creative chef or a good chef? + +This love of creativity can be a problem for the free source world. Most people don't want to use a creative spreadsheet to do their accounting--it could get them in trouble with the SEC or the IRS. They want a solid team player for many of their jobs, not a way cool creative one. + +The free source world is often seen as too artistic and temperamental to undertake the long, arduous task of creating good, solid software that solves the jobs of banks, pharmacies, airlines, and everyone else. Many of these tasks are both mind-numbingly boring and difficult to do. While they just involve adding a few numbers and matching up some data, the tasks have to be done right or airplanes will crash. The free source world can't rely on love or creativity to motivate people to take on these tasks. The only solution might be money. + +Of course, it's important to recognize that even seemingly boring jobs can have very creative solutions. Stallman's GNU Emacs is a fascinating and over-the-top, creative solution to the simple job of manipulating text. Word processors and text editors might not be that exciting anymore, but finding creative ways to accomplish the task is still possible. + +1~ Corporations + +Many movies about teenagers follow a time-proven formula: once the magic summer is over, the gang is going to split up and it will never be the same again. Bob's going to college; Rick is getting married; and Harry is going to be stuck in the old town forever. Right now, the free software world is playing out the same emotions and dramas as the greater world discovers open source software. In the fall, the corporations are coming and the old, cool world of late-night hackfests fueled by pizza and Jolt are in danger. Some people in the realm of free source software are going to grow up, get educated, and join the establishment; +some will get married; and some will get left behind wondering why the old game isn't as cool anymore. + +The free source world is suffering from an acute case of success. Many of the great projects like Apache and Sendmail are growing up and being taken over by corporations with balance sheets. Well, not exactly taken over, but the corporations will exist and they'll try to shepherd development. Other corporations like Apple, Sun, and Netscape are experimenting with open source licenses and trying to make money while sharing code. Some quaint open source companies like Red Hat are growing wealthy by floating IPOs to raise some money and maybe buy a few Porsches for their stakeholders. There's a lot of coming of age going on. + +On the face of it, none of this rampant corporatization should scare the guys who built the free software world in their spare cycles. The corporations are coming to free source because it's a success. They want to grab some of the open software mojo and use it to drive their own companies. The suits on the plane are all tuning into Slashdot, buying T-shirts, and reading Eric Raymond's essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" in the hopes of glomming on to a great idea. The suits have given up their usual quid pro quo: be a good nerd, keep the code running, and we'll let you wear a T-shirt in your basement office. Now they want to try to move in and live the life, too. If Eric Raymond were selling Kool-Aid, they would be fighting to drink it. + +The talk is serious, and it's affecting many of the old-line companies as well. Netscape started the game by releasing the source code to a development version of their browser in March of 1998. Apple and Sun followed and began giving away the source code to part of their OS. Of course, Apple got part of the core of their OS from the open source world, but that's sort of beside the point. They're still sharing some of their new, Apple-only code. Some, not all. But that's a lot more than they shared before. Sun is even sharing the source code to their Java system. If you sign the right papers or click the right buttons, you can download the code right now. Its license is more restrictive, but they're joining the club, getting religion, and hopping on the bandwagon. + +Most of the true devotees are nervous about all of this attention. The free software world was easy to understand when it was just late-night hackfests and endless railing against AT&T and UNIX. It was simple when it was just messing around with grungy code that did way cool things. It was a great, he-man, Windoze-hating clubhouse back then. + +Well, the truth is that some of the free software world is going to go off to college, graduate with a business degree, and turn respectable. Eric Allman, for instance, is trying to build a commercial version of his popular free package Sendmail. The free version will still be free, but you can get a nicer interface and some cooler features for managing accounts if you buy in. If things work out, some of the folks with the free version will want all of the extra features he's tacking on and they'll pay him. No one knows what this will do to the long-term development of Sendmail, of course. Will he only make new improvements in the proprietary code? Will other folks stop contributing to the project because they see a company involved? There's some evidence that Allman's not the same guy who hung around the pizza joint. When I contacted him for an interview, he passed me along to his public relations expert, who wrote back wanting to "make sure this is a profitable way to spend Eric's time." For all we know, Eric may have even been wearing a suit when he hired a corporate PR team. + +Some of the other free software folks are going to get married. The Apache group has leveraged its success with small server organizations into connections with the best companies selling high-powered products. IBM is now a firm supporter of Apache, and they run it on many of their systems. Brian Behlendorf still schedules his own appointments, jokes often, and speaks freely about his vision for Apache, but he's as serious as any married man with several kids to support. It's not just about serving up a few web pages filled with song lyrics or Star Wars trivia. People are using Apache for business--serious business. There can still be fun, but Apache needs to be even more certain that they're not screwing up. + +And of course there are thousands of free software projects that are going to get left behind hanging out at the same old pizza joint. There were always going to be thousands left behind. People get excited about new projects, better protocols, and neater code all the time. The old code just sort of withers away. Occasionally someone rediscovers it, but it is usually just forgotten and superseded. But this natural evolution wasn't painful until the successful projects started ending up on the covers of magazines and generating million-dollar deals with venture capitalists. People will always be wondering why their project isn't as big as Linux. + +There will also be thousands of almost great projects that just sail on being almost great. All of the distributions come with lots of programs that do some neat things. But there's no way that the spotlight can be bright enough to cover them all. There will be only one Torvalds and everyone is just going to be happy that he's so gracious when he reminds the adoring press that most of the work was done by thousands of other nameless folks. + +Most of the teen movies don't bother trying to figure out what happens after that last fateful summer. It's just better to end the movie with a dramatic race or stage show that crystallizes all the unity and passion that built up among this group during their formative years. They sing, they dance, they win the big game, they go to the prom, and then cameras love to freeze the moment at the end of the film. The free software movement, on the other hand, is just too important and powerful to stop this book on a climactic note. It would be fun to just pause the book at the moment in time when Linus Torvalds and Bob Young were all over the magazines. Their big show was a success, but the real question is what will happen when some folks go to school, some folks get married, and some folks are left behind. + +To some extent, the influx of money and corporations is old news. Very old news. Richard Stallman faced the same problem in the 1980s when he realized that he needed to find a way to live without a university paycheck. He came up with the clever notion that the software and the source must always be free, but that anyone could charge whatever the market would bear for the copies. The Free Software Foundation itself continues to fund much of its development by creating and selling both CD-ROMs and printed manuals. + +This decision to welcome money into the fold didn't wreck free software. If anything, it made it possible for companies like Red Hat to emerge and sell easier-to-use versions of the free software. The companies competed to put out the best distributions and didn't use copyright and other intellectual property laws to constrain each other. This helped attract more good programmers to the realm because most folks would rather spend their time writing code than juggling drivers on their machine. Good distributions like Red Hat, Slackware, Debian, FreeBSD, and SuSE made it possible for everyone to get their machines up and running faster. + +There's no reason why the latest push into the mainstream is going to be any different. Sure, Red Hat is charging more and creating better packages, but most of the distribution is still governed by the GPL. Whenever people complain that Red Hat costs too much, Bob Young just points people to the companies that rip off his CDs and charge only $2 or $3 per copy. The GPL keeps many people from straying too far from the ideal. + +The source is also still available. Sure, the corporate suits can come in, cut deals, issue press releases, raise venture capital, and do some IPOs, but that doesn't change the fact that the source code is now widely distributed. Wasn't that the goal of Stallman's revolution? Didn't he want to be able to get at the guts of software and fix it? The source is now more omnipresent than ever. The corporations are practically begging folks to download it and send in bug fixes. + +Of course, access to the source was only half of Stallman's battle. A cynic might growl that the corporations seem to be begging folks to do their research, testing, and development work for them. They're looking for free beers. Stallman wanted freedom to do whatever he wanted with the source and many of the companies aren't ready to throw away all of their control. + +Apple sells its brand, and it was careful not to open up the source code to its classic desktop interface. They kept that locked away. Most of the source code that Apple released is from its next version of the operating system, Mac OS X, which came from the folks at NeXT when Apple acquired that company. Where did that code come from? +Large portions came from the various free versions of BSD like NetBSD or Mach. It's easy to be generous when you only wrote a fraction of the code. + +Ernest Prabhakar, the project manager for Apple's first open source effort known as Darwin, describes the tack he took to get Apple's management to embrace this small core version of the BSD operating system tuned to the Macintosh hardware platform. + +"The first catalysts were the universities. There were a lot of universities like MIT and University of Michigan that had some specialized network infrastructure needs," he said. + +"We realized that the pieces they're most interested in are the most commoditized. There wasn't really any proprietary technology added that we had to worry about them copying. There are people who know them better than we do like the BSD community. We started making the case, if we really want to partner with the universities we should just open the source code and release it as a complete BSD-style operating system. + +"We wanted people to use this in classes, really embed it in the whole educational process without constraining teaching to fit some corporate model," he finishes. + +Of course, Prabhakar suggests that there is some self-interest as well. Apple wants to be a full partner with the BSD community. It wants the code it shares to mingle and cross-pollinate with the code from the BSD trees. In the long run, Apple's Darwin and the BSDs will grow closer together. In an ideal world, both groups will flourish as they avoid duplicating each other's efforts. + +Prabhakar says, "This reduces our reintegration costs. The ability to take the standard version of FreeBSD and dump it into our OS was a big win. Prior to doing the open source, we had done a small scale of givebacks." + +This view is echoed by other companies. IBM is a great hardware company and an even greater service company that's never had much luck selling software, at least in the same way that Microsoft sells software. Their OS/2 never got far off the ground. They've sold plenty of software to companies by bundling it with handholding and long-term service, but they've never had great success in the shrink-wrapped software business. Open source gives them the opportunity to cut software development costs and concentrate on providing service and hardware. They get free development help from everyone and the customers get more flexibility. + +Sun's Community Source License is also not without some self-interest. The company would like to make sure that Java continues to be "Write Once, Run Anywhere," and that means carefully controlling the APIs and the code to make sure no idiosyncrasies or other glitches emerge. People and companies that want to be part of the community must abide by Sun's fairly generous, but not complete, gift to the world. + +The company's web page points out the restriction Sun places on its source code fairly clearly. "Modified source code cannot be distributed without the express written permission of Sun" and "Binary programs built using modified Java 2 SDK source code may not be distributed, internally or externally, without meeting the compatibility and royalty requirements described in the License Agreement." + +While some see this clause as a pair of manacles, Bill Joy explains that the Community Source License is closer to our definition of a real community. "It's a community in a stronger sense," he told an audience at Stanford. "If you make improvements, you can own them." After you negotiate a license with Sun, you can sell them. Joy also points out that Sun's license does require some of the GNU-like sharing by requiring everyone to report bugs. + +Some customers may like a dictator demanding complete obeisance to Sun's definition of Java, but some users are chaffing a bit. The freedom to look at the code isn't enough. They want the freedom to add their own features that are best tuned to their own needs, a process that may start to Balkanize the realm by creating more and more slightly different versions of Java. Sun clearly worries that the benefits of all this tuning aren't worth living through the cacophony of having thousands of slightly different versions. Releasing the source code allows all of the users to see more information about the structure of Sun's Java and helps them work off the same page. This is still a great use of the source code, but it isn't as free as the use imagined by Stallman. + +Alan Baratz, the former president of Sun's Java division, says that their Community Source License has been a large success. Sure, some folks would like the ability to take the code and fork off their own versions as they might be able to do with software protected by a BSD- or GNU-style license, but Java developers really want the assurance that it's all compatible. As many said, "Microsoft wanted to fork Java so it could destroy it." + +Baratz said, "We now have forty thousand community source licensees. The developers and the systems builders and the users all want the branded Java technology. They want to know that all of the apps are going to be there. That's the number-one reason that developers are writing to the platform." Their more restrictive license may not make Stallman and other free software devotees happy, but at least Java will run everywhere. + +Maybe in this case, the quality and strength of the unity Sun brings to the marketplace is more important than the complete freedom to do whatever you want. There are already several Java clones available, like Kaffe. They were created without the help of Sun, so their creators aren't bound by Sun's licenses. But they also go out of their way to avoid splitting with Sun. Tim Wilkinson, the CEO of Transvirtual, the creators of Kaffe, says that he plans to continue to make Kaffe 100 percent Java compatible without paying royalties or abiding by the Community Source License. If his project or other similar ones continue to thrive and grow, then people will know that the freedom of open source can be as important as blind allegiance to Sun. + +These corporate efforts are largely welcomed by the open source world, but the welcome does not come with open arms or a great deal of warmth. + +Source code with some restrictions is generally better than no source at all, but there is still a great deal of suspicion. Theo de Raadt, the leader of the OpenBSD project, says, "Is that free? We will not look at Apple source code because we'll have contaminated ourselves." De Raadt is probably overreacting, but he may have reason to worry. AT&T's USL tied up the BSD project for more than a year with a lawsuit that it eventually lost. Who knows what Apple could do to the folks at OpenBSD if there were a some debate over whether some code should be constrained by the Apple license? It's just easier for everyone at OpenBSD to avoid looking at the Apple code so they can be sure that the Apple license won't give some lawyers a toehold on OpenBSD's code base. + +Richard Stallman says, "Sun wants to be thought of as having joined our club, without paying the dues or complying with the public service requirements. They want the users to settle for the fragments of freedom Sun will let them have." + +He continues, "Sun has intentionally rejected the free software community by using a license that is much too restrictive. You are not allowed to redistribute modified versions of Sun's Java software. It is not free software." + +2~ Fat Cats and Alley Cats + +The corporations could also sow discord and grief by creating two different classes: the haves and the have-nots. The people who work at the company and draw a salary would get paid for working on the software while others would get a cheery grin and some thanks. Everyone's code would still be free, but some of the contributors might get much more than others. In the past, everyone was just hanging out on the Net and adding their contributions because it was fun. + +This split is already growing. Red Hat software employs some of the major Linux contributors like Alan Cox. They get a salary while the rest of the contributors get nothing. Sun, Apple, and IBM employees get salaries, but folks who work on Apache or the open versions of BSD get nothing but the opportunity to hack cool code. + +One employee from Microsoft, who spoke on background, predicted complete and utter disaster. "Those folks are going to see the guys from Red Hat driving around in the Porsches and they're just going to quit writing code. Why help someone else get rich?" he said. I pointed out that jealousy wasn't just a problem for free software projects. Didn't many contract employees from Microsoft gather together and sue to receive stock options? Weren't they locked out, too? + +Still, he raises an interesting point. Getting people to join together for the sake of a group is easy to do when no one is getting rich. What will happen when more money starts pouring into some folks' pockets? +Will people defect? Will they stop contributing? + +Naysayers are quick to point to experiments like Netscape's Mozilla project, which distributed the source code to the next generation of its browser. The project received plenty of hype because it was the first big open source project created by a major company. They set up their own website and built serious tools for keeping track of bugs. Still, the project has not generated any great browser that would allow it to be deemed a success. At this writing, about 15 months after the release, they're still circulating better and better beta versions, but none are as complete or feature-rich as the regular version of Netscape, which remains proprietary.~{ At this writing, version M13 of Mozilla looks very impressive. It's getting quite close to the proprietary version of Netscape. }~ + +The naysayers like to point out that Netscape never really got much outside help on the Mozilla project. Many of the project's core group were Netscape employees and most of the work was done by Netscape employees. There were some shining examples like Jim Clark (no relation to the founder of Netscape with the same name), who contributed an entire XML parser to the project. David Baron began hacking and testing the Mozilla code when he was a freshman at Harvard. But beyond that, there was no great groundswell of enthusiasm. The masses didn't rise up and write hundreds of thousands of lines of code and save Netscape. + +But it's just as easy to cast the project as a success. Mozilla was the first big corporate-sponsored project. Nothing came before it, so it isn't possible to compare it with anything. It is both the best and the worst example. The civilian devotees could just as well be said to have broken the world record for source code contributed to a semi-commercial project. Yes, most of the work was officially done by Netscape employees, but how do you measure work? Many programmers think a good bug report is more valuable than a thousand lines of code. Sure, some folks like Baron spend most of their time testing the source code and looking for incompatibilities, but that's still very valuable. He might not have added new code himself, but his insight may be worth much more to the folks who eventually rely on the product to be bug-free. + +It's also important to measure the scope of the project. Mozilla set out to rewrite most of the Netscape code. In the early days, Netscape grew by leaps and bounds as the company struggled to add more and more features to keep ahead of Microsoft. The company often didn't have the time to rebuild and reengineer the product, and many of the new features were not added in the best possible way. The Mozilla team started off by trying to rebuild the code and put it on a stable foundation for the future. This hard-core, structural work often isn't as dramatic. Casual observers just note that the Mozilla browser doesn't have as many features as plain old Netscape. They don't realize that it's completely redesigned inside. + +Jeff Bates, an editor at Slashdot, says that Mozilla may have suffered because Netscape was so successful. The Netscape browser was already available for free for Linux. "There wasn't a big itch to scratch," he says. +"We already had Netscape, which was fine for most people. This project interested a smaller group than if we'd not had Netscape-hence why it didn't get as much attention." + +The experiences at other companies like Apple and Sun have been more muted. These two companies also released the source code to their major products, but they did not frame the releases as big barn-raising projects where all of the users would rise up and do the development work for the company. Some people portrayed the Mozilla project as a bit of a failure because Netscape employees continued to do the bulk of code writing. Apple and Sun have done a better job emphasizing the value of having the source available while avoiding the impossible dream of getting the folks who buy the computers to write the OS, too. + +Not all interactions between open source projects and corporations involve corporations releasing their source code under a new open source license. Much more code flows from the open source community into corporations. Free things are just as tempting to companies as to people. + +In most cases, the flow is not particularly novel. The companies just choose FreeBSD or some version of Linux for their machines like any normal human being. Many web companies use a free OS like Linux or FreeBSD because they're both cheap and reliable. This is going to grow much more common as companies realize they can save a substantial amount of money over buying seat licenses from companies like Microsoft. + +In some cases, the interactions between the open source realm and the corporate cubicle farm become fairly novel. When the Apache web server grew popular, the developers at IBM recognized that they had an interesting opportunity at hand. If IBM could get the Apache server to work on its platforms, it might sell more machines. Apache was growing more common, and common software often sold machines. When people came looking for a new web server, the IBM salesmen thought it might be nice to offer something that was well known. + +Apache's license is pretty loose. IBM could have taken the Apache code, added some modifications, and simply released it under their own name. The license only required that IBM give some credit by saying the version was derived from Apache itself. This isn't hard to do when you're getting something for free. + +Other companies have done the same thing. Brian Behlendorf, one of the Apache core group, says, "There's a company that's taken the Apache code and ported it to Mac. They didn't contribute anything back to the Apache group, but it didn't really hurt us to do that." He suggested that the karma came back to haunt them because Apple began releasing their own version of Apache with the new OS, effectively limiting the company's market. + +IBM is, of course, an old master at creating smooth relationships with customers and suppliers. They chose to build a deeper relationship with Apache by hiring one of the core developers, Ken Coar, and paying him to keep everyone happy. + +"My job is multifaceted," says Coar. "I don't work on the IBM addedvalue stuff. I work on the base Apache code on whatever platforms are available to me. I serve as a liaison between IBM and the Apache group, basically advising IBM on whether the things that they want to do are appropriate. It's an interesting yet unique role. All of my code makes it back into the base Apache code." + +Coar ended up with the job because he helped IBM and Apache negotiate the original relationship. He said there was a considerable amount of uncertainty on both sides. IBM wondered how they could get something without paying for it, and Apache wondered whether IBM would come in and simply absorb Apache. + +"There were questions about it from the Apache side that any sort of IBM partnership would make it seem as if IBM had acquired Apache. It was something that Apache didn't want to see happen or seem to see happen," Coar said. + +Today, Coar says IBM tries to participate in the Apache project as a peer. Some of the code IBM develops will flow into the group and other bits may remain proprietary. When the Apache group incorporated, Coar and another IBM employee, Ken Stoddard, were members. This sort of long-term involvement can help ensure that the Apache group doesn't start developing the server in ways that will hurt its performance on IBM's machine. If you pay several guys who contribute frequently to the project, you can be certain that your needs will be heard by the group. It doesn't guarantee anything, but it can buy a substantial amount of goodwill. + +Of course, it's important to realize that the Apache group was always fairly business-oriented. Many of the original developers ran web servers and wanted access to the source code. They made money by selling the service of maintaining a website to the customers, not a shrink-wrapped copy of Apache itself. The deal with IBM didn't mean that Apache changed many of its ways; it just started working with some bigger fish. + +At first glance, each of these examples doesn't really suggest that the coming of the corporations is going to change much in the free source world. Many of the changes were made long ago when people realized that some money flowing around made the free software world a much better place. The strongest principles still survive: (1) hackers thrive when the source code is available, and (2) people can create their own versions at will. + +The arrival of companies like IBM doesn't change this. The core Apache code is still available and still running smoothly. The modules still plug in and work well. There's no code that requires IBM hardware to run and the committee seems determined to make sure that any IBM takeover doesn't occur. In fact, it still seems to be in everyone's best interest to keep the old development model. The marketplace loves standards, and IBM could sell many machines just offering a standard version of Apache. When the customers walk in looking for a web server, IBM's sales force can just say "This little baby handles X billion hits a day and it runs the industry-leading Apache server." IBM's arrival isn't much different from the arrival of a straightlaced, no-nonsense guy who strolls in from the Net and wants to contribute to Apache so he can get ahead in his job as a webmaster. In this case, it's just a corporation, not a person. + +Many suggest that IBM will gradually try to absorb more and more control over Apache because that's what corporations do. They generate inscrutable contracts and unleash armies of lawyers. This view is shortsighted because it ignores how much IBM gains by maintaining an arm'slength relationship. If Apache is a general program used on machines throughout the industry, then IBM doesn't need to educate customers on how to use it. Many of them learned in college or in their spare time on their home machines. Many of them read books published by third parties, and some took courses offered by others. IBM is effectively offloading much of its education and support costs onto a marketplace of third-party providers. + +Would IBM be happier if Apache was both the leading product in the market and completely owned by IBM? Sure, but that's not how it turned out. IBM designed the PC, but they couldn't push OS/2 on everyone. They can make great computers, however, and that's not a bad business to be in. At least Apache isn't controlled by anyone else, and that makes the compromise pretty easy on the ego. + +Some worry that there's a greater question left unanswered by the arrival of corporations. In the past, there was a general link between the creator of a product and the consumer. If the creator didn't do a good job, then the consumer could punish the creator by not buying another version. This marketplace would ensure that only the best survived. + +Patrick Reilly writes, "In a free market, identifiable manufacturers own the product. They are responsible for product performance, and they can be held liable for inexcusable flaws." + +What happens if a bug emerges in some version of the Linux kernel and it makes it into several distributions? It's not really the fault of the distribution creators, because they were just shipping the latest version of the kernel. And it's not really the kernel creators' fault, because they weren't marketing the kernel as ready for everyone to run. They were just floating some cool software on the Net for free. Who's responsible for the bug? Who gets sued? + +Reilly takes the scenario even further. Imagine that one clever distribution company finds a fix for the bug and puts it into their distribution. They get no long-term reward because any of the other distribution companies can come along and grab the bug fix. + +He writes, "Consumers concerned about software compatibility would probably purchase the standard versions. But companies would lose profit as other consumers would freely download improved versions of the software from the Internet. Eventually the companies would suffer from widespread confusion over the wide variety of software versions of each product, including standard versions pirated by profiteers." + +There's no doubt that Reilly points toward a true breakdown in the feedback loop that is supposed to keep free markets honest and efficient. Brand names are important, and the free source world is a pretty confusing stew of brand names. + +But he also overestimates the quality of the software emerging from proprietary companies that can supposedly be punished by the marketplace. Many users complain frequently about bugs that never get fixed in proprietary code, in part because the proprietary companies are frantically trying to glom on more features so they can convince more people to buy another version of the software. Bugs don't always get fixed in the proprietary model, either. + +Richard Stallman understands Reilly's point, but he suggests that the facts don't bear him out. If this feedback loop is so important, why do so many people brag about free software's reliability? + +Stallman says, "He has pointed out a theoretical problem, but if you look at the empirical facts, we do not have a real problem. So it is only a problem for the theory, not a problem for the users. Economists may have a challenge explaining why we DO produce such reliable software, but users have no reason to worry." + +2~ The Return of the Hardware Kings + +The biggest effect of the free software revolution may be to shift the power between the hardware and software companies. The biggest corporate proponents of open source are IBM, Apple, Netscape/AOL, Sun, and Hewlett-Packard. All except Netscape are major hardware companies that watched Microsoft turn the PC world into a software monopoly that ruled a commodity hardware business. + +Free source code changes the equation and shifts power away from software companies like Microsoft. IBM and Hewlett-Packard are no longer as beholden to Microsoft if they can ship machines running a free OS. Apple is borrowing open source software and using it for the core of their new OS. These companies know that the customers come to them looking for a computer that works nicely when it comes from the factory. Who cares whether the software is free or not? If it does what the customer wants, then they can make their money on hardware. + +The free software movement pushes software into the public realm, and this makes it easier for the hardware companies to operate. Car companies don't sit around and argue about who owns the locations of the pedals or the position of the dials on the dashboard. Those notions and design solutions are freely available to all car companies equally. The lawyers don't need to get involved in that level of car creation. + +Of course, the free software movement could lead to more consolidation in the hardware business. The car business coalesced over the years because the large companies were able to use their economies of scale to push out the small companies. No one had dominion over the idea of putting four wheels on a car or building an engine with pistons, so the most efficient companies grew big. + +This is also a threat for the computer business. Microsoft licensed their OS to all companies, big or small, that were willing to prostrate themselves before the master. It was in Microsoft's best interests to foster free competition between the computer companies. Free software takes this one step further. If no company has control over the dominant OS, then competition will shift to the most efficient producers. The same forces that brought GM to the center of the car industry could help aggregate the hardware business. + +This vision would be more worrisome if it hadn't happened already. Intel dominates the market for CPU chips and takes home the lion's share of the price of a PC. The marketplace already chose a winner of that battle. Now, free software could unshackle Intel from its need to maintain a partnership with Microsoft by making Intel stronger. + +Of course, the free OSs could also weaken Intel by opening it up to competition. Windows 3.1, 95, and 98 always ran only on Intel platforms. This made it easier for Intel to dominate the PC world because the OS that was most in demand would only run on Intel or Intel compatible chips. Microsoft made some attempt to break out of this tight partnership by creating versions of Windows NT that ran on the Alpha chip, but these were never an important part of the market. + +The free OS also puts Intel's lion's share up for grabs. Linux runs well on Intel chips, but it also runs on chips made by IBM, Motorola, Compaq, and many others. The NetBSD team loves to brag that its software runs on almost all platforms available and is dedicated to porting it to as many as possible. Someone using Linux or NetBSD doesn't care who made the chip inside because the OS behaves similarly on all of them. + +Free source code also threatens one of the traditional ways computer manufacturers differentiated their products. The Apple Macintosh lost market share and potential customers because it was said that there wasn't much software available for it. The software written for the PC would run on the Mac only using a slow program that converted it. Now, if everyone has access to the source code, they can convert the software to run on their machine. In many cases, it's as simple as just recompiling it, a step that takes less than a minute. Someone using an Amiga version of NetBSD could take software running on an Intel chip version and recompile it. + +This threat shows that the emergence of the free OSs ensures that hardware companies will also face increased competitive pressure. Sure, they may be able to get Microsoft off their back, but Linux may make things a bit worse. + +In the end, the coming of age of free software may be just as big a threat to the old way of life for corporations as it is to the free software community. Sure, the hackers will lose the easy camaraderie of swapping code with others, but the corporations will need to learn to live without complete control. Software companies will be under increasing pressure from free versions, and hardware companies will be shocked to discover that their product will become more of a commodity than it was before. Everyone is going to have to find a way to compete and pay the rent when much of the intellectual property is free. + +These are big changes that affect big players. But what will the changes mean to the programmers who stay up late spinning mountains of code? Will they be disenfranchised? Will they quit in despair? Will they move on to open source experiments on the human genome? + +"The money flowing in won't turn people off or break up the community, and here's why," says Eric Raymond. "The demand for programmers has been so high for the last decade that anyone who really cared about money is already gone. We've been selected for artistic passion." + +1~ Money + +Everyone who's made it past high school knows that money changes everything. Jobs disappear, love crumbles, and wars begin when money gets tight. Of course, a good number of free source believers aren't out of high school, but they'll figure this out soon enough. Money is just the way that we pay for things we need like food, clothing, housing, and of course newer, bigger, and faster computers. + +The concept of money has always been the Achilles heel of the free software world. Everyone quickly realizes the advantages of sharing the source code with everyone else. As they say in the software business, "It's a no-brainer." But figuring out a way to keep the fridge stocked with Jolt Cola confounds some of the best advocates for free software. + +Stallman carefully tried to spell out his solution in the GNU Manifesto. He wrote, "There's nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today are based on destruction. + +"Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the way that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction." + +At first glance, Richard Stallman doesn't have to worry too much about making ends meet. MIT gave him an office. He got a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Companies pay him to help port his free software to their platforms. His golden reputation combined with a frugal lifestyle means that he can support himself with two months of paid work a year. The rest of the time he donates to the Free Software Foundation. It's not in the same league as running Microsoft, but he gets by. + +Still, Stallman's existence is far from certain. He had to work hard to develop the funding lines he has. In order to avoid any conflicts of interest, the Free Software Foundation doesn't pay Stallman a salary or cover his travel expenses. He says that getting paid by corporations to port software helped make ends meet, but it didn't help create new software. Stallman works hard to raise new funds for the FSF, and the money goes right out the door to pay programmers on new projects. This daily struggle for some form of income is one of the greatest challenges in the free source world today. + +Many other free software folks are following Stallman's tack by selling the services, not the software. Many of the members of the Apache Webserver Core, for instance, make their money by running websites. They get paid because their customers are able to type in www.website.com and see something pop up. The customer doesn't care whether it is free software or something from Microsoft that is juggling the requests. They just want the graphics and text to keep moving. + +Some consultants are following in the same footsteps. Several now offer discounts of something like 25 percent if the customer agrees to release the source code from the project as free software. If there's no great proprietary information in the project, then customers often take the deal. At first glance, the consultant looks like he's cutting his rates by 25 percent, but at second glance, he might be just making things a bit more efficient for all of his customers. He can reuse the software his clients release, and no one knows it better than he does. In time, all of his clients share code and enjoy lower development costs. + +The model of selling services instead of source code works well for many people, but it is still far from perfect. Software that is sold as part of a shrink-wrapped license is easy for people to understand and budget. If you pay the price, you get the software. Services are often billed by the hour and they're often very open-ended. Managing these relationships can be just as difficult as raising some capital to write the software and then marketing it as shrink-wrapped code. + +2~ Cygnus--One Company that Grew Rich on Free Software + +There have been a number of different success stories of companies built around selling free software. One of the better-known examples is Cygnus, a company that specializes in maintaining and porting the GNU C Compiler. The company originally began by selling support contracts for the free software before realizing that there was a great demand for compiler development. + +The philosophy in the beginning was simple. John Gilmore, one of the founders, said, "We make free software affordable." They felt that free software offered many great tools that people needed and wanted, but realized that the software did not come with guaranteed support. Cygnus would sell people contracts that would pay for an engineer who would learn the source code inside and out while waiting to answer questions. The engineer could also rewrite code and help out. + +David Henkel-Wallace, one of the other founders, says, "We started in 1989 technically, 1990 really. Our first offices were in my house on University Avenue [in Palo Alto]. We didn't have a garage, we had a carport. It was an apartment complex. We got another apartment and etherneted them together. By the time we left, we had six apartments." + +While the Bay Area was very technically sophisticated, the Internet was mainly used at that time by universities and research labs. Commercial hookups were rare and only found in special corners like the corporate research playpen, Xerox PARC. In order to get Net service, Cygnus came up with a novel plan to wire the apartment complex and sell off some of the extra bandwidth to their neighbors. HenkelWallace says, "We started our own ISP [Internet Service Provider] as a cooperative because there weren't those things in those days. Then people moved into those apartments because they were on the Internet." + +At the beginning, the company hoped that the free software would allow them to offer something the major manufacturers didn't: cross-platform consistency. The GNU software would perform the same on a DEC Alpha, a Sun SPARC, and even a Microsoft box. The manufacturers, on the other hand, were locked up in their proprietary worlds where there was little cross-pollination. Each company developed its own editors, compilers, and source code tools, and each took slightly different approaches. + +One of the other founders, Michael Tiemann, writes of the time: +"When it came to tools for programmers in 1989, proprietary software was in a dismal state. First, the tools were primitive in the features they offered. Second, the features, when available, often had built-in limitations that tended to break when projects started to get complicated. Third, support from proprietary vendors was terrible . . . finally, every vendor implemented their own proprietary extensions, so that when you did use the meager features of one platform, you became, imperceptibly at first, then more obviously later, inextricably tied to that platform." + +The solution was to clean up the GNU tools, add some features, and sell the package to people who had shops filled with different machines. Henkel-Wallace said, "We were going to have two products: compiler tools and shell tools. Open systems people will buy a bunch of SGIs, a bunch of HPs, a bunch of Unix machines. Well, we thought people who have the same environment would want to have the same tools." + +This vision didn't work out. They sold no contracts that offered that kind of support. They did find, however, that people wanted them to move the compiler to other platforms. "The compilers people got from the vendors weren't as good and the compiler side of the business was making money from day one," says Henkel-Wallace. + +The company began to specialize in porting GCC, the GNU compiler written first by Richard Stallman, to new chips that came along. While much of the visible world of computers was frantically standardizing on Intel chips running Microsoft operating systems, an invisible world was fragmenting as competition for the embedded systems blossomed. Everyone was making different chips to run the guts of microwave ovens, cell phones, laser printers, network routers, and other devices. These manufacturers didn't care whether a chip ran the latest MS software, they just wanted it to run. The appliance makers would set up the chip makers to compete against each other to provide the best solution with the cheapest price, and the chip manufacturers responded by churning out a stream of new, smaller, faster, and cheaper chips. + +Cygnus began porting the GCC to each of these new chips, usually after being paid by the manufacturer. In the past, the chip companies would write or license their own proprietary compilers in the hope of generating something unique that would attract sales. Cygnus undercut this idea by offering something standard and significantly cheaper. The chip companies would save themselves the trouble of coming up with their own compiler tools and also get something that was fairly familiar to their customers. Folks who used GCC on Motorola's chip last year were open to trying out National Semiconductor's new chip if it also ran GCC. Supporting free software may not have found many takers, but Cygnus found more than enough people who wanted standard systems for their embedded processors. + +Selling processor manufacturers on the conversion contracts was also a bit easier. Businesses wondered what they were doing paying good money for free software. It just didn't compute. The chip manufacturers stopped worrying about this when they realized that the free compilers were just incentives to get people to use their chips. The companies spent millions buying pens, T-shirts, and other doodads that they gave away to market the chips. What was different about buying software? If it made the customers happy, great. The chip companies didn't worry as much about losing a competitive advantage by giving away their work. It was just lagniappe. + +Cygnus, of course, had to worry about competition. There was usually some guy who worked at the chip company or knew someone who worked at the chip company who would say, "Hey, I know compilers as well as those guys at Cygnus. I can download GCC too and underbid them." + +Henkel-Wallace says, "Cygnus was rarely the lowest bidder. People who cared about price more than anyone else were often the hardest customers anyway. We did deals on a fair price and I think people were happy with the result. We rarely competed on price. What really matters to you? Getting a working tool set or a cheap price?" + +2~ How the GPL Built Cygnus's Monopoly + +The GNU General Public License was also a bit of a secret weapon for Cygnus. When their competitors won a contract, they had to release the source code for their version when they were done with it. All of the new features and insights developed by competitors would flow directly back to Cygnus. + +Michael Tiemann sounds surprisingly like Bill Gates when he speaks about this power: "Fortunately, the open source model comes to the rescue again. Unless and until a competitor can match the one hundred-plus engineers we have on staff today, most of whom are primary authors or maintainers of the software we support, they cannot displace us from our position as the 'true GNU' source. The best they can hope to do is add incremental features that their customers might pay them to add. But because the software is open source, whatever value they add comes back to Cygnus. . . ." + +Seeing these effects is something that only a truely devoted fan of free software can do. Most people rarely get beyond identifying the problems with giving up the source code to a project. They don't realize that the GPL affects all users and also hobbles the potential competitors. It's like a mutual disarmament or mutual armament treaty that fixes the rules for all comers and disarmament treaties are often favored by the most powerful. + +The money Cygnus makes by selling this support has been quite outstanding. The company continues to grow every year, and it has been listed as one of the largest and fastest-growing private software companies. The operation was also a bootstrap business where the company used the funds from existing contracts to fund the research and development of new tools. They didn't take funding from outside venture capital firms until 1995. This let the founders and the workers keep a large portion of the company, one of the dreams of every Silicon Valley start-up. In 1999, Red Hot merged with Cygnus to "create an open source powerhouse." + +The success of Cygnus doesn't mean that others have found ways of duplicating the model. While Cygnus has found some success and venture capital, Gilmore says, "The free software business gives many MBAs the willies."Many programmers have found that free software is just a free gift for others. They haven't found an easy way to charge for their work. + +2~ Snitchware + +Larry McVoy is one programmer who looks at the free source world and cringes. He's an old hand from the UNIX world who is now trying to build a new system for storing the source code. To him, giving away source code is a one-way train to no money. Sure, companies like Cygnus and Red Hat can make money by adding some extra service, but the competition means that the price of this value will steadily go to zero. There are no regulatory or large capital costs to restrain entry, so he feels that the free software world will eventually push out all but the independently wealthy and the precollege teens who can live at home. +"We need to find a sustainable method. People need to write code and raise families, pay mortgages, and all of that stuff," he says. + +McVoy's solution is a strange license that some call "snitchware." He's developing a product known as BitKeeper and he's giving it away, with several very different hooks attached. He approached this philosophically. He says, "In order to make money, I need to find something that the free software guys don't value that the businesspeople do value. Then I take it away from the free software guys. The thing I found is your privacy." + +BitKeeper is an interesting type of product that became essential as software projects grew larger and more unwieldy. In the beginning, programmers wrote a program that was just one coherent file with a beginning, a middle, some digressions, and then an end. These were very self-contained and easily managed by one person. + +When more than one programmer started working on a project together, however, everyone needed to work on coordinating their work with each other. One person couldn't start tearing apart the menus because another might be trying to hook up the menus to a new file system. If both started working on the same part, the changes would be difficult if not impossible to sort out when both were done. Once a team of programmers digs out from a major mess like that, they look for some software like BitKeeper to keep the source code organized. + +BitKeeper is sophisticated and well-integrated with the Internet. Teams of programmers can be spread out throughout the world. At particular times, programmers can call each other up and synchronize their projects. Both tightly controlled, large corporate teams and loose and uncoordinated open source development teams can use the tool. + +The synchronization creates change logs that summarize the differences between two versions of the project. These change logs are optimized to move the least amount of information. If two programmers don't do too much work, then synchronizing them doesn't take too long. The change logs build up a complete history of the project and make it possible to roll back the project to earlier points if it turns out that development took the wrong path. + +McVoy's snitchware solution is to post the change logs of the people who don't buy a professional license. These logs include detailed information on how two programs are synchronized, and he figures that this information should be valuable enough for a commercial company to keep secret. They might say, "Moved auction control structure to Bob's version from Caroline's version. Moved new PostScript graphics engine to Caroline's version from Bob's." + +McVoy says, "If you're Sun or Boeing, you don't want the Internet to be posting a message like 'I just added the bomb bay.' But for the free software guys, not only is that acceptable, but it's desirable. If you're doing open source, what do you have to hide?" + +BitKeeper is free for anyone to use, revise, and extend as long as they don't mess with the part that tattles. If you don't care about the world reading your change logs, then it's not much different from the traditional open source license. The user has the same rights to extend, revise, and modify BitKeeper as they do GNU Emacs, with one small exception: you can't disable the snitch feature. + +McVoy thinks this is an understandable trade-off. "From the business guys you can extract money. You can hope that they'll pay you. This is an important point I learned consulting at Schwab and Morgan Stanley. They insist that they pay for the software they get. They don't want to pay nothing. I used to think that they were idiots. Now I think they're very smart," he says. + +The matter is simple economics, he explains. "They believe that if enough money is going to their supplier, it won't be a total disaster. I call this an insurance model of software." + +Companies that pay for the privacy with BitKeeper will also be funding further development. The work won't be done in someone's spare time between exams and the homecoming game. It won't be done between keeping the network running and helping the new secretary learn Microsoft Word. It will be developed by folks who get paid to do the work. + +"There's enough money going back to the corporation so it can be supported," McVoy says. "This is the crux of the problem with the open source model. It's possible to abuse the proprietary model, too. They get you in there, they lock you in, and then they rape you. This business of hoping that it will be okay is unacceptable. You need to have a lock. The MIS directors insist you have a lock." + +He has a point. Linux is a lot of fun to play with and it is now a very stable OS, but it took a fair number of years to get to this point. Many folks in the free source world like to say things like, "It used to be that the most fun in Linux was just getting it to work." Companies like Morgan Stanley, Schwab, American Airlines, and most others live and die on the quality of their computer systems. They're quite willing to pay money if it helps ensure that things don't go wrong. + +McVoy's solution hasn't rubbed everyone the right way. The Open Source Initiative doesn't include his snitchware license in a list of acceptable solutions. "The consensus of the license police is that my license is NOT open source," he says. "The consensus of my lawyer is that it is. But I don't call it open source anymore." + +He's going his own way. "I made my own determination of what people value in the OS community: they have to be able to get the source, modify the source, and redistribute the source for no fee. All of the other crap is yeah, yeah whatever," he says. + +"The problem with the GPL is the GPL has an ax to grind, and in order to grind that ax it takes away all of the rights of the person who wrote the code. It serves the need of everyone in the community except the person who wrote it." + +McVoy has also considered a number of other alternatives. Instead of taking away something that the free software folks don't value, he considered putting in something that the businesses would pay to get rid of. The product could show ads it downloaded from a central location. This solution is already well known on the Internet, where companies give away e-mail, searching solutions, directories, and tons of information in order to sell ads. This solution, however, tends to wreck the usability of the software. Eudora, the popular e-mail program, is distributed with this option. + +McVoy also considered finding a way to charge for changes and support to BitKeeper. "The Cygnus model isn't working well because it turns them into a contracting shop. That means you actually have to do something for every hour of work." + +To him, writing software and charging for each version can generate money without work--that is, without doing further work. The support house has to have someone answering the phone every moment. A company that is selling shrink-wrapped software can collect money as people buy new copies. McVoy doesn't want this cash to spend tipping bartenders on cruise ships, although he doesn't rule it out. He wants the capital to reinvest in other neat ideas. He wants to have some cash coming in so he can start up development teams looking at new and bigger projects. + +The Cygnus model is too constraining for him. He argues that a company relying on support contracts must look for a customer to fund each project. Cygnus, for instance, had to convince Intel that they could do a good job porting the GCC to the i960. They found few people interested in general support of GNU, so they ended up concentrating on GCC. + +McVoy argues that it's the engineers who come up with the dreams first. The customers are often more conservative and less able to see how some new tool or piece of software could be really useful. Someone needs to hole up in a garage for a bit to create a convincing demonstration of the idea. Funding a dream takes capital. + +To him, the absence of money in the free software world can be a real limitation because money is a way to store value. It's not just about affording a new Range Rover and balsamic vinegars that cost more than cocaine by weight. Money can be a nice way to store up effort and transport it across time. Someone can work like a dog for a six months, turn out a great product, and sell it for a pile of cash. Ten years later, the cash can be spent on something else. The work is effectively stored for the future. + +Of course, this vision isn't exactly true. Cygnus has managed to charge enough for their contracts to fund the development of extra tools. Adding new features and rolling them out into the general distribution of some GNU tool is part of the job that the Cygnus team took on for themselves. These new features also mean that the users need more support. On one level, it's not much different from a traditional software development cycle. Cygnus is doing its work by subscription while a traditional house is creating its new features on spec. + +In fact, Cygnus did so well over such a long period of time that it found it could raise capital. "Once Cygnus had a track record of making money and delivering on time, investors wanted a piece of it," says Gilmore. + +Red Hat has managed to sell enough CD-ROM disks to fund the development of new projects. They've created a good selection of installation tools that make it relatively easy for people to use Linux. They also help pay salaries for people like Alan Cox who contribute a great deal to the evolution of the kernel. They do all of this while others are free to copy their distribution disks verbatim. + +McVoy doesn't argue with these facts, but feels that they're just a temporary occurrence. The huge growth of interest in Linux means that many new folks are exploring the operating system. There's a great demand for the hand-holding and packaging that Red Hat offers. In time, though, everyone will figure out how to use the product and the revenue stream should disappear as competition drives out the ability to charge $50 for each disk. + +Of course, the folks at Cygnus or Red Hat might not disagree with McVoy either. They know it's a competitive world and they figure that their only choice is to remain competitive by finding something that people will want to pay for. They've done it in the past and they should probably be able to do it in the future. There are always new features. + +2~ Bounties for Quicker Typer-Uppers + +Some developers are starting to explore a third way of blending capital with open source development by trying to let companies and people put bounties out on source code. The concept is pretty simple and tuned to the open software world. Let's say you have an annoying habit of placing French bon mots in the middle of sentences. Although this looks stupide to your friends, you think it's quite chic. The problem is that your old word processor's spell checker isn't quite à la mode and it only operates avec une seule langue. The problem is that you've spent too much time studying français and drinking de café and not enough time studying Java, the programming language. You're très désolé by your word processor's inability to grok just how BCBG you can be and spell-check in deux languages. + +The bounty system could be your savior. You would post a message saying, "Attention! I will reward with a check for $100 anyone who creates a two-language spell-checker." If you're lucky, someone who knows something about the spell-checker's source code will add the feature in a few minutes. One hundred dollars for a few minutes' work isn't too shabby. + +It is entirely possible that another person out there is having the same problem getting their word processor to verstehen their needs. They might chip in $50 to the pool. If the problem is truly grande, then the pot could grow quite large. + +This solution is blessed with the wide-open, free-market sensibility that many people in the open software community like. The bounties are posted in the open and anyone is free to try to claim the bounties by going to work. Ideally, the most knowledgeable will be the first to complete the job and nab the payoff. + +Several developers are trying to create a firm infrastructure for the plan. Brian Behlendorf, one of the founding members of the Apache web server development team, is working with Tim O'Reilly's company to build a website known as SourceXchange. Another group known as CoSource is led by Bernie Thompson and his wife, Laurie. Both will work to create more software that is released with free source. + +Of course, these projects are more than websites. They're really a process, and how the process will work is still unclear right now. While it is easy to circulate a notice that some guy will pay some money for some software, it is another thing to actually make it work. Writing software is a frustrating process and there are many chances for disagreement. The biggest question on every developer's mind is "How can I be sure I'll be paid?" and the biggest question on every sugar daddy's mind is "How can I be sure that the software works?" + +These questions are part of any software development experience. There is often a large gap between the expectations of the person commissioning the software and the person writing the code. In this shadow are confusion, betrayal, and turmoil. + +The normal solution is to break the project up into milestones and require payment after each milestone passes. If the coder is doing something unsatisfactory, the message is transmitted when payment doesn't arrive. Both SourceXchange and CoSource plan on carrying over the same structure to the world of bounty-hunting programmers. Each project might be broken into a number of different steps and a price for each step might be posted in advance. + +Both systems try to alleviate the danger of nonpayment by requiring that someone step in and referee the end of the project. A peer reviewer must be able to look over the specs of the project and the final code and then determine whether money should be paid. Ideally, this person should be someone both sides respect. + +A neutral party with the ability to make respectable decisions is something many programmers and consultants would welcome. In many normal situations, the contractors can only turn to the courts to solve disagreements, and the legal system is not really schooled in making these kinds of decisions. The company with the money is often able to dangle payment in front of the programmers and use this as a lever to extract more work. Many programmers have at least one horror story to tell about overly ambitious expectations. + +Of course, the existence of a wise neutral party who can see deeply into the problems and provide a fair solution is close to a myth. Judging takes time. SourceXchange promises that these peer reviewers will be paid, and this money will probably have to come from the people offering the bounty. They're the only ones putting money into the system in the long run. Plus, the system must make the people offering bounties happy in the long run or it will fail. + +The CoSource project suggests that the developers must come up with their own authority who will judge the end of the job and present this person with their bid. The sponsors then decide whether to trust the peer reviewer when they okay the job. The authorities will be judged like the developers, and summaries of their reputation will be posted on the site. While it isn't clear how the reviewers will be paid, it is not too much to expect that there will be some people out there who will do it just for the pleasure of having their finger in the stew. They might, for instance, want to offer the bounty themselves but be unable to put up much money. Acting as a reviewer would give them the chance to make sure the software did what they wanted without putting up much cash. + +One of the most difficult questions is how to run the marketplace. A wide-open solution would let the sponsors pay when the job was done satisfactorily. The first person to the door with running code that met the specs would be the one to be paid. Any other team that showed up later would get nothing. + +This approach would offer the greatest guarantees of creating well-running code as quickly as possible. The programmers would have a strong incentive to meet the specs quickly in order to win the cash. The downside is that the price would be driven up because the programmers would be taking on more risk. They would need to capitalize their own development and take the chance that someone might beat them to the door. Anxious sponsors who need some code quickly should be willing to pay the price. + +Another solution is to award contracts before any work is done. Developers would essentially bid on the project and the sponsor would choose one to start work. The process would be fairly formal and favor the seasoned, connected programmers. A couple of kids working in their spare time might be able to win an open bounty, but they would be at a great disadvantage in this system. Both CoSource and SourceXchange say that they'll favor this sort of preliminary negotiation. + +If the contracts are awarded before work begins, the bounty system looks less like a wild free-for-all and more like just a neutral marketplace for contract programmers to make their deals. Companies like Cygnus already bid to be paid for jobs that produce open source. These market-places for bounties will need to provide some structure and efficiencies to make it worth people's time to use them. + +One possible benefit of the bounty system is to aggregate the desires of many small groups. While some bounties will only serve the person who asks for them, many have the potential to help people who are willing to pay. An efficient system should be able to join these people together into one group and put their money into one pot. + +CoSource says that it will try to put together the bounties of many small groups and allow people to pay them with credit cards. It uses the example of a group of Linux developers who would gather together to fund the creation of an open source version of their favorite game. They would each chip in $10, $20, or $50 and when the pot got big enough, someone would step forward. Creating a cohesive political group that could effectively offer a large bounty is a great job for these sites. + +Of course, there are deeper questions about the flow of capital and the nature of risks in these bounty-based approaches. In traditional software development, one group pays for the creation of the software in the hope that they'll be able to sell it for more than it cost to create. Here, the programmer would be guaranteed a fixed payment if he accomplished the job. The developer's risk is not completely eliminated because the job might take longer than they expected, but there is little of the traditional risk of a start-up firm. It may not be a good idea to separate the risk-taking from the people doing the work. That is often the best way to keep people focused and devoted. + +Each of these three systems shows how hard the free software industry is working at finding a way for people to pay their bills and share information successfully. Companies like Cygnus or BitKeeper are real efforts built by serious people who can't live off the largesse of a university or a steady stream of government grants. Their success shows that it is quite possible to make money and give the source code away for free, but it isn't easy. + +Still, there is no way to know how well these companies will survive the brutal competition that comes from the free flow of the source code. There are no barriers to entry, so each corporation must be constantly on its toes. The business becomes one of service, not manufacturing, and that changes everything. There are no grand slam home runs in that world. There are no billion-dollar explosions. Service businesses grow by careful attention to detail and plenty of focused effort. + +1~ Fork + +A T-shirt once offered this wisdom to the world: "If you love someone, set them free. If they come back to you, it was meant to be. If they don't come back, hunt them down and kill them." The world of free software revolves around letting your source code go off into the world. If things go well, others will love the source code, shower it with bug fixes, and send all of this hard work flowing back to you. It will be a shining example of harmony and another reason why the free software world is great. But if things don't work out, someone might fork you and there's nothing you can do about it. + +"Fork" is a UNIX command that allows you to split a job in half. UNIX is an operating system that allows several people to use the same computer to do different tasks, and the operating system pretends to run them simultaneously by quickly jumping from task to task. A typical UNIX computer has at least 100 different tasks running. Some watch the network for incoming data, some run programs for the user, some watch over the file system, and others do many menial tasks. + +If you "fork a job," you arrange to split it into two parts that the computer treats as two separate jobs. This can be quite useful if both jobs are often interrupted, because one can continue while the other one stalls. This solution is great if two tasks, A and B, need to be accomplished independently of each other. If you use one task and try to accomplish A first, then B won't start until A finishes. This can be quite inefficient if A stalls. A better solution is to fork the job and treat A and B as two separate tasks. + +Most programmers don't spend much time talking about these kinds of forks. They're mainly concerned about forks in the political process. + +Programmers use "fork" to describe a similar process in the organization of a project, but the meaning is quite different. Forks of a team mean that the group splits and goes in different directions. One part might concentrate on adding support for buzzword Alpha while the other might aim for full buzzword Beta compatibility. + +In some cases, there are deep divisions behind the decision to fork. One group thinks buzzword Alpha is a sloppy, brain-dead kludge job that's going to blow up in a few years. The other group hates buzzword Beta with a passion. Disputes like this happen all the time. They often get resolved peacefully when someone comes up with buzzword Gamma, which eclipses them both. When no Gamma arrives, people start talking about going their separate ways and forking the source. If the dust settles, two different versions start appearing on the Net competing with each other for the hearts and CPUs of the folks out there. Sometimes the differences between the versions are great and sometimes they're small. But there's now a fork in the evolution of the source code, and people have to start making choices. + +The free software community has a strange attitude toward forks. On one hand, forking is the whole reason Stallman wrote the free software manifesto. He wanted the right and the ability to mess around with the software on his computer. He wanted to be free to change it, modify it, and tear it to shreds if he felt like doing it one afternoon. No one should be able to stop him from doing that. He wanted to be totally free. + +On the other hand, forking can hurt the community by duplicating efforts, splitting alliances, and sowing confusion in the minds of users. If Bob starts writing and publishing his own version of Linux out of his house, then he's taking some energy away from the main version. People start wondering if the version they're running is the Missouri Synod version of Emacs or the Christian Baptist version. Where do they send bug fixes? Who's in charge? Distribution groups like Debian or Red Hat have to spend a few moments trying to decide whether they want to include one version or the other. If they include both, they have to choose one as the default. Sometimes they just throw up their hands and forget about both. It's a civil war, and those are always worse than a plain old war. + +Some forks evolve out of personalities that just rub each other the wrong way. I've heard time and time again, "Oh, we had to kick him out of the group because he was offending people." Many members of the community consider this kind of forking bad. They use the same tone of voice to describe a fork of the source code as they use to describe the breakup of two lovers. It is sad, unfortunate, unpleasant, and something we'll never really understand because we weren't there. Sometimes people take sides because they have a strong opinion about who is right. They'll usually go off and start contributing to that code fork. In other cases, people don't know which to pick and they just close their eyes and join the one with the cutest logo. + +2~ Forks and the Threat of Disunity + +Eric Raymond once got in a big fight with Richard Stallman about the structure of Emacs Lisp. Raymond said, "The Lisp libraries were in bad shape in a number of ways. They were poorly documented. There was a lot of work that had gone on outside the FSF that should be integrated and I wanted to merge in the best work from outside." + +The problem is that Stallman didn't want any part of Raymond's work. "He just said, 'I won't take those changes into the distribution.' +That's his privilege to do," Raymond said. + +That put Raymond in an awkward position. He could continue to do the work, create his own distribution of Emacs, and publicly break with Stallman. If he were right and the Lisp code really needed work, then he would probably find more than a few folks who would cheer his work. They might start following him by downloading his distribution and sending their bug fixes his way. Of course, if he were wrong, he would set up his own web server, do all the work, put his Lisp fixes out there, and find that no one would show up. He would be ignored because people found it easier to just download Stallman's version of Emacs, which everyone thought was sort of the official version, if one could be said to exist. They didn't use the Lisp feature too much so it wasn't worth thinking about how some guy in Pennsylvania had fixed it. They were getting the real thing from the big man himself. + +Of course, something in between would probably happen. Some folks who cared about Lisp would make a point of downloading Raymond's version. The rest of the world would just go on using the regular version. In time, Stallman might soften and embrace the changes, but he might not. Perhaps someone would come along and create a third distribution that melded Raymond's changes with Stallman's into a harmonious version. That would be a great thing, except that it would force everyone to choose from among three different versions. + +In the end, Raymond decided to forget about his improvements. +"Emacs is too large and too complicated and forking is bad. There was in fact one group that got so fed up with working with him that they did fork Emacs. That's why X Emacs exists. But major forks like that are rare events and I didn't want to be part of perpetrating another one," +he said. Someone else was going to have to start the civil war by firing those shots at Fort Sumter. + +2~ BSD's Garden of Forking Paths + +Some forks aren't so bad. There often comes a time when people have legitimate reasons to go down different paths. What's legitimate and what's not is often decided after a big argument, but the standard reasons are the same ones that drive programming projects. A good fork should make a computer run software a gazillion times faster. Or it might make the code much easier to port to a new platform. Or it might make the code more secure. There are a thousand different reasons, and it's impossible to really measure which is the right one. The only true measure is the number of people who follow each branch of the fork. If a project has a number of good disciples and the bug fixes are coming quickly, then people tend to assume it is legitimate. + +The various versions of the BSD software distribution are some of the more famous splits around. All are descended, in one way or another, from the original versions of UNIX that came out of Berkeley. Most of the current ones evolved from the 4.3BSD version and the Network Release 2 and some integrated code from the 4.4BSD release after it became free. All benefited from the work of the hundreds of folks who spent their free time cloning the features controlled by AT&T. All of them are controlled by the same loose BSD license that gives people the right to do pretty much anything they want to the code. All of them share the same cute daemon as a mascot. + +That's where the similarities end. The FreeBSD project is arguably the most successful version. It gets a fairly wide distribution because its developers have a good deal with Walnut Creek CD-ROM Distributors, a company that packages up large bundles of freeware and shareware on the Net and then sells them on CD-ROM. The system is well known and widely used because the FreeBSD team concentrates on making the software easy to use and install on Intel computers. Lately, they've created an Alpha version, but most of the users run the software on x86 chips. Yahoo! uses FreeBSD. + +FreeBSD, of course, began as a fork of an earlier project known as 386BSD, started by Bill Jolitz. This version of BSD was more of an academic example or a proof-of-concept than a big open source project designed to take over the world. + +Jordan Hubbard, someone who would come along later to create a fork of 386BSD, said of Jolitz's decision to create a 386-based fork of BSD, "Bill's real contribution was working with the 386 port. He was kind of an outsider. No one else saw the 386 as interesting. Berkeley had a myopic attitude toward PCs. They were just toys. No one would support Intel. That was the climate at the time. No one really took PCs seriously. Bill's contribution was to realize that PCs were going places." + +From the beginning, Hubbard and several others saw the genius in creating a 386 version of BSD that ran on the cheapest hardware available. They started adding features and gluing in bug fixes, which they distributed as a file that modified the main 386BSD distribution from Jolitz. This was practical at the beginning when the changes were few, but it continued out of respect for the original creator, even after the patches grew complicated. + +Finally, a tussle flared up in 1993. Jordan Hubbard, one of the forkers, writes in his history of the project, + +_1 386BSD was Bill Jolitz's operating system, which had been up to that point suffering rather severely from almost a year's worth of neglect. As the patchkit swelled ever more uncomfortably with each passing day, we were in unanimous agreement that something had to be done and decided to try and assist Bill by providing this interim "cleanup" snapshot. Those plans came to a rude halt when Bill Jolitz suddenly decided to withdraw his sanction from the project and without any clear indication of what would be done instead. + +The FreeBSD team pressed on despite the denial. They decided to fork. Today, 386BSD is largely part of the history of computing while FreeBSD is a living, current OS, at least at the time this book was written. The FreeBSD team has done a good job distributing bug-free versions, and they've been paid off in loyalty, disciples, and money and computers from Walnut Creek. Forking can often be good for society because it prevents one person or clique from thwarting another group. The free software world is filled with many of the same stories of politics that float across the watercoolers of corporations, but the stories don't have to end the same way. If one boss or group tries to shut down a free software project, it really can't. The source code is freely available, and people are free to carry on. The FreeBSD project is one example. + +Of course, good software can have anti-forking effects. Linus Torvalds said in one interview, "Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wasn't available (although Bill Jolitz's series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never have happened." So if 386BSD had been easier to find on the Net and better supported, Linux might never have begun. + +Once someone starts forking BSD, one fork is rarely enough. Another group known as NetBSD also grew fed up with the progress of 386BSD in 1993. This group, however, wanted to build a platform that ran well on many different machines, not just the Intel 386. The FreeBSD folks concentrated on doing a good job on Intel boxes, while the NetBSD wanted to create a version that ran on many different machines. Their slogan became "Of course it runs NetBSD." + +NetBSD runs on practically every machine you can imagine, including older, less up-to-date machines like the Amiga and the Atari. It has also been embraced by companies like NeXT, which bundled parts of it into the version of the OS for the Macintosh known as Rhapsody. Of course, the most common chips like the Intel line and the Alpha are also well supported. + +The NetBSD community emerged at the same time as the FreeBSD world. They didn't realize that each team was working on the same project at the same time. But once they started releasing their own versions, they stayed apart. + +"The NetBSD group has always been the purest. They saw it as an OS research vehicle. That was what CSRG was doing. Their only mandate was to do interesting research," said Hubbard. "It's a very different set of goals than we concentrated on for the 386. The important thing for us was to polish it up. We put all of our efforts into polishing, not porting. This was part of our bringing BSD to the masses kind of thing. We're going for numbers. We're going for mass penetration." + +This orientation meant that NetBSD never really achieved the same market domination as FreeBSD. The group only recently began shipping versions of NetBSD on CD-ROM. FreeBSD, on the other hand, has always excelled at attracting new and curious users thanks to their relationship with Walnut Creek. Many experimenters and open-minded users picked up one of the disks, and a few became excited enough to actually make some contributions. The Walnut Creek partnership also helped the FreeBSD team understand what it needed to do to make their distribution easier to install and simpler to use. That was Walnut Creek's business, after all. + +2~ Flames, Fights, and the Birth of OpenBSD + +The forking did not stop with NetBSD. Soon one member of the NetBSD world, Theo de Raadt, began to rub some people the wrong way. One member of the OpenBSD team told me, "The reason for the split from NetBSD was that Theo got kicked out. I don't understand it completely. More or less they say he was treating users on the mailing list badly. He does tend to be short and terse, but there's nothing wrong with that. He was one of the founding members of NetBSD and they asked him to resign." + +Now, four years after the split began in 1995, de Raadt is still a bit hurt by their decision. He says about his decision to fork BSD again, "I had no choice. I really like what I do. I really like working with a community. At the time it all happened, I was the second most active developer in their source tree. They took the second most active developer and kicked him off." + +Well, they didn't kick him out completely, but they did take away his ability to "commit" changes to the source tree and make them permanent. After the split, de Raadt had to e-mail his contributions to a member of the team so they could check them in. This didn't sit well with de Raadt, who saw it as both a demotion and a real impediment to doing work. + +The root of the split is easy to see. De Raadt is energetic. He thinks and speaks quickly about everything. He has a clear view about most free software and isn't afraid to share it. While some BSD members are charitable and conciliatory to Richard Stallman, de Raadt doesn't bother to hide his contempt for the organization. "The Free Software Foundation is one of the most misnamed organizations," he says, explaining that only BSD-style licensees have the true freedom to do whatever they want with the software. The GNU General Public License is a pair of handcuffs to him. + +De Raadt lives in Calgary and dresses up his personal web page with a picture of himself on top of a mountain wearing a bandanna. If you want to send him a pizza for any reason, he's posted the phone number of his favorite local shop (403/531-3131). Unfortunately, he reports that they don't take foreign credit card numbers anymore. + +He even manages to come up with strong opinions about simple things that he ostensibly loves. Mountain biking is a big obsession, but, he says, "I like mud and despise 'wooded back-alleys' (what most people call logging roads)." That's not the best way to make friends with less extreme folks who enjoy a Sunday ride down logging roads. + +If you like cats, don't read what he had to say about his pets: "I own cats. Their names are Galileo and Kepler--they're still kittens. Kepler-the little bitch--can apparently teleport through walls. Galileo is a rather cool monster. When they become full-grown cats I will make stew & soup out of them. (Kepler is only good for soup)." + +Throwaway comments like this have strange effects on the Net, where text is the only way people can communicate. There are no facial gestures or tonal clues to tell people someone is joking around, and some people don't have well-developed scanners for irony or sarcasm. Some love the sniping and baiting, while others just get annoyed. They can't let snide comments slide off their back. Eventually, the good gentlefolk who feel that personal kindness and politeness should still count for something in this world get annoyed and start trying to do something. + +It's easy to see how this affected the NetBSD folks, who conduct their business in a much more proper way. Charles Hannum, for instance, refused to talk to me about the schism unless I promised that he would be able to review the parts of the book that mentioned NetBSD. He also suggested that forks weren't particularly interesting and shouldn't be part of the book. Others begged off the questions with more polite letters saying that the split happened a long time ago and wasn't worth talking about anymore. Some pointed out that most of the members of the current NetBSD team weren't even around when the split happened. + +While their silence may be quite prudent and a better way to spend a life, it certainly didn't help me get both sides of the story. I pointed out that they wouldn't accept code into the NetBSD tree if the author demanded the right to review the final distribution. I said they could issue a statement or conduct the interview by e-mail. One argued that there was no great problem if a few paragraphs had to be deleted from the book in the end. I pointed out that I couldn't give the hundreds of people I spoke with veto power over the manuscript. It would be impossible to complete. The book wasn't being written by a committee. No one at NetBSD budged. + +De Raadt, on the other hand, spoke quite freely with no preconditions or limitations. He still keeps a log file with a good number of email letters exchanged during the separation and makes it easy to read them on his personal website. That's about as open as you can get. The NetBSD folks who refused to talk to me, on the other hand, seemed intent on keeping control of the story. Their silence came from a different world than the website offering the phone number of the local pizza place as a hint. They were Dragnet; de Raadt was Politically Incorrect. + +When the NetBSD folks decided to do something, they took away de Raadt's access to the source tree. He couldn't just poke around the code making changes as he went along. Well, he could poke around and make changes, but not to the official tree with the latest version. The project was open source, after all. He could download the latest release and start fiddling, but he couldn't make quasi-official decisions about what source was part of the latest official unreleased version. + +De Raadt thought this was a real barrier to work. He couldn't view the latest version of the code because it was kept out of his view. He was stuck with the last release, which might be several months old. That put him at an extreme disadvantage because he might start working on a problem only to discover that someone had either fixed it or changed it. + +Chris Demetriou found himself with the task of kicking de Raadt off of the team. His letter, which can still be found on the OpenBSD site, said that de Raadt's rough behavior and abusive messages had driven away people who might have contributed to the project. Demetriou also refused to talk about NetBSD unless he could review the sections of the book that contained his comments. He also threatened to take all possible action against anyone who even quoted his letters in a commercial book without his permission. + +De Raadt collected this note from Demetriou and the firestorm that followed in a 300k file that he keeps on his website. The NetBSD core tried to be polite and firm, but the matter soon degenerated into a seven-month-long flame war. After some time, people started having meta-arguments, debating whether the real argument was more or less like the bickering of a husband and wife who happen to work at the same company. Husbands and wives should keep their personal fights out of the workplace, they argued. And so they bickered over whether de Raadt's nastygrams were part of his "job" or just part of his social time. + +Through it all, de Raadt tried to get back his access to the source tree of NetBSD and the group tried to propose all sorts of mechanisms for making sure he was making a "positive" contribution and getting along with everyone. At one time, they offered him a letter to sign. These negotiations went nowhere, as de Raadt objected to being forced to make promises that other contributors didn't have to. + +De Raadt wrote free software because he wanted to be free to make changes or write code the way he wanted to do it. If he had wanted to wear the happy-face of a positive contributor, he could have gotten a job at a corporation. Giving up the right to get in flame wars and speak at will may not be that much of a trade-off for normal people with fulltime jobs. Normal folks swallow their pride daily. Normal people don't joke about turning their cats into soup. But de Raadt figured it was like losing a bit of his humanity and signing up willingly for a set of manacles. It just wasn't livable. + +The argument lasted months. De Raadt felt that he tried and tried to rejoin the project without giving away his honor. The core NetBSD team argued that they just wanted to make sure he would be positive. They wanted to make sure he wouldn't drive away perfectly good contributors with brash antics. No one ever gained any ground in the negotiations and in the end, de Raadt was gone. + +The good news is that the fork didn't end badly. De Raadt decided he wasn't going to take the demotion. He just couldn't do good work if he had to run all of his changes by one of the team that kicked him off the project. It took too long to ask "Mother, may I?" to fix every little bug. If he was going to have to run his own tree, he might as well go whole hog and start his own version of BSD. He called it OpenBSD. It was going to be completely open. There were going to be relatively few controls on the members. If the NetBSD core ran its world like the Puritan villagers in a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, then de Raadt was going to run his like Club Med. + +OpenBSD struggled for several months as de Raadt tried to attract more designers and coders to his project. It was a battle for popularity in many ways, not unlike high school. When the cliques split, everyone had to pick and choose. De Raadt had to get some folks in his camp if he was going to make some lemonade. + +The inspiration came to de Raadt one day when he discovered that the flame war archive on his web page was missing a few letters. He says that someone broke into his machine and made a few subtle deletions. Someone who had an intimate knowledge of the NetBSD system. Someone who cared about the image portrayed by the raw emotions in the supposedly private letters. + +He clarifies his comments to make it clear that he's not sure it was someone from the NetBSD core. "I never pursued it. If it happens, it's your own fault. It's not their fault," he said. Of course, the folks from NetBSD refused to discuss this matter or answer questions unless they could review the chapter. + +This break-in gave him a focus. De Raadt looked at NetBSD and decided that it was too insecure. He gathered a group of like-minded people and began to comb the code for potential insecurities. + +"About the same time, I got involved with a company that wrote a network security scanner. Three of the people over there started playing with the source tree and searching for security holes. We started finding problems all over the place, so we started a comprehensive security audit. We started from the beginning. Our task load increased massively. At one time, I had five pieces of paper on my desk full of things to look for," he said. + +Security holes in operating systems are strange beasts that usually appear by mistake when the programmer makes an unfounded assumption. One of the best-known holes is the buffer overflow, which became famous in 1988 after Robert Morris, then a graduate student at Cornell, unleashed a program that used the loophole to bring several important parts of the Internet to a crawl. + +In this case, the programmer creates a buffer to hold all of the information that someone on the net might send. Web browsers, for instance, send requests like "GET http://www.nytimes.com" to ask for the home page of the New York Times website. The programmer must set aside some chunk of memory to hold this request, usually a block that is about 512 bytes long. The programmer chooses an amount that should be more than enough for all requests, including the strangest and most complicated. + +Before the attack became well known, programmers would often ignore the length of the request and assume that 512 bytes was more than enough for anything. Who would ever type a URL that long? + +Who had an e-mail address that long? Attackers soon figured out that they could send more than 512 bytes and started writing over the rest of the computer's memory. The program would dutifully take in 100,000 bytes and keep writing it to memory. An attacker could download any software and start it running. And attackers did this. + +De Raadt and many others started combing the code for loopholes. They made sure every program that used a buffer included a bit of code that would check to ensure that no hacker was trying to sneak in more than the buffer could hold. They checked thousands of other possibilities. Every line was checked and changes were made even if there was no practical way for someone to get at the potential hole. Many buffers, for instance, only accept information from the person sitting at the terminal. The OpenBSD folks changed them, too. + +This audit began soon after the fork in 1995 and continues to this day. Most of the major work is done and the group likes to brag that they haven't had a hole that could be exploited remotely to gain root access in over two years. The latest logo boasts the tag line "Sending kiddies to /dev/null since 1995." That is, any attacker is going to go nowhere with OpenBSD because all of the extra information from the attacks would be routed to /dev/null, a UNIX conceit for being erased, ignored, and forgotten. + +The OpenBSD fork is a good example of how bad political battles can end up solving some important technical problems. Everyone fretted and worried when de Raadt announced that he was forking the BSD world one more time. This would further dilute the resources and sow confusion among users. The concentration on security, however, gave OpenBSD a brand identity, and the other BSD distributions keep at least one eye on the bug fixes distributed by the OpenBSD team. These often lead to surreptitious fixes in their own distribution. + +The focus also helped him attract new coders who were interested in security. "Some of them used to be crackers and they were really cool people. When they become eighteen, it becomes a federal offense, you know," de Raadt says. + +This fork may have made the BSD community stronger because it effectively elevated the focus on security and cryptography to the highest level. In the corporate world, it's like taking the leader of the development team responsible for security and promoting him from senior manager to senior executive vice president of a separate division. The autonomy also gave the OpenBSD team the ability to make bold technical decisions for their own reasons. If they saw a potential security problem that might hurt usability or portability, the OpenBSD team could make the change without worrying that other team members would complain. OpenBSD was about security. If you wanted to work on portability, go to NetBSD. If you cared about ease-of-use on Intel boxes, go to FreeBSD. Creating a separate OpenBSD world made it possible to give security a strong focus. + +2~ Temporary Forks + +It's a mistake to see these forks as absolute splits that never intermingle again. While NetBSD and OpenBSD continue to glower at each other across the Internet ether, the groups share code frequently because the licenses prevent one group from freezing out another. + +Jason Wright, one of the OpenBSD developers, says, "We do watch each other's source trees. One of the things I do for fun is take drivers out of FreeBSD and port them to OpenBSD. Then we have support for a new piece of hardware." + +He says he often looks for drivers written by Bill Paul, because "I've gotten used to his style. So I know what to change when I receive his code. I can do it in about five to six hours. That is, at least a rough port to test if it works." + +Still, the work is not always simple. He says some device drivers are much harder to handle because both groups have taken different approaches to the problem. "SCSI drivers are harder," he says. "There's been some divergence in the layering for SCSI. They're using something called CAM. We've got an older implementation that we've stuck to." +That is, the FreeBSD has reworked the structure of the way that the SCSI information is shipped to the parts of the system asking for information. The OpenBSD hasn't adopted their changes, perhaps because of security reasons or perhaps because of inertia or perhaps because no one has gotten around to thinking about it. The intermingling isn't perfect. + +Both NetBSD and FreeBSD work on security, too. They also watch the change logs of OpenBSD and note when security holes are fixed. They also discover their own holes, and OpenBSD may use them as an inspiration to plug their own code. The discoveries and plugs go both ways as the groups compete to make a perfect OS. + +Kirk McKusick says, "The NetBSD and the OpenBSD have extremely strong personalities. Each one is absolutely terrified the other will gain an inch." + +While the three forks of BSD may cooperate more than they compete, the Linux world still likes to look at the BSD world with a bit of contempt. All of the forks look somewhat messy, even if having the freedom to fork is what Stallman and GNU are ostensibly fighting to achieve. The Linux enthusiasts seem to think, "We've got our ducks in a single row. What's your problem?" It's sort of like the Army mentality. If it's green, uniform, and the same everywhere, then it must be good. + +The BSD lacks the monomaniacal cohesion of Linux, and this seems to hurt their image. The BSD community has always felt that Linux is stealing the limelight that should be shared at least equally between the groups. Linux is really built around a cult of Linus Torvalds, and that makes great press. It's very easy for the press to take photos of one man and put him on the cover of a magazine. It's simple, clean, neat, and perfectly amenable to a 30-second sound bite. Explaining that there's FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and who knows what smaller versions waiting in the wings just isn't as manageable. + +Eric Raymond, a true disciple of Linus Torvalds and Linux, sees it in technical terms. The BSD community is proud of the fact that each distribution is built out of one big source tree. They get all the source code for all the parts of the kernel, the utilities, the editors, and whatnot together in one place. Then they push the compile button and let people work. This is a crisp, effective, well-managed approach to the project. + +The Linux groups, however, are not that coordinated at all. Torvalds only really worries about the kernel, which is his baby. Someone else worries about GCC. Everyone comes up with their own source trees for the parts. The distribution companies like Red Hat worry about gluing the mess together. It's not unusual to find version 2.0 of the kernel in one distribution while another is sporting version 2.2. + +"In BSD, you can do a unified make. They're fairly proud of that," says Raymond. "But this creates rigidities that give people incentives to fork. The BSD things that are built that way develop new spin-off groups each week, while Linux, which is more loosely coupled, doesn't fork." + +He elaborates, "Somebody pointed out that there's a parallel of politics. Rigid political and social institutions tend to change violently if they change at all, while ones with more play in them tend to change peacefully." + +But this distinction may be semantic. Forking does occur in the Linux realm, but it happens as small diversions that get explained away with other words. Red Hat may choose to use GNOME, while another distribution like SuSE might choose KDE. The users will see a big difference because both tools create virtual desktop environments. You can't miss them. But people won't label this a fork. Both distributions are using the same Linux kernel and no one has gone off and said, "To hell with Linus, I'm going to build my own version of Linux." +Everyone's technically still calling themselves Linux, even if they're building something that looks fairly different on the surface. + +Jason Wright, one of the developers on the OpenBSD team, sees the organization as a good thing. "The one thing that all of the BSDs have over Linux is a unified source tree. We don't have Joe Blow's tree or Bob's tree," he says. In other words, when they fork, they do it officially, with great ceremony, and make sure the world knows of their separate creations. They make a clear break, and this makes it easier for developers. + +Wright says that this single source tree made it much easier for them to turn OpenBSD into a very secure OS."We've got the security over Linux. They've recently been doing a security audit for Linux, but they're going to have a lot more trouble. There's not one place to go for the source code." + +To extend this to political terms, the Linux world is like the 1980s when Ronald Reagan ran the Republican party with the maxim that no one should ever criticize another Republican. Sure, people argued internally about taxes, abortion, crime, and the usual controversies, but they displayed a rare public cohesion. No one criticizes Torvalds, and everyone is careful to pay lip service to the importance of Linux cohesion even as they're essentially forking by choosing different packages. + +The BSD world, on the other hand, is like the biblical realm in Monty Python's film The Life of Brian. In it, one character enumerates the various splinter groups opposing the occupation by the Romans. There is the People's Front of Judea, the Judean People's Front, the Front of Judean People, and several others. All are after the same thing and all are manifestly separate. The BSD world may share a fair amount of code; it may share the same goals, but it just presents it as coming from three different camps. + +John Gilmore, one of the founders of the free software company Cygnus and a firm believer in the advantages of the GNU General Public License, says, "In Linux, each package has a maintainer, and patches from all distributions go back through that maintainer. There is a sense of cohesion. People at each distribution work to reduce their differences from the version released by the maintainer. In the BSD world, each tree thinks they own each program--they don't send changes back to a central place because that violates the ego model." + +Jordan Hubbard, the leader of FreeBSD, is critical of Raymond's characterization of the BSD world. "I've always had a special place in my heart for that paper because he painted positions that didn't exist," Hubbard said of Raymond's piece "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." "You could point to just the Linux community and decide which part was cathedral-oriented and which part was bazaar-oriented. + +"Every single OS has cathedral parts and bazaar parts. There are some aspects of development that you leave deliberately unfocused and you let people contribute at their own pace. It's sort of a bubble-up model and that's the bazaar part. Then you have the organizational part of every project. That's the cathedral part. They're the gatekeepers and the standards setters. They're necessary, too," he said. + +When it comes right down to it, there's even plenty of forking going on about the definition of a fork. When some of the Linux team point at the BSD world and start making fun about the forks, the BSD team gets defensive. The BSD guys always get defensive because their founder isn't on the cover of all the magazines. The Linux team hints that maybe, if they weren't forking, they would have someone with a name in lights, too. + +Hubbard is right. Linux forks just as much, they just call it a distribution or an experimental kernel or a patch kit. No one has the chutzpah to spin off their own rival political organization. No one has the political clout. + +2~ A Fork, a Split, and a Reunion + +Now, after all of the nasty stories of backstabbing and bickering, it is important to realize that there are actually some happy stories of forks that merge back together. One of the best stories comes from the halls of an Internet security company, C2Net, that dealt with a fork in a very peaceful way. + +C2Net is a Berkeley-based company run by some hard-core advocates of online privacy and anonymity. The company began by offering a remailing service that allowed people to send anonymous e-mails to one another. Their site would strip off the return address and pass it along to the recipient with no trace of who sent it. They aimed to fulfill the need of people like whistleblowers, leakers, and other people in positions of weakness who wanted to use anonymity to avoid reprisals. + +The company soon took on a bigger goal when it decided to modify the popular Apache web server by adding strong encryption to make it possible for people to process credit cards over the web. The technology, known as SSL for "secure sockets layer," automatically arranged for all of the traffic between a remote web server and the user to be scrambled so that no one could eavesdrop. SSL is a very popular technology on the web today because many companies use it to scramble credit card numbers to defeat eavesdroppers. + +C2Net drew a fair deal of attention when one of its founders, Sameer Parekh, appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine with a headline teasing that he wanted to "overthrow the government." In reality, C2Net wanted to move development operations overseas, where there were no regulations on the creation of cryptographically secure software. C2Net went where the talent was available and priced right. + +In this case, C2Net chose a free version of SSL written by Eric Young known as SSLeay. Young's work is another of the open source success stories. He wrote the original version as a hobby and released it with a BSD-like license. Everyone liked his code, downloaded it, experimented with it, and used it to explore the boundaries of the protocol. Young was just swapping code with the Net and having a good time. + +Parekh and C2Net saw an opportunity. They would merge two free products, the Apache web server and Young's SSLeay, and make a secure version so people could easily set up secure commerce sites for the Internet. They called this product Stronghold and put it on the market commercially. + +C2Net's decision to charge for the software rubbed some folks the wrong way. They were taking two free software packages and making something commercial out of them. This wasn't just a fork, it seemed like robbery to some. Of course, these complaints weren't really fair. Both collections of code emerged with a BSD-style license that gave everyone the right to create and sell commercial additions to the product. There wasn't any GPL-like requirement that they give back to the community. If no one wanted a commercial version, they shouldn't have released the code with a very open license in the first place. + +Parekh understands these objections and says that he has weathered plenty of criticism on the internal mailing lists. Still, he feels that the Stronghold product contributed a great deal to the strength of Apache by legitimizing it. + +"I don't feel guilty about it. I don't think we've contributed a whole lot of source code, which is one of the key metrics that the people in the Apache group are using. In my perspective, the greatest contribution we've made is market acceptance," he said. + +Parekh doesn't mean that he had to build market acceptance among web developers. The Apache group was doing a good job of accomplishing that through their guerrilla tactics, excellent product, and free price tag. But no one was sending a message to the higher levels of the computer industry, where long-term plans were being made and corporate deals were being cut. Parekh feels that he built first-class respectability for the Apache name by creating and supporting a first-class product that big corporations could use successfully. He made sure that everyone knew that Apache was at the core of Stronghold, and people took notice. + +Parekh's first job was getting a patent license from RSA Data Security. Secure software like SSL relies on the RSA algorithm, an idea that was patented by three MIT professors in the 1970s. This patent is controlled by RSA Data Security. While the company publicized some of its licensing terms and went out of its way to market the technology, negotiating a license was not a trivial detail that could be handled by some free software team. Who's going to pay the license? Who's going to compute what some percentage of free is? Who's going to come up with the money? These questions are much easier to answer if you're a corporation charging customers to buy a product. C2Net was doing that. People who bought Stronghold got a license from RSA that ensured they could use the method without being sued. + +The patent was only the first hurdle. SSL is a technology that tries to bring some security to web connections by encrypting the connections between the browser and the server. Netscape added one feature that allows a connection to be established only if the server has a digital certificate that identifies it. These certificates are only issued to a company after it pays a fee to a registered certificate agent like Verisign. + +In the beginning, certificate agents like Verisign would issue the certificates only for servers created by big companies like Netscape or Microsoft. Apache was just an amorphous group on the Net. Verisign and the other authorities weren't paying attention to it. + +Parekh went to them and convinced them to start issuing the certificates so he could start selling Stronghold. + +"We became number three, right behind Microsoft and Netscape. Then they saw how much money they were making from us, so they started signing certificates for everyone," he said. Other Apache projects that used SSL found life much easier once Parekh showed Verisign that there was plenty of money to be made from folks using free software. + +Parekh does not deny that C2Net has not made many contributions to the code base of Apache, but he doesn't feel that this is the best measure. The political and marketing work of establishing Apache as a worthwhile tool is something that he feels may have been more crucial to its long-term health. When he started putting money in the hands of Verisign, he got those folks to realize that Apache had a real market share. That cash talked. + +The Stronghold fork, however, did not make everyone happy. SSL is an important tool and someone was going to start creating another free version. C2Net hired Eric Young and his collaborator Tim Hudson and paid them to do some work for Stronghold. The core version of Young's original SSLeay stayed open, and both continued to add bug fixes and other enhancements over time. Parekh felt comfortable with this relationship. Although Stronghold was paying the salaries of Young and Hudson, they were also spending some of their spare time keeping their SSLeay toolkit up to date. + +Still, the notion of a free version of SSL was a tempting project for someone to undertake. Many people wanted it. Secure digital commerce demanded it. There were plenty of economic incentives pushing for it to happen. Eventually, a German named Ralf S. Engelschall stepped up and wrote a new version he called mod_SSL. Engelschall is a well-regarded contributor to the Apache effort, and he has written or contributed to a number of different modules that could be added to Apache. He calls one the "all-dancing-all-singing mod_rewrite module" +for handling URLs easily. + +Suddenly, Engelschall's new version meant that there were dueling forks. One version came out of Australia, where the creators worked for a company selling a proprietary version of the code. C2Net distributed the Australian version and concentrated on making their product easy to install. The other came out of Europe, distributed for free by someone committed to an open source license. The interface may have been a bit rougher, but it didn't cost any money and it came with the source code. The potential for battle between SSLeay and mod_SSL could have been great. + +The two sides reviewed their options. Parekh must have felt a bit frustrated and at a disadvantage. He had a company that was making a good product with repeat buyers. Then an open source solution came along. C2Net's Stronghold cost money and didn't come with source code, while Engelschall's mod_SSL cost nothing and came with code. Those were major negatives that he could combat only by increasing service. When Engelschall was asked whether his free version was pushing C2Net, he sent back the e-mail with the typed message, "[grin]." + +In essence, C2Net faced the same situation as many major companies like Microsoft and Apple do today. The customers now had a viable open source solution to their problems. No one had to pay C2Net for the software. The users in the United States needed a patent license, but that would expire in late 2000. Luckily, Parekh is a true devotee to the open source world, even though he has been running a proprietary source company for the last several years. He looked at the problem and decided that the only way to stay alive was to join forces and mend the fork. + +To make matters worse, Hudson and Young left C2Net to work for RSA Data Security. Parekh lost two important members of his team, and he faced intense competition. Luckily, his devotion to open source came to the rescue. Hudson and Young couldn't take back any of the work they did on SSLeay. It was open source and available to everyone. + +Parekh, Engelschall, several C2Net employees, and several others sat down (via e-mail) and created a new project they called OpenSSL. This group would carry the torch of SSLeay and keep it up-to-date. Young and Hudson stopped contributing and devoted their time to creating a commercial version for RSA Data Security. + +Parekh says of the time, "Even though it was a serious setback for C2Net to have RSA pirate our people, it was good for the public. Development really accelerated when we started OpenSSL. More people became involved and control became less centralized. It became more like the Apache group. It's a lot bigger than it was before and it's much easier for anyone to contribute." + +Parekh also worked on mending fences with Engelschall. C2Net began to adopt some of the mod_SSL code and blend it into their latest version of Stronghold. To make this blending easier, C2Net began sending some of their formerly proprietary code back to Engelschall so he could mix it with mod_SSL by releasing it as open source. In essence, C2Net was averting a disastrous competition by making nice and sharing with this competitor. It is a surprising move that might not happen in regular business. + +Parekh's decision seems open and beneficent, but it has a certain amount of self-interest behind it. He explains, "We just decided to contribute all of the features we had into mod_SSL so we could start using mod_SSL internally, because it makes our maintenance of that easier. We don't have to maintain our own proprietary version of mod_SSL. Granted, we've made the public version better, but those features weren't significant." + +This mixing wasn't particularly complicated--most of it focused on the structure of the parts of the source code that handle the interface. Programmers call these the "hooks" or the "API." If Stronghold and mod_SSL use the same hook structure, then connecting them is a piece of cake. If Engelschall had changed the hook structure of mod_SSL, then the C2Net would have had to do more work. + +The decision to contribute the code stopped Engelschall from doing the work himself in a way that might have caused more grief for C2Net. +"He was actually planning on implementing them himself, so we were better off contributing ours to avoid compatibility issues," says Parekh. That is to say, Parekh was worried that Engelschall was going to go off and implement all the features C2Net used, and there was a very real danger that Engelschall would implement them in a way that was unusable to Parekh. Then there would be a more serious fork that would further split the two groups. C2Net wouldn't be able to borrow code from the free version of OpenSSL very easily. So it decided to contribute its own code. It was easier to give their code and guarantee that OpenSSL fit neatly into Stronghold. In essence, C2Net chose to give a little so it could continue to get all of the future improvements. + +It's not much different from the car industry. There's nothing inherently better or worse about cars that have their steering wheel on the right-hand side. They're much easier to use in England. But if some free car engineering development team emerged in England, it might make sense for a U.S. company to donate work early to ensure that the final product could have the steering wheel on either side of the car without extensive redesign. If Ford just sat by and hoped to grab the final free product, it might find that the British engineers happily designed for the only roads they knew. + +Engelschall is happy about this change. He wrote in an e-mail message, "They do the only reasonable approach: They base their server on mod_SSL because they know they cannot survive against the Open Source solution with their old proprietary code. And by contributing stuff to mod_SSL they implicitly make their own product better. This way both sides benefit." + +Parekh and C2Net now have a challenge. They must continue to make the Stronghold package better than the free version to justify the cost people are paying. + +Not all forks end with such a happy-faced story of mutual cooperation. Nor do all stories in the free software world end with the moneymaking corporation turning around and giving back their proprietary code to the general effort. But the C2Net/OpenSSL case illustrates how the nature of software development encourages companies and people to give and cooperate to satisfy their own selfish needs. Software can do a variety of wonderful things, but the structure often governs how easy it is for some of us to use. It makes sense to spend some extra time and make donations to a free software project if you want to make sure that the final product fits your specs. + +The good news is that most people don't have much incentive to break off and fork their own project. If you stay on the same team, then you can easily use all the results produced by the other members. Cooperating is so much easier than fighting that people have a big incentive to stay together. If it weren't so selfish, it would be heartwarming. + +1~ Core + +Projects in corporations have managers who report to other managers who report to the CEO who reports to the board. It's all very simple in theory, although it never really works that way in practice. The lines of control get crossed as people form alliances and struggle to keep their bosses happy. + +Projects in the world of open source software, on the other hand, give everyone a copy of the source code and let them be the master of the code running on their machine. Everyone gets to be the Board of Directors, the CEO, and the cubicle serfs rolled into one. If a free software user doesn't like something, then he has the power to change it. You don't like that icon? Boom, it's gone. You don't want KDE on your desktop? Whoosh, it's out of there. No vice president in charge of MSN marketing in Redmond is going to force you to have an icon for easy connection to the Microsoft Network on your desktop. No graphic designer at Apple is going to force you to look at that two-faced Picasso-esque MacOS logo every morning of your life just because their marketing studies show that they need to build a strong brand identity. You're the captain of your free software ship and you decide the menu, the course, the arrangement of the deck chairs, the placement of lookouts from which to watch for icebergs, the type of soap, and the number of toothpicks per passenger to order. In theory, you're the Lord High Master and Most Exalted Ruler of all Software Big and Small, Wild and Wonderful, and Interpreted and Compiled on your machine. + +In practice, no one has the time to use all of that power. It's downright boring to worry about soap and toothpicks. It's exhausting to rebuild window systems when they fail to meet your caviar-grade tastes in software. + +No one has the disk space to maintain an Imelda Marcos-like collection of screen savers, window managers, layout engines, and games for your computer. So you start hanging around with some friends who want similar things and the next thing you know, you've got a group. A group needs leadership, so the alpha dog emerges. Pretty soon, it all begins to look like a corporate development team. Well, kind of. + +Many neophytes in the free software world are often surprised to discover that most of the best free source code out there comes from teams that look surprisingly like corporate development groups. While the licenses and the rhetoric promise the freedom to go your own way, groups coalesce for many of the same reasons that wagon trains and convoys emerge. There's power in numbers. Sometimes these groups even get so serious that they incorporate. The Apache group recently formed the Apache Foundation, which has the job of guiding and supporting the development of the Apache web server. It's all very official looking. For all we know, they're putting cubicles in the foundation offices right now. + +This instinct to work together is just as powerful a force in the free software world as the instinct to grab as much freedom as possible and use it every day. If anything, it's just an essential feature of human life. The founders of the United States of America created an entire constitution without mentioning political parties, but once they pushed the start button, the parties appeared out of nowhere. + +These parties also emerged in the world of free source software. When projects grew larger than one person could safely handle, they usually evolved into development teams. The path for each group is somewhat different, and each one develops its own particular style. The strength of this organization is often the most important determinant of the strength of the software because if the people can work together well, then the problems in the software will be well fixed. + +The most prevalent form of government in these communities is the benign dictatorship. Richard Stallman wrote some of the most important code in the GNU pantheon, and he continues to write new code and help maintain the old software. The world of the Linux kernel is dominated by Linus Torvalds. The original founders always seem to hold a strong sway over the group. Most of the code in the Linux kernel is written by others and checked out by a tight circle of friends, but Torvalds still has the final word on many changes. + +The two of them are, of course, benign dictators, and the two of them don't really have any other choice. Both have a seemingly absolute amount of power, but this power is based on a mixture of personal affection and technical respect. There are no legal bounds that keep all of the developers in line. There are no rules about intellectual property or non-disclosure. Anyone can grab all of the Linux kernel or GNU source code, run off, and start making whatever changes they want. They could rename it FU, Bobux, Fredux, or Meganux and no one could stop them. The old threats of lawyers, guns, and money aren't anywhere to be seen. + +2~ Debian's Core Team + +The Debian group has a wonderful pedigree and many praise it as the purest version of Linux around, but it began as a bunch of outlaws who cried mutiny and tossed Richard Stallman overboard. Well, it wasn't really so dramatic. In fact, "mutiny" isn't really the right word when everyone is free to use the source code however they want. + +Bruce Perens remembers the split occurred less than a year after the project began and says, "Debian had already started. The FSF had been funding Ian Murdock for a few months. Richard at that time wanted us to make all of the executables unstripped." + +When programmers compile software and convert it from human-readable source code into machine-readable binary code, they often leave in some human readable information to help debug the program. Another way to say this is that the programmers don't strip the debugging tags out of the code. These tags are just the names of the variables used in the software, and a programmer can use them to analyze what each variable held when the software started going berserk. + +Perens continued, "His idea was if there was a problem, someone can send a stacktrace back without having to recompile a program and then making it break again. The problem with this was distributing executables unstripped makes them four times as large. It was a lot of extra expense and trouble. And our software didn't dump core anyway. That was really the bottom line. That sort of bug did not come up so often that it was necessary for us to distribute things that way anyways." + +Still, Stallman insisted it was a good idea. Debian resisted and said it took up too much space and raised duplication costs. Eventually, the debate ended as the Debian group went their own way. Although Stallman paid Murdock and wrote much of the GNU code on the disk, the GPL prevented him from doing much. The project continued. The source code lived on. And the Debian disks kept shipping. Stallman was no longer titular leader of Debian. + +The rift between the group has largely healed. Perens now praises Stallman and says that the two of them are still very close philosophically on the most important issues in the free software world. Stallman, for his part, uses Debian on his machines because he feels the closest kinship with it. + +Perens says, "Richard's actually grown up a lot in the last few years. He's learned a lot more about what to do to a volunteer because obviously we're free to walk away at any time." + +Stallman himself remembers the argument rather eloquently."The fact is, I wanted to influence them, but I did not want to force them. Forcing them would go against my moral beliefs. I believe that people are entitled to freedom in these matters, which means that I cannot tell them what to do," he told me. "I wrote the GPL to give everyone freedom from domination by authors of software, and that includes me on both sides." + +There's much debate over the best way to be a benign dictator. Eric Raymond and many others feel that Torvalds's greatest claim to success was creating a good development model. Torvalds released new versions of his kernel often and he tried to share the news about the development as openly as possible. Most of this news travels through a mailing list that is open to all and archived on a website. The mailing list is sort of like a perpetual congress where people debate the technical issues behind the latest changes to the kernel. It's often much better than the real United States Congress because the debate floor is open to all and there are no glaring special interests who try to steer the debate in their direction. After some period of debate, eventually Torvalds makes a decision and this becomes final. Usually he doesn't need to do anything. The answer is pretty obvious to everyone who's followed the discussion. + +This army is a diverse bunch. At a recent Linux conference, Jeff Bates, one of the editors of the influential website Slashdot (www.slashdot.org), +pointed me toward the Debian booth, which was next to theirs. "If you look in the booth, you can see that map. They put a pushpin in the board for every developer and project leader they have around the world. China, Netherlands, Somalia, there are people coming from all over." + +James Lewis-Moss is one of the members, who just happened to be in the Debian booth next door. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, which is four hours west of the Convention Center in downtown Raleigh. The Debian group normally relies upon local volunteers to staff the booth, answer questions, distribute CD-ROMs, and keep people interested in the project. + +Lewis-Moss is officially in charge of maintaining several packages, including the X Emacs, a program that is used to edit text files, read email and news, and do a number of other tasks. A package is the official name for a bundle of smaller programs, files, data, and documentation. These parts are normally installed together because the software won't work without all of its component parts. + +The packager's job is to download the latest software from the programmer and make sure that it runs well with the latest version of the other software to go in the Debian distribution. This crucial task is why groups like Debian are so necessary. If Lewis-Moss does his job well, someone who installs Debian on his computer will not have any trouble using X Emacs. + +Lewis-Moss's job isn't exactly programming, but it's close. He has to download the source code, compile the program, run it, and make sure that the latest version of the source works correctly with the latest version of the Linux kernel and the other parts of the OS that keep a system running. The packager must also ensure that the program works well with the Debian-specific tools that make installation easier. If there are obvious bugs, he'll fix them himself. Otherwise, he'll work with the author on tracking down and fixing the problems. + +He's quite modest about this effort and says, "Most Debian developers don't write a whole lot of code for Debian. We just test things to make sure it works well together. It would be offensive to some of the actual programmers to hear that some of the Debian folks are writing the programs when they're actually not." + +He added that many of the packagers are also programmers in other projects. In his case, he writes Java programs during the day for a company that makes point-of-sale terminals for stores. + +Lewis-Moss ended up with this job in the time-honored tradition of committees and volunteer organizations everywhere. "I reported a bug in X Emacs to Debian. The guy who had the package at that time said, +'I don't want this anymore. Do you want it?' I guess it was random. It was sort of an accident. I didn't intend to become involved in it, but it was something I was interested in. I figured 'Hell, might as well.'" + +The Linux development effort moves slowly forward with thousands of stories like Lewis-Moss's. Folks come along, check out the code, and toss in a few contributions that make it a bit better for themselves. The mailing list debates some of the changes if they're controversial or if they'll affect many people. It's a very efficient system in many ways, if you can stand the heat of the debates. + +Most Americans are pretty divorced from the heated arguments that boil through the corridors of Washington. The view of the House and Senate floor is largely just for show because most members don't attend the debates. The real decisions are made in back rooms. + +The mailing lists that form the core of the different free software projects take all of this debate and pipe it right through to the members. While some discussions occur in private letters and even in the occasional phone call, much of the problem and controversy is dissected for everyone to read. This is crucial because most of the decisions are made largely by consensus. + +"Most of the decisions are technical and most of them will have the right answer or the best possible one at the moment," says Lewis-Moss. +"Often things back down to who is willing to do the work. If you're willing to do the work and the person on the other side isn't willing, then yours is the right one by definition." + +While the mailing list looks like an idealized notion of a congress for the Linux kernel development, it is not as perfect as it may seem. Not all comments are taken equally because friendships and political alliances have evolved through time. The Debian group elected a president to make crucial decisions that can't be made by deep argument and consensus. The president doesn't have many other powers in other cases. + +While the Linux and GNU worlds are dominated by their one great Sun King, many other open source projects have adopted a more modern government structure that is more like Debian. The groups are still fairly ad hoc and unofficial, but they are more democratic. There's less idolatry and less dependence on one person. + +The Debian group is a good example of a very loose-knit structure with less reliance on the central leader. In the beginning, Ian Murdock started the distribution and did much of the coordination. In time, the mailing list grew and attracted other developers like Bruce Perens. As Murdock grew busier, he started handing off work to others. Eventually, he handed off central control to Perens, who slowly delegated more of the control until there was no key maintainer left. If someone dies in a bus crash, the group will live on. + +Now a large group of people act as maintainers for the different packages. Anyone who wants to work on the project can take responsibility for a particular package. This might be a small tool like a game or a bigger tool like the C compiler. In most cases, the maintainer isn't the author of the software or even a hard-core programmer. The maintainer's job is to make sure that the particular package continues to work with all the rest. In many cases, this is a pretty easy job. Most changes in the system don't affect simple programs. But in some cases it's a real challenge and the maintainer must act as a liaison between Debian and the original programmer. Sometimes the maintainers fix the bugs themselves. Sometimes they just report them. But in either case, the maintainer must make sure that the code works. + +Every once and a bit, Debian takes the latest stable kernel from Torvalds's team and mixes it together with all of the other packages. The maintainers check out their packages and when everything works well, Debian presses another CD-ROM and places the pile of code on the net. This is a stable "freeze" that the Debian group does to make sure they've got a stable platform that people can always turn to. + +"Making a whole OS with just a crew of volunteers and no money is a pretty big achievement. You can never discount that. It's easy for Red Hat to do it. They're all getting paid. The fact is that Debian makes a good system and still continues to do so. I don't think that there've been that many unpaid, collaborative projects that complex before," says Perens. + +When Perens took over at Debian he brought about two major changes. The first was to create a nonprofit corporation called Software in the Public Interest and arrange for the IRS to recognize it as a bona fide charitable organization. People and companies who donate money and equipment can take them off their taxes. + +Perens says that the group's budget is about $10,000 a year. "We pay for hardware sometimes. Although a lot of our hardware is donated. We fly people to conferences so they can promote Debian. We have a trade show booth. In general we get the trade show space from the show for free or severely discounted. We also have the conventional PO boxes, accounting, phone calls. The project doesn't have a ton of money, but it doesn't spend a lot, either." + +The Debian group also wrote the first guidelines for acceptable open source software during Perens's time in charge. These eventually mutated to become the definition endorsed by the Open Source Initiative. This isn't too surprising, since Perens was one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative. + +Debian's success has inspired many others. Red Hat, for instance, borrowed a significant amount of work done by Debian when they put together their distribution, and Debian borrows some of Red Hat's tools. When Red Hat went public, it arranged for Debian members to get a chance to buy some of the company's stock reserved for friends and family members. They recognized that Debian's team of package maintainers helped get their job done. + +Debian's constitution and strong political structure have also inspired Sun, which is trying to unite its Java and Jini customers into a community. The company is framing its efforts to support customers as the creation of a community that's protected by a constitution. The old paradigm of customer support is being replaced by a more active world of customer participation and representation. + +Of course, Sun is keeping a close hand on all of these changes. They protect their source code with a Community Source License that places crucial restrictions on the ability of these community members to stray. There's no real freedom to fork. Sun's not willing to embrace Debian's lead on that point, in part because they say they're afraid that Microsoft will use that freedom to scuttle Java. + +2~ Apache's Corporate Core + +The Apache group is one of the more businesslike development teams in the free source world. It emerged in the mid-1990s when the World Wide Web was just blossoming. In the early years, many sites relied on web servers like the free version that came from the NCSA, the supercomputer center at the University of Illinois that helped spark the web revolution by writing a server and a browser. This code was great, but it rarely served all of the purposes of the new webmasters who were starting new sites and building new tools as quickly as they could. + +Brian Behlendorf, one of the founders of the Apache group, remembers the time. "It wasn't just a hobbyist kind of thing. We had need for commercial-quality software and this was before Netscape released its software. We had developed our own set of patches that we traded like baseball cards. Finally we said, 'We had so many paths that overlap. Why don't we create our own version and continue on our own.'" + +These developers then coalesced into a core group and set up a structure for the code. They chose the basic, BSD-style license for their software, which allowed anyone to use the code for whatever purpose without distributing the source code to any changes. Many of the group lived in Berkeley then and still live in the area today. Of course, the BSD-style license also made sense for many of the developers who were involved in businesses and often didn't want to jump into the open source world with what they saw as Stallman's absolutist fervor. Businesses could adopt the Apache code without fear that some license would force them to reveal their source code later. The only catch was that they couldn't call the product Apache unless it was an unmodified copy of something approved by the Apache group. + +Several members of the group went off and formed their own companies and used the code as the basis for their products. Sameer Parekh based the Stronghold server product on Apache after his company added the encryption tools used to protect credit card information. Others just used versions of Apache to serve up websites and billed others for the cost of development. + +In 1999, the group decided to formalize its membership and create a not-for-profit corporation that was devoted to advancing the Apache server source code and the open source world in general. New members can apply to join the corporation, and they must be approved by a majority of the current members. This membership gets together and votes on a board of directors who make the substantive decisions about the group. + +This world isn't much different from the world before the corporation. A mailing list still carries debate and acts as the social glue for the group. But now the decision-making process is formalized. Before, the members of the core group would assign responsibility to different people but the decisions could only be made by rough consensus. This mechanism could be bruising and fractious if the consensus was not easy. This forced the board to work hard to develop potential compromises, but pushed them to shy away from tougher decisions. Now the board can vote and a pure majority can win. + +This seriousness and corporatization are probably the only possible steps that the Apache group could take. They've always been devoted to advancing the members' interests. Many of the other open source projects like Linux were hobbies that became serious. The Apache project was always filled with people who were in the business of building the web. While some might miss the small-town kind of feel of the early years, the corporate structure is bringing more certainty and predictability to the realm. The people don't have to wear suits now that it's a corporation. It just ensures that tough decisions will be made at a predictable pace. + +Still, the formalism adds plenty of rigidity to the structure. An excited newcomer can join the mailing lists, write plenty of code, and move mountains for the Apache group, but he won't be a full member before he is voted in. In the past, an energetic outsider could easily convert hard work into political clout in the organization. Now, a majority of the current members could keep interlopers out of the inner circle. This bureaucracy doesn't have to be a problem, but it has the potential to fragment the community by creating an institution where some people are more equal than others. Keeping the organization open in practice will be a real challenge for the new corporation. + +1~ T-Shirts + +If there's a pantheon for marketing geniuses, then it must include the guy who realized people would pay $1 for several cents' worth of sugar water if it came in a shapely bottle blessed by the brand name CocaCola. It might also include the guy who first figured out that adding new blue crystals to detergent would increase sales. It is a rare breed that understands how to get people to spend money they don't need to spend. + +The next induction ceremony for this pantheon should include Robert Young, the CEO of Red Hat Software, who helped the Linux and the open source world immeasurably by finding a way to charge people for something they could get for free. This discovery made the man rich, which isn't exactly what the free software world is supposed to do. But his company also contributed a sense of stability and certainty to the Linux marketplace, and that was sorely needed. Many hard-core programmers, who know enough to get all of the software for free, are willing to pay $70 to Red Hat just because it is easier. While some may be forever jealous of the millions of dollars in Young's pocket, everyone should realize that bringing Linux to a larger world of computer illiterates requires good packaging and hand-holding. Free software wouldn't be anywhere if someone couldn't find a good way to charge for it. + +The best way to understand why Young ranks with the folks who discovered how to sell sugar water is to go to a conference like LinuxExpo. In the center of the floor is the booth manned by Red Hat Software, the company Young started in Raleigh, North Carolina, after he got through working in the computer-leasing business. Young is in his fifties now and manages to survive despite the fact that most of his company's devotees are much closer to 13. Red Hat bundles together some of the free software made by the community and distributed over the Net and puts it on one relatively easy-to-use CD-ROM. Anyone who wants to install Linux or some of its packages can simply buy a disk from Red Hat and push a bunch of keys. All of the information is on one CD-ROM, and it's relatively tested and pretty much ready to go. If things go wrong, Red Hat promises to answer questions by e-mail or telephone to help people get the product working. + +Red Hat sells their disk at prices that range from $29.95 to $149.95. That buys the user a pretty box, three CD-ROMs including some demonstration versions of other software, all of the source code, a manual, and some telephone or e-mail support. That is pretty much like the same stuff that comes in software boxes from a normal company. The manual isn't as nice as the manuals produced by Apple or Microsoft, but it's not too bad. + +The big difference is that no one needs to buy the CD-ROM from Red Hat. Anyone can download all of the software from the Net. A friend of mine, Hal Skinner, did it yesterday and told me, "I just plugged it in and the software downloaded everything from the Net. I got everything in the Red Hat 6.0 distribution, and it didn't cost me anything." + +Of course, Red Hat isn't hurt too much by folks who grab copies without paying for them. In fact, the company maintains a website that makes it relatively easy for people to do just that. Red Hat didn't write most of the code. They also just grabbed it from various authors throughout the Net who published it under the GNU General Public License. They grabbed it without paying for it, so they're not really put out if someone grabs from them. + +The ability to snag GPL'ed software from around the Net keeps their development costs much lower than Sun, Apple, or Microsoft. They never paid most of the authors of the code they ship. They just package it up. Anyone else can just go find it on the Net and grab it themselves. This pretty much guarantees that Red Hat will be in a commodity business. + +To make matters worse for Red Hat, the potential competitors don't have to go out onto the Net and reassemble the collection of software for themselves. The GPL specifically forbids people from placing limitations on redistributing the source code. That means that a potential competitor doesn't have to do much more than buy a copy of Red Hat's disk and send it off to the CD-ROM pressing plant. People do this all the time. One company at the exposition was selling copies of all the major Linux distributions like Red Hat, Slackware, and OpenBSD for about $3 per disk. If you bought in bulk, you could get 11 disks for $25. Not a bad deal if you're a consumer. + +So, on one side of the floor, Young had a flashy booth filled with workers talking about what you could get if you paid $50 or more for Red Hat's version 6.0 with new enhancements like GNOME. Just a few hundred feet away, a company was selling ripoff copies of the same CDs for $3. Any company that is able to stay in business in a climate like that must be doing something right. + +It's not much different from the supermarket. Someone can pay $1 or more for two liters of Coca-Cola, or they can walk over a few aisles and buy Kool-Aid and raw sugar. It may be much cheaper to buy the raw ingredients, but many people don't. + +Young is also smart enough to use the competition from other cheap disk vendors to his advantage. He can't do anything about the GPL restrictions that force him to share with knockoff competitors, so he makes the best of them. "When people complain about how much we're charging for free software, I tell them to just go to CheapBytes.com," he said at the Expo. This is just one of the companies that regularly duplicates the CDs of Red Hat and resells them. Red Hat often gets some heat from people saying that the company is merely profiting off the hard work of others who've shared their software with the GPL. What gives them the right to charge so much for other people's software? But Young points out that people can get the software for $3. There must be a rational reason why they're buying Red Hat. + +Of course, the two packages aren't exactly equal. Both the original and the knockoff CD-ROM may have exactly the same contents, but the extras are different. The Red Hat package comes with "support," a rather amorphous concept in the software business. In theory, Red Hat has a team of people sitting around their offices diligently waiting to answer the questions of customers who can't get Red Hat software to do the right thing. + +In practice, the questions are often so hard or nebulous that even the support team can't answer them. When I first tried to get Red Hat to run on an old PC, the support team could only tell me that they never promised that their package would run on my funky, slightly obscure Cyrix MediaGX chip. That wasn't much help. Others probably have had better luck because they were using a more standard computer. Of course, I had no trouble installing Red Hat on my latest machine, and I didn't even need to contact tech support. + +The Red Hat packages also come with a book that tries to answer some of the questions in advance. This manual describes the basic installation procedure, but it doesn't go into any detail about the software included in the distribution. If you want to know how to run the database package, you need to dig into the online support provided by the database's developers. + +Many people enjoy buying these extra packages like the manual and the support, even if they never use them. Red Hat has blossomed by providing some hand-holding. Sure, some programmers could download the software from the Internet on their own, but most people don't want to spend the time needed to develop the expertise. + +When I say "Red Hat software," I really mean free source software that Red Hat picked up from the Net and knit into a coherent set of packages that should be, in theory, pretty bug free, tested, and ready for use. Red Hat is selling some hand-holding and filtering for the average user who doesn't want to spend time poking around the Net, checking out the different versions of the software, and ensuring that they work well together. Red Hat programmers have spent some time examining the software on the CD-ROM. They've tested it and occasionally improved it by adding new code to make it run better. + +Red Hat also added a custom installation utility to make life easier for people who want to add Red Hat to their computer.~{ Er, I mean to say "add Linux" or "add GNU/Linux." "Red Hat" is now one of the synonyms for free software. }~ They could have made this package installation tool proprietary. After all, Red Hat programmers wrote the tool on company time. But Young released it with the GNU General Public License, recognizing that the political value of giving something back was worth much more than the price they could charge for the tool. + +This is part of a deliberate political strategy to build goodwill among the programmers who distribute their software. Many Linux users compare the different companies putting together free source software CDROMs and test their commitment to the free software ideals. Debian, for instance, is very popular because it is a largely volunteer project that is careful to only include certified free source software on their CD-ROMs. Debian, however, isn't run like a business and it doesn't have the same attitude. This volunteer effort and enlightened pursuit of the essence of free software make the Debian distribution popular among the purists. + +Distributors like Caldera, on the other hand, include nonfree software with their disk. You pay $29.95 to $149.95 for a CD-ROM and get some nonfree software like a word processor tossed in as a bonus. This is a great deal if you're only going to install the software once, but the copyright on the nonfree software prevents you from distributing the CD-ROM to friends. Caldera is hoping that the extras it throws in will steer people toward its disk and get them to choose Caldera's version of Linux. Many of the purists, like Richard Stallman, hate this practice and think it is just a not very subtle way to privatize the free software. If the average user isn't free to redistribute all the code, then there's something evil afoot. Of course, Stallman or any of the other software authors can't do anything about this because they made their software freely distributable. + +Young is trying to walk the line between these two approaches. Red Hat is very much in the business of selling CD-ROMs. The company has a payroll with more than a handful of programmers who are drawing nonvolunteer salaries to keep the distributions fresh and the code clean. But he's avoided the temptation of adding not-so-free code to his disks. This gives him more credibility with the programmers who create the software and give it away. In theory, Young doesn't need to ingratiate himself to the various authors of GPL-protected software packages. They've already given the code away. Their power is gone. In practice, he gains plenty of political goodwill by playing the game by their rules. + +Several companies are already making PCs with Linux software installed at the factory. While they could simply download the software from the Net themselves and create their own package, several have chosen to bundle Red Hat's version with their machines. Sam Ockman, the president of Penguin Computing, runs one of those companies. + +Ockman is a recent Stanford graduate in his early twenties and a strong devotee of the Linux and GPL world. He says he started his company to prove that Linux could deliver solid, dependable servers that could compete with the best that Sun and Microsoft have to offer. + +Ockman has mixed feelings about life at Stanford. While he fondly remembers the "golf course-like campus," he says the classes were too easy. He graduated with two majors despite spending plenty of time playing around with the Linux kernel. He says that the computer science department's hobbled curriculum drove him to Linux. "Their whole CS community is using a stupid compiler for C on the Macintosh," he says."Why don't they start you off on Linux? By the time you get to [course] 248, you could hack on the Linux kernel or your own replacement kernel. It's just a tragedy that you're sitting there writing virtual kernels on a Sun system that you're not allowed to reboot." + +In essence, the computer science department was keeping their kids penned up in the shallow end of the pool instead of taking them out into the ocean. Ockman found the ocean on his own time and started writing GPL-protected code and contributing to the political emergence of free software. + +When Ockman had to choose a version of Linux for his Penguin computers, he chose Red Hat. Bob Young's company made the sale because it was playing by the rules of the game and giving software back with a GPL. Ockman says, "We actually buy the box set for every single one. Partially because the customers like to get the books, but also to support Red Hat. That's also why we picked Red Hat. They're the most free of all of the distributions." + +Debian, Ockman concedes, is also very free and politically interesting, but says that his company is too small to support multiple distributions. "We only do Red Hat. That was a very strategic decision on our part. All of the distributions are pretty much the same, but there are slight differences in this and that. We could have a twelve-person Debian group, but it would just be a nightmare for us to support all of these different versions of Linux." + +Of course, Penguin Computing could have just bought one Red Hat CD-ROM and installed their software on all of the machines going out the door. That would have let them cut their costs by about $50. The GPL lets anyone install the software as often as they wish. But this wouldn't be pure savings because Ockman is also offloading some of his own work when he bundles a Red Hat package with his computers. He adds, "Technically the box set I include allows customers to call Red Hat, but no one ever does, nor do we expect them or want them to call anyone but us." In essence, his company is adding some extra support with the Red Hat box. + +The support is an important add-on that Young is selling, but he realized long ago that much more was on sale. Red Hat was selling an image, the sense of belonging, and the indeterminant essence of cool. Soda manufacturers realized that anyone could put sugar and water in a bottle, but only the best could rise above the humdrum nature of life by employing the best artists in the land to give their sugar water the right hip feeling. So Young invested in image. His T-shirts and packages have always been some of the most graphically sophisticated on the market. While some folks would get girlfriends or neighbors to draw the images that covered their books and CDs, Red Hat used a talented team to develop their packaging. + +Young jokes about this. He said he was at a trade show talking to a small software company that was trying to give him one of their free promotional T-shirts. He said, "Why don't you try giving away the source code and selling the T-shirts?" + +At the LinuxExpo, Red Hat was selling T-shirts, too. One slick number retailing for $19 just said "The Revolution of Choice" in Red Hat's signature old typewriter font. Others for sale at the company's site routinely run for $15 or more. They sucked me in. When I ordered my first Red Hat disk from them, I bought an extra T-shirt to go with the mix. + +The technology folks at Red Hat may be working with some cuttingedge software that makes the software easy to install, but the marketing group was stealing its plays from Nike, Pepsi, and Disney. They weren't selling running shoes, sugar water, or a ride on a roller coaster--they were selling an experience. Red Hat wasn't repackaging some hacker's science project from the Net, it was offering folks a ticket to a revolution. If the old 1960s radicals had realized this, they might have been able to fund their movement without borrowing money from their square parents. Selling enough groovy, tie-died T-shirts would have been enough.~{ Apple is an old hand at the T-shirt game, and internal projects create T-shirts to celebrate milestones in development. These images were collected in a book, which may be as good a technical history of Apple as might exist. Many projects, including ones that failed, are part of the record. }~ + +Many of the other groups are part of the game. The OpenBSD project sold out of their very fashionable T-shirts with wireframe versions of its little daemon logo soon after the beginning of the LinuxExpo. They continue to sell more T-shirts from their website. Users can also buy CD-ROMs from OpenBSD. + +Several attendees wear yellow copyleft shirts that hold an upsidedown copyright logo <:=Copyleft> arranged so the open side points to the left. + +The most expensive T-shirt at the show came with a logo that imitated one of the early marketing images of the first Star Wars movie. The shirt showed Torvalds and Stallman instead of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker under a banner headline of "OS Wars." The shirt cost only $100, but "came with free admission to the upcoming Linux convention in Atlanta." + +The corporate suits, of course, have adjusted as best they can. The IBM folks at the show wore identical khaki outfits with nicely cut and relatively expensive polo shirts with IBM logos. A regular suit would probably stick out less than the crisp, clean attempt to split the difference between casual cool and button-down business droid. + +Of course, the T-shirts weren't just about pretty packaging and slick images. The shirts also conveyed some information about someone's political affiliations in the community and showed something about the person's technical tastes. Sure, someone could wear an OpenBSD shirt because they liked the cute little daemon logo, but also because they wanted to show that they cared about security. The OpenBSD project began because some users wanted to build a version of UNIX that was much more secure. The group prides itself on fixing bugs early and well. Wearing an OpenBSD shirt proclaims a certain alliance with this team's commitment to security. After all, some of the profits from the shirts went to pay for the development of the software. Wearing the right T-shirt meant choosing an alliance. It meant joining a tribe. + +Young is keenly aware that much of his target market is 13-year-old boys who are flexing their minds and independence for the first time. The same images of rebellion that brought James Dean his stardom are painted on the T-shirts. Some wear shirts proclaiming TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION SOON. Raging against Microsoft is a cliché that is avoided as much as it is still used. The shirts are a mixture of parody, bluster, wit, and confidence. Of course, they're usually black. Everyone wears black. + +Ockman looks at this market competition for T-shirts and sees a genius. He says, "I think Bob Young's absolutely brilliant. Suddenly he realized that there's no future in releasing mainframes. He made a jump after finding college kids in Carolina [using Linux]. For him to make that jump is just amazing. He's a marketing guy. He sat down and figured it out. + +"Every time I hear him talk," Ockman says about Young, "he tells a different story about ketchup. If you take people who've never had ketchup before in their life and you blindly feed them ketchup, they have no taste for ketchup. They don't like it." If you feed them ketchup over time, they begin to demand it on their hamburgers. + +"No one who's never had Coca-Cola before would like it," Ockman continues. "These things are purely a branding issue. It has to be branded for cool in order for people to sit down and learn everything they have to know." + +In essence, Young looked around and saw that a bunch of scruffy kids were creating an OS that was just as good, if not better, than the major OSs costing major sums of money. This OS was, best of all, free for all comers. The OS had a problem, though. The scruffy kids never marketed their software. The deeply intelligent, free-thinking hackers picked up on how cool it was, but the rest of society couldn't make the jump. The scruffy kids didn't bother to try to market it to the rest of society. They were artists. + +Most people who looked at such a situation would have concluded that this strange clan of techno-outsiders was doomed to inhabit the periphery of society forever. There was no marketing of the product because there was no money in the budget and there would never be money in the budget because the software was free. Young recognized that you could still market the software without owning it. You could still slap on a veneer of cool without writing the code yourself. Sugar water costs practically nothing, too. + +Young's plan to brand the OS with a veneer of cool produced more success than anyone could imagine. Red Hat is by far the market leader in providing Linux to the masses, despite the fact that many can and do "steal" a low-cost version. Of course, "steal" isn't the right word, because Red Hat did the same thing. "Borrow" isn't right, "grab" is a bit casual, and "join in everlasting communion with the great free software continuum" is just too enthusiastic to be cool. + +In August 1999, Red Hat completed an initial public offering of the shares of its stock, the common benchmark for success in the cash-driven world of Silicon Valley. Many of the principals at Red Hat got rich when the stock opened at $14 a share on August 11 and closed the day at $52. Bob Young, the CEO of Red Hat, started the day with a bit more than 9 million shares or 15 percent of the company. Technically, not all of this was his because he had distributed some (3,222,746 shares, to be exact) to his wife, Nancy, and put some more (1,418,160) in various trusts for his children. Still, this cut adds up to about $468 million. Marc Ewing, executive vice president and chief technology officer, also ended up with a similar amount of money divided between trusts and his own pocket. Matthew Sulzik, the president, who joined in November 1998, got a bit less (2,736,248 shares) in his pot, but he was a relative newcomer. The big investors, Greylock IX Limited Partnership, Benchmark Capital Partners II, and Intel, split up the big part of the rest of the shares. + +Now, what happened to the boys who wrote the code? Did Richard Stallman get any of it? Did Linus Torvalds? Some of the major developers like Alan Cox and David Miller already work for Red Hat, so they probably drew shares out of the employee pool. There are thousands of names, however, who aren't on anyone's radar screen. They've written many lines of code for naught. + +Red Hat tried to alleviate some of the trouble by allocating 800,000 shares to "directors, officers and employees of Red Hat and to open source software developers and other persons that Red Hat believes have contributed to the success of the open source software community and the growth of Red Hat." This group, occasionally known as the "friends and family," was a way to reward buddies. Red Hat drew up a list of major contributors to the open source distribution and sent out invitations. + +"Dear open source community member," began the e-mail letter that Red Hat sent to about 1,000 people. + +_1 In appreciation of your contribution to the open source community, Red Hat is pleased to offer you this personal, non-transferable, opportunity. . . . Red Hat couldn't have grown this far without the ongoing help and support of the open source community, therefore, we have reserved a portion of the stock in our offering for distribution online to certain members of the open source community. We invite you to participate. + +Many programmers and developers were touched by the thoughtfulness. The list probably wasn't long enough or inclusive enough to pull everyone into the circle, but it did do a good job of spreading the wealth around. The plan began to backfire, however, when E*Trade began to parcel out the shares. Everyone who made it onto the list filled out a form listing their net worth, and E*Trade attempted to decide who was a sophisticated investor and who wasn't. Some folks who had little money (perhaps because they spent too much time writing free software) were locked out. + +One contributor, C. Scott Ananian, wrote about his rejection in Salon magazine, "I filled out the eligibility questionnaire myself. I knew they were trying to weed out inexperienced investors, so on every question that related to experience, I asserted the maximum possible. I knew what I was doing. And it was my money, anyway--I had a God-given right to risk it on as foolhardy a venture as I liked." + +The article drew plenty of flack and murmurs of a class action lawsuit from the disenfranchised. A discussion broke out on Slashdot, the hardcore site for nerds. Some defended E*Trade and pointed out that a Red Hat IPO was not a lock or a guarantee of wealth. Too many grandmothers had been burned by slick-talking stock salesmen in the past. E*Trade had to block out the little guys for their own protection. Stock can go down as well as up. + +Steve Gilliard, a "media operative" at the website NetSlaves, wrote, +"If the Red Hat friends and family group were judged by normal standards, there is no brokerage in the U.S. which would let many of them buy into an IPO. In many cases, they would be denied a brokerage account. Poor people are usually encouraged to make other investments, like paying off Visa and Master Card." + +Others saw it as a trick to weed out the pool and make sure that E*Trade could allocate the shares to its buddies. The more the small guys were excluded, the more the big guys would get for their funds. In the end, the complaints reached some ears. More people were able to sneak in, but the circle was never big enough for all. + +2~ World Domination Pretty Soon? + +Red Hat's big pool of money created more than jealousy in the hearts and minds of the open source world. Jealousy was an emotional response. Fear of a new Microsoft was the rational response that came from the mind. Red Hat's pool of cash was unprecedented in the open source community. People saw what the pile of money and the stock options did to Bill Gates. Everyone began to wonder if the same would happen to Red Hat. + +On the face of it, most open source developers have little to worry about. All the code on the Red Hat disk is covered with a General Protection License and isn't going to become proprietary. Robert Young has been very open about his promise to make sure that everything Red Hat ships falls under the GPL. That includes the distribution tools it writes in-house. + +The GPL is a powerful force that prevents Red Hat from making many unilateral decisions. There are plenty of distributions that would like to take over the mantle of the most popular version of Linux. It's not hard. The source code is all there. + +But more savvy insiders whisper about a velvet-gloved version of Microsoft's "embrace and extend." The company first gains control by stroking the egos and padding the wallets of the most important developers. + +In time, other Red Hat employees will gradually become the most important developers. They're paid to work on open source projects all day. They'll gradually supplant the people who have day jobs. They'll pick up mindshare. Such a silent coup could guarantee that Red Hat will continue to receive large influxes of cash from people who buy the CD-ROMs. + +There are parts of this conspiracy theory that are already true. Red Hat does dominate the United States market for Linux and it controls a great deal of the mindshare. Their careful growth supported by an influx of cash ensured a strong position in the marketplace. + +In November 1999, Red Hat purchased Cygnus Solutions, the other major commercial developer of GPL-protected software, which specialized in maintaining and extending the compiler, GCC. Red Hat had 235 employees at the time and Cygnus Solutions had 181. That's a huge fraction of the open source developers under one roof. The Cygnus press release came with the headline, RED HAT TO ACQUIRE CYGNUS AND CREATE OPEN SOURCE POWERHOUSE. + +To make matters worse, one of the founders of Cygnus, Michael Tiemann, likes to brag that the open source software prevents competitors from rising up to threaten Cygnus. The GPL guarantees that the competitors will also have to publish their source, giving Cygnus a chance to stay ahead. In this model, any company with the money and stamina to achieve market dominance isn't going to be knocked down by some kids in a garage. + +Those are scary confluences. Let's imagine that the conspiracy theory is completely borne out. Let's imagine that all of the other distributions wither away as corporate and consumer clients rush head over heels to put Red Hat on their machines. Red Hat becomes the default in much the same way that Microsoft is the default today. Will Red Hat have the power that Microsoft has today? + +Will they be able to force everyone to have a Red Hat Network logon button on their desktop? Perhaps. Many people are going to trust Red Hat to create a good default installation. Getting software to be loaded by default will give them some power. + +Can they squeeze their partners by charging different rates for Linux? Microsoft is known to offer lower Windows prices to their friends. This is unlikely. Anyone can just buy a single Red Hat CDROM from a duplicator like CheapBytes. This power play won't work. + +Can they duplicate the code of a rival and give it away in much the same way that Microsoft created Internet Explorer and "integrated" it into their browser? You bet they can. They're going to take the best ideas they can get. If they're open source, they'll get sucked into the Red Hat orbit. If they're not, then they'll get someone to clone them. + +Can they force people to pay a "Red Hat tax" just to upgrade to the latest software? Not likely. Red Hat is going to be a service company, and they're going to compete on having the best service for their customers. Their real competitor will be companies that sell support contracts like LinuxCare. Service industries are hard work. Every customer needs perfect care or they'll go somewhere else next time. Red Hat's honeymoon with the IPO cash will only last so long. Eventually, they're going to have to earn the money to get a return on the investment. They're going to be answering a lot of phone calls and e-mails. + +1~ New + +Most of this book frames the entire free source movement as something new and novel. The notion of giving away free source code is something that seems strange and counterintuitive. But despite all of the gloss and excitement about serious folks doing serious work and then just giving it away like great philanthropists, it's pretty easy to argue that this has all been done before. The software world is just rediscovering secrets that the rest of the world learned long ago. + +Giving things away isn't a radical idea. People have been generous since, well, the snake gave Eve that apple. Businesses love to give things away in the hope of snagging customers. Paper towel manufacturers give away towel hardware that only accepts paper in a proprietary size. Food companies give coolers and freezers to stores if the stores agree not to stock rival brands in them. + +In fact, most industries do more than just give away free gifts to lure customers. Most share ideas, strategies, and plans between competitors because cooperation lets them all blossom. Stereo companies make components that interoperate because they adhere to the same standard. Lawyers, engineers, and doctors are just some of the people who constantly trade ideas and solutions with each other despite the fact that they work as competitors. A broad, central, unowned pool of knowledge benefits everyone in much the same way that it helps the free software community. + +The real question is not "Who do these pseudo-commie pinkos think they are?" It's "What took the software industry so long to figure this out?" How did the programmers who are supposedly a bunch of whip-smart, hard-core libertarians let a bunch of lawyers lead them down a path that put them in a cubicle farm and prevented them from talking to each other? + +Recipes are one of the closest things to software in the material world, and many restaurants now share them widely. While chefs once treated them like industrial secrets, they now frequently give copies to magazines and newspapers as a form of publicity. The free advertisement is worth more than the possibility that someone will start cloning the recipe. The restaurants recognized that they were selling more than unique food. Ambiance, service, and quality control are often more in demand than a particular recipe. + +When the free software industry succeeds by sharing the source code now, it's capitalizing on the fact that most people don't want to use the source code to set up a take-no-prisoners rivalry. Most people just want to get their work done. The cost of sharing source code is so low that it doesn't take much gain to make it worth the trouble. One bug fix or tiny feature could pay for it. + +2~ Shareware Is Not Open Source and Open Source Isn't Free + +The software industry has been flirting with how to make money off of the low cost of distributing its product. The concept of shareware began long before the ideological free software movement as companies and individual developers began sharing the software as a cheap form of advertisement. Developers without the capital to start a major marketing campaign have passed around free versions of their software. People could try it and if it met their needs, they could pay for it. Those who didn't like it were honor-bound to erase their version. + +Shareware continues to be popular to this day. A few products have made a large amount of money with this approach, but most have made very little. Some people, including many of the major companies, distribute their own crippled version of their product so people can try it. Crucial functions like the ability to print or save a document to the disk are usually left out as a strong encouragement to buy the real version. + +Of course, free source products aren't the same thing as shareware because most shareware products don't come with the source code. Programmers don't have the ability or the right to modify them to do what they want. This has always been one of the biggest selling points to the high-end marketplace that knows how to program. + +In fact, free source software is not dirt cheap either. Anyone who's been around the open software community for a time realizes that you end up having to pay something for the lunch. Keeping some costs hidden from the consumer isn't new, and it still hasn't gone away in the free software world. The costs may not be much and they may be a much better deal than the proprietary marketplace, but the software still costs something. + +The simplest cost is time. Free software is often not as polished as many commercial products. If you want to use many of the tools, you must study manuals and learn to think like a programmer. Some manuals are quite nice, but many are cursory. This may change as the free software movement aims to dominate the desktop, but the manuals and help aren't as polished as the solutions coming out of Microsoft. Of course, one free software devotee told me by way of apology, "Have you actually tried using Microsoft's manuals or help? They suck, too." + +Even when it is polished, free source software requires time to use. The more options that are available, the more time it takes to configure the software. Free source gives tons of options. + +The lack of polish isn't usually a problem for programmers, and it's often not an extra cost either. Programmers often need to learn a system before they find a way to revise and extend it to do what their boss wants it to do. Learning the guts of a free software package isn't much of an extra cost because they would be just trying to learn the guts of a Microsoft product instead. Plus, the source code makes the process easier. + +Still, most users including the best programmers end up paying a company like Red Hat, Caldera, or a group like OpenBSD to do some of the basic research in building a Linux system. All of the distribution companies charge for a copy of their software and throw in some support. While the software is technically free, you pay for help to get it to work. + +If the free source code is protected by the GNU General Public License, then you end up paying again when you're forced to include your changes with the software you ship. Bundling things up, setting up a server, writing documentation, and answering users' questions take time. Sure, it may be fair, good, and nice to give your additions back to the community, but it can be more of a problem for some companies. Let's say you have to modify a database to handle some proprietary process, like a weird way to make a chemical or manufacture a strange widget. Contributing your source code back into the public domain may reveal something to a competitor. Most companies won't have this problem, but being forced to redistribute code always has costs. + +Of course, the cost of this is debatable. Tivo, for instance, is a company that makes a set-top box for recording television content on an internal hard disk. The average user just sees a fancy, easy-to-use front end, but underneath, the entire system runs on the Linux operating system. Tivo released a copy of the stripped-down version of Linux it ships on its machines on its website, fulfilling its obligation to the GNU GPL. The only problem I've discovered is that the web page (www.tivo.com/linux/) +is not particularly easy to find from the home page. If I hadn't known it was there, I wouldn't have found it. + +Of course, companies that adopt free source software also end up paying in one way or another because they need to hire programmers to keep the software running. This isn't necessarily an extra cost because they would have hired Microsoft experts anyway. Some argue that the free source software is easier to maintain and thus cheaper to use, but these are difficult arguments to settle. + +In each of these ways, the free software community is giving away something to spark interest and then finding a way to make up the cost later. Some in the free software community sell support and others get jobs. Others give back their extensions and bug fixes. A running business is a working ecology where enough gets reinvested to pay for the next generation of development. The free source world isn't a virtual single corporation like the phone company or the cable business, but it can be thought of in that way. Therefore, the free software isn't much different from the free toasters at the banks, the free lollipops at the barber's, or the free drugs from the neighborhood pusher. + +If you want to think bigger, it may be better to see the free software world as closer to the great socialized resources like the ocean, the freeway system, or the general utility infrastructure. These treat everyone equally and provide a common basis for travel and commerce. + +Of course, that's the most cynical way that free software is no different from many of the other industries. There are other ways that the free source vision is just a return to the way that things used to be before the software industry mucked them up. The problem is that a mixture of licensing, copyright, and patent laws have given the software industry more ways to control their product than virtually any other industry. The free source movement is more a reaction against these controls than a brave new experiment. + +2~ Would You License a Car from These Guys? + +Comparing the software industry to the car industry is always a popular game. Normally, the car industry looks a bit poky and slow off the mark because they haven't been turning out new products that are twice as fast and twice as efficient as last year's products. But many parts of the car industry are bright, shining examples of freedom compared to their software equivalents. + +Consider the Saturday afternoon mechanic who likes to change the oil, put in a new carburetor, swap the spark plugs, and keep the car in running order. The car guy can do all of these things without asking the manufacturer for permission. There's nothing illegal about taking apart an engine or even putting an entirely new, souped-up engine in your car. The environmental protection laws may prohibit adding engines that spew pollutants, but the manufacturer is out of the loop. After all, it's your car. You paid for it. + +Software is something completely different. You don't own most of the software you paid for on your computer. You just own a "license" to use it. The difference is that the license can be revoked at any time if you don't follow the rules, and some of the rules can be uncomfortable or onerous. There's nothing wrong with this mechanism. In the right hands, it can be very pleasant. The Berkeley Software Distribution license, for instance, has no real requirements except that you credit the university for its contributions, and the university just revoked that requirement. The GNU Public License is much stricter, but only if you want to change, modify, and distribute the code. In that case, you're only prevented from keeping these changes a secret. That's not a big problem for most of us. + +Other licenses are even more stricter. One Microsoft license prevents the programmer from trying to figure out how the software works inside by saying "LICENSEE may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble Microsoft Agent." These clauses are popular and found in many software licenses. The company lawyers argue that they ostensibly prevent people from stealing the secrets that are bound up in the software. + +These licenses have been interpreted in different ways. The video game maker Accolade, for instance, won its case against the manufacturer Sega by arguing that reverse engineering was the only way to create a clone. If companies couldn't clone, there would be no free market. On the other hand, Connectix lost some of the early court battles when Sony sued them for creating a software clone of the PlayStation. The judge decided that Connectix had violated Sony's copyright when they made a copy to study for reverse engineering. In February 2000, an appeals court struck down this ruling, freeing Connectix to sell the emulator again. By the time you read this, the legal landscape will probably have changed again. + +In practice, license clauses like this only hurt the honest programmers who are trying to deal with a nasty bug. Most people don't want to steal secrets, they just want to be able to make their software work correctly. Decompiling or disassembling the code is a good way to figure out exactly what is going on inside the software. It can save hours and plenty of grief. + +The license even borders on the absurd because the phrase "reverse engineer" is so ambiguous. It may be possible to argue that just learning to use a piece of software is reverse engineering it. Learning how a feature works means learning to predict what it will do. In many cases, the bugs and the glitches in software mean that the features are often a bit unpredictable and only a bit of black-box reverse engineering can teach us how they work. That's not much different from learning the steps that happen inside. Fiddling with shrink-wrapped software is like fiddling with a black box. + +Imagine that General Motors or Ford sold their cars with such a donot-reverse-engineer license. They would either weld the hood shut or add on a special lock and only give the keys to registered dealers who would sign lots of forms that guaranteed that they would keep the workings of the cars secret. No one could change the spark plugs, chop the hood, add a nitro tank, or do anything with the car except drive it around in a completely boring way. Some lawyers at the car companies might love to start shipping cars with such a license. Think how much more they could charge for service!The smart executives might realize that they were hurting their biggest fans, the people who liked to tune, tweak, fiddle, and futz with their machines. They would be stripping away one of the great pleasures of their devices and slowly but surely turning the cars into commodity items that put the owners in legal strait-jackets. + +Some software companies take the licensing requirements to even greater extremes. One of the most famous examples is the Microsoft Agent software, which allows a programmer to create little animated characters that might give instructions. Some versions of Microsoft Office, for instance, come with a talking paper clip that points out new and improved features. Microsoft released this technology to the general programmer community hoping that people would add the tools to their software and create their own talking characters. + +The software is free and Microsoft posts a number of nice tools for using the code on their website. They couldn't leave well enough alone, though, because anyone who wants to use the tool with their code needs to print out and file a separate license with the Microsoft legal staff. Many of the clauses are pretty simple and do useful things like force anyone using the software to try to keep their versions up to date. But the most insidious one ensures that no one will + +_1 "...use the Character Animation Data and Image Files to disparage Microsoft, its products or services or for promotional goods or for products which, in Microsoft's sole judgment, may diminish or otherwise damage Microsoft's goodwill in the SOFTWARE PRODUCT including but not limited to uses which could be deemed under applicable law to be obscene or pornographic, uses which are excessively violent, unlawful, or which purpose is to encourage unlawful activities." + +In other words, if you want to make the cute animated cartoon say something unkind about Microsoft, Microsoft can simply shut you down. And don't even think about creating a little animated marijuana cigarette for your Grateful Dead softwarepalooza. It's practically illegal just to think bad thoughts in the vicinity of a computer running Microsoft Agent. + +Most software licenses are not as bad or as restrictive as the Microsoft Agent license, but many cause their own share of grief. Companies continue to try to come up with more restrictive solutions for combating piracy, and in the end they bother the legitimate users. People are often buying new computers or upgrading a hard disk, and both of these acts require making a copy of old software. Companies that make it too difficult to do these things end up rubbing salt in the wounds of legitimate users who lose a hard disk. + +In this context, the free source world isn't a new flowering of mutual respect and sharing, it's just a return to the good old days when you could take apart what was yours. If you bought the software, you can fiddle with it. This isn't the Age of Aquarius, it is the second coming of Mayberry R.F.D., Home Improvement, and the Dukes of Hazzard. + +2~ Other Professions Were Open from the Start + +This comparison doesn't have to be limited to the car guys in the garage. Many other professions freely share ideas and operate without the very restrictive covenants of the software industry. The legal business is a great example of a world where people are free to beg, borrow, and steal ideas from others. If someone finds a neat loophole, they can't patent it or prevent others from exploiting it. Once other lawyers hear about it, they'll be filing their own lawsuits for their own clients. ~{ 1The legal system is not perfect. Too many cases are now filed under seal, and the courts are too willing to act as private dispute agencies for big corporations. When the law is locked up in this way, it is not a great example for the free software world. }~ + +Consider the world of tobacco liability. Once one state advanced the legal opinion that the tobacco companies were liable for the cost of treating any disease that might emerge from smoking cigarettes, the other states and plenty of lawyers were able to jump on board. Once they settled, the lawyers turned their sights on the gun companies. By the time you read this, they'll probably have moved on to the fat delivery vehicle manufacturers in the fast-food industry and the stress induction groups, aka your employer. The exercise reduction industry, made up of a megalomaniacal consortium of moviemakers, television producers, and, yes, book writers, must be on someone's list.~{ The author recommends that you read this on the Stairmaster or a stationary bike, but only after checking with a registered doctor and consulting with a licensed exercise specialist who is thoroughly familiar with your medical history. These medical specialists will be able to tune your workout to provide the optimal fitness benefits so you can live long enough to get Alzheimer's disease. }~ + +Free source folks are just as free to share ideas. Many of the rival Linux and BSD distributions often borrow code from each other. While they compete for the hearts and minds of buyers, they're forced by the free source rules to share the code. If someone writes one device driver for one platform, it is quickly modified for another. + +The proprietary software world moves slowly in comparison. They keep their ideas secret and people spend thousands of lawyer years on projects just keeping the various licenses straight. Code is shared, but only after lawyers vet the contracts. + +The legal industry is also a good example of how the free sharing of ideas, techniques, and strategies does not hurt the income of the practitioners. In fact, lawyers have managed to carve themselves a very nice slice of the nation's income. Most are not as rich as the lucky few who beat the tobacco companies, but they do all right. + +2~ Copyright, Tool of Dictators + +It would be unfair to the software industry to portray the rest of society as much more sharing and giving. Most of the other industries are frantically using the legal system and any other means necessary to stay ahead of their competitors. It's just part of doing business. + +One of the best examples is content production, which is led by mega-companies like Disney. In recent years, Hollywood has worked hard to get copyright laws changed so that the copyright lasts 95 years instead of 75 years. In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (CTEA) that kept works published after 1923 from passing into the public domain until 2019. The industry feels that this gives them the protection to keep creating new items. Creations like Mickey Mouse and Snow White will continue to live in the very safe place controlled by Disney and not fall into the evil hands of the public domain. + +Several Harvard professors, Larry Lessig, Charles Nesson, and Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and Geoffrey Stewart of the Boston law firm Hale and Dorr filed a lawsuit contesting the act by pointing out that the Constitution provides for a "limited" term. Artists, authors, and creators were given copyright protection, but it was only for a limited amount of time. Afterward, the society could borrow and use the work freely. + +There's little doubt that the major Hollywood producers recognize the value of a well-stocked collection of public domain literature. Movies based on works by William Shakespeare, Henry James, and Jane Austen continue to roll out of the studios to the welcoming patrons who buy tickets despite knowing how the story ends. Disney itself built its movie franchise on shared fables like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White. Very few of Disney's animated films (The Lion King was one of the first ones) were created in-house from a clean piece of paper. Most were market-tested for acceptance by their years in the public domain. Of course, Disney only pays attention to this fact when they're borrowing an idea to create their own version, not when they're defending the copyright of their own creations. They want to take, not give. + +The movie industry, like the proprietary software business, seems to forget just how valuable a shared repository of ideas and solutions can be. In this context, the free source movement isn't an explosion of creative brilliance or a renaissance of cooperation, it's just a return to the good old days when Congress wouldn't slavishly answer the whims of the content industry. If a theater owner wanted to put on a Shakespeare play, the text was in the public domain. If someone wanted to rewrite Jane Austen and create the movie Clueless, they were free to do so. In the good old days, copyright faded after a limited amount of time and the public got something back for granting a monopoly to the artist. In the good old days, the artist got something back, too, when the monopoly of other artists faded away. + +It's not like this brave new world of total copyright protection has generated superior content. The so-called original movies aren't that different. All of the action movies begin with some death or explosion in the first two minutes. They all run through a few car chases that lead to the dramatic final confrontation. The television world is filled with 30-minute sitcoms about a bunch of young kids trying to make it on their own. It's sort of surprising that Hollywood continues to suggest that the copyright laws actually promote creativity. + +It's not hard to believe that we might be better off if some of the characters were protected by an open source license. Superman and Batman have both gone through several decades of character morphing as the artists and writers assigned to the strips change. Of course, that change occurred under the strict control of the corporation with the copyright. + +The thousands of fan novels and short stories are better examples. Many fans of movies like Star Trek or Star Wars often write their own stories using the protected characters without permission. Most of the time the studios and megalithic corporations holding the copyright look the other way. The work doesn't make much money and is usually born out of love for the characters. The lawyers who have the job of defending the copyrights are often cool enough to let it slide. + +Each of these novels provides some insight into the characters and also the novelist. While not every novelist is as talented as the original authors, it can still be fun to watch the hands of another mold the characters and shape his or her destiny. The world of the theater has always accepted the notion that directors and actors will fiddle with plays and leave their own marks on them. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if writers could have the same latitude after the original author enjoyed a short period of exclusivity. + +There are many ways in which the free software world is strange and new to society, but sharing ideas without limitations is not one of them. Almost all businesses let people tinker and change the products they buy. The software industry likes to portray itself as a bunch of libertarians who worship the free market and all of its competition. In reality, the leading firms are riding a wave of power-grabbing that has lasted several decades. The firms and their lawyers have consistently interpreted their rules to allow them to shackle their customers with stronger and stronger bonds designed to keep them loyal and everspending. + +This is all part of a long progression that affects all industries. Linus Torvalds explained his view of the evolution when he told the San Jose Mercury-News, "Regardless of open source, programs will become really cheap. Any industry goes through three phases. First, there's the development of features people need. Then there's the frills-andupgrade phase, when people buy it because it looks cool. Then there's the everybody-takes-it-for-granted phase. This is when it becomes a commodity. Well, we're still in the look-cool-and-upgrade stage. In 10 or 15 years you'll be happy with software that's 5 years old. Open source is one sign that we're moving in that direction." + +In this light, the free software revolution isn't really a revolution at all. It's just the marketplace responding to the overly greedy approaches of some software companies. It's just a return to the good old days when buying something meant that you owned it, not that you just signed on as a sort of enlightened slave of the system. + +1~ Nations + +Microsoft is an American company. Bill Gates lives in Washington State and so do most of the programmers under his dominion. The software they write gets used around the globe in countries big and small, and the money people pay for the software comes flooding back to the Seattle area, where it buys huge houses, designer foods, and lots of serious and very competitive consumption. Through the years, this sort of economic imperialism has built the great cities of Rome, London, Tokyo, Barcelona, and many other minor cities. History is just a long series of epochs when some company comes up with a clever mechanism for moving the wealth of the world home to its cities. Britain relied on opium for a while. Rome, it might be said, sold a legal system. Spain trafficked in pure gold and silver. Microsoft is selling structured information in one of the most efficient schemes yet. + +Of course, these periods of wealth-building invariably come to an abrupt end when some army, which is invariably described as "ragtag," shows up to pillage and plunder. The Mongolian hordes, the Visigoths, and the Vikings are just a few of the lightweight, lean groups that appeared over the horizon and beat the standing army of the fat and complacent society. This was the cycle of boom and doom that built and trashed empire after dynasty after great society. + +Perhaps it's just a coincidence that Linus Torvalds has Viking blood in him. Although he grew up in Finland, he comes from the minority of the population for whom Swedish is the native tongue. The famous neutrality during World War II, the lumbering welfare states, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the bays filled with hiding Russian submarines give the impression that the Viking way is just a thing of the past, but maybe some of the old hack and sack is still left in the bloodlines. + +The Linux movement isn't really about nations and it's not really about war in the old-fashioned sense. It's about nerds building software and letting other nerds see how cool their code is. It's about empowering the world of programmers and cutting out the corporate suits. It's about spending all night coding on wonderful, magnificent software with massive colonnades, endless plazas, big brass bells, and huge steam whistles without asking a boss "Mother, may I?" It's very individualistic and peaceful. + +That stirring romantic vision may be moving the boys in the trenches, but the side effects are beginning to be felt in the world of global politics. Every time Linux, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD is installed, several dollars don't go flowing to Seattle. There's a little bit less available for the Microsoft crowd to spend on mega-mansions, SUVs, and local taxes. The local library, the local police force, and the local schools are going to have a bit less local wealth to tax. In essence, the Linux boys are sacking Seattle without getting out of their chairs or breaking a sweat. You won't see this battle retold on those cable channels that traffic in war documentaries, but it's unfolding as we speak. + +The repercussions go deeper. Microsoft is not just a Seattle firm. Microsoft is an American company and whatever is good for Microsoft is usually good, at least in some form, for the United States. There may be some fraternal squabbling between Microsoft and Silicon Valley, but the United States is doing quite well. The info boom is putting millions to work and raising trillions in taxes. + +The free software revolution undermines this great scheme in two very insidious ways. The first is subtle. No one officially has much control over a free software product, and that means that no country can claim it as its own. If Bill Gates says that the Japanese version of Windows will require a three-button mouse, then Japan will have to adjust. But Torvalds, Stallman, and the rest can't do a darn thing about anyone. People can just reprogram their mouse. If being boss means making people jump, then no one in the free software world is boss of anything. Free source code isn't on anyone's side. It's more neutral than Switzerland was in World War II. The United States can only take solace in the fact that many of the great free source minds choose to live in its boundaries. + +The second effect is more incendiary. Free software doesn't pay taxes. In the last several centuries, governments around the world have spent their days working out schemes to tax every transaction they can find. First, there were just tariffs on goods crossing borders, then the bold went after the income, and now the sales tax and the VAT are the crowning achievement. Along the way, the computer with its selfless ability to count made this possible. But how do you tax something that's free? How do you take a slice out of something that costs nothing? + +These are two insidious effects. The main job of governments is to tax people. Occasionally, one government will lust after the tax revenue of another and a war will break out that will force people to choose sides. The GPL and the BSD licenses destroy this tax mechanism, and no one knows what this will bring. + +One of the best places to see this destabilization is in the efforts of the United States government to regulate the flow of encryption software around the globe. Open source versions of encryption technology are oozing through the cracks of a carefully developed mechanism for restricting the flow of the software. The U.S. government has tried to keep a lid on the technology behind codes and ciphers since World War II. Some argue that the United States won World War II and many of the following wars by a judicious use of eavesdropping. Codebreakers in England and Poland cracked the German Enigma cipher, giving the Allies a valuable clue about German plans. The Allies also poked holes in the Japanese code system and used this to win countless battles. No one has written a comprehensive history of how code-breaking shifted the course of the conflicts in Vietnam, Korea, or the Middle East, but the stories are bound to be compelling. + +In recent years, the job of eavesdropping on conversations around the world has fallen on the National Security Agency, which is loath to lose the high ground that gave the United States so many victories in the past. Cheap consumer cryptographic software threatened the agency's ability to vacuum up bits of intelligence throughout the world, and something needed to be done. If good scrambling software was built into every copy of Eudora and Microsoft Word, then many documents would be virtually unreadable. The United States fought the threat by regulating the export of all encryption source code. The laws allowed the country to regulate the export of munitions, and scrambling software was put in that category. + +These regulations have caused an endless amount of grief in Silicon Valley. The software companies don't want someone telling them what to write. Clearing some piece of software with a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., is a real pain in the neck. It's hard enough to clear it with your boss. Most of the time, the bureaucrat won't approve decent encryption software, and that means the U.S. company has a tough choice: it can either not export its product, or build a substandard one. + +There are branches of the U.S. government that would like to go further. The Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to worry that criminals will use the scrambling software to thwart investigations. The fact that encryption software can also be used by average folks to protect their money and privacy has presented a difficult challenge to policy analysts from the FBI. From time to time, the FBI raises the specter of just banning encryption software outright. + +The software industry has lobbied long and hard to lift these regulations, but they've had limited success. They've pointed out that much foreign software is as good as if not better than American encryption software. They've screamed that they were losing sales to foreign competitors from places like Germany, Australia, and Canada, competitors who could import their software into the U.S. and compete against American companies. None of these arguments went very far because the interests of the U.S. intelligence community always won when the president had to make a decision. + +The free source code world tripped into this debate when a peace activist named Phil Zimmerman sat down one day and wrote a program he called Pretty Good Privacy, or simply PGP. Zimmerman's package was solid, pretty easy to use, and free. To make matters worse for the government, Zimmerman gave away all of the source code and didn't even use a BSD or GPL license. It was just out there for all the world to see. + +The free source code had several effects. First, it made it easy for everyone to learn how to build encryption systems and add the features to their own software. Somewhere there are probably several programmers being paid by drug dealers to use PGP's source code to scramble their data. At least one person trading child pornography was caught using PGP. + +Of course, many legitimate folks embraced it. Network Solutions, the branch of SAIC, the techno powerhouse, uses digital signatures generated by PGP to protect the integrity of the Internet's root server. Many companies use PGP to protect their e-mail and proprietary documents. Banks continue to explore using tools like PGP to run transaction networks. Parents use PGP to protect their kids' e-mail from stalkers. + +The free source code also opened the door to scrutiny. Users, programmers, and other cryptographers took apart the PGP code and looked for bugs and mistakes. After several years of poking, everyone pretty much decided that the software was secure and safe. + +This type of assurance is important in cryptography. Paul Kocher, an expert in cryptography who runs Cryptography Research in San Francisco, explains that free source software is an essential part of developing cryptography."You need source code to test software, and careful testing is the only way to eliminate security problems in crypto-systems," he says. "We need everyone to review the design and code to look for weaknesses." + +Today, security products that come with open source code are the most trusted in the industry. Private companies like RSA Data Security or Entrust can brag about the quality of their in-house scientists or the number of outside contractors who've audited the code, but nothing compares to letting everyone look over the code. + +When Zimmerman launched PGP, however, he knew it was an explicitly political act designed to create the kind of veil of privacy that worried the eavesdroppers. He framed his decision, however, in crisp terms that implicitly gave each person the right to control their thoughts and words. "It's personal. It's private. And it's no one's business but yours," he wrote in the introduction to the manual accompanying the software. "You may be planning a political campaign, discussing your taxes, or having an illicit affair. Or you may be doing something that you feel shouldn't be illegal, but is. Whatever it is, you don't want your private electronic mail (e-mail) or confidential documents read by anyone else. There's nothing wrong with asserting your privacy. Privacy is as apple-pie as the Constitution." + +Initially, Zimmerman distributed PGP under the GPL, but backed away from that when he discovered that the GPL didn't give him much control over improvements. In fact, they proliferated and it made it hard to keep track of who created them. Today, the source code comes with a license that is very similar to the BSD license and lets people circulate the source code as much as they want. + +"I place no restraints on your modifying the source code for your own use," he writes in the accompanying documentation, and then catches himself."However, do not distribute a modified version of PGP under the name 'PGP' without first getting permission from me. Please respect this restriction. PGP's reputation for cryptographic integrity depends on maintaining strict quality control on PGP's cryptographic algorithms and protocols." + +Zimmerman's laissez-faire attitude, however, doesn't mean that the software is available with no restrictions. A holding company named Public Key Partners controlled several fundamental patents, including the ones created by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman. Zimmerman's PGP used this algorithm, and technically anyone using the software was infringing the patent. + +While "infringing on a patent" has a certain legal gravitas, its real effects are hard to quantify. The law grants the patent holders the right to stop anyone from doing what is spelled out in the patent, but it only allows them to use a lawsuit to collect damages. In fact, patent holders can collect triple damages if they can prove that the infringers knew about the patent. These lawsuits can be quite a hassle for a big company like Microsoft, because Microsoft is selling a product and making a profit. Finding a number to multiply by three is easy to do. But the effects of the lawsuits on relatively poor, bearded peace activists who aren't making money is harder to judge. What's three times zero? The lawsuits make even less sense against some guy who's using PGP in his basement. + +Still, the threat of a lawsuit was enough of a cudgel to worry Zimmerman. The costs, however, put a limit on what PKP could demand. In the end, the two parties agreed that PGP could be distributed for non-commercial use if it relied upon a toolkit known as RSAREF made by PKP's sister company, RSA Data Security. Apparently, this would encourage people to use RSAREF in their commercial products and act like some free advertising for the toolkit. + +The patent lawsuit, however, was really a minor threat for Zimmerman. In 1994, the U.S. government started investigating whether Zimmerman had somehow exported encryption software by making it available on the Internet for download. While Zimmerman explicitly denounced violating the laws and took pains to keep the software inside the country, a copy leaked out. Some suggest it was through a posting on the Net that inadvertently got routed throughout the world. Was Zimmerman responsible? +A branch of the U.S. Customs launched a criminal investigation in the Northern District of California to find out. + +Of course, determining how the source code got out of the country was a nearly impossible exercise. Unless Zimmerman confessed or somehow kept some incriminating evidence around, the prosecutors faced a tough job painting him as a lawbreaker. The software was available for free to anyone inside the country, and that meant that everyone had at least an opportunity to break the law. There were no purchase records or registration records. No one knew who had PGP on their disk. Maybe someone carried it across the border after forgetting that the source code was on a hard disk. Maybe a foreigner deliberately came into the U.S. and carried it out. Who knows? Zimmerman says it blew across the border "like dandelion seeds blowing in the wind." + +To make matters worse for the forces in the U.S. government that wanted to curtail PGP, the patent held by RSA wasn't filed abroad due to different regulations. Foreigners could use the software without care, and many did. This was the sort of nightmare that worried the parts of the U.S. intelligence-gathering branch that relied upon wholesale eavesdropping. + +Eventually, the criminal investigation amounted to nothing. No indictments were announced. No trials began. Soon after the investigation ended, Zimmerman helped form a company to create commercial versions of PGP. While the free versions continue to be available today and are in widespread use among individuals, companies often turn to PGP for commercial products that come with a license from PKP. When the RSA patent expires in September 2000, the people will be free to use PGP again.~{ The GNU project has already worked around many of these impediments. Their Privacy Guard package (GNU PG) is released under the GNU license. }~ + +Zimmerman's experiences show how free source code turned into a real thorn in the side of the U.S. government. Businesses can be bought or at least leaned on. Merchandise needs to flow through stores and stores have to obey the law. Red tape can ruin everything. But free software that floats like dandelion seeds can't be controlled. People can give it to each other and it flows like speech. Suddenly it's not a product that's being regulated, but the free exchange of ideas between people, ideas that just happen to be crystallized as a computer program. + +Of course, a bureaucracy has never met something it couldn't regulate, or at least something it couldn't try to regulate. Zimmerman's experience may have proved to some that governments are just speed bumps on the infobahn of the future, but others saw it as a challenge. Until the end of 1999, the U.S. government has tried to tighten up the restrictions on open source versions of encryption technology floating around the world. The problem was that many countries around the globe explicitly exempt open source software from the restrictions, and the United States has lobbied to tighten these loopholes. + +The best place to begin this story may be in the trenches where system administrators for the U.S. government try to keep out hackers. Theo de Raadt, the leader of the OpenBSD team, likes to brag that the U.S. government uses OpenBSD on its secure internal network. The system designers probably made that choice because OpenBSD has been thoroughly audited for security holes and bugs by both the OpenBSD team and the world at large. They want the best code, and it's even free. + +"They're running Network Flight Recorder," de Raadt says. "It's a super sniffing package and an intrusion detection system. They can tell you if bad traffic happens on your private little network that the firewall should have stopped. They have OpenBSD running NFR on every network. They run an IPSEC vpn back to a main network information center where they look and do traffic analysis." + +That is, the departments watch for bad hackers by placing OpenBSD boxes at judicious points to scan the traffic and look for incriminating information. These boxes, of course, must remain secure. If they're compromised, they're worthless. Turning to something like OpenBSD, which has at least been audited, makes sense. + +"They catch a lot of system administrators making mistakes. It's very much a proactive result. They can see that a sys admin has misconfigured a firewall," he says. + +Normally, this would just be a simple happy story about the government getting a great value from an open source operating system. They paid nothing for it and got the results of a widespread, open review looking for security holes. + +De Raadt lives in Canada, not the United States, and he develops OpenBSD there because the laws on the export of encryption software are much more lenient. For a time, Canada did not try to control any mass market software. Recently, it added the requirement that shrinkwrapped software receive a license, but the country seems willing to grant licenses quite liberally. Software that falls into the public domain is not restricted at all. While OpenBSD is not in the public domain, it does fit that definition as set out by the rules. The software is distributed with no restrictions or charge. By the end of 1999, senior officials realized that the stop crypt policy was generating too many ironic moments. + +This is just another example of how free source software throws the traditional-instincts regulatory system for a loop. Companies sell products, and products are regulated. Public domain information, on the other hand, is speech and speech is protected, at least by the U.S. Constitution. Relying on Canada for network security of the Internet was too much. + +In January 2000, the U.S. government capitulated. After relentless pressure from the computer industry, the government recognized that high-quality encryption software like OpenBSD was common throughout the world. It also recognized that the quality was so good that many within the United States imported it. The government loosened restrictions and practically eliminated them for open source software. While many people are still not happy with the new regulations, open source encryption software can now flow out of the United States. The distributors need only notify the U.S. government about where the software is available. The commercial, proprietary encryption software was not as lucky. The regulations are now substantially easier on the corporations but they still require substantial review before an export license is granted. + +The difference in treatment probably did not result from any secret love for Linux or OpenBSD lurking in the hearts of the regulators in the Bureau of Export Affairs at the Department of Commerce. The regulators are probably more afraid of losing a lawsuit brought by Daniel Bernstein. In the latest decision released in May 1999, two out of three judges on an appeals panel concluded that the U.S. government's encryption regulations violated Bernstein's rights of free speech. The government argued that source code is a device not speech. The case is currently being appealed. The new regulations seem targeted to specifically address the problems the court found with the current regulations. + +Encryption software is just the beginning of the travails as the government tries to decide what to do about the free exchange of source code on the Net. Taxes may be next. While people joke that they would be glad to pay 10 percent sales tax on the zero dollars they've spent on GNU software, they're missing some of the deeper philosophical issues behind taxation. Many states don't officially tax the sale of an object; +they demand the money for the use of it. That means if you buy a stereo in Europe, you're still supposed to pay some "use tax" when you turn it on in a state. The states try to use this as a cudgel to demand sales tax revenue from out-of-state catalog and mail-order shops, but they haven't gotten very far. But this hasn't stopped them from trying. + +What tax could be due on a piece of free software? Well, the state could simply look at the software, assign a value to it, and send the user a bill. Many states do just that with automobiles. You might have a rusted clunker, but they use the Blue Book value of a car to determine the tax for the year and each year they send a new bill. This concept proved to be so annoying to citizens of Virginia that Jim Gilmore won the election for governor with a mandate to repeal it. But just because he removed it doesn't mean that others will leave the issue alone. + +If governments ever decide to try to tax free software, the community might be able to fight off the request by arguing that the tax is "paid" +when the government also uses the free software. If 7 out of 100 Apache servers are located in government offices, then the government must be getting 7 percent returned as tax. + +One of the most difficult problems for people is differentiating between wealth and money. The free software movement creates wealth without moving money. The easy flow of digital information makes this possible. Some folks can turn this into money by selling support or assisting others, but most of the time the wealth sits happily in the public domain. + +Today, the Internet boom creates a great pool of knowledge and intellectual wealth for the entire society. Some people have managed to convert this into money by creating websites or tools and marketing them successfully, but the vast pool of intellectual wealth remains open and accessible to all. Who does this belong to? Who can tax this? Who controls it? The most forward-thinking countries will resist the urge to tax it, but how many will really be able to keep on resisting? + +1~ Wealth + +The writer, P. J. O'Rourke, once pointed out that wealth is a particularly confusing concept to understand. It had nothing to do with being born in the right place. Africa is filled with diamonds, gold, platinum, oil, and thousands of other valuable resources, while Japan has hardly anything underground except subway tunnels and anthrax from strange cults. Yet Japan is still far wealthier even after the long swoon of their postbubble economy. + +O'Rourke also pointed out that wealth has nothing to do with raw brains. The Russians play chess as a national sport while Brentwood is filled with dim bulbs like the folks we saw during the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Yet poverty is endemic in Russia, while Brentwood flourishes. Sure, people wait in line for food in Brentwood like they did in Soviet Russia, but this is only to get a table at the hottest new restaurant. + +Wealth is a strange commodity, and understanding it keeps economists busy. Governments need to justify their existence in some way, and lately people in the United States use their perception of the "economy" as a measure of how well the government is doing. But many of their attempts to use numbers to measure wealth and prosperity are doomed to failure. One year, the economists seem to be frantically battling deflation, then they turn around and rattle on and on about inflation. They gave up trying to measure the money supply to follow inflation and seem, at times, to be flying the economy by the seat of their pants. Of course, they're not really in charge. One minute you can't have growth without inflation. The next minute you can. It's all a bit like ancient days of tribal living when the high priest was responsible for dreaming up reasons why the volcano did or did not erupt. Some days the money supply smiles upon us, and on other days, she is very, very angry. + +Wealth in the free software world is an even slippier concept. There's not even any currency to use to keep score. Let's say we wanted to know or at least guesstimate whether the free source world was wealthy. That's not too hard. Most of the guys hacking the code just want to drink caffeinated beverages, play cool games, and write more code. The endless stream of faster and faster computer boxes makes this as close to a perfect world as there could be. To make matters better, new T-shirts with clever slogans keep appearing. It's a nerd utopia. It's Shangri-La for folks who dig computers. + +Of course, deciding whether or not someone is wealthy is not really an interesting question of economics. It's more about self-esteem and happiness. Someone who has simple needs can feel pretty wealthy in a shack. Spoiled kids will never be happy no matter how big their palace. There are plenty of content people in the free software world, but there are also a few who won't be happy until they have source code to a huge, wonderful, bug-free OS with the most features on the planet. They want total world domination. + +A more intriguing question is whether the free source world is wealthier than the proprietary source world. This starts to get tricky because it puts Apples up against oranges and tries to make complicated comparisons. Bill Gates is incredibly wealthy in many senses of the word. He's got billions of dollars, a huge house, dozens of cars, servants, toys, and who knows what else. Even his employees have their own private jets. All of the trappings of wealth are there. Linus Torvalds, on the other hand, says he's pretty happy with about $100,000 a year, although several IPOs will probably leave him well off. Microsoft has thousands of programmers who are paid well to write millions of lines of code a year. Most open source programmers aren't paid much to create what they do. If money were a good measure, then the proprietary source world would win hands-down. + +But money is the answer only if you want piles of paper with pictures of famous Americans on them. Several countries in Latin America generate huge piles of money from drugs, oil, and other natural resources, but the countries remain quite poor. The leaders who end up with most of the money might like the huge disparity, but it has very distinct limitations. When it comes time for college or medical care, the very rich start flying up to the United States. Johns Hopkins, a hospital in Baltimore near where I live, provides wonderful medical service to the poor who live in the surrounding neighborhood. It also has a special wing with plush suites for rich people who fly in for medical treatment. Many are potentates and high government officials from poor countries around the world. + +People in the United States can enjoy the synergies of living near other well-educated, creative, empowered, and engaged citizens. People in poor societies can't assume that someone else will design great roads, build airlines, create cool coffee shops, invent new drugs, or do anything except get by on the few scraps that slip through the cracks to the great unwashed poor. The ultrarich in Latin America may think they're getting a great deal by grabbing all the pie, until they get sick. Then they turn around and fly to hospitals like Johns Hopkins, a place where the poor of Baltimore also enjoy quite similar treatment. Wealth is something very different from cash. + +Most folks in the free source world may not have big bank accounts. Those are just numbers in a computer anyway, and everyone who can program knows how easy it is to fill a computer with numbers. But the free source world has good software and the source code that goes along with it. How many times a day must Bill Gates look at the blue screen of death that splashes across a Windows computer monitor when the Windows software crashes? How many times does Torvalds watch Linux crash? Who's better off? Who's wealthier? + +The question might be asked, "Is your software better than it was four years ago?" That is, does your software do a better job of fetching the mail, moving the data, processing the words, or spreading the sheets? Is it more intuitive, more powerful, more stable, more featurerich, more interesting, more expressive, or just better? + +The answers to these questions can't be measured like money. There's no numerical quotient that can settle any of these questions. There will always be some folks who are happy with their early-edition DOS word processor and don't see the need to reinvent the wheel. There are others who are still unhappy because their desktop machine can't read their mind. + +For the devoted disciples of the open software mantra, the software in the free source world is infinitely better. Richard Stallman feels that the GNU code is better than the Microsoft code just because he has the source code and the freedom to do what he wants with it. The freedom is more important to him than whatever super-duper feature comes out of the Microsoft teams. After all, he can add any feature he wants if he has access to the basic source code. Living without the source code means waiting like a good peon for the nice masters from the big corporation to bless us with a bug fix. + +There's no question that people like Stallman love life with source code. A deeper question is whether the free source realm offers a wealthier lifestyle for the average computer user. Most people aren't programmers, and most programmers aren't even the hard-core hackers who love to fiddle with the UNIX kernel. I've rarely used the source code to Linux, Emacs, or any of the neat tools on the Net, and many times I've simply recompiled the source code without looking at it. Is this community still a better deal? + +There are many ways of looking at the question. The simplest is to compare features. It's hard to deny that the free software world has made great strides in producing something that is easy to use and quite adaptable. The most current distributions at the time I'm writing this come with a variety of packages that provide all of the functionality of Microsoft Windows and more. The editors are good, the browser is excellent, and the availability of software is wonderful. The basic Red Hat or Caldera distribution provides a very rich user interface that is better in many ways than Windows or the Mac. Some of the slightly specialized products like video software editors and music programs aren't as rich-looking, but this is bound to change with time. It is really a very usable world. + +Some grouse that comparing features like this isn't fair to the Mac or Windows world. The GNOME toolkit, they point out, didn't come out of years of research and development. The start button and the toolbar look the same because the GNOME developers were merely copying. The GNU/Linux world didn't create their own OS, they merely cloned all of the hard commercial research that produced UNIX. It's always easier to catch up, but pulling ahead is hard. The folks who want to stay on the cutting edge need to be in the commercial world. It's easy to come up with a list of commercial products and tools that haven't been cloned by an open source dude at the time of this writing: streaming video, vector animation, the full Java API, speech recognition, three dimensional CAD programs, speech synthesis, and so forth. The list goes on and on. The hottest innovations will always come from well capitalized start-ups driven by the carrot of wealth. + +Others point out that the free software world has generated more than its share of innovation. Most of the Internet was built upon non-proprietary standards developed by companies with Department of Defense contracts. Stallman's Emacs continues to be one of the great programs in the world. Many of the projects like Apache are the first place where new ideas are demonstrated. People who want to mock up a project find it easier to extend free source software. These ideas are often reborn as commercial products. While free source users may not have access to the latest commercial innovations, they have plenty of their own emerging from the open software world. GNOME isn't just a Windows clone--it comes with thousands of neat extensions and improvements that can't be found in Redmond. + +Stallman himself says the GNU project improved many pieces of software when they rewrote them. He says, "We built on their work, to the extent that we could legally do so (since we could not use any of their code), but that is the way progress is made. Almost every GNU program that replaces a piece of Unix includes improvements." + +Another way to approach the question is to look at people's behavior. Some argue that companies like Red Hat or organizations like Debian prove that people need and want some of the commercial world's handholding. They can't afford to simply download the code and fiddle with it. Most people aren't high school students doing time for being young. They've got jobs, families, and hobbies. They pay because paying brings continuity, form, structure, and order to the free source world. Ultimately, these Red Hat users aren't Stallman disciples, they're commercial sheep who are just as dependent on Red Hat as the Windows customers are on Microsoft. + +The counter-argument is that this insight overlooks a crucial philosophical difference. The Red Hat customers may be slaves like the Microsoft customers, but they still have important freedoms. Sure, many Americans are wage slaves to an employer who pays them as little as possible, but they do have the freedom to go be wage slaves of another employer if they choose. Old-fashioned slaves faced the whip and death if they tried to take that route. + +Most Linux users don't need to rewrite the source, but they can still benefit from the freedom. If everyone has the freedom, then someone will come along with the ability to do it and if the problem is big enough, someone probably will. In other words, only one person has to fly the X-wing fighter down the trench and blow up the Death Star. + +Some point out that the free source world is fine-if you've got the time and the attention to play with it. The source code only helps those who want to spend the time to engage it. You've got to read it, study it, and practice it to get any value from it at all. Most of us, however, just want the software to work. It's like the distinction between people who relax by watching a baseball game on television and those who join a league to play. The spectators are largely passive, waiting for the action to be served up to them. The league players, on the other hand, don't get anything unless they practice, stretch, push, and hustle. They need to be fully engaged with the game. All of us like an occasional competition, but we often need a soft couch, a six-pack, and the remote control. Free software is a nice opportunity to step up to the plate, but it's not true refreshment for the masses. + +Which is a better world? A polished Disneyland where every action is scripted, or a pile of Lego blocks waiting for us to give them form? +Do we want to be entertained or do we want to interact? Many free software folks would point out that free software doesn't preclude you from settling into the bosom of some corporation for a long winter's nap. Companies like Caldera and Linuxcare are quite willing to hold your hand and give you the source code. Many other corporations are coming around to the same notion. Netscape led the way, and many companies like Apple and Sun will follow along. Microsoft may even do the same thing by the time you read this. + +Money isn't the same as wealth, and the nature of software emphasizes some of the ways in which this is true. Once someone puts the hours into creating software, it costs almost nothing to distribute it to the world. The only real cost is time because raw computer power and caffeinated beverages are very inexpensive. + +2~ Wealth and Poverty + +George Gilder laid out the gap between wealth and money in his influential book Wealth and Poverty. The book emerged in 1981 just before Ronald Reagan took office, and it became one of the philosophical touchstones for the early years of the administration. At the time, Gilder's words were aimed at a world where socialist economies had largely failed but capitalists had never declared victory. The Soviet Union was sliding deeper into poverty. Sweden was heading for some of the highest interest rates imaginable. Yet the newspapers and colleges of the United States refused to acknowledge the failure. Gilder wanted to dispel the notion that capitalism and socialism were locked into some eternal yin/yang battle. In his mind, efficient markets and decentralized capital allocation were a smashing success compared to the plodding bureaucracy that was strangling the Soviet Union. + +Although Gilder spoke generally about the nature of wealth, his insights are particularly good at explaining just why things went so right for the open software world. "Capitalism begins with giving," he says, and explains that societies flourish when people are free to put their money where they hope it will do the best. The investments are scattered like seeds and only some find a good place to grow. Those capitalists who are a mixture of smart and lucky gain the most and then plow their gains back into the society, repeating the process. No one knows what will succeed, so encouraging the bold risk-takers makes sense. + +Gilder's chapter on gift-giving is especially good at explaining the success of the free software world. Capitalism, he explains, is not about greed. It's about giving to people with the implicit knowledge that they'll return the favor severalfold. He draws heavily on anthropology and the writings of academics like Claude Lévi-Strauss to explain how the best societies create capital through gifts that come with the implicit debt that people give something back. The competition between people to give better and better gifts drives society to develop new things that improve everyone's life. + +Gilder and others have seen the roots of capital formation and wealth creation in this gift-giving. "The unending offerings of entrepreneurs, investing capital, creating products, building businesses, inventing jobs, + +accumulating inventories--all long before any return is received, all without assurance that the enterprise will not fail--constitute a pattern of giving that dwarfs in extent and in essential generosity any primitive rite of exchange. Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism," he writes. + +The socialists who've railed against the injustices and brutalities of market capitalism at work would disagree with the strength of his statement, but there are plenty of good examples. The American Civil War was the battle between the northern states where workers were occasionally chained to looms during their shifts and the southern states where the workers were always slaves. In the end, the least cruel society won, in part because of the strength of its industry and its ability to innovate. Companies that discovered this fact flourished and those that didn't eventually failed. By the end of the 20th century, the demand for labor in the United States was so high that companies were actively competing in offering plush treatment for their workers. + +The free software world, of course, is a perfect example of the altruistic nature of the potlatch. Software is given away with no guarantee of any return. People are free to use the software and change it in any way. The GNU Public License is not much different from the social glue that forces tribe members to have a larger party the next year and give back even more. If someone ends up creating something new or interesting after using GPL code as a foundation, then they become required to give the code back to the tribe. + +Of course, it's hard to get much guidance from Gilder over whether the GPL is better than the BSD license. He constantly frames investment as a "gift" to try to deemphasize the greed of capitalism. Of course, anyone who has been through a mortgage foreclosure or a debt refinancing knows that the banks don't act as if they've given away a gift. There are legal solutions for strong-arming the folks who don't give back enough. He was trying to get readers to forget these tactics a bit and get them to realize that after all of the arms are broken, the bank is still left with whatever the loan produced. There were no ultimate guarantees that all of the money would come back. + +Gilder smooths over this with a sharply drawn analogy. Everyone, he says, has experienced the uncomfortable feeling that comes from getting a gift that is the wrong size, the wrong style, or just wrong altogether. "Indeed, it is the very genius of capitalism that it recognizes the difficulty of successful giving, understands the hard work and sacrifice entailed in the mandate to help one's fellow men, and offers a practical way of living a life of effective charity," he writes. It's not enough to give a man a fish, because teaching him to fish is a much better gift. A fish farm that hires a man and gives him stock options may be offering the highest form of giving around. + +Gilder does note that the cycle of gifts alone is not enough to build a strong economy. He suggests that the bigger and bigger piles of coconuts and whale blubber were all that emerged from the endless rounds of potlatching. They were great for feasting, but the piles would rot and go stale before they were consumed. The successful society reinterpreted the cycle of gifts as investment and dividends, and the introduction of money made it possible for people to easily move the returns from one investment to the start of another. This liquidity lets the cycles be more and more efficient and gives people a place to store their wealth. + +Of course, Gilder admits that money is only a temporary storage device. It's just a tool for translating the wealth of one sector of the economy into the wealth of another. It's just a wheelbarrow or an ox cart. If society doesn't value the contributions of the capitalists, the transfer will fail. If the roads are too rocky or blocked by too many toll collectors, the carts won't make the trip. + +At first glance, none of this matters to the free software world. The authors give away their products, and as long as someone pays a minimal amount for storage the software will not decay. The web is filled with source code repositories and strongholds that let people store away their software and let others download it at will. These cost a minimal amount to keep up and the cost is dropping every day. There's no reason to believe that the original work of Stallman will be lost to the disease, pestilence, wear, and decay that have cursed physical objects like houses, clothes, and food. + +But despite the beautiful permanence of software, everyone knows that it goes bad. Programmers don't use the term "bit rot" for fun. As operating systems mature and other programs change, the old interfaces start to slowly break down. One program may depend upon the operating system to print out a file in response to a command. Then a new version of the printing code is revved up to add fancier fonts and more colors. Suddenly the interface doesn't work exactly right. Over time, these thousands of little changes can ruin the heart of a good program in much the same way worms can eat the hull of a wooden ship. + +The good news is that free source software is well positioned to fix these problems. Distributing the source code with the software lets others do their best to keep the software running in a changing environment. John Gilmore, for instance, says that he now embraces the GPL because earlier experiments with totally free software created versions without accompanying source code. + +The bad news is that Gilder has a point about capital formation. Richard Stallman did a great job writing Emacs and GCC, but the accolades weren't as easy to spend as cash. Stallman was like the guy with a pile of whale meat in his front yard. He could feast for a bit, but you can only eat so much whale meat. Stallman could edit all day and night with Emacs. He could revel in the neat features and cool Emacs LISP hacks that friends and disciples would contribute back to the project. But he couldn't translate that pile of whale meat into a free OS that would let him throw away UNIX and Windows. + +While Stallman didn't have monetary capital, he did have plenty of intellectual capital. By 1991, his GNU project had built many well respected tools that were among the best in their class. Torvalds had a great example of what the GPL could do before he chose to protect his Linux kernel with the license. He also had a great set of tools that the GNU project created. + +The GNU project and the Free Software Foundation were able to raise money just on the strength of their software. Emacs and GCC opened doors. People gave money that flowed through to the programmers. While there was no cash flow from software sales, the project found that it could still function quite well. + +Stallman's reputation also can be worth more than money when it opens the right doors. He continues to be blessed by the implicit support of MIT, and many young programmers are proud to contribute their work to his projects. It's a badge of honor to be associated with either Linux or the Free Software Foundation. Programmers often list these details on their résumés, and the facts have weight. + +The reputation also helps him start new projects. I could write the skeleton of a new double-rotating, buzzword-enhanced editor, label it "PeteMACS," and post it to the Net hoping everyone would love it, fix it, and extend it. It could happen. But I'm sure that Stallman would find it much easier to grab the hearts, minds, and spare cycles of programmers because he's got a great reputation. That may not be as liquid as money, but it can be better. + +The way to transfer wealth from project to project is something that the free software world doesn't understand well, but it has a good start. Microsoft struck it rich with DOS and used that money to build Windows. Now it has been frantically trying to use this cash cow to create other new businesses. They push MSN, the Microsoft Network, and hope it will stomp AOL. They've built many content-delivery vehicles like Slate and MSNBC. They've created data-manipulation businesses like Travelocity. Bill Gates can simply dream a dream and put 10,000 programmers to work creating it. He has serious intellectual liquidity. + +In this sense, the battle between free and proprietary software development is one between pure giving and strong liquidity. The GPL world gives with no expectation of return and finds that it often gets a return of a thousand times back from a grateful world of programmers. The proprietary world, on the other hand, can take its profits and redirect them quickly to take on another project. It's a battle of the speed of easy, unfettered, open source cooperation versus the lightning speed of money flowing to make things work. + +Of course, companies like Red Hat lie in a middle ground. The company charges money for support and plows this money back into improving the product. It pays several engineers to devote their time to improving the entire Linux product. It markets its work well and is able to charge a premium for what people are able to get for free. + +No one knows if the way chosen by companies like Red Hat and Caldera and groups like the Free Software Foundation is going to be successful in the long run. Competition can be a very effective way of driving down the price of a product. Some worry that Red Hat will eventually be driven out of business by cheap $2 CDs that rip off the latest distribution. For now, though, the success of these companies shows that people are willing to pay for hand-holding that works well. + +A deeper question is whether the open or proprietary model does a better job of creating a world where we want to live. Satisfying our wants is the ultimate measure of a wealthy society. Computers, cyberspace, and the Internet are rapidly taking up a larger and larger part of people's time. Television viewership is dropping, often dramatically, as people turn to life online. The time spent in cyberspace is going to be important. _1 Stallman wrote in BYTE magazine in 1986, I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage. It is an activity that benefits the person that does it at the cost of impoverishing all of society. One person gains one dollar by destroying two dollars' worth of wealth. + +No one knows what life online will look like in 5 or 10 years. It will certainly include web pages and e-mail, but no one knows who will pay how much. The cost structures and the willingness to pay haven't been sorted out. Some companies are giving away some products so they can make money with others. Many are frantically giving away everything in the hope of attracting enough eyeballs to eventually make some money. + +The proprietary model rewards risk-takers and gives the smartest, fastest programmers a pile of capital they can use to play the game again. It rewards the ones who satisfy our needs and gives them cash they can use to build newer and bigger models. The distribution of power is pretty meritocratic, although it can break down when monopolies are involved. + +But the open source solution certainly provides good software to everyone who wants to bother to try to use it. The free price goes a long way to spreading its bounty to a wide variety of people. No one is excluded and no one is locked out of contributing to the commonweal because they don't have the right pedigree, education, racial heritage, or hair color. Openness is a powerful tool. + +Richard Stallman told me, "Why do you keep talking about 'capital'? +None of this has anything to do with capital. Linus didn't need capital to develop a kernel, he just wrote it. We used money to hire hackers to work on the kernel, but describing that as capital is misleading. + +"The reason why free software is such a good idea is that developing software does not really need a lot of money. If we cannot 'raise capital' the way the proprietary software companies do, that is not really a problem. + +"We do develop a lot of free software. If a theory says we can't, you have to look for the flaws in the theory." + +One of the best ways to illustrate this conundrum is to look at the experiences of the workers at Hotmail after they were acquired by Microsoft. Sure, many of them were overjoyed to receive so much for their share in an organization. Many might even do the same thing again if they had the choice. Many, though, are frustrated by their new position as corporate citizens whose main job is augmenting Microsoft's bottom line. + +One Hotmail founder told the PBS Online columnist Robert Cringely, "All we got was money. There was no recognition, no fun. Microsoft got more from the deal than we did. They knew nothing about the Internet. MSN was a failure. We had 10 million users, yet we got no respect at all from Redmond. Bill Gates specifically said, 'Don't screw-up Hotmail,' yet that's what they did." + +1~ Future + +David Henkel-Wallace sat quietly in a chair in a Palo Alto coffee shop explaining what he did when he worked at the free software firm Cygnus. He brought his new daughter along in a baby carriage and kept her parked alongside. Cygnus, of course, is one of the bigger successes in the free software world. He helped make some real money building and sustaining the free compiler, GCC, that Richard Stallman built and gave away. Cygnus managed to make the real money even after they gave away all of their work. + +In the middle of talking about Cygnus and open source, he points to his child and says, "What I'm really worried about is she'll grow up in a world where software continues to be as buggy as it is today." Other parents might be worried about the economy, gangs, guns in schools, or the amount of sex in films, but Henkel-Wallace wants to make sure that random software crashes start to disappear. + +He's done his part. The open source movement thrives on the GCC compiler, and Cygnus managed to find a way to make money on the process of keeping the compiler up to date. The free operating systems like Linux or FreeBSD are great alternatives for people today. They're small, fast, and very stable, unlike the best offerings of Microsoft or Apple. If the open software movement continues to succeed and grow, his child could grow up into a world where the blue screen of death that terrorizes Microsoft users is as foreign to them as manual typewriters. + +No one knows if the open software world will continue to grow. Some people are very positive and point out that all the features that made it possible for the free OSs to bloom are not going away. If anything, the forces of open exchange and freedom will only accelerate as more people are drawn into the mix. More people mean more bug fixes, which means better software. + +Others are not so certain, and this group includes many of the people who are deeply caught up in the world of open source. Henkel-Wallace, for instance, isn't so sure that the source code makes much difference when 99 percent of the people don't program. Sure, Cygnus had great success sharing source code with the programmers who used GCC, but all of those guys knew how to read the code. What difference will the source code make to the average user who just wants to read his e-mail? +Someone who can't read the source code isn't going to contribute much back to the project and certainly isn't going to put much value in getting it. A proprietary company like Microsoft may be able to maintain a broad base of loyalty just by offering better hand-holding for the folks who can't program. + +Free software stands at an interesting crossroads as this book is being written. It won over a few hackers in garages in the early 1990s. By the mid-1990s, webmasters embraced it as a perfectly good option. Now everyone wonders whether it will conquer the desktop in the next century. + +It's always tempting for an author to take the classic TV news gambit and end the story with the earnest punt phrase, "Whether this will happen remains to be seen. "That may be the most fair way to approach reporting the news, but it's not as much fun. I'm going to boldly predict that open source software will win the long-term war against proprietary companies, but it will be a bloody war and it will be more costly than people expect. Over the next several years, lawyers will spend hours arguing cases; people will spend time in jail; and fortunes will be lost to the struggle. + +While it seems difficult to believe, some people have already spent time in jail for their part in the free software revolution. Kevin Mitnick was arrested in 1995 amid accusations that he stole millions if not billions of dollars' worth of source code. There was no trial, nor even a bail hearing. Finally, after almost five years in prison, Mitnick pled guilty to some charges and received a sentence that was only a few months longer than the time he served while waiting for a trial. Mitnick was accused of stealing millions of dollars from companies by breaking into computers and stealing copies of their source code. + +In the statement he made following his release, he said, ". . . my crimes were simple crimes of trespass. I've acknowledged since my arrest in February 1995 that the actions I took were illegal, and that I committed invasions of privacy--I even offered to plead guilty to my crimes soon after my arrest." + +He continued, "The fact of the matter is that I never deprived the companies involved in this case of anything. I never committed fraud against these companies. And there is not a single piece of evidence suggesting that I did so." + +This trespass, of course, would be breaking the rules. The irony is that in 1999, Sun announced that it was sharing its source code with the world. They begged everyone to look at it and probe it for weaknesses. The tide of opinion changed and Sun changed with it. + +Of course, breaking into a company's computer system will always be bad, but it's hard to view Mitnick's alleged crimes as a terrible thing. Now that source code is largely free and everyone digs public sharing, he begins to look more like a moonshine manufacturer during Prohibition. The free source revolution has given him a rakish charm. Who knows if he deserves it, but the zeitgeist has changed. + +There are more arrests on the way. In January 2000, a young Norwegian man was detained by the Norwegian police who wanted to understand his part in the development of software to unscramble the video data placed on DVD disks. Motion picture producers who released their movies in this format were worried that a tool known as DeCSS, which was floating around the Internet, would make it easier for pirates to make unlicensed copies of their movies. + +The man, Jan Johansen, did not write the tool, but merely helped polish and circulate it on the Net. News reports suggest an anonymous German programmer did the actual heavy lifting. + +Still, Johansen made a great target for the police, who never officially arrested him, although they did take him in for questioning. + +At this writing, it's not clear if Johansen officially broke any laws. Some argue that he violated the basic strictures against breaking and entering. Others argue that he circulated trade secrets that were not legimately obtained. + +Still others see the motion picture industry's response as an effort to control the distribution of movies and the machines that display them. A pirate doesn't need to use the DeCSS tool to unlock the data on a DVD disk. They just make a verbatim copy of the disk without bothering with the encryption. That leads others to suspect that the true motive is to sharply limit the companies that produce machines that can display DVD movies. + +One group that is locked out of the fray is the Linux community. While software for playing DVD movies exists for Macintoshes and PCs, there's none for Linux. DeCSS should not be seen as a hacker's tool, but merely a device that allows Linux users to watch the legitimate copies of the DVDs that they bought. Locking out Linux is like locking in Apple and Microsoft. + +The battle between the motion picture community and the Linux world is just heating up as I write this. There will be more lawsuits and prehaps more jail time ahead for the developers who produced DeCSS and the people who shared it through their websites. + +Most of the battles are not so dramatic. They're largely technical, and the free source world should win these easily. Open source solutions haven't had the same sophisticated graphical interface as Apple or Windows products. Most of the programmers who enjoy Linux or the various versions of BSD don't need the graphical interface and may not care about it. The good news is that projects like KDE and GNOME are great tools already. The open source world must continue to tackle this area and fight to produce something that the average guy can use. + +The good news is that open source software usually wins most technical battles. The free versions of UNIX are already much more stable than the products coming from Microsoft and Apple, and it seems unlikely that this will change. The latest version of Apple's OS has free versions of BSD in its core. That battle is won. Microsoft's version of NT can beat these free OSs in some extreme cases, but these are getting to be rarer by the day. Sun's Solaris is still superior in some ways, but the company is sharing the source code with its users in a way that emulates the open source world. More attention means more programmers and more bug fixes. Technical struggles are easy for open source to win. + +Microsoft's greatest asset is the installed base of Windows, and it will try to use this to the best of its ability to defeat Linux. At this writing, Microsoft is rolling out a new version of the Domain Name Server (DNS), which acts like a telephone book for the Internet. In the past, many of the DNS machines were UNIX boxes because UNIX helped define the Internet. Windows 2000 includes new extensions to DNS that practically force offices to switch over to Windows machines to run DNS. Windows 2000 just won't work as well with an old Linux or UNIX box running DNS. + +This is a typical strategy for Microsoft and one that is difficult, but not impossible, for open source projects to thwart. If the cost of these new servers is great enough, some group of managers is going to create its own open source clone of the modified DNS server. This has happened time and time again, but not always with great success. Linux boxes come with Samba, a program that lets Linux machines act as file servers. It works well and is widely used. Another project, WINE, started with the grand design of cloning all of the much more complicated Windows API used by programmers. It is a wonderful project, but it is far from finished. The size and complexity make a big difference. + +Despite these tactics, Microsoft (and other proprietary companies) will probably lose their quest to dominate the standards on the Internet. They can only devote a few programmers to each monopolistic grab. The free software world has many programmers willing to undertake projects. The numbers are now great enough that the cloners should be able to handle anything Microsoft sends its way. + +The real battles will be political and legal. While the computer world seems to move at a high speed with lots of constant turnover, there's plenty of inertia built into the marketplace. Many people were rather surprised to find that there was plenty of COBOL, FORTRAN, and other old software happily running along without any idea of how to store a date with more than two digits. While Y2K incidents fell far short of the media's hype, the number of systems that required reprogramming was still much larger than conventional wisdom predicted. IBM continues to sell mainframes to customers who started buying mainframes in the 1960s. Once people choose one brand or product or computer architecture, they often stay with it forever. + +This is bad news for the people who expect the free OSs to take over the desktop in the next 5 or 10 years. Corporate managers who keep the machines on people's desktops hate change. Change means reeducation. Change means installing new software throughout the plant. Change means teaching folks a new set of commands for running their word processors. Change means work. People who manage the computer networks in offices get graded on the number of glitches that stop workflow. Why abandon Microsoft now? + +If Microsoft has such an emotional stranglehold on the desktop and the computer industry takes forever to change, will free software ever grow beyond the 10 million or so desktops owned by programmers and their friends? + +Its strongest lever will be price. Freedom is great, but corporations respond better to a cost that is close to, if not exactly, zero. Big companies like Microsoft are enormous cash engines. They need a huge influx of cash to pay the workers, and they can't let their stock price slip. Microsoft's revenues increased with a precision that is rare in corporate America. Some stock analysts joke that the stock price suggests that Microsoft's revenues will grow faster than 10 percent forever. In the past, the company accomplished this by absorbing more and more of the market while finding a way to charge more and more for the software they supply. Businesses that lived quite well with Windows 95 are now running Windows NT. Businesses that ran NT are now using special service packs that handle network management and data functions. The budget for computers just keeps going up, despite the fact that hardware costs go down. + +Something has to give. It's hard to know how much of a lever the price will be. If the revenue at Microsoft stops growing, then the company's stock price could take a sharp dive. The company manages continually to produce greater and greater revenues each quarter with smooth precision. The expectation of the growth is built into the price. Any hiccup could bring the price tumbling down. + +The biggest question is how much people are willing to pay to continue to use Microsoft products. Retooling an office is an expensive proposition. The cost of buying new computers and software is often smaller than the cost of reeducation. While the free software world is much cheaper, shifting is not an easy proposition. Only time will tell how much people are willing to pay for their reluctance to change. + +The first cracks are already obvious. Microsoft lost the server market to Apache and Linux on the basis of price and performance. Web server managers are educated computer users who can make their own decisions without having to worry about the need to train others. Hidden computers like this are easy targets, and the free software world will gobble many of them up. More users mean more bug fixes and propagations of better code. + +The second crack in Microsoft's armor will be appliance computers. Most people want to browse the web and exchange some e-mail. The basic distribution from Red Hat or FreeBSD is good enough. Many people are experimenting with creating computers that are defined by the job they do, not the operating system or the computer chip. Free source packages should have no trouble winning many battles in this arena. The price is right and the manufacturers have to hire the programmers anyway. + +The third breach will be young kids. They have no previous allegiances and are eager to learn new computer technology. Microsoft may ask "Where do you want to go today?" but they don't want to talk with someone whose answer is "The guts of your OS."The best and brightest 13-year-olds are already the biggest fans of free software. They love the power and the complete access. + +The fourth crack will be the large installations in businesses that are interested in competitive bidding. Microsoft charges a bundle for each seat in a company, and anyone bidding for these contracts will be able to charge much less if they ship a free OS. It's not uncommon for a company to pay more than a million dollars to Microsoft for license fees. There's plenty of room for price competition when the bill gets that high. Companies that don't want to change will be hard to move from Windows, but ones that are price-sensitive will be moved. + +Of course, free software really isn't free. A variety of companies offering Linux support need to charge something to pay their bills. Distributions like Red Hat or FreeBSD may not cost much, but they often need some customization and hand-holding. Is a business just trading one bill for another? Won't Linux support end up costing the same thing as Microsoft's product? + +Many don't think so. Microsoft currently wastes billions of dollars a year expanding its business in unproductive ways that don't yield new profits. It spent millions writing a free web browser to compete with Netscape's and then they just gave it away. They probably gave up millions of dollars and untold bargaining chips when they twisted the arms of competitors into shunning Netscape. The company's successful products pay for these excursions. At the very least, a free OS operation would avoid these costs. + +Free OS systems are inherently cheaper to run. If you have the source, you might be able to debug the problem yourself. You probably can't, but it doesn't hurt to try. Companies running Microsoft products can't even try. The free flow of information will help keep costs down. + +Of course, there are also hard numbers. An article in Wired by Andrew Leonard comes with numbers originally developed by the Gartner Group. A 25-person office would cost $21,453 to outfit with Microsoft products and $5,544.70 to outfit with Linux. This estimate is a bit conservative. Most of the Linux cost is debatable because it includes almost $3,000 for 10 service calls to a Linux consultant and about $2,500 for Applixware, an office suite that does much of the same job as Microsoft Office. A truly cheap and technically hip office could make do with the editor built into Netscape and one of the free spreadsheets available for Linux. It's not hard to imagine someone doing the same job for about $3, which is the cost of a cheap knockoff of Red Hat's latest distribution. + +Of course, it's important to realize that free software still costs money to support. But so does Microsoft's. The proprietary software companies also charge to answer questions and provide reliable information. It's not clear that Linux support is any more expensive to offer. + +Also, many offices large and small keep computer technicians on hand. There's no reason to believe that Linux technicians will be any more or less expensive than Microsoft technicians. Both answer questions. Both keep the systems running. At least the Linux tech can look at the source code. + +The average home user and small business user will be the last to go. + +These users will be the most loyal to Microsoft because they will find it harder than anyone else to move. They can't afford to hire their own Linux gurus to redo the office, and they don't have the time to teach themselves. + +These are the main weaknesses for Microsoft, and the company is already taking them seriously. I think many underestimate how bloody the battle is about to become. If free source software is able to stop and even reverse revenue growth for Microsoft, there are going to be some very rich people with deep pockets who feel threatened. Microsoft is probably going to turn to the same legal system that gave it such grief and find some wedge to drive into the Linux community. Their biggest weapon will be patents and copyright to stop the cloners. + +Any legal battle will be an interesting fight. On the one hand, the free software community is diverse and spread out among many different entities. There's no central office and no one source that could be brought down. This means Microsoft would fight a war on many fronts, and this is something that's emotionally and intellectually taxing for anyone, no matter how rich or powerful. + +On the other hand, the free software community has no central reservoir of money or strength. Each small group could be crippled, one by one, by a nasty lawsuit. Groups like OpenBSD are always looking for donations. The Free Software Foundation has some great depth and affection, but its budget is a tiny fraction of Sun's or Microsoft's. Legal bills are real, and lawyers have a way of making them blossom. There may be hundreds of different targets for Microsoft, but many of them won't take much firepower to knock out. + +The free software community is not without some deep pockets itself. Many of the traditional hardware companies like IBM, Compaq, Gateway, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple can make money by selling either hardware or software. They've been hurt in recent years by Microsoft's relentless domination of the desktop. Microsoft negotiated hard contracts with each of the companies that controlled what the user saw. The PC manufacturers received little ability to customize their product. Microsoft turned them into commodity manufacturers and stripped away their control. Each of these companies should see great potential in moving to a free OS and adopting it. There is no extra cost, no strange meetings, no veiled threats, no arm-twisting. + +Suddenly, brands like Hewlett-Packard or IBM can mean something when they're slapped on a PC. Any goofball in a garage can put a circuit board in a box and slap on Microsoft Windows. A big company like HP or IBM could do extra work to make sure the Linux distribution on the box worked well with the components and provided a glitch-free existence for the user. + +The hardware companies will be powerful allies for the free software realm because the companies will be the ones who benefit economically the most from the free software licenses. When all of the software is free, no one controls it and this strips away many of Microsoft's traditional ways of applying leverage. Microsoft, for instance, knocked the legs out from underneath Netscape by giving away Internet Explorer for free. Now the free software world is using the same strategy against Microsoft. It's hard for them to undercut free for most users. + +The university system is a less stable ally. While the notion of free exchange of information is still floating around many of the nation's campuses, the places are frighteningly corporate and profit-minded. Microsoft has plenty of cash at its disposal and it hasn't been shy about spreading it around places like MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. The computer science departments on those campuses are the recipients of brand-new buildings compliments of Bill Gates. These gifts are hard to ignore. + +Microsoft will probably avoid a direct confrontation with the academic tradition of the institutions and choose to cut their prices as low as necessary to dominate the desktops. Universities will probably be given "free," tax-deductible donations of software whenever they stray far from the Microsoft-endorsed solution. Lab managers and people who make decisions about the computing infrastructure of the university will probably get neat "consulting" contracts from Microsoft or its buddies. This will probably not mean total domination, but it will buy a surprisingly large amount of obedience. + +Despite these gifts, free software will continue to grow on the campuses. Students often have little cash and Microsoft doesn't get any great tax deduction by giving gifts to individual students (that's income). The smartest kids in the dorms will continue to run Linux. Many labs do cutting-edge work that requires customized software. These groups will naturally be attracted to free source code because it makes their life easier. It will be difficult for Microsoft to counteract the very real attraction of free software. + +Of course, Microsoft is not without its own arms. Microsoft still has patent law on its side, and this may prove to be a very serious weapon. The law allows the patent holder the exclusive right to determine who uses an idea or invention over the course of the patent, which is now 20 years from the first filing date. That means the patent holder can sue anyone who makes a product that uses the invention. It also means that the patent holder can sue someone who simply cobbles up the invention in his basement and uses the idea without paying anything to anyone. This means that even someone who distributes the software for free or uses the software can be liable for damages. + +In the past, many distrusted the idea of software patents because the patent system wasn't supposed to allow you to lay claim to the laws of nature. This interpretation fell by the wayside as patent lawyers argued successfully that software combined with a computer was a separate machine and machines were eligible for protection. + +Today, it is quite easy to get patent protection for new ideas on how to structure a computer network, an operating system, or a software tool. The only requirement is that they're new and nonobvious. Microsoft has plenty of these. + +If things go perfectly for Microsoft, the company will be able to pull out one or two patents from its huge portfolio and use these to sue Red Hat, Walnut Creek, and a few of the other major distributors. Ideally, this patent would cover some crucial part of the Linux or BSD operating system. After the first few legal bills started arriving on the desk of the Red Hat or Walnut Creek CEO, the companies would have to settle by quitting the business. Eventually, all of the distributors of Linux would crumble and return to the small camps in the hills to lick their wounds. At least, that's probably the dream of some of Microsoft's greatest legal soldiers. + +This maneuver is far from a lock for Microsoft because the free software world has a number of good defenses. The first is that the Linux and BSD world do a good job of publicizing their advances. Any patent holder must file the patent before someone else publishes their ideas. The Linux discussion groups and source distributions are a pretty good public forum. The ideas and patches often circulate publicly long before they make their way into a stable version of the kernel. That means that the patent holders will need to be much farther ahead than the free software world. + +Linux and the free software world are often the cradle of new ideas. University students use open source software all the time. It's much easier to do way cool things if you've got access to the source. Sure, Microsoft has some smart researchers with great funding, but can they compete with all the students? + +Microsoft's ability to dominate the patent world may be hurt by the nature of the game. Filing the application first or publishing an idea first is all that matters in the patent world. Producing a real product is hard work that is helped by the cash supply of Microsoft. Coming up with ideas and circulating them is much easier than building real tools that people can use. + +The second defense is adaptability. The free software distributions can simply strip out the offending code. The Linux and BSD disks are very modular because they come from a variety of different sources. The different layers and tools come from different authors, so they are not highly integrated. This makes it possible to remove one part without ruining the entire system. + +Stallman's GNU project has been dealing with patents for a long time and has some experience programming around them. The GNU Zip program, for instance, was written to avoid the patents on the Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm claimed by UNISYS and IBM. The software is well-written and it works as well as, if not better than, the algorithm it replaces. Now it's pretty standard on the web and very popular because it is open source and patent-free. It's the politically correct compression algorithm to use because it's open to everyone. + +It will be pretty difficult for a company like Microsoft to find a patent that will allow it to deal a fatal blow to either the Linux or BSD distributions. The groups will just clip out the offending code and then work around it. + +Microsoft's greatest hope is to lock up the next generation of computing with patents. New technologies like streaming multimedia or Internet audio are still up for grabs. While people have been studying these topics in universities for some time, the Linux community is further behind. Microsoft will try to dominate these areas with crucial patents that affect how operating systems deal with this kind of data. Their success at this is hard to predict. In any event, while they may be able to cripple the adoption of some new technologies like streaming multimedia, they won't be able to smash the entire world. + +The third and greatest defense for the free source ideology is a loophole in the patent law that may also help many people in the free software world. It is not illegal to use a patented idea if you're in the process of doing some research on how to improve the state of the art in that area. The loophole is very narrow, but many users of free software might fall within it. All of the distributions come with source code, and many of the current users are programmers experimenting with the code. Most of these programmers give their work back to the project and this makes most of their work pretty noncommercial. The loophole probably wouldn't protect the corporations that are using free software simply because it is cheap, but it would still be large enough to allow innovation to continue. A non-commercial community built up around research could still thrive even if Microsoft manages to come up with some patents that are very powerful. + +The world of patents can still constrain the world of free software. Many companies work hard on developing new technology and then rely upon patents to guarantee them a return on investment. These companies have trouble working well with the free software movement because there's no revenue stream to use. A company like Adobe can integrate some neat new streaming technology or compression algorithm and add the cost of a patent license to the price of the product. A free software tool can't. + +This does not preclude the free software world from using some ideas or software. There's no reason why Linux can't run proprietary application software that costs money. Perhaps people will sell licenses for some distributions and patches. Still, the users must shift mental gears when they encounter these packages. + +There are no easy solutions to patent problems. The best news is that proprietary, patented technology rarely comes to dominate the marketplace. There are often ways to work around solutions, and other engineers are great at finding them. Sure, there will be the occasional brilliant lightbulb, transistor, radio, or other solution that is protected by a broad patent, but these will be relatively rare. + +There are a few things that the open source community can do to protect themselves against patents. Right now, many of the efforts at developing open source solutions come after technology emerges. For instance, developing drivers for DVD disks is one of the current challenges at the time that I'm writing this chapter even though the technology has been shipping with many midpriced computers for about a year. + +There is no reason why some ivory-tower, blue-sky research can't take place in a patent-free world of open source. Many companies already allow their researchers to attend conferences and present papers on their open work and classify this as "precompetitive" research. Standards like JPEG or MPEG emerge from committees that pledge not to patent their work. There is no reason why these loose research groups can't be organized around a quasi-BSD or GNU license that forces development to be kept in the open. + +These research groups will probably be poorly funded but much more agile than the corporate teams or even the academic teams. They might be organized around a public newsgroup or mailing list that is organized for the purpose of publicly disclosing ideas. Once they're officially disclosed, no patents can be issued on them. Many companies like IBM and Xerox publish paper journals for defensive purposes. + +Still, the debate about patents will be one that will confound the entire software industry for some time. Many for-profit, proprietary firms are thrown for a loop by some of the patents granted to their competitors. The open source world will have plenty of allies who want to remake the system. + +The patents are probably the most potent legal tool that proprietary software companies can use to threaten the open source world. There is no doubt that the companies will use it to fend off low-rent competition. + +One of the biggest challenges for the free software community will be developing the leadership to undertake these battles. It is one thing to mess around in a garage with your buddies and hang out in some virtual he-man/Microsoft-haters clubhouse cooking up neat code. It's a very different challenge to actually achieve the world domination that the Linux world muses about. When I started writing the book, I thought that an anthem for the free software movement might be Spinal Tap's "Flower People." Now I think it's going to be Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," which warns, "There's something happening here / What it is ain't exactly clear." + +Tim O'Reilly emphasizes this point. When asked about some of the legal battles, he said, "There's definitely going to be a war over this stuff. When I look back at previous revolutions, I realize how violent they became. They threatened to burn Galileo at the stake. They said 'Take it back,' and he backed down. But it didn't make any difference in the end. But just because there's a backlash doesn't mean that open source won't win in the long run." + +Companies like Microsoft don't let markets and turf just slip away. They have a large budget for marketing their software. They know how to generate positive press and plenty of fear in the hearts of managers who must make decisions. They understand the value of intellectual property, and they aren't afraid of dispatching teams of lawyers to ensure that their markets remain defended. + +The open source community, however, is not without a wide variety of strengths, although it may not be aware of them. In fact, this diffuse power and lack of self-awareness and organization is one of its greatest strengths. There is no powerful leadership telling the open source community "Thou shalt adopt these libraries and write to this API." The people in the trenches are testing code, proposing solutions, and getting their hands dirty while making decisions. The realm is not a juggernaut, a bandwagon, a dreadnought, or an unstoppable freight train roaring down the track. It's creeping kudzu, an algae bloom, a teenage fad, and a rising tide mixed together. + +The strength of the free price shouldn't be underestimated. While the cost isn't really nothing after you add up the price of paying Red Hat, Slackware, SuSE, Debian, or someone else to provide support, it's still much cheaper than the proprietary solutions on the market. Price isn't the only thing on people's minds, but it will always be an important one. + +In the end, though, I think the free software world will flourish because of the ideals it embraces. The principles of open debate, broad circulation, easy access, and complete disclosure are like catnip to kids who crackle with intelligence. Why would anyone want to work in a corporate cubicle with a Dilbert boss when you can spend all night hacking on the coolest tools? Why would you want to join some endless corporate hierarchy when you can dive in and be judged on the value of your code? For these reasons, the free software world can always count on recruiting the best and the brightest. + +This process will continue because the Dilbert-grade bosses aren't so dumb. I know more than a few engineers and early employees at startup firms who received very small stock allowances at IPO time. One had written three of the six systems that were crucial to the company's success on the web. Yet he got less than 1 percent of the shares allocated to the new CEO who had just joined the company. The greed of the non-programming money changers who plumb the venture capital waters will continue to poison the experience of the programmers and drive many to the world of free software. If they're not going to get anything, they might as well keep access to the code they write. + +The open source ideals are also strangely empowering because they force everyone to give up their will to power and control. Even if Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, and everyone else in the free software world decides that you're a scumbag who should be exiled to Siberia, they can't take away the code from you. That freedom is a very powerful drug. + +The free software movement is rediscovering the same notions that drove the American colonists to rebel against the forces of English oppression. The same words that flowed through the pens of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin are just as important today. The free software movement certifies that we are all created equal, with the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of bug-free code. This great nation took many years to evolve and took many bad detours along the way, but in the end, the United States tends to do the right thing. + +The free software movement has many flaws, blemishes, and weaknesses, but I believe that it will also flourish over the years. It will take wrong turns and encounter great obstacles, but in the end the devotion to liberty, fraternity, and equality will lead it to make the right decisions and will outstrip all of its proprietary competitors. + +In the end, the lure of the complete freedom to change, revise, extend, and improve the source code of a project is a powerful drug that creative people can't resist. Shrink-wrapped software's ease-of-use and prepackaged convenience are quite valuable for many people, but its world is static and slow. + +In the end, the power to write code and change it without hiring a team of lawyers to parse agreements between companies ensures that the free software world will gradually win. Corporate organization provides money and stability, but in technology the race is usually won by the swiftest. + +In the end, free software creates wealth, not cash, and wealth is much better than cash. You can't eat currency and you can't build a car with gold. Free software does things and accomplishes tasks without crashing into the blue screen of death. It empowers people. People who create it and share it are building real infrastructure that everyone can use. The corporations can try to control it with intellectual property laws. They can buy people, hornswoggle judges, and co-opt politicians, but they can't offer more than money. + +In the end, information wants to be free. Corporations want to believe that software is a manufactured good like a car or a toaster. They want to pretend it is something that can be consumed only once. In reality, it is much closer to a joke, an idea, or gossip. Who's managed to control those? + +For all of these reasons, this grand free-for-all, this great swapfest of software, this wonderful nonstop slumber party of cooperative knowledge creation, this incredible science project on steroids will grow in strange leaps and unexpected bounds until it swallows the world. There will be battles, there will be armies, there will be spies, there will be snakes, there will be court cases, there will be laws, there will be martyrs, there will be heroes, and there will be traitors. But in the end, information just wants to be free. That's what we love about it. + +1~glossary Glossary + +*{Apache License}* A close cousin of the BSD License. The software comes with few restrictions, and none prevent you from taking a copy of Apache, modifying it, and selling binary versions. The only restriction is that you can't call it Apache. For instance, C2Net markets a derivative of Apache known as Stronghold. + +*{AppleScript}* A text language that can be used to control the visual interface of the Macintosh. It essentially says things like "Open that folder and double click on Adobe Photoshop to start it up. Then open the file named 'Pete's Dog's Picture.'" architecture Computer scientists use the word "architecture" to describe the high-level, strategic planning of a system. A computer architect may decide, for instance, that a new system should come with three multiplier circuits but not four after analyzing the sequence of arithmetic operations that a computer will likely be called upon to execute. If there are often three multiplications that could be done concurrently, then installing three multiplier circuits would increase efficiency. Adding a fourth, however, would be a waste of effort if there were few occasions to use it. In most cases, the term "computer architect" applies only to hardware engineers. All sufficiently complicated software projects, however, have an architect who makes the initial design decisions. + +*{Artistic License}* A license created to protect the original PERL language. Some users dislike the license because it is too complex and filled with loopholes. Bruce Perens writes, "The Artistic License requires you to make modifications free, but then gives you a loophole (in Section 7) that allows you to take modifications private or even place parts of the Artistic-licensed program in the public domain!" + +*{BeOS}* An operating system created by the Be, a company run by exApple executive Jean Louis Gassée. + +*{BSD}* An abbreviation for Berkeley Software Distribution, a package first released by Bill Joy in the 1970s. The term has come to mean both a class of UNIX that was part of the distribution and also the license that protects this software. There are several free versions of BSD UNIX that are well-accepted and well-supported by the free source software community. OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD are three of them. Many commercial versions of UNIX, like Sun's Solaris and NeXT's OS, can trace their roots to this distribution. The BSD was originally protected by a license that allowed anyone to freely copy and modify the source code as long as they gave some credit to the University of California at Berkeley. Unlike the GNU GPL, the license does not require the user to release the source code to any modifications. + +*{BSD License}* The original license for BSD software. It placed few restrictions on what you did with the code. The important terms forced you to keep the copyright intact and credit the University of California at Berkeley when you advertise a product. The requirement to include credit is now removed because people realized that they often needed to publish hundreds of acknowledgments for a single CD-ROM. Berkeley removed the term in the hopes that it would set a good example for the rest of the community. + +*{copyleft}* Another term that is sometimes used as a synonym for the GNU General Public License. + +*{Debian Free Software Guidelines}* See Open Source. (www.debian.org) + +*{driver}* Most computers are designed to work with optional devices like modems, disk drives, printers, cameras, and keyboards. A driver is a piece of software that translates the signals sent by the device into a set of signals that can be understood by the operating system. Most operating systems are designed to be modular, so these drivers can be added as an afterthought whenever a user connects a new device. They are usually designed to have a standard structure so other software will work with them. The driver for each mouse, for instance, translates the signals from the mouse into a standard description that includes the position of the mouse and its direction. Drivers are an important point of debate in the free software community because volunteers must often create the drivers. Most manufacturers write the drivers for Windows computers because these customers make up the bulk of their sales. The manufacturers often avoid creating drivers for Linux or BSD systems because they perceive the market to be small. Some manufacturers also cite the GNU GPL as an impediment because they feel that releasing the source code to their drivers publishes important competitive information. + +*{FreeBSD}* The most popular version of BSD. The development team, led by Jordan Hubbard, works hard to provide an easy-to-use tool for computers running the Intel x86 architecture. In recent years, they've tried to branch out into other lines. (www.freebsd.org) + +*{Free Software Foundation}* An organization set up by Richard Stallman to raise money for the creation of new free software. Stallman donates his time to the organization and takes no salary. The money is spent on hiring programmers to create new free software. + +*{GIMP}* The GNU Image Manipulation Program, which can manipulate image files in much the same way as Adobe Photoshop. (www.gimp.org) + +*{GNOME}* The GNU Network Object Model Environment, which might be summarized as "All of the functionality of Microsoft Windows for Linux." It's actually more. There are many enhancements that make the tool easier to use and more flexible than the prototype from Redmond. See also KDE, another package that accomplishes much of the same. (www.gnome.org) + +*{GNU}* A recursive acronym that stands for "GNU is Not UNIX." The project was started by Richard Stallman in the 1980s to fight against the tide of proprietary software. The project began with several very nice programs like GNU Emacs and GCC, the C compiler that was protected by Stallman's GNU General Purpose License. It has since grown to issue software packages that handle many different tasks from games (GNU Chess) to privacy (GNU Privacy Guard). See also GPL and Free Software Foundation (www.gnu.org). Its main goal is to produce a free operating system that provides a user with the ability to do everything they want with software that comes with the source code. + +*{GNU/Linux}* The name some people use for Linux as a way of giving credit to the GNU project for its leadership and contribution of code. + +*{GPL}* An abbreviation that stands for "General Purpose License." +This license was first written by Richard Stallman to control the usage of software created by the GNU project. A user is free to read and modify the source code of a GPL-protected package, but the user must agree to distribute any changes or improvements if they distribute the software at all. Stallman views the license as a way to force people to share their own improvements and contribute back to the project if they benefit from the project's hard work. See also BSD. + +*{higher-level}* languages Modern computer programmers almost always write their software in languages like C, Java, Pascal, or Lisp, which are known as higher-level languages. The word "higher" is a modifier that measures the amount of abstraction available to a programmer. A high-level language might let a programmer say, "Add variable revenues to variable losses to computer profits." A high-level language would be able to figure out just where to find the information about the profits and the losses. A low-level programming language would require the software author to point directly to a location in the memory where the data could be found. + +*{KDE}* The K desktop environment is another toolkit that offers much of the same functionality as Windows. It is controversial because it originally used some proprietary software and some users needed a license. See also GNOME, a similar package that is distributed under the GNU GPL. (www.kde.org) + +*{kernel}* The core of an OS responsible for juggling the different tasks and balancing all of the demands. Imagine a short-order cook who scrambles eggs, toasts bread, chops food, and somehow manages to get an order out in a few minutes. A kernel in an OS juggles the requests to send information to a printer, display a picture on the screen, get data from a website, and a thousand other tasks. + +*{Linux}* The name given to the core of the operating system started by Linus Torvalds in 1991. The word is now generally used to refer to an entire bundle of free software packages that work together. Red Hat Linux, for instance, is a large bundle of software including packages written by many other unrelated projects. + +*{Mozilla Public License}* A cousin of the Netscape Public License that was created to protect the public contributions to the source tree of the Mozilla project. Netscape cannot relicense the modifications to code protected by the MPL, but they can do it to the NPL. See also Netscape Public License. + +*{NetBSD}* One of the original free distributions of BSD. The team focuses on making sure that the software works well on a wide variety of hardware platforms, including relatively rare ones like the Amiga. (www.netbsd.org) + +*{Netscape Public License}* A license created by Netscape when the company decided to release their browser as open source. The license is similar to the BSD License, but it provides special features to Netscape. They're allowed to take snapshots of the open source code and turn them back into a private, proprietary project again. Bruce Perens, one of the unpaid consultants who helped Netscape draft the license, says that the provision was included because Netscape had special contracts with companies to provide a proprietary tool. See also Mozilla Public License. + +*{OpenBSD}* One of the three major versions of BSD available. The development team, led by Theo de Raadt, aims to provide the best possible security by examining the source code in detail and looking for potential holes. (www.openbsd.org) open source A broad term used by the Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org) to embrace software developed and released under the GNU General Public License, the BSD license, the Artistic License, the X Consortium, and the Netscape License. It includes software licenses that put few restrictions on the redistribution of source code. The Open Source Initiative's definition was adapted from the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The OSI's definition includes 10 criteria, which range from insisting that the software and the source code must be freely redistributable to insisting that the license not discriminate. + +*{Open Source Initiative}* A group created by Eric Raymond, Sam Ockman, Bruce Perens, Larry Augustin, and more than a few others. The group checks licenses to see if they match their definition of open source. If the license fits, then it can wear the term "certified by the OSI." + +*{Symmetric Multi-Processing}* Much of the recent work in operating system design is focused on finding efficient ways to run multiple programs simultaneously on multiple CPU chips. This job is relatively straightforward if the different pieces of software run independently of each other. The complexity grows substantially if the CPUs must exchange information to coordinate their progress. The kernel must orchestrate the shuffle of information so that each CPU has enough information to continue its work with a minimum amount of waiting time. Finding a good way to accomplish this SMP is important because many of the new machines appearing after 2000 may come with multiple processors. + +*{UNIX}* An operating system created at AT&T Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. The system was originally designed to support multiple users on a variety of different hardware platforms. Most programs written for the system accept ASCII text and spit out ASCII text, which makes it easy to chain them together. The original name was "unics," which was a pun on the then-popular system known as Multics. + +1~bibliography Bibliography + +*{Abelson, Reed.}* "Among U.S. Donations, Tons of Worthless Drugs." New York Times, June 29, 1999. + +*{Ananian, C. Scott.}* "A Linux Lament: As Red Hat Prepares to Go Public, One Linux Hacker's Dreams of IPO Glory Are Crushed by the Man." 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Kernel Traffic, April 13, 1999. \\ +http://www.kt.opensrc.org/kt19990408_13.html#editorial + +*{Caravita, Giuseppe.}* "Telecommunications, Technology, and Science." Il Sole 24 Ore, March 5, 1999. \\ +http://www.ilsole24ore.it/24oreinformatica/speciale_3d.19990305/INFORMATICA/Informatica/A.html + +*{Chalmers, Rachel.}* "Challenges Ahead for the Linux Standards Base."LinuxWorld, April 1999. \\ +http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-04/lw-04-lsb.html + +*{Coates, James.}* "A Rebellious Reaction to the Linux Revolution."Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1999. \\ +http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/printedition/article/0,1051,SA-Vo9904250051,00.html + +*{Cox, Alan.}* "Editorial." Freshmeat, July 18, 1999. \\ +http://www.freshmeat.net/news/1998/07/18/900797536.html + +*{Cringely, Robert X.}* "Be Careful What You Wish For: Why Being Acquired by Microsoft Makes Hardly Anyone Happy in the Long Run." PBS Online, August 27, 1999. \\ +http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit19990826.html + +*{D'Amico, Mary Lisbeth.}* "German Division of Microsoft Protests 'Where Do You Want to Go Tomorrow' Slogan: Linux Site Holds Contest for New Slogan While Case Is Pending." LinuxWorld, April 13, 1999. \\ +http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-04/lw-04-german.html + +*{Diamond, David.}* "Linus the Liberator." San Jose Mercury News. \\ +http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/special/linus/story.html + +*{DiBona, Chris, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone.}* Open Sources:Voices from the Open Source Revolution. San Francisco: O'Reilly, 1999. + +*{Freeman, Derek.}* Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. + +*{Gilder, George.}* Wealth and Poverty. Institute for Contemporary Studies. San Fransisco: CA, 1981. + +*{Gleick, James.}* "Control Freaks." New York Times, July 19, 1998. \\ "Broken Windows Theory." New York Times, March 21, 1999. + +*{"Interview with Linus Torvalds."}* FatBrain.com, May 1999. \\ +http://www.kt.opensrc.org/interviews/ti19990528_fb.html + +*{Jelinek, Jakub.}* "Re: Mach64 Problems in UltraPenguin 1.1.9." Linux Weekly News, April 27, 1999. \\ +http://www.lwn.net/1999/0429/a/up-dead.html + +*{Johnson, Richard B., and Chris Wedgwood.}* "Segfault in syslogd [problem shown]." April 1999. \\ +http://www.kt.opensrc.org/kt19990415_14.html#8 + +*{Joy, Bill.}* "Talk to Stanford EE 380 Students." November 1999. + +*{Kahn, David.}* The Codebreakers. New York: Macmillan, 1967. + +*{Kahney, Leander.}* "Open-Source Gurus Trade Jabs." Wired News, April 10, 1999. \\ +http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/19049.html \\ +"Apple Lifts License Restrictions." Wired News, April 21, 1999. \\ +http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/19233.html + +*{Kidd, Eric.}* "Why You Might Want to Use the Library GPL for Your Next Library." Linux Gazette, March 1999. \\ +http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue38/kidd.html + +*{Kohn, Alfie.}* "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator; Creativity and Intrinsic Interest Diminish If Task Is Done for Gain." Boston Globe, January 19, 1987. + +*{Leonard, Andrew.}* "Open Season: Why an Industry of Cutthroat Competition Is Suddenly Deciding Good Karma Is Great Business." Wired News, May 1999. + +*{Linksvayer, Mike.}* "Choice of the GNU Generation." Meta Magazine. \\ +http://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html + +*{"Linux Beat Windows NT Handily in an Oracle Performance Benchmark."}* Linux Weekly News, April 29, 1999. \\ +http://rpmfind.net/veillard/oracle/ + +*{Liston, Robert.}* The Pueblo Surrender: A Covert Action by the National Security Agency. New York: Evans, 1988. + +*{Little, Darnell.}* "Comdex Q&A: Linus Torvalds on the Battle Against Microsoft." Chicago Tribune April 19, 1999. \\ +http://chicagotribune.com/business/businessnews/ws/item/0,1267,2674627007-27361,00.html + +*{Lohr, Steve.}* "Tiny Software Maker Takes Aim at Microsoft in Court." New York Times, May 31, 1999. + +*{Mauss, Marcel.}* "Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies," trans. W. D. Halls. New York: W.W. Norton & Company (of reissue in US), 1950. + +*{McKusick, Marshall Kirk.}* "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix." In Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. San Francisco: O'Reilly, 1999. + +*{McKusick, Marshall Kirk, Keith Bostic, and Michael J. Karels, eds.}* The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System \\ (Unix and Open Systems Series). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996. + +*{McMillan, Robert, and Nora Mikes.}* "After the 'Sweet Sixteen': Linus Torvalds's Take on the State of Linux." LinuxWorld, March 1999. \\ +http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-03/lw03-torvalds.html + +*{Metcalfe, Bob.}* "Linux's '60s Technology: Open-Sores Ideology Won't Beat W2K, but What Will?" June 19, 1999. \\ +http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/990621opmetcalfe.xml + +*{Nolan, Chris.}* "Microsoft Antitrust: the Gassée Factor: U.S. Reportedly Looks into Obstacles for Be Operating System." San Jose Mercury News, February 11, 1999. \\ +http://www.sjmercury.com/svtech/columns/talkischeap/docs/cn021199.html + +*{Oakes, Chris.}* "Netscape Browser Guru: We Failed." Wired News, April 2, 1999. \\ +http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/18926.html + +*{Ousterhout, John.}* "Free Software Needs Profit." Dr. Dobb's Journal website, 1999. \\ +http://www.ddj.com/oped/1999/oust.htm + +*{Perens, Bruce, Wichert Akkerman, and Ian Jackson.}* "The Apple Public Source License--Our Concerns." March 1999. \\ +http://perens.com/APSL.html/ \\ +"The Open Source Definition." In Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, ed. Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone, 171-85. San Francisco: O'Reilly, 1999. + +*{Picarille, Lisa, and Malcolm Maclachlan.}* "Apple Defends Open Source Initiative." March 24, 1999. \\ +http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990324S0027 + +*{Raymond, Eric.}* The Cathedral and the Bazaar:Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. San Francisco: O'Reilly, 1999. + +*{Reilly, Patrick.}* "Nader's Microsoft Agenda: Progressive Nonprofit Plan for 'Free' Software." Capital Research Center, April 1, 1999. \\ +http://www.capitalresearch.org/trends/ot-0499a.html + +*{Rubini, Alessandro.}* "Tour of the Linux Kernel Source." Linux Documentation Project. + +*{Rusling, David A.}* "The Linux Kernel." \\ +http://metalab.unc.edu/mdw/LDP/tlk/tlk-title.html + +*{Schmalensee, Richard.}* "Direct Testimony in the Microsoft Anti-Trust Case of 1999." \\ +http://www.courttv.com/trials/ microsoft/legaldocs/ms_wit.html + +*{Schulman, Andrew.}* Unauthorized Windows 95. Foster City, CA: IDG Books, 1995. + +*{Searles, Doc.}* "It's an Industry." Linux Journal, May 21, 1999. \\ +http://www.linuxresources.com/articles/conversations/001.html + +*{Slind-Flor, Victoria.}* "Linux May Alter IP Legal Landscape: Some Predict More Contract Work if Alternative to Windows Catches On." National Law Journal, March 12, 1999. \\ +http://www.lawnewsnetwork.com/stories/mar/e030899q.html + +*{Stallman, Richard.}* "The GNU Manifesto." 1984. \\ +http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html \\ +"Why Software Should Not Have Owners." 1994. \\ +http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html + +*{Thompson, Ken, and Dennis Ritchie.}* "The UNIX Time-Sharing System." Communications of the ACM, 1974. + +*{Thygeson, Gordon.}* Apple T-Shirts: A Yearbook of History at Apple Computer. Cupertino, CA: Pomo Publishing, 1998 + +*{Torvalds, Linus.}* "Linus Torvalds: Leader of the Revolution." Transcript of Chat with Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux OS. ABCNews.com. \\ "Linux's History." July 31, 1992. \\ +http://www.li.org/li/linuxhistory.shtml + +*{Valloppillil, Vinod.}* "Open Source Software: A (New?) Development Methodology." Microsoft, Redmond, WA, August 1998. + +*{Wayner, Peter.}* "If SB266 Wants Plaintext, Give Them Plaintext . . . ," Risks Digest, May 23, 1991. \\ +http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/11.71.html#subj2 \\ +"Should Hackers Spend Years in Prison?" Salon, June 9, 1999. \\ +http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/06/09/hacker_penalties/index.html \\ +"Netscape to Release New Browser Engine to Developers." New York Times, December 7, 1999. \\ "Glory Among the Geeks." Salon, January 1999. \\ +http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1999/01/28feature.html + +*{Whitenger, Dave. "Words of a Maddog."}* Linux Today, April 19, 1999. \\ +http://linuxtoday.com/stories/5118.html + +*{"Web and File Server Comparison: Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 and Red Hat Linux 5.2 Upgraded to the Linux 2.2.2 Kernel."}* Mindcraft, April 13, 1999. \\ +http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/nts4rhlinux.html + +*{Williams, Sam.}* "Linus Has Left the Building." Upside, May 5, 1999. \\ +http://www.upside.com/Open_Season/ + +*{Williams, Riley.}* "Linux Kernel Vertsion History." \\ +http://ps.cus.umist.ac.uk/~rhw/kernel.versions.html + +*{Zawinski, Jamie.}* "Resignation and Postmortem." \\ +http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html + +1~other.works Other works by Peter Wayner + +2~ Disappearing Cryptography, Information Hiding: Steganography & Watermarking -# + +Disappearing Cryptography, Information Hiding: Steganography & Watermarking, 2nd ed. by Peter Wayner ISBN 1-55860-769-2 $44.95 + +To order, visit: http://www.wayner.org/books/discrypt2/ + +Disappearing Cryptography, Second Edition describes how to take words, sounds, or images and hide them in digital data so they look like other words, sounds, or images. When used properly, this powerful technique makes it almost impossible to trace the author and the recipient of a message. Conversations can be submerged in the flow of information through the Internet so that no one can know if a conversation exists at all. + +This full revision of the best-selling first edition describes a number of different techniques to hide information. These include encryption, making data incomprehensible; steganography, embedding information into video, audio, or graphics files; watermarking, hiding data in the noise of image or sound files; mimicry, "dressing up" data and making it appear to be other data, and more. + +The second edition also includes an expanded discussion on hiding information with spread-spectrum algorithms, shuffling tricks, and synthetic worlds. Each chapter is divided into sections, first providing an introduction and high-level summary for those who want to understand the concepts without wading through technical explanations, and then presenting greater detail for those who want to write their own programs. To encourage exploration, the author's Web site +www.wayner.org/books/discrypt2/ contains implementations for hiding information in lists, sentences, and images. + +"Disappearing Cryptography is a witty and entertaining look at the world of information hiding. Peter Wayner provides an intuitive perspective of the many techniques, applications, and research directions in the area of steganography. The sheer breadth of topics is outstanding and makes this book truly unique. A must read for those who would like to begin learning about information hiding." --Deepa Kundur, University of Toronto + +"An excellent introduction for private individuals, businesses, and governments who need to under- stand the complex technologies and their effects on protecting privacy, intellectual property and other interests." - David Banisar, Research Fellow, Harvard Information Infrastructure Project, & Deputy Director, Privacy International. + +2~ Translucent Databases -# + +Translucent Databases, a new book by Peter Wayner, comes with more than two dozen examples in Java and SQL code. The book comes with a royalty-free license to use the code for your own projects in any way you wish. + +_* Do you have personal information in your database? + +_* Do you keep les on your customers, your employees, or anyone else? + +_* Do you need to worry about European laws restricting the information you keep? + +_* Do you keep copies of credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other informa- tion that might be useful to identity thieves or insurance fraudsters? + +_* Do you deal with medical records or personal secrets? + +Most database administrators spend some of each day worrying about the information they keep. Some spend all of their time. Caring for information can be a dangerous responsibility. + +This new book, Translucent Databases, describes a different attitude toward protecting the information. Most databases provide elaborate control mechanisms for letting the right people in to see the right records. These tools are well designed and thoroughly tested, but they can only provide so much support. If someone breaks into the operating system itself, all of the data on the hard disk is unveiled. If a clerk, a supervisor, or a system administrator decides to turn traitor, there's nothing anyone can do. + +Translucent databases provide better, deeper protection by scrambling the data with encryption algorithms. The solutions use the minimal amount of encryption to ensure that the database is still functional. In the best applications, the personal and sensitive information is protected but the database still delivers the information. + +Order today at +http://www.wayner.org/books/td/ diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/gpl2.fsf.sst b/data/samples/current/en/gpl2.fsf.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b65ff80 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/gpl2.fsf.sst @@ -0,0 +1,164 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v2 + +@creator: + :author: Free Software Foundation + +@date: + :published: 1991 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. + :license: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:document;GPL;Software:license;GNU/Linux:License:GPL + +@links: + { Free Software Foundation }http://www.fsf.org + { GPL @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/gpl2.fsf + +:A~ GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE + +:B~ Version 2, June 1991 + +1~ [note] -# + +Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA + +Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. + +1~ Preamble + +The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share +and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to your programs, too. + +When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things. + +To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it. + +For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights. + +We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software. + +Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations. + +Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. 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(Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.) + +These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. + +Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program. + +In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License. + +3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following: + +a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, + +b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, + +c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.) + +The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable. + +If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code. + +4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance. + +5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it. + +6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License. + +7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program. + +If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as a whole is intended to apply in other circumstances. + +It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe any patents or other property right claims or to contest validity of any such claims; this section has the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the free software distribution system, which is implemented by public license practices. Many people have made generous contributions to the wide range of software distributed through that system in reliance on consistent application of that system; it is up to the author/donor to decide if he or she is willing to distribute software through any other system and a licensee cannot impose that choice. + +This section is intended to make thoroughly clear what is believed to be a consequence of the rest of this License. + +8. If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License. + +9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. + +Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation. + +10. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For software which is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally. + +2~ NO WARRANTY + +11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION. + +12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. + +:C~ END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS + +1~ How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs + +If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms. + +To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found. + +<one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.> + +Copyright (C) <year > <name of author> + +This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. + +This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. + +You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA~{ FSF address changed from: 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA }~ + +Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail. + +If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode: + +Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) year name of author + +Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type 'show w'. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type 'show c' for details. + +The hypothetical commands 'show w' and 'show c' should show the appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, the commands you use may be called something other than 'show w' and 'show c'; they could even be mouse-clicks or menu items--whatever suits your program. + +You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names: + +Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program 'Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker. + +<signature of Ty Coon>, 1 April 1989 + +Ty Coon, President of Vice + +This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public License instead of this License. + +%% SiSU markup sample Notes: +% SiSU http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu +% SiSU markup for 0.16 and later: +% 0.20.4 header 0~links +% 0.22 may drop image dimensions (rmagick) +% 0.23 utf-8 ß +% 0.38 or later, may use alternative notation for headers, e.g. @title: (instead of 0~title) +% 0.38 document structure alternative markup, experimental (rad) A,B,C,1,2,3 maps to 1,2,3,4,5,6 +% Output: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/gpl2.fsf/sisu_manifest.html +% SiSU 0.38 experimental (alternative structure) markup used for this document diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/gpl3.fsf.sst b/data/samples/current/en/gpl3.fsf.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..df68a03 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/gpl3.fsf.sst @@ -0,0 +1,293 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v3 + :edition: 3 + :note: Free Software Foundation + :language: English + +@creator: + :author: Free Software Foundation + +@date: + :published: 2007-06-29 + :available: 2007-06-29 + :valid: 2007-06-29 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. http://fsf.org/ + :license: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:document;GPL;Software:license + +@publisher: SiSU on behalf of the Free Software Foundation + +@links: + { Free Software Foundation }http://www.fsf.org + { GPL3 @ FSF }http://gplv3.fsf.org/ + { GPL3 source text }http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt + +:A~ GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE + +:B~ Version 3, 29 June 2007 + +:C~ Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. http://fsf.org/ Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. + +1~ Preamble + +The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works. + +The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to your programs, too. + +When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things. + +To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others. + +For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights. + +Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it. + +For the developers' and authors' protection, the GPL clearly explains that there is no warranty for this free software. For both users' and authors' sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to authors of previous versions. + +Some devices are designed to deny users access to install or run modified versions of the software inside them, although the manufacturer can do so. This is fundamentally incompatible with the aim of protecting users' freedom to change the software. The systematic pattern of such abuse occurs in the area of products for individuals to use, which is precisely where it is most unacceptable. Therefore, we have designed this version of the GPL to prohibit the practice for those products. If such problems arise substantially in other domains, we stand ready to extend this provision to those domains in future versions of the GPL, as needed to protect the freedom of users. + +Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents. States should not allow patents to restrict development and use of software on general-purpose computers, but in those that do, we wish to avoid the special danger that patents applied to a free program could make it effectively proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL assures that patents cannot be used to render the program non-free. + +The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow. + +:C~ TERMS AND CONDITIONS + +1~0 0. Definitions. + +"This License" refers to version 3 of the GNU General Public License. + +"Copyright" also means copyright-like laws that apply to other kinds of works, such as semiconductor masks. + +"The Program" refers to any copyrightable work licensed under this License. Each licensee is addressed as "you". "Licensees" and "recipients" may be individuals or organizations. + +To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a "modified version" of the earlier work or a work "based on" the earlier work. + +A "covered work" means either the unmodified Program or a work based on the Program. + +To "propagate" a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well. + +To "convey" a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying. + +An interactive user interface displays "Appropriate Legal Notices" to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion. + +1~1 1. Source Code. + +The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. "Object code" means any non-source form of a work. + +A "Standard Interface" means an interface that either is an official standard defined by a recognized standards body, or, in the case of interfaces specified for a particular programming language, one that is widely used among developers working in that language. + +The "System Libraries" of an executable work include anything, other than the work as a whole, that (a) is included in the normal form of packaging a Major Component, but which is not part of that Major Component, and (b) serves only to enable use of the work with that Major Component, or to implement a Standard Interface for which an implementation is available to the public in source code form. A "Major Component", in this context, means a major essential component (kernel, window system, and so on) of the specific operating system (if any) on which the executable work runs, or a compiler used to produce the work, or an object code interpreter used to run it. + +The "Corresponding Source" for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work. + +The Corresponding Source need not include anything that users can regenerate automatically from other parts of the Corresponding Source. + +The Corresponding Source for a work in source code form is that same work. + +1~2 2. Basic Permissions. + +All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met. This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program. The output from running a covered work is covered by this License only if the output, given its content, constitutes a covered work. This License acknowledges your rights of fair use or other equivalent, as provided by copyright law. + +You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force. You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you. + +Conveying under any other circumstances is permitted solely under the conditions stated below. Sublicensing is not allowed; section 10 makes it unnecessary. + +1~3 3. Protecting Users' Legal Rights From Anti-Circumvention Law. + +No covered work shall be deemed part of an effective technological measure under any applicable law fulfilling obligations under article 11 of the WIPO copyright treaty adopted on 20 December 1996, or similar laws prohibiting or restricting circumvention of such measures. + +When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures. + +1~4 4. Conveying Verbatim Copies. + +You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program. + +You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee. + +1~5 5. Conveying Modified Source Versions. + +You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: + +_1 a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date. + +_1 b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to "keep intact all notices". + +_1 c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it. + +_1 d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work need not make them do so. + +A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate. + +1~6 6. Conveying Non-Source Forms. + +You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways: + +_1 a) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by the Corresponding Source fixed on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange. + +_1 b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge. + +_1 c) Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written offer to provide the Corresponding Source. This alternative is allowed only occasionally and noncommercially, and only if you received the object code with such an offer, in accord with subsection 6b. + +_1 d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements. + +_1 e) Convey the object code using peer-to-peer transmission, provided you inform other peers where the object code and Corresponding Source of the work are being offered to the general public at no charge under subsection 6d. + +A separable portion of the object code, whose source code is excluded from the Corresponding Source as a System Library, need not be included in conveying the object code work. + +A "User Product" is either (1) a "consumer product", which means any tangible personal property which is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes, or (2) anything designed or sold for incorporation into a dwelling. In determining whether a product is a consumer product, doubtful cases shall be resolved in favor of coverage. For a particular product received by a particular user, "normally used" refers to a typical or common use of that class of product, regardless of the status of the particular user or of the way in which the particular user actually uses, or expects or is expected to use, the product. A product is a consumer product regardless of whether the product has substantial commercial, industrial or non-consumer uses, unless such uses represent the only significant mode of use of the product. + +"Installation Information" for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made. + +If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is characterized), the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information. But this requirement does not apply if neither you nor any third party retains the ability to install modified object code on the User Product (for example, the work has been installed in ROM). + +The requirement to provide Installation Information does not include a requirement to continue to provide support service, warranty, or updates for a work that has been modified or installed by the recipient, or for the User Product in which it has been modified or installed. Access to a network may be denied when the modification itself materially and adversely affects the operation of the network or violates the rules and protocols for communication across the network. + +Corresponding Source conveyed, and Installation Information provided, in accord with this section must be in a format that is publicly documented (and with an implementation available to the public in source code form), and must require no special password or key for unpacking, reading or copying. + +1~7 7. Additional Terms. + +"Additional permissions" are terms that supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions. Additional permissions that are applicable to the entire Program shall be treated as though they were included in this License, to the extent that they are valid under applicable law. If additional permissions apply only to part of the Program, that part may be used separately under those permissions, but the entire Program remains governed by this License without regard to the additional permissions. + +When you convey a copy of a covered work, you may at your option remove any additional permissions from that copy, or from any part of it. (Additional permissions may be written to require their own removal in certain cases when you modify the work.) You may place additional permissions on material, added by you to a covered work, for which you have or can give appropriate copyright permission. + +Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms: + +_1 a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License; or + +_1 b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or + +_1 c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version; or + +_1 d) Limiting the use for publicity purposes of names of licensors or authors of the material; or + +_1 e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks; or + +_1 f) Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of that material by anyone who conveys the material (or modified versions of it) with contractual assumptions of liability to the recipient, for any liability that these contractual assumptions directly impose on those licensors and authors. + +All other non-permissive additional terms are considered "further restrictions" within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term. If a license document contains a further restriction but permits relicensing or conveying under this License, you may add to a covered work material governed by the terms of that license document, provided that the further restriction does not survive such relicensing or conveying. + +If you add terms to a covered work in accord with this section, you must place, in the relevant source files, a statement of the additional terms that apply to those files, or a notice indicating where to find the applicable terms. + +Additional terms, permissive or non-permissive, may be stated in the form of a separately written license, or stated as exceptions; the above requirements apply either way. + +1~8 8. Termination. + +You may not propagate or modify a covered work except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to propagate or modify it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License (including any patent licenses granted under the third paragraph of section 11). + +However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation. + +Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice. + +Termination of your rights under this section does not terminate the licenses of parties who have received copies or rights from you under this License. If your rights have been terminated and not permanently reinstated, you do not qualify to receive new licenses for the same material under section 10. + +1~9 9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies. + +You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so. + +1~10 10. Automatic Licensing of Downstream Recipients. + +Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, subject to this License. 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But first, please read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html. diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst b/data/samples/current/en/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d9370a4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst @@ -0,0 +1,1378 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: Gulliver's Travels + +@creator: + :author: Swift, Jonathan + :prepared_by: David Price + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:fantasy + +@rights: + :copyright: Jonathan Swift + :license: Public Domain + +@date: + :published: 1726 + :created: 1726 + :issued: 1726 + :available: 1726 + :modified: 1735 + :added_to_site: 2005-10-30 + +@links: + { Gulliver's Travels }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullivers_travels + { Johnathan Swift }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Swift + +@make: + :headings: none; none; PART; CHAPTER; + :breaks: new=3; break=4 + +A~ @title @creator + +:B~ Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World + +1~ THE PUBLISHER TO THE READER. + +[As given in the original edition.] + +The author of these Travels, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, is my ancient and intimate friend; there is likewise some relation between us on the mother's side. About three years ago, Mr. Gulliver growing weary of the concourse of curious people coming to him at his house in Redriff, made a small purchase of land, with a convenient house, near Newark, in Nottinghamshire, his native country; where he now lives retired, yet in good esteem among his neighbours. + +Although Mr. Gulliver was born in Nottinghamshire, where his father dwelt, yet I have heard him say his family came from Oxfordshire; to confirm which, I have observed in the churchyard at Banbury in that county, several tombs and monuments of the Gullivers. + +Before he quitted Redriff, he left the custody of the following papers in my hands, with the liberty to dispose of them as I should think fit. I have carefully perused them three times. The style is very plain and simple; and the only fault I find is, that the author, after the manner of travellers, is a little too circumstantial. There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it. + +By the advice of several worthy persons, to whom, with the author's permission, I communicated these papers, I now venture to send them into the world, hoping they may be, at least for some time, a better entertainment to our young noblemen, than the common scribbles of politics and party. + +This volume would have been at least twice as large, if I had not made bold to strike out innumerable passages relating to the winds and tides, as well as to the variations and bearings in the several voyages, together with the minute descriptions of the management of the ship in storms, in the style of sailors; likewise the account of longitudes and latitudes; wherein I have reason to apprehend, that Mr. Gulliver may be a little dissatisfied. But I was resolved to fit the work as much as possible to the general capacity of readers. However, if my own ignorance in sea affairs shall have led me to commit some mistakes, I alone am answerable for them. And if any traveller hath a curiosity to see the whole work at large, as it came from the hands of the author, I will be ready to gratify him. + +As for any further particulars relating to the author, the reader will receive satisfaction from the first pages of the book. + +RICHARD SYMPSON. + +1~ A LETTER FROM CAPTAIN GULLIVER TO HIS COUSIN SYMPSON. + +WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1727. + +I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my travels, with directions to hire some young gentleman of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as my cousin Dampier did, by my advice, in his book called "A Voyage round the world." But I do not remember I gave you power to consent that any thing should be omitted, and much less that any thing should be inserted; therefore, as to the latter, I do here renounce every thing of that kind; particularly a paragraph about her majesty Queen Anne, of most pious and glorious memory; although I did reverence and esteem her more than any of human species. But you, or your interpolator, ought to have considered, that it was not my inclination, so was it not decent to praise any animal of our composition before my master Houyhnhnm: And besides, the fact was altogether false; for to my knowledge, being in England during some part of her majesty's reign, she did govern by a chief minister; nay even by two successively, the first whereof was the lord of Godolphin, and the second the lord of Oxford; so that you have made me say the thing that was not. Likewise in the account of the academy of projectors, and several passages of my discourse to my master Houyhnhnm, you have either omitted some material circumstances, or minced or changed them in such a manner, that I do hardly know my own work. When I formerly hinted to you something of this in a letter, you were pleased to answer that you were afraid of giving offence; that people in power were very watchful over the press, and apt not only to interpret, but to punish every thing which looked like an innuendo (as I think you call it). But, pray how could that which I spoke so many years ago, and at about five thousand leagues distance, in another reign, be applied to any of the Yahoos, who now are said to govern the herd; especially at a time when I little thought, or feared, the unhappiness of living under them? Have not I the most reason to complain, when I see these very Yahoos carried by Houyhnhnms in a vehicle, as if they were brutes, and those the rational creatures? And indeed to avoid so monstrous and detestable a sight was one principal motive of my retirement hither. + +Thus much I thought proper to tell you in relation to yourself, and to the trust I reposed in you. + +I do, in the next place, complain of my own great want of judgment, in being prevailed upon by the entreaties and false reasoning of you and some others, very much against my own opinion, to suffer my travels to be published. Pray bring to your mind how often I desired you to consider, when you insisted on the motive of public good, that the Yahoos were a species of animals utterly incapable of amendment by precept or example: and so it has proved; for, instead of seeing a full stop put to all abuses and corruptions, at least in this little island, as I had reason to expect; behold, after above six months warning, I cannot learn that my book has produced one single effect according to my intentions. I desired you would let me know, by a letter, when party and faction were extinguished; judges learned and upright; pleaders honest and modest, with some tincture of common sense, and Smithfield blazing with pyramids of law books; the young nobility's education entirely changed; the physicians banished; the female Yahoos abounding in virtue, honour, truth, and good sense; courts and levees of great ministers thoroughly weeded and swept; wit, merit, and learning rewarded; all disgracers of the press in prose and verse condemned to eat nothing but their own cotton, and quench their thirst with their own ink. These, and a thousand other reformations, I firmly counted upon by your encouragement; as indeed they were plainly deducible from the precepts delivered in my book. And it must be owned, that seven months were a sufficient time to correct every vice and folly to which Yahoos are subject, if their natures had been capable of the least disposition to virtue or wisdom. Yet, so far have you been from answering my expectation in any of your letters; that on the contrary you are loading our carrier every week with libels, and keys, and reflections, and memoirs, and second parts; wherein I see myself accused of reflecting upon great state folk; of degrading human nature (for so they have still the confidence to style it), and of abusing the female sex. I find likewise that the writers of those bundles are not agreed among themselves; for some of them will not allow me to be the author of my own travels; and others make me author of books to which I am wholly a stranger. + +I find likewise that your printer has been so careless as to confound the times, and mistake the dates, of my several voyages and returns; neither assigning the true year, nor the true month, nor day of the month: and I hear the original manuscript is all destroyed since the publication of my book; neither have I any copy left: however, I have sent you some corrections, which you may insert, if ever there should be a second edition: and yet I cannot stand to them; but shall leave that matter to my judicious and candid readers to adjust it as they please. + +I hear some of our sea Yahoos find fault with my sea-language, as not proper in many parts, nor now in use. I cannot help it. In my first voyages, while I was young, I was instructed by the oldest mariners, and learned to speak as they did. But I have since found that the sea Yahoos are apt, like the land ones, to become new- fangled in their words, which the latter change every year; insomuch, as I remember upon each return to my own country their old dialect was so altered, that I could hardly understand the new. And I observe, when any Yahoo comes from London out of curiosity to visit me at my house, we neither of us are able to deliver our conceptions in a manner intelligible to the other. + +If the censure of the Yahoos could any way affect me, I should have great reason to complain, that some of them are so bold as to think my book of travels a mere fiction out of mine own brain, and have gone so far as to drop hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia. + +Indeed I must confess, that as to the people of Lilliput, Brobdingrag (for so the word should have been spelt, and not erroneously Brobdingnag), and Laputa, I have never yet heard of any Yahoo so presumptuous as to dispute their being, or the facts I have related concerning them; because the truth immediately strikes every reader with conviction. And is there less probability in my account of the Houyhnhnms or Yahoos, when it is manifest as to the latter, there are so many thousands even in this country, who only differ from their brother brutes in Houyhnhnmland, because they use a sort of jabber, and do not go naked? I wrote for their amendment, and not their approbation. The united praise of the whole race would be of less consequence to me, than the neighing of those two degenerate Houyhnhnms I keep in my stable; because from these, degenerate as they are, I still improve in some virtues without any mixture of vice. + +Do these miserable animals presume to think, that I am so degenerated as to defend my veracity? Yahoo as I am, it is well known through all Houyhnhnmland, that, by the instructions and example of my illustrious master, I was able in the compass of two years (although I confess with the utmost difficulty) to remove that infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving, and equivocating, so deeply rooted in the very souls of all my species; especially the Europeans. + +I have other complaints to make upon this vexatious occasion; but I forbear troubling myself or you any further. I must freely confess, that since my last return, some corruptions of my Yahoo nature have revived in me by conversing with a few of your species, and particularly those of my own family, by an unavoidable necessity; else I should never have attempted so absurd a project as that of reforming the Yahoo race in this kingdom: But I have now done with all such visionary schemes for ever. + +April 2, 1727 + +PART I--A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT. + +CHAPTER I. + +[The author gives some account of himself and family. His first inducements to travel. He is shipwrecked, and swims for his life. Gets safe on shore in the country of Lilliput; is made a prisoner, and carried up the country.] + +My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four years. My father now and then sending me small sums of money, I laid them out in learning navigation, and other parts of the mathematics, useful to those who intend to travel, as I always believed it would be, some time or other, my fortune to do. When I left Mr. Bates, I went down to my father: where, by the assistance of him and my uncle John, and some other relations, I got forty pounds, and a promise of thirty pounds a year to maintain me at Leyden: there I studied physic two years and seven months, knowing it would be useful in long voyages. + +Soon after my return from Leyden, I was recommended by my good master, Mr. Bates, to be surgeon to the Swallow, Captain Abraham Pannel, commander; with whom I continued three years and a half, making a voyage or two into the Levant, and some other parts. When I came back I resolved to settle in London; to which Mr. Bates, my master, encouraged me, and by him I was recommended to several patients. I took part of a small house in the Old Jewry; and being advised to alter my condition, I married Mrs. Mary Burton, second daughter to Mr. Edmund Burton, hosier, in Newgate-street, with whom I received four hundred pounds for a portion. + +But my good master Bates dying in two years after, and I having few friends, my business began to fail; for my conscience would not suffer me to imitate the bad practice of too many among my brethren. Having therefore consulted with my wife, and some of my acquaintance, I determined to go again to sea. I was surgeon successively in two ships, and made several voyages, for six years, to the East and West Indies, by which I got some addition to my fortune. My hours of leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern, being always provided with a good number of books; and when I was ashore, in observing the manners and dispositions of the people, as well as learning their language; wherein I had a great facility, by the strength of my memory. + +The last of these voyages not proving very fortunate, I grew weary of the sea, and intended to stay at home with my wife and family. I removed from the Old Jewry to Fetter Lane, and from thence to Wapping, hoping to get business among the sailors; but it would not turn to account. After three years expectation that things would mend, I accepted an advantageous offer from Captain William Prichard, master of the Antelope, who was making a voyage to the South Sea. We set sail from Bristol, May 4, 1699, and our voyage was at first very prosperous. + +It would not be proper, for some reasons, to trouble the reader with the particulars of our adventures in those seas; let it suffice to inform him, that in our passage from thence to the East Indies, we were driven by a violent storm to the north-west of Van Diemen's Land. By an observation, we found ourselves in the latitude of 30 degrees 2 minutes south. Twelve of our crew were dead by immoderate labour and ill food; the rest were in a very weak condition. On the 5th of November, which was the beginning of summer in those parts, the weather being very hazy, the seamen spied a rock within half a cable's length of the ship; but the wind was so strong, that we were driven directly upon it, and immediately split. Six of the crew, of whom I was one, having let down the boat into the sea, made a shift to get clear of the ship and the rock. We rowed, by my computation, about three leagues, till we were able to work no longer, being already spent with labour while we were in the ship. We therefore trusted ourselves to the mercy of the waves, and in about half an hour the boat was overset by a sudden flurry from the north. What became of my companions in the boat, as well as of those who escaped on the rock, or were left in the vessel, I cannot tell; but conclude they were all lost. For my own part, I swam as fortune directed me, and was pushed forward by wind and tide. I often let my legs drop, and could feel no bottom; but when I was almost gone, and able to struggle no longer, I found myself within my depth; and by this time the storm was much abated. The declivity was so small, that I walked near a mile before I got to the shore, which I conjectured was about eight o'clock in the evening. I then advanced forward near half a mile, but could not discover any sign of houses or inhabitants; at least I was in so weak a condition, that I did not observe them. I was extremely tired, and with that, and the heat of the weather, and about half a pint of brandy that I drank as I left the ship, I found myself much inclined to sleep. I lay down on the grass, which was very short and soft, where I slept sounder than ever I remembered to have done in my life, and, as I reckoned, about nine hours; for when I awaked, it was just day-light. I attempted to rise, but was not able to stir: for, as I happened to lie on my back, I found my arms and legs were strongly fastened on each side to the ground; and my hair, which was long and thick, tied down in the same manner. I likewise felt several slender ligatures across my body, from my arm-pits to my thighs. I could only look upwards; the sun began to grow hot, and the light offended my eyes. I heard a confused noise about me; but in the posture I lay, could see nothing except the sky. In a little time I felt something alive moving on my left leg, which advancing gently forward over my breast, came almost up to my chin; when, bending my eyes downwards as much as I could, I perceived it to be a human creature not six inches high, with a bow and arrow in his hands, and a quiver at his back. In the mean time, I felt at least forty more of the same kind (as I conjectured) following the first. I was in the utmost astonishment, and roared so loud, that they all ran back in a fright; and some of them, as I was afterwards told, were hurt with the falls they got by leaping from my sides upon the ground. However, they soon returned, and one of them, who ventured so far as to get a full sight of my face, lifting up his hands and eyes by way of admiration, cried out in a shrill but distinct voice, Hekinah degul: the others repeated the same words several times, but then I knew not what they meant. I lay all this while, as the reader may believe, in great uneasiness. At length, struggling to get loose, I had the fortune to break the strings, and wrench out the pegs that fastened my left arm to the ground; for, by lifting it up to my face, I discovered the methods they had taken to bind me, and at the same time with a violent pull, which gave me excessive pain, I a little loosened the strings that tied down my hair on the left side, so that I was just able to turn my head about two inches. But the creatures ran off a second time, before I could seize them; whereupon there was a great shout in a very shrill accent, and after it ceased I heard one of them cry aloud Tolgo phonac; when in an instant I felt above a hundred arrows discharged on my left hand, which, pricked me like so many needles; and besides, they shot another flight into the air, as we do bombs in Europe, whereof many, I suppose, fell on my body, (though I felt them not), and some on my face, which I immediately covered with my left hand. When this shower of arrows was over, I fell a groaning with grief and pain; and then striving again to get loose, they discharged another volley larger than the first, and some of them attempted with spears to stick me in the sides; but by good luck I had on a buff jerkin, which they could not pierce. I thought it the most prudent method to lie still, and my design was to continue so till night, when, my left hand being already loose, I could easily free myself: and as for the inhabitants, I had reason to believe I might be a match for the greatest army they could bring against me, if they were all of the same size with him that I saw. But fortune disposed otherwise of me. When the people observed I was quiet, they discharged no more arrows; but, by the noise I heard, I knew their numbers increased; and about four yards from me, over against my right ear, I heard a knocking for above an hour, like that of people at work; when turning my head that way, as well as the pegs and strings would permit me, I saw a stage erected about a foot and a half from the ground, capable of holding four of the inhabitants, with two or three ladders to mount it: from whence one of them, who seemed to be a person of quality, made me a long speech, whereof I understood not one syllable. But I should have mentioned, that before the principal person began his oration, he cried out three times, Langro dehul san (these words and the former were afterwards repeated and explained to me); whereupon, immediately, about fifty of the inhabitants came and cut the strings that fastened the left side of my head, which gave me the liberty of turning it to the right, and of observing the person and gesture of him that was to speak. He appeared to be of a middle age, and taller than any of the other three who attended him, whereof one was a page that held up his train, and seemed to be somewhat longer than my middle finger; the other two stood one on each side to support him. He acted every part of an orator, and I could observe many periods of threatenings, and others of promises, pity, and kindness. I answered in a few words, but in the most submissive manner, lifting up my left hand, and both my eyes to the sun, as calling him for a witness; and being almost famished with hunger, having not eaten a morsel for some hours before I left the ship, I found the demands of nature so strong upon me, that I could not forbear showing my impatience (perhaps against the strict rules of decency) by putting my finger frequently to my mouth, to signify that I wanted food. The hurgo (for so they call a great lord, as I afterwards learnt) understood me very well. He descended from the stage, and commanded that several ladders should be applied to my sides, on which above a hundred of the inhabitants mounted and walked towards my mouth, laden with baskets full of meat, which had been provided and sent thither by the king's orders, upon the first intelligence he received of me. I observed there was the flesh of several animals, but could not distinguish them by the taste. There were shoulders, legs, and loins, shaped like those of mutton, and very well dressed, but smaller than the wings of a lark. I ate them by two or three at a mouthful, and took three loaves at a time, about the bigness of musket bullets. They supplied me as fast as they could, showing a thousand marks of wonder and astonishment at my bulk and appetite. I then made another sign, that I wanted drink. They found by my eating that a small quantity would not suffice me; and being a most ingenious people, they slung up, with great dexterity, one of their largest hogsheads, then rolled it towards my hand, and beat out the top; I drank it off at a draught, which I might well do, for it did not hold half a pint, and tasted like a small wine of Burgundy, but much more delicious. They brought me a second hogshead, which I drank in the same manner, and made signs for more; but they had none to give me. When I had performed these wonders, they shouted for joy, and danced upon my breast, repeating several times as they did at first, Hekinah degul. They made me a sign that I should throw down the two hogsheads, but first warning the people below to stand out of the way, crying aloud, Borach mevolah; and when they saw the vessels in the air, there was a universal shout of Hekinah degul. I confess I was often tempted, while they were passing backwards and forwards on my body, to seize forty or fifty of the first that came in my reach, and dash them against the ground. But the remembrance of what I had felt, which probably might not be the worst they could do, and the promise of honour I made them--for so I interpreted my submissive behaviour-- soon drove out these imaginations. Besides, I now considered myself as bound by the laws of hospitality, to a people who had treated me with so much expense and magnificence. However, in my thoughts I could not sufficiently wonder at the intrepidity of these diminutive mortals, who durst venture to mount and walk upon my body, while one of my hands was at liberty, without trembling at the very sight of so prodigious a creature as I must appear to them. After some time, when they observed that I made no more demands for meat, there appeared before me a person of high rank from his imperial majesty. His excellency, having mounted on the small of my right leg, advanced forwards up to my face, with about a dozen of his retinue; and producing his credentials under the signet royal, which he applied close to my eyes, spoke about ten minutes without any signs of anger, but with a kind of determinate resolution, often pointing forwards, which, as I afterwards found, was towards the capital city, about half a mile distant; whither it was agreed by his majesty in council that I must be conveyed. I answered in few words, but to no purpose, and made a sign with my hand that was loose, putting it to the other (but over his excellency's head for fear of hurting him or his train) and then to my own head and body, to signify that I desired my liberty. It appeared that he understood me well enough, for he shook his head by way of disapprobation, and held his hand in a posture to show that I must be carried as a prisoner. However, he made other signs to let me understand that I should have meat and drink enough, and very good treatment. Whereupon I once more thought of attempting to break my bonds; but again, when I felt the smart of their arrows upon my face and hands, which were all in blisters, and many of the darts still sticking in them, and observing likewise that the number of my enemies increased, I gave tokens to let them know that they might do with me what they pleased. Upon this, the hurgo and his train withdrew, with much civility and cheerful countenances. Soon after I heard a general shout, with frequent repetitions of the words Peplom selan; and I felt great numbers of people on my left side relaxing the cords to such a degree, that I was able to turn upon my right, and to ease myself with making water; which I very plentifully did, to the great astonishment of the people; who, conjecturing by my motion what I was going to do, immediately opened to the right and left on that side, to avoid the torrent, which fell with such noise and violence from me. But before this, they had daubed my face and both my hands with a sort of ointment, very pleasant to the smell, which, in a few minutes, removed all the smart of their arrows. These circumstances, added to the refreshment I had received by their victuals and drink, which were very nourishing, disposed me to sleep. I slept about eight hours, as I was afterwards assured; and it was no wonder, for the physicians, by the emperor's order, had mingled a sleepy potion in the hogsheads of wine. + +It seems, that upon the first moment I was discovered sleeping on the ground, after my landing, the emperor had early notice of it by an express; and determined in council, that I should be tied in the manner I have related, (which was done in the night while I slept;) that plenty of meat and drink should be sent to me, and a machine prepared to carry me to the capital city. + +This resolution perhaps may appear very bold and dangerous, and I am confident would not be imitated by any prince in Europe on the like occasion. However, in my opinion, it was extremely prudent, as well as generous: for, supposing these people had endeavoured to kill me with their spears and arrows, while I was asleep, I should certainly have awaked with the first sense of smart, which might so far have roused my rage and strength, as to have enabled me to break the strings wherewith I was tied; after which, as they were not able to make resistance, so they could expect no mercy. + +These people are most excellent mathematicians, and arrived to a great perfection in mechanics, by the countenance and encouragement of the emperor, who is a renowned patron of learning. This prince has several machines fixed on wheels, for the carriage of trees and other great weights. He often builds his largest men of war, whereof some are nine feet long, in the woods where the timber grows, and has them carried on these engines three or four hundred yards to the sea. Five hundred carpenters and engineers were immediately set at work to prepare the greatest engine they had. It was a frame of wood raised three inches from the ground, about seven feet long, and four wide, moving upon twenty-two wheels. The shout I heard was upon the arrival of this engine, which, it seems, set out in four hours after my landing. It was brought parallel to me, as I lay. But the principal difficulty was to raise and place me in this vehicle. Eighty poles, each of one foot high, were erected for this purpose, and very strong cords, of the bigness of packthread, were fastened by hooks to many bandages, which the workmen had girt round my neck, my hands, my body, and my legs. Nine hundred of the strongest men were employed to draw up these cords, by many pulleys fastened on the poles; and thus, in less than three hours, I was raised and slung into the engine, and there tied fast. All this I was told; for, while the operation was performing, I lay in a profound sleep, by the force of that soporiferous medicine infused into my liquor. Fifteen hundred of the emperor's largest horses, each about four inches and a half high, were employed to draw me towards the metropolis, which, as I said, was half a mile distant. + +About four hours after we began our journey, I awaked by a very ridiculous accident; for the carriage being stopped a while, to adjust something that was out of order, two or three of the young natives had the curiosity to see how I looked when I was asleep; they climbed up into the engine, and advancing very softly to my face, one of them, an officer in the guards, put the sharp end of his half-pike a good way up into my left nostril, which tickled my nose like a straw, and made me sneeze violently; whereupon they stole off unperceived, and it was three weeks before I knew the cause of my waking so suddenly. We made a long march the remaining part of the day, and, rested at night with five hundred guards on each side of me, half with torches, and half with bows and arrows, ready to shoot me if I should offer to stir. The next morning at sun-rise we continued our march, and arrived within two hundred yards of the city gates about noon. The emperor, and all his court, came out to meet us; but his great officers would by no means suffer his majesty to endanger his person by mounting on my body. + +At the place where the carriage stopped there stood an ancient temple, esteemed to be the largest in the whole kingdom; which, having been polluted some years before by an unnatural murder, was, according to the zeal of those people, looked upon as profane, and therefore had been applied to common use, and all the ornaments and furniture carried away. In this edifice it was determined I should lodge. The great gate fronting to the north was about four feet high, and almost two feet wide, through which I could easily creep. On each side of the gate was a small window, not above six inches from the ground: into that on the left side, the king's smith conveyed fourscore and eleven chains, like those that hang to a lady's watch in Europe, and almost as large, which were locked to my left leg with six-and-thirty padlocks. Over against this temple, on the other side of the great highway, at twenty feet distance, there was a turret at least five feet high. Here the emperor ascended, with many principal lords of his court, to have an opportunity of viewing me, as I was told, for I could not see them. It was reckoned that above a hundred thousand inhabitants came out of the town upon the same errand; and, in spite of my guards, I believe there could not be fewer than ten thousand at several times, who mounted my body by the help of ladders. But a proclamation was soon issued, to forbid it upon pain of death. When the workmen found it was impossible for me to break loose, they cut all the strings that bound me; whereupon I rose up, with as melancholy a disposition as ever I had in my life. But the noise and astonishment of the people, at seeing me rise and walk, are not to be expressed. The chains that held my left leg were about two yards long, and gave me not only the liberty of walking backwards and forwards in a semicircle, but, being fixed within four inches of the gate, allowed me to creep in, and lie at my full length in the temple. + +CHAPTER II. + +[The emperor of Lilliput, attended by several of the nobility, comes to see the author in his confinement. The emperor's person and habit described. Learned men appointed to teach the author their language. He gains favour by his mild disposition. His pockets are searched, and his sword and pistols taken from him.] + +When I found myself on my feet, I looked about me, and must confess I never beheld a more entertaining prospect. The country around appeared like a continued garden, and the enclosed fields, which were generally forty feet square, resembled so many beds of flowers. These fields were intermingled with woods of half a stang,~^ and the tallest trees, as I could judge, appeared to be seven feet high. I viewed the town on my left hand, which looked like the painted scene of a city in a theatre. + +I had been for some hours extremely pressed by the necessities of nature; which was no wonder, it being almost two days since I had last disburdened myself. I was under great difficulties between urgency and shame. The best expedient I could think of, was to creep into my house, which I accordingly did; and shutting the gate after me, I went as far as the length of my chain would suffer, and discharged my body of that uneasy load. But this was the only time I was ever guilty of so uncleanly an action; for which I cannot but hope the candid reader will give some allowance, after he has maturely and impartially considered my case, and the distress I was in. From this time my constant practice was, as soon as I rose, to perform that business in open air, at the full extent of my chain; and due care was taken every morning before company came, that the offensive matter should be carried off in wheel-barrows, by two servants appointed for that purpose. I would not have dwelt so long upon a circumstance that, perhaps, at first sight, may appear not very momentous, if I had not thought it necessary to justify my character, in point of cleanliness, to the world; which, I am told, some of my maligners have been pleased, upon this and other occasions, to call in question. + +When this adventure was at an end, I came back out of my house, having occasion for fresh air. The emperor was already descended from the tower, and advancing on horseback towards me, which had like to have cost him dear; for the beast, though very well trained, yet wholly unused to such a sight, which appeared as if a mountain moved before him, reared up on its hinder feet: but that prince, who is an excellent horseman, kept his seat, till his attendants ran in, and held the bridle, while his majesty had time to dismount. When he alighted, he surveyed me round with great admiration; but kept beyond the length of my chain. He ordered his cooks and butlers, who were already prepared, to give me victuals and drink, which they pushed forward in a sort of vehicles upon wheels, till I could reach them. I took these vehicles and soon emptied them all; twenty of them were filled with meat, and ten with liquor; each of the former afforded me two or three good mouthfuls; and I emptied the liquor of ten vessels, which was contained in earthen vials, into one vehicle, drinking it off at a draught; and so I did with the rest. The empress, and young princes of the blood of both sexes, attended by many ladies, sat at some distance in their chairs; but upon the accident that happened to the emperor's horse, they alighted, and came near his person, which I am now going to describe. He is taller by almost the breadth of my nail, than any of his court; which alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders. His features are strong and masculine, with an Austrian lip and arched nose, his complexion olive, his countenance erect, his body and limbs well proportioned, all his motions graceful, and his deportment majestic. He was then past his prime, being twenty-eight years and three quarters old, of which he had reigned about seven in great felicity, and generally victorious. For the better convenience of beholding him, I lay on my side, so that my face was parallel to his, and he stood but three yards off: however, I have had him since many times in my hand, and therefore cannot be deceived in the description. His dress was very plain and simple, and the fashion of it between the Asiatic and the European; but he had on his head a light helmet of gold, adorned with jewels, and a plume on the crest. He held his sword drawn in his hand to defend himself, if I should happen to break loose; it was almost three inches long; the hilt and scabbard were gold enriched with diamonds. His voice was shrill, but very clear and articulate; and I could distinctly hear it when I stood up. The ladies and courtiers were all most magnificently clad; so that the spot they stood upon seemed to resemble a petticoat spread upon the ground, embroidered with figures of gold and silver. His imperial majesty spoke often to me, and I returned answers: but neither of us could understand a syllable. There were several of his priests and lawyers present (as I conjectured by their habits), who were commanded to address themselves to me; and I spoke to them in as many languages as I had the least smattering of, which were High and Low Dutch, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and Lingua Franca, but all to no purpose. After about two hours the court retired, and I was left with a strong guard, to prevent the impertinence, and probably the malice of the rabble, who were very impatient to crowd about me as near as they durst; and some of them had the impudence to shoot their arrows at me, as I sat on the ground by the door of my house, whereof one very narrowly missed my left eye. But the colonel ordered six of the ringleaders to be seized, and thought no punishment so proper as to deliver them bound into my hands; which some of his soldiers accordingly did, pushing them forward with the butt-ends of their pikes into my reach. I took them all in my right hand, put five of them into my coat-pocket; and as to the sixth, I made a countenance as if I would eat him alive. The poor man squalled terribly, and the colonel and his officers were in much pain, especially when they saw me take out my penknife: but I soon put them out of fear; for, looking mildly, and immediately cutting the strings he was bound with, I set him gently on the ground, and away he ran. I treated the rest in the same manner, taking them one by one out of my pocket; and I observed both the soldiers and people were highly delighted at this mark of my clemency, which was represented very much to my advantage at court. + +Towards night I got with some difficulty into my house, where I lay on the ground, and continued to do so about a fortnight; during which time, the emperor gave orders to have a bed prepared for me. Six hundred beds of the common measure were brought in carriages, and worked up in my house; a hundred and fifty of their beds, sewn together, made up the breadth and length; and these were four double: which, however, kept me but very indifferently from the hardness of the floor, that was of smooth stone. By the same computation, they provided me with sheets, blankets, and coverlets, tolerable enough for one who had been so long inured to hardships. + +As the news of my arrival spread through the kingdom, it brought prodigious numbers of rich, idle, and curious people to see me; so that the villages were almost emptied; and great neglect of tillage and household affairs must have ensued, if his imperial majesty had not provided, by several proclamations and orders of state, against this inconveniency. He directed that those who had already beheld me should return home, and not presume to come within fifty yards of my house, without license from the court; whereby the secretaries of state got considerable fees. + +In the mean time the emperor held frequent councils, to debate what course should be taken with me; and I was afterwards assured by a particular friend, a person of great quality, who was as much in the secret as any, that the court was under many difficulties concerning me. They apprehended my breaking loose; that my diet would be very expensive, and might cause a famine. Sometimes they determined to starve me; or at least to shoot me in the face and hands with poisoned arrows, which would soon despatch me; but again they considered, that the stench of so large a carcass might produce a plague in the metropolis, and probably spread through the whole kingdom. In the midst of these consultations, several officers of the army went to the door of the great council-chamber, and two of them being admitted, gave an account of my behaviour to the six criminals above-mentioned; which made so favourable an impression in the breast of his majesty and the whole board, in my behalf, that an imperial commission was issued out, obliging all the villages, nine hundred yards round the city, to deliver in every morning six beeves, forty sheep, and other victuals for my sustenance; together with a proportionable quantity of bread, and wine, and other liquors; for the due payment of which, his majesty gave assignments upon his treasury:- for this prince lives chiefly upon his own demesnes; seldom, except upon great occasions, raising any subsidies upon his subjects, who are bound to attend him in his wars at their own expense. An establishment was also made of six hundred persons to be my domestics, who had board-wages allowed for their maintenance, and tents built for them very conveniently on each side of my door. It was likewise ordered, that three hundred tailors should make me a suit of clothes, after the fashion of the country; that six of his majesty's greatest scholars should be employed to instruct me in their language; and lastly, that the emperor's horses, and those of the nobility and troops of guards, should be frequently exercised in my sight, to accustom themselves to me. All these orders were duly put in execution; and in about three weeks I made a great progress in learning their language; during which time the emperor frequently honoured me with his visits, and was pleased to assist my masters in teaching me. We began already to converse together in some sort; and the first words I learnt, were to express my desire "that he would please give me my liberty;" which I every day repeated on my knees. His answer, as I could comprehend it, was, "that this must be a work of time, not to be thought on without the advice of his council, and that first I must lumos kelmin pesso desmar lon emposo;" that is, swear a peace with him and his kingdom. However, that I should be used with all kindness. And he advised me to "acquire, by my patience and discreet behaviour, the good opinion of himself and his subjects." He desired "I would not take it ill, if he gave orders to certain proper officers to search me; for probably I might carry about me several weapons, which must needs be dangerous things, if they answered the bulk of so prodigious a person." I said, "His majesty should be satisfied; for I was ready to strip myself, and turn up my pockets before him." This I delivered part in words, and part in signs. He replied, "that, by the laws of the kingdom, I must be searched by two of his officers; that he knew this could not be done without my consent and assistance; and he had so good an opinion of my generosity and justice, as to trust their persons in my hands; that whatever they took from me, should be returned when I left the country, or paid for at the rate which I would set upon them." I took up the two officers in my hands, put them first into my coat-pockets, and then into every other pocket about me, except my two fobs, and another secret pocket, which I had no mind should be searched, wherein I had some little necessaries that were of no consequence to any but myself. In one of my fobs there was a silver watch, and in the other a small quantity of gold in a purse. These gentlemen, having pen, ink, and paper, about them, made an exact inventory of every thing they saw; and when they had done, desired I would set them down, that they might deliver it to the emperor. This inventory I afterwards translated into English, and is, word for word, as follows: + +"Imprimis: In the right coat-pocket of the great man-mountain" (for so I interpret the words quinbus flestrin,) "after the strictest search, we found only one great piece of coarse-cloth, large enough to be a foot-cloth for your majesty's chief room of state. In the left pocket we saw a huge silver chest, with a cover of the same metal, which we, the searchers, were not able to lift. We desired it should be opened, and one of us stepping into it, found himself up to the mid leg in a sort of dust, some part whereof flying up to our faces set us both a sneezing for several times together. In his right waistcoat-pocket we found a prodigious bundle of white thin substances, folded one over another, about the bigness of three men, tied with a strong cable, and marked with black figures; which we humbly conceive to be writings, every letter almost half as large as the palm of our hands. In the left there was a sort of engine, from the back of which were extended twenty long poles, resembling the pallisados before your majesty's court: wherewith we conjecture the man- mountain combs his head; for we did not always trouble him with questions, because we found it a great difficulty to make him understand us. In the large pocket, on the right side of his middle cover" (so I translate the word ranfulo, by which they meant my breeches,) "we saw a hollow pillar of iron, about the length of a man, fastened to a strong piece of timber larger than the pillar; and upon one side of the pillar, were huge pieces of iron sticking out, cut into strange figures, which we know not what to make of. In the left pocket, another engine of the same kind. In the smaller pocket on the right side, were several round flat pieces of white and red metal, of different bulk; some of the white, which seemed to be silver, were so large and heavy, that my comrade and I could hardly lift them. In the left pocket were two black pillars irregularly shaped: we could not, without difficulty, reach the top of them, as we stood at the bottom of his pocket. One of them was covered, and seemed all of a piece: but at the upper end of the other there appeared a white round substance, about twice the bigness of our heads. Within each of these was enclosed a prodigious plate of steel; which, by our orders, we obliged him to show us, because we apprehended they might be dangerous engines. He took them out of their cases, and told us, that in his own country his practice was to shave his beard with one of these, and cut his meat with the other. There were two pockets which we could not enter: these he called his fobs; they were two large slits cut into the top of his middle cover, but squeezed close by the pressure of his belly. Out of the right fob hung a great silver chain, with a wonderful kind of engine at the bottom. We directed him to draw out whatever was at the end of that chain; which appeared to be a globe, half silver, and half of some transparent metal; for, on the transparent side, we saw certain strange figures circularly drawn, and thought we could touch them, till we found our fingers stopped by the lucid substance. He put this engine into our ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water- mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did any thing without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said, it pointed out the time for every action of his life. From the left fob he took out a net almost large enough for a fisherman, but contrived to open and shut like a purse, and served him for the same use: we found therein several massy pieces of yellow metal, which, if they be real gold, must be of immense value. + +"Having thus, in obedience to your majesty's commands, diligently searched all his pockets, we observed a girdle about his waist made of the hide of some prodigious animal, from which, on the left side, hung a sword of the length of five men; and on the right, a bag or pouch divided into two cells, each cell capable of holding three of your majesty's subjects. In one of these cells were several globes, or balls, of a most ponderous metal, about the bigness of our heads, and requiring a strong hand to lift them: the other cell contained a heap of certain black grains, but of no great bulk or weight, for we could hold above fifty of them in the palms of our hands. + +"This is an exact inventory of what we found about the body of the man-mountain, who used us with great civility, and due respect to your majesty's commission. Signed and sealed on the fourth day of the eighty-ninth moon of your majesty's auspicious reign. + +CLEFRIN FRELOCK, MARSI FRELOCK." + +When this inventory was read over to the emperor, he directed me, although in very gentle terms, to deliver up the several particulars. He first called for my scimitar, which I took out, scabbard and all. In the mean time he ordered three thousand of his choicest troops (who then attended him) to surround me at a distance, with their bows and arrows just ready to discharge; but I did not observe it, for mine eyes were wholly fixed upon his majesty. He then desired me to draw my scimitar, which, although it had got some rust by the sea water, was, in most parts, exceeding bright. I did so, and immediately all the troops gave a shout between terror and surprise; for the sun shone clear, and the reflection dazzled their eyes, as I waved the scimitar to and fro in my hand. His majesty, who is a most magnanimous prince, was less daunted than I could expect: he ordered me to return it into the scabbard, and cast it on the ground as gently as I could, about six feet from the end of my chain. The next thing he demanded was one of the hollow iron pillars; by which he meant my pocket pistols. I drew it out, and at his desire, as well as I could, expressed to him the use of it; and charging it only with powder, which, by the closeness of my pouch, happened to escape wetting in the sea (an inconvenience against which all prudent mariners take special care to provide,) I first cautioned the emperor not to be afraid, and then I let it off in the air. The astonishment here was much greater than at the sight of my scimitar. Hundreds fell down as if they had been struck dead; and even the emperor, although he stood his ground, could not recover himself for some time. I delivered up both my pistols in the same manner as I had done my scimitar, and then my pouch of powder and bullets; begging him that the former might be kept from fire, for it would kindle with the smallest spark, and blow up his imperial palace into the air. I likewise delivered up my watch, which the emperor was very curious to see, and commanded two of his tallest yeomen of the guards to bear it on a pole upon their shoulders, as draymen in England do a barrel of ale. He was amazed at the continual noise it made, and the motion of the minute-hand, which he could easily discern; for their sight is much more acute than ours: he asked the opinions of his learned men about it, which were various and remote, as the reader may well imagine without my repeating; although indeed I could not very perfectly understand them. I then gave up my silver and copper money, my purse, with nine large pieces of gold, and some smaller ones; my knife and razor, my comb and silver snuff-box, my handkerchief and journal-book. My scimitar, pistols, and pouch, were conveyed in carriages to his majesty's stores; but the rest of my goods were returned me. + +I had as I before observed, one private pocket, which escaped their search, wherein there was a pair of spectacles (which I sometimes use for the weakness of mine eyes,) a pocket perspective, and some other little conveniences; which, being of no consequence to the emperor, I did not think myself bound in honour to discover, and I apprehended they might be lost or spoiled if I ventured them out of my possession. + +CHAPTER III. + +[The author diverts the emperor, and his nobility of both sexes, in a very uncommon manner. The diversions of the court of Lilliput described. The author has his liberty granted him upon certain conditions.] + +My gentleness and good behaviour had gained so far on the emperor and his court, and indeed upon the army and people in general, that I began to conceive hopes of getting my liberty in a short time. I took all possible methods to cultivate this favourable disposition. The natives came, by degrees, to be less apprehensive of any danger from me. I would sometimes lie down, and let five or six of them dance on my hand; and at last the boys and girls would venture to come and play at hide-and-seek in my hair. I had now made a good progress in understanding and speaking the language. The emperor had a mind one day to entertain me with several of the country shows, wherein they exceed all nations I have known, both for dexterity and magnificence. I was diverted with none so much as that of the rope-dancers, performed upon a slender white thread, extended about two feet, and twelve inches from the ground. Upon which I shall desire liberty, with the reader's patience, to enlarge a little. + +This diversion is only practised by those persons who are candidates for great employments, and high favour at court. They are trained in this art from their youth, and are not always of noble birth, or liberal education. When a great office is vacant, either by death or disgrace (which often happens,) five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his majesty and the court with a dance on the rope; and whoever jumps the highest, without falling, succeeds in the office. Very often the chief ministers themselves are commanded to show their skill, and to convince the emperor that they have not lost their faculty. Flimnap, the treasurer, is allowed to cut a caper on the straight rope, at least an inch higher than any other lord in the whole empire. I have seen him do the summerset several times together, upon a trencher fixed on a rope which is no thicker than a common packthread in England. My friend Reldresal, principal secretary for private affairs, is, in my opinion, if I am not partial, the second after the treasurer; the rest of the great officers are much upon a par. + +These diversions are often attended with fatal accidents, whereof great numbers are on record. I myself have seen two or three candidates break a limb. But the danger is much greater, when the ministers themselves are commanded to show their dexterity; for, by contending to excel themselves and their fellows, they strain so far that there is hardly one of them who has not received a fall, and some of them two or three. I was assured that, a year or two before my arrival, Flimnap would infallibly have broke his neck, if one of the king's cushions, that accidentally lay on the ground, had not weakened the force of his fall. + +There is likewise another diversion, which is only shown before the emperor and empress, and first minister, upon particular occasions. The emperor lays on the table three fine silken threads of six inches long; one is blue, the other red, and the third green. These threads are proposed as prizes for those persons whom the emperor has a mind to distinguish by a peculiar mark of his favour. The ceremony is performed in his majesty's great chamber of state, where the candidates are to undergo a trial of dexterity very different from the former, and such as I have not observed the least resemblance of in any other country of the new or old world. The emperor holds a stick in his hands, both ends parallel to the horizon, while the candidates advancing, one by one, sometimes leap over the stick, sometimes creep under it, backward and forward, several times, according as the stick is advanced or depressed. Sometimes the emperor holds one end of the stick, and his first minister the other; sometimes the minister has it entirely to himself. Whoever performs his part with most agility, and holds out the longest in leaping and creeping, is rewarded with the blue- coloured silk; the red is given to the next, and the green to the third, which they all wear girt twice round about the middle; and you see few great persons about this court who are not adorned with one of these girdles. + +The horses of the army, and those of the royal stables, having been daily led before me, were no longer shy, but would come up to my very feet without starting. The riders would leap them over my hand, as I held it on the ground; and one of the emperor's huntsmen, upon a large courser, took my foot, shoe and all; which was indeed a prodigious leap. I had the good fortune to divert the emperor one day after a very extraordinary manner. I desired he would order several sticks of two feet high, and the thickness of an ordinary cane, to be brought me; whereupon his majesty commanded the master of his woods to give directions accordingly; and the next morning six woodmen arrived with as many carriages, drawn by eight horses to each. I took nine of these sticks, and fixing them firmly in the ground in a quadrangular figure, two feet and a half square, I took four other sticks, and tied them parallel at each corner, about two feet from the ground; then I fastened my handkerchief to the nine sticks that stood erect; and extended it on all sides, till it was tight as the top of a drum; and the four parallel sticks, rising about five inches higher than the handkerchief, served as ledges on each side. When I had finished my work, I desired the emperor to let a troop of his best horses twenty-four in number, come and exercise upon this plain. His majesty approved of the proposal, and I took them up, one by one, in my hands, ready mounted and armed, with the proper officers to exercise them. As soon as they got into order they divided into two parties, performed mock skirmishes, discharged blunt arrows, drew their swords, fled and pursued, attacked and retired, and in short discovered the best military discipline I ever beheld. The parallel sticks secured them and their horses from falling over the stage; and the emperor was so much delighted, that he ordered this entertainment to be repeated several days, and once was pleased to be lifted up and give the word of command; and with great difficulty persuaded even the empress herself to let me hold her in her close chair within two yards of the stage, when she was able to take a full view of the whole performance. It was my good fortune, that no ill accident happened in these entertainments; only once a fiery horse, that belonged to one of the captains, pawing with his hoof, struck a hole in my handkerchief, and his foot slipping, he overthrew his rider and himself; but I immediately relieved them both, and covering the hole with one hand, I set down the troop with the other, in the same manner as I took them up. The horse that fell was strained in the left shoulder, but the rider got no hurt; and I repaired my handkerchief as well as I could: however, I would not trust to the strength of it any more, in such dangerous enterprises. + +About two or three days before I was set at liberty, as I was entertaining the court with this kind of feat, there arrived an express to inform his majesty, that some of his subjects, riding near the place where I was first taken up, had seen a great black substance lying on the around, very oddly shaped, extending its edges round, as wide as his majesty's bedchamber, and rising up in the middle as high as a man; that it was no living creature, as they at first apprehended, for it lay on the grass without motion; and some of them had walked round it several times; that, by mounting upon each other's shoulders, they had got to the top, which was flat and even, and, stamping upon it, they found that it was hollow within; that they humbly conceived it might be something belonging to the man-mountain; and if his majesty pleased, they would undertake to bring it with only five horses. I presently knew what they meant, and was glad at heart to receive this intelligence. It seems, upon my first reaching the shore after our shipwreck, I was in such confusion, that before I came to the place where I went to sleep, my hat, which I had fastened with a string to my head while I was rowing, and had stuck on all the time I was swimming, fell off after I came to land; the string, as I conjecture, breaking by some accident, which I never observed, but thought my hat had been lost at sea. I entreated his imperial majesty to give orders it might be brought to me as soon as possible, describing to him the use and the nature of it: and the next day the waggoners arrived with it, but not in a very good condition; they had bored two holes in the brim, within an inch and half of the edge, and fastened two hooks in the holes; these hooks were tied by a long cord to the harness, and thus my hat was dragged along for above half an English mile; but, the ground in that country being extremely smooth and level, it received less damage than I expected. + +Two days after this adventure, the emperor, having ordered that part of his army which quarters in and about his metropolis, to be in readiness, took a fancy of diverting himself in a very singular manner. He desired I would stand like a Colossus, with my legs as far asunder as I conveniently could. He then commanded his general (who was an old experienced leader, and a great patron of mine) to draw up the troops in close order, and march them under me; the foot by twenty-four abreast, and the horse by sixteen, with drums beating, colours flying, and pikes advanced. This body consisted of three thousand foot, and a thousand horse. His majesty gave orders, upon pain of death, that every soldier in his march should observe the strictest decency with regard to my person; which however could not prevent some of the younger officers from turning up their eyes as they passed under me: and, to confess the truth, my breeches were at that time in so ill a condition, that they afforded some opportunities for laughter and admiration. + +I had sent so many memorials and petitions for my liberty, that his majesty at length mentioned the matter, first in the cabinet, and then in a full council; where it was opposed by none, except Skyresh Bolgolam, who was pleased, without any provocation, to be my mortal enemy. But it was carried against him by the whole board, and confirmed by the emperor. That minister was galbet, or admiral of the realm, very much in his master's confidence, and a person well versed in affairs, but of a morose and sour complexion. However, he was at length persuaded to comply; but prevailed that the articles and conditions upon which I should be set free, and to which I must swear, should be drawn up by himself. These articles were brought to me by Skyresh Bolgolam in person attended by two under-secretaries, and several persons of distinction. After they were read, I was demanded to swear to the performance of them; first in the manner of my own country, and afterwards in the method prescribed by their laws; which was, to hold my right foot in my left hand, and to place the middle finger of my right hand on the crown of my head, and my thumb on the tip of my right ear. But because the reader may be curious to have some idea of the style and manner of expression peculiar to that people, as well as to know the article upon which I recovered my liberty, I have made a translation of the whole instrument, word for word, as near as I was able, which I here offer to the public. + +"Golbasto Momarem Evlame Gurdilo Shefin Mully Ully Gue, most mighty Emperor of Lilliput, delight and terror of the universe, whose dominions extend five thousand blustrugs (about twelve miles in circumference) to the extremities of the globe; monarch of all monarchs, taller than the sons of men; whose feet press down to the centre, and whose head strikes against the sun; at whose nod the princes of the earth shake their knees; pleasant as the spring, comfortable as the summer, fruitful as autumn, dreadful as winter: his most sublime majesty proposes to the man-mountain, lately arrived at our celestial dominions, the following articles, which, by a solemn oath, he shall be obliged to perform:- + +"1st, The man-mountain shall not depart from our dominions, without our license under our great seal. + +"2d, He shall not presume to come into our metropolis, without our express order; at which time, the inhabitants shall have two hours warning to keep within doors. + +"3d, The said man-mountain shall confine his walks to our principal high roads, and not offer to walk, or lie down, in a meadow or field of corn. + +"4th, As he walks the said roads, he shall take the utmost care not to trample upon the bodies of any of our loving subjects, their horses, or carriages, nor take any of our subjects into his hands without their own consent. + +"5th, If an express requires extraordinary despatch, the man- mountain shall be obliged to carry, in his pocket, the messenger and horse a six days journey, once in every moon, and return the said messenger back (if so required) safe to our imperial presence. + +"6th, He shall be our ally against our enemies in the island of Blefuscu, and do his utmost to destroy their fleet, which is now preparing to invade us. + +"7th, That the said man-mountain shall, at his times of leisure, be aiding and assisting to our workmen, in helping to raise certain great stones, towards covering the wall of the principal park, and other our royal buildings. + +"8th, That the said man-mountain shall, in two moons' time, deliver in an exact survey of the circumference of our dominions, by a computation of his own paces round the coast. + +"Lastly, That, upon his solemn oath to observe all the above articles, the said man-mountain shall have a daily allowance of meat and drink sufficient for the support of 1724 of our subjects, with free access to our royal person, and other marks of our favour. Given at our palace at Belfaborac, the twelfth day of the ninety-first moon of our reign." + +I swore and subscribed to these articles with great cheerfulness and content, although some of them were not so honourable as I could have wished; which proceeded wholly from the malice of Skyresh Bolgolam, the high-admiral: whereupon my chains were immediately unlocked, and I was at full liberty. The emperor himself, in person, did me the honour to be by at the whole ceremony. I made my acknowledgements by prostrating myself at his majesty's feet: but he commanded me to rise; and after many gracious expressions, which, to avoid the censure of vanity, I shall not repeat, he added, "that he hoped I should prove a useful servant, and well deserve all the favours he had already conferred upon me, or might do for the future." + +The reader may please to observe, that, in the last article of the recovery of my liberty, the emperor stipulates to allow me a quantity of meat and drink sufficient for the support of 1724 Lilliputians. Some time after, asking a friend at court how they came to fix on that determinate number, he told me that his majesty's mathematicians, having taken the height of my body by the help of a quadrant, and finding it to exceed theirs in the proportion of twelve to one, they concluded from the similarity of their bodies, that mine must contain at least 1724 of theirs, and consequently would require as much food as was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians. By which the reader may conceive an idea of the ingenuity of that people, as well as the prudent and exact economy of so great a prince. + +CHAPTER IV. + +[Mildendo, the metropolis of Lilliput, described, together with the emperor's palace. A conversation between the author and a principal secretary, concerning the affairs of that empire. The author's offers to serve the emperor in his wars.] + +The first request I made, after I had obtained my liberty, was, that I might have license to see Mildendo, the metropolis; which the emperor easily granted me, but with a special charge to do no hurt either to the inhabitants or their houses. The people had notice, by proclamation, of my design to visit the town. The wall which encompassed it is two feet and a half high, and at least eleven inches broad, so that a coach and horses may be driven very safely round it; and it is flanked with strong towers at ten feet distance. I stepped over the great western gate, and passed very gently, and sidling, through the two principal streets, only in my short waistcoat, for fear of damaging the roofs and eaves of the houses with the skirts of my coat. I walked with the utmost circumspection, to avoid treading on any stragglers who might remain in the streets, although the orders were very strict, that all people should keep in their houses, at their own peril. The garret windows and tops of houses were so crowded with spectators, that I thought in all my travels I had not seen a more populous place. The city is an exact square, each side of the wall being five hundred feet long. The two great streets, which run across and divide it into four quarters, are five feet wide. The lanes and alleys, which I could not enter, but only view them as I passed, are from twelve to eighteen inches. The town is capable of holding five hundred thousand souls: the houses are from three to five stories: the shops and markets well provided. + +The emperor's palace is in the centre of the city where the two great streets meet. It is enclosed by a wall of two feet high, and twenty feet distance from the buildings. I had his majesty's permission to step over this wall; and, the space being so wide between that and the palace, I could easily view it on every side. The outward court is a square of forty feet, and includes two other courts: in the inmost are the royal apartments, which I was very desirous to see, but found it extremely difficult; for the great gates, from one square into another, were but eighteen inches high, and seven inches wide. Now the buildings of the outer court were at least five feet high, and it was impossible for me to stride over them without infinite damage to the pile, though the walls were strongly built of hewn stone, and four inches thick. At the same time the emperor had a great desire that I should see the magnificence of his palace; but this I was not able to do till three days after, which I spent in cutting down with my knife some of the largest trees in the royal park, about a hundred yards distant from the city. Of these trees I made two stools, each about three feet high, and strong enough to bear my weight. The people having received notice a second time, I went again through the city to the palace with my two stools in my hands. When I came to the side of the outer court, I stood upon one stool, and took the other in my hand; this I lifted over the roof, and gently set it down on the space between the first and second court, which was eight feet wide. I then stept over the building very conveniently from one stool to the other, and drew up the first after me with a hooked stick. By this contrivance I got into the inmost court; and, lying down upon my side, I applied my face to the windows of the middle stories, which were left open on purpose, and discovered the most splendid apartments that can be imagined. There I saw the empress and the young princes, in their several lodgings, with their chief attendants about them. Her imperial majesty was pleased to smile very graciously upon me, and gave me out of the window her hand to kiss. + +But I shall not anticipate the reader with further descriptions of this kind, because I reserve them for a greater work, which is now almost ready for the press; containing a general description of this empire, from its first erection, through along series of princes; with a particular account of their wars and politics, laws, learning, and religion; their plants and animals; their peculiar manners and customs, with other matters very curious and useful; my chief design at present being only to relate such events and transactions as happened to the public or to myself during a residence of about nine months in that empire. + +One morning, about a fortnight after I had obtained my liberty, Reldresal, principal secretary (as they style him) for private affairs, came to my house attended only by one servant. He ordered his coach to wait at a distance, and desired I would give him an hours audience; which I readily consented to, on account of his quality and personal merits, as well as of the many good offices he had done me during my solicitations at court. I offered to lie down that he might the more conveniently reach my ear, but he chose rather to let me hold him in my hand during our conversation. He began with compliments on my liberty; said "he might pretend to some merit in it;" but, however, added, "that if it had not been for the present situation of things at court, perhaps I might not have obtained it so soon. For," said he, "as flourishing a condition as we may appear to be in to foreigners, we labour under two mighty evils: a violent faction at home, and the danger of an invasion, by a most potent enemy, from abroad. As to the first, you are to understand, that for about seventy moons past there have been two struggling parties in this empire, under the names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high and low heels of their shoes, by which they distinguish themselves. It is alleged, indeed, that the high heels are most agreeable to our ancient constitution; but, however this be, his majesty has determined to make use only of low heels in the administration of the government, and all offices in the gift of the crown, as you cannot but observe; and particularly that his majesty's imperial heels are lower at least by a drurr than any of his court (drurr is a measure about the fourteenth part of an inch). The animosities between these two parties run so high, that they will neither eat, nor drink, nor talk with each other. We compute the Tramecksan, or high heels, to exceed us in number; but the power is wholly on our side. We apprehend his imperial highness, the heir to the crown, to have some tendency towards the high heels; at least we can plainly discover that one of his heels is higher than the other, which gives him a hobble in his gait. Now, in the midst of these intestine disquiets, we are threatened with an invasion from the island of Blefuscu, which is the other great empire of the universe, almost as large and powerful as this of his majesty. For as to what we have heard you affirm, that there are other kingdoms and states in the world inhabited by human creatures as large as yourself, our philosophers are in much doubt, and would rather conjecture that you dropped from the moon, or one of the stars; because it is certain, that a hundred mortals of your bulk would in a short time destroy all the fruits and cattle of his majesty's dominions: besides, our histories of six thousand moons make no mention of any other regions than the two great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty's grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big- endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments. During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefusca did frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran). This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text; for the words are these: 'that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.' And which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion to be left to every man's conscience, or at least in the power of the chief magistrate to determine. Now, the Big-endian exiles have found so much credit in the emperor of Blefuscu's court, and so much private assistance and encouragement from their party here at home, that a bloody war has been carried on between the two empires for six-and-thirty moons, with various success; during which time we have lost forty capital ships, and a much a greater number of smaller vessels, together with thirty thousand of our best seamen and soldiers; and the damage received by the enemy is reckoned to be somewhat greater than ours. However, they have now equipped a numerous fleet, and are just preparing to make a descent upon us; and his imperial majesty, placing great confidence in your valour and strength, has commanded me to lay this account of his affairs before you." + +I desired the secretary to present my humble duty to the emperor; and to let him know, "that I thought it would not become me, who was a foreigner, to interfere with parties; but I was ready, with the hazard of my life, to defend his person and state against all invaders." + +CHAPTER V. + +[The author, by an extraordinary stratagem, prevents an invasion. A high title of honour is conferred upon him. Ambassadors arrive from the emperor of Blefuscu, and sue for peace. The empress's apartment on fire by an accident; the author instrumental in saving the rest of the palace.] + +The empire of Blefuscu is an island situated to the north-east of Lilliput, from which it is parted only by a channel of eight hundred yards wide. I had not yet seen it, and upon this notice of an intended invasion, I avoided appearing on that side of the coast, for fear of being discovered, by some of the enemy's ships, who had received no intelligence of me; all intercourse between the two empires having been strictly forbidden during the war, upon pain of death, and an embargo laid by our emperor upon all vessels whatsoever. I communicated to his majesty a project I had formed of seizing the enemy's whole fleet; which, as our scouts assured us, lay at anchor in the harbour, ready to sail with the first fair wind. I consulted the most experienced seamen upon the depth of the channel, which they had often plumbed; who told me, that in the middle, at high-water, it was seventy glumgluffs deep, which is about six feet of European measure; and the rest of it fifty glumgluffs at most. I walked towards the north-east coast, over against Blefuscu, where, lying down behind a hillock, I took out my small perspective glass, and viewed the enemy's fleet at anchor, consisting of about fifty men of war, and a great number of transports: I then came back to my house, and gave orders (for which I had a warrant) for a great quantity of the strongest cable and bars of iron. The cable was about as thick as packthread and the bars of the length and size of a knitting-needle. I trebled the cable to make it stronger, and for the same reason I twisted three of the iron bars together, bending the extremities into a hook. Having thus fixed fifty hooks to as many cables, I went back to the north-east coast, and putting off my coat, shoes, and stockings, walked into the sea, in my leathern jerkin, about half an hour before high water. I waded with what haste I could, and swam in the middle about thirty yards, till I felt ground. I arrived at the fleet in less than half an hour. The enemy was so frightened when they saw me, that they leaped out of their ships, and swam to shore, where there could not be fewer than thirty thousand souls. I then took my tackling, and, fastening a hook to the hole at the prow of each, I tied all the cords together at the end. While I was thus employed, the enemy discharged several thousand arrows, many of which stuck in my hands and face, and, beside the excessive smart, gave me much disturbance in my work. My greatest apprehension was for mine eyes, which I should have infallibly lost, if I had not suddenly thought of an expedient. I kept, among other little necessaries, a pair of spectacles in a private pocket, which, as I observed before, had escaped the emperor's searchers. These I took out and fastened as strongly as I could upon my nose, and thus armed, went on boldly with my work, in spite of the enemy's arrows, many of which struck against the glasses of my spectacles, but without any other effect, further than a little to discompose them. I had now fastened all the hooks, and, taking the knot in my hand, began to pull; but not a ship would stir, for they were all too fast held by their anchors, so that the boldest part of my enterprise remained. I therefore let go the cord, and leaving the looks fixed to the ships, I resolutely cut with my knife the cables that fastened the anchors, receiving about two hundred shots in my face and hands; then I took up the knotted end of the cables, to which my hooks were tied, and with great ease drew fifty of the enemy's largest men of war after me. + +The Blefuscudians, who had not the least imagination of what I intended, were at first confounded with astonishment. They had seen me cut the cables, and thought my design was only to let the ships run adrift or fall foul on each other: but when they perceived the whole fleet moving in order, and saw me pulling at the end, they set up such a scream of grief and despair as it is almost impossible to describe or conceive. When I had got out of danger, I stopped awhile to pick out the arrows that stuck in my hands and face; and rubbed on some of the same ointment that was given me at my first arrival, as I have formerly mentioned. I then took off my spectacles, and waiting about an hour, till the tide was a little fallen, I waded through the middle with my cargo, and arrived safe at the royal port of Lilliput. + +The emperor and his whole court stood on the shore, expecting the issue of this great adventure. They saw the ships move forward in a large half-moon, but could not discern me, who was up to my breast in water. When I advanced to the middle of the channel, they were yet more in pain, because I was under water to my neck. The emperor concluded me to be drowned, and that the enemy's fleet was approaching in a hostile manner: but he was soon eased of his fears; for the channel growing shallower every step I made, I came in a short time within hearing, and holding up the end of the cable, by which the fleet was fastened, I cried in a loud voice, "Long live the most puissant king of Lilliput!" This great prince received me at my landing with all possible encomiums, and created me a nardac upon the spot, which is the highest title of honour among them. + +His majesty desired I would take some other opportunity of bringing all the rest of his enemy's ships into his ports. And so unmeasureable is the ambition of princes, that he seemed to think of nothing less than reducing the whole empire of Blefuscu into a province, and governing it, by a viceroy; of destroying the Big- endian exiles, and compelling that people to break the smaller end of their eggs, by which he would remain the sole monarch of the whole world. But I endeavoured to divert him from this design, by many arguments drawn from the topics of policy as well as justice; and I plainly protested, "that I would never be an instrument of bringing a free and brave people into slavery." And, when the matter was debated in council, the wisest part of the ministry were of my opinion. + +This open bold declaration of mine was so opposite to the schemes and politics of his imperial majesty, that he could never forgive me. He mentioned it in a very artful manner at council, where I was told that some of the wisest appeared, at least by their silence, to be of my opinion; but others, who were my secret enemies, could not forbear some expressions which, by a side-wind, reflected on me. And from this time began an intrigue between his majesty and a junto of ministers, maliciously bent against me, which broke out in less than two months, and had like to have ended in my utter destruction. Of so little weight are the greatest services to princes, when put into the balance with a refusal to gratify their passions. + +About three weeks after this exploit, there arrived a solemn embassy from Blefuscu, with humble offers of a peace, which was soon concluded, upon conditions very advantageous to our emperor, wherewith I shall not trouble the reader. There were six ambassadors, with a train of about five hundred persons, and their entry was very magnificent, suitable to the grandeur of their master, and the importance of their business. When their treaty was finished, wherein I did them several good offices by the credit I now had, or at least appeared to have, at court, their excellencies, who were privately told how much I had been their friend, made me a visit in form. They began with many compliments upon my valour and generosity, invited me to that kingdom in the emperor their master's name, and desired me to show them some proofs of my prodigious strength, of which they had heard so many wonders; wherein I readily obliged them, but shall not trouble the reader with the particulars. + +When I had for some time entertained their excellencies, to their infinite satisfaction and surprise, I desired they would do me the honour to present my most humble respects to the emperor their master, the renown of whose virtues had so justly filled the whole world with admiration, and whose royal person I resolved to attend, before I returned to my own country. Accordingly, the next time I had the honour to see our emperor, I desired his general license to wait on the Blefuscudian monarch, which he was pleased to grant me, as I could perceive, in a very cold manner; but could not guess the reason, till I had a whisper from a certain person, "that Flimnap and Bolgolam had represented my intercourse with those ambassadors as a mark of disaffection;" from which I am sure my heart was wholly free. And this was the first time I began to conceive some imperfect idea of courts and ministers. + +It is to be observed, that these ambassadors spoke to me, by an interpreter, the languages of both empires differing as much from each other as any two in Europe, and each nation priding itself upon the antiquity, beauty, and energy of their own tongue, with an avowed contempt for that of their neighbour; yet our emperor, standing upon the advantage he had got by the seizure of their fleet, obliged them to deliver their credentials, and make their speech, in the Lilliputian tongue. And it must be confessed, that from the great intercourse of trade and commerce between both realms, from the continual reception of exiles which is mutual among them, and from the custom, in each empire, to send their young nobility and richer gentry to the other, in order to polish themselves by seeing the world, and understanding men and manners; there are few persons of distinction, or merchants, or seamen, who dwell in the maritime parts, but what can hold conversation in both tongues; as I found some weeks after, when I went to pay my respects to the emperor of Blefuscu, which, in the midst of great misfortunes, through the malice of my enemies, proved a very happy adventure to me, as I shall relate in its proper place. + +The reader may remember, that when I signed those articles upon which I recovered my liberty, there were some which I disliked, upon account of their being too servile; neither could anything but an extreme necessity have forced me to submit. But being now a nardac of the highest rank in that empire, such offices were looked upon as below my dignity, and the emperor (to do him justice), never once mentioned them to me. However, it was not long before I had an opportunity of doing his majesty, at least as I then thought, a most signal service. I was alarmed at midnight with the cries of many hundred people at my door; by which, being suddenly awaked, I was in some kind of terror. I heard the word Burglum repeated incessantly: several of the emperor's court, making their way through the crowd, entreated me to come immediately to the palace, where her imperial majesty's apartment was on fire, by the carelessness of a maid of honour, who fell asleep while she was reading a romance. I got up in an instant; and orders being given to clear the way before me, and it being likewise a moonshine night, I made a shift to get to the palace without trampling on any of the people. I found they had already applied ladders to the walls of the apartment, and were well provided with buckets, but the water was at some distance. These buckets were about the size of large thimbles, and the poor people supplied me with them as fast as they could: but the flame was so violent that they did little good. I might easily have stifled it with my coat, which I unfortunately left behind me for haste, and came away only in my leathern jerkin. The case seemed wholly desperate and deplorable; and this magnificent palace would have infallibly been burnt down to the ground, if, by a presence of mind unusual to me, I had not suddenly thought of an expedient. I had, the evening before, drunk plentifully of a most delicious wine called glimigrim, (the Blefuscudians call it flunec, but ours is esteemed the better sort,) which is very diuretic. By the luckiest chance in the world, I had not discharged myself of any part of it. The heat I had contracted by coming very near the flames, and by labouring to quench them, made the wine begin to operate by urine; which I voided in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished, and the rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting, preserved from destruction. + +It was now day-light, and I returned to my house without waiting to congratulate with the emperor: because, although I had done a very eminent piece of service, yet I could not tell how his majesty might resent the manner by which I had performed it: for, by the fundamental laws of the realm, it is capital in any person, of what quality soever, to make water within the precincts of the palace. But I was a little comforted by a message from his majesty, "that he would give orders to the grand justiciary for passing my pardon in form:" which, however, I could not obtain; and I was privately assured, "that the empress, conceiving the greatest abhorrence of what I had done, removed to the most distant side of the court, firmly resolved that those buildings should never be repaired for her use: and, in the presence of her chief confidents could not forbear vowing revenge." + +CHAPTER VI. + +[Of the inhabitants of Lilliput; their learning, laws, and customs; the manner of educating their children. The author's way of living in that country. His vindication of a great lady.] + +Although I intend to leave the description of this empire to a particular treatise, yet, in the mean time, I am content to gratify the curious reader with some general ideas. As the common size of the natives is somewhat under six inches high, so there is an exact proportion in all other animals, as well as plants and trees: for instance, the tallest horses and oxen are between four and five inches in height, the sheep an inch and half, more or less: their geese about the bigness of a sparrow, and so the several gradations downwards till you come to the smallest, which to my sight, were almost invisible; but nature has adapted the eyes of the Lilliputians to all objects proper for their view: they see with great exactness, but at no great distance. And, to show the sharpness of their sight towards objects that are near, I have been much pleased with observing a cook pulling a lark, which was not so large as a common fly; and a young girl threading an invisible needle with invisible silk. Their tallest trees are about seven feet high: I mean some of those in the great royal park, the tops whereof I could but just reach with my fist clenched. The other vegetables are in the same proportion; but this I leave to the reader's imagination. + +I shall say but little at present of their learning, which, for many ages, has flourished in all its branches among them: but their manner of writing is very peculiar, being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans, nor from the right to the left, like the Arabians, nor from up to down, like the Chinese, but aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other, like ladies in England. + +They bury their dead with their heads directly downward, because they hold an opinion, that in eleven thousand moons they are all to rise again; in which period the earth (which they conceive to be flat) will turn upside down, and by this means they shall, at their resurrection, be found ready standing on their feet. The learned among them confess the absurdity of this doctrine; but the practice still continues, in compliance to the vulgar. + +There are some laws and customs in this empire very peculiar; and if they were not so directly contrary to those of my own dear country, I should be tempted to say a little in their justification. It is only to be wished they were as well executed. The first I shall mention, relates to informers. All crimes against the state, are punished here with the utmost severity; but, if the person accused makes his innocence plainly to appear upon his trial, the accuser is immediately put to an ignominious death; and out of his goods or lands the innocent person is quadruply recompensed for the loss of his time, for the danger he underwent, for the hardship of his imprisonment, and for all the charges he has been at in making his defence; or, if that fund be deficient, it is largely supplied by the crown. The emperor also confers on him some public mark of his favour, and proclamation is made of his innocence through the whole city. + +They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage. I remember, when I was once interceding with the emperor for a criminal who had wronged his master of a great sum of money, which he had received by order and ran away with; and happening to tell his majesty, by way of extenuation, that it was only a breach of trust, the emperor thought it monstrous in me to offer as a defence the greatest aggravation of the crime; and truly I had little to say in return, farther than the common answer, that different nations had different customs; for, I confess, I was heartily ashamed.~^ + +Although we usually call reward and punishment the two hinges upon which all government turns, yet I could never observe this maxim to be put in practice by any nation except that of Lilliput. Whoever can there bring sufficient proof, that he has strictly observed the laws of his country for seventy-three moons, has a claim to certain privileges, according to his quality or condition of life, with a proportionable sum of money out of a fund appropriated for that use: he likewise acquires the title of snilpall, or legal, which is added to his name, but does not descend to his posterity. And these people thought it a prodigious defect of policy among us, when I told them that our laws were enforced only by penalties, without any mention of reward. It is upon this account that the image of Justice, in their courts of judicature, is formed with six eyes, two before, as many behind, and on each side one, to signify circumspection; with a bag of gold open in her right hand, and a sword sheathed in her left, to show she is more disposed to reward than to punish. + +In choosing persons for all employments, they have more regard to good morals than to great abilities; for, since government is necessary to mankind, they believe, that the common size of human understanding is fitted to some station or other; and that Providence never intended to make the management of public affairs a mystery to be comprehended only by a few persons of sublime genius, of which there seldom are three born in an age: but they suppose truth, justice, temperance, and the like, to be in every man's power; the practice of which virtues, assisted by experience and a good intention, would qualify any man for the service of his country, except where a course of study is required. But they thought the want of moral virtues was so far from being supplied by superior endowments of the mind, that employments could never be put into such dangerous hands as those of persons so qualified; and, at least, that the mistakes committed by ignorance, in a virtuous disposition, would never be of such fatal consequence to the public weal, as the practices of a man, whose inclinations led him to be corrupt, and who had great abilities to manage, to multiply, and defend his corruptions. + +In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man incapable of holding any public station; for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies of Providence, the Lilliputians think nothing can be more absurd than for a prince to employ such men as disown the authority under which he acts. + +In relating these and the following laws, I would only be understood to mean the original institutions, and not the most scandalous corruptions, into which these people are fallen by the degenerate nature of man. For, as to that infamous practice of acquiring great employments by dancing on the ropes, or badges of favour and distinction by leaping over sticks and creeping under them, the reader is to observe, that they were first introduced by the grandfather of the emperor now reigning, and grew to the present height by the gradual increase of party and faction. + +Ingratitude is among them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus; that whoever makes ill returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of mankind, from whom he has received no obligation, and therefore such a man is not fit to live. + +Their notions relating to the duties of parents and children differ extremely from ours. For, since the conjunction of male and female is founded upon the great law of nature, in order to propagate and continue the species, the Lilliputians will needs have it, that men and women are joined together, like other animals, by the motives of concupiscence; and that their tenderness towards their young proceeds from the like natural principle: for which reason they will never allow that a child is under any obligation to his father for begetting him, or to his mother for bringing him into the world; which, considering the miseries of human life, was neither a benefit in itself, nor intended so by his parents, whose thoughts, in their love encounters, were otherwise employed. Upon these, and the like reasonings, their opinion is, that parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the education of their own children; and therefore they have in every town public nurseries, where all parents, except cottagers and labourers, are obliged to send their infants of both sexes to be reared and educated, when they come to the age of twenty moons, at which time they are supposed to have some rudiments of docility. These schools are of several kinds, suited to different qualities, and both sexes. They have certain professors well skilled in preparing children for such a condition of life as befits the rank of their parents, and their own capacities, as well as inclinations. I shall first say something of the male nurseries, and then of the female. + +The nurseries for males of noble or eminent birth, are provided with grave and learned professors, and their several deputies. The clothes and food of the children are plain and simple. They are bred up in the principles of honour, justice, courage, modesty, clemency, religion, and love of their country; they are always employed in some business, except in the times of eating and sleeping, which are very short, and two hours for diversions consisting of bodily exercises. They are dressed by men till four years of age, and then are obliged to dress themselves, although their quality be ever so great; and the women attendant, who are aged proportionably to ours at fifty, perform only the most menial offices. They are never suffered to converse with servants, but go together in smaller or greater numbers to take their diversions, and always in the presence of a professor, or one of his deputies; whereby they avoid those early bad impressions of folly and vice, to which our children are subject. Their parents are suffered to see them only twice a year; the visit is to last but an hour; they are allowed to kiss the child at meeting and parting; but a professor, who always stands by on those occasions, will not suffer them to whisper, or use any fondling expressions, or bring any presents of toys, sweetmeats, and the like. + +The pension from each family for the education and entertainment of a child, upon failure of due payment, is levied by the emperor's officers. + +The nurseries for children of ordinary gentlemen, merchants, traders, and handicrafts, are managed proportionably after the same manner; only those designed for trades are put out apprentices at eleven years old, whereas those of persons of quality continue in their exercises till fifteen, which answers to twenty-one with us: but the confinement is gradually lessened for the last three years. + +In the female nurseries, the young girls of quality are educated much like the males, only they are dressed by orderly servants of their own sex; but always in the presence of a professor or deputy, till they come to dress themselves, which is at five years old. And if it be found that these nurses ever presume to entertain the girls with frightful or foolish stories, or the common follies practised by chambermaids among us, they are publicly whipped thrice about the city, imprisoned for a year, and banished for life to the most desolate part of the country. Thus the young ladies are as much ashamed of being cowards and fools as the men, and despise all personal ornaments, beyond decency and cleanliness: neither did I perceive any difference in their education made by their difference of sex, only that the exercises of the females were not altogether so robust; and that some rules were given them relating to domestic life, and a smaller compass of learning was enjoined them: for their maxim is, that among peoples of quality, a wife should be always a reasonable and agreeable companion, because she cannot always be young. When the girls are twelve years old, which among them is the marriageable age, their parents or guardians take them home, with great expressions of gratitude to the professors, and seldom without tears of the young lady and her companions. + +In the nurseries of females of the meaner sort, the children are instructed in all kinds of works proper for their sex, and their several degrees: those intended for apprentices are dismissed at seven years old, the rest are kept to eleven. + +The meaner families who have children at these nurseries, are obliged, besides their annual pension, which is as low as possible, to return to the steward of the nursery a small monthly share of their gettings, to be a portion for the child; and therefore all parents are limited in their expenses by the law. For the Lilliputians think nothing can be more unjust, than for people, in subservience to their own appetites, to bring children into the world, and leave the burthen of supporting them on the public. As to persons of quality, they give security to appropriate a certain sum for each child, suitable to their condition; and these funds are always managed with good husbandry and the most exact justice. + +The cottagers and labourers keep their children at home, their business being only to till and cultivate the earth, and therefore their education is of little consequence to the public: but the old and diseased among them, are supported by hospitals; for begging is a trade unknown in this empire. + +And here it may, perhaps, divert the curious reader, to give some account of my domestics, and my manner of living in this country, during a residence of nine months, and thirteen days. Having a head mechanically turned, and being likewise forced by necessity, I had made for myself a table and chair convenient enough, out of the largest trees in the royal park. Two hundred sempstresses were employed to make me shirts, and linen for my bed and table, all of the strongest and coarsest kind they could get; which, however, they were forced to quilt together in several folds, for the thickest was some degrees finer than lawn. Their linen is usually three inches wide, and three feet make a piece. The sempstresses took my measure as I lay on the ground, one standing at my neck, and another at my mid-leg, with a strong cord extended, that each held by the end, while a third measured the length of the cord with a rule of an inch long. Then they measured my right thumb, and desired no more; for by a mathematical computation, that twice round the thumb is once round the wrist, and so on to the neck and the waist, and by the help of my old shirt, which I displayed on the ground before them for a pattern, they fitted me exactly. Three hundred tailors were employed in the same manner to make me clothes; but they had another contrivance for taking my measure. I kneeled down, and they raised a ladder from the ground to my neck; upon this ladder one of them mounted, and let fall a plumb-line from my collar to the floor, which just answered the length of my coat: but my waist and arms I measured myself. When my clothes were finished, which was done in my house (for the largest of theirs would not have been able to hold them), they looked like the patch-work made by the ladies in England, only that mine were all of a colour. + +I had three hundred cooks to dress my victuals, in little convenient huts built about my house, where they and their families lived, and prepared me two dishes a-piece. I took up twenty waiters in my hand, and placed them on the table: a hundred more attended below on the ground, some with dishes of meat, and some with barrels of wine and other liquors slung on their shoulders; all which the waiters above drew up, as I wanted, in a very ingenious manner, by certain cords, as we draw the bucket up a well in Europe. A dish of their meat was a good mouthful, and a barrel of their liquor a reasonable draught. Their mutton yields to ours, but their beef is excellent. I have had a sirloin so large, that I have been forced to make three bites of it; but this is rare. My servants were astonished to see me eat it, bones and all, as in our country we do the leg of a lark. Their geese and turkeys I usually ate at a mouthful, and I confess they far exceed ours. Of their smaller fowl I could take up twenty or thirty at the end of my knife. + +One day his imperial majesty, being informed of my way of living, desired "that himself and his royal consort, with the young princes of the blood of both sexes, might have the happiness," as he was pleased to call it, "of dining with me." They came accordingly, and I placed them in chairs of state, upon my table, just over against me, with their guards about them. Flimnap, the lord high treasurer, attended there likewise with his white staff; and I observed he often looked on me with a sour countenance, which I would not seem to regard, but ate more than usual, in honour to my dear country, as well as to fill the court with admiration. I have some private reasons to believe, that this visit from his majesty gave Flimnap an opportunity of doing me ill offices to his master. That minister had always been my secret enemy, though he outwardly caressed me more than was usual to the moroseness of his nature. He represented to the emperor "the low condition of his treasury; that he was forced to take up money at a great discount; that exchequer bills would not circulate under nine per cent. below par; that I had cost his majesty above a million and a half of sprugs" (their greatest gold coin, about the bigness of a spangle) "and, upon the whole, that it would be advisable in the emperor to take the first fair occasion of dismissing me." + +I am here obliged to vindicate the reputation of an excellent lady, who was an innocent sufferer upon my account. The treasurer took a fancy to be jealous of his wife, from the malice of some evil tongues, who informed him that her grace had taken a violent affection for my person; and the court scandal ran for some time, that she once came privately to my lodging. This I solemnly declare to be a most infamous falsehood, without any grounds, further than that her grace was pleased to treat me with all innocent marks of freedom and friendship. I own she came often to my house, but always publicly, nor ever without three more in the coach, who were usually her sister and young daughter, and some particular acquaintance; but this was common to many other ladies of the court. And I still appeal to my servants round, whether they at any time saw a coach at my door, without knowing what persons were in it. On those occasions, when a servant had given me notice, my custom was to go immediately to the door, and, after paying my respects, to take up the coach and two horses very carefully in my hands (for, if there were six horses, the postillion always unharnessed four,) and place them on a table, where I had fixed a movable rim quite round, of five inches high, to prevent accidents. And I have often had four coaches and horses at once on my table, full of company, while I sat in my chair, leaning my face towards them; and when I was engaged with one set, the coachmen would gently drive the others round my table. I have passed many an afternoon very agreeably in these conversations. But I defy the treasurer, or his two informers (I will name them, and let them make the best of it) Clustril and Drunlo, to prove that any person ever came to me incognito, except the secretary Reldresal, who was sent by express command of his imperial majesty, as I have before related. I should not have dwelt so long upon this particular, if it had not been a point wherein the reputation of a great lady is so nearly concerned, to say nothing of my own; though I then had the honour to be a nardac, which the treasurer himself is not; for all the world knows, that he is only a glumglum, a title inferior by one degree, as that of a marquis is to a duke in England; yet I allow he preceded me in right of his post. These false informations, which I afterwards came to the knowledge of by an accident not proper to mention, made the treasurer show his lady for some time an ill countenance, and me a worse; and although he was at last undeceived and reconciled to her, yet I lost all credit with him, and found my interest decline very fast with the emperor himself, who was, indeed, too much governed by that favourite. + +CHAPTER VII. + +[The author, being informed of a design to accuse him of high- treason, makes his escape to Blefuscu. His reception there.] + +Before I proceed to give an account of my leaving this kingdom, it may be proper to inform the reader of a private intrigue which had been for two months forming against me. + +I had been hitherto, all my life, a stranger to courts, for which I was unqualified by the meanness of my condition. I had indeed heard and read enough of the dispositions of great princes and ministers, but never expected to have found such terrible effects of them, in so remote a country, governed, as I thought, by very different maxims from those in Europe. + +When I was just preparing to pay my attendance on the emperor of Blefuscu, a considerable person at court (to whom I had been very serviceable, at a time when he lay under the highest displeasure of his imperial majesty) came to my house very privately at night, in a close chair, and, without sending his name, desired admittance. The chairmen were dismissed; I put the chair, with his lordship in it, into my coat-pocket: and, giving orders to a trusty servant, to say I was indisposed and gone to sleep, I fastened the door of my house, placed the chair on the table, according to my usual custom, and sat down by it. After the common salutations were over, observing his lordship's countenance full of concern, and inquiring into the reason, he desired "I would hear him with patience, in a matter that highly concerned my honour and my life." His speech was to the following effect, for I took notes of it as soon as he left me:- + +"You are to know," said he, "that several committees of council have been lately called, in the most private manner, on your account; and it is but two days since his majesty came to a full resolution. + +"You are very sensible that Skyresh Bolgolam" (galbet, or high- admiral) "has been your mortal enemy, almost ever since your arrival. His original reasons I know not; but his hatred is increased since your great success against Blefuscu, by which his glory as admiral is much obscured. This lord, in conjunction with Flimnap the high-treasurer, whose enmity against you is notorious on account of his lady, Limtoc the general, Lalcon the chamberlain, and Balmuff the grand justiciary, have prepared articles of impeachment against you, for treason and other capital crimes." + +This preface made me so impatient, being conscious of my own merits and innocence, that I was going to interrupt him; when he entreated me to be silent, and thus proceeded:- + +"Out of gratitude for the favours you have done me, I procured information of the whole proceedings, and a copy of the articles; wherein I venture my head for your service. + +"'Articles of Impeachment against QUINBUS FLESTRIN, (the Man- Mountain.) + +ARTICLE I. + +"'Whereas, by a statute made in the reign of his imperial majesty Calin Deffar Plune, it is enacted, that, whoever shall make water within the precincts of the royal palace, shall be liable to the pains and penalties of high-treason; notwithstanding, the said Quinbus Flestrin, in open breach of the said law, under colour of extinguishing the fire kindled in the apartment of his majesty's most dear imperial consort, did maliciously, traitorously, and devilishly, by discharge of his urine, put out the said fire kindled in the said apartment, lying and being within the precincts of the said royal palace, against the statute in that case provided, etc. against the duty, etc. + +ARTICLE II. + +"'That the said Quinbus Flestrin, having brought the imperial fleet of Blefuscu into the royal port, and being afterwards commanded by his imperial majesty to seize all the other ships of the said empire of Blefuscu, and reduce that empire to a province, to be governed by a viceroy from hence, and to destroy and put to death, not only all the Big-endian exiles, but likewise all the people of that empire who would not immediately forsake the Big-endian heresy, he, the said Flestrin, like a false traitor against his most auspicious, serene, imperial majesty, did petition to be excused from the said service, upon pretence of unwillingness to force the consciences, or destroy the liberties and lives of an innocent people. + +ARTICLE III. + +"'That, whereas certain ambassadors arrived from the Court of Blefuscu, to sue for peace in his majesty's court, he, the said Flestrin, did, like a false traitor, aid, abet, comfort, and divert, the said ambassadors, although he knew them to be servants to a prince who was lately an open enemy to his imperial majesty, and in an open war against his said majesty. + +ARTICLE IV. + +"'That the said Quinbus Flestrin, contrary to the duty of a faithful subject, is now preparing to make a voyage to the court and empire of Blefuscu, for which he has received only verbal license from his imperial majesty; and, under colour of the said license, does falsely and traitorously intend to take the said voyage, and thereby to aid, comfort, and abet the emperor of Blefuscu, so lately an enemy, and in open war with his imperial majesty aforesaid.' + +"There are some other articles; but these are the most important, of which I have read you an abstract. + +"In the several debates upon this impeachment, it must be confessed that his majesty gave many marks of his great lenity; often urging the services you had done him, and endeavouring to extenuate your crimes. The treasurer and admiral insisted that you should be put to the most painful and ignominious death, by setting fire to your house at night, and the general was to attend with twenty thousand men, armed with poisoned arrows, to shoot you on the face and hands. Some of your servants were to have private orders to strew a poisonous juice on your shirts and sheets, which would soon make you tear your own flesh, and die in the utmost torture. The general came into the same opinion; so that for a long time there was a majority against you; but his majesty resolving, if possible, to spare your life, at last brought off the chamberlain. + +"Upon this incident, Reldresal, principal secretary for private affairs, who always approved himself your true friend, was commanded by the emperor to deliver his opinion, which he accordingly did; and therein justified the good thoughts you have of him. He allowed your crimes to be great, but that still there was room for mercy, the most commendable virtue in a prince, and for which his majesty was so justly celebrated. He said, the friendship between you and him was so well known to the world, that perhaps the most honourable board might think him partial; however, in obedience to the command he had received, he would freely offer his sentiments. That if his majesty, in consideration of your services, and pursuant to his own merciful disposition, would please to spare your life, and only give orders to put out both your eyes, he humbly conceived, that by this expedient justice might in some measure be satisfied, and all the world would applaud the lenity of the emperor, as well as the fair and generous proceedings of those who have the honour to be his counsellors. That the loss of your eyes would be no impediment to your bodily strength, by which you might still be useful to his majesty; that blindness is an addition to courage, by concealing dangers from us; that the fear you had for your eyes, was the greatest difficulty in bringing over the enemy's fleet, and it would be sufficient for you to see by the eyes of the ministers, since the greatest princes do no more. + +"This proposal was received with the utmost disapprobation by the whole board. Bolgolam, the admiral, could not preserve his temper, but, rising up in fury, said, he wondered how the secretary durst presume to give his opinion for preserving the life of a traitor; that the services you had performed were, by all true reasons of state, the great aggravation of your crimes; that you, who were able to extinguish the fire by discharge of urine in her majesty's apartment (which he mentioned with horror), might, at another time, raise an inundation by the same means, to drown the whole palace; and the same strength which enabled you to bring over the enemy's fleet, might serve, upon the first discontent, to carry it back; that he had good reasons to think you were a Big-endian in your heart; and, as treason begins in the heart, before it appears in overt-acts, so he accused you as a traitor on that account, and therefore insisted you should be put to death. + +"The treasurer was of the same opinion: he showed to what straits his majesty's revenue was reduced, by the charge of maintaining you, which would soon grow insupportable; that the secretary's expedient of putting out your eyes, was so far from being a remedy against this evil, that it would probably increase it, as is manifest from the common practice of blinding some kind of fowls, after which they fed the faster, and grew sooner fat; that his sacred majesty and the council, who are your judges, were, in their own consciences, fully convinced of your guilt, which was a sufficient argument to condemn you to death, without the formal proofs required by the strict letter of the law. + +"But his imperial majesty, fully determined against capital punishment, was graciously pleased to say, that since the council thought the loss of your eyes too easy a censure, some other way may be inflicted hereafter. And your friend the secretary, humbly desiring to be heard again, in answer to what the treasurer had objected, concerning the great charge his majesty was at in maintaining you, said, that his excellency, who had the sole disposal of the emperor's revenue, might easily provide against that evil, by gradually lessening your establishment; by which, for want of sufficient for you would grow weak and faint, and lose your appetite, and consequently, decay, and consume in a few months; neither would the stench of your carcass be then so dangerous, when it should become more than half diminished; and immediately upon your death five or six thousand of his majesty's subjects might, in two or three days, cut your flesh from your bones, take it away by cart-loads, and bury it in distant parts, to prevent infection, leaving the skeleton as a monument of admiration to posterity. + +"Thus, by the great friendship of the secretary, the whole affair was compromised. It was strictly enjoined, that the project of starving you by degrees should be kept a secret; but the sentence of putting out your eyes was entered on the books; none dissenting, except Bolgolam the admiral, who, being a creature of the empress, was perpetually instigated by her majesty to insist upon your death, she having borne perpetual malice against you, on account of that infamous and illegal method you took to extinguish the fire in her apartment. + +"In three days your friend the secretary will be directed to come to your house, and read before you the articles of impeachment; and then to signify the great lenity and favour of his majesty and council, whereby you are only condemned to the loss of your eyes, which his majesty does not question you will gratefully and humbly submit to; and twenty of his majesty's surgeons will attend, in order to see the operation well performed, by discharging very sharp-pointed arrows into the balls of your eyes, as you lie on the ground. + +"I leave to your prudence what measures you will take; and to avoid suspicion, I must immediately return in as private a manner as I came." + +His lordship did so; and I remained alone, under many doubts and perplexities of mind. + +It was a custom introduced by this prince and his ministry (very different, as I have been assured, from the practice of former times,) that after the court had decreed any cruel execution, either to gratify the monarch's resentment, or the malice of a favourite, the emperor always made a speech to his whole council, expressing his great lenity and tenderness, as qualities known and confessed by all the world. This speech was immediately published throughout the kingdom; nor did any thing terrify the people so much as those encomiums on his majesty's mercy; because it was observed, that the more these praises were enlarged and insisted on, the more inhuman was the punishment, and the sufferer more innocent. Yet, as to myself, I must confess, having never been designed for a courtier, either by my birth or education, I was so ill a judge of things, that I could not discover the lenity and favour of this sentence, but conceived it (perhaps erroneously) rather to be rigorous than gentle. I sometimes thought of standing my trial, for, although I could not deny the facts alleged in the several articles, yet I hoped they would admit of some extenuation. But having in my life perused many state-trials, which I ever observed to terminate as the judges thought fit to direct, I durst not rely on so dangerous a decision, in so critical a juncture, and against such powerful enemies. Once I was strongly bent upon resistance, for, while I had liberty the whole strength of that empire could hardly subdue me, and I might easily with stones pelt the metropolis to pieces; but I soon rejected that project with horror, by remembering the oath I had made to the emperor, the favours I received from him, and the high title of nardac he conferred upon me. Neither had I so soon learned the gratitude of courtiers, to persuade myself, that his majesty's present seventies acquitted me of all past obligations. + +At last, I fixed upon a resolution, for which it is probable I may incur some censure, and not unjustly; for I confess I owe the preserving of mine eyes, and consequently my liberty, to my own great rashness and want of experience; because, if I had then known the nature of princes and ministers, which I have since observed in many other courts, and their methods of treating criminals less obnoxious than myself, I should, with great alacrity and readiness, have submitted to so easy a punishment. But hurried on by the precipitancy of youth, and having his imperial majesty's license to pay my attendance upon the emperor of Blefuscu, I took this opportunity, before the three days were elapsed, to send a letter to my friend the secretary, signifying my resolution of setting out that morning for Blefuscu, pursuant to the leave I had got; and, without waiting for an answer, I went to that side of the island where our fleet lay. I seized a large man of war, tied a cable to the prow, and, lifting up the anchors, I stripped myself, put my clothes (together with my coverlet, which I carried under my arm) into the vessel, and, drawing it after me, between wading and swimming arrived at the royal port of Blefuscu, where the people had long expected me: they lent me two guides to direct me to the capital city, which is of the same name. I held them in my hands, till I came within two hundred yards of the gate, and desired them "to signify my arrival to one of the secretaries, and let him know, I there waited his majesty's command." I had an answer in about an hour, "that his majesty, attended by the royal family, and great officers of the court, was coming out to receive me." I advanced a hundred yards. The emperor and his train alighted from their horses, the empress and ladies from their coaches, and I did not perceive they were in any fright or concern. I lay on the ground to kiss his majesty's and the empress's hands. I told his majesty, "that I was come according to my promise, and with the license of the emperor my master, to have the honour of seeing so mighty a monarch, and to offer him any service in my power, consistent with my duty to my own prince;" not mentioning a word of my disgrace, because I had hitherto no regular information of it, and might suppose myself wholly ignorant of any such design; neither could I reasonably conceive that the emperor would discover the secret, while I was out of his power; wherein, however, it soon appeared I was deceived. + +I shall not trouble the reader with the particular account of my reception at this court, which was suitable to the generosity of so great a prince; nor of the difficulties I was in for want of a house and bed, being forced to lie on the ground, wrapped up in my coverlet. + +CHAPTER VIII. + +[The author, by a lucky accident, finds means to leave Blefuscu; and, after some difficulties, returns safe to his native country.] + +Three days after my arrival, walking out of curiosity to the north- east coast of the island, I observed, about half a league off in the sea, somewhat that looked like a boat overturned. I pulled off my shoes and stockings, and, wailing two or three hundred yards, I found the object to approach nearer by force of the tide; and then plainly saw it to be a real boat, which I supposed might by some tempest have been driven from a ship. Whereupon, I returned immediately towards the city, and desired his imperial majesty to lend me twenty of the tallest vessels he had left, after the loss of his fleet, and three thousand seamen, under the command of his vice-admiral. This fleet sailed round, while I went back the shortest way to the coast, where I first discovered the boat. I found the tide had driven it still nearer. The seamen were all provided with cordage, which I had beforehand twisted to a sufficient strength. When the ships came up, I stripped myself, and waded till I came within a hundred yards off the boat, after which I was forced to swim till I got up to it. The seamen threw me the end of the cord, which I fastened to a hole in the fore-part of the boat, and the other end to a man of war; but I found all my labour to little purpose; for, being out of my depth, I was not able to work. In this necessity I was forced to swim behind, and push the boat forward, as often as I could, with one of my hands; and the tide favouring me, I advanced so far that I could just hold up my chin and feel the ground. I rested two or three minutes, and then gave the boat another shove, and so on, till the sea was no higher than my arm-pits; and now, the most laborious part being over, I took out my other cables, which were stowed in one of the ships, and fastened them first to the boat, and then to nine of the vessels which attended me; the wind being favourable, the seamen towed, and I shoved, until we arrived within forty yards of the shore; and, waiting till the tide was out, I got dry to the boat, and by the assistance of two thousand men, with ropes and engines, I made a shift to turn it on its bottom, and found it was but little damaged. + +I shall not trouble the reader with the difficulties I was under, by the help of certain paddles, which cost me ten days making, to get my boat to the royal port of Blefuscu, where a mighty concourse of people appeared upon my arrival, full of wonder at the sight of so prodigious a vessel. I told the emperor "that my good fortune had thrown this boat in my way, to carry me to some place whence I might return into my native country; and begged his majesty's orders for getting materials to fit it up, together with his license to depart;" which, after some kind expostulations, he was pleased to grant. + +I did very much wonder, in all this time, not to have heard of any express relating to me from our emperor to the court of Blefuscu. But I was afterward given privately to understand, that his imperial majesty, never imagining I had the least notice of his designs, believed I was only gone to Blefuscu in performance of my promise, according to the license he had given me, which was well known at our court, and would return in a few days, when the ceremony was ended. But he was at last in pain at my long absence; and after consulting with the treasurer and the rest of that cabal, a person of quality was dispatched with the copy of the articles against me. This envoy had instructions to represent to the monarch of Blefuscu, "the great lenity of his master, who was content to punish me no farther than with the loss of mine eyes; that I had fled from justice; and if I did not return in two hours, I should be deprived of my title of nardac, and declared a traitor." The envoy further added, "that in order to maintain the peace and amity between both empires, his master expected that his brother of Blefuscu would give orders to have me sent back to Lilliput, bound hand and foot, to be punished as a traitor." + +The emperor of Blefuscu, having taken three days to consult, returned an answer consisting of many civilities and excuses. He said, "that as for sending me bound, his brother knew it was impossible; that, although I had deprived him of his fleet, yet he owed great obligations to me for many good offices I had done him in making the peace. That, however, both their majesties would soon be made easy; for I had found a prodigious vessel on the shore, able to carry me on the sea, which he had given orders to fit up, with my own assistance and direction; and he hoped, in a few weeks, both empires would be freed from so insupportable an encumbrance." + +With this answer the envoy returned to Lilliput; and the monarch of Blefuscu related to me all that had passed; offering me at the same time (but under the strictest confidence) his gracious protection, if I would continue in his service; wherein, although I believed him sincere, yet I resolved never more to put any confidence in princes or ministers, where I could possibly avoid it; and therefore, with all due acknowledgments for his favourable intentions, I humbly begged to be excused. I told him, "that since fortune, whether good or evil, had thrown a vessel in my way, I was resolved to venture myself on the ocean, rather than be an occasion of difference between two such mighty monarchs." Neither did I find the emperor at all displeased; and I discovered, by a certain accident, that he was very glad of my resolution, and so were most of his ministers. + +These considerations moved me to hasten my departure somewhat sooner than I intended; to which the court, impatient to have me gone, very readily contributed. Five hundred workmen were employed to make two sails to my boat, according to my directions, by quilting thirteen folds of their strongest linen together. I was at the pains of making ropes and cables, by twisting ten, twenty, or thirty of the thickest and strongest of theirs. A great stone that I happened to find, after a long search, by the sea-shore, served me for an anchor. I had the tallow of three hundred cows, for greasing my boat, and other uses. I was at incredible pains in cutting down some of the largest timber-trees, for oars and masts, wherein I was, however, much assisted by his majesty's ship- carpenters, who helped me in smoothing them, after I had done the rough work. + +In about a month, when all was prepared, I sent to receive his majesty's commands, and to take my leave. The emperor and royal family came out of the palace; I lay down on my face to kiss his hand, which he very graciously gave me: so did the empress and young princes of the blood. His majesty presented me with fifty purses of two hundred sprugs a-piece, together with his picture at full length, which I put immediately into one of my gloves, to keep it from being hurt. The ceremonies at my departure were too many to trouble the reader with at this time. + +I stored the boat with the carcases of a hundred oxen, and three hundred sheep, with bread and drink proportionable, and as much meat ready dressed as four hundred cooks could provide. I took with me six cows and two bulls alive, with as many ewes and rams, intending to carry them into my own country, and propagate the breed. And to feed them on board, I had a good bundle of hay, and a bag of corn. I would gladly have taken a dozen of the natives, but this was a thing the emperor would by no means permit; and, besides a diligent search into my pockets, his majesty engaged my honour "not to carry away any of his subjects, although with their own consent and desire." + +Having thus prepared all things as well as I was able, I set sail on the twenty-fourth day of September 1701, at six in the morning; and when I had gone about four-leagues to the northward, the wind being at south-east, at six in the evening I descried a small island, about half a league to the north-west. I advanced forward, and cast anchor on the lee-side of the island, which seemed to be uninhabited. I then took some refreshment, and went to my rest. I slept well, and as I conjectured at least six hours, for I found the day broke in two hours after I awaked. It was a clear night. I ate my breakfast before the sun was up; and heaving anchor, the wind being favourable, I steered the same course that I had done the day before, wherein I was directed by my pocket compass. My intention was to reach, if possible, one of those islands. which I had reason to believe lay to the north-east of Van Diemen's Land. I discovered nothing all that day; but upon the next, about three in the afternoon, when I had by my computation made twenty-four leagues from Blefuscu, I descried a sail steering to the south- east; my course was due east. I hailed her, but could get no answer; yet I found I gained upon her, for the wind slackened. I made all the sail I could, and in half an hour she spied me, then hung out her ancient, and discharged a gun. It is not easy to express the joy I was in, upon the unexpected hope of once more seeing my beloved country, and the dear pledges I left in it. The ship slackened her sails, and I came up with her between five and six in the evening, September 26th; but my heart leaped within me to see her English colours. I put my cows and sheep into my coat- pockets, and got on board with all my little cargo of provisions. The vessel was an English merchantman, returning from Japan by the North and South seas; the captain, Mr. John Biddel, of Deptford, a very civil man, and an excellent sailor. + +We were now in the latitude of 30 degrees south; there were about fifty men in the ship; and here I met an old comrade of mine, one Peter Williams, who gave me a good character to the captain. This gentleman treated me with kindness, and desired I would let him know what place I came from last, and whither I was bound; which I did in a few words, but he thought I was raving, and that the dangers I underwent had disturbed my head; whereupon I took my black cattle and sheep out of my pocket, which, after great astonishment, clearly convinced him of my veracity. I then showed him the gold given me by the emperor of Blefuscu, together with his majesty's picture at full length, and some other rarities of that country. I gave him two purses of two hundreds sprugs each, and promised, when we arrived in England, to make him a present of a cow and a sheep big with young. + +I shall not trouble the reader with a particular account of this voyage, which was very prosperous for the most part. We arrived in the Downs on the 13th of April, 1702. I had only one misfortune, that the rats on board carried away one of my sheep; I found her bones in a hole, picked clean from the flesh. The rest of my cattle I got safe ashore, and set them a-grazing in a bowling-green at Greenwich, where the fineness of the grass made them feed very heartily, though I had always feared the contrary: neither could I possibly have preserved them in so long a voyage, if the captain had not allowed me some of his best biscuit, which, rubbed to powder, and mingled with water, was their constant food. The short time I continued in England, I made a considerable profit by showing my cattle to many persons of quality and others: and before I began my second voyage, I sold them for six hundred pounds. Since my last return I find the breed is considerably increased, especially the sheep, which I hope will prove much to the advantage of the woollen manufacture, by the fineness of the fleeces. + +I stayed but two months with my wife and family, for my insatiable desire of seeing foreign countries, would suffer me to continue no longer. I left fifteen hundred pounds with my wife, and fixed her in a good house at Redriff. My remaining stock I carried with me, part in money and part in goods, in hopes to improve my fortunes. My eldest uncle John had left me an estate in land, near Epping, of about thirty pounds a-year; and I had a long lease of the Black Bull in Fetter-Lane, which yielded me as much more; so that I was not in any danger of leaving my family upon the parish. My son Johnny, named so after his uncle, was at the grammar-school, and a towardly child. My daughter Betty (who is now well married, and has children) was then at her needle-work. I took leave of my wife, and boy and girl, with tears on both sides, and went on board the Adventure, a merchant ship of three hundred tons, bound for Surat, captain John Nicholas, of Liverpool, commander. But my account of this voyage must be referred to the Second Part of my Travels. + +PART II. A VOYAGE TO BROBDINGNAG. + +CHAPTER I. + +[A great storm described; the long boat sent to fetch water; the author goes with it to discover the country. He is left on shore, is seized by one of the natives, and carried to a farmer's house. His reception, with several accidents that happened there. A description of the inhabitants.] + +Having been condemned, by nature and fortune, to active and restless life, in two months after my return, I again left my native country, and took shipping in the Downs, on the 20th day of June, 1702, in the Adventure, Captain John Nicholas, a Cornish man, commander, bound for Surat. We had a very prosperous gale, till we arrived at the Cape of Good Hope, where we landed for fresh water; but discovering a leak, we unshipped our goods and wintered there; for the captain falling sick of an ague, we could not leave the Cape till the end of March. We then set sail, and had a good voyage till we passed the Straits of Madagascar; but having got northward of that island, and to about five degrees south latitude, the winds, which in those seas are observed to blow a constant equal gale between the north and west, from the beginning of December to the beginning of May, on the 19th of April began to blow with much greater violence, and more westerly than usual, continuing so for twenty days together: during which time, we were driven a little to the east of the Molucca Islands, and about three degrees northward of the line, as our captain found by an observation he took the 2nd of May, at which time the wind ceased, and it was a perfect calm, whereat I was not a little rejoiced. But he, being a man well experienced in the navigation of those seas, bid us all prepare against a storm, which accordingly happened the day following: for the southern wind, called the southern monsoon, began to set in. + +Finding it was likely to overblow, we took in our sprit-sail, and stood by to hand the fore-sail; but making foul weather, we looked the guns were all fast, and handed the mizen. The ship lay very broad off, so we thought it better spooning before the sea, than trying or hulling. We reefed the fore-sail and set him, and hauled aft the fore-sheet; the helm was hard a-weather. The ship wore bravely. We belayed the fore down-haul; but the sail was split, and we hauled down the yard, and got the sail into the ship, and unbound all the things clear of it. It was a very fierce storm; the sea broke strange and dangerous. We hauled off upon the laniard of the whip-staff, and helped the man at the helm. We would not get down our topmast, but let all stand, because she scudded before the sea very well, and we knew that the top-mast being aloft, the ship was the wholesomer, and made better way through the sea, seeing we had sea-room. When the storm was over, we set fore-sail and main-sail, and brought the ship to. Then we set the mizen, main-top-sail, and the fore-top-sail. Our course was east-north-east, the wind was at south-west. We got the starboard tacks aboard, we cast off our weather-braces and lifts; we set in the lee-braces, and hauled forward by the weather- bowlings, and hauled them tight, and belayed them, and hauled over the mizen tack to windward, and kept her full and by as near as she would lie. + +During this storm, which was followed by a strong wind west-south- west, we were carried, by my computation, about five hundred leagues to the east, so that the oldest sailor on board could not tell in what part of the world we were. Our provisions held out well, our ship was staunch, and our crew all in good health; but we lay in the utmost distress for water. We thought it best to hold on the same course, rather than turn more northerly, which might have brought us to the north-west part of Great Tartary, and into the Frozen Sea. + +On the 16th day of June, 1703, a boy on the top-mast discovered land. On the 17th, we came in full view of a great island, or continent (for we knew not whether;) on the south side whereof was a small neck of land jutting out into the sea, and a creek too shallow to hold a ship of above one hundred tons. We cast anchor within a league of this creek, and our captain sent a dozen of his men well armed in the long-boat, with vessels for water, if any could be found. I desired his leave to go with them, that I might see the country, and make what discoveries I could. When we came to land we saw no river or spring, nor any sign of inhabitants. Our men therefore wandered on the shore to find out some fresh water near the sea, and I walked alone about a mile on the other side, where I observed the country all barren and rocky. I now began to be weary, and seeing nothing to entertain my curiosity, I returned gently down towards the creek; and the sea being full in my view, I saw our men already got into the boat, and rowing for life to the ship. I was going to holla after them, although it had been to little purpose, when I observed a huge creature walking after them in the sea, as fast as he could: he waded not much deeper than his knees, and took prodigious strides: but our men had the start of him half a league, and, the sea thereabouts being full of sharp-pointed rocks, the monster was not able to overtake the boat. This I was afterwards told, for I durst not stay to see the issue of the adventure; but ran as fast as I could the way I first went, and then climbed up a steep hill, which gave me some prospect of the country. I found it fully cultivated; but that which first surprised me was the length of the grass, which, in those grounds that seemed to be kept for hay, was about twenty feet high. + +I fell into a high road, for so I took it to be, though it served to the inhabitants only as a foot-path through a field of barley. Here I walked on for some time, but could see little on either side, it being now near harvest, and the corn rising at least forty feet. I was an hour walking to the end of this field, which was fenced in with a hedge of at least one hundred and twenty feet high, and the trees so lofty that I could make no computation of their altitude. There was a stile to pass from this field into the next. It had four steps, and a stone to cross over when you came to the uppermost. It was impossible for me to climb this stile, because every step was six-feet high, and the upper stone about twenty. I was endeavouring to find some gap in the hedge, when I discovered one of the inhabitants in the next field, advancing towards the stile, of the same size with him whom I saw in the sea pursuing our boat. He appeared as tall as an ordinary spire steeple, and took about ten yards at every stride, as near as I could guess. I was struck with the utmost fear and astonishment, and ran to hide myself in the corn, whence I saw him at the top of the stile looking back into the next field on the right hand, and heard him call in a voice many degrees louder than a speaking- trumpet: but the noise was so high in the air, that at first I certainly thought it was thunder. Whereupon seven monsters, like himself, came towards him with reaping-hooks in their hands, each hook about the largeness of six scythes. These people were not so well clad as the first, whose servants or labourers they seemed to be; for, upon some words he spoke, they went to reap the corn in the field where I lay. I kept from them at as great a distance as I could, but was forced to move with extreme difficulty, for the stalks of the corn were sometimes not above a foot distant, so that I could hardly squeeze my body betwixt them. However, I made a shift to go forward, till I came to a part of the field where the corn had been laid by the rain and wind. Here it was impossible for me to advance a step; for the stalks were so interwoven, that I could not creep through, and the beards of the fallen ears so strong and pointed, that they pierced through my clothes into my flesh. At the same time I heard the reapers not a hundred yards behind me. Being quite dispirited with toil, and wholly overcome by grief and dispair, I lay down between two ridges, and heartily wished I might there end my days. I bemoaned my desolate widow and fatherless children. I lamented my own folly and wilfulness, in attempting a second voyage, against the advice of all my friends and relations. In this terrible agitation of mind, I could not forbear thinking of Lilliput, whose inhabitants looked upon me as the greatest prodigy that ever appeared in the world; where I was able to draw an imperial fleet in my hand, and perform those other actions, which will be recorded for ever in the chronicles of that empire, while posterity shall hardly believe them, although attested by millions. I reflected what a mortification it must prove to me, to appear as inconsiderable in this nation, as one single Lilliputian would be among us. But this I conceived was to be the least of my misfortunes; for, as human creatures are observed to be more savage and cruel in proportion to their bulk, what could I expect but to be a morsel in the mouth of the first among these enormous barbarians that should happen to seize me? Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right, when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison. It might have pleased fortune, to have let the Lilliputians find some nation, where the people were as diminutive with respect to them, as they were to me. And who knows but that even this prodigious race of mortals might be equally overmatched in some distant part of the world, whereof we have yet no discovery. + +Scared and confounded as I was, I could not forbear going on with these reflections, when one of the reapers, approaching within ten yards of the ridge where I lay, made me apprehend that with the next step I should be squashed to death under his foot, or cut in two with his reaping-hook. And therefore, when he was again about to move, I screamed as loud as fear could make me: whereupon the huge creature trod short, and, looking round about under him for some time, at last espied me as I lay on the ground. He considered awhile, with the caution of one who endeavours to lay hold on a small dangerous animal in such a manner that it shall not be able either to scratch or bite him, as I myself have sometimes done with a weasel in England. At length he ventured to take me behind, by the middle, between his fore-finger and thumb, and brought me within three yards of his eyes, that he might behold my shape more perfectly. I guessed his meaning, and my good fortune gave me so much presence of mind, that I resolved not to struggle in the least as he held me in the air above sixty feet from the ground, although he grievously pinched my sides, for fear I should slip through his fingers. All I ventured was to raise mine eyes towards the sun, and place my hands together in a supplicating posture, and to speak some words in a humble melancholy tone, suitable to the condition I then was in: for I apprehended every moment that he would dash me against the ground, as we usually do any little hateful animal, which we have a mind to destroy. But my good star would have it, that he appeared pleased with my voice and gestures, and began to look upon me as a curiosity, much wondering to hear me pronounce articulate words, although he could not understand them. In the mean time I was not able to forbear groaning and shedding tears, and turning my head towards my sides; letting him know, as well as I could, how cruelly I was hurt by the pressure of his thumb and finger. He seemed to apprehend my meaning; for, lifting up the lappet of his coat, he put me gently into it, and immediately ran along with me to his master, who was a substantial farmer, and the same person I had first seen in the field. + +The farmer having (as I suppose by their talk) received such an account of me as his servant could give him, took a piece of a small straw, about the size of a walking-staff, and therewith lifted up the lappets of my coat; which it seems he thought to be some kind of covering that nature had given me. He blew my hairs aside to take a better view of my face. He called his hinds about him, and asked them, as I afterwards learned, whether they had ever seen in the fields any little creature that resembled me. He then placed me softly on the ground upon all fours, but I got immediately up, and walked slowly backward and forward, to let those people see I had no intent to run away. They all sat down in a circle about me, the better to observe my motions. I pulled off my hat, and made a low bow towards the farmer. I fell on my knees, and lifted up my hands and eyes, and spoke several words as loud as I could: I took a purse of gold out of my pocket, and humbly presented it to him. He received it on the palm of his hand, then applied it close to his eye to see what it was, and afterwards turned it several times with the point of a pin (which he took out of his sleeve,) but could make nothing of it. Whereupon I made a sign that he should place his hand on the ground. I then took the purse, and, opening it, poured all the gold into his palm. There were six Spanish pieces of four pistoles each, beside twenty or thirty smaller coins. I saw him wet the tip of his little finger upon his tongue, and take up one of my largest pieces, and then another; but he seemed to be wholly ignorant what they were. He made me a sign to put them again into my purse, and the purse again into my pocket, which, after offering it to him several times, I thought it best to do. + +The farmer, by this time, was convinced I must be a rational creature. He spoke often to me; but the sound of his voice pierced my ears like that of a water-mill, yet his words were articulate enough. I answered as loud as I could in several languages, and he often laid his ear within two yards of me: but all in vain, for we were wholly unintelligible to each other. He then sent his servants to their work, and taking his handkerchief out of his pocket, he doubled and spread it on his left hand, which he placed flat on the ground with the palm upward, making me a sign to step into it, as I could easily do, for it was not above a foot in thickness. I thought it my part to obey, and, for fear of falling, laid myself at full length upon the handkerchief, with the remainder of which he lapped me up to the head for further security, and in this manner carried me home to his house. There he called his wife, and showed me to her; but she screamed and ran back, as women in England do at the sight of a toad or a spider. However, when she had a while seen my behaviour, and how well I observed the signs her husband made, she was soon reconciled, and by degrees grew extremely tender of me. + +It was about twelve at noon, and a servant brought in dinner. It was only one substantial dish of meat (fit for the plain condition of a husbandman,) in a dish of about four-and-twenty feet diameter. The company were, the farmer and his wife, three children, and an old grandmother. When they were sat down, the farmer placed me at some distance from him on the table, which was thirty feet high from the floor. I was in a terrible fright, and kept as far as I could from the edge, for fear of falling. The wife minced a bit of meat, then crumbled some bread on a trencher, and placed it before me. I made her a low bow, took out my knife and fork, and fell to eat, which gave them exceeding delight. The mistress sent her maid for a small dram cup, which held about two gallons, and filled it with drink; I took up the vessel with much difficulty in both hands, and in a most respectful manner drank to her ladyship's health, expressing the words as loud as I could in English, which made the company laugh so heartily, that I was almost deafened with the noise. This liquor tasted like a small cider, and was not unpleasant. Then the master made me a sign to come to his trencher side; but as I walked on the table, being in great surprise all the time, as the indulgent reader will easily conceive and excuse, I happened to stumble against a crust, and fell flat on my face, but received no hurt. I got up immediately, and observing the good people to be in much concern, I took my hat (which I held under my arm out of good manners,) and waving it over my head, made three huzzas, to show I had got no mischief by my fall. But advancing forward towards my master (as I shall henceforth call him,) his youngest son, who sat next to him, an arch boy of about ten years old, took me up by the legs, and held me so high in the air, that I trembled every limb: but his father snatched me from him, and at the same time gave him such a box on the left ear, as would have felled an European troop of horse to the earth, ordering him to be taken from the table. But being afraid the boy might owe me a spite, and well remembering how mischievous all children among us naturally are to sparrows, rabbits, young kittens, and puppy dogs, I fell on my knees, and pointing to the boy, made my master to understand, as well as I could, that I desired his son might be pardoned. The father complied, and the lad took his seat again, whereupon I went to him, and kissed his hand, which my master took, and made him stroke me gently with it. + +In the midst of dinner, my mistress's favourite cat leaped into her lap. I heard a noise behind me like that of a dozen stocking- weavers at work; and turning my head, I found it proceeded from the purring of that animal, who seemed to be three times larger than an ox, as I computed by the view of her head, and one of her paws, while her mistress was feeding and stroking her. The fierceness of this creature's countenance altogether discomposed me; though I stood at the farther end of the table, above fifty feet off; and although my mistress held her fast, for fear she might give a spring, and seize me in her talons. But it happened there was no danger, for the cat took not the least notice of me when my master placed me within three yards of her. And as I have been always told, and found true by experience in my travels, that flying or discovering fear before a fierce animal, is a certain way to make it pursue or attack you, so I resolved, in this dangerous juncture, to show no manner of concern. I walked with intrepidity five or six times before the very head of the cat, and came within half a yard of her; whereupon she drew herself back, as if she were more afraid of me: I had less apprehension concerning the dogs, whereof three or four came into the room, as it is usual in farmers' houses; one of which was a mastiff, equal in bulk to four elephants, and another a greyhound, somewhat taller than the mastiff, but not so large. + +When dinner was almost done, the nurse came in with a child of a year old in her arms, who immediately spied me, and began a squall that you might have heard from London-Bridge to Chelsea, after the usual oratory of infants, to get me for a plaything. The mother, out of pure indulgence, took me up, and put me towards the child, who presently seized me by the middle, and got my head into his mouth, where I roared so loud that the urchin was frighted, and let me drop, and I should infallibly have broke my neck, if the mother had not held her apron under me. The nurse, to quiet her babe, made use of a rattle which was a kind of hollow vessel filled with great stones, and fastened by a cable to the child's waist: but all in vain; so that she was forced to apply the last remedy by giving it suck. I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious reader an idea of its bulk, shape, and colour. It stood prominent six feet, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug, so varied with spots, pimples, and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous: for I had a near sight of her, she sitting down, the more conveniently to give suck, and I standing on the table. This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass; where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough, and coarse, and ill-coloured. + +I remember when I was at Lilliput, the complexion of those diminutive people appeared to me the fairest in the world; and talking upon this subject with a person of learning there, who was an intimate friend of mine, he said that my face appeared much fairer and smoother when he looked on me from the ground, than it did upon a nearer view, when I took him up in my hand, and brought him close, which he confessed was at first a very shocking sight. He said, "he could discover great holes in my skin; that the stumps of my beard were ten times stronger than the bristles of a boar, and my complexion made up of several colours altogether disagreeable:" although I must beg leave to say for myself, that I am as fair as most of my sex and country, and very little sunburnt by all my travels. On the other side, discoursing of the ladies in that emperor's court, he used to tell me, "one had freckles; another too wide a mouth; a third too large a nose;" nothing of which I was able to distinguish. I confess this reflection was obvious enough; which, however, I could not forbear, lest the reader might think those vast creatures were actually deformed: for I must do them the justice to say, they are a comely race of people, and particularly the features of my master's countenance, although he was but a farmer, when I beheld him from the height of sixty feet, appeared very well proportioned. + +When dinner was done, my master went out to his labourers, and, as I could discover by his voice and gesture, gave his wife strict charge to take care of me. I was very much tired, and disposed to sleep, which my mistress perceiving, she put me on her own bed, and covered me with a clean white handkerchief, but larger and coarser than the mainsail of a man-of-war. + +I slept about two hours, and dreamt I was at home with my wife and children, which aggravated my sorrows when I awaked, and found myself alone in a vast room, between two and three hundred feet wide, and above two hundred high, lying in a bed twenty yards wide. My mistress was gone about her household affairs, and had locked me in. The bed was eight yards from the floor. Some natural necessities required me to get down; I durst not presume to call; and if I had, it would have been in vain, with such a voice as mine, at so great a distance from the room where I lay to the kitchen where the family kept. While I was under these circumstances, two rats crept up the curtains, and ran smelling backwards and forwards on the bed. One of them came up almost to my face, whereupon I rose in a fright, and drew out my hanger to defend myself. These horrible animals had the boldness to attack me on both sides, and one of them held his fore-feet at my collar; but I had the good fortune to rip up his belly before he could do me any mischief. He fell down at my feet; and the other, seeing the fate of his comrade, made his escape, but not without one good wound on the back, which I gave him as he fled, and made the blood run trickling from him. After this exploit, I walked gently to and fro on the bed, to recover my breath and loss of spirits. These creatures were of the size of a large mastiff, but infinitely more nimble and fierce; so that if I had taken off my belt before I went to sleep, I must have infallibly been torn to pieces and devoured. I measured the tail of the dead rat, and found it to be two yards long, wanting an inch; but it went against my stomach to drag the carcass off the bed, where it lay still bleeding; I observed it had yet some life, but with a strong slash across the neck, I thoroughly despatched it. + +Soon after my mistress came into the room, who seeing me all bloody, ran and took me up in her hand. I pointed to the dead rat, smiling, and making other signs to show I was not hurt; whereat she was extremely rejoiced, calling the maid to take up the dead rat with a pair of tongs, and throw it out of the window. Then she set me on a table, where I showed her my hanger all bloody, and wiping it on the lappet of my coat, returned it to the scabbard. I was pressed to do more than one thing which another could not do for me, and therefore endeavoured to make my mistress understand, that I desired to be set down on the floor; which after she had done, my bashfulness would not suffer me to express myself farther, than by pointing to the door, and bowing several times. The good woman, with much difficulty, at last perceived what I would be at, and taking me up again in her hand, walked into the garden, where she set me down. I went on one side about two hundred yards, and beckoning to her not to look or to follow me, I hid myself between two leaves of sorrel, and there discharged the necessities of nature. + +I hope the gentle reader will excuse me for dwelling on these and the like particulars, which, however insignificant they may appear to groveling vulgar minds, yet will certainly help a philosopher to enlarge his thoughts and imagination, and apply them to the benefit of public as well as private life, which was my sole design in presenting this and other accounts of my travels to the world; wherein I have been chiefly studious of truth, without affecting any ornaments of learning or of style. But the whole scene of this voyage made so strong an impression on my mind, and is so deeply fixed in my memory, that, in committing it to paper I did not omit one material circumstance: however, upon a strict review, I blotted out several passages. Of less moment which were in my first copy, for fear of being censured as tedious and trifling, whereof travellers are often, perhaps not without justice, accused. + +CHAPTER II. + +[A description of the farmer's daughter. The author carried to a market-town, and then to the metropolis. The particulars of his journey.] + +My mistress had a daughter of nine years old, a child of towardly parts for her age, very dexterous at her needle, and skilful in dressing her baby. Her mother and she contrived to fit up the baby's cradle for me against night: the cradle was put into a small drawer of a cabinet, and the drawer placed upon a hanging shelf for fear of the rats. This was my bed all the time I staid with those people, though made more convenient by degrees, as I began to learn their language and make my wants known. This young girl was so handy, that after I had once or twice pulled off my clothes before her, she was able to dress and undress me, though I never gave her that trouble when she would let me do either myself. She made me seven shirts, and some other linen, of as fine cloth as could be got, which indeed was coarser than sackcloth; and these she constantly washed for me with her own hands. She was likewise my school-mistress, to teach me the language: when I pointed to any thing, she told me the name of it in her own tongue, so that in a few days I was able to call for whatever I had a mind to. She was very good-natured, and not above forty feet high, being little for her age. She gave me the name of Grildrig, which the family took up, and afterwards the whole kingdom. The word imports what the Latins call nanunculus, the Italians homunceletino, and the English mannikin. To her I chiefly owe my preservation in that country: we never parted while I was there; I called her my Glumdalclitch, or little nurse; and should be guilty of great ingratitude, if I omitted this honourable mention of her care and affection towards me, which I heartily wish it lay in my power to requite as she deserves, instead of being the innocent, but unhappy instrument of her disgrace, as I have too much reason to fear. + +It now began to be known and talked of in the neighbourhood, that my master had found a strange animal in the field, about the bigness of a splacnuck, but exactly shaped in every part like a human creature; which it likewise imitated in all its actions; seemed to speak in a little language of its own, had already learned several words of theirs, went erect upon two legs, was tame and gentle, would come when it was called, do whatever it was bid, had the finest limbs in the world, and a complexion fairer than a nobleman's daughter of three years old. Another farmer, who lived hard by, and was a particular friend of my master, came on a visit on purpose to inquire into the truth of this story. I was immediately produced, and placed upon a table, where I walked as I was commanded, drew my hanger, put it up again, made my reverence to my master's guest, asked him in his own language how he did, and told him HE WAS WELCOME, just as my little nurse had instructed me. This man, who was old and dim-sighted, put on his spectacles to behold me better; at which I could not forbear laughing very heartily, for his eyes appeared like the full moon shining into a chamber at two windows. Our people, who discovered the cause of my mirth, bore me company in laughing, at which the old fellow was fool enough to be angry and out of countenance. He had the character of a great miser; and, to my misfortune, he well deserved it, by the cursed advice he gave my master, to show me as a sight upon a market-day in the next town, which was half an hour's riding, about two-and-twenty miles from our house. I guessed there was some mischief when I observed my master and his friend whispering together, sometimes pointing at me; and my fears made me fancy that I overheard and understood some of their words. But the next morning Glumdalclitch, my little nurse, told me the whole matter, which she had cunningly picked out from her mother. The poor girl laid me on her bosom, and fell a weeping with shame and grief. She apprehended some mischief would happen to me from rude vulgar folks, who might squeeze me to death, or break one of my limbs by taking me in their hands. She had also observed how modest I was in my nature, how nicely I regarded my honour, and what an indignity I should conceive it, to be exposed for money as a public spectacle, to the meanest of the people. She said, her papa and mamma had promised that Grildrig should be hers; but now she found they meant to serve her as they did last year, when they pretended to give her a lamb, and yet, as soon as it was fat, sold it to a butcher. For my own part, I may truly affirm, that I was less concerned than my nurse. I had a strong hope, which never left me, that I should one day recover my liberty: and as to the ignominy of being carried about for a monster, I considered myself to be a perfect stranger in the country, and that such a misfortune could never be charged upon me as a reproach, if ever I should return to England, since the king of Great Britain himself, in my condition, must have undergone the same distress. + +My master, pursuant to the advice of his friend, carried me in a box the next market-day to the neighbouring town, and took along with him his little daughter, my nurse, upon a pillion behind him. The box was close on every side, with a little door for me to go in and out, and a few gimlet holes to let in air. The girl had been so careful as to put the quilt of her baby's bed into it, for me to lie down on. However, I was terribly shaken and discomposed in this journey, though it was but of half an hour: for the horse went about forty feet at every step and trotted so high, that the agitation was equal to the rising and falling of a ship in a great storm, but much more frequent. Our journey was somewhat farther than from London to St. Alban's. My master alighted at an inn which he used to frequent; and after consulting awhile with the inn-keeper, and making some necessary preparations, he hired the grultrud, or crier, to give notice through the town of a strange creature to be seen at the sign of the Green Eagle, not so big as a splacnuck (an animal in that country very finely shaped, about six feet long,) and in every part of the body resembling a human creature, could speak several words, and perform a hundred diverting tricks. + +I was placed upon a table in the largest room of the inn, which might be near three hundred feet square. My little nurse stood on a low stool close to the table, to take care of me, and direct what I should do. My master, to avoid a crowd, would suffer only thirty people at a time to see me. I walked about on the table as the girl commanded; she asked me questions, as far as she knew my understanding of the language reached, and I answered them as loud as I could. I turned about several times to the company, paid my humble respects, said THEY WERE WELCOME, and used some other speeches I had been taught. I took up a thimble filled with liquor, which Glumdalclitch had given me for a cup, and drank their health, I drew out my hanger, and flourished with it after the manner of fencers in England. My nurse gave me a part of a straw, which I exercised as a pike, having learnt the art in my youth. I was that day shown to twelve sets of company, and as often forced to act over again the same fopperies, till I was half dead with weariness and vexation; for those who had seen me made such wonderful reports, that the people were ready to break down the doors to come in. My master, for his own interest, would not suffer any one to touch me except my nurse; and to prevent danger, benches were set round the table at such a distance as to put me out of every body's reach. However, an unlucky school-boy aimed a hazel nut directly at my head, which very narrowly missed me; otherwise it came with so much violence, that it would have infallibly knocked out my brains, for it was almost as large as a small pumpkin, but I had the satisfaction to see the young rogue well beaten, and turned out of the room. + +My master gave public notice that he would show me again the next market-day; and in the meantime he prepared a convenient vehicle for me, which he had reason enough to do; for I was so tired with my first journey, and with entertaining company for eight hours together, that I could hardly stand upon my legs, or speak a word. It was at least three days before I recovered my strength; and that I might have no rest at home, all the neighbouring gentlemen from a hundred miles round, hearing of my fame, came to see me at my master's own house. There could not be fewer than thirty persons with their wives and children (for the country is very populous;) and my master demanded the rate of a full room whenever he showed me at home, although it were only to a single family; so that for some time I had but little ease every day of the week (except Wednesday, which is their Sabbath,) although I were not carried to the town. + +My master, finding how profitable I was likely to be, resolved to carry me to the most considerable cities of the kingdom. Having therefore provided himself with all things necessary for a long journey, and settled his affairs at home, he took leave of his wife, and upon the 17th of August, 1703, about two months after my arrival, we set out for the metropolis, situate near the middle of that empire, and about three thousand miles distance from our house. My master made his daughter Glumdalclitch ride behind him. She carried me on her lap, in a box tied about her waist. The girl had lined it on all sides with the softest cloth she could get, well quilted underneath, furnished it with her baby's bed, provided me with linen and other necessaries, and made everything as convenient as she could. We had no other company but a boy of the house, who rode after us with the luggage. + +My master's design was to show me in all the towns by the way, and to step out of the road for fifty or a hundred miles, to any village, or person of quality's house, where he might expect custom. We made easy journeys, of not above seven or eight score miles a-day; for Glumdalclitch, on purpose to spare me, complained she was tired with the trotting of the horse. She often took me out of my box, at my own desire, to give me air, and show me the country, but always held me fast by a leading-string. We passed over five or six rivers, many degrees broader and deeper than the Nile or the Ganges: and there was hardly a rivulet so small as the Thames at London-bridge. We were ten weeks in our journey, and I was shown in eighteen large towns, besides many villages, and private families. + +On the 26th day of October we arrived at the metropolis, called in their language Lorbrulgrud, or Pride of the Universe. My master took a lodging in the principal street of the city, not far from the royal palace, and put out bills in the usual form, containing an exact description of my person and parts. He hired a large room between three and four hundred feet wide. He provided a table sixty feet in diameter, upon which I was to act my part, and pallisadoed it round three feet from the edge, and as many high, to prevent my falling over. I was shown ten times a-day, to the wonder and satisfaction of all people. I could now speak the language tolerably well, and perfectly understood every word, that was spoken to me. Besides, I had learnt their alphabet, and could make a shift to explain a sentence here and there; for Glumdalclitch had been my instructor while we were at home, and at leisure hours during our journey. She carried a little book in her pocket, not much larger than a Sanson's Atlas; it was a common treatise for the use of young girls, giving a short account of their religion: out of this she taught me my letters, and interpreted the words. + +CHAPTER III. + +[The author sent for to court. The queen buys him of his master the farmer, and presents him to the king. He disputes with his majesty's great scholars. An apartment at court provided for the author. He is in high favour with the queen. He stands up for the honour of his own country. His quarrels with the queen's dwarf.] + +The frequent labours I underwent every day, made, in a few weeks, a very considerable change in my health: the more my master got by me, the more insatiable he grew. I had quite lost my stomach, and was almost reduced to a skeleton. The farmer observed it, and concluding I must soon die, resolved to make as good a hand of me as he could. While he was thus reasoning and resolving with himself, a sardral, or gentleman-usher, came from court, commanding my master to carry me immediately thither for the diversion of the queen and her ladies. Some of the latter had already been to see me, and reported strange things of my beauty, behaviour, and good sense. Her majesty, and those who attended her, were beyond measure delighted with my demeanour. I fell on my knees, and begged the honour of kissing her imperial foot; but this gracious princess held out her little finger towards me, after I was set on the table, which I embraced in both my arms, and put the tip of it with the utmost respect to my lip. She made me some general questions about my country and my travels, which I answered as distinctly, and in as few words as I could. She asked, "whether I could be content to live at court?" I bowed down to the board of the table, and humbly answered "that I was my master's slave: but, if I were at my own disposal, I should be proud to devote my life to her majesty's service." She then asked my master, "whether he was willing to sell me at a good price?" He, who apprehended I could not live a month, was ready enough to part with me, and demanded a thousand pieces of gold, which were ordered him on the spot, each piece being about the bigness of eight hundred moidores; but allowing for the proportion of all things between that country and Europe, and the high price of gold among them, was hardly so great a sum as a thousand guineas would be in England. I then said to the queen, "since I was now her majesty's most humble creature and vassal, I must beg the favour, that Glumdalclitch, who had always tended me with so much care and kindness, and understood to do it so well, might be admitted into her service, and continue to be my nurse and instructor." + +Her majesty agreed to my petition, and easily got the farmer's consent, who was glad enough to have his daughter preferred at court, and the poor girl herself was not able to hide her joy. My late master withdrew, bidding me farewell, and saying he had left me in a good service; to which I replied not a word, only making him a slight bow. + +The queen observed my coldness; and, when the farmer was gone out of the apartment, asked me the reason. I made bold to tell her majesty, "that I owed no other obligation to my late master, than his not dashing out the brains of a poor harmless creature, found by chance in his fields: which obligation was amply recompensed, by the gain he had made in showing me through half the kingdom, and the price he had now sold me for. That the life I had since led was laborious enough to kill an animal of ten times my strength. That my health was much impaired, by the continual drudgery of entertaining the rabble every hour of the day; and that, if my master had not thought my life in danger, her majesty would not have got so cheap a bargain. But as I was out of all fear of being ill-treated under the protection of so great and good an empress, the ornament of nature, the darling of the world, the delight of her subjects, the phoenix of the creation, so I hoped my late master's apprehensions would appear to be groundless; for I already found my spirits revive, by the influence of her most august presence." + +This was the sum of my speech, delivered with great improprieties and hesitation. The latter part was altogether framed in the style peculiar to that people, whereof I learned some phrases from Glumdalclitch, while she was carrying me to court. + +The queen, giving great allowance for my defectiveness in speaking, was, however, surprised at so much wit and good sense in so diminutive an animal. She took me in her own hand, and carried me to the king, who was then retired to his cabinet. His majesty, a prince of much gravity and austere countenance, not well observing my shape at first view, asked the queen after a cold manner "how long it was since she grew fond of a splacnuck?" for such it seems he took me to be, as I lay upon my breast in her majesty's right hand. But this princess, who has an infinite deal of wit and humour, set me gently on my feet upon the scrutoire, and commanded me to give his majesty an account of myself, which I did in a very few words: and Glumdalclitch who attended at the cabinet door, and could not endure I should be out of her sight, being admitted, confirmed all that had passed from my arrival at her father's house. + +The king, although he be as learned a person as any in his dominions, had been educated in the study of philosophy, and particularly mathematics; yet when he observed my shape exactly, and saw me walk erect, before I began to speak, conceived I might be a piece of clock-work (which is in that country arrived to a very great perfection) contrived by some ingenious artist. But when he heard my voice, and found what I delivered to be regular and rational, he could not conceal his astonishment. He was by no means satisfied with the relation I gave him of the manner I came into his kingdom, but thought it a story concerted between Glumdalclitch and her father, who had taught me a set of words to make me sell at a better price. Upon this imagination, he put several other questions to me, and still received rational answers: no otherwise defective than by a foreign accent, and an imperfect knowledge in the language, with some rustic phrases which I had learned at the farmer's house, and did not suit the polite style of a court. + +His majesty sent for three great scholars, who were then in their weekly waiting, according to the custom in that country. These gentlemen, after they had a while examined my shape with much nicety, were of different opinions concerning me. They all agreed that I could not be produced according to the regular laws of nature, because I was not framed with a capacity of preserving my life, either by swiftness, or climbing of trees, or digging holes in the earth. They observed by my teeth, which they viewed with great exactness, that I was a carnivorous animal; yet most quadrupeds being an overmatch for me, and field mice, with some others, too nimble, they could not imagine how I should be able to support myself, unless I fed upon snails and other insects, which they offered, by many learned arguments, to evince that I could not possibly do. One of these virtuosi seemed to think that I might be an embryo, or abortive birth. But this opinion was rejected by the other two, who observed my limbs to be perfect and finished; and that I had lived several years, as it was manifest from my beard, the stumps whereof they plainly discovered through a magnifying glass. They would not allow me to be a dwarf, because my littleness was beyond all degrees of comparison; for the queen's favourite dwarf, the smallest ever known in that kingdom, was near thirty feet high. After much debate, they concluded unanimously, that I was only relplum scalcath, which is interpreted literally lusus naturae; a determination exactly agreeable to the modern philosophy of Europe, whose professors, disdaining the old evasion of occult causes, whereby the followers of Aristotle endeavoured in vain to disguise their ignorance, have invented this wonderful solution of all difficulties, to the unspeakable advancement of human knowledge. + +After this decisive conclusion, I entreated to be heard a word or two. I applied myself to the king, and assured his majesty, "that I came from a country which abounded with several millions of both sexes, and of my own stature; where the animals, trees, and houses, were all in proportion, and where, by consequence, I might be as able to defend myself, and to find sustenance, as any of his majesty's subjects could do here; which I took for a full answer to those gentlemen's arguments." To this they only replied with a smile of contempt, saying, "that the farmer had instructed me very well in my lesson." The king, who had a much better understanding, dismissing his learned men, sent for the farmer, who by good fortune was not yet gone out of town. Having therefore first examined him privately, and then confronted him with me and the young girl, his majesty began to think that what we told him might possibly be true. He desired the queen to order that a particular care should be taken of me; and was of opinion that Glumdalclitch should still continue in her office of tending me, because he observed we had a great affection for each other. A convenient apartment was provided for her at court: she had a sort of governess appointed to take care of her education, a maid to dress her, and two other servants for menial offices; but the care of me was wholly appropriated to herself. The queen commanded her own cabinet-maker to contrive a box, that might serve me for a bedchamber, after the model that Glumdalclitch and I should agree upon. This man was a most ingenious artist, and according to my direction, in three weeks finished for me a wooden chamber of sixteen feet square, and twelve high, with sash-windows, a door, and two closets, like a London bed-chamber. The board, that made the ceiling, was to be lifted up and down by two hinges, to put in a bed ready furnished by her majesty's upholsterer, which Glumdalclitch took out every day to air, made it with her own hands, and letting it down at night, locked up the roof over me. A nice workman, who was famous for little curiosities, undertook to make me two chairs, with backs and frames, of a substance not unlike ivory, and two tables, with a cabinet to put my things in. The room was quilted on all sides, as well as the floor and the ceiling, to prevent any accident from the carelessness of those who carried me, and to break the force of a jolt, when I went in a coach. I desired a lock for my door, to prevent rats and mice from coming in. The smith, after several attempts, made the smallest that ever was seen among them, for I have known a larger at the gate of a gentleman's house in England. I made a shift to keep the key in a pocket of my own, fearing Glumdalclitch might lose it. The queen likewise ordered the thinnest silks that could be gotten, to make me clothes, not much thicker than an English blanket, very cumbersome till I was accustomed to them. They were after the fashion of the kingdom, partly resembling the Persian, and partly the Chinese, and are a very grave and decent habit. + +The queen became so fond of my company, that she could not dine without me. I had a table placed upon the same at which her majesty ate, just at her left elbow, and a chair to sit on. Glumdalclitch stood on a stool on the floor near my table, to assist and take care of me. I had an entire set of silver dishes and plates, and other necessaries, which, in proportion to those of the queen, were not much bigger than what I have seen in a London toy-shop for the furniture of a baby-house: these my little nurse kept in her pocket in a silver box, and gave me at meals as I wanted them, always cleaning them herself. No person dined with the queen but the two princesses royal, the eldest sixteen years old, and the younger at that time thirteen and a month. Her majesty used to put a bit of meat upon one of my dishes, out of which I carved for myself, and her diversion was to see me eat in miniature: for the queen (who had indeed but a weak stomach) took up, at one mouthful, as much as a dozen English farmers could eat at a meal, which to me was for some time a very nauseous sight. She would craunch the wing of a lark, bones and all, between her teeth, although it were nine times as large as that of a full-grown turkey; and put a bit of bread into her mouth as big as two twelve- penny loaves. She drank out of a golden cup, above a hogshead at a draught. Her knives were twice as long as a scythe, set straight upon the handle. The spoons, forks, and other instruments, were all in the same proportion. I remember when Glumdalclitch carried me, out of curiosity, to see some of the tables at court, where ten or a dozen of those enormous knives and forks were lifted up together, I thought I had never till then beheld so terrible a sight. + +It is the custom, that every Wednesday (which, as I have observed, is their Sabbath) the king and queen, with the royal issue of both sexes, dine together in the apartment of his majesty, to whom I was now become a great favourite; and at these times, my little chair and table were placed at his left hand, before one of the salt- cellars. This prince took a pleasure in conversing with me, inquiring into the manners, religion, laws, government, and learning of Europe; wherein I gave him the best account I was able. His apprehension was so clear, and his judgment so exact, that he made very wise reflections and observations upon all I said. But I confess, that, after I had been a little too copious in talking of my own beloved country, of our trade and wars by sea and land, of our schisms in religion, and parties in the state; the prejudices of his education prevailed so far, that he could not forbear taking me up in his right hand, and stroking me gently with the other, after a hearty fit of laughing, asked me, "whether I was a whig or tory?" Then turning to his first minister, who waited behind him with a white staff, near as tall as the mainmast of the Royal Sovereign, he observed "how contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I: and yet," says he, "I dare engage these creatures have their titles and distinctions of honour; they contrive little nests and burrows, that they call houses and cities; they make a figure in dress and equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray!" And thus he continued on, while my colour came and went several times, with indignation, to hear our noble country, the mistress of arts and arms, the scourge of France, the arbitress of Europe, the seat of virtue, piety, honour, and truth, the pride and envy of the world, so contemptuously treated. + +But as I was not in a condition to resent injuries, so upon mature thoughts I began to doubt whether I was injured or no. For, after having been accustomed several months to the sight and converse of this people, and observed every object upon which I cast mine eyes to be of proportionable magnitude, the horror I had at first conceived from their bulk and aspect was so far worn off, that if I had then beheld a company of English lords and ladies in their finery and birth-day clothes, acting their several parts in the most courtly manner of strutting, and bowing, and prating, to say the truth, I should have been strongly tempted to laugh as much at them as the king and his grandees did at me. Neither, indeed, could I forbear smiling at myself, when the queen used to place me upon her hand towards a looking-glass, by which both our persons appeared before me in full view together; and there could be nothing more ridiculous than the comparison; so that I really began to imagine myself dwindled many degrees below my usual size. + +Nothing angered and mortified me so much as the queen's dwarf; who being of the lowest stature that was ever in that country (for I verily think he was not full thirty feet high), became so insolent at seeing a creature so much beneath him, that he would always affect to swagger and look big as he passed by me in the queen's antechamber, while I was standing on some table talking with the lords or ladies of the court, and he seldom failed of a smart word or two upon my littleness; against which I could only revenge myself by calling him brother, challenging him to wrestle, and such repartees as are usually in the mouths of court pages. One day, at dinner, this malicious little cub was so nettled with something I had said to him, that, raising himself upon the frame of her majesty's chair, he took me up by the middle, as I was sitting down, not thinking any harm, and let me drop into a large silver bowl of cream, and then ran away as fast as he could. I fell over head and ears, and, if I had not been a good swimmer, it might have gone very hard with me; for Glumdalclitch in that instant happened to be at the other end of the room, and the queen was in such a fright, that she wanted presence of mind to assist me. But my little nurse ran to my relief, and took me out, after I had swallowed above a quart of cream. I was put to bed: however, I received no other damage than the loss of a suit of clothes, which was utterly spoiled. The dwarf was soundly whipt, and as a farther punishment, forced to drink up the bowl of cream into which he had thrown me: neither was he ever restored to favour; for soon after the queen bestowed him on a lady of high quality, so that I saw him no more, to my very great satisfaction; for I could not tell to what extremities such a malicious urchin might have carried his resentment. + +He had before served me a scurvy trick, which set the queen a-laughing, although at the same time she was heartily vexed, and would have immediately cashiered him, if I had not been so generous as to intercede. Her majesty had taken a marrow-bone upon her plate, and, after knocking out the marrow, placed the bone again in the dish erect, as it stood before; the dwarf, watching his opportunity, while Glumdalclitch was gone to the side-board, mounted the stool that she stood on to take care of me at meals, took me up in both hands, and squeezing my legs together, wedged them into the marrow bone above my waist, where I stuck for some time, and made a very ridiculous figure. I believe it was near a minute before any one knew what was become of me; for I thought it below me to cry out. But, as princes seldom get their meat hot, my legs were not scalded, only my stockings and breeches in a sad condition. The dwarf, at my entreaty, had no other punishment than a sound whipping. + +I was frequently rallied by the queen upon account of my fearfulness; and she used to ask me whether the people of my country were as great cowards as myself? The occasion was this: the kingdom is much pestered with flies in summer; and these odious insects, each of them as big as a Dunstable lark, hardly gave me any rest while I sat at dinner, with their continual humming and buzzing about mine ears. They would sometimes alight upon my victuals, and leave their loathsome excrement, or spawn behind, which to me was very visible, though not to the natives of that country, whose large optics were not so acute as mine, in viewing smaller objects. Sometimes they would fix upon my nose, or forehead, where they stung me to the quick, smelling very offensively; and I could easily trace that viscous matter, which, our naturalists tell us, enables those creatures to walk with their feet upwards upon a ceiling. I had much ado to defend myself against these detestable animals, and could not forbear starting when they came on my face. It was the common practice of the dwarf, to catch a number of these insects in his hand, as schoolboys do among us, and let them out suddenly under my nose, on purpose to frighten me, and divert the queen. My remedy was to cut them in pieces with my knife, as they flew in the air, wherein my dexterity was much admired. + +I remember, one morning, when Glumdalclitch had set me in a box upon a window, as she usually did in fair days to give me air (for I durst not venture to let the box be hung on a nail out of the window, as we do with cages in England), after I had lifted up one of my sashes, and sat down at my table to eat a piece of sweet cake for my breakfast, above twenty wasps, allured by the smell, came flying into the room, humming louder than the drones of as many bagpipes. Some of them seized my cake, and carried it piecemeal away; others flew about my head and face, confounding me with the noise, and putting me in the utmost terror of their stings. However, I had the courage to rise and draw my hanger, and attack them in the air. I dispatched four of them, but the rest got away, and I presently shut my window. These insects were as large as partridges: I took out their stings, found them an inch and a half long, and as sharp as needles. I carefully preserved them all; and having since shown them, with some other curiosities, in several parts of Europe, upon my return to England I gave three of them to Gresham College, and kept the fourth for myself. + +CHAPTER IV. + +[The country described. A proposal for correcting modern maps. The king's palace; and some account of the metropolis. The author's way of travelling. The chief temple described.] + +I now intend to give the reader a short description of this country, as far as I travelled in it, which was not above two thousand miles round Lorbrulgrud, the metropolis. For the queen, whom I always attended, never went farther when she accompanied the king in his progresses, and there staid till his majesty returned from viewing his frontiers. The whole extent of this prince's dominions reaches about six thousand miles in length, and from three to five in breadth: whence I cannot but conclude, that our geographers of Europe are in a great error, by supposing nothing but sea between Japan and California; for it was ever my opinion, that there must be a balance of earth to counterpoise the great continent of Tartary; and therefore they ought to correct their maps and charts, by joining this vast tract of land to the north- west parts of America, wherein I shall be ready to lend them my assistance. + +The kingdom is a peninsula, terminated to the north-east by a ridge of mountains thirty miles high, which are altogether impassable, by reason of the volcanoes upon the tops: neither do the most learned know what sort of mortals inhabit beyond those mountains, or whether they be inhabited at all. On the three other sides, it is bounded by the ocean. There is not one seaport in the whole kingdom: and those parts of the coasts into which the rivers issue, are so full of pointed rocks, and the sea generally so rough, that there is no venturing with the smallest of their boats; so that these people are wholly excluded from any commerce with the rest of the world. But the large rivers are full of vessels, and abound with excellent fish; for they seldom get any from the sea, because the sea fish are of the same size with those in Europe, and consequently not worth catching; whereby it is manifest, that nature, in the production of plants and animals of so extraordinary a bulk, is wholly confined to this continent, of which I leave the reasons to be determined by philosophers. However, now and then they take a whale that happens to be dashed against the rocks, which the common people feed on heartily. These whales I have known so large, that a man could hardly carry one upon his shoulders; and sometimes, for curiosity, they are brought in hampers to Lorbrulgrud; I saw one of them in a dish at the king's table, which passed for a rarity, but I did not observe he was fond of it; for I think, indeed, the bigness disgusted him, although I have seen one somewhat larger in Greenland. + +The country is well inhabited, for it contains fifty-one cities, near a hundred walled towns, and a great number of villages. To satisfy my curious reader, it may be sufficient to describe Lorbrulgrud. This city stands upon almost two equal parts, on each side the river that passes through. It contains above eighty thousand houses, and about six hundred thousand inhabitants. It is in length three glomglungs (which make about fifty-four English miles,) and two and a half in breadth; as I measured it myself in the royal map made by the king's order, which was laid on the ground on purpose for me, and extended a hundred feet: I paced the diameter and circumference several times barefoot, and, computing by the scale, measured it pretty exactly. + +The king's palace is no regular edifice, but a heap of buildings, about seven miles round: the chief rooms are generally two hundred and forty feet high, and broad and long in proportion. A coach was allowed to Glumdalclitch and me, wherein her governess frequently took her out to see the town, or go among the shops; and I was always of the party, carried in my box; although the girl, at my own desire, would often take me out, and hold me in her hand, that I might more conveniently view the houses and the people, as we passed along the streets. I reckoned our coach to be about a square of Westminster-hall, but not altogether so high: however, I cannot be very exact. One day the governess ordered our coachman to stop at several shops, where the beggars, watching their opportunity, crowded to the sides of the coach, and gave me the most horrible spectacle that ever a European eye beheld. There was a woman with a cancer in her breast, swelled to a monstrous size, full of holes, in two or three of which I could have easily crept, and covered my whole body. There was a fellow with a wen in his neck, larger than five wool-packs; and another, with a couple of wooden legs, each about twenty feet high. But the most hateful sight of all, was the lice crawling on their clothes. I could see distinctly the limbs of these vermin with my naked eye, much better than those of a European louse through a microscope, and their snouts with which they rooted like swine. They were the first I had ever beheld, and I should have been curious enough to dissect one of them, if I had had proper instruments, which I unluckily left behind me in the ship, although, indeed, the sight was so nauseous, that it perfectly turned my stomach. + +Besides the large box in which I was usually carried, the queen ordered a smaller one to be made for me, of about twelve feet square, and ten high, for the convenience of travelling; because the other was somewhat too large for Glumdalclitch's lap, and cumbersome in the coach; it was made by the same artist, whom I directed in the whole contrivance. This travelling-closet was an exact square, with a window in the middle of three of the squares, and each window was latticed with iron wire on the outside, to prevent accidents in long journeys. On the fourth side, which had no window, two strong staples were fixed, through which the person that carried me, when I had a mind to be on horseback, put a leathern belt, and buckled it about his waist. This was always the office of some grave trusty servant, in whom I could confide, whether I attended the king and queen in their progresses, or were disposed to see the gardens, or pay a visit to some great lady or minister of state in the court, when Glumdalclitch happened to be out of order; for I soon began to be known and esteemed among the greatest officers, I suppose more upon account of their majesties' favour, than any merit of my own. In journeys, when I was weary of the coach, a servant on horseback would buckle on my box, and place it upon a cushion before him; and there I had a full prospect of the country on three sides, from my three windows. I had, in this closet, a field-bed and a hammock, hung from the ceiling, two chairs and a table, neatly screwed to the floor, to prevent being tossed about by the agitation of the horse or the coach. And having been long used to sea-voyages, those motions, although sometimes very violent, did not much discompose me. + +Whenever I had a mind to see the town, it was always in my travelling-closet; which Glumdalclitch held in her lap in a kind of open sedan, after the fashion of the country, borne by four men, and attended by two others in the queen's livery. The people, who had often heard of me, were very curious to crowd about the sedan, and the girl was complaisant enough to make the bearers stop, and to take me in her hand, that I might be more conveniently seen. + +I was very desirous to see the chief temple, and particularly the tower belonging to it, which is reckoned the highest in the kingdom. Accordingly one day my nurse carried me thither, but I may truly say I came back disappointed; for the height is not above three thousand feet, reckoning from the ground to the highest pinnacle top; which, allowing for the difference between the size of those people and us in Europe, is no great matter for admiration, nor at all equal in proportion (if I rightly remember) to Salisbury steeple. But, not to detract from a nation, to which, during my life, I shall acknowledge myself extremely obliged, it must be allowed, that whatever this famous tower wants in height, is amply made up in beauty and strength: for the walls are near a hundred feet thick, built of hewn stone, whereof each is about forty feet square, and adorned on all sides with statues of gods and emperors, cut in marble, larger than the life, placed in their several niches. I measured a little finger which had fallen down from one of these statues, and lay unperceived among some rubbish, and found it exactly four feet and an inch in length. Glumdalclitch wrapped it up in her handkerchief, and carried it home in her pocket, to keep among other trinkets, of which the girl was very fond, as children at her age usually are. + +The king's kitchen is indeed a noble building, vaulted at top, and about six hundred feet high. The great oven is not so wide, by ten paces, as the cupola at St. Paul's: for I measured the latter on purpose, after my return. But if I should describe the kitchen grate, the prodigious pots and kettles, the joints of meat turning on the spits, with many other particulars, perhaps I should be hardly believed; at least a severe critic would be apt to think I enlarged a little, as travellers are often suspected to do. To avoid which censure I fear I have run too much into the other extreme; and that if this treatise should happen to be translated into the language of Brobdingnag (which is the general name of that kingdom,) and transmitted thither, the king and his people would have reason to complain that I had done them an injury, by a false and diminutive representation. + +His majesty seldom keeps above six hundred horses in his stables: they are generally from fifty-four to sixty feet high. But, when he goes abroad on solemn days, he is attended, for state, by a military guard of five hundred horse, which, indeed, I thought was the most splendid sight that could be ever beheld, till I saw part of his army in battalia, whereof I shall find another occasion to speak. + +CHAPTER V. + +[Several adventurers that happened to the author. The execution of a criminal. The author shows his skill in navigation.] + +I should have lived happy enough in that country, if my littleness had not exposed me to several ridiculous and troublesome accidents; some of which I shall venture to relate. Glumdalclitch often carried me into the gardens of the court in my smaller box, and would sometimes take me out of it, and hold me in her hand, or set me down to walk. I remember, before the dwarf left the queen, he followed us one day into those gardens, and my nurse having set me down, he and I being close together, near some dwarf apple trees, I must needs show my wit, by a silly allusion between him and the trees, which happens to hold in their language as it does in ours. Whereupon, the malicious rogue, watching his opportunity, when I was walking under one of them, shook it directly over my head, by which a dozen apples, each of them near as large as a Bristol barrel, came tumbling about my ears; one of them hit me on the back as I chanced to stoop, and knocked me down flat on my face; but I received no other hurt, and the dwarf was pardoned at my desire, because I had given the provocation. + +Another day, Glumdalclitch left me on a smooth grass-plot to divert myself, while she walked at some distance with her governess. In the meantime, there suddenly fell such a violent shower of hail, that I was immediately by the force of it, struck to the ground: and when I was down, the hailstones gave me such cruel bangs all over the body, as if I had been pelted with tennis-balls; however, I made a shift to creep on all fours, and shelter myself, by lying flat on my face, on the lee-side of a border of lemon-thyme, but so bruised from head to foot, that I could not go abroad in ten days. Neither is this at all to be wondered at, because nature, in that country, observing the same proportion through all her operations, a hailstone is near eighteen hundred times as large as one in Europe; which I can assert upon experience, having been so curious as to weigh and measure them. + +But a more dangerous accident happened to me in the same garden, when my little nurse, believing she had put me in a secure place (which I often entreated her to do, that I might enjoy my own thoughts,) and having left my box at home, to avoid the trouble of carrying it, went to another part of the garden with her governess and some ladies of her acquaintance. While she was absent, and out of hearing, a small white spaniel that belonged to one of the chief gardeners, having got by accident into the garden, happened to range near the place where I lay: the dog, following the scent, came directly up, and taking me in his mouth, ran straight to his master wagging his tail, and set me gently on the ground. By good fortune he had been so well taught, that I was carried between his teeth without the least hurt, or even tearing my clothes. But the poor gardener, who knew me well, and had a great kindness for me, was in a terrible fright: he gently took me up in both his hands, and asked me how I did? but I was so amazed and out of breath, that I could not speak a word. In a few minutes I came to myself, and he carried me safe to my little nurse, who, by this time, had returned to the place where she left me, and was in cruel agonies when I did not appear, nor answer when she called. She severely reprimanded the gardener on account of his dog. But the thing was hushed up, and never known at court, for the girl was afraid of the queen's anger; and truly, as to myself, I thought it would not be for my reputation, that such a story should go about. + +This accident absolutely determined Glumdalclitch never to trust me abroad for the future out of her sight. I had been long afraid of this resolution, and therefore concealed from her some little unlucky adventures, that happened in those times when I was left by myself. Once a kite, hovering over the garden, made a stoop at me, and if I had not resolutely drawn my hanger, and run under a thick espalier, he would have certainly carried me away in his talons. Another time, walking to the top of a fresh mole-hill, I fell to my neck in the hole, through which that animal had cast up the earth, and coined some lie, not worth remembering, to excuse myself for spoiling my clothes. I likewise broke my right shin against the shell of a snail, which I happened to stumble over, as I was walking alone and thinking on poor England. + +I cannot tell whether I were more pleased or mortified to observe, in those solitary walks, that the smaller birds did not appear to be at all afraid of me, but would hop about within a yard's distance, looking for worms and other food, with as much indifference and security as if no creature at all were near them. I remember, a thrush had the confidence to snatch out of my hand, with his bill, a of cake that Glumdalclitch had just given me for my breakfast. When I attempted to catch any of these birds, they would boldly turn against me, endeavouring to peck my fingers, which I durst not venture within their reach; and then they would hop back unconcerned, to hunt for worms or snails, as they did before. But one day, I took a thick cudgel, and threw it with all my strength so luckily, at a linnet, that I knocked him down, and seizing him by the neck with both my hands, ran with him in triumph to my nurse. However, the bird, who had only been stunned, recovering himself gave me so many boxes with his wings, on both sides of my head and body, though I held him at arm's-length, and was out of the reach of his claws, that I was twenty times thinking to let him go. But I was soon relieved by one of our servants, who wrung off the bird's neck, and I had him next day for dinner, by the queen's command. This linnet, as near as I can remember, seemed to be somewhat larger than an English swan. + +The maids of honour often invited Glumdalclitch to their apartments, and desired she would bring me along with her, on purpose to have the pleasure of seeing and touching me. They would often strip me naked from top to toe, and lay me at full length in their bosoms; wherewith I was much disgusted because, to say the truth, a very offensive smell came from their skins; which I do not mention, or intend, to the disadvantage of those excellent ladies, for whom I have all manner of respect; but I conceive that my sense was more acute in proportion to my littleness, and that those illustrious persons were no more disagreeable to their lovers, or to each other, than people of the same quality are with us in England. And, after all, I found their natural smell was much more supportable, than when they used perfumes, under which I immediately swooned away. I cannot forget, that an intimate friend of mine in Lilliput, took the freedom in a warm day, when I had used a good deal of exercise, to complain of a strong smell about me, although I am as little faulty that way, as most of my sex: but I suppose his faculty of smelling was as nice with regard to me, as mine was to that of this people. Upon this point, I cannot forbear doing justice to the queen my mistress, and Glumdalclitch my nurse, whose persons were as sweet as those of any lady in England. + +That which gave me most uneasiness among these maids of honour (when my nurse carried me to visit then) was, to see them use me without any manner of ceremony, like a creature who had no sort of consequence: for they would strip themselves to the skin, and put on their smocks in my presence, while I was placed on their toilet, directly before their naked bodies, which I am sure to me was very far from being a tempting sight, or from giving me any other emotions than those of horror and disgust: their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured, when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than packthreads, to say nothing farther concerning the rest of their persons. Neither did they at all scruple, while I was by, to discharge what they had drank, to the quantity of at least two hogsheads, in a vessel that held above three tuns. The handsomest among these maids of honour, a pleasant, frolicsome girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her nipples, with many other tricks, wherein the reader will excuse me for not being over particular. But I was so much displeased, that I entreated Glumdalclitch to contrive some excuse for not seeing that young lady any more. + +One day, a young gentleman, who was nephew to my nurse's governess, came and pressed them both to see an execution. It was of a man, who had murdered one of that gentleman's intimate acquaintance. Glumdalclitch was prevailed on to be of the company, very much against her inclination, for she was naturally tender-hearted: and, as for myself, although I abhorred such kind of spectacles, yet my curiosity tempted me to see something that I thought must be extraordinary. The malefactor was fixed in a chair upon a scaffold erected for that purpose, and his head cut off at one blow, with a sword of about forty feet long. The veins and arteries spouted up such a prodigious quantity of blood, and so high in the air, that the great jet d'eau at Versailles was not equal to it for the time it lasted: and the head, when it fell on the scaffold floor, gave such a bounce as made me start, although I was at least half an English mile distant. + +The queen, who often used to hear me talk of my sea-voyages, and took all occasions to divert me when I was melancholy, asked me whether I understood how to handle a sail or an oar, and whether a little exercise of rowing might not be convenient for my health? I answered, that I understood both very well: for although my proper employment had been to be surgeon or doctor to the ship, yet often, upon a pinch, I was forced to work like a common mariner. But I could not see how this could be done in their country, where the smallest wherry was equal to a first-rate man of war among us; and such a boat as I could manage would never live in any of their rivers. Her majesty said, if I would contrive a boat, her own joiner should make it, and she would provide a place for me to sail in. The fellow was an ingenious workman, and by my instructions, in ten days, finished a pleasure-boat with all its tackling, able conveniently to hold eight Europeans. When it was finished, the queen was so delighted, that she ran with it in her lap to the king, who ordered it to be put into a cistern full of water, with me in it, by way of trial, where I could not manage my two sculls, or little oars, for want of room. But the queen had before contrived another project. She ordered the joiner to make a wooden trough of three hundred feet long, fifty broad, and eight deep; which, being well pitched, to prevent leaking, was placed on the floor, along the wall, in an outer room of the palace. It had a cock near the bottom to let out the water, when it began to grow stale; and two servants could easily fill it in half an hour. Here I often used to row for my own diversion, as well as that of the queen and her ladies, who thought themselves well entertained with my skill and agility. Sometimes I would put up my sail, and then my business was only to steer, while the ladies gave me a gale with their fans; and, when they were weary, some of their pages would blow my sail forward with their breath, while I showed my art by steering starboard or larboard as I pleased. When I had done, Glumdalclitch always carried back my boat into her closet, and hung it on a nail to dry. + +In this exercise I once met an accident, which had like to have cost me my life; for, one of the pages having put my boat into the trough, the governess who attended Glumdalclitch very officiously lifted me up, to place me in the boat: but I happened to slip through her fingers, and should infallibly have fallen down forty feet upon the floor, if, by the luckiest chance in the world, I had not been stopped by a corking-pin that stuck in the good gentlewoman's stomacher; the head of the pin passing between my shirt and the waistband of my breeches, and thus I was held by the middle in the air, till Glumdalclitch ran to my relief. + +Another time, one of the servants, whose office it was to fill my trough every third day with fresh water, was so careless as to let a huge frog (not perceiving it) slip out of his pail. The frog lay concealed till I was put into my boat, but then, seeing a resting- place, climbed up, and made it lean so much on one side, that I was forced to balance it with all my weight on the other, to prevent overturning. When the frog was got in, it hopped at once half the length of the boat, and then over my head, backward and forward, daubing my face and clothes with its odious slime. The largeness of its features made it appear the most deformed animal that can be conceived. However, I desired Glumdalclitch to let me deal with it alone. I banged it a good while with one of my sculls, and at last forced it to leap out of the boat. + +But the greatest danger I ever underwent in that kingdom, was from a monkey, who belonged to one of the clerks of the kitchen. Glumdalclitch had locked me up in her closet, while she went somewhere upon business, or a visit. The weather being very warm, the closet-window was left open, as well as the windows and the door of my bigger box, in which I usually lived, because of its largeness and conveniency. As I sat quietly meditating at my table, I heard something bounce in at the closet-window, and skip about from one side to the other: whereat, although I was much alarmed, yet I ventured to look out, but not stirring from my seat; and then I saw this frolicsome animal frisking and leaping up and down, till at last he came to my box, which he seemed to view with great pleasure and curiosity, peeping in at the door and every window. I retreated to the farther corner of my room; or box; but the monkey looking in at every side, put me in such a fright, that I wanted presence of mind to conceal myself under the bed, as I might easily have done. After some time spent in peeping, grinning, and chattering, he at last espied me; and reaching one of his paws in at the door, as a cat does when she plays with a mouse, although I often shifted place to avoid him, he at length seized the lappet of my coat (which being made of that country silk, was very thick and strong), and dragged me out. He took me up in his right fore-foot and held me as a nurse does a child she is going to suckle, just as I have seen the same sort of creature do with a kitten in Europe; and when I offered to struggle he squeezed me so hard, that I thought it more prudent to submit. I have good reason to believe, that he took me for a young one of his own species, by his often stroking my face very gently with his other paw. In these diversions he was interrupted by a noise at the closet door, as if somebody were opening it: whereupon he suddenly leaped up to the window at which he had come in, and thence upon the leads and gutters, walking upon three legs, and holding me in the fourth, till he clambered up to a roof that was next to ours. I heard Glumdalclitch give a shriek at the moment he was carrying me out. The poor girl was almost distracted: that quarter of the palace was all in an uproar; the servants ran for ladders; the monkey was seen by hundreds in the court, sitting upon the ridge of a building, holding me like a baby in one of his forepaws, and feeding me with the other, by cramming into my mouth some victuals he had squeezed out of the bag on one side of his chaps, and patting me when I would not eat; whereat many of the rabble below could not forbear laughing; neither do I think they justly ought to be blamed, for, without question, the sight was ridiculous enough to every body but myself. Some of the people threw up stones, hoping to drive the monkey down; but this was strictly forbidden, or else, very probably, my brains had been dashed out. + +The ladders were now applied, and mounted by several men; which the monkey observing, and finding himself almost encompassed, not being able to make speed enough with his three legs, let me drop on a ridge tile, and made his escape. Here I sat for some time, five hundred yards from the ground, expecting every moment to be blown down by the wind, or to fall by my own giddiness, and come tumbling over and over from the ridge to the eaves; but an honest lad, one of my nurse's footmen, climbed up, and putting me into his breeches pocket, brought me down safe. + +I was almost choked with the filthy stuff the monkey had crammed down my throat: but my dear little nurse picked it out of my mouth with a small needle, and then I fell a-vomiting, which gave me great relief. Yet I was so weak and bruised in the sides with the squeezes given me by this odious animal, that I was forced to keep my bed a fortnight. The king, queen, and all the court, sent every day to inquire after my health; and her majesty made me several visits during my sickness. The monkey was killed, and an order made, that no such animal should be kept about the palace. + +When I attended the king after my recovery, to return him thanks for his favours, he was pleased to rally me a good deal upon this adventure. He asked me, "what my thoughts and speculations were, while I lay in the monkey's paw; how I liked the victuals he gave me; his manner of feeding; and whether the fresh air on the roof had sharpened my stomach." He desired to know, "what I would have done upon such an occasion in my own country." I told his majesty, "that in Europe we had no monkeys, except such as were brought for curiosity from other places, and so small, that I could deal with a dozen of them together, if they presumed to attack me. And as for that monstrous animal with whom I was so lately engaged (it was indeed as large as an elephant), if my fears had suffered me to think so far as to make use of my hanger," (looking fiercely, and clapping my hand on the hilt, as I spoke) "when he poked his paw into my chamber, perhaps I should have given him such a wound, as would have made him glad to withdraw it with more haste than he put it in." This I delivered in a firm tone, like a person who was jealous lest his courage should be called in question. However, my speech produced nothing else beside a laud laughter, which all the respect due to his majesty from those about him could not make them contain. This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavour to do himself honour among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him. And yet I have seen the moral of my own behaviour very frequent in England since my return; where a little contemptible varlet, without the least title to birth, person, wit, or common sense, shall presume to look with importance, and put himself upon a foot with the greatest persons of the kingdom. + +I was every day furnishing the court with some ridiculous story: and Glumdalclitch, although she loved me to excess, yet was arch enough to inform the queen, whenever I committed any folly that she thought would be diverting to her majesty. The girl, who had been out of order, was carried by her governess to take the air about an hour's distance, or thirty miles from town. They alighted out of the coach near a small foot-path in a field, and Glumdalclitch setting down my travelling box, I went out of it to walk. There was a cow-dung in the path, and I must need try my activity by attempting to leap over it. I took a run, but unfortunately jumped short, and found myself just in the middle up to my knees. I waded through with some difficulty, and one of the footmen wiped me as clean as he could with his handkerchief, for I was filthily bemired; and my nurse confined me to my box, till we returned home; where the queen was soon informed of what had passed, and the footmen spread it about the court: so that all the mirth for some days was at my expense. + +CHAPTER VI. + +[Several contrivances of the author to please the king and queen. He shows his skill in music. The king inquires into the state of England, which the author relates to him. The king's observations thereon.] + +I used to attend the king's levee once or twice a week, and had often seen him under the barber's hand, which indeed was at first very terrible to behold; for the razor was almost twice as long as an ordinary scythe. His majesty, according to the custom of the country, was only shaved twice a-week. I once prevailed on the barber to give me some of the suds or lather, out of which I picked forty or fifty of the strongest stumps of hair. I then took a piece of fine wood, and cut it like the back of a comb, making several holes in it at equal distances with as small a needle as I could get from Glumdalclitch. I fixed in the stumps so artificially, scraping and sloping them with my knife toward the points, that I made a very tolerable comb; which was a seasonable supply, my own being so much broken in the teeth, that it was almost useless: neither did I know any artist in that country so nice and exact, as would undertake to make me another. + +And this puts me in mind of an amusement, wherein I spent many of my leisure hours. I desired the queen's woman to save for me the combings of her majesty's hair, whereof in time I got a good quantity; and consulting with my friend the cabinet-maker, who had received general orders to do little jobs for me, I directed him to make two chair-frames, no larger than those I had in my box, and to bore little holes with a fine awl, round those parts where I designed the backs and seats; through these holes I wove the strongest hairs I could pick out, just after the manner of cane chairs in England. When they were finished, I made a present of them to her majesty; who kept them in her cabinet, and used to show them for curiosities, as indeed they were the wonder of every one that beheld them. The queen would have me sit upon one of these chairs, but I absolutely refused to obey her, protesting I would rather die than place a dishonourable part of my body on those precious hairs, that once adorned her majesty's head. Of these hairs (as I had always a mechanical genius) I likewise made a neat little purse, about five feet long, with her majesty's name deciphered in gold letters, which I gave to Glumdalclitch, by the queen's consent. To say the truth, it was more for show than use, being not of strength to bear the weight of the larger coins, and therefore she kept nothing in it but some little toys that girls are fond of. + +The king, who delighted in music, had frequent concerts at court, to which I was sometimes carried, and set in my box on a table to hear them: but the noise was so great that I could hardly distinguish the tunes. I am confident that all the drums and trumpets of a royal army, beating and sounding together just at your ears, could not equal it. My practice was to have my box removed from the place where the performers sat, as far as I could, then to shut the doors and windows of it, and draw the window curtains; after which I found their music not disagreeable. + +I had learned in my youth to play a little upon the spinet. Glumdalclitch kept one in her chamber, and a master attended twice a-week to teach her: I called it a spinet, because it somewhat resembled that instrument, and was played upon in the same manner. A fancy came into my head, that I would entertain the king and queen with an English tune upon this instrument. But this appeared extremely difficult: for the spinet was near sixty feet long, each key being almost a foot wide, so that with my arms extended I could not reach to above five keys, and to press them down required a good smart stroke with my fist, which would be too great a labour, and to no purpose. The method I contrived was this: I prepared two round sticks, about the bigness of common cudgels; they were thicker at one end than the other, and I covered the thicker ends with pieces of a mouse's skin, that by rapping on them I might neither damage the tops of the keys nor interrupt the sound. Before the spinet a bench was placed, about four feet below the keys, and I was put upon the bench. I ran sideling upon it, that way and this, as fast as I could, banging the proper keys with my two sticks, and made a shift to play a jig, to the great satisfaction of both their majesties; but it was the most violent exercise I ever underwent; and yet I could not strike above sixteen keys, nor consequently play the bass and treble together, as other artists do; which was a great disadvantage to my performance. + +The king, who, as I before observed, was a prince of excellent understanding, would frequently order that I should be brought in my box, and set upon the table in his closet: he would then command me to bring one of my chairs out of the box, and sit down within three yards distance upon the top of the cabinet, which brought me almost to a level with his face. In this manner I had several conversations with him. I one day took the freedom to tell his majesty, "that the contempt he discovered towards Europe, and the rest of the world, did not seem answerable to those excellent qualities of mind that he was master of; that reason did not extend itself with the bulk of the body; on the contrary, we observed in our country, that the tallest persons were usually the least provided with it; that among other animals, bees and ants had the reputation of more industry, art, and sagacity, than many of the larger kinds; and that, as inconsiderable as he took me to be, I hoped I might live to do his majesty some signal service." The king heard me with attention, and began to conceive a much better opinion of me than he had ever before. He desired "I would give him as exact an account of the government of England as I possibly could; because, as fond as princes commonly are of their own customs (for so he conjectured of other monarchs, by my former discourses), he should be glad to hear of any thing that might deserve imitation." + +Imagine with thyself, courteous reader, how often I then wished for the tongue of Demosthenes or Cicero, that might have enabled me to celebrate the praise of my own dear native country in a style equal to its merits and felicity. + +I began my discourse by informing his majesty, that our dominions consisted of two islands, which composed three mighty kingdoms, under one sovereign, beside our plantations in America. I dwelt long upon the fertility of our soil, and the temperature of our climate. I then spoke at large upon the constitution of an English parliament; partly made up of an illustrious body called the House of Peers; persons of the noblest blood, and of the most ancient and ample patrimonies. I described that extraordinary care always taken of their education in arts and arms, to qualify them for being counsellors both to the king and kingdom; to have a share in the legislature; to be members of the highest court of judicature, whence there can be no appeal; and to be champions always ready for the defence of their prince and country, by their valour, conduct, and fidelity. That these were the ornament and bulwark of the kingdom, worthy followers of their most renowned ancestors, whose honour had been the reward of their virtue, from which their posterity were never once known to degenerate. To these were joined several holy persons, as part of that assembly, under the title of bishops, whose peculiar business is to take care of religion, and of those who instruct the people therein. These were searched and sought out through the whole nation, by the prince and his wisest counsellors, among such of the priesthood as were most deservedly distinguished by the sanctity of their lives, and the depth of their erudition; who were indeed the spiritual fathers of the clergy and the people. + +That the other part of the parliament consisted of an assembly called the House of Commons, who were all principal gentlemen, freely picked and culled out by the people themselves, for their great abilities and love of their country, to represent the wisdom of the whole nation. And that these two bodies made up the most august assembly in Europe; to whom, in conjunction with the prince, the whole legislature is committed. + +I then descended to the courts of justice; over which the judges, those venerable sages and interpreters of the law, presided, for determining the disputed rights and properties of men, as well as for the punishment of vice and protection of innocence. I mentioned the prudent management of our treasury; the valour and achievements of our forces, by sea and land. I computed the number of our people, by reckoning how many millions there might be of each religious sect, or political party among us. I did not omit even our sports and pastimes, or any other particular which I thought might redound to the honour of my country. And I finished all with a brief historical account of affairs and events in England for about a hundred years past. + +This conversation was not ended under five audiences, each of several hours; and the king heard the whole with great attention, frequently taking notes of what I spoke, as well as memorandums of what questions he intended to ask me. + +When I had put an end to these long discources, his majesty, in a sixth audience, consulting his notes, proposed many doubts, queries, and objections, upon every article. He asked, "What methods were used to cultivate the minds and bodies of our young nobility, and in what kind of business they commonly spent the first and teachable parts of their lives? What course was taken to supply that assembly, when any noble family became extinct? What qualifications were necessary in those who are to be created new lords: whether the humour of the prince, a sum of money to a court lady, or a design of strengthening a party opposite to the public interest, ever happened to be the motive in those advancements? What share of knowledge these lords had in the laws of their country, and how they came by it, so as to enable them to decide the properties of their fellow-subjects in the last resort? Whether they were always so free from avarice, partialities, or want, that a bribe, or some other sinister view, could have no place among them? Whether those holy lords I spoke of were always promoted to that rank upon account of their knowledge in religious matters, and the sanctity of their lives; had never been compliers with the times, while they were common priests; or slavish prostitute chaplains to some nobleman, whose opinions they continued servilely to follow, after they were admitted into that assembly?" + +He then desired to know, "What arts were practised in electing those whom I called commoners: whether a stranger, with a strong purse, might not influence the vulgar voters to choose him before their own landlord, or the most considerable gentleman in the neighbourhood? How it came to pass, that people were so violently bent upon getting into this assembly, which I allowed to be a great trouble and expense, often to the ruin of their families, without any salary or pension? because this appeared such an exalted strain of virtue and public spirit, that his majesty seemed to doubt it might possibly not be always sincere." And he desired to know, "Whether such zealous gentlemen could have any views of refunding themselves for the charges and trouble they were at by sacrificing the public good to the designs of a weak and vicious prince, in conjunction with a corrupted ministry?" He multiplied his questions, and sifted me thoroughly upon every part of this head, proposing numberless inquiries and objections, which I think it not prudent or convenient to repeat. + +Upon what I said in relation to our courts of justice, his majesty desired to be satisfied in several points: and this I was the better able to do, having been formerly almost ruined by a long suit in chancery, which was decreed for me with costs. He asked, "What time was usually spent in determining between right and wrong, and what degree of expense? Whether advocates and orators had liberty to plead in causes manifestly known to be unjust, vexatious, or oppressive? Whether party, in religion or politics, were observed to be of any weight in the scale of justice? Whether those pleading orators were persons educated in the general knowledge of equity, or only in provincial, national, and other local customs? Whether they or their judges had any part in penning those laws, which they assumed the liberty of interpreting, and glossing upon at their pleasure? Whether they had ever, at different times, pleaded for and against the same cause, and cited precedents to prove contrary opinions? Whether they were a rich or a poor corporation? Whether they received any pecuniary reward for pleading, or delivering their opinions? And particularly, whether they were ever admitted as members in the lower senate?" + +He fell next upon the management of our treasury; and said, "he thought my memory had failed me, because I computed our taxes at about five or six millions a-year, and when I came to mention the issues, he found they sometimes amounted to more than double; for the notes he had taken were very particular in this point, because he hoped, as he told me, that the knowledge of our conduct might be useful to him, and he could not be deceived in his calculations. But, if what I told him were true, he was still at a loss how a kingdom could run out of its estate, like a private person." He asked me, "who were our creditors; and where we found money to pay them?" He wondered to hear me talk of such chargeable and expensive wars; "that certainly we must be a quarrelsome people, or live among very bad neighbours, and that our generals must needs be richer than our kings." He asked, what business we had out of our own islands, unless upon the score of trade, or treaty, or to defend the coasts with our fleet?" Above all, he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary standing army, in the midst of peace, and among a free people. He said, "if we were governed by our own consent, in the persons of our representatives, he could not imagine of whom we were afraid, or against whom we were to fight; and would hear my opinion, whether a private man's house might not be better defended by himself, his children, and family, than by half-a-dozen rascals, picked up at a venture in the streets for small wages, who might get a hundred times more by cutting their throats?" + +He laughed at my "odd kind of arithmetic," as he was pleased to call it, "in reckoning the numbers of our people, by a computation drawn from the several sects among us, in religion and politics." He said, "he knew no reason why those, who entertain opinions prejudicial to the public, should be obliged to change, or should not be obliged to conceal them. And as it was tyranny in any government to require the first, so it was weakness not to enforce the second: for a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to vend them about for cordials." + +He observed, "that among the diversions of our nobility and gentry, I had mentioned gaming: he desired to know at what age this entertainment was usually taken up, and when it was laid down; how much of their time it employed; whether it ever went so high as to affect their fortunes; whether mean, vicious people, by their dexterity in that art, might not arrive at great riches, and sometimes keep our very nobles in dependence, as well as habituate them to vile companions, wholly take them from the improvement of their minds, and force them, by the losses they received, to learn and practise that infamous dexterity upon others?" + +He was perfectly astonished with the historical account gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting "it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce." + +His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: "My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself," continued the king, "who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." + +CHAPTER VII. + +[The author's love of his country. He makes a proposal of much advantage to the king, which is rejected. The king's great ignorance in politics. The learning of that country very imperfect and confined. The laws, and military affairs, and parties in the state.] + +Nothing but an extreme love of truth could have hindered me from concealing this part of my story. It was in vain to discover my resentments, which were always turned into ridicule; and I was forced to rest with patience, while my noble and beloved country was so injuriously treated. I am as heartily sorry as any of my readers can possibly be, that such an occasion was given: but this prince happened to be so curious and inquisitive upon every particular, that it could not consist either with gratitude or good manners, to refuse giving him what satisfaction I was able. Yet thus much I may be allowed to say in my own vindication, that I artfully eluded many of his questions, and gave to every point a more favourable turn, by many degrees, than the strictness of truth would allow. For I have always borne that laudable partiality to my own country, which Dionysius Halicarnassensis, with so much justice, recommends to an historian: I would hide the frailties and deformities of my political mother, and place her virtues and beauties in the most advantageous light. This was my sincere endeavour in those many discourses I had with that monarch, although it unfortunately failed of success. + +But great allowances should be given to a king, who lives wholly secluded from the rest of the world, and must therefore be altogether unacquainted with the manners and customs that most prevail in other nations: the want of which knowledge will ever produce many prejudices, and a certain narrowness of thinking, from which we, and the politer countries of Europe, are wholly exempted. And it would be hard indeed, if so remote a prince's notions of virtue and vice were to be offered as a standard for all mankind. + +To confirm what I have now said, and further to show the miserable effects of a confined education, I shall here insert a passage, which will hardly obtain belief. In hopes to ingratiate myself further into his majesty's favour, I told him of "an invention, discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder, into a heap of which, the smallest spark of fire falling, would kindle the whole in a moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up in the air together, with a noise and agitation greater than thunder. That a proper quantity of this powder rammed into a hollow tube of brass or iron, according to its bigness, would drive a ball of iron or lead, with such violence and speed, as nothing was able to sustain its force. That the largest balls thus discharged, would not only destroy whole ranks of an army at once, but batter the strongest walls to the ground, sink down ships, with a thousand men in each, to the bottom of the sea, and when linked together by a chain, would cut through masts and rigging, divide hundreds of bodies in the middle, and lay all waste before them. That we often put this powder into large hollow balls of iron, and discharged them by an engine into some city we were besieging, which would rip up the pavements, tear the houses to pieces, burst and throw splinters on every side, dashing out the brains of all who came near. That I knew the ingredients very well, which were cheap and common; I understood the manner of compounding them, and could direct his workmen how to make those tubes, of a size proportionable to all other things in his majesty's kingdom, and the largest need not be above a hundred feet long; twenty or thirty of which tubes, charged with the proper quantity of powder and balls, would batter down the walls of the strongest town in his dominions in a few hours, or destroy the whole metropolis, if ever it should pretend to dispute his absolute commands." This I humbly offered to his majesty, as a small tribute of acknowledgment, in turn for so many marks that I had received, of his royal favour and protection. + +The king was struck with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. "He was amazed, how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I" (these were his expressions) "could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines; whereof," he said, "some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver. As for himself, he protested, that although few things delighted him so much as new discoveries in art or in nature, yet he would rather lose half his kingdom, than be privy to such a secret; which he commanded me, as I valued any life, never to mention any more." + +A strange effect of narrow principles and views! that a prince possessed of every quality which procures veneration, love, and esteem; of strong parts, great wisdom, and profound learning, endowed with admirable talents, and almost adored by his subjects, should, from a nice, unnecessary scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no conception, let slip an opportunity put into his hands that would have made him absolute master of the lives, the liberties, and the fortunes of his people! Neither do I say this, with the least intention to detract from the many virtues of that excellent king, whose character, I am sensible, will, on this account, be very much lessened in the opinion of an English reader: but I take this defect among them to have risen from their ignorance, by not having hitherto reduced politics into a science, as the more acute wits of Europe have done. For, I remember very well, in a discourse one day with the king, when I happened to say, "there were several thousand books among us written upon the art of government," it gave him (directly contrary to my intention) a very mean opinion of our understandings. He professed both to abominate and despise all mystery, refinement, and intrigue, either in a prince or a minister. He could not tell what I meant by secrets of state, where an enemy, or some rival nation, were not in the case. He confined the knowledge of governing within very narrow bounds, to common sense and reason, to justice and lenity, to the speedy determination of civil and criminal causes; with some other obvious topics, which are not worth considering. And he gave it for his opinion, "that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together." + +The learning of this people is very defective, consisting only in morality, history, poetry, and mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in life, to the improvement of agriculture, and all mechanical arts; so that among us, it would be little esteemed. And as to ideas, entities, abstractions, and transcendentals, I could never drive the least conception into their heads. + +No law in that country must exceed in words the number of letters in their alphabet, which consists only of two and twenty. But indeed few of them extend even to that length. They are expressed in the most plain and simple terms, wherein those people are not mercurial enough to discover above one interpretation: and to write a comment upon any law, is a capital crime. As to the decision of civil causes, or proceedings against criminals, their precedents are so few, that they have little reason to boast of any extraordinary skill in either. + +They have had the art of printing, as well as the Chinese, time out of mind: but their libraries are not very large; for that of the king, which is reckoned the largest, does not amount to above a thousand volumes, placed in a gallery of twelve hundred feet long, whence I had liberty to borrow what books I pleased. The queen's joiner had contrived in one of Glumdalclitch's rooms, a kind of wooden machine five-and-twenty feet high, formed like a standing ladder; the steps were each fifty feet long. It was indeed a moveable pair of stairs, the lowest end placed at ten feet distance from the wall of the chamber. The book I had a mind to read, was put up leaning against the wall: I first mounted to the upper step of the ladder, and turning my face towards the book, began at the top of the page, and so walking to the right and left about eight or ten paces, according to the length of the lines, till I had gotten a little below the level of mine eyes, and then descending gradually till I came to the bottom: after which I mounted again, and began the other page in the same manner, and so turned over the leaf, which I could easily do with both my hands, for it was as thick and stiff as a pasteboard, and in the largest folios not above eighteen or twenty feet long. + +Their style is clear, masculine, and smooth, but not florid; for they avoid nothing more than multiplying unnecessary words, or using various expressions. I have perused many of their books, especially those in history and morality. Among the rest, I was much diverted with a little old treatise, which always lay in Glumdalclitch's bed chamber, and belonged to her governess, a grave elderly gentlewoman, who dealt in writings of morality and devotion. The book treats of the weakness of human kind, and is in little esteem, except among the women and the vulgar. However, I was curious to see what an author of that country could say upon such a subject. This writer went through all the usual topics of European moralists, showing "how diminutive, contemptible, and helpless an animal was man in his own nature; how unable to defend himself from inclemencies of the air, or the fury of wild beasts: how much he was excelled by one creature in strength, by another in speed, by a third in foresight, by a fourth in industry." He added, "that nature was degenerated in these latter declining ages of the world, and could now produce only small abortive births, in comparison of those in ancient times." He said "it was very reasonable to think, not only that the species of men were originally much larger, but also that there must have been giants in former ages; which, as it is asserted by history and tradition, so it has been confirmed by huge bones and skulls, casually dug up in several parts of the kingdom, far exceeding the common dwindled race of men in our days." He argued, "that the very laws of nature absolutely required we should have been made, in the beginning of a size more large and robust; not so liable to destruction from every little accident, of a tile falling from a house, or a stone cast from the hand of a boy, or being drowned in a little brook." From this way of reasoning, the author drew several moral applications, useful in the conduct of life, but needless here to repeat. For my own part, I could not avoid reflecting how universally this talent was spread, of drawing lectures in morality, or indeed rather matter of discontent and repining, from the quarrels we raise with nature. And I believe, upon a strict inquiry, those quarrels might be shown as ill-grounded among us as they are among that people. + +As to their military affairs, they boast that the king's army consists of a hundred and seventy-six thousand foot, and thirty-two thousand horse: if that may be called an army, which is made up of tradesmen in the several cities, and farmers in the country, whose commanders are only the nobility and gentry, without pay or reward. They are indeed perfect enough in their exercises, and under very good discipline, wherein I saw no great merit; for how should it be otherwise, where every farmer is under the command of his own landlord, and every citizen under that of the principal men in his own city, chosen after the manner of Venice, by ballot? + +I have often seen the militia of Lorbrulgrud drawn out to exercise, in a great field near the city of twenty miles square. They were in all not above twenty-five thousand foot, and six thousand horse; but it was impossible for me to compute their number, considering the space of ground they took up. A cavalier, mounted on a large steed, might be about ninety feet high. I have seen this whole body of horse, upon a word of command, draw their swords at once, and brandish them in the air. Imagination can figure nothing so grand, so surprising, and so astonishing! it looked as if ten thousand flashes of lightning were darting at the same time from every quarter of the sky. + +I was curious to know how this prince, to whose dominions there is no access from any other country, came to think of armies, or to teach his people the practice of military discipline. But I was soon informed, both by conversation and reading their histories; for, in the course of many ages, they have been troubled with the same disease to which the whole race of mankind is subject; the nobility often contending for power, the people for liberty, and the king for absolute dominion. All which, however happily tempered by the laws of that kingdom, have been sometimes violated by each of the three parties, and have more than once occasioned civil wars; the last whereof was happily put an end to by this prince's grand-father, in a general composition; and the militia, then settled with common consent, has been ever since kept in the strictest duty. + +CHAPTER VIII. + +[The king and queen make a progress to the frontiers. The author attends them. The manner in which he leaves the country very particularly related. He returns to England.] + +I had always a strong impulse that I should some time recover my liberty, though it was impossible to conjecture by what means, or to form any project with the least hope of succeeding. The ship in which I sailed, was the first ever known to be driven within sight of that coast, and the king had given strict orders, that if at any time another appeared, it should be taken ashore, and with all its crew and passengers brought in a tumbril to Lorbrulgrud. He was strongly bent to get me a woman of my own size, by whom I might propagate the breed: but I think I should rather have died than undergone the disgrace of leaving a posterity to be kept in cages, like tame canary-birds, and perhaps, in time, sold about the kingdom, to persons of quality, for curiosities. I was indeed treated with much kindness: I was the favourite of a great king and queen, and the delight of the whole court; but it was upon such a foot as ill became the dignity of humankind. I could never forget those domestic pledges I had left behind me. I wanted to be among people, with whom I could converse upon even terms, and walk about the streets and fields without being afraid of being trod to death like a frog or a young puppy. But my deliverance came sooner than I expected, and in a manner not very common; the whole story and circumstances of which I shall faithfully relate. + +I had now been two years in this country; and about the beginning of the third, Glumdalclitch and I attended the king and queen, in a progress to the south coast of the kingdom. I was carried, as usual, in my travelling-box, which as I have already described, was a very convenient closet, of twelve feet wide. And I had ordered a hammock to be fixed, by silken ropes from the four corners at the top, to break the jolts, when a servant carried me before him on horseback, as I sometimes desired; and would often sleep in my hammock, while we were upon the road. On the roof of my closet, not directly over the middle of the hammock, I ordered the joiner to cut out a hole of a foot square, to give me air in hot weather, as I slept; which hole I shut at pleasure with a board that drew backward and forward through a groove. + +When we came to our journey's end, the king thought proper to pass a few days at a palace he has near Flanflasnic, a city within eighteen English miles of the seaside. Glumdalclitch and I were much fatigued: I had gotten a small cold, but the poor girl was so ill as to be confined to her chamber. I longed to see the ocean, which must be the only scene of my escape, if ever it should happen. I pretended to be worse than I really was, and desired leave to take the fresh air of the sea, with a page, whom I was very fond of, and who had sometimes been trusted with me. I shall never forget with what unwillingness Glumdalclitch consented, nor the strict charge she gave the page to be careful of me, bursting at the same time into a flood of tears, as if she had some forboding of what was to happen. The boy took me out in my box, about half an hours walk from the palace, towards the rocks on the sea-shore. I ordered him to set me down, and lifting up one of my sashes, cast many a wistful melancholy look towards the sea. I found myself not very well, and told the page that I had a mind to take a nap in my hammock, which I hoped would do me good. I got in, and the boy shut the window close down, to keep out the cold. I soon fell asleep, and all I can conjecture is, while I slept, the page, thinking no danger could happen, went among the rocks to look for birds' eggs, having before observed him from my window searching about, and picking up one or two in the clefts. Be that as it will, I found myself suddenly awaked with a violent pull upon the ring, which was fastened at the top of my box for the conveniency of carriage. I felt my box raised very high in the air, and then borne forward with prodigious speed. The first jolt had like to have shaken me out of my hammock, but afterward the motion was easy enough. I called out several times, as loud as I could raise my voice, but all to no purpose. I looked towards my windows, and could see nothing but the clouds and sky. I heard a noise just over my head, like the clapping of wings, and then began to perceive the woful condition I was in; that some eagle had got the ring of my box in his beak, with an intent to let it fall on a rock, like a tortoise in a shell, and then pick out my body, and devour it: for the sagacity and smell of this bird enables him to discover his quarry at a great distance, though better concealed than I could be within a two-inch board. + +In a little time, I observed the noise and flutter of wings to increase very fast, and my box was tossed up and down, like a sign in a windy day. I heard several bangs or buffets, as I thought given to the eagle (for such I am certain it must have been that held the ring of my box in his beak), and then, all on a sudden, felt myself falling perpendicularly down, for above a minute, but with such incredible swiftness, that I almost lost my breath. My fall was stopped by a terrible squash, that sounded louder to my ears than the cataract of Niagara; after which, I was quite in the dark for another minute, and then my box began to rise so high, that I could see light from the tops of the windows. I now perceived I was fallen into the sea. My box, by the weight of my body, the goods that were in, and the broad plates of iron fixed for strength at the four corners of the top and bottom, floated about five feet deep in water. I did then, and do now suppose, that the eagle which flew away with my box was pursued by two or three others, and forced to let me drop, while he defended himself against the rest, who hoped to share in the prey. The plates of iron fastened at the bottom of the box (for those were the strongest) preserved the balance while it fell, and hindered it from being broken on the surface of the water. Every joint of it was well grooved; and the door did not move on hinges, but up and down like a sash, which kept my closet so tight that very little water came in. I got with much difficulty out of my hammock, having first ventured to draw back the slip-board on the roof already mentioned, contrived on purpose to let in air, for want of which I found myself almost stifled. + +How often did I then wish myself with my dear Glumdalclitch, from whom one single hour had so far divided me! And I may say with truth, that in the midst of my own misfortunes I could not forbear lamenting my poor nurse, the grief she would suffer for my loss, the displeasure of the queen, and the ruin of her fortune. Perhaps many travellers have not been under greater difficulties and distress than I was at this juncture, expecting every moment to see my box dashed to pieces, or at least overset by the first violent blast, or rising wave. A breach in one single pane of glass would have been immediate death: nor could any thing have preserved the windows, but the strong lattice wires placed on the outside, against accidents in travelling. I saw the water ooze in at several crannies, although the leaks were not considerable, and I endeavoured to stop them as well as I could. I was not able to lift up the roof of my closet, which otherwise I certainly should have done, and sat on the top of it; where I might at least preserve myself some hours longer, than by being shut up (as I may call it) in the hold. Or if I escaped these dangers for a day or two, what could I expect but a miserable death of cold and hunger? I was four hours under these circumstances, expecting, and indeed wishing, every moment to be my last. + +I have already told the reader that there were two strong staples fixed upon that side of my box which had no window, and into which the servant, who used to carry me on horseback, would put a leathern belt, and buckle it about his waist. Being in this disconsolate state, I heard, or at least thought I heard, some kind of grating noise on that side of my box where the staples were fixed; and soon after I began to fancy that the box was pulled or towed along the sea; for I now and then felt a sort of tugging, which made the waves rise near the tops of my windows, leaving me almost in the dark. This gave me some faint hopes of relief, although I was not able to imagine how it could be brought about. I ventured to unscrew one of my chairs, which were always fastened to the floor; and having made a hard shift to screw it down again, directly under the slipping-board that I had lately opened, I mounted on the chair, and putting my mouth as near as I could to the hole, I called for help in a loud voice, and in all the languages I understood. I then fastened my handkerchief to a stick I usually carried, and thrusting it up the hole, waved it several times in the air, that if any boat or ship were near, the seamen might conjecture some unhappy mortal to be shut up in the box. + +I found no effect from all I could do, but plainly perceived my closet to be moved along; and in the space of an hour, or better, that side of the box where the staples were, and had no windows, struck against something that was hard. I apprehended it to be a rock, and found myself tossed more than ever. I plainly heard a noise upon the cover of my closet, like that of a cable, and the grating of it as it passed through the ring. I then found myself hoisted up, by degrees, at least three feet higher than I was before. Whereupon I again thrust up my stick and handkerchief, calling for help till I was almost hoarse. In return to which, I heard a great shout repeated three times, giving me such transports of joy as are not to be conceived but by those who feel them. I now heard a trampling over my head, and somebody calling through the hole with a loud voice, in the English tongue, "If there be any body below, let them speak." I answered, "I was an Englishman, drawn by ill fortune into the greatest calamity that ever any creature underwent, and begged, by all that was moving, to be delivered out of the dungeon I was in." The voice replied, "I was safe, for my box was fastened to their ship; and the carpenter should immediately come and saw a hole in the cover, large enough to pull me out." I answered, "that was needless, and would take up too much time; for there was no more to be done, but let one of the crew put his finger into the ring, and take the box out of the sea into the ship, and so into the captain's cabin." Some of them, upon hearing me talk so wildly, thought I was mad: others laughed; for indeed it never came into my head, that I was now got among people of my own stature and strength. The carpenter came, and in a few minutes sawed a passage about four feet square, then let down a small ladder, upon which I mounted, and thence was taken into the ship in a very weak condition. + +The sailors were all in amazement, and asked me a thousand questions, which I had no inclination to answer. I was equally confounded at the sight of so many pigmies, for such I took them to be, after having so long accustomed mine eyes to the monstrous objects I had left. But the captain, Mr. Thomas Wilcocks, an honest worthy Shropshire man, observing I was ready to faint, took me into his cabin, gave me a cordial to comfort me, and made me turn in upon his own bed, advising me to take a little rest, of which I had great need. Before I went to sleep, I gave him to understand that I had some valuable furniture in my box, too good to be lost: a fine hammock, a handsome field-bed, two chairs, a table, and a cabinet; that my closet was hung on all sides, or rather quilted, with silk and cotton; that if he would let one of the crew bring my closet into his cabin, I would open it there before him, and show him my goods. The captain, hearing me utter these absurdities, concluded I was raving; however (I suppose to pacify me) he promised to give order as I desired, and going upon deck, sent some of his men down into my closet, whence (as I afterwards found) they drew up all my goods, and stripped off the quilting; but the chairs, cabinet, and bedstead, being screwed to the floor, were much damaged by the ignorance of the seamen, who tore them up by force. Then they knocked off some of the boards for the use of the ship, and when they had got all they had a mind for, let the hull drop into the sea, which by reason of many breaches made in the bottom and sides, sunk to rights. And, indeed, I was glad not to have been a spectator of the havoc they made, because I am confident it would have sensibly touched me, by bringing former passages into my mind, which I would rather have forgot. + +I slept some hours, but perpetually disturbed with dreams of the place I had left, and the dangers I had escaped. However, upon waking, I found myself much recovered. It was now about eight o'clock at night, and the captain ordered supper immediately, thinking I had already fasted too long. He entertained me with great kindness, observing me not to look wildly, or talk inconsistently: and, when we were left alone, desired I would give him a relation of my travels, and by what accident I came to be set adrift, in that monstrous wooden chest. He said "that about twelve o'clock at noon, as he was looking through his glass, he spied it at a distance, and thought it was a sail, which he had a mind to make, being not much out of his course, in hopes of buying some biscuit, his own beginning to fall short. That upon coming nearer, and finding his error, he sent out his long-boat to discover what it was; that his men came back in a fright, swearing they had seen a swimming house. That he laughed at their folly, and went himself in the boat, ordering his men to take a strong cable along with them. That the weather being calm, he rowed round me several times, observed my windows and wire lattices that defended them. That he discovered two staples upon one side, which was all of boards, without any passage for light. He then commanded his men to row up to that side, and fastening a cable to one of the staples, ordered them to tow my chest, as they called it, toward the ship. When it was there, he gave directions to fasten another cable to the ring fixed in the cover, and to raise up my chest with pulleys, which all the sailors were not able to do above two or three feet." He said, "they saw my stick and handkerchief thrust out of the hole, and concluded that some unhappy man must be shut up in the cavity." I asked, "whether he or the crew had seen any prodigious birds in the air, about the time he first discovered me." To which he answered, that discoursing this matter with the sailors while I was asleep, one of them said, he had observed three eagles flying towards the north, but remarked nothing of their being larger than the usual size:" which I suppose must be imputed to the great height they were at; and he could not guess the reason of my question. I then asked the captain, "how far he reckoned we might be from land?" He said, "by the best computation he could make, we were at least a hundred leagues." I assured him, "that he must be mistaken by almost half, for I had not left the country whence I came above two hours before I dropped into the sea." Whereupon he began again to think that my brain was disturbed, of which he gave me a hint, and advised me to go to bed in a cabin he had provided. I assured him, "I was well refreshed with his good entertainment and company, and as much in my senses as ever I was in my life." He then grew serious, and desired to ask me freely, "whether I were not troubled in my mind by the consciousness of some enormous crime, for which I was punished, at the command of some prince, by exposing me in that chest; as great criminals, in other countries, have been forced to sea in a leaky vessel, without provisions: for although he should be sorry to have taken so ill a man into his ship, yet he would engage his word to set me safe ashore, in the first port where we arrived." He added, "that his suspicions were much increased by some very absurd speeches I had delivered at first to his sailors, and afterwards to himself, in relation to my closet or chest, as well as by my odd looks and behaviour while I was at supper." + +I begged his patience to hear me tell my story, which I faithfully did, from the last time I left England, to the moment he first discovered me. And, as truth always forces its way into rational minds, so this honest worthy gentleman, who had some tincture of learning, and very good sense, was immediately convinced of my candour and veracity. But further to confirm all I had said, I entreated him to give order that my cabinet should be brought, of which I had the key in my pocket; for he had already informed me how the seamen disposed of my closet. I opened it in his own presence, and showed him the small collection of rarities I made in the country from which I had been so strangely delivered. There was the comb I had contrived out of the stumps of the king's beard, and another of the same materials, but fixed into a paring of her majesty's thumb-nail, which served for the back. There was a collection of needles and pins, from a foot to half a yard long; four wasp stings, like joiner's tacks; some combings of the queen's hair; a gold ring, which one day she made me a present of, in a most obliging manner, taking it from her little finger, and throwing it over my head like a collar. I desired the captain would please to accept this ring in return for his civilities; which he absolutely refused. I showed him a corn that I had cut off with my own hand, from a maid of honour's toe; it was about the bigness of Kentish pippin, and grown so hard, that when I returned England, I got it hollowed into a cup, and set in silver. Lastly, I desired him to see the breeches I had then on, which were made of a mouse's skin. + +I could force nothing on him but a footman's tooth, which I observed him to examine with great curiosity, and found he had a fancy for it. He received it with abundance of thanks, more than such a trifle could deserve. It was drawn by an unskilful surgeon, in a mistake, from one of Glumdalclitch's men, who was afflicted with the tooth-ache, but it was as sound as any in his head. I got it cleaned, and put it into my cabinet. It was about a foot long, and four inches in diameter. + +The captain was very well satisfied with this plain relation I had given him, and said, "he hoped, when we returned to England, I would oblige the world by putting it on paper, and making it public." My answer was, "that we were overstocked with books of travels: that nothing could now pass which was not extraordinary; wherein I doubted some authors less consulted truth, than their own vanity, or interest, or the diversion of ignorant readers; that my story could contain little beside common events, without those ornamental descriptions of strange plants, trees, birds, and other animals; or of the barbarous customs and idolatry of savage people, with which most writers abound. However, I thanked him for his good opinion, and promised to take the matter into my thoughts." + +He said "he wondered at one thing very much, which was, to hear me speak so loud;" asking me "whether the king or queen of that country were thick of hearing?" I told him, "it was what I had been used to for above two years past, and that I admired as much at the voices of him and his men, who seemed to me only to whisper, and yet I could hear them well enough. But, when I spoke in that country, it was like a man talking in the streets, to another looking out from the top of a steeple, unless when I was placed on a table, or held in any person's hand." I told him, "I had likewise observed another thing, that, when I first got into the ship, and the sailors stood all about me, I thought they were the most little contemptible creatures I had ever beheld." For indeed, while I was in that prince's country, I could never endure to look in a glass, after mine eyes had been accustomed to such prodigious objects, because the comparison gave me so despicable a conceit of myself. The captain said, "that while we were at supper, he observed me to look at every thing with a sort of wonder, and that I often seemed hardly able to contain my laughter, which he knew not well how to take, but imputed it to some disorder in my brain." I answered, "it was very true; and I wondered how I could forbear, when I saw his dishes of the size of a silver three-pence, a leg of pork hardly a mouthful, a cup not so big as a nut-shell;" and so I went on, describing the rest of his household-stuff and provisions, after the same manner. For, although he queen had ordered a little equipage of all things necessary for me, while I was in her service, yet my ideas were wholly taken up with what I saw on every side of me, and I winked at my own littleness, as people do at their own faults. The captain understood my raillery very well, and merrily replied with the old English proverb, "that he doubted mine eyes were bigger than my belly, for he did not observe my stomach so good, although I had fasted all day;" and, continuing in his mirth, protested "he would have gladly given a hundred pounds, to have seen my closet in the eagle's bill, and afterwards in its fall from so great a height into the sea; which would certainly have been a most astonishing object, worthy to have the description of it transmitted to future ages:" and the comparison of Phaeton was so obvious, that he could not forbear applying it, although I did not much admire the conceit. + +The captain having been at Tonquin, was, in his return to England, driven north-eastward to the latitude of 44 degrees, and longitude of 143. But meeting a trade-wind two days after I came on board him, we sailed southward a long time, and coasting New Holland, kept our course west-south-west, and then south-south-west, till we doubled the Cape of Good Hope. Our voyage was very prosperous, but I shall not trouble the reader with a journal of it. The captain called in at one or two ports, and sent in his long-boat for provisions and fresh water; but I never went out of the ship till we came into the Downs, which was on the third day of June, 1706, about nine months after my escape. I offered to leave my goods in security for payment of my freight: but the captain protested he would not receive one farthing. We took a kind leave of each other, and I made him promise he would come to see me at my house in Redriff. I hired a horse and guide for five shillings, which I borrowed of the captain. + +As I was on the road, observing the littleness of the houses, the trees, the cattle, and the people, I began to think myself in Lilliput. I was afraid of trampling on every traveller I met, and often called aloud to have them stand out of the way, so that I had like to have gotten one or two broken heads for my impertinence. + +When I came to my own house, for which I was forced to inquire, one of the servants opening the door, I bent down to go in, (like a goose under a gate,) for fear of striking my head. My wife run out to embrace me, but I stooped lower than her knees, thinking she could otherwise never be able to reach my mouth. My daughter kneeled to ask my blessing, but I could not see her till she arose, having been so long used to stand with my head and eyes erect to above sixty feet; and then I went to take her up with one hand by the waist. I looked down upon the servants, and one or two friends who were in the house, as if they had been pigmies and I a giant. I told my wife, "she had been too thrifty, for I found she had starved herself and her daughter to nothing." In short, I behaved myself so unaccountably, that they were all of the captain's opinion when he first saw me, and concluded I had lost my wits. This I mention as an instance of the great power of habit and prejudice. + +In a little time, I and my family and friends came to a right understanding: but my wife protested "I should never go to sea any more;" although my evil destiny so ordered, that she had not power to hinder me, as the reader may know hereafter. In the mean time, I here conclude the second part of my unfortunate voyages. + +PART III. A VOYAGE TO LAPUTA, BALNIBARBI, LUGGNAGG, GLUBBDUBDRIB, AND JAPAN. + +CHAPTER I. + +[The author sets out on his third voyage. Is taken by pirates. The malice of a Dutchman. His arrival at an island. He is received into Laputa.] + +I had not been at home above ten days, when Captain William Robinson, a Cornish man, commander of the Hopewell, a stout ship of three hundred tons, came to my house. I had formerly been surgeon of another ship where he was master, and a fourth part owner, in a voyage to the Levant. He had always treated me more like a brother, than an inferior officer; and, hearing of my arrival, made me a visit, as I apprehended only out of friendship, for nothing passed more than what is usual after long absences. But repeating his visits often, expressing his joy to find I me in good health, asking, "whether I were now settled for life?" adding, "that he intended a voyage to the East Indies in two months," at last he plainly invited me, though with some apologies, to be surgeon of the ship; "that I should have another surgeon under me, beside our two mates; that my salary should be double to the usual pay; and that having experienced my knowledge in sea-affairs to be at least equal to his, he would enter into any engagement to follow my advice, as much as if I had shared in the command." + +He said so many other obliging things, and I knew him to be so honest a man, that I could not reject this proposal; the thirst I had of seeing the world, notwithstanding my past misfortunes, continuing as violent as ever. The only difficulty that remained, was to persuade my wife, whose consent however I at last obtained, by the prospect of advantage she proposed to her children. + +We set out the 5th day of August, 1706, and arrived at Fort St. George the 11th of April, 1707. We staid there three weeks to refresh our crew, many of whom were sick. From thence we went to Tonquin, where the captain resolved to continue some time, because many of the goods he intended to buy were not ready, nor could he expect to be dispatched in several months. Therefore, in hopes to defray some of the charges he must be at, he bought a sloop, loaded it with several sorts of goods, wherewith the Tonquinese usually trade to the neighbouring islands, and putting fourteen men on board, whereof three were of the country, he appointed me master of the sloop, and gave me power to traffic, while he transacted his affairs at Tonquin. + +We had not sailed above three days, when a great storm arising, we were driven five days to the north-north-east, and then to the east: after which we had fair weather, but still with a pretty strong gale from the west. Upon the tenth day we were chased by two pirates, who soon overtook us; for my sloop was so deep laden, that she sailed very slow, neither were we in a condition to defend ourselves. + +We were boarded about the same time by both the pirates, who entered furiously at the head of their men; but finding us all prostrate upon our faces (for so I gave order), they pinioned us with strong ropes, and setting guard upon us, went to search the sloop. + +I observed among them a Dutchman, who seemed to be of some authority, though he was not commander of either ship. He knew us by our countenances to be Englishmen, and jabbering to us in his own language, swore we should be tied back to back and thrown into the sea. I spoken Dutch tolerably well; I told him who we were, and begged him, in consideration of our being Christians and Protestants, of neighbouring countries in strict alliance, that he would move the captains to take some pity on us. This inflamed his rage; he repeated his threatenings, and turning to his companions, spoke with great vehemence in the Japanese language, as I suppose, often using the word Christianos. + +The largest of the two pirate ships was commanded by a Japanese captain, who spoke a little Dutch, but very imperfectly. He came up to me, and after several questions, which I answered in great humility, he said, "we should not die." I made the captain a very low bow, and then, turning to the Dutchman, said, "I was sorry to find more mercy in a heathen, than in a brother christian." But I had soon reason to repent those foolish words: for that malicious reprobate, having often endeavoured in vain to persuade both the captains that I might be thrown into the sea (which they would not yield to, after the promise made me that I should not die), however, prevailed so far, as to have a punishment inflicted on me, worse, in all human appearance, than death itself. My men were sent by an equal division into both the pirate ships, and my sloop new manned. As to myself, it was determined that I should be set adrift in a small canoe, with paddles and a sail, and four days' provisions; which last, the Japanese captain was so kind to double out of his own stores, and would permit no man to search me. I got down into the canoe, while the Dutchman, standing upon the deck, loaded me with all the curses and injurious terms his language could afford. + +About an hour before we saw the pirates I had taken an observation, and found we were in the latitude of 46 N. and longitude of 183. When I was at some distance from the pirates, I discovered, by my pocket-glass, several islands to the south-east. I set up my sail, the wind being fair, with a design to reach the nearest of those islands, which I made a shift to do, in about three hours. It was all rocky: however I got many birds' eggs; and, striking fire, I kindled some heath and dry sea-weed, by which I roasted my eggs. I ate no other supper, being resolved to spare my provisions as much as I could. I passed the night under the shelter of a rock, strewing some heath under me, and slept pretty well. + +The next day I sailed to another island, and thence to a third and fourth, sometimes using my sail, and sometimes my paddles. But, not to trouble the reader with a particular account of my distresses, let it suffice, that on the fifth day I arrived at the last island in my sight, which lay south-south-east to the former. + +This island was at a greater distance than I expected, and I did not reach it in less than five hours. I encompassed it almost round, before I could find a convenient place to land in; which was a small creek, about three times the wideness of my canoe. I found the island to be all rocky, only a little intermingled with tufts of grass, and sweet-smelling herbs. I took out my small provisions and after having refreshed myself, I secured the remainder in a cave, whereof there were great numbers; I gathered plenty of eggs upon the rocks, and got a quantity of dry sea-weed, and parched grass, which I designed to kindle the next day, and roast my eggs as well as I could, for I had about me my flint, steel, match, and burning-glass. I lay all night in the cave where I had lodged my provisions. My bed was the same dry grass and sea-weed which I intended for fuel. I slept very little, for the disquiets of my mind prevailed over my weariness, and kept me awake. I considered how impossible it was to preserve my life in so desolate a place, and how miserable my end must be: yet found myself so listless and desponding, that I had not the heart to rise; and before I could get spirits enough to creep out of my cave, the day was far advanced. I walked awhile among the rocks: the sky was perfectly clear, and the sun so hot, that I was forced to turn my face from it: when all on a sudden it became obscure, as I thought, in a manner very different from what happens by the interposition of a cloud. I turned back, and perceived a vast opaque body between me and the sun moving forwards towards the island: it seemed to be about two miles high, and hid the sun six or seven minutes; but I did not observe the air to be much colder, or the sky more darkened, than if I had stood under the shade of a mountain. As it approached nearer over the place where I was, it appeared to be a firm substance, the bottom flat, smooth, and shining very bright, from the reflection of the sea below. I stood upon a height about two hundred yards from the shore, and saw this vast body descending almost to a parallel with me, at less than an English mile distance. I took out my pocket perspective, and could plainly discover numbers of people moving up and down the sides of it, which appeared to be sloping; but what those people where doing I was not able to distinguish. + +The natural love of life gave me some inward motion of joy, and I was ready to entertain a hope that this adventure might, some way or other, help to deliver me from the desolate place and condition I was in. But at the same time the reader can hardly conceive my astonishment, to behold an island in the air, inhabited by men, who were able (as it should seem) to raise or sink, or put it into progressive motion, as they pleased. But not being at that time in a disposition to philosophise upon this phenomenon, I rather chose to observe what course the island would take, because it seemed for awhile to stand still. Yet soon after, it advanced nearer, and I could see the sides of it encompassed with several gradations of galleries, and stairs, at certain intervals, to descend from one to the other. In the lowest gallery, I beheld some people fishing with long angling rods, and others looking on. I waved my cap (for my hat was long since worn out) and my handkerchief toward the island; and upon its nearer approach, I called and shouted with the utmost strength of my voice; and then looking circumspectly, I beheld a crowd gather to that side which was most in my view. I found by their pointing towards me and to each other, that they plainly discovered me, although they made no return to my shouting. But I could see four or five men running in great haste, up the stairs, to the top of the island, who then disappeared. I happened rightly to conjecture, that these were sent for orders to some person in authority upon this occasion. + +The number of people increased, and, in less than half all hour, the island was moved and raised in such a manner, that the lowest gallery appeared in a parallel of less then a hundred yards distance from the height where I stood. I then put myself in the most supplicating posture, and spoke in the humblest accent, but received no answer. Those who stood nearest over against me, seemed to be persons of distinction, as I supposed by their habit. They conferred earnestly with each other, looking often upon me. At length one of them called out in a clear, polite, smooth dialect, not unlike in sound to the Italian: and therefore I returned an answer in that language, hoping at least that the cadence might be more agreeable to his ears. Although neither of us understood the other, yet my meaning was easily known, for the people saw the distress I was in. + +They made signs for me to come down from the rock, and go towards the shore, which I accordingly did; and the flying island being raised to a convenient height, the verge directly over me, a chain was let down from the lowest gallery, with a seat fastened to the bottom, to which I fixed myself, and was drawn up by pulleys. + +CHAPTER II. + +[The humours and dispositions of the Laputians described. An account of their learning. Of the king and his court. The author's reception there. The inhabitants subject to fear and disquietudes. An account of the women.] + +At my alighting, I was surrounded with a crowd of people, but those who stood nearest seemed to be of better quality. They beheld me with all the marks and circumstances of wonder; neither indeed was I much in their debt, having never till then seen a race of mortals so singular in their shapes, habits, and countenances. Their heads were all reclined, either to the right, or the left; one of their eyes turned inward, and the other directly up to the zenith. Their outward garments were adorned with the figures of suns, moons, and stars; interwoven with those of fiddles, flutes, harps, trumpets, guitars, harpsichords, and many other instruments of music, unknown to us in Europe. I observed, here and there, many in the habit of servants, with a blown bladder, fastened like a flail to the end of a stick, which they carried in their hands. In each bladder was a small quantity of dried peas, or little pebbles, as I was afterwards informed. With these bladders, they now and then flapped the mouths and ears of those who stood near them, of which practice I could not then conceive the meaning. It seems the minds of these people are so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing; for which reason, those persons who are able to afford it always keep a flapper (the original is climenole) in their family, as one of their domestics; nor ever walk abroad, or make visits, without him. And the business of this officer is, when two, three, or more persons are in company, gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself. This flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his walks, and upon occasion to give him a soft flap on his eyes; because he is always so wrapped up in cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice, and bouncing his head against every post; and in the streets, of justling others, or being justled himself into the kennel. + +It was necessary to give the reader this information, without which he would be at the same loss with me to understand the proceedings of these people, as they conducted me up the stairs to the top of the island, and from thence to the royal palace. While we were ascending, they forgot several times what they were about, and left me to myself, till their memories were again roused by their flappers; for they appeared altogether unmoved by the sight of my foreign habit and countenance, and by the shouts of the vulgar, whose thoughts and minds were more disengaged. + +At last we entered the palace, and proceeded into the chamber of presence, where I saw the king seated on his throne, attended on each side by persons of prime quality. Before the throne, was a large table filled with globes and spheres, and mathematical instruments of all kinds. His majesty took not the least notice of us, although our entrance was not without sufficient noise, by the concourse of all persons belonging to the court. But he was then deep in a problem; and we attended at least an hour, before he could solve it. There stood by him, on each side, a young page with flaps in their hands, and when they saw he was at leisure, one of them gently struck his mouth, and the other his right ear; at which he startled like one awaked on the sudden, and looking towards me and the company I was in, recollected the occasion of our coming, whereof he had been informed before. He spoke some words, whereupon immediately a young man with a flap came up to my side, and flapped me gently on the right ear; but I made signs, as well as I could, that I had no occasion for such an instrument; which, as I afterwards found, gave his majesty, and the whole court, a very mean opinion of my understanding. The king, as far as I could conjecture, asked me several questions, and I addressed myself to him in all the languages I had. When it was found I could neither understand nor be understood, I was conducted by his order to an apartment in his palace (this prince being distinguished above all his predecessors for his hospitality to strangers), where two servants were appointed to attend me. My dinner was brought, and four persons of quality, whom I remembered to have seen very near the king's person, did me the honour to dine with me. We had two courses, of three dishes each. In the first course, there was a shoulder of mutton cut into an equilateral triangle, a piece of beef into a rhomboides, and a pudding into a cycloid. The second course was two ducks trussed up in the form of fiddles; sausages and puddings resembling flutes and hautboys, and a breast of veal in the shape of a harp. The servants cut our bread into cones, cylinders, parallelograms, and several other mathematical figures. + +While we were at dinner, I made bold to ask the names of several things in their language, and those noble persons, by the assistance of their flappers, delighted to give me answers, hoping to raise my admiration of their great abilities if I could be brought to converse with them. I was soon able to call for bread and drink, or whatever else I wanted. + +After dinner my company withdrew, and a person was sent to me by the king's order, attended by a flapper. He brought with him pen, ink, and paper, and three or four books, giving me to understand by signs, that he was sent to teach me the language. We sat together four hours, in which time I wrote down a great number of words in columns, with the translations over against them; I likewise made a shift to learn several short sentences; for my tutor would order one of my servants to fetch something, to turn about, to make a bow, to sit, or to stand, or walk, and the like. Then I took down the sentence in writing. He showed me also, in one of his books, the figures of the sun, moon, and stars, the zodiac, the tropics, and polar circles, together with the denominations of many plains and solids. He gave me the names and descriptions of all the musical instruments, and the general terms of art in playing on each of them. After he had left me, I placed all my words, with their interpretations, in alphabetical order. And thus, in a few days, by the help of a very faithful memory, I got some insight into their language. The word, which I interpret the flying or floating island, is in the original Laputa, whereof I could never learn the true etymology. Lap, in the old obsolete language, signifies high; and untuh, a governor; from which they say, by corruption, was derived Laputa, from Lapuntuh. But I do not approve of this derivation, which seems to be a little strained. I ventured to offer to the learned among them a conjecture of my own, that Laputa was quasi lap outed; lap, signifying properly, the dancing of the sunbeams in the sea, and outed, a wing; which, however, I shall not obtrude, but submit to the judicious reader. + +Those to whom the king had entrusted me, observing how ill I was clad, ordered a tailor to come next morning, and take measure for a suit of clothes. This operator did his office after a different manner from those of his trade in Europe. He first took my altitude by a quadrant, and then, with a rule and compasses, described the dimensions and outlines of my whole body, all which he entered upon paper; and in six days brought my clothes very ill made, and quite out of shape, by happening to mistake a figure in the calculation. But my comfort was, that I observed such accidents very frequent, and little regarded. + +During my confinement for want of clothes, and by an indisposition that held me some days longer, I much enlarged my dictionary; and when I went next to court, was able to understand many things the king spoke, and to return him some kind of answers. His majesty had given orders, that the island should move north-east and by east, to the vertical point over Lagado, the metropolis of the whole kingdom below, upon the firm earth. It was about ninety leagues distant, and our voyage lasted four days and a half. I was not in the least sensible of the progressive motion made in the air by the island. On the second morning, about eleven o'clock, the king himself in person, attended by his nobility, courtiers, and officers, having prepared all their musical instruments, played on them for three hours without intermission, so that I was quite stunned with the noise; neither could I possibly guess the meaning, till my tutor informed me. He said that, the people of their island had their ears adapted to hear "the music of the spheres, which always played at certain periods, and the court was now prepared to bear their part, in whatever instrument they most excelled." + +In our journey towards Lagado, the capital city, his majesty ordered that the island should stop over certain towns and villages, from whence he might receive the petitions of his subjects. And to this purpose, several packthreads were let down, with small weights at the bottom. On these packthreads the people strung their petitions, which mounted up directly, like the scraps of paper fastened by school boys at the end of the string that holds their kite. Sometimes we received wine and victuals from below, which were drawn up by pulleys. + +The knowledge I had in mathematics, gave me great assistance in acquiring their phraseology, which depended much upon that science, and music; and in the latter I was not unskilled. Their ideas are perpetually conversant in lines and figures. If they would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman, or any other animal, they describe it by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometrical terms, or by words of art drawn from music, needless here to repeat. I observed in the king's kitchen all sorts of mathematical and musical instruments, after the figures of which they cut up the joints that were served to his majesty's table. + +Their houses are very ill built, the walls bevil, without one right angle in any apartment; and this defect arises from the contempt they bear to practical geometry, which they despise as vulgar and mechanic; those instructions they give being too refined for the intellects of their workmen, which occasions perpetual mistakes. And although they are dexterous enough upon a piece of paper, in the management of the rule, the pencil, and the divider, yet in the common actions and behaviour of life, I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward, and unhandy people, nor so slow and perplexed in their conceptions upon all other subjects, except those of mathematics and music. They are very bad reasoners, and vehemently given to opposition, unless when they happen to be of the right opinion, which is seldom their case. Imagination, fancy, and invention, they are wholly strangers to, nor have any words in their language, by which those ideas can be expressed; the whole compass of their thoughts and mind being shut up within the two forementioned sciences. + +Most of them, and especially those who deal in the astronomical part, have great faith in judicial astrology, although they are ashamed to own it publicly. But what I chiefly admired, and thought altogether unaccountable, was the strong disposition I observed in them towards news and politics, perpetually inquiring into public affairs, giving their judgments in matters of state, and passionately disputing every inch of a party opinion. I have indeed observed the same disposition among most of the mathematicians I have known in Europe, although I could never discover the least analogy between the two sciences; unless those people suppose, that because the smallest circle has as many degrees as the largest, therefore the regulation and management of the world require no more abilities than the handling and turning of a globe; but I rather take this quality to spring from a very common infirmity of human nature, inclining us to be most curious and conceited in matters where we have least concern, and for which we are least adapted by study or nature. + +These people are under continual disquietudes, never enjoying a minutes peace of mind; and their disturbances proceed from causes which very little affect the rest of mortals. Their apprehensions arise from several changes they dread in the celestial bodies: for instance, that the earth, by the continual approaches of the sun towards it, must, in course of time, be absorbed, or swallowed up; that the face of the sun, will, by degrees, be encrusted with its own effluvia, and give no more light to the world; that the earth very narrowly escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet, which would have infallibly reduced it to ashes; and that the next, which they have calculated for one-and-thirty years hence, will probably destroy us. For if, in its perihelion, it should approach within a certain degree of the sun (as by their calculations they have reason to dread) it will receive a degree of heat ten thousand times more intense than that of red hot glowing iron, and in its absence from the sun, carry a blazing tail ten hundred thousand and fourteen miles long, through which, if the earth should pass at the distance of one hundred thousand miles from the nucleus, or main body of the comet, it must in its passage be set on fire, and reduced to ashes: that the sun, daily spending its rays without any nutriment to supply them, will at last be wholly consumed and annihilated; which must be attended with the destruction of this earth, and of all the planets that receive their light from it. + +They are so perpetually alarmed with the apprehensions of these, and the like impending dangers, that they can neither sleep quietly in their beds, nor have any relish for the common pleasures and amusements of life. When they meet an acquaintance in the morning, the first question is about the sun's health, how he looked at his setting and rising, and what hopes they have to avoid the stroke of the approaching comet. This conversation they are apt to run into with the same temper that boys discover in delighting to hear terrible stories of spirits and hobgoblins, which they greedily listen to, and dare not go to bed for fear. + +The women of the island have abundance of vivacity: they, contemn their husbands, and are exceedingly fond of strangers, whereof there is always a considerable number from the continent below, attending at court, either upon affairs of the several towns and corporations, or their own particular occasions, but are much despised, because they want the same endowments. Among these the ladies choose their gallants: but the vexation is, that they act with too much ease and security; for the husband is always so rapt in speculation, that the mistress and lover may proceed to the greatest familiarities before his face, if he be but provided with paper and implements, and without his flapper at his side. + +The wives and daughters lament their confinement to the island, although I think it the most delicious spot of ground in the world; and although they live here in the greatest plenty and magnificence, and are allowed to do whatever they please, they long to see the world, and take the diversions of the metropolis, which they are not allowed to do without a particular license from the king; and this is not easy to be obtained, because the people of quality have found, by frequent experience, how hard it is to persuade their women to return from below. I was told that a great court lady, who had several children,--is married to the prime minister, the richest subject in the kingdom, a very graceful person, extremely fond of her, and lives in the finest palace of the island,--went down to Lagado on the pretence of health, there hid herself for several months, till the king sent a warrant to search for her; and she was found in an obscure eating-house all in rags, having pawned her clothes to maintain an old deformed footman, who beat her every day, and in whose company she was taken, much against her will. And although her husband received her with all possible kindness, and without the least reproach, she soon after contrived to steal down again, with all her jewels, to the same gallant, and has not been heard of since. + +This may perhaps pass with the reader rather for an European or English story, than for one of a country so remote. But he may please to consider, that the caprices of womankind are not limited by any climate or nation, and that they are much more uniform, than can be easily imagined. + +In about a month's time, I had made a tolerable proficiency in their language, and was able to answer most of the king's questions, when I had the honour to attend him. His majesty discovered not the least curiosity to inquire into the laws, government, history, religion, or manners of the countries where I had been; but confined his questions to the state of mathematics, and received the account I gave him with great contempt and indifference, though often roused by his flapper on each side. + +CHAPTER III. + +[A phenomenon solved by modern philosophy and astronomy. The Laputians' great improvements in the latter. The king's method of suppressing insurrections.] + +I desired leave of this prince to see the curiosities of the island, which he was graciously pleased to grant, and ordered my tutor to attend me. I chiefly wanted to know, to what cause, in art or in nature, it owed its several motions, whereof I will now give a philosophical account to the reader. + +The flying or floating island is exactly circular, its diameter 7837 yards, or about four miles and a half, and consequently contains ten thousand acres. It is three hundred yards thick. The bottom, or under surface, which appears to those who view it below, is one even regular plate of adamant, shooting up to the height of about two hundred yards. Above it lie the several minerals in their usual order, and over all is a coat of rich mould, ten or twelve feet deep. The declivity of the upper surface, from the circumference to the centre, is the natural cause why all the dews and rains, which fall upon the island, are conveyed in small rivulets toward the middle, where they are emptied into four large basins, each of about half a mile in circuit, and two hundred yards distant from the centre. From these basins the water is continually exhaled by the sun in the daytime, which effectually prevents their overflowing. Besides, as it is in the power of the monarch to raise the island above the region of clouds and vapours, he can prevent the falling of dews and rain whenever he pleases. For the highest clouds cannot rise above two miles, as naturalists agree, at least they were never known to do so in that country. + +At the centre of the island there is a chasm about fifty yards in diameter, whence the astronomers descend into a large dome, which is therefore called flandona gagnole, or the astronomer's cave, situated at the depth of a hundred yards beneath the upper surface of the adamant. In this cave are twenty lamps continually burning, which, from the reflection of the adamant, cast a strong light into every part. The place is stored with great variety of sextants, quadrants, telescopes, astrolabes, and other astronomical instruments. But the greatest curiosity, upon which the fate of the island depends, is a loadstone of a prodigious size, in shape resembling a weaver's shuttle. It is in length six yards, and in the thickest part at least three yards over. This magnet is sustained by a very strong axle of adamant passing through its middle, upon which it plays, and is poised so exactly that the weakest hand can turn it. It is hooped round with a hollow cylinder of adamant, four feet yards in diameter, placed horizontally, and supported by eight adamantine feet, each six yards high. In the middle of the concave side, there is a groove twelve inches deep, in which the extremities of the axle are lodged, and turned round as there is occasion. + +The stone cannot be removed from its place by any force, because the hoop and its feet are one continued piece with that body of adamant which constitutes the bottom of the island. + +By means of this loadstone, the island is made to rise and fall, and move from one place to another. For, with respect to that part of the earth over which the monarch presides, the stone is endued at one of its sides with an attractive power, and at the other with a repulsive. Upon placing the magnet erect, with its attracting end towards the earth, the island descends; but when the repelling extremity points downwards, the island mounts directly upwards. When the position of the stone is oblique, the motion of the island is so too: for in this magnet, the forces always act in lines parallel to its direction. + +By this oblique motion, the island is conveyed to different parts of the monarch's dominions. To explain the manner of its progress, let A B represent a line drawn across the dominions of Balnibarbi, let the line c d represent the loadstone, of which let d be the repelling end, and c the attracting end, the island being over C: let the stone be placed in position c d, with its repelling end downwards; then the island will be driven upwards obliquely towards D. When it is arrived at D, let the stone be turned upon its axle, till its attracting end points towards E, and then the island will be carried obliquely towards E; where, if the stone be again turned upon its axle till it stands in the position E F, with its repelling point downwards, the island will rise obliquely towards F, where, by directing the attracting end towards G, the island may be carried to G, and from G to H, by turning the stone, so as to make its repelling extremity to point directly downward. And thus, by changing the situation of the stone, as often as there is occasion, the island is made to rise and fall by turns in an oblique direction, and by those alternate risings and fallings (the obliquity being not considerable) is conveyed from one part of the dominions to the other. + +But it must be observed, that this island cannot move beyond the extent of the dominions below, nor can it rise above the height of four miles. For which the astronomers (who have written large systems concerning the stone) assign the following reason: that the magnetic virtue does not extend beyond the distance of four miles, and that the mineral, which acts upon the stone in the bowels of the earth, and in the sea about six leagues distant from the shore, is not diffused through the whole globe, but terminated with the limits of the king's dominions; and it was easy, from the great advantage of such a superior situation, for a prince to bring under his obedience whatever country lay within the attraction of that magnet. + +When the stone is put parallel to the plane of the horizon, the island stands still; for in that case the extremities of it, being at equal distance from the earth, act with equal force, the one in drawing downwards, the other in pushing upwards, and consequently no motion can ensue. + +This loadstone is under the care of certain astronomers, who, from time to time, give it such positions as the monarch directs. They spend the greatest part of their lives in observing the celestial bodies, which they do by the assistance of glasses, far excelling ours in goodness. For, although their largest telescopes do not exceed three feet, they magnify much more than those of a hundred with us, and show the stars with greater clearness. This advantage has enabled them to extend their discoveries much further than our astronomers in Europe; for they have made a catalogue of ten thousand fixed stars, whereas the largest of ours do not contain above one third part of that number. They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars; whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost, five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the centre of Mars; which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies. + +They have observed ninety-three different comets, and settled their periods with great exactness. If this be true (and they affirm it with great confidence) it is much to be wished, that their observations were made public, whereby the theory of comets, which at present is very lame and defective, might be brought to the same perfection with other arts of astronomy. + +The king would be the most absolute prince in the universe, if he could but prevail on a ministry to join with him; but these having their estates below on the continent, and considering that the office of a favourite has a very uncertain tenure, would never consent to the enslaving of their country. + +If any town should engage in rebellion or mutiny, fall into violent factions, or refuse to pay the usual tribute, the king has two methods of reducing them to obedience. The first and the mildest course is, by keeping the island hovering over such a town, and the lands about it, whereby he can deprive them of the benefit of the sun and the rain, and consequently afflict the inhabitants with dearth and diseases: and if the crime deserve it, they are at the same time pelted from above with great stones, against which they have no defence but by creeping into cellars or caves, while the roofs of their houses are beaten to pieces. But if they still continue obstinate, or offer to raise insurrections, he proceeds to the last remedy, by letting the island drop directly upon their heads, which makes a universal destruction both of houses and men. However, this is an extremity to which the prince is seldom driven, neither indeed is he willing to put it in execution; nor dare his ministers advise him to an action, which, as it would render them odious to the people, so it would be a great damage to their own estates, which all lie below; for the island is the king's demesne. + +But there is still indeed a more weighty reason, why the kings of this country have been always averse from executing so terrible an action, unless upon the utmost necessity. For, if the town intended to be destroyed should have in it any tall rocks, as it generally falls out in the larger cities, a situation probably chosen at first with a view to prevent such a catastrophe; or if it abound in high spires, or pillars of stone, a sudden fall might endanger the bottom or under surface of the island, which, although it consist, as I have said, of one entire adamant, two hundred yards thick, might happen to crack by too great a shock, or burst by approaching too near the fires from the houses below, as the backs, both of iron and stone, will often do in our chimneys. Of all this the people are well apprised, and understand how far to carry their obstinacy, where their liberty or property is concerned. And the king, when he is highest provoked, and most determined to press a city to rubbish, orders the island to descend with great gentleness, out of a pretence of tenderness to his people, but, indeed, for fear of breaking the adamantine bottom; in which case, it is the opinion of all their philosophers, that the loadstone could no longer hold it up, and the whole mass would fall to the ground. + +By a fundamental law of this realm, neither the king, nor either of his two eldest sons, are permitted to leave the island; nor the queen, till she is past child-bearing. + +CHAPTER IV. + +[The author leaves Laputa; is conveyed to Balnibarbi; arrives at the metropolis. A description of the metropolis, and the country adjoining. The author hospitably received by a great lord. His conversation with that lord.] + +Although I cannot say that I was ill treated in this island, yet I must confess I thought myself too much neglected, not without some degree of contempt; for neither prince nor people appeared to be curious in any part of knowledge, except mathematics and music, wherein I was far their inferior, and upon that account very little regarded. + +On the other side, after having seen all the curiosities of the island, I was very desirous to leave it, being heartily weary of those people. They were indeed excellent in two sciences for which I have great esteem, and wherein I am not unversed; but, at the same time, so abstracted and involved in speculation, that I never met with such disagreeable companions. I conversed only with women, tradesmen, flappers, and court-pages, during two months of my abode there; by which, at last, I rendered myself extremely contemptible; yet these were the only people from whom I could ever receive a reasonable answer. + +I had obtained, by hard study, a good degree of knowledge in their language: I was weary of being confined to an island where I received so little countenance, and resolved to leave it with the first opportunity. + +There was a great lord at court, nearly related to the king, and for that reason alone used with respect. He was universally reckoned the most ignorant and stupid person among them. He had performed many eminent services for the crown, had great natural and acquired parts, adorned with integrity and honour; but so ill an ear for music, that his detractors reported, "he had been often known to beat time in the wrong place;" neither could his tutors, without extreme difficulty, teach him to demonstrate the most easy proposition in the mathematics. He was pleased to show me many marks of favour, often did me the honour of a visit, desired to be informed in the affairs of Europe, the laws and customs, the manners and learning of the several countries where I had travelled. He listened to me with great attention, and made very wise observations on all I spoke. He had two flappers attending him for state, but never made use of them, except at court and in visits of ceremony, and would always command them to withdraw, when we were alone together. + +I entreated this illustrious person, to intercede in my behalf with his majesty, for leave to depart; which he accordingly did, as he was pleased to tell me, with regret: for indeed he had made me several offers very advantageous, which, however, I refused, with expressions of the highest acknowledgment. + +On the 16th of February I took leave of his majesty and the court. The king made me a present to the value of about two hundred pounds English, and my protector, his kinsman, as much more, together with a letter of recommendation to a friend of his in Lagado, the metropolis. The island being then hovering over a mountain about two miles from it, I was let down from the lowest gallery, in the same manner as I had been taken up. + +The continent, as far as it is subject to the monarch of the flying island, passes under the general name of Balnibarbi; and the metropolis, as I said before, is called Lagado. I felt some little satisfaction in finding myself on firm ground. I walked to the city without any concern, being clad like one of the natives, and sufficiently instructed to converse with them. I soon found out the person's house to whom I was recommended, presented my letter from his friend the grandee in the island, and was received with much kindness. This great lord, whose name was Munodi, ordered me an apartment in his own house, where I continued during my stay, and was entertained in a most hospitable manner. + +The next morning after my arrival, he took me in his chariot to see the town, which is about half the bigness of London; but the houses very strangely built, and most of them out of repair. The people in the streets walked fast, looked wild, their eyes fixed, and were generally in rags. We passed through one of the town gates, and went about three miles into the country, where I saw many labourers working with several sorts of tools in the ground, but was not able to conjecture what they were about: neither did observe any expectation either of corn or grass, although the soil appeared to be excellent. I could not forbear admiring at these odd appearances, both in town and country; and I made bold to desire my conductor, that he would be pleased to explain to me, what could be meant by so many busy heads, hands, and faces, both in the streets and the fields, because I did not discover any good effects they produced; but, on the contrary, I never knew a soil so unhappily cultivated, houses so ill contrived and so ruinous, or a people whose countenances and habit expressed so much misery and want. + +This lord Munodi was a person of the first rank, and had been some years governor of Lagado; but, by a cabal of ministers, was discharged for insufficiency. However, the king treated him with tenderness, as a well-meaning man, but of a low contemptible understanding. + +When I gave that free censure of the country and its inhabitants, he made no further answer than by telling me, "that I had not been long enough among them to form a judgment; and that the different nations of the world had different customs;" with other common topics to the same purpose. But, when we returned to his palace, he asked me "how I liked the building, what absurdities I observed, and what quarrel I had with the dress or looks of his domestics?" This he might safely do; because every thing about him was magnificent, regular, and polite. I answered, "that his excellency's prudence, quality, and fortune, had exempted him from those defects, which folly and beggary had produced in others." He said, "if I would go with him to his country-house, about twenty miles distant, where his estate lay, there would be more leisure for this kind of conversation." I told his excellency "that I was entirely at his disposal;" and accordingly we set out next morning. + +During our journey he made me observe the several methods used by farmers in managing their lands, which to me were wholly unaccountable; for, except in some very few places, I could not discover one ear of corn or blade of grass. But, in three hours travelling, the scene was wholly altered; we came into a most beautiful country; farmers' houses, at small distances, neatly built; the fields enclosed, containing vineyards, corn-grounds, and meadows. Neither do I remember to have seen a more delightful prospect. His excellency observed my countenance to clear up; he told me, with a sigh, "that there his estate began, and would continue the same, till we should come to his house: that his countrymen ridiculed and despised him, for managing his affairs no better, and for setting so ill an example to the kingdom; which, however, was followed by very few, such as were old, and wilful, and weak like himself." + +We came at length to the house, which was indeed a noble structure, built according to the best rules of ancient architecture. The fountains, gardens, walks, avenues, and groves, were all disposed with exact judgment and taste. I gave due praises to every thing I saw, whereof his excellency took not the least notice till after supper; when, there being no third companion, he told me with a very melancholy air "that he doubted he must throw down his houses in town and country, to rebuild them after the present mode; destroy all his plantations, and cast others into such a form as modern usage required, and give the same directions to all his tenants, unless he would submit to incur the censure of pride, singularity, affectation, ignorance, caprice, and perhaps increase his majesty's displeasure; that the admiration I appeared to be under would cease or diminish, when he had informed me of some particulars which, probably, I never heard of at court, the people there being too much taken up in their own speculations, to have regard to what passed here below." + +The sum of his discourse was to this effect: "That about forty years ago, certain persons went up to Laputa, either upon business or diversion, and, after five months continuance, came back with a very little smattering in mathematics, but full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region: that these persons, upon their return, began to dislike the management of every thing below, and fell into schemes of putting all arts, sciences, languages, and mechanics, upon a new foot. To this end, they procured a royal patent for erecting an academy of projectors in Lagado; and the humour prevailed so strongly among the people, that there is not a town of any consequence in the kingdom without such an academy. In these colleges the professors contrive new rules and methods of agriculture and building, and new instruments, and tools for all trades and manufactures; whereby, as they undertake, one man shall do the work of ten; a palace may be built in a week, of materials so durable as to last for ever without repairing. All the fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase a hundred fold more than they do at present; with innumerable other happy proposals. The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection; and in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes. By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair: that as for himself, being not of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old forms, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did, in every part of life, without innovation: that some few other persons of quality and gentry had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill common-wealth's men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country." + +His lordship added, "That he would not, by any further particulars, prevent the pleasure I should certainly take in viewing the grand academy, whither he was resolved I should go." He only desired me to observe a ruined building, upon the side of a mountain about three miles distant, of which he gave me this account: "That he had a very convenient mill within half a mile of his house, turned by a current from a large river, and sufficient for his own family, as well as a great number of his tenants; that about seven years ago, a club of those projectors came to him with proposals to destroy this mill, and build another on the side of that mountain, on the long ridge whereof a long canal must be cut, for a repository of water, to be conveyed up by pipes and engines to supply the mill, because the wind and air upon a height agitated the water, and thereby made it fitter for motion, and because the water, descending down a declivity, would turn the mill with half the current of a river whose course is more upon a level." He said, "that being then not very well with the court, and pressed by many of his friends, he complied with the proposal; and after employing a hundred men for two years, the work miscarried, the projectors went off, laying the blame entirely upon him, railing at him ever since, and putting others upon the same experiment, with equal assurance of success, as well as equal disappointment." + +In a few days we came back to town; and his excellency, considering the bad character he had in the academy, would not go with me himself, but recommended me to a friend of his, to bear me company thither. My lord was pleased to represent me as a great admirer of projects, and a person of much curiosity and easy belief; which, indeed, was not without truth; for I had myself been a sort of projector in my younger days. + +CHAPTER V. + +[The author permitted to see the grand academy of Lagado. The academy largely described. The arts wherein the professors employ themselves.] + +This academy is not an entire single building, but a continuation of several houses on both sides of a street, which growing waste, was purchased and applied to that use. + +I was received very kindly by the warden, and went for many days to the academy. Every room has in it one or more projectors; and I believe I could not be in fewer than five hundred rooms. + +The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me "to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers." I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them. + +I went into another chamber, but was ready to hasten back, being almost overcome with a horrible stink. My conductor pressed me forward, conjuring me in a whisper "to give no offence, which would be highly resented;" and therefore I durst not so much as stop my nose. The projector of this cell was the most ancient student of the academy; his face and beard were of a pale yellow; his hands and clothes daubed over with filth. When I was presented to him, he gave me a close embrace, a compliment I could well have excused. His employment, from his first coming into the academy, was an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food, by separating the several parts, removing the tincture which it receives from the gall, making the odour exhale, and scumming off the saliva. He had a weekly allowance, from the society, of a vessel filled with human ordure, about the bigness of a Bristol barrel. + +I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder; who likewise showed me a treatise he had written concerning the malleability of fire, which he intended to publish. + +There was a most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method for building houses, by beginning at the roof, and working downward to the foundation; which he justified to me, by the like practice of those two prudent insects, the bee and the spider. + +There was a man born blind, who had several apprentices in his own condition: their employment was to mix colours for painters, which their master taught them to distinguish by feeling and smelling. It was indeed my misfortune to find them at that time not very perfect in their lessons, and the professor himself happened to be generally mistaken. This artist is much encouraged and esteemed by the whole fraternity. + +In another apartment I was highly pleased with a projector who had found a device of ploughing the ground with hogs, to save the charges of ploughs, cattle, and labour. The method is this: in an acre of ground you bury, at six inches distance and eight deep, a quantity of acorns, dates, chestnuts, and other mast or vegetables, whereof these animals are fondest; then you drive six hundred or more of them into the field, where, in a few days, they will root up the whole ground in search of their food, and make it fit for sowing, at the same time manuring it with their dung: it is true, upon experiment, they found the charge and trouble very great, and they had little or no crop. However it is not doubted, that this invention may be capable of great improvement. + +I went into another room, where the walls and ceiling were all hung round with cobwebs, except a narrow passage for the artist to go in and out. At my entrance, he called aloud to me, "not to disturb his webs." He lamented "the fatal mistake the world had been so long in, of using silkworms, while we had such plenty of domestic insects who infinitely excelled the former, because they understood how to weave, as well as spin." And he proposed further, "that by employing spiders, the charge of dyeing silks should be wholly saved;" whereof I was fully convinced, when he showed me a vast number of flies most beautifully coloured, wherewith he fed his spiders, assuring us "that the webs would take a tincture from them; and as he had them of all hues, he hoped to fit everybody's fancy, as soon as he could find proper food for the flies, of certain gums, oils, and other glutinous matter, to give a strength and consistence to the threads." + +There was an astronomer, who had undertaken to place a sun-dial upon the great weathercock on the town-house, by adjusting the annual and diurnal motions of the earth and sun, so as to answer and coincide with all accidental turnings of the wind. + +I was complaining of a small fit of the colic, upon which my conductor led me into a room where a great physician resided, who was famous for curing that disease, by contrary operations from the same instrument. He had a large pair of bellows, with a long slender muzzle of ivory: this he conveyed eight inches up the anus, and drawing in the wind, he affirmed he could make the guts as lank as a dried bladder. But when the disease was more stubborn and violent, he let in the muzzle while the bellows were full of wind, which he discharged into the body of the patient; then withdrew the instrument to replenish it, clapping his thumb strongly against the orifice of then fundament; and this being repeated three or four times, the adventitious wind would rush out, bringing the noxious along with it, (like water put into a pump), and the patient recovered. I saw him try both experiments upon a dog, but could not discern any effect from the former. After the latter the animal was ready to burst, and made so violent a discharge as was very offensive to me and my companion. The dog died on the spot, and we left the doctor endeavouring to recover him, by the same operation. + +I visited many other apartments, but shall not trouble my reader with all the curiosities I observed, being studious of brevity. + +I had hitherto seen only one side of the academy, the other being appropriated to the advancers of speculative learning, of whom I shall say something, when I have mentioned one illustrious person more, who is called among them "the universal artist." He told us "he had been thirty years employing his thoughts for the improvement of human life." He had two large rooms full of wonderful curiosities, and fifty men at work. Some were condensing air into a dry tangible substance, by extracting the nitre, and letting the aqueous or fluid particles percolate; others softening marble, for pillows and pin-cushions; others petrifying the hoofs of a living horse, to preserve them from foundering. The artist himself was at that time busy upon two great designs; the first, to sow land with chaff, wherein he affirmed the true seminal virtue to be contained, as he demonstrated by several experiments, which I was not skilful enough to comprehend. The other was, by a certain composition of gums, minerals, and vegetables, outwardly applied, to prevent the growth of wool upon two young lambs; and he hoped, in a reasonable time to propagate the breed of naked sheep, all over the kingdom. + +We crossed a walk to the other part of the academy, where, as I have already said, the projectors in speculative learning resided. + +The first professor I saw, was in a very large room, with forty pupils about him. After salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a frame, which took up the greatest part of both the length and breadth of the room, he said, "Perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge, by practical and mechanical operations. But the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness; and he flattered himself, that a more noble, exalted thought never sprang in any other man's head. Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study." He then led me to the frame, about the sides, whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me "to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work." The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down. + +Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labour; and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials, to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences; which, however, might be still improved, and much expedited, if the public would raise a fund for making and employing five hundred such frames in Lagado, and oblige the managers to contribute in common their several collections. + +He assured me "that this invention had employed all his thoughts from his youth; that he had emptied the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books between the numbers of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech." + +I made my humblest acknowledgment to this illustrious person, for his great communicativeness; and promised, "if ever I had the good fortune to return to my native country, that I would do him justice, as the sole inventor of this wonderful machine;" the form and contrivance of which I desired leave to delineate on paper, as in the figure here annexed. I told him, "although it were the custom of our learned in Europe to steal inventions from each other, who had thereby at least this advantage, that it became a controversy which was the right owner; yet I would take such caution, that he should have the honour entire, without a rival." + +We next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in consultation upon improving that of their own country. + +The first project was, to shorten discourse, by cutting polysyllables into one, and leaving out verbs and participles, because, in reality, all things imaginable are but norms. + +The other project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health, as well as brevity. For it is plain, that every word we speak is, in some degree, a diminution of our lunge by corrosion, and, consequently, contributes to the shortening of our lives. An expedient was therefore offered, "that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on." And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people. However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things; which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man's business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us, who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave. + +But for short conversations, a man may carry implements in his pockets, and under his arms, enough to supply him; and in his house, he cannot be at a loss. Therefore the room where company meet who practise this art, is full of all things, ready at hand, requisite to furnish matter for this kind of artificial converse. + +Another great advantage proposed by this invention was, that it would serve as a universal language, to be understood in all civilised nations, whose goods and utensils are generally of the same kind, or nearly resembling, so that their uses might easily be comprehended. And thus ambassadors would be qualified to treat with foreign princes, or ministers of state, to whose tongues they were utter strangers. + +I was at the mathematical school, where the master taught his pupils after a method scarce imaginable to us in Europe. The proposition, and demonstration, were fairly written on a thin wafer, with ink composed of a cephalic tincture. This, the student was to swallow upon a fasting stomach, and for three days following, eat nothing but bread and water. As the wafer digested, the tincture mounted to his brain, bearing the proposition along with it. But the success has not hitherto been answerable, partly by some error in the quantum or composition, and partly by the perverseness of lads, to whom this bolus is so nauseous, that they generally steal aside, and discharge it upwards, before it can operate; neither have they been yet persuaded to use so long an abstinence, as the prescription requires. + +CHAPTER VI. + +[A further account of the academy. The author proposes some improvements, which are honourably received.] + +In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained; the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses, which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them, with many other wild, impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, "that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational, which some philosophers have not maintained for truth." + +But, however, I shall so far do justice to this part of the Academy, as to acknowledge that all of them were not so visionary. There was a most ingenious doctor, who seemed to be perfectly versed in the whole nature and system of government. This illustrious person had very usefully employed his studies, in finding out effectual remedies for all diseases and corruptions to which the several kinds of public administration are subject, by the vices or infirmities of those who govern, as well as by the licentiousness of those who are to obey. For instance: whereas all writers and reasoners have agreed, that there is a strict universal resemblance between the natural and the political body; can there be any thing more evident, than that the health of both must be preserved, and the diseases cured, by the same prescriptions? It is allowed, that senates and great councils are often troubled with redundant, ebullient, and other peccant humours; with many diseases of the head, and more of the heart; with strong convulsions, with grievous contractions of the nerves and sinews in both hands, but especially the right; with spleen, flatus, vertigos, and deliriums; with scrofulous tumours, full of fetid purulent matter; with sour frothy ructations: with canine appetites, and crudeness of digestion, besides many others, needless to mention. This doctor therefore proposed, "that upon the meeting of the senate, certain physicians should attend it the three first days of their sitting, and at the close of each day's debate feel the pulses of every senator; after which, having maturely considered and consulted upon the nature of the several maladies, and the methods of cure, they should on the fourth day return to the senate house, attended by their apothecaries stored with proper medicines; and before the members sat, administer to each of them lenitives, aperitives, abstersives, corrosives, restringents, palliatives, laxatives, cephalalgics, icterics, apophlegmatics, acoustics, as their several cases required; and, according as these medicines should operate, repeat, alter, or omit them, at the next meeting." + +This project could not be of any great expense to the public; and might in my poor opinion, be of much use for the despatch of business, in those countries where senates have any share in the legislative power; beget unanimity, shorten debates, open a few mouths which are now closed, and close many more which are now open; curb the petulancy of the young, and correct the positiveness of the old; rouse the stupid, and damp the pert. + +Again: because it is a general complaint, that the favourites of princes are troubled with short and weak memories; the same doctor proposed, "that whoever attended a first minister, after having told his business, with the utmost brevity and in the plainest words, should, at his departure, give the said minister a tweak by the nose, or a kick in the belly, or tread on his corns, or lug him thrice by both ears, or run a pin into his breech; or pinch his arm black and blue, to prevent forgetfulness; and at every levee day, repeat the same operation, till the business were done, or absolutely refused." + +He likewise directed, "that every senator in the great council of a nation, after he had delivered his opinion, and argued in the defence of it, should be obliged to give his vote directly contrary; because if that were done, the result would infallibly terminate in the good of the public." + +When parties in a state are violent, he offered a wonderful contrivance to reconcile them. The method is this: You take a hundred leaders of each party; you dispose them into couples of such whose heads are nearest of a size; then let two nice operators saw off the occiput of each couple at the same time, in such a manner that the brain may be equally divided. Let the occiputs, thus cut off, be interchanged, applying each to the head of his opposite party-man. It seems indeed to be a work that requires some exactness, but the professor assured us, "that if it were dexterously performed, the cure would be infallible." For he argued thus: "that the two half brains being left to debate the matter between themselves within the space of one skull, would soon come to a good understanding, and produce that moderation, as well as regularity of thinking, so much to be wished for in the heads of those, who imagine they come into the world only to watch and govern its motion: and as to the difference of brains, in quantity or quality, among those who are directors in faction, the doctor assured us, from his own knowledge, that "it was a perfect trifle." + +I heard a very warm debate between two professors, about the most commodious and effectual ways and means of raising money, without grieving the subject. The first affirmed, "the justest method would be, to lay a certain tax upon vices and folly; and the sum fixed upon every man to be rated, after the fairest manner, by a jury of his neighbours." The second was of an opinion directly contrary; "to tax those qualities of body and mind, for which men chiefly value themselves; the rate to be more or less, according to the degrees of excelling; the decision whereof should be left entirely to their own breast." The highest tax was upon men who are the greatest favourites of the other sex, and the assessments, according to the number and nature of the favours they have received; for which, they are allowed to be their own vouchers. Wit, valour, and politeness, were likewise proposed to be largely taxed, and collected in the same manner, by every person's giving his own word for the quantum of what he possessed. But as to honour, justice, wisdom, and learning, they should not be taxed at all; because they are qualifications of so singular a kind, that no man will either allow them in his neighbour or value them in himself. + +The women were proposed to be taxed according to their beauty and skill in dressing, wherein they had the same privilege with the men, to be determined by their own judgment. But constancy, chastity, good sense, and good nature, were not rated, because they would not bear the charge of collecting. + +To keep senators in the interest of the crown, it was proposed that the members should raffle for employment; every man first taking an oath, and giving security, that he would vote for the court, whether he won or not; after which, the losers had, in their turn, the liberty of raffling upon the next vacancy. Thus, hope and expectation would be kept alive; none would complain of broken promises, but impute their disappointments wholly to fortune, whose shoulders are broader and stronger than those of a ministry. + +Another professor showed me a large paper of instructions for discovering plots and conspiracies against the government. He advised great statesmen to examine into the diet of all suspected persons; their times of eating; upon which side they lay in bed; with which hand they wipe their posteriors; take a strict view of their excrements, and, from the colour, the odour, the taste, the consistence, the crudeness or maturity of digestion, form a judgment of their thoughts and designs; because men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at stool, which he found by frequent experiment; for, in such conjunctures, when he used, merely as a trial, to consider which was the best way of murdering the king, his ordure would have a tincture of green; but quite different, when he thought only of raising an insurrection, or burning the metropolis. + +The whole discourse was written with great acuteness, containing many observations, both curious and useful for politicians; but, as I conceived, not altogether complete. This I ventured to tell the author, and offered, if he pleased, to supply him with some additions. He received my proposition with more compliance than is usual among writers, especially those of the projecting species, professing "he would be glad to receive further information." + +I told him, "that in the kingdom of Tribnia,~^ by the natives called Langdon,~^ where I had sojourned some time in my travels, the bulk of the people consist in a manner wholly of discoverers, witnesses, informers, accusers, prosecutors, evidences, swearers, together with their several subservient and subaltern instruments, all under the colours, the conduct, and the pay of ministers of state, and their deputies. The plots, in that kingdom, are usually the workmanship of those persons who desire to raise their own characters of profound politicians; to restore new vigour to a crazy administration; to stifle or divert general discontents; to fill their coffers with forfeitures; and raise, or sink the opinion of public credit, as either shall best answer their private advantage. It is first agreed and settled among them, what suspected persons shall be accused of a plot; then, effectual care is taken to secure all their letters and papers, and put the owners in chains. These papers are delivered to a set of artists, very dexterous in finding out the mysterious meanings of words, syllables, and letters: for instance, they can discover a close stool, to signify a privy council; a flock of geese, a senate; a lame dog, an invader; the plague, a standing army; a buzzard, a prime minister; the gout, a high priest; a gibbet, a secretary of state; a chamber pot, a committee of grandees; a sieve, a court lady; a broom, a revolution; a mouse-trap, an employment; a bottomless pit, a treasury; a sink, a court; a cap and bells, a favourite; a broken reed, a court of justice; an empty tun, a general; a running sore, the administration.~^ + +"When this method fails, they have two others more effectual, which the learned among them call acrostics and anagrams. First, they can decipher all initial letters into political meanings. Thus N, shall signify a plot; B, a regiment of horse; L, a fleet at sea; or, secondly, by transposing the letters of the alphabet in any suspected paper, they can lay open the deepest designs of a discontented party. So, for example, if I should say, in a letter to a friend, 'Our brother Tom has just got the piles,' a skilful decipherer would discover, that the same letters which compose that sentence, may be analysed into the following words, 'Resist -, a plot is brought home--The tour.' And this is the anagrammatic method." + +The professor made me great acknowledgments for communicating these observations, and promised to make honourable mention of me in his treatise. + +I saw nothing in this country that could invite me to a longer continuance, and began to think of returning home to England. + +CHAPTER VII. + +[The author leaves Lagado: arrives at Maldonada. No ship ready. He takes a short voyage to Glubbdubdrib. His reception by the governor.] + +The continent, of which this kingdom is apart, extends itself, as I have reason to believe, eastward, to that unknown tract of America westward of California; and north, to the Pacific Ocean, which is not above a hundred and fifty miles from Lagado; where there is a good port, and much commerce with the great island of Luggnagg, situated to the north-west about 29 degrees north latitude, and 140 longitude. This island of Luggnagg stands south-eastward of Japan, about a hundred leagues distant. There is a strict alliance between the Japanese emperor and the king of Luggnagg; which affords frequent opportunities of sailing from one island to the other. I determined therefore to direct my course this way, in order to my return to Europe. I hired two mules, with a guide, to show me the way, and carry my small baggage. I took leave of my noble protector, who had shown me so much favour, and made me a generous present at my departure. + +My journey was without any accident or adventure worth relating. When I arrived at the port of Maldonada (for so it is called) there was no ship in the harbour bound for Luggnagg, nor likely to be in some time. The town is about as large as Portsmouth. I soon fell into some acquaintance, and was very hospitably received. A gentleman of distinction said to me, "that since the ships bound for Luggnagg could not be ready in less than a month, it might be no disagreeable amusement for me to take a trip to the little island of Glubbdubdrib, about five leagues off to the south-west." He offered himself and a friend to accompany me, and that I should be provided with a small convenient bark for the voyage. + +Glubbdubdrib, as nearly as I can interpret the word, signifies the island of sorcerers or magicians. It is about one third as large as the Isle of Wight, and extremely fruitful: it is governed by the head of a certain tribe, who are all magicians. This tribe marries only among each other, and the eldest in succession is prince or governor. He has a noble palace, and a park of about three thousand acres, surrounded by a wall of hewn stone twenty feet high. In this park are several small enclosures for cattle, corn, and gardening. + +The governor and his family are served and attended by domestics of a kind somewhat unusual. By his skill in necromancy he has a power of calling whom he pleases from the dead, and commanding their service for twenty-four hours, but no longer; nor can he call the same persons up again in less than three months, except upon very extraordinary occasions. + +When we arrived at the island, which was about eleven in the morning, one of the gentlemen who accompanied me went to the governor, and desired admittance for a stranger, who came on purpose to have the honour of attending on his highness. This was immediately granted, and we all three entered the gate of the palace between two rows of guards, armed and dressed after a very antic manner, and with something in their countenances that made my flesh creep with a horror I cannot express. We passed through several apartments, between servants of the same sort, ranked on each side as before, till we came to the chamber of presence; where, after three profound obeisances, and a few general questions, we were permitted to sit on three stools, near the lowest step of his highness's throne. He understood the language of Balnibarbi, although it was different from that of this island. He desired me to give him some account of my travels; and, to let me see that I should be treated without ceremony, he dismissed all his attendants with a turn of his finger; at which, to my great astonishment, they vanished in an instant, like visions in a dream when we awake on a sudden. I could not recover myself in some time, till the governor assured me, "that I should receive no hurt:" and observing my two companions to be under no concern, who had been often entertained in the same manner, I began to take courage, and related to his highness a short history of my several adventures; yet not without some hesitation, and frequently looking behind me to the place where I had seen those domestic spectres. I had the honour to dine with the governor, where a new set of ghosts served up the meat, and waited at table. I now observed myself to be less terrified than I had been in the morning. I stayed till sunset, but humbly desired his highness to excuse me for not accepting his invitation of lodging in the palace. My two friends and I lay at a private house in the town adjoining, which is the capital of this little island; and the next morning we returned to pay our duty to the governor, as he was pleased to command us. + +After this manner we continued in the island for ten days, most part of every day with the governor, and at night in our lodging. I soon grew so familiarized to the sight of spirits, that after the third or fourth time they gave me no emotion at all: or, if I had any apprehensions left, my curiosity prevailed over them. For his highness the governor ordered me "to call up whatever persons I would choose to name, and in whatever numbers, among all the dead from the beginning of the world to the present time, and command them to answer any questions I should think fit to ask; with this condition, that my questions must be confined within the compass of the times they lived in. And one thing I might depend upon, that they would certainly tell me the truth, for lying was a talent of no use in the lower world." + +I made my humble acknowledgments to his highness for so great a favour. We were in a chamber, from whence there was a fair prospect into the park. And because my first inclination was to be entertained with scenes of pomp and magnificence, I desired to see Alexander the Great at the head of his army, just after the battle of Arbela: which, upon a motion of the governor's finger, immediately appeared in a large field, under the window where we stood. Alexander was called up into the room: it was with great difficulty that I understood his Greek, and had but little of my own. He assured me upon his honour "that he was not poisoned, but died of a bad fever by excessive drinking." + +Next, I saw Hannibal passing the Alps, who told me "he had not a drop of vinegar in his camp." + +I saw Caesar and Pompey at the head of their troops, just ready to engage. I saw the former, in his last great triumph. I desired that the senate of Rome might appear before me, in one large chamber, and an assembly of somewhat a later age in counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an assembly of heroes and demigods; the other, a knot of pedlars, pick-pockets, highwayman, and bullies. + +The governor, at my request, gave the sign for Caesar and Brutus to advance towards us. I was struck with a profound veneration at the sight of Brutus, and could easily discover the most consummate virtue, the greatest intrepidity and firmness of mind, the truest love of his country, and general benevolence for mankind, in every lineament of his countenance. I observed, with much pleasure, that these two persons were in good intelligence with each other; and Caesar freely confessed to me, "that the greatest actions of his own life were not equal, by many degrees, to the glory of taking it away." I had the honour to have much conversation with Brutus; and was told, "that his ancestor Junius, Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the younger, Sir Thomas More, and himself were perpetually together:" a sextumvirate, to which all the ages of the world cannot add a seventh. + +It would be tedious to trouble the reader with relating what vast numbers of illustrious persons were called up to gratify that insatiable desire I had to see the world in every period of antiquity placed before me. I chiefly fed mine eyes with beholding the destroyers of tyrants and usurpers, and the restorers of liberty to oppressed and injured nations. But it is impossible to express the satisfaction I received in my own mind, after such a manner as to make it a suitable entertainment to the reader. + +CHAPTER VIII. + +[A further account of Glubbdubdrib. Ancient and modern history corrected.] + +Having a desire to see those ancients who were most renowned for wit and learning, I set apart one day on purpose. I proposed that Homer and Aristotle might appear at the head of all their commentators; but these were so numerous, that some hundreds were forced to attend in the court, and outward rooms of the palace. I knew, and could distinguish those two heroes, at first sight, not only from the crowd, but from each other. Homer was the taller and comelier person of the two, walked very erect for one of his age, and his eyes were the most quick and piercing I ever beheld. Aristotle stooped much, and made use of a staff. His visage was meagre, his hair lank and thin, and his voice hollow. I soon discovered that both of them were perfect strangers to the rest of the company, and had never seen or heard of them before; and I had a whisper from a ghost who shall be nameless, "that these commentators always kept in the most distant quarters from their principals, in the lower world, through a consciousness of shame and guilt, because they had so horribly misrepresented the meaning of those authors to posterity." I introduced Didymus and Eustathius to Homer, and prevailed on him to treat them better than perhaps they deserved, for he soon found they wanted a genius to enter into the spirit of a poet. But Aristotle was out of all patience with the account I gave him of Scotus and Ramus, as I presented them to him; and he asked them, "whether the rest of the tribe were as great dunces as themselves?" + +I then desired the governor to call up Descartes and Gassendi, with whom I prevailed to explain their systems to Aristotle. This great philosopher freely acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon conjecture, as all men must do; and he found that Gassendi, who had made the doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the vortices of Descartes, were equally to be exploded. He predicted the same fate to ATTRACTION, whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters. He said, "that new systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age; and even those, who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical principles, would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue when that was determined." + +I spent five days in conversing with many others of the ancient learned. I saw most of the first Roman emperors. I prevailed on the governor to call up Heliogabalus's cooks to dress us a dinner, but they could not show us much of their skill, for want of materials. A helot of Agesilaus made us a dish of Spartan broth, but I was not able to get down a second spoonful. + +The two gentlemen, who conducted me to the island, were pressed by their private affairs to return in three days, which I employed in seeing some of the modern dead, who had made the greatest figure, for two or three hundred years past, in our own and other countries of Europe; and having been always a great admirer of old illustrious families, I desired the governor would call up a dozen or two of kings, with their ancestors in order for eight or nine generations. But my disappointment was grievous and unexpected. For, instead of a long train with royal diadems, I saw in one family two fiddlers, three spruce courtiers, and an Italian prelate. In another, a barber, an abbot, and two cardinals. I have too great a veneration for crowned heads, to dwell any longer on so nice a subject. But as to counts, marquises, dukes, earls, and the like, I was not so scrupulous. And I confess, it was not without some pleasure, that I found myself able to trace the particular features, by which certain families are distinguished, up to their originals. I could plainly discover whence one family derives a long chin; why a second has abounded with knaves for two generations, and fools for two more; why a third happened to be crack-brained, and a fourth to be sharpers; whence it came, what Polydore Virgil says of a certain great house, Nec vir fortis, nec foemina casta; how cruelty, falsehood, and cowardice, grew to be characteristics by which certain families are distinguished as much as by their coats of arms; who first brought the pox into a noble house, which has lineally descended scrofulous tumours to their posterity. Neither could I wonder at all this, when I saw such an interruption of lineages, by pages, lackeys, valets, coachmen, gamesters, fiddlers, players, captains, and pickpockets. + +I was chiefly disgusted with modern history. For having strictly examined all the persons of greatest name in the courts of princes, for a hundred years past, I found how the world had been misled by prostitute writers, to ascribe the greatest exploits in war, to cowards; the wisest counsel, to fools; sincerity, to flatterers; Roman virtue, to betrayers of their country; piety, to atheists; chastity, to sodomites; truth, to informers: how many innocent and excellent persons had been condemned to death or banishment by the practising of great ministers upon the corruption of judges, and the malice of factions: how many villains had been exalted to the highest places of trust, power, dignity, and profit: how great a share in the motions and events of courts, councils, and senates might be challenged by bawds, whores, pimps, parasites, and buffoons. How low an opinion I had of human wisdom and integrity, when I was truly informed of the springs and motives of great enterprises and revolutions in the world, and of the contemptible accidents to which they owed their success. + +Here I discovered the roguery and ignorance of those who pretend to write anecdotes, or secret history; who send so many kings to their graves with a cup of poison; will repeat the discourse between a prince and chief minister, where no witness was by; unlock the thoughts and cabinets of ambassadors and secretaries of state; and have the perpetual misfortune to be mistaken. Here I discovered the true causes of many great events that have surprised the world; how a whore can govern the back-stairs, the back-stairs a council, and the council a senate. A general confessed, in my presence, "that he got a victory purely by the force of cowardice and ill conduct;" and an admiral, "that, for want of proper intelligence, he beat the enemy, to whom he intended to betray the fleet." Three kings protested to me, "that in their whole reigns they never did once prefer any person of merit, unless by mistake, or treachery of some minister in whom they confided; neither would they do it if they were to live again:" and they showed, with great strength of reason, "that the royal throne could not be supported without corruption, because that positive, confident, restiff temper, which virtue infused into a man, was a perpetual clog to public business." + +I had the curiosity to inquire in a particular manner, by what methods great numbers had procured to themselves high titles of honour, and prodigious estates; and I confined my inquiry to a very modern period: however, without grating upon present times, because I would be sure to give no offence even to foreigners (for I hope the reader need not be told, that I do not in the least intend my own country, in what I say upon this occasion,) a great number of persons concerned were called up; and, upon a very slight examination, discovered such a scene of infamy, that I cannot reflect upon it without some seriousness. Perjury, oppression, subornation, fraud, pandarism, and the like infirmities, were among the most excusable arts they had to mention; and for these I gave, as it was reasonable, great allowance. But when some confessed they owed their greatness and wealth to sodomy, or incest; others, to the prostituting of their own wives and daughters; others, to the betraying of their country or their prince; some, to poisoning; more to the perverting of justice, in order to destroy the innocent, I hope I may be pardoned, if these discoveries inclined me a little to abate of that profound veneration, which I am naturally apt to pay to persons of high rank, who ought to be treated with the utmost respect due to their sublime dignity, by us their inferiors. + +I had often read of some great services done to princes and states, and desired to see the persons by whom those services were performed. Upon inquiry I was told, "that their names were to be found on no record, except a few of them, whom history has represented as the vilest of rogues and traitors." As to the rest, I had never once heard of them. They all appeared with dejected looks, and in the meanest habit; most of them telling me, "they died in poverty and disgrace, and the rest on a scaffold or a gibbet." + +Among others, there was one person, whose case appeared a little singular. He had a youth about eighteen years old standing by his side. He told me, "he had for many years been commander of a ship; and in the sea fight at Actium had the good fortune to break through the enemy's great line of battle, sink three of their capital ships, and take a fourth, which was the sole cause of Antony's flight, and of the victory that ensued; that the youth standing by him, his only son, was killed in the action." He added, "that upon the confidence of some merit, the war being at an end, he went to Rome, and solicited at the court of Augustus to be preferred to a greater ship, whose commander had been killed; but, without any regard to his pretensions, it was given to a boy who had never seen the sea, the son of Libertina, who waited on one of the emperor's mistresses. Returning back to his own vessel, he was charged with neglect of duty, and the ship given to a favourite page of Publicola, the vice-admiral; whereupon he retired to a poor farm at a great distance from Rome, and there ended his life." I was so curious to know the truth of this story, that I desired Agrippa might be called, who was admiral in that fight. He appeared, and confirmed the whole account: but with much more advantage to the captain, whose modesty had extenuated or concealed a great part of his merit. + +I was surprised to find corruption grown so high and so quick in that empire, by the force of luxury so lately introduced; which made me less wonder at many parallel cases in other countries, where vices of all kinds have reigned so much longer, and where the whole praise, as well as pillage, has been engrossed by the chief commander, who perhaps had the least title to either. + +As every person called up made exactly the same appearance he had done in the world, it gave me melancholy reflections to observe how much the race of human kind was degenerated among us within these hundred years past; how the pox, under all its consequences and denominations had altered every lineament of an English countenance; shortened the size of bodies, unbraced the nerves, relaxed the sinews and muscles, introduced a sallow complexion, and rendered the flesh loose and rancid. + +I descended so low, as to desire some English yeoman of the old stamp might be summoned to appear; once so famous for the simplicity of their manners, diet, and dress; for justice in their dealings; for their true spirit of liberty; for their valour, and love of their country. Neither could I be wholly unmoved, after comparing the living with the dead, when I considered how all these pure native virtues were prostituted for a piece of money by their grand-children; who, in selling their votes and managing at elections, have acquired every vice and corruption that can possibly be learned in a court. + +CHAPTER IX. + +[The author returns to Maldonada. Sails to the kingdom of Luggnagg. The author confined. He is sent for to court. The manner of his admittance. The king's great lenity to his subjects.] + +The day of our departure being come, I took leave of his highness, the Governor of Glubbdubdrib, and returned with my two companions to Maldonada, where, after a fortnight's waiting, a ship was ready to sail for Luggnagg. The two gentlemen, and some others, were so generous and kind as to furnish me with provisions, and see me on board. I was a month in this voyage. We had one violent storm, and were under a necessity of steering westward to get into the trade wind, which holds for above sixty leagues. On the 21st of April, 1708, we sailed into the river of Clumegnig, which is a seaport town, at the south-east point of Luggnagg. We cast anchor within a league of the town, and made a signal for a pilot. Two of them came on board in less than half an hour, by whom we were guided between certain shoals and rocks, which are very dangerous in the passage, to a large basin, where a fleet may ride in safety within a cable's length of the town-wall. + +Some of our sailors, whether out of treachery or inadvertence, had informed the pilots "that I was a stranger, and great traveller;" whereof these gave notice to a custom-house officer, by whom I was examined very strictly upon my landing. This officer spoke to me in the language of Balnibarbi, which, by the force of much commerce, is generally understood in that town, especially by seamen and those employed in the customs. I gave him a short account of some particulars, and made my story as plausible and consistent as I could; but I thought it necessary to disguise my country, and call myself a Hollander; because my intentions were for Japan, and I knew the Dutch were the only Europeans permitted to enter into that kingdom. I therefore told the officer, "that having been shipwrecked on the coast of Balnibarbi, and cast on a rock, I was received up into Laputa, or the flying island (of which he had often heard), and was now endeavouring to get to Japan, whence I might find a convenience of returning to my own country." The officer said, "I must be confined till he could receive orders from court, for which he would write immediately, and hoped to receive an answer in a fortnight." I was carried to a convenient lodging with a sentry placed at the door; however, I had the liberty of a large garden, and was treated with humanity enough, being maintained all the time at the king's charge. I was invited by several persons, chiefly out of curiosity, because it was reported that I came from countries very remote, of which they had never heard. + +I hired a young man, who came in the same ship, to be an interpreter; he was a native of Luggnagg, but had lived some years at Maldonada, and was a perfect master of both languages. By his assistance, I was able to hold a conversation with those who came to visit me; but this consisted only of their questions, and my answers. + +The despatch came from court about the time we expected. It contained a warrant for conducting me and my retinue to Traldragdubh, or Trildrogdrib (for it is pronounced both ways as near as I can remember), by a party of ten horse. All my retinue was that poor lad for an interpreter, whom I persuaded into my service, and, at my humble request, we had each of us a mule to ride on. A messenger was despatched half a day's journey before us, to give the king notice of my approach, and to desire, "that his majesty would please to appoint a day and hour, when it would by his gracious pleasure that I might have the honour to lick the dust before his footstool." This is the court style, and I found it to be more than matter of form: for, upon my admittance two days after my arrival, I was commanded to crawl upon my belly, and lick the floor as I advanced; but, on account of my being a stranger, care was taken to have it made so clean, that the dust was not offensive. However, this was a peculiar grace, not allowed to any but persons of the highest rank, when they desire an admittance. Nay, sometimes the floor is strewed with dust on purpose, when the person to be admitted happens to have powerful enemies at court; and I have seen a great lord with his mouth so crammed, that when he had crept to the proper distance from the throne; he was not able to speak a word. Neither is there any remedy; because it is capital for those, who receive an audience to spit or wipe their mouths in his majesty's presence. There is indeed another custom, which I cannot altogether approve of: when the king has a mind to put any of his nobles to death in a gentle indulgent manner, he commands the floor to be strewed with a certain brown powder of a deadly composition, which being licked up, infallibly kills him in twenty-four hours. But in justice to this prince's great clemency, and the care he has of his subjects' lives (wherein it were much to be wished that the Monarchs of Europe would imitate him), it must be mentioned for his honour, that strict orders are given to have the infected parts of the floor well washed after every such execution, which, if his domestics neglect, they are in danger of incurring his royal displeasure. I myself heard him give directions, that one of his pages should be whipped, whose turn it was to give notice about washing the floor after an execution, but maliciously had omitted it; by which neglect a young lord of great hopes, coming to an audience, was unfortunately poisoned, although the king at that time had no design against his life. But this good prince was so gracious as to forgive the poor page his whipping, upon promise that he would do so no more, without special orders. + +To return from this digression. When I had crept within four yards of the throne, I raised myself gently upon my knees, and then striking my forehead seven times against the ground, I pronounced the following words, as they had been taught me the night before, Inckpling gloffthrobb squut serummblhiop mlashnalt zwin tnodbalkuffh slhiophad gurdlubh asht. This is the compliment, established by the laws of the land, for all persons admitted to the king's presence. It may be rendered into English thus: "May your celestial majesty outlive the sun, eleven moons and a half!" To this the king returned some answer, which, although I could not understand, yet I replied as I had been directed: Fluft drin yalerick dwuldom prastrad mirpush, which properly signifies, "My tongue is in the mouth of my friend;" and by this expression was meant, that I desired leave to bring my interpreter; whereupon the young man already mentioned was accordingly introduced, by whose intervention I answered as many questions as his majesty could put in above an hour. I spoke in the Balnibarbian tongue, and my interpreter delivered my meaning in that of Luggnagg. + +The king was much delighted with my company, and ordered his bliffmarklub, or high-chamberlain, to appoint a lodging in the court for me and my interpreter; with a daily allowance for my table, and a large purse of gold for my common expenses. + +I staid three months in this country, out of perfect obedience to his majesty; who was pleased highly to favour me, and made me very honourable offers. But I thought it more consistent with prudence and justice to pass the remainder of my days with my wife and family. + +CHAPTER X. + +[The Luggnaggians commended. A particular description of the Struldbrugs, with many conversations between the author and some eminent persons upon that subject.] + +The Luggnaggians are a polite and generous people; and although they are not without some share of that pride which is peculiar to all Eastern countries, yet they show themselves courteous to strangers, especially such who are countenanced by the court. I had many acquaintance, and among persons of the best fashion; and being always attended by my interpreter, the conversation we had was not disagreeable. + +One day, in much good company, I was asked by a person of quality, "whether I had seen any of their struldbrugs, or immortals?" I said, "I had not;" and desired he would explain to me "what he meant by such an appellation, applied to a mortal creature." He told me "that sometimes, though very rarely, a child happened to be born in a family, with a red circular spot in the forehead, directly over the left eyebrow, which was an infallible mark that it should never die." The spot, as he described it, "was about the compass of a silver threepence, but in the course of time grew larger, and changed its colour; for at twelve years old it became green, so continued till five and twenty, then turned to a deep blue: at five and forty it grew coal black, and as large as an English shilling; but never admitted any further alteration." He said, "these births were so rare, that he did not believe there could be above eleven hundred struldbrugs, of both sexes, in the whole kingdom; of which he computed about fifty in the metropolis, and, among the rest, a young girl born; about three years ago: that these productions were not peculiar to any family, but a mere effect of chance; and the children of the struldbrugs themselves were equally mortal with the rest of the people." + +I freely own myself to have been struck with inexpressible delight, upon hearing this account: and the person who gave it me happening to understand the Balnibarbian language, which I spoke very well, I could not forbear breaking out into expressions, perhaps a little too extravagant. I cried out, as in a rapture, "Happy nation, where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal! Happy people, who enjoy so many living examples of ancient virtue, and have masters ready to instruct them in the wisdom of all former ages! but happiest, beyond all comparison, are those excellent struldbrugs, who, being born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehensions of death!" I discovered my admiration that I had not observed any of these illustrious persons at court; the black spot on the forehead being so remarkable a distinction, that I could not have easily overlooked it: and it was impossible that his majesty, a most judicious prince, should not provide himself with a good number of such wise and able counsellors. Yet perhaps the virtue of those reverend sages was too strict for the corrupt and libertine manners of a court: and we often find by experience, that young men are too opinionated and volatile to be guided by the sober dictates of their seniors. However, since the king was pleased to allow me access to his royal person, I was resolved, upon the very first occasion, to deliver my opinion to him on this matter freely and at large, by the help of my interpreter; and whether he would please to take my advice or not, yet in one thing I was determined, that his majesty having frequently offered me an establishment in this country, I would, with great thankfulness, accept the favour, and pass my life here in the conversation of those superior beings the struldbrugs, if they would please to admit me." + +The gentleman to whom I addressed my discourse, because (as I have already observed) he spoke the language of Balnibarbi, said to me, with a sort of a smile which usually arises from pity to the ignorant, "that he was glad of any occasion to keep me among them, and desired my permission to explain to the company what I had spoke." He did so, and they talked together for some time in their own language, whereof I understood not a syllable, neither could I observe by their countenances, what impression my discourse had made on them. After a short silence, the same person told me, "that his friends and mine (so he thought fit to express himself) were very much pleased with the judicious remarks I had made on the great happiness and advantages of immortal life, and they were desirous to know, in a particular manner, what scheme of living I should have formed to myself, if it had fallen to my lot to have been born a struldbrug." + +I answered, "it was easy to be eloquent on so copious and delightful a subject, especially to me, who had been often apt to amuse myself with visions of what I should do, if I were a king, a general, or a great lord: and upon this very case, I had frequently run over the whole system how I should employ myself, and pass the time, if I were sure to live for ever. + +"That, if it had been my good fortune to come into the world a struldbrug, as soon as I could discover my own happiness, by understanding the difference between life and death, I would first resolve, by all arts and methods, whatsoever, to procure myself riches. In the pursuit of which, by thrift and management, I might reasonably expect, in about two hundred years, to be the wealthiest man in the kingdom. In the second place, I would, from my earliest youth, apply myself to the study of arts and sciences, by which I should arrive in time to excel all others in learning. Lastly, I would carefully record every action and event of consequence, that happened in the public, impartially draw the characters of the several successions of princes and great ministers of state, with my own observations on every point. I would exactly set down the several changes in customs, language, fashions of dress, diet, and diversions. By all which acquirements, I should be a living treasure of knowledge and wisdom, and certainly become the oracle of the nation. + +"I would never marry after threescore, but live in a hospitable manner, yet still on the saving side. I would entertain myself in forming and directing the minds of hopeful young men, by convincing them, from my own remembrance, experience, and observation, fortified by numerous examples, of the usefulness of virtue in public and private life. But my choice and constant companions should be a set of my own immortal brotherhood; among whom, I would elect a dozen from the most ancient, down to my own contemporaries. Where any of these wanted fortunes, I would provide them with convenient lodges round my own estate, and have some of them always at my table; only mingling a few of the most valuable among you mortals, whom length of time would harden me to lose with little or no reluctance, and treat your posterity after the same manner; just as a man diverts himself with the annual succession of pinks and tulips in his garden, without regretting the loss of those which withered the preceding year. + +"These struldbrugs and I would mutually communicate our observations and memorials, through the course of time; remark the several gradations by which corruption steals into the world, and oppose it in every step, by giving perpetual warning and instruction to mankind; which, added to the strong influence of our own example, would probably prevent that continual degeneracy of human nature so justly complained of in all ages. + +"Add to this, the pleasure of seeing the various revolutions of states and empires; the changes in the lower and upper world; ancient cities in ruins, and obscure villages become the seats of kings; famous rivers lessening into shallow brooks; the ocean leaving one coast dry, and overwhelming another; the discovery of many countries yet unknown; barbarity overrunning the politest nations, and the most barbarous become civilized. I should then see the discovery of the longitude, the perpetual motion, the universal medicine, and many other great inventions, brought to the utmost perfection. + +"What wonderful discoveries should we make in astronomy, by outliving and confirming our own predictions; by observing the progress and return of comets, with the changes of motion in the sun, moon, and stars!" + +I enlarged upon many other topics, which the natural desire of endless life, and sublunary happiness, could easily furnish me with. When I had ended, and the sum of my discourse had been interpreted, as before, to the rest of the company, there was a good deal of talk among them in the language of the country, not without some laughter at my expense. At last, the same gentleman who had been my interpreter, said, "he was desired by the rest to set me right in a few mistakes, which I had fallen into through the common imbecility of human nature, and upon that allowance was less answerable for them. That this breed of struldbrugs was peculiar to their country, for there were no such people either in Balnibarbi or Japan, where he had the honour to be ambassador from his majesty, and found the natives in both those kingdoms very hard to believe that the fact was possible: and it appeared from my astonishment when he first mentioned the matter to me, that I received it as a thing wholly new, and scarcely to be credited. That in the two kingdoms above mentioned, where, during his residence, he had conversed very much, he observed long life to be the universal desire and wish of mankind. That whoever had one foot in the grave was sure to hold back the other as strongly as he could. That the oldest had still hopes of living one day longer, and looked on death as the greatest evil, from which nature always prompted him to retreat. Only in this island of Luggnagg the appetite for living was not so eager, from the continual example of the struldbrugs before their eyes. + +"That the system of living contrived by me, was unreasonable and unjust; because it supposed a perpetuity of youth, health, and vigour, which no man could be so foolish to hope, however extravagant he may be in his wishes. That the question therefore was not, whether a man would choose to be always in the prime of youth, attended with prosperity and health; but how he would pass a perpetual life under all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along with it. For although few men will avow their desires of being immortal, upon such hard conditions, yet in the two kingdoms before mentioned, of Balnibarbi and Japan, he observed that every man desired to put off death some time longer, let it approach ever so late: and he rarely heard of any man who died willingly, except he were incited by the extremity of grief or torture. And he appealed to me, whether in those countries I had travelled, as well as my own, I had not observed the same general disposition." + +After this preface, he gave me a particular account of the struldbrugs among them. He said, "they commonly acted like mortals till about thirty years old; after which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession: for otherwise, there not being above two or three of that species born in an age, they were too few to form a general observation by. When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects against which their envy seems principally directed, are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others have gone to a harbour of rest to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle-age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition, than upon their best recollections. The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories; these meet with more pity and assistance, because they want many bad qualities which abound in others. + +"If a struldbrug happen to marry one of his own kind, the marriage is dissolved of course, by the courtesy of the kingdom, as soon as the younger of the two comes to be fourscore; for the law thinks it a reasonable indulgence, that those who are condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife. + +"As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates; only a small pittance is reserved for their support; and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period, they are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit; they cannot purchase lands, or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal, not even for the decision of meers and bounds. + +"At ninety, they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue, without increasing or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations. For the same reason, they never can amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect, they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable. + +The language of this country being always upon the flux, the struldbrugs of one age do not understand those of another; neither are they able, after two hundred years, to hold any conversation (farther than by a few general words) with their neighbours the mortals; and thus they lie under the disadvantage of living like foreigners in their own country." + +This was the account given me of the struldbrugs, as near as I can remember. I afterwards saw five or six of different ages, the youngest not above two hundred years old, who were brought to me at several times by some of my friends; but although they were told, "that I was a great traveller, and had seen all the world," they had not the least curiosity to ask me a question; only desired "I would give them slumskudask," or a token of remembrance; which is a modest way of begging, to avoid the law, that strictly forbids it, because they are provided for by the public, although indeed with a very scanty allowance. + +They are despised and hated by all sorts of people. When one of them is born, it is reckoned ominous, and their birth is recorded very particularly so that you may know their age by consulting the register, which, however, has not been kept above a thousand years past, or at least has been destroyed by time or public disturbances. But the usual way of computing how old they are, is by asking them what kings or great persons they can remember, and then consulting history; for infallibly the last prince in their mind did not begin his reign after they were fourscore years old. + +They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld; and the women more horrible than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years, which is not to be described; and among half a dozen, I soon distinguished which was the eldest, although there was not above a century or two between them. + +The reader will easily believe, that from what I had hear and seen, my keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated. I grew heartily ashamed of the pleasing visions I had formed; and thought no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure, from such a life. The king heard of all that had passed between me and my friends upon this occasion, and rallied me very pleasantly; wishing I could send a couple of struldbrugs to my own country, to arm our people against the fear of death; but this, it seems, is forbidden by the fundamental laws of the kingdom, or else I should have been well content with the trouble and expense of transporting them. + +I could not but agree, that the laws of this kingdom relative to the struldbrugs were founded upon the strongest reasons, and such as any other country would be under the necessity of enacting, in the like circumstances. Otherwise, as avarice is the necessary consequence of old age, those immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public. + +CHAPTER XI. + +[The author leaves Luggnagg, and sails to Japan. From thence he returns in a Dutch ship to Amsterdam, and from Amsterdam to England.] + +I thought this account of the struldbrugs might be some entertainment to the reader, because it seems to be a little out of the common way; at least I do not remember to have met the like in any book of travels that has come to my hands: and if I am deceived, my excuse must be, that it is necessary for travellers who describe the same country, very often to agree in dwelling on the same particulars, without deserving the censure of having borrowed or transcribed from those who wrote before them. + +There is indeed a perpetual commerce between this kingdom and the great empire of Japan; and it is very probable, that the Japanese authors may have given some account of the struldbrugs; but my stay in Japan was so short, and I was so entirely a stranger to the language, that I was not qualified to make any inquiries. But I hope the Dutch, upon this notice, will be curious and able enough to supply my defects. + +His majesty having often pressed me to accept some employment in his court, and finding me absolutely determined to return to my native country, was pleased to give me his license to depart; and honoured me with a letter of recommendation, under his own hand, to the Emperor of Japan. He likewise presented me with four hundred and forty-four large pieces of gold (this nation delighting in even numbers), and a red diamond, which I sold in England for eleven hundred pounds. + +On the 6th of May, 1709, I took a solemn leave of his majesty, and all my friends. This prince was so gracious as to order a guard to conduct me to Glanguenstald, which is a royal port to the south- west part of the island. In six days I found a vessel ready to carry me to Japan, and spent fifteen days in the voyage. We landed at a small port-town called Xamoschi, situated on the south-east part of Japan; the town lies on the western point, where there is a narrow strait leading northward into along arm of the sea, upon the north-west part of which, Yedo, the metropolis, stands. At landing, I showed the custom-house officers my letter from the king of Luggnagg to his imperial majesty. They knew the seal perfectly well; it was as broad as the palm of my hand. The impression was, A KING LIFTING UP A LAME BEGGAR FROM THE EARTH. The magistrates of the town, hearing of my letter, received me as a public minister. They provided me with carriages and servants, and bore my charges to Yedo; where I was admitted to an audience, and delivered my letter, which was opened with great ceremony, and explained to the Emperor by an interpreter, who then gave me notice, by his majesty's order, "that I should signify my request, and, whatever it were, it should be granted, for the sake of his royal brother of Luggnagg." This interpreter was a person employed to transact affairs with the Hollanders. He soon conjectured, by my countenance, that I was a European, and therefore repeated his majesty's commands in Low Dutch, which he spoke perfectly well. I answered, as I had before determined, "that I was a Dutch merchant, shipwrecked in a very remote country, whence I had travelled by sea and land to Luggnagg, and then took shipping for Japan; where I knew my countrymen often traded, and with some of these I hoped to get an opportunity of returning into Europe: I therefore most humbly entreated his royal favour, to give order that I should be conducted in safety to Nangasac." To this I added another petition, "that for the sake of my patron the king of Luggnagg, his majesty would condescend to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed on my countrymen, of trampling upon the crucifix: because I had been thrown into his kingdom by my misfortunes, without any intention of trading." When this latter petition was interpreted to the Emperor, he seemed a little surprised; and said, "he believed I was the first of my countrymen who ever made any scruple in this point; and that he began to doubt, whether I was a real Hollander, or not; but rather suspected I must be a Christian. However, for the reasons I had offered, but chiefly to gratify the king of Luggnagg by an uncommon mark of his favour, he would comply with the singularity of my humour; but the affair must be managed with dexterity, and his officers should be commanded to let me pass, as it were by forgetfulness. For he assured me, that if the secret should be discovered by my countrymen the Dutch, they would cut my throat in the voyage." I returned my thanks, by the interpreter, for so unusual a favour; and some troops being at that time on their march to Nangasac, the commanding officer had orders to convey me safe thither, with particular instructions about the business of the crucifix. + +On the 9th day of June, 1709, I arrived at Nangasac, after a very long and troublesome journey. I soon fell into the company of some Dutch sailors belonging to the Amboyna, of Amsterdam, a stout ship of 450 tons. I had lived long in Holland, pursuing my studies at Leyden, and I spoke Dutch well. The seamen soon knew whence I came last: they were curious to inquire into my voyages and course of life. I made up a story as short and probable as I could, but concealed the greatest part. I knew many persons in Holland. I was able to invent names for my parents, whom I pretended to be obscure people in the province of Gelderland. I would have given the captain (one Theodorus Vangrult) what he pleased to ask for my voyage to Holland; but understanding I was a surgeon, he was contented to take half the usual rate, on condition that I would serve him in the way of my calling. Before we took shipping, I was often asked by some of the crew, whether I had performed the ceremony above mentioned? I evaded the question by general answers; "that I had satisfied the Emperor and court in all particulars." However, a malicious rogue of a skipper went to an officer, and pointing to me, told him, "I had not yet trampled on the crucifix;" but the other, who had received instructions to let me pass, gave the rascal twenty strokes on the shoulders with a bamboo; after which I was no more troubled with such questions. + +Nothing happened worth mentioning in this voyage. We sailed with a fair wind to the Cape of Good Hope, where we staid only to take in fresh water. On the 10th of April, 1710, we arrived safe at Amsterdam, having lost only three men by sickness in the voyage, and a fourth, who fell from the foremast into the sea, not far from the coast of Guinea. From Amsterdam I soon after set sail for England, in a small vessel belonging to that city. + +On the 16th of April we put in at the Downs. I landed next morning, and saw once more my native country, after an absence of five years and six months complete. I went straight to Redriff, where I arrived the same day at two in the afternoon, and found my wife and family in good health. + +PART IV -- A VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYHNHNMS. + +CHAPTER I. + +[The author sets out as captain of a ship. His men conspire against him, confine him a long time to his cabin, and set him on shore in an unknown land. He travels up into the country. The Yahoos, a strange sort of animal, described. The author meets two Houyhnhnms.] + +I continued at home with my wife and children about five months, in a very happy condition, if I could have learned the lesson of knowing when I was well. I left my poor wife big with child, and accepted an advantageous offer made me to be captain of the Adventurer, a stout merchantman of 350 tons: for I understood navigation well, and being grown weary of a surgeon's employment at sea, which, however, I could exercise upon occasion, I took a skilful young man of that calling, one Robert Purefoy, into my ship. We set sail from Portsmouth upon the 7th day of September, 1710; on the 14th we met with Captain Pocock, of Bristol, at Teneriffe, who was going to the bay of Campechy to cut logwood. On the 16th, he was parted from us by a storm; I heard since my return, that his ship foundered, and none escaped but one cabin boy. He was an honest man, and a good sailor, but a little too positive in his own opinions, which was the cause of his destruction, as it has been with several others; for if he had followed my advice, he might have been safe at home with his family at this time, as well as myself. + +I had several men who died in my ship of calentures, so that I was forced to get recruits out of Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands, where I touched, by the direction of the merchants who employed me; which I had soon too much cause to repent: for I found afterwards, that most of them had been buccaneers. I had fifty hands onboard; and my orders were, that I should trade with the Indians in the South-Sea, and make what discoveries I could. These rogues, whom I had picked up, debauched my other men, and they all formed a conspiracy to seize the ship, and secure me; which they did one morning, rushing into my cabin, and binding me hand and foot, threatening to throw me overboard, if I offered to stir. I told them, "I was their prisoner, and would submit." This they made me swear to do, and then they unbound me, only fastening one of my legs with a chain, near my bed, and placed a sentry at my door with his piece charged, who was commanded to shoot me dead if I attempted my liberty. They sent me own victuals and drink, and took the government of the ship to themselves. Their design was to turn pirates and, plunder the Spaniards, which they could not do till they got more men. But first they resolved to sell the goods the ship, and then go to Madagascar for recruits, several among them having died since my confinement. They sailed many weeks, and traded with the Indians; but I knew not what course they took, being kept a close prisoner in my cabin, and expecting nothing less than to be murdered, as they often threatened me. + +Upon the 9th day of May, 1711, one James Welch came down to my cabin, and said, "he had orders from the captain to set me ashore." I expostulated with him, but in vain; neither would he so much as tell me who their new captain was. They forced me into the long- boat, letting me put on my best suit of clothes, which were as good as new, and take a small bundle of linen, but no arms, except my hanger; and they were so civil as not to search my pockets, into which I conveyed what money I had, with some other little necessaries. They rowed about a league, and then set me down on a strand. I desired them to tell me what country it was. They all swore, "they knew no more than myself;" but said, "that the captain" (as they called him) "was resolved, after they had sold the lading, to get rid of me in the first place where they could discover land." They pushed off immediately, advising me to make haste for fear of being overtaken by the tide, and so bade me farewell. + +In this desolate condition I advanced forward, and soon got upon firm ground, where I sat down on a bank to rest myself, and consider what I had best do. When I was a little refreshed, I went up into the country, resolving to deliver myself to the first savages I should meet, and purchase my life from them by some bracelets, glass rings, and other toys, which sailors usually provide themselves with in those voyages, and whereof I had some about me. The land was divided by long rows of trees, not regularly planted, but naturally growing; there was great plenty of grass, and several fields of oats. I walked very circumspectly, for fear of being surprised, or suddenly shot with an arrow from behind, or on either side. I fell into a beaten road, where I saw many tracts of human feet, and some of cows, but most of horses. At last I beheld several animals in a field, and one or two of the same kind sitting in trees. Their shape was very singular and deformed, which a little discomposed me, so that I lay down behind a thicket to observe them better. Some of them coming forward near the place where I lay, gave me an opportunity of distinctly marking their form. Their heads and breasts were covered with a thick hair, some frizzled, and others lank; they had beards like goats, and a long ridge of hair down their backs, and the fore parts of their legs and feet; but the rest of their bodies was bare, so that I might see their skins, which were of a brown buff colour. They had no tails, nor any hair at all on their buttocks, except about the anus, which, I presume, nature had placed there to defend them as they sat on the ground, for this posture they used, as well as lying down, and often stood on their hind feet. They climbed high trees as nimbly as a squirrel, for they had strong extended claws before and behind, terminating in sharp points, and hooked. They would often spring, and bound, and leap, with prodigious agility. The females were not so large as the males; they had long lank hair on their heads, but none on their faces, nor any thing more than a sort of down on the rest of their bodies, except about the anus and pudenda. The dugs hung between their fore feet, and often reached almost to the ground as they walked. The hair of both sexes was of several colours, brown, red, black, and yellow. Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my travels, so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy. So that, thinking I had seen enough, full of contempt and aversion, I got up, and pursued the beaten road, hoping it might direct me to the cabin of some Indian. I had not got far, when I met one of these creatures full in my way, and coming up directly to me. The ugly monster, when he saw me, distorted several ways, every feature of his visage, and stared, as at an object he had never seen before; then approaching nearer, lifted up his fore-paw, whether out of curiosity or mischief I could not tell; but I drew my hanger, and gave him a good blow with the flat side of it, for I durst not strike with the edge, fearing the inhabitants might be provoked against me, if they should come to know that I had killed or maimed any of their cattle. When the beast felt the smart, he drew back, and roared so loud, that a herd of at least forty came flocking about me from the next field, howling and making odious faces; but I ran to the body of a tree, and leaning my back against it, kept them off by waving my hanger. Several of this cursed brood, getting hold of the branches behind, leaped up into the tree, whence they began to discharge their excrements on my head; however, I escaped pretty well by sticking close to the stem of the tree, but was almost stifled with the filth, which fell about me on every side. + +In the midst of this distress, I observed them all to run away on a sudden as fast as they could; at which I ventured to leave the tree and pursue the road, wondering what it was that could put them into this fright. But looking on my left hand, I saw a horse walking softly in the field; which my persecutors having sooner discovered, was the cause of their flight. The horse started a little, when he came near me, but soon recovering himself, looked full in my face with manifest tokens of wonder; he viewed my hands and feet, walking round me several times. I would have pursued my journey, but he placed himself directly in the way, yet looking with a very mild aspect, never offering the least violence. We stood gazing at each other for some time; at last I took the boldness to reach my hand towards his neck with a design to stroke it, using the common style and whistle of jockeys, when they are going to handle a strange horse. But this animal seemed to receive my civilities with disdain, shook his head, and bent his brows, softly raising up his right fore-foot to remove my hand. Then he neighed three or four times, but in so different a cadence, that I almost began to think he was speaking to himself, in some language of his own. + +While he and I were thus employed, another horse came up; who applying himself to the first in a very formal manner, they gently struck each other's right hoof before, neighing several times by turns, and varying the sound, which seemed to be almost articulate. They went some paces off, as if it were to confer together, walking side by side, backward and forward, like persons deliberating upon some affair of weight, but often turning their eyes towards me, as it were to watch that I might not escape. I was amazed to see such actions and behaviour in brute beasts; and concluded with myself, that if the inhabitants of this country were endued with a proportionable degree of reason, they must needs be the wisest people upon earth. This thought gave me so much comfort, that I resolved to go forward, until I could discover some house or village, or meet with any of the natives, leaving the two horses to discourse together as they pleased. But the first, who was a dapple gray, observing me to steal off, neighed after me in so expressive a tone, that I fancied myself to understand what he meant; whereupon I turned back, and came near to him to expect his farther commands: but concealing my fear as much as I could, for I began to be in some pain how this adventure might terminate; and the reader will easily believe I did not much like my present situation. + +The two horses came up close to me, looking with great earnestness upon my face and hands. The gray steed rubbed my hat all round with his right fore-hoof, and discomposed it so much that I was forced to adjust it better by taking it off and settling it again; whereat, both he and his companion (who was a brown bay) appeared to be much surprised: the latter felt the lappet of my coat, and finding it to hang loose about me, they both looked with new signs of wonder. He stroked my right hand, seeming to admire the softness and colour; but he squeezed it so hard between his hoof and his pastern, that I was forced to roar; after which they both touched me with all possible tenderness. They were under great perplexity about my shoes and stockings, which they felt very often, neighing to each other, and using various gestures, not unlike those of a philosopher, when he would attempt to solve some new and difficult phenomenon. + +Upon the whole, the behaviour of these animals was so orderly and rational, so acute and judicious, that I at last concluded they must needs be magicians, who had thus metamorphosed themselves upon some design, and seeing a stranger in the way, resolved to divert themselves with him; or, perhaps, were really amazed at the sight of a man so very different in habit, feature, and complexion, from those who might probably live in so remote a climate. Upon the strength of this reasoning, I ventured to address them in the following manner: "Gentlemen, if you be conjurers, as I have good cause to believe, you can understand my language; therefore I make bold to let your worships know that I am a poor distressed Englishman, driven by his misfortunes upon your coast; and I entreat one of you to let me ride upon his back, as if he were a real horse, to some house or village where I can be relieved. In return of which favour, I will make you a present of this knife and bracelet," taking them out of my pocket. The two creatures stood silent while I spoke, seeming to listen with great attention, and when I had ended, they neighed frequently towards each other, as if they were engaged in serious conversation. I plainly observed that their language expressed the passions very well, and the words might, with little pains, be resolved into an alphabet more easily than the Chinese. + +I could frequently distinguish the word Yahoo, which was repeated by each of them several times: and although it was impossible for me to conjecture what it meant, yet while the two horses were busy in conversation, I endeavoured to practise this word upon my tongue; and as soon as they were silent, I boldly pronounced Yahoo in a loud voice, imitating at the same time, as near as I could, the neighing of a horse; at which they were both visibly surprised; and the gray repeated the same word twice, as if he meant to teach me the right accent; wherein I spoke after him as well as I could, and found myself perceivably to improve every time, though very far from any degree of perfection. Then the bay tried me with a second word, much harder to be pronounced; but reducing it to the English orthography, may be spelt thus, Houyhnhnm. I did not succeed in this so well as in the former; but after two or three farther trials, I had better fortune; and they both appeared amazed at my capacity. + +After some further discourse, which I then conjectured might relate to me, the two friends took their leaves, with the same compliment of striking each other's hoof; and the gray made me signs that I should walk before him; wherein I thought it prudent to comply, till I could find a better director. When I offered to slacken my pace, he would cry hhuun hhuun: I guessed his meaning, and gave him to understand, as well as I could, "that I was weary, and not able to walk faster;" upon which he would stand awhile to let me rest. + +CHAPTER II. + +[The author conducted by a Houyhnhnm to his house. The house described. The author's reception. The food of the Houyhnhnms. The author in distress for want of meat. Is at last relieved. His manner of feeding in this country.] + +Having travelled about three miles, we came to a long kind of building, made of timber stuck in the ground, and wattled across; the roof was low and covered with straw. I now began to be a little comforted; and took out some toys, which travellers usually carry for presents to the savage Indians of America, and other parts, in hopes the people of the house would be thereby encouraged to receive me kindly. The horse made me a sign to go in first; it was a large room with a smooth clay floor, and a rack and manger, extending the whole length on one side. There were three nags and two mares, not eating, but some of them sitting down upon their hams, which I very much wondered at; but wondered more to see the rest employed in domestic business; these seemed but ordinary cattle. However, this confirmed my first opinion, that a people who could so far civilise brute animals, must needs excel in wisdom all the nations of the world. The gray came in just after, and thereby prevented any ill treatment which the others might have given me. He neighed to them several times in a style of authority, and received answers. + +Beyond this room there were three others, reaching the length of the house, to which you passed through three doors, opposite to each other, in the manner of a vista. We went through the second room towards the third. Here the gray walked in first, beckoning me to attend: I waited in the second room, and got ready my presents for the master and mistress of the house; they were two knives, three bracelets of false pearls, a small looking-glass, and a bead necklace. The horse neighed three or four times, and I waited to hear some answers in a human voice, but I heard no other returns than in the same dialect, only one or two a little shriller than his. I began to think that this house must belong to some person of great note among them, because there appeared so much ceremony before I could gain admittance. But, that a man of quality should be served all by horses, was beyond my comprehension. I feared my brain was disturbed by my sufferings and misfortunes. I roused myself, and looked about me in the room where I was left alone: this was furnished like the first, only after a more elegant manner. I rubbed my eyes often, but the same objects still occurred. I pinched my arms and sides to awake myself, hoping I might be in a dream. I then absolutely concluded, that all these appearances could be nothing else but necromancy and magic. But I had no time to pursue these reflections; for the gray horse came to the door, and made me a sign to follow him into the third room where I saw a very comely mare, together with a colt and foal, sitting on their haunches upon mats of straw, not unartfully made, and perfectly neat and clean. + +The mare soon after my entrance rose from her mat, and coming up close, after having nicely observed my hands and face, gave me a most contemptuous look; and turning to the horse, I heard the word Yahoo often repeated betwixt them; the meaning of which word I could not then comprehend, although it was the first I had learned to pronounce. But I was soon better informed, to my everlasting mortification; for the horse, beckoning to me with his head, and repeating the hhuun, hhuun, as he did upon the road, which I understood was to attend him, led me out into a kind of court, where was another building, at some distance from the house. Here we entered, and I saw three of those detestable creatures, which I first met after my landing, feeding upon roots, and the flesh of some animals, which I afterwards found to be that of asses and dogs, and now and then a cow, dead by accident or disease. They were all tied by the neck with strong withes fastened to a beam; they held their food between the claws of their fore feet, and tore it with their teeth. + +The master horse ordered a sorrel nag, one of his servants, to untie the largest of these animals, and take him into the yard. The beast and I were brought close together, and by our countenances diligently compared both by master and servant, who thereupon repeated several times the word Yahoo. My horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I observed in this abominable animal, a perfect human figure: the face of it indeed was flat and broad, the nose depressed, the lips large, and the mouth wide; but these differences are common to all savage nations, where the lineaments of the countenance are distorted, by the natives suffering their infants to lie grovelling on the earth, or by carrying them on their backs, nuzzling with their face against the mothers' shoulders. The fore-feet of the Yahoo differed from my hands in nothing else but the length of the nails, the coarseness and brownness of the palms, and the hairiness on the backs. There was the same resemblance between our feet, with the same differences; which I knew very well, though the horses did not, because of my shoes and stockings; the same in every part of our bodies except as to hairiness and colour, which I have already described. + +The great difficulty that seemed to stick with the two horses, was to see the rest of my body so very different from that of a Yahoo, for which I was obliged to my clothes, whereof they had no conception. The sorrel nag offered me a root, which he held (after their manner, as we shall describe in its proper place) between his hoof and pastern; I took it in my hand, and, having smelt it, returned it to him again as civilly as I could. He brought out of the Yahoos' kennel a piece of ass's flesh; but it smelt so offensively that I turned from it with loathing: he then threw it to the Yahoo, by whom it was greedily devoured. He afterwards showed me a wisp of hay, and a fetlock full of oats; but I shook my head, to signify that neither of these were food for me. And indeed I now apprehended that I must absolutely starve, if I did not get to some of my own species; for as to those filthy Yahoos, although there were few greater lovers of mankind at that time than myself, yet I confess I never saw any sensitive being so detestable on all accounts; and the more I came near them the more hateful they grew, while I stayed in that country. This the master horse observed by my behaviour, and therefore sent the Yahoo back to his kennel. He then put his fore-hoof to his mouth, at which I was much surprised, although he did it with ease, and with a motion that appeared perfectly natural, and made other signs, to know what I would eat; but I could not return him such an answer as he was able to apprehend; and if he had understood me, I did not see how it was possible to contrive any way for finding myself nourishment. While we were thus engaged, I observed a cow passing by, whereupon I pointed to her, and expressed a desire to go and milk her. This had its effect; for he led me back into the house, and ordered a mare-servant to open a room, where a good store of milk lay in earthen and wooden vessels, after a very orderly and cleanly manner. She gave me a large bowlful, of which I drank very heartily, and found myself well refreshed. + +About noon, I saw coming towards the house a kind of vehicle drawn like a sledge by four Yahoos. There was in it an old steed, who seemed to be of quality; he alighted with his hind-feet forward, having by accident got a hurt in his left fore-foot. He came to dine with our horse, who received him with great civility. They dined in the best room, and had oats boiled in milk for the second course, which the old horse ate warm, but the rest cold. Their mangers were placed circular in the middle of the room, and divided into several partitions, round which they sat on their haunches, upon bosses of straw. In the middle was a large rack, with angles answering to every partition of the manger; so that each horse and mare ate their own hay, and their own mash of oats and milk, with much decency and regularity. The behaviour of the young colt and foal appeared very modest, and that of the master and mistress extremely cheerful and complaisant to their guest. The gray ordered me to stand by him; and much discourse passed between him and his friend concerning me, as I found by the stranger's often looking on me, and the frequent repetition of the word Yahoo. + +I happened to wear my gloves, which the master gray observing, seemed perplexed, discovering signs of wonder what I had done to my fore-feet. He put his hoof three or four times to them, as if he would signify, that I should reduce them to their former shape, which I presently did, pulling off both my gloves, and putting them into my pocket. This occasioned farther talk; and I saw the company was pleased with my behaviour, whereof I soon found the good effects. I was ordered to speak the few words I understood; and while they were at dinner, the master taught me the names for oats, milk, fire, water, and some others, which I could readily pronounce after him, having from my youth a great facility in learning languages. + +When dinner was done, the master horse took me aside, and by signs and words made me understand the concern he was in that I had nothing to eat. Oats in their tongue are called hlunnh. This word I pronounced two or three times; for although I had refused them at first, yet, upon second thoughts, I considered that I could contrive to make of them a kind of bread, which might be sufficient, with milk, to keep me alive, till I could make my escape to some other country, and to creatures of my own species. The horse immediately ordered a white mare servant of his family to bring me a good quantity of oats in a sort of wooden tray. These I heated before the fire, as well as I could, and rubbed them till the husks came off, which I made a shift to winnow from the grain. I ground and beat them between two stones; then took water, and made them into a paste or cake, which I toasted at the fire and eat warm with milk. It was at first a very insipid diet, though common enough in many parts of Europe, but grew tolerable by time; and having been often reduced to hard fare in my life, this was not the first experiment I had made how easily nature is satisfied. And I cannot but observe, that I never had one hours sickness while I stayed in this island. It is true, I sometimes made a shift to catch a rabbit, or bird, by springs made of Yahoo's hairs; and I often gathered wholesome herbs, which I boiled, and ate as salads with my bread; and now and then, for a rarity, I made a little butter, and drank the whey. I was at first at a great loss for salt, but custom soon reconciled me to the want of it; and I am confident that the frequent use of salt among us is an effect of luxury, and was first introduced only as a provocative to drink, except where it is necessary for preserving flesh in long voyages, or in places remote from great markets; for we observe no animal to be fond of it but man, and as to myself, when I left this country, it was a great while before I could endure the taste of it in anything that I ate. + +This is enough to say upon the subject of my diet, wherewith other travellers fill their books, as if the readers were personally concerned whether we fare well or ill. However, it was necessary to mention this matter, lest the world should think it impossible that I could find sustenance for three years in such a country, and among such inhabitants. + +When it grew towards evening, the master horse ordered a place for me to lodge in; it was but six yards from the house and separated from the stable of the Yahoos. Here I got some straw, and covering myself with my own clothes, slept very sound. But I was in a short time better accommodated, as the reader shall know hereafter, when I come to treat more particularly about my way of living. + +CHAPTER III. + +[The author studies to learn the language. The Houyhnhnm, his master, assists in teaching him. The language described. Several Houyhnhnms of quality come out of curiosity to see the author. He gives his master a short account of his voyage.] + +My principal endeavour was to learn the language, which my master (for so I shall henceforth call him), and his children, and every servant of his house, were desirous to teach me; for they looked upon it as a prodigy, that a brute animal should discover such marks of a rational creature. I pointed to every thing, and inquired the name of it, which I wrote down in my journal-book when I was alone, and corrected my bad accent by desiring those of the family to pronounce it often. In this employment, a sorrel nag, one of the under-servants, was very ready to assist me. + +In speaking, they pronounced through the nose and throat, and their language approaches nearest to the High-Dutch, or German, of any I know in Europe; but is much more graceful and significant. The emperor Charles V. made almost the same observation, when he said "that if he were to speak to his horse, it should be in High- Dutch." + +The curiosity and impatience of my master were so great, that he spent many hours of his leisure to instruct me. He was convinced (as he afterwards told me) that I must be a Yahoo; but my teachableness, civility, and cleanliness, astonished him; which were qualities altogether opposite to those animals. He was most perplexed about my clothes, reasoning sometimes with himself, whether they were a part of my body: for I never pulled them off till the family were asleep, and got them on before they waked in the morning. My master was eager to learn "whence I came; how I acquired those appearances of reason, which I discovered in all my actions; and to know my story from my own mouth, which he hoped he should soon do by the great proficiency I made in learning and pronouncing their words and sentences." To help my memory, I formed all I learned into the English alphabet, and writ the words down, with the translations. This last, after some time, I ventured to do in my master's presence. It cost me much trouble to explain to him what I was doing; for the inhabitants have not the least idea of books or literature. + +In about ten weeks time, I was able to understand most of his questions; and in three months, could give him some tolerable answers. He was extremely curious to know "from what part of the country I came, and how I was taught to imitate a rational creature; because the Yahoos (whom he saw I exactly resembled in my head, hands, and face, that were only visible), with some appearance of cunning, and the strongest disposition to mischief, were observed to be the most unteachable of all brutes." I answered, "that I came over the sea, from a far place, with many others of my own kind, in a great hollow vessel made of the bodies of trees: that my companions forced me to land on this coast, and then left me to shift for myself." It was with some difficulty, and by the help of many signs, that I brought him to understand me. He replied, "that I must needs be mistaken, or that I said the thing which was not;" for they have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood. "He knew it was impossible that there could be a country beyond the sea, or that a parcel of brutes could move a wooden vessel whither they pleased upon water. He was sure no Houyhnhnm alive could make such a vessel, nor would trust Yahoos to manage it." + +The word Houyhnhnm, in their tongue, signifies a HORSE, and, in its etymology, the PERFECTION OF NATURE. I told my master, "that I was at a loss for expression, but would improve as fast as I could; and hoped, in a short time, I should be able to tell him wonders." He was pleased to direct his own mare, his colt, and foal, and the servants of the family, to take all opportunities of instructing me; and every day, for two or three hours, he was at the same pains himself. Several horses and mares of quality in the neighbourhood came often to our house, upon the report spread of "a wonderful Yahoo, that could speak like a Houyhnhnm, and seemed, in his words and actions, to discover some glimmerings of reason." These delighted to converse with me: they put many questions, and received such answers as I was able to return. By all these advantages I made so great a progress, that, in five months from my arrival I understood whatever was spoken, and could express myself tolerably well. + +The Houyhnhnms, who came to visit my master out of a design of seeing and talking with me, could hardly believe me to be a right Yahoo, because my body had a different covering from others of my kind. They were astonished to observe me without the usual hair or skin, except on my head, face, and hands; but I discovered that secret to my master upon an accident which happened about a fortnight before. + +I have already told the reader, that every night, when the family were gone to bed, it was my custom to strip, and cover myself with my clothes. It happened, one morning early, that my master sent for me by the sorrel nag, who was his valet. When he came I was fast asleep, my clothes fallen off on one side, and my shirt above my waist. I awaked at the noise he made, and observed him to deliver his message in some disorder; after which he went to my master, and in a great fright gave him a very confused account of what he had seen. This I presently discovered, for, going as soon as I was dressed to pay my attendance upon his honour, he asked me "the meaning of what his servant had reported, that I was not the same thing when I slept, as I appeared to be at other times; that his vale assured him, some part of me was white, some yellow, at least not so white, and some brown." + +I had hitherto concealed the secret of my dress, in order to distinguish myself, as much as possible, from that cursed race of Yahoos; but now I found it in vain to do so any longer. Besides, I considered that my clothes and shoes would soon wear out, which already were in a declining condition, and must be supplied by some contrivance from the hides of Yahoos, or other brutes; whereby the whole secret would be known. I therefore told my master, "that in the country whence I came, those of my kind always covered their bodies with the hairs of certain animals prepared by art, as well for decency as to avoid the inclemencies of air, both hot and cold; of which, as to my own person, I would give him immediate conviction, if he pleased to command me: only desiring his excuse, if I did not expose those parts that nature taught us to conceal." He said, "my discourse was all very strange, but especially the last part; for he could not understand, why nature should teach us to conceal what nature had given; that neither himself nor family were ashamed of any parts of their bodies; but, however, I might do as I pleased." Whereupon I first unbuttoned my coat, and pulled it off. I did the same with my waistcoat. I drew off my shoes, stockings, and breeches. I let my shirt down to my waist, and drew up the bottom; fastening it like a girdle about my middle, to hide my nakedness. + +My master observed the whole performance with great signs of curiosity and admiration. He took up all my clothes in his pastern, one piece after another, and examined them diligently; he then stroked my body very gently, and looked round me several times; after which, he said, it was plain I must be a perfect Yahoo; but that I differed very much from the rest of my species in the softness, whiteness, and smoothness of my skin; my want of hair in several parts of my body; the shape and shortness of my claws behind and before; and my affectation of walking continually on my two hinder feet. He desired to see no more; and gave me leave to put on my clothes again, for I was shuddering with cold. + +I expressed my uneasiness at his giving me so often the appellation of Yahoo, an odious animal, for which I had so utter a hatred and contempt: I begged he would forbear applying that word to me, and make the same order in his family and among his friends whom he suffered to see me. I requested likewise, "that the secret of my having a false covering to my body, might be known to none but himself, at least as long as my present clothing should last; for as to what the sorrel nag, his valet, had observed, his honour might command him to conceal it." + +All this my master very graciously consented to; and thus the secret was kept till my clothes began to wear out, which I was forced to supply by several contrivances that shall hereafter be mentioned. In the meantime, he desired "I would go on with my utmost diligence to learn their language, because he was more astonished at my capacity for speech and reason, than at the figure of my body, whether it were covered or not;" adding, "that he waited with some impatience to hear the wonders which I promised to tell him." + +Thenceforward he doubled the pains he had been at to instruct me: he brought me into all company, and made them treat me with civility; "because," as he told them, privately, "this would put me into good humour, and make me more diverting." + +Every day, when I waited on him, beside the trouble he was at in teaching, he would ask me several questions concerning myself, which I answered as well as I could, and by these means he had already received some general ideas, though very imperfect. It would be tedious to relate the several steps by which I advanced to a more regular conversation; but the first account I gave of myself in any order and length was to this purpose: + +"That I came from a very far country, as I already had attempted to tell him, with about fifty more of my own species; that we travelled upon the seas in a great hollow vessel made of wood, and larger than his honour's house. I described the ship to him in the best terms I could, and explained, by the help of my handkerchief displayed, how it was driven forward by the wind. That upon a quarrel among us, I was set on shore on this coast, where I walked forward, without knowing whither, till he delivered me from the persecution of those execrable Yahoos." He asked me, "who made the ship, and how it was possible that the Houyhnhnms of my country would leave it to the management of brutes?" My answer was, "that I durst proceed no further in my relation, unless he would give me his word and honour that he would not be offended, and then I would tell him the wonders I had so often promised." He agreed; and I went on by assuring him, that the ship was made by creatures like myself; who, in all the countries I had travelled, as well as in my own, were the only governing rational animals; and that upon my arrival hither, I was as much astonished to see the Houyhnhnms act like rational beings, as he, or his friends, could be, in finding some marks of reason in a creature he was pleased to call a Yahoo; to which I owned my resemblance in every part, but could not account for their degenerate and brutal nature. I said farther, "that if good fortune ever restored me to my native country, to relate my travels hither, as I resolved to do, everybody would believe, that I said the thing that was not, that I invented the story out of my own head; and (with all possible respect to himself, his family, and friends, and under his promise of not being offended) our countrymen would hardly think it probable that a Houyhnhnm should be the presiding creature of a nation, and a Yahoo the brute." + +CHAPTER IV. + +[The Houyhnhnm's notion of truth and falsehood. The author's discourse disapproved by his master. The author gives a more particular account of himself, and the accidents of his voyage.] + +My master heard me with great appearances of uneasiness in his countenance; because doubting, or not believing, are so little known in this country, that the inhabitants cannot tell how to behave themselves under such circumstances. And I remember, in frequent discourses with my master concerning the nature of manhood in other parts of the world, having occasion to talk of lying and false representation, it was with much difficulty that he comprehended what I meant, although he had otherwise a most acute judgment. For he argued thus: "that the use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive information of facts; now, if any one said the thing which was not, these ends were defeated, because I cannot properly be said to understand him; and I am so far from receiving information, that he leaves me worse than in ignorance; for I am led to believe a thing black, when it is white, and short, when it is long." And these were all the notions he had concerning that faculty of lying, so perfectly well understood, and so universally practised, among human creatures. + +To return from this digression. When I asserted that the Yahoos were the only governing animals in my country, which my master said was altogether past his conception, he desired to know, "whether we had Houyhnhnms among us, and what was their employment?" I told him, "we had great numbers; that in summer they grazed in the fields, and in winter were kept in houses with hay and oats, where Yahoo servants were employed to rub their skins smooth, comb their manes, pick their feet, serve them with food, and make their beds." "I understand you well," said my master: "it is now very plain, from all you have spoken, that whatever share of reason the Yahoos pretend to, the Houyhnhnms are your masters; I heartily wish our Yahoos would be so tractable." I begged "his honour would please to excuse me from proceeding any further, because I was very certain that the account he expected from me would be highly displeasing." But he insisted in commanding me to let him know the best and the worst. I told him "he should be obeyed." I owned "that the Houyhnhnms among us, whom we called horses, were the most generous and comely animals we had; that they excelled in strength and swiftness; and when they belonged to persons of quality, were employed in travelling, racing, or drawing chariots; they were treated with much kindness and care, till they fell into diseases, or became foundered in the feet; but then they were sold, and used to all kind of drudgery till they died; after which their skins were stripped, and sold for what they were worth, and their bodies left to be devoured by dogs and birds of prey. But the common race of horses had not so good fortune, being kept by farmers and carriers, and other mean people, who put them to greater labour, and fed them worse." I described, as well as I could, our way of riding; the shape and use of a bridle, a saddle, a spur, and a whip; of harness and wheels. I added, "that we fastened plates of a certain hard substance, called iron, at the bottom of their feet, to preserve their hoofs from being broken by the stony ways, on which we often travelled." + +My master, after some expressions of great indignation, wondered "how we dared to venture upon a Houyhnhnm's back; for he was sure, that the weakest servant in his house would be able to shake off the strongest Yahoo; or by lying down and rolling on his back, squeeze the brute to death." I answered "that our horses were trained up, from three or four years old, to the several uses we intended them for; that if any of them proved intolerably vicious, they were employed for carriages; that they were severely beaten, while they were young, for any mischievous tricks; that the males, designed for the common use of riding or draught, were generally castrated about two years after their birth, to take down their spirits, and make them more tame and gentle; that they were indeed sensible of rewards and punishments; but his honour would please to consider, that they had not the least tincture of reason, any more than the Yahoos in this country." + +It put me to the pains of many circumlocutions, to give my master a right idea of what I spoke; for their language does not abound in variety of words, because their wants and passions are fewer than among us. But it is impossible to express his noble resentment at our savage treatment of the Houyhnhnm race; particularly after I had explained the manner and use of castrating horses among us, to hinder them from propagating their kind, and to render them more servile. He said, "if it were possible there could be any country where Yahoos alone were endued with reason, they certainly must be the governing animal; because reason in time will always prevail against brutal strength. But, considering the frame of our bodies, and especially of mine, he thought no creature of equal bulk was so ill-contrived for employing that reason in the common offices of life;" whereupon he desired to know whether those among whom I lived resembled me, or the Yahoos of his country?" I assured him, "that I was as well shaped as most of my age; but the younger, and the females, were much more soft and tender, and the skins of the latter generally as white as milk." He said, "I differed indeed from other Yahoos, being much more cleanly, and not altogether so deformed; but, in point of real advantage, he thought I differed for the worse: that my nails were of no use either to my fore or hinder feet; as to my fore feet, he could not properly call them by that name, for he never observed me to walk upon them; that they were too soft to bear the ground; that I generally went with them uncovered; neither was the covering I sometimes wore on them of the same shape, or so strong as that on my feet behind: that I could not walk with any security, for if either of my hinder feet slipped, I must inevitably fail." He then began to find fault with other parts of my body: "the flatness of my face, the prominence of my nose, mine eyes placed directly in front, so that I could not look on either side without turning my head: that I was not able to feed myself, without lifting one of my fore-feet to my mouth: and therefore nature had placed those joints to answer that necessity. He knew not what could be the use of those several clefts and divisions in my feet behind; that these were too soft to bear the hardness and sharpness of stones, without a covering made from the skin of some other brute; that my whole body wanted a fence against heat and cold, which I was forced to put on and off every day, with tediousness and trouble: and lastly, that he observed every animal in this country naturally to abhor the Yahoos, whom the weaker avoided, and the stronger drove from them. So that, supposing us to have the gift of reason, he could not see how it were possible to cure that natural antipathy, which every creature discovered against us; nor consequently how we could tame and render them serviceable. However, he would," as he said, "debate the matter no farther, because he was more desirous to know my own story, the country where I was born, and the several actions and events of my life, before I came hither." + +I assured him, "how extremely desirous I was that he should be satisfied on every point; but I doubted much, whether it would be possible for me to explain myself on several subjects, whereof his honour could have no conception; because I saw nothing in his country to which I could resemble them; that, however, I would do my best, and strive to express myself by similitudes, humbly desiring his assistance when I wanted proper words;" which he was pleased to promise me. + +I said, "my birth was of honest parents, in an island called England; which was remote from his country, as many days' journey as the strongest of his honour's servants could travel in the annual course of the sun; that I was bred a surgeon, whose trade it is to cure wounds and hurts in the body, gotten by accident or violence; that my country was governed by a female man, whom we called queen; that I left it to get riches, whereby I might maintain myself and family, when I should return; that, in my last voyage, I was commander of the ship, and had about fifty Yahoos under me, many of which died at sea, and I was forced to supply them by others picked out from several nations; that our ship was twice in danger of being sunk, the first time by a great storm, and the second by striking against a rock." Here my master interposed, by asking me, "how I could persuade strangers, out of different countries, to venture with me, after the losses I had sustained, and the hazards I had run?" I said, "they were fellows of desperate fortunes, forced to fly from the places of their birth on account of their poverty or their crimes. Some were undone by lawsuits; others spent all they had in drinking, whoring, and gaming; others fled for treason; many for murder, theft, poisoning, robbery, perjury, forgery, coining false money, for committing rapes, or sodomy; for flying from their colours, or deserting to the enemy; and most of them had broken prison; none of these durst return to their native countries, for fear of being hanged, or of starving in a jail; and therefore they were under the necessity of seeking a livelihood in other places." + +During this discourse, my master was pleased to interrupt me several times. I had made use of many circumlocutions in describing to him the nature of the several crimes for which most of our crew had been forced to fly their country. This labour took up several days' conversation, before he was able to comprehend me. He was wholly at a loss to know what could be the use or necessity of practising those vices. To clear up which, I endeavoured to give some ideas of the desire of power and riches; of the terrible effects of lust, intemperance, malice, and envy. All this I was forced to define and describe by putting cases and making suppositions. After which, like one whose imagination was struck with something never seen or heard of before, he would lift up his eyes with amazement and indignation. Power, government, war, law, punishment, and a thousand other things, had no terms wherein that language could express them, which made the difficulty almost insuperable, to give my master any conception of what I meant. But being of an excellent understanding, much improved by contemplation and converse, he at last arrived at a competent knowledge of what human nature, in our parts of the world, is capable to perform, and desired I would give him some particular account of that land which we call Europe, but especially of my own country. + +CHAPTER V. + +[The author at his master's command, informs him of the state of England. The causes of war among the princes of Europe. The author begins to explain the English constitution.] + +The reader may please to observe, that the following extract of many conversations I had with my master, contains a summary of the most material points which were discoursed at several times for above two years; his honour often desiring fuller satisfaction, as I farther improved in the Houyhnhnm tongue. I laid before him, as well as I could, the whole state of Europe; I discoursed of trade and manufactures, of arts and sciences; and the answers I gave to all the questions he made, as they arose upon several subjects, were a fund of conversation not to be exhausted. But I shall here only set down the substance of what passed between us concerning my own country, reducing it in order as well as I can, without any regard to time or other circumstances, while I strictly adhere to truth. My only concern is, that I shall hardly be able to do justice to my master's arguments and expressions, which must needs suffer by my want of capacity, as well as by a translation into our barbarous English. + +In obedience, therefore, to his honour's commands, I related to him the Revolution under the Prince of Orange; the long war with France, entered into by the said prince, and renewed by his successor, the present queen, wherein the greatest powers of Christendom were engaged, and which still continued: I computed, at his request, "that about a million of Yahoos might have been killed in the whole progress of it; and perhaps a hundred or more cities taken, and five times as many ships burnt or sunk." + +He asked me, "what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another?" I answered "they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or gray; and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent. + +"Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretend to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrels with another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war is entered upon, because the enemy is too strong; and sometimes, because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want, and we both fight, till they take ours, or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable cause of a war, to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence, or embroiled by factions among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into war against our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land, that would render our dominions round and complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death, and make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living. It is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent practice, when one prince desires the assistance of another, to secure him against an invasion, that the assistant, when he has driven out the invader, should seize on the dominions himself, and kill, imprison, or banish, the prince he came to relieve. Alliance by blood, or marriage, is a frequent cause of war between princes; and the nearer the kindred is, the greater their disposition to quarrel; poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance. For these reasons, the trade of a soldier is held the most honourable of all others; because a soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill, in cold blood, as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can. + +"There is likewise a kind of beggarly princes in Europe, not able to make war by themselves, who hire out their troops to richer nations, for so much a day to each man; of which they keep three- fourths to themselves, and it is the best part of their maintenance: such are those in many northern parts of Europe." + +"What you have told me," said my master, "upon the subject of war, does indeed discover most admirably the effects of that reason you pretend to: however, it is happy that the shame is greater than the danger; and that nature has left you utterly incapable of doing much mischief. For, your mouths lying flat with your faces, you can hardly bite each other to any purpose, unless by consent. Then as to the claws upon your feet before and behind, they are so short and tender, that one of our Yahoos would drive a dozen of yours before him. And therefore, in recounting the numbers of those who have been killed in battle, I cannot but think you have said the thing which is not." + +I could not forbear shaking my head, and smiling a little at his ignorance. And being no stranger to the art of war, I gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carabines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, sea fights, ships sunk with a thousand men, twenty thousand killed on each side, dying groans, limbs flying in the air, smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses' feet, flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcases, left for food to dogs and wolves and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning, and destroying. And to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen, I assured him, "that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship, and beheld the dead bodies drop down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of the spectators." + +I was going on to more particulars, when my master commanded me silence. He said, "whoever understood the nature of Yahoos, might easily believe it possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every action I had named, if their strength and cunning equalled their malice. But as my discourse had increased his abhorrence of the whole species, so he found it gave him a disturbance in his mind to which he was wholly a stranger before. He thought his ears, being used to such abominable words, might, by degrees, admit them with less detestation: that although he hated the Yahoos of this country, yet he no more blamed them for their odious qualities, than he did a gnnayh (a bird of prey) for its cruelty, or a sharp stone for cutting his hoof. But when a creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities, he dreaded lest the corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself. He seemed therefore confident, that, instead of reason we were only possessed of some quality fitted to increase our natural vices; as the reflection from a troubled stream returns the image of an ill shapen body, not only larger but more distorted." + +He added, "that he had heard too much upon the subject of war, both in this and some former discourses. There was another point, which a little perplexed him at present. I had informed him, that some of our crew left their country on account of being ruined by law; that I had already explained the meaning of the word; but he was at a loss how it should come to pass, that the law, which was intended for every man's preservation, should be any man's ruin. Therefore he desired to be further satisfied what I meant by law, and the dispensers thereof, according to the present practice in my own country; because he thought nature and reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what he ought to do, and what to avoid." + +I assured his honour, "that the law was a science in which I had not much conversed, further than by employing advocates, in vain, upon some injustices that had been done me: however, I would give him all the satisfaction I was able." + +I said, "there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves. For example, if my neighbour has a mind to my cow, he has a lawyer to prove that he ought to have my cow from me. I must then hire another to defend my right, it being against all rules of law that any man should be allowed to speak for himself. Now, in this case, I, who am the right owner, lie under two great disadvantages: first, my lawyer, being practised almost from his cradle in defending falsehood, is quite out of his element when he would be an advocate for justice, which is an unnatural office he always attempts with great awkwardness, if not with ill-will. The second disadvantage is, that my lawyer must proceed with great caution, or else he will be reprimanded by the judges, and abhorred by his brethren, as one that would lessen the practice of the law. And therefore I have but two methods to preserve my cow. The first is, to gain over my adversary's lawyer with a double fee, who will then betray his client by insinuating that he hath justice on his side. The second way is for my lawyer to make my cause appear as unjust as he can, by allowing the cow to belong to my adversary: and this, if it be skilfully done, will certainly bespeak the favour of the bench. Now your honour is to know, that these judges are persons appointed to decide all controversies of property, as well as for the trial of criminals, and picked out from the most dexterous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy; and having been biassed all their lives against truth and equity, lie under such a fatal necessity of favouring fraud, perjury, and oppression, that I have known some of them refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty, by doing any thing unbecoming their nature or their office. + +"It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever has been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice, and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of directing accordingly. + +"In pleading, they studiously avoid entering into the merits of the cause; but are loud, violent, and tedious, in dwelling upon all circumstances which are not to the purpose. For instance, in the case already mentioned; they never desire to know what claim or title my adversary has to my cow; but whether the said cow were red or black; her horns long or short; whether the field I graze her in be round or square; whether she was milked at home or abroad; what diseases she is subject to, and the like; after which they consult precedents, adjourn the cause from time to time, and in ten, twenty, or thirty years, come to an issue. + +"It is likewise to be observed, that this society has a peculiar cant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply; whereby they have wholly confounded the very essence of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong; so that it will take thirty years to decide, whether the field left me by my ancestors for six generations belongs to me, or to a stranger three hundred miles off. + +"In the trial of persons accused for crimes against the state, the method is much more short and commendable: the judge first sends to sound the disposition of those in power, after which he can easily hang or save a criminal, strictly preserving all due forms of law." + +Here my master interposing, said, "it was a pity, that creatures endowed with such prodigious abilities of mind, as these lawyers, by the description I gave of them, must certainly be, were not rather encouraged to be instructors of others in wisdom and knowledge." In answer to which I assured his honour, "that in all points out of their own trade, they were usually the most ignorant and stupid generation among us, the most despicable in common conversation, avowed enemies to all knowledge and learning, and equally disposed to pervert the general reason of mankind in every other subject of discourse as in that of their own profession." + +CHAPTER VI. + +[A continuation of the state of England under Queen Anne. The character of a first minister of state in European courts.] + +My master was yet wholly at a loss to understand what motives could incite this race of lawyers to perplex, disquiet, and weary themselves, and engage in a confederacy of injustice, merely for the sake of injuring their fellow-animals; neither could he comprehend what I meant in saying, they did it for hire. Whereupon I was at much pains to describe to him the use of money, the materials it was made of, and the value of the metals; "that when a Yahoo had got a great store of this precious substance, he was able to purchase whatever he had a mind to; the finest clothing, the noblest houses, great tracts of land, the most costly meats and drinks, and have his choice of the most beautiful females. Therefore since money alone was able to perform all these feats, our Yahoos thought they could never have enough of it to spend, or to save, as they found themselves inclined, from their natural bent either to profusion or avarice; that the rich man enjoyed the fruit of the poor man's labour, and the latter were a thousand to one in proportion to the former; that the bulk of our people were forced to live miserably, by labouring every day for small wages, to make a few live plentifully." + +I enlarged myself much on these, and many other particulars to the same purpose; but his honour was still to seek; for he went upon a supposition, that all animals had a title to their share in the productions of the earth, and especially those who presided over the rest. Therefore he desired I would let him know, "what these costly meats were, and how any of us happened to want them?" Whereupon I enumerated as many sorts as came into my head, with the various methods of dressing them, which could not be done without sending vessels by sea to every part of the world, as well for liquors to drink as for sauces and innumerable other conveniences. I assured him "that this whole globe of earth must be at least three times gone round before one of our better female Yahoos could get her breakfast, or a cup to put it in." He said "that must needs be a miserable country which cannot furnish food for its own inhabitants. But what he chiefly wondered at was, how such vast tracts of ground as I described should be wholly without fresh water, and the people put to the necessity of sending over the sea for drink." I replied "that England (the dear place of my nativity) was computed to produce three times the quantity of food more than its inhabitants are able to consume, as well as liquors extracted from grain, or pressed out of the fruit of certain trees, which made excellent drink, and the same proportion in every other convenience of life. But, in order to feed the luxury and intemperance of the males, and the vanity of the females, we sent away the greatest part of our necessary things to other countries, whence, in return, we brought the materials of diseases, folly, and vice, to spend among ourselves. Hence it follows of necessity, that vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, flattering, suborning, forswearing, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, scribbling, star-gazing, poisoning, whoring, canting, libelling, freethinking, and the like occupations:" every one of which terms I was at much pains to make him understand. + +"That wine was not imported among us from foreign countries to supply the want of water or other drinks, but because it was a sort of liquid which made us merry by putting us out of our senses, diverted all melancholy thoughts, begat wild extravagant imaginations in the brain, raised our hopes and banished our fears, suspended every office of reason for a time, and deprived us of the use of our limbs, till we fell into a profound sleep; although it must be confessed, that we always awaked sick and dispirited; and that the use of this liquor filled us with diseases which made our lives uncomfortable and short. + +"But beside all this, the bulk of our people supported themselves by furnishing the necessities or conveniences of life to the rich and to each other. For instance, when I am at home, and dressed as I ought to be, I carry on my body the workmanship of a hundred tradesmen; the building and furniture of my house employ as many more, and five times the number to adorn my wife." + +I was going on to tell him of another sort of people, who get their livelihood by attending the sick, having, upon some occasions, informed his honour that many of my crew had died of diseases. But here it was with the utmost difficulty that I brought him to apprehend what I meant. "He could easily conceive, that a Houyhnhnm, grew weak and heavy a few days before his death, or by some accident might hurt a limb; but that nature, who works all things to perfection, should suffer any pains to breed in our bodies, he thought impossible, and desired to know the reason of so unaccountable an evil." + +I told him "we fed on a thousand things which operated contrary to each other; that we ate when we were not hungry, and drank without the provocation of thirst; that we sat whole nights drinking strong liquors, without eating a bit, which disposed us to sloth, inflamed our bodies, and precipitated or prevented digestion; that prostitute female Yahoos acquired a certain malady, which bred rottenness in the bones of those who fell into their embraces; that this, and many other diseases, were propagated from father to son; so that great numbers came into the world with complicated maladies upon them; that it would be endless to give him a catalogue of all diseases incident to human bodies, for they would not be fewer than five or six hundred, spread over every limb and joint--in short, every part, external and intestine, having diseases appropriated to itself. To remedy which, there was a sort of people bred up among us in the profession, or pretence, of curing the sick. And because I had some skill in the faculty, I would, in gratitude to his honour, let him know the whole mystery and method by which they proceed. + +"Their fundamental is, that all diseases arise from repletion; whence they conclude, that a great evacuation of the body is necessary, either through the natural passage or upwards at the mouth. Their next business is from herbs, minerals, gums, oils, shells, salts, juices, sea-weed, excrements, barks of trees, serpents, toads, frogs, spiders, dead men's flesh and bones, birds, beasts, and fishes, to form a composition, for smell and taste, the most abominable, nauseous, and detestable, they can possibly contrive, which the stomach immediately rejects with loathing, and this they call a vomit; or else, from the same store-house, with some other poisonous additions, they command us to take in at the orifice above or below (just as the physician then happens to be disposed) a medicine equally annoying and disgustful to the bowels; which, relaxing the belly, drives down all before it; and this they call a purge, or a clyster. For nature (as the physicians allege) having intended the superior anterior orifice only for the intromission of solids and liquids, and the inferior posterior for ejection, these artists ingeniously considering that in all diseases nature is forced out of her seat, therefore, to replace her in it, the body must be treated in a manner directly contrary, by interchanging the use of each orifice; forcing solids and liquids in at the anus, and making evacuations at the mouth. + +"But, besides real diseases, we are subject to many that are only imaginary, for which the physicians have invented imaginary cures; these have their several names, and so have the drugs that are proper for them; and with these our female Yahoos are always infested. + +"One great excellency in this tribe, is their skill at prognostics, wherein they seldom fail; their predictions in real diseases, when they rise to any degree of malignity, generally portending death, which is always in their power, when recovery is not: and therefore, upon any unexpected signs of amendment, after they have pronounced their sentence, rather than be accused as false prophets, they know how to approve their sagacity to the world, by a seasonable dose. + +"They are likewise of special use to husbands and wives who are grown weary of their mates; to eldest sons, to great ministers of state, and often to princes." + +I had formerly, upon occasion, discoursed with my master upon the nature of government in general, and particularly of our own excellent constitution, deservedly the wonder and envy of the whole world. But having here accidentally mentioned a minister of state, he commanded me, some time after, to inform him, "what species of Yahoo I particularly meant by that appellation." + +I told him, "that a first or chief minister of state, who was the person I intended to describe, was the creature wholly exempt from joy and grief, love and hatred, pity and anger; at least, makes use of no other passions, but a violent desire of wealth, power, and titles; that he applies his words to all uses, except to the indication of his mind; that he never tells a truth but with an intent that you should take it for a lie; nor a lie, but with a design that you should take it for a truth; that those he speaks worst of behind their backs are in the surest way of preferment; and whenever he begins to praise you to others, or to yourself, you are from that day forlorn. The worst mark you can receive is a promise, especially when it is confirmed with an oath; after which, every wise man retires, and gives over all hopes. + +"There are three methods, by which a man may rise to be chief minister. The first is, by knowing how, with prudence, to dispose of a wife, a daughter, or a sister; the second, by betraying or undermining his predecessor; and the third is, by a furious zeal, in public assemblies, against the corruption's of the court. But a wise prince would rather choose to employ those who practise the last of these methods; because such zealots prove always the most obsequious and subservient to the will and passions of their master. That these ministers, having all employments at their disposal, preserve themselves in power, by bribing the majority of a senate or great council; and at last, by an expedient, called an act of indemnity" (whereof I described the nature to him), "they secure themselves from after-reckonings, and retire from the public laden with the spoils of the nation. + +"The palace of a chief minister is a seminary to breed up others in his own trade: the pages, lackeys, and porters, by imitating their master, become ministers of state in their several districts, and learn to excel in the three principal ingredients, of insolence, lying, and bribery. Accordingly, they have a subaltern court paid to them by persons of the best rank; and sometimes by the force of dexterity and impudence, arrive, through several gradations, to be successors to their lord. + +"He is usually governed by a decayed wench, or favourite footman, who are the tunnels through which all graces are conveyed, and may properly be called, in the last resort, the governors of the kingdom." + +One day, in discourse, my master, having heard me mention the nobility of my country, was pleased to make me a compliment which I could not pretend to deserve: "that he was sure I must have been born of some noble family, because I far exceeded in shape, colour, and cleanliness, all the Yahoos of his nation, although I seemed to fail in strength and agility, which must be imputed to my different way of living from those other brutes; and besides I was not only endowed with the faculty of speech, but likewise with some rudiments of reason, to a degree that, with all his acquaintance, I passed for a prodigy." + +He made me observe, "that among the Houyhnhnms, the white, the sorrel, and the iron-gray, were not so exactly shaped as the bay, the dapple-gray, and the black; nor born with equal talents of mind, or a capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own race, which in that country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural." + +I made his honour my most humble acknowledgments for the good opinion he was pleased to conceive of me, but assured him at the same time, "that my birth was of the lower sort, having been born of plain honest parents, who were just able to give me a tolerable education; that nobility, among us, was altogether a different thing from the idea he had of it; that our young noblemen are bred from their childhood in idleness and luxury; that, as soon as years will permit, they consume their vigour, and contract odious diseases among lewd females; and when their fortunes are almost ruined, they marry some woman of mean birth, disagreeable person, and unsound constitution (merely for the sake of money), whom they hate and despise. That the productions of such marriages are generally scrofulous, rickety, or deformed children; by which means the family seldom continues above three generations, unless the wife takes care to provide a healthy father, among her neighbours or domestics, in order to improve and continue the breed. That a weak diseased body, a meagre countenance, and sallow complexion, are the true marks of noble blood; and a healthy robust appearance is so disgraceful in a man of quality, that the world concludes his real father to have been a groom or a coachman. The imperfections of his mind run parallel with those of his body, being a composition of spleen, dullness, ignorance, caprice, sensuality, and pride. + +"Without the consent of this illustrious body, no law can be enacted, repealed, or altered: and these nobles have likewise the decision of all our possessions, without appeal."~^ + +CHAPTER VII. + +[The author's great love of his native country. His master's observations upon the constitution and administration of England, as described by the author, with parallel cases and comparisons. His master's observations upon human nature.] + +The reader may be disposed to wonder how I could prevail on myself to give so free a representation of my own species, among a race of mortals who are already too apt to conceive the vilest opinion of humankind, from that entire congruity between me and their Yahoos. But I must freely confess, that the many virtues of those excellent quadrupeds, placed in opposite view to human corruptions, had so far opened my eyes and enlarged my understanding, that I began to view the actions and passions of man in a very different light, and to think the honour of my own kind not worth managing; which, besides, it was impossible for me to do, before a person of so acute a judgment as my master, who daily convinced me of a thousand faults in myself, whereof I had not the least perception before, and which, with us, would never be numbered even among human infirmities. I had likewise learned, from his example, an utter detestation of all falsehood or disguise; and truth appeared so amiable to me, that I determined upon sacrificing every thing to it. + +Let me deal so candidly with the reader as to confess that there was yet a much stronger motive for the freedom I took in my representation of things. I had not yet been a year in this country before I contracted such a love and veneration for the inhabitants, that I entered on a firm resolution never to return to humankind, but to pass the rest of my life among these admirable Houyhnhnms, in the contemplation and practice of every virtue, where I could have no example or incitement to vice. But it was decreed by fortune, my perpetual enemy, that so great a felicity should not fall to my share. However, it is now some comfort to reflect, that in what I said of my countrymen, I extenuated their faults as much as I durst before so strict an examiner; and upon every article gave as favourable a turn as the matter would bear. For, indeed, who is there alive that will not be swayed by his bias and partiality to the place of his birth? + +I have related the substance of several conversations I had with my master during the greatest part of the time I had the honour to be in his service; but have, indeed, for brevity sake, omitted much more than is here set down. + +When I had answered all his questions, and his curiosity seemed to be fully satisfied, he sent for me one morning early, and commanded me to sit down at some distance (an honour which he had never before conferred upon me). He said, "he had been very seriously considering my whole story, as far as it related both to myself and my country; that he looked upon us as a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us; that we disarmed ourselves of the few abilities she had bestowed; had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions; that, as to myself, it was manifest I had neither the strength nor agility of a common Yahoo; that I walked infirmly on my hinder feet; had found out a contrivance to make my claws of no use or defence, and to remove the hair from my chin, which was intended as a shelter from the sun and the weather: lastly, that I could neither run with speed, nor climb trees like my brethren," as he called them, "the Yahoos in his country. + +"That our institutions of government and law were plainly owing to our gross defects in reason, and by consequence in virtue; because reason alone is sufficient to govern a rational creature; which was, therefore, a character we had no pretence to challenge, even from the account I had given of my own people; although he manifestly perceived, that, in order to favour them, I had concealed many particulars, and often said the thing which was not. + +"He was the more confirmed in this opinion, because, he observed, that as I agreed in every feature of my body with other Yahoos, except where it was to my real disadvantage in point of strength, speed, and activity, the shortness of my claws, and some other particulars where nature had no part; so from the representation I had given him of our lives, our manners, and our actions, he found as near a resemblance in the disposition of our minds." He said, "the Yahoos were known to hate one another, more than they did any different species of animals; and the reason usually assigned was, the odiousness of their own shapes, which all could see in the rest, but not in themselves. He had therefore begun to think it not unwise in us to cover our bodies, and by that invention conceal many of our deformities from each other, which would else be hardly supportable. But he now found he had been mistaken, and that the dissensions of those brutes in his country were owing to the same cause with ours, as I had described them. For if," said he, "you throw among five Yahoos as much food as would be sufficient for fifty, they will, instead of eating peaceably, fall together by the ears, each single one impatient to have all to itself; and therefore a servant was usually employed to stand by while they were feeding abroad, and those kept at home were tied at a distance from each other: that if a cow died of age or accident, before a Houyhnhnm could secure it for his own Yahoos, those in the neighbourhood would come in herds to seize it, and then would ensue such a battle as I had described, with terrible wounds made by their claws on both sides, although they seldom were able to kill one another, for want of such convenient instruments of death as we had invented. At other times, the like battles have been fought between the Yahoos of several neighbourhoods, without any visible cause; those of one district watching all opportunities to surprise the next, before they are prepared. But if they find their project has miscarried, they return home, and, for want of enemies, engage in what I call a civil war among themselves. + +"That in some fields of his country there are certain shining stones of several colours, whereof the Yahoos are violently fond: and when part of these stones is fixed in the earth, as it sometimes happens, they will dig with their claws for whole days to get them out; then carry them away, and hide them by heaps in their kennels; but still looking round with great caution, for fear their comrades should find out their treasure." My master said, "he could never discover the reason of this unnatural appetite, or how these stones could be of any use to a Yahoo; but now he believed it might proceed from the same principle of avarice which I had ascribed to mankind. That he had once, by way of experiment, privately removed a heap of these stones from the place where one of his Yahoos had buried it; whereupon the sordid animal, missing his treasure, by his loud lamenting brought the whole herd to the place, there miserably howled, then fell to biting and tearing the rest, began to pine away, would neither eat, nor sleep, nor work, till he ordered a servant privately to convey the stones into the same hole, and hide them as before; which, when his Yahoo had found, he presently recovered his spirits and good humour, but took good care to remove them to a better hiding place, and has ever since been a very serviceable brute." + +My master further assured me, which I also observed myself, "that in the fields where the shining stones abound, the fiercest and most frequent battles are fought, occasioned by perpetual inroads of the neighbouring Yahoos." + +He said, "it was common, when two Yahoos discovered such a stone in a field, and were contending which of them should be the proprietor, a third would take the advantage, and carry it away from them both;" which my master would needs contend to have some kind of resemblance with our suits at law; wherein I thought it for our credit not to undeceive him; since the decision he mentioned was much more equitable than many decrees among us; because the plaintiff and defendant there lost nothing beside the stone they contended for: whereas our courts of equity would never have dismissed the cause, while either of them had any thing left. + +My master, continuing his discourse, said, "there was nothing that rendered the Yahoos more odious, than their undistinguishing appetite to devour every thing that came in their way, whether herbs, roots, berries, the corrupted flesh of animals, or all mingled together: and it was peculiar in their temper, that they were fonder of what they could get by rapine or stealth, at a greater distance, than much better food provided for them at home. If their prey held out, they would eat till they were ready to burst; after which, nature had pointed out to them a certain root that gave them a general evacuation. + +"There was also another kind of root, very juicy, but somewhat rare and difficult to be found, which the Yahoos sought for with much eagerness, and would suck it with great delight; it produced in them the same effects that wine has upon us. It would make them sometimes hug, and sometimes tear one another; they would howl, and grin, and chatter, and reel, and tumble, and then fall asleep in the mud." + +I did indeed observe that the Yahoos were the only animals in this country subject to any diseases; which, however, were much fewer than horses have among us, and contracted, not by any ill-treatment they meet with, but by the nastiness and greediness of that sordid brute. Neither has their language any more than a general appellation for those maladies, which is borrowed from the name of the beast, and called hnea-yahoo, or Yahoo's evil; and the cure prescribed is a mixture of their own dung and urine, forcibly put down the Yahoo's throat. This I have since often known to have been taken with success, and do here freely recommend it to my countrymen for the public good, as an admirable specific against all diseases produced by repletion. + +"As to learning, government, arts, manufactures, and the like," my master confessed, "he could find little or no resemblance between the Yahoos of that country and those in ours; for he only meant to observe what parity there was in our natures. He had heard, indeed, some curious Houyhnhnms observe, that in most herds there was a sort of ruling Yahoo (as among us there is generally some leading or principal stag in a park), who was always more deformed in body, and mischievous in disposition, than any of the rest; that this leader had usually a favourite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was to lick his master's feet and posteriors, and drive the female Yahoos to his kennel; for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of ass's flesh. This favourite is hated by the whole herd, and therefore, to protect himself, keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually continues in office till a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at the head of all the Yahoos in that district, young and old, male and female, come in a body, and discharge their excrements upon him from head to foot. But how far this might be applicable to our courts, and favourites, and ministers of state, my master said I could best determine." + +I durst make no return to this malicious insinuation, which debased human understanding below the sagacity of a common hound, who has judgment enough to distinguish and follow the cry of the ablest dog in the pack, without being ever mistaken. + +My master told me, "there were some qualities remarkable in the Yahoos, which he had not observed me to mention, or at least very slightly, in the accounts I had given of humankind." He said, "those animals, like other brutes, had their females in common; but in this they differed, that the she Yahoo would admit the males while she was pregnant; and that the hes would quarrel and fight with the females, as fiercely as with each other; both which practices were such degrees of infamous brutality, as no other sensitive creature ever arrived at. + +"Another thing he wondered at in the Yahoos, was their strange disposition to nastiness and dirt; whereas there appears to be a natural love of cleanliness in all other animals." As to the two former accusations, I was glad to let them pass without any reply, because I had not a word to offer upon them in defence of my species, which otherwise I certainly had done from my own inclinations. But I could have easily vindicated humankind from the imputation of singularity upon the last article, if there had been any swine in that country (as unluckily for me there were not), which, although it may be a sweeter quadruped than a Yahoo, cannot, I humbly conceive, in justice, pretend to more cleanliness; and so his honour himself must have owned, if he had seen their filthy way of feeding, and their custom of wallowing and sleeping in the mud. + +My master likewise mentioned another quality which his servants had discovered in several Yahoos, and to him was wholly unaccountable. He said, "a fancy would sometimes take a Yahoo to retire into a corner, to lie down, and howl, and groan, and spurn away all that came near him, although he were young and fat, wanted neither food nor water, nor did the servant imagine what could possibly ail him. And the only remedy they found was, to set him to hard work, after which he would infallibly come to himself." To this I was silent out of partiality to my own kind; yet here I could plainly discover the true seeds of spleen, which only seizes on the lazy, the luxurious, and the rich; who, if they were forced to undergo the same regimen, I would undertake for the cure. + +His honour had further observed, "that a female Yahoo would often stand behind a bank or a bush, to gaze on the young males passing by, and then appear, and hide, using many antic gestures and grimaces, at which time it was observed that she had a most offensive smell; and when any of the males advanced, would slowly retire, looking often back, and with a counterfeit show of fear, run off into some convenient place, where she knew the male would follow her. + +"At other times, if a female stranger came among them, three or four of her own sex would get about her, and stare, and chatter, and grin, and smell her all over; and then turn off with gestures, that seemed to express contempt and disdain." + +Perhaps my master might refine a little in these speculations, which he had drawn from what he observed himself, or had been told him by others; however, I could not reflect without some amazement, and much sorrow, that the rudiments of lewdness, coquetry, censure, and scandal, should have place by instinct in womankind. + +I expected every moment that my master would accuse the Yahoos of those unnatural appetites in both sexes, so common among us. But nature, it seems, has not been so expert a school-mistress; and these politer pleasures are entirely the productions of art and reason on our side of the globe. + +CHAPTER VIII. + +[The author relates several particulars of the Yahoos. The great virtues of the Houyhnhnms. The education and exercise of their youth. Their general assembly.] + +As I ought to have understood human nature much better than I supposed it possible for my master to do, so it was easy to apply the character he gave of the Yahoos to myself and my countrymen; and I believed I could yet make further discoveries, from my own observation. I therefore often begged his honour to let me go among the herds of Yahoos in the neighbourhood; to which he always very graciously consented, being perfectly convinced that the hatred I bore these brutes would never suffer me to be corrupted by them; and his honour ordered one of his servants, a strong sorrel nag, very honest and good-natured, to be my guard; without whose protection I durst not undertake such adventures. For I have already told the reader how much I was pestered by these odious animals, upon my first arrival; and I afterwards failed very narrowly, three or four times, of falling into their clutches, when I happened to stray at any distance without my hanger. And I have reason to believe they had some imagination that I was of their own species, which I often assisted myself by stripping up my sleeves, and showing my naked arms and breasts in their sight, when my protector was with me. At which times they would approach as near as they durst, and imitate my actions after the manner of monkeys, but ever with great signs of hatred; as a tame jackdaw with cap and stockings is always persecuted by the wild ones, when he happens to be got among them. + +They are prodigiously nimble from their infancy. However, I once caught a young male of three years old, and endeavoured, by all marks of tenderness, to make it quiet; but the little imp fell a squalling, and scratching, and biting with such violence, that I was forced to let it go; and it was high time, for a whole troop of old ones came about us at the noise, but finding the cub was safe (for away it ran), and my sorrel nag being by, they durst not venture near us. I observed the young animal's flesh to smell very rank, and the stink was somewhat between a weasel and a fox, but much more disagreeable. I forgot another circumstance (and perhaps I might have the reader's pardon if it were wholly omitted), that while I held the odious vermin in my hands, it voided its filthy excrements of a yellow liquid substance all over my clothes; but by good fortune there was a small brook hard by, where I washed myself as clean as I could; although I durst not come into my master's presence until I were sufficiently aired. + +By what I could discover, the Yahoos appear to be the most unteachable of all animals: their capacity never reaching higher than to draw or carry burdens. Yet I am of opinion, this defect arises chiefly from a perverse, restive disposition; for they are cunning, malicious, treacherous, and revengeful. They are strong and hardy, but of a cowardly spirit, and, by consequence, insolent, abject, and cruel. It is observed, that the red haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom yet they much exceed in strength and activity. + +The Houyhnhnms keep the Yahoos for present use in huts not far from the house; but the rest are sent abroad to certain fields, where they dig up roots, eat several kinds of herbs, and search about for carrion, or sometimes catch weasels and luhimuhs (a sort of wild rat), which they greedily devour. Nature has taught them to dig deep holes with their nails on the side of a rising ground, wherein they lie by themselves; only the kennels of the females are larger, sufficient to hold two or three cubs. + +They swim from their infancy like frogs, and are able to continue long under water, where they often take fish, which the females carry home to their young. And, upon this occasion, I hope the reader will pardon my relating an odd adventure. + +Being one day abroad with my protector the sorrel nag, and the weather exceeding hot, I entreated him to let me bathe in a river that was near. He consented, and I immediately stripped myself stark naked, and went down softly into the stream. It happened that a young female Yahoo, standing behind a bank, saw the whole proceeding, and inflamed by desire, as the nag and I conjectured, came running with all speed, and leaped into the water, within five yards of the place where I bathed. I was never in my life so terribly frightened. The nag was grazing at some distance, not suspecting any harm. She embraced me after a most fulsome manner. I roared as loud as I could, and the nag came galloping towards me, whereupon she quitted her grasp, with the utmost reluctancy, and leaped upon the opposite bank, where she stood gazing and howling all the time I was putting on my clothes. + +This was a matter of diversion to my master and his family, as well as of mortification to myself. For now I could no longer deny that I was a real Yahoo in every limb and feature, since the females had a natural propensity to me, as one of their own species. Neither was the hair of this brute of a red colour (which might have been some excuse for an appetite a little irregular), but black as a sloe, and her countenance did not make an appearance altogether so hideous as the rest of her kind; for I think she could not be above eleven years old. + +Having lived three years in this country, the reader, I suppose, will expect that I should, like other travellers, give him some account of the manners and customs of its inhabitants, which it was indeed my principal study to learn. + +As these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by nature with a general disposition to all virtues, and have no conceptions or ideas of what is evil in a rational creature, so their grand maxim is, to cultivate reason, and to be wholly governed by it. Neither is reason among them a point problematical, as with us, where men can argue with plausibility on both sides of the question, but strikes you with immediate conviction; as it must needs do, where it is not mingled, obscured, or discoloured, by passion and interest. I remember it was with extreme difficulty that I could bring my master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or how a point could be disputable; because reason taught us to affirm or deny only where we are certain; and beyond our knowledge we cannot do either. So that controversies, wranglings, disputes, and positiveness, in false or dubious propositions, are evils unknown among the Houyhnhnms. In the like manner, when I used to explain to him our several systems of natural philosophy, he would laugh, "that a creature pretending to reason, should value itself upon the knowledge of other people's conjectures, and in things where that knowledge, if it were certain, could be of no use." Wherein he agreed entirely with the sentiments of Socrates, as Plato delivers them; which I mention as the highest honour I can do that prince of philosophers. I have often since reflected, what destruction such doctrine would make in the libraries of Europe; and how many paths of fame would be then shut up in the learned world. + +Friendship and benevolence are the two principal virtues among the Houyhnhnms; and these not confined to particular objects, but universal to the whole race; for a stranger from the remotest part is equally treated with the nearest neighbour, and wherever he goes, looks upon himself as at home. They preserve decency and civility in the highest degrees, but are altogether ignorant of ceremony. They have no fondness for their colts or foals, but the care they take in educating them proceeds entirely from the dictates of reason. And I observed my master to show the same affection to his neighbour's issue, that he had for his own. They will have it that nature teaches them to love the whole species, and it is reason only that makes a distinction of persons, where there is a superior degree of virtue. + +When the matron Houyhnhnms have produced one of each sex, they no longer accompany with their consorts, except they lose one of their issue by some casualty, which very seldom happens; but in such a case they meet again; or when the like accident befalls a person whose wife is past bearing, some other couple bestow on him one of their own colts, and then go together again until the mother is pregnant. This caution is necessary, to prevent the country from being overburdened with numbers. But the race of inferior Houyhnhnms, bred up to be servants, is not so strictly limited upon this article: these are allowed to produce three of each sex, to be domestics in the noble families. + +In their marriages, they are exactly careful to choose such colours as will not make any disagreeable mixture in the breed. Strength is chiefly valued in the male, and comeliness in the female; not upon the account of love, but to preserve the race from degenerating; for where a female happens to excel in strength, a consort is chosen, with regard to comeliness. + +Courtship, love, presents, jointures, settlements have no place in their thoughts, or terms whereby to express them in their language. The young couple meet, and are joined, merely because it is the determination of their parents and friends; it is what they see done every day, and they look upon it as one of the necessary actions of a reasonable being. But the violation of marriage, or any other unchastity, was never heard of; and the married pair pass their lives with the same friendship and mutual benevolence, that they bear to all others of the same species who come in their way, without jealousy, fondness, quarrelling, or discontent. + +In educating the youth of both sexes, their method is admirable, and highly deserves our imitation. These are not suffered to taste a grain of oats, except upon certain days, till eighteen years old; nor milk, but very rarely; and in summer they graze two hours in the morning, and as many in the evening, which their parents likewise observe; but the servants are not allowed above half that time, and a great part of their grass is brought home, which they eat at the most convenient hours, when they can be best spared from work. + +Temperance, industry, exercise, and cleanliness, are the lessons equally enjoined to the young ones of both sexes: and my master thought it monstrous in us, to give the females a different kind of education from the males, except in some articles of domestic management; whereby, as he truly observed, one half of our natives were good for nothing but bringing children into the world; and to trust the care of our children to such useless animals, he said, was yet a greater instance of brutality. + +But the Houyhnhnms train up their youth to strength, speed, and hardiness, by exercising them in running races up and down steep hills, and over hard stony grounds; and when they are all in a sweat, they are ordered to leap over head and ears into a pond or river. Four times a year the youth of a certain district meet to show their proficiency in running and leaping, and other feats of strength and agility; where the victor is rewarded with a song in his or her praise. On this festival, the servants drive a herd of Yahoos into the field, laden with hay, and oats, and milk, for a repast to the Houyhnhnms; after which, these brutes are immediately driven back again, for fear of being noisome to the assembly. + +Every fourth year, at the vernal equinox, there is a representative council of the whole nation, which meets in a plain about twenty miles from our house, and continues about five or six days. Here they inquire into the state and condition of the several districts; whether they abound or be deficient in hay or oats, or cows, or Yahoos; and wherever there is any want (which is but seldom) it is immediately supplied by unanimous consent and contribution. Here likewise the regulation of children is settled: as for instance, if a Houyhnhnm has two males, he changes one of them with another that has two females; and when a child has been lost by any casualty, where the mother is past breeding, it is determined what family in the district shall breed another to supply the loss. + +CHAPTER IX. + +[A grand debate at the general assembly of the Houyhnhnms, and how it was determined. The learning of the Houyhnhnms. Their buildings. Their manner of burials. The defectiveness of their language.] + +One of these grand assemblies was held in my time, about three months before my departure, whither my master went as the representative of our district. In this council was resumed their old debate, and indeed the only debate that ever happened in their country; whereof my master, after his return, give me a very particular account. + +The question to be debated was, "whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth?" One of the members for the affirmative offered several arguments of great strength and weight, alleging, "that as the Yahoos were the most filthy, noisome, and deformed animals which nature ever produced, so they were the most restive and indocible, mischievous and malicious; they would privately suck the teats of the Houyhnhnms' cows, kill and devour their cats, trample down their oats and grass, if they were not continually watched, and commit a thousand other extravagancies." He took notice of a general tradition, "that Yahoos had not been always in their country; but that many ages ago, two of these brutes appeared together upon a mountain; whether produced by the heat of the sun upon corrupted mud and slime, or from the ooze and froth of the sea, was never known; that these Yahoos engendered, and their brood, in a short time, grew so numerous as to overrun and infest the whole nation; that the Houyhnhnms, to get rid of this evil, made a general hunting, and at last enclosed the whole herd; and destroying the elder, every Houyhnhnm kept two young ones in a kennel, and brought them to such a degree of tameness, as an animal, so savage by nature, can be capable of acquiring, using them for draught and carriage; that there seemed to be much truth in this tradition, and that those creatures could not be yinhniamshy (or aborigines of the land), because of the violent hatred the Houyhnhnms, as well as all other animals, bore them, which, although their evil disposition sufficiently deserved, could never have arrived at so high a degree if they had been aborigines, or else they would have long since been rooted out; that the inhabitants, taking a fancy to use the service of the Yahoos, had, very imprudently, neglected to cultivate the breed of asses, which are a comely animal, easily kept, more tame and orderly, without any offensive smell, strong enough for labour, although they yield to the other in agility of body, and if their braying be no agreeable sound, it is far preferable to the horrible howlings of the Yahoos." + +Several others declared their sentiments to the same purpose, when my master proposed an expedient to the assembly, whereof he had indeed borrowed the hint from me. "He approved of the tradition mentioned by the honourable member who spoke before, and affirmed, that the two Yahoos said to be seen first among them, had been driven thither over the sea; that coming to land, and being forsaken by their companions, they retired to the mountains, and degenerating by degrees, became in process of time much more savage than those of their own species in the country whence these two originals came. The reason of this assertion was, that he had now in his possession a certain wonderful Yahoo (meaning myself) which most of them had heard of, and many of them had seen. He then related to them how he first found me; that my body was all covered with an artificial composure of the skins and hairs of other animals; that I spoke in a language of my own, and had thoroughly learned theirs; that I had related to him the accidents which brought me thither; that when he saw me without my covering, I was an exact Yahoo in every part, only of a whiter colour, less hairy, and with shorter claws. He added, how I had endeavoured to persuade him, that in my own and other countries, the Yahoos acted as the governing, rational animal, and held the Houyhnhnms in servitude; that he observed in me all the qualities of a Yahoo, only a little more civilized by some tincture of reason, which, however, was in a degree as far inferior to the Houyhnhnm race, as the Yahoos of their country were to me; that, among other things, I mentioned a custom we had of castrating Houyhnhnms when they were young, in order to render them tame; that the operation was easy and safe; that it was no shame to learn wisdom from brutes, as industry is taught by the ant, and building by the swallow (for so I translate the word lyhannh, although it be a much larger fowl); that this invention might be practised upon the younger Yahoos here, which besides rendering them tractable and fitter for use, would in an age put an end to the whole species, without destroying life; that in the mean time the Houyhnhnms should be exhorted to cultivate the breed of asses, which, as they are in all respects more valuable brutes, so they have this advantage, to be fit for service at five years old, which the others are not till twelve." + +This was all my master thought fit to tell me, at that time, of what passed in the grand council. But he was pleased to conceal one particular, which related personally to myself, whereof I soon felt the unhappy effect, as the reader will know in its proper place, and whence I date all the succeeding misfortunes of my life. + +The Houyhnhnms have no letters, and consequently their knowledge is all traditional. But there happening few events of any moment among a people so well united, naturally disposed to every virtue, wholly governed by reason, and cut off from all commerce with other nations, the historical part is easily preserved without burdening their memories. I have already observed that they are subject to no diseases, and therefore can have no need of physicians. However, they have excellent medicines, composed of herbs, to cure accidental bruises and cuts in the pastern or frog of the foot, by sharp stones, as well as other maims and hurts in the several parts of the body. + +They calculate the year by the revolution of the sun and moon, but use no subdivisions into weeks. They are well enough acquainted with the motions of those two luminaries, and understand the nature of eclipses; and this is the utmost progress of their astronomy. + +In poetry, they must be allowed to excel all other mortals; wherein the justness of their similes, and the minuteness as well as exactness of their descriptions, are indeed inimitable. Their verses abound very much in both of these, and usually contain either some exalted notions of friendship and benevolence or the praises of those who were victors in races and other bodily exercises. Their buildings, although very rude and simple, are not inconvenient, but well contrived to defend them from all injuries of and heat. They have a kind of tree, which at forty years old loosens in the root, and falls with the first storm: it grows very straight, and being pointed like stakes with a sharp stone (for the Houyhnhnms know not the use of iron), they stick them erect in the ground, about ten inches asunder, and then weave in oat straw, or sometimes wattles, between them. The roof is made after the same manner, and so are the doors. + +The Houyhnhnms use the hollow part, between the pastern and the hoof of their fore-foot, as we do our hands, and this with greater dexterity than I could at first imagine. I have seen a white mare of our family thread a needle (which I lent her on purpose) with that joint. They milk their cows, reap their oats, and do all the work which requires hands, in the same manner. They have a kind of hard flints, which, by grinding against other stones, they form into instruments, that serve instead of wedges, axes, and hammers. With tools made of these flints, they likewise cut their hay, and reap their oats, which there grow naturally in several fields; the Yahoos draw home the sheaves in carriages, and the servants tread them in certain covered huts to get out the grain, which is kept in stores. They make a rude kind of earthen and wooden vessels, and bake the former in the sun. + +If they can avoid casualties, they die only of old age, and are buried in the obscurest places that can be found, their friends and relations expressing neither joy nor grief at their departure; nor does the dying person discover the least regret that he is leaving the world, any more than if he were upon returning home from a visit to one of his neighbours. I remember my master having once made an appointment with a friend and his family to come to his house, upon some affair of importance: on the day fixed, the mistress and her two children came very late; she made two excuses, first for her husband, who, as she said, happened that very morning to shnuwnh. The word is strongly expressive in their language, but not easily rendered into English; it signifies, "to retire to his first mother." Her excuse for not coming sooner, was, that her husband dying late in the morning, she was a good while consulting her servants about a convenient place where his body should be laid; and I observed, she behaved herself at our house as cheerfully as the rest. She died about three months after. + +They live generally to seventy, or seventy-five years, very seldom to fourscore. Some weeks before their death, they feel a gradual decay; but without pain. During this time they are much visited by their friends, because they cannot go abroad with their usual ease and satisfaction. However, about ten days before their death, which they seldom fail in computing, they return the visits that have been made them by those who are nearest in the neighbourhood, being carried in a convenient sledge drawn by Yahoos; which vehicle they use, not only upon this occasion, but when they grow old, upon long journeys, or when they are lamed by any accident: and therefore when the dying Houyhnhnms return those visits, they take a solemn leave of their friends, as if they were going to some remote part of the country, where they designed to pass the rest of their lives. + +I know not whether it may be worth observing, that the Houyhnhnms have no word in their language to express any thing that is evil, except what they borrow from the deformities or ill qualities of the Yahoos. Thus they denote the folly of a servant, an omission of a child, a stone that cuts their feet, a continuance of foul or unseasonable weather, and the like, by adding to each the epithet of Yahoo. For instance, hhnm Yahoo; whnaholm Yahoo, ynlhmndwihlma Yahoo, and an ill-contrived house ynholmhnmrohlnw Yahoo. + +I could, with great pleasure, enlarge further upon the manners and virtues of this excellent people; but intending in a short time to publish a volume by itself, expressly upon that subject, I refer the reader thither; and, in the mean time, proceed to relate my own sad catastrophe. + +CHAPTER X. + +[The author's economy, and happy life, among the Houyhnhnms. His great improvement in virtue by conversing with them. Their conversations. The author has notice given him by his master, that he must depart from the country. He falls into a swoon for grief; but submits. He contrives and finishes a canoe by the help of a fellow-servant, and puts to sea at a venture.] + +I had settled my little economy to my own heart's content. My master had ordered a room to be made for me, after their manner, about six yards from the house: the sides and floors of which I plastered with clay, and covered with rush-mats of my own contriving. I had beaten hemp, which there grows wild, and made of it a sort of ticking; this I filled with the feathers of several birds I had taken with springes made of Yahoos' hairs, and were excellent food. I had worked two chairs with my knife, the sorrel nag helping me in the grosser and more laborious part. When my clothes were worn to rags, I made myself others with the skins of rabbits, and of a certain beautiful animal, about the same size, called nnuhnoh, the skin of which is covered with a fine down. Of these I also made very tolerable stockings. I soled my shoes with wood, which I cut from a tree, and fitted to the upper-leather; and when this was worn out, I supplied it with the skins of Yahoos dried in the sun. I often got honey out of hollow trees, which I mingled with water, or ate with my bread. No man could more verify the truth of these two maxims, "That nature is very easily satisfied;" and, "That necessity is the mother of invention." I enjoyed perfect health of body, and tranquillity of mind; I did not feel the treachery or inconstancy of a friend, nor the injuries of a secret or open enemy. I had no occasion of bribing, flattering, or pimping, to procure the favour of any great man, or of his minion; I wanted no fence against fraud or oppression: here was neither physician to destroy my body, nor lawyer to ruin my fortune; no informer to watch my words and actions, or forge accusations against me for hire: here were no gibers, censurers, backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, housebreakers, attorneys, bawds, buffoons, gamesters, politicians, wits, splenetics, tedious talkers, controvertists, ravishers, murderers, robbers, virtuosos; no leaders, or followers, of party and faction; no encouragers to vice, by seducement or examples; no dungeon, axes, gibbets, whipping-posts, or pillories; no cheating shopkeepers or mechanics; no pride, vanity, or affectation; no fops, bullies, drunkards, strolling whores, or poxes; no ranting, lewd, expensive wives; no stupid, proud pedants; no importunate, overbearing, quarrelsome, noisy, roaring, empty, conceited, swearing companions; no scoundrels raised from the dust upon the merit of their vices, or nobility thrown into it on account of their virtues; no lords, fiddlers, judges, or dancing-masters. + +I had the favour of being admitted to several Houyhnhnms, who came to visit or dine with my master; where his honour graciously suffered me to wait in the room, and listen to their discourse. Both he and his company would often descend to ask me questions, and receive my answers. I had also sometimes the honour of attending my master in his visits to others. I never presumed to speak, except in answer to a question; and then I did it with inward regret, because it was a loss of so much time for improving myself; but I was infinitely delighted with the station of an humble auditor in such conversations, where nothing passed but what was useful, expressed in the fewest and most significant words; where, as I have already said, the greatest decency was observed, without the least degree of ceremony; where no person spoke without being pleased himself, and pleasing his companions; where there was no interruption, tediousness, heat, or difference of sentiments. They have a notion, that when people are met together, a short silence does much improve conversation: this I found to be true; for during those little intermissions of talk, new ideas would arise in their minds, which very much enlivened the discourse. Their subjects are, generally on friendship and benevolence, on order and economy; sometimes upon the visible operations of nature, or ancient traditions; upon the bounds and limits of virtue; upon the unerring rules of reason, or upon some determinations to be taken at the next great assembly: and often upon the various excellences of poetry. I may add, without vanity, that my presence often gave them sufficient matter for discourse, because it afforded my master an occasion of letting his friends into the history of me and my country, upon which they were all pleased to descant, in a manner not very advantageous to humankind: and for that reason I shall not repeat what they said; only I may be allowed to observe, that his honour, to my great admiration, appeared to understand the nature of Yahoos much better than myself. He went through all our vices and follies, and discovered many, which I had never mentioned to him, by only supposing what qualities a Yahoo of their country, with a small proportion of reason, might be capable of exerting; and concluded, with too much probability, "how vile, as well as miserable, such a creature must be." + +I freely confess, that all the little knowledge I have of any value, was acquired by the lectures I received from my master, and from hearing the discourses of him and his friends; to which I should be prouder to listen, than to dictate to the greatest and wisest assembly in Europe. I admired the strength, comeliness, and speed of the inhabitants; and such a constellation of virtues, in such amiable persons, produced in me the highest veneration. At first, indeed, I did not feel that natural awe, which the Yahoos and all other animals bear toward them; but it grew upon me by decrees, much sooner than I imagined, and was mingled with a respectful love and gratitude, that they would condescend to distinguish me from the rest of my species. + +When I thought of my family, my friends, my countrymen, or the human race in general, I considered them, as they really were, Yahoos in shape and disposition, perhaps a little more civilized, and qualified with the gift of speech; but making no other use of reason, than to improve and multiply those vices whereof their brethren in this country had only the share that nature allotted them. When I happened to behold the reflection of my own form in a lake or fountain, I turned away my face in horror and detestation of myself, and could better endure the sight of a common Yahoo than of my own person. By conversing with the Houyhnhnms, and looking upon them with delight, I fell to imitate their gait and gesture, which is now grown into a habit; and my friends often tell me, in a blunt way, "that I trot like a horse;" which, however, I take for a great compliment. Neither shall I disown, that in speaking I am apt to fall into the voice and manner of the Houyhnhnms, and hear myself ridiculed on that account, without the least mortification. + +In the midst of all this happiness, and when I looked upon myself to be fully settled for life, my master sent for me one morning a little earlier than his usual hour. I observed by his countenance that he was in some perplexity, and at a loss how to begin what he had to speak. After a short silence, he told me, "he did not know how I would take what he was going to say: that in the last general assembly, when the affair of the Yahoos was entered upon, the representatives had taken offence at his keeping a Yahoo (meaning myself) in his family, more like a Houyhnhnm than a brute animal; that he was known frequently to converse with me, as if he could receive some advantage or pleasure in my company; that such a practice was not agreeable to reason or nature, or a thing ever heard of before among them; the assembly did therefore exhort him either to employ me like the rest of my species, or command me to swim back to the place whence I came: that the first of these expedients was utterly rejected by all the Houyhnhnms who had ever seen me at his house or their own; for they alleged, that because I had some rudiments of reason, added to the natural pravity of those animals, it was to be feared I might be able to seduce them into the woody and mountainous parts of the country, and bring them in troops by night to destroy the Houyhnhnms' cattle, as being naturally of the ravenous kind, and averse from labour." + +My master added, "that he was daily pressed by the Houyhnhnms of the neighbourhood to have the assembly's exhortation executed, which he could not put off much longer. He doubted it would be impossible for me to swim to another country; and therefore wished I would contrive some sort of vehicle, resembling those I had described to him, that might carry me on the sea; in which work I should have the assistance of his own servants, as well as those of his neighbours." He concluded, "that for his own part, he could have been content to keep me in his service as long as I lived; because he found I had cured myself of some bad habits and dispositions, by endeavouring, as far as my inferior nature was capable, to imitate the Houyhnhnms." + +I should here observe to the reader, that a decree of the general assembly in this country is expressed by the word hnhloayn, which signifies an exhortation, as near as I can render it; for they have no conception how a rational creature can be compelled, but only advised, or exhorted; because no person can disobey reason, without giving up his claim to be a rational creature. + +I was struck with the utmost grief and despair at my master's discourse; and being unable to support the agonies I was under, I fell into a swoon at his feet. When I came to myself, he told me "that he concluded I had been dead;" for these people are subject to no such imbecilities of nature. I answered in a faint voice, "that death would have been too great a happiness; that although I could not blame the assembly's exhortation, or the urgency of his friends; yet, in my weak and corrupt judgment, I thought it might consist with reason to have been less rigorous; that I could not swim a league, and probably the nearest land to theirs might be distant above a hundred: that many materials, necessary for making a small vessel to carry me off, were wholly wanting in this country; which, however, I would attempt, in obedience and gratitude to his honour, although I concluded the thing to be impossible, and therefore looked on myself as already devoted to destruction; that the certain prospect of an unnatural death was the least of my evils; for, supposing I should escape with life by some strange adventure, how could I think with temper of passing my days among Yahoos, and relapsing into my old corruptions, for want of examples to lead and keep me within the paths of virtue? that I knew too well upon what solid reasons all the determinations of the wise Houyhnhnms were founded, not to be shaken by arguments of mine, a miserable Yahoo; and therefore, after presenting him with my humble thanks for the offer of his servants' assistance in making a vessel, and desiring a reasonable time for so difficult a work, I told him I would endeavour to preserve a wretched being; and if ever I returned to England, was not without hopes of being useful to my own species, by celebrating the praises of the renowned Houyhnhnms, and proposing their virtues to the imitation of mankind." + +My master, in a few words, made me a very gracious reply; allowed me the space of two months to finish my boat; and ordered the sorrel nag, my fellow-servant (for so, at this distance, I may presume to call him), to follow my instruction; because I told my master, "that his help would be sufficient, and I knew he had a tenderness for me." + +In his company, my first business was to go to that part of the coast where my rebellious crew had ordered me to be set on shore. I got upon a height, and looking on every side into the sea; fancied I saw a small island toward the north-east. I took out my pocket glass, and could then clearly distinguish it above five leagues off, as I computed; but it appeared to the sorrel nag to be only a blue cloud: for as he had no conception of any country beside his own, so he could not be as expert in distinguishing remote objects at sea, as we who so much converse in that element. + +After I had discovered this island, I considered no further; but resolved it should if possible, be the first place of my banishment, leaving the consequence to fortune. + +I returned home, and consulting with the sorrel nag, we went into a copse at some distance, where I with my knife, and he with a sharp flint, fastened very artificially after their manner, to a wooden handle, cut down several oak wattles, about the thickness of a walking-staff, and some larger pieces. But I shall not trouble the reader with a particular description of my own mechanics; let it suffice to say, that in six weeks time with the help of the sorrel nag, who performed the parts that required most labour, I finished a sort of Indian canoe, but much larger, covering it with the skins of Yahoos, well stitched together with hempen threads of my own making. My sail was likewise composed of the skins of the same animal; but I made use of the youngest I could get, the older being too tough and thick; and I likewise provided myself with four paddles. I laid in a stock of boiled flesh, of rabbits and fowls, and took with me two vessels, one filled with milk and the other with water. + +I tried my canoe in a large pond, near my master's house, and then corrected in it what was amiss; stopping all the chinks with Yahoos' tallow, till I found it staunch, and able to bear me and my freight; and, when it was as complete as I could possibly make it, I had it drawn on a carriage very gently by Yahoos to the sea-side, under the conduct of the sorrel nag and another servant. + +When all was ready, and the day came for my departure, I took leave of my master and lady and the whole family, my eyes flowing with tears, and my heart quite sunk with grief. But his honour, out of curiosity, and, perhaps, (if I may speak without vanity,) partly out of kindness, was determined to see me in my canoe, and got several of his neighbouring friends to accompany him. I was forced to wait above an hour for the tide; and then observing the wind very fortunately bearing toward the island to which I intended to steer my course, I took a second leave of my master: but as I was going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he did me the honour to raise it gently to my mouth. I am not ignorant how much I have been censured for mentioning this last particular. Detractors are pleased to think it improbable, that so illustrious a person should descend to give so great a mark of distinction to a creature so inferior as I. Neither have I forgotten how apt some travellers are to boast of extraordinary favours they have received. But, if these censurers were better acquainted with the noble and courteous disposition of the Houyhnhnms, they would soon change their opinion. + +I paid my respects to the rest of the Houyhnhnms in his honour's company; then getting into my canoe, I pushed off from shore. + +CHAPTER XI. + +[The author's dangerous voyage. He arrives at New Holland, hoping to settle there. Is wounded with an arrow by one of the natives. Is seized and carried by force into a Portuguese ship. The great civilities of the captain. The author arrives at England.] + +I began this desperate voyage on February 15, 1714-15, at nine o'clock in the morning. The wind was very favourable; however, I made use at first only of my paddles; but considering I should soon be weary, and that the wind might chop about, I ventured to set up my little sail; and thus, with the help of the tide, I went at the rate of a league and a half an hour, as near as I could guess. My master and his friends continued on the shore till I was almost out of sight; and I often heard the sorrel nag (who always loved me) crying out, "Hnuy illa nyha, majah Yahoo;" "Take care of thyself, gentle Yahoo." + +My design was, if possible, to discover some small island uninhabited, yet sufficient, by my labour, to furnish me with the necessaries of life, which I would have thought a greater happiness, than to be first minister in the politest court of Europe; so horrible was the idea I conceived of returning to live in the society, and under the government of Yahoos. For in such a solitude as I desired, I could at least enjoy my own thoughts, and reflect with delight on the virtues of those inimitable Houyhnhnms, without an opportunity of degenerating into the vices and corruptions of my own species. + +The reader may remember what I related, when my crew conspired against me, and confined me to my cabin; how I continued there several weeks without knowing what course we took; and when I was put ashore in the long-boat, how the sailors told me, with oaths, whether true or false, "that they knew not in what part of the world we were." However, I did then believe us to be about 10 degrees southward of the Cape of Good Hope, or about 45 degrees southern latitude, as I gathered from some general words I overheard among them, being I supposed to the south-east in their intended voyage to Madagascar. And although this were little better than conjecture, yet I resolved to steer my course eastward, hoping to reach the south-west coast of New Holland, and perhaps some such island as I desired lying westward of it. The wind was full west, and by six in the evening I computed I had gone eastward at least eighteen leagues; when I spied a very small island about half a league off, which I soon reached. It was nothing but a rock, with one creek naturally arched by the force of tempests. Here I put in my canoe, and climbing a part of the rock, I could plainly discover land to the east, extending from south to north. I lay all night in my canoe; and repeating my voyage early in the morning, I arrived in seven hours to the south-east point of New Holland. This confirmed me in the opinion I have long entertained, that the maps and charts place this country at least three degrees more to the east than it really is; which thought I communicated many years ago to my worthy friend, Mr. Herman Moll, and gave him my reasons for it, although he has rather chosen to follow other authors. + +I saw no inhabitants in the place where I landed, and being unarmed, I was afraid of venturing far into the country. I found some shellfish on the shore, and ate them raw, not daring to kindle a fire, for fear of being discovered by the natives. I continued three days feeding on oysters and limpets, to save my own provisions; and I fortunately found a brook of excellent water, which gave me great relief. + +On the fourth day, venturing out early a little too far, I saw twenty or thirty natives upon a height not above five hundred yards from me. They were stark naked, men, women, and children, round a fire, as I could discover by the smoke. One of them spied me, and gave notice to the rest; five of them advanced toward me, leaving the women and children at the fire. I made what haste I could to the shore, and, getting into my canoe, shoved off: the savages, observing me retreat, ran after me: and before I could get far enough into the sea, discharged an arrow which wounded me deeply on the inside of my left knee: I shall carry the mark to my grave. I apprehended the arrow might be poisoned, and paddling out of the reach of their darts (being a calm day), I made a shift to suck the wound, and dress it as well as I could. + +I was at a loss what to do, for I durst not return to the same landing-place, but stood to the north, and was forced to paddle, for the wind, though very gentle, was against me, blowing north- west. As I was looking about for a secure landing-place, I saw a sail to the north-north-east, which appearing every minute more visible, I was in some doubt whether I should wait for them or not; but at last my detestation of the Yahoo race prevailed: and turning my canoe, I sailed and paddled together to the south, and got into the same creek whence I set out in the morning, choosing rather to trust myself among these barbarians, than live with European Yahoos. I drew up my canoe as close as I could to the shore, and hid myself behind a stone by the little brook, which, as I have already said, was excellent water. + +The ship came within half a league of this creek, and sent her long boat with vessels to take in fresh water (for the place, it seems, was very well known); but I did not observe it, till the boat was almost on shore; and it was too late to seek another hiding-place. The seamen at their landing observed my canoe, and rummaging it all over, easily conjectured that the owner could not be far off. Four of them, well armed, searched every cranny and lurking-hole, till at last they found me flat on my face behind the stone. They gazed awhile in admiration at my strange uncouth dress; my coat made of skins, my wooden-soled shoes, and my furred stockings; whence, however, they concluded, I was not a native of the place, who all go naked. One of the seamen, in Portuguese, bid me rise, and asked who I was. I understood that language very well, and getting upon my feet, said, "I was a poor Yahoo banished from the Houyhnhnms, and desired they would please to let me depart." They admired to hear me answer them in their own tongue, and saw by my complexion I must be a European; but were at a loss to know what I meant by Yahoos and Houyhnhnms; and at the same time fell a-laughing at my strange tone in speaking, which resembled the neighing of a horse. I trembled all the while betwixt fear and hatred. I again desired leave to depart, and was gently moving to my canoe; but they laid hold of me, desiring to know, "what country I was of? whence I came?" with many other questions. I told them "I was born in England, whence I came about five years ago, and then their country and ours were at peace. I therefore hoped they would not treat me as an enemy, since I meant them no harm, but was a poor Yahoo seeking some desolate place where to pass the remainder of his unfortunate life." + +When they began to talk, I thought I never heard or saw any thing more unnatural; for it appeared to me as monstrous as if a dog or a cow should speak in England, or a Yahoo in Houyhnhnmland. The honest Portuguese were equally amazed at my strange dress, and the odd manner of delivering my words, which, however, they understood very well. They spoke to me with great humanity, and said, "they were sure the captain would carry me gratis to Lisbon, whence I might return to my own country; that two of the seamen would go back to the ship, inform the captain of what they had seen, and receive his orders; in the mean time, unless I would give my solemn oath not to fly, they would secure me by force. I thought it best to comply with their proposal. They were very curious to know my story, but I gave them very little satisfaction, and they all conjectured that my misfortunes had impaired my reason. In two hours the boat, which went laden with vessels of water, returned, with the captain's command to fetch me on board. I fell on my knees to preserve my liberty; but all was in vain; and the men, having tied me with cords, heaved me into the boat, whence I was taken into the ship, and thence into the captain's cabin. + +His name was Pedro de Mendez; he was a very courteous and generous person. He entreated me to give some account of myself, and desired to know what I would eat or drink; said, "I should be used as well as himself;" and spoke so many obliging things, that I wondered to find such civilities from a Yahoo. However, I remained silent and sullen; I was ready to faint at the very smell of him and his men. At last I desired something to eat out of my own canoe; but he ordered me a chicken, and some excellent wine, and then directed that I should be put to bed in a very clean cabin. I would not undress myself, but lay on the bed-clothes, and in half an hour stole out, when I thought the crew was at dinner, and getting to the side of the ship, was going to leap into the sea, and swim for my life, rather than continue among Yahoos. But one of the seamen prevented me, and having informed the captain, I was chained to my cabin. + +After dinner, Don Pedro came to me, and desired to know my reason for so desperate an attempt; assured me, "he only meant to do me all the service he was able;" and spoke so very movingly, that at last I descended to treat him like an animal which had some little portion of reason. I gave him a very short relation of my voyage; of the conspiracy against me by my own men; of the country where they set me on shore, and of my five years residence there. All which he looked upon as if it were a dream or a vision; whereat I took great offence; for I had quite forgot the faculty of lying, so peculiar to Yahoos, in all countries where they preside, and, consequently, their disposition of suspecting truth in others of their own species. I asked him, "whether it were the custom in his country to say the thing which was not?" I assured him, "I had almost forgot what he meant by falsehood, and if I had lived a thousand years in Houyhnhnmland, I should never have heard a lie from the meanest servant; that I was altogether indifferent whether he believed me or not; but, however, in return for his favours, I would give so much allowance to the corruption of his nature, as to answer any objection he would please to make, and then he might easily discover the truth." + +The captain, a wise man, after many endeavours to catch me tripping in some part of my story, at last began to have a better opinion of my veracity. But he added, "that since I professed so inviolable an attachment to truth, I must give him my word and honour to bear him company in this voyage, without attempting any thing against my life; or else he would continue me a prisoner till we arrived at Lisbon." I gave him the promise he required; but at the same time protested, "that I would suffer the greatest hardships, rather than return to live among Yahoos." + +Our voyage passed without any considerable accident. In gratitude to the captain, I sometimes sat with him, at his earnest request, and strove to conceal my antipathy against human kind, although it often broke out; which he suffered to pass without observation. But the greatest part of the day I confined myself to my cabin, to avoid seeing any of the crew. The captain had often entreated me to strip myself of my savage dress, and offered to lend me the best suit of clothes he had. This I would not be prevailed on to accept, abhorring to cover myself with any thing that had been on the back of a Yahoo. I only desired he would lend me two clean shirts, which, having been washed since he wore them, I believed would not so much defile me. These I changed every second day, and washed them myself. + +We arrived at Lisbon, Nov. 5, 1715. At our landing, the captain forced me to cover myself with his cloak, to prevent the rabble from crowding about me. I was conveyed to his own house; and at my earnest request he led me up to the highest room backwards. I conjured him "to conceal from all persons what I had told him of the Houyhnhnms; because the least hint of such a story would not only draw numbers of people to see me, but probably put me in danger of being imprisoned, or burnt by the Inquisition." The captain persuaded me to accept a suit of clothes newly made; but I would not suffer the tailor to take my measure; however, Don Pedro being almost of my size, they fitted me well enough. He accoutred me with other necessaries, all new, which I aired for twenty-four hours before I would use them. + +The captain had no wife, nor above three servants, none of which were suffered to attend at meals; and his whole deportment was so obliging, added to very good human understanding, that I really began to tolerate his company. He gained so far upon me, that I ventured to look out of the back window. By degrees I was brought into another room, whence I peeped into the street, but drew my head back in a fright. In a week's time he seduced me down to the door. I found my terror gradually lessened, but my hatred and contempt seemed to increase. I was at last bold enough to walk the street in his company, but kept my nose well stopped with rue, or sometimes with tobacco. + +In ten days, Don Pedro, to whom I had given some account of my domestic affairs, put it upon me, as a matter of honour and conscience, "that I ought to return to my native country, and live at home with my wife and children." He told me, "there was an English ship in the port just ready to sail, and he would furnish me with all things necessary." It would be tedious to repeat his arguments, and my contradictions. He said, "it was altogether impossible to find such a solitary island as I desired to live in; but I might command in my own house, and pass my time in a manner as recluse as I pleased." + +I complied at last, finding I could not do better. I left Lisbon the 24th day of November, in an English merchantman, but who was the master I never inquired. Don Pedro accompanied me to the ship, and lent me twenty pounds. He took kind leave of me, and embraced me at parting, which I bore as well as I could. During this last voyage I had no commerce with the master or any of his men; but, pretending I was sick, kept close in my cabin. On the fifth of December, 1715, we cast anchor in the Downs, about nine in the morning, and at three in the afternoon I got safe to my house at Rotherhith.~^ + +My wife and family received me with great surprise and joy, because they concluded me certainly dead; but I must freely confess the sight of them filled me only with hatred, disgust, and contempt; and the more, by reflecting on the near alliance I had to them. For although, since my unfortunate exile from the Houyhnhnm country, I had compelled myself to tolerate the sight of Yahoos, and to converse with Don Pedro de Mendez, yet my memory and imagination were perpetually filled with the virtues and ideas of those exalted Houyhnhnms. And when I began to consider that, by copulating with one of the Yahoo species I had become a parent of more, it struck me with the utmost shame, confusion, and horror. + +As soon as I entered the house, my wife took me in her arms, and kissed me; at which, having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell into a swoon for almost an hour. At the time I am writing, it is five years since my last return to England. During the first year, I could not endure my wife or children in my presence; the very smell of them was intolerable; much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room. To this hour they dare not presume to touch my bread, or drink out of the same cup, neither was I ever able to let one of them take me by the hand. The first money I laid out was to buy two young stone-horses, which I keep in a good stable; and next to them, the groom is my greatest favourite, for I feel my spirits revived by the smell he contracts in the stable. My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me and friendship to each other. + +CHAPTER XII. + +[The author's veracity. His design in publishing this work. His censure of those travellers who swerve from the truth. The author clears himself from any sinister ends in writing. An objection answered. The method of planting colonies. His native country commended. The right of the crown to those countries described by the author is justified. The difficulty of conquering them. The author takes his last leave of the reader; proposes his manner of living for the future; gives good advice, and concludes.] + +Thus, gentle reader, I have given thee a faithful history of my travels for sixteen years and above seven months: wherein I have not been so studious of ornament as of truth. I could, perhaps, like others, have astonished thee with strange improbable tales; but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact, in the simplest manner and style; because my principal design was to inform, and not to amuse thee. + +It is easy for us who travel into remote countries, which are seldom visited by Englishmen or other Europeans, to form descriptions of wonderful animals both at sea and land. Whereas a traveller's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad, as well as good, example of what they deliver concerning foreign places. + +I could heartily wish a law was enacted, that every traveller, before he were permitted to publish his voyages, should be obliged to make oath before the Lord High Chancellor, that all he intended to print was absolutely true to the best of his knowledge; for then the world would no longer be deceived, as it usually is, while some writers, to make their works pass the better upon the public, impose the grossest falsities on the unwary reader. I have perused several books of travels with great delight in my younger days; but having since gone over most parts of the globe, and been able to contradict many fabulous accounts from my own observation, it has given me a great disgust against this part of reading, and some indignation to see the credulity of mankind so impudently abused. Therefore, since my acquaintance were pleased to think my poor endeavours might not be unacceptable to my country, I imposed on myself, as a maxim never to be swerved from, that I would strictly adhere to truth; neither indeed can I be ever under the least temptation to vary from it, while I retain in my mind the lectures and example of my noble master and the other illustrious Houyhnhnms of whom I had so long the honour to be an humble hearer. + +- Nec si miserum Fortuna Sinonem Finxit, vanum etiam, mendacemque improba finget. + +I know very well, how little reputation is to be got by writings which require neither genius nor learning, nor indeed any other talent, except a good memory, or an exact journal. I know likewise, that writers of travels, like dictionary-makers, are sunk into oblivion by the weight and bulk of those who come last, and therefore lie uppermost. And it is highly probable, that such travellers, who shall hereafter visit the countries described in this work of mine, may, by detecting my errors (if there be any), and adding many new discoveries of their own, justle me out of vogue, and stand in my place, making the world forget that ever I was an author. This indeed would be too great a mortification, if I wrote for fame: but as my sole intention was the public good, I cannot be altogether disappointed. For who can read of the virtues I have mentioned in the glorious Houyhnhnms, without being ashamed of his own vices, when he considers himself as the reasoning, governing animal of his country? I shall say nothing of those remote nations where Yahoos preside; among which the least corrupted are the Brobdingnagians; whose wise maxims in morality and government it would be our happiness to observe. But I forbear descanting further, and rather leave the judicious reader to his own remarks and application. + +I am not a little pleased that this work of mine can possibly meet with no censurers: for what objections can be made against a writer, who relates only plain facts, that happened in such distant countries, where we have not the least interest, with respect either to trade or negotiations? I have carefully avoided every fault with which common writers of travels are often too justly charged. Besides, I meddle not the least with any party, but write without passion, prejudice, or ill-will against any man, or number of men, whatsoever. I write for the noblest end, to inform and instruct mankind; over whom I may, without breach of modesty, pretend to some superiority, from the advantages I received by conversing so long among the most accomplished Houyhnhnms. I write without any view to profit or praise. I never suffer a word to pass that may look like reflection, or possibly give the least offence, even to those who are most ready to take it. So that I hope I may with justice pronounce myself an author perfectly blameless; against whom the tribes of Answerers, Considerers, Observers, Reflectors, Detectors, Remarkers, will never be able to find matter for exercising their talents. + +I confess, it was whispered to me, "that I was bound in duty, as a subject of England, to have given in a memorial to a secretary of state at my first coming over; because, whatever lands are discovered by a subject belong to the crown." But I doubt whether our conquests in the countries I treat of would be as easy as those of Ferdinando Cortez over the naked Americans. The Lilliputians, I think, are hardly worth the charge of a fleet and army to reduce them; and I question whether it might be prudent or safe to attempt the Brobdingnagians; or whether an English army would be much at their ease with the Flying Island over their heads. The Houyhnhnms indeed appear not to be so well prepared for war, a science to which they are perfect strangers, and especially against missive weapons. However, supposing myself to be a minister of state, I could never give my advice for invading them. Their prudence, unanimity, unacquaintedness with fear, and their love of their country, would amply supply all defects in the military art. Imagine twenty thousand of them breaking into the midst of an European army, confounding the ranks, overturning the carriages, battering the warriors' faces into mummy by terrible yerks from their hinder hoofs; for they would well deserve the character given to Augustus, Recalcitrat undique tutus. But, instead of proposals for conquering that magnanimous nation, I rather wish they were in a capacity, or disposition, to send a sufficient number of their inhabitants for civilizing Europe, by teaching us the first principles of honour, justice, truth, temperance, public spirit, fortitude, chastity, friendship, benevolence, and fidelity. The names of all which virtues are still retained among us in most languages, and are to be met with in modern, as well as ancient authors; which I am able to assert from my own small reading. + +But I had another reason, which made me less forward to enlarge his majesty's dominions by my discoveries. To say the truth, I had conceived a few scruples with relation to the distributive justice of princes upon those occasions. For instance, a crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither; at length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder, they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank, or a stone, for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more, by force, for a sample; return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people! + +But this description, I confess, does by no means affect the British nation, who may be an example to the whole world for their wisdom, care, and justice in planting colonies; their liberal endowments for the advancement of religion and learning; their choice of devout and able pastors to propagate Christianity; their caution in stocking their provinces with people of sober lives and conversations from this the mother kingdom; their strict regard to the distribution of justice, in supplying the civil administration through all their colonies with officers of the greatest abilities, utter strangers to corruption; and, to crown all, by sending the most vigilant and virtuous governors, who have no other views than the happiness of the people over whom they preside, and the honour of the king their master. + +But as those countries which I have described do not appear to have any desire of being conquered and enslaved, murdered or driven out by colonies, nor abound either in gold, silver, sugar, or tobacco, I did humbly conceive, they were by no means proper objects of our zeal, our valour, or our interest. However, if those whom it more concerns think fit to be of another opinion, I am ready to depose, when I shall be lawfully called, that no European did ever visit those countries before me. I mean, if the inhabitants ought to be believed, unless a dispute may arise concerning the two Yahoos, said to have been seen many years ago upon a mountain in Houyhnhnmland. + +But, as to the formality of taking possession in my sovereign's name, it never came once into my thoughts; and if it had, yet, as my affairs then stood, I should perhaps, in point of prudence and self-preservation, have put it off to a better opportunity. + +Having thus answered the only objection that can ever be raised against me as a traveller, I here take a final leave of all my courteous readers, and return to enjoy my own speculations in my little garden at Redriff; to apply those excellent lessons of virtue which I learned among the Houyhnhnms; to instruct the Yahoos of my own family, is far as I shall find them docible animals; to behold my figure often in a glass, and thus, if possible, habituate myself by time to tolerate the sight of a human creature; to lament the brutality to Houyhnhnms in my own country, but always treat their persons with respect, for the sake of my noble master, his family, his friends, and the whole Houyhnhnm race, whom these of ours have the honour to resemble in all their lineaments, however their intellectuals came to degenerate. + +I began last week to permit my wife to sit at dinner with me, at the farthest end of a long table; and to answer (but with the utmost brevity) the few questions I asked her. Yet, the smell of a Yahoo continuing very offensive, I always keep my nose well stopped with rue, lavender, or tobacco leaves. And, although it be hard for a man late in life to remove old habits, I am not altogether out of hopes, in some time, to suffer a neighbour Yahoo in my company, without the apprehensions I am yet under of his teeth or his claws. + +My reconcilement to the Yahoo kind in general might not be so difficult, if they would be content with those vices and follies only which nature has entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician, a whoremonger, a physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this is all according to the due course of things: but when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience; neither shall I be ever able to comprehend how such an animal, and such a vice, could tally together. The wise and virtuous Houyhnhnms, who abound in all excellences that can adorn a rational creature, have no name for this vice in their language, which has no terms to express any thing that is evil, except those whereby they describe the detestable qualities of their Yahoos, among which they were not able to distinguish this of pride, for want of thoroughly understanding human nature, as it shows itself in other countries where that animal presides. But I, who had more experience, could plainly observe some rudiments of it among the wild Yahoos. + +But the Houyhnhnms, who live under the government of reason, are no more proud of the good qualities they possess, than I should be for not wanting a leg or an arm; which no man in his wits would boast of, although he must be miserable without them. I dwell the longer upon this subject from the desire I have to make the society of an English Yahoo by any means not insupportable; and therefore I here entreat those who have any tincture of this absurd vice, that they will not presume to come in my sight. + +^~ A stang is a pole or perch; sixteen feet and a half. + +^~ An act of parliament has been since passed by which some breaches of trust have been made capital. + +^~ Britannia.--Sir W. Scott. + +^~ London.--Sir W. Scott. + +^~ This is the revised text adopted by Dr. Hawksworth (1766). The above paragraph in the original editions (1726) takes another form, commencing:- "I told him that should I happen to live in a kingdom where lots were in vogue," &c. The names Tribnia and Langdon an not mentioned, and the "close stool" and its signification do not occur. + +^~ This paragraph is not in the original editions. + +^~ The original editions and Hawksworth's have Rotherhith here, though earlier in the work, Redriff is said to have been Gulliver's home in England. diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/little_brother.cory_doctorow.sst b/data/samples/current/en/little_brother.cory_doctorow.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2739874 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/little_brother.cory_doctorow.sst @@ -0,0 +1,6546 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Little Brother + +@creator: + :author: Doctorow, Cory |email doctorow@craphound.com + :illustrator: Wilkinson, Richard + :cover: Wordle + +@date: + :published: 2008 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Cory Doctorow, 2008 + :illustrations: Richard Wilkinson, 2009 + :cover: Wordle & Cory Doctorow + :license: This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means: \\ You are free: \\ * to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work \\ * to Remix - to adapt the work \\ Under the following conditions: \\ * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). \\ * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. \\ * Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. \\ * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link http://craphound.com/littlebrother \\ * Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my permission \\ More info here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ \\ See the end of this file for the complete legalese. [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License] \\ Cover image: Wordle, Attribution United States (CC BY) 3.0 \\ Illustration: Richard Wilkinson, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:civil rights|counterculture|young adult|science fiction|computer hackers|terrorism;democracy + :subject: Novel + :loc: PZ7.D66237 Lit 2008 + +@identifier: + :oclc: 176972381 + :isbn: 9780765319852 + +@notes: + :description: After being interrogated for days by the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco, California, seventeen-year-old Marcus, released into what is now a police state, decides to use his expertise in computer hacking to set things right. + +@links: + { Little Brother home }http://craphound.com/littlebrother + { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Cory_Doctorow_novel) + { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Little-Brother-Cory-Doctorow/dp/B002IT5OMA + { @ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Little-Brother/Cory-Doctorow/e/9780765319852 + +@make: + :breaks: break=1 + :cover_image: {cover_image_wordle_little_brother.png 494x775 "Little Brother" }image + :home_button_image: {little_brother_doctorow.png }http://craphound.com/littlebrother + :home_button_text: {Little Brother}http://craphound.com/littlebrother; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com + :footer: {Little Brother}http://craphound.com/littlebrother; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com + +:A~ @title @author + +1~cc READ THIS FIRST + +group{ + +This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means: + +You are free: + +_* to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work + +_* to Remix - to adapt the work + +Under the following conditions: + +_* Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). + +_* Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. + +_* Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. + +_* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link http://craphound.com/littlebrother + +_* Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my permission + +More info here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ + +See the end of this file for the complete legalese. + +}group + +1~intro INTRODUCTION + +I wrote Little Brother in a white-hot fury between May 7, 2007 and July 2, 2007: exactly eight weeks from the day I thought it up to the day I finished it (Alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put up with me clacking out the final chapter at 5AM in our hotel in Rome, where we were celebrating our anniversary). I'd always dreamed of having a book just materialize, fully formed, and come pouring out of my fingertips, no sweat and fuss -- but it wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd thought it would be. There were days when I wrote 10,000 words, hunching over my keyboard in airports, on subways, in taxis -- anywhere I could type. The book was trying to get out of my head, no matter what, and I missed so much sleep and so many meals that friends started to ask if I was unwell. + +When my dad was a young university student in the 1960s, he was one of the few "counterculture" people who thought computers were a good thing. For most young people, computers represented the de-humanization of society. University students were reduced to numbers on a punchcard, each bearing the legend "DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE," prompting some of the students to wear pins that said, "I AM A STUDENT: DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE ME." Computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the authorities to regiment people and bend them to their will. + +When I was a 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get more free. The Berlin Wall was about to come down. Computers -- which had been geeky and weird a few years before -- were everywhere, and the modem I'd used to connect to local bulletin board systems was now connecting me to the entire world through the Internet and commercial online services like GEnie. My lifelong fascination with activist causes went into overdrive as I saw how the main difficulty in activism -- organizing -- was getting easier by leaps and bounds (I still remember the first time I switched from mailing out a newsletter with hand-written addresses to using a database with mail-merge). In the Soviet Union, communications tools were being used to bring information -- and revolution -- to the farthest-flung corners of the largest authoritarian state the Earth had ever seen. + +But 17 years later, things are very different. The computers I love are being co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. The National Security Agency has illegally wiretapped the entire USA and gotten away with it. Car rental companies and mass transit and traffic authorities are watching where we go, sending us automated tickets, finking us out to busybodies, cops and bad guys who gain illicit access to their databases. The Transport Security Administration maintains a "no-fly" list of people who'd never been convicted of any crime, but who are nevertheless considered too dangerous to fly. The list's contents are secret. The rule that makes it enforceable is secret. The criteria for being added to the list are secret. It has four-year-olds on it. And US senators. And decorated veterans -- actual war heroes. + +The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood. + +What's more, kids were clearly being used as guinea-pigs for a new kind of technological state that all of us were on our way to, a world where taking a picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museum or even a Starbucks), or terrorism (in a public place), but where we could be photographed, tracked and logged hundreds of times a day by every tin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat and shop-keeper. A world where any measure, including torture, could be justified just by waving your hands and shouting "Terrorism! 9/11! Terrorism!" until all dissent fell silent. + +We don't have to go down that road. + +If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them around. + +If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech -- not censorship -- then you have a dog in the fight. + +If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tell us the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the same struggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under the same Bill of Rights that adults have. + +This book is meant to be part of the conversation about what an information society means: does it mean total control, or unheard-of liberty? It's not just a noun, it's a verb, it's something you do. + +2~ DO SOMETHING + +This book is meant to be something you do, not just something you read. The technology in this book is either real or nearly real. You can build a lot of it. You can share it and remix it (see THE COPYRIGHT THING, below). You can use the ideas to spark important discussions with your friends and family. You can use those ideas to defeat censorship and get onto the free Internet, even if your government, employer or school doesn't want you to. + +Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs for building the technology in this book. It's easy and incredibly fun. There's nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially stuff that makes you more free: http://www.instructables.com/member/w1n5t0n/ + +Discussions: There's an educator's manual for this book that my publisher, Tor, has put together that has tons of ideas for classroom, reading group and home discussions of the ideas in it: http://www.tor-forge.com/static/Little_Brother_Readers_Guide.pdf + +Defeat censorship: The afterword for this book has lots of resources for increasing your online freedom, blocking the snoops and evading the censorware blocks. The more people who know about this stuff, the better. + +Your stories: I'm collecting stories of people who've used technology to get the upper hand when confronted with abusive authority. I'm going to be including the best of these in a special afterword to the UK edition (see below) of the book, and I'll be putting them online as well. Send me your stories at doctorow@craphound.com, with the subject line "Abuses of Authority". + +2~ GREAT BRITAIN + +I'm a Canadian, and I've lived in lots of places (including San Francisco, the setting for Little Brother), and now I live in London, England, with my wife Alice and our little daughter, Poesy. I've lived here (off and on) for five years now, and though I love it to tiny pieces, there's one thing that's always bugged me: my books aren't available here. Some stores carried them as special items, imported from the USA, but it wasn't published by a British publisher. + +That's changed! HarperCollins UK has bought the British rights to this book (along with my next young adult novel, FOR THE WIN), and they're publishing it just a few months after the US edition, on November 17, 2008 (the day after I get back from my honeymoon!). + +UPDATE: November 27, 2008: And it's on shelves now! The HarperCollins edition's a knockout, too! + +I'm so glad about this, I could bust, honestly. Not just because they're finally selling my books in my adopted homeland, but because /{I'm raising a daughter here, dammit}/, and the surveillance and control mania in this country is starting to scare me bloodless. It seems like the entire police and governance system in Britain has fallen in love with DNA-swabbing, fingerprinting and video-recording everyone, on the off chance that someday you might do something wrong. In early 2008, the head of Scotland Yard seriously proposed taking DNA from /{five-year-olds}/ who display "offending traits" because they'll probably grow up to be criminals. The next week, the London police put up posters asking us all to turn in people who seem to be taking pictures of the ubiquitous CCTV spy-cameras because anyone who pays too much attention to the surveillance machine is probably a terrorist. + +America isn't the only country that lost its mind this decade. Britain's right there in the nuthouse with it, dribbling down its shirt front and pointing its finger at the invisible bogeymen and screaming until it gets its meds. + +We need to be having this conversation all over the planet. + +Want to get a copy in the UK? Sure thing! http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/#uk + +2~ OTHER EDITIONS + +My agent, Russell Galen (and his sub-agent Danny Baror) did an amazing job of pre-selling rights to Little Brother in many languages and formats. Here's the list as of today (May 4, 2008). I'll be updating it as more editions are sold, so feel free to grab another copy of this file (http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download) if there's an edition you're hoping to see, or see http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/ for links to buy all the currently shipping editions. + +_* Audiobook from Random House: http://www.randomhouse.com/audio/littlebrotheraudiobook + +A condition of my deal with Random House is that they're not allowed to release this on services that use "DRM" (Digital Rights Management) systems intended to control use and copying. That means that you won't find this book on Audible or iTunes, because Audible refuses to sell books without DRM (even if the author and publisher don't want DRM), and iTunes only carries Audible audiobooks. However, you can buy the MP3 file direct from RandomHouse or many other fine etailers, or through this widget: http://www.zipidee.com/zipidAudioPreview.aspx?aid=c5a8e946-fd2c-4b9e-a748-f297bba17de8 + +_* My foreign rights agent, Danny Baror, has presold a number of foreign editions: + +_* Greece: Pataki + +_* Russia: AST Publishing + +_* France: Universe Poche + +_* Norway: Det Norske Samlaget + +No publication dates yet for these, but I'll keep updating this file as more information is available. You can also subscribe to my mailing list for more info. + +2~ THE COPYRIGHT THING + +The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much. + +I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of Little Brother (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage. + +I /{hate}/ the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just /{stupid}/ to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a /{license}/ to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing. + +I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who /{must}/ read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life. + +Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they're /{readers}/, they're people who love books. + +People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of /{everything}/ that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band. + +Same with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. I've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online. I'm a stone used bookstore junkie, and I go to book fairs for fun. And you know what? It's the same people at all those places: book fans who do lots of everything that has to do with books. I buy weird, fugly pirate editions of my favorite books in China because they're weird and fugly and look great next to the eight or nine other editions that I paid full-freight for of the same books. I check books out of the library, google them when I need a quote, carry dozens around on my phone and hundreds on my laptop, and have (at this writing) more than 10,000 of them in storage lockers in London, Los Angeles and Toronto. + +If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I /{would}/. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to reconsider their business-models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches! + +Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing. + +In case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place: + +Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money? + +For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in science fiction sell half a million copies -- in a world where 175,000 attend the San Diego Comic Con alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who "like science fiction" (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and so on) just don't really buy books. I'm more interested in getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who's in the tent bought a ticket to be there. + +Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it's in their nature. And many of those copies have a destination, a person they're intended for, a hand-wrought transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation between two people who trust each other enough to share bits. That's the kind of thing that authors (should) dream of, the proverbial sealing of the deal. By making my books available for free pass-along, I make it easy for people who love them to help other people love them. + +What's more, I don't see ebooks as substitute for paper books for most people. It's not that the screens aren't good enough, either: if you're anything like me, you already spend every hour you can get in front of the screen, reading text. But the more computer-literate you are, the less likely you are to be reading long-form works on those screens -- that's because computer-literate people do more things with their computers. We run IM and email and we use the browser in a million diverse ways. We have games running in the background, and endless opportunities to tinker with our music libraries. The more you do with your computer, the more likely it is that you'll be interrupted after five to seven minutes to do something else. That makes the computer extremely poorly suited to reading long-form works off of, unless you have the iron self-discipline of a monk. + +The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper. + +So ebooks sell print books. Every writer I've heard of who's tried giving away ebooks to promote paper books has come back to do it again. That's the commercial case for doing free ebooks. + +Now, onto the artistic case. It's the twenty-first century. Copying stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today (or if it does, it'll be because civilization has collapsed, at which point we'll have other problems). Hard drives aren't going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. Networks won't get slower or harder to access. If you're not making art with the intention of having it copied, you're not really making art for the twenty-first century. There's something charming about making work you don't want to be copied, in the same way that it's nice to go to a Pioneer Village and see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his traditional forge. But it's hardly, you know, /{contemporary}/. I'm a science fiction writer. It's my job to write about the future (on a good day) or at least the present. Art that's not supposed to be copied is from the past. + +Finally, let's look at the moral case. Copying stuff is natural. It's how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story, written when I was six, was an excited re-telling of Star Wars, which I'd just seen in the theater. Now that the Internet -- the world's most efficient copying machine -- is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to play out more and more. There's no way I can stop my readers, and if I tried, I'd be a hypocrite: when I was 17, I was making mix-tapes, photocopying stories, and generally copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet had been around then, I'd have been using it to copy as much as I possibly could. + +There's no way to stop it, and the people who try end up doing more harm than piracy ever did. The record industry's ridiculous holy war against file-sharers (more than 20,000 music fans sued and counting!) exemplifies the absurdity of trying to get the food-coloring out of the swimming pool. If the choice is between allowing copying or being a frothing bully lashing out at anything he can reach, I choose the former. + +2~ DONATIONS AND A WORD TO TEACHERS AND LIBRARIANS + +Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I'm not interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audience I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop. + +But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I think I've found it. + +Here's the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd love to get hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but don't have the budget for it (teachers in the US spend around $1,200 out of pocket each on classroom supplies that their budgets won't stretch to cover, which is why I sponsor a classroom at Ivanhoe Elementary in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can adopt a class yourself here: http://www.adoptaclassroom.org/). + +There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks. + +I'm proposing that we put them together. + +If you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of Little Brother, email freelittlebrother@gmail.com with your name and the name and address of your school. It'll be posted to http://craphound.com/littlebrother/category/donate/ by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it. + +If you enjoyed the electronic edition of Little Brother and you want to donate something to say thanks, go to http://craphound.com/littlebrother/donate/ and find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other personal info first!) to freelittlebrother@gmail.com so that Olga can mark that copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous, otherwise we'll thank you on the donate page. + +I have no idea if this will end up with hundreds, dozens or just a few copies going out -- but I have high hopes! + +1~dedication DEDICATION + +For Alice, who makes me whole + +1~quotes QUOTES + +group{ + +"A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion, as necessary and dangerous as file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane." + +*{Scott Westerfeld}*, author of UGLIES and EXTRAS + +}group + +group{ + +"I can talk about Little Brother in terms of its bravura political speculation or its brilliant uses of technology -- each of which make this book a must-read -- but, at the end of it all, I'm haunted by the universality of Marcus's rite-of-passage and struggle, an experience any teen today is going to grasp: the moment when you choose what your life will mean and how to achieve it." + +*{Steven C Gould}*, author of JUMPER and REFLEX + +}group + +group{ + +I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year, and I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can. + +Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It's a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless. + +*{Neil Gaiman}*, author of ANANSI BOYS + +}group + +group{ + +Little Brother is a scarily realistic adventure about how homeland security technology could be abused to wrongfully imprison innocent Americans. A teenage hacker-turned-hero pits himself against the government to fight for his basic freedoms. This book is action-packed with tales of courage, technology, and demonstrations of digital disobedience as the technophile's civil protest." + +*{Bunnie Huang}*, author of HACKING THE XBOX + +}group + +group{ + +Cory Doctorow is a fast and furious storyteller who gets all the details of alternate reality gaming right, while offering a startling, new vision of how these games might play out in the high-stakes context of a terrorist attack. Little Brother is a brilliant novel with a bold argument: hackers and gamers might just be our country's best hope for the future. + +*{Jane McGonical}*, Designer, I Love Bees + +}group + +group{ + + +The right book at the right time from the right author -- and, not entirely coincidentally, Cory Doctorow's best novel yet. + +*{John Scalzi}*, author of OLD MAN'S WAR + +}group + +group{ + +It's about growing up in the near future where things have kept going on the way they've been going, and it's about hacking as a habit of mind, but mostly it's about growing up and changing and looking at the world and asking what you can do about that. The teenage voice is pitch-perfect. I couldn't put it down, and I loved it. + +*{Jo Walton}*, author of FARTHING + +}group + +group{ + +A worthy younger sibling to Orwell's 1984, Cory Doctorow's LITTLE BROTHER is lively, precocious, and most importantly, a little scary. + +*{Brian K Vaughn}*, author of Y: THE LAST MAN + +}group + +group{ + +"Little Brother" sounds an optimistic warning. It extrapolates from current events to remind us of the ever-growing threats to liberty. But it also notes that liberty ultimately resides in our individual attitudes and +actions. In our increasingly authoritarian world, I especially hope that teenagers and young adults will read it -- and then persuade their peers, parents and teachers to follow suit. + +*{Dan Gillmor}*, author of WE, THE MEDIA + +}group + +1~bookstores ABOUT THE BOOKSTORE DEDICATIONS + +Every chapter of this file has been dedicated to a different bookstore, and in each case, it's a store that I love, a store that's helped me discover books that opened my mind, a store that's helped my career along. The stores didn't pay me anything for this -- I haven't even told them about it -- but it seems like the right thing to do. After all, I'm hoping that you'll read this ebook and decide to buy the paper book, so it only makes sense to suggest a few places you can pick it up! + +1~ Chapter 1 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada.~{ BakkaPhoenix Books: http://www.bakkaphoenixbooks.com/ 697 Queen Street West, Toronto ON Canada M6J1E6, +1 416 963 9993 }~ Bakka is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, and it made me the mutant I am today. I wandered in for the first time around the age of 10 and asked for some recommendations. Tanya Huff (yes, _{the}_ Tanya Huff, but she wasn't a famous writer back then!) took me back into the used section and pressed a copy of H. Beam Piper's "Little Fuzzy" into my hands, and changed my life forever. By the time I was 18, I was working at Bakka -- I took over from Tanya when she retired to write full time -- and I learned life-long lessons about how and why people buy books. I think every writer should work at a bookstore (and plenty of writers have worked at Bakka over the years! For the 30th anniversary of the store, they put together an anthology of stories by Bakka writers that included work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara Tallan --and me!)] }/ + +I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world. My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced "Winston." + +/{Not}/ pronounced "Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn" -- unless you're a clueless disciplinary officer who's far enough behind the curve that you still call the Internet "the information superhighway." + +I know just such a clueless person, and his name is Fred Benson, one of three vice-principals at Cesar Chavez. He's a sucking chest wound of a human being. But if you're going to have a jailer, better a clueless one than one who's really on the ball. + +"Marcus Yallow," he said over the PA one Friday morning. The PA isn't very good to begin with, and when you combine that with Benson's habitual mumble, you get something that sounds more like someone struggling to digest a bad burrito than a school announcement. But human beings are good at picking their names out of audio confusion -- it's a survival trait. + +I grabbed my bag and folded my laptop three-quarters shut -- I didn't want to blow my downloads -- and got ready for the inevitable. + +"Report to the administration office immediately." + +My social studies teacher, Ms Galvez, rolled her eyes at me and I rolled my eyes back at her. The Man was always coming down on me, just because I go through school firewalls like wet kleenex, spoof the gait-recognition software, and nuke the snitch chips they track us with. Galvez is a good type, anyway, never holds that against me (especially when I'm helping get with her webmail so she can talk to her brother who's stationed in Iraq). + +My boy Darryl gave me a smack on the ass as I walked past. I've known Darryl since we were still in diapers and escaping from play-school, and I've been getting him into and out of trouble the whole time. I raised my arms over my head like a prizefighter and made my exit from Social Studies and began the perp-walk to the office. + +I was halfway there when my phone went. That was another no-no -- phones are muy prohibido at Chavez High -- but why should that stop me? I ducked into the toilet and shut myself in the middle stall (the furthest stall is always grossest because so many people head straight for it, hoping to escape the smell and the squick -- the smart money and good hygiene is down the middle). I checked the phone -- my home PC had sent it an email to tell it that there was something new up on Harajuku Fun Madness, which happens to be the best game ever invented. + +I grinned. Spending Fridays at school was teh suck anyway, and I was glad of the excuse to make my escape. + +I ambled the rest of the way to Benson's office and tossed him a wave as I sailed through the door. + +"If it isn't Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn," he said. Fredrick Benson -- Social Security number 545-03-2343, date of birth August 15 1962, mother's maiden name Di Bona, hometown Petaluma -- is a lot taller than me. I'm a runty 5'8", while he stands 6'7", and his college basketball days are far enough behind him that his chest muscles have turned into saggy man-boobs that were painfully obvious through his freebie dot-com polo-shirts. He always looks like he's about to slam-dunk your ass, and he's really into raising his voice for dramatic effect. Both these start to lose their efficacy with repeated application. + +"Sorry, nope," I said. "I never heard of this R2D2 character of yours." + +"W1n5t0n," he said, spelling it out again. He gave me a hairy eyeball and waited for me to wilt. Of course it was my handle, and had been for years. It was the identity I used when I was posting on message-boards where I was making my contributions to the field of applied security research. You know, like sneaking out of school and disabling the minder-tracer on my phone. But he didn't know that this was my handle. Only a small number of people did, and I trusted them all to the end of the earth. + +"Um, not ringing any bells," I said. I'd done some pretty cool stuff around school using that handle -- I was very proud of my work on snitch-tag killers -- and if he could link the two identities, I'd be in trouble. No one at school ever called me w1n5t0n or even Winston. Not even my pals. It was Marcus or nothing. + +Benson settled down behind his desk and tapped his class-ring nervously on his blotter. He did this whenever things started to go bad for him. Poker players call stuff like this a "tell" -- something that let you know what was going on in the other guy's head. I knew Benson's tells backwards and forwards. + +"Marcus, I hope you realize how serious this is." + +"I will just as soon as you explain what this is, sir." I always say "sir" to authority figures when I'm messing with them. It's my own tell. + +He shook his head at me and looked down, another tell. Any second now, he was going to start shouting at me. "Listen, kiddo! It's time you came to grips with the fact that we know about what you've been doing, and that we're not going to be lenient about it. You're going to be lucky if you're not expelled before this meeting is through. Do you want to graduate?" + +"Mr Benson, you still haven't explained what the problem is --" + +He slammed his hand down on the desk and then pointed his finger at me. "The /{problem}/, Mr Yallow, is that you've been engaged in criminal conspiracy to subvert this school's security system, and you have supplied security countermeasures to your fellow students. You know that we expelled Graciella Uriarte last week for using one of your devices." Uriarte had gotten a bad rap. She'd bought a radio-jammer from a head-shop near the 16th Street BART station and it had set off the countermeasures in the school hallway. Not my doing, but I felt for her. + +"And you think I'm involved in that?" + +"We have reliable intelligence indicating that you are w1n5t0n" -- again, he spelled it out, and I began to wonder if he hadn't figured out that the 1 was an I and the 5 was an S. "We know that this w1n5t0n character is responsible for the theft of last year's standardized tests." That actually hadn't been me, but it was a sweet hack, and it was kind of flattering to hear it attributed to me. "And therefore liable for several years in prison unless you cooperate with me." + +"You have 'reliable intelligence'? I'd like to see it." + +He glowered at me. "Your attitude isn't going to help you." + +"If there's evidence, sir, I think you should call the police and turn it over to them. It sounds like this is a very serious matter, and I wouldn't want to stand in the way of a proper investigation by the duly constituted authorities." + +"You want me to call the police." + +"And my parents, I think. That would be for the best." + +We stared at each other across the desk. He'd clearly expected me to fold the second he dropped the bomb on me. I don't fold. I have a trick for staring down people like Benson. I look slightly to the left of their heads, and think about the lyrics to old Irish folk songs, the kinds with three hundred verses. It makes me look perfectly composed and unworried. + +/{And the wing was on the bird and the bird was on the egg and the egg was in the nest and the nest was on the leaf and the leaf was on the twig and the twig was on the branch and the branch was on the limb and the limb was in the tree and the tree was in the bog -- the bog down in the valley-oh! High-ho the rattlin' bog, the bog down in the valley-oh --}/ + +"You can return to class now," he said. "I'll call on you once the police are ready to speak to you." + +"Are you going to call them now?" + +"The procedure for calling in the police is complicated. I'd hoped that we could settle this fairly and quickly, but since you insist --" + +"I can wait while you call them is all," I said. "I don't mind." + +He tapped his ring again and I braced for the blast. + +"/{Go!}/" he yelled. "Get the hell out of my office, you miserable little --" + +I got out, keeping my expression neutral. He wasn't going to call the cops. If he'd had enough evidence to go to the police with, he would have called them in the first place. He hated my guts. I figured he'd heard some unverified gossip and hoped to spook me into confirming it. + +I moved down the corridor lightly and sprightly, keeping my gait even and measured for the gait-recognition cameras. These had been installed only a year before, and I loved them for their sheer idiocy. Beforehand, we'd had face-recognition cameras covering nearly every public space in school, but a court ruled that was unconstitutional. So Benson and a lot of other paranoid school administrators had spent our textbook dollars on these idiot cameras that were supposed to be able to tell one person's walk from another. Yeah, right. + +I got back to class and sat down again, Ms Galvez warmly welcoming me back. I unpacked the school's standard-issue machine and got back into classroom mode. The SchoolBooks were the snitchiest technology of them all, logging every keystroke, watching all the network traffic for suspicious keywords, counting every click, keeping track of every fleeting thought you put out over the net. We'd gotten them in my junior year, and it only took a couple months for the shininess to wear off. Once people figured out that these "free" laptops worked for the man -- and showed a never-ending parade of obnoxious ads to boot -- they suddenly started to feel very heavy and burdensome. + +Cracking my SchoolBook had been easy. The crack was online within a month of the machine showing up, and there was nothing to it -- just download a DVD image, burn it, stick it in the SchoolBook, and boot it while holding down a bunch of different keys at the same time. The DVD did the rest, installing a whole bunch of hidden programs on the machine, programs that would stay hidden even when the Board of Ed did its daily remote integrity checks of the machines. Every now and again I had to get an update for the software to get around the Board's latest tests, but it was a small price to pay to get a little control over the box. + +I fired up IMParanoid, the secret instant messenger that I used when I wanted to have an off-the-record discussion right in the middle of class. Darryl was already logged in. + +> The game's afoot! Something big is going down with Harajuku Fun Madness, dude. You in? + +> No. Freaking. Way. If I get caught ditching a third time, I'm expelled. Man, you know that. We'll go after school. + +> You've got lunch and then study-hall, right? That's two hours. Plenty of time to run down this clue and get back before anyone misses us. I'll get the whole team out. + +Harajuku Fun Madness is the best game ever made. I know I already said that, but it bears repeating. It's an ARG, an Alternate Reality Game, and the story goes that a gang of Japanese fashion-teens discovered a miraculous healing gem at the temple in Harajuku, which is basically where cool Japanese teenagers invented every major subculture for the past ten years. They're being hunted by evil monks, the Yakuza (AKA the Japanese mafia), aliens, tax-inspectors, parents, and a rogue artificial intelligence. They slip the players coded messages that we have to decode and use to track down clues that lead to more coded messages and more clues. + +Imagine the best afternoon you've ever spent prowling the streets of a city, checking out all the weird people, funny hand-bills, street-maniacs, and funky shops. Now add a scavenger hunt to that, one that requires you to research crazy old films and songs and teen culture from around the world and across time and space. And it's a competition, with the winning team of four taking a grand prize of ten days in Tokyo, chilling on Harajuku bridge, geeking out in Akihabara, and taking home all the Astro Boy merchandise you can eat. Except that he's called "Atom Boy" in Japan. + +That's Harajuku Fun Madness, and once you've solved a puzzle or two, you'll never look back. + +> No man, just no. NO. Don't even ask. + +> I need you D. You're the best I've got. I swear I'll get us in and out without anyone knowing it. You know I can do that, right? + +> I know you can do it + +> So you're in? + +> Hell no + +> Come on, Darryl. You're not going to your deathbed wishing you'd spent more study periods sitting in school + +> I'm not going to go to my deathbed wishing I'd spent more time playing ARGs either + +> Yeah but don't you think you might go to your death-bed wishing you'd spent more time with Vanessa Pak? + +Van was part of my team. She went to a private girl's school in the East Bay, but I knew she'd ditch to come out and run the mission with me. Darryl has had a crush on her literally for years -- even before puberty endowed her with many lavish gifts. Darryl had fallen in love with her mind. Sad, really. + +> You suck + +> You're coming? + +He looked at me and shook his head. Then he nodded. I winked at him and set to work getting in touch with the rest of my team. + +# + +I wasn't always into ARGing. I have a dark secret: I used to be a LARPer. LARPing is Live Action Role Playing, and it's just about what it sounds like: running around in costume, talking in a funny accent, pretending to be a super-spy or a vampire or a medieval knight. It's like Capture the Flag in monster-drag, with a bit of Drama Club thrown in, and the best games were the ones we played in Scout Camps out of town in Sonoma or down on the Peninsula. Those three-day epics could get pretty hairy, with all-day hikes, epic battles with foam-and-bamboo swords, casting spells by throwing beanbags and shouting "Fireball!" and so on. Good fun, if a little goofy. Not nearly as geeky as talking about what your elf planned on doing as you sat around a table loaded with Diet Coke cans and painted miniatures, and more physically active than going into a mouse-coma in front of a massively multiplayer game at home. + +The thing that got me into trouble were the mini-games in the hotels. Whenever a science fiction convention came to town, some LARPer would convince them to let us run a couple of six-hour mini-games at the con, piggybacking on their rental of the space. Having a bunch of enthusiastic kids running around in costume lent color to the event, and we got to have a ball among people even more socially deviant than us. + +The problem with hotels is that they have a lot of non-gamers in them, too -- and not just sci-fi people. Normal people. From states that begin and end with vowels. On holidays. + +And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game. + +Let's just leave it at that, OK? + +# + +Class ended in ten minutes, and that didn't leave me with much time to prepare. The first order of business were those pesky gait-recognition cameras. Like I said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them. + +"Gait" is a fancy word for the way you walk. People are pretty good at spotting gaits -- next time you're on a camping trip, check out the bobbing of the flashlight as a distant friend approaches you. Chances are you can identify him just from the movement of the light, the characteristic way it bobs up and down that tells our monkey brains that this is a person approaching us. + +Gait recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolate you in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to a database to see if it knows who you are. It's a biometric identifier, like fingerprints or retina-scans, but it's got a lot more "collisions" than either of those. A biometric "collision" is when a measurement matches more than one person. Only you have your fingerprint, but you share your gait with plenty other people. + +Not exactly, of course. Your personal, inch-by-inch walk is yours and yours alone. The problem is your inch-by-inch walk changes based on how tired you are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled your ankle playing basketball, and whether you've changed your shoes lately. So the system kind of fuzzes-out your profile, looking for people who walk kind of like you. + +There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What's more, it's easy not to walk kind of like you -- just take one shoe off. Of course, you'll always walk like you-with-one-shoe-off in that case, so the cameras will eventually figure out that it's still you. Which is why I prefer to inject a little randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition: I put a handful of gravel into each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two steps are the same. Plus you get a great reflexology foot massage in the process (I kid. Reflexology is about as scientifically useful as gait-recognition). + +The cameras used to set off an alert every time someone they didn't recognize stepped onto campus. + +This did /{not}/ work. + +The alarm went off every ten minutes. When the mailman came by. When a parent dropped in. When the grounds-people went to work fixing up the basketball court. When a student showed up wearing new shoes. + +So now it just tries to keep track of who's where and when. If someone leaves by the school-gates during classes, their gait is checked to see if it kinda-sorta matches any student gait and if it does, whoop-whoop-whoop, ring the alarm! + +Chavez High is ringed with gravel walkways. I like to keep a couple handsful of rocks in my shoulder-bag, just in case. I silently passed Darryl ten or fifteen pointy little bastards and we both loaded our shoes. + +Class was about to finish up -- and I realized that I still hadn't checked the Harajuku Fun Madness site to see where the next clue was! I'd been a little hyper-focused on the escape, and hadn't bothered to figure out where we were escaping /{to}/. + +I turned to my SchoolBook and hit the keyboard. The web-browser we used was supplied with the machine. It was a locked-down spyware version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of 40 used voluntarily. + +I had a copy of Firefox on the USB drive built into my watch, but that wasn't enough -- the SchoolBook ran Windows Vista4Schools, an antique operating system designed to give school administrators the illusion that they controlled the programs their students could run. + +But Vista4Schools is its own worst enemy. There are a lot of programs that Vista4Schools doesn't want you to be able to shut down -- keyloggers, censorware -- and these programs run in a special mode that makes them invisible to the system. You can't quit them because you can't even see they're there. + +Any program whose name starts with $SYS$ is invisible to the operating system. it doesn't show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in the process monitor. So my copy of Firefox was called $SYS$Firefox -- and as I launched it, it became invisible to Windows, and so invisible to the network's snoopware. + +Now I had an indie browser running, I needed an indie network connection. The school's network logged every click in and out of the system, which was bad news if you were planning on surfing over to the Harajuku Fun Madness site for some extra-curricular fun. + +The answer is something ingenious called TOR -- The Onion Router. An onion router is an Internet site that takes requests for web-pages and passes them onto other onion routers, and on to other onion routers, until one of them finally decides to fetch the page and pass it back through the layers of the onion until it reaches you. The traffic to the onion-routers is encrypted, which means that the school can't see what you're asking for, and the layers of the onion don't know who they're working for. There are millions of nodes -- the program was set up by the US Office of Naval Research to help their people get around the censorware in countries like Syria and China, which means that it's perfectly designed for operating in the confines of an average American high school. + +TOR works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty addresses we aren't allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes change all the time -- no way could the school keep track of them all. Firefox and TOR together made me into the invisible man, impervious to Board of Ed snooping, free to check out the Harajuku FM site and see what was up. + +There it was, a new clue. Like all Harajuku Fun Madness clues, it had a physical, online and mental component. The online component was a puzzle you had to solve, one that required you to research the answers to a bunch of obscure questions. This batch included a bunch of questions on the plots in dojinshi -- those are comic books drawn by fans of manga, Japanese comics. They can be as big as the official comics that inspire them, but they're a lot weirder, with crossover story-lines and sometimes really silly songs and action. Lots of love stories, of course. Everyone loves to see their favorite toons hook up. + +I'd have to solve those riddles later, when I got home. They were easiest to solve with the whole team, downloading tons of dojinshi files and scouring them for answers to the puzzles. + +I'd just finished scrap-booking all the clues when the bell rang and we began our escape. I surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of my short boots -- ankle-high Blundstones from Australia, great for running and climbing, and the easy slip-on/slip-off laceless design makes them convenient at the never-ending metal-detectors that are everywhere now. + +We also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that gets easier every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery -- all the bells and whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false sense of security. We surfed the crowd down the hallways, heading for my favorite side-exit. We were halfway along when Darryl hissed, "Crap! I forgot, I've got a library book in my bag." + +"You're kidding me," I said, and hauled him into the next bathroom we passed. Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid -- Radio Frequency ID tag -- glued into its binding, which makes it possible for the librarians to check out the books by waving them over a reader, and lets a library shelf tell you if any of the books on it are out of place. + +But it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was another of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools track /{us}/ with arphids, but they could track /{library books}/, and use the school records to tell them who was likely to be carrying which library book. + +I had a little Faraday pouch in my bag -- these are little wallets lined with a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio energy, silencing arphids. But the pouches were made for neutralizing ID cards and toll-booth transponders, not books like -- + +"Introduction to Physics?" I groaned. The book was the size of a dictionary. + +1~ Chapter 2 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com,~{ Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765319853/downandoutint-20 }~ the largest Internet bookseller in the world. Amazon is _{amazing}_ -- a "store" where you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically everything else, from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate with each other, where they are constantly inventing new and better ways of connecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me like gold -- the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first novel! -- and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy something from Amazon approximately every _{six days}_). Amazon's in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first century and I can't think of a better group of people to be facing down that thorny set of problems.] }/ + +"I'm thinking of majoring in physics when I go to Berkeley," Darryl said. His dad taught at the University of California at Berkeley, which meant he'd get free tuition when he went. And there'd never been any question in Darryl's household about whether he'd go. + +"Fine, but couldn't you research it online?" + +"My dad said I should read it. Besides, I didn't plan on committing any crimes today." + +"Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different." + +"What are we going to do, Marcus?" + +"Well, I can't hide it, so I'm going to have to nuke it." Killing arphids is a dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going for a walk around the shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of lobotomized merchandise that is missing its invisible bar-code, so the manufacturers have refused to implement a "kill signal" that you can radio to an arphid to get it to switch off. You can reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hate doing that to library books. It's not exactly tearing pages out of a book, but it's still bad, since a book with a reprogrammed arphid can't be shelved and can't be found. It just becomes a needle in a haystack. + +That left me with only one option: nuking the thing. Literally. 30 seconds in a microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the market. And because the arphid wouldn't answer at all when D checked it back in at the library, they'd just print a fresh one for it and recode it with the book's catalog info, and it would end up clean and neat back on its shelf. + +All we needed was a microwave. + +"Give it another two minutes and the teacher's lounge will be empty," I said. + +Darryl grabbed his book at headed for the door. "Forget it, no way. I'm going to class." + +I snagged his elbow and dragged him back. "Come on, D, easy now. It'll be fine." + +"The /{teacher's lounge}/? Maybe you weren't listening, Marcus. If I get busted /{just once more}/, I am /{expelled.}/ You hear that? /{Expelled.}/" + +"You won't get caught," I said. The one place a teacher wouldn't be after this period was the lounge. "We'll go in the back way." The lounge had a little kitchenette off to one side, with its own entrance for teachers who just wanted to pop in and get a cup of joe. The microwave -- which always reeked of popcorn and spilled soup -- was right in there, on top of the miniature fridge. + +Darryl groaned. I thought fast. "Look, the bell's /{already rung}/. if you go to study hall now, you'll get a late-slip. Better not to show at all at this point. I can infiltrate and exfiltrate any room on this campus, D. You've seen me do it. I'll keep you safe, bro." + +He groaned again. That was one of Darryl's tells: once he starts groaning, he's ready to give in. + +"Let's roll," I said, and we took off. + +It was flawless. We skirted the classrooms, took the back stairs into the basement, and came up the front stairs right in front of the teachers' lounge. Not a sound came from the door, and I quietly turned the knob and dragged Darryl in before silently closing the door. + +The book just barely fit in the microwave, which was looking even less sanitary than it had the last time I'd popped in here to use it. I conscientiously wrapped it in paper towels before I set it down. "Man, teachers are /{pigs}/," I hissed. Darryl, white faced and tense, said nothing. + +The arphid died in a shower of sparks, which was really quite lovely (though not nearly as pretty as the effect you get when you nuke a frozen grape, which has to be seen to be believed). + +Now, to exfiltrate the campus in perfect anonymity and make our escape. + +Darryl opened the door and began to move out, me on his heels. A second later, he was standing on my toes, elbows jammed into my chest, as he tried to back-pedal into the closet-sized kitchen we'd just left. + +"Get back," he whispered urgently. "Quick -- it's Charles!" + +Charles Walker and I don't get along. We're in the same grade, and we've known each other as long as I've known Darryl, but that's where the resemblance ends. Charles has always been big for his age, and now that he's playing football and on the juice, he's even bigger. He's got anger management problems -- I lost a milk-tooth to him in the third grade, and he's managed to keep from getting in trouble over them by becoming the most active snitch in school. + +It's a bad combination, a bully who also snitches, taking great pleasure in going to the teachers with whatever infractions he's found. Benson /{loved}/ Charles. Charles liked to let on that he had some kind of unspecified bladder problem, which gave him a ready-made excuse to prowl the hallways at Chavez, looking for people to fink on. + +The last time Charles had caught some dirt on me, it had ended with me giving up LARPing. I had no intention of being caught by him again. + +"What's he doing?" + +"He's coming this way is what he's doing," Darryl said. He was shaking. + +"OK," I said. "OK, time for emergency countermeasures." I got my phone out. I'd planned this well in advance. Charles would never get me again. I emailed my server at home, and it got into motion. + +A few seconds later, Charles's phone spazzed out spectacularly. I'd had tens of thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messages sent to it, causing every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep on going off. The attack was accomplished by means of a botnet, and for that I felt bad, but it was in the service of a good cause. + +Botnets are where infected computers spend their afterlives. When you get a worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channel on IRC -- the Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster -- the guy who deployed the worm -- that the computers are there ready to do his bidding. Botnets are supremely powerful, since they can comprise thousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers, scattered all over the Internet, connected to juicy high-speed connections and running on fast home PCs. Those PCs normally function on behalf of their owners, but when the botmaster calls them, they rise like zombies to do his bidding. + +There are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiring an hour or two on a botnet has crashed. Mostly these things work for spammers as cheap, distributed spambots, filling your mailbox with come-ons for boner-pills or with new viruses that can infect you and recruit your machine to join the botnet. + +I'd just rented 10 seconds' time on three thousand PCs and had each of them send a text message or voice-over-IP call to Charles's phone, whose number I'd extracted from a sticky note on Benson's desk during one fateful office-visit. + +Needless to say, Charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. First the SMSes filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking on the routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer and log all those incoming calls' bogus return numbers (did you know that it's /{really easy}/ to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are about fifty ways of doing it -- just google "spoof caller id"). + +Charles stared at it dumbfounded, and jabbed at it furiously, his thick eyebrows knotting and wiggling as he struggled with the demons that had possessed his most personal of devices. The plan was working so far, but he wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing next -- he was supposed to go find some place to sit down and try to figure out how to get his phone back. +Darryl shook me by the shoulder, and I pulled my eye away from the crack in the door. + +"What's he doing?" Darryl whispered. + +"I totaled his phone, but he's just staring at it now instead of moving on." It wasn't going to be easy to reboot that thing. Once the memory was totally filled, it would have a hard time loading the code it needed to delete the bogus messages -- and there was no bulk-erase for texts on his phone, so he'd have to manually delete all of the thousands of messages. + +Darryl shoved me back and stuck his eye up to the door. A moment later, his shoulders started to shake. I got scared, thinking he was panicking, but when he pulled back, I saw that he was laughing so hard that tears were streaming down his cheeks. + +"Galvez just totally busted him for being in the halls during class /{and}/ for having his phone out -- you should have seen her tear into him. She was really enjoying it." + +We shook hands solemnly and snuck back out of the corridor, down the stairs, around the back, out the door, past the fence and out into the glorious sunlight of afternoon in the Mission. Valencia Street had never looked so good. I checked my watch and yelped. + +"Let's move! The rest of the gang is meeting us at the cable-cars in twenty minutes!" + +# + +Van spotted us first. She was blending in with a group of Korean tourists, which is one of her favorite ways of camouflaging herself when she's ditching school. Ever since the truancy moblog went live, our world is full of nosy shopkeepers and pecksniffs who take it upon themselves to snap our piccies and put them on the net where they can be perused by school administrators. + +She came out of the crowd and bounded toward us. Darryl has had a thing for Van since forever, and she's sweet enough to pretend she doesn't know it. She gave me a hug and then moved onto Darryl, giving him a quick sisterly kiss on the cheek that made him go red to the tops of his ears. + +The two of them made a funny pair: Darryl is a little on the heavy side, though he wears it well, and he's got a kind of pink complexion that goes red in the cheeks whenever he runs or gets excited. He's been able to grow a beard since we were 14, but thankfully he started shaving after a brief period known to our gang as "the Lincoln years." And he's tall. Very, very tall. Like basketball player tall. + +Meanwhile, Van is half a head shorter than me, and skinny, with straight black hair that she wears in crazy, elaborate braids that she researches on the net. She's got pretty coppery skin and dark eyes, and she loves big glass rings the size of radishes, which click and clack together when she dances. + +"Where's Jolu?" she said. + +"How are you, Van?" Darryl asked in a choked voice. He always ran a step behind the conversation when it came to Van. + +"I'm great, D. How's your every little thing?" Oh, she was a bad, bad person. Darryl nearly fainted. + +Jolu saved him from social disgrace by showing up just then, in an oversize leather baseball jacket, sharp sneakers, and a meshback cap advertising our favorite Mexican masked wrestler, El Santo Junior. Jolu is Jose Luis Torrez, the completing member of our foursome. He went to a super-strict Catholic school in the Outer Richmond, so it wasn't easy for him to get out. But he always did: no one exfiltrated like our Jolu. He liked his jacket because it hung down low -- which was pretty stylish in parts of the city -- and covered up all his Catholic school crap, which was like a bulls-eye for nosy jerks with the truancy moblog bookmarked on their phones. + +"Who's ready to go?" I asked, once we'd all said hello. I pulled out my phone and showed them the map I'd downloaded to it on the BART. "Near as I can work out, we wanna go up to the Nikko again, then one block past it to O'Farrell, then left up toward Van Ness. Somewhere in there we should find the wireless signal." + +Van made a face. "That's a nasty part of the Tenderloin." I couldn't argue with her. That part of San Francisco is one of the weird bits -- you go in through the Hilton's front entrance and it's all touristy stuff like the cable-car turnaround and family restaurants. Go through to the other side and you're in the 'Loin, where every tracked out transvestite hooker, hard-case pimp, hissing drug dealer and cracked up homeless person in town was concentrated. What they bought and sold, none of us were old enough to be a part of (though there were plenty of hookers our age plying their trade in the 'Loin.) + +"Look on the bright side," I said. "The only time you want to go up around there is broad daylight. None of the other players are going to go near it until tomorrow at the earliest. This is what we in the ARG business call a /{monster head start.}/" + +Jolu grinned at me. "You make it sound like a good thing," he said. + +"Beats eating uni," I said. + +"We going to talk or we going to win?" Van said. After me, she was hands-down the most hardcore player in our group. She took winning very, very seriously. + +We struck out, four good friends, on our way to decode a clue, win the game -- and lose everything we cared about, forever. + +# + +The physical component of today's clue was a set of GPS coordinates -- there were coordinates for all the major cities where Harajuku Fun Madness was played -- where we'd find a WiFi access-point's signal. That signal was being deliberately jammed by another, nearby WiFi point that was hidden so that it couldn't be spotted by conventional wifinders, little key-fobs that told you when you were within range of someone's open access-point, which you could use for free. + +We'd have to track down the location of the "hidden" access point by measuring the strength of the "visible" one, finding the spot where it was most mysteriously weakest. There we'd find another clue -- last time it had been in the special of the day at Anzu, the swanky sushi restaurant in the Nikko hotel in the Tenderloin. The Nikko was owned by Japan Airlines, one of Harajuku Fun Madness's sponsors, and the staff had all made a big fuss over us when we finally tracked down the clue. They'd given us bowls of miso soup and made us try uni, which is sushi made from sea urchin, with the texture of very runny cheese and a smell like very runny dog-droppings. But it tasted /{really}/ good. Or so Darryl told me. I wasn't going to eat that stuff. + +I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone's wifinder about three blocks up O'Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy "Asian Massage Parlor" with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. The network's name was HarajukuFM, so we knew we had the right spot. + +"If it's in there, I'm not going," Darryl said. + +"You all got your wifinders?" I said. + +Darryl and Van had phones with built-in wifinders, while Jolu, being too cool to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separate little directional fob. + +"OK, fan out and see what we see. You're looking for a sharp drop off in the signal that gets worse the more you move along it." + +I took a step backward and ended up standing on someone's toes. A female voice said "oof" and I spun around, worried that some crack-ho was going to stab me for breaking her heels. + +Instead, I found myself face to face with another kid my age. She had a shock of bright pink hair and a sharp, rodent-like face, with big sunglasses that were practically air-force goggles. She was dressed in striped tights beneath a black granny dress, with lots of little Japanese decorer toys safety pinned to it -- anime characters, old world leaders, emblems from foreign soda-pop. + +She held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew. + +"Cheese," she said. "You're on candid snitch-cam." + +"No way," I said. "You wouldn't --" + +"I will," she said. "I will send this photo to truant watch in thirty seconds unless you four back off from this clue and let me and my friends here run it down. You can come back in one hour and it'll be all yours. I think that's more than fair." + +I looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb -- one with blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. "Who are you supposed to be, the Popsicle Squad?" + +"We're the team that's going to kick your team's ass at Harajuku Fun Madness," she said. "And I'm the one who's /{right this second}/ about to upload your photo and get you in /{so much trouble}/ --" + +Behind me I felt Van start forward. Her all-girls school was notorious for its brawls, and I was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick's block off. + +Then the world changed forever. + +We felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet that every Californian knows instinctively -- /{earthquake}/. My first inclination, as always, was to get away: "when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." But the fact was, we were already in the safest place we could be, not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward the middle of the road where bits of falling cornice could brain us. + +Earthquakes are eerily quiet -- at first, anyway -- but this wasn't quiet. This was loud, an incredible roaring sound that was louder than anything I'd ever heard before. The sound was so punishing it drove me to my knees, and I wasn't the only one. Darryl shook my arm and pointed over the buildings and we saw it then: a huge black cloud rising from the northeast, from the direction of the Bay. + +There was another rumble, and the cloud of smoke spread out, that spreading black shape we'd all grown up seeing in movies. Someone had just blown up something, in a big way. + +There were more rumbles and more tremors. Heads appeared at windows up and down the street. We all looked at the mushroom cloud in silence. + +Then the sirens started. + +I'd heard sirens like these before -- they test the civil defense sirens at noon on Tuesdays. But I'd only heard them go off unscheduled in old war movies and video games, the kind where someone is bombing someone else from above. Air raid sirens. The wooooooo sound made it all less real. + +"Report to shelters immediately." It was like the voice of God, coming from all places at once. There were speakers on some of the electric poles, something I'd never noticed before, and they'd all switched on at once. + +"Report to shelters immediately." Shelters? We looked at each other in confusion. What shelters? The cloud was rising steadily, spreading out. Was it nuclear? Were we breathing in our last breaths? + +The girl with the pink hair grabbed her friends and they tore ass downhill, back toward the BART station and the foot of the hills. + +"REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY." There was screaming now, and a lot of running around. Tourists -- you can always spot the tourists, they're the ones who think CALIFORNIA = WARM and spend their San Francisco holidays freezing in shorts and t-shirts -- scattered in every direction. + +"We should go!" Darryl hollered in my ear, just barely audible over the shrieking of the sirens, which had been joined by traditional police sirens. A dozen SFPD cruisers screamed past us. + +"REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY." + +"Down to the BART station," I hollered. My friends nodded. We closed ranks and began to move quickly downhill. + +1~ Chapter 3 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Borderlands Books,~{ Borderland Books: http://www.borderlands-books.com/ 866 Valencia Ave, San Francisco CA USA 94110 +1 888 893 4008 }~ San Francisco's magnificent independent science fiction bookstore. Borderlands is basically located across the street from the fictional Cesar Chavez High depicted in Little Brother, and it's not just notorious for its brilliant events, signings, book clubs and such, but also for its amazing hairless Egyptian cat, Ripley, who likes to perch like a buzzing gargoyle on the computer at the front of the store. Borderlands is about the friendliest bookstore you could ask for, filled with comfy places to sit and read, and staffed by incredibly knowledgeable clerks who know everything there is to know about science fiction. Even better, they've always been willing to take orders for my book (by net or phone) and hold them for me to sign when I drop into the store, then they ship them within the US for free!] }/ + +We passed a lot of people in the road on the way to the Powell Street BART. They were running or walking, white-faced and silent or shouting and panicked. Homeless people cowered in doorways and watched it all, while a tall black tranny hooker shouted at two mustached young men about something. + +The closer we got to the BART, the worse the press of bodies became. By the time we reached the stairway down into the station, it was a mob-scene, a huge brawl of people trying to crowd their way down a narrow staircase. I had my face crushed up against someone's back, and someone else was pressed into my back. + +Darryl was still beside me -- he was big enough that he was hard to shove, and Jolu was right behind him, kind of hanging on to his waist. I spied Vanessa a few yards away, trapped by more people. + +"Screw you!" I heard Van yell behind me. "Pervert! Get your hands off of me!" + +I strained around against the crowd and saw Van looking with disgust at an older guy in a nice suit who was kind of smirking at her. She was digging in her purse and I knew what she was digging for. + +"Don't mace him!" I shouted over the din. "You'll get us all too." + +At the mention of the word mace, the guy looked scared and kind of melted back, though the crowd kept him moving forward. Up ahead, I saw someone, a middle-aged lady in a hippie dress, falter and fall. She screamed as she went down, and I saw her thrashing to get up, but she couldn't, the crowd's pressure was too strong. As I neared her, I bent to help her up, and was nearly knocked over her. I ended up stepping on her stomach as the crowd pushed me past her, but by then I don't think she was feeling anything. + +I was as scared as I'd ever been. There was screaming everywhere now, and more bodies on the floor, and the press from behind was as relentless as a bulldozer. It was all I could do to keep on my feet. + +We were in the open concourse where the turnstiles were. It was hardly any better here -- the enclosed space sent the voices around us echoing back in a roar that made my head ring, and the smell and feeling of all those bodies made me feel a claustrophobia I'd never known I was prone to. + +People were still cramming down the stairs, and more were squeezing past the turnstiles and down the escalators onto the platforms, but it was clear to me that this wasn't going to have a happy ending. + +"Want to take our chances up top?" I said to Darryl. + +"Yes, hell yes," he said. "This is vicious." + +I looked to Vanessa -- there was no way she'd hear me. I managed to get my phone out and I texted her. + +> We're getting out of here + +I saw her feel the vibe from her phone, then look down at it and then back at me and nod vigorously. Darryl, meanwhile, had clued Jolu in. + +"/{What's the plan?}/ Darryl shouted in my ear. + +"We're going to have to go back!" I shouted back, pointing at the remorseless crush of bodies. + +"It's impossible!" he said. + +"It's just going to get more impossible the longer we wait!" + +He shrugged. Van worked her way over to me and grabbed hold of my wrist. I took Darryl and Darryl took Jolu by the other hand and we pushed out. + +It wasn't easy. We moved about three inches a minute at first, then slowed down even more when we reached the stairway. The people we passed were none too happy about us shoving them out of the way, either. A couple people swore at us and there was a guy who looked like he'd have punched me if he'd been able to get his arms loose. We passed three more crushed people beneath us, but there was no way I could have helped them. By that point, I wasn't even thinking of helping anyone. All I could think of was finding the spaces in front of us to move into, of Darryl's mighty straining on my wrist, of my death-grip on Van behind me. + +We popped free like Champagne corks an eternity later, blinking in the grey smoky light. The air raid sirens were still blaring, and the sound of emergency vehicles' sirens as they tore down Market Street was even louder. There was almost no one on the streets anymore -- just the people trying hopelessly to get underground. A lot of them were crying. I spotted a bunch of empty benches -- usually staked out by skanky winos -- and pointed toward them. + +We moved for them, the sirens and the smoke making us duck and hunch our shoulders. We got as far as the benches before Darryl fell forward. + +We all yelled and Vanessa grabbed him and turned him over. The side of his shirt was stained red, and the stain was spreading. She tugged his shirt up and revealed a long, deep cut in his pudgy side. + +"Someone freaking /{stabbed}/ him in the crowd," Jolu said, his hands clenching into fists. "Christ, that's vicious." + +Darryl groaned and looked at us, then down at his side, then he groaned and his head went back again. + +Vanessa took off her jean jacket and then pulled off the cotton hoodie she was wearing underneath it. She wadded it up and pressed it to Darryl's side. "Take his head," she said to me. "Keep it elevated." To Jolu she said, "Get his feet up -- roll up your coat or something." Jolu moved quickly. Vanessa's mother is a nurse and she'd had first aid training every summer at camp. She loved to watch people in movies get their first aid wrong and make fun of them. I was so glad to have her with us. + +We sat there for a long time, holding the hoodie to Darryl's side. He kept insisting that he was fine and that we should let him up, and Van kept telling him to shut up and lie still before she kicked his ass. + +"What about calling 911?" Jolu said. + +I felt like an idiot. I whipped my phone out and punched 911. The sound I got wasn't even a busy signal -- it was like a whimper of pain from the phone system. You don't get sounds like that unless there's three million people all dialing the same number at once. Who needs botnets when you've got terrorists? + +"What about Wikipedia?" Jolu said. + +"No phone, no data," I said. + +"What about them?" Darryl said, and pointed at the street. I looked where he was pointing, thinking I'd see a cop or an paramedic, but there was no one there. + +"It's OK buddy, you just rest," I said. + +"No, you idiot, what about /{them}/, the cops in the cars? There!" + +He was right. Every five seconds, a cop car, an ambulance or a firetruck zoomed past. They could get us some help. I was such an idiot. + +"Come on, then," I said, "let's get you where they can see you and flag one down." + +Vanessa didn't like it, but I figured a cop wasn't going to stop for a kid waving his hat in the street, not that day. They just might stop if they saw Darryl bleeding there, though. I argued briefly with her and Darryl settled it by lurching to his feet and dragging himself down toward Market Street. + +The first vehicle that screamed past -- an ambulance -- didn't even slow down. Neither did the cop car that went past, nor the firetruck, nor the next three cop-cars. Darryl wasn't in good shape -- he was white-faced and panting. Van's sweater was soaked in blood. + +I was sick of cars driving right past me. The next time a car appeared down Market Street, I stepped right out into the road, waving my arms over my head, shouting "/{STOP}/." The car slewed to a stop and only then did I notice that it wasn't a cop car, ambulance or fire-engine. + +It was a military-looking Jeep, like an armored Hummer, only it didn't have any military insignia on it. The car skidded to a stop just in front of me, and I jumped back and lost my balance and ended up on the road. I felt the doors open near me, and then saw a confusion of booted feet moving close by. I looked up and saw a bunch of military-looking guys in coveralls, holding big, bulky rifles and wearing hooded gas masks with tinted face-plates. + +I barely had time to register them before those rifles were pointed at me. I'd never looked down the barrel of a gun before, but everything you've heard about the experience is true. You freeze where you are, time stops, and your heart thunders in your ears. I opened my mouth, then shut it, then, very slowly, I held my hands up in front of me. + +The faceless, eyeless armed man above me kept his gun very level. I didn't even breathe. Van was screaming something and Jolu was shouting and I looked at them for a second and that was when someone put a coarse sack over my head and cinched it tight around my windpipe, so quick and so fiercely I barely had time to gasp before it was locked on me. I was pushed roughly but dispassionately onto my stomach and something went twice around my wrists and then tightened up as well, feeling like baling wire and biting cruelly. I cried out and my own voice was muffled by the hood. + +I was in total darkness now and I strained my ears to hear what was going on with my friends. I heard them shouting through the muffling canvas of the bag, and then I was being impersonally hauled to my feet by my wrists, my arms wrenched up behind my back, my shoulders screaming. + +I stumbled some, then a hand pushed my head down and I was inside the Hummer. More bodies were roughly shoved in beside me. + +"Guys?" I shouted, and earned a hard thump on my head for my trouble. I heard Jolu respond, then felt the thump he was dealt, too. My head rang like a gong. + +"Hey," I said to the soldiers. "Hey, listen! We're just high school students. I wanted to flag you down because my friend was bleeding. Someone stabbed him." I had no idea how much of this was making it through the muffling bag. I kept talking. "Listen -- this is some kind of misunderstanding. We've got to get my friend to a hospital --" + +Someone went upside my head again. It felt like they used a baton or something -- it was harder than anyone had ever hit me in the head before. My eyes swam and watered and I literally couldn't breathe through the pain. A moment later, I caught my breath, but I didn't say anything. I'd learned my lesson. + +Who were these clowns? They weren't wearing insignia. Maybe they were terrorists! I'd never really believed in terrorists before -- I mean, I knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions of ways that the world could kill me -- starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his way down Valencia -- that were infinitely more likely and immediate than terrorists. Terrorists killed a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning. + +Sitting in the back of that Hummer, my head in a hood, my hands lashed behind my back, lurching back and forth while the bruises swelled up on my head, terrorism suddenly felt a lot riskier. + +The car rocked back and forth and tipped uphill. I gathered we were headed over Nob Hill, and from the angle, it seemed we were taking one of the steeper routes -- I guessed Powell Street. + +Now we were descending just as steeply. If my mental map was right, we were heading down to Fisherman's Wharf. You could get on a boat there, get away. That fit with the terrorism hypothesis. Why the hell would terrorists kidnap a bunch of high school students? + +We rocked to a stop still on a downslope. The engine died and then the doors swung open. Someone dragged me by my arms out onto the road, then shoved me, stumbling, down a paved road. A few seconds later, I tripped over a steel staircase, bashing my shins. The hands behind me gave me another shove. I went up the stairs cautiously, not able to use my hands. I got up the third step and reached for the fourth, but it wasn't there. I nearly fell again, but new hands grabbed me from in front and dragged me down a steel floor and then forced me to my knees and locked my hands to something behind me. + +More movement, and the sense of bodies being shackled in alongside of me. Groans and muffled sounds. Laughter. Then a long, timeless eternity in the muffled gloom, breathing my own breath, hearing my own breath in my ears. + +# + +I actually managed a kind of sleep there, kneeling with the circulation cut off to my legs, my head in canvas twilight. My body had squirted a year's supply of adrenalin into my bloodstream in the space of 30 minutes, and while that stuff can give you the strength to lift cars off your loved ones and leap over tall buildings, the payback's always a bitch. + +I woke up to someone pulling the hood off my head. They were neither rough nor careful -- just...impersonal. Like someone at McDonald's putting together burgers. + +The light in the room was so bright I had to squeeze my eyes shut, but slowly I was able to open them to slits, then cracks, then all the way and look around. + +We were all in the back of a truck, a big 16-wheeler. I could see the wheel-wells at regular intervals down the length. But the back of this truck had been turned into some kind of mobile command-post/jail. Steel desks lined the walls with banks of slick flat-panel displays climbing above them on articulated arms that let them be repositioned in a halo around the operators. Each desk had a gorgeous office-chair in front of it, festooned with user-interface knobs for adjusting every millimeter of the sitting surface, as well as height, pitch and yaw. + +Then there was the jail part -- at the front of the truck, furthest away from the doors, there were steel rails bolted into the sides of the vehicle, and attached to these steel rails were the prisoners. + +I spotted Van and Jolu right away. Darryl might have been in the remaining dozen shackled up back here, but it was impossible to say -- many of them were slumped over and blocking my view. It stank of sweat and fear back there. + +Vanessa looked at me and bit her lip. She was scared. So was I. So was Jolu, his eyes rolling crazily in their sockets, the whites showing. I was scared. What's more, I had to piss like a /{race-horse.}/ + +I looked around for our captors. I'd avoided looking at them up until now, the same way you don't look into the dark of a closet where your mind has conjured up a boogey-man. You don't want to know if you're right. + +But I had to get a better look at these jerks who'd kidnapped us. If they were terrorists, I wanted to know. I didn't know what a terrorist looked like, though TV shows had done their best to convince me that they were brown Arabs with big beards and knit caps and loose cotton dresses that hung down to their ankles. + +Not so our captors. They could have been half-time-show cheerleaders on the Super Bowl. They looked /{American}/ in a way I couldn't exactly define. Good jaw-lines, short, neat haircuts that weren't quite military. They came in white and brown, male and female, and smiled freely at one another as they sat down at the other end of the truck, joking and drinking coffees out of go-cups. These weren't Ay-rabs from Afghanistan: they looked like tourists from Nebraska. + +I stared at one, a young white woman with brown hair who barely looked older than me, kind of cute in a scary office-power-suit way. If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you. She did, and her face slammed into a totally different configuration, dispassionate, even robotic. The smile vanished in an instant. + +"Hey," I said. "Look, I don't understand what's going on here, but I really need to take a leak, you know?" + +She looked right through me as if she hadn't heard. + +"I'm serious, if I don't get to a can soon, I'm going to have an ugly accident. It's going to get pretty smelly back here, you know?" + +She turned to her colleagues, a little huddle of three of them, and they held a low conversation I couldn't hear over the fans from the computers. + +She turned back to me. "Hold it for another ten minutes, then you'll each get a piss-call." + +"I don't think I've got another ten minutes in me," I said, letting a little more urgency than I was really feeling creep into my voice. "Seriously, lady, it's now or never." + +She shook her head and looked at me like I was some kind of pathetic loser. She and her friends conferred some more, then another one came forward. He was older, in his early thirties, and pretty big across the shoulders, like he worked out. He looked like he was Chinese or Korean -- even Van can't tell the difference sometimes -- but with that bearing that said /{American}/ in a way I couldn't put my finger on. + +He pulled his sports-coat aside to let me see the hardware strapped there: I recognized a pistol, a tazer and a can of either mace or pepper-spray before he let it fall again. + +"No trouble," he said. + +"None," I agreed. + +He touched something at his belt and the shackles behind me let go, my arms dropping suddenly behind me. It was like he was wearing Batman's utility belt -- wireless remotes for shackles! I guessed it made sense, though: you wouldn't want to lean over your prisoners with all that deadly hardware at their eye-level -- they might grab your gun with their teeth and pull the trigger with their tongues or something. + +My hands were still lashed together behind me by the plastic strapping, and now that I wasn't supported by the shackles, I found that my legs had turned into lumps of cork while I was stuck in one position. Long story short, I basically fell onto my face and kicked my legs weakly as they went pins-and-needles, trying to get them under me so I could rock up to my feet. + +The guy jerked me to my feet and I clown-walked to the very back of the truck, to a little boxed-in porta-john there. I tried to spot Darryl on the way back, but he could have been any of the five or six slumped people. Or none of them. + +"In you go," the guy said. + +I jerked my wrists. "Take these off, please?" My fingers felt like purple sausages from the hours of bondage in the plastic cuffs. + +The guy didn't move. + +"Look," I said, trying not to sound sarcastic or angry (it wasn't easy). "Look. You either cut my wrists free or you're going to have to aim for me. A toilet visit is not a hands-free experience." Someone in the truck sniggered. The guy didn't like me, I could tell from the way his jaw muscles ground around. Man, these people were wired tight. + +He reached down to his belt and came up with a very nice set of multi-pliers. He flicked out a wicked-looking knife and sliced through the plastic cuffs and my hands were my own again. + +"Thanks," I said. + +He shoved me into the bathroom. My hands were useless, like lumps of clay on the ends of my wrists. As I wiggled my fingers limply, they tingled, then the tingling turned to a burning feeling that almost made me cry out. I put the seat down, dropped my pants and sat down. I didn't trust myself to stay on my feet. + +As my bladder cut loose, so did my eyes. I wept, crying silently and rocking back and forth while the tears and snot ran down my face. It was all I could do to keep from sobbing -- I covered my mouth and held the sounds in. I didn't want to give them the satisfaction. + +Finally, I was peed out and cried out and the guy was pounding on the door. I cleaned my face as best as I could with wads of toilet paper, stuck it all down the john and flushed, then looked around for a sink but only found a pump-bottle of heavy-duty hand-sanitizer covered in small-print lists of the bio-agents it worked on. I rubbed some into my hands and stepped out of the john. + +"What were you doing in there?" the guy said. + +"Using the facilities," I said. He turned me around and grabbed my hands and I felt a new pair of plastic cuffs go around them. My wrists had swollen since the last pair had come off and the new ones bit cruelly into my tender skin, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of crying out. + +He shackled me back to my spot and grabbed the next person down, who, I saw now, was Jolu, his face puffy and an ugly bruise on his cheek. + +"Are you OK?" I asked him, and my friend with the utility belt abruptly put his hand on my forehead and shoved hard, bouncing the back of my head off the truck's metal wall with a sound like a clock striking one. "No talking," he said as I struggled to refocus my eyes. + +I didn't like these people. I decided right then that they would pay a price for all this. + +One by one, all the prisoners went to the can, and came back, and when they were done, my guard went back to his friends and had another cup of coffee -- they were drinking out of a big cardboard urn of Starbucks, I saw -- and they had an indistinct conversation that involved a fair bit of laughter. + +Then the door at the back of the truck opened and there was fresh air, not smoky the way it had been before, but tinged with ozone. In the slice of outdoors I saw before the door closed, I caught that it was dark out, and raining, with one of those San Francisco drizzles that's part mist. + +The man who came in was wearing a military uniform. A US military uniform. He saluted the people in the truck and they saluted him back and that's when I knew that I wasn't a prisoner of some terrorists -- I was a prisoner of the United States of America. + +# + +They set up a little screen at the end of the truck and then came for us one at a time, unshackling us and leading us to the back of the truck. As close as I could work it -- counting seconds off in my head, one hippopotami, two hippopotami -- the interviews lasted about seven minutes each. My head throbbed with dehydration and caffeine withdrawal. + +I was third, brought back by the woman with the severe haircut. Up close, she looked tired, with bags under her eyes and grim lines at the corners of her mouth. + +"Thanks," I said, automatically, as she unlocked me with a remote and then dragged me to my feet. I hated myself for the automatic politeness, but it had been drilled into me. + +She didn't twitch a muscle. I went ahead of her to the back of the truck and behind the screen. There was a single folding chair and I sat in it. Two of them -- Severe Haircut woman and utility belt man -- looked at me from their ergonomic super-chairs. + +They had a little table between them with the contents of my wallet and backpack spread out on it. + +"Hello, Marcus," Severe Haircut woman said. "We have some questions for you." + +"Am I under arrest?" I asked. This wasn't an idle question. If you're not under arrest, there are limits on what the cops can and can't do to you. For starters, they can't hold you forever without arresting you, giving you a phone call, and letting you talk to a lawyer. And hoo-boy, was I ever going to talk to a lawyer. + +"What's this for?" she said, holding up my phone. The screen was showing the error message you got if you kept trying to get into its data without giving the right password. It was a bit of a rude message -- an animated hand giving a certain universally recognized gesture -- because I liked to customize my gear. + +"Am I under arrest?" I repeated. They can't make you answer any questions if you're not under arrest, and when you ask if you're under arrest, they have to answer you. It's the rules. + +"You're being detained by the Department of Homeland Security," the woman snapped. + +"Am I under arrest?" + +"You're going to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now." She didn't say, "or else," but it was implied. + +"I would like to contact an attorney," I said. "I would like to know what I've been charged with. I would like to see some form of identification from both of you." + +The two agents exchanged looks. + +"I think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation," Severe Haircut woman said. "I think you should do that right now. We found a number of suspicious devices on your person. We found you and your confederates near the site of the worst terrorist attack this country has ever seen. Put those two facts together and things don't look very good for you, Marcus. You can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry. Now, what is this for?" + +"You think I'm a terrorist? I'm seventeen years old!" + +"Just the right age -- Al Qaeda loves recruiting impressionable, idealistic kids. We googled you, you know. You've posted a lot of very ugly stuff on the public Internet." + +"I would like to speak to an attorney," I said. + +Severe haircut lady looked at me like I was a bug. "You're under the mistaken impression that you've been picked up by the police for a crime. You need to get past that. You are being detained as a potential enemy combatant by the government of the United States. If I were you, I'd be thinking very hard about how to convince us that you are not an enemy combatant. Very hard. Because there are dark holes that enemy combatants can disappear into, very dark deep holes, holes where you can just vanish. Forever. Are you listening to me young man? I want you to unlock this phone and then decrypt the files in its memory. I want you to account for yourself: why were you out on the street? What do you know about the attack on this city?" + +"I'm not going to unlock my phone for you," I said, indignant. My phone's memory had all kinds of private stuff on it: photos, emails, little hacks and mods I'd installed. "That's private stuff." + +"What have you got to hide?" + +"I've got the right to my privacy," I said. "And I want to speak to an attorney." + +"This is your last chance, kid. Honest people don't have anything to hide." + +"I want to speak to an attorney." My parents would pay for it. All the FAQs on getting arrested were clear on this point. Just keep asking to see an attorney, no matter what they say or do. There's no good that comes of talking to the cops without your lawyer present. These two said they weren't cops, but if this wasn't an arrest, what was it? + +In hindsight, maybe I should have unlocked my phone for them. + +1~ Chapter 4 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Barnes and Noble,~{ Barnes and Noble, nationwide: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Little-Brother/Cory-Doctorow/e/9780765319852/?itm=6 }~ a US national chain of bookstores. As America's mom-and-pop bookstores were vanishing, Barnes and Noble started to build these gigantic temples to reading all across the land. Stocking tens of thousands of titles (the mall bookstores and grocery-store spinner racks had stocked a small fraction of that) and keeping long hours that were convenient to families, working people and others potential readers, the B&N stores kept the careers of many writers afloat, stocking titles that smaller stores couldn't possibly afford to keep on their limited shelves. B&N has always had strong community outreach programs, and I've done some of my best-attended, best-organized signings at B&N stores, including the great events at the (sadly departed) B&N in Union Square, New York, where the mega-signing after the Nebula Awards took place, and the B&N in Chicago that hosted the event after the Nebs a few years later. Best of all is that B&N's "geeky" buyers really Get It when it comes to science fiction, comics and manga, games and similar titles. They're passionate and knowledgeable about the field and it shows in the excellent selection on display at the stores.] }/ + +They re-shackled and re-hooded me and left me there. A long time later, the truck started to move, rolling downhill, and then I was hauled back to my feet. I immediately fell over. My legs were so asleep they felt like blocks of ice, all except my knees, which were swollen and tender from all the hours of kneeling. + +Hands grabbed my shoulders and feet and I was picked up like a sack of potatoes. There were indistinct voices around me. Someone crying. Someone cursing. + +I was carried a short distance, then set down and re-shackled to another railing. My knees wouldn't support me anymore and I pitched forward, ending up twisted on the ground like a pretzel, straining against the chains holding my wrists. + +Then we were moving again, and this time, it wasn't like driving in a truck. The floor beneath me rocked gently and vibrated with heavy diesel engines and I realized I was on a ship! My stomach turned to ice. I was being taken off America's shores to somewhere /{else}/, and who the hell knew where that was? I'd been scared before, but this thought /{terrified}/ me, left me paralyzed and wordless with fear. I realized that I might never see my parents again and I actually tasted a little vomit burn up my throat. The bag over my head closed in on me and I could barely breathe, something that was compounded by the weird position I was twisted into. + +But mercifully we weren't on the water for very long. It felt like an hour, but I know now that it was a mere fifteen minutes, and then I felt us docking, felt footsteps on the decking around me and felt other prisoners being unshackled and carried or led away. When they came for me, I tried to stand again, but couldn't, and they carried me again, impersonally, roughly. + +When they took the hood off again, I was in a cell. + +The cell was old and crumbled, and smelled of sea air. There was one window high up, and rusted bars guarded it. It was still dark outside. There was a blanket on the floor and a little metal toilet without a seat, set into the wall. The guard who took off my hood grinned at me and closed the solid steel door behind him. + +I gently massaged my legs, hissing as the blood came back into them and into my hands. Eventually I was able to stand, and then to pace. I heard other people talking, crying, shouting. I did some shouting too: "Jolu! Darryl! Vanessa!" Other voices on the cell-block took up the cry, shouting out names, too, shouting out obscenities. The nearest voices sounded like drunks losing their minds on a street-corner. Maybe I sounded like that too. + +Guards shouted at us to be quiet and that just made everyone yell louder. Eventually we were all howling, screaming our heads off, screaming our throats raw. Why not? What did we have to lose? + +# + +The next time they came to question me, I was filthy and tired, thirsty and hungry. Severe haircut lady was in the new questioning party, as were three big guys who moved me around like a cut of meat. One was black, the other two were white, though one might have been hispanic. They all carried guns. It was like a Benneton's ad crossed with a game of Counter-Strike. + +They'd taken me from my cell and chained my wrists and ankles together. I paid attention to my surroundings as we went. I heard water outside and thought that maybe we were on Alcatraz -- it was a prison, after all, even if it had been a tourist attraction for generations, the place where you went to see where Al Capone and his gangster contemporaries did their time. But I'd been to Alcatraz on a school trip. It was old and rusted, medieval. This place felt like it dated back to World War Two, not colonial times. + +There were bar-codes laser-printed on stickers and placed on each of the cell-doors, and numbers, but other than that, there was no way to tell who or what might be behind them. + +The interrogation room was modern, with fluorescent lights, ergonomic chairs -- not for me, though, I got a folding plastic garden-chair -- and a big wooden board-room table. A mirror lined one wall, just like in the cop shows, and I figured someone or other must be watching from behind it. Severe haircut lady and her friends helped themselves to coffees from an urn on a side-table (I could have torn her throat out with my teeth and taken her coffee just then), and then set a styrofoam cup of water down next to me -- without unlocking my wrists from behind my back, so I couldn't reach it. Hardy har har. + +"Hello, Marcus," Severe Haircut woman said. "How's your 'tude doing today?" + +I didn't say anything. + +"This isn't as bad as it gets you know," she said. "This is as /{good}/ as it gets from now on. Even once you tell us what we want to know, even if that convinces us that you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, you're a marked man now. We'll be watching you everywhere you go and everything you do. You've acted like you've got something to hide, and we don't like that." + +It's pathetic, but all my brain could think about was that phrase, "convince us that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time." This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I had never, ever felt this bad or this scared before. Those words, "wrong place at the wrong time," those six words, they were like a lifeline dangling before me as I thrashed to stay on the surface. + +"Hello, Marcus?" she snapped her fingers in front of my face. "Over here, Marcus." There was a little smile on her face and I hated myself for letting her see my fear. "Marcus, it can be a lot worse than this. This isn't the worst place we can put you, not by a damned sight." She reached down below the table and came out with a briefcase, which she snapped open. From it, she withdrew my phone, my arphid sniper/cloner, my wifinder, and my memory keys. She set them down on the table one after the other. + +"Here's what we want from you. You unlock the phone for us today. If you do that, you'll get outdoor and bathing privileges. You'll get a shower and you'll be allowed to walk around in the exercise yard. Tomorrow, we'll bring you back and ask you to decrypt the data on these memory sticks. Do that, and you'll get to eat in the mess hall. The day after, we're going to want your email passwords, and that will get you library privileges." + +The word "no" was on my lips, like a burp trying to come up, but it wouldn't come. "Why?" is what came out instead. + +"We want to be sure that you're what you seem to be. This is about your security, Marcus. Say you're innocent. You might be, though why an innocent man would act like he's got so much to hide is beyond me. But say you are: you could have been on that bridge when it blew. Your parents could have been. Your friends. Don't you want us to catch the people who attacked your home?" + +It's funny, but when she was talking about my getting "privileges" it scared me into submission. I felt like I'd done /{something}/ to end up where I was, like maybe it was partially my fault, like I could do something to change it. + +But as soon as she switched to this BS about "safety" and "security," my spine came back. "Lady," I said, "you're talking about attacking my home, but as far as I can tell, you're the only one who's attacked me lately. I thought I lived in a country with a constitution. I thought I lived in a country where I had /{rights}/. You're talking about defending my freedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights." + +A flicker of annoyance passed over her face, then went away. "So melodramatic, Marcus. No one's attacked you. You've been detained by your country's government while we seek details on the worst terrorist attack ever perpetrated on our nation's soil. You have it within your power to help us fight this war on our nation's enemies. You want to preserve the Bill of Rights? Help us stop bad people from blowing up your city. Now, you have exactly thirty seconds to unlock that phone before I send you back to your cell. We have lots of other people to interview today." + +She looked at her watch. I rattled my wrists, rattled the chains that kept me from reaching around and unlocking the phone. Yes, I was going to do it. She'd told me what my path was to freedom -- to the world, to my parents -- and that had given me hope. Now she'd threatened to send me away, to take me off that path, and my hope had crashed and all I could think of was how to get back on it. + +So I rattled my wrists, wanting to get to my phone and unlock it for her, and she just looked at me coldly, checking her watch. + +"The password," I said, finally understanding what she wanted of me. She wanted me to say it out loud, here, where she could record it, where her pals could hear it. She didn't want me to just unlock the phone. She wanted me to submit to her. To put her in charge of me. To give up every secret, all my privacy. "The password," I said again, and then I told her the password. God help me, I submitted to her will. + +She smiled a little prim smile, which had to be her ice-queen equivalent of a touchdown dance, and the guards led me away. As the door closed, I saw her bend down over the phone and key the password in. + +I wish I could say that I'd anticipated this possibility in advance and created a fake password that unlocked a completely innocuous partition on my phone, but I wasn't nearly that paranoid/clever. + +You might be wondering at this point what dark secrets I had locked away on my phone and memory sticks and email. I'm just a kid, after all. + +The truth is that I had everything to hide, and nothing. Between my phone and my memory sticks, you could get a pretty good idea of who my friends were, what I thought of them, all the goofy things we'd done. You could read the transcripts of the electronic arguments we'd carried out and the electronic reconciliations we'd arrived at. + +You see, I don't delete stuff. Why would I? Storage is cheap, and you never know when you're going to want to go back to that stuff. Especially the stupid stuff. You know that feeling you get sometimes where you're sitting on the subway and there's no one to talk to and you suddenly remember some bitter fight you had, some terrible thing you said? Well, it's usually never as bad as you remember. Being able to go back and see it again is a great way to remind yourself that you're not as horrible a person as you think you are. Darryl and I have gotten over more fights that way than I can count. + +And even that's not it. I know my phone is private. I know my memory sticks are private. That's because of cryptography -- message scrambling. The math behind crypto is good and solid, and you and me get access to the same crypto that banks and the National Security Agency use. There's only one kind of crypto that anyone uses: crypto that's public, open and can be deployed by anyone. That's how you know it works. + +There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life that's /{yours}/, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked? + +Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body -- and how many of us can say that? -- you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded. + +It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something /{private}/. It's about your life belonging to you. + +They were taking that from me, piece by piece. As I walked back to my cell, that feeling of deserving it came back to me. I'd broken a lot of rules all my life and I'd gotten away with it, by and large. Maybe this was justice. Maybe this was my past coming back to me. After all, I had been where I was because I'd snuck out of school. + +I got my shower. I got to walk around the yard. There was a patch of sky overhead, and it smelled like the Bay Area, but beyond that, I had no clue where I was being held. No other prisoners were visible during my exercise period, and I got pretty bored with walking in circles. I strained my ears for any sound that might help me understand what this place was, but all I heard was the occasional vehicle, some distant conversations, a plane landing somewhere nearby. + +They brought me back to my cell and fed me, a half a pepperoni pie from Goat Hill Pizza, which I knew well, up on Potrero Hill. The carton with its familiar graphic and 415 phone number was a reminder that only a day before, I'd been a free man in a free country and that now I was a prisoner. I worried constantly about Darryl and fretted about my other friends. Maybe they'd been more cooperative and had been released. Maybe they'd told my parents and they were frantically calling around. + +Maybe not. + +The cell was fantastically spare, empty as my soul. I fantasized that the wall opposite my bunk was a screen, that I could be hacking right now, opening the cell-door. I fantasized about my workbench and the projects there -- the old cans I was turning into a ghetto surround-sound rig, the aerial photography kite-cam I was building, my homebrew laptop. + +I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to go home and have my friends and my school and my parents and my life back. I wanted to be able to go where I wanted to go, not be stuck pacing and pacing and pacing. + +# + +They took my passwords for my USB keys next. Those held some interesting messages I'd downloaded from one online discussion group or another, some chat transcripts, things where people had helped me out with some of the knowledge I needed to do the things I did. There was nothing on there you couldn't find with Google, of course, but I didn't think that would count in my favor. + +I got exercise again that afternoon, and this time there were others in the yard when I got there, four other guys and two women, of all ages and racial backgrounds. I guess lots of people were doing things to earn their "privileges." + +They gave me half an hour, and I tried to make conversation with the most normal-seeming of the other prisoners, a black guy about my age with a short afro. But when I introduced myself and stuck my hand out, he cut his eyes toward the cameras mounted ominously in the corners of the yard and kept walking without ever changing his facial expression. + +But then, just before they called my name and brought me back into the building, the door opened and out came -- Vanessa! I'd never been more glad to see a friendly face. She looked tired and grumpy, but not hurt, and when she saw me, she shouted my name and ran to me. We hugged each other hard and I realized I was shaking. Then I realized she was shaking, too. + +"Are you OK?" she said, holding me at arms' length. + +"I'm OK," I said. "They told me they'd let me go if I gave them my passwords." + +"They keep asking me questions about you and Darryl." + +There was a voice blaring over the loudspeaker, shouting at us to stop talking, to walk, but we ignored it. + +"Answer them," I said, instantly. "Anything they ask, answer them. If it'll get you out." + +"How are Darryl and Jolu?" + +"I haven't seen them." + +The door banged open and four big guards boiled out. Two took me and two took Vanessa. They forced me to the ground and turned my head away from Vanessa, though I heard her getting the same treatment. Plastic cuffs went around my wrists and then I was yanked to my feet and brought back to my cell. + +No dinner came that night. No breakfast came the next morning. No one came and brought me to the interrogation room to extract more of my secrets. The plastic cuffs didn't come off, and my shoulders burned, then ached, then went numb, then burned again. I lost all feeling in my hands. + +I had to pee. I couldn't undo my pants. I really, really had to pee. + +I pissed myself. + +They came for me after that, once the hot piss had cooled and gone clammy, making my already filthy jeans stick to my legs. They came for me and walked me down the long hall lined with doors, each door with its own bar code, each bar code a prisoner like me. They walked me down the corridor and brought me to the interrogation room and it was like a different planet when I entered there, a world where things were normal, where everything didn't reek of urine. I felt so dirty and ashamed, and all those feelings of deserving what I got came back to me. + +Severe haircut lady was already sitting. She was perfect: coifed and with just a little makeup. I smelled her hair stuff. She wrinkled her nose at me. I felt the shame rise in me. + +"Well, you've been a very naughty boy, haven't you? Aren't you a filthy thing?" + +Shame. I looked down at the table. I couldn't bear to look up. I wanted to tell her my email password and get gone. + +"What did you and your friend talk about in the yard?" + +I barked a laugh at the table. "I told her to answer your questions. I told her to cooperate." + +"So do you give the orders?" + +I felt the blood sing in my ears. "Oh come on," I said. "We play a /{game}/ together, it's called Harajuku Fun Madness. I'm the /{team captain}/. We're not terrorists, we're high school students. I don't give her orders. I told her that we needed to be /{honest}/ with you so that we could clear up any suspicion and get out of here." + +She didn't say anything for a moment. + +"How is Darryl?" I said. + +"Who?" + +"Darryl. You picked us up together. My friend. Someone had stabbed him in the Powell Street BART. That's why we were up on the surface. To get him help." + +"I'm sure he's fine, then," she said. + +My stomach knotted and I almost threw up. "You don't /{know}/? You haven't got him here?" + +"Who we have here and who we don't have here is not something we're going to discuss with you, ever. That's not something you're going to know. Marcus, you've seen what happens when you don't cooperate with us. You've seen what happens when you disobey our orders. You've been a little cooperative, and it's gotten you almost to the point where you might go free again. If you want to make that possibility into a reality, you'll stick to answering my questions." + +I didn't say anything. + +"You're learning, that's good. Now, your email passwords, please." + +I was ready for this. I gave them everything: server address, login, password. This didn't matter. I didn't keep any email on my server. I downloaded it all and kept it on my laptop at home, which downloaded and deleted my mail from the server every sixty seconds. They wouldn't get anything out of my mail -- it got cleared off the server and stored on my laptop at home. + +Back to the cell, but they cut loose my hands and they gave me a shower and a pair of orange prison pants to wear. They were too big for me and hung down low on my hips, like a Mexican gang-kid in the Mission. That's where the baggy-pants-down-your-ass look comes from you know that? From prison. I tell you what, it's less fun when it's not a fashion statement. + +They took away my jeans, and I spent another day in the cell. The walls were scratched cement over a steel grid. You could tell, because the steel was rusting in the salt air, and the grid shone through the green paint in red-orange. My parents were out that window, somewhere. + +They came for me again the next day. + +"We've been reading your mail for a day now. We changed the password so that your home computer couldn't fetch it." + +Well, of course they had. I would have done the same, now that I thought of it. + +"We have enough on you now to put you away for a very long time, Marcus. Your possession of these articles --" she gestured at all my little gizmos -- "and the data we recovered from your phone and memory sticks, as well as the subversive material we'd no doubt find if we raided your house and took your computer. It's enough to put you away until you're an old man. Do you understand that?" + +I didn't believe it for a second. There's no way a judge would say that all this stuff constituted any kind of real crime. It was free speech, it was technological tinkering. It wasn't a crime. + +But who said that these people would ever put me in front of a judge. + +"We know where you live, we know who your friends are. We know how you operate and how you think." + +It dawned on me then. They were about to let me go. The room seemed to brighten. I heard myself breathing, short little breaths. + +"We just want to know one thing: what was the delivery mechanism for the bombs on the bridge?" + +I stopped breathing. The room darkened again. + +"What?" + +"There were ten charges on the bridge, all along its length. They weren't in car-trunks. They'd been placed there. Who placed them there, and how did they get there?" + +"What?" I said it again. + +"This is your last chance, Marcus," she said. She looked sad. "You were doing so well until now. Tell us this and you can go home. You can get a lawyer and defend yourself in a court of law. There are doubtless extenuating circumstances that you can use to explain your actions. Just tell us this thing, and you're gone." + +"I don't know what you're talking about!" I was crying and I didn't even care. Sobbing, blubbering. "I have /{no idea what you're talking about}/!" + +She shook her head. "Marcus, please. Let us help you. By now you know that we always get what we're after." + +There was a gibbering sound in the back of my mind. They were /{insane}/. I pulled myself together, working hard to stop the tears. "Listen, lady, this is nuts. You've been into my stuff, you've seen it all. I'm a seventeen year old high school student, not a terrorist! You can't seriously think --" + +"Marcus, haven't you figured out that we're serious yet?" She shook her head. "You get pretty good grades. I thought you'd be smarter than that." She made a flicking gesture and the guards picked me up by the armpits. + +Back in my cell, a hundred little speeches occurred to me. The French call this "esprit d'escalier" -- the spirit of the staircase, the snappy rebuttals that come to you after you leave the room and slink down the stairs. In my mind, I stood and delivered, telling her that I was a citizen who loved my freedom, which made me the patriot and made her the traitor. In my mind, I shamed her for turning my country into an armed camp. In my mind, I was eloquent and brilliant and reduced her to tears. + +But you know what? None of those fine words came back to me when they pulled me out the next day. All I could think of was freedom. My parents. + +"Hello, Marcus," she said. "How are you feeling?" + +I looked down at the table. She had a neat pile of documents in front of her, and her ubiquitous go-cup of Starbucks beside her. I found it comforting somehow, a reminder that there was a real world out there somewhere, beyond the walls. + +"We're through investigating you, for now." She let that hang there. Maybe it meant that she was letting me go. Maybe it meant that she was going to throw me in a pit and forget that I existed. + +"And?" I said finally. + +"And I want you to impress on you again that we are very serious about this. Our country has experienced the worst attack ever committed on its soil. How many 9/11s do you want us to suffer before you're willing to cooperate? The details of our investigation are secret. We won't stop at anything in our efforts to bring the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to justice. Do you understand that?" + +"Yes," I mumbled. + +"We are going to send you home today, but you are a marked man. You have not been found to be above suspicion -- we're only releasing you because we're done questioning you for now. But from now on, you /{belong}/ to us. We will be watching you. We'll be waiting for you to make a misstep. Do you understand that we can watch you closely, all the time?" + +"Yes," I mumbled. + +"Good. You will never speak of what happened here to anyone, ever. This is a matter of national security. Do you know that the death penalty still holds for treason in time of war?" + +"Yes," I mumbled. + +"Good boy," she purred. "We have some papers here for you to sign." She pushed the stack of papers across the table to me. Little post-its with SIGN HERE printed on them had been stuck throughout them. A guard undid my cuffs. + +I paged through the papers and my eyes watered and my head swam. I couldn't make sense of them. I tried to decipher the legalese. It seemed that I was signing a declaration that I had been voluntarily held and submitted to voluntary questioning, of my own free will. + +"What happens if I don't sign this?" I said. + +She snatched the papers back and made that flicking gesture again. The guards jerked me to my feet. + +"Wait!" I cried. "Please! I'll sign them!" They dragged me to the door. All I could see was that door, all I could think of was it closing behind me. + +I lost it. I wept. I begged to be allowed to sign the papers. To be so close to freedom and have it snatched away, it made me ready to do anything. I can't count the number of times I've heard someone say, "Oh, I'd rather die than do something-or-other" -- I've said it myself now and again. But that was the first time I understood what it really meant. I would have rather died than go back to my cell. + +I begged as they took me out into the corridor. I told them I'd sign anything. + +She called out to the guards and they stopped. They brought me back. They sat me down. One of them put the pen in my hand. + +Of course, I signed, and signed and signed. + +# + +My jeans and t-shirt were back in my cell, laundered and folded. They smelled of detergent. I put them on and washed my face and sat on my cot and stared at the wall. They'd taken everything from me. First my privacy, then my dignity. I'd been ready to sign anything. I would have signed a confession that said I'd assassinated Abraham Lincoln. + +I tried to cry, but it was like my eyes were dry, out of tears. + +They got me again. A guard approached me with a hood, like the hood I'd been put in when they picked us up, whenever that was, days ago, weeks ago. + +The hood went over my head and cinched tight at my neck. I was in total darkness and the air was stifling and stale. I was raised to my feet and walked down corridors, up stairs, on gravel. Up a gangplank. On a ship's steel deck. My hands were chained behind me, to a railing. I knelt on the deck and listened to the thrum of the diesel engines. + +The ship moved. A hint of salt air made its way into the hood. It was drizzling and my clothes were heavy with water. I was outside, even if my head was in a bag. I was outside, in the world, moments from my freedom. + +They came for me and led me off the boat and over uneven ground. Up three metal stairs. My wrists were unshackled. My hood was removed. + +I was back in the truck. Severe haircut woman was there, at the little desk she'd sat at before. She had a ziploc bag with her, and inside it were my phone and other little devices, my wallet and the change from my pockets. She handed them to me wordlessly. + +I filled my pockets. It felt so weird to have everything back in its familiar place, to be wearing my familiar clothes. Outside the truck's back door, I heard the familiar sounds of my familiar city. + +A guard passed me my backpack. The woman extended her hand to me. I just looked at it. She put it down and gave me a wry smile. Then she mimed zipping up her lips and pointed to me, and opened the door. + +It was daylight outside, gray and drizzling. I was looking down an alley toward cars and trucks and bikes zipping down the road. I stood transfixed on the truck's top step, staring at freedom. + +My knees shook. I knew now that they were playing with me again. In a moment, the guards would grab me and drag me back inside, the bag would go over my head again, and I would be back on the boat and sent off to the prison again, to the endless, unanswerable questions. I barely held myself back from stuffing my fist in my mouth. + +Then I forced myself to go down one stair. Another stair. The last stair. My sneakers crunched down on the crap on the alley's floor, broken glass, a needle, gravel. I took a step. Another. I reached the mouth of the alley and stepped onto the sidewalk. + +No one grabbed me. + +I was free. + +Then strong arms threw themselves around me. I nearly cried. + +1~ Chapter 5 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Secret Headquarters in Los Angeles,~{ Secret Headquarters: http://www.thesecretheadquarters.com/ 3817 W. Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90026 +1 323 666 2228 }~ my drop-dead all-time favorite comic store in the world. It's small and selective about what it stocks, and every time I walk in, I walk out with three or four collections I'd never heard of under my arm. It's like the owners, Dave and David, have the uncanny ability to predict exactly what I'm looking for, and they lay it out for me seconds before I walk into the store. I discovered about three quarters of my favorite comics by wandering into SHQ, grabbing something interesting, sinking into one of the comfy chairs, and finding myself transported to another world. When my second story-collection, OVERCLOCKED, came out, they worked with local illustrator Martin Cenreda to do a free mini-comic based on Printcrime, the first story in the book. I left LA about a year ago, and of all the things I miss about it, Secret Headquarters is right at the top of the list.] }/ + +But it was Van, and she /{was}/ crying, and hugging me so hard I couldn't breathe. I didn't care. I hugged her back, my face buried in her hair. + +"You're OK!" she said. + +"I'm OK," I managed. + +She finally let go of me and another set of arms wrapped themselves around me. It was Jolu! They were both there. He whispered, "You're safe, bro," in my ear and hugged me even tighter than Vanessa had. + +When he let go, I looked around. "Where's Darryl?" I asked. + +They both looked at each other. "Maybe he's still in the truck," Jolu said. + +We turned and looked at the truck at the alley's end. It was a nondescript white 18-wheeler. Someone had already brought the little folding staircase inside. The rear lights glowed red, and the truck rolled backwards towards us, emitting a steady eep, eep, eep. + +"Wait!" I shouted as it accelerated towards us. "Wait! What about Darryl?" The truck drew closer. I kept shouting. "What about Darryl?" + +Jolu and Vanessa each had me by an arm and were dragging me away. I struggled against them, shouting. The truck pulled out of the alley's mouth and reversed into the street and pointed itself downhill and drove away. I tried to run after it, but Van and Jolu wouldn't let me go. + +I sat down on the sidewalk and put my arms around my knees and cried. I cried and cried and cried, loud sobs of the sort I hadn't done since I was a little kid. They wouldn't stop coming. I couldn't stop shaking. + +Vanessa and Jolu got me to my feet and moved me a little ways up the street. There was a Muni bus stop with a bench and they sat me on it. They were both crying too, and we held each other for a while, and I knew we were crying for Darryl, whom none of us ever expected to see again. + +# + +We were north of Chinatown, at the part where it starts to become North Beach, a neighborhood with a bunch of neon strip clubs and the legendary City Lights counterculture bookstore, where the Beat poetry movement had been founded back in the 1950s. + +I knew this part of town well. My parents' favorite Italian restaurant was here and they liked to take me here for big plates of linguine and huge Italian ice-cream mountains with candied figs and lethal little espressos afterward. + +Now it was a different place, a place where I was tasting freedom for the first time in what seemed like an eternity. + +We checked our pockets and found enough money to get a table at one of the Italian restaurants, out on the sidewalk, under an awning. The pretty waitress lighted a gas-heater with a barbeque lighter, took our orders and went inside. The sensation of giving orders, of controlling my destiny, was the most amazing thing I'd ever felt. + +"How long were we in there?" I asked. + +"Six days," Vanessa said. + +"I got five," Jolu said. + +"I didn't count." + +"What did they do to you?" Vanessa said. I didn't want to talk about it, but they were both looking at me. Once I started, I couldn't stop. I told them everything, even when I'd been forced to piss myself, and they took it all in silently. I paused when the waitress delivered our sodas and waited until she got out of earshot, then finished. In the telling, it receded into the distance. By the end of it, I couldn't tell if I was embroidering the truth or if I was making it all seem /{less}/ bad. My memories swam like little fish that I snatched at, and sometimes they wriggled out of my grasp. + +Jolu shook his head. "They were hard on you, dude," he said. He told us about his stay there. They'd questioned him, mostly about me, and he'd kept on telling them the truth, sticking to a plain telling of the facts about that day and about our friendship. They had gotten him to repeat it over and over again, but they hadn't played games with his head the way they had with me. He'd eaten his meals in a mess-hall with a bunch of other people, and been given time in a TV room where they were shown last year's blockbusters on video. + +Vanessa's story was only slightly different. After she'd gotten them angry by talking to me, they'd taken away her clothes and made her wear a set of orange prison overalls. She'd been left in her cell for two days without contact, though she'd been fed regularly. But mostly it was the same as Jolu: the same questions, repeated again and again. + +"They really hated you," Jolu said. "Really had it in for you. Why?" + +I couldn't imagine why. Then I remembered. + +/{You can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry.}/ + +"It was because I wouldn't unlock my phone for them, that first night. That's why they singled me out." I couldn't believe it, but there was no other explanation. It had been sheer vindictiveness. My mind reeled at the thought. They had done all that as a mere punishment for defying their authority. + +I had been scared. Now I was angry. "Those bastards," I said, softly. "They did it to get back at me for mouthing off." + +Jolu swore and then Vanessa cut loose in Korean, something she only did when she was really, really angry. + +"I'm going to get them," I whispered, staring at my soda. "I'm going to get them." + +Jolu shook his head. "You can't, you know. You can't fight back against that." + +# + +None of us much wanted to talk about revenge then. Instead, we talked about what we would do next. We had to go home. Our phones' batteries were dead and it had been years since this neighborhood had any payphones. We just needed to go home. I even thought about taking a taxi, but there wasn't enough money between us to make that possible. + +So we walked. On the corner, we pumped some quarters into a San Francisco Chronicle newspaper box and stopped to read the front section. It had been five days since the bombs went off, but it was still all over the front cover. + +Severe haircut woman had talked about "the bridge" blowing up, and I'd just assumed that she was talking about the Golden Gate bridge, but I was wrong. The terrorists had blown up the /{Bay bridge}/. + +"Why the hell would they blow up the Bay Bridge?" I said. "The Golden Gate is the one on all the postcards." Even if you've never been to San Francisco, chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like: it's that big orange suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from the old military base called the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesy wine-country towns are with their scented candle shops and art galleries. It's picturesque as hell, and it's practically the symbol for the state of California. If you go to the Disneyland California Adventure park, there's a replica of it just past the gates, with a monorail running over it. + +So naturally I assumed that if you were going to blow up a bridge in San Francisco, that's the one you'd blow. + +"They probably got scared off by all the cameras and stuff," Jolu said. "The National Guard's always checking cars at both ends and there's all those suicide fences and junk all along it." People have been jumping off the Golden Gate since it opened in 1937 -- they stopped counting after the thousandth suicide in 1995. + +"Yeah," Vanessa said. "Plus the Bay Bridge actually goes somewhere." The Bay Bridge goes from downtown San Francisco to Oakland and thence to Berkeley, the East Bay townships that are home to many of the people who live and work in town. It's one of the only parts of the Bay Area where a normal person can afford a house big enough to really stretch out in, and there's also the university and a bunch of light industry over there. The BART goes under the Bay and connects the two cities, too, but it's the Bay Bridge that sees most of the traffic. The Golden Gate was a nice bridge if you were a tourist or a rich retiree living out in wine country, but it was mostly ornamental. The Bay Bridge is -- was -- San Francisco's work-horse bridge. + +I thought about it for a minute. "You guys are right," I said. "But I don't think that's all of it. We keep acting like terrorists attack landmarks because they hate landmarks. Terrorists don't hate landmarks or bridges or airplanes. They just want to screw stuff up and make people scared. To make terror. So of course they went after the Bay Bridge after the Golden Gate got all those cameras -- after airplanes got all metal-detectored and X-rayed." I thought about it some more, staring blankly at the cars rolling down the street, at the people walking down the sidewalks, at the city all around me. "Terrorists don't hate airplanes or bridges. They love terror." It was so obvious I couldn't believe I'd never thought of it before. I guess that being treated like a terrorist for a few days was enough to clarify my thinking. + +The other two were staring at me. "I'm right, aren't I? All this crap, all the X-rays and ID checks, they're all useless, aren't they?" + +They nodded slowly. + +"Worse than useless," I said, my voice going up and cracking. "Because they ended up with us in prison, with Darryl --" I hadn't thought of Darryl since we sat down and now it came back to me, my friend, missing, disappeared. I stopped talking and ground my jaws together. + +"We have to tell our parents," Jolu said. + +"We should get a lawyer," Vanessa said. + +I thought of telling my story. Of telling the world what had become of me. Of the videos that would no doubt come out, of me weeping, reduced to a groveling animal. + +"We can't tell them anything," I said, without thinking. + +"What do you mean?" Van said. + +"We can't tell them anything," I repeated. "You heard her. If we talk, they'll come back for us. They'll do to us what they did to Darryl." + +"You're joking," Jolu said. "You want us to --" + +"I want us to fight back," I said. "I want to stay free so that I can do that. If we go out there and blab, they'll just say that we're kids, making it up. We don't even know where we were held! No one will believe us. Then, one day, they'll come for us. + +"I'm telling my parents that I was in one of those camps on the other side of the Bay. I came over to meet you guys there and we got stranded, and just got loose today. They said in the papers that people were still wandering home from them." + +"I can't do that," Vanessa said. "After what they did to you, how can you even think of doing that?" + +"It happened to /{me}/, that's the point. This is me and them, now. I'll beat them, I'll get Darryl. I'm not going to take this lying down. But once our parents are involved, that's it for us. No one will believe us and no one will care. If we do it my way, people will care." + +"What's your way?" Jolu said. "What's your plan?" + +"I don't know yet," I admitted. "Give me until tomorrow morning, give me that, at least." I knew that once they'd kept it a secret for a day, it would have to be a secret forever. Our parents would be even more skeptical if we suddenly "remembered" that we'd been held in a secret prison instead of taken care of in a refugee camp. + +Van and Jolu looked at each other. + +"I'm just asking for a chance," I said. "We'll work out the story on the way, get it straight. Give me one day, just one day." + +The other two nodded glumly and we set off downhill again, heading back towards home. I lived on Potrero Hill, Vanessa lived in the North Mission and Jolu lived in Noe Valley -- three wildly different neighborhoods just a few minutes' walk from one another. + +We turned onto Market Street and stopped dead. The street was barricaded at every corner, the cross-streets reduced to a single lane, and parked down the whole length of Market Street were big, nondescript 18-wheelers like the one that had carried us, hooded, away from the ship's docks and to Chinatown. + +Each one had three steel steps leading down from the back and they buzzed with activity as soldiers, people in suits, and cops went in and out of them. The suits wore little badges on their lapels and the soldiers scanned them as they went in and out -- wireless authorization badges. As we walked past one, I got a look at it, and saw the familiar logo: Department of Homeland Security. The soldier saw me staring and stared back hard, glaring at me. + +I got the message and moved on. I peeled away from the gang at Van Ness. We clung to each other and cried and promised to call each other. + +The walk back to Potrero Hill has an easy route and a hard route, the latter taking you over some of the steepest hills in the city, the kind of thing that you see car chases on in action movies, with cars catching air as they soar over the zenith. I always take the hard way home. It's all residential streets, and the old Victorian houses they call "painted ladies" for their gaudy, elaborate paint-jobs, and front gardens with scented flowers and tall grasses. Housecats stare at you from hedges, and there are hardly any homeless. + +It was so quiet on those streets that it made me wish I'd taken the /{other}/ route, through the Mission, which is... /{raucous}/ is probably the best word for it. Loud and vibrant. Lots of rowdy drunks and angry crack-heads and unconscious junkies, and also lots of families with strollers, old ladies gossiping on stoops, lowriders with boom-cars going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa down the streets. There were hipsters and mopey emo art-students and even a couple old-school punk-rockers, old guys with pot bellies bulging out beneath their Dead Kennedys shirts. Also drag queens, angry gang kids, graffiti artists and bewildered gentrifiers trying not to get killed while their real-estate investments matured. + +I went up Goat Hill and walked past Goat Hill Pizza, which made me think of the jail I'd been held in, and I had to sit down on the bench out front of the restaurant until my shakes passed. Then I noticed the truck up the hill from me, a nondescript 18-wheeler with three metal steps coming down from the back end. I got up and got moving. I felt the eyes watching me from all directions. + +I hurried the rest of the way home. I didn't look at the painted ladies or the gardens or the housecats. I kept my eyes down. + +Both my parents' cars were in the driveway, even though it was the middle of the day. Of course. Dad works in the East Bay, so he'd be stuck at home while they worked on the bridge. Mom -- well, who knew why Mom was home. + +They were home for me. + +Even before I'd finished unlocking the door it had been jerked out of my hand and flung wide. There were both of my parents, looking gray and haggard, bug-eyed and staring at me. We stood there in frozen tableau for a moment, then they both rushed forward and dragged me into the house, nearly tripping me up. They were both talking so loud and fast all I could hear was a wordless, roaring gabble and they both hugged me and cried and I cried too and we just stood there like that in the little foyer, crying and making almost-words until we ran out of steam and went into the kitchen. + +I did what I always did when I came home: got myself a glass of water from the filter in the fridge and dug a couple cookies out of the "biscuit barrel" that mom's sister had sent us from England. The normalcy of this made my heart stop hammering, my heart catching up with my brain, and soon we were all sitting at the table. + +"Where have you been?" they both said, more or less in unison. + +I had given this some thought on the way home. "I got trapped," I said. "In Oakland. I was there with some friends, doing a project, and we were all quarantined." + +"For five days?" + +"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. It was really bad." I'd read about the quarantines in the Chronicle and I cribbed shamelessly from the quotes they'd published. "Yeah. Everyone who got caught in the cloud. They thought we had been attacked with some kind of super-bug and they packed us into shipping containers in the docklands, like sardines. It was really hot and sticky. Not much food, either." + +"Christ," Dad said, his fists balling up on the table. Dad teaches in Berkeley three days a week, working with a few grad students in the library science program. The rest of the time he consults for clients in city and down the Peninsula, third-wave dotcoms that are doing various things with archives. He's a mild-mannered librarian by profession, but he'd been a real radical in the sixties and wrestled a little in high school. I'd seen him get crazy angry now and again -- I'd even made him that angry now and again -- and he could seriously lose it when he was Hulking out. He once threw a swing-set from Ikea across my granddad's whole lawn when it fell apart for the fiftieth time while he was assembling it. + +"Barbarians," Mom said. She's been living in America since she was a teenager, but she still comes over all British when she encounters American cops, health-care, airport security or homelessness. Then the word is "barbarians," and her accent comes back strong. We'd been to London twice to see her family and I can't say as it felt any more civilized than San Francisco, just more cramped. + +"But they let us go, and ferried us over today." I was improvising now. + +"Are you hurt?" Mom said. "Hungry?" + +"Sleepy?" + +"Yeah, a little of all that. Also Dopey, Doc, Sneezy and Bashful." We had a family tradition of Seven Dwarfs jokes. They both smiled a little, but their eyes were still wet. I felt really bad for them. They must have been out of their minds with worry. I was glad for a chance to change the subject. "I'd totally love to eat." + +"I'll order a pizza from Goat Hill," Dad said. + +"No, not that," I said. They both looked at me like I'd sprouted antennae. I normally have a thing about Goat Hill Pizza -- as in, I can normally eat it like a goldfish eats his food, gobbling until it either runs out or I pop. I tried to smile. "I just don't feel like pizza," I said, lamely. "Let's order some curry, OK?" Thank heaven that San Francisco is take-out central. + +Mom went to the drawer of take-out menus (more normalcy, feeling like a drink of water on a dry, sore throat) and riffled through them. We spent a couple of distracting minutes going through the menu from the halal Pakistani place on Valencia. I settled on a mixed tandoori grill and creamed spinach with farmer's cheese, a salted mango lassi (much better than it sounds) and little fried pastries in sugar syrup. + +Once the food was ordered, the questions started again. They'd heard from Van's, Jolu's and Darryl's families (of course) and had tried to report us missing. The police were taking names, but there were so many "displaced persons" that they weren't going to open files on anyone unless they were still missing after seven days. + +Meanwhile, millions of have-you-seen sites had popped up on the net. A couple of the sites were old MySpace clones that had run out of money and saw a new lease on life from all the attention. After all, some venture capitalists had missing family in the Bay Area. Maybe if they were recovered, the site would attract some new investment. I grabbed dad's laptop and looked through them. They were plastered with advertising, of course, and pictures of missing people, mostly grad photos, wedding pictures and that sort of thing. It was pretty ghoulish. + +I found my pic and saw that it was linked to Van's, Jolu's, and Darryl's. There was a little form for marking people found and another one for writing up notes about other missing people. I filled in the fields for me and Jolu and Van, and left Darryl blank. + +"You forgot Darryl," Dad said. He didn't like Darryl much -- once he'd figured out that a couple inches were missing out of one of the bottles in his liquor cabinet, and to my enduring shame I'd blamed it on Darryl. In truth, of course, it had been both of us, just fooling around, trying out vodka-and-Cokes during an all-night gaming session. + +"He wasn't with us," I said. The lie tasted bitter in my mouth. + +"Oh my God," my mom said. She squeezed her hands together. "We just assumed when you came home that you'd all been together." + +"No," I said, the lie growing. "No, he was supposed to meet us but we never met up. He's probably just stuck over in Berkeley. He was going to take the BART over." + +Mom made a whimpering sound. Dad shook his head and closed his eyes. "Don't you know about the BART?" he said. + +I shook my head. I could see where this was going. I felt like the ground was rushing up to me. + +"They blew it up," Dad said. "The bastards blew it up at the same time as the bridge." + +That hadn't been on the front page of the Chronicle, but then, a BART blowout under the water wouldn't be nearly as picturesque as the images of the bridge hanging in tatters and pieces over the Bay. The BART tunnel from the Embarcadero in San Francisco to the West Oakland station was submerged. + +I went back to Dad's computer and surfed the headlines. No one was sure, but the body count was in the thousands. Between the cars that plummeted 191 feet to the sea and the people drowned in the trains, the deaths were mounting. One reporter claimed to have interviewed an "identity counterfeiter" who'd helped "dozens" of people walk away from their old lives by simply vanishing after the attacks, getting new ID made up, and slipping away from bad marriages, bad debts and bad lives. + +Dad actually got tears in his eyes, and Mom was openly crying. They each hugged me again, patting me with their hands as if to assure themselves that I was really there. They kept telling me they loved me. I told them I loved them too. + +We had a weepy dinner and Mom and Dad had each had a couple glasses of wine, which was a lot for them. I told them that I was getting sleepy, which was true, and mooched up to my room. I wasn't going to bed, though. I needed to get online and find out what was going on. I needed to talk to Jolu and Vanessa. I needed to get working on finding Darryl. + +I crept up to my room and opened the door. I hadn't seen my old bed in what felt like a thousand years. I lay down on it and reached over to my bedstand to grab my laptop. I must have not plugged it in all the way -- the electrical adapter needed to be jiggled just right -- so it had slowly discharged while I was away. I plugged it back in and gave it a minute or two to charge up before trying to power it up again. I used the time to get undressed and throw my clothes in the trash -- I never wanted to see them again -- and put on a clean pair of boxers and a fresh t-shirt. The fresh-laundered clothes, straight out of my drawers, felt so familiar and comfortable, like getting hugged by my parents. + +I powered up my laptop and punched a bunch of pillows into place behind me at the top of the bed. I scooched back and opened my computer's lid and settled it onto my thighs. It was still booting, and man, those icons creeping across the screen looked /{good}/. It came all the way up and then it started giving me more low-power warnings. I checked the power-cable again and wiggled it and they went away. The power-jack was really flaking out. + +In fact, it was so bad that I couldn't actually get anything done. Every time I took my hand off the power-cable it lost contact and the computer started to complain about its battery. I took a closer look at it. + +The whole case of my computer was slightly misaligned, the seam split in an angular gape that started narrow and widened toward the back. + +Sometimes you look at a piece of equipment and discover something like this and you wonder, "Was it always like that?" Maybe you just never noticed. + +But with my laptop, that wasn't possible. You see, I built it. After the Board of Ed issued us all with SchoolBooks, there was no way my parents were going to buy me a computer of my own, even though technically the SchoolBook didn't belong to me, and I wasn't supposed to install software on it or mod it. + +I had some money saved -- odd jobs, Christmases and birthdays, a little bit of judicious ebaying. Put it all together and I had enough money to buy a totally crappy, five-year-old machine. + +So Darryl and I built one instead. You can buy laptop cases just like you can buy cases for desktop PCs, though they're a little more specialized than plain old PCs. I'd built a couple PCs with Darryl over the years, scavenging parts from Craigslist and garage sales and ordering stuff from cheap cheap Taiwanese vendors we found on the net. I figured that building a laptop would be the best way to get the power I wanted at the price I could afford. + +To build your own laptop, you start by ordering a "barebook" -- a machine with just a little hardware in it and all the right slots. The good news was, once I was done, I had a machine that was a whole pound lighter than the Dell I'd had my eye on, ran faster, and cost a third of what I would have paid Dell. The bad news was that assembling a laptop is like building one of those ships in a bottle. It's all finicky work with tweezers and magnifying glasses, trying to get everything to fit in that little case. Unlike a full-sized PC -- which is mostly air -- every cubic millimeter of space in a laptop is spoken for. Every time I thought I had it, I'd go to screw the thing back together and find that something was keeping the case from closing all the way, and it'd be back to the drawing board. + +So I knew /{exactly}/ how the seam on my laptop was supposed to look when the thing was closed, and it was /{not}/ supposed to look like this. + +I kept jiggling the power-adapter, but it was hopeless. There was no way I was going to get the thing to boot without taking it apart. I groaned and put it beside the bed. I'd deal with it in the morning. + +# + +That was the theory, anyway. Two hours later, I was still staring at the ceiling, playing back movies in my head of what they'd done to me, what I should have done, all regrets and /{esprit d'escalier.}/ + +I rolled out of bed. It had gone midnight and I'd heard my parents hit the sack at eleven. I grabbed the laptop and cleared some space on my desk and clipped the little LED lamps to the temples of my magnifying glasses and pulled out a set of little precision screwdrivers. A minute later, I had the case open and the keyboard removed and I was staring at the guts of my laptop. I got a can of compressed air and blew out the dust that the fan had sucked in and looked things over. + +Something wasn't right. I couldn't put my finger on it, but then it had been months since I'd had the lid off this thing. Luckily, the third time I'd had to open it up and struggle to close it again, I'd gotten smart: I'd taken a photo of the guts with everything in place. I hadn't been totally smart: at first, I'd just left that pic on my hard drive, and naturally I couldn't get to it when I had the laptop in parts. But then I'd printed it out and stuck it in my messy drawer of papers, the dead-tree graveyard where I kept all the warranty cards and pin-out diagrams. I shuffled them -- they seemed messier than I remembered -- and brought out my photo. I set it down next to the computer and kind of unfocused my eyes, trying to find things that looked out of place. + +Then I spotted it. The ribbon cable that connected the keyboard to the logic-board wasn't connected right. That was a weird one. There was no torque on that part, nothing to dislodge it in the course of normal operations. I tried to press it back down again and discovered that the plug wasn't just badly mounted -- there was something between it and the board. I tweezed it out and shone my light on it. + +There was something new in my keyboard. It was a little chunk of hardware, only a sixteenth of an inch thick, with no markings. The keyboard was plugged into it, and it was plugged into the board. It other words, it was perfectly situated to capture all the keystrokes I made while I typed on my machine. + +It was a bug. + +My heart thudded in my ears. It was dark and quiet in the house, but it wasn't a comforting dark. There were eyes out there, eyes and ears, and they were watching me. Surveilling me. The surveillance I faced at school had followed me home, but this time, it wasn't just the Board of Education looking over my shoulder: the Department of Homeland Security had joined them. + +I almost took the bug out. Then I figured that who ever put it there would know that it was gone. I left it in. It made me sick to do it. + +I looked around for more tampering. I couldn't find any, but did that mean there hadn't been any? Someone had broken into my room and planted this device -- had disassembled my laptop and reassembled it. There were lots of other ways to wiretap a computer. I could never find them all. + +I put the machine together with numb fingers. This time, the case wouldn't snap shut just right, but the power-cable stayed in. I booted it up and set my fingers on the keyboard, thinking that I would run some diagnostics and see what was what. + +But I couldn't do it. + +Hell, maybe my room was wiretapped. Maybe there was a camera spying on me now. + +I'd been feeling paranoid when I got home. Now I was nearly out of my skin. It felt like I was back in jail, back in the interrogation room, stalked by entities who had me utterly in their power. It made me want to cry. + +Only one thing for it. + +I went into the bathroom and took off the toilet-paper roll and replaced it with a fresh one. Luckily, it was almost empty already. I unrolled the rest of the paper and dug through my parts box until I found a little plastic envelope full of ultra-bright white LEDs I'd scavenged out of a dead bike-lamp. I punched their leads through the cardboard tube carefully, using a pin to make the holes, then got out some wire and connected them all in series with little metal clips. I twisted the wires into the leads for a nine-volt battery and connected the battery. Now I had a tube ringed with ultra-bright, directional LEDs, and I could hold it up to my eye and look through it. + +I'd built one of these last year as a science fair project and had been thrown out of the fair once I showed that there were hidden cameras in half the classrooms at Chavez High. Pinhead video-cameras cost less than a good restaurant dinner these days, so they're showing up everywhere. Sneaky store clerks put them in changing rooms or tanning salons and get pervy with the hidden footage they get from their customers -- sometimes they just put it on the net. Knowing how to turn a toilet-paper roll and three bucks' worth of parts into a camera-detector is just good sense. + +This is the simplest way to catch a spy-cam. They have tiny lenses, but they reflect light like the dickens. It works best in a dim room: stare through the tube and slowly scan all the walls and other places someone might have put a camera until you see the glint of a reflection. If the reflection stays still as you move around, that's a lens. + +There wasn't a camera in my room -- not one I could detect, anyway. There might have been audio bugs, of course. Or better cameras. Or nothing at all. Can you blame me for feeling paranoid? + +I loved that laptop. I called it the Salmagundi, which means anything made out of spare parts. + +Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it. Now, though, I felt like I didn't want to ever touch it again. I wanted to throw it out the window. Who knew what they'd done to it? Who knew how it had been tapped? + +I put it in a drawer with the lid shut and looked at the ceiling. It was late and I should be in bed. There was no way I was going to sleep now, though. I was tapped. Everyone might be tapped. The world had changed forever. + +"I'll find a way to get them," I said. It was a vow, I knew it when I heard it, though I'd never made a vow before. + +I couldn't sleep after that. And besides, I had an idea. + +Somewhere in my closet was a shrink-wrapped box containing one still-sealed, mint-in-package Xbox Universal. Every Xbox has been sold way below cost -- Microsoft makes most of its money charging games companies money for the right to put out Xbox games -- but the Universal was the first Xbox that Microsoft decided to give away entirely for free. + +Last Christmas season, there'd been poor losers on every corner dressed as warriors from the Halo series, handing out bags of these game-machines as fast as they could. I guess it worked -- everyone says they sold a whole butt-load of games. Naturally, there were countermeasures to make sure you only played games from companies that had bought licenses from Microsoft to make them. + +Hackers blow through those countermeasures. The Xbox was cracked by a kid from MIT who wrote a best-selling book about it, and then the 360 went down, and then the short-lived Xbox Portable (which we all called the "luggable" -- it weighed three pounds!) succumbed. The Universal was supposed to be totally bulletproof. The high school kids who broke it were Brazilian Linux hackers who lived in a /{favela}/ -- a kind of squatter's slum. + +Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor. + +Once the Brazilians published their crack, we all went nuts on it. Soon there were dozens of alternate operating systems for the Xbox Universal. My favorite was ParanoidXbox, a flavor of Paranoid Linux. Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack. + +I'd burned a ParanoidXbox DVD when they first appeared, but I'd never gotten around to unpacking the Xbox in my closet, finding a TV to hook it up to and so on. My room is crowded enough as it is without letting Microsoft crashware eat up valuable workspace. + +Tonight, I'd make the sacrifice. It took about twenty minutes to get up and running. Not having a TV was the hardest part, but eventually I remembered that I had a little overhead LCD projector that had standard TV RCA connectors on the back. I connected it to the Xbox and shone it on the back of my door and got ParanoidLinux installed. + +Now I was up and running, and ParanoidLinux was looking for other Xbox Universals to talk to. Every Xbox Universal comes with built-in wireless for multiplayer gaming. You can connect to your neighbors on the wireless link and to the Internet, if you have a wireless Internet connection. I found three different sets of neighbors in range. Two of them had their Xbox Universals also connected to the Internet. ParanoidXbox loved that configuration: it could siphon off some of my neighbors' Internet connections and use them to get online through the gaming network. The neighbors would never miss the packets: they were paying for flat-rate Internet connections, and they weren't exactly doing a lot of surfing at 2AM. + +The best part of all this is how it made me /{feel}/: in control. My technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn't spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy. + +My brain was really going now, running like 60. There were lots of reasons to run ParanoidXbox -- the best one was that anyone could write games for it. Already there was a port of MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, so you could play practically any game that had ever been written, all the way back to Pong -- games for the Apple ][+ and games for the Colecovision, games for the NES and the Dreamcast, and so on. + +Even better were all the cool multiplayer games being built specifically for ParanoidXbox -- totally free hobbyist games that anyone could run. When you combined it all, you had a free console full of free games that could get you free Internet access. + +And the best part -- as far as I was concerned -- was that ParanoidXbox was /{paranoid}/. Every bit that went over the air was scrambled to within an inch of its life. You could wiretap it all you wanted, but you'd never figure out who was talking, what they were talking about, or who they were talking to. Anonymous web, email and IM. Just what I needed. + +All I had to do now was convince everyone I knew to use it too. + +1~ Chapter 6 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Powell's Books,~{ Powell's Books: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=9780765319852 1005 W Burnside, Portland, OR 97209 USA +1 800 878 7323 }~ the legendary "City of Books" in Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest bookstore in the world, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and towering shelves. They stock new and used books on the same shelves -- something I've always loved -- and every time I've stopped in, they've had a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been incredibly gracious about asking me to sign the store-stock. The clerks are friendly, the stock is fabulous, and there's even a Powell's at the Portland airport, making it just about the best airport bookstore in the world for my money! }/ + +Believe it or not, my parents made me go to school the next day. I'd only fallen into feverish sleep at three in the morning, but at seven the next day, my Dad was standing at the foot of my bed, threatening to drag me out by the ankles. I managed to get up -- something had died in my mouth after painting my eyelids shut -- and into the shower. + +I let my mom force a piece of toast and a banana into me, wishing fervently that my parents would let me drink coffee at home. I could sneak one on the way to school, but watching them sip down their black gold while I was drag-assing around the house, getting dressed and putting my books in my bag -- it was awful. + +I've walked to school a thousand times, but today it was different. I went up and over the hills to get down into the Mission, and everywhere there were trucks. I saw new sensors and traffic cameras installed at many of the stop-signs. Someone had a lot of surveillance gear lying around, waiting to be installed at the first opportunity. The attack on the Bay Bridge had been just what they needed. + +It all made the city seem more subdued, like being inside an elevator, embarrassed by the close scrutiny of your neighbors and the ubiquitous cameras. + +The Turkish coffee shop on 24th Street fixed me up good with a go-cup of Turkish coffee. Basically, Turkish coffee is mud, pretending to be coffee. It's thick enough to stand a spoon up in, and it has way more caffeine than the kiddee-pops like Red Bull. Take it from someone who's read the Wikipedia entry: this is how the Ottoman Empire was won: maddened horsemen fueled by lethal jet-black coffee-mud. + +I pulled out my debit card to pay and he made a face. "No more debit," he said. + +"Huh? Why not?" I'd paid for my coffee habit on my card for years at the Turk's. He used to hassle me all the time, telling me I was too young to drink the stuff, and he still refused to serve me at all during school hours, convinced that I was skipping class. But over the years, the Turk and me have developed a kind of gruff understanding. + +He shook his head sadly. "You wouldn't understand. Go to school, kid." + +There's no surer way to make me want to understand than to tell me I won't. I wheedled him, demanding that he tell me. He looked like he was going to throw me out, but when I asked him if he thought I wasn't good enough to shop there, he opened up. + +"The security," he said, looking around his little shop with its tubs of dried beans and seeds, its shelves of Turkish groceries. "The government. They monitor it all now, it was in the papers. PATRIOT Act II, the Congress passed it yesterday. Now they can monitor every time you use your card. I say no. I say my shop will not help them spy on my customers." + +My jaw dropped. + +"You think it's no big deal maybe? What is the problem with government knowing when you buy coffee? Because it's one way they know where you are, where you been. Why you think I left Turkey? Where you have government always spying on the people, is no good. I move here twenty years ago for freedom -- I no help them take freedom away." + +"You're going to lose so many sales," I blurted. I wanted to tell him he was a hero and shake his hand, but that was what came out. "Everyone uses debit cards." + +"Maybe not so much anymore. Maybe my customers come here because they know I love freedom too. I am making sign for window. Maybe other stores do the same. I hear the ACLU will sue them for this." + +"You've got all my business from now on," I said. I meant it. I reached into my pocket. "Um, I don't have any cash, though." + +He pursed his lips and nodded. "Many peoples say the same thing. Is OK. You give today's money to the ACLU." + +In two minutes, the Turk and I had exchanged more words than we had in all the time I'd been coming to his shop. I had no idea he had all these passions. I just thought of him as my friendly neighborhood caffeine dealer. Now I shook his hand and when I left his store, I felt like he and I had joined a team. A secret team. + +# + +I'd missed two days of school but it seemed like I hadn't missed much class. They'd shut the school on one of those days while the city scrambled to recover. The next day had been devoted, it seemed, to mourning those missing and presumed dead. The newspapers published biographies of the lost, personal memorials. The Web was filled with these capsule obituaries, thousands of them. + +Embarrassingly, I was one of those people. I stepped into the schoolyard, not knowing this, and then there was a shout and a moment later there were a hundred people around me, pounding me on the back, shaking my hand. A couple girls I didn't even know kissed me, and they were more than friendly kisses. I felt like a rock star. + +My teachers were only a little more subdued. Ms Galvez cried as much as my mother had and hugged me three times before she let me go to my desk and sit down. There was something new at the front of the classroom. A camera. Ms Galvez caught me staring at it and handed me a permission slip on smeary Xeroxed school letterhead. + +The Board of the San Francisco Unified School District had held an emergency session over the weekend and unanimously voted to ask the parents of every kid in the city for permission to put closed circuit television cameras in every classroom and corridor. The law said they couldn't force us to go to school with cameras all over the place, but it didn't say anything about us /{volunteering}/ to give up our Constitutional rights. The letter said that the Board were sure that they would get complete compliance from the City's parents, but that they would make arrangements to teach those kids' whose parents objected in a separate set of "unprotected" classrooms. + +Why did we have cameras in our classrooms now? Terrorists. Of course. Because by blowing up a bridge, terrorists had indicated that schools were next. Somehow that was the conclusion that the Board had reached anyway. + +I read this note three times and then I stuck my hand up. + +"Yes, Marcus?" + +"Ms Galvez, about this note?" + +"Yes, Marcus." + +"Isn't the point of terrorism to make us afraid? That's why it's called /{terror}/ism, right?" + +"I suppose so." The class was staring at me. I wasn't the best student in school, but I did like a good in-class debate. They were waiting to hear what I'd say next. + +"So aren't we doing what the terrorists want from us? Don't they win if we act all afraid and put cameras in the classrooms and all of that?" + +There was some nervous tittering. One of the others put his hand up. It was Charles. Ms Galvez called on him. + +"Putting cameras in makes us safe, which makes us less afraid." + +"Safe from what?" I said, without waiting to be called on. + +"Terrorism," Charles said. The others were nodding their heads. + +"How do they do that? If a suicide bomber rushed in here and blew us all up --" + +"Ms Galvez, Marcus is violating school policy. We're not supposed to make jokes about terrorist attacks --" + +"Who's making jokes?" + +"Thank you, both of you," Ms Galvez said. She looked really unhappy. I felt kind of bad for hijacking her class. "I think that this is a really interesting discussion, but I'd like to hold it over for a future class. I think that these issues may be too emotional for us to have a discussion about them today. Now, let's get back to the suffragists, shall we?" + +So we spent the rest of the hour talking about suffragists and the new lobbying strategies they'd devised for getting four women into every congresscritter's office to lean on him and let him know what it would mean for his political future if he kept on denying women the vote. It was normally the kind of thing I really liked -- little guys making the big and powerful be honest. But today I couldn't concentrate. It must have been Darryl's absence. We both liked Social Studies and we would have had our SchoolBooks out and an IM session up seconds after sitting down, a back-channel for talking about the lesson. + +I'd burned twenty ParanoidXbox discs the night before and I had them all in my bag. I handed them out to people I knew were really, really into gaming. They'd all gotten an Xbox Universal or two the year before, but most of them had stopped using them. The games were really expensive and not a lot of fun. I took them aside between periods, at lunch and study hall, and sang the praises of the ParanoidXbox games to the sky. Free and fun -- addictive social games with lots of cool people playing them from all over the world. + +Giving away one thing to sell another is what they call a "razor blade business" -- companies like Gillette give you free razor-blade handles and then stiff you by charging you a small fortune for the blades. Printer cartridges are the worst for that -- the most expensive Champagne in the world is cheap when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of a penny a gallon to make wholesale. + +Razor-blade businesses depend on you not being able to get the "blades" from someone else. After all, if Gillette can make nine bucks on a ten-dollar replacement blade, why not start a competitor that makes only four bucks selling an identical blade: an 80 percent profit margin is the kind of thing that makes your average business-guy go all drooly and round-eyed. + +So razor-blade companies like Microsoft pour a lot of effort into making it hard and/or illegal to compete with them on the blades. In Microsoft's case, every Xbox has had countermeasures to keep you from running software that was released by people who didn't pay the Microsoft blood-money for the right to sell Xbox programs. + +The people I met didn't think much about this stuff. They perked up when I told them that the games were unmonitored. These days, any online game you play is filled with all kinds of unsavory sorts. First there are the pervs who try to get you to come out to some remote location so they can go all weird and Silence of the Lambs on you. Then there are the cops, who are pretending to be gullible kids so they can bust the pervs. Worst of all, though, are the monitors who spend all their time spying on our discussions and snitching on us for violating their Terms of Service, which say, no flirting, no cussing, and no "clear or masked language which insultingly refers to any aspect of sexual orientation or sexuality." + +I'm no 24/7 horn-dog, but I'm a seventeen year old boy. Sex does come up in conversation every now and again. But God help you if it came up in chat while you were gaming. It was a real buzz-kill. No one monitored the ParanoidXbox games, because they weren't run by a company: they were just games that hackers had written for the hell of it. + +So these game-kids loved the story. They took the discs greedily, and promised to burn copies for all of their friends -- after all, games are most fun when you're playing them with your buddies. + +When I got home, I read that a group of parents were suing the school board over the surveillance cameras in the classrooms, but that they'd already lost their bid to get a preliminary injunction against them. + +# + +I don't know who came up with the name Xnet, but it stuck. You'd hear people talking about it on the Muni. Van called me up to ask me if I'd heard of it and I nearly choked once I figured out what she was talking about: the discs I'd started distributing last week had been sneakernetted and copied all the way to Oakland in the space of two weeks. It made me look over my shoulder -- like I'd broken a rule and now the DHS would come and take me away forever. + +They'd been hard weeks. The BART had completely abandoned cash fares now, switching them for arphid "contactless" cards that you waved at the turnstiles to go through. They were cool and convenient, but every time I used one, I thought about how I was being tracked. Someone on Xnet posted a link to an Electronic Frontier Foundation white paper on the ways that these things could be used to track people, and the paper had tiny stories about little groups of people that had protested at the BART stations. + +I used the Xnet for almost everything now. I'd set up a fake email address through the Pirate Party, a Swedish political party that hated Internet surveillance and promised to keep their mail accounts a secret from everyone, even the cops. I accessed it strictly via Xnet, hopping from one neighbor's Internet connection to the next, staying anonymous -- I hoped -- all the way to Sweden. I wasn't using w1n5ton anymore. If Benson could figure it out, anyone could. My new handle, come up with on the spur of the moment, was M1k3y, and I got a /{lot}/ of email from people who heard in chat rooms and message boards that I could help them troubleshoot their Xnet configurations and connections. + +I missed Harajuku Fun Madness. The company had suspended the game indefinitely. They said that for "security reasons" they didn't think it would be a good idea to hide things and then send people off to find them. What if someone thought it was a bomb? What if someone put a bomb in the same spot? + +What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning! + +I kept on using my laptop, though I got a skin-crawly feeling when I used it. Whoever had wiretapped it would wonder why I didn't use it. I figured I'd just do some random surfing with it every day, a little less each day, so that anyone watching would see me slowly changing my habits, not doing a sudden reversal. Mostly I read those creepy obits -- all those thousands of my friends and neighbors dead at the bottom of the Bay. + +Truth be told, I /{was}/ doing less and less homework every day. I had business elsewhere. I burned new stacks of ParanoidXbox every day, fifty or sixty, and took them around the city to people I'd heard were willing to burn sixty of their own and hand them out to their friends. + +I wasn't too worried about getting caught doing this, because I had good crypto on my side. Crypto is cryptography, or "secret writing," and it's been around since Roman times (literally: Augustus Caesar was a big fan and liked to invent his own codes, some of which we use today for scrambling joke punchlines in email). + +Crypto is math. Hard math. I'm not going to try to explain it in detail because I don't have the math to really get my head around it, either -- look it up on Wikipedia if you really want. + +But here's the Cliff's Notes version: Some kinds of mathematical functions are really easy to do in one direction and really hard to do in the other direction. It's easy to multiply two big prime numbers together and make a giant number. It's really, really hard to take any given giant number and figure out which primes multiply together to give you that number. + +That means that if you can come up with a way of scrambling something based on multiplying large primes, unscrambling it without knowing those primes will be hard. Wicked hard. Like, a trillion years of all the computers ever invented working 24/7 won't be able to do it. + +There are four parts to any crypto message: the original message, called the "cleartext." The scrambled message, called the "ciphertext." The scrambling system, called the "cipher." And finally there's the key: secret stuff you feed into the cipher along with the cleartext to make ciphertext. + +It used to be that crypto people tried to keep all of this a secret. Every agency and government had its own ciphers /{and}/ its own keys. The Nazis and the Allies didn't want the other guys to know how they scrambled their messages, let alone the keys that they could use to descramble them. That sounds like a good idea, right? + +Wrong. + +The first time anyone told me about all this prime factoring stuff, I immediately said, "No way, that's BS. I mean, /{sure}/ it's hard to do this prime factorization stuff, whatever you say it is. But it used to be impossible to fly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytes of storage. Someone /{must}/ have invented a way of descrambling the messages." I had visions of a hollow mountain full of National Security Agency mathematicians reading every email in the world and snickering. + +In fact, that's pretty much what happened during World War II. That's the reason that life isn't more like Castle Wolfenstein, where I've spent many days hunting Nazis. + +The thing is, ciphers are hard to keep secret. There's a lot of math that goes into one, and if they're widely used, then everyone who uses them has to keep them a secret too, and if someone changes sides, you have to find a new cipher. + +The Nazi cipher was called Enigma, and they used a little mechanical computer called an Enigma Machine to scramble and unscramble the messages they got. Every sub and boat and station needed one of these, so it was inevitable that eventually the Allies would get their hands on one. + +When they did, they cracked it. That work was led by my personal all-time hero, a guy named Alan Turing, who pretty much invented computers as we know them today. Unfortunately for him, he was gay, so after the war ended, the stupid British government forced him to get shot up with hormones to "cure" his homosexuality and he killed himself. Darryl gave me a biography of Turing for my 14th birthday -- wrapped in twenty layers of paper and in a recycled Batmobile toy, he was like that with presents -- and I've been a Turing junkie ever since. + +Now the Allies had the Enigma Machine, and they could intercept lots of Nazi radio-messages, which shouldn't have been that big a deal, since every captain had his own secret key. Since the Allies didn't have the keys, having the machine shouldn't have helped. + +Here's where secrecy hurts crypto. The Enigma cipher was flawed. Once Turing looked hard at it, he figured out that the Nazi cryptographers had made a mathematical mistake. By getting his hands on an Enigma Machine, Turing could figure out how to crack /{any}/ Nazi message, no matter what key it used. + +That cost the Nazis the war. I mean, don't get me wrong. That's good news. Take it from a Castle Wolfenstein veteran. You wouldn't want the Nazis running the country. + +After the war, cryptographers spent a lot of time thinking about this. The problem had been that Turing was smarter than the guy who thought up Enigma. Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it. + +And the more they thought about it, the more they realized that /{anyone}/ can come up with a security system that he can't figure out how to break. But /{no one}/ can figure out what a smarter person might do. + +You have to publish a cipher to know that it works. You have to tell /{as many people as possible}/ how it works, so that they can thwack on it with everything they have, testing its security. The longer you go without anyone finding a flaw, the more secure you are. + +Which is how it stands today. If you want to be safe, you don't use crypto that some genius thought of last week. You use the stuff that people have been using for as long as possible without anyone figuring out how to break them. Whether you're a bank, a terrorist, a government or a teenager, you use the same ciphers. + +If you tried to use your own cipher, there'd be the chance that someone out there had found a flaw you missed and was doing a Turing on your butt, deciphering all your "secret" messages and chuckling at your dumb gossip, financial transactions and military secrets. + +So I knew that crypto would keep me safe from eavesdroppers, but I wasn't ready to deal with histograms. + +# + +I got off the BART and waved my card over the turnstile as I headed up to the 24th Street station. As usual, there were lots of weirdos hanging out in the station, drunks and Jesus freaks and intense Mexican men staring at the ground and a few gang kids. I looked straight past them as I hit the stairs and jogged up to the surface. My bag was empty now, no longer bulging with the ParanoidXbox discs I'd been distributing, and it made my shoulders feel light and put a spring in my step as I came up the street. The preachers were at work still, exhorting in Spanish and English about Jesus and so on. + +The counterfeit sunglass sellers were gone, but they'd been replaced by guys selling robot dogs that barked the national anthem and would lift their legs if you showed them a picture of Osama bin Laden. There was probably some cool stuff going on in their little brains and I made a mental note to pick a couple of them up and take them apart later. Face-recognition was pretty new in toys, having only recently made the leap from the military to casinos trying to find cheats, to law enforcement. + +I started down 24th Street toward Potrero Hill and home, rolling my shoulders and smelling the burrito smells wafting out of the restaurants and thinking about dinner. + +I don't know why I happened to glance back over my shoulder, but I did. Maybe it was a little bit of subconscious sixth-sense stuff. I knew I was being followed. + +They were two beefy white guys with little mustaches that made me think of either cops or the gay bikers who rode up and down the Castro, but gay guys usually had better haircuts. They had on windbreakers the color of old cement and blue-jeans, with their waistbands concealed. I thought of all the things a cop might wear on his waistband, of the utility-belt that DHS guy in the truck had worn. Both guys were wearing Bluetooth headsets. + +I kept walking, my heart thumping in my chest. I'd been expecting this since I started. I'd been expecting the DHS to figure out what I was doing. I took every precaution, but Severe-Haircut woman had told me that she'd be watching me. She'd told me I was a marked man. I realized that I'd been waiting to get picked up and taken back to jail. Why not? Why should Darryl be in jail and not me? What did I have going for me? I hadn't even had the guts to tell my parents -- or his -- what had really happened to us. + +I quickened my steps and took a mental inventory. I didn't have anything incriminating in my bag. Not too incriminating, anyway. My SchoolBook was running the crack that let me IM and stuff, but half the people in school had that. I'd changed the way I encrypted the stuff on my phone -- now I /{did}/ have a fake partition that I could turn back into cleartext with one password, but all the good stuff was hidden, and needed another password to open up. That hidden section looked just like random junk -- when you encrypt data, it becomes indistinguishable from random noise -- and they'd never even know it was there. + +There were no discs in my bag. My laptop was free of incriminating evidence. Of course, if they thought to look hard at my Xbox, it was game over. So to speak. + +I stopped where I was standing. I'd done as good a job as I could of covering myself. It was time to face my fate. I stepped into the nearest burrito joint and ordered one with carnitas -- shredded pork -- and extra salsa. Might as well go down with a full stomach. I got a bucket of horchata, too, an ice-cold rice drink that's like watery, semi-sweet rice-pudding (better than it sounds). + +I sat down to eat, and a profound calm fell over me. I was about to go to jail for my "crimes," or I wasn't. My freedom since they'd taken me in had been just a temporary holiday. My country was not my friend anymore: we were now on different sides and I'd known I could never win. + +The two guys came into the restaurant as I was finishing the burrito and going up to order some churros -- deep-fried dough with cinnamon sugar -- for dessert. I guess they'd been waiting outside and got tired of my dawdling. + +They stood behind me at the counter, boxing me in. I took my churro from the pretty granny and paid her, taking a couple of quick bites of the dough before I turned around. I wanted to eat at least a little of my dessert. It might be the last dessert I got for a long, long time. + +Then I turned around. They were both so close I could see the zit on the cheek of the one on the left, the little booger up the nose of the other. + +"'Scuse me," I said, trying to push past them. The one with the booger moved to block me. + +"Sir," he said, "can you step over here with us?" He gestured toward the restaurant's door. + +"Sorry, I'm eating," I said and moved again. This time he put his hand on my chest. He was breathing fast through his nose, making the booger wiggle. I think I was breathing hard too, but it was hard to tell over the hammering of my heart. + +The other one flipped down a flap on the front of his windbreaker to reveal a SFPD insignia. "Police," he said. "Please come with us." + +"Let me just get my stuff," I said. + +"We'll take care of that," he said. The booger one stepped right up close to me, his foot on the inside of mine. You do that in some martial arts, too. It lets you feel if the other guy is shifting his weight, getting ready to move. + +I wasn't going to run, though. I knew I couldn't outrun fate. + +1~ Chapter 7 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to New York City's Books of Wonder,~{ Books of Wonder http://www.booksofwonder.com/ 18 West 18th St, New York, NY 10011 USA +1 212 989 3270 }~ the oldest and largest kids' bookstore in Manhattan. They're located just a few blocks away from Tor Books' offices in the Flatiron Building and every time I drop in to meet with the Tor people, I always sneak away to Books of Wonder to peruse their stock of new, used and rare kids' books. I'm a heavy collector of rare editions of Alice in Wonderland, and Books of Wonder never fails to excite me with some beautiful, limited-edition Alice. They have tons of events for kids and one of the most inviting atmospheres I've ever experienced at a bookstore.] }/ + +They took me outside and around the corner, to a waiting unmarked police car. It wasn't like anyone in that neighborhood would have had a hard time figuring out that it was a cop-car, though. Only police drive big Crown Victorias now that gas had hit seven bucks a gallon. What's more, only cops could double-park in the middle of Van Ness street without getting towed by the schools of predatory tow-operators that circled endlessly, ready to enforce San Francisco's incomprehensible parking regulations and collect a bounty for kidnapping your car. + +Booger blew his nose. I was sitting in the back seat, and so was he. His partner was sitting in the front, typing with one finger on an ancient, ruggedized laptop that looked like Fred Flintstone had been its original owner. + +Booger looked closely at my ID again. "We just want to ask you a few routine questions." + +"Can I see your badges?" I said. These guys were clearly cops, but it couldn't hurt to let them know I knew my rights. + +Booger flashed his badge at me too fast for me to get a good look at it, but Zit in the front seat gave me a long look at his. I got their division number and memorized the four-digit badge number. It was easy: 1337 is also the way hackers write "leet," or "elite." + +They were both being very polite and neither of them was trying to intimidate me the way that the DHS had done when I was in their custody. + +"Am I under arrest?" + +"You've been momentarily detained so that we can ensure your safety and the general public safety," Booger said. + +He passed my driver's license up to Zit, who pecked it slowly into his computer. I saw him make a typo and almost corrected him, but figured it was better to just keep my mouth shut. + +"Is there anything you want to tell me, Marcus? Do they call you Marc?" + +"Marcus is fine," I said. Booger looked like he might be a nice guy. Except for the part about kidnapping me into his car, of course. + +"Marcus. Anything you want to tell me?" + +"Like what? Am I under arrest?" + +"You're not under arrest right now," Booger said. "Would you like to be?" + +"No," I said. + +"Good. We've been watching you since you left the BART. Your Fast Pass says that you've been riding to a lot of strange places at a lot of funny hours." + +I felt something let go inside my chest. This wasn't about the Xnet at all, then, not really. They'd been watching my subway use and wanted to know why it had been so freaky lately. How totally stupid. + +"So you guys follow everyone who comes out of the BART station with a funny ride-history? You must be busy." + +"Not everyone, Marcus. We get an alert when anyone with an uncommon ride profile comes out and that helps us assess whether we want to investigate. In your case, we came along because we wanted to know why a smart-looking kid like you had such a funny ride profile?" + +Now that I knew I wasn't about to go to jail, I was getting pissed. These guys had no business spying on me -- Christ, the BART had no business /{helping}/ them to spy on me. Where the hell did my subway pass get off on finking me out for having a "nonstandard ride pattern?" + +"I think I'd like to be arrested now," I said. + +Booger sat back and raised his eyebrow at me. + +"Really? On what charge?" + +"Oh, you mean riding public transit in a nonstandard way isn't a crime?" + +Zit closed his eyes and scrubbed them with his thumbs. + +Booger sighed a put-upon sigh. "Look, Marcus, we're on your side here. We use this system to catch bad guys. To catch terrorists and drug dealers. Maybe you're a drug dealer yourself. Pretty good way to get around the city, a Fast Pass. Anonymous." + +"What's wrong with anonymous? It was good enough for Thomas Jefferson. And by the way, am I under arrest?" + +"Let's take him home," Zit said. "We can talk to his parents." + +"I think that's a great idea," I said. "I'm sure my parents will be anxious to hear how their tax dollars are being spent --" + +I'd pushed it too far. Booger had been reaching for the door handle but now he whirled on me, all Hulked out and throbbing veins. "Why don't you shut up right now, while it's still an option? After everything that's happened in the past two weeks, it wouldn't kill you to cooperate with us. You know what, maybe we /{should}/ arrest you. You can spend a day or two in jail while your lawyer looks for you. A lot can happen in that time. A /{lot}/. How'd you like that?" + +I didn't say anything. I'd been giddy and angry. Now I was scared witless. + +"I'm sorry," I managed, hating myself again for saying it. + +Booger got in the front seat and Zit put the car in gear, cruising up 24th Street and over Potrero Hill. They had my address from my ID. + +Mom answered the door after they rang the bell, leaving the chain on. She peeked around it, saw me and said, "Marcus? Who are these men?" + +"Police," Booger said. He showed her his badge, letting her get a good look at it -- not whipping it away the way he had with me. "Can we come in?" + +Mom closed the door and took the chain off and let them in. They brought me in and Mom gave the three of us one of her looks. + +"What's this about?" + +Booger pointed at me. "We wanted to ask your son some routine questions about his movements, but he declined to answer them. We felt it might be best to bring him here." + +"Is he under arrest?" Mom's accent was coming on strong. Good old Mom. + +"Are you a United States citizen, ma'am?" Zit said. + +She gave him a look that could have stripped paint. "I shore am, hyuck," she said, in a broad southern accent. "Am /{I}/ under arrest?" + +The two cops exchanged a look. + +Zit took the fore. "We seem to have gotten off to a bad start. We identified your son as someone with a nonstandard public transit usage pattern, as part of a new pro-active enforcement program. When we spot people whose travels are unusual, or that match a suspicious profile, we investigate further." + +"Wait," Mom said. "How do you know how my son uses the Muni?" + +"The Fast Pass," he said. "It tracks voyages." + +"I see," Mom said, folding her arms. Folding her arms was a bad sign. It was bad enough she hadn't offered them a cup of tea -- in Mom-land, that was practically like making them shout through the mail-slot -- but once she folded her arms, it was not going to end well for them. At that moment, I wanted to go and buy her a big bunch of flowers. + +"Marcus here declined to tell us why his movements had been what they were." + +"Are you saying you think my son is a terrorist because of how he rides the bus?" + +"Terrorists aren't the only bad guys we catch this way," Zit said. "Drug dealers. Gang kids. Even shoplifters smart enough to hit a different neighborhood with every run." + +"You think my son is a drug dealer?" + +"We're not saying that --" Zit began. Mom clapped her hands at him to shut him up. + +"Marcus, please pass me your backpack." + +I did. + +Mom unzipped it and looked through it, turning her back to us first. + +"Officers, I can now affirm that there are no narcotics, explosives, or shoplifted gewgaws in my son's bag. I think we're done here. I would like your badge numbers before you go, please." + +Booger sneered at her. "Lady, the ACLU is suing three hundred cops on the SFPD, you're going to have to get in line." + +# + +Mom made me a cup of tea and then chewed me out for eating dinner when I knew that she'd been making falafel. Dad came home while we were still at the table and Mom and I took turns telling him the story. He shook his head. + +"Lillian, they were just doing their jobs." He was still wearing the blue blazer and khakis he wore on the days that he was consulting in Silicon Valley. "The world isn't the same place it was last week." + +Mom set down her teacup. "Drew, you're being ridiculous. Your son is not a terrorist. His use of the public transit system is not cause for a police investigation." + +Dad took off his blazer. "We do this all the time at my work. It's how computers can be used to find all kinds of errors, anomalies and outcomes. You ask the computer to create a profile of an average record in a database and then ask it to find out which records in the database are furthest away from average. It's part of something called Bayesian analysis and it's been around for centuries now. Without it, we couldn't do spam-filtering --" + +"So you're saying that you think the police should suck as hard as my spam filter?" I said. + +Dad never got angry at me for arguing with him, but tonight I could see the strain was running high in him. Still, I couldn't resist. My own father, taking the police's side! + +"I'm saying that it's perfectly reasonable for the police to conduct their investigations by starting with data-mining, and then following it up with leg-work where a human being actually intervenes to see why the abnormality exists. I don't think that a computer should be telling the police whom to arrest, just helping them sort through the haystack to find a needle." + +"But by taking in all that data from the transit system, they're /{creating the haystack}/," I said. "That's a gigantic mountain of data and there's almost nothing worth looking at there, from the police's point of view. It's a total waste." + +"I understand that you don't like that this system caused you some inconvenience, Marcus. But you of all people should appreciate the gravity of the situation. There was no harm done, was there? They even gave you a ride home." + +/{They threatened to send me to jail,}/ I thought, but I could see there was no point in saying it. + +"Besides, you still haven't told us where the blazing hells you've been to create such an unusual traffic pattern." + +That brought me up short. + +"I thought you relied on my judgment, that you didn't want to spy on me." He'd said this often enough. "Do you really want me to account for every trip I've ever taken?" + +# + +I hooked up my Xbox as soon as I got to my room. I'd bolted the projector to the ceiling so that it could shine on the wall over my bed (I'd had to take down my awesome mural of punk rock handbills I'd taken down off telephone poles and glued to big sheets of white paper). + +I powered up the Xbox and watched as it came onto the screen. I was going to email Van and Jolu to tell them about the hassles with the cops, but as I put my fingers to the keyboard, I stopped again. + +A feeling crept over me, one not unlike the feeling I'd had when I realized that they'd turned poor old Salmagundi into a traitor. This time, it was the feeling that my beloved Xnet might be broadcasting the location of every one of its users to the DHS. + +It was what Dad had said: /{You ask the computer to create a profile of an average record in a database and then ask it to find out which records in the database are furthest away from average.}/ + +The Xnet was secure because its users weren't directly connected to the Internet. They hopped from Xbox to Xbox until they found one that was connected to the Internet, then they injected their material as undecipherable, encrypted data. No one could tell which of the Internet's packets were Xnet and which ones were just plain old banking and e-commerce and other encrypted communication. You couldn't find out who was tying the Xnet, let alone who was using the Xnet. + +But what about Dad's "Bayesian statistics?" I'd played with Bayesian math before. Darryl and I once tried to write our own better spam filter and when you filter spam, you need Bayesian math. Thomas Bayes was an 18th century British mathematician that no one cared about until a couple hundred years after he died, when computer scientists realized that his technique for statistically analyzing mountains of data would be super-useful for the modern world's info-Himalayas. + +Here's some of how Bayesian stats work. Say you've got a bunch of spam. You take every word that's in the spam and count how many times it appears. This is called a "word frequency histogram" and it tells you what the probability is that any bag of words is likely to be spam. Now, take a ton of email that's not spam -- in the biz, they call that "ham" -- and do the same. + +Wait until a new email arrives and count the words that appear in it. Then use the word-frequency histogram in the candidate message to calculate the probability that it belongs in the "spam" pile or the "ham" pile. If it turns out to be spam, you adjust the "spam" histogram accordingly. There are lots of ways to refine the technique -- looking at words in pairs, throwing away old data -- but this is how it works at core. It's one of those great, simple ideas that seems obvious after you hear about it. + +It's got lots of applications -- you can ask a computer to count the lines in a picture and see if it's more like a "dog" line-frequency histogram or a "cat" line-frequency histogram. It can find porn, bank fraud, and flamewars. Useful stuff. + +And it was bad news for the Xnet. Say you had the whole Internet wiretapped -- which, of course, the DHS has. You can't tell who's passing Xnet packets by looking at the contents of those packets, thanks to crypto. + +What you /{can}/ do is find out who is sending way, way more encrypted traffic out than everyone else. For a normal Internet surfer, a session online is probably about 95 percent cleartext, five percent ciphertext. If someone is sending out 95 percent ciphertext, maybe you could dispatch the computer-savvy equivalents of Booger and Zit to ask them if they're terrorist drug-dealer Xnet users. + +This happens all the time in China. Some smart dissident will get the idea of getting around the Great Firewall of China, which is used to censor the whole country's Internet connection, by using an encrypted connection to a computer in some other country. Now, the Party there can't tell what the dissident is surfing: maybe it's porn, or bomb-making instructions, or dirty letters from his girlfriend in the Philippines, or political material, or good news about Scientology. They don't have to know. All they have to know is that this guy gets way more encrypted traffic than his neighbors. At that point, they send him to a forced labor camp just to set an example so that everyone can see what happens to smart-asses. + +So far, I was willing to bet that the Xnet was under the DHS's radar, but it wouldn't be the case forever. And after tonight, I wasn't sure that I was in any better shape than a Chinese dissident. I was putting all the people who signed onto the Xnet in jeopardy. The law didn't care if you were actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for being statistically abnormal. And I couldn't even stop it -- now that the Xnet was running, it had a life of its own. + +I was going to have to fix it some other way. + +I wished I could talk to Jolu about this. He worked at an Internet Service Provider called Pigspleen Net that had hired him when he was twelve, and he knew way more about the net than I did. If anyone knew how to keep our butts out of jail, it would be him. + +Luckily, Van and Jolu and I were planning to meet for coffee the next night at our favorite place in the Mission after school. Officially, it was our weekly Harajuku Fun Madness team meeting, but with the game canceled and Darryl gone, it was pretty much just a weekly weep-fest, supplemented by about six phone-calls and IMs a day that went, "Are you OK? Did it really happen?" It would be good to have something else to talk about. + +# + +"You're out of your mind," Vanessa said. "Are you actually, totally, really, for-real crazy or what?" + +She had shown up in her girl's school uniform because she'd been stuck going the long way home, all the way down to the San Mateo bridge then back up into the city, on a shuttle-bus service that her school was operating. She hated being seen in public in her gear, which was totally Sailor Moon -- a pleated skirt and a tunic and knee-socks. She'd been in a bad mood ever since she turned up at the cafe, which was full of older, cooler, mopey emo art students who snickered into their lattes when she turned up. + +"What do you want me to do, Van?" I said. I was getting exasperated myself. School was unbearable now that the game wasn't on, now that Darryl was missing. All day long, in my classes, I consoled myself with the thought of seeing my team, what was left of it. Now we were fighting. + +"I want you to stop putting yourself at risk, M1k3y." The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Sure, we always used our team handles at team meetings, but now that my handle was also associated with my Xnet use, it scared me to hear it said aloud in a public place. + +"Don't use that name in public anymore," I snapped. + +Van shook her head. "That's just what I'm talking about. You could end up going to jail for this, Marcus, and not just you. Lots of people. After what happened to Darryl --" + +"I'm doing this for Darryl!" Art students swiveled to look at us and I lowered my voice. "I'm doing this because the alternative is to let them get away with it all." + +"You think you're going to stop them? You're out of your mind. They're the government." + +"It's still our country," I said. "We still have the right to do this." + +Van looked like she was going to cry. She took a couple of deep breaths and stood up. "I can't do it, I'm sorry. I can't watch you do this. It's like watching a car-wreck in slow motion. You're going to destroy yourself, and I love you too much to watch it happen." + +She bent down and gave me a fierce hug and a hard kiss on the cheek that caught the edge of my mouth. "Take care of yourself, Marcus," she said. My mouth burned where her lips had pressed it. She gave Jolu the same treatment, but square on the cheek. Then she left. + +Jolu and I stared at each other after she'd gone. + +I put my face in my hands. "Dammit," I said, finally. + +Jolu patted me on the back and ordered me another latte. "It'll be OK," he said. + +"You'd think Van, of all people, would understand." Half of Van's family lived in North Korea. Her parents never forgot that they had all those people living under a crazy dictator, not able to escape to America, the way her parents had. + +Jolu shrugged. "Maybe that's why she's so freaked out. Because she knows how dangerous it can get." + +I knew what he was talking about. Two of Van's uncles had gone to jail and had never reappeared. + +"Yeah," I said. + +"So how come you weren't on Xnet last night?" + +I was grateful for the distraction. I explained it all to him, the Bayesian stuff and my fear that we couldn't go on using Xnet the way we had been without getting nabbed. He listened thoughtfully. + +"I see what you're saying. The problem is that if there's too much crypto in someone's Internet connection, they'll stand out as unusual. But if you don't encrypt, you'll make it easy for the bad guys to wiretap you." + +"Yeah," I said. "I've been trying to figure it out all day. Maybe we could slow the connection down, spread it out over more peoples' accounts --" + +"Won't work," he said. "To get it slow enough to vanish into the noise, you'd have to basically shut down the network, which isn't an option." + +"You're right," I said. "But what else can we do?" + +"What if we changed the definition of normal?" + +And that was why Jolu got hired to work at Pigspleen when he was 12. Give him a problem with two bad solutions and he'd figure out a third totally different solution based on throwing away all your assumptions. I nodded vigorously. "Go on, tell me." + +"What if the average San Francisco Internet user had a /{lot}/ more crypto in his average day on the Internet? If we could change the split so it's more like fifty-fifty cleartext to ciphertext, then the users that supply the Xnet would just look like normal." + +"But how do we do that? People just don't care enough about their privacy to surf the net through an encrypted link. They don't see why it matters if eavesdroppers know what they're googling for." + +"Yeah, but web-pages are small amounts of traffic. If we got people to routinely download a few giant encrypted files every day, that would create as much ciphertext as thousands of web-pages." + +"You're talking about indienet," I said. + +"You got it," he said. + +indienet -- all lower case, always -- was the thing that made Pigspleen Net into one of the most successful independent ISPs in the world. Back when the major record labels started suing their fans for downloading their music, a lot of the independent labels and their artists were aghast. How can you make money by suing your customers? + +Pigspleen's founder had the answer: she opened up a deal for any act that wanted to work with their fans instead of fighting them. Give Pigspleen a license to distribute your music to its customers and it would give you a share of the subscription fees based on how popular your music was. For an indie artist, the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity: no one even cares enough about your tunes to steal 'em. + +It worked. Hundreds of independent acts and labels signed up with Pigspleen, and the more music there was, the more fans switched to getting their Internet service from Pigspleen, and the more money there was for the artists. Inside of a year, the ISP had a hundred thousand new customers and now it had a million -- more than half the broadband connections in the city. + +"An overhaul of the indienet code has been on my plate for months now," Jolu said. "The original programs were written really fast and dirty and they could be made a lot more efficient with a little work. But I just haven't had the time. One of the high-marked to-do items has been to encrypt the connections, just because Trudy likes it that way." Trudy Doo was the founder of Pigspleen. She was an old time San Francisco punk legend, the singer/front-woman of the anarcho-feminist band Speedwhores, and she was crazy about privacy. I could totally believe that she'd want her music service encrypted on general principles. + +"Will it be hard? I mean, how long would it take?" + +"Well, there's tons of crypto code for free online, of course," Jolu said. He was doing the thing he did when he was digging into a meaty code problem -- getting that faraway look, drumming his palms on the table, making the coffee slosh into the saucers. I wanted to laugh -- everything might be destroyed and crap and scary, but Jolu would write that code. + +"Can I help?" + +He looked at me. "What, you don't think I can manage it?" + +"What?" + +"I mean, you did this whole Xnet thing without even telling me. Without talking to me. I kind of thought that you didn't need my help with this stuff." + +I was brought up short. "What?" I said again. Jolu was looking really steamed now. It was clear that this had been eating him for a long time. "Jolu --" + +He looked at me and I could see that he was furious. How had I missed this? God, I was such an idiot sometimes. "Look dude, it's not a big deal --" by which he clearly meant that it was a really big deal "-- it's just that you know, you never even /{asked}/. I hate the DHS. Darryl was my friend too. I could have really helped with it." + +I wanted to stick my head between my knees. "Listen Jolu, that was really stupid of me. I did it at like two in the morning. I was just crazy when it was happening. I --" I couldn't explain it. Yeah, he was right, and that was the problem. It had been two in the morning but I could have talked to Jolu about it the next day or the next. I hadn't because I'd known what he'd say -- that it was an ugly hack, that I needed to think it through better. Jolu was always figuring out how to turn my 2 AM ideas into real code, but the stuff that he came out with was always a little different from what I'd come up with. I'd wanted the project for myself. I'd gotten totally into being M1k3y. + +"I'm sorry," I said at last. "I'm really, really sorry. You're totally right. I just got freaked out and did something stupid. I really need your help. I can't make this work without you." + +"You mean it?" + +"Of course I mean it," I said. "You're the best coder I know. You're a goddamned genius, Jolu. I would be honored if you'd help me with this." + +He drummed his fingers some more. "It's just -- You know. You're the leader. Van's the smart one. Darryl was... He was your second-in-command, the guy who had it all organized, who watched the details. Being the programmer, that was /{my}/ thing. It felt like you were saying you didn't need me." + +"Oh man, I am such an idiot. Jolu, you're the best-qualified person I know to do this. I'm really, really, really --" + +"All right, already. Stop. Fine. I believe you. We're all really screwed up right now. So yeah, of course you can help. We can probably even pay you -- I've got a little budget for contract programmers." + +"Really?" No one had ever paid me for writing code. + +"Sure. You're probably good enough to be worth it." He grinned and slugged me in the shoulder. Jolu's really easy-going most of the time, which is why he'd freaked me out so much. + +I paid for the coffees and we went out. I called my parents and let them know what I was doing. Jolu's mom insisted on making us sandwiches. We locked ourselves in his room with his computer and the code for indienet and we embarked on one of the great all-time marathon programming sessions. Once Jolu's family went to bed around 11:30, we were able to kidnap the coffee-machine up to his room and go IV with our magic coffee bean supply. + +If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does /{exactly}/ what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine -- any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door -- using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe. + +A computer is the most complicated machine you'll ever use. It's made of billions of micro-miniaturized transistors that can be configured to run any program you can imagine. But when you sit down at the keyboard and write a line of code, those transistors do what you tell them to. + +Most of us will never build a car. Pretty much none of us will ever create an aviation system. Design a building. Lay out a city. + +Those are complicated machines, those things, and they're off-limits to the likes of you and me. But a computer is like, ten times more complicated, and it will dance to any tune you play. You can learn to write simple code in an afternoon. Start with a language like Python, which was written to give non-programmers an easier way to make the machine dance to their tune. Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work -- if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code. + +We wrote a lot of code that night. + +1~ Chapter 8 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Borders,~{ Borders worldwide http://www.bordersstores.com/locator/locator.jsp }~ the global bookselling giant that you can find in cities all over the world -- I'll never forget walking into the gigantic Borders on Orchard Road in Singapore and discovering a shelf loaded with my novels! For many years, the Borders in Oxford Street in London hosted Pat Cadigan's monthly science fiction evenings, where local and visiting authors would read their work, speak about science fiction and meet their fans. When I'm in a strange city (which happens a lot) and I need a great book for my next flight, there always seems to be a Borders brimming with great choices -- I'm especially partial to the Borders on Union Square in San Francisco.] }/ + +I wasn't the only one who got screwed up by the histograms. There are lots of people who have abnormal traffic patterns, abnormal usage patterns. Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal. + +The Xnet was full of these stories, and so were the newspapers and the TV news. Husbands were caught cheating on their wives; wives were caught cheating on their husbands, kids were caught sneaking out with illicit girlfriends and boyfriends. A kid who hadn't told his parents he had AIDS got caught going to the clinic for his drugs. + +Those were the people with something to hide -- not guilty people, but people with secrets. There were even more people with nothing to hide at all, but who nevertheless resented being picked up, and questioned. Imagine if someone locked you in the back of a police car and demanded that you prove that you're /{not}/ a terrorist. + +It wasn't just public transit. Most drivers in the Bay Area have a FasTrak pass clipped to their sun-visors. This is a little radio-based "wallet" that pays your tolls for you when you cross the bridges, saving you the hassle of sitting in a line for hours at the toll-plazas. They'd tripled the cost of using cash to get across the bridge (though they always fudged this, saying that FasTrak was cheaper, not that anonymous cash was more expensive). Whatever holdouts were left afterward disappeared after the number of cash-lanes was reduced to just one per bridge-head, so that the cash lines were even longer. + +So if you're a local, or if you're driving a rental car from a local agency, you've got a FasTrak. It turns out that toll-plazas aren't the only place that your FasTrak gets read, though. The DHS had put FasTrak readers all over town -- when you drove past them, they logged the time and your ID number, building an ever-more perfect picture of who went where, when, in a database that was augmented by "speeding cameras," "red light cameras" and all the other license-plate cameras that had popped up like mushrooms. + +No one had given it much thought. And now that people were paying attention, we were all starting to notice little things, like the fact that the FasTrak doesn't have an off-switch. + +So if you drove a car, you were just as likely to be pulled over by an SFPD cruiser that wanted to know why you were taking so many trips to the Home Depot lately, and what was that midnight drive up to Sonoma last week about? + +The little demonstrations around town on the weekend were growing. Fifty thousand people marched down Market Street after a week of this monitoring. I couldn't care less. The people who'd occupied my city didn't care what the natives wanted. They were a conquering army. They knew how we felt about that. + +One morning I came down to breakfast just in time to hear Dad tell Mom that the two biggest taxi companies were going to give a "discount" to people who used special cards to pay their fares, supposedly to make drivers safer by reducing the amount of cash they carried. I wondered what would happen to the information about who took which cabs where. + +I realized how close I'd come. The new indienet client had been pushed out as an automatic update just as this stuff started to get bad, and Jolu told me that 80 percent of the traffic he saw at Pigspleen was now encrypted. The Xnet just might have been saved. + +Dad was driving me nuts, though. + +"You're being paranoid, Marcus," he told me over breakfast one day as I told him about the guys I'd seen the cops shaking down on BART the day before. + +"Dad, it's ridiculous. They're not catching any terrorists, are they? It's just making people scared." + +"They may not have caught any terrorists yet, but they're sure getting a lot of scumbags off the streets. Look at the drug dealers -- it says they've put dozens of them away since this all started. Remember when those druggies robbed you? If we don't bust their dealers, it'll only get worse." I'd been mugged the year before. They'd been pretty civilized about it. One skinny guy who smelled bad told me he had a gun, the other one asked me for my wallet. They even let me keep my ID, though they got my debit card and Fast Pass. It had still scared me witless and left me paranoid and checking my shoulder for weeks. + +"But most of the people they hold up aren't doing anything wrong, Dad," I said. This was getting to me. My own father! "It's crazy. For every guilty person they catch, they have to punish thousands of innocent people. That's just not good." + +"Innocent? Guys cheating on their wives? Drug dealers? You're defending them, but what about all the people who died? If you don't have anything to hide --" + +"So you wouldn't mind if they pulled /{you}/ over?" My dad's histograms had proven to be depressingly normal so far. + +"I'd consider it my duty," he said. "I'd be proud. It would make me feel safer." + +Easy for him to say. + +# + +Vanessa didn't like me talking about this stuff, but she was too smart about it for me to stay away from the subject for long. We'd get together all the time, and talk about the weather and school and stuff, and then, somehow, I'd be back on this subject. Vanessa was cool when it happened -- she didn't Hulk out on me again -- but I could see it upset her. + +Still. + +"So my dad says, 'I'd consider it my duty.' Can you freaking /{believe}/ it? I mean, God! I almost told him then about going to jail, asking him if he thought that was our 'duty'!" + +We were sitting in the grass in Dolores Park after school, watching the dogs chase frisbees. + +Van had stopped at home and changed into an old t-shirt for one of her favorite Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibidão -- the forbidden guy from Rio. She'd gotten the shirt at a live show we'd all gone to two years before, sneaking out for a grand adventure down at the Cow Palace, and she'd sprouted an inch or two since, so it was tight and rode up her tummy, showing her flat little belly button. + +She lay back in the weak sun with her eyes closed behind her shades, her toes wiggling in her flip-flops. I'd known Van since forever, and when I thought of her, I usually saw the little kid I'd known with hundreds of jangly bracelets made out of sliced-up soda cans, who played the piano and couldn't dance to save her life. Sitting out there in Dolores Park, I suddenly saw her as she was. + +She was totally h4wt -- that is to say, hot. It was like looking at that picture of a vase and noticing that it was also two faces. I could see that Van was just Van, but I could also see that she was hella pretty, something I'd never noticed. + +Of course, Darryl had known it all along, and don't think that I wasn't bummed out anew when I realized this. + +"You can't tell your dad, you know," she said. "You'd put us all at risk." Her eyes were closed and her chest was rising up and down with her breath, which was distracting in a really embarrassing way. + +"Yeah," I said, glumly. "But the problem is that I know he's just totally full of it. If you pulled my dad over and made him prove he wasn't a child-molesting, drug-dealing terrorist, he'd go berserk. Totally off-the-rails. He hates being put on hold when he calls about his credit-card bill. Being locked in the back of a car and questioned for an hour would give him an aneurism." + +"They only get away with it because the normals feel smug compared to the abnormals. If everyone was getting pulled over, it'd be a disaster. No one would ever get anywhere, they'd all be waiting to get questioned by the cops. Total gridlock." + +Woah. + +"Van, you are a total genius," I said. + +"Tell me about it," she said. She had a lazy smile and she looked at me through half-lidded eyes, almost romantic. + +"Seriously. We can do this. We can mess up the profiles easily. Getting people pulled over is easy." + +She sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. I felt a little flip in my stomach, thinking that she was really impressed with me. + +"It's the arphid cloners," I said. "They're totally easy to make. Just flash the firmware on a ten-dollar Radio Shack reader/writer and you're done. What we do is go around and randomly swap the tags on people, overwriting their Fast Passes and FasTraks with other people's codes. That'll make /{everyone}/ skew all weird and screwy, and make everyone look guilty. Then: total gridlock." + +Van pursed her lips and lowered her shades and I realized she was so angry she couldn't speak. + +"Good bye, Marcus," she said, and got to her feet. Before I knew it, she was walking away so fast she was practically running. + +"Van!" I called, getting to my feet and chasing after her. "Van! Wait!" + +She picked up speed, making me run to catch up with her. + +"Van, what the hell," I said, catching her arm. She jerked it away so hard I punched myself in the face. + +"You're psycho, Marcus. You're going to put all your little Xnet buddies in danger for their lives, and on top of it, you're going to turn the whole city into terrorism suspects. Can't you stop before you hurt these people?" + +I opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "Van, /{I'm}/ not the problem, /{they}/ are. I'm not arresting people, jailing them, making them disappear. The Department of Homeland Security are the ones doing that. I'm fighting back to make them stop." + +"How, by making it worse?" + +"Maybe it has to get worse to get better, Van. Isn't that what you were saying? If everyone was getting pulled over --" + +"That's not what I meant. I didn't mean you should get everyone arrested. If you want to protest, join the protest movement. Do something positive. Didn't you learn /{anything}/ from Darryl? /{Anything?}/" + +"You're damned right I did," I said, losing my cool. "I learned that they can't be trusted. That if you're not fighting them, you're helping them. That they'll turn the country into a prison if we let them. What did you learn, Van? To be scared all the time, to sit tight and keep your head down and hope you don't get noticed? You think it's going to get better? If we don't do anything, this is as /{good as it's going to get}/. It will only get worse and worse from now on. You want to help Darryl? Help me bring them down!" + +There it was again. My vow. Not to get Darryl free, but to bring down the entire DHS. That was crazy, even I knew it. But it was what I planned to do. No question about it. + +Van shoved me hard with both hands. She was strong from school athletics -- fencing, lacrosse, field hockey, all the girls-school sports -- and I ended up on my ass on the disgusting San Francisco sidewalk. She took off and I didn't follow. + +# + +> The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail. + +That was the first line of my first blog post on Open Revolt, my Xnet site. I was writing as M1k3y, and I was ready to go to war. + +> Maybe all the automatic screening is supposed to catch terrorists. Maybe it will catch a terrorist sooner or later. The problem is that it catches /{us}/ too, even though we're not doing anything wrong. + +> The more people it catches, the more brittle it gets. If it catches too many people, it dies. + +> Get the idea? + +I pasted in my HOWTO for building a arphid cloner, and some tips for getting close enough to people to read and write their tags. I put my own cloner in the pocket of my vintage black leather motocross jacket with the armored pockets and left for school. I managed to clone six tags between home and Chavez High. + +It was war they wanted. It was war they'd get. + +# + +If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called "the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy. + +Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people. + +One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong. + +What's one percent of one million? + +1,000,000/100 = 10,000 + +One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify /{one}/ person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify /{10,000}/ people as having it. + +Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent /{inaccuracy}/. + +That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single /{atom}/ in your screen. For that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less at the tip. + +This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to terrorism: + +Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent. + +That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time. + +In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people. + +Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere /{close}/ to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes. + +What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events -- a person is a terrorist -- with inaccurate systems. + +Is it any wonder we were able to make such a mess? + +# + +I stepped out the front door whistling on a Tuesday morning one week into the Operation False Positive. I was rockin' out to some new music I'd downloaded from the Xnet the night before -- lots of people sent M1k3y little digital gifts to say thank you for giving them hope. + +I turned onto 23d Street and carefully took the narrow stone steps cut into the side of the hill. As I descended, I passed Mr Wiener Dog. I don't know Mr Wiener Dog's real name, but I see him nearly every day, walking his three panting wiener dogs up the staircase to the little parkette. Squeezing past them all on the stairs is pretty much impossible and I always end up tangled in a leash, knocked into someone's front garden, or perched on the bumper of one of the cars parked next to the curb. + +Mr Wiener Dog is clearly Someone Important, because he has a fancy watch and always wears a nice suit. I had mentally assumed that he worked down in the financial district. + +Today as I brushed up against him, I triggered my arphid cloner, which was already loaded in the pocket of my leather jacket. The cloner sucked down the numbers off his credit-cards and his car-keys, his passport and the hundred-dollar bills in his wallet. + +Even as it was doing that, it was flashing some of them with new numbers, taken from other people I'd brushed against. It was like switching the license-plates on a bunch of cars, but invisible and instantaneous. I smiled apologetically at Mr Wiener Dog and continued down the stairs. I stopped at three of the cars long enough to swap their FasTrak tags with numbers taken off of all the cars I'd gone past the day before. + +You might think I was being a little aggro here, but I was cautious and conservative compared to a lot of the Xnetters. A couple girls in the Chemical Engineering program at UC Berkeley had figured out how to make a harmless substance out of kitchen products that would trip an explosive sniffer. They'd had a merry time sprinkling it on their profs' briefcases and jackets, then hiding out and watching the same profs try to get into the auditoriums and libraries on campus, only to get flying-tackled by the new security squads that had sprung up everywhere. + +Other people wanted to figure out how to dust envelopes with substances that would test positive for anthrax, but everyone else thought they were out of their minds. Luckily, it didn't seem like they'd be able to figure it out. + +I passed by San Francisco General Hospital and nodded with satisfaction as I saw the huge lines at the front doors. They had a police checkpoint too, of course, and there were enough Xnetters working as interns and cafeteria workers and whatnot there that everyone's badges had been snarled up and swapped around. I'd read the security checks had tacked an hour onto everyone's work day, and the unions were threatening to walk out unless the hospital did something about it. + +A few blocks later, I saw an even longer line for the BART. Cops were walking up and down the line pointing people out and calling them aside for questioning, bag-searches and pat-downs. They kept getting sued for doing this, but it didn't seem to be slowing them down. + +I got to school a little ahead of time and decided to walk down to 22nd Street to get a coffee -- and I passed a police checkpoint where they were pulling over cars for secondary inspection. + +School was no less wild -- the security guards on the metal detectors were also wanding our school IDs and pulling out students with odd movements for questioning. Needless to say, we all had pretty weird movements. Needless to say, classes were starting an hour or more later. + +Classes were crazy. I don't think anyone was able to concentrate. I overheard two teachers talking about how long it had taken them to get home from work the day before, and planning to sneak out early that day. + +It was all I could do to keep from laughing. The paradox of the false positive strikes again! + +Sure enough, they let us out of class early and I headed home the long way, circling through the Mission to see the havoc. Long lines of cars. BART stations lined up around the blocks. People swearing at ATMs that wouldn't dispense their money because they'd had their accounts frozen for suspicious activity (that's the danger of wiring your checking account straight into your FasTrak and Fast Pass!). + +I got home and made myself a sandwich and logged into the Xnet. It had been a good day. People from all over town were crowing about their successes. We'd brought the city of San Francisco to a standstill. The news-reports confirmed it -- they were calling it the DHS gone haywire, blaming it all on the fake-ass "security" that was supposed to be protecting us from terrorism. The Business section of the San Francisco Chronicle gave its whole front page to an estimate of the economic cost of the DHS security resulting from missed work hours, meetings and so on. According to the Chronicle's economist, a week of this crap would cost the city more than the Bay Bridge bombing had. + +Mwa-ha-ha-ha. + +The best part: Dad got home that night late. Very late. Three /{hours}/ late. Why? Because he'd been pulled over, searched, questioned. Then it happened /{again}/. Twice. + +Twice! + +1~ Chapter 9 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Compass Books/Books Inc,~{ Compass Books/Books Inc: http://www.booksinc.net/NASApp/store/Product;jsessionid=abcF-ch09-pbU6m7ZRrLr?s=showproduct&isbn=0765319853 }~ the oldest independent bookstore in the western USA. They've got stores up and down California, in San Francisco, Burlingame, Mountain View and Palo Alto, but coolest of all is that they run a killer bookstore in the middle of Disneyland's Downtown Disney in Anaheim. I'm a stone Disney park freak (see my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom if you don't believe it), and every time I've lived in California, I've bought myself an annual Disneyland pass, and on practically every visit, I drop by Compass Books in Downtown Disney. They stock a brilliant selection of unauthorized (and even critical) books about Disney, as well as a great variety of kids books and science fiction, and the cafe next door makes a mean cappuccino.] }/ + +He was so angry I thought he was going to pop. You know I said I'd only seen him lose his cool rarely? That night, he lost it more than he ever had. + +"You wouldn't believe it. This cop, he was like eighteen years old and he kept saying, 'But sir, why were you in Berkeley yesterday if your client is in Mountain View?' I kept explaining to him that I teach at Berkeley and then he'd say, 'I thought you were a consultant,' and we'd start over again. It was like some kind of sitcom where the cops have been taken over by the stupidity ray. + +"What's worse was he kept insisting that I'd been in Berkeley today as well, and I kept saying no, I hadn't been, and he said I had been. Then he showed me my FasTrak billing and it said I'd driven the San Mateo bridge three times that day! + +"That's not all," he said, and drew in a breath that let me know he was really steamed. "They had information about where I'd been, places that /{didn't have a toll plaza}/. They'd been polling my pass just on the street, at random. And it was /{wrong}/! Holy crap, I mean, they're spying on us all and they're not even competent!" + +I'd drifted down into the kitchen as he railed there, and now I was watching him from the doorway. Mom met my eye and we both raised our eyebrows as if to say, /{Who's going to say 'I told you so' to him?}/ I nodded at her. She could use her spousular powers to nullify his rage in a way that was out of my reach as a mere filial unit. + +"Drew," she said, and grabbed him by the arm to make him stop stalking back and forth in the kitchen, waving his arms like a street-preacher. + +"What?" he snapped. + +"I think you owe Marcus an apology." She kept her voice even and level. Dad and I are the spazzes in the household -- Mom's a total rock. + +Dad looked at me. His eyes narrowed as he thought for a minute. "All right," he said at last. "You're right. I was talking about competent surveillance. These guys were total amateurs. I'm sorry, son," he said. "You were right. That was ridiculous." He stuck his hand out and shook my hand, then gave me a firm, unexpected hug. + +"God, what are we doing to this country, Marcus? Your generation deserves to inherit something better than this." When he let me go, I could see the deep wrinkles in his face, lines I'd never noticed. + +I went back up to my room and played some Xnet games. There was a good multiplayer thing, a clockwork pirate game where you had to quest every day or two to wind up your whole crew's mainsprings before you could go plundering and pillaging again. It was the kind of game I hated but couldn't stop playing: lots of repetitive quests that weren't all that satisfying to complete, a little bit of player-versus-player combat (scrapping to see who would captain the ship) and not that many cool puzzles that you had to figure out. Mostly, playing this kind of game made me homesick for Harajuku Fun Madness, which balanced out running around in the real world, figuring out online puzzles, and strategizing with your team. + +But today it was just what I needed. Mindless entertainment. + +My poor dad. + +I'd done that to him. He'd been happy before, confident that his tax dollars were being spent to keep him safe. I'd destroyed that confidence. It was false confidence, of course, but it had kept him going. Seeing him now, miserable and broken, I wondered if it was better to be clear-eyed and hopeless or to live in a fool's paradise. That shame -- the shame I'd felt since I gave up my passwords, since they'd broken me -- returned, leaving me listless and wanting to just get away from myself. + +My character was a swabbie on the pirate ship /{Zombie Charger}/, and he'd wound down while I'd been offline. I had to IM all the other players on my ship until I found one willing to wind me up. That kept me occupied. I liked it, actually. There was something magic about a total stranger doing you a favor. And since it was the Xnet, I knew that all the strangers were friends, in some sense. + +> Where u located? + +The character who wound me up was called Lizanator, and it was female, though that didn't mean that it was a girl. Guys had some weird affinity for playing female characters. + +> San Francisco + +I said. + +> No stupe, where you located in San Fran? + +> Why, you a pervert? + +That usually shut down that line of conversation. Of course every gamespace was full of pedos and pervs, and cops pretending to be pedo- and perv-bait (though I sure hoped there weren't any cops on the Xnet!). An accusation like that was enough to change the subject nine out of ten times. + +> Mission? Potrero Hill? Noe? East Bay? + +> Just wind me up k thx? + +She stopped winding. + +> You scared? + +> Safe -- why do you care? + +> Just curious + +I was getting a bad vibe off her. She was clearly more than just curious. Call it paranoia. I logged off and shut down my Xbox. + +# + +Dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, "It looks like it's going to get better, at least." He handed me a copy of the /{Chronicle}/ open to the third page. + +> A Department of Homeland Security spokesman has confirmed that the San Francisco office has requested a 300 percent budget and personnel increase from DC + +What? + +> Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for Northern California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press conference yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the Bay Area prompted the request. "We are tracking a spike in underground chatter and activity and believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturing false security alerts to undermine our efforts." + +My eyes crossed. No freaking way. + +> "These false alarms are potentially 'radar chaff' intended to disguise real attacks. The only effective way of combatting them is to step up staffing and analyst levels so that we can fully investigate every lead." + +> Sutherland noted the delays experienced all over the city were "unfortunate" and committed to eliminating them. + +I had a vision of the city with four or five times as many DHS enforcers, brought in to make up for my own stupid ideas. Van was right. The more I fought them, the worse it was going to get. + +Dad pointed at the paper. "These guys may be fools, but they're methodical fools. They'll just keep throwing resources at this problem until they solve it. It's tractable, you know. Mining all the data in the city, following up on every lead. They'll catch the terrorists." + +I lost it. "Dad! Are you /{listening to yourself}/? They're talking about investigating practically every person in the city of San Francisco!" + +"Yeah," he said, "that's right. They'll catch every alimony cheat, every dope dealer, every dirt-bag and every terrorist. You just wait. This could be the best thing that ever happened to this country." + +"Tell me you're joking," I said. "I beg you. You think that that's what they intended when they wrote the Constitution? What about the Bill of Rights?" + +"The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He was awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. "The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?" + +"Because it's an invasion of my privacy!" I said. + +"What's the big deal? Would you rather have privacy or terrorists?" + +Agh. I hated arguing with my dad like this. I needed a coffee. "Dad, come on. Taking away our privacy isn't catching terrorists: it's just inconveniencing normal people." + +"How do you know it's not catching terrorists?" + +"Where are the terrorists they've caught?" + +"I'm sure we'll see arrests in good time. You just wait." + +"Dad, what the hell has happened to you since last night? You were ready to go nuclear on the cops for pulling you over --" + +"Don't use that tone with me, Marcus. What's happened since last night is that I've had the chance to think it over and to read /{this}/." He rattled his paper. "The reason they caught me is that the bad guys are actively jamming them. They need to adjust their techniques to overcome the jamming. But they'll get there. Meanwhile the occasional road stop is a small price to pay. This isn't the time to be playing lawyer about the Bill of Rights. This is the time to make some sacrifices to keep our city safe." + +I couldn't finish my toast. I put the plate in the dishwasher and left for school. I had to get out of there. + +# + +The Xnetters weren't happy about the stepped up police surveillance, but they weren't going to take it lying down. Someone called a phone-in show on KQED and told them that the police were wasting their time, that we could monkeywrench the system faster than they could untangle it. The recording was a top Xnet download that night. + +"This is California Live and we're talking to an anonymous caller at a payphone in San Francisco. He has his own information about the slowdowns we've been facing around town this week. Caller, you're on the air." + +"Yeah, yo, this is just the beginning, you know? I mean, like, we're just getting started. Let them hire a billion pigs and put a checkpoint on every corner. We'll jam them all! And like, all this crap about terrorists? We're not terrorists! Give me a break, I mean, really! We're jamming up the system because we hate the Homeland Security, and because we love our city. Terrorists? I can't even spell jihad. Peace out." + +He sounded like an idiot. Not just the incoherent words, but also his gloating tone. He sounded like a kid who was indecently proud of himself. He /{was}/ a kid who was indecently proud of himself. + +The Xnet flamed out over this. Lots of people thought he was an idiot for calling in, while others thought he was a hero. I worried that there was probably a camera aimed at the payphone he'd used. Or an arphid reader that might have sniffed his Fast Pass. I hoped he'd had the smarts to wipe his fingerprints off the quarter, keep his hood up, and leave all his arphids at home. But I doubted it. I wondered if he'd get a knock on the door sometime soon. + +The way I knew when something big had happened on Xnet was that I'd suddenly get a million emails from people who wanted M1k3y to know about the latest haps. It was just as I was reading about Mr Can't-Spell-Jihad that my mailbox went crazy. Everyone had a message for me -- a link to a livejournal on the Xnet -- one of the many anonymous blogs that were based on the Freenet document publishing system that was also used by Chinese democracy advocates. + +> Close call + +> We were jamming at the Embarcadero tonite and goofing around giving everyone a new car key or door key or Fast Pass or FasTrak, tossing around a little fake gunpowder. There were cops everywhere but we were smarter than them; we're there pretty much every night and we never get caught. + +> So we got caught tonight. It was a stupid mistake we got sloppy we got busted. It was an undercover who caught my pal and then got the rest of us. They'd been watching the crowd for a long time and they had one of those trucks nearby and they took four of us in but missed the rest. + +> The truck was JAMMED like a can of sardines with every kind of person, old young black white rich poor all suspects, and there were two cops trying to ask us questions and the undercovers kept bringing in more of us. Most people were trying to get to the front of the line to get through questioning so we kept on moving back and it was like hours in there and really hot and it was getting more crowded not less. + +> At like 8PM they changed shifts and two new cops came in and bawled out the two cops who were there all like wtf? aren't you doing anything here. They had a real fight and then the two old cops left and the new cops sat down at their desks and whispered to each other for a while. + +> Then one cop stood up and started shouting EVERYONE JUST GO HOME JESUS CHRIST WE'VE GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN BOTHER YOU WITH MORE QUESTIONS IF YOU'VE DONE SOMETHING WRONG JUST DON'T DO IT AGAIN AND LET THIS BE A WARNING TO YOU ALL. + +> A bunch of the suits got really pissed which was HILARIOUS because I mean ten minutes before they were buggin about being held there and now they were wicked pissed about being let go, like make up your minds! + +> We split fast though and got out and came home to write this. There are undercovers everywhere, believe. If you're jamming, be open-eyed and get ready to run when problems happen. If you get caught try to wait it out they're so busy they'll maybe just let you go. + +> We made them that busy! All those people in that truck were there because we'd jammed them. So jam on! + +I felt like I was going to throw up. Those four people -- kids I'd never met -- they nearly went away forever because of something I'd started. + +Because of something I'd told them to do. I was no better than a terrorist. + +# + +The DHS got their budget requisition approved. The President went on TV with the Governor to tell us that no price was too high for security. We had to watch it the next day in school at assembly. My Dad cheered. He'd hated the President since the day he was elected, saying he wasn't any better than the last guy and the last guy had been a complete disaster, but now all he could do was talk about how decisive and dynamic the new guy was. + +"You have to take it easy on your father," Mom said to me one night after I got home from school. She'd been working from home as much as possible. Mom's a freelance relocation specialist who helps British people get settled in in San Francisco. The UK High Commission pays her to answer emails from mystified British people across the country who are totally confused by how freaky we Americans are. She explains Americans for a living, and she said that these days it was better to do that from home, where she didn't have to actually see any Americans or talk to them. + +I don't have any illusions about Britain. America may be willing to trash its Constitution every time some Jihadist looks cross-eyed at us, but as I learned in my ninth-grade Social Studies independent project, the Brits don't even /{have}/ a Constitution. They've got laws there that would curl the hair on your toes: they can put you in jail for an entire year if they're really sure that you're a terrorist but don't have enough evidence to prove it. Now, how sure can they be if they don't have enough evidence to prove it? How'd they get that sure? Did they see you committing terrorist acts in a really vivid dream? + +And the surveillance in Britain makes America look like amateur hour. The average Londoner is photographed 500 times a day, just walking around the streets. Every license plate is photographed at every corner in the country. Everyone from the banks to the public transit company is enthusiastic about tracking you and snitching on you if they think you're remotely suspicious. + +But Mom didn't see it that way. She'd left Britain halfway through high school and she'd never felt at home here, no matter that she'd married a boy from Petaluma and raised a son here. To her, this was always the land of barbarians, and Britain would always be home. + +"Mom, he's just wrong. You of all people should know that. Everything that makes this country great is being flushed down the toilet and he's going along with it. Have you noticed that they haven't /{caught any terrorists}/? Dad's all like, 'We need to be safe,' but he needs to know that most of us don't feel safe. We feel endangered all the time." + +"I know this all, Marcus. Believe me, I'm not fan of what's been happening to this country. But your father is --" She broke off. "When you didn't come home after the attacks, he thought --" + +She got up and made herself a cup of tea, something she did whenever she was uncomfortable or disconcerted. + +"Marcus," she said. "Marcus, we thought you were dead. Do you understand that? We were mourning you for days. We were imagining you blown to bits, at the bottom of the ocean. Dead because some bastard decided to kill hundreds of strangers to make some point." + +That sank in slowly. I mean, I understood that they'd been worried. Lots of people died in the bombings -- four thousand was the present estimate -- and practically everyone knew someone who didn't come home that day. There were two people from my school who had disappeared. + +"Your father was ready to kill someone. Anyone. He was out of his mind. You've never seen him like this. I've never seen him like it either. He was out of his mind. He'd just sit at this table and curse and curse and curse. Vile words, words I'd never heard him say. One day -- the third day -- someone called and he was sure it was you, but it was a wrong number and he threw the phone so hard it disintegrated into thousands of pieces." I'd wondered about the new kitchen phone. + +"Something broke in your father. He loves you. We both love you. You are the most important thing in our lives. I don't think you realize that. Do you remember when you were ten, when I went home to London for all that time? Do you remember?" + +I nodded silently. + +"We were ready to get a divorce, Marcus. Oh, it doesn't matter why anymore. It was just a bad patch, the kind of thing that happens when people who love each other stop paying attention for a few years. He came and got me and convinced me to come back for you. We couldn't bear the thought of doing that to you. We fell in love again for you. We're together today because of you." + +I had a lump in my throat. I'd never known this. No one had ever told me. + +"So your father is having a hard time right now. He's not in his right mind. It's going to take some time before he comes back to us, before he's the man I love again. We need to understand him until then." + +She gave me a long hug, and I noticed how thin her arms had gotten, how saggy the skin on her neck was. I always thought of my mother as young, pale, rosy-cheeked and cheerful, peering shrewdly through her metal-rim glasses. Now she looked a little like an old woman. I had done that to her. The terrorists had done that to her. The Department of Homeland Security had done that to her. In a weird way, we were all on the same side, and Mom and Dad and all those people we'd spoofed were on the other side. + +# + +I couldn't sleep that night. Mom's words kept running through my head. Dad had been tense and quiet at dinner and we'd barely spoken, because I didn't trust myself not to say the wrong thing and because he was all wound up over the latest news, that Al Qaeda was definitely responsible for the bombing. Six different terrorist groups had claimed responsibility for the attack, but only Al Qaeda's Internet video disclosed information that the DHS said they hadn't disclosed to anyone. + +I lay in bed and listened to a late-night call-in radio show. The topic was sex problems, with this gay guy who I normally loved to listen to, he would give people such raw advice, but good advice, and he was really funny and campy. + +Tonight I couldn't laugh. Most of the callers wanted to ask what to do about the fact that they were having a hard time getting busy with their partners ever since the attack. Even on sex-talk radio, I couldn't get away from the topic. + +I switched the radio off and heard a purring engine on the street below. + +My bedroom is in the top floor of our house, one of the painted ladies. I have a sloping attic ceiling and windows on both sides -- one overlooks the whole Mission, the other looks out into the street in front of our place. There were often cars cruising at all hours of the night, but there was something different about this engine noise. + +I went to the street-window and pulled up my blinds. Down on the street below me was a white, unmarked van whose roof was festooned with radio antennas, more antennas than I'd ever seen on a car. It was cruising very slowly down the street, a little dish on top spinning around and around. + +As I watched, the van stopped and one of the back doors popped open. A guy in a DHS uniform -- I could spot one from a hundred yards now -- stepped out into the street. He had some kind of handheld device, and its blue glow lit his face. He paced back and forth, first scouting my neighbors, making notes on his device, then heading for me. There was something familiar in the way he walked, looking down -- + +He was using a wifinder! The DHS was scouting for Xnet nodes. I let go of the blinds and dove across my room for my Xbox. I'd left it up while I downloaded some cool animations one of the Xnetters had made of the President's no-price-too-high speech. I yanked the plug out of the wall, then scurried back to the window and cracked the blind a fraction of an inch. + +The guy was looking down into his wifinder again, walking back and forth in front of our house. A moment later, he got back into his van and drove away. + +I got out my camera and took as many pictures as I could of the van and its antennas. Then I opened them in a free image-editor called The GIMP and edited out everything from the photo except the van, erasing my street and anything that might identify me. + +I posted them to Xnet and wrote down everything I could about the vans. These guys were definitely looking for the Xnet, I could tell. + +Now I really couldn't sleep. + +Nothing for it but to play wind-up pirates. There'd be lots of players even at this hour. The real name for wind-up pirates was Clockwork Plunder, and it was a hobbyist project that had been created by teenaged death-metal freaks from Finland. It was totally free to play, and offered just as much fun as any of the $15/month services like Ender's Universe and Middle Earth Quest and Discworld Dungeons. + +I logged back in and there I was, still on the deck of the Zombie Charger, waiting for someone to wind me up. I hated this part of the game. + +> Hey you + +I typed to a passing pirate. + +> Wind me up? + +He paused and looked at me. + +> y should i? + +> We're on the same team. Plus you get experience points. + +What a jerk. + +> Where are you located? + +> San Francisco + +This was starting to feel familiar. + +> Where in San Francisco? + +I logged out. There was something weird going on in the game. I jumped onto the livejournals and began to crawl from blog to blog. I got through half a dozen before I found something that froze my blood. + +Livejournallers love quizzes. What kind of hobbit are you? Are you a great lover? What planet are you most like? Which character from some movie are you? What's your emotional type? They fill them in and their friends fill them in and everyone compares their results. Harmless fun. + +But the quiz that had taken over the blogs of the Xnet that night was what scared me, because it was anything but harmless: + +* What's your sex + +* What grade are you in? + +* What school do you go to? + +* Where in the city do you live? + +The quizzes plotted the results on a map with colored pushpins for schools and neighborhoods, and made lame recommendations for places to buy pizza and stuff. + +But look at those questions. Think about my answers: + +* Male + +* 12 + +* Chavez High + +* Potrero Hill + +There were only two people in my whole school who matched that profile. Most schools it would be the same. If you wanted to figure out who the Xnetters were, you could use these quizzes to find them all. + +That was bad enough, but what was worse was what it implied: someone from the DHS was using the Xnet to get at us. The Xnet was compromised by the DHS. + +We had spies in our midst. + +# + +I'd given Xnet discs to hundreds of people, and they'd done the same. I knew the people I gave the discs to pretty well. Some of them I knew very well. I've lived in the same house all my life and I've made hundreds and hundreds of friends over the years, from people who went to daycare with me to people I played soccer with, people who LARPed with me, people I met clubbing, people I knew from school. My ARG team were my closest friends, but there were plenty of people I knew and trusted enough to hand an Xnet disc to. + +I needed them now. + +I woke Jolu up by ringing his cell phone and hanging up after the first ring, three times in a row. A minute later, he was up on Xnet and we were able to have a secure chat. I pointed him to my blog-post on the radio vans and he came back a minute later all freaked out. + +> You sure they're looking for us? + +In response I sent him to the quiz. + +> OMG we're doomed + +> No it's not that bad but we need to figure out who we can trust + +> How? + +> That's what I wanted to ask you -- how many people can you totally vouch for like trust them to the ends of the earth? + +> Um 20 or 30 or so + +> I want to get a bunch of really trustworthy people together and do a key-exchange web of trust thing + +Web of trust is one of those cool crypto things that I'd read about but never tried. It was a nearly foolproof way to make sure that you could talk to the people you trusted, but that no one else could listen in. The problem is that it requires you to physically meet with the people in the web at least once, just to get started. + +> I get it sure. That's not bad. But how you going to get everyone together for the key-signing? + +> That's what I wanted to ask you about -- how can we do it without getting busted? + +Jolu typed some words and erased them, typed more and erased them. + +> Darryl would know + +I typed. + +> God, this was the stuff he was great at. + +Jolu didn't type anything. Then, + +> How about a party? + +he typed. + +> How about if we all get together somewhere like we're teenagers having a party and that way we'll have a ready-made excuse if anyone shows up asking us what we're doing there? + +> That would totally work! You're a genius, Jolu. + +> I know it. And you're going to love this: I know just where to do it, too + +> Where? + +> Sutro baths! + +1~ Chapter 10 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Anderson's Bookshops,~{ Anderson's Bookshops http://www.andersonsbookshop.com/search.php?qkey2=doctorow+little+brother&sid=5156&imageField.x=0&imageField.y=0 123 West Jefferson, Naperville, IL 60540 USA +1 630 355 2665 }~ Chicago's legendary kids' bookstore. Anderson's is an old, old family-run business, which started out as an old-timey drug-store selling some books on the side. Today, it's a booming, multi-location kids' book empire, with some incredibly innovative bookselling practices that get books and kids together in really exciting ways. The best of these is the store's mobile book-fairs, in which they ship huge, rolling bookcases, already stocked with excellent kids' books, direct to schools on trucks -- voila, instant book-fair!] }/ + +What would you do if you found out you had a spy in your midst? You could denounce him, put him up against the wall and take him out. But then you might end up with another spy in your midst, and the new spy would be more careful than the last one and maybe not get caught quite so readily. + +Here's a better idea: start intercepting the spy's communications and feed him and his masters misinformation. Say his masters instruct him to gather information on your movements. Let him follow you around and take all the notes he wants, but steam open the envelopes that he sends back to HQ and replace his account of your movements with a fictitious one. If you want, you can make him seem erratic and unreliable so they get rid of him. You can manufacture crises that might make one side or the other reveal the identities of other spies. In short, you own them. + +This is called the man-in-the-middle attack and if you think about it, it's pretty scary. Someone who man-in-the-middles your communications can trick you in any of a thousand ways. + +Of course, there's a great way to get around the man-in-the-middle attack: use crypto. With crypto, it doesn't matter if the enemy can see your messages, because he can't decipher them, change them, and re-send them. That's one of the main reasons to use crypto. + +But remember: for crypto to work, you need to have keys for the people you want to talk to. You and your partner need to share a secret or two, some keys that you can use to encrypt and decrypt your messages so that men-in-the-middle get locked out. + +That's where the idea of public keys comes in. This is a little hairy, but it's so unbelievably elegant too. + +In public key crypto, each user gets two keys. They're long strings of mathematical gibberish, and they have an almost magic property. Whatever you scramble with one key, the other will unlock, and vice-versa. What's more, they're the /{only}/ keys that can do this -- if you can unscramble a message with one key, you /{know}/ it was scrambled with the other (and vice-versa). + +So you take either one of these keys (it doesn't matter which one) and you just /{publish}/ it. You make it a total /{non-secret}/. You want anyone in the world to know what it is. For obvious reasons, they call this your "public key." + +The other key, you hide in the darkest reaches of your mind. You protect it with your life. You never let anyone ever know what it is. That's called your "private key." (Duh.) + +Now say you're a spy and you want to talk with your bosses. Their public key is known by everyone. Your public key is known by everyone. No one knows your private key but you. No one knows their private key but them. + +You want to send them a message. First, you encrypt it with your private key. You could just send that message along, and it would work pretty well, since they would know when the message arrived that it came from you. How? Because if they can decrypt it with your public key, it can /{only}/ have been encrypted with your private key. This is the equivalent of putting your seal or signature on the bottom of a message. It says, "I wrote this, and no one else. No one could have tampered with it or changed it." + +Unfortunately, this won't actually keep your message a /{secret}/. That's because your public key is really well known (it has to be, or you'll be limited to sending messages to those few people who have your public key). Anyone who intercepts the message can read it. They can't change it and make it seem like it came from you, but if you don't want people to know what you're saying, you need a better solution. + +So instead of just encrypting the message with your private key, you /{also}/ encrypt it with your boss's public key. Now it's been locked twice. The first lock -- the boss's public key -- only comes off when combined with your boss's private key. The second lock -- your private key -- only comes off with your public key. When your bosses receive the message, they unlock it with both keys and now they know for sure that: a) you wrote it and b) that only they can read it. + +It's very cool. The day I discovered it, Darryl and I immediately exchanged keys and spent months cackling and rubbing our hands as we exchanged our military-grade secret messages about where to meet after school and whether Van would ever notice him. + +But if you want to understand security, you need to consider the most paranoid possibilities. Like, what if I tricked you into thinking that /{my}/ public key was your boss's public key? You'd encrypt the message with your private key and my public key. I'd decrypt it, read it, re-encrypt it with your boss's /{real}/ public key and send it on. As far as your boss knows, no one but you could have written the message and no one but him could have read it. + +And I get to sit in the middle, like a fat spider in a web, and all your secrets belong to me. + +Now, the easiest way to fix this is to really widely advertise your public key. If it's /{really}/ easy for anyone to know what your real key is, man-in-the-middle gets harder and harder. But you know what? Making things well-known is just as hard as keeping them secret. Think about it -- how many billions of dollars are spent on shampoo ads and other crap, just to make sure that as many people know about something that some advertiser wants them to know? + +There's a cheaper way of fixing man-in-the-middle: the web of trust. Say that before you leave HQ, you and your bosses sit down over coffee and actually tell each other your keys. No more man-in-the-middle! You're absolutely certain whose keys you have, because they were put into your own hands. + +So far, so good. But there's a natural limit to this: how many people can you physically meet with and swap keys? How many hours in the day do you want to devote to the equivalent of writing your own phone book? How many of those people are willing to devote that kind of time to you? + +Thinking about this like a phonebook helps. The world was once a place with a lot of phonebooks, and when you needed a number, you could look it up in the book. But for many of the numbers that you wanted to refer to on a given day, you would either know it by heart, or you'd be able to ask someone else. Even today, when I'm out with my cell-phone, I'll ask Jolu or Darryl if they have a number I'm looking for. It's faster and easier than looking it up online and they're more reliable, too. If Jolu has a number, I trust him, so I trust the number, too. That's called "transitive trust" -- trust that moves across the web of our relationships. + +A web of trust is a bigger version of this. Say I meet Jolu and get his key. I can put it on my "keyring" -- a list of keys that I've signed with my private key. That means you can unlock it with my public key and know for sure that me -- or someone with my key, anyway -- says that "this key belongs to this guy." + +So I hand you my keyring and provided that you trust me to have actually met and verified all the keys on it, you can take it and add it to your keyring. Now, you meet someone else and you hand the whole ring to him. Bigger and bigger the ring grows, and provided that you trust the next guy in the chain, and he trusts the next guy in his chain and so on, you're pretty secure. + +Which brings me to keysigning parties. These are /{exactly}/ what they sound like: a party where everyone gets together and signs everyone else's keys. Darryl and I, when we traded keys, that was kind of a mini-keysigning party, one with only two sad and geeky attendees. But with more people, you create the seed of the web of trust, and the web can expand from there. As everyone on your keyring goes out into the world and meets more people, they can add more and more names to the ring. You don't have to meet the new people, just trust that the signed key you get from the people in your web is valid. + +So that's why web of trust and parties go together like peanut butter and chocolate. + +# + +"Just tell them it's a super-private party, invitational only," I said. "Tell them not to bring anyone along or they won't be admitted." + +Jolu looked at me over his coffee. "You're joking, right? You tell people that, and they'll bring /{extra}/ friends." + +"Argh," I said. I spent a night a week at Jolu's these days, keeping the code up to date on indienet. Pigspleen actually paid me a non-zero sum of money to do this, which was really weird. I never thought I'd be paid to write code. + +"So what do we do? We only want people we really trust there, and we don't want to mention why until we've got everyone's keys and can send them messages in secret." + +Jolu debugged and I watched over his shoulder. This used to be called "extreme programming," which was a little embarrassing. Now we just call it "programming." Two people are much better at spotting bugs than one. As the cliche goes, "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." + +We were working our way through the bug reports and getting ready to push out the new rev. It all auto-updated in the background, so our users didn't really need to do anything, they just woke up once a week or so with a better program. It was pretty freaky to know that the code I wrote would be used by hundreds of thousands of people, /{tomorrow}/! + +"What do we do? Man, I don't know. I think we just have to live with it." + +I thought back to our Harajuku Fun Madness days. There were lots of social challenges involving large groups of people as part of that game. + +"OK, you're right. But let's at least try to keep this secret. Tell them that they can bring a maximum of one person, and it has to be someone they've known personally for a minimum of five years." + +Jolu looked up from the screen. "Hey," he said. "Hey, that would totally work. I can really see it. I mean, if you told me not to bring anyone, I'd be all, 'Who the hell does he think he is?' But when you put it that way, it sounds like some awesome 007 stuff." + +I found a bug. We drank some coffee. I went home and played a little Clockwork Plunder, trying not to think about key-winders with nosy questions, and slept like a baby. + +# + +Sutro baths are San Francisco's authentic fake Roman ruins. When it opened in 1896, it was the largest indoor bathing house in the world, a huge Victorian glass solarium filled with pools and tubs and even an early water slide. It went downhill by the fifties, and the owners torched it for the insurance in 1966. All that's left is a labyrinth of weathered stone set into the sere cliff-face at Ocean Beach. It looks for all the world like a Roman ruin, crumbled and mysterious, and just beyond them is a set of caves that let out into the sea. In rough tides, the waves rush through the caves and over the ruins -- they've even been known to suck in and drown the occasional tourist. + +Ocean Beach is way out past Golden Gate park, a stark cliff lined with expensive, doomed houses, plunging down to a narrow beach studded with jellyfish and brave (insane) surfers. There's a giant white rock that juts out of the shallows off the shore. That's called Seal Rock, and it used to be the place where the sea lions congregated until they were relocated to the more tourist-friendly environs of Fisherman's Wharf. + +After dark, there's hardly anyone out there. It gets very cold, with a salt spray that'll soak you to your bones if you let it. The rocks are sharp and there's broken glass and the occasional junkie needle. + +It is an awesome place for a party. + +Bringing along the tarpaulins and chemical glove-warmers was my idea. Jolu figured out where to get the beer -- his older brother, Javier, had a buddy who actually operated a whole underage drinking service: pay him enough and he'd back up to your secluded party spot with ice-chests and as many brews as you wanted. I blew a bunch of my indienet programming money, and the guy showed up right on time: 8PM, a good hour after sunset, and lugged the six foam ice-chests out of his pickup truck and down into the ruins of the baths. He even brought a spare chest for the empties. + +"You kids play safe now," he said, tipping his cowboy hat. He was a fat Samoan guy with a huge smile, and a scary tank-top that you could see his armpit- and belly- and shoulder-hair escaping from. I peeled twenties off my roll and handed them to him -- his markup was 150 percent. Not a bad racket. + +He looked at my roll. "You know, I could just take that from you," he said, still smiling. "I'm a criminal, after all." + +I put my roll in my pocket and looked him levelly in the eye. I'd been stupid to show him what I was carrying, but I knew that there were times when you should just stand your ground. + +"I'm just messing with you," he said, at last. "But you be careful with that money. Don't go showing it around." + +"Thanks," I said. "Homeland Security'll get my back though." + +His smile got even bigger. "Ha! They're not even real five-oh. Those peckerwoods don't know nothin'." + +I looked over at his truck. Prominently displayed in his windscreen was a FasTrak. I wondered how long it would be until he got busted. + +"You got girls coming tonight? That why you got all the beer?" + +I smiled and waved at him as though he was walking back to his truck, which he should have been doing. He eventually got the hint and drove away. His smile never faltered. + +Jolu helped me hide the coolers in the rubble, working with little white LED torches on headbands. Once the coolers were in place, we threw little white LED keychains into each one, so it would glow when you took the styrofoam lids off, making it easier to see what you were doing. + +It was a moonless night and overcast, and the distant streetlights barely illuminated us. I knew we'd stand out like blazes on an infrared scope, but there was no chance that we'd be able to get a bunch of people together without being observed. I'd settle for being dismissed as a little drunken beach-party. + +I don't really drink much. There's been beer and pot and ecstasy at the parties I've been going to since I was 14, but I hated smoking (though I'm quite partial to a hash brownie every now and again), ecstasy took too long -- who's got a whole weekend to get high and come down -- and beer, well, it was all right, but I didn't see what the big deal was. My favorite was big, elaborate cocktails, the kind of thing served in a ceramic volcano, with six layers, on fire, and a plastic monkey on the rim, but that was mostly for the theater of it all. + +I actually like being drunk. I just don't like being hungover, and boy, do I ever get hungover. Though again, that might have to do with the kind of drinks that come in a ceramic volcano. + +But you can't throw a party without putting a case or two of beer on ice. It's expected. It loosens things up. People do stupid things after too many beers, but it's not like my friends are the kind of people who have cars. And people do stupid things no matter what -- beer or grass or whatever are all incidental to that central fact. + +Jolu and I each cracked beers -- Anchor Steam for him, a Bud Lite for me -- and clinked the bottles together, sitting down on a rock. + +"You told them 9PM?" + +"Yeah," he said. + +"Me too." + +We drank in silence. The Bud Lite was the least alcoholic thing in the ice-chest. I'd need a clear head later. + +"You ever get scared?" I said, finally. + +He turned to me. "No man, I don't get scared. I'm always scared. I've been scared since the minute the explosions happened. I'm so scared sometimes, I don't want to get out of bed." + +"Then why do you do it?" + +He smiled. "About that," he said. "Maybe I won't, not for much longer. I mean, it's been great helping you. Great. Really excellent. I don't know when I've done anything so important. But Marcus, bro, I have to say. . ." He trailed off. + +"What?" I said, though I knew what was coming next. + +"I can't do it forever," he said at last. "Maybe not even for another month. I think I'm through. It's too much risk. The DHS, you can't go to war on them. It's crazy. Really actually crazy." + +"You sound like Van," I said. My voice was much more bitter than I'd intended. + +"I'm not criticizing you, man. I think it's great that you've got the bravery to do this all the time. But I haven't got it. I can't live my life in perpetual terror." + +"What are you saying?" + +"I'm saying I'm out. I'm going to be one of those people who acts like it's all OK, like it'll all go back to normal some day. I'm going to use the Internet like I always did, and only use the Xnet to play games. I'm going to get out is what I'm saying. I won't be a part of your plans anymore." + +I didn't say anything. + +"I know that's leaving you on your own. I don't want that, believe me. I'd much rather you give up with me. You can't declare war on the government of the USA. It's not a fight you're going to win. Watching you try is like watching a bird fly into a window again and again." + +He wanted me to say something. What /{I}/ wanted to say was, /{Jesus Jolu, thanks so very much for abandoning me! Do you forget what it was like when they took us away? Do you forget what the country used to be like before they took it over?}/ But that's not what he wanted me to say. What he wanted me to say was: + +"I understand, Jolu. I respect your choice." + +He drank the rest of his bottle and pulled out another one and twisted off the cap. + +"There's something else," he said. + +"What?" + +"I wasn't going to mention it, but I want you to understand why I have to do this." + +"Jesus, Jolu, /{what}/?" + +"I hate to say it, but you're /{white}/. I'm not. White people get caught with cocaine and do a little rehab time. Brown people get caught with crack and go to prison for twenty years. White people see cops on the street and feel safer. Brown people see cops on the street and wonder if they're about to get searched. The way the DHS is treating you? The law in this country has always been like that for us." + +It was so unfair. I didn't ask to be white. I didn't think I was being braver just because I'm white. But I knew what Jolu was saying. If the cops stopped someone in the Mission and asked to see some ID, chances were that person wasn't white. Whatever risk I ran, Jolu ran more. Whatever penalty I'd pay, Jolu would pay more. + +"I don't know what to say," I said. + +"You don't have to say anything," he said. "I just wanted you to know, so you could understand." + +I could see people walking down the side trail toward us. They were friends of Jolu's, two Mexican guys and a girl I knew from around, short and geeky, always wearing cute black Buddy Holly glasses that made her look like the outcast art-student in a teen movie who comes back as the big success. + +Jolu introduced me and gave them beers. The girl didn't take one, but instead produced a small silver flask of vodka from her purse and offered me a drink. I took a swallow -- warm vodka must be an acquired taste -- and complimented her on the flask, which was embossed with a repeating motif of Parappa the Rapper characters. + +"It's Japanese," she said as I played another LED keyring over it. "They have all these great booze-toys based on kids' games. Totally twisted." + +I introduced myself and she introduced herself. "Ange," she said, and shook my hand with hers -- dry, warm, with short nails. Jolu introduced me to his pals, whom he'd known since computer camp in the fourth grade. More people showed up -- five, then ten, then twenty. It was a seriously big group now. + +We'd told people to arrive by 9:30 sharp, and we gave it until 9:45 to see who all would show up. About three quarters were Jolu's friends. I'd invited all the people I really trusted. Either I was more discriminating than Jolu or less popular. Now that he'd told me he was quitting, it made me think that he was less discriminating. I was really pissed at him, but trying not to let it show by concentrating on socializing with other people. But he wasn't stupid. He knew what was going on. I could see that he was really bummed. Good. + +"OK," I said, climbing up on a ruin, "OK, hey, hello?" A few people nearby paid attention to me, but the ones in the back kept on chatting. I put my arms in the air like a referee, but it was too dark. Eventually I hit on the idea of turning my LED keychain on and pointing it at each of the talkers in turn, then at me. Gradually, the crowd fell quiet. + +I welcomed them and thanked them all for coming, then asked them to close in so I could explain why we were there. I could tell they were into the secrecy of it all, intrigued and a little warmed up by the beer. + +"So here it is. You all use the Xnet. It's no coincidence that the Xnet was created right after the DHS took over the city. The people who did that are an organization devoted to personal liberty, who created the network to keep us safe from DHS spooks and enforcers." Jolu and I had worked this out in advance. We weren't going to cop to being behind it all, not to anyone. It was way too risky. Instead, we'd put it out that we were merely lieutenants in "M1k3y"'s army, acting to organize the local resistance. + +"The Xnet isn't pure," I said. "It can be used by the other side just as readily as by us. We know that there are DHS spies who use it now. They use social engineering hacks to try to get us to reveal ourselves so that they can bust us. If the Xnet is going to succeed, we need to figure out how to keep them from spying on us. We need a network within the network." + +I paused and let this sink in. Jolu had suggested that this might be a little heavy -- learning that you're about to be brought into a revolutionary cell. + +"Now, I'm not here to ask you to do anything active. You don't have to go out jamming or anything. You've been brought here because we know you're cool, we know you're trustworthy. It's that trustworthiness I want to get you to contribute tonight. Some of you will already be familiar with the web of trust and keysigning parties, but for the rest of you, I'll run it down quickly --" Which I did. + +"Now what I want from you tonight is to meet the people here and figure out how much you can trust them. We're going to help you generate key-pairs and share them with each other." + +This part was tricky. Asking people to bring their own laptops wouldn't have worked out, but we still needed to do something hella complicated that wouldn't exactly work with paper and pencil. + +I held up a laptop Jolu and I had rebuilt the night before, from the ground up. "I trust this machine. Every component in it was laid by our own hands. It's running a fresh out-of-the-box version of ParanoidLinux, booted off of the DVD. If there's a trustworthy computer left anywhere in the world, this might well be it. + +"I've got a key-generator loaded here. You come up here and give it some random input -- mash the keys, wiggle the mouse -- and it will use that as the seed to create a random public- and private key for you, which it will display on the screen. You can take a picture of the private key with your phone, and hit any key to make it go away forever -- it's not stored on the disk at all. Then it will show you your public key. At that point, you call over all the people here you trust and who trust you, and /{they}/ take a picture of the screen with you standing next to it, so they know whose key it is. + +"When you get home, you have to convert the photos to keys. This is going to be a lot of work, I'm afraid, but you'll only have to do it once. You have to be super-careful about typing these in -- one mistake and you're screwed. Luckily, we've got a way to tell if you've got it right: beneath the key will be a much shorter number, called the 'fingerprint'. Once you've typed in the key, you can generate a fingerprint from it and compare it to the fingerprint, and if they match, you've got it right." + +They all boggled at me. OK, so I'd asked them to do something pretty weird, it's true, but still. + + +1~ Chapter 11 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to the University Bookstore~{ The University Bookstore http://www4.bookstore.washington.edu/_trade/ShowTitleUBS.taf?ActionArg=Title&ISBN=9780765319852 4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105 USA +1 800 335 READ }~ at the University of Washington, whose science fiction section rivals many specialty stores, thanks to the sharp-eyed, dedicated science fiction buyer, Duane Wilkins. Duane's a real science fiction fan -- I first met him at the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto in 2003 -- and it shows in the eclectic and informed choices on display at the store. One great predictor of a great bookstore is the quality of the "shelf review" -- the little bits of cardboard stuck to the shelves with (generally hand-lettered) staff-reviews extolling the virtues of books you might otherwise miss. The staff at the University Bookstore have clearly benefited from Duane's tutelage, as the shelf reviews at the University Bookstore are second to none.] }/ + +Jolu stood up. + +"This is where it starts, guys. This is how we know which side you're on. You might not be willing to take to the streets and get busted for your beliefs, but if you /{have}/ beliefs, this will let us know it. This will create the web of trust that tells us who's in and who's out. If we're ever going to get our country back, we need to do this. We need to do something like this." + +Someone in the audience -- it was Ange -- had a hand up, holding a beer bottle. + +"So call me stupid but I don't understand this at all. Why do you want us to do this?" + +Jolu looked at me, and I looked back at him. It had all seemed so obvious when we were organizing it. "The Xnet isn't just a way to play free games. It's the last open communications network in America. It's the last way to communicate without being snooped on by the DHS. For it to work we need to know that the person we're talking to isn't a snoop. That means that we need to know that the people we're sending messages to are the people we think they are. + +"That's where you come in. You're all here because we trust you. I mean, really trust you. Trust you with our lives." + +Some of the people groaned. It sounded melodramatic and stupid. + +I got back to my feet. + +"When the bombs went off," I said, then something welled up in my chest, something painful. "When the bombs went off, there were four of us caught up by Market Street. For whatever reason, the DHS decided that made us suspicious. They put bags over our heads, put us on a ship and interrogated us for days. They humiliated us. Played games with our minds. Then they let us go. + +"All except one person. My best friend. He was with us when they picked us up. He'd been hurt and he needed medical care. He never came out again. They say they never saw him. They say that if we ever tell anyone about this, they'll arrest us and make us disappear. + +"Forever." + +I was shaking. The shame. The goddamned shame. Jolu had the light on me. + +"Oh Christ," I said. "You people are the first ones I've told. If this story gets around, you can bet they'll know who leaked it. You can bet they'll come knocking on my door." I took some more deep breaths. "That's why I volunteered on the Xnet. That's why my life, from now on, is about fighting the DHS. With every breath. Every day. Until we're free again. Any one of you could put me in jail now, if you wanted to." + +Ange put her hand up again. "We're not going to rat on you," she said. "No way. I know pretty much everyone here and I can promise you that. I don't know how to know who to trust, but I know who /{not}/ to trust: old people. Our parents. Grownups. When they think of someone being spied on, they think of someone /{else}/, a bad guy. When they think of someone being caught and sent to a secret prison, it's someone /{else}/ -- someone brown, someone young, someone foreign. + +"They forget what it's like to be our age. To be the object of suspicion /{all the time}/! How many times have you gotten on the bus and had every person on it give you a look like you'd been gargling turds and skinning puppies? + +"What's worse, they're turning into adults younger and younger out there. Back in the day, they used to say 'Never trust anyone over 30.' I say, 'Don't trust any bastard over 25!'" + +That got a laugh, and she laughed too. She was pretty, in a weird, horsey way, with a long face and a long jaw. "I'm not really kidding, you know? I mean, think about it. Who elected these ass-clowns? Who let them invade our city? Who voted to put the cameras in our classrooms and follow us around with creepy spyware chips in our transit passes and cars? It wasn't a 16-year-old. We may be dumb, we may be young, but we're not scum." + +"I want that on a t-shirt," I said. + +"It would be a good one," she said. We smiled at each other. + +"Where do I go to get my keys?" she said, and pulled out her phone. + +"We'll do it over there, in the secluded spot by the caves. I'll take you in there and set you up, then you do your thing and take the machine around to your friends to get photos of your public key so they can sign it when they get home." + +I raised my voice. "Oh! One more thing! Jesus, I can't believe I forgot this. /{Delete those photos once you've typed in the keys}/! The last thing we want is a Flickr stream full of pictures of all of us conspiring together." + +There was some good-natured, nervous chuckling, then Jolu turned out the light and in the sudden darkness I could see nothing. Gradually, my eyes adjusted and I set off for the cave. Someone was walking behind me. Ange. I turned and smiled at her, and she smiled back, luminous teeth in the dark. + +"Thanks for that," I said. "You were great." + +"You mean what you said about the bag on your head and everything?" + +"I meant it," I said. "It happened. I never told anyone, but it happened." I thought about it for a moment. "You know, with all the time that went by since, without saying anything, it started to feel like a bad dream. It was real though." I stopped and climbed up into the cave. "I'm glad I finally told people. Any longer and I might have started to doubt my own sanity." + +I set up the laptop on a dry bit of rock and booted it from the DVD with her watching. "I'm going to reboot it for every person. This is a standard ParanoidLinux disc, though I guess you'd have to take my word for it." + +"Hell," she said. "This is all about trust, right?" + +"Yeah," I said. "Trust." + +I retreated some distance as she ran the key-generator, listening to her typing and mousing to create randomness, listening to the crash of the surf, listening to the party noises from over where the beer was. + +She stepped out of the cave, carrying the laptop. On it, in huge white luminous letters, were her public key and her fingerprint and email address. She held the screen up beside her face and waited while I got my phone out. + +"Cheese," she said. I snapped her pic and dropped the camera back in my pocket. She wandered off to the revelers and let them each get pics of her and the screen. It was festive. Fun. She really had a lot of charisma -- you didn't want to laugh at her, you just wanted to laugh /{with}/ her. And hell, it /{was}/ funny! We were declaring a secret war on the secret police. Who the hell did we think we were? + +So it went, through the next hour or so, everyone taking pictures and making keys. I got to meet everyone there. I knew a lot of them -- some were my invitees -- and the others were friends of my pals or my pals' pals. We should all be buddies. We were, by the time the night was out. They were all good people. + +Once everyone was done, Jolu went to make a key, and then turned away, giving me a sheepish grin. I was past my anger with him, though. He was doing what he had to do. I knew that no matter what he said, he'd always be there for me. And we'd been through the DHS jail together. Van too. No matter what, that would bind us together forever. + +I did my key and did the perp-walk around the gang, letting everyone snap a pic. Then I climbed up on the high spot I'd spoken from earlier and called for everyone's attention. + +"So a lot of you have noted that there's a vital flaw in this procedure: what if this laptop can't be trusted? What if it's secretly recording our instructions? What if it's spying on us? What if Jose-Luis and I can't be trusted?" + +More good-natured chuckles. A little warmer than before, more beery. + +"I mean it," I said. "If we were on the wrong side, this could get all of us -- all of /{you}/ -- into a heap of trouble. Jail, maybe." + +The chuckles turned more nervous. + +"So that's why I'm going to do this," I said, and picked up a hammer I'd brought from my Dad's toolkit. I set the laptop down beside me on the rock and swung the hammer, Jolu following the swing with his keychain light. Crash -- I'd always dreamt of killing a laptop with a hammer, and here I was doing it. It felt pornographically good. And bad. + +Smash! The screen-panel fell off, shattered into millions of pieces, exposing the keyboard. I kept hitting it, until the keyboard fell off, exposing the motherboard and the hard-drive. Crash! I aimed square for the hard-drive, hitting it with everything I had. It took three blows before the case split, exposing the fragile media inside. I kept hitting it until there was nothing bigger than a cigarette lighter, then I put it all in a garbage bag. The crowd was cheering wildly -- loud enough that I actually got worried that someone far above us might hear over the surf and call the law. + +"All right!" I called. "Now, if you'd like to accompany me, I'm going to march this down to the sea and soak it in salt water for ten minutes." + +I didn't have any takers at first, but then Ange came forward and took my arm in her warm hand and said, "That was beautiful," in my ear and we marched down to the sea together. + +It was perfectly dark by the sea, and treacherous, even with our keychain lights. Slippery, sharp rocks that were difficult enough to walk on even without trying to balance six pounds of smashed electronics in a plastic bag. I slipped once and thought I was going to cut myself up, but she caught me with a surprisingly strong grip and kept me upright. I was pulled in right close to her, close enough to smell her perfume, which smelled like new cars. I love that smell. + +"Thanks," I managed, looking into the big eyes that were further magnified by her mannish, black-rimmed glasses. I couldn't tell what color they were in the dark, but I guessed something dark, based on her dark hair and olive complexion. She looked Mediterranean, maybe Greek or Spanish or Italian. + +I crouched down and dipped the bag in the sea, letting it fill with salt water. I managed to slip a little and soak my shoe, and I swore and she laughed. We'd hardly said a word since we lit out for the ocean. There was something magical in our wordless silence. + +At that point, I had kissed a total of three girls in my life, not counting that moment when I went back to school and got a hero's welcome. That's not a gigantic number, but it's not a minuscule one, either. I have reasonable girl radar, and I think I could have kissed her. She wasn't h4wt in the traditional sense, but there's something about a girl and a night and a beach, plus she was smart and passionate and committed. + +But I didn't kiss her, or take her hand. Instead we had a moment that I can only describe as spiritual. The surf, the night, the sea and the rocks, and our breathing. The moment stretched. I sighed. This had been quite a ride. I had a lot of typing to do tonight, putting all those keys into my keychain, signing them and publishing the signed keys. Starting the web of trust. + +She sighed too. + +"Let's go," I said. + +"Yeah," she said. + +Back we went. It was a good night, that night. + +# + +Jolu waited after for his brother's friend to come by and pick up his coolers. I walked with everyone else up the road to the nearest Muni stop and got on board. Of course, none of us was using an issued Muni pass. By that point, Xnetters habitually cloned someone else's Muni pass three or four times a day, assuming a new identity for every ride. + +It was hard to stay cool on the bus. We were all a little drunk, and looking at our faces under the bright bus lights was kind of hilarious. We got pretty loud and the driver used his intercom to tell us to keep it down twice, then told us to shut up right now or he'd call the cops. + +That set us to giggling again and we disembarked in a mass before he did call the cops. We were in North Beach now, and there were lots of buses, taxis, the BART at Market Street, neon-lit clubs and cafes to pull apart our grouping, so we drifted away. + +I got home and fired up my Xbox and started typing in keys from my phone's screen. It was dull, hypnotic work. I was a little drunk, and it lulled me into a half-sleep. + +I was about ready to nod off when a new IM window popped up. + +> herro! + +I didn't recognize the handle -- spexgril -- but I had an idea who might be behind it. + +> hi + +I typed, cautiously. + +> it's me, from tonight + +Then she paste-bombed a block of crypto. I'd already entered her public key into my keychain, so I told the IM client to try decrypting the code with the key. + +> it's me, from tonight + +It was her! + +> Fancy meeting you here + +I typed, then encrypted it to my public key and mailed it off. + +> It was great meeting you + +I typed. + +> You too. I don't meet too many smart guys who are also cute and also socially aware. Good god, man, you don't give a girl much of a chance. + +My heart hammered in my chest. + +> Hello? Tap tap? This thing on? I wasn't born here folks, but I'm sure dying here. Don't forget to tip your waitresses, they work hard. I'm here all week. + +I laughed aloud. + +> I'm here, I'm here. Laughing too hard to type is all + +> Well at least my IM comedy-fu is still mighty + +Um. + +> It was really great to meet you too + +> Yeah, it usually is. Where are you taking me? + +> Taking you? + +> On our next adventure? + +> I didn't really have anything planned + +> Oki -- then I'll take YOU. Saturday. Dolores Park. Illegal open air concert. Be there or be a dodecahedron + +> Wait what? + +> Don't you even read Xnet? It's all over the place. You ever hear of the Speedwhores? + +I nearly choked. That was Trudy Doo's band -- as in Trudy Doo, the woman who had paid me and Jolu to update the indienet code. + +> Yeah I've heard of them + +> They're putting on a huge show and they've got like fifty bands signed to play the bill, going to set up on the tennis courts and bring out their own amp trucks and rock out all night + +I felt like I'd been living under a rock. How had I missed that? There was an anarchist bookstore on Valencia that I sometimes passed on the way to school that had a poster of an old revolutionary named Emma Goldman with the caption "If I can't dance, I don't want to be a part of your revolution." I'd been spending all my energies on figuring out how to use the Xnet to organize dedicated fighters so they could jam the DHS, but this was so much cooler. A big concert -- I had no idea how to do one of those, but I was glad someone did. + +And now that I thought of it, I was damned proud that they were using the Xnet to do it. + +# + +The next day I was a zombie. Ange and I had chatted -- flirted -- until 4AM. Lucky for me, it was a Saturday and I was able to sleep in, but between the hangover and the sleep-dep, I could barely put two thoughts together. + +By lunchtime, I managed to get up and get my ass out onto the streets. I staggered down toward the Turk's to buy my coffee -- these days, if I was alone, I always bought my coffee there, like the Turk and I were part of a secret club. + +On the way, I passed a lot of fresh graffiti. I liked Mission graffiti; a lot of the times, it came in huge, luscious murals, or sarcastic art-student stencils. I liked that the Mission's taggers kept right on going, under the nose of the DHS. Another kind of Xnet, I supposed -- they must have all kinds of ways of knowing what was going on, where to get paint, what cameras worked. Some of the cameras had been spray-painted over, I noticed. + +Maybe they used Xnet! + +Painted in ten-foot-high letters on the side of an auto-yard's fence were the drippy words: DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25. + +I stopped. Had someone left my "party" last night and come here with a can of paint? A lot of those people lived in the neighborhood. + +I got my coffee and had a little wander around town. I kept thinking I should be calling someone, seeing if they wanted to get a movie or something. That's how it used to be on a lazy Saturday like this. But who was I going to call? Van wasn't talking to me, I didn't think I was ready to talk to Jolu, and Darryl -- + +Well, I couldn't call Darryl. + +I got my coffee and went home and did a little searching around on the Xnet's blogs. These anonablogs were untraceable to any author -- unless that author was stupid enough to put her name on it -- and there were a lot of them. Most of them were apolitical, but a lot of them weren't. They talked about schools and the unfairness there. They talked about the cops. Tagging. + +Turned out there'd been plans for the concert in the park for weeks. It had hopped from blog to blog, turning into a full-blown movement without my noticing. And the concert was called Don't Trust Anyone Over 25. + +Well, that explained where Ange got it. It was a good slogan. + +# + +Monday morning, I decided I wanted to check out that anarchist bookstore again, see about getting one of those Emma Goldman posters. I needed the reminder. + +I detoured down to 16th and Mission on my way to school, then up to Valencia and across. The store was shut, but I got the hours off the door and made sure they still had that poster up. + +As I walked down Valencia, I was amazed to see how much of the DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25 stuff there was. Half the shops had DON'T TRUST merch in the windows: lunchboxes, babydoll tees, pencil-boxes, trucker hats. The hipster stores have been getting faster and faster, of course. As new memes sweep the net in the course of a day or two, stores have gotten better at putting merch in the windows to match. Some funny little youtube of a guy launching himself with jet-packs made of carbonated water would land in your inbox on Monday and by Tuesday you'd be able to buy t-shirts with stills from the video on it. + +But it was amazing to see something make the leap from Xnet to the head shops. Distressed designer jeans with the slogan written in careful high school ball-point ink. Embroidered patches. + +Good news travels fast. + +It was written on the black-board when I got to Ms Galvez's Social Studies class. We all sat at our desks, smiling at it. It seemed to smile back. There was something profoundly cheering about the idea that we could all trust each other, that the enemy could be identified. I knew it wasn't entirely true, but it wasn't entirely false either. + +Ms Galvez came in and patted her hair and set down her SchoolBook on her desk and powered it up. She picked up her chalk and turned around to face the board. We all laughed. Good-naturedly, but we laughed. + +She turned around and was laughing too. "Inflation has hit the nation's slogan-writers, it seems. How many of you know where this phrase comes from?" + +We looked at each other. "Hippies?" someone said, and we laughed. Hippies are all over San Francisco, both the old stoner kinds with giant skanky beards and tie-dyes, and the new kind, who are more into dress-up and maybe playing hacky-sack than protesting anything. + +"Well, yes, hippies. But when we think of hippies these days, we just think of the clothes and the music. Clothes and music were incidental to the main part of what made that era, the sixties, important. + +"You've heard about the civil rights movement to end segregation, white and black kids like you riding buses into the South to sign up black voters and protest against official state racism. California was one of the main places where the civil rights leaders came from. We've always been a little more political than the rest of the country, and this is also a part of the country where black people have been able to get the same union factory jobs as white people, so they were a little better off than their cousins in the southland. + +"The students at Berkeley sent a steady stream of freedom riders south, and they recruited them from information tables on campus, at Bancroft and Telegraph Avenue. You've probably seen that there are still tables there to this day. + +"Well, the campus tried to shut them down. The president of the university banned political organizing on campus, but the civil rights kids wouldn't stop. The police tried to arrest a guy who was handing out literature from one of these tables, and they put him in a van, but 3,000 students surrounded the van and refused to let it budge. They wouldn't let them take this kid to jail. They stood on top of the van and gave speeches about the First Amendment and Free Speech. + +"That galvanized the Free Speech Movement. That was the start of the hippies, but it was also where more radical student movements came from. Black power groups like the Black Panthers -- and later gay rights groups like the Pink Panthers, too. Radical women's groups, even 'lesbian separatists' who wanted to abolish men altogether! And the Yippies. Anyone ever hear of the Yippies?" + +"Didn't they levitate the Pentagon?" I said. I'd once seen a documentary about this. + +She laughed. "I forgot about that, but yes, that was them! Yippies were like very political hippies, but they weren't serious the way we think of politics these days. They were very playful. Pranksters. They threw money into the New York Stock Exchange. They circled the Pentagon with hundreds of protestors and said a magic spell that was supposed to levitate it. They invented a fictional kind of LSD that you could spray onto people with squirt-guns and shot each other with it and pretended to be stoned. They were funny and they made great TV -- one Yippie, a clown called Wavy Gravy, used to get hundreds of protestors to dress up like Santa Claus so that the cameras would show police officers arresting and dragging away Santa on the news that night -- and they mobilized a lot of people. + +"Their big moment was the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where they called for demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War. Thousands of demonstrators poured into Chicago, slept in the parks, and picketed every day. They had lots of bizarre stunts that year, like running a pig called Pigasus for the presidential nomination. The police and the demonstrators fought in the streets -- they'd done that many times before, but the Chicago cops didn't have the smarts to leave the reporters alone. They beat up the reporters, and the reporters retaliated by finally showing what really went on at these demonstrations, so the whole country watched their kids being really savagely beaten down by the Chicago police. They called it a 'police riot.' + +"The Yippies loved to say, 'Never trust anyone over 30.' They meant that people who were born before a certain time, when America had been fighting enemies like the Nazis, could never understand what it meant to love your country enough to refuse to fight the Vietnamese. They thought that by the time you hit 30, your attitudes would be frozen and you couldn't ever understand why the kids of the day were taken to the streets, dropping out, freaking out. + +"San Francisco was ground zero for this. Revolutionary armies were founded here. Some of them blew up buildings or robbed banks for their cause. A lot of those kids grew up to be more or less normal, while others ended up in jail. Some of the university dropouts did amazing things -- for example, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple Computers and invented the PC." + +I was really getting into this. I knew a little of it, but I'd never heard it told like this. Or maybe it had never mattered as much as it did now. Suddenly, those lame, solemn, grown-up street demonstrations didn't seem so lame after all. Maybe there was room for that kind of action in the Xnet movement. + +I put my hand up. "Did they win? Did the Yippies win?" + +She gave me a long look, like she was thinking it over. No one said a word. We all wanted to hear the answer. + +"They didn't lose," she said. "They kind of imploded a little. Some of them went to jail for drugs or other things. Some of them changed their tunes and became yuppies and went on the lecture circuit telling everyone how stupid they'd been, talking about how good greed was and how dumb they'd been. + +"But they did change the world. The war in Vietnam ended, and the kind of conformity and unquestioning obedience that people had called patriotism went out of style in a big way. Black rights, women's rights and gay rights came a long way. Chicano rights, rights for disabled people, the whole tradition of civil liberties was created or strengthened by these people. Today's protest movement is the direct descendant of those struggles." + +"I can't believe you're talking about them like this," Charles said. He was leaning so far in his seat he was half standing, and his sharp, skinny face had gone red. He had wet, large eyes and big lips, and when he got excited he looked a little like a fish. + +Ms Galvez stiffened a little, then said, "Go on, Charles." + +"You've just described terrorists. Actual terrorists. They blew up buildings, you said. They tried to destroy the stock exchange. They beat up cops, and stopped cops from arresting people who were breaking the law. They attacked us!" + +Ms Galvez nodded slowly. I could tell she was trying to figure out how to handle Charles, who really seemed like he was ready to pop. "Charles raises a good point. The Yippies weren't foreign agents, they were American citizens. When you say 'They attacked us,' you need to figure out who 'they' and 'us' are. When it's your fellow countrymen --" + +"Crap!" he shouted. He was on his feet now. "We were at war then. These guys were giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It's easy to tell who's us and who's them: if you support America, you're us. If you support the people who are shooting at Americans, you're /{them}/." + +"Does anyone else want to comment on this?" + +Several hands shot up. Ms Galvez called on them. Some people pointed out that the reason that the Vietnamese were shooting at Americans is that the Americans had flown to Vietnam and started running around the jungle with guns. Others thought that Charles had a point, that people shouldn't be allowed to do illegal things. + +Everyone had a good debate except Charles, who just shouted at people, interrupting them when they tried to get their points out. Ms Galvez tried to get him to wait for his turn a couple times, but he wasn't having any of it. + +I was looking something up on my SchoolBook, something I knew I'd read. + +I found it. I stood up. Ms Galvez looked expectantly at me. The other people followed her gaze and went quiet. Even Charles looked at me after a while, his big wet eyes burning with hatred for me. + +"I wanted to read something," I said. "It's short. 'Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.'" + +1~ Chapter 12 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Forbidden Planet,~{ Forbidden Planet, UK, Dublin and New York City: http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk }~ the British chain of science fiction and fantasy books, comics, toys and videos. Forbidden Planet has stores up and down the UK, and also sports outposts in Manhattan and Dublin, Ireland. It's dangerous to set foot in a Forbidden Planet -- rarely do I escape with my wallet intact. Forbidden Planet really leads the pack in bringing the gigantic audience for TV and movie science fiction into contact with science fiction books -- something that's absolutely critical to the future of the field.] }/ + +Ms Galvez's smile was wide. + +"Does anyone know what that comes from?" + +A bunch of people chorused, "The Declaration of Independence." + +I nodded. + +"Why did you read that to us, Marcus?" + +"Because it seems to me that the founders of this country said that governments should only last for so long as we believe that they're working for us, and if we stop believing in them, we should overthrow them. That's what it says, right?" + +Charles shook his head. "That was hundreds of years ago!" he said. "Things are different now!" + +"What's different?" + +"Well, for one thing, we don't have a king anymore. They were talking about a government that existed because some old jerk's great-great-great-grandfather believed that God put him in charge and killed everyone who disagreed with him. We have a democratically elected government --" + +"I didn't vote for them," I said. + +"So that gives you the right to blow up a building?" + +"What? Who said anything about blowing up a building? The Yippies and hippies and all those people believed that the government no longer listened to them -- look at the way people who tried to sign up voters in the South were treated! They were beaten up, arrested --" + +"Some of them were killed," Ms Galvez said. She held up her hands and waited for Charles and me to sit down. "We're almost out of time for today, but I want to commend you all on one of the most interesting classes I've ever taught. This has been an excellent discussion and I've learned much from you all. I hope you've learned from each other, too. Thank you all for your contributions. + +"I have an extra-credit assignment for those of you who want a little challenge. I'd like you to write up a paper comparing the political response to the anti-war and civil rights movements in the Bay Area to the present day civil rights responses to the War on Terror. Three pages minimum, but take as long as you'd like. I'm interested to see what you come up with." + +The bell rang a moment later and everyone filed out of the class. I hung back and waited for Ms Galvez to notice me. + +"Yes, Marcus?" + +"That was amazing," I said. "I never knew all that stuff about the sixties." + +"The seventies, too. This place has always been an exciting place to live in politically charged times. I really liked your reference to the Declaration -- that was very clever." + +"Thanks," I said. "It just came to me. I never really appreciated what those words all meant before today." + +"Well, those are the words every teacher loves to hear, Marcus," she said, and shook my hand. "I can't wait to read your paper." + +# + +I bought the Emma Goldman poster on the way home and stuck it up over my desk, tacked over a vintage black-light poster. I also bought a NEVER TRUST t-shirt that had a photoshop of Grover and Elmo kicking the grownups Gordon and Susan off Sesame Street. It made me laugh. I later found out that there had already been about six photoshop contests for the slogan online in places like Fark and Worth1000 and B3ta and there were hundreds of ready-made pics floating around to go on whatever merch someone churned out. + +Mom raised an eyebrow at the shirt, and Dad shook his head and lectured me about not looking for trouble. I felt a little vindicated by his reaction. + +Ange found me online again and we IM-flirted until late at night again. The white van with the antennas came back and I switched off my Xbox until it had passed. We'd all gotten used to doing that. + +Ange was really excited by this party. It looked like it was going to be monster. There were so many bands signed up they were talking about setting up a B-stage for the secondary acts. + +> How'd they get a permit to blast sound all night in that park? There's houses all around there + +> Per-mit? What is "per-mit"? Tell me more of your hu-man per-mit. + +> Woah, it's illegal? + +> Um, hello? /{You're}/ worried about breaking the law? + +> Fair point + +> LOL + +I felt a little premonition of nervousness though. I mean, I was taking this perfectly awesome girl out on a date that weekend -- well, she was taking me, technically -- to an illegal rave being held in the middle of a busy neighborhood. + +It was bound to be interesting at least. + +# + +Interesting. + +People started to drift into Dolores Park through the long Saturday afternoon, showing up among the ultimate frisbee players and the dog-walkers. Some of them played frisbee or walked dogs. It wasn't really clear how the concert was going to work, but there were a lot of cops and undercovers hanging around. You could tell the undercovers because, like Zit and Booger, they had Castro haircuts and Nebraska physiques: tubby guys with short hair and untidy mustaches. They drifted around, looking awkward and uncomfortable in their giant shorts and loose-fitting shirts that no-doubt hung down to cover the chandelier of gear hung around their midriffs. + +Dolores Park is pretty and sunny, with palm trees, tennis courts, and lots of hills and regular trees to run around on, or hang out on. Homeless people sleep there at night, but that's true everywhere in San Francisco. + +I met Ange down the street, at the anarchist bookstore. That had been my suggestion. In hindsight, it was a totally transparent move to seem cool and edgy to this girl, but at the time I would have sworn that I picked it because it was a convenient place to meet up. She was reading a book called /{Up Against the Wall Motherf_____r}/ when I got there. + +"Nice," I said. "You kiss your mother with that mouth?" + +"Your mama don't complain," she said. "Actually, it's a history of a group of people like the Yippies, but from New York. They all used that word as their last names, like 'Ben M-F.' The idea was to have a group out there, making news, but with a totally unprintable name. Just to screw around with the news-media. Pretty funny, really." She put the book back on the shelf and now I wondered if I should hug her. People in California hug to say hello and goodbye all the time. Except when they don't. And sometimes they kiss on the cheek. It's all very confusing. + +She settled it for me by grabbing me in a hug and tugging my head down to her, kissing me hard on the cheek, then blowing a fart on my neck. I laughed and pushed her away. + +"You want a burrito?" I asked. + +"Is that a question or a statement of the obvious?" + +"Neither. It's an order." + +I bought some funny stickers that said THIS PHONE IS TAPPED which were the right size to put on the receivers on the pay phones that still lined the streets of the Mission, it being the kind of neighborhood where you got people who couldn't necessarily afford a cellphone. + +We walked out into the night air. I told Ange about the scene at the park when I left. + +"I bet they have a hundred of those trucks parked around the block," she said. "The better to bust you with." + +"Um." I looked around. "I sort of hoped that you would say something like, 'Aw, there's no chance they'll do anything about it.'" + +"I don't think that's really the idea. The idea is to put a lot of civilians in a position where the cops have to decide, are we going to treat these ordinary people like terrorists? It's a little like the jamming, but with music instead of gadgets. You jam, right?" + +Sometimes I forget that all my friends don't know that Marcus and M1k3y are the same person. "Yeah, a little," I said. + +"This is like jamming with a bunch of awesome bands." + +"I see." + +Mission burritos are an institution. They are cheap, giant and delicious. Imagine a tube the size of a bazooka shell, filled with spicy grilled meat, guacamole, salsa, tomatoes, refried beans, rice, onions and cilantro. It has the same relationship to Taco Bell that a Lamborghini has to a Hot Wheels car. + +There are about two hundred Mission burrito joints. They're all heroically ugly, with uncomfortable seats, minimal decor -- faded Mexican tourist office posters and electrified framed Jesus and Mary holograms -- and loud mariachi music. The thing that distinguishes them, mostly, is what kind of exotic meat they fill their wares with. The really authentic places have brains and tongue, which I never order, but it's nice to know it's there. + +The place we went to had both brains and tongue, which we didn't order. I got carne asada and she got shredded chicken and we each got a big cup of horchata. + +As soon as we sat down, she unrolled her burrito and took a little bottle out of her purse. It was a little stainless-steel aerosol canister that looked for all the world like a pepper-spray self-defense unit. She aimed it at her burrito's exposed guts and misted them with a fine red oily spray. I caught a whiff of it and my throat closed and my eyes watered. + +"What the hell are you doing to that poor, defenseless burrito?" + +She gave me a wicked smile. "I'm a spicy food addict," she said. "This is capsaicin oil in a mister." + +"Capsaicin --" + +"Yeah, the stuff in pepper spray. This is like pepper spray but slightly more dilute. And way more delicious. Think of it as Spicy Cajun Visine if it helps." + +My eyes burned just thinking of it. + +"You're kidding," I said. "You are so not going to eat that." + +Her eyebrows shot up. "That sounds like a challenge, sonny. You just watch me." + +She rolled the burrito up as carefully as a stoner rolling up a joint, tucking the ends in, then re-wrapping it in tinfoil. She peeled off one end and brought it up to her mouth, poised with it just before her lips. + +Right up to the time she bit into it, I couldn't believe that she was going to do it. I mean, that was basically an anti-personnel weapon she'd just slathered on her dinner. + +She bit into it. Chewed. Swallowed. Gave every impression of having a delicious dinner. + +"Want a bite?" she said, innocently. + +"Yeah," I said. I like spicy food. I always order the curries with four chilies next to them on the menu at the Pakistani places. + +I peeled back more foil and took a big bite. + +Big mistake. + +You know that feeling you get when you take a big bite of horseradish or wasabi or whatever, and it feels like your sinuses are closing at the same time as your windpipe, filling your head with trapped, nuclear-hot air that tries to batter its way out through your watering eyes and nostrils? That feeling like steam is about to pour out of your ears like a cartoon character? + +This was a lot worse. + +This was like putting your hand on a hot stove, only it's not your hand, it's the entire inside of your head, and your esophagus all the way down to your stomach. My entire body sprang out in a sweat and I choked and choked. + +Wordlessly, she passed me my horchata and I managed to get the straw into my mouth and suck hard on it, gulping down half of it in one go. + +"So there's a scale, the Scoville scale, that we chili-fanciers use to talk about how spicy a pepper is. Pure capsaicin is about 15 million Scovilles. Tabasco is about 50,000. Pepper spray is a healthy three million. This stuff is a puny 200,000, about as hot as a mild Scotch Bonnet Pepper. I worked up to it in about a year. Some of the real hardcore can get up to a million or so, twenty times hotter than Tabasco. That's pretty freaking hot. At Scoville temperatures like that, your brain gets totally awash in endorphins. It's a better body-stone than hash. And it's good for you." + +I was getting my sinuses back now, able to breathe without gasping. + +"Of course, you get a ferocious ring of fire when you go to the john," she said, winking at me. + +Yowch. + +"You are insane," I said. + +"Fine talk from a man whose hobby is building and smashing laptops," she said. + +"Touche," I said and touched my forehead. + +"Want some?" She held out her mister. + +"Pass," I said, quickly enough that we both laughed. + +When we left the restaurant and headed for Dolores park, she put her arm around my waist and I found that she was just the right height for me to put my arm around her shoulders. That was new. I'd never been a tall guy, and the girls I'd dated had all been my height -- teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature. It was nice. It felt nice. + +We turned the corner on 20th Street and walked up toward Dolores. Before we'd taken a single step, we could feel the buzz. It was like the hum of a million bees. There were lots of people streaming toward the park, and when I looked toward it, I saw that it was about a hundred times more crowded than it had been when I went to meet Ange. + +That sight made my blood run hot. It was a beautiful cool night and we were about to party, really party, party like there was no tomorrow. "Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." + +Without saying anything we both broke into a trot. There were lots of cops, with tense faces, but what the hell were they going to do? There were a /{lot}/ of people in the park. I'm not so good at counting crowds. The papers later quoted organizers as saying there were 20,000 people; the cops said 5,000. Maybe that means there were 12,500. + +Whatever. It was more people than I'd ever stood among, as part of an unscheduled, unsanctioned, /{illegal}/ event. + +We were among them in an instant. I can't swear to it, but I don't think there was anyone over 25 in that press of bodies. Everyone was smiling. Some young kids were there, 10 or 12, and that made me feel better. No one would do anything too stupid with kids that little in the crowd. No one wanted to see little kids get hurt. This was just going to be a glorious spring night of celebration. + +I figured the thing to do was push in towards the tennis courts. We threaded our way through the crowd, and to stay together we took each other's hands. Only staying together didn't require us to intertwine fingers. That was strictly for pleasure. It was very pleasurable. + +The bands were all inside the tennis courts, with their guitars and mixers and keyboards and even a drum kit. Later, on Xnet, I found a Flickr stream of them smuggling all this stuff in, piece by piece, in gym bags and under their coats. Along with it all were huge speakers, the kind you see in automotive supply places, and among them, a stack of...car batteries. I laughed. Genius! That was how they were going to power their stacks. From where I stood, I could see that they were cells from a hybrid car, a Prius. Someone had gutted an eco-mobile to power the night's entertainment. The batteries continued outside the courts, stacked up against the fence, tethered to the main stack by wires threaded through the chain-link. I counted -- 200 batteries! Christ! Those things weighed a ton, too. + +There's no way they organized this without email and wikis and mailing lists. And there's no way people this smart would have done that on the public Internet. This had all taken place on the Xnet, I'd bet my boots on it. + +We just kind of bounced around in the crowd for a while as the bands tuned up and conferred with one another. I saw Trudy Doo from a distance, in the tennis courts. She looked like she was in a cage, like a pro wrestler. She was wearing a torn wife-beater and her hair was in long, fluorescent pink dreads down to her waist. She was wearing army camouflage pants and giant gothy boots with steel over-toes. As I watched, she picked up a heavy motorcycle jacket, worn as a catcher's mitt, and put it on like armor. It probably was armor, I realized. + +I tried to wave to her, to impress Ange I guess, but she didn't see me and I kind of looked like a spazz so I stopped. The energy in the crowd was amazing. You hear people talk about "vibes" and "energy" for big groups of people, but until you've experienced it, you probably think it's just a figure of speech. + +It's not. It's the smiles, infectious and big as watermelons, on every face. Everyone bopping a little to an unheard rhythm, shoulders rocking. Rolling walks. Jokes and laughs. The tone of every voice tight and excited, like a firework about to go off. And you can't help but be a part of it. Because you are. + +By the time the bands kicked off, I was utterly stoned on crowd-vibe. The opening act was some kind of Serbian turbo-folk, which I couldn't figure out how to dance to. I know how to dance to exactly two kinds of music: trance (shuffle around and let the music move you) and punk (bash around and mosh until you get hurt or exhausted or both). The next act was Oakland hip-hoppers, backed by a thrash metal band, which is better than it sounds. Then some bubble-gum pop. Then Speedwhores took the stage, and Trudy Doo stepped up to the mic. + +"My name is Trudy Doo and you're an idiot if you trust me. I'm thirty two and it's too late for me. I'm lost. I'm stuck in the old way of thinking. I still take my freedom for granted and let other people take it away from me. You're the first generation to grow up in Gulag America, and you know what your freedom is worth to the last goddamned cent!" + +The crowd roared. She was playing fast little skittery nervous chords on her guitar and her bass player, a huge fat girl with a dykey haircut and even bigger boots and a smile you could open beer bottles with was laying it down fast and hard already. I wanted to bounce. I bounced. Ange bounced with me. We were sweating freely in the evening, which reeked of perspiration and pot smoke. Warm bodies crushed in on all sides of us. They bounced too. + +"Don't trust anyone over 25!" she shouted. + +We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring. + +"Don't trust anyone over 25!" + +"/{Don't trust anyone over 25!}/" + +"Don't trust anyone over 25!" + +"/{Don't trust anyone over 25!}/" + +"Don't trust anyone over 25!" + +"/{Don't trust anyone over 25!}/" + +She banged some hard chords on her guitar and the other guitarist, a little pixie of a girl whose face bristled with piercings, jammed in, going wheedle-dee-wheedle-dee-dee up high, past the twelfth fret. + +"It's our goddamned city! It's our goddamned country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to victory! *Take it back!" + +"TAKE IT BACK!" we roared. She jammed down hard on her guitar. We roared the note back and then it got really really LOUD. + +# + +I danced until I was so tired I couldn't dance another step. Ange danced alongside of me. Technically, we were rubbing our sweaty bodies against each other for several hours, but believe it or not, I totally wasn't being a horn-dog about it. We were dancing, lost in the godbeat and the thrash and the screaming -- TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK! + +When I couldn't dance anymore, I grabbed her hand and she squeezed mine like I was keeping her from falling off a building. She dragged me toward the edge of the crowd, where it got thinner and cooler. Out there, on the edge of Dolores Park, we were in the cool air and the sweat on our bodies went instantly icy. We shivered and she threw her arms around my waist. "Warm me," she commanded. I didn't need a hint. I hugged her back. Her heart was an echo of the fast beats from the stage -- breakbeats now, fast and furious and wordless. + +She smelled of sweat, a sharp tang that smelled great. I knew I smelled of sweat too. My nose was pointed into the top of her head, and her face was right at my collarbone. She moved her hands to my neck and tugged. + +"Get down here, I didn't bring a stepladder," is what she said and I tried to smile, but it's hard to smile when you're kissing. + +Like I said, I'd kissed three girls in my life. Two of them had never kissed anyone before. One had been dating since she was 12. She had issues. + +None of them kissed like Ange. She made her whole mouth soft, like the inside of a ripe piece of fruit, and she didn't jam her tongue in my mouth, but slid it in there, and sucked my lips into her mouth at the same time, so it was like my mouth and hers were merging. I heard myself moan and I grabbed her and squeezed her harder. + +Slowly, gently, we lowered ourselves to the grass. We lay on our sides and clutched each other, kissing and kissing. The world disappeared so there was only the kiss. + +My hands found her butt, her waist. The edge of her t-shirt. Her warm tummy, her soft navel. They inched higher. She moaned too. + +"Not here," she said. "Let's move over there." She pointed across the street at the big white church that gives Mission Dolores Park and the Mission its name. Holding hands, moving quickly, we crossed to the church. It had big pillars in front of it. She put my back up against one of them and pulled my face down to hers again. My hands went quickly and boldly back to her shirt. I slipped them up her front. + +"It undoes in the back," she whispered into my mouth. I had a boner that could cut glass. I moved my hands around to her back, which was strong and broad, and found the hook with my fingers, which were trembling. I fumbled for a while, thinking of all those jokes about how bad guys are at undoing bras. I was bad at it. Then the hook sprang free. She gasped into my mouth. I slipped my hands around, feeling the wetness of her armpits -- which was sexy and not at all gross for some reason -- and then brushed the sides of her breasts. + +That's when the sirens started. + +They were louder than anything I'd ever heard. A sound like a physical sensation, like something blowing you off your feet. A sound as loud as your ears could process, and then louder. + +"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY," a voice said, like God rattling in my skull. + +"THIS IS AN ILLEGAL GATHERING. DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY." + +The band had stopped playing. The noise of the crowd across the street changed. It got scared. Angry. + +I heard a click as the PA system of car-speakers and car-batteries in the tennis courts powered up. + +"TAKE IT BACK!" + +It was a defiant yell, like a sound shouted into the surf or screamed off a cliff. + +"TAKE IT BACK!" + +The crowd /{growled}/, a sound that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. + +"/{TAKE IT BACK}/!" they chanted. "TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK!" + +The police moved in in lines, carrying plastic shields, wearing Darth Vader helmets that covered their faces. Each one had a black truncheon and infra-red goggles. They looked like soldiers out of some futuristic war movie. They took a step forward in unison and every one of them banged his truncheon on his shield, a cracking noise like the earth splitting. Another step, another crack. They were all around the park and closing in now. + +"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY," the voice of God said again. There were helicopters overhead now. No floodlights, though. The infrared goggles, right. Of course. They'd have infrared scopes in the sky, too. I pulled Ange back against the doorway of the church, tucking us back from the cops and the choppers. + +"TAKE IT BACK!" the PA roared. It was Trudy Doo's rebel yell and I heard her guitar thrash out some chords, then her drummer playing, then that big deep bass. + +"TAKE IT BACK!" the crowd answered, and they boiled out of the park at the police lines. + +I've never been in a war, but now I think I know what it must be like. What it must be like when scared kids charge across a field at an opposing force, knowing what's coming, running anyway, screaming, hollering. + +"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY," the voice of God said. It was coming from trucks parked all around the park, trucks that had swung into place in the last few seconds. + +That's when the mist fell. It came out of the choppers, and we just caught the edge of it. It made the top of my head feel like it was going to come off. It made my sinuses feel like they were being punctured with ice-picks. It made my eyes swell and water, and my throat close. + +Pepper spray. Not 200 thousand Scovilles. A million and a half. They'd gassed the crowd. + +I didn't see what happened next, but I heard it, over the sound of both me and Ange choking and holding each other. First the choking, retching sounds. The guitar and drums and bass crashed to a halt. Then coughing. + +Then screaming. + +The screaming went on for a long time. When I could see again, the cops had their scopes up on their foreheads and the choppers were flooding Dolores Park with so much light it looked like daylight. Everyone was looking at the Park, which was good news, because when the lights went up like that, we were totally visible. + +"What do we do?" Ange said. Her voice was tight, scared. I didn't trust myself to speak for a moment. I swallowed a few times. + +"We walk away," I said. "That's all we can do. Walk away. Like we were just passing by. Down to Dolores and turn left and up towards 16th Street. Like we're just passing by. Like this is none of our business." + +"That'll never work," she said. + +"It's all I've got." + +"You don't think we should try to run for it?" + +"No," I said. "If we run, they'll chase us. Maybe if we walk, they'll figure we haven't done anything and let us alone. They have a lot of arrests to make. They'll be busy for a long time." + +The park was rolling with bodies, people and adults clawing at their faces and gasping. The cops dragged them by the armpits, then lashed their wrists with plastic cuffs and tossed them into the trucks like rag-dolls. + +"OK?" I said. + +"OK," she said. + +And that's just what we did. Walked, holding hands, quickly and business-like, like two people wanting to avoid whatever trouble someone else was making. The kind of walk you adopt when you want to pretend you can't see a panhandler, or don't want to get involved in a street-fight. + +It worked. + +We reached the corner and turned and kept going. Neither of us dared to speak for two blocks. Then I let out a gasp of air I hadn't know I'd been holding in. + +We came to 16th Street and turned down toward Mission Street. Normally that's a pretty scary neighborhood at 2AM on a Saturday night. That night it was a relief -- same old druggies and hookers and dealers and drunks. No cops with truncheons, no gas. + +"Um," I said as we breathed in the night air. "Coffee?" + +"Home," she said. "I think home for now. Coffee later." + +"Yeah," I agreed. She lived up in Hayes Valley. I spotted a taxi rolling by and I hailed it. That was a small miracle -- there are hardly any cabs when you need them in San Francisco. + +"Have you got cabfare home?" + +"Yeah," she said. The cab-driver looked at us through his window. I opened the back door so he wouldn't take off. + +"Good night," I said. + +She put her hands behind my head and pulled my face toward her. She kissed me hard on the mouth, nothing sexual in it, but somehow more intimate for that. + +"Good night," she whispered in my ear, and slipped into the taxi. + +Head swimming, eyes running, a burning shame for having left all those Xnetters to the tender mercies of the DHS and the SFPD, I set off for home. + +# + +Monday morning, Fred Benson was standing behind Ms Galvez's desk. + +"Ms Galvez will no longer be teaching this class," he said, once we'd taken our seats. He had a self-satisfied note that I recognized immediately. On a hunch, I checked out Charles. He was smiling like it was his birthday and he'd been given the best present in the world. + +I put my hand up. + +"Why not?" + +"It's Board policy not to discuss employee matters with anyone except the employee and the disciplinary committee," he said, without even bothering to hide how much he enjoyed saying it. + +"We'll be beginning a new unit today, on national security. Your SchoolBooks have the new texts. Please open them and turn to the first screen." + +The opening screen was emblazoned with a DHS logo and the title: WHAT EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT HOMELAND SECURITY. + +I wanted to throw my SchoolBook on the floor. + +# + +I'd made arrangements to meet Ange at a cafe in her neighborhood after school. I jumped on the BART and found myself sitting behind two guys in suits. They were looking at the San Francisco Chronicle, which featured a full-page post-mortem on the "youth riot" in Mission Dolores Park. They were tutting and clucking over it. Then one said to the other, "It's like they're brainwashed or something. Christ, were we ever that stupid?" + +I got up and moved to another seat. + +1~ Chapter 13 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Books-A-Million,~{ Books-A-Million http://www.booksamillion.com/ncom/books?&isbn=0765319853 }~ a chain of gigantic bookstores spread across the USA. I first encountered Books-A-Million while staying at a hotel in Terre Haute, Indiana (I was giving a speech at the Rose Hulman Institute of Technology later that day). The store was next to my hotel and I really needed some reading material -- I'd been on the road for a solid month and I'd read everything in my suitcase, and I had another five cities to go before I headed home. As I stared intently at the shelves, a clerk asked me if I needed any help. Now, I've worked at bookstores before, and a knowledgeable clerk is worth her weight in gold, so I said sure, and started to describe my tastes, naming authors I'd enjoyed. The clerk smiled and said, "I've got just the book for you," and proceeded to take down a copy of my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I busted out laughing, introduced myself, and had an absolutely lovely chat about science fiction that almost made me late to give my speech!] }/ + +"They're total whores," Ange said, spitting the word out. "In fact, that's an insult to hardworking whores everywhere. They're, they're /{profiteers.}/" + +We were looking at a stack of newspapers we'd picked up and brought to the cafe. They all contained "reporting" on the party in Dolores Park and to a one, they made it sound like a drunken, druggy orgy of kids who'd attacked the cops. /{USA Today}/ described the cost of the "riot" and included the cost of washing away the pepper-spray residue from the gas-bombing, the rash of asthma attacks that clogged the city's emergency rooms, and the cost of processing the eight hundred arrested "rioters." + +No one was telling our side. + +"Well, the Xnet got it right, anyway," I said. I'd saved a bunch of the blogs and videos and photostreams to my phone and I showed them to her. They were first-hand accounts from people who'd been gassed, and beaten up. The video showed us all dancing, having fun, showed the peaceful political speeches and the chant of "Take It Back" and Trudy Doo talking about us being the only generation that could believe in fighting for our freedoms. + +"We need to make people know about this," she said. + +"Yeah," I said, glumly. "That's a nice theory." + +"Well, why do you think the press doesn't ever publish our side?" + +"You said it, they're whores." + +"Yeah, but whores do it for the money. They could sell more papers and commercials if they had a controversy. All they have now is a crime -- controversy is much bigger." + +"OK, point taken. So why don't they do it? Well, reporters can barely search regular blogs, let alone keep track of the Xnet. It's not as if that's a real adult-friendly place to be." + +"Yeah," she said. "Well, we can fix that, right?" + +"Huh?" + +"Write it all up. Put it in one place, with all the links. A single place where you can go that's intended for the press to find it and get the whole picture. Link it to the HOWTOs for Xnet. Internet users can get to the Xnet, provided they don't care about the DHS finding out what they've been surfing." + +"You think it'll work?" + +"Well, even if it doesn't, it's something positive to do." + +"Why would they listen to us, anyway?" + +"Who wouldn't listen to M1k3y?" + +I put down my coffee. I picked up my phone and slipped it into my pocket. I stood up, turned on my heel, and walked out of the cafe. I picked a direction at random and kept going. My face felt tight, the blood gone into my stomach, which churned. + +/{They know who you are,}/ I thought. /{They know who M1k3y is.}/ That was it. If Ange had figured it out, the DHS had too. I was doomed. I had known that since they let me go from the DHS truck, that someday they'd come and arrest me and put me away forever, send me to wherever Darryl had gone. + +It was all over. + +She nearly tackled me as I reached Market Street. She was out of breath and looked furious. + +"What the /{hell}/ is your problem, mister?" + +I shook her off and kept walking. It was all over. + +She grabbed me again. "Stop it, Marcus, you're scaring me. Come on, talk to me." + +I stopped and looked at her. She blurred before my eyes. I couldn't focus on anything. I had a mad desire to jump into the path of a Muni trolley as it tore past us, down the middle of the road. Better to die than to go back. + +"Marcus!" She did something I'd only seen people do in the movies. She slapped me, a hard crack across the face. "Talk to me, dammit!" + +I looked at her and put my hand to my face, which was stinging hard. + +"No one is supposed to know who I am," I said. "I can't put it any more simply. If you know, it's all over. Once other people know, it's all over." + +"Oh god, I'm sorry. Look, I only know because, well, because I blackmailed Jolu. After the party I stalked you a little, trying to figure out if you were the nice guy you seemed to be or a secret axe-murderer. I've known Jolu for a long time and when I asked him about you, he gushed like you were the Second Coming or something, but I could hear that there was something he wasn't telling me. I've known Jolu for a long time. He dated my older sister at computer camp when he was a kid. I have some really good dirt on him. I told him I'd go public with it if he didn't tell me." + +"So he told you." + +"No," she said. "He told me to go to hell. Then I told him something about me. Something I'd never told anyone else." + +"What?" + +She looked at me. Looked around. Looked back at me. "OK. I won't swear you to secrecy because what's the point? Either I can trust you or I can't. + +"Last year, I --" she broke off. "Last year, I stole the standardized tests and published them on the net. It was just a lark. I happened to be walking past the principal's office and I saw them in his safe, and the door was hanging open. I ducked into his office -- there were six sets of copies and I just put one into my bag and took off again. When I got home, I scanned them all and put them up on a Pirate Party server in Denmark." + +"That was /{you}/?" I said. + +She blushed. "Um. Yeah." + +"Holy crap!" I said. It had been huge news. The Board of Education said that its No Child Left Behind tests had cost tens of millions of dollars to produce and that they'd have to spend it all over again now that they'd had the leak. They called it "edu-terrorism." The news had speculated endlessly about the political motivations of the leaker, wondering if it was a teacher's protest, or a student, or a thief, or a disgruntled government contractor. + +"That was YOU?" + +"It was me," she said. + +"And you told Jolu this --" + +"Because I wanted him to be sure that I would keep the secret. If he knew /{my}/ secret, then he'd have something he could use to put me in jail if I opened my trap. Give a little, get a little. Quid pro quo, like in Silence of the Lambs." + +"And he told you." + +"No," she said. "He didn't." + +"But --" + +"Then I told him how into you I was. How I was planning to totally make an idiot of myself and throw myself at you. /{Then}/ he told me." + +I couldn't think of anything to say then. I looked down at my toes. She grabbed my hands and squeezed them. + +"I'm sorry I squeezed it out of him. It was your decision to tell me, if you were going to tell me at all. I had no business --" + +"No," I said. Now that I knew how she'd found out, I was starting to calm down. "No, it's good you know. /{You}/." + +"Me," she said. "Li'l ol' me." + +"OK, I can live with this. But there's one other thing." + +"What?" + +"There's no way to say this without sounding like a jerk, so I'll just say it. People who date each other -- or whatever it is we're doing now -- they split up. When they split up, they get angry at each other. Sometimes even hate each other. It's really cold to think about that happening between us, but you know, we've got to think about it." + +"I solemnly promise that there is nothing you could ever do to me that would cause me to betray your secret. Nothing. Screw a dozen cheerleaders in my bed while my mother watches. Make me listen to Britney Spears. Rip off my laptop, smash it with hammers and soak it in sea-water. I promise. Nothing. Ever." + +I whooshed out some air. + +"Um," I said. + +"Now would be a good time to kiss me," she said, and turned her face up. + +# + +M1k3y's next big project on the Xnet was putting together the ultimate roundup of reports of the DON'T TRUST party at Dolores Park. I put together the biggest, most bad-ass site I could, with sections showing the action by location, by time, by category -- police violence, dancing, aftermath, singing. I uploaded the whole concert. + +It was pretty much all I worked on for the rest of the night. And the next night. And the next. + +My mailbox overflowed with suggestions from people. They sent me dumps off their phones and their pocket-cameras. Then I got an email from a name I recognized -- Dr Eeevil (three "e"s), one of the prime maintainers of ParanoidLinux. + +> M1k3y + +> I have been watching your Xnet experiment with great interest. Here in Germany, we have much experience with what happens with a government that gets out of control. + +> One thing you should know is that every camera has a unique "noise signature" that can be used to later connect a picture with a camera. That means that the photos you're republishing on your site could potentially be used to identify the photographers, should they later be picked up for something else. + +> Luckily, it's not hard to strip out the signatures, if you care to. There's a utility on the ParanoidLinux distro you're using that does this -- it's called photonomous, and you'll find it in /usr/bin. Just read the man pages for documentation. It's simple though. + +> Good luck with what you're doing. Don't get caught. Stay free. Stay paranoid. + +> Dr Eeevil + +I de-fingerprintized all the photos I'd posted and put them back up, along with a note explaining what Dr Eeevil had told me, warning everyone else to do the same. We all had the same basic ParanoidXbox install, so we could all anonymize our pictures. There wasn't anything I could do about the photos that had already been downloaded and cached, but from now on we'd be smarter. + +That was all the thought I gave the matter that night, until I got down to breakfast the next morning and Mom had the radio on, playing the NPR morning news. + +"Arabic news agency Al-Jazeera is running pictures, video and first-hand accounts of last weekend's youth riot in Mission Dolores park," the announcer said as I was drinking a glass of orange juice. I managed not to spray it across the room, but I /{did}/ choke a little. + +"Al-Jazeera reporters claim that these accounts were published on the so-called 'Xnet,' a clandestine network used by students and Al-Quaeda sympathizers in the Bay Area. This network's existence has long been rumored, but today marks its first mainstream mention." + +Mom shook her head. "Just what we need," she said. "As if the police weren't bad enough. Kids running around, pretending to be guerrillas and giving them the excuse to really crack down." + +"The Xnet weblogs have carried hundreds of reports and multimedia files from young people who attended the riot and allege that they were gathered peacefully until the police attacked /{them}/. Here is one of those accounts. + +"'All we were doing was dancing. I brought my little brother. Bands played and we talked about freedom, about how we were losing it to these jerks who say they hate terrorists but who attack us though we're not terrorists we're Americans. I think they hate freedom, not us. + +"We danced and the bands played and it was all fun and good and then the cops started shouting at us to disperse. We all shouted take it back! Meaning take America back. The cops gassed us with pepper spray. My little brother is twelve. He missed three days of school. My stupid parents say it was my fault. How about the police? We pay them and they're supposed to protect us but they gassed us for no good reason, gassed us like they gas enemy soldiers.' + +"Similar accounts, including audio and video, can be found on Al-Jazeera's website and on the Xnet. You can find directions for accessing this Xnet on NPR's homepage." + +Dad came down. + +"Do you use the Xnet?" he said. He looked intensely at my face. I felt myself squirm. + +"It's for video-games," I said. "That's what most people use it for. It's just a wireless network. It's what everyone did with those free Xboxes they gave away last year." + +He glowered at me. "Games? Marcus, you don't realize it, but you're providing cover for people who plan on attacking and destroying this country. I don't want to see you using this Xnet. Not anymore. Do I make myself clear?" + +I wanted to argue. Hell, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders. But I didn't. I looked away. I said, "Sure, Dad." I went to school. + +# + +At first I was relieved when I discovered that they weren't going to leave Mr Benson in charge of my social studies class. But the woman they found to replace him was my worst nightmare. + +She was young, just about 28 or 29, and pretty, in a wholesome kind of way. She was blonde and spoke with a soft southern accent when she introduced herself to us as Mrs Andersen. That set off alarm bells right away. I didn't know /{any}/ women under the age of sixty that called themselves "Mrs." + +But I was prepared to overlook it. She was young, pretty, she sounded nice. She would be OK. + +She wasn't OK. + +"Under what circumstances should the federal government be prepared to suspend the Bill of Rights?" she said, turning to the blackboard and writing down a row of numbers, one through ten. + +"Never," I said, not waiting to be called on. This was easy. "Constitutional rights are absolute." + +"That's not a very sophisticated view." She looked at her seating-plan. "Marcus. For example, say a policeman conducts an improper search -- he goes beyond the stuff specified in his warrant. He discovers compelling evidence that a bad guy killed your father. It's the only evidence that exists. Should the bad guy go free?" + +I knew the answer to this, but I couldn't really explain it. "Yes," I said, finally. "But the police shouldn't conduct improper searches --" + +"Wrong," she said. "The proper response to police misconduct is disciplinary action against the police, not punishing all of society for one cop's mistake." She wrote "Criminal guilt" under point one on the board. + +"Other ways in which the Bill of Rights can be superseded?" + +Charles put his hand up. "Shouting fire in a crowded theater?" + +"Very good --" she consulted the seating plan -- "Charles. There are many instances in which the First Amendment is not absolute. Let's list some more of those." + +Charles put his hand up again. "Endangering a law enforcement officer." + +"Yes, disclosing the identity of an undercover policeman or intelligence officer. Very good." She wrote it down. "Others?" + +"National security," Charles said, not waiting for her to call on him again. "Libel. Obscenity. Corruption of minors. Child porn. Bomb-making recipes." Mrs Andersen wrote these down fast, but stopped at child porn. "Child porn is just a form of obscenity." + +I was feeling sick. This was not what I'd learned or believed about my country. I put my hand up. + +"Yes, Marcus?" + +"I don't get it. You're making it sound like the Bill of Rights is optional. It's the Constitution. We're supposed to follow it absolutely." + +"That's a common oversimplification," she said, giving me a fake smile. "But the fact of the matter is that the framers of the Constitution intended it to be a living document that was revised over time. They understood that the Republic wouldn't be able to last forever if the government of the day couldn't govern according to the needs of the day. They never intended the Constitution to be looked on like religious doctrine. After all, they came here fleeing religious doctrine." + +I shook my head. "What? No. They were merchants and artisans who were loyal to the King until he instituted policies that were against their interests and enforced them brutally. The religious refugees were way earlier." + +"Some of the Framers were descended from religious refugees," she said. + +"And the Bill of Rights isn't supposed to be something you pick and choose from. What the Framers hated was tyranny. That's what the Bill of Rights is supposed to prevent. They were a revolutionary army and they wanted a set of principles that everyone could agree to. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The right of people to throw off their oppressors." + +"Yes, yes," she said, waving at me. "They believed in the right of people to get rid of their Kings, but --" Charles was grinning and when she said that, he smiled even wider. + +"They set out the Bill of Rights because they thought that having absolute rights was better than the risk that someone would take them away. Like the First Amendment: it's supposed to protect us by preventing the government from creating two kinds of speech, allowed speech and criminal speech. They didn't want to face the risk that some jerk would decide that the things that he found unpleasant were illegal." + +She turned and wrote, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" on it. + +"We're getting a little ahead of the lesson, but you seem like an advanced group." The others laughed at this, nervously. + +"The role of government is to secure for citizens the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In that order. It's like a filter. If the government wants to do something that makes us a little unhappy, or takes away some of our liberty, it's OK, providing they're doing it to save our lives. That's why the cops can lock you up if they think you're a danger to yourself or others. You lose your liberty and happiness to protect life. If you've got life, you might get liberty and happiness later." + +Some of the others had their hands up. "Doesn't that mean that they can do anything they want, if they say it's to stop someone from hurting us in the future?" + +"Yeah," another kid said. "This sounds like you're saying that national security is more important than the Constitution." + +I was so proud of my fellow students then. I said, "How can you protect freedom by suspending the Bill of Rights?" + +She shook her head at us like we were being very stupid. "The 'revolutionary' founding fathers /{shot traitors}/ and spies. They didn't believe in absolute freedom, not when it threatened the Republic. Now you take these Xnet people --" + +I tried hard not to stiffen. + +"-- these so-called jammers who were on the news this morning. After this city was attacked by people who've declared war on this country, they set about sabotaging the security measures set up to catch the bad guys and prevent them from doing it again. They did this by endangering and inconveniencing their fellow citizens --" + +"They did it to show that our rights were being taken away in the name of protecting them!" I said. OK, I shouted. God, she had me so steamed. "They did it because the government was treating /{everyone}/ like a suspected terrorist." + +"So they wanted to prove that they shouldn't be treated like terrorists," Charles shouted back, "so they acted like terrorists? So they committed terrorism?" + +I boiled. + +"Oh for Christ's sake. Committed terrorism? They showed that universal surveillance was more dangerous than terrorism. Look at what happened in the park last weekend. Those people were dancing and listening to music. How is /{that}/ terrorism?" + +The teacher crossed the room and stood before me, looming over me until I shut up. "Marcus, you seem to think that nothing has changed in this country. You need to understand that the bombing of the Bay Bridge changed everything. Thousands of our friends and relatives lie dead at the bottom of the Bay. This is a time for national unity in the face of the violent insult our country has suffered --" + +I stood up. I'd had enough of this "everything has changed" crapola. "National unity? The whole point of America is that we're the country where dissent is welcome. We're a country of dissidents and fighters and university dropouts and free speech people." + +I thought of Ms Galvez's last lesson and the thousands of Berkeley students who'd surrounded the police-van when they tried to arrest a guy for distributing civil rights literature. No one tried to stop those trucks when they drove away with all the people who'd been dancing in the park. I didn't try. I was running away. + +Maybe everything /{had}/ changed. + +"I believe you know where Mr Benson's office is," she said to me. "You are to present yourself to him immediately. I will /{not}/ have my classes disrupted by disrespectful behavior. For someone who claims to love freedom of speech, you're certainly willing to shout down anyone who disagrees with you." + +I picked up my SchoolBook and my bag and stormed out. The door had a gas-lift, so it was impossible to slam, or I would have slammed it. + +I went fast to Mr Benson's office. Cameras filmed me as I went. My gait was recorded. The arphids in my student ID broadcast my identity to sensors in the hallway. It was like being in jail. + +"Close the door, Marcus," Mr Benson said. He turned his screen around so that I could see the video feed from the social studies classroom. He'd been watching. + +"What do you have to say for yourself?" + +"That wasn't teaching, it was /{propaganda}/. She told us that the Constitution didn't matter!" + +"No, she said it wasn't religious doctrine. And you attacked her like some kind of fundamentalist, proving her point. Marcus, you of all people should understand that everything changed when the bridge was bombed. Your friend Darryl --" + +"Don't you say a goddamned word about him," I said, the anger bubbling over. "You're not fit to talk about him. Yeah, I understand that everything's different now. We used to be a free country. Now we're not." + +"Marcus, do you know what 'zero-tolerance' means?" + +I backed down. He could expel me for "threatening behavior." It was supposed to be used against gang kids who tried to intimidate their teachers. But of course he wouldn't have any compunctions about using it on me. + +"Yes," I said. "I know what it means." + +"I think you owe me an apology," he said. + +I looked at him. He was barely suppressing his sadistic smile. A part of me wanted to grovel. It wanted to beg for his forgiveness for all my shame. I tamped that part down and decided that I would rather get kicked out than apologize. + +"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." I remembered it word for word. + +He shook his head. "Remembering things isn't the same as understanding them, sonny." He bent over his computer and made some clicks. His printer purred. He handed me a sheet of warm Board letterhead that said I'd been suspended for two weeks. + +"I'll email your parents now. If you are still on school property in thirty minutes, you'll be arrested for trespassing." + +I looked at him. + +"You don't want to declare war on me in my own school," he said. "You can't win that war. GO!" + +I left. + +1~ Chapter 14 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, California.~{ Mysterious Galaxy http://mysteriousgalaxy.booksense.com/NASApp/store/Product?s=showproduct&isbn=9780765319852 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 San Diego, CA USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747 }~ The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to sign books every time I've been in San Diego for a conference or to teach (the Clarion Writers' Workshop is based at UC San Diego in nearby La Jolla, CA), and every time I show up, they pack the house. This is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who know that they'll always be able to get great recommendations and great ideas at the store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion down to the store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book and I've never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.] }/ + +The Xnet wasn't much fun in the middle of the school-day, when all the people who used it were in school. I had the piece of paper folded in the back pocket of my jeans, and I threw it on the kitchen table when I got home. I sat down in the living room and switched on the TV. I never watched it, but I knew that my parents did. The TV and the radio and the newspapers were where they got all their ideas about the world. + +The news was terrible. There were so many reasons to be scared. American soldiers were dying all over the world. Not just soldiers, either. National guardsmen, who thought they were signing up to help rescue people from hurricanes, stationed overseas for years and years of a long and endless war. + +I flipped around the 24-hour news networks, one after another, a parade of officials telling us why we should be scared. A parade of photos of bombs going off around the world. + +I kept flipping and found myself looking at a familiar face. It was the guy who had come into the truck and spoken to Severe-Haircut woman when I was chained up in the back. Wearing a military uniform. The caption identified him as Major General Graeme Sutherland, Regional Commander, DHS. + +"I hold in my hands actual literature on offer at the so-called concert in Dolores Park last weekend." He held up a stack of pamphlets. There'd been lots of pamphleteers there, I remembered. Wherever you got a group of people in San Francisco, you got pamphlets. + +"I want you to look at these for a moment. Let me read you their titles. WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED: A CITIZEN'S GUIDE TO OVERTHROWING THE STATE. Here's one, DID THE SEPTEMBER 11TH BOMBINGS REALLY HAPPEN? And another, HOW TO USE THEIR SECURITY AGAINST THEM. This literature shows us the true purpose of the illegal gathering on Saturday night. This wasn't merely an unsafe gathering of thousands of people without proper precaution, or even toilets. It was a recruiting rally for the enemy. It was an attempt to corrupt children into embracing the idea that America shouldn't protect herself. + +"Take this slogan, DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25. What better way to ensure that no considered, balanced, adult discussion is ever injected into your pro-terrorist message than to exclude adults, limiting your group to impressionable young people? + +"When police came on the scene, they found a recruitment rally for America's enemies in progress. The gathering had already disrupted the nights of hundreds of residents in the area, none of whom had been consulted in the planning of this all night rave party. + +"They ordered these people to disperse -- that much is visible on all the video -- and when the revelers turned to attack them, egged on by the musicians on stage, the police subdued them using non-lethal crowd control techniques. + +"The arrestees were ring-leaders and provocateurs who had led the thousands of impressionistic young people there to charge the police lines. 827 of them were taken into custody. Many of these people had prior offenses. More than 100 of them had outstanding warrants. They are still in custody. + +"Ladies and gentlemen, America is fighting a war on many fronts, but nowhere is she in more grave danger than she is here, at home. Whether we are being attacked by terrorists or those who sympathize with them." + +A reporter held up a hand and said, "General Sutherland, surely you're not saying that these children were terrorist sympathizers for attending a party in a park?" + +"Of course not. But when young people are brought under the influence of our country's enemies, it's easy for them to end up over their heads. Terrorists would love to recruit a fifth column to fight the war on the home front for them. If these were my children, I'd be gravely concerned." + +Another reporter chimed in. "Surely this is just an open air concert, General? They were hardly drilling with rifles." + +The General produced a stack of photos and began to hold them up. "These are pictures that officers took with infra-red cameras before moving in." He held them next to his face and paged through them one at a time. They showed people dancing really rough, some people getting crushed or stepped on. Then they moved into sex stuff by the trees, a girl with three guys, two guys necking together. "There were children as young as ten years old at this event. A deadly cocktail of drugs, propaganda and music resulted in dozens of injuries. It's a wonder there weren't any deaths." + +I switched the TV off. They made it look like it had been a riot. If my parents thought I'd been there, they'd have strapped me to my bed for a month and only let me out afterward wearing a tracking collar. + +Speaking of which, they were going to be /{pissed}/ when they found out I'd been suspended. + +# + +They didn't take it well. Dad wanted to ground me, but Mom and I talked him out of it. + +"You know that vice-principal has had it in for Marcus for years," Mom said. "The last time we met him you cursed him for an hour afterward. I think the word 'asshole' was mentioned repeatedly." + +Dad shook his head. "Disrupting a class to argue against the Department of Homeland Security --" + +"It's a social studies class, Dad," I said. I was beyond caring anymore, but I felt like if Mom was going to stick up for me, I should help her out. "We were talking about the DHS. Isn't debate supposed to be healthy?" + +"Look, son," he said. He'd taking to calling me "son" a lot. It made me feel like he'd stopped thinking of me as a person and switched to thinking of me as a kind of half-formed larva that needed to be guided out of adolescence. I hated it. "You're going to have to learn to live with the fact that we live in a different world today. You have every right to speak your mind of course, but you have to be prepared for the consequences of doing so. You have to face the fact that there are people who are hurting, who aren't going to want to argue the finer points of Constitutional law when their lives are at stake. We're in a lifeboat now, and once you're in the lifeboat, no one wants to hear about how mean the captain is being." + +I barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes. + +"I've been assigned two weeks of independent study, writing one paper for each of my subjects, using the city for my background -- a history paper, a social studies paper, an English paper, a physics paper. It beats sitting around at home watching television." + +Dad looked hard at me, like he suspected I was up to something, then nodded. I said goodnight to them and went up to my room. I fired up my Xbox and opened a word-processor and started to brainstorm ideas for my papers. Why not? It really was better than sitting around at home. + +# + +I ended up IMing with Ange for quite a while that night. She was sympathetic about everything and told me she'd help me with my papers if I wanted to meet her after school the next night. I knew where her school was -- she went to the same school as Van -- and it was all the way over in the East Bay, where I hadn't visited since the bombs went. + +I was really excited at the prospect of seeing her again. Every night since the party, I'd gone to bed thinking of two things: the sight of the crowd charging the police lines and the feeling of the side of her breast under her shirt as we leaned against the pillar. She was amazing. I'd never been with a girl as...aggressive as her before. It had always been me putting the moves on and them pushing me away. I got the feeling that Ange was as much of a horn-dog as I was. It was a tantalizing notion. + +I slept soundly that night, with exciting dreams of me and Ange and what we might do if we found ourselves in a secluded spot somewhere. + +The next day, I set out to work on my papers. San Francisco is a good place to write about. History? Sure, it's there, from the Gold Rush to the WWII shipyards, the Japanese internment camps, the invention of the PC. Physics? The Exploratorium has the coolest exhibits of any museum I've ever been to. I took a perverse satisfaction in the exhibits on soil liquefaction during big quakes. English? Jack London, Beat Poets, science fiction writers like Pat Murphy and Rudy Rucker. Social studies? The Free Speech Movement, Cesar Chavez, gay rights, feminism, anti-war movement... + +I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter about the world around me. I could do that just by walking around the city. I decided I'd do an English paper about the Beats first. City Lights books had a great library in an upstairs room where Alan Ginsberg and his buddies had created their radical druggy poetry. The one we'd read in English class was /{Howl}/ and I would never forget the opening lines, they gave me shivers down my back: + +I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, + +dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, + +angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night... + +I liked the way he ran those words all together, "starving hysterical naked." I knew how that felt. And "best minds of my generation" made me think hard too. It made me remember the park and the police and the gas falling. They busted Ginsberg for obscenity over Howl -- all about a line about gay sex that would hardly have caused us to blink an eye today. It made me happy somehow, knowing that we'd made some progress. That things had been even more restrictive than this before. + +I lost myself in the library, reading these beautiful old editions of the books. I got lost in Jack Kerouac's /{On the Road}/, a novel I'd been meaning to read for a long time, and a clerk who came up to check on me nodded approvingly and found me a cheap edition that he sold me for six bucks. + +I walked into Chinatown and had dim sum buns and noodles with hot-sauce that I had previously considered to be pretty hot, but which would never seem anything like hot ever again, not now that I'd had an Ange special. + +As the day wore on toward the afternoon, I got on the BART and switched to a San Mateo bridge shuttle bus to bring me around to the East Bay. I read my copy of /{On the Road}/ and dug the scenery whizzing past. /{On the Road}/ is a semi-autobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, a druggy, hard-drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around America, working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meeting people and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos, con-men, muggers, scumbags and angels. There's not really a plot -- Kerouac supposedly wrote it in three weeks on a long roll of paper, stoned out of his mind -- only a bunch of amazing things, one thing happening after another. He makes friends with self-destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who get him involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still it works out, if you know what I mean. + +There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it being read aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the central valley on the way to LA, one of those places with a gas station and a diner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff and do stuff. + +It was a long bus ride and I must have dozed off a little -- staying up late IMing with Ange was hard on my sleep-schedule, since Mom still expected me down for breakfast. I woke up and changed buses and before long, I was at Ange's school. + +She came bounding out of the gates in her uniform -- I'd never seen her in it before, it was kind of cute in a weird way, and reminded me of Van in her uniform. She gave me a long hug and a hard kiss on the cheek. + +"Hello you!" she said. + +"Hiya!" + +"Whatcha reading?" + +I'd been waiting for this. I'd marked the passage with a finger. "Listen: 'They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"'" + +She took the book and read the passage again for herself. "Wow, dingledodies! I love it! Is it all like this?" + +I told her about the parts I'd read, walking slowly down the sidewalk back toward the bus-stop. Once we turned the corner, she put her arm around my waist and I slung mine around her shoulder. Walking down the street with a girl -- my girlfriend? Sure, why not? -- talking about this cool book. It was heaven. Made me forget my troubles for a little while. + +"Marcus?" + +I turned around. It was Van. In my subconscious I'd expected this. I knew because my conscious mind wasn't remotely surprised. It wasn't a big school, and they all got out at the same time. I hadn't spoken to Van in weeks, and those weeks felt like months. We used to talk every day. + +"Hey, Van," I said. I suppressed the urge to take my arm off of Ange's shoulders. Van seemed surprised, but not angry, more ashen, shaken. She looked closely at the two of us. + +"Angela?" + +"Hey, Vanessa," Ange said. + +"What are you doing here?" + +"I came out to get Ange," I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. I was suddenly embarrassed to be seen with another girl. + +"Oh," Van said. "Well, it was nice to see you." + +"Nice to see you too, Vanessa," Ange said, swinging me around, marching me back toward the bus-stop. + +"You know her?" Ange said. + +"Yeah, since forever." + +"Was she your girlfriend?" + +"What? No! No way! We were just friends." + +"You /{were}/ friends?" + +I felt like Van was walking right behind us, listening in, though at the pace we were walking, she would have to be jogging to keep up. I resisted the temptation to look over my shoulder for as long as possible, then I did. There were lots of girls from the school behind us, but no Van. + +"She was with me and Jose-Luis and Darryl when we were arrested. We used to ARG together. The four of us, we were kind of best friends." + +"And what happened?" + +I dropped my voice. "She didn't like the Xnet," I said. "She thought we would get into trouble. That I'd get other people into trouble." + +"And that's why you stopped being friends?" + +"We just drifted apart." + +We walked a few steps. "You weren't, you know, boyfriend/girlfriend friends?" + +"No!" I said. My face was hot. I felt like I sounded like I was lying, even though I was telling the truth. + +Ange jerked us to a halt and studied my face. + +"Were you?" + +"No! Seriously! Just friends. Darryl and her -- well, not quite, but Darryl was so into her. There was no way --" + +"But if Darryl hadn't been into her, you would have, huh?" + +"No, Ange, no. Please, just believe me and let it go. Vanessa was a good friend and we're not anymore, and that upsets me, but I was never into her that way, all right? + +She slumped a little. "OK, OK. I'm sorry. I don't really get along with her is all. We've never gotten along in all the years we've known each other." + +Oh ho, I thought. This would be how it came to be that Jolu knew her for so long and I never met her; she had some kind of thing with Van and he didn't want to bring her around. + +She gave me a long hug and we kissed, and a bunch of girls passed us going /{woooo}/ and we straightened up and headed for the bus-stop. Ahead of us walked Van, who must have gone past while we were kissing. I felt like a complete jerk. + +Of course, she was at the stop and on the bus and we didn't say a word to each other, and I tried to make conversation with Ange all the way, but it was awkward. + +The plan was to stop for a coffee and head to Ange's place to hang out and "study," i.e. take turns on her Xbox looking at the Xnet. Ange's mom got home late on Tuesdays, which was her night for yoga class and dinner with her girls, and Ange's sister was going out with her boyfriend, so we'd have the place to ourselves. I'd been having pervy thoughts about it ever since we'd made the plan. + +We got to her place and went straight to her room and shut the door. Her room was kind of a disaster, covered with layers of clothes and notebooks and parts of PCs that would dig into your stocking feet like caltrops. Her desk was worse than the floor, piled high with books and comics, so we ended up sitting on her bed, which was OK by me. + +The awkwardness from seeing Van had gone away somewhat and we got her Xbox up and running. It was in the center of a nest of wires, some going to a wireless antenna she'd hacked into it and stuck to the window so she could tune in the neighbors' WiFi. Some went to a couple of old laptop screens she'd turned into standalone monitors, balanced on stands and bristling with exposed electronics. The screens were on both bedside tables, which was an excellent setup for watching movies or IMing from bed -- she could turn the monitors sidewise and lie on her side and they'd be right-side-up, no matter which side she lay on. + +We both knew what we were really there for, sitting side by side propped against the bedside table. I was trembling a little and super-conscious of the warmth of her leg and shoulder against mine, but I needed to go through the motions of logging into Xnet and seeing what email I'd gotten and so on. + +There was an email from a kid who liked to send in funny phone-cam videos of the DHS being really crazy -- the last one had been of them disassembling a baby's stroller after a bomb-sniffing dog had shown an interest in it, taking it apart with screwdrivers right on the street in the Marina while all these rich people walked past, staring at them and marveling at how weird it was. + +I'd linked to the video and it had been downloaded like crazy. He'd hosted it on the Internet Archive's Alexandria mirror in Egypt, where they'd host anything for free so long as you'd put it under the Creative Commons license, which let anyone remix it and share it. The US archive -- which was down in the Presidio, only a few minutes away -- had been forced to take down all those videos in the name of national security, but the Alexandria archive had split away into its own organization and was hosting anything that embarrassed the USA. + +This kid -- his handle was Kameraspie -- had sent me an even better video this time around. It was at the doorway to City Hall in Civic Center, a huge wedding cake of a building covered with statues in little archways and gilt leaves and trim. The DHS had a secure perimeter around the building, and Kameraspie's video showed a great shot of their checkpoint as a guy in an officer's uniform approached and showed his ID and put his briefcase on the X-ray belt. + +It was all OK until one of the DHS people saw something he didn't like on the X-ray. He questioned the General, who rolled his eyes and said something inaudible (the video had been shot from across the street, apparently with a homemade concealed zoom lens, so the audio was mostly of people walking past and traffic noises). + +The General and the DHS guys got into an argument, and the longer they argued, the more DHS guys gathered around them. Finally, the General shook his head angrily and waved his finger at the DHS guy's chest and picked up his briefcase and started to walk away. The DHS guys shouted at him, but he didn't slow. His body language really said, "I am totally, utterly pissed." + +Then it happened. The DHS guys ran after the general. Kameraspie slowed the video down here, so we could see, in frame-by-frame slo-mo, the general half-turning, his face all like, "No freaking way are you about to tackle me," then changing to horror as three of the giant DHS guards slammed into him, knocking him sideways, then catching him at the middle, like a career-ending football tackle. The general -- middle aged, steely grey hair, lined and dignified face -- went down like a sack of potatoes and bounced twice, his face slamming off the sidewalk and blood starting out of his nose. + +The DHS hog-tied the general, strapping him at ankles and wrists. The general was shouting now, really shouting, his face purpling under the blood streaming from his nose. Legs swished by in the tight zoom. Passing pedestrians looked at this guy in his uniform, getting tied up, and you could see from his face that this was the worst part, this was the ritual humiliation, the removal of dignity. The clip ended. + +"Oh my dear sweet Buddha," I said looking at the screen as it faded to black, starting the video again. I nudged Ange and showed her the clip. She watched wordless, jaw hanging down to her chest. + +"Post that," she said. "Post that post that post that post that!" + +I posted it. I could barely type as I wrote it up, describing what I'd seen, adding a note to see if anyone could identify the military man in the video, if anyone knew anything about this. + +I hit publish. + +We watched the video. We watched it again. + +My email pinged. + +> I totally recognize that dude -- you can find his bio on Wikipedia. He's General Claude Geist. He commanded the joint UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti. + +I checked the bio. There was a picture of the general at a press conference, and notes about his role in the difficult Haiti mission. It was clearly the same guy. + +I updated the post. + +Theoretically, this was Ange's and my chance to make out, but that wasn't what we ended up doing. We crawled the Xnet blogs, looking for more accounts of the DHS searching people, tackling people, invading them. This was a familiar task, the same thing I'd done with all the footage and accounts from the riots in the park. I started a new category on my blog for this, AbusesOfAuthority, and filed them away. Ange kept coming up with new search terms for me to try and by the time her mom got home, my new category had seventy posts, headlined by General Geist's City Hall takedown. + +# + +I worked on my Beat paper all the next day at home, reading the Kerouac and surfing the Xnet. I was planning on meeting Ange at school, but I totally wimped out at the thought of seeing Van again, so I texted her an excuse about working on the paper. + +There were all kinds of great suggestions for AbusesOfAuthority coming in; hundreds of little and big ones, pictures and audio. The meme was spreading. + +It spread. The next morning there were even more. Someone started a new blog called AbusesOfAuthority that collected hundreds more. The pile grew. We competed to find the juiciest stories, the craziest pictures. + +The deal with my parents was that I'd eat breakfast with them every morning and talk about the projects I was doing. They liked that I was reading Kerouac. It had been a favorite book of both of theirs and it turned out there was already a copy on the bookcase in my parents' room. My dad brought it down and I flipped through it. There were passages marked up with pen, dog-eared pages, notes in the margin. My dad had really loved this book. + +It made me remember a better time, when my Dad and I had been able to talk for five minutes without shouting at each other about terrorism, and we had a great breakfast talking about the way that the novel was plotted, all the crazy adventures. + +But the next morning at breakfast they were both glued to the radio. + +"Abuses of Authority -- it's the latest craze on San Francisco's notorious Xnet, and it's captured the world's attention. Called A-oh-A, the movement is composed of 'Little Brothers' who watch back against the Department of Homeland Security's anti-terrorism measures, documenting the failures and excesses. The rallying cry is a popular viral video clip of a General Claude Geist, a retired three-star general, being tackled by DHS officers on the sidewalk in front of City Hall. Geist hasn't made a statement on the incident, but commentary from young people who are upset with their own treatment has been fast and furious. + +"Most notable has been the global attention the movement has received. Stills from the Geist video have appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Korea, Great Britain, Germany, Egypt and Japan, and broadcasters around the world have aired the clip on prime-time news. The issue came to a head last night, when the British Broadcasting Corporation's National News Evening program ran a special report on the fact that no American broadcaster or news agency has covered this story. Commenters on the BBC's website noted that BBC America's version of the news did not carry the report." + +They brought on a couple of interviews: British media watchdogs, a Swedish Pirate Party kid who made jeering remarks about America's corrupt press, a retired American newscaster living in Tokyo, then they aired a short clip from Al-Jazeera, comparing the American press record and the record of the national news-media in Syria. + +I felt like my parents were staring at me, that they knew what I was doing. But when I cleared away my dishes, I saw that they were looking at each other. + +Dad was holding his coffee cup so hard his hands were shaking. Mom was looking at him. + +"They're trying to discredit us," Dad said finally. "They're trying to sabotage the efforts to keep us safe." + +I opened my mouth, but my mom caught my eye and shook her head. Instead I went up to my room and worked on my Kerouac paper. Once I'd heard the door slam twice, I fired up my Xbox and got online. + +> Hello M1k3y. This is Colin Brown. I'm a producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news programme The National. We're doing a story on Xnet and have sent a reporter to San Francisco to cover it from there. Would you be interested in doing an interview to discuss your group and its actions? + +I stared at the screen. Jesus. They wanted to /{interview}/ me about "my group"? + +> Um thanks no. I'm all about privacy. And it's not "my group." But thanks for doing the story! + +A minute later, another email. + +> We can mask you and ensure your anonymity. You know that the Department of Homeland Security will be happy to provide their own spokesperson. I'm interested in getting your side. + +I filed the email. He was right, but I'd be crazy to do this. For all I knew, he /{was}/ the DHS. + +I picked up more Kerouac. Another email came in. Same request, different news-agency: KQED wanted to meet me and record a radio interview. A station in Brazil. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Deutsche Welle. All day, the press requests came in. All day, I politely turned them down. + +I didn't get much Kerouac read that day. + +# + +"Hold a press-conference," is what Ange said, as we sat in the cafe near her place that evening. I wasn't keen on going out to her school anymore, getting stuck on a bus with Van again. + +"What? Are you crazy?" + +"Do it in Clockwork Plunder. Just pick a trading post where there's no PvP allowed and name a time. You can login from here." + +PvP is player-versus-player combat. Parts of Clockwork Plunder were neutral ground, which meant that we could theoretically bring in a ton of noob reporters without worrying about gamers killing them in the middle of the press-conference. + +"I don't know anything about press conferences." + +"Oh, just google it. I'm sure someone's written an article on holding a successful one. I mean, if the President can manage it, I'm sure you can. He looks like he can barely tie his shoes without help." + +We ordered more coffee. + +"You are a very smart woman," I said. + +"And I'm beautiful," she said. + +"That too," I said. + +1~ Chapter 15 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo,~{ Chapters/Indigo: http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Little-Brother-Cory-Doctorow/9780765319852-item.html }~ the national Canadian megachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent science fiction bookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto and I knew that something big was going on right away, because two of our smartest, best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they'd been hired to run the science fiction section. From the start, Chapters raised the bar on what a big corporate bookstore could be, extending its hours, adding a friendly cafe and lots of seating, installing in-store self-service terminals and stocking the most amazing variety of titles.] }/ + +I blogged the press-conference even before I'd sent out the invitations to the press. I could tell that all these writers wanted to make me into a leader or a general or a supreme guerrilla commandant, and I figured one way of solving that would be to have a bunch of Xnetters running around answering questions too. + +Then I emailed the press. The responses ranged from puzzled to enthusiastic -- only the Fox reporter was "outraged" that I had the gall to ask her to play a game in order to appear on her TV show. The rest of them seemed to think that it would make a pretty cool story, though plenty of them wanted lots of tech support for signing onto the game + +I picked 8PM, after dinner. Mom had been bugging me about all the evenings I'd been spending out of the house until I finally spilled the beans about Ange, whereupon she came over all misty and kept looking at me like, my-little-boy's-growing-up. She wanted to meet Ange, and I used that as leverage, promising to bring her over the next night if I could "go to the movies" with Ange tonight. + +Ange's mom and sister were out again -- they weren't real stay-at-homes -- which left me and Ange alone in her room with her Xbox and mine. I unplugged one of her bedside screens and attached my Xbox to it so that we could both login at once. + +Both Xboxes were idle, logged into Clockwork Plunder. I was pacing. + +"It's going to be fine," she said. She glanced at her screen. "Patcheye Pete's Market has 600 players in it now!" We'd picked Patcheye Pete's because it was the market closest to the village square where new players spawned. If the reporters weren't already Clockwork Plunder players -- ha! -- then that's where they'd show up. In my blog post I'd asked people generally to hang out on the route between Patcheye Pete's and the spawn-gate and direct anyone who looked like a disoriented reporter over to Pete's. + +"What the hell am I going to tell them?" + +"You just answer their questions -- and if you don't like a question, ignore it. Someone else can answer it. It'll be fine." + +"This is insane." + +"This is perfect, Marcus. If you want to really screw the DHS, you have to embarrass them. It's not like you're going to be able to out-shoot them. Your only weapon is your ability to make them look like morons." + +I flopped on the bed and she pulled my head into her lap and stroked my hair. I'd been playing around with different haircuts before the bombing, dying it all kinds of funny colors, but since I'd gotten out of jail I couldn't be bothered. It had gotten long and stupid and shaggy and I'd gone into the bathroom and grabbed my clippers and buzzed it down to half an inch all around, which took zero effort to take care of and helped me to be invisible when I was out jamming and cloning arphids. + +I opened my eyes and stared into her big brown eyes behind her glasses. They were round and liquid and expressive. She could make them bug out when she wanted to make me laugh, or make them soft and sad, or lazy and sleepy in a way that made me melt into a puddle of horniness. + +That's what she was doing right now. + +I sat up slowly and hugged her. She hugged me back. We kissed. She was an amazing kisser. I know I've already said that, but it bears repeating. We kissed a lot, but for one reason or another we always stopped before it got too heavy. + +Now I wanted to go farther. I found the hem of her t-shirt and tugged. She put her hands over her head and pulled back a few inches. I knew that she'd do that. I'd known since the night in the park. Maybe that's why we hadn't gone farther -- I knew I couldn't rely on her to back off, which scared me a little. + +But I wasn't scared then. The impending press-conference, the fights with my parents, the international attention, the sense that there was a movement that was careening around the city like a wild pinball -- it made my skin tingle and my blood sing. + +And she was beautiful, and smart, and clever and funny, and I was falling in love with her. + +Her shirt slid off, her arching her back to help me get it over her shoulders. She reached behind her and did something and her bra fell away. I stared goggle-eyed, motionless and breathless, and then she grabbed /{my}/ shirt and pulled it over my head, grabbing me and pulling my bare chest to hers. + +We rolled on the bed and touched each other and ground our bodies together and groaned. She kissed all over my chest and I did the same to her. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think, I could only move and kiss and lick and touch. + +We dared each other to go forward. I undid her jeans. She undid mine. I lowered her zipper, she did mine, and tugged my jeans off. I tugged off hers. A moment later we were both naked, except for my socks, which I peeled off with my toes. + +It was then that I caught sight of the bedside clock, which had long ago rolled onto the floor and lay there, glowing up at us. + +"Crap!" I yelped. "It starts in two minutes!" I couldn't freaking believe that I was about to stop what I was about to stop doing, when I was about to stop doing it. I mean, if you'd asked me, "Marcus, you are about to get laid for the firstest time EVAR, will you stop if I let off this nuclear bomb in the same room as you?" the answer would have been a resounding and unequivocal /{NO}/. + +And yet we stopped for this. + +She grabbed me and pulled my face to hers and kissed me until I thought I would pass out, then we both grabbed our clothes and more or less dressed, grabbing our keyboards and mice and heading for Patcheye Pete's. + +# + +You could easily tell who the press were: they were the noobs who played their characters like staggering drunks, weaving back and forth and up and down, trying to get the hang of it all, occasionally hitting the wrong key and offering strangers all or part of their inventory, or giving them accidental hugs and kicks. + +The Xnetters were easy to spot, too: we all played Clockwork Plunder whenever we had some spare time (or didn't feel like doing our homework), and we had pretty tricked-out characters with cool weapons and booby-traps on the keys sticking out of our backs that would cream anyone who tried to snatch them and leave us to wind down. + +When I appeared, a system status message displayed M1K3Y HAS ENTERED PATCHEYE PETE'S -- WELCOME SWABBIE WE OFFER FAIR TRADE FOR FINE BOOTY. All the players on the screen froze, then they crowded around me. The chat exploded. I thought about turning on my voice-paging and grabbing a headset, but seeing how many people were trying to talk at once, I realized how confusing that would be. Text was much easier to follow and they couldn't misquote me (heh heh). + +I'd scouted the location before with Ange -- it was great campaigning with her, since we could both keep each other wound up. There was a high-spot on a pile of boxes of salt-rations that I could stand on and be seen from anywhere in the market. + +> Good evening and thank you all for coming. My name is M1k3y and I'm not the leader of anything. All around you are Xnetters who have as much to say about why we're here as I do. I use the Xnet because I believe in freedom and the Constitution of the United States of America. I use Xnet because the DHS has turned my city into a police-state where we're all suspected terrorists. I use Xnet because I think you can't defend freedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights. I learned about the Constitution in a California school and I was raised to love my country for its freedom. If I have a philosophy, it is this: + +> Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. + +> I didn't write that, but I believe it. The DHS does not govern with my consent. + +> Thank you + +I'd written this the day before, bouncing drafts back and forth with Ange. Pasting it in only took a second, though it took everyone in the game a moment to read it. A lot of the Xnetters cheered, big showy pirate "Hurrah"s with raised sabers and pet parrots squawking and flying overhead. + +Gradually, the journalists digested it too. The chat was running past fast, so fast you could barely read it, lots of Xnetters saying things like "Right on" and "America, love it or leave it" and "DHS go home" and "America out of San Francisco," all slogans that had been big on the Xnet blogosphere. + +> M1k3y, this is Priya Rajneesh from the BBC. You say you're not the leader of any movement, but do you believe there is a movement? Is it called the Xnet? + +Lots of answers. Some people said there wasn't a movement, some said there was and lots of people had ideas about what it was called: Xnet, Little Brothers, Little Sisters, and my personal favorite, the United States of America. + +They were really cooking. I let them go, thinking of what I could say. Once I had it, I typed, + +> I think that kind of answers your question, doesn't it? There may be one or more movements and they may be called Xnet or not. + +> M1k3y, I'm Doug Christensen from the Washington Internet Daily. What do you think the DHS should be doing to prevent another attack on San Francisco, if what they're doing isn't successful. + +More chatter. Lots of people said that the terrorists and the government were the same -- either literally, or just meaning that they were equally bad. Some said the government knew how to catch terrorists but preferred not to because "war presidents" got re-elected. + +> I don't know + +I typed finally. + +> I really don't. I ask myself this question a lot because I don't want to get blown up and I don't want my city to get blown up. Here's what I've figured out, though: if it's the DHS's job to keep us safe, they're failing. All the crap they've done, none of it would stop the bridge from being blown up again. Tracing us around the city? Taking away our freedom? Making us suspicious of each other, turning us against each other? Calling dissenters traitors? The point of terrorism is to terrify us. The DHS terrifies me. + +> I don't have any say in what the terrorists do to me, but if this is a free country then I should be able to at least say what my own cops do to me. I should be able to keep them from terrorizing me. + +> I know that's not a good answer. Sorry. + +> What do you mean when you say that the DHS wouldn't stop terrorists? How do you know? + +> Who are you? + +> I'm with the Sydney Morning Herald. + +> I'm 17 years old. I'm not a straight-A student or anything. Even so, I figured out how to make an Internet that they can't wiretap. I figured out how to jam their person-tracking technology. I can turn innocent people into suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. I could get metal onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. I figured this stuff out by looking at the web and by thinking about it. If I can do it, terrorists can do it. They told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. Do you feel safe? + +> In Australia? Why yes I do + +The pirates all laughed. + +More journalists asked questions. Some were sympathetic, some were hostile. When I got tired, I handed my keyboard to Ange and let her be M1k3y for a while. It didn't really feel like M1k3y and me were the same person anymore anyway. M1k3y was the kind of kid who talked to international journalists and inspired a movement. Marcus got suspended from school and fought with his dad and wondered if he was good enough for his kick-ass girlfriend. + +By 11PM I'd had enough. Besides, my parents would be expecting me home soon. I logged out of the game and so did Ange and we lay there for a moment. I took her hand and she squeezed hard. We hugged. + +She kissed my neck and murmured something. + +"What?" + +"I said I love you," she said. "What, you want me to send you a telegram?" + +"Wow," I said. + +"You're that surprised, huh?" + +"No. Um. It's just -- I was going to say that to you." + +"Sure you were," she said, and bit the tip of my nose. + +"It's just that I've never said it before," I said. "So I was working up to it." + +"You still haven't said it, you know. Don't think I haven't noticed. We girls pick upon these things." + +"I love you, Ange Carvelli," I said. + +"I love you too, Marcus Yallow." + +We kissed and nuzzled and I started to breathe hard and so did she. That's when her mom knocked on the door. + +"Angela," she said, "I think it's time your friend went home, don't you?" + +"Yes, mother," she said, and mimed swinging an axe. As I put my socks and shoes on, she muttered, "They'll say, that Angela, she was such a good girl, who would have thought it, all the time she was in the back yard, helping her mother out by sharpening that hatchet." + +I laughed. "You don't know how easy you have it. There is /{no way}/ my folks would leave us alone in my bedroom until 11 o'clock." + +"11:45," she said, checking her clock. + +"Crap!" I yelped and tied my shoes. + +"Go," she said, "run and be free! Look both ways before crossing the road! Write if you get work! Don't even stop for a hug! If you're not out of here by the count of ten, there's going to be /{trouble}/, mister. One. Two. Three." + +I shut her up by leaping onto the bed, landing on her and kissing her until she stopped trying to count. Satisfied with my victory, I pounded down the stairs, my Xbox under my arm. + +Her mom was at the foot of the stairs. We'd only met a couple times. She looked like an older, taller version of Ange -- Ange said her father was the short one -- with contacts instead of glasses. She seemed to have tentatively classed me as a good guy, and I appreciated it. + +"Good night, Mrs Carvelli," I said. + +"Good night, Mr Yallow," she said. It was one of our little rituals, ever since I'd called her Mrs Carvelli when we first met. + +I found myself standing awkwardly by the door. + +"Yes?" she said. + +"Um," I said. "Thanks for having me over." + +"You're always welcome in our home, young man," she said. + +"And thanks for Ange," I said finally, hating how lame it sounded. But she smiled broadly and gave me a brief hug. + +"You're very welcome," she said. + +The whole bus ride home, I thought over the press-conference, thought about Ange naked and writhing with me on her bed, thought about her mother smiling and showing me the door. + +My mom was waiting up for me. She asked me about the movie and I gave her the response I'd worked out in advance, cribbing from the review it had gotten in the /{Bay Guardian}/. + +As I fell asleep, the press-conference came back. I was really proud of it. It had been so cool, to have all these big-shot journos show up in the game, to have them listen to me and to have them listen to all the people who believed in the same things as me. I dropped off with a smile on my lips. + +# + +I should have known better. + +XNET LEADER: I COULD GET METAL ONTO AN AIRPLANE + +DHS DOESN'T HAVE MY CONSENT TO GOVERN + +XNET KIDS: USA OUT OF SAN FRANCISCO + +Those were the /{good}/ headlines. Everyone sent me the articles to blog, but it was the last thing I wanted to do. + +I'd blown it, somehow. The press had come to my press-conference and concluded that we were terrorists or terrorist dupes. The worst was the reporter on Fox News, who had apparently shown up anyway, and who devoted a ten-minute commentary to us, talking about our "criminal treason." Her killer line, repeated on every news-outlet I found, was: + +"They say they don't have a name. I've got one for them. Let's call these spoiled children Cal-Quaeda. They do the terrorists' work on the home front. When -- not if, but when -- California gets attacked again, these brats will be as much to blame as the House of Saud." + +Leaders of the anti-war movement denounced us as fringe elements. One guy went on TV to say that he believed we had been fabricated by the DHS to discredit them. + +The DHS had their own press-conference announcing that they would double the security in San Francisco. They held up an arphid cloner they'd found somewhere and demonstrated it in action, using it to stage a car-theft, and warned everyone to be on their alert for young people behaving suspiciously, especially those whose hands were out of sight. + +They weren't kidding. I finished my Kerouac paper and started in on a paper about the Summer of Love, the summer of 1967 when the anti-war movement and the hippies converged on San Francisco. The guys who founded Ben and Jerry's -- old hippies themselves -- had founded a hippie museum in the Haight, and there were other archives and exhibits to see around town. + +But it wasn't easy getting around. By the end of the week, I was getting frisked an average of four times a day. Cops checked my ID and questioned me about why I was out in the street, carefully eyeballing the letter from Chavez saying that I was suspended. + +I got lucky. No one arrested me. But the rest of the Xnet weren't so lucky. Every night the DHS announced more arrests, "ringleaders" and "operatives" of Xnet, people I didn't know and had never heard of, paraded on TV along with the arphid sniffers and other devices that had been in their pockets. They announced that the people were "naming names," compromising the "Xnet network" and that more arrests were expected soon. The name "M1k3y" was often heard. + +Dad loved this. He and I watched the news together, him gloating, me shrinking away, quietly freaking out. "You should see the stuff they're going to use on these kids," Dad said. "I've seen it in action. They'll get a couple of these kids and check out their friends lists on IM and the speed-dials on their phones, look for names that come up over and over, look for patterns, bringing in more kids. They're going to unravel them like an old sweater." + +I canceled Ange's dinner at our place and started spending even more time there. Ange's little sister Tina started to call me "the house-guest," as in "is the house-guest eating dinner with me tonight?" I liked Tina. All she cared about was going out and partying and meeting guys, but she was funny and utterly devoted to Ange. One night as we were doing the dishes, she dried her hands and said, conversationally, "You know, you seem like a nice guy, Marcus. My sister's just crazy about you and I like you too. But I have to tell you something: if you break her heart, I will track you down and pull your scrotum over your head. It's not a pretty sight." + +I assured her that I would sooner pull my own scrotum over my head than break Ange's heart and she nodded. "So long as we're clear on that." + +"Your sister is a nut," I said as we lay on Ange's bed again, looking at Xnet blogs. That is pretty much all we did: fool around and read Xnet. + +"Did she use the scrotum line on you? I hate it when she does that. She just loves the word 'scrotum,' you know. It's nothing personal." + +I kissed her. We read some more. + +"Listen to this," she said. "Police project four to six /{hundred}/ arrests this weekend in what they say will be the largest coordinated raid on Xnet dissidents to date." + +I felt like throwing up. + +"We've got to stop this," I said. "You know there are people who are doing /{more}/ jamming to show that they're not intimidated? Isn't that just /{crazy?}/" + +"I think it's brave," she said. "We can't let them scare us into submission." + +"What? No, Ange, no. We can't let hundreds of people go to /{jail}/. You haven't been there. I have. It's worse than you think. It's worse than you can imagine." + +"I have a pretty fertile imagination," she said. + +"Stop it, OK? Be serious for a second. I won't do this. I won't send those people to jail. If I do, I'm the guy that Van thinks I am." + +"Marcus, I'm being serious. You think that these people don't know they could go to jail? They believe in the cause. You believe in it too. Give them the credit to know what they're getting into. It's not up to you to decide what risks they can or can't take." + +"It's my responsibility because if I tell them to stop, they'll stop." + +"I thought you weren't the leader?" + +"I'm not, of course I'm not. But I can't help it if they look to me for guidance. And so long as they do, I have a responsibility to help them stay safe. You see that, right?" + +"All I see is you getting ready to cut and run at the first sign of trouble. I think you're afraid they're going to figure out who /{you}/ are. I think you're afraid for /{you}/." + +"That's not fair," I said, sitting up, pulling away from her. + +"Really? Who's the guy who nearly had a heart attack when he thought that his secret identity was out?" + +"That was different," I said. "This isn't about me. You know it isn't. Why are you being like this?" + +"Why are /{you}/ like this?" she said. "Why aren't /{you}/ willing to be the guy who was brave enough to get all this started?" + +"This isn't brave, it's suicide." + +"Cheap teenage melodrama, M1k3y." + +"Don't call me that!" + +"What, 'M1k3y'? Why not, /{M1k3y}/?" + +I put my shoes on. I picked up my bag. I walked home. + +# + +> Why I'm not jamming + +> I won't tell anyone else what to do, because I'm not anyone's leader, no matter what Fox News thinks. + +> But I am going to tell you what /{I}/ plan on doing. If you think that's the right thing to do, maybe you'll do it too. + +> I'm not jamming. Not this week. Maybe not next. It's not because I'm scared. It's because I'm smart enough to know that I'm better free than in prison. They figured out how to stop our tactic, so we need to come up with a new tactic. I don't care what the tactic is, but I want it to work. It's /{stupid}/ to get arrested. It's only jamming if you get away with it. + +> There's another reason not to jam. If you get caught, they might use you to catch your friends, and their friends, and their friends. They might bust your friends even if they're not on Xnet, because the DHS is like a maddened bull and they don't exactly worry if they've got the right guy. + +> I'm not telling you what to do. + +> But the DHS is dumb and we're smart. Jamming proves that they can't fight terrorism because it proves that they can't even stop a bunch of kids. If you get caught, it makes them look like they're smarter than us. + +> THEY AREN'T SMARTER THAN US! We are smarter than them. Let's be smart. Let's figure out how to jam them, no matter how many goons they put on the streets of our city. + +I posted it. I went to bed. + +I missed Ange. + +# + +Ange and I didn't speak for the next four days, including the weekend, and then it was time to go back to school. I'd almost called her a million times, written a thousand unsent emails and IMs. + +Now I was back in Social Studies class, and Mrs Andersen greeted me with voluble, sarcastic courtesy, asking me sweetly how my "holiday" had been. I sat down and mumbled nothing. I could hear Charles snicker. + +She taught us a class on Manifest Destiny, the idea that the Americans were destined to take over the whole world (or at least that's how she made it seem) and seemed to be trying to provoke me into saying something so she could throw me out. + +I felt the eyes of the class on me, and it reminded me of M1k3y and the people who looked up to him. I was sick of being looked up to. I missed Ange. + +I got through the rest of the day without anything making any kind of mark on me. I don't think I said eight words. + +Finally it was over and I hit the doors, heading for the gates and the stupid Mission and my pointless house. + +I was barely out the gate when someone crashed into me. He was a young homeless guy, maybe my age, maybe a little older. He wore a long, greasy overcoat, a pair of baggy jeans, and rotting sneakers that looked like they'd been through a wood-chipper. His long hair hung over his face, and he had a pubic beard that straggled down his throat into the collar of a no-color knit sweater. + +I took this all in as we lay next to each other on the sidewalk, people passing us and giving us weird looks. It seemed that he'd crashed into me while hurrying down Valencia, bent over with the burden of a split backpack that lay beside him on the pavement, covered in tight geometric doodles in magic-marker. + +He got to his knees and rocked back and forth, like he was drunk or had hit his head. + +"Sorry buddy," he said. "Didn't see you. You hurt?" + +I sat up too. Nothing felt hurt. + +"Um. No, it's OK." + +He stood up and smiled. His teeth were shockingly white and straight, like an ad for an orthodontic clinic. He held his hand out to me and his grip was strong and firm. + +"I'm really sorry." His voice was also clear and intelligent. I'd expected him to sound like the drunks who talked to themselves as they roamed the Mission late at night, but he sounded like a knowledgeable bookstore clerk. + +"It's no problem," I said. + +He stuck out his hand again. + +"Zeb," he said. + +"Marcus," I said. + +"A pleasure, Marcus," he said. "Hope to run into you again sometime!" + +Laughing, he picked up his backpack, turned on his heel and hurried away. + +# + +I walked the rest of the way home in a bemused fug. Mom was at the kitchen table and we had a little chat about nothing at all, the way we used to do, before everything changed. + +I took the stairs up to my room and flopped down in my chair. For once, I didn't want to login to the Xnet. I'd checked in that morning before school to discover that my note had created a gigantic controversy among people who agreed with me and people who were righteously pissed that I was telling them to back off from their beloved sport. + +I had three thousand projects I'd been in the middle of when it had all started. I was building a pinhole camera out of legos, I'd been playing with aerial kite photography using an old digital camera with a trigger hacked out of silly putty that was stretched out at launch and slowly snapped back to its original shape, triggering the shutter at regular intervals. I had a vacuum tube amp I'd been building into an ancient, rusted, dented olive-oil tin that looked like an archaeological find -- once it was done, I'd planned to build in a dock for my phone and a set of 5.1 surround-sound speakers out of tuna-fish cans. + +I looked over my workbench and finally picked up the pinhole camera. Methodically snapping legos together was just about my speed. + +I took off my watch and the chunky silver two-finger ring that showed a monkey and a ninja squaring off to fight and dropped them into the little box I used for all the crap I load into my pockets and around my neck before stepping out for the day: phone, wallet, keys, wifinder, change, batteries, retractable cables... I dumped it all out into the box, and found myself holding something I didn't remember putting in there in the first place. + +It was a piece of paper, grey and soft as flannel, furry at the edges where it had been torn away from some larger piece of paper. It was covered in the tiniest, most careful handwriting I'd ever seen. I unfolded it and held it up. The writing covered both sides, running down from the top left corner of one side to a crabbed signature at the bottom right corner of the other side. + +The signature read, simply: ZEB. + +I picked it up and started to read. + +> Dear Marcus + +> You don't know me but I know you. For the past three months, since the Bay Bridge was blown up, I have been imprisoned on Treasure Island. I was in the yard on the day you talked to that Asian girl and got tackled. You were brave. Good on you. + +> I had a burst appendix the day afterward and ended up in the infirmary. In the next bed was a guy named Darryl. We were both in recovery for a long time and by the time we got well, we were too much of an embarrassment to them to let go. + +> So they decided we must really be guilty. They questioned us every day. You've been through their questioning, I know. Imagine it for months. Darryl and I ended up cell-mates. We knew we were bugged, so we only talked about inconsequentialities. But at night, when we were in our cots, we would softly tap out messages to each other in Morse code (I knew my HAM radio days would come in useful sometime). + +> At first, their questions to us were just the same crap as ever, who did it, how'd they do it. But after a little while, they switched to asking us about the Xnet. Of course, we'd never heard of it. That didn't stop them asking. + +> Darryl told me that they brought him arphid cloners, Xboxes, all kinds of technology and demanded that he tell them who used them, where they learned to mod them. Darryl told me about your games and the things you learned. + +> Especially: The DHS asked us about our friends. Who did we know? What were they like? Did they have political feelings? Had they been in trouble at school? With the law? + +> We call the prison Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It's been a week since I got out and I don't think that anyone knows that their sons and daughters are imprisoned in the middle of the Bay. At night we could hear people laughing and partying on the mainland. + +> I got out last week. I won't tell you how, in case this falls into the wrong hands. Maybe others will take my route. + +> Darryl told me how to find you and made me promise to tell you what I knew when I got back. Now that I've done that I'm out of here like last year. One way or another, I'm leaving this country. Screw America. + +> Stay strong. They're scared of you. Kick them for me. Don't get caught. + +> Zeb + +There were tears in my eyes as I finished the note. I had a disposable lighter somewhere on my desk that I sometimes used to melt the insulation off of wires, and I dug it out and held it to the note. I knew I owed it to Zeb to destroy it and make sure no one else ever saw it, in case it might lead them back to him, wherever he was going. + +I held the flame and the note, but I couldn't do it. + +Darryl. + +With all the crap with the Xnet and Ange and the DHS, I'd almost forgotten he existed. He'd become a ghost, like an old friend who'd moved away or gone on an exchange program. All that time, they'd been questioning him, demanding that he rat me out, explain the Xnet, the jammers. He'd been on Treasure Island, the abandoned military base that was halfway along the demolished span of the Bay Bridge. He'd been so close I could have swam to him. + +I put the lighter down and re-read the note. By the time it was done, I was weeping, sobbing. It all came back to me, the lady with the severe haircut and the questions she'd asked and the reek of piss and the stiffness of my pants as the urine dried them into coarse canvas. + +"Marcus?" + +My door was ajar and my mother was standing in it, watching me with a worried look. How long had she been there? + +I armed the tears away from my face and snorted up the snot. "Mom," I said. "Hi." + +She came into my room and hugged me. "What is it? Do you need to talk?" + +The note lay on the table. + +"Is that from your girlfriend? Is everything all right?" + +She'd given me an out. I could just blame it all on problems with Ange and she'd leave my room and leave me alone. I opened my mouth to do just that, and then this came out: + +"I was in jail. After the bridge blew. I was in jail for that whole time." + +The sobs that came then didn't sound like my voice. They sounded like an animal noise, maybe a donkey or some kind of big cat noise in the night. I sobbed so my throat burned and ached with it, so my chest heaved. + +Mom took me in her arms, the way she used to when I was a little boy, and she stroked my hair, and she murmured in my ear, and rocked me, and gradually, slowly, the sobs dissipated. + +I took a deep breath and Mom got me a glass of water. I sat on the edge of my bed and she sat in my desk chair and I told her everything. + +Everything. + +Well, most of it. + +1~ Chapter 16 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to San Francisco's Booksmith,~{ Booksmith http://thebooksmith.booksense.com 1644 Haight St. San Francisco CA 94117 USA +1 415 863 8688 }~ ensconced in the storied Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, just a few doors down from the Ben and Jerry's at the exact corner of Haight and Ashbury. The Booksmith folks really know how to run an author event -- when I lived in San Francisco, I used to go down all the time to hear incredible writers speak (William Gibson was unforgettable). They also produce little baseball-card-style trading cards for each author -- I have two from my own appearances there.] }/ + +At first Mom looked shocked, then outraged, and finally she gave up altogether and just let her jaw hang open as I took her through the interrogation, pissing myself, the bag over my head, Darryl. I showed her the note. + +"Why --?" + +In that single syllable, every recrimination I'd dealt myself in the night, every moment that I'd lacked the bravery to tell the world what it was really about, why I was really fighting, what had really inspired the Xnet. + +I sucked in a breath. + +"They told me I'd go to jail if I talked about it. Not just for a few days. Forever. I was -- I was scared." + +Mom sat with me for a long time, not saying anything. Then, "What about Darryl's father?" + +She might as well have stuck a knitting needle in my chest. Darryl's father. He must have assumed that Darryl was dead, long dead. + +And wasn't he? After the DHS has held you illegally for three months, would they ever let you go? + +But Zeb got out. Maybe Darryl would get out. Maybe me and the Xnet could help get Darryl out. + +"I haven't told him," I said. + +Now Mom was crying. She didn't cry easily. It was a British thing. It made her little hiccoughing sobs much worse to hear. + +"You will tell him," she managed. "You will." + +"I will." + +"But first we have to tell your father." + +# + +Dad no longer had any regular time when he came home. Between his consulting clients -- who had lots of work now that the DHS was shopping for data-mining startups on the peninsula -- and the long commute to Berkeley, he might get home any time between 6PM and midnight. + +Tonight Mom called him and told him he was coming home /{right now}/. He said something and she just repeated it: /{right now}/. + +When he got there, we had arranged ourselves in the living room with the note between us on the coffee table. + +It was easier to tell, the second time. The secret was getting lighter. I didn't embellish, I didn't hide anything. I came clean. + +I'd heard of coming clean before but I'd never understood what it meant until I did it. Holding in the secret had dirtied me, soiled my spirit. It had made me afraid and ashamed. It had made me into all the things that Ange said I was. + +Dad sat stiff as a ramrod the whole time, his face carved of stone. When I handed him the note, he read it twice and then set it down carefully. + +He shook his head and stood up and headed for the front door. + +"Where are you going?" Mom asked, alarmed. + +"I need a walk," was all he managed to gasp, his voice breaking. + +We stared awkwardly at each other, Mom and me, and waited for him to come home. I tried to imagine what was going on in his head. He'd been such a different man after the bombings and I knew from Mom that what had changed him were the days of thinking I was dead. He'd come to believe that the terrorists had nearly killed his son and it had made him crazy. + +Crazy enough to do whatever the DHS asked, to line up like a good little sheep and let them control him, drive him. + +Now he knew that it was the DHS that had imprisoned me, the DHS that had taken San Francisco's children hostage in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It made perfect sense, now that I thought of it. Of course it had been Treasure Island where I'd been kept. Where else was a ten-minute boat-ride from San Francisco? + +When Dad came back, he looked angrier than he ever had in his life. + +"You should have told me!" he roared. + +Mom interposed herself between him and me. "You're blaming the wrong person," she said. "It wasn't Marcus who did the kidnapping and the intimidation." + +He shook his head and stamped. "I'm not blaming Marcus. I know /{exactly}/ who's to blame. Me. Me and the stupid DHS. Get your shoes on, grab your coats." + +"Where are we going?" + +"To see Darryl's father. Then we're going to Barbara Stratford's place." + +# + +I knew the name Barbara Stratford from somewhere, but I couldn't remember where. I thought that maybe she was an old friend of my parents, but I couldn't exactly place her. + +Meantime, I was headed for Darryl's father's place. I'd never really felt comfortable around the old man, who'd been a Navy radio operator and ran his household like a tight ship. He'd taught Darryl Morse code when he was a kid, which I'd always thought was cool. It was one of the ways I knew that I could trust Zeb's letter. But for every cool thing like Morse code, Darryl's father had some crazy military discipline that seemed to be for its own sake, like insisting on hospital corners on the beds and shaving twice a day. It drove Darryl up the wall. + +Darryl's mother hadn't liked it much either, and had taken off back to her family in Minnesota when Darryl was ten -- Darryl spent his summers and Christmases there. + +I was sitting in the back of the car, and I could see the back of Dad's head as he drove. The muscles in his neck were tense and kept jumping around as he ground his jaws. + +Mom kept her hand on his arm, but no one was around to comfort me. If only I could call Ange. Or Jolu. Or Van. Maybe I would when the day was done. + +"He must have buried his son in his mind," Dad said, as we whipped up through the hairpin curves leading up Twin Peaks to the little cottage that Darryl and his father shared. The fog was on Twin Peaks, the way it often was at night in San Francisco, making the headlamps reflect back on us. Each time we swung around a corner, I saw the valleys of the city laid out below us, bowls of twinkling lights that shifted in the mist. + +"Is this the one?" + +"Yes," I said. "This is it." I hadn't been to Darryl's in months, but I'd spent enough time here over the years to recognize it right off. + +The three of us stood around the car for a long moment, waiting to see who would go and ring the doorbell. To my surprise, it was me. + +I rang it and we all waited in held-breath silence for a minute. I rang it again. Darryl's father's car was in the driveway, and we'd seen a light burning in the living room. I was about to ring a third time when the door opened. + +"Marcus?" Darryl's father wasn't anything like I remembered him. Unshaven, in a housecoat and bare feet, with long toenails and red eyes. He'd gained weight, and a soft extra chin wobbled beneath the firm military jaw. His thin hair was wispy and disordered. + +"Mr Glover," I said. My parents crowded into the door behind me. + +"Hello, Ron," my mother said. + +"Ron," my father said. + +"You too? What's going on?" + +"Can we come in?" + +# + +His living room looked like one of those news-segments they show about abandoned kids who spend a month locked in before they're rescued by the neighbors: frozen meal boxes, empty beer cans and juice bottles, moldy cereal bowls and piles of newspapers. There was a reek of cat piss and litter crunched underneath our feet. Even without the cat piss, the smell was incredible, like a bus-station toilet. + +The couch was made up with a grimy sheet and a couple of greasy pillows and the cushions had a dented, much-slept-upon look. + +We all stood there for a long silent moment, embarrassment overwhelming every other emotion. Darryl's father looked like he wanted to die. + +Slowly, he moved aside the sheets from the sofa and cleared the stacked, greasy food-trays off of a couple of the chairs, carrying them into the kitchen, and, from the sound of it, tossing them on the floor. + +We sat gingerly in the places he'd cleared, and then he came back and sat down too. + +"I'm sorry," he said vaguely. "I don't really have any coffee to offer you. I'm having more groceries delivered tomorrow so I'm running low --" + +"Ron," my father said. "Listen to us. We have something to tell you, and it's not going to be easy to hear." + +He sat like a statue as I talked. He glanced down at the note, read it without seeming to understand it, then read it again. He handed it back to me. + +He was trembling. + +"He's --" + +"Darryl is alive," I said. "Darryl is alive and being held prisoner on Treasure Island." + +He stuffed his fist in his mouth and made a horrible groaning sound. + +"We have a friend," my father said. "She writes for the /{Bay Guardian}/. An investigative reporter." + +That's where I knew the name from. The free weekly /{Guardian}/ often lost its reporters to bigger daily papers and the Internet, but Barbara Stratford had been there forever. I had a dim memory of having dinner with her when I was a kid. + +"We're going there now," my mother said. "Will you come with us, Ron? Will you tell her Darryl's story?" + +He put his face in his hands and breathed deeply. Dad tried to put his hand on his shoulders, but Mr Glover shook it off violently. + +"I need to clean myself up," he said. "Give me a minute." + +Mr Glover came back downstairs a changed man. He'd shaved and gelled his hair back, and had put on a crisp military dress uniform with a row of campaign ribbons on the breast. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and kind of gestured at it. + +"I don't have much clean stuff that's presentable at the moment. And this seemed appropriate. You know, if she wanted to take pictures." + +He and Dad rode up front and I got in the back, behind him. Up close, he smelled a little of beer, like it was coming through his pores. + +# + +It was midnight by the time we rolled into Barbara Stratford's driveway. She lived out of town, down in Mountain View, and as we sped down the 101, none of us said a word. The high-tech buildings alongside the highway streamed past us. + +This was a different Bay Area to the one I lived in, more like the suburban America I sometimes saw on TV. Lots of freeways and subdivisions of identical houses, towns where there weren't any homeless people pushing shopping carts down the sidewalk -- there weren't even sidewalks! + +Mom had phoned Barbara Stratford while we were waiting for Mr Glover to come downstairs. The journalist had been sleeping, but Mom had been so wound up she forgot to be all British and embarrassed about waking her up. Instead, she just told her, tensely, that she had something to talk about and that it had to be in person. + +When we rolled up to Barbara Stratford's house, my first thought was of the Brady Bunch place -- a low ranch house with a brick baffle in front of it and a neat, perfectly square lawn. There was a kind of abstract tile pattern on the baffle, and an old-fashioned UHF TV antenna rising from behind it. We wandered around to the entrance and saw that there were lights on inside already. + +The writer opened the door before we had a chance to ring the bell. She was about my parents' age, a tall thin woman with a hawk-like nose and shrewd eyes with a lot of laugh-lines. She was wearing a pair of jeans that were hip enough to be seen at one of the boutiques on Valencia Street, and a loose Indian cotton blouse that hung down to her thighs. She had small round glasses that flashed in her hallway light. + +She smiled a tight little smile at us. + +"You brought the whole clan, I see," she said. + +Mom nodded. "You'll understand why in a minute," she said. Mr Glover stepped from behind Dad. + +"And you called in the Navy?" + +"All in good time." + +We were introduced one at a time to her. She had a firm handshake and long fingers. + +Her place was furnished in Japanese minimalist style, just a few precisely proportioned, low pieces of furniture, large clay pots of bamboo that brushed the ceiling, and what looked like a large, rusted piece of a diesel engine perched on top of a polished marble plinth. I decided I liked it. The floors were old wood, sanded and stained, but not filled, so you could see cracks and pits underneath the varnish. I /{really}/ liked that, especially as I walked over it in my stocking feet. + +"I have coffee on," she said. "Who wants some?" + +We all put up our hands. I glared defiantly at my parents. + +"Right," she said. + +She disappeared into another room and came back a moment later bearing a rough bamboo tray with a half-gallon thermos jug and six cups of precise design but with rough, sloppy decorations. I liked those too. + +"Now," she said, once she'd poured and served. "It's very good to see you all again. Marcus, I think the last time I saw you, you were maybe seven years old. As I recall, you were very excited about your new video games, which you showed me." + +I didn't remember it at all, but that sounded like what I'd been into at seven. I guessed it was my Sega Dreamcast. + +She produced a tape-recorder and a yellow pad and a pen, and twirled the pen. "I'm here to listen to whatever you tell me, and I can promise you that I'll take it all in confidence. But I can't promise that I'll do anything with it, or that it's going to get published." The way she said it made me realize that my Mom had called in a pretty big favor getting this lady out of bed, friend or no friend. It must be kind of a pain in the ass to be a big-shot investigative reporter. There were probably a million people who would have liked her to take up their cause. + +Mom nodded at me. Even though I'd told the story three times that night, I found myself tongue-tied. This was different from telling my parents. Different from telling Darryl's father. This -- this would start a new move in the game. + +I started slowly, and watched Barbara take notes. I drank a whole cup of coffee just explaining what ARGing was and how I got out of school to play. Mom and Dad and Mr Glover all listened intently to this part. I poured myself another cup and drank it on the way to explaining how we were taken in. By the time I'd run through the whole story, I'd drained the pot and I needed a piss like a race-horse. + +Her bathroom was just as stark as the living-room, with a brown, organic soap that smelled like clean mud. I came back in and found the adults quietly watching me. + +Mr Glover told his story next. He didn't have anything to say about what had happened, but he explained that he was a veteran and that his son was a good kid. He talked about what it felt like to believe that his son had died, about how his ex-wife had had a collapse when she found out and ended up in a hospital. He cried a little, unashamed, the tears streaming down his lined face and darkening the collar of his dress-uniform. + +When it was all done, Barbara went into a different room and came back with a bottle of Irish whiskey. "It's a Bushmills 15 year old rum-cask aged blend," she said, setting down four small cups. None for me. "It hasn't been sold in ten years. I think this is probably an appropriate time to break it out." + +She poured them each a small glass of the liquor, then raised hers and sipped at it, draining half the glass. The rest of the adults followed suit. They drank again, and finished the glasses. She poured them new shots. + +"All right," she said. "Here's what I can tell you right now. I believe you. Not just because I know you, Lillian. The story sounds right, and it ties in with other rumors I've heard. But I'm not going to be able to just take your word for it. I'm going to have to investigate every aspect of this, and every element of your lives and stories. I need to know if there's anything you're not telling me, anything that could be used to discredit you after this comes to light. I need everything. It could take weeks before I'm ready to publish. + +"You also need to think about your safety and this Darryl's safety. If he's really an 'un-person' then bringing pressure to bear on the DHS could cause them to move him somewhere much further away. Think Syria. They could also do something much worse." She let that hang in the air. I knew she meant that they might kill him. + +"I'm going to take this letter and scan it now. I want pictures of the two of you, now and later -- we can send out a photographer, but I want to document this as thoroughly as I can tonight, too." + +I went with her into her office to do the scan. I'd expected a stylish, low-powered computer that fit in with her decor, but instead, her spare-bedroom/office was crammed with top-of-the-line PCs, big flat-panel monitors, and a scanner big enough to lay a whole sheet of newsprint on. She was fast with it all, too. I noted with some approval that she was running ParanoidLinux. This lady took her job seriously. + +The computers' fans set up an effective white-noise shield, but even so, I closed the door and moved in close to her. + +"Um, Barbara?" + +"Yes?" + +"About what you said, about what might be used to discredit me?" + +"Yes?" + +"What I tell you, you can't be forced to tell anyone else, right?" + +"In theory. Let me put it this way. I've gone to jail twice rather than rat out a source." + +"OK, OK. Good. Wow. Jail. Wow. OK." I took a deep breath. "You've heard of Xnet? Of M1k3y?" + +"Yes?" + +"I'm M1k3y." + +"Oh," she said. She worked the scanner and flipped the note over to get the reverse. She was scanning at some unbelievable resolution, 10,000 dots per inch or higher, and on-screen it was like the output of an electron-tunneling microscope. + +"Well, that does put a different complexion on this." + +"Yeah," I said. "I guess it does." + +"Your parents don't know." + +"Nope. And I don't know if I want them to." + +"That's something you're going to have to work out. I need to think about this. Can you come by my office? I'd like to talk to you about what this means, exactly." + +"Do you have an Xbox Universal? I could bring over an installer." + +"Yes, I'm sure that can be arranged. When you come by, tell the receptionist that you're Mr Brown, to see me. They know what that means. No note will be taken of you coming, and all the security camera footage for the day will be automatically scrubbed and the cameras deactivated until you leave." + +"Wow," I said. "You think like I do." + +She smiled and socked me in the shoulder. "Kiddo, I've been at this game for a hell of a long time. So far, I've managed to spend more time free than behind bars. Paranoia is my friend." + +# + +I was like a zombie the next day in school. I'd totaled about three hours of sleep, and even three cups of the Turk's caffeine mud failed to jump-start my brain. The problem with caffeine is that it's too easy to get acclimated to it, so you have to take higher and higher doses just to get above normal. + +I'd spent the night thinking over what I had to do. It was like running though a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, every one leading to the same dead end. When I went to Barbara, it would be over for me. That was the outcome, no matter how I thought about it. + +By the time the school day was over, all I wanted was to go home and crawl into bed. But I had an appointment at the /{Bay Guardian}/, down on the waterfront. I kept my eyes on my feet as I wobbled out the gate, and as I turned into 24th Street, another pair of feet fell into step with me. I recognized the shoes and stopped. + +"Ange?" + +She looked like I felt. Sleep-deprived and raccoon-eyed, with sad brackets in the corners of her mouth. + +"Hi there," she said. "Surprise. I gave myself French Leave from school. I couldn't concentrate anyway." + +"Um," I said. + +"Shut up and give me a hug, you idiot." + +I did. It felt good. Better than good. It felt like I'd amputated part of myself and it had been reattached. + +"I love you, Marcus Yallow." + +"I love you, Angela Carvelli." + +"OK," she said breaking it off. "I liked your post about why you're not jamming. I can respect it. What have you done about finding a way to jam them without getting caught?" + +"I'm on my way to meet an investigative journalist who's going to publish a story about how I got sent to jail, how I started Xnet, and how Darryl is being illegally held by the DHS at a secret prison on Treasure Island." + +"Oh." She looked around for a moment. "Couldn't you think of anything, you know, ambitious?" + +"Want to come?" + +"I am coming, yes. And I would like you to explain this in detail if you don't mind." + +After all the re-tellings, this one, told as we walked to Potrero Avenue and down to 15th Street, was the easiest. She held my hand and squeezed it often. + +We took the stairs up to the /{Bay Guardian}/'s offices two at a time. My heart was pounding. I got to the reception desk and told the bored girl behind it, "I'm here to see Barbara Stratford. My name is Mr Green." + +"I think you mean Mr Brown?" + +"Yeah," I said, and blushed. "Mr Brown." + +She did something at her computer, then said, "Have a seat. Barbara will be out in a minute. Can I get you anything?" + +"Coffee," we both said in unison. Another reason to love Ange: we were addicted to the same drug. + +The receptionist -- a pretty latina woman only a few years older than us, dressed in Gap styles so old they were actually kind of hipster-retro -- nodded and stepped out and came back with a couple of cups bearing the newspaper's masthead. + +We sipped in silence, watching visitors and reporters come and go. Finally, Barbara came to get us. She was wearing practically the same thing as the night before. It suited her. She quirked an eyebrow at me when she saw that I'd brought a date. + +"Hello," I said. "Um, this is --" + +"Ms Brown," Ange said, extending a hand. Oh, yeah, right, our identities were supposed to be a secret. "I work with Mr Green." She elbowed me lightly. + +"Let's go then," Barbara said, and led us back to a board-room with long glass walls with their blinds drawn shut. She set down a tray of Whole Foods organic Oreo clones, a digital recorder, and another yellow pad. + +"Do you want to record this too?" she asked. + +Hadn't actually thought of that. I could see why it would be useful if I wanted to dispute what Barbara printed, though. Still, if I couldn't trust her to do right by me, I was doomed anyway. + +"No, that's OK," I said. + +"Right, let's go. Young lady, my name is Barbara Stratford and I'm an investigative reporter. I gather you know why I'm here, and I'm curious to know why you're here." + +"I work with Marcus on the Xnet," she said. "Do you need to know my name?" + +"Not right now, I don't," Barbara said. "You can be anonymous if you'd like. Marcus, I asked you to tell me this story because I need to know how it plays with the story you told me about your friend Darryl and the note you showed me. I can see how it would be a good adjunct; I could pitch this as the origin of the Xnet. 'They made an enemy they'll never forget,' that sort of thing. But to be honest, I'd rather not have to tell that story if I don't have to. + +"I'd rather have a nice clean tale about the secret prison on our doorstep, without having to argue about whether the prisoners there are the sort of people likely to walk out the doors and establish an underground movement bent on destabilizing the federal government. I'm sure you can understand that." + +I did. If the Xnet was part of the story, some people would say, see, they need to put guys like that in jail or they'll start a riot. + +"This is your show," I said. "I think you need to tell the world about Darryl. When you do that, it's going to tell the DHS that I've gone public and they're going to go after me. Maybe they'll figure out then that I'm involved with the Xnet. Maybe they'll connect me to M1k3y. I guess what I'm saying is, once you publish about Darryl, it's all over for me no matter what. I've made my peace with that." + +"As good be hanged for a sheep as a lamb," she said. "Right. Well, that's settled. I want the two of you to tell me everything you can about the founding and operation of the Xnet, and then I want a demonstration. What do you use it for? Who else uses it? How did it spread? Who wrote the software? Everything." + +"This'll take a while," Ange said. + +"I've got a while," Barbara said. She drank some coffee and ate a fake Oreo. "This could be the most important story of the War on Terror. This could be the story that topples the government. When you have a story like this, you take it very carefully." + +1~ Chapter 17 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Waterstone's,~{ Waterstones http://www.waterstones.com }~ the national UK bookselling chain. Waterstone's is a chain of stores, but each one has the feel of a great independent store, with tons of personality, great stock (especially audiobooks!), and knowledgeable staff.] }/ + +So we told her. I found it really fun, actually. Teaching people how to use technology is always exciting. It's so cool to watch people figure out how the technology around them can be used to make their lives better. Ange was great too -- we made an excellent team. We'd trade off explaining how it all worked. Barbara was pretty good at this stuff to begin with, of course. + +It turned out that she'd covered the crypto wars, the period in the early nineties when civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation fought for the right of Americans to use strong crypto. I dimly knew about that period, but Barbara explained it in a way that made me get goose-pimples. + +It's unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government classed crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export or use it on national security grounds. Get that? We used to have illegal /{math}/ in this country. + +The National Security Agency were the real movers behind the ban. They had a crypto standard that they said was strong enough for bankers and their customers to use, but not so strong that the mafia would be able to keep its books secret from them. The standard, DES-56, was said to be practically unbreakable. Then one of EFF's millionaire co-founders built a $250,000 DES-56 cracker that could break the cipher in two hours. + +Still the NSA argued that it should be able to keep American citizens from possessing secrets it couldn't pry into. Then EFF dealt its death-blow. In 1995, they represented a Berkeley mathematics grad student called Dan Bernstein in court. Bernstein had written a crypto tutorial that contained computer code that could be used to make a cipher stronger than DES-56. Millions of times stronger. As far as the NSA was concerned, that made his article into a weapon, and therefore unpublishable. + +Well, it may be hard to get a judge to understand crypto and what it means, but it turned out that the average Appeals Court judge isn't real enthusiastic about telling grad students what kind of articles they're allowed to write. The crypto wars ended with a victory for the good guys when the 9th Circuit Appellate Division Court ruled that code was a form of expression protected under the First Amendment -- "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech." If you've ever bought something on the Internet, or sent a secret message, or checked your bank-balance, you used crypto that EFF legalized. Good thing, too: the NSA just isn't that smart. Anything they know how to crack, you can be sure that terrorists and mobsters can get around too. + +Barbara had been one of the reporters who'd made her reputation from covering the issue. She'd cut her teeth covering the tail end of the civil rights movement in San Francisco, and she recognized the similarity between the fight for the Constitution in the real world and the fight in cyberspace. + +So she got it. I don't think I could have explained this stuff to my parents, but with Barbara it was easy. She asked smart questions about our cryptographic protocols and security procedures, sometimes asking stuff I didn't know the answer to -- sometimes pointing out potential breaks in our procedure. + +We plugged in the Xbox and got it online. There were four open WiFi nodes visible from the board room and I told it to change between them at random intervals. She got this too -- once you were actually plugged into the Xnet, it was just like being on the Internet, only some stuff was a little slower, and it was all anonymous and unsniffable. + +"So now what?" I said as we wound down. I'd talked myself dry and I had a terrible acid feeling from the coffee. Besides, Ange kept squeezing my hand under the table in a way that made me want to break away and find somewhere private to finish making up for our first fight. + +"Now I do journalism. You go away and I research all the things you've told me and try to confirm them to the extent that I can. I'll let you see what I'm going to publish and I'll let you know when it's going to go live. I'd prefer that you /{not}/ talk about this with anyone else now, because I want the scoop and because I want to make sure that I get the story before it goes all muddy from press speculation and DHS spin. + +"I /{will}/ have to call the DHS for comment before I go to press, but I'll do that in a way that protects you to whatever extent possible. I'll also be sure to let you know before that happens. + +"One thing I need to be clear on: this isn't your story anymore. It's mine. You were very generous to give it to me and I'll try to repay the gift, but you don't get the right to edit anything out, to change it, or to stop me. This is now in motion and it won't stop. Do you understand that?" + +I hadn't thought about it in those terms but once she said it, it was obvious. It meant that I had launched and I wouldn't be able to recall the rocket. It was going to fall where it was aimed, or it would go off course, but it was in the air and couldn't be changed now. Sometime in the near future, I would stop being Marcus -- I would be a public figure. I'd be the guy who blew the whistle on the DHS. + +I'd be a dead man walking. + +I guess Ange was thinking along the same lines, because she'd gone a color between white and green. + +"Let's get out of here," she said. + +# + +Ange's mom and sister were out again, which made it easy to decide where we were going for the evening. It was past supper time, but my parents had known that I was meeting with Barbara and wouldn't give me any grief if I came home late. + +When we got to Ange's, I had no urge to plug in my Xbox. I had had all the Xnet I could handle for one day. All I could think about was Ange, Ange, Ange. Living without Ange. Knowing Ange was angry with me. Ange never going to talk to me again. Ange never going to kiss me again. + +She'd been thinking the same. I could see it in her eyes as we shut the door to her bedroom and looked at each other. I was hungry for her, like you'd hunger for dinner after not eating for days. Like you'd thirst for a glass of water after playing soccer for three hours straight. + +Like none of that. It was more. It was something I'd never felt before. I wanted to eat her whole, devour her. + +Up until now, she'd been the sexual one in our relationship. I'd let her set and control the pace. It was amazingly erotic to have /{her}/ grab /{me}/ and take off my shirt, drag my face to hers. + +But tonight I couldn't hold back. I wouldn't hold back. + +The door clicked shut and I reached for the hem of her t-shirt and yanked, barely giving her time to lift her arms as I pulled it over her head. I tore my own shirt over my head, listening to the cotton crackle as the stitches came loose. + +Her eyes were shining, her mouth open, her breathing fast and shallow. Mine was too, my breath and my heart and my blood all roaring in my ears. + +I took off the rest of our clothes with equal zest, throwing them into the piles of dirty and clean laundry on the floor. There were books and papers all over the bed and I swept them aside. We landed on the unmade bedclothes a second later, arms around one another, squeezing like we would pull ourselves right through one another. She moaned into my mouth and I made the sound back, and I felt her voice buzz in my vocal chords, a feeling more intimate than anything I'd ever felt before. + +She broke away and reached for the bedstand. She yanked open the drawer and threw a white pharmacy bag on the bed before me. I looked inside. Condoms. Trojans. One dozen spermicidal. Still sealed. I smiled at her and she smiled back and I opened the box. + +# + +I'd thought about what it would be like for years. A hundred times a day I'd imagined it. Some days, I'd thought of practically nothing else. + +It was nothing like I expected. Parts of it were better. Parts of it were lots worse. While it was going on, it felt like an eternity. Afterwards, it seemed to be over in the blink of an eye. + +Afterwards, I felt the same. But I also felt different. Something had changed between us. + +It was weird. We were both shy as we put our clothes on and puttered around the room, looking away, not meeting each other's eyes. I wrapped the condom in a kleenex from a box beside the bed and took it into the bathroom and wound it with toilet paper and stuck it deep into the trash-can. + +When I came back in, Ange was sitting up in bed and playing with her Xbox. I sat down carefully beside her and took her hand. She turned to face me and smiled. We were both worn out, trembly. + +"Thanks," I said. + +She didn't say anything. She turned her face to me. She was grinning hugely, but fat tears were rolling down her cheeks. + +I hugged her and she grabbed tightly onto me. "You're a good man, Marcus Yallow," she whispered. "Thank you." + +I didn't know what to say, but I squeezed her back. Finally, we parted. She wasn't crying any more, but she was still smiling. + +She pointed at my Xbox, on the floor beside the bed. I took the hint. I picked it up and plugged it in and logged in. + +Same old same old. Lots of email. The new posts on the blogs I read streamed in. Spam. God did I get a lot of spam. My Swedish mailbox was repeatedly "joe-jobbed" -- used as the return address for spams sent to hundreds of millions of Internet accounts, so that all the bounces and angry messages came back to me. I didn't know who was behind it. Maybe the DHS trying to overwhelm my mailbox. Maybe it was just people pranking. The Pirate Party had pretty good filters, though, and they gave anyone who wanted it 500 gigabytes of email storage, so I wasn't likely to be drowned any time soon. + +I filtered it all out, hammering on the delete key. I had a separate mailbox for stuff that came in encrypted to my public key, since that was likely to be Xnet-related and possibly sensitive. Spammers hadn't figured out that using public keys would make their junk mail more plausible yet, so for now this worked well. + +There were a couple dozen encrypted messages from people in the web of trust. I skimmed them -- links to videos and pics of new abuses from the DHS, horror stories about near-escapes, rants about stuff I'd blogged. The usual. + +Then I came to one that was only encrypted to my public key. That meant that no one else could read it, but I had no idea who had written it. It said it came from Masha, which could either be a handle or a name -- I couldn't tell which. + +> M1k3y + +> You don't know me, but I know you. + +> I was arrested the day that the bridge blew. They questioned me. They decided I was innocent. They offered me a job: help them hunt down the terrorists who'd killed my neighbors. + +> It sounded like a good deal at the time. Little did I realize that my actual job would turn out to be spying on kids who resented their city being turned into a police state. + +> I infiltrated Xnet on the day it launched. I am in your web of trust. If I wanted to spill my identity, I could send you email from an address you'd trust. Three addresses, actually. I'm totally inside your network as only another 17-year-old can be. Some of the email you've gotten has been carefully chosen misinformation from me and my handlers. + +> They don't know who you are, but they're coming close. They continue to turn people, to compromise them. They mine the social network sites and use threats to turn kids into informants. There are hundreds of people working for the DHS on Xnet right now. I have their names, handles and keys. Private and public. + +> Within days of the Xnet launch, we went to work on exploiting ParanoidLinux. The exploits so far have been small and insubstantial, but a break is inevitable. Once we have a zero-day break, you're dead. + +> I think it's safe to say that if my handlers knew that I was typing this, my ass would be stuck in Gitmo-by-the-Bay until I was an old woman. + +> Even if they don't break ParanoidLinux, there are poisoned ParanoidXbox distros floating around. They don't match the checksums, but how many people look at the checksums? Besides me and you? Plenty of kids are already dead, though they don't know it. + +> All that remains is for my handlers to figure out the best time to bust you to make the biggest impact in the media. That time will be sooner, not later. Believe. + +> You're probably wondering why I'm telling you this. + +> I am too. + +> Here's where I come from. I signed up to fight terrorists. Instead, I'm spying on Americans who believe things that the DHS doesn't like. Not people who plan on blowing up bridges, but protestors. I can't do it anymore. + +> But neither can you, whether or not you know it. Like I say, it's only a matter of time until you're in chains on Treasure Island. That's not if, that's when. + +> So I'm through here. Down in Los Angeles, there are some people. They say they can keep me safe if I want to get out. + +> I want to get out. + +> I will take you with me, if you want to come. Better to be a fighter than a martyr. If you come with me, we can figure out how to win together. I'm as smart as you. Believe. + +> What do you say? + +> Here's my public key. + +> Masha + +# + +When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. + +Ever hear that rhyme? It's not good advice, but at least it's easy to follow. I leapt off the bed and paced back and forth. My heart thudded and my blood sang in a cruel parody of the way I'd felt when we got home. This wasn't sexual excitement, it was raw terror. + +"What?" Ange said. "What?" + +I pointed at the screen on my side of the bed. She rolled over and grabbed my keyboard and scribed on the touchpad with her fingertip. She read in silence. + +I paced. + +"This has to be lies," she said. "The DHS is playing games with your head." + +I looked at her. She was biting her lip. She didn't look like she believed it. + +"You think?" + +"Sure. They can't beat you, so they're coming after you using Xnet." + +"Yeah." + +I sat back down on the bed. I was breathing fast again. + +"Chill out," she said. "It's just head-games. Here." + +She never took my keyboard from me before, but now there was a new intimacy between us. She hit reply and typed, + +> Nice try. + +She was writing as M1k3y now, too. We were together in a way that was different from before. + +"Go ahead and sign it. We'll see what she says." + +I didn't know if that was the best idea, but I didn't have any better ones. I signed it and encrypted it with my private key and the public key Masha had provided. + +The reply was instant. + +> I thought you'd say something like that. + +> Here's a hack you haven't thought of. I can anonymously tunnel video over DNS. Here are some links to clips you might want to look at before you decide I'm full of it. These people are all recording each other, all the time, as insurance against a back-stab. It's pretty easy to snoop off them as they snoop on each other. + +> Masha + +Attached was source-code for a little program that appeared to do exactly what Masha claimed: pull video over the Domain Name Service protocol. + +Let me back up a moment here and explain something. At the end of the day, every Internet protocol is just a sequence of text sent back and forth in a prescribed order. It's kind of like getting a truck and putting a car in it, then putting a motorcycle in the car's trunk, then attaching a bicycle to the back of the motorcycle, then hanging a pair of Rollerblades on the back of the bike. Except that then, if you want, you can attach the truck to the Rollerblades. + +For example, take Simple Mail Transport Protocol, or SMTP, which is used for sending email. + +Here's a sample conversation between me and my mail server, sending a message to myself: + +> HELO littlebrother.com.se + +250 mail.pirateparty.org.se Hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to meet you + +> MAIL FROM:m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se + +250 2.1.0 m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se... Sender ok + +> RCPT TO:m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se + +250 2.1.5 m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se... Recipient ok + +> DATA + +354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself + +> When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout + +> . + +250 2.0.0 k5SMW0xQ006174 Message accepted for delivery + +QUIT + +221 2.0.0 mail.pirateparty.org.se closing connection + +Connection closed by foreign host. + +This conversation's grammar was defined in 1982 by Jon Postel, one of the Internet's heroic forefathers, who used to literally run the most important servers on the net under his desk at the University of Southern California, back in the paleolithic era. + +Now, imagine that you hooked up a mail-server to an IM session. You could send an IM to the server that said "HELO littlebrother.com.se" and it would reply with "250 mail.pirateparty.org.se Hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to meet you." In other words, you could have the same conversation over IM as you do over SMTP. With the right tweaks, the whole mail-server business could take place inside of a chat. Or a web-session. Or anything else. + +This is called "tunneling." You put the SMTP inside a chat "tunnel." You could then put the chat back into an SMTP tunnel if you wanted to be really weird, tunneling the tunnel in another tunnel. + +In fact, every Internet protocol is susceptible to this process. It's cool, because it means that if you're on a network with only Web access, you can tunnel your mail over it. You can tunnel your favorite P2P over it. You can even tunnel Xnet -- which itself is a tunnel for dozens of protocols -- over it. + +Domain Name Service is an interesting and ancient Internet protocol, dating back to 1983. It's the way that your computer converts a computer's name -- like pirateparty.org.se -- to the IP number that computers actually use to talk to each other over the net, like 204.11.50.136. It generally works like magic, even though it's got millions of moving parts -- every ISP runs a DNS server, as do most governments and lots of private operators. These DNS boxes all talk to each other all the time, making and filling requests to each other so no matter how obscure the name is you feed to your computer, it will be able to turn it into a number. + +Before DNS, there was the HOSTS file. Believe it or not, this was a single document that listed the name and address of /{every single computer}/ connected to the Internet. Every computer had a copy of it. This file was eventually too big to move around, so DNS was invented, and ran on a server that used to live under Jon Postel's desk. If the cleaners knocked out the plug, the entire Internet lost its ability to find itself. Seriously. + +The thing about DNS today is that it's everywhere. Every network has a DNS server living on it, and all of those servers are configured to talk to each other and to random people all over the Internet. + +What Masha had done was figure out a way to tunnel a video-streaming system over DNS. She was breaking up the video into billions of pieces and hiding each of them in a normal message to a DNS server. By running her code, I was able to pull the video from all those DNS servers, all over the Internet, at incredible speed. It must have looked bizarre on the network histograms, like I was looking up the address of every computer in the world. + +But it had two advantages I appreciated at once: I was able to get the video with blinding speed -- as soon as I clicked the first link, I started to receive full-screen pictures, without any jitter or stuttering -- and I had no idea where it was hosted. It was totally anonymous. + +At first I didn't even clock the content of the video. I was totally floored by the cleverness of this hack. Streaming video from DNS? That was so smart and weird, it was practically /{perverted}/. + +Gradually, what I was seeing began to sink in. + +It was a board-room table in a small room with a mirror down one wall. I knew that room. I'd sat in that room, while Severe-Haircut woman had made me speak my password aloud. There were five comfortable chairs around the table, each with a comfortable person, all in DHS uniform. I recognized Major General Graeme Sutherland, the DHS Bay Area commander, along with Severe Haircut. The others were new to me. They all watched a video screen at the end of the table, on which there was an infinitely more familiar face. + +Kurt Rooney was known nationally as the President's chief strategist, the man who returned the party for its third term, and who was steaming towards a fourth. They called him "Ruthless" and I'd seen a news report once about how tight a rein he kept his staffers on, calling them, IMing them, watching their every motion, controlling every step. He was old, with a lined face and pale gray eyes and a flat nose with broad, flared nostrils and thin lips, a man who looked like he was smelling something bad all the time. + +He was the man on the screen. He was talking, and everyone else was focused on his screen, everyone taking notes as fast as they could type, trying to look smart. + +"-- say that they're angry with authority, but we need to show the country that it's terrorists, not the government, that they need to blame. Do you understand me? The nation does not love that city. As far as they're concerned, it is a Sodom and Gomorrah of fags and atheists who deserve to rot in hell. The only reason the country cares what they think in San Francisco is that they had the good fortune to have been blown to hell by some Islamic terrorists. + +"These Xnet children are getting to the point where they might start to be useful to us. The more radical they get, the more the rest of the nation understands that there are threats everywhere." + +His audience finished typing. + +"We can control that, I think," Severe Haircut Lady said. "Our people in the Xnet have built up a lot of influence. The Manchurian Bloggers are running as many as fifty blogs each, flooding the chat channels, linking to each other, mostly just taking the party line set by this M1k3y. But they've already shown that they can provoke radical action, even when M1k3y is putting the brakes on." + +Major General Sutherland nodded. "We have been planning to leave them underground until about a month before the midterms." I guessed that meant the mid-term elections, not my exams. "That's per the original plan. But it sounds like --" + +"We've got another plan for the midterms," Rooney said. "Need-to-know, of course, but you should all probably not plan on traveling for the month before. Cut the Xnet loose now, as soon as you can. So long as they're moderates, they're a liability. Keep them radical." + +The video cut off. + +Ange and I sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the screen. Ange reached out and started the video again. We watched it. It was worse the second time. + +I tossed the keyboard aside and got up. + +"I am /{so sick}/ of being scared," I said. "Let's take this to Barbara and have her publish it all. Put it all on the net. Let them take me away. At least I'll know what's going to happen then. At least then I'll have a little /{certainty}/ in my life." + +Ange grabbed me and hugged me, soothed me. "I know baby, I know. It's all terrible. But you're focusing on the bad stuff and ignoring the good stuff. You've created a movement. You've outflanked the jerks in the White House, the crooks in DHS uniforms. You've put yourself in a position where you could be responsible for blowing the lid off of the entire rotten DHS thing. + +"Sure they're out to get you. Course they are. Have you ever doubted it for a moment? I always figured they were. But Marcus, /{they don't know who you are}/. Think about that. All those people, money, guns and spies, and you, a seventeen year old high school kid -- you're still beating them. They don't know about Barbara. They don't know about Zeb. You've jammed them in the streets of San Francisco and humiliated them before the world. So stop moping, all right? You're winning." + +"They're coming for me, though. You see that. They're going to put me in jail forever. Not even jail. I'll just disappear, like Darryl. Maybe worse. Maybe Syria. Why leave me in San Francisco? I'm a liability as long as I'm in the USA." + +She sat down on the bed with me. + +"Yeah," she said. "That." + +"That." + +"Well, you know what you have to do, right?" + +"What?" She looked pointedly at my keyboard. I could see the tears rolling down her cheeks. "No! You're out of your mind. You think I'm going to run off with some nut off the Internet? Some spy?" + +"You got a better idea?" + +I kicked a pile of her laundry into the air. "Whatever. Fine. I'll talk to her some more." + +"You talk to her," Ange said. "You tell her you and your girlfriend are getting out." + +"What?" + +"Shut up, dickhead. You think you're in danger? I'm in just as much danger, Marcus. It's called guilt by association. When you go, I go." She had her jaw thrust out at a mutinous angle. "You and I -- we're together now. You have to understand that." + +We sat down on the bed together. + +"Unless you don't want me," she said, finally, in a small voice. + +"You're kidding me, right?" + +"Do I look like I'm kidding?" + +"There's no way I would voluntarily go without you, Ange. I could never have asked you to come, but I'm ecstatic that you offered." + +She smiled and tossed me my keyboard. + +"Email this Masha creature. Let's see what this chick can do for us." + +I emailed her, encrypting the message, waiting for a reply. Ange nuzzled me a little and I kissed her and we necked. Something about the danger and the pact to go together -- it made me forget the awkwardness of having sex, made me freaking horny as hell. + +We were half naked again when Masha's email arrived. + +> Two of you? Jesus, like it won't be hard enough already. + +> I don't get to leave except to do field intelligence after a big Xnet hit. You get me? The handlers watch my every move, but I go off the leash when something big happens with Xnetters. I get sent into the field then. + +> You do something big. I get sent to it. I get us both out. All three of us, if you insist. + +> Make it fast, though. I can't send you a lot of email, understand? They watch me. They're closing in on you. You don't have a lot of time. Weeks? Maybe just days. + +> I need you to get me out. That's why I'm doing this, in case you're wondering. I can't escape on my own. I need a big Xnet distraction. That's your department. Don't fail me, M1k3y, or we're both dead. Your girlie too. + +> Masha + +My phone rang, making us both jump. It was my mom wanting to know when I was coming home. I told her I was on my way. She didn't mention Barbara. We'd agreed that we wouldn't talk about any of this stuff on the phone. That was my dad's idea. He could be as paranoid as me. + +"I have to go," I said. + +"Our parents will be --" + +"I know," I said. "I saw what happened to my parents when they thought I was dead. Knowing that I'm a fugitive isn't going to be much better. But they'd rather I be a fugitive than a prisoner. That's what I think. Anyway, once we disappear, Barbara can publish without worrying about getting us into trouble." + +We kissed at the door of her room. Not one of the hot, sloppy numbers we usually did when parting ways. A sweet kiss this time. A slow kiss. A goodbye kind of kiss. + +# + +BART rides are introspective. When the train rocks back and forth and you try not to make eye contact with the other riders and you try not to read the ads for plastic surgery, bail bondsmen and AIDS testing, when you try to ignore the graffiti and not look too closely at the stuff in the carpeting. That's when your mind starts to really churn and churn. + +You rock back and forth and your mind goes over all the things you've overlooked, plays back all the movies of your life where you're no hero, where you're a chump or a sucker. + +Your brain comes up with theories like this one: + +/{If the DHS wanted to catch M1k3y, what better way than to lure him into the open, panic him into leading some kind of big, public Xnet event? Wouldn't that be worth the chance of a compromising video leaking?}/ + +Your brain comes up with stuff like that even when the train ride only lasts two or three stops. When you get off, and you start moving, the blood gets running and sometimes your brain helps you out again. + +Sometimes your brain gives you solutions in addition to problems. + +1~ Chapter 18 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Vancouver's multilingual Sophia Books,~{ Sophia Books http://www.sophiabooks.com/ 450 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC Canada V6B1L1 +1 604 684 0484 }~ a diverse and exciting store filled with the best of the strange and exciting pop culture worlds of many lands. Sophia was around the corner from my hotel when I went to Van to give a talk at Simon Fraser University, and the Sophia folks emailed me in advance to ask me to drop in and sign their stock while I was in the neighborhood. When I got there, I discovered a treasure-trove of never-before-seen works in a dizzying array of languages, from graphic novels to thick academic treatises, presided over by good-natured (even slapstick) staff who so palpably enjoyed their jobs that it spread to every customer who stepped through the door.] }/ + +There was a time when my favorite thing in the world was putting on a cape and hanging out in hotels, pretending to be an invisible vampire whom everyone stared at. + +It's complicated, and not nearly as weird as it sounds. The Live Action Role Playing scene combines the best aspects of D&D with drama club with going to sci-fi cons. + +I understand that this might not make it sound as appealing to you as it was to me when I was 14. + +The best games were the ones at the Scout Camps out of town: a hundred teenagers, boys and girls, fighting the Friday night traffic, swapping stories, playing handheld games, showing off for hours. Then debarking to stand in the grass before a group of older men and women in bad-ass, home-made armor, dented and scarred, like armor must have been in the old days, not like it's portrayed in the movies, but like a soldier's uniform after a month in the bush. + +These people were nominally paid to run the games, but you didn't get the job unless you were the kind of person who'd do it for free. They'd have already divided us into teams based on the questionnaires we'd filled in beforehand, and we'd get our team assignments then, like being called up for baseball sides. + +Then you'd get your briefing packages. These were like the briefings the spies get in the movies: here's your identity, here's your mission, here's the secrets you know about the group. + +From there, it was time for dinner: roaring fires, meat popping on spits, tofu sizzling on skillets (it's northern California, a vegetarian option is not optional), and a style of eating and drinking that can only be described as quaffing. + +Already, the keen kids would be getting into character. My first game, I was a wizard. I had a bag of beanbags that represented spells -- when I threw one, I would shout the name of the spell I was casting -- fireball, magic missile, cone of light -- and the player or "monster" I threw it at would keel over if I connected. Or not -- sometimes we had to call in a ref to mediate, but for the most part, we were all pretty good about playing fair. No one liked a dice lawyer. + +By bedtime, we were all in character. At 14, I wasn't super-sure what a wizard was supposed to sound like, but I could take my cues from the movies and novels. I spoke in slow, measured tones, keeping my face composed in a suitably mystical expression, and thinking mystical thoughts. + +The mission was complicated, retrieving a sacred relic that had been stolen by an ogre who was bent on subjugating the people of the land to his will. It didn't really matter a whole lot. What mattered was that I had a private mission, to capture a certain kind of imp to serve as my familiar, and that I had a secret nemesis, another player on the team who had taken part in a raid that killed my family when I was a boy, a player who didn't know that I'd come back, bent on revenge. Somewhere, of course, there was another player with a similar grudge against me, so that even as I was enjoying the camaraderie of the team, I'd always have to keep an eye open for a knife in the back, poison in the food. + +For the next two days, we played it out. There were parts of the weekend that were like hide-and-seek, some that were like wilderness survival exercises, some that were like solving crossword puzzles. The game-masters had done a great job. And you really got to be friends with the other people on the mission. Darryl was the target of my first murder, and I put my back into it, even though he was my pal. Nice guy. Shame I'd have to kill him. + +I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a band of orcs, playing rock-papers-scissors with each orc to determine who would prevail in combat. This is a lot more exciting than it sounds. + +It was like summer camp for drama geeks. We talked until late at night in tents, looked at the stars, jumped in the river when we got hot, slapped away mosquitos. Became best friends, or lifelong enemies. + +I don't know why Charles's parents sent him LARPing. He wasn't the kind of kid who really enjoyed that kind of thing. He was more the pulling-wings-off-flies type. Oh, maybe not. But he just was not into being in costume in the woods. He spent the whole time mooching around, sneering at everyone and everything, trying to convince us all that we weren't having the good time we all felt like we were having. You've no doubt found that kind of person before, the kind of person who is compelled to ensure that everyone else has a rotten time. + +The other thing about Charles was that he couldn't get the hang of simulated combat. Once you start running around the woods and playing these elaborate, semi-military games, it's easy to get totally adrenalized to the point where you're ready to tear out someone's throat. This is not a good state to be in when you're carrying a prop sword, club, pike or other utensil. This is why no one is ever allowed to hit anyone, under any circumstances, in these games. Instead, when you get close enough to someone to fight, you play a quick couple rounds of rock-paper-scissors, with modifiers based on your experience, armaments, and condition. The referees mediate disputes. It's quite civilized, and a little weird. You go running after someone through the woods, catch up with him, bare your teeth, and sit down to play a little roshambo. But it works -- and it keeps everything safe and fun. + +Charles couldn't really get the hang of this. I think he was perfectly capable of understanding that the rule was no contact, but he was simultaneously capable of deciding that the rule didn't matter, and that he wasn't going to abide by it. The refs called him on it a bunch of times over the weekend, and he kept on promising to stick by it, and kept on going back. He was one of the bigger kids there already, and he was fond of "accidentally" tackling you at the end of a chase. Not fun when you get tackled into the rocky forest floor. + +I had just mightily smote Darryl in a little clearing where he'd been treasure-hunting, and we were having a little laugh over my extreme sneakiness. He was going to go monstering -- killed players could switch to playing monsters, which meant that the longer the game wore on, the more monsters there were coming after you, meaning that everyone got to keep on playing and the game's battles just got more and more epic. + +That was when Charles came out of the woods behind me and tackled me, throwing me to the ground so hard that I couldn't breathe for a moment. "Gotcha!" he yelled. I only knew him slightly before this, and I'd never thought much of him, but now I was ready for murder. I climbed slowly to my feet and looked at him, his chest heaving, grinning. "You're so dead," he said. "I totally got you." + +I smiled and something felt wrong and sore in my face. I touched my upper lip. It was bloody. My nose was bleeding and my lip was split, cut on a root I'd face-planted into when he tackled me. + +I wiped the blood on my pants-leg and smiled. I made like I thought that it was all in fun. I laughed a little. I moved towards him. + +Charles wasn't fooled. He was already backing away, trying to fade into the woods. Darryl moved to flank him. I took the other flank. Abruptly, he turned and ran. Darryl's foot hooked his ankle and sent him sprawling. We rushed him, just in time to hear a ref's whistle. + +The ref hadn't seen Charles foul me, but he'd seen Charles's play that weekend. He sent Charles back to the camp entrance and told him he was out of the game. Charles complained mightily, but to our satisfaction, the ref wasn't having any of it. Once Charles had gone, he gave /{us}/ both a lecture, too, telling us that our retaliation was no more justified than Charles's attack. + +It was OK. That night, once the games had ended, we all got hot showers in the scout dorms. Darryl and I stole Charles's clothes and towel. We tied them in knots and dropped them in the urinal. A lot of the boys were happy to contribute to the effort of soaking them. Charles had been very enthusiastic about his tackles. + +I wish I could have watched him when he got out of his shower and discovered his clothes. It's a hard decision: do you run naked across the camp, or pick apart the tight, piss-soaked knots in your clothes and then put them on? + +He chose nudity. I probably would have chosen the same. We lined up along the route from the showers to the shed where the packs were stored and applauded him. I was at the front of the line, leading the applause. + +# + +The Scout Camp weekends only came three or four times a year, which left Darryl and me -- and lots of other LARPers -- with a serious LARP deficiency in our lives. + +Luckily, there were the Wretched Daylight games in the city hotels. Wretched Daylight is another LARP, rival vampire clans and vampire hunters, and it's got its own quirky rules. Players get cards to help them resolve combat skirmishes, so each skirmish involves playing a little hand of a strategic card game. Vampires can become invisible by cloaking themselves, crossing their arms over their chests, and all the other players have to pretend they don't see them, continuing on with their conversations about their plans and so on. The true test of a good player is whether you're honest enough to go on spilling your secrets in front of an "invisible" rival without acting as though he was in the room. + +There were a couple of big Wretched Daylight games every month. The organizers of the games had a good relationship with the city's hotels and they let it be known that they'd take ten unbooked rooms on Friday night and fill them with players who'd run around the hotel, playing low-key Wretched Daylight in the corridors, around the pool, and so on, eating at the hotel restaurant and paying for the hotel WiFi. They'd close the booking on Friday afternoon, email us, and we'd go straight from school to whichever hotel it was, bringing our knapsacks, sleeping six or eight to a room for the weekend, living on junk-food, playing until three AM. It was good, safe fun that our parents could get behind. + +The organizers were a well-known literacy charity that ran kids' writing workshops, drama workshops and so on. They had been running the games for ten years without incident. Everything was strictly booze- and drug-free, to keep the organizers from getting busted on some kind of corruption of minors rap. We'd draw between ten and a hundred players, depending on the weekend, and for the cost of a couple movies, you could have two and a half days' worth of solid fun. + +One day, though, they lucked into a block of rooms at the Monaco, a hotel in the Tenderloin that catered to arty older tourists, the kind of place where every room came with a goldfish bowl, where the lobby was full of beautiful old people in fine clothes, showing off their plastic surgery results. + +Normally, the mundanes -- our word for non-players -- just ignored us, figuring that we were skylarking kids. But that weekend there happened to be an editor for an Italian travel magazine staying, and he took an interest in things. He cornered me as I skulked in the lobby, hoping to spot the clan-master of my rivals and swoop in on him and draw his blood. I was standing against the wall with my arms folded over my chest, being invisible, when he came up to me and asked me, in accented English, what me and my friends were doing in the hotel that weekend? + +I tried to brush him off, but he wouldn't be put off. So I figured I'd just make something up and he'd go away. + +I didn't imagine that he'd print it. I really didn't imagine that it would get picked up by the American press. + +"We're here because our prince has died, and so we've had to come in search of a new ruler." + +"A prince?" + +"Yes," I said, getting into it. "We're the Old People. We came to America in the 16th Century and have had our own royal family in the wilds of Pennsylvania ever since. We live simply in the woods. We don't use modern technology. But the prince was the last of the line and he died last week. Some terrible wasting disease took him. The young men of my clan have left to find the descendants of his great-uncle, who went away to join the modern people in the time of my grandfather. He is said to have multiplied, and we will find the last of his bloodline and bring them back to their rightful home." + +I read a lot of fantasy novels. This kind of thing came easily to me. + +"We found a woman who knew of these descendants. She told us one was staying in this hotel, and we've come to find him. But we've been tracked here by a rival clan who would keep us from bringing home our prince, to keep us weak and easy to dominate. Thus it is vital we keep to ourselves. We do not talk to the New People when we can help it. Talking to you now causes me great discomfort." + +He was watching me shrewdly. I had uncrossed my arms, which meant that I was now "visible" to rival vampires, one of whom had been slowly sneaking up on us. At the last moment, I turned and saw her, arms spread, hissing at us, vamping it up in high style. + +I threw my arms wide and hissed back at her, then pelted through the lobby, hopping over a leather sofa and deking around a potted plant, making her chase me. I'd scouted an escape route down through the stairwell to the basement health-club and I took it, shaking her off. + +I didn't see him again that weekend, but I /{did}/ relate the story to some of my fellow LARPers, who embroidered the tale and found lots of opportunities to tell it over the weekend. + +The Italian magazine had a staffer who'd done her master's degree on Amish anti-technology communities in rural Pennsylvania, and she thought we sounded awfully interesting. Based on the notes and taped interviews of her boss from his trip to San Francisco, she wrote a fascinating, heart-wrenching article about these weird, juvenile cultists who were crisscrossing America in search of their "prince." Hell, people will print anything these days. + +But the thing was, stories like that get picked up and republished. First it was Italian bloggers, then a few American bloggers. People across the country reported "sightings" of the Old People, though whether they were making it up, or whether others were playing the same game, I didn't know. + +It worked its way up the media food-chain all the way to the /{New York Times}/, who, unfortunately, have an unhealthy appetite for fact-checking. The reporter they put on the story eventually tracked it down to the Monaco Hotel, who put them in touch with the LARP organizers, who laughingly spilled the whole story. + +Well, at that point, LARPing got a lot less cool. We became known as the nation's foremost hoaxers, as weird, pathological liars. The press who we'd inadvertently tricked into covering the story of the Old People were now interested in redeeming themselves by reporting on how unbelievably weird we LARPers were, and that was when Charles let everyone in school know that Darryl and I were the biggest LARPing weenies in the city. + +That was not a good season. Some of the gang didn't mind, but we did. The teasing was merciless. Charles led it. I'd find plastic fangs in my bag, and kids I passed in the hall would go "bleh, bleh" like a cartoon vampire, or they'd talk with fake Transylvanian accents when I was around. + +We switched to ARGing pretty soon afterwards. It was more fun in some ways, and it was a lot less weird. Every now and again, though, I missed my cape and those weekends in the hotel. + +# + +The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit-parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind. + +As I tried to concentrate on Masha and my impending doom, the Old People incident kept coming back to haunt me. There'd been a similar, sick, sinking doomed feeling then, as more and more press outlets picked up the story, as the likelihood increased of someone figuring out that it had been me who'd sprung the story on the stupid Italian editor in the designer jeans with crooked seams, the starched collarless shirt, and the oversized metal-rimmed glasses. + +There's an alternative to dwelling on your mistakes. You can learn from them. + +It's a good theory, anyway. Maybe the reason your subconscious dredges up all these miserable ghosts is that they need to get closure before they can rest peacefully in humiliation afterlife. My subconscious kept visiting me with ghosts in the hopes that I would do something to let them rest in peace. + +All the way home, I turned over this memory and the thought of what I would do about "Masha," in case she was playing me. I needed some insurance. + +And by the time I reached my house -- to be swept up into melancholy hugs from Mom and Dad -- I had it. + +# + +The trick was to time this so that it happened fast enough that the DHS couldn't prepare for it, but with a long enough lead time that the Xnet would have time to turn out in force. + +The trick was to stage this so that there were too many present to arrest us all, but to put it somewhere that the press could see it and the grownups, so the DHS wouldn't just gas us again. + +The trick was to come up with something with the media friendliness of the levitation of the Pentagon. The trick was to stage something that we could rally around, like 3,000 Berkeley students refusing to let one of their number be taken away in a police van. + +The trick was to put the press there, ready to say what the police did, the way they had in 1968 in Chicago. + +It was going to be some trick. + +I cut out of school an hour early the next day, using my customary techniques for getting out, not caring if it would trigger some kind of new DHS checker that would result in my parents getting a note. + +One way or another, my parents' last problem after tomorrow would be whether I was in trouble at school. + +I met Ange at her place. She'd had to cut out of school even earlier, but she'd just made a big deal out of her cramps and pretended she was going to keel over and they sent her home. + +We started to spread the word on Xnet. We sent it in email to trusted friends, and IMmed it to our buddy lists. We roamed the decks and towns of Clockwork Plunder and told our team-mates. Giving everyone enough information to get them to show up but not so much as to tip our hand to the DHS was tricky, but I thought I had just the right balance: + +> VAMPMOB TOMORROW + +> If you're a goth, dress to impress. If you're not a goth, find a goth and borrow some clothes. Think vampire. + +> The game starts at 8:00AM sharp. SHARP. Be there and ready to be divided into teams. The game lasts 30 minutes, so you'll have plenty of time to get to school afterward. + +> Location will be revealed tomorrow. Email your public key to m1k3y@littlebrother.pirateparty.org.se and check your messages at 7AM for the update. If that's too early for you, stay up all night. That's what we're going to do. + +> This is the most fun you will have all year, guaranteed. + +> Believe. + +> M1k3y + +Then I sent a short message to Masha. + +> Tomorrow + +> M1k3y + +A minute later, she emailed back: + +> I thought so. VampMob, huh? You work fast. Wear a red hat. Travel light. + +# + +What do you bring along when you go fugitive? I'd carried enough heavy packs around enough scout camps to know that every ounce you add cuts into your shoulders with all the crushing force of gravity with every step you take -- it's not just one ounce, it's one ounce that you carry for a million steps. It's a ton. + +"Right," Ange said. "Smart. And you never take more than three days' worth of clothes, either. You can rinse stuff out in the sink. Better to have a spot on your t-shirt than a suitcase that's too big and heavy to stash under a plane-seat." + +She'd pulled out a ballistic nylon courier bag that went across her chest, between her breasts -- something that made me get a little sweaty -- and slung diagonally across her back. It was roomy inside, and she'd set it down on the bed. Now she was piling clothes next to it. + +"I figure that three t-shirts, a pair of pants, a pair of shorts, three changes of underwear, three pairs of socks and a sweater will do it." + +She dumped out her gym bag and picked out her toiletries. "I'll have to remember to stick my toothbrush in tomorrow morning before I head down to Civic Center." + +Watching her pack was impressive. She was ruthless about it all. It was also freaky -- it made me realize that the next day, I was going to go away. Maybe for a long time. Maybe forever. + +"Do I bring my Xbox?" she asked. "I've got a ton of stuff on the hard-drive, notes and sketches and email. I wouldn't want it to fall into the wrong hands." + +"It's all encrypted," I said. "That's standard with ParanoidXbox. But leave the Xbox behind, there'll be plenty of them in LA. Just create a Pirate Party account and email an image of your hard-drive to yourself. I'm going to do the same when I get home." + +She did so, and queued up the email. It was going to take a couple hours for all the data to squeeze through her neighbor's WiFi network and wing its way to Sweden. + +Then she closed the flap on the bag and tightened the compression straps. She had something the size of a soccer-ball slung over her back now, and I stared admiringly at it. She could walk down the street with that under her shoulder and no one would look twice -- she looked like she was on her way to school. + +"One more thing," she said, and went to her bedside table and took out the condoms. She took the strips of rubbers out of the box and opened the bag and stuck them inside, then gave me a slap on the ass. + +"Now what?" I said. + +"Now we go to your place and do your stuff. It's time I met your parents, no?" + +She left the bag amid the piles of clothes and junk all over the floor. She was ready to turn her back on all of it, walk away, just to be with me. Just to support the cause. It made me feel brave, too. + +# + +Mom was already home when I got there. She had her laptop open on the kitchen table and was answering email while talking into a headset connected to it, helping some poor Yorkshireman and his family acclimate to living in Louisiana. + +I came through the door and Ange followed, grinning like mad, but holding my hand so tight I could feel the bones grinding together. I didn't know what she was so worried about. It wasn't like she was going to end up spending a lot of time hanging around with my parents after this, even if it went badly. + +Mom hung up on the Yorkshireman when we got in. + +"Hello, Marcus," she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. "And who is this?" + +"Mom, meet Ange. Ange, this is my Mom, Lillian." Mom stood up and gave Ange a hug. + +"It's very good to meet you, darling," she said, looking her over from top to bottom. Ange looked pretty acceptable, I think. She dressed well, and low-key, and you could tell how smart she was just by looking at her. + +"A pleasure to meet you, Mrs Yallow," she said. She sounded very confident and self-assured. Much better than I had when I'd met her mom. + +"It's Lillian, love," she said. She was taking in every detail. "Are you staying for dinner?" + +"I'd love that," she said. + +"Do you eat meat?" Mom's pretty acclimated to living in California. + +"I eat anything that doesn't eat me first," she said. + +"She's a hot-sauce junkie," I said. "You could serve her old tires and she'd eat 'em if she could smother them in salsa." + +Ange socked me gently in the shoulder. + +"I was going to order Thai," Mom said. "I'll add a couple of their five-chili dishes to the order." + +Ange thanked her politely and Mom bustled around the kitchen, getting us glasses of juice and a plate of biscuits and asking three times if we wanted any tea. I squirmed a little. + +"Thanks, Mom," I said. "We're going to go upstairs for a while." + +Mom's eyes narrowed for a second, then she smiled again. "Of course," she said. "Your father will be home in an hour, we'll eat then." + +I had my vampire stuff all stashed in the back of my closet. I let Ange sort through it while I went through my clothes. I was only going as far as LA. They had stores there, all the clothing I could need. I just needed to get together three or four favorite tees and a favorite pair of jeans, a tube of deodorant, a roll of dental floss. + +"Money!" I said. + +"Yeah," she said. "I was going to clean out my bank account on the way home at an ATM. I've got maybe five hundred saved up." + +"Really?" + +"What am I going to spend it on?" she said. "Ever since the Xnet, I haven't had to even pay any service charges." + +"I think I've got three hundred or so." + +"Well, there you go. Grab it on the way to Civic Center in the morning." + +I had a big book-bag I used when I was hauling lots of gear around town. It was less conspicuous than my camping pack. Ange went through my piles mercilessly and culled them down to her favorites. + +Once it was packed and under my bed, we both sat down. + +"We're going to have to get up really early tomorrow," she said. + +"Yeah, big day." + +The plan was to get messages out with a bunch of fake VampMob locations tomorrow, sending people out to secluded spots within a few minutes' walk of Civic Center. We'd cut out a spray-paint stencil that just said VAMPMOB CIVIC CENTER -> -> that we would spray-paint at those spots around 5AM. That would keep the DHS from locking down the Civic Center before we got there. I had the mailbot ready to send out the messages at 7AM -- I'd just leave my Xbox running when I went out. + +"How long. . ." She trailed off. + +"That's what I've been wondering, too," I said. "It could be a long time, I suppose. But who knows? With Barbara's article coming out --" I'd queued an email to her for the next morning, too -- "and all, maybe we'll be heroes in two weeks." + +"Maybe," she said and sighed. + +I put my arm around her. Her shoulders were shaking. + +"I'm terrified," I said. "I think that it would be crazy not to be terrified." + +"Yeah," she said. "Yeah." + +Mom called us to dinner. Dad shook Ange's hand. He looked unshaved and worried, the way he had since we'd gone to see Barbara, but on meeting Ange, a little of the old Dad came back. She kissed him on the cheek and he insisted that she call him Drew. + +Dinner was actually really good. The ice broke when Ange took out her hot-sauce mister and treated her plate, and explained about Scoville units. Dad tried a forkful of her food and went reeling into the kitchen to drink a gallon of milk. Believe it or not, Mom still tried it after that and gave every impression of loving it. Mom, it turned out, was an undiscovered spicy food prodigy, a natural. + +Before she left, Ange pressed the hot-sauce mister on Mom. "I have a spare at home," she said. I'd watched her pack it in her backpack. "You seem like the kind of woman who should have one of these." + +1~ Chapter 19 + +/{ [This chapter is dedicated to the MIT Press Bookshop,~{ MIT Press Bookstore http://web.mit.edu/bookstore/www/ Building E38, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA USA 02139-4307 +1 617 253 5249 }~ a store I've visited on every single trip to Boston over the past ten years. MIT, of course, is one of the legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the campus bookstore lives up to the incredible expectations I had when I first set foot in it. In addition to the wonderful titles published by the MIT press, the bookshop is a tour through the most exciting high-tech publications in the world, from hacker zines like 2600 to fat academic anthologies on video-game design. This is one of those stores where I have to ask them to ship my purchases home because they don't fit in my suitcase.] }/ + +Here's the email that went out at 7AM the next day, while Ange and I were spray-painting VAMP-MOB CIVIC CENTER -> -> at strategic locations around town. + +> RULES FOR VAMPMOB + +> You are part of a clan of daylight vampires. You've discovered the secret of surviving the terrible light of the sun. The secret was cannibalism: the blood of another vampire can give you the strength to walk among the living. + +> You need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay in the game. If one minute goes by without a bite, you're out. Once you're out, turn your shirt around backwards and go referee -- watch two or three vamps to see if they're getting their bites in. + +> To bite another vamp, you have to say "Bite!" five times before they do. So you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact, and shout "bite bite bite bite bite!" and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles to dust. + +> You and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team. They are your clan. You derive no nourishment from their blood. + +> You can "go invisible" by standing still and folding your arms over your chest. You can't bite invisible vamps, and they can't bite you. + +> This game is played on the honor system. The point is to have fun and get your vamp on, not to win. + +> There is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winners begin to emerge. The game-masters will start a whisper campaign among the players when the time comes. Spread the whisper as quickly as you can and watch for the sign. + +> M1k3y + +> bite bite bite bite bite! + +We'd hoped that a hundred people would be willing to play VampMob. We'd sent out about two hundred invites each. But when I sat bolt upright at 4AM and grabbed my Xbox, there were /{400}/ replies there. Four /{hundred}/. + +I fed the addresses to the bot and stole out of the house. I descended the stairs, listening to my father snore and my mom rolling over in their bed. I locked the door behind me. + +At 4:15 AM, Potrero Hill was as quiet as the countryside. There were some distant traffic rumbles, and once, a car crawled past me. I stopped at an ATM and drew out $320 in twenties, rolled them up and put a rubber-band around them, and stuck the roll in a zip-up pocket low on the thigh of my vampire pants. + +I was wearing my cape again, and a ruffled shirt, and tuxedo pants that had been modded to have enough pockets to carry all my little bits and pieces. I had on pointed boots with silver-skull buckles, and I'd teased my hair into a black dandelion clock around my head. Ange was bringing the white makeup and had promised to do my eyeliner and black nail-polish. Why the hell not? When was the next time I was going to get to play dressup like this? + +Ange met me in front of her house. She had her backpack on too, and fishnet tights, a ruffled gothic lolita maid's dress, white face-paint, elaborate kabuki eye-makeup, and her fingers and throat dripped with silver jewelry. + +"You look /{great}/!" we said to each other in unison, then laughed quietly and stole off through the streets, spray-paint cans in our pockets. + +# + +As I surveyed Civic Center, I thought about what it would look like once 400 VampMobbers converged on it. I expected them in ten minutes, out front of City Hall. Already the big plaza teemed with commuters who neatly sidestepped the homeless people begging there. + +I've always hated Civic Center. It's a collection of huge wedding-cake buildings: court houses, museums, and civic buildings like City Hall. The sidewalks are wide, the buildings are white. In the tourist guides to San Francisco, they manage to photograph it so that it looks like Epcot Center, futuristic and austere. + +But on the ground, it's grimy and gross. Homeless people sleep on all the benches. The district is empty by 6PM except for drunks and druggies, because with only one kind of building there, there's no legit reason for people to hang around after the sun goes down. It's more like a mall than a neighborhood, and the only businesses there are bail-bondsmen and liquor stores, places that cater to the families of crooks on trial and the bums who make it their nighttime home. + +I really came to understand all of this when I read an interview with an amazing old urban planner, a woman called Jane Jacobs who was the first person to really nail why it was wrong to slice cities up with freeways, stick all the poor people in housing projects, and use zoning laws to tightly control who got to do what where. + +Jacobs explained that real cities are organic and they have a lot of variety -- rich and poor, white and brown, Anglo and Mex, retail and residential and even industrial. A neighborhood like that has all kinds of people passing through it at all hours of the day or night, so you get businesses that cater to every need, you get people around all the time, acting like eyes on the street. + +You've encountered this before. You go walking around some older part of some city and you find that it's full of the coolest looking stores, guys in suits and people in fashion-rags, upscale restaurants and funky cafes, a little movie theater maybe, houses with elaborate paint-jobs. Sure, there might be a Starbucks too, but there's also a neat-looking fruit market and a florist who appears to be three hundred years old as she snips carefully at the flowers in her windows. It's the opposite of a planned space, like a mall. It feels like a wild garden or even a woods: like it /{grew}/. + +You couldn't get any further from that than Civic Center. I read an interview with Jacobs where she talked about the great old neighborhood they knocked down to build it. It had been just that kind of neighborhood, the kind of place that happened without permission or rhyme or reason. + +Jacobs said that she predicted that within a few years, Civic Center would be one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, a ghost-town at night, a place that sustained a thin crop of weedy booze shops and flea-pit motels. In the interview, she didn't seem very glad to have been vindicated; she sounded like she was talking about a dead friend when she described what Civic Center had become. + +Now it was rush hour and Civic Center was as busy as it could be. The Civic Center BART also serves as the major station for Muni trolley lines, and if you need to switch from one to another, that's where you do it. At 8AM, there were thousands of people coming up the stairs, going down the stairs, getting into and out of taxis and on and off buses. They got squeezed by DHS checkpoints by the different civic buildings, and routed around aggressive panhandlers. They all smelled like their shampoos and colognes, fresh out of the shower and armored in their work suits, swinging laptop bags and briefcases. At 8AM, Civic Center was business central. + +And here came the vamps. A couple dozen coming down Van Ness, a couple dozen coming up Market. More coming from the other side of Market. More coming up from Van Ness. They slipped around the side of the buildings, wearing the white face-paint and the black eyeliner, black clothes, leather jackets, huge stompy boots. Fishnet fingerless gloves. + +They began to fill up the plaza. A few of the business people gave them passing glances and then looked away, not wanting to let these weirdos into their personal realities as they thought about whatever crap they were about to wade through for another eight hours. The vamps milled around, not sure when the game was on. They pooled together in large groups, like an oil spill in reverse, all this black gathering in one place. A lot of them sported old-timey hats, bowlers and toppers. Many of the girls were in full-on elegant gothic lolita maid costumes with huge platforms. + +I tried to estimate the numbers. 200. Then, five minutes later, it was 300. 400. They were still streaming in. The vamps had brought friends. + +Someone grabbed my ass. I spun around and saw Ange, laughing so hard she had to hold her thighs, bent double. + +"Look at them all, man, look at them all!" she gasped. The square was twice as crowded as it had been a few minutes ago. I had no idea how many Xnetters there were, but easily 1000 of them had just showed up to my little party. Christ. + +The DHS and SFPD cops were starting to mill around, talking into their radios and clustering together. I heard a far-away siren. + +"All right," I said, shaking Ange by the arm. "All right, let's /{go}/." + +We both slipped off into the crowd and as soon as we encountered our first vamp, we both said, loudly, "Bite bite bite bite bite!" My victim was a stunned -- but cute -- girl with spider-webs drawn on her hands and smudged mascara running down her cheeks. She said, "Crap," and moved away, acknowledging that I'd gotten her. + +The call of "bite bite bite bite bite" had scrambled the other nearby vamps. Some of them were attacking each other, others were moving for cover, hiding out. I had my victim for the minute, so I skulked away, using mundanes for cover. All around me, the cry of "bite bite bite bite bite!" and shouts and laughs and curses. + +The sound spread like a virus through the crowd. All the vamps knew the game was on now, and the ones who were clustered together were dropping like flies. They laughed and cussed and moved away, clueing the still-in vamps that the game was on. And more vamps were arriving by the second. + +8:16. It was time to bag another vamp. I crouched low and moved through the legs of the straights as they headed for the BART stairs. They jerked back with surprise and swerved to avoid me. I had my eyes laser-locked on a set of black platform boots with steel dragons over the toes, and so I wasn't expecting it when I came face to face with another vamp, a guy of about 15 or 16, hair gelled straight back and wearing a PVC Marilyn Manson jacket draped with necklaces of fake tusks carved with intricate symbols. + +"Bite bite bite --" he began, when one of the mundanes tripped over him and they both went sprawling. I leapt over to him and shouted "bite bite bite bite bite!" before he could untangle himself again. + +More vamps were arriving. The suits were really freaking out. The game overflowed the sidewalk and moved into Van Ness, spreading up toward Market Street. Drivers honked, the trolleys made angry /{ding}/s. I heard more sirens, but now traffic was snarled in every direction. + +It was freaking /{glorious}/. + +BITE BITE BITE BITE BITE! + +The sound came from all around me. There were so many vamps there, playing so furiously, it was like a roar. I risked standing up and looking around and found that I was right in the middle of a giant crowd of vamps that went as far as I could see in every direction. + +BITE BITE BITE BITE BITE! + +This was even better than the concert in Dolores Park. That had been angry and rockin', but this was -- well, it was just /{fun}/. It was like going back to the playground, to the epic games of tag we'd play on lunch breaks when the sun was out, hundreds of people chasing each other around. The adults and the cars just made it more fun, more funny. + +That's what it was: it was /{funny}/. We were all laughing now. + +But the cops were really mobilizing now. I heard helicopters. Any second now, it would be over. Time for the endgame. + +I grabbed a vamp. + +"Endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you've been gassed. Pass it on. What did I just say?" + +The vamp was a girl, tiny, so short I thought she was really young, but she must have been 17 or 18 from her face and the smile. "Oh, that's wicked," she said. + +"What did I say?" + +"Endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you've been gassed. Pass it on. What did I just say?" + +"Right," I said. "Pass it on." + +She melted into the crowd. I grabbed another vamp. I passed it on. He went off to pass it on. + +Somewhere in the crowd, I knew Ange was doing this too. Somewhere in the crowd, there might be infiltrators, fake Xnetters, but what could they do with this knowledge? It's not like the cops had a choice. They were going to order us to disperse. That was guaranteed. + +I had to get to Ange. The plan was to meet at the Founder's Statue in the Plaza, but reaching it was going to be hard. The crowd wasn't moving anymore, it was /{surging}/, like the mob had in the way down to the BART station on the day the bombs went off. I struggled to make my way through it just as the PA underneath the helicopter switched on. + +"THIS IS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. YOU ARE ORDERED TO DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY." + +Around me, hundreds of vamps fell to the ground, clutching their throats, clawing at their eyes, gasping for breath. It was easy to fake being gassed, we'd all had plenty of time to study the footage of the partiers in Mission Dolores Park going down under the pepper-spray clouds. + +"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY." + +I fell to the ground, protecting my pack, reaching around to the red baseball hat folded into the waistband of my pants. I jammed it on my head and then grabbed my throat and made horrendous retching noises. + +The only ones still standing were the mundanes, the salarymen who'd been just trying to get to their jobs. I looked around as best as I could at them as I choked and gasped. + +"THIS IS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. YOU ARE ORDERED TO DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY. DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY." The voice of god made my bowels ache. I felt it in my molars and in my femurs and my spine. + +The salarymen were scared. They were moving as fast as they could, but in no particular direction. The helicopters seemed to be directly overhead no matter where you stood. The cops were wading into the crowd now, and they'd put on their helmets. Some had shields. Some had gas masks. I gasped harder. + +Then the salarymen were running. I probably would have run too. I watched a guy whip a $500 jacket off and wrap it around his face before heading south toward Mission, only to trip up and go sprawling. His curses joined the choking sounds. + +This wasn't supposed to happen -- the choking was just supposed to freak people out and get them confused, not panic them into a stampede. + +There were screams now, screams I recognized all too well from the night in the park. That was the sound of people who were scared spitless, running into each other as they tried like hell to get away. + +And then the air-raid sirens began. + +I hadn't heard that sound since the bombs went off, but I would never forget it. It sliced through me and went straight into my balls, turning my legs into jelly on the way. It made me want to run away in a panic. I got to my feet, red cap on my head, thinking of only one thing: Ange. Ange and the Founders' Statue. + +Everyone was on their feet now, running in all directions, screaming. I pushed people out of my way, holding onto my pack and my hat, heading for Founders' Statue. Masha was looking for me, I was looking for Ange. Ange was out there. + +I pushed and cursed. Elbowed someone. Someone came down on my foot so hard I felt something go /{crunch}/ and I shoved him so he went down. He tried to get up and someone stepped on him. I shoved and pushed. + +Then I reached out my arm to shove someone else and strong hands grabbed my wrist and my elbow in one fluid motion and brought my arm back around behind my back. It felt like my shoulder was about to wrench out of its socket, and I instantly doubled over, hollering, a sound that was barely audible over the din of the crowd, the thrum of the choppers, the wail of the sirens. + +I was brought back upright by the strong hands behind me, which steered me like a marionette. The hold was so perfect I couldn't even think of squirming. I couldn't think of the noise or the helicopter or Ange. All I could think of was moving the way that the person who had me wanted me to move. I was brought around so that I was face-to-face with the person. + +It was a girl whose face was sharp and rodent-like, half-hidden by a giant pair of sunglasses. Over the sunglasses, a mop of bright pink hair, spiked out in all directions. + +"You!" I said. I knew her. She'd taken a picture of me and threatened to rat me out to truant watch. That had been five minutes before the alarms started. She'd been the one, ruthless and cunning. We'd both run from that spot in the Tenderloin as the klaxon sounded behind us, and we'd both been picked up by the cops. I'd been hostile and they'd decided that I was an enemy. + +She -- Masha -- became their ally. + +"Hello, M1k3y," she hissed in my ear, close as a lover. A shiver went up my back. She let go of my arm and I shook it out. + +"Christ," I said. "You!" + +"Yes, me," she said. "The gas is gonna come down in about two minutes. Let's haul ass." + +"Ange -- my girlfriend -- is by the Founders' Statue." + +Masha looked over the crowd. "No chance," she said. "We try to make it there, we're doomed. The gas is coming down in two minutes, in case you missed it the first time." + +I stopped moving. "I don't go without Ange," I said. + +She shrugged. "Suit yourself," she shouted in my ear. "Your funeral." + +She began to push through the crowd, moving away, north, toward downtown. I continued to push for the Founders' Statue. A second later, my arm was back in the terrible lock and I was being swung around and propelled forward. + +"You know too much, jerk-off," she said. "You've seen my face. You're coming with me." + +I screamed at her, struggled till it felt like my arm would break, but she was pushing me forward. My sore foot was agony with every step, my shoulder felt like it would break. + +With her using me as a battering ram, we made good progress through the crowd. The whine of the helicopters changed and she gave me a harder push. "RUN!" she yelled. "Here comes the gas!" + +The crowd noise changed, too. The choking sounds and scream sounds got much, much louder. I'd heard that pitch of sound before. We were back in the park. The gas was raining down. I held my breath and /{ran}/. + +We cleared the crowd and she let go of my arm. I shook it out. I limped as fast as I could up the sidewalk as the crowd thinned and thinned. We were heading towards a group of DHS cops with riot shields and helmets and masks. As we drew near them, they moved to block us, but Masha held up a badge and they melted away like she was Obi Wan Kenobi, saying "These aren't the droids you're looking for." + +"You goddamned /{bitch}/," I said as we sped up Market Street. "We have to go back for Ange." + +She pursed her lips and shook her head. "I feel for you, buddy. I haven't seen my boyfriend in months. He probably thinks I'm dead. Fortunes of war. We go back for your Ange, we're dead. If we push on, we have a chance. So long as we have a chance, she has a chance. Those kids aren't all going to Gitmo. They'll probably take a few hundred in for questioning and send the rest home." + +We were moving up Market Street now, past the strip joints where the little encampments of bums and junkies sat, stinking like open toilets. Masha guided me to a little alcove in the shut door of one of the strip places. She stripped off her jacket and turned it inside out -- the lining was a muted stripe pattern, and with the jacket's seams reversed, it hung differently. She produced a wool hat from her pocket and pulled it over her hair, letting it form a jaunty, off-center peak. Then she took out some make-up remover wipes and went to work on her face and fingernails. In a minute, she was a different woman. + +"Wardrobe change," she said. "Now you. Lose the shoes, lose the jacket, lose the hat." I could see her point. The cops would be looking very carefully at anyone who looked like they'd been a part of the VampMob. I ditched the hat entirely -- I'd never liked ball caps. Then I jammed the jacket into my pack and got out a long-sleeved tee with a picture of Rosa Luxembourg on it and pulled it over my black tee. I let Masha wipe my makeup off and clean my nails and a minute later, I was clean. + +"Switch off your phone," she said. "You carrying any arphids?" + +I had my student card, my ATM card, my Fast Pass. They all went into a silvered bag she held out, which I recognized as a radio-proof Faraday pouch. But as she put them in her pocket, I realized I'd just turned my ID over to her. If she was on the other side... + +The magnitude of what had just happened began to sink in. In my mind, I'd pictured having Ange with me at this point. Ange would make it two against one. Ange would help me see if there was something amiss. If Masha wasn't all she said she was. + +"Put these pebbles in your shoes before you put them on --" + +"It's OK. I sprained my foot. No gait recognition program will spot me now." + +She nodded once, one pro to another, and slung her pack. I picked up mine and we moved. The total time for the changeover was less than a minute. We looked and walked like two different people. + +She looked at her watch and shook her head. "Come on," she said. "We have to make our rendezvous. Don't think of running, either. You've got two choices now. Me, or jail. They'll be analyzing the footage from that mob for days, but once they're done, every face in it will go in a database. Our departure will be noted. We are both wanted criminals now." + +# + +She got us off Market Street on the next block, swinging back into the Tenderloin. I knew this neighborhood. This was where we'd gone hunting for an open WiFi access-point back on the day, playing Harajuku Fun Madness. + +"Where are we going?" I said. + +"We're about to catch a ride," she said. "Shut up and let me concentrate." + +We moved fast, and sweat streamed down my face from under my hair, coursed down my back and slid down the crack of my ass and my thighs. My foot was /{really}/ hurting and I was seeing the streets of San Francisco race by, maybe for the last time, ever. + +It didn't help that we were ploughing straight uphill, moving for the zone where the seedy Tenderloin gives way to the nosebleed real-estate values of Nob Hill. My breath came in ragged gasps. She moved us mostly up narrow alleys, using the big streets just to get from one alley to the next. + +We were just stepping into one such alley, Sabin Place, when someone fell in behind us and said, "Freeze right there." It was full of evil mirth. We stopped and turned around. + +At the mouth of the alley stood Charles, wearing a halfhearted VampMob outfit of black t-shirt and jeans and white face-paint. "Hello, Marcus," he said. "You going somewhere?" He smiled a huge, wet grin. "Who's your girlfriend?" + +"What do you want, Charles?" + +"Well, I've been hanging out on that traitorous Xnet ever since I spotted you giving out DVDs at school. When I heard about your VampMob, I thought I'd go along and hang around the edges, just to see if you showed up and what you did. You know what I saw?" + +I said nothing. He had his phone in his hand, pointed at us. Recording. Maybe ready to dial 911. Beside me, Masha had gone still as a board. + +"I saw you /{leading}/ the damned thing. And I /{recorded}/ it, Marcus. So now I'm going to call the cops and we're going to wait right here for them. And then you're going to go to pound-you-in-the-ass prison, for a long, long time." + +Masha stepped forward. + +"Stop right there, chickie," he said. "I saw you get him away. I saw it all --" + +She took another step forward and snatched the phone out of his hand, reaching behind her with her other hand and bringing it out holding a wallet open. + +"DHS, dick-head," she said. "I'm DHS. I've been running this twerp back to his masters to see where he went. I /{was}/ doing that. Now you've blown it. We have a name for that. We call it 'Obstruction of National Security.' You're about to hear that phrase a lot more often." + +Charles took a step backward, his hands held up in front of him. He'd gone even paler under his makeup. "What? No! I mean -- I didn't know! I was trying to /{help}/!" + +"The last thing we need is a bunch of high school Junior G-men 'helping' buddy. You can tell it to the judge." + +He moved back again, but Masha was fast. She grabbed his wrist and twisted him into the same judo hold she'd had me in back at Civic Center. Her hand dipped back to her pockets and came out holding a strip of plastic, a handcuff strip, which she quickly wound around his wrists. + +That was the last thing I saw as I took off running. + +# + +I made it as far as the other end of the alley before she caught up with me, tackling me from behind and sending me sprawling. I couldn't move very fast, not with my hurt foot and the weight of my pack. I went down in a hard face-plant and skidded, grinding my cheek into the grimy asphalt. + +"Jesus," she said. "You're a goddamned idiot. You didn't /{believe}/ that, did you?" + +My heart thudded in my chest. She was on top of me and slowly she let me up. + +"Do I need to cuff you, Marcus?" + +I got to my feet. I hurt all over. I wanted to die. + +"Come on," she said. "It's not far now." + +# + +'It' turned out to be a moving van on a Nob Hill side-street, a sixteen-wheeler the size of one of the ubiquitous DHS trucks that still turned up on San Francisco's street corners, bristling with antennas. + +This one, though, said "Three Guys and a Truck Moving" on the side, and the three guys were very much in evidence, trekking in and out of a tall apartment building with a green awning. They were carrying crated furniture, neatly labeled boxes, loading them one at a time onto the truck and carefully packing them there. + +She walked us around the block once, apparently unsatisfied with something, then, on the next pass, she made eye-contact with the man who was watching the van, an older black guy with a kidney-belt and heavy gloves. He had a kind face and he smiled at us as she led us quickly, casually up the truck's three stairs and into its depth. "Under the big table," he said. "We left you some space there." + +The truck was more than half full, but there was a narrow corridor around a huge table with a quilted blanket thrown over it and bubble-wrap wound around its legs. + +Masha pulled me under the table. It was stuffy and still and dusty under there, and I suppressed a sneeze as we scrunched in among the boxes. The space was so tight that we were on top of each other. I didn't think that Ange would have fit in there. + +"Bitch," I said, looking at Masha. + +"Shut up. You should be licking my boots thanking me. You would have ended up in jail in a week, two tops. Not Gitmo-by-the-Bay. Syria, maybe. I think that's where they sent the ones they really wanted to disappear." + +I put my head on my knees and tried to breathe deeply. + +"Why would you do something so stupid as declaring war on the DHS anyway?" + +I told her. I told her about being busted and I told her about Darryl. + +She patted her pockets and came up with a phone. It was Charles's. "Wrong phone." She came up with another phone. She turned it on and the glow from its screen filled our little fort. After fiddling for a second, she showed it to me. + +It was the picture she'd snapped of us, just before the bombs blew. It was the picture of Jolu and Van and me and -- + +Darryl. + +I was holding in my hand proof that Darryl had been with us minutes before we'd all gone into DHS custody. Proof that he'd been alive and well and in our company. + +"You need to give me a copy of this," I said. "I need it." + +"When we get to LA," she said, snatching the phone back. "Once you've been briefed on how to be a fugitive without getting both our asses caught and shipped to Syria. I don't want you getting rescue ideas about this guy. He's safe enough where he is -- for now." + +I thought about trying to take it from her by force, but she'd already demonstrated her physical skill. She must have been a black-belt or something. + +We sat there in the dark, listening to the three guys load the truck with box after box, tying things down, grunting with the effort of it. I tried to sleep, but couldn't. Masha had no such problem. She snored. + +There was still light shining through the narrow, obstructed corridor that led to the fresh air outside. I stared at it, through the gloom, and thought of Ange. + +My Ange. Her hair brushing her shoulders as she turned her head from side to side, laughing at something I'd done. Her face when I'd seen her last, falling down in the crowd at VampMob. All those people at VampMob, like the people in the park, down and writhing, the DHS moving in with truncheons. The ones who disappeared. + +Darryl. Stuck on Treasure Island, his side stitched up, taken out of his cell for endless rounds of questioning about the terrorists. + +Darryl's father, ruined and boozy, unshaven. Washed up and in his uniform, "for the photos." Weeping like a little boy. + +My own father, and the way that he had been changed by my disappearance to Treasure Island. He'd been just as broken as Darryl's father, but in his own way. And his face, when I told him where I'd been. + +That was when I knew that I couldn't run. + +That was when I knew that I had to stay and fight. + +# + +Masha's breathing was deep and regular, but when I reached with glacial slowness into her pocket for her phone, she snuffled a little and shifted. I froze and didn't even breathe for a full two minutes, counting one hippopotami, two hippopotami. + +Slowly, her breath deepened again. I tugged the phone free of her jacket-pocket one millimeter at a time, my fingers and arm trembling with the effort of moving so slowly. + +Then I had it, a little candy-bar shaped thing. + +I turned to head for the light, when I had a flash of memory: Charles, holding out his phone, waggling it at us, taunting us. It had been a candy-bar-shaped phone, silver, plastered in the logos of a dozen companies that had subsidized the cost of the handset through the phone company. It was the kind of phone where you had to listen to a commercial every time you made a call. + +It was too dim to see the phone clearly in the truck, but I could feel it. Were those company decals on its sides? Yes? Yes. I had just stolen /{Charles's}/ phone from Masha. + +I turned back around slowly, slowly, and slowly, slowly, /{slowly}/, I reached back into her pocket. /{Her}/ phone was bigger and bulkier, with a better camera and who knew what else? + +I'd been through this once before -- that made it a little easier. Millimeter by millimeter again, I teased it free of her pocket, stopping twice when she snuffled and twitched. + +I had the phone free of her pocket and I was beginning to back away when her hand shot out, fast as a snake, and grabbed my wrist, hard, fingertips grinding away at the small, tender bones below my hand. + +I gasped and stared into Masha's wide-open, staring eyes. + +"You are such an idiot," she said, conversationally, taking the phone from me, punching at its keypad with her other hand. "How did you plan on unlocking this again?" + +I swallowed. I felt bones grind against each other in my wrist. I bit my lip to keep from crying out. + +She continued to punch away with her other hand. "Is this what you thought you'd get away with?" She showed me the picture of all of us, Darryl and Jolu, Van and me. "This picture?" + +I didn't say anything. My wrist felt like it would shatter. + +"Maybe I should just delete it, take temptation out of your way." Her free hand moved some more. Her phone asked her if she was sure and she had to look at it to find the right button. + +That's when I moved. I had Charles's phone in my other hand still, and I brought it down on her crushing hand as hard as I could, banging my knuckles on the table overhead. I hit her hand so hard the phone shattered and she yelped and her hand went slack. I was still moving, reaching for her other hand, for her now-unlocked phone with her thumb still poised over the OK key. Her fingers spasmed on the empty air as I snatched the phone out of her hand. + +I moved down the narrow corridor on hands and knees, heading for the light. I felt her hands slap at my feet and ankles twice, and I had to shove aside some of the boxes that had walled us in like a Pharaoh in a tomb. A few of them fell down behind me, and I heard Masha grunt again. + +The rolling truck door was open a crack and I dove for it, slithering out under it. The steps had been removed and I found myself hanging over the road, sliding headfirst into it, clanging my head off the blacktop with a thump that rang my ears like a gong. I scrambled to my feet, holding the bumper, and desperately dragged down on the door-handle, slamming it shut. Masha screamed inside -- I must have caught her fingertips. I felt like throwing up, but I didn't. + +I padlocked the truck instead. + +1~ Chapter 20 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to The Tattered Cover,~{ The Tattered Cover http://www.tatteredcover.com/NASApp/store/Product?s=showproduct&isbn=9780765319852 1628 16th St., Denver, CO USA 80202 +1 303 436 1070 }~ Denver's legendary independent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover quite by accident: Alice and I had just landed in Denver, coming in from London, and it was early and cold and we needed coffee. We drove in aimless rental-car circles, and that's when I spotted it, the Tattered Cover's sign. Something about it tingled in my hindbrain -- I knew I'd heard of this place. We pulled in (got a coffee) and stepped into the store -- a wonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks, and miles and miles of bookshelves.] }/ + +None of the three guys were around at the moment, so I took off. My head hurt so much I thought I must be bleeding, but my hands came away dry. My twisted ankle had frozen up in the truck so that I ran like a broken marionette, and I stopped only once, to cancel the photo-deletion on Masha's phone. I turned off its radio -- both to save battery and to keep it from being used to track me -- and set the sleep timer to two hours, the longest setting available. I tried to set it to not require a password to wake from sleep, but that required a password itself. I was just going to have to tap the keypad at least once every two hours until I could figure out how to get the photo off of the phone. I would need a charger, then. + +I didn't have a plan. I needed one. I needed to sit down, to get online -- to figure out what I was going to do next. I was sick of letting other people do my planning for me. I didn't want to be acting because of what Masha did, or because of the DHS, or because of my dad. Or because of Ange? Well, maybe I'd act because of Ange. That would be just fine, in fact. + +I'd just been slipping downhill, taking alleys when I could, merging with the Tenderloin crowds. I didn't have any destination in mind. Every few minutes, I put my hand in my pocket and nudged one of the keys on Masha's phone to keep it from going asleep. It made an awkward bulge, unfolded there in my jacket. + +I stopped and leaned against a building. My ankle was killing me. Where was I, anyway? + +O'Farrell, at Hyde Street. In front of a dodgy "Asian Massage Parlor." My traitorous feet had taken me right back to the beginning -- taken me back to where the photo on Masha's phone had been taken, seconds before the Bay Bridge blew, before my life changed forever. + +I wanted to sit down on the sidewalk and bawl, but that wouldn't solve my problems. I had to call Barbara Stratford, tell her what had happened. Show her the photo of Darryl. + +What was I thinking? I had to show her the video, the one that Masha had sent me -- the one where the President's Chief of Staff gloated at the attacks on San Francisco and admitted that he knew when and where the next attacks would happen and that he wouldn't stop them because they'd help his man get re-elected. + +That was a plan, then: get in touch with Barbara, give her the documents, and get them into print. The VampMob had to have really freaked people out, made them think that we really were a bunch of terrorists. Of course, when I'd been planning it, I had been thinking of how good a distraction it would be, not how it would look to some NASCAR Dad in Nebraska. + +I'd call Barbara, and I'd do it smart, from a payphone, putting my hood up so that the inevitable CCTV wouldn't get a photo of me. I dug a quarter out of my pocket and polished it on my shirt-tail, getting the fingerprints off it. + +I headed downhill, down and down to the BART station and the payphones there. I made it to the trolley-car stop when I spotted the cover of the week's /{Bay Guardian}/, stacked in a high pile next to a homeless black guy who smiled at me. "Go ahead and read the cover, it's free -- it'll cost you fifty cents to look inside, though." + +The headline was set in the biggest type I'd seen since 9/11: + +INSIDE GITMO-BY-THE-BAY + +Beneath it, in slightly smaller type: + +"How the DHS has kept our children and friends in secret prisons on our doorstep. + +"By Barbara Stratford, Special to the Bay Guardian" + +The newspaper seller shook his head. "Can you believe that?" he said. "Right here in San Francisco. Man, the government /{sucks}/." + +Theoretically, the /{Guardian}/ was free, but this guy appeared to have cornered the local market for copies of it. I had a quarter in my hand. I dropped it into his cup and fished for another one. I didn't bother polishing the fingerprints off of it this time. + +"We're told that the world changed forever when the Bay Bridge was blown up by parties unknown. Thousands of our friends and neighbors died on that day. Almost none of them have been recovered; their remains are presumed to be resting in the city's harbor. + +"But an extraordinary story told to this reporter by a young man who was arrested by the DHS minutes after the explosion suggests that our own government has illegally held many of those thought dead on Treasure Island, which had been evacuated and declared off-limits to civilians shortly after the bombing..." + +I sat down on a bench -- the same bench, I noted with a prickly hair-up-the-neck feeling, where we'd rested Darryl after escaping from the BART station -- and read the article all the way through. It took a huge effort not to burst into tears right there. Barbara had found some photos of me and Darryl goofing around together and they ran alongside the text. The photos were maybe a year old, but I looked so much /{younger}/ in them, like I was 10 or 11. I'd done a lot of growing up in the past couple months. + +The piece was beautifully written. I kept feeling outraged on behalf of the poor kids she was writing about, then remembering that she was writing about /{me}/. Zeb's note was there, his crabbed handwriting reproduced in large, a half-sheet of the newspaper. Barbara had dug up more info on other kids who were missing and presumed dead, a long list, and asked how many had been stuck there on the island, just a few miles from their parents' doorsteps. + +I dug another quarter out of my pocket, then changed my mind. What was the chance that Barbara's phone wasn't tapped? There was no way I was going to be able to call her now, not directly. I needed some intermediary to get in touch with her and get her to meet me somewhere south. So much for plans. + +What I really, really needed was the Xnet. + +How the hell was I going to get online? My phone's wifinder was blinking like crazy -- there was wireless all around me, but I didn't have an Xbox and a TV and a ParanoidXbox DVD to boot from. WiFi, WiFi everywhere... + +That's when I spotted them. Two kids, about my age, moving among the crowd at the top of the stairs down into the BART. + +What caught my eye was the way they were moving, kind of clumsy, nudging up against the commuters and the tourists. Each had a hand in his pocket, and whenever they met one another's eye, they snickered. They couldn't have been more obvious jammers, but the crowd was oblivious to them. Being down in that neighborhood, you expect to be dodging homeless people and crazies, so you don't make eye contact, don't look around at all if you can help it. + +I sidled up to one. He seemed really young, but he couldn't have been any younger than me. + +"Hey," I said. "Hey, can you guys come over here for a second?" + +He pretended not to hear me. He looked right through me, the way you would a homeless person. + +"Come on," I said. "I don't have a lot of time." I grabbed his shoulder and hissed in his ear. "The cops are after me. I'm from Xnet." + +He looked scared now, like he wanted to run away, and his friend was moving toward us. "I'm serious," I said. "Just hear me out." + +His friend came over. He was taller, and beefy -- like Darryl. "Hey," he said. "Something wrong?" + +His friend whispered in his ear. The two of them looked like they were going to bolt. + +I grabbed my copy of the /{Bay Guardian}/ from under my arm and rattled it in front of them. "Just turn to page 5, OK?" + +They did. They looked at the headline. The photo. Me. + +"Oh, dude," the first one said. "We are /{so}/ not worthy." He grinned at me like crazy, and the beefier one slapped me on the back. + +"No /{way}/ --" he said. "You're M --" + +I put a hand over his mouth. "Come over here, OK?" + +I brought them back to my bench. I noticed that there was something old and brown staining the sidewalk underneath it. Darryl's blood? It made my skin pucker up. We sat down. + +"I'm Marcus," I said, swallowing hard as I gave my real name to these two who already knew me as M1k3y. I was blowing my cover, but the /{Bay Guardian}/ had already made the connection for me. + +"Nate," the small one said. "Liam," the bigger one said. "Dude, it is /{such}/ an honor to meet you. You're like our all-time hero --" + +"Don't say that," I said. "Don't say that. You two are like a flashing advertisement that says, 'I am jamming, please put my ass in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. You couldn't be more obvious." + +Liam looked like he might cry. + +"Don't worry, you didn't get busted. I'll give you some tips, later." He brightened up again. What was becoming weirdly clear was that these two really /{did}/ idolize M1k3y, and that they'd do anything I said. They were grinning like idiots. It made me uncomfortable, sick to my stomach. + +"Listen, I need to get on Xnet, now, without going home or anywhere near home. Do you two live near here?" + +"I do," Nate said. "Up at the top of California Street. It's a bit of a walk -- steep hills." I'd just walked all the way down them. Masha was somewhere up there. But still, it was better than I had any right to expect. + +"Let's go," I said. + +# + +Nate loaned me his baseball hat and traded jackets with me. I didn't have to worry about gait-recognition, not with my ankle throbbing the way it was -- I limped like an extra in a cowboy movie. + +Nate lived in a huge four-bedroom apartment at the top of Nob Hill. The building had a doorman, in a red overcoat with gold brocade, and he touched his cap and called Nate, "Mr Nate" and welcomed us all there. The place was spotless and smelled of furniture polish. I tried not to gawp at what must have been a couple million bucks' worth of condo. + +"My dad," he explained. "He was an investment banker. Lots of life insurance. He died when I was 14 and we got it all. They'd been divorced for years, but he left my mom as beneficiary." + +From the floor-to-ceiling window, you could see a stunning view of the other side of Nob Hill, all the way down to Fisherman's Wharf, to the ugly stub of the Bay Bridge, the crowd of cranes and trucks. Through the mist, I could just make out Treasure Island. Looking down all that way, it gave me a crazy urge to jump. + +I got online with his Xbox and a huge plasma screen in the living room. He showed me how many open WiFi networks were visible from his high vantage point -- twenty, thirty of them. This was a good spot to be an Xnetter. + +There was a /{lot}/ of email in my M1k3y account. 20,000 new messages since Ange and I had left her place that morning. Lots of it was from the press, asking for followup interviews, but most of it was from the Xnetters, people who'd seen the /{Guardian}/ story and wanted to tell me that they'd do anything to help me, anything I needed. + +That did it. Tears started to roll down my cheeks. + +Nate and Liam exchanged glances. I tried to stop, but it was no good. I was sobbing now. Nate went to an oak book-case on one wall and swung a bar out of one of its shelves, revealing gleaming rows of bottles. He poured me a shot of something golden brown and brought it to me. + +"Rare Irish whiskey," he said. "Mom's favorite." + +It tasted like fire, like gold. I sipped at it, trying not to choke. I didn't really like hard liquor, but this was different. I took several deep breaths. + +"Thanks, Nate," I said. He looked like I'd just pinned a medal on him. He was a good kid. + +"All right," I said, and picked up the keyboard. The two boys watched in fascination as I paged through my mail on the gigantic screen. + +What I was looking for, first and foremost, was email from Ange. There was a chance that she'd just gotten away. There was always that chance. + +I was an idiot to even hope. There was nothing from her. I started going through the mail as fast as I could, picking apart the press requests, the fan mail, the hate mail, the spam... + +And that's when I found it: a letter from Zeb. + +"It wasn't nice to wake up this morning and find the letter that I thought you would destroy in the pages of the newspaper. Not nice at all. Made me feel -- hunted. + +"But I've come to understand why you did it. I don't know if I can approve of your tactics, but it's easy to see that your motives were sound. + +"If you're reading this, that means that there's a good chance you've gone underground. It's not easy. I've been learning that. I've been learning a lot more. + +"I can help you. I should do that for you. You're doing what you can for me. (Even if you're not doing it with my permission.) + +"Reply if you get this, if you're on the run and alone. Or reply if you're in custody, being run by our friends on Gitmo, looking for a way to make the pain stop. If they've got you, you'll do what they tell you. I know that. I'll take that risk. + +"For you, M1k3y." + +"Wooooah," Liam breathed. "Duuuuude." I wanted to smack him. I turned to say something awful and cutting to him, but he was staring at me with eyes as big as saucers, looking like he wanted to drop to his knees and worship me. + +"Can I just say," Nate said, "can I just say that it is the biggest honor of my entire life to help you? Can I just say that?" + +I was blushing now. There was nothing for it. These two were totally star-struck, even though I wasn't any kind of star, not in my own mind at least. + +"Can you guys --" I swallowed. "Can I have some privacy here?" + +They slunk out of the room like bad puppies and I felt like a tool. I typed fast. + +"I got away, Zeb. And I'm on the run. I need all the help I can get. I want to end this now." I remembered to take Masha's phone out of my pocket and tickle it to keep it from going to sleep. + +They let me use the shower, gave me a change of clothes, a new backpack with half their earthquake kit in it -- energy bars, medicine, hot and cold packs, and an old sleeping-bag. They even slipped a spare Xbox Universal already loaded with ParanoidXbox on it into there. That was a nice touch. I had to draw the line at a flaregun. + +I kept on checking my email to see if Zeb had replied. I answered the fan mail. I answered the mail from the press. I deleted the hate mail. I was half-expecting to see something from Masha, but chances were she was halfway to LA by now, her fingers hurt, and in no position to type. I tickled her phone again. + +They encouraged me to take a nap and for a brief, shameful moment, I got all paranoid like maybe these guys were thinking of turning me in once I was asleep. Which was idiotic -- they could have turned me in just as easily when I was awake. I just couldn't compute the fact that they thought /{so much}/ of me. I had known, intellectually, that there were people who would follow M1k3y. I'd met some of those people that morning, shouting BITE BITE BITE and vamping it up at Civic Center. But these two were more personal. They were just nice, goofy guys, they coulda been any of my friends back in the days before the Xnet, just two pals who palled around having teenage adventures. They'd volunteered to join an army, my army. I had a responsibility to them. Left to themselves, they'd get caught, it was only a matter of time. They were too trusting. + +"Guys, listen to me for a second. I have something serious I need to talk to you about." + +They almost stood at attention. It would have been funny if it wasn't so scary. + +"Here's the thing. Now that you've helped me, it's really dangerous. If you get caught, I'll get caught. They'll get anything you know out of you --" I held up my hand to forestall their protests. "No, stop. You haven't been through it. Everyone talks. Everyone breaks. If you're ever caught, you tell them everything, right away, as fast as you can, as much as you can. They'll get it all eventually anyway. That's how they work. + +"But you won't get caught, and here's why: you're not jammers anymore. You are retired from active duty. You're a --" I fished in my memory for vocabulary words culled from spy thrillers -- "you're a sleeper cell. Stand down. Go back to being normal kids. One way or another, I'm going to break this thing, break it wide open, end it. Or it will get me, finally, do me in. If you don't hear from me within 72 hours, assume that they got me. Do whatever you want then. But for the next three days -- and forever, if I do what I'm trying to do -- stand down. Will you promise me that?" + +They promised with all solemnity. I let them talk me into napping, but made them swear to rouse me once an hour. I'd have to tickle Masha's phone and I wanted to know as soon as Zeb got back in touch with me. + +# + +The rendezvous was on a BART car, which made me nervous. They're full of cameras. But Zeb knew what he was doing. He had me meet him in the last car of a certain train departing from Powell Street Station, at a time when that car was filled with the press of bodies. He sidled up to me in the crowd, and the good commuters of San Francisco cleared a space for him, the hollow that always surrounds homeless people. + +"Nice to see you again," he muttered, facing into the doorway. Looking into the dark glass, I could see that there was no one close enough to eavesdrop -- not without some kind of high-efficiency mic rig, and if they knew enough to show up here with one of those, we were dead anyway. + +"You too, brother," I said. "I'm -- I'm sorry, you know?" + +"Shut up. Don't be sorry. You were braver than I am. Are you ready to go underground now? Ready to disappear?" + +"About that." + +"Yes?" + +"That's not the plan." + +"Oh," he said. + +"Listen, OK? I have -- I have pictures, video. Stuff that really /{proves}/ something." I reached into my pocket and tickled Masha's phone. I'd bought a charger for it in Union Square on the way down, and had stopped and plugged it in at a cafe for long enough to get the battery up to four out of five bars. "I need to get it to Barbara Stratford, the woman from the /{Guardian}/. But they're going to be watching her -- watching to see if I show up." + +"You don't think that they'll be watching for me, too? If your plan involves me going within a mile of that woman's home or office --" + +"I want you to get Van to come and meet me. Did Darryl ever tell you about Van? The girl --" + +"He told me. Yes, he told me. You don't think they'll be watching her? All of you who were arrested?" + +"I think they will. I don't think they'll be watching her as hard. And Van has totally clean hands. She never cooperated with any of my --" I swallowed. "With my projects. So they might be a little more relaxed about her. If she calls the Bay Guardian to make an appointment to explain why I'm just full of crap, maybe they'll let her keep it." + +He stared at the door for a long time. + +"You know what happens when they catch us again." It wasn't a question. + +I nodded. + +"Are you sure? Some of the people that were on Treasure Island with us got taken away in helicopters. They got taken /{offshore}/. There are countries where America can outsource its torture. Countries where you will rot forever. Countries where you wish they would just get it over with, have you dig a trench and then shoot you in the back of the head as you stand over it." + +I swallowed and nodded. + +"Is it worth the risk? We can go underground for a long, long time here. Someday we might get our country back. We can wait it out." + +I shook my head. "You can't get anything done by doing nothing. It's our /{country}/. They've taken it from us. The terrorists who attack us are still free -- but /{we're not}/. I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself." + +# + +That afternoon, Van left school as usual, sitting in the back of the bus with a tight knot of her friends, laughing and joking the way she always did. The other riders on the bus took special note of her, she was so loud, and besides, she was wearing that stupid, giant floppy hat, something that looked like a piece out of a school play about Renaissance sword fighters. At one point they all huddled together, then turned away to look out the back of the bus, pointing and giggling. The girl who wore the hat now was the same height as Van, and from behind, it could be her. + +No one paid any attention to the mousy little Asian girl who got off a few stops before the BART. She was dressed in a plain old school uniform, and looking down shyly as she stepped off. Besides, at that moment, the loud Korean girl let out a whoop and her friends followed along, laughing so loudly that even the bus driver slowed down, twisted in his seat and gave them a dirty look. + +Van hurried away down the street with her head down, her hair tied back and dropped down the collar of her out-of-style bubble jacket. She had slipped lifts into her shoes that made her two wobbly, awkward inches taller, and had taken her contacts out and put on her least-favored glasses, with huge lenses that took up half her face. Although I'd been waiting in the bus-shelter for her and knew when to expect her, I hardly recognized her. I got up and walked along behind her, across the street, trailing by half a block. + +The people who passed me looked away as quickly as possible. I looked like a homeless kid, with a grubby cardboard sign, street-grimy overcoat, huge, overstuffed knapsack with duct-tape over its rips. No one wants to look at a street-kid, because if you meet his eye, he might ask you for some spare change. I'd walked around Oakland all afternoon and the only person who'd spoken to me was a Jehovah's Witness and a Scientologist, both trying to convert me. It felt gross, like being hit on by a pervert. + +Van followed the directions I'd written down carefully. Zeb had passed them to her the same way he'd given me the note outside school -- bumping into her as she waited for the bus, apologizing profusely. I'd written the note plainly and simply, just laying it out for her: I know you don't approve. I understand. But this is it, this is the most important favor I've ever asked of you. Please. Please. + +She'd come. I knew she would. We had a lot of history, Van and I. She didn't like what had happened to the world, either. Besides, an evil, chuckling voice in my head had pointed out, she was under suspicion now that Barbara's article was out. + +We walked like that for six or seven blocks, looking at who was near us, what cars went past. Zeb told me about five-person trails, where five different undercovers traded off duties following you, making it nearly impossible to spot them. You had to go somewhere totally desolate, where anyone at all would stand out like a sore thumb. + +The overpass for the 880 was just a few blocks from the Coliseum BART station, and even with all the circling Van did, it didn't take long to reach it. The noise from overhead was nearly deafening. No one else was around, not that I could tell. I'd visited the site before I suggested it to Van in the note, taking care to check for places where someone could hide. There weren't any. + +Once she stopped at the appointed place, I moved quickly to catch up to her. She blinked owlishly at me from behind her glasses. + +"Marcus," she breathed, and tears swam in her eyes. I found that I was crying too. I'd make a really rotten fugitive. Too sentimental. + +She hugged me so hard I couldn't breathe. I hugged her back even harder. + +Then she kissed me. + +Not on the cheek, not like a sister. Full on the lips, a hot, wet, steamy kiss that seemed to go on forever. I was so overcome with emotion -- + +No, that's bull. I knew exactly what I was doing. I kissed her back. + +Then I stopped and pulled away, nearly shoved her away. "Van," I gasped. + +"Oops," she said. + +"Van," I said again. + +"Sorry," she said. "I --" + +Something occurred to me just then, something I guess I should have seen a long, long time before. + +"You /{like}/ me, don't you?" + +She nodded miserably. "For years," she said. + +Oh, God. Darryl, all these years, so in love with her, and the whole time she was looking at me, secretly wanting me. And then I ended up with Ange. Ange said that she'd always fought with Van. And I was running around, getting into so much trouble. + +"Van," I said. "Van, I'm so sorry." + +"Forget it," she said, looking away. "I know it can't be. I just wanted to do that once, just in case I never --" She bit down on the words. + +"Van, I need you to do something for me. Something important. I need you to meet with the journalist from the Bay Guardian, Barbara Stratford, the one who wrote the article. I need you to give her something." I explained about Masha's phone, told her about the video that Masha had sent me. + +"What good will this do, Marcus? What's the point?" + +"Van, you were right, at least partly. We can't fix the world by putting other people at risk. I need to solve the problem by telling what I know. I should have done that from the start. Should have walked straight out of their custody and to Darryl's father's house and told him what I knew. Now, though, I have evidence. This stuff -- it could change the world. This is my last hope. The only hope for getting Darryl out, for getting a life that I don't spend underground, hiding from the cops. And you're the only person I can trust to do this." + +"Why me?" + +"You're kidding, right? Look at how well you handled getting here. You're a pro. You're the best at this of any of us. You're the only one I can trust. That's why you." + +"Why not your friend Angie?" She said the name without any inflection at all, like it was a block of cement. + +I looked down. "I thought you knew. They arrested her. She's in Gitmo -- on Treasure Island. She's been there for days now." I had been trying not to think about this, not to think about what might be happening to her. Now I couldn't stop myself and I started to sob. I felt a pain in my stomach, like I'd been kicked, and I pushed my hands into my middle to hold myself in. I folded there, and the next thing I knew, I was on my side in the rubble under the freeway, holding myself and crying. + +Van knelt down by my side. "Give me the phone," she said, her voice an angry hiss. I fished it out of my pocket and passed it to her. + +Embarrassed, I stopped crying and sat up. I knew that snot was running down my face. Van was giving me a look of pure revulsion. "You need to keep it from going to sleep," I said. "I have a charger here." I rummaged in my pack. I hadn't slept all the way through the night since I acquired it. I set the phone's alarm to go off every 90 minutes and wake me up so that I could keep it from going to sleep. "Don't fold it shut, either." + +"And the video?" + +"That's harder," I said. "I emailed a copy to myself, but I can't get onto the Xnet anymore." In a pinch, I could have gone back to Nate and Liam and used their Xbox again, but I didn't want to risk it. "Look, I'm going to give you my login and password for the Pirate Party's mail-server. You'll have to use Tor to access it -- Homeland Security is bound to be scanning for people logging into p-party mail." + +"Your login and password," she said, looking a little surprised. + +"I trust you, Van. I know I can trust you." + +She shook her head. "You /{never}/ give out your passwords, Marcus." + +"I don't think it matters anymore. Either you succeed or I -- or it's the end of Marcus Yallow. Maybe I'll get a new identity, but I don't think so. I think they'll catch me. I guess I've known all along that they'd catch me, some day." + +She looked at me, furious now. "What a waste. What was it all for, anyway?" + +Of all the things she could have said, nothing could have hurt me more. It was like another kick in the stomach. What a waste, all of it, futile. Darryl and Ange, gone. I might never see my family again. And still, Homeland Security had my city and my country caught in a massive, irrational shrieking freak-out where anything could be done in the name of stopping terrorism. + +Van looked like she was waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to say to that. She left me there. + +# + +Zeb had a pizza for me when I got back "home" -- to the tent under a freeway overpass in the Mission that he'd staked out for the night. He had a pup tent, military surplus, stenciled with SAN FRANCISCO LOCAL HOMELESS COORDINATING BOARD. + +The pizza was a Dominos, cold and clabbered, but delicious for all that. "You like pineapple on your pizza?" + +Zeb smiled condescendingly at me. "Freegans can't be choosy," he said. + +"Freegans?" + +"Like vegans, but we only eat free food." + +"Free food?" + +He grinned again. "You know -- /{free}/ food. From the free food store?" + +"You stole this?" + +"No, dummy. It's from the other store. The little one out behind the store? Made of blue steel? Kind of funky smelling?" + +"You got this out of the garbage?" + +He flung his head back and cackled. "Yes indeedy. You should /{see}/ your face. Dude, it's OK. It's not like it was rotten. It was fresh -- just a screwed up order. They threw it out in the box. They sprinkle rat poison over everything at closing-time, but if you get there quick, you're OK. You should see what grocery stores throw out! Wait until breakfast. I'm going to make you a fruit salad you won't believe. As soon as one strawberry in the box goes a little green and fuzzy, the whole thing is out --" + +I tuned him out. The pizza was fine. It wasn't as if sitting in the dumpster would infect it or something. If it was gross, that was only because it came from Domino's -- the worst pizza in town. I'd never liked their food, and I'd given it up altogether when I found out that they bankrolled a bunch of ultra-crazy politicians who thought that global warming and evolution were satanic plots. + +It was hard to shake the feeling of grossness, though. + +But there /{was}/ another way to look at it. Zeb had showed me a secret, something I hadn't anticipated: there was a whole hidden world out there, a way of getting by without participating in the system. + +"Freegans, huh?" + +"Yogurt, too," he said, nodding vigorously. "For the fruit salad. They throw it out the day after the best-before date, but it's not as if it goes green at midnight. It's yogurt, I mean, it's basically just rotten milk to begin with." + +I swallowed. The pizza tasted funny. Rat poison. Spoiled yogurt. Furry strawberries. This would take some getting used to. + +I ate another bite. Actually, Domino's pizza sucked a little less when you got it for free. + +Liam's sleeping bag was warm and welcoming after a long, emotionally exhausting day. Van would have made contact with Barbara by now. She'd have the video and the picture. I'd call her in the morning and find out what she thought I should do next. I'd have to come in once she published, to back it all up. + +I thought about that as I closed my eyes, thought about what it would be like to turn myself in, the cameras all rolling, following the infamous M1k3y into one of those big, columnated buildings in Civic Center. + +The sound of the cars screaming by overhead turned into a kind of ocean sound as I drifted away. There were other tents nearby, homeless people. I'd met a few of them that afternoon, before it got dark and we all retreated to huddle near our own tents. They were all older than me, rough looking and gruff. None of them looked crazy or violent, though. Just like people who'd had bad luck, or made bad decisions, or both. + +I must have fallen asleep, because I don't remember anything else until a bright light was shined into my face, so bright it was blinding. + +"That's him," said a voice behind the light. + +"Bag him," said another voice, one I'd heard before, one I'd heard over and over again in my dreams, lecturing to me, demanding my passwords. Severe-haircut-woman. + +The bag went over my head quickly and was cinched so tight at the throat that I choked and threw up my freegan pizza. As I spasmed and choked, hard hands bound my wrists, then my ankles. I was rolled onto a stretcher and hoisted, then carried into a vehicle, up a couple of clanging metal steps. They dropped me into a padded floor. There was no sound at all in the back of the vehicle once they closed the doors. The padding deadened everything except my own choking. + +"Well, hello again," she said. I felt the van rock as she crawled in with me. I was still choking, trying to gasp in a breath. Vomit filled my mouth and trickled down my windpipe. + +"We won't let you die," she said. "If you stop breathing, we'll make sure you start again. So don't worry about it." + +I choked harder. I sipped at air. Some was getting through. Deep, wracking coughs shook my chest and back, dislodging some more of the puke. More breath. + +"See?" she said. "Not so bad. Welcome home, M1k3y. We've got somewhere very special to take you." + +I relaxed onto my back, feeling the van rock. The smell of used pizza was overwhelming at first, but as with all strong stimuli, my brain gradually grew accustomed to it, filtered it out until it was just a faint aroma. The rocking of the van was almost comforting. + +That's when it happened. An incredible, deep calm that swept over me like I was lying on the beach and the ocean had swept in and lifted me as gently as a parent, held me aloft and swept me out onto a warm sea under a warm sun. After everything that had happened, I was caught, but it didn't matter. I had gotten the information to Barbara. I had organized the Xnet. I had won. And if I hadn't won, I had done everything I could have done. More than I ever thought I could do. I took a mental inventory as I rode, thinking of everything that I had accomplished, that /{we}/ had accomplished. The city, the country, the world was full of people who wouldn't live the way DHS wanted us to live. We'd fight forever. They couldn't jail us all. + +I sighed and smiled. + +She'd been talking all along, I realized. I'd been so far into my happy place that she'd just gone away. + +"-- smart kid like you. You'd think that you'd know better than to mess with us. We've had an eye on you since the day you walked out. We would have caught you even if you hadn't gone crying to your lesbo journalist traitor. I just don't get it -- we had an understanding, you and me..." + +We rumbled over a metal plate, the van's shocks rocking, and then the rocking changed. We were on water. Heading to Treasure Island. Hey, Ange was there. Darryl, too. Maybe. + +# + +The hood didn't come off until I was in my cell. They didn't bother with the cuffs at my wrists and ankles, just rolled me off the stretcher and onto the floor. It was dark, but by the moonlight from the single, tiny, high window, I could see that the mattress had been taken off the cot. The room contained me, a toilet, a bed-frame, and a sink, and nothing else. + +I closed my eyes and let the ocean lift me. I floated away. Somewhere, far below me, was my body. I could tell what would happen next. I was being left to piss myself. Again. I knew what that was like. I'd pissed myself before. It smelled bad. It itched. It was humiliating, like being a baby. + +But I'd survived it. + +I laughed. The sound was weird, and it drew me back into my body, back to the present. I laughed and laughed. I'd had the worst that they could throw at me, and I'd survived it, and I'd /{beaten them}/, beaten them for months, showed them up as chumps and despots. I'd /{won}/. + +I let my bladder cut loose. It was sore and full anyway, and no time like the present. + +The ocean swept me away. + +# + +When morning came, two efficient, impersonal guards cut the bindings off of my wrists and ankles. I still couldn't walk -- when I stood, my legs gave way like a stringless marionette's. Too much time in one position. The guards pulled my arms over their shoulders and half-dragged/half-carried me down the familiar corridor. The bar codes on the doors were curling up and dangling now, attacked by the salt air. + +I got an idea. "Ange!" I yelled. "Darryl!" I yelled. My guards yanked me along faster, clearly disturbed but not sure what to do about it. "Guys, it's me, Marcus! Stay free!" + +Behind one of the doors, someone sobbed. Someone else cried out in what sounded like Arabic. Then it was cacophony, a thousand different shouting voices. + +They brought me to a new room. It was an old shower-room, with the shower-heads still present in the mould tiles. + +"Hello, M1k3y," Severe Haircut said. "You seem to have had an eventful morning." She wrinkled her nose pointedly. + +"I pissed myself," I said, cheerfully. "You should try it." + +"Maybe we should give you a bath, then," she said. She nodded, and my guards carried me to another stretcher. This one had restraining straps running its length. They dropped me onto it and it was ice-cold and soaked through. Before I knew it, they had the straps across my shoulders, hips and ankles. A minute later, three more straps were tied down. A man's hands grabbed the railings by my head and released some catches, and a moment later I was tilted down, my head below my feet. + +"Let's start with something simple," she said. I craned my head to see her. She had turned to a desk with an Xbox on it, connected to an expensive-looking flat-panel TV. "I'd like you to tell me your login and password for your Pirate Party email, please?" + +I closed my eyes and let the ocean carry me off the beach. + +"Do you know what waterboarding is, M1k3y?" Her voice reeled me in. "You get strapped down like this, and we pour water over your head, up your nose and down your mouth. You can't suppress the gag reflex. They call it a simulated execution, and from what I can tell from this side of the room, that's a fair assessment. You won't be able to fight the feeling that you're dying." + +I tried to go away. I'd heard of waterboarding. This was it, real torture. And this was just the beginning. + +I couldn't go away. The ocean didn't sweep in and lift me. There was a tightness in my chest, my eyelids fluttered. I could feel clammy piss on my legs and clammy sweat in my hair. My skin itched from the dried puke. + +She swam into view above me. "Let's start with the login," she said. + +I closed my eyes, squeezed them shut. + +"Give him a drink," she said. + +I heard people moving. I took a deep breath and held it. + +The water started as a trickle, a ladleful of water gently poured over my chin, my lips. Up my upturned nostrils. It went back into my throat, starting to choke me, but I wouldn't cough, wouldn't gasp and suck it into my lungs. I held onto my breath and squeezed my eyes harder. + +There was a commotion from outside the room, a sound of chaotic boots stamping, angry, outraged shouts. The dipper was emptied into my face. + +I heard her mutter something to someone in the room, then to me she said, "Just the login, Marcus. It's a simple request. What could I do with your login, anyway?" + +This time, it was a bucket of water, all at once, a flood that didn't stop, it must have been gigantic. I couldn't help it. I gasped and aspirated the water into my lungs, coughed and took more water in. I knew they wouldn't kill me, but I couldn't convince my body of that. In every fiber of my being, I knew I was going to die. I couldn't even cry -- the water was still pouring over me. + +Then it stopped. I coughed and coughed and coughed, but at the angle I was at, the water I coughed up dribbled back into my nose and burned down my sinuses. + +The coughs were so deep they hurt, hurt my ribs and my hips as I twisted against them. I hated how my body was betraying me, how my mind couldn't control my body, but there was nothing for it. + +Finally, the coughing subsided enough for me to take in what was going on around me. People were shouting and it sounded like someone was scuffling, wrestling. I opened my eyes and blinked into the bright light, then craned my neck, still coughing a little. + +The room had a lot more people in it than it had had when we started. Most of them seemed to be wearing body armor, helmets, and smoked-plastic visors. They were shouting at the Treasure Island guards, who were shouting back, necks corded with veins. + +"Stand down!" one of the body-armors said. "Stand down and put your hands in the air. You are under arrest!" + +Severe haircut woman was talking on her phone. One of the body armors noticed her and he moved swiftly to her and batted her phone away with a gloved hand. Everyone fell silent as it sailed through the air in an arc that spanned the small room, clattering to the ground in a shower of parts. + +The silence broke and the body-armors moved into the room. Two grabbed each of my torturers. I almost managed a smile at the look on Severe Haircut's face when two men grabbed her by the shoulders, turned her around, and yanked a set of plastic handcuffs around her wrists. + +One of the body-armors moved forward from the doorway. He had a video camera on his shoulder, a serious rig with blinding white light. He got the whole room, circling me twice while he got me. I found myself staying perfectly still, as though I was sitting for a portrait. + +It was ridiculous. + +"Do you think you could get me off of this thing?" I managed to get it all out with only a little choking. + +Two more body armors moved up to me, one a woman, and began to unstrap me. They flipped their visors up and smiled at me. They had red crosses on their shoulders and helmets. + +Beneath the red crosses was another insignia: CHP. California Highway Patrol. They were State Troopers. + +I started to ask what they were doing there, and that's when I saw Barbara Stratford. She'd evidently been held back in the corridor, but now she came in pushing and shoving. "There you are," she said, kneeling beside me and grabbing me in the longest, hardest hug of my life. + +That's when I knew it -- Guantanamo by the Bay was in the hands of its enemies. I was saved. + +1~ Chapter 21 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Pages Books in Toronto, Canada.~{ Pages Books http://pagesbooks.ca/ 256 Queen St W, Toronto, ON M5V 1Z8 Canada +1 416 598 1447 }~ Long a fixture on the bleedingly trendy Queen Street West strip, Pages is located over the road from CityTV and just a few doors down from the old Bakka store where I worked. We at Bakka loved having Pages down the street from us: what we were to science fiction, they were to everything else: hand-picked material representing the stuff you'd never find elsewhere, the stuff you didn't know you were looking for until you saw it there. Pages also has one of the best news-stands I've ever seen, row on row of incredible magazines and zines from all over the world.] }/ + +They left me and Barbara alone in the room then, and I used the working shower head to rinse off -- I was suddenly embarrassed to be covered in piss and barf. When I finished, Barbara was in tears. + +"Your parents --" she began. + +I felt like I might throw up again. God, my poor folks. What they must have gone through. + +"Are they here?" + +"No," she said. "It's complicated," she said. + +"What?" + +"You're still under arrest, Marcus. Everyone here is. They can't just sweep in and throw open the doors. Everyone here is going to have to be processed through the criminal justice system. It could take, well, it could take months." + +"I'm going to have to stay here for /{months}/?" + +She grabbed my hands. "No, I think we're going to be able to get you arraigned and released on bail pretty fast. But pretty fast is a relative term. I wouldn't expect anything to happen today. And it's not going to be like those people had it. It will be humane. There will be real food. No interrogations. Visits from your family. + +"Just because the DHS is out, it doesn't mean that you get to just walk out of here. What's happened here is that we're getting rid of the bizarro-world version of the justice system they'd instituted and replacing it with the old system. The system with judges, open trials and lawyers. + +"So we can try to get you transferred to a juvie facility on the mainland, but Marcus, those places can be really rough. Really, really rough. This might be the best place for you until we get you bailed out." + +Bailed out. Of course. I was a criminal -- I hadn't been charged yet, but there were bound to be plenty of charges they could think of. It was practically illegal just to think impure thoughts about the government. + +She gave my hands another squeeze. "It sucks, but this is how it has to be. The point is, it's /{over}/. The Governor has thrown the DHS out of the State, dismantled every checkpoint. The Attorney General has issued warrants for any law-enforcement officers involved in 'stress interrogations' and secret imprisonments. They'll go to jail, Marcus, and it's because of what you did." + +I was numb. I heard the words, but they hardly made sense. Somehow, it was over, but it wasn't over. + +"Look," she said. "We probably have an hour or two before this all settles down, before they come back and put you away again. What do you want to do? Walk on the beach? Get a meal? These people had an incredible staff room -- we raided it on the way in. Gourmet all the way." + +At last a question I could answer. "I want to find Ange. I want to find Darryl." + +# + +I tried to use a computer I found to look up their cell-numbers, but it wanted a password, so we were reduced to walking the corridors, calling out their names. Behind the cell-doors, prisoners screamed back at us, or cried, or begged us to let them go. They didn't understand what had just happened, couldn't see their former guards being herded onto the docks in plastic handcuffs, taken away by California state SWAT teams. + +"Ange!" I called over the din, "Ange Carvelli! Darryl Glover! It's Marcus!" + +We'd walked the whole length of the cell-block and they hadn't answered. I felt like crying. They'd been shipped overseas -- they were in Syria or worse. I'd never see them again. + +I sat down and leaned against the corridor wall and put my face in my hands. I saw Severe Haircut Woman's face, saw her smirk as she asked me for my login. She had done this. She would go to jail for it, but that wasn't enough. I thought that when I saw her again, I might kill her. She deserved it. + +"Come on," Barbara said, "Come on, Marcus. Don't give up. There's more around here, come on." + +She was right. All the doors we'd passed in the cellblock were old, rusting things that dated back to when the base was first built. But at the very end of the corridor, sagging open, was a new high-security door as thick as a dictionary. We pulled it open and ventured into the dark corridor within. + +There were four more cell-doors here, doors without bar codes. Each had a small electronic keypad mounted on it. + +"Darryl?" I said. "Ange?" + +"Marcus?" + +It was Ange, calling out from behind the furthest door. Ange, my Ange, my angel. + +"Ange!" I cried. "It's me, it's me!" + +"Oh God, Marcus," she choked out, and then it was all sobs. + +I pounded on the other doors. "Darryl! Darryl, are you here?" + +"I'm here." The voice was very small, and very hoarse. "I'm here. I'm very, very sorry. Please. I'm very sorry." + +He sounded... broken. Shattered. + +"It's me, D," I said, leaning on his door. "It's Marcus. It's over -- they arrested the guards. They kicked the Department of Homeland Security out. We're getting trials, open trials. And we get to testify against /{them}/." + +"I'm sorry," he said. "Please, I'm so sorry." + +The California patrolmen came to the door then. They still had their camera rolling. "Ms Stratford?" one said. He had his faceplate up and he looked like any other cop, not like my savior. Like someone come to lock me up. + +"Captain Sanchez," she said. "We've located two of the prisoners of interest here. I'd like to see them released and inspect them for myself." + +"Ma'am, we don't have access codes for those doors yet," he said. + +She held up her hand. "That wasn't the arrangement. I was to have complete access to this facility. That came direct from the Governor, sir. We aren't budging until you open these cells." Her face was perfectly smooth, without a single hint of give or flex. She meant it. + +The Captain looked like he needed sleep. He grimaced. "I'll see what I can do," he said. + +# + +They did manage to open the cells, finally, about half an hour later. It took three tries, but they eventually got the right codes entered, matching them to the arphids on the ID badges they'd taken off the guards they'd arrested. + +They got into Ange's cell first. She was dressed in a hospital gown, open at the back, and her cell was even more bare than mine had been -- just padding all over, no sink or bed, no light. She emerged blinking into the corridor and the police camera was on her, its bright lights in her face. Barbara stepped protectively between us and it. Ange stepped tentatively out of her cell, shuffling a little. There was something wrong with her eyes, with her face. She was crying, but that wasn't it. + +"They drugged me," she said. "When I wouldn't stop screaming for a lawyer." + +That's when I hugged her. She sagged against me, but she squeezed back, too. She smelled stale and sweaty, and I smelled no better. I never wanted to let go. + +That's when they opened Darryl's cell. + +He had shredded his paper hospital gown. He was curled up, naked, in the back of the cell, shielding himself from the camera and our stares. I ran to him. + +"D," I whispered in his ear. "D, it's me. It's Marcus. It's over. The guards have been arrested. We're going to get bail, we're going home." + +He trembled and squeezed his eyes shut. "I'm sorry," he whispered, and turned his face away. + +They took me away then, a cop in body-armor and Barbara, took me back to my cell and locked the door, and that's where I spent the night. + +# + +I don't remember much about the trip to the courthouse. They had me chained to five other prisoners, all of whom had been in for a lot longer than me. One only spoke Arabic -- he was an old man, and he trembled. The others were all young. I was the only white one. Once we had been gathered on the deck of the ferry, I saw that nearly everyone on Treasure Island had been one shade of brown or another. + +I had only been inside for one night, but it was too long. There was a light drizzle coming down, normally the sort of thing that would make me hunch my shoulders and look down, but today I joined everyone else in craning my head back at the infinite gray sky, reveling in the stinging wet as we raced across the bay to the ferry-docks. + +They took us away in buses. The shackles made climbing into the buses awkward, and it took a long time for everyone to load. No one cared. When we weren't struggling to solve the geometry problem of six people, one chain, narrow bus-aisle, we were just looking around at the city around us, up the hill at the buildings. + +All I could think of was finding Darryl and Ange, but neither were in evidence. It was a big crowd and we weren't allowed to move freely through it. The state troopers who handled us were gentle enough, but they were still big, armored and armed. I kept thinking I saw Darryl in the crowd, but it was always someone else with that same beaten, hunched look that he'd had in his cell. He wasn't the only broken one. + +At the courthouse, they marched us into interview rooms in our shackle group. An ACLU lawyer took our information and asked us a few questions -- when she got to me, she smiled and greeted me by name -- and then led us into the courtroom before the judge. He wore an actual robe, and seemed to be in a good mood. + +The deal seemed to be that anyone who had a family member to post bail could go free, and everyone else got sent to prison. The ACLU lawyer did a lot of talking to the judge, asking for a few more hours while the prisoners' families were rounded up and brought to the court-house. The judge was pretty good about it, but when I realized that some of these people had been locked up since the bridge blew, taken for dead by their families, without trial, subjected to interrogation, isolation, torture -- I wanted to just break the chains myself and set everyone free. + +When I was brought before the judge, he looked down at me and took off his glasses. He looked tired. The ACLU lawyer looked tired. The bailiffs looked tired. Behind me, I could hear a sudden buzz of conversation as my name was called by the bailiff. The judge rapped his gavel once, without looking away from me. He scrubbed at his eyes. + +"Mr Yallow," he said, "the prosecution has identified you as a flight risk. I think they have a point. You certainly have more, shall we say, /{history}/, than the other people here. I am tempted to hold you over for trial, no matter how much bail your parents are prepared to post." + +My lawyer started to say something, but the judge silenced her with a look. He scrubbed at his eyes. + +"Do you have anything to say?" + +"I had the chance to run," I said. "Last week. Someone offered to take me away, get me out of town, help me build a new identity. Instead I stole her phone, escaped from our truck, and ran away. I turned over her phone -- which had evidence about my friend, Darryl Glover, on it -- to a journalist and hid out here, in town." + +"You stole a phone?" + +"I decided that I couldn't run. That I had to face justice -- that my freedom wasn't worth anything if I was a wanted man, or if the city was still under the DHS. If my friends were still locked up. That freedom for me wasn't as important as a free country." + +"But you did steal a phone." + +I nodded. "I did. I plan on giving it back, if I ever find the young woman in question." + +"Well, thank you for that speech, Mr Yallow. You are a very well spoken young man." He glared at the prosecutor. "Some would say a very brave man, too. There was a certain video on the news this morning. It suggested that you had some legitimate reason to evade the authorities. In light of that, and of your little speech here, I will grant bail, but I will also ask the prosecutor to add a charge of Misdemeanor Petty Theft to the count, as regards the matter of the phone. For this, I expect another $50,000 in bail." + +He banged his gavel again, and my lawyer gave my hand a squeeze. + +He looked down at me again and re-seated his glasses. He had dandruff, there on the shoulders of his robe. A little more rained down as his glasses touched his wiry, curly hair. + +"You can go now, young man. Stay out of trouble." + +# + +I turned to go and someone tackled me. It was Dad. He literally lifted me off my feet, hugging me so hard my ribs creaked. He hugged me the way I remembered him hugging me when I was a little boy, when he'd spin me around and around in hilarious, vomitous games of airplane that ended with him tossing me in the air and catching me and squeezing me like that, so hard it almost hurt. + +A set of softer hands pried me gently out of his arms. Mom. She held me at arm's length for a moment, searching my face for something, not saying anything, tears streaming down her face. She smiled and it turned into a sob and then she was holding me too, and Dad's arm encircled us both. + +When they let go, I managed to finally say something. "Darryl?" + +"His father met me somewhere else. He's in the hospital." + +"When can I see him?" + +"It's our next stop," Dad said. He was grim. "He doesn't --" He stopped. "They say he'll be OK," he said. His voice was choked. + +"How about Ange?" + +"Her mother took her home. She wanted to wait here for you, but..." + +I understood. I felt full of understanding now, for how all the families of all the people who'd been locked away must feel. The courtroom was full of tears and hugs, and even the bailiffs couldn't stop it. + +"Let's go see Darryl," I said. "And let me borrow your phone?" + +I called Ange on the way to the hospital where they were keeping Darryl -- San Francisco General, just down the street from us -- and arranged to see her after dinner. She talked in a hurried whisper. Her mom wasn't sure whether to punish her or not, but Ange didn't want to tempt fate. + +There were two state troopers in the corridor where Darryl was being held. They were holding off a legion of reporters who stood on tiptoe to see around them and get pictures. The flashes popped in our eyes like strobes, and I shook my head to clear it. My parents had brought me clean clothes and I'd changed in the back seat, but I still felt gross, even after scrubbing myself in the court-house bathrooms. + +Some of the reporters called my name. Oh yeah, that's right, I was famous now. The state troopers gave me a look, too -- either they'd recognized my face or my name when the reporters called it out. + +Darryl's father met us at the door of his hospital room, speaking in a whisper too low for the reporters to hear. He was in civvies, the jeans and sweater I normally thought of him wearing, but he had his service ribbons pinned to his breast. + +"He's sleeping," he said. "He woke up a little while ago and he started crying. He couldn't stop. They gave him something to help him sleep." + +He led us in, and there was Darryl, his hair clean and combed, sleeping with his mouth open. There was white stuff at the corners of his mouth. He had a semi-private room, and in the other bed there was an older Arab-looking guy, in his 40s. I realized it was the guy I'd been chained to on the way off of Treasure Island. We exchanged embarrassed waves. + +Then I turned back to Darryl. I took his hand. His nails had been chewed to the quick. He'd been a nail-biter when he was a kid, but he'd kicked the habit when we got to high school. I think Van talked him out of it, telling him how gross it was for him to have his fingers in his mouth all the time. + +I heard my parents and Darryl's dad take a step away, drawing the curtains around us. I put my face down next to his on the pillow. He had a straggly, patchy beard that reminded me of Zeb. + +"Hey, D," I said. "You made it. You're going to be OK." + +He snored a little. I almost said, "I love you," a phrase I'd only said to one non-family-member ever, a phrase that was weird to say to another guy. In the end, I just gave his hand another squeeze. Poor Darryl. + +1~epilogue Epilogue + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Hudson Booksellers,~{ Hudson Booksellers http://www.hudsongroup.com/HudsonBooksellers_s.html }~ the booksellers that are in practically every airport in the USA. Most of the Hudson stands have just a few titles (though those are often surprisingly diverse), but the big ones, like the one in the AA terminal at Chicago's O'Hare, are as good as any neighborhood store. It takes something special to bring a personal touch to an airport, and Hudson's has saved my mind on more than one long Chicago layover.] }/ + +Barbara called me at the office on July 4th weekend. I wasn't the only one who'd come into work on the holiday weekend, but I was the only one whose excuse was that my day-release program wouldn't let me leave town. + +In the end, they convicted me of stealing Masha's phone. Can you believe that? The prosecution had done a deal with my lawyer to drop all charges related to "Electronic terrorism" and "inciting riots" in exchange for my pleading guilty to the misdemeanor petty theft charge. I got three months in a day-release program with a half-way house for juvenile offenders in the Mission. I slept at the halfway house, sharing a dorm with a bunch of actual criminals, gang kids and druggie kids, a couple of real nuts. During the day, I was "free" to go out and work at my "job." + +"Marcus, they're letting her go," she said. + +"Who?" + +"Johnstone, Carrie Johnstone," she said. "The closed military tribunal cleared her of any wrongdoing. The file is sealed. She's being returned to active duty. They're sending her to Iraq." + +Carrie Johnstone was Severe Haircut Woman's name. It came out in the preliminary hearings at the California Superior Court, but that was just about all that came out. She wouldn't say a word about who she took orders from, what she'd done, who had been imprisoned and why. She just sat, perfectly silent, day after day, in the courthouse. + +The Feds, meanwhile, had blustered and shouted about the Governor's "unilateral, illegal" shut-down of the Treasure Island facility, and the Mayor's eviction of fed cops from San Francisco. A lot of those cops had ended up in state prisons, along with the guards from Gitmo-by-the-Bay. + +Then, one day, there was no statement from the White House, nothing from the state capitol. And the next day, there was a dry, tense press-conference held jointly on the steps of the Governor's mansion, where the head of the DHS and the governor announced their "understanding." + +The DHS would hold a closed, military tribunal to investigate "possible errors in judgment" committed after the attack on the Bay Bridge. The tribunal would use every tool at its disposal to ensure that criminal acts were properly punished. In return, control over DHS operations in California would go through the State Senate, which would have the power to shut down, inspect, or re-prioritize all homeland security in the state. + +The roar of the reporters had been deafening and Barbara had gotten the first question in. "Mr Governor, with all due respect: we have incontrovertible video evidence that Marcus Yallow, a citizen of this state, native born, was subjected to a simulated execution by DHS officers, apparently acting on orders from the White House. Is the State really willing to abandon any pretense of justice for its citizens in the face of illegal, barbaric /{torture}/?" Her voice trembled, but didn't crack. + +The Governor spread his hands. "The military tribunals will accomplish justice. If Mr Yallow -- or any other person who has cause to fault the Department of Homeland Security -- wants further justice, he is, of course, entitled to sue for such damages as may be owing to him from the federal government." + +That's what I was doing. Over twenty thousand civil lawsuits were filed against the DHS in the week after the Governor's announcement. Mine was being handled by the ACLU, and they'd filed motions to get at the results of the closed military tribunals. So far, the courts were pretty sympathetic to this. + +But I hadn't expected this. + +"She got off totally Scot-free?" + +"The press release doesn't say much. 'After a thorough examination of the events in San Francisco and in the special anti-terror detention center on Treasure Island, it is the finding of this tribunal that Ms Johnstone's actions do not warrant further discipline.' There's that word, 'further' -- like they've already punished her." + +I snorted. I'd dreamed of Carrie Johnstone nearly every night since I was released from Gitmo-by-the-Bay. I'd seen her face looming over mine, that little snarly smile as she told the man to give me a "drink." + +"Marcus --" Barbara said, but I cut her off. + +"It's fine. It's fine. I'm going to do a video about this. Get it out over the weekend. Mondays are big days for viral video. Everyone'll be coming back from the holiday weekend, looking for something funny to forward around school or the office." + +I saw a shrink twice a week as part of my deal at the halfway house. Once I'd gotten over seeing that as some kind of punishment, it had been good. He'd helped me focus on doing constructive things when I was upset, instead of letting it eat me up. The videos helped. + +"I have to go," I said, swallowing hard to keep the emotion out of my voice. + +"Take care of yourself, Marcus," Barbara said. + +Ange hugged me from behind as I hung up the phone. "I just read about it online," she said. She read a million newsfeeds, pulling them with a headline reader that sucked up stories as fast as they ended up on the wire. She was our official blogger, and she was good at it, snipping out the interesting stories and throwing them online like a short order cook turning around breakfast orders. + +I turned around in her arms so that I was hugging her from in front. Truth be told, we hadn't gotten a lot of work done that day. I wasn't allowed to be out of the halfway house after dinner time, and she couldn't visit me there. We saw each other around the office, but there were usually a lot of other people around, which kind of put a crimp in our cuddling. Being alone in the office for a day was too much temptation. It was hot and sultry, too, which meant we were both in tank-tops and shorts, a lot of skin-to-skin contact as we worked next to each other. + +"I'm going to make a video," I said. "I want to release it today." + +"Good," she said. "Let's do it." + +Ange read the press-release. I did a little monologue, synched over that famous footage of me on the water-board, eyes wild in the harsh light of the camera, tears streaming down my face, hair matted and flecked with barf. + +"This is me. I am on a waterboard. I am being tortured in a simulated execution. The torture is supervised by a woman called Carrie Johnstone. She works for the government. You might remember her from this video." + +I cut in the video of Johnstone and Kurt Rooney. "That's Johnstone and Secretary of State Kurt Rooney, the president's chief strategist." + +/{"The nation does not love that city. As far as they're concerned, it is a Sodom and Gomorrah of fags and atheists who deserve to rot in hell. The only reason the country cares what they think in San Francisco is that they had the good fortune to have been blown to hell by some Islamic terrorists."}/ + +"He's talking about the city where I live. At last count, 4,215 of my neighbors were killed on the day he's talking about. But some of them may not have been killed. Some of them disappeared into the same prison where I was tortured. Some mothers and fathers, children and lovers, brothers and sisters will never see their loved ones again -- because they were secretly imprisoned in an illegal jail right here in the San Francisco Bay. They were shipped overseas. The records were meticulous, but Carrie Johnstone has the encryption keys." I cut back to Carrie Johnstone, the footage of her sitting at the board table with Rooney, laughing. + +I cut in the footage of Johnstone being arrested. "When they arrested her, I thought we'd get justice. All the people she broke and disappeared. But the president --" I cut to a still of him laughing and playing golf on one of his many holidays "-- and his Chief Strategist --" now a still of Rooney shaking hands with an infamous terrorist leader who used to be on "our side" "-- intervened. They sent her to a secret military tribunal and now that tribunal has cleared her. Somehow, they saw nothing wrong with all of this." + +I cut in a photomontage of the hundreds of shots of prisoners in their cells that Barbara had published on the Bay Guardian's site the day we were released. "We elected these people. We pay their salaries. They're supposed to be on our side. They're supposed to defend our freedoms. But these people --" a series of shots of Johnstone and the others who'd been sent to the tribunal "-- betrayed our trust. The election is four months away. That's a lot of time. Enough for you to go out and find five of your neighbors -- five people who've given up on voting because their choice is 'none of the above.' + +"Talk to your neighbors. Make them promise to vote. Make them promise to take the country back from the torturers and thugs. The people who laughed at my friends as they lay fresh in their graves at the bottom of the harbor. Make them promise to talk to their neighbors. + +"Most of us choose none of the above. It's not working. You have to choose -- choose freedom. + +"My name is Marcus Yallow. I was tortured by my country, but I still love it here. I'm seventeen years old. I want to grow up in a free country. I want to live in a free country." + +I faded out to the logo of the website. Ange had built it, with help from Jolu, who got us all the free hosting we could ever need on Pigspleen. + +The office was an interesting place. Technically we were called Coalition of Voters for a Free America, but everyone called us the Xnetters. The organization -- a charitable nonprofit -- had been co-founded by Barbara and some of her lawyer friends right after the liberation of Treasure Island. The funding was kicked off by some tech millionaires who couldn't believe that a bunch of hacker kids had kicked the DHS's ass. Sometimes, they'd ask us to go down the peninsula to Sand Hill Road, where all the venture capitalists were, and give a little presentation on Xnet technology. There were about a zillion startups who were trying to make a buck on the Xnet. + +Whatever -- I didn't have to have anything to do with it, and I got a desk and an office with a storefront, right there on Valencia Street, where we gave away ParanoidXbox CDs and held workshops on building better WiFi antennas. A surprising number of average people dropped in to make personal donations, both of hardware (you can run ParanoidLinux on just about anything, not just Xbox Universals) and cash money. They loved us. + +The big plan was to launch our own ARG in September, just in time for the election, and to really tie it in with signing up voters and getting them to the polls. Only 42 percent of Americans showed up at the polls for the last election -- nonvoters had a huge majority. I kept trying to get Darryl and Van to one of our planning sessions, but they kept on declining. They were spending a lot of time together, and Van insisted that it was totally nonromantic. Darryl wouldn't talk to me much at all, though he sent me long emails about just about everything that wasn't about Van or terrorism or prison. + +Ange squeezed my hand. "God, I hate that woman," she said. + +I nodded. "Just one more rotten thing this country's done to Iraq," I said. "If they sent her to my town, I'd probably become a terrorist." + +"You did become a terrorist when they sent her to your town." + +"So I did," I said. + +"Are you going to Ms Galvez's hearing on Monday?" + +"Totally." I'd introduced Ange to Ms Galvez a couple weeks before, when my old teacher invited me over for dinner. The teacher's union had gotten a hearing for her before the board of the Unified School District to argue for getting her old job back. They said that Fred Benson was coming out of (early) retirement to testify against her. I was looking forward to seeing her again. + +"Do you want to go get a burrito?" + +"Totally." + +"Let me get my hot-sauce," she said. + +I checked my email one more time -- my PirateParty email, which still got a dribble of messages from old Xnetters who hadn't found my Coalition of Voters address yet. + +The latest message was from a throwaway email address from one of the new Brazilian anonymizers. + +> Found her, thanks. You didn't tell me she was so h4wt. + +"Who's /{that}/ from?" + +I laughed. "Zeb," I said. "Remember Zeb? I gave him Masha's email address. I figured, if they're both underground, might as well introduce them to one another." + +"He thinks Masha is /{cute}/?" + +"Give the guy a break, he's clearly had his mind warped by circumstances." + +"And you?" + +"Me?" + +"Yeah -- was your mind warped by circumstances?" + +I held Ange out at arm's length and looked her up and down and up and down. I held her cheeks and stared through her thick-framed glasses into her big, mischievous tilted eyes. I ran my fingers through her hair. + +"Ange, I've never thought more clearly in my whole life." + +She kissed me then, and I kissed her back, and it was some time before we went out for that burrito. + +1~afterword_1 Afterword by Bruce Schneier + +I'm a security technologist. My job is making people secure. + +I think about security systems and how to break them. Then, how to make them more secure. Computer security systems. Surveillance systems. Airplane security systems and voting machines and RFID chips and everything else. + +Cory invited me into the last few pages of his book because he wanted me to tell you that security is fun. It's incredibly fun. It's cat and mouse, who can outsmart whom, hunter versus hunted fun. I think it's the most fun job you can possibly have. If you thought it was fun to read about Marcus outsmarting the gait-recognition cameras with rocks in his shoes, think of how much more fun it would be if you were the first person in the world to think of that. + +Working in security means knowing a lot about technology. It might mean knowing about computers and networks, or cameras and how they work, or the chemistry of bomb detection. But really, security is a mindset. It's a way of thinking. Marcus is a great example of that way of thinking. He's always looking for ways a security system fails. I'll bet he couldn't walk into a store without figuring out a way to shoplift. Not that he'd do it -- there's a difference between knowing how to defeat a security system and actually defeating it -- but he'd know he could. + +It's how security people think. We're constantly looking at security systems and how to get around them; we can't help it. + +This kind of thinking is important no matter what side of security you're on. If you've been hired to build a shoplift-proof store, you'd better know how to shoplift. If you're designing a camera system that detects individual gaits, you'd better plan for people putting rocks in their shoes. Because if you don't, you're not going to design anything good. + +So when you're wandering through your day, take a moment to look at the security systems around you. Look at the cameras in the stores you shop at. (Do they prevent crime, or just move it next door?) See how a restaurant operates. (If you pay after you eat, why don't more people just leave without paying?) Pay attention at airport security. (How could you get a weapon onto an airplane?) Watch what the teller does at a bank. (Bank security is designed to prevent tellers from stealing just as much as it is to prevent you from stealing.) Stare at an anthill. (Insects are all about security.) Read the Constitution, and notice all the ways it provides people with security against government. Look at traffic lights and door locks and all the security systems on television and in the movies. Figure out how they work, what threats they protect against and what threats they don't, how they fail, and how they can be exploited. + +Spend enough time doing this, and you'll find yourself thinking differently about the world. You'll start noticing that many of the security systems out there don't actually do what they claim to, and that much of our national security is a waste of money. You'll understand privacy as essential to security, not in opposition. You'll stop worrying about things other people worry about, and start worrying about things other people don't even think about. + +Sometimes you'll notice something about security that no one has ever thought about before. And maybe you'll figure out a new way to break a security system. + +It was only a few years ago that someone invented phishing. + +I'm frequently amazed how easy it is to break some pretty big-name security systems. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the big one is that it's impossible to prove that something is secure. All you can do is try to break it -- if you fail, you know that it's secure enough to keep /{you}/ out, but what about someone who's smarter than you? Anyone can design a security system so strong he himself can't break it. + +Think about that for a second, because it's not obvious. No one is qualified to analyze their own security designs, because the designer and the analyzer will be the same person, with the same limits. Someone else has to analyze the security, because it has to be secure against things the designers didn't think of. + +This means that all of us have to analyze the security that other people design. And surprisingly often, one of us breaks it. Marcus's exploits aren't far-fetched; that kind of thing happens all the time. Go onto the net and look up "bump key" or "Bic pen Kryptonite lock"; you'll find a couple of really interesting stories about seemingly strong security defeated by pretty basic technology. + +And when that happens, be sure to publish it on the Internet somewhere. Secrecy and security aren't the same, even though it may seem that way. Only bad security relies on secrecy; good security works even if all the details of it are public. + +And publishing vulnerabilities forces security designers to design better security, and makes us all better consumers of security. If you buy a Kryptonite bike lock and it can be defeated with a Bic pen, you're not getting very good security for your money. And, likewise, if a bunch of smart kids can defeat the DHS's antiterrorist technologies, then it's not going to do a very good job against real terrorists. + +Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even stupider. + +So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of them. + +Bruce Schneier +http://www.schneier.com + +1~afterword_2 Afterword by Andrew "bunnie" Huang, Xbox Hacker + +Hackers are explorers, digital pioneers. It's in a hacker's nature to question conventions and be tempted by intricate problems. Any complex system is sport for a hacker; a side effect of this is the hacker's natural affinity for problems involving security. Society is a large and complex system, and is certainly not off limits to a little hacking. As a result, hackers are often stereotyped as iconoclasts and social misfits, people who defy social norms for the sake of defiance. When I hacked the Xbox in 2002 while at MIT, I wasn’t doing it to rebel or to cause harm; I was just following a natural impulse, the same impulse that leads to fixing a broken iPod or exploring the roofs and tunnels at MIT.  +  +Unfortunately, the combination of not complying with social norms and knowing “threatening” things like how to read the arphid on your credit card or how to pick locks causes some people to fear hackers. However, the motivations of a hacker are typically as simple as “I’m an engineer because I like to design things.” People often ask me, “Why did you hack the Xbox security system?” And my answer is simple: First, I own the things that I buy. If someone can tell me what I can and can’t run on my hardware, then I don’t own it. Second, because it’s there. It’s a system of sufficient complexity to make good sport. It was a great diversion from the late nights working on my PhD. +  +I was lucky. The fact that I was a graduate student at MIT when I hacked the Xbox legitimized the activity in the eyes of the right people. However, the right to hack shouldn’t only be extended to academics. I got my start on hacking when I was just a boy in elementary school, taking apart every electronic appliance I could get my hands on, much to my parents’ chagrin. My reading collection included books on model rocketry, artillery, nuclear weaponry and explosives manufacture -- books that I borrowed from my school library (I think the Cold War influenced the reading selection in public schools). I also played with my fair share of ad-hoc fireworks and roamed the open construction sites of houses being raised in my Midwestern neighborhood. While not the wisest of things to do, these were important experiences in my coming of age and I grew up to be a free thinker because of the social tolerance and trust of my community. +  +Current events have not been so kind to aspiring hackers. Little Brother shows how we can get from where we are today to a world where social tolerance for new and different thoughts dies altogether. A recent event highlights exactly how close we are to crossing the line into the world of Little Brother. I had the fortune of reading an early draft of Little Brother back in November 2006. Fast forward two months to the end of January 2007, when Boston police found suspected explosive devices and shut down the city for a day. These devices turned out to be nothing more than circuit boards with flashing LEDs, promoting a show for the Cartoon Network. The artists who placed this urban graffiti were taken in as suspected terrorists and ultimately charged with felony; the network producers had to shell out a $2 million settlement, and the head of the Cartoon Network resigned over the fallout.  + +Have the terrorists already won? Have we given in to fear, such that artists, hobbyists, hackers, iconoclasts, or perhaps an unassuming group of kids playing Harajuku Fun Madness, could be so trivially implicated as terrorists? + +There is a term for this dysfunction -- it is called an autoimmune disease, where an organism's defense system goes into overdrive so much that it fails to recognize itself and attacks its own cells. Ultimately, the organism self-destructs. Right now, America is on the verge of going into anaphylactic shock over its own freedoms, and we need to inoculate ourselves against this. Technology is no cure for this paranoia; in fact, it may enhance the paranoia: it turns us into prisoners of our own device. Coercing millions of people to strip off their outer garments and walk barefoot through metal detectors every day is no solution either. It only serves to remind the population every day that they have a reason to be afraid, while in practice providing only a flimsy barrier to a determined adversary. + +The truth is that we can't count on someone else to make us feel free, and M1k3y won’t come and save us the day our freedoms are lost to paranoia. That's because M1k3y is in you and in me--Little Brother is a reminder that no matter how unpredictable the future may be, we don't win freedom through security systems, cryptography, interrogations and spot searches. We win freedom by having the courage and the conviction to live every day freely and to act as a free society, no matter how great the threats are on the horizon. + +Be like M1k3y: step out the door and dare to be free. + +1~bibliogrphy Bibliography + +No writer creates from scratch -- we all engage in what Isaac Newton called "standing on the shoulders of giants." We borrow, plunder and remix the art and culture created by those around us and by our literary forebears. + +If you liked this book and want to learn more, there are plenty of sources to turn to, online and at your local library or bookstore. + +Hacking is a great subject. All science relies on telling other people what you've done so that they can verify it, learn from it, and improve on it, and hacking is all about that process, so there's plenty published on the subject. + +Start with Andrew "Bunnie" Huang's "Hacking the Xbox," (No Starch Press, 2003) a wonderful book that tells the story of how Bunnie, then a student at MIT, reverse-engineered the Xbox's anti-tampering mechanisms and opened the way for all the subsequent cool hacks for the platform. In telling the story, Bunnie has also created a kind of Bible for reverse engineering and hardware hacking. + +Bruce Schneier's "Secrets and Lies" (Wiley, 2000) and "Beyond Fear" (Copernicus, 2003) are the definitive lay-person's texts on understanding security and thinking critically about it, while his "Applied Cryptography" (Wiley, 1995) remains the authoritative source for understanding crypto. Bruce maintains an excellent blog and mailing list at schneier.com/blog. Crypto and security are the realm of the talented amateur, and the "cypherpunk" movement is full of kids, home-makers, parents, lawyers, and every other stripe of person, hammering away on security protocols and ciphers. + +There are several great magazines devoted to this subject, but the two best ones are 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, which is full of pseudonymous, boasting accounts of hacks accomplished, and O'Reilly's MAKE magazine, which features solid HOWTOs for making your own hardware projects at home. + +The online world overflows with material on this subject, of course. Ed Felten and Alex J Halderman's Freedom to Tinker (www.freedom-to-tinker.com) is a blog maintained by two fantastic Princeton engineering profs who write lucidly about security, wiretapping, anti-copying technology and crypto. + +Don't miss Natalie Jeremijenko's "Feral Robotics" at UC San Diego (xdesign.ucsd.edu/feralrobots/). Natalie and her students rewire toy robot dogs from Toys R Us and turn them into bad-ass toxic-waste detectors. They unleash them on public parks where big corporations have dumped their waste and demonstrate in media-friendly fashion how toxic the ground is. + +Like many of the hacks in this book, the tunneling-over-DNS stuff is real. Dan Kaminsky, a tunneling expert of the first water, published details in 2004 (www.doxpara.com/bo2004.ppt). + +The guru of "citizen journalism" is Dan Gillmor, who is presently running Center for Citizen Media at Harvard and UC Berkeley -- he also wrote a hell of a book on the subject, "We, the Media" (O'Reilly, 2004). + +If you want to learn more about hacking arphids, start with Annalee Newitz's Wired Magazine article "The RFID Hacking Underground" (www.wirednews.com/wired/archive/14.05/rfid.html). Adam Greenfield's "Everyware" (New Riders Press, 2006) is a chilling look at the dangers of a world of arphids. + +Neal Gershenfeld's Fab Lab at MIT (fab.cba.mit.edu) is hacking out the world's first real, cheap "3D printers" that can pump out any object you can dream of. This is documented in Gershenfeld's excellent book on the subject, "Fab" (Basic Books, 2005). + +Bruce Sterling's "Shaping Things" (MIT Press, 2005) shows how arphids and fabs could be used to force companies to build products that don't poison the world. + +Speaking of Bruce Sterling, he wrote the first great book on hackers and the law, "The Hacker Crackdown" (Bantam, 1993), which is also the first book published by a major publisher that was released on the Internet at the same time (copies abound; see stuff.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html for one). It was reading this book that turned me on to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I was privileged to work for four years. + +The Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) is a charitable membership organization with a student rate. They spend the money that private individuals give them to keep the Internet safe for personal liberty, free speech, due process, and the rest of the Bill of Rights. They're the Internet's most effective freedom fighters, and you can join the struggle just by signing up for their mailing list and writing to your elected officials when they're considering selling you out in the name of fighting terrorism, piracy, the mafia, or whatever bogeyman has caught their attention today. EFF also helps maintain TOR, The Onion Router, which is a real technology you can use /{right now}/ to get out of your government, school or library's censoring firewall (tor.eff.org). + +EFF has a huge, deep website with amazing information aimed at a general audience, as do the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org), Public Knowledge (publicknowledge.org), FreeCulture (freeculture.org), Creative Commons (creativecommons.org) -- all of which also are worthy of your support. FreeCulture is an international student movement that actively recruits kids to found their own local chapters at their high schools and universities. It's a great way to get involved and make a difference. + +A lot of websites chronicle the fight for cyberliberties, but few go at it with the verve of Slashdot, "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters" (slashdot.org). + +And of course, you /{have to}/ visit Wikipedia, the collaborative, net-authored encyclopedia that anyone can edit, with more than 1,000,000 entries in English alone. Wikipedia covers hacking and counterculture in astonishing depth and with amazing, up-to-the-nanosecond currency. One caution: you can't just look at the entries in Wikipedia. It's really important to look at the "History" and "Discussion" links at the top of every Wikipedia page to see how the current version of the truth was arrived at, get an appreciation for the competing points-of-view there, and decide for yourself whom you trust. + +If you want to get at some /{real}/ forbidden knowledge, have a skim around Cryptome (cryptome.org), the world's most amazing archive of secret, suppressed and liberated information. Cryptome's brave publishers collect material that's been pried out of the state by Freedom of Information Act requests or leaked by whistle-blowers and publishes it. + +The best fictional account of the history of crypto is, hands-down, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (Avon, 2002). Stephenson tells the story of Alan Turing and the Nazi Enigma Machine, turning it into a gripping war-novel that you won't be able to put down. + +The Pirate Party mentioned in Little Brother is real and thriving in Sweden (www.piratpartiet.se), Denmark, the USA and France at the time of this writing (July, 2006). They're a little out-there, but a movement takes all kinds. + +Speaking of out-there, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies did indeed try to levitate the Pentagon, throw money into the stock exchange, and work with a group called the Up Against the Wall Motherf_____ers. Abbie Hoffman's classic book on ripping off the system, "Steal This Book," is back in print (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002) and it's also online as a collaborative wiki for people who want to try to update it (stealthiswiki.nine9pages.com). + +Hoffman's autobiography, "Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture" (also in print from Four Walls Eight Windows) is one of my favorite memoirs ever, even if it is highly fictionalized. Hoffman was an incredible storyteller and had great activist instincts. If you want to know how he really lived his life, though, try Larry Sloman's "Steal This Dream" (Doubleday, 1998). + +More counterculture fun: Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" can be had in practically any used bookstore for a buck or two. Allan Ginsberg's "HOWL" is online in many places, and you can hear him read it if you search for the MP3 at archive.org. For bonus points, track down the album "Tenderness Junction" by the Fugs, which includes the audio of Allan Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman's levitation ceremony at the Pentagon. + +This book couldn't have been written if not for George Orwell's magnificent, world-changing "1984," the best novel ever published on how societies go wrong. I read this book when I was 12 and have read it 30 or 40 times since, and every time, I get something new out of it. Orwell was a master of storytelling and was clearly sick over the totalitarian state that emerged in the Soviet Union. 1984 holds up today as a genuinely frightening work of science fiction, and it is one of the novels that literally changed the world. Today, "Orwellian" is synonymous with a state of ubiquitous surveillance, doublethink, and torture. + +Many novelists have tackled parts of the story in Little Brother. Daniel Pinkwater's towering comic masterpiece, "Alan Mendelsohn: The Boy From Mars" (presently in print as part of the omnibus "5 Novels," Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997) is a book that every geek needs to read. If you've ever felt like an outcast for being too smart or weird, READ THIS BOOK. It changed my life. + +On a more contemporary front, there's Scott Westerfeld's "So Yesterday" (Razorbill, 2004), which follows the adventures of cool hunters and counterculture jammers. Scott and his wife Justine Larbalestier were my partial inspiration to write a book for young adults -- as was Kathe Koja. Thanks, guys. + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgments + +This book owes a tremendous debt to many writers, friends, mentors, and heroes who made it possible. + +For the hackers and cypherpunks: Bunnie Huang, Seth Schoen, Ed Felten, Alex Halderman, Gweeds, Natalie Jeremijenko, Emmanuel Goldstein, Aaron Swartz + +For the heroes: Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Larry Lessig, Shari Steele, Cindy Cohn, Fred von Lohmann, Jamie Boyle, George Orwell, Abbie Hoffman, Joe Trippi, Bruce Schneier, Ross Dowson, Harry Kopyto, Tim O'Reilly + +For the writers: Bruce Sterling, Kathe Koja, Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, Pat York, Annalee Newitz, Dan Gillmor, Daniel Pinkwater, Kevin Pouslen, Wendy Grossman, Jay Lake, Ben Rosenbaum + +For the friends: Fiona Romeo, Quinn Norton, Danny O'Brien, Jon Gilbert, danah boyd, Zak Hanna, Emily Hurson, Grad Conn, John Henson, Amanda Foubister, Xeni Jardin, Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, John Battelle, Karl Levesque, Kate Miles, Neil and Tara-Lee Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, Ken Snider + +For the mentors: Judy Merril, Roz and Gord Doctorow, Harriet Wolff, Jim Kelly, Damon Knight, Scott Edelman + +Thank you all for giving me the tools to think and write about these ideas. + +1~cc_a_nc_sa Creative Commons + +!_ Creative Commons Legal Code + +!_ Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported + +CREATIVE COMMONS CORPORATION IS NOT A LAW FIRM AND DOES NOT PROVIDE LEGAL SERVICES. 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For the avoidance of doubt, this trademark restriction does not form part of this License. + +Creative Commons may be contacted at http://creativecommons.org/. diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/the_cathedral_and_the_bazaar.eric_s_raymond.sst b/data/samples/current/en/the_cathedral_and_the_bazaar.eric_s_raymond.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f89dd40 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/the_cathedral_and_the_bazaar.eric_s_raymond.sst @@ -0,0 +1,592 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: The Cathedral and the Bazaar + +@creator: + :author: Raymond, Eric S. + +@date: + :published: 2002-08-02 + :created: 1997-05-21 + :issued: 1997-05-21 + :available: 1997-05-21 + :modified: 2002-08-02 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright © 2000 Eric S. Raymond. + :license: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Open Publication License, version 2.0. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;programming;software:open source software;open source software:development + +@identifier: + :oclc: 45835582 + +@notes: + :abstract: I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of the surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral" model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software. + +@links: + { The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Source }http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ + { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar + { CatB @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Networks-Production-Transforms-Markets/dp/0596001088/ + { CatB @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0596001088 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:C; break=1 + :home_button_text: {The Cathedral and the Bazaar}http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/; {Eric S. Raymond}http://www.catb.org/~esr/ + :footer: {The Cathedral and the Bazaar}http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/; {Eric S. Raymond}http://www.catb.org/~esr/ + +:A~ @title @author + +1~ The Cathedral and the Bazaar + +Linux is subversive. Who would have thought even five years ago (1991) that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet? + +Certainly not I. By the time Linux swam onto my radar screen in early 1993, I had already been involved in Unix and open-source development for ten years. I was one of the first GNU contributors in the mid-1980s. I had released a good deal of open-source software onto the net, developing or co-developing several programs (nethack, Emacs's VC and GUD modes, xlife, and others) that are still in wide use today. I thought I knew how it was done. + +Linux overturned much of what I thought I knew. I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time. + +Linus Torvalds's style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who'd take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles. + +The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard not just at individual projects, but also at trying to understand why the Linux world not only didn't fly apart in confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders. + +By mid-1996 I thought I was beginning to understand. Chance handed me a perfect way to test my theory, in the form of an open-source project that I could consciously try to run in the bazaar style. So I did—and it was a significant success. + +This is the story of that project. I'll use it to propose some aphorisms about effective open-source development. Not all of these are things I first learned in the Linux world, but we'll see how the Linux world gives them particular point. If I'm correct, they'll help you understand exactly what it is that makes the Linux community such a fountain of good software—and, perhaps, they will help you become more productive yourself. + +1~ The Mail Must Get Through + +Since 1993 I'd been running the technical side of a small free-access Internet service provider called Chester County InterLink (CCIL) in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I co-founded CCIL and wrote our unique multiuser bulletin-board software—you can check it out by telnetting to locke.ccil.org. Today it supports almost three thousand users on thirty lines. The job allowed me 24-hour-a-day access to the net through CCIL's 56K line—in fact, the job practically demanded it! + +I had gotten quite used to instant Internet email. I found having to periodically telnet over to locke to check my mail annoying. What I wanted was for my mail to be delivered on snark (my home system) so that I would be notified when it arrived and could handle it using all my local tools. + +The Internet's native mail forwarding protocol, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), wouldn't suit, because it works best when machines are connected full-time, while my personal machine isn't always on the Internet, and doesn't have a static IP address. What I needed was a program that would reach out over my intermittent dialup connection and pull across my mail to be delivered locally. I knew such things existed, and that most of them used a simple application protocol called POP (Post Office Protocol). POP is now widely supported by most common mail clients, but at the time, it wasn't built in to the mail reader I was using. + +I needed a POP3 client. So I went out on the Internet and found one. Actually, I found three or four. I used one of them for a while, but it was missing what seemed an obvious feature, the ability to hack the addresses on fetched mail so replies would work properly. + +The problem was this: suppose someone named `joe' on locke sent me mail. If I fetched the mail to snark and then tried to reply to it, my mailer would cheerfully try to ship it to a nonexistent `joe' on snark. Hand-editing reply addresses to tack on <@ccil.org> quickly got to be a serious pain. + +This was clearly something the computer ought to be doing for me. But none of the existing POP clients knew how! And this brings us to the first lesson: + +_1 1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch. + +Perhaps this should have been obvious (it's long been proverbial that "Necessity is the mother of invention") but too often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love. But not in the Linux world—which may explain why the average quality of software originated in the Linux community is so high. + +So, did I immediately launch into a furious whirl of coding up a brand-new POP3 client to compete with the existing ones? Not on your life! I looked carefully at the POP utilities I had in hand, asking myself "Which one is closest to what I want?" Because: + +_1 2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse). + +While I don't claim to be a great programmer, I try to imitate one. An important trait of the great ones is constructive laziness. They know that you get an A not for effort but for results, and that it's almost always easier to start from a good partial solution than from nothing at all. + +Linus Torvalds, for example, didn't actually try to write Linux from scratch. Instead, he started by reusing code and ideas from Minix, a tiny Unix-like operating system for PC clones. Eventually all the Minix code went away or was completely rewritten—but while it was there, it provided scaffolding for the infant that would eventually become Linux. + +In the same spirit, I went looking for an existing POP utility that was reasonably well coded, to use as a development base. + +The source-sharing tradition of the Unix world has always been friendly to code reuse (this is why the GNU project chose Unix as a base OS, in spite of serious reservations about the OS itself). The Linux world has taken this tradition nearly to its technological limit; it has terabytes of open sources generally available. So spending time looking for some else's almost-good-enough is more likely to give you good results in the Linux world than anywhere else. + +And it did for me. With those I'd found earlier, my second search made up a total of nine candidates—fetchpop, PopTart, get-mail, gwpop, pimp, pop-perl, popc, popmail and upop. The one I first settled on was `fetchpop' by Seung-Hong Oh. I put my header-rewrite feature in it, and made various other improvements which the author accepted into his 1.9 release. + +A few weeks later, though, I stumbled across the code for popclient by Carl Harris, and found I had a problem. Though fetchpop had some good original ideas in it (such as its background-daemon mode), it could only handle POP3 and was rather amateurishly coded (Seung-Hong was at that time a bright but inexperienced programmer, and both traits showed). Carl's code was better, quite professional and solid, but his program lacked several important and rather tricky-to-implement fetchpop features (including those I'd coded myself). + +Stay or switch? If I switched, I'd be throwing away the coding I'd already done in exchange for a better development base. + +A practical motive to switch was the presence of multiple-protocol support. POP3 is the most commonly used of the post-office server protocols, but not the only one. Fetchpop and the other competition didn't do POP2, RPOP, or APOP, and I was already having vague thoughts of perhaps adding IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol, the most recently designed and most powerful post-office protocol) just for fun. + +But I had a more theoretical reason to think switching might be as good an idea as well, something I learned long before Linux. + +_1 3. "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11) + +Or, to put it another way, you often don't really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once [JB]. + +Well (I told myself) the changes to fetchpop had been my first try. So I switched. + +After I sent my first set of popclient patches to Carl Harris on 25 June 1996, I found out that he had basically lost interest in popclient some time before. The code was a bit dusty, with minor bugs hanging out. I had many changes to make, and we quickly agreed that the logical thing for me to do was take over the program. + +Without my actually noticing, the project had escalated. No longer was I just contemplating minor patches to an existing POP client. I took on maintaining an entire one, and there were ideas bubbling in my head that I knew would probably lead to major changes. + +In a software culture that encourages code-sharing, this is a natural way for a project to evolve. I was acting out this principle: + +_1 4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you. + +But Carl Harris's attitude was even more important. He understood that + +_1 5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor. + +Without ever having to discuss it, Carl and I knew we had a common goal of having the best solution out there. The only question for either of us was whether I could establish that I was a safe pair of hands. Once I did that, he acted with grace and dispatch. I hope I will do as well when it comes my turn. + +1~ The Importance of Having Users + +And so I inherited popclient. Just as importantly, I inherited popclient's user base. Users are wonderful things to have, and not just because they demonstrate that you're serving a need, that you've done something right. Properly cultivated, they can become co-developers. + +Another strength of the Unix tradition, one that Linux pushes to a happy extreme, is that a lot of users are hackers too. Because source code is available, they can be effective hackers. This can be tremendously useful for shortening debugging time. Given a bit of encouragement, your users will diagnose problems, suggest fixes, and help improve the code far more quickly than you could unaided. + +_1 6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. + +The power of this effect is easy to underestimate. In fact, pretty well all of us in the open-source world drastically underestimated how well it would scale up with number of users and against system complexity, until Linus Torvalds showed us differently. + +In fact, I think Linus's cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model. When I expressed this opinion in his presence once, he smiled and quietly repeated something he has often said: "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do." Lazy like a fox. Or, as Robert Heinlein famously wrote of one of his characters, too lazy to fail. + +In retrospect, one precedent for the methods and success of Linux can be seen in the development of the GNU Emacs Lisp library and Lisp code archives. In contrast to the cathedral-building style of the Emacs C core and most other GNU tools, the evolution of the Lisp code pool was fluid and very user-driven. Ideas and prototype modes were often rewritten three or four times before reaching a stable final form. And loosely-coupled collaborations enabled by the Internet, a la Linux, were frequent. + +Indeed, my own most successful single hack previous to fetchmail was probably Emacs VC (version control) mode, a Linux-like collaboration by email with three other people, only one of whom (Richard Stallman, the author of Emacs and founder of the Free Software Foundation) I have met to this day. It was a front-end for SCCS, RCS and later CVS from within Emacs that offered "one-touch" version control operations. It evolved from a tiny, crude sccs.el mode somebody else had written. And the development of VC succeeded because, unlike Emacs itself, Emacs Lisp code could go through release/test/improve generations very quickly. + +The Emacs story is not unique. There have been other software products with a two-level architecture and a two-tier user community that combined a cathedral-mode core and a bazaar-mode toolbox. One such is MATLAB, a commercial data-analysis and visualization tool. Users of MATLAB and other products with a similar structure invariably report that the action, the ferment, the innovation mostly takes place in the open part of the tool where a large and varied community can tinker with it. + +1~ Release Early, Release Often + +Early and frequent releases are a critical part of the Linux development model. Most developers (including me) used to believe this was bad policy for larger than trivial projects, because early versions are almost by definition buggy versions and you don't want to wear out the patience of your users. + +This belief reinforced the general commitment to a cathedral-building style of development. If the overriding objective was for users to see as few bugs as possible, why then you'd only release a version every six months (or less often), and work like a dog on debugging between releases. The Emacs C core was developed this way. The Lisp library, in effect, was not—because there were active Lisp archives outside the FSF's control, where you could go to find new and development code versions independently of Emacs's release cycle [QR]. + +The most important of these, the Ohio State Emacs Lisp archive, anticipated the spirit and many of the features of today's big Linux archives. But few of us really thought very hard about what we were doing, or about what the very existence of that archive suggested about problems in the FSF's cathedral-building development model. I made one serious attempt around 1992 to get a lot of the Ohio code formally merged into the official Emacs Lisp library. I ran into political trouble and was largely unsuccessful. + +But by a year later, as Linux became widely visible, it was clear that something different and much healthier was going on there. Linus's open development policy was the very opposite of cathedral-building. Linux's Internet archives were burgeoning, multiple distributions were being floated. And all of this was driven by an unheard-of frequency of core system releases. + +Linus was treating his users as co-developers in the most effective possible way: + +_1 7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers. + +Linus's innovation wasn't so much in doing quick-turnaround releases incorporating lots of user feedback (something like this had been Unix-world tradition for a long time), but in scaling it up to a level of intensity that matched the complexity of what he was developing. In those early times (around 1991) it wasn't unknown for him to release a new kernel more than once a day! Because he cultivated his base of co-developers and leveraged the Internet for collaboration harder than anyone else, this worked. + +But how did it work? And was it something I could duplicate, or did it rely on some unique genius of Linus Torvalds? + +I didn't think so. Granted, Linus is a damn fine hacker. How many of us could engineer an entire production-quality operating system kernel from scratch? But Linux didn't represent any awesome conceptual leap forward. Linus is not (or at least, not yet) an innovative genius of design in the way that, say, Richard Stallman or James Gosling (of NeWS and Java) are. Rather, Linus seems to me to be a genius of engineering and implementation, with a sixth sense for avoiding bugs and development dead-ends and a true knack for finding the minimum-effort path from point A to point B. Indeed, the whole design of Linux breathes this quality and mirrors Linus's essentially conservative and simplifying design approach. + +So, if rapid releases and leveraging the Internet medium to the hilt were not accidents but integral parts of Linus's engineering-genius insight into the minimum-effort path, what was he maximizing? What was he cranking out of the machinery? + +Put that way, the question answers itself. Linus was keeping his hacker/users constantly stimulated and rewarded—stimulated by the prospect of having an ego-satisfying piece of the action, rewarded by the sight of constant (even daily) improvement in their work. + +Linus was directly aiming to maximize the number of person-hours thrown at debugging and development, even at the possible cost of instability in the code and user-base burnout if any serious bug proved intractable. Linus was behaving as though he believed something like this: + +_1 8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. + +Or, less formally, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." I dub this: "Linus's Law". + +My original formulation was that every problem "will be transparent to somebody". Linus demurred that the person who understands and fixes the problem is not necessarily or even usually the person who first characterizes it. "Somebody finds the problem," he says, "and somebody else understands it. And I'll go on record as saying that finding it is the bigger challenge." That correction is important; we'll see how in the next section, when we examine the practice of debugging in more detail. But the key point is that both parts of the process (finding and fixing) tend to happen rapidly. + +In Linus's Law, I think, lies the core difference underlying the cathedral-builder and bazaar styles. In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you've winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect. + +In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena—or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quickly when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door. + +And that's it. That's enough. If "Linus's Law" is false, then any system as complex as the Linux kernel, being hacked over by as many hands as the that kernel was, should at some point have collapsed under the weight of unforseen bad interactions and undiscovered "deep" bugs. If it's true, on the other hand, it is sufficient to explain Linux's relative lack of bugginess and its continuous uptimes spanning months or even years. + +Maybe it shouldn't have been such a surprise, at that. Sociologists years ago discovered that the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers. They called this the Delphi effect. It appears that what Linus has shown is that this applies even to debugging an operating system—that the Delphi effect can tame development complexity even at the complexity level of an OS kernel. [CV] + +One special feature of the Linux situation that clearly helps along the Delphi effect is the fact that the contributors for any given project are self-selected. An early respondent pointed out that contributions are received not from a random sample, but from people who are interested enough to use the software, learn about how it works, attempt to find solutions to problems they encounter, and actually produce an apparently reasonable fix. Anyone who passes all these filters is highly likely to have something useful to contribute. + +Linus's Law can be rephrased as "Debugging is parallelizable". Although debugging requires debuggers to communicate with some coordinating developer, it doesn't require significant coordination between debuggers. Thus it doesn't fall prey to the same quadratic complexity and management costs that make adding developers problematic. + +In practice, the theoretical loss of efficiency due to duplication of work by debuggers almost never seems to be an issue in the Linux world. One effect of a "release early and often" policy is to minimize such duplication by propagating fed-back fixes quickly [JH]. + +Brooks (the author of The Mythical Man-Month) even made an off-hand observation related to this: "The total cost of maintaining a widely used program is typically 40 percent or more of the cost of developing it. Surprisingly this cost is strongly affected by the number of users. More users find more bugs." [emphasis added]. + +More users find more bugs because adding more users adds more different ways of stressing the program. This effect is amplified when the users are co-developers. Each one approaches the task of bug characterization with a slightly different perceptual set and analytical toolkit, a different angle on the problem. The "Delphi effect" seems to work precisely because of this variation. In the specific context of debugging, the variation also tends to reduce duplication of effort. + +So adding more beta-testers may not reduce the complexity of the current "deepest" bug from the developer's point of view, but it increases the probability that someone's toolkit will be matched to the problem in such a way that the bug is shallow to that person. + +Linus coppers his bets, too. In case there are serious bugs, Linux kernel version are numbered in such a way that potential users can make a choice either to run the last version designated "stable" or to ride the cutting edge and risk bugs in order to get new features. This tactic is not yet systematically imitated by most Linux hackers, but perhaps it should be; the fact that either choice is available makes both more attractive. [HBS] + +1~ How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity + +It's one thing to observe in the large that the bazaar style greatly accelerates debugging and code evolution. It's another to understand exactly how and why it does so at the micro-level of day-to-day developer and tester behavior. In this section (written three years after the original paper, using insights by developers who read it and re-examined their own behavior) we'll take a hard look at the actual mechanisms. Non-technically inclined readers can safely skip to the next section. + +One key to understanding is to realize exactly why it is that the kind of bug report non–source-aware users normally turn in tends not to be very useful. Non–source-aware users tend to report only surface symptoms; they take their environment for granted, so they (a) omit critical background data, and (b) seldom include a reliable recipe for reproducing the bug. + +The underlying problem here is a mismatch between the tester's and the developer's mental models of the program; the tester, on the outside looking in, and the developer on the inside looking out. In closed-source development they're both stuck in these roles, and tend to talk past each other and find each other deeply frustrating. + +Open-source development breaks this bind, making it far easier for tester and developer to develop a shared representation grounded in the actual source code and to communicate effectively about it. Practically, there is a huge difference in leverage for the developer between the kind of bug report that just reports externally-visible symptoms and the kind that hooks directly to the developer's source-code–based mental representation of the program. + +Most bugs, most of the time, are easily nailed given even an incomplete but suggestive characterization of their error conditions at source-code level. When someone among your beta-testers can point out, "there's a boundary problem in line nnn", or even just "under conditions X, Y, and Z, this variable rolls over", a quick look at the offending code often suffices to pin down the exact mode of failure and generate a fix. + +Thus, source-code awareness by both parties greatly enhances both good communication and the synergy between what a beta-tester reports and what the core developer(s) know. In turn, this means that the core developers' time tends to be well conserved, even with many collaborators. + +Another characteristic of the open-source method that conserves developer time is the communication structure of typical open-source projects. Above I used the term "core developer"; this reflects a distinction between the project core (typically quite small; a single core developer is common, and one to three is typical) and the project halo of beta-testers and available contributors (which often numbers in the hundreds). + +The fundamental problem that traditional software-development organization addresses is Brook's Law: "Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later." More generally, Brooks's Law predicts that the complexity and communication costs of a project rise with the square of the number of developers, while work done only rises linearly. + +Brooks's Law is founded on experience that bugs tend strongly to cluster at the interfaces between code written by different people, and that communications/coordination overhead on a project tends to rise with the number of interfaces between human beings. Thus, problems scale with the number of communications paths between developers, which scales as the square of the humber of developers (more precisely, according to the formula N*(N - 1)/2 where N is the number of developers). + +The Brooks's Law analysis (and the resulting fear of large numbers in development groups) rests on a hidden assummption: that the communications structure of the project is necessarily a complete graph, that everybody talks to everybody else. But on open-source projects, the halo developers work on what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and only within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead. [SU] + +There are are still more reasons that source-code–level bug reporting tends to be very efficient. They center around the fact that a single error can often have multiple possible symptoms, manifesting differently depending on details of the user's usage pattern and environment. Such errors tend to be exactly the sort of complex and subtle bugs (such as dynamic-memory-management errors or nondeterministic interrupt-window artifacts) that are hardest to reproduce at will or to pin down by static analysis, and which do the most to create long-term problems in software. + +A tester who sends in a tentative source-code–level characterization of such a multi-symptom bug (e.g. "It looks to me like there's a window in the signal handling near line 1250" or "Where are you zeroing that buffer?") may give a developer, otherwise too close to the code to see it, the critical clue to a half-dozen disparate symptoms. In cases like this, it may be hard or even impossible to know which externally-visible misbehaviour was caused by precisely which bug—but with frequent releases, it's unnecessary to know. Other collaborators will be likely to find out quickly whether their bug has been fixed or not. In many cases, source-level bug reports will cause misbehaviours to drop out without ever having been attributed to any specific fix. + +Complex multi-symptom errors also tend to have multiple trace paths from surface symptoms back to the actual bug. Which of the trace paths a given developer or tester can chase may depend on subtleties of that person's environment, and may well change in a not obviously deterministic way over time. In effect, each developer and tester samples a semi-random set of the program's state space when looking for the etiology of a symptom. The more subtle and complex the bug, the less likely that skill will be able to guarantee the relevance of that sample. + +For simple and easily reproducible bugs, then, the accent will be on the "semi" rather than the "random"; debugging skill and intimacy with the code and its architecture will matter a lot. But for complex bugs, the accent will be on the "random". Under these circumstances many people running traces will be much more effective than a few people running traces sequentially—even if the few have a much higher average skill level. + +This effect will be greatly amplified if the difficulty of following trace paths from different surface symptoms back to a bug varies significantly in a way that can't be predicted by looking at the symptoms. A single developer sampling those paths sequentially will be as likely to pick a difficult trace path on the first try as an easy one. On the other hand, suppose many people are trying trace paths in parallel while doing rapid releases. Then it is likely one of them will find the easiest path immediately, and nail the bug in a much shorter time. The project maintainer will see that, ship a new release, and the other people running traces on the same bug will be able to stop before having spent too much time on their more difficult traces [RJ]. + +1~ When Is a Rose Not a Rose? + +Having studied Linus's behavior and formed a theory about why it was successful, I made a conscious decision to test this theory on my new (admittedly much less complex and ambitious) project. + +But the first thing I did was reorganize and simplify popclient a lot. Carl Harris's implementation was very sound, but exhibited a kind of unnecessary complexity common to many C programmers. He treated the code as central and the data structures as support for the code. As a result, the code was beautiful but the data structure design ad-hoc and rather ugly (at least by the high standards of this veteran LISP hacker). + +I had another purpose for rewriting besides improving the code and the data structure design, however. That was to evolve it into something I understood completely. It's no fun to be responsible for fixing bugs in a program you don't understand. + +For the first month or so, then, I was simply following out the implications of Carl's basic design. The first serious change I made was to add IMAP support. I did this by reorganizing the protocol machines into a generic driver and three method tables (for POP2, POP3, and IMAP). This and the previous changes illustrate a general principle that's good for programmers to keep in mind, especially in languages like C that don't naturally do dynamic typing: + +_1 9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. + +Brooks, Chapter 9: "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." Allowing for thirty years of terminological/cultural shift, it's the same point. + +At this point (early September 1996, about six weeks from zero) I started thinking that a name change might be in order—after all, it wasn't just a POP client any more. But I hesitated, because there was as yet nothing genuinely new in the design. My version of popclient had yet to develop an identity of its own. + +That changed, radically, when popclient learned how to forward fetched mail to the SMTP port. I'll get to that in a moment. But first: I said earlier that I'd decided to use this project to test my theory about what Linus Torvalds had done right. How (you may well ask) did I do that? In these ways: + +_* I released early and often (almost never less often than every ten days; during periods of intense development, once a day). + +_* I grew my beta list by adding to it everyone who contacted me about fetchmail. + +_* I sent chatty announcements to the beta list whenever I released, encouraging people to participate. + +_* And I listened to my beta-testers, polling them about design decisions and stroking them whenever they sent in patches and feedback. + +The payoff from these simple measures was immediate. From the beginning of the project, I got bug reports of a quality most developers would kill for, often with good fixes attached. I got thoughtful criticism, I got fan mail, I got intelligent feature suggestions. Which leads to: + +_1 10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource. + +One interesting measure of fetchmail's success is the sheer size of the project beta list, fetchmail-friends. At the time of latest revision of this paper (November 2000) it has 287 members and is adding two or three a week. + +Actually, when I revised in late May 1997 I found the list was beginning to lose members from its high of close to 300 for an interesting reason. Several people have asked me to unsubscribe them because fetchmail is working so well for them that they no longer need to see the list traffic! Perhaps this is part of the normal life-cycle of a mature bazaar-style project. + +1~ Popclient becomes Fetchmail + +The real turning point in the project was when Harry Hochheiser sent me his scratch code for forwarding mail to the client machine's SMTP port. I realized almost immediately that a reliable implementation of this feature would make all the other mail delivery modes next to obsolete. + +For many weeks I had been tweaking fetchmail rather incrementally while feeling like the interface design was serviceable but grubby—inelegant and with too many exiguous options hanging out all over. The options to dump fetched mail to a mailbox file or standard output particularly bothered me, but I couldn't figure out why. + +(If you don't care about the technicalia of Internet mail, the next two paragraphs can be safely skipped.) + +What I saw when I thought about SMTP forwarding was that popclient had been trying to do too many things. It had been designed to be both a mail transport agent (MTA) and a local delivery agent (MDA). With SMTP forwarding, it could get out of the MDA business and be a pure MTA, handing off mail to other programs for local delivery just as sendmail does. + +Why mess with all the complexity of configuring a mail delivery agent or setting up lock-and-append on a mailbox when port 25 is almost guaranteed to be there on any platform with TCP/IP support in the first place? Especially when this means retrieved mail is guaranteed to look like normal sender-initiated SMTP mail, which is really what we want anyway. + +(Back to a higher level....) + +Even if you didn't follow the preceding technical jargon, there are several important lessons here. First, this SMTP-forwarding concept was the biggest single payoff I got from consciously trying to emulate Linus's methods. A user gave me this terrific idea—all I had to do was understand the implications. + +_1 11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better. + +Interestingly enough, you will quickly find that if you are completely and self-deprecatingly truthful about how much you owe other people, the world at large will treat you as though you did every bit of the invention yourself and are just being becomingly modest about your innate genius. We can all see how well this worked for Linus! + +(When I gave my talk at the first Perl Conference in August 1997, hacker extraordinaire Larry Wall was in the front row. As I got to the last line above he called out, religious-revival style, "Tell it, tell it, brother!". The whole audience laughed, because they knew this had worked for the inventor of Perl, too.) + +After a very few weeks of running the project in the same spirit, I began to get similar praise not just from my users but from other people to whom the word leaked out. I stashed away some of that email; I'll look at it again sometime if I ever start wondering whether my life has been worthwhile :-). + +But there are two more fundamental, non-political lessons here that are general to all kinds of design. + +_1 12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong. + +I had been trying to solve the wrong problem by continuing to develop popclient as a combined MTA/MDA with all kinds of funky local delivery modes. Fetchmail's design needed to be rethought from the ground up as a pure MTA, a part of the normal SMTP-speaking Internet mail path. + +When you hit a wall in development—when you find yourself hard put to think past the next patch—it's often time to ask not whether you've got the right answer, but whether you're asking the right question. Perhaps the problem needs to be reframed. + +Well, I had reframed my problem. Clearly, the right thing to do was (1) hack SMTP forwarding support into the generic driver, (2) make it the default mode, and (3) eventually throw out all the other delivery modes, especially the deliver-to-file and deliver-to-standard-output options. + +I hesitated over step 3 for some time, fearing to upset long-time popclient users dependent on the alternate delivery mechanisms. In theory, they could immediately switch to .forward files or their non-sendmail equivalents to get the same effects. In practice the transition might have been messy. + +But when I did it, the benefits proved huge. The cruftiest parts of the driver code vanished. Configuration got radically simpler—no more grovelling around for the system MDA and user's mailbox, no more worries about whether the underlying OS supports file locking. + +Also, the only way to lose mail vanished. If you specified delivery to a file and the disk got full, your mail got lost. This can't happen with SMTP forwarding because your SMTP listener won't return OK unless the message can be delivered or at least spooled for later delivery. + +Also, performance improved (though not so you'd notice it in a single run). Another not insignificant benefit of this change was that the manual page got a lot simpler. + +Later, I had to bring delivery via a user-specified local MDA back in order to allow handling of some obscure situations involving dynamic SLIP. But I found a much simpler way to do it. + +The moral? Don't hesitate to throw away superannuated features when you can do it without loss of effectiveness. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (who was an aviator and aircraft designer when he wasn't authoring classic children's books) said: + +_1 13. "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away." + +When your code is getting both better and simpler, that is when you know it's right. And in the process, the fetchmail design acquired an identity of its own, different from the ancestral popclient. + +It was time for the name change. The new design looked much more like a dual of sendmail than the old popclient had; both are MTAs, but where sendmail pushes then delivers, the new popclient pulls then delivers. So, two months off the blocks, I renamed it fetchmail. + +There is a more general lesson in this story about how SMTP delivery came to fetchmail. It is not only debugging that is parallelizable; development and (to a perhaps surprising extent) exploration of design space is, too. When your development mode is rapidly iterative, development and enhancement may become special cases of debugging—fixing `bugs of omission' in the original capabilities or concept of the software. + +Even at a higher level of design, it can be very valuable to have lots of co-developers random-walking through the design space near your product. Consider the way a puddle of water finds a drain, or better yet how ants find food: exploration essentially by diffusion, followed by exploitation mediated by a scalable communication mechanism. This works very well; as with Harry Hochheiser and me, one of your outriders may well find a huge win nearby that you were just a little too close-focused to see. + +1~ Fetchmail Grows Up + +There I was with a neat and innovative design, code that I knew worked well because I used it every day, and a burgeoning beta list. It gradually dawned on me that I was no longer engaged in a trivial personal hack that might happen to be useful to few other people. I had my hands on a program that every hacker with a Unix box and a SLIP/PPP mail connection really needs. + +With the SMTP forwarding feature, it pulled far enough in front of the competition to potentially become a "category killer", one of those classic programs that fills its niche so competently that the alternatives are not just discarded but almost forgotten. + +I think you can't really aim or plan for a result like this. You have to get pulled into it by design ideas so powerful that afterward the results just seem inevitable, natural, even foreordained. The only way to try for ideas like that is by having lots of ideas—or by having the engineering judgment to take other peoples' good ideas beyond where the originators thought they could go. + +Andy Tanenbaum had the original idea to build a simple native Unix for IBM PCs, for use as a teaching tool (he called it Minix). Linus Torvalds pushed the Minix concept further than Andrew probably thought it could go—and it grew into something wonderful. In the same way (though on a smaller scale), I took some ideas by Carl Harris and Harry Hochheiser and pushed them hard. Neither of us was `original' in the romantic way people think is genius. But then, most science and engineering and software development isn't done by original genius, hacker mythology to the contrary. + +The results were pretty heady stuff all the same—in fact, just the kind of success every hacker lives for! And they meant I would have to set my standards even higher. To make fetchmail as good as I now saw it could be, I'd have to write not just for my own needs, but also include and support features necessary to others but outside my orbit. And do that while keeping the program simple and robust. + +The first and overwhelmingly most important feature I wrote after realizing this was multidrop support—the ability to fetch mail from mailboxes that had accumulated all mail for a group of users, and then route each piece of mail to its individual recipients. + +I decided to add the multidrop support partly because some users were clamoring for it, but mostly because I thought it would shake bugs out of the single-drop code by forcing me to deal with addressing in full generality. And so it proved. Getting RFC 822 address parsing right took me a remarkably long time, not because any individual piece of it is hard but because it involved a pile of interdependent and fussy details. + +But multidrop addressing turned out to be an excellent design decision as well. Here's how I knew: + +_1 14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected. + +The unexpected use for multidrop fetchmail is to run mailing lists with the list kept, and alias expansion done, on the client side of the Internet connection. This means someone running a personal machine through an ISP account can manage a mailing list without continuing access to the ISP's alias files. + +Another important change demanded by my beta-testers was support for 8-bit MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) operation. This was pretty easy to do, because I had been careful to keep the code 8-bit clean (that is, to not press the 8th bit, unused in the ASCII character set, into service to carry information within the program). Not because I anticipated the demand for this feature, but rather in obedience to another rule: + +_1 15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to! + +Had I not obeyed this rule, 8-bit MIME support would have been difficult and buggy. As it was, all I had to do is read the MIME standard (RFC 1652) and add a trivial bit of header-generation logic. + +Some European users bugged me into adding an option to limit the number of messages retrieved per session (so they can control costs from their expensive phone networks). I resisted this for a long time, and I'm still not entirely happy about it. But if you're writing for the world, you have to listen to your customers—this doesn't change just because they're not paying you in money. + +1~ A Few More Lessons from Fetchmail + +Before we go back to general software-engineering issues, there are a couple more specific lessons from the fetchmail experience to ponder. Nontechnical readers can safely skip this section. + +The rc (control) file syntax includes optional `noise' keywords that are entirely ignored by the parser. The English-like syntax they allow is considerably more readable than the traditional terse keyword-value pairs you get when you strip them all out. + +These started out as a late-night experiment when I noticed how much the rc file declarations were beginning to resemble an imperative minilanguage. (This is also why I changed the original popclient "server" keyword to "poll"). + +It seemed to me that trying to make that imperative minilanguage more like English might make it easier to use. Now, although I'm a convinced partisan of the "make it a language" school of design as exemplified by Emacs and HTML and many database engines, I am not normally a big fan of "English-like" syntaxes. + +Traditionally programmers have tended to favor control syntaxes that are very precise and compact and have no redundancy at all. This is a cultural legacy from when computing resources were expensive, so parsing stages had to be as cheap and simple as possible. English, with about 50% redundancy, looked like a very inappropriate model then. + +This is not my reason for normally avoiding English-like syntaxes; I mention it here only to demolish it. With cheap cycles and core, terseness should not be an end in itself. Nowadays it's more important for a language to be convenient for humans than to be cheap for the computer. + +There remain, however, good reasons to be wary. One is the complexity cost of the parsing stage—you don't want to raise that to the point where it's a significant source of bugs and user confusion in itself. Another is that trying to make a language syntax English-like often demands that the "English" it speaks be bent seriously out of shape, so much so that the superficial resemblance to natural language is as confusing as a traditional syntax would have been. (You see this bad effect in a lot of so-called "fourth generation" and commercial database-query languages.) + +The fetchmail control syntax seems to avoid these problems because the language domain is extremely restricted. It's nowhere near a general-purpose language; the things it says simply are not very complicated, so there's little potential for confusion in moving mentally between a tiny subset of English and the actual control language. I think there may be a broader lesson here: + +_1 16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend. + +Another lesson is about security by obscurity. Some fetchmail users asked me to change the software to store passwords encrypted in the rc file, so snoopers wouldn't be able to casually see them. + +I didn't do it, because this doesn't actually add protection. Anyone who's acquired permissions to read your rc file will be able to run fetchmail as you anyway—and if it's your password they're after, they'd be able to rip the necessary decoder out of the fetchmail code itself to get it. + +All .fetchmailrc password encryption would have done is give a false sense of security to people who don't think very hard. The general rule here is: + +_1 17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets. + +1~ Necessary Preconditions for the Bazaar Style + +Early reviewers and test audiences for this essay consistently raised questions about the preconditions for successful bazaar-style development, including both the qualifications of the project leader and the state of code at the time one goes public and starts to try to build a co-developer community. + +It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style [IN]. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn't try it. I didn't either. Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with. + +When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future. + +Linux and fetchmail both went public with strong, attractive basic designs. Many people thinking about the bazaar model as I have presented it have correctly considered this critical, then jumped from that to the conclusion that a high degree of design intuition and cleverness in the project leader is indispensable. + +But Linus got his design from Unix. I got mine initially from the ancestral popclient (though it would later change a great deal, much more proportionately speaking than has Linux). So does the leader/coordinator for a bazaar-style effort really have to have exceptional design talent, or can he get by through leveraging the design talent of others? + +I think it is not critical that the coordinator be able to originate designs of exceptional brilliance, but it is absolutely critical that the coordinator be able to recognize good design ideas from others. + +Both the Linux and fetchmail projects show evidence of this. Linus, while not (as previously discussed) a spectacularly original designer, has displayed a powerful knack for recognizing good design and integrating it into the Linux kernel. And I have already described how the single most powerful design idea in fetchmail (SMTP forwarding) came from somebody else. + +Early audiences of this essay complimented me by suggesting that I am prone to undervalue design originality in bazaar projects because I have a lot of it myself, and therefore take it for granted. There may be some truth to this; design (as opposed to coding or debugging) is certainly my strongest skill. + +But the problem with being clever and original in software design is that it gets to be a habit—you start reflexively making things cute and complicated when you should be keeping them robust and simple. I have had projects crash on me because I made this mistake, but I managed to avoid this with fetchmail. + +So I believe the fetchmail project succeeded partly because I restrained my tendency to be clever; this argues (at least) against design originality being essential for successful bazaar projects. And consider Linux. Suppose Linus Torvalds had been trying to pull off fundamental innovations in operating system design during the development; does it seem at all likely that the resulting kernel would be as stable and successful as what we have? + +A certain base level of design and coding skill is required, of course, but I expect almost anybody seriously thinking of launching a bazaar effort will already be above that minimum. The open-source community's internal market in reputation exerts subtle pressure on people not to launch development efforts they're not competent to follow through on. So far this seems to have worked pretty well. + +There is another kind of skill not normally associated with software development which I think is as important as design cleverness to bazaar projects—and it may be more important. A bazaar project coordinator or leader must have good people and communications skills. + +This should be obvious. In order to build a development community, you need to attract people, interest them in what you're doing, and keep them happy about the amount of work they're doing. Technical sizzle will go a long way towards accomplishing this, but it's far from the whole story. The personality you project matters, too. + +It is not a coincidence that Linus is a nice guy who makes people like him and want to help him. It's not a coincidence that I'm an energetic extrovert who enjoys working a crowd and has some of the delivery and instincts of a stand-up comic. To make the bazaar model work, it helps enormously if you have at least a little skill at charming people. + +1~ The Social Context of Open-Source Software + +It is truly written: the best hacks start out as personal solutions to the author's everyday problems, and spread because the problem turns out to be typical for a large class of users. This takes us back to the matter of rule 1, restated in a perhaps more useful way: + +_1 18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you. + +So it was with Carl Harris and the ancestral popclient, and so with me and fetchmail. But this has been understood for a long time. The interesting point, the point that the histories of Linux and fetchmail seem to demand we focus on, is the next stage—the evolution of software in the presence of a large and active community of users and co-developers. + +In The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks observed that programmer time is not fungible; adding developers to a late software project makes it later. As we've seen previously, he argued that the complexity and communication costs of a project rise with the square of the number of developers, while work done only rises linearly. Brooks's Law has been widely regarded as a truism. But we've examined in this essay an number of ways in which the process of open-source development falsifies the assumptionms behind it—and, empirically, if Brooks's Law were the whole picture Linux would be impossible. + +Gerald Weinberg's classic The Psychology of Computer Programming supplied what, in hindsight, we can see as a vital correction to Brooks. In his discussion of "egoless programming", Weinberg observed that in shops where developers are not territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than elsewhere. (Recently, Kent Beck's `extreme programming' technique of deploying coders in pairs looking over one anothers' shoulders might be seen as an attempt to force this effect.) + +Weinberg's choice of terminology has perhaps prevented his analysis from gaining the acceptance it deserved—one has to smile at the thought of describing Internet hackers as "egoless". But I think his argument looks more compelling today than ever. + +The bazaar method, by harnessing the full power of the "egoless programming" effect, strongly mitigates the effect of Brooks's Law. The principle behind Brooks's Law is not repealed, but given a large developer population and cheap communications its effects can be swamped by competing nonlinearities that are not otherwise visible. This resembles the relationship between Newtonian and Einsteinian physics—the older system is still valid at low energies, but if you push mass and velocity high enough you get surprises like nuclear explosions or Linux. + +The history of Unix should have prepared us for what we're learning from Linux (and what I've verified experimentally on a smaller scale by deliberately copying Linus's methods [EGCS]). That is, while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which feedback exploring the design space, code contributions, bug-spotting, and other improvements come from from hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people. + +But the traditional Unix world was prevented from pushing this approach to the ultimate by several factors. One was the legal contraints of various licenses, trade secrets, and commercial interests. Another (in hindsight) was that the Internet wasn't yet good enough. + +Before cheap Internet, there were some geographically compact communities where the culture encouraged Weinberg's "egoless" programming, and a developer could easily attract a lot of skilled kibitzers and co-developers. Bell Labs, the MIT AI and LCS labs, UC Berkeley—these became the home of innovations that are legendary and still potent. + +Linux was the first project for which a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool was made. I don't think it's a coincidence that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993–1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet access made possible. + +While cheap Internet was a necessary condition for the Linux model to evolve, I think it was not by itself a sufficient condition. Another vital factor was the development of a leadership style and set of cooperative customs that could allow developers to attract co-developers and get maximum leverage out of the medium. + +But what is this leadership style and what are these customs? They cannot be based on power relationships—and even if they could be, leadership by coercion would not produce the results we see. Weinberg quotes the autobiography of the 19th-century Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyvich Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist to good effect on this subject: + +_1 Having been brought up in a serf-owner's family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with [free] men, and when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills. + +The "severe effort of many converging wills" is precisely what a project like Linux requires—and the "principle of command" is effectively impossible to apply among volunteers in the anarchist's paradise we call the Internet. To operate and compete effectively, hackers who want to lead collaborative projects have to learn how to recruit and energize effective communities of interest in the mode vaguely suggested by Kropotkin's "principle of understanding". They must learn to use Linus's Law.[SP] + +Earlier I referred to the "Delphi effect" as a possible explanation for Linus's Law. But more powerful analogies to adaptive systems in biology and economics also irresistably suggest themselves. The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the "principle of understanding". + +The "utility function" Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation "altruistic", but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized "egoboo" (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one's reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity. + +Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin's "principle of shared understanding". This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied. + +We may view Linus's method as a way to create an efficient market in "egoboo"—to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he. + +Many people (especially those who politically distrust free markets) would expect a culture of self-directed egoists to be fragmented, territorial, wasteful, secretive, and hostile. But this expectation is clearly falsified by (to give just one example) the stunning variety, quality, and depth of Linux documentation. It is a hallowed given that programmers hate documenting; how is it, then, that Linux hackers generate so much documentation? Evidently Linux's free market in egoboo works better to produce virtuous, other-directed behavior than the massively-funded documentation shops of commercial software producers. + +Both the fetchmail and Linux kernel projects show that by properly rewarding the egos of many other hackers, a strong developer/coordinator can use the Internet to capture the benefits of having lots of co-developers without having a project collapse into a chaotic mess. So to Brooks's Law I counter-propose the following: + +_1 19: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one. + +I think the future of open-source software will increasingly belong to people who know how to play Linus's game, people who leave behind the cathedral and embrace the bazaar. This is not to say that individual vision and brilliance will no longer matter; rather, I think that the cutting edge of open-source software will belong to people who start from individual vision and brilliance, then amplify it through the effective construction of voluntary communities of interest. + +Perhaps this is not only the future of open-source software. No closed-source developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem. Very few could afford even to hire the more than 200 (1999: 600, 2000: 800) people who have contributed to fetchmail! + +Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software "hoarding" is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem. + +1~ On Management and the Maginot Line + +The original Cathedral and Bazaar paper of 1997 ended with the vision above—that of happy networked hordes of programmer/anarchists outcompeting and overwhelming the hierarchical world of conventional closed software. + +A good many skeptics weren't convinced, however; and the questions they raise deserve a fair engagement. Most of the objections to the bazaar argument come down to the claim that its proponents have underestimated the productivity-multiplying effect of conventional management. + +Traditionally-minded software-development managers often object that the casualness with which project groups form and change and dissolve in the open-source world negates a significant part of the apparent advantage of numbers that the open-source community has over any single closed-source developer. They would observe that in software development it is really sustained effort over time and the degree to which customers can expect continuing investment in the product that matters, not just how many people have thrown a bone in the pot and left it to simmer. + +There is something to this argument, to be sure; in fact, I have developed the idea that expected future service value is the key to the economics of software production in the essay The Magic Cauldron. + +But this argument also has a major hidden problem; its implicit assumption that open-source development cannot deliver such sustained effort. In fact, there have been open-source projects that maintained a coherent direction and an effective maintainer community over quite long periods of time without the kinds of incentive structures or institutional controls that conventional management finds essential. The development of the GNU Emacs editor is an extreme and instructive example; it has absorbed the efforts of hundreds of contributors over 15 years into a unified architectural vision, despite high turnover and the fact that only one person (its author) has been continuously active during all that time. No closed-source editor has ever matched this longevity record. + +This suggests a reason for questioning the advantages of conventionally-managed software development that is independent of the rest of the arguments over cathedral vs. bazaar mode. If it's possible for GNU Emacs to express a consistent architectural vision over 15 years, or for an operating system like Linux to do the same over 8 years of rapidly changing hardware and platform technology; and if (as is indeed the case) there have been many well-architected open-source projects of more than 5 years duration -- then we are entitled to wonder what, if anything, the tremendous overhead of conventionally-managed development is actually buying us. + +Whatever it is certainly doesn't include reliable execution by deadline, or on budget, or to all features of the specification; it's a rare `managed' project that meets even one of these goals, let alone all three. It also does not appear to be ability to adapt to changes in technology and economic context during the project lifetime, either; the open-source community has proven far more effective on that score (as one can readily verify, for example, by comparing the 30-year history of the Internet with the short half-lives of proprietary networking technologies—or the cost of the 16-bit to 32-bit transition in Microsoft Windows with the nearly effortless upward migration of Linux during the same period, not only along the Intel line of development but to more than a dozen other hardware platforms, including the 64-bit Alpha as well). + +One thing many people think the traditional mode buys you is somebody to hold legally liable and potentially recover compensation from if the project goes wrong. But this is an illusion; most software licenses are written to disclaim even warranty of merchantability, let alone performance—and cases of successful recovery for software nonperformance are vanishingly rare. Even if they were common, feeling comforted by having somebody to sue would be missing the point. You didn't want to be in a lawsuit; you wanted working software. + +So what is all that management overhead buying? + +In order to understand that, we need to understand what software development managers believe they do. A woman I know who seems to be very good at this job says software project management has five functions: + +_* To define goals and keep everybody pointed in the same direction + +_* To monitor and make sure crucial details don't get skipped + +_* To motivate people to do boring but necessary drudgework + +_* To organize the deployment of people for best productivity + +_* To marshal resources needed to sustain the project + +Apparently worthy goals, all of these; but under the open-source model, and in its surrounding social context, they can begin to seem strangely irrelevant. We'll take them in reverse order. + +My friend reports that a lot of resource marshalling is basically defensive; once you have your people and machines and office space, you have to defend them from peer managers competing for the same resources, and from higher-ups trying to allocate the most efficient use of a limited pool. + +But open-source developers are volunteers, self-selected for both interest and ability to contribute to the projects they work on (and this remains generally true even when they are being paid a salary to hack open source.) The volunteer ethos tends to take care of the `attack' side of resource-marshalling automatically; people bring their own resources to the table. And there is little or no need for a manager to `play defense' in the conventional sense. + +Anyway, in a world of cheap PCs and fast Internet links, we find pretty consistently that the only really limiting resource is skilled attention. Open-source projects, when they founder, essentially never do so for want of machines or links or office space; they die only when the developers themselves lose interest. + +That being the case, it's doubly important that open-source hackers organize themselves for maximum productivity by self-selection—and the social milieu selects ruthlessly for competence. My friend, familiar with both the open-source world and large closed projects, believes that open source has been successful partly because its culture only accepts the most talented 5% or so of the programming population. She spends most of her time organizing the deployment of the other 95%, and has thus observed first-hand the well-known variance of a factor of one hundred in productivity between the most able programmers and the merely competent. + +The size of that variance has always raised an awkward question: would individual projects, and the field as a whole, be better off without more than 50% of the least able in it? Thoughtful managers have understood for a long time that if conventional software management's only function were to convert the least able from a net loss to a marginal win, the game might not be worth the candle. + +The success of the open-source community sharpens this question considerably, by providing hard evidence that it is often cheaper and more effective to recruit self-selected volunteers from the Internet than it is to manage buildings full of people who would rather be doing something else. + +Which brings us neatly to the question of motivation. An equivalent and often-heard way to state my friend's point is that traditional development management is a necessary compensation for poorly motivated programmers who would not otherwise turn out good work. + +This answer usually travels with a claim that the open-source community can only be relied on only to do work that is `sexy' or technically sweet; anything else will be left undone (or done only poorly) unless it's churned out by money-motivated cubicle peons with managers cracking whips over them. I address the psychological and social reasons for being skeptical of this claim in Homesteading the Noosphere. For present purposes, however, I think it's more interesting to point out the implications of accepting it as true. + +If the conventional, closed-source, heavily-managed style of software development is really defended only by a sort of Maginot Line of problems conducive to boredom, then it's going to remain viable in each individual application area for only so long as nobody finds those problems really interesting and nobody else finds any way to route around them. Because the moment there is open-source competition for a `boring' piece of software, customers are going to know that it was finally tackled by someone who chose that problem to solve because of a fascination with the problem itself—which, in software as in other kinds of creative work, is a far more effective motivator than money alone. + +Having a conventional management structure solely in order to motivate, then, is probably good tactics but bad strategy; a short-term win, but in the longer term a surer loss. + +So far, conventional development management looks like a bad bet now against open source on two points (resource marshalling, organization), and like it's living on borrowed time with respect to a third (motivation). And the poor beleaguered conventional manager is not going to get any succour from the monitoring issue; the strongest argument the open-source community has is that decentralized peer review trumps all the conventional methods for trying to ensure that details don't get slipped. + +Can we save defining goals as a justification for the overhead of conventional software project management? Perhaps; but to do so, we'll need good reason to believe that management committees and corporate roadmaps are more successful at defining worthy and widely shared goals than the project leaders and tribal elders who fill the analogous role in the open-source world. + +That is on the face of it a pretty hard case to make. And it's not so much the open-source side of the balance (the longevity of Emacs, or Linus Torvalds's ability to mobilize hordes of developers with talk of "world domination") that makes it tough. Rather, it's the demonstrated awfulness of conventional mechanisms for defining the goals of software projects. + +One of the best-known folk theorems of software engineering is that 60% to 75% of conventional software projects either are never completed or are rejected by their intended users. If that range is anywhere near true (and I've never met a manager of any experience who disputes it) then more projects than not are being aimed at goals that are either (a) not realistically attainable, or (b) just plain wrong. + +This, more than any other problem, is the reason that in today's software engineering world the very phrase "management committee" is likely to send chills down the hearer's spine—even (or perhaps especially) if the hearer is a manager. The days when only programmers griped about this pattern are long past; Dilbert cartoons hang over executives' desks now. + +Our reply, then, to the traditional software development manager, is simple—if the open-source community has really underestimated the value of conventional management, why do so many of you display contempt for your own process? + +Once again the example of the open-source community sharpens this question considerably—because we have fun doing what we do. Our creative play has been racking up technical, market-share, and mind-share successes at an astounding rate. We're proving not only that we can do better software, but that joy is an asset. + +Two and a half years after the first version of this essay, the most radical thought I can offer to close with is no longer a vision of an open-source–dominated software world; that, after all, looks plausible to a lot of sober people in suits these days. + +Rather, I want to suggest what may be a wider lesson about software, (and probably about every kind of creative or professional work). Human beings generally take pleasure in a task when it falls in a sort of optimal-challenge zone; not so easy as to be boring, not too hard to achieve. A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction. Enjoyment predicts efficiency. + +Relating to your own work process with fear and loathing (even in the displaced, ironic way suggested by hanging up Dilbert cartoons) should therefore be regarded in itself as a sign that the process has failed. Joy, humor, and playfulness are indeed assets; it was not mainly for the alliteration that I wrote of "happy hordes" above, and it is no mere joke that the Linux mascot is a cuddly, neotenous penguin. + +It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work. + +1~ Epilog: Netscape Embraces the Bazaar + +It's a strange feeling to realize you're helping make history.... + +On January 22 1998, approximately seven months after I first published The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Netscape Communications, Inc. announced plans to give away the source for Netscape Communicator. I had had no clue this was going to happen before the day of the announcement. + +Eric Hahn, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Netscape, emailed me shortly afterwards as follows: "On behalf of everyone at Netscape, I want to thank you for helping us get to this point in the first place. Your thinking and writings were fundamental inspirations to our decision." + +The following week I flew out to Silicon Valley at Netscape's invitation for a day-long strategy conference (on 4 Feb 1998) with some of their top executives and technical people. We designed Netscape's source-release strategy and license together. + +A few days later I wrote the following: + +_1 Netscape is about to provide us with a large-scale, real-world test of the bazaar model in the commercial world. The open-source culture now faces a danger; if Netscape's execution doesn't work, the open-source concept may be so discredited that the commercial world won't touch it again for another decade. + +_1 On the other hand, this is also a spectacular opportunity. Initial reaction to the move on Wall Street and elsewhere has been cautiously positive. We're being given a chance to prove ourselves, too. If Netscape regains substantial market share through this move, it just may set off a long-overdue revolution in the software industry. + +_1 The next year should be a very instructive and interesting time. + +And indeed it was. As I write in mid-2000, the development of what was later named Mozilla has been only a qualified success. It achieved Netscape's original goal, which was to deny Microsoft a monopoly lock on the browser market. It has also achieved some dramatic successes (notably the release of the next-generation Gecko rendering engine). + +However, it has not yet garnered the massive development effort from outside Netscape that the Mozilla founders had originally hoped for. The problem here seems to be that for a long time the Mozilla distribution actually broke one of the basic rules of the bazaar model; it didn't ship with something potential contributors could easily run and see working. (Until more than a year after release, building Mozilla from source required a license for the proprietary Motif library.) + +Most negatively (from the point of view of the outside world) the Mozilla group didn't ship a production-quality browser for two and a half years after the project launch—and in 1999 one of the project's principals caused a bit of a sensation by resigning, complaining of poor management and missed opportunities. "Open source," he correctly observed, "is not magic pixie dust." + +And indeed it is not. The long-term prognosis for Mozilla looks dramatically better now (in November 2000) than it did at the time of Jamie Zawinski's resignation letter—in the last few weeks the nightly releases have finally passed the critical threshold to production usability. But Jamie was right to point out that going open will not necessarily save an existing project that suffers from ill-defined goals or spaghetti code or any of the software engineering's other chronic ills. Mozilla has managed to provide an example simultaneously of how open source can succeed and how it could fail. + +In the mean time, however, the open-source idea has scored successes and found backers elsewhere. Since the Netscape release we've seen a tremendous explosion of interest in the open-source development model, a trend both driven by and driving the continuing success of the Linux operating system. The trend Mozilla touched off is continuing at an accelerating rate. + +% Thyrsus Enterprises + +% http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ + +% This is version 3.0 + +% $Date: 2008/12/10 18:25:30 $ +% Revision History +% Revision 1.57 11 September 2000 esr +% New major section ``How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity". +% Revision 1.52 28 August 2000 esr +% MATLAB is a reinforcing parallel to Emacs. Corbatoó & Vyssotsky got it in 1965. +% Revision 1.51 24 August 2000 esr +% First DocBook version. Minor updates to Fall 2000 on the time-sensitive material. +% Revision 1.49 5 May 2000 esr +% Added the HBS note on deadlines and scheduling. +% Revision 1.51 31 August 1999 esr +% This the version that O'Reilly printed in the first edition of the book. +% Revision 1.45 8 August 1999 esr +% Added the endnotes on the Snafu Principle, (pre)historical examples of bazaar development, and originality in the bazaar. +% Revision 1.44 29 July 1999 esr +% Added the ``On Management and the Maginot Line" section, some insights about the usefulness of bazaars for exploring design space, and substantially improved the Epilog. +% Revision 1.40 20 Nov 1998 esr +% Added a correction of Brooks based on the Halloween Documents. +% Revision 1.39 28 July 1998 esr +% I removed Paul Eggert's 'graph on GPL vs. bazaar in response to cogent aguments from RMS on +% Revision 1.31 February 10 1998 esr +% Added ``Epilog: Netscape Embraces the Bazaar!" +% Revision 1.29 February 9 1998 esr +% Changed ``free software" to ``open source". +% Revision 1.27 18 November 1997 esr +% Added the Perl Conference anecdote. +% Revision 1.20 7 July 1997 esr +% Added the bibliography. +% Revision 1.16 21 May 1997 esr + +% First official presentation at the Linux Kongress. + diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/the_public_domain.james_boyle.sst b/data/samples/current/en/the_public_domain.james_boyle.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..89988b2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/the_public_domain.james_boyle.sst @@ -0,0 +1,2040 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: The Public Domain + :subtitle: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind + +@creator: + :author: Boyle, James + +@date: + :published: 2008 + +@rights: + :copyright: 2008, James Boyle + :license: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA) 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;public domain;intellectual property:public domain + +@links: + {The Public Domain}http://www.thepublicdomain.org/ + {James Boyle}http://james-boyle.com/ + +@make: + :headings: none; none; none; none; + :num_top: 1 + :breaks: new=:C; break=1 + :home_button_text: {The Public Domain}http://www.thepublicdomain.org/; {James Boyle}http://james-boyle.com/ + :footer: {The Public Domain}http://www.thepublicdomain.org/; {James Boyle}http://james-boyle.com/ + +:A~ @title @author + +1~ Acknowledgments + +The ideas for this book come from the theoretical and practical work I have been doing for the last ten years. None of that work has been done alone. As a result, the list of people to whom I am indebted makes Oscar night acknowledgments look haiku-terse by comparison. Here I can mention only a few. I beg pardon for the inevitable omissions. First and foremost, my family has tolerated my eccentricities and fixations and moderated them with gentle and deserved mockery. “Want that insignia torn off your car, Dad? Then it would be in the public domain, right?” + +My colleagues at Duke are one of the main influences on my work. I am lucky enough to work in the only “Center for the Study of the Public Domain” in the academic world. I owe the biggest debt of gratitude to my colleague Jennifer Jenkins, who directs the Center and who has influenced every chapter in this book. David Lange brought me to Duke. His work on the public domain has always been an inspiration to mine. Arti Rai’s remarkable theoretical and empirical studies have helped me to understand everything from software patents to synthetic biology. Jerry Reichman has supplied energy, insight, and a spirited and cosmopolitan focus on the multiple ways in which property can be protected. Jed Purdy and Neil Siegel commented on drafts and provided crucial insights on the construction of my argument. Catherine Fisk, Jim Salzman, Stuart Benjamin, Jonathan Wiener, Mitu Gulati, Jeff Powell, Chris Schroeder, and many, many others helped out—sometimes without knowing it, but often at the cost of the scarcest of all resources: time. Amidst a brilliant group of research assistants, Jordi Weinstock and David Silverstein stood out. Jordi showed a dogged ability to track down obscure 1950s songs that was almost scary. Additional thanks go to Jennifer Ma, Tolu Adewale, Paulina Orchard, and Emily Sauter. Balfour Smith, the coordinator of our Center, shepherded the manuscript through its many drafts with skill and erudition. + +Duke is the most interdisciplinary university I have ever encountered and so the obligations flow beyond the law school. Professor Anthony Kelley, a brilliant composer, not only educated me in composition and the history of musical borrowing but co-taught a class on musical borrowing that dramatically influenced Chapter 6. Colleagues in the business school—particularly Jim Anton, a great economic modeler and greater volleyball partner, and Wes Cohen, a leading empiricist—all left their marks. Dr. Robert Cook-Deegan, leader of Duke’s Center for Public Genomics, and my wife Lauren Dame, associate director of the Genome Ethics, Law and Policy Center, provided crucial support to my work with the sciences in general and synthetic biology in particular. I was also inspired and informed by colleagues and students in computer science, English, history, and political science. + +But the work I am describing here is—as the last chapter suggests—something that goes far beyond the boundaries of one institution. A large group of intellectual property scholars have influenced my ideas. Most importantly, Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler have each given far more than they received from me in the “sharing economy” of scholarship. If the ideas I describe here have a future, it is because of the astounding leadership Larry has provided and the insights into “the wealth of networks” that Yochai brings. Jessica Litman, Pam Samuelson, Michael Carroll, Julie Cohen, Peggy Radin, Carol Rose, Rebecca Eisenberg, Mark Lemley, Terry Fisher, Justin Hughes, Neil Netanel, Wendy Gordon, David Nimmer, Tyler Ochoa, Tim Wu, and many others have all taught me things I needed to know. Jessica in particular caught and corrected (some of ) my many errors, while Pam encouraged me to think about the definition of the public domain in ways that have been vital to this book. Michael suggested valuable edits—though I did not always listen. Historical work by Carla Hesse, Martha Woodmansee, and Mark Rose has been central to my analysis, which also could not have existed but for work on the governance of the commons by Elinor Ostrom, Charlotte Hess, and Carol Rose. Kembrew McLeod and Siva Vaidhyanathan inspired my work on music and sampling. Peter Jaszi was named in my last book as the person who most influenced it. That influence remains. + +Beyond the academy, my main debt is to the board members and staff of Creative Commons, Science Commons, and ccLearn. Creative Commons, on whose board I am proud to have served, is the brainchild of Larry Lessig and Hal Abelson; Science Commons and ccLearn are divisions of Creative Commons that I helped to set up which concentrate on the sciences and on education, respectively. The practical experience of building a “creative commons” with private tools—of allowing creative collaboration with people you have never met—has shaped this book far beyond the chapter devoted to it. Hal Abelson, Michael Carroll, and Eric Saltzman were on the midwife team for the birth of those organizations and became close friends in the process. Since the entire Creative Commons staff has made it routine to do seven impossible things before breakfast, it is hard to single out any one individual—but without Glenn Brown at Creative Commons and John Wilbanks at Science Commons, neither organization would exist today. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and another Creative Commons board member, also provided key insights. Finally, but for the leadership of Laurie Racine neither Creative Commons nor our Center at Duke would be where they are today, and thus many of the experiments I describe in this book would not have happened. + +The intellectual property bar is a fascinating, brilliant, and engagingly eccentric group of lawyers. I owe debts to many of its members. Whitney Broussard told me the dirty secrets of the music industry. Daphne Keller—a former student and later a colleague—helped in more ways than I can count. + +A number of scientists and computer scientists made me see things I otherwise would not have—Drew Endy and Randy Ruttenberg in synthetic biology, Nobel laureates Sir John Sulston and Harold Varmus in genomics and biology more generally, Paul Ginsparg in astrophysics, and Harlan Onsrud in geospatial data. Paul Uhlir’s work at the National Academy of Sciences introduced me to many of these issues. The work of Richard Stallman, the creator of the free software movement, remains an inspiration even though he profoundly disagrees with my nomenclature here—and with much else besides. + +Activists, civil rights lawyers, bloggers, and librarians have actually done much of the hard work of building the movement I describe at the end of this book. Jamie Love has touched, sparked, or masterminded almost every benign development I write about here, and novelist Cory Doctorow has either blogged it or influenced it. I have worked particularly closely with Manon Ress, Fred von Lohmann, Cindy Cohn, Jason Schultz, and Gigi Sohn. John Howkins and Gilberto Gil have provided considerable leadership internationally. But there are many, many others. The entire community of librarians deserves our thanks for standing up for free public access to knowledge for over two hundred years. Librarians are my heroes. They should be yours, too. + +Some of the work contained here has been published in other forms elsewhere. Portions of Chapters 2 and 3 appeared as “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain”;~{James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain,” Law and Contemporary Problems 66 (Winter–Spring 2003): 33–74.}~ Chapter 7 shares little textually but much in terms of inspiration with an article I co-wrote for PLoS Biology with Arti Rai, “Synthetic Biology: Caught between Property Rights, the Public Domain, and the Commons.”~{Arti Rai and James Boyle, “Synthetic Biology: Caught between Property Rights, the Public Domain, and the Commons,” PLoS Biology 5 (2007): 389–393, available at http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050058&ct=1. }~ For several years now I have been a columnist for the Financial Times’s “New Economy Policy Forum.” Portions of Chapter 5 and Chapter 9 had their origins in columns written for that forum. Chapter 10 has its roots both in my article “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?”~{James Boyle, “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?” Duke Law Journal 47 (1997): 87–116, available at http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/cite.php?47+Duke+L.+J.+87. }~ and in the symposium, Cultural Environmentalism @ 10,~{“Cultural Environmentalism @ 10,” Law and Contemporary Problems 70 (Spring 2007): 1–210, available at http://www.law.duke.edu/ce10. }~ that Larry Lessig kindly organized for the tenth anniversary of that article. + +Finally, I need to thank the institutions who have supported this study. The Rockefeller Center in Bellagio provided an inspiring beginning. The Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, and Hewlett Foundations have generously supported my work, as have Duke Law School’s research grants and Bost Fellowships. My work on synthetic biology and the human genome was supported in part by a CEER grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute and the Department of Energy (P50 HG003391-02). In addition, my thanks go out to the anonymous donor whose generous donation allowed us to found the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and to Bob Young and Laurie Racine, whose work made the Center possible. Yale University Press were supportive and critical in all the right places. I would like to thank them for agreeing to release this work under a Creative Commons license. What could be more appropriate to the book’s theme? + +I could go on and on. But I will not. This flurry of names and areas of knowledge signifies more than just the deep thanks of a dilettante. It signifies the emergence of an area of concern, the coming together of very different groups around a shared problem—an imbalance in the rules that define property in the information age. It is that problem, its history, philosophy, and politics that I try to sketch out in the pages ahead. + + + +1~ Preface: Comprised of at Least Jelly? + +Each person has a different breaking point. For one of my students it was United States Patent number 6,004,596 for a “Sealed Crustless Sandwich.” In the curiously mangled form of English that patent law produces, it was described this way: + +_1 A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings there between. The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.~{U.S. Patent No. 6,004,596 (filed Dec. 21, 1999), available at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm (search “6,004,596”). As is required, the patent refers extensively to the “prior art”—in this case prior art in sealing sandwiches. It also refers to the classic scientific reference work “50 Great Sandwiches by Carole Handslip 81–84, 86, 95, 1994.” Is this patent ridiculous? Yes, clearly so. But not so ridiculous that its eventual owner, Smucker’s, refrained from sending out cease and desist letters to competing sandwich manufacturers, and, when one of those competitors successfully requested the Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine the patent, from appealing the resulting rejection all the way through the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The judges there were less than sympathetic at oral argument. “Judge Arthur Gajarsa noted that his wife often squeezes together the sides of their child’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to keep the filling from oozing out. ‘I’m afraid she might be infringing on your patent!’ he said.” The court found that the PTO got it right the second time around and agreed with the Board of Patent Appeals in rejecting the patent. Portfolio Media, “Peanut Butter and Jelly Case Reaches Federal Circuit,” IPLaw360 (April 7, 2005), available at http://www.iplawbulletin.com. For the Board of Patent Appeals’s learned discussion of whether the patent was anticipated by such devices as the “Tartmaster,” complete with disputes over expert testimony on the subjects of cutting, crimping, and “leaking outwardly” and painstaking inquiries about what would seem obvious to a “person having ordinary skill in the art of sandwich making,” see http://des.uspto.gov/Foia/ReterivePdf?system=BPAI&flNm=fd031754 and http://des.uspto.gov/Foia/ReterivePdf?system=BPAI&flNm=fd031775. One could conclude from this case that the system works (eventually). Or one could ask who cares about silly patents like this—even if they are used in an attempt to undermine competition? The larger point, however, is that an initial process of examination that finds a crimped peanut butter and jelly sandwich is “novel and nonobvious” is hardly going to do better when more complex technologies are at stake. I take that point up in Chapter 2 with reference to Thomas Jefferson’s discussion of patents and in Chapter 7 on synthetic biology. For a more general discussion of the flaws of the patent system see Adam B. Jaffe and Josh Lerner, Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System Is Endangering Innovation, and Progress and What To Do About It (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).}~ + +“But why does this upset you?” I asked; “you’ve seen much worse than this.” And he had. There are patents on human genes, on auctions, on algorithms.~{These types of patents are discussed in Chapter 7.}~ The U.S. Olympic Committee has an expansive right akin to a trademark over the word “Olympic” and will not permit gay activists to hold a “Gay Olympic Games.” The Supreme Court sees no First Amendment problem with this.~{San Francisco Arts & Athletics, Inc., et al. v. United States Olympic Committee, 483 U.S. 522 (1987). See also James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 145–148.}~ Margaret Mitchell’s estate famously tried to use copyright to prevent Gone With the Wind from being told from a slave’s point of view.~{SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co., 268 F.3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001).}~ The copyright over the words you are now reading will not expire until seventy years after my death; the men die young in my family, but still you will allow me to hope that this might put it close to the year 2100. Congress periodically considers legislative proposals that would allow the ownership of facts.~{See Samuel E. Trosow, “Sui Generis Database Legislation: A Critical Analysis,” Yale Journal of Law & Technology 7 (2005): 534–642; Miriam Bitton, “Trends in Protection for Informational Works under Copyright Law during the 19th and 20th Centuries,” Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review 13 (2006): 115–176.}~ The Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives content providers a whole array of legally protected digital fences to enclose their work.~{The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is discussed at length in Chapter 5. “Digital fences” include password protection, encryption, and forms of digital rights management.}~ In some cases it effectively removes the privilege of fair use. Each day brings some new Internet horror story about the excesses of intellectual property. Some of them are even true. The list goes on and on. (By the end of this book, I hope to have convinced you that this matters.) With all of this going on, this enclosure movement of the mind, this locking up of symbols and themes and facts and genes and ideas (and eventually people), why get excited about the patenting of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? “I just thought that there were limits,” he said; “some things should be sacred.” + +This book is an attempt to tell the story of the battles over intellectual property, the range wars of the information age. I want to convince you that intellectual property is important, that it is something that any informed citizen needs to know a little about, in the same way that any informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment, or civil rights, or the way the economy works. I will try my best to be fair, to explain the issues and give both sides of the argument. Still, you should know that this is more than mere description. In the pages that follow, I try to show that current intellectual property policy is overwhelmingly and tragically bad in ways that everyone, and not just lawyers or economists, should care about. We are making bad decisions that will have a negative effect on our culture, our kids’ schools, and our communications networks; on free speech, medicine, and scientific research. We are wasting some of the promise of the Internet, running the risk of ruining an amazing system of scientific innovation, carving out an intellectual property exemption to the First Amendment. I do not write this as an enemy of intellectual property, a dot-communist ready to end all property rights; in fact, I am a fan. It is precisely because I am a fan that I am so alarmed about the direction we are taking. + +Still, the message of this book is neither doom nor gloom. None of these decisions is irrevocable. The worst ones can still be avoided altogether, and there are powerful counterweights in both law and culture to the negative trends I describe here. There are lots of reasons for optimism. I will get to most of these later, but one bears mentioning now. Contrary to what everyone has told you, the subject of intellectual property is both accessible and interesting; what people can understand, they can change—or pressure their legislators to change. + +I stress this point because I want to challenge a kind of willed ignorance. Every news story refers to intellectual property as “arcane,” “technical,” or “abstruse” in the same way as they referred to former attorney general Alberto Gonzales as “controversial.” It is a verbal tic and it serves to reinforce the idea that this is something about which popular debate is impossible. But it is also wrong. The central issues of intellectual property are not technical, abstruse, or arcane. To be sure, the rules of intellectual property law can be as complex as a tax code (though they should not be). But at the heart of intellectual property law are a set of ideas that a ten-year-old can understand perfectly well. (While writing this book, I checked this on a ten-year-old I then happened to have around the house.) You do not need to be a scientist or an economist or a lawyer to understand it. The stuff is also a lot of fun to think about. I live in constant wonder that they pay me to do so. + +Should you be able to tell the story of Gone With the Wind from a slave’s point of view even if the author does not want you to? Should the Dallas Cowboys be able to stop the release of Debbie Does Dallas, a cheesy porno flick, in which the title character brings great dishonor to a uniform similar to that worn by the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders? (After all, the audience might end up associating the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders with . . . well, commodified sexuality.)~{Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Inc. v. Pussycat Cinema, Ltd. , 604 F.2d 200 (2nd Cir. 1979).}~ + +Should the U.S. Commerce Department be able to patent the genes of a Guyami Indian woman who shows an unusual resistance to leukemia?~{“In the forests of Panama lives a Guyami Indian woman who is unusually resistant to a virus that causes leukemia. She was discovered by scientific ‘gene hunters,’ engaged in seeking out native peoples whose lives and cultures are threatened with extinction. Though they provided basic medical care, the hunters did not set out to preserve the people, only their genes—which can be kept in cultures of ‘immortalized’ cells grown in the laboratory. In 1993, the U.S. Department of Commerce tried to patent the Guyami woman’s genes—and only abandoned the attempt in the face of furious protest from representatives of indigenous peoples.” Tom Wilkie, “Whose Gene Is It Anyway?” Independent (London, November 19, 1995), 75.}~ What would it mean to patent someone’s genes, anyway? Forbidding scientific research on the gene without the patent holder’s consent? Forbidding human reproduction? Can religions secure copyrights over their scriptures? Even the ones they claim to have been dictated by gods or aliens? Even if American copyright law requires “an author,” presumably a human one?~{See Christina Rhee, “Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 13 (1998): 69–81.}~ Can they use those copyrights to discipline heretics or critics who insist on quoting the scripture in full? + +Should anyone own the protocols—the agreed-upon common technical standards—that make the Internet possible? Does reading a Web page count as “copying” it?~{See James Boyle, “Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person’s Guide,” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 10 (1996): 83–94.}~ Should that question depend on technical “facts” (for example, how long the page stays in your browser’s cache) or should it depend on some choice that we want to make about the extent of the copyright holder’s rights? + +These questions may be hard, because the underlying moral and political and economic issues need to be thought through. They may be weird; alien scriptural dictation might qualify there. They surely aren’t uninteresting, although I admit to a certain prejudice on that point. And some of them, like the design of our telecommunications networks, or the patenting of human genes, or the relationship between copyright and free speech, are not merely interesting, they are important. It seems like a bad idea to leave them to a few lawyers and lobbyists simply because you are told they are “technical.” + +So the first goal of the book is to introduce you to intellectual property, to explain why it matters, why it is the legal form of the information age. The second goal is to persuade you that our intellectual property policy is going the wrong way; two roads are diverging and we are on the one that doesn’t lead to Rome. + +The third goal is harder to explain. We have a simple word for, and an intuitive understanding of, the complex reality of “property.” Admittedly, lawyers think about property differently from the way lay-people do; this is only one of the strange mental changes that law school brings. But everyone in our society has a richly textured understanding of “mine” and “thine,” of rights of exclusion, of division of rights over the same property (for example, between tenant and landlord), of transfer of rights in part or in whole (for example, rental or sale). But what about the opposite of property—property’s antonym, property’s outside? What is it? Is it just stuff that is not worth owning—abandoned junk? Stuff that is not yet owned—such as a seashell on a public beach, about to be taken home? Or stuff that cannot be owned—a human being, for example? Or stuff that is collectively owned—would that be the radio spectrum or a public park? Or stuff that is owned by no one, such as the deep seabed or the moon? Property’s outside, whether it is “the public domain” or “the commons,” turns out to be harder to grasp than its inside. + +To the extent that we think about property’s outside, it tends to have a negative connotation; we want to get stuff out of the lost-and-found office and back into circulation as property. We talk of “the tragedy of the commons,”~{Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248.}~ meaning that unowned or collectively owned resources will be managed poorly; the common pasture will be overgrazed by the villagers’ sheep because no one has an incentive to hold back. + +When the subject is intellectual property, this gap in our knowledge turns out to be important because our intellectual property system depends on a balance between what is property and what is not. For a set of reasons that I will explain later, “the opposite of property” is a concept that is much more important when we come to the world of ideas, information, expression, and invention. We want a lot of material to be in the public domain, material that can be spread without property rights. “The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”~{International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215, 250 (1918) (Brandeis, J., dissenting); Yochai Benkler, “Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain,” New York University Law Review 74 (1999): 354–446.}~ Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property. The third goal of this book is to explore property’s outside, property’s various antonyms, and to show how we are undervaluing the public domain and the information commons at the very moment in history when we need them most. Academic articles and clever legal briefs cannot solve this problem alone. + +Instead, I argue that precisely because we are in the information age, we need a movement—akin to the environmental movement—to preserve the public domain. The explosion of industrial technologies that threatened the environment also taught us to recognize its value. The explosion of information technologies has precipitated an intellectual land grab; it must also teach us about both the existence and the value of the public domain. This enlightenment does not happen by itself. The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently, to see that there was such a thing as “the environment” rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment. + +We have to “invent” the public domain before we can save it. + +A word about style. I am trying to write about complicated issues, some of which have been neglected by academic scholarship, while others have been catalogued in detail. I want to advance the field, to piece together the story of the second enclosure movement, to tell you something new about the balance between property and its opposite. But I want to do so in a way that is readable. For those in my profession, being readable is a dangerous goal. You have never heard true condescension until you have heard academics pronounce the word “popularizer.” They say it as Isadora Duncan might have said “dowdy.” To be honest, I share their concern. All too often, clarity is achieved by leaving out the key qualification necessary to the argument, the sualso include a short guide to further reading. I have used citations sparingly, but more widely than an author of a popular book normally does, so that the scholarly audience can trace out my reasoning. But the core of the argument is in the text. + +The second balance I have struggled to hit is that between breadth and depth. The central thesis of the book is that the line between intellectual property and the public domain is important in every area of culture, science, and technology. As a result, it ranges widely in subject matter. Yet readers come with different backgrounds, interests, and bodies of knowledge. As a result, the structure of the book is designed to facilitate self-selection based on interest. The first three chapters and the conclusion provide the theoretical basis. Each chapter builds on those themes, but is also designed to be largely freestanding. The readers who thrill to the idea that there might be constitutional challenges to the regulation of digital speech by copyright law may wallow in those arguments to their hearts’ content. Others may quickly grasp the gist and head on for the story of how Ray Charles’s voice ended up in a mashup attacking President Bush, or the discussion of genetically engineered bacteria that take photographs and are themselves the subject of intellectual property rights. To those readers who nevertheless conclude that I have failed to balance correctly between precision and clarity, or breadth and depth, I offer my apologies. I fear you may be right. It was not for want of trying. + +1~ Chapter 1: Why Intellectual Property? + +Imagine yourself starting a society from scratch. Perhaps you fought a revolution, or perhaps you led a party of adventurers into some empty land, conveniently free of indigenous peoples. Now your task is to make the society work. You have a preference for democracy and liberty and you want a vibrant culture: a culture with a little chunk of everything, one that offers hundreds of ways to live and thousands of ideals of beauty. You don’t want everything to be high culture; you want beer and skittles and trashy delights as well as brilliant news reporting, avant-garde theater, and shocking sculpture. You can see a role for highbrow, state-supported media or publicly financed artworks, but your initial working assumption is that the final arbiter of culture should be the people who watch, read, and listen to it, and who remake it every day. And even if you are dubious about the way popular choice gets formed, you prefer it to some government funding body or coterie of art mavens. + +At the same time as you are developing your culture, you want a flourishing economy—and not just in literature or film. You want innovation and invention. You want drugs that cure terrible diseases, and designs for more fuel-efficient stoves, and useful little doodads, like mousetraps, or Post-it notes, or solar-powered backscratchers. To be exact, you want lots of innovation but you do not know exactly what innovation or even what types of innovation you want. + +Given scarce time and resources, should we try to improve typewriters or render them obsolete with word processors, or develop functional voice recognition software, or just concentrate on making solar-powered backscratchers? Who knew that they needed Post-it notes or surgical stents or specialized rice planters until those things were actually developed? How do you make priorities when the priorities include things you cannot rationally value because you do not have them yet? How do you decide what to fund and when to fund it, what desires to trade off against each other? + +The society you have founded normally relies on market signals to allocate resources. If a lot of people want petunias for their gardens, and are willing to pay handsomely for them, then some farmer who was formerly growing soybeans or gourds will devote a field to petunias instead. He will compete with the other petunia sellers to sell them to you. Voila! We do not need a state planner to consult the vegetable five-year plan and decree “Petunias for the People!” Instead, the decision about how to deploy society’s productive resources is being made “automatically,” cybernetically even, by rational individuals responding to price signals. And in a competitive market, you will get your petunias at very close to the cost of growing them and bringing them to market. Consumer desires are satisfied and productive resources are allocated efficiently. It’s a tour de force. + +Of course, there are problems. The market measures the value of a good by whether people have the ability and willingness to pay for it, so the whims of the rich may be more “valuable” than the needs of the destitute. We may spend more on pet psychiatry for the traumatized poodles on East 71st Street than on developing a cure for sleeping sickness, because the emotional wellbeing of the pets of the wealthy is “worth more” than the lives of the tropical world’s poor. But for a lot of products, in a lot of areas, the market works—and that is a fact not to be taken for granted. + +Why not use this mechanism to meet your cultural and innovation needs? If people need Madame Bovary or The New York Times or a new kind of antibiotic, surely the market will provide it? Apparently not. You have brought economists with you into your brave new world—perhaps out of nostalgia, or because a lot of packing got done at the last minute. The economists shake their heads.~{As the suggested further reading indicates, this light-hearted account of the economic basis of intellectual property conceals considerable complexity. On the other hand, the core argument is presented here—and a compelling argument it is.}~ The petunia farmer is selling something that is “a rivalrous good.” If I have the petunia, you can’t have it. What’s more, petunias are “excludable.” The farmer only gives you petunias when you pay for them. It is these factors that make the petunia market work. What about Madame Bovary, or the antibiotic, or The New York Times? Well, it depends. If books have to be copied out by hand, then Madame Bovary is just like the petunia. But if thousands of copies of Madame Bovary can be printed on a printing press, or photocopied, or downloaded from www.flaubertsparrot.com, then the book becomes something that is nonrival; once Madame Bovary is written, it can satisfy many readers with little additional effort or cost. Indeed, depending on the technologies of reproduction, it may be very hard to exclude people from Madame Bovary. + +Imagine a Napster for French literature; everyone could have Madame Bovary and only the first purchaser would have to pay for it. Because of these “nonrival” and “nonexcludable” characteristics, Flaubert’s publisher would have a more difficult time coming up with a business plan than the petunia farmer. The same is true for the drug company that invests millions in screening and testing various drug candidates and ends up with a new antibiotic that is both safe and effective, but which can be copied for pennies. Who will invest the money, knowing that any product can be undercut by copies that don’t have to pay the research costs? How are authors and publishers and drug manufacturers to make money? And if they can’t make money, how are we to induce people to be authors or to be the investors who put money into the publishing or pharmaceutical business? + +It is important to pause at this point and inquire how closely reality hews to the economic story of “nonexcludable” and “nonrival” public goods. It turns out that the reality is much more complex. First, there may be motivations for creation that do not depend on the market mechanism. People sometimes create because they seek fame, or out of altruism, or because an inherent creative force will not let them do otherwise. Where those motivations operate, we may not need a financial incentive to create. Thus the “problem” of cheap copying in fact becomes a virtue. Second, the same technologies that make copying cheaper may also lower the costs of advertising and distribution, cutting down on the need to finance expensive distribution chains. Third, even in situations that do require incentives for creativity and for distribution, it may be that being “first to market” with an innovation provides the innovator with enough of a head start on the competition to support the innovation.~{See Jack Hirshleifer, “The Private and Social Value of Information and the Reward to Inventive Activity,” American Economic Review 61 (1971): 561–574.}~ Fourth, while some aspects of the innovation may truly be nonrival, other aspects may not. Software is nonrival and hard to exclude people from, but it is easy to exclude your customers from the help line or technical support. The CD may be copied cheaply; the concert is easy to police. The innovator may even be advantaged by being able to trade on the likely effects of her innovation. If I know I have developed the digital camera, I may sell the conventional film company’s shares short. Guarantees of authenticity, quality, and ease of use may attract purchasers even if unauthorized copying is theoretically cheaper. + +In other words, the economic model of pure public goods will track our reality well in some areas and poorly in others—and the argument for state intervention to fix the problems of public goods will therefore wax and wane correspondingly. In the case of drug patents, for example, it is very strong. For lots of low-level business innovation, however, we believe that adequate incentives are provided by being first to market, and so we see no need to give monopoly power to the first business to come up with a new business plan—at least we did not until some disastrous patent law decisions discussed later in this book. Nor does a lowering of copying costs hurt every industry equally. Digital copies of music were a threat to the traditional music business, but digital copies of books? I am skeptical. This book will be freely and legally available online to all who wish to copy it. Both the publisher and I believe that this will increase rather than decrease sales. + +Ignore these inconvenient complicating factors for a moment. Assume that wherever things are cheap to copy and hard to exclude others from, we have a potential collapse of the market. That book, that drug, that film will simply not be produced in the first place—unless the state steps in somehow to change the equation. This is the standard argument for intellectual property rights. And a very good argument it is. In order to solve the potentially “market-breaking” problem of goods that are expensive to make and cheap to copy, we will use what my colleague Jerry Reichman calls the “market-making” device of intellectual property. The state will create a right to exclude others from the invention or the expression and confer it on the inventor or the author. The most familiar rights of this kind are copyrights and patents. (Trademarks present some special issues, which I will address a little later.) Having been given the ability to forbid people to copy your invention or your novel, you can make them pay for the privilege of getting access. You have been put back in the position of the petunia farmer. + +Pause for a moment and think of what a brilliant social innovation this is—at least potentially. Focus not on the incentives alone, but on the decentralization of information processing and decision making that a market offers. Instead of having ministries of art that define the appropriate culture to be produced this year, or turning the entire path of national innovation policy over to the government, intellectual property decentralizes the choices about what creative and innovative paths to pursue while retaining the possibility that people will actually get paid for their innovation and creative expression. + +The promise of copyright is this: if you are a radical environmentalist who wants to alert the world to the danger posed by climate change, or a passionate advocate of homeschooling, or a cartoonist with a uniquely twisted view of life, or a musician who can make a slack key guitar do very strange things, or a person who likes to take amazingly saccharine pictures of puppies and put them on greeting cards—maybe you can quit your day job and actually make a living from your expressive powers. If the market works, if the middlemen and distributors are smart enough, competitive enough, and willing to take a chance on expression that competes with their in-house talent, if you can make it somehow into the public consciousness, then you can be paid for allowing the world to copy, distribute, and perform your stuff. You risk your time and your effort and your passion and, if the market likes it, you will be rewarded. (At the very least, the giant producers of culture will be able to assemble vast teams of animators and musicians and software gurus and meld their labors into a videotape that will successfully anesthetize your children for two hours; no small accomplishment, let me tell you, and one for which people will certainly pay.) + +More importantly, if the system works, the choices about the content of our culture—the mix of earnest essays and saccharine greeting cards and scantily clad singers and poetic renditions of Norse myths—will be decentralized to the people who actually read, or listen to, or watch the stuff. This is our cultural policy and it is driven, in part, by copyright. + +The promise of patent is this: we have a multitude of human needs and a multitude of individuals and firms who might be able to satisfy those needs through innovation. Patent law offers us a decentralized system that, in principle, will allow individuals and firms to pick the problem that they wish to solve. Inventors and entrepreneurs can risk their time and their capital and, if they produce a solution that finds favor in the marketplace, will be able to reap the return provided by the legal right to exclude—by the legal monopoly over the resulting invention. The market hints at some unmet need—for drugs that might reduce obesity or cure multiple sclerosis, or for Post-it notes or windshield wipers that come on intermittently in light rain—and the innovator and her investors make a bet that they can meet that need. (Not all of these technologies will be patentable—only those that are novel and “nonobvious,” something that goes beyond what any skilled person in the relevant field would have done.) + +In return for the legal monopoly, patent holders must describe the technology well enough to allow anyone to replicate it once the patent term ends. Thus patent law allows us to avert two dangers: the danger that the innovation will languish because the inventor has no way to recover her investment of time and capital, and the danger that the inventor will turn to secrecy instead, hiding the details of her innovation behind black box technologies and restrictive contracts, so that society never gets the knowledge embedded in it. (This is a real danger. The medieval guilds often relied on secrecy to maintain the commercial advantage conveyed by their special skills, thus slowing progress down and sometimes simply stopping it. We still don’t know how they made Stradivarius violins sound so good. Patents, by contrast, keep the knowledge public, at least in theory;~{Unfortunately, the reality turns out to be less rosy. James Bessen, “Patents and the Diffusion of Technical Information,” Economics Letters 86 (2005): 122: “[S]urvey evidence suggests that firms do not place much value on the disclosed information. Moreover, those firms that do read patents do not use them primarily as a source of information on technology. Instead, they use them for other purposes, such as keeping track of competitors or checking for infringement. There are, in fact, sound theoretical reasons why the disclosed information may not be very valuable. [Fritz] Machlup and [Edith] Penrose report that the argument about diffusion is an old one, popular since the mid-19th century. They also point out that, at least through the 1950s, economists have been skeptical about this argument. The problem, also recognized in the mid-19th century, is that ‘only unconcealable inventions are patented,’ so patents reveal little that could not be otherwise learned. On the other hand, ‘concealable inventions remain concealed.’ ” [Citations omitted.]}~ you must describe it to own it.) And again, decisions about the direction of innovation have been largely, though not entirely, decentralized to the people who actually might use the products and services that result. This is our innovation policy and it is increasingly driven by patent. + +What about the legal protection of trademarks, the little words or symbols or product shapes that identify products for us? Why do we have trademark law, this “homestead law for the English language”?~{Felix S. Cohen, “Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach,” Columbia Law Review 35 (1935): 817.}~ Why not simply allow anyone to use any name or attractive symbol that they want on their products, even if someone else used it first? A trademark gives me a limited right to exclude other people from using my mark, or brand name, or product shape, just as copyright and patent law give me a limited right to exclude other people from my original expression or my novel invention. Why create such a right and back it with the force of law? + +According to the economists, the answer is that trademark law does two things. It saves consumers time. We have good reason to believe that a soap that says “Ivory” or a tub of ice cream that says “Häagen-Dazs” will be made by the same manufacturer that made the last batch of Ivory soap or Häagen-Dazs ice cream. If we liked the good before and we see the symbol again, we know what we are getting. I can work out what kind of soap, ice cream, or car I like, and then just look for the appropriate sign rather than investigating the product all over again each time I buy. That would be wasteful and economists hate waste. At the same time, trademarks fulfill a second function: they are supposed to give manufacturers an incentive to make good products—or at least to make products of consistent quality or price—to build up a good brand name and invest in consistency of its key features, knowing that no other firm can take their name or symbol. (Why produce a high-quality product, or a reliable cheap product, and build a big market share if a free rider could wait until people liked the product and then just produce an imitation with the same name but of lower quality?) The promise of trademark is that quality and commercial information flow regulate themselves, with rational consumers judging among goods of consistent quality produced by manufacturers with an interest in building up long-term reputation. + +So there we have the idealized vision of intellectual property. It is not merely supposed to produce incentives for innovation by rewarding creators, though that is vital. Intellectual property is also supposed to create a feedback mechanism that dictates the contours of information and innovation production. It is not an overstatement to say that intellectual property rights are designed to shape our information marketplace. Copyright law is supposed to give us a self-regulating cultural policy in which the right to exclude others from one’s original expression fuels a vibrant public sphere indirectly driven by popular demand. At its best, it is supposed to allow a decentralized and iconoclastic cultural ferment in which independent artists, musicians, and writers can take their unique visions, histories, poems, or songs to the world—and make a living doing so if their work finds favor. Patent law is supposed to give us a self-regulating innovation policy in which the right to exclude others from novel and useful inventions creates a cybernetic and responsive innovation marketplace. The allocation of social resources to particular types of innovation is driven by guesses about what the market wants. Trademark law is supposed to give us a self-regulating commercial information policy in which the right to exclude others from one’s trade name, symbol, or slogan produces a market for consumer information in which firms have incentives to establish quality brand names and consumers can rely on the meaning and the stability of the logos that surround them. Ivory soap will always mean Ivory soap and Coke will mean Coke, at least until the owners of those marks decide to change the nature of their products. + +Some readers will find my use of the term “intellectual property” mistaken and offensive. They will argue, and I agree, that the use of the term “property” can cause people mistakenly to conflate these rights with those to physical property. (I outline that process and its negative consequences in the next chapter.) They will argue, and again I agree, that there are big differences between the three fields I have described. Should we not just list the specific rights about which we are speaking—copyright, patent, or trademark? Both of these concerns are real and well-founded, but I respectfully disagree with the conclusion that we should give up the term “intellectual property.” + +First, as I have tried to show above, while there are considerable differences between the three fields I discussed, there is also a core similarity—the attempt to use a legally created privilege to solve a potential “public goods problem.” That similarity can enlighten as well as confuse. Yes, copyright looks very different from patent, just as a whale looks very different from a mouse. But we do not condemn the scientist who notes that they are both “mammals”—a socially constructed category—so long as he has a reason for focusing on that commonality. Second, the language of intellectual property exists. It has political reality in the world. Sometimes the language confuses and misleads. There are two possible reactions to such a reality. One can reject it and insist on a different and “purified” nomenclature, or one can attempt to point out the misperceptions and confusions using the very language in which they are embedded. I do not reject the first tactic. It can be useful. Here, though, I have embraced the second. + +I have provided the idealized story of intellectual property. But is it true? Did the law really develop that way? Does it work that way now? Does this story still apply in the world of the Internet and the Human Genome Project? If you believed the idealized story, would you know what kind of intellectual property laws to write? The answer to all of these questions is “not exactly.” + +Like most social institutions, intellectual property has an altogether messier and more interesting history than this sanitized version of its functioning would suggest. The precursors of copyright law served to force the identification of the author, so that he could be punished if he proved to be a heretic or a revolutionary. The Statute of Anne—the first true copyright statute—was produced partly because of publishers’ fights with booksellers; the authorial right grew as an afterthought.~{For contrasting views of the sequence of events, see John Feather, “Publishers and Politicians: The Remaking of the Law of Copyright in Britain 1775–1842,” pt. 2, “The Rights of Authors,” Publishing History 25 (1989): 45–72; Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).}~ The history of patents includes a wealth of attempts to reward friends of the government and restrict or control dangerous technologies. Trademark law has shuttled uneasily between being a free-floating way to police competition so as to prohibit actions that courts thought were “unfair” and an absolute property right over an individual word or symbol. + +But does intellectual property work this way now, promoting the ideal of progress, a transparent marketplace, easy and cheap access to information, decentralized and iconoclastic cultural production, self-correcting innovation policy? Often it does, but distressingly often it does the reverse. The rights that were supposed to be limited in time and scope to the minimum monopoly necessary to ensure production become instead a kind of perpetual corporate welfare—restraining the next generation of creators instead of encouraging them. The system that was supposed to harness the genius of both the market and democracy sometimes subverts both. Worse, it does so inefficiently, locking up vast swaths of culture in order to confer a benefit on a tiny minority of works. But this is too abstract. A single instance from copyright law will serve as a concrete example of what is at stake here. Later in the book I will give other examples. + +2~ You’ll Get My Library of Congress When . . . + +Go to the Library of Congress catalogue. It is online at http://catalog.loc.gov/. This is an astounding repository of material—not just books and periodicals, but pictures, films, and music. The vast majority of this material, perhaps as much as 95 percent in the case of books, is commercially unavailable.~{Tim O’Reilly points out that there are 32 million titles in the Online Computer Library Center’s “WorldCat” catalogue—this is a reasonable proxy for the number of books in U.S. libraries. Nielsen’s Bookscan shows that 1.2 million books sold at least one copy in 2005. This yields a ratio of books commercially available to books ever published of about 4 percent. But of those 1.2 million books, many are in the public domain—think of Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Melville, Kipling. Thus the percentage of books that are under copyright and commercially available may actually be considerably lower than 4 percent. See http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/11/oops_only_4_of_titles_are_bein.html. For a lucid account of the statistics in the context of the Google Book Search Project, see http://lessig.org/blog/2006/01/google_book_search_the_argumen.html. }~ The process happens comparatively quickly. Estimates suggest that a mere twentyeight years after publication 85 percent of the works are no longer being commercially produced. (We know that when U.S. copyright required renewal after twenty-eight years, about 85 percent of all copyright holders did not bother to renew. This is a reasonable, if rough, guide to commercial viability.)~{See Barbara Ringer, “Study Number 31: Renewal of Copyright,” reprinted in U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights, Copyright Law Revision, 86th Cong., 1st Sess., Committee Print (1960), 187. See also HR Rep. 94-1476 (1976), 136; William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 210–212.}~ + +Yet because the copyright term is now so long, in many cases extending well over a century, most of twentieth-century culture is still under copyright—copyrighted but unavailable. Much of this, in other words, is lost culture. No one is reprinting the books, screening the films, or playing the songs. No one is allowed to. In fact, we may not even know who holds the copyright. Companies have gone out of business. Records are incomplete or absent. In some cases, it is even more complicated. A film, for example, might have one copyright over the sound track, another over the movie footage, and another over the script. You get the idea. These works—which are commercially unavailable and also have no identifiable copyright holder—are called “orphan works.” They make up a huge percentage of our great libraries’ holdings. For example, scholars estimate that the majority of our film holdings are orphan works.~{Details of the orphan works problem can be found in the proposals presented to the copyright office by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain; Orphan Works: Analysis and Proposal: Submission to the Copyright Office—March 2005, available at http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/pdf/cspdproposal.pdf, and Access to Orphan Films: Submission to the Copyright Office—March 2005, available at http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/pdf/cspdorphanfilm.pdf. Two recent bills, in the Senate and House, respectively, attempt to address the orphan works problems. The Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008, S 2913, 110th Cong. (2008), would add a new section to the Copyright Act limiting remedies for infringement of orphan works and requiring the establishment of a database of pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works. The House bill, The Orphan Works Act of 2008, HR 5889, 110th Cong. (2008), is similar but not identical. While these bills are a good start, the eventual remedy will need to be more sweeping.}~ For books, the estimates are similar. Not only are these works unavailable commercially, there is simply no way to find and contact the person who could agree to give permission to digitize the work or make it available in a new form. + +Take a conservative set of numbers. Subtract from our totals the works that are clearly in the public domain. In the United States, that is generally work produced before 1923. That material, at least, we can use freely. Subtract, too, the works that are still available from the copyright holder. There we can gain access if we are willing to pay. Yet this still leaves a huge proportion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture commercially unavailable but under copyright. In the case of books, the number is over 95 percent, as I said before; with films and music, it is harder to tell, but the percentages are still tragically high. A substantial proportion of that total is made up of orphan works. They cannot be reprinted or digitized even if we were willing to pay the owner to do so. And then comes the Internet. Right now, you can search for those books or films or songs and have the location of the work instantly displayed, as well as a few details about it. And if you live in Washington, D.C., or near some other great library, you can go to a reading room, and if the work can be found and has not been checked out, and has not deteriorated, you can read the books (though you probably will not be able to arrange to see the movies unless you are an accredited film scholar). + +I was searching the Library of Congress catalogue online one night, tracking down a seventy-year-old book about politics and markets, when my son came in to watch me. He was about eight years old at the time but already a child of the Internet age. He asked what I was doing and I explained that I was printing out the details of the book so that I could try to find it in my own university library. “Why don’t you read it online?” he said, reaching over my shoulder and double-clicking on the title, frowning when that merely led to another information page: “How do you get to read the actual book?” I smiled at the assumption that all the works of literature were not merely in the Library of Congress, but actually on the Net: available to anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world—so that you could not merely search for, but also read or print, some large slice of the Library’s holdings. Imagine what that would be like. Imagine the little underlined blue hyperlink from each title—to my son it made perfect sense. The book’s title was in the catalogue. When you clicked the link, surely you would get to read it. That is what happened in his experience when one clicked a link. Why not here? It was an old book, after all, no longer in print. Imagine being able to read the books, hear the music, or watch the films—or at least the ones that the Library of Congress thought it worthwhile to digitize. Of course, that is ridiculous. + +I tried to explain this to my son. I showed him that there were some works that could be seen online. I took him to the online photograph library, meaning to show him the wealth of amazing historical photographs. Instead, I found myself brooding over the lengthy listing of legal restrictions on the images and the explanation that reproduction of protected items may require the written permission of the copyright owners and that, in many cases, only indistinct and tiny thumbnail images are displayed to those searching from outside the Library of Congress “because of potential rights considerations.” The same was true of the scratchy folk songs from the twenties or the early film holdings. The material was in the Library, of course—remarkable collections in some cases, carefully preserved, and sometimes even digitized at public expense. Yet only a tiny fraction of it is available online. (There is a fascinating set of Edison’s early films, for example.) + +Most of the material available online comes from so long ago that the copyright could not possibly still be in force. But since copyright lasts for seventy years after the death of the author (or ninety-five years if it was a corporate “work for hire”), that could be a very, very long time indeed. Long enough, in fact, to keep off limits almost the whole history of moving pictures and the entire history of recorded music. Long enough to lock up almost all of twentieth-century culture. + +But is that not what copyright is supposed to do? To grant the right to restrict access, so as to allow authors to charge for the privilege of obtaining it? Yes, indeed. And this is a very good idea. But as I argue in this book, the goal of the system ought to be to give the monopoly only for as long as necessary to provide an incentive. After that, we should let the work fall into the public domain where all of us can use it, transform it, adapt it, build on it, republish it as we wish. For most works, the owners expect to make all the money they are going to recoup from the work with five or ten years of exclusive rights. The rest of the copyright term is of little use to them except as a kind of lottery ticket in case the work proves to be a one-in-a-million perennial favorite. The one-in-a-million lottery winner will benefit, of course, if his ticket comes up. And if the ticket is “free,” who would not take it? But the ticket is not free to the public. They pay higher prices for the works still being commercially exploited and, frequently, the price of complete unavailability for the works that are not. + +Think of a one-in-a-million perennial favorite—Harry Potter, say. Long after J. K. Rowling is dust, we will all be forbidden from making derivative works, or publishing cheap editions or large-type versions, or simply reproducing it for pleasure. I am a great admirer of Ms. Rowling’s work, but my guess is that little extra incentive was provided by the thought that her copyright will endure seventy rather than merely fifty years after her death. Some large costs are being imposed here, for a small benefit. And the costs fall even more heavily on all the other works, which are available nowhere but in some moldering library stacks. To put it another way, if copyright owners had to purchase each additional five years of term separately, the same way we buy warranties on our appliances, the economically rational ones would mainly settle for a fairly short period. + +Of course, there are some works that are still being exploited commercially long after their publication date. Obviously the owners of these works would not want them freely available online. This seems reasonable enough, though even with those works the copyright should expire eventually. But remember, in the Library of Congress’s vast, wonderful pudding of songs and pictures and films and books and magazines and newspapers, there is perhaps a handful of raisins’ worth of works that anyone is making any money from, and the vast majority of those come from the last ten years. If one goes back twenty years, perhaps a raisin. Fifty years? A slight raisiny aroma. We restrict access to the whole pudding in order to give the owners of the raisin slivers their due. But this pudding is almost all of twentieth-century culture, and we are restricting access to it when almost of all of it could be available. + +If you do not know much about copyright, you might think that I am exaggerating. After all, if no one has any financial interest in the works or we do not even know who owns the copyright, surely a library would be free to put those works online? Doesn’t “no harm, no foul” apply in the world of copyright? In a word, no. Copyright is what lawyers call a “strict liability” system. This means that it is generally not a legal excuse to say that you did not believe you were violating copyright, or that you did so by accident, or in the belief that no one would care, and that your actions benefited the public. Innocence and mistake do not absolve you, though they might reduce the penalties imposed. Since it is so difficult to know exactly who owns the copyright (or copyrights) on a work, many libraries simply will not reproduce the material or make it available online until they can be sure the copyright has expired—which may mean waiting for over a century. They cannot afford to take the risk. + +What is wrong with this picture? Copyright has done its job and encouraged the creation of the work. But now it acts as a fence, keeping us out and restricting access to the work to those who have the time and resources to trudge through the stacks of the nation’s archives. In some cases, as with film, it may simply make the work completely unavailable. + +So far I have been talking as though copyright were the only reason the material is not freely available online. But of course, this is not true. Digitizing costs money (though less every year) and there is a lot of rubbish out there, stuff no one would ever want to make available digitally (though it must be noted that one man’s rubbish is another man’s delight). But that still leaves vast amounts of material that we would want, and be willing to pay, to have digitized. Remember also that if the material were legally free, anyone could get in on the act of digitizing it and putting it up. Google’s much-heralded effort to scan the books in major libraries is just the kind of thing I mean. But Google is being sued for violating copyright—even though it allows any author to “opt out” of its system, and even though under the Google system you cannot click to get the book if it is still under copyright, merely a snippet a few sentences long from the book. + +If you are shaking your head as you read this, saying that no one would bother digitizing most of the material in the archives, look at the Internet and ask yourself where the information came from the last time you did a search. Was it an official and prestigious institution? A university or a museum or a government? Sometimes those are our sources of information, of course. But do you not find the majority of the information you need by wandering off into a strange click-trail of sites, amateur and professional, commercial and not, hobbyist and entrepreneur, all self-organized by internal referrals and search engine algorithms? Even if Google did not undertake the task of digitization, there would be hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of others who would—not with Google’s resources, to be sure. In the process, they would create something quite remarkable. + +The most satisfying proofs are existence proofs. A platypus is an existence proof that mammals can lay eggs. The Internet is an existence proof of the remarkable information processing power of a decentralized network of hobbyists, amateurs, universities, businesses, volunteer groups, professionals, and retired experts and who knows what else. It is a network that produces useful information and services. Frequently, it does so at no cost to the user and without anyone guiding it. Imagine that energy, that decentralized and idiosyncratically dispersed pattern of interests, turned loose on the cultural artifacts of the twentieth century. Then imagine it coupled to the efforts of the great state archives and private museums who themselves would be free to do the same thing. Think of the people who would work on Buster Keaton, or the literary classics of the 1930s, or the films of the Second World War, or footage on the daily lives of African-Americans during segregation, or the music of the Great Depression, or theremin recordings, or the best of vaudeville. Imagine your Google search in such a world. Imagine that Library of Congress. One science fiction writer has taken a stab. His character utters the immortal line, “Man, you’ll get my Library of Congress when you pry my cold dead fingers off it!”~{Bruce Sterling, Heavy Weather (New York: Bantam, 1994): 73.}~ + +Familiar with the effect of this kind of train of thought on his father, my son had long since wandered off in search of a basketball game to watch. But I have to admit his question was something of an epiphany for me: Where do you click to get the actual book? + +The response I get from a lot of people is that this vision of the Library of Congress is communism, pure and simple. Such people view Google’s attempt to digitize books as simple theft. Surely it will destroy the incentives necessary to produce the next beach novel, the next academic monograph, the next teen band CD, the next hundred-million-dollar movie? But this mistakes my suggestion. Imagine a very conservative system. First, let us make people demonstrate that they want a copyright, by the arduous step of actually writing the word copyright or the little © on the work. (At the moment, everyone gets a copyright as soon as the work is written down or otherwise fixed, whether they want one or not.) But how long a copyright? We know that the majority of works are only valuable for five or ten years. Let us give copyright owners more than double that, say twenty-eight years of exclusive rights. If prior experience is any guide, 85 percent of works will be allowed to enter the public domain after that period. If that isn’t generous enough, let us say that the small proportion of owners who still find value in their copyright at the end of twenty-eight years can extend their copyright for another twenty-eight years. Works that are not renewed fall immediately into the public domain. If you check the register after twenty-eight years and the work has not been renewed, it is in the public domain. Works that are renewed get the extra time. + +Now this is a conservative suggestion, too conservative in my view, though still better than what we have now. Is it feasible? It would be hard to argue that it is not. This pretty much was the law in the United States until 1978. (My system is a little simpler, but the broad strokes are the same.) Since that point, in two broad stages, we have moved away from this system at the very moment in history when the Internet made it a particularly stupid idea to do so. + +How have we changed the system? We have given copyrights to the creator of any original work as soon as it is fixed, so that you, reader, are the author of thousands of copyrighted works. Almost everything up on the Internet is copyrighted, even if its creators do not know that and would prefer it to be in the public domain. Imagine that you want to make a documentary and use a film clip that a student filmmaker has put up on his home page. Perhaps you want to adapt the nifty graphics that a high school teacher in Hawaii created to teach her calculus class, thinking that, with a few changes, you could use the material for your state’s K-12 physics program. Perhaps you are a collage artist who wishes to incorporate images that amateur artists have put online. None of the works are marked by a copyright symbol. Certainly they are up on the Internet, but does that mean that they are available for reprinting, adaptation, or incorporation in a new work? + +In each of these cases, you simply do not know whether what you are doing is legal or not. Of course, you can take the risk, though that becomes less advisable if you want to share your work with others. Each broadening of the circle of sharing increases the value to society but also the legal danger to you. What if you want to put the course materials on the Net, or publish the anthology, or display the movie? Perhaps you can try to persuade your publisher or employer or distributor to take the risk. Perhaps you can track down the authors of every piece you wish to use and puzzle through the way to get a legal release from them stating that they give you permission to use the work they did not even know they had copyright over. Or you can give up. Whatever happens, you waste time and effort in trying to figure out a way of getting around a system that is designed around neither your needs nor the needs of many of the people whose work you want to use. + +Apart from doing away with the need to indicate that you want your works to be copyrighted, we have lengthened the copyright term. We did this without any credible evidence that it was necessary to encourage innovation. We have extended the terms of living and even of dead authors over works that have already been created. (It is hard to argue that this was a necessary incentive, what with the works already existing and the authors often being dead.) We have done away with the need to renew the right. Everyone gets the term of life plus seventy years, or ninety-five years for corporate “works for hire.” All protected by a “strict liability” system with scary penalties. And, as I said before, we have made all those choices just when the Internet makes their costs particularly tragic. + +In sum, we have forgone the Library of Congress I described without even apparently realizing we were doing so. We have locked up most of twentieth-century culture and done it in a particularly inefficient and senseless way, creating vast costs in order to convey proportionally tiny benefits. (And all without much complaint from those who normally object to inefficient government subsidy programs.) Worst of all, we have turned the system on its head. Copyright, intended to be the servant of creativity, a means of promoting access to information, is becoming an obstacle to both. + +That, then, is one example of the stakes of the debate over intellectual property policy. Unfortunately, the problem of copyright terms is just one example, one instance of a larger pattern. As I will try to show, this pattern is repeated again and again in patents, in trademarks, and elsewhere in copyright law. This is not an isolated “glitch.” It is a complicated but relentless tendency that has led to a hypertrophy of intellectual property rights and an assault on the public domain. In fact, in many cases, the reality is even worse: there appears to be a complete ignorance about the value of the public domain. Property’s opposite, its outside, is getting short shrift. + +To paraphrase a song from my youth, “how did we get here?” Where should we turn to understand the role of intellectual property in the era of the Internet and the decoding of the human genome? We could turn to the cutting edge of technology or to economics or information theory. But none of those would be as useful a starting place as a letter that was written about two hundred years ago, using a high-tech quill pen, about a subject far from the digital world. + +2~ Chapter 1: Further Reading + +This chapter argues that at least one goal we have in an intellectual property system is the attempt to solve various “public goods problems.” (Subsequent chapters defend that view historically and normatively, discuss the ideas of moral right and natural right, the tradition of the droits d’auteur, and the similarities and dissimilarities between the arguments for tangible and intellectual property rights. Further reading on those issues can be found in the relevant chapter.) + +The single best starting point for someone who wishes to understand an economic perspective on intellectual property is William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003). The story laid out in this chapter is one largely (but not entirely) focused on the idea of intellectual property rights offered as incentives—the carrot that induces the author to write, the inventor to research, the investor to fund that research, and the corporation to develop attractive and stable brand names that convey reliable information to consumers. This is conventionally known as the ex ante perspective. But as the chapter also hints, intellectual property rights, like property rights in general, have a role after the innovation has occurred—facilitating its efficient exploitation, allowing inventors to disclose their inventions to prospective licensees without thereby losing control of them, and providing a state-constructed, neatly tied bundle of entitlements that can be efficiently traded in the market. Readers interested in these perspectives will benefit from looking at these articles: Edmund Kitch, “The Nature and Function of the Patent System,” Journal of Law and Economics 20 (1977): 265–290; Paul J. Heald, “A Transaction Costs Theory of Patent Law,” Ohio State Law Journal 66 (2005): 473–509; and Robert Merges, “A Transactional View of Property Rights,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 20 (2005): 1477–1520. Of course, just as the incentives account of intellectual property has its skeptics, so these ex post theories attract skepticism from those who believe that, in practice, the rights will not be clear and well-delineated but vague and potentially overlapping, that the licensing markets will find themselves entangled in “patent thickets” from which the participants can escape only at great cost or by ignoring the law altogether. It is worth comparing Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research,” Science 280 (1998): 698–701, with John Walsh, Ashish Arora, and Wesley Cohen, “Effects of Research Tool Patents and Licensing on Biomedical Innovation,” in Patents in the Knowledge-Based Economy (Washington D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003), 285–340. There is a nice irony to imagining that the necessary mechanism of the efficient market is “ignore the property rights when they are inconvenient.” + +The skeptics argue that the alternative to a deeply commodified world of invention and innovation, with hundreds of thousands of licensing markets, is a rich information and innovation commons, from which all can draw freely, supporting a thin and well-defined layer of intellectual property rights close to the ultimate commercially viable innovation. The rhetorical structure of the debate—replete with paradox and inversion—is laid out in James Boyle, “Cruel, Mean, or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and Digital Intellectual Property,” Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000): 2007–2039. For some of the difficulties in the attempt to arrive at a coherent economic theory of intellectual property, see James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 35–46. Finally, while I urge that at the outset we must care about the actual effects and economic incentives provided by intellectual property rights, I am by no means asserting that we should stop there. Indeed to do so would dramatically impoverish our view of the world. James Boyle, “Enclosing the Genome: What Squabbles over Genetic Patents Could Teach Us,” in Perspectives on Properties of the Human Genome Project, ed. F. Scott Kieff (San Diego, Calif.: Elsevier Academic Press, 2003), 97, 107–109. + +In other words, as all this suggests, this chapter is only an introduction to a rich and complex debate. + +1~ Chapter 2: Thomas Jefferson Writes a Letter + +On August 13, 1813, Thomas Jefferson took up his pen to write to Isaac McPherson.~{Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson (August 13, 1813), in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1907), vol. XIII, 326–338 (hereinafter Letter to McPherson), available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjser1.html (follow “May 1, 1812” hyperlink, then navigate to image 1057).}~ It was a quiet week in Jefferson’s correspondence. He wrote a letter to Madison about the appointment of a tax assessor, attempted to procure a government position for an acquaintance, produced a fascinating and lengthy series of comments on a new “Rudiments of English Grammar,” discussed the orthography of nouns ending in “y,” accepted the necessary delay in the publication of a study on the anatomy of mammoth bones, completed a brief biography of Governor Lewis, and, in general, confined himself narrowly in subject matter.~{For example, attempting to procure a former stable master a position (letter from Thomas Jefferson to Samuel H. Smith [August 15, 1813], available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjser1.html [follow “May 1, 1812” hyperlink, then navigate to image 1070]), comments on “Rudiments of English Grammar” (letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Waldo [August 16, 1813], in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. XIII, 338–347), orthography of the plurals of nouns ending in “y” (letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Wilson [August 17, 1813], Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. XIII, 347–348), accepting the necessary delay in the publication of a study on the anatomy of mammoth bones (letter from Thomas Jefferson to Caspar Wistar [August 17, 1813], available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjser1.html [follow “May 1, 1812” hyperlink, then navigate to image 1095]), and discussing the Lewis biography (excerpt of a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Paul Allen [August 18, 1813], Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents 1783–1854, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 586). \\ It is easy, in fact, reading this prodigious outpouring of knowledge and enthusiasm, to forget the other side of Jefferson and the social system that gave him the leisure to write these letters. Just a few weeks before he wrote to McPherson, he wrote a letter to Jeremiah Goodman about a slave called Hercules who had been imprisoned as a runaway. \\ “The folly he has committed certainly justifies further punishment, and he goes in expectation of receiving it. . . .” Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Jeremiah A. Goodman (July 26, 1813), in Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, ed. Edwin Morris Betts (Charlottesville, Va.: American Philosophical Society, 1999), 36. While leaving the matter up to Goodman, Jefferson argues for leniency and for refraining from further punishment. In that sense, it is a humane letter. But this is one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, full of glorious principles—unalienable rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—enunciated in the context of indignation at relatively mild colonial policies of taxation and legislation. How could a man who thought that taxing tea was tyranny, and that all men had an unalienable right to liberty, believe that it was “folly” justifying “further punishment” for a slave to run away? Reading the letter—a curiously intimate, almost voyeuristic act—one finds oneself saying “What was he thinking?”}~ But on the 13th of August, Jefferson’s mind was on intellectual property, and most specifically, patents. + +Jefferson’s writing is, as usual, apparently effortless. Some find his penmanship a little hard to decipher. To me, used to plowing through the frenzied chicken tracks that law students produce during exams, it seems perfectly clear. If handwriting truly showed the architecture of the soul, then Jefferson’s would conjure up Monticello or the University of Virginia. There are a few revisions and interlineations, a couple of words squeezed in with a caret at the bottom of the line, but for the most part the lines of handwriting simply roll on and on—“the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain,”~{Letter to McPherson, 333.}~ to quote a phrase from the letter, caught in vellum and ink, though that brain has been dust for more than a century and a half. I love libraries. I love the mushroom smell of gently rotting paper, the flaky crackle of manuscripts, and the surprise of matching style of handwriting with style of thought. Today, though, I am viewing his letter over the Internet on a computer screen. (You can too. The details are [in the footnotes].) + +I think Jefferson would have been fascinated by the Internet. After all, this was the man whose library became the Library of Congress,~{See Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Baldwin (April 14, 1802), in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. XIX, 128–129.}~ who exemplifies the notion of the brilliant dabbler in a hundred fields, whose own book collection was clearly a vital and much consulted part of his daily existence, and whose vision of politics celebrates the power of an informed citizenry. Admittedly, the massive conflicts between Jefferson’s announced principles and his actions on the issue of slavery have led some, though not me, to doubt that there is any sincerity or moral instruction to be found in his words.~{See Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 2nd ed. (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), ix; Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997) 1, 40–43, 60–61, 222.}~ But even those who find him a sham can hardly fail to see the continual and obvious joy he felt about knowledge and its spread. + +In the letter to Isaac McPherson, a letter that has become very famous in the world of the digerati,~{Letter to McPherson, 336, quoted in John Perry Barlow, “Economy of Ideas,” Wired (March 1994): 84. For a careful scholarly explanation of the antimonopolist origins of eighteenth-century ideas such as Jefferson’s, see Tyler T. Ochoa and Mark Rose, “The Anti-Monopoly Origins of the Patent and Copyright Clause,” Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. 49 (2002): 675–706. One scholar has offered a thoughtful critique that suggests Jefferson’s views were not, in fact, representative either of the times or of the attitudes of the other framers toward intellectual property. See Adam Mossoff, “Who Cares What Thomas Jefferson Thought about Patents? Reevaluating the Patent ‘Privilege’ in Historical Context,” Cornell Law Review 92 (2007): 953–1012.}~ this joy becomes manifest. The initial subject of the correspondence seems far from the online world. McPherson wrote to Jefferson about “elevators, conveyers and Hopper-boys.” Specifically, he wanted to know Jefferson’s opinion of a patent that had been issued to Mr. Oliver Evans. Jefferson devotes a paragraph to a recent retrospective extension of patent rights (he disapproves) and then turns to Evans’s elevators. + +Patents then, as now, were only supposed to be given for inventions that were novel, nonobvious, and useful. Jefferson had considerable doubt whether Evans’s device, essentially a revolving string of buckets used to move grain, actually counted as “an invention.” “The question then whether such a string of buckets was invented first by Oliver Evans, is a mere question of fact in mathematical history. Now, turning to such books only as I happen to possess, I find abundant proof that this simple machinery has been in use from time immemorial.” Jefferson cites from his library example after example of references to the “Persian wheel”—a string of buckets to move water. The display of scholarship is effortless and without artifice. If the device existed to move water, he declares, Mr. Evans can hardly patent it to move grain. “If one person invents a knife convenient for pointing our pens, another cannot have a patent right for the same knife to point our pencils. A compass was invented for navigating the sea; another could not have a patent right for using it to survey land.”~{Letter to McPherson, 328.}~ + +So far as we can tell, this was the only part of the letter that interested McPherson. Later correspondence indicates that he had a pamphlet printed questioning the patent.~{Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Thomas Cooper (February 10, 1814), in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1321.}~ But while it is impressive to see Jefferson’s easy command of historical evidence or his grasp of the importance of limiting the subject matter, scope, and duration of patents, these qualities alone would not have given the letter the fame it now has. It is when Jefferson turns to the idea of intellectual property itself that the letter becomes more than a historical curiosity. In a couple of pages, quickly jotted down on a humid August day in 1813, he frames the issue as well as anyone has since. + +He starts by dismissing the idea “that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs.” In lines that will sound strange to those who assume that the framers of the Constitution were property absolutists, Jefferson argues that “stable ownership” of even tangible property is “a gift of social law.” Intellectual property, then, has still less of a claim to some permanent, absolute, and natural status. + +_1 [W]hile it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.~{Letter to McPherson, 333.}~ + +Jefferson’s point here may seem obscure to us. We are not used to starting every argument from first principles. But it is in fact quite simple. It is society that creates property rights that go beyond mere occupancy. It does so for several reasons—reasons of both practicality and natural justice. (Elsewhere in his writings, Jefferson expands on this point at greater length.) One of those reasons has to do with the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of two different people having full and unfettered ownership of the same piece of property simultaneously. Another linked reason comes from the practicality of excluding others from our property, so that we can exploit it secure from the plunder or sloth of others. The economists you encountered in Chapter 1 have, with their usual linguistic felicity, coined the terms “rivalrous” and “excludable” to describe these characteristics. + +With rivalrous property, one person’s use precludes another’s. If I drink the milk, you cannot. Excludable property is, logically enough, property from which others can easily be excluded or kept out. But ideas seem to have neither of these characteristics. + +_1 If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possess the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.~{Ibid., 333–334.}~ + +Those who quote the passage sometimes stop here, which is a shame, because it leaves the impression that Jefferson was unequivocally against intellectual property rights. But that would be a considerable overstatement. When he says that inventions can never be the subject of property, he means a permanent and exclusive property right which, as a matter of natural right, no just government could abridge. However, inventions could be covered by temporary state-created monopolies instituted for the common good. In the lines immediately following the popularly quoted excerpt, Jefferson goes on: + +_1 Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from [inventions], as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.~{Ibid.}~ + +Jefferson’s message was a skeptical recognition that intellectual property rights might be necessary, a careful explanation that they should not be treated as natural rights, and a warning of the monopolistic dangers that they pose. He immediately goes on to say something else, something that is, if anything, more true in the world of patents on Internet business methods and gene sequences than it was in the world of “conveyers and Hopper-boys.” + +_1 Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not.~{Ibid., 335.}~ + +So Jefferson gives us a classic set of cautions, cautions that we should be required to repeat, as police officers repeat the Miranda Warning to a suspect. In this case, they should be repeated before we rush off into the world of intellectual property policy rather than before we talk to the police without our lawyers present. + +2~ The Jefferson Warning + +Like the Miranda Warning, the Jefferson Warning has a number of important parts. + +_* First, the stuff we cover with intellectual property rights has certain vital differences from the stuff we cover with tangible property rights. Partly because of those differences, Jefferson, like most of his successors in the United States, does not see intellectual property as a claim of natural right based on expended labor. Instead it is a temporary state-created monopoly given to encourage further innovation. + +_* Second, there is no “entitlement” to have an intellectual property right. Such rights may or may not be given as a matter of social “will and convenience” without “claim or complaint from any body.” + +_* Third, intellectual property rights are not and should not be permanent; in fact they should be tightly limited in time and should not last a day longer than necessary to encourage the innovation in the first place. + +_* Fourth, a linked point, they have considerable monopolistic dangers—they may well produce more “embarrassment than advantage.” In fact, since intellectual property rights potentially restrain the benevolent tendency of “ideas . . . [to] freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man,” they may in some cases actually hinder rather than encourage innovation. + +_* Fifth, deciding whether to have an intellectual property system is only the first choice in a long series.~{See ibid., 333–335.}~ Even if one believes that intellectual property is a good idea, which I firmly do, one will still have the hard job of saying which types of innovation or information are “worth to the public the embarrassment” of an exclusive right, and of drawing the limits of that right. This line-drawing task turns out to be very difficult. Without the cautions that Jefferson gave us it is impossible to do it well. + +Jefferson’s message was famously echoed and amplified thirty years later in Britain by Thomas Babington Macaulay.~{Readers interested in learning more about this fascinating man could begin with George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, London ed. (Longmans, 1876).}~ Macaulay’s speeches to the House of Commons in 1841 on the subject of copyright term extension still express better than anything else the position that intellectual property rights are necessary evils which must be carefully circumscribed by law. In order for the supply of valuable books to be maintained, authors “must be remunerated for their literary labour. And there are only two ways in which they can be remunerated. One of those ways is patronage; the other is copyright.” Patronage is rejected out of hand. “I can conceive no system more fatal to the integrity and independence of literary men than one under which they should be taught to look for their daily bread to the favour of ministers and nobles.”~{Thomas Babington Macaulay, speech delivered in the House of Commons (February 5, 1841), in The Life and Works of Lord Macaulay: Complete in Ten Volumes, Edinburgh ed. (Longmans, 1897), vol. VIII, 198 (hereinafter Macaulay Speech).}~ + +_1 We have, then, only one resource left. We must betake ourselves to copyright, be the inconveniences of copyright what they may. Those inconveniences, in truth, are neither few nor small. Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly. . . . I believe, Sir, that I may safely take it for granted that the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad. And I may with equal safety challenge my honorable friend to find out any distinction between copyright and other privileges of the same kind; any reason why a monopoly of books should produce an effect directly the reverse of that which was produced by the East India Company’s monopoly of tea, or by Lord Essex’s monopoly of sweet wines. Thus, then, stands the case. It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.~{Ibid., 199.}~ + +Notice that it is the monopolistic quality of intellectual property that really disturbs Macaulay. His was a generation of thinkers for whom the negative effect of monopolies of any kind (and state-granted monopolies in particular) was axiomatic. He becomes almost contemptuous when one of the supporters of copyright extension declared that it was merely “a theory” that monopoly makes things expensive. Macaulay agrees, tongue in cheek. “It is a theory in the same sense in which it is a theory, that day and night follow each other, that lead is heavier than water, that bread nourishes, that arsenic poisons, that alcohol intoxicates.”~{Ibid., 198–199.}~ + +These words from Jefferson and Macaulay encapsulate an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century free-trade skepticism about intellectual property, a skepticism that is widely, but not universally, believed to have played an important role in shaping the history of intellectual property in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Certainly the U.S. Supreme Court has offered support for that position,~{Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1, 7–11 (1966).}~ and, with one significant recent exception,~{Adam Mossoff, “Who Cares What Thomas Jefferson Thought about Patents? Reevaluating the Patent ‘Privilege’ in Historical Context,” Cornell Law Review 92 (2007): 953–1012. In a thoughtful, carefully reasoned, and provocative article, Professor Mossoff argues that Jefferson’s views have been misused by the courts and legal historians, and that if we understand the use of the word “privilege” in historical context, we see that the “patent privilege” was influenced by a philosophy of natural rights as well as the antimonopolist utilitarianism described here. I both agree and disagree. \\ Professor Mossoff’s central point—that the word “privilege” was not understood by eighteenth-century audiences as the antonym of “right”—is surely correct. To lay great stress on the linguistic point that the patent right is “merely” a “privilege” is to rest one’s argument on a weak reed. But this is not the only argument. One could also believe that intellectual property rights have vital conceptual and practical differences with property rights over tangible objects or land, that the framers of the Constitution who were most involved in the intellectual property clause were deeply opposed to the confusion involved in conflating the two, and that they looked upon this confusion particularly harshly because of an intense concern about state monopolies. One can still disagree with this assessment, of course; one can interpret Madison’s words this way or that, or interpret subsequent patent decisions as deep statements of principle or commonplace rhetorical flourishes. Still it seems to me a much stronger argument than the one based on the privilege–right distinction. I am not sure Professor Mossoff would disagree. \\ Professor Mossoff is also correct to point out that a “legal privilege” did sometimes mean to an eighteenth-century reader something that the state was duty-bound to grant. There was, in fact, a wide range of sources from which an eighteenth-century lawyer could derive a state obligation to grant a privilege. Eighteenth-century legal talk was a normative bouillabaisse—a rich stew of natural right, common law, utility, and progress—often thrown together without regard to their differences. Some lawyers and judges thought the common law embodied natural rights, others that it represented the dictates of “progress” and “utility,” and others, more confusingly still, seemed to adopt all of those views at once. \\ Nevertheless, I would agree that some eighteenth-century writers saw claims of common-law right beneath the assertion of some “privileges” and that a smaller number of those assumed common-law right and natural right to be equivalent, and thus saw a strong state obligation to grant a particular privilege based on natural right, wherever that privilege had been recognized by English or U.S. common law. But here is where I part company with Professor Mossoff. \\ First, I do not believe that the most important architects of the intellectual property clause shared that view when it came to patents and copyrights. Jefferson, of course, was not one of those who believed the state was so bound. “Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from [inventions], as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body” (Letter to McPherson, 334, emphasis added). More importantly, Jefferson’s thinking about patents was infused by a deeply utilitarian, antimonopolist tinge. So, I would argue, was Madison’s. \\ The quotations from Madison which I give later show clearly, to me at least, that Madison shared Jefferson’s deeply utilitarian attitude toward patent and copyright law. I think there is very good reason to believe that this attitude was dominant among the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers whose writings were so influential to the framers. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the American Revolution was violently against the world of monopoly and corruption that was the supposed target of the English Statute of Monopolies (itself hardly a natural rights document). Yes, those thinkers might fall back into talking about how hard an inventor had worked or construing a patent expansively. Yes, they might think that within the boundaries of settled law, it would be unjust to deny one inventor a patent when the general scheme of patent law had already been laid down. But that did not and does not negate the antimonopolist and, for that matter, utilitarian roots of the Constitution’s intellectual property clause. \\ Second, while I agree that there were strands of natural right thinking and a labor theory of value in the U.S. intellectual property system, and that they continue to this day—indeed, these were the very views that the Feist decision discussed in Chapter 9 repudiated, as late as 1991—I think it is easy to make too much of that fact. Is this signal or noise? There are conceptual reasons to think it is the latter. Later in this chapter I discuss the evolution of the droits d’auteur tradition in France. Here, at the supposed heart of the natural rights tradition, we find thinkers driven inexorably to consider the question of limits. How far does the supposed natural right extend—in time, in space, in subject matter? It is at that moment that the utilitarian focus and the fear of monopoly represented by Jefferson and Madison—and, for that matter, Locke and Condorcet—become so important. \\ Professor Mossoff is correct to criticize the focus on the word “privilege,” and also correct that the ideas of natural right and the labor theory of value always color attitudes toward intellectual property claims. But it would be an equal and opposite mistake to ignore two points. First, intellectual property rights are profoundly different from physical property rights over land in ways that should definitively shape policy choices. Second, partly because of those differences, and because of the influence of free-trade Scottish Enlightenment thought on the American Revolution in particular, there was a powerful antimonopolist and free-trade sentiment behind the copyright and patent clause. Simply read the clause. Congress is given the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Does this really read like the work of a group of believers in natural right? On the contrary, it reads like a limited grant of power to achieve a particular utilitarian goal. That sentiment—nicely encapsulated in but by no means limited to the words of Jefferson—is still a good starting place for an understanding of intellectual property.}~ historians of intellectual property have agreed.~{See, e.g., Ochoa and Rose, “Anti-Monopoly Origins,” and Edward C. Walterscheid, The Nature of the Intellectual Property Clause: A Study in Historical Perspective (Buffalo, N.Y.: W. S. Hein, 2002). Ochoa, Rose, and Walterscheid stress the antimonopolist concerns that animated some of those who were most active in the debates about intellectual property. They also point out the influence of the English Statute of Monopolies of 1623, which attacked monopolies in general, while making an exception for periods of legal exclusivity for a limited time granted over “sole Working or Making of any Manner of new Manufacture within this Realm, to the first true Inventor or Inventors of such Manufactures which others at the time of the Making of such Letters Patents Grants did not use, so they be not contrary to the Law, nor mischievous to the State, by Raising of the Prices of Commodities at home, or Hurt by Trade, or generally inconvenient.”}~ Jefferson himself had believed that the Constitution should have definite limits on both the term and the scope of intellectual property rights.~{For example, in a letter to Madison commenting on the draft of the Constitution: “I like it, as far as it goes; but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additions would have pleased me: . . . Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding . . . years, but for no longer term, and no other purpose.” Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (August 28, 1789), in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 7, 450–451.}~ James Madison stressed the costs of any intellectual property right and the need to limit its term and to allow the government to end the monopoly by compulsory purchase if necessary.~{“Monopolies tho’ in certain cases useful ought to be granted with caution, and guarded with strictness against abuse. The Constitution of the U.S. has limited them to two cases—the authors of Books, and of useful inventions, in both which they are considered as a compensation for a benefit actually gained to the community as a purchase of property which the owner might otherwise withhold from public use. There can be no just objection to a temporary monopoly in these cases: but it ought to be temporary because under that limitation a sufficient recompence and encouragement may be given. The limitation is particularly proper in the case of inventions, because they grow so much out of preceding ones that there is the less merit in the authors; and because, for the same reason, the discovery might be expected in a short time from other hands. . . . Monopolies have been granted in other Countries, and by some of the States in this, on another principle, that of supporting some useful undertaking, until experience and success should render the monopoly unnecessary, and lead to a salutary competition . . . But grants of this sort can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all; the danger being very great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly, will be overbalanced by the evil effect of the precedent; and it being not impossible that the monopoly itself in its original operation, may produce more evil than good. In all cases of monopoly, not excepting those in favor of authors and inventors, it would be well to reserve to the State, a right to extinguish the monopoly by paying a specified and reasonable sum. . . . Perpetual monopolies of every sort are forbidden not only by the Genius of free Governments, but by the imperfection of human foresight.” James Madison, “Monopolies, Perpetuities, Corporations, Ecclesiastical Endowments” (1819), in “Aspects of Monopoly One Hundred Years Ago,” Harper’s Magazine, ed. Galliard Hunt, 128 (1914), 489–490; also in “Madison’s ‘Detatched Memoranda,’ ” ed. Elizabeth Fleet, William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 3 no. 4 (1946): 551–552, available at http://www.constitution.org/jm/18191213_monopolies.htm.}~ Adam Smith expressed similar views. Monopolies that carry on long after they were needed to encourage some socially beneficial activity, he said, tax every other citizen “very absurdly in two different ways: first, by the high price of goods, which, in the case of a free trade, they could buy much cheaper; and, secondly, by their total exclusion from a branch of business which it might be both convenient and profitable for many of them to carry on.”~{Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, pt. 3, Of the Expenses of Public Works and Public Institutions, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1880), 2:339: “When a company of merchants undertake, at their own risk and expense, to establish a new trade with some remote and barbarous nation, it may not be unreasonable to incorporate them into a joint-stock company, and to grant them, in case of their success, a monopoly of the trade for a certain number of years. It is the easiest and most natural way in which the state can recompense them for hazarding a dangerous and expensive experiment, of which the public is afterwards to reap the benefit. A temporary monopoly of this kind may be vindicated, upon the same principles upon which a like monopoly of a new machine is granted to its inventor, and that of a new book to its author. But upon the expiration of the term, the monopoly ought certainly to determine; the forts and garrisons, if it was found necessary to establish any, to be taken into the hands of government, their value to be paid to the company, and the trade to be laid open to all the subjects of the state. By a perpetual monopoly, all the other subjects of the state are taxed very absurdly in two different ways: first, by the high price of goods, which, in the case of a free trade, they could buy much cheaper; and, secondly, by their total exclusion from a branch of business which it might be both convenient and profitable for many of them to carry on.”}~ + +It is important to note, though, that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers I have quoted were not against intellectual property. All of them—Jefferson, Madison, Smith, and Macaulay—could see good reason why intellectual property rights should be granted. They simply insisted on weighing the costs and benefits of a new right, each expansion of scope, each lengthening of the copyright term. Here is Macaulay again, waxing eloquently sarcastic about the costs and benefits of extending the copyright term so that it would last many years after the author’s death: + +_1 I will take an example. Dr. Johnson died fifty-six years ago. If the law were what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it, somebody would now have the monopoly of Dr. Johnson’s works. Who that somebody would be it is impossible to say; but we may venture to guess. I guess, then, that it would have been some bookseller, who was the assign of another bookseller, who was the grandson of a third bookseller, who had bought the copyright from Black Frank, the Doctor’s servant and residuary legatee, in 1785 or 1786. Now, would the knowledge that this copyright would exist in 1841 have been a source of gratification to Johnson? Would it have stimulated his exertions? Would it have once drawn him out of his bed before noon? Would it have once cheered him under a fit of the spleen? Would it have induced him to give us one more allegory, one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal? I firmly believe not. I firmly believe that a hundred years ago, when he was writing our debates for the Gentleman’s Magazine, he would very much rather have had twopence to buy a plate of shin of beef at a cook’s shop underground.~{Macaulay Speech, 200–201.}~ + +Again, I am struck by how seamlessly Macaulay coupled beautiful, evocative writing and careful, analytic argument. Admittedly, he was remarkable even in his own time, but it is hard to imagine a contemporary speechwriter, let alone a politician, coming up with Dr. Johnson “cheered . . . under a fit of the spleen” or buying a “plate of shin of beef at a cook’s shop underground.” Almost as hard as it is to imagine any of them engaging in Jefferson’s correspondence about mammoth bones, orthography, and the practicalities of the nautical torpedo. But I digress. + +Macaulay is not against using a lengthened copyright term to give an extra reward to writers, even if this would dramatically raise the price of books. What he objects to is dramatically raising the price of books written by long-dead authors in a way that benefits the authors hardly at all. + +_1 Considered as a reward to him, the difference between a twenty years’ and a sixty years’ term of posthumous copyright would have been nothing or next to nothing. But is the difference nothing to us? I can buy Rasselas for sixpence; I might have had to give five shillings for it. I can buy the Dictionary, the entire genuine Dictionary, for two guineas, perhaps for less; I might have had to give five or six guineas for it. Do I grudge this to a man like Dr. Johnson? Not at all. Show me that the prospect of this boon roused him to any vigorous effort, or sustained his spirits under depressing circumstances, and I am quite willing to pay the price of such an object, heavy as that price is. But what I do complain of is that my circumstances are to be worse, and Johnson’s none the better; that I am to give five pounds for what to him was not worth a farthing.~{Ibid., 201.}~ + +Though Macaulay won the debate over copyright term extension, it is worth noting here that his opponents triumphed in the end. As I pointed out in the last chapter, the copyright term in most of Europe and in the United States now lasts for the life of the author and an additional seventy years afterward, ten years more than the proposal which made Macaulay so indignant. In the United States, corporate owners of “works-for-hire” get ninety-five years.~{17 U.S.C. § 304 (1998).}~ The Supreme Court recently heard a constitutional challenge to the law which expanded the term of copyrights by twenty years to reach this remarkable length.~{Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003).}~ (Full disclosure: I helped prepare an amicus brief in that case.)~{See Brief for Hal Roach Studios and Michael Agee as Amici Curiae Supporting Petitioners, Eldred v. Ashcroft.}~ This law, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, also extended existing copyrights over works which had already been created.~{Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Pub. L. No. 105-298, 112 Stat. 2827 (1998).}~ As I observed earlier, this is particularly remarkable if the idea is to give an incentive to create. Obviously the authors of existing works were given sufficient incentive to create; we know that because they did. Why do we need to give the people who now hold their copyrights another twenty years of monopoly? This is all cost and no benefit. Macaulay would have been furious. + +When the Supreme Court heard the case, it was presented with a remarkable friend-of-the-court brief from seventeen economists, several of them Nobel laureates.~{Brief of George A. Akerlof, Kenneth J. Arrow, Timothy F. Bresnahan, James M. Buchanan, Ronald H. Coase, Linda R. Cohen, Milton Friedman, Jerry R. Green, Robert W. Hahn, Thomas W. Hazlett, C. Scott Hemphill, Robert E. Litan, Roger G. Noll, Richard Schmalensee, Steven Shavell, Hal R. Varian, and Richard J. Zeckhauser as Amici Curiae In Support of Petitioners, Eldred v. Ashcroft, available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvashcroft/supct/amici/economists.pdf. }~ The economists made exactly Macaulay’s argument, though in less graceful language. They pointed out that copyright extension imposed enormous costs on the public and yet conveyed tiny advantages, if any, to the creator. Such an extension, particularly over works that had already been written, hardly fit the limits of Congress’s power under the Constitution “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”~{U.S. Constitution, art. I, § 8, cl. 8. }~ Macaulay doubted that these enormously long terms would encourage the living. Surely they would do little to encourage the dead, while imposing considerable costs of access on the living? Thus they could hardly be said to “promote the progress” of knowledge as the Constitution requires. The Court was unmoved by this and other arguments. It upheld the law. I will return to its decision at the end of the book. + +The intellectual property skeptics had other concerns. Macaulay was particularly worried about the power that went with a transferable and inheritable monopoly. It is not only that the effect of monopoly is “to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad.” Macaulay also pointed out that those who controlled the monopoly, particularly after the death of the original author, might be given too great a control over our collective culture. Censorious heirs or purchasers of the copyright might prevent the reprinting of a great work because they disagreed with its morals.~{“These are strong cases. I have shown you that, if the law had been what you are now going to make it, the finest prose work of fiction in the language, the finest biographical work in the language, would very probably have been suppressed. But I have stated my case weakly. The books which I have mentioned are singularly inoffensive books, books not touching on any of those questions which drive even wise men beyond the bounds of wisdom. There are books of a very different kind, books which are the rallying points of great political and religious parties. What is likely to happen if the copyright of one of these books should by descent or transfer come into the possession of some hostile zealot?” Macaulay Speech, 199, 206. }~ We might lose the works of Found them distasteful and used the power of the copyright to suppress them. This is no mere fantasy, Macaulay tells us. After praising the novels of Samuel Richardson in terms that, to modern eyes, seem a little fervid (“No writings, those of Shakespeare excepted, show more profound knowledge of the human heart”), Macaulay recounts the story of Richardson’s grandson, “a clergyman in the city of London.” Though a “most upright and excellent man,” the grandson “had conceived a strong prejudice against works of fiction,” “thought all novel-reading not only frivolous but sinful,” and “had never thought it right to read one of his grandfather’s books.”~{Ibid., 205.}~ Extended copyright terms might hand over the copyright to such a man. The public would lose, not because they had to pay exorbitant prices that denied some access to the work, but because the work would be altogether suppressed. Richardson’s novels—Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and so on—are now the preserve of the classroom rather than the drawing room, so this might not seem like much of a loss. But Macaulay’s next example is not so easy to dismiss. + +_1 One of the most instructive, interesting, and delightful books in our language is Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Now it is well known that Boswell’s eldest son considered this book, considered the whole relation of Boswell to Johnson, as a blot in the escutcheon of the family. He thought, not perhaps altogether without reason, that his father had exhibited himself in a ludicrous and degrading light. And thus he became so sore and irritable that at last he could not bear to hear the Life of Johnson mentioned. Suppose that the law had been what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it. Suppose that the copyright of Boswell’s Life of Johnson had belonged, as it well might, during sixty years, to Boswell’s eldest son. What would have been the consequence? An unadulterated copy of the finest biographical work in the world would have been as scarce as the first edition of Camden’s Britannia.~{Ibid., 206.}~ + +From more recent examples we can see that outright suppression is not the only thing to fear. The authors’ heirs, or the corporations which have purchased their rights, may keep policing the boundaries of the work long after the original author is dead. In 2001, Alice Randall published The Wind Done Gone. As its title might indicate, The Wind Done Gone was a 220-page “critique of and reaction to” the world of Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.~{Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (New York: Macmillan, 1936).}~ Most crucially, perhaps, it was a version of Gone With the Wind told from the slaves’ point of view. Suddenly the actions of Rhett (“R”), Scarlett (“Other”), and an obviously gay Ashley (“Dreamy Gentleman”) come into new perspective through the eyes of Scarlett’s “mulatto” half-sister. Mitchell’s estate wanted to prevent publication of the book. At first they were successful.~{SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co. , 136 F. Supp. 2d 1357 (N.D.Ga. 2001). For thoughtful commentary see Jed Rubenfeld, “The Freedom of Imagination: Copyright’s Constitutionality,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2002): 1–60. Robert S. Boynton provides a beautifully readable account of copyright’s restrictions in “The Tyranny of Copyright?” The New York Times Magazine (January 25, 2004): 40–45, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25COPYRIGHT.html?ex=1390366800&en=9eb265b1f26e8b14&ei=5007∂ner=USERLAND. }~ As Yochai Benkler puts it, + +_1 Alice Randall, an African American woman, was ordered by a government official not to publish her criticism of the romanticization of the Old South, at least not in the words she wanted to use. The official was not one of the many in Congress and the Administration who share the romantic view of the Confederacy. It was a federal judge in Atlanta who told Randall that she could not write her critique in the words she wanted to use—a judge enforcing copyright law.~{Yochai Benkler, “Through the Looking Glass: Alice and Constitutional Foundations of the Public Domain,” Law and Contemporary Problems 66 (Winter–Spring 2003): 173.}~ + +“They killed Miss Scarlett!” the astonished trial judge said after reading Randall’s book. My colleague Jennifer Jenkins, one of the lawyers in the case, recounts that the judge saw the case in relentlessly physical terms, seeing the parody as a “bulldozer” and Gone With the Wind as a walled country estate into which the bulldozer had violently trespassed. He was consequently unimpressed with the claim that this “bulldozer” was protected by the First Amendment. Eventually, the court of appeals overturned the district court’s judgment.~{SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co. , 268 F.3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001).}~ Fifty-two years after Margaret Mitchell’s death, it was a hotly debated point how much leeway co others to comment upon, critique, embellish upon, and parody the cultural icon she had conjured up. + +2~ A Natural Right? + +To some people, my argument so far—and Jefferson’s and Macaulay’s—will seem to miss the point. They see intellectual property rights not as an incentive, a method of encouraging the production and distribution of innovation, but as a natural or moral right. My book is mine because I wrote it, not because society or the law gives me some period of exclusivity over allowing the copying of its contents. My invention is mine because it came from my brain, not because the law declares a twenty-year monopoly over its production or distribution. My logo is mine because I worked hard on it, not because the state grants me a trademark in order to lower search costs and prevent consumer confusion. One answer is simply to say “In the United States, the framers of the Constitution, the legislature, and the courts have chosen to arrange things otherwise. In copyright, patent, and trademark law—despite occasional deviations—they have embraced the utilitarian view instead.” + +Broadly speaking, that answer is correct.~{See note 19 of this chapter for a discussion of the most recent and thoughtful challenge to this claim.}~ It also holds, to a lesser extent, in Britain. Even in the droits d’auteur countries, which have a markedly different copyright law regime, it largely holds for their patent and trademark law systems, and utilitarian strands suffuse even “the sacred rights of authors.” So, on a national level, we have rejected or dramatically limited the natural rights view, and on an international level, we have rejected it in “industrial property”—patent and trademark—and modified it in copyright. + +I think this answer is correct and important, but we have an obligation to go further. Partly that is because intuitions about ownership coming naturally with labor or discovery continue to influence the law. Partly it is because those moral intuitions are important and appealing. Partly it is because we might wish to modify or criticize our current system. Using the views of the framers, or current law, to preempt discussion is unsatisfactory—even though those views are of particular importance for the legal policy decisions we face in the short run, the issues on which much of my argument is concentrated. + +There are varying stated grounds for natural or moral rights in intellectual creations. Some people may think the book is mine because I worked on it—a Lockean conception where I mix my sweat with these words and receive a property right in the process. + +For all its attractions, there are considerable difficulties with such a view. Even within the world of tangible property, Locke’s theory is more complicated than a simple equation of labor with property right. Jefferson’s account of property is actually closer to Locke’s than many would realize. When Jefferson points out the difficulty in justifying a natural right even in an acre of land, let alone a book, his premises are not radically different from Locke’s. The same is true when Jefferson says that “[s]table ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society.” Even if natural right does create the ground for the property claim, it is “social law” that shapes its contours and guarantees its stability. Jefferson, of course, thought that was particularly true for intellectual property rights. In that context, he felt the natural rights argument was much weaker and the need for socially defined purposive contours and limitations stronger. + +Locke’s own views on what we would think of as copyright are hard to determine. We do know that he had a strong antipathy to monopolies—particularly those affecting expression. He believed, for example, that giving publishers monopolies over great public domain books caused a disastrous fall in quality. Instead, he argued, such books should be open for all to compete to produce the best edition. Of course, he was writing in the context of monopolistic printing privileges—to which he was strongly opposed—rather than of individual authorial rights. Yet he went further and suggested that even for contemporary works, after a particular time in print—say fifty years—books could be printed by anyone. + +_1 I demand whether, if another act for printing should be made, it be not reasonable that nobody should have any peculiar right in any book which has been in print fifty years, but any one as well as another might have liberty to print it: for by such titles as these, which lie dormant, and hinder others, many good books come quite to be lost.~{Lord King, The Life of John Locke with Extracts from His Correspondence, Journals and Common-Place Books vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn, 1830), 379–380.}~ + +This sounds like a strongly utilitarian argument, rather than one based on labor and natural right. Of course, we are not bound by what Locke or Jefferson thought. Still it is striking to see the turn to a utilitarian conception from both of them. + +The Lockean tradition is not the only one, of course. Others believe that the property right stems from the unique personality of each individual—the configurations of your individual genius made manifest in the lines of your sonnet. (Some limit the natural right to literary and expressive work; can a mousetrap or a drug molecule express the riddle and wonder of the human spirit?) Whatever their moral basis or their ambit, the common ground between these positions is the belief in a rationale for intellectual property rights beyond the utilitarian concerns of Jefferson or Macaulay. + +The norms embodied in the moral rights or natural rights tradition are deeply attractive—at least to me. Many of us feel a special connection to our expressive creations—even the humble ones such as a term paper or a birthday poem. It is one of the reasons that the central moral rights in the French droits d’auteur, or author’s rights, tradition resonate so strongly with us. The entitlement of an author to be correctly attributed, to have some control over the integrity of his work, seems important regardless of its utilitarian functions. + +Yet even as we find this claim attractive, we become aware of the need to find limiting principles to it. It gives us pause to think that Margaret Mitchell or her heirs could forbid someone parodying her work. Are there no free-speech limitations? When other forms of authorship, such as computer programs, are brought into copyright’s domain, does the power of the moral right decrease, while the need to limit its scope intensifies? + +Then there is the question of length. How long is a natural right in expression or invention supposed to last? It seems absurd to imagine that Shakespeare’s or Mozart’s heirs, or those who had bought their copyrights, would still be controlling the performance, reproduction, and interpretation of their works hundreds of years after their death. If the rights are truly formed for a nonutilitarian purpose, after all, why should they expire? The person who first acquires property rights in land by work or conquest passes those rights down to heirs and buyers with the chain of transmission reaching to the present day. Should copyright follow suit? Even in France, the home of the strongest form of the droits d’auteur and of the “moral rights” tradition, the answer to this question was in the negative. + +We owe a large part of the literary moral rights tradition to the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. In France before the Revolution, as in England before the Statute of Anne, the first true copyright legislation, the regulation of publishing was through a set of “privileges” given to printers, not rights given to authors. Publishers would have a guild-enforced monopoly over certain titles. Their right was against competing publishers printing the list of titles over which they had the privilege. The Revolution abolished these privileges and, at first, put nothing in their place. On the other hand, as Carla Hesse’s fascinating work reveals, there was intermittent interference by the Prefecture of Police with those who copied most flagrantly. One such publisher was sternly instructed by the police in these terms: + +_1 [A]ccording to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, liberty means only the freedom to do what does not harm others; and that it harms others to appropriate the work of an author, because it is an infringement of the sacred right of property; and that such an enterprise, if it were to remain unpunished, would deprive citizens of the instruction they await from celebrated authors like M. Bernardin de St. Pierre, because no author would want to consecrate his labors to the instruction of his age if piracy were ever authorized.~{Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris, ser. AA, carton 200, feuilles 182–183, “Procès-verbal de police, section de St. Geneviève, 23–24 octobre 1791.” Quoted in Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 91.}~ + +Note the interesting mixture of the language of the “sacred rights of property” and the strong utilitarian justification which cites effects on future literary production and the “instruction” of citizens. + +More expansive conceptions of the rights of authors and, particularly, of publishers were also offered. Even before the Revolution, publishers had been making the arguments that their privileges were a form of property rights and had the very good sense to hire the young Diderot to make those arguments. Hesse quotes his words: + +_1 What form of wealth could belong to a man, if not a work of the mind, . . . if not his own thoughts, . . . the most precious part of himself, that will never perish, that will immortalize him? What comparison could there be between a man, the very substance of man, his soul, and a field, a tree, a vine, that nature has offered in the beginning equally to all, and that an individual has only appropriated through cultivating it?~{Quoted in Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics, 100.}~ + +Diderot’s theme is that authors’ rights should actually be stronger than other property rights for two reasons. First, they relate to the very essence of the person, the most “precious part of himself.” Second, they are the only property rights over something that has been added to the existing store of wealth rather than taken from it. Authorial property, unlike property in land, adds to the common store rather than detracting from it. Locke believed that a just assertion of property rights must leave “enough and as good” for others in the society. What could better satisfy this condition than a property right over a novel that did not exist before I wrote it? One hundred years later Victor Hugo echoed the same thoughts in a speech to the Conseil d’Etat and pointed out at the same time that literary property rights could potentially “reconcile” troublesome authors to society and state. + +_1 You feel the importance and necessity of defending property today. Well, begin by recognising the first and most sacred of all properties, the one which is neither a transmission nor an acquisition but a creation, namely literary property . . . reconcile the artists with society by means of property.~{Victor Hugo, speech to the Conseil d’Etat, September 30, 1849, quoted in Bernard Edelman, Ownership of the Image: Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 41.}~ +Diderot wanted perpetual copyrights for authors and, agreeably to his employers, a correspondingly perpetual printing privilege. If the author’s heirs could not be traced, the copyright would devolve to the current publisher. + +But as Hesse points out, there was another view of literary property—a much more skeptical one put forward best by Condorcet. This view is also an influential part of the heritage of the droits d’auteur, even if it is downplayed in its contemporary rhetoric. Condorcet began by framing the question of literary property as one of political liberty. “Does a man have the right to forbid another man to write the same words that he himself wrote first? That is the question to resolve.”~{Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A. Condorcet O’Connor and M. F. Arago, vol. 11 (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1847), 308, available at http://books.google.com/books?id—ZoGAAAAQAAJ. }~ Like Jefferson, Condorcet is utterly unconvinced that property rights in a book can be compared to those in a field or a piece of furniture which can be occupied or used by only one man. The type of property is “based on the nature of the thing.” He concluded, again in language strikingly similar to Jefferson’s and Macaulay’s, that literary property was not a real property right but a privilege, and one which must be assessed on a utilitarian basis in terms of its contribution to enlightenment.~{Ibid., 308–309: “En effet, on sent qu’il ne peut y avoir aucun rapport entre la propriété d’un ouvrage et celle d’un champ, qui ne peut être cultivé que par un homme; d’un meuble qui ne peut servir qu’à un homme, et dont, par conséquent, la propriété exclusive est fondée sur la nature de la chose. Ainsi ce n’est point ici une propriété dérivée de l’ordre naturel, et défendue par la force sociale; c’est une propriété fondée par la société même. Ce n’est pas un véritable droit, c’est un privilége, comme ces jouissances exclusives de tout ce qui peut être enlevé au possesseur unique sans violence.”}~ + +_1 Any privilege therefore imposes a hindrance on freedom, placing a restriction on the rights of other citizens; As such it is not only harmful to the rights of others who want to copy, but the rights of all those who want copies, and that which increases the price is an injustice. Does the public interest require tother words, are [literary] privileges needed and useful or harmful to the progress of enlightenment?~{Ibid., 309: “Tout privilége est donc une gêne imposée à la liberté, une restriction mise aux droits des autres citoyens; dans ce genre il est nuisible non-seulement aux droits des autres qui veulent copier, mais aux droits de tous ceux qui veulent avoir des copies, et pour qui ce qui en augmente le prix est une injustice. L’intérêt public exige-t-il que les hommes fassent ce sacrifice? Telle est la question qu’il faut examiner; en d’autres termes, les priviléges sont-ils nécessaires, utiles ou nuisibles au progrès des lumières?”}~ + +Condorcet’s conclusion was that they were not necessary and that they could be harmful. “The books that most furthered the progress of enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, the works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, have not enjoyed the benefits of a privilege.” Instead he seemed to favor a combination of “subscriptions” to authors with a trademark-like protection which allowed an author to identify a particular edition of his work as the genuine one, but which also allowed competing editions to circulate freely. In such a market, he believed that the price of the competing editions would fall to “natural” levels—today we would call it marginal cost—but the original author would still be able to charge a modest premium for the edition he authorized or certified because readers would prefer it as both more accurate and more authentic. One possible analogy is to the history of the fashion industry in the United States. It operates largely without design protection but relies heavily on the trademarks accorded to favored designers and brands. There are “knockoffs” of Armani or Balenciaga, but the wealthy still pay an enormous premium for the real thing. + +Condorcet also insisted that whatever protection was accorded to literary works must not extend to the ideas within them. It is the truths within books that make them “useful”—a word that does not have the same luminance and importance for us today as it did for the philosophers of the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. He argued that any privilege given the author could not extend to “preventing another man from exhibiting the same truths, in perfectly the same order, from the same evidence” or from extending those arguments and developing their consequences. In a line that Hesse rightly highlights, he declares that any privileges do not extend over facts or ideas. “Ce n’est pas pour les choses, les idées; c’est pour les mots, pour le nom de l’auteur.” + +In sum, Condorcet favors a limited privilege, circumscribed by an inquiry into its effects in promoting progress and enlightenment. The privilege only applies to expression and to “the author’s name,” rather than to facts and ideas. This is very much within the tradition of Jefferson and Macaulay. + +Hesse argues, correctly I think, that two warring ideas shaped—or are at least useful ways of understanding—the development of the droits d’auteur tradition. On one side were Diderot and the publishers promoting an expansive and perpetual natural authorial right, which nevertheless was supposed to vest suspiciously easily in publishers. On the other was Condorcet, looking skeptically at authorial privileges as merely one type of state interference with free markets and the free circulation of books and ideas. In place of Diderot’s perpetual natural right, Condorcet sketched out a regime that encourages production and distribution by granting the minimum rights necessary for progress. + +Different as they are, these two sides share a common ground. They both focus, though for different reasons, on “expression”—the imprimatur of the author’s unique human spirit on the ideas and facts that he or she transmits. It is this “original expression” that modern copyright and the modern droits d’auteur actually cover. In today’s copyright law, the facts and ideas in an author’s work proceed immediately into the public domain. In other work, I have argued that by confining the property right tightly to the “original expression” stemming from the unique personality of an individual author the law seems to accomplish a number of things simultaneously. It provides + +_1 a conceptual basis for partial, limited property rights, without completely collapsing the notion of property into the idea of a temporary, limited, utilitarian state grant, revocable at will. [At the same time it offers] a moral and philosophical justification for fencing in the commons, giving the author property in something built from the resources of the public domain—language, culture, genre, scientific community, or what have you. If one makes originality of spirit the assumed feature of authorship and the touchstone for property rights, one can see the author as creating something entirely new—not recombining the resources of the commons.~{James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 55–57.}~ + +That is an account of the romantic theory of authorship in the context of contemporary Anglo-American copyright law. But when one looks at the history of the French droits d’auteur tradition, it is striking how well those words describe that system as well. When the French legislature finally produced a law of authors’ rights it turned out, in Hesse’s words, to reflect “an epistemologically impure and unstable legal synthesis that combined an instrumentalist notion of the public good with a theory of authorship based on natural rights.” + +_1 Although it drew on a Diderotist rhetoric of the sanctity of individual creativity as an inviolable right, it did not rigorously respect the conclusions Diderot drew from this position. In contrast to the privilège d’auteur of 1777, the law did not recognize the author’s claim beyond his lifetime but consecrated the notion, advanced first by Pierre Manuel to defend his edition of Mirabeau, that the only true heir to an author’s work was the nation as a whole. This notion of a public domain, of democratic access to a common cultural inheritance on which no particular claim could be made, bore the traces not of Diderot, but of Condorcet’s faith that truths were given in nature and, although mediated through individual minds, belonged ultimately to all. Progress in human understanding depended not on private knowledge claims, but on free and equal access to enlightenment. An author’s property rights were conceived as recompense for his service as an agent of enlightenment through publication of his ideas. The law of 1793 accomplished this task of synthesis through political negotiation rather than philosophical reasoning—that is, by refashioning the political identity of the author in the first few years of the Revolution from a privileged creature of the absolutist police state into a servant of public enlightenment.~{Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics, 121–122. As Hesse points out, this legal legerdemain also produced an interesting transformation in the status of the great authors of the French tradition. “If the Old Regime first accorded Voltaire, Rousseau, or Mirabeau the possibility of legal status as privileged authors with perpetual private lineages for their texts, the Revolution relocated these figures in the public domain, the legal parallel to the civic rituals that unearthed them from private gravesites and reposed their bodily remains in the public temple of the Pantheon.” Ibid., 123. One of the central features of the debates described in this book is a starkly different set of characterizations of the public domain. Is it a communist repossession of the sacred rights of authors? The noble common store of knowledge from which all future creators can build? The worthless remainder of material that is no longer worth protecting?}~ + +Hesse argues that this instability would continue through the revolutionary period. I agree; indeed I would argue that it does so to the present day. Why? The answer is simple. The moral rights view simply proved too much. Without a limiting principle—of time, or scope, or effect—it seemed to presage a perpetual and expansive control of expressive creations, and perhaps of inventions. Our intuition that this is a bad idea comes from our intuitive understanding that “Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels. All of this was much clearer before the assimilation of literature to private enterprise.”~{Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 96–97.}~ + +This is the flip side of the arguments that Diderot and later Hugo put forward. Perhaps the romantic author does not create out of thin air. Perhaps he or she is deeply embedded in a literary, musical, cultural, or scientific tradition that would not flourish if treated as a set of permanently walled private plots. Even within the droits d’auteur tradition, we see a recognition that the continuing progress of enlightenment and the sacred genius of authors might both require a certain level of freedom in knowledge inputs and a certain level of control over knowledge outputs. We see also the recognition that these two requirements are in fundamental tension. When it comes to reconciling that tension we must turn in part to utilitarian effects. In short, we should pay attention to Jefferson and Macaulay and Condorcet, not just because their thoughts shaped the legal and philosophical traditions in which we now work—though that is particularly true in the case of the United States—but because they were right, or at least more right than the alternative. + +Of course, we could build a culture around a notion of natural, absolute, and permanent rights to invention and expression. It is not a world many of us would want to live in. There are exceptions of course. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Mark Helprin—author of Winter’s Tale—argued that intellectual property should become perpetual.~{Mark Helprin, “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” New York Times editorial (May 20, 2007), A12.}~ After all, rights in real estate or personal property do not expire—though their owners might. Why is it that copyrights should “only” last for a lifetime plus seventy additional years, or patents for a mere twenty? Mr. Helprin expresses respect for the genius of the framers, but is unmoved by their firm command that rights be granted only for “limited times.” He concludes that it was a misunderstanding. Jefferson did not realize that while ideas cannot be owned, their expression can. What’s more, the framers were misled by their rustic times. “No one except perhaps Hamilton or Franklin might have imagined that services and intellectual property would become primary fields of endeavor and the chief engines of the economy. Now they are, and it is no more rational to deny them equal status than it would have been to confiscate farms, ropewalks and other forms of property in the 18th century.” Poor Jefferson. How lucky we are to have Mr. Helprin to remedy the consequences of his lack of vision. + +Or perhaps not. Think of the way that Jefferson traced the origins of the mechanical arts used in the elevators and hopper-boys all the way back to ancient Persia. (In Mr. Helprin’s utopia, presumably, a royalty stream would run to Cyrus the Great’s engineers.) Jefferson’s point was that for the process of invention to work, we need to confine narrowly the time and scope of the state-provided monopoly, otherwise further inventions would become impossible. Each process or part of a new invention would risk infringing a myriad of prior patents on its subcomponents. Innovation would strangle in a thicket of conflicting monopolies with their roots vanishing back in time. Presumably the title of Mr. Helprin’s excellent novel would require clearance from Shakespeare’s heirs. + +Of course, one could construct a more modest Lockean idea of intellectual property~{The two most influential and brilliant examples are Justin Hughes, “The Philosophy of Intellectual Property,” Georgetown Law Journal 77 (1988): 287–366, and Wendy J. Gordon, “A Property Right in Self-Expression: Equality and Individualism in the Natural Law of Intellectual Property,” Yale Law Journal 102 (1993): 1533–1610. Both of these articles attempt not to use Locke as the basis for a world of absolute right, but instead to focus on the Locke whose world of private property coexisted with a commons—albeit one much diminished after the invention of money. If one goes far enough into the Lockean conception—fine-tuning “enough and as good” so as to allow for a vigorous commons, and the claims of labor so as to take account of the importance of the embedded contributions of culture and science—then the differences between the Jeffersonian view and the Lockean view start to recede in significance. Academics have found the Lockean view attractive, noting, correctly, that Locke is commonly brandished as a rhetorical emblem for property schemes that he himself would have scorned. Yet when one looks at the actual world of intellectual property policy discourse, and the difficulty of enunciating even the simple Jeffersonian antimonopolist ideas I lay out here, it is hard to imagine the nuanced Lockean view flourishing. Consider this comment of Jeremy Waldron’s and ask yourself—is this result more likely from within the Jeffersonian or the Lockean view? \\ Our tendency of course is to focus on authors when we think about intellectual property. Many of us are authors ourselves: reading a case about copyright we can empathize readily with a plaintiff’s feeling for the effort he has put in, his need to control his work, and his natural desire to reap the fruits of his own labor. In this Essay, however, I shall look at the way we think about actual, potential and putative infringers of copyright, those whose freedom is or might be constrained by others’ ownership of songs, plays, words, images and stories. Clearly our concept of the author and this concept of the copier are two sides of the same coin. If we think of an author as having a natural right to profit from his work, then we will think of the copier as some sort of thief; whereas if we think of the author as beneficiary of a statutory monopoly, it may be easier to see the copier as an embodiment of free enterprise values. These are the connections I want to discuss, and my argument will be that we cannot begin to unravel the conundrums of moral justification in this area unless we are willing to approach the matter even-handedly from both sides of the question. \\ After a magisterial study of justifications for the existing world of intellectual property, Waldron concludes, “[t]he fact is, however, that whether or not we speak of a burden of proof, an institution like intellectual property is not self-justifying; we owe a justification to anyone who finds that he can move less freely than he would in the absence of the institution. So although the people whose perspective I have taken—the copiers—may be denigrated as unoriginal plagiarists or thieves of others’ work, still they are the ones who feel the immediate impact of our intellectual property laws. It affects what they may do, how they may speak, and how they may earn a living. Of course nothing is settled by saying that it is their interests that are particularly at stake; if the tables were turned, we should want to highlight the perspective of the authors. But as things stand, the would-be copiers are the ones to whom a justification of intellectual property is owed.” See Jeremy Waldron, “From Authors to Copiers: Individual Rights and Social Values in Intellectual Property,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 68 (1993): 841, 842, 887. That justification seems more plausibly and practically to come from the perspective I sketch out here. See also William Fisher, “Theories of Intellectual Property,” in New Essays in the Legal and Political Theory of Property, ed. Stephen R. Munzer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 168–200.} —building on the notion of “enough and as good” left over for others and drawing the limits tightly enough to avoid the worst of Mr. Helprin’s excesses. But as one attempts to do this systematically, the power of the Jeffersonian vision becomes all the more apparent—at least as a starting place. + +The Jefferson Warning will play an important role in this book. But my arguments here have implications far beyond Jefferson’s time, country, or constitutional tradition. In the last analysis, I hope to convince you of the importance of the Jefferson Warning or the views of Macaulay not because they are famous authorities and revered thinkers or because they framed constitutions or debated legislation. I wish to convince you that their views are important because they encapsulate neatly an important series of truths about intellectual property. We should listen to the Jefferson Warning not because it is prestigious but because of its insight. As the Diderot-Condorcet debates point out, the questions on which Jefferson and Macaulay focused do not disappear merely because one embraces a philosophy of moral rights—if anything, they become more pressing, particularly when one comes to define the limits of intellectual property in scope and time. I ask that those readers who remain leery of the Jeffersonian focus concentrate on that last issue. In an era when we have been expanding intellectual property rights relentlessly, it is a crucial one. If the Jefferson Warning produces in my unconvinced reader even a slight queasiness about the likely effects of such a process of expansion, it will have done its job—though in fact the tradition it represented was much richer than a simple utilitarian series of cautions. + +2~ A Tradition of Skeptical Minimalism + +Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual property debates went beyond Macaulay’s antimonopolist focus on price, access, quality, and control of the nation’s literary heritage. While Macaulay is the best-remembered English skeptic from the 1840s, there were other, more radical skeptics who saw copyright primarily as a “tax on literacy” or a “tax on knowledge,” identical in its effects to the newspaper stamp taxes.~{Catherine Seville, Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England: The Framing of the 1842 Copyright Act (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 46–48.}~ This was a time when mass literacy and mass education were the hotly debated corollaries to the enlargement of the franchise. The radical reformers looked with hostility on anything that seemed likely to raise the cost of reading and thus continue to restrict political and social debate to the wealthier classes. Macaulay worried about a world in which “a copy of Clarissa would . . . [be] as rare as an Aldus or a Caxton.”~{Macaulay Speech, 256.}~ His more radical colleagues saw copyright—to use our ugly jargon rather than theirs—as one of the many ways in which state communications policy is set and the communicative landscape tilted to favor the rich and powerful.~{This point is made today by a number of authors. See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), available at http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf; Neil Weinstock Netanel, “Locating Copyright Within the First Amendment Skein,” Stanford Law Review 54 (2001): 1–86; Netanel, “Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society,” Yale Law Journal 106 (1996): 283–388; David McGowan, “Why the First Amendment Cannot Dictate Copyright Policy,” available at http://lawreview.law.pitt.edu/issues/65/65.2/McGowan.pdf [Ed. note: originally published as: David McGowan, “First Amendment & Copyright Policy,” available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=460280; the new link is to the final published version of the article]; Randal Picker, “Copyright as Entry Policy: The Case of Digital Distribution,” Antitrust Bulletin 47 (2002): 423, 424.}~ Macaulay worried about the effects of monopoly on literature and culture. All of them worried about the effects of copyright on democracy, on speech, on education. In the world of the Internet, these skeptics too have their contemporary equivalents. + +Patent law also attracted its share of attacks in the mid-nineteenth century. A fusillade of criticism, often delivered by economists and cast in the language of free trade, portrayed the patent system as actively harmful. + +_1 At the annual meeting of the Kongress deutscher Volkswirthe held in Dresden, September 1863, the following resolution was adopted “by an overwhelming majority”: “Considering that patents hinder rather than further the progress of invention; that they hamper the prompt general utilization of useful inventions; that on balance they cause more harm than benefit to the inventors themselves and, thus, are a highly deceptive form of compensation; the Congress of German Economists resolves: that patents of invention are injurious to common welfare.”~{Quoted in Fritz Machlup and Edith Penrose, “The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 10, no. 1 (1950): 4, n8.}~ + +In the Netherlands, the patent system was actually abolished in 1869 as a result of such criticisms. Observers in a number of other countries, including Britain, concluded that their national patent systems were doomed. Various proposals were made to replace patents, with state-provided prizes or bounties to particularly useful inventions being the most popular.~{Ironically, contemporary economists are rediscovering the attractions of patent alternatives. A paper by Steven Shavell and Tanguy Van Ypersele is particularly interesting in this regard: “Rewards versus Intellectual Property Rights,” NBER Working Paper series, no. 6956, available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w6956. }~ + +These snippets are hardly sufficient to constitute any kind of survey of critical reactions to intellectual property systems, but I believe that nevertheless they give us some sense of typical debates. What do these debates tell us? From the early days of intellectual property as we know it now, the main objections raised against it were framed in the language of free trade and “anti-monopoly.” In the United States, the founding generation of intellectuals had been nurtured on the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment and the history of the struggle against royal monopolies. They saw the arguments in favor of intellectual property but warned again and again of the need to circumscribe both its term and its scope. This is the point at the heart of Jefferson’s letter. This is why he insisted that we understand the policy implications of the differences between tangible property and ideas, which “like fire” are “expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point.” + +What were the concerns of these early critics? They worried about intellectual property producing artificial scarcity, high prices, and low quality. They insisted that the benefits of each incremental expansion of intellectual property be weighed against its costs. Think of Macaulay discussing Johnson’s preference for a shin of beef rather than another slice of postmortem copyright protection. They worried about its justice; given that we all learn from and build on the past, do we have a right to carve out our own incremental innovations and protect them by intellectual property rights?~{“Governor Thomas was so pleased with the construction of this stove . . . that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declined it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz.: That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.” Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, in The Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. John Bigelow, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 237–238.}~ Price aside, they also worried that intellectual property (especially with a lengthy term) might give too much control to a single individual or corporation over some vital aspect of science and culture. In more muted fashion, they discussed the possible effects that intellectual property might have on future innovation. The most radical among them worried about intellectual property’s effects on political debate, education, and even control of the communications infrastructure, though they did not use that particular phrase. But the overwhelming theme was the promotion of free trade and a corresponding opposition to monopolies. Now if we were to stop here and simply require that today’s policy makers, legislators, and judges recite the Jefferson Warning before they rush off to make new intellectual property rules for the Internet and the genome, we would have accomplished a great deal. National and international policy makers are keen to set the “rules of the road for the digital age.” If they would momentarily pause their excited millenarian burbling and read the points scratched out with a quill pen in 1813, or delivered (without PowerPoint support) on the floor of the House of Commons in the 1840s, we would be better off. Everyone is beginning to understand that in the world of the twenty-first century the rules of intellectual property are both vital and contentious. How good it would be then if our debate on intellectual property policy were as vigorous and as informed as the debates of the nineteenth century. (Though we might hope it would also be more democratic.) + +And yet . . . there is much that is missing from the skepticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and much that remains unclear. Look at the structure of these comments; they are framed as criticisms of intellectual property rather than defenses of the public domain or the commons, terms that simply do not appear in the debates. There is no real discussion of the world of intellectual property’s outside, its opposite. Most of these critics take as their goal the prevention or limitation of an “artificial” monopoly; without this monopoly our goal is to have a world of—what? The assumption is that we will return to a norm of freedom, but of what kind? Free trade in expression and innovation, as opposed to monopoly? Free access to expression and innovation, as opposed to access for pay? Or free access to innovation and expression in the sense of not being subject to the right of another person to pick and choose who is given access, even if all have to pay some flat fee? Or is it common ownership and control that we seek, including the communal right to forbid certain kinds of uses of the shared resource? The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics brushed over these points; but to be fair, we continue to do so today. The opposite of property, or perhaps we should say the opposites of property, are much more obscure to us than property itself. + +For the most part, the antimonopolist view of intellectual property makes a simple case. Monopolies are bad. Have as few as possible and make them as narrow and as short as possible. This is a fine principle, but it falls short of an affirmative explanation and defense of the role of the public domain or the commons in enabling creativity, culture, and science. That is a shame because just as intellectual property is different from tangible property, so too is its opposite, its outside. + +What are those opposites? The two major terms in use are “the public domain” and “the commons.” Both are used in multiple ways—probably a good thing. The public domain is material that is not covered by intellectual property rights. Material might be in the public domain because it was never capable of being owned. Examples would be the English language or the formulae of Newtonian physics. Alternatively, something might be in the public domain because rights have expired. The works of Shakespeare or the patents over powered flight are examples. + +Some definitions of the public domain are more granular. They focus not only on complete works but on the reserved spaces of freedom inside intellectual property. The public domain would include the privilege to excerpt short quotations in a review. This vision is messier, but more instructive. If one uses a spatial metaphor, the absolutist vision is a tessellated map. Areas of private property are neatly delineated from areas of the public domain. Mozart’s plot sits next to that of Britney Spears; one public, the other private. In the granular view, the map is more complex. Ms. Spears’ plot is cut through with rights to make fair use, as well as with limitations on ownership of standard themes. Instead of the simple tiled map, the granular vision has private plots with public roads running through them. + +In popular discussion, we tend to use the absolutist view of both property and the public domain. Lawyers prefer the more complex view of property and are coming slowly to have a similarly complex view of the public domain. That is the definition I will be using. + +The term “commons” is generally used to denote a resource over which some group has access and use rights—albeit perhaps under certain conditions. It is used in even more ways than the term “public domain.” The first axis along which definitions of the term “commons” vary is the size of the group that has access rights. Some would say it is a commons only if the whole society has access. That is the view I will take here. + +The other difference between public domain and commons is the extent of restrictions on use. Material in the public domain is free of property rights. You may do with it what you wish. A commons can be restrictive. For example, some open source software makes your freedom to modify the software contingent on the condition that your contributions, too, will be freely open to others. I will discuss this type of commons in Chapter 8. + +So these are working definitions of public domain and commons. But why should we care? Because the public domain is the basis for our art, our science, and our self-understanding. It is the raw material from which we make new inventions and create new cultural works. Why is it so important? Let us start with the dry reasons. + +Information and innovation are largely nonrival and nonexcludable goods. This is Jefferson’s point, though expressed in less graceful language. It has some interesting corollaries. Information is hard to value until you have it, but once you have it, how can you dispossess yourself of it? The apple can be taken back by the merchant if you decide not to buy. The facts or the formulae cannot. The moment when you might have decided to pay or not to pay is already over. The great economist Kenneth Arrow formalized this insight about information economics,~{Kenneth Arrow, “Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention,” in National Bureau of Economic Research, The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), 609–626.}~ and it profoundly shapes intellectual property policy. (To a large extent, for example, the requirement of “patent disclosure” attempts to solve this problem. I can read all about your mousetrap but I am still forbidden from using it. I can decide whether or not to license your design at that point.) But for all the material in the public domain, where no intellectual property right is necessary, this point is solved elegantly by having the information be “free as the air to common use.” All of us can use the same store of information, innovation, and free culture. It will be available at its cost of reproduction—close to zero—and we can all build upon it without interfering with each other. Think of the English language, basic business methods, tables of logarithms, the Pythagorean theorem, Shakespeare’s insights about human nature, the periodic table, Ohm’s law, the sonnet form, the musical scale. + +Would you have paid to purchase access to each of these? I might tell you that English was a superior communication tool—a really good command language for your cognitive operating system. There could be levels of access with corresponding prices. Would you pay to get access to “English Professional Edition”? We can certainly imagine such a way of organizing languages. (To some extent, scribal conventions operated this way. The languages of the professions still do. One paid for access to “law French” in the common law courts of England. One pays for an interpreter of contemporary legal jargon in today’s legal system. But even there the language is free to the autodidact.) We can imagine language, scientific knowledge, basic algebra, the tonic scale, or the classics of four-hundred-year-old literature all being available only as property. Those who had the highest “value for use” would purchase them. Those who did not value them highly—whether because they could not know what could be built with them until they had done so or because they did not have the money—would not. What would this world, this culture, this science, this market look like? + +It would probably be very inefficient, the economists tell us. Perfect information is a defining feature of the perfect market. The more commodified and restricted our access to information, the less efficient the operation of the market, the more poorly it allocates resources in our society. (The permanent and in some sense insoluble tension between the need to provide incentives to generate information, thus raising its cost, and the need to have access to perfect information for efficiency is the central feature of our intellectual property policy.)~{Sanford J. Grossman and Joseph E. Stiglitz, “On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets,” American Economic Review 70 (1980), 393–408; Boyle, Shamans, 35–42.}~ When we commodify too much we actually undermine creativity, since we are raising the price of the inputs for future creations—which might themselves be covered by intellectual property rights. But “inefficient” is too bloodless a way to describe this world. It would be awful. + +Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our art all depend more heavily on a public domain of freely available material than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights. The public domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The public domain is the place we quarry the building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture. Or at least it has been. + +I deliberately gave easy examples. It is obvious how unnecessary but also how harmful it would be to extend property rights to language, to facts, to business methods and scientific algorithms, to the basic structures of music, to art whose creators are long dead. It is obvious that this would not produce more innovation, more debate, more art, more democracy. But what about the places where the value of the public domain is not obvious? + +What if we were actually moving to extend patents to business methods, or intellectual property rights to unoriginal compilations of facts? What if we had locked up most of twentieth-century culture without getting a net benefit in return? What if the basic building blocks of new scientific fields were being patented long before anything concrete or useful could be built from them? What if we were littering our electronic communication space with digital barbed wire and regulating the tiniest fragments of music as if they were stock certificates? What if we were doing all this in the blithe belief that more property rights mean more innovation? The story of this book is that we are. + +The Jefferson Warning is important. It is, however, just a warning. While it would be excellent to print it on pocket cards and hand it to our elected representatives, that alone will not solve the most pressing problems we face. In the chapters that follow, I shall try to go further. In Chapter 3, I set the process of expansion we are engaged in—our “second enclosure movement”—in perspective by comparing it to the original enclosures of the grassy commons of old England. In Chapter 4, I jump from the world of the fifteenth or nineteenth century to the world of the twenty-first, from elevators and grain hoppers to video recorders, the Internet, and file-sharing services. I use the story of several key legal disputes to illustrate a broader history—the history of intellectual property’s struggle with communications technologies that allow people to copy more cheaply. Strangely enough, the Jefferson Warning will be crucial in understanding the debate over copyright online and, in particular, in understanding the fear that drives our current policy making, a fear I refer to as the Internet Threat. + +2~ Chapter 2: Further Reading + +In this chapter I offered a snapshot of the historical debate over copyright, patent and—to a lesser extent—trademark law. The argument is partly a matter of intellectual history: a claim about what various individuals and groups actually believed about intellectual property rights, and the way those beliefs shaped the policies they supported and the legal structures they created. But it is also a normative argument—a claim that this vision of intellectual property is better than the more “physicalist” and “absolutist” alternatives I described or, at the very least, that it is an important corrective to our current excesses. This dual character complicates the task of providing a guide to further reading: books could be written on either portion alone. + +My own understanding of the history of “intellectual property”—itself a relatively recently invented and contentious category—has been profoundly influenced by more scholars than I can list here. Edward C. Walterscheid, The Nature of the Intellectual Property Clause: A Study in Historical Perspective (Buffalo, N.Y.: W. S. Hein, 2002), gives a magisterial account of the origins of the U.S. Constitution’s intellectual property clause. Tyler T. Ochoa and Mark Rose, “The Anti-Monopoly Origins of the Patent and Copyright Clause,” Journal of the Patent & Trademark Office Society 84 (2002): 909–940, offer a vision of the history that is closest to the one I put forward here. In addition, Tyler T. Ochoa, “Origins and Meanings of the Public Domain,” University of Dayton Law Review 28 (2002): 215–267, provides the same service for the concept of the public domain. Malla Pollack provides a useful historical study of the contemporary understanding of the word “progress” at the time of the American Constitution in Malla Pollack, “The Democratic Public Domain: Reconnecting the Modern First Amendment and the Original Progress Clause (a.k.a. Copyright and Patent Clause),” Jurimetrics 45 (2004): 23–40. A rich and thought-provoking account of the way that ideas of intellectual property worked themselves out in the context of the corporate workplace can be found in Catherine Fisk, Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2009). + +Of course, the history of copyright or of intellectual property cannot be confined to the two figures I focus on principally here—Jefferson and Macaulay—nor cannot it be confined to the Anglo-American tradition or to the debates in which Jefferson and Macaulay were participating. Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), is vital reading to understand the parallels between the Anglo-American and droits d’auteur tradition. It is also fascinating reading. For studies of the broader intellectual climate, I recommend Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Peter Jaszi, “Toward a Theory of Copyright: The Metamorphoses of ‘Authorship,’ ” Duke Law Journal 1991, no. 2: 455–502; Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968). The British debates at the time of Macaulay are beautifully captured in Catherine Seville, Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England: The Framing of the 1842 Copyright Act (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999). (It should be noted that, while sympathetic, she is less moved than I by Macaulay’s arguments.) + +Any collection of historical works this rich and complex resists summary description—nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of these works stress the centrality of the skeptical “antimonopolist” attitudes I use Jefferson and Macaulay to represent to the history of intellectual property. This does not mean there is unanimity or anything close to it. In particular, Adam Mossoff, “Who Cares What Thomas Jefferson Thought about Patents? Reevaluating the Patent ‘Privilege’ in Historical Context,” Cornell Law Review 92 (2007): 953–1012, which came to light late in the writing of this book, offers a thoughtful historical account that criticizes the tendency to use Jefferson’s views as representative of a dominant strand in American intellectual property. My agreements and disagreements with Mossoff’s arguments are discussed fully later in the notes to this chapter. The central point, however, and the single strongest argument against those who would instead attempt to construct a more absolutist, physicalist or labor-based theory of intellectual property, is the problem of limits. Where does one stop? How can one put a limit on the potentially absolute claim over some intellectual creation? How can one specify the limits on prior creators that actually give me ownership over what I create, for I surely have built on the works of others? How can one circumscribe the negative effects on speech, life, and culture that the absolutist or maximalist tradition threatens to generate? My ultimate argument is that the purpose-driven, skeptical, antimonopolistic tendencies of Jefferson and Macaulay answer those questions far better than any contending theory, that they represent not merely an intellectual history sadly neglected in today’s political debates, but a practical solution to the inevitable question, “where do you draw the line?” + +1~ Chapter 3: The Second Enclosure Movement + +poem{ + +The law locks up the man or woman +Who steals the goose from off the common +But leaves the greater villain loose +Who steals the common from off the goose. +The law demands that we atone +When we take things we do not own +But leaves the lords and ladies fine +Who take things that are yours and mine. +The poor and wretched don’t escape +If they conspire the law to break; +This must be so but they endure +Those who conspire to make the law. +The law locks up the man or woman +Who steals the goose from off the common +And geese will still a common lack +Till they go and steal it back. + +[Anon.]~{Apart from being anonymous, this poem is extremely hard to date. It probably originates in the enclosure controversies of the eighteenth century. However, the earliest reference to it that I have been able to discover is from 1821. Edward Birch was moved to compose some (fairly poor) verses in response when he reported “seeing the following jeu d’esprit in a Handbill posted up in Plaistow, as a ‘CAUTION’ to prevent persons from supporting the intended inclosure of Hainault or Waltham Forest.” He then quotes a version of the poem. Edward Birch, Tickler Magazine 3 (February 1821), 45. In 1860, “Exon,” a staff writer for the journal Notes and Queries, declares that “the animosity excited against the Inclosure Acts and their authors . . . was almost without precedent: though fifty years and more have passed, the subject is still a sore one in many parishes. . . . I remember some years ago, in hunting over an old library discovering a box full of printed squibs, satires and ballads of the time against the acts and those who were supposed to favor them,—the library having belonged to a gentleman who played an active part on the opposition side.” “Exon,” “Ballads Against Inclosures,” Notes and Queries 9, 2nd series (February 1860): 130–131. He reports finding the poem in that box, and quotes a verse from it. The context of the article makes it appear that the poem itself must date from the late eighteenth century. In other sources, the poem is sometimes dated at 1764, and said to be in response to Sir Charles Pratt’s fencing of common land. See, e.g., Dana A. Freiburger, “John Thompson, English Philomath—A Question of Land Surveying and Astronomy,” n. 15, available at http://www.nd.edu/~histast4/exhibits/papers/Freiburger/. This attribution is widespread and may well be true, but I have been able to discover no contemporary source material that sustains it. By the end of the nineteenth century, the poem was being quoted, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with agreement, on both sides of the Atlantic. See Ezra S. Carr, “Aids and Obstacles to Agriculture on the Pacific-Coast,” in The Patrons of Husbandry on the Pacific Coast (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft and Co., 1875), 290–291; Edward P. Cheyney, An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 219.}~ + +}poem + +In fits and starts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, the English “commons” was “enclosed.”~{Although we refer to it as the enclosure movement, it was actually a series of enclosures that started in the fifteenth century and went on, with differing means, ends, and varieties of state involvement, until the nineteenth. See, e.g., J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450–1850 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977).}~ Enclosure did not necessarily mean physical fencing, though that could happen. More likely, the previously common land was simply converted into private property, generally controlled by a single landholder. + +The poem that begins this chapter is the pithiest condemnation of the process. It manages in a few lines to criticize double standards, expose the controversial nature of property rights, and take a slap at the legitimacy of state power. And it does this all with humor, without jargon, and in rhyming couplets. Academics should take note. Like most criticisms of the enclosure movement, the poem depicts a world of rapacious, state-aided “privatization,” a conversion into private property of something that had formerly been common property or perhaps had been outside the property system altogether. One kind of “stealing” is legal, says the poet, because the state changes the law of property to give the “lords and ladies” a right over an area formerly open to all. But let a commoner steal something and he is locked up. + +The anonymous author was not alone in feeling indignant. Thomas More (one of only two saints to write really good political theory) made similar points, though he used sheep rather than geese in his argument. Writing in the sixteenth century, he had argued that enclosure was not merely unjust in itself but harmful in its consequences: a cause of economic inequality, crime, and social dislocation. In a wonderfully bizarre passage he argues that sheep are a principal cause of theft. Sheep? Why, yes. + +_1 [Y]our sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. + +Who were these sheep? Bizarre Dolly-like clones? Transgenic killer rams? No. More meant only that under the economic lure of the wool trade, the “noblemen and gentlemen” were attempting their own enclosure movement. + +_1 [They] leave no ground for tillage, they enclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing, but only the church to be made a sheep-house. . . . Therefore that one covetous and insatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and enclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own.~{Thomas More, Utopia (New York: W. J. Black, 1947), 32.}~ + +The sheep devour all. The dispossessed “husbandmen” now find themselves without land or money and turn instead to theft. In More’s vision, it is all very The Second Enclosure Movement simple. Greed leads to enclosure. Enclosure disrupts the life of the poor farmer. Disruption leads to crime and violence. + +Writing 400 years later, Karl Polanyi echoes More precisely. He calls the enclosure movement “a revolution of the rich against the poor” and goes on to paint it in the most unflattering light. “The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common. . . .”~{Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 35. Polanyi continues in the same vein. “The fabric of society was being disrupted. Desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves.” Ibid. See also E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: V. Gollancz, 1963), 218.}~ And turning them to “beggars and thieves.” The critics of enclosure saw other harms too, though they are harder to classify. They bemoaned the relentless power of market logic to migrate to new areas, disrupting traditional social relationships and perhaps even views of the self, or the relationship of human beings to the environment. Fundamentally, they mourned the loss of a form of life. + +So much for the bad side of the enclosure movement. For many economic historians, everything I have said up to now is the worst kind of sentimental bunk, romanticizing a form of life that was neither comfortable nor noble, and certainly not very egalitarian. The big point about the enclosure movement is that it worked; this innovation in property systems allowed an unparalleled expansion of productive possibilities.~{See generally Lord Ernle, English Farming Past and Present, 6th ed. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961).}~ By transferring inefficiently managed common land into the hands of a single owner, enclosure escaped the aptly named “tragedy of the commons.” It gave incentives for large-scale investment, allowed control over exploitation, and in general ensured that resources could be put to their most efficient use. Before the enclosure movement, the feudal lord would not invest in drainage systems, sheep purchases, or crop rotation that might increase yields from the common—he knew all too well that the fruits of his labor could be appropriated by others. The strong private property rights and single-entity control that were introduced in the enclosure movement avoid the tragedies of overuse and underinvestment: more grain will be grown, more sheep raised, consumers will benefit, and fewer people will starve in the long run.~{For an excellent summary of the views of Hobbes, Locke, and Blackstone on these points, see Hannibal Travis, “Pirates of the Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian Copyright and the First Amendment,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 15 (2000): 789–803.}~ + +If the price of this social gain is a greater concentration of economic power, the introduction of market forces into areas where they previously had not been so obvious, or the disruption of a modus vivendi with the environment—then, enclosure’s defenders say, so be it! In their view, the agricultural surplus produced by enclosure helped to save a society devastated by the mass deaths of the sixteenth century. Those who weep over the terrible effects of private property should realize that it literally saves lives. + +Now it is worth noting that while this view was once unchallenged,~{More recent accounts which argue that enclosure led to productivity gains tend to be more qualified in their praise. Compare the more positive account given in Ernle, English Farming, with Michael Turner, “English Open Fields and Enclosures: Retardation or Productivity Improvements,” Journal of Economic History 46 (1986): 688: “Enclosure cannot be seen as the automatic open door to this cycle of agricultural improvement, but the foregoing estimates do suggest that perhaps it was a door which opened frequently, and with profit.”}~ recent scholarship has thrown some doubts on the effects of enclosure on agricultural production.~{Most notably work by Robert C. Allen: “The Efficiency and Distributional Consequences of Eighteenth Century Enclosures,” The Economic Journal 92 (1982): 937–953; Enclosure and The Yeoman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Allen argues that the enclosure movement produced major distributional consequences, but little observable efficiency gain. The pie was carved up differently, to the advantage of the landlords, but made no larger. In contrast, Turner sees enclosure as one possible, though not a necessary, route to productivity gains (“English Open Fields,” 688). Donald McCloskey’s work also argues for efficiency gains from enclosure, largely from the evidence provided by rent increases. Donald N. McCloskey, “The Enclosure of Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of English Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 15–35; “The Prudent Peasant: New Findings on Open Fields,” Journal of Economic History 51 (1991): 343–355. In Allen’s view, however, the increase in rents was largely a measure of the way that changes in legal rights altered the bargaining power of the parties and the cultural context of rent negotiations; enclosure allowed landlords to capture more of the existing surplus produced by the land, rather than dramatically expanding it. “[T]he enclosure movement itself might be regarded as the first state sponsored land reform. Like so many since, it was justified with efficiency arguments, while its main effect (according to the data analysed here) was to redistribute income to already rich landowners.” Allen, “Eighteenth Century Enclosures,” 950–951.}~ Some scholars argue that the commons was actually better run than the defenders of enclosure admit.~{The possibility of producing “order without law” and thus sometimes governing the commons without tragedy has also fascinated scholars of contemporary land use. Robert C. Ellickson, Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).}~ Thus, while enclosure did produce the changes in the distribution of wealth that so incensed an earlier generation of critical historians, they argue that there are significant questions about whether it led to greater efficiency or innovation. The pie was carved up differently, but did it get bigger? The debate about these issues is little known, however, outside the world of economic historians. “Everyone” knows that a commons is by definition tragic and that the logic of enclosure is as true today as it was in the fifteenth century. I will not get involved in this debate. Assume for the sake of argument that enclosure did indeed produce a surge in agriculture. Assume, in other words, that converting the commons into private property saved lives. This is the logic of enclosure. It is a powerful argument, but it is not always right. + +This is all very well, but what does it have to do with intellectual property? I hope the answer is obvious. The argument of this book is that we are in the middle of a second enclosure movement. While it sounds grandiloquent to call it “the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind,” in a very real sense that is just what it is.~{The analogy to the enclosure movement has been too succulent to resist. To my knowledge, Ben Kaplan, Pamela Samuelson, Yochai Benkler, David Lange, Christopher May, David Bollier, and Keith Aoki have all employed the trope, as I myself have on previous occasions. For a particularly thoughtful and careful development of the parallel between the two enclosure movements, see Travis, “Pirates of the Information Infrastructure.”}~ True, the new state-created property rights may be “intellectual” rather than “real,” but once again things that were formerly thought of as common property, or as “uncommodifiable,” or outside the market altogether, are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights. + +Take the human genome as an example. Again, the supporters of enclosure have argued that the state was right to step in and extend the reach of property rights; that only thus could we guarantee the kind of investment of time, ingenuity, and capital necessary to produce new drugs and gene therapies.~{See, e.g., William A. Haseltine, “The Case for Gene Patents,” Technology Review (September 2000): 59, available at http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/haseltine0900.asp; cf. Alexander K. Haas, “The Wellcome Trust’s Disclosures of Gene Sequence Data into the Public Domain & the Potential for Proprietary Rights in the Human Genome,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 16 (2001): 145–164.}~ To the question, “Should there be patents over human genes?” the supporters of enclosure would answer that private property saves lives.~{See, e.g., Haseltine, “The Case for Gene Patents”; Biotechnology Industry Association, “Genentech, Incyte Genomics Tell House Subcommittee Gene Patents Essential for Medical Progress,” available at http://www.bio.org/news/newsitem.asp?id=2000_0713_01. }~ The opponents of enclosure have claimed that the human genome belongs to everyone, that it is literally the common heritage of humankind, that it should not and perhaps in some sense cannot be owned, and that the consequences of turning over the human genome to private property rights will be dreadful, as market logic invades areas which should be the farthest from the market. In stories about stem cell and gene sequence patents, critics have mused darkly about the way in which the state is handing over monopoly power to a few individuals and corporations, potentially introducing bottlenecks and coordination costs that slow down innovation.~{See, e.g., Howard Markel, “Patents Could Block the Way to a Cure,” New York Times (August 24, 2001), A19. For the general background to these arguments, see Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Patenting the Human Genome,” Emory Law Journal 39 (1990): 740–744.}~ + +Alongside these accounts of the beneficiaries of the new property scheme run news stories about those who were not so fortunate, the commoners of the genetic enclosure. Law students across America read Moore v. Regents of University of California, a California Supreme Court case deciding that Mr. Moore had no property interest in the cells derived from his spleen.~{793 P.2d 479, 488–497 (Cal. 1990).}~ The court tells us that giving private property rights to “sources” would slow the freewheeling practice researchers have of sharing their cell lines with all and sundry.~{Ibid., 493–494. One imagines Styrofoam coolers criss-crossing the country by FedEx in an orgy of communistic flesh-swapping.}~ The doctors whose inventive genius created a billion-dollar cell line from Mr. Moore’s “naturally occurring raw material,” by contrast, are granted a patent. Private property rights here, by contrast, are a necessary incentive to research.~{Ibid., 493.}~ Economists on both sides of the enclosure debate concentrate on the efficient allocation of rights. Popular discussion, on the other hand, doubtless demonstrating a reprehensible lack of rigor, returns again and again to more naturalistic assumptions such as the essentially “common” quality of the property involved or the idea that one owns one’s own body.~{I might be suspected of anti-economist irony here. In truth, neither side’s arguments are fully satisfying. It is easy to agree with Richard Posner that the language of economics offers a “thin and unsatisfactory epistemology” through which to understand the world. Richard Posner, The Problems of Jurisprudence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990): xiv (quoting Paul Bator, “The Judicial Universe of Judge Richard Posner,” University of Chicago Law Review 52 (1985): 1161). On the other hand, explaining what it means to “own one’s own body,” or specifying the noncommodifiable limits on the market, turns out to be a remarkably tricky business, as Margaret Jane Radin has shown with great elegance in Contested Commodities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).}~ + +The genome is not the only area to be partially “enclosed” during this second enclosure movement. The expansion of intellectual property rights has been remarkable—from business method patents, to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to trademark “anti-dilution” rulings, to the European Database Protection Directive.~{Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the Legal Protection of Databases, 1996 Official Journal of the European Union (L 77) 20, available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31996L0009:EN:HTML [Ed. note: originally published as http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/infosoc/legreg/docs/969ec.html, the link has been changed].}~ The old limits to intellectual property rights—the antierosion walls around the public domain—are also under attack. The annual process of updating my syllabus for a basic intellectual property course provides a nice snapshot of what is going on. I can wax nostalgic looking back to a five-year-old text, with its confident list of subject matter that intellectual property rights could not cover, the privileges that circumscribed the rights that did exist, and the length of time before a work falls into the public domain. In each case, the limits have been eaten away. + +2~ How Much of the Intangible Commons Should We Enclose? + +So far I have argued that there are profound similarities between the first enclosure movement and our contemporary expansion of intellectual property, which I call the second enclosure movement. Once again, the critics and proponents of enclosure are locked in battle, hurling at each other incommensurable claims about innovation, efficiency, traditional values, the boundaries of the market, the saving of lives, the loss of familiar liberties. Once again, opposition to enclosure is portrayed as economically illiterate: the beneficiaries of enclosure telling us that an expansion of property rights is needed in order to fuel progress. Indeed, the post-Cold War “Washington consensus” is invoked to claim that the lesson of history itself is that the only way to get growth and efficiency is through markets; property rights, surely, are the sine qua non of markets.~{The phrase “Washington consensus” originated in John Williamson, “What Washington Means by Policy Reform,” in Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? ed. John Williamson (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990). Over time it has come to be used as shorthand for a neoliberal view of economic policy that puts its faith in deregulation, privatization, and the creation and defense of secure property rights as the cure for all ills. (See Joseph Stiglitz, “The World Bank at the Millennium,” Economic Journal 109 [1999]: 577–597.) It has thus become linked to the triumphalist neoliberal account of the end of history and the victory of unregulated markets: see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Neither of these two results are, to be fair, what its creator intended. See John Williamson, “What Should the Bank Think about the Washington Consensus?” Institute for International Economics (July 1999), available at http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/paper.cfm?ResearchID=351. }~ + +This faith in enclosure is rooted in a correspondingly deep pessimism about the possibility of managing resources that are either commonly owned or owned by no one. If all have the right to graze their herds on common land, what incentive does anyone have to hold back? My attempt to safeguard the future of the pasture will simply be undercut by others anxious to get theirs while the getting is good. Soon the pasture will be overgrazed and all our flocks will go hungry. In a 1968 article, Garrett Hardin came up with the phrase that would become shorthand for the idea that there were inherent problems with collectively managed resources: “the tragedy of the commons.”~{Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248.}~ The phrase, more so than the actual arguments in his article, has come to exercise considerable power over our policies today. Private property—enclosure—is portrayed as the happy ending for the tragedy of the commons: when policy makers see a resource that is unowned, they tend to reach reflexively for “the solving idea of property.” According to this view, enclosure is not a “revolution of the rich against the poor,” it is a revolution to save the waste of socially vital resources. To say that some social resource is not owned by an individual, that it is free as the air to common use, is automatically to conjure up the idea that it is being wasted. + +But if there are similarities between our two enclosures, there are also profound dissimilarities; the networked commons of the mind has many different characteristics from the grassy commons of Old England.~{The differences are particularly strong in the arguments over “desert”—are these property rights deserved or are they simply violations of the public trust, privatizations of the commons? For example, some would say that we never had the same traditional claims over the genetic commons that the victims of the first enclosure movement had over theirs; this is more like newly discovered frontier land, or perhaps even privately drained marshland, than it is like well-known common land that all have traditionally used. In this case, the enclosers can claim (though their claims are disputed) that they discovered or perhaps simply made usable the territory they seek to own. The opponents of gene patenting, on the other hand, turn more frequently than the farmers of the eighteenth century to religious and ethical arguments about the sanctity of life and the incompatibility of property with living systems. These arguments, or the appeals to free speech that dominate debates over digital intellectual property, have no precise analogue in debates over hunting or pasturage, though again there are common themes. For example, we are already seeing nostalgic laments of the loss of the immemorial rights of Internet users. At the same time, the old language of property law is turned to this more evanescent subject matter; a favorite title of mine is I. Trotter Hardy, “The Ancient Doctrine of Trespass to Web Sites,” 1996, art. 7, Journal of Online Law art. 7, available at http://www.wm.edu/law/publications/jol/95_96/hardy.html. }~ I want to concentrate here on two key differences between the intellectual commons and the commons of the first enclosure movement, differences that should lead us to question whether this commons is truly tragic and to ask whether stronger intellectual property rights really are the solution to our problems. These differences are well known, indeed they are the starting point for most intellectual property law, a starting point that Jefferson and Macaulay have already laid out for us. Nevertheless, reflection on them might help to explain both the problems and the stakes in the current wave of expansion. + +Unlike the earthy commons, the commons of the mind is generally “nonrival.” Many uses of land are mutually exclusive: if I am using the field for grazing, it may interfere with your plans to use it for growing crops. By contrast, a gene sequence, an MP3 file, or an image may be used by multiple parties; my The Second Enclosure Movement use does not interfere with yours. To simplify a complicated analysis, this means that the threat of overuse of fields and fisheries is generally not a problem with the informational or innovational commons.~{The exceptions to this statement turn out to be fascinating. In the interest of brevity, however, I will ignore them entirely.}~ Thus, one type of tragedy of the commons is avoided. + +The concerns in the informational commons have to do with a different kind of collective action problem: the problem of incentives to create the resource in the first place. The difficulty comes from the assumption that information goods are not only nonrival (uses do not interfere with each other), but also nonexcludable (it is impossible, or at least hard, to stop one unit of the good from satisfying an infinite number of users at zero marginal cost). Pirates will copy the song, the mousetrap, the drug formula, the brand. The rest of the argument is well known. Lacking an ability to exclude, creators will be unable to charge for their creations; there will be inadequate incentives to create. Thus, the law must step in and create a limited monopoly called an intellectual property right. + +How about the argument that the increasing importance of information-intensive products to the world economy means that protection must increase? Must the information commons be enclosed because it is now a more important sector of economic activity?~{Remember, I am talking here about increases in the level of rights: protecting new subject matter for longer periods of time, criminalizing certain technologies, making it illegal to cut through digital fences even if they have the effect of foreclosing previously lawful uses, and so on. Each of these has the effect of diminishing the public domain in the name of national economic policy.}~ This was certainly one of the arguments for the first enclosure movement. For example, during the Napoleonic Wars enclosure was defended as a necessary method of increasing the efficiency of agricultural production, now a vital sector of a wartime economy. + +Here we come to another big difference between the commons of the mind and the earthy commons. As has frequently been pointed out, information products are often made up of fragments of other information products; your information output is someone else’s information input.~{James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 29; William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, “Economic Analysis of Copyright Law,” Journal of Legal Studies 18 (1989): 325; Pamela Samuelson and Suzanne Scotchmer, “The Law & Economics of Reverse Engineering,” Yale Law Journal 111 (2002): 1575–1664; Jessica Litman, “The Public Domain,” Emory Law Journal 39 (1990): 1010–1011.}~ These inputs may be snippets of code, discoveries, prior research, images, genres of work, cultural references, or databases of single nucleotide polymorphisms—each is raw material for future innovation. Every increase in protection raises the cost of, or reduces access to, the raw material from which you might have built those future products. The balance is a delicate one; one Nobel Prize-winning economist has claimed that it is actually impossible to strike that balance so as to produce an informationally efficient market.~{Sanford J. Grossman and Joseph E. Stiglitz, “On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets,” American Economic Review 70 (1980): 404.}~ + +Whether or not it is impossible in theory, it is surely a difficult problem in practice. In other words, even if enclosure of the arable commons always produced gains (itself a subject of debate), enclosure of the information commons clearly has the potential to harm innovation as well as to support it.~{For a more technical account, see James Boyle, “Cruel, Mean, or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and Digital Intellectual Property,” Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000): 2007–2039.}~ More property rights, even though they supposedly offer greater incentives, do not necessarily make for more and better production and innovation—sometimes just the opposite is true. It may be that intellectual property rights slow down innovation, by putting multiple roadblocks in the way of subsequent innovation.~{The most recent example of this phenomenon is multiple legal roadblocks in bringing GoldenRice™ to market. For a fascinating study of the various issues involved and the strategies for working around them, see R. David Kryder, Stanley P. Kowalski, and Anatole F. Krattiger, “The Intellectual and Technical Property Components of Pro-Vitamin A Rice (GoldenRice™): A Preliminary Freedom-to-Operate Review,” ISAAA Briefs No. 20 (2000), available at http://www.isaaa.org/Briefs/20/briefs.htm. In assessing the economic effects of patents, one has to balance the delays and increased costs caused by the web of property rights against the benefits to society of the incentives to innovation, the requirement of disclosure, and the eventual access to the patented subject matter. When the qualification levels for patents are set too low, the benefits are minuscule and the costs very high—the web of property rights is particularly tangled, complicating follow-on innovation, the monopoly goes to “buy” a very low level of inventiveness, and the disclosure is of little value.}~ Using a nice inversion of the idea of the tragedy of the commons, Heller and Eisenberg referred to these effects—the transaction costs caused by myriad property rights over the necessary components of some subsequent innovation—as “the tragedy of the anticommons.”~{Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research,” Science 280 (1998): 698–701.}~ + +In short, even if the enclosure movement was a complete success, there are important reasons to believe that the intangible world is less clearly a candidate for enclosure, that we should pause, study the balance between the world of the owned and the world of the free, gather evidence. After all, even in physical space, “common” property such as roads increases the value of the surrounding private tracts. If there are limits to the virtues of enclosure even there, how much more so in a world of intangible and nonrival goods, which develop by drawing on prior creations? Yet the second enclosure movement proceeds confidently nevertheless—with little argument and less evidence. + +To be sure, there is a danger of overstatement. The very fact that the changes have been so one-sided makes it hard to resist exaggerating their impact. In 1918, Justice Brandeis confidently claimed that “[t]he general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”~{Int’l News Serv. v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215, 250 (1918) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).}~ That baseline—intellectual property rights are the exception rather than the norm; ideas and facts must always remain in the public domain—is still supposed to be our starting point.~{Yochai Benkler, “Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain,” New York University Law Review 74 (1999): 354, 361, 424.}~ It is, however, under attack. + +Both overtly and covertly, the commons of facts and ideas is being enclosed. Patents are increasingly stretched to cover “ideas” that twenty years ago all scholars would have agreed were unpatentable.~{The so-called “business method” patents, which cover such “inventions” as auctions or accounting methods, are an obvious example. See, e.g., State St. Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Fin. Group, Inc. , 149 F.3d 1368, 1373 (Fed. Cir. 1998).}~ Most troubling of all are the attempts to introduce intellectual property rights over mere compilations of facts.~{Database Investment and Intellectual Property Antipiracy Act of 1996, HR 3531, 104th Cong. (1996); Collections of Information Antipiracy Act, S 2291, 105th Cong. (1998).}~ If U.S. intellectual property law had an article of faith, it was that unoriginal compilations of facts would remain in the public domain, that this availability of the raw material of science and speech was as important to the next generation of innovation as the intellectual property rights themselves.~{See, e.g., Feist Publications v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co. , 499 U.S. 340, 350 (1991): “Copyright treats facts and factual compilations in a wholly consistent manner. Facts, whether alone or as part of a compilation, are not original and therefore may not be copyrighted.” To hold otherwise “distorts basic copyright principles in that it creates a monopoly in public domain materials without the necessary justification of protecting and encouraging the creation of ‘writings’ by ‘authors.’ ” Ibid., at 354.}~ The system would hand out monopolies in inventions and in original expression, while the facts below (and ideas above) would remain free for all to build upon. But this premise is being undermined. Some of the challenges are subtle: in patent law, stretched interpretations of novelty and nonobviousness allow intellectual property rights to move closer and closer to the underlying data layer; gene sequence patents come very close to being rights over a particular discovered arrangement of data—C’s, G’s, A’s, and T’s.~{See Eisenberg, “Patenting the Human Genome”; Haas, “Wellcome Trust’s Disclosures.”}~ Other challenges are overt: the European Database Protection Directive did (and various proposed bills in the United States would) create proprietary rights over compilations of facts, often without even the carefully framed exceptions of the copyright scheme, such as the usefully protean category of fair use. + +The older strategy of intellectual property law was a “braided” one: thread a thin layer of intellectual property rights around a commons of material from which future creators would draw.~{Those who prefer topographical metaphors might imagine a quilted pattern of public and private land, with legal rules specifying that certain areas, beaches say, can never be privately owned, and accompanying rules giving public rights of way through private land if there is a danger that access to the commons might otherwise be blocked.}~ Even that thin layer of intellectual property rights was limited so as to allow access to the material when that was necessary to further the goals of the system. Fair use allows for parody, commentary, and criticism, and also for “decompilation” of computer programs so that Microsoft’s competitors can reverse engineer Word’s features in order to make sure their program can convert Word files. It may sound paradoxical, but in a very real sense protection of the commons was one of the fundamental goals of intellectual property law. + +In the new vision of intellectual property, however, property should be extended everywhere; more is better. Expanding patentable and copyrightable subject matter, lengthening the copyright term, giving legal protection to “digital barbed wire,” even if it is used to prevent fair use: each of these can be understood as a vote of no confidence in the productive powers of the commons. We seem to be shifting from Brandeis’s assumption that the “noblest of human productions are free as the air to common use” to the assumption that any commons is inefficient, if not tragic. + +The expansion is more than a formal one. It used to be relatively hard to violate an intellectual property right. The technologies of reproduction or the activities necessary to infringe were largely, though not entirely, industrial. Imagine someone walking up to you in 1950, handing you a book or a record or a movie reel, and saying “Quick! Do something the law of intellectual property might forbid.” (This, I admit, is a scenario only likely to come to the mind of a person in my line of work.) You would have been hard-pressed to do so. Perhaps you could find a balky mimeograph machine, or press a reel-to-reel tape recorder into use. You might manage a single unauthorized showing of the movie—though to how many people? But triggering the law of intellectual property would be genuinely difficult. Like an antitank mine, it would not be triggered by the footsteps of individuals. It was reserved for bigger game. + +This was no accident. The law of intellectual property placed its triggers at the point where commercial activity by competitors could undercut the exploitation of markets by the rights holder. Copying, performance, distribution—these were things done by other industrial entities who were in competition with the owner of the rights: other publishers, movie theaters, distributors, manufacturers. In practice, if not theory, the law was ptal industry regulation of unfair competition—made by the people in the affected industries for the people in the affected industries. The latter point is worth stressing. Congress would, and still does, literally hand over the lawmaking process to the industries involved, telling them to draft their intra-industry contract in the form of a law, and then to return to Congress to have it enacted. The public was not at the table, needless to say, and the assumption was that to the extent there was a public interest involved in intellectual property law, it was in making sure that the industries involved got their act together, so that the flow of new books and drugs and movies would continue. Members of the public, in other words, were generally thought of as passive consumers of finished products produced under a form of intra-industry regulation that rarely implicated any act that an ordinary person would want, or be able, to engage in. + +In the world of the 1950s, these assumptions make some sense—though we might still disagree with the definition of the public interest. It was assumed by many that copyright need not and probably should not regulate private, noncommercial acts. The person who lends a book to a friend or takes a chapter into class is very different from the company with a printing press that chooses to reproduce ten thousand copies and sell them. The photocopier and the VCR make that distinction fuzzier, and the networked computer threatens to erase it altogether. + +So how are things different today? If you are a person who routinely uses computers, the Internet, or digital media, imagine a day when you do not create—intentionally and unintentionally—hundreds of temporary, evanescent copies. (If you doubt this, look in the cache of your browser.) Is there a day when you do not “distribute” or retransmit fragments of articles you have read, when you do not seek to share with friends some image or tune? Is there a day when you do not rework for your job, for your class work, or simply for pastiche or fun, some of the digital material around you? In a networked society, copying is not only easy, it is a necessary part of transmission, storage, caching, and, some would claim, even reading.~{See Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001).}~ + +As bioinformatics blurs the line between computer modeling and biological research, digital production techniques blur the lines between listening, editing, and remaking. “Rip, mix, and burn,” says the Apple advertisement. It marks a world in which the old regime of intellectual property, operating upstream as a form of industrial competition policy, has been replaced. Intellectual property is now in and on the desktop and is implicated in routine creative, communicative, and just plain consumptive acts that each of us performs every day. Suddenly, the triggers of copyright—reproduction, distribution—can be activated by individual footsteps. + +Of course, we would hope that in your daily actions you scrupulously observed the rights—all the rights—of the companies that have interests in the texts, tunes, images of celebrities, trademarks, business method patents, and fragments of computer code you dealt with. Did you? Can you be sure? I teach intellectual property, but I admit to some uncertainty. I would not have imagined that a temporary image of a Web page captured in the cache of my browser counted as a “copy” for the purposes of copyright law.~{See James Boyle, “Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person’s Guide,” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 10 (1996): 47–112.}~ I would have thought that it was fair use for a company to photocopy articles in journals it subscribed to, and paid for, in order to circulate them to its researchers.~{American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, 37 F.3d 882 (2nd Cir. 1994).}~ If a conservative Web site reposted news articles from liberal newspapers with critical commentary, that, too, would have seemed like fair use.~{Los Angeles Times v. Free Republic, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 5669, 54 U.S.P.Q.2D 1453 (C.D. Cal. 2000).}~ I would have thought that it was beneficial competition, and not a trespass, for an electronic “aggregator” to gather together auction prices or airline fares, so as to give consumers more choice.~{eBay, Inc. v. Bidder’s Edge, Inc. , 100 F. Supp. 2d 1058 (N.D. Cal. 2000).}~ I would not have thought that a search engine that catalogued and displayed in framed format the digital graphics found on the Internet would be sued for infringing the copyrights of the owners of those images.~{Kelly v. Arriba Soft, 336 F.3d 811 (9th Cir. 2003). After initially holding that while thumbnails were fair use, inline links that displayed pictures were not fair use, the court reversed itself and found fair use in both instances.}~ I would not have thought that I might be sued for violating intellectual property law if I tried to compete with a printer company by making toner cartridges that were compatible with its printers.~{After a District Court issued a temporary injunction telling Static Controls that it must cease manufacturing generic toner cartridges that operated in Lexmark printers—indicating it was likely to be found to be violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “anti-circumvention” provisions—the Appeals Court held that such cartridges did not in fact violate the DMCA. Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc. , 387 F.3d 522 (6th Cir. 2004).}~ + +The examples go on. I know that the “research exemption” in U.S. patent law is very tightly limited, but I would have laughed if you had told me that even a research university was forbidden from doing research unless that research had no conceivable practical or academic worth—in other words that even in academia, in a project with no commercial goal, the research exemption only covered research that was completely pointless.~{Madey v. Duke Univ. , 307 F.3d 1351 (Fed. Cir. 2003), cert. denied, 539 U.S. 958 (2003).}~ Why have an exemption at all, in that case? I would have told an academic cryptography researcher that he need not fear legal threats from copyright owners simply for researching and publishing work on the vulnerabilities of copy protection schemes.~{“When scientists from Princeton University and Rice University tried to publish their findings [on the vulnerabilities in a copy protection scheme] in April 2001, the recording industry claimed that the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal to discuss or provide technology that might be used to bypass industry controls limiting how consumers can use music they have purchased. ‘Studying digital access technologies and publishing the research for our colleagues are both fundamental to the progress of science and academic freedom,’ stated Princeton scientist Edward Felten. ‘The recording industry’s interpretation of the DMCA would make scientific progress on this important topic illegal.’ . . . \\ “SDMI sponsored the ‘SDMI Public Challenge’ in September 2000, asking Netizens to try to break their favored watermark schemes, designed to control consumer access to digital music. When the scientists’ paper about their successful defeat of the watermarks, including one developed by a company called Verance, was accepted for publication, Matt Oppenheim, an officer of both RIAA and SDMI, sent the Princeton professor a letter threatening legal liability if the scientist published his results.” “EFF Media Release: Princeton Scientists Sue Over Squelched Research,” available at http://w2.eff.org/IP/DMCA/Felten_v_RIAA/20010606_eff_felten_pr.html. After a First Amendment challenge to the relevant provisions of the DMCA, the threats were withdrawn.}~ I would not have thought that one could patent the idea of having an electronic Dutch auction on the Internet, working out the daily prices of a bundle of mutual funds through simple arithmetic, or buying something online with one click.~{See, e.g., Robert P. Merges, “As Many as Six Impossible Patents before Breakfast: Property Rights for Business Concepts and Patent System Reform,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 615.}~ I would have assumed that celebrities’ rights to control their images should end with their deaths, and that courts would agree that those rights were tightly limited by the First Amendment. Yet, in each of these cases, I would have been wrong, or at least I might be wrong—enough that a sane person would worry. Not all of the expansive claims eventually triumphed, of course, but some did. Guessing which would and which would not was hard even for me, though, as I said, I teach intellectual property law. You, probably, do not. + +In 1950 none of this would have mattered. Unless you were in some related business—as a publisher, broadcaster, film distributor, or what have you—it would have been hard for you to trigger the rules of intellectual property law. If you were in such a business, you were probably very familiar with the rules that governed your activities and well represented by corporate counsel who knew them even better. What’s more, the rules were neither as complex nor as counterintuitive as they are now. They also did not reach as far. The reach of the rights has been expanded, and their content made more difficult to understand, at the exact moment that their practical effect has been transformed. It is not merely that the triggers of intellectual property law can easily be set off by individual footsteps. There are now many more triggers and their trip wires are harder to see. + +From the point of view of the content industries, of course, all this is foolishness. It is not some undesirable accident that intellectual property has come to regulate personal, noncommercial activity. It is absolutely necessary. Think of Napster. When individuals engaging in noncommercial activity have the ability to threaten the music or film industry’s business plan by engaging in the very acts that copyright law always regulated—namely reproduction and distribution—of course it is appropriate for them, and the networks they “share” on, to be subject to liability. What’s more, to the extent that copying becomes cheaper and easier, it is necessary for us to strengthen intellectual property rights. We must meet the greater danger of copying with more expansive rights, harsher penalties, and expanded protections, some of which may indeed have the practical effect of reducing rights that citizens thought they had, such as fair use, low-level noncommercial sharing among personal friends, resale, and so on. Without an increase in private property rights, in other words, cheaper copying will eat the heart out of our creative and cultural industries. I call this claim the Internet Threat. + +2~ Chapter 3: Further Reading + +The endnotes to this chapter supply copious particular references; this page provides the overview. Those seeking to understand the various methods by which different aspects of common land were enclosed over a 400 year history in England should start with J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450–1850 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977). Thomas More, Utopia (New York: W. J. Black, 1947), provides a harsh criticism of the enclosure movement, one that is echoed hundreds of years later by Polanyi: Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). Economic historians have generally believed that the enclosure movement yielded considerable efficiency gains—bringing under centralized control and management, property that had previously been inefficiently managed under a regime of common access. When efficiency gains mean higher productivity so that fewer people starve, this is no small thing. Donald N. McCloskey, “The Enclosure of Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of English Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 15–35; “The Prudent Peasant: New Findings on Open Fields,” Journal of Economic History 51 (1991): 343–355. This argument seems plausible, but it has recently received powerful challenges, for example, that by Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). + +In the twentieth century, the negative effects of open access or common ownership received an environmental gloss thanks to the work of Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248. However, work by scholars such as Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Carol Rose, “The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property,” University of Chicago Law Review 53 (1986): 711–781, have introduced considerable nuance to this idea. Some resources may be more efficiently used if they are held in common. In addition, nonlegal, customary, and norm-based forms of “regulation” often act to mitigate the theoretical dangers of overuse or under-investment. + +Beyond the theoretical and historical arguments about the effects of enclosure on real property lie the question of how well those arguments translate to the world of the intangible and intellectual. It is that question which this chapter raises. Christopher May, A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights: The New Enclosures? (London: Routledge, 2000) offers a similar analogy—as do several other articles cited in the text. The key differences obviously lie in the features of intellectual property identified in the earlier chapters—its nonrivalrousness and nonexcludability—and on the ways in which a commons of cultural, scientific, and technical information has been central to the operation of both liberal democracy and capitalist economy. I owe the latter point particularly to Richard Nelson, whose work on the economics of innovation amply repays further study: Richard Nelson, Technology, Institutions, and Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). + +1~ Chapter 4: The Internet Threat + +The conventional wisdom is that governments respond slowly to technological change. In the case of the Internet, nothing could be further from the truth. In 1994 and 1995, “dot-com” was still a mystical term for many. Most stories about the Internet dealt with sexual predation rather than possibilities of extreme wealth. Internet commerce itself was barely an idea, and some of the most exciting sites on the Web had pictures of coffeepots in university departments far away. (“See,” one would proudly say to a technological neophyte friend when introducing him to the wonders of the Net, “the pot is empty and we can see that live from here! This changes everything!”) It was an innocent time. Yet the U.S. government was already turning the wheels of intellectual property policy to respond to the threat (and promise) of the Internet. More precisely, they were trying to shape the future of the cumbersomely named “National Information Infrastructure,” the official name for the “information superhighway” that it was presumed would replace the “immature” technology of the Net. The government was wrong about that, and about a lot else. + +The blueprint for new intellectual property policy online came from the Patent and Trademark Office. That office promulgated first a Green Paper and then, after further hearings, a White Paper, on “Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure.”~{For the background to these documents see James Boyle, “Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person’s Guide,” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 10 (1996): 47–112; Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001).}~ As policy and legal documents these are in one sense long out of date. Some of their legal arguments were successfully challenged. Some of their most important proposals were rejected, while many others have become law. But as a starting point from which to trace the frame of mind that has come to dominate intellectual property policy online, they are hard to equal. + +These documents contained proposals that nowadays would be seen as fairly controversial. Internet service providers were said to be “strictly liable” for copyright violations committed by their subscribers; that is to say, they were legally responsible whether or not they knew about the violation or were at fault in any way. Loading a document into your browser’s transient cache memory while reading it was said to be making a “copy.” There was more: the beginnings of what later became the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,~{Pub. L. No. 105-304, 112 Stat. 2860 (1998) (codified as amended in scattered sections of 5,17, 28, and 35 U.S.C.).}~ making it illegal to cut through the digital fences which content providers put around their products. The attitude toward fair use was particularly revealing. At one point in the White Paper it was hinted that fair use might be a relic of the inconveniences of the analog age, to be discarded now that we could have automated fractional payments for even the most insignificant use.~{Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights (Washington, D.C.: Information Infrastructure Task Force, 1995), 73 n. 227. Hereinafter White Paper.}~ (It was noted, however, that some disagreed with this conclusion.) At another point, fair use was described as a “tax” on rights holders and a “subsidy” to those who benefited from it, such as educational institutions.~{White Paper, 84.}~ The White Paper also suggested that while any potential loss to rights holders caused by the new technology needed to be countered with new rights and new protections, any potential gain to them through the new technology was simply theirs. Potential gain did not offset the need to compensate for potential loss + +So what views of intellectual property were we carrying forward into the Internet age? Intellectual property is just like other property. Rights are presumptively absolute. Any limitations on them, such as fair use, are taxes on property owners, subsidies to the society at large. It sounds like a perfect time to administer the Jefferson Warning I sketched out in Chapter 2. After all, Jefferson was specifically warning against each of these errors two hundred years ago. To find them in a student paper would be disappointing—irritating, even. But this document was the blueprint for the intellectual property regime of cyberspace. + +But do these mistakes matter? How important is it that we get the rules of intellectual property right? To me, a number of my colleagues, some librarians, and a few software gurus, the White Paper was more than just a bit of bad policy in a technical field—like a poorly drafted statute about the witnessing of wills, say. When you set up the property rules in some new space, you determine much about the history that follows. Property rules have a huge effect on power relationships and bargaining positions. Think of rules setting out water rights or the right to drive cattle over homesteaders’ land in the American West. But they also are part of a larger way of seeing the world; think of the early-twentieth-century rules treating unions as “conspiracies in restraint of trade” or the Supreme Court decisions that dispossessed the American Indians on the theory that they did not comprehend the concept of property and thus did not “own” the land being taken from them.~{“Congress did not provide that one class in the community could combine to restrain interstate trade and another class could not. . . . It provided that ‘every’ contract, combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade was illegal.” Loewe v. Lawlor, 208 U.S. 274 (1908); “Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness. . . .” Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 543, 590 (1823).}~ We were at a comparable point in the history of cyberspace. What was being set up here was a vision of economy and culture, a frame of mind about how the world of cultural exchange operates, and eventually a blueprint for our systems of communication. At this stage, the range of possibilities is extremely wide. A lot of different choices could be made, but subsequent changes would be harder and harder as people and companies built their activities around the rules that had been laid down. This was, in short, a tipping point where it was particularly important that we make the right decisions. + +Conventional political science told us there were a lot of reasons to fear that we would not make the right decisions. The political process was going to be particularly vulnerable to problems of capture by established industries, many of whom would (rightly) see the Internet as a potential threat to their role as intermediaries between artists and creators on the one hand and the public on the other. + +Intellectual property legislation had always been a cozy world in which the content, publishing, and distribution industries were literally asked to draft the rules by which they would live. The law was treated as a kind of contract between the affected industries. Rationally enough, those industries would wish to use the law not merely to protect their legitimate existing property rights, but to make challenges to their basic business plans illegal. (Imagine what would have happened if we had given the lamp-oil sellers the right to define the rules under which the newfangled electric light companies would operate.) There would be no easy counterweight to these pressures, as Jessica Litman points out in a wonderful set of reflections on copyright lawmaking, because the potential competitors to existing titans were just being born and could thus be strangled safely in their cradles.~{“As the entertainment and information markets have gotten more complicated, the copyright law has gotten longer, more specific, and harder to understand. Neither book publishers nor libraries have any interest in making the library privilege broad enough so that it would be useful to users that aren’t libraries, and neither movie studios nor broadcast stations have any interest in making the broadcaster’s privilege broad enough to be of some use to say, cable television or satellite TV, so that doesn’t happen. Negotiated privileges tend to be very specific, and tend to pose substantial entry barriers to outsiders who can’t be at the negotiating table because their industries haven’t been invented yet. So negotiated copyright statutes have tended, throughout the century, to be kind to the entrenched status quo and hostile to upstart new industries.” Litman, Digital Copyright, 25.}~ Certainly the public would have little grasp as yet of what was at stake. + +In any event, when had the public played a role in intellectual property legislation? That kind of law affected businesses with printing presses or TV towers, not normal citizens. It did not help that the legislators were largely both ignorant and distrustful of the technology of the Internet—which was, at the time, thought to be dominated by foreign hackers, suicidal cults, pirates, and sleazy pornographers. (Terrorists and Nigerian spammers would be added to the mix later.) + +Given an area of law that legislators were happy to hand over to the affected industries and a technology that was both unfamiliar and threatening, the prospects for legislative insight were poor. Lawmakers were assured by lobbyists + +# that this was business as usual, that no dramatic changes were being made by the Green or White papers; or + +# that the technology presented a terrible menace to the American cultural industries, but that prompt and statesmanlike action would save the day; or + +# that layers of new property rights, new private enforcers of those rights, and technological control and surveillance measures were all needed in order to benefit consumers, who would now be able to “purchase culture by the sip rather than by the glass” in a pervasively monitored digital environment. + +In practice, somewhat confusingly, these three arguments would often be combined. Legislators’ statements seemed to suggest that this was a routine Armageddon in which firm, decisive statesmanship was needed to preserve the digital status quo in a profoundly transformative and proconsumer way. Reading the congressional debates was likely to give one conceptual whiplash. + +To make things worse, the press was—in 1995, at least—clueless about these issues. It was not that the newspapers were ignoring the Internet. They were paying attention—obsessive attention in some cases. But as far as the mainstream press was concerned, the story line on the Internet was sex: pornography, online predation, more pornography. The lowbrow press stopped there. To be fair, the highbrow press was also interested in Internet legal issues (the regulation of pornography, the regulation of online predation) and constitutional questions (the First Amendment protection of Internet pornography). Reporters were also asking questions about the social effect of the network (including, among other things, the threats posed by pornography and online predators). + +There were certainly important issues within the areas the press was willing to focus on, and I do not mean to trivialize them. I worked with a couple of civil liberties groups in opposing the hapless Communications Decency Act, one of the most poorly drafted pieces of speech regulation ever to come out of Congress.~{Communications Decency Act of 1996 (47 U.S.C. §§ 230, 560, 561) (1996).}~ It was a palpably unconstitutional statute, eventually struck down by a unanimous Supreme Court.~{Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997).}~ Its proposals would have burdened the speech of adults while failing to protect the interests of minors. Reporters loved the topic of the Communications Decency Act. It was about sex, technology, and the First Amendment. It foreshadowed the future of online speech regulation. One could write about it while feeling simultaneously prurient, principled, and prescient: the journalistic trifecta. For law professors who worked on digital issues, the Communications Decency Act was an easy topic to get the public to focus on; we had the reporters and editors calling us, pleading for a quote or an opinion piece. + +Intellectual property was something quite different. It was occasionally covered in the business pages with the same enthusiasm devoted to changes in derivatives rules. Presented with the proposals in the Green and White Papers, the reporters went looking for opinions from the Software Publishers Association, the Recording Industry Association of America, or the Motion Picture Association of America. This was not bias or laziness—to whom else would they go? Who was on the “other side” of these issues? Remember, all of this occurred before Napster was a gleam in Sean Fanning’s eye. Sean Fanning was in middle school. Amazon.com was a new company and “Google” was not yet a verb. + +In this environment, convincing the legislature or the press that fundamental public choices were implicated in the design of intellectual property rights for the digital world was about as easy as convincing them that fundamental public choices were implicated in the rules of tiddlywinks. My own experience is probably representative. I remember trying to pitch an article on the subject to a charming but uncomprehending opinion page editor at the Washington Post. I tried to explain that decisions about property rules would shape the way we thought about the technology. Would the relatively anonymous and decentralized characteristics of the Internet that made it such a powerful tool for global speech and debate come to be seen as a bug rather than a feature, something to be “fixed” to make the Net safe for protected content? The rules would also shape the economic interests that drove future policy. Would we try to build the system around the model of proprietary content dispensed in tightly controlled chunks? Would fair use be made technologically obsolescent? Would we undercut the various nontraditional methods of innovation, such as free software, before they ever managed to establish themselves? What would become of libraries in the digital world, of the ideal that access to books had important differences from access to Twinkies? After I concluded this lengthy and slightly incoherent cri de coeur, there was a long pause; then the editor said politely, “Are you sure you couldn’t make some of these points about a free speech issue, like the Communications Decency Act, maybe?” + +I finally placed the piece in the Washington Times,~{James Boyle, “Overregulating the Internet,” Washington Times (November 14, 1995), A17.}~ which was best known at the time as the only metropolitan newspaper owned by the Unification Church, familiarly referred to as the Moonies. This hardly counted as a direct line to the popular imagination (though the article’s mild criticisms elicited an extraordinary reaction from the Clinton administration’s lead official on intellectual property policy—throwing me for several weeks into a surreal world of secondhand threats, third-party leaks, and a hilarious back-and-forth in the letters page).~{See James Boyle, “The One Thing Government Officials Can’t Do Is Threaten Their Critics,” Washington Times (March 6, 1996), A16.}~ + +Things were not completely one-sided. An unlikely group of critics had formed: librarians, a few software developers, law professors, some Internet libertarians. Of particular note was the Digital Future Coalition, which grew to represent a broad range of interested groups and industries thanks in part to the prescient analysis and remarkable energy of one of my colleagues, Peter Jaszi.~{“The DFC was forged in 1995 in response to the release of the Clinton administration’s White Paper on Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure. The White Paper recommended significantly altering existing copyright law to increase the security of ownership rights for creators of motion pictures, publishers and others in the proprietary community. Members of the DFC recognized that if the policy proposals delineated in the White Paper were implemented, educators, businesses, libraries, consumers and others would be severely restricted in their efforts to take advantage of the benefits of digital networks.” See http://www.dfc.org/dfc1/Learning_Center/about.html. }~ Together with Pamela Samuelson, Jessica Litman, and a number of other distinguished legal scholars, Peter turned his considerable intellectual talents to explaining why writers, telecom companies, scientists, manufacturers of consumer electronics, and a host of other groups should be interested in the rules being debated. There had been a series of official hearings in which complaints were carefully collected and just as carefully ignored. This became harder to do as the critics became more numerous and better organized. Nevertheless, the currents were clearly running against them. It would be nice to say that this was merely because of the clubby history of intellectual property legislation, or the difficulty in getting press attention, or the various issues of industry capture and collective action problems. Yet this would be to miss a vital element of the situation. + +Conventional political science showed that there were structural reasons why the legislative process was likely to succumb to industry capture.~{See the classic account in Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).}~ The reality turned out to be much worse. The real problem was not a political process dominated by cynical power politics, nor an initial absence of critical newspaper coverage, though both of those factors contributed. The real problem was that most of the proponents of the White Paper’s policies believed their own arguments so deeply and sincerely that they saw any criticism of those positions as either godless communism or hippy digital anarchism. (Frequently, in fact, they clung to their arguments even when there was fairly strong evidence that they would actually be harming themselves by putting these policies into effect. I will expand on this point later.) More importantly, they succeeded in getting their story about the threats and promises of the digital future accepted as the basis for all discussion of intellectual property policy. It became the organizing set of principles, the master narrative—call it what you will. + +The heart of the story is beguilingly simple. The Internet makes copying cheaper and does so on an unparalleled global scale. Therefore we must meet the greater danger of illicit copying with more expansive rights, harsher penalties, and expanded protections. True, as I pointed out before, some of these expansions may indeed have the practical effect of reducing rights that citizens thought they had, such as fair use, low-level noncommercial sharing among personal friends, resale, and so on. But without an increase in private property rights, cheaper copying will eat the heart out of our creative and cultural industries. I call this story the Internet Threat. It is a powerful argument and it deserves some explanation. + +Think back for a moment to the first chapter and the difference between Madame Bovary and the petunia. If the reason for intellectual property rights is the “nonrival” and “nonexcludable” nature of the goods they protect, then surely the lowering of copying and transmission costs implies a corresponding need to increase the strength of intellectual property rights. Imagine a line. At one end sits a monk painstakingly transcribing Aristotle’s Poetics. In the middle lies the Gutenberg printing press. Three-quarters of the way along the line is a photocopying machine. At the far end lies the Internet and the online version of the human genome. At each stage, copying costs are lowered and goods become both less rival and less excludable. My MP3 files are available to anyone in the world running Napster. Songs can be found and copied with ease. The symbolic end of rivalry comes when I am playing the song in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at the very moment that you are both downloading and listening to it in Kazakhstan—now that is nonrival. + +2~ The Logic of Perfect Control + +My point is that there is a teleology—a theory about how intellectual property law must develop historically—hidden inside the argument I call the Internet Threat. The argument, which is touted endlessly by the content industries—and not without reason—can be reduced to this: The strength of intellectual property rights must vary inversely with the cost of copying. With high copying costs, one needs weak intellectual property rights if any at all. To deal with the monk-copyist, we need no copyright because physical control of the manuscript is enough. What does it matter if I say I will copy your manuscript, if I must do it by hand? How will this present a threat to you? There is no need to create a legal right to exclude others from copying, no need for a “copy right.” As copying costs fall, however, the need to exclude increases. To deal with the Gutenberg press, we need the Statute of Anne—the first copyright statute—and the long evolution of copyright it ushered in. + +But then comes the Internet. To deal with the Internet, we need the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,~{See note 2 above.}~ the No Electronic Theft Act,~{Pub. L. No. 105-147, 111 Stat. 2678 (1997) (codified as amended in scattered sections of 17 and 18 U.S.C.).}~ the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act,~{Pub. L. No. 105-298, 112 Stat. 2827 (1998) (codified as amended in scattered sections of 17 U.S.C.).}~ and perhaps even the Collections of Information Antipiracy Act.~{S 2291, 105th Cong. (1998).}~ As copying costs approach zero, intellectual property rights must approach perfect control. We must strengthen the rights, lengthen the term of the rights, increase the penalties, and make noncommercial illicit copying a crime. We must move outside the traditional realm of copyright altogether to regulate the technology around the copyrighted material. Companies are surrounding their digital materials with digital fences. We must make it a violation of the law to cut those digital fences, even if you do so to make a “fair use” of the material on the other side. We must prohibit the making of things that can be used as fence-cutters—a prospect that worries researchers on encryption. In the long run, we must get rid of the troublesome anonymity of the Internet, requiring each computer to have an individual ID. We must make click-wrap contracts enforceable, even on third parties, even when you cannot read them before clicking—so that you never actually buy the software, music, movies, and e-books you download, merely “license” them for a narrowly defined range of uses. We must create interlocking software and hardware systems that monitor and control the material played on those systems—so that songs can be licensed to particular computers at particular times. Uses that the owners wish to forbid will actually be impossible, whether they are legal or not. + +In other words, we must make this technology of the Internet, which was hailed as the great “technology of freedom,” into a technology of control and surveillance. The possibility of individuals circulating costless perfect digital copies requires it. It would be facile (if tempting) to say we must remake the Internet to make it safe for Britney Spears. The “Internet Threat” argument is that we must remake the Net if we want digital creativity—whether in music or software or movies or e-texts. And since the strength of the property rights varies inversely with the cost of copying, costless copying means that the remade Net must approach perfect control, both in its legal regime and its technical architecture. + +Like any attractive but misleading argument, the Internet Threat has a lot of truth. Ask the software company producing expensive, specialized computer-assisted design programs costing thousands of dollars what happens when the program is made available on a “warez” site or a peer-to-peer file-sharing network. The upstart computer game company pinning its hopes and its capital on a single new game would tell you the same thing. The easy availability of perfect, costless copies is a danger to all kinds of valuable cultural and economic production. The story of the Internet Threat is not wrong, it is simply dramatically incomplete in lots of ways. Here are two of them. + +2~ Costless Copying Brings Both Costs and Benefits + +The Internet does lower the cost of copying and thus the cost of illicit copying. Of course, it also lowers the costs of production, distribution, and advertising, and dramatically increases the size of the potential market. Is the net result a loss to rights holders such that we need to increase protection and control in order to maintain a constant level of incentives? A large, leaky market may actually provide more revenue than a small one over which one’s control is much stronger. What’s more, the same technologies that allow for cheap copying also allow for swift and encyclopedic search engines—the best devices ever invented for detecting illicit copying. What the Net takes away with one hand, it often gives back with the other. Cheaper copying does not merely mean loss, it also means opportunity. Before strengthening intellectual property rights, we would need to know whether the loss was greater than the gain and whether revised business models and new distribution mechanisms could avoid the losses while capturing more of the gains. + +But wait, surely theft is theft? If the new technologies enable more theft of intellectual property, must we not strengthen the laws in order to deal with the problem? If some new technology led to a rash of car thefts, we might increase police resources and prison sentences, perhaps pass new legislation creating new crimes related to car theft. We would do all of this even if the technology in question gave car owners significant benefits elsewhere. Theft is theft, is it not? + +The answer in a word is no. Saying “theft is theft” is exactly the error that the Jefferson Warning is supposed to guard against. We should not assume that intellectual property and material property are the same in all regards. The goal of creating the limited monopoly called an intellectual property right is to provide the minimum necessary incentive to encourage the desired level of innovation. Anything extra is deadweight loss. When someone takes your car, they have the car and you do not. When, because of some new technology, someone is able to get access to the MP3 file of your new song, they have the file and so do you. You did not lose the song. What you may have lost is the opportunity to sell the song to that person or to the people with whom they “share” the file. We should not be indifferent to this kind of loss; it is a serious concern. But the fact that a new technology brings economic benefits as well as economic harm to the creation, distribution, and sale of intellectual property products means that we should pause before increasing the level of rights, changing the architecture of our communications networks, creating new crimes, and so on. + +Remember, many of the things that the content industries were concerned about on the Internet were already illegal, already subject to suit and prosecution. The question is not whether the Internet should be an intellectual property-free zone; it should not be, is not, and never was. The question is whether, when the content industries come asking for additional or new rights, for new penalties, for the criminalization of certain types of technology, we should take into account the gains that the Internet has brought them, as well as the costs, before we accede to their requests. The answer, of course, is that we should. Sadly, we did not. This does not mean that all of the content industries’ attempts to strengthen the law are wrong and unnecessary. It means that we do not know whether they are or not. + +There is a fairly solid tradition in intellectual property policy of what I call “20/20 downside” vision. All of the threats posed by any new technology—the player piano, the jukebox, the photocopier, the VCR, the Internet—are seen with extraordinary clarity. The opportunities, however, particularly those which involve changing a business model or restructuring a market, are dismissed as phantoms. The downside dominates the field, the upside is invisible. The story of video recorders is the best-known example. When video recorders—another technology promising cheaper copying—first appeared, the reaction of movie studios was one of horror. Their business plans relied upon showing movies in theaters and then licensing them to television stations. VCRs and Betamaxes fit nowhere in this plan; they were seen merely as copyright violation devices. Hollywood tried to have them taxed to pay for the losses that would be caused. Their assumption? Cheaper copying demands stronger rights. + +Having lost that battle, the movie studios tried to have the manufacturers of the recording devices found liable for contributory copyright infringement; liable, in other words, for assisting the copyright violations that could be carried out by the owners of Sony Betamaxes. This, of course, was exactly the same legal claim that would be made in the Napster case. In the Sony case, however, the movie companies lost. The Supreme Court said that recording of TV programs to “time-shift” them to a more convenient hour was a fair use.~{Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. , 464 U.S. 417 (1984).}~ The movie studios’ claims were rejected. + +Freed from the threat of liability, the price of video recorders continued to fall. They flooded consumers’ houses at a speed unparalleled until the arrival of the World Wide Web. All these boxes sitting by TVs now cried out for content, content that was provided by an emerging video rental market. Until the triumph of DVDs, the videocassette rental market made up more than 50 percent of the movie industry’s revenues.~{See Tina Balio, Museum of Broadcast Communications, “Betamax Case,” Encyclopedia of TV (1997), available at http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/B/htmlB/betamaxcase/betamaxcase.htm (“The Betamax case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which reversed the appeals court decision on 17 January 1984. By 1986, VCRs had been installed in fifty percent of American homes and annual videocassettes sales surpassed the theatrical box-office.”). The year 1986 was also the peak of the video rental market: “Video’s high mark, according to studies by A. C. Nielsen Media Research, was in late 1986, when an estimated 34.3 million households with VCR’s took home 111.9 million cassettes a month, or an average of 3.26 movies per household.” Peter M. Nichols, “Movie Rentals Fade, Forcing an Industry to Change its Focus,” New York Times (May 6, 1990), A1.}~ Were losses caused by video recorders? To be sure. Some people who might have gone to see a movie in a theater because the TV schedule was inconvenient could instead record the show and watch it later. Videos could even be shared with friends and families—tattered copies of Disney movies recorded from some cable show could be passed on to siblings whose kids have reached the appropriate age. VCRs were also used for copying that was clearly illicit—large-scale duplication and sale of movies by someone other than the rights holder. A cheaper copying technology definitely caused losses. But it also provided substantial gains, gains that far outweighed the losses. Ironically, had the movie companies “won” in the Sony case, they might now be worse off. + +The Sony story provides us with some useful lessons—first, this 20/20 downside vision is a poor guide to copyright policy. Under its sway, some companies will invariably equate greater control with profit and cheaper copying with loss. They will conclude, sometimes rightly, that their very existence is threatened, and, sometimes wrongly, that the threat is to innovation and culture itself rather than to their particular way of delivering it. They will turn to the legislature and the courts for guarantees that they can go on doing business in the old familiar ways. Normally, the marketplace is supposed to provide correctives to this kind of myopia. Upstart companies, not bound by the habits of the last generation, are supposed to move nimbly to harvest the benefits from the new technology and to outcompete the lumbering dinosaurs. In certain situations, though, competition will not work: + +_* if the dinosaurs are a cartel strong enough to squelch competition; + +_* if they have enlisted the state to make the threatening technology illegal, describing it as a predatory encroachment on the “rights” of the old guard rather than aggressive competition; + +_* if ingrained prejudices are simply so strong that the potential business benefits take years to become apparent; or + +_* if the market has “locked in” on a dominant standard—a technology or an operating system, say—to which new market entrants do not have legal access. + +In those situations, markets cannot be counted on to self-correct. Unfortunately, and this is a key point, intellectual property policy frequently deals with controversies in which all of these conditions hold true. + +Let me repeat this point, because it is one of the most important ones in this book. To a political scientist or market analyst, the conditions I have just described sound like a rarely seen perfect storm of legislative and market dysfunction. To an intellectual property scholar, they sound like business as usual. + +In the case of the VCR wars, none of these factors obtained. The state refused to step in to aid the movie companies by criminalizing the new technology. There were equally powerful companies on the other side of the issue (the consumer electronics companies selling VCRs) who saw this new market as a natural extension of a familiar existing market—audio recorders. There was no dominant proprietary technological standard controlled by the threatened industry that could be used to shut down any threats to their business model. The market was allowed to develop and evolve without premature legal intervention or proprietary technological lockout. Thus we know in this case that the movie companies were wrong, that their claims of impending doom from cheap copies were completely mistaken. The public and, ironically, the industry itself benefited as a result. But the Sony case is the exception rather than the rule. That is why it is so important. If competition and change can be forbidden, we will get relatively few cases that disprove the logic that cheaper copying must always mean stronger rights. The “natural experiments” will never be allowed to happen. They will be squelched by those who see only threat in the technologies that allow cheaper copies and who can persuade legislators or judges to see the world their way. The story line I describe here, the Internet Threat, will become the conventional wisdom. In the process, it will make it much less likely that we will have the evidence needed to refute it. + +2~ The Holes Matter as Much as the Cheese + +The Sony case is important in another way. The Supreme Court’s decision turned on the judgment that it was a “fair use” under U.S. copyright law for consumers to record television programs for time-shifting purposes. Since fair use comes up numerous times in this book, it is worth pausing for a moment to explain what it is. + +The content industries like to portray fair use as a narrow and grudging defense against an otherwise valid case for copyright infringement—as if the claim were, “Yes, I trespassed on your land, which was wrong, I admit. But I was starving and looking for food. Please give me a break.” This is simply inaccurate. True, fair use is asserted as “an affirmative defense”; that is the way it is brought up in a copyright case. But in U.S. law, fair uses are stated quite clearly to be limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright holder—uses that were never within the copyright holder’s power to prohibit. The defense is not “I trespassed on your land, but I was starving.” It is “I did not trespass on your land. I walked on the public road that runs through it, a road you never owned in the first place.” When society hands out the right to the copyright holder, it carves out certain areas of use and refuses to hand over control of them. Again, remember the Jefferson Warning. This is not a presumptively absolute property right. It is a conditional grant of a limited and temporary monopoly. One cannot start from the presumption that the rights holder has absolute rights over all possible uses and therefore that any time a citizen makes use of the work in any way, the rights holder is entitled to get paid or to claim “piracy” if he does not get paid. Under the sway of the story line I called the Internet Threat, legislators have lost sight of this point. So what is “fair use”? When I am asked this question by nonlawyers, I offer to show them the actual provision in the copyright act. They recoil, clearly imagining they are about to be shown something the size and complexity of the tax code. Here is the statutory fair use provision in its entirety: + +_1 #{Sec. 107. - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use}# + +_1 Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— + +_1 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; + +_1 2. the nature of the copyrighted work; + +_1 3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and + +_1 4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. + +_1 The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors. + +“But this seems quite sensible,” people often say, as though they had expected both Byzantine complexity and manifest irrationality. (Perhaps they have had some experience with legal matters after all.) The ones who think about it a little longer realize that these factors cannot be mechanically applied. Look at factor 3, for example. Someone who is making a parody frequently needs to take large chunks of the parodied work. That is the nature of a parody, after all. They might then sell the parody, thus also getting into trouble with factor 1. And what about factor 4? Someone might quote big chunks of my book in a devastating review that ruined any chance the book had of selling well. Come to think of it, even a parody might have a negative effect on the “potential market” for the parodied work. But surely those uses would still be “fair”? (In both instances, the Supreme Court agrees that they are fair uses.) + +In coming up with these hypothetical problem cases, the copyright novice is probably closer to having a good understanding of the purpose of fair use than many people who have studied it for years. In fact, the novice’s questions shed light on all of the exceptions, limitations, and defenses to proprietary rights—the holes in the cheese of intellectual property. The scholar’s urge is to find one theory that explains all the possible applications of the fair use doctrine, to arrange all of the cases like targets and shoot a single arrow through all of them. Perhaps fair use is designed to reduce the difficulty of clearing rights when it would be uneconomical or impossibly complex to do so: to reduce the paperwork, hassle, delay, ignorance, and aggravation that economists refer to under the sanguine name of “transaction costs.”~{For background, see Wendy Gordon, “Fair Use as Market Failure: A Structural and Economic Analysis of the Betamax Case and Its Predecessors,” Columbia Law Review 82 (1982): 1600–1657. For accounts that imagine a reduction of fair use as transaction costs fall, see Edmund W. Kitch, “Can the Internet Shrink Fair Use?,” Nebraska Law Review 78 (1999): 880–890; Robert P. Merges, “The End of Friction? Property Rights and the Contract in the ‘Newtonian’ World of On-Line Commerce,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 12 (1997): 115–136. This argument has hardly gone unanswered with articles pointing out that it neglects both the social values of fair use and the actual economics of its operation. See Jonathan Dowell, “Bytes and Pieces: Fragmented Copies, Licensing, and Fair Use in A Digital World,” California Law Review 86 (1998): 843–878; Ben Depoorter and Francesco Parisi, “Fair Use and Copyright Protection: A Price Theory Explanation,” International Review of Law and Economics 21 (2002): 453–473.}~ (Though the idea that fair use is about transaction costs hardly explains some of the types of fair use we care most about—the rights to parody, to criticize, to reverse engineer.) Or perhaps fair use allows the rights of a transformative author to be trumped only by a second transformative author, who is building on the first—the parodist, reviewer, collage artist, or what have you.~{“I believe the answer to the question of justification turns primarily on whether, and to what extent, the challenged use is transformative. The use must be productive and must employ the quoted matter in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original.” Pierre N. Leval, “Toward a Fair Use Standard,” Harvard Law Review 103 (1990): 1111.}~ (Then again, photocopying for classroom use does not sound very “transformative.”) Could fair use be dictated by the Constitution or by international free speech guarantees? In this view, fair use provides a safety valve that allows copyright to coexist with the First Amendment, property rights over speech to coexist with freedom of expression.~{See Neil Weinstock Netanel, “Locating Copyright Within the First Amendment Skein,” Stanford Law Review 54 (2001): 1–86; Yochai Benkler, “Free As the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain,” New York University Law Review 74 (1999): 354–446; Larry Lessig, Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture: “Copyright’s First Amendment” (March 1, 2001), in UCLA Law Review 48 (2001): 1057–1074; Melville B. Nimmer, “Does Copyright Abridge the First Amendment Guaranties of Free Speech and the Press?” UCLA Law Review 17 (1970): 1180–1204.}~ After all, it is not entirely obvious how it could be constitutional to forbid me, in the name of a federal law, from translating Mein Kampf in order to warn of the dangers of fascism or parodying some piece of art to subversive effect. + +Each of these ideas about fair use has much to recommend it, as do the many other grand theories that have been offered to explain the puzzle. And therein lies the problem. + +Intellectual property is a brilliant social invention which presents us with great benefits but also with a multitude of dangers: + +# the danger that the monopoly is unnecessary to produce the innovation, or that it is broader or lasts for longer than is necessary to encourage future production; + +# that overly broad rights will chill speech, criticism, or scientific progress; + +# that it will restrict access in ways that discourage “follow-on” innovation; + +# that it will lead to industry concentration in a way that hurts consumers or citizens while being less subject to antitrust regulation precisely because the monopoly or oligopoly rests on intellectual property rights; + +# that it will establish strong “network effects” which cause the market to tip over to some inefficient technology; and + +# that it will give the rights holder control over some technology outside the range of the monopoly but closely linked to it. + +The list of dangers goes on and on, and so does the list of exceptions, limitations, and restraints designed to prevent them. We restrict the length of intellectual property rights. (At least, we used to. The framers thought it so important to do so that they put the need to have a limited term in the Constitution itself; nevertheless both Congress and the Supreme Court seem to have given up on that one.) We restrict the scope of intellectual property rights, so that they cannot cover raw facts or general ideas, only the range of innovation and expression in between. (At least, we used to. Developments in database protection, gene patents, and business method patents are clearly eroding those walls.) As with fair use, we impose limitations on the rights when we hand them out in the first place. The exclusive right conferred by copyright does not include the right to prevent criticism, parody, classroom copying, decompilation of computer programs, and so on. (Though as the next chapter shows, a number of recent legal changes mean that the practical ability to exercise fair use rights is seriously threatened.) + +These limitations on intellectual property do not fit a single theory, unless that theory is “avoiding the multiple and evolving dangers of intellectual property itself.” Even a single limitation such as fair use clearly responds to many different concerns about the dangers of intellectual property rights. Indeed it will evolve to fit new circumstances. When computer programs were first clearly covered by copyright law, software engineers wondered if this would cripple the industry. Why? Anyone who wishes to compete with a dominant program needs to “decompile” it in order to make their program “interoperable,” or simply better. For example, a new word processing program, no matter how good, would be dead on arrival unless it could read all the files people had created with the old, dominant word processing software. But to do this, the engineers at the upstart company would have to take apart their competitor’s program. In the process they would have to create temporary copies of the old program, even though the final product—the hot new software—would be completely different from the old. Would this be a violation of copyright law? + +In a series of remarkable and far-seeing cases involving such issues, the courts said no.~{Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc. , 977 F.2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1992); Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America Inc. , 975 F.2d 832 (Fed. Cir. 1992).}~ “Decompilation” was fair use. The law of fair use had evolved in the context of expressive, nonfunctional, stand-alone works such as books, poems, songs. Now it was being applied to a functional product whose economics depended strongly on “network effects”—many types of programs are useful only if they are widely used. Without interoperability, we could never take our existing documents or spreadsheets or datasets and move to a new program, even if it was better. One program would not be able to read the files created by another. It would be as if language itself had been copyrighted. To have said that the incidental copies created in the process of decompiling software were actually infringements of copyright would have turned the law on its head because of a technological accident (you needed temporarily to “copy” the programs in order to understand how they worked and make yours work with them) and a legal accident (copyright was now being used to regulate functional articles of commerce: “machines” made of binary code). The difference between copying and reading, or copying and understanding, had changed because of the technology. The context had changed because the law was being stretched to cover new types of products, whose economics were very different from those of novels. Rather than let the dominant software companies use copyright to stop others from making interoperable software, the courts used an escape hatch—fair use—to prevent that danger and to uphold the basic goal of copyright: encouraging progress in science and the useful arts. + +This long story is told to make a simple point. The variegated and evolving limitations on intellectual property are as important as the rights they constrain, curtail, and define. The holes matter as much as the cheese. + +What does this have to do with the Sony case? In that case, remember, the Supreme Court had said that copying TV shows in order to time-shift was fair use. The Court could simply have stopped there. It could have said, “since most of what consumers do is legal, there can be no claim of contributory or vicarious infringement. Sony is not contributing to infringement since consumers are not infringing copyright by copying shows in the first place.” Interestingly, though this is the heart of the ruling, the court went further. It quoted some seemingly unrelated patent law doctrine on contributory infringement: “A finding of contributory infringement does not, of course, remove the article from the market altogether; it does, however, give the patentee effective control over the sale of that item. Indeed, a finding of contributory infringement is normally the functional equivalent of holding that the disputed article is within the monopoly granted to the patentee.” Clearly, the Justices were concerned that, by using copyright law, the movie studios could actually get control of a new technology. + +The fact that the Court expressed this concern through an analogy to patent law was, at first sight, fairly surprising. Courts do not normally look at copyrights in quite the same way as they look at patents. For one thing, patent rights are stronger, though they are harder to obtain and last for a shorter period of time. For another, while courts often express concern about the dangers of a patent-driven monopoly over a particular technology, it is strange to see that concern in the context of copyright law. An unnecessary monopoly over a plow or a grain elevator may, as Jefferson pointed out, slow technological development. But a monopoly over Snow White or “Ode on a Grecian Urn”? We do not normally think of rights over expression (the realm of copyright) threatening to sweep within their ambit an entire new technological invention (the realm of patent). + +But in the Sony case, the Supreme Court quite clearly saw that, in a world where technological developments made copying easier, the idea of contributory infringement in copyright could be used to suppress or control entire technologies that seemed, in the logic of 20/20 downside vision, to pose a threat to the copyright holder. Indeed, in some sense, the logic behind the Internet Threat—“cheaper copying requires greater control”—demands this result, though the Sony case antedates the World Wide Web by a considerable time. If it is cheap copying itself that poses the threat, then the content owners will increasingly move to gain control over the technologies of cheap copying, using copyright as their stalking horse. That is why the Sony Court went beyond the simple ruling on fair use to explain the consequences of the movie companies’ claim. In a footnote (the place where judges often bury their most trenchant asides) the Court was almost snide: + +_1 It seems extraordinary to suggest that the Copyright Act confers upon all copyright owners collectively, much less the two respondents in this case, the exclusive right to distribute VTR’s [Video Tape Recorders] simply because they may be used to infringe copyrights. That, however, is the logical implication of their claim. The request for an injunction below indicates that respondents seek, in effect, to declare VTR’s contraband. Their suggestion in this Court that a continuing royalty pursuant to a judicially created compulsory license would be an acceptable remedy merely indicates that respondents, for their part, would be willing to license their claimed monopoly interest in VTR’s to Sony in return for a royalty.~{Sony 464 U.S. at 441 n. 21.}~ + +The real heart of the Sony case is not that “time-shifting” of TV programs is fair use. It is an altogether deeper principle with implications for all of the holes in the intellectual property cheese. The Sony Court declared that because video recorders were capable of substantial noninfringing uses, the manufacturers of those devices were not guilty of contributory infringement. If the rights of copyright holders were absolute, if they had the authority to prohibit any activity that appeared to pose a threat to their current business model, then it is quite possible that video recorders would have been guilty of contributory infringement. It is because we have, and need, multiple exceptions and limitations on intellectual property that the Supreme Court was able to resist the claim that copyright itself forbids technologies of cheaper copying. To put it another way, without a robust set of exceptions and limitations on copyright, the idea that cheaper copying requires greater control will inexorably drive us toward the position that the technologies of cheaper reproduction must be put under the governance of copyright holders. + +Thus we have a corollary to the Jefferson Warning—call it the Sony Axiom: cheaper copying makes the limitations on copyright more rather than less important. Without those limitations, copyright law will bloat and metastasize into a claim of monopoly, or at least control, over the very architectures of our communications technology. And that is exactly where the logic of the Internet Threat is taking us today. + +2~ From Napster to Grokster + +Seventeen years after the Sony decision, another court had to deal with a suit by outraged copyright holders against the creators of a technology that allowed individuals to copy material cheaply and easily. The suit was called A&M Records v. Napster.~{A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc. , 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001).}~ Napster was a “peer-to-peer” file sharing system. The files were not kept on some huge central server. Instead, there was a central directory—think of a telephone directory—which contained a constantly updated list of the addresses of individual computers and the files they contained. Anyone who had the software could query the central registry to find a file’s location and then establish a direct computer-to-computer connection—anywhere in the world—with the person who had the file they desired. This decentralized design meant the system was extremely “robust,” very fast, and of nearly infinite capacity. Using this technology, tens of millions of people around the world were “sharing” music, an activity which record companies quite understandably viewed as simple theft. In fact, it would be hard to think of a situation that illustrated the Internet Threat better. The case ended up in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which hears cases in an area that includes California and thus has decided a lot of copyright cases over the years. + +There was an irony here. When the Supreme Court decided the Sony case, it was on appeal from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Sony, with its rule about reproductive technologies with substantial noninfringing uses, reversed the appeals court decision. The Supreme Court was, in effect, telling the Ninth Circuit that it was wrong, that its ruling would have required the “extraordinary” (legal shorthand for “stupid”) conclusion that copyright law gave copyright holders a veto on new technology. In the process, the Supreme Court told the Ninth Circuit that it also did not understand the law of fair use, or the freedom that should be given to individuals to make “noncommercial” private copies. The identities of the judges had changed, but now, seventeen years later, the same Circuit Court had another high-profile case on exactly the same issues. In case any of the judges might have missed this irony, it took David Boies, the lawyer for Napster, about ninety seconds to remind them in his oral argument. “This court,” he said, adding as if in afterthought, “in the decision that the Supreme Court ultimately reversed in Sony. . . .”~{A&M Records v. Napster: C-SPAN Videotape 159534, Part 1 of 1 (October 2, 2000).}~ To the laypeople in the audience it probably just seemed like another piece of legal droning. But to the lawyers in the room the message was quite clear. “The last time you got a case about a major new technology of consumer reproduction, you really screwed it up. Hope you can do better this time.” The judges’ mouths quirked—not entirely in pleasure. The point had been registered. + +Think for a moment of the dilemma in which the court had been placed. On the one hand, you had tens of millions of people “sharing” music files and Napster was the service that allowed them to do it. If this was not contributory copyright infringement, what was? On the other hand, Napster seemed to fit very nicely under the rule announced in the Sony case. + +The argument went like this. Like the VCR, the Napster service had substantial noninfringing uses. It allowed bands to expose their music to the world through the “New Artists” program. It made it easy to share music which was no longer under copyright. These uses clearly do not infringe copyright. There were also the claims that it permitted “space-shifting” by consumers who already owned the music or “sampling” of music by listeners as they decided whether or not to buy. One could argue that space-shifting and sampling were fair use (though in the end the court disagreed). But since we have two clear noninfringing uses, the technology obviously does have substantial uses that do not violate copyright. Thus, Napster cannot be liable as a contributory infringer, just as Sony could not be liable for the Betamax. Supreme Court precedent covers this case. The Ninth Circuit is bound by that precedent. All the judges can do, goes the argument, is to apply the words of the rule laid down in Sony, say that Napster wins, and move on to the next case. If Congress wants to make services like Napster illegal, it is going to have to pass a new law. The boundaries of the Sony rule are clear and Napster fits within them. (Of course, the last point is subject to argument, but the argument for Napster on this issue was a good one. Not overwhelming—there were more noninfringing uses in the Sony case because the normal way consumers used the technology in question was found to be a fair use—but certainly powerful.) + +A more daring strategy was to suggest that all the copying done over Napster was fair use, or at least presumptively fair. In Sony, the Supreme Court had said that the law presumes that noncommercial private copying—such as taping a show at home for future viewing—is a fair use. This presumption shifts the burden to the copyright holder to prove that the practice caused harm to them. Copying on Napster was done by private individuals. No money was exchanged. Does this mean we must presume it was fair use and require the music companies and songwriters to show clear evidence of “market harm” if they want to convince us otherwise? + +It sounds as though proving market harm would be pretty easy. How could millions of people exchanging hundreds of millions of songs not be causing harm? But it is more complicated. Remember the Jefferson Warning. We are not talking about swiping shoes from a shoe store. There one merely has to show the theft to prove the loss. By contrast, music files are copied without being “taken” from their owner. The record companies would have to show harm to their market—the people downloading who do not purchase music because it is available for free. Those who download, but would not have purchased, do not count. And we have to balance those who are deterred from purchasing against those who purchase a whole CD because they are exposed to new music through Napster. One very interesting empirical study on the subject indicates that the result is a wash, with hardly any measurable effect on sales; the overall drop in CD purchases results from larger macroeconomic issues.~{Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” Journal of Political Economy 115, no. 1 (2007): 1–42.}~ This study, however, has been subject to detailed methodological criticism.~{Stan J. Liebowitz, “How Reliable Is the Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf Paper on File-Sharing?” available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1014399. }~ Another study shows a weak effect on sales, though rather woundingly it seems to suggest that the result is economically efficient—fewer people end up with music they do not like.~{Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel, “Piracy on the High C’s: Music Downloading, Sales Displacement, and Social Welfare in a Sample of College Students,” available at http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/waldfogj/jle_piracy.pdf [Ed. note: originally published as http://www.law.upenn.edu/polk/dropbox/waldfogel.pdf, link has changed]. +}~ Other studies, by contrast, support the record company position—suggesting that illicit file sharing does indeed undercut sales of both CDs and authorized digital downloads.~{M. Peitz and P. Waelbroeck, “The Effect of Internet Piracy on Music Sales: Cross-Section Evidence,” Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues (December 2004): 71–79, available at http://www.serci.org/docs_1_2/waelbroeck.pdf. For an excellent general discussion see Rufus Pollock’s summary of the empirical evidence at http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/p2p_summary.html. }~ Given the complexities of the issue, the record companies did not want to engage in a war of dueling empirical studies. + +So, if Napster’s users were not infringing copyright law in the first place—at least until the record companies came up with convincing evidence of market harm—because their copying was noncommercial, then Napster could hardly be guilty of contributory infringement, could it? There would be no infringement at all! + +You could see Mr. Boies’s arguments as simple equations between the cases. + +_* Noninfringing uses such as recording public domain films and “time-shifting” programs are equivalent to noninfringing uses such as the New Artists program or sharing public domain music (and maybe “space-shifting” one’s own music?); or + +_* Private noncommercial videotaping is equivalent to private noncommercial file sharing. Both are presumptively fair uses. + +_* Either way, Sony=Napster and Napster wins. + +Napster did not win, of course, though when the judges handed down their decision it was clear they had been paying attention to Mr. Boies, at least enough to make them very wary of tampering with Sony. They claimed that they were upholding that case, but that Napster could be liable anyway. How? Because there was enough evidence here to show that the controllers of Napster had “actual knowledge that specific infringing material is available using its system, that it could block access to the system by suppliers of the infringing material, and that it failed to remove the material.” There was indeed evidence that Napster knew how its system was being used—an embarrassing amount of it, including early memos saying that users will want anonymity because they are trading in “pirated music.” Then there were nasty circumstantial details, like the thousands of infringing songs on the hard drive of one particular Napster employee—the compliance officer tasked with enforcing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act! (The recording company lawyers waxed wonderfully sarcastic about that.) + +But despite the ludicrously dirty hands of Napster as a company, lawyers could see that the appeals court was making a lot of new law as it struggled to find a way to uphold Sony while still making Napster liable. The court’s ruling sounded reasonable and clear, something that would only strike at bad actors while paying heed to the Sony Axiom and the assurance of safety that the rule in Sony had provided to technology developers for the previous twenty years. But hard cases make bad law. In order to accomplish this piece of legal legerdemain, the court had to alter or reinterpret the law in ways that are disturbing. + +The first thing the court did was to reject the argument that the “sharing” was private and noncommercial. As to the idea that it is not private, fair enough. Sharing one’s music with fifty-four million people does not sound that private, even if it is done for private ends, in private spaces. What about noncommercial? Embracing some earlier rulings on the subject, the court said a use was “commercial” if you got for nothing something for which you would otherwise have to pay. On the surface this sounds both clever and reasonable—a way to differentiate home taping from global file sharing—but the argument quickly begins to unravel. True, the Betamax owners could get TV shows for free just by watching at the regular time. But they could not get a copy of the show for free at the moment they wanted to watch it. That was why they taped. One could even argue that Napster users would have access to most songs over the radio for free. But lawyers’ quibbling about which way the rule cuts in this case is not the point. Instead, we need to focus on the change in the definition of “commercial,” because it illustrates a wider shift. + +Remember, a finding that a use is “noncommercial” makes it more likely that a court will find it to be legal—to be a fair use. The old test focused mainly on whether the motive for the copying was to make money. (A different stage of the inquiry concerned whether there was harm to the copyright holder’s market.) The Napster court’s test concentrates on whether the person consuming the copy got something for free. Instead of focusing on the fact that the person making the copy is not making money out of it—think of a professor making electronic copies of articles for his students to download—it focuses on the presumptively dirty hands of those who are “getting something for nothing.” But lots of copyright law is about “getting something for nothing.” To put it differently, one central goal of copyright is to limit the monopoly given to the copyright owner so that he or she cannot force citizens to pay for every single type of use. The design of the law itself is supposed to facilitate that. When “getting something for free” comes to equal “commercial” in the analysis of fair use, things are dangerously out of balance. Think back to Jefferson’s analogy. If I light my candle at yours, am I getting fire for free, when otherwise I would have had to pay for matches? Does that make it a “commercial” act? + +Having dismissed the claim that this was noncommercial sharing, the court then reinterpreted the Sony decision to allow liability when there was “actual knowledge” of specific copyright violations, an ability to block access by infringers, and a failure to do so. Neither side was entirely happy with this ruling, but the record companies believed—rightly—that it would allow them effectively to shut Napster down. Yet the Napster ruling only postponed the issue. The next set of file sharing services to be sued after Napster were even more decentralized peer-to-peer systems; the Napster court’s reinterpretation of Sony would not be able to reach them. + +The peer-to-peer file sharing service called Grokster is a relatively typical example. Unlike Napster, Grokster had no central registry. The system was entirely run by the individual “peer” computers. Because the system was designed this way, the people who made and distributed the software had no knowledge of specific infringing files. The users were doing the searching, indexing, and storing, and Grokster had no ability to control their behavior. For those reasons, a court of appeals held that Grokster was not liable. As in Sony, the system had substantial noninfringing uses. Lots of interesting content was traded on Grokster with the copyright holder’s consent. Other material was in the public domain. Grokster made money by streaming advertisements to the users of its software. The movie companies and record companies saw this as a flagrant, for-profit piracy ring. Grokster’s response was that like the makers of the VCR, it was simply providing a technology. Its financial interest was in people using that technology, not in using it for illicit purposes—though, like the VCR manufacturer, it would profit either way. The court of appeals agreed. True, the majority of the material traded on Grokster was illicitly copied, but the court felt that it could not give the recording or movie companies control over a technology simply because it allowed for easier copying, even if most of that copying was illegal. As I tried to point out in the section on the Sony Axiom, that line of thought leads to copyright holders having a veto over technological development. + +It was at this point that the Supreme Court stepped in. In the case of MGM v. Grokster,~{MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. , 545 U.S. 913 (2005).}~ the Supreme Court followed the line of the Napster court, but went even further. The Court created a new type of contributory copyright infringement—while apparently denying it was doing so. Grokster and its fellow services were liable because of three different kinds of evidence that they had “intended” to induce copyright violation. First, they were trying “to satisfy a known demand for copyright infringement.” This could be shown by the way that they advertised themselves as alternatives to the “notorious file-sharing service, Napster.” Second, the file sharing services did not try to develop filtering software to identify and eliminate copyrighted content—though this alone would not have been enough to make them liable. Finally, their advertising-supported system clearly profited by high-intensity use, which they knew was driven in the most part by illicit copying. This too would not have been enough by itself, the Court added, but had to be seen in the context of the whole record of the case. + +Let me be clear. I wept no tears for Napster, Grokster, and their ilk. I see no high-minded principle vindicated by middle-class kids getting access to music they do not want to pay for. It is difficult to take seriously the sanctimonious preening of those who cast each junior downloader of corporate rock as a Ché Guevara, fighting heroically to bring about a new creative landscape in music. (It is almost as hard to take seriously the record industry executives who moralistically denounce the downloading in the name of the poor, suffering artists, when they preside over a system of contracts with those same artists that makes feudal indenture look benign.) The file sharing companies themselves were also pretty unappealing. Many of the services were bloated with adware and spyware. True, some of their software engineers started with a dewy-eyed belief that this was a revolutionary technology that would break the record companies and usher in a new era of musical creativity. Whether one agrees or disagrees with them, it is hard—for me at least—to doubt their sincerity. But even this quality did not last long. For most of the people involved, the words “stock options” worked their normal, morally debilitating magic. In internal company correspondence, attacks on the hypocrisy of the music companies and defenses of a democratic communications structure imperceptibly gave way to discussions of “customer base,” “user experience,” and “saleable demographics.” I care little that Napster and Grokster—as individual companies—lost their specific legal battles. There are few heroes in this story. But if we had to rely on heroes, nothing would ever get done. + +I do care about the technology behind Napster and Grokster—about the kind of decentralized system it represents. I also care about the principle I identified as the Sony Axiom—a principle that goes far beyond music, peer-to-peer systems, or the Internet as a whole. The Supreme Court’s decision in Grokster could have been much worse. But it still offers a modest threat both to that technology and to that axiom. + +What is so great about peer-to-peer systems? We talk about “cheap speech” on the Internet, but bandwidth is actually expensive. If one is talking about music or video files, and one wishes to speak to many people in a short period of time, one vital way to have cheap speech is over peer-to-peer networks. If many of your viewers or listeners are willing to become broadcasting stations as they watch, you can cheaply reach a million people in a short period of time with your video of abuse in Abu Ghraib or your parody of political leaders. You do not need to rely on a broadcasting station, or even on the continued existence of entities such as YouTube, which face their own legal worries. By making your listeners your distributors, you can quickly reach the same number of ears that the payola-soaked radio waves allow the record companies to reach. + +One need not cheer Grokster. Much of what went on there was indeed illicit. But there are two key things to understand about peer-to-peer networks. The first is that they are hard to police. They have multiple nodes. That is why they work. It means they will have both infringing and noninfringing uses, and the noninfringing uses will be centrally connected to our deepest values of free speech and cultural decentralization. + +The second feature of peer-to-peer networks is even more basic. They are networks and thus subject to the laws of network economics. In short, they only work well if many people use them. A person who uses a peer-to-peer system that no one else uses is in the position of the person who owns the only fax machine in the world. Peer-to-peer networks provide cheap and unregulable audiovisual or data-heavy “speech” to a mass audience. And if the past is any guide, those networks will also carry large amounts of illicit material, just as photocopying machines (and VCRs) are widely used to violate copyright. The Grokster case makes it harder, but not impossible, to have successful, widely used peer-to-peer systems that are not themselves illicit. If they are widely used, there will be infringing content. If you try to police them and filter them, you will know more about that infringing content and thus might be liable—that was the point of the Napster case. If you do not, you will be failing to take precautions. That was the point of the Grokster case. What is a poor peer-to-peer network to do? Apart from making sure that the last four letters of your service’s name are not “-ster,” I am hard-pressed to advise you. + +A decision does not need to make an activity illegal in order to impede it. It only needs to make it uncertain. Already, for example, the free—and so far as I could tell, entirely well-meaning—service “bonpoo,” which allowed you to send large file attachments to many people at once, has shut down all of its capabilities except photo transfer. That is simply one trivial instance of a larger harm. Lots of new communications technologies will remain undeveloped because of the uncertainties left by this ruling. + +My colleague Jennifer Jenkins gave one useful hyperbolic illustration, drawing on earlier work by the Electronic Frontier Foundation: if one were launching the iPod today, it is not clear how it would fare under Grokster’s standard. Of course, there is no danger that the iPod will be challenged. It has become respectable and the music companies ended up sanctioning it. But how does it fare if we simply apply the tests laid down in the Grokster case? There is Apple’s “tainted” advertising campaign, urging users to “Rip, Mix, and Burn.” Does this not suggest complicity, or even intent? There is the fact that the iPod does not restrict itself solely to proprietary formats protected by digital rights management. It also allows uncontrolled MP3 files despite the fact that this format is “notoriously” used to transfer files against the wishes of the copyright owner. This, surely, is a “failure to police.” And finally, there is the fact that it would cost about $10,000 to fill an iPod with songs downloaded from iTunes. Clearly Apple must be aware that much of the music that fills iPods is illicitly copied. They are profiting from that fact to drive demand for the product, just as Grokster was profiting from the attractions of illicit traffic to drive people to use their service! + +No one is going to sue Apple now, of course. In fact, established players in the marketplace are probably fairly safe (and have better lawyers). But what if a product as good as the iPod were being developed now by some upstart company? What if it were no more and no less likely to be used for infringing purposes? Would the business plan ever see the light of day? Or would it be quietly smothered due to legal uncertainty? I have little sympathy for Grokster the company, but the decision that doomed it is a bad piece of technology policy. + +There is a second reason to dislike the Grokster decision. Despite some of the angst-ridden announcements made when the decision was handed down, the Supreme Court has not killed peer-to-peer systems. The concept is far too well entrenched. But the decision will mean that there are fewer of them that are widely used, easy to operate, and made by responsible and reputable people you can trust. This will probably lessen, but not end, illicit copying online. But that effect comes with a price—it makes our communications architecture a little bit more tightly controlled, reducing but not removing the availability of methods of mass distribution that are entirely outside centralized public or private control. It is another—relatively small—step toward an Internet that is more like cable TV or iTunes, a one-way flow of approved content. One might decide that such a price was well worth paying. But where is the limiting principle or end point of the logic that led to it? + +There is no provision in U.S. statutory copyright law that imposes liability for contributory or vicarious infringement. None. The patent statute has such a provision; not the Copyright Act. The courts have simply made the scheme up themselves. Then they made up limitations—such as Sony—in order to rein it in. In Grokster, the Supreme Court went further. It made up a new type of “inducement” liability. Fine. As I have tried to indicate here, the decision is not as dreadful as it is reputed to be. But so long as there is any unregulated space in our communications network, some portion of it will have illicitly copied content on it. The more the system is free of central control, the more it is open to use by any citizen, the cheaper it gets—all very desirable characteristics—the more illicit content there will be. That is the premise of the Internet Threat—the belief that control must rise as copying costs fall. I have tried here to suggest an alternative interpretation, the Sony Axiom: without a strong internal set of limitations over copyright, cheaper copying and the logic of the Internet Threat will always drive us toward giving control over our communications architecture to the content industries. + +There was one particularly striking moment in the Napster oral argument. The lawyer for the recording companies was arguing that Napster was illegal. The judges interrupted, as they often do, and there was a back-and-forth debate about the likely reach of any ruling that would shut down Napster. “I am not trying to say the Internet is illegal,” said the lawyer. There was a pause as everyone weighed those words carefully. + +My response would be “Really? Why not?” The logic of the Internet Threat leads to the position that a network is either controlled or illegal. The better and cheaper the network, the tighter the control needed. The Internet itself could have been designed differently. There could have been more centralized control, filtering of content, a design based on one-way transmission, closed protocols that allow users only a limited number of options. Indeed there were such systems—the national French Minitel system is an example. The Internet represents the opposite set of choices—freedom from centralized control, absence of intervention. In a famous article, Saltzer, Reed, and Clark provided the argument that an “end-to-end” network that is “dumb” and leaves processing to the “ends”—the smart terminals at either end of the wires—will be stable and robust.~{J. H. Saltzer, D. P. Reed, and D. D. Clark, “End-to-End Arguments in System Design,” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (November 1984): 277.}~ But it will also be remarkably uncontrolled and it will lower global copying costs close to zero for digital content. It is that principle that has made it successful. To put it tersely: the logic of the Internet Threat runs in exactly the opposite direction to the Internet itself. The logic of control is not the logic of the Net. + +Here is one last thought experiment. Apply the same test I suggested for the iPod to the Internet itself.~{Technically, this discussion fuses components of the Internet—its transfer protocols, for example—with aspects of the World Wide Web, the set of linked hypertext documents assembled on top of it.}~ Imagine you knew nothing of the Net. (Those of you who are over twenty-five may actually be able to remember when you knew nothing of the Net.) Imagine that you are sitting in a room somewhere discussing—perhaps with a group of government bureaucrats or some policy analysts from the Commerce Department—whether to develop this particular network. The scientists are enthusiastic. They talk of robustness and dumb networks with smart terminals. They talk of TCP/IP and HTML and decentralized systems that run on open protocols, so that anyone can connect to this network and use it any way they want to. You, of course, know nothing about the truly astounding outburst of creativity and communication that would actually flower on such a system, that would flower precisely because it is so open and no one country or company controls it or the protocols that run it. You do not know that millions of people worldwide will assemble the greatest factual reference work the world has ever seen on this network—often providing their information for free out of some bizarre love of sharing. You do not know about Amazon.com or Hotornot.com or the newspapers of the world online, or search engines, automatic page translation, plug-ins, or browsers. You cannot imagine free or open-source software being assembled by thousands of programmers worldwide. E-mail is only a dimly understood phenomenon to you. Teenagers in your world have never heard of instant messaging—a nostalgic thought. + +As the scientists talk, it becomes clear that they are describing a system without centralized direction or policing. Imagine that your decision is framed by the logic of control I have described in this chapter, by the fears that the content industry has had for at least the last thirty years—by the logic of the suit they brought in Sony. Imagine, in other words, that we make the up-or-down decision to develop the Internet based on the values and fears that our copyright policy now exhibits, and that the content industries have exhibited for thirty years. There is no way, no way at all, that a network like it would ever be developed. It would be strangled at birth. You would be told by the lawyers and policy wonks that it would be a haven for piracy and illegality. (And it would be, of course—though it would also be much, much more.) You would be told that the system needed to be designed to be safe for commerce or it would never attract investment, that it would need to be controlled and centralized for it to be reliable, that it would need to be monitored to stop it being a hotbed of crime. With the copyright lawyers in the room, you would end up designing something that looked like cable TV or Minitel. The Internet would never get off the ground. + +The Internet is safe now, of course, because it developed so fast that it was a reality before people had time to be afraid of it. But it should give us pause that if we had our current guiding set of policy goals in place, our assumption that cheaper copying means we need greater regulation, we would never have allowed it to flourish. As Jessica Litman points out, we are increasingly making our decisions about technology and communications policy inside copyright law. We are doing so according to the logic of control that I have sketched out in this chapter. But the logic of control is a partial logic. It blinds us to certain possibilities, ones that have huge and proven potential—look at the Internet. + +The law has not been entirely one-sided, however. The Sony case drew a line in the sand which promised to halt the inevitable drift toward greater and greater control over communications technology by content owners. It turned out the heavens did not fall. Indeed, the content companies thrived. Perhaps that line was drawn in the wrong place; reasonable people can disagree about that. But Grokster smudges the line without drawing a clear new one. If that new line is drawn according to the logic of control, what technologies will we never see? Could they be technologies that would transform our lives as unimaginably as the Internet has since 1995? + +I have described the story line—the cluster of metaphors and images and concerns—that pervades our copyright policy. I labeled it “the Internet Threat.” In the next chapter, I discuss an alternative story line, a different way of understanding our current policies. The subject of that story line is the best-known example of contemporary attempts to control the digital world, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. + +2~ Chapter 4: Further Reading + +The first book to read on the history of the tension between copying technologies and the law that regulates them is Paul Goldstein’s effortlessly erudite Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox, 2nd ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). Goldstein and I differ somewhat in our optimism about current regulatory developments but his work is an indispensable beginning for the inquiry and a pleasure to read. One fascinating theme in the book is that the intellectual tension between maximalists and minimalists (or optimists and pessimists as he describes them) is actually a fundamental part of copyright law’s survival strategy—its dialectical method of dealing with technological change. If so, in this book I am struggling gamely to do my part by holding up my side of the dialectic. It does not seem to be winning much recently. Perhaps copyright’s Hegel is asleep. + +Much of this chapter concerns itself with copyright’s response to the Internet. No book comes close to laying this out as well as Jessica Litman’s Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001). Litman is a beautiful essayist and this book is both accessible and detailed. Those readers who are interested in the history of that dying technology, the VCR, will find a brilliant account in James Lardner, Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese & the VCR Wars (New York: Norton, 1987). One needs only to scan its pages to pick up the eerie foreshadowing of the Internet Threat. Litman’s article on the Sony case provides a detailed legal history to back up Ladner’s social history. Jessica Litman, “The Sony Paradox,” Case Western Reserve Law Review 55 (2005): 917–962. Pamela Samuelson has a fine article exploring the jurisprudential impact of Sony’s reasoning. Pamela Samuelson, “The Generativity of Sony v. Universal: The Intellectual Property Legacy of Justice Stevens,” Fordham Law Review 74 (2006): 1831–1876. + +The scholarly literature on Napster, copyright, and peer-to-peer technologies generally is both wide and deep. In addition to Litman’s book, some personal favorites include: Raymond Shih Ray Ku, “The Creative Destruction of Copyright: Napster and the New Economics of Digital Technology,” University of Chicago Law Review 69 (2002): 263–324; Mark A. Lemley and R. Anthony Reese, “Reducing Digital Copyright Infringement Without Restricting Innovation,” Stanford Law Review 56 (2003–2004): 1345–1434; Jane C. Ginsburg, “Separating the Sony Sheep From the Grokster Goats: Reckoning the Future Business Plans of Copyright-Dependent Technology Entrepreneurs,” University of Arizona Law Review 50 (2008): 577–609; Justin Hughes, “On the Logic of Suing One’s Customers and the Dilemma of Infringement-Based Business Models,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 22 (2005): 725–766; Douglas Lichtman and William Landes, “Indirect Liability for Copyright Infringement: An Economic Perspective,” Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 16 (2003): 395–410; and Glynn S. Lunney, Jr., “Fair Use and Market Failure: Sony Revisited,” Boston University Law Review 82 (2002): 975–1030. + +In addition to these articles, a number have focused specifically on alternative methods of encouraging cultural production while maximizing technological and cultural freedom. Two that have profoundly influenced my own thinking are Neil Weinstock Netanel, “Impose a Noncommercial Use Levy to Allow Free Peer-to-Peer File Sharing,” Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 17 (2003): 1–84; and William Fisher, Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). Fisher, whose presentations and articles reveal a cathedral-like conceptual structure that would have delighted the Encyclopedists, argues powerfully that a system of levies on broadband technology, distributed in proportion to the popularity of the music downloaded could allow us to permit “free” access to music while still compensating musicians. His responses to the problems of measurement, gaming of the system, privacy, and so on will not convince everyone but they represent by far the most systematic treatment of the subject. + +1~ Chapter 5: The Farmers’ Tale: An Allegory + +Imagine that a bustling group of colonists has just moved into a new area, a huge, unexplored plain. (Again, assume the native inhabitants have conveniently disappeared.) Some of the colonists want to farm just as they always did in the old country. “Good fences make good neighbors” is their motto. Others, inspired by the wide-open spaces around them, declare that this new land needs new ways. They want to let their cattle roam as they will; their slogan is “Protect the open range.” In practice, the eventual result is a mixture of the two regimes. Fields under cultivation can be walled off but there is a right of passage through the farmers’ lands for all who want it, so long as no damage is done. This means travelers do not need to make costly and inefficient detours around each farm. In the long run, these “public roads” actually increase the value of the private property through which they pass. They also let the ranchers move their cattle around from one area of pasture to another. The ranchers become strong proponents of “public, open highways” (though some people muse darkly that they do very well out of that rule). Still, most people want open highways; the system seems to work pretty well, in fact. + +Two new technologies are introduced. First, the automobile is developed. Now thieves can drive through the farmers’ fields, stop quickly to grab some corn or a lettuce, and be back on the highway before they can be caught. Of course, the farmers’ costs have also fallen dramatically; now they have tractors to work their fields and trucks to take their products to distant markets. The farmers do not dwell on the benefits of the new technology, however. Understandably, they focus more on the profits they could reap if they could get all the advantages of the technology and none of its costs. They demand new legal protections aimed at producing that result. “What’s good for agriculture is good for the nation,” they say. But now comes the second technological shock—the development of barbed wire. The cost of erecting impassable barriers falls dramatically. The farmers begin to see the possibility of enclosing all of their land, roads and fields alike. This will help them protect their crops from pilfering, but it will also allow them to charge people for opening the gates in their fences—even the gates on public roads. That is a nice extra revenue stream which will, the farmers say, “help encourage agriculture.” After all, more fences mean more money for farmers, and more money for farmers means they can invest in new methods of farming, which will mean everyone is better off, right? + +What is to be done? Assume that each side presents its case to the legislature. There are three obvious possibilities: + +First, the legislature can simply tell each side to work it out amongst themselves. The law will continue to forbid trespass, but we are neither going to make it a crime to put up a barbed wire fence if it blocks legitimate public rights of way nor to make it a crime to cut a barbed wire fence, unless the fence cutter is also a trespasser. The farmers can attempt to enclose land by putting barbed wire around it. Ranchers and drivers can legally cut those fences when they are blocking public rights of way. Trespass remains trespass, nothing more. + +Second, the legislature could heed the ranchers’ fears that barbed wire will permit the farmers not only to protect their own land, but to rob the public of its existing rights of way, turning open highways into toll roads. (The ranchers, of course, are more concerned with the rights of cattle than people, but most drivers agree with them.) As a result, the state could forbid the erection of a barbed wire fence where it might block a public right of way—classing it as a kind of theft, perhaps. + +Third, the legislature could take the farmers’ side. Theorizing that this new automobile technology presents “a terrible threat to agriculture, because of rampant crop piracy,” the state could go beyond the existing law of trespass and make it a crime to cut barbed wire fences wherever you find them (even if the fences are enclosing public lands as well as private, or blocking public roads). To back up its command, it could get into the technology regulation business—making the manufacture or possession of wire cutters illegal. + +The state picks option three. Wire cutting becomes a crime, wire cutters are classed with lock picks and other “criminals’ tools,” and the people who make wire cutters are told their business is illegal. A storm of protest arises in the rural driving community. The wire cutter manufacturers claim that their products have lots of legitimate uses. All to no avail: the farmers press on. They have two new demands. Cars should be fitted with mandatory radio beacons and highways put under constant state surveillance in order to deter crop theft. In addition, car trunks should be redesigned so they can hold less—just in case the owner plans to load them up with purloined produce. Civil libertarians unite with car manufacturers to attack the plan. The farmers declare that the car manufacturers are only interested in making money from potential thieves and that the civil libertarians are Nervous Nellies: no one has anything to fear except the criminals. “What’s good for agriculture is good for the nation,” they announce again. As the barbed wire gates swing shut across the highways of the region, the legislature heads back into session. + +2~ Between Paranoia and Reality: The DMCA + +I have argued that confusing intellectual property with physical property is dangerous. I stand by that argument. Yet analogies to physical property are powerful. It is inevitable that we attempt to explain new phenomena by comparing them to material with which we are more familiar. While the content companies’ tales of “theft” and “piracy” are the most prevalent, they are by no means the only such analogy one can make. In this chapter I try to prove that point. + +The Farmers’ Tale is my allegorical attempt to explain the struggle over the single most controversial piece of intellectual property legislation in recent years, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.~{Pub. L. No. 105-304, 112 Stat. 2860 (1998) (codified as amended in scattered sections of 5, 17, 28, and 35 U.S.C.).}~ The DMCA did many things, but for our purposes its crucial provisions are those forbidding the “circumvention of copyright protection systems,” the technological measures that copyright holders can use to deny access to their works or control our behavior once we get access. These measures include encryption, controls on how many times a file can be copied, password protection, and so on. Copyright protection systems are, in other words, the digital equivalent of barbed wire, used to add an additional layer of “physical” protection to the property owner’s existing legal protection. But, unlike barbed wire, they can also control what we do once we get access to the property. + +The rules that forbid circumvention of these systems are logically, if not elegantly, referred to as the anticircumvention provisions. They are to be found in Section 1201 of the Copyright Act, an ungainly and lumpily written portion of the law that was inserted in 1998 as part of the complex set of amendments collectively referred to as the DMCA. I will explain the significance of these rules in a moment. My hope is that the analogy to the Farmers’ Tale will make them a little easier to understand—at least for those of you for whom talk of digital rights management, anticircumvention provisions, and network effects is not second nature. + +Notice the differences between this allegory and the “Internet Threat” story line I described in the last chapter. There are two sets of bad guys in the Farmers’ Tale. The greedy thieves (who are still thieves in this story—not heroes) and the greedy farmers who use a genuine if indefinite “threat” posed by a new technology to mask a power grab. The Internet Threat is the story of an industry devastated by piracy, in desperate need of help from the state to protect its legitimate property interests. By contrast, the Farmers’ Tale is the story of a self-interested attempt not only to protect property but to cut off recognized rights of public access in a way that will actually make the whole society worse off. The legitimate role of the state in protecting private property has been stretched into an attempt to regulate technology so as to pick winners in the marketplace, enriching the farmers at the expense of consumers and other businesses. In the long run this will not be good for business as a whole. A patchwork of private toll roads is an economic nightmare. + +That is not the most worrying part of the story: the farmers’ proposals are moving in the direction of regulating still more technology—the mandatory radio beacons and constantly monitored roads conjure up a police state—and all to protect a bunch of hysterical vegetable growers whose political clout far outweighs their actual economic importance. + +Both the Internet Threat and the Farmers’ Tale are, of course, ways to understand what is currently going on in the intellectual property wars. In the digital realm, the part of the farmers is played by the content companies, the recording industry associations, the movie and software trade groups. Pointing to the threat of digital piracy, they demanded and received extra legal protection for their copyrighted content. Unlike earlier expansions—longer copyright terms, more stringent penalties, the shrinking of exceptions and limitations, expansions in copyrightable subject matter—this was not a protection of the work itself; it was a protection of the digital fences wrapped around it, and a regulation of the technology that might threaten those fences. + +What is the significance of this? The digital revolution makes it easier to copy copyrighted content. It also makes it easier to protect that content, and to do so in a more granular and precisely calibrated way. Imagine being able to sell a paperback book that could only be read by the original purchaser or a song that could only be listened to by a particular person in a particular room. Digital rights management technology makes it a lot easier to do these things. Suddenly the copyright owners have considerable physical control over their songs, e-books, and software, even after they have sold them. It is as if the recording industry or the publishers had a representative in your living room. They can use that control not merely to prevent illicit copying but to control and limit usage in ways that go far beyond their exclusive rights under copyright. All of this happens without the law or the state doing anything. Like barbed wire, this is a technological protection measure. + +Like the farmers, the content companies were not content with their barbed wire alone. They wanted legally protected barbed wire in addition to their existing legal rights under copyright. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it became illegal to circumvent a technical protection measure such as encryption—the digital barbed wire behind which content companies secrete their work—even if what you did with the content when you got past the barbed wire was a fair use; excerpting a fragment of a film for a school presentation, for example, or making a copy of an encrypted audio file for personal use in another device. In other words, by using digital barbed wire, the content companies could prevent citizens from making the “fair uses” the copyright law allowed. This undermines some of the limitations on their exclusive rights that the Copyright Act explicitly carves out in Section 107, and thus shifts the balance of power that the Copyright Act establishes. Cutting barbed wire became a civil wrong, and perhaps a crime, even if the wire blocked a public road. Under most circumstances, making wire cutters was also now against the law. + +The ranchers—whose digital equivalents are communications companies and hardware manufacturers—chafed under these new rules. The most powerful groups managed to get special dispensations. Internet service providers, for example, got a qualified immunity from copyright infringement that occurs over their networks. But ordinary citizens, librarians, and civil libertarians also complained, and they were not as well represented in the legislature. It is true that the new rules may help to prevent illicit copying, but they also strike a blow against the exercise of fair use rights—rights that are important both to free speech and competition. Even if the content companies were absolutely right about the threats from digital piracy, this consequence should make us pause. But critics of the DMCA say that there is little evidence that the content companies are right. They quote some of the empirical studies I mentioned in the last chapter, particularly the ones that show no net negative effect from unauthorized music downloading on CD sales. They claim—and they are on strong ground here—that even if there are some losses from the new copying technologies, there are also benefits. Like the farmers, the critics would argue, the content companies take the benefits of the new technology for granted, but wish the law to step in to ameliorate the harms it also creates. And like the farmers, they are not yet satisfied. Their new proposals go even further—scarily further. Thus runs the critics’ argument. + +The critics of the DMCA conjure up a world in which it will be illegal to lend each other books or songs, where it will be impossible for us to copy even small fragments of digital work for criticism or parody, where encryption research will be severely “chilled,” and where large quantities of the public domain will be enclosed together with the copyrighted content that the DMCA is supposed to protect. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Unintended Consequences” studies give concrete examples.)~{See Electronic Frontiers Foundation, “Unintended Consequences,” available at http://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-consequences-seven-years-under-dmca. }~ They think the DMCA undoes the balance at the heart of copyright law, that it can be used to entrench existing businesses and their business methods, that it threatens speech, competition, privacy, and innovation itself. In short, they think the DMCA is the worst intellectual property law Congress has ever passed and view the adoption of similar laws around the world with a reaction little short of horror. + +Those who supported the DMCA disagree, of course, and do so honestly. They see rampant piracy as a reality and the threat to fair use as some kind of academic hypothetical rarely encountered in reality. What’s more, many of them do not think fair use is that important economically or culturally. If markets work well, users could be made to pay for the rights that fair use gives—but only if they wanted them. One could buy expensive digital books which one was allowed to share, quote, or copy for classroom use, and cheaper ones which one had to keep to oneself. Remember that for many of the people who supported the DMCA, fair use is something of a “loophole”; certainly not an affirmative right of the public or a reserved limitation on the original property grant from the state. (Remember the Sony Axiom from Chapter 4?) They find the analogy of fair use to a public road ludicrous. This film, or book, or song, is mine; anything you do with it, or to it, you do at my sufferance. (Remember the Jefferson Warning from Chapter 2?) + +How has the DMCA worked in reality? Which group’s attitudes were vindicated? Two case studies may help us to answer these questions. + +2~ Infectious Speech: The DMCA and Freedom of Expression + +Jon Johansen, a 16-year-old Norwegian, was the unwitting catalyst for one of the most important cases interpreting the DMCA. He and two anonymous helpers wrote a program called DeCSS. Depending on whom you listen to, DeCSS is described either as a way of allowing people who use Linux or other open source operating systems to play DVDs on their computers, or as a tool for piracy that threatened the entire movie industry and violated the DMCA. + +A little background is in order. When you play a commercial DVD, your actions are partly controlled by a simple encryption scheme called CSS, or the Content Scramble System. The DVD Copy Control Association licenses the keys to this encryption system to the manufacturers of DVD players. Without a key, most DVDs could not be played. The manufacturer then embeds this key in its hardware design in such a way that it is easy for your player to decode and play the movie but hard, at least for a person of average technical competence, to copy the decoded “stream.” + +Because the DVD Copy Control Association will only license keys to manufacturers whose DVD players conform exactly to their specifications, the CSS scheme can also be used to control viewers in other ways. For example, DVD players are required to have one of six “region codes,” depending on where in the world they are sold. Region 1 is the United States and Canada. Region 2 is Japan, Europe, South Africa, the Middle East, and—bizarrely—Greenland. Region 3 is South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; and so on. The CSS scheme can be used to restrict a movie to a player with the appropriate region code. If you try to play a movie coded for region 6 (China) in a DVD player from region 1, it will not play. This allows filmmakers to distribute different versions of films to different regions at different times based on sequential release in cinemas, or simply to distribute DVDs with different prices to different regions without worrying about whether the cheaper DVDs will “leak” into the more lucrative markets. CSS and the hardware scheme that unlocks it can also be used to prevent you from fast-forwarding through the commercials at the beginning of the movie if the copyright owner does not want you to, or from skipping the FBI notice. The machine will not do it. In fact, it is deliberately built so that it cannot do it. + +What we have here is a digital fence that is partly used to prevent copying. Movie studios are understandably worried about the worldwide circulation of perfect digital copies of their movies. CSS was supposed to help to prevent that, or at least make it much harder. But because almost all movies are encrypted with CSS and access to the keys comes with conditions, CSS also allows a more fine-grained control over consumers. Manufacturers are not allowed to make players which can view movies from all region codes or skip portions of the DVD that the owners do not want you to skip. The licensing body puts it this way on its Web site: “Q. Under the terms of the CSS licensing agreement, is it legal for a licensed manufacturer to produce and sell a product which allows a user to disable any CSS protections? A. No. Such products are not allowed under the terms of the CSS license. They are illegal.”~{See DVD Copy Control Association, “Frequently Asked Questions,” available at http://www.dvdcca.org/faq.html. }~ A technology introduced to protect intellectual property rights allows control in ways that those rights alone do not. + +Before the DMCA, the movie companies could have done exactly this. They could have wrapped their movies in a digital fence. The consumer electronics companies that wanted to could license a key and be allowed to use a trademark that indicated that they were approved by the DVD Copy Control Association. But what if a manufacturer of DVD players felt that American consumers wanted to be able to play their Japanese anime movies without buying another DVD player to do so? Or what if they thought people were antsy and did not want to watch the FBI notice before every film? The manufacturer could have tried to “reverse engineer” the CSS system, to figure out how it worked. If they succeeded, they could make a player that was free of the restrictions that the CSS licensing authority imposed. + +Of course there were some legal limitations even before the DMCA. Our hypothetical manufacturer could not break into the safe where the CSS code was being held or bribe an employee to provide it. (That would be a trespass or a violation of trade secret law.) It could not violate copyright laws over the various types of software that controlled DVD players. It could not use the trademarks of any of the entities involved, including any seal of approval granted by the DVD Copy Control Association. But it could—at least in the United States—try to reverse engineer the product so as to make a competing product with features that the customers liked more. It would be no more illegal than a company making a cheaper generic razor cartridge that fits my expensive Gillette Mach 3 razor, a generic printer cartridge to replace the expensive one in my Lexmark printer, or, for that matter, a generic remote control for my garage door opener. In each case, of course, the original manufacturer would prefer that I use their products rather than the unlicensed ones. They can design their product to make it hard to use a generic replacement or even tell me that my warranty will be void if I use one. But they cannot say that the unlicensed product is illegal. We are back in option one of the Farmers’ Tale, before the legislature acted. The farmers can put up their wire, and even use it to block passage that would be otherwise legal, but it is not a crime to figure out a way through the fence unless the fence cutter is also a trespasser. The DMCA, however, might have changed all of that. + +Let us return to Mr. Johansen, the 16-year-old Norwegian. He and his two anonymous collaborators claimed that they were affected by another limitation imposed by the CSS licensing body. At that time, there was no way to play DVDs on a computer running Linux, or any other free or open source operating system. (I will talk more about free and open source software later.) Let’s say you buy a laptop. A Sony Vaio running Windows, for example. It has a slot in the side for DVDs to slide in and software that comes along with it which allows the DVD reader to decode and play the disk. The people who wrote the software have been licensed by the DVD Copy Control Association and provided with a CSS key. But at the time Mr. Johansen set out to create DeCSS, the licensing body had not licensed keys to any free or open source software developers. Say Mr. Johansen buys the Sony Vaio, but with the Linux operating system on it instead of Windows. The computer is the same. The little slot is still there. Writing an open source program to control the DVD player is trivial. But without the CSS key, there is no way for the player to decode and play the movie. (The licensing authority later did license an open source player, perhaps because they realized its unavailability gave Mr. Johansen a strong defense, perhaps because they feared an antitrust suit, or perhaps because they just got around to it.) + +Mr. Johansen and his supporters claimed strenuously that DeCSS was not in fact an aid to illicit copying. In fact, they argued that CSS was not really designed to protect DVDs against illicit copying. Commercial DVD “pirates” do not need to crack the CSS encryption. Quite the contrary: they produce exact copies of the DVD, CSS encryption and all, and the buyer’s player dutifully decodes it and plays it. Mr. Johansen claimed that his goals were very different from those of the pirates. + +_1 The motivation was being able to play DVDs the way we want to. I don’t like being forced to use a specific operating system or a specific player to watch movies (or listen to music). Nor do I like being forced to watch commercials. When your DVD player tells you “This operation is not allowed” when you try to skip commercials, it becomes pretty clear that DRM really stands for Digital Restrictions Management.~{Thomas Mennecke, “Slyck.com Interviews Jon Lech Johansen” (April 4, 2005), available at http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=733. }~ + +In Mr. Johansen’s view, CSS was simply an attempt to control consumers, an attempt which should be a valid target for legal reverse engineering. He has a point. There were indeed other ways to copy DVDs which did not require DeCSS and which gave you files of more manageable size. CSS was indeed more than a simple anticopying device. The entire scheme—the keys, the licenses, the hardware requirements—was designed to give movie studios greater control over their movies in a number of ways, some of them unrelated to copying. On the other hand, he overstated the point. One function of CSS was indeed to make it harder for the average person playing a DVD on a computer to copy the file from the DVD to her hard disk and give it to a friend. It is very easy for the average 14-year-old to take a commercial music CD, change the songs into smaller files in the MP3 format, and share them with a friend. It is not as easy to do the same thing to a DVD—not impossible, just harder—and CSS is one of the reasons why. + +Mr. Johansen’s program, DeCSS, was quickly made available worldwide. Mirror sites provided copies of the program and lists of such locations were easy to find using standard search tools. One such list was provided by the online site run by a magazine called 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. The magazine features everything from pictures of pay phones from around the world to tips on how to hack into computer or telephone systems. Its publisher is one Eric Corley, who goes by the name Emmanuel Goldstein—the resistance leader in George Orwell’s 1984. + +In 1999, Universal City Studios brought suit against a number of individuals for distributing DeCSS. The case was called Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes et al. Corley was among the defendants. The suit prominently included a claim that the defendants were violating the DMCA. It was in this case that the DMCA received its first major legal challenge. + +Depending on the characterization of the facts, the case seems to be about very different things. It could seem a classic First Amendment fight. (“Plucky magazine publisher told copyright law forbids him from linking to other sites on the Internet!”) Or it could seem the very essence of illegal activity. (“Shadowy site which unashamedly caters to computer ‘hackers’ tries to spread access to the burglar’s tools of cyberspace!”) + +Of course, most lawsuits involve conflicts over facts. Much of what lawyers do is put the same facts into different conceptual boxes. But here, merely describing what Corley does, what hackers are, or what 2600 magazine is all about involves one in a profound culture clash. The best way to capture the clash may be to quote from an early entry about Corley in Wikipedia, the remarkable online encyclopedia. + +The encyclopedia first quotes the description of 2600 magazine from Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, the federal district court judge who decided the Reimerdes case. + +_1 “2600: The Hacker Quarterly has included articles on such topics as how to steal an Internet domain name, how to write more secure ASP code, access other people’s e-mail, secure your Linux box, intercept cellular phone calls, how to put Linux on an Xbox, how to remove spyware, and break into the computer systems at Costco stores and Federal Express. One issue contains a guide to the federal criminal justice system for readers charged with computer hacking. In addition, 2600 operates a web site located at 2600.com (http://www.2600.com), which is managed primarily by Mr. Corley and has been in existence since 1995.” + +The Wikipedia article then continues as follows: + +_1 While the judge’s tone is clearly disapproving, others would point out that bookstores, movies and television channels are filled with material on how to commit murder . . . and that without the efforts of the hacker community, however ill-intentioned, computer insecurity would be even more of a problem than it already is.~{As is often the way, these pages have now been modified on Wikipedia. At the time of writing, this excerpt can still be found at http://www.indopedia.org/Eric_Corley.html. }~ + +In fact, Judge Kaplan was not entirely disapproving. He mentions articles in 2600 that cover laudable or innocuous tasks, as well as others about tasks that most readers would find objectionable and rightly think to be illegal. But the anonymous volunteer who wrote this version of Corley’s Wikipedia entry clearly saw the issue differently. Wikipedia does not portray the hacker community as universally benevolent (“however ill-intentioned”), but that community is also seen as providing a useful service rather than merely a set of how-to guides for would-be digital burglars. + +To most people, pointing out vulnerabilities in computer security systems seemed, at least in 1999, like telling the world that your neighbor has forgotten to lock his door and all his possessions are there for the taking. But to the online community, it is by no means so clear. From the perspective of those who are knowledgeable in the field, there is a moral continuum. There is clearly legitimate computer security and cryptography research, which includes attempts to break into computer systems to test their defenses—that is how one finds out they are secure, after all. Then there are “hackers.” This term could be used to describe those who merely like to program. Richard Stallman, for example, the originator of the free software movement, describes himself thus. But the term could also be used for those who are interested in security or interoperability—making two systems work together. That was Mr. Johansen’s declared goal, after all. But some self-described hackers go further. They believe that exploring and disclosing the weaknesses of supposedly secure systems is intellectually fulfilling, practically important, and protected by the First Amendment. They disclaim both moral and legal responsibility for the consequences of their disclosures. (Or at least the negative consequences; they frequently take credit for the positive consequences, such as improved security.) Finally, there are “crackers,” whose interest in gaining entry to computer systems is malicious or for financial gain. At what point on this continuum does the activity become legally, or morally, unacceptable? As the Reimerdes trial went on, it became clear that the answer the DMCA gave might not be the same as the one given even by undeniably legitimate computer scientists. + +A large number of legal arguments were involved in the Reimerdes case, but for our purposes here the most important ones dealt with the relationship between copyright and the First Amendment. What is that relationship? + +In one obvious sense copyright actually aids free speech. By providing an incentive to create works, copyright “add[s] the fuel of interest to the fire of genius,”~{Abraham Lincoln, Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions (April 6, 1858), available at http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/discoveries.htm. }~ and thus helps to create the system of decentralized creative production and distribution I described in Chapter 1. But copyright also restrains speech. At its base, it allows an individual to call upon the state to prevent someone from speaking or expressing themselves in a particular way. This may involve a simple refusal to let the speaker use some text, picture, verse, or story in their message, or it may involve a refusal to let them transform it in some way. + +Neither copyright law nor the American Constitution is blind to these dangers. Copyright has a number of built-in safeguards. The most important of these is that copyright only covers “original expression”—both the ideas and facts in this book can be used by anyone without my permission. Thus, goes the theory, the speaker’s freedom of expression is never truly restrained. The only thing I am barred from is using your words, your exact plot, your photograph, your music—not your facts, your ideas, your genre, the events you describe. + +That is not always enough, of course. Sometimes the problem is that the speaker cannot paraphrase around the restraints posed by copyright. He needs to use the particular text or image in question to convey his message. The ideas, the facts, or a mere paraphrase of the expression would not be enough. In cases like that copyright’s answer is “fair use.” A politician could not prevent journalists who disagree with him from quoting his autobiography in discussing his life. If an African-American author wishes to tell the story of Gone With the Wind from the slaves’ perspective, she may do so in the face of the copyright holders’ attempts to stop her. Even fair use, though, may not cover every concern about free expression. Before World War II, Alan Cranston—later a U.S. Senator—wanted to convince American readers that the version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf published in the United States was distorted. He believed it to be slanted toward American sensibilities, downplaying both anti-Semitism and German expansionism. His solution? To publish his own English translation, taken direct and uncut from the German edition. He wanted to prove, with Hitler’s own words, that the United States had a dangerously distorted version of the German leader. But this is the kind of thing copyright law forbids and it is not clear that fair use allows. (In the end he did it anyway.)~{See Neil Weinstock Netanel, “Locating Copyright Within the First Amendment Skein,” Stanford Law Review 54 (2001): 15 (citing Houghton Mifflin Co. v. Noram Publ’g Co. , 28 F. Supp. 676 (S.D.N.Y. 1939); Houghton Mifflin Co. v. Stackpole Sons, Inc. , 104 F.2d 306 (2nd Cir. 1939) (upholding the validity of the U.S. copyright in Mein Kampf); Anthony O. Miller, “Court Halted Dime Edition of ‘Mein Kampf’: Cranston Tells How Hitler Sued Him and Won,” Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1988, § 1, 4 (giving Cranston’s version of the case’s underlying facts)).}~ + +For the moment though, it is enough to realize that copyright law is not immune from the First Amendment or from free speech concerns more generally. If we do not notice that most of the time, it is because the internal limitations of copyright—fair use, the idea-expression distinction, and so on—generally take care of the First Amendment issue, not because the issue was never there. + +So what First Amendment issues did the DMCA present? Most obviously, the DMCA gave a new right to copyright owners. By using a few simple technological measures, they could distribute a work in a particular format and yet, because of their new intellectual property right, they could make illegal an otherwise lawful process of gaining access for the purposes of making fair use. Of course, the First Amendment allows me to make fair use factually impossible. I can do that without raising any constitutional issues by hiding my manuscript and never letting you see it or just by using unbreakable encryption on my digital products. It allows me to use existing conventional property rights to make fair use illegal. If I own the only copy of the book and it is inside my house, it would be trespass for you to enter. No First Amendment problem there. But in passing the DMCA, Congress had created a new intellectual property right inside copyright law itself, a law aimed directly at expression, that made it illegal to get access for the purpose of making fair use even when you legally bought the physical book, or the physical DVD, and now wish to quote it or parody it. Even that is not the problem. It is that Congress cannot grant the exclusive rights of copyright without simultaneously accompanying them by the limitations of fair use.~{The Corley court was uncertain about this point. (“Preliminarily, we note that the Supreme Court has never held that fair use is constitutionally required, although some isolated statements in its opinions might arguably be enlisted for such a requirement.”). Universal City Studios v. Corley, 273 F.3d 429, 458 (2d Cir. 2001). In my view, both logic and those “isolated statements” suggest that fair use is required. As I point out later, when the Supreme Court revisited the matter in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), it stressed that it was precisely the internal limitations such as fair use that made copyright law normally immune to First Amendment scrutiny. The Court added “when . . . Congress has not altered the traditional contours of copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is unnecessary.” Ibid. at 221 (citing Harper & Row, 471 U.S. at 560). Yet that is exactly what the DMCA does: alters “the traditional contours of copyright protection” by handing out the exclusive right at the same time as it confers a legal power to remove the privilege of fair use.}~ Regardless of what physical constraints and tangible property rights might do to limit my ability to make fair uses, Congress had now, by law, allowed a copyright owner to distribute a particular work with the exclusive rights but without some of those limitations. + +Imagine that Congress had passed the following law instead of the DMCA: “Any copyright owner can make it illegal to make a fair use of a copyrighted work by putting a red dot on their books, records, and films before selling them. It shall be a crime to circumvent the red dot even if, but for the dot, the use would have been fair.” That would be clearly unconstitutional. It gives copyright owners a new intellectual property right to “turn off fair use” in copyrighted works distributed to the mass market. Is the DMCA not the same thing? + +This was the issue in Reimerdes. True, if I cut through the digital fence on a DVD in order to excerpt a small portion in a critical documentary, I would not be violating your copyright, but I would be violating the anticircumvention provisions. And DeCSS seemed to be a tool for doing what the DMCA forbids. By providing links to it, Mr. Corley and 2600 were “trafficking” in a technology that allows others to circumvent a technological protection measure. DeCSS could, of course, be used for purposes that did not violate copyright—to make the DVD play on a computer running Linux, for example. It enabled various noninfringing fair uses. It could also be used to aid illicit copying. But the alleged violation of the DMCA had nothing to do with that. The alleged violation of the DMCA was making the digital wire cutters available in the first place. So one First Amendment problem with the DMCA can be stated quite simply. It appeared to make it illegal to exercise at least some of the limitations and exceptions copyright law needs in order to pass First Amendment scrutiny. Or did it just make it very, very difficult to exercise those rights legally? I could, after all, make a videotape of the DVD playing on my television, and use that grainy, blurry image in my documentary criticizing the filmmaker. The DMCA would not be violated, though my movie might be painful to watch. + +The other possible First Amendment problem with the DMCA was that in regulating programs such as DeCSS, the DMCA was actually regulating “speech.” The first challenge to the DMCA was that, by making tools like DeCSS illegal, the DMCA took away a constitutionally necessary escape hatch to copyright, thus making copyright law as a whole violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. The second challenge was different. The problem was that the program itself was speech and the DMCA was regulating it illicitly. + +The reasoning went like this. A computer program is a form of expression and communication. The source code can even be read by human beings. True, it is an abstract form of communication—like musical notation and mathematical algorithms. But those are clearly protected by the First Amendment. Congress could not make Schoenberg’s twelve-tone scale illegal or punish mathematicians for physics equations that seemed to support a theory of the universe’s origin other than the creationism that is currently so popular. True, the source code is a description of a method of doing something, and the code can, if run on a computer, produce a result—but one could argue that those attributes do not affect the First Amendment’s protection. Neither a recipe for hash brownies nor a player piano roll for the Nazi “Horst Wessel” song could constitutionally be prohibited, even though actually to make the hash brownies would be illegal, and even though the piano roll is functional (it “makes” the player piano play the tune). True, most people cannot read computer code, but speech does not need to be common or accessible to be protected. In fact, the courts have even held that the choice to communicate in a particular language is constitutionally protected in some settings. + +On the other hand, software code is undeniably functional. Lots of functional articles can be said to have some expressive content—a gun, an airbag, a crash helmet, a set of burglar’s tools, a computer virus. And many actions have expressive content: a terrorist bombing, for example. Surely these could be regulated by Congress? To the defendants, DeCSS looked like a physics equation, a musical score, or a recipe. To the movie studios, DeCSS had all the First Amendment significance of a crowbar, lock pick, or, for that matter, a car bombing. The same argument was repeated over the hyperlinks that Corley and others provided to sites which carried the DeCSS program. Speech or function? To the defendants, forbidding 2600 to link to these sites was like preventing the Washington Post from describing the availability of drugs on certain blocks of 16th Street. To the movie companies, the hyperlinks were the equivalent of loading potential buyers into a van, taking them down there, and giving them enough money to make the purchase. + +Which of the two First Amendment arguments is more convincing? That the DMCA is a congressionally created off-switch for fair use? Or that software code is speech and the DMCA restricts it? Like a lot of scholars, before Reimerdes went to trial, I thought that the first argument was by far the more powerful. I still do. I thought the odds of the court buying the “code is speech” argument were low. About that I was wrong, though it turned out not to matter. + +A number of the reports noted that after some initial skepticism, Judge Kaplan had been impressed by the defendants’ expert witnesses, particularly those who had testified that code was speech. When the ruling came out, this impression was confirmed. Judge Kaplan agreed that code was a form of speech or expression. But celebration was premature. Having done so, he disagreed with the defendants’ claim that it could not be regulated. + +_1 Computer code is expressive. To that extent, it is a matter of First Amendment concern. But computer code is not purely expressive any more than the assassination of a political figure is purely a political statement. Code causes computers to perform desired functions. Its expressive element no more immunizes its functional aspects from regulation than the expressive motives of an assassin immunize the assassin’s action. In an era in which the transmission of computer viruses—which, like DeCSS, are simply computer code and thus to some degree expressive—can disable systems upon which the nation depends and in which other computer code also is capable of inflicting other harm, society must be able to regulate the use and dissemination of code in appropriate circumstances. The Constitution, after all, is a framework for building a just and democratic society. It is not a suicide pact.~{See Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d 294, 304–5 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).}~ + +Judge Kaplan is right in saying that there cannot be a bright-line rule immunizing computer code from regulation merely because it has expressive elements. The First Amendment does not protect computer viruses. But the defendants were not arguing that computer code was constitutionally inviolable, only that any law that regulated it had to be subject to First Amendment scrutiny. After all, the government makes the description of how to make a nuclear weapon classified information. That is clearly “speech,” but its regulation is also constitutional. The First Amendment is not, and never was, an absolute guarantee of freedom of speech. Instead, the question is whether the law is within the realm of “the freedom of speech” guarantee, which in turn depends on what kind of a law it is. Where does it fit in the “levels of scrutiny” that courts have constructed to discriminate between types of legislation affecting speech? Is the DMCA a “content-based” regulation, such as a law forbidding labor picketing but allowing other kinds of demonstrations? Content-based regulations are given the highest and most demanding level of scrutiny. Alternatively, is it a “content-neutral” regulation, such as a law that forbids talking—about any subject—in a library? To Judge Kaplan, the answer was clear, and grounds for sarcasm. + +_1 The reason that Congress enacted the anti-trafficking provision of the DMCA had nothing to do with suppressing particular ideas of computer programmers and everything to do with functionality—with preventing people from circumventing technological access control measures—just as laws prohibiting the possession of burglar tools have nothing to do with preventing people from expressing themselves by accumulating what to them may be attractive assortments of implements and everything to do with preventing burglaries. + +I agree, though it is worth noting that the burglar tool analogy is a disputed one. Johansen claimed DeCSS was more like a screwdriver—something with both licit and illicit uses. + +So the DMCA was content-neutral regulation. That means it still has to pass a fairly daunting legal threshold. It will only be upheld if “it furthers an important or substantial governmental interest; if the governmental interest is unrelated to the suppression of free expression; and if the incidental restriction on alleged First Amendment freedoms is no greater than is essential to the furtherance of that interest.”~{Ibid., 329–30 (quoting Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC, 512 U.S. 622, 662 (1997) (quoting U.S. v. O’Brien, 391 U.S. 367, 377 (internal quotations omitted)).}~ Judge Kaplan felt that the DMCA satisfied that standard. I am not so sure. Yes, the governmental interest in protecting copyright holders’ rights is important. And yes, I must disagree with some of my friends in the civil liberties world and say that the government’s interest is unrelated to the suppression of free expression. But is “the incidental restriction of First Amendment freedoms no greater than is essential to the furtherance of that interest”? In other words, could the DMCA have achieved its goals without imposing as great a limitation on the expression of people like Mr. Johansen and Mr. Corley? + +Congress could have passed many laws less restrictive than the DMCA. It could have only penalized the use of programs such as DeCSS for an illicit purpose. If it wished to reach those who create the tools as well as use them, it could have required proof that the creator intended them to be used for illegal purposes. Just as we look at the government’s intention in creating the law, we could make the intent of the software writer critical for the purposes of assessing whether or not his actions are illegal. If I write a novel detailing a clever way to kill someone and you use it to carry out a real murder, the First Amendment does not allow the state to punish me. If I write a manual on how to be a hit man and sell it to you, it may. First Amendment law is generally skeptical of statutes that impose “strict liability” without a requirement of intent. But Judge Kaplan believed that the DMCA made the motives of Mr. Johansen irrelevant, except insofar as they were relevant to the narrowly tailored exceptions of the DMCA, such as encryption research. In other words, even if Mr. Johansen made DeCSS so that he and his friends could watch DVDs they purchased legally on computers running Linux, they could still be liable for breaking the DMCA. + +The DMCA’s breadth goes further than its treatment of intent. The statute could have only made it illegal to provide a program yourself. But Judge Kaplan interpreted it to prohibit even linking to a site where the program is to be found. No requirement of intent. No requirement that you actually supply the infringing program. That is a pretty broad interpretation and one which he admits restricts expression. How could he conclude that restrictions this broad were “no greater than essential”? From his rhetoric, the answer is clear. Judge Kaplan believes the story of the Internet Threat I discussed in Chapter 4. He sees DeCSS as a poison. In fact, he thinks it is worse than a poison because it may spread to infect others. It is a disease, a virus. The DMCA is the stern and harsh quarantine required to control it—a digital public health measure. His reasoning is worth quoting at length. + +_1 There was a time when copyright infringement could be dealt with quite adequately by focusing on the infringing act. . . . The copyright holder . . . usually was able to trace the copies up the chain of distribution, find and prosecute the infringer, and shut off the infringement at the source. In principle, the digital world is very different. Once a decryption program like DeCSS is written, it quickly can be sent all over the world. Every recipient is capable not only of decrypting and perfectly copying plaintiffs’ copyrighted DVDs, but also of retransmitting perfect copies of DeCSS and thus enabling every recipient to do the same. . . . The process potentially is exponential rather than linear. Indeed, the difference is illustrated by comparison of two epidemiological models describing the spread of different kinds of disease. In a common source epidemic, as where members of a population contract a non-contagious disease from a poisoned well, the disease spreads only by exposure to the common source. If one eliminates the source, or closes the contaminated well, the epidemic is stopped. In a propagated outbreak epidemic, on the other hand, the disease spreads from person to person. Hence, finding the initial source of infection accomplishes little, as the disease continues to spread even if the initial source is eliminated.~{Ibid., 331–332.}~ + +This is a very good point, and one that the critics of the DMCA sometimes gloss over too quickly. The structure of digital replication is indeed different from the old centralized model of copying and distribution. Instead of tracing all illicit copies back to a single infringing printing press, we face the fear that the machinery of piracy can be copied just as fast as the copies it allows us to make. + +It is here that the defendants lose the battle of the metaphors. Yes, code is speech, it conveys information. But viruses are codes and they convey information too. Judge Kaplan explicitly invokes this comparison several times. Biological viruses are tools for the replication of genetic information. They subvert their hosts’ cellular programming to make copies of themselves, just as a computer virus hijacks an infected computer and causes it to send out more copies of the virus. True, DeCSS requires human intervention to download the program and use it. Yet from Judge Kaplan’s language it is evident that he sees the program not as an act of expression but as a virus spreading like wildfire. Seen this way, the individual “choices” to download or redistribute are simply the program’s method of spreading itself, like the irritation produced by the cold virus that encourages sneezes and coughs, thereby transmitting the illness to others. Just as in an epidemic, the harshest measures are called for. There is no poisoned well here, no pirate with a printing press we can shut down. Anyone is potentially an infringer. Individuals cannot be presumed to be healthy. We cannot give their immune systems, or their motives, the benefit of the doubt. Instead we must see them as potential carriers. The healthy must be quarantined as well as the sick. Facing such a danger, Judge Kaplan agrees that Congress needed to be draconian. We cannot wait for illegal copying. We must strike preemptively at the technology that might enable it. There is no place for inquiries into “intent” here; no way that we can restrict liability to those who actually provide the program. Thus, though “code is speech” and the DMCA does incidentally restrict expression, Judge Kaplan concludes that its restraints are no greater than is necessary. + +There are three questions here. The first is whether Congress was right. The second is whether, in the context of the movie industry, we can see evidence of the evil it needed to combat. The third question is very different: whether the DMCA is constitutional. In my opinion, the answer to questions one and two is no, for the reasons outlined in Chapter 4’s analysis of the Internet Threat. Yes, cheaper copying can increase the rate of illicit copying, but it also lowers advertising costs and offers new business models—Netflix, downloads on demand, viral distribution of trailers, and so on. The technology helps as well as hurts. It does not help the movie industry as much as it might help the music industry, which can more easily distribute its products over the Internet. But the Internet also does not pose as much danger to movies as it does to music. The movie industry’s doomsaying aside, there is no exact movie equivalent of Napster and there is unlikely to be one in the near future.~{One empirical study seems to challenge this assumption, though at modest levels. Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel, “Piracy on the Silver Screen,” Journal of Industrial Economics 55 (2007): 379–395. Rob and Waldfogel surveyed college students—traditionally a population that engages in high levels of downloading since they have “free” and extremely high speed Internet connections, lots of leisure time, and low disposable income. Even among this group, the authors found that total levels of downloading were low—2.1 percent of paid consumption. The authors also assumed that all unpaid downloading or DVD burning was equal to piracy—an assumption that is clearly false. The Sony case makes that clear. In fact, Rob and Waldfogel found a positive relationship between second time unpaid viewings and future paid viewings; watching the movie a second time on a downloaded or privately made copy burned from the airwaves actually was associated with more paid purchases. The authors were skeptical of any causal link, however. Ibid., 389.}~ + +This is not just because movies are longer and harder to download than songs. It is because most people only watch a film once. Most people do not want a library of two thousand films to play again and again. Music is a repeated experience good in a way that movies simply are not, and that social fact profoundly affects the likelihood of downloading as opposed to rental. The transient song on a radio or an Internet stream is not an adequate substitute for possessing the song permanently—something which costs a lot more. Apart from kids’ movies, which can be used to induce catatonia in one’s progeny time and again, and a few classic favorites, most people do not want to own movies. Watching the film on television or renting it for a night is perfectly satisfactory. Both of these involve little hassle or cost. The content industries are fond of saying “you cannot compete with free.” But this is simply not true. Cheap and easily acquired goods of certified quality compete very well with free goods of uncertain quality whose acquisition involves some difficulty. This is one of the main reasons the movie companies were wrong in the Sony case. + +Thus while Judge Kaplan’s discussion of the looming digital Black Death is nicely apocalyptic, it does not seem very accurate. How many of your friends download movies illicitly over the Internet, let alone movies that were ripped from DVDs? Yes, it can be done. But the actual descriptions of the process in the Reimerdes case smack more of bathos than terror. + +_1 Although the process is computationally intensive, plaintiffs’ expert decrypted a store-bought copy of Sleepless in Seattle in 20 to 45 minutes. . . . The decryption of a CSS-protected DVD is only the beginning of the tale, as the decrypted file is very large. . . . One solution to this problem, however, is DivX, a compression utility available on the Internet that is promoted as a means of compressing decrypted motion picture files to manageable size. . . . While the compressed sound and graphic files then must be synchronized, a tedious process that took plaintiffs’ expert between 10 and 20 hours, the task is entirely feasible. . . . At trial, defendants repeated, as if it were a mantra, the refrain that plaintiffs, as they stipulated, have no direct evidence of a specific occasion on which any person decrypted a copyrighted motion picture with DeCSS and transmitted it over the Internet. But that is unpersuasive. Plaintiffs’ expert expended very little effort to find someone in an IRC chat room who exchanged a compressed, decrypted copy of The Matrix, one of plaintiffs’ copyrighted motion pictures, for a copy of Sleepless in Seattle. While the simultaneous electronic exchange of the two movies took approximately six hours, the computers required little operator attention during the interim. + +So the epidemic threat that hangs over the movie industry consists of the danger that someone will spend fifteen minutes decrypting and ten to twenty hours tediously synchronizing a movie that is then available for a speedy six-hour download? + +Admittedly, someone only needs to do the synchronizing once. There are newer tools that make the task easier. And we could improve the download time. But even so, would you bother? Faced with the colossal expense and hassle of renting the same movie at Blockbuster for $3, some consumers might prefer this process, I suppose. But I would not sell my shares in movie studios quite yet. In fact, the real threat to movie studios is the large-scale criminal distribution of illicitly copied DVDs—copied bit for bit from the original. The distributors of those do not need to use programs like DeCSS. A more distant threat comes from legal recordings from television made on TiVo’s and ReplayTVs—where consumers’ actions are legal and CSS is not an issue. So far as we can tell, there is no measurable effect of illicit digital downloads on sales or rentals of DVDs. We could go through the process Judge Kaplan describes, I suppose, just as when the VCR was invented we could have taped movies from television and swapped them with our friends. But as the movie studios discovered after the Sony case, most of us would rather just rent the movie. Because something is possible does not mean it will happen. + +So in my view, Congress generally overestimated the threat posed by the digital world and underestimated the benefits. In addition, the movie industry is a weak place to make the case for the necessity of the DMCA. Fine, but that is not the legal issue here. The constitutionality of the DMCA does not turn on whether the DMCA was a good idea. That is not the court’s decision to make. The question is not even whether the particular industry involved is, in reality, facing much of a threat from digital downloading. The law, after all, exists for all digital works, not just the ones at issue here. The question is whether the restriction on speech imposed by the DMCA was “no greater than is essential.” And that is a harder question. + +I still disagree with Judge Kaplan. A more narrowly tailored statute could have accomplished the DMCA’s legitimate goals without impinging as greatly on expression. I think that the rhetoric of the Internet Threat blinded Judge Kaplan to some important issues and led him to overestimate the danger and thus the severity of the measures necessary to combat it. Thus, even under the “code is speech” part of the analysis, I think the DMCA fails First Amendment scrutiny. But if we are confining ourselves to the expression inherent in the software itself, I acknowledge that it is a close call. + +Sadly, Judge Kaplan spent much less time on the other First Amendment argument against the DMCA—that it is unconstitutional because it gives copyright holders a new intellectual property entitlement, created by Congress under the Copyright Clause, a legal power to deprive users of a constitutionally required limitation on copyright’s exclusive rights. In my view, he also framed the argument wrongly when he did discuss it. To be fair, these problems can partly be traced to the fact that the defendants spent most of their energy on the argument that code was expression, paying less attention to everything else. As Judge Kaplan explained it, the claim was that the DMCA might have the effect of restricting an alleged fair use right of access to copyrighted material. Predictably enough, he responded that there was no such right of access. Copyright holders could always lock up the book or restrict entrance to the gallery. In any event, while fair use of DVDs might be curtailed, he argued that most movies are also available on videotape. Even if the film were only available on DVD, the prospective fair user could write down the words and quote them, or record the sound from the screen. Finally, Judge Kaplan pointed out that even if the DMCA might allow a significant erosion of fair use to develop over time, such a problem was not present here. Those making First Amendment claims are sometimes allowed by courts to show that, even if the law as it applied to them were constitutional, it would restrict the First Amendment rights of others. Judge Kaplan declined to apply that doctrine here. In effect, he said “come back when there is a problem.” + +On appeal, the case was decided by a panel led by Judge Jon Newman. Here the fair use argument received more attention but the result was the same: “Come back when there is a problem.” Significantly, both courts pointed out another concern. The DMCA could effectively make copyright perpetual because even though the copyright term would expire, the legally protected encryption would continue, and tools such as DeCSS, which would have allowed access to the public domain work, would be illegal.~{Admittedly, section 1201 only affects works protected under the copyright act, so arguably the legal protection of the digital fence would expire with the copyright term. But even if the courts interpreted the statute this way, two problems would remain. First, since the DMCA prohibited the trafficking in tools which allowed the breaking of the encryption, the law would have effectively forbidden the production of wire cutters for gaining access to identically encrypted public domain works—remember Judge Kaplan’s discussion of the irrelevance of Mr. Johansen’s motives. Second, it would be trivially easy to add a trivial amount of new copyrighted material to the work that had fallen into the public domain. Access to the public domain work would then be prohibited for another period of life plus seventy years. And so on. The Copyright Office holds hearings on the question of whether there are any “classes of work” that need exemption from the DMCA’s provisions. So far, those exemptions have been highly restrictive in application.}~ This is a major issue because it appears to violate both the First Amendment and the Copyright Clause’s requirement of a limited time. The defendants did not spend adequate time on this argument, however, and the courts again left it for later consideration. + +The court of appeals saw the defendants’ argument in just the same way as Judge Kaplan had seen it: a claim that there was a fair use right of actual access to the finest version of every work in every medium, on which the DMCA put a practical limitation. Such a claim was easy to dismiss. There was no such right of guaranteed practical access. Copyright owners could restrict the practical ability to exercise fair use in many ways without the Constitution being involved. In addition, in a world where copyrighted content is frequently available in both analog and digital form, the actual effects of the DMCA might be trivial and were, in any event, constitutionally acceptable. Judge Newman repeated Judge Kaplan’s point that one could always make fair use of the work in a way the DMCA did not reach, such as by videotaping a picture of the screen. + +_1 The fact that the resulting copy will not be as perfect or as manipulable as a digital copy obtained by having direct access to the DVD movie in its digital form, provides no basis for a claim of unconstitutional limitation of fair use. A film critic making fair use of a movie by quoting selected lines of dialogue has no constitutionally valid claim that the review (in print or on television) would be technologically superior if the reviewer had not been prevented from using a movie camera in the theater, nor has an art student a valid constitutional claim to fair use of a painting by photographing it in a museum. Fair use has never been held to be a guarantee of access to copyrighted material in order to copy it by the fair user’s preferred technique or in the format of the original. + +Once the issue is framed this way, the case has been lost. I would argue that there are three baseline errors here: a focus on “affirmative rights of access” as opposed to limits on Congress’s power in handing out exclusive rights over expression without their constitutionally necessary limitations, a focus on practical effects of the provisions rather than on formal constitutional limitations on the copyright system over all classes of works, and a confusion between intellectual property rights and physical property rights that goes to the heart of the Jefferson Warning discussed in Chapter 2. The question is not whether users have a constitutionally protected right of practical access to a preferred version of a work. The question is whether it violates the First Amendment for Congress to give to copyright holders an intellectual property right to exempt their copyrighted works in some formats from fair use and other provisions that are necessary for copyright law in general to be constitutional. + +Remember my earlier example. What if Congress amended Section 1201 to say “Any copyright owner can make it illegal to make a fair use of a copyrighted work by putting a red dot on their books, records, and films before selling them. It shall be a crime to circumvent the red dot even if, but for the dot, the use would have been fair”? This statute, I think, is clearly unconstitutional. It would be no answer to say that some owners will not use the red dot, and even for those that do, there will be older, dotless versions still available. It is irrelevant that I might be able to copy down the crucial lines of the book over your shoulder while you read it and thus claim that I, personally, had not circumvented the dot. The unconstitutionality of the statute does not turn on whether the dots might fall off because of bad adhesive, or whether there are many secondhand bookstores in the area, in which undotted volumes can be found. Even if the red dot rule were only to be applied to hardback books, or graphic novels, or cassette tapes, it would still be unconstitutional. Nor do we have to wait until the entire marketplace is dominated by red-dotted products before considering the issue. It is no answer to say that even before the red dot rule, copyright holders could always have hidden their works, or locked them in safes, or even negotiated individual contracts with the purchasers that have the effect of limiting fair use. That way of framing it just misunderstands the issue on a fundamental level. The claim is not about the happenstance of practical access or the way that a copyright holder can use physical control of an object or existing tangible property rights to undercut fair use. + +The point is that Congress violates the First Amendment when, with respect to any work, it gives me an intellectual property right to prohibit copying and distribution of an expressive work sold in the marketplace and an additional legal power to opt out of the limitations contained in Section 107 over that work. The bundle of rights conveyed by the DMCA does exactly that. It is not the DMCA alone that we must analyze. The question is whether Congress can give the exclusive rights contained in Section 106 of the Copyright Act over a particular class of works (say digital works), if it also gives a new right to prohibit citizens from gaining access to those works for the purposes of making a fair use. If Judge Kaplan and Judge Newman are correct, then the DMCA gives an entirely new intellectual property right (technically, a legal power) to the copyright holders to do exactly that. To put it the other way around, the DMCA subtracts from the citizen’s bundle of entitlements under federal copyright law, the right (technically, lawyers would call it a privilege) to gain access to a work legally in his possession for the purpose of making a fair use. It is that rule change that is unconstitutional, I would argue, and the way Judge Kaplan and Judge Newman frame that issue makes them miss the point. + +Framing is important. The confusions that I have talked about in this book all make an appearance. It starts with the whole controversy being framed by the Internet Threat story line from Chapter 4. Because Judge Kaplan is convinced that every citizen is now a potential infringer, a potentially infectious virus carrier, he is ill disposed to listen to claims about fair use. Civil liberties claims do not do very well in epidemics. It is only right for him to defer to Congress’s perception of the problem and the solution, of course. But he buys so deeply into the magnitude of the threat, the extent of the potential piracy pandemic, that it is very hard for him to take seriously the idea that even here there is a legitimate constitutional fair use claim. + +The Sony Axiom from Chapter 4 is also ignored, or at least undervalued. As I pointed out there, without a robust set of exceptions and limitations on copyright, the idea that cheaper copying requires greater control will inexorably drive us toward the position that the technologies of cheaper reproduction must be put under the governance of copyright holders. The DMCA continues that logic; its drafters concluded that the right to get access to digital works for purposes of making a fair use must be taken from the bundle of rights possessed by citizens, while the right to enjoin both access and the technologies of access is added to those of copyright holders. Never mind the correctness of such a conclusion as a matter of policy. Are there constitutional limitations on Congress taking such an action? Kaplan and Newman in effect tell us, “not yet.” + +More important than the perception of the threat is the understanding of what intellectual property is all about. In Chapter 2, Jefferson warned us that intellectual property rights are not like physical property rights. In analyzing the DMCA, where do we turn for analogies? To physical property, violence, and theft. The cases analyzing the DMCA are full of analogies to trespass, to breaking and entering, to burglars’ tools, and to safecrackers. Private property carries a lot of baggage with it, but we know it well—it is the place we naturally turn for insight. Even I, in order to point out some of the difficulties with those analogies, had to turn to farmers and barbed wire and public rights-of-way along highways. There is nothing wrong with analogies. They help us understand things that are new by comparing them to things we think we understand better. Analogies are only bad when they ignore the key difference between the two things being analyzed. That is what happens here. + +Jefferson reminded us that intellectual property rights are clearly artifacts of state creation, monopolies whose internal limitations in scope, duration, and so on are just as important as the rights themselves. Jefferson doubts whether even property rights over land can be understood as natural and absolute—copyrights and patents, which cover subject matter that can be infinitely reproduced without diminishing its substance, clearly cannot. They frequently involve a claim to control purchasers’ behavior with respect to some aspect of an artifact after it has been sold to them in the marketplace, making simpleminded analogies to “breaking and entering” inappropriate—the extent of the property in question is precisely the issue in dispute. (When Johansen was tried in Norway under the national computer crime law, the court laconically observed that he had bought the DVDs, and one cannot break into one’s own property—effectively turning the analogy on its head.) Jefferson starts from the baseline that monopoly is the exception and freedom is the rule—any limitations on that freedom have to be justified. That is why he always discusses the right and the limitations on the right as an inseparable pair. One cannot discuss them in isolation. + +Kaplan and Newman are fine, thoughtful judges. They do not altogether ignore those points. But look how the analysis is set up. At several points in the discussion, there seems to be the assumption that copyright owners have entitlements to total control as of right and that fair use is a mere lucky loophole which, because it can be negated by the happenstance of whether one can get physical access, can hardly have major First Amendment status. They keep pointing out that physical control and tangible property rights frequently allow copyright holders to make fair use impracticable. “And so what?” Jefferson might have responded. This is a classic non sequitur. The question is whether the Congress has the power to add a new right of access-denial to the intellectual property monopoly it is constructing, undermining—as to some works and some fair uses—the balance that the law sets up. The citizen is not pleading for a new right of access, trumping all physical restraint and tangible property rights. The citizen is claiming that Congress has no power to give exclusive rights to restrain copying of digital content while simultaneously taking away the citizen’s existing right to get access to that content for the purposes of fair use—at least in those cases where access is physically possible and violates no other property right, real or intellectual. + +The Constitution does not require the United States to break into President Nixon’s desk to get me his tapes, buy me a tape recorder, or give me a right to 18.5 minutes on the broadcast airwaves to play them. But if I can get access to the tapes legally, it does forbid the government from giving President Nixon the power to put a red dot on those tapes and thus claim an intellectual property right to stop me playing them on TV or digitizing them to make the sounds clearer. The restraints imposed by physical happenstance and tangible property rights are different from those imposed by copyright—a congressionally created monopoly over expression. We cannot assume because one is constitutionally acceptable that the others are too. Jefferson understood that, and his analysis can help us even in a constitutional conflict over a technology he could hardly have dreamt of. (Though perhaps with Jefferson, this is a bad bet.) + +The same point comes up in a different way when the court disconnects the fair use discussion from the exclusive rights discussion. The question is not “Do I have a constitutionally protected right of physical access to a preferred version of a movie, so as to make my task easy?” That gets the court caught up in questions of when a majority of movies will only be available on DVD, or how poor a substitute the analog version would be, or how many fair uses will require actually cutting a digital fence. But all of these inquiries miss the point. The question is “Can Congress hand out the exclusive rights of copyright over digital works if it does not accompany those rights with the suite of limitations that the court has repeatedly said “saves” copyright from violating the First Amendment?” The proportion of digital works to the total number of works produced in other formats is irrelevant. As to these works, the rule is unconstitutional. But what about the number or proportion of types of fair uses affected? That is more relevant but still not dispositive in the way Kaplan and Newman imagined. True, not every trivial statutory modification of fair use makes copyright unconstitutional. But this is not a trivial modification: over an entire class of works, copyright owners are given a legal power to deprive users of their privilege to gain otherwise lawful access for the purposes of fair use. If you give the digital filmmaker the exclusive rights of copyright but forbid the film professor from going through the otherwise lawful process of parodying or quoting, that rule is unconstitutional, no matter how many other fair uses are unaffected. If the copyright law were amended to forbid journalists playing, on a Friday, excerpts of legally acquired red-dotted tapes made by presidents whose last name begins with N, it would still be unconstitutional. + +The legal implementation of this conclusion would be simple. It would be unconstitutional to punish an individual for gaining access in order to make a fair use. However, if they cut down the digital fence to make illicit copies, both the cutting and the copying would be illegal. But what about the prohibition of trafficking in digital wire cutters, technologies such as DeCSS? There the constitutional question is harder. I would argue that the First Amendment requires an interpretation of the antitrafficking provisions that comes closer to the ruling in the Sony case. If Mr. Johansen did indeed make DeCSS to play DVDs on his Linux computer, and if that were indeed a substantial noninfringing use, then it cannot be illegal for him to develop the technology. But I accept that this is a harder line to draw constitutionally. About my first conclusion, though, I think the argument is both strong and clear. + +Ironically, there is some support for my claim and it comes from an even higher, if not uniformly more thoughtful, set of judges than Newman and Kaplan. In the depressing case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Supreme Court upheld retrospective copyright term extensions against a variety of constitutional challenges. (Full disclosure: I assisted in the preparation of an amicus curiae brief in the case.) One of those challenges was based on the First Amendment. The fairly reasonable claim was that Congress could not retroactively lock up an entire twenty-year swathe of culture that had already been produced. Such a law would be all restraint of expression, performance, republication, adaption, and so on, with no incentive benefits. The Court was unconvinced. But it did say: + +_1 To the extent such assertions raise First Amendment concerns, copyright’s built-in free speech safeguards are generally adequate to address them. We recognize that the D.C. Circuit spoke too broadly when it declared copyrights “categorically immune from challenges under the First Amendment.” . . . But when, as in this case, Congress has not altered the traditional contours of copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is unnecessary.~{Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003) at 221 (citing Harper & Row, 471 U.S. at 560).}~ + +The DMCA, of course, does exactly this. As to digital works it alters the “traditional contours of copyright protection” in a way that affects “copyright’s built-in free speech safeguards.” That is what the Farmers’ Tale was all about. Perhaps one day, in a case not involving a Norwegian teenager, a hacker magazine run by a long-haired editor with an Orwellian nom de plume, and an obscure technology that is accused of posing apocalyptic threats to the American film industry, that point will come out more clearly. + +But the issue of speech regulation is only half of the story. Intellectual property rights over digital technologies affect not only speech, but the framework of competition and markets as well, as the next example makes clear. + +2~ The Apple of Forbidden Knowledge: The DMCA and Competition + +You could tell it was a bizarre feud by the statement Apple issued, one strangely at odds with the Californian Zen-chic the company normally projects. “We are stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod, and we are investigating the implications of their actions under the DMCA and other laws.”~{Rob Pegoraro, “RealPlayer’s iPod-Compatible Update ‘Stunned’ Apple,” Washington Post (August 8, 2004), F6.}~ + +What vile thing had RealNetworks done? They had developed a program called Harmony that would allow iPod owners to buy songs from Real’s Music Store and play them on their own iPods. That’s it. So why all the outrage? It turns out that like the story of DeCSS, this little controversy has a lot to teach us about the landscape of intellectual property disputes, about the mental topography of the high-tech economy. But where the DeCSS case was a war of metaphors around the boundaries of freedom of expression, the iPod story is about ways in which intellectual property marks the limits of competition. + +Apple iPods can be used to store all kinds of material, from word processing documents to MP3 files. If you want to use these popular digital music players to download copy-protected music, though, you have only one source: Apple’s iTunes service, which offers songs at 99 cents a pop in the United States, 79 pence in the United Kingdom. If you try to download copy-protected material from any other service, the iPod will refuse to play it. Or at least, that had been the case until Real managed to make their Harmony service compatible. + +Real’s actions meant that consumers had two sources of copy-protected music for their iPods. Presumably all the virtues of competition, including improved variety and lowered prices, would follow. The iPod owners would be happy. But Apple was not. The first lesson of the story is how strangely people use the metaphors of tangible property in new-economy disputes. How exactly had Real “broken into” the iPod? It had not broken into my iPod, which is after all my iPod. If I want to use Real’s service to download music to my own device, where’s the breaking and entering? + +What Real had done was make the iPod “interoperable” with another format. If Boyle’s word processing program can convert Microsoft Word files into Boyle’s format, allowing Word users to switch programs, am I “breaking into Word”? Well, Microsoft might think so, but most of us do not. So leaving aside the legal claim for a moment, where is the ethical foul? + +Apple was saying (and apparently believed) that Real had broken into something different from my iPod or your iPod. They had broken into the idea of an iPod. (I imagine a small, platonic white rectangle, presumably imbued with the spirit of Steve Jobs.) Their true sin was trying to understand the iPod so that they could make it do things that Apple did not want it to do. As an ethical matter, does figuring out how things work, in order to compete with the original manufacturer, count as breaking and entering? In the strange netherworld between hardware and software, device and product, the answer is often a morally heartfelt “yes!” I would stress “morally heartfelt.” It is true manufacturers want to make lots of money and would rather not have competitors. Bob Young of Red Hat claims “every business person wakes up in the morning and says ‘how can I become a monopolist?’ ” Beyond that, though, innovators actually come to believe that they have the moral right to control the uses of their goods after they are sold. This isn’t your iPod, it’s Apple’s iPod. + +Yet even if they believe this, we don’t have to agree. In the material world, when a razor manufacturer claims that a generic razor blade maker is “stealing my customers” by making compatible blades, we simply laugh. The “hacking” there consists of looking at the razor and manufacturing a blade that will fit. To say this is somehow immoral seems laughable. Is the conclusion changed when the information about compatibility is inscribed in binary code and silicon circuits, rather than the molded plastic of a razor cartridge? What if ensuring the “fit” between the two products is not a matter of making sure the new blades snugly connect to the razor but of making sure the software embedded in my generic product sends the right code to the original product in order to be recognized? Our moral intuitions are a little less confident here. All kinds of bad policy can flourish in that area of moral uncertainty. + +This leads us to the law. Surely Apple’s suggestion that the DMCA might prohibit what Real had done is as baseless as their moral argument? In the United States, the answer is “probably,” at least if the courts continue in the direction they are currently taking, but it is a closer call than you would think. Internationally, the answer is even less certain. That is where the iPod war provides its second new-economy lesson. Think for a moment about the way that the law shapes the business choices in this dispute. + +In a competitive market, Apple would choose whether to make the iPod an open platform, able to work with everyone’s music service, or to try to keep it closed, hoping to extract more money by using consumers’ loyalty to the hardware to drive them to the tied music service. If they attempted to keep it closed, competitors would try to make compatible products, acting like the manufacturers of generic razor blades or printer cartridges. + +The war would be fought out on the hardware (and software) level, with the manufacturer of the platform constantly seeking to make the competing products incompatible, to bad-mouth their quality, and to use fear, uncertainty, and doubt to stop consumers from switching. (Apple’s actual words were: “When we update our iPod software from time to time, it is highly likely that Real’s Harmony technology will cease to work with current and future iPods.”) Meanwhile the competitors would race to untangle the knots as fast as the platform manufacturer could tie them. If the consumers got irritated enough they could give up their sunk costs and switch to another product altogether. + +All of this seems fine, even if it represents the kind of socially wasteful arms race that led critics of capitalism to prophesy its inevitable doom. Competition is good and competition will often require interoperability. But what do we mean by competition? Is it competition if I assassinate your employees or poison the food in your restaurant? If I trespass on your land in order to sell a competing product? If I break into your safe to steal your trade secrets, use my monopoly position in the market to impose resale price agreements, or violate your patent? It is the law that draws the line between competition and theft, between virtuous competitive imitation and illicit “piracy.” + +Sometimes we need to give innovators property rights that allow them to prevent second-comers from free riding on their efforts. We have to do so because it is necessary to encourage future innovation. On the other hand, sometimes we not only allow the second-comer to free ride, we positively encourage it, believing that this is an integral part of competition and that there are adequate incentives to encourage innovation without the state stepping in. Intellectual property policy, indeed a large part of the policy behind all property rights, is about drawing the line between the two situations. Too far in one direction and innovation suffers because potential investors realize good ideas will immediately be copied. Too far in the other direction and monopolies hurt both competition and future innovation. + +Imagine you are the first person to invest in getting the public to eat burritos for breakfast, or to place a petrol station at a certain crossroads, or to clip papers together with a folded bit of wire. In each case we give you some property rights. The fast-food vendor may own a trademarked phrase or jingle that the public learns to associate with his product. Since the patent office issued a patent for the sealed and crimped “peanut butter and jelly” sandwich I described at the beginning of the book, even a patent is not out of the question if your disgusting concoction is sufficiently novel and nonobvious. But we should not allow you to have a patent over all burritos, or burritos for breakfast, still less over the idea of fast food. As for the paper clip maker, there might be a trademark over the particular paper clip, but the idea of folding wire to secure paper stays in the public domain. The owner of the petrol station gets physical ownership of the land, but cannot stop a second-comer from setting up shop across the road, even if the first-comer’s labor, capital, and effort proved that the location is a good one. We positively encourage follow-on imitation in those cases. + +Now how about the case in point? What does Apple get in the way of property rights? Think back to my description of the intellectual property system in Chapter 1. They can get patents over those aspects of the iPod—both hardware and software—that are sufficiently innovative. Patents are what we use to protect inventions. They also get a copyright over the various pieces of software involved. That protects them only against someone who copies their code, not someone who writes new software to do the same thing. Copyrights are what we use to protect original expression. They get rights under trademark law over the name and perhaps parts of the design of the product—maybe the distinctive look of the iPod—though that is a bit more complex. All of these rights, plus being the first to break into the market in a big way, the brilliance of the design, and the tight integration between the hardware and the service, produce a formidable competitive advantage. The iPod is a very good product. + +Now if a competitor infringes any of Apple’s rights, for example by making a literal copy of the code, using their trademark in a way the law does not allow, or infringing on one of their patents, then Apple can shut them down and extract hefty damages. Quite right, too. But should they be able to prevent someone from making an interoperable product, provided they do not violate any of these existing rights in the process? Laws like the DMCA make that question more complicated. + +Nowadays, there is software in many, many more products than you would imagine. Your watch, your phone, your printer, your thermostat, your garage door opener, your refrigerator, your microwave, your television—the odds are that if you bought them in the last ten years, they have some software component. In the 1970s the courts and Congress had concluded that software could be copyrighted as original expression, like a song or a novel, as well as being patented when it was novel, nonobvious, and useful. Frequently, different aspects of the same program will be covered by copyright and by patent. But software is a machine made of words, the machine of the digital age. That fact already causes some problems for our competition policy. Will the exceptions and limitations designed to deal with a copyright over a novel work adequately when they are applied to Microsoft Windows? That issue was already unclear. With the DMCA, we have added another crucial problem. Where there is copyrighted software there can be digital fences around it. If the copyright owner can forbid people to cut these fences to gain access to the software, then it can effectively enlarge its monopoly, capture tied services, and prohibit generic competition. + +It was just this line of thought that led some other companies to do more than merely make threatening noises about the DMCA. Lexmark makes printers. But it also makes lots of money off the replacement ink or toner cartridges for those printers. In some cases, in fact, that is where printer companies make the majority of their profits. As a result, they are not exactly keen on generic replacements. Chamberlain makes garage door opener systems. But they also sell replacements for the controllers—the little devices that you use to trigger the door. Lawyers from both of those firms looked at the DMCA and saw a chance to do something most companies would love to do; to make generic competition illegal. Lexmark designed their printer program so that it would not accept a toner cartridge unless it received the correct “checksum” or validation number. So far, this looks no different from the razor manufacturer trying to make it difficult to manufacture a compatible replacement blade. Generic competitors now had to embed chips in their printer cartridges which would produce the correct code, otherwise they would not work in Lexmark printers. + +Static Control Components is a North Carolina company that manufactures chips whose main function is to send the correct code to the printer program. With this chip implanted in them, generic cartridges would work in Lexmark printers. Lexmark’s response could have been to change their program, rendering the chip obsolete, just as Apple could change the iTunes software to lock out Real Music’s Rhapsody. Doing so would have been quite within their rights. Indeed it is a standard part of the interoperability wars. Instead, Lexmark sued Static Controls, claiming, among other things, a violation of the DMCA.~{Lexmark, Int’l v. Static Control Companies, Inc. , 387 F.3d 522 (6th Cir. 2004).}~ Like Apple in the press release I quoted earlier, Lexmark clearly saw this as a kind of digital breaking and entering. This was their printer, their printer program, their market for replacement cartridges. Static was just helping a bunch of cheats camouflage their generic cartridges as authentic Lexmark cartridges. Translated into the legal language of the DMCA the claim is a little different, but still recognizable. Static was “trafficking” in a device that allowed the “circumvention of a technical protection measure” used to prevent “access to a copyrighted work”—namely the computer program inside the printer. That is behavior that the DMCA forbids. + +The garage door company, Chamberlain—who also claimed to be concerned about the security of their garage doors—made a similar argument. In order to get the garage door to open, the generic replacement opener had to provide the right code to the program in the actual motor system. That program is copyrighted. The code controls “access” to it. Suddenly, the manufacturers of generic printer cartridges and garage door openers start to look rather like Jon Johansen. + +Surely the courts did not accept this argument? Bizarrely enough, some of them did—at least at first. But perhaps it was not so bizarre. The DMCA was indeed a radical new law. It did shift the boundaries of power between intellectual property owners and others. And intellectual property rights are always about restraining competition, defining what is legitimate and what is not—that is what they do. There was a respectable argument that these devices did in fact violate the DMCA. In fact, it was respectable enough to convince a federal judge. The district court judge in the Lexmark case concluded that Lexmark was likely to win on both the DMCA claim and on a more traditional copyright claim and issued an injunction against Static Control. In Skylink, the case involving garage door openers, by contrast, the district court held that the universal garage door opener did not violate the DMCA. Both cases were appealed and both appeals courts sided with the generic manufacturers, saying that the DMCA did not prohibit this kind of access—merely making a computer program work the way it was supposed to. + +The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) heard the Skylink appeal. In a remarkably far-reaching decision, the court effectively took many of the positions that Mr. Corley’s lawyers had argued for in the DeCSS case, but they did so not to protect speech, but to protect competition. In fact, they implied that taking Chamberlain’s side in the case would silently overrule the antitrust statutes. They also interpreted the new right created by the DMCA so as to add an implicit limitation. In their construction, merely gaining access is not illegal; only gaining access for the purpose of violating the copyright holders’ rights violates the statute. The Reimerdes court had been willing to accept that the new access right allows a copyright holder to prohibit “fair uses as well as foul.” When Chamberlain made the same argument as to their garage door opener program, the CAFC was incredulous. + +_1 Such an entitlement [as the one Chamberlain claims] would go far beyond the idea that the DMCA allows copyright owner to prohibit “fair uses . . . as well as foul.” Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d at 304. Chamberlain’s proposed construction would allow copyright owners to prohibit exclusively fair uses even in the absence of any feared foul use. It would, therefore, allow any copyright owner, through a combination of contractual terms and technological measures, to repeal the fair use doctrine with respect to an individual copyrighted work—or even selected copies of that copyrighted work.~{Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Tech., Inc. , 381 F.3d 1178 (Fed. Cir. 2004). This of course was exactly the claim that Mr. Corley’s lawyers made, to no avail.}~ + +There are multiple ironies here. The CAFC rarely meets an intellectual property right it does not like. It has presided over a twenty-year expansion of American patent law that many scholars find indefensible. But when (for dubious jurisdictional reasons) it sorties beyond its traditional ambit of patent law, it is stunned by the potential expansiveness of the DMCA. Then there is the comparison with the Reimerdes case. How interesting that the First Amendment and concerns about free expression have comparatively little bite when applied to the DMCA, but antitrust and concerns about competition require that we curtail it. After all, the heart of Mr. Johansen’s argument was that he had to write the DeCSS program in order to play his own DVDs on his own computer—to get access to his own DVDs, just as the purchaser of a replacement garage door control is getting access to the program that operates his own garage door. Indeed, Mr. Johansen’s criticism of CSS was that it allowed the movie companies, “through a combination of contractual terms and technological measures, to repeal the fair use doctrine with respect to an individual copyrighted work.” Mr. Corley echoed those claims. + +Of course, the situations are not identical. The key limitation in Skylink is that the court saw no threat of “foul use.” The Reimerdes court could see little else. On the other hand, the rulings are not easily reconciled. The Skylink court cannot imagine that Congress would want to give the copyright holder a new “property” right to prevent access unconnected to any underlying copyright violation. + +_1 As we have seen, Congress chose to create new causes of action for circumvention and for trafficking in circumvention devices. Congress did not choose to create new property rights. . . . Were we to interpret Congress’s words in a way that eliminated all balance and granted copyright owners carte blanche authority to preclude all use, Congressional intent would remain unrealized. + +Yet, arguably, that is exactly what the Reimerdes decision does, precisely because it focuses on enabling access alone, not access for the purpose of violating one of the rights of the copyright holder. The Reimerdes court saw a violation of the law just in cutting the wire or making a wire cutter. The Skylink court focused on whether the person cutting the wire was going to trespass once the cutting was done. In effect, the two courts disagree on which of the options offered to the legislature in the Farmers’ Tale was actually enacted by Congress. Which court is correct? The Skylink decision strikes me as sensible. It also makes the statute constitutionally much more defensible—something that the Skylink court does not consider. But in the process, it has to rewrite the DMCA substantially. One should not presume that it will be this interpretation that will triumph. + +2~ Summing Up: Exaggerations, Half-Truths, and Bipolar Disorders in Technology Policy + +Let me return to the question with which I began the chapter. For many critics of contemporary intellectual property law, the DMCA is the very embodiment of all that is wrong. (I still cherish a friend’s account of British protesters outside the American Embassy in London singing “D-M-C-A” to the tune of the Village People’s “YMCA” and holding up signs calling for the law’s repeal—to the great confusion of the diplomatic personnel.) The critics conjure up a digital apocalypse—a world of perfect control achieved through legally backed digital fences, in which both speech and competition suffer, and where citizens lose privacy, the privilege of fair use, and the right to criticize popular culture rather than simply consume it. In their view, the legal disaster is only exacerbated by bumbling judges who do not understand the technology and who are easily fooled by the doom-laden rhetoric of the content companies. The DMCA’s supporters, on the other hand, think criticisms of the DMCA are overblown, that the dark tales of digital control are either paranoid delusions or tendentious exaggerations, and that far from being excessive, the DMCA’s provisions are not sufficient to control an epidemic of illicit copying. More draconian intervention is needed. As for fair use, as I pointed out before, many of the DMCA’s supporters do not think fair use is that important economically or culturally speaking. At best it is a “loophole” that copyright owners should have the right to close; certainly not an affirmative right of the public or a reserved limitation on the original property grant from the state. + +Who is right? Obviously, I disagree profoundly with the DMCA’s supporters. I wrote this book partly to explain—using Jefferson and Macaulay and the Sony case—what was wrong with their logic. It would be both convenient and predictable for me to claim that the DMCA is the intellectual property incarnation of the Antichrist. But it would not be true. In fact, I would not even put the DMCA in the top three of bad intellectual property initiatives worldwide. And many of the fears conjured up about it are indeed overblown. + +Of course, the critics have a point. The DMCA is a very badly drafted law. As I have tried to show here, its key provisions were probably unnecessary and are, in my view, unconstitutional. If coupled with a number of other legal “innovations” favored by the content industry, the DMCA could play a very destructive role. In general, in fact, the Farmers’ Tale is fairly accurate in describing both the origins of and the threats posed by the DMCA. Yet the single largest of those threats—the idea that the DMCA could be used to fence off large portions of the public domain and to make the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act essentially irrelevant—is still largely a threat rather than a reality. In some cases, fair use rights are curtailed. But for most citizens and for the majority of media, the DMCA has had relatively little effect. Digital rights management (DRM) certainly exists; indeed it is all around us. You can see that every time you try to play a DVD bought in another part of the world, open an Adobe eBook, or copy a song you have downloaded from iTunes. But so far, the world of legally backed digital rights management has not brought about the worst of the dystopian consequences that some people, including me, feared might result. + +In many cases, citizens simply reject digital rights management. They will not buy products that use it. Attempts to introduce it into music CDs, for example, have been a resounding failure. In other cases, DRM has not been used in ways that the critics feared. There are genuine scandals, of course—cryptography research has been chilled, the DMCA has been turned to anticompetitive ends, and so on. It is also troubling to see federal judges issuing injunctions not only against banned material but also against those who link to the banned material. Somehow the blithe reassurance that this is consistent with the First Amendment fails to comfort one. But many of the evils prophesied for the DMCA remain as just that: prophecies. + +There are also entries on the positive side of the ledger. The “safe-harbors” that the DMCA gave Internet service providers and search services have been a vital and positive force in the development of the Internet. It may even be true that in some cases, such as iTunes, the DMCA did what its backers claimed it would—encourage new provision of digital content by reassuring the record companies that they could put their music online surrounded by legally backed digital rights management. (Notably, however, the trend is now going the other way. Companies are coming to realize that many consumers prefer, and will pay more for, unprotected MP3 files.) + +Of course, depending on your view of the music industry, that might seem like a mixed blessing. One might also wonder if the same consumer benefits might have been produced with a much less restrictive law. But with the exception of a few important areas—such as cryptography research, where its effects are reported to be severe—I would have to say that the criticisms focus too much on the DMCA, to the exclusion of the rest of the intellectual property landscape. Yes, the DMCA offers enormous potential for abuse, particularly in conjunction with some other developments in intellectual property that I will discuss later, but much of the abuse has not yet happened. Yet even if it never did happen, the DMCA has important lessons to teach us. + +In this section I have tried to show how legal rules—particularly intellectual property rules—define the boundaries of legitimate competition. We used to assume that this was principally the function of patent and trademark law, less so of copyright. Of course, copyright would affect competition in publishing and in the TV and movie industries, but it hardly seemed central to competition policy in general. But once courts and legislatures accepted that software is copyrightable, that assessment changed. The levers and cogs of the machines of the modern economy are forged out of ones and zeros instead of steel and brass. In that situation, copyright is central to the competition policy of a high-tech economy. + +As the Apple case shows, our moral intuitions about competition are going to be cloudier in the world of digital content and cyberspace. The same is true of the law. Even in the material world it can be hard to draw the line between the legitimate and ruthless pursuit of commercial advantage and various forms of unfair competition, antitrust violations, and so on. But in the immaterial world, the boundaries are even harder to draw. Is this the digital equivalent of trespass or legitimate passage on a public road that runs through your property? As I pointed out earlier, the constant analogies to physical property are likely to conceal as much as they reveal. Is this virtuous competitive imitation or illicit copying? We have strong, and by no means coherent, moral and legal intuitions about the answers to such questions. And our legal structure often gives us the raw material to make a very good case for both sides of the argument. + +Into this already troubled situation, with a set of rules designed for original expression in novels and poems being applied to machines made of computer code, we add the DMCA and its new rights of uncertain extent. Copyright had a well-developed set of exceptions to deal with anticompetitive behavior. Where the existing exceptions did not function, courts tended to turn to fair use as the universal method for patching the system up—the duct tape of the copyright system. Without an evolving idea of fair use, copyright would overshoot its bounds as it was applied to new technologies and new economic conditions. Indeed that was the point of the Sony Axiom. The DMCA threw this system into disarray, into a war of competing metaphors. + +The Skylink court sees monopolists being handed carte blanche to abolish the restraints on their monopolies. Competition policy demands that we construe the DMCA narrowly. The Reimerdes court sees a virus masquerading as speech, a digital pandemic that must be stopped at all costs by a draconian program of electronic public health. Each proceeds to construe the statute around the reality they have created. It is by no means certain which metaphor will win the day, still less which resolution will triumph in other countries that have passed versions of the DMCA. International attitudes toward speech, competition, and the necessary exceptions in a copyright system vary widely. Yet backed by the story of the Internet Threat, the content companies are already saying that we need to go further both nationally and internationally—introducing more technology mandates, requiring computers to have hardware that will only play approved copyrighted versions, allowing content companies to hack into private computers in search of material they think is theirs, and so on. Remember the suggestion from the beginning of the chapter, that all cars be assumed to be getaway vehicles for the felonious filchers of vegetables, and thus that they should be fitted with radio beacons, have the size of their cargo space reduced, and so on? The Farmers’ Tale continues to evolve. + +2~ Chapter 5: Further Reading + +This chapter focuses primarily on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), one of the most controversial recent pieces of intellectual property legislation and the subject of extensive scholarship and commentary. + +3~ The DMCA and DRM + +Once again Jessica Litman’s Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001) is an indispensable introduction. David Nimmer offered one of the early, and prescient, analyses of the conceptual problems in the statute. David Nimmer, “A Riff on Fair Use in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 148 (2000): 673–742. His anthology, Copyright: Sacred Text, Technology, and the DMCA (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2003), is also worthy reading for those who wish to pursue the legal issues further. Tarleton Gillespie’s book Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), is an accessible but thorough introduction to the economic, political, and cultural consequences of so-called “digital rights management” or DRM. Legal scholars have been assiduous in pointing out the problems that legally backed DRM brings to science, culture, policy, and economic competition. Pamela Samuelson’s “Intellectual Property and the Digital Economy: Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to be Revised,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 519–566, is an early critique that proved to be particularly accurate in its predictions. Jerome Reichman, Graeme Dinwoodie, and Pamela Samuelson, “A Reverse Notice and Takedown Regime to Enable Public Interest Uses of Technically Protected Copyrighted Works,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 22 (2007): 981–1060, provides a fascinating recent proposal for a method to solve some of those problems. Dan Burk’s “Anticircumvention Misuse,” UCLA Law Review 50 (2003): 1095–1140, offers a similar piece of conceptual judo, looking at the way in which copyright’s traditional concerns with anticompetitive and predatory misuse of intellectual property rights could be turned on the new legally backed digital fences of cyberspace. Julie Cohen sets the debate in the wider perspective of political theory in a way that has been influential on my own thinking. In “Lochner in Cyberspace: The New Economic Orthodoxy of ‘Rights Management,’ ” Michigan Law Review 97 (1998): 462–563, and her subsequent work, she describes the ways in which digital rights management presents fascinating echoes of the ideology of socially untrammeled property rights that dominated the first twenty years of the twentieth century in the United States and was eventually countered with the ideals of the New Deal. Finally, Jane Ginsburg, “Copyright and Control over New Technologies of Dissemination,” Columbia Law Review 101 (2001): 1613–1647, provides a more positive account, arguing that on balance—given the dangers of illicit digital copying—the DMCA’s benefits outweigh its costs. + +3~ The DMCA and Freedom of Expression + +Those who are interested in the tensions between copyright law and free expression are the beneficiaries of an explosion of scholarship. I cannot begin to cite it all here. Melville Nimmer’s article from 1970, “Does Copyright Abridge the First Amendment Guarantees of Free Speech and Press?” UCLA Law Review 17 (1970): 1180–1204, is a required starting place though its full impact was not to be felt for some time. Lawrence Lessig, “Copyright’s First Amendment,” UCLA Law Review 48 (2001): 1057–1074, provides a lovely reflection of the impact of Nimmer’s arguments more than 30 years on. Neil Netanel’s book Copyright’s Paradox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), is the single most comprehensive work in the field and a fascinating read. Netanel’s arguments, and those of Yochai Benkler, “Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain,” New York University Law Review 74 (1999): 354–446, and Jed Rubenfeld, “The Freedom of Imagination: Copyright’s Constitutionality,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2002): 1–60, have been influential on my own thinking in many areas. Bernt Hugenholtz has demonstrated that the concern about a tension between copyright law and freedom of expression is by no means limited to the United States. P. Bernt Hugenholtz, “Copyright and Freedom of Expression in Europe” in Expanding the Boundaries of Intellectual Property: Innovation Policy for the Information Society, ed. Rochelle Dreyfuss, Diane Zimmerman, and Harry First (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), at 341. (This entire volume is superb, it should be noted.) L. Ray Patterson—an inspiration to the current generation of copyright scholars—summed up the intellectual current well when he compared the DMCA to the methods of censorship imposed by the seventeenth century Licensing Act. L. Ray Patterson, “The DMCA: A Modern Version of the Licensing Act of 1662,” Journal of Intellectual Property Law 10 (2002): 33–58. + +Last, but by no means least, is the new book by my brilliant colleagues, David Lange and H. Jefferson Powell: No Law: Intellectual Property in the Image of an Absolute First Amendment (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2008). No Law offers a fascinating thought experiment: what would a First Amendment jurisprudence look like that took seriously the premise that “no law” is allowed to restrict ‘the freedom of speech’ protected by the First Amendment and then turned its eyes on copyright? It is the answer to the question “and what exactly does ‘the freedom of speech’ permit?” that is most intriguing. Interestingly, though Lange and Powell find many copyright doctrines problematic, they are inclined to view the DMCA more charitably. I disagree for the reasons given in this chapter. + +1~ Chapter 6: I Got a Mashup + +So far, I have talked about the root ideas of intellectual property. I have talked about its history, about the way it influences and is influenced by technology. I have talked about its effects on free speech and on competition. Until now, however, I have not described the way that it actually affects culture. This chapter aims to rectify the omission, looking at the way copyright law handles one specific form of cultural creation—music. It turns out that some of the problems identified in Chapters 4 and 5 are not simply the result of a mismatch between old law and new technology, or the difficulties posed in applying copyright to software, to machines made of words. The same issues appear at the heart of a much older cultural tradition. + +This is the story of a song and of that song’s history. But it is also a story about property and race and art, about the way copyright law has shaped, encouraged, and prohibited music over the last hundred years, about the lines it draws, the boundaries it sets, and the art it forbids. + +Music is hard for copyright law to handle. If one had to represent the image of creativity around which copyright law and patent law, respectively, are built, patent law’s model of creativity would be a pyramid and copyright law’s a fountain, or even an explosion. + +In patent law, the assumption is that technological development converges. Two engineers from two different countries tend to produce similar ways of catching mice or harnessing the power of steam. There are a limited number of good ways of accomplishing a technical task. In addition, technological progress is assumed to be incremental. Each development builds on the ones behind it. Based on this image, patent law makes a series of decisions about what gets covered by property rights, for how long, how to handle “subsequent improvements,” and so on. Patent rights last for a short time, not only to lower costs to consumers, but because we want to build on the technology inventors have created as soon as possible, without getting their permission. Even during the patent term, subsequent “improvers” get their own rights and can bargain with the original patent holder to share the profits. + +Copyright’s assumptions are different. Copyright began with texts, with creative expression. Here the assumption is (generally) that there are infinite possibilities, that two writers will not converge on the same words, and that the next generation of storytellers does not need to take the actual “stuff” that copyright covers in order to make the next play or novel. (It may be because of this image that so few policy makers seem to worry that copyright now lasts for a very long time.) Subsequent “improvements” of copyrighted material are called derivative works, and without the rights holder’s permission, they are illegal. Again, the assumption seems to be that you can just write your own book. Do not claim you need to build on mine. + +Of course, each of these pictures is a caricature. The reality is more complex. Copyright can make this assumption more easily because it does not cover ideas or facts—just their expression. “Boy meets girl, falls in love, girl dies” is not supposed to be owned. The novel Love Story is. It is assumed that I do not need Erich Segal’s copyrighted expression to write my own love story. Even if literary creativity does converge around standard genres, plots, and archetypes, it is assumed that those are in the public domain, leaving future creators free to build their own work without using material that is subject to copyright. We could debate the truth of that matter for literature: the expansion of copyright’s ambit to cover plotlines and characters makes it more questionable. Certainly many recognized forms of creativity, such as the pastiche, the collage, the literary biography, and the parody need extensive access to prior copyrighted work. But regardless of how well we think the image of individual creativity fits literature, it fits very poorly in music where so much creativity is recognizably more collective and additive, and where much of the raw material used by subsequent creators is potentially covered by copyright. + +So how does the accretive process of musical creativity fare in the modern law and culture of copyright? How would the great musical traditions of the twentieth century—jazz, soul, blues, rock—have developed under today’s copyright regime? Would they have developed at all? How does the law apply to the new musicians, remixers, and samplers who offer their work on the Internet? Do the lines it draws fit with our ethics, our traditions of free speech and commentary, our aesthetic judgments? It would take a shelf of books to answer such questions definitively. In this chapter, all I can do is suggest some possibilities—using the history of a single song as my case study. + +% --- + +On August 29th, 2005, a hurricane made landfall in Louisiana. The forecasters called it “Hurricane Katrina,” quickly shortened to “Katrina” as its story took over the news. The New Orleans levees failed. Soon the United States and then most of the world was watching pictures of a flooded New Orleans, seeing pleading citizens—mainly African-American—and a Keystone Cops response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The stories from New Orleans became more and more frightening. There were tales not only of natural disaster—drownings, elderly patients trapped in hospitals—but of a collapse of civilization: looting, murder and rape, stores being broken into with impunity, rescue helicopters fired upon, women and children sexually assaulted in the convention center where many of the refugees huddled. Later, it would turn out that many, perhaps most, of these reports were untrue, but one would not have guessed that from the news coverage. + +The television played certain images over and over again. People—again, mainly African-Americans—were portrayed breaking into stores, pleading from rooftops, or later, when help still had not arrived, angrily gesturing and shouting obscenities at the camera. + +As the disaster unfolded in slow motion, celebrities began appearing in televised appeals to raise money for those who had been affected by the storm. Kanye West, the hip hop musician, was one of them. Appearing on NBC on September 2, with the comedian Mike Myers, West started out seeming quietly upset. Finally, he exploded. + +_1 I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, “They’re looting.” You see a white family, it says, “They’re looking for food.” And, you know, it’s been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black. . . . So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help—with the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way—and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us! + +Myers, who, according to the Washington Post, “looked like a guy who stopped on the tarmac to tie his shoe and got hit in the back with the 8:30 to LaGuardia,” filled in with some comments about the possible effect of the storm on the willingness of Louisiana citizens to live in the area in the future. Then he turned back to West, who uttered the line that came to epitomize Katrina for many people around the world, and to infuriate a large number of others. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people!” Myers, the Post wrote, “now look[ed] like the 8:30 to LaGuardia turned around and caught him square between the eyes.”~{Lisa de Moraes, “Kanye West’s Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC,” Washington Post (September 3, 2005), C1, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090300165.html. }~ In truth, he did appear even more stunned than before, something I would not have thought possible. + +In Houston, Micah Nickerson and Damien Randle were volunteering to help New Orleans evacuees at the Astrodome and Houston Convention Center during the weekend of September 3. They, too, were incensed both by the slowness of the federal response to the disaster and by the portrayal of the evacuees in the media. But Mr. Nickerson and Mr. Randle were not just volunteers, they were also a hip-hop duo called “The Legendary K.O.” What better way to express their outrage than through their art? An article in the New York Times described their response. + +_1 “When they got to Houston, people were just seeing for the first time how they were portrayed in the media,” said Damien Randle, 31, a financial adviser and one half of the Legendary K.O. “It was so upsetting for them to be up on a roof for two days, with their kids in soiled diapers, and then see themselves portrayed as looters.” In response, Mr. Randle and his partner, Micah Nickerson, wrote a rap based on the stories of the people they were helping. On Sept. 6, Mr. Nickerson sent Mr. Randle an instant message containing a music file and one verse, recorded on his home computer. Mr. Randle recorded an additional verse and sent it back, and 15 minutes later it was up on their Web site: www.k-otix.com.~{John Leland, “Art Born of Outrage in the Internet Age,” New York Times (September 25, 2005), D3.}~ + +The song was called “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” (also referred to as “George Bush Doesn’t Like Black People”). Appropriately, given that Mr. West was the one to come up with the phrase, the song was built around Mr. West’s “Gold Digger.” Much of the melody was sampled directly from the recording of that song. Yet the words were very different. Where “Gold Digger” is about a predatory, sensual, and materialist woman who “take[s] my money when I’m in need” and is a “triflin’ friend indeed,” The Legendary K.O.’s song is a lyrical and profane condemnation of the response to Katrina by both the government and the media. Here is a sample: + +poem{ + +Five days in this motherf__ attic +Can’t use the cellphone I keep getting static +Dying ’cause they lying instead of telling us the truth +Other day the helicopters got my neighbors off the roof +Screwed ’cause they say they coming back for us too +That was three days ago, I don’t see no rescue +See a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do +Since God made the path that I’m trying to walk through +Swam to the store, tryin’ to look for food +Corner store’s kinda flooded so I broke my way through +I got what I could but before I got through +News say the police shot a black man trying to loot +(Who!?) Don’t like black people +George Bush don’t like black people +George Bush don’t like black people + +}poem + +This chapter is the story of that song. “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” is the end (for the moment) of a line of musical borrowing. That borrowing extends far beyond Kanye West’s song “Gold Digger.” “Gold Digger” is memorable largely because it in turn borrows from an even older song, a very famous one written half a century before and hailed by many as the birth of soul music. It is in the origins of that song that we will start the trail. + +2~ I Got A Woman + +In 1955, Ray Charles Robinson, better known as Ray Charles, released a song called “I Got a Woman.” It was a defining moment in Charles’s musical development. Early in his career he had unashamedly modeled himself on Nat King Cole. + +_1 I knew back then that Nat Cole was bigger than ever. Whites could relate to him because he dealt with material they understood, and he did so with great feeling. Funny thing, but during all these years I was imitating Nat Cole, I never thought twice about it, never felt bad about copying the cat’s licks. To me it was practically a science. I worked at it, I enjoyed it, I was proud of it, and I loved doing it. He was a guy everyone admired, and it just made sense to me, musical and commercial sense, to study his technique. It was something like when a young lawyer—just out of school—respects an older lawyer. He tries to get inside his mind, he studies to see how he writes up all his cases, and he’s going to sound a whole lot like the older man—at least till he figures out how to get his own shit together. Today I hear some singers who I think sound like me. Joe Cocker, for instance. Man, I know that cat must sleep with my records. But I don’t mind. I’m flattered; I understand. After all, I did the same thing.~{Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1978), 86.}~ + +In the early 50s Charles decided that he needed to move away from Cole’s style and find his own sound, “sink, swim or die.” But as with any musician, “his own sound” was the product of a number of musical traditions—blues and gospel particularly. It is out of those traditions that “I Got a Woman” emerged; indeed it is that combination that causes it to be identified as one of the birthplaces of soul music. + +According to the overwhelming majority of sources, “I Got a Woman” stems from a fairly overt piece of musical borrowing—Charles reworded the hymn “Jesus Is All the World to Me”—sometimes referred to as “My Jesus Is All the World to Me.” + +_1 Musically, soul denotes styles performed by and for black audiences according to past musical practices reinterpreted and redefined. During its development, three performers played significant roles in shaping its sound, messages, and performance practice: Ray Charles, James Brown, and Aretha Franklin. If one can pinpoint a moment when gospel and blues began to merge into a secular version of gospel song, it was in 1954 when Ray Charles recorded “My Jesus Is All the World to Me,” changing its text to “I Got A Woman.”~{Robert W. Stephens, “Soul: A Historical Reconstruction of Continuity and Change in Black Popular Music,” The Black Perspective in Music 12, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 32.}~ + +That story is repeated in the biography on Charles’s Web site. “Charles reworded the gospel tune ‘Jesus Is All the World to Me’ adding deep church inflections to the secular rhythms of the nightclubs, and the world was never the same.”~{Forever Ray, available at http://www.raycharles.com/the_man_biography.html. }~ Michael Lydon, Charles’s most impressive biographer, simply reports that “Jesus Is All the World to Me” is described as the song’s origin in another published source,~{Michael Lydon, Ray Charles (New York: Routledge, 2004), 419: “Arnold Shaw, in The Rockin’ 50’s says that ‘I Got a Woman’ is based on Jesus is All the World to Me. Because Renald Richard left Ray’s band before the song was recorded, he was not at first properly credited: some record labels list [Ray Charles] alone as the songwriter. Richard, however, straightened that out with Atlantic, and he has for many years earned a substantial income from his royalties.”}~ and this origin is cited repeatedly elsewhere in books, newspaper articles, and online,~{See Stephens, “Soul,” 32. The standard biographical literature also repeats the same story: \\ In 1954 an historic recording session with Atlantic records fused gospel with rhythm-and-blues and established Charles’ “sweet new style” in American music. One number recorded at that session was destined to become his first great success. Secularizing the gospel hymn “My Jesus Is All the World to Me,” Charles employed the 8- and 16-measure forms of gospel music, in conjunction with the 12-measure form of standard blues. Charles contended that his invention of soul music resulted from the heightening of the intensity of the emotion expressed by jazz through the charging of feeling in the unbridled way of gospel. \\ “Ray Charles,” Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1998), 469. Popular accounts offer the same story: \\ This young, blind, black, gravelly-voiced singer brought together the most engaging aspects of black music into one form and began the process of synthesis that led to soul and, ultimately, funk a decade later. He would turn around gospel standards like “My Jesus Is All the World to Me,” recreating it as “I Got a Woman[.]” \\ Ricky Vincent, Funk: The Music, The People, and the Rhythm of the One (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996), 121. See also Joel Hirschhorn, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Songwriting (New York: Alpha Books, 2004), 108: “I Got a Woman was Ray’s rewrite of ‘My Jesus Is All the World to Me.’ ” \\ Charles himself was more equivocal about the origins of the song: \\ So I was lucky. Lucky to have my own band at this point in my career. Lucky to be able to construct my musical building to my exact specifications. And lucky in another way: While I was stomping around New Orleans, I had met a trumpeter named Renolds [sic] Richard who by thus time was in my band. One day he brought me some words to a song. I dressed them up a little and put them to music. The tune was called “I Got a Woman,” and it was another of those spirituals which I refashioned in my own way. I Got a Woman was my first real smash, much bigger than [“]Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand[.]” This spiritual-and-blues combination of mine was starting to hit. \\ Charles and Ritz, Brother Ray, 150.}~ though the most detailed accounts also mention Renald Richard, Charles’s trumpeter, who is credited with co-writing the song.~{See Lydon, Ray Charles, 419.}~ + +To secular ears, “Jesus Is All the World to Me” is a plodding piece of music with a mechanical, up-and-down melodic structure. It conjures up a bored (and white) church audience, trudging through the verses, a semitone flat, while thinking about Sunday lunch rather than salvation. It is about as far removed as one could be from the syncopated beat and amorous subject matter of “I Got a Woman.” The hymn was the product of Will Lamartine Thompson—a severe-looking fellow with a faint resemblance to an elderly Doc Holliday—who died in 1909 and is buried in the same place he was born, East Liverpool, Ohio. But the words have an earnestness to them that gives life to the otherwise uninspired verse. + +poem{ + +Jesus is all the world to me, my life, my joy, my all; +He is my strength from day to day, without Him I would fall. +When I am sad, to Him I go, no other one can cheer me so; +When I am sad, He makes me glad, He’s my Friend. + +}poem + +Reading those words, one can understand the sincerity that made Mr. Thompson spurn commercial publishers for his devotional music, instead founding his own publishing house (also in East Liverpool) to make sure that his hymns reached the people. I can quote as much of the song as I want without worrying about legal consequences because the copyright on Mr. Thompson’s lyrics has expired. So has the copyright over the music. The song was published in 1904. Copyright had only been extended to musical compositions in 1881. Like all copyrights back then, copyright over music lasted for only twenty-eight years, with a possible extension for another fourteen. If Ray Charles did indeed reword it fifty years later, he was doing nothing illegal. It had been in the public domain for at least eight years, and probably for twenty. Now maybe Charles’s genius was to hear in this hymn, or in a syncopated gospel version of this hymn, the possibility of a fusion of traditions which would itself become a new tradition—soul. Or perhaps his genius was in knowing a good idea—Richard’s—when he heard it, and turning that idea into the beginnings of its own musical genre. + +Soul is a fusion of gospel on the one hand and rhythm and blues on the other. From gospel, soul takes the call-and-response pattern of preacher and congregation and the wailing vocals of someone “testifying” to their faith. From rhythm and blues it takes the choice of instruments, some of the upbeat tempo, and the distinctly worldly and secular attitude to the (inevitable) troubles of life. Musicologists delight in parsing the patterns of influence further; R&B itself had roots in “jump music” and the vocal style of the “blues shouters” who performed with the big bands. It also has links to jazz. Gospel reaches back to spirituals and so on. + +As with all music, those musical traditions can be traced back or forward in time, the net of influence and borrowing widening as one goes in either direction. In each, one can point to distinctive musical motifs—the chords of the twelve-bar blues, or the flattened fifth in bebop. But musical traditions are also defined by performance styles and characteristic sounds: the warm guitar that came out of the valve amplifiers of early funk, the thrashing (and poorly miked) drums of ’80s punk, or the tinny piano of honky-tonk. Finally, styles are often built around “standards”—classic songs of the genre to which an almost obligatory reference is made. My colleague, the talented composer Anthony Kelley, uses Henry Louis Gates’s term “signifyin’ ” to describe the process of showing you are embedded in your musical tradition by referring back to its classics in your playing. In jazz, for example, one demonstrates one’s rootedness in the tradition by quoting a standard, but also one’s virtuosity in being able to trim it into a particular eight-bar solo, beginning and ending on the right note for the current moment in the chord progression. “I Got Rhythm” and “Round Midnight” are such songs for jazz. (The chord changes of “I Got Rhythm” are so standard, they are referred to as “the rhythm changes”—a standard basis for improvisation.) And to stretch the connections further, as Kelley points out, the haunting introduction to “Round Midnight” is itself remarkably similar to Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. + +Through all these layers of musical borrowing and reference, at least in the twentieth century in the United States, runs the seam of race. When white musicians “borrowed” from soul to make “blue-eyed soul,” when Elvis took songs and styles from rhythm and blues and turned them into rockabilly, a process of racial cleansing went on. Styles were adapted but were cleansed of those elements thought inappropriate for a larger white audience. Generally, this involved cutting some of the rawer sensuality, removing racially specific verbal and musical references, and, for much of the century, cutting the African-American artists out of the profits in the process. + +There is another irony here. Styles formed by patterns of gleeful borrowing, formed as part of a musical commons—the blues of the Mississippi Delta, for example—were eventually commercialized and “frozen” into a particular form by white artists. Sometimes those styles were covered with intellectual property rights which denied the ability of the original community to “borrow back.” In the last thirty or forty years of the century, African-American artists got into the picture too, understandably embracing with considerable zeal the commercial opportunities and property rights that had previously been denied to them. But aside from the issue of racial injustice, one has to consider the question of sustainability. + +In other work, I have tried to show how a vision of intellectual property rights built around a notion of the romantic author can sometimes operate as a one-way valve vis-à-vis traditional and collective creative work.~{James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).}~ There is a danger that copyright will treat collectively created musical traditions as unowned raw material, but will then prevent the commercialized versions of those traditions—now associated with an individual artist—from continuing to act as the basis for the next cycle of musical adaptation and development. One wonders whether jazz, blues, R&B, gospel, and soul would even have been possible as musical styles if, from their inception, they had been covered by the strong property rights we apply today. That is a question I want to return to at the end of this chapter. + +Musical styles change over time and so do their techniques of appropriation. Sometimes musical generations find their successors are engaging in different types of borrowing than they themselves engaged in. They do not always find it congenial. It is striking how often musicians condemn a younger generation’s practice of musical appropriation as theft, while viewing their own musical development and indebtedness as benign and organic. James Brown attacked the use of his guitar licks or the drum patterns from his songs by hip-hop samplers, for example, but celebrated the process of borrowing from gospel standards and from rhythm and blues that created the “Hardest Working Man in Show Business”—both the song and the musical persona. To be sure, there are differences between the two practices. Samplers take a three-second segment off the actual recording of “Funky Drummer,” manipulate it, and turn it into a repeating rhythm loop for a hip-hop song. This is a different kind of borrowing than the adaptation of a chord pattern from a gospel standard to make an R&B hit. But which way does the difference cut as a matter of ethics, aesthetics, or law? + +Charles himself came in for considerable criticism for his fusion of gospel intonations and melodic structures with the nightclub sound of rhythm and blues, but not because it was viewed as piracy. It was viewed as sacrilegious. + +_1 Charles totally removed himself from the polite music he had made in the past. There was an unrestrained exuberance to the new Ray Charles, a fierce earthiness that, while it would not have been unfamiliar to any follower of gospel music, was almost revolutionary in the world of pop. Big Bill Broonzy was outraged: “He’s crying, sanctified. He’s mixing the blues with the spirituals. He should be singing in a church.”~{James Henke, Holly George-Warren, Anthony Decurtis, and Jim Miller, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Music (New York: Random House, 1992), 130.}~ + +Charles disagreed. “You can’t run away from yourself. . . . What you are inside is what you are inside. I was raised in the church and was around blues and would hear all these musicians on the jukeboxes and then I would go to revival meetings on Sunday morning. So I would get both sides of music. A lot of people at the time thought it was sacrilegious but all I was doing was singing the way I felt.”~{Great American Country, “Ray Charles Biography,” available at http://www.gactv.com/gac/ar_artists_a-z/article/0,,GAC_26071_4888297,00.html. }~ Why the charge of sacrilege? Because beyond the breach of stylistic barriers, the relationships Charles described did not seem to belong in church. + +“I Got a Woman” tells of a woman, “way over town,” who is good to the singer—very good, in fact. She gives him money when he is in need, is a “kind of friend indeed,” even saves her “early morning loving” just for him (and it is tender loving at that). In the third verse we learn she does not grumble, fuss, or run in the streets, “knows a woman’s place is right there now in the home,” and in general is a paragon of femininity. Gender roles aside, it is a fabulous song, from the elongated “We-e-ell . . .” in Charles’s distinctive tones, to the momentary hesitation that heightens the tension, all the way through the driving beat of the main verses and the sense that a gospel choir would have fit right in on the choruses, testifying ecstatically to the virtues of Charles’s lady friend. Charles liked women—a lot of women, according to his biographers—and a lot of women liked him right back. That feeling comes through very clearly from this song. + +I would like to quote the song lyrics for you, just as I did the words of the hymn, but that requires a little more thought. Charles’s song was released in 1955. By that time, the copyright term for a musical composition was twenty-eight years, renewable for another twenty-eight if the author wished. (Later, the twenty-eight-year second term would be increased to forty-seven years. Still later, the copyright term would be extended to life plus seventy years, or ninety-five years for a “work for hire.” Sound recordings themselves would not be protected by federal law until the early 1970s.) Anyone who wrote or distributed a song under the “28+28” system was, in effect, saying “this is a long enough protection for me,” enough incentive to create. Thus, we could have assumed that “I Got a Woman” would enter the public domain in either 1983 or, if renewed, 2011. Unfortunately for us, and for a latter-day Ray Charles, the copyright term has been extended several times since then, and each time it was also extended retrospectively. Artists, musicians, novelists, and filmmakers who had created their works on the understanding that they had twenty-eight or fifty-six or seventy-five years of protection now have considerably more. This was the point raised in Chapter 1. Most of the culture of the twentieth century, produced under a perfectly well-functioning system with much shorter copyright terms, is still locked up and will be for many years to come. + +In the case of “I Got a Woman,” it is now about fifty years since the song’s release—the same length of time as between Thompson’s hymn and Charles’s alleged “rewording.” If the words and music were properly copyrighted at the time of its publication, and renewed when appropriate, the copyright still has forty-five years to run. No one will be able to “reword” “I Got a Woman” and use it to found a new genre, or take substantial portions of its melody, until the year 2050. The freedoms Ray Charles says he used to create his song are denied to his successors until nearly a century after the song’s release. (As we will see in a moment, this put certain constraints on Kanye West.) + +Would it truly be a violation of copyright for me to quote the middle stanza in a nonfiction book on copyright policy? Not at all. It is a classic “fair use.” In a moment I will do so. But it is something that the publisher may well fuss over, because copyright holders are extremely aggressive in asking for payments for the slightest little segment. Copyright holders in music and song lyrics are among the most aggressive of the lot. Year after year academics, critics, and historians pay fairly substantial fees (by our standards) to license tiny fragments of songs even though their incorporation is almost certainly fair use. Many of them do not know the law. Others do, but want to avoid the hassle, the threats, the nasty letters. It is simpler just to pay. + +Unfortunately, these individual actions have a collective impact. One of the factors used to consider whether something is a fair use is whether or not there is a market for this particular use of a work. If there is, it is less likely to be a fair use to quote or incorporate such a fragment. As several courts have pointed out, there is a powerful element of circularity here. You claim you have a right to stop me from doing x—quoting two lines of your three-verse song in an academic book, say. I say you have no such right and it is a fair use. You say it is not a fair use because it interferes with your market—the market for selling licenses for two-sentence fragments. But when do you have such a market? When you have a right to stop me quoting the two-sentence fragment unless I pay you. Do you have such a right? But that is exactly what we are trying to decide! Is it a fair use or not? The existence of the market depends on it not being a fair use for me to quote it without permission. To say “I would have a market if I could stop you doing it, so it cannot be a fair use, so I can stop you” is perfectly circular. + +How do we get out of the circle? Often the court will look to customs and patterns in the world outside. Do people accept this as a market? Do they traditionally pay such fees? Thus, if a lot of people choose to pay for quotes that actually should have been fair use, the “market” for short quotes will begin to emerge. That will, in turn, affect the boundaries of fair use for the worse. Slowly, fair use will constrict, will atrophy. The hypertrophied permissions culture starts as myth, but it can become reality. + +In any event, Ray Charles had no need of fair use to make “I Got a Woman” because the hymn his biography claims it is based on was in the public domain. But is that the real source? I can hear little resemblance. As I researched the origins of “I Got a Woman,” I found claims that there was a different source, a mysterious song by the Bailey Gospel Singers, or the Harold Bailey Gospel Singers, called “I’ve Got a Savior.”~{“His 1955 smash ‘I’ve Got a Woman,’ for example, was adapted from a gospel number he’d liked called ‘I’ve Got a Savior.’ ” Chip Deffaa, Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 161.}~ The Columbia Records gospel catalogue even provided a catalogue number.~{Columbia Catalog Number CO45097, available at http://settlet.fateback.com/COL30000.htm. }~ There was such a song, or so it seemed. But there the research stalled. The exemplary librarians at Duke University Music Library could find no trace. Catalogues of published records showed nothing. Inquiries to various music librarian listservs also produced no answer. There was a man called Harold Bailey, who sang with a group of gospel singers, but though several Internet postings suggested he was connected to the song, his biography revealed he would have been only thirteen at the time. The Library of Congress did not have it. Eventually, Jordi Weinstock—a great research assistant who demonstrated willingness to pester anyone in the world who might conceivably have access to the recording—hit gold. The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts had a copy—a 78 rpm vinyl record by the Bailey Gospel Singers with “Jesus Is the Searchlight” on the B-side. Our library was able to obtain a copy on interlibrary loan from the helpful curator, Don McCormick. + +It sounds like the same song. Not the same words, of course: the introduction is different and the Bailey Gospel Singers lack the boom-chicky-boom backing of Charles’s version, but the central melody is almost exactly the same. When the Bailey Gospel Singers sing “Keeps me up / Keeps me strong / Teach me right / When I doing wrong / Well, I’ve got a savior / Oh what a savior / yes I have,” the melody, and even the intonation, parallel Charles singing the equivalent lines: “She gimme money / when I’m in need / Yeah she’s a kind of / friend indeed / I’ve got a woman / way over town / who’s good to me.” + +True, some of the lyrical and rhythmic patterns of “I’ve Got a Savior” are older still. They come from a spiritual called “Ain’t That Good News,” dating from 1940, which rehearses all the things the singer will have in the Kingdom of Heaven—a harp, a robe, slippers (!), and, finally, a savior. The author of “I’ve Got a Savior” was, like all the artists discussed here, taking a great deal from a prior musical tradition. Nevertheless, Charles’s borrowing is particularly overt and direct. The term “rewording” is appropriate. So far as I can see, whether or not he also relied on a fifty-year-old hymn, Ray Charles appears to have taken both the melody and lyrical pattern of his most famous hit from a song that was made a mere three or four years earlier. + +Like many 78 rpm records, this one was sold without liner notes. The center of the record provides the only details. It gives the name of the track and the band and a single word under the song title, “Ward”—presumably the composer. “Ward” might be Clara Ward of the Ward Singers, a talented gospel singer and songwriter who became Aretha Franklin’s mentor and who had her own music publishing company. + +There is a particular reason to think that she might have written the song: Ray Charles clearly liked to adapt her music to secular ends. We know that he “reworked” Ward’s gospel classic “This Little Light of Mine” into “This Little Girl of Mine.” Ward reportedly was irritated by the practice. So far as we know, the copying of the music did not annoy her because she viewed it as theft, but because she viewed it as an offense against gospel music. + +_1 Charles is now starting to get criticism from some gospel music performers for secularizing gospel music and presenting it in usual R&B venues. Most adamant in her misgivings is Clara Ward who complains about “This Little Girl Of Mine” being a reworking of “This Little Light Of Mine” (which it is), as a slap against the gospel field.~{J. C. Marion, “Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years,” JammUpp 2 no. 32 (2004): 32, http://home.earthlink.net/~v1tiger/jammuppvol2.html. }~ + +This stage of Charles’s career is described, rightly, hy and sensual style that becomes his trademark—his own sound. That is true enough; there had been nothing quite like this before. Yet it was hardly original creation out of nothing. Both Charles himself and the musicological literature point out that “his own sound,” “his style,” is in reality a fusion of two prior genres—rhythm and blues and gospel. But looking at the actual songs that created soul as a genre shows us that the fusion goes far beyond merely a stylistic one. Charles makes some of his most famous songs by taking existing gospel classics and reworking or simply rewording them. “I’ve Got a Savior” becomes “I Got a Woman.” “This Little Light of Mine” becomes “This Little Girl of Mine.” + +The connection is striking: two very recent gospel songs, probably by the same author, from which Charles copies the melody, structure, pattern of verses, even most of the title—in each case substituting a beloved sensual woman for the beloved deity. Many others have noticed just how closely Charles based his songs on gospel tunes, although the prevalence of the story that “I Got a Woman” is derived from an early-twentieth-century hymn caused most to see only the second transposition, not the first.~{“If one can pinpoint a moment when gospel and blues began to merge into a secular version of gospel song, it was in 1954 when Ray Charles recorded ‘My Jesus Is All the World to Me,’ changing its text to ‘I Got A Woman.’ The following year, he changed Clara Ward’s ‘This Little Light of Mine’ to ‘This Little Girl of Mine.’ ” Stephens, “Soul,” 32.}~ Borrowing from a fifty-year-old hymn and changing it substantially in the process seems a little different from the repeated process of “search and replace” musical collage that Charles performed on the contemporary works of Clara Ward. + +If I am right, Charles’s “merger” of gospel and blues relied on a very direct process of transposition. The transposition was not just of themes: passion for woman substituted for passion for God. That is a familiar aspect of soul.~{Robert Lashley, “Why Ray Charles Matters,” Blogcritics Magazine, December 17, 2005, http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/12/17/032826.php: \\ But it was the staggering, nearly byzantine ambition that encompassed Charles’ musical mind which is the foundation for his art. You can hear it in his first imprint on the pop music world, 1955’s I Got A Woman. The shuffling big beat borrows from Louis Jordan’s big band fusion, the backbeat is 2/4 gospel. The arrangement is lucid, not quite jazz, not quite blues, definitely not rock and roll but something sophisticated altogether. The emotions are feral, but not quite the primitiveness of rock and roll. It is the sound of life, a place where there is an ever flowing river of cool. It, you might ask? Rhythm and Blues, Ray Charles’ invention. \\ A volcano bubbling under the surface, Ray spent the mid 50’s crafting timeless songs as if there were cars on an assembly[.] Start with the blasphemous fusion of Hallelujah I [L]ove Her So and This Little Girl of Mine, where Ray changes the words from loving god to loving a woman, yet, in the intensity of his performance, raises the question if he’s still loving the same thing. \\ The anonymous encyclopedists at Wikipedia agree: \\ Many of the most prominent soul artists, such as Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Wilson Pickett and Al Green, had roots in the church and gospel music and brought with them much of the vocal styles of artists such as Clara Ward and Julius Cheeks. Secular songwriters often appropriated gospel songs, such as the Pilgrim Travelers’ song “I’ve Got A New Home,” which Ray Charles turned into “Lonely Avenue,” or “Stand By Me,” which Ben E. King and Lieber and Stoller adapted from a well-known gospel song, or Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get A Witness,” which reworks traditional gospel catchphrases. In other cases secular musicians did the opposite, attaching phrases and titles from the gospel tradition to secular songs to create soul hits such as “Come See About Me” for the Supremes and “99½ Won’t Do” for Wilson Pickett. \\ “Urban Contemporary Gospel,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/urban_contemporary_gospel. }~ It is what allows it to draw so easily from gospel’s fieriness and yet coat the religion with a distinctly more worldly passion. Sex, sin, and syncopation—what more could one ask? But Charles’s genius was to take particular songs that had already proved themselves in the church and on the radio, and to grab large chunks of the melody and structure. He was not just copying themes, or merging genres, he was copying the melodies and words from recent songs. + +Was this mere musical plagiarism, then? Should we think less of Ray Charles’s genius because we find just how closely two of the canonical songs in the creation of soul were based on the work of his contemporaries? Hardly. “I Got a Woman” and “This Little Girl of Mine” are simply brilliant. Charles does in fact span the worlds of the nightclub at 3 a.m. on Sunday morning and the church later that day, of ecstatic testimony and good old-fashioned sexual infatuation. But the way he does so is a lot more like welding, or bricolage, than it is like designing out of nothing or creating anew while distantly tugged by mysterious musical forces called “themes” or “genres.” Charles takes bits that have been proven to work and combines them to make something new. When I tell engineers or software engineers this story, they nod. Of course that is how creation works. One does not reinvent the wheel, or the method of debugging, so why should one reinvent the hook, the riff, or the melody? And yet Charles’s creation does not have the degraded artistic quality that is associated with “mere” cut-and-paste or collage techniques. The combination is greater than the sum of its parts. If Charles’s songs do not fit our model of innovative artistic creativity, perhaps we need to revise the model—at least for music—rather than devaluing his work. + +When I began this study, it seemed to me that the greatest challenge to copyright law in dealing with music was preventing rights from “creeping,” expanding from coverage of a single song or melody to cover essential elements of genre, style, and theme. In effect, we needed to apply the Jefferson Warning to music, to defeat the constant tendency to confuse intellectual property with real property, and to reject the attempts to make the right holder’s control total. My assumption was that all we needed to do was to keep open the “common space” of genre and style, and let new artists create their new compositions out of the material in that commons and gain protection over them. In many ways, Charles’s work lies at the very core of the stuff copyright wishes to promote. It is not merely innovative and expressive itself, it also helped form a whole new genre in which other artists could express themselves. But to create this work, Charles needed to make use of a lot more than just genres and styles created by others. He needed their actual songs. If the reactions of Clara Ward and Big Bill Broonzy are anything to go by, they would not have given him permission. To them, soul was a stylistic violation, a mingling of the sacred with the profane. If given a copyright veto over his work, and a culture that accepts its use, Ward might well have exercised it. Like the disapproving heirs that Macaulay talked about, she could have denied us a vital part of the cultural record. Control has a price. + +Did Ray Charles commit copyright infringement? Perhaps. We would have to find if the songs are substantially similar, once we had excluded standard forms, public domain elements, and so on. I would say that they are substantially similar, but was the material used copyright-protected expression? + +The Copyright Office database shows no entry for “I’ve Got a Savior.” This is not conclusive, but it seems to indicate that no copyright was ever registered in the work. In fact, it is quite possible that the song was first written without a copyright notice. Nowadays that omission would be irrelevant. Works are copyrighted as soon as they are fixed in material form, regardless of whether any copyright notice is attached. In 1951, however, a notice was required when the work was published, and if one was not put on the work, it passed immediately into the public domain. However, later legislation decreed that the relevant publication was not of the record, but of the notation. If the record were pressed and sold without a copyright notice, the error could be corrected. If a lead sheet or a sheet music version of “I’ve Got a Savior” had been published without notice or registration, it would enter the public domain. It is possible that this happened. Intellectual property rights simply played a lesser role in the 1950s music business than they do today, both for better and for worse. Large areas of creativity operated as copyright-free zones. Even where copyrights were properly registered, permission fees were not demanded for tiny samples. While bootlegged recordings or direct note-for-note copies might well draw legal action, borrowing and transformation were apparently viewed as a normal part of the creative process. In some cases, artists simply did not use copyright. They made money from performances. Their records might receive some kind of protection from state law. These protections sufficed. + +But the lack of protection also had a less attractive and more racially skewed side. African-American artists were less likely to have the resources and knowledge necessary to navigate the system of copyright. For both black and white artists, whatever rights there were moved quickly away from the actual creators toward the agents, record companies, and distributors. They still do. But African-American musicians got an even worse deal than their white counterparts. True, the copyright system was only an infinitesimal part of that process. A much larger part was the economic consequences of segregation and racial apartheid. But copyright was one of the many levers of power that were more easily pulled by white hands. This is an important point because the need to end that palpable racial injustice is sometimes used to justify every aspect of our current highly legalized musical culture. About that conclusion, I am less convinced. + +In any event, it is possible that the musical composition for “I’ve Got a Savior” went immediately into the public domain. If that were the case, Ray Charles could draw on it, could change it, could refine it without permission or fee. Certainly there is no mention of seeking permission or paying fees in any of the histories of “I Got a Woman.” Indeed, the only question of rectitude Charles was focused on was the stylistic one. Was it appropriate to mix gospel and R&B, devotional music and secular desire? Charles and Richard seemed to see the process of rewording and adapting as just a standard part of the musician’s creative process. The only question was whether these two styles were aesthetically or morally suited, not whether the borrowing itself was illegal or unethical. So, whether they drew on a hymn that had fallen into the public domain after the expiration of its copyright term, or a gospel song for which copyright had never been sought, or whether they simply took a copyrighted song and did to it something that no one at the time thought was legally inappropriate, Renald Richard and Ray Charles were able to create “I Got a Woman” and play a significant role in founding a new musical genre—soul. + +One thing is clear. Much of what Charles and Richard did in creating their song would be illegal today. Copyright terms are longer. Copyright protection itself is automatic. Copyright policing is much more aggressive. The musical culture has changed into one in which every fragment must be licensed and paid for. The combination is fatal to the particular pattern of borrowing that created these seminal songs of soul. + +That should give us pause. I return to the ideas of the Jefferson Warning from Chapter 2 and the Sony Axiom from Chapter 4. Copyright is not an end in itself. It has a goal: to promote the progress of cultural and scientific creativity. That goal requires rights that are less than absolute. As Jessica Litman points out, building in the intellectual space is different from building in the physical space. We do not normally dismantle old houses to make new ones. This point is not confined to music. Earlier I quoted Northrop Frye: “Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels. All of this was much clearer before the assimilation of literature to private enterprise.”~{Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 96–97.}~ The question is, how big are the holes we need to leave in the private rights? How large a commons do we need to offer to future creators? + +Ray Charles’s creation of “I Got a Woman” is only one case. By itself, it proves nothing. Yet, if we find that the seminal, genre-creating artworks of yesteryear would be illegal under the law and culture of today, we have to ask ourselves “is this really what we want?” What will the music of the future look like if the Clara Wards and Will Lamartine Thompsons of today can simply refuse to license on aesthetic grounds or demand payment for every tiny fragment? Tracing the line further back, it is fascinating to wonder whether gospel, blues, and jazz would have developed if musical motifs had been jealously guarded as private property rather than developed as a kind of melodic and rhythmic commons. Like most counterfactuals, that one has no clear answer, but there is substantial cause for skepticism. If copyright is supposed to be promoting innovation and development in culture, is it doing its job? + +2~ An Industry of Gold Diggers + +Fifty years after “I Got a Woman” was written, Kanye West released “Gold Digger” on the album Late Registration. Mr. West is an interesting figure in rap. At first he was shunned because his clean-cut looks and preppy clothing ran against the gangster image that often dominates the music. It is just hard imagining Mr. West delivering a line like Rakim’s “I used to be a stick-up kid, so I think of all the devious things I did” with a straight face. (Still less “Stop smiling, ain’t nothin’ funny, nothing moves but the money.”) Perhaps partly as a result, his lyrics are oddly bipolar in their views about exaggerated masculinity and the misogyny that sometimes accompanies it. + +For the song, Mr. West recruited Jamie Foxx, who had played Ray Charles in the movie Ray. Showing an impressive expanse of oiled chest, Mr. Foxx imitates Charles’s style and the melody of “I Got a Woman” to provide the lyrical chorus to “Gold Digger.” “I Got a Woman” anchors West’s song. It provides its melodic hook. It breaks up the rap with a burst of musical nostalgia. But Mr. West’s gold digger is very different from Ray Charles’s woman friend. This woman does not give money when the singer is in need. She takes his money when he is in need and is a “triflin’ friend indeed.” Mr. Charles had a friend who gave him tender morning loving. Jamie Foxx sings of a mercenary gold digger who digs on him. When Mr. West adds the rap verses to the song, we get a perfect caricature of such a person, uninterested in any man who is broke, dragging around four kids and an entourage, insisting all of them be entertained at her boyfriend’s expense, and wielding unfounded paternity suits like a proprietary business method. Mr. West’s repeated disclaimer “I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger” is unconvincing, because both the words of the introduction and the implicit message of the rap tell us she is. We even get the absurd image of a man who is playing on the winning side in the Super Bowl but driving a Hyundai, so financially demanding is his girlfriend. At several points the song descends into ludicrous—and perhaps conscious—self-mockery, as it explores the concerns of the rich African-American celebrity male. My favorite line is “If you ain’t no punk, holler ‘We want prenup!!’ ” The audience obliges. It sounds like assertiveness training for show business millionaires. + +It would be hard to get a feminist role model out of either “I Got a Woman” or “Gold Digger.” One offers the feminine virtues of modesty and fidelity, but magically combines them with wantonness where the singer is concerned and an open checkbook. The other is a parody of the self-assertive economic actor, as rapacious as any multinational, who uses her sexuality for profit. Put them together and you have bookends—male fantasy and male nightmare. Was that Mr. West’s point? Perhaps. The song itself takes several sly turns. The gold digger dogging Mr. West is used as part of a homily to black women on how to treat their (noncelebrity) black men. They should stick with their man because his ambition is going to take him from mopping floors to the fryers, from a Datsun to a Benz. It seems that Mr. West is getting a little preachy, while slamming the actual social mobility available to black men. Moving from floor cleaning to frying chicken is not actually going to provide a Mercedes. But he immediately undercuts that tone twice, once by acknowledging the boyfriend’s likely infidelity and again by saying that even if the black woman follows his homily, “once you get on, he leave yo’ ass for a white girl.” + +Mr. West has a tendency to make sudden turns like this in his lyrics—ironically upsetting the theme he has just set up. So it is not hard to imagine that he deliberately used a fragment of Charles’s song, not just because it sounded good but to contrast the image of the fantasy woman from Charles’s 1950s soul, who is faithful, sensual, and always willing to offer a loan, with an image from today’s rap—sexually predatory and emasculating women who are uninterested in men except as a source of money. Even the retro cover of the single, with its 1950s-style pinup drawing of a white model, seems to draw the connection. Did he use Charles’s song precisely because of these clashing cultural snapshots? Perhaps, or perhaps he just liked the tune. In any event, the contrast is striking. When it was released, Charles’s song was seen as a sacrilegious depiction of sensuality and the woman was decried as a harlot. Compared to the woman in Mr. West’s song, she sounds like a Girl Scout. It is also a little depressing. Ray Charles was neither an egalitarian metrosexual nor a Prince Charming where women were concerned—anything but. But as I said before, you do get a sense that he liked women—however unrealistic or two-dimensional their portrayal. It is hard to get that sense from “Gold Digger.” + +Was Mr. West legally required to ask permission—and pay, if necessary—to use a fragment of “I Got a Woman” for his chorus? The longest single piece of borrowing occurs in the introduction: twenty-six words and their accompanying music. “She takes my money, when I’m in need, oh she’s a triflin’ friend indeed. Oh she’s a gold digger, way over town, who digs on me.” As I pointed out, the lyrics from Charles’s song present a very different story. “She gimme money / when I’m in need / Yeah she’s a kind of / friend indeed / I’ve got a woman / way over town / who’s good to me.” But even if the message is the opposite, the musical borrowing is direct. It is also extensive. During Mr. West’s rap, the entire background melody is a loop of Jamie Foxx singing the Ray Charles-inspired melody in the background. During the song, Mr. Foxx returns to words that are closer to Charles’s original: “She gimme money, when I’m in need,” a refrain that is conspicuously at odds with the woman being described by Mr. West. That eight-bar loop of a Ray Charles melody runs throughout Kanye West’s song. + +Mr. West is very successful, so the fragment of the song was “cleared”—payment was made to Charles’s estate. It is fascinating to think of what might have happened if Charles’s heirs had refused. After all, one could see West’s song as a crude desecration of Charles’s earlier work, rather than a good-humored homage. Since this is not a “cover version” of the song—one which does not change its nature and thus operates under the statutory licensing scheme—Charles’s heirs would have the right to refuse a licensing request. Unlike Clara Ward, it is clear that Charles’s heirs have the legal power to say no, to prevent reuse of which they disapprove. + +Was West legally required to license? Would all this amount to a copyright violation? It is worth running through the analysis because it gives a beautiful snapshot of the rules with which current law surrounds musical creation. + +Today, a song is generally covered by at least two copyrights. One covers the musical composition—the sheet music and the lyrics—and the other the particular sound recording of that composition. Just as there are two kinds of copyrights, so there are at least two kinds of borrowings that copyright might be concerned with. First, one musical composition might infringe another. Thus, for example, a court found that George Harrison “subconsciously” based his song “My Sweet Lord” on the melody of “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons. + +How much does it take to infringe? That is a difficult question. The law’s standard is “substantial similarity,” but not every kind of similarity counts. Minimal or de minimis copying of tiny fragments is ignored. Certain styles or forms have become standards; for example, the basic chord structure of the twelve-bar blues or the habit of introducing instruments one at a time, from quietest to loudest. There are only so many notes—and so many ways to rearrange them; inevitably any song will be similar to some other. Yet that cannot mean that all songs infringe copyright. Finally, even where there is substantial similarity of a kind that copyright is concerned with, the second artist may claim “fair use”—for parody or criticism, say. Copyright law, in other words, has tried to solve the problem with which I began the chapter. Because much of musical creativity is organic and collective and additive, because it does use prior musical expression, some copyright decisions have tried to carve out a realm of freedom for that creativity, using doctrines with names such as scènes à faire, merger, and fair use. This is yet another example of judges trying to achieve the balance that this book is all about—between the realm of the protected and the public domain—recognizing that it is the balance, not the property side alone, that allows for new creativity. + +The second type of potential infringement comes when someone uses a fragment of the earlier recording as part of the later one, actually copying a portion of the recording itself and using it in a new song. One might imagine the same rules would be applied—de minimis copying irrelevant, certain standard forms unprotected, and so on. And one would be wrong. In a case called Bridgeport Music, which I will discuss in a moment, the Court of Appeals ruled that taking even two notes of a musical recording counts as potentially actionable copying. Where recordings are concerned, in other words, there is almost no class of copying so minimal that the law would ignore it. This is a terrible decision, at least in my opinion, likely to be rejected by other Circuits and perhaps even eventually by the Supreme Court. But for the moment, it is a case that samplers have to deal with. + +How does Kanye West fare under these rules? He may sample from the actual recording of Mr. Charles’s song. It is hard to tell. He certainly copies portions of the melody. That means we have to look at the copyright in the musical composition—the words and the music of “I Got a Woman.” For a copyright infringement, one needs a valid copyright and evidence of copying, the amount copied needs to be more than an insignificant fragment, substantial similarity is required, and the similarity has to be between the new work and the elements of the original that are actually protected by copyright. Elements taken from the public domain, standard introductions, musical clichés, and so forth, do not get included in the calculation of similarity. Finally, the copier can claim “fair use”—that his borrowing is legally privileged because it is commentary, criticism, parody, and so on. + +Does Charles, or his record company, have a valid copyright in the musical composition? One huge problem in copyright law is that it is remarkably hard to find this out. Even with the best will in the world, it is hard for an artist, musician, or teacher to know what is covered by copyright and what is not. Nowadays, all works are copyrighted as soon as they are fixed, but at the time “I Got a Woman” was written one had to include a copyright notice or the song went immediately into the public domain. The Copyright Office database shows no copyright over the words and music of “I Got a Woman.” There are copyrights over a variety of recordings of the song. If Mr. West is using a fragment of the recording, these would affect him. But the melody? It is possible that the underlying musical composition is in the public domain. Finding out whether it is or is not would probably cost one a lot of money. + +Suppose that Mr. Charles has complied with all the formalities. The words and music were published with a copyright notice. A copyright registration was filed and renewed. Does Mr. West infringe this copyright? That is where the discovery of the Bailey Gospel Singers recording is potentially so important. Charles only gets a copyright in his original creation. Those elements taken from the public domain (if “I’ve Got a Savior” was indeed in the public domain) or from other copyrighted songs do not count. The irony here is that the elements that Kanye West borrows from Ray Charles are almost exactly the same ones Ray Charles borrows from the Bailey Gospel Singers. “I’ve got a savior, Oh what a savior” becomes “I got a woman, way over town” becomes “There’s a Gold Digger, way over town.” And of course, the music behind those words is even more similar. When The Legendary K.O. reached for Kanye West’s song in order to criticize Mr. Bush, they found themselves sampling Jamie Foxx, who was copying Ray Charles, who was copying the Bailey Gospel Singers, who themselves may have borrowed their theme from an older spiritual. + +2~ George Bush Doesn’t Care . . . + +poem{ + +Five damn days, five long days +And at the end of the fifth he walking in like “Hey!” +Chilling on his vacation, sitting patiently +Them black folks gotta hope, gotta wait and see +If FEMA really comes through in an emergency +But nobody seem to have a sense of urgency +Now the mayor’s been reduced to crying +I guess Bush said, “N———’s been used to dying!” +He said, “I know it looks bad, just have to wait” +Forgetting folks was too broke to evacuate +N———’s starving and they dying of thirst +I bet he had to go and check on them refineries first +Making a killing off the price of gas +He would have been up in Connecticut twice as fast . . . +After all that we’ve been through nothing’s changed +You can call Red Cross but the fact remains that . . . +George Bush ain’t a gold digger, +but he ain’t f——ing with no broke n———s + +}poem + +“George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People,” The Legendary K.O. + +The song “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” was an immediate sensation. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded it. Within days two different video versions had been made, one by Franklin Lopez and another by a filmmaker called “The Black Lantern.” Both synchronized the lyrics of the song with news clips of the disaster and unsympathetic footage of President Bush apparently ignoring what was going on. The effect was both hilarious and tragic. The videos were even more popular than the song alone. The blogosphere was fascinated—entries were posted, e-mails circulated to friends with the usual “you have to see this!” taglines. In fact, the song was so popular that it received the ultimate recognition of an Internet fad: the New York Times wrote a story on it, setting the practice in historical context. + +_1 In the 18th century, songwriters responded to current events by writing new lyrics to existing melodies. “Benjamin Franklin used to write broadside ballads every time a disaster struck,” said Elijah Wald, a music historian, and sell the printed lyrics in the street that afternoon. This tradition of responding culturally to terrible events had almost been forgotten, Mr. Wald said, but in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it may be making a comeback, with the obvious difference that, where Franklin would have sold a few song sheets to his fellow Philadelphians, the Internet allows artists today to reach the whole world.~{John Leland, “Art Born of Outrage in the Internet Age,” New York Times (September 25, 2005), D3.}~ + +Mr. Nickerson’s and Mr. Randle’s song started with Kanye West’s words—taken from the fundraiser with Mike Myers. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” From there it launched into the song. The background melody comes almost entirely from a looped, or infinitely repeated, version of the hook that Kanye West and Jamie Foxx had in turn taken from Ray Charles: “She gimme money, when I’m in need. I gotta leave.” Against that background, The Legendary K.O. provide their profane and angry commentary, part of which is excerpted above, with a chorus of “George Bush don’t like black people,” in case anyone had missed the point. + +The videos differ in the issues they stress. Franklin Lopez’s movie is, rather pointedly given its theme, just black and white. He uses ornate captions pages, reminiscent of silent film from the 1920s, to make political points against the background of the song and the news footage. As the captions read “Katrina Rapidly Approaches,” we cut to a shot of the hurricane. “The President Ponders on What to Do.” We have a shot of Mr. Bush playing golf. “I Think I’ll Ride This One Out.” Mr. Bush is shown relaxing on a golf cart, juxtaposed against pictures of African-Americans wading through the floods. The captions add, as an afterthought, “And Keep Dealing with the Brown People.” (Pictures of soldiers shooting.) When FEMA’s Michael Brown is shown—at the moment when Bush said “Brownie, you are doing a hell of a job”—the captions comment mockingly, “The Horse Judge to the Rescue.” + +Mr. Lopez’s video obviously tries to use The Legendary K.O.’s song to make larger political arguments about the country. For example, it asserts that “in 2004 Bush diverted most of the funds for the levees to the war in Iraq.” Scenes reminiscent of a Michael Moore documentary are shown. There are pictures of the Iraq war, Halliburton signs, and shots of the president with a member of the Saudi royal family. The captions accuse the president of showing insensitivity and disdain to racial minorities. One summarizes the general theme: “Since he was elected president, George Bush’s policies have been less than kind toward Africans and Hispanics.” Issues ranging from the response to the Darfur massacres, No Child Left Behind, and the attempted privatization of Social Security also make their appearance. The video concludes by giving the donation information for the Red Cross and saying that we are “onto” Bush. A picture of a Klansman removing his hood is shown, with the image manipulated so that the face revealed is Mr. Bush’s. + +The Black Lantern’s video is just as angry, and it uses some of the same footage, but the themes it picks up are different. It starts with a logo that parodies the FBI copyright warning shown at the beginning of movies: “WARNING: Artist supports filesharing. Please distribute freely.” That dissolves into a picture of Kanye West and Mike Myers. West is speaking, somewhat awkwardly as he goes “off script,” and at first Mr. Myers is nodding, though he starts to look increasingly worried. West says, “I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family it says they are looting. You see a white family, it says they are looking for food.” Finally, West says “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” and the camera catches Myers’s mute, appalled reaction. Then the song begins. The film cuts repeatedly between a music video of Mr. Foxx as he sang the lines for “Gold Digger” and the news coverage of the debacle in New Orleans. At one point the music pauses and a news anchor says, “You simply get chills when you look at these people. They are so poor. And so black.” The song resumes. Here the message is simpler. The media coverage is biased and governmental attention slowed because of negative racial stereotypes and lack of concern about black people. + +Some readers will find that this song and these videos capture their own political perspectives perfectly. They will love the bitterly ironic and obscene outrage at the government’s failure, the double standards of the press, and the disproportionate and callously disregarded impact on the poor and black. Others will find both song and films to be stupid, insulting, and reductionist—an attempt to find racial prejudice in a situation that, at worst, was an example of good old-fashioned governmental incompetence. Still others will find the language just too off-putting to even think about the message. Whatever your feelings about the content, I urge you to set them aside for a moment. For better or worse, Mr. Bush just happened to be president at the moment when the Internet was coming into its own as a method of distributing digitally remixed political commentary, which itself has recently become something that amateurs can do for pennies rather than an expensive activity reserved to professionals. The point is that whatever rules we apply to deal with “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” will also apply to the next video that alleges corruption in a Democratic administration or that attacks the sacred cows of the left rather than the right. How should we think about this kind of activity, this taking the songs and films and photos of others and remixing them to express political, satirical, parodic, or simply funny points of view? + +2~ Sampling + +Let us begin with the music. Unlike the other songs I have discussed here, with the possible exception of Mr. West’s, “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” makes use of digital samples of the work of others. In other words, this is not merely about copying the tune or the lyrics. The reason that Mr. Nickerson and Mr. Randle could make and distribute this song so fast (and so cheaply) is that they took fragments from the recording of “Gold Digger” and looped them to form the background to their own rap. That was also part of the reason for the positive public reaction. Kanye West (and Ray Charles and Clara Ward) are very talented musicians. West’s song was already all over the airwaves. The Legendary K.O. capitalized on that, just as Benjamin Franklin capitalized on the familiarity of the songs he reworded. But where Franklin could only take the tune, The Legendary K.O. could take the actual ones and zeros of the digital sound file. + +As I mentioned earlier, there are two types of copyright protection over music. There is the copyright over the musical composition and, a much more recent phenomenon, the copyright over the actual recording. This song potentially infringes both of them. + +Readers who came of age in the 1980s might remember the music of Public Enemy and N.W.A.—a dense wall of sound on which rap lyrics were overlaid. That wall of sound was in fact made up of samples, sometimes hundreds of tiny samples in a single track. Rap and hip-hop musicians proceeded under the assumption that taking a fragment of someone else’s recording was as acceptable legally (and aesthetically) as a jazz musician quoting a fragment of another tune during a solo. In both cases, the use of “quotation” is a defining part of the genre, a harmless or even complimentary homage. Or so they thought. + +In a 1991 case called Grand Upright, that idea was squashed.~{Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records, Inc., 780 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1991).}~ The rap artist Biz Markie had extensively sampled Gilbert O’Sullivan’s song “Alone Again (Naturally)” for his own song “Alone Again.” The court could have applied the rules described earlier in this chapter, decided whether or not this was a large enough usage to make the second song substantially similar to the original, discussed whether or not it counted as a fair use, whether Markie’s use was transformative or parodic, whether it was going to have a negative impact on the market for the original, weighed the issues, and ruled either way. In doing so, there would have been some nice points to discuss about whether or not the breadth of fair use depends in part on the practice in the relevant artistic community, how to understand parodic reference, or the relevant markets for the work. (Biz Markie’s lawyers had asked for permission to use the sample, but the Supreme Court has made clear that seeking permission does not weigh against a defense of fair use.) There were also some tricky issues about the breadth of legal rights over recordings—the right was of relatively recent creation and had some interesting limitations. Underlying it all was a more fundamental question: how do we interpret the rules of copyright so as to encourage musical creativity? After all, as this chapter has shown, borrowing and reference are a fundamental part of musical practice. We ought to think twice before concluding they are illegal. Are we to criminalize jazz? Condemn Charles Ives? And if not, what is the carefully crafted line we draw that allows some of those uses but condemns this one? + +Judge Duffy, however, was uninterested in any of these subtleties. + +_1 “Thou shalt not steal” has been an admonition followed since the dawn of civilization. Unfortunately, in the modern world of business this admonition is not always followed. Indeed, the defendants in this action for copyright infringement would have this court believe that stealing is rampant in the music business and, for that reason, their conduct here should be excused. The conduct of the defendants herein, however, violates not only the Seventh Commandment, but also the copyright laws of this country.~{Ibid., 183.}~ + +If this were a law school exam, it would get a “D.” (Maybe a C given grade inflation.) Duffy makes all of the errors Jefferson warned us against. Tangible property is the same as intellectual property. Songs are the same as sheep and the same rules can apply to both. Theft is theft. The prior injunctions of the framers and the courts notwithstanding, we do not need to think carefully about the precise boundaries of intellectual property rights or worry that interpreting them too broadly is as bad as making them too narrow. So far as Judge Duffy is concerned, the tablets on Mount Sinai were inscribed with an absolute injunction against digital sampling. (The font must have been small.) But to say all this is merely to scratch the surface of how regrettable a decision it is. In the narrowest and most formalistic legal terms it is also very poor. + +Judge Duffy gives not a single citation to the provisions of the Copyright Act. He ignores issues of de minimis copying, substantial similarity, fair use, and the differences between the right over the recording and that over the composition. In fact, he quotes the Bible more, and more accurately, than he does Title 17 of the U.S. Code—the Copyright Act. The one mention he makes of actual copyright law is at the end of the opinion, when he refers the case for criminal prosecution! When I first read this case, I seriously wondered for a moment if it were a crude parody of a legal opinion written by someone who had never been to law school. + +Is the result in this case wrong? Personally, I do not think so. It is possible, even probable, that a conscientious judge who bothered to read the law could go through a careful analysis and find that Markie’s use went beyond de minimis copying, that it was neither creative, parodic, nor short enough to count as a fair use. The judge might have presumed a negative effect on the market for Mr. O’Sullivan’s song and thus could have ruled that it was a copyright infringement. In doing so, the judge would have to give some guidance to future courts about digital sampling. The most likely guidance would be “the sample here is so extensive and so unchanged, that this case says little about the wider musical practice of sampling.” Judge Duffy’s opinion was poor not because of the result he reached, but because he reached it in an overly broad and judicially inappropriate way that became a guideline for future cultural creation. Worse still, the industry listened to him. + +In excellent books on this issue, Kembrew McLeod and Siva Vaidhyanathan each argue that Grand Upright was a disaster for rap music.~{Kembrew McLeod, Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership and Intellectual Property Law (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), and Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York: New York University Press, 2001).}~ The industry’s practice turned full circle almost overnight. Now every sample, no matter how tiny, had to be “cleared”—licensed from the owners of the recording. As they tell the story, this “legal” change caused an aesthetic change. The number of samples in an average song dropped precipitously. The engaging complexity of the Public Enemy “wall of sound” gave way to the simplistic thumping beat and unimaginative synthesizer lines of modern rap. I must admit to sharing McLeod’s and Vaidhyanathan’s musical prejudices. The causal claim is harder to substantiate, but industry lawyers and musicians both agree that changes in the industry’s understanding of the law had a major role in transforming the practice of sampling. + +If we disregard the Jefferson Warning and assume the recording artist has absolute property rights over his work, then we could ignore the idea that forcing people to pay for stuff they take might have a negative effect on future art and culture. Theft is theft. I might be able to make art much more easily if I did not have to pay for the paint and canvas, but that is not commonly held to excuse shoplifting from art stores. But if we take the Jefferson Warning seriously, then intellectual property’s job is to balance the need to provide incentives for production and distribution with the need to leave future creators free to build upon the past. Reasonable minds will differ on where this line is to be drawn, but the process of drawing it is very different from the process Judge Duffy had in mind. + +For fifteen years, critics of the decision waited for an appeals court to fix the law in this area. When the case of Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films came up, they thought they had what they wanted. The band NWA had used a tiny fragment (less than two seconds) consisting of three notes of a guitar solo from the George Clinton song “Get Off Your Ass and Jam.” The fragment was an arpeggiated chord, which simply means that you strike the notes of the chord individually and in sequence. It was, in fact, a pretty standard “deedly” sound, familiar from many guitar solos. NWA then heavily distorted this fragment and looped it so that it played in the background of one part of the song—so faintly that it is almost impossible to hear and completely impossible to recognize. (With the distortion it sounds like a very faint and distant police siren.) A company called Bridgeport Music owned the sound recording copyright over the Clinton song. They sued. NWA’s response was predictable—this was classic de minimis copying, which the law did not touch. One did not even have to get to the issue of fair use (though this surely would be one). + +The appeals court did not waste any time attempting to dignify Judge Duffy’s decision in Grand Upright. + +_1 Although Grand Upright applied a bright-line test in a sampling case, we have not cited it as precedent for several reasons. First, it is a district court opinion and as such has no binding precedential value. Second, although it appears to have involved claims for both sound recording and musical composition copyright infringement, the trial judge does not distinguish which he is talking about in his ruling, and appears to be addressing primarily the musical composition copyright. Third, and perhaps most important, there is no analysis set forth to indicate how the judge arrived at his ruling, which has resulted in the case being criticized by commentators.~{Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films, 410 F.3d 792, 804n16 (6th Cir. 2005).}~ + +They did like one thing about the decision, however: its bright-line rule, “Thou Shalt Not Steal.” (Lawyers use the term “bright-line rule” to refer to a rule that is very easy to apply to the facts. A 55 mph speed limit is a bright-line rule.) The Bridgeport court rejected the idea that sound recording copyrights and music composition copyrights should be analyzed in the same way. They wanted to set a clear rule defining how much of a sound recording one could use without permission. How much? Nothing. To be precise, the court suggests in a footnote that taking a single note might be acceptable since the copyright protection only covers a “series.” Anything more, however, is clearly off limits. + +Though they come to a conclusion that, if anything, is more stringent than Judge Duffy’s, they do so very differently. In their words, “Get a license or do not sample.” Effectively, the court concludes that the sound recording copyright is different enough from the composition copyright that a court could reasonably conclude that a different analysis is required. The judges are fully aware that copyright must balance encouraging current creators and leaving raw material to future creators—the Jefferson Warning holds no novelty for them. But they conclude that a clear “one-note rule” will do, because if the costs of licenses are too high, samplers can simply recreate the riff themselves, and this will tend to keep prices reasonable. + +This is an interesting idea. Why does this not happen more often? Why do samplers not simply recreate James Brown’s drumbeat from “Funky Drummer,” or George Clinton’s solo from “Get Off Your Ass and Jam”? Musicians offer lots of different answers. They do not understand the distinction the court is drawing, so the market never develops. The samples themselves cannot be replicated, because the music has all kinds of overtones from the historical equipment used and even the methods of recording. Fundamentally, though, the answer seems to be one of authenticity, ironically enough. The original beats have a totemic significance—like the great standard chord sequences in jazz. One cannot substitute replicas for James Brown’s funkiness. It just would not be the same. As Walter Benjamin pointed out long ago in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” cheap copying actually increases the demand for authenticity.~{Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 217–42.}~ The court’s economic analysis—which imagines a world of fungible beats produced for music as a consumer good—deals poorly with such motivations. + +When the court first released its decision, it was greeted with concern even by recording industry representatives who might have been expected to favor it, because it appeared to do away with not only the de minimis limitation on copyright (some portions are just too small to count as “copying”) but the fair use provisions as well. The court took the very unusual step of rehearing the case and amending the opinion, changing it in a number of places and adding a paragraph that stated that when the case went back to the district court, the judge there was free to consider the fair use defense. Of course, if one takes this seriously—and, for the constitutional reasons given in Chapter 5, I agree that the court has no power to write fair use out of the statute—it undermines the supposedly clear rule. If the factors of fair use are seriously applied, how can a three-note excerpt ever fail to be fair use? And if we always have to do a conventional fair use analysis, then the apparent clarity of the one-note rule is an illusion. + +The Bridgeport decision is a bad one, I believe. Among other things, it fails to take seriously the constitutional limitations on copyright—including the originality requirement and the First Amendment. (A three-note sample is not original enough to be protected under copyright law, in my view. There are also more speech-related issues in sampling than the court seems to realize.) The competitive licensing market the court imagines seems more like economic fantasy than reality. I think the ruling sets unnecessary barriers on musical creation and ends up with a rule that is just as blurry as the one it criticizes. I think the court’s reading of the statute and legislative history is wrong—though I have not bored you with the full details of that argument. But I want to be clear that it is a very different kind of bad decision from Judge Duffy’s. + +The court in Bridgeport does see copyright as a balance. It does understand the need for future creators to build on the past, but it also shows that a simple willingness to look upon intellectual property protections in a utilitarian way does not solve all problems. It certainly does not proceed from Jefferson’s presumption that intellectual property protections should be interpreted narrowly. Though it claims to have a “literal” reading of the statute, the real driving force in the analysis is an unconsummated desire for bright-line rules and a belief that the market will solve these problems by itself. The court also suggests that “[i]f this is not what Congress intended or is not what they would intend now, it is easy enough for the record industry, as they have done in the past, to go back to Congress for a clarification or change in the law.” Note the assumption that “the record industry” is the most reliable guide to Congress’s intentions or that it is the only entity affected by such a rule. This is truly the image of copyright law as a contract among affected industries. Of course, digital artists such as The Legendary K.O. hardly fit within such a model. + +Under the rule in Bridgeport—“Get a license or do not sample”—Mr. Randle and Mr. Nickerson appear to be breaking the law. They did not get a license and they most definitely did sample. What about fair use? Under fair use, copyright allows a very specific (and possibly lengthy) use of another’s material when the purpose is parody of that prior work itself. The Supreme Court gave parody a unique status in the Acuff-Rose case. The (extremely profane) rap group 2 Live Crew had asked for permission to produce a version of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” But where Orbison sang about the pretty woman walking down the street whom he would like to meet, 2 Live Crew wrote about a “big hairy woman” (“with hair that ain’t legit, ’cause you look like Cousin It”). They sang about a “bald headed” woman with a “teeny weeny afro.” They sang about group sex with both women. Finally, they told a “two timin’ woman,” “now I know the baby ain’t mine.” Justice Souter showed the characteristic sangfroid of a Supreme Court justice faced with raunchy rap music. + +_1 While we might not assign a high rank to the parodic element here, we think it fair to say that 2 Live Crew’s song reasonably could be perceived as commenting on the original or criticizing it, to some degree. 2 Live Crew juxtaposes the romantic musings of a man whose fantasy comes true, with degrading taunts, a bawdy demand for sex, and a sigh of relief from paternal responsibility. The later words can be taken as a comment on the naiveté of the original of an earlier day, as a rejection of its sentiment that ignores the ugliness of street life and the debasement that it signifies. It is this joinder of reference and ridicule that marks off the author’s choice of parody from the other types of comment and criticism that traditionally have had a claim to fair use protection as transformative works.~{Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 583 (1994).}~ [emphasis added] + +Truly, the law can confront and master all cultural forms. The heart of parody as the Supreme Court described it is that one is taking aim at the original. Because 2 Live Crew could be seen as directing their song at Orbison’s original, rather than using Orbison’s song to make some other political or social point, the court was willing to give it the favorable consideration that parody receives as a fair use. + +Does “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” fit that model? The Legendary K.O. were not “taking aim” at “Gold Digger.” True, they quoted West’s actual words from the television broadcast (also copyrighted). They even used them as their title. But they were not taking aim at his song. (Ironically, Kanye West has a better claim that he was taking aim at Ray Charles’s picture of womanhood, in just the way described in the 2 Live Crew case.) Rather, The Legendary K.O. were using the sample of the song as the backing to an entirely different rap that expressed, in familiar and popular musical form, a more expansive version of his condemnation of both press and president. That does not end the inquiry. Parody is not the only form of protected criticism or commentary. But it makes it much harder for them to succeed, particularly in light of the hostility toward sampling betrayed by both Grand Upright and Bridgeport. + +The videos made by The Black Lantern and Franklin Lopez present an even more complex set of questions. On top of the music copyright issues, we also have fair use claims for the extensive news footage and footage of Mr. Foxx. The Black Lantern also used some fragments of a popular video by JibJab, which had a cartoon Bush and Kerry singing dueling parodied versions of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land.” When JibJab’s video first came out, the Guthrie estate claimed copyright infringement over the song. Assisted by a number of public interest legal groups, JibJab claimed fair use. (It eventually came out that the copyright over the song was no longer valid.) What did Jib- Jab do when The Black Lantern sampled them in their turn? In a move that both wins the prize for hypocrisy and serves to sum up the intersection of law and culture I have been describing, they sent him a cease and desist letter. The video was taken down for a week and he was eventually forced to remove the segment of their video from his work. Fair use for me, but not for thee. + +2~ Conclusion + +The Legendary K.O. samples Kanye West, who uses a fragment from Ray Charles, who may have taken material from Will Lamartine Thompson or, more likely, from Clara Ward (who herself borrowed from a gospel standard). The chain of borrowing I describe here has one end in the hymns and spirituals of the early 1900s and the other in the twenty-first century’s chaotic stew of digital sampling, remix, and mashup. Along the way, we have the synthesis of old and the invention of new musical genres—often against the wishes of those whose work is serving as the raw material. One way of viewing this story is that each of these musicians (except for some imaginary original artist, the musical source of the Nile) is a plagiarist and a pirate. If they are licensing their material or getting it from the public domain, then they may not be lawbreakers but they are still unoriginal slavish imitators. If one’s image of creativity is that of the romantic, iconoclastic creator who invents the world anew with each creation, those conclusions seem entirely appropriate. The borrowing here is rampant. Far from building everything anew, these musicians seem quite deliberately to base their work on fragments taken from others. + +It is important to remember that copyright does not subscribe completely to the idea of romantic creation where music is concerned. As I pointed out earlier, musical genres develop out of other genres: soul from gospel and rhythm and blues; gospel from spirituals; rhythm and blues from jazz, jump music, and Delta blues; and so on. When it comes to genres, we can play the game of musicological “six degrees of separation” all day long. Copyright is supposed to leave “holes” in its coverage so that the genre is not covered, only the specific form of creativity within the genre. I mentioned before the need to keep the lines of genre and form open, to keep them free from private property rights in order to allow musicians to develop the form by using them as common property, the “highways” of musical progress. So, for example, the twelve-bar blues uses the first, fourth, and fifth chords in a scale. That sequence cannot be owned, unless blues is to become impossible or illegal. Bebop is characterized by copious use of the flattened fifth—a sound which was jarring to audiences when it was first introduced and which marked the break with the more accessible jazz of swing and the big bands. The flattened fifth is not owned. These characteristic genre-creating sequences or sounds are supposed to be left in the public domain, though increasingly some scholars—including me—are coming to believe that we have managed to make the copyright holder’s control so complete and so granular as to close those common areas and impede the development of future musical forms. The Bridgeport court might extend its logic and imagine that the entire musical commons could be licensed, of course. The presence of other chord sequences would keep the price down! But up to now, we have not gone that far. In theory at least, copyright is not supposed to stop the next Ray Charles, the person who wants to fuse two older forms of music to create a third. + +Yet the chain of borrowing that links The Legendary K.O., Kanye West, Ray Charles, and the Bailey Gospel Singers is of a different kind. This borrowing involves taking chunks of prior musicians’ melodies, their words, their lyrical patterns. This is not just copying the genre. It is copying the lines of the song within the genre. This is the kind of stuff copyright is supposed to regulate even when it is working well. And yet, listening to the sequence, it is hard to deny that at each stage something artistic and innovative, something remarkable, has been created. In fact, the story of this song is the striking ability of each set of artists to impose their own sound, temperament, spirituality, humor, vision of women, or, in the case of The Legendary K.O., their intense and profane political anger, onto the musical phrases they have in common. + +The postmodern conclusion here is “there is nothing new under the sun”—that all creation is re-creation, that there is no such thing as originality, merely endless imitation. If this is meant to be a comment about how things get created, at least in music, I think there is some truth to it. But if it is a claim about aesthetic worth, a denial that there are more and less creative individuals in the arts, I find it as facile and unconvincing as its romantic authorial opposite. + +What is fascinating about the artists I describe here is that, while they do not fit neatly into either the aesthetic ideal of independent creation or the legal model for how creative expression gets made, they each have a remarkable, palpable creativity. Each leaves us with something new, even if formed partly from the fragments of the past. One could describe Ray Charles as the merest plagiarist—making “search and replace” songs by substituting a woman for the deity in already-established hits. But if that is our conclusion, it merely proves that our theories of aesthetics are poorer than the creativity they seek to describe. So much the worse for the theories. + +As Jefferson pointed out, the lines surrounding intellectual property are hard to draw—something the Bridgeport court got right. When we draw them, whether legally or as a matter of aesthetic morality, we do so partly with standard instances in mind. “Well, that can’t be wrong,” we think to ourselves, and reason by analogy accordingly. Yet the process of analogy fails us sometimes, because the types of borrowing change over time. + +Ray Charles was frank about the way he copied the style and licks of Nat King Cole like an apprentice learning from a lawyer. But he and his estate assiduously guarded his copyrights against more modern borrowing they found to be inappropriate. Judge Duffy thunderously denounces Biz Markie. It is harder to imagine him leveling the same condemnation at Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Ives, Oscar Peterson, or, for that matter, Beethoven, though all of them made copious use of the works of others in their own. It is bizarre to imagine a Bridgeport-like rule being extended to composition copyrights and applied to music such as jazz. “Get a license or do not solo”? I think not. Does it make any more sense for sampling? + +If there is a single reason I told the story of these songs it is this: to most of us, certainly to me, the idea that copyright encourages creativity and discourages the reuse of material created by others seems reasonable. Of course, I would want to apply the correctives implied by the Jefferson Warning—to make sure the rights were as short and as narrow as possible. But at least when it comes to copying chunks of expression still covered by copyright, our intuitions are to encourage people to create “their own work,” rather than to rely on remix. What does that mean in the world of music? As the story I have told here seems to illustrate, even musicians of unquestioned “originality,” even those who can make a claim to having created a new musical genre, sometimes did so by a process rather more like collage than creation out of nothing, taking chunks of existing work that were proven to work well and setting them in a new context or frame. + +Imagine Ray Charles trying to create “I Got a Woman” today. Both of his possible sources would be strongly and automatically protected by copyright. The industries in which those works were produced would be much more legalistic and infinitely more litigious. The owners of those copyrights could use them to stop him from “desecrating their work”—which is literally what he is doing. We know Clara Ward objected to Charles’s other borrowings from gospel. I cannot imagine Will Lamartine Thompson or his worthy neighbors in East Liverpool looking kindly on the sweet “early morning loving” outside of wedlock described in “I Got a Woman,” still less the use of sacred music to glorify it. And copyright gives them the power to say no. Remember Macaulay’s description of how Richardson’s novels might have been censored by a moralistic heir? Even if the objections were not vetoes, but simple demands for payment, would we get “I Got a Woman” and “This Little Girl of Mine”? Given the extent of the borrowing that jump-started this particular genre-bridging effort, would we be likely to see the birth of soul music? + +Congress assures us that the many increases in copyright protection have been in the name of encouraging creativity. The music industry says the same thing when its pettifogging clearance procedures and permission culture are criticized. But do we really think we are more likely to get a twenty-first-century Ray Charles, or a fusion of styles to create a new genre, in the world we have made? Do we really think that the formalist ignorance of Judge Duffy or the market optimism of the Bridgeport court, in which thick markets offer fungible sets of samples to be traded like commodities, are good guides for the future of music? Are we in fact killing musical creativity with the rules that are supposed to defend it? + +An Internet optimist would tell us that is precisely the point. True, because of the errors described in the chapter on the Jefferson Warning, and the mistakes catalogued in the chapters on the Internet Threat and the Farmers’ Tale, we have dramatically expanded the scope, length, and power of the rights that are supposed to shape our creative culture. But technology cures all. Look at The Legendary K.O., The Black Lantern, or Franklin Lopez. They are all probably breaking the law as it is currently interpreted by the courts. But their work can be created for pennies and distributed to millions. The technology allows people to circumvent the law. Admittedly, some of the copyright holders will police their rights assiduously—think of JibJab’s newfound dislike of fair use and their power to alter The Black Lantern’s video. But others either cannot or will not. Kanye West’s representatives in particular are unlikely to be stupid enough to sue The Legendary K.O. in the first place. Internet distribution becomes a demimonde in which the rules of the rest of the society either cannot or will not be enforced. Art gets its breathing room, not from legal exceptions, but from technological enforcement difficulties. Finally, as more and more people can create and distribute digital culture, they are less likely to understand, believe in, or accept rules that are strongly at variance with their aesthetic and moral assumptions. + +There is a lot to these points. The technology does transform the conditions of creativity, and sometimes it runs right over the law in the process. Thousands, even millions, can be reached outside of conventional distribution channels with work that is technically illegal. And attitudes toward creative propriety do not track legal rules. When I wrote to Mr. Randle and Mr. Nickerson, I found that they realized Mr. West probably had a legal right to get their work taken down, but they felt he would not use it, and they had a very commonsensical conception of what they ought to be allowed to do. They were not making any money from this. They were making a political point, drawing attention to a political and human problem. That made it okay. They would have liked more formal permission so that they could actually distribute CDs through conventional for-profit channels, perhaps with some portion of the proceeds going to disaster relief, but they understood they were unlikely to get it. + +Despite all this, I am uncomfortable with the argument “do not worry, technology will allow us to evade the rules where they are stupid.” A system that can only function well through repeated lawbreaking is an unstable and dangerous one. It breeds a lack of respect for the law in those who should be its greatest supporters and beneficiaries. It blurs civil disobedience and plain old lawbreaking. Sitting in on the segregated lunch counter and being willing to face the consequences is very different from parking in the disabled space and hoping you can get away with it. It also blurs our judgment of conduct. Whatever one thinks of them, The Legendary K.O. are doing something very different than a college student who just does not want to pay for music and downloads thousands of tracks for free from file sharing networks. + +The problem is not simply one of blurring. Technology-based “freedoms” are not reliable (though legal ones, too, may fail). In a pinch, the technology may not save you, as thousands of those same downloaders have found out when sued by the RIAA and forced to pay thousands of dollars for an activity they thought to be private and anonymous. The Internet “solution” also leaves certain types of artistic creation dependent on the vagaries of the current technology, which may well change, eliminating some of the zone of freedom we currently rely on. But more worrisome is the fact that this “solution” actually confines certain types of art to the world of the Internet. + +The video of “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” could be seen by many, but only if they were wired to the right technological and social network. (After all, someone has to tell you to watch.) It was a searing intervention in the national debate on Katrina. But it appeared on no television station. Like most of the mashups created online, the fact that the rights could never be cleared keeps it off mass media. Copyright acts as the barbed wire around mass media outlets. That is a shame, I think. Not because that video is so good—you may love it or hate it. But because this kind of artwork has something important to contribute to our national culture. Imagine a world in which Ray Charles could create “I Got a Woman,” but could only circulate it to a narrow group of the file-trading digerati because of a flagrant violation of Clara Ward’s copyright. Do we still get soul? The blues? Jazz? Or do we just get a precious and insular digital subculture, whose cultural experiments never reach the mainstream? + +Throughout his life, Charles described an intimate relationship with his audience, with the public. He described their tastes as a check, as a corrective; he thought they would actually be “ahead” of the artists. He wanted to make songs that would be listened to by tens of millions of people. And he wanted to make art and lots of money. I am all for the person who wants to create as an “amateur-professional” and distribute outside the chains of commerce. I have worked with organizations that make it easier to do this. But I also believe in the power and creativity of commercial culture and political speech carried on mass media. Ironically, our current copyright system serves it poorly. + +What is the solution to all of this? The music business runs on compulsory licenses, a legally granted ability to use music in certain ways without permission, though with a fee. The system seems to function pretty well. One solution is to extend that system to the world of mashups and derivative works. If you merely copy the whole of my work and circulate it on file sharing networks or on CDs, we apply the current rules and penalties. If, on the other hand, you make a “derivative” work, mixing your work with mine, then there are two alternatives. If you stay in the world of nonprofit exchange, you get a heightened presumption in favor of fair use (perhaps administered through a quicker and cheaper system of arbitration). If you move into the for-profit world, then you must pay a flat licensing fee or percentage of profits to the copyright holder. + +A second solution would be to curtail the hypertrophy of protectionism that made all this happen in the first place. The copyright term could be shortened or we could require renewal every twenty-eight years. (There are international treaties that currently forbid the latter alternative.) We could cut back on excesses like the Bridgeport decision, create incentives to make the music industry less legalistically insistent on policing the most atomic level of creation. We could exempt samples shorter than five seconds from copyright liability, clarify the boundaries of fair use, and extend it beyond parody to other genre-smashing forms such as satire and collage. + +There are enormous obstacles to all these proposals. In particular, while artists fare very poorly under the current clearance culture—paying but not receiving the benefits of payments—the middlemen who profit from transaction costs are not keen on abolishing them. Certainly if, as the Bridgeport court assumed, the recording industry is the party responsible for fine-tuning copyright law, we are hardly likely to see any reforms that threaten current modes of doing business. Yet there is a ray of hope. It is getting harder and harder to pretend that the rules ostensibly designed to encourage creativity are actually working. At the same time, more and more people are creating and distributing cultural objects—becoming “subjects” of intellectual property law in the process, often to their dismay and irritation. It is in that conjunction—a far cry from the industry contract envisioned by the Bridgeport court—that hope for the future of copyright law’s treatment of culture might lie. + +2~ Chapter 6: Further Reading + +Musical borrowing is the subject of the next “graphic novel”—which is to say comic book—produced by me, Keith Aoki, and Jennifer Jenkins: Theft!: A History of Music (Durham, N.C.: Center for the Study of the Public Domain, forthcoming 2009). Our earlier effort to make intellectual property accessible to film makers and mashup artists can be found in Bound By Law (Durham, N.C.: Center for the Study of the Public Domain, 2006), available in full at http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics. An expanded edition of Bound By Law will be published in the Fall of 2008 by Duke University Press. However, neither graphic novel can provide a sense of the scholarly literature in music, musicology, law, and biography that enabled me to write this chapter. + +3~ Musical History + +The indispensable guide to music history is J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 7th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). For those who have access through a university or library the Grove Music database is the single most comprehensive computer-aided source: [recenlty moved to] Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/ [Ed. note: originally published as http://www.grovemusic.com/index.html; link has changed]. A fascinating book by Frederic Scherer, Quarter Notes and Bank Notes: The Economics of Music Composition in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), explores different incentive systems—such as patronage or markets enabled by intellectual property rights—and their respective effect on musical aesthetics and musical production. Scherer is one of the foremost contemporary economists of innovation. To have him writing about the practices of court composers and manuscript publishers is completely fascinating. At the end of the day, he diplomatically refuses to say whether patronage or market mechanisms produced “better” music but the careful reader will pick up indications of which way he leans. + +3~ Musical Borrowing + +There is a vast scholarly literature on musical borrowing—indeed the discipline of musicology takes the study of borrowing, in its largest sense, as one of its main organizing themes. Beyond a personal tour provided by Professor Anthony Kelley of Duke University, I found a number of books particularly useful. Burkholder’s History (J. Peter Burkholder, Donald J. Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 7th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006)) is full of examples of borrowing and influence—whether of style, notation, musical conventions, or melody itself. But it is Burkholder’s book on Charles Ives—that fertile early-twentieth-century borrower—that was most influential: J. Peter Burkholder, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995). Ives’s own thoughts on his mashup of prior American musical forms can be found in Charles Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 10–25. David Metzer’s Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), throws light on the way that quotations or borrowings came to have a particular cultural meaning in different musical traditions. Honey Meconi’s collection Early Musical Borrowing, ed. Honey Meconi (New York: Routledge, 2004), discusses—among many other things—the issue of borrowing between the secular and religious musical traditions, something that helped me work through that issue in this chapter. Finally, “Musical Borrowing: An Annotated Bibliography” (http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/borrowing/) provides a searchable database of articles about musical borrowing. + +3~ Music and Copyright Law + +I was particularly influenced by two books and two articles. The books are Kembrew McLeod, Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership and Intellectual Property Law (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), and Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York: New York University Press, 2001). McLeod and Vaidhyanathan are the authors who sounded the alarm about the cultural and aesthetic effects of the heavy-handed legal regulation of musical borrowing. Together with the work of Larry Lessig (particularly his writing on the “permissions culture”) Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001), their scholarship has defined the field. + +The two articles that influenced me the most focus more specifically on the details of the evolution of music on the one hand and music copyright on the other. Both of them are by Michael Carroll: “The Struggle for Music Copyright,” Florida Law Review 57 (2005): 907–961, and “Whose Music Is It Anyway?: How We Came to View Musical Expression as a Form of Property,” University of Cincinnati Law Review 72 (2004): 1405–1496. But these two pieces by no means exhaust the literature. Olufunmilayo Arewa has written memorably on copyright and musical borrowing in “Copyright on Catfish Row: Musical Borrowing, Porgy & Bess and Unfair Use,” Rutgers Law Journal 37 (2006): 277–353, and “From J. C. Bach to Hip Hop: Musical Borrowing, Copyright and Cultural Context,” North Carolina Law Review 84 (2006): 547–645. I also recommend K. J. Greene, “Copyright, Culture & Black Music: A Legacy of Unequal Protection,” Hastings Communications & Entertainment Law Journal 21 (1999): 339–392. There is much, much more. Finally, Joanna Demers’s recent book Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), provides a more comprehensive coverage than I can hope to in a single chapter. + +Beyond the scholarly literature, two websites allow you to experiment with these issues online. The History of Sampling created by Jesse Kriss, http://jessekriss.com/projects/samplinghistory/, allows you to explore visually exactly which hip-hop samplers borrowed from which older songs and to trace the process backwards or forwards. Extremely cool. The Copyright Infringement Project, sponsored by the UCLA Intellectual Property Project and Columbia Law School, http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/law/library/caselist.html, is an extremely useful educational site that gives examples of cases alleging musical copyright infringement, including the relevant sound files. The older version of this project confusingly referred to these cases as “plagiarism” cases—something that judges themselves also frequently do. Plagiarism is the moral, academic, or professional sin of taking ideas, facts or expression and passing them off as your own. If I take the central arguments from your book and completely reword them, or if I present a series of facts you uncovered as an historian and include them in my own book without attribution, you may accuse me of plagiarism, though not of copyright infringement. If I take the words of Shakespeare or Dickens and pass them off as my own, I am committing plagiarism but certainly not copyright infringement, for even under today’s rules those works have long since entered the public domain. If I credit T. S. Eliot but then proceed to reprint the entire of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” without the permission of the copyright holders, I am committing copyright infringement, but certainly not plagiarism. At best, plagiarism and copyright infringement overlap to some extent, but each regulates large areas about which the other is indifferent. We sap the strength of both norm systems by confusing them. The new incarnation of the project, at UCLA, has removed the word “plagiarism” from its title. + +3~ The People and the Music + +A brief biography of Will Lamartine Thompson can be found in C. B. Galbreath, “Song Writers of Ohio (Will Lamartine Thompson),” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 14 (January, 1905): 291–312. Since the copyright has expired you can read it in full, and see the picture of Thompson, at http://books.google.com/books?id=3N-WqdvA6T4C&printsec=titlepage#PRA1-PA291,M1. + +The best book on Clara Ward is Willa Ward-Royster, Toni Rose, and Horace Clarance Boyer, How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World Famous Ward Singers (Philadelphia, Penn.: Temple University Press, 1997). + +The best biography of Ray Charles is Michael Lydon, Ray Charles: Man and Music (New York: Routledge, 2004). Charles’s autobiography is also a fascinating read. Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1992). Charles’s website, which contains useful biographical and discographical information, is at www.raycharles.com. There is much more, of course, but these resources provide a good starting place. + +There are several hagiographic biographies of Mr. West, but none worth reading. Those who have not already been inundated with information through the popular press could do worse than to start with his rather breathless Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West. + +The main source of information on The Legendary K.O.—a name they now use intermittently—is their website is www.k-otix.com. (I am grateful to Mr. Nickerson and Mr. Randle for confirming additional portions of the story by e-mail.) The song “George Bush Doesn’t Like Black People” is no longer available on their website, however an audio version of it is currently available at http://www.ourmedia.org/node/53964. The Black Lantern’s video can be found at http://www.theblacklantern.com/george.html. Franklin Lopez’s video can currently be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGRcEXtLpTo. Whether any of those sites will be available in a year’s time is hard to tell. Those who plan to listen or view are reminded that the lyrics are ‘explicit.’ + +The songs by Clara Ward, Ray Charles, and Kanye West are widely available through a variety of commercial outlets, as are several commercial versions of “Jesus is All the World to Me” by Mr. Thompson. + +I would recommend The Clara Ward Singers, Meetin’ Tonight (Vanguard Records, 1994), compact disc. It includes a version of “Meetin’ Tonight: This Little Light of Mine” in which the human limits on the ability to sustain a note are broken repeatedly. Any Ray Charles compilation will feature some of the songs discussed here. The most economical is probably Ray Charles, I’ve Got a Woman & Other Hits by Ray Charles (Rhino Flashback Records, 1997), compact disc. It includes “I Got a Woman” and “This Little Girl of Mine.” Kanye West, Late Registration (Roc-a-Fella Records, 2005), compact disc, contains the full version of “Gold Digger.” + +Finally, I would love to be able to play you the full version of the Bailey Gospel Singers “I Got a Savior” (B-Side: “Jesus is the Searchlight”) (Columbia Records, 1951), 78 rpm phonograph record. Unfortunately, given the legal uncertainties I am forbidden from doing so, and I know of no licit way—for free or for pay—that you can listen to it, short of traveling to the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts yourself and asking to hear the original 78. Perhaps that simple fact is the most elegant encapsulation of my argument here. + +1~ Chapter 7: The Enclosure of Science and Technology: Two Case Studies + +Over the last forty years, much has changed in the way that scientific research and technological development are organized, funded, and institutionally arranged. Much has also changed in the type of scientific and technical material that is covered by intellectual property rights, the ways that material is covered, the parties who hold the rights, and the state of research and development at which rights claims are made. Many academics who study both science’s organizational structure and the intellectual property claims that surround it are concerned about the results. To say this is not to conjure up a tragically lost world of pure research science, untainted by property claims or profit motives. That world never existed and it is probably a good thing too. Intellectual property rights, and the profit motive more generally, have a vital and beneficial role in moving innovations from lab bench to bedside, from computer simulation to actual flight. The question is not whether intellectual property rights are useful as part of scientific and technological development. The question is what type of rights they should be, where in the research process those rights are best deployed, how they should coexist with state funded basic scientific and technological research, how broad they should be, how they should deal with new technologies, how long they should last, how they should treat follow-on innovations. + +I cannot hope here to answer all those questions, though some fascinating research has begun the process. Instead, as with the music chapter, I will offer a case study—actually two case studies—that try to illuminate the process I am describing, to illustrate its pitfalls and its strange and unintended consequences. + +The two defining technologies of the last thirty years are biotechnology and the networked computer. Each is both product and platform. Innovations themselves, they are also constitutive technologies that enable still more innovations. But at several historical moments in the development of each we came perilously close to breaking technology with law.~{See, e.g., Pamela Samuelson, Randall Davis, Mitchell D. Kapor, and J. H. Reichman, “A Manifesto Concerning the Legal Protection of Computer Programs,” Columbia Law Review 94 (1994): 2308–2431; Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research,” Science 280 (1998): 698–701.}~ Some would say that it was not just a close shave: we actually have hampered or limited the full potential of technology, slowing down its dynamism with a host of overbroad software patents, gene patents, and materials transfer agreements. Others are more optimistic. They think that a series of rapid improvisations by courts, scientists, programmers, and businesspeople has largely mitigated any problems caused by the process of legal expansion.~{Wes Cohen’s empirical studies, for example, suggest that some of the potential dangers from overbroad gene patents have been offset by widespread lawbreaking among academic research scientists, who simply ignore patents that get in their way, and by more flexible licensing practices than the anticommons theorists had predicted. John P. Walsh, Ashish Arora, and Wesley Cohen, “Effects of Research Tool Patents and Licensing on Biomedical Innovation,” in Patents in the Knowledge-Based Economy, ed. W. Cohen and S. A. Merrill (National Research Council, 2003), 285–340.}~ But if mistakes were made, it is important to know what they were lest we continue or repeat them. If there were “fixes,” it is important to know if they can be replicated. + +So were there mistakes? If so, have they been fixed, and how? Drawing on an article I co-wrote with my brilliant colleague Arti Rai,~{Arti Rai and James Boyle, “Synthetic Biology: Caught between Property Rights, the Public Domain, and the Commons,” PLoS Biology 5 (2007): 389–393, available at http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050058&ct=1. }~ this chapter suggests some answers to those questions by sketching out some details of the legal history of those technologies, concluding with a discussion of a single promising new technology that shares aspects of both—synthetic biology. The answers are important. Behind the abstract words “innovation” or “technological development” there are lives saved or lost, communicative freedoms expanded or contracted, communities enabled or stunted, wealth generated or not. The subject would benefit from informed, sophisticated, democratic attention. It is not something you want to leave a host of lawyers and lobbyists to decide among themselves. + +2~ A Machine that Contains All Other Machines + +Imagine a person staring at an infinite roll of paper tape. On the paper are symbols in some alphabet or number system. The reader carries out simple, The Enclosure of Science and Technology operable instructions on the basis of that data. “Add together the next two digits you are presented with and write down the answer. If the answer is odd, go to step 2. If the answer is even, go to step 3.” Now replace the person with a mechanical head that can “read” the instructions, carry out the desired operations, and write the answer down. The British mathematician Alan Turing imagined something like this—a little more complicated, perhaps, but fairly similar. What is it? We have the reading head, the set of instructions, the data on which the instructions are to be performed, the record of the result, and some kind of “state table” that tells the machine where it is in the process. These are the component parts of Turing machines—or as we know them better, computers. More accurately, Turing machines are a method of simulating the operation of computers, a metaphor that enables us to imitate their logical processes. In the words of Wikipedia, “despite their simplicity—[they] can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer that could possibly be constructed.” And to give lawyers fits. But that is getting ahead of ourselves. + +In Greek mythology, Procrustes had a bed to which he fitted its prospective occupants, whether they liked it or not. The tall were trimmed down. The short stretched on the rack. Intellectual property lawyers have many similarities to Procrustes. The technologies that are brought before them are made to fit the conceptual boxes the law provides, boxes with names such as “copyright” and “patent.” Occasionally, new conceptual boxes are made, but—for very good reasons—most of the time we stick with the boxes we have. As with Procrustes, things do not always fit and the process can be distressing for its subjects. + +It is important to realize that the process of trimming and stretching can be done well or badly. If it is done really badly, the technology is stunted, deformed, even destroyed. If it is done well, the law aids the development of the technology in exactly the happy way described in Chapter 1. What did our Procrustean legal system do with computers and computer science? + +I will focus on software—the set of instructions the machine is to perform. How should we think of it? Software is written down by programmers. It is recorded first in a form readable to humans, or at least geeks. Then, through a series of transformations, it is turned into the machine code, the ones and zeros that will operate the computer. But at its root it can be understood through the metaphor of the simple list of instructions to be carried out in order, just as with the Turing machine and its infinite tape. + +How should we fit software into the categories of intellectual property? We have “writing,” fixation in some medium of symbols that can be read by others—both machine and human. Writing is normally the domain of copyright. Are computer programs copyrightable? All kinds of problems present themselves. At least in the United States, copyright covers expression. As I pointed out in a previous book, at its base is the conception of the romantic author impressing her uniqueness of spirit on the work at the moment of writing. It is that expressive choice, not the facts or ideas on which the work is based, that copyright covers. And it is only original expression that copyright covers. It does not cover purely functional objects, systems, processes, or methods of operation. One cannot copyright the coat hanger, the mousetrap, or long division. One cannot even copyright a “sculpture” if the main function of its design is to serve as a bicycle rack. Admittedly, one can copyright some expressive works that serve a practical purpose. A book about how to do double-entry bookkeeping is copyrightable. Yet copyright covers only the expressive choices used in selecting the words to explain the method, and the images to represent it, not the methods it describes or the facts or ideas it contains. Can copyright cover computer programs? Should we see them as copyrightable how-to books or as uncopyrightable machines made of words? + +Machines and other functional innovations are normally the domain of patent rights. One can patent the mousetrap, and then one gets an exclusive right to the actual mechanically enabled method of catching mice, not just the artistic flourishes on the blueprint. Patents have more demanding criteria than copyrights. The invention needs to be novel and have utility, or usefulness; I cannot get a patent over something that would have been an obvious idea to an insider in the relevant field of technology, a “person having ordinary skill in the art,” or PHOSITA, in the jargon of patent lawyers. But once I get my patent, it gives me a very strong power to exclude others from the invention—even if they came up with it independently. The right lasts for twenty years. Follow-on innovators who improve on my idea can get a patent on that improvement. They can block me from using the improvement. I can block them from using the original invention. Thus we have an incentive to negotiate if either of us wants to bring the improved innovation to market. + +So where did software fit? Was it copyrightable writing or patentable invention? There are two issues here. The first is whether there should be any intellectual property rights over software at all. The basic case for that proposition is simple, a classic example of the public goods problem described in the first chapter. Software costs money to create, but is cheap to copy. When a youthful The Enclosure of Science and Technology Bill Gates wrote his 1976 letter to the wonderfully named Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, he put the point clearly. + +_1 Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all the bugs, documenting his product and distribute it for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money into hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.~{William Gates III, An Open Letter to Hobbyists, February 3, 1976, quoted in Wallace Wang, Steal This Computer Book 4.0: What They Won’t Tell You About the Internet (San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2006), 73.}~ + +He signed the letter “Bill Gates, General Partner, Micro-Soft.” The hyphen would disappear in time. The philosophy stuck around. + +Though there are quibbles about the facts in Gates’s letter—critics claim he himself did a lot of free riding on public domain code and government-funded computer time—his basic point is that software needs to be protected by (enforceable) property rights if we expect it to be effectively and sustainably produced. Some software developers disagree. But assuming one concedes the point for the sake of argument, there is a second question: should software be covered by copyright or patent, or some unidentified third option? In practice, software ended up being covered by both schemes, partly because of actions by Congress, which included several references to software in the Copyright Act, and partly as a result of decisions by the Copyright Office, the Patent and Trademark Office, and judges. One could copyright one’s code and also gain a patent over the “nonobvious,” novel, and useful innovations inside the software. + +At first, it was the use of copyright that stirred the most concern. As I explained in the last chapter, copyright seems to be built around an assumption of diverging innovation—the fountain or explosion of expressive activity. Different people in different situations who sit down to write a sonnet or a love story, it is presumed, will produce very different creations rather than being drawn to a single result. Thus strong rights over the resulting work are not supposed to inhibit future progress. I can find my own muse, my own path to immortality. Creative expression is presumed to be largely independent of the work of prior authors. Raw material is not needed. “Copyright is about sustaining the conditions of creativity that enable an individual to craft out of thin air an Appalachian Spring, a Sun Also Rises, a Citizen Kane.”~{Paul Goldstein, “Copyright,” Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. 38 (1991): 109–110.}~ + +There are lots of reasons to doubt that this vision of “creation out of nothing” works very well even in the arts, the traditional domain of copyright law. The story of Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman” bears ample witness to those doubts. But whatever its merits or defects in the realm of the arts, the vision seems completely wrongheaded when it comes to software. Software solutions to practical problems do converge, and programmers definitely draw upon prior lines of code. Worse still, as I pointed out earlier, software tends to exhibit “network effects.” Unlike my choice of novel, my choice of word processing program is very strongly influenced, perhaps dominated, by the question of what program other people have chosen to buy. That means that even if a programmer could find a completely different way to write a word processing program, he has to be able to make it read the dominant program’s files, and mimic its features, if he is to attract any customers at all. That hardly sounds like completely divergent creation. + +Seeing that software failed to fit the Procrustean bed of copyright, many scholars presumed the process of forcing it into place would be catastrophic. They believed that, lacking patent’s high standards, copyright’s monopolies would proliferate widely. Copyright’s treatment of follow-on or “derivative” works would impede innovation, it was thought. The force of network effects would allow the copyright holder of whatever software became “the standard” to extract huge monopoly rents and prevent competing innovation for many years longer than the patent term. Users of programs would be locked in, unable to shift their documents, data, or acquired skills to a competing program. Doom and gloom abounded among copyright scholars, including many who shared Mr. Gates’s basic premise—that software should be covered by property rights. They simply believed that these were the wrong property rights to use. + +Copyright did indeed cause problems for software developers, though it is hard to judge whether those problems outweighed the economic benefits of encouraging software innovation, production, and distribution. But the negative effects of copyright were minimized by a remarkably prescient set of actions by courts and, to a much lesser extent, Congress, so that the worst scenarios did not come to pass. Courts interpreted the copyright over software very narrowly, so that it covered little beyond literal infringement. (Remember Jefferson’s point about the importance of being careful about the scope of a right.) They developed a complicated test to work out whether one program infringed the details of another. The details give law students headaches every year, but the effects were simple. If your software was similar to mine merely because it was performing the same function, or because I had picked the most efficient way to perform some task, or even because there was market demand for doing it that way, then none of those similarities counted for the purposes of infringement. Nor did material that was taken from the public domain. The result was that while someone who made literal copies of Windows Vista was clearly infringing copyright, the person who made a competing program generally would not be. + +In addition, courts interpreted the fair use doctrine to cover “decompilation”—which is basically taking apart someone else’s program so that you can understand it and compete with it. As part of the process, the decompiler had to make a copy of the program. If the law were read literally, decompilation would hardly seem to be a fair use. The decompiler makes a whole copy, for a commercial purpose, of a copyrighted work, precisely in order to cause harm to its market by offering a substitute good. But the courts took a broader view. The copy was a necessary part of the process of producing a competing product, rather than a piratical attempt to sell a copy of the same product. This limitation on copyright provided by fair use was needed in order to foster the innovation that copyright is supposed to encourage. This is a nice variation of the Sony Axiom from Chapter 4. + +These rulings and others like them meant that software was protected by copyright, as Mr. Gates wanted, but that the copyright did not give its owner the right to prevent functional imitation and competition. Is that enough? Clearly the network effects are real. Most of us use Windows and most of us use Microsoft Word, and one very big reason is because everyone else does. Optimists believe the lure of capturing this huge market will keep potential competitors hungry and monopolists scared. The lumbering dominant players will not become complacent about innovation or try to grab every morsel of monopoly rent, goes the argument. They still have to fear their raptor-like competitors lurking in the shadows. Perhaps. Or perhaps it also takes the consistent threat of antitrust enforcement. In any event, whether or not we hit the optimal point in protecting software with intellectual property rights, those rights certainly did not destroy the industry. It appeared that, even with convergent creativity and network effects, software could be crammed into the Procrustean bed of copyright without killing it off in the process. Indeed, to some, it seemed to fare very well. They would claim that the easy legal protection provided by copyright gave a nascent industry just enough protection to encourage the investment of time, talent, and dollars, while not prohibiting the next generation of companies from building on the innovations of the past. + +In addition, the interaction between copyright and software has produced some surprising results. There is a strong argument that it is the fact that software is copyrightable that has enabled the “commons-based creativity” of free and open source software. What does commons-based creativity mean? Basically, it is creativity that builds on an open resource available to all. An additional component of some definitions is that the results of the creativity must be fed back into the commons for all to use. Think of English. You can use English without license or fee, and you can innovate by producing new words, slang, or phrases without clearance from some Academie Anglaise. After you coin your term, it is in turn available to me to build upon or to use in my own sentences, novels, or jokes. And so the cycle continues. As the last chapter showed, for the entire history of musical creativity until the last forty years or so, the same had been true of at least a low level of musical borrowing. At the basic level of musical phrases, themes, snatches of melody, even chord structures, music was commons-based creativity. Property rights did not reach down into the atomic structure of music. They stayed at a higher level—prohibiting reproduction of complete works or copying of substantial and important chunks. So in some areas of both music and language, we had commons-based creativity because there were no property rights over the relevant level. The software commons is different. + +The creators of free and open source software were able to use the fact that software is copyrighted, and that the right attaches automatically upon creation and fixation, to set up new, distributed methods of innovation. For example, free and open source software under the General Public License—such as Linux—is a “commons” to which all are granted access. Anyone may use the software without any restrictions. They are guaranteed access to the human-readable “source code,” rather than just the inscrutable “machine code,” so that they can understand, tinker, and modify. Modifications can be distributed so long as the new creation is licensed under the open terms of the original. This creates a virtuous cycle: each addition builds on the commons and is returned to it. The copyright over the software was the “hook” that allowed software engineers to create a license that gave free access and the right to modify and required future programmers to keep offering those freedoms. Without the copyright, those features of the license would not have been enforceable. For example, someone could have modified the open program and released it without the source code—denying future users the right to understand and modify easily. To use an analogy beloved of free software enthusiasts, the hood of the car would be welded shut. Home repair, tinkering, customization, and redesign become practically impossible. + +Of course, if there were no copyright over software at all, software engineers would have other freedoms—even if not legally guaranteed open access to source code. Still, it was hard to deny that the extension of the property regime had—bizarrely, at first sight—actually enabled the creation of a continuing open commons. The tempting real estate analogy would be environmentalists using strong property rights over land to guarantee conservation and open access to a green space, where, without property rights, the space could be despoiled by all. But as I have pointed out earlier, while such analogies may help us, the differences between land and intellectual property demand that they be scrutinized very carefully. It is hard to overgraze an idea. + +So much for copyright. What about patents? U.S. patent law had drawn a firm line between patentable invention and unpatentable idea, formula, or algorithm. The mousetrap could be patented, but not the formula used to calculate the speed at which it would snap shut. Ideas, algorithms, and formulae were in the public domain—as were “business methods.” Or so we thought. + +The line between idea or algorithm on the one hand and patentable machine on the other looks nice and easy. But put that algorithm—that series of steps capable of being specified in the way described by the Turing machine—onto a computer, and things begin to look more complex. Say, for example, that algorithm was the process for converting miles into kilometers and vice versa. “Take the first number. If it is followed by the word miles, then multiply by 8/5. If it is followed by the word kilometers, multiply by 5/8 . . .” and so on. In the abstract, this is classic public domain stuff—no more patentable than E=mc2 or F=ma. What about when those steps are put onto the tape of the Turing machine, onto a program running on the hard drive of a computer? + +The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (the United States’s leading patent court) seems to believe that computers can turn unpatentable ideas into patentable machines. In fact, in this conception, the computer sitting on your desk becomes multiple patentable machines—a word processing machine, an e-mail machine, a machine running the program to calculate the tensile strength of steel. I want to stress that the other bars to patentability remain. My example of mile-to-kilometer conversion would be patentable subject matter but, we hope, no patent would be granted because the algorithm is not novel and is obvious. (Sadly, the Patent and Trademark Office seems determined to undermine this hope by granting patents on the most mundane and obvious applications.) But the concern here is not limited to the idea that without a subject matter bar, too many obvious patents will be granted by an overworked and badly incentivized patent office. It is that the patent was supposed to be granted at the very end of a process of investigation and scientific and engineering innovation. The formulae, algorithms, and scientific discoveries on which the patented invention was based remained in the public domain for all to use. It was only when we got to the very end of the process, with a concrete innovation ready to go to market, that the patent was to be given. Yet the ability to couple the abstract algorithm with the concept of a Turing machine undermines this conception. Suddenly the patents are available at the very beginning of the process, even to people who are merely specifying—in the abstract—the idea of a computer running a particular series of algorithmic activities. + +The words “by means of a computer” are—in the eyes of the Federal Circuit—an incantation of magical power, able to transubstantiate the ideas and formulae of the public domain into private property. And, like the breaking of a minor taboo that presages a Victorian literary character’s slide into debauchery, once that first wall protecting the public domain was breached, the court found it easier and easier to breach still others. If one could turn an algorithm into a patentable machine simply by adding “by means of a computer,” then one could turn a business method into something patentable by specifying the organizational or information technology structure through which the business method is to be implemented. + +If you still remember the first chapters of this book, you might wonder why we would want to patent business methods. Intellectual property rights are supposed to be handed out only when necessary to produce incentives to supply some public good, incentives that otherwise would be lacking. Yet there are already plenty of incentives to come up with new business methods. (Greed and fear are the most obvious.) There is no evidence to suggest that we need a state-backed monopoly to encourage the development of new business methods. In fact, we want people to copy the businesses of others, lowering prices as a result. The process of copying business methods is called “competition” and it is the basis of a free-market economy. Yet patent law would prohibit it for twenty years. So why introduce patents? Brushing aside such minor objections with ease, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit declared business methods to be patentable. Was this what Jefferson had in mind when he said “I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not”? I doubt it. + +It is commonplace for courts to look at the purpose of the law they are enforcing when seeking to understand what it means. In areas of regulation which are obviously instrumental—aimed at producing some particular result in the world—that approach is ubiquitous. In applying the antitrust laws, for example, courts have given meaning to the relatively vague words of the law by turning to economic analysis of the likely effects of different rules on different market structures. + +Patent law is as instrumental a structure as one could imagine. In the United States, for example, the constitutional authorization to Congress to pass patent and copyright legislation is very explicit that these rights are to be made with a purpose in view. Congress has the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” One might imagine that courts would try to interpret the patent and copyright laws with that purpose, and the Jefferson Warning about its constraints, firmly in mind. Yet utilitarian caution about extending monopolies is seldom to be found in the reasoning of our chief patent court. + +The difference is striking. Jefferson said that the job of those who administered the patent system was to see if a patent was “worth the embarrassment to the public” before granting it. The Constitution tells Congress to make only those patent laws that “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” One might imagine that this constitutional goal would guide courts in construing those same laws. Yet neither Jeffersonian ideals nor the constitutional text seem relevant to our chief patent court when interpreting statutory subject matter. Anything under the sun made by man is patentable subject matter, and there’s an end to it. The case that announced the rule on business methods involved a patent on the process of keeping accounts in a “hub-and-spoke” mutual fund—which included multiplying all of the stock holdings of each fund in a family of funds by the respective current share price to get total fund value and then dividing by the number of mutual fund shares that each customer actually holds to find the balance in their accounts. As my son observed, “I couldn’t do that until nearly the end of third grade!”~{State St. Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Fin. Group, Inc., 149 F.3d 1368, 1373 (Fed. Cir. 1998).}~ + +In theory of course, if the patent is not novel or is obvious, it will still be refused. The Supreme Court recently held that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has made “nonobvious” too easy a standard to meet.~{KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) [Ed. note: originally published as 550 U.S. ___ (2007), 127 S. Ct. 1727 (2007); citation updated].}~ It is unclear, however, whether that judgment will produce concrete effects on actual practices of patent grants and litigation. The Patent and Trademark Office puts pressure on examiners to issue patents, and it is very expensive to challenge those that are granted. Better, where possible, to rule out certain subject matter in the first place. Tempted in part by its flirtation with the “idea made machine” in the context of a computer, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit could not bring itself to do so. Where copyright law evolved to wall off and minimize the dangers of extending protection over software, patent law actually extended the idea behind software patents to make patentable any thought process that might produce a useful result. Once breached, the walls protecting the public domain in patent law show a disturbing tendency to erode at an increasing rate. + +To sum up, the conceptual possibilities presented to copyright and patent law by the idea of a Turing machine were fascinating. Should we extend copyright or patent to cover the new technology? The answer was “we will extend both!” Yet the results of the extension were complex and unexpected in ways that we will have to understand if we want to go beyond the simple but important injunctions of Jefferson and Macaulay. Who would have predicted that software copyrights could be used to create a self-perpetuating commons as well as a monopoly over operating systems, or that judges would talk knowingly of network effects in curtailing the scope of coverage? Who would have predicted that patents would be extended not only to basic algorithms implemented by a computer, but to methods of business themselves (truly a strange return to legalized business monopolies for a country whose founders viewed them as one of the greatest evils that could be borne)? + +2~ Synthetic Biology + +If you are a reader of Science, PLoS Biology, or Nature, you will have noticed some attractive and bizarre photographs recently. A field of bacteria that form themselves into bull’s-eyes and polka dots. A dim photograph of a woman’s face “taken” by bacteria that have been programmed to be sensitive to light. You may also have read about more inspiring, if less photogenic, accomplishments—for example, the group of scientists who managed to program bacteria to produce artemesinin, a scarce natural remedy for malaria derived from wormwood. Poking deeper into these stories, you would have found the phrase “synthetic biology” repeated again and again, though a precise definition would have eluded you. + +What is “synthetic biology”? For some it is simply that the product or process involves biological materials not found in nature. Good old-fashioned biotechnology would qualify. One of the first biotechnology patent cases, Diamond v. Chakrabarty, involved some bacteria which Dr. Chakrabarty had engineered to eat oil slicks—not their natural foodstuff.~{Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980).}~ The Supreme Court noted that the bacteria were not found in nature and found them to be patentable, though alive. According to the simplest definition, Dr. Chakrabarty’s process would count as synthetic biology, though this example antedates the common use of the term by two decades. For other scientists, it is the completely synthetic quality of the biology involved that marks the edge of the discipline. The DNA we are familiar with, for example, has four “base pairs”—A, C, G, and T. Scientists have developed genetic alphabets that involve twelve base pairs. Not only is the result not found in nature, but the very language in which it is expressed is entirely new and artificial. + +I want to focus on a third conception of synthetic biology: the idea of turning biotechnology from an artisanal process of one-off creations, developed with customized techniques, to a true engineering discipline, using processes and parts that are as standardized and as well understood as valves, screws, capacitors, or resistors. The electrical engineer told to build a circuit does not go out and invent her own switches or capacitors. She can build a circuit using off-the-shelf components whose performance is expressed using standard measurements. This is the dream of one group of synthetic biologists: that biological engineering truly become engineering, with biological black boxes that perform all of the standard functions of electrical or mechanical engineering—measuring flow, reacting to a high signal by giving out a low signal, or vice versa, starting or terminating a sequence, connecting the energy of one process to another, and so on. + +Of course an engineer understands the principle behind a ratchet, or a valve, but he does not have to go through the process of thinking “as part of this design, I will have to create a thing that lets stuff flow through one way and not the other.” The valve is the mechanical unit that stands for that thought, a concept reified in standardized material form which does not need to be taken apart and parsed each time it is used. By contrast, the synthetic biologists claim, much of current biotechnological experimentation operates the way a seventeenth-century artisan did. Think of the gunsmith making beautiful one-off classics for his aristocratic patrons, without standardized calibers, parts, or even standard-gauge springs or screws. The process produces the gun, but it does not use, or produce, standard parts that can also be used by the next gunsmith. + +Is this portrayal of biology correct? Does it involve some hyping of the new hot field, some denigration of the older techniques? I would be shocked, shocked, to find there was hype involved in the scientific or academic enterprise. But whatever the degree to which the novelty of this process is being subtly inflated, it is hard to avoid being impressed by the projects that this group of synthetic biologists has undertaken. The MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts, for example, has exactly the goal I have just described. + +_1 The development of well-specified, standard, and interchangeable biological parts is a critical step towards the design and construction of integrated biological systems. The MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts supports this goal by recording and indexing biological parts that are currently being built and offering synthesis and assembly services to construct new parts, devices, and systems. . . . In the summer of 2004, the Registry contained about 100 basic parts such as operators, protein coding regions, and transcriptional terminators, and devices such as logic gates built from these basic parts. Today the number of parts has increased to about 700 available parts and 2000 defined parts. The Registry believes in the idea that a standard biological part should be well specified and able to be paired with other parts into subassemblies and whole systems. Once the parameters of these parts are determined and standardized, simulation and design of genetic systems will become easier and more reliable. The parts in the Registry are not simply segments of DNA, they are functional units.~{ http://parts.mit.edu/registry/index.php/Help:About_the_Registry. }~ + +Using the Registry, a group of MIT scientists organizes an annual contest called iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition. Students can draw from the standard parts that the Registry contains, and perhaps contribute their own creations back to it. What kinds of “genetically engineered machines” do they build? + +_1 A team of eight undergraduates from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia—cheering and leaping onto MIT’s Kresge Auditorium stage in green team T-shirts—won the grand prize earlier this month at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition at MIT. The group—which received an engraved award in the shape of a large aluminum Lego piece—explored a way to use engineered cells to intercept the body’s excessive response to infection, which can lead to a fatal condition called sepsis. The goal of the 380 students on 35 university teams from around the world was to build biological systems the way a contractor would build a house—with a toolkit of standard parts. iGEM participants spent the summer immersed in the growing field of synthetic biology, creating simple systems from interchangeable parts that operate in living cells. Biology, once thought too complicated to be engineered like a clock, computer or microwave oven, has proven to be open to manipulation at the genetic level. The new creations are engineered from snippets of DNA, the molecules that run living cells.~{“Gene Machine: Cells Engineered to Prevent Sepsis Win Synthetic Biology Competition,” Science Daily (November 15, 2006), available at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061114193826.htm. }~ + +Other iGEM entries have included E. coli bacteria that had been engineered to smell like wintergreen while they were growing and dividing and like bananas when they were finished, a biologically engineered detector that would change color when exposed to unhealthy levels of arsenic in drinking water, a method of programming mouse stem cells to “differentiate” into more specialized cells on command, and the mat of picture-taking bacteria I mentioned earlier. + +No matter how laudable the arsenic detector or the experimental technique dealing with sepsis, or how cool the idea of banana-scented, picture-taking bacteria, this kind of enterprise will cause some of you to shudder. Professor Drew Endy, one of the pioneers in this field, believes that part of that reaction stems from simple novelty. “A lot of people who were scaring folks in 1975 now have Nobel prizes.”~{ http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/igem.html. }~ But even if inchoate, the concerns that synthetic biology arouses stem from more than novelty. There is a deep-seated fear that if we see the natural world of biology as merely another system that we can routinely engineer, we will have extended our technocratic methods into a realm that was only intermittently subject to them in a way that threatens both our structure of self-understanding and our ecosystem. + +To this, the synthetic biologists respond that we are already engineering nature. In their view, planned, structured, and rationalized genetic engineering poses fewer dangers than poorly understood interventions to produce some specific result in comparative ignorance of the processes we are employing to do so. If the “code” is transparent, subject to review by a peer community, and based on known parts and structures, each identified by a standard genetic “barcode,” then the chance of detecting problems and solving them is higher. And while the dangers are real and not to be minimized, the potential benefits—the lives saved because the scarce antimalarial drug can now be manufactured by energetic E. coli or because a cheap test can demonstrate arsenic contamination in a village well—are not to be minimized either. + +I first became aware of synthetic biology when a number of the scientists working on the Registry of Standard Biological Parts contacted me and my colleague Arti Rai. They did not use these exact words, but their question boiled down to “how does synthetic biology fare in intellectual property’s categories, and how can we keep the basics of the science open for all to use?” As you can tell from this book, I find intellectual property fascinating—lamentably so perhaps. Nevertheless, I was depressed by the idea that scientists would have to spend their valuable time trying to work out how to save their discipline from being messed up by the law. Surely it would be better to have them doing, well, science? + +They have cause for concern. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, synthetic biology shares characteristics of both software and biotechnology. Remember the focus on reducing functions to black boxes. Synthetic biologists are looking for the biological equivalents of switches, valves, and inverters. The more abstractly these are described, the more they come to resemble simple algebraic expressions, replete with “if, then” statements and instructions that resolve to “if x, then y, if not x, then z.” + +If this sounds reminiscent of the discussion of the Turing machine, it should. When the broad rules for software and business methods were enunciated by the federal courts, software was already a developed industry. Even though the rules would have allowed the equivalent of patenting the alphabet, the very maturity of the field minimized the disruption such patents could cause. Of course “prior art” was not always written down. Even when it was recorded, it was sometimes badly handled by the examiners and the courts, partly because they set a very undemanding standard for “ordinary expertise” in the art. Nevertheless, there was still a lot of prior experience and it rendered some of the more basic claims incredible. That is not true in the synthetic biology field. + +Consider a recent article in Nature, “A universal RNAi-based logic evaluator that operates in mammalian cells.”~{Keller Rinaudo et al., “A universal RNAi-based logic evaluator that operates in mammalian cells,” Nature Biotechnology 25 (2007): 795–801.}~ The scientists describe their task in terms that should be familiar. “A molecular automaton is an engineered molecular system coupled to a (bio)molecular environment by ‘flow of incoming messages and the actions of outgoing messages,’ where the incoming messages are processed by an ‘intermediate set of elements,’ that is, a computer.” The article goes on to describe some of the key elements of so-called “Boolean algebra”—“or,” “and,” “not,” and so on—implemented in living mammalian cells. + +These inscriptions of Boolean algebra in cells and DNA sequences can be patented. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, for example, owns patent number 6,774,222: + +_1 This invention relates to novel molecular constructs that act as various logic elements, i.e., gates and flip-flops. . . . The basic functional unit of the construct comprises a nucleic acid having at least two protein binding sites that cannot be simultaneously occupied by their cognate binding protein. This basic unit can be assembled in any number of formats providing molecular constructs that act like traditional digital logic elements (flips-flops, gates, inverters, etc.). + +My colleagues Arti Rai and Sapna Kumar have performed a patent search and found many more patents of similar breadth.~{Sapna Kumar and Arti Rai, “Synthetic Biology: The Intellectual Property Puzzle,” Texas Law Review 85 (2007): 1745–1768.}~ + +What is the concern? After all, this is cutting-edge science. These seem like novel, nonobvious inventions with considerable utility. The concern is that the change in the rules over patentable subject matter, coupled with the Patent and Trademark Office’s handling of both software and biotechnology, will come together so that the patent is not over some particular biological circuit, but, rather, over Boolean algebra itself as implemented by any biotechnological means. It would be as if, right at the beginning of the computer age, we had issued patents over formal logic in software—not over a particular computer design, but over the idea of a computer or a binary circuit itself. + +“By means of a computer” was the magic phrase that caused the walls around the public domain of algorithms and ideas to crumble. Will “by means of a biological circuit” do the same? And—to repeat the key point—unlike computer science, biotechnology is developing after the hypertrophy of our intellectual property system. We do not have the immune system provided by the established practices and norms, the “prior art,” even the community expectations that protected software from the worst effects of patents over the building blocks of science. + +Following the example of software, the founders of the MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts had the idea of protecting their discipline from overly expansive intellectual property claims by turning those rights against themselves. Free and open source software developers have created a “commons” using the copyright over the code to impose a license on their software, one that requires subsequent developers to keep the source open and to give improvements back to the software commons—a virtuous cycle. Could the Registry of Standard Biological Parts do the same thing? The software commons rests on a license. But, as I pointed out in the last section, the license depends on an underlying property right. It is because I have automatic copyright over my code that I can tell you “use it according to these terms or you will be violating my copyright.” Is there a copyright over the products of synthetic biology? To create one we would have to take the extension of copyright that was required to reach software and stretch it even further. Bill Gates might argue for intellectual property rights over software using the logic of his article in Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Will the argument for copyrights over synthetic biological coding be “I need the property right so I can create a commons”? + +In practice, I think the answer is, and should be, no. Of course, one could think of this as just another type of coding, making expressive choices in a code of A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s, just as a programmer does in Java or C++. Yet, software was already a stretch for copyright law. Synthetic biology strikes me as a subject matter that the courts, Congress, and the Copyright Office are unlikely to want to cram into copyright’s already distorted outlines—particularly given the obvious availability of patent rights. As a matter of conceptual intuition, I think they will see biological subject matter as harder to fit into the categories of original expressive writing. On one level, yes, it is all information, but, on another level, the idea of programming with gene sequences will probably raise hackles that the idea of coding inside a programming language never would. As a normative matter, I think it would be a poor choice to apply copyright to the products of synthetic biology. Attempting to produce a particular open commons, one might enable the kind of hundred-year monopolies over functional objects that the critics of software copyright initially feared. + +If one wishes to keep the basic ideas and techniques of synthetic biology open for subsequent innovators, there are alternatives to the idea of a synthetic biology open source license. The Registry of Standard Biological Parts or the BioBricks Foundation can simply put all their work into the public domain immediately. (This, indeed, is what they are currently doing.) Such a scheme lacks one key feature of open source software: the right to force subsequent innovators to release their code back into the commons. Yet it would make subsequent patents on the material impossible, because it had already been published. + +Regardless of the decisions made about the future of synthetic biology, I think its story—coupled to that of software and biotechnology more generally—presents us with an important lesson. I started the chapter with the metaphor of Procrustes’s bed. But in the case of software and biotechnology, both the bed—the categories of copyright and patent—and its inhabitants—the new technologies—were stretched. Cracks formed in the boundaries that were supposed to prevent copyright from being applied to functional articles, to prevent patents extending to cover ideas, algorithms, and business methods. + +Until this point, though the science would have been strange to Jefferson or his contemporaries, the underlying issue would have been familiar. The free-trade, Scottish Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have scoffed at the idea that business methods or algorithms could be patented, let alone that one could patent the “or,” “if-then,” and “not” functions of Boolean algebra as implemented by a biological mechanism. The response, presumably, is to fine tune our patent standards—to patent the mousetrap and the corkscrew, not the notion of catching mice or opening bottles by mechanical means. Still less should we allow the patenting of algebra. These are fine points. Later scholarship has added formulae, data, and historical analysis to back up Jefferson’s concerns, while never surpassing his prose. As I said at the beginning of the book, if we were to print out the Jefferson Warning and slip it into the shirt pocket of every legislator and regulator, our policy would be remarkably improved. + +But it is here that the story takes a new turn, something that neither Jefferson nor the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment had thought of, something that goes beyond their cautions not to confuse intellectual property with physical property, to keep its boundaries, scope, and term as small as possible while still encouraging the desired innovation. + +Think of the reaction of the synthetic biologists at MIT. They feared that the basic building blocks of their new discipline could be locked up, slowing the progress of science and research by inserting intellectual property rights at the wrong point in the research cycle. To solve the problem they were led seriously to consider claiming copyright over the products of synthetic biology—to fight overly broad patent rights with a privately constructed copyright commons, to ride the process of legal expansion and turn it to their own ends. As I pointed out earlier, I think the tactic would not fare well in this particular case. But it is an example of a new move in the debate over intellectual property, a new tactic: the attempt to create a privately constructed commons where the public domain created by the state does not give you the freedom that you believe creativity needs in order to thrive. It is to that tactic, and the distributed creativity that it enables, that I will turn to now. + +2~ Chapter 7: Further Reading + +As the introduction to this chapter suggests, the intersection of intellectual property law and science and technology has been attracting considerable attention from scholars recently, some of it dismayed. The difficulty—and this is why I chose the case-study method for this chapter—is that there are multiple sets of concerns and they resist easy summary. + +The first set of concerns is that the granting of intellectual property rights far “upstream”—that is very close to basic science—is impeding the process of science and technology. In addition, scholars have argued that the sheer volume of intellectual property claims will produce an anti-commons effect or patent thicket. Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research,” Science 280 (1998): 698–701. The argument here is that the closer one is to basic research the stronger the case is for leaving the information untouched by property rights—allowing all to draw on it and develop “downstream” innovations, which can then be covered by intellectual property rights. In practice, two concerns are often alluded to: the fact that much of the basic research is state funded and conducted in nonprofit universities and the belief that the transaction costs of licensing will inhibit research or concentrate it in a few hands. Research on genes indicating a propensity to breast cancer is a frequently cited example of the latter problem. Fabienne Orsi and Benjamin Coriat, “Are ‘Strong Patents’ Beneficial to Innovative Activities? Lessons from the Genetic Testing for Breast Cancer Controversies,” Industrial and Corporate Change 14 (2005): 1205–1221. But here, too, anecdote outweighs evidence. Timothy Caulfield, Robert M. Cook-Deegan, F. Scott Kieff, and John P. Walsh, “Evidence and Anecdotes: An Analysis of Human Gene Patenting Controversies,” Nature Biotechnology 24 (2006): 1091–1094. On the other side of this debate is the argument that having intellectual property rights, even on state-funded university research, will facilitate commercialization—allowing the commercial investor to know that it will acquire sufficient rights to exclude others from the innovation. This is the premise behind “Bayh-Dole,” the act (P.L. 96-517, Patent and Trademark Act Amendments of 1980; codified in 35 U.S.C. § 200–212 and implemented by 37 C.F.R. 401) that sets up the framework for technology transfer from state funded university research. + +To date, the evidence for the anti-commons effect inside academia has been equivocal, at best. Walsh, Cohen, and Arora found no such effect—but one main reason for the absence of problems appeared to be that scientists were simply flouting the law (or were ignorant of it). John P. Walsh, Ashish Arora, and Wesley M. Cohen, “Effects of Research Tool Patents and Licensing on Biomedical Innovation,” in Patents in the Knowledge-Based Economy, ed. Wesley M. Cohen and Stephen A. Merrill (Washington D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003), 285–340. I would question whether a research system based on massive law-breaking is sustainable, particularly after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit clarified for us that there effectively is no academic research exemption in U.S. patent law. Madey v. Duke University, 307 F.3d 1351 (Fed. Cir. 2002). The National Research Council’s committee on the subject found few problems now but possible cause for concern in the future. Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in Genomic and Protein Research and Innovation, National Research Council, Reaping the Benefits of Genomic and Proteomic Research: Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation, and Public Health (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 2005). A study by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science also reported few problems, though a closer reading revealed that licensing produced delays in research—some of them considerable—but did not cause it to be abandoned. The effects were greatest on industry scientists. American Association for the Advancement of Science, Directorate for Science and Policy Programs, International Intellectual Property Experiences: A Report of Four Countries (Washington, D.C.: AAAS, 2007), available at http://sippi.aaas.org/Pubs/SIPPI_Four_Country_Report.pdf. Fiona Murray and Scott Stern, “Do Formal Intellectual Property Rights Hinder the Free Flow of Scientific Knowledge? An Empirical Test of the Anti-Commons Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 63 (2007): 648–687, found a definite but modest anti-commons effect, restricting further research and publication on patented materials. Similar concerns have been raised about access to scientific data. J. H. Reichman and Paul Uhlir, “A Contractually Reconstructed Research Commons for Scientific Data in a Highly Protectionist Intellectual Property Environment,” Law and Contemporary Problems 66 (2003): 315–462. + +What about the opposite question? Are we getting benefits from the process of increasing the use of intellectual property rights in basic university research? The best study of the effects of the current university technology transfer process found little definitive evidence of net benefits and some cause for concern that the traditional role of universities in freely supplying knowledge is being undermined. David Mowery, Richard Nelson, Bhaven Sampat, and Arvids Ziedonis, Ivory Tower and Industrial Innovation: University-Industry Technology Transfer Before and After the Bayh-Dole Act (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford Business Press, 2004). + +Beyond the questions about the effects of upstream intellectual property rights on basic research lay the much harder questions about the effects of intellectual property rights on the development of technologies. Here there is much evidence that decisions about patent scope are vital and, as Robert Merges and Richard Nelson reveal, that poor decisions can hamper or cripple the development of disruptive technologies. Robert Merges and Richard R. Nelson, “On the Complex Economics of Patent Scope,” Columbia Law Review 90 (1990): 839–916; Suzanne Scotchmer, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Cumulative Research and the Patent Law,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5 (1991): 29–41. The fear, highlighted in this chapter, is that poor decisions about patent scope and subject matter can inhibit technological change. On the subject of that fear, there is much more evidence. James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer, Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk (Princeton: N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner, Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What To Do About It (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). + +1~ Chapter 8: A Creative Commons + +If you go to the familiar Google search page and click the intimidating link marked “advanced search,” you come to a page that gives you more fine-grained control over the framing of your query. Nestled among the choices that allow you to pick your desired language, or exclude raunchy content, is an option that says “usage rights.” Click “free to use or share” and then search for “physics textbook” and you can download a 1,200-page physics textbook, copy it, or even print it out and hand it to your students. Search for “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” and you will find Cory Doctorow’s fabulous science fiction novel, online, in full, for free. His other novels are there too—with the willing connivance of his commercial publisher. Search for “David Byrne, My Fair Lady” and you will be able to download Byrne’s song and make copies for your friends. You’ll find songs from Gilberto Gil and the Beastie Boys on the same page. No need to pay iTunes or worry about breaking the law. + +Go to the “advanced” page on Flickr, the popular photo sharing site, and you will find a similar choice marked “Creative Commons License.” Check that box and then search for “Duke Chapel” and you will get a selection of beautiful photos of the lovely piece of faux Gothic architecture that sits about three hundred yards from the office where I am writing these words. You can copy those photos, and 66 million others on different subjects, share them with your friends, print them for your wall, and, in some cases, even use them commercially. The same basic tools can be found on a range of specialized search engines with names like OWL Music Search, BlipTV, SpinExpress, and OERCommons. Searching those sites, or just sticking with the advanced options on Google or Yahoo, will get you courses in music theory, moral philosophy, and C++ programming from famous universities; a full-length movie called Teach by Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim; and free architectural drawings that can be used to build low-cost housing. At the Wellcome Library, you will find two thousand years of medical images that can be shared freely. Searching for “skeleton” is particularly fun. You can even go to your favorite search engine, type in the title of this book, find a site that will allow you to download it, and send the PDF to a hundred friends, warmly anticipating their rapturous enjoyment. (Better ask them first.) + +All this copying and sharing and printing sounds illegal, but it is not (at least if you went through the steps I described). And the things you can do with this content do not stop with simply reproducing it, printing it on paper, or sending it by e-mail. Much of it can be changed, customized, remixed—you could rewrite the module of the class and insert your own illustrations, animate the graphs showing calculus in action, morph the photo into something new. If you search for a musician with the unpromising name “Brad Sucks,” you will find a Web site bearing the modest subtitle “A one man band with no fans.” Brad, it turns out, does not suck and has many fans. What makes him particularly interesting is that he allows those fans, or anyone else for that matter, to remix his music and post their creations online. I am particularly fond of the Matterovermind remix of “Making Me Nervous,” but it may not be to your taste. Go to a site called ccMixter and you will find that musicians, famous and obscure, are inviting you to sample and remix their music. Or search Google for Colin Mutchler and listen to a haunting song called “My Life Changed.” Mr. Mutchler and a violinist called Cora Beth Bridges whom he had never met created that song together. He posted a song called “My Life” online, giving anyone the freedom to add to it, and she did—“My Life.” Changed. + +On December 15, 2002, in San Francisco, a charitable organization called Creative Commons was launched. (Full disclosure: I have been a proud board member of Creative Commons since its creation.) Creative Commons was the brainchild of Larry Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred. All the works I have just described—and this book itself—are under Creative Commons licenses. The authors and creators of those works have chosen to share it with the world, with you, under generous terms, while reserving certain rights for themselves. They may have allowed you to copy it, but not to alter it—to make derivative works. Or they may have allowed you to use it as you wish, so long as you do so noncommercially. Or they may have given you complete freedom, provided only that you attribute them as the owner of the work. There are a few simple choices and a limited menu of permutations. + +What makes these licenses unusual is that they can be read by two groups that normal licenses exclude—human beings (rather than just lawyers) and computers. The textbooks, photos, films, and songs have a tasteful little emblem on them marked with a “cc” which, if you click on it, links to a “Commons Deed,” a simple one-page explanation of the freedoms you have. There are even icons—a dollar with a slash through it, for example—that make things even clearer. Better still, the reason the search engines could find this material is that the licenses also “tell” search engines exactly what freedoms have been given. Simple “metadata” (a fancy word for tags that computers can read) mark the material with its particular level of freedoms. This is not digital rights management. The license will not try to control your computer, install itself on your hard drive, or break your TV. It is just an expression of the terms under which the author has chosen to release the work. That means that if you search Google or Flickr for “works I am free to share, even commercially,” you know you can go into business selling those textbooks, or printing those photos on mugs and T-shirts, so long as you give the author attribution. If you search for “show me works I can build on,” you know you are allowed to make what copyright lawyers call “derivative works.” + +The idea behind Creative Commons was simple. As I pointed out in the first chapter, copyright adheres automatically on “fixation.” As soon as you lift the pen from the paper, click the shutter, or save the file, the work is copyrighted. No formalities. No need even to use the little symbol ©. Once copyrighted, the work is protected by the full might of the legal system. And the legal system’s default setting is that “all rights are reserved” to the author, which means effectively that anyone but the author is forbidden to copy, adapt, or publicly perform the work. This might have been a fine rule for a world in which there were high barriers to publication. The material that was not published was theoretically under an “all rights reserved” regime, but who cared? It was practically inaccessible anyway. After the development of the World Wide Web, all that had changed. Suddenly people and institutions, millions upon millions of them, were putting content online—blogs, photo sites, videologs, podcasts, course materials. It was all just up there. + +But what could you do with it? You could read it, or look at it, or play it presumably—otherwise why had the author put it up? But could you copy it? Put it on your own site? Include it in a manual used by the whole school district? E-mail it to someone? Translate it into your own language? Quote beyond the boundaries of fair use? Adapt for your own purposes? Take the song and use it for your video? Of course, if you really wanted the work a lot, you could try to contact the author—not always easy. And one by one, we could all contact each other and ask for particular types of permissions for use. If the use was large enough or widespread enough, perhaps we would even think that an individual contract was necessary. Lawyers could be hired and terms hashed out. + +All this would be fine if the author wished to retain all the rights that copyright gives and grant them only individually, for pay, with lawyers in the room. But what about the authors, the millions upon millions of writers, and photographers and musicians, and filmmakers and bloggers and scholars, who very much want to share their work? The Cora Beth Bridges of the world are never going to write individual letters to the Colin Mutchlers of the world asking for permission to make a derivative work out of “My Life.” The person who translated my articles into Spanish or Mandarin, or the people who repost them on their Web sites, or include them in their anthologies might have asked permission if I had not granted it in advance. I doubt though that I would have been contacted by the very talented person who took images from a comic book about fair use that I co-wrote and mashed them up with words from a book by Larry Lessig, and some really nice music from someone none of us had ever met. Without some easy way to give permission in advance, and to do so in a way that human beings and computers, as well as lawyers, can understand, those collaborations will never happen, though all the parties would be delighted if they did. These are losses from “failed sharing”—every bit as real as losses from unauthorized copying, but much less in the public eye. + + +Creative Commons was conceived as a private “hack” to produce a more fine-tuned copyright structure, to replace “all rights reserved” with “some rights reserved” for those who wished to do so. It tried to do for culture what the General Public License had done for software. It made use of the same technologies that had created the issue: the technologies that made fixation of expressive content and its distribution to the world something that people, as well as large concentrations of capital, could do. As a result, it was able to attract a surprising range of support—Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America and Hillary Rosen of the Recording Industry Association of America, as well as John Perry Barlow of the Grateful Dead, whose attitude toward intellectual property was distinctly less favorable. Why could they all agree? These licenses were not a choice forced on anyone. The author was choosing what to share and under what terms. But that sharing created something different, something new. It was more than a series of isolated actions. The result was the creation of a global “commons” of material that was open to all, provided they adhered to the terms of the licenses. Suddenly it was possible to think of creating a work entirely out of Creative Commons-licensed content—text, photos, movies, music. Your coursebook on music theory, or your documentary on the New York skyline, could combine your own original material with high-quality text, illustrations, photos, video, and music created by strangers. One could imagine entire fields—of open educational content or of open music—in which creators could work without keeping one eye nervously on legal threats or permissions. + +From one perspective, Creative Commons looks like a simple device for enabling exercise of authorial control, remarkable only for the extremely large number of authors making that choice and the simplicity with which they can do so. From another, it can be seen as re-creating, by private choice and automated licenses, the world of creativity before law had permeated to the finest, most atomic level of science and culture—the world of folk music or 1950s jazz, of jokes and slang and recipes, of Ray Charles’s “rewording” of gospel songs, or of Isaac Newton describing himself as “standing on the shoulders of giants” (and not having to pay them royalties). Remember, that is not a world without intellectual property. The cookbook might be copyrighted even if the recipe was not. Folk music makes it to the popular scene and is sold as a copyrighted product. The jazz musician “freezes” a particular version of the improvisation on a communally shared set of musical motifs, records it, and sometimes even claims ownership of it. Newton himself was famously touchy about precedence and attribution, even if not about legal ownership of his ideas. But it is a world in which creativity and innovation proceed on the basis of an extremely large “commons” of material into which it was never imagined that property rights could permeate. + +For many of us, Creative Commons was conceived of as a second-best solution created by private agreement because the best solution could not be obtained through public law. The best solution would be a return of the formality requirement—a requirement that one at least write the words “James Boyle copyright 2008,” for example, in order to get more than 100 years of legal protection backed by “strict liability” and federal criminal law. Those who did not wish to have the legal monopoly could omit the phrase and the work would pass into the public domain, with a period of time during which the author could claim copyright retrospectively if the phrase was omitted by accident. The default position would become freedom and the dead weight losses caused by giving legal monopolies to those who had not asked for them, and did not want them, would disappear. To return to the words of Justice Brandeis that I quoted at the beginning of the book: + +_1 The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use. Upon these incorporeal productions the attribute of property is continued after such communication only in certain classes of cases where public policy has seemed to demand it. + +Brandeis echoes the Jeffersonian preference for a norm of freedom, with narrowly constrained exceptions only when necessary. That preference means that the commons of which I spoke is a relatively large one—property rights are the exception, not the norm. Of course, many of those who use Creative Commons licenses might disagree with that policy preference and with every idea in this book. They may worship the DMCA or just want a way to get their song or their article out there while retaining some measure of control. That does not matter. The licenses are agnostic. Like a land trust which has a local pro-growth industrialist and a local environmentalist on its board, they permit us to come to a restricted agreement on goals (“make sure this space is available to the public”) even when underlying ideologies differ. They do this using those most conservative of tools—property rights and licenses. And yet, if our vision of property is “sole and despotic dominion,” these licenses have created something very different—a commons has been made out of private and exclusive rights. + +My point here is that Creative Commons licenses or the tools of free and open source software—to which I will turn in a moment—represent something more than merely a second-best solution to a poorly chosen rule. They represent a visible example of a type of creativity, of innovation, which has been around for a very long time, but which has reached new salience on the Internet—distributed creativity based around a shared commons of material. + +2~ Free and Open Software + +In 2007, Clay Shirky, an incisive commentator on networked culture, gave a speech which anyone but a Net aficionado might have found simultaneously romantic and impenetrable. He started by telling the story of a Shinto shrine that has been painstakingly rebuilt to exactly the same plan many times over its 1,300-year life—and which was denied certification as a historic building as a result. Shirky’s point? What was remarkable was not the building. It was a community that would continue to build and rebuild the thing for more than a millennium. + +From there, Shirky shifted to a discussion of his attempt to get AT&/T to adopt the high-level programming language Perl—which is released as free and open source software under the General Public License. From its initial creation by Larry Wall in 1987, Perl has been adapted, modified, and developed by an extraordinary range of talented programmers, becoming more powerful and flexible in the process. As Shirky recounts the story, when the AT&T representatives asked “where do you get your support?” Shirky responded, “ ‘we get our support from a community’—which to them sounded a bit like ‘we get our Thursdays from a banana.’ ” Shirky concluded the speech thus: + +_1 We have always loved one another. We’re human. It’s something we’re good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has been quite limited. With love alone, you can plan a birthday party. Add coordinating tools and you can write an operating system. In the past, we would do little things for love, but big things required money. Now we can do big things for love.~{Clay Shirky, “Supernova Talk: The Internet Runs on Love,” available at http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/02/supernova-talk-the-internet-runs-on-love.html; see also Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).}~ + +There are a few people out there for whom “operating systems” and “love” could plausibly coexist in a sentence not constructed by an infinite number of monkeys. For most though, the question is, what could he possibly have meant? + +The arguments in this book so far have taken as a given the incentives and collective action problems to which intellectual property is a response. Think of Chapter 1 and the economic explanation of “public goods.” The fact that it is expensive to do the research to find the right drug, but cheap to manufacture it once it is identified provides a reason to create a legal right of exclusion. In those realms where the innovation would not have happened anyway, the legal right of exclusion gives a power to price above cost, which in turn gives incentives to creators and distributors. So goes the theory. I have discussed the extent to which the logic of enclosure works for the commons of the mind as well as it did for the arable commons, taking into account the effects of an information society and a global Internet. What I have not done is asked whether a global network actually transforms some of our assumptions about how creation happens in a way that reshapes the debate about the need for incentives, at least in certain areas. This, however, is exactly the question that needs to be asked. + +For anyone interested in the way that networks can enable new collaborative methods of production, the free software movement, and the broader but less political movement that goes under the name of open source software, provide interesting case studies.~{See Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub., 2001); Peter Wayner, Free for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000); Eben Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” First Monday 4 (1999), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594 [Ed. note: originally published as http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_8/index.html, the link has changed].}~ Open source software is released under a series of licenses, the most important being the General Public License (GPL). The GPL specifies that anyone may copy the software, provided the license remains attached and the source code for the software always remains available.~{Proprietary, or “binary only,” software is generally released only after the source code has been compiled into machine-readable object code, a form that is impenetrable to the user. Even if you were a master programmer, and the provisions of the Copyright Act, the appropriate licenses, and the DMCA did not forbid you from doing so, you would be unable to modify commercial proprietary software to customize it for your needs, remove a bug, or add a feature. Open source programmers say, disdainfully, that it is like buying a car with the hood welded shut. See, e.g., Wayner, Free for All, 264.}~ Users may add to or modify the code, may build on it and incorporate it into their own work, but if they do so, then the new program created is also covered by the GPL. Some people refer to this as the “viral” nature of the license; others find the term offensive.~{See Brian Behlendorf, “Open Source as a Business Strategy,” in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, ed. Chris DiBona et al. (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly, 1999), 149, 163.}~ The point, however, is that the open quality of the creative enterprise spreads. It is not simply a donation of a program or a work to the public domain, but a continual accretion in which all gain the benefits of the program on pain of agreeing to give their additions and innovations back to the communal project. + +For the whole structure to work without large-scale centralized coordination, the creation process has to be modular, with units of different sizes and complexities, each requiring slightly different expertise, all of which can be added together to make a grand whole. I can work on the sendmail program, you on the search algorithms. More likely, lots of people try, their efforts are judged by the community, and the best ones are adopted. Under these conditions, this curious mix of Kropotkin and Adam Smith, Richard Dawkins and Richard Stallman, we get distributed production without having to rely on the proprietary exclusion model. The whole enterprise will be much, much, much greater than the sum of the parts. + +What’s more, and this is a truly fascinating twist, when the production process does need more centralized coordination, some governance that guides how the sticky modular bits are put together, it is at least theoretically possible that we can come up with the control system in exactly the same way. In this sense, distributed production is potentially recursive. Governance processes, too, can be assembled through distributed methods on a global network, by people with widely varying motivations, skills, and reserve prices.~{One organization theorist to whom I mentioned the idea said, “Ugh, governance by food fight.” Anyone who has ever been on an organizational listserv, a global production process run by people who are long on brains and short on social skills, knows how accurate that description is. E pur si muove.}~ + +The free and open source software movements have produced software that rivals or, some claim, exceeds the capabilities of conventional proprietary, binary-only software.~{See Bruce Brown, “Enterprise-Level Security Made Easy,” PC Magazine (January 15, 2002), 28; Jim Rapoza, “Open-Source Fever Spreads,” PC Week (December 13, 1999), 1.}~ Its adoption on the “enterprise level” is impressive, as is the number and enthusiasm of the various technical testaments to its strengths. You have almost certainly used open source software or been its beneficiary. Your favorite Web site or search engine may run on it. If your browser is Firefox, you use it every day. It powers surprising things around you—your ATM or your TiVo. The plane you are flying in may be running it. It just works. + +Governments have taken notice. The United Kingdom, for example, concluded last year that open source software “will be considered alongside proprietary software and contracts will be awarded on a value-for-money basis.” The Office of Government Commerce said open source software is “a viable desktop alternative for the majority of government users” and “can generate significant savings. . . . These trials have proved that open source software is now a real contender alongside proprietary solutions. If commercial companies and other governments are taking it seriously, then so must we.”~{“UK Government Report Gives Nod to Open Source,” Desktop Linux (October 28, 2004), available at http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS5013620917.html. }~ Sweden found open source software to be in many cases “equivalent to—or better than—commercial products” and concluded that software procurement “shall evaluate open software as well as commercial solutions, to provide better competition in the market.”~{ “Cases of Official Recognition of Free and Open Source Software,” available at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/opensource/cases/index_en.htm. }~ + +What is remarkable is not merely that the software works technically, but that it is an example of widespread, continued, high-quality innovation. The really remarkable thing is that it works socially, as a continuing system, sustained by a network consisting both of volunteers and of individuals employed by companies such as IBM and Google whose software “output” is nevertheless released into the commons. + +Here, it seems, we have a classic public good: code that can be copied freely and sold or redistributed without paying the creator or creators. This sounds like a tragedy of the commons of the kind that I described in the first three chapters of the book. Obviously, with a nonrival, nonexcludable good like software, this method of production cannot be sustained; there are inadequate incentives to ensure continued production. E pur si muove, as Galileo is apocryphally supposed to have said in the face of Cardinal Bellarmine’s certainties: “And yet it moves.”~{ E. Cobham Brewer, The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London: John Cassell, 1894), 1111–1112. }~ Or, as Clay Shirky put it, “we get our support from a community.” + +For a fair amount of time, most economists looked at open source software and threw up their hands. From their point of view, “we get our support from a community” did indeed sound like “we get our Thursdays from a banana.” There is an old economics joke about the impossibility of finding a twenty-dollar bill lying on a sidewalk. In an efficient market, the money would already have been picked up. (Do not wait for a punch line.) When economists looked at open source software they saw not a single twenty-dollar bill lying implausibly on the sidewalk, but whole bushels of them. Why would anyone work on a project the fruits of which could be appropriated by anyone? Since copyright adheres on fixation—since the computer programmer already has the legal power to exclude others—why would he or she choose to take the extra step of adopting a license that undermined that exclusion? Why would anyone choose to allow others to use and modify the results of their hard work? Why would they care whether the newcomers, in turn, released their contributions back into the commons? + +The puzzles went beyond the motivations of the people engaging in this particular form of “distributed creativity.” How could these implausible contributions be organized? How should we understand this strange form of organization? It is not a company or a government bureaucracy. What could it be? To Richard Epstein, the answer was obvious and pointed to a reason the experiment must inevitably end in failure: + +_1 The open source movement shares many features with a workers’ commune, and is likely to fail for the same reason: it cannot scale up to meet its own successes. To see the long-term difficulty, imagine a commune entirely owned by its original workers who share pro rata in its increases in value. The system might work well in the early days when the workforce remains fixed. But what happens when a given worker wants to quit? Does that worker receive in cash or kind his share of the gain in value during the period of his employment? If not, then the run-up in value during his period of employment will be gobbled up by his successor—a recipe for immense resentment. Yet that danger can be ducked only by creating a capital structure that gives present employees separable interests in either debt or equity in exchange for their contributions to the company. But once that is done, then the worker commune is converted into a traditional company whose shareholders and creditors contain a large fraction of its present and former employers. The bottom line is that idealistic communes cannot last for the long haul.~{ Richard Epstein, “Why Open Source Is Unsustainable,” FT.com (October 21, 2004), available at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/78d9812a-2386-11d9-aee5-00000e2511c8.html. }~ + +There are a number of ideas here. First, “idealistic communes cannot last for the long haul.” The skepticism about the staying power of idealism sounds plausible today, though there are some relatively prominent counterexamples. The Catholic Church is also a purportedly idealistic institution. It is based on canonical texts that are subject to even more heated arguments about textual interpretation than those which surround the General Public License. It seems to be surviving the long haul quite well. + +The second reason for doomsaying is provided by the word “commune.” The problems Epstein describes are real where tangible property and excludable assets are involved. But is the free and open source community a “commune,” holding tangible property in common and excluding the rest of us? Must it worry about how to split up the proceeds if someone leaves because of bad karma? Or is it a community creating and offering to the world the ability to use, for free, nonrival goods that all of us can have, use, and reinterpret as we wish? In that kind of commune, each of us could take all the property the community had created with us when we left and the commune would still be none the poorer. Jefferson was not thinking of software when he talked of the person who lights his taper from mine but does not darken me, but the idea is the same one. Copying software is not like fighting over who owns the scented candles or the VW bus. Does the person who wrote the “kernel” of the operating system resent the person who, much later, writes the code to manage Internet Protocol addresses on a wireless network? Why should he? Now the program does more cool stuff. Both of them can use it. What’s to resent? + +How about idealism? There is indeed a broad debate on the reasons that the system works: Are the motivations those of the gift economy? Is it, as Shirky says, simply the flowering of an innate love that human beings have always had for each other and for sharing, now given new strength by the geographic reach and cooperative techniques the Internet provides? “With love alone, you can plan a birthday party. Add coordinating tools and you can write an operating system.” Is this actually a form of potlatch, in which one gains prestige by the extravagance of the resources one “wastes”? Is open source an implicit résumé-builder that pays off in other ways? Is it driven by the species-being, the innate human love of creation that continually drives us to create new things even when homo economicus would be at home in bed, mumbling about public goods problems?~{ For a seminal statement, see Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant,” 45: “ ‘[I]ncentives’ is merely a metaphor, and as a metaphor to describe human creative activity it’s pretty crummy. I have said this before, but the better metaphor arose on the day Michael Faraday first noticed what happened when he wrapped a coil of wire around a magnet and spun the magnet. Current flows in such a wire, but we don’t ask what the incentive is for the electrons to leave home. We say that the current results from an emergent property of the system, which we call induction. The question we ask is ‘what’s the resistance of the wire?’ So Moglen’s Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday’s Law says that if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network. It’s an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another’s pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone. The only question to ask is, what’s the resistance of the network? Moglen’s Metaphorical Corollary to Ohm’s Law states that the resistance of the network is directly proportional to the field strength of the ‘intellectual property’ system. So the right answer to the econodwarf is, resist the resistance.” }~ + +Yochai Benkler and I would argue that these questions are fun to debate but ultimately irrelevant.~{Benkler’s reasoning is characteristically elegant, even formal in its precision, while mine is clunkier. See Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2002): 369–446.}~ Assume a random distribution of incentive structures in different people, a global network—transmission, information sharing, and copying costs that approach zero—and a modular creation process. With these assumptions, it just does not matter why they do it. In lots of cases, they will do it. One person works for love of the species, another in the hope of a better job, a third for the joy of solving puzzles, and a fourth because he has to solve a particular problem anyway for his own job and loses nothing by making his hack available for all. Each person has their own reserve price, the point at which they say, “Now I will turn off Survivor and go and create something.” But on a global network, there are a lot of people, and with numbers that big and information overhead that small, even relatively hard projects will attract motivated and skilled people whose particular reserve price has been crossed. + +More conventionally, many people write free software because they are paid to do so. Amazingly, IBM now earns more from what it calls “Linux-related revenues” than it does from traditional patent licensing, and IBM is the largest patent holder in the world.~{Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 46–47.}~ It has decided that the availability of an open platform, to which many firms and individuals contribute, will actually allow it to sell more of its services, and, for that matter, its hardware. A large group of other companies seem to agree. They like the idea of basing their services, hardware, and added value on a widely adopted “commons.” This does not seem like a community in decline. + +People used to say that collaborative creation could never produce a quality product. That has been shown to be false. So now they say that collaborative creation cannot be sustained because the governance mechanisms will not survive the success of the project. Professor Epstein conjures up a “central committee” from which insiders will be unable to cash out—a nice mixture of communist and capitalist metaphors. All governance systems—including democracies and corporate boards—have problems. But so far as we can tell, those who are influential in the free software and open source governance communities (there is, alas, no “central committee”) feel that they are doing very well indeed. In the last resort, when they disagree with decisions that are taken, there is always the possibility of “forking the code,” introducing a change to the software that not everyone agrees with, and then letting free choice and market selection converge on the preferred iteration. The free software ecosystem also exhibits diversity. Systems based on GNU-Linux, for example, have distinct “flavors” with names like Ubuntu, Debian, and Slackware, each with passionate adherents and each optimized for a particular concern—beauty, ease of use, technical manipulability. So far, the tradition of “rough consensus and running code” seems to be proving itself empirically as a robust governance system. + +Why on earth should we care? People have come up with a surprising way to create software. So what? There are at least three reasons we might care. First, it teaches us something about the limitations of conventional economics and the counterintuitive business methods that thrive on networks. Second, it might offer a new tool in our attempt to solve a variety of social problems. Third, and most speculative, it hints at the way that a global communications network can sometimes help move the line between work and play, professional and amateur, individual and community creation, rote production and compensated “hobby.” + +We should pay attention to open source software because it shows us something about business methods in the digital world—indeed in the entire world of “information-based” products, which is coming to include biotechnology. The scale of your network matters. The larger the number of people who use your operating system, make programs for your type of computer, create new levels for your game, or use your device, the better off you are. A single fax machine is a paperweight. Two make up a communications link. Ten million and you have a ubiquitous communications network into which your “paperweight” is now a hugely valuable doorway. + +This is the strange characteristic of networked goods. The actions of strangers dramatically increase or decrease the usefulness of your good. At each stage the decision of someone else to buy a fax machine increases the value of mine. If I am eating an apple, I am indifferent about whether you are too. But if I have a fax machine then my welfare is actually improved by the decisions of strangers to buy one. The same process works in reverse. Buy a word processing program that becomes unpopular, get “locked in” to using it, and find yourself unable to exchange your work easily with others. Networks matter and increasing the size of the networks continues to add benefits to the individual members. + +What’s true for the users of networks is doubly so for the producers of the goods that create them. From the perspective of a producer of a good that shows strong network effects such as a word processing program or an operating system, the optimal position is to be the company that owns and controls the dominant product on the market. The ownership and control is probably by means of intellectual property rights, which are, after all, the type of property rights one finds on networks. The value of that property depends on those positive and negative network effects. This is the reason Microsoft is worth so much money. The immense investment in time, familiarity, legacy documents, and training that Windows or Word users have provides a strong incentive not to change products. The fact that other users are similarly constrained makes it difficult to manage any change. Even if I change word processor formats and go through the trouble to convert all my documents, I still need to exchange files with you, who are similarly constrained. From a monopolist’s point of view, the handcuffs of network effects are indeed golden, though opinions differ about whether or not this is a cause for antitrust action. + +But if the position that yields the most revenue is that of a monopolist exercising total control, the second-best position may well be that of a company contributing to a large and widely used network based on open standards and, perhaps, open software. The companies that contribute to open source do not have the ability to exercise monopoly control, the right to extract every last cent of value from it. But they do have a different advantage; they get the benefit of all the contributions to the system without having to pay for them. The person who improves an open source program may not work for IBM or Red Hat, but those companies benefit from her addition, just as she does from theirs. The system is designed to continue growing, adding more contributions back into the commons. The users get the benefit of an ever-enlarging network, while the openness of the material diminishes the lock-in effects. Lacking the ability to extract payment for the network good itself—the operating system, say—the companies that participate typically get paid for providing tied goods and services, the value of which increases as the network does. + +I write a column for the Financial Times, but I lack the fervor of the true enthusiast in the “Great Game of Markets.” By themselves, counterintuitive business methods do not make my antennae tingle. But as Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler have argued, this is something more than just another business method. They point us to the dramatic role that openness—whether in network architecture, software, or content—has had in the success of the Internet. What is going on here is actually a remarkable corrective to the simplistic notion of the tragedy of the commons, a corrective to the Internet Threat storyline and to the dynamics of the second enclosure movement. This commons creates and sustains value, and allows firms and individuals to benefit from it, without depleting the value already created. To appropriate a phrase from Carol Rose, open source teaches us about the comedy of the commons, a way of arranging markets and production that we, with our experience rooted in physical property and its typical characteristics, at first find counterintuitive and bizarre. Which brings us to the next question for open source. Can we use its techniques to solve problems beyond the world of software production? + +In the language of computer programmers, the issue here is “does it scale?” Can we generalize anything from this limited example? How many types of production, innovation, and research fit into the model I have just described? After all, for many innovations and inventions one needs hardware, capital investment, and large-scale, real-world data collection—stuff, in its infinite recalcitrance and facticity. Maybe the open source model provides a workaround to the individual incentives problem, but that is not the only problem. And how many types of innovation or cultural production are as modular as software? Is open source software a paradigm case of collective innovation that helps us to understand open source software and not much else? + +Again, I think this is a good question, but it may be the wrong one. My own guess is that an open source method of production is far more common than we realize. “Even before the Internet” (as some of my students have taken to saying portentously), science, law, education, and musical genres all developed in ways that are markedly similar to the model I have described. The marketplace of ideas, the continuous roiling development in thought and norms that our political culture spawns, owes much more to the distributed, nonproprietary model than it does to the special case of commodified innovation that we think about in copyright and patent. Not that copyright and patent are unimportant in the process, but they may well be the exception rather than the norm. Commons-based production of ideas is hardly unfamiliar, after all. + +In fact, all the mottos of free software development have their counterparts in the theory of democracy and open society; “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” is merely the most obvious example. Karl Popper would have cheered.~{See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945).}~ The importance of open source software is not that it introduces us to a wholly new idea. It is that it makes us see clearly a very old idea. With open source the technology was novel, the production process transparent, and the result of that process was a “product” which outcompeted other products in the marketplace. “How can this have happened? What about the tragedy of the commons?” we asked in puzzlement, coming only slowly to the realization that other examples of commons-based, nonproprietary production were all around us. + +Still, this does not answer the question of whether the model can scale still further, whether it can be applied to solve problems in other spheres. To answer that question we would need to think more about the modularity of other types of inventions. How much can they be broken down into chunks suitable for distribution among a widespread community? Which forms of innovation have some irreducible need for high capital investment in distinctly nonvirtual components—a particle accelerator or a Phase III drug trial? Again, my guess is that the increasing migration of the sciences toward data- and processing-rich models makes much more of innovation and discovery a potential candidate for the distributed model. Bioinformatics and computational biology, the open source genomics project,~{See http://www.ensembl.org. }~ the BioBricks Foundation I mentioned in the last chapter, the possibility of distributed data scrutiny by lay volunteers~{ See, e.g., NASA’s “Clickworkers” experiment, which used public volunteers to analyze Mars landing data, available at http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/top. }~ —all of these offer intriguing glances into the potential for the future. Finally, of course, the Internet is one big experiment in, as Benkler puts it, peer-to-peer cultural production.~{ Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin,” 11. }~ + +If these questions are good ones, why are they also the wrong ones? I have given my guesses about the future of the distributed model of innovation. My own utopia has it flourishing alongside a scaled-down, but still powerful, intellectual property regime. Equally plausible scenarios see it as a dead end or as the inevitable victor in the war of productive processes. These are all guesses, however. At the very least, there is some possibility, even hope, that we could have a world in which much more of intellectual and inventive production is free. “ ‘Free’ as in ‘free speech,’ ” Richard Stallman says, not “free as in ‘free beer.’ ”~{ Free Software Foundation, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html [Ed. note: originally published at http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/philosophy/free-sw.html, the link has changed]. }~ But we could hope that much of it would be both free of centralized control and low- or no-cost. When the marginal cost of reproduction is zero, the marginal cost of transmission and storage approaches zero, the process of creation is additive, and much of the labor doesn’t charge, the world looks a little different.~{Exhibit A: the Internet—from the software and protocols on which it runs to the multiple volunteer sources of content and information. }~ This is at least a possible future, or part of a possible future, and one that we should not foreclose without thinking twice. Yet that is what we are doing. The Database Protection Bills and Directives, which extend intellectual property rights to the layer of facts;~{See, e.g., the Database Investment and Intellectual Property Antipiracy Act of 1996, HR 3531, 104th Cong. (1996); The Consumer Access Bill, HR 1858, 106th Cong. § 101(1) (1999); see also Council Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 11 March 1996 on the Legal Protection of Databases, 1996 Official Journal of the European Union, L77 (27.03.1996): 20–28. }~ the efflorescence of software patents;~{ See generally Julie E. Cohen and Mark A. Lemley, “Patent Scope and Innovation in the Software Industry,” California Law Review 89 (2001): 1–58; see also Pamela Samuelson et al., “A Manifesto Concerning the Legal Protection of Computer Programs,” Columbia Law Review 94 (1994): 2308–2431. }~ the UCITA-led validation of shrinkwrap licenses that bind third parties;~{ Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, available at http://www.law.upenn.edu/bll/archives/ulc/ucita/2002final.htm. }~ the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anticircumvention provisions~{ 17 U.S.C. § 1201 (2002). }~ —the point of all of these developments is not merely that they make the peer-to-peer model difficult, but that in many cases they rule it out altogether. I will assert this point here, rather than argue for it, but I think it can be (and has been) demonstrated quite convincingly.~{ This point has been ably made by Pamela Samuelson, Jessica Litman, Jerry Reichman, Larry Lessig, and Yochai Benkler, among others. See Pamela Samuelson, “Intellectual Property and the Digital Economy: Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to Be Revised,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 519–566; Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001); J. H. Reichman and Paul F. Uhlir, “Database Protection at the Crossroads: Recent Developments and Their Impact on Science and Technology,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 793–838; Lawrence Lessig, “Jail Time in the Digital Age,” New York Times (July 30, 2001), A17; and Yochai Benkler, “Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain,” New York University Law Review 74 (1999): 354–446. Each has a slightly different focus and emphasis on the problem, but each has pointed out the impediments now being erected to distributed, nonproprietary solutions. See also James Boyle, “Cruel, Mean, or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and Digital Intellectual Property,” Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000): 2007–2039. }~ + +The point is, then, that there is a chance that a new (or old, but under-recognized) method of production could flourish in ways that seem truly valuable—valuable to free speech, innovation, scientific discovery, the wallets of consumers, to what William Fisher calls “semiotic democracy,”~{ William W. Fisher III, “Property and Contract on the Internet,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 73 (1998): 1217–1218. }~ and, perhaps, valuable to the balance between joyful creation and drudgery for hire. True, it is only a chance. True, this theory’s scope of operation and sustainability are uncertain. But why would we want to foreclose it? That is what the recent expansions of intellectual property threaten to do. And remember, these expansions were dubious even in a world where we saw little or no possibility of the distributed production model I have described, where discussion of network effects had yet to reach the pages of The New Yorker,~{ See James Boyle, “Missing the Point on Microsoft,” Salon.com (April 7, 2000), http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/04/07/greenspan/index.html. }~ and where our concerns about the excesses of intellectual property were simply the ones that Jefferson, Madison, and Macaulay gave us so long ago. + +2~ Learning from the Sharing Economy + +Accept for the sake of argument that the free software community actually works, actually produces high-quality products capable of competing in the market with proprietary alternatives. Concede for a moment that the adoption of Creative Commons licenses shows there are millions of creators out there who want to share their works with others. Many of those creators even want to allow the world to build on their material. Indeed, let us concede that the whole history of the Web, from Wikipedia to the obsessive and usefully detailed sites created on everything from Vikings to shoe polishes, shows a desire to share one’s knowledge, to build on the work of others one has never met. These efforts are remarkably varied. Some are ultimately aimed at profit—even if their results are free. Think of IBM’s open source initiatives or musicians who release Creative Commons-licensed work in order to get more club gigs. Some are provided as a volunteer act of benevolence or civic duty, even if they “compete” with expensive proprietary alternatives. Think of Wikipedia or MIT’s OpenCourseWare. When the infrastructure for this collaboration does not exist, it gets assembled—and quickly. Both the GPL and Creative Commons are examples. Accept all of this. So what? + +Lesson number one comes from the nonprofit activities—everything from Wikipedia to Web sites created by enthusiasts. People like to create and wish to share. In many cases they will do so without financial reward. A surprising amount of useful, creative, or expressive activity is generated without any financial incentive at all. + +Should this cause us to throw out the economic case for copyrights? No. But it should lead us to reassess it. As I explained in Chapter 1, copyright provides an incentive for two distinct activities. First, it offers an incentive to create the work in the first place. The author of Windows for Dummies or Harry Potter gets a right to exclude others from copying the work, a right that he or she can sell in the marketplace. The goal is to offer a financial reason to devote time to this particular creative activity. It is this incentive that is most often cited when attempting to persuade policy makers to expand protection. Second, it offers an incentive to distribute the work—to typeset and print large quantities of the work and to sell it to bookstores, or to broadcast it, or put it on movie screens. + +Each medium is economically different, of course. The economics of the feature film are different from those of the book, the magazine, or the operating system. Thus, we have never had very good figures on the relative importance of these incentives. We can only guess at how much of the incentive from copyright goes to encouraging creation and how much to distribution. Until recently, most types of distribution demanded higher levels of capital. The industry structure that resulted often consisted of creators who worked as wage or contract labor for distributors—either never acquiring copyright in their work in the first place or immediately transferring that copyright to their employers. Because distribution was expensive, our experience with material generated for fun or out of a love of sharing was an essentially private and local one. You might have a neighbor’s photocopied sheet of baking recipes that worked well at high altitudes, or of fishing techniques that worked well on a particular lake, a song that a friend created for a special occasion, or a short story you wrote for your kids—and then typed up for them to tell to theirs. Financial incentives were not needed to encourage the creation of the work, but the cost of distribution dramatically limited its dissemination. + +The single most dramatic thing that the Web has done by lowering the cost of communication and distribution, at the same moment that other electronic tools lowered the cost of production, is to make this local and private activity a global and public one. Someone, somewhere, will have written the guide to fishing on that lake, baking at that altitude, washing windows, or treating stings from Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish. Someone will have taken a photo of the Duke Chapel or explained the history, economics, and chemistry of shoe polish or distilling. Someone might even have created a great class on music theory or C++programming. Someone will have written a handy little program to manage DNS requests on a local network. Bizarrely, at least as far as the economists were concerned, these people all wanted to share what they had made. Because of the genius of search engines, and the implicit peer-review function that those engines deduce from patterns of links to pages, I can find that material when I need it. + +True, much of the material on the Web is inane or insane, confused, badly written, tendentious, and inaccurate. (It should be noted that this is hardly a problem confined to the Web or volunteer-generated material. Personally, I would not want People magazine or Fox News in a time capsule to represent my civilization. But some of the material on the Web is clearly worse.) Yes, Wikipedia is occasionally inaccurate—though in one test in Nature it stacked up well against the Encyclopedia Britannica, and it is obviously much more encyclopedic in its coverage. But all of this misses the point. + +Consider how your expectations about information retrieval have changed in the last fifteen years. We now simply assume that questions about a piece of architecture, a bit of local history, a recipe, or the true author of a song can all be answered within seconds. We have forgotten what it is like to be routinely in ignorance because of the unavailability of some piece of information. One podcaster I talked to called it being a member of “the right-click generation”: “When I am walking around and I see a building, I almost feel as though I ought to be able to ‘right click’ it and have the architect’s name pop up.” Consider that it now seems normal for a gay Iraqi man in Baghdad to have a blog that offers hundreds of thousands of readers around the world a literate and touching account of the American occupation from a perspective entirely different from that provided by the mainstream press.~{ See “Salam Pax,” Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salam_Pax. }~ We think it normal for a person of moderate resources to be able to speak to the world from a war zone, whether or not he is affiliated with a newspaper or credentialed by a corporation. + +These examples are not the end of the process. Our methods of sorting, ranking, and verifying the material generated are still evolving. They may improve even beyond this point. We are only fifteen years into this particular experiment, after all. And a huge amount of this material is produced by our fellow citizens without the profit motive. + +Does this mean that we no longer need copyright or patent protection to encourage the production and distribution of creative work? No. The fishing tips are great, but I still might buy a handsomely illustrated guide to take on the lake with me or, even better, just stay at home and read A River Runs Through It. The New Yorker, and not a sheaf of printouts from the Web, still sits on my coffee table, though much of the high-quality content I read comes to me online, for free, from strangers who are generating it for pleasure, not profit, or who profit from open sharing, not closed control. The online blogosphere provides a vital counterpoint to mainstream media, but it exists in a symbiotic—some would say parasitic—relationship with that media and the network of professional news gatherers for which it pays. Some of the most interesting open source production methods actually rely on copyright. Even if they did not, open source production would not suffice to run our pharmaceutical industry (though it might help with certain stages of the drug discovery process). + +Still, just as it would be silly to dismiss the importance of intellectual property based on our experience of blogs and Wikipedia and open source software, it would be equally silly to underestimate what the Web has taught us. The Web has enabled an astonishing flowering of communication and expression, an astounding democratization of creativity. We have learned just how strong, and how useful, is the human urge to express, communicate, invent, and create—provided the barriers to sharing are lowered. These are the very things that copyright and patent are supposed to encourage. For us to portray the Web—as the Internet Threat story line does—as predominantly a threat to creativity is simply perverse. For us to base our policies only on that notion would be a tragedy. We might end up stultifying one of the greatest explosions of human creativity the world has ever seen by treating it as an unimportant marginal case and instead designing our rules around the production processes of commercial culture in the late twentieth century. + +The shape of our copyright and to a lesser extent our patent system comes from a world in which almost all large-scale distribution was an expensive, capital-intensive enterprise. The roles of gatekeeper and financier, producer and assembler, distributor and advertiser, tended naturally to coalesce into vertically integrated firms or symbiotic commercial partnerships. Those firms were presumed to be the proxy for the public interest when it came to intellectual property policy. Who would know better than they what was needed? Occasionally, device manufacturers would provide a counterweight—as in the Sony case—where the defense of a particular “consumer freedom” actually created a market for a complementary product. Artists and authors might be trotted out as appealing spokespersons, though the laws that were made only sporadically reflected their economic and artistic interests. Librarians and educational institutions had influence at the edges. Most of the time, though, it was the assemblers and distributors of content whose voices and assumptions about markets would be heard. + +Out of this pattern of habit and influence, and out of much deeper notions about authorship and invention that I have explored elsewhere, developed an ideology, a worldview. Call it maximalism. Its proponents sincerely believed in it and pursued it even when it did not make economic sense. (Think how lucky the movie industry is that it lost the Sony + +This process was not—let me stress—was not a simple process of economic determinism or industry conspiracy. Anyone who claims that is the thesis of this book simply has not read it. (Reviewers beware.) Let us start with economic determinism. It was not a situation in which the law mechanistically recorded the interests of the most economically important industries in the area. This was the creation of a worldview, not the steely-eyed calculation of profit and loss. Not only did many of the rules we ended up with make no sense from the point of view of some of the largest economic players in the area—think of the device manufacturers, the search engines, and so on—they frequently made no sense from the perspective of those proposing them. Attempting to twist the law to make it illegal for technology to interfere with your old business method is frequently bad for the industry seeking the protection, as well as for the technology, the market, and the wider society. Since this worldview makes incumbents systematically blind to profit-making opportunities that could be secured by greater openness, rather than greater control, it actually disables them from pursuing some of the most promising methods by which they could have made money for their shareholders. Again, the chapter on the Sony decision offers a salutary example. + +Economic determinism does not explain the rules we have. Neither are those rules simply a result of the manipulation of elected officials by incumbent industries through crafty campaign contributions and distorted evidence (though to be sure, there was a lot of that as well). Many of the people who put forward this worldview—both lobbyists and lobbied—sincerely believe that more rights will always lead to more innovation, that all property rights are the same, that we do not need to think about both the input and output sides of the equation, that cheaper copying techniques automatically require greater protections, and so on. What of the modest suggestions I put forward here? We could sum them up thus: do not apply identical assumptions to physical and intellectual property. Focus on both the inputs to and the outputs of the creative process; protecting the latter may increase the cost of the former. Look both at the role of the public domain and the commons of cultural and scientific material and at the need to provide incentives for creativity and distribution through exclusive rights. More rights will not automatically produce more innovation. Indeed, we should confine rights as narrowly as possible while still providing the desired result. Look at the empirical evidence before and after increasing the level of protection. Pay attention to the benefits as well as the costs of the new technologies and the flowering of creativity they enable. + +To me, these points seem bland, boring, obvious—verging on tautology or pablum. To many believers in the worldview I have described, they are either straightforward heresy or a smokescreen for some real, underlying agenda—which is identified as communism, anarchism, or, somewhat confusingly, both. + +This account smacks of exaggeration, I know. How could things be so one-sided? The best answer I can give came from a question I was asked at a recent conference. The questioner pointed out politely that it was unlikely that the policy-making process would ignore such a fundamental and obvious set of points—points that I myself observed had been well understood for hundreds of years. I had used many examples of intellectual property rights being extended—in length, breadth, scope. Why had I not spoken, he asked, of all the times over the last fifty years when intellectual property rights had been weakened, curtailed, shortened? Since human beings were fallible, surely there were occasions when the length of a copyright or patent term had proved to be too long, or the scope of a right too large, and the rights had been narrowed appropriately by legislation. Why did I not cite any of these? The answer is simple. To the best of my knowledge, there are none. Legislatively, intellectual property rights have moved only in one direction—outward. (Court decisions present a more complex picture, as the previous chapter’s discussion of software copyrights and business method patents shows.) + +What are the odds that the costs of new technologies are always greater than their benefits as far as intellectual property rights holders are concerned? This pattern is not a matter of policies carefully crafted around the evidence. It is the fossil record of fifty years of maximalism. If I lean toward the other side of the story it is not because I am a foe of intellectual property. It is because I believe our policies have become fundamentally unbalanced—unbalanced in ways that actually blind us to what is going on in the world of creativity. + +We are living through an existence-proof that there are other methods of generating innovation, expression, and creativity than the proprietary, exclusionary model of sole control. True, these methods existed before. Yet they tended to be local or invisible or both. The Internet has shown conclusively and visibly that—at least in certain sectors—we can have a global flowering of creativity, innovation, and information sharing in which intellectual property rights function in a very different way than under the standard model of proprietary control. In some cases, intellectual property rights were simply irrelevant—much of the information sharing and indexing on the Web falls within this category. In some cases they were used to prevent exclusivity. Think of Creative Commons or the General Public License. In some, they were actually impediments. Software patents, for example, have a negative effect on open source software development—one that policy makers are only now slowly beginning to acknowledge. + +It is important not to overstate how far the sharing economy can get us. It might help to cut the costs of early-stage drug development, as the Tropical Disease Initiative attempts to do for neglected diseases. It will not generate a Phase III drug trial or bring a drug to market. Sharing methods might be used to generate cult movies such as Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, which was created using techniques borrowed from open source software and is available under a Creative Commons license. They will not produce a mammoth blockbuster like Ben Hur, or Waterworld for that matter—results that will generate mixed feelings. So there are real limitations to the processes I describe. + +But even acknowledging those limitations, it is fair to say that one of the most striking events to occur during our lifetimes is the transformation wrought by the Web, a transformation that is partly driven by the extraordinary explosion of nonproprietary creativity and sharing across digital networks. The cultural expectation that a web of expression and information will just be there—whatever subject we are discussing—is a fundamental one, the one that in some sense separates us from our children. With this as a background it is both bizarre and perverse that we choose to concentrate our policy making only on maintaining the business methods of the last century, only on the story line of the Internet Threat, only on the dangers that the technology poses to creativity (and it does pose some) and never on the benefits. + +What would it mean to pay attention to the changes I have described? It would mean assessing the impact of rules on both proprietary and nonproprietary production. For example, if the introduction of a broad regime of software patents would render open source software development more difficult (because individual contributors cannot afford to do a patent search on every piece of code they contribute), then this should be reflected as a cost of software patents, to be balanced against whatever benefits the system brought. A method for encouraging innovation might, in fact, inhibit one form of it. + +Paying attention to the last ten years means we need to realize that nonproprietary, distributed production is not the poor relation of traditional proprietary, hierarchically organized production. This is no hippy lovefest. It is the business method on which IBM has staked billions of dollars; the method of cultural production that generates much of the information each of us uses every day. It is just as deserving of respect and the solicitude of policy makers as the more familiar methods pursued by the film studios and proprietary software companies. Losses due to sharing that failed because of artificially erected legal barriers are every bit as real as losses that come about because of illicit copying. Yet our attention goes entirely to the latter. + +The main thrust of the argument here is still firmly within the Jeffersonian, Scottish Enlightenment tradition. Jefferson does not wish to give the patent to Oliver Evans because he believes the invention will be (and has been) generated anyway without the granting of an intellectual property right and that there are sufficient information retrieval methods to have practical access to it. In this case, the information retrieval method is not Google. It is a polymath genius combing his library in Monticello for references to Persian irrigation methods. The “embarrassment” caused by the unnecessary patent is added expense and bureaucracy in agriculture and impediments to further innovators, not the undermining of open source software. But it is the same principle of cautious minimalism, the same belief that much innovation goes on without proprietary control and that intellectual property rights are the exception, not the rule. When Benjamin Franklin, a man who surely deserved patents under even the most stringent set of tests, chooses to forgo them because he has secured so much benefit from the contributions of others, he expresses Shirky’s norm nicely. + +Indeed, Jefferson’s optimism depends partly on a view of information sharing that captures beautifully the attitudes of the generation that built the Web. The letter that I discussed in Chapter 2 was widely cited for precisely this reason. Remember these lines? + +_1 That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. + +What could encapsulate better the process by which information spreads on a global network? What could more elegantly state the norms of the “information wants to be free” generation? (Though those who quoted him conveniently omitted the portions of his analysis where he concedes that there are cases where intellectual property rights may be necessary and desirable.) + +In some ways, then, the explosion of nonproprietary and, in many cases, noncommercial creativity and information sharing is simply the vindication of Jefferson’s comparison of ideas with “fire . . . expansible over all space.” The Web makes the simile a reality and puts an exclamation point at the end of the Jefferson Warning. All the more reason to pay attention to it. But the creative commons I described here goes further. It forces us to reconceptualize a form of life, a method of production, and a means of social organization that we used to relegate to the private world of informal sharing and collaboration. Denied a commons by bad intellectual property rules, we can sometimes build our own—which may in some ways do even more for us than the zone of free trade, free thought, and free action that Jefferson wished to protect. + +Does all this mean that the Jefferson Warning is no longer necessary? Can we mitigate the negative effects of intellectual property expansion through a series of privately constructed commons? The answers to those questions are, respectively, “no” and “sometimes.” Think of the story of retrospectively extended copyright and orphan works. In many cases the problem with our intellectual property rights is that they create barriers to sharing—without producing an incentive in return—in ways that can never be solved through private agreement. Twentieth century culture will largely remain off-limits for digitization, reproduction, adaptation, and translation. No series of private contracts or licenses can fix the problem because the relevant parties are not in the room and might not agree if they were. + +Even when the parties are available and agree to share, the benefits may not flow to all equally. Beset by a multitude of vague patents of questionable worth and uncertain scope, large information technology firms routinely create patent pools. IBM tosses in thousands of patents, so does Hewlett or Dell. Each agrees not to sue the other. This is great for the established companies; they can proceed without fear of legal action from the landmine patents that litter the technological landscape. As far as the participants are concerned, the patent pool is almost like the public domain—but a privatized public domain, a park that only residents may enter. But what about the start up company that does not have the thousands of patents necessary for entry? They are not in as happy a situation. The patent pool fixes the problem of poor patent quality and unclear scope—one that Jefferson was worrying about 200 years ago. But it fixes it only for the dominant firms, hurting competition in the process. + +Attempts to form a commons may also backfire. The coordination problems are legion. There are difficulties of compatibility in licenses and the process, no matter how easy, still imposes transaction costs. Nevertheless, with all of these qualifications, the idea of the privately created commons is an important addition to the world view that Jefferson provided, a new tool in our attempt to craft a working system of innovation and culture. No one who looks at the Web can doubt the power of distributed, and frequently uncompensated, creativity in constructing remarkable reference works, operating systems, cultural conversations, even libraries of images and music. Some of that innovation happens largely outside of the world of intellectual property. Some of it happens in privately created areas of sharing that use property rights and open, sometimes even machine-readable, licenses to create a commons on which others can build. The world of creativity and its methods is wider than we had thought. That is one of the vital and exciting lessons the Internet teaches us; unfortunately, the only one our policy makers seem to hear is “cheaper copying means more piracy.” + +2~ Chapter 8: Further Reading + +3~ Distributed Creativity + +The most remarkable and important book on “distributed creativity” and the sharing economy is Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006). Benkler sets the idea of “peer production” alongside other mechanisms of market and political governance and offers a series of powerful normative arguments about why we should prefer that future. Comprehensive though this book may seem, it is incomplete unless it is read in conjunction with one of Benkler’s essays: Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2002): 369–446. In that essay, Benkler puts forward the vital argument—described in this chapter—about what collaborative production does to Coase’s theory of the firm. + +Benkler’s work is hardly the only resource however. Other fine works covering some of the same themes include: Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, ed., CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), which includes an essay by me presenting an earlier version of the “second enclosure movement” argument. Clay Shirky’s recent book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), is an extremely readable and thoughtful addition to this body of work—it includes a more developed version of the speech I discuss. Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), is a fascinating account of the way that innovation happens in more places than we have traditionally imagined—particularly in end-user communities. In one sense, this reinforces a theme of this chapter: that the “peer production” and “distributed creativity” described here is not something new, merely something that is given dramatically more salience and reach by the Web. Dan Hunter and F. Gregory Lastowka’s article, “Amateur-to-Amateur,” William & Mary Law Review 46 (2004): 951–1030, describes some of the difficulties in adapting copyright law to fit “peer production.” Finally, Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008)—also relevant to Chapter 10—argues that if the democratically attractive aspects of the Internet are to be saved, it can only be done through enlisting the collective energy and insight of the Internet’s users. + +3~ Free and Open Source Software + +Free and open source software has been a subject of considerable interest to commentators. Glyn Moody’s Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub., 2001), and Peter Wayner’s Free for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000), both offer readable and accessible histories of the phenomenon. Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, revised edition (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly, 2001), is a classic philosophy of the movement, written by a key participant—author of the phrase, famous among geeks, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Steve Weber, in The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), offers a scholarly argument that the success of free and open source software is not an exception to economic principles but a vindication of them. I agree, though the emphasis that Benkler and I put forward is rather different. To get a sense of the argument that free software (open source software’s normatively charged cousin) is desirable for its political and moral implications, not just because of its efficiency or commercial success, one should read the essays of Richard Stallman, the true father of free software and a fine polemical, but rigorous, essayist. Richard Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, ed. Joshua Gay (Boston: GNU Press, 2002). Another strong collection of essays can be found in Joseph Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott A. Hissam, and Karim R. Lakhani, eds., Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). If you only have time to read a single essay on the subject it should be Eben Moglen’s “Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” First Monday 4 (1999), available at http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594 [Ed. note: originally published as http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_8/moglen/, the link has changed]. + +3~ Creative Commons + +Creative Commons has only just begun to attract its own chroniclers. Larry Lessig, its founder, provides a characteristically eloquent account in “The Creative Commons,” Montana Law Review 65 (2004): 1–14. Michael W. Carroll, a founding board member, has produced a thought-provoking essay discussing the more general implications of organizations such as Creative Commons. Michael W. Carroll, “Creative Commons and the New Intermediaries,” Michigan State Law Review, 2006, n.1 (Spring): 45–65. Minjeong Kim offers an empirical study of Creative Commons licenses in “The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2007): Article 10, available at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/kim.html. However, simply because of the rapidity of adoption of Creative Commons licenses, the work is already dramatically out of date. My colleague Jerome Reichman and Paul Uhlir of the National Academy of Sciences have written a magisterial study of the way in which tools similar to Creative Commons licenses could be used to lower transaction costs in the flow of scientific and technical data. J. H. Reichman and Paul Uhlir, “A Contractually Reconstructed Research Commons for Scientific Data in a Highly Protectionist Intellectual Property Environment,” Law and Contemporary Problems 66 (2003): 315–462. Finally, the gifted author, David Bollier, is reportedly writing a book on Creative Commons entitled Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (New York: New Press, forthcoming 2009). + +Niva Elkin-Koren offers a more critical view of Creative Commons in “Exploring Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit,” in The Future of the Public Domain—Identifying the Commons in Information Law, ed. P. Bernt Hugenholtz and Lucie Guibault (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2006). Elkin-Koren’s argument is that Creative Commons has an unintended negative effect by leading individuals to think of themselves through the reified categories of legal subjects and property owners—forcing into a legalized realm something that should simply be experienced as culture. Elkin-Koren is a perceptive and influential scholar; some of her early work on bulletin boards for example, was extremely important in explaining the stakes of regulating the Internet to a group of judges and policy makers. I also acknowledge the truth of her theoretical point; in many ways Creative Commons is offered as a second best solution. But I am unconvinced by the conclusion. Partly, this is because I think Elkin-Koren’s account of the actual perceptions of license users is insufficiently grounded in actual evidence. Partly, it is because I think the legalization—undesirable though it may be in places—has already happened. Now we must deal with it. Partly, it is because I believe that many of the activities that the licenses enable—a global commons of free educational materials, for example—simply cannot be produced any other way in the political reality we face, and I have a preference for lighting candles rather than lamenting the darkness. + +1~ Chapter 9: An Evidence-Free Zone + +Perhaps some of the arguments in this book have convinced you. Perhaps it is a mistake to think of intellectual property in the same way we think of physical property. Perhaps limitations and exceptions to those rights are as important as the rights themselves. Perhaps the public domain has a vital and tragically neglected role to play in innovation and culture. Perhaps relentlessly expanding property rights will not automatically bring us increased innovation in science and culture. Perhaps the second enclosure movement is more troubling than the first. Perhaps it is unwise to extend copyright again and again, and to do so retrospectively, locking up most of twentieth-century culture in order to protect the tiny fragment of it that is still commercially available. Perhaps technological improvements bring both benefits and costs to existing rights holders—both of which should be considered when setting policy. Perhaps we need a vigorous set of internal limitations and exceptions within copyright, or control over content will inevitably become control over the medium of transmission. Perhaps the Internet should make us think seriously about the power of nonproprietary and distributed production. + +Saying all this gives us some guidance in how we should think. It points out certain patterns of error. But its prescriptions are not simple. Precisely because it is not a rejection of intellectual property rights, but rather a claim that they only work well through a process of consciously balancing openness and control, public domain and private right, it still leaves open the question of where that point of balance is and how to strike it. + +In this chapter I want to offer a suggestion that in any other field would be stunningly obvious, boring even, but in the funhouse mirror of intellectual property appears revolutionary. We should make our policy based on empirical evidence of its likely effects and there should be a formal requirement of empirical reconsideration of those policies after they have been implemented to see if they are working. Why is this a good idea? + +Imagine a process of reviewing prescription drugs that goes like this: representatives from the drug company come to the regulators and argue that their drug works well and should be approved. They have no evidence of this beyond a few anecdotes about people who want to take it and perhaps some very simple models of how the drug might affect the human body. The drug is approved. No trials, no empirical evidence of any kind, no follow-up. Or imagine a process of making environmental regulations in which there were no data, and no attempts to gather data, about the effects of the particular pollutants being studied. Even the harshest critics of regulation would admit we generally do better than this. But this is often the way we make intellectual property policy. + +So how do we decide the ground rules of the information age? Representatives of interested industries come to regulators and ask for another heaping slice of monopoly rent in the form of an intellectual property right. They have doom-laden predictions, they have anecdotes, carefully selected to pluck the heartstrings of legislators, they have celebrities who testify—often incoherently, but with palpable charisma—and they have very, very simple economic models. The basic economic model here is “If you give me a larger right, I will have a larger incentive to innovate. Thus the bigger the rights, the more innovation we will get. Right?” + +As I have tried to show here using the words of Jefferson and Macaulay and examples such as term extension, software copyrights, and garage door openers, this logic is fallacious. Even without data, the “more is better” idea is obviously flawed. Copyrighting the alphabet will not produce more books. Patenting E=mc2 will not yield more scientific innovation. Intellectual property creates barriers to, as well as incentives toward, innovation. Jefferson agonized over the issue of when the benefits exceed the costs of a new right. “I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not.” It is not clear that contemporary policy makers approach issues with anything like the same sophistication or humility. But it would be an equal mistake to conclude, as some do, that expansions of intellectual property are never justified. Extensions of rights can help or hurt, but without economic evidence beforehand and review afterward, we will never know. This point should be obvious, banal, even deeply boring, but sadly it is not. + +From Jefferson and Macaulay and Adam Smith, I derived a second point. In the absence of evidence on either side, the presumption should be against creating a new, legalized monopoly. The burden of proof should lie on those who claim, in any particular case, that the state should step in to stop competition, outlaw copying, proscribe technology, or restrict speech. They have to show us that the existing protection is not enough. But this presumption is a second-best solution and the empirical emptiness of the debates frustrating. + +This makes an occasion where there is some evidence a time for celebration. What we need is a test case in which one country adopts the proposed new intellectual property right and another similarly situated country does not, and we can assess how they are both doing after a number of years. + +There is such a case. It is the “database right.” + +2~ Owning Facts? + +Europe adopted a Database Directive in 1996 which gave a high level of copyright protection to databases and conferred a new “sui generis” database right even on unoriginal compilations of facts. In the United States, by contrast, in a 1991 case called Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), the Supreme Court made it clear that unoriginal compilations of facts are not copyrightable. + +What does all this mean? Take the phone directory—that was the product at issue in the Feist case. A white pages directory is a database of names and numbers, compiled in alphabetical order by name. Does anyone have an intellectual property right over it? Not the particular dog-eared directory lying next to your phone. Does the phone company that compiled it own the facts, the numbers inside that directory? Could they forbid me from copying them, adding others from surrounding areas, and issuing a competing directory that I believed consumers would find more valuable? This was an important issue for Feist because it went to the heart of their business. They issued regional telephone directories, combining records from multiple phone companies. In this case, all the other companies in the region agreed to license their data to Feist. Rural did not, so Feist copied the information, checked as many entries as possible, adding addresses to some of the listings, and published the combined result. Rural sued and lost. The Supreme Court declared that mere alphabetical listings and other unoriginal assemblies of data cannot be copyrighted. + +_1 It may seem unfair that much of the fruit of the compiler’s labor may be used by others without compensation. As Justice Brennan has correctly observed, however, this is not “some unforeseen byproduct of a statutory scheme.” It is, rather, “the essence of copyright,” and a constitutional requirement. The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This principle, known as the idea/expression or fact/expression dichotomy, applies to all works of authorship. As applied to a factual compilation, assuming the absence of original written expression, only the compiler’s selection and arrangement may be protected; the raw facts may be copied at will. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.~{ Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. , 499 U.S. 340 (1991). }~ + +Feist was not as revolutionary as some critics claimed it to be. Most of the appeals courts in the United States had long held this to be the case. As the Court pointed out in the passage above, it is a fundamental tenet of the U.S. intellectual property system that neither facts nor ideas can be owned. Feist merely reiterated that point clearly and stressed that it was not just a policy choice, it was a constitutional requirement—a limit imposed by the Constitution’s grant of power to Congress to make copyright and patent laws. + +Daily politics cares little for the limitations imposed by constitutions or for the structural principle the Court describes—that we should leave facts free for others to build upon. Since 1991, a few database companies have lobbied the Congress strenuously and continuously to create a special database right over facts. Interestingly, apart from academics, scientists, and civil libertarians, many database companies, and even those well-known property haters, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, oppose the creation of such a right. They believe that database providers can adequately protect themselves with contracts or technical means such as passwords, can rely on providing tied services, and so on. Moreover, they argue that strong database protection may make it harder to generate databases in the first place; the facts you need may be locked up. We need to focus on the inputs as well as the outputs of the process—a point I have tried to make throughout this book. The pressure to create a new right continues, however, aided by cries that the United States must “harmonize” with Europe, where, you will remember, compilations of facts are strongly protected by intellectual property rights, even if their arrangement is unoriginal. + +So here we have our natural experiment. One major economy rejects such protection and resists pressure to create a new right. A different major economic region, at a comparable level of development, institutes the right with the explicit claim that it will help to produce new databases and make that segment of the economy more competitive. Presumably government economists in the United States and the European Union have been hard at work ever since, seeing if the right actually worked? Well, not exactly. + +Despite the fact that the European Commission has a legal obligation to review the Database Directive for its effects on competition, it was more than three years late issuing its report. At first, during the review process, no attention was paid to the actual evidence of whether the Directive helps or hurts the European Union, or whether the database industry in the United States has collapsed or flourished. That is a shame, because the evidence was there and it was fairly shocking. Yet finally, at the end of the process, the Commission did turn to the evidence, as I will recount, and came to a remarkable conclusion—which was promptly stifled for political reasons. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. + +How do we frame the empirical inquiry? Intellectual property rights allow the creation of state-backed monopolies, and “the general tendency of monopolies,” as Macaulay pointed out, is “to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad.” Monopolies are an evil, but they must sometimes be accepted when they are necessary to the production of some good, some particular social goal. In this case, the “evil” is obviously going to be an increase in the price of databases and the legal ability to exclude competitors from their use—that, after all, is the point of granting the new right. This right of exclusion may then have dynamic effects, hampering the ability of subsequent innovators to build on what went before. The “good” is that we are supposed to get lots of new databases, databases that we would not have had but for the existence of the database right. + +If the database right were working, we would expect positive answers to three crucial questions. First, has the European database industry’s rate of growth increased since 1996, while the U.S. database industry has languished? (The drop-off in the U.S. database industry ought to be particularly severe after 1991 if the proponents of database protection are correct; they argued the Feist case was a change in current law and a great surprise to the industry.) + +Second, are the principal beneficiaries of the database right in Europe producing databases they would not have produced otherwise? Obviously, if a society is handing over a database right for a database that would have been created anyway, it is overpaying—needlessly increasing prices for consumers and burdens for competitors. This goes to the design of the right—has it been crafted too broadly, so that it is not being targeted to those areas where it is needed to encourage innovation? + +Third, and this one is harder to judge, is the new right promoting innovation and competition rather than stifling it? For example, if the existence of the right allowed a one-time surge of newcomers to the market who then use their rights to discourage new entrants, or if we promoted some increase in databases but made scientific aggregation of large amounts of data harder overall, then the database right might actually be stifling the innovation it is designed to foment. + +Those are the three questions that any review of the Database Directive must answer. But we have preliminary answers to those three questions and they are either strongly negative or extremely doubtful. + +Are database rights necessary for a thriving database industry? The answer appears to be no. In the United States, the database industry has grown more than twenty-five-fold since 1979 and—contrary to those who paint the Feist case as a revolution—for that entire period, in most of the United States, it was clear that unoriginal databases were not covered by copyright. The figures are even more interesting in the legal database market. The two major proponents of database protection in the United States are Reed Elsevier, the owner of Lexis, and Thomson Publishing, the owner of Westlaw. Fascinatingly, both companies made their key acquisitions in the U.S. legal database market after the Feist decision, at which point no one could have thought unoriginal databases were copyrightable. This seems to be some evidence that they believed they could make money even without a database right. How? In the old-fashioned way: competing on features, accuracy, tied services, making users pay for entry to the database, and so on. + +If those companies believed there were profits to be made, they were right. Jason Gelman, a former Duke student, pointed out in a recent paper that Thomson’s legal regulatory division had a profit margin of over 26 percent for the first quarter of 2004. Reed Elsevier’s 2003 profit margin for LexisNexis was 22.8 percent. Both profit margins were significantly higher than the company average and both were earned primarily in the $6 billion U.S. legal database market, a market which is thriving without strong intellectual property protection over databases. (First rule of thumb for regulators: when someone with a profit margin over 20 percent asks you for additional monopoly protection, pause before agreeing.) + +What about Europe? There is some good news for the proponents of database protection. As Hugenholtz, Maurer, and Onsrud point out in a nice article in Science magazine, there was a sharp, one-time spike in the number of companies entering the European database market immediately following the implementation of the Directive in member states.~{ Stephen M. Maurer, P. Bernt Hugenholtz, and Harlan J. Onsrud, “Europe’s Database Experiment,” Science 294 (2001): 789–790. }~ Yet their work, and “Across Two Worlds,”~{ Stephen M. Maurer, “Across Two Worlds: US and European Models of Database Protection,” paper commissioned by Industry Canada (2001). }~ a fascinating study by Maurer, suggests that the rate of entry then fell back to levels similar to those before the directive. Maurer’s analysis shows that the attrition rate was also very high in some European markets in the period following the passage of the directive—even with the new right, many companies dropped out. + +At the end of the day, the British database industry—the strongest performer in Europe—added about two hundred databases in the three years immediately after the implementation of the directive. In France, there was little net change in the number of databases and the number of providers fell sharply. In Germany, the industry added nearly three hundred databases immediately following the directive—a remarkable surge—about two hundred of which rapidly disappeared. During the same period, the U.S. industry added about nine hundred databases. Bottom line? Europe’s industry did get a one-time boost and some of those firms have stayed in the market; that is a benefit, though a costly one. But database growth rates have gone back to predirective levels, while the anticompetitive costs of database protection are now a permanent fixture of the European landscape. The United States, by contrast, gets a nice steady growth rate in databases without paying the monopoly cost. (Second rule of thumb for regulators: Do no harm! Do not create rights without strong evidence that the incentive effect is worth the anticompetitive cost.) + +Now the second question. Is the Database Directive encouraging the production of databases we would not have gotten otherwise? Here the evidence is clear and disturbing. Again, Hugenholtz et al. point out that the majority of cases brought under the directive have been about databases that would have been created anyway—telephone numbers, television schedules, concert times. A review of more recent cases reveals the same pattern. These databases are inevitably generated by the operation of the business in question and cannot be independently compiled by a competitor. The database right simply serves to limit competition in the provision of the information. Recently, the European Court of Justice implicitly underscored this point in a series of cases concerning football scores, horse racing results, and so on. Rejecting a protectionist and one-sided opinion from its Advocate General, the court ruled that the mere running of a business which generates data does not count as “substantial investment” sufficient to trigger the database right. It would be nice to think that this is the beginning of some skepticism about the reach of the directive. Yet the court provides little discussion of the economic reasons behind its interpretation; the analysis is merely semantic and definitional, a sharp contrast to its competition decisions. + +So what kinds of creations are being generated by this bold new right? The answer is somewhere between bathos and pathos. Here are some of the wonderful “databases” that people found it worthwhile litigating over: a Web site consisting of a collection of 259 hyperlinks to “parenting resources,” a collection of poems, an assortment of advertisements, headings referring to local news, and charts of popular music. The sad list goes on and on. The European Commission might ask itself whether these are really the kind of “databases” that we need a legal monopoly to encourage and that we want to tie up judicial resources protecting. The point that many more such factual resources can be found online in the United States without any legalized database protection also seems worthy of note. At the very least, the evidence indicates that the right is drawn much too broadly and triggered too easily in ways that produce litigation but little social benefit. + +Now, in one sense, these lawsuits over trivial collections of hyperlinks and headlines might be seen as irrelevant. They may indicate we are handing out rights unnecessarily—did we really need a legal monopoly, and court involvement, to get someone to compile hyperlinks on a Web page? But it is hard to see social harm. As with the patents over “sealed crustless” peanut butter sandwiches or “methods of swinging on a swing,” we may shake our heads at the stupidity of the system, but if the problems consist only of trivial creations, at least we are not likely to grieve because some vital piece of information was locked up. But we should not be so quick to declare such examples irrelevant. They tend to show that the system for drawing the boundaries of the right is broken—and that is of general concern, even if the issue at hand is not. + +Finally, is the database right encouraging scientific innovation or hurting it? Here the evidence is merely suggestive. Scientists have claimed that the European database right, together with the perverse failure of European governments to take advantage of the limited scientific research exceptions allowed by the directive, have made it much harder to aggregate data, to replicate studies, and to judge published articles. In fact, academic scientific bodies have been among the strongest critics of database protection. But negative evidence, by its nature, is hard to produce; “show me the science that did not get done!” Certainly, both U.S. science and commerce have benefited extraordinarily from the openness of U.S. data policy. I will deal with this issue in the next part of this chapter. + +If the United States does not give intellectual property protection to raw data, to facts, how is it that the database industry has managed to thrive here and to do better than in Europe, which has extremely strong protection? The economists described in Chapter 1 would surely tell us that this is a potential “public goods” problem. If it is hard to exclude others from the resource—it is cheap and easy to copy—and if the use of the resource is not “rival”—if I don’t use up your facts by consulting them—then we ought to see the kind of dystopia economists predict. What would that consist of? First it might result in underproduction. Databases with a social value higher than their cost of creation would not get made because the creator could not get an adequate return on investment. In some cases it might even lead to the reverse—overproduction, where each party creates the database for itself. We get a social overinvestment to produce the resource because there is no legal right to exclude others from it. If you gave the first creator an intellectual property right over the data, they could sell to subsequent users at a price lower than their own cost to create the database. Everyone would win. But the United States did not give the intellectual property right and yet its database industry is flourishing. There are lots of commercial database providers and many different kinds of databases. How can this be? Is the economic model wrong? + +The answer to that is no, the model is not wrong. It is, however, incomplete and all too often applied in sweeping ways without acknowledging that its basic assumptions may not hold in a particular case. That sounds vague. Let me give a concrete example. Westlaw is one of the two leading legal database providers and, as I mentioned before, one of the key proponents of creating intellectual property rights over unoriginal databases. (There is considerable question whether such a law would be constitutional in the United States, but I will pass over that argument for the moment.) Westlaw’s “problem” is that much of the material that it provides to its subscribers is not covered by copyright. Under Section 105 of the U.S. Copyright Act, works of the federal government cannot be copyrighted. They pass immediately into the public domain. Thus all the federal court decisions, from district courts all the way up to the Supreme Court, all the federal statutes, the infinite complexity of the Federal Register, all this is free from copyright. This might seem logical for government-created work, for which the taxpayer has already paid, but as I will explain in the next section of the chapter, not every country adopts such a policy. + +West, another Thomson subsidiary that owns Westlaw, publishes the standard case reporter series. When lawyers or judges refer to a particular opinion, or quote a passage within an opinion, they will almost always use the page number of the West edition. After all, if no one else can find the cases or statutes or paragraphs of an opinion that you are referring to, legal argument is all but impossible. (This might seem like a great idea to you. I beg to differ.) As electronic versions of legal materials became more prevalent, West began getting more competition. Its competitors did two things that West found unforgivable. First, they frequently copied the text of the cases from West’s electronic services, or CD-ROMs, rather than retyping them themselves. Since the cases were works of the federal government, this was perfectly legal provided the competitors did not include West’s own material, such as summaries of the cases written by its employees or its key number system for finding related issues. Second, the competitors would include, within their electronic editions, the page numbers to West’s editions. Since lawyers need to cite the precise words or arguments they are referring to, providing the raw opinion alone would have been all but useless. Because West’s page numbers were one of the standard ways to cite case opinions, competitors would indicate where the page breaks on the printed page would have been, just as West did in its own databases. + +West’s reaction to all of this was exactly like Apple’s reaction in the story I told in Chapter 5 about the iPod or like Rural’s reaction to the copying of its phone directory. This was theft! They were freeloading on West’s hard work! West had mixed its sweat with these cites, and so should be able to exclude other people from them! Since it could not claim copyright over the cases, West claimed copyright over the order in which they were arranged, saying that when its competitors provided its page numbers for citation purposes, they were infringing that copyright. + +In the end, West lost its legal battles to claim copyright over the arrangement of the collections of cases and the sequence in which they were presented. The Court held that, as with the phone directory, the order in which the cases were arranged lacked the minimum originality required to sustain a copyright claim.~{ Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing Co. , 158 F.3d 674 (2nd Cir. 1998). }~ At this stage, according to the standard public goods story, West’s business should have collapsed. Unable to exclude competitors from much of the raw material of its databases, West would be undercut by competitors. More importantly, from the point of view of intellectual property policy, its fate would deter potential investors in other databases—databases that we would lose without even knowing they could have been possible. Except that is not the way it turned out. West has continued to thrive. Indeed, its profits have been quite remarkable. How can this be? + +The West story shows us three ways in which we can leap too quickly from the abstract claim that some information goods are public goods—nonexcludable and nonrival—to the claim that this particular information good has those attributes. The reality is much more complex. Type www.westlaw.com into your Internet browser. That will take you to the home page of West’s excellent legal research service. Now, I have a password to that site. You probably do not. Without a password, you cannot get access to West’s site at all. To the average consumer, the password acts as a physical or technical barrier, making the good “excludable”—that is, making it possible to exclude someone from it without invoking intellectual property rights. But what about competitors? They could buy access and use that access to download vast quantities of the material that is unprotected by copyright. Or could they? Again, West can erect a variety of barriers, ranging from technical limits on how much can be downloaded to contractual restrictions on what those who purchase its service can do (“No copying every federal case,” for example). + +Let’s say the competitor somehow manages to get around all this. Let’s say it somehow avoids copying the material that West does have a copyright over—such as the headnotes and case synopses. The competitor launches their competing site at lower prices amidst much fanfare. Do I immediately and faithlessly desert West for a lower-priced competitor? Not at all. First of all, there are lots of useful things in the West database that are covered by copyright—law review articles and certain treatises, for example. The competitor frequently cannot copy those without coming to the same sort of agreements that West has with the copyright holders. For much legal research, that secondary material is as important as the cases. If West has both, and the competitor only one, I will stick with West. Second, West’s service is very well designed. (It is only their copyright policies I dislike, not the product.) If a judge cites a law review article in a case, West will helpfully provide a hyperlink to the precise section of the article she is referring to. I can click on it and in a second see what the substance of the argument is. The reverse is true if a law review article cites a statute or a case. Cases have “flags” on them indicating whether they have been overruled or cited approvingly in subsequent decisions. In other words, faced with the competitive pressure of those who would commoditize their service and provide it at lower cost, West has done what any smart company would: added features and competed by offering a superior service. Often it has done so by “tying” its uncopyrightable data structures to its huge library of copyrighted legal material. + +The company that challenged Westlaw in court was called Hyperlaw. It won triumphantly. The courts declared that federal cases and the page numbers in the West volumes were in the public domain. That decision came in 1998 and Westlaw has lobbied hard since then to reverse it by statute, to create some version of the Database Directive in the United States. To date, they have failed. The victor, Hyperlaw, has since gone out of business. Westlaw has not. + +This little story contains a larger truth. It is true that innovation and information goods will, in general, tend to be less excludable and less rival than a ham sandwich, say. But, in practice, some of them will be linked or connected in their social setting to other phenomena that are highly excludable. The software can easily be copied—but access to the help lines can be restricted with ease. Audiences cannot easily be excluded from viewing television broadcasts, but advertisers can easily be excluded from placing their advertisements in those programs. The noncopyrightable court decisions are of most use when embedded within a technical system that gives easy access to other material—some of it copyrighted and all of it protected by technical measures and contractual restrictions. The music file can be downloaded; the band’s T-shirt or the experience of the live concert cannot. Does this mean that we never need an intellectual property right? Not at all. But it does indicate that we need to be careful when someone claims that “without a new intellectual property right I am doomed.” + +One final story may drive home the point. When they read Feist v. Rural, law students often assume that the only reason Feist offered to license the white pages listings from Rural is because they (mistakenly) thought they were copyrighted. This is unlikely. Most good copyright lawyers would have told you at the time of the Feist case that the “sweat of the brow” decisions that gave copyright protection based on hard work were not good law. Most courts of appeals had said so. True, there was some legal uncertainty, and that is often worth paying to avoid. But switch the question around and suppose it is the day after the Supreme Court decides the Feist case, and Feist is heading off into another market to try to make a new regional phone directory. Do they now just take the numbers without paying for them, or do they still try to negotiate a license? The latter is overwhelmingly likely. Why? Well, for one thing, they would get a computer-readable version of the names and would not have to retype or optically scan them. More importantly, the contract could include a right to immediate updates and new listings. + +The day after the Feist decision, the only thing that had changed in the telephone directory market was that telephone companies knew for sure, rather than merely as a probability, that if they refused to license, their competitors could laboriously copy their old listings without penalty. The nuclear option was no longer available. Maybe the price demanded would be a little lower. But there would still be lots of good reasons for Feist to buy the information, even though it was uncopyrighted. You do not always need an intellectual property right to make a deal. Of course, that is not the whole story. Perhaps the incentives provided by other methods are insufficient. But in the U.S. database industry they do not seem to have been. Quite the contrary. The studies we have on the European and the American rules on database rights indicate that the American approach simply works better. + +I was not always opposed to intellectual property rights over data. Indeed, in a book written before the enactment of the Database Directive, I said that there was a respectable economic argument that such protection might be warranted and that we needed research on the issue.~{ James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). }~ Unfortunately, Europe got the right without the research. The facts are now in. If the European Database Directive were a drug, the government would be pulling it from the market until its efficacy and harmfulness could be reassessed. At the very least, the Commission needed a detailed empirical review of the directive’s effects, and needs to adjust the directive’s definitions and fine-tune its limitations. But there is a second lesson. There is more discussion of the empirical economic effects of the Database Directive in this chapter than in the six-hundred-page review of the directive that the European Commission paid a private company to conduct, and which was the first official document to consider the issue. + +That seemed to me and to many other academics to be a scandal and we said so as loudly as we could, pointing out the empirical evidence suggesting that the directive was not working. Yet if it was a scandal, it was not a surprising one, because the evidence-free process is altogether typical of the way we make intellectual property policy. President Bush is not the only one to make “faith-based” decisions. + +There was, however, a ray of hope. In its official report on the competitive effects of the Database Directive, the European Commission recently went beyond reliance on anecdote and industry testimony and did something aescribed the directive as “a Community creation with no precedent in any international convention.” Using a methodology similar to the one in this chapter on the subject, the Commission found that “the economic impact of the ‘sui generis’ right on database production is unproven. Introduced to stimulate the production of databases in Europe, the new instrument has had no proven impact on the production of databases.”~{ First evaluation of Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases, DG Internal Market and Services Working Paper (Brussels, Belgium: Commission of the European Communities, 2005), 5. }~ + +In fact, their study showed that the production of databases had fallen to pre-directive levels and that the U.S. database industry, which has no such intellectual property right, was growing faster than the European Union’s. The gap appears to be widening. This is consistent with the data I had pointed out in newspaper articles on the subject, but the Commission’s study was more recent and, if anything, more damning. + +Commission insiders hinted that the study may be part of a larger—and welcome—transformation in which a more professional and empirical look is being taken at the competitive effects of intellectual property protection. Could we be moving away from faith-based policy in which the assumption is that the more new rights we create, the better off we will be? Perhaps. But unfortunately, while the report was a dramatic improvement, traces of the Commission’s older predilection for faith-based policy and voodoo economics still remain. + +The Commission coupled its empirical study of whether the directive had actually stimulated the production of new databases with another intriguing kind of empiricism. It sent out a questionnaire to the European database industry asking if they liked their intellectual property right—a procedure with all the rigor of setting farm policy by asking French farmers how they feel about agricultural subsidies. More bizarrely still, the report sometimes juxtaposed the two studies as if they were of equivalent worth. Perhaps this method of decision making could be expanded to other areas. We could set communications policy by conducting psychoanalytic interviews with state telephone companies—let current incumbents’ opinions determine what is good for the market as a whole. “What is your emotional relationship with your monopoly?” “I really like it!” “Do you think it hurts competition?” “Not at all!” + +There are also a few places where the reasoning in the report left one scratching one’s head. One goal of the database right was to help close the gap between the size of the European and U.S. database markets. Even before the directive, most European countries already gave greater protection than the United States to compilations of fact. The directive raised the level still higher. The theory was that this would help build European market share. Of course, the opposite is also possible. Setting intellectual property rights too high can actually stunt innovation. In practice, as the Commission’s report observes, “the ratio of European / U.S. database production, which was nearly 1:2 in 1996, has become 1:3 in 2004.”~{ Ibid., 22. }~ Europe had started with higher protection and a smaller market. Then it raised its level of protection and lost even more ground. Yet the report was oddly diffident about the possibility that the U.S. system actually works better. + +In its conclusion, the report offered a number of possibilities, including repealing the directive, amending it to limit or remove the “sui generis” right while leaving the rest of the directive in place, and keeping the system as it is. The first options are easy to understand. Who would want to keep a system when it is not increasing database production, or European market share, and, indeed, might be actively harmful? Why leave things as they are? The report offers several reasons. + +First, database companies want to keep the directive. (The report delicately notes that their “endorsement . . . is somewhat at odds with the continued success of U.S. publishing and database production that thrives without . . . [such] protection,” but nevertheless appears to be “a political reality.”) Second, repealing the directive would reopen the debate on what level of protection is needed. Third, change may be costly. + +Imagine applying these arguments to a drug trial. The patients in the control group have done better than those given the drug and there is evidence that the drug might be harmful. But the drug companies like their profits and want to keep the drug on the market. Though “somewhat at odds” with the evidence, this is a “political reality.” Getting rid of the drug would reopen the debate on the search for a cure. Change is costly—true. But what is the purpose of a review if the status quo is always to be preferred? + +The final result? Faced with what Commission staff members tell me was a tidal wave of lobbying from publishers, the Commission quietly decided to leave the directive unchanged, despite the evidence. The result itself is not remarkable. Industry capture of a regulatory apparatus is hardly a surprise. What is remarkable is that this is one of the first times any entity engaged in making intellectual property policy on the international level has even looked seriously at the empirical evidence of that policy’s effects. + +To be sure, figures are thrown around in hearings. The software industry will present studies showing, for example, that it has lost billions of dollars because of illicit copying. It has indeed lost profits relative to what it could get with all the benefits of cheaper copying and transmission worldwide and with perfect copyright enforcement as well. (Though the methodology of some of the studies, which assumes that each copier would have paid full price—is ridiculous.) But this simply begs the question. A new technology is introduced that increases the size of your market and decreases your costs dramatically, but also increases illicit copying. Is this cause for state intervention to increase your level of rights or the funds going toward enforcement of copyright law, as opposed to any other law enforcement priority? The question for empirical analysis, both before and after a policy change, should be “Is this change necessary in order to maintain incentives for production and distribution? Will whatever benefits it brings outweigh the costs of static and dynamic losses—price increases to consumers and impediments to future innovators?” The content companies might still be able to justify the extensions of their rights. But they would be doing so in the context of a rational, evidence-based debate about the real goals of intellectual property, not on the assumption that they have a natural right to collect all the economic surplus gained by a reduction in the costs of reproduction and distribution. + +2~ Does Public Information Want To Be Free? + +The United States has much to learn from Europe about information policy. The ineffectively scattered U.S. approach to data privacy, for example, produces random islands of privacy protection in a sea of potential vulnerability. Until recently, your video rental records were better protected than your medical records. Europe, by contrast, has tried to establish a holistic framework, a much more effective approach. But there are places where the lessons should flow the other way. The first one, I have suggested, is database protection. The second is a related but separate issue: the legal treatment of publicly generated data, the huge, and hugely important, flow of information produced by government-funded activities—from ordnance survey maps and weather data to state-produced texts, traffic studies, and scientific information. How is this flow of information distributed? The norm turns out to be very different in the United States and in Europe. + +In one part of the world, state-produced data flows are frequently viewed as revenue sources. They are often copyrighted or protected by database rights. Many of the departments which produce them attempt to make a profit or at least to recover their entire operating costs through user fees. It is heresy to suggest that the taxpayer has already paid for the production of this data and should not have to do so twice. The other part of the world practices a benign form of information socialism. By law, any text produced by the central government is free from copyright and passes immediately into the public domain. The basic norm is that public data flows should be available at the cost of reproduction alone. + +It is easy to guess which area is which. The United States is surely the profit- and property-obsessed realm, Europe the place where the state takes pride in providing data as a public service? No, actually, it is the other way around. + +Take weather data. The United States makes complete weather data available to all at the cost of reproduction. If the superb government Web sites and data feeds are insufficient, for the cost of a box of blank DVDs you can have the entire history of weather records across the continental United States. European countries, by contrast, typically claim government copyright over weather data and often require the payment of substantial fees. Which approach is better? I have been studying the issue for fifteen years, and if I had to suggest a single article it would be the magisterial study by Peter Weiss called “Borders in Cyberspace,” published by the National Academies of Science.~{ In Open Access and the Public Domain in Digital Data and Information for Science: Proceedings of an International Symposium (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2004), 69–73, available at http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11030&page=69. }~ Weiss shows that the U.S. approach generates far more social wealth. True, the information is initially provided for free, but a thriving private weather industry has sprung up which takes the publicly funded data as its raw material and then adds value to it. The U.S. weather risk management industry, for example, is more than ten times bigger than the European one, employing more people, producing more valuable products, generating more social wealth. Another study estimates that Europe invests 9.5 billion Euros in weather data and gets approximately 68 billion back in economic value—in everything from more efficient farming and construction decisions to better holiday planning—a sevenfold multiplier. The United States, by contrast, invests twice as much—19 billion—but gets back a return of 750 billion Euros, a thirty-nine-fold multiplier. + +Other studies suggest similar patterns elsewhere, in areas ranging from geospatial data to traffic patterns and agriculture. The “free” information flow is better at priming the pump of economic activity. + +Some readers may not thrill to this way of looking at things because it smacks of private corporations getting a “free ride” on the public purse—social wealth be damned. But the benefits of open data policies go further. Every year the monsoon season kills hundreds and causes massive property damage in Southeast Asia. One set of monsoon rains alone killed 660 people in India and left 4.5 million homeless. Researchers seeking to predict the monsoon sought complete weather records from the United States and Europe so as to generate a model based on global weather patterns. The U.S. data was easily and cheaply available at the cost of reproduction. The researchers could not afford to pay the price asked by the European weather services, precluding the “ensemble” analysis they sought to do. Weiss asks rhetorically, “What is the economic and social harm to over 1 billion people from hampered research?” In the wake of the outpouring of sympathy for tsunami victims in the same region, this example seems somehow even more tragic. Will the pattern be repeated with seismographic, cartographic, and satellite data? One hopes not. + +The European attitude may be changing. Competition policy has already been a powerful force in pushing countries to rethink their attitudes to government data. The European Directive on the Reuse of Public Sector Information takes large strides in the right direction, as do studies by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and several national initiatives.~{ Directive 2003/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 November 2003 on the Re-use of Public Sector Information, Official Journal of the European Union, L 345 (31.12.2003): 90–96; Public Sector Modernisation: Open Government, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2005), available at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/1/35/34455306.pdf; The Socioeconomic Effects of Public Sector Information on Digital Networks: Toward a Better Understanding of Different Access and Reuse Policies (February 2008 OECD conference), more information at http://www.oecd.org/document/48/0,3343,en_2649_201185_40046832_1_1_1_1,00.html; and the government sites of individual countries in the European Union such as Ireland (http://www.psi.gov.ie/). }~ Unfortunately, though, most of these follow the same pattern. An initially strong draft is watered down and the utterly crucial question of whether data should be provided at the marginal cost of reproduction is fudged or avoided. This is a shame. Again, if we really believed in evidence-based policy making, the debate would be very different. + +2~ Breaking the Deal + +What would the debate look like if we took some of the steps I mention here? Unfortunately there are very few examples of evidence-based policy making, but the few that do exist are striking. + +In 2006, the government-convened Gowers Review of intellectual property policy in the United Kingdom considered a number of proposals on changes to copyright law, including a retrospective extension of sound recording copyright terms.~{ Andrew Gowers, Gowers Review of Intellectual Property (London: HMSO, 2006), available at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/pbr06_gowers_report_755.pdf [Ed. note: originally published at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/6/E/pbr06_gowers_report_755.pdf, the link has changed]. }~ The copyright term for sound recordings in the United Kingdom is fifty years. (It is longer for compositions.) At the end of the fifty-year period, the recording enters the public domain. If the composition is also in the public domain—the great orchestral works of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart, for example, or the jazz classics of the early twentieth century—then anyone can copy the recording. This means we could make it freely available in an online repository for music students throughout Britain—perhaps preparing the next generation of performers—or republish it in a digitally cleansed and enhanced edition. If the composition is still under copyright, as with much popular music, then the composer is still entitled to a licensing fee, but now any music publisher who pays that fee can reissue the work—introducing competition and, presumably, bringing down prices of the recording. + +The recording industry, along with successful artists such as Sir Cliff Richard and Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, wished to extend the fifty-year term to ninety-five years, or perhaps even longer—the life of the performer, plus seventy years. This proposal was not just for new recordings, but for the ones that have already been made. + +Think of the copyright system as offering a deal to artists and record companies. “We will enlist the force of the state to give you fifty years of monopoly over your recordings. During that time, you will have the exclusive right to distribute and reproduce your recording. After that time, it is available to all, just as you benefited from the availability of public domain works from your predecessors. Will you make records under these terms?” + +Obviously, fifty years of legalized exclusivity was enough of an incentive to get them to make the music in the first place. We have the unimpeachable evidence that they actually did. Now they want to change the terms of the deal retrospectively. They say this will “harmonize” the law internationally, give recordings the same treatment as compositions, help struggling musicians, and give the recording industry some extra money that it might spend on developing new talent. (Or on Porsches, shareholder dividends, and plastic ducks. If you give me another forty-five years of monopoly rent, I can spend it as I wish.) + +Change the context and think about how you would react to this if the deal was presented to you personally. You hired an artist to paint a portrait. You offered $500. He agreed. You had a deal. He painted the painting. You liked it. You gave him the money. A few years later he returned. “You owe me another $450,” he said. + +You both looked at the contract. “But you agreed to paint it for $500 and I paid you that amount.” He admitted this was true, but pointed out that painters in other countries sometimes received higher amounts, as did sculptors in our own country. In fact, he told you, all painters in our country planned to demand another $450 for each picture they had already painted as well as for future pictures. This would “harmonize” our prices with other countries, put painting on the same footing as sculpture, and enable painters to hire more apprentices. His other argument was that painters often lost money. Only changing the terms of their deals long after they were struck could keep them in business. Paying the money was your duty. If you did not pay, it meant that you did not respect art and private property. + +You would find these arguments absurd. Yet they are the same ones the record industry used, relying heavily on the confusions against which this book has warned. Is the record companies’ idea as outrageous as the demands of my imaginary painter? It is actually worse. + +The majority of sound recordings made more than forty years ago are commercially unavailable. After fifty years, only a tiny percentage are still being sold. It is extremely hard to find the copyright holders of the remainder. They might have died, gone out of business, or simply stopped caring. Even if the composer can be found, or paid through a collection society, without the consent of the holder of the copyright over the musical recording, the work must stay in the library. These are “orphan works”—a category that probably comprises the majority of twentieth-century cultural artifacts. + +Yet as I pointed out earlier, without the copyright holder’s permission, it is illegal to copy or redistribute or perform these works, even if it is done on a nonprofit basis. The goal of copyright is to encourage the production of, and public access to, cultural works. It has done its job in encouraging production. Now it operates as a fence to discourage access. As the years go by, we continue to lock up 100 percent of our recorded culture from a particular year in order to benefit an ever-dwindling percentage—the lottery winners—in a grotesquely inefficient cultural policy. + +Finally, fifty years after they were made, sound recordings enter the public domain in the United Kingdom (though as I pointed out earlier, licensing fees would still be due to the composer if the work itself was still under copyright). Now anyone—individual, company, specialist in public domain material—could offer the work to the public. But not if the record companies can persuade the government otherwise. Like my imaginary painter, they want to change the terms of the deal retrospectively. But at least the painter’s proposal would not make the vast majority of paintings unavailable just to benefit a tiny minority of current artists. + +The recording industry’s proposal for retrospective extension was effectively a tax on the British music-buying public to benefit the copyright holders of a tiny proportion of sound recordings. The public loses three times. It loses first when it is forced to continue to pay monopoly prices for older, commercially available music, rather than getting the benefit of the bargain British legislators originally offered: fifty years of exclusivity, then the public domain. The public loses a second time when, as a side effect, it is denied access to commercially unavailable music; no library or niche publisher can make the forgotten recordings available again. Finally, the public loses a third time because allowing retrospective extensions will distort the political process in the future, leading to an almost inevitable legislative capture by the tiny minority who find that their work still has commercial value at the end of the copyright term they were originally granted. As Larry Lessig has pointed out repeatedly, the time to have the debate about the length of the copyright term is before we know whose works will survive commercially. + +The whole idea is very silly. But if this is the silly idea we wish to pursue, then simply increase the income tax proportionately and distribute the benefits to those record companies and musicians whose music is still commercially available after fifty years. Require them to put the money into developing new artists—something the current proposal does not do. Let all the other recordings pass into the public domain. + +Of course, no government would consider such an idea for a moment. Tax the public to give a monopoly windfall to those who already hit the jackpot, because they claim their industry cannot survive without retrospectively changing the terms of its deals? It is indeed laughable. Yet it is a far better proposal than the one that was presented to the Gowers Review. + +What happened next was instructive. The Review commissioned an economic study of the effects of copyright term extension—both prospective and retrospective—on recorded music from the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law. The resulting document was a model of its kind.~{ University of Cambridge Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, Review of the Economic Evidence Relating to an Extension of Copyright in Sound Recordings (2006), available at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/gowers_cipilreport.pdf [Ed. note: originally published at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/B/4/gowers_cipilreport.pdf, the link has changed]. }~ + +With painstaking care and a real (if sometimes fruitless) attempt to make economic arguments accessible to ordinary human beings, the study laid out the costs and benefits of extending the copyright term over sound recordings. It pointed out that the time to measure the value of a prospective term extension is at the moment the copyright is granted. Only then does it produce its incentive effects. The question one must ask is how much value today does it give an artist or record company to have their copyright extended by a year at the end of the existing period of protection. Then one must look to see whether the benefits of the added incentive outweigh the social costs it imposes. To put it another way, if the state were selling today the rights to have protection from year fifty to year ninety-five, how much would a rational copyright holder pay, particularly knowing that there is only a small likelihood the work will even be commercially available to take advantage of the extension? Would that amount be greater than the losses imposed on society by extending the right? + +Obviously, the value of the extension is affected by our “discount rate”—the annual amount by which we must discount a pound sterling in royalties I will not receive for fifty-one years in order to find its value now. Unsurprisingly, one finds that the value of that pound in the future is tiny at the moment when it matters—today—in the calculation of an artist or distributor making the decision whether to create. Conservative estimates yield a present value between 3 percent and 9 percent of the eventual amount. By that analysis, a pound in fifty years is worth between three and nine pence to you today, while other estimates have the value falling below one penny. This seems unlikely to spur much creativity at the margin. Or to put it in the more elegant language of Macaulay, quoted in Chapter 2: + +_1 I will take an example. Dr. Johnson died fifty-six years ago. If the law were what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it, somebody would now have the monopoly of Dr. Johnson’s works. Who that somebody would be it is impossible to say; but we may venture to guess. I guess, then, that it would have been some bookseller, who was the assign of another bookseller, who was the grandson of a third bookseller, who had bought the copyright from Black Frank, the Doctor’s servant and residuary legatee, in 1785 or 1786. Now, would the knowledge that this copyright would exist in 1841 have been a source of gratification to Johnson? Would it have stimulated his exertions? Would it have once drawn him out of his bed before noon? Would it have once cheered him under a fit of the spleen? Would it have induced him to give us one more allegory, one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal? I firmly believe not. I firmly believe that a hundred years ago, when he was writing our debates for the Gentleman’s Magazine, he would very much rather have had twopence to buy a plate of shin of beef at a cook’s shop underground.~{ Ibid., 21–22. }~ + +The art form is different, but the thought of a 1960s Cliff Richard or Ian Anderson being “cheered under a fit of the spleen” by the prospect of a copyright extension fifty years hence is truly a lovely one. + +Considering all these factors, as well as the effects on investment in British versus American music and on the balance of trade, the Cambridge study found that the extension would cost consumers between 240 and 480 million pounds, far more than the benefits to performers and recording studios. (In practice, the report suggested, without changes in the law, most of the benefits would not have gone to the original recording artist in any case.) It found prospective extension led to a clear social welfare loss. What of retrospective extension? + +The report considered, and found wanting, arguments that retrospective extension is necessary to encourage “media migration”—the digitization of existing works, for example. In fact, most studies have found precisely the reverse—that public domain works are more available and more frequently adapted into different media. (Look on Amazon.com for a classic work that is out of copyright—Moby-Dick, for example—and see how many adaptations and formats are available.) It also rejected the argument that harmonization alone was enough to justify extension—retrospective or prospective—pointing out the considerable actual variation in both term and scope of rights afforded to performers in different countries. Finally, it warned of the “hidden ‘ratcheting’ effect of harmonisation which results from the fact that harmonization is almost invariably upwards.” Its conclusion was simple: + +_1 [R]etrospective term extensions reduce social welfare. Thus, in this case, it would seem that basic theory alone is sufficient to provide strong, and unambiguous, guidance for policy-makers. . . . We therefore see no reason to quarrel with the consensus of the profession on this issue which as summed up by Akerlof et al. . . . [states] categorically that . . . “[retrospective] extension provides essentially no incentive to create new works. Once a work is created, additional compensation to the producer is simply a windfall.”~{ Ibid. }~ + +The Gowers Review agreed. Its fourth recommendation read simply, “Policy makers should adopt the principle that the term and scope of protection for IP rights should not be altered retrospectively.” Perhaps more important, though, was the simple paragraph at the front of the document captioned “The Approach of the Review.” It begins thus: “The Review takes an evidence-based approach to its policy analysis and has supplemented internal analysis by commissioning external experts to examine the economic impact of changes. . . .” + +Why specify that one was taking an “evidence-based” approach? At first, the comment seems unnecessary. What other approach would one take? Anecdotal? Astrological? But there is a framework in which empirical evidence of the effects of policy simply seems irrelevant—one based on natural right. When the Review was given to the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, that frame of mind was much in evidence: + +_1 The Gowers Review undertook an extensive analysis of the argument for extending the term. On economic grounds, the Review concluded that there was little evidence that extension would benefit performers, increase the number of works created or made available, or provide incentives for creativity; and it noted a potentially negative effect on the balance of trade. . . . Gowers’s analysis was thorough and in economic terms may be correct. It gives the impression, however, of having been conducted entirely on economic grounds. We strongly believe that copyright represents a moral right of a creator to choose to retain ownership and control of their own intellectual property. We have not heard a convincing reason why a composer and his or her heirs should benefit from a term of copyright which extends for lifetime and beyond, but a performer should not. . . . Given the strength and importance of the creative industries in the U.K., it seems extraordinary that the protection of intellectual property rights should be weaker here than in many other countries whose creative industries are less successful.~{ House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, Fifth Report (2007), available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmcumeds/509/50910.htm. }~ + +A couple of things are worth noting here. The first is that the Committee is quite prepared to believe that the effects of term extension would not benefit performers or provide incentives for creativity, and even to believe that it would hurt the balance of trade. The second is the curious argument in the last sentence. Other countries have stronger systems of rights and are less successful. We should change our regime to be more like them! Obviously the idea that a country’s creative industries might be less successful because their systems of rights were stronger does not occur to the Committee for a moment. Though it proclaims itself to be unaffected by economic thought, it is in fact deeply influenced by the “more rights equals more innovation” ideology of maximalism that I have described in these pages. + +Nestling between these two apparently contradictory ideas is a serious argument that needs to be confronted. Should we ignore evidence—even conclusive evidence—of negative economic effects, harm to consumers, and consequences for the availability of culture because we are dealing with an issue of moral right, almost natural right? Must we extend the rights of the artists who recorded those songs (or rather the record companies who immediately acquired their copyrights) because they are simply theirs as a matter of natural justice? Do performers have a natural right to recorded songs either because they have labored on them, mixing their sweat with each track, or because something of their personality is forever stamped into the song? Must we grant an additional forty-five years of commercial exclusivity, not because of economic incentive, but because of natural right? + +Most of us feel the pull of this argument. I certainly do. But as I pointed out in Chapter 2, there are considerable problems with such an idea. First, it runs against the premises of actual copyright systems. In the United States, for example, the Constitution resolutely presents the opposite picture. Exclusive rights are to encourage progress in science and the useful arts. The Supreme Court has elaborated on this point many times, rejecting both labor-based “sweat of the brow” theories of copyright and more expansive visions based on a natural right to the products of one’s genius—whether inventions or novels. Britain, too, has a history of looking to copyright as a utilitarian scheme—though with more reference to, and legal protection of, particular “moral rights” than one finds in the United States. But even in the most expansive “moral rights” legal systems, even in the early days of debate about the rights of authors after the French Revolution, it is accepted that there are temporal limits on these rights. If this is true of authors, it is even more true of performers, who are not granted the full suite of author’s rights in moral rights jurisdictions, being exiled to a form of protection called “neighboring” rights. + +In all of these schemes, there are time limits on the length of the rights (and frequently different ones for different creators—authors, inventors, performers, and so on). Once one has accepted that point, the question of how long they should be is, surely, a matter for empirical and utilitarian analysis. One cannot credibly say that natural rights or the deep deontological structure of the universe gives me a right to twenty-eight or fifty-six or seventy years of exclusivity. The argument must turn instead to a question of consequences. Which limit is better? Once one asks that question, the Gowers Review’s economic assessment is overwhelming, as the Select Committee itself recognized. In the end, the government agreed—noting that a European Union study had found precisely the same thing. The sound recording right should not be extended, still less extended retrospectively. The evidence-free zone had been penetrated. But not for long. As this book went to press, the European Commission announced its support for an even longer Europe-wide extension of the sound recording right. The contrary arguments and empirical evidence were ignored, minimized, explained away. How can this pattern be broken? + +In the next and final chapter, I try to answer that question. I offer a partial explanation for the cognitive and organizational blindnesses that have brought us to this point. I argue that we have much to learn from the history, theory, and organizational practices of the environmental movement. The environmental movement taught us to see “the environment” for the first time, to recognize its importance, and to change the way we thought about ecology, property, and economics in consequence. What we need is an environmentalism of mind, of culture, of information. In the words of my colleague David Lange, we need to “recognize the public domain.” And to save it. + +2~ Chapter 9: Further Reading + +3~ Database Rights + +Mark J. Davison, The Legal Protection of Databases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), provides a fine introduction to the legal, and legalistic, issues surrounding the legal protection of databases. Precisely because of the need to focus on those issues, and that audience, the discussion is internal to the conceptual categories of the various legal systems he discusses, rather than focusing on the external questions I discuss here. Insiders will find the discussion indispensable. Outsiders may find it hermetic. For those readers, an article by Davison and Hugenholtz may be more accessible. It points out the ways in which the European Court of Justice has tried to rein in the database right. Mark J. Davison and P. Bernt Hugenholtz, “Football Fixtures, Horseraces and Spinoffs: The ECJ Domesticates the Database Right,” European Intellectual Property Review 27, no. 3 (2005): 113–118. + +When it comes to the general intellectual framework for thinking about database rights, Jerome Reichman and Pamela Samuelson provide the germinal point of view: J. H. Reichman and Pamela Samuelson, “Intellectual Property Rights in Data?” Vanderbilt Law Review 50 (1997): 51–166. Frequent readers of Reichman will be unsurprised that “take and pay” liability rules make an appearance as a possible solution. Yochai Benkler’s article, “Constitutional Bounds of Database Protection: The Role of Judicial Review in the Creation and Definition of Private Rights in Information,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 15 (2000): 535–604, indicates the free expression and self-determination problems presented by intellectual property rights over facts. By contrast, J. H. Reichman and Paul F. Uhlir, “Database Protection at the Crossroads: Recent Developments and Their Impact on Science and Technology,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 793–838, point out their negative effects on science and technological development. Increasingly, science will depend on the recombination of multiple databases to solve problems. At first, this will be done for huge and important projects. But increasingly, it will be done to solve smaller problems—scientists will seek to mix and mash a variety of data sources into an interoperable whole in order to solve the scientific problem du jour. Unfortunately, there are many obstacles to this promising tendency to harness digital technology to scientific research. Some of them are technical, some social, some semantic, some legal. One of the legal problems is posed by the expansion of database rights: the tendency to have intellectual property rights penetrate down to the most basic, unoriginal, or atomic level of data—a move that, as I point out in this chapter, is empirically shown to be counterproductive. Stephen M. Maurer, P. Bernt Hugenholtz, and Harlan J. Onsrud, “Europe’s Database Experiment,” Science 294 (2001): 789–780. Further information on the various barriers to data aggregation can be gleaned from the website of Science Commons (http://www.sciencecommons.org), an organization with which I am associated. + +3~ Evidence-based Policy + +The move toward evidence-based policy has garnered considerable support in academia, but, as yet, only a little traction among policy makers. Readers interested in exploring the issue further can find a series of my Financial Times’s articles on the subject at http://www.ft.com/techforum. James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer, Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), is a sterling example of the way in which we could and should be looking at policy proposals. That book’s list of references provides a nice overview of recent work in the field. As the title indicates, Bessen and Meurer do not grade our current system highly. Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner, Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What To Do About It (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), offers an earlier, and similar, assessment backed by data rather than faith. For us to have evidence-based policy, we need actual evidence. Here the work of empiricists such as my colleague Wes Cohen has proven vital. Much of this work is comparative in nature—relying on the kind of “natural experiment” I describe in this chapter. A fine example is provided by Wesley M. Cohen, Akira Goto, Akiya Nagata, Richard R. Nelson, and John P. Walsh, “R&D Spillovers, Patents and the Incentives to Innovate in Japan and the United States,” Research Policy 31 (2002): 1349–67. + +All of this may seem obvious. Where else would intellectual property academics turn in order to assess the effect of various policy alternatives than to empirical and comparative data? Yet as the chapter points out, that simple conclusion has yet to become a standard assumption in the making of policy. The Gowers Review mentioned in the chapter is a nice example of how things might be otherwise. Gowers Review of Intellectual Property (London: HMSO, 2006), available at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/pbr06_gowers_report_755.pdf [Ed. note: originally published at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/6/E/pbr06_gowers_report_755.pdf, link has changed]. Of course, a turn to evidence is only the beginning. It hardly means that the evidence will be clear, the points of view harmonious, or the normative assessments shared. But at least the conversation is beginning from a rooting in facts rather than faith. + +3~ Publicly Generated Information + +Access to public, or state generated, data is not simply a matter of economic efficiency. Wouter Hins and Dirk Voorhoof, “Access to State-Held Information as a Fundamental Right under the European Convention on Human Rights,” European Constitutional Law Review 3 (2007): 114–126. But in efficiency terms, it does seem to present some clear benefits. Peter Weiss, “Borders in Cyberspace: Conflicting Government Information Policies and their Economic Impacts,” in Open Access and the Public Domain in Digital Data and Information for Science: Proceedings of an International Symposium (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2004), 69–73. The issues of publicly generated information are particularly pressing in geospatial data—which can be vital for academic research and economic development. Bastiaan van Loenen and Harlan Onsrud, “Geographic Data for Academic Research: Assessing Access Policies,” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 31 (2004): 3–17. It is an issue that is gaining attention in Europe: “Directive 2003/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 November 2003 on the Re-use of Public Sector Information,” Official Journal of the European Union 46 (31.12.2003) 90–96 (L 345). However, there is a long way to go. + +3~ Sound Recording Rights + +A good place to start is the Gowers Review, cited above, and the report generated by the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, University of Cambridge, Review of the Economic Evidence Relating to an Extension of the Term of Copyright in Sound Recordings (2006), available at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/gowers_cipilreport.pdf [Ed. note: originally published at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/B/4/gowers_cipilreport.pdf, the link has changed]. My own views are close to those put forward by this excellent article: Natali Helberger, Nicole Dufft, Stef van Gompel, and Bernt Hugenholtz, “Never Forever: Why Extending the Term of Protection for Sound Recordings is a Bad Idea,” European Intellectual Property Review 30 (2008): 174–181. + +1~ Chapter 10: An Environmentalism for Information + +Over the last fifteen years, a group of scholars have finally persuaded economists to believe something noneconomists find obvious: “behavioral economics” shows that people do not act as economic theory predicts. But hold your cheers. This is not a vindication of folk wisdom over the pointy-heads. The deviations from “rational behavior” are not the wonderful cornucopia of human motivations you might imagine. There are patterns. For example, we are systematically likely to overestimate chances of loss and underestimate chances of gain, to rely on simplifying heuristics to frame problems even when those heuristics are contradicted by the facts. + +Some of the patterns are endearing; the supposedly “irrational” concerns for distributive equality that persist in all but the economically trained and the extreme right, for example. But most of them simply involve the mapping of cognitive bias. We can take advantage of those biases, as those who sell us ludicrously expensive and irrational warranties on consumer goods do. Or we can correct for them, like a pilot who is trained to rely on his instruments rather than his faulty perceptions when flying in heavy cloud. + +This book has introduced you to the wonders and terrors of intellectual property law—the range wars of the Internet age. There have been discussions of synthetic biology and musical sampling, digital locks and the hackers who break them, Jefferson and Macaulay, and the fight over video recorders. Now it is time to sum up. + +I would argue that the chapters in this book present evidence of another kind of cognitive bias, one that the behavioral economists have not yet identified. Call it the openness aversion. Cultural agoraphobia. We are systematically likely to undervalue the importance, viability, and productive power of open systems, open networks, and nonproprietary production. + +2~ Cultural Agoraphobia? + +Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the years since then. (For some, this might be a relief.) + +The first question is a thought experiment I introduced in Chapter 4. You have to design an international computer network. One group of scientists describes a system that is fundamentally open: open protocols and open systems so that anyone could connect to the system and offer information or products to the world. Another group—scholars, businesspeople, bureaucrats—points out the problems. Anyone could connect to the system! They could do anything! The system itself would not limit them to a few approved actions or approved connections. There would be porn, and piracy, and viruses, and spam. Terrorists could put up videos glorifying themselves. Your neighbor’s site could compete with the New York Times or the U.S. government in documenting the war in Iraq. Better to have a well-managed system in which official approval is required to put up a site, where only a few selected actions are permitted by the network protocols, where most of us are merely recipients of information, where spam, viruses, and piracy (and innovation and participatory culture and anonymous speech) are impossible. Which network design would you have picked? Remember, you have no experience of blogs, or mashups, or Google; no experience of the Web. Just you and your cognitive filters. + +Imagine a form of software which anyone could copy and change, created under a license which required subsequent programmers to offer their software on the same terms. Imagine legions of programmers worldwide contributing their creations back into a “commons.” Is this anarchic-sounding method of production economically viable? Could it successfully compete with the hierarchically organized corporations producing proprietary, closed code, controlled by both law and technology? Be truthful. + +Finally, set yourself the task of producing the greatest reference work the world has ever seen. You are told that it must cover everything from the best Thai food in Durham to the annual rice production of Thailand, from the best places to see blue whales to the history of the Blue Dog Coalition. Would you create a massive organization of paid experts, each assigned a topic, with hierarchical layers of editors above them, producing a set of encyclopedic tomes that are rigorously controlled by copyright and trademark? Or would you wait for hobbyists, governments, scientists, and volunteer encyclopedists to produce, and search engines to organize and rank, a cornucopia of information? I know which way I would have bet in 1991. But I also know that the last time I consulted an encyclopedia was in 1998. You? + +It is not that openness is always right. It is not. Often we need strong intellectual property rights, privacy controls, and networks that demand authentication. Rather, it is that we need a balance between open and closed, owned and free, and we are systematically likely to get the balance wrong. (How did you do on the test?) Partly this is because we still don’t understand the kind of property that lives on networks; most of our experience is with tangible property. Sandwiches that one hundred people cannot share. Fields that can be overgrazed if outsiders cannot be excluded. For that kind of property, control makes more sense. Like astronauts brought up in gravity, our reflexes are poorly suited for free fall. Jefferson’s words were true even of grain elevators and hopper-boys. But in our world, the proportion of intangible to tangible property is much, much higher. The tendency to conflate intellectual and real property is even more dangerous in a networked world. We need his words more than he did. + +Each of the questions I asked is related to the World Wide Web. Not the Internet, the collective name for the whole phenomenon, including the underlying methods of sending and receiving packets. Some version of the underlying network has been around for much longer, in one form or another. But it only attracted popular attention, only revolutionized the world, when on top of it was built the World Wide Web—the network of protocols and pages and hyperlinks that is so much a part of our lives and which arose only from Tim Berners-Lee’s work at CERN in 1991. + +My daughter will graduate from college in the year 2011. (At least, we both hope so.) She is older than the Web. It will not even have had its twentieth birthday on her graduation day. By Christmas of 2012, it will be able to drink legally in the United States. I wrote those sentences, but I find it hard to believe them myself. A life without the Web is easy to remember and yet hard to recapture fully. It seems like such a natural part of our world, too fixed to have been such a recent arrival, as if someone suggested that all the roads and buildings around you had arrived in the last fifteen years. + +Some of you may find these words inexplicable because you live in a happy, Thoreau-like bliss, free of any contact with computer networks. If so, I take my hat off to you. The world of open sky and virtuous sweat, of books and sport and laughter, is no less dear to me than to you. Having an avatar in a virtual world holds the same interest as elective dental surgery. I care about the Web not because I want to live my life there, but because of what it has allowed us to achieve, what it represents for the potential of open science and culture. That, I think, is something that Thoreau (and even Emerson for that matter) might have cared about deeply. Yet, as I suggested earlier in this book, I seriously doubt that we would create the Web today—at least if policy makers and market incumbents understood what the technology might become early enough to stop it. + +I am not postulating some sinister “Breakages, Limited” that stifles technological innovation. I am merely pointing out the imbalance between our intuitive perceptions of the virtues and dangers of open and closed systems, an imbalance I share, quite frankly. + +In place of what we have today, I think we would try, indeed we are trying, to reinvent a tamer, more controlled Web and to change the nature of the underlying network on which it operates. (This is a fear I share with those who have written about it more eloquently than I, particularly Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler.) We would restrict openness of access, decrease anonymity, and limit the number of actions that a network participant could perform. The benefits would be undeniable. It would cut down on spam, viruses, and illicit peer-to-peer file sharing. At the same time, it would undercut the iconoclastic technological, cultural, and political potential that the Web offers, the ability of a new technology, a new service to build on open networks and open protocols, without needing approval from regulators or entrenched market players, or even the owners of the Web pages to which you link. + +Imagine, by contrast, an Internet and a World Wide Web that looked like America Online, circa 1996, or Compuserve, or the French state network Minitel. True, your exposure to penis-enhancement techniques, misspelled stock tips, and the penniless sons of Nigerian oil ministers would be reduced. That sounds pretty attractive. But the idea that the AOL search engine would be replaced by Yahoo and then Google, let alone Google Maps? That new forms of instant messaging would displace Compuserve’s e-mail? That the Chinese dissident would have access to anonymized Internet services, that you might make phone calls worldwide for free from your computer, or that a blog like BoingBoing would end up having more page views than many major newspapers? Forget it. Goodbye to the radical idea that anyone can link to any page on the network without permission. A revised network could have the opposite rule and even impose it by default. + +A tamer network could keep much tighter control over content, particularly copyrighted content. You might still get the video of the gentlemen doing strange things with Mentos and soda bottles, though not its viral method of distribution. But forget about “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” and all your favorite mashups. Its controlled network of links and its limited access would never unleash the collective fact-gathering genius the Web has shown. For a fee, you would have Microsoft Encarta and the Encyclopedia Britannica online. What about the “right-click universe” of knowledge about the world gathered by strangers, shared on comparatively open sites worldwide, and ordered by search engines? What about Wikipedia? I think not. + +The counterfactual I offer is not merely a counterfactual. Yes, we got the Web. It spread too fast to think of taming it into the more mature, sedate “National Information Infrastructure” that the Clinton administration imagined. But as Larry Lessig pointed out years ago, the nature of a network can always be changed. The war over the control and design of the network, and the networked computer, is never-ending. As I write these words, the battles are over “trusted computing” and “Net neutrality.” Trusted computing is a feature built into the operating system which makes it impossible to run processes that have not been approved by some outside body and digitally identified. It would indeed help to safeguard your computer from viruses and other threats and make it harder to copy material the content owners did not want you to copy (perhaps even if you had a right to). In the process it would help to lock in the power of those who had a dominant position in operating systems and popular programs. (Microsoft is a big supporter.) It would make open source software, which allows users to modify programs, inherently suspect. It would, in fact, as Jonathan Zittrain points out, change the nature of the general-purpose computer, which you can program to do anything, back toward the terminal which tells you what functions are allowed.~{ Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). }~ Think of a DVD player. + +The attack on Net neutrality, by contrast, is an attempt by the companies who own the networks to be allowed to discriminate between favored and disfavored content, giving the former preferential access. (One wit analogized it to letting the phone company say, “we will delay your call to Pizza Hut for sixty seconds, but if you want to be put through to our featured pizza provider immediately, hit nine now!”) Taken together, these proposals would put the control of the computer back in the hands of the owners of the content and the operating system, and control of the network users’ choices in the hands of the person who sells them their bandwidth. At the same time, our intellectual property agenda is filled with proposals to create new intellectual property rights or extend old ones. That is the openness aversion in action. + +Now, perhaps to you, the closed alternatives still sound better. Perhaps you do not care as much about the kind of technological dynamism, or anonymous speech, or cultural ferment that thrills the digerati. Perhaps you care more about the risks posed by the underlying freedom. That is a perfectly reasonable point of view. After all, openness does present real dangers; the same freedom given to the innovator, the artist, and the dissident is given to the predator and the criminal. At each moment in history when we have opened a communications network, or the franchise, or literacy, reasonable people have worried about the consequences that might ensue. Would expanded literacy lead to a general coarsening of the literary imagination? (Sometimes, perhaps. But it would and did lead to much more besides, to literature and culture of which we could not have dreamed.) Would an expanded franchise put the control of the state into the hands of the uneducated? (Yes, unless we had free national educational systems. “Now we must educate our masters” was the slogan of the educational reformers after the enlargement of the franchise in Britain in the nineteenth century. Openness sometimes begets openness.) Would translating the Bible from Latin into the vernacular open the door to unorthodox and heretical interpretations, to a congregation straying because they did not need to depend on a priestly intermediary with privileged access to the text? (Oh, yes indeed.) Would TV and radio play into the hands of demagogues? (Yes, and help expose their misdeeds.) + +Openness is not always right. Far from it. But our prior experience seems to be that we are systematically better at seeing its dangers than its benefits. This book has been an attempt, in the sphere of intellectual property, to help us counteract that bias. Like the pilot in the cloud looking at his instruments, we might learn that we are upside down. But what do we do about it? + +2~ Learning from Environmentalism + +I have argued that our policies are distorted not merely by industry capture or the power of incumbent firms, but by a series of cultural and economic biases or presuppositions: the equation of intellectual property to physical property; the assumption that whenever value is created, an intellectual property right should follow; the romantic idea of creativity that needs no raw material from which to build; the habit of considering the threats, but not the benefits, of new technologies; the notion that more rights will automatically bring more innovation; the failure to realize that the public domain is a vital contributor to innovation and culture; and a tendency to see the dangers of openness, but not its potential benefits.~{ Of course, these are not the only assumptions, arguments, and metaphors around. Powerful counterweights exist: the ideas of Jefferson and Macaulay, which I described here, but also others, more loosely related—the Scottish Enlightenment’s stress on the political and moral benefits of competition, free commerce, and free labor; deep economic and political skepticism about monopolies; the strong traditions of open science; and even liberalism’s abiding focus on free speech and access to information. If you hear the slogan “information wants to be free,” you may agree or disagree with the personification. You may find the idea simplistic. But you do not find it incomprehensible, as you might if someone said “housing wants to be free” or “food wants to be free.” We view access to information and culture as vital to successful versions of both capitalism and liberal democracy. We apply to blockages in information flow or disparities in access to information a skepticism that does not always apply to other social goods. Our attitudes toward informational resources are simply different from our attitudes toward other forms of power, wealth, or advantage. It is one of the reasons that the Jefferson Warning is so immediately attractive. It is this attitudinal difference that makes the political terrain on these issues so fascinating. }~ + +One of the most stunning pieces of evidence to our aversion to openness is that, for the last fifty years, whenever there has been a change in the law, it has almost always been to expand intellectual property rights. (Remember, this implies that every significant change in technology, society, or economy required more rights, never less, nor even the same amount.) We have done all this almost entirely in the absence of empirical evidence, and without empirical reconsideration to see if our policies were working. As I pointed out in the last chapter, intellectual property policy is an “evidence-free zone.” It runs on faith alone and its faith consists of the cluster of ideas I have outlined in this book. Whether we call this cluster of ideas maximalism, cultural agoraphobia, or the openness aversion, it exercises a profound influence on our intellectual property and communications policy. + +These ideas are not free-floating. They exist within, are influenced by, and in turn influence, a political economy. The political economy matters and it will shape any viable response. Even if the costs of getting the policies wrong are huge and unnecessary—think of the costs of the copyright extensions that lock up most of twentieth-century culture in order to protect the tiny fraction of it that is still commercially available—they are spread out over the entire population, while the benefits accrue to a small group of commercial entities that deeply and sincerely believe in the maximalist creed. This pattern of diffuse but large losses and concentrated gains is, as Mancur Olson taught us, a recipe for political malfunction.~{ Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965) and Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982). }~ Yet the problem is even deeper than that—in four ways. + +First, though intellectual property rules will profoundly shape science, culture, and the market in the information age, they just seem obscure, wonkish, hard to get excited about. Certainly, people can get upset about individual examples—overbroad patents on human genes, copyright lawsuits against whistleblowers who leak e-mails showing corporate misdeeds that threaten the integrity of electronic voting, rules that paralyze documentary filmmakers, or require payment for sampling three notes from a prior song, extensions of rights that allow patents on auctions or business methods, make genres such as jazz seem legally problematic, create new rights over facts, or snarl up foundational technologies. But they see each of these as an isolated malfunction, not part of a larger social problem or set of attitudes. + +Second, what holds true for issues, also holds true for communities. What links the person writing open source software, and trying to negotiate a sea of software patents in the process, to the film archivist trying to stir up interest in all the wonderful “orphan films”—still under copyright but with no copyright owner we can find—before they molder away into nitrate dust? When a university collaborates with Google to digitize books in their collection for the purposes of search and retrieval, even if only a tiny portion of the text will be visible for any work still under copyright, does it sense any common interest with the synthetic biologist trying to create the BioBricks Foundation, to keep open the foundational elements of a new scientific field? Both may be sued for their efforts—one connection at least. + +When a developing nation tries to make use of the explicit “flexibilities” built into international trade agreements so as to make available a life-saving drug to its population through a process of compulsory licensing and compensation, it will find itself pilloried as a lawbreaker—though it is not—or punished through bilateral agreements. Will that process form any common interest with the high-technology industries in the United States who chafe at the way that current intellectual property rules enshrine older technologies and business methods and give them the protection of law? There are some links between those two situations. Will the parties see those links, or will the developing world’s negotiators think that the current intellectual property rules express some monolithic “Western” set of interests? Will the high-tech companies think this is just an issue of dumb lawyers failing to understand technology? Each gap in understanding of common interest is a strike against an effective response. + +Third, an effective political response would actually be easier if our current rules came merely from the relentless pursuit of corporate self-interest. (Here I part company with those who believe that self-interest is simply “there”—not shaped by socially constructed ideas, attitudes, ideologies, or biases.) In fact, the openness aversion sometimes obscures self-interest as well as the public interest. Think of the relentless insistence of the movie companies on making video recorders illegal. Nor does the framework of maximalism help if our goal is to have all the interested economic actors in the room when policy is made. For example, by framing issues of communications policy or Internet regulation as questions of intellectual property, we automatically privilege one set of interested parties—content owners—over others who also have a large economic stake in the matter. + +Fourth, and finally, the biggest problem is that even if one could overcome the problems of political interest, or ideological closed-mindedness, the answers to many of these questions require balance, thought, and empirical evidence—all qualities markedly missing in the debate. If the answer were that intellectual property rights are bad, then forming good policy would be easy. But that is as silly and one-sided an idea as the maximalist one I have been criticizing here. Here are three examples: + +# Drug patents do help produce drugs. Jettisoning them is a bad idea—though experimenting with additional and alternative methods of encouraging medical innovation is a very good one. + +# I believe copyrights over literary works should be shorter, and that one should have to renew them after twenty-eight years—something that about 85 percent of authors and publishers will not do, if prior history is anything to go by. I think that would give ample incentives to write and distribute books, and give us a richer, more accessible culture and educational system to boot, a Library of Congress where you truly can “click to get the book” as my son asked me to do years ago now. But that does not mean that I wish to abolish copyright. On the contrary, I think it is an excellent system. + +# All the empirical evidence shows that protecting compilations of facts, as the European Database Directive does, has been a profound failure as a policy, imposing costs on consumers without encouraging new database production. But if the evidence said the opposite, I would support a new database right. + +We need a political debate about intellectual property that recognizes these trade-offs; that does not impose simplistic, one-sided solutions; that looks to evidence. We need to understand the delicate and subtle balance between property and the opposite of property, the role of rights, but also of the public domain and the commons. Building a theory, let alone a movement, around such an issue is hard. Doing so when we lack some of the basic theoretical tools and vocabularies is daunting. We do not even have a robust conception of the public domain. If they think of it as a legal issue at all, people simply think of it as whatever is left over after an endless series of rights have been carved out. Can one build a politics to protect a residue? + +So we have at least four problems: an issue that is perceived as obscure, affecting scattered groups with little knowledge of each other’s interest, dominated by an ideology that is genuinely believed by its adherents, in the place of which we have to make careful, balanced, empirically grounded suggestions. Assume for a moment the need for a politics of intellectual property that seeks a solution to these four problems. What might such a politics look like? + +I have argued that in a number of respects, the politics of intellectual property and the public domain is at the stage that the American environmental movement was at in the 1950s. In 1950, there were people who cared strongly about issues we would now identify as “environmental”—supporters of the park system and birdwatchers, but also hunters and those who disdained chemical pesticides in growing their foods. In the world of intellectual property, we have start-up software engineers, libraries, appropriationist artists, parodists, biographers, and biotech researchers. In the 50s and 60s, we had flurries of outrage over particular crises—burning rivers, oil spills, dreadful smog. In the world of intellectual property, we have the kind of stories I have tried to tell here. Lacking, however, is a general framework, a perception of common interest in apparently disparate situations. + +Crudely speaking, the environmental movement was deeply influenced by two basic analytical frameworks. The first was the idea of ecology: the fragile, complex, and unpredictable interconnections between living systems. The second was the idea of welfare economics—the ways in which markets can fail to make activities internalize their full costs.~{ “The source of the general divergences between the values of marginal social and marginal private net product that occur under simple competition is the fact that, in some occupations, a part of the product of a unit of resources consists of something, which, instead of coming in the first instance to the person who invests the unit, comes instead, in the first instance (i.e., prior to sale if sale takes place), as a positive or negative item, to other people.” Arthur C. Pigou, “Divergences between Marginal Social Net Product and Marginal Private Net Product,” in The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan, 1932), available at http://www.econlib.org/Library/NPDBooks/Pigou/pgEW1.html. Ironically, so far as I can find, Pigou does not use the word “externality.” }~ The combination of the two ideas yielded a powerful and disturbing conclusion. Markets would routinely fail to make activities internalize their own costs, particularly their own environmental costs. This failure would, routinely, disrupt or destroy fragile ecological systems, with unpredictable, ugly, dangerous, and possibly irreparable consequences. These two types of analysis pointed to a general interest in environmental protection and thus helped to build a large constituency which supported governmental efforts to that end. The duck hunter’s preservation of wetlands as a species habitat turns out to have wider functions in the prevention of erosion and the maintenance of water quality. The decision to burn coal rather than natural gas for power generation may have impacts on everything from forests to fisheries. The attempt to reduce greenhouse gases and mitigate the damage from global warming cuts across every aspect of the economy. + +Of course, it would be silly to think that environmental policy was fueled only by ideas rather than more immediate desires. As William Ruckelshaus put it, “With air pollution there was, for example, a desire of the people living in Denver to see the mountains again. Similarly, the people living in Los Angeles had a desire to see one another.” Funnily enough, as with intellectual property, changes in communications technology also played a role. “In our living rooms in the middle sixties, black and white television went out and color television came in. We have only begun to understand some of the impacts of television on our lives, but certainly for the environmental movement it was a bonanza. A yellow outfall flowing into a blue river does not have anywhere near the impact on black and white television that it has on color television; neither does brown smog against a blue sky.”~{ William D. Ruckelshaus, “Environmental Protection: A Brief History of the Environmental Movement in America and the Implications Abroad,” Environmental Law 15 (1985): 457. }~ More importantly perhaps, the technologically fueled deluge of information, whether from weather satellites or computer models running on supercomputers, provided some of the evidence that—eventually—started to build a consensus around the seriousness of global warming. + +Despite the importance of these other factors, the ideas I mentioned—ecology and welfare economics—were extremely important for the environmental movement. They helped to provide its agenda, its rhetoric, and the perception of common interest underneath its coalition politics. Even more interestingly, for my purposes, those ideas—which began as inaccessible scientific or economic concepts, far from popular discourse—were brought into the mainstream of American politics. This did not happen easily or automatically. Popularizing complicated ideas is hard work. There were popular books, television discussions, documentaries on Love Canal or the California kelp beds, op-ed pieces in newspapers, and pontificating experts on TV. Environmental groups both shocking and staid played their part, through the dramatic theater of a Greenpeace protest or the tweedy respectability of the Audubon Society. Where once the idea of “the Environment” (as opposed to “my lake,” say) was seen as a mere abstraction, something that couldn’t stand against the concrete benefits brought by a particular piece of development, it came to be an abstraction with both the force of law and of popular interest behind it. + +To me, this suggests a strategy for the future of the politics of intellectual property, a way to save our eroding public domain. In both areas, we seem to have the same recipe for failure in the structure of the decision-making process. Democratic decisions are made badly when they are primarily made by and for the benefit of a few stakeholders, whether industrialists or content providers. This effect is only intensified when the transaction costs of identifying and resisting the change are high. Think of the costs and benefits of acid rain-producing power generation or—less serious, but surely similar in form—the costs and benefits of retrospectively increasing copyright term limits on works for which the copyright had already expired, pulling them back out of the public domain. There are obvious benefits to the heirs and assigns of authors whose copyright has expired in having Congress put the fence back up around this portion of the intellectual commons. There are clearly some costs—for example, to education and public debate—in not having multiple, competing low-cost editions of these works. But these costs are individually small and have few obvious stakeholders to represent them. + +Yet, as I have tried to argue here, beyond the failures in the decision-making process, lie failures in the way we think about the issues. The environmental movement gained much of its persuasive power by pointing out that for structural reasons we were likely to make bad environmental decisions: a legal system based on a particular notion of what “private property” entailed and an engineering or scientific system that treated the world as a simple, linearly related set of causes and effects. In both of these conceptual systems, the environment actually disappeared; there was no place for it in the analysis. Small surprise, then, that we did not preserve it very well. I have argued that the same is true about the public domain. The confusions against which the Jefferson Warning cautions, the source-blindness of a model of property rights centered on an “original author,” and the political blindness to the importance of the public domain as a whole (not “my lake,” but “the Environment”), all come together to make the public domain disappear, first in concept and then, increasingly, as a reality. To end this process we need a cultural environmentalism, an environmentalism of the mind, and over the last ten years we have actually begun to build one. + +Cultural environmentalism is an idea, an intellectual and practical movement, that is intended to be a solution to a set of political and theoretical problems—an imbalance in the way we make intellectual property policy, a legal regime that has adapted poorly to the transformation that technology has produced in the scope of law, and, perhaps most importantly, a set of mental models, economic nostrums, and property theories that each have a public domain-shaped hole at their center. + +The comparison I drew between the history of environmentalism and the state of intellectual property policy had a number of facets. The environmental movement had “invented” the concept of the environment and used it to tie together a set of phenomena that would otherwise seem very separate. In doing so, it changed perceptions of self-interest and helped to form coalitions where none had existed before—just as earth science built upon research into the fragile interconnections of ecology and on the Pigouvian analysis of economic externalities. I argue that we need to make visible the invisible contributions of the public domain, the “ecosystem services” performed by the underappreciated but nevertheless vital reservoir of freedom in culture and science.~{ As always, Jessica Litman provides the clearest and most down-to-earth example. Commenting on Rebecca Tushnet’s engrossing paper on fan fiction (Rebecca Tushnet, “Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural Creativity,” Law and Contemporary Problems 70 (Spring 2007): 135–174), Litman describes copyright’s “balance between uses copyright owners are entitled to control and other uses that they simply are not entitled to control.” Jessica Litman, “Creative Reading,” Law and Contemporary Problems 70 (Spring 2007), 175. That balance, she suggests, is not bug but feature. The spaces of freedom that exist in the analog world because widespread use is possible without copying are neither oversights, nor temporarily abandoned mines of monopoly rent just waiting for a better technological retrieval method. They are integral parts of the copyright system. }~ And, just as with environmentalism, we need not only a semantic reorganization, or a set of conceptual and analytic tools, but a movement of people devoted to bringing a goal to the attention of their fellow citizens. + +I have tried hard to show that there is something larger going on under the realpolitik of land grabs by Disney and campaign contributions by the Recording Industry Association of America. But it would be an equal and opposite mistake to think that this is just about a dysfunctional discourse of intellectual property. In this part of the analysis, too, the environmental movement offers some useful practical reminders. The ideas of ecology and environmental welfare economics were important, but one cannot merely write A Sand County Almanac and hope the world will change. Environmentalists piggybacked on existing sources of conservationist sentiment—love of nature, the national parks movement, hikers, campers, birdwatchers. They built coalitions between those who might be affected by environmental changes. They even stretched their political base by discovering, albeit too slowly, the realities of environmental racism, on the one hand, and the benefits of market solutions to some environmental problems on the other. Some of these aspects, at least, could be replicated in the politics of intellectual property. + +Ten years ago, when I first offered the environmental analogy, I claimed that intellectual property policy was seen as a contract struck between industry groups—something technical, esoteric, and largely irrelevant to individual citizens, except in that they were purchasers of the products that flowed out of the system. Whether or not that view has ever been tenable, it is not so in a digital age. Instead, I offered the basic argument laid out here—that we needed a “politics of intellectual property” modeled on the environmental movement to create a genuine and informed political debate on intellectual property policy.~{ James Boyle, “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?” Duke Law Journal 47 (1997): 87–116. }~ + +So far, I have concentrated on the theoretical and academic tools such a debate would need—focusing particularly on property theory and on economic analysis and its limits. But if there is to be a genuinely democratic politics of intellectual property, we would need an institutional diversity in the policymaking debate that was comparable to that of the environmental movement. + +Environmentalism presents us with a remarkable diversity of organizational forms and missions. We have Greenpeace, the Environmental Legal Defense Fund, groups of concerned scientists, and the Audubon Society, each with its own methods, groups of supporters, and sets of issues. Yet we also have local and pragmatic coalitions to save a particular bit of green space, using the private tools of covenants and contracts.~{ Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, “Cultural Environmentalism and the Constructed Commons,” Law and Contemporary Problems 70 (Spring 2007): 23–50. }~ I think we can see the beginnings of the replication of that institutional diversity in the world of intangible property. + +Ten years ago, civil society had little to offer in terms of groups that represented anything other than an industry position on intellectual property, still less ones that took seriously the preservation of the public domain or the idea that intellectual property policy was a matter of balance, rather than simple maximization of rights. There were the librarians and a few academics. That was about it. This position has changed radically. + +There are academic centers that concentrate on the theoretical issues discussed in this book—one of them at my university. Thanks in large part to the leadership of Pamela Samuelson, there are law student clinics that do impact litigation on issues such as fair use and that represent underserved clients such as documentarians. But beyond academic work, there are organizations that have dedicated themselves to advocacy and to litigation around the themes of preservation of the public domain, defense of limitations and exceptions in copyright, and the protection of free speech from the effects of intellectual property regulation of both content and the communications infrastructure. The Electronic Frontier Foundation did exist ten years ago, but its coverage of intellectual property issues was only episodic. Its portfolio of litigation and public education on the subject is now nothing short of remarkable. Public Knowledge’s valuable lobbying and education is another obvious example. International organizations with similar aims include the Open Rights Group in the United Kingdom.~{ See http://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property [Ed. note: originally published at http://www.eff.org/IP/, the link has changed], http://www.openrightsgroup.org/, http://www.publicknowledge.org/. }~ + +Organizing has also taken place around particular cases—such as Eldred v. Ashcroft, the challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.~{ Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003). Once again, Professor Lessig had the central role as counsel for petitioners. }~ Activity is not confined to the world of copyright. The Public Patent Foundation combats “patent creep” by exposing and challenging bad patents.~{ See http://www.pubpat.org/. }~ It would be remiss not to mention the international Access to Knowledge, or A2K, movement, inspired by the work of Jamie Love.~{ See Access to Knowledge, http://www.cptech.org/a2k/. Some of Mr. Love’s initiatives are discussed at http://www.cptech.org/jamie/. }~ While its focus is on the kinds of issues represented by the access-to-medicines movement, it has made the idea of balance in intellectual property and the protection of the public domain one of its central components. Mr. Love himself is also the central figure behind the idea of a Research and Development Treaty which would amend international trade agreements to make intellectual property merely one of a whole range of economic methods for stimulating innovation.~{ Tim Hubbard and James Love, “A New Trade Framework for Global Healthcare R&D,” PLoS Biology 2 (2004): e52. }~ His work has touched almost every single one of the movements discussed here. + +The Access to Knowledge movement has many institutional variants. The Development Agenda at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), put forward by India and Brazil, includes similar themes, as do the Geneva Declaration and the Adelphi Charter produced by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.~{ WIPO Development Agenda, available at http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/da.html. The Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization, available at http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/futureofwipodeclaration.pdf. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I wrote one of the first manifestos that formed the basis for earlier drafts of the Declaration. James Boyle, “A Manifesto on WIPO and the Future of Intellectual Property,” Duke Law & Technology Review 0009 (2004): 1–12, available at http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/PDF/2004DLTR0009.pdf. The Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation, and Intellectual Property, available at http://www.adelphicharter.org/. The Charter was issued by the British Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). For discussion of the Charter see James Boyle, “Protecting the Public Domain,” Guardian.co.uk (October 14, 2005), available at http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,9828,1591467,00.html; “Free Ideas,” The Economist (October 15, 2005), 68. Again, in the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I advised the RSA on these issues and was on the steering committee of the group that produced the Charter. }~ History is full of wordy charters and declarations, of course. By themselves they mean little. Yet the level of public and media attention paid to them indicates that intellectual property policy is now of interest beyond a narrow group of affected industries. To underscore this point, several major foundations have introduced intellectual property initiatives, something that would have been inconceivable ten years ago.~{ An example is the MacArthur Foundation Program on Intellectual Property and the Public Domain: “The General Program . . . was begun in 2002 as a short-term project to support new models, policy analysis, and public education designed to bring about balance between public and private interests concerning intellectual property rights in a digital era.” See www.macfound.org/grantmaking_guidelines_ippd [Ed. note: originally published as http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.943331/k.DA6/General_Grantmaking__Intellectual_Property.htm, the link changed]. The Ford Foundation has a similar initiative. Frédéric Sultan, “International Intellectual Property Initiative: Ford Foundation I-Jumelage Resources,” available at http://www.vecam.org/ijumelage/spip.php?article609. }~ + +Finally, to complete the analogy to the land trust, we have the organizations I mentioned earlier, such as Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation.~{ See http://www.creativecommons.org and http://www.fsf.org. }~ The latter group pioneered within software the attempt to create a licensed “commons” in which freedoms are guaranteed. The licensed commons replaces the law’s default rules with choices made by individuals, the effects of which are magnified by collective action. The end result is a zone of public freedom enabled by private choice. + +If one looks at these institutions and actors and at the range of issues on which they focus—from software to drug patents, from reverse engineering to access to archival records—the obvious question is, how did they overcome the collective action problem? What ties together a critique of digital locks and the access-to-medicines movement? Again, I think the answer points to the usefulness of the environmental analogy. As I pointed out, the invention of the “environment” trope tied together groups whose interests, considered at a lower level of abstraction, seemed entirely different—hunters and birdwatchers, antipollution protesters and conservation biologists. The idea of the “environment” literally created the self-interest or set of preferences that ties the movement together. The same is true here. Apparently disparate interests are linked by ideas of the protection of the public domain and of the importance of a balance between protection and freedom in cultural and scientific ecology.~{ This process runs counter to the assumptions of theorists of collective action problems in a way remarkable enough to have attracted its own chroniclers. See Amy Kapczynski, “The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property,” Yale Law Journal 117 (2008): 804–885. Economists generally assume preferences are simply given, individuals just have them and they are “exogenous” to the legal system in the sense that they are unaffected by the allocation of legal rights. The emergence of the movements and institutions I am describing here paints a different picture. The “preferences” are socially constructed, created through a collective process of debate and decision which shifts the level of abstraction upwards; and, as Kapczynski perceptively notes, they are highly influenced by the legal categories and rights against which the groups involved initially defined themselves. }~ + +But even a broad range of initiatives and institutions would not, in and of themselves, produce results. One must convince people that one’s arguments are good, one’s institutional innovations necessary, one’s horror stories disturbing. Environmentalism has managed to win the battle for clarity—to make its points clearly enough that they ceased to be dismissed as “arcane” or technical, to overcome neglect by the media, to articulate a set of concerns that are those of any educated citizen. The other striking phenomenon of the last ten years is the migration of intellectual property issues off the law reviews or business pages and onto the front pages and the editorial pages. Blogs have been particularly influential. Widely read sites such as Slashdot and BoingBoing have multiple postings on intellectual property issues each day; some are rants, but others are at a level of sophistication that once would have been confined to academic discussion.~{ See “News for Nerds: Stuff That Matters,” http://www.slashdot.org, and “A Directory of Wonderful Things,” http://www.boingboing.net. }~ Scientists passionately debate the importance of open access to scholarly journals. Geographers and climatologists fume over access to geospatial data. The movement has been pronounced enough to generate its own reaction. The popular comics site “xkcd” has strips critical of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,~{ Pub. L. No. 105-304, 112 Stat. 2860 (1998) (codified as amended in scattered sections of 5, 17, 28, and 35 U.S.C.). }~ but also a nerdily idyllic picture of a stick figure reclining under a tree and saying, “Sometimes I just can’t get outraged over copyright law.”~{ For the former see “Content Protection,” http://xkcd.com/c129.html, and “Digital Rights Management,” http://xkcd.com/c86.html. For the latter, see “Copyright,” http://xkcd.com/c14.html. }~ That cartoon now resides on my computer desktop. (It is under a Creative Commons license, ironically enough.) + +Who can blame the stick figure? Certainly not I. Is it not silly to equate the protection of the environment with the protection of the public domain? After all, one is the struggle to save a planetary ecology and the other is just some silly argument about legal rules and culture and science. I would be the first to yield primacy to the environmental challenges we are facing. Mass extinction events are to be avoided, particularly if they involve you personally. Yet my willingness to minimize the importance of the rules that determine who owns science and culture goes only so far. + +A better intellectual property system will not save the planet. On the other hand, one of the most promising sets of tools for building biofuels comes from synthetic biology. Ask some of the leading scientists in that field why they devoted their precious time to trying to work out a system that would offer the valuable incentives that patents provide while leaving a commons of “biobricks” open to all for future development. I worry about these rules naturally; they were forced to do so. A better intellectual property system certainly will not end world hunger. Still it is interesting to read about the lengthy struggles to clear the multiple, overlapping patents on GoldenRice™—a rice grain genetically engineered to cure vitamin deficiencies that nearly perished in a thicket of blurrily overlapping rights.~{ R. David Kryder, Stanley P. Kowalski, and Anatole F. Krattiger, “The Intellectual and Technical Property Components of Pro-Vitamin A Rice (GoldenRice™): A Preliminary Freedom-to-Operate Review,” ISAAA Briefs No. 20 (2000), available at http://www.isaaa.org/Briefs/20/briefs.htm. }~ + +A better intellectual property system will not cure AIDS or rheumatoid arthritis or Huntington’s disease or malaria. Certainly not by itself. Patents have already played a positive role in contributing to treatments for the first two, though they are unlikely to help much on the latter two; the affected populations are too few or too poor. But overly broad, or vague, or confusing patents could (and I believe have) hurt all of those efforts—even those being pursued out of altruism. Those problems could be mitigated. Reforms that made possible legal and facilitated distribution of patented medicines in Africa might save millions of lives. They would cost drug companies little. Africa makes up 1.6 percent of their global market. Interesting alternative methods have even been suggested for encouraging investment in treatments for neglected diseases and diseases of the world’s poor. At the moment, we spend 90 percent of our research dollars on diseases that affect 10 percent of the global population. Perhaps this is the best we can do, but would it not be nice to have a vigorous public debate on the subject? Some possible innovations are much easier. A simple rule that required the eventual free publication online of all government-funded health research, under open licenses, rather than its sequestration behind the paywalls of commercial journals, could help fuel remarkable innovations in scientific synthesis and computer-aided research while giving citizens access to the research for which they have already paid. + +Good intellectual property policy will not save our culture. But bad policy may lock up our cultural heritage unnecessarily, leave it to molder in libraries, forbid citizens to digitize it, even though the vast majority of it will never be available publicly and no copyright owner can be found. Would you not prefer the world in which your children could look at the Library of Congress online catalogue and click to get the book or film or song that otherwise languished as an “orphan work”? Good intellectual policy will not necessarily give us great new music. But the policy we have today would make some of the music we most cherish illegal, or at least legally questionable. Does that inspire confidence for the future? As for the World Wide Web, I offer again my thought experiment from the first part of this chapter. Would we be more likely to invent it or forbid it today? We are certainly working busily to change the openness of the general-purpose computer, the neutrality of the network, and the degree of control that content companies can exert over hardware. + +I do not claim that the issues I have written about here are the most important problem the world faces. That would be ridiculous. But I do claim that they are facets of a very important problem and one to which we are paying far too little attention. + +I would also be the first to admit that these issues are complicated. Even if we heeded the precepts I have outlined in this book, even if we actually started to look at intellectual property as an empirical question, even if we turned to data rather than faith for our assessments, reasonable people would disagree about much. Some of the most ludicrous recent excesses—huge retrospective copyright term extensions, database rights, proposed webcasting treaties, business method patents—do not pass the laugh test, in my view and that of most scholars. Stopping and then reversing that tide would be valuable, even transformative, but other issues are a closer call. + +It is also true that we do not have all the tools we need. A lot remains to be done, both academically and practically. We need better evidence. We need property theories that give us as rich a conception of property’s outside—of the public domain and the commons—as we have of property itself. We need to rethink some of our policies of international harmonization and reconsider what types of policy actually benefit the developing world. We should explore ways of compensating artists that are very different from the ones we use now, and study the use of distributed creativity and open source in new areas of science and culture. + +Difficulties aside, I have tried here to show that we need a cultural environmental movement, a politics that enables us first to see and then to preserve the public domain, to understand its contributions to our art, our technology, and our culture. Where is that movement now? + +There is cause for both concern and optimism. Concern, because it is still hard for courts, legislators, policy makers, and citizens to see beyond the word “property” to the reality underneath. I started this book with the question from my son about the online catalogue of the Library of Congress: “Where do you click to get the book?” In 2003 the Supreme Court heard Eldred v. Ashcroft, the challenge to retrospective copyright term extension. Over two strong dissents, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the act against both First Amendment and Copyright Clause challenges. The dead had their copyrights extended yet again. The widest legal restriction of speech in the history of the Republic—putting off-limits most twentieth-century books, poems, films, and songs for another twenty years without a corresponding speech benefit or incentive—can proceed without significant First Amendment review. Does such a decision mean the task this book undertakes—to take seriously the contributions of the public domain to innovation, culture, and speech—is ultimately doomed, whatever its intellectual merits, to face a hostile or uncomprehending audience? Admittedly, Eldred focused specifically on two particular constitutional claims. Still, the attitude of the majority toward the importance of the public domain—whether in the textual limitations on Congress’s power or the application of the First Amendment—can hardly be cause for optimism. And yet . . . The media reaction was remarkable. + +The New York Times was sufficiently unfamiliar with the term “public domain” that it was not entirely sure whether or not to use the definite article in front of it. But unfamiliarity did not imply complacency. An editorial declared that this decision “makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity. Public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment.”~{ “The Supreme Court Docket: The Coming of Copyright Perpetuity,” New York Times editorial (January 16, 2003), A28. }~ The Washington Post, though more inclined to agree that retrospective extension might be constitutional, declared the copyright system to be “broken” in that it “effectively and perpetually protects nearly all material that anyone would want to cite or use. That’s not what the framers envisioned, and it’s not in the public interest.”~{ “Free Mickey Mouse,” Washington Post editorial (January 21, 2003), A16. }~ + +I could not agree more. But as I have tried to show here, the process is not limited to copyright, or culture, or texts, or the United States. Think of the stories about business method patents, or synthetic biology, or the regulation of musical borrowing on the atomic level. Think of the discussion of the openness aversion that began this chapter. In the middle of the most successful and exciting experiment in nonproprietary, distributed creativity in the history of the species, our policy makers can see only the threat from “piracy.” They act accordingly. Our second enclosure movement is well under way. The poem with which I began Chapter 3 told us: “And geese will still a common lack / Till they go and steal it back.” I cannot match the terseness or the rhyme, but if we assume that the enclosure of the commons of the mind will bring us prosperity, great science, and vibrant culture, well, we will look like very silly geese indeed. + +2~ Chapter 10: Further Reading + +Those who are interested in the evolution of the analogy between environmentalism and the movement to recognize and safeguard the public domain can start with the editors’ introductions to the Symposium Cultural Environmentalism @ 10, James Boyle and Lawrence Lessig, eds., Law and Contemporary Problems 70 (2007) 1–21, available at http://www.law.duke.edu/ce10. + +The single best chronicle of the Access to Knowledge (“A2K”) movement is Amy Kapczynski, “The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property,” Yale Law Journal 117 (2008): 804–885. Lawrence Lessig’s work has been a common point of reference: Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001), and Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (New York: Penguin, 2004). Many of the key political initiatives have come from James Love and the Consumer Project on Technology. A wealth of material can be found at http://www.cptech.org/a2k/ and at Knowledge Ecology International, http://www.keionline.org/index.php. The inaugural edition of the journal Knowledge Ecology Studies presents an informal discussion of the origins of the idea at http://www.kestudies.org/ojs/index.php/kes/article/view/29/53. + +For the ways in which the A2K movement has involved both criticism of and attempts to reform international bodies such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) see James Boyle, “A Manifesto on WIPO and the Future of Intellectual Property,” Duke Law and Technology Review 0009 (2004): 1–12, available at http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/PDF/2004DLTR0009.pdf, and Christopher May, The World Intellectual Property Organization: Resurgence and the Development Agenda (London: Routledge, 2006). + +The minimalist or antimonopolistic attitude toward intellectual property has a long history, as this book has tried to show. The specific concern with the public domain is of more recent origin. The foundational essay was published by my colleague David Lange, “Recognizing the Public Domain,” Law and Contemporary Problems 44, no. 4 (1981): 147–178. I would also recommend Collected Papers, Duke Conference on the Public Domain, ed. James Boyle (Durham, N.C.: Center for the Study of the Public Domain, 2003), which contains scholarly articles on the history, constitutional status, scientific importance, musical significance, property theory, and economic effects of the public domain. The entire volume can be read online at http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/lcp/indexpd.htm. + +Finally, Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, which has generously supported the writing of this book has a wide variety of resources—ranging from scholarly texts to films and comic books—on the subjects of intellectual property, the public domain and idea of an environmentalism for information. Those resources can be found at http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd. + + diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst b/data/samples/current/en/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6628c26 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst @@ -0,0 +1,5815 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: The Wealth of Networks + :subtitle: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom + :language: US + +@creator: + :author: Benkler, Yochai + +@date: + :published: 2006-04-03 + :created: 2006-04-03 + :issued: 2006-04-03 + :available: 2006-04-03 + :modified: 2006-04-03 + :valid: 2006-04-03 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) 2006 Yochai Benkler. + :license: All rights reserved. Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ The author has made an online version of the book available under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license; it can be accessed through the author's website at http://www.benkler.org. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;networks;Internet;intellectual property:patents|copyright;intellectual property:copyright:creative commons;economics;society;copyright;patents;book:subject:information society|information networks|economics|public policy|society|copyright|patents + +@identifier: + :isbn: 9780300110562 + :oclc: 61881089 + +% :isbn: 0300110561 + +% STRANGE FRUIT By Lewis Allan 1939 (Renewed) by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP) International copyright secured. All rights reserved. All rights outside the United States controlled by Edward B. Marks Music Company. Reprinted by permission. + +% :created: 2006-01-27 + +@links: + { The Wealth of Networks, dedicated wiki }http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page + { Yochai Benkler, wiki }http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page + { @ Wikipedia}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks + { WoN @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Networks-Production-Transforms-Markets/dp/0300110561/ + { WoN @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0300110561 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:B; break=1 + :home_button_image: {won_benkler.png }http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page + :footer: {The Wealth of Networks}http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page; {Yochai Benkler}http://http://www.doctorow.com + +:A~ @title @author + +1~attribution Attribution~# + +!_ For Deb, Noam, and Ari~# + +"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing." "Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable."~# + +John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)~# + +1~acknowledgments Acknowledgments + +Reading this manuscript was an act of heroic generosity. I owe my gratitude to those who did and who therefore helped me to avoid at least some of the errors that I would have made without their assistance. Bruce Ackerman spent countless hours listening, and reading and challenging both this book and its precursor bits and pieces since 2001. I owe much of its present conception and form to his friendship. Jack Balkin not only read the manuscript, but in an act of great generosity taught it to his seminar, imposed it on the fellows of Yale's Information Society Project, and then spent hours with me working through the limitations and pitfalls they found. Marvin Ammori, Ady Barkan, Elazar Barkan, Becky Bolin, Eszter Hargittai, Niva Elkin Koren, Amy Kapczynski, Eddan Katz, Zac Katz, Nimrod Koslovski, Orly Lobel, Katherine McDaniel, and Siva Vaidhyanathan all read the manuscript and provided valuable thoughts and insights. Michael O'Malley from Yale University Press deserves special thanks for helping me decide to write the book that I really wanted to write, not something else, and then stay the course. ,{[pg 10]}, + +This book has been more than a decade in the making. Its roots go back to 1993-1994: long nights of conversations, as only graduate students can have, with Niva Elkin Koren about democracy in cyberspace; a series of formative conversations with Mitch Kapor; a couple of madly imaginative sessions with Charlie Nesson; and a moment of true understanding with Eben Moglen. Equally central from around that time, but at an angle, were a paper under Terry Fisher's guidance on nineteenth-century homesteading and the radical republicans, and a series of classes and papers with Frank Michelman, Duncan Kennedy, Mort Horwitz, Roberto Unger, and the late David Charny, which led me to think quite fundamentally about the role of property and economic organization in the construction of human freedom. It was Frank Michelman who taught me that the hard trick was to do so as a liberal. + +Since then, I have been fortunate in many and diverse intellectual friendships and encounters, from people in different fields and foci, who shed light on various aspects of this project. I met Larry Lessig for (almost) the first time in 1998. By the end of a two-hour conversation, we had formed a friendship and intellectual conversation that has been central to my work ever since. He has, over the past few years, played a pivotal role in changing the public understanding of control, freedom, and creativity in the digital environment. Over the course of these years, I spent many hours learning from Jamie Boyle, Terry Fisher, and Eben Moglen. In different ways and styles, each of them has had significant influence on my work. There was a moment, sometime between the conference Boyle organized at Yale in 1999 and the one he organized at Duke in 2001, when a range of people who had been doing similar things, pushing against the wind with varying degrees of interconnection, seemed to cohere into a single intellectual movement, centered on the importance of the commons to information production and creativity generally, and to the digitally networked environment in particular. In various contexts, both before this period and since, I have learned much from Julie Cohen, Becky Eisenberg, Bernt Hugenholtz, David Johnson, David Lange, Jessica Litman, Neil Netanel, Helen Nissenbaum, Peggy Radin, Arti Rai, David Post, Jerry Reichman, Pam Samuelson, Jon Zittrain, and Diane Zimmerman. One of the great pleasures of this field is the time I have been able to spend with technologists, economists, sociologists, and others who don't quite fit into any of these categories. Many have been very patient with me and taught me much. In particular, I owe thanks to Sam Bowles, Dave Clark, Dewayne Hendricks, Richard Jefferson, Natalie Jeremijenko, Tara Lemmey, Josh Lerner, Andy Lippman, David Reed, Chuck Sabel, Jerry Saltzer, Tim Shepard, Clay Shirky, and Eric von Hippel. In constitutional law and political theory, I benefited early and consistently from the insights of Ed Baker, with whom I spent many hours puzzling through practically every problem of political theory that I tackle in this book; Chris Eisgruber, Dick Fallon, Larry Kramer, Burt Neuborne, Larry Sager, and Kathleen Sullivan all helped in constructing various components of the argument. + +Much of the early work in this project was done at New York University, whose law school offered me an intellectually engaging and institutionally safe environment to explore some quite unorthodox views. A friend, visiting when I gave a brown-bag workshop there in 1998, pointed out that at very few law schools could I have presented "The Commons as a Neglected Factor of Information Policy" as an untenured member of the faculty, to a room full of law and economics scholars, without jeopardizing my career. Mark Geistfeld, in particular, helped me work though the economics of sharing--as we shared many a pleasant afternoon on the beach, watching our boys playing in the waves. I benefited from the generosity of Al Engelberg, who funded the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy and through it students and fellows, from whose work I learned so much; and Arthur Penn, who funded the Information Law Institute and through it that amazing intellectual moment, the 2000 conference on "A Free Information Ecology in the Digital Environment," and the series of workshops that became the Open Spectrum Project. During that period, I was fortunate enough to have had wonderful students and fellows with whom I worked in various ways that later informed this book, in particular Gaia Bernstein, Mike Burstein, John Kuzin, Greg Pomerantz, Steve Snyder, and Alan Toner. +={ institutional ecology of digital environment } + +Since 2001, first as a visitor and now as a member, I have had the remarkable pleasure of being part of the intellectual community that is Yale Law School. The book in its present form, structure, and emphasis is a direct reflection of my immersion in this wonderful community. Practically every single one of my colleagues has read articles I have written over this period, attended workshops where I presented my work, provided comments that helped to improve the articles--and through them, this book, as well. I owe each and every one of them thanks, not least to Tony Kronman, who made me see that it would be so. To list them all would be redundant. To list some would inevitably underrepresent the various contributions they have made. Still, I will try to say a few of the special thanks, owing much yet to ,{[pg xii]}, those I will not name. Working out the economics was a precondition of being able to make the core political claims. Bob Ellickson, Dan Kahan, and Carol Rose all engaged deeply with questions of reciprocity and commonsbased production, while Jim Whitman kept my feet to the fire on the relationship to the anthropology of the gift. Ian Ayres, Ron Daniels during his visit, Al Klevorick, George Priest, Susan Rose-Ackerman, and Alan Schwartz provided much-needed mixtures of skepticism and help in constructing the arguments that would allay it. Akhil Amar, Owen Fiss, Jerry Mashaw, Robert Post, Jed Rubenfeld, Reva Siegal, and Kenji Yoshino helped me work on the normative and constitutional questions. The turn I took to focusing on global development as the core aspect of the implications for justice, as it is in chapter 9, resulted from an invitation from Harold Koh and Oona Hathaway to speak at their seminar on globalization, and their thoughtful comments to my paper. The greatest influence on that turn has been Amy Kapczynski's work as a fellow at Yale, and with her, the students who invited me to work with them on university licensing policy, in particular, Sam Chaifetz. + +Oddly enough, I have *{never had the proper context}* in which to give two more basic thanks. My father, who was swept up in the resistance to British colonialism and later in Israel's War of Independence, dropped out of high school. He was left with a passionate intellectual hunger and a voracious appetite for reading. He died too young to even imagine sitting, as I do today with my own sons, with the greatest library in human history right there, at the dinner table, with us. But he would have loved it. Another great debt is to David Grais, who spent many hours mentoring me in my first law job, bought me my first copy of Strunk and White, and, for all practical purposes, taught me how to write in English; as he reads these words, he will be mortified, I fear, to be associated with a work of authorship as undisciplined as this, with so many excessively long sentences, replete with dependent clauses and unnecessarily complex formulations of quite simple ideas. + +Finally, to my best friend and tag-team partner in this tussle we call life, Deborah Schrag, with whom I have shared nicely more or less everything since we were barely adults. ,{[pg 1]}, + +1~1 Chapter 1 - Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge + +Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done. For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions. In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passe today to speak of "the Internet revolution." In some academic circles, it is positively naïve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries. ,{[pg 2]}, +={ access : + human development and justice +2 ; + information economy +55 +} + +A series of changes in the technologies, economic organization, and social practices of production in this environment has created new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. These changes have increased the role of nonmarket and nonproprietary production, both by individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations. These newly emerging practices have seen remarkable success in areas as diverse as software development and investigative reporting, avant-garde video and multiplayer online games. Together, they hint at the emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the industrial information economy of the twentieth century. This new freedom holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information dependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere. + +The rise of greater scope for individual and cooperative nonmarket production of information and culture, however, threatens the incumbents of the industrial information economy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in the midst of a battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment. A wide range of laws and institutions-- from broad areas like telecommunications, copyright, or international trade regulation, to minutiae like the rules for registering domain names or whether digital television receivers will be required by law to recognize a particular code--are being tugged and warped in efforts to tilt the playing field toward one way of doing things or the other. How these battles turn out over the next decade or so will likely have a significant effect on how we come to know what is going on in the world we occupy, and to what extent and in what forms we will be able--as autonomous individuals, as citizens, and as participants in cultures and communities--to affect how we and others see the world as it is and as it might be. + +2~ THE EMERGENCE OF THE NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY +={ information economy : + emergence of +9 ; + networked information economy +52 : + emergence of +9 +} + +The most advanced economies in the world today have made two parallel shifts that, paradoxically, make possible a significant attenuation of the limitations that market-based production places on the pursuit of the political ,{[pg 3]}, values central to liberal societies. The first move, in the making for more than a century, is to an economy centered on information (financial services, accounting, software, science) and cultural (films, music) production, and the manipulation of symbols (from making sneakers to branding them and manufacturing the cultural significance of the Swoosh). The second is the move to a communications environment built on cheap processors with high computation capabilities, interconnected in a pervasive network--the phenomenon we associate with the Internet. It is this second shift that allows for an increasing role for nonmarket production in the information and cultural production sector, organized in a radically more decentralized pattern than was true of this sector in the twentieth century. The first shift means that these new patterns of production--nonmarket and radically decentralized--will emerge, if permitted, at the core, rather than the periphery of the most advanced economies. It promises to enable social production and exchange to play a much larger role, alongside property- and marketbased production, than they ever have in modern democracies. +={ nonmarket information producers +4 ; + physical constraints on information production +2 ; + production of information : + physical constraints on +2 +} + +The first part of this book is dedicated to establishing a number of basic economic observations. Its overarching claim is that we are seeing the emergence of a new stage in the information economy, which I call the "networked information economy." It is displacing the industrial information economy that typified information production from about the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. What characterizes the networked information economy is that decentralized individual action--specifically, new and important cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies--plays a much greater role than it did, or could have, in the industrial information economy. The catalyst for this change is the happenstance of the fabrication technology of computation, and its ripple effects throughout the technologies of communication and storage. The declining price of computation, communication, and storage have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world's population--on the order of a billion people around the globe. The core distinguishing feature of communications, information, and cultural production since the mid-nineteenth century was that effective communication spanning the ever-larger societies and geographies that came to make up the relevant political and economic units of the day required ever-larger investments of physical capital. Large-circulation mechanical presses, the telegraph ,{[pg 4]}, system, powerful radio and later television transmitters, cable and satellite, and the mainframe computer became necessary to make information and communicate it on scales that went beyond the very local. Wanting to communicate with others was not a sufficient condition to being able to do so. As a result, information and cultural production took on, over the course of this period, a more industrial model than the economics of information itself would have required. The rise of the networked, computer-mediated communications environment has changed this basic fact. The material requirements for effective information production and communication are now owned by numbers of individuals several orders of magnitude larger than the number of owners of the basic means of information production and exchange a mere two decades ago. +={ capabilities of individuals : + coordinated effects of individual actions ; + commercial model of communication +1 ; + constraints of information production, physical +1 ; + coordinated effects of individual actions +2 ; + individual capabilities and action : + coordinated effects of individual actions +2 ; + industrial model of communication +1 ; + information production : + physical constraints on +1 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment +1 ; + traditional model of communication +} + +The removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has made human creativity and the economics of information itself the core structuring facts in the new networked information economy. These have quite different characteristics than coal, steel, and manual human labor, which characterized the industrial economy and structured our basic thinking about economic production for the past century. They lead to three observations about the emerging information production system. First, nonproprietary strategies have always been more important in information production than they were in the production of steel or automobiles, even when the economics of communication weighed in favor of industrial models. Education, arts and sciences, political debate, and theological disputation have always been much more importantly infused with nonmarket motivations and actors than, say, the automobile industry. As the material barrier that ultimately nonetheless drove much of our information environment to be funneled through the proprietary, market-based strategies is removed, these basic nonmarket, nonproprietary, motivations and organizational forms should in principle become even more important to the information production system. + +Second, we have in fact seen the rise of nonmarket production to much greater importance. Individuals can reach and inform or edify millions around the world. Such a reach was simply unavailable to diversely motivated individuals before, unless they funneled their efforts through either market organizations or philanthropically or state-funded efforts. The fact that every such effort is available to anyone connected to the network, from anywhere, has led to the emergence of coordinate effects, where the aggregate effect of individual action, even when it is not self-consciously cooperative, produces ,{[pg 5]}, the coordinate effect of a new and rich information environment. One needs only to run a Google search on any subject of interest to see how the "information good" that is the response to one's query is produced by the coordinate effects of the uncoordinated actions of a wide and diverse range of individuals and organizations acting on a wide range of motivations-- both market and nonmarket, state-based and nonstate. +={ aggregate effect of individual action } + +Third, and likely most radical, new, and difficult for observers to believe, is the rise of effective, large-scale cooperative efforts--peer production of information, knowledge, and culture. These are typified by the emergence of free and open-source software. We are beginning to see the expansion of this model not only to our core software platforms, but beyond them into every domain of information and cultural production--and this book visits these in many different domains--from peer production of encyclopedias, to news and commentary, to immersive entertainment. +={ free software +1 ; + open-source software +1 ; + peer production ; + software, open-source +} + +It is easy to miss these changes. They run against the grain of some of our most basic Economics 101 intuitions, intuitions honed in the industrial economy at a time when the only serious alternative seen was state Communism--an alternative almost universally considered unattractive today. The undeniable economic success of free software has prompted some leading-edge economists to try to understand why many thousands of loosely networked free software developers can compete with Microsoft at its own game and produce a massive operating system--GNU/Linux. That growing literature, consistent with its own goals, has focused on software and the particulars of the free and open-source software development communities, although Eric von Hippel's notion of "user-driven innovation" has begun to expand that focus to thinking about how individual need and creativity drive innovation at the individual level, and its diffusion through networks of likeminded individuals. The political implications of free software have been central to the free software movement and its founder, Richard Stallman, and were developed provocatively and with great insight by Eben Moglen. Free software is but one salient example of a much broader phenomenon. Why can fifty thousand volunteers successfully coauthor /{Wikipedia}/, the most serious online alternative to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then turn around and give it away for free? Why do 4.5 million volunteers contribute their leftover computer cycles to create the most powerful supercomputer on Earth, SETI@Home? Without a broadly accepted analytic model to explain these phenomena, we tend to treat them as curiosities, perhaps transient fads, possibly of significance in one market segment or another. We ,{[pg 6]}, should try instead to see them for what they are: a new mode of production emerging in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world-- those that are the most fully computer networked and for which information goods and services have come to occupy the highest-valued roles. +={ Moglen, Eben ; + von Hippel, Eric ; + Stallman, Richard +} + +Human beings are, and always have been, diversely motivated beings. We act instrumentally, but also noninstrumentally. We act for material gain, but also for psychological well-being and gratification, and for social connectedness. There is nothing new or earth-shattering about this, except perhaps to some economists. In the industrial economy in general, and the industrial information economy as well, most opportunities to make things that were valuable and important to many people were constrained by the physical capital requirements of making them. From the steam engine to the assembly line, from the double-rotary printing press to the communications satellite, the capital constraints on action were such that simply wanting to do something was rarely a sufficient condition to enable one to do it. Financing the necessary physical capital, in turn, oriented the necessarily capital-intensive projects toward a production and organizational strategy that could justify the investments. In market economies, that meant orienting toward market production. In state-run economies, that meant orienting production toward the goals of the state bureaucracy. In either case, the practical individual freedom to cooperate with others in making things of value was limited by the extent of the capital requirements of production. +={ behavior : + motivation to produce +2 ; + capital for production +1 ; + constraints of information production, monetary ; + diversity : + human motivation +1 | motivation to produce +1 ; + human motivation ; + incentives to produce ; + information production capital +1 ; + monetary constraints on information production +2 ; + motivation to produce +1 ; + physical capital for production +2 ; + production capital +2 +} + +In the networked information economy, the physical capital required for production is broadly distributed throughout society. Personal computers and network connections are ubiquitous. This does not mean that they cannot be used for markets, or that individuals cease to seek market opportunities. It does mean, however, that whenever someone, somewhere, among the billion connected human beings, and ultimately among all those who will be connected, wants to make something that requires human creativity, a computer, and a network connection, he or she can do so--alone, or in cooperation with others. He or she already has the capital capacity necessary to do so; if not alone, then at least in cooperation with other individuals acting for complementary reasons. The result is that a good deal more that human beings value can now be done by individuals, who interact with each other socially, as human beings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through the price system. Sometimes, under conditions I specify in some detail, these nonmarket collaborations can be better at motivating effort and can allow creative people to work on information projects more ,{[pg 7]}, efficiently than would traditional market mechanisms and corporations. The result is a flourishing nonmarket sector of information, knowledge, and cultural production, based in the networked environment, and applied to anything that the many individuals connected to it can imagine. Its outputs, in turn, are not treated as exclusive property. They are instead subject to an increasingly robust ethic of open sharing, open for all others to build on, extend, and make their own. + +Because the presence and importance of nonmarket production has become so counterintuitive to people living in market-based economies at the end of the twentieth century, part I of this volume is fairly detailed and technical; overcoming what we intuitively "know" requires disciplined analysis. Readers who are not inclined toward economic analysis should at least read the introduction to part I, the segments entitled "When Information Production Meets the Computer Network" and "Diversity of Strategies in our Current Production System" in chapter 2, and the case studies in chapter 3. These should provide enough of an intuitive feel for what I mean by the diversity of production strategies for information and the emergence of nonmarket individual and cooperative production, to serve as the basis for the more normatively oriented parts of the book. Readers who are genuinely skeptical of the possibility that nonmarket production is sustainable and effective, and in many cases is an efficient strategy for information, knowledge, and cultural production, should take the time to read part I in its entirety. The emergence of precisely this possibility and practice lies at the very heart of my claims about the ways in which liberal commitments are translated into lived experiences in the networked environment, and forms the factual foundation of the political-theoretical and the institutional-legal discussion that occupies the remainder of the book. + +2~ NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY AND LIBERAL, DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES +={ democratic societies +15 ; + information economy : + democracy and liberalism +15 ; + liberal societies +15 ; + networked information economy : + democracy and liberalism +15 +} + +How we make information, how we get it, how we speak to others, and how others speak to us are core components of the shape of freedom in any society. Part II of this book provides a detailed look at how the changes in the technological, economic, and social affordances of the networked information environment affect a series of core commitments of a wide range of liberal democracies. The basic claim is that the diversity of ways of organizing information production and use opens a range of possibilities for pursuing % ,{[pg 8]}, the core political values of liberal societies--individual freedom, a more genuinely participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice. These values provide the vectors of political morality along which the shape and dimensions of any liberal society can be plotted. Because their practical policy implications are often contradictory, rather than complementary, the pursuit of each places certain limits on how we pursue the others, leading different liberal societies to respect them in different patterns. How much a society constrains the democratic decision-making powers of the majority in favor of individual freedom, or to what extent it pursues social justice, have always been attributes that define the political contours and nature of that society. But the economics of industrial production, and our pursuit of productivity and growth, have imposed a limit on how we can pursue any mix of arrangements to implement our commitments to freedom and justice. Singapore is commonly trotted out as an extreme example of the trade-off of freedom for welfare, but all democracies with advanced capitalist economies have made some such trade-off. Predictions of how well we will be able to feed ourselves are always an important consideration in thinking about whether, for example, to democratize wheat production or make it more egalitarian. Efforts to push workplace democracy have also often foundered on the shoals--real or imagined--of these limits, as have many plans for redistribution in the name of social justice. Market-based, proprietary production has often seemed simply too productive to tinker with. The emergence of the networked information economy promises to expand the horizons of the feasible in political imagination. Different liberal polities can pursue different mixtures of respect for different liberal commitments. However, the overarching constraint represented by the seeming necessity of the industrial model of information and cultural production has significantly shifted as an effective constraint on the pursuit of liberal commitments. + +3~ Enhanced Autonomy +={ autonomy +3 ; + individual autonomy +2 ; + democratic societies : + autonomy +3 ; + liberal societies : + autonomy +3 +} + +The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I ,{[pg 9]}, describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community. +={ institutional ecology of digital environment +1 ; + loose affiliations +1 ; + networked public sphere : + loose affiliations +1 ; + norms (social) : + loose affiliations +1 ; + peer production : + loose affiliations ; + public sphere : + loose affiliations +1 ; + regulation by social norms : + loose affiliations +1 ; + scope of loose relations +1 ; + social relations and norms : + loose affiliations +1 +} + +I begin, therefore, with an analysis of the effects of networked information economy on individual autonomy. First, individuals can do more for themselves independently of the permission or cooperation of others. They can create their own expressions, and they can seek out the information they need, with substantially less dependence on the commercial mass media of the twentieth century. Second, and no less importantly, individuals can do more in loose affiliation with others, rather than requiring stable, long-term relations, like coworker relations or participation in formal organizations, to underwrite effective cooperation. Very few individuals living in the industrial information economy could, in any realistic sense, decide to build a new Library of Alexandria of global reach, or to start an encyclopedia. As collaboration among far-flung individuals becomes more common, the idea of doing things that require cooperation with others becomes much more attainable, and the range of projects individuals can choose as their own therefore qualitatively increases. The very fluidity and low commitment required of any given cooperative relationship increases the range and diversity of cooperative relations people can enter, and therefore of collaborative projects they can conceive of as open to them. + +These ways in which autonomy is enhanced require a fairly substantive and rich conception of autonomy as a practical lived experience, rather than the formal conception preferred by many who think of autonomy as a philosophical concept. But even from a narrower perspective, which spans a broader range of conceptions of autonomy, at a minimum we can say that individuals are less susceptible to manipulation by a legally defined class of others--the owners of communications infrastructure and media. The networked information economy provides varied alternative platforms for communication, so that it moderates the power of the traditional mass-media model, where ownership of the means of communication enables an owner to select what others view, and thereby to affect their perceptions of what they can and cannot do. Moreover, the diversity of perspectives on the way the world is and the way it could be for any given individual is qualitatively increased. This gives individuals a significantly greater role in authoring their own lives, by enabling them to perceive a broader range of possibilities, and by providing them a richer baseline against which to measure the choices they in fact make. +={ commercial model of communication ; + industrial model of communication ; + traditional model of communication +} + +% ,{[pg 10]}, + +3~ Democracy: The Networked Public Sphere +={ democratic societies : + public sphere, shift from mass media +4 +} + +The second major implication of the networked information economy is the shift it enables from the mass-mediated public sphere to a networked public sphere. This shift is also based on the increasing freedom individuals enjoy to participate in creating information and knowledge, and the possibilities it presents for a new public sphere to emerge alongside the commercial, mass-media markets. The idea that the Internet democratizes is hardly new. It has been a staple of writing about the Internet since the early 1990s. The relatively simple first-generation claims about the liberating effects of the Internet, summarized in the U.S. Supreme Court's celebration of its potential to make everyone a pamphleteer, came under a variety of criticisms and attacks over the course of the past half decade or so. Here, I offer a detailed analysis of how the emergence of a networked information economy in particular, as an alternative to mass media, improves the political public sphere. The first-generation critique of the democratizing effect of the Internet was based on various implications of the problem of information overload, or the Babel objection. According to the Babel objection, when everyone can speak, no one can be heard, and we devolve either to a cacophony or to the reemergence of money as the distinguishing factor between statements that are heard and those that wallow in obscurity. The second-generation critique was that the Internet is not as decentralized as we thought in the 1990s. The emerging patterns of Internet use show that very few sites capture an exceedingly large amount of attention, and millions of sites go unnoticed. In this world, the Babel objection is perhaps avoided, but only at the expense of the very promise of the Internet as a democratic medium. +={ centralization of communications : + decentralization +3 ; + decentralization of communications +3 ; + democratic societies : + shift from mass-media communications model +3 ; + Babel objection ; + commercial model of communication : + shift away from +2 ; + industrial model of communication : + shift away from +3 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + shift away from +3 ; + liberal societies : + public sphere, shift from mass media +3 ; + networked public sphere +3 ; + public sphere +3 ; + traditional model of communication : + shift away from +3 ; + information overload and Babel objection +} + +In chapters 6 and 7, I offer a detailed and updated analysis of this, perhaps the best-known and most contentious claim about the Internet's liberalizing effects. First, it is important to understand that any consideration of the democratizing effects of the Internet must measure its effects as compared to the commercial, mass-media-based public sphere, not as compared to an idealized utopia that we embraced a decade ago of how the Internet might be. Commercial mass media that have dominated the public spheres of all modern democracies have been studied extensively. They have been shown in extensive literature to exhibit a series of failures as platforms for public discourse. First, they provide a relatively limited intake basin--that is, too many observations and concerns of too many people in complex modern ,{[pg 11]}, societies are left unobserved and unattended to by the small cadre of commercial journalists charged with perceiving the range of issues of public concern in any given society. Second, particularly where the market is concentrated, they give their owners inordinate power to shape opinion and information. This power they can either use themselves or sell to the highest bidder. And third, whenever the owners of commercial media choose not to exercise their power in this way, they then tend to program toward the inane and soothing, rather than toward that which will be politically engaging, and they tend to oversimplify complex public discussions. On the background of these limitations of the mass media, I suggest that the networked public sphere enables many more individuals to communicate their observations and their viewpoints to many others, and to do so in a way that cannot be controlled by media owners and is not as easily corruptible by money as were the mass media. + +The empirical and theoretical literature about network topology and use provides answers to all the major critiques of the claim that the Internet improves the structure of the public sphere. In particular, I show how a wide range of mechanisms--starting from the simple mailing list, through static Web pages, the emergence of writable Web capabilities, and mobility--are being embedded in a social system for the collection of politically salient information, observations, and comments, and provide a platform for discourse. These platforms solve some of the basic limitations of the commercial, concentrated mass media as the core platform of the public sphere in contemporary complex democracies. They enable anyone, anywhere, to go through his or her practical life, observing the social environment through new eyes--the eyes of someone who could actually inject a thought, a criticism, or a concern into the public debate. Individuals become less passive, and thus more engaged observers of social spaces that could potentially become subjects for political conversation; they become more engaged participants in the debates about their observations. The various formats of the networked public sphere provide anyone with an outlet to speak, to inquire, to investigate, without need to access the resources of a major media organization. We are seeing the emergence of new, decentralized approaches to fulfilling the watchdog function and to engaging in political debate and organization. These are being undertaken in a distinctly nonmarket form, in ways that would have been much more difficult to pursue effectively, as a standard part of the construction of the public sphere, before the networked information environment. Working through detailed examples, I try ,{[pg 12]}, to render the optimism about the democratic advantages of the networked public sphere a fully specified argument. + +The networked public sphere has also begun to respond to the information overload problem, but without re-creating the power of mass media at the points of filtering and accreditation. There are two core elements to these developments: First, we are beginning to see the emergence of nonmarket, peer-produced alternative sources of filtration and accreditation in place of the market-based alternatives. Relevance and accreditation are themselves information goods, just like software or an encyclopedia. What we are seeing on the network is that filtering for both relevance and accreditation has become the object of widespread practices of mutual pointing, of peer review, of pointing to original sources of claims, and its complement, the social practice that those who have some ability to evaluate the claims in fact do comment on them. The second element is a contingent but empirically confirmed observation of how users actually use the network. As a descriptive matter, information flow in the network is much more ordered than a simple random walk in the cacophony of information flow would suggest, and significantly less centralized than the mass media environment was. Some sites are much more visible and widely read than others. This is true both when one looks at the Web as a whole, and when one looks at smaller clusters of similar sites or users who tend to cluster. Most commentators who have looked at this pattern have interpreted it as a reemergence of mass media--the dominance of the few visible sites. But a full consideration of the various elements of the network topology literature supports a very different interpretation, in which order emerges in the networked environment without re-creating the failures of the mass-media-dominated public sphere. Sites cluster around communities of interest: Australian fire brigades tend to link to other Australian fire brigades, conservative political blogs (Web logs or online journals) in the United States to other conservative political blogs in the United States, and to a lesser but still significant extent, to liberal political blogs. In each of these clusters, the pattern of some high visibility nodes continues, but as the clusters become small enough, many more of the sites are moderately linked to each other in the cluster. Through this pattern, the network seems to be forming into an attention backbone. "Local" clusters--communities of interest--can provide initial vetting and "peer-review-like" qualities to individual contributions made within an interest cluster. Observations that are seen as significant within a community ,{[pg 13]}, of interest make their way to the relatively visible sites in that cluster, from where they become visible to people in larger ("regional") clusters. This continues until an observation makes its way to the "superstar" sites that hundreds of thousands of people might read and use. This path is complemented by the practice of relatively easy commenting and posting directly to many of the superstar sites, which creates shortcuts to wide attention. It is fairly simple to grasp intuitively why these patterns might emerge. Users tend to treat other people's choices about what to link to and to read as good indicators of what is worthwhile for them. They are not slavish in this, though; they apply some judgment of their own as to whether certain types of users--say, political junkies of a particular stripe, or fans of a specific television program--are the best predictors of what will be interesting for them. The result is that attention in the networked environment is more dependent on being interesting to an engaged group of people than it is in the mass-media environment, where moderate interest to large numbers of weakly engaged viewers is preferable. Because of the redundancy of clusters and links, and because many clusters are based on mutual interest, not on capital investment, it is more difficult to buy attention on the Internet than it is in mass media outlets, and harder still to use money to squelch an opposing view. These characteristics save the networked environment from the Babel objection without reintroducing excessive power in any single party or small cluster of them, and without causing a resurgence in the role of money as a precondition to the ability to speak publicly. +={ accreditation : + as public good ; + Babel objection ; + clusters in network topology ; + information overload and Babel objection ; + filtering : + as public good ; + information flow ; + local clusters in network topology ; + regional clusters in network topology ; + relevance filtering : + as public good +} + +3~ Justice and Human Development +={ access : + human development and justice +3 ; + democratic societies : + justice and human development +3 ; + human development and justice +3 ; + justice and human development +3 ; + liberal societies : + justice and human development +} + +Information, knowledge, and information-rich goods and tools play a significant role in economic opportunity and human development. While the networked information economy cannot solve global hunger and disease, its emergence does open reasonably well-defined new avenues for addressing and constructing some of the basic requirements of justice and human development. Because the outputs of the networked information economy are usually nonproprietary, it provides free access to a set of the basic instrumentalities of economic opportunity and the basic outputs of the information economy. From a liberal perspective concerned with justice, at a minimum, these outputs become more readily available as "finished goods" to those who are least well off. More importantly, the availability of free information resources makes participating in the economy less dependent on ,{[pg 14]}, surmounting access barriers to financing and social-transactional networks that made working out of poverty difficult in industrial economies. These resources and tools thus improve equality of opportunity. + +From a more substantive and global perspective focused on human development, the freedom to use basic resources and capabilities allows improved participation in the production of information and information-dependent components of human development. First, and currently most advanced, the emergence of a broad range of free software utilities makes it easier for poor and middle-income countries to obtain core software capabilities. More importantly, free software enables the emergence of local capabilities to provide software services, both for national uses and as a basis for participating in a global software services industry, without need to rely on permission from multinational software companies. Scientific publication is beginning to use commons-based strategies to publish important sources of information in a way that makes the outputs freely available in poorer countries. More ambitiously, we begin to see in agricultural research a combined effort of public, nonprofit, and open-source-like efforts being developed and applied to problems of agricultural innovation. The ultimate purpose is to develop a set of basic capabilities that would allow collaboration among farmers and scientists, in both poor countries and around the globe, to develop better, more nutritious crops to improve food security throughout the poorer regions of the world. Equally ambitious, but less operationally advanced, we are beginning to see early efforts to translate this system of innovation to health-related products. +={ free software : + human development and justice ; + innovation : + human development +1 ; + open-source software : + human development and justice ; + software, open-source : + human development and justice +} + +All these efforts are aimed at solving one of the most glaring problems of poverty and poor human development in the global information economy: Even as opulence increases in the wealthier economies--as information and innovation offer longer and healthier lives that are enriched by better access to information, knowledge, and culture--in many places, life expectancy is decreasing, morbidity is increasing, and illiteracy remains rampant. Some, although by no means all, of this global injustice is due to the fact that we have come to rely ever-more exclusively on proprietary business models of the industrial economy to provide some of the most basic information components of human development. As the networked information economy develops new ways of producing information, whose outputs are not treated as proprietary and exclusive but can be made available freely to everyone, it offers modest but meaningful opportunities for improving human development everywhere. We are seeing early signs of the emergence of an innovation ,{[pg 15]}, ecosystem made of public funding, traditional nonprofits, and the newly emerging sector of peer production that is making it possible to advance human development through cooperative efforts in both rich countries and poor. + +3~ A Critical Culture and Networked Social Relations + +The networked information economy also allows for the emergence of a more critical and self-reflective culture. In the past decade, a number of legal scholars--Niva Elkin Koren, Terry Fisher, Larry Lessig, and Jack Balkin-- have begun to examine how the Internet democratizes culture. Following this work and rooted in the deliberative strand of democratic theory, I suggest that the networked information environment offers us a more attractive cultural production system in two distinct ways: (1) it makes culture more transparent, and (2) it makes culture more malleable. Together, these mean that we are seeing the emergence of a new folk culture--a practice that has been largely suppressed in the industrial era of cultural production--where many more of us participate actively in making cultural moves and finding meaning in the world around us. These practices make their practitioners better "readers" of their own culture and more self-reflective and critical of the culture they occupy, thereby enabling them to become more self-reflective participants in conversations within that culture. This also allows individuals much greater freedom to participate in tugging and pulling at the cultural creations of others, "glomming on" to them, as Balkin puts it, and making the culture they occupy more their own than was possible with mass-media culture. In these senses, we can say that culture is becoming more democratic: self-reflective and participatory. +={ Balkin, Jack ; + communities : + critical culture and self-reflection +1 ; + critical culture and self-reflection +1 ; + culture : + criticality of (self-reflection) +1 ; + democratic societies : + critical culture and social relations +1 ; + Fisher, William (Terry) ; + Koren, Niva Elkin ; + Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) ; + self-organization : + See clusters in network topology self-reflection +1 ; + liberal societies : + critical culture and social relations +} + +Throughout much of this book, I underscore the increased capabilities of individuals as the core driving social force behind the networked information economy. This heightened individual capacity has raised concerns by many that the Internet further fragments community, continuing the long trend of industrialization. A substantial body of empirical literature suggests, however, that we are in fact using the Internet largely at the expense of television, and that this exchange is a good one from the perspective of social ties. We use the Internet to keep in touch with family and intimate friends, both geographically proximate and distant. To the extent we do see a shift in social ties, it is because, in addition to strengthening our strong bonds, we are also increasing the range and diversity of weaker connections. Following ,{[pg 16]}, Manuel Castells and Barry Wellman, I suggest that we have become more adept at filling some of the same emotional and context-generating functions that have traditionally been associated with the importance of community with a network of overlapping social ties that are limited in duration or intensity. +={ attention fragmentation ; + Castells, Manuel ; + fragmentation of communication ; + norms (social) : + fragmentation of communication ; + regulation by social norms : + fragmentation of communication ; + social relations and norms : + fragmentation of communication ; + communities : + fragmentation of ; + diversity : + fragmentation of communication ; + Castells, Manuel +} + +2~ FOUR METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTS +={ information economy : + methodological choices +14 ; + networked environmental policy : + See policy ; + networked information economy : + methodological choices +14 +} + +There are four methodological choices represented by the thesis that I have outlined up to this point, and therefore in this book as a whole, which require explication and defense. The first is that I assign a very significant role to technology. The second is that I offer an explanation centered on social relations, but operating in the domain of economics, rather than sociology. The third and fourth are more internal to liberal political theory. The third is that I am offering a liberal political theory, but taking a path that has usually been resisted in that literature--considering economic structure and the limits of the market and its supporting institutions from the perspective of freedom, rather than accepting the market as it is, and defending or criticizing adjustments through the lens of distributive justice. Fourth, my approach heavily emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations. Much of the discussion revolves around the choice between markets and nonmarket social behavior. In much of it, the state plays no role, or is perceived as playing a primarily negative role, in a way that is alien to the progressive branches of liberal political thought. In this, it seems more of a libertarian or an anarchistic thesis than a liberal one. I do not completely discount the state, as I will explain. But I do suggest that what is special about our moment is the rising efficacy of individuals and loose, nonmarket affiliations as agents of political economy. Just like the market, the state will have to adjust to this new emerging modality of human action. Liberal political theory must first recognize and understand it before it can begin to renegotiate its agenda for the liberal state, progressive or otherwise. +={ capabilities of individuals : + technology and human affairs +5 ; + human affairs, technology and +5 ; + individual capabilities and action : + technology and human affairs +5 +} + +3~ The Role of Technology in Human Affairs +={ technology : + role of +2 +} + +The first methodological choice concerns how one should treat the role of technology in the development of human affairs. The kind of technological determinism that typified Lewis Mumford, or, specifically in the area of communications, Marshall McLuhan, is widely perceived in academia today ,{[pg 17]}, as being too deterministic, though perhaps not so in popular culture. The contemporary effort to offer more nuanced, institution-based, and politicalchoice-based explanations is perhaps best typified by Paul Starr's recent and excellent work on the creation of the media. While these contemporary efforts are indeed powerful, one should not confuse a work like Elizabeth Eisenstein's carefully argued and detailed The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, with McLuhan's determinism. Assuming that technologies are just tools that happen, more or less, to be there, and are employed in any given society in a pattern that depends only on what that society and culture makes of them is too constrained. A society that has no wheel and no writing has certain limits on what it can do. Barry Wellman has imported into sociology a term borrowed from engineering--affordances.~{ Barry Wellman et al., "The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism," JCMC 8, no. 3 (April 2003). }~ Langdon Winner called these the "political properties" of technologies.~{ Langdon Winner, ed., "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" in The Whale and The Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19-39. }~ An earlier version of this idea is Harold Innis's concept of "the bias of communications."~{ Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). Innis too is often lumped with McLuhan and Walter Ong as a technological determinist. His work was, however, one of a political economist, and he emphasized the relationship between technology and economic and social organization, much more than the deterministic operation of technology on human cognition and capability. }~ In Internet law and policy debates this approach has become widely adopted through the influential work of Lawrence Lessig, who characterized it as "code is law."~{ Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999). }~ +={ deregulation : + See policy determinism, technological +1 ; + Eisenstein, Elizabeth ; + McLuhan, Marshall ; + Mumford, Lewis ; + Winner, Langdon ; + Wellman, Barry ; + Starr, Paul +} + +The idea is simple to explain, and distinct from a naïve determinism. Different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform. All other things being equal, things that are easier to do are more likely to be done, and things that are harder to do are less likely to be done. All other things are never equal. That is why technological determinism in the strict sense--if you have technology "t," you should expect social structure or relation "s" to emerge--is false. Ocean navigation had a different adoption and use when introduced in states whose land empire ambitions were effectively countered by strong neighbors--like Spain and Portugal--than in nations that were focused on building a vast inland empire, like China. Print had different effects on literacy in countries where religion encouraged individual reading--like Prussia, Scotland, England, and New England--than where religion discouraged individual, unmediated interaction with texts, like France and Spain. This form of understanding the role of technology is adopted here. Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, technology sets some parameters of individual and social action. It can make some actions, relationships, organizations, and institutions easier to pursue, and others harder. In a challenging environment--be the challenges natural or human--it can make some behaviors obsolete by increasing the efficacy of directly competitive strategies. However, within the realm of the feasible--uses not rendered impossible by the adoption or rejection of a technology--different patterns of adoption and use ,{[pg 18]}, can result in very different social relations that emerge around a technology. Unless these patterns are in competition, or unless even in competition they are not catastrophically less effective at meeting the challenges, different societies can persist with different patterns of use over long periods. It is the feasibility of long-term sustainability of different patterns of use that makes this book relevant to policy, not purely to theory. The same technologies of networked computers can be adopted in very different patterns. There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible. That is a choice we face as a society. The way we develop will, in significant measure, depend on choices we make in the next decade or so. + +3~ The Role of Economic Analysis and Methodological Individualism +={ individualist methodologies +1 ; + economic analysis, role of +1 +} + +It should be emphasized, as the second point, that this book has a descriptive methodology that is distinctly individualist and economic in orientation, which is hardly the only way to approach this problem. Manuel Castells's magisterial treatment of the networked society~{ Manuel Castells, The Rise of Networked Society (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). }~ locates its central characteristic in the shift from groups and hierarchies to networks as social and organizational models--looser, flexible arrangements of human affairs. Castells develops this theory as he describes a wide range of changes, from transportation networks to globalization and industrialization. In his work, the Internet fits into this trend, enabling better coordination and cooperation in these sorts of loosely affiliated networks. My own emphasis is on the specific relative roles of market and nonmarket sectors, and how that change anchors the radical decentralization that he too observes, as a matter of sociological observation. I place at the core of the shift the technical and economic characteristics of computer networks and information. These provide the pivot for the shift toward radical decentralization of production. They underlie the shift from an information environment dominated by proprietary, market-oriented action, to a world in which nonproprietary, nonmarket transactional frameworks play a large role alongside market production. This newly emerging, nonproprietary sector affects to a substantial degree the entire information environment in which individuals and societies live their lives. If there is one lesson we can learn from globalization and the ever-increasing reach of the market, it is that the logic of the market exerts enormous pressure on existing social structures. If we are indeed seeing the emergence of a substantial component of nonmarket production at the very ,{[pg 19]}, core of our economic engine--the production and exchange of information, and through it of information-based goods, tools, services, and capabilities-- then this change suggests a genuine limit on the extent of the market. Such a limit, growing from within the very market that it limits, in its most advanced loci, would represent a genuine shift in direction for what appeared to be the ever-increasing global reach of the market economy and society in the past half century. +={ Castells, Manuel ; + methodological individualism ; + nonmarket information producers : + role of +} + +3~ Economic Structure in Liberal Political Theory +={ economics in liberal political theory +2 ; + liberal political theory +2 +} + +The third point has to do with the role of economic structure in liberal political theory. My analysis in this regard is practical and human centric. By this, I mean to say two things: First, I am concerned with human beings, with individuals as the bearers of moral claims regarding the structure of the political and economic systems they inhabit. Within the liberal tradition, the position I take is humanistic and general, as opposed to political and particular. It is concerned first and foremost with the claims of human beings as human beings, rather than with the requirements of democracy or the entitlements of citizenship or membership in a legitimate or meaningfully self-governed political community. There are diverse ways of respecting the basic claims of human freedom, dignity, and well-being. Different liberal polities do so with different mixes of constitutional and policy practices. The rise of global information economic structures and relationships affects human beings everywhere. In some places, it complements democratic traditions. In others, it destabilizes constraints on liberty. An understanding of how we can think of this moment in terms of human freedom and development must transcend the particular traditions, both liberal and illiberal, of any single nation. The actual practice of freedom that we see emerging from the networked environment allows people to reach across national or social boundaries, across space and political division. It allows people to solve problems together in new associations that are outside the boundaries of formal, legal-political association. In this fluid social economic environment, the individual's claims provide a moral anchor for considering the structures of power and opportunity, of freedom and well-being. Furthermore, while it is often convenient and widely accepted to treat organizations or communities as legal entities, as "persons," they are not moral agents. Their role in an analysis of freedom and justice is derivative from their role--both enabling and constraining--as structuring context in which human beings, ,{[pg 20]}, the actual moral agents of political economy, find themselves. In this regard, my positions here are decidedly "liberal," as opposed to either communitarian or critical. +={ dignity ; + well-being ; + freedom ; + communities : + as persons +1 +} + +Second, I am concerned with actual human beings in actual historical settings, not with representations of human beings abstracted from their settings. These commitments mean that freedom and justice for historically situated individuals are measured from a first-person, practical perspective. No constraints on individual freedom and no sources of inequality are categorically exempt from review, nor are any considered privileged under this view. Neither economy nor cultural heritage is given independent moral weight. A person whose life and relations are fully regimented by external forces is unfree, no matter whether the source of regimentation can be understood as market-based, authoritarian, or traditional community values. This does not entail a radical anarchism or libertarianism. Organizations, communities, and other external structures are pervasively necessary for human beings to flourish and to act freely and effectively. This does mean, however, that I think of these structures only from the perspective of their effects on human beings. Their value is purely derivative from their importance to the actual human beings that inhabit them and are structured--for better or worse--by them. As a practical matter, this places concern with market structure and economic organization much closer to the core of questions of freedom than liberal theory usually is willing to do. Liberals have tended to leave the basic structure of property and markets either to libertarians--who, like Friedrich Hayek, accepted its present contours as "natural," and a core constituent element of freedom--or to Marxists and neo-Marxists. I treat property and markets as just one domain of human action, with affordances and limitations. Their presence enhances freedom along some dimensions, but their institutional requirements can become sources of constraint when they squelch freedom of action in nonmarket contexts. Calibrating the reach of the market, then, becomes central not only to the shape of justice or welfare in a society, but also to freedom. +={ autonomy +5 ; + capabilities of individuals +5 ; + democratic societies : + individual capabilities in +5 ; + individual autonomy : + individual capabilities in +5 ; + individual capabilities and action +5 ; + Hayek, Friedrich +} + +3~ Whither the State? +={ government : + role of +4 ; + state, role of +4 +} + +The fourth and last point emerges in various places throughout this book, but deserves explicit note here. What I find new and interesting about the networked information economy is the rise of individual practical capabilities, and the role that these new capabilities play in increasing the relative salience of nonproprietary, often nonmarket individual and social behavior. ,{[pg 21]}, + +In my discussion of autonomy and democracy, of justice and a critical culture, I emphasize the rise of individual and cooperative private action and the relative decrease in the dominance of market-based and proprietary action. Where in all this is the state? For the most part, as you will see particularly in chapter 11, the state in both the United States and Europe has played a role in supporting the market-based industrial incumbents of the twentieth-century information production system at the expense of the individuals who make up the emerging networked information economy. Most state interventions have been in the form of either captured legislation catering to incumbents, or, at best, well-intentioned but wrongheaded efforts to optimize the institutional ecology for outdated modes of information and cultural production. In the traditional mapping of political theory, a position such as the one I present here--that freedom and justice can and should best be achieved by a combination of market action and private, voluntary (not to say charitable) nonmarket action, and that the state is a relatively suspect actor--is libertarian. Perhaps, given that I subject to similar criticism rules styled by their proponents as "property"--like "intellectual property" or "spectrum property rights"--it is anarchist, focused on the role of mutual aid and highly skeptical of the state. (It is quite fashionable nowadays to be libertarian, as it has been for a few decades, and more fashionable to be anarchist than it has been in a century.) + +The more modest truth is that my position is not rooted in a theoretical skepticism about the state, but in a practical diagnosis of opportunities, barriers, and strategies for achieving improvements in human freedom and development given the actual conditions of technology, economy, and politics. I have no objection in principle to an effective, liberal state pursuing one of a range of liberal projects and commitments. Here and there throughout this book you will encounter instances where I suggest that the state could play constructive roles, if it stopped listening to incumbents for long enough to realize this. These include, for example, municipal funding of neutral broadband networks, state funding of basic research, and possible strategic regulatory interventions to negate monopoly control over essential resources in the digital environment. However, the necessity for the state's affirmative role is muted because of my diagnosis of the particular trajectory of markets, on the one hand, and individual and social action, on the other hand, in the digitally networked information environment. The particular economics of computation and communications; the particular economics of information, knowledge, and cultural production; and the relative role of ,{[pg 22]}, information in contemporary, advanced economies have coalesced to make nonmarket individual and social action the most important domain of action in the furtherance of the core liberal commitments. Given these particular characteristics, there is more freedom to be found through opening up institutional spaces for voluntary individual and cooperative action than there is in intentional public action through the state. Nevertheless, I offer no particular reasons to resist many of the roles traditionally played by the liberal state. I offer no reason to think that, for example, education should stop being primarily a state-funded, public activity and a core responsibility of the liberal state, or that public health should not be so. I have every reason to think that the rise of nonmarket production enhances, rather than decreases, the justifiability of state funding for basic science and research, as the spillover effects of publicly funded information production can now be much greater and more effectively disseminated and used to enhance the general welfare. +={ social action +1 } + +The important new fact about the networked environment, however, is the efficacy and centrality of individual and collective social action. In most domains, freedom of action for individuals, alone and in loose cooperation with others, can achieve much of the liberal desiderata I consider throughout this book. From a global perspective, enabling individuals to act in this way also extends the benefits of liberalization across borders, increasing the capacities of individuals in nonliberal states to grab greater freedom than those who control their political systems would like. By contrast, as long as states in the most advanced market-based economies continue to try to optimize their institutional frameworks to support the incumbents of the industrial information economy, they tend to threaten rather than support liberal commitments. Once the networked information economy has stabilized and we come to understand the relative importance of voluntary private action outside of markets, the state can begin to adjust its policies to facilitate nonmarket action and to take advantage of its outputs to improve its own support for core liberal commitments. +={ collaborative authorship : + See also peer production collective social action +} + +2~ THE STAKES OF IT ALL: THE BATTLE OVER THE INSTITUTIONAL ECOLOGY OF THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT +={ commercial model of communication +9 ; + industrial model of communication +9 ; + information economy : + institutional ecology +9 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment +9 ; + networked information economy : + institutional ecology +9 ; + proprietary rights +9 ; + traditional model of communication +9 +} + +No benevolent historical force will inexorably lead this technologicaleconomic moment to develop toward an open, diverse, liberal equilibrium. ,{[pg 23]}, If the transformation I describe as possible occurs, it will lead to substantial redistribution of power and money from the twentieth-century industrial producers of information, culture, and communications--like Hollywood, the recording industry, and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunications services giants--to a combination of widely diffuse populations around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools that make this population better able to produce its own information environment rather than buying it ready-made. None of the industrial giants of yore are taking this reallocation lying down. The technology will not overcome their resistance through an insurmountable progressive impulse. The reorganization of production and the advances it can bring in freedom and justice will emerge, therefore, only as a result of social and political action aimed at protecting the new social patterns from the incumbents' assaults. It is precisely to develop an understanding of what is at stake and why it is worth fighting for that I write this book. I offer no reassurances, however, that any of this will in fact come to pass. + +The battle over the relative salience of the proprietary, industrial models of information production and exchange and the emerging networked information economy is being carried out in the domain of the institutional ecology of the digital environment. In a wide range of contexts, a similar set of institutional questions is being contested: To what extent will resources necessary for information production and exchange be governed as a commons, free for all to use and biased in their availability in favor of none? To what extent will these resources be entirely proprietary, and available only to those functioning within the market or within traditional forms of wellfunded nonmarket action like the state and organized philanthropy? We see this battle played out at all layers of the information environment: the physical devices and network channels necessary to communicate; the existing information and cultural resources out of which new statements must be made; and the logical resources--the software and standards--necessary to translate what human beings want to say to each other into signals that machines can process and transmit. Its central question is whether there will, or will not, be a core common infrastructure that is governed as a commons and therefore available to anyone who wishes to participate in the networked information environment outside of the market-based, proprietary framework. +={ property ownership +5 ; + commons +} + +This is not to say that property is in some sense inherently bad. Property, together with contract, is the core institutional component of markets, and ,{[pg 24]}, a core institutional element of liberal societies. It is what enables sellers to extract prices from buyers, and buyers to know that when they pay, they will be secure in their ability to use what they bought. It underlies our capacity to plan actions that require use of resources that, without exclusivity, would be unavailable for us to use. But property also constrains action. The rules of property are circumscribed and intended to elicit a particular datum--willingness and ability to pay for exclusive control over a resource. They constrain what one person or another can do with regard to a resource; that is, use it in some ways but not others, reveal or hide information with regard to it, and so forth. These constraints are necessary so that people must transact with each other through markets, rather than through force or social networks, but they do so at the expense of constraining action outside of the market to the extent that it depends on access to these resources. +={ constrains of information production, physical +2 ; + physical constraints on information production +2 +} + +Commons are another core institutional component of freedom of action in free societies, but they are structured to enable action that is not based on exclusive control over the resources necessary for action. For example, I can plan an outdoor party with some degree of certainty by renting a private garden or beach, through the property system. Alternatively, I can plan to meet my friends on a public beach or at Sheep's Meadow in Central Park. I can buy an easement from my neighbor to reach a nearby river, or I can walk around her property using the public road that makes up our transportation commons. Each institutional framework--property and commons--allows for a certain freedom of action and a certain degree of predictability of access to resources. Their complementary coexistence and relative salience as institutional frameworks for action determine the relative reach of the market and the domain of nonmarket action, both individual and social, in the resources they govern and the activities that depend on access to those resources. Now that material conditions have enabled the emergence of greater scope for nonmarket action, the scope and existence of a core common infrastructure that includes the basic resources necessary to produce and exchange information will shape the degree to which individuals will be able to act in all the ways that I describe as central to the emergence of a networked information economy and the freedoms it makes possible. +={ commons } + +At the physical layer, the transition to broadband has been accompanied by a more concentrated market structure for physical wires and connections, and less regulation of the degree to which owners can control the flow of ,{[pg 25]}, information on their networks. The emergence of open wireless networks, based on "spectrum commons," counteracts this trend to some extent, as does the current apparent business practice of broadband owners not to use their ownership to control the flow of information over their networks. Efforts to overcome the broadband market concentration through the development of municipal broadband networks are currently highly contested in legislation and courts. The single most threatening development at the physical layer has been an effort driven primarily by Hollywood, over the past few years, to require the manufacturers of computation devices to design their systems so as to enforce the copyright claims and permissions imposed by the owners of digital copyrighted works. Should this effort succeed, the core characteristic of computers--that they are general-purpose devices whose abilities can be configured and changed over time by their owners as uses and preferences change--will be abandoned in favor of machines that can be trusted to perform according to factory specifications, irrespective of what their owners wish. The primary reason that these laws have not yet passed, and are unlikely to pass, is that the computer hardware and software, and electronics and telecommunications industries all understand that such a law would undermine their innovation and creativity. At the logical layer, we are seeing a concerted effort, again headed primarily by Hollywood and the recording industry, to shape the software and standards to make sure that digitally encoded cultural products can continue to be sold as packaged goods. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the assault on peer-to-peer technologies are the most obvious in this regard. +={ boradband networks } + +More generally information, knowledge, and culture are being subjected to a second enclosure movement, as James Boyle has recently explored in depth. The freedom of action for individuals who wish to produce information, knowledge, and culture is being systematically curtailed in order to secure the economic returns demanded by the manufacturers of the industrial information economy. A rich literature in law has developed in response to this increasing enclosure over the past twenty years. It started with David Lange's evocative exploration of the public domain and Pamela Samuelson's prescient critique of the application of copyright to computer programs and digital materials, and continued through Jessica Litman's work on the public domain and digital copyright and Boyle's exploration of the basic romantic assumptions underlying our emerging "intellectual property" construct and the need for an environmentalist framework for preserving the public domain. It reached its most eloquent expression in Lawrence Lessig's arguments ,{[pg 26]}, for the centrality of free exchange of ideas and information to our most creative endeavors, and his diagnoses of the destructive effects of the present enclosure movement. This growing skepticism among legal academics has been matched by a long-standing skepticism among economists (to which I devote much discussion in chapter 2). The lack of either analytic or empirical foundation for the regulatory drive toward ever-stronger proprietary rights has not, however, resulted in a transformed politics of the regulation of intellectual production. Only recently have we begun to see a politics of information policy and "intellectual property" emerge from a combination of popular politics among computer engineers, college students, and activists concerned with the global poor; a reorientation of traditional media advocates; and a very gradual realization by high-technology firms that rules pushed by Hollywood can impede the growth of computer-based businesses. This political countermovement is tied to quite basic characteristics of the technology of computer communications, and to the persistent and growing social practices of sharing--some, like p2p (peer-to-peer) file sharing, in direct opposition to proprietary claims; others, increasingly, are instances of the emerging practices of making information on nonproprietary models and of individuals sharing what they themselves made in social, rather than market patterns. These economic and social forces are pushing at each other in opposite directions, and each is trying to mold the legal environment to better accommodate its requirements. We still stand at a point where information production could be regulated so that, for most users, it will be forced back into the industrial model, squelching the emerging model of individual, radically decentralized, and nonmarket production and its attendant improvements in freedom and justice. +={ Boyle, James ; + Lange, David ; + Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) ; + Litman, Jessica ; + Samuelson, Pamela ; + policy +2 +} + +Social and economic organization is not infinitely malleable. Neither is it always equally open to affirmative design. The actual practices of human interaction with information, knowledge, and culture and with production and consumption are the consequence of a feedback effect between social practices, economic organization, technological affordances, and formal constraints on behavior through law and similar institutional forms. These components of the constraints and affordances of human behavior tend to adapt dynamically to each other, so that the tension between the technological affordances, the social and economic practices, and the law are often not too great. During periods of stability, these components of the structure within which human beings live are mostly aligned and mutually reinforce ,{[pg 27]}, each other, but the stability is subject to shock at any one of these dimensions. Sometimes shock can come in the form of economic crisis, as it did in the United States during the Great Depression. Often it can come from an external physical threat to social institutions, like a war. Sometimes, though probably rarely, it can come from law, as, some would argue, it came from the desegregation decision in /{Brown v. Board of Education}/. Sometimes it can come from technology; the introduction of print was such a perturbation, as was, surely, the steam engine. The introduction of the highcapacity mechanical presses and telegraph ushered in the era of mass media. The introduction of radio created a similar perturbation, which for a brief moment destabilized the mass-media model, but quickly converged to it. In each case, the period of perturbation offered more opportunities and greater risks than the periods of relative stability. During periods of perturbation, more of the ways in which society organizes itself are up for grabs; more can be renegotiated, as the various other components of human stability adjust to the changes. To borrow Stephen Jay Gould's term from evolutionary theory, human societies exist in a series of punctuated equilibria. The periods of disequilibrium are not necessarily long. A mere twenty-five years passed between the invention of radio and its adaptation to the mass-media model. A similar period passed between the introduction of telephony and its adoption of the monopoly utility form that enabled only one-to-one limited communications. In each of these periods, various paths could have been taken. Radio showed us even within the past century how, in some societies, different paths were in fact taken and then sustained over decades. After a period of instability, however, the various elements of human behavioral constraint and affordances settled on a new stable alignment. During periods of stability, we can probably hope for little more than tinkering at the edges of the human condition. +={ Gould, Stephen Jay ; + Luther, Martin +} + +This book is offered, then, as a challenge to contemporary liberal democracies. We are in the midst of a technological, economic, and organizational transformation that allows us to renegotiate the terms of freedom, justice, and productivity in the information society. How we shall live in this new environment will in some significant measure depend on policy choices that we make over the next decade or so. To be able to understand these choices, to be able to make them well, we must recognize that they are part of what is fundamentally a social and political choice--a choice about how to be free, equal, productive human beings under a new set of technological and ,{[pg 28]}, economic conditions. As economic policy, allowing yesterday's winners to dictate the terms of tomorrow's economic competition would be disastrous. As social policy, missing an opportunity to enrich democracy, freedom, and justice in our society while maintaining or even enhancing our productivity would be unforgivable. ,{[pg 29]}, + +:B~ Part One - The Networked Information Economy + +1~p1 Introduction +={ communities : + technology-defined social structure +9 ; + norms (social) : + technology-defined structure +9 ; + regulation by social norms : + technology-defined structure +9 ; + social relations and norms : + technology-defined structure +9 ; + social structure, defined by technology +9 ; + technology : + social structure defined by +9 +} + +For more than 150 years, new communications technologies have tended to concentrate and commercialize the production and exchange of information, while extending the geographic and social reach of information distribution networks. High-volume mechanical presses and the telegraph combined with new business practices to change newspapers from small-circulation local efforts into mass media. Newspapers became means of communications intended to reach ever-larger and more dispersed audiences, and their management required substantial capital investment. As the size of the audience and its geographic and social dispersion increased, public discourse developed an increasingly one-way model. Information and opinion that was widely known and formed the shared basis for political conversation and broad social relations flowed from ever more capital-intensive commercial and professional producers to passive, undifferentiated consumers. It was a model easily adopted and amplified by radio, television, and later cable and satellite communications. This trend did not cover all forms of communication and culture. Telephones and personal interactions, most importantly, ,{[pg 30]}, and small-scale distributions, like mimeographed handbills, were obvious alternatives. Yet the growth of efficient transportation and effective large-scale managerial and administrative structures meant that the sources of effective political and economic power extended over larger geographic areas and required reaching a larger and more geographically dispersed population. The economics of long-distance mass distribution systems necessary to reach this constantly increasing and more dispersed relevant population were typified by high up-front costs and low marginal costs of distribution. These cost characteristics drove cultural production toward delivery to everwider audiences of increasingly high production-value goods, whose fixed costs could be spread over ever-larger audiences--like television series, recorded music, and movies. Because of these economic characteristics, the mass-media model of information and cultural production and transmission became the dominant form of public communication in the twentieth century. + +The Internet presents the possibility of a radical reversal of this long trend. It is the first modern communications medium that expands its reach by decentralizing the capital structure of production and distribution of information, culture, and knowledge. Much of the physical capital that embeds most of the intelligence in the network is widely diffused and owned by end users. Network routers and servers are not qualitatively different from the computers that end users own, unlike broadcast stations or cable systems, which are radically different in economic and technical terms from the televisions that receive their signals. This basic change in the material conditions of information and cultural production and distribution have substantial effects on how we come to know the world we occupy and the alternative courses of action open to us as individuals and as social actors. Through these effects, the emerging networked environment structures how we perceive and pursue core values in modern liberal societies. + +Technology alone does not, however, determine social structure. The introduction of print in China and Korea did not induce the kind of profound religious and political reformation that followed the printed Bible and disputations in Europe. But technology is not irrelevant, either. Luther's were not the first disputations nailed to a church door. Print, however, made it practically feasible for more than 300,000 copies of Luther's publications to be circulated between 1517 and 1520 in a way that earlier disputations could not have been.~{ Elizabeth Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). }~ Vernacular reading of the Bible became a feasible form of religious self-direction only when printing these Bibles and making them ,{[pg 31]}, available to individual households became economically feasible, and not when all copyists were either monks or otherwise dependent on the church. Technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice. Some things become easier and cheaper, others harder and more expensive to do or to prevent under different technological conditions. The interaction between these technological-economic feasibility spaces, and the social responses to these changes--both in terms of institutional changes, like law and regulation, and in terms of changing social practices--define the qualities of a period. The way life is actually lived by people within a given set of interlocking technological, economic, institutional, and social practices is what makes a society attractive or unattractive, what renders its practices laudable or lamentable. + +A particular confluence of technical and economic changes is now altering the way we produce and exchange information, knowledge, and culture in ways that could redefine basic practices, first in the most advanced economies, and eventually around the globe. The potential break from the past 150 years is masked by the somewhat liberal use of the term "information economy" in various permutations since the 1970s. The term has been used widely to signify the dramatic increase in the importance of usable information as a means of controlling production and the flow of inputs, outputs, and services. While often evoked as parallel to the "postindustrial" stage, in fact, the information economy was tightly linked throughout the twentieth century with controlling the processes of the industrial economy. This is clearest in the case of accounting firms and financial markets, but is true of the industrial modalities of organizing cultural production as well. Hollywood, the broadcast networks, and the recording industry were built around a physical production model. Once the cultural utterances, the songs or movies, were initially produced and fixed in some means of storage and transmission, the economics of production and distribution of these physical goods took over. Making the initial utterances and the physical goods that embodied them required high capital investment up front. Making many copies was not much more expensive than making few copies, and very much cheaper on a per-copy basis. These industries therefore organized themselves to invest large sums in making a small number of high production-value cultural "artifacts," which were then either replicated and stamped onto many low-cost copies of each artifact, or broadcast or distributed through high-cost systems for low marginal cost ephemeral consumption on screens and with receivers. This required an effort to manage demand for those ,{[pg 32]}, products that were in fact recorded and replicated or distributed, so as to make sure that the producers could sell many units of a small number of cultural utterances at a low per-unit cost, rather than few units each of many cultural utterances at higher per-unit costs. Because of its focus around capital-intensive production and distribution techniques, this first stage might best be thought of as the "industrial information economy." +={ information, defined } + +Radical decentralization of intelligence in our communications network and the centrality of information, knowledge, culture, and ideas to advanced economic activity are leading to a new stage of the information economy-- the networked information economy. In this new stage, we can harness many more of the diverse paths and mechanisms for cultural transmission that were muted by the economies of scale that led to the rise of the concentrated, controlled form of mass media, whether commercial or state-run. The most important aspect of the networked information economy is the possibility it opens for reversing the control focus of the industrial information economy. In particular, it holds out the possibility of reversing two trends in cultural production central to the project of control: concentration and commercialization. + +Two fundamental facts have changed in the economic ecology in which the industrial information enterprises have arisen. First, the basic output that has become dominant in the most advanced economies is human meaning and communication. Second, the basic physical capital necessary to express and communicate human meaning is the connected personal computer. The core functionalities of processing, storage, and communications are widely owned throughout the population of users. Together, these changes destabilize the industrial stage of the information economy. Both the capacity to make meaning--to encode and decode humanly meaningful statements-- and the capacity to communicate one's meaning around the world, are held by, or readily available to, at least many hundreds of millions of users around the globe. Any person who has information can connect with any other person who wants it, and anyone who wants to make it mean something in some context, can do so. The high capital costs that were a prerequisite to gathering, working, and communicating information, knowledge, and culture, have now been widely distributed in the society. The entry barrier they posed no longer offers a condensation point for the large organizations that once dominated the information environment. Instead, emerging models of information and cultural production, radically decentralized and based on ,{[pg 33]}, emergent patterns of cooperation and sharing, but also of simple coordinate coexistence, are beginning to take on an ever-larger role in how we produce meaning--information, knowledge, and culture--in the networked information economy. +={ physical capital for production ; + peer production ; + capital for production ; + constraints of information production, monetary ; + industrial age : + destabilization of ; + information production capital ; + monetary constraints on information production ; + production capital +} + +A Google response to a query, which returns dozens or more sites with answers to an information question you may have, is an example of coordinate coexistence producing information. As Jessica Litman demonstrated in Sharing and Stealing, hundreds of independent producers of information, acting for reasons ranging from hobby and fun to work and sales, produce information, independently and at widely varying costs, related to what you were looking for. They all coexist without knowing of each other, most of them without thinking or planning on serving you in particular, or even a class of user like you. Yet the sheer volume and diversity of interests and sources allows their distributed, unrelated efforts to be coordinated-- through the Google algorithm in this case, but also through many others-- into a picture that has meaning and provides the answer to your question. Other, more deeply engaged and cooperative enterprises are also emerging on the Internet. /{Wikipedia}/, a multilingual encyclopedia coauthored by fifty thousand volunteers, is one particularly effective example of many such enterprises. +={ Litman, Jessica } + +The technical conditions of communication and information processing are enabling the emergence of new social and economic practices of information and knowledge production. Eisenstein carefully documented how print loosened the power of the church over information and knowledge production in Europe, and enabled, particularly in the Protestant North, the emergence of early modern capitalist enterprises in the form of print shops. These printers were able to use their market revenues to become independent of the church or the princes, as copyists never were, and to form the economic and social basis of a liberal, market-based freedom of thought and communication. Over the past century and a half, these early printers turned into the commercial mass media: A particular type of market-based production--concentrated, largely homogenous, and highly commercialized--that came to dominate our information environment by the end of the twentieth century. On the background of that dominant role, the possibility that a radically different form of information production will emerge--decentralized; socially, no less than commercially, driven; and as diverse as human thought itself--offers the promise of a deep change in how we see the world ,{[pg 34]}, around us, how we come to know about it and evaluate it, and how we are capable of communicating with others about what we know, believe, and plan. + +This part of the book is dedicated to explaining the technological-economic transformation that is making these practices possible. Not because economics drives all; not because technology determines the way society or communication go; but because it is the technological shock, combined with the economic sustainability of the emerging social practices, that creates the new set of social and political opportunities that are the subject of this book. By working out the economics of these practices, we can understand the economic parameters within which practical political imagination and fulfillment can operate in the digitally networked environment. I describe sustained productive enterprises that take the form of decentralized and nonmarket-based production, and explain why productivity and growth are consistent with a shift toward such modes of production. What I describe is not an exercise in pastoral utopianism. It is not a vision of a return to production in a preindustrial world. It is a practical possibility that directly results from our economic understanding of information and culture as objects of production. It flows from fairly standard economic analysis applied to a very nonstandard economic reality: one in which all the means of producing and exchanging information and culture are placed in the hands of hundreds of millions, and eventually billions, of people around the world, available for them to work with not only when they are functioning in the market to keep body and soul together, but also, and with equal efficacy, when they are functioning in society and alone, trying to give meaning to their lives as individuals and as social beings. ,{[pg 35]}, + +1~2 Chapter 2 - Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation +={ economics of information production and innovation +40 ; + information production economics +40 ; + innovation economics +40 +} + +There are no noncommercial automobile manufacturers. There are no volunteer steel foundries. You would never choose to have your primary source of bread depend on voluntary contributions from others. Nevertheless, scientists working at noncommercial research institutes funded by nonprofit educational institutions and government grants produce most of our basic science. Widespread cooperative networks of volunteers write the software and standards that run most of the Internet and enable what we do with it. Many people turn to National Public Radio or the BBC as a reliable source of news. What is it about information that explains this difference? Why do we rely almost exclusively on markets and commercial firms to produce cars, steel, and wheat, but much less so for the most critical information our advanced societies depend on? Is this a historical contingency, or is there something about information as an object of production that makes nonmarket production attractive? + +The technical economic answer is that certain characteristics of information and culture lead us to understand them as "public ,{[pg 36]}, goods," rather than as "pure private goods" or standard "economic goods." When economists speak of information, they usually say that it is "nonrival." We consider a good to be nonrival when its consumption by one person does not make it any less available for consumption by another. Once such a good is produced, no more social resources need be invested in creating more of it to satisfy the next consumer. Apples are rival. If I eat this apple, you cannot eat it. If you nonetheless want to eat an apple, more resources (trees, labor) need to be diverted from, say, building chairs, to growing apples, to satisfy you. The social cost of your consuming the second apple is the cost of not using the resources needed to grow the second apple (the wood from the tree) in their next best use. In other words, it is the cost to society of not having the additional chairs that could have been made from the tree. Information is nonrival. Once a scientist has established a fact, or once Tolstoy has written War and Peace, neither the scientist nor Tolstoy need spend a single second on producing additional War and Peace manuscripts or studies for the one-hundredth, one-thousandth, or one-millionth user of what they wrote. The physical paper for the book or journal costs something, but the information itself need only be created once. Economists call such goods "public" because a market will not produce them if priced at their marginal cost--zero. In order to provide Tolstoy or the scientist with income, we regulate publishing: We pass laws that enable their publishers to prevent competitors from entering the market. Because no competitors are permitted into the market for copies of War and Peace, the publishers can price the contents of the book or journal at above their actual marginal cost of zero. They can then turn some of that excess revenue over to Tolstoy. Even if these laws are therefore necessary to create the incentives for publication, the market that develops based on them will, from the technical economic perspective, systematically be inefficient. As Kenneth Arrow put it in 1962, "precisely to the extent that [property] is effective, there is underutilization of the information."~{ The full statement was: "[A]ny information obtained, say a new method of production, should, from the welfare point of view, be available free of charge (apart from the costs of transmitting information). This insures optimal utilization of the information but of course provides no incentive for investment in research. In a free enterprise economy, inventive activity is supported by using the invention to create property rights; precisely to the extent that it is successful, there is an underutilization of information." Kenneth Arrow, "Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention," in Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors, ed. Richard R. Nelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 616-617. }~ Because welfare economics defines a market as producing a good efficiently only when it is pricing the good at its marginal cost, a good like information (and culture and knowledge are, for purposes of economics, forms of information), which can never be sold both at a positive (greater than zero) price and at its marginal cost, is fundamentally a candidate for substantial nonmarket production. +={ Arrow, Kenneth ; + efficiency of information regulation +8 ; + inefficiency of information regulation +8 ; + proprietary rights, inefficiency of +8 ; + regulating information, efficiency of +8 ; + information production : + nonrivalry +4 ; + information as nonrival +4 ; + nonrival goods +4 ; + production of information : + nonrivalry +4 ; + public goods vs. nonrival goods +4 +} + +This widely held explanation of the economics of information production has led to an understanding that markets based on patents or copyrights involve a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency. That is, looking ,{[pg 37]}, at the state of the world on any given day, it is inefficient that people and firms sell the information they possess. From the perspective of a society's overall welfare, the most efficient thing would be for those who possess information to give it away for free--or rather, for the cost of communicating it and no more. On any given day, enforcing copyright law leads to inefficient underutilization of copyrighted information. However, looking at the problem of information production over time, the standard defense of exclusive rights like copyright expects firms and people not to produce if they know that their products will be available for anyone to take for free. In order to harness the efforts of individuals and firms that want to make money, we are willing to trade off some static inefficiency to achieve dynamic efficiency. That is, we are willing to have some inefficient lack of access to information every day, in exchange for getting more people involved in information production over time. Authors and inventors or, more commonly, companies that contract with musicians and filmmakers, scientists, and engineers, will invest in research and create cultural goods because they expect to sell their information products. Over time, this incentive effect will give us more innovation and creativity, which will outweigh the inefficiency at any given moment caused by selling the information at above its marginal cost. This defense of exclusive rights is limited by the extent to which it correctly describes the motivations of information producers and the business models open to them to appropriate the benefits of their investments. If some information producers do not need to capture the economic benefits of their particular information outputs, or if some businesses can capture the economic value of their information production by means other than exclusive control over their products, then the justification for regulating access by granting copyrights or patents is weakened. As I will discuss in detail, both of these limits on the standard defense are in fact the case. + +Nonrivalry, moreover, is not the only quirky characteristic of information production as an economic phenomenon. The other crucial quirkiness is that information is both input and output of its own production process. In order to write today's academic or news article, I need access to yesterday's articles and reports. In order to write today's novel, movie, or song, I need to use and rework existing cultural forms, such as story lines and twists. This characteristic is known to economists as the "on the shoulders of giants" effect, recalling a statement attributed to Isaac Newton: "If I have seen farther it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants."~{ Suzanne Scotchmer, "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Cumulative Research and the Patent Law," Journal of Economic Perspectives 5 (1991): 29-41. }~ This second quirkiness ,{[pg 38]}, of information as a production good makes property-like exclusive rights less appealing as the dominant institutional arrangement for information and cultural production than it would have been had the sole quirky characteristic of information been its nonrivalry. The reason is that if any new information good or innovation builds on existing information, then strengthening intellectual property rights increases the prices that those who invest in producing information today must pay to those who did so yesterday, in addition to increasing the rewards an information producer can get tomorrow. Given the nonrivalry, those payments made today for yesterday's information are all inefficiently too high, from today's perspective. They are all above the marginal cost--zero. Today's users of information are not only today's readers and consumers. They are also today's producers and tomorrow's innovators. Their net benefit from a strengthened patent or copyright regime, given not only increased potential revenues but also the increased costs, may be negative. If we pass a law that regulates information production too strictly, allowing its beneficiaries to impose prices that are too high on today's innovators, then we will have not only too little consumption of information today, but also too little production of new information for tomorrow. +={ building on existing information +2 ; + existing information, building on +2 ; + information production inputs : + existing information +2 ; + inputs to production : + existing information +2 ; + on the shoulders of giants +2 ; + production inputs : + existing information +2 ; + reuse of information +2 ; + Shirky, Clay : + "shoulders of giants" +2 ; + Newton, Isaac +} + +Perhaps the most amazing document of the consensus among economists today that, because of the combination of nonrivalry and the "on the shoulders of giants" effect, excessive expansion of "intellectual property" protection is economically detrimental, was the economists' brief filed in the Supreme Court case of /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/.~{ Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003). }~ The case challenged a law that extended the term of copyright protection from lasting for the life of the author plus fifty years, to life of the author plus seventy years, or from seventy-five years to ninety-five years for copyrights owned by corporations. If information were like land or iron, the ideal length of property rights would be infinite from the economists' perspective. In this case, however, where the "property right" was copyright, more than two dozen leading economists volunteered to sign a brief opposing the law, counting among their number five Nobel laureates, including that well-known market skeptic, Milton Friedman. +={ Friedman, Milton } + +The efficiency of regulating information, knowledge, and cultural production through strong copyright and patent is not only theoretically ambiguous, it also lacks empirical basis. The empirical work trying to assess the impact of intellectual property on innovation has focused to date on patents. The evidence provides little basis to support stronger and increasing exclusive ,{[pg 39]}, rights of the type we saw in the last two and a half decades of the twentieth century. Practically no studies show a clear-cut benefit to stronger or longer patents.~{ Adam Jaffe, "The U.S. Patent System in Transition: Policy Innovation and the Innovation Process," Research Policy 29 (2000): 531. }~ In perhaps one of the most startling papers on the economics of innovation published in the past few years, Josh Lerner looked at changes in intellectual property law in sixty countries over a period of 150 years. He studied close to three hundred policy changes, and found that, both in developing countries and in economically advanced countries that already have patent law, patenting both at home and abroad by domestic firms of the country that made the policy change, a proxy for their investment in research and development, decreases slightly when patent law is strengthened!~{ Josh Lerner, "Patent Protection and Innovation Over 150 Years" (working paper no. 8977, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2002). }~ The implication is that when a country--either one that already has a significant patent system, or a developing nation--increases its patent protection, it slightly decreases the level of investment in innovation by local firms. Going on intuitions alone, without understanding the background theory, this seems implausible--why would inventors or companies innovate less when they get more protection? Once you understand the interaction of nonrivalry and the "on the shoulders of giants" effect, the findings are entirely consistent with theory. Increasing patent protection, both in developing nations that are net importers of existing technology and science, and in developed nations that already have a degree of patent protection, and therefore some nontrivial protection for inventors, increases the costs that current innovators have to pay on existing knowledge more than it increases their ability to appropriate the value of their own contributions. When one cuts through the rent-seeking politics of intellectual property lobbies like the pharmaceutical companies or Hollywood and the recording industry; when one overcomes the honestly erroneous, but nonetheless conscience-soothing beliefs of lawyers who defend the copyright and patent-dependent industries and the judges they later become, the reality of both theory and empirics in the economics of intellectual property is that both in theory and as far as empirical evidence shows, there is remarkably little support in economics for regulating information, knowledge, and cultural production through the tools of intellectual property law. +={ Lerner, Josh ; + information production, market-based : + without property protections +4 ; + market-based information producers : + without property protections +4 ; + nonexclusion-market production strategies +4 ; + nonmarket information producers +4 +} + +Where does innovation and information production come from, then, if it does not come as much from intellectual-property-based market actors, as many generally believe? The answer is that it comes mostly from a mixture of (1) nonmarket sources--both state and nonstate--and (2) market actors whose business models do not depend on the regulatory framework of intellectual property. The former type of producer is the expected answer, ,{[pg 40]}, within mainstream economics, for a public goods problem like information production. The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Department are major sources of funding for research in the United States, as are government agencies in Europe, at the national and European level, Japan, and other major industrialized nations. The latter type--that is, the presence and importance of market-based producers whose business models do not require and do not depend on intellectual property protection--is not theoretically predicted by that model, but is entirely obvious once you begin to think about it. + +Consider a daily newspaper. Normally, we think of newspapers as dependent on copyrights. In fact, however, that would be a mistake. No daily newspaper would survive if it depended for its business on waiting until a competitor came out with an edition, then copied the stories, and reproduced them in a competing edition. Daily newspapers earn their revenue from a combination of low-priced newsstand sales or subscriptions together with advertising revenues. Neither of those is copyright dependent once we understand that consumers will not wait half a day until the competitor's paper comes out to save a nickel or a quarter on the price of the newspaper. If all copyright on newspapers were abolished, the revenues of newspapers would be little affected.~{ At most, a "hot news" exception on the model of /{International News Service v. Associated Press}/, 248 U.S. 215 (1918), might be required. Even that, however, would only be applicable to online editions that are for pay. In paper, habits of reading, accreditation of the original paper, and first-to-market advantages of even a few hours would be enough. Online, where the first-to-market advantage could shrink to seconds, "hot news" protection may be worthwhile. However, almost all papers are available for free and rely solely on advertising. The benefits of reading a copied version are, at that point, practically insignificant to the reader. }~ Take, for example, the 2003 annual reports of a few of the leading newspaper companies in the United States. The New York Times Company receives a little more than $3 billion a year from advertising and circulation revenues, and a little more than $200 million a year in revenues from all other sources. Even if the entire amount of "other sources" were from syndication of stories and photos--which likely overstates the role of these copyright-dependent sources--it would account for little more than 6 percent of total revenues. The net operating revenues for the Gannett Company were more than $5.6 billion in newspaper advertising and circulation revenue, relative to about $380 million in all other revenues. As with the New York Times, at most a little more than 6 percent of revenues could be attributed to copyright-dependent activities. For Knight Ridder, the 2003 numbers were $2.8 billion and $100 million, respectively, or a maximum of about 3.5 percent from copyrights. Given these numbers, it is safe to say that daily newspapers are not a copyright-dependent industry, although they are clearly a market-based information production industry. +={ daily newspapers ; + newspapers +} + +As it turns out, repeated survey studies since 1981 have shown that in all industrial sectors except for very few--most notably pharmaceuticals--firm managers do not see patents as the most important way they capture the ,{[pg 41]}, benefits of their research and developments.~{ Wesley Cohen, R. Nelson, and J. Walsh, "Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not)" (working paper no. 7552, National Bureau Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2000); Richard Levin et al., "Appropriating the Returns from Industrial Research and Development"Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 3 (1987): 783; Mansfield et al., "Imitation Costs and Patents: An Empirical Study," The Economic Journal 91 (1981): 907. }~ They rank the advantages that strong research and development gives them in lowering the cost or improving the quality of manufacture, being the first in the market, or developing strong marketing relationships as more important than patents. The term "intellectual property" has high cultural visibility today. Hollywood, the recording industry, and pharmaceuticals occupy center stage on the national and international policy agenda for information policy. However, in the overall mix of our information, knowledge, and cultural production system, the total weight of these exclusivity-based market actors is surprisingly small relative to the combination of nonmarket sectors, government and nonprofit, and market-based actors whose business models do not depend on proprietary exclusion from their information outputs. + +The upshot of the mainstream economic analysis of information production today is that the widely held intuition that markets are more or less the best way to produce goods, that property rights and contracts are efficient ways of organizing production decisions, and that subsidies distort production decisions, is only very ambiguously applicable to information. While exclusive rights-based production can partially solve the problem of how information will be produced in our society, a comprehensive regulatory system that tries to mimic property in this area--such as both the United States and the European Union have tried to implement internally and through international agreements--simply cannot work perfectly, even in an ideal market posited by the most abstract economics models. Instead, we find the majority of businesses in most sectors reporting that they do not rely on intellectual property as a primary mechanism for appropriating the benefits of their research and development investments. In addition, we find mainstream economists believing that there is a substantial role for government funding; that nonprofit research can be more efficient than for-profit research; and, otherwise, that nonproprietary production can play an important role in our information production system. + +2~ THE DIVERSITY OF STRATEGIES IN OUR CURRENT INFORMATION PRODUCTION SYSTEM +={ production of information : + strategies of +11 ; + proprietary rights : + strategies for information production +11 ; + strategies for information production +11 ; + business strategies for information production +11 ; + economics of information production and innovation : + current production strategies +11 ; + information production : + strategies of ; + information production economics : + current production strategies +11 ; + innovation economics : + current production strategies +} + +The actual universe of information production in the economy then, is not as dependent on property rights and markets in information goods as the last quarter century's increasing obsession with "intellectual property" might ,{[pg 42]}, suggest. Instead, what we see both from empirical work and theoretical work is that individuals and firms in the economy produce information using a wide range of strategies. Some of these strategies indeed rely on exclusive rights like patents or copyrights, and aim at selling information as a good into an information market. Many, however, do not. In order to provide some texture to what these models look like, we can outline a series of ideal-type "business" strategies for producing information. The point here is not to provide an exhaustive map of the empirical business literature. It is, instead, to offer a simple analytic framework within which to understand the mix of strategies available for firms and individuals to appropriate the benefits of their investments--of time, money, or both, in activities that result in the production of information, knowledge, and culture. The differentiating parameters are simple: cost minimization and benefit maximization. Any of these strategies could use inputs that are already owned--such as existing lyrics for a song or a patented invention to improve on--by buying a license from the owner of the exclusive rights for the existing information. Cost minimization here refers purely to ideal-type strategies for obtaining as many of the information inputs as possible at their marginal cost of zero, instead of buying licenses to inputs at a positive market price. It can be pursued by using materials from the public domain, by using materials the producer itself owns, or by sharing/bartering for information inputs owned by others in exchange for one's own information inputs. Benefits can be obtained either in reliance on asserting one's exclusive rights, or by following a non-exclusive strategy, using some other mechanism that improves the position of the information producer because they invested in producing the information. Nonexclusive strategies for benefit maximization can be pursued both by market actors and by nonmarket actors. Table 2.1 maps nine ideal-type strategies characterized by these components. +={ benefit maximization ; + proprietary rights : + models of +5 ; + capital for production : + cost minimization and benefit maximization ; + constraints of information production, monetary : + cost minimization and benefits maximization ; + cost : + minimizing ; + information production capital : + cost minimization and benefit maximization ; + monetary constraints on information production : + cost minimization and benefit maximization ; + money : + cost minimization and benefit maximization ; + physical capital for production : + cost minimization and benefit maximization ; + production capital : + cost minimization and benefit maximization +} + +The ideal-type strategy that underlies patents and copyrights can be thought of as the "Romantic Maximizer." It conceives of the information producer as a single author or inventor laboring creatively--hence romantic--but in expectation of royalties, rather than immortality, beauty, or truth. An individual or small start-up firm that sells software it developed to a larger firm, or an author selling rights to a book or a film typify this model. The second ideal type that arises within exclusive-rights based industries, "Mickey," is a larger firm that already owns an inventory of exclusive rights, some through in-house development, some by buying from Romantic Maximizers. ,{[pg 43]}, +={ Mickey model +3 ; + Romantic Maximizer model +2 +} + +-\\- + +!_ Table 2.1: Ideal-Type Information Production Strategies +={ demand-side effects of information production ; + Joe Einstein model +1 ; + learning networks +1 ; + limited sharing networks +1 ; + Los Alamos model +1 ; + nonmarket information producers : + strategies for information production +1 ; + RCA strategy +1 ; + Scholarly Lawyers model +1 ; + sharing : + limited sharing networks +} + +table{~h c4; 25; 25; 25; 25; + +Cost Minimization/ Benefit Acquisition +Public Domain +Intrafirm +Barter/Sharing + +Rights based exclusion (make money by exercising exclusive rights - licensing or blocking competition) +Romantic Maximizers (authors, composers; sell to publishers; sometimes sell to Mickeys) +Mikey (Disney reuses inventory for derivative works; buy outputs of Romantic Maximizers) +RCA (small number of companies hold blocking patents; they create patent pools to build valuable goods) + +Nonexclusion - Market (make money from information production but not by exercising the exclusive rights) +Scholarly Lawyers (write articles to get clients; other examples include bands that give music out for free as advertisements for touring and charge money for performance; software developers who develop software and make money from customizing it to a particular client, on-site management, advice and training, not from licensing) +Know-How (firms that have cheaper or better production processes because of their research, lower their costs or improve the quality of other goods or services; lawyer offices that build on existing forms) +Learning Networks (share information with similar organizations - make money from early access to information. For example, newspapers join together to create a wire service; firms where engineers and scientists from different firms attend professional societies to diffuse knowledge) + +Nonexclusion - Nonmarket +Joe Einstein (give away information for free in return for status, benefits to reputation, value for the innovation to themselves; wide range of motivations. Includes members of amateur choirs who perform for free, academics who write articles for fame, people who write opeds, contribute to mailing lists; many free software developers and free software generally for most uses) +Los Alamos (share in-house information, rely on in-house inputs to produce valuable public goods used to secure additional government funding and status) +Limited sharing networks (release paper to small number of colleagues to get comments so you can improve it before publication. Make use of time delay to gain relative advantage later on using Joe Einstein strategy. Share one's information on formal condition of reciprocity: like "copyleft" conditions on derivative works for distribution) + +}table + +% ,{[pg 44]}, + +- A defining cost-reduction mechanism for Mickey is that it applies creative people to work on its own inventory, for which it need not pay above marginal cost prices in the market. This strategy is the most advantageous in an environment of very strong exclusive rights protection for a number of reasons. First, the ability to extract higher rents from the existing inventory of information goods is greatest for firms that (a) have an inventory and (b) rely on asserting exclusive rights as their mode of extracting value. Second, the increased costs of production associated with strong exclusive rights are cushioned by the ability of such firms to rework their existing inventory, rather than trying to work with materials from an evershrinking public domain or paying for every source of inspiration and element of a new composition. The coarsest version of this strategy might be found if Disney were to produce a "winter sports" thirty-minute television program by tying together scenes from existing cartoons, say, one in which Goofy plays hockey followed by a snippet of Donald Duck ice skating, and so on. More subtle, and representative of the type of reuse relevant to the analysis here, would be the case where Disney buys the rights to Winniethe-Pooh, and, after producing an animated version of stories from the original books, then continues to work with the same characters and relationships to create a new film, say, Winnie-the-Pooh--Frankenpooh (or Beauty and the Beast--Enchanted Christmas; or The Little Mermaid--Stormy the Wild Seahorse). The third exclusive-rights-based strategy, which I call "RCA," is barter among the owners of inventories. Patent pools, cross-licensing, and market-sharing agreements among the radio patents holders in 1920-1921, which I describe in chapter 6, are a perfect example. RCA, GE, AT&T, and Westinghouse held blocking patents that prevented each other and anyone else from manufacturing the best radios possible given technology at that time. The four companies entered an agreement to combine their patents and divide the radio equipment and services markets, which they used throughout the 1920s to exclude competitors and to capture precisely the postinnovation monopoly rents sought to be created by patents. +={ RCA strategy } + +Exclusive-rights-based business models, however, represent only a fraction of our information production system. There are both market-based and nonmarket models to sustain and organize information production. Together, these account for a substantial portion of our information output. Indeed, industry surveys concerned with patents have shown that the vast majority of industrial R&D is pursued with strategies that do not rely primarily on patents. This does not mean that most or any of the firms that ,{[pg 45]}, pursue these strategies possess or seek no exclusive rights in their information products. It simply means that their production strategy does not depend on asserting these rights through exclusion. One such cluster of strategies, which I call "Scholarly Lawyers," relies on demand-side effects of access to the information the producer distributes. It relies on the fact that sometimes using an information good that one has produced makes its users seek out a relationship with the author. The author then charges for the relationship, not for the information. Doctors or lawyers who publish in trade journals, become known, and get business as a result are an instance of this strategy. An enormously creative industry, much of which operates on this model, is software. About two-thirds of industry revenues in software development come from activities that the Economic Census describes as: (1) writing, modifying, testing, and supporting software to meet the needs of a particular customer; (2) planning and designing computer systems that integrate computer hardware, software, and communication technologies; (3) on-site management and operation of clients' computer systems and/or data processing facilities; and (4) other professional and technical computer-related advice and services, systems consultants, and computer training. "Software publishing," by contrast, the business model that relies on sales based on copyright, accounts for a little more than one-third of the industry's revenues.~{ In the 2002 Economic Census, compare NAICS categories 5415 (computer systems and related services) to NAICS 5112 (software publishing). Between the 1997 Economic Census and the 2002 census, this ratio remained stable, at about 36 percent in 1997 and 37 percent in 2002. See 2002 Economic Census, "Industry Series, Information, Software Publishers, and Computer Systems, Design and Related Services" (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 2004). }~ Interestingly, this is the model of appropriation that more than a decade ago, Esther Dyson and John Perry Barlow heralded as the future of music and musicians. They argued in the early 1990s for more or less free access to copies of recordings distributed online, which would lead to greater attendance at live gigs. Revenue from performances, rather than recording, would pay artists. +={ demand-side effects of information production ; + Scholarly Lawyers model ; + Barlow, John Perry ; + Dyson, Esther ; + nonexclusion-market production strategies +5 +} + +The most common models of industrial R&D outside of pharmaceuticals, however, depend on supply-side effects of information production. One central reason to pursue research is its effects on firm-specific advantages, like production know-how, which permit the firm to produce more efficiently than competitors and sell better or cheaper competing products. Daily newspapers collectively fund news agencies, and individually fund reporters, because their ability to find information and report it is a necessary input into their product--timely news. As I have already suggested, they do not need copyright to protect their revenues. Those are protected by the short half-life of dailies. The investments come in order to be able to play in the market for daily newspapers. Similarly, the learning curve and knowhow effects in semiconductors are such that early entry into the market for ,{[pg 46]}, a new chip will give the first mover significant advantages over competitors. Investment is then made to capture that position, and the investment is captured by the quasi-rents available from the first-mover advantage. In some cases, innovation is necessary in order to be able to produce at the state of the art. Firms participate in "Learning Networks" to gain the benefits of being at the state of the art, and sharing their respective improvements. However, they can only participate if they innovate. If they do not innovate, they lack the in-house capacity to understand the state of the art and play at it. Their investments are then recouped not from asserting their exclusive rights, but from the fact that they sell into one of a set of markets, access into which is protected by the relatively small number of firms with such absorption capacity, or the ability to function at the edge of the state of the art. Firms of this sort might barter their information for access, or simply be part of a small group of organizations with enough knowledge to exploit the information generated and informally shared by all participants in these learning networks. They obtain rents from the concentrated market structure, not from assertion of property rights.~{ Levin et al., "Appropriating the Returns," 794-796 (secrecy, lead time, and learningcurve advantages regarded as more effective than patents by most firms). See also F. M. Scherer, "Learning by Doing and International Trade in Semiconductors" (faculty research working paper series R94-13, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1994), an empirical study of semiconductor industry suggesting that for industries with steep learning curves, investment in information production is driven by advantages of being first down the learning curve rather than the expectation of legal rights of exclusion. The absorption effect is described in Wesley M. Cohen and Daniel A. Leventhal, "Innovation and Learning: The Two Faces of R&D," The Economic Journal 99 (1989): 569-596. The collaboration effect was initially described in Richard R. Nelson, "The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific Research," Journal of Political Economy 67 (June 1959): 297-306. The most extensive work over the past fifteen years, and the source of the term of learning networks, has been from Woody Powell on knowledge and learning networks. Identifying the role of markets made concentrated by the limited ability to use information, rather than through exclusive rights, was made in F. M. Scherer, "Nordhaus's Theory of Optimal Patent Life: A Geometric Reinterpretation," American Economic Review 62 (1972): 422-427.}~ +={ Know-How model ; + information production, market-based : + without property protections +4 ; + market-based information producers : + without property protections +4 ; + supply-side effects of information production +1 ; + learning networks +} + +An excellent example of a business strategy based on nonexclusivity is IBM's. The firm has obtained the largest number of patents every year from 1993 to 2004, amassing in total more than 29,000 patents. IBM has also, however, been one of the firms most aggressively engaged in adapting its business model to the emergence of free software. Figure 2.1 shows what happened to the relative weight of patent royalties, licenses, and sales in IBM's revenues and revenues that the firm described as coming from "Linuxrelated services." Within a span of four years, the Linux-related services category moved from accounting for practically no revenues, to providing double the revenues from all patent-related sources, of the firm that has been the most patent-productive in the United States. IBM has described itself as investing more than a billion dollars in free software developers, hired programmers to help develop the Linux kernel and other free software; and donated patents to the Free Software Foundation. What this does for the firm is provide it with a better operating system for its server business-- making the servers better, faster, more reliable, and therefore more valuable to consumers. Participating in free software development has also allowed IBM to develop service relationships with its customers, building on free software to offer customer-specific solutions. In other words, IBM has combined both supply-side and demand-side strategies to adopt a nonproprietary business model that has generated more than $2 billion yearly of business ,{[pg 47]}, for the firm. Its strategy is, if not symbiotic, certainly complementary to free software. +={ free software ; + IBM's business strategy ; + open-source software ; + software, open-source +} + +{won_benkler_2_1.png "Figure 2.1: Selected IBM Revenues, 2000-2003" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/ + +I began this chapter with a puzzle--advanced economies rely on nonmarket organizations for information production much more than they do in other sectors. The puzzle reflects the fact that alongside the diversity of market-oriented business models for information production there is a wide diversity of nonmarket models as well. At a broad level of abstraction, I designate this diversity of motivations and organizational forms as "Joe Einstein"--to underscore the breadth of the range of social practices and practitioners of nonmarket production. These include universities and other research institutes; government research labs that publicize their work, or government information agencies like the Census Bureau. They also include individuals, like academics; authors and artists who play to "immortality" rather than seek to maximize the revenue from their creation. Eric von Hippel has for many years documented user innovation in areas ranging from surfboard design to new mechanisms for pushing electric wiring through insulation tiles.~{ Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). }~ The Oratorio Society of New York, whose chorus ,{[pg 48]}, members are all volunteers, has filled Carnegie Hall every December with a performance of Handel's Messiah since the theatre's first season in 1891. Political parties, advocacy groups, and churches are but few of the stable social organizations that fill our information environment with news and views. For symmetry purposes in table 2.1, we also see reliance on internal inventories by some nonmarket organizations, like secret government labs that do not release their information outputs, but use it to continue to obtain public funding. This is what I call "Los Alamos." Sharing in limited networks also occurs in nonmarket relationships, as when academic colleagues circulate a draft to get comments. In the nonmarket, nonproprietary domain, however, these strategies were in the past relatively smaller in scope and significance than the simple act of taking from the public domain and contributing back to it that typifies most Joe Einstein behaviors. Only since the mid-1980s have we begun to see a shift from releasing into the public domain to adoption of commons-binding licensing, like the "copyleft" strategies I describe in chapter 3. What makes these strategies distinct from Joe Einstein is that they formalize the requirement of reciprocity, at least for some set of rights shared. +={ Joe Einstein model ; + nonmarket information producers : + strategies for information production +1 ; + von Hippel, Eric ; + Los Alamos model ; + limited sharing networks +1 ; + sharing : + limited sharing networks +} + +My point is not to provide an exhaustive list of all the ways we produce information. It is simply to offer some texture to the statement that information, knowledge, and culture are produced in diverse ways in contemporary society. Doing so allows us to understand the comparatively limited role that production based purely on exclusive rights--like patents, copyrights, and similar regulatory constraints on the use and exchange of information--has played in our information production system to this day. It is not new or mysterious to suggest that nonmarket production is important to information production. It is not new or mysterious to suggest that efficiency increases whenever it is possible to produce information in a way that allows the producer--whether market actor or not--to appropriate the benefits of production without actually charging a price for use of the information itself. Such strategies are legion among both market and nonmarket actors. Recognizing this raises two distinct questions: First, how does the cluster of mechanisms that make up intellectual property law affect this mix? Second, how do we account for the mix of strategies at any given time? Why, for example, did proprietary, market-based production become so salient in music and movies in the twentieth century, and what is it about the digitally networked environment that could change this mix? ,{[pg 49]}, + +2~ THE EFFECTS OF EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS +={ property ownership : + effects of exclusive rights +4 ; + proprietary rights : + effects of +4 ; + proprietary rights, inefficiency of +4 ; + regulating information, efficiency of +4 ; + efficiency of information regulation +4 ; + economics of information production and innovation : + exclusive rights +4 ; + innovation economics : + exclusive rights +4 ; + inefficiency of information regulation +4 ; + information production economics : + exclusive rights +4 ; + innovation economics : + exclusive rights +4 +} + +Once we recognize that there are diverse strategies of appropriation for information production, we come to see a new source of inefficiency caused by strong "intellectual property"-type rights. Recall that in the mainstream analysis, exclusive rights always cause static inefficiency--that is, they allow producers to charge positive prices for products (information) that have a zero marginal cost. Exclusive rights have a more ambiguous effect dynamically. They raise the expected returns from information production, and thereby are thought to induce investment in information production and innovation. However, they also increase the costs of information inputs. If existing innovations are more likely covered by patent, then current producers will more likely have to pay for innovations or uses that in the past would have been available freely from the public domain. Whether, overall, any given regulatory change that increases the scope of exclusive rights improves or undermines new innovation therefore depends on whether, given the level of appropriability that preceded it, it increased input costs more or less than it increased the prospect of being paid for one's outputs. +={ information appropriation strategies +2 ; + appropriation strategies +2 ; + diversity : + appropriation strategies +2 +} + +The diversity of appropriation strategies adds one more kink to this story. Consider the following very simple hypothetical. Imagine an industry that produces "infowidgets." There are ten firms in the business. Two of them are infowidget publishers on the Romantic Maximizer model. They produce infowidgets as finished goods, and sell them based on patent. Six firms produce infowidgets on supply-side (Know-How) or demand-side (Scholarly Lawyer) effects: they make their Realwidgets or Servicewidgets more efficient or desirable to consumers, respectively. Two firms are nonprofit infowidget producers that exist on a fixed, philanthropically endowed income. Each firm produces five infowidgets, for a total market supply of fifty. Now imagine a change in law that increases exclusivity. Assume that this is a change in law that, absent diversity of appropriation, would be considered efficient. Say it increases input costs by 10 percent and appropriability by 20 percent, for a net expected gain of 10 percent. The two infowidget publishers would each see a 10 percent net gain, and let us assume that this would cause each to increase its efforts by 10 percent and produce 10 percent more infowidgets. Looking at these two firms alone, the change in law caused an increase from ten infowidgets to eleven--a gain for the policy change. Looking at the market as a whole, however, eight firms see an increase of 10 percent in costs, and no gain in appropriability. This is because none of these firms ,{[pg 50]}, actually relies on exclusive rights to appropriate its product's value. If, commensurate with our assumption for the publishers, we assume that this results in a decline in effort and productivity of 10 percent for the eight firms, we would see these firms decline from forty infowidgets to thirty-six, and total market production would decline from fifty infowidgets to forty-seven. + +Another kind of effect for the change in law may be to persuade some of the firms to shift strategies or to consolidate. Imagine, for example, that most of the inputs required by the two publishers were owned by the other infowidget publisher. If the two firms merged into one Mickey, each could use the outputs of the other at its marginal cost--zero--instead of at its exclusive-rights market price. The increase in exclusive rights would then not affect the merged firm's costs, only the costs of outside firms that would have to buy the merged firm's outputs from the market. Given this dynamic, strong exclusive rights drive concentration of inventory owners. We see this very clearly in the increasing sizes of inventory-based firms like Disney. Moreover, the increased appropriability in the exclusive-rights market will likely shift some firms at the margin of the nonproprietary business models to adopt proprietary business models. This, in turn, will increase the amount of information available only from proprietary sources. The feedback effect will further accelerate the rise in information input costs, increasing the gains from shifting to a proprietary strategy and to consolidating larger inventories with new production. + +Given diverse strategies, the primary unambiguous effect of increasing the scope and force of exclusive rights is to shape the population of business strategies. Strong exclusive rights increase the attractiveness of exclusiverights-based strategies at the expense of nonproprietary strategies, whether market-based or nonmarket based. They also increase the value and attraction of consolidation of large inventories of existing information with new production. + +2~ WHEN INFORMATION PRODUCTION MEETS THE COMPUTER NETWORK +={ economics of information production and innovation : + production of computer networks +7 ; + innovation economics : + production over computer networks +7 ; + information production economics : + production over computer networks +7 +} + +Music in the nineteenth century was largely a relational good. It was something people did in the physical presence of each other: in the folk way through hearing, repeating, and improvising; in the middle-class way of buying sheet music and playing for guests or attending public performances; or in the upper-class way of hiring musicians. Capital was widely distributed ,{[pg 51]}, among musicians in the form of instruments, or geographically dispersed in the hands of performance hall (and drawing room) owners. Market-based production depended on performance through presence. It provided opportunities for artists to live and perform locally, or to reach stardom in cultural centers, but without displacing the local performers. With the introduction of the phonograph, a new, more passive relationship to played music was made possible in reliance on the high-capital requirements of recording, copying, and distributing specific instantiations of recorded music--records. What developed was a concentrated, commercial industry, based on massive financial investments in advertising, or preference formation, aimed at getting ever-larger crowds to want those recordings that the recording executives had chosen. In other words, the music industry took on a more industrial model of production, and many of the local venues--from the living room to the local dance hall--came to be occupied by mechanical recordings rather than amateur and professional local performances. This model crowded out some, but not all, of the live-performance-based markets (for example, jazz clubs, piano bars, or weddings), and created new live-performance markets--the megastar concert tour. The music industry shifted from a reliance on Scholarly Lawyer and Joe Einstein models to reliance on Romantic Maximizer and Mickey models. As computers became more music-capable and digital networks became a ubiquitously available distribution medium, we saw the emergence of the present conflict over the regulation of cultural production--the law of copyright--between the twentieth-century, industrial model recording industry and the emerging amateur distribution systems coupled, at least according to its supporters, to a reemergence of decentralized, relation-based markets for professional performance artists. +={ music industry +1 } + +This stylized story of the music industry typifies the mass media more generally. Since the introduction of the mechanical press and the telegraph, followed by the phonograph, film, the high-powered radio transmitter, and through to the cable plant or satellite, the capital costs of fixing information and cultural goods in a transmission medium--a high-circulation newspaper, a record or movie, a radio or television program--have been high and increasing. The high physical and financial capital costs involved in making a widely accessible information good and distributing it to the increasingly larger communities (brought together by better transportation systems and more interlinked economic and political systems) muted the relative role of nonmarket production, and emphasized the role of those firms that could ,{[pg 52]}, muster the financial and physical capital necessary to communicate on a mass scale. Just as these large, industrial-age machine requirements increased the capital costs involved in information and cultural production, thereby triggering commercialization and concentration of much of this sector, so too ubiquitously available cheap processors have dramatically reduced the capital input costs required to fix information and cultural expressions and communicate them globally. By doing so, they have rendered feasible a radical reorganization of our information and cultural production system, away from heavy reliance on commercial, concentrated business models and toward greater reliance on nonproprietary appropriation strategies, in particular nonmarket strategies whose efficacy was dampened throughout the industrial period by the high capital costs of effective communication. + +Information and cultural production have three primary categories of inputs. The first is existing information and culture. We already know that existing information is a nonrival good--that is, its real marginal cost at any given moment is zero. The second major cost is that of the mechanical means of sensing our environment, processing it, and communicating new information goods. This is the high cost that typified the industrial model, and which has drastically declined in computer networks. The third factor is human communicative capacity--the creativity, experience, and cultural awareness necessary to take from the universe of existing information and cultural resources and turn them into new insights, symbols, or representations meaningful to others with whom we converse. Given the zero cost of existing information and the declining cost of communication and processing, human capacity becomes the primary scarce resource in the networked information economy. +={ building on existing information ; + existing information, building on ; + reuse of information ; + capabilities of individuals : + human capacity as resource +4 ; + capacity : + human communication +4 ; + communication : + capacity of +4 ; + cost : + capital for production creative capacity +4 ; + human communicative capacity +4 ; + individual capabilities and action : + human capacity as resource ; + information production inputs : + existing information ; + inputs to production : + existing information ; + production inputs : + existing information +} + +Human communicative capacity, however, is an input with radically different characteristics than those of, say, printing presses or satellites. It is held by each individual, and cannot be "transferred" from one person to another or aggregated like so many machines. It is something each of us innately has, though in divergent quanta and qualities. Individual human capacities, rather than the capacity to aggregate financial capital, become the economic core of our information and cultural production. Some of that human capacity is currently, and will continue to be, traded through markets in creative labor. However, its liberation from the constraints of physical capital leaves creative human beings much freer to engage in a wide range of information and cultural production practices than those they could afford to participate in when, in addition to creativity, experience, cultural awareness ,{[pg 53]}, and time, one needed a few million dollars to engage in information production. From our friendships to our communities we live life and exchange ideas, insights, and expressions in many more diverse relations than those mediated by the market. In the physical economy, these relationships were largely relegated to spaces outside of our economic production system. The promise of the networked information economy is to bring this rich diversity of social life smack into the middle of our economy and our productive lives. + +Let's do a little experiment. Imagine that you were performing a Web search with me. Imagine that we were using Google as our search engine, and that what we wanted to do was answer the questions of an inquisitive six-year-old about Viking ships. What would we get, sitting in front of our computers and plugging in a search request for "Viking Ships"? The first site is Canadian, and includes a collection of resources, essays, and worksheets. An enterprising elementary school teacher at the Gander Academy in Newfoundland seems to have put these together. He has essays on different questions, and links to sites hosted by a wide range of individuals and organizations, such as a Swedish museum, individual sites hosted on geocities, and even to a specific picture of a replica Viking ship, hosted on a commercial site dedicated to selling nautical replicas. In other words, it is a Joe Einstein site that points to other sites, which in turn use either Joe Einstein or Scholarly Lawyer strategies. This multiplicity of sources of information that show up on the very first site is then replicated as one continues to explore the remaining links. The second link is to a Norwegian site called "the Viking Network," a Web ring dedicated to preparing and hosting short essays on Vikings. It includes brief essays, maps, and external links, such as one to an article in Scientific American. "To become a member you must produce an Information Sheet on the Vikings in your local area and send it in electronic format to Viking Network. Your info-sheet will then be included in the Viking Network web." The third site is maintained by a Danish commercial photographer, and hosted in Copenhagen, in a portion dedicated to photographs of archeological finds and replicas of Danish Viking ships. A retired professor from the University of Pittsburgh runs the fourth. The fifth is somewhere between a hobby and a showcase for the services of an individual, independent Web publisher offering publishing-related services. The sixth and seventh are museums, in Norway and Virginia, respectively. The eighth is the Web site of a hobbyists' group dedicated to building Viking Ship replicas. The ninth includes classroom materials and ,{[pg 54]}, teaching guides made freely available on the Internet by PBS, the American Public Broadcasting Service. Certainly, if you perform this search now, as you read this book, the rankings will change from those I saw when I ran it; but I venture that the mix, the range and diversity of producers, and the relative salience of nonmarket producers will not change significantly. + +The difference that the digitally networked environment makes is its capacity to increase the efficacy, and therefore the importance, of many more, and more diverse, nonmarket producers falling within the general category of Joe Einstein. It makes nonmarket strategies--from individual hobbyists to formal, well-funded nonprofits--vastly more effective than they could be in the mass-media environment. The economics of this phenomenon are neither mysterious nor complex. Imagine the grade-school teacher who wishes to put together ten to twenty pages of materials on Viking ships for schoolchildren. Pre-Internet, he would need to go to one or more libraries and museums, find books with pictures, maps, and text, or take his own photographs (assuming he was permitted by the museums) and write his own texts, combining this research. He would then need to select portions, clear the copyrights to reprint them, find a printing house that would set his text and pictures in a press, pay to print a number of copies, and then distribute them to all children who wanted them. Clearly, research today is simpler and cheaper. Cutting and pasting pictures and texts that are digital is cheaper. Depending on where the teacher is located, it is possible that these initial steps would have been insurmountable, particularly for a teacher in a poorly endowed community without easy access to books on the subject, where research would have required substantial travel. Even once these barriers were surmounted, in the precomputer, pre-Internet days, turning out materials that looked and felt like a high quality product, with highresolution pictures and maps, and legible print required access to capitalintensive facilities. The cost of creating even one copy of such a product would likely dissuade the teacher from producing the booklet. At most, he might have produced a mimeographed bibliography, and perhaps some text reproduced on a photocopier. Now, place the teacher with a computer and a high-speed Internet connection, at home or in the school library. The cost of production and distribution of the products of his effort are trivial. A Web site can be maintained for a few dollars a month. The computer itself is widely accessible throughout the developed world. It becomes trivial for a teacher to produce the "booklet"--with more information, available to anyone in the world, anywhere, at any time, as long as he is willing to spend ,{[pg 55]}, some of his free time putting together the booklet rather than watching television or reading a book. +={ nonmarket strategies, effectiveness of +2 ; + technology : + effectiveness of nonmarket strategies +2 +} + +When you multiply these very simple stylized facts by the roughly billion people who live in societies sufficiently wealthy to allow cheap ubiquitous Internet access, the breadth and depth of the transformation we are undergoing begins to become clear. A billion people in advanced economies may have between two billion and six billion spare hours among them, every day. In order to harness these billions of hours, it would take the whole workforce of almost 340,000 workers employed by the entire motion picture and recording industries in the United States put together, assuming each worker worked forty-hour weeks without taking a single vacation, for between three and eight and a half years! Beyond the sheer potential quantitative capacity, however one wishes to discount it to account for different levels of talent, knowledge, and motivation, a billion volunteers have qualities that make them more likely to produce what others want to read, see, listen to, or experience. They have diverse interests--as diverse as human culture itself. Some care about Viking ships, others about the integrity of voting machines. Some care about obscure music bands, others share a passion for baking. As Eben Moglen put it, "if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network. It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone."~{ Eben Moglen, "Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright," First Monday (1999), http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_8/moglen/. }~ It is this combination of a will to create and to communicate with others, and a shared cultural experience that makes it likely that each of us wants to talk about something that we believe others will also want to talk about, that makes the billion potential participants in today's online conversation, and the six billion in tomorrow's conversation, affirmatively better than the commercial industrial model. When the economics of industrial production require high up-front costs and low marginal costs, the producers must focus on creating a few superstars and making sure that everyone tunes in to listen or watch them. This requires that they focus on averaging out what consumers are most likely to buy. This works reasonably well as long as there is no better substitute. As long as it is expensive to produce music or the evening news, there are indeed few competitors for top billing, and the star system can function. Once every person on the planet, or even only every person living in a wealthy economy and 10-20 percent of those living in poorer countries, can easily talk to their friends and compatriots, the competition becomes tougher. It does not mean that there is no continued role ,{[pg 56]}, for the mass-produced and mass-marketed cultural products--be they Britney Spears or the broadcast news. It does, however, mean that many more "niche markets"--if markets, rather than conversations, are what they should be called--begin to play an ever-increasing role in the total mix of our cultural production system. The economics of production in a digital environment should lead us to expect an increase in the relative salience of nonmarket production models in the overall mix of our information production system, and it is efficient for this to happen--more information will be produced, and much of it will be available for its users at its marginal cost. +={ diversity : + human communication +1 ; + Moglen, Eben ; + niche markets +} + +The known quirky characteristics of information and knowledge as production goods have always given nonmarket production a much greater role in this production system than was common in capitalist economies for tangible goods. The dramatic decline in the cost of the material means of producing and exchanging information, knowledge, and culture has substantially decreased the costs of information expression and exchange, and thereby increased the relative efficacy of nonmarket production. When these facts are layered over the fact that information, knowledge, and culture have become the central high-value-added economic activities of the most advanced economies, we find ourselves in a new and unfamiliar social and economic condition. Social behavior that traditionally was relegated to the peripheries of the economy has become central to the most advanced economies. Nonmarket behavior is becoming central to producing our information and cultural environment. Sources of knowledge and cultural edification, through which we come to know and comprehend the world, to form our opinions about it, and to express ourselves in communication with others about what we see and believe have shifted from heavy reliance on commercial, concentrated media, to being produced on a much more widely distributed model, by many actors who are not driven by the imperatives of advertising or the sale of entertainment goods. + +2~ STRONG EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT +={ economics of information production and innovation : + exclusive rights +3 ; + information production economics : + exclusive rights +3 ; + innovation economics : + exclusive rights +3 ; + proprietary rights +3 +} + +We now have the basic elements of a clash between incumbent institutions and emerging social practice. Technologies of information and cultural production initially led to the increasing salience of commercial, industrialmodel production in these areas. Over the course of the twentieth century, ,{[pg 57]}, in some of the most culturally visible industries like movies and music, copyright law coevolved with the industrial model. By the end of the twentieth century, copyright was longer, broader, and vastly more encompassing than it had been at the beginning of that century. Other exclusive rights in information, culture, and the fruits of innovation expanded following a similar logic. Strong, broad, exclusive rights like these have predictable effects. They preferentially improve the returns to business models that rely on exclusive rights, like copyrights and patents, at the expense of information and cultural production outside the market or in market relationships that do not depend on exclusive appropriation. They make it more lucrative to consolidate inventories of existing materials. The businesses that developed around the material capital required for production fed back into the political system, which responded by serially optimizing the institutional ecology to fit the needs of the industrial information economy firms at the expense of other information producers. + +The networked information economy has upset the apple cart on the technical, material cost side of information production and exchange. The institutional ecology, the political framework (the lobbyists, the habits of legislatures), and the legal culture (the beliefs of judges, the practices of lawyers) have not changed. They are as they developed over the course of the twentieth century--centered on optimizing the conditions of those commercial firms that thrive in the presence of strong exclusive rights in information and culture. The outcome of the conflict between the industrial information economy and its emerging networked alternative will determine whether we evolve into a permission culture, as Lessig warns and projects, or into a society marked by social practice of nonmarket production and cooperative sharing of information, knowledge, and culture of the type I describe throughout this book, and which I argue will improve freedom and justice in liberal societies. Chapter 11 chronicles many of the arenas in which this basic conflict is played out. However, for the remainder of this part and part II, the basic economic understanding I offer here is all that is necessary. + +There are diverse motivations and strategies for organizing information production. Their relative attractiveness is to some extent dependent on technology, to some extent on institutional arrangements. The rise that we see today in the efficacy and scope of nonmarket production, and of the peer production that I describe and analyze in the following two chapters, are well within the predictable, given our understanding of the economics of information production. The social practices of information production ,{[pg 58]}, that form the basis of much of the normative analysis I offer in part II are internally sustainable given the material conditions of information production and exchange in the digitally networked environment. These patterns are unfamiliar to us. They grate on our intuitions about how production happens. They grate on the institutional arrangements we developed over the course of the twentieth century to regulate information and cultural production. But that is because they arise from a quite basically different set of material conditions. We must understand these new modes of production. We must learn to evaluate them and compare their advantages and disadvantages to those of the industrial information producers. And then we must adjust our institutional environment to make way for the new social practices made possible by the networked environment. ,{[pg 59]}, + +1~3 Chapter 3 - Peer Production and Sharing +={ peer production +63 ; + sharing +63 +} + +At the heart of the economic engine, of the world's most advanced economies, we are beginning to notice a persistent and quite amazing phenomenon. A new model of production has taken root; one that should not be there, at least according to our most widely held beliefs about economic behavior. It should not, the intuitions of the late-twentieth-century American would say, be the case that thousands of volunteers will come together to collaborate on a complex economic project. It certainly should not be that these volunteers will beat the largest and best-financed business enterprises in the world at their own game. And yet, this is precisely what is happening in the software world. + +Industrial organization literature provides a prominent place for the transaction costs view of markets and firms, based on insights of Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson. On this view, people use markets when the gains from doing so, net of transaction costs, exceed the gains from doing the same thing in a managed firm, net of the costs of organizing and managing a firm. Firms emerge when the opposite is true, and transaction costs can best be reduced by ,{[pg 60]}, bringing an activity into a managed context that requires no individual transactions to allocate this resource or that effort. The emergence of free and open-source software, and the phenomenal success of its flagships, the GNU/ Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, Perl, and many others, should cause us to take a second look at this dominant paradigm.~{ For an excellent history of the free software movement and of open-source development, see Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution (New York: Perseus Publishing, 2001). }~ Free software projects do not rely on markets or on managerial hierarchies to organize production. Programmers do not generally participate in a project because someone who is their boss told them to, though some do. They do not generally participate in a project because someone offers them a price to do so, though some participants do focus on long-term appropriation through money-oriented activities, like consulting or service contracts. However, the critical mass of participation in projects cannot be explained by the direct presence of a price or even a future monetary return. This is particularly true of the all-important, microlevel decisions: who will work, with what software, on what project. In other words, programmers participate in free software projects without following the signals generated by marketbased, firm-based, or hybrid models. In chapter 2 I focused on how the networked information economy departs from the industrial information economy by improving the efficacy of nonmarket production generally. Free software offers a glimpse at a more basic and radical challenge. It suggests that the networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production: radically decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands. This is what I call "commons-based peer production." +={ Coase, Ronald ; + capital for production : + transaction costs ; + commercial model of communication : + transaction costs ; + constraints of information production, monetary : + transaction cost ; + economics of nonmarket production : + transaction costs ; + industrial model of communication : + transaction costs ; + information production, market-based : + transaction costs ; + information production capital : + transaction costs ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + transaction costs ; + market-based information producers : + transaction costs ; + monetary constraints on information production : + transaction costs ; + nonmarket production, economics of : + transaction costs ; + norms (social) : + transaction costs ; + physical capital for production : + transaction costs ; + production capital : + transaction costs ; + regulation by social norms : + transaction costs ; + social relations and norms : + transaction costs ; + strategies for information production : + transaction costs ; + traditional model of communication : + transaction costs ; + transaction costs ; + Williamson, Oliver ; + commons +3 +} + +"Commons" refers to a particular institutional form of structuring the rights to access, use, and control resources. It is the opposite of "property" in the following sense: With property, law determines one particular person who has the authority to decide how the resource will be used. That person may sell it, or give it away, more or less as he or she pleases. "More or less" because property doesn't mean anything goes. We cannot, for example, decide that we will give our property away to one branch of our family, as long as that branch has boys, and then if that branch has no boys, decree that the property will revert to some other branch of the family. That type of provision, once common in English property law, is now legally void for public policy reasons. There are many other things we cannot do with our property--like build on wetlands. However, the core characteristic of property ,{[pg 61]}, as the institutional foundation of markets is that the allocation of power to decide how a resource will be used is systematically and drastically asymmetric. That asymmetry permits the existence of "an owner" who can decide what to do, and with whom. We know that transactions must be made-- rent, purchase, and so forth--if we want the resource to be put to some other use. The salient characteristic of commons, as opposed to property, is that no single person has exclusive control over the use and disposition of any particular resource in the commons. Instead, resources governed by commons may be used or disposed of by anyone among some (more or less well-defined) number of persons, under rules that may range from "anything goes" to quite crisply articulated formal rules that are effectively enforced. +={ property ownership : + control over, as asymmetric +2 ; + asymmetric commons +1 +} + +Commons can be divided into four types based on two parameters. The first parameter is whether they are open to anyone or only to a defined group. The oceans, the air, and highway systems are clear examples of open commons. Various traditional pasture arrangements in Swiss villages or irrigation regions in Spain are now classic examples, described by Eleanor Ostrom, of limited-access common resources--where access is limited only to members of the village or association that collectively "owns" some defined pasturelands or irrigation system.~{ Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). }~ As Carol Rose noted, these are better thought of as limited common property regimes, rather than commons, because they behave as property vis-a-vis the entire world except members ` of the group who together hold them in common. The second parameter is whether a commons system is regulated or unregulated. Practically all well-studied, limited common property regimes are regulated by more or less elaborate rules--some formal, some social-conventional--governing the use of the resources. Open commons, on the other hand, vary widely. Some commons, called open access, are governed by no rule. Anyone can use resources within these types of commons at will and without payment. Air is such a resource, with respect to air intake (breathing, feeding a turbine). However, air is a regulated commons with regard to outtake. For individual human beings, breathing out is mildly regulated by social convention--you do not breath too heavily on another human being's face unless forced to. Air is a more extensively regulated commons for industrial exhalation--in the shape of pollution controls. The most successful and obvious regulated commons in contemporary landscapes are the sidewalks, streets, roads, and highways that cover our land and regulate the material foundation of our ability to move from one place to the other. In all these cases, however, the characteristic of commons is that the constraints, if any, are symmetric ,{[pg 62]}, among all users, and cannot be unilaterally controlled by any single individual. The term "commons-based" is intended to underscore that what is characteristic of the cooperative enterprises I describe in this chapter is that they are not built around the asymmetric exclusion typical of property. Rather, the inputs and outputs of the process are shared, freely or conditionally, in an institutional form that leaves them equally available for all to use as they choose at their individual discretion. This latter characteristic-- that commons leave individuals free to make their own choices with regard to resources managed as a commons--is at the foundation of the freedom they make possible. This is a freedom I return to in the discussion of autonomy. Not all commons-based production efforts qualify as peer production. Any production strategy that manages its inputs and outputs as commons locates that production modality outside the proprietary system, in a framework of social relations. It is the freedom to interact with resources and projects without seeking anyone's permission that marks commons-based production generally, and it is also that freedom that underlies the particular efficiencies of peer production, which I explore in chapter 4. +={ commons : + types of ; + limited-access common resources ; + open commons ; + regulated commons ; + Rose, Carol ; + symmetric commons ; + unregulated commons ; + freedom : + of commons +} + +The term "peer production" characterizes a subset of commons-based production practices. It refers to production systems that depend on individual action that is self-selected and decentralized, rather than hierarchically assigned. "Centralization" is a particular response to the problem of how to make the behavior of many individual agents cohere into an effective pattern or achieve an effective result. Its primary attribute is the separation of the locus of opportunities for action from the authority to choose the action that the agent will undertake. Government authorities, firm managers, teachers in a classroom, all occupy a context in which potentially many individual wills could lead to action, and reduce the number of people whose will is permitted to affect the actual behavior patterns that the agents will adopt. "Decentralization" describes conditions under which the actions of many agents cohere and are effective despite the fact that they do not rely on reducing the number of people whose will counts to direct effective action. A substantial literature in the past twenty years, typified, for example, by Charles Sabel's work, has focused on the ways in which firms have tried to overcome the rigidities of managerial pyramids by decentralizing learning, planning, and execution of the firm's functions in the hands of employees or teams. The most pervasive mode of "decentralization," however, is the ideal market. Each individual agent acts according to his or her will. Coherence and efficacy emerge because individuals signal their wishes, and plan ,{[pg 63]}, their behavior not in cooperation with others, but by coordinating, understanding the will of others and expressing their own through the price system. +={ centralization of communications : + decentralization ; + decentralization of communications ; + ideal market ; + Sabel, Charles +} + +What we are seeing now is the emergence of more effective collective action practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the price system or a managerial structure for coordination. In this, they complement the increasing salience of uncoordinated nonmarket behavior that we saw in chapter 2. The networked environment not only provides a more effective platform for action to nonprofit organizations that organize action like firms or to hobbyists who merely coexist coordinately. It also provides a platform for new mechanisms for widely dispersed agents to adopt radically decentralized cooperation strategies other than by using proprietary and contractual claims to elicit prices or impose managerial commands. This kind of information production by agents operating on a decentralized, nonproprietary model is not completely new. Science is built by many people contributing incrementally--not operating on market signals, not being handed their research marching orders by a boss--independently deciding what to research, bringing their collaboration together, and creating science. What we see in the networked information economy is a dramatic increase in the importance and the centrality of information produced in this way. + +2~ FREE/OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE +={ free software +7 ; + open-source software +7 ; + software, open-source +7 +} + +The quintessential instance of commons-based peer production has been free software. Free software, or open source, is an approach to software development that is based on shared effort on a nonproprietary model. It depends on many individuals contributing to a common project, with a variety of motivations, and sharing their respective contributions without any single person or entity asserting rights to exclude either from the contributed components or from the resulting whole. In order to avoid having the joint product appropriated by any single party, participants usually retain copyrights in their contribution, but license them to anyone--participant or stranger--on a model that combines a universal license to use the materials with licensing constraints that make it difficult, if not impossible, for any single contributor or third party to appropriate the project. This model of licensing is the most important institutional innovation of the free software movement. Its central instance is the GNU General Public License, or GPL. ,{[pg 64]}, +={ General Public License (GPL) +4 ; + GPL (General Public License) +4 ; + licensing : + GPL (General Public License) +4 +} + +This requires anyone who modifies software and distributes the modified version to license it under the same free terms as the original software. While there have been many arguments about how widely the provisions that prevent downstream appropriation should be used, the practical adoption patterns have been dominated by forms of licensing that prevent anyone from exclusively appropriating the contributions or the joint product. More than 85 percent of active free software projects include some version of the GPL or similarly structured license.~{ Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole, "The Scope of Open Source Licensing" (Harvard NOM working paper no. 02-42, table 1, Cambridge, MA, 2002). The figure is computed out of the data reported in this paper for the number of free software development projects that Lerner and Tirole identify as having "restrictive" or "very restrictive" licenses. }~ + +Free software has played a critical role in the recognition of peer production, because software is a functional good with measurable qualities. It can be more or less authoritatively tested against its market-based competitors. And, in many instances, free software has prevailed. About 70 percent of Web server software, in particular for critical e-commerce sites, runs on the Apache Web server--free software.~{ Netcraft, April 2004 Web Server Survey, http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_ server_survey.html. }~ More than half of all back-office e-mail functions are run by one free software program or another. Google, Amazon, and CNN.com, for example, run their Web servers on the GNU/Linux operating system. They do this, presumably, because they believe this peerproduced operating system is more reliable than the alternatives, not because the system is "free." It would be absurd to risk a higher rate of failure in their core business activities in order to save a few hundred thousand dollars on licensing fees. Companies like IBM and Hewlett Packard, consumer electronics manufacturers, as well as military and other mission-critical government agencies around the world have begun to adopt business and service strategies that rely and extend free software. They do this because it allows them to build better equipment, sell better services, or better fulfill their public role, even though they do not control the software development process and cannot claim proprietary rights of exclusion in the products of their contributions. +={ GNU/Linux operating system +3 } + +The story of free software begins in 1984, when Richard Stallman started working on a project of building a nonproprietary operating system he called GNU (GNU's Not Unix). Stallman, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), operated from political conviction. He wanted a world in which software enabled people to use information freely, where no one would have to ask permission to change the software they use to fit their needs or to share it with a friend for whom it would be helpful. These freedoms to share and to make your own software were fundamentally incompatible with a model of production that relies on property rights and markets, he thought, because in order for there to be a market in uses of ,{[pg 65]}, software, owners must be able to make the software unavailable to people who need it. These people would then pay the provider in exchange for access to the software or modification they need. If anyone can make software or share software they possess with friends, it becomes very difficult to write software on a business model that relies on excluding people from software they need unless they pay. As a practical matter, Stallman started writing software himself, and wrote a good bit of it. More fundamentally, he adopted a legal technique that started a snowball rolling. He could not write a whole operating system by himself. Instead, he released pieces of his code under a license that allowed anyone to copy, distribute, and modify the software in whatever way they pleased. He required only that, if the person who modified the software then distributed it to others, he or she do so under the exact same conditions that he had distributed his software. In this way, he invited all other programmers to collaborate with him on this development program, if they wanted to, on the condition that they be as generous with making their contributions available to others as he had been with his. Because he retained the copyright to the software he distributed, he could write this condition into the license that he attached to the software. This meant that anyone using or distributing the software as is, without modifying it, would not violate Stallman's license. They could also modify the software for their own use, and this would not violate the license. However, if they chose to distribute the modified software, they would violate Stallman's copyright unless they included a license identical to his with the software they distributed. This license became the GNU General Public License, or GPL. The legal jujitsu Stallman used--asserting his own copyright claims, but only to force all downstream users who wanted to rely on his contributions to make their own contributions available to everyone else--came to be known as "copyleft," an ironic twist on copyright. This legal artifice allowed anyone to contribute to the GNU project without worrying that one day they would wake up and find that someone had locked them out of the system they had helped to build. +={ Stallman, Richard +2 ; + copyleft +} + +The next major step came when a person with a more practical, rather than prophetic, approach to his work began developing one central component of the operating system--the kernel. Linus Torvalds began to share the early implementations of his kernel, called Linux, with others, under the GPL. These others then modified, added, contributed, and shared among themselves these pieces of the operating system. Building on top of Stallman's foundation, Torvalds crystallized a model of production that was fundamentally ,{[pg 66]}, different from those that preceded it. His model was based on voluntary contributions and ubiquitous, recursive sharing; on small incremental improvements to a project by widely dispersed people, some of whom contributed a lot, others a little. Based on our usual assumptions about volunteer projects and decentralized production processes that have no managers, this was a model that could not succeed. But it did. +={ Linux operating system ; + Torvalds, Linus +} + +It took almost a decade for the mainstream technology industry to recognize the value of free or open-source software development and its collaborative production methodology. As the process expanded and came to encompass more participants, and produce more of the basic tools of Internet connectivity--Web server, e-mail server, scripting--more of those who participated sought to "normalize" it, or, more specifically, to render it apolitical. Free software is about freedom ("free as in free speech, not free beer" is Stallman's epitaph for it). "Open-source software" was chosen as a term that would not carry the political connotations. It was simply a mode of organizing software production that may be more effective than market-based production. This move to depoliticize peer production of software led to something of a schism between the free software movement and the communities of open source software developers. It is important to understand, however, that from the perspective of society at large and the historical trajectory of information production generally the abandonment of political motivation and the importation of free software into the mainstream have not made it less politically interesting, but more so. Open source and its wide adoption in the business and bureaucratic mainstream allowed free software to emerge from the fringes of the software world and move to the center of the public debate about practical alternatives to the current way of doing things. +={ collaboration, open-source +1 } + +So what is open-source software development? The best source for a phenomenology of open-source development continues to be Eric Raymond's /{Cathedral and Bazaar}/, written in 1998. Imagine that one person, or a small group of friends, wants a utility. It could be a text editor, photo-retouching software, or an operating system. The person or small group starts by developing a part of this project, up to a point where the whole utility--if it is simple enough--or some important part of it, is functional, though it might have much room for improvement. At this point, the person makes the program freely available to others, with its source code--instructions in a human-readable language that explain how the software does whatever it does when compiled into a machine-readable language. When others begin ,{[pg 67]}, to use it, they may find bugs, or related utilities that they want to add (e.g., the photo-retouching software only increases size and sharpness, and one of its users wants it to allow changing colors as well). The person who has found the bug or is interested in how to add functions to the software may or may not be the best person in the world to actually write the software fix. Nevertheless, he reports the bug or the new need in an Internet forum of users of the software. That person, or someone else, then thinks that they have a way of tweaking the software to fix the bug or add the new utility. They then do so, just as the first person did, and release a new version of the software with the fix or the added utility. The result is a collaboration between three people--the first author, who wrote the initial software; the second person, who identified a problem or shortcoming; and the third person, who fixed it. This collaboration is not managed by anyone who organizes the three, but is instead the outcome of them all reading the same Internet-based forum and using the same software, which is released under an open, rather than proprietary, license. This enables some of its users to identify problems and others to fix these problems without asking anyone's permission and without engaging in any transactions. +={ Raymond, Eric } + +The most surprising thing that the open source movement has shown, in real life, is that this simple model can operate on very different scales, from the small, three-person model I described for simple projects, up to the many thousands of people involved in writing the Linux kernel and the GNU/ Linux operating system--an immensely difficult production task. SourceForge, the most popular hosting-meeting place of such projects, has close to 100,000 registered projects, and nearly a million registered users. The economics of this phenomenon are complex. In the larger-scale models, actual organization form is more diverse than the simple, three-person model. In particular, in some of the larger projects, most prominently the Linux kernel development process, a certain kind of meritocratic hierarchy is clearly present. However, it is a hierarchy that is very different in style, practical implementation, and organizational role than that of the manager in the firm. I explain this in chapter 4, as part of the analysis of the organizational forms of peer production. For now, all we need is a broad outline of how peer-production projects look, as we turn to observe case studies of kindred production models in areas outside of software. ,{[pg 68]}, + +2~ PEER PRODUCTION OF INFORMATION, KNOWLEDGE, AND CULTURE GENERALLY + +Free software is, without a doubt, the most visible instance of peer production at the turn of the twenty-first century. It is by no means, however, the only instance. Ubiquitous computer communications networks are bringing about a dramatic change in the scope, scale, and efficacy of peer production throughout the information and cultural production system. As computers become cheaper and as network connections become faster, cheaper, and ubiquitous, we are seeing the phenomenon of peer production of information scale to much larger sizes, performing more complex tasks than were possible in the past for nonprofessional production. To make this phenomenon more tangible, I describe a number of such enterprises, organized to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach throughout the information production and exchange chain. While it is possible to break an act of communication into finer-grained subcomponents, largely we see three distinct functions involved in the process. First, there is an initial utterance of a humanly meaningful statement. Writing an article or drawing a picture, whether done by a professional or an amateur, whether high quality or low, is such an action. Second, there is a separate function of mapping the initial utterances on a knowledge map. In particular, an utterance must be understood as "relevant" in some sense, and "credible." Relevance is a subjective question of mapping an utterance on the conceptual map of a given user seeking information for a particular purpose defined by that individual. Credibility is a question of quality by some objective measure that the individual adopts as appropriate for purposes of evaluating a given utterance. The distinction between the two is somewhat artificial, however, because very often the utility of a piece of information will depend on a combined valuation of its credibility and relevance. I therefore refer to "relevance/accreditation" as a single function for purposes of this discussion, keeping in mind that the two are complementary and not entirely separable functions that an individual requires as part of being able to use utterances that others have uttered in putting together the user's understanding of the world. Finally, there is the function of distribution, or how one takes an utterance produced by one person and distributes it to other people who find it credible and relevant. In the mass-media world, these functions were often, though by no means always, integrated. NBC news produced the utterances, gave them credibility by clearing them on the evening news, and distributed ,{[pg 69]}, them simultaneously. What the Internet is permitting is much greater disaggregation of these functions. +={ accreditation ; + distribution of information ; + filtering ; + information production inputs +13 ; + inputs to production +13 ; + production inputs +13 ; + relevance filtering +} + +3~ Uttering Content + +NASA Clickworkers was "an experiment to see if public volunteers, each working for a few minutes here and there can do some routine science analysis that would normally be done by a scientist or graduate student working for months on end." Users could mark craters on maps of Mars, classify craters that have already been marked, or search the Mars landscape for "honeycomb" terrain. The project was "a pilot study with limited funding, run part-time by one software engineer, with occasional input from two scientists." In its first six months of operation, more than 85,000 users visited the site, with many contributing to the effort, making more than 1.9 million entries (including redundant entries of the same craters, used to average out errors). An analysis of the quality of markings showed "that the automaticallycomputed consensus of a large number of clickworkers is virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience in identifying Mars craters."~{ Clickworkers Results: Crater Marking Activity, July 3, 2001, http://clickworkers.arc .nasa.gov/documents/crater-marking.pdf. }~ The tasks performed by clickworkers (like marking craters) were discrete, each easily performed in a matter of minutes. As a result, users could choose to work for a few minutes doing a single iteration or for hours by doing many. An early study of the project suggested that some clickworkers indeed worked on the project for weeks, but that 37 percent of the work was done by one-time contributors.~{ /{B. Kanefsky, N. G. Barlow, and V. C. Gulick}/, Can Distributed Volunteers Accomplish Massive Data Analysis Tasks? http://www.clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/documents /abstract.pdf. }~ +={ clickworkers project +2 ; + information production inputs : + NASA Clickworkers project +2 ; + inputs to production : + NASA Clickworkers project +2 ; + NASA Clickworkers +2 ; + production inputs NASA Clickworkers project +2 +} + +The clickworkers project was a particularly clear example of how a complex professional task that requires a number of highly trained individuals on full-time salaries can be reorganized so as to be performed by tens of thousands of volunteers in increments so minute that the tasks could be performed on a much lower budget. The low budget would be devoted to coordinating the volunteer effort. However, the raw human capital needed would be contributed for the fun of it. The professionalism of the original scientists was replaced by a combination of high modularization of the task. The organizers broke a large, complex task into small, independent modules. They built in redundancy and automated averaging out of both errors and purposeful erroneous markings--like those of an errant art student who thought it amusing to mark concentric circles on the map. What the NASA scientists running this experiment had tapped into was a vast pool of fiveminute increments of human judgment, applied with motivation to participate in a task unrelated to "making a living." ,{[pg 70]}, + +While clickworkers was a distinct, self-conscious experiment, it suggests characteristics of distributed production that are, in fact, quite widely observable. We have already seen in chapter 2, in our little search for Viking ships, how the Internet can produce encyclopedic or almanac-type information. The power of the Web to answer such an encyclopedic question comes not from the fact that one particular site has all the great answers. It is not an Encyclopedia Britannica. The power comes from the fact that it allows a user looking for specific information at a given time to collect answers from a sufficiently large number of contributions. The task of sifting and accrediting falls to the user, motivated by the need to find an answer to the question posed. As long as there are tools to lower the cost of that task to a level acceptable to the user, the Web shall have "produced" the information content the user was looking for. These are not trivial considerations, but they are also not intractable. As we shall see, some of the solutions can themselves be peer produced, and some solutions are emerging as a function of the speed of computation and communication, which enables more efficient technological solutions. +={ communities : + critical culture and self-reflection +9 ; + culture : + criticality of (self-reflection) +9 +} + +Encyclopedic and almanac-type information emerges on the Web out of the coordinate but entirely independent action of millions of users. This type of information also provides the focus on one of the most successful collaborative enterprises that has developed in the first five years of the twenty-first century, /{Wikipedia}/. /{Wikipedia}/ was founded by an Internet entrepreneur, Jimmy Wales. Wales had earlier tried to organize an encyclopedia named Nupedia, which was built on a traditional production model, but whose outputs were to be released freely: its contributors were to be PhDs, using a formal, peer-reviewed process. That project appears to have failed to generate a sufficient number of high-quality contributions, but its outputs were used in /{Wikipedia}/ as the seeds for a radically new form of encyclopedia writing. Founded in January 2001, /{Wikipedia}/ combines three core characteristics: First, it uses a collaborative authorship tool, Wiki. This platform enables anyone, including anonymous passersby, to edit almost any page in the entire project. It stores all versions, makes changes easily visible, and enables anyone to revert a document to any prior version as well as to add changes, small and large. All contributions and changes are rendered transparent by the software and database. Second, it is a self-conscious effort at creating an encyclopedia--governed first and foremost by a collective informal undertaking to strive for a neutral point of view, within the limits of substantial self-awareness as to the difficulties of such an enterprise. An effort ,{[pg 71]}, to represent sympathetically all views on a subject, rather than to achieve objectivity, is the core operative characteristic of this effort. Third, all the content generated by this collaboration is released under the GNU Free Documentation License, an adaptation of the GNU GPL to texts. The shift in strategy toward an open, peer-produced model proved enormously successful. The site saw tremendous growth both in the number of contributors, including the number of active and very active contributors, and in the number of articles included in the encyclopedia (table 3.1). Most of the early growth was in English, but more recently there has been an increase in the number of articles in many other languages: most notably in German (more than 200,000 articles), Japanese (more than 120,000 articles), and French (about 100,000), but also in another five languages that have between 40,000 and 70,000 articles each, another eleven languages with 10,000 to 40,000 articles each, and thirty-five languages with between 1,000 and 10,000 articles each. +={ critical culture and self-reflection : + Wikipedia project +8 ; + information production inputs : + Wikipedia project +8 ; + inputs to production : + Wikipedia project +8 ; + production inputs : + Wikipedia project +8 ; + self-organization : + Wikipedia project +8 ; + Wikipedia project +8 +} + +The first systematic study of the quality of /{Wikipedia}/ articles was published as this book was going to press. The journal Nature compared 42 science articles from /{Wikipedia}/ to the gold standard of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and concluded that "the difference in accuracy was not particularly great."~{ J. Giles, "Special Report: Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head," Nature, December 14, 2005, available at http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html. }~ On November 15, 2004, Robert McHenry, a former editor in chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published an article criticizing /{Wikipedia}/ as "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia."~{ http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html. }~ As an example, McHenry mocked the /{Wikipedia}/ article on Alexander Hamilton. He noted that Hamilton biographers have a problem fixing his birth year--whether it is 1755 or 1757. /{Wikipedia}/ glossed over this error, fixing the date at 1755. McHenry then went on to criticize the way the dates were treated throughout the article, using it as an anchor to his general claim: /{Wikipedia}/ is unreliable because it is not professionally produced. What McHenry did not note was that the other major online encyclopedias--like Columbia or Encarta--similarly failed to deal with the ambiguity surrounding Hamilton's birth date. Only the Britannica did. However, McHenry's critique triggered the /{Wikipedia}/ distributed correction mechanism. Within hours of the publication of McHenry's Web article, the reference was corrected. The following few days saw intensive cleanup efforts to conform all references in the biography to the newly corrected version. Within a week or so, /{Wikipedia}/ had a correct, reasonably clean version. It now stood alone with the Encyclopedia Britannica as a source of accurate basic encyclopedic information. In coming to curse it, McHenry found himself blessing /{Wikipedia}/. He had demonstrated ,{[pg 72]}, precisely the correction mechanism that makes /{Wikipedia}/, in the long term, a robust model of reasonably reliable information. +={ McHenry, Robert } + +!_ Table 3.1: Contributors to Wikipedia, January 2001 - June 2005 + +{table~h 24; 12; 12; 12; 12; 12; 12;} + |Jan. 2001|Jan. 2002|Jan. 2003|Jan. 2004|July 2004|June 2006 +Contributors* | 10| 472| 2,188| 9,653| 25,011| 48,721 +Active contributors** | 9| 212| 846| 3,228| 8,442| 16,945 +Very active contributors*** | 0| 31| 190| 692| 1,639| 3,016 +No. of English language articles| 25| 16,000| 101,000| 190,000| 320,000| 630,000 +No. of articles, all languages | 25| 19,000| 138,000| 490,000| 862,000|1,600,000 + +\* Contributed at least ten times; \** at least 5 times in last month; \*\** more than 100 times in last month. + +- Perhaps the most interesting characteristic about /{Wikipedia}/ is the selfconscious social-norms-based dedication to objective writing. Unlike some of the other projects that I describe in this chapter, /{Wikipedia}/ does not include elaborate software-controlled access and editing capabilities. It is generally open for anyone to edit the materials, delete another's change, debate the desirable contents, survey archives for prior changes, and so forth. It depends on self-conscious use of open discourse, usually aimed at consensus. While there is the possibility that a user will call for a vote of the participants on any given definition, such calls can, and usually are, ignored by the community unless a sufficiently large number of users have decided that debate has been exhausted. While the system operators and server host-- Wales--have the practical power to block users who are systematically disruptive, this power seems to be used rarely. The project relies instead on social norms to secure the dedication of project participants to objective writing. So, while not entirely anarchic, the project is nonetheless substantially more social, human, and intensively discourse- and trust-based than the other major projects described here. The following fragments from an early version of the self-described essential characteristics and basic policies of /{Wikipedia}/ are illustrative: +={ norms (social) +3 ; + regulation by social norms +3 ; + social regulations and norms +3 +} + +_1 First and foremost, the /{Wikipedia}/ project is self-consciously an encyclopedia-- rather than a dictionary, discussion forum, web portal, etc. /{Wikipedia}/'s participants ,{[pg 73]}, commonly follow, and enforce, a few basic policies that seem essential to keeping the project running smoothly and productively. First, because we have a huge variety of participants of all ideologies, and from around the world, /{Wikipedia}/ is committed to making its articles as unbiased as possible. The aim is not to write articles from a single objective point of view--this is a common misunderstanding of the policy--but rather, to fairly and sympathetically present all views on an issue. See "neutral point of view" page for further explanation. ~{ Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm," Yale Law Journal 112 (2001): 369. }~ +={ commercial model of communication : + security-related policy +2 ; + industrial model of communication : + security-related policy +2 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + security-related policy +2 ; + policy : + security-related policy +2 ; + security-related policy : + vandalism on Wikipedia +2 ; + traditional model of communication : + security-related policy +2 ; + vandalism on Wikipedia +2 +} + +The point to see from this quotation is that the participants of /{Wikipedia}/ are plainly people who like to write. Some of them participate in other collaborative authorship projects. However, when they enter the common project of /{Wikipedia}/, they undertake to participate in a particular way--a way that the group has adopted to make its product be an encyclopedia. On their interpretation, that means conveying in brief terms the state of the art on the item, including divergent opinions about it, but not the author's opinion. Whether that is an attainable goal is a subject of interpretive theory, and is a question as applicable to a professional encyclopedia as it is to /{Wikipedia}/. As the project has grown, it has developed more elaborate spaces for discussing governance and for conflict resolution. It has developed structures for mediation, and if that fails, arbitration, of disputes about particular articles. + +The important point is that /{Wikipedia}/ requires not only mechanical cooperation among people, but a commitment to a particular style of writing and describing concepts that is far from intuitive or natural to people. It requires self-discipline. It enforces the behavior it requires primarily through appeal to the common enterprise that the participants are engaged in, coupled with a thoroughly transparent platform that faithfully records and renders all individual interventions in the common project and facilitates discourse among participants about how their contributions do, or do not, contribute to this common enterprise. This combination of an explicit statement of common purpose, transparency, and the ability of participants to identify each other's actions and counteract them--that is, edit out "bad" or "faithless" definitions--seems to have succeeded in keeping this community from devolving into inefficacy or worse. A case study by IBM showed, for example, that while there were many instances of vandalism on /{Wikipedia}/, including deletion of entire versions of articles on controversial topics like "abortion," the ability of users to see what was done and to fix it with a single click by reverting to a past version meant that acts of vandalism were ,{[pg 74]}, corrected within minutes. Indeed, corrections were so rapid that vandalism acts and their corrections did not even appear on a mechanically generated image of the abortion definition as it changed over time.~{ IBM Collaborative User Experience Research Group, History Flows: Results (2003), http://www.research.ibm.com/history/results.htm. }~ What is perhaps surprising is that this success occurs not in a tightly knit community with many social relations to reinforce the sense of common purpose and the social norms embodying it, but in a large and geographically dispersed group of otherwise unrelated participants. It suggests that even in a group of this size, social norms coupled with a facility to allow any participant to edit out purposeful or mistaken deviations in contravention of the social norms, and a robust platform for largely unmediated conversation, keep the group on track. + +A very different cultural form of distributed content production is presented by the rise of massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) as immersive entertainment. These fall in the same cultural "time slot" as television shows and movies of the twentieth century. The interesting thing about these types of games is that they organize the production of "scripts" very differently from movies or television shows. In a game like Ultima Online or EverQuest, the role of the commercial provider is not to tell a finished, highly polished story to be consumed start to finish by passive consumers. Rather, the role of the game provider is to build tools with which users collaborate to tell a story. There have been observations about this approach for years, regarding MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and MOOs (Multi-User Object Oriented games). The point to understand about MMOGs is that they produce a discrete element of "content" that was in the past dominated by centralized professional production. The screenwriter of an immersive entertainment product like a movie is like the scientist marking Mars craters--a professional producer of a finished good. In MMOGs, this function is produced by using the appropriate software platform to allow the story to be written by the many users as they experience it. The individual contributions of the users/coauthors of the story line are literally done for fun-- they are playing a game. However, they are spending real economic goods-- their attention and substantial subscription fees--on a form of entertainment that uses a platform for active coproduction of a story line to displace what was once passive reception of a finished, commercially and professionally manufactured good. +={ communities : + immersive entertainment +1 ; + computer gaming environment +1 ; + entertainment industry : + immersive +1 ; + games, immersive +1 ; + immersive entertainment +1 ; + information production inputs : + immersive entertainment +1 ; + inputs to production : + immersive entertainment +1 ; + massive multiplayer games ; + MMOGs (massive multiplayer online games) ; + production inputs : + immersive entertainment +1 +} + +By 2003, a company called Linden Lab took this concept a major step forward by building an online game environment called Second Life. Second Life began almost entirely devoid of content. It was tools all the way down. ,{[pg 75]}, Within a matter of months, it had thousands of subscribers, inhabiting a "world" that had thousands of characters, hundreds of thousands of objects, multiple areas, villages, and "story lines." The individual users themselves had created more than 99 percent of all objects in the game environment, and all story lines and substantive frameworks for interaction--such as a particular village or group of theme-based participants. The interactions in the game environment involved a good deal of gift giving and a good deal of trade, but also some very surprising structured behaviors. Some users set up a university, where lessons were given in both in-game skills and in programming. Others designed spaceships and engaged in alien abductions (undergoing one seemed to become a status symbol within the game). At one point, aiming (successfully) to prevent the company from changing its pricing policy, users staged a demonstration by making signs and picketing the entry point to the game; and a "tax revolt" by placing large numbers of "tea crates" around an in-game reproduction of the Washington Monument. Within months, Second Life had become an immersive experience, like a movie or book, but one where the commercial provider offered a platform and tools, while the users wrote the story lines, rendered the "set," and performed the entire play. +={ Second Life game environment } + +3~ Relevance/Accreditation +={ accreditation +10 ; + filtering +10 ; + relevance filtering +10 +} + +How are we to know that the content produced by widely dispersed individuals is not sheer gobbledygook? Can relevance and accreditation itself be produced on a peer-production model? One type of answer is provided by looking at commercial businesses that successfully break off precisely the "accreditation and relevance" piece of their product, and rely on peer production to perform that function. Amazon and Google are probably the two most prominent examples of this strategy. +={ accreditation : + Amazon +1 ; + Amazon +1 ; + filtering : + Amazon +1 ; + relevance filtering : + Amazon +1 +} + +Amazon uses a mix of mechanisms to get in front of their buyers of books and other products that the users are likely to purchase. A number of these mechanisms produce relevance and accreditation by harnessing the users themselves. At the simplest level, the recommendation "customers who bought items you recently viewed also bought these items" is a mechanical means of extracting judgments of relevance and accreditation from the actions of many individuals, who produce the datum of relevance as byproduct of making their own purchasing decisions. Amazon also allows users to create topical lists and track other users as their "friends and favorites." Amazon, like many consumer sites today, also provides users with the ability ,{[pg 76]}, to rate books they buy, generating a peer-produced rating by averaging the ratings. More fundamentally, the core innovation of Google, widely recognized as the most efficient general search engine during the first half of the 2000s, was to introduce peer-based judgments of relevance. Like other search engines at the time, Google used a text-based algorithm to retrieve a given universe of Web pages initially. Its major innovation was its PageRank algorithm, which harnesses peer production of ranking in the following way. The engine treats links from other Web sites pointing to a given Web site as votes of confidence. Whenever someone who authors a Web site links to someone else's page, that person has stated quite explicitly that the linked page is worth a visit. Google's search engine counts these links as distributed votes of confidence in the quality of the page pointed to. Pages that are heavily linked-to count as more important votes of confidence. If a highly linked-to site links to a given page, that vote counts for more than the vote of a site that no one else thinks is worth visiting. The point to take home from looking at Google and Amazon is that corporations that have done immensely well at acquiring and retaining users have harnessed peer production to enable users to find things they want quickly and efficiently. +={ accreditation : + Google ; + communities : + critical culture and self-reflection +1 ; + culture : + criticality of (self-reflection) +1 ; + filtering : + Google ; + Google ; + relevance filtering : + Google +} + +The most prominent example of a distributed project self-consciously devoted to peer production of relevance is the Open Directory Project. The site relies on more than sixty thousand volunteer editors to determine which links should be included in the directory. Acceptance as a volunteer requires application. Quality relies on a peer-review process based substantially on seniority as a volunteer and level of engagement with the site. The site is hosted and administered by Netscape, which pays for server space and a small number of employees to administer the site and set up the initial guidelines. Licensing is free and presumably adds value partly to America Online's (AOL's) and Netscape's commercial search engine/portal and partly through goodwill. Volunteers are not affiliated with Netscape and receive no compensation. They spend time selecting sites for inclusion in the directory (in small increments of perhaps fifteen minutes per site reviewed), producing the most comprehensive, highest-quality human-edited directory of the Web--at this point outshining the directory produced by the company that pioneered human edited directories of the Web: Yahoo!. +={ accreditation : + Open Directory Project (ODP) ; + critical culture and self-reflection : + Open Directory Project ; + filtering : + Open Directory Project (ODP) ; + ODP (Open Directory Project) ; + Open Directory Project (ODP) ; + relevance filtering : + Open Directory Project (ODP) ; + self-organization : + Open Directory Project +} + +Perhaps the most elaborate platform for peer production of relevance and accreditation, at multiple layers, is used by Slashdot. Billed as "News for Nerds," Slashdot has become a leading technology newsletter on the Web, coproduced by hundreds of thousands of users. Slashdot primarily consists ,{[pg 77]}, of users commenting on initial submissions that cover a variety of technology-related topics. The submissions are typically a link to an off-site story, coupled with commentary from the person who submits the piece. Users follow up the initial submission with comments that often number in the hundreds. The initial submissions themselves, and more importantly, the approach to sifting through the comments of users for relevance and accreditation, provide a rich example of how this function can be performed on a distributed, peer-production model. +={ accreditation : + Slashdot +6 ; + filtering : + Slashdot +6 ; + relevance filtering : + Slashdot +6 ; + Slashdot +6 +} + +First, it is important to understand that the function of posting a story from another site onto Slashdot, the first "utterance" in a chain of comments on Slashdot, is itself an act of relevance production. The person submitting the story is telling the community of Slashdot users, "here is a story that `News for Nerds' readers should be interested in." This initial submission of a link is itself very coarsely filtered by editors who are paid employees of Open Source Technology Group (OSTG), which runs a number of similar platforms--like SourceForge, the most important platform for free software developers. OSTG is a subsidiary of VA Software, a software services company. The FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) response to, "how do you verify the accuracy of Slashdot stories?" is revealing: "We don't. You do. If something seems outrageous, we might look for some corroboration, but as a rule, we regard this as the responsibility of the submitter and the audience. This is why it's important to read comments. You might find something that refutes, or supports, the story in the main." In other words, Slashdot very self-consciously is organized as a means of facilitating peer production of accreditation; it is at the comments stage that the story undergoes its most important form of accreditation--peer review ex-post. +={ OSTG (Open Source Technology Group) } + +Filtering and accreditation of comments on Slashdot offer the most interesting case study of peer production of these functions. Users submit comments that are displayed together with the initial submission of a story. Think of the "content" produced in these comments as a cross between academic peer review of journal submissions and a peer-produced substitute for television's "talking heads." It is in the means of accrediting and evaluating these comments that Slashdot's system provides a comprehensive example of peer production of relevance and accreditation. Slashdot implements an automated system to select moderators from the pool of users. Moderators are chosen according to several criteria; they must be logged in (not anonymous), they must be regular users (who use the site averagely, not one-time page loaders or compulsive users), they must have been using ,{[pg 78]}, the site for a while (this defeats people who try to sign up just to moderate), they must be willing, and they must have positive "karma." Karma is a number assigned to a user that primarily reflects whether he or she has posted good or bad comments (according to ratings from other moderators). If a user meets these criteria, the program assigns the user moderator status and the user gets five "influence points" to review comments. The moderator rates a comment of his choice using a drop-down list with words such as "flamebait" and "informative." A positive word increases the rating of a comment one point and a negative word decreases the rating a point. Each time a moderator rates a comment, it costs one influence point, so he or she can only rate five comments for each moderating period. The period lasts for three days and if the user does not use the influence points, they expire. The moderation setup is designed to give many users a small amount of power. This decreases the effect of users with an ax to grind or with poor judgment. The site also implements some automated "troll filters," which prevent users from sabotaging the system. Troll filters stop users from posting more than once every sixty seconds, prevent identical posts, and will ban a user for twenty-four hours if he or she has been moderated down several times within a short time frame. Slashdot then provides users with a "threshold" filter that allows each user to block lower-quality comments. The scheme uses the numerical rating of the comment (ranging from 1 to 5). Comments start out at 0 for anonymous posters, 1 for registered users, and 2 for registered users with good "karma." As a result, if a user sets his or her filter at 1, the user will not see any comments from anonymous posters unless the comments' ratings were increased by a moderator. A user can set his or her filter anywhere from 1 (viewing all of the comments) to 5 (where only the posts that have been upgraded by several moderators will show up). +={ karma (Slashdot) ; + norms (social) : + Slashdot mechanisms for +3 ; + regulation by social norms : + Slashdot mechanisms for +3 ; + social relations and norms : + Slashdot mechanisms for +3 ; + troll filters (Slashdot) +} + +Relevance, as distinct from accreditation, is also tied into the Slashdot scheme because off-topic posts should receive an "off topic" rating by the moderators and sink below the threshold level (assuming the user has the threshold set above the minimum). However, the moderation system is limited to choices that sometimes are not mutually exclusive. For instance, a moderator may have to choose between "funny" ( 1) and "off topic" ( 1) when a post is both funny and off topic. As a result, an irrelevant post can increase in ranking and rise above the threshold level because it is funny or informative. It is unclear, however, whether this is a limitation on relevance, or indeed mimics our own normal behavior, say in reading a newspaper or browsing a library, where we might let our eyes linger longer on a funny or ,{[pg 79]}, informative tidbit, even after we have ascertained that it is not exactly relevant to what we were looking for. + +The primary function of moderation is to provide accreditation. If a user sets a high threshold level, they will only see posts that are considered of high quality by the moderators. Users also receive accreditation through their karma. If their posts consistently receive high ratings, their karma will increase. At a certain karma level, their comments will start off with a rating of 2, thereby giving them a louder voice in the sense that users with a threshold of 2 will now see their posts immediately, and fewer upward moderations are needed to push their comments even higher. Conversely, a user with bad karma from consistently poorly rated comments can lose accreditation by having his or her posts initially start off at 0 or 1. In addition to the mechanized means of selecting moderators and minimizing their power to skew the accreditation system, Slashdot implements a system of peer-review accreditation for the moderators themselves. Slashdot accomplishes this "metamoderation" by making any user that has an account from the first 90 percent of accounts created on the system eligible to evaluate the moderators. Each eligible user who opts to perform metamoderation review is provided with ten random moderator ratings of comments. The user/metamoderator then rates the moderator's rating as either unfair, fair, or neither. The metamoderation process affects the karma of the original moderator, which, when lowered sufficiently by cumulative judgments of unfair ratings, will remove the moderator from the moderation system. +={ metamoderation (Slashdot) +1 } + +Together, these mechanisms allow for distributed production of both relevance and accreditation. Because there are many moderators who can moderate any given comment, and thanks to the mechanisms that explicitly limit the power of any one moderator to overinfluence the aggregate judgment, the system evens out differences in evaluation by aggregating judgments. It then allows individual users to determine what level of accreditation pronounced by this aggregate system fits their particular time and needs by setting their filter to be more or less inclusive. By introducing "karma," the system also allows users to build reputation over time, and to gain greater control over the accreditation of their own work relative to the power of the critics. Users, moderators, and metamoderators are all volunteers. + +The primary point to take from the Slashdot example is that the same dynamic that we saw used for peer production of initial utterances, or content, can be implemented to produce relevance and accreditation. Rather than using the full-time effort of professional accreditation experts, the system ,{[pg 80]}, is designed to permit the aggregation of many small judgments, each of which entails a trivial effort for the contributor, regarding both relevance and accreditation of the materials. The software that mediates the communication among the collaborating peers embeds both the means to facilitate the participation and a variety of mechanisms designed to defend the common effort from poor judgment or defection. + +3~ Value-Added Distribution +={ distribution of information +3 } + +Finally, when we speak of information or cultural goods that exist (content has been produced) and are made usable through some relevance and accreditation mechanisms, there remains the question of distribution. To some extent, this is a nonissue on the Internet. Distribution is cheap. All one needs is a server and large pipes connecting one's server to the world. Nonetheless, this segment of the publication process has also provided us with important examples of peer production, including one of its earliest examples--Project Gutenberg. + +Project Gutenberg entails hundreds of volunteers who scan in and correct books so that they are freely available in digital form. It has amassed more than 13,000 books, and makes the collection available to everyone for free. The vast majority of the "e-texts" offered are public domain materials. The site itself presents the e-texts in ASCII format, the lowest technical common denominator, but does not discourage volunteers from offering the e-texts in markup languages. It contains a search engine that allows a reader to search for typical fields such as subject, author, and title. Project Gutenberg volunteers can select any book that is in the public domain to transform into an e-text. The volunteer submits a copy of the title page of the book to Michael Hart--who founded the project--for copyright research. The volunteer is notified to proceed if the book passes the copyright clearance. The decision on which book to convert to e-text is left up to the volunteer, subject to copyright limitations. Typically, a volunteer converts a book to ASCII format using OCR (optical character recognition) and proofreads it one time in order to screen it for major errors. He or she then passes the ASCII file to a volunteer proofreader. This exchange is orchestrated with very little supervision. The volunteers use a Listserv mailing list and a bulletin board to initiate and supervise the exchange. In addition, books are labeled with a version number indicating how many times they have been proofed. The site encourages volunteers to select a book that has a low number and proof it. The Project Gutenberg proofing process is simple. ,{[pg 81]}, Proofreaders (aside from the first pass) are not expected to have access to the book, but merely review the e-text for self-evident errors. +={ Hart, Michael +1 ; + Project Gutenberg +1 +} + +Distributed Proofreading, a site originally unaffiliated with Project Gutenberg, is devoted to proofing Project Gutenberg e-texts more efficiently, by distributing the volunteer proofreading function in smaller and more information-rich modules. Charles Franks, a computer programmer from Las Vegas, decided that he had a more efficient way to proofread these etexts. He built an interface that allowed volunteers to compare scanned images of original texts with the e-texts available on Project Gutenberg. In the Distributed Proofreading process, scanned pages are stored on the site, and volunteers are shown a scanned page and a page of the e-text simultaneously so that they can compare the e-text to the original page. Because of the fine-grained modularity, proofreaders can come on the site and proof one or a few pages and submit them. By contrast, on the Project Gutenberg site, the entire book is typically exchanged, or at minimum, a chapter. In this fashion, Distributed Proofreading clears the proofing of tens of thousands of pages every month. After a couple of years of working independently, Franks joined forces with Hart. By late 2004, the site had proofread more than five thousand volumes using this method. +={ Franks, Charles ; + distributed production +} + +3~ Sharing of Processing, Storage, and Communications Platforms +={ allocating excess capacity +15 ; + capacity : + sharing +15 ; + excess capacity, sharing +15 ; + reallocating excess capacity +15 ; + sharing +15 : + excess capacity +15 +} + +All the examples of peer production that we have seen up to this point have been examples where individuals pool their time, experience, wisdom, and creativity to form new information, knowledge, and cultural goods. As we look around the Internet, however, we find that users also cooperate in similar loosely affiliated groups, without market signals or managerial commands, to build supercomputers and massive data storage and retrieval systems. In their radical decentralization and reliance on social relations and motivations, these sharing practices are similar to peer production of information, knowledge, and culture. They differ in one important aspect: Users are not sharing their innate and acquired human capabilities, and, unlike information, their inputs and outputs are not public goods. The participants are, instead, sharing material goods that they privately own, mostly personal computers and their components. They produce economic, not public, goods--computation, storage, and communications capacity. +={ supercomputers +1 ; + capacity : + processing (computational) +1 ; + computational capacity +1 ; + processing capacity +1 +} + +As of the middle of 2004, the fastest supercomputer in the world was SETI@home. It ran about 75 percent faster than the supercomputer that ,{[pg 82]}, was then formally known as "the fastest supercomputer in the world": the IBM Blue Gene/L. And yet, there was and is no single SETI@home computer. Instead, the SETI@home project has developed software and a collaboration platform that have enabled millions of participants to pool their computation resources into a single powerful computer. Every user who participates in the project must download a small screen saver. When a user's personal computer is idle, the screen saver starts up, downloads problems for calculation--in SETI@home, these are radio astronomy signals to be analyzed for regularities--and calculates the problem it has downloaded. Once the program calculates a solution, it automatically sends its results to the main site. The cycle continues for as long as, and repeats every time that, the computer is idle from its user's perspective. As of the middle of 2004, the project had harnessed the computers of 4.5 million users, allowing it to run computations at speeds greater than those achieved by the fastest supercomputers in the world that private firms, using full-time engineers, developed for the largest and best-funded government laboratories in the world. SETI@home is the most prominent, but is only one among dozens of similarly structured Internet-based distributed computing platforms. Another, whose structure has been the subject of the most extensive formal analysis by its creators, is Folding@home. As of mid-2004, Folding@home had amassed contributions of about 840,000 processors contributed by more than 365,000 users. +={ SETI@home project +2 ; + distributed computing projects +2 ; + Folding@home project +2 ; + home project +2 +} + +SETI@home and Folding@home provide a good basis for describing the fairly common characteristics of Internet-based distributed computation projects. First, these are noncommercial projects, engaged in pursuits understood as scientific, for the general good, seeking to harness contributions of individuals who wish to contribute to such larger-than-themselves goals. SETI@home helps in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Folding@home helps in protein folding research. Fightaids@home is dedicated to running models that screen compounds for the likelihood that they will provide good drug candidates to fight HIV/AIDS. Genome@home is dedicated to modeling artificial genes that would be created to generate useful proteins. Other sites, like those dedicated to cryptography or mathematics, have a narrower appeal, and combine "altruistic" with hobby as their basic motivational appeal. The absence of money is, in any event, typical of the large majority of active distributed computing projects. Less than one-fifth of these projects mention money at all. Most of those that do mention money refer to the contributors' eligibility for a share of a generally available ,{[pg 83]}, prize for solving a scientific or mathematical challenge, and mix an appeal to hobby and altruism with the promise of money. Only two of about sixty projects active in 2004 were built on a pay-per-contribution basis, and these were quite small-scale by comparison to many of the others. +={ altruism +1 ; + Fightaids@home project ; + Genome@home project +} + +Most of the distributed computing projects provide a series of utilities and statistics intended to allow contributors to attach meaning to their contributions in a variety of ways. The projects appear to be eclectic in their implicit social and psychological theories of the motivations for participation in the projects. Sites describe the scientific purpose of the models and the specific scientific output, including posting articles that have used the calculations. In these components, the project organizers seem to assume some degree of taste for generalized altruism and the pursuit of meaning in contributing to a common goal. They also implement a variety of mechanisms to reinforce the sense of purpose, such as providing aggregate statistics about the total computations performed by the project as a whole. However, the sites also seem to assume a healthy dose of what is known in the anthropology of gift literature as agonistic giving--that is, giving intended to show that the person giving is greater than or more important than others, who gave less. For example, most of the sites allow individuals to track their own contributions, and provide "user of the month"-type rankings. An interesting characteristic of quite a few of these is the ability to create "teams" of users, who in turn compete on who has provided more cycles or work units. SETI@home in particular taps into ready-made nationalisms, by offering country-level statistics. Some of the team names on Folding@home also suggest other, out-of-project bonding measures, such as national or ethnic bonds (for example, Overclockers Australia or Alliance Francophone), technical minority status (for example, Linux or MacAddict4Life), and organizational affiliation (University of Tennessee or University of Alabama), as well as shared cultural reference points (Knights who say Ni!). In addition, the sites offer platforms for simple connectedness and mutual companionship, by offering user fora to discuss the science and the social participation involved. It is possible that these sites are shooting in the dark, as far as motivating sharing is concerned. It also possible, however, that they have tapped into a valuable insight, which is that people behave sociably and generously for all sorts of different reasons, and that at least in this domain, adding reasons to participate--some agonistic, some altruistic, some reciprocity-seeking--does not have a crowding-out effect. +={ agnostic giving } + +Like distributed computing projects, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks are ,{[pg 84]}, an excellent example of a highly efficient system for storing and accessing data in a computer network. These networks of sharing are much less "mysterious," in terms of understanding the human motivation behind participation. Nevertheless, they provide important lessons about the extent to which large-scale collaboration among strangers or loosely affiliated users can provide effective communications platforms. For fairly obvious reasons, we usually think of peer-to-peer networks, beginning with Napster, as a "problem." This is because they were initially overwhelmingly used to perform an act that, by the analysis of almost any legal scholar, was copyright infringement. To a significant extent, they are still used in this form. There were, and continue to be, many arguments about whether the acts of the firms that provided peer-to-peer software were responsible for the violations. However, there has been little argument that anyone who allows thousands of other users to make copies of his or her music files is violating copyright-- hence the public interpretation of the creation of peer-to-peer networks as primarily a problem. From the narrow perspective of the law of copyright or of the business model of the recording industry and Hollywood, this may be an appropriate focus. From the perspective of diagnosing what is happening to our social and economic structure, the fact that the files traded on these networks were mostly music in the first few years of this technology's implementation is little more than a distraction. Let me explain why. +={ file-sharing networks +4 ; + p2p networks +4 ; + peer-to-peer networks +4 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + peer-to-peer networks +4 ; + network topology : + peer-to-peer networks +4 ; + structure of network : + peer-to-peer networks +4 ; + topology, network : + peer-to-peer networks +4 ; + music industry : + peer-to-peer networks and +1 ; + proprietary rights : + peer-to-peer networks and +1 +} + +Imagine for a moment that someone--be it a legislator defining a policy goal or a businessperson defining a desired service--had stood up in mid1999 and set the following requirements: "We would like to develop a new music and movie distribution system. We would like it to store all the music and movies ever digitized. We would like it to be available from anywhere in the world. We would like it to be able to serve tens of millions of users at any given moment." Any person at the time would have predicted that building such a system would cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars; that running it would require large standing engineering staffs; that managing it so that users could find what they wanted and not drown in the sea of content would require some substantial number of "curators"--DJs and movie buffs--and that it would take at least five to ten years to build. Instead, the system was built cheaply by a wide range of actors, starting with Shawn Fanning's idea and implementation of Napster. Once the idea was out, others perfected the idea further, eliminating the need for even the one centralized feature that Napster included--a list of who had what files on which computer that provided the matchmaking function in the Napster ,{[pg 85]}, network. Since then, under the pressure of suits from the recording industry and a steady and persistent demand for peer-to-peer music software, rapid successive generations of Gnutella, and then the FastTrack clients KaZaa and Morpheus, Overnet and eDonkey, the improvements of BitTorrent, and many others have enhanced the reliability, coverage, and speed of the peer-to-peer music distribution system--all under constant threat of litigation, fines, police searches and even, in some countries, imprisonment of the developers or users of these networks. +={ Fanning, Shawn } + +What is truly unique about peer-to-peer networks as a signal of what is to come is the fact that with ridiculously low financial investment, a few teenagers and twenty-something-year-olds were able to write software and protocols that allowed tens of millions of computer users around the world to cooperate in producing the most efficient and robust file storage and retrieval system in the world. No major investment was necessary in creating a server farm to store and make available the vast quantities of data represented by the media files. The users' computers are themselves the "server farm." No massive investment in dedicated distribution channels made of high-quality fiber optics was necessary. The standard Internet connections of users, with some very intelligent file transfer protocols, sufficed. Architecture oriented toward enabling users to cooperate with each other in storage, search, retrieval, and delivery of files was all that was necessary to build a content distribution network that dwarfed anything that existed before. + +Again, there is nothing mysterious about why users participate in peer-to-peer networks. They want music; they can get it from these networks for free; so they participate. The broader point to take from looking at peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, however, is the sheer effectiveness of large-scale collaboration among individuals once they possess, under their individual control, the physical capital necessary to make their cooperation effective. These systems are not "subsidized," in the sense that they do not pay the full marginal cost of their service. Remember, music, like all information, is a nonrival public good whose marginal cost, once produced, is zero. Moreover, digital files are not "taken" from one place in order to be played in the other. They are replicated wherever they are wanted, and thereby made more ubiquitous, not scarce. The only actual social cost involved at the time of the transmission is the storage capacity, communications capacity, and processing capacity necessary to store, catalog, search, retrieve, and transfer the information necessary to replicate the files from where copies reside to where more copies are desired. As with any nonrival good, if Jane is willing ,{[pg 86]}, to spend the actual social costs involved in replicating the music file that already exists and that Jack possesses, then it is efficient that she do so without paying the creator a dime. It may throw a monkey wrench into the particular way in which our society has chosen to pay musicians and recording executives. This, as we saw in chapter 2, trades off efficiency for longer-term incentive effects for the recording industry. However, it is efficient within the normal meaning of the term in economics in a way that it would not have been had Jane and Jack used subsidized computers or network connections. +={ information production : + nonrivalry ; + production of information : + nonrivalry ; + networks sharing +} + +As with distributed computing, peer-to-peer file-sharing systems build on the fact that individual users own vast quantities of excess capacity embedded in their personal computers. As with distributed computing, peer-to-peer networks developed architectures that allowed users to share this excess capacity with each other. By cooperating in these sharing practices, users construct together systems with capabilities far exceeding those that they could have developed by themselves, as well as the capabilities that even the best-financed corporations could provide using techniques that rely on components they fully owned. The network components owned by any single music delivery service cannot match the collective storage and retrieval capabilities of the universe of users' hard drives and network connections. Similarly, the processors arrayed in the supercomputers find it difficult to compete with the vast computation resource available on the millions of personal computers connected to the Internet, and the proprietary software development firms find themselves competing, and in some areas losing to, the vast pool of programming talent connected to the Internet in the form of participants in free and open source software development projects. +={ capacity : + processing (computational) | storage ; + computational capacity ; + data storage capacity ; + information sharing ; + processing capacity ; + storage capacity ; + connectivity +1 +} + +In addition to computation and storage, the last major element of computer communications networks is connectivity. Here, too, perhaps more dramatically than in either of the two other functionalities, we have seen the development of sharing-based techniques. The most direct transfer of the design characteristics of peer-to-peer networks to communications has been the successful development of Skype--an Internet telephony utility that allows the owners of computers to have voice conversations with each other over the Internet for free, and to dial into the public telephone network for a fee. As of this writing, Skype is already used by more than two million users at any given moment in time. They use a FastTrack-like architecture to share their computing and communications resources to create a global ,{[pg 87]}, telephone system running on top of the Internet. It was created, and is run by, the developers of KaZaa. +={ Skype utility } + +Most dramatically, however, we have seen these techniques emerging in wireless communications. Throughout almost the entire twentieth century, radio communications used a single engineering approach to allow multiple messages to be sent wirelessly in a single geographic area. This approach was to transmit each of the different simultaneous messages by generating separate electromagnetic waves for each, which differed from each other by the frequency of oscillation, or wavelength. The receiver could then separate out the messages by ignoring all electromagnetic energy received at its antenna unless it oscillated at the frequency of the desired message. This engineering technique, adopted by Marconi in 1900, formed the basis of our notion of "spectrum": the range of frequencies at which we know how to generate electromagnetic waves with sufficient control and predictability that we can encode and decode information with them, as well as the notion that there are "channels" of spectrum that are "used" by a communication. For more than half a century, radio communications regulation was thought necessary because spectrum was scarce, and unless regulated, everyone would transmit at all frequencies causing chaos and an inability to send messages. From 1959, when Ronald Coase first published his critique of this regulatory approach, until the early 1990s, when spectrum auctions began, the terms of the debate over "spectrum policy," or wireless communications regulation, revolved around whether the exclusive right to transmit radio signals in a given geographic area should be granted as a regulatory license or a tradable property right. In the 1990s, with the introduction of auctions, we began to see the adoption of a primitive version of a property-based system through "spectrum auctions." By the early 2000s, this system allowed the new "owners" of these exclusive rights to begin to shift what were initially purely mobile telephony systems to mobile data communications as well. +={ Coase, Ronald ; + proprietary rights : + wireless networks ; + wireless communications +2 +} + +By this time, however, the century-old engineering assumptions that underlay the regulation-versus-property conceptualization of the possibilities open for the institutional framework of wireless communications had been rendered obsolete by new computation and network technologies.~{ For the full argument, see Yochai Benkler, "Some Economics of Wireless Communications," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 16 (2002): 25; and Yochai Benkler, "Overcoming Agoraphobia: Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 11 (1998): 287. For an excellent overview of the intellectual history of this debate and a contribution to the institutional design necessary to make space for this change, see Kevin Werbach, "Supercommons: Towards a Unified Theory of Wireless Communication," Texas Law Review 82 (2004): 863. The policy implications of computationally intensive radios using wide bands were first raised by George Gilder in "The New Rule of the Wireless," Forbes ASAP, March 29, 1993, and Paul Baran, "Visions of the 21st Century Communications: Is the Shortage of Radio Spectrum for Broadband Networks of the Future a Self Made Problem?" (keynote talk transcript, 8th Annual Conference on Next Generation Networks, Washington, DC, November 9, 1994). Both statements focused on the potential abundance of spectrum, and how it renders "spectrum management" obsolete. Eli Noam was the first to point out that, even if one did not buy the idea that computationally intensive radios eliminated scarcity, they still rendered spectrum property rights obsolete, and enabled instead a fluid, dynamic, real-time market in spectrum clearance rights. See Eli Noam, "Taking the Next Step Beyond Spectrum Auctions: Open Spectrum Access," Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Magazine 33, no. 12 (1995): 66-73; later elaborated in Eli Noam, "Spectrum Auction: Yesterday's Heresy, Today's Orthodoxy, Tomorrow's Anachronism. Taking the Next Step to Open Spectrum Access," Journal of Law and Economics 41 (1998): 765, 778-780. The argument that equipment markets based on a spectrum commons, or free access to frequencies, could replace the role planned for markets in spectrum property rights with computationally intensive equipment and sophisticated network sharing protocols, and would likely be more efficient even assuming that scarcity persists, was made in Benkler, "Overcoming Agoraphobia." Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999) and Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001) developed a rationale based on the innovation dynamic in support of the economic value of open wireless networks. David Reed, "Comments for FCC Spectrum Task Force on Spectrum Policy," filed with the Federal Communications Commission July 10, 2002, crystallized the technical underpinnings and limitations of the idea that spectrum can be regarded as property. }~ The dramatic decline in computation cost and improvements in digital signal processing, network architecture, and antenna systems had fundamentally changed the design space of wireless communications systems. Instead of having one primary parameter with which to separate out messages--the ,{[pg 88]}, frequency of oscillation of the carrier wave--engineers could now use many different mechanisms to allow much smarter receivers to separate out the message they wanted to receive from all other sources of electromagnetic radiation in the geographic area they occupied. Radio transmitters could now transmit at the same frequency, simultaneously, without "interfering" with each other--that is, without confusing the receivers as to which radiation carried the required message and which did not. Just like automobiles that can share a commons-based medium--the road--and unlike railroad cars, which must use dedicated, owned, and managed railroad tracks--these new radios could share "the spectrum" as a commons. It was no longer necessary, or even efficient, to pass laws--be they in the form of regulations or of exclusive property-like rights--that carved up the usable spectrum into exclusively controlled slices. Instead, large numbers of transceivers, owned and operated by end users, could be deployed and use equipment-embedded protocols to coordinate their communications. + +The reasons that owners would share the excess capacity of their new radios are relatively straightforward in this case. Users want to have wireless connectivity all the time, to be reachable and immediately available everywhere. However, they do not actually want to communicate every few microseconds. They will therefore be willing to purchase and keep turned on equipment that provides them with such connectivity. Manufacturers, in turn, will develop and adhere to standards that will improve capacity and connectivity. As a matter of engineering, what has been called "cooperation gain"--the improved quality of the system gained when the nodes cooperate--is the most promising source of capacity scaling for distributed wireless systems.~{ See Benkler, "Some Economics," 44-47. The term "cooperation gain" was developed by Reed to describe a somewhat broader concept than "diversity gain" is in multiuser information theory. }~ Cooperation gain is easy to understand from day-to-day interactions. When we sit in a lecture and miss a word or two, we might turn to a neighbor and ask, "Did you hear what she said?" In radio systems, this kind of cooperation among the antennae (just like the ears) of neighbors is called antenna diversity, and is the basis for the design of a number of systems to improve reception. We might stand in a loud crowd without being able to shout or walk over to the other end of the room, but ask a friend: "If you see so and so, tell him x"; that friend then bumps into a friend of so and so and tells that person: "If you see so and so, tell him x"; and so forth. When we do this, we are using what in radio engineering is called repeater networks. These kinds of cooperative systems can carry much higher loads without interference, sharing wide swaths of spectrum, ,{[pg 89]}, in ways that are more efficient than systems that rely on explicit market transactions based on property in the right to emit power in discrete frequencies. The design of such "ad hoc mesh networks"--that is, networks of radios that can configure themselves into cooperative networks as need arises, and help each other forward messages and decipher incoming messages over the din of radio emissions--are the most dynamic area in radio engineering today. +={ cooperation gain ; + network topology : + repeater networks +1 ; + repeater networks +1 ; + structure of network : + repeater network +1 ; + topology, network : + repeater networks +1 ; + ad hoc mesh networks +} + +This technological shift gave rise to the fastest-growing sector in the wireless communications arena in the first few years of the twenty-first century-- WiFi and similar unlicensed wireless devices. The economic success of the equipment market that utilizes the few primitive "spectrum commons" available in the United States--originally intended for low-power devices like garage openers and the spurious emissions of microwave ovens--led toward at first slow, and more recently quite dramatic, change in U.S. wireless policy. In the past two years alone, what have been called "commons-based" approaches to wireless communications policy have come to be seen as a legitimate, indeed a central, component of the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC's) wireless policy.~{ Spectrum Policy Task Force Report to the Commission (Federal Communications Commission, Washington, DC, 2002); Michael K. Powell, "Broadband Migration III: New Directions in Wireless Policy" (Remarks at the Silicon Flatiron Telecommunications Program, University of Colorado at Boulder, October 30, 2002). }~ We are beginning to see in this space the most prominent example of a system that was entirely oriented toward regulation aimed at improving the institutional conditions of marketbased production of wireless transport capacity sold as a finished good (connectivity minutes), shifting toward enabling the emergence of a market in shareable goods (smart radios) designed to provision transport on a sharing model. +={ commons : + wireless communications as +} + +I hope these detailed examples provide a common set of mental pictures of what peer production looks like. In the next chapter I explain the economics of peer production of information and the sharing of material resources for computation, communications, and storage in particular, and of nonmarket, social production more generally: why it is efficient, how we can explain the motivations that lead people to participate in these great enterprises of nonmarket cooperation, and why we see so much more of it online than we do off-line. The moral and political discussion throughout the remainder of the book does not, however, depend on your accepting the particular analysis I offer in chapter 4 to "domesticate" these phenomena within more or less standard economics. At this point, it is important that the stories have provided a texture for, and established the plausibility of, ,{[pg 90]}, the claim that nonmarket production in general and peer production in particular are phenomena of much wider application than free software, and exist in important ways throughout the networked information economy. For purposes of understanding the political implications that occupy most of this book, that is all that is necessary. ,{[pg 91]}, + +1~4 Chapter 4 - The Economics of Social Production +={ economics of nonmarket production +68 ; + nonmarket production, economics of +68 +} + +The increasing salience of nonmarket production in general, and peer production in particular, raises three puzzles from an economics perspective. First, why do people participate? What is their motivation when they work for or contribute resources to a project for which they are not paid or directly rewarded? Second, why now, why here? What, if anything, is special about the digitally networked environment that would lead us to believe that peer production is here to stay as an important economic phenomenon, as opposed to a fad that will pass as the medium matures and patterns of behavior settle toward those more familiar to us from the economy of steel, coal, and temp agencies. Third, is it efficient to have all these people sharing their computers and donating their time and creative effort? Moving through the answers to these questions, it becomes clear that the diverse and complex patterns of behavior observed on the Internet, from Viking ship hobbyists to the developers of the GNU/ Linux operating system, are perfectly consistent with much of our contemporary understanding of human economic behavior. We need to assume no fundamental change in the nature of humanity; ,{[pg 92]}, we need not declare the end of economics as we know it. We merely need to see that the material conditions of production in the networked information economy have changed in ways that increase the relative salience of social sharing and exchange as a modality of economic production. That is, behaviors and motivation patterns familiar to us from social relations generally continue to cohere in their own patterns. What has changed is that now these patterns of behavior have become effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship and mutual recognition. They have come to play a substantial role as modes of motivating, informing, and organizing productive behavior at the very core of the information economy. And it is this increasing role as a modality of information production that ripples through the rest this book. It is the feasibility of producing information, knowledge, and culture through social, rather than market and proprietary relations--through cooperative peer production and coordinate individual action--that creates the opportunities for greater autonomous action, a more critical culture, a more discursively engaged and better informed republic, and perhaps a more equitable global community. +={ behavior : + motivation to produce +11 ; + diversity : + motivation to produce +11 ; + human motivation +11 ; + incentives to produce +11 ; + motivation to produce +11 ; + norms (social) : + motivation within +4 ; + regulation by social norms : + motivation within +4 ; + social relations and norms : + motivation within +4 +} + +2~ MOTIVATION + +Much of economics achieves analytic tractability by adopting a very simple model of human motivation. The basic assumption is that all human motivations can be more or less reduced to something like positive and negative utilities--things people want, and things people want to avoid. These are capable of being summed, and are usually translatable into a universal medium of exchange, like money. Adding more of something people want, like money, to any given interaction will, all things considered, make that interaction more desirable to rational people. While simplistic, this highly tractable model of human motivation has enabled policy prescriptions that have proven far more productive than prescriptions that depended on other models of human motivation--such as assuming that benign administrators will be motivated to serve their people, or that individuals will undertake self-sacrifice for the good of the nation or the commune. + +Of course, this simple model underlying much of contemporary economics is wrong. At least it is wrong as a universal description of human motivation. If you leave a fifty-dollar check on the table at the end of a dinner party at a friend's house, you do not increase the probability that you will ,{[pg 93]}, be invited again. We live our lives in diverse social frames, and money has a complex relationship with these--sometimes it adds to the motivation to participate, sometimes it detracts from it. While this is probably a trivial observation outside of the field of economics, it is quite radical within that analytic framework. The present generation's efforts to formalize and engage it began with the Titmuss-Arrow debate of the early 1970s. In a major work, Richard Titmuss compared the U.S. and British blood supply systems. The former was largely commercial at the time, organized by a mix of private for-profit and nonprofit actors; the latter entirely voluntary and organized by the National Health Service. Titmuss found that the British system had higher-quality blood (as measured by the likelihood of recipients contracting hepatitis from transfusions), less blood waste, and fewer blood shortages at hospitals. Titmuss also attacked the U.S. system as inequitable, arguing that the rich exploited the poor and desperate by buying their blood. He concluded that an altruistic blood procurement system is both more ethical and more efficient than a market system, and recommended that the market be kept out of blood donation to protect the "right to give."~{ Richard M. Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 94. }~ Titmuss's argument came under immediate attack from economists. Most relevant for our purposes here, Kenneth Arrow agreed that the differences in blood quality indicated that the U.S. blood system was flawed, but rejected Titmuss's central theoretical claim that markets reduce donative activity. Arrow reported the alternative hypothesis held by "economists typically," that if some people respond to exhortation/moral incentives (donors), while others respond to prices and market incentives (sellers), these two groups likely behave independently--neither responds to the other's incentives. Thus, the decision to allow or ban markets should have no effect on donative behavior. Removing a market could, however, remove incentives of the "bad blood" suppliers to sell blood, thereby improving the overall quality of the blood supply. Titmuss had not established his hypothesis analytically, Arrow argued, and its proof or refutation would lie in empirical study.~{ Kenneth J. Arrow, "Gifts and Exchanges," Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1972): 343. }~ Theoretical differences aside, the U.S. blood supply system did in fact transition to an allvolunteer system of social donation since the 1970s. In surveys since, blood donors have reported that they "enjoy helping" others, experienced a sense of moral obligation or responsibility, or exhibited characteristics of reciprocators after they or their relatives received blood. +={ Arrow, Kenneth ; + blood donation ; + Titmuss, Richard +} + +A number of scholars, primarily in psychology and economics, have attempted to resolve this question both empirically and theoretically. The most systematic work within economics is that of Swiss economist Bruno Frey ,{[pg 94]}, and various collaborators, building on the work of psychologist Edward Deci.~{ Bruno S. Frey, Not Just for Money: An Economic Theory of Personal Motivation (Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar, 1997); Bruno S. Frey, Inspiring Economics: Human Motivation in Political Economy (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2001), 52-72. An excellent survey of this literature is Bruno S. Frey and Reto Jegen, "Motivation Crowding Theory," Journal of Economic Surveys 15, no. 5 (2001): 589. For a crystallization of the underlying psychological theory, see Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (New York: Plenum, 1985). }~ A simple statement of this model is that individuals have intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Extrinsic motivations are imposed on individuals from the outside. They take the form of either offers of money for, or prices imposed on, behavior, or threats of punishment or reward from a manager or a judge for complying with, or failing to comply with, specifically prescribed behavior. Intrinsic motivations are reasons for action that come from within the person, such as pleasure or personal satisfaction. Extrinsic motivations are said to "crowd out" intrinsic motivations because they (a) impair self-determination--that is, people feel pressured by an external force, and therefore feel overjustified in maintaining their intrinsic motivation rather than complying with the will of the source of the extrinsic reward; or (b) impair self-esteem--they cause individuals to feel that their internal motivation is rejected, not valued, and as a result, their self-esteem is diminished, causing them to reduce effort. Intuitively, this model relies on there being a culturally contingent notion of what one "ought" to do if one is a welladjusted human being and member of a decent society. Being offered money to do something you know you "ought" to do, and that self-respecting members of society usually in fact do, implies that the person offering the money believes that you are not a well-adjusted human being or an equally respectable member of society. This causes the person offered the money either to believe the offerer, and thereby lose self-esteem and reduce effort, or to resent him and resist the offer. A similar causal explanation is formalized by Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole, who claim that the person receiving the monetary incentives infers that the person offering the compensation does not trust the offeree to do the right thing, or to do it well of their own accord. The offeree's self-confidence and intrinsic motivation to succeed are reduced to the extent that the offeree believes that the offerer--a manager or parent, for example--is better situated to judge the offeree's abilities.~{ Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole, "Self-Confidence and Social Interactions" (working paper no. 7585, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, March 2000). }~ +={ Frey, Bruno +1 ; + Benabou, Ronald ; + Deci, Edward ; + Tirole, Jean ; + extrinsic motivations +3 ; + intrinsic motivations +6 ; + money : + as demotivator +3 ; + price compensation, as demotivator +3 ; + self-determinims, extrinsic motivation and ; + self-esteem, extrinsic motivation and ; + filtering by information provider. See blocked access financial reward, as demotivator +3 +} + +More powerful than the theoretical literature is the substantial empirical literature--including field and laboratory experiments, econometrics, and surveys--that has developed since the mid-1990s to test the hypotheses of this model of human motivation. Across many different settings, researchers have found substantial evidence that, under some circumstances, adding money for an activity previously undertaken without price compensation reduces, rather than increases, the level of activity. The work has covered contexts as diverse as the willingness of employees to work more or to share their experience and knowledge with team members, of communities to ,{[pg 95]}, accept locally undesirable land uses, or of parents to pick up children from day-care centers punctually.~{ Truman F. Bewley, "A Depressed Labor Market as Explained by Participants," American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings) 85 (1995): 250, provides survey data about managers' beliefs about the effects of incentive contracts; Margit Osterloh and Bruno S. Frey, "Motivation, Knowledge Transfer, and Organizational Form," Organization Science 11 (2000): 538, provides evidence that employees with tacit knowledge communicate it to coworkers more efficiently without extrinsic motivations, with the appropriate social motivations, than when money is offered for "teaching" their knowledge; Bruno S. Frey and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, "The Cost of Price Incentives: An Empirical Analysis of Motivation Crowding-Out," American Economic Review 87 (1997): 746; and Howard Kunreuther and Douslar Easterling, "Are Risk-Benefit Tradeoffs Possible in Siting Hazardous Facilities?" American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings) 80 (1990): 252-286, describe empirical studies where communities became less willing to accept undesirable public facilities (Not in My Back Yard or NIMBY) when offered compensation, relative to when the arguments made were policy based on the common weal; Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, "A Fine Is a Price," Journal of Legal Studies 29 (2000): 1, found that introducing a fine for tardy pickup of kindergarten kids increased, rather than decreased, the tardiness of parents, and once the sense of social obligation was lost to the sense that it was "merely" a transaction, the parents continued to be late at pickup, even after the fine was removed. }~ The results of this empirical literature strongly suggest that across various domains some displacement or crowding out can be identified between monetary rewards and nonmonetary motivations. This does not mean that offering monetary incentives does not increase extrinsic rewards--it does. Where extrinsic rewards dominate, this will increase the activity rewarded as usually predicted in economics. However, the effect on intrinsic motivation, at least sometimes, operates in the opposite direction. Where intrinsic motivation is an important factor because pricing and contracting are difficult to achieve, or because the payment that can be offered is relatively low, the aggregate effect may be negative. Persuading experienced employees to communicate their tacit knowledge to the teams they work with is a good example of the type of behavior that is very hard to specify for efficient pricing, and therefore occurs more effectively through social motivations for teamwork than through payments. Negative effects of small payments on participation in work that was otherwise volunteer-based are an example of low payments recruiting relatively few people, but making others shift their efforts elsewhere and thereby reducing, rather than increasing, the total level of volunteering for the job. + +The psychology-based alternative to the "more money for an activity will mean more of the activity" assumption implicit in most of these new economic models is complemented by a sociology-based alternative. This comes from one branch of the social capital literature--the branch that relates back to Mark Granovetter's 1974 book, Getting a Job, and was initiated as a crossover from sociology to economics by James Coleman.~{ James S. Coleman, "Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital," American Journal of Sociology 94, supplement (1988): S95, S108. For important early contributions to this literature, see Mark Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology 78 (1973): 1360; Mark Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Yoram BenPorath, "The F-Connection: Families, Friends and Firms and the Organization of Exchange," Population and Development Review 6 (1980): 1. }~ This line of literature rests on the claim that, as Nan Lin puts it, "there are two ultimate (or primitive) rewards for human beings in a social structure: economic standing and social standing."~{ Nan Lin, Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 150-151. }~ These rewards are understood as instrumental and, in this regard, are highly amenable to economics. Both economic and social aspects represent "standing"--that is, a relational measure expressed in terms of one's capacity to mobilize resources. Some resources can be mobilized by money. Social relations can mobilize others. For a wide range of reasons-- institutional, cultural, and possibly technological--some resources are more readily capable of being mobilized by social relations than by money. If you want to get your nephew a job at a law firm in the United States today, a friendly relationship with the firm's hiring partner is more likely to help than passing on an envelope full of cash. If this theory of social capital is correct, then sometimes you should be willing to trade off financial rewards for social ,{[pg 96]}, capital. Critically, the two are not fungible or cumulative. A hiring partner paid in an economy where monetary bribes for job interviews are standard does not acquire a social obligation. That same hiring partner in that same culture, who is also a friend and therefore forgoes payment, however, probably does acquire a social obligation, tenable for a similar social situation in the future. The magnitude of the social debt, however, may now be smaller. It is likely measured by the amount of money saved from not having to pay the price, not by the value of getting the nephew a job, as it would likely be in an economy where jobs cannot be had for bribes. There are things and behaviors, then, that simply cannot be commodified for market exchange, like friendship. Any effort to mix the two, to pay for one's friendship, would render it something completely different--perhaps a psychoanalysis session in our culture. There are things that, even if commodified, can still be used for social exchange, but the meaning of the social exchange would be diminished. One thinks of borrowing eggs from a neighbor, or lending a hand to friends who are moving their furniture to a new apartment. And there are things that, even when commodified, continue to be available for social exchange with its full force. Consider gamete donations as an example in contemporary American culture. It is important to see, though, that there is nothing intrinsic about any given "thing" or behavior that makes it fall into one or another of these categories. The categories are culturally contingent and cross-culturally diverse. What matters for our purposes here, though, is only the realization that for any given culture, there will be some acts that a person would prefer to perform not for money, but for social standing, recognition, and probably, ultimately, instrumental value obtainable only if that person has performed the action through a social, rather than a market, transaction. +={ Coleman, James ; + Granovetter, Mark ; + Lin, Nan ; + social capital ; + culture : + as motivational context +2 ; + human motivation : + cultural context of +2 ; + incentives to produce : + cultural context +2 ; + motivation to produce : + cultural context +2 +} + +It is not necessary to pin down precisely the correct or most complete theory of motivation, or the full extent and dimensions of crowding out nonmarket rewards by the introduction or use of market rewards. All that is required to outline the framework for analysis is recognition that there is some form of social and psychological motivation that is neither fungible with money nor simply cumulative with it. Transacting within the price system may either increase or decrease the social-psychological rewards (be they intrinsic or extrinsic, functional or symbolic). The intuition is simple. As I have already said, leaving a fifty-dollar check on the table after one has finished a pleasant dinner at a friend's house would not increase the host's ,{[pg 97]}, social and psychological gains from the evening. Most likely, it would diminish them sufficiently that one would never again be invited. A bottle of wine or a bouquet of flowers would, to the contrary, improve the social gains. And if dinner is not intuitively obvious, think of sex. The point is simple. Money-oriented motivations are different from socially oriented motivations. Sometimes they align. Sometimes they collide. Which of the two will be the case is historically and culturally contingent. The presence of money in sports or entertainment reduced the social psychological gains from performance in late-nineteenth-century Victorian England, at least for members of the middle and upper classes. This is reflected in the long-standing insistence on the "amateur" status of the Olympics, or the status of "actors" in the Victorian society. This has changed dramatically more than a century later, where athletes' and popular entertainers' social standing is practically measured in the millions of dollars their performances can command. + +The relative relationships of money and social-psychological rewards are, then, dependent on culture and context. Similar actions may have different meanings in different social or cultural contexts. Consider three lawyers contemplating whether to write a paper presenting their opinion--one is a practicing attorney, the second is a judge, and the third is an academic. For the first, money and honor are often, though not always, positively correlated. Being able to command a very high hourly fee for writing the requested paper is a mode of expressing one's standing in the profession, as well as a means of putting caviar on the table. Yet, there are modes of acquiring esteem--like writing the paper as a report for a bar committee-- that are not improved by the presence of money, and are in fact undermined by it. This latter effect is sharpest for the judge. If a judge is approached with an offer of money for writing an opinion, not only is this not a mark of honor, it is a subversion of the social role and would render corrupt the writing of the opinion. For the judge, the intrinsic "rewards" for writing the opinion when matched by a payment for the product would be guilt and shame, and the offer therefore an expression of disrespect. Finally, if the same paper is requested of the academic, the presence of money is located somewhere in between the judge and the practitioner. To a high degree, like the judge, the academic who writes for money is rendered suspect in her community of scholarship. A paper clearly funded by a party, whose results support the party's regulatory or litigation position, is practically worthless as an academic work. In a mirror image of the practitioner, however, there ,{[pg 98]}, are some forms of money that add to and reinforce an academic's social psychological rewards--peer-reviewed grants and prizes most prominent among them. + +Moreover, individuals are not monolithic agents. While it is possible to posit idealized avaricious money-grubbers, altruistic saints, or social climbers, the reality of most people is a composite of these all, and one that is not like any of them. Clearly, some people are more focused on making money, and others are more generous; some more driven by social standing and esteem, others by a psychological sense of well-being. The for-profit and nonprofit systems probably draw people with different tastes for these desiderata. Academic science and commercial science also probably draw scientists with similar training but different tastes for types of rewards. However, welladjusted, healthy individuals are rarely monolithic in their requirements. We would normally think of someone who chose to ignore and betray friends and family to obtain either more money or greater social recognition as a fetishist of some form or another. We spend some of our time making money, some of our time enjoying it hedonically; some of our time being with and helping family, friends, and neighbors; some of our time creatively expressing ourselves, exploring who we are and what we would like to become. Some of us, because of economic conditions we occupy, or because of our tastes, spend very large amounts of time trying to make money-- whether to become rich or, more commonly, just to make ends meet. Others spend more time volunteering, chatting, or writing. + +For all of us, there comes a time on any given day, week, and month, every year and in different degrees over our lifetimes, when we choose to act in some way that is oriented toward fulfilling our social and psychological needs, not our market-exchangeable needs. It is that part of our lives and our motivational structure that social production taps, and on which it thrives. There is nothing mysterious about this. It is evident to any of us who rush home to our family or to a restaurant or bar with friends at the end of a workday, rather than staying on for another hour of overtime or to increase our billable hours; or at least regret it when we cannot. It is evident to any of us who has ever brought a cup of tea to a sick friend or relative, or received one; to anyone who has lent a hand moving a friend's belongings; played a game; told a joke, or enjoyed one told by a friend. What needs to be understood now, however, is under what conditions these many and diverse social actions can turn into an important modality of economic production. When can all these acts, distinct from our desire for ,{[pg 99]}, money and motivated by social and psychological needs, be mobilized, directed, and made effective in ways that we recognize as economically valuable? + +2~ SOCIAL PRODUCTION: FEASIBILITY CONDITIONS AND ORGANIZATIONAL FORM +={ capacity : + human communication +13 ; + communication : + feasibility conditions for social production +13 ; + cost : + feasibility conditions for social production +13 ; + feasibility conditions or social production +13 ; + human communicative capacity : + feasibility conditions for social production +13 ; + information production : + feasibility conditions for social production +13 ; + nonmarket information producers : + conditions for production +13 ; + nonmarket production, economics of : + feasibility conditions +13 ; + peer production : + feasibility conditions for social production +13 ; + production of information : + feasibility conditions for social production +13 +} + +The core technologically contingent fact that enables social relations to become a salient modality of production in the networked information economy is that all the inputs necessary to effective productive activity are under the control of individual users. Human creativity, wisdom, and life experience are all possessed uniquely by individuals. The computer processors, data storage devices, and communications capacity necessary to make new meaningful conversational moves from the existing universe of information and stimuli, and to render and communicate them to others near and far are also under the control of these same individual users--at least in the advanced economies and in some portions of the population of developing economies. This does not mean that all the physical capital necessary to process, store, and communicate information is under individual user control. That is not necessary. It is, rather, that the majority of individuals in these societies have the threshold level of material capacity required to explore the information environment they occupy, to take from it, and to make their own contributions to it. +={ capabilities of individuals : + as physical capital +1 ; + capital for production : + control of +1 ; + constraints of information production, monetary : + control of +1 ; + individual capabilities and action : + as physical capital +1 ; + information production capital : + control of +1 ; + monetary constraints on information production : + control of +1 ; + physical capital for production : + control of +1 ; + production capital : + control of +1 +} + +There is nothing about computation or communication that naturally or necessarily enables this fact. It is a felicitous happenstance of the fabrication technology of computing machines in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and, it seems, in the reasonably foreseeable future. It is cheaper to build freestanding computers that enable their owners to use a wide and dynamically changing range of information applications, and that are cheap enough that each machine is owned by an individual user or household, than it is to build massive supercomputers with incredibly high-speed communications to yet cheaper simple terminals, and to sell information services to individuals on an on-demand or standardized package model. Natural or contingent, it is nevertheless a fact of the industrial base of the networked information economy that individual users--susceptible as they are to acting on diverse motivations, in diverse relationships, some market-based, some social--possess and control the physical capital necessary to make effective the human capacities they uniquely and individually possess. ,{[pg 100]}, + +Now, having the core inputs of information production ubiquitously distributed in society is a core enabling fact, but it alone cannot assure that social production will become economically significant. Children and teenagers, retirees, and very rich individuals can spend most of their lives socializing or volunteering; most other people cannot. While creative capacity and judgment are universally distributed in a population, available time and attention are not, and human creative capacity cannot be fully dedicated to nonmarket, nonproprietary production all the time. Someone needs to work for money, at least some of the time, to pay the rent and put food on the table. Personal computers too are only used for earnings-generating activities some of the time. In both these resources, there remain large quantities of excess capacity--time and interest in human beings; processing, storage, and communications capacity in computers--available to be used for activities whose rewards are not monetary or monetizable, directly or indirectly. + +For this excess capacity to be harnessed and become effective, the information production process must effectively integrate widely dispersed contributions, from many individual human beings and machines. These contributions are diverse in their quality, quantity, and focus, in their timing and geographic location. The great success of the Internet generally, and peer-production processes in particular, has been the adoption of technical and organizational architectures that have allowed them to pool such diverse efforts effectively. The core characteristics underlying the success of these enterprises are their modularity and their capacity to integrate many finegrained contributions. + +"Modularity" is a property of a project that describes the extent to which it can be broken down into smaller components, or modules, that can be independently produced before they are assembled into a whole. If modules are independent, individual contributors can choose what and when to contribute independently of each other. This maximizes their autonomy and flexibility to define the nature, extent, and timing of their participation in the project. Breaking up the maps of Mars involved in the clickworkers project (described in chapter 3) and rendering them in small segments with a simple marking tool is a way of modularizing the task of mapping craters. In the SETI@home project (see chapter 3), the task of scanning radio astronomy signals is broken down into millions of little computations as a way of modularizing the calculations involved. + +"Granularity" refers to the size of the modules, in terms of the time and effort that an individual must invest in producing them. The five minutes ,{[pg 101]}, required for moderating a comment on Slashdot, or for metamoderating a moderator, is more fine-grained than the hours necessary to participate in writing a bug fix in an open-source project. More people can participate in the former than in the latter, independent of the differences in the knowledge required for participation. The number of people who can, in principle, participate in a project is therefore inversely related to the size of the smallest-scale contribution necessary to produce a usable module. The granularity of the modules therefore sets the smallest possible individual investment necessary to participate in a project. If this investment is sufficiently low, then "incentives" for producing that component of a modular project can be of trivial magnitude. Most importantly for our purposes of understanding the rising role of nonmarket production, the time can be drawn from the excess time we normally dedicate to having fun and participating in social interactions. If the finest-grained contributions are relatively large and would require a large investment of time and effort, the universe of potential contributors decreases. A successful large-scale peer-production project must therefore have a predominate portion of its modules be relatively fine-grained. +={ diversity : + granularity of participation +3 ; + granularity +3 ; + human motivation : + granularity of participation and +3 ; + incentives to produce : + granularity of participation and +3 ; + motivation to produce +3 ; + granularity of participation and +3 ; + modularity +3 ; + organization structure +7 : + granularity +3 | modularity +3 ; + structure of organizations +7 : + granularity +3 | modularity +3 ; + structured production +7 : + granularity +3 | modularity +3 ; + planned modularization +3 +} + +Perhaps the clearest example of how large-grained modules can make projects falter is the condition, as of the middle of 2005, of efforts to peer produce open textbooks. The largest such effort is Wikibooks, a site associated with /{Wikipedia}/, which has not taken off as did its famous parent project. Very few texts there have reached maturity to the extent that they could be usable as a partial textbook, and those few that have were largely written by one individual with minor contributions by others. Similarly, an ambitious initiative launched in California in 2004 still had not gone far beyond an impassioned plea for help by mid-2005. The project that seems most successful as of 2005 was a South African project, Free High School Science Texts (FHSST), founded by a physics graduate student, Mark Horner. As of this writing, that three-year-old project had more or less completed a physics text, and was about halfway through chemistry and mathematics textbooks. The whole FHSST project involves a substantially more managed approach than is common in peer-production efforts, with a core group of dedicated graduate student administrators recruiting contributors, assigning tasks, and integrating the contributions. Horner suggests that the basic limiting factor is that in order to write a high school textbook, the output must comply with state-imposed guidelines for content and form. To achieve these requirements, the various modules must cohere to a degree ,{[pg 102]}, much larger than necessary in a project like /{Wikipedia}/, which can endure high diversity in style and development without losing its utility. As a result, the individual contributions have been kept at a high level of abstraction-- an idea or principle explained at a time. The minimal time commitment required of each contributor is therefore large, and has led many of those who volunteered initially to not complete their contributions. In this case, the guideline requirements constrained the project's granularity, and thereby impeded its ability to grow and capture the necessary thousands of smallgrained contributions. With orders of magnitude fewer contributors, each must be much more highly motivated and available than is necessary in /{Wikipedia}/, Slashdot, and similar successful projects. +={ FHSST (Free High School Science Texts) ; + Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) ; + Horner, Mark ; + Wikibooks project +} + +It is not necessary, however, that each and every chunk or module be fine grained. Free software projects in particular have shown us that successful peer-production projects may also be structured, technically and culturally, in ways that make it possible for different individuals to contribute vastly different levels of effort commensurate with their ability, motivation, and availability. The large free software projects might integrate thousands of people who are acting primarily for social psychological reasons--because it is fun or cool; a few hundred young programmers aiming to make a name for themselves so as to become employable; and dozens of programmers who are paid to write free software by firms that follow one of the nonproprietary strategies described in chapter 2. IBM and Red Hat are the quintessential examples of firms that contribute paid employee time to peer-production projects in this form. This form of link between a commercial firm and a peer production community is by no means necessary for a peer-production process to succeed; it does, however, provide one constructive interface between market- and nonmarket-motivated behavior, through which actions on the two types of motivation can reinforce, rather than undermine, each other. +={ free software : + project modularity and granularity ; + open-source software : + project modularity and granularity ; + software, open-source : + project modularity and granularity +} + +The characteristics of planned modularization of a problem are highly visible and explicit in some peer-production projects--the distributed computing projects like SETI@home are particularly good examples of this. However, if we were to step back and look at the entire phenomenon of Web-based publication from a bird's-eye view, we would see that the architecture of the World Wide Web, in particular the persistence of personal Web pages and blogs and their self-contained, technical independence of each other, give the Web as a whole the characteristics of modularity and variable but fine-grained granularity. Imagine that you were trying to evaluate ,{[pg 103]}, how, if at all, the Web is performing the task of media watchdog. Consider one example, which I return to in chapter 7: The Memory Hole, a Web site created and maintained by Russ Kick, a freelance author and editor. Kick spent some number of hours preparing and filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the Defense Department, seeking photographs of coffins of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq. He was able to do so over some period, not having to rely on "getting the scoop" to earn his dinner. At the same time, tens of thousands of other individual Web publishers and bloggers were similarly spending their time hunting down stories that moved them, or that they happened to stumble across in their own daily lives. When Kick eventually got the photographs, he could upload them onto his Web site, where they were immediately available for anyone to see. Because each contribution like Kick's can be independently created and stored, because no single permission point or failure point is present in the architecture of the Web--it is merely a way of conveniently labeling documents stored independently by many people who are connected to the Internet and use HTML (hypertext markup language) and HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol)--as an "information service," it is highly modular and diversely granular. Each independent contribution comprises as large or small an investment as its owner-operator chooses to make. Together, they form a vast almanac, trivia trove, and news and commentary facility, to name but a few, produced by millions of people at their leisure--whenever they can or want to, about whatever they want. +={ autonomy : + independence of Web sites ; + democratic societies : + independence of Web sites ; + independence of Web sites ; + individual autonomy : + independence of Web sites ; + Kick, Russ ; + The Memory Hole +} + +The independence of Web sites is what marks their major difference from more organized peer-production processes, where contributions are marked not by their independence but by their interdependence. The Web as a whole requires no formal structure of cooperation. As an "information good" or medium, it emerges as a pattern out of coordinate coexistence of millions of entirely independent acts. All it requires is a pattern recognition utility superimposed over the outputs of these acts--a search engine or directory. Peer-production processes, to the contrary, do generally require some substantive cooperation among users. A single rating of an individual comment on Slashdot does not by itself moderate the comment up or down, neither does an individual marking of a crater. Spotting a bug in free software, proposing a fix, reviewing the proposed fix, and integrating it into the software are interdependent acts that require a level of cooperation. This necessity for cooperation requires peer-production processes to adopt more engaged strategies for assuring that everyone who participates is doing so in ,{[pg 104]}, good faith, competently, and in ways that do not undermine the whole, and weeding out those would-be participants who are not. +={ Slashdot +1 ; + accreditation : + Slashdot +1 ; + filtering : + Slashdot +1 ; + relevance filtering : + Slashdot +1 ; + peer production : + maintenance of cooperation +1 ; + structured production : + maintenance of cooperation +1 +} + +Cooperation in peer-production processes is usually maintained by some combination of technical architecture, social norms, legal rules, and a technically backed hierarchy that is validated by social norms. /{Wikipedia}/ is the strongest example of a discourse-centric model of cooperation based on social norms. However, even /{Wikipedia}/ includes, ultimately, a small number of people with system administrator privileges who can eliminate accounts or block users in the event that someone is being genuinely obstructionist. This technical fallback, however, appears only after substantial play has been given to self-policing by participants, and to informal and quasi-formal communitybased dispute resolution mechanisms. Slashdot, by contrast, provides a strong model of a sophisticated technical system intended to assure that no one can "defect" from the cooperative enterprise of commenting and moderating comments. It limits behavior enabled by the system to avoid destructive behavior before it happens, rather than policing it after the fact. The Slash code does this by technically limiting the power any given person has to moderate anyone else up or down, and by making every moderator the subject of a peer review system whose judgments are enforced technically-- that is, when any given user is described by a sufficiently large number of other users as unfair, that user automatically loses the technical ability to moderate the comments of others. The system itself is a free software project, licensed under the GPL (General Public License)--which is itself the quintessential example of how law is used to prevent some types of defection from the common enterprise of peer production of software. The particular type of defection that the GPL protects against is appropriation of the joint product by any single individual or firm, the risk of which would make it less attractive for anyone to contribute to the project to begin with. The GPL assures that, as a legal matter, no one who contributes to a free software project need worry that some other contributor will take the project and make it exclusively their own. The ultimate quality judgments regarding what is incorporated into the "formal" releases of free software projects provide the clearest example of the extent to which a meritocratic hierarchy can be used to integrate diverse contributions into a finished single product. In the case of the Linux kernel development project (see chapter 3), it was always within the power of Linus Torvalds, who initiated the project, to decide which contributions should be included in a new release, and which should not. But it is a funny sort of hierarchy, whose quirkiness Steve Weber ,{[pg 105]}, well explicates.~{ Steve Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). }~ Torvalds's authority is persuasive, not legal or technical, and certainly not determinative. He can do nothing except persuade others to prevent them from developing anything they want and add it to their kernel, or to distribute that alternative version of the kernel. There is nothing he can do to prevent the entire community of users, or some subsection of it, from rejecting his judgment about what ought to be included in the kernel. Anyone is legally free to do as they please. So these projects are based on a hierarchy of meritocratic respect, on social norms, and, to a great extent, on the mutual recognition by most players in this game that it is to everybody's advantage to have someone overlay a peer review system with some leadership. +={ Wikipedia project ; + Torvalds, Linus ; + Weber, Steve ; + General Public License (GPL) : + See also free software ; + GPL (General Public License) : + See Also free software ; + licensing : + GPL (General Public License) +} + +In combination then, three characteristics make possible the emergence of information production that is not based on exclusive proprietary claims, not aimed toward sales in a market for either motivation or information, and not organized around property and contract claims to form firms or market exchanges. First, the physical machinery necessary to participate in information and cultural production is almost universally distributed in the population of the advanced economies. Certainly, personal computers as capital goods are under the control of numbers of individuals that are orders of magnitude larger than the number of parties controlling the use of massproduction-capable printing presses, broadcast transmitters, satellites, or cable systems, record manufacturing and distribution chains, and film studios and distribution systems. This means that the physical machinery can be put in service and deployed in response to any one of the diverse motivations individual human beings experience. They need not be deployed in order to maximize returns on the financial capital, because financial capital need not be mobilized to acquire and put in service any of the large capital goods typical of the industrial information economy. Second, the primary raw materials in the information economy, unlike the industrial economy, are public goods--existing information, knowledge, and culture. Their actual marginal social cost is zero. Unless regulatory policy makes them purposefully expensive in order to sustain the proprietary business models, acquiring raw materials also requires no financial capital outlay. Again, this means that these raw materials can be deployed for any human motivation. They need not maximize financial returns. Third, the technical architectures, organizational models, and social dynamics of information production and exchange on the Internet have developed so that they allow us to structure the solution to problems--in particular to information production problems--in ways ,{[pg 106]}, that are highly modular. This allows many diversely motivated people to act for a wide range of reasons that, in combination, cohere into new useful information, knowledge, and cultural goods. These architectures and organizational models allow both independent creation that coexists and coheres into usable patterns, and interdependent cooperative enterprises in the form of peer-production processes. +={ computers ; + hardware ; + personal computers ; + physical machinery and computers +} + +Together, these three characteristics suggest that the patterns of social production of information that we are observing in the digitally networked environment are not a fad. They are, rather, a sustainable pattern of human production given the characteristics of the networked information economy. The diversity of human motivation is nothing new. We now have a substantial literature documenting its importance in free and open-source software development projects, from Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole, Rishab Ghosh, Eric Von Hippel and Karim Lakhani, and others. Neither is the public goods nature of information new. What is new are the technological conditions that allow these facts to provide the ingredients of a much larger role in the networked information economy for nonmarket, nonproprietary production to emerge. As long as capitalization and ownership of the physical capital base of this economy remain widely distributed and as long as regulatory policy does not make information inputs artificially expensive, individuals will be able to deploy their own creativity, wisdom, conversational capacities, and connected computers, both independently and in loose interdependent cooperation with others, to create a substantial portion of the information environment we occupy. Moreover, we will be able to do so for whatever reason we choose--through markets or firms to feed and clothe ourselves, or through social relations and open communication with others, to give our lives meaning and context. +={ Lerner, Josh ; + Tirole, Jean ; + Ghosh, Rishab ; + Lakhani, Karim ; + Tirole, Jean,von Hippel, Eric +} + +2~ TRANSACTION COSTS AND EFFICIENCY +={ commercial model of communication : + transaction costs +16 ; + economics of nonmarket production : + transaction costs +16 ; + efficiency of information regulation +16 ; + industrial model of communication : + transaction costs +16 ; + inefficiency of information regulation +16 ; + information production, market-based : + transaction costs +16 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + transaction costs +16 ; + market-based information producers : + transaction costs +16 ; + nonmarket production, economics of : + transaction costs +16 ; + norms (social) : + transaction costs +16 ; + peer production : + sustainability of +16 ; + proprietary rights, inefficiency of +16 ; + regulating information, efficiency of +16 ; + regulation by social norms : + transaction costs +16 ; + social relations and norms : + transaction costs +16 ; + strategies for information production : + transaction costs +16 ; + sustainability of peer production +16 ; + traditional model of communication : + transaction costs +16 ; + transaction costs +16 +} + +For purposes of analyzing the political values that are the concern of most of this book, all that is necessary is that we accept that peer production in particular, and nonmarket information production and exchange in general, are sustainable in the networked information economy. Most of the remainder of the book seeks to evaluate why, and to what extent, the presence of a substantial nonmarket, commons-based sector in the information production system is desirable from the perspective of various aspects of freedom and justice. Whether this sector is "efficient" within the meaning of the ,{[pg 107]}, word in welfare economics is beside the point to most of these considerations. Even a strong commitment to a pragmatic political theory, one that accepts and incorporates into its consideration the limits imposed by material and economic reality, need not aim for "efficient" policy in the welfare sense. It is sufficient that the policy is economically and socially sustainable on its own bottom--in other words, that it does not require constant subsidization at the expense of some other area excluded from the analysis. It is nonetheless worthwhile spending a few pages explaining why, and under what conditions, commons-based peer production, and social production more generally, are not only sustainable but actually efficient ways of organizing information production. + +The efficient allocation of two scarce resources and one public good are at stake in the choice between social production--whether it is peer production or independent nonmarket production--and market-based production. Because most of the outputs of these processes are nonrival goods-- information, knowledge, and culture--the fact that the social production system releases them freely, without extracting a price for using them, means that it would, all other things being equal, be more efficient for information to be produced on a nonproprietary social model, rather than on a proprietary market model. Indeed, all other things need not even be equal for this to hold. It is enough that the net value of the information produced by commons-based social production processes and released freely for anyone to use as they please is no less than the total value of information produced through property-based systems minus the deadweight loss caused by the above-marginal-cost pricing practices that are the intended result of the intellectual property system. + +The two scarce resources are: first, human creativity, time, and attention; and second, the computation and communications resources used in information production and exchange. In both cases, the primary reason to choose among proprietary and nonproprietary strategies, between marketbased systems--be they direct market exchange or firm-based hierarchical production--and social systems, are the comparative transaction costs of each, and the extent to which these transaction costs either outweigh the benefits of working through each system, or cause the system to distort the information it generates so as to systematically misallocate resources. +={ market transactions +3 } + +The first thing to recognize is that markets, firms, and social relations are three distinct transactional frameworks. Imagine that I am sitting in a room and need paper for my printer. I could (a) order paper from a store; (b) call ,{[pg 108]}, the storeroom, if I am in a firm or organization that has one, and ask the clerk to deliver the paper I need; or (c) walk over to a neighbor and borrow some paper. Choice (a) describes the market transactional framework. The store knows I need paper immediately because I am willing to pay for it now. Alternative (b) is an example of the firm as a transactional framework. The paper is in the storeroom because someone in the organization planned that someone else would need paper today, with some probability, and ordered enough to fill that expected need. The clerk in the storeroom gives it to me because that is his job; again, defined by someone who planned to have someone available to deliver paper when someone else in the proper channels of authority says that she needs it. Comparing and improving the efficiency of (a) and (b), respectively, has been a central project in transaction-costs organization theory. We might compare, for example, the costs of taking my call, verifying the credit card information, and sending a delivery truck for my one batch of paper, to the costs of someone planning for the average needs of a group of people like me, who occasionally run out of paper, and stocking a storeroom with enough paper and a clerk to fill our needs in a timely manner. However, notice that (c) is also an alternative transactional framework. I could, rather than incurring the costs of transacting through the market with the local store or of building a firm with sufficient lines of authority to stock and manage the storeroom, pop over to my neighbor and ask for some paper. This would make sense even within an existing firm when, for example, I need two or three pages immediately and do not want to wait for the storeroom clerk to do his rounds, or more generally, if I am working at home and the costs of creating "a firm," stocking a storeroom, and paying a clerk are too high for my neighbors and me. Instead, we develop a set of neighborly social relations, rather than a firm-based organization, to deal with shortfalls during periods when it would be too costly to assure a steady flow of paper from the market--for example, late in the evening, on a weekend, or in a sparsely populated area. + +The point is not, of course, to reduce all social relations and human decency to a transaction-costs theory. Too many such straight planks have already been cut from the crooked timber of humanity to make that exercise useful or enlightening. The point is that most of economics internally has been ignoring the social transactional framework as an alternative whose relative efficiency can be accounted for and considered in much the same way as the relative cost advantages of simple markets when compared to the hierarchical organizations that typify much of our economic activity--firms. ,{[pg 109]}, + +A market transaction, in order to be efficient, must be clearly demarcated as to what it includes, so that it can be priced efficiently. That price must then be paid in equally crisply delineated currency. Even if a transaction initially may be declared to involve sale of "an amount reasonably required to produce the required output," for a "customary" price, at some point what was provided and what is owed must be crystallized and fixed for a formal exchange. The crispness is a functional requirement of the price system. It derives from the precision and formality of the medium of exchange--currency--and the ambition to provide refined representations of the comparative value of marginal decisions through denomination in an exchange medium that represents these incremental value differences. Similarly, managerial hierarchies require a crisp definition of who should be doing what, when, and how, in order to permit the planning and coordination process to be effective. +={ crispness of currency exchange +5 ; + cost : + crispness of +5 ; + culture : + social exchange, crispness of +5 ; + money : + crispness of currency exchange +5 ; + creativity, value of +5 ; + defining price +5 ; + information production inputs : + pricing +5 ; + inputs to production : + pricing +5 ; + medium of exchange +5 ; + pricing +5 ; + production inputs : + pricing +5 ; + specificity of price +5 ; + standardizing creativity +5 +} + +Social exchange, on the other hand, does not require the same degree of crispness at the margin. As Maurice Godelier put it in /{The Enigma of the Gift}/, "the mark of the gift between close friends and relatives . . . is not the absence of obligations, it is the absence of `calculation.' "~{ Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5. }~ There are, obviously, elaborate and formally ritualistic systems of social exchange, in both ancient societies and modern. There are common-property regimes that monitor and record calls on the common pool very crisply. However, in many of the common-property regimes, one finds mechanisms of bounding or fairly allocating access to the common pool that more coarsely delineate the entitlements, behaviors, and consequences than is necessary for a proprietary system. In modern market society, where we have money as a formal medium of precise exchange, and where social relations are more fluid than in traditional societies, social exchange certainly occurs as a fuzzier medium. Across many cultures, generosity is understood as imposing a debt of obligation; but none of the precise amount of value given, the precise nature of the debt to be repaid, or the date of repayment need necessarily be specified. Actions enter into a cloud of goodwill or membership, out of which each agent can understand him- or herself as being entitled to a certain flow of dependencies or benefits in exchange for continued cooperative behavior. This may be an ongoing relationship between two people, a small group like a family or group of friends, and up to a general level of generosity among strangers that makes for a decent society. The point is that social exchange does not require defining, for example, "I will lend you my car and help you move these five boxes on Monday, and in exchange you will feed my ,{[pg 110]}, fish next July," in the same way that the following would: "I will move five boxes on Tuesday for $100, six boxes for $120." This does not mean that social systems are cost free--far from it. They require tremendous investment, acculturation, and maintenance. This is true in this case every bit as much as it is true for markets or states. Once functional, however, social exchanges require less information crispness at the margin. +={ commons : + crispness of social exchange ; + Godelier, Maurice +} + +Both social and market exchange systems require large fixed costs--the setting up of legal institutions and enforcement systems for markets, and creating social networks, norms, and institutions for the social exchange. Once these initial costs have been invested, however, market transactions systematically require a greater degree of precise information about the content of actions, goods, and obligations, and more precision of monitoring and enforcement on a per-transaction basis than do social exchange systems. +={ capital for production : + fixed and initial costs ; + constraints of information production, monetary : + fixed and initial costs ; + information production capital : + fixed and initial costs ; + information sharing : + initial costs ; + monetary constraints on information production : + fixed and initial costs ; + physical capital for production : + fixed and initial costs ; + production capital : + fixed and initial costs ; + fixed costs +} + +This difference between markets and hierarchical organizations, on the one hand, and peer-production processes based on social relations, on the other, is particularly acute in the context of human creative labor--one of the central scarce resources that these systems must allocate in the networked information economy. The levels and focus of individual effort are notoriously hard to specify for pricing or managerial commands, considering all aspects of individual effort and ability--talent, motivation, workload, and focus--as they change in small increments over the span of an individual's full day, let alone months. What we see instead is codification of effort types--a garbage collector, a law professor--that are priced more or less finely. However, we only need to look at the relative homogeneity of law firm starting salaries as compared to the high variability of individual ability and motivation levels of graduating law students to realize that pricing of individual effort can be quite crude. Similarly, these attributes are also difficult to monitor and verify over time, though perhaps not quite as difficult as predicting them ex ante. Pricing therefore continues to be a function of relatively crude information about the actual variability among people. More importantly, as aspects of performance that are harder to fully specify in advance or monitor--like creativity over time given the occurrence of new opportunities to be creative, or implicit know-how--become a more significant aspect of what is valuable about an individual's contribution, market mechanisms become more and more costly to maintain efficiently, and, as a practical matter, simply lose a lot of information. +={ communication : + pricing ; + cost : + pricing ; + human communicative capacity : + pricing ; + capacity : + human communication +} + +People have different innate capabilities; personal, social, and educational histories; emotional frameworks; and ongoing lived experiences, which make ,{[pg 111]}, for immensely diverse associations with, idiosyncratic insights into, and divergent utilization of existing information and cultural inputs at different times and in different contexts. Human creativity is therefore very difficult to standardize and specify in the contracts necessary for either market-cleared or hierarchically organized production. As the weight of human intellectual effort increases in the overall mix of inputs into a given production process, an organization model that does not require contractual specification of the individual effort required to participate in a collective enterprise, and which allows individuals to self-identify for tasks, will be better at gathering and utilizing information about who should be doing what than a system that does require such specification. Some firms try to solve this problem by utilizing market- and social-relations-oriented hybrids, like incentive compensation schemes and employee-of-the-month-type social motivational frameworks. These may be able to improve on firm-only or market-only approaches. It is unclear, though, how well they can overcome the core difficulty: that is, that both markets and firm hierarchies require significant specification of the object of organization and pricing--in this case, human intellectual input. The point here is qualitative. It is not only, or even primarily, that more people can participate in production in a commons-based effort. It is that the widely distributed model of information production will better identify the best person to produce a specific component of a project, considering all abilities and availability to work on the specific module within a specific time frame. With enough uncertainty as to the value of various productive activities, and enough variability in the quality of both information inputs and human creative talent vis-a-vis any set of production ` opportunities, freedom of action for individuals coupled with continuous communications among the pool of potential producers and consumers can generate better information about the most valuable productive actions, and the best human inputs available to engage in these actions at a given time. Markets and firm incentive schemes are aimed at producing precisely this form of self-identification. However, the rigidities associated with collecting and comprehending bids from individuals through these systems (that is, transaction costs) limit the efficacy of self-identification by comparison to a system in which, once an individual self-identifies for a task, he or she can then undertake it without permission, contract, or instruction from another. The emergence of networked organizations (described and analyzed in the work of Charles Sabel and others) suggests that firms are in fact trying to overcome these limitations by developing parallels to the freedom to learn, ,{[pg 112]}, innovate, and act on these innovations that is intrinsic to peer-production processes by loosening the managerial bonds, locating more of the conception and execution of problem solving away from the managerial core of the firm, and implementing these through social, as well as monetary, motivations. However, the need to assure that the value created is captured within the organization limits the extent to which these strategies can be implemented within a single enterprise, as opposed to their implementation in an open process of social production. This effect, in turn, is in some sectors attenuated through the use of what Walter Powell and others have described as learning networks. Engineers and scientists often create frameworks that allow them to step out of their organizational affiliations, through conferences or workshops. By reproducing the social production characteristics of academic exchange, they overcome some of the information loss caused by the boundary of the firm. While these organizational strategies attenuate the problem, they also underscore the degree to which it is widespread and understood by organizations as such. The fact that the direction of the solutions business organizations choose tends to shift elements of the production process away from market- or firm-based models and toward networked social production models is revealing. Now, the self-identification that is central to the relative information efficiency of peer production is not always perfect. Some mechanisms used by firms and markets to codify effort levels and abilities--like formal credentials--are the result of experience with substantial errors or misstatements by individuals of their capacities. To succeed, therefore, peer-production systems must also incorporate mechanisms for smoothing out incorrect self-assessments--as peer review does in traditional academic research or in the major sites like /{Wikipedia}/ or Slashdot, or as redundancy and statistical averaging do in the case of NASA clickworkers. The prevalence of misperceptions that individual contributors have about their own ability and the cost of eliminating such errors will be part of the transaction costs associated with this form of organization. They parallel quality control problems faced by firms and markets. +={ Sabel, Charles ; + capacity : + transaction costs +5 ; + communication : + transaction costs +5 ; + computational capacity : + transaction costs +5 ; + data storage capacity : + transaction costs +5 ; + information sharing : + transaction costs +5 ; + storage capacity : + transaction costs +26 ; + communities : + critical culture and self-reflection ; + critical culture and self-reflection : + self-identification as transaction cost ; + culture : + criticality of (self-reflection) ; + learning networks ; + self-organization : + self-identification as transaction cost ; + Powell, Walter +} + +The lack of crisp specification of who is giving what to whom, and in exchange for what, also bears on the comparative transaction costs associated with the allocation of the second major type of scarce resource in the networked information economy: the physical resources that make up the networked information environment--communications, computation, and storage capacity. It is important to note, however, that these are very different from creativity and information as inputs: they are private goods, not a ,{[pg 113]}, public good like information, and they are standardized goods with well-specified capacities, not heterogeneous and highly uncertain attributes like human creativity at a given moment and context. Their outputs, unlike information, are not public goods. The reasons that they are nonetheless subject to efficient sharing in the networked environment therefore require a different economic explanation. However, the sharing of these material resources, like the sharing of human creativity, insight, and attention, nonetheless relies on both the comparative transaction costs of markets and social relations and the diversity of human motivation. + +Personal computers, wireless transceivers, and Internet connections are "shareable goods." The basic intuition behind the concept of shareable goods is simple. There are goods that are "lumpy": given a state of technology, they can only be produced in certain discrete bundles that offer discontinuous amounts of functionality or capacity. In order to have any ability to run a computation, for example, a consumer must buy a computer processor. These, in turn, only come in discrete units with a certain speed or capacity. One could easily imagine a world where computers are very large and their owners sell computation capacity to consumers "on demand," whenever they needed to run an application. That is basically the way the mainframe world of the 1960s and 1970s worked. However, the economics of microchip fabrication and of network connections over the past thirty years, followed by storage technology, have changed that. For most functions that users need, the price-performance trade-off favors stand-alone, general-purpose personal computers, owned by individuals and capable of running locally most applications users want, over remote facilities capable of selling on-demand computation and storage. So computation and storage today come in discrete, lumpy units. You can decide to buy a faster or slower chip, or a larger or smaller hard drive, but once you buy them, you have the capacity of these machines at your disposal, whether you need it or not. +={ computers : + as shareable, lumpy goods +2 ; + hardware : + as shareable, lumpy goods +2 ; + lumpy goods +2 ; + personal computers : + as shareable, lumpy goods +2 ; + physical machinery and computers : + as shareable, lumpy goods +2 ; + shareable goods +2 +} + +Lumpy goods can, in turn, be fine-, medium-, or large-grained. A large-grained good is one that is so expensive it can only be used by aggregating demand for it. Industrial capital equipment, like a steam engine, is of this type. Fine-grained goods are of a granularity that allows consumers to buy precisely as much of the goods needed for the amount of capacity they require. Medium-grained goods are small enough for an individual to justify buying for her own use, given their price and her willingness and ability to pay for the functionality she plans to use. A personal computer is a medium-grained lumpy good in the advanced economies and among the more well-to-do ,{[pg 114]}, in poorer countries, but is a large-grained capital good for most people in poor countries. If, given the price of such a good and the wealth of a society, a large number of individuals buy and use such medium-grained lumpy goods, that society will have a large amount of excess capacity "out there," in the hands of individuals. Because these machines are put into service to serve the needs of individuals, their excess capacity is available for these individuals to use as they wish--for their own uses, to sell to others, or to share with others. It is the combination of the fact that these machines are available at prices (relative to wealth) that allow users to put them in service based purely on their value for personal use, and the fact that they have enough capacity to facilitate additionally the action and fulfill the needs of others, that makes them "shareable." If they were so expensive that they could only be bought by pooling the value of a number of users, they would be placed in service either using some market mechanism to aggregate that demand, or through formal arrangements of common ownership by all those whose demand was combined to invest in purchasing the resource. If they were so finely grained in their capacity that there would be nothing left to share, again, sharing would be harder to sustain. The fact that they are both relatively inexpensive and have excess capacity makes them the basis for a stable model of individual ownership of resources combined with social sharing of that excess capacity. +={ fine-grained goods ; + medium-grained goods ; + large-grained goods ; + diversity : + granularity of participation +1 ; + granularity : + of lumpy goods +1 ; + human motivation : + granularity of participation and +1 ; + incentives to produce : + granularity of participation and +1 ; + motivation to produce : + granularity of participation and +1 ; + organization structure : + granularity +1 ; + structure of organizations : + granularity +1 ; + structured production : + granularity +1 ; + allocating excess capacity +3 ; + capacity : + sharing +3 ; + efficiency of information regulation : + capacity reallocation +3 ; + excess capacity, sharing +3 ; + inefficiency of information regulation : + capacity reallocation +3 ; + proprietary rights, inefficiency of : + capacity reallocation +3 ; + reallocating excess capacity +3 ; + reallocation +3 ; + sharing : + excess capacity +} + +Because social sharing requires less precise specification of the transactional details with each transaction, it has a distinct advantage over market-based mechanisms for reallocating the excess capacity of shareable goods, particularly when they have small quanta of excess capacity relative to the amount necessary to achieve the desired outcome. For example, imagine that there are one thousand people in a population of computer owners. Imagine that each computer is capable of performing one hundred computations per second, and that each computer owner needs to perform about eighty operations per second. Every owner, in other words, has twenty operations of excess capacity every second. Now imagine that the marginal transaction costs of arranging a sale of these twenty operations--exchanging PayPal (a widely used low-cost Internet-based payment system) account information, insurance against nonpayment, specific statement of how much time the computer can be used, and so forth--cost ten cents more than the marginal transaction costs of sharing the excess capacity socially. John wants to render a photograph in one second, which takes two hundred operations per second. Robert wants to model the folding of proteins, which takes ten thousand ,{[pg 115]}, operations per second. For John, a sharing system would save fifty cents--assuming he can use his own computer for half of the two hundred operations he needs. He needs to transact with five other users to "rent" their excess capacity of twenty operations each. Robert, on the other hand, needs to transact with five hundred individual owners in order to use their excess capacity, and for him, using a sharing system is fifty dollars cheaper. The point of the illustration is simple. The cost advantage of sharing as a transactional framework relative to the price system increases linearly with the number of transactions necessary to acquire the level of resources necessary for an operation. If excess capacity in a society is very widely distributed in small dollops, and for any given use of the excess capacity it is necessary to pool the excess capacity of thousands or even millions of individual users, the transaction-cost advantages of the sharing system become significant. + +The transaction-cost effect is reinforced by the motivation crowding out theory. When many discrete chunks of excess capacity need to be pooled, each distinct contributor cannot be paid a very large amount. Motivation crowding out theory would predict that when the monetary rewards to an activity are low, the negative effect of crowding out the social-psychological motivation will weigh more heavily than any increased incentive that is created by the promise of a small payment to transfer one's excess capacity. The upshot is that when the technological state results in excess capacity of physical capital being widely distributed in small dollops, social sharing can outperform secondary markets as a mechanism for harnessing that excess capacity. This is so because of both transaction costs and motivation. Fewer owners will be willing to sell their excess capacity cheaply than to give it away for free in the right social context and the transaction costs of selling will be higher than those of sharing. +={ behavior : + motivation to produce +1 ; + diversity : + motivation to produce +1 ; + human motivation : + crowding out theory ; + incentives to produce : + crowding out theory ; + motivation to produce : + crowding out theory +} + +From an efficiency perspective, then, there are clear reasons to think that social production systems--both peer production of information, knowledge, and culture and sharing of material resources--can be more efficient than market-based systems to motivate and allocate both human creative effort and the excess computation, storage, and communications capacity that typify the networked information economy. That does not mean that all of us will move out of market-based productive relationships all of the time. It does mean that alongside our market-based behaviors we generate substantial amounts of human creativity and mechanical capacity. The transaction costs of clearing those resources through the price system or through ,{[pg 116]}, firms are substantial, and considerably larger for the marginal transaction than clearing them through social-sharing mechanisms as a transactional framework. With the right institutional framework and peer-review or quality-control mechanisms, and with well-modularized organization of work, social sharing is likely to identify the best person available for a job and make it feasible for that person to work on that job using freely available information inputs. Similarly, social transactional frameworks are likely to be substantially less expensive than market transactions for pooling large numbers of discrete, small increments of the excess capacity of the personal computer processors, hard drives, and network connections that make up the physical capital base of the networked information economy. In both cases, given that much of what is shared is excess capacity from the perspective of the contributors, available to them after they have fulfilled some threshold level of their market-based consumption requirements, social-sharing systems are likely to tap in to social psychological motivations that money cannot tap, and, indeed, that the presence of money in a transactional framework could nullify. Because of these effects, social sharing and collaboration can provide not only a sustainable alternative to market-based and firm-based models of provisioning information, knowledge, culture, and communications, but also an alternative that more efficiently utilizes the human and physical capital base of the networked information economy. A society whose institutional ecology permitted social production to thrive would be more productive under these conditions than a society that optimized its institutional environment solely for market- and firm-based production, ignoring its detrimental effects to social production. + +2~ THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL PRODUCTION IN THE DIGITALLY NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT +={ economics of nonmarket production : + emergence in digital networks +18 ; + nonmarket information producers : + emergence of social production +18 ; + nonmarket production, economics of : + emergence in digital networks +18 ; + sharing : + emergence of social production +18 +} + +There is a curious congruence between the anthropologists of the gift and mainstream economists today. Both treat the gift literature as being about the periphery, about societies starkly different from modern capitalist societies. As Godelier puts it, "What a contrast between these types of society, these social and mental universes, and today's capitalist society where the majority of social relations are impersonal (involving the individual as citizen and the state, for instance), and where the exchange of things and services is conducted for the most part in an anonymous marketplace, leaving little room for an economy and moral code based on gift-giving."~{ Godelier, The Enigma, 106. }~ And yet, ,{[pg 117]}, sharing is everywhere around us in the advanced economies. Since the 1980s, we have seen an increasing focus, in a number of literatures, on production practices that rely heavily on social rather than price-based or governmental policies. These include, initially, the literature on social norms and social capital, or trust.~{ In the legal literature, Robert Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), is the locus classicus for showing how social norms can substitute for law. For a bibliography of the social norms literature outside of law, see Richard H. McAdams, "The Origin, Development, and Regulation of Norms," Michigan Law Review 96 (1997): 338n1, 339n2. Early contributions were: Edna Ullman-Margalit, The Emergence of Norms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); James Coleman, "Norms as Social Capital," in Economic Imperialism: The Economic Approach Applied Outside the Field of Economics, ed. Peter Bernholz and Gerard Radnitsky (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1987), 133-155; Sally E. Merry, "Rethinking Gossip and Scandal," in Toward a Theory of Social Control, Fundamentals, ed. Donald Black (New York: Academic Press, 1984). }~ Both these lines of literature, however, are statements of the institutional role of social mechanisms for enabling market exchange and production. More direct observations of social production and exchange systems are provided by the literature on social provisioning of public goods-- like social norm enforcement as a dimension of policing criminality, and the literature on common property regimes.~{ On policing, see Robert C. Ellickson, "Controlling Chronic Misconduct in City Spaces: Of Panhandlers, Skid Rows, and Public-Space Zoning," Yale Law Journal 105 (1996): 1165, 1194-1202; and Dan M. Kahan, "Between Economics and Sociology: The New Path of Deterrence," Michigan Law Review 95 (1997): 2477. }~ The former are limited by their focus on public goods provisioning. The latter are usually limited by their focus on discretely identifiable types of resources--common pool resources-- that must be managed as among a group of claimants while retaining a proprietary outer boundary toward nonmembers. The focus of those who study these phenomena is usually on relatively small and tightly knit communities, with clear boundaries between members and nonmembers.~{ An early and broad claim in the name of commons in resources for communication and transportation, as well as human community building--like roads, canals, or social-gathering places--is Carol Rose, "The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property," University Chicago Law Review 53 (1986): 711. Condensing around the work of Elinor Ostrom, a more narrowly defined literature developed over the course of the 1990s: Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Another seminal study was James M. Acheson, The Lobster Gangs of Maine (New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1988). A brief intellectual history of the study of common resource pools and common property regimes can be found in Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, "Ideas, Artifacts, Facilities, and Content: Information as a Common-Pool Resource," Law & Contemporary Problems 66 (2003): 111. }~ +={ Godelier, Maurice ; + gifts +1 +} + +These lines of literature point to an emerging understanding of social production and exchange as an alternative to markets and firms. Social production is not limited to public goods, to exotic, out-of-the-way places like surviving medieval Spanish irrigation regions or the shores of Maine's lobster fishing grounds, or even to the ubiquitous phenomenon of the household. As SETI@home and Slashdot suggest, it is not necessarily limited to stable communities of individuals who interact often and know each other, or who expect to continue to interact personally. Social production of goods and services, both public and private, is ubiquitous, though unnoticed. It sometimes substitutes for, and sometimes complements, market and state production everywhere. It is, to be fanciful, the dark matter of our economic production universe. + +Consider the way in which the following sentences are intuitively familiar, yet as a practical matter, describe the provisioning of goods or services that have well-defined NAICS categories (the categories used by the Economic Census to categorize economic sectors) whose provisioning through the markets is accounted for in the Economic Census, but that are commonly provisioned in a form consistent with the definition of sharing--on a radically distributed model, without price or command. + +group{ + +NAICS 624410624410 [Babysitting services, child day care] + "John, could you pick up Bobby today when you take Lauren to soccer? +I have a conference call I have to make." ,{[pg 118]}, + "Are you doing homework with Zoe today, or shall I?" + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 484210 [Trucking used household, office, or institutional +furniture and equipment] + "Jane, could you lend a hand moving this table to the dining room?" + "Here, let me hold the elevator door for you, this looks heavy." + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 484122 [Trucking, general freight, long-distance, +less-than-truckload] + "Jack, do you mind if I load my box of books in your trunk so +you can drop it off at my brother's on your way to Boston?" + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 514110 [Traffic reporting services] + "Oh, don't take I-95, it's got horrible construction traffic to +exit 39." + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 711510 [Newspaper columnists, independent (freelance)] + "I don't know about Kerry, he doesn't move me, I think he should be +more aggressive in criticizing Bush on Iraq." + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 621610 [Home health-care services] + "Can you please get me my medicine? I'm too wiped to get up." + "Would you like a cup of tea?" + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 561591 [Tourist information bureaus] + "Excuse me, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?" + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 561321 [Temporary help services] + "I've got a real crunch on the farm, can you come over on Saturday +and lend a hand?" + "This is crazy, I've got to get this document out tonight, could you +lend me a hand with proofing and pulling it all together tonight?" + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 71 [Arts, entertainment, and recreation] + "Did you hear the one about the Buddhist monk, the Rabbi, and +the Catholic priest...?" + "Roger, bring out your guitar...." + "Anybody up for a game of...?" + +}group + +The litany of examples generalizes through a combination of four dimensions that require an expansion from the current focus of the literatures related to social production. First, they relate to production of goods and services, not only of norms or rules. Social relations provide the very motivations for, and information relating to, production and exchange, not only the institutional framework for organizing action, which itself is motivated, informed, and organized by markets or managerial commands. Second, they relate to all kinds of goods, not only public goods. In particular, the paradigm cases of free software development and distributed computing involve labor and shareable goods--each plainly utilizing private goods as inputs, ,{[pg 119]}, and, in the case of distributed computing, producing private goods as outputs. Third, at least some of them relate not only to relations of production within well-defined communities of individuals who have repeated interactions, but extend to cover baseline standards of human decency. These enable strangers to ask one another for the time or for directions, enable drivers to cede the road to each other, and enable strangers to collaborate on software projects, on coauthoring an online encyclopedia, or on running simulations of how proteins fold. Fourth, they may either complement or substitute for market and state production systems, depending on the social construction of mixed provisioning. It is hard to measure the weight that social and sharing-based production has in the economy. Our intuitions about capillary systems would suggest that the total volume of boxes or books moved or lifted, instructions given, news relayed, and meals prepared by family, friends, neighbors, and minimally decent strangers would be very high relative to the amount of substitutable activity carried on through market exchanges or state provisioning. +={ capabilities of individuals : + as modality of production +5 ; + individual capabilities and action : + as modality of production +5 ; + information production inputs : + individual action as modality +5 ; + inputs to production : + individual action as modality +5 ; + production inputs : + individual action as modality +5 +} + +Why do we, despite the ubiquity of social production, generally ignore it as an economic phenomenon, and why might we now reconsider its importance? A threshold requirement for social sharing to be a modality of economic production, as opposed to one purely of social reproduction, is that sharing-based action be effective. Efficacy of individual action depends on the physical capital requirements for action to become materially effective, which, in turn, depend on technology. Effective action may have very low physical capital requirements, so that every individual has, by natural capacity, "the physical capital" necessary for action. Social production or sharing can then be ubiquitous (though in practice, it may not). Vocal cords to participate in a sing-along or muscles to lift a box are obvious examples. When the capital requirements are nontrivial, but the capital good is widely distributed and available, sharing can similarly be ubiquitous and effective. This is true both when the shared resource or good is the capacity of the capital good itself--as in the case of shareable goods--and when some widely distributed human capacity is made effective through the use of the widely distributed capital goods--as in the case of human creativity, judgment, experience, and labor shared in online peer-production processes--in which participants contribute using the widespread availability of connected computers. When use of larger-scale physical capital goods is a threshold requirement of effective action, we should not expect to see widespread reliance on decentralized sharing as a standard modality of production. Industrial ,{[pg 120]}, mass-manufacture of automobiles, steel, or plastic toys, for example, is not the sort of thing that is likely to be produced on a social-sharing basis, because of the capital constraints. This is not to say that even for large-scale capital projects, like irrigation systems and dams, social production systems cannot step into the breach. We have those core examples in the common-property regime literature, and we have worker-owned firms as examples of mixed systems. However, those systems tend to replicate the characteristics of firm, state, or market production--using various combinations of quotas, scrip systems, formal policing by "professional" officers, or management within worker-owned firms. By comparison, the "common property" arrangements described among lobster gangs of Maine or fishing groups in Japan, where capital requirements are much lower, tend to be more social-relations-based systems, with less formalized or crisp measurement of contributions to, and calls on, the production system. +={ sharing : + technology dependence of +1 ; + technology : + dependence on, for sharing +1 | enabling social sharing as production modality +4 +} + +To say that sharing is technology dependent is not to deny that it is a ubiquitous human phenomenon. Sharing is so deeply engrained in so many of our cultures that it would be difficult to argue that with the "right" (or perhaps "wrong") technological contingencies, it would simply disappear. My claim, however, is narrower. It is that the relative economic role of sharing changes with technology. There are technological conditions that require more or less capital, in larger or smaller packets, for effective provisioning of goods, services, and resources the people value. As these conditions change, the relative scope for social-sharing practices to play a role in production changes. When goods, services, and resources are widely dispersed, their owners can choose to engage with each other through social sharing instead of through markets or a formal, state-based relationship, because individuals have available to them the resources necessary to engage in such behavior without recourse to capital markets or the taxation power of the state. If technological changes make the resources necessary for effective action rare or expensive, individuals may wish to interact in social relations, but they can now only do so ineffectively, or in different fields of endeavor that do not similarly require high capitalization. Large-packet, expensive physical capital draws the behavior into one or the other of the modalities of production that can collect the necessary financial capital--through markets or taxation. Nothing, however, prevents change from happening in the opposite direction. Goods, services, and resources that, in the industrial stage of the information economy required large-scale, concentrated capital investment to provision, are now subject to a changing technological environment ,{[pg 121]}, that can make sharing a better way of achieving the same results than can states, markets, or their hybrid, regulated industries. + +Because of changes in the technology of the industrial base of the most advanced economies, social sharing and exchange is becoming a common modality of production at their very core--in the information, culture, education, computation, and communications sectors. Free software, distributed computing, ad hoc mesh wireless networks, and other forms of peer production offer clear examples of large-scale, measurably effective sharing practices. The highly distributed capital structure of contemporary communications and computation systems is largely responsible for this increased salience of social sharing as a modality of economic production in that environment. By lowering the capital costs required for effective individual action, these technologies have allowed various provisioning problems to be structured in forms amenable to decentralized production based on social relations, rather than through markets or hierarchies. + +My claim is not, of course, that we live in a unique moment of humanistic sharing. It is, rather, that our own moment in history suggests a more general observation. The technological state of a society, in particular the extent to which individual agents can engage in efficacious production activities with material resources under their individual control, affects the opportunities for, and hence the comparative prevalence and salience of, social, market-- both price-based and managerial--and state production modalities. The capital cost of effective economic action in the industrial economy shunted sharing to its economic peripheries--to households in the advanced economies, and to the global economic peripheries that have been the subject of the anthropology of gift or the common-property regime literatures. The emerging restructuring of capital investment in digital networks--in particular, the phenomenon of user-capitalized computation and communications capabilities--are at least partly reversing that effect. Technology does not determine the level of sharing. It does, however, set threshold constraints on the effective domain of sharing as a modality of economic production. Within the domain of the practically feasible, the actual level of sharing practices will be culturally driven and cross-culturally diverse. + +Most practices of production--social or market-based--are already embedded in a given technological context. They present no visible "problem" to solve or policy choice to make. We do not need to be focused consciously on improving the conditions under which friends lend a hand to each other to move boxes, make dinner, or take kids to school. We feel no need to ,{[pg 122]}, reconsider the appropriateness of market-based firms as the primary modality for the production of automobiles. However, in moments where a field of action is undergoing a technological transition that changes the opportunities for sharing as a modality of production, understanding that sharing is a modality of production becomes more important, as does understanding how it functions as such. This is so, as we are seeing today, when prior technologies have already set up market- or state-based production systems that have the law and policy-making systems already designed to fit their requirements. While the prior arrangement may have been the most efficient, or even may have been absolutely necessary for the incumbent production system, its extension under new technological conditions may undermine, rather than improve, the capacity of a society to produce and provision the goods, resources, or capacities that are the object of policy analysis. This is, as I discuss in part III, true of wireless communications regulation, or "spectrum management," as it is usually called; of the regulation of information, knowledge, and cultural production, or "intellectual property," as it is usually now called; and it may be true of policies for computation and wired communications networks, as distributed computing and the emerging peer-to-peer architectures suggest. + +2~ THE INTERFACE OF SOCIAL PRODUCTION AND MARKET-BASED BUSINESSES +={ commercial model of communication : + relationship with social producers +6 ; + industrial model of communication : + relationship with social producers +6 ; + information production, market-based : + relationship with social producers +6 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + relationship with social producers +6 ; + market-based information producers : + relationship with social producers +6 ; + nonmarket information producers : + relationship with nonmarket information producers (cont.) market-based businesses +6 ; + peer production : + relationship with market-based business +6 ; + social production, relationship with market-based business +6 ; + traditional model of communication : + relationship with social producers +6 +} + +The rise of social production does not entail a decline in market-based production. Social production first and foremost harnesses impulses, time, and resources that, in the industrial information economy, would have been wasted or used purely for consumption. Its immediate effect is therefore likely to increase overall productivity in the sectors where it is effective. But that does not mean that its effect on market-based enterprises is neutral. A newly effective form of social behavior, coupled with a cultural shift in tastes as well as the development of new technological and social solution spaces to problems that were once solved through market-based firms, exercises a significant force on the shape and conditions of market action. Understanding the threats that these developments pose to some incumbents explains much of the political economy of law in this area, which will occupy chapter 11. At the simplest level, social production in general and peer production in particular present new sources of competition to incumbents that produce information goods for which there are now socially produced substitutes. ,{[pg 123]}, Open source software development, for example, first received mainstream media attention in 1998 due to publication of a leaked internal memorandum from Microsoft, which came to be known as The Halloween Memo. In it, a Microsoft strategist identified the open source methodology as the one major potential threat to the company's dominance over the desktop. As we have seen since, definitively in the Web server market and gradually in segments of the operating system market, this prediction proved prescient. Similarly, /{Wikipedia}/ now presents a source of competition to online encyclopedias like Columbia, Grolier, or Encarta, and may well come to be seen as an adequate substitute for Britannica as well. Most publicly visible, peer-to-peer file sharing networks have come to compete with the recording industry as an alternative music distribution system, to the point where the longterm existence of that industry is in question. Some scholars like William Fisher, and artists like Jenny Toomey and participants in the Future of Music Coalition, are already looking for alternative ways of securing for artists a living from the music they make. +={ community clusters : + market and nonmarket producers +1 ; + Fisher, William (Terry) ; + Toomey, Jenny ; + The Halloween Memo +} + +The competitive threat from social production, however, is merely a surface phenomenon. Businesses often face competition or its potential, and this is a new source, with new economics, which may or may not put some of the incumbents out of business. But there is nothing new about entrants with new business models putting slow incumbents out of business. More basic is the change in opportunity spaces, the relationships of firms to users, and, indeed, the very nature of the boundary of the firm that those businesses that are already adapting to the presence and predicted persistence of social production are exhibiting. Understanding the opportunities social production presents for businesses begins to outline how a stable social production system can coexist and develop a mutually reinforcing relationship with market-based organizations that adapt to and adopt, instead of fight, them. +={ capacity : + opportunities created by social production +4 ; + opportunities created by social production +4 +} + +Consider the example I presented in chapter 2 of IBM's relationship to the free and open source software development community. IBM, as I explained there, has shown more than $2 billion a year in "Linux-related revenues." Prior to IBM's commitment to adapting to what the firm sees as the inevitability of free and open source software, the company either developed in house or bought from external vendors the software it needed as part of its hardware business, on the one hand, and its software services-- customization, enterprise solutions, and so forth--on the other hand. In each case, the software development follows a well-recognized supply chain model. Through either an employment contract or a supply contract the ,{[pg 124]}, company secures a legal right to require either an employee or a vendor to deliver a given output at a given time. In reliance on that notion of a supply chain that is fixed or determined by a contract, the company turns around and promises to its clients that it will deliver the integrated product or service that includes the contracted-for component. With free or open source software, that relationship changes. IBM is effectively relying for its inputs on a loosely defined cloud of people who are engaged in productive social relations. It is making the judgment that the probability that a sufficiently good product will emerge out of this cloud is high enough that it can undertake a contractual obligation to its clients, even though no one in the cloud is specifically contractually committed to it to produce the specific inputs the firm needs in the time-frame it needs it. This apparent shift from a contractually deterministic supply chain to a probabilistic supply chain is less dramatic, however, than it seems. Even when contracts are signed with employees or suppliers, they merely provide a probability that the employee or the supplier will in fact supply in time and at appropriate quality, given the difficulties of coordination and implementation. A broad literature in organization theory has developed around the effort to map the various strategies of collaboration and control intended to improve the likelihood that the different components of the production process will deliver what they are supposed to: from early efforts at vertical integration, to relational contracting, pragmatic collaboration, or Toyota's fabled flexible specialization. The presence of a formalized enforceable contract, for outputs in which the supplier can claim and transfer a property right, may change the probability of the desired outcome, but not the fact that in entering its own contract with its clients, the company is making a prediction about the required availability of necessary inputs in time. When the company turns instead to the cloud of social production for its inputs, it is making a similar prediction. And, as with more engaged forms of relational contracting, pragmatic collaborations, or other models of iterated relations with co-producers, the company may engage with the social process in order to improve the probability that the required inputs will in fact be produced in time. In the case of companies like IBM or Red Hat, this means, at least partly, paying employees to participate in the open source development projects. But managing this relationship is tricky. The firms must do so without seeking to, or even seeming to seek to, take over the project; for to take over the project in order to steer it more "predictably" toward the firm's needs is to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. For IBM and more recently Nokia, supporting ,{[pg 125]}, the social processes on which they rely has also meant contributing hundreds of patents to the Free Software Foundation, or openly licensing them to the software development community, so as to extend the protective umbrella created by these patents against suits by competitors. As the companies that adopt this strategic reorientation become more integrated into the peer-production process itself, the boundary of the firm becomes more porous. Participation in the discussions and governance of open source development projects creates new ambiguity as to where, in relation to what is "inside" and "outside" of the firm boundary, the social process is. In some cases, a firm may begin to provide utilities or platforms for the users whose outputs it then uses in its own products. The Open Source Development Group (OSDG), for example, provides platforms for Slashdot and SourceForge. In these cases, the notion that there are discrete "suppliers" and "consumers," and that each of these is clearly demarcated from the other and outside of the set of stable relations that form the inside of the firm becomes somewhat attenuated. +={ free software : + as competition to market-based business ; + open-source software : + as competition to market-based business ; + software, open-source : + as competition to market based business ; + IBM's business strategy +1 ; + management, changing relationships of +3 +} + +As firms have begun to experience these newly ambiguous relationships with individuals and social groups, they have come to wrestle with questions of leadership and coexistence. Businesses like IBM, or eBay, which uses peer production as a critical component of its business ecology--the peer reviewed system of creating trustworthiness, without which person-to-person transactions among individual strangers at a distance would be impossible-- have to structure their relationship to the peer-production processes that they co-exist with in a helpful and non-threatening way. Sometimes, as we saw in the case of IBM's contributions to the social process, this may mean support without attempting to assume "leadership" of the project. Sometimes, as when peer production is integrated more directly into what is otherwise a commercially created and owned platform--as in the case of eBay--the relationship is more like that of a peer-production leader than of a commercial actor. Here, the critical and difficult point for business managers to accept is that bringing the peer-production community into the newly semi-porous boundary of the firm--taking those who used to be customers and turning them into participants in a process of co-production-- changes the relationship of the firm's managers and its users. Linden Labs, which runs Second Life, learned this in the context of the tax revolt described in chapter 3. Users cannot be ordered around like employees. Nor can they be simply advertised-to and manipulated, or even passively surveyed, like customers. To do that would be to lose the creative and generative social ,{[pg 126]}, character that makes integration of peer production into a commercial business model so valuable for those businesses that adopt it. Instead, managers must be able to identify patterns that emerge in the community and inspire trust that they are correctly judging the patterns that are valuable from the perspective of the users, not only the enterprise, so that the users in fact coalesce around and extend these patterns. + +The other quite basic change wrought by the emergence of social production, from the perspective of businesses, is a change in taste. Active users require and value new and different things than passive consumers did. The industrial information economy specialized in producing finished goods, like movies or music, to be consumed passively, and well-behaved appliances, like televisions, whose use was fully specified at the factory door. The emerging businesses of the networked information economy are focusing on serving the demand of active users for platforms and tools that are much more loosely designed, late-binding--that is, optimized only at the moment of use and not in advance--variable in their uses, and oriented toward providing users with new, flexible platforms for relationships. Personal computers, camera phones, audio and video editing software, and similar utilities are examples of tools whose value increases for users as they are enabled to explore new ways to be creative and productively engaged with others. In the network, we are beginning to see business models emerge to allow people to come together, like MeetUp, and to share annotations of Web pages they read, like del.icio.us, or photographs they took, like Flickr. Services like Blogger and Technorati similarly provide platforms for the new social and cultural practices of personal journals, or the new modes of expression described in chapters 7 and 8. +={ active vs. passive consumers +1 ; + consumer surplus : + See capacity, sharing consumerism, active vs. passive +1 ; + diversity : + changes in taste ; + participatory culture : + See also culture passive vs. active consumers +1 ; + users as consumers +1 ; + taste, changes in +} + +The overarching point is that social production is reshaping the market conditions under which businesses operate. To some of the incumbents of the industrial information economy, the pressure from social production is experienced as pure threat. It is the clash between these incumbents and the new practices that was most widely reported in the media in the first five years of the twenty-first century, and that has driven much of policy making, legislation, and litigation in this area. But the much more fundamental effect on the business environment is that social production is changing the relationship of firms to individuals outside of them, and through this changing the strategies that firms internally are exploring. It is creating new sources of inputs, and new tastes and opportunities for outputs. Consumers are changing into users--more active and productive than the consumers of the ,{[pg 127]}, industrial information economy. The change is reshaping the relationships necessary for business success, requiring closer integration of users into the process of production, both in inputs and outputs. It requires different leadership talents and foci. By the time of this writing, in 2005, these new opportunities and adaptations have begun to be seized upon as strategic advantages by some of the most successful companies working around the Internet and information technology, and increasingly now around information and cultural production more generally. Eric von Hippel's work has shown how the model of user innovation has been integrated into the business model of innovative firms even in sectors far removed from either the network or from information production--like designing kite-surfing equipment or mountain bikes. As businesses begin to do this, the platforms and tools for collaboration improve, the opportunities and salience of social production increases, and the political economy begins to shift. And as these firms and social processes coevolve, the dynamic accommodation they are developing provides us with an image of what the future stable interface between market-based businesses and the newly salient social production is likely to look like. ,{[pg 128]}, ,{[pg 129]}, +={ von Hippel, Eric } + +:B~ Part Two - The Political Economy of Property and Commons + +1~p2 Introduction +={ commons +5 ; + property ownership +5 +} + +How a society produces its information environment goes to the very core of freedom. Who gets to say what, to whom? What is the state of the world? What counts as credible information? How will different forms of action affect the way the world can become? These questions go to the foundations of effective human action. They determine what individuals understand to be the range of options open to them, and the range of consequences to their actions. They determine what is understood to be open for debate in a society, and what is considered impossible as a collective goal or a collective path for action. They determine whose views count toward collective action, and whose views are lost and never introduced into the debate of what we should do as political entities or social communities. Freedom depends on the information environment that those individuals and societies occupy. Information underlies the very possibility of individual self-direction. Information and communication constitute the practices that enable a community to form a common range of understandings of what is at stake and what paths are open for the taking. They are constitutive ,{[pg 130]}, components of both formal and informal mechanisms for deciding on collective action. Societies that embed the emerging networked information economy in an institutional ecology that accommodates nonmarket production, both individual and cooperative, will improve the freedom of their constituents along all these dimensions. +={ freedom } + +The networked information economy makes individuals better able to do things for and by themselves, and makes them less susceptible to manipulation by others than they were in the mass-media culture. In this sense, the emergence of this new set of technical, economic, social, and institutional relations can increase the relative role that each individual is able to play in authoring his or her own life. The networked information economy also promises to provide a much more robust platform for public debate. It enables citizens to participate in public conversation continuously and pervasively, not as passive recipients of "received wisdom" from professional talking heads, but as active participants in conversations carried out at many levels of political and social structure. Individuals can find out more about what goes on in the world, and share it more effectively with others. They can check the claims of others and produce their own, and they can be heard by others, both those who are like-minded and opponents. At a more foundational level of collective understanding, the shift from an industrial to a networked information economy increases the extent to which individuals can become active participants in producing their own cultural environment. It opens the possibility of a more critical and reflective culture. + +Unlike the relationship of information production to freedom, the relationship between the organization of information production and distributive justice is not intrinsic. However, the importance of knowledge in contemporary economic production makes a change in the modality of information production important to justice as well. The networked information economy can provide opportunities for global development and for improvements in the justice of distribution of opportunities and capacities everywhere. Economic opportunity and welfare today--of an individual, a social group, or a nation--depend on the state of knowledge and access to opportunities to learn and apply practical knowledge. Transportation networks, global financial markets, and institutional trade arrangements have made material resources and outputs capable of flowing more efficiently from any one corner of the globe to another than they were at any previous period. Economic welfare and growth now depend more on knowledge and social ,{[pg 131]}, organization than on natural sources. Knowledge transfer and social reform, probably more than any other set of changes, can affect the economic opportunities and material development of different parts of the global economic system, within economies both advanced and less developed. The emergence of a substantial nonmarket sector in the networked information economy offers opportunities for providing better access to knowledge and information as input from, and better access for information outputs of, developing and less-developed economies and poorer geographic and social sectors in the advanced economies. Better access to knowledge and the emergence of less capital-dependent forms of productive social organization offer the possibility that the emergence of the networked information economy will open up opportunities for improvement in economic justice, on scales both global and local. +={ economic opportunity ; + human welfare ; + welfare +} + +The basic intuition and popular belief that the Internet will bring greater freedom and global equity has been around since the early 1990s. It has been the technophile's basic belief, just as the horrors of cyberporn, cybercrime, or cyberterrorism have been the standard gut-wrenching fears of the technophobe. The technophilic response is reminiscent of claims made in the past for electricity, for radio, or for telegraph, expressing what James Carey described as "the mythos of the electrical sublime." The question this part of the book explores is whether this claim, given the experience of the past decade, can be sustained on careful analysis, or whether it is yet another instance of a long line of technological utopianism. The fact that earlier utopias were overly optimistic does not mean that these previous technologies did not in fact alter the conditions of life--material, social, and intellectual. They did, but they did so differently in different societies, and in ways that diverged from the social utopias attached to them. Different nations absorbed and used these technologies differently, diverging in social and cultural habits, but also in institutional strategies for adoption--some more state-centric, others more market based; some more controlled, others less so. Utopian or at least best-case conceptions of the emerging condition are valuable if they help diagnose the socially and politically significant attributes of the emerging networked information economy correctly and allow us to form a normative conception of their significance. At a minimum, with these in hand, we can begin to design our institutional response to the present technological perturbation in order to improve the conditions of freedom and justice over the next few decades. ,{[pg 132]}, +={ Carey, James } + +The chapters in this part focus on major liberal commitments or concerns. Chapter 5 addresses the question of individual autonomy. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 address democratic participation: first in the political public sphere and then, more broadly, in the construction of culture. Chapter 9 deals with justice and human development. Chapter 10 considers the effects of the networked information economy on community. ,{[pg 133]}, + +1~5 Chapter 5 - Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information, and Law +={ autonomy +64 ; + individual autonomy +64 +} + +The emergence of the networked information economy has the potential to increase individual autonomy. First, it increases the range and diversity of things that individuals can do for and by themselves. It does this by lifting, for one important domain of life, some of the central material constraints on what individuals can do that typified the industrial information economy. The majority of materials, tools, and platforms necessary for effective action in the information environment are in the hands of most individuals in advanced economies. Second, the networked information economy provides nonproprietary alternative sources of communications capacity and information, alongside the proprietary platforms of mediated communications. This decreases the extent to which individuals are subject to being acted upon by the owners of the facilities on which they depend for communications. The construction of consumers as passive objects of manipulation that typified television culture has not disappeared overnight, but it is losing its dominance in the information environment. Third, the networked information environment qualitatively increases the range and diversity of information ,{[pg 134]}, available to individuals. It does so by enabling sources commercial and noncommercial, mainstream and fringe, domestic or foreign, to produce information and communicate with anyone. This diversity radically changes the universe of options that individuals can consider as open for them to pursue. It provides them a richer basis to form critical judgments about how they could live their lives, and, through this opportunity for critical reflection, why they should value the life they choose. + +2~ FREEDOM TO DO MORE FOR ONESELF, BY ONESELF, AND WITH OTHERS + +Rory Cejas was a twenty-six-year-old firefighter/paramedic with the Miami Fire Department in 2003, when he enlisted the help of his brother, wife, and a friend to make a Star Wars-like fan film. Using a simple camcorder and tripod, and widely available film and image generation and editing software on his computer, he made a twenty-minute film he called /{The Jedi Saga}/. The film is not a parody. It is not social criticism. It is a straightforward effort to make a movie in the genre of /{Star Wars}/, using the same type of characters and story lines. In the predigital world, it would have been impossible, as a practical matter, for Cejas to do this. It would have been an implausible part of his life plan to cast his wife as a dark femme fatale, or his brother as a Jedi Knight, so they could battle shoulder-to-shoulder, light sabers drawn, against a platoon of Imperial clone soldiers. And it would have been impossible for him to distribute the film he had made to friends and strangers. The material conditions of cultural production have changed, so that it has now become part of his feasible set of options. He needs no help from government to do so. He needs no media access rules that give him access to fancy film studios. He needs no cable access rules to allow him to distribute his fantasy to anyone who wants to watch it. The new set of feasible options open to him includes not only the option passively to sit in the theatre or in front of the television and watch the images created by George Lucas, but also the option of trying his hand at making this type of film by himself. +={ Cejas, Rory +1 ; + Jedi Saga, The +1 ; + Lucas, George +1 +} + +/{Jedi Saga}/ will not be a blockbuster. It is not likely to be watched by many people. Those who do watch it are not likely to enjoy it in the same way that they enjoyed any of Lucas's films, but that is not its point. When someone like Cejas makes such a film, he is not displacing what Lucas does. He is changing what he himself does--from sitting in front of a screen that ,{[pg 135]}, is painted by another to painting his own screen. Those who watch it will enjoy it in the same way that friends and family enjoy speaking to each other or singing together, rather than watching talking heads or listening to Talking Heads. Television culture, the epitome of the industrial information economy, structured the role of consumers as highly passive. While media scholars like John Fiske noted the continuing role of viewers in construing and interpreting the messages they receive, the role of the consumer in this model is well defined. The media product is a finished good that they consume, not one that they make. Nowhere is this clearer than in the movie theatre, where the absence of light, the enveloping sound, and the size of the screen are all designed to remove the viewer as agent, leaving only a set of receptors--eyes, ears--through which to receive the finished good that is the movie. There is nothing wrong with the movies as one mode of entertainment. The problem emerges, however, when the movie theatre becomes an apt metaphor for the relationship the majority of people have with most of the information environment they occupy. That increasing passivity of television culture came to be a hallmark of life for most people in the late stages of the industrial information economy. The couch potato, the eyeball bought and sold by Madison Avenue, has no part in making the information environment he or she occupies. +={ active vs. passive consumers +1 ; + consumer surplus : + See capacity, sharing consumerism, active vs. passive +1 ; + culture : + of television ; + Fiske, John ; + participatory culture : + See also culture passive vs. active consumers ; + television : + culture of +} + +Perhaps no single entertainment product better symbolizes the shift that the networked information economy makes possible from television culture than the massive multiplayer online game. These games are typified by two central characteristics. First, they offer a persistent game environment. That is, any action taken or "object" created anywhere in the game world persists over time, unless and until it is destroyed by some agent in the game; and it exists to the same extent for all players. Second, the games are effectively massive collaboration platforms for thousands, tens of thousands--or in the case of Lineage, the most popular game in South Korea, more than four million--users. These platforms therefore provide individual players with various contexts in which to match their wits and skills with other human players. The computer gaming environment provides a persistent relational database of the actions and social interactions of players. The first games that became mass phenomena, like Ultima Online or Everquest, started with an already richly instantiated context. Designers of these games continue to play a large role in defining the range of actions and relations feasible for players. The basic medieval themes, the role of magic and weapons, and the types and ranges of actions that are possible create much of the context, and ,{[pg 136]}, therefore the types of relationships pursued. Still, these games leave qualitatively greater room for individual effort and personal taste in producing the experience, the relationships, and hence the story line, relative to a television or movie experience. Second Life, a newer game by Linden Labs, offers us a glimpse into the next step in this genre of immersive entertainment. Like other massively multiplayer online games, Second Life is a persistent collaboration platform for its users. Unlike other games, however, Second Life offers only tools, with no story line, stock objects, or any cultural or meaning-oriented context whatsoever. Its users have created 99 percent of the objects in the game environment. The medieval village was nothing but blank space when they started. So was the flying vehicle design shop, the futuristic outpost, or the university, where some of the users are offering courses in basic programming skills and in-game design. Linden Labs charges a flat monthly subscription fee. Its employees focus on building tools that enable users to do everything from basic story concept down to the finest details of their own appearance and of objects they use in the game world. The in-game human relationships are those made by the users as they interact with each other in this immersive entertainment experience. The game's relationship to its users is fundamentally different from that of the movie or television studio. Movies and television seek to control the entire experience--rendering the viewer inert, but satisfied. Second Life sees the users as active makers of the entertainment environment that they occupy, and seeks to provide them with the tools they need to be so. The two models assume fundamentally different conceptions of play. Whereas in front of the television, the consumer is a passive receptacle, limited to selecting which finished good he or she will consume from a relatively narrow range of options, in the world of Second Life, the individual is treated as a fundamentally active, creative human being, capable of building his or her own fantasies, alone and in affiliation with others. +={ communities : + immersive entertainment ; + computer gaming environment ; + entertainment industry : + immersive ; + games, immersive ; + immersive entertainment ; + massive multiplayer games ; + MMOGs (massive multiplayer online games) ; + Second Life game environment +} + +Second Life and /{Jedi Saga}/ are merely examples, perhaps trivial ones, within the entertainment domain. They represent a shift in possibilities open both to human beings in the networked information economy and to the firms that sell them the tools for becoming active creators and users of their information environment. They are stark examples because of the centrality of the couch potato as the image of human action in television culture. Their characteristics are representative of the shift in the individual's role that is typical of the networked information economy in general and of peer production in particular. Linus Torvalds, the original creator of the Linux kernel ,{[pg 137]}, development community, was, to use Eric Raymond's characterization, a designer with an itch to scratch. Peer-production projects often are composed of people who want to do something in the world and turn to the network to find a community of peers willing to work together to make that wish a reality. Michael Hart had been working in various contexts for more than thirty years when he--at first gradually, and more recently with increasing speed--harnessed the contributions of hundreds of volunteers to Project Gutenberg in pursuit of his goal to create a globally accessible library of public domain e-texts. Charles Franks was a computer programmer from Las Vegas when he decided he had a more efficient way to proofread those e-texts, and built an interface that allowed volunteers to compare scanned images of original texts with the e-texts available on Project Gutenberg. After working independently for a couple of years, he joined forces with Hart. Franks's facility now clears the volunteer work of more than one thousand proofreaders, who proof between two hundred and three hundred books a month. Each of the thousands of volunteers who participate in free software development projects, in /{Wikipedia}/, in the Open Directory Project, or in any of the many other peer-production projects, is living some version, as a major or minor part of their lives, of the possibilities captured by the stories of a Linus Torvalds, a Michael Hart, or /{The Jedi Saga}/. Each has decided to take advantage of some combination of technical, organizational, and social conditions within which we have come to live, and to become an active creator in his or her world, rather than merely to accept what was already there. The belief that it is possible to make something valuable happen in the world, and the practice of actually acting on that belief, represent a qualitative improvement in the condition of individual freedom. They mark the emergence of new practices of self-directed agency as a lived experience, going beyond mere formal permissibility and theoretical possibility. +={ Project Gutenberg ; + Torvalds, Linus ; + Franks, Charles ; + Hart, Michael ; + Raymond, Eric +} + +Our conception of autonomy has not only been forged in the context of the rise of the democratic, civil rights?respecting state over its major competitors as a political system. In parallel, we have occupied the context of the increasing dominance of market-based industrial economy over its competitors. The culture we have developed over the past century is suffused with images that speak of the loss of agency imposed by that industrial economy. No cultural image better captures the way that mass industrial production reduced workers to cogs and consumers to receptacles than the one-dimensional curves typical of welfare economics--those that render human beings as mere production and demand functions. Their cultural, if ,{[pg 138]}, not intellectual, roots are in Fredrick Taylor's Theory of Scientific Management: the idea of abstracting and defining all motions and actions of employees in the production process so that all the knowledge was in the system, while the employees were barely more than its replaceable parts. Taylorism, ironically, was a vast improvement over the depredations of the first industrial age, with its sweatshops and child labor. It nonetheless resolved into the kind of mechanical existence depicted in Charlie Chaplin's tragic-comic portrait, Modern Times. While the grind of industrial Taylorism seems far from the core of the advanced economies, shunted as it is now to poorer economies, the basic sense of alienation and lack of effective agency persists. Scott Adams's Dilbert comic strip, devoted to the life of a white-collar employee in a nameless U.S. corporation, thoroughly alienated from the enterprise, crimped by corporate hierarchy, resisting in all sorts of ways-- but trapped in a cubicle--powerfully captures this sense for the industrial information economy in much the same way that Chaplin's Modern Times did for the industrial economy itself. +={ industrial age : + reduction of individual autonomy +1 ; + Adams, Scott ; + Chaplin, Charlie ; + Taylor, Fredrick +} + +In the industrial economy and its information adjunct, most people live most of their lives within hierarchical relations of production, and within relatively tightly scripted possibilities after work, as consumers. It did not necessarily have to be this way. Michael Piore and Charles Sabel's Second Industrial Divide and Roberto Mangabeira Unger's False Necessity were central to the emergence of a "third way" literature that developed in the 1980s and 1990s to explore the possible alternative paths to production processes that did not depend so completely on the displacement of individual agency by hierarchical production systems. The emergence of radically decentralized, nonmarket production provides a new outlet for the attenuation of the constrained and constraining roles of employees and consumers. It is not limited to Northern Italian artisan industries or imagined for emerging economies, but is at the very heart of the most advanced market economies. Peer production and otherwise decentralized nonmarket production can alter the producer/consumer relationship with regard to culture, entertainment, and information. We are seeing the emergence of the user as a new category of relationship to information production and exchange. Users are individuals who are sometimes consumers and sometimes producers. They are substantially more engaged participants, both in defining the terms of their productive activity and in defining what they consume and how they consume it. In these two great domains of life--production and consumption, work and play--the networked information economy promises to enrich individual ,{[pg 139]}, autonomy substantively by creating an environment built less around control and more around facilitating action. +={ Sabel, Charles ; + Mangabeira Unger, Roberto ; + Piore, Michael +} + +The emergence of radically decentralized nonmarket production in general and of peer production in particular as feasible forms of action opens new classes of behaviors to individuals. Individuals can now justifiably believe that they can in fact do things that they want to do, and build things that they want to build in the digitally networked environment, and that this pursuit of their will need not, perhaps even cannot, be frustrated by insurmountable cost or an alien bureaucracy. Whether their actions are in the domain of political organization (like the organizers of MoveOn.org), or of education and professional attainment (as with the case of Jim Cornish, who decided to create a worldwide center of information on the Vikings from his fifth-grade schoolroom in Gander, Newfoundland), the networked information environment opens new domains for productive life that simply were not there before. In doing so, it has provided us with new ways to imagine our lives as productive human beings. Writing a free operating system or publishing a free encyclopedia may have seemed quixotic a mere few years ago, but these are now far from delusional. Human beings who live in a material and social context that lets them aspire to such things as possible for them to do, in their own lives, by themselves and in loose affiliation with others, are human beings who have a greater realm for their agency. We can live a life more authored by our own will and imagination than by the material and social conditions in which we find ourselves. At least we can do so more effectively than we could until the last decade of the twentieth century. + +This new practical individual freedom, made feasible by the digital environment, is at the root of the improvements I describe here for political participation, for justice and human development, for the creation of a more critical culture, and for the emergence of the networked individual as a more fluid member of community. In each of these domains, the improvements in the degree to which these liberal commitments are honored and practiced emerge from new behaviors made possible and effective by the networked information economy. These behaviors emerge now precisely because individuals have a greater degree of freedom to act effectively, unconstrained by a need to ask permission from anyone. It is this freedom that increases the salience of nonmonetizable motivations as drivers of production. It is this freedom to seek out whatever information we wish, to write about it, and to join and leave various projects and associations with others that underlies ,{[pg 140]}, the new efficiencies we see in the networked information economy. These behaviors underlie the cooperative news and commentary production that form the basis of the networked public sphere, and in turn enable us to look at the world as potential participants in discourse, rather than as potential viewers only. They are at the root of making a more transparent and reflective culture. They make possible the strategies I suggest as feasible avenues to assure equitable access to opportunities for economic participation and to improve human development globally. + +Treating these new practical opportunities for action as improvements in autonomy is not a theoretically unproblematic proposition. For all its intuitive appeal and centrality, autonomy is a notoriously nebulous concept. In particular, there are deep divisions within the literature as to whether it is appropriate to conceive of autonomy in substantive terms--as Gerald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, and Joel Feinberg most prominently have, and as I have here--or in formal terms. Formal conceptions of autonomy are committed to assuming that all people have the capacity for autonomous choice, and do not go further in attempting to measure the degree of freedom people actually exercise in the world in which they are in fact constrained by circumstances, both natural and human. This commitment is not rooted in some stubborn unwillingness to recognize the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that actually constrain our choices. Rather, it comes from the sense that only by treating people as having these capacities and abilities can we accord them adequate respect as free, rational beings, and avoid sliding into overbearing paternalism. As Robert Post put it, while autonomy may well be something that needs to be "achieved" as a descriptive matter, the "structures of social authority" will be designed differently depending on whether or not individuals are treated as autonomous. "From the point of view of the designer of the structure, therefore, the presence or absence of autonomy functions as an axiomatic and foundational principle."~{ Robert Post, "Meiklejohn's Mistake: Individual Autonomy and the Reform of Public Discourse," University of Colorado Law Review 64 (1993): 1109, 1130-1132. }~ Autonomy theory that too closely aims to understand the degree of autonomy people actually exercise under different institutional arrangements threatens to form the basis of an overbearing benevolence that would undermine the very possibility of autonomous action. +={ autonomy : + formal conception of +3 ; + formal autonomy theory +3 ; + individual autonomy : + formal conception of +3 ; + Dworkin, Gerard ; + Post, Robert ; + Raz, Joseph ; + Feinberg, Joel +} + +While the fear of an overbearing bureaucracy benevolently guiding us through life toward becoming more autonomous is justifiable, the formal conception of autonomy pays a high price in its bluntness as a tool to diagnose the autonomy implications of policy. Given how we are: situated, ,{[pg 141]}, context-bound, messy individuals, it would be a high price to pay to lose the ability to understand how law and policy actually affect whatever capacity we do have to be the authors of our own life choices in some meaningful sense. We are individuals who have the capacity to form beliefs and to change them, to form opinions and plans and defend them--but also to listen to arguments and revise our beliefs. We experience some decisions as being more free than others; we mock or lament ourselves when we find ourselves trapped by the machine or the cubicle, and we do so in terms of a sense of helplessness, a negation of freedom, not only, or even primarily, in terms of lack of welfare; and we cherish whatever conditions those are that we experience as "free" precisely for that freedom, not for other reasons. Certainly, the concerns with an overbearing state, whether professing benevolence or not, are real and immediate. No one who lives with the near past of the totalitarianism of the twentieth century or with contemporary authoritarianism and fundamentalism can belittle these. But the great evils that the state can impose through formal law should not cause us to adopt methodological commitments that would limit our ability to see the many ways in which ordinary life in democratic societies can nonetheless be more or less free, more or less conducive to individual self-authorship. + +If we take our question to be one concerned with diagnosing the condition of freedom of individuals, we must observe the conditions of life from a first-person, practical perspective--that is, from the perspective of the person whose autonomy we are considering. If we accept that all individuals are always constrained by personal circumstances both physical and social, then the way to think about autonomy of human agents is to inquire into the relative capacity of individuals to be the authors of their lives within the constraints of context. From this perspective, whether the sources of constraint are private actors or public law is irrelevant. What matters is the extent to which a particular configuration of material, social, and institutional conditions allows an individual to be the author of his or her life, and to what extent these conditions allow others to act upon the individual as an object of manipulation. As a means of diagnosing the conditions of individual freedom in a given society and context, we must seek to observe the extent to which people are, in fact, able to plan and pursue a life that can reasonably be described as a product of their own choices. It allows us to compare different conditions, and determine that a certain condition allows individuals to do more for themselves, without asking permission from anyone. In this sense, we can say that the conditions that enabled Cejas ,{[pg 142]}, to make /{Jedi Saga}/ are conditions that made him more autonomous than he would have been without the tools that made that movie possible. It is in this sense that the increased range of actions we can imagine for ourselves in loose affiliation with others--like creating a Project Gutenberg--increases our ability to imagine and pursue life plans that would have been impossible in the recent past. +={ Cejas, Rory } + +From the perspective of the implications of autonomy for how people act in the digital environment, and therefore how they are changing the conditions of freedom and justice along the various dimensions explored in these chapters, this kind of freedom to act is central. It is a practical freedom sufficient to sustain the behaviors that underlie the improvements in these other domains. From an internal perspective of the theory of autonomy, however, this basic observation that people can do more by themselves, alone or in loose affiliation with others, is only part of the contribution of the networked information economy to autonomy, and a part that will only be considered an improvement by those who conceive of autonomy as a substantive concept. The implications of the networked information economy for autonomy are, however, broader, in ways that make them attractive across many conceptions of autonomy. To make that point, however, we must focus more specifically on law as the source of constraint, a concern common to both substantive and formal conceptions of autonomy. As a means of analyzing the implications of law to autonomy, the perspective offered here requires that we broaden our analysis beyond laws that directly limit autonomy. We must also look to laws that structure the conditions of action for individuals living within the ambit of their effect. In particular, where we have an opportunity to structure a set of core resources necessary for individuals to perceive the state of the world and the range of possible actions, and to communicate their intentions to others, we must consider whether the way we regulate these resources will create systematic limitations on the capacity of individuals to control their own lives, and in their susceptibility to manipulation and control by others. Once we recognize that there cannot be a person who is ideally "free," in the sense of being unconstrained or uncaused by the decisions of others, we are left to measure the effects of all sorts of constraints that predictably flow from a particular legal arrangement, in terms of the effect they have on the relative role that individuals play in authoring their own lives. ,{[pg 143]}, + +2~ AUTONOMY, PROPERTY, AND COMMONS +={ culture : + security of context +5 ; + freedom : + property and commons +5 ; + norms (social) : + property, commons, and autonomy +5 ; + property ownership : + autonomy and +5 ; + regulation by social norms : + property, commons, and autonomy +5 ; + security of context +5 ; + social relations and norms : + property, commons, and autonomy +5 +} + +The first legal framework whose role is altered by the emergence of the networked information economy is the property-like regulatory structure of patents, copyrights, and similar exclusion mechanisms applicable to information, knowledge, and culture. Property is usually thought in liberal theory to enhance, rather than constrain, individual freedom, in two quite distinct ways. First, it provides security of material context--that is, it allows one to know with some certainty that some set of resources, those that belong to her, will be available for her to use to execute her plans over time. This is the core of Kant's theory of property, which relies on a notion of positive liberty, the freedom to do things successfully based on life plans we can lay for ourselves. Second, property and markets provide greater freedom of action for the individual owner as compared both, as Marx diagnosed, to the feudal arrangements that preceded them, and, as he decidedly did not but Hayek did, to the models of state ownership and regulation that competed with them throughout most of the twentieth century. +={ Hayek, Friedrich ; + Kant, Immanuel ; + Marx, Karl +} + +Markets are indeed institutional spaces that enable a substantial degree of free choice. "Free," however, does not mean "anything goes." If John possesses a car and Jane possesses a gun, a market will develop only if John is prohibited from running Jane over and taking her gun, and also if Jane is prohibited from shooting at John or threatening to shoot him if he does not give her his car. A market that is more or less efficient will develop only if many other things are prohibited to, or required of, one or both sides--like monopolization or disclosure. Markets are, in other words, structured relationships intended to elicit a particular datum--the comparative willingness and ability of agents to pay for goods or resources. The most basic set of constraints that structure behavior in order to enable markets are those we usually call property. Property is a cluster of background rules that determine what resources each of us has when we come into relations with others, and, no less important, what "having" or "lacking" a resource entails in our relations with these others. These rules impose constraints on who can do what in the domain of actions that require access to resources that are the subjects of property law. They are aimed to crystallize asymmetries of power over resources, which then form the basis for exchanges--I will allow you to do X, which I am asymmetrically empowered to do (for example, watch television using this cable system), and you, in turn, will allow me to do Y, which you are asymmetrically empowered to do (for example, receive payment ,{[pg 144]}, from your bank account). While a necessary precondition for markets, property also means that choice in markets is itself not free of constraints, but is instead constrained in a particular pattern. It makes some people more powerful with regard to some things, and must constrain the freedom of action of others in order to achieve this asymmetry.~{ This conception of property was first introduced and developed systematically by Robert Lee Hale in the 1920s and 1930s, and was more recently integrated with contemporary postmodern critiques of power by Duncan Kennedy, Sexy Dressing Etc.: Essays on the Power and Politics of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). }~ + +Commons are an alternative form of institutional space, where human agents can act free of the particular constraints required for markets, and where they have some degree of confidence that the resources they need for their plans will be available to them. Both freedom of action and security of resource availability are achieved in very different patterns than they are in property-based markets. As with markets, commons do not mean that anything goes. Managing resources as commons does, however, mean that individuals and groups can use those resources under different types of constraints than those imposed by property law. These constraints may be social, physical, or regulatory. They may make individuals more free or less so, in the sense of permitting a greater or lesser freedom of action to choose among a range of actions that require access to resources governed by them than would property rules in the same resources. Whether having a particular type of resource subject to a commons, rather than a property-based market, enhances freedom of action and security, or harms them, is a context-specific question. It depends on how the commons is structured, and how property rights in the resource would have been structured in the absence of a commons. The public spaces in New York City, like Central Park, Union Square, or any sidewalk, afford more people greater freedom than does a private backyard--certainly to all but its owner. Given the diversity of options that these public spaces make possible as compared to the social norms that neighbors enforce against each other, they probably offer more freedom of action than a backyard offers even to its owner in many loosely urban and suburban communities. Swiss pastures or irrigation districts of the type that Elinor Ostrom described as classic cases of long-standing sustainable commons offer their participants security of holdings at least as stable as any property system, but place substantial traditional constraints on who can use the resources, how they can use them, and how, if at all, they can transfer their rights and do something completely different. These types of commons likely afford their participants less, rather than more, freedom of action than would have been afforded had they owned the same resource in a market-alienable property arrangement, although they retain security in much the same way. Commons, like the air, the sidewalk, the road and highway, the ,{[pg 145]}, ocean, or the public beach, achieve security on a very different model. I can rely on the resources so managed in a probabilistic, rather than deterministic sense. I can plan to meet my friends for a picnic in the park, not because I own the park and can direct that it be used for my picnic, but because I know there will be a park, that it is free for me to use, and that there will be enough space for us to find a corner to sit in. This is also the sort of security that allows me to plan to leave my house at some hour, and plan to be at work at some other hour, relying not on owning the transportation path, but on the availability to me of the roads and highways on symmetric terms to its availability to everyone else. If we look more closely, we will see that property and markets also offer only a probabilistic security of context, whose parameters are different--for example, the degree of certainty we have as to whether the resource we rely on as our property will be stolen or damaged, whether it will be sufficient for what we need, or if we need more, whether it will be available for sale and whether we will be able to afford it. +={ commons : + autonomy and +2 ; + Ostrom, Elinor +} + +Like property and markets, then, commons provide both freedom of action and security of context. They do so, however, through the imposition of different constraints than do property and market rules. In particular, what typifies all these commons in contradistinction to property is that no actor is empowered by law to act upon another as an object of his or her will. I can impose conditions on your behavior when you are walking on my garden path, but I have no authority to impose on you when you walk down the sidewalk. Whether one or the other of the two systems, used exclusively, will provide "greater freedom" in some aggregate sense is not a priori determinable. It will depend on the technical characteristics of the resource, the precise contours of the rules of, respectively, the proprietary market and the commons, and the distribution of wealth in society. Given the diversity of resources and contexts, and the impossibility of a purely "anything goes" absence of rules for either system, some mix of the two different institutional frameworks is likely to provide the greatest diversity of freedom to act in a material context. This diversity, in turn, enables the greatest freedom to plan action within material contexts, allowing individuals to trade off the availabilities of, and constraints on, different resources to forge a context sufficiently provisioned to enable them to execute their plans, while being sufficiently unregulated to permit them to do so. Freedom inheres in diversity of constraint, not in the optimality of the balance of freedom and constraint represented by any single institutional arrangement. It is the diversity of constraint that allows individuals to plan to live out different ,{[pg 146]}, portions and aspects of their lives in different institutional contexts, taking advantage of the different degrees of freedom and security they make possible. + +In the context of information, knowledge, and culture, because of the nonrivalry of information and its characteristic as input as well as output of the production process, the commons provides substantially greater security of context than it does when material resources, like parks or roadways, are at stake. Moreover, peer production and the networked information economy provide an increasingly robust source of new information inputs. This reduces the risk of lacking resources necessary to create new expressions or find out new things, and renders more robust the freedom to act without being susceptible to constraint from someone who holds asymmetrically greater power over the information resources one needs. As to information, then, we can say with a high degree of confidence that a more expansive commons improves individual autonomy, while enclosure of the public domain undermines it. This is less determinate with communications systems. Because computers and network connections are rival goods, there is less certainty that a commons will deliver the required resources. Under present conditions, a mixture of commons-based and proprietary communications systems is likely to improve autonomy. If, however, technological and social conditions change so that, for example, sharing on the model of peer-to-peer networks, distributed computation, or wireless mesh networks will be able to offer as dependable a set of communications and computation resources as the Web offers information and knowledge resources, the relative attractiveness of commons-oriented communications policies will increase from the perspective of autonomy. +={ autonomy : + information environment, structure of ; + individual autonomy : + information environment, structure of ; + network topology : + autonomy and ; + structure of network : + autonomy and ; + topology, network : + autonomy and +} + +% watch may belong only to next section, if so remove + +2~ AUTONOMY AND THE INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT +={ autonomy : + information environment, structure of +24 ; + individual autonomy : + information environment, structure of +24 ; + network topology : + autonomy and +24 ; + structure of network : + autonomy and +24 ; + topology, network : + autonomy and +24 +} + +The structure of our information environment is constitutive of our autonomy, not only functionally significant to it. While the capacity to act free of constraints is most immediately and clearly changed by the networked information economy, information plays an even more foundational role in our very capacity to make and pursue life plans that can properly be called our own. A fundamental requirement of self-direction is the capacity to perceive the state of the world, to conceive of available options for action, to connect actions to consequences, to evaluate alternative outcomes, and to ,{[pg 147]}, decide upon and pursue an action accordingly. Without these, no action, even if mechanically self-directed in the sense that my brain consciously directs my body to act, can be understood as autonomous in any normatively interesting sense. All of the components of decision making prior to action, and those actions that are themselves communicative moves or require communication as a precondition to efficacy, are constituted by the information and communications environment we, as agents, occupy. Conditions that cause failures at any of these junctures, which place bottlenecks, failures of communication, or provide opportunities for manipulation by a gatekeeper in the information environment, create threats to the autonomy of individuals in that environment. The shape of the information environment, and the distribution of power within it to control information flows to and from individuals, are, as we have seen, the contingent product of a combination of technology, economic behavior, social patterns, and institutional structure or law. + +In 1999, Cisco Systems issued a technical white paper, which described a new router that the company planned to sell to cable broadband providers. In describing advantages that these new "policy routers" offer cable providers, the paper explained that if the provider's users want to subscribe to a service that "pushes" information to their computer: "You could restrict the incoming push broadcasts as well as subscribers' outgoing access to the push site to discourage its use. At the same time, you could promote your own or a partner's services with full speed features to encourage adoption of your services."~{ White Paper, "Controlling Your Network, A Must for Cable Operators" (1999), http:// www.cptech.org/ecom/openaccess/cisco1.html. }~ +={ access : + systematically blocked by policy routers +3 ; + blocked access : + autonomy and +7 | policy routers +3 ; + capacity : + policy routers +3 ; + Cisco policy routers +3 ; + culture : + shaping perceptions of others +7 ; + information flow : + controlling with policy routers +3 ; + information production inputs : + systematically blocked by policy routers +3 ; + inputs to production : + systematically blocked by policy routers +3 ; + manipulating perceptions of others +7 ; + perceptions of others, shaping +7 ; + policy routers +3 ; + production inputs : + systematically blocked by policy routers +3 ; + routers, controlling information flow with +3 ; + shaping perceptions of others +7 +} + +In plain English, the broadband provider could inspect the packets flowing to and from a customer, and decide which packets would go through faster and more reliably, and which would slow down or be lost. Its engineering purpose was to improve quality of service. However, it could readily be used to make it harder for individual users to receive information that they want to subscribe to, and easier for them to receive information from sites preferred by the provider--for example, the provider's own site, or sites of those who pay the cable operator for using this function to help "encourage" users to adopt their services. There are no reports of broadband providers using these capabilities systematically. But occasional events, such as when Canada's second largest telecommunications company blocked access for all its subscribers and those of smaller Internet service providers that relied on its network to the website of the Telecommunications Workers Union in 2005, suggest that the concern is far from imaginary. ,{[pg 148]}, + +It is fairly clear that the new router increases the capacity of cable operators to treat their subscribers as objects, and to manipulate their actions in order to make them act as the provider wills, rather than as they would have had they had perfect information. It is less obvious whether this is a violation of, or a decrease in, the autonomy of the users. At one extreme, imagine the home as a black box with no communications capabilities save one--the cable broadband connection. Whatever comes through that cable is, for all practical purposes, "the state of the world," as far as the inhabitants of that home know. In this extreme situation, the difference between a completely neutral pipe that carries large amounts of information indiscriminately, and a pipe finely controlled by the cable operator is a large one, in terms of the autonomy of the home's inhabitants. If the pipe is indiscriminate, then the choices of the users determine what they know; decisions based on that knowledge can be said to be autonomous, at least to the extent that whether they are or are not autonomous is a function of the state of the agent's knowledge when forming a decision. If the pipe is finely controlled and purposefully manipulated by the cable operator, by contrast, then decisions that individuals make based on the knowledge they acquire through that pipe are substantially a function of the choices of the controller of the pipe, not of the users. At the other extreme, if each agent has dozens of alternative channels of communication to the home, and knows how the information flow of each one is managed, then the introduction of policy routers into one or some of those channels has no real implications for the agent's autonomy. While it may render one or more channels manipulable by their provider, the presence of alternative, indiscriminate channels, on the one hand, and of competition and choice among various manipulated channels, on the other hand, attenuates the extent to which the choices of the provider structure the universe of information within which the individual agent operates. The provider no longer can be said to shape the individual's choices, even if it tries to shape the information environment observable through its channel with the specific intent of manipulating the actions of users who view the world through its pipe. With sufficient choice among pipes, and sufficient knowledge about the differences between pipes, the very choice to use the manipulated pipe can be seen as an autonomous act. The resulting state of knowledge is self-selected by the user. Even if that state of knowledge then is partial and future actions constrained by it, the limited range of options is itself an expression of the user's autonomy, not a hindrance on it. For example, consider the following: Odysseus and his men mix different ,{[pg 149]}, forms of freedom and constraint in the face of the Sirens. Odysseus maintains his capacity to acquire new information by leaving his ears unplugged, but binds himself to stay on the ship by having his men tie him to the mast. His men choose the same course at the same time, but bind themselves to the ship by having Odysseus stop their ears with wax, so that they do not get the new information--the siren songs--that might change their minds and cause them not to stay the course. Both are autonomous when they pass by the Sirens, though both are free only because of their current incapacity. Odysseus's incapacity to jump into the water and swim to the Sirens and his men's incapacity to hear the siren songs are a result of their autonomously chosen past actions. + +The world we live in is neither black box nor cornucopia of well-specified communications channels. However, characterizing the range of possible configurations of the communications environment we occupy as lying on a spectrum from one to the other provides us with a framework for describing the degree to which actual conditions of a communications environment are conducive to individual autonomy. More important perhaps, it allows us to characterize policy and law that affects the communications environment as improving or undermining individual autonomy. Law can affect the range of channels of communications available to individuals, as well as the rules under which they are used. How many communications channels and sources of information can an individual receive? How many are available for him or her to communicate with others? Who controls these communications channels? What does control over the communications channels to an agent entail? What can the controller do, and what can it not? All of these questions are the subject of various forms of policy and law. Their implications affect the degree of autonomy possessed by individuals operating with the institutional-technical-economic framework thus created. + +There are two primary types of effects that information law can have on personal autonomy. The first type is concerned with the relative capacity of some people systematically to constrain the perceptions or shape the preferences of others. A law that systematically gives some people the power to control the options perceived by, or the preferences of, others, is a law that harms autonomy. Government regulation of the press and its propaganda that attempts to shape its subjects' lives is a special case of this more general concern. This concern is in some measure quantitative, in the sense that a greater degree of control to which one is subject is a greater offense to autonomy. More fundamentally, a law that systematically makes one adult ,{[pg 150]}, susceptible to the control of another offends the autonomy of the former. Law has created the conditions for one person to act upon another as an object. This is the nonpragmatic offense to autonomy committed by abortion regulations upheld in /{Planned Parenthood v. Casey}/ --such as requirements that women who seek abortions listen to lectures designed to dissuade them. These were justified by the plurality there, not by the claim that they did not impinge on a woman's autonomy, but that the state's interest in the potential life of a child trumps the autonomy of the pregnant woman. +={ information production inputs : + propaganda ; + inputs to production : + propaganda ; + manipulating perceptions of others : + with propaganda ; + perceptions of others, shaping : + with propaganda ; + production inputs : + propaganda ; + propaganda ; + shaping perceptions of others : + with propaganda +} + +The second type of effect that law can have on autonomy is to reduce significantly the range and variety of options open to people in society generally, or to certain classes of people. This is different from the concern with government intervention generally. It is not focused on whether the state prohibits these options, but only on whether the effect of the law is to remove options. It is less important whether this effect is through prohibition or through a set of predictable or observable behavioral adaptations among individuals and organizations that, as a practical matter, remove these options. I do not mean to argue for the imposition of restraints, in the name of autonomy, on any lawmaking that results in a removal of any single option, irrespective of the quantity and variety of options still open. Much of law does that. Rather, the autonomy concern is implicated by laws that systematically and significantly reduce the number, and more important, impoverish the variety, of options open to people in the society for which the law is passed. +={ behavior : + number and variety of options +2 ; + diversity : + of behavioral options +2 ; + freedom : + behavioral options +2 ; + number of behavioral options +2 ; + options, behavioral +2 ; + variety of behavioral options +2 +} + +"Number and variety" is intended to suggest two dimensions of effect on the options open to an individual. The first is quantitative. For an individual to author her own life, she must have a significant set of options from which to choose; otherwise, it is the choice set--or whoever, if anyone, made it so--and not the individual, that is governing her life. This quantitative dimension, however, does not mean that more choices are always better, from the individual's perspective. It is sufficient that the individual have some adequate threshold level of options in order for him or her to exercise substantive self-authorship, rather than being authored by circumstances. Beyond that threshold level, additional options may affect one's welfare and success as an autonomous agent, but they do not so constrain an individual's choices as to make one not autonomous. Beyond quantitative adequacy, the options available to an individual must represent meaningfully different paths, not merely slight variations on a theme. Qualitatively, autonomy requires the availability of options in whose adoption or rejection the individual ,{[pg 151]}, can practice critical reflection and life choices. In order to sustain the autonomy of a person born and raised in a culture with a set of socially embedded conventions about what a good life is, one would want a choice set that included at least some unconventional, non-mainstream, if you will, critical options. If all the options one has--even if, in a purely quantitative sense, they are "adequate"--are conventional or mainstream, then one loses an important dimension of self-creation. The point is not that to be truly autonomous one necessarily must be unconventional. Rather, if self-governance for an individual consists in critical reflection and re-creation by making choices over the course of his life, then some of the options open must be different from what he would choose simply by drifting through life, adopting a life plan for no reason other than that it is accepted by most others. A person who chooses a conventional life in the presence of the option to live otherwise makes that conventional life his or her own in a way that a person who lives a conventional life without knowing about alternatives does not. + +As long as our autonomy analysis of information law is sensitive to these two effects on information flow to, from, and among individuals and organizations in the regulated society, it need not conflict with the concerns of those who adopt the formal conception of autonomy. It calls for no therapeutic agenda to educate adults in a wide range of options. It calls for no one to sit in front of educational programs. It merely focuses on two core effects that law can have through the way it structures the relationships among people with regard to the information environment they occupy. If a law--passed for any reason that may or may not be related to autonomy concerns--creates systematic shifts of power among groups in society, so that some have a greater ability to shape the perceptions of others with regard to available options, consequences of action, or the value of preferences, then that law is suspect from an autonomy perspective. It makes the choices of some people less their own and more subject to manipulation by those to whom the law gives the power to control perceptions. Furthermore, a law that systematically and severely limits the range of options known to individuals is one that imposes a normative price, in terms of autonomy, for whatever value it is intended to deliver. As long as the focus of autonomy as an institutional design desideratum is on securing the best possible information flow to the individual, the designer of the legal structure need not assume that individuals are not autonomous, or have failures of autonomy, in order to serve autonomy. All the designer need assume is that individuals ,{[pg 152]}, will not act in order to optimize the autonomy of their neighbors. Law then responds by avoiding institutional designs that facilitate the capacity of some groups of individuals to act on others in ways that are systematically at the expense of the ability of those others to control their own lives, and by implementing policies that predictably diversify the set of options that all individuals are able to see as open to them. + +Throughout most of the 1990s and currently, communications and information policy around the globe was guided by a wish to "let the private sector lead," interpreted in large measure to mean that various property and property-like regulatory frameworks should be strengthened, while various regulatory constraints on property-like rights should be eased. The drive toward proprietary, market-based provisioning of communications and information came from disillusionment with regulatory systems and state-owned communications networks. It saw the privatization of national postal, telephone, and telegraph authorities (PTTs) around the world. Even a country with a long tradition of state-centric communications policy, like France, privatized much of its telecommunications systems. In the United States, this model translated into efforts to shift telecommunications from the regulated monopoly model it followed throughout most of the twentieth century to a competitive market, and to shift Internet development from being primarily a government-funded exercise, as it had been from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, to being purely private property, market based. This model was declared in the Clinton administration's 1993 National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action, which pushed for privatization of Internet deployment and development. It was the basis of that administration's 1995 White Paper on Intellectual Property, which mapped the most aggressive agenda ever put forward by any American administration in favor of perfect enclosure of the public domain; and it was in those years when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) first implemented spectrum auctions aimed at more thorough privatization of wireless communications in the United States. The general push for stronger intellectual property rights and more marketcentric telecommunications systems also became a central tenet of international trade regimes, pushing similar policies in smaller and developing economies. +={ commons : + wireless communications as +3 ; + privatization : + of communications and information systems +3 ; + wireless communications : + privatization vs. commons +3 +} + +The result of the push toward private provisioning and deregulation has led to the emergence of a near-monopolistic market structure for wired physical broadband services. By the end of 2003, more than 96 percent of homes and small offices in the United States that had any kind of "high-speed" ,{[pg 153]}, Internet services received their service from either their incumbent cable operator or their incumbent local telephone company. If one focuses on the subset of these homes and offices that get service that provides more substantial room for autonomous communicative action--that is, those that have upstream service at high-speed, enabling them to publish and participate in online production efforts and not simply to receive information at high speeds--the picture is even more dismal. Less than 2 percent of homes and small offices receive their broadband connectivity from someone other than their cable carrier or incumbent telephone carrier. More than 83 percent of these users get their access from their cable operator. Moreover, the growth rate in adoption of cable broadband and local telephone digital subscriber line (DSL) has been high and positive, whereas the growth rate of the few competing platforms, like satellite broadband, has been stagnant or shrinking. The proprietary wired environment is gravitating toward a high-speed connectivity platform that will be either a lopsided duopoly, or eventually resolve into a monopoly platform.~{ Data are all based on FCC Report on High Speed Services, Appendix to Fourth 706 Report NOI (Washington, DC: Federal Communications Commission, December 2003). }~ These owners are capable, both technically and legally, of installing the kind of policy routers with which I opened the discussion of autonomy and information law--routers that would allow them to speed up some packets and slow down or reject others in ways intended to shape the universe of information available to users of their networks. +={ broadband networks : + market structure of ; + monopoly : + wired environment as ; + wired communications : + market structure of ; + proprietary rights : + wireless networks +2 +} + +The alternative of building some portions of our telecommunications and information production and exchange systems as commons was not understood in the mid-1990s, when the policy that resulted in this market structure for communications was developed. As we saw in chapter 3, however, wireless communications technology has progressed to the point where it is now possible for users to own equipment that cooperates in mesh networks to form a "last-mile" infrastructure that no one other than the users own. Radio networks can now be designed so that their capital structure more closely approximates the Internet and personal computer markets, bringing with it a greater scope for commons-based peer production of telecommunications infrastructure. Throughout most of the twentieth century, wireless communications combined high-cost capital goods (radio transmitters and antennae towers) with cheaper consumer goods (radio receivers), using regulated proprietary infrastructure, to deliver a finished good of wireless communications on an industrial model. Now WiFi is marking the possibility of an inversion of the capital structure of wireless communication. We see end-user equipment manufacturers like Intel, Cisco, and others producing ,{[pg 154]}, and selling radio "transceivers" that are shareable goods. By using ad hoc mesh networking techniques, some early versions of which are already being deployed, these transceivers allow their individual owners to cooperate and coprovision their own wireless communications network, without depending on any cable carrier or other wired provider as a carrier of last resort. Almost the entire debate around spectrum policy and the relative merits of markets and commons in wireless policy is conducted today in terms of efficiency and innovation. A common question these days is which of the two approaches will lead to greater growth of wireless communications capacity and will more efficiently allocate the capacity we already have. I have contributed my fair share of this form of analysis, but the question that concerns us here is different. We must ask what, if any, are the implications of the emergence of a feasible, sustainable model of a commons-based physical infrastructure for the first and last mile of the communications environment, in terms of individual autonomy? +={ efficiency of information regulation : + wireless communications policy ; + inefficiency of information regulation : + wireless communications policy ; + innovation : + wireless communications policy ; + proprietary rights : + wireless communications policy ; + reallocation : + wireless communications policy +} + +The choice between proprietary and commons-based wireless data networks takes on new significance in light of the market structure of the wired network, and the power it gives owners of broadband networks to control the information flow into the vast majority of homes. Commons-based wireless systems become the primary legal form of communications capacity that does not systematically subject its users to manipulation by an infrastructure owner. + +Imagine a world with four agents--A, B, C, and D--connected to each other by a communications network. Each component, or route, of the network could be owned or unowned. If all components are unowned, that is, are organized as a commons, each agent has an equal privilege to use any component of the network to communicate with any other agent. If all components are owned, the owner of any network component can deny to any other agent use of that network component to communicate with anyone else. This translates in the real world into whether or not there is a "spectrum owner" who "owns" the link between any two users, or whether the link is simply a consequence of the fact that two users are communicating with each other in a way that no one has a right to prevent them from doing. + +In this simple model, if the network is unowned, then for any communication all that is required is a willing sender and a willing recipient. No third agent gets a say as to whether any other pair will communicate with each other. Each agent determines independently of the others whether to ,{[pg 155]}, participate in a communicative exchange, and communication occurs whenever all its participants, and only they, agree to communicate with each other. For example, A can exchange information with B, as long as B consents. The only person who has a right to prevent A from receiving information from, or sending information to, B, is B, in the exercise of B's own autonomous choice whether to change her information environment. Under these conditions, neither A nor B is subject to control of her information environment by others, except where such control results from denying her the capacity to control the information environment of another. If all network components are owned, on the other hand, then for any communication there must be a willing sender, a willing recipient, and a willing infrastructure owner. In a pure property regime, infrastructure owners have a say over whether, and the conditions under which, others in their society will communicate with each other. It is precisely the power to prevent others from communicating that makes infrastructure ownership a valuable enterprise: One can charge for granting one's permission to communicate. For example, imagine that D owns all lines connecting A to B directly or through D, and C owns all lines connecting A or B to C. As in the previous scenario, A wishes to exchange information with B. Now, in addition to B, A must obtain either C's or D's consent. A now functions under two distinct types of constraint. The first, as before, is a constraint imposed by B's autonomy: A cannot change B's information environment (by exchanging information with her) without B's consent. The second constraint is that A must persuade an owner of whatever carriage medium connects A to B to permit A and B to communicate. The communication is not sent to or from C or D. It does not change C's or D's information environment, and that is not A's intention. C and D's ability to consent or withhold consent is not based on the autonomy principle. It is based, instead, on an instrumental calculus: namely, that creating such property rights in infrastructure will lead to the right incentives for the deployment of infrastructure necessary for A and B to communicate in the first place. +={ computers : + infrastructure ownership +1 ; + hardware : + infrastructure ownership +1 ; + permission to communicate +1 ; + personal computers : + infrastructure ownership +1 ; + physical machinery and computers : + infrastructure ownership +1 ; + proprietary rights : + infrastructure ownership +1 ; + information sharing : + infrastructure ownership +} + +Now imagine that D owns the entire infrastructure. If A wants to get information from B or to communicate to C in order to persuade C to act in a way that is beneficial to A, A needs D's permission. D may grant or withhold permission, and may do so either for a fee or upon the imposition of conditions on the communication. Most significantly, D can choose to prevent anyone from communicating with anyone else, or to expose each participant to the communications of only some, but not all, members of ,{[pg 156]}, society. This characteristic of her ownership gives D the power to shape A's information environment by selectively exposing A to information in the form of communications from others. Most commonly, we might see this where D decides that B will pay more if all infrastructure is devoted to permitting B to communicate her information to A and C, rather than any of it used to convey A's statements to C. D might then refuse to carry A's message to C and permit only B to communicate to A and C. The point is that from A's perspective, A is dependent upon D's decisions as to what information can be carried on the infrastructure, among whom, and in what directions. To the extent of that dependence, A's autonomy is compromised. We might call the requirement that D can place on A as a precondition to using the infrastructure an "influence exaction." +={ access : + influence exaction +1 ; + blocked access : + influence exaction +1 ; + culture : + influence exaction +1 ; + influence exaction +1 ; + manipulating perceptions of others : + influence exaction +1 ; + perceptions of others, shaping : + influence exaction +1 ; + shaping perceptions of others : + influence exaction +1 +} + +The magnitude of the negative effect on autonomy, or of the influence exaction, depends primarily on (a) the degree to which it is hard or easy to get around D's facility, and (b) the degree of transparency of the exaction. Compare, for example, Cisco's policy router for cable broadband, which allows the cable operator to speed up and slow down packets based on its preferences, to Amazon's brief experiment in 1998-1999 with accepting undisclosed payments from publishers in exchange for recommending their books. If a cable operator programs its routers to slow down packets of competitors, or of information providers that do not pay, this practice places a significant exaction on users. First, the exaction is entirely nontransparent. There are many reasons that different sites load at different speeds, or even fail to load altogether. Users, the vast majority of whom are unaware that the provider could, if it chose, regulate the flow of information to them, will assume that it is the target site that is failing, not that their own service provider is manipulating what they can see. Second, there is no genuine work-around. Cable broadband covers roughly two-thirds of the home market, in many places without alternative; and where there is an alternative, there is only one--the incumbent telephone company. Without one of these noncompetitive infrastructure owners, the home user has no broadband access to the Internet. In Amazon's case, the consumer outrage when the practice was revealed focused on the lack of transparency. Users had little objection to clearly demarcated advertisement. The resistance was to the nontransparent manipulation of the recommendation system aimed at causing the consumers to act in ways consistent with Amazon's goals, rather than their own. In that case, however, there were alternatives. There are many different places from which to find book reviews and recommendations, and ,{[pg 157]}, at the time, barnesandnoble.com was already available as an online bookseller--and had not significantly adopted similar practices. The exaction was therefore less significant. Moreover, once the practice was revealed, Amazon publicly renounced it and began to place advertisements in a clearly recognizable separate category. The lesson was not lost on others. When Google began at roughly the same time as a search engine, it broke with the then common practice of selling search-result location. When the company later introduced advertised links, it designed its interface to separate out clearly the advertisements from the algorithm-based results, and to give the latter more prominent placement than the former. This does not necessarily mean that any search engine that accepts payments for linking is necessarily bad. A search engine like Overture, which explicitly and publicly returns results ranked according to which, among the sites retrieved, paid Overture the most, has its own value for consumers looking for commercial sites. A transparent, nonmonopolistic option of this sort increases, rather than decreases, the freedom of users to find the information they want and act on it. The problem would be with search engines that mix the two strategies and hide the mix, or with a monopolistic search engine. +={ access : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + blocked access : + policy routers ; + capacity : + policy routers ; + Cisco policy routers : + influence exaction ; + information flow : + controlling with policy routers ; + information production inputs : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + inputs to production : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + policy routers : + influence exaction ; + production inputs : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + routers, controlling information flow with : + influence exaction +} + +Because of the importance of the possibility to work around the owned infrastructure, the degree of competitiveness of any market in such infrastructure is important. Before considering the limits of even competitive markets by comparison to commons, however, it is important to recognize that a concern with autonomy provides a distinct justification for the policy concern with media concentration. To understand the effects of concentration, we can think of freedom from constraint as a dimension of welfare. Just as we have no reason to think that in a concentrated market, total welfare, let alone consumer welfare, will be optimal, we also have no reason to think that a component of welfare--freedom from constraint as a condition to access one's communicative environment--will be optimal. Moreover, when we use a "welfare" calculus as a metaphor for the degree of autonomy users have in the system, we must optimize not total welfare, as we do in economic analysis, but only what in the metaphorical calculus would count as "consumer surplus." In the domain of influence and autonomy, only "consumer surplus" counts as autonomy enhancing. "Producer surplus," the degree of successful imposition of influence on others as a condition of service, translates in an autonomy calculus into control exerted by some people (providers) over others (consumers). It reflects the successful negation of autonomy. The monopoly case therefore presents a new normative ,{[pg 158]}, dimension of the well-known critiques of media concentration. Why, however, is this not solely an analysis of media concentration? Why does a competitive market in infrastructure not solve the autonomy deficit of property? +={ accreditation : + concentration of mass-media power ; + allocating excess capacity ; + capacity : + sharing ; + community clusters : + communications infrastructure +3 ; + concentration of mass-media power ; + excess capacity, sharing ; + filtering : + concentration of mass-media power ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + concentration of mass-media power ; + human welfare : + freedom from constraint +2 ; + media concentration ; + reallocating excess capacity ; + relevance filtering : + concentration of mass-media power ; + sharing : + excess capacity ; + welfare : + freedom from constraint +2 ; + processors. See computer producer surplus +} + +If we make standard assumptions of perfectly competitive markets and apply them to our A-B-D example, one would think that the analysis must change. D no longer has monopoly power. We would presume that the owners of infrastructure would be driven by competition to allocate infrastructure to uses that users value most highly. If one owner "charges" a high price in terms of conditions imposed on users, say to forgo receiving certain kinds of speech uncongenial to the owner, then the users will go to a competitor who does not impose that condition. This standard market response is far from morally irrelevant if one is concerned with autonomy. If, in fact, every individual can choose precisely the package of influence exactions and the cash-to-influence trade-off under which he or she is willing to communicate, then the autonomy deficit that I suggest is created by property rights in communications infrastructure is minimal. If all possible degrees of freedom from the influence of others are available to autonomous individuals, then respecting their choices, including their decisions to subject themselves to the influence of others in exchange for releasing some funds so they are available for other pursuits, respects their autonomy. +={ access : + influence exaction +2 ; + blocked access : + influence exaction +1 ; + Cisco policy routers : + influence exaction +2 ; + culture : + influence exaction +2 ; + influence exaction +2 ; + manipulating perceptions of others : + influence exaction +2 ; + perceptions of others, shaping : + influence exaction +2 ; + policy routers : + influence exaction +2 ; + routers, controlling information flow with : + influence exaction +2 ; + shaping perceptions of others : + influence exaction +2 +} + +Actual competition, however, will not eliminate the autonomy deficit of privately owned communications infrastructure, for familiar reasons. The most familiar constraint on the "market will solve it" hunch is imposed by transaction costs--in particular, information-gathering and negotiation costs. Influence exactions are less easily homogenized than prices expressed in currency. They will therefore be more expensive to eliminate through transactions. Some people value certain kinds of information lobbed at them positively; others negatively. Some people are more immune to suggestion, others less. The content and context of an exaction will have a large effect on its efficacy as a device for affecting the choices of the person subject to its influence, and these could change from communication to communication for the same person, let alone for different individuals. Both users and providers have imperfect information about the users' susceptibility to manipulated information flows; they have imperfect information about the value that each user would place on being free of particular exactions. Obtaining the information necessary to provide a good fit for each consumer's preferences regarding the right influence-to-cash ratio for a given service ,{[pg 159]}, would be prohibitively expensive. Even if the information were obtained, negotiating the precise cash-to-influence trade-off would be costly. Negotiation also may fail because of strategic behavior. The consumer's ideal outcome is to labor under an exaction that is ineffective. If the consumer can reduce the price by submitting to constraints on communication that would affect an average consumer, but will not change her agenda or subvert her capacity to author her life, she has increased her welfare without compromising her autonomy. The vendor's ideal outcome, however, is that the influence exaction be effective--that it succeed in changing the recipient's preferences or her agenda to fit those of the vendor. The parties, therefore, will hide their true beliefs about whether a particular condition to using proprietary infrastructure is of a type that is likely to be effective at influencing the particular recipient. Under anything less than a hypothetical and practically unattainable perfect market in communications infrastructure services, users of a proprietary infrastructure will face a less-than-perfect menu of influence exactions that they must accept before they can communicate using owned infrastructure. +={ policy : + property-based +3 ; + privatization : + of communications and information systems +3 +} + +Adopting a regulatory framework under which all physical means of communication are based on private property rights in the infrastructure will therefore create a cost for users, in terms of autonomy. This cost is the autonomy deficit of exclusive reliance on proprietary models. If ownership of infrastructure is concentrated, or if owners can benefit from exerting political, personal, cultural, or social influence over others who seek access to their infrastructure, they will impose conditions on use of the infrastructure that will satisfy their will to exert influence. If agents other than owners (advertisers, tobacco companies, the U.S. drug czar) value the ability to influence users of the infrastructure, then the influence-exaction component of the price of using the infrastructure will be sold to serve the interests of these third parties. To the extent that these influence exactions are effective, a pure private-property regime for infrastructure allows owners to constrain the autonomy of users. The owners can do this by controlling and manipulating the users' information environment to shape how they perceive their life choices in ways that make them more likely to act in a manner that the owners prefer. + +The traditional progressive or social-democratic response to failures of property-based markets has been administrative regulation. In the area of communications, these responses have taken the form of access regulations-- ranging from common carriage to more limited right-of-reply, fairness ,{[pg 160]}, doctrine-type regulations. Perfect access regulation--in particular, common-carrier obligations--like a perfectly competitive market, could in principle alleviate the autonomy deficit of property. Like markets, however, actual regulation that limits the powers that go with property in infrastructure suffers from a number of limitations. First, the institutional details of the common-carriage regime can skew incentives for what types of communications will be available, and with what degree of freedom. If we learned one thing from the history of American communications policy in the twentieth century, it is that regulated entities are adept at shaping their services, pricing, and business models to take advantage of every weakness in the common-carriage regulatory system. They are even more adept at influencing the regulatory process to introduce lucrative weaknesses into the regulatory system. At present, cable broadband has succeeded in achieving a status almost entirely exempt from access requirements that might mitigate its power to control how the platform is used, and broadband over legacy telephone systems is increasingly winning a parallel status of unregulated semi-monopoly. Second, the organization that owns the infrastructure retains the same internal incentives to control content as it would in the absence of common carriage and will do so to the extent that it can sneak by any imperfections in either the carriage regulations or their enforcement. Third, as long as the network is built to run through a central organizational clearinghouse, that center remains a potential point at which regulators can reassert control or delegate to owners the power to prevent unwanted speech by purposefully limiting the scope of the common-carriage requirements. +={ common-carriage regulatory system } + +As a practical matter, then, if all wireless systems are based on property, just like the wired systems are, then wireless will offer some benefits through the introduction of some, albeit imperfect, competition. However, it will not offer the autonomy-enhancing effects that a genuine diversity of constraint can offer. If, on the other hand, policies currently being experimented with in the United States do result in the emergence of a robust, sustainable wireless communications infrastructure, owned and shared by its users and freely available to all under symmetric technical constraints, it will offer a genuinely alternative communications platform. It may be as technically good as the wired platforms for all users and uses, or it may not. Nevertheless, because of its radically distributed capitalization, and its reliance on commons rendered sustainable by equipment-embedded technical protocols, rather than on markets that depend on institutionally created asymmetric power over communications, a commons-based wireless system will offer an ,{[pg 161]}, infrastructure that operates under genuinely different institutional constraints. Such a system can become an infrastructure of first and last resort for uses that would not fit the constraints of the proprietary market, or for users who find the price-to-influence exaction bundles offered in the market too threatening to their autonomy. + +The emerging viability of commons-based strategies for the provisioning of communications, storage, and computation capacity enables us to take a practical, real world look at the autonomy deficit of a purely property-based communications system. As we compare property to commons, we see that property, by design, introduces a series of legal powers that asymmetrically enable owners of infrastructure to exert influence over users of their systems. This asymmetry is necessary for the functioning of markets. Predictably and systematically, however, it allows one group of actors--owners--to act upon another group of actors--consumers--as objects of manipulation. No single idiom in contemporary culture captures this characteristic better than the term "the market in eyeballs," used to describe the market in advertising slots. Commons, on the other hand, do not rely on asymmetric constraints. They eliminate points of asymmetric control over the resources necessary for effective communication, thereby eliminating the legal bases of the objectification of others. These are not spaces of perfect freedom from all constraints. However, the constraints they impose are substantively different from those generated by either the property system or by an administrative regulatory system. Their introduction alongside proprietary networks therefore diversifies the constraints under which individuals operate. By offering alternative transactional frameworks for alternative information flows, these networks substantially and qualitatively increase the freedom of individuals to perceive the world through their own eyes, and to form their own perceptions of what options are open to them and how they might evaluate alternative courses of action. + +2~ AUTONOMY, MASS MEDIA, AND NONMARKET INFORMATION PRODUCERS + +The autonomy deficit of private communications and information systems is a result of the formal structure of property as an institutional device and the role of communications and information systems as basic requirements in the ability of individuals to formulate purposes and plan actions to fit their lives. The gains flow directly from the institutional characteristics of ,{[pg 162]}, commons. The emergence of the networked information economy makes one other important contribution to autonomy. It qualitatively diversifies the information available to individuals. Information, knowledge, and culture are now produced by sources that respond to a myriad of motivations, rather than primarily the motivation to sell into mass markets. Production is organized in any one of a myriad of productive organizational forms, rather than solely the for-profit business firm. The supplementation of the profit motive and the business organization by other motivations and organizational forms--ranging from individual play to large-scale peer-production projects--provides not only a discontinuously dramatic increase in the number of available information sources but, more significantly, an increase in available information sources that are qualitatively different from others. + +Imagine three storytelling societies: the Reds, the Blues, and the Greens. Each society follows a set of customs as to how they live and how they tell stories. Among the Reds and the Blues, everyone is busy all day, and no one tells stories except in the evening. In the evening, in both of these societies, everyone gathers in a big tent, and there is one designated storyteller who sits in front of the audience and tells stories. It is not that no one is allowed to tell stories elsewhere. However, in these societies, given the time constraints people face, if anyone were to sit down in the shade in the middle of the day and start to tell a story, no one else would stop to listen. Among the Reds, the storyteller is a hereditary position, and he or she alone decides which stories to tell. Among the Blues, the storyteller is elected every night by simple majority vote. Every member of the community is eligible to offer him- or herself as that night's storyteller, and every member is eligible to vote. Among the Greens, people tell stories all day, and everywhere. Everyone tells stories. People stop and listen if they wish, sometimes in small groups of two or three, sometimes in very large groups. Stories in each of these societies play a very important role in understanding and evaluating the world. They are the way people describe the world as they know it. They serve as testing grounds to imagine how the world might be, and as a way to work out what is good and desirable and what is bad and undesirable. The societies are isolated from each other and from any other source of information. + +Now consider Ron, Bob, and Gertrude, individual members of the Reds, Blues, and Greens, respectively. Ron's perception of the options open to him and his evaluation of these options are largely controlled by the hereditary storyteller. He can try to contact the storyteller to persuade him to tell ,{[pg 163]}, different stories, but the storyteller is the figure who determines what stories are told. To the extent that these stories describe the universe of options Ron knows about, the storyteller defines the options Ron has. The storyteller's perception of the range of options largely will determine the size and diversity of the range of options open to Ron. This not only limits the range of known options significantly, but it also prevents Ron from choosing to become a storyteller himself. Ron is subjected to the storyteller's control to the extent that, by selecting which stories to tell and how to tell them, the storyteller can shape Ron's aspirations and actions. In other words, both the freedom to be an active producer and the freedom from the control of another are constrained. Bob's autonomy is constrained not by the storyteller, but by the majority of voters among the Blues. These voters select the storyteller, and the way they choose will affect Bob's access to stories profoundly. If the majority selects only a small group of entertaining, popular, pleasing, or powerful (in some other dimension, like wealth or political power) storytellers, then Bob's perception of the range of options will be only slightly wider than Ron's, if at all. The locus of power to control Bob's sense of what he can and cannot do has shifted. It is not the hereditary storyteller, but rather the majority. Bob can participate in deciding which stories can be told. He can offer himself as a storyteller every night. He cannot, however, decide to become a storyteller independently of the choices of a majority of Blues, nor can he decide for himself what stories he will hear. He is significantly constrained by the preferences of a simple majority. Gertrude is in a very different position. First, she can decide to tell a story whenever she wants to, subject only to whether there is any other Green who wants to listen. She is free to become an active producer except as constrained by the autonomy of other individual Greens. Second, she can select from the stories that any other Green wishes to tell, because she and all those surrounding her can sit in the shade and tell a story. No one person, and no majority, determines for her whether she can or cannot tell a story. No one can unilaterally control whose stories Gertrude can listen to. And no one can determine for her the range and diversity of stories that will be available to her from any other member of the Greens who wishes to tell a story. + +The difference between the Reds, on the one hand, and the Blues or Greens, on the other hand, is formal. Among the Reds, only the storyteller may tell the story as a matter of formal right, and listeners only have a choice of whether to listen to this story or to no story at all. Among the ,{[pg 164]}, Blues and the Greens anyone may tell a story as a matter of formal right, and listeners, as a matter of formal right, may choose from whom they will hear. The difference between the Reds and the Blues, on the one hand, and the Greens, on the other hand, is economic. In the former, opportunities for storytelling are scarce. The social cost is higher, in terms of stories unavailable for hearing, or of choosing one storyteller over another. The difference between the Blues and the Greens, then, is not formal, but practical. The high cost of communication created by the Blues' custom of listening to stories only in the evening, in a big tent, together with everyone else, makes it practically necessary to select "a storyteller" who occupies an evening. Since the stories play a substantive role in individuals' perceptions of how they might live their lives, that practical difference alters the capacity of individual Blues and Greens to perceive a wide and diverse set of options, as well as to exercise control over their perceptions and evaluations of options open for living their lives and to exercise the freedom themselves to be storytellers. The range of stories Bob is likely to listen to, and the degree to which he can choose unilaterally whether he will tell or listen, and to which story, are closer, as a practical matter, to those of Ron than to those of Gertrude. Gertrude has many more stories and storytelling settings to choose from, and many more instances where she can offer her own stories to others in her society. She, and everyone else in her society, can be exposed to a wider variety of conceptions of how life can and ought to be lived. This wider diversity of perceptions gives her greater choice and increases her ability to compose her own life story out of the more varied materials at her disposal. She can be more self-authored than either Ron or Bob. This diversity replicates, in large measure, the range of perceptions of how one might live a life that can be found among all Greens, precisely because the storytelling customs make every Green a potential storyteller, a potential source of information and inspiration about how one might live one's life. +={ diversity +5 } + +All this could sound like a morality tale about how wonderfully the market maximizes autonomy. The Greens easily could sound like Greenbacks, rather than like environmentalists staking out public parks as information commons. However, this is not the case in the industrial information economy, where media markets have high entry barriers and large economies of scale. It is costly to start up a television station, not to speak of a network, a newspaper, a cable company, or a movie distribution system. It is costly to produce the kind of content delivered over these systems. Once production costs or the costs of laying a network are incurred, the additional marginal ,{[pg 165]}, cost of making information available to many users, or of adding users to the network, is much smaller than the initial cost. This is what gives information and cultural products and communications facilities supply-side economies of scale and underlies the industrial model of producing them. The result is that the industrial information economy is better stylized by the Reds and Blues rather than by the Greens. While there is no formal limitation on anyone producing and disseminating information products, the economic realities limit the opportunities for storytelling in the mass-mediated environment and make storytelling opportunities a scarce good. It is very costly to tell stories in the mass-mediated environment. Therefore, most storytellers are commercial entities that seek to sell their stories to the audience. Given the discussion earlier in this chapter, it is fairly straightforward to see how the Greens represent greater freedom to choose to become an active producer of one's own information environment. It is similarly clear that they make it exceedingly difficult for any single actor to control the information flow to any other actor. We can now focus on how the story provides a way of understanding the justification and contours of the third focus of autonomy-respecting policy: the requirement that government not limit the quantity and diversity of information available. +={ autonomy : + mass media and +1 ; + capital for production : + production costs as limiting ; + commercial model of communication : + autonomy and +1 ; + constraints of information production, monetary : + production costs as limiting ; + cost : + of production, as limiting ; + individual autonomy : + mass media and +1 ; + industrial model of communication : + autonomy and +1 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + autonomy and +1 ; + monetary constraints on information production : + production costs as limiting ; + money : + cost of production as limiting ; + information production capital : + production costs as limiting ; + physical capital for production : + production costs as limiting ; + production capital : + production costs as limiting ; + traditional model of communication : + autonomy and +1 ; + diversity : + mass-mediated environments +1 +} + +The fact that our mass-mediated environment is mostly commercial makes it more like the Blues than the Reds. These outlets serve the tastes of the majority--expressed in some combination of cash payment and attention to advertising. I do not offer here a full analysis--covered so well by Baker in Media, Markets, and Democracy--as to why mass-media markets do not reflect the preferences of their audiences very well. Presented here is a tweak of an older set of analyses of whether monopoly or competition is better in mass-media markets to illustrate the relationship between markets, channels, and diversity of content. In chapter 6, I describe in greater detail the SteinerBeebe model of diversity and number of channels. For our purposes here, it is enough to note that this model shows how advertiser-supported media tend to program lowest-common-denominator programs, intended to "capture the eyeballs" of the largest possible number of viewers. These media do not seek to identify what viewers intensely want to watch, but tend to clear programs that are tolerable enough to viewers so that they do not switch off their television. The presence or absence of smaller-segment oriented television depends on the shape of demand in an audience, the number of channels available to serve that audience, and the ownership structure. The relationship between diversity of content and diversity of structure or ownership ,{[pg 166]}, is not smooth. It occurs in leaps. Small increases in the number of outlets continue to serve large clusters of low-intensity preferences--that is, what people find acceptable. A new channel that is added will more often try to take a bite out of a large pie represented by some lowest-commondenominator audience segment than to try to serve a new niche market. Only after a relatively high threshold number of outlets are reached do advertiser-supported media have sufficient reason to try to capture much smaller and higher-intensity preference clusters--what people are really interested in. The upshot is that if all storytellers in society are profit maximizing and operate in a market, the number of storytellers and venues matters tremendously for the diversity of stories told in a society. It is quite possible to have very active market competition in how well the same narrow set of stories are told, as opposed to what stories are told, even though there are many people who would rather hear different stories altogether, but who are in clusters too small, too poor, or too uncoordinated to persuade the storytellers to change their stories rather than their props. +={ Baker, Edwin } + +The networked information economy is departing from the industrial information economy along two dimensions that suggest a radical increase in the number of storytellers and the qualitative diversity of stories told. At the simplest level, the cost of a channel is so low that some publication capacity is becoming available to practically every person in society. Ranging from an e-mail account, to a few megabytes of hosting capacity to host a subscriber's Web site, to space on a peer-to-peer distribution network available for any kind of file (like FreeNet or eDonkey), individuals are now increasingly in possession of the basic means necessary to have an outlet for their stories. The number of channels is therefore in the process of jumping from some infinitesimally small fraction of the population--whether this fraction is three networks or five hundred channels almost does not matter by comparison--to a number of channels roughly equal to the number of users. This dramatic increase in the number of channels is matched by the fact that the low costs of communications and production enable anyone who wishes to tell a story to do so, whether or not the story they tell will predictably capture enough of a paying (or advertising-susceptible) audience to recoup production costs. Self-expression, religious fervor, hobby, community seeking, political mobilization, any one of the many and diverse reasons that might drive us to want to speak to others is now a sufficient reason to enable us to do so in mediated form to people both distant and close. The basic filter of marketability has been removed, allowing anything ,{[pg 167]}, that emerges out of the great diversity of human experience, interest, taste, and expressive motivation to flow to and from everyone connected to everyone else. Given that all diversity within the industrial information economy needed to flow through the marketability filter, the removal of that filter marks a qualitative increase in the range and diversity of life options, opinions, tastes, and possible life plans available to users of the networked information economy. + +The image of everyone being equally able to tell stories brings, perhaps more crisply than any other image, two critical objections to the attractiveness of the networked information economy: quality and cacophony. The problem of quality is easily grasped, but is less directly connected to autonomy. Having many high school plays and pickup basketball games is not the same as having Hollywood movies or the National Basketball Association (NBA). The problem of quality understood in these terms, to the extent that the shift from industrial to networked information production in fact causes it, does not represent a threat to autonomy as much as a welfare cost of making the autonomy-enhancing change. More troubling from the perspective of autonomy is the problem of information overload, which is related to, but distinct from, production quality. The cornucopia of stories out of which each of us can author our own will only enhance autonomy if it does not resolve into a cacophony of meaningless noise. How, one might worry, can a system of information production enhance the ability of an individual to author his or her life, if it is impossible to tell whether this or that particular story or piece of information is credible, or whether it is relevant to the individual's particular experience? Will individuals spend all their time sifting through mounds of inane stories and fairy tales, instead of evaluating which life is best for them based on a small and manageable set of credible and relevant stories? None of the philosophical accounts of substantive autonomy suggests that there is a linearly increasing relationship between the number of options open to an individual--or in this case, perceivable by an individual--and that person's autonomy. Information overload and decision costs can get in the way of actually living one's autonomously selected life. + +The quality problem is often raised in public discussions of the Internet, and takes the form of a question: Where will high-quality information products, like movies, come from? This form of the objection, while common, is underspecified normatively and overstated descriptively. First, it is not at all clear what might be meant by "quality," insofar as it is a characteristic of ,{[pg 168]}, information, knowledge, and cultural production that is negatively affected by the shift from an industrial to a networked information economy. Chapter 2 explains that information has always been produced in various modalities, not only in market-oriented organizations and certainly not in proprietary strategies. Political theory is not "better" along any interesting dimension when written by someone aiming to maximize her own or her publisher's commercial profits. Most of the commercial, proprietary online encyclopedias are not better than /{Wikipedia}/ along any clearly observable dimension. Moreover, many information and cultural goods are produced on a relational model, rather than a packaged-goods model. The emergence of the digitally networked environment does not much change their economics or sustainability. Professional theatre that depends on live performances is an example, as are musical performances. To the extent, therefore, that the emergence of substantial scope for nonmarket, distributed production in a networked information economy places pressure on "quality," it is quality of a certain kind. The threatened desiderata are those that are uniquely attractive about industrially produced mass-market products. The high-production-cost Hollywood movie or television series are the threatened species. Even that species is not entirely endangered, and the threat varies for different industries, as explained in some detail in chapter 11. Some movies, particularly those currently made for video release only, may well, in fact, recede. However, truly high-production-value movies will continue to have a business model through release windows other than home video distribution. Independently, the pressure on advertising-supported television from multichannel video-- cable and satellite--on the other hand, is pushing for more low-cost productions like reality TV. That internal development in mass media, rather than the networked information economy, is already pushing industrial producers toward low-cost, low-quality productions. Moreover, as a large section of chapter 7 illustrates, peer production and nonmarket production are producing desirable public information--news and commentary--that offer qualities central to democratic discourse. Chapter 8 discusses how these two forms of production provide a more transparent and plastic cultural environment--both central to the individual's capacity for defining his or her goals and options. What emerges in the networked information environment, therefore, will not be a system for low-quality amateur mimicry of existing commercial products. What will emerge is space for much more expression, from diverse sources and of diverse qualities. Freedom--the freedom to speak, but also to be free from manipulation and to be cognizant ,{[pg 169]}, of many and diverse options--inheres in this radically greater diversity of information, knowledge, and culture through which to understand the world and imagine how one could be. +={ high-production value content } + +Rejecting the notion that there will be an appreciable loss of quality in some absolute sense does not solve the deeper problem of information overload, or having too much information to be able to focus or act upon it. Having too much information with no real way of separating the wheat from the chaff forms what we might call the Babel objection. Individuals must have access to some mechanism that sifts through the universe of information, knowledge, and cultural moves in order to whittle them down to a manageable and usable scope. The question then becomes whether the networked information economy, given the human need for filtration, actually improves the information environment of individuals relative to the industrial information economy. There are three elements to the answer: First, as a baseline, it is important to recognize the power that inheres in the editorial function. The extent to which information overload inhibits autonomy relative to the autonomy of an individual exposed to a well-edited information flow depends on how much the editor who whittles down the information flow thereby gains power over the life of the user of the editorial function, and how he or she uses that power. Second, there is the question of whether users can select and change their editor freely, or whether the editorial function is bundled with other communicative functions and sold by service providers among which users have little choice. Finally, there is the understanding that filtration and accreditation are themselves information goods, like any other, and that they too can be produced on a commonsbased, nonmarket model, and therefore without incurring the autonomy deficit that a reintroduction of property to solve the Babel objection would impose. +={ accreditation +8 ; + Babel objection +9 ; + filtering +8 ; + information overload and Babel objection +9 ; + relevance filtering +8 +} + +Relevance filtration and accreditation are integral parts of all communications. A communication must be relevant for a given sender to send to a given recipient and relevant for the recipient to receive. Accreditation further filters relevant information for credibility. Decisions of filtration for purposes of relevance and accreditation are made with reference to the values of the person filtering the information, not the values of the person receiving the information. For instance, the editor of a cable network newsmagazine decides whether a given story is relevant to send out. The owner of the cable system decides whether it is, in the aggregate, relevant to its viewers to see that newsmagazine on its system. Only if both so decide, does each viewer ,{[pg 170]}, get the residual choice of whether to view the story. Of the three decisions that must coincide to mark the newsmagazine as relevant to the viewer, only one is under the control of the individual recipient. And, while the editor's choice might be perceived in some sense as inherent to the production of the information, the cable operator's choice is purely a function of its role as proprietor of the infrastructure. The point to focus on is that the recipient's judgment is dependent on the cable operator's decision as to whether to release the program. The primary benefit of proprietary systems as mechanisms of avoiding the problem of information overload or the Babel objection is precisely the fact that the individual cannot exercise his own judgment as to all the programs that the cable operator--or other commercial intermediary between someone who makes a statement and someone who might receive it--has decided not to release. +={ culture : + shaping perceptions of others +1 ; + manipulating perceptions of others +1 ; + perceptions of others, shaping +1 ; + shaping perceptions of others +1 +} + +As with any flow, control over a necessary passageway or bottleneck in the course of a communication gives the person controlling that point the power to direct the entire flow downstream from it. This power enables the provision of a valuable filtration service, which promises the recipient that he or she will not spend hours gazing at irrelevant materials. However, filtration only enhances the autonomy of users if the editor's notions of relevance and quality resemble those of the sender and the recipient. Imagine a recipient who really wants to be educated about African politics, but also likes sports. Under perfect conditions, he would seek out information on African politics most of the time, with occasional searches for information on sports. The editor, however, makes her money by selling advertising. For her, the relevant information is whatever will keep the viewer's attention most closely on the screen while maintaining a pleasantly acquisitive mood. Given a choice between transmitting information about famine in Sudan, which she worries will make viewers feel charitable rather than acquisitive, and transmitting a football game that has no similar adverse effects, she will prefer the latter. The general point should be obvious. For purposes of enhancing the autonomy of the user, the filtering and accreditation function suffers from an agency problem. To the extent that the values of the editor diverge from those of the user, an editor who selects relevant information based on her values and plans for the users does not facilitate user autonomy, but rather imposes her own preferences regarding what should be relevant to users given her decisions about their life choices. A parallel effect occurs with accreditation. An editor might choose to treat as credible a person whose views or manner of presentation draw audiences, rather than necessary ,{[pg 171]}, the wisest or best-informed of commentators. The wide range in quality of talking heads on television should suffice as an example. The Babel objection may give us good reason to pause before we celebrate the networked information economy, but it does not provide us with reasons to celebrate the autonomy effects of the industrial information economy. +={ behavior : + number and variety of options ; + blocked access : + autonomy and +1 ; + diversity : + of behavioral options ; + freedom : + behavioral options ; + options, behavioral ; + variety of behavioral options ; + number of behavioral options +} + +The second component of the response to the Babel objection has to do with the organization of filtration and accreditation in the industrial information economy. The cable operator owns its cable system by virtue of capital investment and (perhaps) expertise in laying cables, hooking up homes, and selling video services. However, it is control over the pipeline into the home that gives it the editorial role in the materials that reach the home. Given the concentrated economics of cable systems, this editorial power is not easy to replace and is not subject to open competition. The same phenomenon occurs with other media that are concentrated and where the information production and distribution functions are integrated with relevance filtration and accreditation: from one-newspaper towns to broadcasters or cable broadband service providers. An edited environment that frees the individual to think about and choose from a small selection of information inputs becomes less attractive when the editor takes on that role as a result of the ownership of carriage media, a large printing press, or copyrights in existing content, rather than as a result of selection by the user as a preferred editor or filter. The existence of an editor means that there is less information for an individual to process. It does not mean that the values according to which the information was pared down are those that the user would have chosen absent the tied relationship between editing and either proprietary content production or carriage. +={ accreditation : + as distributed system +1 ; + distributed filtering and accreditation +1 ; + filtering : + as distributed system +1 ; + relevance filtering : + as distributed system +1 +} + +Finally, and most important, just like any other form of information, knowledge, and culture, relevance and accreditation can be, and are, produced in a distributed fashion. Instead of relying on the judgment of a record label and a DJ of a commercial radio station for what music is worth listening to, users can compare notes as to what they like, and give music to friends whom they think will like it. This is the virtue of music file-sharing systems as distribution systems. Moreover, some of the most interesting experiments in peer production described in chapter 3 are focused on filtration. From the discussions of /{Wikipedia}/ to the moderation and metamoderation scheme of Slashdot, and from the sixty thousand volunteers that make up the Open Directory Project to the PageRank system used by Google, the means of filtering data are being produced within the networked information ,{[pg 172]}, economy using peer production and the coordinate patterns of nonproprietary production more generally. The presence of these filters provides the most important answer to the Babel objection. The presence of filters that do not depend on proprietary control, and that do not bundle proprietary content production and carriage services with filtering, offers a genuinely distinct approach toward presenting autonomous individuals with a choice among different filters that reflect genuinely diverse motivations and organizational forms of the providers. + +Beyond the specific efforts at commons-based accreditation and relevance filtration, we are beginning to observe empirically that patterns of use of the Internet and the World Wide Web exhibit a significant degree of order. In chapter 7, I describe in detail and apply the literature that has explored network topology to the Babel objection in the context of democracy and the emerging networked public sphere, but its basic lesson applies here as well. In brief, the structure of linking on the Internet suggests that, even without quasi-formal collaborative filtering, the coordinate behavior of many autonomous individuals settles on an order that permits us to make sense of the tremendous flow of information that results from universal practical ability to speak and create. We observe the Web developing an order--with high-visibility nodes, and clusters of thickly connected "regions" where groups of Web sites accredit each other by mutual referencing. The high-visibility Web sites provide points of condensation for informing individual choices, every bit as much as they form points of condensation for public discourse. The enormous diversity of topical and context-dependent clustering, whose content is nonetheless available for anyone to reach from anywhere, provides both a way of slicing through the information and rendering it comprehensible, and a way of searching for new sources of information beyond those that one interacts with as a matter of course. The Babel objection is partly solved, then, by the fact that people tend to congregate around common choices. We do this not as a result of purposeful manipulation, but rather because in choosing whether or not to read something, we probably give some weight to whether or not other people have chosen to read it. Unless one assumes that individual human beings are entirely dissimilar from each other, then the fact that many others have chosen to read something is a reasonable signal that it may be worthwhile for me to read. This phenomenon is both universal--as we see with the fact that Google successfully provides useful ranking by aggregating all judgments around the Web as to the relevance of any given Web site--and recursively ,{[pg 173]}, present within interest-based and context-based clusters or groups. The clustering and actual degree distribution in the Web suggests, however, that people do not simply follow the herd--they will not read whatever a majority reads. Rather, they will make additional rough judgments about which other people's preferences are most likely to predict their own, or which topics to look in. From these very simple rules--other people share something with me in their tastes, and some sets of other people share more with me than others--we see the Babel objection solved on a distributed model, without anyone exerting formal legal control or practical economic power. +={ network topology ; + structure of network ; + topology, network +} + +Why, however, is this not a simple reintroduction of heteronomy, of dependence on the judgment of others that subjects individuals to their control? The answer is that, unlike with proprietary filters imposed at bottlenecks or gateways, attention-distribution patterns emerge from many small-scale, independent choices where free choice exists. They are not easily manipulable by anyone. Significantly, the millions of Web sites that do not have high traffic do not "go out of business." As Clay Shirky puts it, while my thoughts about the weekend are unlikely to be interesting to three random users, they may well be interesting, and a basis for conversation, for three of my close friends. The fact that power law distributions of attention to Web sites result from random distributions of interests, not from formal or practical bottlenecks that cannot be worked around, means that whenever an individual chooses to search based on some mechanism other than the simplest, thinnest belief that individuals are all equally similar and dissimilar, a different type of site will emerge as highly visible. Topical sites cluster, unsurprisingly, around topical preference groups; one site does not account for all readers irrespective of their interests. We, as individuals, also go through an iterative process of assigning a likely relevance to the judgments of others. Through this process, we limit the information overload that would threaten to swamp our capacity to know; we diversify the sources of information to which we expose ourselves; and we avoid a stifling dependence on an editor whose judgments we cannot circumvent. We might spend some of our time using the most general, "human interest has some overlap" algorithm represented by Google for some things, but use political common interest, geographic or local interest, hobbyist, subject matter, or the like, to slice the universe of potential others with whose judgments we will choose to affiliate for any given search. By a combination of random searching and purposeful deployment of social mapping--who is likely to be interested in what is relevant to me now--we can solve the Babel objection while subjecting ,{[pg 174]}, ourselves neither to the legal and market power of proprietors of communications infrastructure or media products nor to the simple judgments of the undifferentiated herd. These observations have the virtue of being not only based on rigorous mathematical and empirical studies, as we see in chapter 7, but also being more consistent with intuitive experience of anyone who has used the Internet for any decent length of time. We do not degenerate into mindless meandering through a cacophonous din. We find things we want quite well. We stumble across things others suggest to us. When we do go on an unplanned walk, within a very short number of steps we either find something interesting or go back to looking in ways that are more self-conscious and ordered. +={ Shirky, Clay } + +The core response to the Babel objection is, then, to accept that filtration is crucial to an autonomous individual. Nonetheless, that acknowledgement does not suggest that the filtration and accreditation systems that the industrial information economy has in fact produced, tied to proprietary control over content production and exchange, are the best means to protect autonomous individuals from the threat of paralysis due to information overload. Property in infrastructure and content affords control that can be used to provide filtration. To that extent, property provides the power for some people to shape the will-formation processes of others. The adoption of distributed information-production systems--both structured as cooperative peer-production enterprises and unstructured coordinate results of individual behavior, like the clustering of preferences around Web sites--does not mean that filtration and accreditation lose their importance. It only means that autonomy is better served when these communicative functions, like others, are available from a nonproprietary, open model of production alongside the proprietary mechanisms of filtration. Being autonomous in this context does not mean that we have to make all the information, read it all, and sift through it all by ourselves. It means that the combination of institutional and practical constraints on who can produce information, who can access it, and who can determine what is worth reading leaves each individual with a substantial role in determining what he shall read, and whose judgment he shall adhere to in sifting through the information environment, for what purposes, and under what circumstances. As always in the case of autonomy for context-bound individuals, the question is the relative role that individuals play, not some absolute, context-independent role that could be defined as being the condition of freedom. + +The increasing feasibility of nonmarket, nonproprietary production of information, ,{[pg 175]}, knowledge, and culture, and of communications and computation capacity holds the promise of increasing the degree of autonomy for individuals in the networked information economy. By removing basic capital and organizational constraints on individual action and effective cooperation, the networked information economy allows individuals to do more for and by themselves, and to form associations with others whose help they require in pursuing their plans. We are beginning to see a shift from the highly constrained roles of employee and consumer in the industrial economy, to more flexible, self-authored roles of user and peer participant in cooperative ventures, at least for some part of life. By providing as commons a set of core resources necessary for perceiving the state of the world, constructing one's own perceptions of it and one's own contributions to the information environment we all occupy, the networked information economy diversifies the set of constraints under which individuals can view the world and attenuates the extent to which users are subject to manipulation and control by the owners of core communications and information systems they rely on. By making it possible for many more diversely motivated and organized individuals and groups to communicate with each other, the emerging model of information production provides individuals with radically different sources and types of stories, out of which we can work to author our own lives. Information, knowledge, and culture can now be produced not only by many more people than could do so in the industrial information economy, but also by individuals and in subjects and styles that could not pass the filter of marketability in the mass-media environment. The result is a proliferation of strands of stories and of means of scanning the universe of potential stories about how the world is and how it might become, leaving individuals with much greater leeway to choose, and therefore a much greater role in weaving their own life tapestry. ,{[pg 176]}, + +1~6 Chapter 6 - Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media +={ commercial mass media : + See also traditional model of communication commercial mass media, political freedom and +53 ; + mass media, political freedom and +53 ; + political freedom, mass media and +53 +} + +Modern democracies and mass media have coevolved throughout the twentieth century. The first modern national republics--the early American Republic, the French Republic from the Revolution to the Terror, the Dutch Republic, and the early British parliamentary monarchy--preexisted mass media. They provide us with some model of the shape of the public sphere in a republic without mass media, what Jurgen Habermas called the bourgeois public sphere. However, the expansion of democracies in complex modern societies has largely been a phenomenon of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries--in particular, the post-World War II years. During this period, the platform of the public sphere was dominated by mass media--print, radio, and television. In authoritarian regimes, these means of mass communication were controlled by the state. In democracies, they operated either under state ownership, with varying degrees of independence from the sitting government, or under private ownership financially dependent on advertising markets. We do not, therefore, have examples of complex modern democracies whose public sphere is built on a platform that is widely ,{[pg 177]}, distributed and independent of both government control and market demands. The Internet as a technology, and the networked information economy as an organizational and social model of information and cultural production, promise the emergence of a substantial alternative platform for the public sphere. The networked public sphere, as it is currently developing, suggests that it will have no obvious points of control or exertion of influence--either by fiat or by purchase. It seems to invert the mass-media model in that it is driven heavily by what dense clusters of users find intensely interesting and engaging, rather than by what large swathes of them find mildly interesting on average. And it promises to offer a platform for engaged citizens to cooperate and provide observations and opinions, and to serve as a watchdog over society on a peer-production model. +={ democratic societies +1 ; + networked public sphere : + defined +4 ; + public sphere +4 +} + +% ={Habermas, Jurgen} + +The claim that the Internet democratizes is hardly new. "Everyone a pamphleteer" has been an iconic claim about the Net since the early 1990s. It is a claim that has been subjected to significant critique. What I offer, therefore, in this chapter and the next is not a restatement of the basic case, but a detailed analysis of how the Internet and the emerging networked information economy provide us with distinct improvements in the structure of the public sphere over the mass media. I will also explain and discuss the solutions that have emerged within the networked environment itself to some of the persistent concerns raised about democracy and the Internet: the problems of information overload, fragmentation of discourse, and the erosion of the watchdog function of the media. + +For purposes of considering political freedom, I adopt a very limited definition of "public sphere." The term is used in reference to the set of practices that members of a society use to communicate about matters they understand to be of public concern and that potentially require collective action or recognition. Moreover, not even all communications about matters of potential public concern can be said to be part of the public sphere. Communications within self-contained relationships whose boundaries are defined independently of the political processes for collective action are "private," if those communications remain purely internal. Dinner-table conversations, grumblings at a bridge club, or private letters have that characteristic, if they occur in a context where they are not later transmitted across the associational boundaries to others who are not part of the family or the bridge club. Whether these conversations are, or are not, part of the public sphere depends on the actual communications practices in a given society. The same practices can become an initial step in generating public opinion ,{[pg 178]}, in the public sphere if they are nodes in a network of communications that do cross associational boundaries. A society with a repressive regime that controls the society-wide communications facilities nonetheless may have an active public sphere if social networks and individual mobility are sufficient to allow opinions expressed within discrete associational settings to spread throughout a substantial portion of the society and to take on political meaning for those who discuss them. The public sphere is, then, a sociologically descriptive category. It is a term for signifying how, if at all, people in a given society speak to each other in their relationship as constituents about what their condition is and what they ought or ought not to do as a political unit. This is a purposefully narrow conception of the public sphere. It is intended to focus on the effects of the networked environment on what has traditionally been understood to be political participation in a republic. I postpone consideration of a broader conception of the public sphere, and of the political nature of who gets to decide meaning and how cultural interpretations of the conditions of life and the alternatives open to a society are created and negotiated in a society until chapter 8. +={ private communications } + +The practices that define the public sphere are structured by an interaction of culture, organization, institutions, economics, and technical communications infrastructure. The technical platforms of ink and rag paper, handpresses, and the idea of a postal service were equally present in the early American Republic, Britain, and France of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, the degree of literacy, the social practices of newspaper reading, the relative social egalitarianism as opposed to elitism, the practices of political suppression or subsidy, and the extent of the postal system led to a more egalitarian, open public sphere, shaped as a network of smaller-scale local clusters in the United States, as opposed to the more tightly regulated and elitist national and metropolis-centered public spheres of France and Britain. The technical platforms of mass-circulation print and radio were equally available in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, in Britain, and in the United States in the 1930s. Again, however, the vastly different political and legal structures of the former created an authoritarian public sphere, while the latter two, both liberal public spheres, differed significantly in the business organization and economic model of production, the legal framework and the cultural practices of reading and listening-- leading to the then still elitist overlay on the public sphere in Britain relative to a more populist public sphere in the United States. +={ commercial mass media : + as platform for public sphere +3 | structure of +3 ; + commercial model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +3 | structure of mass media +3 ; + industrial model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +3 | structure of mass media +3 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + emerging role of mass media +3 | structure of mass media +3 ; + mass media : + as platform for public sphere +3 | structure of +3 ; + mass media : + commercial platform for public sphere +3 ; + networked public sphere : + mass-media platform for +3 ; + political freedom, mass media and : + commercial platform for public sphere +3 ; + public sphere : + mass media platform for +3 ; + structure of mass media +3 ; + traditional model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +3 | structure of mass media +3 +} + +Mass media structured the public sphere of the twentieth century in all ,{[pg 179]}, advanced modern societies. They combined a particular technical architecture, a particular economic cost structure, a limited range of organizational forms, two or three primary institutional models, and a set of cultural practices typified by consumption of finished media goods. The structure of the mass media resulted in a relatively controlled public sphere--although the degree of control was vastly different depending on whether the institutional model was liberal or authoritarian--with influence over the debate in the public sphere heavily tilted toward those who controlled the means of mass communications. The technical architecture was a one-way, hub-and-spoke structure, with unidirectional links to its ends, running from the center to the periphery. A very small number of production facilities produced large amounts of identical copies of statements or communications, which could then be efficiently sent in identical form to very large numbers of recipients. There was no return loop to send observations or opinions back from the edges to the core of the architecture in the same channel and with similar salience to the communications process, and no means within the massmedia architecture for communication among the end points about the content of the exchanges. Communications among the individuals at the ends were shunted to other media--personal communications or telephones-- which allowed communications among the ends. However, these edge media were either local or one-to-one. Their social reach, and hence potential political efficacy, was many orders of magnitude smaller than that of the mass media. + +The economic structure was typified by high-cost hubs and cheap, ubiquitous, reception-only systems at the ends. This led to a limited range of organizational models available for production: those that could collect sufficient funds to set up a hub. These included: state-owned hubs in most countries; advertising-supported commercial hubs in some of the liberal states, most distinctly in the United States; and, particularly for radio and television, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) model or hybrid models like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Canada. The role of hybrid and purely commercial, advertising-supported media increased substantially around the globe outside the United States in the last two to three decades of the twentieth century. Over the course of the century, there also emerged civil-society or philanthropy-supported hubs, like the party presses in Europe, nonprofit publications like Consumer Reports (later, in the United States), and, more important, public radio and television. The oneway technical architecture and the mass-audience organizational model underwrote ,{[pg 180]}, the development of a relatively passive cultural model of media consumption. Consumers (or subjects, in authoritarian systems) at the ends of these systems would treat the communications that filled the public sphere as finished goods. These were to be treated not as moves in a conversation, but as completed statements whose addressees were understood to be passive: readers, listeners, and viewers. + +The Internet's effect on the public sphere is different in different societies, depending on what salient structuring components of the existing public sphere its introduction perturbs. In authoritarian countries, it is the absence of a single or manageably small set of points of control that is placing the greatest pressure on the capacity of the regimes to control their public sphere, and thereby to simplify the problem of controlling the actions of the population. In liberal countries, the effect of the Internet operates through its implications for economic cost and organizational form. In both cases, however, the most fundamental and potentially long-standing effect that Internet communications are having is on the cultural practice of public communication. The Internet allows individuals to abandon the idea of the public sphere as primarily constructed of finished statements uttered by a small set of actors socially understood to be "the media" (whether state owned or commercial) and separated from society, and to move toward a set of social practices that see individuals as participating in a debate. Statements in the public sphere can now be seen as invitations for a conversation, not as finished goods. Individuals can work their way through their lives, collecting observations and forming opinions that they understand to be practically capable of becoming moves in a broader public conversation, rather than merely the grist for private musings. + +2~ DESIGN CHARACTERISTICS OF A COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM FOR A LIBERAL PUBLIC PLATFORM OR A LIBERAL PUBLIC SPHERE +={ commercial mass media : + design characteristics of liberal public sphere +8 ; + liberal societies : + design of public sphere +8 ; + mass media, political freedom and : + design characteristics of liberal public sphere +8 ; + networked public sphere : + liberal, design characteristics of +8 ; + political freedom, mass media and : + design characteristics of liberal public sphere +8 ; + public sphere : + liberal, design characteristics of +8 +} + +How is private opinion about matters of collective, formal, public action formed? How is private opinion communicated to others in a form and in channels that allow it to be converted into a public, political opinion, and a position worthy of political concern by the formal structures of governance of a society? How, ultimately, is such a political and public opinion converted into formal state action? These questions are central to understanding how ,{[pg 181]}, individuals in complex contemporary societies, located at great distances from each other and possessing completely different endowments of material, intellectual, social, and formal ties and capabilities, can be citizens of the same democratic polity rather than merely subjects of a more or less responsive authority. In the idealized Athenian agora or New England town hall, the answers are simple and local. All citizens meet in the agora, they speak in a way that all relevant citizens can hear, they argue with each other, and ultimately they also constitute the body that votes and converts the opinion that emerges into a legitimate action of political authority. Of course, even in those small, locally bounded polities, things were never quite so simple. Nevertheless, the idealized version does at least give us a set of functional characteristics that we might seek in a public sphere: a place where people can come to express and listen to proposals for agenda items--things that ought to concern us as members of a polity and that have the potential to become objects of collective action; a place where we can make and gather statements of fact about the state of our world and about alternative courses of action; where we can listen to opinions about the relative quality and merits of those facts and alternative courses of action; and a place where we can bring our own concerns to the fore and have them evaluated by others. + +Understood in this way, the public sphere describes a social communication process. Habermas defines the public sphere as "a network for communicating information and points of view (i.e., opinions expressing affirmative or negative attitudes)"; which, in the process of communicating this information and these points of view, filters and synthesizes them "in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions."~{ Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Contributions to Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). }~ Taken in this descriptive sense, the public sphere does not relate to a particular form of public discourse that is normatively attractive from some perspective or another. It defines a particular set of social practices that are necessary for the functioning of any complex social system that includes elements of governing human beings. There are authoritarian public spheres, where communications are regimented and controlled by the government in order to achieve acquiescence and to mobilize support, rather than relying solely on force to suppress dissent and opposition. There are various forms of liberal public spheres, constituted by differences in the political and communications systems scattered around liberal democracies throughout the world. The BBC or the state-owned televisions throughout postwar Western European democracies, for example, constituted the public spheres in different ,{[pg 182]}, ways than did the commercial mass media that dominated the American public sphere. As advertiser-supported mass media have come to occupy a larger role even in places where they were not dominant before the last quarter of the twentieth century, the long American experience with this form provides useful insight globally. +={ Habermas, Jurgen } + +In order to consider the relative advantages and failures of various platforms for a public sphere, we need to define a minimal set of desiderata that such a platform must possess. My point is not to define an ideal set of constraints and affordances of the public sphere that would secure legitimacy or would be most attractive under one conception of democracy or another. Rather, my intention is to define a design question: What characteristics of a communications system and practices are sufficiently basic to be desired by a wide range of conceptions of democracy? With these in hand, we will be able to compare the commercial mass media and the emerging alternatives in the digitally networked environment. + +/{Universal Intake}/. Any system of government committed to the idea that, in principle, the concerns of all those governed by that system are equally respected as potential proper subjects for political action and that all those governed have a say in what government should do requires a public sphere that can capture the observations of all constituents. These include at least their observations about the state of the world as they perceive and understand it, and their opinions of the relative desirability of alternative courses of action with regard to their perceptions or those of others. It is important not to confuse "universal intake" with more comprehensive ideas, such as that every voice must be heard in actual political debates, or that all concerns deserve debate and answer. Universal intake does not imply these broader requirements. It is, indeed, the role of filtering and accreditation to whittle down what the universal intake function drags in and make it into a manageable set of political discussion topics and interventions. However, the basic requirement of a public sphere is that it must in principle be susceptible to perceiving and considering the issues of anyone who believes that their condition is a matter appropriate for political consideration and collective action. The extent to which that personal judgment about what the political discourse should be concerned with actually coincides with what the group as a whole will consider in the public sphere is a function of the filtering and accreditation functions. ,{[pg 183]}, +={ information production inputs : + universal intake +1 ; + inputs to production : + universal intake +1 ; + production inputs : + universal intake +1 ; + universal intake +1 +} + +/{Filtering for Potential Political Relevance}/. Not everything that someone considers to be a proper concern for collective action is perceived as such by most other participants in the political debate. A public sphere that has some successful implementation of universal intake must also have a filter to separate out those matters that are plausibly within the domain of organized political action and those that are not. What constitutes the range of plausible political topics is locally contingent, changes over time, and is itself a contested political question, as was shown most obviously by the "personal is political" feminist intellectual campaign. While it left "my dad won't buy me the candy I want" out of the realm of the political, it insisted on treating "my husband is beating me" as critically relevant in political debate. An overly restrictive filtering system is likely to impoverish a public sphere and rob it of its capacity to develop legitimate public opinion. It tends to exclude views and concerns that are in fact held by a sufficiently large number of people, or to affect people in sufficiently salient ways that they turn out, in historical context, to place pressure on the political system that fails to consider them or provide a legitimate answer, if not a solution. A system that is too loose tends to fail because it does not allow a sufficient narrowing of focus to provide the kind of sustained attention and concentration necessary to consider a matter and develop a range of public opinions on it. +={ filtering +1 ; + relevance filtering +1 +} + +/{Filtering for Accreditation}/. Accreditation is different from relevance, requires different kinds of judgments, and may be performed in different ways than basic relevance filtering. A statement like "the president has sold out space policy to Martians" is different from "my dad won't buy me the candy I want." It is potentially as relevant as "the president has sold out energy policy to oil companies." What makes the former a subject for entertainment, not political debate, is its lack of credibility. Much of the function of journalistic professional norms is to create and preserve the credibility of the professional press as a source of accreditation for the public at large. Parties provide a major vehicle for passing the filters of both relevance and accreditation. Academia gives its members a source of credibility, whose force (ideally) varies with the degree to which their statements come out of, and pertain to, their core roles as creators of knowledge through their disciplinary constraints. Civil servants in reasonably professional systems can provide a source of accreditation. Large corporations have come to play such a role, though with greater ambiguity. The emerging role of nongovernment organizations ,{[pg 184]}, (NGOs), very often is intended precisely to preorganize opinion that does not easily pass the relevant public sphere's filters of relevance and accreditation and provide it with a voice that will. Note that accreditation of a move in political discourse is very different from accreditation of a move in, for example, academic discourse, because the objective of each system is different. In academic discourse, the fact that a large number of people hold a particular opinion ("the universe was created in seven days") does not render that opinion credible enough to warrant serious academic discussion. In political discourse, say, about public school curricula, the fact that a large number of people hold the same view and are inclined to have it taught in public schools makes that claim highly relevant and "credible." In other words, it is credible that this could become a political opinion that forms a part of public discourse with the potential to lead to public action. Filters, both for relevance and accreditation, provide a critical point of control over the debate, and hence are extremely important design elements. +={ accreditation ; + opinion, public : + synthesis of +} + +/{Synthesis of "Public Opinion."}/ The communications system that offers the platform for the public sphere must also enable the synthesis of clusters of individual opinion that are sufficiently close and articulated to form something more than private opinions held by some number of individuals. How this is done is tricky, and what counts as "public opinion" may vary among different theories of democracy. In deliberative conceptions, this might make requirements of the form of discourse. Civic republicans would focus on open deliberation among people who see their role as deliberating about the common good. Habermas would focus on deliberating under conditions that assure the absence of coercion, while Bruce Ackerman would admit to deliberation only arguments formulated so as to be neutral as among conceptions of the good. In pluralist conceptions, like John Rawls's in Political Liberalism, which do not seek ultimately to arrive at a common understanding but instead seek to peaceably clear competing positions as to how we ought to act as a polity, this might mean the synthesis of a position that has sufficient overlap among those who hold it that they are willing to sign on to a particular form of statement in order to get the bargaining benefits of scale as an interest group with a coherent position. That position then comes to the polls and the bargaining table as one that must be considered, overpowered, or bargained with. In any event, the platform has to provide some capacity to synthesize the finely disparate and varied versions of beliefs and positions held by actual individuals into articulated positions amenable for ,{[pg 185]}, consideration and adoption in the formal political sphere and by a system of government, and to render them in ways that make them sufficiently salient in the overall mix of potential opinions to form a condensation point for collective action. +={ Habermas, Jurgen ; + Ackerman, Bruce ; + clusters in network topology : + synthesis of public opinion ; + accreditation ; + opinion, public : + synthesis of ; + public opinion : + synthesis of ; + synthesis of public opinion ; + Rawls, John +} + +/{Independence from Government Control}/. The core role of the political public sphere is to provide a platform for converting privately developed observations, intuitions, and opinions into public opinions that can be brought to bear in the political system toward determining collective action. One core output of these communications is instructions to the administration sitting in government. To the extent that the platform is dependent on that same sitting government, there is a basic tension between the role of debate in the public sphere as issuing instructions to the executive and the interests of the sitting executive to retain its position and its agenda and have it ratified by the public. This does not mean that the communications system must exclude government from communicating its positions, explaining them, and advocating them. However, when it steps into the public sphere, the locus of the formation and crystallization of public opinion, the sitting administration must act as a participant in explicit conversation, and not as a platform controller that can tilt the platform in its direction. +={ government : + independence from control of ; + independence from government control ; + policy : + independence from government control +} + +2~ THE EMERGENCE OF THE COMMERCIAL MASS-MEDIA PLATFORM FOR THE PUBLIC SPHERE +={ commercial model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +1 ; + industrial model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +1 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + emerging role of mass media +1 ; + mass media : + as platform for public sphere +1 ; + mass media, political freedom and : + commercial platform for public sphere +1 ; + networked public sphere : + mass-media platform for +1 ; + political freedom, mass media and : + commercial platform for public sphere +1 ; + public sphere : + mass media platform for +1 ; + traditional model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +1 +} + +Throughout the twentieth century, the mass media have played a fundamental constitutive role in the construction of the public sphere in liberal democracies. Over this period, first in the United States and later throughout the world, the commercial, advertising-supported form of mass media has become dominant in both print and electronic media. Sometimes, these media have played a role that has drawn admiration as "the fourth estate." Here, the media are seen as a critical watchdog over government processes, and as a major platform for translating the mobilization of social movements into salient, and ultimately actionable, political statements. These same media, however, have also drawn mountains of derision for the power they wield, as well as fail to wield, and for the shallowness of public communication they promote in the normal course of the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers. Nowhere was this clearer than in the criticism of the large role that television came to play in American public culture and its public ,{[pg 186]}, sphere. Contemporary debates bear the imprint of the three major networks, which in the early 1980s still accounted for 92 percent of television viewers and were turned on and watched for hours a day in typical American homes. These inspired works like Neil Postman's /{Amusing Ourselves to Death or Robert Putnam's claim, in Bowling Alone}/, that television seemed to be the primary identifiable discrete cause of the decline of American civic life. Nevertheless, whether positive or negative, variants of the mass-media model of communications have been dominant throughout the twentieth century, in both print and electronic media. The mass-media model has been the dominant model of communications in both democracies and their authoritarian rivals throughout the period when democracy established itself, first against monarchies, and later against communism and fascism. To say that mass media were dominant is not to say that only technical systems of remote communications form the platform of the public sphere. As Theda Skocpol and Putnam have each traced in the context of the American and Italian polities, organizations and associations of personal civic involvement form an important platform for public participation. And yet, as both have recorded, these platforms have been on the decline. So "dominant" does not mean sole, but instead means overridingly important in the structuring of the public sphere. It is this dominance, not the very existence, of mass media that is being challenged by the emergence of the networked public sphere. +={ commercial press +2 ; + newspapers +2 ; + press, commercial +2 ; + print media, commercial +2 ; + radio +13 ; + Postman, Neil ; + television ; + commercial mass media : + as platform for public sphere +1 +} + +The roots of the contemporary industrial structure of mass media presage both the attractive and unattractive aspects of the media we see today. Pioneered by the Dutch printers of the seventeenth century, a commercial press that did not need to rely on government grants and printing contracts, or on the church, became a source of a constant flow of heterodox literature and political debate.~{ Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Jeremey Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac's Gazzette de Leyde (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). }~ However, a commercial press has always also been sensitive to the conditions of the marketplace--costs, audience, and competition. In seventeenth-century England, the Stationers' Monopoly provided its insiders enough market protection from competitors that its members were more than happy to oblige the Crown with a compliant press in exchange for monopoly. It was only after the demise of that monopoly that a genuinely political press appeared in earnest, only to be met by a combination of libel prosecutions, high stamp taxes, and outright bribery and acquisition by government.~{ Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 33-46. }~ These, like the more direct censorship and sponsorship relationships that typified the prerevolutionary French press, kept newspapers and gazettes relatively compliant, and their distribution largely limited to elite audiences. Political dissent did not form part of a stable and ,{[pg 187]}, independent market-based business model. As Paul Starr has shown, the evolution of the British colonies in America was different. While the first century or so of settlement saw few papers, and those mostly "authorized" gazettes, competition began to increase over the course of the eighteenth century. The levels of literacy, particularly in New England, were exceptionally high, the population was relatively prosperous, and the regulatory constraints that applied in England, including the Stamp Tax of 1712, did not apply in the colonies. As second and third newspapers emerged in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, and were no longer supported by the colonial governments through postal franchises, the public sphere became more contentious. This was now a public sphere whose voices were self-supporting, like Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette. The mobilization of much of this press during the revolutionary era, and the broad perception that it played an important role in constituting the American public, allowed the commercial press to continue to play an independent and critical role after the revolution as well, a fate not shared by the brief flowering of the press immediately after the French Revolution. A combination of high literacy and high government tolerance, but also of postal subsidies, led the new United States to have a number and diversity of newspapers unequalled anywhere else, with a higher weekly circulation by 1840 in the 17-million-strong United States than in all of Europe with its population then of 233 million. By 1830, when Tocqueville visited America, he was confronted with a widespread practice of newspaper reading--not only in towns, but in farflung farms as well, newspapers that were a primary organizing mechanism for political association.~{ Starr, Creation of the Media, 48-62, 86-87. }~ +={ Starr, Paul +1 ; + Franklin, Benjamin ; + Tocqueville, Alexis, de ; + de Tocqueville, Alexis ; + large-circulation press +1 +} + +This widespread development of small-circulation, mostly local, competitive commercial press that carried highly political and associational news and opinion came under pressure not from government, but from the economies of scale of the mechanical press, the telegraph, and the ever-expanding political and economic communities brought together by rail and industrialization. Harold Innis argued more than half a century ago that the increasing costs of mechanical presses, coupled with the much-larger circulation they enabled and the availability of a flow of facts from around the world through telegraph, reoriented newspapers toward a mass-circulation, relatively low-denominator advertising medium. These internal economies, as Alfred Chandler and, later, James Beniger showed in their work, intersected with the vast increase in industrial output, which in turn required new mechanisms of demand management--in other words, more sophisticated ,{[pg 188]}, advertising to generate and channel demand. In the 1830s, the Sun and Herald were published in New York on large-circulation scales, reducing prices to a penny a copy and shifting content from mostly politics and business news to new forms of reporting: petty crimes from the police courts, human-interest stories, and outright entertainment-value hoaxes.~{ Starr, Creation of the Media, 131-133. }~ The startup cost of founding such mass-circulation papers rapidly increased over the second quarter of the nineteenth century, as figure 6.1 illustrates. James Gordon Bennett founded the Herald in 1835, with an investment of five hundred dollars, equal to a little more than $10,400 in 2005 dollars. By 1840, the necessary investment was ten to twenty times greater, between five and ten thousand dollars, or $106,000?$212,000 in 2005 terms. By 1850, that amount had again grown tenfold, to $100,000, about $2.38 million in 2005.~{ Starr, Creation of the Media, 135. }~ In the span of fifteen years, the costs of starting a newspaper rose from a number that many could conceive of spending for a wide range of motivations using a mix of organizational forms, to something that required a more or less industrial business model to recoup a very substantial financial investment. The new costs reflected mutually reinforcing increases in organizational cost (because of the professionalization of the newspaper publishing model) and the introduction of high-capacity, higher-cost equipment: electric presses (1839); the Hoe double-cylinder rotary press (1846), which raised output from the five hundred to one thousand sheets per hour of the early steam presses (up from 250 sheets for the handpress) to twelve thousand sheets per hour; and eventually William Bullock's roll-fed rotary press that produced twelve thousand complete newspapers per hour by 1865. The introduction of telegraph and the emergence of news agencies--particularly the Associated Press (AP) in the United States and Reuters in England--completed the basic structure of the commercial printed press. These characteristics--relatively high cost, professional, advertising supported, dependent on access to a comparatively small number of news agencies (which, in the case of the AP, were often used to anticompetitive advantage by their members until the midtwentieth-century antitrust case)--continued to typify print media. With the introduction of competition from radio and television, these effects tended to lead to greater concentration, with a majority of papers facing no local competition, and an ever-increasing number of papers coming under the joint ownership of a very small number of news publishing houses. +={ Beniger, James ; + Chandler, Alfred ; + Titmuss, Richard ; + Bennett, James Gorden ; + Bullock, William +} + +{won_benkler_6_1.png "Figure 6.1: Start-up Costs of a Daily Newspaper, 1835-1850 (in 2005 dollars)" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +% moved image above paragraph instead of at start of page 189 of original text, joined logical paragraph ending page 188 and continued on page 189 after image + +The introduction of radio was the next and only serious potential inflection point, prior to the emergence of the Internet, at which some portion of the public sphere could have developed away from the advertiser- ,{[pg 189]}, supported mass-media model. In most of Europe, radio followed the path of state-controlled media, with variable degrees of freedom from the executive at different times and places. Britain developed the BBC, a public organization funded by government-imposed levies, but granted sufficient operational freedom to offer a genuine platform for a public sphere, as opposed to a reflection of the government's voice and agenda. While this model successfully developed what is perhaps the gold standard of broadcast journalism, it also grew as a largely elite institution throughout much of the twentieth century. The BBC model of state-based funding and monopoly with genuine editorial autonomy became the basis of the broadcast model in a number of former colonies: Canada and Australia adopted a hybrid model in the 1930s. This included a well-funded public broadcaster, but did not impose a monopoly in its favor, allowing commercial broadcasters to grow alongside it. Newly independent former colonies in the postwar era that became democracies, like India and Israel, adopted the model with monopoly, levy-based funding, and a degree of editorial independence. The most currently visible adoption of a hybrid model based on some state funding but with editorial freedom is Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite station partly funded by the Emir of Qatar, but apparently free to pursue its own editorial policy, whose coverage stands in sharp contrast to that of the state-run broadcasters ,{[pg 190]}, in the region. In none of these BBC-like places did broadcast diverge from the basic centralized communications model of the mass media, but it followed a path distinct from the commercial mass media. Radio, and later television, was a more tightly controlled medium than was the printed press; its intake, filtering, and synthesis of public discourse were relatively insulated from the pressure of both markets, which typified the American model, and politics, which typified the state-owned broadcasters. These were instead controlled by the professional judgments of their management and journalists, and showed both the high professionalism that accompanied freedom along both those dimensions and the class and professional elite filters that typify those who control the media under that organizational model. The United States took a different path that eventually replicated, extended, and enhanced the commercial, advertiser-supported mass-media model originated in the printed press. This model was to become the template for the development of similar broadcasters alongside the state-owned and independent BBC-model channels adopted throughout much of the rest of the world, and of programming production for newer distribution technologies, like cable and satellite stations. The birth of radio as a platform for the public sphere in the United States was on election night in 1920.~{ The following discussion of the birth of radio is adapted from Yochai Benkler, "Overcoming Agoraphobia: Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 11 (Winter 1997-1998): 287. That article provides the detailed support for the description. The major secondary works relied on are Erik Barnouw, A History of Broadcasting in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966-1970); Gleason Archer, History of Radio to 1926 (New York: Arno Press, 1971); and Philip T. Rosen, Modern Stentors: Radio Broadcasters and the Federal Government, 1920-1934 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980). }~ Two stations broadcast the election returns as their launchpad for an entirely new medium--wireless broadcast to a wide audience. One was the Detroit News amateur station, 8MK, a broadcast that was framed and understood as an internal communication of a technical fraternity--the many amateurs who had been trained in radio communications for World War I and who then came to form a substantial and engaged technical community. The other was KDKA Pittsburgh, launched by Westinghouse as a bid to create demand for radio receivers of a kind that it had geared up to make during the war. Over the following four or five years, it was unclear which of these two models of communication would dominate the new medium. By 1926, however, the industrial structure that would lead radio to follow the path of commercial, advertiser-supported, concentrated mass media, dependent on government licensing and specializing in influencing its own regulatory oversight process was already in place. +={ BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) ; + monopoly : + radio broadcasting ; + KDKA Pittsburgh ; + radio : + as public sphere platform +} + +Although this development had its roots in the industrial structure of radio production as it emerged from the first two decades of innovation and businesses in the twentieth century, it was shaped significantly by political-regulatory choices during the 1920s. At the turn of the twentieth century, radio was seen exclusively as a means of wireless telegraphy, emphasizing ,{[pg 191]}, ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communications. Although some amateurs experimented with voice programs, broadcast was a mode of point-to-point communications; entertainment was not seen as its function until the 1920s. The first decade and a half of radio in the United States saw rapid innovation and competition, followed by a series of patent suits aimed to consolidate control over the technology. By 1916, the ideal transmitter based on technology available at the time required licenses of patents held by Marconi, AT&T, General Electric (GE), and a few individuals. No licenses were in fact granted. The industry had reached stalemate. When the United States joined the war, however, the navy moved quickly to break the stalemate, effectively creating a compulsory cross-licensing scheme for war production, and brought in Westinghouse, the other major potential manufacturer of vacuum tubes alongside GE, as a participant in the industry. The two years following the war saw intervention by the U.S. government to assure that American radio industry would not be controlled by British Marconi because of concerns in the navy that British control over radio would render the United States vulnerable to the same tactic Britain used against Germany at the start of the war--cutting off all transoceanic telegraph communications. The navy brokered a deal in 1919 whereby a new company was created-- the Radio Corporation of America (RCA)--which bought Marconi's American business. By early 1920, RCA, GE, and AT&T entered into a patent cross-licensing model that would allow each to produce for a market segment: RCA would control transoceanic wireless telegraphy, while GE and AT&T's Western Electric subsidiary would make radio transmitters and sell them under the RCA brand. This left Westinghouse with production facilities developed for the war, but shut out of the existing equipment markets by the patent pool. Launching KDKA Pittsburgh was part of its response: Westinghouse would create demand for small receivers that it could manufacture without access to the patents held by the pool. The other part of its strategy consisted of acquiring patents that, within a few months, enabled Westinghouse to force its inclusion in the patent pool, redrawing the market division map to give Westinghouse 40 percent of the receiving equipment market. The first part of Westinghouse's strategy, adoption of broadcasting to generate demand for receivers, proved highly successful and in the long run more important. Within two years, there were receivers in 10 percent of American homes. Throughout the 1920s, equipment sales were big business. +={ KDKA Pittsburgh +1 ; + AT&T ; + GE (General Electric) ; + licensing : + radio +3 ; + Marconi ; + proprietary rights : + radio patents ; + radio : + patents ; + RCA (Radio Corporation of America) ; + Westinghouse +1 +} + +Radio stations, however, were not dominated by the equipment manufacturers, or by anyone else for that matter, in the first few years. While the ,{[pg 192]}, equipment manufacturers did build powerful stations like KDKA Pittsburgh, WJZ Newark, KYW Chicago (Westinghouse), and WGY Schenectady (GE), they did not sell advertising, but rather made their money from equipment sales. These stations did not, in any meaningful sense of the word, dominate the radio sphere in the first few years of radio, as the networks would indeed come to do within a decade. In November 1921, the first five licenses were issued by the Department of Commerce under the new category of "broadcasting" of "news, lectures, entertainment, etc." Within eight months, the department had issued another 453 licenses. Many of these went to universities, churches, and unions, as well as local shops hoping to attract business with their broadcasts. Universities, seeing radio as a vehicle for broadening their role, began broadcasting lectures and educational programming. Seventy-four institutes of higher learning operated stations by the end of 1922. The University of Nebraska offered two-credit courses whose lectures were transmitted over the air. Churches, newspapers, and department stores each forayed into this new space, much as we saw the emergence of Web sites for every organization over the course of the mid-1990s. Thousands of amateurs were experimenting with technical and format innovations. While receivers were substantially cheaper than transmitters, it was still possible to assemble and sell relatively cheap transmitters, for local communications, at prices sufficiently low that thousands of individual amateurs could take to the air. At this point in time, then, it was not yet foreordained that radio would follow the mass-media model, with a small number of well-funded speakers and hordes of passive listeners. Within a short period, however, a combination of technology, business practices, and regulatory decisions did in fact settle on the model, comprised of a small number of advertiser-supported national networks, that came to typify the American broadcast system throughout most of the rest of the century and that became the template for television as well. +={ university-owned-radio } + +Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, played a pivotal role in this development. Throughout the first few years after the war, Hoover had positioned himself as the champion of making control over radio a private market affair, allying himself both with commercial radio interests and with the amateurs against the navy and the postal service, each of which sought some form of nationalization of radio similar to what would happen more or less everywhere else in the world. In 1922, Hoover assembled the first of four annual radio conferences, representing radio manufacturers, broadcasters, and some engineers and amateurs. This forum became Hoover's primary ,{[pg 193]}, stage. Over the next four years, he used its annual meeting to derive policy recommendations, legitimacy, and cooperation for his regulatory action, all without a hint of authority under the Radio Act of 1912. Hoover relied heavily on the rhetoric of public interest and on the support of amateurs to justify his system of private broadcasting coordinated by the Department of Commerce. From 1922 on, however, he followed a pattern that would systematically benefit large commercial broadcasters over small ones; commercial broadcasters over educational and religious broadcasters; and the one-to-many broadcasts over the point-to-point, small-scale wireless telephony and telegraphy that the amateurs were developing. After January 1922, the department inserted a limitation on amateur licenses, excluding from their coverage the broadcast of "weather reports, market reports, music, concerts, speeches, news or similar information or entertainment." This, together with a Department of Commerce order to all amateurs to stop broadcasting at 360 meters (the wave assigned broadcasting), effectively limited amateurs to shortwave radiotelephony and telegraphy in a set of frequencies then thought to be commercially insignificant. In the summer, the department assigned broadcasters, in addition to 360 meters, another band, at 400 meters. Licenses in this Class B category were reserved for transmitters operating at power levels of 500-1,000 watts, who did not use phonograph records. These limitations on Class B licenses made the newly created channel a feasible home only to broadcasters who could afford the much-more-expensive, high-powered transmitters and could arrange for live broadcasts, rather than simply play phonograph records. The success of this new frequency was not immediate, because many receivers could not tune out stations broadcasting at the two frequencies in order to listen to the other. Hoover, failing to move Congress to amend the radio law to provide him with the power necessary to regulate broadcasting, relied on the recommendations of the Second Radio Conference in 1923 as public support for adopting a new regime, and continued to act without legislative authority. He announced that the broadcast band would be divided in three: high-powered (500-1,000 watts) stations serving large areas would have no interference in those large areas, and would not share frequencies. They would transmit on frequencies between 300 and 545 meters. Medium-powered stations served smaller areas without interference, and would operate at assigned channels between 222 and 300 meters. The remaining low-powered stations would not be eliminated, as the bigger actors wanted, but would remain at 360 meters, with limited hours of operation and geographic reach. Many of these lower-powered broadcasters ,{[pg 194]}, were educational and religious institutions that perceived Hoover's allocation as a preference for the RCA-GE-AT&T-Westinghouse alliance. Despite his protestations against commercial broadcasting ("If a speech by the President is to be used as the meat in a sandwich of two patent medicine advertisements, there will be no radio left"), Hoover consistently reserved clear channels and issued high-power licenses to commercial broadcasters. The final policy action based on the radio conferences came in 1925, when the Department of Commerce stopped issuing licenses. The result was a secondary market in licenses, in which some religious and educational stations were bought out by commercial concerns. These purchases further gravitated radio toward commercial ownership. The licensing preference for stations that could afford high-powered transmitters, long hours of operation, and compliance with high technical constraints continued after the Radio Act of 1927. As a practical matter, it led to assignment of twenty-one out of the twentyfour clear channel licenses created by the Federal Radio Commission to the newly created network-affiliated stations. +={ Hoover, Herbert ; + AT&T +3 ; + proprietary rights : + radio patents +1 ; + radio : + patents +1 ; + advertiser-supported media +3 +} + +Over the course of this period, tensions also began to emerge within the patent alliance. The phenomenal success of receiver sales tempted Western Electric into that market. In the meantime, AT&T, almost by mistake, began to challenge GE, Westinghouse, and RCA in broadcasting as an outgrowth of its attempt to create a broadcast common-carriage facility. Despite the successes of broadcast and receiver sales, it was not clear in 1922-1923 how the cost of setting up and maintaining stations would be paid for. In England, a tax was levied on radio sets, and its revenue used to fund the BBC. No such proposal was considered in the United States, but the editor of Radio Broadcast proposed a national endowed fund, like those that support public libraries and museums, and in 1924, a committee of New York businessmen solicited public donations to fund broadcasters (the response was so pitiful that the funds were returned to their donors). AT&T was the only company to offer a solution. Building on its telephone service experience, it offered radio telephony to the public for a fee. Genuine wireless telephony, even mobile telephony, had been the subject of experimentation since the second decade of radio, but that was not what AT&T offered. In February 1922, AT&T established WEAF in New York, a broadcast station over which AT&T was to provide no programming of its own, but instead would enable the public or program providers to pay on a per-time basis. AT&T treated this service as a form of wireless telephony so that it would fall, under the patent alliance agreements of 1920, under the exclusive control of AT&T. ,{[pg 195]}, +={ radio telephony ; + toll broadcasting +2 ; + broadcasting, radio. See radio broadcasting, toll +2 ; + toll broadcasting +2 +} + +RCA, Westinghouse, and GE could not compete in this area. "Toll broadcasting" was not a success by its own terms. There was insufficient demand for communicating with the public to sustain a full schedule that would justify listeners tuning into the station. As a result, AT&T produced its own programming. In order to increase the potential audience for its transmissions while using its advantage in wired facilities, AT&T experimented with remote transmissions, such as live reports from sports events, and with simultaneous transmissions of its broadcasts by other stations, connected to its New York feed by cable. In its effort to launch toll broadcasting, AT&T found itself by mid-1923 with the first functioning precursor to an advertiser-supported broadcast network. +={ GE (General Electric) +1 ; + RCA (Radio Corporation of America) +1 ; + Westinghouse +1 +} + +The alliance members now threatened each other: AT&T threatened to enter into receiver manufacturing and broadcast, and the RCA alliance, with its powerful stations, threatened to adopt "toll broadcasting," or advertiser-supported radio. The patent allies submitted their dispute to an arbitrator, who was to interpret the 1920 agreements, reached at a time of wireless telegraphy, to divide the spoils of the broadcast world of 1924. In late 1924, the arbitrator found for RCA-GE-Westinghouse on almost all issues. Capitalizing on RCA's difficulties with the antitrust authorities and congressional hearings over aggressive monopolization practices in the receiving set market, however, AT&T countered that if the 1920 agreements meant what the arbitrator said they meant, they were a combination in restraint of trade to which AT&T would not adhere. Bargaining in the shadow of the mutual threats of contract and antitrust actions, the former allies reached a solution that formed the basis of future radio broadcasting. AT&T would leave broadcasting. A new company, owned by RCA, GE, and Westinghouse would be formed, and would purchase AT&T's stations. The new company would enter into a long-term contract with AT&T to provide the long-distance communications necessary to set up the broadcast network that David Sarnoff envisioned as the future of broadcast. This new entity would, in 1926, become the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). AT&T's WEAF station would become the center of one of NBC's two networks, and the division arrived at would thereafter form the basis of the broadcast system in the United States. +={ monopoly : + radio broadcasting +1 ; + NBC (National Broadcasting Company) ; + Sarnoff, David +} + +By the middle of 1926, then, the institutional and organizational elements that became the American broadcast system were, to a great extent, in place. The idea of government monopoly over broadcasting, which became dominant in Great Britain, Europe, and their former colonies, was forever abandoned. ,{[pg 196]}, The idea of a private-property regime in spectrum, which had been advocated by commercial broadcasters to spur investment in broadcast, was rejected on the backdrop of other battles over conservation of federal resources. The Radio Act of 1927, passed by Congress in record speed a few months after a court invalidated Hoover's entire regulatory edifice as lacking legal foundation, enacted this framework as the basic structure of American broadcast. A relatively small group of commercial broadcasters and equipment manufacturers took the lead in broadcast development. A governmental regulatory agency, using a standard of "the public good," allocated frequency, time, and power assignments to minimize interference and to resolve conflicts. The public good, by and large, correlated to the needs of commercial broadcasters and their listeners. Later, the broadcast networks supplanted the patent alliance as the primary force to which the Federal Radio Commission paid heed. The early 1930s still saw battles over the degree of freedom that these networks had to pursue their own commercial interests, free of regulation (studied in Robert McChesney's work).~{ Robert Waterman McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). }~ By that point, however, the power of the broadcasters was already too great to be seriously challenged. Interests like those of the amateurs, whose romantic pioneering mantle still held strong purchase on the process, educational institutions, and religious organizations continued to exercise some force on the allocation and management of the spectrum. However, they were addressed on the periphery of the broadcast platform, leaving the public sphere to be largely mediated by a tiny number of commercial entities running a controlled, advertiser-supported platform of mass media. Following the settlement around radio, there were no more genuine inflection points in the structure of mass media. Television followed radio, and was even more concentrated. Cable networks and satellite networks varied to some extent, but retained the basic advertiser-supported model, oriented toward luring the widest possible audience to view the advertising that paid for the programming. +={ mass media : + as platform for public sphere ; + McChesney, Robert ; + Radio Act of 1927 +} + +2~ BASIC CRITIQUES OF MASS MEDIA +={ mass media : + as platform for public sphere +3 ; + commercial mass media : + criticisms +22 ; + commercial mass media : + basic critiques of +22 ; + mass media : + basic critiques of +22 ; + mass media, political freedom and +22 ; + political freedom, mass media and : + criticisms +22 +} + +The cluster of practices that form the mass-media model was highly conducive to social control in authoritarian countries. The hub-and-spoke technical architecture and unidirectional endpoint-reception model of these systems made it very simple to control, by controlling the core--the state-owned television, radio, and newspapers. The high cost of providing ,{[pg 197]}, high-circulation statements meant that subversive publications were difficult to make and communicate across large distances and to large populations of potential supporters. Samizdat of various forms and channels have existed in most if not all authoritarian societies, but at great disadvantage relative to public communication. The passivity of readers, listeners, and viewers coincided nicely with the role of the authoritarian public sphere--to manage opinion in order to cause the widest possible willing, or at least quiescent, compliance, and thereby to limit the need for using actual repressive force. + +In liberal democracies, the same technical and economic cost characteristics resulted in a very different pattern of communications practices. However, these practices relied on, and took advantage of, some of the very same basic architectural and cost characteristics. The practices of commercial mass media in liberal democracies have been the subject of a vast literature, criticizing their failures and extolling their virtues as a core platform for the liberal public sphere. There have been three primary critiques of these media: First, their intake has been seen as too limited. Too few information collection points leave too many views entirely unexplored and unrepresented because they are far from the concerns of the cadre of professional journalists, or cannot afford to buy their way to public attention. The debates about localism and diversity of ownership of radio and television stations have been the clearest policy locus of this critique in the United States. They are based on the assumption that local and socially diverse ownership of radio stations will lead to better representation of concerns as they are distributed in society. Second, concentrated mass media has been criticized as giving the owners too much power--which they either employ themselves or sell to the highest bidder--over what is said and how it is evaluated. Third, the advertising-supported media needs to attract large audiences, leading programming away from the genuinely politically important, challenging, and engaging, and toward the titillating or the soothing. This critique has emphasized the tension between business interests and journalistic ethics, and the claims that market imperatives and the bottom line lead to shoddy or cowering reporting; quiescence in majority tastes and positions in order to maximize audience; spectacle rather than substantive conversation of issues even when political matters are covered; and an emphasis on entertainment over news and analysis. +={ access : + large-audience programming | limited by mass media +3 | systematically blocked by policy routers +3 ; + accreditation : + of mass media owners ; + advertiser-supported media : + denominator programming ; + alertness, undermined by commercialism ; + blocked access : + large-audience programming | mass media and +3 | policy routers +3 ; + capacity : + diversity of content in large audience media | policy routers +3 ; + Cisco policy routers +3 ; + commercialism, undermining political concern ; + concentration of mass-media power ; + diversity : + large-audience programming ; + ethic (journalistic) vs. business necessity ; + exercise of programming power ; + filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +1 ; + first-best preferences : + large-audience programming | power of mass media owners ; + information flow : + controlling with policy routers +3 | limited by mass media +3 | large-audience programming ; + information production inputs : + large-audience programming | limited by mass media +3 | systematically blocked by policy routers +3 | universal intake +3 ; + inputs to production : + large-audience programming | limited by mass media +3 | systematically blocked by policy routers +3 | universal intake +3 ; + inertness, political ; + journalism, undermined by commercialism ; + large-audience programming ; + limited intake of mass media +3 ; + lowest-common-denominator programming ; + owners of mass media, power of ; + policy : + independence from government control +1 ; + policy routers +3 ; + political concern, undermined by commercialism ; + power of mass media owners ; + production inputs : + large-audience programming | limited by mass media +3 | systematically blocked by policy routers +3 | universal intake +3 ; + relevance filtering : + power of mass media owners ; + routers, controlling information flow with +3 ; + television : + large-audience programming ; + universal intake +3 +} + +% (index) policy routers mentioned much, locate properly re-check!!! + +Three primary defenses or advantages have also been seen in these media: first is their independence from government, party, or upper-class largesse, particularly against the background of the state-owned media in authoritarian ,{[pg 198]}, regimes, and given the high cost of production and communication, commercial mass media have been seen as necessary to create a public sphere grounded outside government. Second is the professionalism and large newsrooms that commercial mass media can afford to support to perform the watchdog function in complex societies. Because of their market-based revenues, they can replace universal intake with well-researched observations that citizens would not otherwise have made, and that are critical to a well-functioning democracy. Third, their near-universal visibility and independence enable them to identify important issues percolating in society. They can provide a platform to put them on the public agenda. They can express, filter, and accredit statements about these issues, so that they become well-specified subjects and feasible objects for public debate among informed citizens. That is to say, the limited number of points to which all are tuned and the limited number of "slots" available for speaking on these media form the basis for providing the synthesis required for public opinion and raising the salience of matters of public concern to the point of potential collective action. In the remainder of this chapter, I will explain the criticisms of the commercial mass media in more detail. I then take up in chapter 7 the question of how the Internet in general, and the rise of nonmarket and cooperative individual production in the networked information economy in particular, can solve or alleviate those problems while fulfilling some of the important roles of mass media in democracies today. +={ government : + independence from control of ; + independence from government control ; + commercial model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +2 ; + industrial model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +2 ; + industrial ecology of digital environment : + emerging role of mass media +2 ; + networked public sphere : + mass-media platform for +2 ; + political freedom, media and : + commercial platform for public sphere +2 ; + producers professionalism, mass media ; + public sphere +2 ; + traditional model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +2 ; + visibility of mass media +} + +% ={commercial mass media:as platform for public sphere} + +3~ Mass Media as a Platform for the Public Sphere +={ commercial mass media : + as platform for public sphere +1 ; + mass media, political freedom and : + commercial platform for public sphere +1 +} + +The structure of mass media as a mode of communications imposes a certain set of basic characteristics on the kind of public conversation it makes possible. First, it is always communication from a small number of people, organized into an even smaller number of distinct outlets, to an audience several orders of magnitude larger, unlimited in principle in its membership except by the production capacity of the media itself--which, in the case of print, may mean the number of copies, and in radio, television, cable, and the like, means whatever physical-reach constraints, if any, are imposed by the technology and business organizational arrangements used by these outlets. In large, complex, modern societies, no one knows everything. The initial function of a platform for the public sphere is one of intake--taking into the system the observations and opinions of as many members of society as possible as potential objects of public concern and consideration. The ,{[pg 199]}, radical difference between the number of intake points the mass media have and the range and diversity of human existence in large complex societies assures a large degree of information loss at the intake stage. Second, the vast difference between the number of speakers and the number of listeners, and the finished-goods style of mass-media products, imposes significant constraints on the extent to which these media can be open to feedback-- that is, to responsive communications that are tied together as a conversation with multiple reciprocal moves from both sides of the conversation. Third, the immense and very loosely defined audience of mass media affects the filtering and synthesis functions of the mass media as a platform for the public sphere. One of the observations regarding the content of newspapers in the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries was the shift they took as their circulation increased--from party-oriented, based in relatively thick communities of interest and practice, to fact- and sensation-oriented, with content that made thinner requirements on their users in order to achieve broader and more weakly defined readership. Fourth, and finally, because of the high costs of organizing these media, the functions of intake, sorting for relevance, accrediting, and synthesis are all combined in the hands of the same media operators, selected initially for their capacity to pool the capital necessary to communicate the information to wide audiences. While all these functions are necessary for a usable public sphere, the correlation of capacity to pool capital resources with capacity to offer the best possible filtering and synthesis is not obvious. In addition to basic structural constraints that come from the characteristic of a communications modality that can properly be called "mass media," there are also critiques that arise more specifically from the business models that have characterized the commercial mass media over the course of most of the twentieth century. Media markets are relatively concentrated, and the most common business model involves selling the attention of large audiences to commercial advertisers. +={ accreditation : + capacity for, by mass media ; + advertiser-supported media +7 ; + capacity : + mass media limits on ; + clusters in network topology : + synthesis of public opinion ; + feedback and intake limits of mass media ; + filtering : + capacity for by mass media | concentration of mass-media power +7 ; + opinion, public : + synthesis of ; + public opinion : + synthesis of ; + relevance filtering : + capacity for, by mass media | power of mass media owners +7 ; + responsive communications ; + synthesis of public opinion : + See also accreditation +} + +3~ Media Concentration: The Power of Ownership and Money +={ accreditation : + power of mass media owners +6 ; + concentration of mass-media power +6 ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + of mass media owners +6 ; + owners of mass media, power of +6 ; + power of mass media owners +6 +} + +The Sinclair Broadcast Group is one of the largest owners of television broadcast stations in the United States. The group's 2003 Annual Report proudly states in its title, "Our Company. Your Message. 26 Million Households"; that is, roughly one quarter of U.S. households. Sinclair owns and operates or provides programming and sales to sixty-two stations in the United States, including multiple local affiliates of NBC, ABC, CBS, and ,{[pg 200]}, Fox. In April 2004, ABC News's program Nightline dedicated a special program to reading the names of American service personnel who had been killed in the Iraq War. The management of Sinclair decided that its seven ABC affiliates would not air the program, defending its decision because the program "appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq."~{ "Names of U.S. Dead Read on Nightline," Associated Press Report, May 1, 2004, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4864247/. }~ At the time, the rising number of American casualties in Iraq was already a major factor in the 2004 presidential election campaign, and both ABC's decision to air the program, and Sinclair's decision to refuse to carry it could be seen as interventions by the media in setting the political agenda and contributing to the public debate. It is difficult to gauge the politics of a commercial organization, but one rough proxy is political donations. In the case of Sinclair, 95 percent of the donations made by individuals associated with the company during the 2004 election cycle went to Republicans, while only 5 percent went to Democrats.~{ The numbers given here are taken from The Center for Responsive Politics, http:// www.opensecrets.org/, and are based on information released by the Federal Elections Commission. }~ Contributions of Disney, on the other hand, the owner of the ABC network, split about seventy-thirty in favor of contribution to Democrats. It is difficult to parse the extent to which political leanings of this sort are personal to the executives and professional employees who make decisions about programming, and to what extent these are more organizationally self-interested, depending on the respective positions of the political parties on the conditions of the industry's business. In some cases, it is quite obvious that the motives are political. When one looks, for example, at contributions by Disney's film division, they are distributed 100 percent in favor of Democrats. This mostly seems to reflect the large contributions of the Weinstein brothers, who run the semi-independent studio Miramax, which also distributed Michael Moore's politically explosive criticism of the Bush administration, Fahrenheit 9/11, in 2004. Sinclair's contributions were aligned with, though more skewed than, those of the National Association of Broadcasters political action committee, which were distributed 61 percent to 39 percent in favor of Republicans. Here the possible motivation is that Republicans have espoused a regulatory agenda at the Federal Communications Commission that allows broadcasters greater freedom to consolidate and to operate more as businesses and less as public trustees. +={ exercise of programming power +5 ; + SBG (Sinclair Broadcast Group) ; + Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG) ; + Moore, Michael +} + +The basic point is not, of course, to trace the particular politics of one programming decision or another. It is the relative power of those who manage the mass media when it so dominates public discourse as to shape public perceptions and public debate. This power can be brought to bear throughout the components of the platform, from the intake function (what ,{[pg 201]}, facts about the world are observed) to the filtration and synthesis (the selection of materials, their presentation, and the selection of who will debate them and in what format). These are all central to forming the agenda that the public perceives, choreographing the discussion, the range of opinions perceived and admitted into the conversation, and through these, ultimately, choreographing the perceived consensus and the range of permissible debate. One might think of this as "the Berlusconi effect." Thinking in terms of a particular individual, known for a personal managerial style, who translated the power of control over media into his election as prime minister of his country symbolizes well the concern, but of course does not exhaust the problem, which is both broader and more subtle than the concern with the possibility that mass media will be owned by individuals who would exert total control over these media and translate their control into immediate political power, manufacturing and shaping the appearance of a public sphere, rather than providing a platform for one. +={ Berlusconi effect } + +The power of the commercial mass media depends on the degree of concentration in mass-media markets. A million equally watched channels do not exercise power. Concentration is a common word used to describe the power media exercise when there are only few outlets, but a tricky one because it implies two very distinct phenomena. The first is a lack of competition in a market, to a degree sufficient to allow a firm to exercise power over its pricing. This is the antitrust sense. The second, very different concern might be called "mindshare." That is, media is "concentrated" when a small number of media firms play a large role as the channel from and to a substantial majority of readers, viewers, and listeners in a given politically relevant social unit. + +If one thinks that commercial firms operating in a market will always "give the audience what it wants" and that what the audience wants is a fully representative cross-section of all observations and opinions relevant to public discourse, then the antitrust sense would be the only one that mattered. A competitive market would force any market actor simply to reflect the range of available opinions actually held in the public. Even by this measure, however, there continue to be debates about how one should define the relevant market and what one is measuring. The more one includes all potential nationally available sources of information, newspapers, magazines, television, radio, satellite, cable, and the like, the less concentrated the market seems. However, as Eli Noam's recent work on local media concentration has argued, treating a tiny television station on Long Island as equivalent to ,{[pg 202]}, WCBS in New York severely underrepresents the power of mass media over their audience. Noam offered the most comprehensive analysis currently available of the patterns of concentration where media are actually accessed-- locally, where people live--from 1984 to 2001-2002. Most media are consumed locally--because of the cost of national distribution of paper newspapers, and because of the technical and regulatory constraints on nationwide distribution of radio and television. Noam computed two measures of market concentration for each of thirty local markets: the HerfindahlHirschman Index (HHI), a standard method used by the Department of Justice to measure market concentration for antitrust purposes; and what he calls a C4 index--that is, the market share of the top four firms in a market, and C1, the share of the top single firm in the market. He found that, based on the HHI index, all the local media markets are highly concentrated. In the standard measure, a market with an index of less than 1,000 is not concentrated, a market with an index of 1,000-1,800 is moderately concentrated, and a market with an index of above 1,800 on the HHI is highly concentrated. Noam found that local radio, which had an index below 1,000 between 1984 and 1992, rose over the course of the following years substantially. Regulatory restrictions were loosened over the course of the 1990s, resulting by the end of the decade in an HHI index measure of 2,400 for big cities, and higher for medium-sized and small markets. And yet, radio is less concentrated than local multichannel television (cable and satellite) with an HHI of 6,300, local magazines with an HHI of 6,859, and local newspapers with an HHI of 7,621. The only form of media whose concentration has declined to less than highly concentrated (HHI 1,714) is local television, as the rise of new networks and local stations' viability on cable has moved us away from the three-network world of 1984. It is still the case, however, that the top four television stations capture 73 percent of the viewers in most markets, and 62 percent in large markets. The most concentrated media in local markets are newspapers, which, except for the few largest markets, operate on a one-newspaper town model. C1 concentration has grown in this area to 83 percent of readership for the leading papers, and an HHI of 7,621. +={ Noam, Eli ; + commercial press ; + HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index) ; + newspapers : + market concentration ; + press, commercial ; + radio : + market concentration ; + television : + market concentration +} + +The degree of concentration in media markets supports the proposition that owners of media can either exercise power over the programming they provide or what they write, or sell their power over programming to those who would like to shape opinions. Even if one were therefore to hold the Pollyannaish view that market-based media in a competitive market would ,{[pg 203]}, be constrained by competition to give citizens what they need, as Ed Baker put it, there is no reason to think the same in these kinds of highly concentrated markets. As it turns out, a long tradition of scholarship has also developed the claim that even without such high levels of concentration in the antitrust sense, advertiser-supported media markets are hardly good mechanisms for assuring that the contents of the media provide a good reflection of the information citizens need to know as members of a polity, the range of opinions and views about what ought to occupy the public, and what solutions are available to those problems that are perceived and discussed.~{ A careful catalog of these makes up the first part of C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). }~ First, we have long known that advertiser-supported media suffer from more or less well-defined failures, purely as market mechanisms, at representing the actual distribution of first-best preferences of audiences. As I describe in more detail in the next section, whether providers in any market structure, from monopoly to full competition, will even try to serve firstbest preferences of their audience turns out to be a function of the distribution of actual first-best and second-best preferences, and the number of "channels." Second, there is a systematic analytic problem with defining consumer demand for information. Perfect information is a precondition to an efficient market, not its output. In order for consumers to value information or an opinion fully, they must know it and assimilate it to their own worldview and understanding. However, the basic problem to be solved by media markets is precisely to select which information people will value if they in fact come to know it, so it is impossible to gauge the value of a unit of information before it has been produced, and hence to base production decisions on actual existing user preferences. The result is that, even if media markets were perfectly competitive, a substantial degree of discretion and influence would remain in the hands of commercial media owners. +={ Baker, Edwin ; + advertiser-supported media : + reflection of consumer preference ; + constraints on behavior : + See autonomy, freedom consumer demand for information ; + demand for information, consumer ; + information, perfect ; + perfect information +} + +The actual cultural practice of mass-media production and consumption is more complex than either the view of "efficient media markets" across the board or the general case against media concentration and commercialism. Many of the relevant companies are public companies, answerable to at least large institutional shareholders, and made up of managements that need not be monolithic in their political alignment or judgment as to the desirability of making political gains as opposed to market share. Unless there is economic or charismatic leadership of the type of a William Randolph Hearst or a Rupert Murdoch, organizations usually have complex structures, with varying degrees of freedom for local editors, reporters, and midlevel managers to tug and pull at the fabric of programming. Different media companies ,{[pg 204]}, also have different business models, and aim at different market segments. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post do not aim at the same audience as most daily local newspapers in the United States. They are aimed at elites, who want to buy newspapers that can credibly claim to embody highly professional journalism. This requires separation of editorial from business decisions--at least for some segments of the newspapers that are critical in attracting those readers. The degree to which the Berlusconi effect in its full-blown form of individual or self-consciously directed political power through shaping of the public sphere will apply is not one that can necessarily be answered as a matter of a priori theoretical framework for all mass media. Instead, it is a concern, a tendency, whose actual salience in any given public sphere or set of firms is the product of historical contingency, different from one country to another and one period to another. It will depend on the strategies of particular companies and their relative mindshare in a society. However, it is clear and structurally characteristic of mass media that a society that depends for its public sphere on a relatively small number of actors, usually firms, to provide most of the platform of its public sphere, is setting itself up for, at least, a form of discourse elitism. In other words, those who are on the inside of the media will be able to exert substantially greater influence over the agenda, the shape of the conversation, and through these the outcomes of public discourse, than other individuals or groups in society. Moreover, for commercial organizations, this power could be sold--and as a business model, one should expect it to be. The most direct way to sell influence is explicit political advertising, but just as we see "product placement" in movies as a form of advertising, we see advertiser influence on the content of the editorial materials. Part of this influence is directly substantive and political. Another is the source of the second critique of commercial mass media. +={ Hearst, William Randolph ; + Murdoch, Rupert ; + Berlusconi effect ; + business decisions vs. editorial decisions ; + editorial filtering : + See relevance filtering editorial vs. business decisions ; + ethic (journalistic) vs. business necessity +10 ; + journalism, undermined by commercialism +10 ; + political concern, undermined by commercialism +10 +} + +3~ Commercialism, Journalism, and Political Inertness +={ access : + large-audience programming +9 ; + advertiser-supported media : + denominator programming +9 ; + alertness, undermined by commercialism +9 ; + blocked access : + large-audience programming ; + capacity : + diversity of content in large-audience media +9 ; + commercialism, undermining political concern +9 ; + diversity : + large-audience programming +9 ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + large-audience programming +9 ; + inertness, political +9 ; + information flow : + large-audience programming +9 ; + information production inputs : + large-audience programming +9 ; + inputs to production : + large-audience programming +9 ; + large-audience programming +9 ; + production inputs : + large-audience programming +9 ; + television : + large-audience programming +9 +} + +The second cluster of concerns about the commercial mass media is the degree to which their commercialism undermines their will and capacity to provide a platform for public, politically oriented discourse. The concern is, in this sense, the opposite of the concern with excessive power. Rather than the fear that the concentrated mass media will exercise its power to pull opinion in its owners' interest, the fear is that the commercial interests of these media will cause them to pull content away from matters of genuine ,{[pg 205]}, political concern altogether. It is typified in a quote offered by Ben Bagdikian, attributed to W. R. Nelson, publisher of the Kansas City Star in 1915: "Newspapers are read at the breakfast table and dinner tables. God's great gift to man is appetite. Put nothing in the paper that will destroy it."~{ Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 5th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 118. }~ Examples abound, but the basic analytic structure of the claim is fairly simple and consists of three distinct components. First, advertiser-supported media need to achieve the largest audience possible, not the most engaged or satisfied audience possible. This leads such media to focus on lowest-common-denominator programming and materials that have broad second-best appeal, rather than trying to tailor their programming to the true first-best preferences of well-defined segments of the audience. Second, issues of genuine public concern and potential political contention are toned down and structured as a performance between iconic representations of large bodies of opinion, in order to avoid alienating too much of the audience. This is the reemergence of spectacle that Habermas identified in The Transformation of the Public Sphere. The tendency toward lowest-common-denominator programming translates in the political sphere into a focus on fairly well-defined, iconic views, and to avoidance of genuinely controversial material, because it is easier to lose an audience by offending its members than by being only mildly interesting. The steady structuring of the media as professional, commercial, and one way over 150 years has led to a pattern whereby, when political debate is communicated, it is mostly communicated as performance. Someone represents a party or widely known opinion, and is juxtaposed with others who similarly represent alternative widely known views. These avatars of public opinion then enact a clash of opinion, orchestrated in order to leave the media neutral and free of blame, in the eyes of their viewers, for espousing an offensively partisan view. Third, and finally, this business logic often stands in contradiction to journalistic ethic. While there are niche markets for high-end journalism and strong opinion, outlets that serve those markets are specialized. Those that cater to broader markets need to subject journalistic ethic to business necessity, emphasizing celebrities or local crime over distant famines or a careful analysis of economic policy. +={ Habermas, Jurgen ; + Nelson, W. R. ; + lowest-common-denominator programming +8 ; + Bagdikian, Ben ; + communication : + through performance ; + controversy, avoidance of ; + iconic representations of opinion ; + opinion, public : + iconic representations of ; + performance as means of communication ; + public opinion : + iconic representations of +} + +The basic drive behind programming choices in advertising-supported mass media was explored in the context of the problem of "program diversity" and competition. It relies on a type of analysis introduced by Peter Steiner in 1952. The basic model argued that advertiser-supported media are sensitive only to the number of viewers, not the intensity of their satisfaction. This created an odd situation, where competitors would tend to divide ,{[pg 206]}, among them the largest market segments, and leave smaller slices of the audience unserved, whereas a monopolist would serve each market segment, in order of size, until it ran out of channels. Because it has no incentive to divide all the viewers who want, for example, sitcoms, among two or more stations, a monopolist would program a sitcom on one channel, and the next-most-desired program on the next channel. Two competitors, on the other hand, would both potentially program sitcoms, if dividing those who prefer sitcoms in half still yields a larger total audience size than airing the next-most-desired program. To illustrate this effect with a rather extreme hypothetical example, imagine that we are in a television market of 10 million viewers. Suppose that the distribution of preferences in the audience is as follows: 1,000,000 want to watch sitcoms; 750,000 want sports; 500,000 want local news; 250,000 want action movies; 9,990 are interested in foreign films; and 9,980 want programs on gardening. The stark drop-off between action movies and foreign films and gardening is intended to reflect the fact that the 7.5 million potential viewers who do not fall into one of the first four clusters are distributed in hundreds of small clusters, none commanding more than 10,000 viewers. Before we examine why this extreme assumption is likely correct, let us first see what happens if it were. Table 6.1 presents the programming choices that would typify those of competing channels, based on the number of channels competing and the distribution of preferences in the audience. It reflects the assumptions that each programmer wants to maximize the number of viewers of its channel and that the viewers are equally likely to watch one channel as another if both offer the same type of programming. The numbers in parentheses next to the programming choice represent the number of viewers the programmer can hope to attract given these assumptions, not including the probability that some of the 7.5 million viewers outside the main clusters will also tune in. In this extreme example, one would need a system with more than 250 channels in order to start seeing something other than sitcoms, sports, local news, and action movies. Why, however, is such a distribution likely, or even plausible? The assumption is not intended to represent an actual distribution of what people most prefer to watch. Rather, it reflects the notion that many people have best preferences, fallback preferences, and tolerable options. Their first-best preferences reflect what they really want to watch, and people are highly diverse in this dimension. Their fallback and tolerable preferences reflect the kinds of things they would be willing to watch if nothing else is available, rather than getting up off the sofa and going to a local cafe or reading a book. ,{[pg 207]}, +={ steiner, Peter } + +!_ Table 6.1: Distribution of Channels Hypothetical + +table{~h c2; 10; 90 + +No. of channels +Programming Available (in thousands of viewers) + +1 +sitcom (1000) + +2 +sitcom (1000), sports (750) + +3 +sitcom (1000 or 500), sports (750), indifferent between sitcoms and local news (500) + +4 +sitcom (500), sports (750), sitcom (500), local news (500) + +5 +sitcom (500), sports (375), sitcom (500), local news (500), sports (375) + +6 +sitcom (333), sports (375), sitcom (333), local news (500), sports (375), sitcom (333) + +7 +sitcom (333), sports (375), sitcom (333), local news (500), sports (375), sitcom (333), action movies (250) + +8 +sitcom (333), sports (375), sitcom (333), local news (250), sports (375), sitcom (333), action movies (250), local news (250) + +9 +sitcom (250), sports (375), sitcom (250), local news (250), sports (375), sitcom (250), action movies (250), local news (250), sitcom (250) + +*** +*** + +250 +100 channels of sitcom (10); 75 channels of sports (10); 50 channels of local news (10); 25 channels of action movies (10) + +251 +100 channels of sitcom (10); 75 channels of sports (10); 50 channels of local news (10); 25 channels of action movies (10); 1 foreign film channel (9.99) + +252 +100 channels of sitcom (10); 75 channels of sports (10); 50 channels of local news (10); 25 channels of action movies (10); 1 foreign film channel (9.99); 1 gardening channel (9.98) + +}table + +Here represented by sitcoms, sports, and the like, fallback options are more widely shared, even among people whose first-best preferences differ widely, because they represent what people will tolerate before switching, a much less strict requirement than what they really want. This assumption follows Jack Beebe's refinement of Steiner's model. Beebe established that media monopolists would show nothing but common-denominator programs and that competition among broadcasters would begin to serve the smaller preference clusters only if a large enough number of channels were available. Such a model would explain the broad cultural sense of Bruce Springsteen's song, "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)," and why we saw the emergence of channels like Black Entertainment Television, Univision (Spanish channel in the United States), or The History Channel only when cable systems significantly expanded channel capacity, as well as why direct- ,{[pg 208]}, broadcast satellite and, more recently, digital cable offerings were the first venue for twenty-four-hour-a-day cooking channels and smaller minority-language channels.~{ Peter O. Steiner, "Program Patterns and Preferences, and the Workability of Competition in Radio Broadcasting," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 66 (1952): 194. The major other contribution in this literature is Jack H. Beebe, "Institutional Structure and Program Choices in Television Markets," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 91 (1977): 15. A parallel line of analysis of the relationship between programming and the market structure of broadcasting began with Michael Spence and Bruce Owen, "Television Programming, Monopolistic Competition, and Welfare," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 91 (1977): 103. For an excellent review of this literature, see Matthew L. Spitzer, "Justifying Minority Preferences in Broadcasting," South California Law Review 64 (1991): 293, 304-319. }~ +={ Beebe, Jack ; + monopoly : + breadth of programming under +} + +While this work was developed in the context of analyzing media diversity of offerings, it provides a foundation for understanding the programming choices of all advertiser-supported mass media, including the press, in domains relevant to the role they play as a platform for the public sphere. It provides a framework for understanding, but also limiting, the applicability of the idea that mass media will put nothing in the newspaper that will destroy the reader's appetite. Controversial views and genuinely disturbing images, descriptions, or arguments have a higher likelihood of turning readers, listeners, and viewers away than entertainment, mildly interesting and amusing human-interest stories, and a steady flow of basic crime and courtroom dramas, and similar fare typical of local television newscasts and newspapers. On the other hand, depending on the number of channels, there are clearly market segments for people who are "political junkies," or engaged elites, who can support some small number of outlets aimed at that crowd. The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal are examples in print, programs like Meet the Press or Nightline and perhaps channels like CNN and Fox News are examples of the possibility and limitations of this exception to the general entertainment-oriented, noncontroversial, and politically inert style of commercial mass media. The dynamic of programming to the lowest common denominator can, however, iteratively replicate itself even within relatively news- and elite-oriented media outlets. Even among news junkies, larger news outlets must cater relatively to the mainstream of its intended audience. Too strident a position or too probing an inquiry may slice the market segment to which they sell too thin. This is likely what leads to the common criticism, from both the Right and Left, that the same media are too "liberal" and too "conservative," respectively. By contrast, magazines, whose business model can support much lower circulation levels, exhibit a substantially greater will for political engagement and analysis than even the relatively political-readership-oriented, larger-circulation mass media. By definition, however, the media that cater to these niche markets serve only a small segment of the political community. Fox News in the United States appears to be a powerful counterexample to this trend. It is difficult to pinpoint why. The channel likely represents a composite of the Berlusconi effect, the high market segmentation made possible by high-capacity cable ,{[pg 209]}, systems, the very large market segment of Republicans, and the relatively polarized tone of American political culture since the early 1990s. + +The mass-media model as a whole, with the same caveat for niche markets, does not lend itself well to in-depth discussion and dialog. High professionalism can, to some extent, compensate for the basic structural problem of a medium built on the model of a small number of producers transmitting to an audience that is many orders of magnitude larger. The basic problem occurs at the intake and synthesis stages of communication. However diligent they may be, a small number of professional reporters, embedded as they are within social segments that are part of social, economic, and political elites, are a relatively stunted mechanism for intake. If one seeks to collect the wide range of individual observations, experiences, and opinions that make up the actual universe of concerns and opinions of a large public as a basic input into the public sphere, before filtering, the centralized model of mass media provides a limited means of capturing those insights. On the back end of the communication of public discourse, concentrated media of necessity must structure most "participants" in the debate as passive recipients of finished messages and images. That is the core characteristic of mass media: Content is produced prior to transmission in a relatively small number of centers, and when finished is then transmitted to a mass audience, which consumes it. This is the basis of the claim of the role of professional journalism to begin with, separating it from nonprofessional observations of those who consume its products. The result of this basic structure of the media product is that discussion and analysis of issues of common concern is an iconic representation of discussion, a choreographed enactment of public debate. The participants are selected for the fact that they represent wellunderstood, well-defined positions among those actually prevalent in a population, the images and stories are chosen to represent issues, and the public debate that is actually facilitated (and is supposedly where synthesis of the opinions in public debate actually happens) is in fact an already presynthesized portrayal of an argument among avatars of relatively large segments of opinion as perceived by the journalists and stagers of the debate. In the United States, this translates into fairly standard formats of "on the left X, on the right Y," or "the Republicans' position" versus "the Democrats' position." It translates into "photo-op" moments of publicly enacting an idea, a policy position, or a state of affairs--whether it is a president landing on an aircraft carrier to represent security and the successful completion of a ,{[pg 210]}, controversial war, or a candidate hunting with his buddies to represent a position on gun control. It is important to recognize that by describing these characteristics, I am not identifying failures of imagination, thoughtfulness, or professionalism on the part of media organizations. These are simply characteristics of a mass-mediated public sphere; modes of communication that offer the path of least resistance given the characteristics of the production and distribution process of mass media, particularly commercial mass media. There are partial exceptions, as there are to the diversity of content or the emphasis on entertainment value, but these do not reflect what most citizens read, see, or hear. The phenomenon of talk radio and call-in shows represents a very different, but certainly not more reflective form. They represent the pornography and violence of political discourse--a combination of exhibitionism and voyeurism intended to entertain us with opportunities to act out suppressed desires and to glimpse what we might be like if we allowed ourselves more leeway from what it means to be a well-socialized adult. +={ iconic representations of opinion ; + opinion, public : + iconic representations of ; + public opinion : + iconic representations of +} + +The two basic critiques of commercial mass media coalesce on the conflict between journalistic ethics and the necessities of commercialism. If professional journalists seek to perform a robust watchdog function, to inform their readers and viewers, and to provoke and explore in depth, then the dynamics of both power and lowest-common-denominator appeal push back. Different organizations, with different degrees of managerial control, editorial independence, internal organizational culture, and freedom from competitive pressures, with different intended market segments, will resolve these tensions differently. A quick reading of the conclusions of some media scholarship, and more commonly, arguments made in public debates over the media, would tend to lump "the media" as a single entity, with a single set of failures. In fact, unsurprisingly, the literature suggests substantial heterogeneity among organizations and media. Television seems to be the worst culprit on the dimension of political inertness. Print media, both magazines and some newspapers, include significant variation in the degree to which they fit these general models of failure. + +As we turn now to consider the advantages of the introduction of Internet communications, we shall see how this new model can complement the mass media and alleviate its worst weaknesses. In particular, the discussion focuses on the emergence of the networked information economy and the relatively larger role it makes feasible for nonmarket actors and for radically distributed production of information and culture. One need not adopt the position ,{[pg 211]}, that the commercial mass media are somehow abusive, evil, corporate-controlled giants, and that the Internet is the ideal Jeffersonian republic in order to track a series of genuine improvements represented by what the new emerging modalities of public communication can do as platforms for the public sphere. Greater access to means of direct individual communications, to collaborative speech platforms, and to nonmarket producers more generally can complement the commercial mass media and contribute to a significantly improved public sphere. ,{[pg 212]}, + +1~7 Chapter 7 - Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere +={ networked public sphere +108 ; + political freedom, public sphere and +108 ; + public sphere +108 +} + +The fundamental elements of the difference between the networked information economy and the mass media are network architecture and the cost of becoming a speaker. The first element is the shift from a hub-and-spoke architecture with unidirectional links to the end points in the mass media, to distributed architecture with multidirectional connections among all nodes in the networked information environment. The second is the practical elimination of communications costs as a barrier to speaking across associational boundaries. Together, these characteristics have fundamentally altered the capacity of individuals, acting alone or with others, to be active participants in the public sphere as opposed to its passive readers, listeners, or viewers. For authoritarian countries, this means that it is harder and more costly, though not perhaps entirely impossible, to both be networked and maintain control over their public spheres. China seems to be doing too good a job of this in the middle of the first decade of this century for us to say much more than that it is harder to maintain control, and therefore that at least in some authoritarian regimes, control will be looser. In ,{[pg 213]}, liberal democracies, ubiquitous individual ability to produce information creates the potential for near-universal intake. It therefore portends significant, though not inevitable, changes in the structure of the public sphere from the commercial mass-media environment. These changes raise challenges for filtering. They underlie some of the critiques of the claims about the democratizing effect of the Internet that I explore later in this chapter. Fundamentally, however, they are the roots of possible change. Beginning with the cost of sending an e-mail to some number of friends or to a mailing list of people interested in a particular subject, to the cost of setting up a Web site or a blog, and through to the possibility of maintaining interactive conversations with large numbers of people through sites like Slashdot, the cost of being a speaker in a regional, national, or even international political conversation is several orders of magnitude lower than the cost of speaking in the mass-mediated environment. This, in turn, leads to several orders of magnitude more speakers and participants in conversation and, ultimately, in the public sphere. +={ democratizing effects of Internet +7 ; + Internet : + democratizing effects of +7 +} + +The change is as much qualitative as it is quantitative. The qualitative change is represented in the experience of being a potential speaker, as opposed to simply a listener and voter. It relates to the self-perception of individuals in society and the culture of participation they can adopt. The easy possibility of communicating effectively into the public sphere allows individuals to reorient themselves from passive readers and listeners to potential speakers and participants in a conversation. The way we listen to what we hear changes because of this; as does, perhaps most fundamentally, the way we observe and process daily events in our lives. We no longer need to take these as merely private observations, but as potential subjects for public communication. This change affects the relative power of the media. It affects the structure of intake of observations and views. It affects the presentation of issues and observations for discourse. It affects the way issues are filtered, for whom and by whom. Finally, it affects the ways in which positions are crystallized and synthesized, sometimes still by being amplified to the point that the mass media take them as inputs and convert them into political positions, but occasionally by direct organization of opinion and action to the point of reaching a salience that drives the political process directly. + +The basic case for the democratizing effect of the Internet, as seen from the perspective of the mid-1990s, was articulated in an opinion of the /{U.S. Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU}/: ,{[pg 214]}, + +_1 The Web is thus comparable, from the readers' viewpoint, to both a vast library including millions of readily available and indexed publications and a sprawling mall offering goods and services. From the publishers' point of view, it constitutes a vast platform from which to address and hear from a world-wide audience of millions of readers, viewers, researchers, and buyers. Any person or organization with a computer connected to the Internet can "publish" information. Publishers include government agencies, educational institutions, commercial entities, advocacy groups, and individuals. . . . + +_1 Through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox. Through the use of Web pages, mail exploders, and newsgroups, the same individual can become a pamphleteer. As the District Court found, "the content on the Internet is as diverse as human thought."~{ /{Reno v. ACLU}/, 521 U.S. 844, 852-853, and 896-897 (1997). }~ + +The observations of what is different and unique about this new medium relative to those that dominated the twentieth century are already present in the quotes from the Court. There are two distinct types of effects. The first, as the Court notes from "the readers' perspective," is the abundance and diversity of human expression available to anyone, anywhere, in a way that was not feasible in the mass-mediated environment. The second, and more fundamental, is that anyone can be a publisher, including individuals, educational institutions, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), alongside the traditional speakers of the mass-media environment--government and commercial entities. + +Since the end of the 1990s there has been significant criticism of this early conception of the democratizing effects of the Internet. One line of critique includes variants of the Babel objection: the concern that information overload will lead to fragmentation of discourse, polarization, and the loss of political community. A different and descriptively contradictory line of critique suggests that the Internet is, in fact, exhibiting concentration: Both infrastructure and, more fundamentally, patterns of attention are much less distributed than we thought. As a consequence, the Internet diverges from the mass media much less than we thought in the 1990s and significantly less than we might hope. + +I begin the chapter by offering a menu of the core technologies and usage patterns that can be said, as of the middle of the first decade of the twentyfirst century, to represent the core Internet-based technologies of democratic discourse. I then use two case studies to describe the social and economic practices through which these tools are implemented to construct the public ,{[pg 215]}, sphere, and how these practices differ quite radically from the mass-media model. On the background of these stories, we are then able to consider the critiques that have been leveled against the claim that the Internet democratizes. Close examination of the application of networked information economy to the production of the public sphere suggests that the emerging networked public sphere offers significant improvements over one dominated by commercial mass media. Throughout the discussion, it is important to keep in mind that the relevant comparison is always between the public sphere that we in fact had throughout the twentieth century, the one dominated by mass media, that is the baseline for comparison, not the utopian image of the "everyone a pamphleteer" that animated the hopes of the 1990s for Internet democracy. Departures from the naïve utopia are not signs that the Internet does not democratize, after all. They are merely signs that the medium and its analysis are maturing. + +2~ BASIC TOOLS OF NETWORKED COMMUNICATION +={ communication diversity : + See diversity communication tools +8 ; + Internet : + technologies of +8 ; + networked public sphere : + basic communication tools +8 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + basic communication tools +8 ; + public sphere : + basic communication tools +8 ; + technology +8 +} + +Analyzing the effect of the networked information environment on public discourse by cataloging the currently popular tools for communication is, to some extent, self-defeating. These will undoubtedly be supplanted by new ones. Analyzing this effect without having a sense of what these tools are or how they are being used is, on the other hand, impossible. This leaves us with the need to catalog what is, while trying to abstract from what is being used to what relationships of information and communication are emerging, and from these to transpose to a theory of the networked information economy as a new platform for the public sphere. + +E-mail is the most popular application on the Net. It is cheap and trivially easy to use. Basic e-mail, as currently used, is not ideal for public communications. While it provides a cheap and efficient means of communicating with large numbers of individuals who are not part of one's basic set of social associations, the presence of large amounts of commercial spam and the amount of mail flowing in and out of mailboxes make indiscriminate e-mail distributions a relatively poor mechanism for being heard. E-mails to smaller groups, preselected by the sender for having some interest in a subject or relationship to the sender, do, however, provide a rudimentary mechanism for communicating observations, ideas, and opinions to a significant circle, on an ad hoc basis. Mailing lists are more stable and self-selecting, and ,{[pg 216]}, therefore more significant as a basic tool for the networked public sphere. Some mailing lists are moderated or edited, and run by one or a small number of editors. Others are not edited in any significant way. What separates mailing lists from most Web-based uses is the fact that they push the information on them into the mailbox of subscribers. Because of their attention limits, individuals restrict their subscriptions, so posting on a mailing list tends to be done by and for people who have self-selected as having a heightened degree of common interest, substantive or contextual. It therefore enhances the degree to which one is heard by those already interested in a topic. It is not a communications model of one-to-many, or few-to-many as broadcast is to an open, undefined class of audience members. Instead, it allows one, or a few, or even a limited large group to communicate to a large but limited group, where the limit is self-selection as being interested or even immersed in a subject. +={ discussion lists (electronic) ; + distribution lists (electronic) ; + e-mail ; + mailing lists (electronic) ; + Web +4 +} + +The World Wide Web is the other major platform for tools that individuals use to communicate in the networked public sphere. It enables a wide range of applications, from basic static Web pages, to, more recently, blogs and various social-software-mediated platforms for large-scale conversations of the type described in chapter 3--like Slashdot. Static Web pages are the individual's basic "broadcast" medium. They allow any individual or organization to present basic texts, sounds, and images pertaining to their position. They allow small NGOs to have a worldwide presence and visibility. They allow individuals to offer thoughts and commentaries. They allow the creation of a vast, searchable database of information, observations, and opinions, available at low cost for anyone, both to read and write into. This does not yet mean that all these statements are heard by the relevant others to whom they are addressed. Substantial analysis is devoted to that problem, but first let us complete the catalog of tools and information flow structures. +={ blogs +3 ; + static Web pages +1 ; + writable Web +3 +} + +One Web-based tool and an emerging cultural practice around it that extends the basic characteristics of Web sites as media for the political public sphere are Web logs, or blogs. Blogs are a tool and an approach to using the Web that extends the use of Web pages in two significant ways. Technically, blogs are part of a broader category of innovations that make the web "writable." That is, they make Web pages easily capable of modification through a simple interface. They can be modified from anywhere with a networked computer, and the results of writing onto the Web page are immediately available to anyone who accesses the blog to read. This technical change resulted in two divergences from the cultural practice of Web sites ,{[pg 217]}, in the 1990s. First, they allowed the evolution of a journal-style Web page, where individual short posts are added to the Web site in short or large intervals. As practice has developed over the past few years, these posts are usually archived chronologically. For many users, this means that blogs have become a form of personal journal, updated daily or so, for their own use and perhaps for the use of a very small group of friends. What is significant about this characteristic from the perspective of the construction of the public sphere is that blogs enable individuals to write to their Web pages in journalism time--that is, hourly, daily, weekly--whereas Web page culture that preceded it tended to be slower moving: less an equivalent of reportage than of the essay. Today, one certainly finds individuals using blog software to maintain what are essentially static Web pages, to which they add essays or content occasionally, and Web sites that do not use blogging technology but are updated daily. The public sphere function is based on the content and cadence--that is, the use practice--not the technical platform. + +The second critical innovation of the writable Web in general and of blogs in particular was the fact that in addition to the owner, readers/users could write to the blog. Blogging software allows the person who runs a blog to permit some, all, or none of the readers to post comments to the blog, with or without retaining power to edit or moderate the posts that go on, and those that do not. The result is therefore not only that many more people write finished statements and disseminate them widely, but also that the end product is a weighted conversation, rather than a finished good. It is a conversation because of the common practice of allowing and posting comments, as well as comments to these comments. Blog writers--bloggers-- often post their own responses in the comment section or address comments in the primary section. Blog-based conversation is weighted, because the culture and technical affordances of blogging give the owner of the blog greater weight in deciding who gets to post or comment and who gets to decide these questions. Different blogs use these capabilities differently; some opt for broader intake and discussion on the board, others for a more tightly edited blog. In all these cases, however, the communications model or information-flow structure that blogs facilitate is a weighted conversation that takes the form of one or a group of primary contributors/authors, together with some larger number, often many, secondary contributors, communicating to an unlimited number of many readers. + +The writable Web also encompasses another set of practices that are distinct, but that are often pooled in the literature together with blogs. These ,{[pg 218]}, are the various larger-scale, collaborative-content production systems available on the Web, of the type described in chapter 3. Two basic characteristics make sites like Slashdot or /{Wikipedia}/ different from blogs. First, they are intended for, and used by, very large groups, rather than intended to facilitate a conversation weighted toward one or a small number of primary speakers. Unlike blogs, they are not media for individual or small group expression with a conversation feature. They are intrinsically group communication media. They therefore incorporate social software solutions to avoid deterioration into chaos--peer review, structured posting privileges, reputation systems, and so on. Second, in the case of Wikis, the conversation platform is anchored by a common text. From the perspective of facilitating the synthesis of positions and opinions, the presence of collaborative authorship of texts offers an additional degree of viscosity to the conversation, so that views "stick" to each other, must jostle for space, and accommodate each other. In the process, the output is more easily recognizable as a collective output and a salient opinion or observation than where the form of the conversation is more free-flowing exchange of competing views. +={ collaborative authorship } + +Common to all these Web-based tools--both static and dynamic, individual and cooperative--are linking, quotation, and presentation. It is at the very core of the hypertext markup language (HTML) to make referencing easy. And it is at the very core of a radically distributed network to allow materials to be archived by whoever wants to archive them, and then to be accessible to whoever has the reference. Around these easy capabilities, the cultural practice has emerged to reference through links for easy transition from your own page or post to the one you are referring to--whether as inspiration or in disagreement. This culture is fundamentally different from the mass-media culture, where sending a five-hundred-page report to millions of users is hard and expensive. In the mass media, therefore, instead of allowing readers to read the report alongside its review, all that is offered is the professional review in the context of a culture that trusts the reviewer. On the Web, linking to original materials and references is considered a core characteristic of communication. The culture is oriented toward "see for yourself." Confidence in an observation comes from a combination of the reputation of the speaker as it has emerged over time, reading underlying sources you believe you have some competence to evaluate for yourself, and knowing that for any given referenced claim or source, there is some group of people out there, unaffiliated with the reviewer or speaker, who will have access to the source and the means for making their disagreement with the ,{[pg 219]}, speaker's views known. Linking and "see for yourself" represent a radically different and more participatory model of accreditation than typified the mass media. +={ hyperlinking on the Web ; + linking on the Web ; + network topology : + quoting on Web ; + quoting on Web ; + referencing on the Web ; + structure of network : + quoting on Web ; + topology, network : + quoting on Web ; + Web : + quoting from other sites ; + wireless communications : + quoting from other sites +} + +Another dimension that is less well developed in the United States than it is in Europe and East Asia is mobility, or the spatial and temporal ubiquity of basic tools for observing and commenting on the world we inhabit. Dan Gillmor is clearly right to include these basic characteristics in his book We the Media, adding to the core tools of what he describes as a transformation in journalism, short message service (SMS), and mobile connected cameras to mailing lists, Web logs, Wikis, and other tools. The United States has remained mostly a PC-based networked system, whereas in Europe and Asia, there has been more substantial growth in handheld devices, primarily mobile phones. In these domains, SMS--the "e-mail" of mobile phones--and camera phones have become critical sources of information, in real time. In some poor countries, where cell phone minutes remain very (even prohibitively) expensive for many users and where landlines may not exist, text messaging is becoming a central and ubiquitous communication tool. What these suggest to us is a transition, as the capabilities of both systems converge, to widespread availability of the ability to register and communicate observations in text, audio, and video, wherever we are and whenever we wish. Drazen Pantic tells of how listeners of Internet-based Radio B-92 in Belgrade reported events in their neighborhoods after the broadcast station had been shut down by the Milosevic regime. Howard Rheingold describes in Smart Mobs how citizens of the Philippines used SMS to organize real-time movements and action to overthrow their government. In a complex modern society, where things that matter can happen anywhere and at any time, the capacities of people armed with the means of recording, rendering, and communicating their observations change their relationship to the events that surround them. Whatever one sees and hears can be treated as input into public debate in ways that were impossible when capturing, rendering, and communicating were facilities reserved to a handful of organizations and a few thousands of their employees. +={ Gilmore, Dan ; + Pantic, Drazen ; + Rheingold, Howard ; + mobile phones ; + text messaging +} + +2~ NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY MEETS THE PUBLIC SPHERE +={ information economy : + effects on public sphere +21 ; + networked information economy : + effects on public sphere +21 +} + +The networked public sphere is not made of tools, but of social production practices that these tools enable. The primary effect of the Internet on the ,{[pg 220]}, public sphere in liberal societies relies on the information and cultural production activity of emerging nonmarket actors: individuals working alone and cooperatively with others, more formal associations like NGOs, and their feedback effect on the mainstream media itself. These enable the networked public sphere to moderate the two major concerns with commercial mass media as a platform for the public sphere: (1) the excessive power it gives its owners, and (2) its tendency, when owners do not dedicate their media to exert power, to foster an inert polity. More fundamentally, the social practices of information and discourse allow a very large number of actors to see themselves as potential contributors to public discourse and as potential actors in political arenas, rather than mostly passive recipients of mediated information who occasionally can vote their preferences. In this section, I offer two detailed stories that highlight different aspects of the effects of the networked information economy on the construction of the public sphere. The first story focuses on how the networked public sphere allows individuals to monitor and disrupt the use of mass-media power, as well as organize for political action. The second emphasizes in particular how the networked public sphere allows individuals and groups of intense political engagement to report, comment, and generally play the role traditionally assigned to the press in observing, analyzing, and creating political salience for matters of public interest. The case studies provide a context both for seeing how the networked public sphere responds to the core failings of the commercial, mass-media-dominated public sphere and for considering the critiques of the Internet as a platform for a liberal public sphere. + +Our first story concerns Sinclair Broadcasting and the 2004 U.S. presidential election. It highlights the opportunities that mass-media owners have to exert power over the public sphere, the variability within the media itself in how this power is used, and, most significant for our purposes here, the potential corrective effect of the networked information environment. At its core, it suggests that the existence of radically decentralized outlets for individuals and groups can provide a check on the excessive power that media owners were able to exercise in the industrial information economy. +={ blogs : + Sinclair Broadcasting case study +6 ; + boycott of Sinclair Broadcasting +6 ; + SBG (Sinclair Broadcast Group) +6 ; + Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG) +6 +} + +Sinclair, which owns major television stations in a number of what were considered the most competitive and important states in the 2004 election-- including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowa--informed its staff and stations that it planned to preempt the normal schedule of its sixty-two stations to air a documentary called Stolen Honor: The Wounds That Never Heal, as a news program, a week and a half before the elections.~{ Elizabeth Jensen, "Sinclair Fires Journalist After Critical Comments," Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2004. }~ The documentary ,{[pg 221]}, was reported to be a strident attack on Democratic candidate John Kerry's Vietnam War service. One reporter in Sinclair's Washington bureau, who objected to the program and described it as "blatant political propaganda," was promptly fired.~{ Jensen, "Sinclair Fires Journalist"; Sheridan Lyons, "Fired Reporter Tells Why He Spoke Out," Baltimore Sun, October 29, 2004. }~ The fact that Sinclair owns stations reaching one quarter of U.S. households, that it used its ownership to preempt local broadcast schedules, and that it fired a reporter who objected to its decision, make this a classic "Berlusconi effect" story, coupled with a poster-child case against media concentration and the ownership of more than a small number of outlets by any single owner. The story of Sinclair's plans broke on Saturday, October 9, 2004, in the Los Angeles Times. Over the weekend, "official" responses were beginning to emerge in the Democratic Party. The Kerry campaign raised questions about whether the program violated election laws as an undeclared "in-kind" contribution to the Bush campaign. By Tuesday, October 12, the Democratic National Committee announced that it was filing a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), while seventeen Democratic senators wrote a letter to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), demanding that the commission investigate whether Sinclair was abusing the public trust in the airwaves. Neither the FEC nor the FCC, however, acted or intervened throughout the episode. +={ accreditation : + concentration of mass-media power +5 | power of mass media owners +5 ; + Berlusconi effect +5 ; + capacity : + networked public sphere reaction +5 ; + commercial mass media : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + concentration of mass-media power : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + culture : + shaping perceptions of others +5 ; + exercise of programming power : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + filtering : + corrective effects of network environment ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + concentration of mass-media power +5 | power of mass media owners +5 ; + information production inputs : + propaganda +5 ; + inputs to production : + propaganda +5 ; + manipulating perceptions of others : + with propaganda +5 ; + mass media : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + media concentration : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + owners of mass media, power of : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + perceptions of others, shaping : + with propaganda +5 ; + power of mass media owners : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + production inputs : + propaganda +5 ; + propaganda : + Stolen Honor documentary +5 ; + relevance filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +5 | power of mass media owners +5 ; + shaping perceptions of others : + with propaganda +5 ; + Stolen Honor documentary +5 +} + +Alongside these standard avenues of response in the traditional public sphere of commercial mass media, their regulators, and established parties, a very different kind of response was brewing on the Net, in the blogosphere. On the morning of October 9, 2004, the Los Angeles Times story was blogged on a number of political blogs--Josh Marshall on talkingpointsmemo. com, Chris Bower on MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas on dailyKos.com. By midday that Saturday, October 9, two efforts aimed at organizing opposition to Sinclair were posted in the dailyKos and MyDD. A "boycottSinclair" site was set up by one individual, and was pointed to by these blogs. Chris Bowers on MyDD provided a complete list of Sinclair stations and urged people to call the stations and threaten to picket and boycott. By Sunday, October 10, the dailyKos posted a list of national advertisers with Sinclair, urging readers to call them. On Monday, October 11, MyDD linked to that list, while another blog, theleftcoaster.com, posted a variety of action agenda items, from picketing affiliates of Sinclair to suggesting that readers oppose Sinclair license renewals, providing a link to the FCC site explaining the basic renewal process and listing public-interest organizations to work with. That same day, another individual, Nick Davis, started a Web site, ,{[pg 222]}, BoycottSBG.com, on which he posted the basic idea that a concerted boycott of local advertisers was the way to go, while another site, stopsinclair.org, began pushing for a petition. In the meantime, TalkingPoints published a letter from Reed Hundt, former chairman of the FCC, to Sinclair, and continued finding tidbits about the film and its maker. Later on Monday, TalkingPoints posted a letter from a reader who suggested that stockholders of Sinclair could bring a derivative action. By 5:00 a.m. on the dawn of Tuesday, October 12, however, TalkingPoints began pointing toward Davis's database on BoycottSBG.com. By 10:00 that morning, Marshall posted on TalkingPoints a letter from an anonymous reader, which began by saying: "I've worked in the media business for 30 years and I guarantee you that sales is what these local TV stations are all about. They don't care about license renewal or overwhelming public outrage. They care about sales only, so only local advertisers can affect their decisions." This reader then outlined a plan for how to watch and list all local advertisers, and then write to the sales managers--not general managers--of the local stations and tell them which advertisers you are going to call, and then call those. By 1:00 p.m. Marshall posted a story of his own experience with this strategy. He used Davis's database to identify an Ohio affiliate's local advertisers. He tried to call the sales manager of the station, but could not get through. He then called the advertisers. The post is a "how to" instruction manual, including admonitions to remember that the advertisers know nothing of this, the story must be explained, and accusatory tones avoided, and so on. Marshall then began to post letters from readers who explained with whom they had talked--a particular sales manager, for example--and who were then referred to national headquarters. He continued to emphasize that advertisers were the right addressees. By 5:00 p.m. that same Tuesday, Marshall was reporting more readers writing in about experiences, and continued to steer his readers to sites that helped them to identify their local affiliate's sales manager and their advertisers.~{ The various posts are archived and can be read, chronologically, at http:// www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_10.php. }~ +={ Bower, Chris ; + dailyKos.com site ; + Davis, Nick +1 ; + Marshall, Josh ; + Moulitas, Markos ; + MyDD.com site ; + TalkingPoints site ; + BoycottSBG.com site +1 ; + Hundt, Reed +} + +By the morning of Wednesday, October 13, the boycott database already included eight hundred advertisers, and was providing sample letters for users to send to advertisers. Later that day, BoycottSBG reported that some participants in the boycott had received reply e-mails telling them that their unsolicited e-mail constituted illegal spam. Davis explained that the CANSPAM Act, the relevant federal statute, applied only to commercial spam, and pointed users to a law firm site that provided an overview of CANSPAM. By October 14, the boycott effort was clearly bearing fruit. Davis ,{[pg 223]}, reported that Sinclair affiliates were threatening advertisers who cancelled advertisements with legal action, and called for volunteer lawyers to help respond. Within a brief period, he collected more than a dozen volunteers to help the advertisers. Later that day, another blogger at grassroots nation.com had set up a utility that allowed users to send an e-mail to all advertisers in the BoycottSBG database. By the morning of Friday, October 15, Davis was reporting more than fifty advertisers pulling ads, and three or four mainstream media reports had picked up the boycott story and reported on it. That day, an analyst at Lehman Brothers issued a research report that downgraded the expected twelve-month outlook for the price of Sinclair stock, citing concerns about loss of advertiser revenue and risk of tighter regulation. Mainstream news reports over the weekend and the following week systematically placed that report in context of local advertisers pulling their ads from Sinclair. On Monday, October 18, the company's stock price dropped by 8 percent (while the S&P 500 rose by about half a percent). The following morning, the stock dropped a further 6 percent, before beginning to climb back, as Sinclair announced that it would not show Stolen Honor, but would provide a balanced program with only portions of the documentary and one that would include arguments on the other side. On that day, the company's stock price had reached its lowest point in three years. The day after the announced change in programming decision, the share price bounced back to where it had been on October 15. There were obviously multiple reasons for the stock price losses, and Sinclair stock had been losing ground for many months prior to these events. Nonetheless, as figure 7.1 demonstrates, the market responded quite sluggishly to the announcements of regulatory and political action by the Democratic establishment earlier in the week of October 12, by comparison to the precipitous decline and dramatic bounce-back surrounding the market projections that referred to advertising loss. While this does not prove that the Weborganized, blog-driven and -facilitated boycott was the determining factor, as compared to fears of formal regulatory action, the timing strongly suggests that the efficacy of the boycott played a very significant role. + +The first lesson of the Sinclair Stolen Honor story is about commercial mass media themselves. The potential for the exercise of inordinate power by media owners is not an imaginary concern. Here was a publicly traded firm whose managers supported a political party and who planned to use their corporate control over stations reaching one quarter of U.S. households, many in swing states, to put a distinctly political message in front of this large audience. ,{[pg 224]}, + +{won_benkler_7_1.png "Figure 7.1: Sinclair Stock, October 8?November 5, 2004" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +- We also learn, however, that in the absence of monopoly, such decisions do not determine what everyone sees or hears, and that other mass-media outlets will criticize each other under these conditions. This criticism alone, however, cannot stop a determined media owner from trying to exert its influence in the public sphere, and if placed as Sinclair was, in locations with significant political weight, such intervention could have substantial influence. Second, we learn that the new, network-based media can exert a significant counterforce. They offer a completely new and much more widely open intake basin for insight and commentary. The speed with which individuals were able to set up sites to stake out a position, to collect and make available information relevant to a specific matter of public concern, and to provide a platform for others to exchange views about the appropriate political strategy and tactics was completely different from anything that the economics and organizational structure of mass media make feasible. The third lesson is about the internal dynamics of the networked public sphere. Filtering and synthesis occurred through discussion, trial, and error. Multiple proposals for action surfaced, and the practice of linking allowed most anyone interested who connected to one of the nodes in the network to follow ,{[pg 225]}, quotations and references to get a sense of the broad range of proposals. Different people could coalesce on different modes of action--150,000 signed the petition on stopsinclair.org, while others began to work on the boycott. Setting up the mechanism was trivial, both technically and as a matter of cost--something a single committed individual could choose to do. Pointing and adoption provided the filtering, and feedback about the efficacy, again distributed through a system of cross-references, allowed for testing and accreditation of this course of action. High-visibility sites, like Talkingpointsmemo or the dailyKos, offered transmissions hubs that disseminated information about the various efforts and provided a platform for interest-group-wide tactical discussions. It remains ambiguous to what extent these dispersed loci of public debate still needed mass-media exposure to achieve broad political salience. BoycottSBG.com received more than three hundred thousand unique visitors during its first week of operations, and more than one million page views. It successfully coordinated a campaign that resulted in real effects on advertisers in a large number of geographically dispersed media markets. In this case, at least, mainstream media reports on these efforts were few, and the most immediate "transmission mechanism" of their effect was the analyst's report from Lehman, not the media. It is harder to judge the extent to which those few mainstream media reports that did appear featured in the decision of the analyst to credit the success of the boycott efforts. The fact that mainstream media outlets may have played a role in increasing the salience of the boycott does not, however, take away from the basic role played by these new mechanisms of bringing information and experience to bear on a broad public conversation combined with a mechanism to organize political action across many different locations and social contexts. +={ BoycottSBG.com site } + +Our second story focuses not on the new reactive capacity of the networked public sphere, but on its generative capacity. In this capacity, it begins to outline the qualitative change in the role of individuals as potential investigators and commentators, as active participants in defining the agenda and debating action in the public sphere. This story is about Diebold Election Systems (one of the leading manufacturers of electronic voting machines and a subsidiary of one of the foremost ATM manufacturers in the world, with more than $2 billion a year in revenue), and the way that public criticism of its voting machines developed. It provides a series of observations about how the networked information economy operates, and how it allows large numbers of people to participate in a peer-production enterprise of ,{[pg 226]}, news gathering, analysis, and distribution, applied to a quite unsettling set of claims. While the context of the story is a debate over electronic voting, that is not what makes it pertinent to democracy. The debate could have centered on any corporate and government practice that had highly unsettling implications, was difficult to investigate and parse, and was largely ignored by mainstream media. The point is that the networked public sphere did engage, and did successfully turn something that was not a matter of serious public discussion to a public discussion that led to public action. +={ capacity : + networked public sphere generation +12 ; + Diebold Election Systems +12 ; + electronic voting machines (case study) +12 ; + information production : + networked public sphere capacity for +12 ; + networked public sphere : + Diebold Election Systems case study +12 ; + peer production : + electronic voting machines (case study) +12 ; + policy : + Diebold Election Systems case study +12 ; + production of information : + networked public sphere capacity for +12 ; + public sphere : + Diebold Election Systems case study +12 ; + voting, electronic +12 +} + +Electronic voting machines were first used to a substantial degree in the United States in the November 2002 elections. Prior to, and immediately following that election, there was sparse mass-media coverage of electronic voting machines. The emphasis was mostly on the newness, occasional slips, and the availability of technical support staff to help at polls. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution story, entitled "Georgia Puts Trust in Electronic Voting, Critics Fret about Absence of Paper Trails,"~{ Duane D. Stanford, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 31, 2002, 1A. }~ is not atypical of coverage at the time, which generally reported criticism by computer engineers, but conveyed an overall soothing message about the efficacy of the machines and about efforts by officials and companies to make sure that all would be well. The New York Times report of the Georgia effort did not even mention the critics.~{ Katherine Q. Seelye, "The 2002 Campaign: The States; Georgia About to Plunge into Touch-Screen Voting," New York Times, October 30, 2002, A22. }~ The Washington Post reported on the fears of failure with the newness of the machines, but emphasized the extensive efforts that the manufacturer, Diebold, was making to train election officials and to have hundreds of technicians available to respond to failure.~{ Edward Walsh, "Election Day to Be Test of Voting Process," Washington Post, November 4, 2002, A1. }~ After the election, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the touch-screen machines were a hit, burying in the text any references to machines that highlighted the wrong candidates or the long lines at the booths, while the Washington Post highlighted long lines in one Maryland county, but smooth operation elsewhere. Later, the Post reported a University of Maryland study that surveyed users and stated that quite a few needed help from election officials, compromising voter privacy.~{ Washington Post, December 12, 2002. }~ Given the centrality of voting mechanisms for democracy, the deep concerns that voting irregularities determined the 2000 presidential elections, and the sense that voting machines would be a solution to the "hanging chads" problem (the imperfectly punctured paper ballots that came to symbolize the Florida fiasco during that election), mass-media reports were remarkably devoid of any serious inquiry into how secure and accurate voting machines were, and included a high quotient of soothing comments from election officials who bought the machines and executives of the manufacturers who sold them. No mass-media outlet sought to go ,{[pg 227]}, behind the claims of the manufacturers about their machines, to inquire into their security or the integrity of their tallying and transmission mechanisms against vote tampering. No doubt doing so would have been difficult. These systems were protected as trade secrets. State governments charged with certifying the systems were bound to treat what access they had to the inner workings as confidential. Analyzing these systems requires high degrees of expertise in computer security. Getting around these barriers is difficult. However, it turned out to be feasible for a collection of volunteers in various settings and contexts on the Net. + +In late January 2003, Bev Harris, an activist focused on electronic voting machines, was doing research on Diebold, which has provided more than 75,000 voting machines in the United States and produced many of the machines used in Brazil's purely electronic voting system. Harris had set up a whistle-blower site as part of a Web site she ran at the time, blackboxvoting.com. Apparently working from a tip, Harris found out about an openly available site where Diebold stored more than forty thousand files about how its system works. These included specifications for, and the actual code of, Diebold's machines and vote-tallying system. In early February 2003, Harris published two initial journalistic accounts on an online journal in New Zealand, Scoop.com--whose business model includes providing an unedited platform for commentators who wish to use it as a platform to publish their materials. She also set up a space on her Web site for technically literate users to comment on the files she had retrieved. In early July of that year, she published an analysis of the results of the discussions on her site, which pointed out how access to the Diebold open site could have been used to affect the 2002 election results in Georgia (where there had been a tightly contested Senate race). In an editorial attached to the publication, entitled "Bigger than Watergate," the editors of Scoop claimed that what Harris had found was nothing short of a mechanism for capturing the U.S. elections process. They then inserted a number of lines that go to the very heart of how the networked information economy can use peer production to play the role of watchdog: +={ Harris, Bev } + +_1 We can now reveal for the first time the location of a complete online copy of the original data set. As we anticipate attempts to prevent the distribution of this information we encourage supporters of democracy to make copies of these files and to make them available on websites and file sharing networks: http:// users.actrix.co.nz/dolly/. As many of the files are zip password protected you may need some assistance in opening them, we have found that the utility available at ,{[pg 228]}, the following URL works well: http://www.lostpassword.com. Finally some of the zip files are partially damaged, but these too can be read by using the utility at: http://www.zip-repair.com/. At this stage in this inquiry we do not believe that we have come even remotely close to investigating all aspects of this data; i.e., there is no reason to believe that the security flaws discovered so far are the only ones. Therefore we expect many more discoveries to be made. We want the assistance of the online computing community in this enterprise and we encourage you to file your findings at the forum HERE [providing link to forum]. + +A number of characteristics of this call to arms would have been simply infeasible in the mass-media environment. They represent a genuinely different mind-set about how news and analysis are produced and how censorship and power are circumvented. First, the ubiquity of storage and communications capacity means that public discourse can rely on "see for yourself" rather than on "trust me." The first move, then, is to make the raw materials available for all to see. Second, the editors anticipated that the company would try to suppress the information. Their response was not to use a counterweight of the economic and public muscle of a big media corporation to protect use of the materials. Instead, it was widespread distribution of information--about where the files could be found, and about where tools to crack the passwords and repair bad files could be found-- matched with a call for action: get these files, copy them, and store them in many places so they cannot be squelched. Third, the editors did not rely on large sums of money flowing from being a big media organization to hire experts and interns to scour the files. Instead, they posed a challenge to whoever was interested--there are more scoops to be found, this is important for democracy, good hunting!! Finally, they offered a platform for integration of the insights on their own forum. This short paragraph outlines a mechanism for radically distributed storage, distribution, analysis, and reporting on the Diebold files. + +As the story unfolded over the next few months, this basic model of peer production of investigation, reportage, analysis, and communication indeed worked. It resulted in the decertification of some of Diebold's systems in California, and contributed to a shift in the requirements of a number of states, which now require voting machines to produce a paper trail for recount purposes. The first analysis of the Diebold system based on the files Harris originally found was performed by a group of computer scientists at the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University and released ,{[pg 229]}, as a working paper in late July 2003. The Hopkins Report, or Rubin Report as it was also named after one of its authors, Aviel Rubin, presented deep criticism of the Diebold system and its vulnerabilities on many dimensions. The academic credibility of its authors required a focused response from Diebold. The company published a line-by-line response. Other computer scientists joined in the debate. They showed the limitations and advantages of the Hopkins Report, but also where the Diebold response was adequate and where it provided implicit admission of the presence of a number of the vulnerabilities identified in the report. The report and comments to it sparked two other major reports, commissioned by Maryland in the fall of 2003 and later in January 2004, as part of that state's efforts to decide whether to adopt electronic voting machines. Both studies found a wide range of flaws in the systems they examined and required modifications (see figure 7.2). +={ Harris, Bev +1 ; + Rubin, Aviel ; + Hopkins Report +} + +Meanwhile, trouble was brewing elsewhere for Diebold. In early August 2003, someone provided Wired magazine with a very large cache containing thousands of internal e-mails of Diebold. Wired reported that the e-mails were obtained by a hacker, emphasizing this as another example of the laxity of Diebold's security. However, the magazine provided neither an analysis of the e-mails nor access to them. Bev Harris, the activist who had originally found the Diebold materials, on the other hand, received the same cache, and posted the e-mails and memos on her site. Diebold's response was to threaten litigation. Claiming copyright in the e-mails, the company demanded from Harris, her Internet service provider, and a number of other sites where the materials had been posted, that the e-mails be removed. The e-mails were removed from these sites, but the strategy of widely distributed replication of data and its storage in many different topological and organizationally diverse settings made Diebold's efforts ultimately futile. The protagonists from this point on were college students. First, two students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and quickly students in a number of other universities in the United States, began storing the e-mails and scouring them for evidence of impropriety. In October 2003, Diebold proceeded to write to the universities whose students were hosting the materials. The company invoked provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that require Web-hosting companies to remove infringing materials when copyright owners notify them of the presence of these materials on their sites. The universities obliged, and required the students to remove the materials from their sites. The students, however, did not disappear quietly into the ,{[pg 230]}, night. + +{won_benkler_7_2.png "Figure 7.2: Analysis of the Diebold Source Code Materials" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +- On October 21, 2003, they launched a multipronged campaign of what they described as "electronic civil disobedience." First, they kept moving the files from one student to another's machine, encouraging students around the country to resist the efforts to eliminate the material. Second, they injected the materials into FreeNet, the anticensorship peer-to-peer publication network, and into other peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, like eDonkey and BitTorrent. Third, supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the primary civil-rights organizations concerned with Internet freedom, the students brought suit against Diebold, seeking a judicial declaration that their posting of the materials was privileged. They won both the insurgent campaign and the formal one. As a practical matter, the materials remained publicly available throughout this period. As a matter of law, the litigation went badly enough for Diebold that the company issued a letter promising not to sue the students. The court nonetheless awarded the students damages and attorneys' fees because it found that Diebold had "knowingly and materially misrepresented" that the publication of the e-mail archive was a copyright violation in its letters to the Internet service providers.~{ /{Online Policy Group v. Diebold}/, Inc., 337 F. Supp. 2d 1195 (2004). }~ ,{[pg 231]}, + +Central from the perspective of understanding the dynamics of the networked public sphere is not, however, the court case--it was resolved almost a year later, after most of the important events had already unfolded--but the efficacy of the students' continued persistent publication in the teeth of the cease-and-desist letters and the willingness of the universities to comply. The strategy of replicating the files everywhere made it impracticable to keep the documents from the public eye. And the public eye, in turn, scrutinized. Among the things that began to surface as users read the files were internal e-mails recognizing problems with the voting system, with the security of the FTP site from which Harris had originally obtained the specifications of the voting systems, and e-mail that indicated that the machines implemented in California had been "patched" or updated after their certification. That is, the machines actually being deployed in California were at least somewhat different from the machines that had been tested and certified by the state. This turned out to have been a critical find. +={ Harris, Bev } + +California had a Voting Systems Panel within the office of the secretary of state that reviewed and certified voting machines. On November 3, 2003, two weeks after the students launched their electronic disobedience campaign, the agenda of the panel's meeting was to include a discussion of proposed modifications to one of Diebold's voting systems. Instead of discussing the agenda item, however, one of the panel members made a motion to table the item until the secretary of state had an opportunity to investigate, because "It has come to our attention that some very disconcerting information regarding this item [sic] and we are informed that this company, Diebold, may have installed uncertified software in at least one county before it was certified."~{ California Secretary of State Voting Systems Panel, Meeting Minutes, November 3, 2003, http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/vsp_min_110303.pdf. }~ The source of the information is left unclear in the minutes. A later report in Wired cited an unnamed source in the secretary of state's office as saying that somebody within the company had provided this information. The timing and context, however, suggest that it was the revelation and discussion of the e-mail memoranda online that played that role. Two of the members of the public who spoke on the record mention information from within the company. One specifically mentions the information gleaned from company e-mails. In the next committee meeting, on December 16, 2003, one member of the public who was in attendance specifically referred to the e-mails on the Internet, referencing in particular a January e-mail about upgrades and changes to the certified systems. By that December meeting, the independent investigation by the secretary of state had found systematic discrepancies between the systems actually installed ,{[pg 232]}, and those tested and certified by the state. The following few months saw more studies, answers, debates, and the eventual decertification of many of the Diebold machines installed in California (see figures 7.3a and 7.3b). + +The structure of public inquiry, debate, and collective action exemplified by this story is fundamentally different from the structure of public inquiry and debate in the mass-media-dominated public sphere of the twentieth century. The initial investigation and analysis was done by a committed activist, operating on a low budget and with no financing from a media company. The output of this initial inquiry was not a respectable analysis by a major player in the public debate. It was access to raw materials and initial observations about them, available to start a conversation. Analysis then emerged from a widely distributed process undertaken by Internet users of many different types and abilities. In this case, it included academics studying electronic voting systems, activists, computer systems practitioners, and mobilized students. When the pressure from a well-financed corporation mounted, it was not the prestige and money of a Washington Post or a New York Times that protected the integrity of the information and its availability for public scrutiny. It was the radically distributed cooperative efforts of students and peer-to-peer network users around the Internet. These efforts were, in turn, nested in other communities of cooperative production--like the free software community that developed some of the applications used to disseminate the e-mails after Swarthmore removed them from the students' own site. There was no single orchestrating power--neither party nor professional commercial media outlet. There was instead a series of uncoordinated but mutually reinforcing actions by individuals in different settings and contexts, operating under diverse organizational restrictions and affordances, to expose, analyze, and distribute criticism and evidence for it. The networked public sphere here does not rely on advertising or capturing large audiences to focus its efforts. What became salient for the public agenda and shaped public discussion was what intensely engaged active participants, rather than what kept the moderate attention of large groups of passive viewers. Instead of the lowest-common-denominator focus typical of commercial mass media, each individual and group can--and, indeed, most likely will--focus precisely on what is most intensely interesting to its participants. Instead of iconic representation built on the scarcity of time slots and space on the air or on the page, we see the emergence of a "see for yourself" culture. Access to underlying documents and statements, and to ,{[pg 233]}, the direct expression of the opinions of others, becomes a central part of the medium. + +{won_benkler_7_3a.png "Figure 7.3a: Diebold Internal E-mails Discovery and Distribution" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +2~ CRITIQUES OF THE CLAIMS THAT THE INTERNET HAS DEMOCRATIZING EFFECTS +={ democratizing effects of Internet : + critiques of claims of +12 ; + Internet : + democratizing effect of +12 ; + networked public sphere : + critiques that Internet democratizes +12 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + critiques that Internet democratizes +12 ; + public sphere : + critiques that Internet democratizes +12 +} + +It is common today to think of the 1990s, out of which came the Supreme Court's opinion in /{Reno v. ACLU}/, as a time of naïve optimism about the Internet, expressing in political optimism the same enthusiasm that drove the stock market bubble, with the same degree of justifiability. An ideal liberal public sphere did not, in fact, burst into being from the Internet, fully grown like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. The detailed criticisms of the early claims about the democratizing effects of the Internet can be characterized as variants of five basic claims: + +{won_benkler_7_3a.png "Figure 7.3b: Internal E-mails Translated to Political and Judicial Action" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +1. /{Information overload.}/ A basic problem created when everyone can speak is that there will be too many statements, or too much information. Too ,{[pg 234]}, many observations and too many points of view make the problem of sifting through them extremely difficult, leading to an unmanageable din. This overall concern, a variant of the Babel objection, underlies three more specific arguments: that money will end up dominating anyway, that there will be fragmentation of discourse, and that fragmentation of discourse will lead to its polarization. +={ Babel objection ; + information overload and Babel objection +} + +/{Money will end up dominating anyway.}/ A point originally raised by Eli Noam is that in this explosively large universe, getting attention will be as difficult as getting your initial message out in the mass-media context, if not more so. The same means that dominated the capacity to speak in the mass-media environment--money--will dominate the capacity to be heard on the Internet, even if it no longer controls the capacity to speak. +={ money : + as dominant factor +} + +/{Fragmentation of attention and discourse.}/ A point raised most explicitly by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com is that the ubiquity of information and the absence of the mass media as condensation points will impoverish public discourse by fragmenting it. There will be no public sphere. ,{[pg 235]}, Individuals will view the world through millions of personally customized windows that will offer no common ground for political discourse or action, except among groups of highly similar individuals who customize their windows to see similar things. +={ Sunstein, Cass +1 ; + attention fragmentation ; + communities : + fragmentation of ; + diversity : + fragmentation of communication ; + fragmentation of communication ; + norms (social) : + fragmentation of communication ; + regulation by social norms : + fragmentation of communication ; + social relations and norms : + fragmentation of communication +} + +/{Polarization.}/ A descriptively related but analytically distinct critique of Sunstein's was that the fragmentation would lead to polarization. When information and opinions are shared only within groups of likeminded participants, he argued, they tend to reinforce each other's views and beliefs without engaging with alternative views or seeing the concerns and critiques of others. This makes each view more extreme in its own direction and increases the distance between positions taken by opposing camps. +={ polarization } + +2. /{Centralization of the Internet.}/ A second-generation criticism of the democratizing effects of the Internet is that it turns out, in fact, not to be as egalitarian or distributed as the 1990s conception had suggested. First, there is concentration in the pipelines and basic tools of communications. Second, and more intractable to policy, even in an open network, a high degree of attention is concentrated on a few top sites--a tiny number of sites are read by the vast majority of readers, while many sites are never visited by anyone. In this context, the Internet is replicating the massmedia model, perhaps adding a few channels, but not genuinely changing anything structural. +={ accreditation : + concentration of mass-media power +1 ; + centralization of communications ; + concentration of mass-media power +1 ; + filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +1 ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + concentration of mass-media power ; + Internet : + centralization of ; + media concentration ; + relevance filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +} + +Note that the concern with information overload is in direct tension with the second-generation concerns. To the extent that the concerns about Internet concentration are correct, they suggest that the information overload is not a deep problem. Sadly, from the perspective of democracy, it turns out that according to the concentration concern, there are few speakers to which most people listen, just as in the mass-media environment. While this means that the supposed benefits of the networked public sphere are illusory, it also means that the information overload concerns about what happens when there is no central set of speakers to whom most people listen are solved in much the same way that the mass-media model deals with the factual diversity of information, opinion, and observations in large societies--by consigning them to public oblivion. The response to both sets of concerns will therefore require combined consideration of a series of questions: To what extent are the claims of concentration correct? How do they solve the information overload ,{[pg 236]}, problem? To what extent does the observed concentration replicate the mass-media model? +={ Babel objection ; + information overload and Babel objection +} + +3. /{Centrality of commercial mass media to the Fourth Estate function.}/ The importance of the press to the political process is nothing new. It earned the press the nickname "the Fourth Estate" (a reference to the three estates that made up the prerevolutionary French Estates-General, the clergy, nobility, and townsmen), which has been in use for at least a hundred and fifty years. In American free speech theory, the press is often described as fulfilling "the watchdog function," deriving from the notion that the public representatives must be watched over to assure they do the public's business faithfully. In the context of the Internet, the concern, most clearly articulated by Neil Netanel, has been that in the modern complex societies in which we live, commercial mass media are critical for preserving the watchdog function of the media. Big, sophisticated, well-funded government and corporate market actors have enormous resources at their disposal to act as they please and to avoid scrutiny and democratic control. Only similarly big, powerful, independently funded media organizations, whose basic market roles are to observe and criticize other large organizations, can match these established elite organizational actors. Individuals and collections of volunteers talking to each other may be nice, but they cannot seriously replace well-funded, economically and politically powerful media. +={ Netanel, Neil ; + filtering : + watchdog functionality ; + networked public sphere : + watchdog functionality ; + peer production : + watchdog functionality ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + watchdog functionality ; + public sphere : + watchdog functionality ; + relevance filtering : + watchdog functionality ; + watchdog functionality +} + +4. /{Authoritarian countries can use filtering and monitoring to squelch Internet use.}/ A distinct set of claims and their critiques have to do with the effects of the Internet on authoritarian countries. The critique is leveled at a basic belief supposedly, and perhaps actually, held by some cyberlibertarians, that with enough access to Internet tools freedom will burst out everywhere. The argument is that China, more than any other country, shows that it is possible to allow a population access to the Internet-- it is now home to the second-largest national population of Internet users--and still control that use quite substantially. +={ authoritarian control ; + blocked access : + authoritarian control ; + filtering : + by authoritarian countries ; + government : + authoritarian control ; + monitoring, authoritarian ; + relevance filtering : + by authoritarian countries +} + +5. /{Digital divide.}/ While the Internet may increase the circle of participants in the public sphere, access to its tools is skewed in favor of those who already are well-off in society--in terms of wealth, race, and skills. I do not respond to this critique in this chapter. First, in the United States, this is less stark today than it was in the late 1990s. Computers and Internet connections are becoming cheaper and more widely available in public libraries and schools. As they become more central to life, they ,{[pg 237]}, seem to be reaching higher penetration rates, and growth rates among underrepresented groups are higher than the growth rate among the highly represented groups. The digital divide with regard to basic access within advanced economies is important as long as it persists, but seems to be a transitional problem. Moreover, it is important to recall that the democratizing effects of the Internet must be compared to democracy in the context of mass media, not in the context of an idealized utopia. Computer literacy and skills, while far from universal, are much more widely distributed than the skills and instruments of mass-media production. Second, I devote chapter 9 to the question of how and why the emergence specifically of nonmarket production provides new avenues for substantial improvements in equality of access to various desiderata that the market distributes unevenly, both within advanced economies and globally, where the maldistribution is much more acute. While the digital divide critique can therefore temper our enthusiasm for how radical the change represented by the networked information economy may be in terms of democracy, the networked information economy is itself an avenue for alleviating maldistribution. +={ digital divide ; + human welfare : + digital divide ; + welfare : + digital divide +} + +The remainder of this chapter is devoted to responding to these critiques, providing a defense of the claim that the Internet can contribute to a more attractive liberal public sphere. As we work through these objections, we can develop a better understanding of how the networked information economy responds to or overcomes the particular systematic failures of mass media as platforms for the public sphere. Throughout this analysis, it is comparison of the attractiveness of the networked public sphere to that baseline--the mass-media-dominated public sphere--not comparison to a nonexistent ideal public sphere or to the utopia of "everyone a pamphleteer," that should matter most to our assessment of its democratic promise. + +2~ IS THE INTERNET TOO CHAOTIC, TOO CONCENTRATED, OR NEITHER? +={ accreditation : + concentration of mass-media power +7 ; + Babel objection +7 ; + centralization of communications +7 ; + channels, transmission : + See transport channel policy chaotic, Internet as +7 ; + concentration of mass-media power +7 ; + filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +7 ; + filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +7 ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + concentration of mass-media power +7 ; + information overload and Babel objection +7 ; + Internet : + centralization of +7 ; + media concentration +7 ; + networked public sphere : + Internet as concentrated vs. chaotic +7 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + Internet as concentrated vs. chaotic +7 ; + public sphere : + Internet as concentrated vs. chaotic +7 ; + relevance filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +7 +} + +The first-generation critique of the claims that the Internet democratizes focused heavily on three variants of the information overload or Babel objection. The basic descriptive proposition that animated the Supreme Court in /{Reno v. ACLU}/ was taken as more or less descriptively accurate: Everyone would be equally able to speak on the Internet. However, this basic observation ,{[pg 238]}, was then followed by a descriptive or normative explanation of why this development was a threat to democracy, or at least not much of a boon. The basic problem that is diagnosed by this line of critique is the problem of attention. When everyone can speak, the central point of failure becomes the capacity to be heard--who listens to whom, and how that question is decided. Speaking in a medium that no one will actually hear with any reasonable likelihood may be psychologically satisfying, but it is not a move in a political conversation. Noam's prediction was, therefore, that there would be a reconcentration of attention: money would reemerge in this environment as a major determinant of the capacity to be heard, certainly no less, and perhaps even more so, than it was in the mass-media environment.~{ Eli Noam, "Will the Internet Be Bad for Democracy?" (November 2001), http:// www.citi.columbia.edu/elinoam/articles/int_bad_dem.htm. }~ Sunstein's theory was different. He accepted Nicholas Negroponte's prediction that people would be reading "The Daily Me," that is, that each of us would create highly customized windows on the information environment that would be narrowly tailored to our unique combination of interests. From this assumption about how people would be informed, he spun out two distinct but related critiques. The first was that discourse would be fragmented. With no six o'clock news to tell us what is on the public agenda, there would be no public agenda, just a fragmented multiplicity of private agendas that never coalesce into a platform for political discussion. The second was that, in a fragmented discourse, individuals would cluster into groups of self-reinforcing, self-referential discussion groups. These types of groups, he argued from social scientific evidence, tend to render their participants' views more extreme and less amenable to the conversation across political divides necessary to achieve reasoned democratic decisions. +={ Negroponte, Nicholas ; + Noam, Eli +1 ; + attention fragmentation +1 ; + communities : + fragmentation of +1 ; + diversity : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + norms (social) : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + regulation by social norms : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + social relations and norms : + fragmentation of communication +1 +} + +Extensive empirical and theoretical studies of actual use patterns of the Internet over the past five to eight years has given rise to a second-generation critique of the claim that the Internet democratizes. According to this critique, attention is much more concentrated on the Internet than we thought a few years ago: a tiny number of sites are highly linked, the vast majority of "speakers" are not heard, and the democratic potential of the Internet is lost. If correct, these claims suggest that Internet use patterns solve the problem of discourse fragmentation that Sunstein was worried about. Rather than each user reading a customized and completely different "newspaper," the vast majority of users turn out to see the same sites. In a network with a small number of highly visible sites that practically everyone reads, the discourse fragmentation problem is resolved. Because they are seen by most people, the polarization problem too is solved--the highly visible sites are ,{[pg 239]}, not small-group interactions with homogeneous viewpoints. While resolving Sunstein's concerns, this pattern is certainly consistent with Noam's prediction that money would have to be paid to reach visibility, effectively replicating the mass-media model. While centralization would resolve the Babel objection, it would do so only at the expense of losing much of the democratic promise of the Net. + +Therefore, we now turn to the question: Is the Internet in fact too chaotic or too concentrated to yield a more attractive democratic discourse than the mass media did? I suggest that neither is the case. At the risk of appearing a chimera of Goldilocks and Pangloss, I argue instead that the observed use of the network exhibits an order that is not too concentrated and not too chaotic, but rather, if not "just right," at least structures a networked public sphere more attractive than the mass-media-dominated public sphere. + +There are two very distinct types of claims about Internet centralization. The first, and earlier, has the familiar ring of media concentration. It is the simpler of the two, and is tractable to policy. The second, concerned with the emergent patterns of attention and linking on an otherwise open network, is more difficult to explain and intractable to policy. I suggest, however, that it actually stabilizes and structures democratic discourse, providing a better answer to the fears of information overload than either the mass media or any efforts to regulate attention to matters of public concern. + +The media-concentration type argument has been central to arguments about the necessity of open access to broadband platforms, made most forcefully over the past few years by Lawrence Lessig. The argument is that the basic instrumentalities of Internet communications are subject to concentrated markets. This market concentration in basic access becomes a potential point of concentration of the power to influence the discourse made possible by access. Eli Noam's recent work provides the most comprehensive study currently available of the degree of market concentration in media industries. It offers a bleak picture.~{ Eli Noam, "The Internet Still Wide, Open, and Competitive?" Paper presented at The Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, September 2003, http:// www.tprc.org/papers/2003/200/noam_TPRC2003.pdf. }~ Noam looked at markets in basic infrastructure components of the Internet: Internet backbones, Internet service providers (ISPs), broadband providers, portals, search engines, browser software, media player software, and Internet telephony. Aggregating across all these sectors, he found that the Internet sector defined in terms of these components was, throughout most of the period from 1984 to 2002, concentrated according to traditional antitrust measures. Between 1992 and 1998, however, this sector was "highly concentrated" by the Justice Department's measure of market concentration for antitrust purposes. Moreover, the power ,{[pg 240]}, of the top ten firms in each of these markets, and in aggregate for firms that had large market segments in a number of these markets, shows that an ever-smaller number of firms were capturing about 25 percent of the revenues in the Internet sector. A cruder, but consistent finding is the FCC's, showing that 96 percent of homes and small offices get their broadband access either from their incumbent cable operator or their incumbent local telephone carrier.~{ Federal Communications Commission, Report on High Speed Services, December 2003. }~ It is important to recognize that these findings are suggesting potential points of failure for the networked information economy. They are not a critique of the democratic potential of the networked public sphere, but rather show us how we could fail to develop it by following the wrong policies. +={ Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) ; + access : + broadband services, concentration of +1 ; + broadband networks : + concentration in access services +1 ; + concentration in broadband access services +1 +} + +The risk of concentration in broadband access services is that a small number of firms, sufficiently small to have economic power in the antitrust sense, will control the markets for the basic instrumentalities of Internet communications. Recall, however, that the low cost of computers and the open-ended architecture of the Internet protocol itself are the core enabling facts that have allowed us to transition from the mass-media model to the networked information model. As long as these basic instrumentalities are open and neutral as among uses, and are relatively cheap, the basic economics of nonmarket production described in part I should not change. Under competitive conditions, as technology makes computation and communications cheaper, a well-functioning market should ensure that outcome. Under oligopolistic conditions, however, there is a threat that the network will become too expensive to be neutral as among market and nonmarket production. If basic upstream network connections, server space, and up-to-date reading and writing utilities become so expensive that one needs to adopt a commercial model to sustain them, then the basic economic characteristic that typifies the networked information economy--the relatively large role of nonproprietary, nonmarket production--will have been reversed. However, the risk is not focused solely or even primarily on explicit pricing. One of the primary remaining scarce resources in the networked environment is user time and attention. As chapter 5 explained, owners of communications facilities can extract value from their users in ways that are more subtle than increasing price. In particular, they can make some sites and statements easier to reach and see--more prominently displayed on the screen, faster to load--and sell that relative ease to those who are willing to pay.~{ See Eszter Hargittai, "The Changing Online Landscape: From Free-For-All to Commercial Gatekeeping," http://www.eszter.com/research/pubs/hargittai-onlinelandscape.pdf. }~ In that environment, nonmarket sites are systematically disadvantaged irrespective of the quality of their content. ,{[pg 241]}, + +The critique of concentration in this form therefore does not undermine the claim that the networked information economy, if permitted to flourish, will improve the democratic public sphere. It underscores the threat of excessive monopoly in infrastructure to the sustainability of the networked public sphere. The combination of observations regarding market concentration and an understanding of the importance of a networked public sphere to democratic societies suggests that a policy intervention is possible and desirable. Chapter 11 explains why the relevant intervention is to permit substantial segments of the core common infrastructure--the basic physical transport layer of wireless or fiber and the software and standards that run communications--to be produced and provisioned by users and managed as a commons. + +2~ ON POWER LAW DISTRIBUTIONS, NETWORK TOPOLOGY, AND BEING HEARD +={ concentration of Web attention +29 ; + distribution of information : + power law distribution of site connections +29 ; + hyperlinking on the Web : + power law distribution of site connections +29 ; + Internet : + power law distribution of site connections +29 ; + linking on the Web : + power law distribution of site connections +29 ; + network topology : + power law distribution of site connections +29 ; + networked public sphere : + topology and connectivity of +29 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + topology and connectivity of +29 ; + power law distribution of Web connections +29 ; + public sphere : + topology and connectivity of +29 ; + referencing on the Web : + power law distribution of Web site connections +29 ; + structure of network : + power law distribution of Web site connections +29 ; + topology, network : + power law distribution of Web site connections +29 ; + Web : + power law distribution of Web site connections +29 ; + wireless communications : + power law distribution of Web site connections +29 +} + +A much more intractable challenge to the claim that the networked information economy will democratize the public sphere emerges from observations of a set or phenomena that characterize the Internet, the Web, the blogosphere, and, indeed, most growing networks. In order to extract information out of the universe of statements and communications made possible by the Internet, users are freely adopting practices that lead to the emergence of a new hierarchy. Rather than succumb to the "information overload" problem, users are solving it by congregating in a small number of sites. This conclusion is based on a new but growing literature on the likelihood that a Web page will be linked to by others. The distribution of that probability turns out to be highly skew. That is, there is a tiny probability that any given Web site will be linked to by a huge number of people, and a very large probability that for a given Web site only one other site, or even no site, will link to it. This fact is true of large numbers of very different networks described in physics, biology, and social science, as well as in communications networks. If true in this pure form about Web usage, this phenomenon presents a serious theoretical and empirical challenge to the claim that Internet communications of the sorts we have seen here meaningfully decentralize democratic discourse. It is not a problem that is tractable to policy. We cannot as a practical matter force people to read different things than what they choose to read; nor should we wish to. If users avoid information overload by focusing on a small subset of sites in an otherwise ,{[pg 242]}, open network that allows them to read more or less whatever they want and whatever anyone has written, policy interventions aimed to force a different pattern would be hard to justify from the perspective of liberal democratic theory. + +The sustained study of the distribution of links on the Internet and the Web is relatively new--only a few years old. There is significant theoretical work in a field of mathematics called graph theory, or network topology, on power law distributions in networks, on skew distributions that are not pure power law, and on the mathematically related small-worlds phenomenon in networks. The basic intuition is that, if indeed a tiny minority of sites gets a large number of links, and the vast majority gets few or no links, it will be very difficult to be seen unless you are on the highly visible site. Attention patterns make the open network replicate mass media. While explaining this literature over the next few pages, I show that what is in fact emerging is very different from, and more attractive than, the mass-media-dominated public sphere. + +While the Internet, the Web, and the blogosphere are indeed exhibiting much greater order than the freewheeling, "everyone a pamphleteer" image would suggest, this structure does not replicate a mass-media model. We are seeing a newly shaped information environment, where indeed few are read by many, but clusters of moderately read sites provide platforms for vastly greater numbers of speakers than were heard in the mass-media environment. Filtering, accreditation, synthesis, and salience are created through a system of peer review by information affinity groups, topical or interest based. These groups filter the observations and opinions of an enormous range of people, and transmit those that pass local peer review to broader groups and ultimately to the polity more broadly, without recourse to market-based points of control over the information flow. Intense interest and engagement by small groups that share common concerns, rather than lowest-commondenominator interest in wide groups that are largely alienated from each other, is what draws attention to statements and makes them more visible. This makes the emerging networked public sphere more responsive to intensely held concerns of a much wider swath of the population than the mass media were capable of seeing, and creates a communications process that is more resistant to corruption by money. + +In what way, first, is attention concentrated on the Net? We are used to seeing probability distributions that describe social phenomena following a Gaussian distribution: where the mean and the median are the same and the ,{[pg 243]}, probabilities fall off symmetrically as we describe events that are farther from the median. This is the famous Bell Curve. Some phenomena, however, observed initially in Pareto's work on income distribution and Zipf 's on the probability of the use of English words in text and in city populations, exhibit completely different probability distributions. These distributions have very long "tails"--that is, they are characterized by a very small number of very high-yield events (like the number of words that have an enormously high probability of appearing in a randomly chosen sentence, like "the" or "to") and a very large number of events that have a very low probability of appearing (like the probability that the word "probability" or "blogosphere" will appear in a randomly chosen sentence). To grasp intuitively how unintuitive such distributions are to us, we could think of radio humorist Garrison Keillor's description of the fictitious Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average." That statement is amusing because we assume intelligence follows a normal distribution. If intelligence were distributed according to a power law, most children there would actually be below average--the median is well below the mean in such distributions (see figure 7.4). Later work by Herbert Simon in the 1950s, and by Derek de Solla Price in the 1960s, on cumulative advantage in scientific citations~{ Derek de Solla Price, "Networks of Scientific Papers," Science 149 (1965): 510; Herbert Simon, "On a Class of Skew Distribution Function," Biometrica 42 (1955): 425-440, reprinted in Herbert Simon, Models of Man Social and Rational: Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting (New York: Garland, 1957). }~ presaged an emergence at the end of the 1990s of intense interest in power law characterizations of degree distributions, or the number of connections any point in a network has to other points, in many kinds of networks--from networks of neurons and axons, to social networks and communications and information networks. +={ de Solla Price, Derek ; + Solla Price, Derek (de Solla Price) ; + Keillor, Garrison ; + Pareto, Vilfredo ; + Simon, Herbert ; + Zipf, George +} + +{won_benkler_7_4.png "Figure 7.4: Illustration of How Normal Distribution and Power Law Distribution Would Differ in Describing How Many Web Sites Have Few or Many Links Pointing at Them" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +% image moved above paragraph from start of original books page 244 + +The Internet and the World Wide Web offered a testable setting, where large-scale investigation could be done automatically by studying link structure (who is linked-in to and by whom, who links out and to whom, how these are related, and so on), and where the practical applications of better understanding were easily articulated--such as the design of better search engines. In 1999, Albert-László Barabasi and Reka Albert published a paper in /{Science}/ showing that a variety of networked phenomena have a predictable topology: The distribution of links into and out of nodes on the network follows a power law. There is a very low probability that any vertex, or node, in the network will be very highly connected to many others, and a very large probability that a very large number of nodes will be connected only very loosely, or perhaps not at all. Intuitively, a lot of Web sites link to information that is located on Yahoo!, while very few link to any randomly selected individual's Web site. Barabasi and Albert hypothesized a mechanism ,{[pg 244]}, for this distribution to evolve, which they called "preferential attachment." That is, new nodes prefer to attach to already well-attached nodes. Any network that grows through the addition of new nodes, and in which nodes preferentially attach to nodes that are already well attached, will eventually exhibit this distribution.~{ Albert-Laszio Barabasi and Reka Albert, "Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks," Science 286 (1999): 509. }~ In other words, the rich get richer. At the same time, two computer scientists, Lada Adamic and Bernardo Huberman, published a study in Nature that identified the presence of power law distributions in the number of Web pages in a given site. They hypothesized not that new nodes preferentially attach to old ones, but that each site has an intrinsically different growth rate, and that new sites are formed at an exponential rate.~{ Bernardo Huberman and Lada Adamic, "Growth Dynamics of the World Wide Web," Nature 401 (1999): 131. }~ The intrinsically different growth rates could be interpreted as quality, interest, or perhaps investment of money in site development and marketing. They showed that on these assumptions, a power law distribution would emerge. Since the publication of these articles we have seen an explosion of theoretical and empirical literature on graph theory, or the structure and growth of networks, and particularly on link structure in the World Wide Web. It has consistently shown that the number of links into and out of Web sites follows power laws and that the exponent (the exponential ,{[pg 245]}, factor that determines that the drop-off between the most linked-to site and the second most linked-to site, and the third, and so on, will be so dramatically rapid, and how rapid it is) for inlinks is roughly 2.1 and for outlinks 2.7. +={ Albert, Reka ; + Barabasi, Albert-László +1 ; + Huberman, Bernardo ; + Adamic, Lada ; + growth rates of Web sites +} + +If one assumes that most people read things by either following links, or by using a search engine, like Google, that heavily relies on counting inlinks to rank its results, then it is likely that the number of visitors to a Web page, and more recently, the number of readers of blogs, will follow a similarly highly skew distribution. The implication for democracy that comes most immediately to mind is dismal. While, as the Supreme Court noted with enthusiasm, on the Internet everyone can be a pamphleteer or have their own soapbox, the Internet does not, in fact, allow individuals to be heard in ways that are substantially more effective than standing on a soapbox in a city square. Many Web pages and blogs will simply go unread, and will not contribute to a more engaged polity. This argument was most clearly made in Barabasi's popularization of his field, Linked: "The most intriguing result of our Web-mapping project was the complete absence of democracy, fairness, and egalitarian values on the Web. We learned that the topology of the Web prevents us from seeing anything but a mere handful of the billion documents out there."~{ Albert-Laszio Barabasi, Linked, How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life (New York: Penguin, 2003), 56-57. One unpublished quantitative study showed specifically that the skewness holds for political Web sites related to various hot-button political issues in the United States--like abortion, gun control, or the death penalty. A small fraction of the Web sites discussing these issues account for the large majority of links into them. Matthew Hindman, Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis, and Judy Johnson, " `Googelarchy': How a Few Heavily Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web," July 28, 2003, http://www.scholar.google.com/url?sa U&q http://www.princeton.edu/~mhindman/googlearchy-hindman.pdf. }~ + +The stories offered in this chapter and throughout this book present a puzzle for this interpretation of the power law distribution of links in the network as re-creating a concentrated medium. The success of Nick Davis's site, BoycottSBG, would be a genuine fluke. The probability that such a site could be established on a Monday, and by Friday of the same week would have had three hundred thousand unique visitors and would have orchestrated a successful campaign, is so small as to be negligible. The probability that a completely different site, StopSinclair.org, of equally network-obscure origins, would be established on the very same day and also successfully catch the attention of enough readers to collect 150,000 signatures on a petition to protest Sinclair's broadcast, rather than wallowing undetected in the mass of self-published angry commentary, is practically insignificant. And yet, intuitively, it seems unsurprising that a large population of individuals who are politically mobilized on the same side of the political map and share a political goal in the public sphere--using a network that makes it trivially simple to set up new points of information and coordination, tell each other about them, and reach and use them from anywhere--would, in fact, inform each other and gather to participate in a political demonstration. We saw ,{[pg 246]}, that the boycott technique that Davis had designed his Web site to facilitate was discussed on TalkingPoints--a site near the top of the power law distribution of political blogs--but that it was a proposal by an anonymous individual who claimed to know what makes local affiliates tick, not of TalkingPoints author Josh Marshall. By midweek, after initially stoking the fires of support for Davis's boycott, Marshall had stepped back, and Davis's site became the clearing point for reports, tactical conversations, and mobilization. Davis not only was visible, but rather than being drowned out by the high-powered transmitter, TalkingPoints, his relationship with the high-visibility site was part of his success. This story alone cannot, of course, "refute" the power law distribution of network links, nor is it offered as a refutation. It does, however, provide a context for looking more closely at the emerging understanding of the topology of the Web, and how it relates to the fears of concentration of the Internet, and the problems of information overload, discourse fragmentation, and the degree to which money will come to dominate such an unstructured and wide-open environment. It suggests a more complex story than simply "the rich get richer" and "you might speak, but no one will hear you." In this case, the topology of the network allowed rapid emergence of a position, its filtering and synthesis, and its rise to salience. Network topology helped facilitate all these components of the public sphere, rather than undermined them. We can go back to the mathematical and computer science literature to begin to see why. +={ Davis, Nick ; + Marshall, Josh +} + +Within two months of the publication of Barabasi and Albert's article, Adamic and Huberman had published a letter arguing that, if Barabasi and Albert were right about preferential attachment, then older sites should systematically be among those that are at the high end of the distribution, while new ones will wallow in obscurity. The older sites are already attached, so newer sites would preferentially attach to the older sites. This, in turn, would make them even more attractive when a new crop of Web sites emerged and had to decide which sites to link to. In fact, however, Adamic and Huberman showed that there is no such empirical correlation among Web sites. They argued that their mechanism--that nodes have intrinsic growth rates that are different--better describes the data. In their response, Barabasi and Albert showed that on their data set, the older nodes are actually more connected in a way that follows a power law, but only on average--that is to say, the average number of connections of a class of older nodes related to the average number of links to a younger class of nodes follows a power law. This argued that their basic model was sound, but ,{[pg 247]}, required that they modify their equations to include something similar to what Huberman and Adamic had proposed--an intrinsic growth factor for each node, as well as the preferential connection of new nodes to established nodes.~{ Lada Adamic and Bernardo Huberman, "Power Law Distribution of the World Wide Web," Science 287 (2000): 2115. }~ This modification is important because it means that not every new node is doomed to be unread relative to the old ones, only that on average they are much less likely to be read. It makes room for rapidly growing new nodes, but does not theorize what might determine the rate of growth. It is possible, for example, that money could determine growth rates: In order to be seen, new sites or statements would have to spend money to gain visibility and salience. As the BoycottSBG and Diebold stories suggest, however, as does the Lott story described later in this chapter, there are other ways of achieving immediate salience. In the case of BoycottSBG, it was providing a solution that resonated with the political beliefs of many people and was useful to them for their expression and mobilization. Moreover, the continued presence of preferential attachment suggests that noncommercial Web sites that are already highly connected because of the time they were introduced (like the Electronic Frontier Foundation), because of their internal attractiveness to large communities (like Slashdot), or because of their salience to the immediate interests of users (like BoycottSBG), will have persistent visibility even in the face of large infusions of money by commercial sites. Developments in network topology theory and its relationship to the structure of the empirically mapped real Internet offer a map of the networked information environment that is indeed quite different from the naïve model of "everyone a pamphleteer." To the limited extent that these findings have been interpreted for political meaning, they have been seen as a disappointment--the real world, as it turns out, does not measure up to anything like that utopia. However, that is the wrong baseline. There never has been a complex, large modern democracy in which everyone could speak and be heard by everyone else. The correct baseline is the one-way structure of the commercial mass media. The normatively relevant descriptive questions are whether the networked public sphere provides broader intake, participatory filtering, and relatively incorruptible platforms for creating public salience. I suggest that it does. Four characteristics of network topology structure the Web and the blogosphere in an ordered, but nonetheless meaningfully participatory form. First, at a microlevel, sites cluster--in particular, topically and interest-related sites link much more heavily to each other than to other sites. Second, at a macrolevel, the Web and the blogosphere have ,{[pg 248]}, giant, strongly connected cores--"areas" where 20-30 percent of all sites are highly and redundantly interlinked; that is, tens or hundreds of millions of sites, rather than ten, fifty, or even five hundred television stations. That pattern repeats itself in smaller subclusters as well. Third, as the clusters get small enough, the obscurity of sites participating in the cluster diminishes, while the visibility of the superstars remains high, forming a filtering and transmission backbone for universal intake and local filtering. Fourth and finally, the Web exhibits "small-world" phenomena, making most Web sites reachable through shallow paths from most other Web sites. I will explain each of these below, as well as how they interact to form a reasonably attractive image of the networked public sphere. +={ Albert, Reka ; + Barabasi, Albert-László ; + Adamic, Lada +1 ; + Huberman, Bernardo ; + growth rates of Web sites ; + obscurity of some Web sites ; + older Web sites, obscurity of ; + clusters in network topology +7 ; + organizational clustering +7 ; + social clustering +7 ; + topical clustering +7 +} + +First, links are not smoothly distributed throughout the network. Sites cluster into densely linked "regions" or communities of interest. Computer scientists have looked at clustering from the perspective of what topical or other correlated characteristics describe these relatively high-density interconnected regions of nodes. What they found was perhaps entirely predictable from an intuitive perspective of the network users, but important as we try to understand the structure of information flow on the Web. Web sites cluster into topical and social/organizational clusters. Early work done in the IBM Almaden Research Center on how link structure could be used as a search technique showed that by mapping densely interlinked sites without looking at content, one could find communities of interest that identify very fine-grained topical connections, such as Australian fire brigades or Turkish students in the United States.~{ Ravi Kumar et al., "Trawling the Web for Emerging Cyber-Communities," WWW8/ Computer Networks 31, nos. 11-16 (1999): 1481-1493. }~ A later study out of the NEC Research Institute more formally defined the interlinking that would identify a "community" as one in which the nodes were more densely connected to each other than they were to nodes outside the cluster by some amount. The study also showed that topically connected sites meet this definition. For instance, sites related to molecular biology clustered with each other--in the sense of being more interlinked with each other than with off-topic sites--as did sites about physics and black holes.~{ Gary W. Flake et al., "Self-Organization and Identification of Web Communities," IEEE Computer 35, no. 3 (2002): 66-71. Another paper that showed significant internal citations within topics was Soumen Chakrabati et al., "The Structure of Broad Topics on the Web," WWW2002, Honolulu, HI, May 7-11, 2002. }~ Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance recently showed that liberal political blogs and conservative political blogs densely interlink with each other, mostly pointing within each political leaning but with about 15 percent of links posted by the most visible sites also linking across the political divide.~{ Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance, "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 Election: Divided They Blog," March 1, 2005, http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/2005/ AdamicGlanceBlogWWW.pdf. }~ Physicists analyze clustering as the property of transitivity in networks: the increased probability that if node A is connected to node B, and node B is connected to node C, that node A also will be connected to node C, forming a triangle. Newman has shown that ,{[pg 249]}, the clustering coefficient of a network that exhibits power law distribution of connections or degrees--that is, its tendency to cluster--is related to the exponent of the distribution. At low exponents, below 2.333, the clustering coefficient becomes high. This explains analytically the empirically observed high level of clustering on the Web, whose exponent for inlinks has been empirically shown to be 2.1.~{ M.E.J. Newman, "The Structure and Function of Complex Networks," Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Review 45, section 4.2.2 (2003): 167-256; S. N. Dorogovstev and J.F.F. Mendes, Evolution of Networks: From Biological Nets to the Internet and WWW (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). }~ +={ Glance, Natalie } + +Second, at a macrolevel and in smaller subclusters, the power law distribution does not resolve into everyone being connected in a mass-media model relationship to a small number of major "backbone" sites. As early as 1999, Broder and others showed that a very large number of sites occupy what has been called a giant, strongly connected core.~{ This structure was first described by Andrei Broder et al., "Graph Structure of the Web," paper presented at www9 conference (1999), http://www.almaden.ibm.com/ webfountain/resources/GraphStructureintheWeb.pdf. It has since been further studied, refined, and substantiated in various studies. }~ That is, nodes within this core are heavily linked and interlinked, with multiple redundant paths among them. Empirically, as of 2001, this structure was comprised of about 28 percent of nodes. At the same time, about 22 percent of nodes had links into the core, but were not linked to from it--these may have been new sites, or relatively lower-interest sites. The same proportion of sites was linked-to from the core, but did not link back to it--these might have been ultimate depositories of documents, or internal organizational sites. Finally, roughly the same proportion of sites occupied "tendrils" or "tubes" that cannot reach, or be reached from, the core. Tendrils can be reached from the group of sites that link into the strongly connected core or can reach into the group that can be connected to from the core. Tubes connect the inlinking sites to the outlinked sites without going through the core. About 10 percent of sites are entirely isolated. This structure has been called a "bow tie"--with a large core and equally sized in- and outflows to and from that core (see figure 7.5). +={ Broder, Andrei ; + backbone Web sites +2 ; + bow tie structure of Web +2 ; + clusters in network topology : + bow tie structure of Web +2 ; + core Web sites +2 ; + Internet : + strongly connected Web sites +2 ; + network topology : + strongly connected Web sites +2 ; + power law distribution of Web connections : + strongly connected Web sites +2 ; + strongly connected Web sites +2 ; + structure of network : + strongly connected Web sites +2 ; + tendrils (Web topology) +2 ; + core Web sites +2 ; + topology, network : + strongly connected Web sites +2 ; + tubes (Web topology) +2 ; + Web : + backbone sites +2 ; + wireless communications : + backbone sites +2 +} + +{won_benkler_7_5.png "Figure 7.5: Bow Tie Structure of the Web" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +% image moved above paragraph from start of original book page 250 + +One way of interpreting this structure as counterdemocratic is to say: This means that half of all Web sites are not reachable from the other half--the "IN," "tendrils," and disconnected portions cannot be reached from any of the sites in SCC and OUT. This is indeed disappointing from the "everyone a pamphleteer" perspective. On the other hand, one could say that half of all Web pages, the SCC and OUT components, are reachable from IN and SCC. That is, hundreds of millions of pages are reachable from hundreds of millions of potential entry points. This represents a very different intake function and freedom to speak in a way that is potentially accessible to others than a five-hundred-channel, mass-media model. More significant yet, Dill and others showed that the bow tie structure appears not only at the level of the Web as a whole, but repeats itself within clusters. That is, the Web ,{[pg 250]}, appears to show characteristics of self-similarity, up to a point--links within clusters also follow a power law distribution and cluster, and have a bow tie structure of similar proportions to that of the overall Web. Tying the two points about clustering and the presence of a strongly connected core, Dill and his coauthors showed that what they called "thematically unified clusters," such as geographically or content-related groupings of Web sites, themselves exhibit these strongly connected cores that provided a thematically defined navigational backbone to the Web. It is not that one or two major sites were connected to by all thematically related sites; rather, as at the network level, on the order of 25-30 percent were highly interlinked, and another 25 percent were reachable from within the strongly connected core.~{ Dill et al., "Self-Similarity in the Web" (San Jose, CA: IBM Almaden Research Center, 2001); S. N. Dorogovstev and J.F.F. Mendes, Evolution of Networks. }~ Moreover, when the data was pared down to treat only the home page, rather than each Web page within a single site as a distinct "node" (that is, everything that came under www.foo.com was treated as one node, as opposed to the usual method where www.foo.com, www.foo.com/nonsuch, and www.foo.com/somethingelse are each treated as a separate node), fully 82 percent of the nodes were in the strongly connected core, and an additional 13 percent were reachable from the SCC as the OUT group. +={ Dill, Stephen } + +Third, another finding of Web topology and critical adjustment to the ,{[pg 251]}, basic Barabasi and Albert model is that when the topically or organizationally related clusters become small enough--on the order of hundreds or even low thousands of Web pages--they no longer follow a pure power law distribution. Instead, they follow a distribution that still has a very long tail-- these smaller clusters still have a few genuine "superstars"--but the body of the distribution is substantially more moderate: beyond the few superstars, the shape of the link distribution looks a little more like a normal distribution. Instead of continuing to drop off exponentially, many sites exhibit a moderate degree of connectivity. Figure 7.6 illustrates how a hypothetical distribution of this sort would differ both from the normal and power law distributions illustrated in figure 7.4. David Pennock and others, in their paper describing these empirical findings, hypothesized a uniform component added to the purely exponential original Barabasi and Albert model. This uniform component could be random (as they modeled it), but might also stand for quality of materials, or level of interest in the site by participants in the smaller cluster. At large numbers of nodes, the exponent dominates the uniform component, accounting for the pure power law distribution when looking at the Web as a whole, or even at broadly defined topics. In smaller clusters of sites, however, the uniform component begins to exert a stronger pull on the distribution. The exponent keeps the long tail intact, but the uniform component accounts for a much more moderate body. Many sites will have dozens, or even hundreds of links. The Pennock paper looked at sites whose number was reduced by looking only at sites of certain organizations--universities or public companies. Chakrabarti and others later confirmed this finding for topical clusters as well. That is, when they looked at small clusters of topically related sites, the distribution of links still has a long tail for a small number of highly connected sites in every topic, but the body of the distribution diverges from a power law distribution, and represents a substantial proportion of sites that are moderately linked.~{ Soumen Chakrabarti et al., "The Structure of Broad Topics on the Web," WWW2002, Honolulu, HI, May 7-11, 2002. }~ Even more specifically, Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell reported that the Pennock modification better describes distribution of links specifically to and among political blogs.~{ Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell, "The Power and Politics of Blogs" (July 2004), http://www.danieldrezner.com/research/blogpaperfinal.pdf. }~ +={ Albert, Reka ; + Chakrabarti, Soumen ; + Drezner, Daniel ; + Farrell, Henry ; + Pennock, David ; + Barabasi, Albert-László ; + power law distribution of Web connections : + uniform component of moderate connectivity ; + structure of network : + moderately linked sites ; + topology, network : + moderately linked sites ; + network topology : + moderately linked sites ; + obscurity of some Web sites +1 +} + +{won_benkler_7_6.png "Figure 7.6: Illustration of a Skew Distribution That Does Not Follow a Power Law" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +% image moved above paragraph from start of original book page 252 + +These findings are critical to the interpretation of the distribution of links as it relates to human attention and communication. There is a big difference between a situation where no one is looking at any of the sites on the low end of the distribution, because everyone is looking only at the superstars, and a situation where dozens or hundreds of sites at the low end are looking at each other, as well as at the superstars. The former leaves all but the very ,{[pg 252]}, few languishing in obscurity, with no one to look at them. The latter, as explained in more detail below, offers a mechanism for topically related and interest-based clusters to form a peer-reviewed system of filtering, accreditation, and salience generation. It gives the long tail on the low end of the distribution heft (and quite a bit of wag). + +The fourth and last piece of mapping the network as a platform for the public sphere is called the "small-worlds effect." Based on Stanley Milgram's sociological experiment and on mathematical models later proposed by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, both theoretical and empirical work has shown that the number of links that must be traversed from any point in the network to any other point is relatively small.~{ D. J. Watts and S. H. Strogatz, "Collective Dynamics of `Small World' Networks," Nature 393 (1998): 440-442; D. J. Watts, Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks Between Order and Randomness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). }~ Fairly shallow "walks"-- that is, clicking through three or four layers of links--allow a user to cover a large portion of the Web. +={ Milgram, Stanley ; + Strogatz, Steven ; + Watts, Duncan ; + blogs : + small-worlds effects ; + small-worlds effect +3 +} + +What is true of the Web as a whole turns out to be true of the blogosphere as well, and even of the specifically political blogosphere. Early 2003 saw increasing conversations in the blogosphere about the emergence of an "Alist," a number of highly visible blogs that were beginning to seem more like mass media than like blogs. In two blog-based studies, Clay Shirky and then Jason Kottke published widely read explanations of how the blogosphere ,{[pg 253]}, was simply exhibiting the power law characteristics common on the Web.~{ Clay Shirky, "Power Law, Weblogs, and Inequality" (February 8, 2003), http:// www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.htm; Jason Kottke, "Weblogs and Power Laws" (February 9, 2003), http://www.kottke.org/03/02/weblogs-and-power-laws. }~ The emergence in 2003 of discussions of this sort in the blogosphere is, it turns out, hardly surprising. In a time-sensitive study also published in 2003, Kumar and others provided an analysis of the network topology of the blogosphere. They found that it was very similar to that of the Web as a whole--both at the macro- and microlevels. Interestingly, they found that the strongly connected core only developed after a certain threshold, in terms of total number of nodes, had been reached, and that it began to develop extensively only in 2001, reached about 20 percent of all blogs in 2002, and continued to grow rapidly. They also showed that what they called the "community" structure--the degree of clustering or mutual pointing within groups--was high, an order of magnitude more than a random graph with a similar power law exponent would have generated. Moreover, the degree to which a cluster is active or inactive, highly connected or not, changes over time. In addition to time-insensitive superstars, there are also flare-ups of connectivity for sites depending on the activity and relevance of their community of interest. This latter observation is consistent with what we saw happen for BoycottSBG.com. Kumar and his collaborators explained these phenomena by the not-too-surprising claim that bloggers link to each other based on topicality--that is, their judgment of the quality and relevance of the materials--not only on the basis of how well connected they are already.~{ Ravi Kumar et al., "On the Bursty Evolution of Blogspace," Proceedings of WWW2003, May 20-24, 2003, http://www2003.org/cdrom/papers/refereed/p477/ p477-kumar/p477-kumar.htm. }~ +={ Kottke, Jason ; + Kumar, Ravi ; + Shirky, Clay ; + clusters in network topology +5 ; + network topology : + emergent ordered structure +5 ; + structure of network : + emergent ordered structure +5 ; + topology, network : + emergent ordered structure +5 +} + +This body of literature on network topology suggests a model for how order has emerged on the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the blogosphere. The networked public sphere allows hundreds of millions of people to publish whatever and whenever they please without disintegrating into an unusable cacophony, as the first-generation critics argued, and it filters and focuses attention without re-creating the highly concentrated model of the mass media that concerned the second-generation critique. We now know that the network at all its various layers follows a degree of order, where some sites are vastly more visible than most. This order is loose enough, however, and exhibits a sufficient number of redundant paths from an enormous number of sites to another enormous number, that the effect is fundamentally different from the small number of commercial professional editors of the mass media. + +Individuals and individual organizations cluster around topical, organizational, or other common features. At a sufficiently fine-grained degree of clustering, a substantial proportion of the clustered sites are moderately connected, ,{[pg 254]}, and each can therefore be a point of intake that will effectively transmit observations or opinions within and among the users of that topical or interest-based cluster. Because even in small clusters the distribution of links still has a long tail, these smaller clusters still include high-visibility nodes. These relatively high-visibility nodes can serve as points of transfer to larger clusters, acting as an attention backbone that transmits information among clusters. Subclusters within a general category--such as liberal and conservative blogs clustering within the broader cluster of political blogs-- are also interlinked, though less densely than within-cluster connectivity. The higher level or larger clusters again exhibit a similar feature, where higher visibility nodes can serve as clearinghouses and connectivity points among clusters and across the Web. These are all highly connected with redundant links within a giant, strongly connected core--comprising more than a quarter of the nodes in any given level of cluster. The small-worlds phenomenon means that individual users who travel a small number of different links from similar starting points within a cluster cover large portions of the Web and can find diverse sites. By then linking to them on their own Web sites, or giving them to others by e-mail or blog post, sites provide multiple redundant paths open to many users to and from most statements on the Web. High-visibility nodes amplify and focus on given statements, and in this regard, have greater power in the information environment they occupy. However, there is sufficient redundancy of paths through high-visibility nodes that no single node or small collection of nodes can control the flow of information in the core and around the Web. This is true both at the level of the cluster and at the level of the Web as a whole. + +The result is an ordered system of intake, filtering, and synthesis that can in theory emerge in networks generally, and empirically has been shown to have emerged on the Web. It does not depend on single points of control. It avoids the generation of a din through which no voice can be heard, as the fears of fragmentation predicted. And, while money may be useful in achieving visibility, the structure of the Web means that money is neither necessary nor sufficient to grab attention--because the networked information economy, unlike its industrial predecessor, does not offer simple points of dissemination and control for purchasing assured attention. What the network topology literature allows us to do, then, is to offer a richer, more detailed, and empirically supported picture of how the network can be a platform for the public sphere that is structured in a fundamentally different way than the mass-media model. The problem is approached ,{[pg 255]}, through a self-organizing principle, beginning with communities of interest on smallish scales, practices of mutual pointing, and the fact that, with freedom to choose what to see and who to link to, with some codependence among the choices of individuals as to whom to link, highly connected points emerge even at small scales, and continue to be replicated with everlarger visibility as the clusters grow. Without forming or requiring a formal hierarchy, and without creating single points of control, each cluster generates a set of sites that offer points of initial filtering, in ways that are still congruent with the judgments of participants in the highly connected small cluster. The process is replicated at larger and more general clusters, to the point where positions that have been synthesized "locally" and "regionally" can reach Web-wide visibility and salience. It turns out that we are not intellectual lemmings. We do not use the freedom that the network has made possible to plunge into the abyss of incoherent babble. Instead, through iterative processes of cooperative filtering and "transmission" through the high visibility nodes, the low-end thin tail turns out to be a peer-produced filter and transmission medium for a vastly larger number of speakers than was imaginable in the mass-media model. + +The effects of the topology of the network are reinforced by the cultural forms of linking, e-mail lists, and the writable Web. The network topology literature treats every page or site as a node. The emergence of the writable Web, however, allows each node to itself become a cluster of users and posters who, collectively, gain salience as a node. Slashdot is "a node" in the network as a whole, one that is highly linked and visible. Slashdot itself, however, is a highly distributed system for peer production of observations and opinions about matters that people who care about information technology and communications ought to care about. Some of the most visible blogs, like the dailyKos, are cooperative blogs with a number of authors. More important, the major blogs receive input--through posts or e-mails-- from their users. Recall, for example, that the original discussion of a Sinclair boycott that would focus on local advertisers arrived on TalkingPoints through an e-mail comment from a reader. Talkingpoints regularly solicits and incorporates input from and research by its users. The cultural practice of writing to highly visible blogs with far greater ease than writing a letter to the editor and with looser constraints on what gets posted makes these nodes themselves platforms for the expression, filtering, and synthesis of observations and opinions. Moreover, as Drezner and Farrell have shown, blogs have developed cultural practices of mutual citation--when one blogger ,{[pg 256]}, finds a source by reading another, the practice is to link to the original blog, not only directly to the underlying source. Jack Balkin has argued that the culture of linking more generally and the "see for yourself" culture also significantly militate against fragmentation of discourse, because users link to materials they are commenting on, even in disagreement. +={ Drezner, Daniel ; + Farrell, Henry ; + Balkin, Jack ; + attention fragmentation +1 ; + communities : + fragmentation of +1 ; + diversity : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + norms (social) : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + regulation by social norms : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + social relations and norms : + fragmentation of communication +1 +} + +Our understanding of the emerging structure of the networked information environment, then, provides the basis for a response to the family of criticisms of the first generation claims that the Internet democratizes. Recall that these criticisms, rooted in the problem of information overload, or the Babel objection, revolved around three claims. The first claim was that the Internet would result in a fragmentation of public discourse. The clustering of topically related sites, such as politically oriented sites, and of communities of interest, the emergence of high-visibility sites that the majority of sites link to, and the practices of mutual linking show quantitatively and qualitatively what Internet users likely experience intuitively. While there is enormous diversity on the Internet, there are also mechanisms and practices that generate a common set of themes, concerns, and public knowledge around which a public sphere can emerge. Any given site is likely to be within a very small number of clicks away from a site that is visible from a very large number of other sites, and these form a backbone of common materials, observations, and concerns. All the findings of power law distribution of linking, clustering, and the presence of a strongly connected core, as well as the linking culture and "see for yourself," oppose the fragmentation prediction. Users self-organize to filter the universe of information that is generated in the network. This self-organization includes a number of highly salient sites that provide a core of common social and cultural experiences and knowledge that can provide the basis for a common public sphere, rather than a fragmented one. + +The second claim was that fragmentation would cause polarization. Because like-minded people would talk only to each other, they would tend to amplify their differences and adopt more extreme versions of their positions. Given that the evidence demonstrates there is no fragmentation, in the sense of a lack of a common discourse, it would be surprising to find higher polarization because of the Internet. Moreover, as Balkin argued, the fact that the Internet allows widely dispersed people with extreme views to find each other and talk is not a failure for the liberal public sphere, though it may present new challenges for the liberal state in constraining extreme action. Only polarization of discourse in society as a whole can properly be ,{[pg 257]}, considered a challenge to the attractiveness of the networked public sphere. However, the practices of linking, "see for yourself," or quotation of the position one is criticizing, and the widespread practice of examining and criticizing the assumptions and assertions of one's interlocutors actually point the other way, militating against polarization. A potential counterargument, however, was created by the most extensive recent study of the political blogosphere. In that study, Adamic and Glance showed that only about 10 percent of the links on any randomly selected political blog linked to a site across the ideological divide. The number increased for the "A-list" political blogs, which linked across the political divide about 15 percent of the time. The picture that emerges is one of distinct "liberal" and "conservative" spheres of conversation, with very dense links within, and more sparse links between them. On one interpretation, then, although there are salient sites that provide a common subject matter for discourse, actual conversations occur in distinct and separate spheres--exactly the kind of setting that Sunstein argued would lead to polarization. Two of the study's findings, however, suggest a different interpretation. The first was that there was still a substantial amount of cross-divide linking. One out of every six or seven links in the top sites on each side of the divide linked to the other side in roughly equal proportions (although conservatives tended to link slightly more overall--both internally and across the divide). The second was, that in an effort to see whether the more closely interlinked conservative sites therefore showed greater convergence "on message," Adamic and Glance found that greater interlinking did not correlate with less diversity in external (outside of the blogosphere) reference points.~{ Both of these findings are consistent with even more recent work by Hargittai, E., J. Gallo and S. Zehnder, "Mapping the Political Blogosphere: An Analysis of LargeScale Online Political Discussions," 2005. Poster presented at the International Communication Association meetings, New York. }~ Together, these findings suggest a different interpretation. Each cluster of more or less like-minded blogs tended to read each other and quote each other much more than they did the other side. This operated not so much as an echo chamber as a forum for working out of observations and interpretations internally, among likeminded people. Many of these initial statements or inquiries die because the community finds them uninteresting or fruitless. Some reach greater salience, and are distributed through the high-visibility sites throughout the community of interest. Issues that in this form reached political salience became topics of conversation and commentary across the divide. This is certainly consistent with both the BoycottSBG and Diebold stories, where we saw a significant early working out of strategies and observations before the criticism reached genuine political salience. There would have been no point for opponents to link to and criticize early ideas kicked around within the community, ,{[pg 258]}, like opposing Sinclair station renewal applications. Only after a few days, when the boycott was crystallizing, would opponents have reason to point out the boycott effort and discuss it. This interpretation also well characterizes the way in which the Trent Lott story described later in this chapter began percolating on the liberal side of the blogosphere, but then migrated over to the center-right. +={ Adamic, Lada ; + Lott, Trent ; + Glance, Natalie ; + polarization +} + +The third claim was that money would reemerge as the primary source of power brokerage because of the difficulty of getting attention on the Net. Descriptively, it shares a prediction with the second-generation claims: Namely, that the Internet will centralize discourse. It differs in the mechanism of concentration: it will not be the result of an emergent property of large-scale networks, but rather of an old, tried-and-true way of capturing the political arena--money. But the peer-production model of filtering and discussion suggests that the networked public sphere will be substantially less corruptible by money. In the interpretation that I propose, filtering for the network as a whole is done as a form of nested peer-review decisions, beginning with the speaker's closest information affinity group. Consistent with what we have been seeing in more structured peer-production projects like /{Wikipedia}/, Slashdot, or free software, communities of interest use clustering and mutual pointing to peer produce the basic filtering mechanism necessary for the public sphere to be effective and avoid being drowned in the din of the crowd. The nested structure of the Web, whereby subclusters form relatively dense higher-level clusters, which then again combine into even higher-level clusters, and in each case, have a number of high-end salient sites, allows for the statements that pass these filters to become globally salient in the relevant public sphere. This structure, which describes the analytic and empirical work on the Web as a whole, fits remarkably well as a description of the dynamics we saw in looking more closely at the success of the boycott on Sinclair, as well as the successful campaign to investigate and challenge Diebold's voting machines. +={ centralization of communications +4 ; + money : + centralization of communications +4 ; + filtering +4 ; + relevance filtering +4 +} + +The peer-produced structure of the attention backbone suggests that money is neither necessary nor sufficient to attract attention in the networked public sphere (although nothing suggests that money has become irrelevant to political attention given the continued importance of mass media). It renders less surprising Howard Dean's strong campaign for the Democratic presidential primaries in 2003 and the much more stable success of MoveOn.org since the late 1990s. These suggest that attention on the network has more to do with mobilizing the judgments, links, and cooperation ,{[pg 259]}, of large bodies of small-scale contributors than with applying large sums of money. There is no obvious broadcast station that one can buy in order to assure salience. There are, of course, the highly visible sites, and they do offer a mechanism of getting your message to large numbers of people. However, the degree of engaged readership, interlinking, and clustering suggests that, in fact, being exposed to a certain message in one or a small number of highly visible places accounts for only a small part of the range of "reading" that gets done. More significantly, it suggests that reading, as opposed to having a conversation, is only part of what people do in the networked environment. In the networked public sphere, receiving information or getting out a finished message are only parts, and not necessarily the most important parts, of democratic discourse. The central desideratum of a political campaign that is rooted in the Internet is the capacity to engage users to the point that they become effective participants in a conversation and an effort; one that they have a genuine stake in and that is linked to a larger, society-wide debate. This engagement is not easily purchased, nor is it captured by the concept of a well-educated public that receives all the information it needs to be an informed citizenry. Instead, it is precisely the varied modes of participation in small-, medium-, and large-scale conversations, with varied but sustained degrees of efficacy, that make the public sphere of the networked environment different, and more attractive, than was the mass-media-based public sphere. +={ Dean, Howard ; + Web : + backbone sites +1 ; + wireless communications : + backbone sites +1 ; + access : + large-audience programming +1 ; + capacity : + diversity of content in large-audience media +1 ; + diversity : + large-audience programming +1 ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + large-audience programming +1 ; + information flow : + large-audience programming +1 ; + information production inputs : + large-audience programming +1 ; + inputs to production : + large-audience programming +1 ; + large-audience programming : + susceptibility of networked public sphere +1 ; + lowest-common-denominator programming +1 ; + production inputs : + large-audience programming ; + television : + large-audience programming +1 +} + +The networked public sphere is not only more resistant to control by money, but it is also less susceptible to the lowest-common-denominator orientation that the pursuit of money often leads mass media to adopt. Because communication in peer-produced media starts from an intrinsic motivation--writing or commenting about what one cares about--it begins with the opposite of lowest common denominator. It begins with what irks you, the contributing peer, individually, the most. This is, in the political world, analogous to Eric Raymond's claim that every free or open-source software project begins with programmers with an itch to scratch--something directly relevant to their lives and needs that they want to fix. The networked information economy, which makes it possible for individuals alone and in cooperation with others to scour the universe of politically relevant events, to point to them, and to comment and argue about them, follows a similar logic. This is why one freelance writer with lefty leanings, Russ Kick, is able to maintain a Web site, The Memory Hole, with documents that he gets by filing Freedom of Information Act requests. In April ,{[pg 260]}, 2004, Kick was the first to obtain the U.S. military's photographs of the coffins of personnel killed in Iraq being flown home. No mainstream news organization had done so, but many published the photographs almost immediately after Kick had obtained them. Like free software, like Davis and the bloggers who participated in the debates over the Sinclair boycott, or the students who published the Diebold e-mails, the decision of what to publish does not start from a manager's or editor's judgment of what would be relevant and interesting to many people without being overly upsetting to too many others. It starts with the question: What do I care about most now? +={ Raymond, Eric ; + Davis, Nick ; + Kick, Russ ; + advertiser-supported media : + lowest-common-denominator programming ; + blocked access : + large-audience programming +} + +To conclude, we need to consider the attractiveness of the networked public sphere not from the perspective of the mid-1990s utopianism, but from the perspective of how it compares to the actual media that have dominated the public sphere in all modern democracies. The networked public sphere provides an effective nonmarket alternative for intake, filtering, and synthesis outside the market-based mass media. This nonmarket alternative can attenuate the influence over the public sphere that can be achieved through control over, or purchase of control over, the mass media. It offers a substantially broader capture basin for intake of observations and opinions generated by anyone with a stake in the polity, anywhere. It appears to have developed a structure that allows for this enormous capture basin to be filtered, synthesized, and made part of a polity-wide discourse. This nested structure of clusters of communities of interest, typified by steadily increasing visibility of superstar nodes, allows for both the filtering and salience to climb up the hierarchy of clusters, but offers sufficient redundant paths and interlinking to avoid the creation of a small set of points of control where power can be either directly exercised or bought. + +There is, in this story, an enormous degree of contingency and factual specificity. That is, my claims on behalf of the networked information economy as a platform for the public sphere are not based on general claims about human nature, the meaning of liberal discourse, context-independent efficiency, or the benevolent nature of the technology we happen to have stumbled across at the end of the twentieth century. They are instead based on, and depend on the continued accuracy of, a description of the economics of fabrication of computers and network connections, and a description of the dynamics of linking in a network of connected nodes. As such, my claim is not that the Internet inherently liberates. I do not claim that commonsbased production of information, knowledge, and culture will win out by ,{[pg 261]}, some irresistible progressive force. That is what makes the study of the political economy of information, knowledge, and culture in the networked environment directly relevant to policy. The literature on network topology suggests that, as long as there are widely distributed capabilities to publish, link, and advise others about what to read and link to, networks enable intrinsic processes that allow substantial ordering of the information. The pattern of information flow in such a network is more resistant to the application of control or influence than was the mass-media model. But things can change. Google could become so powerful on the desktop, in the e-mail utility, and on the Web, that it will effectively become a supernode that will indeed raise the prospect of a reemergence of a mass-media model. Then the politics of search engines, as Lucas Introna and Helen Nissenbaum called it, become central. The zeal to curb peer-to-peer file sharing of movies and music could lead to a substantial redesign of computing equipment and networks, to a degree that would make it harder for end users to exchange information of their own making. Understanding what we will lose if such changes indeed warp the topology of the network, and through it the basic structure of the networked public sphere, is precisely the object of this book as a whole. For now, though, let us say that the networked information economy as it has developed to this date has a capacity to take in, filter, and synthesize observations and opinions from a population that is orders of magnitude larger than the population that was capable of being captured by the mass media. It has done so without re-creating identifiable and reliable points of control and manipulation that would replicate the core limitation of the mass-media model of the public sphere--its susceptibility to the exertion of control by its regulators, owners, or those who pay them. +={ Introna, Lucas ; + Nissenbaum, Helen +} + +2~ WHO WILL PLAY THE WATCHDOG FUNCTION? +={ filtering : + watchdog functionality +5 ; + networked public sphere : + watchdog functionality +5 ; + peer production : + watchdog functionality +5 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + watchdog functionality +5 ; + public sphere : + watchdog functionality +5 ; + relevance filtering : + watchdog functionality +5 ; + watchdog functionality +5 +} + +A distinct critique leveled at the networked public sphere as a platform for democratic politics is the concern for who will fill the role of watchdog. Neil Netanel made this argument most clearly. His concern was that, perhaps freedom of expression for all is a good thing, and perhaps we could even overcome information overflow problems, but we live in a complex world with powerful actors. Government and corporate power is large, and individuals, no matter how good their tools, cannot be a serious alternative to a well-funded, independent press that can pay investigative reporters, defend lawsuits, and generally act like the New York Times and the Washington Post ,{[pg 262]}, when they published the Pentagon Papers in the teeth of the Nixon administration's resistance, providing some of the most damning evidence against the planning and continued prosecution of the war in Vietnam. Netanel is cognizant of the tensions between the need to capture large audiences and sell advertising, on the one hand, and the role of watchdog, on the other. He nonetheless emphasizes that the networked public sphere cannot investigate as deeply or create the public salience that the mass media can. These limitations make commercial mass media, for all their limitations, necessary for a liberal public sphere. +={ Netanel, Neil } + +This diagnosis of the potential of the networked public sphere underrepresents its productive capacity. The Diebold story provides in narrative form a detailed response to each of the concerns. The problem of voting machines has all the characteristics of an important, hard subject. It stirs deep fears that democracy is being stolen, and is therefore highly unsettling. It involves a difficult set of technical judgments about the functioning of voting machines. It required exposure and analysis of corporate-owned materials in the teeth of litigation threats and efforts to suppress and discredit the criticism. At each juncture in the process, the participants in the critique turned iteratively to peer production and radically distributed methods of investigation, analysis, distribution, and resistance to suppression: the initial observations of the whistle-blower or the hacker; the materials made available on a "see for yourself" and "come analyze this and share your insights" model; the distribution by students; and the fallback option when their server was shut down of replication around the network. At each stage, a peer-production solution was interposed in place of where a well-funded, high-end mass-media outlet would have traditionally applied funding in expectation of sales of copy. And it was only after the networked public sphere developed the analysis and debate that the mass media caught on, and then only gingerly. +={ Diebold Election Systems ; + electronic voting machines (case study) ; + networked public sphere : + Diebold Election Systems case study ; + policy : + Diebold Election Systems case study ; + public sphere : + Diebold Election Systems case study ; + voting, electronic +} + +The Diebold case was not an aberration, but merely a particularly rich case study of a much broader phenomenon, most extensively described in Dan Gilmore's We the Media. The basic production modalities that typify the networked information economy are now being applied to the problem of producing politically relevant information. In 2005, the most visible example of application of the networked information economy--both in its peer-production dimension and more generally by combining a wide range of nonproprietary production models--to the watchdog function of the media is the political blogosphere. The founding myth of the blogosphere's ,{[pg 263]}, journalistic potency was built on the back of then Senate majority leader Trent Lott. In 2002, Lott had the indiscretion of saying, at the onehundredth-birthday party of Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, that if Thurmond had won his Dixiecrat presidential campaign, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years." Thurmond had run on a segregationist campaign, splitting from the Democratic Party in opposition to Harry Truman's early civil rights efforts, as the post?World War II winds began blowing toward the eventual demise of formal, legal racial segregation in the United States. Few positions are taken to be more self-evident in the national public morality of early twenty-first-century America than that formal, state-imposed, racial discrimination is an abomination. And yet, the first few days after the birthday party at which Lott made his statement saw almost no reporting on the statement. ABC News and the Washington Post made small mention of it, but most media outlets reported merely on a congenial salute and farewell celebration of the Senate's oldest and longestserving member. Things were different in the blogosphere. At first liberal blogs, and within three days conservative bloggers as well, began to excavate past racist statements by Lott, and to beat the drums calling for his censure or removal as Senate leader. Within about a week, the story surfaced in the mainstream media, became a major embarrassment, and led to Lott's resignation as Senate majority leader about a week later. A careful case study of this event leaves it unclear why the mainstream media initially ignored the story.~{ Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Case Program: " `Big Media' Meets `Bloggers': Coverage of Trent Lott's Remarks at Strom Thurmond's Birthday Party," http:// www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/Research_Publications/Case_Studies/1731_0.pdf.}~ It may have been that the largely social event drew the wrong sort of reporters. It may have been that reporters and editors who depend on major Washington, D.C., players were reluctant to challenge Lott. Perhaps they thought it rude to emphasize this indiscretion, or too upsetting to us all to think of just how close to the surface thoughts that we deem abominable can lurk. There is little disagreement that the day after the party, the story was picked up and discussed by Marshall on TalkingPoints, as well as by another liberal blogger, Atrios, who apparently got it from a post on Slate's "Chatterbox," which picked it up from ABC News's own The Note, a news summary made available on the television network's Web site. While the mass media largely ignored the story, and the two or three mainstream reporters who tried to write about it were getting little traction, bloggers were collecting more stories about prior instances where Lott's actions tended to suggest support for racist causes. Marshall, for example, found that Lott had filed a 1981 amicus curiae brief in support of Bob Jones University's effort to retain its tax-exempt status. The U.S. government had rescinded ,{[pg 264]}, that status because the university practiced racial discrimination--such as prohibiting interracial dating. By Monday of the following week, four days after the remarks, conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, and others were calling for Lott's resignation. It is possible that, absent the blogosphere, the story would still have flared up. There were two or so mainstream reporters still looking into the story. Jesse Jackson had come out within four days of the comment and said Lott should resign as majority leader. Eventually, when the mass media did enter the fray, its coverage clearly dominated the public agenda and its reporters uncovered materials that helped speed Lott's exit. However, given the short news cycle, the lack of initial interest by the media, and the large time lag between the event itself and when the media actually took the subject up, it seems likely that without the intervention of the blogosphere, the story would have died. What happened instead is that the cluster of political blogs--starting on the Left but then moving across the Left-Right divide--took up the subject, investigated, wrote opinions, collected links and public interest, and eventually captured enough attention to make the comments a matter of public importance. Free from the need to appear neutral and not to offend readers, and free from the need to keep close working relationships with news subjects, bloggers were able to identify something that grated on their sensibilities, talk about it, dig deeper, and eventually generate a substantial intervention into the public sphere. That intervention still had to pass through the mass media, for we still live in a communications environment heavily based on those media. However, the new source of insight, debate, and eventual condensation of effective public opinion came from within the networked information environment. +={ Gilmore, Dan ; + Atrios (blogger Duncan Black) ; + Lott, Trent ; + Marshall, Josh ; + Thurmond, Strom ; + Jackson, Jesse ; + Reynolds, Glenn ; + blogs : + watchdog functionality +} + +The point is not to respond to the argument with a litany of anecdotes. The point is that the argument about the commercial media's role as watchdog turns out to be a familiar argument--it is the same argument that was made about software and supercomputers, encyclopedias and immersive entertainment scripts. The answer, too, is by now familiar. Just as the World Wide Web can offer a platform for the emergence of an enormous and effective almanac, just as free software can produce excellent software and peer production can produce a good encyclopedia, so too can peer production produce the public watchdog function. In doing so, clearly the unorganized collection of Internet users lacks some of the basic tools of the mass media: dedicated full-time reporters; contacts with politicians who need media to survive, and therefore cannot always afford to stonewall questions; or ,{[pg 265]}, public visibility and credibility to back their assertions. However, networkbased peer production also avoids the inherent conflicts between investigative reporting and the bottom line--its cost, its risk of litigation, its risk of withdrawal of advertising from alienated corporate subjects, and its risk of alienating readers. Building on the wide variation and diversity of knowledge, time, availability, insight, and experience, as well as the vast communications and information resources on hand for almost anyone in advanced economies, we are seeing that the watchdog function too is being peer produced in the networked information economy. + +Note that while my focus in this chapter has been mostly the organization of public discourse, both the Sinclair and the Diebold case studies also identify characteristics of distributed political action. We see collective action emerging from the convergence of independent individual actions, with no hierarchical control like that of a political party or an organized campaign. There may be some coordination and condensation points--like BoycottSBG.com or blackboxvoting.org. Like other integration platforms in peer-production systems, these condensation points provide a critical function. They do not, however, control the process. One manifestation of distributed coordination for political action is something Howard Rheingold has called "smart mobs"--large collections of individuals who are able to coordinate real-world action through widely distributed information and communications technology. He tells of the "People Power II" revolution in Manila in 2001, where demonstrations to oust then president Estrada were coordinated spontaneously through extensive text messaging.~{ Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002). }~ Few images in the early twentyfirst century can convey this phenomenon more vividly than the demonstrations around the world on February 15, 2003. Between six and ten million protesters were reported to have gone to the streets of major cities in about sixty countries in opposition to the American-led invasion of Iraq. There had been no major media campaign leading up to the demonstrations-- though there was much media attention to them later. There had been no organizing committee. Instead, there was a network of roughly concordant actions, none controlling the other, all loosely discussing what ought to be done and when. MoveOn.org in the United States provides an example of a coordination platform for a network of politically mobilized activities. It builds on e-mail and Web-based media to communicate opportunities for political action to those likely to be willing and able to take it. Radically distributed, network-based solutions to the problems of political mobilization rely on the same characteristics as networked information production ,{[pg 266]}, more generally: extensive communications leading to concordant and cooperative patterns of behavior without the introduction of hierarchy or the interposition of payment. +={ Rheingold, Howard } + +2~ USING NETWORKED COMMUNICATION TO WORK AROUND AUTHORITARIAN CONTROL +={ authoritarian control : + working around +7 ; + blocked access : + authoritarian control +7 ; + communication : + authoritarian control, working around +7 ; + government : + authoritarian control +7 | working around authorities +7 ; + Internet : + authoritarian control over +7 ; + monopoly : + authoritarian control +7 ; + networked public sphere : + authoritarian control, working around +7 ; + policy : + authoritarian control +7 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + authoritarian control, working around +7 ; + public sphere : + authoritarian control, working around +7 +} + +The Internet and the networked public sphere offer a different set of potential benefits, and suffer a different set of threats, as a platform for liberation in authoritarian countries. State-controlled mass-media models are highly conducive to authoritarian control. Because they usually rely on a small number of technical and organizational points of control, mass media offer a relatively easy target for capture and control by governments. Successful control of such universally visible media then becomes an important tool of information manipulation, which, in turn, eases the problem of controlling the population. Not surprisingly, capture of the national television and radio stations is invariably an early target of coups and revolutions. The highly distributed networked architecture of the Internet makes it harder to control communications in this way. + +The case of Radio B92 in Yugoslavia offers an example. B92 was founded in 1989, as an independent radio station. Over the course of the 1990s, it developed a significant independent newsroom broadcast over the station itself, and syndicated through thirty affiliated independent stations. B92 was banned twice after the NATO bombing of Belgrade, in an effort by the Milosevic regime to control information about the war. In each case, however, the station continued to produce programming, and distributed it over the Internet from a server based in Amsterdam. The point is a simple one. Shutting down a broadcast station is simple. There is one transmitter with one antenna, and police can find and hold it. It is much harder to shut down all connections from all reporters to a server and from the server back into the country wherever a computer exists. +={ B92 radio ; + Radio B92 +} + +This is not to say that the Internet will of necessity in the long term lead all authoritarian regimes to collapse. One option open to such regimes is simply to resist Internet use. In 2003, Burma, or Myanmar, had 28,000 Internet users out of a population of more than 42 million, or one in fifteen hundred, as compared, for example, to 6 million out of 65 million in neighboring Thailand, or roughly one in eleven. Most countries are not, however, willing to forgo the benefits of connectivity to maintain their control. Iran's ,{[pg 267]}, population of 69 million includes 4.3 million Internet users, while China has about 80 million users, second only to the United States in absolute terms, out of a population of 1.3 billion. That is, both China and Iran have a density of Internet users of about one in sixteen.~{ Data taken from CIA World Fact Book (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2004). }~ Burma's negligible level of Internet availability is a compound effect of low gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and government policies. Some countries with similar GDP levels still have levels of Internet users in the population that are two orders of magnitude higher: Cameroon (1 Internet user for every 27 residents), Moldova (1 in 30), and Mongolia (1 in 55). Even very large poor countries have several times more users per population than Myanmar: like Pakistan (1 in 100), Mauritania (1 in 300), and Bangladesh (1 in 580). Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung outline how Myanmar achieves its high degree of control and low degree of use.~{ Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung, "The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law" (working paper no. 55, University of San Diego School of Law, Public Law and Legal Theory, June 2003). }~ Myanmar has only one Internet service provider (ISP), owned by the government. The government must authorize anyone who wants to use the Internet or create a Web page within the country. Some of the licensees, like foreign businesses, are apparently permitted and enabled only to send e-mail, while using the Web is limited to security officials who monitor it. With this level of draconian regulation, Myanmar can avoid the liberating effects of the Internet altogether, at the cost of losing all its economic benefits. Few regimes are willing to pay that price. +={ Solum, Lawrence +1 ; + Chung, Minn +1 +} + +Introducing Internet communications into a society does not, however, immediately and automatically mean that an open, liberal public sphere emerges. The Internet is technically harder to control than mass media. It increases the cost and decreases the efficacy of information control. However, a regime willing and able to spend enough money and engineering power, and to limit its population's access to the Internet sufficiently, can have substantial success in controlling the flow of information into and out of its country. Solum and Chung describe in detail one of the most extensive and successful of these efforts, the one that has been conducted by China-- home to the second-largest population of Internet users in the world, whose policies controlled use of the Internet by two out of every fifteen Internet users in the world in 2003. In China, the government holds a monopoly over all Internet connections going into and out of the country. It either provides or licenses the four national backbones that carry traffic throughout China and connect it to the global network. ISPs that hang off these backbones are licensed, and must provide information about the location and workings of their facilities, as well as comply with a code of conduct. Individual ,{[pg 268]}, users must register and provide information about their machines, and the many Internet cafes are required to install filtering software that will filter out subversive sites. There have been crackdowns on Internet cafes to enforce these requirements. This set of regulations has replicated one aspect of the mass-medium model for the Internet--it has created a potential point of concentration or centralization of information flow that would make it easier to control Internet use. The highly distributed production capabilities of the networked information economy, however, as opposed merely to the distributed carriage capability of the Internet, mean that more must be done at this bottleneck to squelch the flow of information and opinion than would have to be done with mass media. That "more" in China has consisted of an effort to employ automatic filters--some at the level of the cybercafe or the local ISP, some at the level of the national backbone networks. The variability of these loci and their effects is reflected in partial efficacy and variable performance for these mechanisms. The most extensive study of the efficacy of these strategies for controlling information flows over the Internet to China was conducted by Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman. From servers within China, they sampled about two hundred thousand Web sites and found that about fifty thousand were unavailable at least once, and close to nineteen thousand were unavailable on two distinct occasions. The blocking patterns seemed to follow mass-media logic--BBC News was consistently unavailable, as CNN and other major news sites often were; the U.S. court system official site was unavailable. However, Web sites that provided similar information--like those that offered access to all court cases but were outside the official system--were available. The core Web sites of human rights organizations or of Taiwan and Tibet-related organizations were blocked, and about sixty of the top one hundred results for "Tibet" on Google were blocked. What is also apparent from their study, however, and confirmed by Amnesty International's reports on Internet censorship in China, is that while censorship is significant, it is only partially effective.~{ Amnesty International, People's Republic of China, State Control of the Internet in China (2002). }~ The Amnesty report noted that Chinese users were able to use a variety of techniques to avoid the filtering, such as the use of proxy servers, but even Zittrain and Edelman, apparently testing for filtering as experienced by unsophisticated or compliant Internet users in China, could access many sites that would, on their face, seem potentially destabilizing. +={ Edelman, Ben ; + Zittrain, Jonathan ; + censorship +2 ; + centralization of communication : + authoritarian filtering +1 +} + +This level of censorship may indeed be effective enough for a government negotiating economic and trade expansion with political stability and control. It suggests, however, limits of the ability of even a highly dedicated ,{[pg 269]}, government to control the capacity of Internet communications to route around censorship and to make it much easier for determined users to find information they care about, and to disseminate their own information to others. Iran's experience, with a similar level of Internet penetration, emphasizes the difficulty of maintaining control of Internet publication.~{ A synthesis of news-based accounts is Babak Rahimi, "Cyberdissent: The Internet in Revolutionary Iran," Middle East Review of International Affairs 7, no. 3 (2003). }~ Iran's network emerged from 1993 onward from the university system, quite rapidly complemented by commercial ISPs. Because deployment and use of the Internet preceded its regulation by the government, its architecture is less amenable to centralized filtering and control than China's. Internet access through university accounts and cybercafes appears to be substantial, and until the past three or four years, had operated free of the crackdowns and prison terms suffered by opposition print publications and reporters. The conservative branches of the regime seem to have taken a greater interest in suppressing Internet communications since the publication of imprisoned Ayatollah Montazeri's critique of the foundations of the Islamic state on the Web in December 2000. While the original Web site, montazeri.com, seems to have been eliminated, the site persists as montazeri.ws, using a Western Samoan domain name, as do a number of other Iranian publications. There are now dozens of chat rooms, blogs, and Web sites, and e-mail also seems to be playing an increasing role in the education and organization of an opposition. While the conservative branches of the Iranian state have been clamping down on these forms, and some bloggers and Web site operators have found themselves subject to the same mistreatment as journalists, the efficacy of these efforts to shut down opposition seems to be limited and uneven. +={ chat rooms +1 } + +Media other than static Web sites present substantially deeper problems for regimes like those of China and Iran. Scanning the text of e-mail messages of millions of users who can encrypt their communications with widely available tools creates a much more complex problem. Ephemeral media like chat rooms and writable Web tools allow the content of an Internet communication or Web site to be changed easily and dynamically, so that blocking sites becomes harder, while coordinating moves to new sites to route around blocking becomes easier. At one degree of complexity deeper, the widely distributed architecture of the Net also allows users to build censorship-resistant networks by pooling their own resources. The pioneering example of this approach is Freenet, initially developed in 1999-2000 by Ian Clarke, an Irish programmer fresh out of a degree in computer science and artificial intelligence at Edinburgh University. Now a broader free-software project, Freenet ,{[pg 270]}, is a peer-to-peer application specifically designed to be censorship resistant. Unlike the more famous peer-to-peer network developed at the time--Napster--Freenet was not intended to store music files on the hard drives of users. Instead, it stores bits and pieces of publications, and then uses sophisticated algorithms to deliver the documents to whoever seeks them, in encrypted form. This design trades off easy availability for a series of security measures that prevent even the owners of the hard drives on which the data resides--or government agents that search their computers--from knowing what is on their hard drive or from controlling it. As a practical matter, if someone in a country that prohibits certain content but enables Internet connections wants to publish content--say, a Web site or blog--safely, they can inject it into the Freenet system. The content will be encrypted and divided into little bits and pieces that are stored in many different hard drives of participants in the network. No single computer will have all the information, and shutting down any given computer will not make the information unavailable. It will continue to be accessible to anyone running the Freenet client. Freenet indeed appears to be used in China, although the precise scope is hard to determine, as the network is intended to mask the identity and location of both readers and publishers in this system. The point to focus on is not the specifics of Freenet, but the feasibility of constructing user-based censorship-resistant storage and retrieval systems that would be practically impossible for a national censorship system to identify and block subversive content. +={ Clarke, Ian ; + Freenet +} + +To conclude, in authoritarian countries, the introduction of Internet communications makes it harder and more costly for governments to control the public sphere. If these governments are willing to forgo the benefits of Internet connectivity, they can avoid this problem. If they are not, they find themselves with less control over the public sphere. There are, obviously, other means of more direct repression. However, control over the mass media was, throughout most of the twentieth century, a core tool of repressive governments. It allowed them to manipulate what the masses of their populations knew and believed, and thus limited the portion of the population that the government needed to physically repress to a small and often geographically localized group. The efficacy of these techniques of repression is blunted by adoption of the Internet and the emergence of a networked information economy. Low-cost communications, distributed technical and organizational structure, and ubiquitous presence of dynamic authorship ,{[pg 271]}, tools make control over the public sphere difficult, and practically never perfect. + +2~ TOWARD A NETWORKED PUBLIC SPHERE +={ future : + public sphere +3 ; + networked public sphere : + future of +3 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + future of +3 ; + public sphere : + future of +3 +} + +The first generation of statements that the Internet democratizes was correct but imprecise. The Internet does restructure public discourse in ways that give individuals a greater say in their governance than the mass media made possible. The Internet does provide avenues of discourse around the bottlenecks of older media, whether these are held by authoritarian governments or by media owners. But the mechanisms for this change are more complex than those articulated in the past. And these more complex mechanisms respond to the basic critiques that have been raised against the notion that the Internet enhances democracy. + +Part of what has changed with the Internet is technical infrastructure. Network communications do not offer themselves up as easily for single points of control as did the mass media. While it is possible for authoritarian regimes to try to retain bottlenecks in the Internet, the cost is higher and the efficacy lower than in mass-media-dominated systems. While this does not mean that introduction of the Internet will automatically result in global democratization, it does make the work of authoritarian regimes harder. In liberal democracies, the primary effect of the Internet runs through the emergence of the networked information economy. We are seeing the emergence to much greater significance of nonmarket, individual, and cooperative peerproduction efforts to produce universal intake of observations and opinions about the state of the world and what might and ought to be done about it. We are seeing the emergence of filtering, accreditation, and synthesis mechanisms as part of network behavior. These rely on clustering of communities of interest and association and highlighting of certain sites, but offer tremendous redundancy of paths for expression and accreditation. These practices leave no single point of failure for discourse: no single point where observations can be squelched or attention commanded--by fiat or with the application of money. Because of these emerging systems, the networked information economy is solving the information overload and discourse fragmentation concerns without reintroducing the distortions of the mass-media model. Peer production, both long-term and organized, as in the case of Slashdot, and ad hoc and dynamically formed, as in the case of blogging or ,{[pg 272]}, the Sinclair or Diebold cases, is providing some of the most important functionalities of the media. These efforts provide a watchdog, a source of salient observations regarding matters of public concern, and a platform for discussing the alternatives open to a polity. + +In the networked information environment, everyone is free to observe, report, question, and debate, not only in principle, but in actual capability. They can do this, if not through their own widely read blog, then through a cycle of mailing lists, collective Web-based media like Slashdot, comments on blogs, or even merely through e-mails to friends who, in turn, have meaningful visibility in a smallish-scale cluster of sites or lists. We are witnessing a fundamental change in how individuals can interact with their democracy and experience their role as citizens. Ideal citizens need not be seen purely as trying to inform themselves about what others have found, so that they can vote intelligently. They need not be limited to reading the opinions of opinion makers and judging them in private conversations. They are no longer constrained to occupy the role of mere readers, viewers, and listeners. They can be, instead, participants in a conversation. Practices that begin to take advantage of these new capabilities shift the locus of content creation from the few professional journalists trolling society for issues and observations, to the people who make up that society. They begin to free the public agenda setting from dependence on the judgments of managers, whose job it is to assure that the maximum number of readers, viewers, and listeners are sold in the market for eyeballs. The agenda thus can be rooted in the life and experience of individual participants in society--in their observations, experiences, and obsessions. The network allows all citizens to change their relationship to the public sphere. They no longer need be consumers and passive spectators. They can become creators and primary subjects. It is in this sense that the Internet democratizes. ,{[pg 273]}, + +1~8 Chapter 8 - Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical +={ culture +51 } + +poem{ + +Gone with the Wind + +There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. +Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the +last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and +of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream +remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind. + +--MGM (1939) film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's novel (1936) + +}poem + +poem{ + +Strange Fruit + +Southern trees bear strange fruit, +Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, +Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, +Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. + +Pastoral scene of the gallant south, +The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, +Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, +Then the sudden smell of burning flesh. + +Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck, +For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, +For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, +Here is a strange and bitter crop. + +--Billie Holiday (1939) + from lyrics by Abel Meeropol (1937) + +}poem +={ Holiday, Billie } + +% issue with poem, index tag is placed at end not beginning + +% ,{[pg 274]}, + +In 1939, Gone with the Wind reaped seven Oscars, while Billie Holiday's song reached number 16 on the charts, even though Columbia Records refused to release it: Holiday had to record it with a small company that was run out of a storefront in midtown Manhattan. On the eve of the second reconstruction era, which was to overhaul the legal framework of race relations over the two decades beginning with the desegregation of the armed forces in the late 1940s and culminating with the civil rights acts passed between 1964-1968, the two sides of the debate over desegregation and the legacy of slavery were minting new icons through which to express their most basic beliefs about the South and its peculiar institutions. As the following three decades unfolded and the South was gradually forced to change its ways, the cultural domain continued to work out the meaning of race relations in the United States and the history of slavery. The actual slogging of regulation of discrimination, implementation of desegregation and later affirmative action, and the more local politics of hiring and firing were punctuated throughout this period by salient iconic retellings of the stories of race relations in the United States, from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? to Roots. The point of this chapter, however, is not to discuss race relations, but to understand culture and cultural production in terms of political theory. Gone with the Wind and Strange Fruit or Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? offer us intuitively accessible instances of a much broader and more basic characteristic of human understanding and social relations. Culture, shared meaning, and symbols are how we construct our views of life across a wide range of domains--personal, political, and social. How culture is produced is therefore an essential ingredient in structuring how freedom and justice are perceived, conceived, and pursued. In the twentieth century, Hollywood and the recording industry came to play a very large role in this domain. The networked information economy now seems poised to attenuate that role in favor of a more participatory and transparent cultural production system. + +Cultural freedom occupies a position that relates to both political freedom and individual autonomy, but is synonymous with neither. The root of its importance is that none of us exist outside of culture. As individuals and as political actors, we understand the world we occupy, evaluate it, and act in it from within a set of understandings and frames of meaning and reference that we share with others. What institutions and decisions are considered "legitimate" and worthy of compliance or participation; what courses of ,{[pg 275]}, action are attractive; what forms of interaction with others are considered appropriate--these are all understandings negotiated from within a set of shared frames of meaning. How those frames of meaning are shaped and by whom become central components of the structure of freedom for those individuals and societies that inhabit it and are inhabited by it. They define the public sphere in a much broader sense than we considered in the prior chapters. + +The networked information economy makes it possible to reshape both the "who" and the "how" of cultural production relative to cultural production in the twentieth century. It adds to the centralized, market-oriented production system a new framework of radically decentralized individual and cooperative nonmarket production. It thereby affects the ability of individuals and groups to participate in the production of the cultural tools and frameworks of human understanding and discourse. It affects the way we, as individuals and members of social and political clusters, interact with culture, and through it with each other. It makes culture more transparent to its inhabitants. It makes the process of cultural production more participatory, in the sense that more of those who live within a culture can actively participate in its creation. We are seeing the possibility of an emergence of a new popular culture, produced on the folk-culture model and inhabited actively, rather than passively consumed by the masses. Through these twin characteristics--transparency and participation--the networked information economy also creates greater space for critical evaluation of cultural materials and tools. The practice of producing culture makes us all more sophisticated readers, viewers, and listeners, as well as more engaged makers. + +Throughout the twentieth century, the making of widely shared images and symbols was a concentrated practice that went through the filters of Hollywood and the recording industry. The radically declining costs of manipulating video and still images, audio, and text have, however, made culturally embedded criticism and broad participation in the making of meaning much more feasible than in the past. Anyone with a personal computer can cut and mix files, make their own files, and publish them to a global audience. This is not to say that cultural bricolage, playfulness, and criticism did not exist before. One can go to the avant-garde movement, but equally well to African-Brazilian culture or to Our Lady of Guadalupe to find them. Even with regard to television, that most passive of electronic media, John Fiske argued under the rubric of "semiotic democracy" that viewers engage ,{[pg 276]}, in creative play and meaning making around the TV shows they watch. However, the technical characteristics of digital information technology, the economics of networked information production, and the social practices of networked discourse qualitatively change the role individuals can play in cultural production. +={ Fiske, John } + +The practical capacity individuals and noncommercial actors have to use and manipulate cultural artifacts today, playfully or critically, far outstrips anything possible in television, film, or recorded music, as these were organized throughout the twentieth century. The diversity of cultural moves and statements that results from these new opportunities for creativity vastly increases the range of cultural elements accessible to any individual. Our ability, therefore, to navigate the cultural environment and make it our own, both through creation and through active selection and attention, has increased to the point of making a qualitative difference. In the academic law literature, Niva Elkin Koren wrote early about the potential democratization of "meaning making processes," William Fisher about "semiotic democracy," and Jack Balkin about a "democratic culture." Lessig has explored the generative capacity of the freedom to create culture, its contribution to creativity itself. These efforts revolve around the idea that there is something normatively attractive, from the perspective of "democracy" as a liberal value, about the fact that anyone, using widely available equipment, can take from the existing cultural universe more or less whatever they want, cut it, paste it, mix it, and make it their own--equally well expressing their adoration as their disgust, their embrace of certain images as their rejection of them. +={ Balkin, Jack ; + Fisher, William (Terry) ; + Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) +} + +Building on this work, this chapter seeks to do three things: First, I claim that the modalities of cultural production and exchange are a proper subject for normative evaluation within a broad range of liberal political theory. Culture is a social-psychological-cognitive fact of human existence. Ignoring it, as rights-based and utilitarian versions of liberalism tend to do, disables political theory from commenting on central characteristics of a society and its institutional frameworks. Analyzing the attractiveness of any given political institutional system without considering how it affects cultural production, and through it the production of the basic frames of meaning through which individual and collective self-determination functions, leaves a large hole in our analysis. Liberal political theory needs a theory of culture and agency that is viscous enough to matter normatively, but loose enough to give its core foci--the individual and the political system--room to be effective ,{[pg 277]}, independently, not as a mere expression or extension of culture. Second, I argue that cultural production in the form of the networked information economy offers individuals a greater participatory role in making the culture they occupy, and makes this culture more transparent to its inhabitants. This descriptive part occupies much of the chapter. Third, I suggest the relatively straightforward conclusion of the prior two observations. From the perspective of liberal political theory, the kind of open, participatory, transparent folk culture that is emerging in the networked environment is normatively more attractive than was the industrial cultural production system typified by Hollywood and the recording industry. + +A nine-year-old girl searching Google for Barbie will quite quickly find links to AdiosBarbie.com, to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), and to other, similarly critical sites interspersed among those dedicated to selling and playing with the doll. The contested nature of the doll becomes publicly and everywhere apparent, liberated from the confines of feminist-criticism symposia and undergraduate courses. This simple Web search represents both of the core contributions of the networked information economy. First, from the perspective of the searching girl, it represents a new transparency of cultural symbols. Second, from the perspective of the participants in AdiosBarbie or the BLO, the girl's use of their site completes their own quest to participate in making the cultural meaning of Barbie. The networked information environment provides an outlet for contrary expression and a medium for shaking what we accept as cultural baseline assumptions. Its radically decentralized production modes provide greater freedom to participate effectively in defining the cultural symbols of our day. These characteristics make the networked environment attractive from the perspectives of both personal freedom of expression and an engaged and self-aware political discourse. +={ Barbie (doll), culture of } + +We cannot, however, take for granted that the technological capacity to participate in the cultural conversation, to mix and make our own, will translate into the freedom to do so. The practices of cultural and countercultural creation are at the very core of the battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment. The tension is perhaps not new or unique to the Internet, but its salience is now greater. The makers of the 1970s comic strip Air Pirates already found their comics confiscated when they portrayed Mickey and Minnie and Donald and Daisy in various compromising countercultural postures. Now, the ever-increasing scope and expanse ,{[pg 278]}, of copyright law and associated regulatory mechanisms, on the one hand, and of individual and collective nonmarket creativity, on the other hand, have heightened the conflict between cultural freedom and the regulatory framework on which the industrial cultural production system depends. As Lessig, Jessica Litman, and Siva Vaidhyanathan have each portrayed elegantly and in detail, the copyright industries have on many dimensions persuaded both Congress and courts that individual, nonmarket creativity using the cultural outputs of the industrial information economy is to be prohibited. As we stand today, freedom to play with the cultural environment is nonetheless preserved in the teeth of the legal constraints, because of the high costs of enforcement, on the one hand, and the ubiquity and low cost of the means to engage in creative cultural bricolage, on the other hand. These social, institutional, and technical facts still leave us with quite a bit of unauthorized creative expression. These facts, however, are contingent and fragile. Chapter 11 outlines in some detail the long trend toward the creation of ever-stronger legal regulation of cultural production, and in particular, the enclosure movement that began in the 1970s and gained steam in the mid-1990s. A series of seemingly discrete regulatory moves threatens the emerging networked folk culture. Ranging from judicial interpretations of copyright law to efforts to regulate the hardware and software of the networked environment, we are seeing a series of efforts to restrict nonmarket use of twentieth-century cultural materials in order to preserve the business models of Hollywood and the recording industry. These regulatory efforts threaten the freedom to participate in twenty-first-century cultural production, because current creation requires taking and mixing the twentieth-century cultural materials that make up who we are as culturally embedded beings. Here, however, I focus on explaining how cultural participation maps onto the project of liberal political theory, and why the emerging cultural practices should be seen as attractive within that normative framework. I leave development of the policy implications to part III. +={ Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) ; + Litman, Jessica ; + Vaidhyanathan, Silva ; + copyright issues ; + proprietary rights : + cultural environment and +} + +2~ CULTURAL FREEDOM IN LIBERAL POLITICAL THEORY +={ liberal political theory : + cultural freedom +12 +} + +Utilitarian and rights-based liberal political theories have an awkward relationship to culture. Both major strains of liberal theory make a certain set of assumptions about the autonomous individuals with which they are concerned. Individuals are assumed to be rational and knowledgeable, at least ,{[pg 279]}, about what is good for them. They are conceived of as possessing a capacity for reason and a set of preferences prior to engagement with others. Political theory then proceeds to concern itself with political structures that respect the autonomy of individuals with such characteristics. In the political domain, this conception of the individual is easiest to see in pluralist theories, which require institutions for collective decision making that clear what are treated as already-formed preferences of individuals or voluntary groupings. + +Culture represents a mysterious category for these types of liberal political theories. It is difficult to specify how it functions in terms readily amenable to a conception of individuals whose rationality and preferences for their own good are treated as though they preexist and are independent of society. A concept of culture requires some commonly held meaning among these individuals. Even the simplest intuitive conception of what culture might mean would treat this common frame of meaning as the result of social processes that preexist any individual, and partially structure what it is that individuals bring to the table as they negotiate their lives together, in society or in a polity. Inhabiting a culture is a precondition to any interpretation of what is at stake in any communicative exchange among individuals. A partly subconscious, lifelong dynamic social process of becoming and changing as a cultural being is difficult to fold into a collective decision-making model that focuses on designing a discursive platform for individuated discrete participants who are the bearers of political will. It is easier to model respect for an individual's will when one adopts a view of that will as independent, stable, and purely internally generated. It is harder to do so when one conceives of that individual will as already in some unspecified degree rooted in exchange with others about what an individual is to value and prefer. + +Culture has, of course, been incorporated into political theory as a central part of the critique of liberalism. The politics of culture have been a staple of critical theory since Marx first wrote that "Religion . . . is the opium of the people" and that "to call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions."~{ Karl Marx, "Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," Deutsch-Franzosicher Jahrbucher (1844). }~ The twentieth century saw a wide array of critique, from cultural Marxism to poststructuralism and postmodernism. However, much of mainstream liberal political theory has chosen to ignore, rather than respond and adapt to, these critiques. In Political Liberalism, for example, Rawls acknowledges "the fact" of reasonable pluralism--of groups that persistently and reasonably hold competing comprehensive doctrines--and aims for political pluralism as a mode of managing the irreconcilable differences. This leaves the formation ,{[pg 280]}, of the comprehensive doctrine and the systems of belief within which it is rendered "reasonable" a black box to liberal theory. This may be an adequate strategy for analyzing the structure of formal political institutions at the broadest level of abstraction. However, it disables liberal political theory from dealing with more fine-grained questions of policy that act within the black box. +={ Marx, Karl ; + Rawls, John ; + culture : + freedom of +9 ; + economics in liberal political theory : + cultural freedom +9 ; + freedom : + cultural +9 +} + +As a practical matter, treating culture as a black box disables a political theory as a mechanism for diagnosing the actual conditions of life in a society in terms of its own political values. It does so in precisely the same way that a formal conception of autonomy disables those who hold it from diagnosing the conditions of autonomy in practical life. Imagine for a moment that we had received a revelation that a crude version of Antonio Gramsci's hegemony theory was perfectly correct as a matter of descriptive sociology. Ruling classes do, in fact, consciously and successfully manipulate the culture in order to make the oppressed classes compliant. It would be difficult, then, to continue to justify holding a position about political institutions, or autonomy, that treated the question of how culture, generally, or even the narrow subset of reasonably held comprehensive doctrines like religion, are made, as a black box. It would be difficult to defend respect for autonomous choices as respect for an individual's will, if an objective observer could point to a social process, external to the individual and acting upon him or her, as the cause of the individual holding that will. It would be difficult to focus one's political design imperatives on public processes that allow people to express their beliefs and preferences, argue about them, and ultimately vote on them, if it is descriptively correct that those beliefs and preferences are themselves the product of manipulation of some groups by others. +={ Gramsci, Antonio +1 ; + autonomy : + culture and +2 ; + individual autonomy : + culture and +2 +} + +The point is not, of course, that Gramsci was descriptively right or that any of the broad range of critical theories of culture is correct as a descriptive matter. It is that liberal theories that ignore culture are rendered incapable of answering some questions that arise in the real world and have real implications for individuals and polities. There is a range of sociological, psychological, or linguistic descriptions that could characterize the culture of a society as more or less in accord with the concern of liberalism with individual and collective self-determination. Some such descriptive theory of culture can provide us with enough purchase on the role of culture to diagnose the attractiveness of a cultural production system from a politicaltheory perspective. It does not require that liberal theory abandon individuals ,{[pg 281]}, as the bearers of the claims of political morality. It does not require that liberal political theory refocus on culture as opposed to formal political institutions. It does require, however, that liberal theory at least be able to diagnose different conditions in the practical cultural life of a society as more or less attractive from the perspective of liberal political theory. + +The efforts of deliberative liberal theories to account for culture offer the most obvious source of such an insight. These political theories have worked to develop a conception of culture and its relationship to liberalism precisely because at a minimum, they require mutual intelligibility across individuals, which cannot adequately be explained without some conception of culture. In Jurgen Habermas's work, culture plays the role of a basis for mutual intelligibility. As the basis for "interpersonal intelligibility," we see culture playing such a role in the work of Bruce Ackerman, who speaks of acculturation as the necessary condition to liberal dialogue. "Cultural coherence" is something he sees children requiring as a precondition to becoming liberal citizens: it allows them to "Talk" and defend their claims in terms without which there can be no liberal conversation.~{ Bruce A. Ackerman, Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 333-335, 141-146. }~ Michael Walzer argues that, "in matters of morality, argument is simply the appeal to common meanings."~{ Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 29. }~ Will Kymlicka claims that for individual autonomy, "freedom involves making choices amongst various options, and our societal culture not only provides these options, but makes them meaningful to us." A societal culture, in turn, is a "shared vocabulary of tradition and convention" that is "embodied in social life[,] institutionally embodied--in schools, media, economy, government, etc."~{ Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 76, 83. }~ Common meanings in all these frameworks must mean more than simple comprehension of the words of another. It provides a common baseline, which is not itself at that moment the subject of conversation or inquiry, but forms the background on which conversation and inquiry take place. Habermas's definition of lifeworld as "background knowledge," for example, is a crisp rendering of culture in this role: +={ Habermas, Jurgen +1 ; + Ackerman, Bruce ; + Kymlicka, Will ; + Walzer, Michael +} + +_1 the lifeworld embraces us as an unmediated certainty, out of whose immediate proximity we live and speak. This all-penetrating, yet latent and unnoticed presence of the background of communicative action can be described as a more intense, yet deficient, form of knowledge and ability. To begin with, we make use of this knowledge involuntarily, without reflectively knowing that we possess it at all. What enables background knowledge to acquire absolute certainty in this way, and even augments its epistemic quality from a subjective standpoint, is precisely the property that robs it of a constitutive feature of knowledge: we make use of ,{[pg 282]}, such knowledge without the awareness that it could be false. Insofar as all knowledge is fallible and is known to be such, background knowledge does not represent knowledge at all, in a strict sense. As background knowledge, it lacks the possibility of being challenged, that is, of being raised to the level of criticizable validity claims. One can do this only by converting it from a resource into a topic of discussion, at which point--just when it is thematized--it no longer functions as a lifeworld background but rather disintegrates in its background modality.~{ Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 22-23. }~ + +In other words, our understanding of meaning--how we are, how others are, what ought to be--are in some significant portion unexamined assumptions that we share with others, and to which we appeal as we engage in communication with them. This does not mean that culture is a version of false consciousness. It does not mean that background knowledge cannot be examined rationally or otherwise undermines the very possibility or coherence of a liberal individual or polity. It does mean, however, that at any given time, in any given context, there will be some set of historically contingent beliefs, attitudes, and social and psychological conditions that will in the normal course remain unexamined, and form the unexamined foundation of conversation. Culture is revisable through critical examination, at which point it ceases to be "common knowledge" and becomes a contested assumption. Nevertheless, some body of unexamined common knowledge is necessary for us to have an intelligible conversation that does not constantly go around in circles, challenging the assumptions on whichever conversational move is made. + +Culture, in this framework, is not destiny. It does not predetermine who we are, or what we can become or do, nor is it a fixed artifact. It is the product of a dynamic process of engagement among those who make up a culture. It is a frame of meaning from within which we must inevitably function and speak to each other, and whose terms, constraints, and affordances we always negotiate. There is no point outside of culture from which to do otherwise. An old Yiddish folktale tells of a naïve rabbi who, for safekeeping, put a ten-ruble note inside his copy of the Torah, at the page of the commandment, "thou shalt not steal." That same night, a thief stole into the rabbi's home, took the ten-ruble note, and left a five-ruble note in its place, at the page of the commandment, "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." The rabbi and the thief share a common cultural framework (as do we, across the cultural divide), through which their various actions can be understood; indeed, without which their actions would be unintelligible. ,{[pg 283]}, The story offers a theory of culture, power, and freedom that is more congenial to liberal political theory than critical theories, and yet provides a conception of the role of culture in human relations that provides enough friction, or viscosity, to allow meaning making in culture to play a role in the core concerns of liberal political theory. Their actions are part strategic and part communicative--that is to say, to some extent they seek to force an outcome, and to some extent they seek to engage the other in a conversation in order to achieve a commonly accepted outcome. The rabbi places the ten-ruble note in the Bible in order to impress upon the putative thief that he should leave the money where it is. He cannot exert force on the thief by locking the money up in a safe because he does not own one. Instead, he calls upon a shared understanding and a claim of authority within the governed society to persuade the thief. The thief, to the contrary, could have physically taken the ten-ruble note without replacing it, but he does not. He engages the rabbi in the same conversation. In part, he justifies his claim to five rubles. In part, he resists the authority of the rabbi--not by rejecting the culture that renders the rabbi a privileged expert, but by playing the game of Talmudic disputation. There is a price, though, for participating in the conversation. The thief must leave the five-ruble note; he cannot take the whole amount. + +In this story, culture is open to interpretation and manipulation, but not infinitely so. Some moves may be valid within a cultural framework and alter it; others simply will not. The practical force of culture, on the other hand, is not brute force. It cannot force an outcome, but it can exert a real pull on the range of behaviors that people will seriously consider undertaking, both as individuals and as polities. The storyteller relies on the listener's cultural understanding about the limits of argument, or communicative action. The story exploits the open texture of culture, and the listener's shared cultural belief that stealing is an act of force, not a claim of justice; that those who engage in it do not conceive of themselves as engaged in legitimate defensible acts. The rabbi was naïve to begin with, but the thief 's disputation is inconsistent with our sense of the nature of the act of stealing in exactly the same way that the rabbi's was, but inversely. The thief, the rabbi, and the storyteller participate in making, and altering, the meaning of the commandments. + +Culture changes through the actions of individuals in the cultural context. Beliefs, claims, communicative moves that have one meaning before an intervention ,{[pg 284]}, may begin to shift in their meaning as a result of other moves, made by other participants in the same cultural milieu. One need not adopt any given fully fledged meme theory of culture--like Richard Dawkins's, or Balkin's political adaptation of it as a theory of ideology--to accept that culture is created through communication among human beings, that it exerts some force on what they can say to each other and how it will be received, and that the parameters of a culture as a platform for making meaning in interaction among human beings change over time with use. How cultural moves are made, by whom, and with what degree of perfect replication or subtle (and not so subtle) change, become important elements in determining the rate and direction of cultural change. These changes, over time, alter the platform individuals must use to make sense of the world they occupy, and for participants in conversation to be able to make intelligible communications to each other about the world they share and where it can and ought to go. Culture so understood is a social fact about particular sets of human beings in historical context. As a social fact, it constrains and facilitates the development, expression, and questioning of beliefs and positions. Whether and how Darwinism should be taught in public schools, for example, is a live political question in vast regions of the United States, and is played out as a debate over whether evolution is "merely a theory." Whether racial segregation should be practiced in these schools is no longer a viable or even conceivable political agenda. The difference between Darwinism and the undesirability of racial segregation is not that one is scientifically true and the other is not. The difference is that the former is not part of the "common knowledge" of a large section of society, whereas the latter is, in a way that no longer requires proof by detailed sociological and psychological studies of the type cited by the Supreme Court in support of its holding, in /{Brown v. Board of Education}/, that segregation in education was inherently unequal. +={ Balkin, Jack ; + Dawkins, Richard ; + capabilities of individuals : + cultural shift ; + individual capabilities and action : + cultural shift +} + +If culture is indeed part of how we form a shared sense of unexamined common knowledge, it plays a significant role in framing the meaning of the state of the world, the availability and desirability of choices, and the organization of discourse. The question of how culture is framed (and through it, meaning and the baseline conversational moves) then becomes germane to a liberal political theory. Between the Scylla of a fixed culture (with hierarchical, concentrated power to control its development and interpretation) and the Charybdis of a perfectly open culture (where nothing ,{[pg 285]}, is fixed and everything is up for grabs, offering no anchor for meaning and mutual intelligibility), there is a wide range of practical social and economic arrangements around the production and use of culture. In evaluating the attractiveness of various arrangements from the perspective of liberal theory, we come to an already familiar trade-off, and an already familiar answer. As in the case of autonomy and political discourse, a greater ability of individuals to participate in the creation of the cultural meaning of the world they occupy is attractive from the perspective of the liberal commitments to individual freedom and democratic participation. As in both areas that we have already considered, a Babel objection appears: Too much freedom to challenge and remake our own cultural environment will lead to a lack of shared meaning. As in those two cases, however, the fears of too active a community of meaning making are likely exaggerated. Loosening the dominant power of Hollywood and television over contemporary culture is likely to represent an incremental improvement, from the perspective of liberal political commitments. It will lead to a greater transparency of culture, and therefore a greater capacity for critical reflection, and it will provide more opportunities for participating in the creation of culture, for interpolating individual glosses on it, and for creating shared variations on common themes. + +2~ THE TRANSPARENCY OF INTERNET CULTURE +={ culture : + transparency of +12 ; + Internet : + transparency of culture +12 ; + networked public sphere : + transparency of Internet culture +12 ; + public sphere : + transparency of Internet culture +12 ; + transparency of Internet culture +12 +} + +If you run a search for "Barbie" on three separate search engines--Google, Overture, and Yahoo!--you will get quite different results. Table 8.1 lists these results in the order in which they appear on each search engine. Overture is a search engine that sells placement to the parties who are being searched. Hits on this search engine are therefore ranked based on whoever paid Overture the most in order to be placed highly in response to a query. On this list, none of the top ten results represent anything other than sales-related Barbie sites. Critical sites begin to appear only around the twentyfifth result, presumably after all paying clients have been served. Google, as we already know, uses a radically decentralized mechanism for assigning relevance. It counts how many sites on the Web have linked to a particular site that has the search term in it, and ranks the search results by placing a site with a high number of incoming links above a site with a low number of incoming links. In effect, each Web site publisher "votes" for a site's ,{[pg 286]}, ,{[pg 287]}, relevance by linking to it, and Google aggregates these votes and renders them on their results page as higher ranking. The little girl who searches for Barbie on Google will encounter a culturally contested figure. The same girl, searching on Overture, will encounter a commodity toy. In each case, the underlying efforts of Mattel, the producer of Barbie, have not changed. What is different is that in an environment where relevance is measured in nonmarket action--placing a link to a Web site because you deem it relevant to whatever you are doing with your Web site--as opposed to in dollars, Barbie has become a more transparent cultural object. It is easier for the little girl to see that the doll is not only a toy, not only a symbol of beauty and glamour, but also a symbol of how norms of female beauty in our society can be oppressive to women and girls. The transparency does not force the girl to choose one meaning of Barbie or another. It does, however, render transparent that Barbie can have multiple meanings and that choosing meanings is a matter of political concern for some set of people who coinhabit this culture. Yahoo! occupies something of a middle ground--its algorithm does link to two of the critical sites among the top ten, and within the top twenty, identifies most of the sites that appear on Google's top ten that are not related to sales or promotion. +={ Barbie (doll), culture of +4 } + +-\\- + +% table moved after paragraph + +!_ Table 8.1: Results for "Barbie" - Google versus Overture and Yahoo! + +table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33; + +Google +Overture +Yahoo! + +Barbie.com (Mattel's site) +Barbie at Amazon.com +Barbie.com + +AdiosBarbie.com: A Body Image for Every Body (site created by women critical of Barbie's projected body image) +Barbie on Sale at KBToys +Barbie Collector + +Barbie Bazar magazine (Barbie collectible news and Information) +Target.com: Barbies +My Scene.com + +If You Were a Barbie, Which Messed Up Version Would You Be? +Barbie: Best prices and selection (bizrate.com) +EverythingGirl.com + +Visible Barbie Project (macabre images of Barbie sliced as though in a science project) +Barbies, New and Pre-owned at NetDoll +Barbie History (fan-type history, mostly when various dolls were released) + +Barbie: The Image of Us All (1995 undergraduate paper about Barbie's cultural history) +Barbies - compare prices (nextag.com) +Mattel, Inc. + +Audigraph.free.fr (Barbie and Ken sex animation) +Barbie Toys (complete line of Barbie electronics online) +Spatula Jackson's Barbies (picutes of Barbie as various counter-cultural images) + +Suicide bomber Barbie (Barbie with explosives strapped to waist) +Barbie Party supplies +Barbie! (fan site) + +Barbies (Barbie dressed and painted as counter-cultural images) +Barbie and her accessories online +The Distorted Barbie + +}table + +A similar phenomenon repeats itself in the context of explicit efforts to define Barbie--encyclopedias. There are, as of this writing, six generalinterest online encyclopedias that are reasonably accessible on the Internet-- that is to say, can be found with reasonable ease by looking at major search engines, sites that focus on education and parenting, and similar techniques. Five are commercial, and one is a quintessential commons-based peerproduction project-- /{Wikipedia}/. Of the five commercial encyclopedias, only one is available at no charge, the Columbia Encyclopedia, which is packaged in two primary forms--as encyclopedia.com and as part of Bartleby.com.~{ Encyclopedia.com is a part of Highbeam Research, Inc., which combines free and pay research services. Bartleby provides searching and access to many reference and highculture works at no charge, combining it with advertising, a book store, and many links to Amazon.com or to the publishers for purchasing the printed versions of the materials. }~ The other four--Britannica, Microsoft's Encarta, the World Book, and Grolier's Online Encyclopedia--charge various subscription rates that range around fifty to sixty dollars a year. The Columbia Encyclopedia includes no reference to Barbie, the doll. The World Book has no "Barbie" entry, but does include a reference to Barbie as part of a fairly substantial article on "Dolls." The only information that is given is that the doll was introduced in 1959, that she has a large wardrobe, and in a different place, that darkskinned Barbies were introduced in the 1980s. The article concludes with a guide of about three hundred words to good doll-collecting practices. Microsoft's ,{[pg 288]}, Encarta also includes Barbie in the article on "Doll," but provides a brief separate definition as well, which replicates the World Book information in slightly different form: 1959, large wardrobe, and introduction of dark-skinned Barbies. The online photograph available with the definition is of a brown-skinned, black-haired Barbie. Grolier's Online's major generalpurpose encyclopedia, Americana, also has no entry for Barbie, but makes reference to the doll as part of the article on dolls. Barbie is described as a revolutionary new doll, made to resemble a teenage fashion model as part of a trend to realism in dolls. Grolier's Online does, however, include a more specialized American Studies encyclopedia that has an article on Barbie. That article heavily emphasizes the number of dolls sold and their value, provides some description of the chronological history of the doll, and makes opaque references to Barbie's physique and her emphasis on consumption. While the encyclopedia includes bibliographic references to critical works about Barbie, the textual references to cultural critique or problems she raises are very slight and quite oblique. +={ Wikipedia project : + Barbie doll content +2 +} + +Only two encyclopedias focus explicitly on Barbie's cultural meaning: Britannica and /{Wikipedia}/. The Britannica entry was written by M. G. Lord, a professional journalist who authored a book entitled Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. It is a tightly written piece that underscores the critique of Barbie, both on body dimensions and its relationship to the body image of girls, and excessive consumerism. It also, however, makes clear the fact that Barbie was the first doll to give girls a play image that was not focused on nurturing and family roles, but was an independent, professional adult: playing roles such as airline pilot, astronaut, or presidential candidate. The article also provides brief references to the role of Barbie in a global market economy--its manufacture outside the United States, despite its marketing as an American cultural icon, and its manufacturer's early adoption of direct-to-children marketing. /{Wikipedia}/ provides more or less all the information provided in the Britannica definition, including a reference to Lord's own book, and adds substantially more material from within Barbie lore itself and a detailed time line of the doll's history. It has a strong emphasis on the body image controversy, and emphasizes both the critique that Barbie encourages girls to focus on shallow consumption of fashion accessories, and that she represents an unattainable lifestyle for most girls who play with her. The very first version of the definition, posted January 3, 2003, included only a brief reference to a change in Barbie's waistline as a result of efforts by parents and anorexia groups ,{[pg 289]}, concerned with the doll's impact on girls' nutrition. This remained the only reference to the critique of Barbie until December 15, 2003, when a user who was not logged in introduced a fairly roughly written section that emphasized both the body image concerns and the consumerism concerns with Barbie. During the same day, a number of regular contributors (that is, users with log-in names and their own talk pages) edited the new section and improved its language and flow, but kept the basic concepts intact. Three weeks later, on January 5, 2004, another regular user rewrote the section, reorganized the paragraphs so that the critique of Barbie's emphasis on high consumption was separated from the emphasis on Barbie's body dimensions, and also separated and clarified the qualifying claims that Barbie's independence and professional outfits may have had positive effects on girls' perception of possible life plans. This contributor also introduced a reference to the fact that the term "Barbie" is often used to denote a shallow or silly girl or woman. After that, with a change three weeks later from describing Barbie as available for most of her life only as "white Anglo-Saxon (and probably protestant)" to "white woman of apparently European descent" this part of the definition stabilized. As this description aims to make clear, /{Wikipedia}/ makes the history of the evolution of the article entirely transparent. The software platform allows any reader to look at prior versions of the definition, to compare specific versions, and to read the "talk" pages-- the pages where the participants discuss their definition and their thoughts about it. + +The relative emphasis of Google and /{Wikipedia}/, on the one hand, and Overture, Yahoo!, and the commercial encyclopedias other than Britannica, on the other hand, is emblematic of a basic difference between markets and social conversations with regard to culture. If we focus on the role of culture as "common knowledge" or background knowledge, its relationship to the market--at least for theoretical economists--is exogenous. It can be taken as given and treated as "taste." In more practical business environments, culture is indeed a source of taste and demand, but it is not taken as exogenous. Culture, symbolism, and meaning, as they are tied with marketbased goods, become a major focus of advertising and of demand management. No one who has been exposed to the advertising campaigns of Coca-Cola, Nike, or Apple Computers, as well as practically to any one of a broad range of advertising campaigns over the past few decades, can fail to see that these are not primarily a communication about the material characteristics or qualities of the products or services sold by the advertisers. ,{[pg 290]}, + +They are about meaning. These campaigns try to invest the act of buying their products or services with a cultural meaning that they cultivate, manipulate, and try to generalize in the practices of the society in which they are advertising, precisely in order to shape taste. They offer an opportunity to generate rents, because the consumer has to have this company's shoe rather than that one, because that particular shoe makes the customer this kind of person rather than that kind--cool rather than stuffy, sophisticated rather than common. Neither the theoretical economists nor the marketing executives have any interest in rendering culture transparent or writable. Whether one treats culture as exogenous or as a domain for limiting the elasticity of demand for one's particular product, there is no impetus to make it easier for consumers to see through the cultural symbols, debate their significance, or make them their own. If there is business reason to do anything about culture, it is to try to shape the cultural meaning of an object or practice, in order to shape the demand for it, while keeping the role of culture hidden and assuring control over the careful cultural choreography of the symbols attached to the company. Indeed, in 1995, the U.S. Congress enacted a new kind of trademark law, the Federal Antidilution Act, which for the first time disconnects trademark protection from protecting consumers from confusion by knockoffs. The Antidilution Act of 1995 gives the owner of any famous mark--and only famous marks--protection from any use that dilutes the meaning that the brand owner has attached to its own mark. It can be entirely clear to consumers that a particular use does not come from the owner of the brand, and still, the owner has a right to prevent this use. While there is some constitutional free-speech protection for criticism, there is also a basic change in the understanding of trademark law-- from a consumer protection law intended to assure that consumers can rely on the consistency of goods marked in a certain way, to a property right in controlling the meaning of symbols a company has successfully cultivated so that they are, in fact, famous. This legal change marks a major shift in the understanding of the role of law in assigning control for cultural meaning generated by market actors. +={ Antidilutation Act of 1995 ; + branding : + trademark dilutation ; + dilutation of trademarks ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + trademark dilutation ; + proprietary rights : + trademark dilutation ; + trademark dilutation ; + information production, market-based : + cultural change, transparency of +4 ; + market-based information producers : + cultural change, transparency of +4 ; + nonmarket information producers : + cultural change, transparency of +4 +} + +Unlike market production of culture, meaning making as a social, nonmarket practice has no similar systematic reason to accept meaning as it comes. Certainly, some social relations do. When girls play with dolls, collect them, or exhibit them, they are rarely engaged in reflection on the meaning of the dolls, just as fans of Scarlett O'Hara, of which a brief Internet search suggests there are many, are not usually engaged in critique of Gone with the ,{[pg 291]}, Wind as much as in replication and adoption of its romantic themes. Plainly, however, some conversations we have with each other are about who we are, how we came to be who we are, and whether we view the answers we find to these questions as attractive or not. In other words, some social interactions do have room for examining culture as well as inhabiting it, for considering background knowledge for what it is, rather than taking it as a given input into the shape of demand or using it as a medium for managing meaning and demand. People often engage in conversations with each other precisely to understand themselves in the world, their relationship to others, and what makes them like and unlike those others. One major domain in which this formation of self- and group identity occurs is the adoption or rejection of, and inquiry into, cultural symbols and sources of meaning that will make a group cohere or splinter; that will make people like or unlike each other. + +The distinction I draw here between market-based and nonmarket-based activities is purposefully overstated to clarify the basic structural differences between these two modes of organizing communications and the degree of transparency of culture they foster. As even the very simple story of how Barbie is defined in Internet communications demonstrates, practices are not usually as cleanly divided. Like the role of the elite newspapers in providing political coverage, discussed in chapter 6, some market-based efforts do provide transparency; indeed, their very market rationale pushes them to engage in a systematic effort to provide transparency. Google's strategy from the start has been to assume that what individuals are interested in is a reflection of what other individuals--who are interested in roughly the same area, but spend more time on it, that is, Web page authors--think is worthwhile. The company built its business model around rendering transparent what people and organizations that make their information available freely consider relevant. Occasionally, Google has had to deal with "search engine optimizers," who have advised companies on how to game its search engine to achieve a high ranking. Google has fought these optimizers; sometimes by outright blocking access to traffic that originates with them. In these cases, we see a technical competition between firms--the optimizers--whose interest is in capturing attention based on the interests of those who pay them, and a firm, Google, whose strategic choice is to render the distributed judgments of relevance on the Web more or less faithfully. There, the market incentive actually drives Google's investment affirmatively toward transparency. However, the market decision must be strategic, not tactical, for this ,{[pg 292]}, to be the case. Fear of litigation has, for example, caused Google to bury links that threatened it with liability. The most prominent of these cases occurred when the Church of Scientology threatened to sue Google over presenting links to www.xenu.net, a site dedicated to criticizing scientology. Google initially removed the link. However, its strategic interest was brought to the fore by widespread criticism of its decision on the Internet, and the firm relented. A search for "Scientology" as of this writing reveals a wide range of sites, many critical of scientology, and xenu.net is the second link. A search for "scientology Google" will reveal many stories, not quite flattering either to Google or to the Church of Scientology, as the top links. We see similar diversity among the encyclopedias. Britannica offered as clear a presentation of the controversy over Barbie as /{Wikipedia}/. Britannica has built its reputation and business model on delivery of the knowledge and opinions of those in positions to claim authority in the name of high culture professional competence, and delivering that perspective to those who buy the encyclopedia precisely to gain access to that kind of knowledge base, judgment, and formal credibility. In both cases, the long-term business model of the companies calls for reflecting the views and insights of agents who are not themselves thoroughly within the market--whether they are academics who write articles for Britannica, or the many and diverse Web page owners on the Internet. In both cases, these business models lead to a much more transparent cultural representation than what Hollywood or Madison Avenue produce. Just as not all market-based organizations render culture opaque, not all nonmarket or social-relations-based conversations aim to explore and expose cultural assumptions. Social conversations can indeed be among the most highly deferential to cultural assumptions, and can repress critique more effectively and completely than market-based conversations. Whether in communities of unquestioning religious devotion or those that enforce strict egalitarian political correctness, we commonly see, in societies both traditional and contemporary, significant social pressures against challenging background cultural assumptions within social conversations. We have, for example, always had more cultural experimentation and fermentation in cities, where social ties are looser and communities can exercise less social control over questioning minds and conversation. Ubiquitous Internet communications expand something of the freedom of city parks and streets, but also the freedom of cafes and bars--commercial platforms for social inter? action--so that it is available everywhere. + +The claim I make here, as elsewhere throughout this book, is not that ,{[pg 293]}, nonmarket production will, in fact, generally displace market production, or that such displacement is necessary to achieve the improvement in the degree of participation in cultural production and legibility. My claim is that the emergence of a substantial nonmarket alternative path for cultural conversation increases the degrees of freedom available to individuals and groups to engage in cultural production and exchange, and that doing so increases the transparency of culture to its inhabitants. It is a claim tied to the particular technological moment and its particular locus of occurrence--our networked communications environment. It is based on the fact that it is displacing the particular industrial form of information and cultural production of the twentieth century, with its heavy emphasis on consumption in mass markets. In this context, the emergence of a substantial sector of nonmarket production, and of peer production, or the emergence of individuals acting cooperatively as a major new source of defining widely transmissible statements and conversations about the meaning of the culture we share, makes culture substantially more transparent and available for reflection, and therefore for revision. +={ communities : + critical culture and self-reflection +1 ; + critical culture and self-reflection +1 ; + culture : + criticality of (self-reflection) +1 ; + self-organization : + See clusters in network topology self-reflection +1 +} + +Two other dimensions are made very clear by the /{Wikipedia}/ example. The first is the degree of self-consciousness that is feasible with open, conversation-based definition of culture that is itself rendered more transparent. The second is the degree to which the culture is writable, the degree to which individuals can participate in mixing and matching and making their own emphases, for themselves and for others, on the existing set of symbols. Fisher, for example, has used the term "semiotic democracy" to describe the potential embodied in the emerging openness of Internet culture to participation by users. The term originates from Fiske's Television Culture as a counterpoint to the claim that television was actually a purely one-way medium that only enacted culture on viewers. Instead, Fiske claimed that viewers resist these meanings, put them in their own contexts, use them in various ways, and subvert them to make their own meaning. However, much of this resistance is unstated, some of it unself-conscious. There are the acts of reception and interpretation, or of using images and sentences in different contexts of life than those depicted in the television program; but these acts are local, enacted within small-scale local cultures, and are not the result of a self-conscious conversation among users of the culture about its limits, its meanings, and its subversions. One of the phenomena we are beginning to observe on the Internet is an emerging culture of conversation about culture, which is both self-conscious and informed by linking or quoting from specific ,{[pg 294]}, reference points. The /{Wikipedia}/ development of the definition of Barbie, its history, and the availability of a talk page alongside it for discussion about the definition, are an extreme version of self-conscious discussion about culture. The basic tools enabled by the Internet--cutting, pasting, rendering, annotating, and commenting--make active utilization and conscious discussion of cultural symbols and artifacts easier to create, sustain, and read more generally. +={ Fisher, William (Terry) ; + Fiske, John +} + +The flexibility with which cultural artifacts--meaning-carrying objects-- can be rendered, preserved, and surrounded by different context and discussion makes it easy for anyone, anywhere, to make a self-conscious statement about culture. They enable what Balkin has called "glomming on"-- taking that which is common cultural representation and reworking it into your own move in a cultural conversation.~{ Jack Balkin, "Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society," New York University Law Review 79 (2004): 1. }~ The low cost of storage, and the ubiquitous possibility of connecting from any connection location to any storage space make any such statement persistent and available to others. The ease of commenting, linking, and writing to other locations of statements, in turn, increases the possibility of response and counterresponse. These conversations can then be found by others, and at least read if not contributed to. In other words, as with other, purposeful peer-produced projects like /{Wikipedia}/, the basic characteristics of the Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular have made it possible for anyone, anywhere, for any reason to begin to contribute to an accretion of conversation about well-defined cultural objects or about cultural trends and characteristics generally. These conversations can persist across time and exist across distance, and are available for both active participation and passive reading by many people in many places. The result is, as we are already seeing it, the emergence of widely accessible, self-conscious conversation about the meaning of contemporary culture by those who inhabit it. This "writability" is also the second characteristic that the /{Wikipedia}/ definition process makes very clear, and the second major change brought about by the networked information economy in the digital environment. +={ Balkin, Jack } + +2~ THE PLASTICITY OF INTERNET CULTURE: THE FUTURE OF HIGH-PRODUCTION-VALUE FOLK CULTURE +={ high-production value content +2 ; + Internet : + plasticity of culture +2 ; + plasticity of Internet culture +2 +} + +I have already described the phenomena of blogs, of individually created movies like /{The Jedi Saga}/, and of Second Life, the game platform where ,{[pg 295]}, users have made all the story lines and all the objects, while the commercial provider created the tools and hosts the platform for their collective storytelling. We are seeing the broad emergence of business models that are aimed precisely at providing users with the tools to write, compose, film, and mix existing materials, and to publish, play, render, and distribute what we have made to others, everywhere. Blogger, for example, provides simple tools for online publication of written materials. Apple Computer offers a product called GarageBand, that lets users compose and play their own music. It includes a large library of prerecorded building blocks--different instruments, riffs, loops--and an interface that allows the user to mix, match, record and add their own, and produce their own musical composition and play it. Video-editing utilities, coupled with the easy malleability of digital video, enable people to make films--whether about their own lives or, as in the case of /{The Jedi Saga}/, of fantasies. The emerging phenomenon of Machinima--short movies that are made using game platforms--underscores how digital platforms can also become tools for creation in unintended ways. Creators use the 3-D rendering capabilities of an existing game, but use the game to stage a movie scene or video presentation, which they record as it is played out. This recording is then distributed on the Internet as a standalone short film. While many of these are still crude, the basic possibilities they present as modes of making movies is significant. Needless to say, not everyone is Mozart. Not everyone is even a reasonably talented musician, author, or filmmaker. Much of what can be and is done is not wildly creative, and much of it takes the form of Balkin's "glomming on": That is, users take existing popular culture, or otherwise professionally created culture, and perform it, sometimes with an effort toward fidelity to the professionals, but often with their own twists, making it their own in an immediate and unmediated way. However, just as learning how to read music and play an instrument can make one a better-informed listener, so too a ubiquitous practice of making cultural artifacts of all forms enables individuals in society to be better readers, listeners, and viewers of professionally produced culture, as well as contributors of our own statements into this mix of collective culture. +={ Balkin, Jack ; + commercial culture, production of +1 ; + information production, market-based : + mass popular culture +1 ; + market-based information producers : + mass popular culture +1 ; + market-based information producers : + mass popular culture +1 ; + popular culture, commercial production of +1 +} + +People have always created their own culture. Popular music did not begin with Elvis. There has always been a folk culture--of music, storytelling, and theater. What happened over the course of the twentieth century in advanced economies, and to a lesser extent but still substantially around the globe, is the displacement of folk culture by commercially produced mass popular ,{[pg 296]}, culture. The role of the individuals and communities vis-a-vis cultural arti` facts changed, from coproducers and replicators to passive consumers. The time frame where elders might tell stories, children might put on a show for the adults, or those gathered might sing songs came to be occupied by background music, from the radio or phonograph, or by television. We came to assume a certain level of "production values"--quality of sound and image, quality of rendering and staging--that are unattainable with our crude means and our relatively untrained voices or use of instruments. Not only time for local popular creation was displaced, therefore, but also a sense of what counted as engaging, delightful articulation of culture. In a now-classic article from 1937, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin authored one of the only instances of critical theory that took an optimistic view of the emergence of popular culture in the twentieth century as a potentially liberating turn. Benjamin's core claim was that with mechanical replication of art, the "aura" that used to attach to single works of art is dissipated. Benjamin saw this aura of unique works of art as reinforcing a distance between the masses and the representations of culture, reinforcing the perception of their weakness and distance from truly great things. He saw in mechanical reproducibility the possibility of bringing copies down to earth, to the hands of the masses, and reversing the sense of distance and relative weakness of the mass culture. What Benjamin did not yet see were the ways in which mechanical reproduction would insert a different kind of barrier between many dispersed individuals and the capacity to make culture. The barrier of production costs, production values, and the star system that came along with them, replaced the iconic role of the unique work of art with new, but equally high barriers to participation in making culture. It is precisely those barriers that the capabilities provided by digital media begin to erode. It is becoming feasible for users to cut and paste, "glom on," to existing cultural materials; to implement their intuitions, tastes, and expressions through media that render them with newly acceptable degrees of technical quality, and to distribute them among others, both near and far. As Hollywood begins to use more computer-generated special effects, but more important, whole films--2004 alone saw major releases like Shrek 2, The Incredibles, and Polar Express--and as the quality of widely available image-generation software and hardware improves, the production value gap between individual users or collections of users and the commercial-professional studios will decrease. As this book is completed in early 2005, nothing makes clearer the value of retelling basic stories through ,{[pg 297]}, the prism of contemporary witty criticism of prevailing culture than do Shrek 2 and The Incredibles, and, equally, nothing exposes the limits of purely technical, movie-star-centered quality than the lifelessness of Polar Express. As online games like Second Life provide users with new tools and platforms to tell and retell their own stories, or their own versions of well-trodden paths, as digital multimedia tools do the same for individuals outside of the collaborative storytelling platforms, we can begin to see a reemergence of folk stories and songs as widespread cultural practices. And as network connections become ubiquitous, and search engines and filters improve, we can begin to see this folk culture emerging to play a substantially greater role in the production of our cultural environment. +={ Walter, Benjamin } + +2~ A PARTICIPATORY CULTURE: TOWARD POLICY +={ control of public sphere : + See mass media controlling culture +5 ; + culture : + participatory, policies for +5 | shaping perceptions of others +5 ; + future : + participatory culture +5 ; + information production inputs : + propaganda +5 ; + inputs to production : + propaganda +5 ; + manipulating perceptions of others : + with propaganda +5 ; + participatory culture +5 ; + perceptions of others, shaping : + with propaganda +5 ; + policy : + participatory culture +5 ; + production inputs : + propaganda +5 ; + propaganda : + manipulating culture +5 ; + shaping perceptions of others : + with propaganda +5 +} + +Culture is too broad a concept to suggest an all-encompassing theory centered around technology in general or the Internet in particular. My focus is therefore much narrower, along two dimensions. First, I am concerned with thinking about the role of culture to human interactions that can be understood in terms of basic liberal political commitments--that is to say, a concern for the degree of freedom individuals have to form and pursue a life plan, and the degree of participation they can exercise in debating and determining collective action. Second, my claim is focused on the relative attractiveness of the twentieth-century industrial model of cultural production and what appears to be emerging as the networked model in the early twenty-first century, rather than on the relationship of the latter to some theoretically defined ideal culture. +={ culture : + freedom of +1 ; + economics in liberal political theory : + cultural freedom +1 ; + freedom : + cultural +1 ; + liberal political theory : + cultural freedom +1 +} + +A liberal political theory cannot wish away the role of culture in structuring human events. We engage in wide ranges of social practices of making and exchanging symbols that are concerned with how our life is and how it might be, with which paths are valuable for us as individuals to pursue and which are not, and with what objectives we as collective communities-- from the local to the global--ought to pursue. This unstructured, ubiquitous conversation is centrally concerned with things that a liberal political system speaks to, but it is not amenable to anything like an institutionalized process that could render its results "legitimate." Culture operates as a set of background assumptions and common knowledge that structure our understanding of the state of the world and the range of possible actions and outcomes open to us individually and collectively. It constrains the range of conversational ,{[pg 298]}, moves open to us to consider what we are doing and how we might act differently. In these regards, it is a source of power in the critical-theory sense--a source that exerts real limits on what we can do and how we can be. As a source of power, it is not a natural force that stands apart from human endeavor and is therefore a fact that is not itself amenable to political evaluation. As we see well in the efforts of parents and teachers, advertising agencies and propaganda departments, culture is manipulable, manageable, and a direct locus of intentional action aimed precisely at harnessing its force as a way of controlling the lives of those who inhabit it. At the same time, however, culture is not the barrel of a gun or the chains of a dungeon. There are limits on the degree to which culture can actually control those who inhabit it. Those degrees depend to a great extent on the relative difficulty or ease of seeing through culture, of talking about it with others, and of seeing other alternatives or other ways of symbolizing the possible and the desirable. + +Understanding that culture is a matter of political concern even within a liberal framework does not, however, translate into an agenda of intervention in the cultural sphere as an extension of legitimate political decision making. Cultural discourse is systematically not amenable to formal regulation, management, or direction from the political system. First, participation in cultural discourse is intimately tied to individual self-expression, and its regulation would therefore require levels of intrusion in individual autonomy that would render any benefits in terms of a participatory political system Pyrrhic indeed. Second, culture is much more intricately woven into the fabric of everyday life than political processes and debates. It is language-- the basic framework within which we can comprehend anything, and through which we do so everywhere. To regulate culture is to regulate our very comprehension of the world we occupy. Third, therefore, culture infuses our thoughts at a wide range of levels of consciousness. Regulating culture, or intervening in its creation and direction, would entail self-conscious action to affect citizens at a subconscious or weakly conscious level. Fourth, and finally, there is no Archimedean point outside of culture on which to stand and decide--let us pour a little bit more of this kind of image or that, so that we achieve a better consciousness, one that better fits even our most just and legitimately arrived-at political determinations. + +A systematic commitment to avoid direct intervention in cultural exchange does not leave us with nothing to do or say about culture, and about law or policy as it relates to it. What we have is the capacity and need ,{[pg 299]}, to observe a cultural production and exchange system and to assure that it is as unconstraining and free from manipulation as possible. We must diagnose what makes a culture more or less opaque to its inhabitants; what makes it more or less liable to be strictly constraining of the conversations that rely on it; and what makes the possibility of many and diverse sources and forms of cultural intervention more or less likely. On the background of this project, I suggest that the emergence of Internet culture is an attractive development from the perspective of liberal political theory. This is so both because of the technical characteristics of digital objects and computer network communications, and because of the emerging industrial structure of the networked information economy--typified by the increased salience of nonmarket production in general and of individual production, alone or in concert with others, in particular. The openness of digital networks allows for a much wider range of perspectives on any particular symbol or range of symbols to be visible for anyone, everywhere. The cross section of views that makes it easy to see that Barbie is a contested symbol makes it possible more generally to observe very different cultural forms and perspectives for any individual. This transparency of background unstated assumptions and common knowledge is the beginning of self-reflection and the capacity to break out of given molds. Greater transparency is also a necessary element in, and a consequence of, collaborative action, as various participants either explicitly, or through negotiating the divergence of their nonexplicit different perspectives, come to a clearer statement of their assumptions, so that these move from the background to the fore, and become more amenable to examination and revision. The plasticity of digital objects, in turn, improves the degree to which individuals can begin to produce a new folk culture, one that already builds on the twentieth-century culture that was highly unavailable for folk retelling and re-creation. This plasticity, and the practices of writing your own culture, then feed back into the transparency, both because the practice of making one's own music, movie, or essay makes one a more self-conscious user of the cultural artifacts of others, and because in retelling anew known stories, we again come to see what the originals were about and how they do, or do not, fit our own sense of how things are and how they ought to be. There is emerging a broad practice of learning by doing that makes the entire society more effective readers and writers of their own culture. +={ Internet : + plasticity of culture ; + plasticity of Internet culture +} + +By comparison to the highly choreographed cultural production system of the industrial information economy, the emergence of a new folk culture ,{[pg 300]}, and of a wider practice of active personal engagement in the telling and retelling of basic cultural themes and emerging concerns and attachments offers new avenues for freedom. It makes culture more participatory, and renders it more legible to all its inhabitants. The basic structuring force of culture is not eliminated, of course. The notion of floating monads disconnected from a culture is illusory. Indeed, it is undesirable. However, the framework that culture offers us, the language that makes it possible for us to make statements and incorporate the statements of others in the daily social conversation that pervades life, is one that is more amenable to our own remaking. We become more sophisticated users of this framework, more self-conscious about it, and have a greater capacity to recognize, challenge, and change that which we find oppressive, and to articulate, exchange, and adopt that which we find enabling. As chapter 11 makes clear, however, the tension between the industrial model of cultural production and the networked information economy is nowhere more pronounced than in the question of the degree to which the new folk culture of the twenty-first century will be permitted to build upon the outputs of the twentieth-century industrial model. In this battle, the stakes are high. One cannot make new culture ex nihilo. We are as we are today, as cultural beings, occupying a set of common symbols and stories that are heavily based on the outputs of that industrial period. If we are to make this culture our own, render it legible, and make it into a new platform for our needs and conversations today, we must find a way to cut, paste, and remix present culture. And it is precisely this freedom that most directly challenges the laws written for the twentieth-century technology, economy, and cultural practice. ,{[pg 301]}, + +1~9 Chapter 9 - Justice and Development +={ human development and justice +91 ; + justice and human development +91 +} + +How will the emergence of a substantial sector of nonmarket, commons-based production in the information economy affect questions of distribution and human well-being? The pessimistic answer is, very little. Hunger, disease, and deeply rooted racial, ethnic, or class stratification will not be solved by a more decentralized, nonproprietary information production system. Without clean water, basic literacy, moderately well-functioning governments, and universal practical adoption of the commitment to treat all human beings as fundamentally deserving of equal regard, the fancy Internet-based society will have little effect on the billions living in poverty or deprivation, either in the rich world, or, more urgently and deeply, in poor and middle-income economies. There is enough truth in this pessimistic answer to require us to tread lightly in embracing the belief that the shift to a networked information economy can indeed have meaningful effects in the domain of justice and human development. + +Despite the caution required in overstating the role that the networked information economy can play in solving issues of justice, ,{[pg 302]}, it is important to recognize that information, knowledge, and culture are core inputs into human welfare. Agricultural knowledge and biological innovation are central to food security. Medical innovation and access to its fruits are central to living a long and healthy life. Literacy and education are central to individual growth, to democratic self-governance, and to economic capabilities. Economic growth itself is critically dependent on innovation and information. For all these reasons, information policy has become a critical element of development policy and the question of how societies attain and distribute human welfare and well-being. Access to knowledge has become central to human development. The emergence of the networked information economy offers definable opportunities for improvement in the normative domain of justice, as it does for freedom, by comparison to what was achievable in the industrial information economy. +={ commercial model of communication : + barriers to justice +1 ; + industrial model of communication : + barriers to justice +1 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + barriers to justice +1 ; + traditional model of communication : + barriers to justice +1 ; + policy : + proprietary rights vs. justice +2 ; + proprietary rights : + justice vs. +2 +} + +We can analyze the implications of the emergence of the networked information economy for justice or equality within two quite different frames. The first is liberal, and concerned primarily with some form of equality of opportunity. The second is social-democratic, or development oriented, and focused on universal provision of a substantial set of elements of human well-being. The availability of information from nonmarket sources and the range of opportunities to act within a nonproprietary production environment improve distribution in both these frameworks, but in different ways. Despite the differences, within both frameworks the effect crystallizes into one of access--access to opportunities for one's own action, and access to the outputs and inputs of the information economy. The industrial economy creates cost barriers and transactional-institutional barriers to both these domains. The networked information economy reduces both types of barriers, or creates alternative paths around them. It thereby equalizes, to some extent, both the opportunities to participate as an economic actor and the practical capacity to partake of the fruits of the increasingly information-based global economy. + +The opportunities that the network information economy offers, however, often run counter to the central policy drive of both the United States and the European Union in the international trade and intellectual property systems. These two major powers have systematically pushed for ever-stronger proprietary protection and increasing reliance on strong patents, copyrights, and similar exclusive rights as the core information policy for growth and development. Chapter 2 explains why such a policy is suspect from a purely economic perspective concerned with optimizing innovation. ,{[pg 303]}, A system that relies too heavily on proprietary approaches to information production is not, however, merely inefficient. It is unjust. Proprietary rights are designed to elicit signals of people's willingness and ability to pay. In the presence of extreme distribution differences like those that characterize the global economy, the market is a poor measure of comparative welfare. A system that signals what innovations are most desirable and rations access to these innovations based on ability, as well as willingness, to pay, overrepresents welfare gains of the wealthy and underrepresents welfare gains of the poor. Twenty thousand American teenagers can simply afford, and will be willing to pay, much more for acne medication than the more than a million Africans who die of malaria every year can afford to pay for a vaccine. A system that relies too heavily on proprietary models for managing information production and exchange is unjust because it is geared toward serving small welfare increases for people who can pay a lot for incremental improvements in welfare, and against providing large welfare increases for people who cannot pay for what they need. + +2~ LIBERAL THEORIES OF JUSTICE AND THE NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY +={ human development and justice : + liberal theories of +7 ; + human welfare : + liberal theories of justice +7 ; + information economy : + justice, liberal theories of +7 ; + justice and human development : + liberal theories of +7 ; + liberal societies : + theories of justice +7 ; + welfare : + liberal theories of justice +7 | see also justice and human development +} + +Liberal theories of justice can be categorized according to how they characterize the sources of inequality in terms of luck, responsibility, and structure. By luck, I mean reasons for the poverty of an individual that are beyond his or her control, and that are part of that individual's lot in life unaffected by his or her choices or actions. By responsibility, I mean causes for the poverty of an individual that can be traced back to his or her actions or choices. By structure, I mean causes for the inequality of an individual that are beyond his or her control, but are traceable to institutions, economic organizations, or social relations that form a society's transactional framework and constrain the behavior of the individual or undermine the efficacy of his or her efforts at self-help. +={ background knowledge : + see culture bad luck, justice and +2 ; + DSL : + see broadband networks dumb luck, justice and +2 ; + luck, justice and +2 ; + misfortune, justice and +2 ; + organization structure : + justice and +2 ; + structure of organizations : + justice and +2 +} + +We can think of John Rawls's /{Theory of Justice}/ as based on a notion that the poorest people are the poorest because of dumb luck. His proposal for a systematic way of defending and limiting redistribution is the "difference principle." A society should organize its redistribution efforts in order to make those who are least well-off as well-off as they can be. The theory of desert is that, because any of us could in principle be the victim of this dumb luck, we would all have agreed, if none of us had known where we ,{[pg 304]}, would be on the distribution of bad luck, to minimize our exposure to really horrendous conditions. The practical implication is that while we might be bound to sacrifice some productivity to achieve redistribution, we cannot sacrifice too much. If we did that, we would most likely be hurting, rather than helping, the weakest and poorest. Libertarian theories of justice, most prominently represented by Robert Nozick's entitlement theory, on the other hand, tend to ignore bad luck or impoverishing structure. They focus solely on whether the particular holdings of a particular person at any given moment are unjustly obtained. If they are not, they may not justly be taken from the person who holds them. Explicitly, these theories ignore the poor. As a practical matter and by implication, they treat responsibility as the source of the success of the wealthy, and by negation, the plight of the poorest--leading them to be highly resistant to claims of redistribution. +={ Rawls, John +1 ; + Nozick, Robert ; + redistribution theory +1 +} + +The basic observation that an individual's economic condition is a function of his or her own actions does not necessarily resolve into a blanket rejection of redistribution, as we see in the work of other liberals. Ronald Dworkin's work on inequality offers a critique of Rawls's, in that it tries to include a component of responsibility alongside recognition of the role of luck. In his framework, if (1) resources were justly distributed and (2) bad luck in initial endowment were compensated through some insurance scheme, then poverty that resulted from bad choices, not bad luck, would not deserve help through redistribution. While Rawls's theory ignores personal responsibility, and in this regard, is less attractive from the perspective of a liberal theory that respects individual autonomy, it has the advantage of offering a much clearer metric for a just system. One can measure the welfare of the poorest under different redistribution rules in market economies. One can then see how much redistribution is too much, in the sense that welfare is reduced to the point that the poorest are actually worse off than they would be under a less-egalitarian system. You could compare the Soviet Union, West Germany, and the United States of the late 1960s?early 1970s, and draw conclusions. Dworkin's insurance scheme would require too fine an ability to measure the expected incapacitating effect of various low endowments--from wealth to intelligence to health--in a market economy, and to calibrate wealth endowments to equalize them, to offer a measuring rod for policy. It does, however, have the merit of distinguishing--for purposes of judging desert to benefit from society's redistribution efforts--between a child of privilege who fell into poverty through bad investments coupled with sloth and a person born into a poor family with severe mental ,{[pg 305]}, defects. Bruce Ackerman's Social Justice and the Liberal State also provides a mechanism of differentiating the deserving from the undeserving, but adds policy tractability by including the dimension of structure to luck and responsibility. In addition to the dumb luck of how wealthy your parents are when you are born and what genetic endowment you are born with, there are also questions of the education system you grow up with and the transactional framework through which you live your life--which opportunities it affords, and which it cuts off or burdens. His proposals therefore seek to provide basic remedies for those failures, to the extent that they can, in fact, be remedied. One such proposal is Anne Alstott and Ackerman's idea of a government-funded personal endowment at birth, coupled with the freedom to squander it and suffer the consequential reduction in welfare.~{ Anne Alstott and Bruce Ackerman, The Stakeholder Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). }~ He also emphasizes a more open and egalitarian transactional framework that would allow anyone access to opportunities to transact with others, rather than depending on, for example, unequal access to social links as a precondition to productive behavior. +={ Dworkin, Ronald ; + Ackerman, Bruce +3 ; + Alstott, Anne ; + capabilities of individuals : + economic condition and ; + entertainment industry : + see also music industry entitlement theory ; + individual capabilities and action : + economic condition and ; + policy : + liberal theories of justice and +3 +} + +The networked information economy improves justice from the perspective of every single one of these theories of justice. Imagine a good that improves the welfare of its users--it could be software, or an encyclopedia, or a product review. Now imagine a policy choice that could make production of that good on a nonmarket, peer-production basis too expensive to perform, or make it easy for an owner of an input to exclude competitors-- both market-based and social-production based. For example, a government might decide to: recognize patents on software interfaces, so that it would be very expensive to buy the right to make your software work with someone else's; impose threshold formal education requirements on the authors of any encyclopedia available for school-age children to read, or impose very strict copyright requirements on using information contained in other sources (as opposed to only prohibiting copying their language) and impose high penalties for small omissions; or give the putative subjects of reviews very strong rights to charge for the privilege of reviewing a product--such as by expanding trademark rights to refer to the product, or prohibiting a reviewer to take apart a product without permission. The details do not matter. I offer them only to provide a sense of the commonplace kinds of choices that governments could make that would, as a practical matter, differentially burden nonmarket producers, whether nonprofit organizations or informal peer-production collaborations. Let us call a rule set that is looser from the perspective of access to existing information resources Rule Set A, and a rule ,{[pg 306]}, set that imposes higher costs on access to information inputs Rule Set B. As explained in chapter 2, it is quite likely that adopting B would depress information production and innovation, even if it were intended to increase the production of information by, for example, strengthening copyright or patent. This is because the added incentives for some producers who produce with the aim of capturing the rents created by copyright or patents must be weighed against their costs. These include (a) the higher costs even for those producers and (b) the higher costs for all producers who do not rely on exclusive rights at all, but instead use either a nonproprietary market model--like service--or a nonmarket model, like nonprofits and individual authors, and that do not benefit in any way from the increased appropriation. However, let us make here a much weaker assumption--that an increase in the rules of exclusion will not affect overall production. Let us assume that there will be exactly enough increased production by producers who rely on a proprietary model to offset the losses of production in the nonproprietary sectors. + +It is easy to see why a policy shift from A to B would be regressive from the perspective of theories like Rawls's or Ackerman's. Under Rule A, let us say that in this state of affairs, State A, there are five online encyclopedias. One of them is peer produced and freely available for anyone to use. Rule B is passed. In the new State B, there are still five encyclopedias. It has become too expensive to maintain the free encyclopedia, however, and more profitable to run commercial online encyclopedias. A new commercial encyclopedia has entered the market in competition with the four commercial encyclopedias that existed in State A, and the free encyclopedia folded. From the perspective of the difference principle, we can assume that the change has resulted in a stable overall welfare in the Kaldor-Hicks sense. (That is, overall welfare has increased enough so that, even though some people may be worse off, those who have been made better off are sufficiently better off that they could, in principle, compensate everyone who is worse off enough to make everyone either better off or no worse off than they were before.) There are still five encyclopedias. However, now they all charge a subscription fee. The poorest members of society are worse off, even if we posit that total social welfare has remained unchanged. In State A, they had access for free to an encyclopedia. They could use the information (or the software utility, if the example were software) without having to give up any other sources of welfare. In State B, they must choose between the same amount ,{[pg 307]}, of encyclopedia usage as they had before, and less of some other source of welfare, or the same welfare from other sources, and no encyclopedia. If we assume, contrary to theory and empirical evidence from the innovation economics literature, that the move to State B systematically and predictably improves the incentives and investments of the commercial producers, that would still by itself not justify the policy shift from the perspective of the difference principle. One would have to sustain a much stricter claim: that the marginal improvement in the quality of the encyclopedias, and a decline in price from the added market competition that was not felt by the commercial producers when they were competing with the free, peer-produced version, would still make the poorest better off, even though they now must pay for any level of encyclopedia access, than they were when they had four commercial competitors with their prior levels of investment operating in a competitive landscape of four commercial and one free encyclopedia. +={ Rawls, John } + +From the perspective of Ackerman's theory of justice, the advantages of the networked information economy are clearer yet. Ackerman characterizes some of the basic prerequisites for participating in a market economy as access to a transactional framework, to basic information, and to an adequate educational endowment. To the extent that any of the basic utilities required to participate in an information economy at all are available without sensitivity to price--that is, free to anyone--they are made available in a form that is substantially insulated from the happenstance of initial wealth endowments. In this sense at least, the development of a networked information economy overcomes some of the structural components of continued poverty--lack of access to information about market opportunities for production and cheaper consumption, about the quality of goods, or lack of communications capacity to people or places where one can act productively. While Dworkin's theory does not provide a similarly clear locus for mapping the effect of the networked information economy on justice, there is some advantage, and no loss, from this perspective, in having more of the information economy function on a nonmarket basis. As long as one recognizes bad luck as a partial reason for poverty, then having information resources available for free use is one mechanism of moderating the effects of bad luck in endowment, and lowers the need to compensate for those effects insofar as they translate to lack of access to information resources. This added access results from voluntary communication by the producers and a respect for their willingness to communicate what they produced freely. ,{[pg 308]}, While the benefits flow to individuals irrespective of whether their present state is due to luck or irresponsibility, it does not involve a forced redistribution from responsible individuals to irresponsible individuals. +={ Dworkin, Ronald } + +From the perspective of liberal theories of justice, then, the emergence of the networked information economy is an unqualified improvement. Except under restrictive assumptions inconsistent with what we know as a matter of both theory and empirics about the economics of innovation and information production, the emergence of a substantial sector of information production and exchange that is based on social transactional frameworks, rather than on a proprietary exclusion business model, improves distribution in society. Its outputs are available freely to anyone, as basic inputs into their own actions--whether market-based or nonmarket-based. The facilities it produces improve the prospects of all who are connected to the Internet-- whether they are seeking to use it as consumers or as producers. It softens some of the effects of resource inequality. It offers platforms for greater equality of opportunity to participate in market- and nonmarket-based enterprises. This characteristic is explored in much greater detail in the next segment of this chapter, but it is important to emphasize here that equality of opportunity to act in the face of unequal endowment is central to all liberal theories of justice. As a practical matter, these characteristics of the networked information economy make the widespread availability of Internet access a more salient objective of redistribution policy. They make policy debates, which are mostly discussed in today's political sphere in terms of innovation and growth, and sometimes in terms of freedom, also a matter of liberal justice. + +2~ COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR HUMAN WELFARE AND DEVELOPMENT +={ commons : + human welfare and development +4 ; + democratic societies : + social-democratic theories of justice +4 ; + global development +4 ; + human development and justice +4 ; + human welfare : + commons-based strategies +4 ; + justice and human development : + commons-based strategies +4 ; + social-democratic theories of justice +4 ; + welfare : + commons-based strategies +4 +} + +There is a long social-democratic tradition of focusing not on theoretical conditions of equality in a liberal society, but on the actual well-being of human beings in a society. This conception of justice shares with liberal theories the acceptance of market economy as a fundamental component of free societies. However, its emphasis is not equality of opportunity or even some level of social insurance that still allows the slothful to fall, but on assuring a basic degree of well-being to everyone in society. Particularly in the European social democracies, the ambition has been to make that basic level quite high, but the basic framework of even American Social Security-- ,{[pg 309]}, unless it is fundamentally changed in the coming years--has this characteristic. The literature on global poverty and its alleviation was initially independent of this concern, but as global communications and awareness increased, and as the conditions of life in most advanced market economies for most people improved, the lines between the concerns with domestic conditions and global poverty blurred. We have seen an increasing merging of the concerns into a concern for basic human well-being everywhere. It is represented in no individual's work more clearly than in that of Amartya Sen, who has focused on the centrality of development everywhere to the definition not only of justice, but of freedom as well. + +The emerging salience of global development as the core concern of distributive justice is largely based on the sheer magnitude of the problems faced by much of the world's population.~{ Numbers are all taken from the 2004 Human Development Report (New York: UN Development Programme, 2004). }~ In the world's largest democracy, 80 percent of the population--slightly more people than the entire population of the United States and the expanded European Union combined-- lives on less than two dollars a day, 39 percent of adults are illiterate, and 47 percent of children under the age of five are underweight for their age. In Africa's wealthiest democracy, a child at birth has a 45 percent probability of dying before he or she reaches the age of forty. India and South Africa are far from being the worst-off countries. The scope of destitution around the globe exerts a moral pull on any acceptable discussion of justice. Intuitively, these problems seem too fundamental to be seriously affected by the networked information economy--what has /{Wikipedia}/ got to do with the 49 percent of the population of Congo that lacks sustainable access to improved water sources? It is, indeed, important not to be overexuberant about the importance of information and communications policy in the context of global human development. But it is also important not to ignore the centrality of information to most of our more-advanced strategies for producing core components of welfare and development. To see this, we can begin by looking at the components of the Human Development Index (HDI). +={ HDI (Human Development Index) +2 ; + Human Development Index (HDI) +2 ; + Human Development Report +} + +The Human Development Report was initiated in 1990 as an effort to measure a broad set of components of what makes a life livable, and, ultimately, attractive. It was developed in contradistinction to indicators centered on economic output, like gross domestic product (GDP) or economic growth alone, in order to provide a more refined sense of what aspects of a nation's economy and society make it more or less livable. It allows a more nuanced approach toward improving the conditions of life everywhere. As ,{[pg 310]}, Sen pointed out, the people of China, Kerala in India, and Sri Lanka lead much longer and healthier lives than other countries, like Brazil or South Africa, which have a higher per capita income.~{ Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), 46-47. }~ The Human Development Report measures a wide range of outcomes and characteristics of life. The major composite index it tracks is the Human Development Index. The HDI tries to capture the capacity of people to live long and healthy lives, to be knowledgeable, and to have material resources sufficient to provide a decent standard of living. It does so by combining three major components: life expectancy at birth, adult literacy and school enrollment, and GDP per capita. As Figure 9.1 illustrates, in the global information economy, each and every one of these measures is significantly, though not solely, a function of access to information, knowledge, and information-embedded goods and services. Life expectancy is affected by adequate nutrition and access to lifesaving medicines. Biotechnological innovation for agriculture, along with agronomic innovation in cultivation techniques and other, lower-tech modes of innovation, account for a high portion of improvements in the capacity of societies to feed themselves and in the availability of nutritious foods. Medicines depend on pharmaceutical research and access to its products, and health care depends on research and publication for the development and dissemination of information about best-care practices. Education is also heavily dependent, not surprisingly, on access to materials and facilities for teaching. This includes access to basic textbooks, libraries, computation and communications systems, and the presence of local academic centers. Finally, economic growth has been understood for more than half a century to be centrally driven by innovation. This is particularly true of latecomers, who can improve their own condition most rapidly by adopting best practices and advanced technology developed elsewhere, and then adapting to local conditions and adding their own from the new technological platform achieved in this way. All three of these components are, then, substantially affected by access to, and use of, information and knowledge. The basic premise of the claim that the emergence of the networked information economy can provide significant benefits to human development is that the manner in which we produce new information--and equally important, the institutional framework we use to manage the stock of existing information and knowledge around the world--can have significant impact on human development. ,{[pg 311]}, + +{won_benkler_9_1.png "Figure 9.1: HDI and Information" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +2~ INFORMATION-EMBEDDED GOODS AND TOOLS, INFORMATION, AND KNOWLEDGE +={ human welfare : + information-based advantages +7 ; + welfare : + information-based advantages +7 +} + +One can usefully idealize three types of information-based advantages that developed economies have, and that would need to be available to developing and less-developed economies if one's goal were the improvement in conditions in those economies and the opportunities for innovation in them. These include information-embedded material resources--consumption goods and production tools--information, and knowledge. +={ goods, information-embedded +2 ; + information-embedded goods +2 ; + proprietary rights : + information-embedded goods and tools +2 +} + +/{Information-Embedded Goods}/. These are goods that are not themselves information, but that are better, more plentiful, or cheaper because of some technological advance embedded in them or associated with their production. Pharmaceuticals and agricultural goods are the most obvious examples in the areas of health and food security, respectively. While there are other constraints on access to innovative products in these areas--regulatory and political in nature--a perennial barrier is cost. And a perennial barrier to competition that could reduce the cost is the presence of exclusive rights, ,{[pg 312]}, mostly in the form of patents, but also in the form of internationally recognized breeders' rights and regulatory data exclusivity. In the areas of computation and communication, hardware and software are the primary domains of concern. With hardware, there have been some efforts toward developing cheaper equipment--like the simputer and the Jhai computer efforts to develop inexpensive computers. Because of the relatively commoditized state of most components of these systems, however, marginal cost, rather than exclusive rights, has been the primary barrier to access. The solution, if one has emerged, has been aggregation of demand--a networked computer for a village, rather than an individual. For software, the initial solution was piracy. More recently, we have seen an increased use of free software instead. The former cannot genuinely be described as a "solution," and is being eliminated gradually by trade policy efforts. The latter--adoption of free software to obtain state-of-the-art software--forms the primary template for the class of commons-based solutions to development that I explore in this chapter. + +/{Information-Embedded Tools}/. One level deeper than the actual useful material things one would need to enhance welfare are tools necessary for innovation itself. In the areas of agricultural biotechnology and medicines, these include enabling technologies for advanced research, as well as access to materials and existing compounds for experimentation. Access to these is perhaps the most widely understood to present problems in the patent system of the developed world, as much as it is for the developing world--an awareness that has mostly crystallized under Michael Heller's felicitous phrase "anti-commons," or Carl Shapiro's "patent thicket." The intuition, whose analytic basis is explained in chapter 2, is that innovation is encumbered more than it is encouraged when basic tools for innovation are proprietary, where the property system gives owners of these tools proprietary rights to control innovation that relies on their tools, and where any given new innovation requires the consent of, and payment to, many such owners. This problem is not unique to the developing world. Nonetheless, because of the relatively small dollar value of the market for medicines that treat diseases that affect only poorer countries or of crop varieties optimized for those countries, the cost hurdle weighs more heavily on the public or nonprofit efforts to achieve food security and health in poor and middle-income countries. These nonmarket-based research efforts into diseases and crops of concern purely to these areas are not constructed to appropriate gains from ,{[pg 313]}, exclusive rights to research tools, but only bear their costs on downstream innovation. +={ Heller, Michael ; + Shapiro, Carl ; + information-embedded tools ; + tools, information-embedded +} + +/{Information}/. The distinction between information and knowledge is a tricky one. I use "information" here colloquially, to refer to raw data, scientific reports of the output of scientific discovery, news, and factual reports. I use "knowledge" to refer to the set of cultural practices and capacities necessary for processing the information into either new statements in the information exchange, or more important in our context, for practical use of the information in appropriate ways to produce more desirable actions or outcomes from action. Three types of information that are clearly important for purposes of development are scientific publications, scientific and economic data, and news and factual reports. Scientific publication has seen a tremendous cost escalation, widely perceived to have reached crisis proportions even by the terms of the best-endowed university libraries in the wealthiest countries. Over the course of the 1990s, some estimates saw a 260 percent increase in the prices of scientific publications, and libraries were reported choosing between journal subscription and monograph purchases.~{ Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King, Towards Electronic Journals: Realities for Scientists, Librarians, and Publishers (Washington, DC: Special Libraries Association, 2000), 273. }~ In response to this crisis, and in reliance on what were perceived to be the publication costreduction opportunities for Internet publication, some scientists--led by Nobel laureate and then head of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus--began to agitate for a scientist-based publication system.~{ Harold Varmus, E-Biomed: A Proposal for Electronic Publications in the Biomedical Sciences (Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, 1999). }~ The debates were, and continue to be, heated in this area. However, currently we are beginning to see the emergence of scientist-run and -driven publication systems that distribute their papers for free online, either within a traditional peer-review system like the Public Library of Science (PLoS), or within tightly knit disciplines like theoretical physics, with only post-publication peer review and revision, as in the case of the Los Alamos Archive, or ArXiv.org. Together with free software and peer production on the Internet, the PLoS and ArXiv.org models offer insights into the basic shape of the class of commons-based, nonproprietary production solutions to problems of information production and exchange unhampered by intellectual property. +={ Varmus, Harold ; + access : + to raw data +1 ; + economic data, access to +1 ; + information, defined +1 ; + public-domain data +1 ; + raw data +1 ; + scientific data, access to +1 ; + scientific publication ; + public sphere relationships : + see social relations and norms publication, scientific +} + +Scientific and economic data present a parallel conceptual problem, but in a different legal setting. In the case of both types of data, much of it is produced by government agencies. In the United States, however, raw data is in the public domain, and while initial access may require payment of the cost of distribution, reworking of the data as a tool in information production ,{[pg 314]}, and innovation--and its redistribution by those who acquired access initially--is considered to be in the public domain. In Europe, this has not been the case since the 1996 Database Directive, which created a propertylike right in raw data in an effort to improve the standing of European database producers. Efforts to pass similar legislation in the United States have been mounted and stalled in practically every Congress since the mid1990s. These laws continue to be introduced, driven by the lobby of the largest owners of nongovernment databases, and irrespective of the fact that for almost a decade, Europe's database industry has grown only slowly in the presence of a right, while the U.S. database industry has flourished without an exclusive rights regime. + +News, market reports, and other factual reporting seem to have escaped the problems of barriers to access. Here it is most likely that the value-appropriation model simply does not depend on exclusive rights. Market data is generated as a by-product of the market function itself. Tiny time delays are sufficient to generate a paying subscriber base, while leaving the price trends necessary for, say, farmers to decide at what prices to sell their grain in the local market, freely available.~{ C. K. Prahald, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School of Publishing, 2005), 319-357, Section 4, "The ITC e-Choupal Story." }~ As I suggested in chapter 2, the advertising-supported press has never been copyright dependent, but has instead depended on timely updating of news to capture attention, and then attach that attention to advertising. This has not changed, but the speed of the update cycle has increased and, more important, distribution has become global, so that obtaining most information is now trivial to anyone with access to an Internet connection. While this continues to raise issues with deployment of communications hardware and the knowledge of how to use it, these issues can be, and are being, approached through aggregation of demand in either public or private forms. These types of information do not themselves appear to exhibit significant barriers to access once network connectivity is provided. +={ factual reporting, access to ; + market reports, access to ; + news (as data) +} + +/{Knowledge}/. In this context, I refer mostly to two types of concern. The first is the possibility of the transfer of implicit knowledge, which resists codification into what would here be treated as "information"--for example, training manuals. The primary mechanism for transfer of knowledge of this type is learning by doing, and knowledge transfer of this form cannot happen except through opportunities for local practice of the knowledge. The second type of knowledge transfer of concern here is formal instruction in an education context (as compared with dissemination of codified outputs for self- ,{[pg 315]}, teaching). Here, there is a genuine limit on the capacity of the networked information economy to improve access to knowledge. Individual, face-to-face instruction does not scale across participants, time, and distance. However, some components of education, at all levels, are nonetheless susceptible to improvement with the increase in nonmarket and radically decentralized production processes. The MIT Open Courseware initiative is instructive as to how the universities of advanced economies can attempt to make at least their teaching materials and manuals freely available to teachers throughout the world, thereby leaving the pedagogy in local hands but providing more of the basic inputs into the teaching process on a global scale. More important perhaps is the possibility that teachers and educators can collaborate, both locally and globally, on an open platform model like /{Wikipedia}/, to coauthor learning objects, teaching modules, and, more ambitiously, textbooks that could then be widely accessed by local teachers +={ Open Courseware Initiative (MIT) ; + educational instruction ; + formal instruction ; + implicit knowledge, transfer of ; + knowledge, defined ; + transfer of knowledge +} + +2~ INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION OF HDI-RELATED INFORMATION INDUSTRIES +={ industrial model of communication : + information industries +2 ; + information industries +2 +} + +The production of information and knowledge is very different from the production of steel or automobiles. Chapter 2 explains in some detail that information production has always included substantial reliance on nonmarket actors and on nonmarket, nonproprietary settings as core modalities of production. In software, for example, we saw that Mickey and romantic maximizer-type producers, who rely on exclusive rights directly, have accounted for a stable 36-37 percent of market-based revenues for software developers, while the remainder was focused on both supply-side and demand-side improvements in the capacity to offer software services. This number actually overstates the importance of software publishing, because it does not at all count free software development except when it is monetized by an IBM or a Red Hat, leaving tremendous value unaccounted for. A very large portion of the investments and research in any of the information production fields important to human development occur within the category that I have broadly described as "Joe Einstein." These include both those places formally designated for the pursuit of information and knowledge in themselves, like universities, and those that operate in the social sphere, but produce information and knowledge as a more or less central part of their existence--like churches or political parties. Moreover, individuals acting as social beings have played a central role in our information ,{[pg 316]}, production and exchange system. In order to provide a more sector-specific analysis of how commons-based, as opposed to proprietary, strategies can contribute to development, I offer here a more detailed breakdown specifically of software, scientific publication, agriculture, and biomedical innovation than is provided in chapter 2. +={ Joe Einstein model ; + commons +1 +} + +Table 9.1 presents a higher-resolution statement of the major actors in these fields, within both the market and the nonmarket sectors, from which we can then begin to analyze the path toward, and the sustainability of, more significant commons-based production of the necessities of human development. Table 9.1 identifies the relative role of each of the types of main actors in information and knowledge production across the major sectors relevant to contemporary policy debates. It is most important to extract from this table the diversity of business models and roles not only in each industry, but also among industries. This diversity means that different types of actors can have different relative roles: nonprofits as opposed to individuals, universities as opposed to government, or nonproprietary market actors--that is, market actors whose business model is service based or otherwise does not depend on exclusive appropriation of information--as compared to nonmarket actors. The following segments look at each of these sectors more specifically, and describe the ways in which commons-based strategies are already, or could be, used to improve the access to information, knowledge, and the information-embedded goods and tools for human development. However, even a cursory look at the table shows that the current production landscape of software is particularly well suited to having a greater role for commonsbased production. For example, exclusive proprietary producers account for only one-third of software-related revenues, even within the market. The remainder is covered by various services and relationships that are compatible with nonproprietary treatment of the software itself. Individuals and nonprofit associations also have played a very large role, and continue to do so, not only in free software development, but in the development of standards as well. As we look at each sector, we see that they differ in their incumbent industrial landscape, and these differences mean that each sector may be more or less amenable to commons-based strategies, and, even if in principle amenable, may present harder or easier transition problems. ,{[pg 317]}, + +!_ Table 9.1: Map of Players and Roles in Major Relevant Sectors + +table{~h c7; 14; 14; 14; 14; 14; 14; 14; + +Actor Sector +Government +Universities, Libraries, etc. +IP-Based Industry +Non-IP-Based Industry +NGOs/ Nonprofits +Individuals + +Software +Research funding, defense, procurement +Basic research and design; components "incubate" much else +Software publishing (1/3 annual revenue) +Software services, customization (2/3 annual revenue) +FSF; Apache; W3C; IETF +Free/ opensource software + +Scientific publication +Research funding +University presses; salaries; promotions and tenure +Elsevier Science; professional associations +Biomed Central +PLoS; ArXiv +Working papers; Web-based self-publishing + +Agricultural Biotech +Grants and government labs +Basic research; tech transfer (50%) +Big Pharma; Biotech (50%) +Generics +One-World Health +None + +}table + +2~ TOWARD ADOPTING COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPMENT +={ commons, production through +15 : + see peer production commons-based research +15 ; + development, commons-based +15 ; + human development and justice : + commons-based research +15 ; + human welfare : + commons-based research +15 ; + justice and human development : + commons-based research ; + policy : + commons-based research ; + proprietary rights : + commons-based research +15 | global welfare and research +4 ; + research, commons-based +15 ; + welfare : + commons-based research +15 ; + trade policy +4 +} + +The mainstream understanding of intellectual property by its dominant policy-making institutions--the Patent Office and U.S. trade representative in the United States, the Commission in the European Union, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) systems internationally--is that strong protection is good, and stronger protection is better. In development and trade policy, this translates into a belief that the primary mechanism for knowledge transfer and development in a global information economy is for ,{[pg 318]}, all nations, developing as well as developed, to ratchet up their intellectual property law standards to fit the most protective regimes adopted in the United States and Europe. As a practical political matter, the congruence between the United States and the European Union in this area means that this basic understanding is expressed in the international trade system, in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its TRIPS agreement, and in international intellectual property treaties, through the WIPO. The next few segments present an alternative view. Intellectual property as an institution is substantially more ambiguous in its effects on information production than the steady drive toward expansive rights would suggest. The full argument is in chapter 2. + +Intellectual property is particularly harmful to net information importers. In our present world trade system, these are the poor and middle-income nations. Like all users of information protected by exclusive rights, these nations are required by strong intellectual property rights to pay more than the marginal cost of the information at the time that they buy it. In the standard argument, this is intended to give producers incentives to create information that users want. Given the relative poverty of these countries, however, practically none of the intellectual-property-dependent producers develop products specifically with returns from poor or even middle-income markets in mind. The pharmaceutical industry receives about 5 percent of its global revenues from low- and middle-income countries. That is why we have so little investment in drugs for diseases that affect only those parts of the world. It is why most agricultural research that has focused on agriculture in poorer areas of the world has been public sector and nonprofit. Under these conditions, the above-marginal-cost prices paid in these poorer countries are purely regressive redistribution. The information, knowledge, and information-embedded goods paid for would have been developed in expectation of rich world rents alone. The prospects of rents from poorer countries do not affect their development. They do not affect either the rate or the direction of research and development. They simply place some of the rents that pay for technology development in the rich countries on consumers in poor and middle-income countries. The morality of this redistribution from the world's poor to the world's rich has never been confronted or defended in the European or American public spheres. It simply goes unnoticed. When crises in access to information-embedded goods do appear--such as in the AIDS/HIV access to medicines crisis--these are seldom tied to our ,{[pg 319]}, basic institutional choice. In our trade policies, Americans and Europeans push for ever-stronger protection. We thereby systematically benefit those who own much of the stock of usable human knowledge. We do so at the direct expense of those who need access to knowledge in order to feed themselves and heal their sick. +={ HIV/AIDS +1 ; + property ownership : + trade policy +1 +} + +The practical politics of the international intellectual property and trade regime make it very difficult to reverse the trend toward ever-increasing exclusive property protections. The economic returns to exclusive proprietary rights in information are highly concentrated in the hands of those who own such rights. The costs are widely diffuse in the populations of both the developing and developed world. The basic inefficiency of excessive property protection is difficult to understand bycomparison to the intuitive, but mistaken, Economics 101 belief that property is good, more property is better, and intellectual property must be the same. The result is that pressures on the governmentsthat represent exporters of intellectual property rights permissions--in particular, the United States and the European Union--come in this area mostly from the owners, and they continuously push for everstronger rights. Monopoly is a good thing to have if you can get it. Its value for rent extraction isno less valuable for a database or patent-based company than it is for the dictator's nephew in a banana republic. However, its value to these supplicants does not make it any more efficient or desirable. The political landscape is, however, gradually beginning to change. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, and particularly in the wake of the urgency with which the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa has infused the debate over access to medicines, there has been a growing public interest advocacy movementfocused on the intellectual property trade regime. This movement is, however, confronted with a highly playable system. A victory for developing world access in one round in the TRIPS context always leaves other places to construct mechanisms for exclusivity. Bilateral trade negotiations are one domain that is beginning to play an important role. In these, the United States or the European Union can force a rice- or cotton-exporting country to concede a commitment to strong intellectual property protection in exchange for favorable treatment for their core export. The intellectual property exporting nations can then go to WIPO, and push for new treaties based on the emerging international practice of bilateral agreements. This, in turn, would cycle back and be generalized and enforced through the trade regimes. Another approach is for the exporting nations to change their own ,{[pg 320]}, laws, and then drive higher standards elsewhere in the name of "harmonization." Because the international trade and intellectual property system is highly "playable" and manipulable in these ways, systematic resistance to the expansion of intellectual property laws is difficult. +={ efficiency of information regulation : + property protections ; + inefficiency of information regulation : + property protections ; + proprietary rights, inefficiency of : + property protections ; + reallocation : + property protections +} + +The promise of the commons-based strategies explored in the remainder of this chapter is that they can be implemented without changes in law-- either national or international. They are paths that the emerging networked information economy has opened to individuals, nonprofits, and publicsector organizations that want to help in improving human development in the poorer regions of the world to take action on their own. As with decentralized speech for democratic discourse, and collaborative production by individuals of the information environment they occupy as autonomous agents, here too we begin to see that self-help and cooperative action outside the proprietary system offer an opportunity for those who wish to pursue it. In this case, it is an opportunity to achieve a more just distribution of the world's resources and a set of meaningful improvements in human development. Some of these solutions are "commons-based," in the sense that they rely on free access to existing information that is in the commons, and they facilitate further use and development of that information and those information-embedded goods and tools by releasing their information outputs openly, and managing them as a commons, rather than as property. Some of the solutions are specifically peer-production solutions. We see this most clearly in software, and to some extent in the more radical proposals for scientific publication. I will also explore here the viability of peerproduction efforts in agricultural and biomedical innovation, although in those fields, commons-based approaches grafted onto traditional publicsector and nonprofit organizations at present hold the more clearly articulated alternatives. + +3~ Software +={ free software : + commons-based welfare development +3 ; + open-source software : + commons-based welfare development +3 ; + software : + commons-based welfare development +3 ; + software, open-source : + commons-based welfare development +3 +} + +The software industry offers a baseline case because of the proven large scope for peer production in free software. As in other information-intensive industries, government funding and research have played an enormously important role, and university research provides much of the basic science. However, the relative role of individuals, nonprofits, and nonproprietary market producers is larger in software than in the other sectors. First, twothirds of revenues derived from software in the United States are from services ,{[pg 321]}, and do not depend on proprietary exclusion. Like IBM's "Linux-related services" category, for which the company claimed more than two billion dollars of revenue for 2003, these services do not depend on exclusion from the software, but on charging for service relationships.~{ For the sources of numbers for the software industry, see chapter 2 in this volume. IBM numbers, in particular, are identified in figure 2.1. }~ Second, some of the most basic elements of the software environment--like standards and protocols--are developed in nonprofit associations, like the Internet Engineering Taskforce or the World Wide Web Consortium. Third, the role of individuals engaged in peer production--the free and open-source software development communities--is very large. Together, these make for an organizational ecology highly conducive to nonproprietary production, whose outputs can be freely usable around the globe. The other sectors have some degree of similar components, and commons-based strategies for development can focus on filling in the missing components and on leveraging nonproprietary components already in place. + +In the context of development, free software has the potential to play two distinct and significant roles. The first is offering low-cost access to highperforming software for developing nations. The second is creating the potential for participation in software markets based on human ability, even without access to a stock of exclusive rights in existing software. At present, there is a movement in both developing and the most advanced economies to increase reliance on free software. In the United States, the Presidential Technology Advisory Commission advised the president in 2000 to increase use of free software in mission-critical applications, arguing the high quality and dependability of such systems. To the extent that quality, reliability, and ease of self-customization are consistently better with certain free software products, they are attractive to developing-country governments for the same reasons that they are to the governments of developed countries. In the context of developing nations, the primary additional arguments that have been made include cost, transparency, freedom from reliance on a single foreign source (read, Microsoft), and the potential of local software programmers to learn the program, acquire skills, and therefore easily enter the global market with services and applications for free software.~{ These arguments were set out most clearly and early in a public exchange of letters between Representative Villanueva Nunez in Peru and Microsoft's representatives in that country. The exchange can be found on the Web site of the Open Source Initiative, http://www.opensource.org/docs/peru_and_ms.php. }~ The question of cost, despite the confusion that often arises from the word "free," is not obvious. It depends to some extent on the last hope--that local software developers will become skilled in the free software platforms. The cost of software to any enterprise includes the extent, cost, and efficacy with which the software can be maintained, upgraded, and fixed when errors occur. Free ,{[pg 322]}, software may or may not involve an up-front charge. Even if it does not, that does not make it cost-free. However, free software enables an open market in free software servicing, which in turn improves and lowers the cost of servicing the software over time. More important, because the software is open for all to see and because developer communities are often multinational, local developers can come, learn the software, and become relatively low-cost software service providers for their own government. This, in turn, helps realize the low-cost promise over and above the licensing fees avoided. Other arguments in favor of government procurement of free software focus on the value of transparency of software used for public purposes. The basic thrust of these arguments is that free software makes it possible for constituents to monitor the behavior of machines used in governments, to make sure that they are designed to do what they are publicly reported to do. The most significant manifestation of this sentiment in the United States is the hitherto-unsuccessful, but fairly persistent effort to require states to utilize voting machines that use free software, or at a minimum, to use software whose source code is open for public inspection. This is a consideration that, if valid, is equally suitable for developing nations. The concern with independence from a single foreign provider, in the case of operating systems, is again not purely a developing-nation concern. Just as the United States required American Marconi to transfer its assets to an American company, RCA, so that it would not be dependent for a critical infrastructure on a foreign provider, other countries may have similar concerns about Microsoft. Again, to the extent that this is a valid concern, it is so for rich nations as much as it is for poor, with the exceptions of the European Union and Japan, which likely do have bargaining power with Microsoft to a degree that smaller markets do not. +={ services, software +1 ; + transparency of free software +} + +The last and quite distinct potential gain is the possibility of creating a context and an anchor for a free software development sector based on service. This was cited as the primary reason behind Brazil's significant push to use free software in government departments and in telecenters that the federal government is setting up to provide Internet service access to some of its poorer and more remote areas. Software services represent a very large industry. In the United States, software services are an industry roughly twice the size of the movie and video industry. Software developers from low- and middle-income countries can participate in the growing free software segment of this market by using their skills alone. Unlike with service for the proprietary domain, they need not buy licenses to learn and practice the ,{[pg 323]}, services. Moreover, if Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and other major developing countries were to rely heavily on free software, then the "internal market," within the developing world, for free software?related services would become very substantial. Building public-sector demand for these services would be one place to start. Moreover, because free software development is a global phenomenon, free software developers who learn their skills within the developing world would be able to export those skills elsewhere. Just as India's call centers leverage the country's colonial past with its resulting broad availability of English speakers, so too countries like Brazil can leverage their active free software development community to provide software services for free software platforms anywhere in the developed and developing worlds. With free software, the developing-world providers can compete as equals. They do not need access to permissions to operate. Their relationships need not replicate the "outsourcing" model so common in proprietary industries, where permission to work on a project is the point of control over the ability to do so. There will still be branding issues that undoubtedly will affect access to developed markets. However, there will be no baseline constraints of minimal capital necessary to enter the market and try to develop a reputation for reliability. As a development strategy, then, utilization of free software achieves transfer of information-embedded goods for free or at low cost. It also transfers information about the nature of the product and its operation--the source code. Finally, it enables transfer, at least potentially, of opportunities for learning by doing and of opportunities for participating in the global market. These would depend on knowledge of a free software platform that anyone is free to learn, rather than on access to financial capital or intellectual property inventories as preconditions to effective participation. + +3~ Scientific Publication +={ public sphere relationships +6 : + see social relations and norms publication, scientific +6 ; + scientific publication : + commons-based welfare development +6 +} + +Scientific publication is a second sector where a nonproprietary strategy can be implemented readily and is already developing to supplant the proprietary model. Here, the existing market structure is quite odd in a way that likely makes it unstable. Authoring and peer review, the two core value-creating activities, are done by scientists who perform neither task in expectation of royalties or payment. The model of most publications, however, is highly proprietary. A small number of business organizations, like Elsevier Science, control most of the publications. Alongside them, professional associations of scientists also publish their major journals using a proprietary model. ,{[pg 324]}, Universities, whose scientists need access to the papers, incur substantial cost burdens to pay for the publications as a basic input into their own new work. While the effects of this odd system are heavily felt in universities in rich countries, the burden of subscription rates that go into the thousands of dollars per title make access to up-to-date scientific research prohibitive for universities and scientists working in poorer economies. Nonproprietary solutions are already beginning to emerge in this space. They fall into two large clusters. +={ authoring of scientific publications +2 ; + peer review of scientific publications +2 ; + proprietary rights : + scientific publication +2 +} + +The first cluster is closer to the traditional peer-review publication model. It uses Internet communications to streamline the editorial and peer-review system, but still depends on a small, salaried editorial staff. Instead of relying on subscription payments, it relies on other forms of payments that do not require charging a price for the outputs. In the case of the purely nonprofit Public Library of Science (PLoS), the sources of revenue combine author's payments for publication, philanthropic support, and university memberships. In the case of the for-profit BioMed Central, based in the United Kingdom, it is a combination of author payments, university memberships, and a variety of customized derivative products like subscription-based literature reviews and customized electronic update services. Author payments--fees authors must pay to have their work published--are built into the cost of scientific research and included in grant applications. In other words, they are intended to be publicly funded. Indeed, in 2005, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the major funding agency for biomedical science in the United States, announced a requirement that all NIH-funded research be made freely available on the Web within twelve months of publication. Both PLoS and BioMed Central have waiver processes for scientists who cannot pay the publication fees. The articles on both systems are available immediately for free on the Internet. The model exists. It works internally and is sustainable as such. What is left in determining the overall weight that these open-access journals will have in the landscape of scientific publication is the relatively conservative nature of universities themselves. The established journals, like Science or Nature, still carry substantially more prestige than the new journals. As long as this is the case, and as long as hiring and promotion decisions continue to be based on the prestige of the journal in which a scientist's work is published, the ability of the new journals to replace the traditional ones will be curtailed. Some of the established journals, however, are operated by professional associations of scientists. There is an internal tension between the interests of the associations in securing ,{[pg 325]}, their revenue and the growing interest of scientists in open-access publication. Combined with the apparent economic sustainability of the open-access journals, it seems that some of these established journals will likely shift over to the open-access model. At a minimum, policy interventions like those proposed by the NIH will force traditional publications to adapt their business model by making access free after a few months. The point here, however, is not to predict the overall likely success of open-access journals. It is to combine them with what we have seen happening in software as another example of a reorganization of the components of the industrial structure of an information production system. Individual scientists, government funding agencies, nonprofits and foundations, and nonproprietary commercial business models can create the same good--scientific publication--but without the cost barrier that the old model imposed on access to its fruits. Such a reorientation would significantly improve the access of universities and physicians in developing nations to the most advanced scientific publication. +={ BioMed Central ; + NIH (National Institutes of Health) ; + PLoS (Public Library of Science) ; + Public Library of Science (PLoS) +} + +The second approach to scientific publication parallels more closely free software development and peer production. This is typified by ArXiv and the emerging practices of self-archiving or self-publishing. ArXiv.org is an online repository of working papers in physics, mathematics, and computer science. It started out focusing on physics, and that is where it has become the sine qua non of publication in some subdisciplines. The archive does not perform review except for technical format compliance. Quality control is maintained by postpublication review and commentary, as well as by hosting updated versions of the papers with explanations (provided by authors) of the changes. It is likely that the reason ArXiv.org has become so successful in physics is the very small and highly specialized nature of the discipline. The universe of potential readers is small, and their capacity to distinguish good arguments from bad is high. Reputation effects of poor publications are likely immediate. +={ ArXiv.org +1 ; + archiving of scientific publications +1 ; + self-archiving of scientific publications +1 +} + +While ArXiv offers a single repository, a much broader approach has been the developing practice of self-archiving. Academics post their completed work on their own Web sites and make it available freely. The primary limitation of this mechanism is the absence of an easy, single location where one can search for papers on a topic of concern. And yet we are already seeing the emergence of tagging standards and protocols that allow anyone to search the universe of self-archived materials. Once completed, such a development process would in principle render archiving by single points of reference unnecessary. The University of Michigan Digital Library Production ,{[pg 326]}, Service, for example, has developed a protocol called OAIster (pronounced like oyster, with the tagline "find the pearls"), which combines the acronym of Open Archives Initiative with the "ster" ending made popular in reference to peer-to-peer distribution technologies since Napster (AIMster, Grokster, Friendster, and the like). The basic impulse of the Open Archives Initiative is to develop a sufficiently refined set of meta-data tags that would allow anyone who archives their materials with OAI-compliant tagging to be searched easily, quickly, and accurately on the Web. In that case, a general Web search becomes a targeted academic search in a "database" of scientific publications. However, the database is actually a network of self-created, small personal databases that comply with a common tagging and search standard. Again, my point here is not to explore the details of one or another of these approaches. If scientists and other academics adopt this approach of self-archiving coupled with standardized interfaces for global, welldelimited searches, the problem of lack of access to academic publication because of their high-cost publication will be eliminated. +={ OAIster protocol ; + Open Archives Initiative +} + +Other types of documents, for example, primary- and secondary-education textbooks, are in a much more rudimentary stage of the development of peer-production models. First, it should be recognized that responses to illiteracy and low educational completion in the poorer areas of the world are largely a result of lack of schoolteachers, physical infrastructure for classrooms, demand for children's schooling among parents who are themselves illiterate, and lack of effectively enforced compulsory education policy. The cost of textbooks contributes only a portion of the problem of cost. The opportunity cost of children's labor is probably the largest factor. Nonetheless, outdated materials and poor quality of teaching materials are often cited as one limit on the educational achievement of those who do attend school. The costs of books, school fees, uniforms, and stationery can amount to 20? 30 percent of a family's income.~{ A good regional study of the extent and details of educational deprivation is Mahbub ul Haq and Khadija ul Haq, Human Development in South Asia 1998: The Education Challenge (Islamabad, Pakistan: Human Development Center). }~ The component of the problem contributed by the teaching materials may be alleviated by innovative approaches to textbook and education materials authoring. Chapter 4 already discussed some textbook initiatives. The most successful commons-based textbook authoring project, which is also the most relevant from the perspective of development, is the South African project, Free High School Science Texts (FHSST). The FHSST initiative is more narrowly focused than the broader efforts of Wikibooks or the California initiative, more managed, and more successful. Nonetheless, in three years of substantial effort by a group of dedicated volunteers who administer the project, its product is one physics ,{[pg 327]}, high school text, and advanced drafts of two other science texts. The main constraint on the efficacy of collaborative textbook authoring is that compliance requirements imposed by education ministries tend to require a great degree of coherence, which constrains the degree of modularity that these text-authoring projects adopt. The relatively large-grained contributions required limit the number of contributors, slowing the process. The future of these efforts is therefore likely to be determined by the extent to which their designers are able to find ways to make finer-grained modules without losing the coherence required for primary- and secondary-education texts. Texts at the post-secondary level likely present less of a problem, because of the greater freedom instructors have to select texts. This allows an initiative like MIT's Open Courseware Initiative to succeed. That initiative provides syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets, etc. from over 1,100 courses. The basic creators of the materials are paid academics who produce these materials for one of their core professional roles: teaching college- and graduate-level courses. The content is, by and large, a "side-effect" of teaching. What is left to be done is to integrate, create easy interfaces and search capabilities, and so forth. The university funds these functions through its own resources and dedicated grant funding. In the context of MIT, then, these functions are performed on a traditional model--a large, well-funded nonprofit provides an important public good through the application of full-time staff aimed at non-wealth-maximizing goals. The critical point here was the radical departure of MIT from the emerging culture of the 1980s and 1990s in American academia. When other universities were thinking of "distance education" in terms of selling access to taped lectures and materials so as to raise new revenue, MIT thought of what its basic mandate to advance knowledge and educate students in a networked environment entailed. The answer was to give anyone, anywhere, access to the teaching materials of some of the best minds in the world. As an intervention in the ecology of free knowledge and information and an act of leadership among universities, the MIT initiative was therefore a major event. As a model for organizational innovation in the domain of information production generally and the creation of educational resources in particular, it was less significant. +={ FHSST (Free High School Science Texts) ; + Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) ; + teaching materials ; + textbooks ; + educational instruction ; + MIT's Open Courseware Initiative ; + Open Courseware Initiative (MIT) +} + +Software and academic publication, then, offer the two most advanced examples of commons-based strategies employed in a sector whose outputs are important to development, in ways that improve access to basic information, knowledge, and information-embedded tools. Building on these basic cases, we can begin to see how similar strategies can be employed to ,{[pg 328]}, create a substantial set of commons-based solutions that could improve the distribution of information germane to human development. + +2~ COMMONS-BASED RESEARCH FOR FOOD AND MEDICINES +={ commons, production through +24 : + see peer production commons-based research | food and agricultural innovation +24 ; + development, commons-based : + food and agricultural innovation +24 ; + global development : + food and agricultural innovation +24 ; + research, commons-based : + food and agricultural innovation +24 +} + +While computation and access to existing scientific research are important in the development of any nation, they still operate at a remove from the most basic needs of the world poor. On its face, it is far from obvious how the emergence of the networked information economy can grow rice to feed millions of malnourished children or deliver drugs to millions of HIV/AIDS patients. On closer observation, however, a tremendous proportion of the way modern societies grow food and develop medicines is based on scientific research and technical innovation. We have seen how the functions of mass media can be fulfilled by nonproprietary models of news and commentary. We have seen the potential of free and open source software and open-access publications to replace and redress some of the failures of proprietary software and scientific publication, respectively. These cases suggest that the basic choice between a system that depends on exclusive rights and business models that use exclusion to appropriate research outputs and a system that weaves together various actors--public and private, organized and individual--in a nonproprietary social network of innovation, has important implications for the direction of innovation and for access to its products. Public attention has focused mostly on the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa and the lack of access to existing drugs because of their high costs. However, that crisis is merely the tip of the iceberg. It is the most visible to many because of the presence of the disease in rich countries and its cultural and political salience in the United States and Europe. The exclusive rights system is a poor institutional mechanism for serving the needs of those who are worst off around the globe. Its weaknesses pervade the problems of food security and agricultural research aimed at increasing the supply of nourishing food throughout the developing world, and of access to medicines in general, and to medicines for developing-world diseases in particular. Each of these areas has seen a similar shift in national and international policy toward greater reliance on exclusive rights, most important of which are patents. Each area has also begun to see the emergence of commons-based models to alleviate the problems of patents. However, they differ from each other still. Agriculture offers more immediate opportunities for improvement ,{[pg 329]}, because of the relatively larger role of public research--national, international, and academic--and of the long practices of farmer innovation in seed associations and local and regional frameworks. I explore it first in some detail, as it offers a template for what could be a path for development in medical research as well. +={ HIV/AIDS ; + folk culture : + see culture food, commons-research based on +} + +2~ Food Security: Commons-Based Agricultural Innovation +={ agricultural innovation, commons-based +22 ; + food security, commons-based research on +22 ; + innovation : + agricultural, commons-based +22 +} + +Agricultural innovation over the past century has led to a vast increase in crop yields. Since the 1960s, innovation aimed at increasing yields and improving quality has been the centerpiece of efforts to secure the supply of food to the world's poor, to avoid famine and eliminate chronic malnutrition. These efforts have produced substantial increases in the production of food and decreases in its cost, but their benefits have varied widely in different regions of the world. Now, increases in productivity are not alone a sufficient condition to prevent famine. Sen's observations that democracies have no famines--that is, that good government and accountability will force public efforts to prevent famine--are widely accepted today. The contributions of the networked information economy to democratic participation and transparency are discussed in chapters 6-8, and to the extent that those chapters correctly characterize the changes in political discourse, should help alleviate human poverty through their effects on democracy. However, the cost and quality of food available to accountable governments of poor countries, or to international aid organizations or nongovernment organizations (NGOs) that step in to try to alleviate the misery caused by ineffective or malicious governments, affect how much can be done to avoid not only catastrophic famine, but also chronic malnutrition. Improvements in agriculture make it possible for anyone addressing food security to perform better than they could have if food production had lower yields, of less nutritious food, at higher prices. Despite its potential benefits, however, agricultural innovation has been subject to an unusual degree of sustained skepticism aimed at the very project of organized scientific and scientifically based innovation. Criticism combines biological-ecological concerns with social and economic concerns. Nowhere is this criticism more strident, or more successful at moving policy, than in current European resistance to genetically modified (GM) foods. The emergence of commons-based production strategies can go some way toward allaying the biological-ecological fears by locating much of the innovation at the local level. Its primary benefit, however, ,{[pg 330]}, is likely to be in offering a path for agricultural and biological innovation that is sustainable and low cost, and that need not result in appropriation of the food production chain by a small number of multinational businesses, as many critics fear. + +Scientific plant improvement in the United States dates back to the establishment of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the land-grant universities, and later the state agricultural experiment stations during the Civil War and in the decades that followed. Public-sector investment dominated agricultural research at the time, and with the rediscovery of Mendel's work in 1900, took a turn toward systematic selective breeding. Through crop improvement associations, seed certification programs, and open-release policies allowing anyone to breed and sell the certified new seeds, farmers were provided access to the fruits of public research in a reasonably efficient and open market. The development of hybrid corn through this system was the first major modern success that vastly increased agricultural yields. It reshaped our understanding not only of agriculture, but also more generally of the value of innovation, by comparison to efficiency, to growth. Yields in the United States doubled between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s, and by the mid-1980s, cornfields had a yield six times greater than they had fifty years before. Beginning in the early 1960s, with funding from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, and continuing over the following forty years, agricultural research designed to increase the supply of agricultural production and lower its cost became a central component of international and national policies aimed at securing the supply of food to the world's poor populations, avoiding famines and, ultimately, eliminating chronic malnutrition. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines was the first such institute, founded in the 1960s, followed by the International Center for Wheat and Maize Improvement (CIM-MYT) in Mexico (1966), and the two institutes for tropical agriculture in Colombia and Nigeria (1967). Together, these became the foundation for the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which now includes sixteen centers. Over the same period, National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) also were created around the world, focusing on research specific to local agroecological conditions. Research in these centers preceded the biotechnology revolution, and used various experimental breeding techniques to obtain high-yielding plants: for example, plants with shorter growing seasons, or more adapted to intensive fertilizer use. These efforts later introduced varieties ,{[pg 331]}, that were resistant to local pests, diseases, and to various harsh environmental conditions. + +The "Green Revolution," as the introduction of these new, scientificresearch-based varieties has been called, indeed resulted in substantial increases in yields, initially in rice and wheat, in Asia and Latin America. The term "Green Revolution" is often limited to describing these changes in those regions in the 1960s and 1970s. A recent study shows, however, that the growth in yields has continued throughout the last forty years, and has, with varying degrees, occurred around the world.~{ Robert Evenson and D. Gollin, eds., Crop Variety Improvement and Its Effect on Productivity: The Impact of International Agricultural Research (New York: CABI Pub., 2002); results summarized in Robert Evenson and D. Gollin, "Assessing the Impact of the Green Revolution, 1960-2000," Science 300 (May 2003): 758-762. }~ More than eight thousand modern varieties of rice, wheat, maize, other major cereals, and root and protein crops have been released over the course of this period by more than four hundred public breeding programs. One of the most interesting finds of this study was that fewer than 1 percent of these modern varieties had any crosses with public or private breeding programs in the developed world, and that private-sector contributions in general were limited to hybrid maize, sorghum, and millet. The effort, in other words, was almost entirely public sector, and almost entirely based in the developing world, with complementary efforts of the international and national programs. Yields in Asia increased sevenfold from 1961 to 2000, and fivefold in Latin America, the Middle East/North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. More than 60 percent of the growth in Asia and Latin America occurred in the 1960s?1980s, while the primary growth in Sub-Saharan Africa began in the 1980s. In Latin America, most of the early-stage increases in yields came from increasing cultivated areas ( 40 percent), and from other changes in cultivation-- increased use of fertilizer, mechanization, and irrigation. About 15 percent of the growth in the early period was attributable to the use of modern varieties. In the latter twenty years, however, more than 40 percent of the total increase in yields was attributable to the use of new varieties. In Asia in the early period, about 19 percent of the increase came from modern varieties, but almost the entire rest of the increase came from increased use of fertilizer, mechanization, and irrigation, not from increased cultivated areas. It is trivial to see why changes of this sort would elicit both environmental and a socialeconomic critique of the industrialization of farm work. Again, though, in the latter twenty years, 46 percent of the increase in yields is attributable to the use of modern varieties. Modern varieties played a significantly less prominent role in the Green Revolution of the Middle East and Africa, contributing 5-6 percent of the growth in yields. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, ,{[pg 332]}, early efforts to introduce varieties from Asia and Latin America failed, and local developments only began to be adopted in the 1980s. In the latter twenty-year period, however, the Middle East and North Africa did see a substantial role for modern varieties--accounting for close to 40 percent of a more than doubling of yields. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the overwhelming majority of the tripling of yields came from increasing area of cultivation, and about 16 percent came from modern varieties. Over the past forty years, then, research-based improvements in plants have come to play a larger role in increasing agricultural yields in the developing world. Their success was, however, more limited in the complex and very difficult environments of SubSaharan Africa. Much of the benefit has to do with local independence, as opposed to heavier dependence on food imports. Evenson and Gollin, for example, conservatively estimate that higher prices and a greater reliance on imports in the developing world in the absence of the Green Revolution would have resulted in 13-14 percent lower caloric intake in the developing world, and in a 6-8 percent higher proportion of malnourished children. While these numbers may not seem eye-popping, for populations already living on marginal nutrition, they represent significant differences in quality of life and in physical and mental development for millions of children and adults. +={ Green Revolution +5 } + +The agricultural research that went into much of the Green Revolution did not involve biotechnology--that is, manipulation of plant varieties at the genetic level through recombinant DNA techniques. Rather, it occurred at the level of experimental breeding. In the developed world, however, much of the research over the past twenty-five years has been focused on the use of biotechnology to achieve more targeted results than breeding can, has been more heavily based on private-sector investment, and has resulted in more private-sector ownership over the innovations. The promise of biotechnology, and particularly of genetically engineered or modified foods, has been that they could provide significant improvements in yields as well as in health effects, quality of the foods grown, and environmental effects. Plants engineered to be pest resistant could decrease the need to use pesticides, resulting in environmental benefits and health benefits to farmers. Plants engineered for ever-higher yields without increasing tilled acreage could limit the pressure for deforestation. Plants could be engineered to carry specific nutritional supplements, like golden rice with beta-carotene, so as to introduce necessarily nutritional requirements into subsistence diets. Beyond the hypothetically optimistic possibilities, there is little question that genetic engineering has already produced crops that lower the cost of production ,{[pg 333]}, for farmers by increasing herbicide and pest tolerance. As of 2002, more than 50 percent of the world's soybean acreage was covered with genetically modified (GM) soybeans, and 20 percent with cotton. Twenty-seven percent of acreage covered with GM crops is in the developing world. This number will grow significantly now that Brazil has decided to permit the introduction of GM crops, given its growing agricultural role, and now that India, as the world's largest cotton producer, has approved the use of Bt cotton--a GM form of cotton that improves its resistance to a common pest. There are, then, substantial advantages to farmers, at least, and widespread adoption of GM crops both in the developed world outside of Europe and in the developing world. +={ biotechnology +7 ; + genetically modified (GM) foods +7 ; + GM (genetically modified) foods +7 +} + +This largely benign story of increasing yields, resistance, and quality has not been without critics, to put it mildly. The criticism predates biotechnology and the development of transgenic varieties. Its roots are in criticism of experimental breeding programs of the American agricultural sectors and the Green Revolution. However, the greatest public visibility and political success of these criticisms has been in the context of GM foods. The critique brings together odd intellectual and political bedfellows, because it includes five distinct components: social and economic critique of the industrialization of agriculture, environmental and health effects, consumer preference for "natural" or artisan production of foodstuffs, and, perhaps to a more limited extent, protectionism of domestic farm sectors. + +Perhaps the oldest component of the critique is the social-economic critique. One arm of the critique focuses on how mechanization, increased use of chemicals, and ultimately the use of nonreproducing proprietary seed led to incorporation of the agricultural sector into the capitalist form of production. In the United States, even with its large "family farm" sector, purchased inputs now greatly exceed nonpurchased inputs, production is highly capital intensive, and large-scale production accounts for the majority of land tilled and the majority of revenue captured from farming.~{ Jack R. Kloppenburg, Jr., First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology 1492-2000 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), table 2.2. }~ In 2003, 56 percent of farms had sales of less than $10,000 a year. Roughly 85 percent of farms had less than $100,000 in sales.~{ USDA National Agriculture Statistics Survey (2004), http://www.usda.gov/ nass/aggraphs/fncht3.htm. }~ These farms account for only 42 percent of the farmland. By comparison, 3.4 percent of farms have sales of more than $500,000 a year, and account for more than 21 percent of land. In the aggregate, the 7.5 percent of farms with sales over $250,000 account for 37 percent of land cultivated. Of all principal owners of farms in the United States in 2002, 42.5 percent reported something other than farming as their principal occupation, and many reported spending two hundred or ,{[pg 334]}, more days off-farm, or even no work days at all on the farm. The growth of large-scale "agribusiness," that is, mechanized, rationalized industrial-scale production of agricultural products, and more important, of agricultural inputs, is seen as replacing the family farm and the small-scale, self-sufficient farm, and bringing farm labor into the capitalist mode of production. As scientific development of seeds and chemical applications increases, the seed as input becomes separated from the grain as output, making farmers dependent on the purchase of industrially produced seed. This further removes farmwork from traditional modes of self-sufficiency and craftlike production to an industrial mode. This basic dynamic is repeated in the critique of the Green Revolution, with the added overlay that the industrial producers of seed are seen to be multinational corporations, and the industrialization of agriculture is seen as creating dependencies in the periphery on the industrial-scientific core of the global economy. + +The social-economic critique has been enmeshed, as a political matter, with environmental, health, and consumer-oriented critiques as well. The environmental critiques focus on describing the products of science as monocultures, which, lacking the genetic diversity of locally used varieties, are more susceptible to catastrophic failure. Critics also fear contamination of existing varieties, unpredictable interactions with pests, and negative effects on indigenous species. The health effects concern focused initially on how breeding for yield may have decreased nutritional content, and in the more recent GM food debates, the concern that genetically altered foods will have some unanticipated negative health reactions that would only become apparent many years from now. The consumer concerns have to do with quality and an aesthetic attraction to artisan-mode agricultural products and aversion to eating industrial outputs. These social-economic and environmental-health-consumer concerns tend also to be aligned with protectionist lobbies, not only for economic purposes, but also reflecting a strong cultural attachment to the farming landscape and human ecology, particularly in Europe. +={ environmental criticism of GM foods +1 ; + health effects of GM foods +1 +} + +This combination of social-economic and postcolonial critique, environmentalism, public-health concerns, consumer advocacy, and farm-sector protectionism against the relatively industrialized American agricultural sector reached a height of success in the 1999 five-year ban imposed by the European Union on all GM food sales. A recent study of a governmental Science Review Board in the United Kingdom, however, found that there was no ,{[pg 335]}, evidence for any of the environmental or health critiques of GM foods.~{ First Report of the GM Science Review Panel, An Open Review of the Science Relevant to GM Crops and Food Based on the Interests and Concerns of the Public, United Kingdom, July 2003. }~ Indeed, as Peter Pringle masterfully chronicled in Food, Inc., both sides of the political debate could be described as having buffed their cases significantly. The successes and potential benefits have undoubtedly been overstated by enamored scientists and avaricious vendors. There is little doubt, too, that the near-hysterical pitch at which the failures and risks of GM foods have been trumpeted has little science to back it, and the debate has degenerated to a state that makes reasoned, evidence-based consideration difficult. In Europe in general, however, there is wide acceptance of what is called a "precautionary principle." One way of putting it is that absence of evidence of harm is not evidence of absence of harm, and caution counsels against adoption of the new and at least theoretically dangerous. It was this precautionary principle rather than evidence of harm that was at the base of the European ban. This ban has recently been lifted, in the wake of a WTO trade dispute with the United States and other major producers who challenged the ban as a trade barrier. However, the European Union retained strict labeling requirements. This battle among wealthy countries, between the conservative "Fortress Europe" mentality and the growing reliance of American agriculture on biotechnological innovation, would have little moral valence if it did not affect funding for, and availability of, biotechnological research for the populations of the developing world. Partly as a consequence of the strong European resistance to GM foods, the international agricultural research centers that led the way in the development of the Green Revolution varieties, and that released their developments freely for anyone to sell and use without proprietary constraint, were slow to develop capacity in genetic engineering and biotechnological research more generally. Rather than the public national and international efforts leading the way, a study of GM use in developing nations concluded that practically all GM acreage is sown with seed obtained in the finished form from a developed-world supplier, for a price premium or technology licensing fee.~{ Robert E. Evenson, "GMOs: Prospects for Productivity Increases in Developing Countries," Journal of Agricultural and Food Industrial Organization 2 (2004): article 2. }~ The seed, and its improvements, is proprietary to the vendor in this model. It is not supplied in a form or with the rights to further improve locally and independently. Because of the critique of innovation in agriculture as part of the process of globalization and industrialization, of environmental degradation, and of consumer exploitation, the political forces that would have been most likely to support public-sector investment in agricultural innovation are in opposition to such investments. The result has not been retardation of biotechnological innovation ,{[pg 336]}, in agriculture, but its increasing privatization: primarily in the United States and now increasingly in Latin America, whose role in global agricultural production is growing. +={ Pringle, Peter ; + privatization : + agricultural biotechnologies +2 ; + proprietary rights : + agricultural biotechnologies +2 ; + technology : + agricultural +16 +} + +Private-sector investment, in turn, operates within a system of patents and other breeders' exclusive rights, whose general theoretical limitations are discussed in chapter 2. In agriculture, this has two distinct but mutually reinforcing implications. The first is that, while private-sector innovation has indeed accounted for most genetically engineered crops in the developing world, research aimed at improving agricultural production in the neediest places has not been significantly pursued by the major private-sector firms. A sector based on expectation of sales of products embedding its patents will not focus its research where human welfare will be most enhanced. It will focus where human welfare can best be expressed in monetary terms. The poor are systematically underserved by such a system. It is intended to elicit investments in research in directions that investors believe will result in outputs that serve the needs of those with the highest willingness and ability to pay for their outputs. The second is that even where the products of innovation can, as a matter of biological characteristics, be taken as inputs into local research and development--by farmers or by national agricultural research systems--the international system of patents and plant breeders' rights enforcement makes it illegal to do so without a license. This again retards the ability of poor countries and their farmers and research institutes to conduct research into local adaptations of improved crops. + +The central question raised by the increasing privatization of agricultural biotechnology over the past twenty years is: What can be done to employ commons-based strategies to provide a foundation for research that will be focused on the food security of developing world populations? Is there a way of managing innovation in this sector so that it will not be heavily weighted in favor of populations with a higher ability to pay, and so that its outputs allow farmers and national research efforts to improve and adapt to highly variable local agroecological environments? The continued presence of the public-sector research infrastructure--including the international and national research centers, universities, and NGOs dedicated to the problem of food security--and the potential of harnessing individual farmers and scientists to cooperative development of open biological innovation for agriculture suggest that commons-based paths for development in the area of food security and agricultural innovation are indeed feasible. + +First, some of the largest and most rapidly developing nations that still ,{[pg 337]}, have large poor populations--most prominently, China, India, and Brazil-- can achieve significant advances through their own national agricultural research systems. Their research can, in turn, provide a platform for further innovation and adaptation by projects in poorer national systems, as well as in nongovernmental public and peer-production efforts. In this regard, China seems to be leading the way. The first rice genome to be sequenced was japonica, apparently sequenced in 2000 by scientists at Monsanto, but not published. The second, an independent and published sequence of japonica, was sequenced by scientists at Syngenta, and published as the first published rice genome sequence in Science in April 2002. To protect its proprietary interests, Syngenta entered a special agreement with Science, which permitted the authors not to deposit the genomic information into the public Genbank maintained by the National Institutes of Health in the United States.~{ Elliot Marshall, "A Deal for the Rice Genome," Science 296 (April 2002): 34. }~ Depositing the information in GenBank makes it immediately available for other scientists to work with freely. All the major scientific publications require that such information be deposited and made publicly available as a standard condition of publication, but Science waved this requirement for the Syngenta japonica sequence. The same issue of Science, however, carried a similar publication, the sequence of Oryza sativa L.ssp. indica, the most widely cultivated subspecies in China. This was sequenced by a public Chinese effort, and its outputs were immediately deposited in GenBank. The simultaneous publication of the rice genome by a major private firm and a Chinese public effort was the first public exposure to the enormous advances that China's public sector has made in agricultural biotechnology, and its focus first and foremost on improving Chinese agriculture. While its investments are still an order of magnitude smaller than those of public and private sectors in the developed countries, China has been reported as the source of more than half of all expenditures in the developing world.~{ Jikun Huang et al., "Plant Biotechnology in China," Science 295 (2002): 674. }~ China's longest experience with GM agriculture is with Bt cotton, which was introduced in 1997. By 2000, 20 percent of China's cotton acreage was sown to Bt cotton. One study showed that the average acreage of a farm was less than 0.5 hectare of cotton, and the trait that was most valuable to them was Bt cotton's reduced pesticide needs. Those who adopted Bt cotton used less pesticide, reducing labor for pest control and the pesticide cost per kilogram of cotton produced. This allowed an average cost savings of 28 percent. Another effect suggested by survey data--which, if confirmed over time, would be very important as a matter of public health, but also to the political economy of the agricultural biotechnology debate--is that farmers ,{[pg 338]}, who do not use Bt cotton are four times as likely to report symptoms of a degree of toxic exposure following application of pesticides than farmers who did adopt Bt cotton.~{ Huang et al., "Plant Biotechnology." }~ The point is not, of course, to sing the praises of GM cotton or the Chinese research system. China's efforts offer an example of how the larger national research systems can provide an anchor for agricultural research, providing solutions both for their own populations, and, by making the products of their research publicly and freely available, offer a foundation for the work of others. +={ Bt cotton ; + Chinese agricultural research ; + Syngenta +} + +Alongside the national efforts in developing nations, there are two major paths for commons-based research and development in agriculture that could serve the developing world more generally. The first is based on existing research institutes and programs cooperating to build a commons-based system, cleared of the barriers of patents and breeders' rights, outside and alongside the proprietary system. The second is based on the kind of loose affiliation of university scientists, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals that we saw play such a significant role in the development of free and open-source software. The most promising current efforts in the former vein are the PIPRA (Public Intellectual Property for Agriculture) coalition of public-sector universities in the United States, and, if it delivers on its theoretical promises, the Generation Challenge Program led by CGIAR (the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research). The most promising model of the latter, and probably the most ambitious commons-based project for biological innovation currently contemplated, is BIOS (Biological Innovation for an Open Society). +={ PIPRA (Public Intellectual Property for Agriculture) +6 ; + collaborative authorship : + among universities +6 ; + communication : + university alliances +6 ; + proprietary rights : + university alliances +6 ; + university alliances +6 ; + licensing : + agricultural biotechnologies +10 ; + proprietary rights : + agricultural biotechnologies +10 +} + +PIPRA is a collaboration effort among public-sector universities and agricultural research institutes in the United States, aimed at managing their rights portfolio in a way that will give their own and other researchers freedom to operate in an institutional ecology increasingly populated by patents and other rights that make work difficult. The basic thesis and underlying problem that led to PIPRA's founding were expressed in an article in Science coauthored by fourteen university presidents.~{ Richard Atkinson et al., "Public Sector Collaboration for Agricultural IP Management," Science 301 (2003): 174. }~ They underscored the centrality of public-sector, land-grant university-based research to American agriculture, and the shift over the last twenty-five years toward increased use of intellectual property rules to cover basic discoveries and tools necessary for agricultural innovation. These strategies have been adopted by both commercial firms and, increasingly, by public-sector universities as the primary mechanism for technology transfer from the scientific institute to the commercializing firms. The problem they saw was that in agricultural research, ,{[pg 339]}, innovation was incremental. It relies on access to existing germplasm and crop varieties that, with each generation of innovation, brought with them an ever-increasing set of intellectual property claims that had to be licensed in order to obtain permission to innovate further. The universities decided to use the power that ownership over roughly 24 percent of the patents in agricultural biotechnology innovations provides them as a lever with which to unravel the patent thickets and to reduce the barriers to research that they increasingly found themselves dealing with. The main story, one might say the "founding myth" of PIPRA, was the story of golden rice. Golden rice is a variety of rice that was engineered to provide dietary vitamin A. It was developed with the hope that it could introduce vitamin A supplement to populations in which vitamin A deficiency causes roughly 500,000 cases of blindness a year and contributes to more than 2 million deaths a year. However, when it came to translating the research into deliverable plants, the developers encountered more than seventy patents in a number of countries and six materials transfer agreements that restricted the work and delayed it substantially. PIPRA was launched as an effort of public-sector universities to cooperate in achieving two core goals that would respond to this type of barrier--preserving the right to pursue applications to subsistence crops and other developing-world-related crops, and preserving their own freedom to operate vis-a-vis each other's patent portfolios. +={ golden rice } + +The basic insight of PIPRA, which can serve as a model for university alliances in the context of the development of medicines as well as agriculture, is that universities are not profit-seeking enterprises, and university scientists are not primarily driven by a profit motive. In a system that offers opportunities for academic and business tracks for people with similar basic skills, academia tends to attract those who are more driven by nonmonetary motivations. While universities have invested a good deal of time and money since the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 permitted and indeed encouraged them to patent innovations developed with public funding, patent and other exclusive-rights-based revenues have not generally emerged as an important part of the revenue scheme of universities. As table 9.2 shows, except for one or two outliers, patent revenues have been all but negligible in university budgets.~{ This table is a slightly expanded version of one originally published in Yochai Benkler, "Commons Based Strategies and the Problems of Patents," Science 305 (2004): 1110. }~ This fact makes it fiscally feasible for universities to use their patent portfolios to maximize the global social benefit of their research, rather than trying to maximize patent revenue. In particular, universities can aim to include provisions in their technology licensing agreements that are aimed at the dual goals of (a) delivering products embedding their innovations ,{[pg 340]}, to developing nations at reasonable prices and (b) providing researchers and plant breeders the freedom to operate that would allow them to research, develop, and ultimately produce crops that would improve food security in the developing world. + +% end of paragraph which occurs on page 341 apended above table + +!_ Table 9.2: Selected University Gross Revenues and Patent Licensing Revenues + +table{~h c6; 28; 14; 14; 14; 14; 14; + +. +Total Revenues (millions) +Licensing & Royalties (mil.) +Licensing & Royalties (% of total) +Gov. Grants & Contracts (mil.) +Gov. Grants & Contracts (% of total) + +All universities +$227,000 +$1270 +0.56% +$31,430 +13.85% + +University of Columbia +$2,074 +$178.4 $100-120a +8.6% 4.9-5.9% +$532 +25.65% + +University of California +$14,166 +$81.3 $55(net)b +0.57% 0.39% +$2372 +16.74% + +Stanford University +$3,475 +$43.3 $36.8c +1.25% 1.06% +$860 +24.75% + +Florida State +$2,646 +$35.6 +1.35% +$238 +8.99% + +University of Wisconsin Madison +$1,696 +$32 +1.89% +$417.4 +24.61% + +University of Minnesota +$1,237 +$38.7 +3.12% +$323.5 +26.15% + +Harvard +$2,473 +$47.9 +1.94% +$416 $548.7d +16.82% 22.19% + +Cal Tech +$531 +$26.7e $15.7f +5.02% 2.95% +$268 +50.47% + +}table + +Sources: Aggregate revenues: U.S. Dept. of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2001, and Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2001 (2003), Table F; Association of University Technology Management, Annual Survey Summary FY 2002 (AUTM 2003), Table S-12. Individual institutions: publicly available annual reports of each university and/or its technology transfer office for FY 2003. + +group{ + +Notes: + +a. Large ambiguity results because technology transfer office reports increased +revenues for yearend 2003 as $178M without reporting expenses; University +Annual Report reports licensing revenue with all "revenue from other +educational and research activities," and reports a 10 percent decline in this +category, "reflecting an anticipated decline in royalty and license income" +from the $133M for the previous year-end, 2002. The table reflects an assumed +net contribution to university revenues between $100-120M (the entire decline +in the category due to royalty/royalties decreased proportionately with the +category). + +b. University of California Annual Report of the Office of Technology Transfer +is more transparent than most in providing expenses--both net legal expenses +and tech transfer direct operating expenses, which allows a clear separation of +net revenues from technology transfer activities. + +c. Minus direct expenses, not including expenses for unlicensed inventions. + +d. Federal- and nonfederal-sponsored research. + +e. Almost half of this amount is in income from a single Initial Public +Offering, and therefore does not represent a recurring source of licensing +revenue. + +f. Technology transfer gross revenue minus the one-time event of an initial +public offering of LiquidMetal Technologies. + +}group + +% ,{[pg 341]}, + +While PIPRA shows an avenue for collaboration among universities in the public interest, it is an avenue that does not specifically rely on, or benefit in great measure from, the information networks or the networked information economy. It continues to rely on the traditional model of publicly funded research. More explicit in its effort to leverage the cost savings made possible by networked information systems is the Generation Challenge Program (GCP). The GCP is an effort to bring the CGIAR into the biotechnology sphere, carefully, given the political resistance to genetically modified foods, and quickly, given the already relatively late start that the international research centers have had in this area. Its stated emphasis is on building an architecture of innovation, or network of research relationships, that will provide low-cost techniques for the basic contemporary technologies of agricultural research. The program has five primary foci, but the basic thrust is to generate improvements both in basic genomics science and in breeding and farmer education, in both cases for developing world agriculture. One early focus would be on building a communications system that allows participating institutions and scientists to move information efficiently and utilize computational resources to pursue research. There are hundreds of thousands of samples of germplasm, from "landrace" (that is, locally agriculturally developed) and wild varieties to modern varieties, located in databases around the world in international, national, and academic institutions. There are tremendous high-capacity computation resources in some of the most advanced research institutes, but not in many of the national and international programs. One of the major goals articulated for the GCP is to develop Web-based interfaces to share these data and computational resources. Another is to provide a platform for sharing new questions and directions of research among participants. The work in this network will, in turn, rely on materials that have proprietary interests attached to them, and will produce outputs that could have proprietary interests attached to them as well. Just like the universities, the GCP institutes (national, international, and nonprofit) are looking for an approach aimed to secure open access to research materials and tools and to provide humanitarian access to its products, particularly for subsistence crop development and use. As of this writing, however, the GCP is still in a formative stage, more an aspiration than ,{[pg 342]}, a working model. Whether it will succeed in overcoming the political constraints placed on the CGIAR as well as the relative latecomer status of the international public efforts to this area of work remains to be seen. But the elements of the GCP certainly exhibit an understanding of the possibilities presented by commons-based networked collaboration, and an ambition to both build upon them and contribute to their development. +={ CGIAR's GCP program ; + GCP (Generation Challenge Program) ; + Generation Challenge Program (GCP) +} + +The most ambitious effort to create a commons-based framework for biological innovation in this field is BIOS. BIOS is an initiative of CAMBIA (Center for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture), a nonprofit agricultural research institute based in Australia, which was founded and is directed by Richard Jefferson, a pioneer in plant biotechnology. BIOS is based on the observation that much of contemporary agricultural research depends on access to tools and enabling technologies-- such as mechanisms to identify genes or for transferring them into target plants. When these tools are appropriated by a small number of firms and available only as part of capital-intensive production techniques, they cannot serve as the basis for innovation at the local level or for research organized on nonproprietary models. One of the core insights driving the BIOS initiative is the recognition that when a subset of necessary tools is available in the public domain, but other critical tools are not, the owners of those tools appropriate the full benefits of public domain innovation without at the same time changing the basic structural barriers to use of the proprietary technology. To overcome these problems, the BIOS initiative includes both a strong informatics component and a fairly ambitious "copyleft"-like model (similar to the GPL described in chapter 3) of licensing CAMBIA's basic tools and those of other members of the BIOS initiative. The informatics component builds on a patent database that has been developed by CAMBIA for a number of years, and whose ambition is to provide as complete as possible a dataset of who owns what tools, what the contours of ownership are, and by implication, who needs to be negotiated with and where research paths might emerge that are not yet appropriated and therefore may be open to unrestricted innovation. +={ Jefferson, Richard ; + BIOS initiative +2 ; + CAMBIA research institute +2 ; + copyleft +1 +} + +The licensing or pooling component is more proactive, and is likely the most significant of the project. BIOS is setting up a licensing and pooling arrangement, "primed" by CAMBIA's own significant innovations in tools, which are licensed to all of the initiative's participants on a free model, with grant-back provisions that perform an openness-binding function similar to copyleft.~{ Wim Broothaertz et al., "Gene Transfer to Plants by Diverse Species of Bacteria," Nature 433 (2005): 629. }~ In coarse terms, this means that anyone who builds upon the ,{[pg 343]}, contributions of others must contribute improvements back to the other participants. One aspect of this model is that it does not assume that all research comes from academic institutions or from traditional governmentfunded, nongovernmental, or intergovernmental research institutes. It tries to create a framework that, like the open-source development community, engages commercial and noncommercial, public and private, organized and individual participants into a cooperative research network. The platform for this collaboration is "BioForge," styled after Sourceforge, one of the major free and open-source software development platforms. The commitment to engage many different innovators is most clearly seen in the efforts of BIOS to include major international commercial providers and local potential commercial breeders alongside the more likely targets of a commons-based initiative. Central to this move is the belief that in agricultural science, the basic tools can, although this may be hard, be separated from specific applications or products. All actors, including the commercial ones, therefore have an interest in the open and efficient development of tools, leaving competition and profit making for the market in applications. At the other end of the spectrum, BIOS's focus on making tools freely available is built on the proposition that innovation for food security involves more than biotechnology alone. It involves environmental management, locale-specific adaptations, and social and economic adoption in forms that are locally and internally sustainable, as opposed to dependent on a constant inflow of commoditized seed and other inputs. The range of participants is, then, much wider than envisioned by PIPRA or the GCP. It ranges from multinational corporations through academic scientists, to farmers and local associations, pooling their efforts in a communications platform and institutional model that is very similar to the way in which the GNU/Linux operating system has been developed. As of this writing, the BIOS project is still in its early infancy, and cannot be evaluated by its outputs. However, its structure offers the crispest example of the extent to which the peer-production model in particular, and commons-based production more generally, can be transposed into other areas of innovation at the very heart of what makes for human development--the ability to feed oneself adequately. +={ BioForge } + +PIPRA and the BIOS initiative are the most salient examples of, and the most significant first steps in the development of commons-based strategies to achieve food security. Their vitality and necessity challenge the conventional wisdom that ever-increasing intellectual property rights are necessary to secure greater investment in research, or that the adoption of proprietary ,{[pg 344]}, rights is benign. Increasing appropriation of basic tools and enabling technologies creates barriers to entry for innovators--public-sector, nonprofit organizations, and the local farmers themselves--concerned with feeding those who cannot signal with their dollars that they are in need. The emergence of commons-based techniques--particularly, of an open innovation platform that can incorporate farmers and local agronomists from around the world into the development and feedback process through networked collaboration platforms--promises the most likely avenue to achieve research oriented toward increased food security in the developing world. It promises a mechanism of development that will not increase the relative weight and control of a small number of commercial firms that specialize in agricultural production. It will instead release the products of innovation into a selfbinding commons--one that is institutionally designed to defend itself against appropriation. It promises an iterative collaboration platform that would be able to collect environmental and local feedback in the way that a free software development project collects bug reports--through a continuous process of networked conversation among the user-innovators themselves. In combination with public investments from national governments in the developing world, from the developed world, and from more traditional international research centers, agricultural research for food security may be on a path of development toward constructing a sustainable commons-based innovation ecology alongside the proprietary system. Whether it follows this path will be partly a function of the engagement of the actors themselves, but partly a function of the extent to which the international intellectual property/trade system will refrain from raising obstacles to the emergence of these commons-based efforts. + +3~ Access to Medicines: Commons-Based Strategies for Biomedical Research +={ access : + to medicine +14 ; + biomedical research, commons-based +14 ; + commons, production through : + see peer production commons-based research | medical and pharmaceutical innovation +14 ; + development, commons-based : + medical and pharmaceutical innovation +14 ; + drugs, commons-based research on +14 ; + global development : + medical and pharmaceutical innovation +14 ; + medicines, commons-based research on +14 ; + pharmaceuticals, commons-based research on +14 ; + research, commons-based : + medical and pharmaceutical innovation +14 +} + +Nothing has played a more important role in exposing the systematic problems that the international trade and patent system presents for human development than access to medicines for HIV/AIDS. This is so for a number of reasons. First, HIV/AIDS has reached pandemic proportions. One quarter of all deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases in 2002 were caused by AIDS, accounting for almost 5 percent of all deaths in the world that year.~{ These numbers and others in this paragraph are taken from the 2004 WHO World Health Report, Annex Table 2. }~ Second, it is a new condition, unknown to medicine a mere twenty-five years ago, is communicable, and in principle is of a type--infectious diseases--that we have come to see modern medicine as capable of solving. ,{[pg 345]}, This makes it different from much bigger killers--like the many cancers and forms of heart disease--which account for about nine times as many deaths globally. Third, it has a significant presence in the advanced economies. Because it was perceived there as a disease primarily affecting the gay community, it had a strong and well-defined political lobby and high cultural salience. Fourth, and finally, there have indeed been enormous advances in the development of medicines for HIV/AIDS. Mortality for patients who are treated is therefore much lower than for those who are not. These treatments are new, under patent, and enormously expensive. As a result, death-- as opposed to chronic illness--has become overwhelmingly a consequence of poverty. More than 75 percent of deaths caused by AIDS in 2002 were in Africa. HIV/AIDS drugs offer a vivid example of an instance where drugs exist for a disease but cannot be afforded in the poorest countries. They represent, however, only a part, and perhaps the smaller part, of the limitations that a patent-based drug development system presents for providing medicines to the poor. No less important is the absence of a market pull for drugs aimed at diseases that are solely or primarily developing-world diseases--like drugs for tropical diseases, or the still-elusive malaria vaccine. +={ HIV/AIDS } + +To the extent that the United States and Europe are creating a global innovation system that relies on patents and market incentives as its primary driver of research and innovation, these wealthy democracies are, of necessity, choosing to neglect diseases that disproportionately affect the poor. There is nothing evil about a pharmaceutical company that is responsible to its shareholders deciding to invest where it expects to reap profit. It is not immoral for a firm to invest its research funds in finding a drug to treat acne, which might affect 20 million teenagers in the United States, rather than a drug that will cure African sleeping sickness, which affects 66 million Africans and kills about fifty thousand every year. If there is immorality to be found, it is in the legal and policy system that relies heavily on the patent system to induce drug discovery and development, and does not adequately fund and organize biomedical research to solve the problems that cannot be solved by relying solely on market pull. However, the politics of public response to patents for drugs are similar in structure to those that have to do with agricultural biotechnology exclusive rights. There is a very strong patentbased industry--much stronger than in any other patent-sensitive area. The rents from strong patents are enormous, and a rational monopolist will pay up to the value of its rents to maintain and improve its monopoly. The primary potential political push-back in the pharmaceutical area, which does ,{[pg 346]}, not exist in the agricultural innovation area, is that the exorbitant costs of drugs developed under this system is hurting even the well-endowed purses of developed-world populations. The policy battles in the United States and throughout the developed world around drug cost containment may yet result in a sufficient loosening of the patent constraints to deliver positive side effects for the developing world. However, they may also work in the opposite direction. The unwillingness of the wealthy populations in the developed world to pay high rents for drugs retards the most immediate path to lower-cost drugs in the developing world--simple subsidy of below-cost sales in poor countries cross-subsidized by above-cost rents in wealthy countries. +={ commercial model of communication : + medical innovation and ; + industrial model of communication : + medical innovation and ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + medical innovation and ; + monopoly : + medical research and innovation ; + policy : + pharmaceutical innovation ; + proprietary rights : + medical and pharmaceutical innovation ; + traditional model of communication : + medical innovation and +} + +The industrial structure of biomedical research and pharmaceutical development is different from that of agricultural science in ways that still leave a substantial potential role for commons-based strategies. However, these would be differently organized and aligned than in agriculture. First, while governments play an enormous role in funding basic biomedical science, there are no real equivalents of the national and international agricultural research institutes. In other words, there are few public-sector laboratories that actually produce finished drugs for delivery in the developing world, on the model of the International Rice Research Institute or one of the national agricultural research systems. On the other hand, there is a thriving generics industry, based in both advanced and developing economies, that stands ready to produce drugs once these are researched. The primary constraint on harnessing its capacity for low-cost drug production and delivery for poorer nations is the international intellectual property system. The other major difference is that, unlike with software, scientific publication, or farmers in agriculture, there is no existing framework for individuals to participate in research and development on drugs and treatments. The primary potential source of nongovernmental investment of effort and thought into biomedical research and development are universities as institutions and scientists, if they choose to organize themselves into effective peer-production communities. + +Universities and scientists have two complementary paths open to them to pursue commons-based strategies to provide improved research on the relatively neglected diseases of the poor and improved access to existing drugs that are available in the developed world but unaffordable in the developing. The first involves leveraging existing university patent portfolios--much as the universities allied in PIPRA are exploring and as CAMBIA is doing more ,{[pg 347]}, aggressively. The second involves work in an entirely new model--constructing collaboration platforms to allow scientists to engage in peer production, cross-cutting the traditional grant-funded lab, and aiming toward research into diseases that do not exercise a market pull on the biomedical research system in the advanced economies. +={ collaborative authorship : + among universities +5 ; + communication : + university alliances +5 ; + information production, market-based : + universities as +3 ; + market-based information producers : + universities as +3 ; + nonmarket information producers : + universities as +3 ; + sharing : + university patents +5 ; + university alliances +5 +} + +/{Leveraging University Patents}/. In February 2001, the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) asked Yale University, which held the key South African patent on stavudine--one of the drugs then most commonly used in combination therapies--for permission to use generic versions in a pilot AIDS treatment program. At the time, the licensed version of the drug, sold by Bristol-MyersSquibb (BMS), cost $1,600 per patient per year. A generic version, manufactured in India, was available for $47 per patient per year. At that point in history, thirty-nine drug manufacturers were suing the South African government to strike down a law permitting importation of generics in a health crisis, and no drug company had yet made concessions on pricing in developing nations. Within weeks of receiving MSF's request, Yale negotiated with BMS to secure the sale of stavudine for fifty-five dollars a year in South Africa. Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and other universities have, in the years since, entered into similar ad hoc agreements with regard to developing-world applications or distribution of drugs that depend on their patented technologies. These successes provide a template for a much broader realignment of how universities use their patent portfolios to alleviate the problems of access to medicines in developing nations. +={ Doctors Without Borders ; + Medecins Sans Frontieres ; + MSF (Medecins San Frontieres) +} + +We have already seen in table 9.2 that while universities own a substantial and increasing number of patents, they do not fiscally depend in any significant way on patent revenue. These play a very small part in the overall scheme of revenues. This makes it practical for universities to reconsider how they use their patents and to reorient toward using them to maximize their beneficial effects on equitable access to pharmaceuticals developed in the advanced economies. Two distinct moves are necessary to harness publicly funded university research toward building an information commons that is easily accessible for global redistribution. The first is internal to the university process itself. The second has to do with the interface between the university and patent-dependent and similar exclusive-rights-dependent market actors. + +Universities are internally conflicted about their public and market goals. ,{[pg 348]}, Dating back to the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, universities have increased their patenting practices for the products of publicly funded research. Technology transfer offices that have been set up to facilitate this practice are, in many cases, measured by the number of patent applications, grants, and dollars they bring in to the university. These metrics for measuring the success of these offices tend to make them function, and understand their role, in a way that is parallel to exclusive-rights-dependent market actors, instead of as public-sector, publicly funded, and publicly minded institutions. A technology transfer officer who has successfully provided a royalty-free license to a nonprofit concerned with developing nations has no obvious metric in which to record and report the magnitude of her success (saving X millions of lives or displacing Y misery), unlike her colleague who can readily report X millions of dollars from a market-oriented license, or even merely Y dozens of patents filed. Universities must consider more explicitly their special role in the global information and knowledge production system. If they recommit to a role focused on serving the improvement of the lot of humanity, rather than maximization of their revenue stream, they should adapt their patenting and licensing practices appropriately. In particular, it will be important following such a rededication to redefine the role of technology transfer offices in terms of lives saved, quality-of-life measures improved, or similar substantive measures that reflect the mission of university research, rather than the present metrics borrowed from the very different world of patent-dependent market production. While the internal process is culturally and politically difficult, it is not, in fact, analytically or technically complex. Universities have, for a very long time, seen themselves primarily as dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and human welfare through basic research, reasoned inquiry, and education. The long-standing social traditions of science have always stood apart from market incentives and orientations. The problem is therefore one of reawakening slightly dormant cultural norms and understandings, rather than creating new ones in the teeth of long-standing contrary traditions. The problem should be substantially simpler than, say, persuading companies that traditionally thought of their innovation in terms of patents granted or royalties claimed, as some technology industry participants have, to adopt free software strategies. +={ distribution of information : + university-based innovation +2 +} + +If universities do make the change, then the more complex problem will remain: designing an institutional interface between universities and the pharmaceutical industry that will provide sustainable significant benefits for developing-world distribution of drugs and for research opportunities into ,{[pg 349]}, developing-world diseases. As we already saw in the context of agriculture, patents create two discrete kinds of barriers: The first is on distribution, because of the monopoly pricing power they purposefully confer on their owners. The second is on research that requires access to tools, enabling technologies, data, and materials generated by the developed-world research process, and that could be useful to research on developing-world diseases. Universities working alone will not provide access to drugs. While universities perform more than half of the basic scientific research in the United States, this effort means that more than 93 percent of university research expenditures go to basic and applied science, leaving less than 7 percent for development--the final research necessary to convert a scientific project into a usable product.~{ National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resource Statistics, Special Report: National Patterns of Research and Development Resources: 2003 NSF 05-308 (Arlington, VA: NSF, 2005), table 1. }~ Universities therefore cannot simply release their own patents and expect treatments based on their technologies to become accessible. Instead, a change is necessary in licensing practices that takes an approach similar to a synthesis of the general public license (GPL), of BIOS's licensing approach, and PIPRA. + +Universities working together can cooperate to include in their licenses provisions that would secure freedom to operate for anyone conducting research into developing-world diseases or production for distribution in poorer nations. The institutional details of such a licensing regime are relatively complex and arcane, but efforts are, in fact, under way to develop such licenses and to have them adopted by universities.~{ The detailed analysis can be found in Amy Kapzcynzki et al., "Addressing Global Health Inequities: An Open Licensing Paradigm for Public Sector Inventions," Berkeley Journal of Law and Technology (Spring 2005). 24. See Jean Lanjouw, "A New Global Patent Regime for Diseases: U.S. and International Legal Issues," Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 16 (2002). 25. S. Maurer, A. Sali, and A. Rai, "Finding Cures for Tropical Disease: Is Open Source the Answer?" Public Library of Science: Medicine 1, no. 3 (December 2004): e56. }~ What is important here, for understanding the potential, is the basic idea and framework. In exchange for access to the university's patents, the pharmaceutical licensees will agree not to assert any of their own rights in drugs that require a university license against generics manufacturers who make generic versions of those drugs purely for distribution in low- and middle-income countries. An Indian or American generics manufacturer could produce patented drugs that relied on university patents and were licensed under this kind of an equitable-access license, as long as it distributed its products solely in poor countries. A government or nonprofit research institute operating in South Africa could work with patented research tools without concern that doing so would violate the patents. However, neither could then import the products of their production or research into the developed world without violating the patents of both the university and the drug company. The licenses would create a mechanism for redistribution of drug products and research tools from the developed economies to the developing. It would do so without requiring the kind of regulatory changes advocated by others, such as ,{[pg 350]}, Jean Lanjouw, who have advocated policy changes aimed similarly to achieve differential pricing in the developing and developed worlds.24 Because this redistribution could be achieved by universities acting through licensing, instead of through changes in law, it offers a more feasible political path for achieving the desired result. Such action by universities would, of course, not solve all the problems of access to medicines. First, not all health-related products are based on university research. Second, patents do not account for all, or perhaps even most, of the reason that patients in poor nations are not treated. A lack of delivery infrastructure, public-health monitoring and care, and stable conditions to implement disease-control policy likely weigh more heavily. Nonetheless, there are successful and stable government and nonprofit programs that could treat hundreds of thousands or millions of patients more than they do now, if the cost of drugs were lower. Achieving improved access for those patients seems a goal worthy of pursuit, even if it is no magic bullet to solve all the illnesses of poverty. + +/{Nonprofit Research}/. Even a successful campaign to change the licensing practices of universities in order to achieve inexpensive access to the products of pharmaceutical research would leave the problem of research into diseases that affect primarily the poor. This is because, unless universities themselves undertake the development process, the patent-based pharmaceuticals have no reason to. The "simple" answer to this problem is more funding from the public sector or foundations for both basic research and development. This avenue has made some progress, and some foundations--particularly, in recent years, the Gates Foundation--have invested enormous amounts of money in searching for cures and improving basic public-health conditions of disease in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. It has received a particularly interesting boost since 2000, with the founding of the Institute for One World Health, a nonprofit pharmaceutical dedicated to research and development specifically into developing-world diseases. The basic model of One World Health begins by taking contributions of drug leads that are deemed unprofitable by the pharmaceutical industry--from both universities and pharmaceutical companies. The firms have no reason not to contribute their patents on leads purely for purposes they do not intend to pursue. The group then relies on foundation and public-sector funding to perform synthesis, preclinical and clinical trials, in collaboration with research centers in the United States, India, Bangladesh, and Thailand, and when the time comes around for manufacturing, the institute collaborates with manufacturers ,{[pg 351]}, in developing nations to produce low-cost instances of the drugs, and with government and NGO public-health providers to organize distribution. This model is new, and has not yet had enough time to mature and provide measurable success. However, it is promising. +={ Institute for One World Health ; + One World Health ; + nonprofit medical research +} + +/{Peer Production of Drug Research and Development}/. Scientists, scientists-intraining, and to some extent, nonscientists can complement university licensing practices and formally organized nonprofit efforts as a third component of the ecology of commons-based producers. The initial response to the notion that peer production can be used for drug development is that the process is too complex, expensive, and time consuming to succumb to commons-based strategies. This may, at the end of the day, prove true. However, this was also thought of complex software projects or of supercomputing, until free software and distributed computing projects like SETI@Home and Folding@Home came along and proved them wrong. The basic point is to see how distributed nonmarket efforts are organized, and to see how the scientific production process can be broken up to fit a peer-production model. +={ allocating excess capacity +2 ; + capacity : + sharing +2 ; + excess capacity, sharing +2 ; + sharing : + excess capacity +2 ; + peer production : + drug research and development ; + reallocating excess capacity +2 +} + +First, anything that can be done through computer modeling or data analysis can, in principle, be done on a peer-production basis. Increasing portions of biomedical research are done today through modeling, computer simulation, and data analysis of the large and growing databases, including a wide range of genetic, chemical, and biological information. As more of the process of drug discovery of potential leads can be done by modeling and computational analysis, more can be organized for peer production. The relevant model here is open bioinformatics. Bioinformatics generally is the practice of pursuing solutions to biological questions using mathematics and information technology. Open bioinformatics is a movement within bioinformatics aimed at developing the tools in an open-source model, and in providing access to the tools and the outputs on a free and open basis. Projects like these include the Ensmbl Genome Browser, operated by the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Sanger Centre, or the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), both of which use computer databases to provide access to data and to run various searches on combinations, patterns, and so forth, in the data. In both cases, access to the data and the value-adding functionalities are free. The software too is developed on a free software model. These, in turn, are complemented by database policies like those of the International HapMap Project, an effort to map ,{[pg 352]}, common variations in the human genome, whose participants have committed to releasing all the data they collect freely into the public domain. The economics of this portion of research into drugs are very similar to the economics of software and computation. The models are just software. Some models will be able to run on the ever-more-powerful basic machines that the scientists themselves use. However, anything that requires serious computation could be modeled for distributed computing. This would allow projects to harness volunteer computation resources, like Folding@Home, Genome@Home, or FightAIDS@Home--sites that already harness the computing power of hundreds of thousands of users to attack biomedical science questions. This stage of the process is the one that most directly can be translated into a peer-production model, and, in fact, there have been proposals, such as the Tropical Disease Initiative proposed by Maurer, Sali, and Rai.~{ 25 }~ +={ bioinfomatics ; + HapMap Project ; + International HapMap Project +} + +Second, and more complex, is the problem of building wet-lab science on a peer-production basis. Some efforts would have to focus on the basic science. Some might be at the phase of optimization and chemical synthesis. Some, even more ambitiously, would be at the stage of preclinical animal trials and even clinical trials. The wet lab seems to present an insurmountable obstacle for a serious role for peer production in biomedical science. Nevertheless, it is not clear that it is actually any more so than it might have seemed for the development of an operating system, or a supercomputer, before these were achieved. Laboratories have two immensely valuable resources that may be capable of being harnessed to peer production. Most important by far are postdoctoral fellows. These are the same characters who populate so many free software projects, only geeks of a different feather. They are at a similar life stage. They have the same hectic, overworked lives, and yet the same capacity to work one more hour on something else, something interesting, exciting, or career enhancing, like a special grant announced by the government. The other resources that have overcapacity might be thought of as petri dishes, or if that sounds too quaint and oldfashioned, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machines or electrophoresis equipment. The point is simple. Laboratory funding currently is silo-based. Each lab is usually funded to have all the equipment it needs for run-ofthe-mill work, except for very large machines operated on time-share principles. Those machines that are redundantly provisioned in laboratories have downtime. That downtime coupled with a postdoctoral fellow in the lab is an experiment waiting to happen. If a group that is seeking to start a project ,{[pg 353]}, defines discrete modules of a common experiment, and provides a communications platform to allow people to download project modules, perform them, and upload results, it would be possible to harness the overcapacity that exists in laboratories. In principle, although this is a harder empirical question, the same could be done for other widely available laboratory materials and even animals for preclinical trials on the model of, "brother, can you spare a mouse?" One fascinating proposal and early experiment at the University of Indiana-Purdue University Indianapolis was suggested by William Scott, a chemistry professor. Scott proposed developing simple, lowcost kits for training undergraduate students in chemical synthesis, but which would use targets and molecules identified by computational biology as potential treatments for developing-world diseases as their output. With enough redundancy across different classrooms and institutions around the world, the results could be verified while screening and synthesizing a significant number of potential drugs. The undergraduate educational experience could actually contribute to new experiments, as opposed simply to synthesizing outputs that are not really needed by anyone. Clinical trials provide yet another level of complexity, because the problem of delivering consistent drug formulations for testing to physicians and patients stretches the imagination. One option would be that research centers in countries affected by the diseases in question could pick up the work at this point, and create and conduct clinical trials. These too could be coordinated across regions and countries among the clinicians administering the tests, so that accruing patients and obtaining sufficient information could be achieved more rapidly and at lower cost. As in the case of One World Health, production and regulatory approval, from this stage on, could be taken up by the generics manufacturers. In order to prevent the outputs from being appropriated at this stage, every stage in the process would require a public-domain-binding license that would prevent a manufacturer from taking the outputs and, by making small changes, patenting the ultimate drug. +={ Scott, William ; + laboratories, peer-produced +1 ; + wet-lab science, peer production of +1 ; + clinical trials, peer-produced +} + +This proposal about medicine is, at this stage, the most imaginary among the commons-based strategies for development suggested here. However, it is analytically consistent with them, and, in principle, should be attainable. In combination with the more traditional commons-based approaches, university research, and the nonprofit world, peer production could contribute to an innovation ecology that could overcome the systematic inability of a purely patent-based system to register and respond to the health needs of the world's poor. ,{[pg 354]}, + +3~ COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPMENT: CONCLUSION +={ commons, production through : + see peer production commons-based research +4 ; + development, commons-based +4 ; + proprietary rights : + global welfare and research +4 ; + research, commons-based +4 ; + trade policy +4 +} + +Welfare, development, and growth outside of the core economies heavily depend on the transfer of information-embedded goods and tools, information, and knowledge from the technologically advanced economies to the developing and less-developed economies and societies around the globe. These are important partly as finished usable components of welfare. Perhaps more important, however, they are necessary as tools and platforms on which innovation, research, and development can be pursued by local actors in the developing world itself--from the free software developers of Brazil to the agricultural scientists and farmers of Southeast Asia. The primary obstacles to diffusion of these desiderata in the required direction are the institutional framework of intellectual property and trade and the political power of the patent-dependent business models in the information-exporting economies. This is not because the proprietors of information goods and tools are evil. It is because their fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder value, and the less-developed and developing economies have little money. As rational maximizers with a legal monopoly, the patent holders restrict output and sell at higher rates. This is not a bug in the institutional system we call "intellectual property." It is a known feature that has known undesirable side effects of inefficiently restricting access to the products of innovation. In the context of vast disparities in wealth across the globe, however, this known feature does not merely lead to less than theoretically optimal use of the information. It leads to predictable increase of morbidity and mortality and to higher barriers to development. + +The rise of the networked information economy provides a new framework for thinking about how to work around the barriers that the international intellectual property regime places on development. Public-sector and other nonprofit institutions that have traditionally played an important role in development can do so with a greater degree of efficacy. Moreover, the emergence of peer production provides a model for new solutions to some of the problems of access to information and knowledge. In software and communications, these are directly available. In scientific information and some educational materials, we are beginning to see adaptations of these models to support core elements of development and learning. In food security and health, the translation process may be more difficult. In agriculture, we are seeing more immediate progress in the development of a woven ,{[pg 355]}, fabric of public-sector, academic, nonprofit, and individual innovation and learning to pursue biological innovation outside of the markets based on patents and breeders' rights. In medicine, we are still at a very early stage of organizational experiments and institutional proposals. The barriers to implementation are significant. However, there is growing awareness of the human cost of relying solely on the patent-based production system, and of the potential of commons-based strategies to alleviate these failures. + +Ideally, perhaps, the most direct way to arrive at a better system for harnessing innovation to development would pass through a new international politics of development, which would result in a better-designed international system of trade and innovation policy. There is in fact a global movement of NGOs and developing nations pursuing this goal. It is possible, however, that the politics of international trade are sufficiently bent to the purposes of incumbent industrial information economy proprietors and the governments that support them as a matter of industrial policy that the political path of formal institutional reform will fail. Certainly, the history of the TRIPS agreement and, more recently, efforts to pass new expansive treaties through the WIPO suggest this. However, one of the lessons we learn as we look at the networked information economy is that the work of governments through international treaties is not the final word on innovation and its diffusion across boundaries of wealth. The emergence of social sharing as a substantial mode of production in the networked environment offers an alternative route for individuals and nonprofit entities to take a much more substantial role in delivering actual desired outcomes independent of the formal system. Commons-based and peer production efforts may not be a cure-all. However, as we have seen in the software world, these strategies can make a big contribution to quite fundamental aspects of human welfare and development. And this is where freedom and justice coincide. +={ global development +1 } + +The practical freedom of individuals to act and associate freely--free from the constraints of proprietary endowment, free from the constraints of formal relations of contract or stable organizations--allows individual action in ad hoc, informal association to emerge as a new global mover. It frees the ability of people to act in response to all their motivations. In doing so, it offers a new path, alongside those of the market and formal governmental investment in public welfare, for achieving definable and significant improvements in human development throughout the world. ,{[pg 356]}, + +1~10 Chapter 10 - Social Ties: Networking Together +={ norms (social) +38 ; + regulation by social norms +38 ; + social relations and norms +38 +} + +Increased practical individual autonomy has been central to my claims throughout this book. It underlies the efficiency and sustainability of nonproprietary production in the networked information economy. It underlies the improvements I describe in both freedom and justice. Many have raised concerns that this new freedom will fray social ties and fragment social relations. On this view, the new freedom is one of detached monads, a freedom to live arid, lonely lives free of the many constraining attachments that make us grounded, well-adjusted human beings. Bolstered by early sociological studies, this perspective was one of two diametrically opposed views that typified the way the Internet's effect on community, or close social relations, was portrayed in the 1990s. The other view, popular among the digerati, was that "virtual communities" would come to represent a new form of human communal existence, providing new scope for building a shared experience of human interaction. Within a few short years, however, empirical research suggests that while neither view had it completely right, it was the ,{[pg 357]}, dystopian view that got it especially wrong. The effects of the Internet on social relations are obviously complex. It is likely too soon to tell which social practices this new mode of communication will ultimately settle on. The most recent research, however, suggests that the Internet has some fairly well-defined effects on human community and intimate social relations. These effects mark neither breakdown nor transcendence, but they do represent an improvement over the world of television and telephone along most dimensions of normative concern with social relations. +={ communities : + virtual +9 ; + virtual communities +9 : + see also social relations and norms +} + +We are seeing two effects: first, and most robustly, we see a thickening of preexisting relations with friends, family, and neighbors, particularly with those who were not easily reachable in the pre-Internet-mediated environment. Parents, for example, use instant messages to communicate with their children who are in college. Friends who have moved away from each other are keeping in touch more than they did before they had e-mail, because email does not require them to coordinate a time to talk or to pay longdistance rates. However, this thickening of contacts seems to occur alongside a loosening of the hierarchical aspects of these relationships, as individuals weave their own web of supporting peer relations into the fabric of what might otherwise be stifling familial relationships. Second, we are beginning to see the emergence of greater scope for limited-purpose, loose relationships. These may not fit the ideal model of "virtual communities." They certainly do not fit a deep conception of "community" as a person's primary source of emotional context and support. They are nonetheless effective and meaningful to their participants. It appears that, as the digitally networked environment begins to displace mass media and telephones, its salient communications characteristics provide new dimensions to thicken existing social relations, while also providing new capabilities for looser and more fluid, but still meaningful social networks. A central aspect of this positive improvement in loose ties has been the technical-organizational shift from an information environment dominated by commercial mass media on a oneto-many model, which does not foster group interaction among viewers, to an information environment that both technically and as a matter of social practice enables user-centric, group-based active cooperation platforms of the kind that typify the networked information economy. This is not to say that the Internet necessarily effects all people, all social groups, and networks identically. The effects on different people in different settings and networks will likely vary, certainly in their magnitude. My purpose here, however, is ,{[pg 358]}, to respond to the concern that enhanced individual capabilities entail social fragmentation and alienation. The available data do not support that claim as a description of a broad social effect. +={ communication : + thickening of preexisting relations ; + displacement of real-world interaction ; + family relations, strengthening of ; + loose affiliations ; + neighborhood relations, strengthening of ; + networked public sphere : + loose affiliations ; + norms (social) : + loose affiliations | thickening of preexisting relations ; + peer production : + loose affiliations ; + preexisting relations, thickening of ; + public sphere : + loose affiliations ; + regulation by social norms : + loose affiliations | thickening of preexisting relations ; + scope of loose relationships ; + social relations and norms : + loose affiliations | thickening of preexisting relations ; + supplantation of real-world interaction ; + thickening of preexisting relations +} + +2~ FROM "VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES" TO FEAR OF DISINTEGRATION + +Angst about the fragmentation of organic deep social ties, the gemeinschaft community, the family, is hardly a creature of the Internet. In some form or another, the fear that cities, industrialization, rapid transportation, mass communications, and other accoutrements of modern industrial society are leading to alienation, breakdown of the family, and the disruption of community has been a fixed element of sociology since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Its mirror image--the search for real or imagined, more or less idealized community, "grounded" in preindustrial pastoral memory or postindustrial utopia--was often not far behind. Unsurprisingly, this patterned opposition of fear and yearning was replayed in the context of the Internet, as the transformative effect of this new medium made it a new focal point for both strands of thought. + +In the case of the Internet, the optimists preceded the pessimists. In his now-classic The Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold put it most succinctly in 1993: +={ Rheingold, Howard +2 } + +_1 My direct observations of online behavior around the world over the past ten years have led me to conclude that whenever CMC [computer mediated communications] technology becomes available to people anywhere, they inevitably build virtual communities with it, just as microorganisms inevitably create colonies. I suspect that one of the explanations for this phenomenon is the hunger for community that grows in the breasts of people around the world as more and more informal public spaces disappear from our real lives. I also suspect that these new media attract colonies of enthusiasts because CMC enables people to do things with each other in new ways, and to do altogether new kinds of things-- just as telegraphs, telephones, and televisions did. + +/{The Virtual Community}/ was grounded on Rheingold's own experience in the WELL (Whole Earth `Lectronic Link). The WELL was one the earliest well-developed instances of large-scale social interaction among people who started out as strangers but came to see themselves as a community. Its members eventually began to organize meetings in real space to strengthen ,{[pg 359]}, the bonds, while mostly continuing their interaction through computermediated communications. Note the structure of Rheingold's claim in this early passage. There is a hunger for community, no longer satisfied by the declining availability of physical spaces for human connection. There is a newly available medium that allows people to connect despite their physical distance. This new opportunity inevitably and automatically brings people to use its affordances--the behaviors it makes possible--to fulfill their need for human connection. Over and above this, the new medium offers new ways of communicating and new ways of doing things together, thereby enhancing what was previously possible. Others followed Rheingold over the course of the 1990s in many and various ways. The basic structure of the claim about the potential of cyberspace to forge a new domain for human connection, one that overcomes the limitations that industrial mass-mediated society places on community, was oft repeated. The basic observation that the Internet permits the emergence of new relationships that play a significant role in their participants' lives and are anchored in online communications continues to be made. As discussed below, however, much of the research suggests that the new online relationships develop in addition to, rather than instead of, physical face-to-face human interaction in community and family--which turns out to be alive and well. +={ WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) } + +It was not long before a very different set of claims emerged about the Internet. Rather than a solution to the problems that industrial society creates for family and society, the Internet was seen as increasing alienation by absorbing its users. It made them unavailable to spend time with their families. It immersed them in diversions from the real world with its real relationships. In a social-relations version of the Babel objection, it was seen as narrowing the set of shared cultural experiences to such an extent that people, for lack of a common sitcom or news show to talk about, become increasingly alienated from each other. One strand of this type of criticism questioned the value of online relationships themselves as plausible replacements for real-world human connection. Sherry Turkle, the most important early explorer of virtual identity, characterized this concern as: "is it really sensible to suggest that the way to revitalize community is to sit alone in our rooms, typing at our networked computers and filling our lives with virtual friends?"~{ Sherry Turkle, "Virtuality and Its Discontents, Searching for Community in Cyberspace," The American Prospect 7, no. 24 (1996); Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). }~ Instead of investing themselves with real relationships, risking real exposure and connection, people engage in limited-purpose, lowintensity relationships. If it doesn't work out, they can always sign off, and no harm done. ,{[pg 360]}, +={ alienation +2 ; + depression +2 ; + friendships, virtual +2 ; + isolation +2 ; + loneliness +2 +} + +Another strand of criticism focused less on the thinness, not to say vacuity, of online relations, and more on sheer time. According to this argument, the time and effort spent on the Net came at the expense of time spent with family and friends. Prominent and oft cited in this vein were two early studies. The first, entitled Internet Paradox, was led by Robert Kraut.~{ Robert Kraut et al., "Internet Paradox, A Social Technology that Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well Being," American Psychologist 53 (1998): 1017? 1031. }~ It was the first longitudinal study of a substantial number of users--169 users in the first year or two of their Internet use. Kraut and his collaborators found a slight, but statistically significant, correlation between increases in Internet use and (a) decreases in family communication, (b) decreases in the size of social circle, both near and far, and (c) an increase in depression and loneliness. The researchers hypothesized that use of the Internet replaces strong ties with weak ties. They ideal-typed these communications as exchanging knitting tips with participants in a knitting Listserv, or jokes with someone you would meet on a tourist information site. These trivialities, they thought, came to fill time that, in the absence of the Internet, would be spent with people with whom one has stronger ties. From a communications theory perspective, this causal explanation was more sophisticated than the more widely claimed assimilation of the Internet and television--that a computer monitor is simply one more screen to take away from the time one has to talk to real human beings.~{ A fairly typical statement of this view, quoted in a study commissioned by the Kellogg Foundation, was: "TV or other media, such as computers, are no longer a kind of `electronic hearth,' where a family will gather around and make decisions or have discussions. My position, based on our most recent studies, is that most media in the home are working against bringing families together." Christopher Lee et al., "Evaluating Information and Communications Technology: Perspective for a Balanced Approach," Report to the Kellogg Foundation (December 17, 2001), http:// www.si.umich.edu/pne/kellogg/013.html. }~ It recognized that using the Internet is fundamentally different from watching TV. It allows users to communicate with each other, rather than, like television, encouraging passive reception in a kind of "parallel play." Using a distinction between strong ties and weak ties, introduced by Mark Granovetter in what later became the social capital literature, these researchers suggested that the kind of human contact that was built around online interactions was thinner and less meaningful, so that the time spent on these relationships, on balance, weakened one's stock of social relations. +={ Granovetter, Mark ; + Kraut, Robert ; + contact, online vs. physical +1 ; + human contact, online vs. physical +1 ; + physical contact, diminishment of +1 ; + value of online contact ; + vacuity of online relations ; + thinness of online relations ; + weak ties of online relations ; + television : + Internet use vs. +1 ; + social capital +1 +} + +A second, more sensationalist release of a study followed two years later. In 2000, the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society's "preliminary report" on Internet and society, more of a press release than a report, emphasized the finding that "the more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings."~{ Norman H. Nie and Lutz Ebring, "Internet and Society, A Preliminary Report," Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, February 17, 2000, 15 (Press Release), http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/bctf/Stanford_Report.pdf. }~ The actual results were somewhat less stark than the widely reported press release. As among all Internet users, only slightly more than 8 percent reported spending less time with family; 6 percent reported spending more time with family, and 86 percent spent about the same amount of time. Similarly, 9 percent reported spending less time with friends, 4 percent spent more time, and 87 percent spent the ,{[pg 361]}, same amount of time.~{ Ibid., 42-43, tables CH-WFAM, CH-WFRN. }~ The press release probably should not have read, "social isolation increases," but instead, "Internet seems to have indeterminate, but in any event small, effects on our interaction with family and friends"--hardly the stuff of front-page news coverage.~{ See John Markoff and A. Newer, "Lonelier Crowd Emerges in Internet Study," New York Times, February 16, 2000, section A, page 1, column 1. }~ The strongest result supporting the "isolation" thesis in that study was that 27 percent of respondents who were heavy Internet users reported spending less time on the phone with friends and family. The study did not ask whether they used email instead of the phone to keep in touch with these family and friends, and whether they thought they had more or less of a connection with these friends and family as a result. Instead, as the author reported in his press release, "E-mail is a way to stay in touch, but you can't share coffee or beer with somebody on e-mail, or give them a hug" (as opposed, one supposes, to the common practice of phone hugs).~{ Nie and Ebring, "Internet and Society," 19. }~ As Amitai Etzioni noted in his biting critique of that study, the truly significant findings were that Internet users spent less time watching television and shopping. Forty-seven percent of those surveyed said that they watched less television than they used to, and that number reached 65 percent for heavy users and 27 percent for light users. Only 3 percent of those surveyed said they watched more TV. Nineteen percent of all respondents and 25 percent of those who used the Internet more than five hours a week said they shopped less in stores, while only 3 percent said they shopped more in stores. The study did not explore how people were using the time they freed by watching less television and shopping less in physical stores. It did not ask whether they used any of this newfound time to increase and strengthen their social and kin ties.~{ Amitai Etzioni, "Debating the Societal Effects of the Internet: Connecting with the World," Public Perspective 11 (May/June 2000): 42, also available at http:// www.gwu.edu/ ccps/etzioni/A273.html. }~ + +2~ A MORE POSITIVE PICTURE EMERGES OVER TIME +={ social capital +13 } + +The concerns represented by these early studies of the effects of Internet use on community and family seem to fall into two basic bins. The first is that sustained, more or less intimate human relations are critical to well-functioning human beings as a matter of psychological need. The claims that Internet use is associated with greater loneliness and depression map well onto the fears that human connection ground into a thin gruel of electronic bits simply will not give people the kind of human connectedness they need as social beings. The second bin of concerns falls largely within the "social capital" literature, and, like that literature itself, can be divided largely into two main subcategories. The first, following James Coleman and Mark Granovetter, focuses on the ,{[pg 362]}, economic function of social ties and the ways in which people who have social capital can be materially better off than people who lack it. The second, exemplified by Robert Putnam's work, focuses on the political aspects of engaged societies, and on the ways in which communities with high social capital--defined as social relations with people in local, stable, face-to-face interactions--will lead to better results in terms of political participation and the provisioning of local public goods, like education and community policing. For this literature, the shape of social ties, their relative strength, and who is connected to whom become more prominent features. +={ Coleman, James ; + Granovetter, Mark ; + Putnum, Robert +} + +There are, roughly speaking, two types of responses to these concerns. The first is empirical. In order for these concerns to be valid as applied to increasing use of Internet communications, it must be the case that Internet communications, with all of their inadequacies, come to supplant real-world human interactions, rather than simply to supplement them. Unless Internet connections actually displace direct, unmediated, human contact, there is no basis to think that using the Internet will lead to a decline in those nourishing connections we need psychologically, or in the useful connections we make socially, that are based on direct human contact with friends, family, and neighbors. The second response is theoretical. It challenges the notion that the socially embedded individual is a fixed entity with unchanging needs that are, or are not, fulfilled by changing social conditions and relations. Instead, it suggests that the "nature" of individuals changes over time, based on actual social practices and expectations. In this case, we are seeing a shift from individuals who depend on social relations that are dominated by locally embedded, thick, unmediated, given, and stable relations, into networked individuals--who are more dependent on their own combination of strong and weak ties, who switch networks, cross boundaries, and weave their own web of more or less instrumental, relatively fluid relationships. Manuel Castells calls this the "networked society,"~{ Manuel Castells, The Rise of Networked Society 2d ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000). }~ Barry Wellman, "networked individualism."~{ Barry Wellman et al., "The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism," Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 8, no. 3 (April 2003). }~ To simplify vastly, it is not that people cease to depend on others and their context for both psychological and social wellbeing and efficacy. It is that the kinds of connections that we come to rely on for these basic human needs change over time. Comparisons of current practices to the old ways of achieving the desiderata of community, and fears regarding the loss of community, are more a form of nostalgia than a diagnosis of present social malaise. ,{[pg 363]}, +={ Castells, Manuel ; + Wellman, Barry ; + displacement of real-world interaction +5 ; + family relations, strengthening of +5 ; + loose affiliations ; + neighborhood relations, strengthening of +5 ; + networked public sphere : + loose affiliations ; + norms (social) : + loose affiliations ; + peer production : + loose affiliations ; + public sphere : + loose affiliations ; + regulation by social norms : + loose affiliations ; + social relations and norms : + loose affiliations ; + supplantation of real-world interaction +5 ; + thickening of preexisting relations +5 +} + +3~ Users Increase Their Connections with Preexisting Relations +={ e-mail : + thickening of preexisting relations +4 ; + social capital : + thickening of preexisting relations +4 +} + +The most basic response to the concerns over the decline of community and its implications for both the psychological and the social capital strands is the empirical one. Relations with one's local geographic community and with one's intimate friends and family do not seem to be substantially affected by Internet use. To the extent that these relationships are affected, the effect is positive. Kraut and his collaborators continued their study, for example, and followed up with their study subjects for an additional three years. They found that the negative effects they had reported in the first year or two dissipated over the total period of observation.~{ Robert Kraut et al., "Internet Paradox Revisited," Journal of Social Issues 58, no. 1 (2002): 49. }~ Their basic hypothesis that the Internet probably strengthened weak ties, however, is consistent with other research and theoretical work. One of the earliest systematic studies of high-speed Internet access and its effects on communities in this vein was by Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman.~{ Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman, "Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb," City & Community 2, no. 4 (December 2003): 277. }~ They studied the aptly named Toronto suburb Netville, where homes had high-speed wiring years before broadband access began to be adopted widely in North America. One of their most powerful findings was that people who were connected recognized three times as many of their neighbors by name and regularly talked with twice as many as those who were not wired. On the other hand, however, stronger ties--indicated by actually visiting neighbors, as opposed to just knowing their name or stopping to say good morning--were associated with how long a person had lived in the neighborhood, not with whether or not they were wired. In other words, weak ties of the sort of knowing another's name or stopping to chat with them were significantly strengthened by Internet connection, even within a geographic neighborhood. Stronger ties were not. Using applications like a local e-mail list and personal e-mails, wired residents communicated with others in their neighborhood much more often than did nonwired residents. Moreover, wired residents recognized the names of people in a wider radius from their homes, while nonwired residents tended to know only people within their block, or even a few homes on each side. However, again, stronger social ties, like visiting and talking face-to-face, tended to be concentrated among physically proximate neighbors. Other studies also observed this increase of weak ties in a neighborhood with individuals who are more geographically distant than one's own immediate street or block.~{ Gustavo S. Mesch and Yael Levanon, "Community Networking and Locally-Based Social Ties in Two Suburban Localities," City & Community 2, no. 4 (December 2003): 335. }~ Perhaps the most visible aspect of the social capital implications of a well-wired geographic community was the finding that ,{[pg 364]}, +={ Hampton, Keith ; + Kraut, Robert ; + Wellman, Barry ; + weak ties of online relations +} + +wired neighbors began to sit on their front porches, instead of in their backyard, thereby providing live social reinforcement of community through daily brief greetings, as well as creating a socially enforced community policing mechanism. + +We now have quite a bit of social science research on the side of a number of factual propositions.~{ Useful surveys include: Paul DiMaggio et al., "Social Implications of the Internet," Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 307-336; Robyn B. Driskell and Larry Lyon, "Are Virtual Communities True Communities? Examining the Environments and Elements of Community," City & Community 1, no. 4 (December 2002): 349; James E. Katz and Ronald E. Rice, Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, Interaction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). }~ Human beings, whether connected to the Internet or not, continue to communicate preferentially with people who are geographically proximate than with those who are distant.~{ Barry Wellman, "Computer Networks as Social Networks," Science 293, issue 5537 (September 2001): 2031. }~ Nevertheless, people who are connected to the Internet communicate more with people who are geographically distant without decreasing the number of local connections. While the total number of connections continues to be greatest with proximate family members, friends, coworkers, and neighbors, the Internet's greatest effect is in improving the ability of individuals to add to these proximate relationships new and better-connected relationships with people who are geographically distant. This includes keeping more in touch with friends and relatives who live far away, and creating new weak-tie relationships around communities of interest and practice. To the extent that survey data are reliable, the most comprehensive and updated surveys support these observations. It now seems clear that Internet users "buy" their time to use the Internet by watching less television, and that the more Internet experience they have, the less they watch TV. People who use the Internet claim to have increased the number of people they stay in touch with, while mostly reporting no effect on time they spend with their family.~{ Jeffery I. Cole et al., "The UCLA Internet Report: Surveying the Digital Future, Year Three" (UCLA Center for Communication Policy, January 2003), 33, 55, 62, http:// www.ccp.ucla.edu/pdf/UCLA-Internet-Report-Year-Three.pdf. }~ +={ television : + Internet use vs. +} + +Connections with family and friends seemed to be thickened by the new channels of communication, rather than supplanted by them. Emblematic of this were recent results of a survey conducted by the Pew project on "Internet and American Life" on Holidays Online. Almost half of respondents surveyed reported using e-mail to organize holiday activities with family (48 percent) and friends (46 percent), 27 percent reported sending or receiving holiday greetings, and while a third described themselves as shopping online in order to save money, 51 percent said they went online to find an unusual or hard-to-find gift. In other words, half of those who used the Internet for holiday shopping did so in order to personalize their gift further, rather than simply to take advantage of the most obvious use of e-commerce--price comparison and time savings. Further support for this position is offered in another Pew study, entitled "Internet and Daily Life." In that survey, the two most common uses--both of which respondents claimed they did more of because of the Net than they otherwise would have--were connecting ,{[pg 365]}, with family and friends and looking up information.~{ Pew Internet and Daily Life Project (August 11, 2004), report available at http:// www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/131/report_display.asp. }~ Further evidence that the Internet is used to strengthen and service preexisting relations, rather than create new ones, is the fact that 79 percent of those who use the Internet at all do so to communicate with friends and family, while only 26 percent use the Internet to meet new people or to arrange dates. Another point of evidence is the use of instant messaging (IM). IM is a synchronous communications medium that requires its users to set time aside to respond and provides information to those who wish to communicate with an individual about whether that person is or is not available at any given moment. Because it is so demanding, IM is preferentially useful for communicating with individuals with whom one already has a preexisting relationship. This preferential use for strengthening preexisting relations is also indicated by the fact that two-thirds of IM users report using IM with no more than five others, while only one in ten users reports instant messaging with more than ten people. A recent Pew study of instant messaging shows that 53 million adults--42 percent of Internet users in the United States--trade IM messages. Forty percent use IM to contact coworkers, one-third family, and 21 percent use it to communicate equally with both. Men and women IM in equal proportions, but women IM more than men do, averaging 433 minutes per month as compared to 366 minutes, respectively, and households with children IM more than households without children. +={ Pew studies ; + instant messaging ; + text messaging +} + +These studies are surveys and local case studies. They cannot offer a knockdown argument about how "we"--everyone, everywhere--are using the Internet. The same technology likely has different effects when it is introduced into cultures that differ from each other in their pre-Internet baseline.~{ See Barry Wellman, "The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism," Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 8, no. 3 (April 2003); Gustavo S. Mesch and Yael Levanon, "Community Networking and Locally-Based Social Ties in Two Suburban Localities, City & Community 2, no. 4 (December 2003): 335. }~ Despite these cautions, these studies do offer the best evidence we have about Internet use patterns. As best we can tell from contemporary social science, Internet use increases the contact that people have with others who traditionally have been seen as forming a person's "community": family, friends, and neighbors. Moreover, the Internet is also used as a platform for forging new relationships, in addition to those that are preexisting. These relationships are more limited in nature than ties to friends and family. They are detached from spatial constraints, and even time synchronicity; they are usually interest or practice based, and therefore play a more limited role in people's lives than the more demanding and encompassing relationships with family or intimate friends. Each discrete connection or cluster of connections that forms a social network, or a network of social relations, plays some role, but not a definitive one, in each participant's life. There is little disagreement ,{[pg 366]}, among researchers that these kinds of weak ties or limited-liability social relationships are easier to create on the Internet, and that we see some increase in their prevalence among Internet users. The primary disagreement is interpretive--in other words, is it, on balance, a good thing that we have multiple, overlapping, limited emotional liability relationships, or does it, in fact, undermine our socially embedded being? + +2~ Networked Individuals +={ loose affiliations +4 ; + networked public sphere : + loose affiliations +4 ; + norms (social) : + loose affiliations +4 | working with social expectations +4 ; + peer production : + loose affiliations +4 ; + public sphere : + loose affiliations +4 ; + regulation by social norms : + loose affiliations +4 | working with social expectations +4 ; + social capital : + networked society +4 ; + social relations and norms : + loose affiliations +4 | working with social expectations +4 +} + +The interpretive argument about the normative value of the increase in weak ties is colored by the empirical finding that the time spent on the Internet in these limited relationships does not come at the expense of the number of communications with preexisting, real-world relationships. Given our current state of sociological knowledge, the normative question cannot be whether online relations are a reasonable replacement for real-world friendship. Instead, it must be how we understand the effect of the interaction between an increasingly thickened network of communications with preexisting relations and the casting of a broader net that captures many more, and more varied, relations. What is emerging in the work of sociologists is a framework that sees the networked society or the networked individual as entailing an abundance of social connections and more effectively deployed attention. The concern with the decline of community conceives of a scarcity of forms of stable, nurturing, embedding relations, which are mostly fixed over the life of an individual and depend on long-standing and interdependent relations in stable groups, often with hierarchical relations. What we now see emerging is a diversity of forms of attachment and an abundance of connections that enable individuals to attain discrete components of the package of desiderata that "community" has come to stand for in sociology. As Wellman puts it: "Communities and societies have been changing towards networked societies where boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse others, linkages switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies are flatter and more recursive. . . . Their work and community networks are diffuse, sparsely knit, with vague, overlapping, social and spatial boundaries."~{ Barry Wellman, "The Social Affordances of the Internet." }~ In this context, the range and diversity of network connections beyond the traditional family, friends, stable coworkers, or village becomes a source of dynamic stability, rather than tension and disconnect. +={ Wellman, Barry } + +The emergence of networked individuals is not, however, a mere overlay, "floating" on top of thickened preexisting social relations without touching them except to add more relations. The interpolation of new networked ,{[pg 367]}, connections, and the individual's role in weaving those for him- or herself, allows individuals to reorganize their social relations in ways that fit them better. They can use their network connections to loosen social bonds that are too hierarchical and stifling, while filling in the gaps where their realworld relations seem lacking. Nowhere is this interpolation clearer than in Mizuko Ito's work on the use of mobile phones, primarily for text messaging and e-mail, among Japanese teenagers.~{ A review of Ito's own work and that of other scholars of Japanese techno-youth culture is Mizuko Ito, "Mobile Phones, Japanese Youth, and the Re-Placement of Social Contact," forthcoming in Mobile Communications: Re-negotiation of the Social Sphere, ed., Rich Ling and P. Pedersen (New York: Springer, 2005). }~ Japanese urban teenagers generally live in tighter physical quarters than their American or European counterparts, and within quite strict social structures of hierarchy and respect. Ito and others have documented how these teenagers use mobile phones--primarily as platforms for text messages--that is, as a mobile cross between email and instant messaging and more recently images, to loosen the constraints under which they live. They text at home and in the classroom, making connections to meet in the city and be together, and otherwise succeed in constructing a network of time- and space-bending emotional connections with their friends, without--and this is the critical observation--breaking the social molds they otherwise occupy. They continue to spend time in their home, with their family. They continue to show respect and play the role of child at home and at school. However, they interpolate that role and those relations with a sub-rosa network of connections that fulfill otherwise suppressed emotional needs and ties. +={ text messaging ; + mobile phones +} + +The phenomenon is not limited to youths, but is applicable more generally to the capacity of users to rely on their networked connections to escape or moderate some of the more constraining effects of their stable social connections. In the United States, a now iconic case--mostly described in terms of privacy--was that of U.S. Navy sailor Timothy McVeigh (not the Oklahoma bomber). McVeigh was discharged from the navy when his superiors found out that he was gay by accessing his AOL (America Online) account. The case was primarily considered in terms of McVeigh's e-mail account privacy. It settled for an undisclosed sum, and McVeigh retired from the navy with benefits. However, what is important for us here is not the "individual rights" category under which the case was fought, but the practice that it revealed. Here was an eighteen-year veteran of the navy who used the space-time breaking possibilities of networked communications to loosen one of the most constraining attributes imaginable of the hierarchical framework that he nonetheless chose to be part of--the U.S. Navy. It would be odd to think that the navy did not provide McVeigh with a sense of identity and camaraderie that closely knit communities provide their ,{[pg 368]}, members. Yet at the same time, it also stifled his ability to live one of the most basic of all human ties--his sexual identity. He used the network and its potential for anonymous and pseudonymous existence to coexist between these two social structures. +={ McVeigh, Timothy (sailor) } + +% book index reference to Shirky, Clay on page 368, not found + +At the other end of the spectrum of social ties, we see new platforms emerging to generate the kinds of bridging relations that were so central to the identification of "weak ties" in social capital literature. Weak ties are described in the social capital literature as allowing people to transmit information across social networks about available opportunities and resources, as well as provide at least a limited form of vouching for others--as one introduces a friend to a friend of a friend. What we are seeing on the Net is an increase in the platforms developed to allow people to create these kinds of weak ties based on an interest or practice. Perhaps clearest of these is Meetup.com. Meetup is a Web site that allows users to search for others who share an interest and who are locally available to meet face-to-face. The search results show users what meetings are occurring within their requested area and interest. The groups then meet periodically, and those who sign up for them also are able to provide a profile and photo of themselves, to facilitate and sustain the real-world group meetings. The power of this platform is that it is not intended as a replacement for real-space meetings. It is intended as a replacement for the happenstance of social networks as they transmit information about opportunities for interest- and practice-based social relations. The vouching function, on the other hand, seems to have more mixed efficacy, as Dana Boyd's ethnography of Friendster suggests.~{ Dana M. Boyd, "Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking," Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems (CHI 2004) (Vienna: ACM, April 24-29, 2004). }~ Friendster was started as a dating Web site. It was built on the assumption that dating a friend of a friend of a friend is safer and more likely to be successful than dating someone based on a similar profile, located on a general dating site like match.com--in other words, that vouching as friends provides valuable information. As Boyd shows, however, the attempt of Friendster to articulate and render transparent the social networks of its users met with less than perfect success. The platform only permits users to designate friend/not friend, without the finer granularity enabled by a face-toface conversation about someone, where one can answer or anticipate the question, "just how well do you know this person?" with a variety of means, from tone to express reservations. On Friendster, it seems that people cast broader networks, and for fear of offending or alienating others, include many more "friendsters" than they actually have "friends." The result is a weak platform for mapping general connections, rather than a genuine articulation ,{[pg 369]}, of vouching through social networks. Nonetheless, it does provide a visible rendering of at least the thinnest of weak ties, and strengthens their effect in this regard. It enables very weak ties to perform some of the roles of real-world weak social ties. +={ Boyd, Dana ; + bridging social relationships ; + Friendster ; + Meetup.com site ; + vouching for others, network of +} + +2~ THE INTERNET AS A PLATFORM FOR HUMAN CONNECTION +={ Internet : + as platform for human connection +4 ; + norms (social) : + Internet as platform for +4 ; + regulation by social norms : + Internet as platform for +4 ; + social relations and norms : + Internet as platform for +4 +} + +Communication is constitutive of social relations. We cannot have relationships except by communicating with others. Different communications media differ from each other--in who gets to speak to whom and in what can be said. These differences structure the social relations that rely on these various modes of communication so that they differ from each other in significant ways. Technological determinism is not required to accept this. Some aspects of the difference are purely technical. Script allows text and more or less crude images to be transmitted at a distance, but not voice, touch, smell, or taste. To the extent that there are human emotions, modes of submission and exertion of authority, irony, love or affection, or information that is easily encoded and conveyed in face-to-face communications but not in script, script-based communications are a poor substitute for presence. A long and romantic tradition of love letters and poems notwithstanding, there is a certain thinness to that mode in the hands of all but the most gifted writers relative to the fleshiness of unmediated love. Some aspects of the difference among media of communication are not necessarily technical, but are rather culturally or organizationally embedded. Television can transmit text. However, text distribution is not television's relative advantage in a sociocultural environment that already has mass-circulation print media, and in a technical context where the resolution of television images is relatively low. As a matter of cultural and business practice, therefore, from its inception, television emphasized moving images and sound, not text transmission. Radio could have been deployed as short-range, point-to-point personal communications systems, giving us a nation of walkie-talkies. However, as chapter 6 described, doing so would have required a very different set of regulatory and business decisions between 1919 and 1927. Communications media take on certain social roles, structures of control, and emphases of style that combine their technical capacities and limits with the sociocultural business context into which they were introduced, and through which they developed. The result is a cluster of use characteristics that define how a ,{[pg 370]}, given medium is used within a given society, in a given historical context. They make media differ from each other, providing platforms with very different capacities and emphases for their users. +={ radio : + as platform for human connection +1 ; + text distribution as platform for human connection +1 ; + written communications as platform for human connection +1 +} + +As a technical and organizational matter, the Internet allows for a radically more diverse suite of communications models than any of the twentiethcentury systems permitted. It allows for textual, aural, and visual communications. It permits spatial and temporal asynchronicity, as in the case of email or Web pages, but also enables temporal synchronicity--as in the case of IM, online game environments, or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). It can even be used for subchannel communications within a spatially synchronous context, such as in a meeting where people pass electronic notes to each other by e-mail or IM. Because it is still highly textual, it requires more direct attention than radio, but like print, it is highly multiplexable-- both between uses of the Internet and other media, and among Internet uses themselves. Similar to print media, you can pick your head up from the paper, make a comment, and get back to reading. Much more richly, one can be on a voice over IP conversation and e-mail at the same time, or read news interlaced with receiving and responding to e-mail. It offers oneto-one, one-to-few, few-to-few, one-to-many, and many-to-many communications capabilities, more diverse in this regard than any medium for social communication that preceded it, including--on the dimensions of distance, asynchronicity, and many-to-many capabilities--even that richest of media: face-to-face communications. + +Because of its technical flexibility and the "business model" of Internet service providers as primarily carriers, the Internet lends itself to being used for a wide range of social relations. Nothing in "the nature of the technology" requires that it be the basis of rich social relations, rather than becoming, as some predicted in the early 1990s, a "celestial jukebox" for the mass distribution of prepackaged content to passive end points. In contradistinction to the dominant remote communications technologies of the twentieth century, however, the Internet offers some new easy ways to communicate that foster both of the types of social communication that the social science literature seems to be observing. Namely, it makes it easy to increase the number of communications with preexisting friends and family, and increases communication with geographically distant or more loosely affiliated others. Print, radio, television, film, and sound recording all operated largely on a one-to-many model. They did not, given the economics of production and transmission, provide a usable means of remote communication for individuals ,{[pg 371]}, at the edges of these communication media. Television, film, sound recording, and print industries were simply too expensive, and their business organization was too focused on selling broadcast-model communications, to support significant individual communication. When cassette tapes were introduced, we might have seen people recording a tape instead of writing a letter to friends or family. However, this was relatively cumbersome, low quality, and time consuming. Telephones were the primary means of communications used by individuals, and they indeed became the primary form of mediated personal social communications. However, telephone conversations require synchronicity, which means that they can only be used for socializing purposes when both parties have time. They were also only usable throughout this period for serial, one-to-one conversations. Moreover, for most of the twentieth century, a long-distance call was a very expensive proposition for most nonbusiness users, and outside of the United States, local calls too carried nontrivial time-sensitive prices in most places. Telephones were therefore a reasonable medium for social relations with preexisting friends and family. However, their utility dropped off radically with the cost of communication, which was at a minimum associated with geographic distance. In all these dimensions, the Internet makes it easier and cheaper to communicate with family and friends, at close proximity or over great distances, through the barriers of busy schedules and differing time zones. Moreover, because of the relatively low-impact nature of these communications, the Internet allows people to experiment with looser relations more readily. In other words, the Internet does not make us more social beings. It simply offers more degrees of freedom for each of us to design our own communications space than were available in the past. It could have been that we would have used that design flexibility to re-create the massmedia model. But to predict that it would be used in this fashion requires a cramped view of human desire and connectedness. It was much more likely that, given the freedom to design our own communications environment flexibly and to tailor it to our own individual needs dynamically over time, we would create a system that lets us strengthen the ties that are most important to us. It was perhaps less predictable, but unsurprising after the fact, that this freedom would also be used to explore a wider range of relations than simply consuming finished media goods. +={ telephone, as platform for human connection } + +There is an appropriate wariness in contemporary academic commentary about falling into the trap of "the mythos of the electrical sublime" by adopting a form of Internet utopianism.~{ James W. Carrey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). }~ It is important, however, not to ,{[pg 372]}, let this caution blind us to the facts about Internet use, and the technical, business, and cultural capabilities that the Internet makes feasible. The cluster of technologies of computation and communications that characterize the Internet today are, in fact, used in functionally different ways, and make for several different media of communication than we had in the twentieth century. The single technical platform might best be understood to enable several different "media"--in the sense of clusters of technical-socialeconomic practices of communication--and the number of these enabled media is growing. Instant messaging came many years after e-mail, and a few years after Web pages. Blogging one's daily journal on LiveJournal so that a group of intimates can check in on one's life as it unfolds was not a medium that was available to users until even more recently. The Internet is still providing its users with new ways to communicate with each other, and these represent a genuinely wide range of new capabilities. It is therefore unsurprising that connected social beings, such as we are, will take advantage of these new capabilities to form connections that were practically infeasible in the past. This is not media determinism. This is not millenarian utopianism. It is a simple observation. People do what they can, not what they cannot. In the daily humdrum of their lives, individuals do more of what is easier to do than what requires great exertion. When a new medium makes it easy for people to do new things, they may well, in fact, do them. And when these new things are systematically more user-centric, dialogic, flexible in terms of the temporal and spatial synchronicity they require or enable, and multiplexable, people will communicate with each other in ways and amounts that they could not before. + +2~ THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE +={ behavior : + enforced with social software +4 ; + blogs : + as social software +4 ; + collaborative authorship : + social software +4 ; + norms (social) : + enforced norms with software +4 | software for, emergence of +4 ; + regulation by social norms : + enforced norms with software +4 | software for, emergence of +4 ; + social relations and norms : + enforced norms with software +4 | software for, emergence of +4 ; + social software +4 ; + software : + social +4 ; + technology : + social software +4 ; + Wikis as social software +4 +} + +The design of the Internet itself is agnostic as among the social structures and relations it enables. At its technical core is a commitment to push all the detailed instantiations of human communications to the edges of the network--to the applications that run on the computers of users. This technical agnosticism leads to a social agnosticism. The possibility of large-scale sharing and cooperation practices, of medium-scale platforms for collaboration and discussion, and of small-scale, one-to-one communications has led to the development of a wide range of software designs and applications to facilitate different types of communications. The World Wide Web was used initially as a global broadcast medium available to anyone and everyone, ,{[pg 373]}, everywhere. In e-mail, we see a medium available for one-to-one, few-tofew, one-to-many and, to a lesser extent, many-to-many use. One of the more interesting phenomena of the past few years is the emergence of what is beginning to be called "social software." As a new design space, it is concerned with groups that are, as defined by Clay Shirky, who first articulated the concept, "Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group." The definition of the term is somewhat amorphous, but the basic concept is software whose design characteristic is that it treats genuine social phenomena as different from one-to-one or one-to-many communications. It seeks to build one's expectations about the social interactions that the software will facilitate into the design of the platform. The design imperative was most clearly articulated by Shirky when he wrote that from the perspective of the software designer, the user of social software is the group, not the individual.~{ Clay Shirky, "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy," published first in Networks, Economics and Culture mailing list July 1, 2003. }~ +={ Shirky, Clay } + +A simple example will help to illustrate. Take any given site that uses a collaborative authorship tool, like the Wiki that is the basis of /{Wikipedia}/ and many other cooperative authorship exercises. From the perspective of an individual user, the ease of posting a comment on the Wiki, and the ease of erasing one's own comments from it, would be important characteristics: The fewer registration and sign-in procedures, the better. Not so from the perspective of the group. The group requires some "stickiness" to make the group as a group, and the project as a project, avoid the rending forces of individualism and self-reference. So, for example, design components that require registration for posting, or give users different rights to post and erase comments over time, depending on whether they are logged in or not, or depending on a record of their past cooperative or uncooperative behavior, are a burden for the individual user. However, that is precisely their point. They are intended to give those users with a greater stake in the common enterprise a slight, or sometimes large, edge in maintaining the group's cohesion. Similarly, erasing past comments may be useful for the individual, for example, if they were silly or untempered. Keeping the comments there is, however, useful to the group--as a source of experience about the individual or part of the group's collective memory about mistakes made in the past that should not be repeated by someone else. Again, the needs of the group as a group often differ from those of the individual participant. Thinking of the platform as social software entails designing it with characteristics ,{[pg 374]}, that have a certain social-science or psychological model of the interactions of a group, and building the platform's affordances in order to enhance the survivability and efficacy of the group, even if it sometimes comes at the expense of the individual user's ease of use or comfort. + +This emergence of social software--like blogs with opportunities to comment, Wikis, as well as social-norm-mediated Listservs or uses of the "cc" line in e-mail--underscores the nondeterministic nature of the claim about the relationship between the Internet and social relations. The Internet makes possible all sorts of human communications that were not technically feasible before its widespread adoption. Within this wide range of newly feasible communications patterns, we are beginning to see the emergence of different types of relationships--some positive, some, like spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail), decidedly negative. In seeking to predict and diagnose the relationship between the increasing use of Internet communications and the shape of social relations, we see that the newly emerging constructive social possibilities are leading to new design challenges. These, in turn, are finding engineers and enthusiasts willing and able to design for them. The genuinely new capability--connecting among few and many at a distance in a dialogic, recursive form--is leading to the emergence of new design problems. These problems come from the fact that the new social settings come with their own social dynamics, but without long-standing structures of mediation and constructive ordering. Hence the early infamy of the tendency of Usenet and Listservs discussions to deteriorate into destructive flame wars. As social habits of using these kinds of media mature, so that users already know that letting loose on a list will likely result in a flame war and will kill the conversation, and as designers understand that social dynamics--including both those that allow people to form and sustain groups and those that rend them apart with equal if not greater force--we are seeing the coevolution of social norms and platform designs that are intended to give play to the former, and mediate or moderate the latter. These platforms are less likely to matter for sustaining the group in preexisting relations--as among friends or family. The structuring of those relationships is dominated by social norms. However, they do offer a new form and a stabilizing context for the newly emerging diverse set of social relations--at a distance, across interests and contexts--that typify both peer production and many forms of social interaction aimed purely at social reproduction. +={ peer production : + as platform for human connection +1 +} + +The peer-production processes that are described in primarily economic ,{[pg 375]}, terms in chapter 3--like free software development, /{Wikipedia}/, or the Open Directory Project--represent one cluster of important instances of this new form of social relations. They offer a type of relationship that is nonhierarchical and organized in a radically decentralized pattern. Their social valence is given by some combination of the shared experience of joint creativity they enable, as well as their efficacy--their ability to give their users a sense of common purpose and mutual support in achieving it. Individuals adopt projects and purposes they consider worth pursuing. Through these projects they find others, with whom they initially share only a general sense of human connectedness and common practical interest, but with whom they then interact in ways that allow the relationship to thicken over time. Nowhere is this process clearer than on the community pages of /{Wikipedia}/. Because of the limited degree to which that platform uses technical means to constrain destructive behavior, the common enterprise has developed practices of user-to-user communication, multiuser mediation, and userappointed mediation to resolve disputes and disagreements. Through their involvement in these, users increase their participation, their familiarity with other participants--at least in this limited role as coauthors--and their practices of mutual engagement with these others. In this way, peer production offers a new platform for human connection, bringing together otherwise unconnected individuals and replacing common background or geographic proximity with a sense of well-defined purpose and the successful common pursuit of this purpose as the condensation point for human connection. Individuals who are connected to each other in a peer-production community may or may not be bowling alone when they are off-line, but they are certainly playing together online. + +2~ THE INTERNET AND HUMAN COMMUNITY +={ communities : + human and Internet, together +2 ; + human community, coexisting with Internet +2 ; + Internet : + coexisting with human community +2 ; + norms (social) : + Internet and human coexistence +2 ; + regulation by social norms : + Internet and human coexistence +2 ; + social relations and norms : + Internet and human coexistence +2 +} + +This chapter began with a basic question. While the networked information economy may enhance the autonomy of individuals, does it not also facilitate the breakdown of community? The answer offered here has been partly empirical and partly conceptual. + +Empirically, it seems that the Internet is allowing us to eat our cake and have it too, apparently keeping our (social) figure by cutting down on the social equivalent of deep-fried dough--television. That is, we communicate more, rather than less, with the core constituents of our organic communities--our family and our friends--and we seem, in some places, also to ,{[pg 376]}, be communicating more with our neighbors. We also communicate more with loosely affiliated others, who are geographically remote, and who may share only relatively small slivers of overlapping interests, or for only short periods of life. The proliferation of potential connections creates the social parallel to the Babel objection in the context of autonomy--with all these possible links, will any of them be meaningful? The answer is largely that we do, in fact, employ very strong filtering on our Internet-based social connections in one obvious dimension: We continue to use the newly feasible lines of communication primarily to thicken and strengthen connections with preexisting relationships--family and friends. The clearest indication of this is the parsimony with which most people use instant messaging. The other mechanism we seem to be using to avoid drowning in the noise of potential chitchat with ever-changing strangers is that we tend to find networks of connections that have some stickiness from our perspective. This stickiness could be the efficacy of a cluster of connections in pursuit of a goal one cares about, as in the case of the newly emerging peer-production enterprises. It could be the ways in which the internal social interaction has combined social norms with platform design to offer relatively stable relations with others who share common interests. Users do not amble around in a social equivalent of Brownian motion. They tend to cluster in new social relations, albeit looser and for more limited purposes than the traditional pillars of community. +={ networked public sphere : + see also social relations and norms networked society +1 +} + +The conceptual answer has been that the image of "community" that seeks a facsimile of a distant pastoral village is simply the wrong image of how we interact as social beings. We are a networked society now--networked individuals connected with each other in a mesh of loosely knit, overlapping, flat connections. This does not leave us in a state of anomie. We are welladjusted, networked individuals; well-adjusted socially in ways that those who seek community would value, but in new and different ways. In a substantial departure from the range of feasible communications channels available in the twentieth century, the Internet has begun to offer us new ways of connecting to each other in groups small and large. As we have come to take advantage of these new capabilities, we see social norms and software coevolving to offer new, more stable, and richer contexts for forging new relationships beyond those that in the past have been the focus of our social lives. These do not displace the older relations. They do not mark a fundamental shift in human nature into selfless, community-conscious characters. We continue to be complex beings, radically individual and self-interested ,{[pg 377]}, at the same time that we are entwined with others who form the context out of which we take meaning, and in which we live our lives. However, we now have new scope for interaction with others. We have new opportunities for building sustained limited-purpose relations, weak and intermediate-strength ties that have significant roles in providing us with context, with a source of defining part of our identity, with potential sources for support, and with human companionship. That does not mean that these new relationships will come to displace the centrality of our more immediate relationships. They will, however, offer increasingly attractive supplements as we seek new and diverse ways to embed ourselves in relation to others, to gain efficacy in weaker ties, and to interpolate different social networks in combinations that provide us both stability of context and a greater degree of freedom from the hierarchical and constraining aspects of some of our social relations. ,{[pg 378]}, ,{[pg 379]}, + +:B~ Part Three - Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation + +1~p3 Introduction + +Part I of this book offers a descriptive, progressive account of emerging patterns of nonmarket individual and cooperative social behavior, and an analysis of why these patterns are internally sustainable and increase information economy productivity. Part II combines descriptive and normative analysis to claim that these emerging practices offer defined improvements in autonomy, democratic discourse, cultural creation, and justice. I have noted periodically, however, that the descriptions of emerging social practices and the analysis of their potential by no means imply that these changes will necessarily become stable or provide the benefits I ascribe them. They are not a deterministic consequence of the adoption of networked computers as core tools of information production and exchange. There is no inevitable historical force that drives the technological-economic moment toward an open, diverse, liberal equilibrium. If the transformation I describe actually generalizes and stabilizes, it could lead to substantial redistribution of power and money. The twentieth-century industrial producers of information, culture, and communications--like Hollywood, the recording industry, ,{[pg 380]}, and some of the telecommunications giants--stand to lose much. The winners would be a combination of the widely diffuse population of individuals around the globe and the firms or other toolmakers and platform providers who supply these newly capable individuals with the context for participating in the networked information economy. None of the industrial giants of yore are taking this threat lying down. Technology will not overcome their resistance through an insurmountable progressive impulse of history. The reorganization of production and the advances it can bring in freedom and justice will emerge only as a result of social practices and political actions that successfully resist efforts to regulate the emergence of the networked information economy in order to minimize its impact on the incumbents. + +Since the middle of the 1990s, we have seen intensifying battles over the institutional ecology within which the industrial mode of information production and the newly emerging networked modes compete. Partly, this has been a battle over telecommunications infrastructure regulation. Most important, however, this has meant a battle over "intellectual property" protection, very broadly defined. Building upon and extending a twenty-five-year trend of expansion of copyrights, patents, and similar exclusive rights, the last half-decade of the twentieth century saw expansion of institutional mechanisms for exerting exclusive control in multiple dimensions. The term of copyright was lengthened. Patent rights were extended to cover software and business methods. Trademarks were extended by the Antidilution Act of 1995 to cover entirely new values, which became the basis for liability in the early domain-name trademark disputes. Most important, we saw a move to create new legal tools with which information vendors could hermetically seal access to their materials to an extent never before possible. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibited the creation and use of technologies that would allow users to get at materials whose owners control through encryption. It prohibited even technologies that users can employ to use the materials in ways that the owners have no right to prevent. Today we are seeing efforts to further extend similar technological regulations-- down to the level of regulating hardware to make sure that it complies with design specifications created by the copyright industries. At other layers of the communications environment, we see efforts to expand software patents, to control the architecture of personal computing devices, and to create ever-stronger property rights in physical infrastructure--be it the telephone lines, cable plant, or wireless frequencies. Together, these legislative and judicial ,{[pg 381]}, acts have formed what many have been calling a second enclosure movement: A concerted effort to shape the institutional ecology in order to help proprietary models of information production at the expense of burdening nonmarket, nonproprietary production.~{ For a review of the literature and a substantial contribution to it, see James Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain," Law and Contemporary Problems 66 (Winter-Spring 2003): 33-74. }~ The new enclosure movement is not driven purely by avarice and rent seeking--though it has much of that too. Some of its components are based in well-meaning judicial and regulatory choices that represent a particular conception of innovation and its relationship to exclusive rights. That conception, focused on mass-mediatype content, movies, and music, and on pharmaceutical-style innovation systems, is highly solicitous of the exclusive rights that are the bread and butter of those culturally salient formats. It is also suspicious of, and detrimental to, the forms of nonmarket, commons-based production emerging in the networked information economy. +={ Antidilutation Act of 1995 ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ; + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) ; + proprietary rights : + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) | enclosure movement +1 ; + commercial model of communication : + enclosure movement +1 ; + enclosure movement +1 ; + industrial model of communication : + enclosure movement +1 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + enclosure movement +1 ; + policy : + enclosure movement +1 ; + traditional model of communication : + enclosure movement +1 +} + +% extra ref to antidilutation act added + +This new enclosure movement has been the subject of sustained and diverse academic critique since the mid-1980s.~{ Early versions in the legal literature of the skepticism regarding the growth of exclusive rights were Ralph Brown's work on trademarks, Benjamin Kaplan's caution over the gathering storm that would become the Copyright Act of 1976, and Stephen Breyer's work questioning the economic necessity of copyright in many industries. Until, and including the 1980s, these remained, for the most part, rare voices--joined in the 1980s by David Lange's poetic exhortation for the public domain; Pamela Samuelson's systematic critique of the application of copyright to computer programs, long before anyone was paying attention; Jessica Litman's early work on the political economy of copyright legislation and the systematic refusal to recognize the public domain as such; and William Fisher's theoretical exploration of fair use. The 1990s saw a significant growth of academic questioning of enclosure: Samuelson continued to press the question of copyright in software and digital materials; Litman added a steady stream of prescient observations as to where the digital copyright was going and how it was going wrong; Peter Jaszi attacked the notion of the romantic author; Ray Patterson developed a user-centric view of copyright; Diane Zimmerman revitalized the debate over the conflict between copyright and the first amendment; James Boyle introduced erudite criticism of the theoretical coherence of the relentless drive to propertization; Niva Elkin Koren explored copyright and democracy; Keith Aoki questioned trademark, patents, and global trade systems; Julie Cohen early explored technical protection systems and privacy; and Eben Moglen began mercilessly to apply the insights of free software to hack at the foundations of intellectual property apologia. Rebecca Eisenberg, and more recently, Arti Rai, questioned the wisdom of patents on research tools to biomedical innovation. In this decade, William Fisher, Larry Lessig, Litman, and Siva Vaidhyanathan have each described the various forms that the enclosure movement has taken and exposed its many limitations. Lessig and Vaidhyanathan, in particular, have begun to explore the relations between the institutional battles and the freedom in the networked environment. }~ The core of this rich critique has been that the cases and statutes of the past decade or so have upset the traditional balance, in copyrights in particular, between seeking to create incentives through the grant of exclusive rights and assuring access to information through the judicious limitation of these rights and the privileging of various uses. I do not seek to replicate that work here, or to offer a comprehensive listing of all the regulatory moves that have increased the scope of proprietary rights in digital communications networks. Instead, I offer a way of framing these various changes as moves in a large-scale battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment. By "institutional ecology," I mean to say that institutions matter to behavior, but in ways that are more complex than usually considered in economic models. They interact with the technological state, the cultural conceptions of behaviors, and with incumbent and emerging social practices that may be motivated not only by self-maximizing behavior, but also by a range of other social and psychological motivations. In this complex ecology, institutions--most prominently, law--affect these other parameters, and are, in turn, affected by them. Institutions coevolve with technology and with social and market behavior. This coevolution leads to periods of relative stability, punctuated by periods of disequilibrium, which may be caused by external shocks or internally generated phase shifts. During these moments, the various parameters will be out of step, and will pull and tug at the pattern of behavior, at the technology, and at the institutional forms of the behavior. After the tugging and pulling has shaped the various parameters in ways that are more consistent ,{[pg 382]}, with each other, we should expect to see periods of relative stability and coherence. + +Chapter 11 is devoted to an overview of the range of discrete policy areas that are shaping the institutional ecology of digital networks, in which proprietary, market-based models of information production compete with those that are individual, social, and peer produced. In almost all contexts, when presented with a policy choice, advanced economies have chosen to regulate information production and exchange in ways that make it easier to pursue a proprietary, exclusion-based model of production of entertainment goods at the expense of commons- and service-based models of information production and exchange. This has been true irrespective of the political party in power in the United States, or the cultural differences in the salience of market orientation between Europe and the United States. However, the technological trajectory, the social practices, and the cultural understanding are often working at cross-purposes with the regulatory impulse. The equilibrium on which these conflicting forces settle will shape, to a large extent, the way in which information, knowledge, and culture are produced and used over the coming few decades. Chapter 12 concludes the book with an overview of what we have seen about the political economy of information and what we might therefore understand to be at stake in the policy choices that liberal democracies and advanced economies will be making in the coming years. ,{[pg 383]}, + +1~11 Chapter 11 - The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment +={ commercial model of communication +133 ; + industrial model of communication +133 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment +133 ; + policy +133 ; + traditional model of communication +133 +} + +The decade straddling the turn of the twenty-first century has seen high levels of legislative and policy activity in the domains of information and communications. Between 1995 and 1998, the United States completely overhauled its telecommunications law for the first time in sixty years, departed drastically from decades of practice on wireless regulation, revolutionized the scope and focus of trademark law, lengthened the term of copyright, criminalized individual user infringement, and created new para-copyright powers for rights holders that were so complex that the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that enacted them was longer than the entire Copyright Act. Europe covered similar ground on telecommunications, and added a new exclusive right in raw facts in databases. Both the United States and the European Union drove for internationalization of the norms they adopted, through the new World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties and, more important, though the inclusion of intellectual property concerns in the international trade regime. In the seven years since then, legal battles have raged over the meaning of these changes, as well ,{[pg 384]}, as over efforts to extend them in other directions. From telecommunications law to copyrights, from domain name assignment to trespass to server, we have seen a broad range of distinct regulatory moves surrounding the question of control over the basic resources needed to create, encode, transmit, and receive information, knowledge, and culture in the digital environment. As we telescope up from the details of sundry regulatory skirmishes, we begin to see a broad pattern of conflict over the way that access to these core resources will be controlled. + +Much of the formal regulatory drive has been to increase the degree to which private, commercial parties can gain and assert exclusivity in core resources necessary for information production and exchange. At the physical layer, the shift to broadband Internet has been accompanied by less competitive pressure and greater legal freedom for providers to exclude competitors from, and shape the use of, their networks. That freedom from both legal and market constraints on exercising control has been complemented by increasing pressures from copyright industries to require that providers exercise greater control over the information flows in their networks in order to enforce copyrights. At the logical layer, anticircumvention provisions and the efforts to squelch peer-to-peer sharing have created institutional pressures on software and protocols to offer a more controlled and controllable environment. At the content layer, we have seen a steady series of institutional changes aimed at tightening exclusivity. +={ content layer of institutional ecology +1 ; + layers of institutional ecology +1 : + content layer +1 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology ; + physical capital for production +1 ; + policy layers +1 +} + +At each of these layers, however, we have also seen countervailing forces. At the physical layer, the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) move to permit the development of wireless devices capable of self-configuring as user-owned networks offers an important avenue for a commons-based last mile. The open standards used for personal computer design have provided an open platform. The concerted resistance against efforts to require computers to be designed so they can more reliably enforce copyrights against their users has, to this point, prevented extension of the DMCA approach to hardware design. At the logical layer, the continued centrality of open standard-setting processes and the emergence of free software as a primary modality of producing mission-critical software provide significant resistance to efforts to enclose the logical layer. At the content layer, where law has been perhaps most systematically one-sided in its efforts to enclose, the cultural movements and the technical affordances that form the foundation of the transformation described throughout this book stand as the most significant barrier to enclosure. ,{[pg 385]}, + +It is difficult to tell how much is really at stake, from the long-term perspective, in all these legal battles. From one point of view, law would have to achieve a great deal in order to replicate the twentieth-century model of industrial information economy in the new technical-social context. It would have to curtail some of the most fundamental technical characteristics of computer networks and extinguish some of our most fundamental human motivations and practices of sharing and cooperation. It would have to shift the market away from developing ever-cheaper general-purpose computers whose value to users is precisely their on-the-fly configurability over time, toward more controllable and predictable devices. It would have to squelch the emerging technologies in wireless, storage, and computation that are permitting users to share their excess resources ever more efficiently. It would have to dampen the influence of free software, and prevent people, young and old, from doing the age-old human thing: saying to each other, "here, why don't you take this, you'll like it," with things they can trivially part with and share socially. It is far from obvious that law can, in fact, achieve such basic changes. From another viewpoint, there may be no need to completely squelch all these things. Lessig called this the principle of bovinity: a small number of rules, consistently applied, suffice to control a herd of large animals. There is no need to assure that all people in all contexts continue to behave as couch potatoes for the true scope of the networked information economy to be constrained. It is enough that the core enabling technologies and the core cultural practices are confined to small groups-- some teenagers, some countercultural activists. There have been places like the East Village or the Left Bank throughout the period of the industrial information economy. For the gains in autonomy, democracy, justice, and a critical culture that are described in part II to materialize, the practices of nonmarket information production, individually free creation, and cooperative peer production must become more than fringe practices. They must become a part of life for substantial portions of the networked population. The battle over the institutional ecology of the digitally networked environment is waged precisely over how many individual users will continue to participate in making the networked information environment, and how much of the population of consumers will continue to sit on the couch and passively receive the finished goods of industrial information producers. ,{[pg 386]}, +={ Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) } + +2~ INSTITUTIONAL ECOLOGY AND PATH DEPENDENCE +={ commercial model of communication : + path dependency +5 ; + industrial model of communication : + path dependency +5 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + path dependency +5 ; + policy : + path dependency +5 ; + traditional model of communication : + path dependency +5 +} + +The century-old pragmatist turn in American legal thought has led to the development of a large and rich literature about the relationship of law to society and economy. It has both Right and Left versions, and has disciplinary roots in history, economics, sociology, psychology, and critical theory. Explanations are many: some simple, some complex; some analytically tractable, many not. I do not make a substantive contribution to that debate here, but rather build on some of its strains to suggest that the process is complex, and particularly, that the relationship of law to social relations is one of punctuated equilibrium--there are periods of stability followed by periods of upheaval, and then adaptation and stabilization anew, until the next cycle. Hopefully, the preceding ten chapters have provided sufficient reason to think that we are going through a moment of social-economic transformation today, rooted in a technological shock to our basic modes of information, knowledge, and cultural production. Most of this chapter offers a sufficient description of the legislative and judicial battles of the past few years to make the case that we are in the midst of a significant perturbation of some sort. I suggest that the heightened activity is, in fact, a battle, in the domain of law and policy, over the shape of the social settlement that will emerge around the digital computation and communications revolution. + +The basic claim is made up of fairly simple components. First, law affects human behavior on a micromotivational level and on a macro-social-organizational level. This is in contradistinction to, on the one hand, the classical Marxist claim that law is epiphenomenal, and, on the other hand, the increasingly rare simple economic models that ignore transaction costs and institutional barriers and simply assume that people will act in order to maximize their welfare, irrespective of institutional arrangements. Second, the causal relationship between law and human behavior is complex. Simple deterministic models of the form "if law X, then behavior Y" have been used as assumptions, but these are widely understood as, and criticized for being, oversimplifications for methodological purposes. Laws do affect human behavior by changing the payoffs to regulated actions directly. However, they also shape social norms with regard to behaviors, psychological attitudes toward various behaviors, the cultural understanding of actions, and the politics of claims about behaviors and practices. These effects are not all linearly additive. Some push back and nullify the law, some amplify its ,{[pg 387]}, effects; it is not always predictable which of these any legal change will be. Decreasing the length of a "Walk" signal to assure that pedestrians are not hit by cars may trigger wider adoption of jaywalking as a norm, affecting ultimate behavior in exactly the opposite direction of what was intended. This change may, in turn, affect enforcement regarding jaywalking, or the length of the signals set for cars, because the risks involved in different signal lengths change as actual expected behavior changes, which again may feed back on driving and walking practices. Third, and as part of the complexity of the causal relation, the effects of law differ in different material, social, and cultural contexts. The same law introduced in different societies or at different times will have different effects. It may enable and disable a different set of practices, and trigger a different cascade of feedback and countereffects. This is because human beings are diverse in their motivational structure and their cultural frames of meaning for behavior, for law, or for outcomes. Fourth, the process of lawmaking is not exogenous to the effects of law on social relations and human behavior. One can look at positive political theory or at the history of social movements to see that the shape of law itself is contested in society because it makes (through its complex causal mechanisms) some behaviors less attractive, valuable, or permissible, and others more so. The "winners" and the "losers" battle each other to tweak the institutional playing field to fit their needs. As a consequence of these, there is relatively widespread acceptance that there is path dependence in institutions and social organization. That is, the actual organization of human affairs and legal systems is not converging through a process of either Marxist determinism or its neoclassical economics mirror image, "the most efficient institutions win out in the end." Different societies will differ in initial conditions and their historically contingent first moves in response to similar perturbations, and variances will emerge in their actual practices and institutional arrangements that persist over time--irrespective of their relative inefficiency or injustice. + +The term "institutional ecology" refers to this context-dependent, causally complex, feedback-ridden, path-dependent process. An example of this interaction in the area of communications practices is the description in chapter 6 of how the introduction of radio was received and embedded in different legal and economic systems early in the twentieth century. A series of organizational and institutional choices converged in all nations on a broadcast model, but the American broadcast model, the BBC model, and the state-run monopoly radio models created very different journalistic styles, ,{[pg 388]}, consumption expectations and styles, and funding mechanisms in these various systems. These differences, rooted in a series of choices made during a short period in the 1920s, persisted for decades in each of the respective systems. Paul Starr has argued in The Creation of the Media that basic institutional choices--from postage pricing to freedom of the press--interacted with cultural practices and political culture to underwrite substantial differences in the print media of the United States, Britain, and much of the European continent in the late eighteenth and throughout much of the nineteenth centuries.~{ Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004). }~ Again, the basic institutional and cultural practices were put in place around the time of the American Revolution, and were later overlaid with the introduction of mass-circulation presses and the telegraph in the mid-1800s. Ithiel de Sola Pool's Technologies of Freedom describes the battle between newspapers and telegraph operators in the United States and Britain over control of telegraphed news flows. In Britain, this resulted in the nationalization of telegraph and the continued dominance of London and The Times. In the United States, it resolved into the pooling model of the Associated Press, based on private lines for news delivery and sharing-- the prototype for newspaper chains and later network-television models of mass media.~{ Ithiel de Sola-Pool, Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983), 91-100. }~ The possibility of multiple stable equilibria alongside each other evoked by the stories of radio and print media is a common characteristic to both ecological models and analytically tractable models of path dependency. Both methodological approaches depend on feedback effects and therefore suggest that for any given path divergence, there is a point in time where early actions that trigger feedbacks can cause large and sustained differences over time. +={ Pool, Ithiel de Sola ; + Starr, Paul ; + radio ; + patents : + see proprietary rights path dependency +} + +Systems that exhibit path dependencies are characterized by periods of relative pliability followed by periods of relative stability. Institutions and social practices coevolve through a series of adaptations--feedback effects from the institutional system to social, cultural, and psychological frameworks; responses into the institutional system; and success and failure of various behavioral patterns and belief systems--until a society reaches a stage of relative stability. It can then be shaken out of that stability by external shocks--like Admiral Perry's arrival in Japan--or internal buildup of pressure to a point of phase transition, as in the case of slavery in the United States. Of course, not all shocks can so neatly be categorized as external or internal--as in the case of the Depression and the New Deal. To say that there are periods of stability is not to say that in such periods, everything is just dandy for everyone. It is only to say that the political, social, economic ,{[pg 389]}, settlement is too widely comfortable for, accepted or acquiesced in, by too many agents who in that society have the power to change practices for institutional change to have substantial effects on the range of lived human practices. + +The first two parts of this book explained why the introduction of digital computer-communications networks presents a perturbation of transformative potential for the basic model of information production and exchange in modern complex societies. They focused on the technological, economic, and social patterns that are emerging, and how they differ from the industrial information economy that preceded them. This chapter offers a fairly detailed map of how law and policy are being tugged and pulled in response to these changes. Digital computers and networked communications as a broad category will not be rolled back by these laws. Instead, we are seeing a battle--often but not always self-conscious--over the precise shape of these technologies. More important, we are observing a series of efforts to shape the social and economic practices as they develop to take advantage of these new technologies. + +2~ A FRAMEWORK FOR MAPPING THE INSTITUTIONAL ECOLOGY +={ commercial model of communication : + mapping, framework for +13 ; + industrial model of communication : + mapping, framework for +13 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + mapping, framework for +13 ; + layers of institutional ecology +13 ; + policy : + mapping institutional ecology +13 ; + policy layers +13 ; + traditional model of communication : + mapping, framework for +13 +} + +Two specific examples will illustrate the various levels at which law can operate to shape the use of information and its production and exchange. The first example builds on the story from chapter 7 of how embarrassing internal e-mails from Diebold, the electronic voting machine maker, were exposed by investigative journalism conducted on a nonmarket and peerproduction model. After students at Swarthmore College posted the files, Diebold made a demand under the DMCA that the college remove the materials or face suit for contributory copyright infringement. The students were therefore forced to remove the materials. However, in order keep the materials available, the students asked students at other institutions to mirror the files, and injected them into the eDonkey, BitTorrent, and FreeNet filesharing and publication networks. Ultimately, a court held that the unauthorized publication of files that were not intended for sale and carried such high public value was a fair use. This meant that the underlying publication of the files was not itself a violation, and therefore the Internet service provider was not liable for providing a conduit. However, the case was decided on September 30, 2004--long after the information would have been relevant ,{[pg 390]}, to the voting equipment certification process in California. What kept the information available for public review was not the ultimate vindication of the students' publication. It was the fact that the materials were kept in the public sphere even under threat of litigation. Recall also that at least some of the earlier set of Diebold files that were uncovered by the activist who had started the whole process in early 2003 were zipped, or perhaps encrypted in some form. Scoop, the Web site that published the revelation of the initial files, published--along with its challenge to the Internet community to scour the files and find holes in the system--links to locations in which utilities necessary for reading the files could be found. +={ Diebold Election Systems +3 ; + electronic voting machines (case study) +3 ; + networked public sphere : + Diebold Election Systems case study +3 ; + policy : + Diebold Election Systems case study +3 ; + public sphere : + Diebold Election Systems case study +3 ; + voting, electronic +3 +} + +There are four primary potential points of failure in this story that could have conspired to prevent the revelation of the Diebold files, or at least to suppress the peer-produced journalistic mode that made them available. First, if the service provider--the college, in this case--had been a sole provider with no alternative physical transmission systems, its decision to block the materials under threat of suit would have prevented publication of the materials throughout the relevant period. Second, the existence of peer-to-peer networks that overlay the physical networks and were used to distribute the materials made expunging them from the Internet practically impossible. There was no single point of storage that could be locked down. This made the prospect of threatening other universities futile. Third, those of the original files that were not in plain text were readable with software utilities that were freely available on the Internet, and to which Scoop pointed its readers. This made the files readable to many more critical eyes than they otherwise would have been. Fourth, and finally, the fact that access to the raw materials--the e-mails--was ultimately found to be privileged under the fair-use doctrine in copyright law allowed all the acts that had been performed in the preceding period under a shadow of legal liability to proceed in the light of legality. + +The second example does not involve litigation, but highlights more of the levers open to legal manipulation. In the weeks preceding the American-led invasion of Iraq, a Swedish video artist produced an audio version of Diana Ross and Lionel Richie's love ballad, "Endless Love," lip-synched to news footage of U.S. president George Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair. By carefully synchronizing the lip movements from the various news clips, the video produced the effect of Bush "singing" Richie's part, and Blair "singing" Ross's, serenading each other with an eternal love ballad. No legal action with regard to the release of this short video has been reported. However, ,{[pg 391]}, the story adds two components not available in the context of the Diebold files context. First, it highlights that quotation from video and music requires actual copying of the digital file. Unlike text, you cannot simply transcribe the images or the sound. This means that access to the unencrypted bits is more important than in the case of text. Second, it is not at all clear that using the entire song, unmodified, is a "fair use." While it is true that the Swedish video is unlikely to cut into the market for the original song, there is nothing in the video that is a parody either of the song itself or of the news footage. The video uses "found materials," that is, materials produced by others, to mix them in a way that is surprising, creative, and creates a genuinely new statement. However, its use of the song is much more complete than the minimalist uses of digital sampling in recorded music, where using a mere two-second, three-note riff from another's song has been found to be a violation unless done with a negotiated license.~{ /{Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films}/, 2004 U.S. App. LEXIS 26877. }~ + +Combined, the two stories suggest that we can map the resources necessary for a creative communication, whether produced on a market model or a nonmarket model, as including a number of discrete elements. First, there is the universe of "content" itself: existing information, cultural artifacts and communications, and knowledge structures. These include the song and video footage, or the e-mail files, in the two stories. Second, there is the cluster of machinery that goes into capturing, manipulating, fixing and communicating the new cultural utterances or communications made of these inputs, mixed with the creativity, knowledge, information, or communications capacities of the creator of the new statement or communication. These include the physical devices--the computers used by the students and the video artist, as well as by their readers or viewers--and the physical transmission mechanisms used to send the information or communications from one place to another. In the Diebold case, the firm tried to use the Internet service provider liability regime of the DMCA to cut off the machine storage and mechanical communications capacity provided to the students by the university. However, the "machinery" also includes the logical components-- the software necessary to capture, read or listen to, cut, paste, and remake the texts or music; the software and protocols necessary to store, retrieve, search, and communicate the information across the Internet. + +As these stories suggest, freedom to create and communicate requires use of diverse things and relationships--mechanical devices and protocols, information, cultural materials, and so forth. Because of this diversity of components ,{[pg 392]}, and relationships, the institutional ecology of information production and exchange is a complex one. It includes regulatory and policy elements that affect different industries, draw on various legal doctrines and traditions, and rely on diverse economic and political theories and practices. It includes social norms of sharing and consumption of things conceived of as quite different--bandwidth, computers, and entertainment materials. To make these cohere into a single problem, for several years I have been using a very simple, three-layered representation of the basic functions involved in mediated human communications. These are intended to map how different institutional components interact to affect the answer to the basic questions that define the normative characteristics of a communications system--who gets to say what, to whom, and who decides?~{ Other layer-based abstractions have been proposed, most effectively by Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung, The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law, University of San Diego Public Law Research Paper No. 55. Their model more closely hews to the OSI layers, and is tailored to being more specifically usable for a particular legal principle--never regulate at a level lower than you need to. I seek a higherlevel abstraction whose role is not to serve as a tool to constrain specific rules, but as a map for understanding the relationships between diverse institutional elements as they relate to the basic problem of how information is produced and exchanged in society. }~ + +These are the physical, logical, and content layers. The physical layer refers to the material things used to connect human beings to each other. These include the computers, phones, handhelds, wires, wireless links, and the like. The content layer is the set of humanly meaningful statements that human beings utter to and with one another. It includes both the actual utterances and the mechanisms, to the extent that they are based on human communication rather than mechanical processing, for filtering, accreditation, and interpretation. The logical layer represents the algorithms, standards, ways of translating human meaning into something that machines can transmit, store, or compute, and something that machines process into communications meaningful to human beings. These include standards, protocols, and software--both general enabling platforms like operating systems, and more specific applications. A mediated human communication must use all three layers, and each layer therefore represents a resource or a pathway that the communication must use or traverse in order to reach its intended destination. In each and every one of these layers, we have seen the emergence of technical and practical capabilities for using that layer on a nonproprietary model that would make access cheaper, less susceptible to control by any single party or class of parties, or both. In each and every layer, we have seen significant policy battles over whether these nonproprietary or open-platform practices will be facilitated or even permitted. Looking at the aggregate effect, we see that at all these layers, a series of battles is being fought over the degree to which some minimal set of basic resources and capabilities necessary to use and participate in constructing the information environment will be available for use on a nonproprietary, nonmarket basis. ,{[pg 393]}, +={ content layer of institutional ecology ; + layers of institutional ecology : + content layer | physical layer | see also logical layer of institutional ecology ; + logical layer of institutional ecology ; + physical layer of institutional ecology ; + policy layers : + content layer | physical layer +} + +In each layer, the policy debate is almost always carried out in local, specific terms. We ask questions like, Will this policy optimize "spectrum management" in these frequencies, or, Will this decrease the number of CDs sold? However, the basic, overarching question that we must learn to ask in all these debates is: Are we leaving enough institutional space for the socialeconomic practices of networked information production to emerge? The networked information economy requires access to a core set of capabilities--existing information and culture, mechanical means to process, store, and communicate new contributions and mixes, and the logical systems necessary to connect them to each other. What nonmarket forms of production need is a core common infrastructure that anyone can use, irrespective of whether their production model is market-based or not, proprietary or not. In almost all these dimensions, the current trajectory of technologicaleconomic-social trends is indeed leading to the emergence of such a core common infrastructure, and the practices that make up the networked information economy are taking advantage of open resources. Wireless equipment manufacturers are producing devices that let users build their own networks, even if these are now at a primitive stage. The open-innovation ethos of the programmer and Internet engineering community produce both free software and proprietary software that rely on open standards for providing an open logical layer. The emerging practices of free sharing of information, knowledge, and culture that occupy most of the discussion in this book are producing an ever-growing stream of freely and openly accessible content resources. The core common infrastructure appears to be emerging without need for help from a guiding regulatory hand. This may or may not be a stable pattern. It is possible that by some happenstance one or two firms, using one or two critical technologies, will be able to capture and control a bottleneck. At that point, perhaps regulatory intervention will be required. However, from the beginning of legal responses to the Internet and up to this writing in the middle of 2005, the primary role of law has been reactive and reactionary. It has functioned as a point of resistance to the emergence of the networked information economy. It has been used by incumbents from the industrial information economies to contain the risks posed by the emerging capabilities of the networked information environment. What the emerging networked information economy therefore needs, in almost all cases, is not regulatory protection, but regulatory abstinence. + +The remainder of this chapter provides a more or less detailed presentation of the decisions being made at each layer, and how they relate to the freedom ,{[pg 394]}, to create, individually and with others, without having to go through proprietary, market-based transactional frameworks. Because so many components are involved, and so much has happened since the mid-1990s, the discussion is of necessity both long in the aggregate and truncated in each particular category. To overcome this expositional problem, I have collected the various institutional changes in table 11.1. For readers interested only in the overarching claim of this chapter--that is, that there is, in fact, a battle over the institutional environment, and that many present choices interact to increase or decrease the availability of basic resources for information production and exchange--table 11.1 may provide sufficient detail. For those interested in a case study of the complex relationship between law, technology, social behavior, and market structure, the discussion of peer-to-peer networks may be particularly interesting to pursue. + +A quick look at table 11.1 reveals that there is a diverse set of sources of openness. A few of these are legal. Mostly, they are based on technological and social practices, including resistance to legal and regulatory drives toward enclosure. Examples of policy interventions that support an open core common infrastructure are the FCC's increased permission to deploy open wireless networks and the various municipal broadband initiatives. The former is a regulatory intervention, but its form is largely removal of past prohibitions on an entire engineering approach to building wireless systems. Municipal efforts to produce open broadband networks are being resisted at the state legislation level, with statutes that remove the power to provision broadband from the home rule powers of municipalities. For the most part, the drive for openness is based on individual and voluntary cooperative action, not law. The social practices of openness take on a quasi-normative face when practiced in standard-setting bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). However, none of these have the force of law. Legal devices also support openness when used in voluntaristic models like free software licensing and Creative Commons?type licensing. However, most often when law has intervened in its regulatory force, as opposed to its contractual-enablement force, it has done so almost entirely on the side of proprietary enclosure. + +Another characteristic of the social-economic-institutional struggle is an alliance between a large number of commercial actors and the social sharing culture. We see this in the way that wireless equipment manufacturers are selling into a market of users of WiFi and similar unlicensed wireless devices. We see this in the way that personal computer manufacturers are competing ,{[pg 395]}, over decreasing margins by producing the most general-purpose machines that would be most flexible for their users, rather than machines that would most effectively implement the interests of Hollywood and the recording industry. We see this in the way that service and equipment-based firms, like IBM and Hewlett-Packard (HP), support open-source and free software. The alliance between the diffuse users and the companies that are adapting their business models to serve them as users, instead of as passive consumers, affects the political economy of this institutional battle in favor of openness. On the other hand, security consciousness in the United States has led to some efforts to tip the balance in favor of closed proprietary systems, apparently because these are currently perceived as more secure, or at least more amenable to government control. While orthogonal in its political origins to the battle between proprietary and commons-based strategies for information production, this drive does tilt the field in favor of enclosure, at least at the time of this writing in 2005. +={ commercial model of communication : + security-related policy ; + industrial model of communication : + security-related policy ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + security-related policy ; + policy : + security-related ; + security-related policy ; + traditional model of communication : + security-related policy +} + +% paragraph end moved above table + +!_ Table 11.1: Overview of the Institutional Ecology +={ content layer of institutional ecology : + recent changes ; + layers of institutional ecology : + content layer ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + recent changes ; + physical layer of institutional ecology : + recent changes ; + policy layers : + content layer +} + +table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33; + +. +Enclosure +Openness + +Physical Transport +Broadband trated by FCC as information service +Open wireless networks + +. +DMCA ISP liability +Municipal broadband initiatives + +. +Municipal broadband barred by states +. + +Physical Devices +CBDPTA: regulatory requirements to implement "trusted systems"; private efforts towards the same goal +Standardization + +. +Operator-controlled mobile phones +Fiercely competitive market in commodity components + +Logical Transmission protocols +Privatized DNS/ICANN +TCP/IP + +. +. +IETF + +. +. +p2p networks + +Logical Software +DMCA anticircumvention; Proprietary OS; Web browser; Software Patents +Free Software + +. +. +W3C + +. +. +P2p software widely used + +. +. +social acceptability of widespread hacking of copy protection + +Content +Copyright expansion: "Right to read"; No de minimis digital sampling; "Fair use" narrowed: effect on potential market "commercial" defined broadly; Criminalization; Term extension +Increasing sharing practices and adoption of sharing licensing practices + +. +Contractual enclosure: UCITA +Musicians distribute music freely + +. +Trademark dilution +Creative Commons; other open publication models + +. +Database protection +Widespread social disdain for copyright + +. +Linking and trespass to chattels +International jurisdictional arbitrage + +. +International "harmonization" and trade enforcement of maximal exclusive rights regimes +Early signs of a global access to knowledge movement combining developing nations with free information ecology advocates, both markets and non-market, raising a challenge to the enclosure movement + +}table + +% ,{[pg 396]}, + +Over the past few years, we have also seen that the global character of the Internet is a major limit on effective enclosure, when openness is a function of technical and social practices, and enclosure is a function of law.~{ The first major treatment of this phenomenon was Michael Froomkin, "The Internet as a Source of Regulatory Arbitrage" (1996), http://www.law.miami.edu/froomkin/articles/arbitr.htm. }~ When Napster was shut down in the United States, for example, KaZaa emerged in the Netherlands, from where it later moved to Australia. This force is meeting the countervailing force of international harmonization--a series of bilateral and multilateral efforts to "harmonize" exclusive rights regimes internationally and efforts to coordinate international enforcement. It is difficult at this stage to predict which of these forces will ultimately have the upper hand. It is not too early to map in which direction each is pushing. And it is therefore not too early to characterize the normative implications of the success or failure of these institutional efforts. +={ Internet : + globality of, effects on policy ; + policy : + global Internet and +} + +2~ THE PHYSICAL LAYER +={ physical capital for production +26 : + see also commons and social capital +} + +The physical layer encompasses both transmission channels and devices for producing and communicating information. In the broadcast and telephone era, devices were starkly differentiated. Consumers owned dumb terminals. Providers owned sophisticated networks and equipment: transmitters and switches. Consumers could therefore consume whatever providers could produce most efficiently that the providers believed consumers would pay for. Central to the emergence of the freedom of users in the networked environment is an erosion of the differentiation between consumer and provider ,{[pg 397]}, equipment. Consumers came to use general-purpose computers that could do whatever their owners wanted, instead of special-purpose terminals that could only do what their vendors designed them to do. These devices were initially connected over a transmission network--the public phone system-- that was regulated as a common carrier. Common carriage required the network owners to carry all communications without differentiating by type or content. The network was neutral as among communications. The transition to broadband networks, and to a lesser extent the emergence of Internet services on mobile phones, are threatening to undermine that neutrality and nudge the network away from its end-to-end, user-centric model to one designed more like a five-thousand-channel broadcast model. At the same time, Hollywood and the recording industry are pressuring the U.S. Congress to impose regulatory requirements on the design of personal computers so that they can be relied on not to copy music and movies without permission. In the process, the law seeks to nudge personal computers away from being purely general-purpose computation devices toward being devices with factory-defined behaviors vis-a-vis predicted-use patterns, like glorified ` televisions and CD players. The emergence of the networked information economy as described in this book depends on the continued existence of an open transport network connecting general-purpose computers. It therefore also depends on the failure of the efforts to restructure the network on the model of proprietary networks connecting terminals with sufficiently controlled capabilities to be predictable and well behaved from the perspective of incumbent production models. + +3~ Transport: Wires and Wireless +={ transport channel policy +16 } + +Recall the Cisco white paper quoted in chapter 5. In it, Cisco touted the value of its then new router, which would allow a broadband provider to differentiate streams of information going to and from the home at the packet level. If the packet came from a competitor, or someone the user wanted to see or hear but the owner preferred that the user did not, the packet could be slowed down or dropped. If it came from the owner or an affiliate, it could be speeded up. The purpose of the router was not to enable evil control over users. It was to provide better-functioning networks. America Online (AOL), for example, has been reported as blocking its users from reaching Web sites that have been advertised in spam e-mails. The theory is that if spammers know their Web site will be inaccessible to AOL customers, they will stop.~{ Jonathan Krim, "AOL Blocks Spammers' Web Sites," Washington Post, March 20, 2004, p. A01; also available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?page name article&contentId A9449-2004Mar19¬Found true. }~ The ability of service providers to block sites or packets from ,{[pg 398]}, certain senders and promote packets from others may indeed be used to improve the network. However, whether this ability will in fact be used to improve service depends on the extent to which the interests of all users, and particularly those concerned with productive uses of the network, are aligned with the interests of the service providers. Clearly, when in 2005 Telus, Canada's second largest telecommunications company, blocked access to the Web site of the Telecommunications Workers Union for all of its own clients and those of internet service providers that relied on its backbone network, it was not seeking to improve service for those customers' benefit, but to control a conversation in which it had an intense interest. When there is a misalignment, the question is what, if anything, disciplines the service providers' use of the technological capabilities they possess? One source of discipline would be a genuinely competitive market. The transition to broadband has, however, severely constrained the degree of competition in Internet access services. Another would be regulation: requiring owners to treat all packets equally. This solution, while simple to describe, remains highly controversial in the policy world. It has strong supporters and strong opposition from the incumbent broadband providers, and has, as a practical matter, been rejected for the time being by the FCC. The third type of solution would be both more radical and less "interventionist" from the perspective of regulation. It would involve eliminating contemporary regulatory barriers to the emergence of a user-owned wireless infrastructure. It would allow users to deploy their own equipment, share their wireless capacity, and create a "last mile" owned by all users in common, and controlled by none. This would, in effect, put equipment manufacturers in competition to construct the "last mile" of broadband networks, and thereby open up the market in "middle-mile" Internet connection services. +={ access : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + blocked access : + policy routers ; + capacity : + policy routers ; + Cisco policy routers ; + information flow : + controlling with policy routers ; + information production inputs : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + inputs to production : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + policy routers ; + production inputs : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + routers, controlling information flow with +} + +Since the early 1990s, when the Clinton administration announced its "Agenda for Action" for what was then called "the information superhighway," it was the policy of the United States to "let the private sector lead" in deployment of the Internet. To a greater or lesser degree, this commitment to private provisioning was adopted in most other advanced economies in the world. In the first few years, this meant that investment in the backbone of the Internet was private, and heavily funded by the stock bubble of the late 1990s. It also meant that the last distribution bottleneck--the "last mile"--was privately owned. Until the end of the 1990s, the last mile was made mostly of dial-up connections over the copper wires of the incumbent local exchange carriers. This meant that the physical layer was not only ,{[pg 399]}, proprietary, but that it was, for all practical purposes, monopolistically owned. Why, then, did the early Internet nonetheless develop into a robust, end-to-end neutral network? As Lessig showed, this was because the telephone carriers were regulated as common carriers. They were required to carry all traffic without discrimination. Whether a bit stream came from Cable News Network (CNN) or from an individual blog, all streams-- upstream from the user and downstream to the user--were treated neutrally. + +4~ Broadband Regulation +={ access : + cable providers, regulation of +4 ; + broadband networks : + cable as commons +4 | regulation of +4 ; + cable broadband transport, as commons +4 ; + commons : + cable providers as +4 ; + transport channel policy : + broadband regulation +4 ; + wired communications : + policy on +4 +} + +The end of the 1990s saw the emergence of broadband networks. In the United States, cable systems, using hybrid fiber-coaxial systems, moved first, and became the primary providers. The incumbent local telephone carriers have been playing catch-up ever since, using digital subscriber line (DSL) techniques to squeeze sufficient speed out of their copper infrastructure to remain competitive, while slowly rolling out fiber infrastructure closer to the home. As of 2003, the incumbent cable carriers and the incumbent local telephone companies accounted for roughly 96 percent of all broadband access to homes and small offices.~{ FCC Report on High Speed Services, December 2003 (Appendix to Fourth 706 Report NOI). }~ In 1999-2000, as cable was beginning to move into a more prominent position, academic critique began to emerge, stating that the cable broadband architecture could be manipulated to deviate from the neutral, end-to-end architecture of the Internet. One such paper was written by Jerome Saltzer, one of the authors of the paper that originally defined the "end-to-end" design principle of the Internet in 1980, and Lessig and Mark Lemley wrote another. These papers began to emphasize that cable broadband providers technically could, and had commercial incentive to, stop treating all communications neutrally. They could begin to move from a network where almost all functions are performed by user-owned computers at the ends of the network to one where more is done by provider equipment at the core. The introduction of the Cisco policy router was seen as a stark marker of how things could change. +={ Lemley, Mark ; + Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) ; + Saltzer, Jerome ; + access : + cable providers, regulation of +3 +} + +The following two years saw significant regulatory battles over whether the cable providers would be required to behave as commons carriers. In particular, the question was whether they would be required to offer competitors nondiscriminatory access to their networks, so that these competitors could compete in Internet services. The theory was that competition would discipline the incumbents from skewing their networks too far away from what users valued as an open Internet. The first round of battles occurred at the municipal level. Local franchising authorities tried to use their power ,{[pg 400]}, over cable licenses to require cable operators to offer open access to their competitors if they chose to offer cable broadband. The cable providers challenged these regulations in courts. The most prominent decision came out of Portland, Oregon, where the Federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that broadband was part information service and part telecommunications service, but not a cable service. The FCC, not the cable franchising authority, had power to regulate it.~{ 216 F.3d 871 (9th Cir. 2000). }~ At the same time, as part of the approval of the AOL-Time Warner merger, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) required the new company to give at least three competitors open access to its broadband facilities, should AOL be offered cable broadband facilities over Time Warner. + +The AOL-Time Warner merger requirements, along with the Ninth Circuit's finding that cable broadband included a telecommunications component, seemed to indicate that cable broadband transport would come to be treated as a common carrier. This was not to be. In late 2001 and the middle of 2002, the FCC issued a series of reports that would reach the exact opposite result. Cable broadband, the commission held, was an information service, not a telecommunications service. This created an imbalance with the telecommunications status of broadband over telephone infrastructure, which at the time was treated as a telecommunications service. The commission dealt with this imbalance by holding that broadband over telephone infrastructure, like broadband over cable, was now to be treated as an information service. Adopting this definition was perhaps admissible as a matter of legal reasoning, but it certainly was not required by either sound legal reasoning or policy. The FCC's reasoning effectively took the business model that cable operators had successfully used to capture two-thirds of the market in broadband--bundling two discrete functionalities, transport (carrying bits) and higher-level services (like e-mail and Web hosting)--and treated it as though it described the intrinsic nature of "broadband cable" as a service. Because that service included more than just carriage of bits, it could be called an information service. Of course, it would have been as legally admissible, and more technically accurate, to do as the Ninth Circuit had done. That is, to say that cable broadband bundles two distinct services: carriage and information-use tools. The former is a telecommunications service. In June of 2005, the Supreme Court in the Brand X case upheld the FCC's authority to make this legally admissible policy error, upholding as a matter of deference to the expert agency the Commission's position that cable broadband services should be treated as information services.~{ /{National Cable and Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services}/ (decided June 27, 2005). }~ As a matter ,{[pg 401]}, of policy, the designation of broadband services as "information services" more or less locked the FCC into a "no regulation" approach. As information services, broadband providers obtained the legal power to "edit" their programming, just like any operator of an information service, like a Web site. Indeed, this new designation has placed a serious question mark over whether future efforts to regulate carriage decisions would be considered constitutional, or would instead be treated as violations of the carriers' "free speech" rights as a provider of information. Over the course of the 1990s, there were a number of instances where carriers--particularly cable, but also telephone companies--were required by law to carry some signals from competitors. In particular, cable providers were required to carry over-the-air broadcast television, telephone carriers, in FCC rules called "video dialtone," were required to offer video on a common carriage basis, and cable providers that chose to offer broadband were required to make their infrastructure available to competitors on a common carrier model. In each of these cases, the carriage requirements were subjected to First Amendment scrutiny by courts. In the case of cable carriage of broadcast television, the carriage requirements were only upheld after six years of litigation.~{ /{Turner Broad. Sys. v. FCC}/, 512 U.S. 622 (1994) and /{Turner Broad. Sys. v. FCC}/, 520 U.S. 180 (1997). }~ In cases involving video common carriage requirements applied to telephone companies and cable broadband, lower courts struck down the carriage requirements as violating the telephone and cable companies' free-speech rights.~{ /{Chesapeake & Potomac Tel. Co. v. United States}/, 42 F.3d 181 (4th Cir. 1994); /{Comcast Cablevision of Broward County, Inc. v. Broward County}/, 124 F. Supp. 2d 685, 698 (D. Fla., 2000). }~ To a large extent, then, the FCC's regulatory definition left the incumbent cable and telephone providers--who control 96 percent of broadband connections to home and small offices--unregulated, and potentially constitutionally immune to access regulation and carriage requirements. +={ carriage requirements of cable providers +1 } + +Since 2003 the cable access debate--over whether competitors should get access to the transport networks of incumbent broadband carriers--has been replaced with an effort to seek behavioral regulation in the form of "network neutrality." This regulatory concept would require broadband providers to treat all packets equally, without forcing them to open their network up to competitors or impose any other of the commitments associated with common carriage. The concept has the backing of some very powerful actors, including Microsoft, and more recently MCI, which still owns much of the Internet backbone, though not the last mile. For this reason, if for no other, it remains as of this writing a viable path for institutional reform that would balance the basic structural shift of Internet infrastructure from a commoncarriage to a privately controlled model. Even if successful, the drive to network neutrality would keep the physical infrastructure a technical bottleneck, ,{[pg 402]}, owned by a small number of firms facing very limited competition, with wide legal latitude for using that control to affect the flow of information over their networks. + +4~ Open Wireless networks +={ broadband networks : + open wireless networks +5 ; + communities : + open wireless networks +5 ; + last mile (wireless) +5 ; + mobile phones : + open wireless networks +5 ; + open wireless networks +5 ; + sharing : + open wireless networks +5 ; + transport channel policy : + open wireless networks +5 ; + wireless communications : + open networks +5 +} + +A more basic and structural opportunity to create an open broadband infrastructure is, however, emerging in the wireless domain. To see how, we must first recognize that opportunities to control the broadband infrastructure in general are not evenly distributed throughout the networked infrastructure. The long-haul portions of the network have multiple redundant paths with no clear choke points. The primary choke point over the physical transport of bits across the Internet is in the last mile of all but the most highly connected districts. That is, the primary bottleneck is the wire or cable connecting the home and small office to the network. It is here that cable and local telephone incumbents control the market. It is here that the high costs of digging trenches, pulling fiber, and getting wires through and into walls pose a prohibitive barrier to competition. And it is here, in the last mile, that unlicensed wireless approaches now offer the greatest promise to deliver a common physical infrastructure of first and last resort, owned by its users, shared as a commons, and offering no entity a bottleneck from which to control who gets to say what to whom. + +As discussed in chapter 6, from the end of World War I and through the mid-twenties, improvements in the capacity of expensive transmitters and a series of strategic moves by the owners of the core patents in radio transmission led to the emergence of the industrial model of radio communications that typified the twentieth century. Radio came to be dominated by a small number of professional, commercial networks, based on high-capital-cost transmitters. These were supported by a regulatory framework tailored to making the primary model of radio utilization for most Americans passive reception, with simple receivers, of commercial programming delivered with high-powered transmitters. This industrial model, which assumed large-scale capital investment in the core of the network and small-scale investments at the edges, optimized for receiving what is generated at the core, imprinted on wireless communications systems both at the level of design and at the level of regulation. When mobile telephony came along, it replicated the same model, using relatively cheap handsets oriented toward an infrastructure-centric deployment of towers. The regulatory model followed Hoover's initial pattern and perfected it. A government agency strictly controlled who may ,{[pg 403]}, place a transmitter, where, with what antenna height, and using what power. The justification was avoidance of interference. The presence of strict licensing was used as the basic assumption in the engineering of wireless systems throughout this period. Since 1959, economic analysis of wireless regulation has criticized this approach, but only on the basis that it inefficiently regulated the legal right to construct a wireless system by using strictly regulated spectrum licenses, instead of creating a market in "spectrum use" rights.~{ The locus classicus of the economists' critique was Ronald Coase, "The Federal Communications Commission," Journal of Law and Economics 2 (1959): 1. The best worked-out version of how these property rights would look remains Arthur S. De Vany et al., "A Property System for Market Allocation of the Electromagnetic Spectrum: A Legal-Economic-Engineering Study," Stanford Law Review 21 (1969): 1499. }~ This critique kept the basic engineering assumptions stable--for radio to be useful, a high-powered transmitter must be received by simple receivers. Given this engineering assumption, someone had to control the right to emit energy in any range of radio frequencies. The economists wanted the controller to be a property owner with a flexible, transferable right. The regulators wanted it to be a licensee subject to regulatory oversight and approval by the FCC. +={ capacity : + radio sharing +1 ; + radio +1 ; + sharing : + radio capacity +1 | capacity +1 +} + +As chapter 3 explained, by the time that legislatures in the United States and around the world had begun to accede to the wisdom of the economists' critique, it had been rendered obsolete by technology. In particular, it had been rendered obsolete by the fact that the declining cost of computation and the increasing sophistication of communications protocols among enduser devices in a network made possible new, sharing-based solutions to the problem of how to allow users to communicate without wires. Instead of having a regulation-determined exclusive right to transmit, which may or may not be subject to market reallocation, it is possible to have a market in smart radio equipment owned by individuals. These devices have the technical ability to share capacity and cooperate in the creation of wireless carriage capacity. These radios can, for example, cooperate by relaying each other's messages or temporarily "lending" their antennae to neighbors to help them decipher messages of senders, without anyone having exclusive use of the spectrum. Just as PCs can cooperate to create a supercomputer in SETI@Home by sharing their computation, and a global-scale, peer-to-peer data-storage and retrieval system by sharing their hard drives, computationally intensive radios can share their capacity to produce a local wireless broadband infrastructure. Open wireless networks allow users to install their own wireless device--much like the WiFi devices that have become popular. These devices then search automatically for neighbors with similar capabilities, and self-configure into a high-speed wireless data network. Reaching this goal does not, at this point, require significant technological innovation. The technology is there, though it does require substantial engineering ,{[pg 404]}, effort to implement. The economic incentives to develop such devices are fairly straightforward. Users already require wireless local networks. They will gain added utility from extending their range for themselves, which would be coupled with the possibility of sharing with others to provide significant wide-area network capacity for whose availability they need not rely on any particular provider. Ultimately, it would be a way for users to circumvent the monopoly last mile and recapture some of the rents they currently pay. Equipment manufacturers obviously have an incentive to try to cut into the rents captured by the broadband monopoly/oligopoly by offering an equipment-embedded alternative. + +My point here is not to consider the comparative efficiency of a market in wireless licenses and a market in end-user equipment designed for sharing channels that no one owns. It is to highlight the implications of the emergence of a last mile that is owned by no one in particular, and is the product of cooperation among neighbors in the form of, "I'll carry your bits if you carry mine." At the simplest level, neighbors could access locally relevant information directly, over a wide-area network. More significant, the fact that users in a locality coproduced their own last-mile infrastructure would allow commercial Internet providers to set up Internet points of presence anywhere within the "cloud" of the locale. The last mile would be provided not by these competing Internet service providers, but by the cooperative efforts of the residents of local neighborhoods. Competitors in providing the "middle mile"--the connection from the last mile to the Internet cloud-- could emerge, in a way that they cannot if they must first lay their own last mile all the way to each home. The users, rather than the middle-mile providers, shall have paid the capital cost of producing the local transmission system--their own cooperative radios. The presence of a commons-based, coproduced last mile alongside the proprietary broadband network eliminates the last mile as a bottleneck for control over who speaks, with what degree of ease, and with what types of production values and interactivity. + +The development of open wireless networks, owned by their users and focused on sophisticated general-purpose devices at their edges also offers a counterpoint to the emerging trend among mobile telephony providers to offer a relatively limited and controlled version of the Internet over the phones they sell. Some wireless providers are simply offering mobile Internet connections throughout their networks, for laptops. Others, however, are using their networks to allow customers to use their ever-more-sophisticated phones to surf portions of the Web. These latter services diverge in their ,{[pg 405]}, styles. Some tend to be limited, offering only a set of affiliated Web sites rather than genuine connectivity to the Internet itself with a general-purpose device. Sprint's "News" offerings, for example, connects users to CNNtoGo, ABCNews.com, and the like, but will not enable a user to reach the blogosphere to upload a photo of protesters being manhandled, for example. So while mobility in principle increases the power of the Web, and text messaging puts e-mail-like capabilities everywhere, the effect of the implementations of the Web on phones is more ambiguous. It could be more like a Web-enabled reception device than a genuinely active node in a multidirectional network. Widespread adoption of open wireless networks would give mobile phone manufacturers a new option. They could build into the mobile telephones the ability to tap into open wireless networks, and use them as general-purpose access points to the Internet. The extent to which this will be a viable option for the mobile telephone manufacturers depends on how much the incumbent mobile telephone service providers, those who purchased their licenses at high-priced auctions, will resist this move. Most users buy their phones from their providers, not from general electronic equipment stores. Phones are often tied to specific providers in ways that users are not able to change for themselves. In these conditions, it is likely that mobile providers will resist the competition from free open wireless systems for "data minutes" by refusing to sell dual-purpose equipment. Worse, they may boycott manufacturers who make mobile phones that are also general-purpose Web-surfing devices over open wireless networks. How that conflict will go, and whether users would be willing to carry a separate small device to enable them to have open Internet access alongside their mobile phone, will determine the extent to which the benefits of open wireless networks will be transposed into the mobile domain. Normatively, that outcome has significant implications. From the perspective of the citizen watchdog function, ubiquitous availability of capture, rendering, and communication capabilities are important. From the perspective of personal autonomy as informed action in context, extending openness to mobile units would provide significant advantages to allow individuals to construct their own information environment on the go, as they are confronting decisions and points of action in their daily lives. + +4~ Municipal Broadband Initiatives +={ broadband networks : + municipal initiatives +2 ; + commons : + municipal broadband initiatives +2 ; + communities : + municipal broadband initiatives +2 ; + municipal broadband initiatives +2 ; + open wireless networks : + municipal broadband initiatives +2 ; + transport channel policy : + municipal broadband initiatives +2 ; + wireless communications : + municipal broadband initiatives +2 +} + +One alternative path for the emergence of basic physical information transport infrastructure on a nonmarket model is the drive to establish municipal ,{[pg 406]}, systems. These proposed systems would not be commons-based in the sense that they would not be created by the cooperative actions of individuals without formal structure. They would be public, like highways, sidewalks, parks, and sewage systems. Whether they are, or are not, ultimately to perform as commons would depend on how they would be regulated. In the United States, given the First Amendment constraints on government preferring some speech to other speech in public fora, it is likely that municipal systems would be managed as commons. In this regard, they would have parallel beneficial characteristics to those of open wireless systems. The basic thesis underlying municipal broadband initiatives is similar to that which has led some municipalities to create municipal utilities or transportation hubs. Connectivity has strong positive externalities. It makes a city's residents more available for the information economy and the city itself a more attractive locale for businesses. Most of the efforts have indeed been phrased in these instrumental terms. The initial drive has been the creation of municipal fiber-to-the-home networks. The town of Bristol, Virginia, is an example. It has a population of slightly more than seventeen thousand. Median household income is 68 percent of the national median. These statistics made it an unattractive locus for early broadband rollout by incumbent providers. However, in 2003, Bristol residents had one of the most advanced residential fiber-to-the-home networks in the country, available for less than forty dollars a month. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the city had broadband penetration rivaling many of the top U.S. markets with denser and wealthier populations. The "miracle" of Bristol is that the residents of the town, fed up with waiting for the local telephone and cable companies, built their own, municipally owned network. Theirs has become among the most ambitious and successful of more than five hundred publicly owned utilities in the United States that offer high-speed Internet, cable, and telephone services to their residents. Some of the larger cities--Chicago and Philadelphia, most prominently--are moving as of this writing in a similar direction. The idea in Chicago is that basic "dark fiber"--that is, the physical fiber going to the home, but without the electronics that would determine what kinds of uses the connectivity could be put to--would be built by the city. Access to use this entirely neutral, high-capacity platform would then be open to anyone-- commercial and noncommercial alike. The drive in Philadelphia emphasizes the other, more recently available avenue--wireless. The quality of WiFi and the widespread adoption of wireless techniques have moved other municipalities to adopt wireless or mixed-fiber wireless strategies. Municipalities are ,{[pg 407]}, proposing to use publicly owned facilities to place wireless points of access around the town, covering the area in a cloud of connectivity and providing open Internet access from anywhere in the city. Philadelphia's initiative has received the widest public attention, although other, smaller cities are closer to having a wireless cloud over the city already. +={ Bristol, Virginia +1 ; + Philadelphia, wireless initiatives in +1 +} + +The incumbent broadband providers have not taken kindly to the municipal assault on their monopoly (or oligopoly) profits. When the city of Abilene, Texas, tried to offer municipal broadband service in the late-1990s, Southwestern Bell (SBC) persuaded the Texas legislature to pass a law that prohibited local governments from providing high-speed Internet access. The town appealed to the FCC and the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. Both bodies held that when Congress passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and said that, "no state . . . regulation . . . may prohibit . . . the ability of any entity to provide . . . telecommunications service," municipalities were not included in the term "any entity." As the D.C. Circuit put it, "any" might have some significance "depending on the speaker's tone of voice," but here it did not really mean "any entity," only some. And states could certainly regulate the actions of municipalities, which are treated in U.S. law as merely their subdivisions or organs.~{ /{City of Abilene, Texas v. Federal Communications Commission}/, 164 F3d 49 (1999). }~ Bristol, Virginia, had to fight off similar efforts to prohibit its plans through state law before it was able to roll out its network. In early 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court was presented with the practice of state preemption of municipal broadband efforts and chose to leave the municipalities to fend for themselves. A coalition of Missouri municipalities challenged a Missouri law that, like the Texas law, prohibited them from stepping in to offer their citizens broadband service. The Court of the Appeals for the Eighth Circuit agreed with the municipalities. The 1996 Act, after all, was intended precisely to allow anyone to compete with the incumbents. The section that prohibited states from regulating the ability of "any entity" to enter the telecommunications service market precisely anticipated that the local incumbents would use their clout in state legislatures to thwart the federal policy of introducing competition into the local loop. Here, the incumbents were doing just that, but the Supreme Court reversed the Eighth Circuit decision. Without dwelling too much on the wisdom of allowing citizens of municipalities to decide for themselves whether they want a municipal system, the court issued an opinion that was technically defensible in terms of statutory interpretation, but effectively invited the incumbent broadband providers to put their lobbying efforts into persuading state legislators to prohibit municipal efforts.~{ /{Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League}/, 541 U.S. 125 (2004). }~ After ,{[pg 408]}, Philadelphia rolled out its wireless plan, it was not long before the Pennsylvania legislature passed a similar law prohibiting municipalities from offering broadband. While Philadelphia's plan itself was grandfathered, future expansion from a series of wireless "hot spots" in open area to a genuine municipal network will likely be challenged under the new state law. Other municipalities in Pennsylvania are entirely foreclosed from pursuing this option. In this domain, at least as of 2005, the incumbents seem to have had some substantial success in containing the emergence of municipal broadband networks as a significant approach to eliminating the bottleneck in local network infrastructure. +={ Abilene, Texas } + +3~ Devices +={ computers : + policy on physical devices +7 ; + devices (physical), policy regarding +7 : + see also computers ; + hardware : + policy on physical devices +7 ; + hardware regulations +7 ; + personal computers : + policy on physical devises +7 ; + physical machinery and computers : + policy on physical devices +7 +} + +The second major component of the physical layer of the networked environment is comprised of the devices people use to compute and communicate. Personal computers, handhelds, game consoles, and to a lesser extent, but lurking in the background, televisions, are the primary relevant devices. In the United States, personal computers are the overwhelmingly dominant mode of connectivity. In Europe and Japan, mobile handheld devices occupy a much larger space. Game consoles are beginning to provide an alternative computationally intensive device, and Web-TV has been a background idea for a while. The increasing digitization of both over-the-air and cable broadcast makes digital TV a background presence, if not an immediate alternative avenue, to Internet communications. None of these devices are constructed by a commons--in the way that open wireless networks, free software, or peer-produced content can be. Personal computers, however, are built on open architecture, using highly standardized commodity components and open interfaces in an enormously competitive market. As a practical matter, therefore, PCs provide an open-platform device. Handhelds, game consoles, and digital televisions, on the other hand, use more or less proprietary architectures and interfaces and are produced in a less-competitive market-- not because there is no competition among the manufacturers, but because the distribution chain, through the service providers, is relatively controlled. The result is that configurations and features can more readily be customized for personal computers. New uses can be developed and implemented in the hardware without permission from any owner of a manufacturing or distribution outlet. As handhelds grow in their capabilities, and personal computers collapse in size, the two modes of communicating are bumping into each other's turf. At the moment, there is no obvious regulatory push to ,{[pg 409]}, nudge one or the other out. Observing the evolution of these markets therefore has less to do with policy. As we look at these markets, however, it is important to recognize that the outcome of this competition is not normatively neutral. The capabilities made possible by personal computers underlie much of the social and economic activity described throughout this book. Proprietary handhelds, and even more so, game consoles and televisions, are, presently at least, platforms that choreograph their use. They structure their users' capabilities according to design requirements set by their producers and distributors. A physical layer usable with general-purpose computers is one that is pliable and open for any number of uses by individuals, in a way that a physical layer used through more narrowly scripted devices is not. +={ proprietary rights : + openness of personal computers +1 +} + +The major regulatory threat to the openness of personal computers comes from efforts to regulate the use of copyrighted materials. This question is explored in greater depth in the context of discussing the logical layer. Here, I only note that peer-to-peer networks, and what Fisher has called "promiscuous copying" on the Internet, have created a perceived threat to the very existence of the major players in the industrial cultural production system-- Hollywood and the recording industry. These industries are enormously adept at driving the regulation of their business environment--the laws of copyright, in particular. As the threat of copying and sharing of their content by users increased, these industries have maintained a steady pressure on Congress, the courts, and the executive to ratchet up the degree to which their rights are enforced. As we will see in looking at the logical and content layers, these efforts have been successful in changing the law and pushing for more aggressive enforcement. They have not, however, succeeded in suppressing widespread copying. Copying continues, if not entirely unabated, certainly at a rate that was impossible a mere six years ago. +={ Fisher, William (Terry) ; + entertainment industry : + hardware regulation and +5 +} + +One major dimension of the effort to stop copying has been a drive to regulate the design of personal computers. Pioneered by Senator Fritz Hollings in mid-2001, a number of bills were drafted and lobbied for: the first was the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act; the second, Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), was actually introduced in the Senate in 2002.~{ Bill Number S. 2048, 107th Congress, 2nd Session. }~ The basic structure of these proposed statutes was that they required manufacturers to design their computers to be "trusted systems." The term "trusted," however, had a very odd meaning. The point is that the system, or computer, can be trusted to perform in certain predictable ways, irrespective of what its owner wishes. ,{[pg 410]}, +={ Hollings, Fritz +3 ; + CBDPTA (Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act) ; + Security Systems Standards and Certification Act ; + trusted systems, computers as +1 +} + +The impulse is trivial to explain. If you believe that most users are using their personal computers to copy films and music illegally, then you can think of these users as untrustworthy. In order to be able to distribute films and music in the digital environment that is trustworthy, one must disable the users from behaving as they would choose to. The result is a range of efforts at producing what has derisively been called "the Fritz chip": legal mandates that systems be designed so that personal computers cannot run programs that are not certified properly to the chip. The most successful of these campaigns was Hollywood's achievement in persuading the FCC to require manufacturers of all devices capable of receiving digital television signals from the television set to comply with a particular "trusted system" standard. This "broadcast flag" regulation was odd in two distinct ways. First, the rule-making documents show quite clearly that this was a rule driven by Hollywood, not by the broadcasters. This is unusual because the industries that usually play a central role in these rule makings are those regulated by the FCC, such as broadcasters and cable systems. Second, the FCC was not, in fact, regulating the industries that it normally has jurisdiction to regulate. Instead, the rule applied to any device that could use digital television signals after they had already been received in the home. In other words, they were regulating practically every computer and digital-video-capable consumer electronics device imaginable. The Court of Appeals ultimately indeed struck down the regulation as wildly beyond the agency's jurisdiction, but the broadcast flag nonetheless is the closest that the industrial information economy incumbents have come to achieving regulatory control over the design of computers. +={ broadcast flag regulation } + +The efforts to regulate hardware to fit the distribution model of Hollywood and the recording industry pose a significant danger to the networked information environment. The core design principle of general-purpose computers is that they are open for varied uses over time, as their owners change their priorities and preferences. It is this general-purpose character that has allowed personal computers to take on such varied roles since their adoption in the 1980s. The purpose of the Fritz chip?style laws is to make computing devices less flexible. It is to define a range of socially, culturally, and economically acceptable uses of the machines that are predicted by the legislature and the industry actors, and to implement factory-defined capabilities that are not flexible, and do not give end users the freedom to change the intended use over time and to adapt to changing social and economic conditions and opportunities. ,{[pg 411]}, + +The political economy of this regulatory effort, and similar drives that have been more successful in the logical and content layers, is uncharacteristic of American politics. Personal computers, software, and telecommunications services are significantly larger industries than Hollywood and the recording industry. Verizon alone has roughly similar annual revenues to the entire U.S. movie industry. Each one of the industries that the content industries have tried to regulate has revenues several times greater than do the movie and music industries combined. The relative successes of Hollywood and the recording industry in regulating the logical and content layers, and the viability of their efforts to pass a Fritz chip law, attest to the remarkable cultural power of these industries and to their lobbying prowess. The reason is likely historical. The software and hardware industries in particular have developed mostly outside of the regulatory arena; only around 2002 did they begin to understand that what goes on in Washington could really hurt them. The telecommunications carriers, which are some of the oldest hands at the regulatory game, have had some success in preventing regulations that would force them to police their users and limit Internet use. However, the bulk of their lobbying efforts have been aimed elsewhere. The institutions of higher education, which have found themselves under attack for not policing their students' use of peer-to-peer networks, have been entirely ineffective at presenting their cultural and economic value and the importance of open Internet access to higher education, as compared to the hypothetical losses of Hollywood and the recording industry. Despite the past successes of these entertainment-industry incumbents, two elements suggest that physical device regulation of the CBDPTA form will not follow the same successful path of similar legislation at the logical layer, the DMCA of 1998. The first element is the fact that, unlike in 1998, the technology industries have now realized that Hollywood is seeking to severely constrain their design space. Industries with half a trillion dollars a year in revenues tend to have significant pull in American and international lawmaking bodies, even against industries, like movies and sound recording, that have high cultural visibility but no more than seventy-five billion dollars a year in revenues. The second is that in 1998, there were very few public advocacy organizations operating in the space of intellectual property and trying to play watchdog and to speak for the interests of users. By 2004, a number of organizations dedicated to users' rights in the digital environment emerged to make that conflict clear. The combination of well-defined business interests with increasing representation of user interests creates a political landscape ,{[pg 412]}, in which it will be difficult to pass sweeping laws to limit the flexibility of personal computers. The most recent iteration of the Fritz chip agenda, the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004 was indeed defeated, for the time being, by a coalition of high-technology firms and people who would have formerly been seen as left-of-center media activists. + +Regulation of device design remains at the frontier of the battles over the institutional ecology of the digital environment. It is precisely ubiquitous access to basic, general-purpose computers, as opposed to glorified televisions or telephone handsets, that lies at the very heart of the networked information economy. And it is therefore precisely ubiquitous access to such basic machines that is a precondition to the improvements in freedom and justice that we can see emerging in the digital environment. + +2~ THE LOGICAL LAYER +={ logical layer of institutional ecology +40 } + +At the logical layer, most of the efforts aimed to secure a proprietary model and a more tightly controlled institutional ecology follow a similar pattern to the efforts to regulate device design. They come from the needs of the content-layer businesses--Hollywood and the recording industry, in particular. Unlike the physical transmission layer, which is historically rooted in a proprietary but regulated organizational form, most of the logical layer of the Internet has its roots in open, nonproprietary protocols and standards. The broad term "logical layer" combines a wide range of quite different functionalities. The most basic logical components--the basic protocols and standards for Internet connectivity--have from the beginning of the Internet been open, unowned, and used in common by all Internet users and applications. They were developed by computer scientists funded primarily with public money. The basic Internet Protocol (IP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are open for all to use. Most of the basic standards for communicating were developed in the IETF, a loosely defined standardssetting body that works almost entirely on a meritocratic basis--a body that Michael Froomkin once suggested is the closest earthly approximation of Habermas's ideal speech situation. Individual computer engineers contributed irrespective of formal status or organizational affiliation, and the organization ran on the principle that Dave Clark termed "rough consensus and running code." The World Wide Web protocols and authoring conventions HTTP and HTML were created, and over the course of their lives, shepherded by Tim Berners Lee, who has chosen to dedicate his efforts to making ,{[pg 413]}, the Web a public good rather than cashing in on his innovation. The sheer technical necessity of these basic protocols and the cultural stature of their achievement within the engineering community have given these open processes and their commonslike institutional structure a strong gravitational pull on the design of other components of the logical layer, at least insofar as it relates to the communication side of the Internet. +={ Clark, Dave ; + Froomkin, Michael ; + Habermas, Jurgen +} + +This basic open model has been in constant tension with the proprietary models that have come to use and focus on the Internet in the past decade. By the mid-1990s, the development of graphical-user interfaces to the Web drove Internet use out of universities and into homes. Commercial actors began to look for ways to capture the commercial value of the human potential of the World Wide Web and the Internet, while Hollywood and the recording industry saw the threat of one giant worldwide copying machine looming large. At the same time, the Clinton administration's search of "third-way" liberal agenda manifested in these areas as a commitment to "let the private sector lead" in deployment of the Internet, and an "intellectual property" policy based on extreme protectionism for the exclusive-rightsdependent industries aimed, in the metaphors of that time, to get cars on the information superhighway or help the Internet become a celestial jukebox. The result was a series of moves designed to make the institutional ecology of the Internet more conducive to the proprietary model. + +3~ The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 +={ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) +7 ; + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) +7 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) +7 ; + proprietary rights : + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) +7 +} + +No piece of legislation more clearly represents the battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment than the pompously named Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). The DMCA was the culmination of more than three years of lobbying and varied efforts, both domestically in the United States and internationally, over the passage of two WIPO treaties in 1996. The basic worldview behind it, expressed in a 1995 white paper issued by the Clinton administration, was that in order for the National Information Infrastructure (NII) to take off, it had to have "content," and that its great promise was that it could deliver the equivalent of thousands of channels of entertainment. This would only happen, however, if the NII was made safe for delivery of digital content without making it easily copied and distributed without authorization and without payment. The two core recommendations of that early road map were focused on regulating technology and organizational responsibility. First, law was to regulate ,{[pg 414]}, the development of technologies that might defeat any encryption or other mechanisms that the owners of copyrighted materials would use to prevent use of their works. Second, Internet service providers were to be held accountable for infringements made by their users, so that they would have an incentive to police their systems. Early efforts to pass this agenda in legislation were resisted, primarily by the large telecommunications service providers. The Baby Bells--U.S. regional telephone companies that were created from the breakup of AT&T (Ma Bell) in 1984, when the telecommunications company was split up in order to introduce a more competitive structure to the telecom industry--also played a role in partly defeating implementation of this agenda in the negotiations toward new WIPO treaties in 1996, treaties that ultimately included a much-muted version of the white paper agenda. Nonetheless, the following year saw significant lobbying for "implementing legislation" to bring U.S. law in line with the requirements of the new WIPO treaties. This new posture placed the emphasis of congressional debates on national industrial policy and the importance of strong protection to the export activities of the U.S. content industries. It was enough to tip the balance in favor of passage of the DMCA. The Internet service provider liability portions bore the marks of a hard-fought battle. The core concerns of the telecommunications companies were addressed by creating an explicit exemption for pure carriage of traffic. Furthermore, providers of more sophisticated services, like Web hosting, were provided immunity from liability for simple failure to police their system actively. In exchange, however, service providers were required to respond to requests by copyright owners by immediately removing materials that the copyright owners deemed infringing. This was the provision under which Diebold forced Swarthmore to remove the embarrassing e-mail records from the students' Web sites. The other, more basic, element of the DMCA was the anticircumvention regime it put in place. Pamela Samuelson has described the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA as the result of a battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. At the time, unlike the telecommunications giants who were born of and made within the regulatory environment, Silicon Valley did not quite understand that what happened in Washington, D.C., could affect its business. The Act was therefore an almost unqualified victory for Hollywood, moderated only by a long list of weak exemptions for various parties that bothered to show up and lobby against it. +={ Samuelson, Pamela ; + anticircumvention provisions, DMCA +4 ; + encryption circumvention +3 +} + +The central feature of the DMCA, a long and convoluted piece of legislation, ,{[pg 415]}, is its anticircumvention and antidevice provisions. These provisions made it illegal to use, develop, or sell technologies that had certain properties. Copyright owners believed that it would be possible to build strong encryption into media products distributed on the Internet. If they did so successfully, the copyright owners could charge for digital distribution and users would not be able to make unauthorized copies of the works. If this outcome was achieved, the content industries could simply keep their traditional business model--selling movies or music as discrete packages--at lower cost, and with a more refined ability to extract the value users got from using their materials. The DMCA was intended to make this possible by outlawing technologies that would allow users to get around, or circumvent, the protection measures that the owners of copyrighted materials put in place. At first blush, this proposition sounds entirely reasonable. If you think of the content of a music file as a home, and of the copy protection mechanism as its lock, then all the DMCA does is prohibit the making and distributing of burglary tools. This is indeed how the legislation was presented by its supporters. From this perspective, even the relatively draconian consequences spelled out in the DMCA's criminal penalties seem defensible. +={ antidevice provisions, DMCA } + +There are two distinct problems with this way of presenting what the DMCA does. First, copyrights are far from coextensive with real property. There are many uses of existing works that are permissible to all. They are treated in copyright law like walking on the sidewalk or in a public park is treated in property law, not like walking across the land of a neighbor. This is true, most obviously, for older works whose copyright has expired. This is true for certain kinds of uses of a work, like quoting it for purposes of criticism or parody. Encryption and other copy-protection techniques are not limited by the definition of legal rights. They can be used to protect all kinds of digital files--whether their contents are still covered by copyright or not, and whether the uses that users wish to make of them are privileged or not. Circumvention techniques, similarly, can be used to circumvent copyprotection mechanisms for purposes both legitimate and illegitimate. A barbed wire cutter, to borrow Boyle's metaphor, could be a burglary tool if the barbed wire is placed at the property line. However, it could equally be a tool for exercising your privilege if the private barbed wire has been drawn around public lands or across a sidewalk or highway. The DMCA prohibited all wire cutters, even though there were many uses of these technologies that could be used for legal purposes. Imagine a ten-year-old girl doing her homework on the history of the Holocaust. She includes in her multimedia paper ,{[pg 416]}, a clip from Steven Spielberg's film, Schindler's List, in which a little girl in red, the only color image on an otherwise black-and-white screen, walks through the pandemonium of a deportation. In her project, the child painstakingly superimposes her own face over that of the girl in the film for the entire sequence, frame by frame. She calls the paper, "My Grandmother." There is little question that most copyright lawyers (not retained by the owner of the movie) would say that this use would count as a "fair use," and would be privileged under the Copyright Act. There is also little question that if Schindler's List was only available in encrypted digital form, a company would have violated the DMCA if it distributed a product that enabled the girl to get around the encryption in order to use the snippet she needed, and which by traditional copyright law she was permitted to use. It is in the face of this concern about overreaching by those who employ technological protection measures that Julie Cohen argued for the "right to hack"--to circumvent code that impedes one's exercise of one's privileged uses. +={ Boyle, James ; + Cohen, Julie ; + Speilberg, Steven +} + +The second problem with the DMCA is that its definitions are broad and malleable. Simple acts like writing an academic paper on how the encryption works, or publishing a report on the Web that tells users where they can find information about how to circumvent a copy-protection mechanism could be included in the definition of providing a circumvention device. Edward Felten is a computer scientist at Princeton. As he was preparing to publish an academic paper on encryption, he received a threatening letter from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), telling him that publication of the paper constituted a violation of the DMCA. The music industry had spent substantial sums on developing encryption for digital music distribution. In order to test the system before it actually entrusted music with this wrapper, the industry issued a public challenge, inviting cryptographers to try to break the code. Felten succeeded in doing so, but did not continue to test his solutions because the industry required that, in order to continue testing, he sign a nondisclosure agreement. Felten is an academic, not a businessperson. He works to make knowledge public, not to keep it secret. He refused to sign the nondisclosure agreement, and prepared to publish his initial findings, which he had made without entering any nondisclosure agreement. As he did so, he received the RIAA's threatening letter. In response, he asked a federal district court to declare that publication of his findings was not a violation of the DMCA. The RIAA, realizing that trying to silence academic publication of a criticism of the ,{[pg 417]}, weakness of its approach to encryption was not the best litigation stance, moved to dismiss the case by promising it would never bring suit.~{ /{Felten v. Recording Indust. Assoc. of America Inc.}/, No. CV- 01-2669 (D.N.J. June 26, 2001). }~ +={ Felten, Edward ; + music industry : + DMCA violations ; + RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) +} + +Another case did not end so well for the defendant. It involved a suit by the eight Hollywood studios against a hacker magazine, 2600. The studios sought an injunction prohibiting 2600 from making available a program called DeCSS, which circumvents the copy-protection scheme used to control access to DVDs, named CSS. CSS prevents copying or any use of DVDs unauthorized by the vendor. DeCSS was written by a fifteen-year-old Norwegian named Jon Johanson, who claimed (though the district court discounted his claim) to have written it as part of an effort to create a DVD player for GNU/Linux-based machines. A copy of DeCSS, together with a story about it was posted on the 2600 site. The industry obtained an injunction against 2600, prohibiting not only the posting of DeCSS, but also its linking to other sites that post the program--that is, telling users where they can get the program, rather than actually distributing a circumvention program. That decision may or may not have been correct on the merits. There are strong arguments in favor of the proposition that making DVDs compatible with GNU/Linux systems is a fair use. There are strong arguments that the DMCA goes much farther than it needs to in restricting speech of software programmers and Web authors, and so is invalid under the First Amendment. The court rejected these arguments. +={ Johanson, Jon ; + DeCSS program +} + +The point here is not, however, to revisit the legal correctness of that decision, but to illustrate the effects of the DMCA as an element in the institutional ecology of the logical layer. The DMCA is intended as a strong legal barrier to certain technological paths of innovation at the logical layer of the digital environment. It is intended specifically to preserve the "thing-" or "goods"-like nature of entertainment products--music and movies, in particular. As such, it is intended to, and does to some extent, shape the technological development toward treating information and culture as finished goods, rather than as the outputs of social and communications processes that blur the production-consumption distinction. It makes it more difficult for individuals and nonmarket actors to gain access to digital materials that the technology, the market, and the social practices, left unregulated, would have made readily available. It makes practices of cutting and pasting, changing and annotating existing cultural materials harder to do than the technology would have made possible. I have argued elsewhere that when Congress self-consciously makes it harder for individuals to use whatever technology is available to them, to speak as they please and to whomever ,{[pg 418]}, they please, in the interest of some public goal (in this case, preservation of Hollywood and the recording industry for the public good), it must justify its acts under the First Amendment. However, the important question is not one of U.S. constitutional law. + +The more general claim, true for any country that decides to enforce a DMCA-like law, is that prohibiting technologies that allow individuals to make flexible and creative uses of digital cultural materials burdens the development of the networked information economy and society. It burdens individual autonomy, the emergence of the networked public sphere and critical culture, and some of the paths available for global human development that the networked information economy makes possible. All these losses will be incurred in expectation of improvements in creativity, even though it is not at all clear that doing so would actually improve, even on a simple utilitarian calculus, the creative production of any given country or region. Passing a DMCA-type law will not by itself squelch the development of nonmarket and peer production. Indeed, many of these technological and social-economic developments emerged and have flourished after the DMCA was already in place. It does, however, represent a choice to tilt the institutional ecology in favor of industrial production and distribution of cultural packaged goods, at the expense of commons-based relations of sharing information, knowledge, and culture. Twentieth-century cultural materials provide the most immediate and important source of references and images for contemporary cultural creation. Given the relatively recent provenance of movies, recorded music, and photography, much of contemporary culture was created in these media. These basic materials for the creation of contemporary multimedia culture are, in turn, encoded in formats that cannot simply be copied by hand, as texts might be even in the teeth of technical protection measures. The capacity to copy mechanically is a necessary precondition for the capacity to quote and combine existing materials of these kinds into new cultural statements and conversational moves. Preserving the capacity of industrial cultural producers to maintain a hermetic seal on the use of materials to which they own copyright can be bought only at the cost of disabling the newly emerging modes of cultural production from quoting and directly building upon much of the culture of the last century. + +3~ The Battle over Peer-to-Peer Networks +={ file-sharing networks +15 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology +15 ; + network topology : + peer-to-peer networks +15 ; + p2p networks +15 ; + peer-to-peer networks +15 ; + structure of network : + peer-to-peer networks +15 ; + topology, network : + peer-to-peer networks +15 +} + +The second major institutional battle over the technical and social trajectory of Internet development has revolved around peer-to-peer (p2p) networks. I ,{[pg 419]}, offer a detailed description of it here, but not because I think it will be the make-it-or-break-it of the networked information economy. If any laws have that determinative a power, they are the Fritz chip and DMCA. However, the peer-to-peer legal battle offers an excellent case study of just how difficult it is to evaluate the effects of institutional ecology on technology, economic organization, and social practice. + +Peer-to-peer technologies as a global phenomenon emerged from Napster and its use by tens of millions of users around the globe for unauthorized sharing of music files. In the six years since their introduction, p2p networks have developed robust and impressive technical capabilities. They have been adopted by more than one hundred million users, and are increasingly applied to uses well beyond music sharing. These developments have occurred despite a systematic and aggressive campaign of litigation and criminal enforcement in a number of national systems against both developers and users. Technically, p2p networks are algorithms that run on top of the Internet and allow users to connect directly from one end user's machine to another. In theory, that is how the whole Internet works--or at least how it worked when there were a small number of computers attached to it. In practice, most users connect through an Internet service provider, and most content available for access on the Internet was available on a server owned and operated by someone distinct from its users. In the late 1990s, there were rudimentary utilities that allowed one user to access information stored on the computer of another, but no widely used utility allowed large numbers of individuals to search each other's hard drives and share data directly from one user to another. Around 1998-1999, early Internet music distribution models, like MP3.com, therefore provided a centralized distribution point for music. This made them highly vulnerable to legal attack. Shawn Fanning, then eighteen years old, was apparently looking for ways to do what teenagers always do--share their music with friends--in a way that would not involve a central point of storing and copying. He developed Napster--the first major, widely adopted p2p technology. Unlike MP3.com, users of Napster could connect their computers directly--one person could download a song stored on the computer of another without mediation. All that the Napster site itself did, in addition to providing the end-user software, was to provide a centralized directory of which songs resided on which machine. There is little disagreement in the literature that it is an infringement under U.S. copyright law for any given user to allow others to duplicate copyrighted music from his or her computer to theirs. The centralizing role of Napster ,{[pg 420]}, in facilitating these exchanges, alongside a number of ill-considered statements by some of its principals, were enough to render the company liable for contributory copyright infringement. +={ Fanning, Shawn ; + MP3.com ; + Napster +1 : + see also peer-to-peer networks +} + +The genie of p2p technology and the social practice of sharing music, however, were already out of the bottle. The story of the following few years, to the extent that one can tell a history of the present and the recent past, offers two core insights. First, it shows how institutional design can be a battleground over the conditions of cultural production in the digital environment. Second, it exposes the limits of the extent to which the institutional ecology can determine the ultimate structure of behavior at a moment of significant and rapid technological and social perturbation. Napster's judicial closure provided no real respite for the recording industry. As Napster was winding down, Gnutella, a free software alternative, had already begun to replace it. Gnutella did not depend on any centralized component, not even to facilitate search. This meant that there was no central provider. There was no firm against which to bring action. Even if there were, it would be impossible to "shut down" use of the program. Gnutella was a freestanding program that individual users could install. Once installed, its users could connect to anyone else who had installed the program, without passing through any choke point. There was no central server to shut down. Gnutella had some technical imperfections, but these were soon overcome by other implementations of p2p. The most successful improvement over Gnutella was the FastTrack architecture, now used by Kazaa, Grokster, and other applications, including some free software applications. It improves on the search capabilities of Gnutella by designating some users as "supernodes," which store information about what songs are available in their "neighborhood." This avoids Gnutella's primary weakness, the relatively high degree of network overhead traffic. The supernodes operate on an ad hoc basis. They change based on whose computer is available with enough storage and bandwidth. They too, therefore, provide no litigation target. Other technologies have developed to speed up or make more robust the distribution of files, including BitTorrent, eDonkey and its free-software relative eMule, and many others. Within less than two years of Napster's closure, more people were using these various platforms to share files than Napster had users at its height. Some of these new firms found themselves again under legal assault--both in the United States and abroad. +={ FastTrak architecture ; + Gnutella +} + +As the technologies grew and developed, and as the legal attacks increased, the basic problem presented by the litigation against technology manufacturers ,{[pg 421]}, became evident. Peer-to-peer techniques can be used for a wide range of uses, only some of which are illegal. At the simplest level, they can be used to distribute music that is released by an increasing number of bands freely. These bands hope to get exposure that they can parley into concert performances. As recorded music from the 1950s begins to fall into the public domain in Europe and Australia, golden oldies become another legitimate reason to use p2p technologies. More important, p2p systems are being adapted to different kinds of uses. Chapter 7 discusses how FreeNet is being used to disseminate subversive documents, using the persistence and robustness of p2p networks to evade detection and suppression by authoritarian regimes. BitTorrent was initially developed to deal with the large file transfers required for free software distributions. BitTorrent and eDonkey were both used by the Swarthmore students when their college shut down their Internet connection in response to Diebold's letter threatening action under the service provider liability provisions of the DMCA. The founders of KaZaa have begun to offer an Internet telephony utility, Skype, which allows users to make phone calls from one computer to another for free, and from their computer to the telephone network for a small fee. Skype is a p2p technology. +={ KaZaa +1 ; + Skype utility +} + +In other words, p2p is developing as a general approach toward producing distributed data storage and retrieval systems, just as open wireless networks and distributed computing are emerging to take advantage of personal devices to produce distributed communications and computation systems, respectively. As the social and technological uses of p2p technologies grow and diversify, the legal assault on all p2p developers becomes less sustainable-- both as a legal matter and as a social-technical matter. KaZaa was sued in the Netherlands, and moved to Australia. It was later subject to actions in Australia, but by that time, the Dutch courts found the company not to be liable to the music labels. Grokster, a firm based in the United States, was initially found to have offered a sufficiently diverse set of capabilities, beyond merely facilitating copyright infringements, that the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to find it liable simply for making and distributing its software. The Supreme Court reversed that holding, however, returning the case to the lower courts to find, factually, whether Grokster had actual intent to facilitate illegal copying.~{ /{Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer v. Grokster, Ltd.}/ (decided June 27, 2005). }~ Even if Grokster ultimately loses, the FastTrack network architecture will not disappear; clients (that is, end user software) will continue to exist, including free software clients. Perhaps it will be harder to raise money for businesses located within the United States ,{[pg 422]}, to operate in this technological space, because the new rule announced by the Supreme Court in Grokster raises the risk of litigation for innovators in the p2p space. However, as with encryption regulation in the mid-1990s, it is not clear that the United States can unilaterally prevent the development of technology for which there is worldwide demand and with regard to whose development there is globally accessible talent. +={ Grokster } + +How important more generally are these legal battles to the organization of cultural production in the networked environment? There are two components to the answer: The first component considers the likely effect of the legal battles on the development and adoption of the technology and the social practice of promiscuous copying. In this domain, law seems unlikely to prevent the continued development of p2p technologies. It has, however, had two opposite results. First, it has affected the path of the technological evolution in a way that is contrary to the industry interests but consistent with increasing distribution of the core functions of the logical layer. Second, it seems to have dampened somewhat the social practice of file sharing. The second component assumes that a range of p2p technologies will continue to be widely adopted, and that some significant amount of sharing will continue to be practiced. The question then becomes what effect this will have on the primary cultural industries that have fought this technology-- movies and recorded music. Within this new context, music will likely change more radically than movies, and the primary effect will be on the accreditation function--how music is recognized and adopted by fans. Film, if it is substantially affected, will likely be affected largely by a shift in tastes. + +MP3.com was the first major music distribution site shut down by litigation. From the industry's perspective, it should have represented an entirely unthreatening business model. Users paid a subscription fee, in exchange for which they were allowed to download music. There were various quirks and kinks in this model that made it unattractive to the music industry at the time: the industry did not control this major site, and therefore had to share the rents from the music, and more important, there was no effective control over the music files once downloaded. However, from the perspective of 2005, MP3.com was a vastly more manageable technology for the sound recording business model than a free software file-sharing client. MP3.com was a single site, with a corporate owner that could be (and was) held responsible. It controlled which user had access to what files--by requiring each user to insert a CD into the computer to prove that he or she had bought the CD--so that usage could in principle be monitored and, if ,{[pg 423]}, desired, compensation could be tied to usage. It did not fundamentally change the social practice of choosing music. It provided something that was more like a music-on-demand jukebox than a point of music sharing. As a legal matter, MP3.com's infringement was centered on the fact that it stored and delivered the music from this central server instead of from the licensed individual copies. In response to the shutdown of MP3.com, Napster redesigned the role of the centralized mode, and left storage in the hands of users, keeping only the directory and search functions centralized. When Napster was shut down, Gnutella and later FastTrack further decentralized the system, offering a fully decentralized, ad hoc reconfigurable cataloging and search function. Because these algorithms represent architecture and a protocol-based network, not a particular program, they are usable in many different implementations. This includes free software programs like MLDonkey--which is a nascent file-sharing system that is aimed to run simultaneously across most of the popular file-sharing networks, including FastTrack, BitTorrent, and Overnet, the eDonkey network. These programs are now written by, and available from, many different jurisdictions. There is no central point of control over their distribution. There is no central point through which to measure and charge for their use. They are, from a technical perspective, much more resilient to litigation attack, and much less friendly to various possible models of charging for downloads or usage. From a technological perspective, then, the litigation backfired. It created a network that is less susceptible to integration into an industrial model of music distribution based on royalty payments per user or use. +={ MP3.com } + +It is harder to gauge, however, whether the litigation was a success or a failure from a social-practice point of view. There have been conflicting reports on the effects of file sharing and the litigation on CD sales. The recording industry claimed that CD sales were down because of file sharing, but more independent academic studies suggested that CD sales were not independently affected by file sharing, as opposed to the general economic downturn.~{ See Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf, "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales" (working paper), http://www.unc.edu/cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf. }~ The Pew project on Internet and American Life user survey data suggests that the litigation strategy against individual users has dampened the use of file sharing, though file sharing is still substantially more common among users than paying for files from the newly emerging payper-download authorized services. In mid-2003, the Pew study found that 29 percent of Internet users surveyed said they had downloaded music files, identical to the percentage of users who had downloaded music in the first quarter of 2001, the heyday of Napster. Twenty-one percent responded that ,{[pg 424]}, they allow others to download from their computer.~{ Mary Madden and Amanda Lenhart, "Music Downloading, File-Sharing, and Copyright" (Pew, July 2003), http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Copyright_Memo.pdf/. }~ This meant that somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-five million adults in the United States alone were sharing music files in mid-2003, when the recording industry began to sue individual users. Of these, fully two-thirds expressly stated that they did not care whether the files they downloaded were or were not copyrighted. By the end of 2003, five months after the industry began to sue individuals, the number of respondents who admitted to downloading music dropped by half. During the next few months, these numbers increased slightly to twenty-three million adults, remaining below the mid-2003 numbers in absolute terms and more so in terms of percentage of Internet users. Of those who had at one point downloaded, but had stopped, roughly a third said that the threat of suit was the reason they had stopped file sharing.~{ Lee Rainie and Mary Madden, "The State of Music Downloading and File-Sharing Online" (Pew, April 2004), http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Filesharing_April_ 04.pdf. }~ During this same period, use of pay online music download services, like iTunes, rose to about 7 percent of Internet users. Sharing of all kinds of media files--music, movies, and games--was at 23 percent of adult Internet users. These numbers do indeed suggest that, in the aggregate, music downloading is reported somewhat less often than it was in the past. It is hard to tell how much of this reduction is due to actual behavioral change as compared to an unwillingness to self-report on behavior that could subject one to litigation. It is impossible to tell how much of an effect the litigation has had specifically on sharing by younger people--teenagers and college students--who make up a large portion of both CD buyers and file sharers. Nonetheless, the reduction in the total number of self-reported users and the relatively steady percentage of total Internet users who share files of various kinds suggest that the litigation does seem to have had a moderating effect on file sharing as a social practice. It has not, however, prevented file sharing from continuing to be a major behavioral pattern among one-fifth to one-quarter of Internet users, and likely a much higher proportion in the most relevant populations from the perspective of the music and movie industries--teenagers and young adults. +={ Pew studies } + +From the perspective of understanding the effects of institutional ecology, then, the still-raging battle over peer-to-peer networks presents an ambiguous picture. One can speculate with some degree of confidence that, had Napster not been stopped by litigation, file sharing would have been a much wider social practice than it is today. The application was extremely easy to use; it offered a single network for all file-sharing users, thereby offering an extremely diverse and universal content distribution network; and for a brief period, it was a cultural icon and a seemingly acceptable social practice. The ,{[pg 425]}, period of regrouping that followed its closure; the imperfect interfaces of early Gnutella clients; the relative fragmentation of file sharing into a number of networks, each with a smaller coverage of content than was present; and the fear of personal litigation risk are likely to have limited adoption. On the other hand, in the longer run, the technological developments have created platforms that are less compatible with the industrial model, and which would be harder to integrate into a stable settlement for music distribution in the digital environment. +={ entertainment industry : + peer-to-peer networks and +6 +} + +Prediction aside, it is not immediately obvious why peer-to-peer networks contribute to the kinds of nonmarket production and creativity that I have focused on as the core of the networked information economy. At first blush, they seem simply to be mechanisms for fans to get industrially produced recorded music without paying musicians. This has little to do with democratization of creativity. To see why p2p networks nonetheless are a part of the development of a more attractive cultural production system, and how they can therefore affect the industrial organization of cultural production, we can look first at music, and then, independently, at movies. The industrial structure of each is different, and the likely effects of p2p networks are different in each case. +={ music industry +3 } + +Recorded music began with the phonograph--a packaged good intended primarily for home consumption. The industry that grew around the ability to stamp and distribute records divided the revenue structure such that artists have been paid primarily from live public performances and merchandizing. Very few musicians, including successful recording artists, make money from recording royalties. The recording industry takes almost all of the revenues from record and CD sales, and provides primarily promotion and distribution. It does not bear the capital cost of the initial musical creation; artists do. With the declining cost of computation, that cost has become relatively low, often simply a computer owned by artists themselves, much as they own their instruments. Because of this industrial structure, peer-to-peer networks are a genuine threat to displacing the entire recording industry, while leaving musicians, if not entirely unaffected, relatively insulated from the change and perhaps mildly better off. Just as the recording industry stamps CDs, promotes them on radio stations, and places them on distribution chain shelves, p2p networks produce the physical and informational aspects of a music distribution system. However, p2p networks do so collaboratively, by sharing the capacity of their computers, hard drives, and network connections. Filtering and accreditation, or "promotion," are produced on the ,{[pg 426]}, model that Eben Moglen called "anarchist distribution." Jane's friends and friends of her friends are more likely to know exactly what music would make her happy than are recording executives trying to predict which song to place, on which station and which shelf, to expose her to exactly the music she is most likely to buy in a context where she would buy it. Filesharing systems produce distribution and "promotion" of music in a socialsharing modality. Alongside peer-produced music reviews, they could entirely supplant the role of the recording industry. +={ Moglen, Eben } + +Musicians and songwriters seem to be relatively insulated from the effects of p2p networks, and on balance, are probably affected positively. The most comprehensive survey data available, from mid-2004, shows that 35 percent of musicians and songwriters said that free downloads have helped their careers. Only 5 percent said it has hurt them. Thirty percent said it increased attendance at concerts, 21 percent that it helped them sell CDs and other merchandise, and 19 percent that it helped them gain radio playing time. These results are consistent with what one would expect given the revenue structure of the industry, although the study did not separate answers out based on whether the respondent was able to live entirely or primarily on their music, which represented only 16 percent of the respondents to the survey. In all, it appears that much of the actual flow of revenue to artists-- from performances and other sources--is stable. This is likely to remain true even if the CD market were entirely displaced by peer-to-peer distribution. Musicians will still be able to play for their dinner, at least not significantly less so than they can today. Perhaps there will be fewer millionaires. Perhaps fewer mediocre musicians with attractive physiques will be sold as "geniuses," and more talented musicians will be heard than otherwise would have, and will as a result be able to get paying gigs instead of waiting tables or "getting a job." But it would be silly to think that music, a cultural form without which no human society has existed, will cease to be in our world if we abandon the industrial form it took for the blink of a historical eye that was the twentieth century. Music was not born with the phonograph, nor will it die with the peer-to-peer network. The terms of the debate, then, are about cultural policy; perhaps about industrial policy. Will we get the kind of music we want in this system, whoever "we" are? Will American recording companies continue to get the export revenue streams they do? Will artists be able to live from making music? Some of these arguments are serious. Some are but a tempest in a monopoly-rent teapot. It is clear that a technological change has rendered obsolete a particular mode of distributing ,{[pg 427]}, information and culture. Distribution, once the sole domain of market-based firms, now can be produced by decentralized networks of users, sharing instantiations of music they deem attractive with others, using equipment they own and generic network connections. This distribution network, in turn, allows a much more diverse range of musicians to reach much more finely grained audiences than were optimal for industrial production and distribution of mechanical instantiations of music in vinyl or CD formats. The legal battles reflect an effort by an incumbent industry to preserve its very lucrative business model. The industry has, to this point, delayed the transition to peer-based distribution, but it is unclear for how long or to what extent it will be successful in preventing the gradual transition to userbased distribution. + +The movie industry has a different industrial structure and likely a different trajectory in its relations to p2p networks. First and foremost, movies began as a relatively high capital cost experience good. Making a movie, as opposed to writing a song, was something that required a studio and a large workforce. It could not be done by a musician with a guitar or a piano. Furthermore, movies were, throughout most of their history, collective experience goods. They were a medium for public performance experienced outside of the home, in a social context. With the introduction of television, it was easy to adapt movie revenue structure by delaying release of films to television viewing until after demand for the movie at the theater declined, as well as to develop their capabilities into a new line of business--television production. However, theatrical release continued to be the major source of revenue. When video came along, the movie industry cried murder in the Sony Betamax case, but actually found it quite easy to work videocassettes into yet another release window, like television, and another medium, the made-for-video movie. Digital distribution affects the distribution of cultural artifacts as packaged goods for home consumption. It does not affect the social experience of going out to the movies. At most, it could affect the consumption of the twenty-year-old mode of movie distribution: videos and DVDs. As recently as the year 2000, when the Hollywood studios were litigating the DeCSS case, they represented to the court that home video sales were roughly 40 percent of revenue, a number consistent with other reports.~{ See 111 F.Supp.2d at 310, fns. 69-70; PBS Frontline report, http://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/hollywood/business/windows.html. }~ The remainder, composed of theatrical release revenues and various television releases, remains reasonably unthreatened as a set of modes of revenue capture to sustain the high-production value, high-cost movies that typify Hollywood. Forty percent is undoubtedly a large chunk, but unlike ,{[pg 428]}, the recording industry, which began with individually owned recordings, the movie industry preexisted videocassettes and DVDs, and is likely to outlive them even if p2p networks were to eliminate that market entirely, which is doubtful. + +The harder and more interesting question is whether cheap high-quality digital video-capture and editing technologies combined with p2p networks for efficient distribution could make film a more diverse medium than it is now. The potential hypothetical promise of p2p networks like BitTorrent is that they could offer very robust and efficient distribution networks for films outside the mainstream industry. Unlike garage bands and small-scale music productions, however, this promise is as yet speculative. We do not invest in public education for film creation, as we do in the teaching of writing. Most of the raw materials out of which a culture of digital capture and amateur editing could develop are themselves under copyright, a subject we return to when considering the content layer. There are some early efforts, like atomfilms.com, at short movie distribution. The technological capabilities are there. It is possible that if films older than thirty or even fifty years were released into the public domain, they would form the raw material out of which a new cultural production practice would form. If it did, p2p networks would likely play an important role in their distribution. However, for now, although the sound recording and movie industries stand shoulder to shoulder in the lobbying efforts, their circumstances and likely trajectory in relation to file sharing are likely quite different. + +The battles over p2p and the DMCA offer some insight into the potential, but also the limits, of tweaking the institutional ecology. The ambition of the industrial cultural producers in both cases was significant. They sought to deploy law to shape emerging technologies and social practices to make sure that the business model they had adopted for the technologies of film and sound recording continued to work in the digital environment. Doing so effectively would require substantial elimination of certain lines of innovation, like certain kinds of decryption and p2p networks. It would require outlawing behavior widely adopted by people around the world--social sharing of most things that they can easily share--which, in the case of music, has been adopted by tens of millions of people around the world. The belief that all this could be changed in a globally interconnected network through the use of law was perhaps naïve. Nonetheless, the legal efforts have had some impact on social practices and on the ready availability of materials ,{[pg 429]}, for free use. The DMCA may not have made any single copyright protection mechanism hold up to the scrutiny of hackers and crackers around the Internet. However, it has prevented circumvention devices from being integrated into mainstream platforms, like the Windows operating system or some of the main antivirus programs, which would have been "natural" places for them to appear in consumer markets. The p2p litigation did not eliminate the p2p networks, but it does seem to have successfully dampened the social practice of file sharing. One can take quite different views of these effects from a policy perspective. However, it is clear that they are selfconscious efforts to tweak the institutional ecology of the digital environment in order to dampen the most direct threats it poses for the twentieth-century industrial model of cultural production. In the case of the DMCA, this is done at the direct cost of making it substantially harder for users to make creative use of the existing stock of audiovisual materials from the twentieth century--materials that are absolutely central to our cultural selfunderstanding at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the case of p2p networks, the cost to nonmarket production is more indirect, and may vary across different cultural forms. The most important long-term effect of the pressure that this litigation has put on technology to develop decentralized search and retrieval systems may, ultimately and ironically, be to improve the efficiency of radically decentralized cultural production and distribution, and make decentralized production more, rather than less, robust to the vicissitudes of institutional ecology. + +3~ The Domain Name System: From Public Trust to the Fetishism of Mnemonics +={ domain name system +5 ; + Internet : + Web addresses +5 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + domain name system +5 ; + Web : + domain name addresses +5 ; + wireless communications : + domain name addresses +5 +} + +Not all battles over the role of property-like arrangements at the logical layer originate from Hollywood and the recording industry. One of the major battles outside of the ambit of the copyright industries concerned the allocation and ownership of domain names. At stake was the degree to which brand name ownership in the material world could be leveraged into attention on the Internet. Domain names are alphanumeric mnemonics used to represent actual Internet addresses of computers connected to the network. While 130.132.51.8 is hard for human beings to remember, www.yale.edu is easier. The two strings have identical meaning to any computer connected to the Internet--they refer to a server that responds to World Wide Web queries for Yale University's main site. Every computer connected to the Internet has a unique address, either permanent or assigned by a provider ,{[pg 430]}, for the session. That requires that someone distribute addresses--both numeric and mnemonic. Until 1992, names and numbers were assigned on a purely first-come, first-served basis by Jon Postel, one of the very first developers of the Internet, under U.S. government contract. Postel also ran a computer, called the root server, to which all computers would turn to ask the numeric address of letters.mnemonic.edu, so they could translate what the human operator remembered as the address into one their machine could use. Postel called this system "the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, IANA," whose motto he set as, "Dedicated to preserving the central coordinating functions of the global Internet for the public good." In 1992, Postel got tired of this coordinating job, and the government contracted it to a private firm called Network Solutions, Inc., or NSI. As the number of applications grew, and as the administration sought to make this system pay for itself, NSI was allowed in 1995 to begin to charge fees for assigning names and numbers. At about the same time, widespread adoption of a graphical browser made using the World Wide Web radically simpler and more intuitive to the uninitiated. These two developments brought together two forces to bear on the domain name issue--each with a very different origin and intent. The first force consisted of the engineers who had created and developed the Internet, led by Postel, who saw the domain name space to be a public trust and resisted its commercialization by NSI. The second force consisted of trademark owners and their lawyers, who suddenly realized the potential for using control over domain names to extend the value of their brand names to a new domain of trade--e-commerce. These two forces placed the U.S. government under pressure to do two things: (1) release the monopoly that NSI--a for-profit corporation--had on the domain name space, and (2) find an efficient means of allowing trademark owners to control the use of alphanumeric strings used in their trademarks as domain names. Postel initially tried to "take back the root" by asking various regional domain name servers to point to his computer, instead of to the one maintained by NSI in Virginia. This caused uproar in the government, and Postel was accused of attacking and hijacking the Internet! His stature and passion, however, placed significant weight on the side of keeping the naming system as an open public trust. That position came to an abrupt end with his death in 1996. By late 1996, a self-appointed International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) was formed, with the blessing of the Internet Society (ISOC), a professional membership society for individuals and organizations involved in Internet planning. IAHC's membership was about half intellectual property ,{[pg 431]}, lawyers and half engineers. In February 1997, IAHC came out with a document called the gTLD-MoU (generic top-level domain name memorandum of understanding). Although the product of a small group, the gTLD-MoU claimed to speak for "The Internet Community." Although it involved no governments, it was deposited "for signature" with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Dutifully, some 226 organizations--Internet services companies, telecommunications providers, consulting firms, and a few chapters of the ISOC signed on. Section 2 of the gTLD-MoU, announcing its principles, reveals the driving forces of the project. While it begins with the announcement that the top-level domain space "is a public resource and is subject to the public trust," it quickly commits to the principle that "the current and future Internet name space stakeholders can benefit most from a self-regulatory and market-oriented approach to Internet domain name registration services." This results in two policy principles: (1) commercial competition in domain name registration by releasing the monopoly NSI had, and (2) protecting trademarks in the alphanumeric strings that make up the second-level domain names. The final, internationalizing component of the effort--represented by the interests of the WIPO and ITU bureaucracies--was attained by creating a Council of Registrars as a Swiss corporation, and creating special relationships with the ITU and the WIPO. +={ IAHC (International Ad Hock Committee) ; + IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) ; + NSI (Network Solutions. Inc.) +1 ; + Postel, Jon ; + branding : + domain names and +4 ; + gTLD-MoU document ; + proprietary rights : + domain names +4 +} + +None of this institutional edifice could be built without the U.S. government. In early 1998, the administration responded to this ferment with a green paper, seeking the creation of a private, nonprofit corporation registered in the United States to take on management of the domain name issue. By its own terms, the green paper responded to concerns of the domain name registration monopoly and of trademark issues in domain names, first and foremost, and to some extent to increasing clamor from abroad for a voice in Internet governance. Despite a cool response from the European Union, the U.S. government proceeded to finalize a white paper and authorize the creation of its preferred model--the private, nonprofit corporation. Thus was born the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as a private, nonprofit California corporation. Over time, it succeeded in large measure in loosening NSI's monopoly on domain name registration. Its efforts on the trademark side effectively created a global preemptive property right. Following an invitation in the U.S. government's white paper for ICANN to study the proper approach to trademark enforcement in the domain name space, ICANN and WIPO initiated a process ,{[pg 432]}, that began in July 1998 and ended in April 1999. As Froomkin describes his experience as a public-interest expert in this process, the process feigned transparency and open discourse, but was in actuality an opaque staff-driven drafting effort.~{ A. M. Froomkin, "Semi-Private International Rulemaking: Lessons Learned from the WIPO Domain Name Process," http://www.personal.law.miami.edu/froomkin/ articles/TPRC99.pdf. }~ The result was a very strong global property right available to trademark owners in the alphanumeric strings that make up domain names. This was supported by binding arbitration. Because it controlled the root server, ICANN could enforce its arbitration decisions worldwide. If ICANN decides that, say, the McDonald's fast-food corporation and not a hypothetical farmer named Old McDonald owned www.mcdonalds.com, all computers in the world would be referred to the corporate site, not the personal one. Not entirely satisfied with the degree to which the ICANNWIPO process protected their trademarks, some of the major trademark owners lobbied the U.S. Congress to pass an even stricter law. This law would make it easier for the owners of commercial brand names to obtain domain names that include their brand, whether or not there was any probability that users would actually confuse sites like the hypothetical Old McDonald's with that of the fast-food chain. +={ Froomkin, Michael ; + ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) +} + +The degree to which the increased appropriation of the domain name space is important is a function of the extent to which the cultural practice of using human memory to find information will continue to be widespread. The underlying assumption of the value of trademarked alphanumeric strings as second-level domain names is that users will approach electronic commerce by typing in "www.brandname.com" as their standard way of relating to information on the Net. This is far from obviously the most efficient solution. In physical space, where collecting comparative information on price, quality, and so on is very costly, brand names serve an important informational role. In cyberspace, where software can compare prices, and product-review services that link to vendors are easy to set up and cheap to implement, the brand name becomes an encumbrance on good information, not its facilitator. If users are limited, for instance, to hunting around as to whether information they seek is on www.brandname.com, www.brand_ name.com, or www.brand.net, name recognition from the real world becomes a bottleneck to e-commerce. And this is precisely the reason why owners of established marks sought to assure early adoption of trademarks in domain names--it assures users that they can, in fact, find their accustomed products on the Web without having to go through search algorithms that might expose them to comparison with pesky start-up competitors. As search engines become better and more tightly integrated into the basic ,{[pg 433]}, browser functionality, the idea that a user who wants to buy from Delta Airlines would simply type "www.delta.com," as opposed to plugging "delta airlines" into an integrated search toolbar and getting the airline as a first hit becomes quaint. However, quaint inefficient cultural practices can persist. And if this indeed is one that will persist, then the contours of the property right matter. As the law has developed over the past few years, ownership of a trademark that includes a certain alphanumeric string almost always gives the owner of the trademark a preemptive right in using the letters and numbers incorporated in that mark as a domain name. + +Domain name disputes have fallen into three main categories. There are cases of simple arbitrage. Individuals who predicted that having a domain name with the brand name in it would be valuable, registered such domain names aplenty, and waited for the flat-footed brand name owners to pay them to hand over the domain. There is nothing more inefficient about this form of arbitrage than any other. The arbitrageurs "reserved" commercially valuable names so they could be auctioned, rather than taken up by someone who might have a non-negotiable interest in the name--for example, someone whose personal name it was. These arbitrageurs were nonetheless branded pirates and hijackers, and the consistent result of all the cases on domain names has been that the corporate owners of brand names receive the domain names associated with their brands without having to pay the arbitrageurs. Indeed, the arbitrageurs were subject to damage judgments. A second kind of case involved bona fide holders of domain names that made sense for them, but were nonetheless shared with a famous brand name. One child nicknamed "Pokey" registered "pokey.org," and his battle to keep that name against a toy manufacturer that sold a toy called "pokey" became a poster child for this type of case. Results have been more mixed in this case, depending on how sympathetic the early registrant was. The third type of case--and in many senses, most important from the perspective of freedom to participate not merely as a consumer in the networked environment, but as a producer--involves those who use brand names to draw attention to the fact that they are attacking the owner of the brand. One well-known example occurred when Verizon Wireless was launched. The same hacker magazine involved in the DeCSS case, 2600, purchased the domain name "verizonreallysucks.com" to poke fun at Verizon. In response to a letter requiring that they give up the domain name, the magazine purchased the domain name "VerizonShouldSpendMoreTimeFixingItsNetworkAndLess MoneyOnLawyers.com." These types of cases have again met with varying ,{[pg 434]}, degrees of sympathy from courts and arbitrators under the ICANN process, although it is fairly obvious that using a brand name in order to mock and criticize its owner and the cultural meaning it tries to attach to its mark is at the very core of fair use, cultural criticism, and free expression. +={ arbitrage, domain names } + +The point here is not to argue for one type of answer or another in terms of trademark law, constitutional law, or the logic of ICANN. It is to identify points of pressure where the drive to create proprietary rights is creating points of control over the flow of information and the freedom to make meaning in the networked environment. The domain name issue was seen by many as momentous when it was new. ICANN has drawn a variety of both yearnings and fears as a potential source of democratic governance for the Internet or a platform for U.S. hegemony. I suspect that neither of these will turn out to be true. The importance of property rights in domain names is directly based on the search practices of users. Search engines, directories, review sites, and referrals through links play a large role in enabling users to find information they are interested in. Control over the domain name space is unlikely to provide a real bottleneck that will prevent both commercial competitors and individual speakers from drawing attention to their competition or criticism. However, the battle is indicative of the efforts to use proprietary rights in a particular element of the institutional ecology of the logical layer--trademarks in domain names--to tilt the environment in favor of the owners of famous brand names, and against individuals, noncommercial actors, and smaller, less-known competitors. + +3~ The Browser Wars +={ browsers +2 ; + Internet : + Web browsers +2 ; + Internet Explorer browser +2 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + Web browsers +2 ; + Microsoft Corporation : + browser wars +2 ; + Web : + browser wars +2 ; + wireless communications : + browser wars +2 +} + +A much more fundamental battle over the logical layer has occurred in the browser wars. Here, the "institutional" component is not formal institutions, like laws or regulations, but technical practice institutions--the standards for Web site design. Unlike on the network protocol side, the device side of the logical layer--the software running personal computers--was thoroughly property-based by the mid-1990s. Microsoft's dominance in desktop operating systems was well established, and there was strong presence of other software publishers in consumer applications, pulling the logical layer toward a proprietary model. In 1995, Microsoft came to perceive the Internet and particularly the World Wide Web as a threat to its control over the desktop. The user-side Web browser threatened to make the desktop a more open environment that would undermine its monopoly. Since that time, the two pulls--the openness of the nonproprietary network and the closed nature ,{[pg 435]}, of the desktop--have engaged in a fairly energetic tug-of-war over the digital environment. This push-me-pull-you game is played out both in the domain of market share, where Microsoft has been immensely successful, and in the domain of standard setting, where it has been only moderately successful. In market share, the story is well known and has been well documented in the Microsoft antitrust litigation. Part of the reason that it is so hard for a new operating system to compete with Microsoft's is that application developers write first, and sometimes only, for the already-dominant operating system. A firm investing millions of dollars in developing a new piece of photo-editing software will usually choose to write it so that it works with the operating system that has two hundred million users, not the one that has only fifteen million users. Microsoft feared that Netscape's browser, dominant in the mid-1990s, would come to be a universal translator among applications--that developers could write their applications to run on the browser, and the browser would handle translation across different operating systems. If that were to happen, Microsoft's operating system would have to compete on intrinsic quality. Windows would lose the boost of the felicitous feedback effect, where more users mean more applications, and this greater number of applications in turn draws more new users, and so forth. To prevent this eventuality, Microsoft engaged in a series of practices, ultimately found to have violated the antitrust laws, aimed at getting a dominant majority of Internet users to adopt Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE). Illegal or not, these practices succeeded in making IE the dominant browser, overtaking the original market leader, Netscape, within a short number of years. By the time the antitrust case was completed, Netscape had turned browser development over to the open-source development community, but under licensing conditions sufficiently vague so that the project generated little early engagement. Only around 2001-2002, did the Mozilla browser development project get sufficient independence and security for developers to begin to contribute energetically. It was only in late 2004, early 2005, that Mozilla Firefox became the first major release of a free software browser that showed promise of capturing some user-share back from IE. +={ Netscape and browser wars } + +Microsoft's dominance over the operating system and browser has not, as a practical matter, resulted in tight control over the information flow and use on the Internet. This is so for three reasons. First, the TCP/IP protocol is more fundamental to Internet communications. It allows any application or content to run across the network, as long as it knows how to translate itself into very simple packets with standard addressing information. To prevent ,{[pg 436]}, applications from doing this over basic TCP/IP would make the Microsoft operating system substantially crippling to many applications developers, which brings us to the second reason. Microsoft's dominance depends to a great extent on the vastly greater library of applications available to run on Windows. To make this library possible, Microsoft makes available a wide range of application program interfaces that developers can use without seeking Microsoft's permission. As a strategic decision about what enhances its core dominance, Microsoft may tilt the application development arena in its favor, but not enough to make it too hard for most applications to be implemented on a Windows platform. While not nearly as open as a genuinely open-source platform, Windows is also a far cry from a completely controlled platform, whose owner seeks to control all applications that are permitted to be developed for, and all uses that can be made of, its platform. Third, while IE controls much of the browser market share, Microsoft has not succeeded in dominating the standards for Web authoring. Web browser standard setting happens on the turf of the mythic creator of the Web-- Tim Berners Lee. Lee chairs the W3C, a nonprofit organization that sets the standard ways in which Web pages are authored so that they have a predictable appearance on the browser's screen. Microsoft has, over the years, introduced various proprietary extensions that are not part of the Web standard, and has persuaded many Web authors to optimize their Web sites to IE. If it succeeds, it will have wrested practical control over standard setting from the W3C. However, as of this writing, Web pages generally continue to be authored using mostly standard, open extensions, and anyone browsing the Internet with a free software browser, like any of the Mozilla family, will be able to read and interact with most Web sites, including the major ecommerce sites, without encountering nonstandard interfaces optimized for IE. At a minimum, these sites are able to query the browser as to whether or not it is IE, and serve it with either the open standard or the proprietary standard version accordingly. + +3~ Free Software +={ free software : + policy on +1 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + free software policies +1 ; + open-source software : + policy on +1 ; + software, open-source : + policy on +1 +} + +The role of Mozilla in the browser wars points to the much more substantial and general role of the free software movement and the open-source development community as major sources of openness, and as a backstop against appropriation of the logical layer. In some of the most fundamental uses of the Internet--Web-server software, Web-scripting software, and e-mail servers--free or open-source software has a dominant user share. In others, like ,{[pg 437]}, the operating system, it offers a robust alternative sufficiently significant to prevent enclosure of an entire component of the logical layer. Because of its licensing structure and the fact that the technical specifications are open for inspection and use by anyone, free software offers the most completely open, commons-based institutional and organizational arrangement for any resource or capability in the digital environment. Any resource in the logical layer that is the product of a free software development project is institutionally designed to be available for nonmarket, nonproprietary strategies of use. The same openness, however, makes free software resistant to control. If one tries to implement a constraining implementation of a certain function--for example, an audio driver that will not allow music to be played without proper authorization from a copyright holder--the openness of the code for inspection will allow users to identify what, and how, the software is constraining. The same institutional framework will allow any developer to "fix" the problem and change the way the software behaves. This is how free and open-source software is developed to begin with. One cannot limit access to the software--for purposes of inspection and modification--to developers whose behavior can be controlled by contract or property and still have the software be "open source" or free. As long as free software can provide a fully implemented alternative to the computing functionalities users want, perfect enclosure of the logical layer is impossible. This openness is a boon for those who wish the network to develop in response to a wide range of motivations and practices. However, it presents a serious problem for anyone who seeks to constrain the range of uses made of the Internet. And, just as they did in the context of trusted systems, the incumbent industrial culture producers--Hollywood and the recording industry-- would, in fact, like to control how the Internet is used and how software behaves. + +3~ Software Patents +={ innovation : + software patents and +2 ; + proprietary rights : + software patents +2 ; + software : + patents for +2 +} + +Throughout most of its history, software has been protected primarily by copyright, if at all. Beginning in the early 1980s, and culminating formally in the late 1990s, the Federal Circuit, the appellate court that oversees the U.S. patent law, made clear that software was patentable. The result has been that software has increasingly become the subject of patent rights. There is now pressure for the European Union to pass a similar reform, and to internationalize the patentability of software more generally. There are a variety of policy questions surrounding the advisability of software patents. Software ,{[pg 438]}, development is a highly incremental process. This means that patents tend to impose a burden on a substantial amount of future innovation, and to reward innovation steps whose qualitative improvement over past contributions may be too small to justify the discontinuity represented by a patent grant. Moreover, innovation in the software business has flourished without patents, and there is no obvious reason to implement a new exclusive right in a market that seems to have been enormously innovative without it. Most important, software components interact with each other constantly. Sometimes interoperating with a certain program may be absolutely necessary to perform a function, not because the software is so good, but because it has become the standard. The patent then may extend to the very functionality, whereas a copyright would have extended only to the particular code by which it was achieved. The primary fear is that patents over standards could become major bottlenecks. + +From the perspective of the battle over the institutional ecology, free software and open-source development stand to lose the most from software patents. A patent holder may charge a firm that develops dependent software in order to capture rents. However, there is no obvious party to charge for free software development. Even if the patent owner has a very open licensing policy--say, licensing the patent nonexclusively to anyone without discrimination for $10,000--most free software developers will not be able to play. IBM and Red Hat may pay for licenses, but the individual contributor hacking away at his or her computer, will not be able to. The basic driver of free software innovation is easy ubiquitous access to the state of the art, coupled with diverse motivations and talents brought to bear on a particular design problem. If working on a problem requires a patent license, and if any new development must not only write new source code, but also avoid replicating a broad scope patent or else pay a large fee, then the conditions for free software development are thoroughly undermined. Free software is responsible for some of the most basic and widely used innovations and utilities on the Internet today. Software more generally is heavily populated by service firms that do not functionally rely on exclusive rights, copyrights, or patents. Neither free software nor service-based software development need patents, and both, particularly free and open-source software, stand to be stifled significantly by widespread software patenting. As seen in the case of the browser war, in the case of Gnutella, and the much more widely used basic utilities of the Web--Apache server software, a number of free e-mail servers, and the Perl scripting language--free and open-source ,{[pg 439]}, software developers provide central chunks of the logical layer. They do so in a way that leaves that layer open for anyone to use and build upon. The drive to increase the degree of exclusivity available for software by adopting patents over and above copyright threatens the continued vitality of this development methodology. In particular, it threatens to take certain discrete application areas that may require access to patented standard elements or protocols out of the domain of what can be done by free software. As such, it poses a significant threat to the availability of an open logical layer for at least some forms of network use. + +2~ THE CONTENT LAYER +={ content layer of institutional ecology +35 ; + layers of institutional ecology : + content layer +35 ; + policy layers : + content layer +35 +} + +The last set of resources necessary for information production and exchange is the universe of existing information, knowledge, and culture. The battle over the scope, breadth, extent, and enforcement of copyright, patent, trademarks, and a variety of exotic rights like trespass to chattels or the right to link has been the subject of a large legal literature. Instead of covering the entire range of enclosure efforts of the past decade or more, I offer a set of brief descriptions of the choices being made in this domain. The intention is not to criticize or judge the intrinsic logic of any of these legal changes, but merely to illustrate how all these toggles of institutional ecology are being set in favor of proprietary strategies, at the expense of nonproprietary producers. + +3~ Copyright +={ content layer of institutional ecology : + copyright issues +9 : + see also proprietary rights ; + copyright issues +9 ; + proprietary rights : + copyright issues +9 +} + +The first domain in which we have seen a systematic preference for commercial producers that rely on property over commons-based producers is in copyright. This preference arises from a combination of expansive interpretations of what rights include, a niggardly interpretive attitude toward users' privileges, especially fair use, and increased criminalization. These have made copyright law significantly more industrial-production friendly than it was in the past or than it need be from the perspective of optimizing creativity or welfare in the networked information economy, rather than rent-extraction by incumbents. + +/{Right to Read}/. Jessica Litman early diagnosed an emerging new "right to read."~{ Jessica Litman, "The Exclusive Right to Read," Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 13 (1994): 29. }~ The basic right of copyright, to control copying, was never seen to include the right to control who reads an existing copy, when, and how ,{[pg 440]}, many times. Once a user bought a copy, he or she could read it many times, lend it to a friend, or leave it on the park bench or in the library for anyone else to read. This provided a coarse valve to limit the deadweight loss associated with appropriating a public good like information. As a happenstance of computer technology, reading on a screen involves making a temporary copy of a file onto the temporary memory of the computer. An early decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, MAI Systems, treated RAM (random-access memory) copies of this sort as "copies" for purposes of copyright.~{ /{MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc.}/, 991 F.2d 511 (9th Cir. 1993). }~ This position, while weakly defended, was not later challenged or rejected by other courts. Its result is that every act of reading on a screen involves "making a copy" within the meaning of the Copyright Act. As a practical matter, this interpretation expands the formal rights of copyright holders to cover any and all computer-mediated uses of their works, because no use can be made with a computer without at least formally implicating the right to copy. More important than the formal legal right, however, this universal baseline claim to a right to control even simple reading of one's copyrighted work marked a change in attitude. Justified later through various claims--such as the efficiency of private ordering or of price discrimination--it came to stand for a fairly broad proposition: Owners should have the right to control all valuable uses of their works. Combined with the possibility and existence of technical controls on actual use and the DMCA's prohibition on circumventing those controls, this means that copyright law has shifted. It existed throughout most of its history as a regulatory provision that reserved certain uses of works for exclusive control by authors, but left other, not explicitly constrained uses free. It has now become a law that gives rights holders the exclusive right to control any computer-mediated use of their works, and captures in its regulatory scope all uses that were excluded from control in prior media. +={ Litman, Jessica ; + right to read +} + +/{Fair Use Narrowed}/. Fair use in copyright was always a judicially created concept with a large degree of uncertainty in its application. This uncertainty, coupled with a broader interpretation of what counts as a commercial use, a restrictive judicial view of what counts as fair, and increased criminalization have narrowed its practical scope. +={ fair use and copyright +2 } + +First, it is important to recognize that the theoretical availability of the fair-use doctrine does not, as a practical matter, help most productions. This is due to a combination of two factors: (1) fair-use doctrine is highly fact specific and uncertain in application, and (2) the Copyright Act provides ,{[pg 441]}, large fixed statutory damages, even if there is no actual damage to the copyright owner. Lessig demonstrated this effect most clearly by working through an example of a documentary film.~{ Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). }~ A film will not be distributed without liability insurance. Insurance, in turn, will not be issued without formal clearance, or permission, from the owner of each copyrighted work, any portion of which is included in the film, even if the amount used is trivially small and insignificant to the documentary. A five-second snippet of a television program that happened to play on a television set in the background of a sequence captured in documentary film can therefore prevent distribution of the film, unless the filmmaker can persuade the owner of that program to grant rights to use the materials. Copyright owners in such television programs may demand thousands of dollars for even such a minimal and incidental use of "their" images. This is not because a court would ultimately find that using the image as is, with the tiny fraction of the television program in the background, was not covered by fair use. It probably would be a fair use. It is because insurance companies and distributors would refuse to incur the risk of litigation. + +Second, in the past few years, even this uncertain scope has been constricted by expanding the definitions of what counts as interference with a market and what counts as a commercial use. Consider the Free Republic case. In that case, a political Web site offered a forum for users to post stories from various newspapers as grist for a political discussion of their contents or their slant. The court held that because newspapers may one day sell access to archived articles, and because some users may read some articles on the Web forum instead of searching and retrieving them from the newspapers' archive, the use interfered with a potential market. Moreover, because Free Republic received donations from users (although it did not require them) and exchanged advertising arrangements with other political sites, the court treated the site as a "commercial user," and its use of newspaper articles to facilitate political discussion of them "a commercial use." These factors enabled the court to hold that posting an article from a medium--daily newspapers--whose existence does not depend on copyright, in a way that may one day come to have an effect on uncertain future revenues, which in any case would be marginal to the business model of the newspapers, was not a fair use even when done for purposes of political commentary. + +/{Criminalization}/. Copyright enforcement has also been substantially criminalized in the past few years. Beginning with the No Electronic Theft Act ,{[pg 442]}, (NET Act) in 1997 and later incorporated into the DMCA, criminal copyright has recently become much more expansive than it was until a few years ago. Prior to passage of the NET Act, only commercial pirates--those that slavishly made thousands of copies of video or audiocassettes and sold them for profit--would have qualified as criminal violators of copyright. Criminal liability has now been expanded to cover private copying and free sharing of copyrighted materials whose cumulative nominal price (irrespective of actual displaced demand) is quite low. As criminal copyright law is currently written, many of the tens of millions using p2p networks are felons. It is one thing when the recording industry labels tens of millions of individuals in a society "pirates" in a rhetorical effort to conform social norms to its members' business model. It is quite another when the state brands them felons and fines or imprisons them. Litman has offered the most plausible explanation of this phenomenon.~{ Jessica Litman, "Electronic Commerce and Free Speech," Journal of Ethics and Information Technology 1 (1999): 213. }~ As the network makes low-cost production and exchange of information and culture easier, the large-scale commercial producers are faced with a new source of competition--volunteers, people who provide information and culture for free. As the universe of people who can threaten the industry has grown to encompass more or less the entire universe of potential customers, the plausibility of using civil actions to force individuals to buy rather than share information goods decreases. Suing all of one's intended customers is not a sustainable business model. In the interest of maintaining the business model that relies on control over information goods and their sale as products, the copyright industry has instead enlisted criminal enforcement by the state to prevent the emergence of such a system of free exchange. These changes in formal law have, in what is perhaps a more important development, been coupled with changes in the Justice Department's enforcement policy, leading to a substantial increase in the shadow of criminal enforcement in this area.~{ See Department of Justice Intellectual Property Policy and Programs, http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/ippolicy.htm. }~ +={ criminalization of copyright infringement ; + No Electrical Theft (NET) Act +} + +/{Term Extension}/. The change in copyright law that received the most widespread public attention was the extension of copyright term in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. The statute became cause celebre in the early 2000s because it was the basis of a major public campaign and constitutional challenge in the case of /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/.~{ /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/, 537 U.S. 186 (2003). }~ The actual marginal burden of this statute on use of existing materials could be seen as relatively small. The length of copyright protection was already very long-- seventy-five years for corporate-owned materials, life of the author plus fifty for materials initially owned by human authors. The Sonny Bono Copyright ,{[pg 443]}, Term Extension Act increased these two numbers to ninety-five and life plus seventy, respectively. The major implication, however, was that the Act showed that retroactive extension was always available. As materials that were still valuable in the stocks of Disney, in particular, came close to the public domain, their lives would be extended indefinitely. The legal challenge to the statute brought to public light the fact that, as a practical matter, almost the entire stock of twentieth-century culture and beyond would stay privately owned, and its copyright would be renewed indefinitely. For video and sound recordings, this meant that almost the entire universe of materials would never become part of the public domain; would never be available for free use as inputs into nonproprietary production. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the retroactive extension. The inordinately long term of protection in the United States, initially passed under the pretext of "harmonizing" the length of protection in the United States and in Europe, is now being used as an excuse to "harmonize" the length of protection for various kinds of materials--like sound recordings--that actually have shorter terms of protection in Europe or other countries, like Australia. At stake in all these battles is the question of when, if ever, will Errol Flynn's or Mickey Mouse's movies, or Elvis's music, become part of the public domain? When will these be available for individual users on the same terms that Shakespeare or Mozart are available? The implication of Eldred is that they may never join the public domain, unless the politics of term-extension legislation change. +={ Eldred v. Ashcroft ; + Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 ; + term of copyright +} + +/{No de Minimis Digital Sampling}/. A narrower, but revealing change is the recent elimination of digital sampling from the universe of ex ante permissible actions, even when all that is taken is a tiny snippet. The case is recent and has not been generalized by other courts as of this writing. However, it offers insight into the mind-set of judges who are confronted with digital opportunities, and who in good faith continue to see the stakes as involving purely the organization of a commercial industry, rather than defining the comparative scope of commercial industry and nonmarket commons-based creativity. Courts seem blind to the effects of their decisions on the institutional ecology within which nonproprietary, individual, and social creation must live. In Bridgeport Music, Inc., the Sixth Circuit was presented with the following problem: The defendant had created a rap song.~{ /{Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films}/, 383 F.3d 390 (6th Cir.2004). }~ In making it, he had digitally copied a two-second guitar riff from a digital recording of a 1970s song, and then looped and inserted it in various places to create a completely different musical effect than the original. The district court ,{[pg 444]}, had decided that the amount borrowed was so small as to make the borrowing de minimis--too little for the law to be concerned with. The Court of Appeals, however, decided that it would be too burdensome for courts to have to decide, on a case-by-case basis, how much was too little for law to be concerned with. Moreover, it would create too much uncertainty for recording companies; it is, as the court put it, "cheaper to license than to litigate."~{ 383 F3d 390, 400. }~ The court therefore held that any digital sampling, no matter how trivial, could be the basis of a copyright suit. Such a bright-line rule that makes all direct copying of digital bits, no matter how small, an infringement, makes digital sound recordings legally unavailable for noncommercial, individually creative mixing. There are now computer programs, like Garage Band, that allow individual users to cut and mix existing materials to create their own music. These may not result in great musical compositions. But they may. That, in any event, is not their point. They allow users to have a very different relationship to recorded music than merely passively listening to finished, unalterable musical pieces. By imagining that the only parties affected by copyright coverage of sampling are recording artists who have contracts with recording studios and seek to sell CDs, and can therefore afford to pay licensing fees for every two-second riff they borrow, the court effectively outlawed an entire model of user creativity. Given how easy it is to cut, paste, loop, slow down, and speed up short snippets, and how creatively exhilarating it is for users--young and old--to tinker with creating musical compositions with instruments they do not know how to play, it is likely that the opinion has rendered illegal a practice that will continue, at least for the time being. Whether the social practice will ultimately cause the law to change or vice versa is more difficult to predict. +={ de minimis digital sampling ; + digital sampling ; + music industry : + digital sampling ; + sampling, digital (music) +} + +3~ Contractual Enclosure: Click-Wrap Licenses and the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) +={ click-wrap licenses +3 ; + context, cultural : + see culture cultural enclosure +3 ; + licensing : + shrink-wrap (contractual enclosure) +3 ; + proprietary rights : + contractual enclosure +3 ; + shrink-wrap licenses +3 ; + UCITA (Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act) +3 +} + +Practically all academic commentators on copyright law--whether critics or proponents of this provision or that--understand copyright to be a public policy accommodation between the goal of providing incentives to creators and the goal of providing efficiently priced access to both users and downstream creators. Ideally, it takes into consideration the social costs and benefits of one settlement or another, and seeks to implement an optimal tradeoff. Beginning in the 1980s, software and other digital goods were sold with "shrink-wrap licenses." These were licenses to use the software, which purported ,{[pg 445]}, to apply to mass-market buyers because the buyer would be deemed to have accepted the contract by opening the packaging of the software. These practices later transmuted online into click-wrap licenses familiar to most anyone who has installed software and had to click "I Agree" once or more before the software would install. Contracts are not bound by the balance struck in public law. Licensors can demand, and licensees can agree to, almost any terms. Among the terms most commonly inserted in such licenses that restrict the rights of users are prohibitions on reverse engineering, and restrictions on the use of raw data in compilations, even though copyright law itself does not recognize rights in data. As Mark Lemley showed, most courts prior to the mid-1990s did not enforce such terms.~{ Mark A. Lemley, "Intellectual Property and Shrinkwrap Licenses," Southern California Law Review 68 (1995): 1239, 1248-1253. }~ Some courts refused to enforce shrink-wrap licenses in mass-market transactions by relying on state contract law, finding an absence of sufficient consent or an unenforceable contract of adhesion. Others relied on federal preemption, stating that to the extent state contract law purported to enforce a contract that prohibited fair use or otherwise protected material in the public domain--like the raw information contained in a report--it was preempted by federal copyright law that chose to leave this material in the public domain, freely usable by all. In 1996, in /{ProCD v. Zeidenberg}/, the Seventh Circuit held otherwise, arguing that private ordering would be more efficient than a single public determination of what the right balance was.~{ 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996). }~ +={ Lemley, Mark ; + privatization : + ProCD v. Zeidenberg +} + +The following few years saw substantial academic debate as to the desirability of contractual opt-outs from the public policy settlement. More important, the five years that followed saw a concerted effort to introduce a new part to the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC)--a model commercial law that, though nonbinding, is almost universally adopted at the state level in the United States, with some modifications. The proposed new UCC Article 2B was to eliminate the state law concerns by formally endorsing the use of standard shrink-wrap licenses. The proposed article generated substantial academic and political heat, ultimately being dropped by the American Law Institute, one of the main sponsors of the UCC. A model law did ultimately pass under the name of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), as part of a less universally adopted model law effort. Only two states adopted the law--Virginia and Maryland. A number of other states then passed anti-UCITA laws, which gave their residents a safe harbor from having UCITA applied to their click-wrap transactions. +={ UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) } + +The reason that ProCD and UCITA generated so much debate was the concern that click-wrap licenses were operating in an inefficient market, and ,{[pg 446]}, that they were, as a practical matter, displacing the policy balance represented by copyright law. Mass-market transactions do not represent a genuine negotiated agreement, in the individualized case, as to what the efficient contours of permissions are for the given user and the given information product. They are, rather, generalized judgments by the vendor as to what terms are most attractive for it that the market will bear. Unlike rival economic goods, information goods sold at a positive price in reliance on copyright are, by definition, priced above marginal cost. The information itself is nonrival. Its marginal cost is zero. Any transaction priced above the cost of communication is evidence of some market power in the hands of the provider, used to price based on value and elasticity of demand, not on marginal cost. Moreover, the vast majority of users are unlikely to pay close attention to license details they consider to be boilerplate. This means there is likely significant information shortfall on the part of consumers as to the content of the licenses, and the sensitivity of demand to overreaching contract terms is likely low. This is not because consumers are stupid or slothful, but because the probability that either they would be able to negotiate out from under a standard provision, or a court would enforce against them a truly abusive provision is too low to justify investing in reading and arguing about contracts for all but their largest purchases. In combination, these considerations make it difficult to claim as a general matter that privately set licensing terms would be more efficient than the publicly set background rules of copyright law.~{ For a more complete technical explanation, see Yochai Benkler, "An Unhurried View of Private Ordering in Information Transactions," Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000): 2063. }~ The combination of mass-market contracts enforced by technical controls over use of digital materials, which in turn are protected by the DMCA, threatens to displace the statutorily defined public domain with a privately defined realm of permissible use.~{ James Boyle, "Cruel, Mean or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and Digital Intellectual Property," Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000); Julie E. Cohen, "Copyright and the Jurisprudence of Self-Help," Berkeley Technology Law Journal 13 (1998): 1089; Niva Elkin-Koren, "Copyright Policy and the Limits of Freedom of Contract," Berkeley Technology Law Journal 12 (1997): 93. }~ This privately defined settlement would be arrived at in non-negotiated mass-market transactions, in the presence of significant information asymmetries between consumers and vendors, and in the presence of systematic market power of at least some degree. + +3~ Trademark Dilution +={ branding : + trademark dilutation +4 ; + dilutation of trademarks +4 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + trademark dilutation +4 ; + proprietary rights : + trademark dilutation +4 ; + trademark dilutation +4 +} + +As discussed in chapter 8, the centrality of commercial interaction to social existence in early-twenty-first-century America means that much of our core iconography is commercial in origin and owned as a trademark. Mickey, Barbie, Playboy, or Coke are important signifiers of meaning in contemporary culture. Using iconography is a central means of creating rich, culturally situated expressions of one's understanding of the world. Yet, as Boyle ,{[pg 447]}, has pointed out, now that we treat flag burning as a constitutionally protected expression, trademark law has made commercial icons the sole remaining venerable objects in our law. Trademark law permits the owners of culturally significant images to control their use, to squelch criticism, and to define exclusively the meaning that the symbols they own carry. +={ Boyle, James } + +Three factors make trademark protection today more of a concern as a source of enclosure than it might have been in the past. First is the introduction of the federal Anti-Dilution Act of 1995. Second is the emergence of the brand as the product, as opposed to a signifier for the product. Third is the substantial reduction in search and other information costs created by the Net. Together, these three factors mean that owned symbols are becoming increasingly important as cultural signifiers, are being enclosed much more extensively than before precisely as cultural signifiers, and with less justification beyond the fact that trademarks, like all exclusive rights, are economically valuable to their owners. +={ Antidilutation Act of 1995 +2 } + +In 1995, Congress passed the first federal Anti-Dilution Act. Though treated as a trademark protection law, and codifying doctrines that arose in trademark common law, antidilution is a fundamentally different economic right than trademark protection. Traditional trademark protection is focused on preventing consumer confusion. It is intended to assure that consumers can cheaply tell the difference between one product and another, and to give producers incentives to create consistent quality products that can be associated with their trademark. Trademark law traditionally reflected these interests. Likelihood of consumer confusion was the sine qua non of trademark infringement. If I wanted to buy a Coca-Cola, I did not want to have to make sure I was not buying a different dark beverage in a red can called Coca-Gola. Infringement actions were mostly limited to suits among competitors in similar relevant markets, where confusion could occur. So, while trademark law restricted how certain symbols could be used, it was so only as among competitors, and only as to the commercial, not cultural, meaning of their trademark. The antidilution law changes the most relevant factors. It is intended to protect famous brand names, irrespective of a likelihood of confusion, from being diluted by use by others. The association between a particular corporation and a symbol is protected for its value to that corporation, irrespective of the use. It no longer regulates solely competitors to the benefit of competition. It prohibits many more possible uses of the symbol than was the case under traditional trademark law. It applies even to noncommercial users where there is no possibility of confusion. The emergence ,{[pg 448]}, of this antidilution theory of exclusivity is particularly important as brands have become the product itself, rather than a marker for the product. Nike and Calvin Klein are examples: The product sold in these cases is not a better shoe or shirt--the product sold is the brand. And the brand is associated with a cultural and social meaning that is developed purposefully by the owner of the brand so that people will want to buy it. This development explains why dilution has become such a desirable exclusive right for those who own it. It also explains the cost of denying to anyone the right to use the symbol, now a signifier of general social meaning, in ways that do not confuse consumers in the traditional trademark sense, but provide cultural criticism of the message signified. + +Ironically, the increase in the power of trademark owners to control uses of their trademark comes at a time when its functional importance as a mechanism for reducing search costs is declining. Traditional trademark's most important justification was that it reduced information collection costs and thereby facilitated welfare-enhancing trade. In the context of the Internet, this function is significantly less important. General search costs are lower. Individual items in commerce can provide vastly greater amounts of information about their contents and quality. Users can use machine processing to search and sift through this information and to compare views and reviews of specific items. Trademark has become less, rather than more, functionally important as a mechanism for dealing with search costs. When we move in the next few years to individual-item digital marking, such as with RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, all the relevant information about contents, origin, and manufacture down to the level of the item, as opposed to the product line, will be readily available to consumers in real space, by scanning any given item, even if it is not otherwise marked at all. In this setting, where the information qualities of trademarks will significantly decline, the antidilution law nonetheless assures that owners can control the increasingly important cultural meaning of trademarks. Trademark, including dilution, is subject to a fair use exception like that of copyright. For the same reasons as operated in copyright, however, the presence of such a doctrine only ameliorates, but does not solve, the limits that a broad exclusive right places on the capacity of nonmarket-oriented creative uses of materials--in this case, culturally meaningful symbols. ,{[pg 449]}, + +3~ Database Protection +={ database protection +3 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + database protection +3 ; + proprietary rights : + database protection +3 ; + raw data : + database protection +3 +} + +In 1991, in /{Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co.}/, the Supreme Court held that raw facts in a compilation, or database, were not covered by the Copyright Act. The constitutional clause that grants Congress the power to create exclusive rights for authors, the Court held, required that works protected were original with the author. The creative element of the compilation--its organization or selectivity, for example, if sufficiently creative-- could therefore be protected under copyright law. However, the raw facts compiled could not. Copying data from an existing compilation was therefore not "piracy"; it was not unfair or unjust; it was purposefully privileged in order to advance the goals of the constitutional power to make exclusive grants--the advancement of progress and creative uses of the data.~{ /{Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc.}/, 499 U.S. 340, 349-350 (1991). }~ A few years later, the European Union passed a Database Directive, which created a discrete and expansive right in raw data compilations.~{ Directive No. 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases, 1996 O.J. (L 77) 20. }~ The years since the Court decided Feist have seen repeated efforts by the larger players in the database publishing industry to pass similar legislation in the United States that would, as a practical matter, overturn Feist and create exclusive private rights in the raw data in compilations. "Harmonization" with Europe has been presented as a major argument in favor of this law. Because the Feist Court based its decision on limits to the constitutional power to create exclusive rights in raw information, efforts to protect database providers mostly revolved around an unfair competition law, based in the Commerce Clause, rather than on precisely replicating the European right. In fact, however, the primary draft that has repeatedly been introduced walks, talks, and looks like a property right. +={ Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co. +1 ; + Database Directive +1 +} + +Sustained and careful work, most prominently by Jerome Reichman and Paul Uhlir, has shown that the proposed database right is unnecessary and detrimental, particularly to scientific research.~{ J. H. Reichman and Paul F. Uhlir, "Database Protection at the Crossroads: Recent Developments and Their Impact on Science and Technology," Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 793; Stephen M. Maurer and Suzanne Scotchmer, "Database Protection: Is It Broken and Should We Fix It?" Science 284 (1999): 1129. }~ Perhaps no example explains this point better than the "natural experiment" that Boyle has pointed to, and which the United States and Europe have been running over the past decade or so. The United States has formally had no exclusive right in data since 1991. Europe has explicitly had such a right since 1996. One would expect that both the European Union and the United States would look to the comparative effects on the industries in both places when the former decides whether to keep its law, and the latter decides whether to adopt one like it. The evidence is reasonably consistent and persuasive. Following the Feist decision, the U.S. database industry continued to grow steadily, without ,{[pg 450]}, a blip. The "removal" of the property right in data by Feist had no effect on growth. Europe at the time had a much smaller database industry than did the United States, as measured by the number of databases and database companies. Maurer, Hugenholz, and Onsrud showed that, following the introduction of the European sui generis right, each country saw a one-time spike in the number of databases and new database companies, but this was followed within a year or two by a decline to the levels seen before the Directive, which have been fairly stagnant since the early 1990s.~{ See Stephen M. Maurer, P. Bernt Hugenholtz, and Harlan J. Onsrud, "Europe's Database Experiment," Science 294 (2001): 789; Stephen M. Maurer, "Across Two Worlds: Database Protection in the U.S. and Europe," paper prepared for Industry Canada's Conference on Intellectual Property and Innovation in the KnowledgeBased Economy, May 23-24 2001. }~ Another study, more specifically oriented toward the appropriate policy for government-collected data, compared the practices of Europe--where government agencies are required to charge what the market will bear for access to data they collect--and the United States, where the government makes data it collects freely available at the cost of reproduction, as well as for free on the Web. That study found that the secondary uses of data, including commercial- and noncommercial-sector uses--such as, for example, markets in commercial risk management and meteorological services--contributed vastly more to the economy of the United States because of secondary uses of freely accessed government weather data than equivalent market sectors in Europe were able to contribute to their respective economies.~{ Peter Weiss, "Borders in Cyberspace: Conflicting Public Sector Information Policies and their Economic Impacts" (U.S. Dept. of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, February 2002). }~ The evidence suggests, then, that the artificial imposition of rents for proprietary data is suppressing growth in European market-based commercial services and products that rely on access to data, relative to the steady growth in the parallel U.S. markets, where no such right exists. It is trivial to see that a cost structure that suppresses growth among market-based entities that would at least partially benefit from being able to charge more for their outputs would have an even more deleterious effect on nonmarket information production and exchange activities, which are burdened by the higher costs and gain no benefit from the proprietary rights. +={ Reichman, Jerome ; + Uhlir, Paul +} + +There is, then, mounting evidence that rights in raw data are unnecessary to create a basis for a robust database industry. Database manufacturers rely on relational contracts--subscriptions to continuously updated databases-- rather than on property-like rights. The evidence suggests that, in fact, exclusive rights are detrimental to various downstream industries that rely on access to data. Despite these fairly robust observations from a decade of experience, there continues to be a threat that such a law will pass in the U.S. Congress. This continued effort to pass such a law underscores two facts. First, much of the legislation in this area reflects rent seeking, rather than reasoned policy. Second, the deeply held belief that "more property-like ,{[pg 451]}, rights will lead to more productivity" is hard to shake, even in the teeth of both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence to the contrary. + +3~ Linking and Trespass to Chattels: New Forms of Information Exclusivity +={ database protection : + trespass to chattels +4 ; + eBay v. Bidder's Edge +4 ; + hyperlinking on the Web : + as trespass +4 ; + Internet : + linking as trespass +4 ; + linking on the Web : + as trespass +4 ; + network topology : + linking as trespass +4 ; + proprietary rights : + trespass to chattels +4 ; + referencing on the Web : + linking as trespass +4 ; + structure of network : + linking as trespass +4 ; + topology, network : + linking as trespass +4 ; + trespass to chattels +4 ; + Web : + linking as trespass +4 ; + wireless communications : + linking as trespass +4 +} + +Some litigants have turned to state law remedies to protect their data indirectly, by developing a common-law, trespass-to-server form of action. The primary instance of this trend is /{eBay v. Bidder's Edge}/, a suit by the leading auction site against an aggregator site. Aggregators collect information about what is being auctioned in multiple locations, and make the information about the items available in one place so that a user can search eBay and other auction sites simultaneously. The eventual bidding itself is done on the site that the item's owner chose to make his or her item available, under the terms required by that site. The court held that the automated information collection process--running a computer program that automatically requests information from the server about what is listed on it, called a spider or a bot--was a "trespass to chattels."~{ /{eBay, Inc. v. Bidder's Edge, Inc.}/, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13326 (N.D.Cal. 2000). }~ This ancient form of action, originally intended to apply to actual taking or destruction of goods, mutated into a prohibition on unlicensed automated searching. The injunction led to Bidder's Edge closing its doors before the Ninth Circuit had an opportunity to review the decision. A common-law decision like /{eBay v. Bidder's Edge}/ creates a common-law exclusive private right in information by the back door. In principle, the information itself is still free of property rights. Reading it mechanically--an absolute necessity given the volume of the information and its storage on magnetic media accessible only by mechanical means--can, however, be prohibited as "trespass." The practical result would be equivalent to some aspects of a federal exclusive private right in raw data, but without the mitigating attributes of any exceptions that would be directly introduced into legislation. It is still too early to tell whether cases such as these ultimately will be considered preempted by federal copyright law,~{ The preemption model could be similar to the model followed by the Second Circuit in /{NBA v. Motorola}/, 105 F.3d 841 (2d Cir. 1997), which restricted state misappropriation claims to narrow bounds delimited by federal policy embedded in the Copyright Act. This might require actual proof that the bots have stopped service, or threaten the service's very existence. }~ or perhaps would be limited by first amendment law on the model of /{New York Times v. Sullivan}/.~{ /{New York Times v. Sullivan}/, 376 U.S. 254, 266 (1964). }~ + +Beyond the roundabout exclusivity in raw data, trespass to chattels presents one instance of a broader question that is arising in application of both common-law and statutory provisions. At stake is the legal control over information about information, like linking and other statements people make about the availability and valence of some described information. Linking--the mutual pointing of many documents to each other--is the very ,{[pg 452]}, core idea of the World Wide Web. In a variety of cases, parties have attempted to use law to control the linking practices of others. The basic structure of these cases is that A wants to tell users M and N about information presented by B. The meaning of a link is, after all, "here you can read information presented by someone other than me that I deem interesting or relevant to you, my reader." Someone, usually B, but possibly some other agent C, wants to control what M and N know or do with regard to the information B is presenting. B (or C) then sues A to prevent A from linking to the information on B's site. + +The simplest instance of such a case involved a service that Microsoft offered--sidewalk.com--that provided access to, among other things, information on events in various cities. If a user wanted a ticket to the event, the sidewalk site linked that user directly to a page on ticketmaster.com where the user could buy a ticket. Ticketmaster objected to this practice, preferring instead that sidewalk.com link to its home page, in order to expose the users to all the advertising and services Ticketmaster provided, rather than solely to the specific service sought by the user referred by sidewalk .com. At stake in these linking cases is who will control the context in which certain information is presented. If deep linking is prohibited, Ticketmaster will control the context--the other movies or events available to be seen, their relative prominence, reviews, and so forth. The right to control linking then becomes a right to shape the meaning and relevance of one's statements for others. If the choice between Ticketmaster and Microsoft as controllers of the context of information may seem of little normative consequence, it is important to recognize that the right to control linking could easily apply to a local library, or church, or a neighbor as they participate in peer-producing relevance and accreditation of the information to which they link. +={ Microsoft Corporation : + sidewalk.com ; + sidewalk.com ; + Ticketmaster +} + +The general point is this: On the Internet, there are a variety of ways that some people can let others know about information that exists somewhere on the Web. In doing so, these informers loosen someone else's control over the described information--be it the government, a third party interested in limiting access to the information, or the person offering the information. In a series of instances over the past half decade or more we have seen attempts by people who control certain information to limit the ability of others to challenge that control by providing information about the information. These are not cases in which a person without access to information is seeking affirmative access from the "owner" of information. These are ,{[pg 453]}, cases where someone who dislikes what another is saying about particular information is seeking the aid of law to control what other parties can say to each other about that information. Understood in these terms, the restrictive nature of these legal moves in terms of how they burden free speech in general, and impede the freedom of anyone, anywhere, to provide information, relevance, and accreditation, becomes clear. The /{eBay v. Bidder's Edge}/ case suggests one particular additional aspect. While much of the political attention focuses on formal "intellectual property"?style statutes passed by Congress, in the past few years we have seen that state law and common-law doctrine are also being drafted to create areas of exclusivity and boundaries on the free use of information. These efforts are often less well informed, and because they were arrived at ad hoc, often without understanding that they are actually forms of regulating information production and exchange, they include none of the balancing privileges or limitations of rights that are so common in the formal statutory frameworks. + +3~ International "Harmonization" +={ global development : + international harmonization +5 ; + harmonization, international +5 ; + international harmonization +5 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + international harmonization +5 ; + policy : + international harmonization +5 ; + proprietary rights : + international harmonization +5 +} + +One theme that has repeatedly appeared in the discussion of databases, the DMCA, and term extension, is the way in which "harmonization" and internationalization of exclusive rights are used to ratchet up the degree of exclusivity afforded rights holders. It is trite to point out that the most advanced economies in the world today are information and culture exporters. This is true of both the United States and Europe. Some of the cultural export industries--most notably Hollywood, the recording industry, some segments of the software industry, and pharmaceuticals--have business models that rely on the assertion of exclusive rights in information. Both the United States and the European Union, therefore, have spent the past decade and a half pushing for ever-more aggressive and expansive exclusive rights in international agreements and for harmonization of national laws around the world toward the highest degrees of protection. Chapter 9 discusses in some detail why this was not justified as a matter of economic rationality, and why it is deleterious as a matter of justice. Here, I only note the characteristic of internationalization and harmonization as a one-way ratchet toward ever-expanding exclusivity. + +Take a simple provision like the term of copyright protection. In the mid1990s, Europe was providing for many works (but not all) a term of life of the author plus seventy years, while the United States provided exclusivity for the life of the author plus fifty. A central argument for the Sonny Bono ,{[pg 454]}, Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was to "harmonize" with Europe. In the debates leading up to the law, one legislator actually argued that if our software manufacturers had a shorter term of copyright, they would be disadvantaged relative to the European firms. This argument assumes, of course, that U.S. software firms could stay competitive in the software business by introducing nothing new in software for seventy-five years, and that it would be the loss of revenues from products that had not been sufficiently updated for seventy-five years to warrant new copyright that would place them at a disadvantage. The newly extended period created by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is, however, longer in some cases than the protection afforded in Europe. Sound recordings, for example, are protected for fifty years in Europe. The arguments are now flowing in the opposite direction--harmonization toward the American standard for all kinds of works, for fear that the recordings of Elvis or the Beatles will fall into the European public domain within a few paltry years. "Harmonization" is never invoked to de-escalate exclusivity--for example, as a reason to eliminate the European database right in order to harmonize with the obviously successful American model of no protection, or to shorten the length of protection for sound recordings in the United States. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 ; + term of copyright +1 ; + trade policy +1 +} + +International agreements also provide a fertile forum for ratcheting up protection. Lobbies achieve a new right in a given jurisdiction--say an extension of term, or a requirement to protect technological protection measures on the model of the DMCA. The host country, usually the United States, the European Union, or both, then present the new right for treaty approval, as the United States did in the context of the WIPO treaties in the mid-1990s. Where this fails, the United States has more recently begun to negotiate bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) with individual nations. The structure of negotiation is roughly as follows: The United States will say to Thailand, or India, or whoever the trading partner is: If you would like preferential treatment of your core export, say textiles or rice, we would like you to include this provision or that in your domestic copyright or patent law. Once this is agreed to in a number of bilateral FTAs, the major IP exporters can come back to the multilateral negotiations and claim an emerging international practice, which may provide more exclusivity than their then applicable domestic law. With changes to international treaties in hand, domestic resistance to legislation can be overcome, as we saw in the United States when the WIPO treaties were used to push through Congress the DMCA anticircumvention provisions that had failed to pass two years ,{[pg 455]}, earlier. Any domestic efforts to reverse and limit exclusivity then have to overcome substantial hurdles placed by the international agreements, like the agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). The difficulty of amending international agreements to permit a nation to decrease the degree of exclusivity it grants copyright or patent holders becomes an important one-way ratchet, preventing de-escalation. + +3~ Countervailing Forces + +As this very brief overview demonstrates, most of the formal institutional moves at the content layer are pushing toward greater scope and reach for exclusive rights in the universe of existing information, knowledge, and cultural resources. The primary countervailing forces in the content layer are similar to the primary countervailing forces in the logical layer--that is, social and cultural push-back against exclusivity. Recall how central free software and the open, cooperative, nonproprietary standard-setting processes are to the openness of the logical layer. In the content layer, we are seeing the emergence of a culture of free creation and sharing developing as a countervailing force to the increasing exclusivity generated by the public, formal lawmaking system. The Public Library of Science discussed in chapter 9 is an initiative of scientists who, frustrated with the extraordinarily high journal costs for academic journals, have begun to develop systems for scientific publication whose outputs are immediately and freely available everywhere. The Creative Commons is an initiative to develop a series of licenses that allow individuals who create information, knowledge, and culture to attach simple licenses that define what others may, or may not, do with their work. The innovation represented by these licenses relative to the background copyright system is that they make it trivial for people to give others permission to use their creations. Before their introduction, there were no widely available legal forms to make it clear to the world that it is free to use my work, with or without restrictions. More important than the institutional innovation of Creative Commons is its character as a social movement. Under the moniker of the "free culture" movement, it aims to encourage widespread adoption of sharing one's creations with others. What a mature movement like the free software movement, or nascent movements like the free culture movement and the scientists' movement for open publication and open archiving are aimed at is the creation of a legally selfreinforcing domain of open cultural sharing. They do not negate propertylike rights in information, knowledge, and culture. Rather, they represent a ,{[pg 456]}, self-conscious choice by their participants to use copyrights, patents, and similar rights to create a domain of resources that are free to all for common use. +={ Creative Commons initiative } + +Alongside these institutionally instantiated moves to create a selfreinforcing set of common resources, there is a widespread, global culture of ignoring exclusive rights. It is manifest in the widespread use of file-sharing software to share copyrighted materials. It is manifest in the widespread acclaim that those who crack copy-protection mechanisms receive. This culture has developed a rhetoric of justification that focuses on the overreaching of the copyright industries and on the ways in which the artists themselves are being exploited by rights holders. While clearly illegal in the United States, there are places where courts have sporadically treated participation in these practices as copying for private use, which is exempted in some countries, including a number of European countries. In any event the sheer size of this movement and its apparent refusal to disappear in the face of lawsuits and public debate present a genuine countervailing pressure against the legal tightening of exclusivity. As a practical matter, efforts to impose perfect private ordering and to limit access to the underlying digital bits in movies and songs through technical means have largely failed under the sustained gaze of the community of computer scientists and hackers who have shown its flaws time and again. Moreover, the mechanisms developed in response to a large demand for infringing file-sharing utilities were the very mechanisms that were later available to the Swarthmore students to avoid having the Diebold files removed from the Internet and that are shared by other censorship-resistant publication systems. The tools that challenge the "entertainment-as-finished-good" business model are coming into much wider and unquestionably legitimate use. Litigation may succeed in dampening use of these tools for copying, but also creates a heightened political awareness of information-production regulation. The same students involved in the Diebold case, radicalized by the lawsuit, began a campus "free culture" movement. It is difficult to predict how this new political awareness will play out in a political arena--the making of copyrights, patents, and similar exclusive rights--that for decades has functioned as a technical backwater that could never invoke a major newspaper editorial, and was therefore largely controlled by the industries whose rents it secured. ,{[pg 457]}, + +2~ THE PROBLEM OF SECURITY +={ commercial model of communication : + security-related policy +4 ; + free software : + security considerations +4 ; + industrial model of communication : + security-related policy +4 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + security-related policy +4 ; + open-source software : + security considerations +4 ; + policy : + security-related +4 ; + security-related policy +4 ; + software, open-source : + security considerations +4 ; + traditional model of communication : + security-related policy +4 +} + +This book as a whole is dedicated to the emergence of commons-based information production and its implications for liberal democracies. Of necessity, the emphasis of this chapter too is on institutional design questions that are driven by the conflict between the industrial and networked information economies. Orthogonal to this conflict, but always relevant to it, is the perennial concern of communications policy with security and crime. Throughout much of the 1990s, this concern manifested primarily as a conflict over encryption. The "crypto-wars," as they were called, revolved around the FBI's efforts to force industry to adopt technology that had a backdoor-- then called the "Clipper Chip"--that would facilitate wiretapping and investigation. After retarding encryption adoption in the United States for almost a decade, the federal government ultimately decided that trying to hobble security in most American systems (that is, forcing everyone to adopt weaker encryption) in order to assure that the FBI could better investigate the failures of security that would inevitably follow use of such weak encryption was a bad idea. The fact that encryption research and business was moving overseas--giving criminals alternative sources for obtaining excellent encryption tools while the U.S. industry fell behind--did not help the FBI's cause. The same impulse is to some extent at work again, with the added force of the post-9/11 security mind-set. +={ encryption +1 ; + file-sharing networks : + security considerations +1 +} + +One concern is that open wireless networks are available for criminals to hide their tracks--the criminal uses someone else's Internet connection using their unencrypted WiFi access point, and when the authorities successfully track the Internet address back to the WiFi router, they find an innocent neighbor rather than the culprit. This concern has led to some proposals that manufacturers of WiFi routers set their defaults so that, out of the box, the router is encrypted. Given how "sticky" defaults are in technology products, this would have enormously deleterious effects on the development of open wireless networks. Another concern is that free and open-source software reveals its design to anyone who wants to read it. This makes it easier to find flaws that could be exploited by attackers and nearly impossible to hide purposefully designed weaknesses, such as susceptibility to wiretapping. A third is that a resilient, encrypted, anonymous peer-to-peer network, like FreeNet or some of the major p2p architectures, offers the criminals or terrorists communications systems that are, for all practical purposes, beyond the control of law enforcement and counterterrorism efforts. To the extent ,{[pg 458]}, that they take this form, security concerns tend to support the agenda of the proprietary producers. +={ open wireless networks : + security +1 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + peer-to-peer networks +1 ; + p2p networks : + security considerations ; + peer-to-peer networks : + security considerations ; + network topology : + peer-to-peer networks ; + structure of network : + peer-to-peer networks ; + topology, network : + peer-to-peer networks +} + +However, security concerns need not support proprietary architectures and practices. On the wireless front, there is a very wide range of anonymization techniques available for criminals and terrorists who use the Internet to cover their tracks. The marginally greater difficulty that shutting off access to WiFi routers would impose on determined criminals bent on covering their tracks is unlikely to be worth the loss of an entire approach toward constructing an additional last-mile loop for local telecommunications. One of the core concerns of security is the preservation of network capacity as a critical infrastructure. Another is assuring communications for critical security personnel. Open wireless networks that are built from ad hoc, self-configuring mesh networks are the most robust design for a local communications loop currently available. It is practically impossible to disrupt local communications in such a network, because these networks are designed so that each router will automatically look for the next available neighbor with which to make a network. These systems will self-heal in response to any attack on communications infrastructure as a function of their basic normal operational design. They can then be available both for their primary intended critical missions and for first responders as backup data networks, even when main systems have been lost--as they were, in fact, lost in downtown Manhattan after the World Trade Center attack. To imagine that security is enhanced by eliminating the possibility that such a backup local communications network will emerge in exchange for forcing criminals to use more anonymizers and proxy servers instead of a neighbor's WiFi router requires a very narrow view of security. Similarly, the same ease of study that makes flaws in free software observable to potential terrorists or criminals makes them available to the community of developers, who quickly shore up the defenses of the programs. Over the past decade, security flaws in proprietary programs, which are not open to inspection by such large numbers of developers and testers, have been much more common than security breaches in free software. Those who argue that proprietary software is more secure and allows for better surveillance seem to be largely rehearsing the thought process that typified the FBI's position in the Clipper Chip debate. +={ capacity : + securing +} + +More fundamentally, the security concerns represent a lack of ease with the great freedom enabled by the networked information environment. Some of the individuals who can now do more alone and in association with others want to do harm to the United States in particular, and to advanced liberal ,{[pg 459]}, market-based democracies more generally. Others want to trade Nazi memorabilia or child pornography. Just as the Internet makes it harder for authoritarian regimes to control their populations, so too the tremendous openness and freedom of the networked environment requires new ways of protecting open societies from destructive individuals and groups. And yet, particularly in light of the systematic and significant benefits of the networked information economy and its sharing-based open production practices to the core political commitments of liberal democracies, preserving security in these societies by eliminating the technologies that can support improvements in the very freedom being protected is perverse. Given Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, however, squelching the emergence of an open networked environment and economy hardly seems to be the most glaring of self-defeating moves in the war to protect freedom and human dignity in liberal societies. It is too early to tell whether the security urge will ultimately weigh in on the side of the industrial information economy incumbents, or will instead follow the path of the crypto-wars, and lead security concerns to support the networked information economy's ability to provide survivable, redundant, and effective critical infrastructures and information production and exchange capabilities. If the former, this impulse may well present a formidable obstacle to the emergence of an open networked information environment. ,{[pg 460]}, + +1~12 Chapter 12 - Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy +={ commercial model of communication : + stakes of information policy +21 ; + industrial model of communication : + stakes of information policy +21 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + stakes of information policy +21 ; + policy : + stakes of +21 ; + stakes of information policy +21 ; + traditional model of communication : + stakes of information policy +21 +} + +Complex modern societies have developed in the context of mass media and industrial information economy. Our theories of growth and innovation assume that industrial models of innovation are dominant. Our theories about how effective communications in complex societies are achieved center on market-based, proprietary models, with a professional commercial core and a dispersed, relatively passive periphery. Our conceptions of human agency, collective deliberation, and common culture in these societies are embedded in the experience and practice of capital-intensive information and cultural production practices that emphasize proprietary, market-based models and starkly separate production from consumption. Our institutional frameworks reflect these conceptual models of information production and exchange, and have come, over the past few years, to enforce these conceptions as practiced reality, even when they need not be. +={ proprietary rights : + dominance of, overstated +2 +} + +This book began with four economic observations. First, the baseline conception that proprietary strategies are dominant in our information production system is overstated. The education system, ,{[pg 461]}, from kindergarten to doctoral programs, is thoroughly infused with nonproprietary motivations, social relations, and organizational forms. The arts and sciences are replete with voluntarism and actions oriented primarily toward social-psychological motivations rather than market appropriation. Political and theological discourses are thoroughly based in nonmarket forms and motivations. Perhaps most surprisingly, even industrial research and development, while market oriented, is in most industries not based on proprietary claims of exclusion, but on improved efficiencies and customer relations that can be captured and that drive innovation, without need for proprietary strategies of appropriation. Despite the continued importance of nonproprietary production in information as a practical matter, the conceptual nuance required to acknowledge its importance ran against the grain of the increasingly dominant thesis that property and markets are the roots of all growth and productivity. Partly as a result of the ideological and military conflict with Communism, partly as a result of the theoretical elegance of a simple and tractable solution, policy makers and their advisers came to believe toward the end of the twentieth century that property in information and innovation was like property in wristwatches and automobiles. The more clearly you defined and enforced it, and the closer it was to perfect exclusive rights, the more production you would get. The rising dominance of this conceptual model combined with the rent-seeking lobbying of industrialmodel producers to underwrite a fairly rapid and substantial tipping of the institutional ecology of innovation and information production in favor of proprietary models. The U.S. patent system was overhauled in the early 1980s, in ways that strengthened and broadened the reach and scope of exclusivity. Copyright was vastly expanded in the mid-1970s, and again in the latter 1990s. Trademark was vastly expanded in the 1990s. Other associated rights were created and strengthened throughout these years. +={ cost : + proprietary models +3 ; + efficiency of information regulation +3 ; + inefficiency of information regulation +3 ; + proprietary rights, inefficiency of +3 ; + regulating information, efficiency of +3 +} + +The second economic point is that these expansions of rights operate, as a practical matter, as a tax on nonproprietary models of production in favor of the proprietary models. It makes access to information resources more expensive for all, while improving appropriability only for some. Introducing software patents, for example, may help some of the participants in the onethird of the software industry that depends on sales of finished software items. But it clearly raises the costs without increasing benefits for the twothirds of the industry that is service based and relational. As a practical matter, the substantial increases in the scope and reach of exclusive rights have adversely affected the operating conditions of nonproprietary producers. ,{[pg 462]}, + +Universities have begun to seek patents and pay royalties, impeding the sharing of information that typified past practice. Businesses that do not actually rely on asserting patents for their business model have found themselves amassing large patent portfolios at great expense, simply to fend off the threat of suit by others who would try to hold them up. Older documentary films, like Eyes on the Prize, have been hidden from public view for years, because of the cost and complexity of clearing the rights to every piece of footage or trademark that happens to have been captured by the camera. New documentaries require substantially greater funding than would have been necessary to pay for their creation, because of the costs of clearing newly expanded rights. + +The third economic observation is that the basic technologies of information processing, storage, and communication have made nonproprietary models more attractive and effective than was ever before possible. Ubiquitous low-cost processors, storage media, and networked connectivity have made it practically feasible for individuals, alone and in cooperation with others, to create and exchange information, knowledge, and culture in patterns of social reciprocity, redistribution, and sharing, rather than proprietary, market-based production. The basic material capital requirements of information production are now in the hands of a billion people around the globe who are connected to each other more or less seamlessly. These material conditions have given individuals a new practical freedom of action. If a person or group wishes to start an information-production project for any reason, that group or person need not raise significant funds to acquire the necessary capital. In the past, the necessity to obtain funds constrained information producers to find a market-based model to sustain the investment, or to obtain government funding. The funding requirements, in turn, subordinated the producers either to the demands of markets, in particular to mass-market appeal, or to the agendas of state bureaucracies. The networked information environment has permitted the emergence to much greater significance of the nonmarket sector, the nonprofit sector, and, most radically, of individuals. +={ cost : + technologies ; + peer production +2 ; + technology : + costs of +} + +The fourth and final economic observation describes and analyzes the rise of peer production. This cluster of phenomena, from free and open-source software to /{Wikipedia}/ and SETI@Home, presents a stark challenge to conventional thinking about the economics of information production. Indeed, it challenges the economic understanding of the relative roles of marketbased and nonmarket production more generally. It is important to see these ,{[pg 463]}, phenomena not as exceptions, quirks, or ephemeral fads, but as indications of a fundamental fact about transactional forms and their relationship to the technological conditions of production. It is a mistake to think that we have only two basic free transactional forms--property-based markets and hierarchically organized firms. We have three, and the third is social sharing and exchange. It is a widespread phenomenon--we live and practice it every day with our household members, coworkers, and neighbors. We coproduce and exchange economic goods and services. But we do not count these in the economic census. Worse, we do not count them in our institutional design. I suggest that the reason social production has been shunted to the peripheries of the advanced economies is that the core economic activities of the economies of steel and coal required large capital investments. These left markets, firms, or state-run enterprises dominant. As the first stage of the information economy emerged, existing information and human creativity-- each a "good" with fundamentally different economic characteristics than coal or steel--became important inputs. The organization of production nevertheless followed an industrial model, because information production and exchange itself still required high capital costs--a mechanical printing press, a broadcast station, or later, an IBM mainframe. The current networked stage of the information economy emerged when the barrier of high capital costs was removed. The total capital cost of communication and creation did not necessarily decline. Capital investment, however, became widely distributed in small dollops, owned by individuals connected in a network. We came to a stage where the core economic activities of the most advanced economies--the production and processing of information--could be achieved by pooling physical capital owned by widely dispersed individuals and groups, who have purchased the capital means for personal, household, and small-business use. Then, human creativity and existing information were left as the main remaining core inputs. Something new and radically different started to happen. People began to apply behaviors they practice in their living rooms or in the elevator--"Here, let me lend you a hand," or "What did you think of last night's speech?"--to production problems that had, throughout the twentieth century, been solved on the model of Ford and General Motors. The rise of peer production is neither mysterious nor fickle when viewed through this lens. It is as rational and efficient given the objectives and material conditions of information production at the turn of the twenty-first century as the assembly line was for the conditions at the turn of the twentieth. The pooling of human creativity and of ,{[pg 464]}, computation, communication, and storage enables nonmarket motivations and relations to play a much larger role in the production of the information environment than it has been able to for at least decades, perhaps for as long as a century and a half. + +A genuine shift in the way we produce the information environment that we occupy as individual agents, as citizens, as culturally embedded creatures, and as social beings goes to the core of our basic liberal commitments. Information and communications are core elements of autonomy and of public political discourse and decision making. Communication is the basic unit of social existence. Culture and knowledge, broadly conceived, form the basic frame of reference through which we come to understand ourselves and others in the world. For any liberal political theory--any theory that begins with a focus on individuals and their freedom to be the authors of their own lives in connection with others--the basic questions of how individuals and communities come to know and evaluate are central to the project of characterizing the normative value of institutional, social, and political systems. Independently, in the context of an information- and innovation-centric economy, the basic components of human development also depend on how we produce information and innovation, and how we disseminate its implementations. The emergence of a substantial role for nonproprietary production offers discrete strategies to improve human development around the globe. Productivity in the information economy can be sustained without the kinds of exclusivity that have made it difficult for knowledge, information, and their beneficial implementations to diffuse beyond the circles of the wealthiest nations and social groups. We can provide a detailed and specific account of why the emergence of nonmarket, nonproprietary production to a more significant role than it had in the industrial information economy could offer improvements in the domains of both freedom and justice, without sacrificing--indeed, while improving--productivity. +={ autonomy +4 ; + individual autonomy +4 ; + information production ; + production of information +} + +From the perspective of individual autonomy, the emergence of the networked information economy offers a series of identifiable improvements in how we perceive the world around us, the extent to which we can affect our perceptions of the world, the range of actions open to us and their possible outcomes, and the range of cooperative enterprises we can seek to enter to pursue our choices. It allows us to do more for and by ourselves. It allows us to form loose associations with others who are interested in a particular outcome they share with us, allowing us to provide and explore many more ,{[pg 465]}, diverse avenues of learning and speaking than we could achieve by ourselves or in association solely with others who share long-term strong ties. By creating sources of information and communication facilities that no one owns or exclusively controls, the networked information economy removes some of the most basic opportunities for manipulation of those who depend on information and communication by the owners of the basic means of communications and the producers of the core cultural forms. It does not eliminate the possibility that one person will try to act upon another as object. But it removes the structural constraints that make it impossible to communicate at all without being subject to such action by others. +={ networked public sphere +2 : + see also social relations and norms networked society +} + +From the perspective of democratic discourse and a participatory republic, the networked information economy offers a genuine reorganization of the public sphere. Except in the very early stages of a small number of today's democracies, modern democracies have largely developed in the context of mass media as the core of their public spheres. A systematic and broad literature has explored the basic limitations of commercial mass media as the core of the public sphere, as well as it advantages. The emergence of a networked public sphere is attenuating, or even solving, the most basic failings of the mass-mediated public sphere. It attenuates the power of the commercial mass-media owners and those who can pay them. It provides an avenue for substantially more diverse and politically mobilized communication than was feasible in a commercial mass media with a small number of speakers and a vast number of passive recipients. The views of many more individuals and communities can be heard. Perhaps most interestingly, the phenomenon of peer production is now finding its way into the public sphere. It is allowing loosely affiliated individuals across the network to fulfill some of the basic and central functions of the mass media. We are seeing the rise of nonmarket, distributed, and collaborative investigative journalism, critical commentary, and platforms for political mobilization and organization. We are seeing the rise of collaborative filtering and accreditation, which allows individuals engaged in public discourse to be their own source of deciding whom to trust and whose words to question. +={ diversity : + fragmentation of communication +2 ; + public sphere +1 +} + +A common critique of claims that the Internet improves democracy and autonomy is centered on information overload and fragmentation. What we have seen emerging in the networked environment is a combination of selfconscious peer-production efforts and emergent properties of large systems of human beings that have avoided this unhappy fate. We have seen the adoption of a number of practices that have made for a reasonably navigable ,{[pg 466]}, and coherent information environment without re-creating the mass-media model. There are organized nonmarket projects for producing filtering and accreditation, ranging from the Open Directory Project to mailing lists to like-minded people, like MoveOn.org. There is a widespread cultural practice of mutual pointing and linking; a culture of "Here, see for yourself, I think this is interesting." The basic model of observing the judgments of others as to what is interesting and valuable, coupled with exercising one's own judgment about who shares one's interests and whose judgment seems to be sound has created a pattern of linking and usage of the Web and the Internet that is substantially more ordered than a cacophonous free-for-all, and less hierarchically organized and controlled by few than was the massmedia environment. It turns out that we are not intellectual lemmings. Given freedom to participate in making our own information environment, we neither descend into Babel, nor do we replicate the hierarchies of the mass-mediated public spheres to avoid it. +={ attention fragmentation +1 ; + Babel objection +1 ; + communities : + fragmentation of +1 ; + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + information overload and Babel objection +1 ; + norms (social) : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + regulation by social norms : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + social relations and norms : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + culture +1 +} + +The concepts of culture and society occupy more tenuous positions in liberal theory than autonomy and democracy. As a consequence, mapping the effects of the changes in information production and exchange on these domains as aspects of liberal societies is more complex. As to culture, the minimum that we can say is that the networked information environment is rendering culture more transparent. We all "occupy" culture; our perceptions, views, and structures of comprehension are all always embedded in culture. And yet there are degrees to which this fact can be rendered more or less opaque to us as inhabitants of a culture. In the networked information environment, as individuals and groups use their newfound autonomy to engage in personal and collective expression through existing cultural forms, these forms become more transparent--both through practice and through critical examination. The mass-media television culture encouraged passive consumption of polished, finished goods. The emergence of what might be thought of as a newly invigorated folk culture--created by and among individuals and groups, rather than by professionals for passive consumption-- provides both a wider set of cultural forms and practices and a bettereducated or better-practiced community of "readers" of culture. From the perspective of a liberal theory unwilling simply to ignore the fact that culture structures meaning, personal values, and political conceptions, the emergence of a more transparent and participatory cultural production system is a clear improvement over the commercial, professional mass culture of the twentieth century. In the domain of social relations, the degree of autonomy and the ,{[pg 467]}, loose associations made possible by the Internet, which play such an important role in the gains for autonomy, democracy, and a critical culture, have raised substantial concerns about how the networked environment will contribute to a further erosion of community and solidarity. As with the Babel objection, however, it appears that we are not using the Internet further to fragment our social lives. The Internet is beginning to replace twentieth-century remote media--television and telephone. The new patterns of use that we are observing as a result of this partial displacement suggest that much of network use focuses on enhancing and deepening existing real-world relations, as well as adding new online relations. Some of the time that used to be devoted to passive reception of standardized finished goods through a television is now reoriented toward communicating and making together with others, in both tightly and loosely knit social relations. Moreover, the basic experience of treating others, including strangers, as potential partners in cooperation contributes to a thickening of the sense of possible social bonds beyond merely co-consumers of standardized products. Peer production can provide a new domain of reasonably thick connection with remote others. + +The same capabilities to make information and knowledge, to innovate, and to communicate that lie at the core of the gains in freedom in liberal societies also underlie the primary advances I suggest are possible in terms of justice and human development. From the perspective of a liberal conception of justice, the possibility that more of the basic requirements of human welfare and the capabilities necessary to be a productive, self-reliant individual are available outside of the market insulates access to these basic requirements and capabilities from the happenstance of wealth distribution. From a more substantive perspective, information and innovation are central components of all aspects of a rich meaning of human development. Information and innovation are central to human health--in the production and use of both food and medicines. They are central to human learning and the development of the knowledge any individual needs to make life richer. And they are, and have for more than fifty years been known to be, central to growth of material welfare. Along all three of these dimensions, the emergence of a substantial sector of nonmarket production that is not based on exclusivity and does not require exclusion to feed its own engine contributes to global human development. The same economic characteristics that make exclusive rights in information a tool that imposes barriers to access in advanced economies make these rights a form of tax on technological latecomers. ,{[pg 468]}, What most poor and middle-income countries lack is not human creativity, but access to the basic tools of innovation. The cost of the material requirements of innovation and information production is declining rapidly in many domains, as more can be done with ever-cheaper computers and communications systems. But exclusive rights in existing innovation tools and information resources remain a significant barrier to innovation, education, and the use of information-embedded tools and goods in low- and middle-income countries. As new strategies for the production of information and knowledge are making their outputs available freely for use and continuing innovation by everyone everywhere, the networked information economy can begin to contribute significantly to improvements in human development. We already see free software and free and open Internet standards playing that role in information technology sectors. We are beginning to see it take form in academic publishing, raw information, and educational materials, like multilingual encyclopedias, around the globe. More tentatively, we are beginning to see open commons-based innovation models and peer production emerge in areas of agricultural research and bioagricultural innovation, as well as, even more tentatively, in the area of biomedical research. These are still very early examples of what can be produced by the networked information economy, and how it can contribute, even if only to a limited extent, to the capacity of people around the globe to live a long and healthy, well-educated, and materially adequate life. +={ human development and justice +1 ; + justice and human development +1 +} + +If the networked information economy is indeed a significant inflection point for modern societies along all these dimensions, it is so because it upsets the dominance of proprietary, market-based production in the sphere of the production of knowledge, information, and culture. This upset is hardly uncontroversial. It will likely result in significant redistribution of wealth, and no less importantly, power, from previously dominant firms and business models to a mixture of individuals and social groups on the one hand, and on the other hand businesses that reshape their business models to take advantage of, and build tools an platforms for, the newly productive social relations. As a practical matter, the major economic and social changes described here are not deterministically preordained by the internal logic of technological progress. What we see instead is that the happenstance of the fabrication technology of computation, in particular, as well as storage and communications, has created technological conditions conducive to a significant realignment of our information production and exchange system. The actual structure of the markets, technologies, and social practices that ,{[pg 469]}, have been destabilized by the introduction of computer-communications networks is now the subject of a large-scale and diffuse institutional battle. + +We are seeing significant battles over the organization and legal capabilities of the physical components of the digitally networked environment. Will all broadband infrastructures be privately owned? If so, how wide a margin of control will owners have to prefer some messages over others? Will we, to the contrary, permit open wireless networks to emerge as an infrastructure of first and last resort, owned by its users and exclusively controlled by no one? The drives to greater private ownership in wired infrastructure, and the push by Hollywood and the recording industry to require digital devices mechanically to comply with exclusivity-respecting standards are driving the technical and organizational design toward a closed environment that would be more conducive to proprietary strategies. Open wireless networks and the present business model of the large and successful device companies--particularly, personal computers--to use open standards push in the opposite direction. End-user equipment companies are mostly focused on making their products as valuable as possible to their users, and are therefore oriented toward offering general-purpose platforms that can be deployed by their owners as they choose. These then become equally available for marketoriented as for social behaviors, for proprietary consumption as for productive sharing. + +At the logical layer, the ethic of open standards in the technical community, the emergence of the free software movement and its apolitical cousin, open-source development practices, on the one hand, and the antiauthoritarian drives behind encryption hacking and some of the peer-to-peer technologies, on the other hand, are pushing toward an open logical layer available for all to use. The efforts of the content industries to make the Internet manageable--most visibly, the DMCA and the continued dominance of Microsoft over the desktop, and the willingness of courts and legislatures to try to stamp out copyright-defeating technologies even when these obviously have significant benefits to users who have no interest in copying the latest song in order not to pay for the CD--are the primary sources of institutional constraint on the freedom to use the logical resources necessary to communicate in the network. +={ content layer of institutional ecology +2 ; + layers of institutional ecology +2 : + content layer +2 | physical layer +2 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology ; + physical layer of institutional ecology +2 ; + policy layers +2 : + content layer +2 | physical layer +2 +} + +At the content layer--the universe of existing information, knowledge, and culture--we are observing a fairly systematic trend in law, but a growing countertrend in society. In law, we see a continual tightening of the control that the owners of exclusive rights are given. Copyrights are longer, apply ,{[pg 470]}, to more uses, and are interpreted as reaching into every corner of valuable use. Trademarks are stronger and more aggressive. Patents have expanded to new domains and are given greater leeway. All these changes are skewing the institutional ecology in favor of business models and production practices that are based on exclusive proprietary claims; they are lobbied for by firms that collect large rents if these laws are expanded, followed, and enforced. Social trends in the past few years, however, are pushing in the opposite direction. These are precisely the trends of networked information economy, of nonmarket production, of an increased ethic of sharing, and an increased ambition to participate in communities of practice that produce vast quantities of information, knowledge, and culture for free use, sharing, and followon creation by others. +={ institutional ecology of digital environment +3 } + +The political and judicial pressures to form an institutional ecology that is decidedly tilted in favor of proprietary business models are running headon into the emerging social practices described throughout this book. To flourish, a networked information economy rich in social production practices requires a core common infrastructure, a set of resources necessary for information production and exchange that are open for all to use. This requires physical, logical, and content resources from which to make new statements, encode them for communication, and then render and receive them. At present, these resources are available through a mixture of legal and illegal, planned and unplanned sources. Some aspects come from the happenstance of the trajectories of very different industries that have operated under very different regulatory frameworks: telecommunications, personal computers, software, Internet connectivity, public- and private-sector information, and cultural publication. Some come from more or less widespread adoption of practices of questionable legality or outright illegality. Peer-to-peer file sharing includes many instances of outright illegality practiced by tens of millions of Internet users. But simple uses of quotations, clips, and mix-and-match creative practices that may, or, increasingly, may not, fall into the narrowing category of fair use are also priming the pump of nonmarket production. At the same time, we are seeing an ever-more self-conscious adoption of commons-based practices as a modality of information production and exchange. Free software, Creative Commons, the Public Library of Science, the new guidelines of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on free publication of papers, new open archiving practices, librarian movements, and many other communities of practice are developing what was a contingent fact into a self-conscious social movement. As ,{[pg 471]}, the domain of existing information and culture comes to be occupied by information and knowledge produced within these free sharing movements and licensed on the model of open-licensing techniques, the problem of the conflict with the proprietary domain will recede. Twentieth-century materials will continue to be a point of friction, but a sufficient quotient of twentyfirst-century materials seem now to be increasingly available from sources that are happy to share them with future users and creators. If this socialcultural trend continues over time, access to content resources will present an ever-lower barrier to nonmarket production. +={ commercial model of communication ; + industrial model of communication +1 ; + traditional model of communication +1 +} + +The relationship of institutional ecology to social practice is a complex one. It is hard to predict at this point whether a successful sustained effort on the part of the industrial information economy producers will succeed in flipping even more of the institutional toggles in favor of proprietary production. There is already a more significant social movement than existed in the 1990s in the United States, in Europe, and around the world that is resisting current efforts to further enclose the information environment. This social movement is getting support from large and wealthy industrial players who have reoriented their business model to become the platforms, toolmakers, and service providers for and alongside the emerging nonmarket sector. IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Cisco, for example, might stand shoulder to shoulder with a nongovernment organization (NGO) like Public Knowledge in an effort to block legislation that would require personal computers to comply with standards set by Hollywood for copy protection. When Hollywood sued Grokster, the file-sharing company, and asked the Supreme Court to expand contributory liability of the makers of technologies that are used to infringe copyrights, it found itself arrayed against amicus briefs filed by Intel, the Consumer Electronics Association, and Verizon, SBC, AT&T, MCI, and Sun Microsystems, alongside briefs from the Free Software Foundation, and the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, and Public Knowledge. + +Even if laws that favor enclosure do pass in one, or even many jurisdictions, it is not entirely clear that law can unilaterally turn back a trend that combines powerful technological, social, and economic drivers. We have seen even in the area of peer-to-peer networks, where the arguments of the incumbents seemed the most morally compelling and where their legal successes have been the most complete, that stemming the tide of change is difficult--perhaps impossible. Bits are a part of a flow in the networked information environment, and trying to legislate that fact away in order to ,{[pg 472]}, preserve a business model that sells particular collections of bits as discrete, finished goods may simply prove to be impossible. Nonetheless, legal constraints significantly shape the parameters of what companies and individuals decide to market and use. It is not hard to imagine that, were Napster seen as legal, it would have by now encompassed a much larger portion of the population of Internet users than the number of users who actually now use file-sharing networks. Whether the same moderate levels of success in shaping behavior can be replicated in areas where the claims of the incumbents are much more tenuous, as a matter of both policy and moral claims--such as in the legal protection of anticircumvention devices or the contraction of fair use--is an even harder question. The object of a discussion of the institutional ecology of the networked environment is, in any event, not prognostication. It is to provide a moral framework within which to understand the many and diverse policy battles we have seen over the past decade, and which undoubtedly will continue into the coming decade, that I have written this book. + +We are in the midst of a quite basic transformation in how we perceive the world around us, and how we act, alone and in concert with others, to shape our own understanding of the world we occupy and that of others with whom we share it. Patterns of social practice, long suppressed as economic activities in the context of industrial economy, have now emerged to greater importance than they have had in a century and a half. With them, they bring the possibility of genuine gains in the very core of liberal commitments, in both advanced economies and around the globe. The rise of commons-based information production, of individuals and loose associations producing information in nonproprietary forms, presents a genuine discontinuity from the industrial information economy of the twentieth century. It brings with it great promise, and great uncertainty. We have early intimations as to how market-based enterprises can adjust to make room for this newly emerging phenomenon--IBM's adoption of open source, Second Life's adoption of user-created immersive entertainment, or Open Source Technology Group's development of a platform for Slashdot. We also have very clear examples of businesses that have decided to fight the new changes by using every trick in the book, and some, like injecting corrupt files into peer-to-peer networks, that are decidedly not in the book. Law and regulation form one important domain in which these battles over the shape of our emerging information production system are fought. As we observe these battles; as we participate in them as individuals choosing how to behave and ,{[pg 473]}, what to believe, as citizens, lobbyists, lawyers, or activists; as we act out these legal battles as legislators, judges, or treaty negotiators, it is important that we understand the normative stakes of what we are doing. + +We have an opportunity to change the way we create and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. By doing so, we can make the twentyfirst century one that offers individuals greater autonomy, political communities greater democracy, and societies greater opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection. We can remove some of the transactional barriers to material opportunity, and improve the state of human development everywhere. Perhaps these changes will be the foundation of a true transformation toward more liberal and egalitarian societies. Perhaps they will merely improve, in well-defined but smaller ways, human life along each of these dimensions. That alone is more than enough to justify an embrace of the networked information economy by anyone who values human welfare, development, and freedom. + +1~blurb Blurb + +_1 "In this book, Benkler establishes himself as the leading intellectual of the information age. Profoundly rich in its insight and truth, this work will be the central text for understanding how networks have changed how we understand the world. No work to date has more carefully or convincingly made the case for a fundamental change in how we understand the economy of society." Lawrence Lessig, professor of law, Stanford Law School + +_1 "A lucid, powerful, and optimistic account of a revolution in the making." Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of /{The Anarchist in the Library}/ + +_1 "This deeply researched book documents the fundamental changes in the ways in which we produce and share ideas, information, and entertainment. Then, drawing widely on the literatures of philosophy, economics, and political theory, it shows why these changes should be welcomed, not resisted. The trends examined, if allowed to continue, will radically alter our lives - and no other scholar describes them so clearly or champions them more effectively than Benkler." William W. Fisher III, Hale and Dorr Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Harvard University, and directory, Berkman Center for Internet and Society + +_1 "A magnificent achievement. Yochai Benkler shows us how the Internet enables new commons-based methods for producing goods, remaking culture, and participating in public life. /{The Wealth of Networks}/ is an indispensable guide to the political economy of our digitally networked world." Jack M. Balkin, professor of law and director of the Information Society Project, Yale University. + +A dedicated wiki may be found at: http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page + +Including a pdf: http://www.benkler.org/wonchapters.html + +The author's website is: http://www.benkler.org/ + +The books may be purchased at bookshops, including { Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Networks-Production-Transforms-Markets/dp/0300110561/ or at { Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0300110561 + +% Not final copy: markup not final, output numbering is therefore subject to change + +% italics need checking + +% hyphenation in markup text needs review, pdf to text transformation not perfect + +% book index can be preserved as book pages have been kept after a fashion, should be added + +% original footnotes do not have meaning in this copy and have been removed diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst b/data/samples/current/en/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..65e5dbe --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst @@ -0,0 +1,2344 @@ +% SiSU 4.0.0 + +@title: Through The Looking-Glass + +@creator: Carroll, Lewis + +@date: + :published: 1871 + :created: 1871 + :issued: 1871 + :available: 1871 + :added_to_site: 2004-04-12 + +% 2005-10-30 + +@rights: + :copyright: Lewis Carroll + :license: Public Domain + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:fantasy|children's fiction + +@links: +{ Through the Looking Glass @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Looking-Glass +{ Lewis Carroll @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll + +@make: + :headings: none; none; none; CHAPTER; + :breaks: new=3; break=4 + +:A~ @title @author \\ The Millennium Fulcrum Edition 1.7 [text only] + +CHAPTER I - Looking-Glass house + +One thing was certain, that the WHITE kitten had had nothing to do with it:--it was the black kitten's fault entirely. For the white kitten had been having its face washed by the old cat for the last quarter of an hour (and bearing it pretty well, considering); so you see that it COULDN'T have had any hand in the mischief. + +The way Dinah washed her children's faces was this: first she held the poor thing down by its ear with one paw, and then with the other paw she rubbed its face all over, the wrong way, beginning at the nose: and just now, as I said, she was hard at work on the white kitten, which was lying quite still and trying to purr--no doubt feeling that it was all meant for its good. + +But the black kitten had been finished with earlier in the afternoon, and so, while Alice was sitting curled up in a corner of the great arm-chair, half talking to herself and half asleep, the kitten had been having a grand game of romps with the ball of worsted Alice had been trying to wind up, and had been rolling it up and down till it had all come undone again; and there it was, spread over the hearth-rug, all knots and tangles, with the kitten running after its own tail in the middle. + +'Oh, you wicked little thing!' cried Alice, catching up the kitten, and giving it a little kiss to make it understand that it was in disgrace. 'Really, Dinah ought to have taught you better manners! You OUGHT, Dinah, you know you ought!' she added, looking reproachfully at the old cat, and speaking in as cross a voice as she could manage--and then she scrambled back into the arm-chair, taking the kitten and the worsted with her, and began winding up the ball again. But she didn't get on very fast, as she was talking all the time, sometimes to the kitten, and sometimes to herself. Kitty sat very demurely on her knee, pretending to watch the progress of the winding, and now and then putting out one paw and gently touching the ball, as if it would be glad to help, if it might. + +'Do you know what to-morrow is, Kitty?' Alice began. 'You'd have guessed if you'd been up in the window with me--only Dinah was making you tidy, so you couldn't. I was watching the boys getting in sticks for the bonfire--and it wants plenty of sticks, Kitty! Only it got so cold, and it snowed so, they had to leave off. Never mind, Kitty, we'll go and see the bonfire to-morrow.' Here Alice wound two or three turns of the worsted round the kitten's neck, just to see how it would look: this led to a scramble, in which the ball rolled down upon the floor, and yards and yards of it got unwound again. + +'Do you know, I was so angry, Kitty,' Alice went on as soon as they were comfortably settled again, 'when I saw all the mischief you had been doing, I was very nearly opening the window, and putting you out into the snow! And you'd have deserved it, you little mischievous darling! What have you got to say for yourself? Now don't interrupt me!' she went on, holding up one finger. 'I'm going to tell you all your faults. Number one: you squeaked twice while Dinah was washing your face this morning. Now you can't deny it, Kitty: I heard you! What's that you say?' (pretending that the kitten was speaking.) 'Her paw went into your eye? Well, that's YOUR fault, for keeping your eyes open--if you'd shut them tight up, it wouldn't have happened. Now don't make any more excuses, but listen! Number two: you pulled Snowdrop away by the tail just as I had put down the saucer of milk before her! What, you were thirsty, were you? How do you know she wasn't thirsty too? Now for number three: you unwound every bit of the worsted while I wasn't looking! + +'That's three faults, Kitty, and you've not been punished for any of them yet. You know I'm saving up all your punishments for Wednesday week--Suppose they had saved up all MY punishments!' she went on, talking more to herself than the kitten. 'What WOULD they do at the end of a year? I should be sent to prison, I suppose, when the day came. Or--let me see--suppose each punishment was to be going without a dinner: then, when the miserable day came, I should have to go without fifty dinners at once! Well, I shouldn't mind THAT much! I'd far rather go without them than eat them! + +'Do you hear the snow against the window-panes, Kitty? How nice and soft it sounds! Just as if some one was kissing the window all over outside. I wonder if the snow LOVES the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again." And when they wake up in the summer, Kitty, they dress themselves all in green, and dance about--whenever the wind blows--oh, that's very pretty!' cried Alice, dropping the ball of worsted to clap her hands. 'And I do so WISH it was true! I'm sure the woods look sleepy in the autumn, when the leaves are getting brown. + +'Kitty, can you play chess? Now, don't smile, my dear, I'm asking it seriously. Because, when we were playing just now, you watched just as if you understood it: and when I said "Check!" you purred! Well, it WAS a nice check, Kitty, and really I might have won, if it hadn't been for that nasty Knight, that came wiggling down among my pieces. Kitty, dear, let's pretend--' And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favourite phrase 'Let's pretend.' She had had quite a long argument with her sister only the day before --all because Alice had begun with 'Let's pretend we're kings and queens;' and her sister, who liked being very exact, had argued that they couldn't, because there were only two of them, and Alice had been reduced at last to say, 'Well, YOU can be one of them then, and I'LL be all the rest.' And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, 'Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyaena, and you're a bone.' + +But this is taking us away from Alice's speech to the kitten. 'Let's pretend that you're the Red Queen, Kitty! Do you know, I think if you sat up and folded your arms, you'd look exactly like her. Now do try, there's a dear!' And Alice got the Red Queen off the table, and set it up before the kitten as a model for it to imitate: however, the thing didn't succeed, principally, Alice said, because the kitten wouldn't fold its arms properly. So, to punish it, she held it up to the Looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was--'and if you're not good directly,' she added, 'I'll put you through into Looking-glass House. How would you like THAT?' + +'Now, if you'll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I'll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there's the room you can see through the glass--that's just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair--all but the bit behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see THAT bit! I want so much to know whether they've a fire in the winter: you never CAN tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too--but that may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that, because I've held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room. + +'How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they'd give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn't good to drink--But oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little PEEP of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking- glass House! I'm sure it's got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let's pretend there's a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through--' She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass WAS beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist. + +In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. 'So I shall be as warm here as I was in the old room,' thought Alice: 'warmer, in fact, because there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can't get at me!' + +Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was as different as possible. For instance, the pictures on the wall next the fire seemed to be all alive, and the very clock on the chimney-piece (you know you can only see the back of it in the Looking-glass) had got the face of a little old man, and grinned at her. + +'They don't keep this room so tidy as the other,' Alice thought to herself, as she noticed several of the chessmen down in the hearth among the cinders: but in another moment, with a little 'Oh!' of surprise, she was down on her hands and knees watching them. The chessmen were walking about, two and two! + +'Here are the Red King and the Red Queen,' Alice said (in a whisper, for fear of frightening them), 'and there are the White King and the White Queen sitting on the edge of the shovel--and here are two castles walking arm in arm--I don't think they can hear me,' she went on, as she put her head closer down, 'and I'm nearly sure they can't see me. I feel somehow as if I were invisible--' + +Here something began squeaking on the table behind Alice, and made her turn her head just in time to see one of the White Pawns roll over and begin kicking: she watched it with great curiosity to see what would happen next. + +'It is the voice of my child!' the White Queen cried out as she rushed past the King, so violently that she knocked him over among the cinders. 'My precious Lily! My imperial kitten!' and she began scrambling wildly up the side of the fender. + +'Imperial fiddlestick!' said the King, rubbing his nose, which had been hurt by the fall. He had a right to be a LITTLE annoyed with the Queen, for he was covered with ashes from head to foot. + +Alice was very anxious to be of use, and, as the poor little Lily was nearly screaming herself into a fit, she hastily picked up the Queen and set her on the table by the side of her noisy little daughter. + +The Queen gasped, and sat down: the rapid journey through the air had quite taken away her breath and for a minute or two she could do nothing but hug the little Lily in silence. As soon as she had recovered her breath a little, she called out to the White King, who was sitting sulkily among the ashes, 'Mind the volcano!' + +'What volcano?' said the King, looking up anxiously into the fire, as if he thought that was the most likely place to find one. + +'Blew--me--up,' panted the Queen, who was still a little out of breath. 'Mind you come up--the regular way--don't get blown up!' + +Alice watched the White King as he slowly struggled up from bar to bar, till at last she said, 'Why, you'll be hours and hours getting to the table, at that rate. I'd far better help you, hadn't I?' But the King took no notice of the question: it was quite clear that he could neither hear her nor see her. + +So Alice picked him up very gently, and lifted him across more slowly than she had lifted the Queen, that she mightn't take his breath away: but, before she put him on the table, she thought she might as well dust him a little, he was so covered with ashes. + +She said afterwards that she had never seen in all her life such a face as the King made, when he found himself held in the air by an invisible hand, and being dusted: he was far too much astonished to cry out, but his eyes and his mouth went on getting larger and larger, and rounder and rounder, till her hand shook so with laughing that she nearly let him drop upon the floor. + +'Oh! PLEASE don't make such faces, my dear!' she cried out, quite forgetting that the King couldn't hear her. 'You make me laugh so that I can hardly hold you! And don't keep your mouth so wide open! All the ashes will get into it--there, now I think you're tidy enough!' she added, as she smoothed his hair, and set him upon the table near the Queen. + +The King immediately fell flat on his back, and lay perfectly still: and Alice was a little alarmed at what she had done, and went round the room to see if she could find any water to throw over him. However, she could find nothing but a bottle of ink, and when she got back with it she found he had recovered, and he and the Queen were talking together in a frightened whisper--so low, that Alice could hardly hear what they said. + +The King was saying, 'I assure, you my dear, I turned cold to the very ends of my whiskers!' + +To which the Queen replied, 'You haven't got any whiskers.' + +'The horror of that moment,' the King went on, 'I shall never, NEVER forget!' + +'You will, though,' the Queen said, 'if you don't make a memorandum of it.' + +Alice looked on with great interest as the King took an enormous memorandum-book out of his pocket, and began writing. A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him. + +The poor King looked puzzled and unhappy, and struggled with the pencil for some time without saying anything; but Alice was too strong for him, and at last he panted out, 'My dear! I really MUST get a thinner pencil. I can't manage this one a bit; it writes all manner of things that I don't intend--' + +'What manner of things?' said the Queen, looking over the book (in which Alice had put 'THE WHITE KNIGHT IS SLIDING DOWN THE POKER. HE BALANCES VERY BADLY') 'That's not a memorandum of YOUR feelings!' + +There was a book lying near Alice on the table, and while she sat watching the White King (for she was still a little anxious about him, and had the ink all ready to throw over him, in case he fainted again), she turned over the leaves, to find some part that she could read, '--for it's all in some language I don't know,' she said to herself. + +It was like this. + +poem{ + + YKCOWREBBAJ + + sevot yhtils eht dna ,gillirb sawT' + ebaw eht ni elbmig dna eryg diD + ,sevogorob eht erew ysmim llA + .ebargtuo shtar emom eht dnA + +}poem + +She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. 'Why, it's a Looking-glass book, of course! And if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again.' + +This was the poem that Alice read. + +poem{ + + JABBERWOCKY + + 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves + Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; + All mimsy were the borogoves, + And the mome raths outgrabe. + + 'Beware the Jabberwock, my son! + The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! + Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun + The frumious Bandersnatch!' + + He took his vorpal sword in hand: + Long time the manxome foe he sought-- + So rested he by the Tumtum tree, + And stood awhile in thought. + + And as in uffish thought he stood, + The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, + Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, + And burbled as it came! + + One, two! One, two! And through and through + The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! + He left it dead, and with its head + He went galumphing back. + + 'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? + Come to my arms, my beamish boy! + O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' + He chortled in his joy. + + 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves + Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; + All mimsy were the borogoves, + And the mome raths outgrabe. + +}poem + +'It seems very pretty,' she said when she had finished it, 'but it's RATHER hard to understand!' (You see she didn't like to confess, ever to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) 'Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are! However, SOMEBODY killed SOMETHING: that's clear, at any rate--' + +'But oh!' thought Alice, suddenly jumping up, 'if I don't make haste I shall have to go back through the Looking-glass, before I've seen what the rest of the house is like! Let's have a look at the garden first!' She was out of the room in a moment, and ran down stairs--or, at least, it wasn't exactly running, but a new invention of hers for getting down stairs quickly and easily, as Alice said to herself. She just kept the tips of her fingers on the hand-rail, and floated gently down without even touching the stairs with her feet; then she floated on through the hall, and would have gone straight out at the door in the same way, if she hadn't caught hold of the door-post. She was getting a little giddy with so much floating in the air, and was rather glad to find herself walking again in the natural way. + +CHAPTER II - The Garden of Live Flowers + +'I should see the garden far better,' said Alice to herself, 'if I could get to the top of that hill: and here's a path that leads straight to it--at least, no, it doesn't do that--' (after going a few yards along the path, and turning several sharp corners), 'but I suppose it will at last. But how curiously it twists! It's more like a corkscrew than a path! Well, THIS turn goes to the hill, I suppose--no, it doesn't! This goes straight back to the house! Well then, I'll try it the other way.' + +And so she did: wandering up and down, and trying turn after turn, but always coming back to the house, do what she would. Indeed, once, when she turned a corner rather more quickly than usual, she ran against it before she could stop herself. + +'It's no use talking about it,' Alice said, looking up at the house and pretending it was arguing with her. 'I'm NOT going in again yet. I know I should have to get through the Looking-glass again--back into the old room--and there'd be an end of all my adventures!' + +So, resolutely turning her back upon the house, she set out once more down the path, determined to keep straight on till she got to the hill. For a few minutes all went on well, and she was just saying, 'I really SHALL do it this time--' when the path gave a sudden twist and shook itself (as she described it afterwards), and the next moment she found herself actually walking in at the door. + +'Oh, it's too bad!' she cried. 'I never saw such a house for getting in the way! Never!' + +However, there was the hill full in sight, so there was nothing to be done but start again. This time she came upon a large flower-bed, with a border of daisies, and a willow-tree growing in the middle. + +'O Tiger-lily,' said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind, 'I WISH you could talk!' + +'We CAN talk,' said the Tiger-lily: 'when there's anybody worth talking to.' + +Alice was so astonished that she could not speak for a minute: it quite seemed to take her breath away. At length, as the Tiger-lily only went on waving about, she spoke again, in a timid voice--almost in a whisper. 'And can ALL the flowers talk?' + +'As well as YOU can,' said the Tiger-lily. 'And a great deal louder.' + +'It isn't manners for us to begin, you know,' said the Rose, 'and I really was wondering when you'd speak! Said I to myself, "Her face has got SOME sense in it, though it's not a clever one!" Still, you're the right colour, and that goes a long way.' + +'I don't care about the colour,' the Tiger-lily remarked. 'If only her petals curled up a little more, she'd be all right.' + +Alice didn't like being criticised, so she began asking questions. 'Aren't you sometimes frightened at being planted out here, with nobody to take care of you?' + +'There's the tree in the middle,' said the Rose: 'what else is it good for?' + +'But what could it do, if any danger came?' Alice asked. + +'It says "Bough-wough!"' cried a Daisy: 'that's why its branches are called boughs!' + +'Didn't you know THAT?' cried another Daisy, and here they all began shouting together, till the air seemed quite full of little shrill voices. 'Silence, every one of you!' cried the Tiger- lily, waving itself passionately from side to side, and trembling with excitement. 'They know I can't get at them!' it panted, bending its quivering head towards Alice, 'or they wouldn't dare to do it!' + +'Never mind!' Alice said in a soothing tone, and stooping down to the daisies, who were just beginning again, she whispered, 'If you don't hold your tongues, I'll pick you!' + +There was silence in a moment, and several of the pink daisies turned white. + +'That's right!' said the Tiger-lily. 'The daisies are worst of all. When one speaks, they all begin together, and it's enough to make one wither to hear the way they go on!' + +'How is it you can all talk so nicely?' Alice said, hoping to get it into a better temper by a compliment. 'I've been in many gardens before, but none of the flowers could talk.' + +'Put your hand down, and feel the ground,' said the Tiger-lily. 'Then you'll know why.' + +Alice did so. 'It's very hard,' she said, 'but I don't see what that has to do with it.' + +'In most gardens,' the Tiger-lily said, 'they make the beds too soft--so that the flowers are always asleep.' + +This sounded a very good reason, and Alice was quite pleased to know it. 'I never thought of that before!' she said. + +'It's MY opinion that you never think AT ALL,' the Rose said in a rather severe tone. + +'I never saw anybody that looked stupider,' a Violet said, so suddenly, that Alice quite jumped; for it hadn't spoken before. + +'Hold YOUR tongue!' cried the Tiger-lily. 'As if YOU ever saw anybody! You keep your head under the leaves, and snore away there, till you know no more what's going on in the world, than if you were a bud!' + +'Are there any more people in the garden besides me?' Alice said, not choosing to notice the Rose's last remark. + +'There's one other flower in the garden that can move about like you,' said the Rose. 'I wonder how you do it--' ('You're always wondering,' said the Tiger-lily), 'but she's more bushy than you are.' + +'Is she like me?' Alice asked eagerly, for the thought crossed her mind, 'There's another little girl in the garden, somewhere!' + +'Well, she has the same awkward shape as you,' the Rose said, 'but she's redder--and her petals are shorter, I think.' + +'Her petals are done up close, almost like a dahlia,' the Tiger-lily interrupted: 'not tumbled about anyhow, like yours.' + +'But that's not YOUR fault,' the Rose added kindly: 'you're beginning to fade, you know--and then one can't help one's petals getting a little untidy.' + +Alice didn't like this idea at all: so, to change the subject, she asked 'Does she ever come out here?' + +'I daresay you'll see her soon,' said the Rose. 'She's one of the thorny kind.' + +'Where does she wear the thorns?' Alice asked with some curiosity. + +'Why all round her head, of course,' the Rose replied. 'I was wondering YOU hadn't got some too. I thought it was the regular rule.' + +'She's coming!' cried the Larkspur. 'I hear her footstep, thump, thump, thump, along the gravel-walk!' + +Alice looked round eagerly, and found that it was the Red Queen. 'She's grown a good deal!' was her first remark. She had indeed: when Alice first found her in the ashes, she had been only three inches high--and here she was, half a head taller than Alice herself! + +'It's the fresh air that does it,' said the Rose: 'wonderfully fine air it is, out here.' + +'I think I'll go and meet her,' said Alice, for, though the flowers were interesting enough, she felt that it would be far grander to have a talk with a real Queen. + +'You can't possibly do that,' said the Rose: '_I_ should advise you to walk the other way.' + +This sounded nonsense to Alice, so she said nothing, but set off at once towards the Red Queen. To her surprise, she lost sight of her in a moment, and found herself walking in at the front-door again. + +A little provoked, she drew back, and after looking everywhere for the queen (whom she spied out at last, a long way off), she thought she would try the plan, this time, of walking in the opposite direction. + +It succeeded beautifully. She had not been walking a minute before she found herself face to face with the Red Queen, and full in sight of the hill she had been so long aiming at. + +'Where do you come from?' said the Red Queen. 'And where are you going? Look up, speak nicely, and don't twiddle your fingers all the time.' + +Alice attended to all these directions, and explained, as well as she could, that she had lost her way. + +'I don't know what you mean by YOUR way,' said the Queen: 'all the ways about here belong to ME--but why did you come out here at all?' she added in a kinder tone. 'Curtsey while you're thinking what to say, it saves time.' + +Alice wondered a little at this, but she was too much in awe of the Queen to disbelieve it. 'I'll try it when I go home,' she thought to herself, 'the next time I'm a little late for dinner.' + +'It's time for you to answer now,' the Queen said, looking at her watch: 'open your mouth a LITTLE wider when you speak, and always say "your Majesty."' + +'I only wanted to see what the garden was like, your Majesty--' + +'That's right,' said the Queen, patting her on the head, which Alice didn't like at all, 'though, when you say "garden,"--I'VE seen gardens, compared with which this would be a wilderness.' + +Alice didn't dare to argue the point, but went on: '--and I thought I'd try and find my way to the top of that hill--' + +'When you say "hill,"' the Queen interrupted, '_I_ could show you hills, in comparison with which you'd call that a valley.' + +'No, I shouldn't,' said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at last: 'a hill CAN'T be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense--' + +The Red Queen shook her head, 'You may call it "nonsense" if you like,' she said, 'but I'VE heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!' + +Alice curtseyed again, as she was afraid from the Queen's tone that she was a LITTLE offended: and they walked on in silence till they got to the top of the little hill. + +For some minutes Alice stood without speaking, looking out in all directions over the country--and a most curious country it was. There were a number of tiny little brooks running straight across it from side to side, and the ground between was divided up into squares by a number of little green hedges, that reached from brook to brook. + +'I declare it's marked out just like a large chessboard!' Alice said at last. 'There ought to be some men moving about somewhere --and so there are!' She added in a tone of delight, and her heart began to beat quick with excitement as she went on. 'It's a great huge game of chess that's being played--all over the world--if this IS the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is! How I WISH I was one of them! I wouldn't mind being a Pawn, if only I might join--though of course I should LIKE to be a Queen, best.' + +She glanced rather shyly at the real Queen as she said this, but her companion only smiled pleasantly, and said, 'That's easily managed. You can be the White Queen's Pawn, if you like, as Lily's too young to play; and you're in the Second Square to begin with: when you get to the Eighth Square you'll be a Queen --' Just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run. + +Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying 'Faster! Faster!' but Alice felt she COULD NOT go faster, though she had not breath left to say so. + +The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. 'I wonder if all the things move along with us?' thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, 'Faster! Don't try to talk!' + +Not that Alice had any idea of doing THAT. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried 'Faster! Faster!' and dragged her along. 'Are we nearly there?' Alice managed to pant out at last. + +'Nearly there!' the Queen repeated. 'Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster!' And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in Alice's ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied. + +'Now! Now!' cried the Queen. 'Faster! Faster!' And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy. + +The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, 'You may rest a little now.' + +Alice looked round her in great surprise. 'Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!' + +'Of course it is,' said the Queen, 'what would you have it?' + +'Well, in OUR country,' said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.' + +'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!' + +'I'd rather not try, please!' said Alice. 'I'm quite content to stay here--only I AM so hot and thirsty!' + +'I know what YOU'D like!' the Queen said good-naturedly, taking a little box out of her pocket. 'Have a biscuit?' + +Alice thought it would not be civil to say 'No,' though it wasn't at all what she wanted. So she took it, and ate it as well as she could: and it was VERY dry; and she thought she had never been so nearly choked in all her life. + +'While you're refreshing yourself,' said the Queen, 'I'll just take the measurements.' And she took a ribbon out of her pocket, marked in inches, and began measuring the ground, and sticking little pegs in here and there. + +'At the end of two yards,' she said, putting in a peg to mark the distance, 'I shall give you your directions--have another biscuit?' + +'No, thank you,' said Alice: 'one's QUITE enough!' + +'Thirst quenched, I hope?' said the Queen. + +Alice did not know what to say to this, but luckily the Queen did not wait for an answer, but went on. 'At the end of THREE yards I shall repeat them--for fear of your forgetting them. At the end of FOUR, I shall say good-bye. And at the end of FIVE, I shall go!' + +She had got all the pegs put in by this time, and Alice looked on with great interest as she returned to the tree, and then began slowly walking down the row. + +At the two-yard peg she faced round, and said, 'A pawn goes two squares in its first move, you know. So you'll go VERY quickly through the Third Square--by railway, I should think--and you'll find yourself in the Fourth Square in no time. Well, THAT square belongs to Tweedledum and Tweedledee--the Fifth is mostly water--the Sixth belongs to Humpty Dumpty--But you make no remark?' + +'I--I didn't know I had to make one--just then,' Alice faltered out. + +'You SHOULD have said, "It's extremely kind of you to tell me all this"--however, we'll suppose it said--the Seventh Square is all forest--however, one of the Knights will show you the way--and in the Eighth Square we shall be Queens together, and it's all feasting and fun!' Alice got up and curtseyed, and sat down again. + +At the next peg the Queen turned again, and this time she said, 'Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing --turn out your toes as you walk--and remember who you are!' She did not wait for Alice to curtsey this time, but walked on quickly to the next peg, where she turned for a moment to say 'good-bye,' and then hurried on to the last. + +How it happened, Alice never knew, but exactly as she came to the last peg, she was gone. Whether she vanished into the air, or whether she ran quickly into the wood ('and she CAN run very fast!' thought Alice), there was no way of guessing, but she was gone, and Alice began to remember that she was a Pawn, and that it would soon be time for her to move. + +CHAPTER III - Looking-Glass Insects + +Of course the first thing to do was to make a grand survey of the country she was going to travel through. 'It's something very like learning geography,' thought Alice, as she stood on tiptoe in hopes of being able to see a little further. 'Principal rivers-- there ARE none. Principal mountains--I'm on the only one, but I don't think it's got any name. Principal towns--why, what ARE those creatures, making honey down there? They can't be bees-- nobody ever saw bees a mile off, you know--' and for some time she stood silent, watching one of them that was bustling about among the flowers, poking its proboscis into them, 'just as if it was a regular bee,' thought Alice. + +However, this was anything but a regular bee: in fact it was an elephant--as Alice soon found out, though the idea quite took her breath away at first. 'And what enormous flowers they must be!' was her next idea. 'Something like cottages with the roofs taken off, and stalks put to them--and what quantities of honey they must make! I think I'll go down and--no, I won't JUST yet,' she went on, checking herself just as she was beginning to run down the hill, and trying to find some excuse for turning shy so suddenly. 'It'll never do to go down among them without a good long branch to brush them away--and what fun it'll be when they ask me how I like my walk. I shall say-- "Oh, I like it well enough--"' (here came the favourite little toss of the head), '"only it was so dusty and hot, and the elephants did tease so!"' + +'I think I'll go down the other way,' she said after a pause: 'and perhaps I may visit the elephants later on. Besides, I do so want to get into the Third Square!' + +So with this excuse she ran down the hill and jumped over the first of the six little brooks. + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +'Tickets, please!' said the Guard, putting his head in at the window. In a moment everybody was holding out a ticket: they were about the same size as the people, and quite seemed to fill the carriage. + +'Now then! Show your ticket, child!' the Guard went on, looking angrily at Alice. And a great many voices all said together ('like the chorus of a song,' thought Alice), 'Don't keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute!' + +'I'm afraid I haven't got one,' Alice said in a frightened tone: 'there wasn't a ticket-office where I came from.' And again the chorus of voices went on. 'There wasn't room for one where she came from. The land there is worth a thousand pounds an inch!' + +'Don't make excuses,' said the Guard: 'you should have bought one from the engine-driver.' And once more the chorus of voices went on with 'The man that drives the engine. Why, the smoke alone is worth a thousand pounds a puff!' + +Alice thought to herself, 'Then there's no use in speaking.' The voices didn't join in this time, as she hadn't spoken, but to her great surprise, they all THOUGHT in chorus (I hope you understand what THINKING IN CHORUS means--for I must confess that _I_ don't), 'Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!' + +'I shall dream about a thousand pounds tonight, I know I shall!' thought Alice. + +All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera- glass. At last he said, 'You're travelling the wrong way,' and shut up the window and went away. + +'So young a child,' said the gentleman sitting opposite to her (he was dressed in white paper), 'ought to know which way she's going, even if she doesn't know her own name!' + +A Goat, that was sitting next to the gentleman in white, shut his eyes and said in a loud voice, 'She ought to know her way to the ticket-office, even if she doesn't know her alphabet!' + +There was a Beetle sitting next to the Goat (it was a very queer carriage-full of passengers altogether), and, as the rule seemed to be that they should all speak in turn, HE went on with 'She'll have to go back from here as luggage!' + +Alice couldn't see who was sitting beyond the Beetle, but a hoarse voice spoke next. 'Change engines--' it said, and was obliged to leave off. + +'It sounds like a horse,' Alice thought to herself. And an extremely small voice, close to her ear, said, 'You might make a joke on that--something about "horse" and "hoarse," you know.' + +Then a very gentle voice in the distance said, 'She must be labelled "Lass, with care," you know--' + +And after that other voices went on ('What a number of people there are in the carriage!' thought Alice), saying, 'She must go by post, as she's got a head on her--' 'She must be sent as a message by the telegraph--' 'She must draw the train herself the rest of the way--' and so on. + +But the gentleman dressed in white paper leaned forwards and whispered in her ear, 'Never mind what they all say, my dear, but take a return-ticket every time the train stops.' + +'Indeed I shan't!' Alice said rather impatiently. 'I don't belong to this railway journey at all--I was in a wood just now --and I wish I could get back there.' + +'You might make a joke on THAT,' said the little voice close to her ear: 'something about "you WOULD if you could," you know.' + +'Don't tease so,' said Alice, looking about in vain to see where the voice came from; 'if you're so anxious to have a joke made, why don't you make one yourself?' + +The little voice sighed deeply: it was VERY unhappy, evidently, and Alice would have said something pitying to comfort it, 'If it would only sigh like other people!' she thought. But this was such a wonderfully small sigh, that she wouldn't have heard it at all, if it hadn't come QUITE close to her ear. The consequence of this was that it tickled her ear very much, and quite took off her thoughts from the unhappiness of the poor little creature. + +'I know you are a friend,' the little voice went on; 'a dear friend, and an old friend. And you won't hurt me, though I AM an insect.' + +'What kind of insect?' Alice inquired a little anxiously. What she really wanted to know was, whether it could sting or not, but she thought this wouldn't be quite a civil question to ask. + +'What, then you don't--' the little voice began, when it was drowned by a shrill scream from the engine, and everybody jumped up in alarm, Alice among the rest. + +The Horse, who had put his head out of the window, quietly drew it in and said, 'It's only a brook we have to jump over.' Everybody seemed satisfied with this, though Alice felt a little nervous at the idea of trains jumping at all. 'However, it'll take us into the Fourth Square, that's some comfort!' she said to herself. In another moment she felt the carriage rise straight up into the air, and in her fright she caught at the thing nearest to her hand, which happened to be the Goat's beard. + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +But the beard seemed to melt away as she touched it, and she found herself sitting quietly under a tree--while the Gnat (for that was the insect she had been talking to) was balancing itself on a twig just over her head, and fanning her with its wings. + +It certainly was a VERY large Gnat: 'about the size of a chicken,' Alice thought. Still, she couldn't feel nervous with it, after they had been talking together so long. + +'--then you don't like all insects?' the Gnat went on, as quietly as if nothing had happened. + +'I like them when they can talk,' Alice said. 'None of them ever talk, where _{I}_ come from.' + +'What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where YOU come from?' the Gnat inquired. + +'I don't REJOICE in insects at all,' Alice explained, 'because I'm rather afraid of them--at least the large kinds. But I can tell you the names of some of them.' + +'Of course they answer to their names?' the Gnat remarked carelessly. + +'I never knew them do it.' + +'What's the use of their having names,' the Gnat said, 'if they won't answer to them?' + +'No use to THEM,' said Alice; 'but it's useful to the people who name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?' + +'I can't say,' the Gnat replied. 'Further on, in the wood down there, they've got no names--however, go on with your list of insects: you're wasting time.' + +'Well, there's the Horse-fly,' Alice began, counting off the names on her fingers. + +'All right,' said the Gnat: 'half way up that bush, you'll see a Rocking-horse-fly, if you look. It's made entirely of wood, and gets about by swinging itself from branch to branch.' + +'What does it live on?' Alice asked, with great curiosity. + +'Sap and sawdust,' said the Gnat. 'Go on with the list.' + +Alice looked up at the Rocking-horse-fly with great interest, and made up her mind that it must have been just repainted, it looked so bright and sticky; and then she went on. + +'And there's the Dragon-fly.' + +'Look on the branch above your head,' said the Gnat, 'and there you'll find a snap-dragon-fly. Its body is made of plum-pudding, its wings of holly-leaves, and its head is a raisin burning in brandy.' + +'And what does it live on?' + +'Frumenty and mince pie,' the Gnat replied; 'and it makes its nest in a Christmas box.' + +'And then there's the Butterfly,' Alice went on, after she had taken a good look at the insect with its head on fire, and had thought to herself, 'I wonder if that's the reason insects are so fond of flying into candles--because they want to turn into Snap-dragon-flies!' + +'Crawling at your feet,' said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in some alarm), 'you may observe a Bread-and-Butterfly. Its wings are thin slices of Bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.' + +'And what does IT live on?' + +'Weak tea with cream in it.' + +A new difficulty came into Alice's head. 'Supposing it couldn't find any?' she suggested. + +'Then it would die, of course.' + +'But that must happen very often,' Alice remarked thoughtfully. + +'It always happens,' said the Gnat. + +After this, Alice was silent for a minute or two, pondering. The Gnat amused itself meanwhile by humming round and round her head: at last it settled again and remarked, 'I suppose you don't want to lose your name?' + +'No, indeed,' Alice said, a little anxiously. + +'And yet I don't know,' the Gnat went on in a careless tone: 'only think how convenient it would be if you could manage to go home without it! For instance, if the governess wanted to call you to your lessons, she would call out "come here--," and there she would have to leave off, because there wouldn't be any name for her to call, and of course you wouldn't have to go, you know.' + +'That would never do, I'm sure,' said Alice: 'the governess would never think of excusing me lessons for that. If she couldn't remember my name, she'd call me "Miss!" as the servants do.' + +'Well, if she said "Miss," and didn't say anything more,' the Gnat remarked, 'of course you'd miss your lessons. That's a joke. I wish YOU had made it.' + +'Why do you wish _{I}_ had made it?' Alice asked. 'It's a very bad one.' + +But the Gnat only sighed deeply, while two large tears came rolling down its cheeks. + +'You shouldn't make jokes,' Alice said, 'if it makes you so unhappy.' + +Then came another of those melancholy little sighs, and this time the poor Gnat really seemed to have sighed itself away, for, when Alice looked up, there was nothing whatever to be seen on the twig, and, as she was getting quite chilly with sitting still so long, she got up and walked on. + +She very soon came to an open field, with a wood on the other side of it: it looked much darker than the last wood, and Alice felt a LITTLE timid about going into it. However, on second thoughts, she made up her mind to go on: 'for I certainly won't go BACK,' she thought to herself, and this was the only way to the Eighth Square. + +'This must be the wood,' she said thoughtfully to herself, 'where things have no names. I wonder what'll become of MY name when I go in? I shouldn't like to lose it at all--because they'd have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be trying to find the creature that had got my old name! That's just like the advertisements, you know, when people lose dogs--"ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF 'DASH:' HAD ON A BRASS COLLAR"--just fancy calling everything you met "Alice," till one of them answered! Only they wouldn't answer at all, if they were wise.' + +She was rambling on in this way when she reached the wood: it looked very cool and shady. 'Well, at any rate it's a great comfort,' she said as she stepped under the trees, 'after being so hot, to get into the--into WHAT?' she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. 'I mean to get under the--under the--under THIS, you know!' putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. 'What DOES it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name--why, to be sure it hasn't!' + +She stood silent for a minute, thinking: then she suddenly began again. 'Then it really HAS happened, after all! And now, who am I? I WILL remember, if I can! I'm determined to do it!' But being determined didn't help much, and all she could say, after a great deal of puzzling, was, 'L, I KNOW it begins with L!' + +Just then a Fawn came wandering by: it looked at Alice with its large gentle eyes, but didn't seem at all frightened. 'Here then! Here then!' Alice said, as she held out her hand and tried to stroke it; but it only started back a little, and then stood looking at her again. + +'What do you call yourself?' the Fawn said at last. Such a soft sweet voice it had! + +'I wish I knew!' thought poor Alice. She answered, rather sadly, 'Nothing, just now.' + +'Think again,' it said: 'that won't do.' + +Alice thought, but nothing came of it. 'Please, would you tell me what YOU call yourself?' she said timidly. 'I think that might help a little.' + +'I'll tell you, if you'll move a little further on,' the Fawn said. 'I can't remember here.' + +So they walked on together though the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arms. 'I'm a Fawn!' it cried out in a voice of delight, 'and, dear me! you're a human child!' A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed. + +Alice stood looking after it, almost ready to cry with vexation at having lost her dear little fellow-traveller so suddenly. 'However, I know my name now.' she said, 'that's SOME comfort. Alice--Alice--I won't forget it again. And now, which of these finger-posts ought I to follow, I wonder?' + +It was not a very difficult question to answer, as there was only one road through the wood, and the two finger-posts both pointed along it. 'I'll settle it,' Alice said to herself, 'when the road divides and they point different ways.' + +But this did not seem likely to happen. She went on and on, a long way, but wherever the road divided there were sure to be two finger-posts pointing the same way, one marked 'TO TWEEDLEDUM'S HOUSE' and the other 'TO THE HOUSE OF TWEEDLEDEE.' + +'I do believe,' said Alice at last, 'that they live in the same house! I wonder I never thought of that before--But I can't stay there long. I'll just call and say "how d'you do?" and ask them the way out of the wood. If I could only get to the Eighth Square before it gets dark!' So she wandered on, talking to herself as she went, till, on turning a sharp corner, she came upon two fat little men, so suddenly that she could not help starting back, but in another moment she recovered herself, feeling sure that they must be. + +CHAPTER IV - Tweedledum and Tweedledee + +They were standing under a tree, each with an arm round the other's neck, and Alice knew which was which in a moment, because one of them had 'DUM' embroidered on his collar, and the other 'DEE.' 'I suppose they've each got "TWEEDLE" round at the back of the collar,' she said to herself. + +They stood so still that she quite forgot they were alive, and she was just looking round to see if the word "TWEEDLE" was written at the back of each collar, when she was startled by a voice coming from the one marked 'DUM.' + +'If you think we're wax-works,' he said, 'you ought to pay, you know. Wax-works weren't made to be looked at for nothing, nohow!' + +'Contrariwise,' added the one marked 'DEE,' 'if you think we're alive, you ought to speak.' + +'I'm sure I'm very sorry,' was all Alice could say; for the words of the old song kept ringing through her head like the ticking of a clock, and she could hardly help saying them out loud:-- + +poem{ + + 'Tweedledum and Tweedledee + Agreed to have a battle; + For Tweedledum said Tweedledee + Had spoiled his nice new rattle. + + Just then flew down a monstrous crow, + As black as a tar-barrel; + Which frightened both the heroes so, + They quite forgot their quarrel.' + +}poem + +'I know what you're thinking about,' said Tweedledum: 'but it isn't so, nohow.' + +'Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.' + +'I was thinking,' Alice said very politely, 'which is the best way out of this wood: it's getting so dark. Would you tell me, please?' + +But the little men only looked at each other and grinned. + +They looked so exactly like a couple of great schoolboys, that Alice couldn't help pointing her finger at Tweedledum, and saying 'First Boy!' + +'Nohow!' Tweedledum cried out briskly, and shut his mouth up again with a snap. + +'Next Boy!' said Alice, passing on to Tweedledee, though she felt quite certain he would only shout out 'Contrariwise!' and so he did. + +'You've been wrong!' cried Tweedledum. 'The first thing in a visit is to say "How d'ye do?" and shake hands!' And here the two brothers gave each other a hug, and then they held out the two hands that were free, to shake hands with her. + +Alice did not like shaking hands with either of them first, for fear of hurting the other one's feelings; so, as the best way out of the difficulty, she took hold of both hands at once: the next moment they were dancing round in a ring. This seemed quite natural (she remembered afterwards), and she was not even surprised to hear music playing: it seemed to come from the tree under which they were dancing, and it was done (as well as she could make it out) by the branches rubbing one across the other, like fiddles and fiddle-sticks. + +'But it certainly WAS funny,' (Alice said afterwards, when she was telling her sister the history of all this,) 'to find myself singing "HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH." I don't know when I began it, but somehow I felt as if I'd been singing it a long long time!' + +The other two dancers were fat, and very soon out of breath. 'Four times round is enough for one dance,' Tweedledum panted out, and they left off dancing as suddenly as they had begun: the music stopped at the same moment. + +Then they let go of Alice's hands, and stood looking at her for a minute: there was a rather awkward pause, as Alice didn't know how to begin a conversation with people she had just been dancing with. 'It would never do to say "How d'ye do?" NOW,' she said to herself: 'we seem to have got beyond that, somehow!' + +'I hope you're not much tired?' she said at last. + +'Nohow. And thank you VERY much for asking,' said Tweedledum. + +'So much obliged!' added Tweedledee. 'You like poetry?' + +'Ye-es, pretty well--SOME poetry,' Alice said doubtfully. 'Would you tell me which road leads out of the wood?' + +'What shall I repeat to her?' said Tweedledee, looking round at Tweedledum with great solemn eyes, and not noticing Alice's question. + +'"THE WALRUS AND THE CARPENTER" is the longest,' Tweedledum replied, giving his brother an affectionate hug. + +Tweedledee began instantly: + +'The sun was shining--' + +Here Alice ventured to interrupt him. 'If it's VERY long,' she said, as politely as she could, 'would you please tell me first which road--' + +Tweedledee smiled gently, and began again: + +poem{ + + 'The sun was shining on the sea, + Shining with all his might: + He did his very best to make + The billows smooth and bright-- + And this was odd, because it was + The middle of the night. + + The moon was shining sulkily, + Because she thought the sun + Had got no business to be there + After the day was done-- + "It's very rude of him," she said, + "To come and spoil the fun!" + + The sea was wet as wet could be, + The sands were dry as dry. + You could not see a cloud, because + No cloud was in the sky: + No birds were flying over head-- + There were no birds to fly. + + The Walrus and the Carpenter + Were walking close at hand; + They wept like anything to see + Such quantities of sand: + "If this were only cleared away," + They said, "it WOULD be grand!" + + "If seven maids with seven mops + Swept it for half a year, + Do you suppose," the Walrus said, + "That they could get it clear?" + "I doubt it," said the Carpenter, + And shed a bitter tear. + + "O Oysters, come and walk with us!" + The Walrus did beseech. + "A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, + Along the briny beach: + We cannot do with more than four, + To give a hand to each." + + The eldest Oyster looked at him. + But never a word he said: + The eldest Oyster winked his eye, + And shook his heavy head-- + Meaning to say he did not choose + To leave the oyster-bed. + + But four young oysters hurried up, + All eager for the treat: + Their coats were brushed, their faces washed, + Their shoes were clean and neat-- + And this was odd, because, you know, + They hadn't any feet. + + Four other Oysters followed them, + And yet another four; + And thick and fast they came at last, + And more, and more, and more-- + All hopping through the frothy waves, + And scrambling to the shore. + + The Walrus and the Carpenter + Walked on a mile or so, + And then they rested on a rock + Conveniently low: + And all the little Oysters stood + And waited in a row. + + "The time has come," the Walrus said, + "To talk of many things: + Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- + Of cabbages--and kings-- + And why the sea is boiling hot-- + And whether pigs have wings." + + "But wait a bit," the Oysters cried, + "Before we have our chat; + For some of us are out of breath, + And all of us are fat!" + "No hurry!" said the Carpenter. + They thanked him much for that. + + "A loaf of bread," the Walrus said, + "Is what we chiefly need: + Pepper and vinegar besides + Are very good indeed-- + Now if you're ready Oysters dear, + We can begin to feed." + + "But not on us!" the Oysters cried, + Turning a little blue, + "After such kindness, that would be + A dismal thing to do!" + "The night is fine," the Walrus said + "Do you admire the view? + + "It was so kind of you to come! + And you are very nice!" + The Carpenter said nothing but + "Cut us another slice: + I wish you were not quite so deaf-- + I've had to ask you twice!" + + "It seems a shame," the Walrus said, + "To play them such a trick, + After we've brought them out so far, + And made them trot so quick!" + The Carpenter said nothing but + "The butter's spread too thick!" + + "I weep for you," the Walrus said. + "I deeply sympathize." + With sobs and tears he sorted out + Those of the largest size. + Holding his pocket handkerchief + Before his streaming eyes. + + "O Oysters," said the Carpenter. + "You've had a pleasant run! + Shall we be trotting home again?" + But answer came there none-- + And that was scarcely odd, because + They'd eaten every one.' + +}poem + +'I like the Walrus best,' said Alice: 'because you see he was a LITTLE sorry for the poor oysters.' + +'He ate more than the Carpenter, though,' said Tweedledee. 'You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn't count how many he took: contrariwise.' + +'That was mean!' Alice said indignantly. 'Then I like the Carpenter best--if he didn't eat so many as the Walrus.' + +'But he ate as many as he could get,' said Tweedledum. + +This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, 'Well! They were BOTH very unpleasant characters--' Here she checked herself in some alarm, at hearing something that sounded to her like the puffing of a large steam-engine in the wood near them, though she feared it was more likely to be a wild beast. 'Are there any lions or tigers about here?' she asked timidly. + +'It's only the Red King snoring,' said Tweedledee. + +'Come and look at him!' the brothers cried, and they each took one of Alice's hands, and led her up to where the King was sleeping. + +'Isn't he a LOVELY sight?' said Tweedledum. + +Alice couldn't say honestly that he was. He had a tall red night-cap on, with a tassel, and he was lying crumpled up into a sort of untidy heap, and snoring loud--'fit to snore his head off!' as Tweedledum remarked. + +'I'm afraid he'll catch cold with lying on the damp grass,' said Alice, who was a very thoughtful little girl. + +'He's dreaming now,' said Tweedledee: 'and what do you think he's dreaming about?' + +Alice said 'Nobody can guess that.' + +'Why, about YOU!' Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. 'And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?' + +'Where I am now, of course,' said Alice. + +'Not you!' Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. 'You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!' + +'If that there King was to wake,' added Tweedledum, 'you'd go out--bang!--just like a candle!' + +'I shouldn't!' Alice exclaimed indignantly. 'Besides, if I'M only a sort of thing in his dream, what are YOU, I should like to know?' + +'Ditto' said Tweedledum. + +'Ditto, ditto' cried Tweedledee. + +He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn't help saying, 'Hush! You'll be waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise.' + +'Well, it no use YOUR talking about waking him,' said Tweedledum, 'when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real.' + +'I AM real!' said Alice and began to cry. + +'You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying,' Tweedledee remarked: 'there's nothing to cry about.' + +'If I wasn't real,' Alice said--half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous--'I shouldn't be able to cry.' + +'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?' Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt. + +'I know they're talking nonsense,' Alice thought to herself: 'and it's foolish to cry about it.' So she brushed away her tears, and went on as cheerfully as she could. 'At any rate I'd better be getting out of the wood, for really it's coming on very dark. Do you think it's going to rain?' + +Tweedledum spread a large umbrella over himself and his brother, and looked up into it. 'No, I don't think it is,' he said: 'at least--not under HERE. Nohow.' + +'But it may rain OUTSIDE?' + +'It may--if it chooses,' said Tweedledee: 'we've no objection. Contrariwise.' + +'Selfish things!' thought Alice, and she was just going to say 'Good-night' and leave them, when Tweedledum sprang out from under the umbrella and seized her by the wrist. + +'Do you see THAT?' he said, in a voice choking with passion, and his eyes grew large and yellow all in a moment, as he pointed with a trembling finger at a small white thing lying under the tree. + +'It's only a rattle,' Alice said, after a careful examination of the little white thing. 'Not a rattleSNAKE, you know,' she added hastily, thinking that he was frightened: 'only an old rattle--quite old and broken.' + +'I knew it was!' cried Tweedledum, beginning to stamp about wildly and tear his hair. 'It's spoilt, of course!' Here he looked at Tweedledee, who immediately sat down on the ground, and tried to hide himself under the umbrella. + +Alice laid her hand upon his arm, and said in a soothing tone, 'You needn't be so angry about an old rattle.' + +'But it isn't old!' Tweedledum cried, in a greater fury than ever. 'It's new, I tell you--I bought it yesterday--my nice new RATTLE!' and his voice rose to a perfect scream. + +All this time Tweedledee was trying his best to fold up the umbrella, with himself in it: which was such an extraordinary thing to do, that it quite took off Alice's attention from the angry brother. But he couldn't quite succeed, and it ended in his rolling over, bundled up in the umbrella, with only his head out: and there he lay, opening and shutting his mouth and his large eyes--'looking more like a fish than anything else,' Alice thought. + +'Of course you agree to have a battle?' Tweedledum said in a calmer tone. + +'I suppose so,' the other sulkily replied, as he crawled out of the umbrella: 'only SHE must help us to dress up, you know.' + +So the two brothers went off hand-in-hand into the wood, and returned in a minute with their arms full of things--such as bolsters, blankets, hearth-rugs, table-cloths, dish-covers and coal-scuttles. 'I hope you're a good hand at pinning and tying strings?' Tweedledum remarked. 'Every one of these things has got to go on, somehow or other.' + +Alice said afterwards she had never seen such a fuss made about anything in all her life--the way those two bustled about-- and the quantity of things they put on--and the trouble they gave her in tying strings and fastening buttons--'Really they'll be more like bundles of old clothes than anything else, by the time they're ready!' she said to herself, as she arranged a bolster round the neck of Tweedledee, 'to keep his head from being cut off,' as he said. + +'You know,' he added very gravely, 'it's one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle--to get one's head cut off.' + +Alice laughed aloud: but she managed to turn it into a cough, for fear of hurting his feelings. + +'Do I look very pale?' said Tweedledum, coming up to have his helmet tied on. (He CALLED it a helmet, though it certainly looked much more like a saucepan.) + +'Well--yes--a LITTLE,' Alice replied gently. + +'I'm very brave generally,' he went on in a low voice: 'only to-day I happen to have a headache.' + +'And I'VE got a toothache!' said Tweedledee, who had overheard the remark. 'I'm far worse off than you!' + +'Then you'd better not fight to-day,' said Alice, thinking it a good opportunity to make peace. + +'We MUST have a bit of a fight, but I don't care about going on long,' said Tweedledum. 'What's the time now?' + +Tweedledee looked at his watch, and said 'Half-past four.' + +'Let's fight till six, and then have dinner,' said Tweedledum. + +'Very well,' the other said, rather sadly: 'and SHE can watch us--only you'd better not come VERY close,' he added: 'I generally hit everything I can see--when I get really excited.' + +'And _{I}_ hit everything within reach,' cried Tweedledum, 'whether I can see it or not!' + +Alice laughed. 'You must hit the TREES pretty often, I should think,' she said. + +Tweedledum looked round him with a satisfied smile. 'I don't suppose,' he said, 'there'll be a tree left standing, for ever so far round, by the time we've finished!' + +'And all about a rattle!' said Alice, still hoping to make them a LITTLE ashamed of fighting for such a trifle. + +'I shouldn't have minded it so much,' said Tweedledum, 'if it hadn't been a new one.' + +'I wish the monstrous crow would come!' thought Alice. + +'There's only one sword, you know,' Tweedledum said to his brother: 'but you can have the umbrella--it's quite as sharp. Only we must begin quick. It's getting as dark as it can.' + +'And darker,' said Tweedledee. + +It was getting dark so suddenly that Alice thought there must be a thunderstorm coming on. 'What a thick black cloud that is!' she said. 'And how fast it comes! Why, I do believe it's got wings!' + +'It's the crow!' Tweedledum cried out in a shrill voice of alarm: and the two brothers took to their heels and were out of sight in a moment. + +Alice ran a little way into the wood, and stopped under a large tree. 'It can never get at me HERE,' she thought: 'it's far too large to squeeze itself in among the trees. But I wish it wouldn't flap its wings so--it makes quite a hurricane in the wood-- here's somebody's shawl being blown away!' + +CHAPTER V - Wool and Water + +She caught the shawl as she spoke, and looked about for the owner: in another moment the White Queen came running wildly through the wood, with both arms stretched out wide, as if she were flying, and Alice very civilly went to meet her with the shawl. + +'I'm very glad I happened to be in the way,' Alice said, as she helped her to put on her shawl again. + +The White Queen only looked at her in a helpless frightened sort of way, and kept repeating something in a whisper to herself that sounded like 'bread-and-butter, bread-and-butter,' and Alice felt that if there was to be any conversation at all, she must manage it herself. So she began rather timidly: 'Am I addressing the White Queen?' + +'Well, yes, if you call that a-dressing,' The Queen said. 'It isn't MY notion of the thing, at all.' + +Alice thought it would never do to have an argument at the very beginning of their conversation, so she smiled and said, 'If your Majesty will only tell me the right way to begin, I'll do it as well as I can.' + +'But I don't want it done at all!' groaned the poor Queen. 'I've been a-dressing myself for the last two hours.' + +It would have been all the better, as it seemed to Alice, if she had got some one else to dress her, she was so dreadfully untidy. 'Every single thing's crooked,' Alice thought to herself, 'and she's all over pins!--may I put your shawl straight for you?' she added aloud. + +'I don't know what's the matter with it!' the Queen said, in a melancholy voice. 'It's out of temper, I think. I've pinned it here, and I've pinned it there, but there's no pleasing it!' + +'It CAN'T go straight, you know, if you pin it all on one side,' Alice said, as she gently put it right for her; 'and, dear me, what a state your hair is in!' + +'The brush has got entangled in it!' the Queen said with a sigh. 'And I lost the comb yesterday.' + +Alice carefully released the brush, and did her best to get the hair into order. 'Come, you look rather better now!' she said, after altering most of the pins. 'But really you should have a lady's maid!' + +'I'm sure I'll take you with pleasure!' the Queen said. 'Twopence a week, and jam every other day.' + +Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said, 'I don't want you to hire ME--and I don't care for jam.' + +'It's very good jam,' said the Queen. + +'Well, I don't want any TO-DAY, at any rate.' + +'You couldn't have it if you DID want it,' the Queen said. 'The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday--but never jam to-day.' + +'It MUST come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected. + +'No, it can't,' said the Queen. 'It's jam every OTHER day: to-day isn't any OTHER day, you know.' + +'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!' + +'That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: 'it always makes one a little giddy at first--' + +'Living backwards!' Alice repeated in great astonishment. 'I never heard of such a thing!' + +'--but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways.' + +'I'm sure MINE only works one way,' Alice remarked. 'I can't remember things before they happen.' + +'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked. + +'What sort of things do YOU remember best?' Alice ventured to ask. + +'Oh, things that happened the week after next,' the Queen replied in a careless tone. 'For instance, now,' she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster [band-aid] on her finger as she spoke, 'there's the King's Messenger. He's in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn't even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.' + +'Suppose he never commits the crime?' said Alice. + +'That would be all the better, wouldn't it?' the Queen said, as she bound the plaster round her finger with a bit of ribbon. + +Alice felt there was no denying THAT. 'Of course it would be all the better,' she said: 'but it wouldn't be all the better his being punished.' + +'You're wrong THERE, at any rate,' said the Queen: 'were YOU ever punished?' + +'Only for faults,' said Alice. + +'And you were all the better for it, I know!' the Queen said triumphantly. + +'Yes, but then I HAD done the things I was punished for,' said Alice: 'that makes all the difference.' + +'But if you HADN'T done them,' the Queen said, 'that would have been better still; better, and better, and better!' Her voice went higher with each 'better,' till it got quite to a squeak at last. + +Alice was just beginning to say 'There's a mistake somewhere--,' when the Queen began screaming so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished. 'Oh, oh, oh!' shouted the Queen, shaking her hand about as if she wanted to shake it off. 'My finger's bleeding! Oh, oh, oh, oh!' + +Her screams were so exactly like the whistle of a steam-engine, that Alice had to hold both her hands over her ears. + +'What IS the matter?' she said, as soon as there was a chance of making herself heard. 'Have you pricked your finger?' + +'I haven't pricked it YET,' the Queen said, 'but I soon shall-- oh, oh, oh!' + +'When do you expect to do it?' Alice asked, feeling very much inclined to laugh. + +'When I fasten my shawl again,' the poor Queen groaned out: 'the brooch will come undone directly. Oh, oh!' As she said the words the brooch flew open, and the Queen clutched wildly at it, and tried to clasp it again. + +'Take care!' cried Alice. 'You're holding it all crooked!' And she caught at the brooch; but it was too late: the pin had slipped, and the Queen had pricked her finger. + +'That accounts for the bleeding, you see,' she said to Alice with a smile. 'Now you understand the way things happen here.' + +'But why don't you scream now?' Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put over her ears again. + +'Why, I've done all the screaming already,' said the Queen. 'What would be the good of having it all over again?' + +By this time it was getting light. 'The crow must have flown away, I think,' said Alice: 'I'm so glad it's gone. I thought it was the night coming on.' + +'I wish _{I}_ could manage to be glad!' the Queen said. 'Only I never can remember the rule. You must be very happy, living in this wood, and being glad whenever you like!' + +'Only it is so VERY lonely here!' Alice said in a melancholy voice; and at the thought of her loneliness two large tears came rolling down her cheeks. + +'Oh, don't go on like that!' cried the poor Queen, wringing her hands in despair. 'Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come to-day. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry!' + +Alice could not help laughing at this, even in the midst of her tears. 'Can YOU keep from crying by considering things?' she asked. + +'That's the way it's done,' the Queen said with great decision: 'nobody can do two things at once, you know. Let's consider your age to begin with--how old are you?' + +'I'm seven and a half exactly.' + +'You needn't say "exactually,"' the Queen remarked: 'I can believe it without that. Now I'll give YOU something to believe. I'm just one hundred and one, five months and a day.' + +'I can't believe THAT!' said Alice. + +'Can't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone. 'Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.' + +Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said: 'one CAN'T believe impossible things.' + +'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!' + +The brooch had come undone as she spoke, and a sudden gust of wind blew the Queen's shawl across a little brook. The Queen spread out her arms again, and went flying after it, and this time she succeeded in catching it for herself. 'I've got it!' she cried in a triumphant tone. 'Now you shall see me pin it on again, all by myself!' + +'Then I hope your finger is better now?' Alice said very politely, as she crossed the little brook after the Queen. + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +'Oh, much better!' cried the Queen, her voice rising to a squeak as she went on. 'Much be-etter! Be-etter! Be-e-e-etter! Be-e-ehh!' The last word ended in a long bleat, so like a sheep that Alice quite started. + +She looked at the Queen, who seemed to have suddenly wrapped herself up in wool. Alice rubbed her eyes, and looked again. She couldn't make out what had happened at all. Was she in a shop? And was that really--was it really a SHEEP that was sitting on the other side of the counter? Rub as she could, she could make nothing more of it: she was in a little dark shop, leaning with her elbows on the counter, and opposite to her was an old Sheep, sitting in an arm-chair knitting, and every now and then leaving off to look at her through a great pair of spectacles. + +'What is it you want to buy?' the Sheep said at last, looking up for a moment from her knitting. + +'I don't QUITE know yet,' Alice said, very gently. 'I should like to look all round me first, if I might.' + +'You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like,' said the Sheep: 'but you can't look ALL round you--unless you've got eyes at the back of your head.' + +But these, as it happened, Alice had NOT got: so she contented herself with turning round, looking at the shelves as she came to them. + +The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things-- but the oddest part of it all was, that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty: though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold. + +'Things flow about so here!' she said at last in a plaintive tone, after she had spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large bright thing, that looked sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a work-box, and was always in the shelf next above the one she was looking at. 'And this one is the most provoking of all--but I'll tell you what--' she added, as a sudden thought struck her, 'I'll follow it up to the very top shelf of all. It'll puzzle it to go through the ceiling, I expect!' + +But even this plan failed: the 'thing' went through the ceiling as quietly as possible, as if it were quite used to it. + +'Are you a child or a teetotum?' the Sheep said, as she took up another pair of needles. 'You'll make me giddy soon, if you go on turning round like that.' She was now working with fourteen pairs at once, and Alice couldn't help looking at her in great astonishment. + +'How CAN she knit with so many?' the puzzled child thought to herself. 'She gets more and more like a porcupine every minute!' + +'Can you row?' the Sheep asked, handing her a pair of knitting- needles as she spoke. + +'Yes, a little--but not on land--and not with needles--' Alice was beginning to say, when suddenly the needles turned into oars in her hands, and she found they were in a little boat, gliding along between banks: so there was nothing for it but to do her best. + +'Feather!' cried the Sheep, as she took up another pair of needles. + +This didn't sound like a remark that needed any answer, so Alice said nothing, but pulled away. There was something very queer about the water, she thought, as every now and then the oars got fast in it, and would hardly come out again. + +'Feather! Feather!' the Sheep cried again, taking more needles. 'You'll be catching a crab directly.' + +'A dear little crab!' thought Alice. 'I should like that.' + +'Didn't you hear me say "Feather"?' the Sheep cried angrily, taking up quite a bunch of needles. + +'Indeed I did,' said Alice: 'you've said it very often--and very loud. Please, where ARE the crabs?' + +'In the water, of course!' said the Sheep, sticking some of the needles into her hair, as her hands were full. 'Feather, I say!' + +'WHY do you say "feather" so often?' Alice asked at last, rather vexed. 'I'm not a bird!' + +'You are,' said the Sheep: 'you're a little goose.' + +This offended Alice a little, so there was no more conversation for a minute or two, while the boat glided gently on, sometimes among beds of weeds (which made the oars stick fast in the water, worse then ever), and sometimes under trees, but always with the same tall river-banks frowning over their heads. + +'Oh, please! There are some scented rushes!' Alice cried in a sudden transport of delight. 'There really are--and SUCH beauties!' + +'You needn't say "please" to ME about 'em,' the Sheep said, without looking up from her knitting: 'I didn't put 'em there, and I'm not going to take 'em away.' + +'No, but I meant--please, may we wait and pick some?' Alice pleaded. 'If you don't mind stopping the boat for a minute.' + +'How am _I_ to stop it?' said the Sheep. 'If you leave off rowing, it'll stop of itself.' + +So the boat was left to drift down the stream as it would, till it glided gently in among the waving rushes. And then the little sleeves were carefully rolled up, and the little arms were plunged in elbow-deep to get the rushes a good long way down before breaking them off--and for a while Alice forgot all about the Sheep and the knitting, as she bent over the side of the boat, with just the ends of her tangled hair dipping into the water--while with bright eager eyes she caught at one bunch after another of the darling scented rushes. + +'I only hope the boat won't tipple over!' she said to herself. 'Oh, WHAT a lovely one! Only I couldn't quite reach it.' 'And it certainly DID seem a little provoking ('almost as if it happened on purpose,' she thought) that, though she managed to pick plenty of beautiful rushes as the boat glided by, there was always a more lovely one that she couldn't reach. + +'The prettiest are always further!' she said at last, with a sigh at the obstinacy of the rushes in growing so far off, as, with flushed cheeks and dripping hair and hands, she scrambled back into her place, and began to arrange her new-found treasures. + +What mattered it to her just then that the rushes had begun to fade, and to lose all their scent and beauty, from the very moment that she picked them? Even real scented rushes, you know, last only a very little while--and these, being dream-rushes, melted away almost like snow, as they lay in heaps at her feet-- but Alice hardly noticed this, there were so many other curious things to think about. + +They hadn't gone much farther before the blade of one of the oars got fast in the water and WOULDN'T come out again (so Alice explained it afterwards), and the consequence was that the handle of it caught her under the chin, and, in spite of a series of little shrieks of 'Oh, oh, oh!' from poor Alice, it swept her straight off the seat, and down among the heap of rushes. + +However, she wasn't hurt, and was soon up again: the Sheep went on with her knitting all the while, just as if nothing had happened. 'That was a nice crab you caught!' she remarked, as Alice got back into her place, very much relieved to find herself still in the boat. + +'Was it? I didn't see it,' Said Alice, peeping cautiously over the side of the boat into the dark water. 'I wish it hadn't let go--I should so like to see a little crab to take home with me!' But the Sheep only laughed scornfully, and went on with her knitting. + +'Are there many crabs here?' said Alice. + +'Crabs, and all sorts of things,' said the Sheep: 'plenty of choice, only make up your mind. Now, what DO you want to buy?' + +'To buy!' Alice echoed in a tone that was half astonished and half frightened--for the oars, and the boat, and the river, had vanished all in a moment, and she was back again in the little dark shop. + +'I should like to buy an egg, please,' she said timidly. 'How do you sell them?' + +'Fivepence farthing for one--Twopence for two,' the Sheep replied. + +'Then two are cheaper than one?' Alice said in a surprised tone, taking out her purse. + +'Only you MUST eat them both, if you buy two,' said the Sheep. + +'Then I'll have ONE, please,' said Alice, as she put the money down on the counter. For she thought to herself, 'They mightn't be at all nice, you know.' + +The Sheep took the money, and put it away in a box: then she said 'I never put things into people's hands--that would never do--you must get it for yourself.' And so saying, she went off to the other end of the shop, and set the egg upright on a shelf. + +'I wonder WHY it wouldn't do?' thought Alice, as she groped her way among the tables and chairs, for the shop was very dark towards the end. 'The egg seems to get further away the more I walk towards it. Let me see, is this a chair? Why, it's got branches, I declare! How very odd to find trees growing here! And actually here's a little brook! Well, this is the very queerest shop I ever saw!' + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +So she went on, wondering more and more at every step, as everything turned into a tree the moment she came up to it, and she quite expected the egg to do the same. + +CHAPTER VI - Humpty Dumpty + +However, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself. 'It can't be anybody else!' she said to herself. 'I'm as certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face.' + +It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous face. Humpty Dumpty was sitting with his legs crossed, like a Turk, on the top of a high wall--such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his balance--and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the opposite direction, and he didn't take the least notice of her, she thought he must be a stuffed figure after all. + +'And how exactly like an egg he is!' she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall. + +'It's VERY provoking,' Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, 'to be called an egg-- VERY!' + +'I said you LOOKED like an egg, Sir,' Alice gently explained. 'And some eggs are very pretty, you know' she added, hoping to turn her remark into a sort of a compliment. + +'Some people,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking away from her as usual, 'have no more sense than a baby!' + +Alice didn't know what to say to this: it wasn't at all like conversation, she thought, as he never said anything to HER; in fact, his last remark was evidently addressed to a tree--so she stood and softly repeated to herself:-- + +poem{ + + 'Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall: + Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. + All the King's horses and all the King's men + Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty in his place again.' + +}poem + +'That last line is much too long for the poetry,' she added, almost out loud, forgetting that Humpty Dumpty would hear her. + +'Don't stand there chattering to yourself like that,' Humpty Dumpty said, looking at her for the first time, 'but tell me your name and your business.' + +'My NAME is Alice, but--' + +'It's a stupid enough name!' Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. 'What does it mean?' + +'MUST a name mean something?' Alice asked doubtfully. + +'Of course it must,' Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: 'MY name means the shape I am--and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.' + +'Why do you sit out here all alone?' said Alice, not wishing to begin an argument. + +'Why, because there's nobody with me!' cried Humpty Dumpty. 'Did you think I didn't know the answer to THAT? Ask another.' + +'Don't you think you'd be safer down on the ground?' Alice went on, not with any idea of making another riddle, but simply in her good-natured anxiety for the queer creature. 'That wall is so VERY narrow!' + +'What tremendously easy riddles you ask!' Humpty Dumpty growled out. 'Of course I don't think so! Why, if ever I DID fall off-- which there's no chance of--but IF I did--' Here he pursed his lips and looked so solemn and grand that Alice could hardly help laughing. 'IF I did fall,' he went on, 'THE KING HAS PROMISED ME--WITH HIS VERY OWN MOUTH--to--to--' + +'To send all his horses and all his men,' Alice interrupted, rather unwisely. + +'Now I declare that's too bad!' Humpty Dumpty cried, breaking into a sudden passion. 'You've been listening at doors--and behind trees-- and down chimneys--or you couldn't have known it!' + +'I haven't, indeed!' Alice said very gently. 'It's in a book.' + +'Ah, well! They may write such things in a BOOK,' Humpty Dumpty said in a calmer tone. 'That's what you call a History of England, that is. Now, take a good look at me! I'm one that has spoken to a King, _{I}_ am: mayhap you'll never see such another: and to show you I'm not proud, you may shake hands with me!' And he grinned almost from ear to ear, as he leant forwards (and as nearly as possible fell off the wall in doing so) and offered Alice his hand. She watched him a little anxiously as she took it. 'If he smiled much more, the ends of his mouth might meet behind,' she thought: 'and then I don't know what would happen to his head! I'm afraid it would come off!' + +'Yes, all his horses and all his men,' Humpty Dumpty went on. 'They'd pick me up again in a minute, THEY would! However, this conversation is going on a little too fast: let's go back to the last remark but one.' + +'I'm afraid I can't quite remember it,' Alice said very politely. + +'In that case we start fresh,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'and it's my turn to choose a subject--' ('He talks about it just as if it was a game!' thought Alice.) 'So here's a question for you. How old did you say you were?' + +Alice made a short calculation, and said 'Seven years and six months.' + +'Wrong!' Humpty Dumpty exclaimed triumphantly. 'You never said a word like it!' + +'I though you meant "How old ARE you?"' Alice explained. + +'If I'd meant that, I'd have said it,' said Humpty Dumpty. + +Alice didn't want to begin another argument, so she said nothing. + +'Seven years and six months!' Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. 'An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you'd asked MY advice, I'd have said "Leave off at seven"--but it's too late now.' + +'I never ask advice about growing,' Alice said indignantly. + +'Too proud?' the other inquired. + +Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. 'I mean,' she said, 'that one can't help growing older.' + +'ONE can't, perhaps,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'but TWO can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven.' + +'What a beautiful belt you've got on!' Alice suddenly remarked. + +(They had had quite enough of the subject of age, she thought: and if they really were to take turns in choosing subjects, it was her turn now.) 'At least,' she corrected herself on second thoughts, 'a beautiful cravat, I should have said--no, a belt, I mean--I beg your pardon!' she added in dismay, for Humpty Dumpty looked thoroughly offended, and she began to wish she hadn't chosen that subject. 'If I only knew,' she thought to herself, 'which was neck and which was waist!' + +Evidently Humpty Dumpty was very angry, though he said nothing for a minute or two. When he DID speak again, it was in a deep growl. + +'It is a--MOST--PROVOKING--thing,' he said at last, 'when a person doesn't know a cravat from a belt!' + +'I know it's very ignorant of me,' Alice said, in so humble a tone that Humpty Dumpty relented. + +'It's a cravat, child, and a beautiful one, as you say. It's a present from the White King and Queen. There now!' + +'Is it really?' said Alice, quite pleased to find that she HAD chosen a good subject, after all. + +'They gave it me,' Humpty Dumpty continued thoughtfully, as he crossed one knee over the other and clasped his hands round it, 'they gave it me--for an un-birthday present.' + +'I beg your pardon?' Alice said with a puzzled air. + +'I'm not offended,' said Humpty Dumpty. + +'I mean, what IS an un-birthday present?' + +'A present given when it isn't your birthday, of course.' + +Alice considered a little. 'I like birthday presents best,' she said at last. + +'You don't know what you're talking about!' cried Humpty Dumpty. 'How many days are there in a year?' + +'Three hundred and sixty-five,' said Alice. + +'And how many birthdays have you?' + +'One.' + +'And if you take one from three hundred and sixty-five, what remains?' + +'Three hundred and sixty-four, of course.' + +Humpty Dumpty looked doubtful. 'I'd rather see that done on paper,' he said. + +Alice couldn't help smiling as she took out her memorandum- book, and worked the sum for him: + +code{ + + 365 + 1 + ___ + + 364 + ___ + +}code + +Humpty Dumpty took the book, and looked at it carefully. 'That seems to be done right--' he began. + +'You're holding it upside down!' Alice interrupted. + +'To be sure I was!' Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for him. 'I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that SEEMS to be done right--though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now--and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents--' + +'Certainly,' said Alice. + +'And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!' + +'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said. + +Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't-- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"' + +'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected. + +'When _{I}_ use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.' + +'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.' + +'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master-- that's all.' + +Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them-- particularly verbs, they're the proudest--adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs--however, _{I}_ can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what _{I}_ say!' + +'Would you tell me, please,' said Alice 'what that means?' + +'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. 'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.' + +'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone. + +'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.' + +'Oh!' said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark. + +'Ah, you should see 'em come round me of a Saturday night,' Humpty Dumpty went on, wagging his head gravely from side to side: 'for to get their wages, you know.' + +(Alice didn't venture to ask what he paid them with; and so you see I can't tell YOU.) + +'You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,' said Alice. 'Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called "Jabberwocky"?' + +'Let's hear it,' said Humpty Dumpty. 'I can explain all the poems that were ever invented--and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.' + +This sounded very hopeful, so Alice repeated the first verse: + +poem{ + + 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves + Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; + All mimsy were the borogoves, + And the mome raths outgrabe. + +}poem + +'That's enough to begin with,' Humpty Dumpty interrupted: 'there are plenty of hard words there. "BRILLIG" means four o'clock in the afternoon--the time when you begin BROILING things for dinner.' + +'That'll do very well,' said Alice: 'and "SLITHY"?' + +'Well, "SLITHY" means "lithe and slimy." "Lithe" is the same as "active." You see it's like a portmanteau--there are two meanings packed up into one word.' + +'I see it now,' Alice remarked thoughtfully: 'and what are "TOVES"?' + +'Well, "TOVES" are something like badgers--they're something like lizards--and they're something like corkscrews.' + +'They must be very curious looking creatures.' + +'They are that,' said Humpty Dumpty: 'also they make their nests under sun-dials--also they live on cheese.' + +'And what's the "GYRE" and to "GIMBLE"?' + +'To "GYRE" is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To "GIMBLE" is to make holes like a gimlet.' + +'And "THE WABE" is the grass-plot round a sun-dial, I suppose?' said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity. + +'Of course it is. It's called "WABE," you know, because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it--' + +'And a long way beyond it on each side,' Alice added. + +'Exactly so. Well, then, "MIMSY" is "flimsy and miserable" (there's another portmanteau for you). And a "BOROGOVE" is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round-- something like a live mop.' + +'And then "MOME RATHS"?' said Alice. 'I'm afraid I'm giving you a great deal of trouble.' + +'Well, a "RATH" is a sort of green pig: but "MOME" I'm not certain about. I think it's short for "from home"--meaning that they'd lost their way, you know.' + +'And what does "OUTGRABE" mean?' + +'Well, "OUTGRABING" is something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle: however, you'll hear it done, maybe--down in the wood yonder--and when you've once heard it you'll be QUITE content. Who's been repeating all that hard stuff to you?' + +'I read it in a book,' said Alice. 'But I had some poetry repeated to me, much easier than that, by--Tweedledee, I think it was.' + +'As to poetry, you know,' said Humpty Dumpty, stretching out one of his great hands, '_I_ can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes to that--' + +'Oh, it needn't come to that!' Alice hastily said, hoping to keep him from beginning. + +'The piece I'm going to repeat,' he went on without noticing her remark, 'was written entirely for your amusement.' + +Alice felt that in that case she really OUGHT to listen to it, so she sat down, and said 'Thank you' rather sadly. + +poem{ + + 'In winter, when the fields are white, + I sing this song for your delight-- + +}poem + +only I don't sing it,' he added, as an explanation. + +'I see you don't,' said Alice. + +'If you can SEE whether I'm singing or not, you've sharper eyes than most.' Humpty Dumpty remarked severely. Alice was silent. + +poem{ + + 'In spring, when woods are getting green, + I'll try and tell you what I mean.' + +}poem + +'Thank you very much,' said Alice. + +poem{ + + 'In summer, when the days are long, + Perhaps you'll understand the song: + In autumn, when the leaves are brown, + Take pen and ink, and write it down.' + +}poem + +'I will, if I can remember it so long,' said Alice. + +'You needn't go on making remarks like that,' Humpty Dumpty said: 'they're not sensible, and they put me out.' + +poem{ + + 'I sent a message to the fish: + I told them "This is what I wish." + + The little fishes of the sea, + They sent an answer back to me. + + The little fishes' answer was + "We cannot do it, Sir, because--"' + +}poem + +'I'm afraid I don't quite understand,' said Alice. + +'It gets easier further on,' Humpty Dumpty replied. + +poem{ + + 'I sent to them again to say + "It will be better to obey." + + The fishes answered with a grin, + "Why, what a temper you are in!" + + I told them once, I told them twice: + They would not listen to advice. + + I took a kettle large and new, + Fit for the deed I had to do. + + My heart went hop, my heart went thump; + I filled the kettle at the pump. + + Then some one came to me and said, + "The little fishes are in bed." + + I said to him, I said it plain, + "Then you must wake them up again." + + I said it very loud and clear; + I went and shouted in his ear.' + +}poem + +Humpty Dumpty raised his voice almost to a scream as he repeated this verse, and Alice thought with a shudder, 'I wouldn't have been the messenger for ANYTHING!' + +poem{ + + 'But he was very stiff and proud; + He said "You needn't shout so loud!" + + And he was very proud and stiff; + He said "I'd go and wake them, if--" + + I took a corkscrew from the shelf: + I went to wake them up myself. + + And when I found the door was locked, + I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked. + + And when I found the door was shut, + I tried to turn the handle, but--' + +}poem + +There was a long pause. + +'Is that all?' Alice timidly asked. + +'That's all,' said Humpty Dumpty. 'Good-bye.' + +This was rather sudden, Alice thought: but, after such a VERY strong hint that she ought to be going, she felt that it would hardly be civil to stay. So she got up, and held out her hand. 'Good-bye, till we meet again!' she said as cheerfully as she could. + +'I shouldn't know you again if we DID meet,' Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake; 'you're so exactly like other people.' + +'The face is what one goes by, generally,' Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone. + +'That's just what I complain of,' said Humpty Dumpty. 'Your face is the same as everybody has--the two eyes, so--' (marking their places in the air with this thumb) 'nose in the middle, mouth under. It's always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance--or the mouth at the top--that would be SOME help.' + +'It wouldn't look nice,' Alice objected. But Humpty Dumpty only shut his eyes and said 'Wait till you've tried.' + +Alice waited a minute to see if he would speak again, but as he never opened his eyes or took any further notice of her, she said 'Good-bye!' once more, and, getting no answer to this, she quietly walked away: but she couldn't help saying to herself as she went, 'Of all the unsatisfactory--' (she repeated this aloud, as it was a great comfort to have such a long word to say) 'of all the unsatisfactory people I EVER met--' She never finished the sentence, for at this moment a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end. + +CHAPTER VII - The Lion and the Unicorn + +The next moment soldiers came running through the wood, at first in twos and threes, then ten or twenty together, and at last in such crowds that they seemed to fill the whole forest. Alice got behind a tree, for fear of being run over, and watched them go by. + +She thought that in all her life she had never seen soldiers so uncertain on their feet: they were always tripping over something or other, and whenever one went down, several more always fell over him, so that the ground was soon covered with little heaps of men. + +Then came the horses. Having four feet, these managed rather better than the foot-soldiers: but even THEY stumbled now and then; and it seemed to be a regular rule that, whenever a horse stumbled the rider fell off instantly. The confusion got worse every moment, and Alice was very glad to get out of the wood into an open place, where she found the White King seated on the ground, busily writing in his memorandum-book. + +'I've sent them all!' the King cried in a tone of delight, on seeing Alice. 'Did you happen to meet any soldiers, my dear, as you came through the wood?' + +'Yes, I did,' said Alice: 'several thousand, I should think.' + +'Four thousand two hundred and seven, that's the exact number,' the King said, referring to his book. 'I couldn't send all the horses, you know, because two of them are wanted in the game. And I haven't sent the two Messengers, either. They're both gone to the town. Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.' + +'I see nobody on the road,' said Alice. + +'I only wish _{I}_ had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it's as much as _{I}_ can do to see real people, by this light!' + +All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. 'I see somebody now!' she exclaimed at last. 'But he's coming very slowly--and what curious attitudes he goes into!' (For the messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.) + +'Not at all,' said the King. 'He's an Anglo-Saxon Messenger-- and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He only does them when he's happy. His name is Haigha.' (He pronounced it so as to rhyme with 'mayor.') + +'I love my love with an H,' Alice couldn't help beginning, 'because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous. I fed him with--with--with Ham-sandwiches and Hay. His name is Haigha, and he lives--' + +'He lives on the Hill,' the King remarked simply, without the least idea that he was joining in the game, while Alice was still hesitating for the name of a town beginning with H. 'The other Messenger's called Hatta. I must have TWO, you know--to come and go. One to come, and one to go.' + +'I beg your pardon?' said Alice. + +'It isn't respectable to beg,' said the King. + +'I only meant that I didn't understand,' said Alice. 'Why one to come and one to go?' + +'Didn't I tell you?' the King repeated impatiently. 'I must have Two--to fetch and carry. One to fetch, and one to carry.' + +At this moment the Messenger arrived: he was far too much out of breath to say a word, and could only wave his hands about, and make the most fearful faces at the poor King. + +'This young lady loves you with an H,' the King said, introducing Alice in the hope of turning off the Messenger's attention from himself--but it was no use--the Anglo-Saxon attitudes only got more extraordinary every moment, while the great eyes rolled wildly from side to side. + +'You alarm me!' said the King. 'I feel faint--Give me a ham sandwich!' + +On which the Messenger, to Alice's great amusement, opened a bag that hung round his neck, and handed a sandwich to the King, who devoured it greedily. + +'Another sandwich!' said the King. + +'There's nothing but hay left now,' the Messenger said, peeping into the bag. + +'Hay, then,' the King murmured in a faint whisper. + +Alice was glad to see that it revived him a good deal. 'There's nothing like eating hay when you're faint,' he remarked to her, as he munched away. + +'I should think throwing cold water over you would be better,' Alice suggested: 'or some sal-volatile.' + +'I didn't say there was nothing BETTER,' the King replied. 'I said there was nothing LIKE it.' Which Alice did not venture to deny. + +'Who did you pass on the road?' the King went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some more hay. + +'Nobody,' said the Messenger. + +'Quite right,' said the King: 'this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you.' + +'I do my best,' the Messenger said in a sulky tone. 'I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!' + +'He can't do that,' said the King, 'or else he'd have been here first. However, now you've got your breath, you may tell us what's happened in the town.' + +'I'll whisper it,' said the Messenger, putting his hands to his mouth in the shape of a trumpet, and stooping so as to get close to the King's ear. Alice was sorry for this, as she wanted to hear the news too. However, instead of whispering, he simply shouted at the top of his voice 'They're at it again!' + +'Do you call THAT a whisper?' cried the poor King, jumping up and shaking himself. 'If you do such a thing again, I'll have you buttered! It went through and through my head like an earthquake!' + +'It would have to be a very tiny earthquake!' thought Alice. 'Who are at it again?' she ventured to ask. + +'Why the Lion and the Unicorn, of course,' said the King. + +'Fighting for the crown?' + +'Yes, to be sure,' said the King: 'and the best of the joke is, that it's MY crown all the while! Let's run and see them.' And they trotted off, Alice repeating to herself, as she ran, the words of the old song:-- + +poem{ + + 'The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown: + The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town. + Some gave them white bread, some gave them brown; + Some gave them plum-cake and drummed them out of town.' + +}poem + +'Does--the one--that wins--get the crown?' she asked, as well as she could, for the run was putting her quite out of breath. + +'Dear me, no!' said the King. 'What an idea!' + +'Would you--be good enough,' Alice panted out, after running a little further, 'to stop a minute--just to get--one's breath again?' + +'I'm GOOD enough,' the King said, 'only I'm not strong enough. You see, a minute goes by so fearfully quick. You might as well try to stop a Bandersnatch!' + +Alice had no more breath for talking, so they trotted on in silence, till they came in sight of a great crowd, in the middle of which the Lion and Unicorn were fighting. They were in such a cloud of dust, that at first Alice could not make out which was which: but she soon managed to distinguish the Unicorn by his horn. + +They placed themselves close to where Hatta, the other messenger, was standing watching the fight, with a cup of tea in one hand and a piece of bread-and-butter in the other. + +'He's only just out of prison, and he hadn't finished his tea when he was sent in,' Haigha whispered to Alice: 'and they only give them oyster-shells in there--so you see he's very hungry and thirsty. How are you, dear child?' he went on, putting his arm affectionately round Hatta's neck. + +Hatta looked round and nodded, and went on with his bread and butter. + +'Were you happy in prison, dear child?' said Haigha. + +Hatta looked round once more, and this time a tear or two trickled down his cheek: but not a word would he say. + +'Speak, can't you!' Haigha cried impatiently. But Hatta only munched away, and drank some more tea. + +'Speak, won't you!' cried the King. 'How are they getting on with the fight?' + +Hatta made a desperate effort, and swallowed a large piece of bread-and-butter. 'They're getting on very well,' he said in a choking voice: 'each of them has been down about eighty-seven times.' + +'Then I suppose they'll soon bring the white bread and the brown?' Alice ventured to remark. + +'It's waiting for 'em now,' said Hatta: 'this is a bit of it as I'm eating.' + +There was a pause in the fight just then, and the Lion and the Unicorn sat down, panting, while the King called out 'Ten minutes allowed for refreshments!' Haigha and Hatta set to work at once, carrying rough trays of white and brown bread. Alice took a piece to taste, but it was VERY dry. + +'I don't think they'll fight any more to-day,' the King said to Hatta: 'go and order the drums to begin.' And Hatta went bounding away like a grasshopper. + +For a minute or two Alice stood silent, watching him. Suddenly she brightened up. 'Look, look!' she cried, pointing eagerly. 'There's the White Queen running across the country! She came flying out of the wood over yonder--How fast those Queens CAN run!' + +'There's some enemy after her, no doubt,' the King said, without even looking round. 'That wood's full of them.' + +'But aren't you going to run and help her?' Alice asked, very much surprised at his taking it so quietly. + +'No use, no use!' said the King. 'She runs so fearfully quick. You might as well try to catch a Bandersnatch! But I'll make a memorandum about her, if you like--She's a dear good creature,' he repeated softly to himself, as he opened his memorandum-book. 'Do you spell "creature" with a double "e"?' + +At this moment the Unicorn sauntered by them, with his hands in his pockets. 'I had the best of it this time?' he said to the King, just glancing at him as he passed. + +'A little--a little,' the King replied, rather nervously. 'You shouldn't have run him through with your horn, you know.' + +'It didn't hurt him,' the Unicorn said carelessly, and he was going on, when his eye happened to fall upon Alice: he turned round rather instantly, and stood for some time looking at her with an air of the deepest disgust. + +'What--is--this?' he said at last. + +'This is a child!' Haigha replied eagerly, coming in front of Alice to introduce her, and spreading out both his hands towards her in an Anglo-Saxon attitude. 'We only found it to-day. It's as large as life, and twice as natural!' + +'I always thought they were fabulous monsters!' said the Unicorn. 'Is it alive?' + +'It can talk,' said Haigha, solemnly. + +The Unicorn looked dreamily at Alice, and said 'Talk, child.' + +Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: 'Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too! I never saw one alive before!' + +'Well, now that we HAVE seen each other,' said the Unicorn, 'if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?' + +'Yes, if you like,' said Alice. + +'Come, fetch out the plum-cake, old man!' the Unicorn went on, turning from her to the King. 'None of your brown bread for me!' + +'Certainly--certainly!' the King muttered, and beckoned to Haigha. 'Open the bag!' he whispered. 'Quick! Not that one-- that's full of hay!' + +Haigha took a large cake out of the bag, and gave it to Alice to hold, while he got out a dish and carving-knife. How they all came out of it Alice couldn't guess. It was just like a conjuring-trick, she thought. + +The Lion had joined them while this was going on: he looked very tired and sleepy, and his eyes were half shut. 'What's this!' he said, blinking lazily at Alice, and speaking in a deep hollow tone that sounded like the tolling of a great bell. + +'Ah, what IS it, now?' the Unicorn cried eagerly. 'You'll never guess! _{I}_ couldn't.' + +The Lion looked at Alice wearily. 'Are you animal--vegetable --or mineral?' he said, yawning at every other word. + +'It's a fabulous monster!' the Unicorn cried out, before Alice could reply. + +'Then hand round the plum-cake, Monster,' the Lion said, lying down and putting his chin on this paws. 'And sit down, both of you,' (to the King and the Unicorn): 'fair play with the cake, you know!' + +The King was evidently very uncomfortable at having to sit down between the two great creatures; but there was no other place for him. + +'What a fight we might have for the crown, NOW!' the Unicorn said, looking slyly up at the crown, which the poor King was nearly shaking off his head, he trembled so much. + +'I should win easy,' said the Lion. + +'I'm not so sure of that,' said the Unicorn. + +'Why, I beat you all round the town, you chicken!' the Lion replied angrily, half getting up as he spoke. + +Here the King interrupted, to prevent the quarrel going on: he was very nervous, and his voice quite quivered. 'All round the town?' he said. 'That's a good long way. Did you go by the old bridge, or the market-place? You get the best view by the old bridge.' + +'I'm sure I don't know,' the Lion growled out as he lay down again. 'There was too much dust to see anything. What a time the Monster is, cutting up that cake!' + +Alice had seated herself on the bank of a little brook, with the great dish on her knees, and was sawing away diligently with the knife. 'It's very provoking!' she said, in reply to the Lion (she was getting quite used to being called 'the Monster'). 'I've cut several slices already, but they always join on again!' + +'You don't know how to manage Looking-glass cakes,' the Unicorn remarked. 'Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards.' + +This sounded nonsense, but Alice very obediently got up, and carried the dish round, and the cake divided itself into three pieces as she did so. 'NOW cut it up,' said the Lion, as she returned to her place with the empty dish. + +'I say, this isn't fair!' cried the Unicorn, as Alice sat with the knife in her hand, very much puzzled how to begin. 'The Monster has given the Lion twice as much as me!' + +'She's kept none for herself, anyhow,' said the Lion. 'Do you like plum-cake, Monster?' + +But before Alice could answer him, the drums began. + +Where the noise came from, she couldn't make out: the air seemed full of it, and it rang through and through her head till she felt quite deafened. She started to her feet and sprang across the little brook in her terror, + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +and had just time to see the Lion and the Unicorn rise to their feet, with angry looks at being interrupted in their feast, before she dropped to her knees, and put her hands over her ears, vainly trying to shut out the dreadful uproar. + +'If THAT doesn't "drum them out of town,"' she thought to herself, 'nothing ever will!' + +CHAPTER VIII - 'It's my own Invention' + +After a while the noise seemed gradually to die away, till all was dead silence, and Alice lifted up her head in some alarm. There was no one to be seen, and her first thought was that she must have been dreaming about the Lion and the Unicorn and those queer Anglo-Saxon Messengers. However, there was the great dish still lying at her feet, on which she had tried to cut the plum- cake, 'So I wasn't dreaming, after all,' she said to herself, 'unless--unless we're all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it's MY dream, and not the Red King's! I don't like belonging to another person's dream,' she went on in a rather complaining tone: 'I've a great mind to go and wake him, and see what happens!' + +At this moment her thoughts were interrupted by a loud shouting of 'Ahoy! Ahoy! Check!' and a Knight dressed in crimson armour came galloping down upon her, brandishing a great club. Just as he reached her, the horse stopped suddenly: 'You're my prisoner!' the Knight cried, as he tumbled off his horse. + +Startled as she was, Alice was more frightened for him than for herself at the moment, and watched him with some anxiety as he mounted again. As soon as he was comfortably in the saddle, he began once more 'You're my--' but here another voice broke in 'Ahoy! Ahoy! Check!' and Alice looked round in some surprise for the new enemy. + +This time it was a White Knight. He drew up at Alice's side, and tumbled off his horse just as the Red Knight had done: then he got on again, and the two Knights sat and looked at each other for some time without speaking. Alice looked from one to the other in some bewilderment. + +'She's MY prisoner, you know!' the Red Knight said at last. + +'Yes, but then _I_ came and rescued her!' the White Knight replied. + +'Well, we must fight for her, then,' said the Red Knight, as he took up his helmet (which hung from the saddle, and was something the shape of a horse's head), and put it on. + +'You will observe the Rules of Battle, of course?' the White Knight remarked, putting on his helmet too. + +'I always do,' said the Red Knight, and they began banging away at each other with such fury that Alice got behind a tree to be out of the way of the blows. + +'I wonder, now, what the Rules of Battle are,' she said to herself, as she watched the fight, timidly peeping out from her hiding-place: 'one Rule seems to be, that if one Knight hits the other, he knocks him off his horse, and if he misses, he tumbles off himself--and another Rule seems to be that they hold their clubs with their arms, as if they were Punch and Judy--What a noise they make when they tumble! Just like a whole set of fire- irons falling into the fender! And how quiet the horses are! They let them get on and off them just as if they were tables!' + +Another Rule of Battle, that Alice had not noticed, seemed to be that they always fell on their heads, and the battle ended with their both falling off in this way, side by side: when they got up again, they shook hands, and then the Red Knight mounted and galloped off. + +'It was a glorious victory, wasn't it?' said the White Knight, as he came up panting. + +'I don't know,' Alice said doubtfully. 'I don't want to be anybody's prisoner. I want to be a Queen.' + +'So you will, when you've crossed the next brook,' said the White Knight. 'I'll see you safe to the end of the wood--and then I must go back, you know. That's the end of my move.' + +'Thank you very much,' said Alice. 'May I help you off with your helmet?' It was evidently more than he could manage by himself; however, she managed to shake him out of it at last. + +'Now one can breathe more easily,' said the Knight, putting back his shaggy hair with both hands, and turning his gentle face and large mild eyes to Alice. She thought she had never seen such a strange-looking soldier in all her life. + +He was dressed in tin armour, which seemed to fit him very badly, and he had a queer-shaped little deal box fastened across his shoulder, upside-down, and with the lid hanging open. Alice looked at it with great curiosity. + +'I see you're admiring my little box.' the Knight said in a friendly tone. 'It's my own invention--to keep clothes and sandwiches in. You see I carry it upside-down, so that the rain can't get in.' + +'But the things can get OUT,' Alice gently remarked. 'Do you know the lid's open?' + +'I didn't know it,' the Knight said, a shade of vexation passing over his face. 'Then all the things must have fallen out! And the box is no use without them.' He unfastened it as he spoke, and was just going to throw it into the bushes, when a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and he hung it carefully on a tree. 'Can you guess why I did that?' he said to Alice. + +Alice shook her head. + +'In hopes some bees may make a nest in it--then I should get the honey.' + +'But you've got a bee-hive--or something like one--fastened to the saddle,' said Alice. + +'Yes, it's a very good bee-hive,' the Knight said in a discontented tone, 'one of the best kind. But not a single bee has come near it yet. And the other thing is a mouse-trap. I suppose the mice keep the bees out--or the bees keep the mice out, I don't know which.' + +'I was wondering what the mouse-trap was for,' said Alice. 'It isn't very likely there would be any mice on the horse's back.' + +'Not very likely, perhaps,' said the Knight: 'but if they DO come, I don't choose to have them running all about.' + +'You see,' he went on after a pause, 'it's as well to be provided for EVERYTHING. That's the reason the horse has all those anklets round his feet.' + +'But what are they for?' Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity. + +'To guard against the bites of sharks,' the Knight replied. 'It's an invention of my own. And now help me on. I'll go with you to the end of the wood--What's the dish for?' + +'It's meant for plum-cake,' said Alice. + +'We'd better take it with us,' the Knight said. 'It'll come in handy if we find any plum-cake. Help me to get it into this bag.' + +This took a very long time to manage, though Alice held the bag open very carefully, because the Knight was so VERY awkward in putting in the dish: the first two or three times that he tried he fell in himself instead. 'It's rather a tight fit, you see,' he said, as they got it in a last; 'There are so many candlesticks in the bag.' And he hung it to the saddle, which was already loaded with bunches of carrots, and fire-irons, and many other things. + +'I hope you've got your hair well fastened on?' he continued, as they set off. + +'Only in the usual way,' Alice said, smiling. + +'That's hardly enough,' he said, anxiously. 'You see the wind is so VERY strong here. It's as strong as soup.' + +'Have you invented a plan for keeping the hair from being blown off?' Alice enquired. + +'Not yet,' said the Knight. 'But I've got a plan for keeping it from FALLING off.' + +'I should like to hear it, very much.' + +'First you take an upright stick,' said the Knight. 'Then you make your hair creep up it, like a fruit-tree. Now the reason hair falls off is because it hangs DOWN--things never fall UPWARDS, you know. It's a plan of my own invention. You may try it if you like.' + +It didn't sound a comfortable plan, Alice thought, and for a few minutes she walked on in silence, puzzling over the idea, and every now and then stopping to help the poor Knight, who certainly was NOT a good rider. + +Whenever the horse stopped (which it did very often), he fell off in front; and whenever it went on again (which it generally did rather suddenly), he fell off behind. Otherwise he kept on pretty well, except that he had a habit of now and then falling off sideways; and as he generally did this on the side on which Alice was walking, she soon found that it was the best plan not to walk QUITE close to the horse. + +'I'm afraid you've not had much practice in riding,' she ventured to say, as she was helping him up from his fifth tumble. + +The Knight looked very much surprised, and a little offended at the remark. 'What makes you say that?' he asked, as he scrambled back into the saddle, keeping hold of Alice's hair with one hand, to save himself from falling over on the other side. + +'Because people don't fall off quite so often, when they've had much practice.' + +'I've had plenty of practice,' the Knight said very gravely: 'plenty of practice!' + +Alice could think of nothing better to say than 'Indeed?' but she said it as heartily as she could. They went on a little way in silence after this, the Knight with his eyes shut, muttering to himself, and Alice watching anxiously for the next tumble. + +'The great art of riding,' the Knight suddenly began in a loud voice, waving his right arm as he spoke, 'is to keep--' Here the sentence ended as suddenly as it had begun, as the Knight fell heavily on the top of his head exactly in the path where Alice was walking. She was quite frightened this time, and said in an anxious tone, as she picked him up, 'I hope no bones are broken?' + +'None to speak of,' the Knight said, as if he didn't mind breaking two or three of them. 'The great art of riding, as I was saying, is--to keep your balance properly. Like this, you know--' + +He let go the bridle, and stretched out both his arms to show Alice what he meant, and this time he fell flat on his back, right under the horse's feet. + +'Plenty of practice!' he went on repeating, all the time that Alice was getting him on his feet again. 'Plenty of practice!' + +'It's too ridiculous!' cried Alice, losing all her patience this time. 'You ought to have a wooden horse on wheels, that you ought!' + +'Does that kind go smoothly?' the Knight asked in a tone of great interest, clasping his arms round the horse's neck as he spoke, just in time to save himself from tumbling off again. + +'Much more smoothly than a live horse,' Alice said, with a little scream of laughter, in spite of all she could do to prevent it. + +'I'll get one,' the Knight said thoughtfully to himself. 'One or two--several.' + +There was a short silence after this, and then the Knight went on again. 'I'm a great hand at inventing things. Now, I daresay you noticed, that last time you picked me up, that I was looking rather thoughtful?' + +'You WERE a little grave,' said Alice. + +'Well, just then I was inventing a new way of getting over a gate--would you like to hear it?' + +'Very much indeed,' Alice said politely. + +'I'll tell you how I came to think of it,' said the Knight. 'You see, I said to myself, "The only difficulty is with the feet: the HEAD is high enough already." Now, first I put my head on the top of the gate--then I stand on my head--then the feet are high enough, you see--then I'm over, you see.' + +'Yes, I suppose you'd be over when that was done,' Alice said thoughtfully: 'but don't you think it would be rather hard?' + +'I haven't tried it yet,' the Knight said, gravely: 'so I can't tell for certain--but I'm afraid it WOULD be a little hard.' + +He looked so vexed at the idea, that Alice changed the subject hastily. 'What a curious helmet you've got!' she said cheerfully. 'Is that your invention too?' + +The Knight looked down proudly at his helmet, which hung from the saddle. 'Yes,' he said, 'but I've invented a better one than that--like a sugar loaf. When I used to wear it, if I fell off the horse, it always touched the ground directly. So I had a VERY little way to fall, you see--But there WAS the danger of falling INTO it, to be sure. That happened to me once--and the worst of it was, before I could get out again, the other White Knight came and put it on. He thought it was his own helmet.' + +The knight looked so solemn about it that Alice did not dare to laugh. 'I'm afraid you must have hurt him,' she said in a trembling voice, 'being on the top of his head.' + +'I had to kick him, of course,' the Knight said, very seriously. 'And then he took the helmet off again--but it took hours and hours to get me out. I was as fast as--as lightning, you know.' + +'But that's a different kind of fastness,' Alice objected. + +The Knight shook his head. 'It was all kinds of fastness with me, I can assure you!' he said. He raised his hands in some excitement as he said this, and instantly rolled out of the saddle, and fell headlong into a deep ditch. + +Alice ran to the side of the ditch to look for him. She was rather startled by the fall, as for some time he had kept on very well, and she was afraid that he really WAS hurt this time. However, though she could see nothing but the soles of his feet, she was much relieved to hear that he was talking on in his usual tone. 'All kinds of fastness,' he repeated: 'but it was careless of him to put another man's helmet on--with the man in it, too.' + +'How CAN you go on talking so quietly, head downwards?' Alice asked, as she dragged him out by the feet, and laid him in a heap on the bank. + +The Knight looked surprised at the question. 'What does it matter where my body happens to be?' he said. 'My mind goes on working all the same. In fact, the more head downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things.' + +'Now the cleverest thing of the sort that I ever did,' he went on after a pause, 'was inventing a new pudding during the meat- course.' + +'In time to have it cooked for the next course?' said Alice. 'Well, not the NEXT course,' the Knight said in a slow thoughtful tone: 'no, certainly not the next COURSE.' + +'Then it would have to be the next day. I suppose you wouldn't have two pudding-courses in one dinner?' + +'Well, not the NEXT day,' the Knight repeated as before: 'not the next DAY. In fact,' he went on, holding his head down, and his voice getting lower and lower, 'I don't believe that pudding ever WAS cooked! In fact, I don't believe that pudding ever WILL be cooked! And yet it was a very clever pudding to invent.' + +'What did you mean it to be made of?' Alice asked, hoping to cheer him up, for the poor Knight seemed quite low-spirited about it. + +'It began with blotting paper,' the Knight answered with a groan. + +'That wouldn't be very nice, I'm afraid--' + +'Not very nice ALONE,' he interrupted, quite eagerly: 'but you've no idea what a difference it makes mixing it with other things--such as gunpowder and sealing-wax. And here I must leave you.' They had just come to the end of the wood. + +Alice could only look puzzled: she was thinking of the pudding. + +'You are sad,' the Knight said in an anxious tone: 'let me sing you a song to comfort you.' + +'Is it very long?' Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day. + +'It's long,' said the Knight, 'but very, VERY beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it--either it brings the TEARS into their eyes, or else--' + +'Or else what?' said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause. + +'Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called "HADDOCKS' EYES."' + +'Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel interested. + +'No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little vexed. 'That's what the name is CALLED. The name really IS "THE AGED AGED MAN."' + +'Then I ought to have said "That's what the SONG is called"?' Alice corrected herself. + +'No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The SONG is called "WAYS AND MEANS": but that's only what it's CALLED, you know!' + +'Well, what IS the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered. + +'I was coming to that,' the Knight said. 'The song really IS "A-SITTING ON A GATE": and the tune's my own invention.' + +So saying, he stopped his horse and let the reins fall on its neck: then, slowly beating time with one hand, and with a faint smile lighting up his gentle foolish face, as if he enjoyed the music of his song, he began. + +Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday--the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight--the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her--the horse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet--and the black shadows of the forest behind--all this she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading her eyes, she leant against a tree, watching the strange pair, and listening, in a half dream, to the melancholy music of the song. + +'But the tune ISN'T his own invention,' she said to herself: 'it's "I GIVE THEE ALL, I CAN NO MORE."' She stood and listened very attentively, but no tears came into her eyes. + +poem{ + + 'I'll tell thee everything I can; + There's little to relate. + I saw an aged aged man, + A-sitting on a gate. + "Who are you, aged man?" I said, + "and how is it you live?" + And his answer trickled through my head + Like water through a sieve. + + He said "I look for butterflies + That sleep among the wheat: + I make them into mutton-pies, + And sell them in the street. + I sell them unto men," he said, + "Who sail on stormy seas; + And that's the way I get my bread-- + A trifle, if you please." + + But I was thinking of a plan + To dye one's whiskers green, + And always use so large a fan + That they could not be seen. + So, having no reply to give + To what the old man said, + I cried, "Come, tell me how you live!" + And thumped him on the head. + + His accents mild took up the tale: + He said "I go my ways, + And when I find a mountain-rill, + I set it in a blaze; + And thence they make a stuff they call + Rolands' Macassar Oil-- + Yet twopence-halfpenny is all + They give me for my toil." + + But I was thinking of a way + To feed oneself on batter, + And so go on from day to day + Getting a little fatter. + I shook him well from side to side, + Until his face was blue: + "Come, tell me how you live," I cried, + "And what it is you do!" + + He said "I hunt for haddocks' eyes + Among the heather bright, + And work them into waistcoat-buttons + In the silent night. + And these I do not sell for gold + Or coin of silvery shine + But for a copper halfpenny, + And that will purchase nine. + + "I sometimes dig for buttered rolls, + Or set limed twigs for crabs; + I sometimes search the grassy knolls + For wheels of Hansom-cabs. + And that's the way" (he gave a wink) + "By which I get my wealth-- + And very gladly will I drink + Your Honour's noble health." + + I heard him then, for I had just + Completed my design + To keep the Menai bridge from rust + By boiling it in wine. + I thanked him much for telling me + The way he got his wealth, + But chiefly for his wish that he + Might drink my noble health. + + And now, if e'er by chance I put + My fingers into glue + Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot + Into a left-hand shoe, + Or if I drop upon my toe + A very heavy weight, + I weep, for it reminds me so, + Of that old man I used to know-- + + Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow, + Whose hair was whiter than the snow, + Whose face was very like a crow, + With eyes, like cinders, all aglow, + Who seemed distracted with his woe, + Who rocked his body to and fro, + And muttered mumblingly and low, + As if his mouth were full of dough, + Who snorted like a buffalo-- + That summer evening, long ago, + A-sitting on a gate.' + +}poem + +As the Knight sang the last words of the ballad, he gathered up the reins, and turned his horse's head along the road by which they had come. 'You've only a few yards to go,' he said, 'down the hill and over that little brook, and then you'll be a Queen-- But you'll stay and see me off first?' he added as Alice turned with an eager look in the direction to which he pointed. 'I shan't be long. You'll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road? I think it'll encourage me, you see.' + +'Of course I'll wait,' said Alice: 'and thank you very much for coming so far--and for the song--I liked it very much.' + +'I hope so,' the Knight said doubtfully: 'but you didn't cry so much as I thought you would.' + +So they shook hands, and then the Knight rode slowly away into the forest. 'It won't take long to see him OFF, I expect,' Alice said to herself, as she stood watching him. 'There he goes! Right on his head as usual! However, he gets on again pretty easily--that comes of having so many things hung round the horse--' So she went on talking to herself, as she watched the horse walking leisurely along the road, and the Knight tumbling off, first on one side and then on the other. After the fourth or fifth tumble he reached the turn, and then she waved her handkerchief to him, and waited till he was out of sight. + +'I hope it encouraged him,' she said, as she turned to run down the hill: 'and now for the last brook, and to be a Queen! How grand it sounds!' A very few steps brought her to the edge of the brook. 'The Eighth Square at last!' she cried as she bounded across, + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +and threw herself down to rest on a lawn as soft as moss, with little flower-beds dotted about it here and there. 'Oh, how glad I am to get here! And what IS this on my head?' she exclaimed in a tone of dismay, as she put her hands up to something very heavy, and fitted tight all round her head. + +'But how CAN it have got there without my knowing it?' she said to herself, as she lifted it off, and set it on her lap to make out what it could possibly be. + +It was a golden crown. + +CHAPTER IX - Queen Alice + +'Well, this IS grand!' said Alice. 'I never expected I should be a Queen so soon--and I'll tell you what it is, your majesty,' she went on in a severe tone (she was always rather fond of scolding herself), 'it'll never do for you to be lolling about on the grass like that! Queens have to be dignified, you know!' + +So she got up and walked about--rather stiffly just at first, as she was afraid that the crown might come off: but she comforted herself with the thought that there was nobody to see her, 'and if I really am a Queen,' she said as she sat down again, 'I shall be able to manage it quite well in time.' + +Everything was happening so oddly that she didn't feel a bit surprised at finding the Red Queen and the White Queen sitting close to her, one on each side: she would have liked very much to ask them how they came there, but she feared it would not be quite civil. However, there would be no harm, she thought, in asking if the game was over. 'Please, would you tell me--' she began, looking timidly at the Red Queen. + +'Speak when you're spoken to!' The Queen sharply interrupted her. + +'But if everybody obeyed that rule,' said Alice, who was always ready for a little argument, 'and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for YOU to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything, so that--' + +'Ridiculous!' cried the Queen. 'Why, don't you see, child--' here she broke off with a frown, and, after thinking for a minute, suddenly changed the subject of the conversation. 'What do you mean by "If you really are a Queen"? What right have you to call yourself so? You can't be a Queen, you know, till you've passed the proper examination. And the sooner we begin it, the better.' + +'I only said "if"!' poor Alice pleaded in a piteous tone. + +The two Queens looked at each other, and the Red Queen remarked, with a little shudder, 'She SAYS she only said "if"--' + +'But she said a great deal more than that!' the White Queen moaned, wringing her hands. 'Oh, ever so much more than that!' + +'So you did, you know,' the Red Queen said to Alice. 'Always speak the truth--think before you speak--and write it down afterwards.' + +'I'm sure I didn't mean--' Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen interrupted her impatiently. + +'That's just what I complain of! You SHOULD have meant! What do you suppose is the use of child without any meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning--and a child's more important than a joke, I hope. You couldn't deny that, even if you tried with both hands.' + +'I don't deny things with my HANDS,' Alice objected. + +'Nobody said you did,' said the Red Queen. 'I said you couldn't if you tried.' + +'She's in that state of mind,' said the White Queen, 'that she wants to deny SOMETHING--only she doesn't know what to deny!' + +'A nasty, vicious temper,' the Red Queen remarked; and then there was an uncomfortable silence for a minute or two. + +The Red Queen broke the silence by saying to the White Queen, 'I invite you to Alice's dinner-party this afternoon.' + +The White Queen smiled feebly, and said 'And I invite YOU.' + +'I didn't know I was to have a party at all,' said Alice; 'but if there is to be one, I think _{I}_ ought to invite the guests.' + +'We gave you the opportunity of doing it,' the Red Queen remarked: 'but I daresay you've not had many lessons in manners yet?' + +'Manners are not taught in lessons,' said Alice. 'Lessons teach you to do sums, and things of that sort.' + +'And you do Addition?' the White Queen asked. 'What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?' + +'I don't know,' said Alice. 'I lost count.' + +'She can't do Addition,' the Red Queen interrupted. 'Can you do Subtraction? Take nine from eight.' + +'Nine from eight I can't, you know,' Alice replied very readily: 'but--' + +'She can't do Subtraction,' said the White Queen. 'Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife--what's the answer to that?' + +'I suppose--' Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen answered for her. 'Bread-and-butter, of course. Try another Subtraction sum. Take a bone from a dog: what remains?' + +Alice considered. 'The bone wouldn't remain, of course, if I took it--and the dog wouldn't remain; it would come to bite me --and I'm sure I shouldn't remain!' + +'Then you think nothing would remain?' said the Red Queen. + +'I think that's the answer.' + +'Wrong, as usual,' said the Red Queen: 'the dog's temper would remain.' + +'But I don't see how--' + +'Why, look here!' the Red Queen cried. 'The dog would lose its temper, wouldn't it?' + +'Perhaps it would,' Alice replied cautiously. + +'Then if the dog went away, its temper would remain!' the Queen exclaimed triumphantly. + +Alice said, as gravely as she could, 'They might go different ways.' But she couldn't help thinking to herself, 'What dreadful nonsense we ARE talking!' + +'She can't do sums a BIT!' the Queens said together, with great emphasis. + +'Can YOU do sums?' Alice said, turning suddenly on the White Queen, for she didn't like being found fault with so much. + +The Queen gasped and shut her eyes. 'I can do Addition, if you give me time--but I can do Subtraction, under ANY circumstances!' + +'Of course you know your A B C?' said the Red Queen. + +'To be sure I do.' said Alice. + +'So do I,' the White Queen whispered: 'we'll often say it over together, dear. And I'll tell you a secret--I can read words of one letter! Isn't THAT grand! However, don't be discouraged. You'll come to it in time.' + +Here the Red Queen began again. 'Can you answer useful questions?' she said. 'How is bread made?' + +'I know THAT!' Alice cried eagerly. 'You take some flour--' + +'Where do you pick the flower?' the White Queen asked. 'In a garden, or in the hedges?' + +'Well, it isn't PICKED at all,' Alice explained: 'it's GROUND--' + +'How many acres of ground?' said the White Queen. 'You mustn't leave out so many things.' + +'Fan her head!' the Red Queen anxiously interrupted. 'She'll be feverish after so much thinking.' So they set to work and fanned her with bunches of leaves, till she had to beg them to leave off, it blew her hair about so. + +'She's all right again now,' said the Red Queen. 'Do you know Languages? What's the French for fiddle-de-dee?' + +'Fiddle-de-dee's not English,' Alice replied gravely. + +'Who ever said it was?' said the Red Queen. + +Alice thought she saw a way out of the difficulty this time. 'If you'll tell me what language "fiddle-de-dee" is, I'll tell you the French for it!' she exclaimed triumphantly. + +But the Red Queen drew herself up rather stiffly, and said 'Queens never make bargains.' + +'I wish Queens never asked questions,' Alice thought to herself. + +'Don't let us quarrel,' the White Queen said in an anxious tone. 'What is the cause of lightning?' + +'The cause of lightning,' Alice said very decidedly, for she felt quite certain about this, 'is the thunder--no, no!' she hastily corrected herself. 'I meant the other way.' + +'It's too late to correct it,' said the Red Queen: 'when you've once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.' + +'Which reminds me--' the White Queen said, looking down and nervously clasping and unclasping her hands, 'we had SUCH a thunderstorm last Tuesday--I mean one of the last set of Tuesdays, you know.' + +Alice was puzzled. 'In OUR country,' she remarked, 'there's only one day at a time.' + +The Red Queen said, 'That's a poor thin way of doing things. Now HERE, we mostly have days and nights two or three at a time, and sometimes in the winter we take as many as five nights together--for warmth, you know.' + +'Are five nights warmer than one night, then?' Alice ventured to ask. + +'Five times as warm, of course.' + +'But they should be five times as COLD, by the same rule--' + +'Just so!' cried the Red Queen. 'Five times as warm, AND five times as cold--just as I'm five times as rich as you are, AND five times as clever!' + +Alice sighed and gave it up. 'It's exactly like a riddle with no answer!' she thought. + +'Humpty Dumpty saw it too,' the White Queen went on in a low voice, more as if she were talking to herself. 'He came to the door with a corkscrew in his hand--' + +'What did he want?' said the Red Queen. + +'He said he WOULD come in,' the White Queen went on, 'because he was looking for a hippopotamus. Now, as it happened, there wasn't such a thing in the house, that morning.' + +'Is there generally?' Alice asked in an astonished tone. + +'Well, only on Thursdays,' said the Queen. + +'I know what he came for,' said Alice: 'he wanted to punish the fish, because--' + +Here the White Queen began again. 'It was SUCH a thunderstorm, you can't think!' ('She NEVER could, you know,' said the Red Queen.) 'And part of the roof came off, and ever so much thunder got in--and it went rolling round the room in great lumps--and knocking over the tables and things--till I was so frightened, I couldn't remember my own name!' + +Alice thought to herself, 'I never should TRY to remember my name in the middle of an accident! Where would be the use of it?' but she did not say this aloud, for fear of hurting the poor Queen's feeling. + +'Your Majesty must excuse her,' the Red Queen said to Alice, taking one of the White Queen's hands in her own, and gently stroking it: 'she means well, but she can't help saying foolish things, as a general rule.' + +The White Queen looked timidly at Alice, who felt she OUGHT to say something kind, but really couldn't think of anything at the moment. + +'She never was really well brought up,' the Red Queen went on: 'but it's amazing how good-tempered she is! Pat her on the head, and see how pleased she'll be!' But this was more than Alice had courage to do. + +'A little kindness--and putting her hair in papers--would do wonders with her--' + +The White Queen gave a deep sigh, and laid her head on Alice's shoulder. 'I AM so sleepy?' she moaned. + +'She's tired, poor thing!' said the Red Queen. 'Smooth her hair --lend her your nightcap--and sing her a soothing lullaby.' + +'I haven't got a nightcap with me,' said Alice, as she tried to obey the first direction: 'and I don't know any soothing lullabies.' + +'I must do it myself, then,' said the Red Queen, and she began: + +poem{ + + 'Hush-a-by lady, in Alice's lap! + Till the feast's ready, we've time for a nap: + When the feast's over, we'll go to the ball-- + Red Queen, and White Queen, and Alice, and all! + +}poem + +'And now you know the words,' she added, as she put her head down on Alice's other shoulder, 'just sing it through to ME. I'm getting sleepy, too.' In another moment both Queens were fast asleep, and snoring loud. + +'What AM I to do?' exclaimed Alice, looking about in great perplexity, as first one round head, and then the other, rolled down from her shoulder, and lay like a heavy lump in her lap. 'I don't think it EVER happened before, that any one had to take care of two Queens asleep at once! No, not in all the History of England--it couldn't, you know, because there never was more than one Queen at a time. Do wake up, you heavy things!' she went on in an impatient tone; but there was no answer but a gentle snoring. + +The snoring got more distinct every minute, and sounded more like a tune: at last she could even make out the words, and she listened so eagerly that, when the two great heads vanished from her lap, she hardly missed them. + +She was standing before an arched doorway over which were the words QUEEN ALICE in large letters, and on each side of the arch there was a bell-handle; one was marked 'Visitors' Bell,' and the other 'Servants' Bell.' + +'I'll wait till the song's over,' thought Alice, 'and then I'll ring--the--WHICH bell must I ring?' she went on, very much puzzled by the names. 'I'm not a visitor, and I'm not a servant. There OUGHT to be one marked "Queen," you know--' + +Just then the door opened a little way, and a creature with a long beak put its head out for a moment and said 'No admittance till the week after next!' and shut the door again with a bang. + +Alice knocked and rang in vain for a long time, but at last, a very old Frog, who was sitting under a tree, got up and hobbled slowly towards her: he was dressed in bright yellow, and had enormous boots on. + +'What is it, now?' the Frog said in a deep hoarse whisper. + +Alice turned round, ready to find fault with anybody. 'Where's the servant whose business it is to answer the door?' she began angrily. + +'Which door?' said the Frog. + +Alice almost stamped with irritation at the slow drawl in which he spoke. 'THIS door, of course!' + +The Frog looked at the door with his large dull eyes for a minute: then he went nearer and rubbed it with his thumb, as if he were trying whether the paint would come off; then he looked at Alice. + +'To answer the door?' he said. 'What's it been asking of?' He was so hoarse that Alice could scarcely hear him. + +'I don't know what you mean,' she said. + +'I talks English, doesn't I?' the Frog went on. 'Or are you deaf? What did it ask you?' + +'Nothing!' Alice said impatiently. 'I've been knocking at it!' + +'Shouldn't do that--shouldn't do that--' the Frog muttered. 'Vexes it, you know.' Then he went up and gave the door a kick with one of his great feet. 'You let IT alone,' he panted out, as he hobbled back to his tree, 'and it'll let YOU alone, you know.' + +At this moment the door was flung open, and a shrill voice was heard singing: + +poem{ + + 'To the Looking-Glass world it was Alice that said, + "I've a sceptre in hand, I've a crown on my head; + Let the Looking-Glass creatures, whatever they be, + Come and dine with the Red Queen, the White Queen, and me."' + +}poem + +And hundreds of voices joined in the chorus: + +poem{ + + 'Then fill up the glasses as quick as you can, + And sprinkle the table with buttons and bran: + Put cats in the coffee, and mice in the tea-- + And welcome Queen Alice with thirty-times-three!' + +}poem + +Then followed a confused noise of cheering, and Alice thought to herself, 'Thirty times three makes ninety. I wonder if any one's counting?' In a minute there was silence again, and the same shrill voice sang another verse; + +poem{ + + '"O Looking-Glass creatures," quothe Alice, "draw near! + 'Tis an honour to see me, a favour to hear: + 'Tis a privilege high to have dinner and tea + Along with the Red Queen, the White Queen, and me!"' + +}poem + +Then came the chorus again:-- + +poem{ + + 'Then fill up the glasses with treacle and ink, + Or anything else that is pleasant to drink: + Mix sand with the cider, and wool with the wine-- + And welcome Queen Alice with ninety-times-nine!' + +}poem + +'Ninety times nine!' Alice repeated in despair, 'Oh, that'll never be done! I'd better go in at once--' and there was a dead silence the moment she appeared. + +Alice glanced nervously along the table, as she walked up the large hall, and noticed that there were about fifty guests, of all kinds: some were animals, some birds, and there were even a few flowers among them. 'I'm glad they've come without waiting to be asked,' she thought: 'I should never have known who were the right people to invite!' + +There were three chairs at the head of the table; the Red and White Queens had already taken two of them, but the middle one was empty. Alice sat down in it, rather uncomfortable in the silence, and longing for some one to speak. + +At last the Red Queen began. 'You've missed the soup and fish,' she said. 'Put on the joint!' And the waiters set a leg of mutton before Alice, who looked at it rather anxiously, as she had never had to carve a joint before. + +'You look a little shy; let me introduce you to that leg of mutton,' said the Red Queen. 'Alice--Mutton; Mutton--Alice.' The leg of mutton got up in the dish and made a little bow to Alice; and Alice returned the bow, not knowing whether to be frightened or amused. + +'May I give you a slice?' she said, taking up the knife and fork, and looking from one Queen to the other. + +'Certainly not,' the Red Queen said, very decidedly: 'it isn't etiquette to cut any one you've been introduced to. Remove the joint!' And the waiters carried it off, and brought a large plum-pudding in its place. + +'I won't be introduced to the pudding, please,' Alice said rather hastily, 'or we shall get no dinner at all. May I give you some?' + +But the Red Queen looked sulky, and growled 'Pudding--Alice; Alice--Pudding. Remove the pudding!' and the waiters took it away so quickly that Alice couldn't return its bow. + +However, she didn't see why the Red Queen should be the only one to give orders, so, as an experiment, she called out 'Waiter! Bring back the pudding!' and there it was again in a moment like a conjuring-trick. It was so large that she couldn't help feeling a LITTLE shy with it, as she had been with the mutton; however, she conquered her shyness by a great effort and cut a slice and handed it to the Red Queen. + +'What impertinence!' said the Pudding. 'I wonder how you'd like it, if I were to cut a slice out of YOU, you creature!' + +It spoke in a thick, suety sort of voice, and Alice hadn't a word to say in reply: she could only sit and look at it and gasp. + +'Make a remark,' said the Red Queen: 'it's ridiculous to leave all the conversation to the pudding!' + +'Do you know, I've had such a quantity of poetry repeated to me to-day,' Alice began, a little frightened at finding that, the moment she opened her lips, there was dead silence, and all eyes were fixed upon her; 'and it's a very curious thing, I think-- every poem was about fishes in some way. Do you know why they're so fond of fishes, all about here?' + +She spoke to the Red Queen, whose answer was a little wide of the mark. 'As to fishes,' she said, very slowly and solemnly, putting her mouth close to Alice's ear, 'her White Majesty knows a lovely riddle--all in poetry--all about fishes. Shall she repeat it?' + +'Her Red Majesty's very kind to mention it,' the White Queen murmured into Alice's other ear, in a voice like the cooing of a pigeon. 'It would be SUCH a treat! May I?' + +'Please do,' Alice said very politely. + +The White Queen laughed with delight, and stroked Alice's cheek. Then she began: + +poem{ + + '"First, the fish must be caught." + That is easy: a baby, I think, could have caught it. + "Next, the fish must be bought." + That is easy: a penny, I think, would have bought it. + + "Now cook me the fish!" + That is easy, and will not take more than a minute. + "Let it lie in a dish!" + That is easy, because it already is in it. + + "Bring it here! Let me sup!" + It is easy to set such a dish on the table. + "Take the dish-cover up!" + Ah, THAT is so hard that I fear I'm unable! + + For it holds it like glue-- + Holds the lid to the dish, while it lies in the middle: + Which is easiest to do, + Un-dish-cover the fish, or dishcover the riddle?' + +}poem + +'Take a minute to think about it, and then guess,' said the Red Queen. 'Meanwhile, we'll drink your health--Queen Alice's health!' she screamed at the top of her voice, and all the guests began drinking it directly, and very queerly they managed it: some of them put their glasses upon their heads like extinguishers, and drank all that trickled down their faces--others upset the decanters, and drank the wine as it ran off the edges of the table--and three of them (who looked like kangaroos) scrambled into the dish of roast mutton, and began eagerly lapping up the gravy, 'just like pigs in a trough!' thought Alice. + +'You ought to return thanks in a neat speech,' the Red Queen said, frowning at Alice as she spoke. + +'We must support you, you know,' the White Queen whispered, as Alice got up to do it, very obediently, but a little frightened. + +'Thank you very much,' she whispered in reply, 'but I can do quite well without.' + +'That wouldn't be at all the thing,' the Red Queen said very decidedly: so Alice tried to submit to it with a good grace. + +('And they DID push so!' she said afterwards, when she was telling her sister the history of the feast. 'You would have thought they wanted to squeeze me flat!') + +In fact it was rather difficult for her to keep in her place while she made her speech: the two Queens pushed her so, one on each side, that they nearly lifted her up into the air: 'I rise to return thanks--' Alice began: and she really DID rise as she spoke, several inches; but she got hold of the edge of the table, and managed to pull herself down again. + +'Take care of yourself!' screamed the White Queen, seizing Alice's hair with both her hands. 'Something's going to happen!' + +And then (as Alice afterwards described it) all sorts of things happened in a moment. The candles all grew up to the ceiling, looking something like a bed of rushes with fireworks at the top. As to the bottles, they each took a pair of plates, which they hastily fitted on as wings, and so, with forks for legs, went fluttering about in all directions: 'and very like birds they look,' Alice thought to herself, as well as she could in the dreadful confusion that was beginning. + +At this moment she heard a hoarse laugh at her side, and turned to see what was the matter with the White Queen; but, instead of the Queen, there was the leg of mutton sitting in the chair. 'Here I am!' cried a voice from the soup tureen, and Alice turned again, just in time to see the Queen's broad good-natured face grinning at her for a moment over the edge of the tureen, before she disappeared into the soup. + +There was not a moment to be lost. Already several of the guests were lying down in the dishes, and the soup ladle was walking up the table towards Alice's chair, and beckoning to her impatiently to get out of its way. + +'I can't stand this any longer!' she cried as she jumped up and seized the table-cloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor. + +'And as for YOU,' she went on, turning fiercely upon the Red Queen, whom she considered as the cause of all the mischief--but the Queen was no longer at her side--she had suddenly dwindled down to the size of a little doll, and was now on the table, merrily running round and round after her own shawl, which was trailing behind her. + +At any other time, Alice would have felt surprised at this, but she was far too much excited to be surprised at anything NOW. 'As for YOU,' she repeated, catching hold of the little creature in the very act of jumping over a bottle which had just lighted upon the table, 'I'll shake you into a kitten, that I will!' + +CHAPTER X - Shaking + +She took her off the table as she spoke, and shook her backwards and forwards with all her might. + +The Red Queen made no resistance whatever; only her face grew very small, and her eyes got large and green: and still, as Alice went on shaking her, she kept on growing shorter--and fatter--and softer--and rounder--and-- + +CHAPTER XI - Waking + +--and it really WAS a kitten, after all. + +CHAPTER XII - Which Dreamed it? + +'Your majesty shouldn't purr so loud,' Alice said, rubbing her eyes, and addressing the kitten, respectfully, yet with some severity. 'You woke me out of oh! such a nice dream! And you've been along with me, Kitty--all through the Looking-Glass world. Did you know it, dear?' + +It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they ALWAYS purr. 'If they would only purr for "yes" and mew for "no," or any rule of that sort,' she had said, 'so that one could keep up a conversation! But how CAN you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?' + +On this occasion the kitten only purred: and it was impossible to guess whether it meant 'yes' or 'no.' + +So Alice hunted among the chessmen on the table till she had found the Red Queen: then she went down on her knees on the hearth-rug, and put the kitten and the Queen to look at each other. 'Now, Kitty!' she cried, clapping her hands triumphantly. 'Confess that was what you turned into!' + +('But it wouldn't look at it,' she said, when she was explaining the thing afterwards to her sister: 'it turned away its head, and pretended not to see it: but it looked a LITTLE ashamed of itself, so I think it MUST have been the Red Queen.') + +'Sit up a little more stiffly, dear!' Alice cried with a merry laugh. 'And curtsey while you're thinking what to--what to purr. It saves time, remember!' And she caught it up and gave it one little kiss, 'just in honour of having been a Red Queen.' + +'Snowdrop, my pet!' she went on, looking over her shoulder at the White Kitten, which was still patiently undergoing its toilet, 'when WILL Dinah have finished with your White Majesty, I wonder? That must be the reason you were so untidy in my dream-- Dinah! do you know that you're scrubbing a White Queen? Really, it's most disrespectful of you! + +'And what did DINAH turn to, I wonder?' she prattled on, as she settled comfortably down, with one elbow in the rug, and her chin in her hand, to watch the kittens. 'Tell me, Dinah, did you turn to Humpty Dumpty? I THINK you did--however, you'd better not mention it to your friends just yet, for I'm not sure. + +'By the way, Kitty, if only you'd been really with me in my dream, there was one thing you WOULD have enjoyed--I had such a quantity of poetry said to me, all about fishes! To-morrow morning you shall have a real treat. All the time you're eating your breakfast, I'll repeat "The Walrus and the Carpenter" to you; and then you can make believe it's oysters, dear! + +'Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should NOT go on licking your paw like that--as if Dinah hadn't washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it MUST have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course--but then I was part of his dream, too! WAS it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know--Oh, Kitty, DO help to settle it! I'm sure your paw can wait!' But the provoking kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn't heard the question. + +Which do YOU think it was? + +poem{ + + A boat beneath a sunny sky, + Lingering onward dreamily + In an evening of July-- + + Children three that nestle near, + Eager eye and willing ear, + Pleased a simple tale to hear-- + + Long has paled that sunny sky: + Echoes fade and memories die. + Autumn frosts have slain July. + + Still she haunts me, phantomwise, + Alice moving under skies + Never seen by waking eyes. + + Children yet, the tale to hear, + Eager eye and willing ear, + Lovingly shall nestle near. + + In a Wonderland they lie, + Dreaming as the days go by, + Dreaming as the summers die: + + Ever drifting down the stream-- + Lingering in the golden gleam-- + Life, what is it but a dream? + +}poem + +THE END diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst b/data/samples/current/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dea81c8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst @@ -0,0 +1,5079 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Two Bits + :subtitle: The Cultural Significance of Free Software + +@creator: + :author: Kelty, Christopher M. + +@date: + :published: 2008 + +@rights: + :copyright: © 2008 Duke University Press \\ Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ \\ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland \\ Typeset in Charis (an Open Source font) by Achorn International \\ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data and republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed pages of this book. + :license: Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or by mail from Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, Calif. 94305, U.S.A. "NonCommercial" as defined in this license specifically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if sale does not result in a profit by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or NGO. \\ Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), which provided funds to help support the electronic interface of this book. \\ Two Bits is accessible on the Web at twobits.net. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;open source software:social aspects;software:development:geeks;anthropology:geeks;book:subject:anthropology|information society|geeks;society;programming;society:information society; + +@identifier: + :oclc: 183914703 + +% :isbn: 978082234264-9 + +@links: + { Two Bits home page }http://twobits.net/ + { Christopher M. Kelty }http://kelty.org/ + { Two Bits @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Two-Bits-Cultural-Significance-Software/dp/0822342642 + { Two Bits @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Two-Bits/Christopher-M-Kelty/e/9780822342649 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:C; break=1 + :italics: /Two Bits/i + :home_button_text: {Two Bits}http://twobits.net; {Christopher M. Kelty}http://kelty.org/ + :footer: {Two Bits}http://twobits.net; {Christopher M. Kelty}http://kelty.org/ +%:home_button_image: {2bits.png }http://twobits.net + +:A~ @title @author + +1~dedication Dedication + +To my parents, Anne and Ted + +1~preface Preface + +This is a book about Free Software, also known as Open Source Software, and is meant for anyone who wants to understand the cultural significance of Free Software. Two Bits explains how Free Software works and how it emerged in tandem with the Internet as both a technical and a social form. Understanding Free Software in detail is the best way to understand many contentious and confusing changes related to the Internet, to "commons," to software, and to networks. Whether you think first of e-mail, Napster, Wikipedia, MySpace, or Flickr; whether you think of the proliferation of databases, identity thieves, and privacy concerns; whether you think of traditional knowledge, patents on genes, the death of scholarly publishing, or compulsory licensing of AIDS medicine; whether you think of MoveOn.org or net neutrality or YouTube—the issues raised by these phenomena can be better understood by looking carefully at the emergence of Free Software. ,{[PAGE x]}, + +Why? Because it is in Free Software and its history that the issues raised—from intellectual property and piracy to online political advocacy and "social" software—were first figured out and confronted. Free Software’s roots stretch back to the 1970s and crisscross the histories of the personal computer and the Internet, the peaks and troughs of the information-technology and software industries, the transformation of intellectual property law, the innovation of organizations and "virtual" collaboration, and the rise of networked social movements. Free Software does not explain why these various changes have occurred, but rather how individuals and groups are responding: by creating new things, new practices, and new forms of life. It is these practices and forms of life—not the software itself—that are most significant, and they have in turn served as templates that others can use and transform: practices of sharing source code, conceptualizing openness, writing copyright (and copyleft) licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing for all of the above. There are explanations aplenty for why things are the way they are: it’s globalization, it’s the network society, it’s an ideology of transparency, it’s the virtualization of work, it’s the new flat earth, it’s Empire. We are drowning in the why, both popular and scholarly, but starving for the how. + +Understanding how Free Software works is not just an academic pursuit but an experience that transforms the lives and work of participants involved. Over the last decade, in fieldwork with software programmers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, artists, activists, and other geeks I have repeatedly observed that understanding how Free Software works results in a revelation. People—even (or, perhaps, especially) those who do not consider themselves programmers, hackers, geeks, or technophiles—come out of the experience with something like religion, because Free Software is all about the practices, not about the ideologies and goals that swirl on its surface. Free Software and its creators and users are not, as a group, antimarket or anticommercial; they are not, as a group, anti-intellectual property or antigovernment; they are not, as a group, pro- or anti- anything. In fact, they are not really a group at all: not a corporation or an organization; not an NGO or a government agency; not a professional society or an informal horde of hackers; not a movement or a research project. + +Free Software is, however, public; it is about making things public. This fact is key to comprehending its cultural significance, its ,{[PAGE xi]}, appeal, and its proliferation. Free Software is public in a particular way: it is a self-determining, collective, politically independent mode of creating very complex technical objects that are made publicly and freely available to everyone—a "commons," in common parlance. It is a practice of working through the promises of equality, fairness, justice, reason, and argument in a domain of technically complex software and networks, and in a context of powerful, lopsided laws about intellectual property. The fact that something public in this grand sense emerges out of practices so seemingly arcane is why the first urge of many converts is to ask: how can Free Software be "ported" to other aspects of life, such as movies, music, science or medicine, civil society, and education? It is this proselytizing urge and the ease with which the practices are spread that make up the cultural significance of Free Software. For better or for worse, we may all be using Free Software before we know it. + +1~ Acknowledgements + +Anthropology is dependent on strangers who become friends and colleagues—strangers who contribute the very essence of the work. In my case, these strangers are also hyperaware of issues of credit, reputation, acknowledgment, reuse, and modification of ideas and things. Therefore, the list is extensive and detailed. + +Sean Doyle and Adrian Gropper opened the doors to this project, providing unparalleled insight, hospitality, challenge, and curiosity. Axel Roch introduced me to Volker Grassmuck, and to much else. Volker Grassmuck introduced me to Berlin’s Free Software world and invited me to participate in the Wizards of OS conferences. Udhay Shankar introduced me to almost everyone I know, sometimes after the fact. Shiv Sastry helped me find lodging in Bangalore at his Aunt Anasuya Sastry’s house, which is called "Silicon Valley" and which was truly a lovely place to stay. Bharath Chari and Ram Sundaram let me haunt their office and cat-5 cables ,{[PAGE xiv]}, during one of the more turbulent periods of their careers. Glenn Otis Brown visited, drank, talked, invited, challenged, entertained, chided, encouraged, drove, was driven, and gave and received advice. Ross Reedstrom welcomed me to the Rice Linux Users’ Group and to Connexions. Brent Hendricks did yeoman’s work, suffering my questions and intrusions. Geneva Henry, Jenn Drummond, Chuck Bearden, Kathy Fletcher, Manpreet Kaur, Mark Husband, Max Starkenberg, Elvena Mayo, Joey King, and Joel Thierstein have been welcoming and enthusiastic at every meeting. Sid Burris has challenged and respected my work, which has been an honor. Rich Baraniuk listens to everything I say, for better or for worse; he is a magnificent collaborator and friend. + +James Boyle has been constantly supportive, for what feels like very little return on investment. Very few people get to read and critique and help reshape the argument and structure of a book, and to appear in it as well. Mario Biagioli helped me see the intricate strategy described in chapter 6. Stefan Helmreich read early drafts and transformed my thinking about networks. Manuel DeLanda explained the term assemblage to me. James Faubion corrected my thinking in chapter 2, helped me immeasurably with the Protestants, and has been an exquisitely supportive colleague and department chair. Mazyar Lotfalian and Melissa Cefkin provided their apartment and library, in which I wrote large parts of chapter 1. Matt Price and Michelle Murphy have listened patiently to me construct and reconstruct versions of this book for at least six years. Tom and Elizabeth Landecker provided hospitality and stunningly beautiful surroundings in which to rewrite parts of the book. Lisa Gitelman read carefully and helped explain issues about documentation and versioning that I discuss in chapter 4. Matt Ratto read and commented on chapters 4-7, convinced me to drop a useless distinction, and to clarify the conclusion to chapter 7. Shay David provided strategic insights about openness from his own work and pushed me to explain the point of recursive publics more clearly. Biella Coleman has been a constant interlocutor on the issues in this book—her contributions are too deep, too various, and too thorough to detail. Her own work on Free Software and hackers has been a constant sounding board and guide, and it has been a pleasure to work together on our respective texts. Kim Fortun helped me figure it all out. ,{[PAGE xv]}, + +George Marcus hired me into a fantastic anthropology department and has had immense faith in this project throughout its lifetime. Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier, and Andrew Lakoff have provided an extremely valuable setting—the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory—within which the arguments of this book developed in ways they could not have as a solitary project. Joe Dumit has encouraged and prodded and questioned and brainstormed and guided and inspired. Michael Fischer is the best mentor and advisor ever. He has read everything, has written much that precedes and shapes this work, and has been an unwavering supporter and friend throughout. + +Tish Stringer, Michael Powell, Valerie Olson, Ala Alazzeh, Lina Dib, Angela Rivas, Anthony Potoczniak, Ayla Samli, Ebru Kayaalp, Michael Kriz, Erkan Saka, Elise McCarthy, Elitza Ranova, Amanda Randall, Kris Peterson, Laura Jones, Nahal Naficy, Andrea Frolic, and Casey O’Donnell make my job rock. Scott McGill, Sarah Ellenzweig, Stephen Collier, Carl Pearson, Dan Wallach, Tracy Volz, Rich Doyle, Ussama Makdisi, Elora Shehabbudin, Michael Morrow, Taryn Kinney, Gregory Kaplan, Jane Greenberg, Hajime Nakatani, Kirsten Ostherr, Henning Schmidgen, Jason Danziger, Kayte Young, Nicholas King, Jennifer Fishman, Paul Drueke, Roberta Bivins, Sherri Roush, Stefan Timmermans, Laura Lark, and Susann Wilkinson either made Houston a wonderful place to be or provided an opportunity to escape it. I am especially happy that Thom Chivens has done both and more. + +The Center for the Study of Cultures provided me with a Faculty Fellowship in the fall of 2003, which allowed me to accomplish much of the work in conceptualizing the book. The Harvard History of Science Department and the MIT Program in History, Anthropology, and Social Studies of Science and Technology hosted me in the spring of 2005, allowing me to write most of chapters 7, 8, and 9. Rice University has been extremely generous in all respects, and a wonderful place to work. I’m most grateful for a junior sabbatical that gave me the chance to complete much of this book. John Hoffman graciously and generously allowed the use of the domain name twobits.net, in support of Free Software. Ken Wissoker, Courtney Berger, and the anonymous reviewers for Duke University Press have made this a much, much better book than when I started. ,{[PAGE xvi]}, + +My parents, Ted and Anne, and my brother, Kevin, have always been supportive and loving; though they claim to have no idea what I do, I nonetheless owe my small success to their constant support. Hannah Landecker has read and reread and rewritten every part of this work; she has made it and me better, and I love her dearly for it. Last, but not least, my new project, Ida Jane Kelty Landecker, is much cuter and smarter and funnier than Two Bits, and I love her for distracting me from it. + +1~introduction Introduction + +Introduction + +Around 1998 Free Software emerged from a happily subterranean and obscure existence stretching back roughly twenty years. At the very pinnacle of the dotcom boom, Free Software suddenly populated the pages of mainstream business journals, entered the strategy and planning discussions of executives, confounded the radar of political leaders and regulators around the globe, and permeated the consciousness of a generation of technophile teenagers growing up in the 1990s wondering how people ever lived without e-mail. Free Software appeared to be something shocking, something that economic history suggested could never exist: a practice of creating software—good software—that was privately owned, but freely and publicly accessible. Free Software, as its ambiguous moniker suggests, is both free from constraints and free of charge. Such characteristics seem to violate economic logic and the principles of private ownership and individual autonomy, yet there are tens of ,{[pg 2]}, millions of people creating this software and hundreds of millions more using it. Why? Why now? And most important: how? +={ Free Software +3 } + +Free Software is a set of practices for the distributed collaborative creation of software source code that is then made openly and freely available through a clever, unconventional use of copyright law.~{ A Note on Terminology: There is still debate about how to refer to Free Software, which is also known as Open Source Software. The scholarly community has adopted either FOSS or FLOSS (or F/LOSS): the former stands for the Anglo-American Free and Open Source Software; the latter stands for the continental Free, Libre and Open Source Software. Two Bits sticks to the simple term Free Software to refer to all of these things, except where it is specifically necessary to differentiate two or more names, or to specify people or events so named. The reason is primarily aesthetic and political, but Free Software is also the older term, as well as the one that includes issues of moral and social order. I explain in chapter 3 why there are two terms. }~ But it is much more: Free Software exemplifies a considerable reorientation of knowledge and power in contemporary society—a reorientation of power with respect to the creation, dissemination, and authorization of knowledge in the era of the Internet. This book is about the cultural significance of Free Software, and by cultural I mean much more than the exotic behavioral or sartorial traits of software programmers, fascinating though they be. By culture, I mean an ongoing experimental system, a space of modification and modulation, of figuring out and testing; culture is an experiment that is hard to keep an eye on, one that changes quickly and sometimes starkly. Culture as an experimental system crosses economies and governments, networked social spheres, and the infrastructure of knowledge and power within which our world functions today—or fails to. Free Software, as a cultural practice, weaves together a surprising range of places, objects, and people; it contains patterns, thresholds, and repetitions that are not simple or immediately obvious, either to the geeks who make Free Software or to those who want to understand it. It is my goal in this book to reveal some of those complex patterns and thresholds, both historically and anthropologically, and to explain not just what Free Software is but also how it has emerged in the recent past and will continue to change in the near future.~{ 2 Michael M. J. Fischer, "Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems." }~ +={ culture : + as experimental system ; + Free Software : + open source vs. +2 | as experimental system ; + Geeks +1 ; + Open Source : + Free Software vs. +2 ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +1 +} + +The significance of Free Software extends far beyond the arcane and detailed technical practices of software programmers and "geeks" (as I refer to them herein). Since about 1998, the practices and ideas of Free Software have extended into new realms of life and creativity: from software to music and film to science, engineering, and education; from national politics of intellectual property to global debates about civil society; from UNIX to Mac OS X and Windows; from medical records and databases to international disease monitoring and synthetic biology; from Open Source to open access. Free Software is no longer only about software—it exemplifies a more general reorientation of power and knowledge. +={ Open access +2 } + +The terms Free Software and Open Source don’t quite capture the extent of this reorientation or their own cultural significance. They ,{[pg 3]}, refer, quite narrowly, to the practice of creating software—an activity many people consider to be quite far from their experience. However, creating Free Software is more than that: it includes a unique combination of more familiar practices that range from creating and policing intellectual property to arguing about the meaning of "openness" to organizing and coordinating people and machines across locales and time zones. Taken together, these practices make Free Software distinct, significant, and meaningful both to those who create it and to those who take the time to understand how it comes into being. + +In order to analyze and illustrate the more general cultural significance of Free Software and its consequences, I introduce the concept of a "recursive public." A recursive public is a /{public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.}/ Free Software is one instance of this concept, both as it has emerged in the recent past and as it undergoes transformation and differentiation in the near future. There are other instances, including those that emerge from the practices of Free Software, such as Creative Commons, the Connexions project, and the Open Access movement in science. These latter instances may or may not be Free Software, or even "software" projects per se, but they are connected through the same practices, and what makes them significant is that they may also be "recursive publics" in the sense I explore in this book. Recursive publics, and publics generally, differ from interest groups, corporations, unions, professions, churches, and other forms of organization because of their focus on the radical technological modifiability of their own terms of existence. In any public there inevitably arises a moment when the question of how things are said, who controls the means of communication, or whether each and everyone is being properly heard becomes an issue. A legitimate public sphere is one that gives outsiders a way in: they may or may not be heard, but they do not have to appeal to any authority (inside or outside the organization) in order to have a voice.~{ So, for instance, when a professional society founded on charters and ideals for membership and qualification speaks as a public, it represents its members, as when the American Medical Association argues for or against changes to Medicare. However, if a new group—say, of nurses—seeks not only to participate in this discussion—which may be possible, even welcomed—but to change the structure of representation in order to give themselves status equal to doctors, this change is impossible, for it goes against the very aims and principles of the society. Indeed, the nurses will be urged to form their own society, not to join that of the doctors, a proposition which gives the lie to the existing structures of power. By contrast, a public is an entity that is less controlled and hence more agonistic, such that nurses might join, speak, and insist on changing the terms of debate, just as patients, scientists, or homeless people might. Their success, however, depends entirely on the force with which their actions transform the focus and terms of the public. Concepts of the public sphere have been roundly critiqued in the last twenty years for presuming that such "equality of access" is sufficient to achieve representation, when in fact other contextual factors (race, class, sex) inherently weight the representative power of different participants. But these are two different and overlapping problems: one cannot solve the problem of pernicious, invisible forms of inequality unless one first solves the problem of ensuring a certain kind of structural publicity. It is precisely the focus on maintaining publicity for a recursive public, over against massive and powerful corporate and governmental attempts to restrict it, that I locate as the central struggle of Free Software. Gender certainly influences who gets heard within Free Software, for example, but it is a mistake to focus on this inequality at the expense of the larger, more threatening form of political failure that Free Software addresses. And I think there are plenty of geeks—man, woman and animal—who share this sentiment. }~ Such publics are not inherently modifiable, but are made so—and maintained—through the practices of participants. It is possible for Free Software as we know it to cease to be public, or to become just one more settled ,{[pg 4]}, form of power, but my focus is on the recent past and near future of something that is (for the time being) public in a radical and novel way. +={ Connexions project ; + Creative Commons ; + public +6 ; + recursive public : + definition of +} + +The concept of a recursive public is not meant to apply to any and every instance of a public—it is not a replacement for the concept of a "public sphere"—but is intended rather to give readers a specific and detailed sense of the non-obvious, but persistent threads that form the warp and weft of Free Software and to analyze similar and related projects that continue to emerge from it as novel and unprecedented forms of publicity and political action. + +At first glance, the thread tying these projects together seems to be the Internet. And indeed, the history and cultural significance of Free Software has been intricately mixed up with that of the Internet over the last thirty years. The Internet is a unique platform—an environment or an infrastructure—for Free Software. But the Internet looks the way it does because of Free Software. Free Software and the Internet are related like figure and ground or like system and environment; neither are stable or unchanging in and of themselves, and there are a number of practical, technical, and historical places where the two are essentially indistinguishable. The Internet is not itself a recursive public, but it is something vitally important to that public, something about which such publics care deeply and act to preserve. Throughout this book, I will return to these three phenomena: the Internet, a heterogeneous and diverse, though singular, infrastructure of technologies and uses; Free Software, a very specific set of technical, legal, and social practices that now require the Internet; and recursive publics, an analytic concept intended to clarify the relation of the first two. +={ Internet +12 : + relation to Free Software ; + Free Software : + relation to Internet ; + public sphere : + theories of +} + +Both the Internet and Free Software are historically specific, that is, not just any old new media or information technology. But the Internet is many, many specific things to many, many specific people. As one reviewer of an early manuscript version of this book noted, "For most people, the Internet is porn, stock quotes, Al Jazeera clips of executions, Skype, seeing pictures of the grandkids, porn, never having to buy another encyclopedia, MySpace, e-mail, online housing listings, Amazon, Googling potential romantic interests, etc. etc." It is impossible to explain all of these things; the meaning and significance of the proliferation of digital pornography is a very different concern than that of the fall of the print encyclopedia ,{[pg 5]}, and the rise of Wikipedia. Yet certain underlying practices relate these diverse phenomena to one another and help explain why they have occurred at this time and in this technical, legal, and social context. By looking carefully at Free Software and its modulations, I suggest, one can come to a better understanding of the changes affecting pornography, Wikipedia, stock quotes, and many other wonderful and terrifying things.~{ Wikipedia is perhaps the most widely known and generally familiar example of what this book is about. Even though it is not identified as such, it is in fact a Free Software project and a "modulation" of Free Software as I describe it here. The non-technically inclined reader might keep Wikipedia in mind as an example with which to follow the argument of this book. I will return to it explicitly in part 3. However, for better or for worse, there will be no discussion of pornography. }~ +={ Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia) } + +Two Bits has three parts. Part I of this book introduces the reader to the concept of recursive publics by exploring the lives, works, and discussions of an international community of geeks brought together by their shared interest in the Internet. Chapter 1 asks, in an ethnographic voice, "Why do geeks associate with one another?" The answer—told via the story of Napster in 2000 and the standards process at the heart of the Internet—is that they are making a recursive public. Chapter 2 explores the words and attitudes of geeks more closely, focusing on the strange stories they tell (about the Protestant Reformation, about their practical everyday polymathy, about progress and enlightenment), stories that make sense of contemporary political economy in sometimes surprising ways. Central to part I is an explication of the ways in which geeks argue about technology but also argue with and through it, by building, modifying, and maintaining the very software, networks, and legal tools within which and by which they associate with one another. It is meant to give the reader a kind of visceral sense of why certain arrangements of technology, organization, and law—specifically that of the Internet and Free Software—are so vitally important to these geeks. +={ geeks ; + Napster ; + technology : + as argument +} + +Part II takes a step back from ethnographic engagement to ask, "What is Free Software and why has it emerged at this point in history?" Part II is a historically detailed portrait of the emergence of Free Software beginning in 1998-99 and stretching back in time as far as the late 1950s; it recapitulates part I by examining Free Software as an exemplar of a recursive public. The five chapters in part II tell a coherent historical story, but each is focused on a separate component of Free Software. The stories in these chapters help distinguish the figure of Free Software from the ground of the Internet. The diversity of technical practices, economic concerns, information technologies, and legal and organizational practices is huge, and these five chapters distinguish and describe the specific practices in their historical contexts and settings: practices of ,{[pg 6]}, proselytizing and arguing, of sharing, porting, and forking source code, of conceptualizing openness and open systems, of creating Free Software copyright, and of coordinating people and source code. +={ copyright +1 } + +Part III returns to ethnographic engagement, analyzing two related projects inspired by Free Software which modulate one or more of the five components discussed in part II, that is, which take the practices as developed in Free Software and experiment with making something new and different. The two projects are Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to develop an online scholarly textbook commons. By tracing the modulations of practices in detail, I ask, "Are these projects still Free Software?" and "Are these projects still recursive publics?" The answer to the first questions reveals how Free Software’s flexible practices are influencing specific forms of practice far from software programming, while the answer to the second question helps explain how Free Software, Creative Commons, Connexions, and projects like them are all related, strategic responses to the reorientation of power and knowledge. The conclusion raises a series of questions intended to help scholars looking at related phenomena. +={ Connexions project ; + Creative Commons ; + Practices : + five components of Free Software +} + +!_ Recursive Publics and the Reorientation of Power and Knowledge +={ public +3 ; + legitimacy : + circulation of knowledge and +8 ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +14 +} + +Governance and control of the creation and dissemination of knowledge have changed considerably in the context of the Internet over the last thirty years. Nearly all kinds of media are easier to produce, publish, circulate, modify, mash-up, remix, or reuse. The number of such creations, circulations, and borrowings has exploded, and the tools of knowledge creation and circulation—software and networks—have also become more and more pervasively available. The results have also been explosive and include anxieties about validity, quality, ownership and control, moral panics galore, and new concerns about the shape and legitimacy of global "intellectual property" systems. All of these concerns amount to a reorientation of knowledge and power that is incomplete and emergent, and whose implications reach directly into the heart of the legitimacy, certainty, reliability and especially the finality and temporality of ,{[pg 7]}, the knowledge and infrastructures we collectively create. It is a reorientation at once more specific and more general than the grand diagnostic claims of an "information" or "network" society, or the rise of knowledge work or knowledge-based economies; it is more specific because it concerns precise and detailed technical and legal practices, more general because it is a cultural reorientation, not only an economic or legal one. +={ information society } + +Free Software exemplifies this reorientation; it is not simply a technical pursuit but also the creation of a "public," a collective that asserts itself as a check on other constituted forms of power—like states, the church, and corporations—but which remains independent of these domains of power.~{ Although the term public clearly suggests private as its opposite, Free Software is not anticommercial. A very large amount of money, both real and notional, is involved in the creation of Free Software. The term recursive ,{[PAGE 313]}, market could also be used, in order to emphasize the importance (especially during the 1990s) of the economic features of the practice. The point is not to test whether Free Software is a "public" or a "market," but to construct a concept adequate to the practices that constitute it. }~ Free Software is a response to this reorientation that has resulted in a novel form of democratic political action, a means by which publics can be created and maintained in forms not at all familiar to us from the past. Free Software is a public of a particular kind: a recursive public. Recursive publics are publics concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and maintain the infrastructure that allows them to come into being in the first place and which, in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and the identities of the participants as creative and autonomous individuals. In the cases explored herein, that specific infrastructure includes the creation of the Internet itself, as well as its associated tools and structures, such as Usenet, e-mail, the World Wide Web (www), UNIX and UNIX-derived operating systems, protocols, standards, and standards processes. For the last thirty years, the Internet has been the subject of a contest in which Free Software has been both a central combatant and an important architect. +={ recursive public : + definition of +35 ; + technology : + politics of +} + +By calling Free Software a recursive public, I am doing two things: first, I am drawing attention to the democratic and political significance of Free Software and the Internet; and second, I am suggesting that our current understanding (both academic and colloquial) of what counts as a self-governing public, or even as "the public," is radically inadequate to understanding the contemporary reorientation of knowledge and power. The first case is easy to make: it is obvious that there is something political about Free Software, but most casual observers assume, erroneously, that it is simply an ideological stance and that it is anti-intellectual property or technolibertarian. I hope to show how geeks do not start with ideologies, but instead come to them through their involvement in the ,{[pg 8]}, practices of creating Free Software and its derivatives. To be sure, there are ideologues aplenty, but there are far more people who start out thinking of themselves as libertarians or liberators, but who become something quite different through their participation in Free Software. + +The second case is more complex: why another contribution to the debate about the public and public spheres? There are two reasons I have found it necessary to invent, and to attempt to make precise, the concept of a recursive public: the first is to signal the need to include within the spectrum of political activity the creation, modification, and maintenance of software, networks, and legal documents. Coding, hacking, patching, sharing, compiling, and modifying of software are forms of political action that now routinely accompany familiar political forms of expression like free speech, assembly, petition, and a free press. Such activities are expressive in ways that conventional political theory and social science do not recognize: they can both express and "implement" ideas about the social and moral order of society. Software and networks can express ideas in the conventional written sense as well as create (express) infrastructures that allow ideas to circulate in novel and unexpected ways. At an analytic level, the concept of a recursive public is a way of insisting on the importance to public debate of the unruly technical materiality of a political order, not just the embodied discourse (however material) about that order. Throughout this book, I raise the question of how Free Software and the Internet are themselves a public, as well as what that public actually makes, builds, and maintains. +={ public sphere : + recursive public vs. ; + technology : + as argument +} + +The second reason I use the concept of a recursive public is that conventional publics have been described as "self-grounding," as constituted only through discourse in the conventional sense of speech, writing, and assembly.~{ See, for example, Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 67-74. }~ Recursive publics are "recursive" not only because of the "self-grounding" of commitments and identities but also because they are concerned with the depth or strata of this self-grounding: the layers of technical and legal infrastructure which are necessary for, say, the Internet to exist as the infrastructure of a public. Every act of self-grounding that constitutes a public relies in turn on the existence of a medium or ground through which communication is possible—whether face-to-face speech, epistolary communication, or net-based assembly—and recursive publics relentlessly question the status of these media, suggesting ,{[pg 9]}, that they, too, must be independent for a public to be authentic. At each of these layers, technical and legal and organizational decisions can affect whether or not the infrastructure will allow, or even ensure, the continued existence of the recursive publics that are concerned with it. Recursive publics’ independence from power is not absolute; it is provisional and structured in response to the historically constituted layering of power and control within the infrastructures of computing and communication. +={ recursive public : + layers of +1 +} + +For instance, a very important aspect of the contemporary Internet, and one that has been fiercely disputed (recently under the banner of "net neutrality"), is its singularity: there is only one Internet. This was not an inevitable or a technically determined outcome, but the result of a contest in which a series of decisions were made about layers ranging from the very basic physical configuration of the Internet (packet-switched networks and routing systems indifferent to data types), to the standards and protocols that make it work (e.g., TCP/IP or DNS), to the applications that run on it (e-mail, www, ssh). The outcome of these decisions has been to privilege the singularity of the Internet and to champion its standardization, rather than to promote its fragmentation into multiple incompatible networks. These same kinds of decisions are routinely discussed, weighed, and programmed in the activity of various Free Software projects, as well as its derivatives. They are, I claim, decisions embedded in imaginations of order that are simultaneously moral and technical. +={ Internet : + singularity of ; + Net neutrality +} + +By contrast, governments, corporations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other institutions have plenty of reasons—profit, security, control—to seek to fragment the Internet. But it is the check on this power provided by recursive publics and especially the practices that now make up Free Software that has kept the Internet whole to date. It is a check on power that is by no means absolute, but is nonetheless rigorously and technically concerned with its legitimacy and independence not only from state-based forms of power and control, but from corporate, commercial, and nongovernmental power as well. To the extent that the Internet is public and extensible (including the capability of creating private subnetworks), it is because of the practices discussed herein and their culmination in a recursive public. + +Recursive publics respond to governance by directly engaging in, maintaining, and often modifying the infrastructure they seek, as a ,{[pg 10]}, public, to inhabit and extend—and not only by offering opinions or protesting decisions, as conventional publics do (in most theories of the public sphere). Recursive publics seek to create what might be understood, enigmatically, as a constantly "self-leveling" level playing field. And it is in the attempt to make the playing field self-leveling that they confront and resist forms of power and control that seek to level it to the advantage of one or another large constituency: state, government, corporation, profession. It is important to understand that geeks do not simply want to level the playing field to their advantage—they have no affinity or identity as such. Instead, they wish to devise ways to give the playing field a certain kind of agency, effected through the agency of many different humans, but checked by its technical and legal structure and openness. Geeks do not wish to compete qua capitalists or entrepreneurs unless they can assure themselves that (qua public actors) that they can compete fairly. It is an ethic of justice shot through with an aesthetic of technical elegance and legal cleverness. +={ affinity (of geeks) +1 ; + public sphere : + recursive public vs. +1 ; + modifiability +6 +} + +The fact that recursive publics respond in this way—through direct engagement and modification—is a key aspect of the reorientation of power and knowledge that Free Software exemplifies. They are reconstituting the relationship between liberty and knowledge in a technically and historically specific context. Geeks create and modify and argue about licenses and source code and protocols and standards and revision control and ideologies of freedom and pragmatism not simply because these things are inherently or universally important, but because they concern the relationship of governance to the freedom of expression and nature of consent. Source code and copyright licenses, revision control and mailing lists are the pamphlets, coffeehouses, and salons of the twenty-first century: Tischgesellschaften become Schreibtischgesellschaften.~{ Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, esp. 27-43. }~ +={ technology : + as argument +} + +The "reorientation of power and knowledge" has two key aspects that are part of the concept of recursive publics: availability and modifiability (or adaptability). Availability is a broad, diffuse, and familiar issue. It includes things like transparency, open governance or transparent organization, secrecy and freedom of information, and open access in science. Availability includes the business-school theories of "disintermediation" and "transparency and accountability" and the spread of "audit culture" and so-called neoliberal regimes of governance; it is just as often the subject of suspicion as it is a kind of moral mandate, as in the case of open ,{[pg 11]}, access to scientific results and publications.~{ Critiques of the demand for availability and the putatively inherent superiority of transparency include Coombe and Herman, "Rhetorical Virtues" and "Your Second Life?"; Christen, "Gone Digital"; and Anderson and Bowery, "The Imaginary Politics of Access to Knowledge." }~ All of these issues are certainly touched on in detailed and practical ways in the creation of Free Software. Debates about the mode of availability of information made possible in the era of the Internet range from digital-rights management and copy protection, to national security and corporate espionage, to scientific progress and open societies. +={ adaptability ; + modifiability +4 ; + availability : + open systems and +4 +} + +However, it is modifiability that is the most fascinating, and unnerving, aspect of the reorientation of power and knowledge. Modifiability includes the ability not only to access—that is, to reuse in the trivial sense of using something without restrictions—but to transform it for use in new contexts, to different ends, or in order to participate directly in its improvement and to redistribute or recirculate those improvements within the same infrastructures while securing the same rights for everyone else. In fact, the core practice of Free Software is the practice of reuse and modification of software source code. Reuse and modification are also the key ideas that projects modeled on Free Software (such as Connexions and Creative Commons) see as their goal. Creative Commons has as its motto "Culture always builds on the past," and they intend that to mean "through legal appropriation and modification." Connexions, which allows authors to create online bits and pieces of textbooks explicitly encourages authors to reuse work by other people, to modify it, and to make it their own. Modifiability therefore raises a very specific and important question about finality. When is something (software, a film, music, culture) finished? How long does it remain finished? Who decides? Or more generally, what does its temporality look like, and how does that temporality restructure political relationships? Such issues are generally familiar only to historians and literary scholars who understand the transformation of canons, the interplay of imitation and originality, and the theoretical questions raised, for instance, in textual scholarship. But the contemporary meaning of modification includes both a vast increase in the speed and scope of modifiability and a certain automation of the practice that was unfamiliar before the advent of sophisticated, distributed forms of software. +={ Connexions project ; + Creative Commons ; + finality +2 ; + modifiability : + implications for finality +2 ; + practices +3 +} + +Modifiability is an oft-claimed advantage of Free Software. It can be updated, modified, extended, or changed to deal with other changing environments: new hardware, new operating systems, unforeseen technologies, or new laws and practices. At an infrastructural level, such modifiability makes sense: it is a response to ,{[pg 12]}, and an alternative to technocratic forms of planning. It is a way of planning in the ability to plan out; an effort to continuously secure the ability to deal with surprise and unexpected outcomes; a way of making flexible, modifiable infrastructures like the Internet as safe as permanent, inflexible ones like roads and bridges. +={ planning +1 } + +But what is the cultural significance of modifiability? What does it mean to plan in modifiability to culture, to music, to education and science? At a clerical level, such a question is obvious whenever a scholar cannot recover a document written in WordPerfect 2.0 or on a disk for which there are no longer disk drives, or when a library archive considers saving both the media and the machines that read that media. Modifiability is an imperative for building infrastructures that can last longer. However, it is not only a solution to a clerical problem: it creates new possibilities and new problems for long-settled practices like publication, or the goals and structure of intellectual-property systems, or the definition of the finality, lifetime, monumentality, and especially, the identity of a work. Long-settled, seemingly unassailable practices—like the authority of published books or the power of governments to control information—are suddenly confounded and denaturalized by the techniques of modifiability. + +Over the last ten to fifteen years, as the Internet has spread exponentially and insinuated itself into the most intimate practices of all kinds of people, the issues of availability and modifiability and the reorientation of knowledge and power they signify have become commonplace. As this has happened, the significance and practices associated with Free Software have also spread—and been modulated in the process. These practices provide a material and meaningful starting point for an array of recursive publics who play with, modulate, and transform them as they debate and build new ways to share, create, license, and control their respective productions. They do not all share the same goals, immediate or long-term, but by engaging in the technical, legal, and social practices pioneered in Free Software, they do in fact share a "social imaginary" that defines a particular relationship between technology, organs of governance (whether state, corporate, or nongovernmental), and the Internet. Scientists in a lab or musicians in a band; scholars creating a textbook or social movements contemplating modes of organization and protest; government bureaucrats issuing data or journalists investigating corruption; corporations that manage ,{[pg 13]}, personal data or co-ops that monitor community development—all these groups and others may find themselves adopting, modulating, rejecting, or refining the practices that have made up Free Software in the recent past and will do so in the near future. +={ social imaginary } + +!_ Experiment and Modulation +={ cultural significance +1 ; + Free Software : + as experimental system +14 +} + +What exactly is Free Software? This question is, perhaps surprisingly, an incredibly common one in geek life. Debates about definition and discussions and denunciations are ubiquitous. As an anthropologist, I have routinely participated in such discussions and debates, and it is through my immediate participation that Two Bits opens. In part I I tell stories about geeks, stories that are meant to give the reader that classic anthropological sense of being thrown into another world. The stories reveal several general aspects of what geeks talk about and how they do so, without getting into what Free Software is in detail. I start in this way because my project started this way. I did not initially intend to study Free Software, but it was impossible to ignore its emergence and manifest centrality to geeks. The debates about the definition of Free Software that I participated in online and in the field eventually led me away from studying geeks per se and turned me toward the central research concern of this book: what is the cultural significance of Free Software? + +In part II what I offer is not a definition of Free Software, but a history of how it came to be. The story begins in 1998, with an important announcement by Netscape that it would give away the source code to its main product, Netscape Navigator, and works backward from this announcement into the stories of the UNIX operating system, "open systems," copyright law, the Internet, and tools for coordinating people and code. Together, these five stories constitute a description of how Free Software works as a practice. As a cultural analysis, these stories highlight just how experimental the practices are, and how individuals keep track of and modulate the practices along the way. +={ Netscape +1 ; + Netscape Navigator (application) ; + openness +3 ; + Open Systems +} + +Netscape’s decision came at an important point in the life of Free Software. It was at just this moment that Free Software was becoming aware of itself as a coherent movement and not just a diverse amalgamation of projects, tools, or practices. Ironically, this ,{[pg 14]}, recognition also betokened a split: certain parties started to insist that the movement be called "Open Source" software instead, to highlight the practical over the ideological commitments of the movement. The proposal itself unleashed an enormous public discussion about what defined Free Software (or Open Source). This enigmatic event, in which a movement became aware of itself at the same time that it began to question its mission, is the subject of chapter 3. I use the term movement to designate one of the five core components of Free Software: the practices of argument and disagreement about the meaning of Free Software. Through these practices of discussion and critique, the other four practices start to come into relief, and participants in both Free Software and Open Source come to realize something surprising: for all the ideological distinctions at the level of discourse, they are doing exactly the same thing at the level of practice. The affect-laden histrionics with which geeks argue about the definition of what makes Free Software free or Open Source open can be matched only by the sober specificity of the detailed practices they share. +={ movement (component of Free Software) ; + Free Software : + open source vs. ; + Open Source : + Free Software vs. ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) +} + +The second component of Free Software is just such a mundane activity: sharing source code (chapter 4). It is an essential and fundamentally routine practice, but one with a history that reveals the goals of software portability, the interactions of commercial and academic software development, and the centrality of source code (and not only of abstract concepts) in pedagogical settings. The details of "sharing" source code also form the story of the rise and proliferation of the UNIX operating system and its myriad derivatives. + +The third component, conceptualizing openness (chapter 5), is about the specific technical and "moral" meanings of openness, especially as it emerged in the 1980s in the computer industry’s debates over "open systems." These debates concerned the creation of a particular infrastructure, including both technical standards and protocols (a standard UNIX and protocols for networks), and an ideal market infrastructure that would allow open systems to flourish. Chapter 5 is the story of the failure to achieve a market infrastructure for open systems, in part due to a significant blind spot: the role of intellectual property. +={ Open Systems } + +The fourth component, applying copyright (and copyleft) licenses (chapter 6), involves the problem of intellectual property as it faced programmers and geeks in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this ,{[pg 15]}, chapter I detail the story of the first Free Software license—the GNU General Public License (GPL)—which emerged out of a controversy around a very famous piece of software called EMACS. The controversy is coincident with changing laws (in 1976 and 1980) and changing practices in the software industry—a general drift from trade secret to copyright protection—and it is also a story about the vaunted "hacker ethic" that reveals it in its native practical setting, rather than as a rarefied list of rules. +={ hacker ethic } + +The fifth component, the practice of coordination and collaboration (chapter 7), is the most talked about: the idea of tens or hundreds of thousands of people volunteering their time to contribute to the creation of complex software. In this chapter I show how novel forms of coordination developed in the 1990s and how they worked in the canonical cases of Apache and Linux; I also highlight how coordination facilitates the commitment to adaptability (or modifiability) over against planning and hierarchy, and how this commitment resolves the tension between individual virtuosity and the need for collective control. +={ adaptability ; + Apache (Free Software project) ; + coordination (component of Free Software) ; + Linux (Free Software project) +} + +Taken together, these five components make up Free Software—but they are not a definition. Within each of these five practices, many similar and dissimilar activities might reasonably be included. The point of such a redescription of the practices of Free Software is to conceptualize them as a kind of collective technical experimental system. Within each component are a range of differences in practice, from conventional to experimental. At the center, so to speak, are the most common and accepted versions of a practice; at the edges are more unusual or controversial versions. Together, the components make up an experimental system whose infrastructure is the Internet and whose "hypotheses" concern the reorientation of knowledge and power. +={ experiment, collective technical +2 } + +For example, one can hardly have Free Software without source code, but it need not be written in C (though the vast majority of it is); it can be written in Java or perl or TeX. However, if one stretches the meaning of source code to include music (sheet music as source and performance as binary), what happens? Is this still Free Software? What happens when both the sheet and the performance are "born digital"? Or, to take a different example, Free Software requires Free Software licenses, but the terms of these licenses are often changed and often heatedly discussed and vigilantly policed by geeks. What degree of change removes a license ,{[pg 16]}, from the realm of Free Software and why? How much flexibility is allowed? +={ TeX ; + perl (programming language) +} + +Conceived this way, Free Software is a system of thresholds, not of classification; the excitement that participants and observers sense comes from the modulation (experimentation) of each of these practices and the subsequent discovery of where the thresholds are. Many, many people have written their own "Free Software" copyright licenses, but only some of them remain within the threshold of the practice as defined by the system. Modulations happen whenever someone learns how some component of Free Software works and asks, "Can I try these practices out in some other domain?" +={ modulation : + of Free Software +4 ; + Free Software : + modulations of +} + +The reality of constant modulation means that these five practices do not define Free Software once and for all; they define it with respect to its constitution in the contemporary. It is a set of practices defined "around the point" 1998-99, an intensive coordinate space that allows one to explore Free Software’s components prospectively and retrospectively: into the near future and the recent past. Free Software is a machine for charting the (re)emergence of a problematic of power and knowledge as it is filtered through the technical realities of the Internet and the political and economic configuration of the contemporary. Each of these practices has its own temporality of development and emergence, but they have recently come together into this full house called either Free Software or Open Source.~{ This description of Free Software could also be called an "assemblage." The most recent source for this is Rabinow, Anthropos Today. The language of thresholds and intensities is most clearly developed by Manuel DeLanda in A Thousand Years of Non-linear History and in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. The term problematization, from Rabinow (which he channels from Foucault), is a synonym for the phrase "reorientation of knowledge and power" as I use it here. }~ + +Viewing Free Software as an experimental system has a strategic purpose in Two Bits. It sets the stage for part III, wherein I ask what kinds of modulations might no longer qualify as Free Software per se, but still qualify as recursive publics. It was around 2000 that talk of "commons" began to percolate out of discussions about Free Software: commons in educational materials, commons in biodiversity materials, commons in music, text, and video, commons in medical data, commons in scientific results and data.~{ See Kelty, "Culture’s Open Sources." }~ On the one hand, it was continuous with interest in creating "digital archives" or "online collections" or "digital libraries"; on the other hand, it was a conjugation of the digital collection with the problems and practices of intellectual property. The very term commons—at once a new name and a theoretical object of investigation—was meant to suggest something more than simply a collection, whether of ,{[pg 17]}, digital objects or anything else; it was meant to signal the public interest, collective management, and legal status of the collection.~{ The genealogy of the term commons has a number of sources. An obvious source is Garrett Hardin’s famous 1968 article "The Tragedy of the Commons." James Boyle has done more than anyone to specify the term, especially during a 2001 conference on the public domain, which included the inspired guest-list juxtaposition of the appropriation-happy musical collective Negativland and the dame of "commons" studies, Elinor Ostrom, whose book Governing the Commons has served as a certain inspiration for thinking about commons versus public domains. Boyle, for his part, has ceaselessly pushed the "environmental" metaphor of speaking for the public domain as environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s spoke for the environment (see Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain" and "A Politics of Intellectual Property"). The term commons is useful in this context precisely because it distinguishes the "public domain" as an imagined object of pure public transaction and coordination, as opposed to a "commons," which can consist of privately owned things/spaces that are managed in such a fashion that they effectively function like a "public domain" is imagined to (see Boyle, "The Public Domain"; Hess and Ostrom, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons). }~ +={ commons +2 } + +In part III, I look in detail at two "commons" understood as modulations of the component practices of Free Software. Rather than treating commons projects simply as metaphorical or inspirational uses of Free Software, I treat them as modulations, which allows me to remain directly connected to the changing practices involved. The goal of part III is to understand how commons projects like Connexions and Creative Commons breach the thresholds of these practices and yet maintain something of the same orientation. What changes, for instance, have made it possible to imagine new forms of free content, free culture, open source music, or a science commons? What happens as new communities of people adopt and modulate the five component practices? Do they also become recursive publics, concerned with the maintenance and expansion of the infrastructures that allow them to come into being in the first place? Are they concerned with the implications of availability and modifiability that continue to unfold, continue to be figured out, in the realms of education, music, film, science, and writing? +={ Connexions project +1 ; + Creative Commons +1 ; + figuring out +1 ; + modifiability +1 +} + +The answers in part III make clear that, so far, these concerns are alive and well in the modulations of Free Software: Creative Commons and Connexions each struggle to come to terms with new ways of creating, sharing, and reusing content in the contemporary legal environment, with the Internet as infrastructure. Chapters 8 and 9 provide a detailed analysis of a technical and legal experiment: a modulation that begins with source code, but quickly requires modulations in licensing arrangements and forms of coordination. It is here that Two Bits provides the most detailed story of figuring out set against the background of the reorientation of knowledge and power. This story is, in particular, one of reuse, of modifiability and the problems that emerge in the attempt to build it into the everyday practices of pedagogical writing and cultural production of myriad forms. Doing so leads the actors involved directly to the question of the existence and ontology of norms: norms of scholarly production, borrowing, reuse, citation, reputation, and ownership. These last chapters open up questions about the stability of modern knowledge, not as an archival or a legal problem, but as a social and normative one; they raise questions about the invention and control of norms, and the forms of life that may emerge from these ,{[pg 18]}, practices. Recursive publics come to exist where it is clear that such invention and control need to be widely shared, openly examined, and carefully monitored. +={ norms : + existence of +} + +!_ Three Ways of Looking at Two Bits + +Two Bits makes three kinds of scholarly contributions: empirical, methodological, and theoretical. Because it is based largely on fieldwork (which includes historical and archival work), these three contributions are often mixed up with each other. Fieldwork, especially in cultural and social anthropology in the last thirty years, has come to be understood less and less as one particular tool in a methodological toolbox, and more and more as distinctive mode of epistemological encounter.~{ Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique; Marcus and Clifford, Writing Culture; Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice; Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin; Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason and Anthropos Today. }~ The questions I began with emerged out of science and technology studies, but they might end up making sense to a variety of fields, ranging from legal studies to computer science. + +Empirically speaking, the actors in my stories are figuring something out, something unfamiliar, troubling, imprecise, and occasionally shocking to everyone involved at different times and to differing extents.~{ The language of "figuring out" has its immediate source in the work of Kim Fortun, "Figuring Out Ethnography." Fortun’s work refines two other sources, the work of Bruno Latour in Science in Action and that of Hans-Jorg Rheinberger in Towards History of Epistemic Things. Latour describes the difference between "science made" and "science in the making" and how the careful analysis of new objects can reveal how they come to be. Rheinberger extends this approach through analysis of the detailed practices involved in figuring out a new object or a new process—practices which participants cannot quite name or explain in precise terms until after the fact. }~ There are two kinds of figuring-out stories: the contemporary ones in which I have been an active participant (those of Connexions and Creative Commons), and the historical ones conducted through "archival" research and rereading of certain kinds of texts, discussions, and analyses-at-the-time (those of UNIX, EMACS, Linux, Apache, and Open Systems). Some are stories of technical figuring out, but most are stories of figuring out a problem that appears to have emerged. Some of these stories involve callow and earnest actors, some involve scheming and strategy, but in all of them the figuring out is presented "in the making" and not as something that can be conveniently narrated as obvious and uncontested with the benefit of hindsight. Throughout this book, I tell stories that illustrate what geeks are like in some respects, but, more important, that show them in the midst of figuring things out—a practice that can happen both in discussion and in the course of designing, planning, executing, writing, debugging, hacking, and fixing. +={ Connexions project ; + Creative Commons ; + figuring out +1 +} + +There are also myriad ways in which geeks narrate their own actions to themselves and others, as they figure things out. Indeed, ,{[pg 19]}, there is no crisis of representing the other here: geeks are vocal, loud, persistent, and loquacious. The superalterns can speak for themselves. However, such representations should not necessarily be taken as evidence that geeks provide adequate analytic or critical explanations of their own actions. Some of the available writing provides excellent description, but distracting analysis. Eric Raymond’s work is an example of such a combination.~{ Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. }~ Over the course of my fieldwork, Raymond’s work has always been present as an excellent guide to the practices and questions that plague geeks—much like a classic "principal informant" in anthropology. And yet his analyses, which many geeks subscribe to, are distracting. They are fanciful, occasionally enjoyable and enlightening—but they are not about the cultural significance of Free Software. As such I am less interested in treating geeks as natives to be explained and more interested in arguing with them: the people in Two Bits are a sine qua non of the ethnography, but they are not the objects of its analysis.~{ The literature on "virtual communities," "online communities," the culture of hackers and geeks, or the social study of information technology offers important background information, although it is not the subject of this book. A comprehensive review of work in anthropology and related disciplines is Wilson and Peterson, "The Anthropology of Online Communities." Other touchstones are Miller and Slater, The Internet; Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy; Hine, Virtual Ethnography; Kling, Computerization and Controversy; Star, The Cultures of Computing; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society; Boczkowski, Digitizing the News. Most social-science work in information technology has dealt with questions of inequality and the so-called digital divide, an excellent overview being DiMaggio et al., "From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use." Beyond works in anthropology and science studies, a number of works from various other disciplines have recently taken up similar themes, especially Adrian MacKenzie, Cutting Code; Galloway, Protocol; Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom; and Liu, Laws of Cool. By contrast, if social-science studies of information technology are set against a background of historical and ethnographic studies of "figuring out" problems of specific information technologies, software, or networks, then the literature is sparse. Examples of anthropology and science studies of figuring out include Barry, Political Machines; Hayden, When Nature Goes Public; and Fortun, Advocating Bhopal. Matt Ratto has also portrayed this activity in Free Software in his dissertation, "The Pressure of Openness." }~ +={ ethnography +1 ; + geeks : + self-representation ; + Raymond, Eric Steven +1 ; + Cathedral and the Bazaar +} + +Because the stories I tell here are in fact recent by the standards of historical scholarship, there is not much by way of comparison in terms of the empirical material. I rely on a number of books and articles on the history of the early Internet, especially Janet Abbate’s scholarship and the single historical work on UNIX, Peter Salus’s A Quarter Century of Unix.~{ In addition to Abbate and Salus, see Norberg and O’Neill, Transforming Computer Technology; Naughton, A Brief History of the Future; Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late; Waldrop, The Dream Machine; Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1. For a classic autodocumentation of one aspect of the Internet, see Hauben and Hauben, Netizens. }~ There are also a couple of excellent journalistic works, such as Glyn Moody’s Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution (which, like Two Bits, relies heavily on the novel accessibility of detailed discussions carried out on public mailing lists). Similarly, the scholarship on Free Software and its history is just starting to establish itself around a coherent set of questions.~{ Kelty, "Culture’s Open Sources"; Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom"; Ratto, "The Pressure of Openness"; Joseph Feller et al., Perspectives ,{[pg 315]}, on Free and Open Source Software; see also http://freesoftware.mit.edu/, organized by Karim Lakhani, which is a large collection of work on Free Software projects. Early work in this area derived both from the writings of practitioners such as Raymond and from business and management scholars who noticed in Free Software a remarkable, surprising set of seeming contradictions. The best of these works to date is Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source. Weber’s conclusions are similar to those presented here, and he has a kind of cryptoethnographic familiarity (that he does not explicitly avow) with the actors and practices. Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks extends and generalizes some of Weber’s argument. }~ +={ Moody, Glyn ; + Salus, Peter +} + +Methodologically, Two Bits provides an example of how to study distributed phenomena ethnographically. Free Software and the Internet are objects that do not have a single geographic site at which they can be studied. Hence, this work is multisited in the simple sense of having multiple sites at which these objects were investigated: Boston, Bangalore, Berlin, Houston. It was conducted among particular people, projects, and companies and at conferences and online gatherings too numerous to list, but it has not been a study of a single Free Software project distributed around the globe. In all of these places and projects the geeks I worked with were randomly and loosely affiliated people with diverse lives and histories. Some ,{[pg 20]}, identified as Free Software hackers, but most did not. Some had never met each other in real life, and some had. They represented multiple corporations and institutions, and came from diverse nations, but they nonetheless shared a certain set of ideas and idioms that made it possible for me to travel from Boston to Berlin to Bangalore and pick up an ongoing conversation with different people, in very different places, without missing a beat. +={ Berlin ; + distributed phenomena, ethnography of +6 +} + +The study of distributed phenomena does not necessarily imply the detailed, local study of each instance of a phenomenon, nor does it necessitate visiting every relevant geographical site—indeed, such a project is not only extremely difficult, but confuses map and territory. As Max Weber put it, "It is not the ‘actual’ inter-connection of ‘things’ but the conceptual inter-connection of problems that define the scope of the various sciences."~{ Max Weber, "Objectivity in the Social Sciences and Social Policy," 68. }~ The decisions about where to go, whom to study, and how to think about Free Software are arbitrary in the precise sense that because the phenomena are so widely distributed, it is possible to make any given node into a source of rich and detailed knowledge about the distributed phenomena itself, not only about the local site. Thus, for instance, the Connexions project would probably have remained largely unknown to me had I not taken a job in Houston, but it nevertheless possesses precise, identifiable connections to the other sites and sets of people that I have studied, and is therefore recognizable as part of this distributed phenomena, rather than some other. I was actively looking for something like Connexions in order to ask questions about what was becoming of Free Software and how it was transforming. Had there been no Connexions in my back yard, another similar field site would have served instead. +={ Weber, Max } + +It is in this sense that the ethnographic object of this study is not geeks and not any particular project or place or set of people, but Free Software and the Internet. Even more precisely, the ethnographic object of this study is "recursive publics"—except that this concept is also the work of the ethnography, not its preliminary object. I could not have identified "recursive publics" as the object of the ethnography at the outset, and this is nice proof that ethnographic work is a particular kind of epistemological encounter, an encounter that requires considerable conceptual work during and after the material labor of fieldwork, and throughout the material labor of writing and rewriting, in order to make sense of and reorient it into a question that will have looked deliberate and ,{[pg 21]}, answerable in hindsight. Ethnography of this sort requires a long-term commitment and an ability to see past the obvious surface of rapid transformation to a more obscure and slower temporality of cultural significance, yet still pose questions and refine debates about the near future.~{ Despite what might sound like a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach, the design of this project was in fact conducted according to specific methodologies. The most salient is actor-network theory: Latour, Science in Action; Law, "Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering"; Callon, "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation"; Latour, Pandora’s Hope; Latour, Re-assembling the Social; Callon, Laws of the Markets; Law and Hassard, Actor Network Theory and After. Ironically, there have been no actor-network studies of networks, which is to say, of particular information and communication technologies such as the Internet. The confusion of the word network (as an analytical and methodological term) with that of network (as a particular configuration of wires, waves, software, and chips, or of people, roads, and buses, or of databases, names, and diseases) means that it is necessary to always distinguish this-network-here from any-network-whatsoever. My approach shares much with the ontological questions raised in works such as Law, Aircraft Stories; Mol, The Body Multiple; Cussins, "Ontological Choreography"; Charis Thompson, Making Parents; and Dumit, Picturing Personhood. }~ Historically speaking, the chapters of part II can be understood as a contribution to a history of scientific infrastructure—or perhaps to an understanding of large-scale, collective experimentation.~{ I understand a concern with scientific infrastructure to begin with Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air Pump, but the genealogy is no doubt more complex. It includes Shapin, The Social History of Truth; Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier; Galison, How Experiments End and Image and Logic; Daston, Biographies of Scientific Objects; Johns, The Nature of the Book. A whole range of works explore the issue of scientific tools and infrastructure: Kohler, Lords of the Fly; Rheinberger, Towards a History of Epistemic Things; Landecker, Culturing Life; Keating and Cambrosio, Biomedical Platforms. Bruno Latour’s "What Rules of Method for the New Socio-scientific Experiments" provides one example of where science studies might go with these questions. Important texts on the subject of technical infrastructures include Walsh and Bayma, "Computer Networks and Scientific Work"; Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out; Edwards, The ,{[pg 316]}, Closed World; Misa, Brey, and Feenberg, Modernity and Technology; Star and Ruhleder, "Steps Towards an Ecology of Infrastructure." }~ The Internet and Free Software are each an important practical transformation that will have effects on the practice of science and a kind of complex technical practice for which there are few existing models of study. +={ Actor Network Theory ; + Internet +1 +} + +A methodological note about the peculiarity of my subject is also in order. The Attentive Reader will note that there are very few fragments of conventional ethnographic material (i.e., interviews or notes) transcribed herein. Where they do appear, they tend to be "publicly available"—which is to say, accessible via the Internet—and are cited as such, with as much detail as necessary to allow the reader to recover them. Conventional wisdom in both anthropology and history has it that what makes a study interesting, in part, is the work a researcher has put into gathering that which is not already available, that is, primary sources as opposed to secondary sources. In some cases I provide that primary access (specifically in chapters 2, 8, and 9), but in many others it is now literally impossible: nearly everything is archived. Discussions, fights, collaborations, talks, papers, software, articles, news stories, history, old software, old software manuals, reminiscences, notes, and drawings—it is all saved by someone, somewhere, and, more important, often made instantly available by those who collect it. The range of conversations and interactions that count as private (either in the sense of disappearing from written memory or of being accessible only to the parties involved) has shrunk demonstrably since about 1981. +={ ethnographic data : + availability of +5 +} + +Such obsessive archiving means that ethnographic research is stratified in time. Questions that would otherwise have required "being there" are much easier to research after the fact, and this is most evident in my reconstruction from sources on USENET and mailing lists in chapters 1, 6, and 7. The overwhelming availability of quasi-archival materials is something I refer to, in a play on the EMACS text editor, as "self-documenting history." That is to say, one of the activities that geeks love to participate in, and encourage, is the creation, analysis, and archiving of their own roles in the ,{[pg 22]}, development of the Internet. No matter how obscure or arcane, it seems most geeks have a well-developed sense of possibility—their contribution could turn out to have been transformative, important, originary. What geeks may lack in social adroitness, they make up for in archival hubris. + +Finally, the theoretical contribution of Two Bits consists of a refinement of debates about publics, public spheres, and social imaginaries that appear troubled in the context of the Internet and Free Software. Terminology such as virtual community, online community, cyberspace, network society, or information society are generally not theoretical constructs, but ways of designating a subgenre of disciplinary research having to do with electronic networks. The need for a more precise analysis of the kinds of association that take place on and through information technology is clear; the first step is to make precise which information technologies and which specific practices make a difference. +={ public sphere : + theories of +3 ; + social imaginary +2 ; + information society : + see also public sphere +} + +There is a relatively large and growing literature on the Internet as a public sphere, but such literature is generally less concerned with refining the concept through research and more concerned with pronouncing whether or not the Internet fits Habermas’s definition of the bourgeois public sphere, a definition primarily conceived to account for the eighteenth century in Britain, not the twenty-first-century Internet.~{ Dreyfus, On the Internet; Dean, "Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere." }~ The facts of technical and human life, as they unfold through the Internet and around the practices of Free Software, are not easy to cram into Habermas’s definition. The goal of Two Bits is not to do so, but to offer conceptual clarity based in ethnographic fieldwork. +={ Habermas, Jürgen +2 } + +The key texts for understanding the concept of recursive publics are the works of Habermas, Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries, and Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic and Publics and Counterpublics. Secondary texts that refine these notions are John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Here it is not the public sphere per se that is the center of analysis, but the "ideas of modern moral and social order" and the terminology of "modern social imaginaries."~{ In addition, see Lippmann, The Phantom Public; Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere; Latour and Weibel, Making Things Public. The debate about social imaginaries begins alternately with Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities or with Cornelius Castoriadis’s The Imaginary Institution of Society; see also Chatterjee, "A Response to Taylor’s ‘Modes of Civil Society’"; Gaonkar, "Toward New Imaginaries"; Charles Taylor, "Modes of Civil Society" and Sources of the Self. }~ I find these concepts to be useful as starting points for a very specific reason: to distinguish the meaning of moral order from the meaning of moral and technical order that I explore with respect to geeks. I do not seek to test the concept of social imaginary here, but to build something on top of it. ,{[pg 23]}, +={ Arendt, Hannah ; + Taylor, Charles +} + +If recursive public is a useful concept, it is because it helps elaborate the general question of the "reorientation of knowledge and power." In particular it is meant to bring into relief the ways in which the Internet and Free Software are related to the political economy of modern society through the creation not only of new knowledge, but of new infrastructures for circulating, maintaining, and modifying it. Just as Warner’s book The Letters of the Republic was concerned with the emergence of the discourse of republicanism and the simultaneous development of an American republic of letters, or as Habermas’s analysis was concerned with the relationship of the bourgeois public sphere to the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, this book asks a similar series of questions: how are the emergent practices of recursive publics related to emerging relations of political and technical life in a world that submits to the Internet and its forms of circulation? Is there still a role for a republic of letters, much less a species of public that can seriously claim independence and autonomy from other constituted forms of power? Are Habermas’s pessimistic critiques of the bankruptcy of the public sphere in the twentieth century equally applicable to the structures of the twenty-first century? Or is it possible that recursive publics represent a reemergence of strong, authentic publics in a world shot through with cynicism and suspicion about mass media, verifiable knowledge, and enlightenment rationality? +[PAGE 24: BLANK] + +:B~ Part I the internet + +1~part1 [the internet] -# + +_1 The concept of the state, like most concepts which are introduced by "The," is both too rigid and too tied up with controversies to be of ready use. It is a concept which can be approached by a flank movement more easily than by a frontal attack. The moment we utter the words "The State" a score of intellectual ghosts rise to obscure our vision. Without our intention and without our notice, the notion of "The State" draws us imperceptibly into a consideration of the logical relationship of various ideas to one another, and away from the facts of human activity. It is better, if possible, to start from the latter and see if we are not led thereby into an idea of something which will turn out to implicate the marks and signs which characterize political behavior. +={ Dewey, John } + +- john dewey, /{The Public and Its Problems}/ + +1~ 1. Geeks and Recursive Publics +={ recursive public +12 ; + geeks +6 +} + +% Geek entry added here as seems implied as relevant to section + +Since about 1997, I have been living with geeks online and off. I have been drawn from Boston to Bangalore to Berlin to Houston to Palo Alto, from conferences and workshops to launch parties, pubs, and Internet Relay Chats (IRCs). All along the way in my research questions of commitment and practice, of ideology and imagination have arisen, even as the exact nature of the connections between these people and ideas remained obscure to me: what binds geeks together? As my fieldwork pulled me from a Boston start-up company that worked with radiological images to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurial elites in Bangalore, my logistical question eventually developed into an analytical concept: geeks are bound together as a recursive public. +={ Berlin +2 ; + Internet +5 +} + +How did I come to understand geeks as a public constituted around the technical and moral ideas of order that allow them to associate with one another? Through this question, one can start to understand the larger narrative of Two Bits: that of Free Software ,{[pg 28]}, as an exemplary instance of a recursive public and as a set of practices that allow such publics to expand and spread. In this chapter I describe, ethnographically, the diverse, dispersed, and as an exemplary instance of a recursive public and as a set of practices that allow such publics to expand and spread. In this chapter I describe, ethnographically, the diverse, dispersed, and novel forms of entanglements that bind geeks together, and I construct the concept of a recursive public in order to explain these entanglements. +={ ethnography +1 ; + moral and technical order +3 +} + +A recursive public is a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public. Geeks find affinity with one another because they share an abiding moral imagination of the technical infrastructure, the Internet, that has allowed them to develop and maintain this affinity in the first place. I elaborate the concept of recursive public (which is not a term used by geeks) in relation to theories of ideology, publics, and public spheres and social imaginaries. I illustrate the concept through ethnographic stories and examples that highlight geeks’ imaginations of the technical and moral order of the Internet. These stories include those of the fate of Amicas, a Boston-based healthcare start-up, between 1997 and 2003, of my participation with new media academics and activists in Berlin in 1999-2001, and of the activities of a group of largely Bangalore-based information technology (IT) professionals on and offline, especially concerning the events surrounding the peer-topeer file sharing application Napster in 2000-2001. +={ affinity (of geeks) +3 ; + Napster +2 +} + +The phrase "moral and technical order" signals both technology—principally software, hardware, networks, and protocols—and an imagination of the proper order of collective political and commercial action, that is, how economy and society should be ordered collectively. Recursive publics are just as concerned with the moral order of markets as they are with that of commons; they are not anticommercial or antigovernment. They exist independent of, and as a check on, constituted forms of power, which include markets and corporations. Unlike other concepts of a public or of a public sphere, "recursive public" captures the fact that geeks’ principal mode of associating and acting is through the medium of the Internet, and it is through this medium that a recursive public can come into being in the first place. The Internet is not itself a public sphere, a public, or a recursive public, but a complex, heterogeneous infrastructure that constitutes and constrains geeks’ everyday practical commitments, their ability to "become public" or to compose a common world. As such, their participation qua recursive publics structures their identity as creative and autonomous ,{[pg 29]}, individuals. The fact that the geeks described here have been brought together by mailing lists and e-mail, bulletin-board services and Web sites, books and modems, air travel and academia, and cross-talking and cross-posting in ways that were not possible before the Internet is at the core of their own reasoning about why they associate with each other. They are the builders and imaginers of this space, and the space is what allows them to build and imagine it. + +Why recursive? I call such publics recursive for two reasons: first, in order to signal that this kind of public includes the activities of making, maintaining, and modifying software and networks, as well as the more conventional discourse that is thereby enabled; and second, in order to suggest the recursive "depth" of the public, the series of technical and legal layers—from applications to protocols to the physical infrastructures of waves and wires—that are the subject of this making, maintaining, and modifying. The first of these characteristics is evident in the fact that geeks use technology as a kind of argument, for a specific kind of order: they argue about technology, but they also argue through it. They express ideas, but they also express infrastructures through which ideas can be expressed (and circulated) in new ways. The second of these characteristics—regarding layers—is reflected in the ability of geeks to immediately see connections between, for example, Napster (a user application) and TCP/IP (a network protocol) and to draw out implications for both of them. By connecting these layers, Napster comes to represent the Internet in miniature. The question of where these layers stop (hardware? laws and regulations? physical constants? etc.) circumscribes the limits of the imagination of technical and moral order shared by geeks. +={ recursive public : + layers of ; + technology : + as argument +} + +Above all, "recursive public" is a concept—not a thing. It is intended to make distinctions, allow comparison, highlight salient features, and relate two diverse kinds of things (the Internet and Free Software) in a particular historical context of changing relations of power and knowledge. The stories in this chapter (and throughout the book) give some sense of how geeks interact and what they do technically and legally, but the concept of a recursive public provides a way of explaining why geeks (or people involved in Free Software or its derivatives) associate with one another, as well as a way of testing whether other similar cases of contemporary, technologically mediated affinity are similarly structured. ,{[pg 30]}, + +!_ Recursion +={ recursion, definition of +5 } + + +_1 Recursion (or "recursive") is a mathematical concept, one which is a standard feature of any education in computer programming. The definition from the Oxford English Dictionary reads: "2. a. Involving or being a repeated procedure such that the required result at each step except the last is given in terms of the result(s) of the next step, until after a finite number of steps a terminus is reached with an outright evaluation of the result." It should be distinguished from simple iteration or repetition. Recursion is always subject to a limit and is more like a process of repeated deferral, until the last step in the process, at which point all the deferred steps are calculated and the result given. + +_1 Recursion is powerful in programming because it allows for the definition of procedures in terms of themselves—something that seems at first counterintuitive. So, for example, + +group{ + + ; + otherwise return n times factorial of n-1; + (defun (factorial n) ; This is the name of the function and its input n. + (if (=n 1) ; This is the final limit, or recursive depth + 1 ; if n=1, then return 1 + (* n (factorial (- n 1))))) + ; + call the procedure from within itself, and + ; + calculate the next step of the result before + ; + giving an answer.1 + +}group +={ Abelson, Hal } + +_1 In Two Bits a recursive public is one whose existence (which consists solely in address through discourse) is only possible through discursive and technical reference to the means of creating this public. Recursiveness is always contingent on a limit which determines the depth of a recursive procedure. So, for instance, a Free Software project may depend on some other kind of software or operating system, which may in turn depend on particular open protocols or a particular process, which in turn depend on certain kinds of hardware that implement them. The "depth" of recursion is determined by the openness necessary for the project itself. +={ recursive public : + layers of +} + +_1 James Boyle has also noted the recursive nature, in particular, of Free Software: "What’s more, and this is a truly fascinating twist, when the production process does need more centralized coordination, some governance that guides how the sticky modular bits are put together, it is at least theoretically possible that we can come up with the control system in exactly the same way. In this sense, distributed production is potentially recursive."2 +={ Boyle, James } + +_1 1. Abelson and Sussman, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, 30. + +_1 2. Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain," 46. ,{[pg 31]}, + +2~ From the Facts of Human Activity + +Boston, May 2003. Starbucks. Sean and Adrian are on their way to pick me up for dinner. I’ve already had too much coffee, so I sit at the window reading the paper. Eventually Adrian calls to find out where I am, I tell him, and he promises to show up in fifteen minutes. I get bored and go outside to wait, watch the traffic go by. More or less right on time (only post-dotcom is Adrian ever on time), Sean’s new blue VW Beetle rolls into view. Adrian jumps out of the passenger seat and into the back, and I get in. Sean has been driving for a little over a year. He seems confident, cautious, but meanders through the streets of Cambridge. We are destined for Winchester, a township on the Charles River, in order to go to an Indian restaurant that one of Sean’s friends has recommended. When I ask how they are doing, they say, "Good, good." Adrian offers, "Well, Sean’s better than he has been in two years." "Really?" I say, impressed. +={ Doyle, Sean +6 ; + Gropper, Adrian +6 +} + +Sean says, "Well, happier than at least the last year. I, well, let me put it this way: forgive me father for I have sinned, I still have unclean thoughts about some of the upper management in the company, I occasionally think they are not doing things in the best interest of the company, and I see them as self-serving and sometimes wish them ill." In this rolling blue confessional Sean describes some of the people who I am familiar with whom he now tries very hard not to think about. I look at him and say, "Ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers, and you will be absolved, my child." Turning to Adrian, I ask, "And what about you?" Adrian continues the joke: "I, too, have sinned. I have reached the point where I can see absolutely nothing good coming of this company but that I can keep my investments in it long enough to pay for my children’s college tuition." I say, "You, my son, I cannot help." Sean says, "Well, funny thing about tainted money . . . there just taint enough of it." + +I am awestruck. When I met Sean and Adrian, in 1997, their start-up company, Amicas, was full of spit, with five employees working out of Adrian’s living room and big plans to revolutionize the medical-imaging world. They had connived to get Massachusetts General Hospital to install their rudimentary system and let it compete with the big corporate sloths that normally stalked back offices: General Electric, Agfa, Siemens. It was these behemoths, according to Sean and Adrian, that were bilking hospitals ,{[pg 32]}, and healthcare providers with promises of cure-all technologies and horribly designed "silos," "legacy systems," and other closed-system monsters of corporate IT harkening back to the days of IBM mainframes. These beasts obviously did not belong to the gleaming future of Internet-enabled scalability. By June of 2000, Amicas had hired new "professional" management, moved to Watertown, and grown to about a hundred employees. They had achieved their goal of creating an alternative Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) for use in hospital radiology departments and based on Internet standards. +={ Amicas (corporation) +9 ; + standards : + Internet ; + proprietary systems : + closed +} + +At that point, in the spring of 2000, Sean could still cheerfully introduce me to his new boss—the same man he would come to hate, inasmuch as Sean hates anyone. But by 2002 he was frustrated by the extraordinary variety of corner-cutting and, more particularly, by the complacency with which management ignored his recommendations and released software that was almost certainly going to fail later, if not sooner. Sean, who is sort of permanently callow about things corporate, could find no other explanation than that the new management was evil. + +But by 2003 the company had succeeded, having grown to more than 200 employees and established steady revenue and a stable presence throughout the healthcare world. Both Sean and Adrian were made rich—not wildly rich, but rich enough—by its success. In the process, however, it also morphed into exactly what Sean and Adrian had created it in order to fight: a slothlike corporate purveyor of promises and broken software. Promises Adrian had made and software Sean had built. The failure of Amicas to transform healthcare was a failure too complex and technical for most of America to understand, but it rested atop the success of Amicas in terms more readily comprehensible: a growing company making profit. Adrian and Sean had started the company not to make money, but in order to fix a broken healthcare system; yet the system stayed broken while they made money. + +In the rolling confessional, Sean and Adrian did in fact see me, however jokingly, as a kind of redeemer, a priest (albeit of an order with no flock) whose judgment of the affairs past was essential to their narration of their venture as a success, a failure, or as an unsatisfying and complicated mixture of both. I thought about this strange moment of confession, of the combination of recognition and denial, of Adrian’s new objectification of the company as an ,{[pg 33]}, investment opportunity, and of Sean’s continuing struggle to make his life and his work harmonize in order to produce good in the world. Only the promise of the next project, the next mission (and the ostensible reason for our dinner meeting) could possibly have mitigated the emotional disaster that their enterprise might otherwise be. Sean’s and Adrian’s endless, arcane fervor for the promise of new technologies did not cease, even given the quotidian calamities these technologies leave in their wake. Their faith was strong, and continuously tested. + +Adrian’s and Sean’s passion was not for money—though money was a powerful drug—it was for the Internet: for the ways in which the Internet could replace the existing infrastructure of hospitals and healthcare providers, deliver on old promises of telemedicine and teleradiology, and, above all, level a playing field systematically distorted and angled by corporate and government institutions that sought secrecy and private control, and stymied progress. In healthcare, as Adrian repeatedly explained to me, this skewed playing field was not only unfair but malicious and irresponsible. It was costing lives. It slowed the creation and deployment of technologies and solutions that could lower costs and thus provide more healthcare for more people. The Internet was not part of the problem; it was part of the solution to the problems that ailed 1990s healthcare. + +At the end of our car trip, at the Indian restaurant in Winchester, I learned about their next scheme, a project called MedCommons, which would build on the ideals of Free Software and give individuals a way to securely control and manage their own healthcare data. The rhetoric of commons and the promise of the Internet as an infrastructure dominated our conversation, but the realities of funding and the question of whether MedCommons could be pursued without starting another company remained unsettled. I tried to imagine what form a future confession might take. +={ commons ; + MedCommons +2 +} + +2~ Geeks and Their Internets +={ geeks +8 ; + Internet : + geeks and +8 +} + +Sean and Adrian are geeks. They are entrepreneurs and idealists in different ways, a sometimes paradoxical combination. They are certainly ,{[pg 34]}, obsessed with technology, but especially with the Internet, and they clearly distinguish themselves from others who are obsessed with technology of just any sort. They aren’t quite representative—they do not stand in for all geeks—but the way they think about the Internet and its possibilities might be. Among the rich story of their successes and failures, one might glimpse the outlines of a question: where do their sympathies lie? Who are they with? Who do they recognize as being like them? What might draw them together with other geeks if not a corporation, a nation, a language, or a cause? What binds these two geeks to any others? +={ affinity (of geeks) ; + entrepreneurialism +4 +} + +Sean worked for the Federal Reserve in the 1980s, where he was introduced to UNIX, C programming, EMACS, Usenet, Free Software, and the Free Software Foundation. But he was not a Free Software hacker; indeed, he resisted my attempts to call him a hacker at all. Nevertheless, he started a series of projects and companies with Adrian that drew on the repertoire of practices and ideas familiar from Free Software, including their MedCommons project, which was based more or less explicitly in the ideals of Free Software. Adrian has a degree in medicine and in engineering, and is a serial entrepreneur, with Amicas being his biggest success—and throughout the last ten years has attended all manner of conferences and meetings devoted to Free Software, Open Source, open standards, and so on, almost always as the lone representative from healthcare. Both graduated from the MIT (Sean in economics, Adrian in engineering), one of the more heated cauldrons of the Internet and the storied home of hackerdom, but neither were MIT hackers, nor even computer-science majors. +={ Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +% open standards + +Their goals in creating a start-up rested on their understanding of the Internet as an infrastructure: as a standardized infrastructure with certain extremely powerful properties, not the least of which was its flexibility. Sean and Adrian talked endlessly about open systems, open standards, and the need for the Internet to remain open and standardized. Adrian spoke in general terms about how it would revolutionize healthcare; Sean spoke in specific terms about how it structured the way Amicas’s software was being designed and written. Both participated in standards committees and in the online and offline discussions that are tantamount to policymaking in the Internet world. The company they created was a "virtual" company, that is, built on tools that depended on the Internet and allowed employees to manage and work from a variety of locations, though not without frustration, of course: Sean waited years for broadband access in his home, and the hospitals they served ,{[pg 35]}, hemmed themselves in with virtual private networks, intranets, and security firewalls that betrayed the promises of openness that Sean and Adrian heralded. +={ infrastructure } + +The Internet was not the object of their work and lives, but it did represent in detail a kind of moral or social order embodied in a technical system and available to everyone to use as a platform whereby they might compete to improve and innovate in any realm. To be sure, although not all Internet entrepreneurs of the 1990s saw the Internet in the same way, Sean and Adrian were hardly alone in their vision. Something about the particular way in which they understood the Internet as representing a moral order—simultaneously a network, a market, a public, and a technology—was shared by a large group of people, those who I now refer to simply as geeks. + +The term geek is meant to be inclusive and to index the problematic of a recursive public. Other terms may be equally useful, but perhaps semantically overdetermined, most notably hacker, which regardless of its definitional range, tends to connote someone subversive and/or criminal and to exclude geek-sympathetic entrepreneurs and lawyers and activists.~{ For the canonical story, see Levy, Hackers. Hack referred to (and still does) a clever use of technology, usually unintended by the maker, to achieve some task in an elegant manner. The term has been successfully redefined by the mass media to refer to computer users who break into and commit criminal acts on corporate or government or personal computers connected to a network. Many self-identified hackers insist that the criminal element be referred to as crackers (see, in particular, the entries on "Hackers," "Geeks" and "Crackers" in The Jargon File, http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/, also published as Raymond, The New Hackers’ Dictionary). On the subject of definitions and the cultural and ethical characteristics of hackers, see Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom," chap. 2. }~ Geek is meant to signal, like the public in "recursive public," that geeks stand outside power, at least in some aspects, and that they are not capitalists or technocrats, even if they start businesses or work in government or industry.~{ One example of the usage of geek is in Star, The Cultures of Computing. Various denunciations (e.g., Barbrook and Cameron, "The California Ideology"; Borsook, Technolibertarianism) tend to focus on journalistic accounts of an ideology that has little to do with what hackers, geeks, and entrepreneurs actually make. A more relevant categorical distinction than that between hackers and geeks is that between geeks and technocrats; in the case of technocrats, the "anthropology of technocracy" is proposed as the study of the limits of technical rationality, in particular the forms through which "planning" creates "gaps in the form that serve as ‘targets of intervention’" (Riles, "Real Time," 393). Riles’s "technocrats" are certainly not the "geeks" I portray here (or at least, if they are, it is only in their frustrating day jobs). Geeks do have libertarian, specifically Hayekian or Feyerabendian leanings, but are more likely to see technical failures not as failures of planning, but as bugs, inefficiencies, or occasionally as the products of human hubris or stupidity that is born of a faith in planning. }~ Geek is meant to signal a mode of thinking and working, not an identity; it is a mode or quality that allows people to find each other, for reasons other than the fact that they share an office, a degree, a language, or a nation. +={ geeks : + hackers vs. +3 ; + hackers +3 +} + +Until the mid-1990s, hacker, geek, and computer nerd designated a very specific type: programmers and lurkers on relatively underground networks, usually college students, computer scientists, and "amateurs" or "hobbyists." A classic mock self-diagnostic called the Geek Code, by Robert Hayden, accurately and humorously detailed the various ways in which one could be a geek in 1996—UNIX/ Linux skills, love/hate of Star Trek, particular eating and clothing habits—but as Hayden himself points out, the geeks of the early 1990s exist no longer. The elite subcultural, relatively homogenous group it once was has been overrun: "The Internet of 1996 was still a wild untamed virgin paradise of geeks and eggheads unpopulated by script kiddies, and the denizens of AOL. When things changed, I seriously lost my way. I mean, all the ‘geek’ that was the Internet ,{[pg 36]}, was gone and replaced by Xfiles buzzwords and politicians passing laws about a technology they refused to comprehend."~{ See The Geek Code, http://www.geekcode.com/. }~ +={ Hayden, Robert +2 } + +For the purists like Hayden, geeks were there first, and they understood something, lived in a way, that simply cannot be comprehended by "script kiddies" (i.e., teenagers who perform the hacking equivalent of spray painting or cow tipping), crackers, or AOL users, all of whom are despised by Hayden-style geeks as unskilled users who parade around the Internet as if they own it. While certainly elitist, Hayden captures the distinction between those who are legitimately allowed to call themselves geeks (or hackers) and those who aren’t, a distinction that is often formulated recursively, of course: "You are a hacker when another hacker calls you a hacker." + +However, since the explosive growth of the Internet, geek has become more common a designation, and my use of the term thus suggests a role that is larger than programmer/hacker, but not as large as "all Internet users." Despite Hayden’s frustration, geeks are still bound together as an elite and can be easily distinguished from "AOL users." Some of the people I discuss would not call themselves geeks, and some would. Not all are engineers or programmers: I have met businessmen, lawyers, activists, bloggers, gastroenterologists, anthropologists, lesbians, schizophrenics, scientists, poets, people suffering from malaria, sea captains, drug dealers, and people who keep lemurs, many of whom refer to themselves as geeks, some of the time.~{ Geeks are also identified often by the playfulness and agility with which they manipulate these labels and characterizations. See Michael M. J. Fischer, "Worlding Cyberspace" for an example. }~ There are also lawyers, politicians, sociologists, and economists who may not refer to themselves as geeks, but who care about the Internet just as other geeks do. By contrast "users" of the Internet, even those who use it eighteen out of twenty-four hours in a day to ship goods and play games, are not necessarily geeks by this characterization. + +2~ Operating Systems and Social Systems + +Berlin, November 1999. I am in a very hip club in Mitte called WMF. It’s about eight o’clock—five hours too early for me to be a hipster, but the context is extremely cool. WMF is in a hard-to-find, abandoned building in the former East; it is partially converted, filled with a mixture of new and old furnishings, video projectors, speakers, makeshift bars, and dance-floor lighting. A crowd of around fifty people lingers amid smoke and Beck’s beer bottles, ,{[pg 37]}, sitting on stools and chairs and sofas and the floor. We are listening to an academic read a paper about Claude Shannon, the MIT engineer credited with the creation of information theory. The author is smoking and reading in German while the audience politely listens. He speaks for about seventy minutes. There are questions and some perfunctory discussion. As the crowd breaks up, I find myself, in halting German that quickly converts to English, having a series of animated conversations about the GNU General Public License, the Debian Linux Distribution, open standards in net radio, and a variety of things for which Claude Shannon is the perfect ghostly technopaterfamilias, even if his seventy-minute invocation has clashed heavily with the surroundings. +={ Berlin +2 ; + Shannon, Claude +} + +Despite my lame German, I still manage to jump deeply into issues that seem extremely familiar: Internet standards and open systems and licensing issues and namespaces and patent law and so on. These are not businesspeople, this is not a start-up company. As I would eventually learn, there was even a certain disdain for die Krawattenfaktor, the suit-and-tie factor, at these occasional, hybrid events hosted by Mikro e.V., a nonprofit collective of journalists, academics, activists, artists, and others interested in new media, the Internet, and related issues. Mikro’s constituency included people from Germany, Holland, Austria, and points eastward. They took some pride in describing Berlin as "the farthest East the West gets" and arranged for a group photo in which, facing West, they stood behind the statue of Marx and Lenin, who face East and look eternally at the iconic East German radio tower (Funkturm) in Alexanderplatz. Mikro’s members are resolutely activist and see the issues around the Internet-as-infrastructure not in terms of its potential for business opportunities, but in urgently political and unrepentantly aesthetic terms—terms that are nonetheless similar to those of Sean and Adrian, from whom I learned the language that allows me to mingle with the Mikro crowd at WMF. I am now a geek. +={ Mikro e.V. +1 ; + Open Systems ; + standards : + Internet +} + +Before long, I am talking with Volker Grassmuck, founding member of Mikro and organizer of the successful "Wizards of OS" conference, held earlier in the year, which had the very intriguing subtitle "Operating Systems and Social Systems." Grassmuck is inviting me to participate in a planning session for the next WOS, held at the Chaos Computer Congress, a hacker gathering that occurs each year in December in Berlin. In the following months I will meet a huge number of people who seem, uncharacteristically for artists ,{[pg 38]}, and activists, strangely obsessed with configuring their Linux distributions or hacking the http protocol or attending German Parliament hearings on copyright reform. The political lives of these folks have indeed mixed up operating systems and social systems in ways that are more than metaphorical. +={ Grassmuck, Volker } + +2~ The Idea of Order at the Keyboard + +If intuition can lead one from geek to geek, from start-up to nightclub, and across countries, languages, and professional orientations, it can only be due to a shared set of ideas of how things fit together in the world. These ideas might be "cultural" in the traditional sense of finding expression among a community of people who share backgrounds, homes, nations, languages, idioms, ethnos, norms, or other designators of belonging and co-presence. But because the Internet—like colonialism, satellite broadcasting, and air travel, among other things—crosses all these lines with abandon that the shared idea of order is better understood as part of a public, or public sphere, a vast republic of letters and media and ideas circulating in and through our thoughts and papers and letters and conversations, at a planetary scope and scale. +={ culture ; + public +15 ; + public sphere : + theories of +15 ; + social imaginary +15 ; + Internet : + idea of order and +1 +} + +% index could have been more precise, matches book + +"Public sphere" is an odd kind of thing, however. It is at once a concept—intended to make sense of a space that is not the here and now, but one made up of writings, ideas, and discussions—and a set of ideas that people have about themselves and their own participation in such a space. I must be able to imagine myself speaking and being spoken to in such a space and to imagine a great number of other people also doing so according to unwritten rules we share. I don’t need a complete theory, and I don’t need to call it a public sphere, but I must somehow share an idea of order with all those other people who also imagine themselves participating in and subjecting themselves to that order. In fact, if the public sphere exists as more than just a theory, then it has no other basis than just such a shared imagination of order, an imagination which provides a guide against which to make judgments and a map for changing or achieving that order. Without such a shared imagination, a public sphere is otherwise nothing more than a cacophony of voices and information, nothing more than a stream of data, structured and formatted by and for machines, whether paper or electronic. ,{[pg 39]}, + +Charles Taylor, building on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Michael Warner, suggests that the public sphere (both idea and thing) that emerged in the eighteenth century was created through practices of communication and association that reflected a moral order in which the public stands outside power and guides or checks its operation through shared discourse and enlightened discussion. Contrary to the experience of bodies coming together into a common space (Taylor calls them "topical spaces," such as conversation, ritual, assembly), the crucial component is that the public sphere "transcends such topical spaces. We might say that it knits a plurality of spaces into one larger space of non-assembly. The same public discussion is deemed to pass through our debate today, and someone else’s earnest conversation tomorrow, and the newspaper interview Thursday and so on. . . . The public sphere that emerges in the eighteenth century is a meta-topical common space."~{ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 86. }~ +={ Habermas, Jürgen ; + Taylor, Charles +3 ; + Warner, Michael +} + +Because of this, Taylor refers to his version of a public as a "social imaginary," a way of capturing a phenomena that wavers between having concrete existence "out there" and imagined rational existence "in here." There are a handful of other such imagined spaces—the economy, the self-governing people, civil society—and in Taylor’s philosophical history they are related to each through the "ideas of moral and social order" that have developed in the West and around the world.~{ On the subject of imagined communities and the role of information technologies in imagined networks, see Green, Harvey, and Knox, "Scales of Place and Networks"; and Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire. }~ +={ social imaginary : + ideology vs. +3 +} + +Taylor’s social imaginary is intended to do something specific: to resist the "spectre of idealism," the distinction between ideas and practices, between "ideologies" and the so-called material world as "rival causal agents." Taylor suggests, "Because human practices are the kind of thing that makes sense, certain ideas are internal to them; one cannot distinguish the two in order to ask the question Which causes which?"~{ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 32. }~ Even if materialist explanations of cause are satisfying, as they often are, Taylor suggests that they are so "at the cost of being implausible as a universal principle," and he offers instead an analysis of the rise of the modern imaginaries of moral order.~{ Ibid., 33-48. Taylor’s history of the transition from feudal nobility to civil society to the rise of republican democracies (however incomplete) is comparable to Foucault’s history of the birth of biopolitics, in La naissance de la biopolitique, as an attempt to historicize governance with respect to its theories and systems, as well as within the material forms it takes. }~ +={ ideology +6 } + +The concept of recursive public, like that of Taylor’s public sphere, is understood here as a kind of social imaginary. The primary reason is to bypass the dichotomy between ideas and material practice. Because the creation of software, networks, and legal documents are precisely the kinds of activities that trouble this distinction—they are at once ideas and things that have material effects in the ,{[pg 40]}, world, both expressive and performative—it is extremely difficult to identify the properly material materiality (source code? computer chips? semiconductor manufacturing plants?). This is the first of the reasons why a recursive public is to be distinguished from the classic formulae of the public sphere, that is, that it requires a kind of imagination that includes the writing and publishing and speaking and arguing we are familiar with, as well as the making of new kinds of software infrastructures for the circulation, archiving, movement, and modifiability of our enunciations. + +The concept of a social imaginary also avoids the conundrums created by the concept of "ideology" and its distinction from material practice. Ideology in its technical usage has been slowly and surely overwhelmed by its pejorative meaning: "The ideological is never one’s own position; it is always the stance of someone else, always their ideology."~{ Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 2. }~ If one were to attempt an explanation of any particular ideology in nonpejorative terms, there is seemingly nothing that might rescue the explanation from itself becoming ideological. + +The problem is an old one. Clifford Geertz noted it in "Ideology as a Cultural System," as did Karl Mannheim before him in Ideology and Utopia: it is the difficulty of employing a non-evaluative concept of ideology.~{ Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System"; Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. Both, of course, also signal the origin of the scientific use of the term proximately with Karl Marx’s "German Ideology" and more distantly in the Enlightenment writings of Destutt de Tracy. }~ Of all the versions of struggle over the concept of a scientific or objective sociology, it is the claim of exploring ideology objectively that most rankles. As Geertz put it, "Men do not care to have beliefs to which they attach great moral significance examined dispassionately, no matter for how pure a purpose; and if they are themselves highly ideologized, they may find it simply impossible to believe that a disinterested approach to critical matters of social and political conviction can be other than a scholastic sham."~{ Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," 195. }~ +={ Geertz, Clifford +3 ; + Mannheim, Karl +1 +} + +Mannheim offered one response: a version of epistemological relativism in which the analysis of ideology included the ideological position of the analyst. Geertz offered another: a science of "symbolic action" based in Kenneth Burke’s work and drawing on a host of philosophers and literary critics.~{ Ibid., 208-13. }~ Neither the concept of ideology, nor the methods of cultural anthropology have been the same since. "Ideology" has become one of the most widely deployed (some might say, most diffuse) tools of critique, where critique is understood as the analysis of cultural patterns given in language and symbolic structures, for the purposes of bringing ,{[pg 41]}, to light systems of hegemony, domination, authority, resistance, and/or misrecognition.~{ The depth and the extent of this issue is obviously huge. Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia is an excellent analysis to the problem of ideology prior to 1975. Terry Eagleton’s books The Ideology of the Aesthetic and Ideology: An Introduction are Marxist explorations that include discussions of hegemony and resistance in the context of artistic and literary theory in the 1980s. Slavoj Žižek creates a Lacanian-inspired algebraic system of analysis that combines Marxism and psychoanalysis in novel ways (see Žižek, Mapping Ideology). There is even an attempt to replace the concept of ideology with a metaphor of "software" and "memes" (see Balkin, Cultural Software). The core of the issue of ideology as a practice (and the vicissitudes of materialism that trouble it) are also at the heart of works by Pierre Bourdieu and his followers (on the relationship of ideology and hegemony, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy). In anthropology, see Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. }~ However, the practices of critique are just as (if not more) likely to be turned on critical scholars themselves, to show how the processes of analysis, hidden assumptions, latent functions of the university, or other unrecognized features the material, non-ideological real world cause the analyst to fall into an ideological trap. + +The concept of ideology takes a turn toward "social imaginary" in Paul Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, where he proposes ideological and utopian thought as two components of "social and cultural imagination." Ricoeur’s overview divides approaches to the concept of ideology into three basic types—the distorting, the integrating, and the legitimating—according to how actors deal with reality through (symbolic) imagination. Does the imagination distort reality, integrate it, or legitimate it vis-à-vis the state? Ricoeur defends the second, Geertzian flavor: ideologies integrate the symbolic structure of the world into a meaningful whole, and "only because the structure of social life is already symbolic can it be distorted."~{ Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 10. }~ +={ social imaginary : + ideology vs. +6 ; + Ricoeur, Paul +1 +} + +For Ricoeur, the very substance of life begins in the interpretation of reality, and therefore ideologies (as well as utopias—and perhaps conspiracies) could well be treated as systems that integrate those interpretations into the meaningful wholes of political life. Ricoeur’s analysis of the integration of reality though social imagination, however, does not explicitly address how imagination functions: what exactly is the nature of this symbolic action or interpretation, or imagination? Can one know it from the outside, and does it resist the distinction between ideology and material practice? Both Ricoeur and Geertz harbor hope that ideology can be made scientific, that the integration of reality through symbolic action requires only the development of concepts adequate to the job. + +Re-enter Charles Taylor. In Modern Social Imaginaries the concept of social imaginary is distinctive in that it attempts to capture the specific integrative imaginations of modern moral and social order. Taylor stresses that they are imaginations—not necessarily theories—of modern moral and social order: "By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways in ,{[pg 42]}, which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations."~{ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. }~ Social imaginaries develop historically and result in both new institutions and new subjectivities; the concepts of public, market, and civil society (among others) are located in the imaginative faculties of actors who recognize the shared, common existence of these ideas, even if they differ on the details, and the practices of those actors reflect a commitment to working out these shared concepts. +={ Taylor, Charles +3 } + +Social imaginaries are an extension of "background" in the philosophical sense: "a wider grasp of our whole predicament."~{ Ibid., 25. }~ The example Taylor uses is that of marching in a demonstration: the action is in our imaginative repertory and has a meaning that cannot be reduced to the local context: "We know how to assemble, pick up banners and march. . . . [W]e understand the ritual. . . . [T]he immediate sense of what we are doing, getting the message to our government and our fellow citizens that the cuts must stop, say, makes sense in a wider context, in which we see ourselves standing in a continuing relation with others, in which it is appropriate to address them in this manner."~{ Ibid., 26-27. }~ But we also stand "internationally" and "in history" against a background of stories, images, legends, symbols, and theories. "The background that makes sense of any given act is wide and deep. It doesn’t include everything in our world, but the relevant sense-giving features can’t be circumscribed. . . . [It] draws on our whole world, that is, our sense of our whole predicament in time and space, among others and in history."~{ Ibid., 28. }~ + +The social imaginary is not simply the norms that structure our actions; it is also a sense of what makes norms achievable or "realizable," as Taylor says. This is the idea of a "moral order," one that we expect to exist, and if it doesn’t, one that provides a plan for achieving it. For Taylor, there is such a thing as a "modern idea of order," which includes, among other things, ideas of what it means to be an individual, ideas of how individual passions and desires are related to collective association, and, most important, ideas about living in time together (he stresses a radically secular conception of time—secular in a sense that means more than simply "outside religion"). He by no means insists that this is the only such definition of modernity (the door is wide open to understanding alternative modernities), but that the modern idea of moral order is ,{[pg 43]}, one that dominates and structures a very wide array of institutions and individuals around the world. + +The "modern idea of moral order" is a good place to return to the question of geeks and their recursive publics. Are the ideas of order shared by geeks different from those Taylor outlines? Do geeks like Sean and Adrian, or activists in Berlin, possess a distinctive social imaginary? Or do they (despite their planetary dispersal) participate in this common modern idea of moral order? Do the stories and narratives, the tools and technologies, the theories and imaginations they follow and build on have something distinctive about them? Sean’s and Adrian’s commitment to transforming healthcare seems to be, for instance, motivated by a notion of moral order in which the means of allocation of healthcare might become more just, but it is also shot through with technical ideas about the role of standards, the Internet, and the problems with current technical solutions; so while they may seem to be simply advocating for better healthcare, they do so through a technical language and practice that are probably quite alien to policymakers, upper management, and healthcare advocacy groups that might otherwise be in complete sympathy. +={ Berlin ; + Doyle, Sean ; + Gropper, Adrian ; + moral and technical order +1 +} + +The affinity of geeks for each other is processed through and by ideas of order that are both moral and technical—ideas of order that do indeed mix up "operating systems and social systems." These systems include the technical means (the infrastructure) through which geeks meet, assemble, collaborate, and plan, as well as how they talk and think about those activities. The infrastructure—the Internet—allows for a remarkably wide and diverse array of people to encounter and engage with each other. That is to say, the idea of order shared by geeks is shared because they are geeks, because they "get it," because the Internet’s structure and software have taken a particular form through which geeks come to understand the moral order that gives the fabric of their political lives warp and weft. +={ affinity (of geeks) } + +2~ Internet Silk Road +={ Bangalore +7 ; + Internet : + India and +7 +} + +Bangalore, March 2000. I am at another bar, this time on one of Bangalore’s trendiest streets. The bar is called Purple Haze, and I have been taken there, the day after my arrival, by Udhay Shankar ,{[pg 44]}, N. Inside it is dark and smoky, purple, filled with men between eighteen and thirty, and decorated with posters of Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Jim Morrison (Udhay: "I hate that band"), Led Zeppelin, and a somewhat out of place Frank Zappa (Udhay: "One of my political and musical heroes"). All of the men, it appears, are singing along with the music, which is almost without exception heavy metal. +={ Shakar, Udhay +6 ; + music +1 +} + +I engage in some stilted conversation with Udhay and his cousin Kirti about the difference between Karnatic music and rock-androll, which seems to boil down to the following: Karnatic music decreases metabolism and heart rate, leading to a relaxed state of mind; rock music does the opposite. Given my aim of focusing on the Internet and questions of openness, I have already decided not to pay attention to this talk of music. In retrospect, I understand this to have been a grave methodological error: I underestimated the extent to which the subject of music has been one of the primary routes into precisely the questions about the "reorientation of knowledge and power" I was interested in. Over the course of the evening and the following days, Udhay introduced me, as promised, to a range of people he either knew or worked with in some capacity. Almost all of the people I met appeared to sincerely love heavy-metal music. + +I met Udhay Shankar N. in 1999 through a newsletter, distributed via e-mail, called Tasty Bits from the Technology Front. It was one of a handful of sources I watched closely while in Berlin, looking for such connections to geek culture. The newsletter described a start-up company in Bangalore, one that was devoted to creating a gateway between the Internet and mobile phones, and which was, according to the newsletter, an entirely Indian operation, though presumably with U.S. venture funds. I wanted to find a company to compare to Amicas: a start-up, run by geeks, with a similar approach to the Internet, but halfway around the world and in a "culture" that might be presumed to occupy a very different kind of moral order. Udhay invited me to visit and promised to introduce me to everyone he knew. He described himself as a "random networker"; he was not really a programmer or a designer or a Free Software geek, despite his extensive knowledge of software, devices, operating systems, and so on, including Free and Open Source Software. Neither was he a businessman, but rather described himself as the guy who "translates between the suits and the techs." ,{[pg 45]}, +={ Berlin ; + Amicas (corporation) +2 ; + culture +} + +Udhay "collects interesting people," and it was primarily through his zest for collecting that I met all the people I did. I met cosmopolitan activists and elite lawyers and venture capitalists and engineers and cousins and brothers and sisters of engineers. I met advertising executives and airline flight attendants and consultants in Bombay. I met journalists and gastroenterologists, computer-science professors and musicians, and one mother of a robot scientist in Bangalore. Among them were Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Jews, Parsis, and Christians, but most of them considered themselves more secular and scientific than religious. Many were self-educated, or like their U.S. counterparts, had dropped out of university at some point, but continued to teach themselves about computers and networks. Some were graduates or employees of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, an institution that was among the most important for Indian geeks (as Stanford University is to Silicon Valley, many would say). Among the geeks to whom Udhay introduced me, there were only two commonalities: the geeks were, for the most part, male, and they all loved heavy-metal music.~{ The question of gender plagues the topic of computer culture. The gendering of hackers and geeks and the more general exclusion of women in computing have been widely observed by academics. I can do no more here than direct readers to the increasingly large and sophisticated literature on the topic. See especially Light, "When Computers Were Women"; Turkle, The Second Self and Life on the Screen. With respect to Free Software, see Nafus, Krieger, Leach, "Patches Don’t Have Gender." More generally, see Kirkup et al., The Gendered Cyborg; Downey, The Machine in Me; Faulkner, "Dualisms, Hierarchies and Gender in Engineering"; Grint and Gill, The Gender-Technology Relation; Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature; Herring, "Gender and Democracy in Computer-Mediated Communication"; Kendall, "‘Oh No! I’m a NERD!’"; Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse; Green and Adam, Virtual Gender; P. Hopkins, Sex/Machine; Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology and "Reflections on Gender and Technology Studies"; and Fiona Wilson, "Can’t Compute, Won’t Compute." Also see the novels and stories of Ellen Ullman, including Close to the Machine and The Bug: A Novel. }~ +={ Gender ; + Religion +1 +} + +While I was in Bangalore, I was invited to join a mailing list run by Udhay called Silk-list, an irregular, unmoderated list devoted to "intelligent conversation." The list has no particular focus: long, meandering conversations about Indian politics, religion, economics, and history erupt regularly; topics range from food to science fiction to movie reviews to discussions on Kashmir, Harry Potter, the singularity, or nanotechnology. Udhay started Silk-list in 1997 with Bharath Chari and Ram Sundaram, and the recipients have included hundreds of people around the world, some very well-known ones, programmers, lawyers, a Bombay advertising executive, science-fiction authors, entrepreneurs, one member of the start-up Amicas, at least two transhumanists, one (diagnosed) schizophrenic, and myself. Active participants usually numbered about ten to fifteen, while many more lurked in the background. +={ Chari, Bharath ; + Silk-list (mailing list) +5 ; + Sundaram, Ram +} + +% silk index marking not identical to book page numbering + +Silk-list is an excellent index of the relationship between the network of people in Bangalore and their connection to a worldwide community on the Internet—a fascinating story of the power of heterogeneously connected networks and media. Udhay explained that in the early 1990s he first participated in and then taught himself to configure and run a modem-based networking system known as a Bulletin Board Service (BBS) in Bangalore. In 1994 he heard about a book by Howard Rheingold called The Virtual ,{[pg 46]}, Community, which was his first introduction to the Internet. A couple of years later when he finally had access to the Internet, he immediately e-mailed John Perry Barlow, whose work he knew from Wired magazine, to ask for Rheingold’s e-mail address in order to connect with him. Rheingold and Barlow exist, in some ways, at the center of a certain kind of geek world: Rheingold’s books are widely read popular accounts of the social and community aspects of new technologies that have often had considerable impact internationally; Barlow helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is responsible for popularizing the phrase "information wants to be free."~{ Originally coined by Steward Brand, the phrase was widely cited after it appeared in Barlow’s 1994 article "The Economy of Ideas." }~ Both men had a profound influence on Udhay and ultimately provided him with the ideas central to running an online community. A series of other connections of similar sorts—some personal, some precipitated out of other media and other channels, some entirely random—are what make up the membership of Silk-list.~{ On the genesis of "virtual communities" and the role of Steward Brand, see Turner, "Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy." }~ +={ Rheingold, Howard ; + Barlow, John Perry ; + Wired (magazine) +} + +Like many similar communities of "digerati" during and after the dot.com boom, Silk-list constituted itself more or less organically around people who "got it," that is, people who claimed to understand the Internet, its transformative potential, and who had the technical skills to participate in its expansion. Silk-list was not the only list of its kind. Others such as the Tasty Bits newsletter, the FoRK (Friends of Rohit Khare) mailing list (both based in Boston), and the Nettime and Syndicate mailing lists (both based in the Netherlands) ostensibly had different reasons for existence, but many had the same subscribers and overlapping communities of geeks. Subscription was open to anyone, and occasionally someone would stumble on the list and join in, but most were either invited by members or friends of friends, or they were connected by virtue of cross-posting from any number of other mailing lists to which members were subscribed. + +2~ /pub +={ Internet : + public spheres and +25 ; + Silk-list (mailing list) : + as a public +12 +} + +Silk-list is public in many senses of the word. Practically speaking, one need not be invited to join, and the material that passes through the list is publicly archived and can be found easily on the Internet. Udhay does his best to encourage everyone to speak and to participate, and to discourage forms of discourse that he thinks ,{[pg 47]}, might silence participants into lurking. Silk-list is not a government, corporate, or nongovernmental list, but is constituted only through the activity of geeks finding each other and speaking to each other on this list (which can happen in all manner of ways: through work, through school, through conferences, through fame, through random association, etc.). Recall Charles Taylor’s distinction between a topical and a metatopical space. Silk-list is not a conventionally topical space: at no point do all of its members meet face-to-face (though there are regular meet-ups in cities around the world), and they are not all online at the same time (though the volume and tempo of messages often reflect who is online "speaking" to each other at any given moment). It is a topical space, however, if one considers it from the perspective of the machine: the list of names on the mailing list are all assembled together in a database, or in a file, on the server that manages the mailing list. It is a stretch to call this an "assembly," however, because it assembles only the avatars of the mailing-list readers, many of whom probably ignore or delete most of the messages. +={ Taylor, Charles +2 } + +Silk-list is certainly, on the other hand, a "metatopical" public. It "knits together" a variety of topical spaces: my discussion with friends in Houston, and other members’ discussions with people around the world, as well as the sources of multiple discussions like newspaper and magazine articles, films, events, and so on that are reported and discussed online. But Silk-list is not "The" public—it is far from being the only forum in which the public sphere is knitted together. Many, many such lists exist. + +In Publics and Counterpublics Michael Warner offers a further distinction. "The" public is a social imaginary, one operative in the terms laid out by Taylor: as a kind of vision of order evidenced through stories, images, narratives, and so on that constitute the imagination of what it means to be part of the public, as well as plans necessary for creating the public, if necessary. Warner distinguishes, however, between a concrete, embodied audience, like that at a play, a demonstration, or a riot (a topical public in Taylor’s terms), and an audience brought into being by discourse and its circulation, an audience that is not metatopical so much as it is a public that is concrete in a different way; it is concrete not in the face-to-face temporality of the speech act, but in the sense of calling a public into being through an address that has a different temporality. It is a public that is concrete in a media-specific ,{[pg 48]}, manner: it depends on the structures of creation, circulation, use, performance, and reuse of particular kinds of discourse, particular objects or instances of discourse. +={ public : + self-grounding of +4 ; + social imaginary +4 ; + Warner, Michael +4 +} + +% check public self grounding of marker + +Warner’s distinction has a number of implications. The first, as Warner is careful to note, is that the existence of particular media is not sufficient for a public to come into existence. Just because a book is printed does not mean that a public exists; it requires also that the public take corresponding action, that is, that they read it. To be part of a particular public is to choose to pay attention to those who choose to address those who choose to pay attention . . . and so on. Or as Warner puts it, "The circularity is essential to the phenomenon. A public might be real and efficacious, but its reality lies in just this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence."~{ Warner, "Publics and Counterpublics," 51. }~ + +This "autotelic" feature of a public is crucial if one is to understand the function of a public as standing outside of power. It simply cannot be organized by the state, by a corporation, or by any other social totality if it is to have the legitimacy of an independently functioning public. As Warner puts it, "A public organizes itself independently of state institutions, law, formal frameworks of citizenship, or preexisting institutions such as the church. If it were not possible to think of the public as organized independently of the state or other frameworks, the public could not be sovereign with respect to the state. . . . Speaking, writing, and thinking involve us—actively and immediately—in a public, and thus in the being of the sovereign."~{ Ibid., 51-52. See also Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 69. }~ +={ public : + autotelic and independent +1 +} + +% ={Public:autotelic and independent+6} ?? + +Warner’s description makes no claim that any public or even The Public actually takes this form in the present: it is a description of a social imaginary or a "faith" that allows individuals to make sense of their actions according to a modern idea of social order. As Warner (and Habermas before him) suggests, the existence of such autonomous publics—and certainly the idea of "public opinion"— does not always conform to this idea of order. Often such publics turn out to have been controlled all along by states, corporations, capitalism, and other forms of social totality that determine the nature of discourse in insidious ways. A public whose participants have no faith that it is autotelic and autonomous is little more than a charade meant to assuage opposition to authority, to transform ,{[pg 49]}, political power and equality into the negotiation between unequal parties. + +Is Silk-list a public? More important, is it a sovereign one? Warner’s distinction between different media-specific forms of assembly is crucial to answering this question. If one wants to know whether a mailing list on the Internet is more or less likely to be a sovereign public than a book-reading public or the nightly-news-hearing one, then one needs to approach it from the specificity of the form of discourse. This specificity not only includes whether the form is text or video and audio, or whether the text is ASCII or Unicode, or the video PAL or NTSC, but it also includes the means of creation, circulation, and reuse of that discourse as well. + +The on-demand, Internet-mediated book, by contrast, will have a much different temporality of circulation: it might languish in obscurity due to lack of marketing or reputable authority, or it might get mentioned somewhere like the New York Times and suddenly become a sensation. For such a book, copyright law (in the form of a copyleft license) might allow a much wider range of uses and reuses, but it will restrict certain forms of commercialization of the text. The two publics might therefore end up looking quite different, overlapping, to be sure, but varying in terms of their control ,{[pg 50]}, and the terms of admittance. What is at stake is the power of one or the other such public to appear as an independent and sovereign entity—free from suspect constraints and control—whose function is to argue with other constituted forms of power. +={ copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) ; + publication +1 +} + +The conventionally published book may well satisfy all the criteria of being a public, at least in the colloquial sense of making a set of ideas and a discourse widely available and expecting to influence, or receive a response from, constituted forms of sovereign power. However, it is only the latter "on-demand" scheme for publishing that satisfies the criteria of being a recursive public. The differences in this example offer a crude indication of why the Internet is so crucially important to geeks, so important that it draws them together, in its defense, as an infrastructure that enables the creation of publics that are thought to be autonomous, independent, and autotelic. Geeks share an idea of moral and technical order when it comes to the Internet; not only this, but they share a commitment to maintaining that order because it is what allows them to associate as a recursive public in the first place. They discover, or rediscover, through their association, the power and possibility of occupying the position of independent public—one not controlled by states, corporations, or other organizations, but open (they claim) through and through—and develop a desire to defend it from encroachment, destruction, or refeudalization (to use Habermas’s term for the fragmentation of the public sphere). +={ Habermas, Jürgen ; + moral and technical order +2 ; + public : + autotelic and independent +2 +} + +The recursive public is thus not only the book and the discourse around the book. It is not even "content" expanded to include all kinds of media. It is also the technical structure of the Internet as well: its software, its protocols and standards, its applications and software, its legal status and the licenses and regulations that govern it. This captures both of the reasons why recursive publics are distinctive: (1) they include not only the discourses of a public, but the ability to make, maintain, and manipulate the infrastructures of those discourses as well; and (2) they are "layered" and include both discourses and infrastructures, to a specific technical extent (i.e., not all the way down). The meaning of which layers are important develops more or less immediately from direct engagement with the medium. In the following example, for instance, Napster represents the potential of the Internet in miniature—as an application—but it also connects immediately to concerns about the core protocols that govern the Internet and the process of standardization ,{[pg 51]}, that governs the development of these protocols: hence recursion through the layers of an infrastructure. +={ Napster ; + recursive public : + layers of ; + Standards : + Internet +} + +These two aspects of the recursive public also relate to a concern about the fragmentation or refeudalization of the public sphere: there is only one Internet. Its singularity is not technically determined or by any means necessary, but it is what makes the Internet so valuable to geeks. It is a contest, the goal of which is to maintain the Internet as an infrastructure for autonomous and autotelic publics to emerge as part of The Public, understood as part of an imaginary of moral and technical order: operating systems and social systems. +={ Internet : + singularity of +} + +2~ From Napster to the Internet +={ Napster +21 } + +On 27 July 2000 Eugen Leitl cross-posted to Silk-list a message with the subject line "Prelude to the Singularity." The message’s original author, Jeff Bone (not at the time a member of Silk-list), had posted the "op-ed piece" initially to the FoRK mailing list as a response to the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) actions against Napster. The RIAA had just succeeded in getting U.S. district judge Marilyn Hall Patel, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, to issue an injunction to Napster to stop downloads of copyrighted music. Bone’s op-ed said, +={ Bone, Jeff +26 ; + Internet : + singularity of ; + Leitl, Eugene ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) +1 +} + +_1 Popular folklore has it that the Internet was designed with decentralized routing protocols in order to withstand a nuclear attack. That is, the Internet "senses damage" and "routes around it." It has been said that, on the ’Net, censorship is perceived as damage and is subsequently routed around. The RIAA, in a sense, has cast itself in a censor’s role. Consequently, the music industry will be perceived as damage—and it will be routed around. There is no doubt that this will happen, and that technology will evolve more quickly than businesses and social institutions can; there are numerous highly-visible projects already underway that attempt to create technology that is invulnerable to legal challenges of various kinds. Julian Morrison, the originator of a project (called Fling) to build a fully anonymous/untraceable suite of network protocols, expresses this particularly eloquently.~{ The rest of this message can be found in the Silk-list archives at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2869 (accessed 18 August 2006). The reference to "Fling" is to a project now available at http://fling.sourceforge.net/ (accessed 18 August 2006). The full archives of Silk-list can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/ and the full archives of the FoRK list can be found at http://www.xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork/. }~ +={ censorship } + +Bone’s message is replete with details that illustrate the meaning and value of the Internet to geeks, and that help clarify the concept ,{[pg 52]}, of a recursive public. While it is only one message, it nonetheless condenses and expresses a variety of stories, images, folklore, and technical details that I elaborate herein. +={ recursive public : + layers of +2 | examples of +28 +} + +The Napster shutdown in 2000 soured music fans and geeks alike, and it didn’t really help the record labels who perpetrated it either. For many geeks, Napster represented the Internet in miniature, an innovation that both demonstrated something on a scope and scale never seen before, and that also connected people around something they cared deeply about—their shared interest in music. Napster raised interesting questions about its own success: Was it successful because it allowed people to develop new musical interests on a scope and scale they had never experienced before? Or was it successful because it gave people with already existing musical interests a way to share music on a scope and scale they had never experienced before? That is to say, was it an innovation in marketing or in distribution? The music industry experienced it as the latter and hence as direct competition with their own means of distribution. Many music fans experienced it as the former, what Cory Doctorow nicely labeled "risk-free grazing," meaning the ability to try out an almost unimaginable diversity of music before choosing what to invest one’s interests (and money) in. To a large extent, Napster was therefore a recapitulation of what the Internet already meant to geeks. + +Bone’s message, the event of the Napster shutdown, and the various responses to it nicely illustrate the two key aspects of the recursive public: first, the way in which geeks argue not only about rights and ideas (e.g., is it legal to share music?) but also about the infrastructures that allow such arguing and sharing; second, the "layers" of a recursive public are evidenced in the immediate connection of Napster (an application familiar to millions) to the "decentralized routing protocols" (TCP/IP, DNS, and others) that made it possible for Napster to work the way it did. +={ Domain Name System (DNS) } + +Bone’s message contains four interrelated points. The first concerns the concept of autonomous technical progress. The title "Prelude to the Singularity" refers to a 1993 article by Vernor Vinge about the notion of a "singularity," a point in time when the speed of autonomous technological development outstrips the human capacity to control it.~{ Vinge, "The Coming Technological Singularity." }~ The notion of singularity has the status of a kind of colloquial "law" similar to Moore’s Law or Metcalfe’s Law, as well as signaling links to a more general literature with roots in ,{[pg 53]}, libertarian or classically liberal ideas of social order ranging from John Locke and John Stuart Mill to Ayn Rand and David Brin.~{ Moore’s Law—named for Gordon Moore, former head of Intel—states that the speed and capacity of computer central processing units (CPUs) doubles every eighteen months, which it has done since roughly 1970. Metcalfe’s Law—named for Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet—states that the utility of a network equals the square of the number of users, suggesting that the number of things one can do with a network increases exponentially as members are added linearly. }~ +={ liberalism, classical ; + Metcalfe's Law ; + Moore's Law ; + singularity ; + transhumanism ; + Locke, John ; + Mill, John Stuart ; + Rand, Ayn ; + Brin, David ; + Vinge, Vernor +} + +Bone’s affinity for transhumanist stories of evolutionary theory, economic theory, and rapid innovation sets the stage for the rest of his message. The crucial rhetorical gambit here is the appeal to inevitability (as in the emphatic "there is no doubt that this will happen"): Bone establishes that he is speaking to an audience that is accustomed to hearing about the inevitability of technical progress and the impossibility of legal maneuvering to change it, but his audience may not necessarily agree with these assumptions. Geeks occupy a spectrum from "polymath" to "transhumanist," a spectrum that includes their understandings of technological progress and its relation to human intervention. Bone’s message clearly lands on the far transhumanist side. + +A second point concerns censorship and the locus of power: according to Bone, power does not primarily reside with the government or the church, but comes instead from the private sector, in this case the coalition of corporations represented by the RIAA. The significance of this has to do with the fact that a "public" is expected to be its own sovereign entity, distinct from church, state, or corporation, and while censorship by the church or the state is a familiar form of aggression against publics, censorship by corporations (or consortia representing them), as it strikes Bone and others, is a novel development. Whether the blocking of file-sharing can legitimately be called censorship is also controversial, and many Silk-list respondents found the accusation of censorship untenable. +={ censorship +1 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) +1 +} + +Proving Bone’s contention, over the course of the subsequent years and court cases, the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have been given considerably more police authority than even many federal agencies—especially with regard to policing networks themselves (an issue which, given its technical abstruseness, has rarely been mentioned in the mainstream mass media). Both organizations have not only sought to prosecute filesharers but have been granted rights to obtain information from Internet Service Providers about customer activities and have consistently sought the right to secretly disable (hack into, disable, or destroy) private computers suspected of illegal activity. Even if these practices may not be defined as censorship per se, they are nonetheless fine examples of the issues that most exercise geeks: the use of legal means by a few (in this case, private corporations) to ,{[pg 54]}, suppress or transform technologies in wide use by the many. They also index the problems of monopoly, antitrust, and technical control that are not obvious and often find expression, for example, in allegories of reformation and the control of the music-sharing laity by papal authorities. +={ antitrust ; + monopoly ; + Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ; + protestant Reformation : + as usable past +} + +Third, Bone’s message can itself be understood in terms of the reorientation of knowledge and power. Although what it means to call his message an "op-ed" piece may seem obvious, Bone’s message was not published anywhere in any conventional sense. It doesn’t appear to have been widely cited or linked to. However, for one day at least, it was a heated discussion topic on three mailing lists, including Silk-list. "Publication" in this instance is a different kind of event than getting an op-ed in the New York Times. +={ publication +2 } + +The material on Silk-list rests somewhere between private conversation (in a public place, perhaps) and published opinion. No editor made a decision to "publish" the message—Bone just clicked "send." However, as with any print publication, his piece was theoretically accessible by anyone, and what’s more, a potentially huge number of copies may be archived in many different places (the computers of all the participants, the server that hosts the list, the Yahoo! Groups servers that archive it, Google’s search databases, etc.). Bone’s message exemplifies the recursive nature of the recursive public: it is a public statement about the openness of the Internet, and it is an example of the new forms of publicness it makes possible through its openness. +={ Internet +9 } + +% Internet +9 is not in original index + +The constraints on who speaks in a public sphere (such as the power of printers and publishers, the requirements of licensing, or issues of cost and accessibility) are much looser in the Internet era than in any previous one. The Internet gives a previously unknown Jeff Bone the power to dash off a manifesto without so much as a second thought. On the other hand, the ease of distribution belies the difficulty of actually being heard: the multitudes of other Jeff Bones make it much harder to get an audience. In terms of publics, Bone’s message can constitute a public in the same sense that a New York Times op-ed can, but its impact and meaning will be different. His message is openly and freely available for as long as there are geeks and laws and machines that maintain it, but the New York Times piece will have more authority, will be less accessible, and, most important, will not be available to just anyone. Geeks imagine a space where anyone can speak with similar reach and staying ,{[pg 55]}, power—even if that does not automatically imply authority—and they imagine that it should remain open at all costs. Bone is therefore interested precisely in a technical infrastructure that ensures his right to speak about that infrastructure and offer critique and guidance concerning it. + +The ability to create and to maintain such a recursive public, however, raises the fourth and most substantial point that Bone’s message makes clear. The leap to speaking about the "decentralized routing protocols" represents clearly the shared moral and technical order of geeks, derived in this case from the specific details of the Internet. Bone’s post begins with a series of statements that are part of the common repertoire of technical stories and images among geeks. Bone begins by making reference to the "folklore" of the Internet, in which routing protocols are commonly believed to have been created to withstand a nuclear attack. In calling it folklore he suggests that this is not a precise description of the Internet, but an image that captures its design goals. Bone collapses it into a more recent bit of folklore: "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it."~{ This quotation from the 1990s is attributed to Electronic Frontier Foundation’s founder and "cyber-libertarian" John Gilmore. Whether there ,{[pg 319]}, is any truth to this widespread belief expressed in the statement is not clear. On the one hand, the protocol to which this folklore refers—the general system of "message switching" and, later, "packet switching" invented by Paul Baran at RAND Corporation—does seem to lend itself to robustness (on this history, see Abbate, Inventing the Internet). However, it is not clear that nuclear threats were the only reason such robustness was a design goal; simply to ensure communication in a distributed network was necessary in itself. Nonetheless, the story has great currency as a myth of the nature and structure of the Internet. Paul Edwards suggests that both stories are true ("Infrastructure and Modernity," 216-20, 225n13). }~ Both bits of folklore are widely circulated and cited; they encapsulate one of the core intellectual ideas about the architecture of the Internet, that is, its open and distributed interconnectivity. There is certainly a specific technical backdrop for this suggestion: the TCP/IP "internetting" protocols were designed to link up multiple networks without making them sacrifice their autonomy and control. However, Bone uses this technical argument more in the manner of a social imaginary than of a theory, that is, as a way of thinking about the technical (and moral) order of the Internet, of what the Internet is supposed to be like. +={ censorship +5 ; + moral and technical order ; + Gilmore, John +1 ; + Internet : + folklore and ; + libertarianism +1 ; + protocols : + TCP/IP ; + social imaginary +10 ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) ; + folklore of Internet : + see also usable pasts +} + +In the early 1990s this version of the technical order of the Internet was part of a vibrant libertarian dogma asserting that the Internet simply could not be governed by any land-based sovereign and that it was fundamentally a place of liberty and freedom. This was the central message of people such as John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, Howard Rheingold, Esther Dyson, and a host of others who populated both the pre-1993 Internet (that is, before the World Wide Web became widely available) and the pages of magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000—the same group of people, incidentally, whose ideas were visible and meaningful to Udhay Shankar and his friends in India even prior to Internet access there, not to mention to Sean and Adrian in Boston, and artists and activists in ,{[pg 56]}, Europe, all of whom often reacted more strongly against this libertarian aesthetic. +={ Barlow, John Perry ; + Doyle, Sean ; + Dyson, Esther ; + Rheingold, Howard ; + Shakar, Udhay ; + Wired (magazine) +} + +For Jeff Bone (and a great many geeks), the folkloric notion that "the net treats censorship as damage" is a very powerful one: it suggests that censorship is impossible because there is no central point of control. A related and oft-cited sentiment is that "trying to take something off of the Internet is like trying to take pee out of a pool." This is perceived by geeks as a virtue, not a drawback, of the Internet. + +For Jeff Bone (and a great many geeks), the folkloric notion that "the net treats censorship as damage" is a very powerful one: it suggests that censorship is impossible because there is no central point of control. A related and oft-cited sentiment is that "trying to take something off of the Internet is like trying to take pee out of a pool." This is perceived by geeks as a virtue, not a drawback, of the Internet. + +On the other side of the spectrum, however, this view of the unregulatable nature of the Internet has been roundly criticized, most prominently by Lawrence Lessig, who is otherwise often in sympathy with geek culture. Lessig suggests that just because the Internet has a particular structure does not mean that it must always be that way.~{ Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. See also Gillespie, "Engineering a Principle" on the related history of the "end to end" design principle. }~ His argument has two prongs: first, that the Internet is structured the way it is because it is made of code that people write, and thus it could have been and will be otherwise, given that there are changes and innovations occurring all the time; second, that the particular structure of the Internet therefore governs or regulates behavior in particular ways: Code is Law. So while it may be true that no one can make the Internet "closed" by passing a law, it is also true that the Internet could become closed if the technology were to be altered for that purpose, a process that may well be nudged and guided by laws, regulations, and norms. +={ norms ; + Lessig, Lawrence +2 ; + recursive public : + layers of +2 ; + regulation : + Internet +} + +Lessig’s critique is actually at the heart of Bone’s concern, and the concern of recursive publics generally: the Internet is a contest and one that needs to be repeatedly and constantly replayed in order to maintain it as the legitimate infrastructure through which geeks associate with one another. Geeks argue in detail about what distinguishes technical factors from legal or social ones. Openness on the Internet is complexly intertwined with issues of availability, price, legal restriction, usability, elegance of design, censorship, trade secrecy, and so on. ,{[pg 57]}, + +However, even where openness is presented as a natural tendency for technology (in oft-made analogies with reproductive fitness and biodiversity, for example), it is only a partial claim in that it represents only one of the "layers" of a recursive public. For instance, when Bone suggests that the net is "invulnerable to legal attack" because "technology will evolve more quickly than businesses and social institutions can," he is not only referring to the fact that the Internet’s novel technical configuration has few central points of control, which makes it difficult for a single institution to control it, but also talking about the distributed, loosely connected networks of people who have the right to write and rewrite software and deal regularly with the underlying protocols of the Internet—in other words, of geeks themselves. + +Many geeks, perhaps including Bone, discover the nature of this order by coming to understand how the Internet works—how it works technically, but also who created it and how. Some have come to this understanding through participation in Free Software (an exemplary "recursive public"), others through stories and technologies and projects and histories that illuminate the process of creating, growing, and evolving the Internet. The story of the process by which the Internet is standardized is perhaps the most well known: it is the story of the Internet Engineering Task Force and its Requests for Comments system. +={ Request for Comments (RFC) } + +2~ Requests for Comments +={ Internet +9 ; + Request for Comments (RFC) +7 +} + +For many geeks, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its Requests for Comments (RFC) system exemplify key features of the moral and technical order they share, the "stories and practices" that make up a social imaginary, according to Charles Taylor. The IETF is a longstanding association of Internet engineers who try to help disseminate some of the core standards of the Internet through ,{[pg 58]}, the RFC process. Membership is open to individuals, and the association has very little real control over the structure or growth of the Internet—only over the key process of Internet standardization. Its standards rarely have the kind of political legitimacy that one associates with international treaties and the standards bodies of Geneva, but they are nonetheless de facto legitimate. The RFC process is an unusual standards process that allows modifications to existing technologies to be made before the standard is finalized. Together Internet standards and the RFC process form the background of the Napster debate and of Jeff Bone’s claims about "internet routing protocols." +={ Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) +8 ; + moral and technical order +1 ; + Napster +8 ; + standards : + Internet +6 ; + standards processes +2 ; + Taylor, Charles +} + +A famous bit of Internet-governance folklore expresses succinctly the combination of moral and technical order that geeks share (attributed to IETF member David Clark): "We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code."~{ This is constantly repeated on the Internet and attributed to David Clark, but no one really knows where or when he stated it. It appears in a 1997 interview of David Clark by Jonathan Zittrain, the transcript of which is available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/jzfallsem//trans/clark/ (accessed 18 August 2006). }~ This quote emphasizes the necessity of arguing with and through technology, the first aspect of a recursive public; the only argument that convinces is working code. If it works, then it can be implemented; if it is implemented, it will "route around" the legal damage done by the RIAA. The notion of "running code" is central to an understanding of the relationship between argumentby- technology and argument-by-talk for geeks. Very commonly, the response by geeks to people who argued about Napster that summer—and the courts’ decisions regarding it—was to dismiss their complaints as mere talk. Many suggested that if Napster were shut down, thousands more programs like it would spring up in its wake. As one mailing-list participant, Ashish "Hash" Gulhati, put it, "It is precisely these totally unenforceable and mindless judicial decisions that will start to look like self-satisfied wanking when there’s code out there which will make the laws worth less than the paper they’re written on. When it comes to fighting this shit in a way that counts, everything that isn’t code is just talk."~{ Ashish "Hash" Gulhati, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 9 September 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/3125. }~ +={ Clark, David ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) ; + Gulhati, Ashish ; + recursive public : + layers of +3 +} + +Such powerful rhetoric often collapses the process itself, for someone has to write the code. It can even be somewhat paradoxical: there is a need to talk forcefully about the need for less talk and more code, as demonstrated by Eugen Leitl when I objected that Silk-listers were "just talking": "Of course we should talk. Did my last post consist of some kickass Python code adding sore-missed functionality to Mojonation? Nope. Just more meta-level waffle about the importance of waffling less, coding more. I lack the ,{[pg 59]}, proper mental equipment upstairs for being a good coder, hence I attempt to corrupt young impressionable innocents into contributing to the cause. Unashamedly so. So sue me."~{ Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 9 September 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/3127. Python is a programming language. Mojonation was a very promising peer-to-peer application in 2000 that has since ceased to exist. }~ +={ Leitl, Eugene ; + programming +1 +} + +Eugen’s flippancy reveals a recognition that there is a political component to coding, even if, in the end, talk disappears and only code remains. Though Eugen and others might like to adopt a rhetoric that suggests "it will just happen," in practice none of them really act that way. Rather, the activities of coding, writing software, or improving and diversifying the software that exists are not inevitable or automatic but have specific characteristics. They require time and "the proper mental equipment." The inevitability they refer to consists not in some fantasy of machine intelligence, but in a social imaginary shared by many people in loosely connected networks who spend all their free time building, downloading, hacking, testing, installing, patching, coding, arguing, blogging, and proselytizing—in short, creating a recursive public enabled by the Internet. + +Jeff Bone’s op-ed piece, which is typically enthusiastic about the inevitability of new technologies, still takes time to reference one of thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of projects as worthy of attention and support, a project called Fling, which is an attempt to rewrite the core protocols of the Internet.~{ In particular, this project focuses on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the Domain Name System (DNS). The first two have remained largely stable over the last thirty years, but the DNS system has been highly politicized (see Mueller, Ruling the Root). }~ The goal of the project is to write a software implementation of these protocols with the explicit goal of making them "anonymous, untraceable, and untappable." Fling is not a corporation, a start-up, or a university research project (though some such projects are); it is only a Web site. The core protocols of the Internet, contained in the RFCs, are little more than documents describing how computers should interact with each other. They are standards, but of an unusual kind.~{ On Internet standards, see Schmidt and Werle, Coordinating Technology; Abbate and Kahin, Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure. }~ Bone’s leap from a discussion about Napster to one about the core protocols of the Internet is not unusual. It represents the second aspect of a recursive public: the importance of understanding the Internet as a set of "layers," each enabling the next and each requiring an openness that both prevents central control and leads to maximum creativity. +={ protocols : + TCP/IP +1 ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) +} + +% ={Domain Name System (DNS);Napster} ={Napster;Standards;Standards processes} + +RFCs have developed from an informal system of memos into a formal standardization process over the life of the Internet, as the IETF and the Internet Society (ISOC) have become more bureaucratic entities. The process of writing and maintaining these documents is particular to the Internet, precisely because the Internet ,{[pg 60]}, is the kind of network experiment that facilitates the sharing of resources across administratively bounded networks. It is a process that has allowed all the experimenters to both share the network and to propose changes to it, in a common space. RFCs are primarily suggestions, not demands. They are "public domain" documents and thus available to everyone with access to the Internet. As David Clark’s reference to "consensus and running code" demonstrates, the essential component of setting Internet standards is a good, working implementation of the protocols. Someone must write software that behaves in the ways specified by the RFC, which is, after all, only a document, not a piece of software. Different implementations of, for example, the TCP/IP protocol or the File Transfer Protocol (ftp) depend initially on individuals, groups, and/or corporations building them into an operating-system kernel or a piece of user software and subsequently on the existence of a large number of people using the same operating system or application. +={ Internet Society (ISOC) ; + Clark, David ; + standards processes +2 +} + +In many cases, subsequent to an implementation that has been disseminated and adopted, the RFCs have been amended to reflect these working implementations and to ordain them as standards. So the current standards are actually bootstrapped, through a process of writing RFCs, followed by a process of creating implementations that adhere loosely to the rules in the RFC, then observing the progress of implementations, and then rewriting RFCs so that the process begins all over again. The fact that geeks can have a discussion via e-mail depends on the very existence of both an RFC to define the e-mail protocol and implementations of software to send the e-mails. + +This standardization process essentially inverts the process of planning. Instead of planning a system, which is then standardized, refined, and finally built according to specification, the RFC process allows plans to be proposed, implemented, refined, reproposed, rebuilt, and so on until they are adopted by users and become the standard approved of by the IETF. The implication for most geeks is that this process is permanently and fundamentally open: changes to it can be proposed, implemented, and adopted without end, and the better a technology becomes, the more difficult it becomes to improve on it, and therefore the less reason there is to subvert it or reinvent it. Counterexamples, in which a standard emerges but no one adopts it, are also plentiful, and they suggest that the standardization process extends beyond the proposal-implementation-proposal-standard ,{[pg 61]}, circle to include the problem of actually convincing users to switch from one working technology to a better one. However, such failures of adoption are also seen as a kind of confirmation of the quality or ease of use of the current solution, and they are all the more likely to be resisted when some organization or political entity tries to force users to switch to the new standard—something the IETF has refrained from doing for the most part. +={ planning } + +2~ Conclusion: Recursive Public +={ public +7 } + +Napster was a familiar and widely discussed instance of the "reorientation of power and knowledge" (or in this case, power and music) wrought by the Internet and the practices of geeks. Napster was not, however, a recursive public or a Free Software project, but a dot-com-inspired business plan in which proprietary software was given away for free in the hopes that revenue would flow from the stock market, from advertising, or from enhanced versions of the software. Therefore, geeks did not defend Napster as much as they experienced its legal restriction as a wake-up call: the Internet enables Napster and will enable many other things, but laws, corporations, lobbyists, money, and governments can destroy all of it. +={ music ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +} + +I started this chapter by asking what draws geeks together: what constitutes the chain that binds geeks like Sean and Adrian to hipsters in Berlin and to entrepreneurs and programmers in Bangalore? What constitutes their affinity if it is not any of the conventional candidates like culture, nation, corporation, or language? A colloquial answer might be that it is simply the Internet that brings them together: cyberspace, virtual communities, online culture. But this doesn’t answer the question of why? Because they can? Because Community Is Good? If mere association is the goal, why not AOL or a vast private network provided by Microsoft? +={ affinity (of geeks) +2 ; + Berlin ; + Doyle, Sean +} + +My answer, by contrast, is that geeks’ affinity with one another is structured by shared moral and technical understandings of order. They are a public, an independent public that has the ability to build, maintain, and modify itself, that is not restricted to the activities of speaking, writing, arguing, or protesting. Recursive publics form through their experience with the Internet precisely because the Internet is the kind of thing they can inhabit and transform. Two ,{[pg 62]}, things make recursive publics distinctive: the ability to include the practice of creating this infrastructure as part of the activity of being public or contesting control; and the ability to "recurse" through the layers of that infrastructure, maintaining its publicness at each level without making it into an unchanging, static, unmodifiable thing. +={ moral and technical order ; + Infrastructure +4 +} + +The affinity constituted by a recursive public, through the medium of the Internet, creates geeks who understand clearly what association through the Internet means. This affinity structures their imagination of what the Internet is and enables: creation, distribution, modification of knowledge, music, science, software. The infrastructure—this-infrastructure-here, the Internet—must be understood as part of this imaginary (in addition to being a pulsating tangle of computers, wires, waves, and electrons). +={ music } + +The Internet is not the only medium for such association. A corporation, for example, is also based on a shared imaginary of the economy, of how markets, exchanges, and business cycles are supposed to work; it is the creation of a concrete set of relations and practices, one that is generally inflexible—even in this age of socalled flexible capitalism—because it requires a commitment of time, humans, and capital. Even in fast capitalism one needs to rent office space, buy toilet paper, install payroll software, and so on. + +The Internet is not the only medium for such association. A corporation, for example, is also based on a shared imaginary of the economy, of how markets, exchanges, and business cycles are supposed to work; it is the creation of a concrete set of relations and practices, one that is generally inflexible—even in this age of socalled flexible capitalism—because it requires a commitment of time, humans, and capital. Even in fast capitalism one needs to rent office space, buy toilet paper, install payroll software, and so on. + +The urgency evidenced in the case of Napster (and repeated in numerous other instances, such as the debate over net neutrality) is linked to a moral idea of order in which there is a shared imaginary,{[pg 63]}, of The Public, and not only a vast multiplicity of competing publics. It is an urgency linked directly to the fact that the Internet provides geeks with a platform, an environment, an infrastructure through which they not only associate, but create, and do so in a manner that is widely felt to be autonomous, autotelic, and independent of at least the most conventional forms of power: states and corporations—independent enough, in fact, that both states and corporations can make widespread use of this infrastructure (can become geeks themselves) without necessarily endangering its independence. +={ Napster ; + moral and technical order +} + +% ={Public:autotelic and independent} + +1~ 2. Protestant Reformers, Polymaths, Transhumanists +={ allegory, of Protestant Reformation +54 ; + Protestant Reformation +54 ; + transhumanism +} + +% this Transhumanism ref not in original index + +% [PAGE 64] + +Geeks talk a lot. They don’t talk about recursive publics. They don’t often talk about imaginations, infrastructures, moral or technical orders. But they do talk a lot. A great deal of time and typing is necessary to create software and networks: learning and talking, teaching and arguing, telling stories and reading polemics, reflecting on the world in and about the infrastructure one inhabits. In this chapter I linger on the stories geeks tell, and especially on stories and reflections that mark out contemporary problems of knowledge and power—stories about grand issues like progress, enlightenment, liberty, and freedom. +={ moral and technical order ; + enlightenment +3 ; + Geeks +6 ; + Progress +3 +} + +Issues of enlightenment, progress, and freedom are quite obviously still part of a "social imaginary," especially imaginations of the relationship of knowledge and enlightenment to freedom and autonomy so clearly at stake in the notion of a public or public ,{[pg 65]}, sphere. And while the example of Free Software illuminates how issues of enlightenment, progress, and freedom are proposed, contested, and implemented in and through software and networks, this chapter contains stories that are better understood as "usable pasts"—less technical and more accessible narratives that make sense of the contemporary world by reflecting on the past and its difference from today. +={ social imaginary ; + usable pasts +2 +} + +Usable pasts is a more charitable term for what might be called modern myths among geeks: stories that the tellers know to be a combination of fact and fiction. They are told not in order to remember the past, but in order to make sense of the present and of the future. They make sense of practices that are not questioned in the doing, but which are not easily understood in available intellectual or colloquial terms. The first set of stories I relate are those about the Protestant Reformation: allegories that make use of Catholic and Protestant churches, laity, clergy, high priests, and reformation-era images of control and liberation. It might be surprising that geeks turn to the past (and especially to religious allegory) in order to make sense of the present, but the reason is quite simple: there are no "ready-to-narrate" stories that make sense of the practices of geeks today. Precisely because geeks are "figuring out" things that are not clear or obvious, they are of necessity bereft of effective ways of talking about it. The Protestant Reformation makes for good allegory because it separates power from control; it draws on stories of catechism and ritual, alphabets, pamphlets and liturgies, indulgences and self-help in order to give geeks a way to make sense of the distinction between power and control, and how it relates to the technical and political economy they occupy. The contemporary relationship among states, corporations, small businesses, and geeks is not captured by familiar oppositions like commercial/noncommercial, for/against private property, or capitalist/socialist—it is a relationship of reform and conversion, not revolution or overthrow. +={ figuring out } + +Usable pasts are stories, but they are stories that reflect specific attitudes and specific ways of thinking about the relationship between past, present, and future. Geeks think and talk a lot about time, progress, and change, but their conclusions and attitudes are by no means uniform. Some geeks are much more aware of the specific historical circumstances and contexts in which they operate, others less so. In this chapter I pose a question via Michel ,{[pg 66]}, Foucault’s famous short piece "What Is Enlightenment?" Namely, are geeks modern? For Foucault, rereading Kant’s eponymous piece from 1784, the problem of being modern (or of an age being "enlightened") is not one of a period or epoch that people live through; rather, it involves a subjective relationship, an attitude. Kant’s explanation of enlightenment does not suggest that it is itself a universal, but that it occurs through a form of reflection on what difference the changes of one’s immediate historical past make to one’s understanding of the supposed universals of a much longer history—that is, one must ask why it is necessary to think the way one does today about problems that have been confronted in ages past. For Foucault, such reflections must be rooted in the "historically unique forms in which the generalities of our relations . . . have been problematized."~{ Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment," 319. }~ Thus, I want to ask of geeks, how do they connect the historically unique problems they confront—from the Internet to Napster to intellectual property to sharing and reusing source code—to the generalities of relations in which they narrate them as problems of liberty, knowledge, power, and enlightenment? Or, as Foucault puts it, are they modern in this sense? Do they "despise the present" or not? +={ Foucault, Michel ; + geeks : + as moderns ; + intellectual property ; + Kant, Immanuel ; + Napster +} + +The attitudes that geeks take in responding to these questions fall along a spectrum that I have identified as ranging from "polymaths" to "transhumanists." These monikers are drawn from real discussions with geeks, but they don’t designate a kind of person. They are "subroutines," perhaps, called from within a larger program of moral and technical imaginations of order. It is possible for the same person to be a polymath at work and a transhumanist at home, but generally speaking they are conflicting and opposite mantles. In polymath routines, technology is an intervention into a complicated, historically unique field of people, customs, organizations, other technologies, and laws; in transhumanist routines, technology is seen as an inevitable force—a product of human action, but not of human design—that is impossible to control or resist through legal or customary means. +={ intervention, technology as ; + moral and technical order ; + transhumanism +} + +2~ Protestant Reformation + +Geeks love allegories about the Protestant Reformation; they relish stories of Luther and Calvin, of popery and iconoclasm, of reformation ,{[pg 67]}, over revolution. Allegories of Protestant revolt allow geeks to make sense of the relationship between the state (the monarchy), large corporations (the Catholic Church), the small start-ups, individual programmers, and adepts among whom they spend most of their time (Protestant reformers), and the laity (known as "lusers" and "sheeple"). It gives them a way to assert that they prefer reformation (to save capitalism from the capitalists) over revolution. Obviously, not all geeks tell stories of "religious wars" and the Protestant Reformation, but these images reappear often enough in conversations that most geeks will more or less instantly recognize them as a way of making sense of modern corporate, state, and political power in the arena of information technology: the figures of Pope, the Catholic Church, the Vatican, the monarchs of various nations, the laity, the rebel adepts like Luther and Calvin, as well as models of sectarianism, iconoclasm ("In the beginning was the Command Line"), politicoreligious power, and arcane theological argumentation.~{ Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line. }~ The allegories that unfold provide geeks a way to make sense of a similarly complex modern situation in which it is not the Church and the State that struggle, but the Corporation and the State; and what geeks struggle over are not matters of church doctrine and organization, but matters of information technology and its organization as intellectual property and economic motor. I stress here that this is not an analogy that I myself am making (though I happily make use of it), but is one that is in wide circulation among the geeks I study. To the historian or religious critic, it may seem incomplete, or absurd, or bizarre, but it still serves a specific function, and this is why I highlight it as one component of the practical and technical ideas of order that geeks share. +={ Intellectual property ; + Luther, Martin +15 ; + reformation vs. revolution ; + religious wars +5 +} + +% this "intellectual property" reference not in original index + +At the first level are allegories of "religious war" or "holy war" (and increasingly, of "jihads"). Such stories reveal a certain cynicism: they describe a technical war of details between two pieces of software that accomplish the same thing through different means, so devotion to one or the other is seen as a kind of arbitrary theological commitment, at once reliant on a pure rationality and requiring aesthetic or political judgment. Such stories imply that two technologies are equally good and equally bad and that one’s choice of sect is thus an entirely nonrational one based in the vicissitudes of background and belief. Some people are zealous proselytizers of a technology, some are not. As one Usenet message explains: "Religious ‘wars’ have tended to occur over theological and doctrinal ,{[pg 68]}, technicalities of one sort or another. The parallels between that and the computing technicalities that result in ‘computing wars’ are pretty strong."~{ Message-ID: { tht55.221960$701.2930569@news4.giganews.com. }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=tht55.221960$701.2930569@news4.giganews.com }~ + +Perhaps the most familiar and famous of these wars is that between Apple and Microsoft (formerly between Apple and IBM), a conflict that is often played out in dramatic and broad strokes that imply fundamental differences, when in fact the differences are extremely slight.~{ The Apple-Microsoft conflict was given memorable expression by Umberto Eco in a widely read piece that compared the Apple user interface ,{[pg 320]}, to Catholicism and the PC user interface to Protestantism ("La bustina di Minerva," Espresso, 30 September 1994, back page). }~ Geeks are also familiar with a wealth of less well-known "holy wars": EMACS versus vi; KDE versus Gnome; Linux versus BSD; Oracle versus all other databases.~{ One entry on Wikipedia differentiates religious wars from run-of-the-mill "flame wars" as follows: "Whereas a flame war is usually a particular spate of flaming against a non-flamy background, a holy war is a drawn-out disagreement that may last years or even span careers" ("Flaming [Internet]," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_war [accessed 16 January 2006]). }~ + +Often the language of the Reformation creeps playfully into otherwise serious attempts to make aesthetic judgments about technology, as in this analysis of the programming language tcl/tk: +={ programming languages +2 } + +_1 It’s also not clear that the primary design criterion in tcl, perl, or Visual BASIC was visual beauty—nor, probably, should it have been. Ousterhout said people will vote with their feet. This is important. While the High Priests in their Ivory Towers design pristine languages of stark beauty and balanced perfection for their own appreciation, the rest of the mundane world will in blind and contented ignorance go plodding along using nasty little languages like those enumerated above. These poor sots will be getting a great deal of work done, putting bread on the table for their kids, and getting home at night to share it with them. The difference is that the priests will shake their fingers at the laity, and the laity won’t care, because they’ll be in bed asleep.~{ Message-ID: { 369tva$8l0@csnews.cs.colorado.edu. }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=369tva$8l0@csnews.cs.colorado.edu }~ + +In this instance, the "religious war" concerns the difference between academic programming languages and regular programmers made equivalent to a distinction between the insularity of the Catholic Church and the self-help of a protestant laity: the heroes (such as tcl/tk, perl, and python—all Free Software) are the "nasty little languages" of the laity; the High Priests design (presumably) Algol, LISP, and other "academic" languages. +={ perl (programming language) ; + python (programming language) ; + tcl/tk (programming language) +} + +At a second level, however, the allegory makes precise use of Protestant Reformation details. For example, in a discussion about the various fights over the Gnu C Compiler (gcc), a central component of the various UNIX operating systems, Christopher Browne posted this counter-reformation allegory to a Usenet group. +={ GNU C Compiler (gcc) +6 ; + UNIX operating system +} + +_1 The EGCS project was started around two years ago when G++ (and GCC) development got pretty "stuck." EGCS sought to integrate together ,{[pg 69]}, a number of the groups of patches that people were making to the GCC "family." In effect, there had been a "Protestant Reformation," with split-offs of: + +_2 a) The GNU FORTRAN Denomination; + +_2 b) The Pentium Tuning Sect; + +_2 c) The IBM Haifa Instruction Scheduler Denomination; + +_2 d) The C++ Standard Acolytes. + +_1 These groups had been unable to integrate their efforts (for various reasons) with the Catholic Version, GCC 2.8. The Ecumenical GNU Compiler Society sought to draw these groups back into the Catholic flock. The project was fairly successful; GCC 2.8 was succeeded by GCC 2.9, which was not a direct upgrade from 2.8, but rather the results of the EGCS project. EGCS is now GCC.~{ Message-ID: { c1dz4.145472$mb.2669517@news6.giganews.com. }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=c1dz4.145472$mb.2669517@news6.giganews.com It should be noted, in case the reader is unsure how serious this is, that EGCS stood for Extended GNU Compiler System, not Ecumenical GNU Compiler Society. }~ + +In addition to the obvious pleasure with which they deploy the sectarian aspects of the Protestant Reformation, geeks also allow themselves to see their struggles as those of Luther-like adepts, confronted by powerful worldly institutions that are distinct but intertwined: the Catholic Church and absolutist monarchs. Sometimes these comparisons are meant to mock theological argument; sometimes they are more straightforwardly hagiographic. For instance, a 1998 article in Salon compares Martin Luther and Linus Torvalds (originator of the Linux kernel). +={ Linux (Free Software project) ; + Torvalds, Linus +1 +} + +_1 In Luther’s Day, the Roman Catholic Church had a near-monopoly on the cultural, intellectual and spiritual life of Europe. But the principal source text informing that life—the Bible—was off limits to ordinary people. . . . Linus Torvalds is an information-age reformer cut from the same cloth. Like Luther, his journey began while studying for ordination into the modern priesthood of computer scientists at the University of Helsinki—far from the seats of power in Redmond and Silicon Valley. Also like Luther, he had a divine, slightly nutty idea to remove the intervening bureaucracies and put ordinary folks in a direct relationship to a higher power—in this case, their computers. Dissolving the programmer-user distinction, he encouraged ordinary people to participate in the development of their computing environment. And just as Luther sought to make the entire sacramental shebang—the wine, the bread and the translated Word—available to the hoi polloi, Linus seeks to revoke the developer’s proprietary access to the OS, insisting that the full operating system source code be delivered—without cost—to every ordinary Joe at the desktop.~{ "Martin Luther, Meet Linus Torvalds," Salon, 12 November 1998, http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/11/12feature.html (accessed 5 February 2005). }~ ,{[pg 70]}, + +Adepts with strong convictions—monks and priests whose initiation and mastery are evident—make the allegory work. Other uses of Christian iconography are less, so to speak, faithful to the sources. Another prominent personality, Richard Stallman, of the Free Software Foundation, is prone to dressing as his alter-ego, St. IGNUcius, patron saint of the church of EMACS—a church with no god, but intense devotion to a baroque text-processing program of undeniable, nigh-miraculous power.~{ See http://www.stallman.org/saint.html (accessed 5 February 2005) and http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/religion/ (accessed 5 February 2005). On EMACS, see chapter 6. }~ +={ EMACS (text editor) ; + Stallman, Richard +} + +Often the appeal of Reformation-era rhetoric comes from a kind of indictment of the present: despite all this high tech, super-fabulous computronic wonderfulness, we are no less feudal, no less violent, no less arbitrary and undemocratic; which is to say, geeks have progressed, have seen the light and the way, but the rest of society—and especially management and marketing—have not. In this sense, Reformation allegories are stories of how "things never change." + +But the most compelling use of the Protestant Reformation as usable past comes in the more detailed understandings geeks have of the political economy of information technology. The allegorization of the Catholic Church with Microsoft, for instance, is a frequent component, as in this brief message regarding start-up key combinations in the Be operating system: "These secret handshakes are intended to reinforce a cabalistic high priesthood and should not have been disclosed to the laity. Forget you ever saw this post and go by [sic] something from Microsoft."~{ Message-ID: 6ms27l$6e1@bgtnsc01.worldnet.att.net. In one very humorous case the comparison is literalized "Microsoft acquires Catholic Church" (Message-ID: gaijin-870804300-dragonwing@sec.lia.net). }~ +={ Microsoft : + as Catholic Church +1 ; + usable pasts +} + +More generally, large corporations like IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft are made to stand in for Catholicism, while bureaucratic congresses and parliaments with their lobbyists take on the role of absolutist monarchs and their cronies. Geeks can then see themselves as fighting to uphold Christianity (true capitalism) against the church (corporations) and to be reforming a way of life that is corrupted by church and monarchs, instead of overthrowing through revolution a system they believe to be flawed. There is a historically and technically specific component of this political economy in which it is in the interest of corporations like IBM and Microsoft to keep users "locked as securely to Big Blue as an manacled wretch in a medieval dungeon."~{ Paul Fusco, "The Gospel According to Joy," New York Times, 27 March 1988, Sunday Magazine, 28. }~ +={ International Business Machines (IBM) } + +Such stories appeal because they bypass the language of modern American politics (liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican) in which there are only two sides to any issue. They also bypass an ,{[pg 71]}, argument between capitalism and socialism, in which if you are not pro-capitalism you must be a communist. They are stories that allow the more pragmatist of the geeks to engage in intervention and reformation, rather than revolution. Though I’ve rarely heard it articulated so bluntly, the allegory often implies that one must "save capitalism from the capitalists," a sentiment that implies at least some kind of human control over capitalism. +={ control, relationship to power ; + power, relationship to control ; + Reformation vs. revolution +} + +In fact, the allegorical use of the Reformation and the church generates all kinds of clever comparisons. A typical description of such comparisons might go like this: the Catholic Church stands in for large, publicly traded corporations, especially those controlling large amounts of intellectual property (the granting of which might roughly be equated with the ceremonies of communion and confession) for which they depend on the assistance and support of national governments. Naturally, it is the storied excesses of the church—indulgences, liturgical complexity, ritualistic ceremony, and corruption—which make for easy allegory. Modern corporations can be figured as a small, elite papal body with theologians (executives and their lawyers, boards of directors and their lawyers), who command a much larger clergy (employees), who serve a laity (consumers) largely imagined to be sinful (underspending on music and movies—indeed, even "stealing" them) and thus in need of elaborate and ritualistic cleansing (advertising and lawsuits) by the church. Access to grace (the American Dream) is mediated only by the church and is given form through the holy acts of shopping and home improvement. The executives preach messages of damnation to the government, messages most government officials are all too willing to hear: do not tamper with our market share, do not affect our pricing, do not limit our ability to expand these markets. The executives also offer unaccountable promises of salvation in the guise of deregulation and the American version of "reform"—the demolition of state and national social services. Government officials in turn have developed their own "divine right of kings," which justifies certain forms of manipulation (once called "elections") of succession. Indulgences are sold left and right by lobbyists or industry associations, and the decrees of the papacy evidence little but full disconnection from the miserable everyday existence of the flock. + +In fact, it is remarkable how easy such comparisons become the more details of the political economy of information one learns. But ,{[pg 72]}, allegories of the Reformation and clerical power can lead easily to cynicism, which should perhaps be read in this instance as evidence of political disenfranchisement, rather than a lapse in faith. And yet the usable pasts of these reformation-minded modern monks and priests crop up regularly not only because they provide relief from technical chatter but because they explain a political, technical, legal situation that does not have ready-to-narrate stories. Geeks live in a world finely controlled by corporate organizations, mass media, marketing departments, and lobbyists, yet they share a profound distrust of government regulation—they need another set of just-so stories to make sense of it. The standard unusable pasts of the freeing of markets, the inevitability of capitalism and democracy, or more lately, the necessity of security don’t do justice to their experience. + +Allegories of Reformation are stories that make sense of the political economy of information. But they also have a more precise use: to make sense of the distinction between power and control. Because geeks are "closer to the machine" than the rest of the laity, one might reasonably expect them to be the ones in power. This is clearly not the case, however, and it is the frustrations and mysteries by which states, corporations, and individuals manipulate technical details in order to shift power that often earns the deepest ire of geeks. Control, therefore, includes the detailed methods and actual practices by which corporations, government agencies, or individuals attempt to manipulate people (or enroll them to manipulate themselves and others) into making technical choices that serve power, rather than rationality, liberty, elegance, or any other geekly concern. +={ control, relationship to power } + +Consider the subject of evil. During my conversations with Sean Doyle in the late 1990s, as well as with a number of other geeks, the term evil was regularly used to refer to some kind of design or technical problem. I asked Sean what he meant. +={ Doyle, Sean +6 ; + evil +6 +} + +!_ SD: +[Evil is] just a term I use to say that something’s wrong, but usually it means something is wrong on purpose, there was agency behind it. I can’t remember [the example you gave] but I think it may have been some GE equipment, where it has this default where it likes to send things in its own private format rather than in DICOM [the radiology industry standard for digital images], if you give it a choice. I don’t know why they would have done something like that, ,{[pg 73]}, it doesn’t solve any backward compatibility problem, it’s really just an exclusionary sort of thing. So I guess there’s Evil like that. . . . + +!_ CK: +one of the other examples that you had . . . was something with Internet Explorer 3.0? +={ Microsoft : + Internet Explorer +} + +!_ SD: +Yes, oh yes, there are so many things with IE3 that are completely Evil. Like here’s one of them: in the http protocol there’s a thing called the "user agent field" where a browser announces to the server who it is. If you look at IE, it announces that it is Mozilla, which is the [code-name for] Netscape. Why did they do this? Well because a lot of the web servers were sending out certain code that said, if it were Mozilla they would serve the stuff down, [if not] they would send out something very simple or stupid that would look very ugly. But it turned out that [IE3, or maybe IE2] didn’t support things when it first came out. Like, I don’t think they supported tables, and later on, their versions of Javascript were so different that there was no way it was compatible—it just added tremendous complexity. It was just a way of pissing on the Internet and saying there’s no law that says we have to follow these Internet standards. We can do as we damn well please, and we’re so big that you can’t stop us. So I view it as Evil in that way. I mean they obviously have the talent to do it. They obviously have the resources to do it. They’ve obviously done the work, it’s just that they’ll have this little twitch where they won’t support a certain MIME type or they’ll support some things differently than others. +={ Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) ; + Mozilla ; + standards : + Internet +} + +!_ CK: +But these kinds of incompatibility issues can happen as a result of a lack of communication or coordination, which might involve agency at some level, right? + +!_ SD: +Well, I think of that more as Stupidity than Evil [laughter]. No, Evil is when there is an opportunity to do something, and an understanding that there is an opportunity to, and resources and all that—and then you do something just to spite the other person. You know I’m sure it’s like in messy divorces, where you would rather sell the property at half its value rather than have it go to the other person. + +Sean relates control to power by casting the decisions of a large corporation in a moral light. Although the specific allegory of the Protestant Reformation does not operate here, the details do. Microsoft’s decision to manipulate Internet Explorer’s behavior stems not from a lack of technical sophistication, nor is it an "accident" of ,{[pg 74]}, complexity, according to Sean, but is a deliberate assertion of economic and political power to corrupt the very details by which software has been created and standardized and is expected to function. The clear goal of this activity is conversion, the expansion of Microsoft’s flock through a detailed control of the beliefs and practices (browsers and functionality) of computer users. Calling Microsoft "Evil" in this way has much the same meaning as questioning the Catholic Church’s use of ritual, ceremony, literacy, and history—the details of the "implementation" of religion, so to speak. +={ Microsoft : + as Catholic Church +9 | Internet Explorer ; + power, relationship to control : + see also reorientation of power and knowledge +} + +Or, in the terms of the Protestant Reformation itself, the practices of conversion as well as those of liberation, learning, and self-help are central to the story. It is not an accident that many historians of the Reformation themselves draw attention to the promises of liberation through reformation "information technologies."~{ See, for example, Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation. There is rigorous debate about the relation of print, religion, and capitalism: one locus classicus is Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, which was inspired by McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy. See also Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England and The Christian’s ABCs; Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent, chaps. 1-3. }~ Colloquial (and often academic) assertions that the printing press was technologically necessary or sufficient to bring the Reformation about appear constantly as a parable of this new age of information. Often the printing press is the only "technological" cause considered, but scholars of the real, historical Reformation also pay close attention to the fact of widespread literacy, to circulating devotional pamphlets, catechisms, and theological tracts, as well as to the range of transformations of political and legal relationships that occurred simultaneously with the introduction of the printing press. + +✠  © + +One final way to demonstrate the effectiveness of these allegories—their ability to work on the minds of geeks—is to demonstrate how they have started to work on me, to demonstrate how much of a geek I have become—a form of participant allegorization, so to speak. The longer one considers the problems that make up the contemporary political economy of information technology that geeks inhabit, the more likely it is that these allegories will start to present themselves almost automatically—as, for instance, when I read The Story of A, a delightful book having nothing to do with geeks, a book about literacy in early America. The author, Patricia Crain, explains that the Christ’s cross (see above) was often used in the creation of hornbooks or battledores, small leather-backed paddles inscribed with the Lord’s Prayer and the alphabet, which were used ,{[pg 75]}, to teach children their ABCs from as early as the fifteenth century until as late as the nineteenth: "In its early print manifestations, the pedagogical alphabet is headed not by the letter A but by the ‘Christ’s Cross’: ✠. . . . Because the alphabet is associated with Catholic Iconography, as if the two sets of signs were really part of one semiological system, one of the struggles of the Reformation would be to wrest the alphabet away from the Catholic Church."~{ Crain, The Story of A, 16-17. }~ +={ Crain, Patricia +1 } + +Here, allegorically, the Catholic Church’s control of the alphabet (like Microsoft’s programming of Internet Explorer to blur public standards for the Internet) is not simply ideological; it is not just a fantasy of origin or ownership planted in the fallow mental soil of believers, but in fact a very specific, very nonsubjective, and very media-specific normative tool of control. Crain explains further: "Today ✠ represents the imprimatur of the Catholic Church on copyright pages. In its connection to the early modern alphabet as well, this cross carries an imprimatur or licensing effect. This ‘let it be printed,’ however, is directed not to the artisan printer but to the mind and memory of the young scholar. . . . Like modern copyright, the cross authorizes the existence of the alphabet and associates the letters with sacred authorship, especially since another long-lived function of ✠ in liturgical missals is to mark gospel passages. The symbol both conveys information and generates ritual behavior."~{ Ibid., 20-21. }~ +={ Copyright +2 ; + Microsoft : + Internet Explorer ; + authorship ; + standards : + Internet +} + +% Internet Standards added + +The © today carries as much if not more power, both ideologically and legally, as the cross of the Catholic church. It is the very symbol of authorship, even though in origin and in function it governs only ownership and rights. Magical thinking about copyright abounds, but one important function of the symbol ©, if not its legal implications, is to achieve the same thing as the Christ’s cross: to associate in the mind of the reader the ownership of a particular text (or in this case, piece of software) with a particular organization or person. Furthermore, even though the symbol is an artifact of national and international law, it creates an association not between a text and the state or government, but between a text and particular corporations, publishers, printers, or authors. + +Like the Christ’s cross, the copyright symbol carries both a licensing effect (exclusive, limited or nonexclusive) and an imprimatur on the minds of people: "let it be imprinted in memory" that this is the work of such and such an author and that this is the property of such and such a corporation. +={ intellectual property } + +% ,{[pg 76]}, + +Without the allegory of the Protestant Reformation, the only available narrative for such evil—whether it be the behavior of Microsoft or of some other corporation—is that corporations are "competing in the marketplace according to the rules of capitalism" and thus when geeks decry such behavior, it’s just sour grapes. If corporations are not breaking any laws, why shouldn’t they be allowed to achieve control in this manner? In this narrative there is no room for a moral evaluation of competition—anything goes, it would seem. Claiming for Microsoft that it is simply playing by the rules of capitalism puts everyone else into either the competitor box or the noncompetitor box (the state and other noncompetitive organizations). Using the allegory of the Protestant Reformation, on the other hand, gives geeks a way to make sense of an unequal distribution among competing powers—between large and small corporations, and between market power and the details of control. It provides an alternate imagination against which to judge the technically and legally specific actions that corporations and individuals take, and to imagine forms of justified action in return. +={ evil +1 } + +Without such an allegory, geeks who oppose Microsoft are generally forced into the position of being anticapitalist or are forced to adopt the stance that all standards should be publicly generated and controlled, a position few wish to take. Indeed, many geeks would prefer a different kind of imaginary altogether—a recursive public, perhaps. Instead of an infrastructure subject to unequal distributions of power and shot through with "evil" distortions of technical control, there is, as geeks see it, the possibility for a "self-leveling" level playing field, an autotelic system of rules, both technical and legal, by which all participants are expected to compete equally. Even if it remains an imaginary, the allegory of the Protestant Reformation makes sense of (gives order to) the political economy of the contemporary information-technology world and allows geeks to conceive of their interests and actions according to a narrative of reformation, rather than one of revolution or submission. In the Reformation the interpretation or truth of Christian teaching was not primarily in question: it was not a doctrinal revolution, but a bureaucratic one. Likewise, geeks do not question the rightness of networks, software, or protocols and standards, nor are they against capitalism or intellectual property, but they do wish to maintain a space for critique and the moral evaluation of contemporary capitalism and competition. +={ intellectual property ; + infrastructure +4 ; + public ; + recursive public ; + standards : + Internet +} + +% ,{[pg 77]}, + +2~ Polymaths and Transhumanists +={ Polymaths : + transhumanists vs. +55 ; + Transhumanism : + polymaths vs. +55 +} + +Usable pasts articulate the conjunction of "operating systems and social systems," giving narrative form to imaginations of moral and technical order. To say that there are no ready-to-narrate stories about contemporary political economy means only that the standard colloquial explanations of the state of the modern world do not do justice to the kinds of moral and technical imaginations of order that geeks possess by virtue of their practices. Geeks live in, and build, one kind of world—a world of software, networks, and infrastructures—but they are often confronted with stories and explanations that simply don’t match up with their experience, whether in newspapers and on television, or among nongeek friends. To many geeks, proselytization seems an obvious route: why not help friends and neighbors to understand the hidden world of networks and software, since, they are quite certain, it will come to structure their lives as well? +={ moral and technical order ; + usable pasts +} + +Geeks gather through the Internet and, like a self-governing people, possess nascent ideas of independence, contract, and constitution by which they wish to govern themselves and resist governance by others.~{ At a populist level, this was captured by John Perry Barlow’s "Declaration of Independence of the Internet," http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. }~ Conventional political philosophies like libertarianism, anarchism, and (neo)liberalism only partially capture these social imaginaries precisely because they make no reference to the operating systems, software, and networks within which geeks live, work, and in turn seek to build and extend. + +Geeks live in specific ways in time and space. They are not just users of technology, or a "network society," or a "virtual community," but embodied and imagining actors whose affinity for one another is enabled in new ways by the tools and technologies they have such deep affective connections to. They live in this-network-here, a historically unique form grounded in particular social, moral, national, and historical specificities which nonetheless relates to generalities such as progress, technology, infrastructure, and liberty. Geeks are by no means of one mind about such generalities though, and they often have highly developed means of thinking about them. +={ affinity (of geeks) ; + progress +} + +Foucault’s article "What Is Enlightenment?" captures part of this problematic. For Foucault, Kant’s understanding of modernity was an attempt to rethink the relationship between the passage of historical time and the subjective relationship that individuals have toward it. +={ enlightenment +3 ; + Foucault, Michel +3 ; + Kant, Immanuel +1 ; + modernity +2 +} + +% ,{[pg 78]}, + +_1 Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity as an attitude rather than as a period of history. And by "attitude," I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. No doubt a bit like what the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the "modern era" from the "premodern" or "postmodern," I think it would be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of "countermodernity."~{ Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment," 309-10. }~ + +In thinking through how geeks understand the present, the past, and the future, I pose the question of whether they are "modern" in this sense. Foucault makes use of Baudelaire as his foil for explaining in what the attitude of modernity consists: "For [Baudelaire,] being modern . . . consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present, or behind it, but within it."~{ Ibid., 310. }~ He suggests that Baudelaire’s understanding of modernity is "an attitude that makes it possible to grasp the ‘heroic’ aspect of the present moment . . . the will to ‘heroize’ the present."~{ Ibid., 310. }~ Heroic here means something like redescribing the seemingly fleeting events of the present in terms that conjure forth the universal or eternal character that animates them. In Foucault’s channeling of Baudelaire such an attitude is incommensurable with one that sees in the passage of the present into the future some version of autonomous progress (whether absolute spirit or decadent degeneration), and the tag he uses for this is "you have no right to despise the present." To be modern is to confront the present as a problem that can be transformed by human action, not as an inevitable outcome of processes beyond the scope of individual or collective human control, that is, "attitudes of counter-modernity." When geeks tell stories of the past to make sense of the future, it is often precisely in order to "heroize" the present in this sense—but not all geeks do so. Within the spectrum from polymath to transhumanist, there are attitudes of both modernity and countermodernity. +={ geeks : + as moderns +} + +% ={Progress} + +The questions I raise here are also those of politics in a classical sense: Are the geeks I discuss bound by an attitude toward the present that concerns such things as the relationship of the public to the private and the social (à la Hannah Arendt), the relationship ,{[pg 79]}, of economics to liberty (à la John Stuart Mill and John Dewey), or the possibilities for rational organization of society through the application of scientific knowledge (à la Friedrich Hayek or Foucault)? Are geeks "enlightened"? Are they Enlightenment rationalists? What might this mean so long after the Enlightenment and its vigorous, wide-ranging critiques? How is their enlightenment related to the technical and infrastructural commitments they have made? Or, to put it differently, what makes enlightenment newly necessary now, in the milieu of the Internet, Free Software, and recursive publics? What kinds of relationships become apparent when one asks how these geeks relate their own conscious appreciation of the history and politics of their time to their everyday practices and commitments? Do geeks despise the present? +={ Dewey, John ; + Mill, John Stuart ; + Hayek, Friedrich ; + time : + technical progress and +} + +Polymaths and transhumanists speak differently about concepts like technology, infrastructure, networks, and software, and they have different ideas about their temporality and relationship to progress and liberty. Some geeks see technology as one kind of intervention into a constituted field of organizations, money, politics, and people. Some see it as an autonomous force made up of humans and impersonal forces of evolution and complexity. Different geeks speak about the role of technology and its relationship to the present and future in different ways, and how they understand this relationship is related to their own rich understandings of the complex technical and political environment they live and work in. + +!_ Polymaths +Polymathy is "avowed dilettantism," not extreme intelligence. It results from a curiosity that seems to grip a remarkable number of people who spend their time on the Internet and from the basic necessity of being able to evaluate and incorporate sometimes quite disparate fields of knowledge in order to build workable software. Polymathy inevitably emerges in the context of large software and networking projects; it is a creature of constraints, a process bootstrapped by the complex sediment of technologies, businesses, people, money, and plans. It might also be posed in the negative: bad software design is often the result of not enough avowed dilettantism. Polymaths must know a very large and wide range of things in order to intervene in an existing distribution of machines, people, practices, and places. They must have a detailed sense of the present, and the project of the present, in order to imagine how the future might be different. +={ software development +3 } + +% ,{[pg 80]}, + +My favorite polymath is Sean Doyle. Sean built the first versions of a piece of software that forms the centerpiece of the radiological-image-management company Amicas. In order to build it Sean learned the following: Java, to program it; the mathematics of wavelets, to encode the images; the workflow of hospital radiologists and the manner in which they make diagnoses from images, to make the interface usable; several incompatible databases and the SQL database language, to build the archive and repository; and manual after manual of technical standards, the largest and most frightening of which was the Digital Imaging and Communication (DICOM) standard for radiological images. Sean also read Science and Nature regularly, looking for inspiration about interface design; he read books and articles about imaging very small things (mosquito knees), very large things (galaxies and interstellar dust), very old things (fossils), and very pretty things (butterfly-wing patterns as a function of developmental pathways). Sean also introduced me to Tibetan food, to Jan Svankmeyer films, to Open Source Software, to cladistics and paleoherpetology, to Disney’s scorched-earth policy with respect to culture, and to many other awesome things. +={ Amicas (corporation) +17 ; + Doyle, Sean +3 ; + programming +3 ; + standards +} + +Sean is clearly an unusual character, but not that unusual. Over the years I have met many people with a similar range and depth of knowledge (though rarely with Sean’s humility, which does set him apart). Polymathy is an occupational hazard for geeks. There is no sense in which a good programmer, software architect, or information architect simply specializes in code. Specialization is seen not as an end in itself, but rather as a kind of technical prerequisite before other work—the real work—can be accomplished. The real work is the design, the process of inserting usable software into a completely unfamiliar amalgamation of people, organizations, machines, and practices. Design is hard work, whereas the technical stuff—like choosing the right language or adhering to a standard or finding a ready-made piece of code to plug in somewhere—is not. +={ design +2 } + +It is possible for Internet geeks and software architects to think this way in part due to the fact that so many of the technical issues they face are both extremely well defined and very easy to address with a quick search and download. It is easy to be an avowed dilettante in the age of mailing lists, newsgroups, and online scientific publishing. I myself have learned whole swaths of technical practices in this manner, but I have designed no technology of note. ,{[pg 81]}, + +Sean’s partner in Amicas, Adrian Gropper, also fits the bill of polymath, though he is not a programmer. Adrian, a physician and a graduate of MIT’s engineering program, might be called a "high-functioning polymath." He scans the horizon of technical and scientific accomplishments, looking for ways to incorporate them into his vision of medical technology qua intervention. Sean mockingly calls these "delusions," but both agree that Amicas would be nowhere without them. Adrian and Sean exemplify how the meanings of technology, intervention, design, and infrastructure are understood by polymaths as a particular form of pragmatic intervention, a progress achieved through deliberate, piecemeal re-formation of existing systems. As Adrian comments: +={ entrepreneurialism +8 ; + Gropper, Adrian +8 ; + intervention, technology as +42 +} + +_1 I firmly believe that in the long run the only way you can save money and improve healthcare is to add technology. I believe that more strongly than I believe, for instance, that if people invent better pesticides they’ll be able to grow more rice, and it’s for the universal good of the world to be able to support more people. I have some doubt as to whether I support people doing genetic engineering of crops and pesticides as being "to the good." But I do, however, believe that healthcare is different in that in the long run you can impact both the cost and quality of healthcare by adding technology. And you can call that a religious belief if you want, it’s not rational. But I guess what I’m willing to say is that traditional healthcare that’s not technology-based has pretty much run out of steam.~{ Adrian Gropper, interview by author, 28 November 1998. }~ +={ healthcare : + information technology in +7 ; + religion +} + +In this conversation, the "technological" is restricted to the novel things that can make healthcare less costly (i.e., cost-reducing, not cost-cutting), ease suffering, or extend life. Certain kinds of technological intervention are either superfluous or even pointless, and Adrian can’t quite identify this "class"—it isn’t "technology" in general, but it includes some kinds of things that are technological. What is more important is that technology does not solve anything by itself; it does not obviate the political problems of healthcare rationing: "Now, however, you get this other problem, which is that the way that healthcare is rationed is through the fear of pain, financial pain to some extent, but physical pain; so if you have a technology that, for instance, makes it relatively painless to fix . . . I guess, bluntly put, it’s cheaper to let people die in most cases, and that’s just undeniable. So what I find interesting in all of this, is that most people who are dealing with the politics of healthcare ,{[pg 82]}, resource management don’t want to have this discussion, nobody wants to talk about this, the doctors don’t want to talk about it, because it’s too depressing to talk about the value of. . . . And they don’t really have a mandate to talk about technology."~{ Adrian Gropper, interview by author, 28 November 1998. }~ + +Adrian’s self-defined role in this arena is as a nonpracticing physician who is also an engineer and an entrepreneur—hence, his polymathy has emerged from his attempts to translate between doctors, engineers, and businesspeople. His goal is twofold: first, create technologies that save money and improve the allocation of healthcare (and the great dream of telemedicine concerns precisely this goal: the reallocation of the most valuable asset, individuals and their expertise); second, to raise the level of discussion in the business-cum-medical world about the role of technology in managing healthcare resources. Polymathy is essential, since Adrian’s twofold mission requires understanding the language and lives of at least three distinct groups who work elbow-to-elbow in healthcare: engineers and software architects; doctors and nurses; and businessmen. +={ healthcare : + allocation of +5 +} + +Technology has two different meanings according to Adrian’s two goals: in the first case technology refers to the intervention by means of new technologies (from software, to materials, to electronics, to pharmaceuticals) in specific healthcare situations wherein high costs or limited access to care can be affected. Sometimes technology is allocated, sometimes it does the allocating. Adrian’s goal is to match his knowledge of state-of-the-art technology—in particular, Internet technology—with a specific healthcare situation and thereby effect a reorganization of practices, people, tools, and information. The tool Amicas created was distinguished by its clever use of compression, Internet standards, and cheap storage media to compete with much larger, more expensive, much more entrenched "legacy" and "turnkey" systems. Whether Amicas invented something "new" is less interesting than the nature of this intervention into an existing milieu. This intervention is what Adrian calls "technology." For Amicas, the relevant technology—the important intervention—was the Internet, which Amicas conceived as a tool for changing the nature of the way healthcare was organized. Their goal was to replace the infrastructure of the hospital radiology department (and potentially the other departments as well) with the Internet. Amicas was able to confront and reform the practices of powerful, entrenched entities, from the administration of large ,{[pg 83]}, hospitals to their corporate bedfellows, like HBOC, Agfa, Siemens, and GE. +={ technology : + meanings of +7 +} + +With regard to raising the level of discussion, however, technology refers to a kind of political-rhetorical argument: technology does not save the world (nor does it destroy it); it only saves lives—and it does this only when one makes particular decisions about its allocation. Or, put differently, the means is technology, but the ends are still where the action is at. Thus, the hype surrounding information technology in healthcare is horrifying to Adrian: promises precede technologies, and the promises suggest that the means can replace the ends. Large corporations that promise "technology," but offer no real hard interventions (Adrian’s first meaning of technology) that can be concretely demonstrated to reduce costs or improve allocation are simply a waste of resources. Such companies are doubly frustrating because they use "technology" as a blinder that allows people to not think about the hard problems (the ends) of allocation, equity, management, and organization; that is, they treat "technology" (the means) as if it were a solution as such. + +Adrian routinely analyzes the rhetorical and practical uses of technology in healthcare with this kind of subtlety; clearly, such subtlety of thought is rare, and it sets Adrian apart as someone who understands that intervention into, and reform of, modern organizations and styles of thought has to happen through reformation—through the clever use of technology by people who understand it intimately—not through revolution. Reformation through technical innovation is opposed here to control through the consolidation of money and power. +={ reformation vs. revolution } + +In my observations, Adrian always made a point of making the technology—the software tools and picture-archiving system—easily accessible, easily demonstrable to customers. When talking to hospital purchasers, he often said something like "I can show you the software, and I can tell you the price, and I can demonstrate the problem it will solve." In contrast, however, an array of enormous corporations with salesmen and women (usually called consultants) were probably saying something more like "Your hospital needs more technology, our corporation is big and stable—give us this much money and we will solve your problem." For Adrian, the decision to "hold hands," as he put it, with the comfortably large corporation was irrational if the hospital could instead purchase a specific technology that did a specific thing, for a real price. ,{[pg 84]}, + +Adrian’s reflections on technology are also reflections on the nature of progress. Progress is limited intervention structured by goals that are not set by the technology itself, even if entrepreneurial activity is specifically focused on finding new uses and new ideas for new technologies. But discussions about healthcare allocation—which Adrian sees as a problem amenable to certain kinds of technical solutions—are instead structured as if technology did not matter to the nature of the ends. It is a point Adrian resists: "I firmly believe that in the long run the only way you can save money and improve healthcare is to add technology." + +Sean is similarly frustrated by the homogenization of the concept of technology, especially when it is used to suggest, for instance, that hospitals "lag behind" other industries with regard to computerization, a complaint usually made in order to either instigate investment or explain failures. Sean first objects to such a homogenous notion of "technological." +={ Doyle, Sean +5 ; + Technology : + lag +2 ; + time : + technical progress and +2 ; + lag, technological +2 +} + +_1 I actually have no idea what that means, that it’s lagging behind. Because certainly in many ways in terms of image processing or some very high-tech things it’s probably way ahead. And if that means what’s on people’s desktops, ever since 19-maybe-84 or so when I arrived at MGH [Massachusetts General Hospital] there’s been a computer on pretty much everyone’s desktop. . . . It seems like most hospitals that I have been to seem to have a serious commitment to networks and automation, etcetera. . . . I don’t know about a lot of manufacturing industries—they might have computer consoles there, but it’s a different sort of animal. Farms probably lag really far behind, I won’t even talk about amusement parks. In some sense, hospitals are very complicated little communities, and so to say that this thing as a whole is lagging behind doesn’t make much sense.~{ Sean Doyle, interview by author, 30 March 1999. }~ + +He also objects to the notion that such a lag results in failures caused by technology, rather than by something like incompetence or bad management. In fact, it might be fair to say that, for the polymath, sometimes technology actually dissolves. Its boundaries are not easily drawn, nor are its uses, nor are its purported "unintended consequences." On one side there are rules, regulations, protocols, standards, norms, and forms of behavior; on the other there are organizational structures, business plans and logic, human skills, and other machines. This complex milieu requires reform from within: it cannot be replaced wholesale; it cannot leap-frog ,{[pg 85]}, other industries in terms of computerization, as intervention is always local and strategic; and it involves a more complex relationship to the project of the present than simply "lagging behind" or "leaping ahead." + +Polymathy—inasmuch as it is a polymathy of the lived experience of the necessity for multiple expertise to suit a situation—turns people into pragmatists. Technology is never simply a solution to a problem, but always part of a series of factors. The polymath, unlike the technophobe, can see when technology matters and when it doesn’t. The polymath has a very this-worldly approach to technology: there is neither mystery nor promise, only human ingenuity and error. In this manner, polymaths might better be described as Feyerabendians than as pragmatists (and, indeed, Sean turned out to be an avid reader of Feyerabend). The polymath feels there is no single method by which technology works its magic: it is highly dependent on rules, on patterned actions, and on the observation of contingent and contextual factors. Intervention into this already instituted field of people, machines, tools, desires, and beliefs requires a kind of scientific-technical genius, but it is hardly single, or even autonomous. This version of pragmatism is, as Feyerabend sometimes refers to it, simply a kind of awareness: of standards, of rules, of history, of possibility.~{ Feyerabend, Against Method, 215-25. }~ The polymath thus does not allow himself or herself to despise the present, but insists on both reflecting on it and intervening in it. +={ Feyerabend, Paul +1 ; + pragmatism +} + +Sean and Adrian are avowedly scientific and technical people; like Feyerabend, they assume that their interlocutors believe in good science and the benefits of progress. They have little patience for Luddites, for new-agers, for religious intolerance, or for any other non-Enlightenment-derived attitude. They do not despise the present, because they have a well-developed sense of how provisional the conventions of modern technology and business are. Very little is sacred, and rules, when they exist, are fragile. Breaking them pointlessly is immodest, but innovation is often itself seen as a way of transforming a set of accepted rules or practices to other ends. Progress is limited intervention.~{ One of the ways Adrian discusses innovation is via the argument of the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. It describes "sustaining vs. disruptive" technologies as less an issue of how technologies work or what they are made of, and more an issue of how their success and performance are measured. See Adrian Gropper, "The Internet as a Disruptive Technology," Imaging Economics, December 2001, http://www.imagingeconomics.com/library/200112-10.asp (accessed 19 September 2006). }~ +={ enlightenment +1 } + +How ironic, and troubling, then, to realize that Sean’s and Adrian’s company would eventually become the kind of thing they started Amicas in order to reform. Outside of the limited intervention, certain kinds of momentum seem irresistible: the demand for investment and funding rounds, the need for "professional management," ,{[pg 86]}, and the inertia of already streamlined and highly conservative purchasing practices in healthcare. For Sean and Adrian, Amicas became a failure in its success. Nonetheless, they remain resolutely modern polymaths: they do not despise the present. As described in Kant’s "What Is Enlightenment?" the duty of the citizen is broken into public and private: on the one hand, a duty to carry out the responsibilities of an office; on the other, a duty to offer criticism where criticism is due, as a "scholar" in a reading public. Sean’s and Adrian’s endeavor, in the form of a private start-up company, might well be understood as the expression of the scholar’s duty to offer criticism, through the creation of a particular kind of technical critique of an existing (and by their assessment) ethically suspect healthcare system. The mixture of private capital, public institutions, citizenship, and technology, however, is something Kant could not have known—and Sean and Adrian’s technical pursuits must be understood as something more: a kind of modern civic duty, in the service of liberty and responding to the particularities of contemporary technical life.~{ On kinds of civic duty, see Fortun and Fortun, "Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology." }~ +={ Kant, Immanuel } + +!_ Transhumanists +Polymathy is born of practical and pragmatic engagement with specific situations, and in some ways is demanded by such exigencies. Opposite polymathy, however, and leaning more toward a concern with the whole, with totality and the universal, are attitudes that I refer to by the label transhumanism, which concerns the mode of belief in the Timeline of Technical Progress.~{ There is, in fact, a very specific group of people called transhumanists, about whom I will say very little. I invoke the label here because I think certain aspects of transhumanism are present across the spectrum of engineers, scientists, and geeks. }~ +={ time : + technical progress and +20 ; + futurology +20 +} + +Transhumanism, the movement and the philosophy, focuses on the power of technology to transcend the limitations of the human body as currently evolved. Subscribers believe—but already this is the wrong word—in the possibility of downloading consciousness onto silicon, of cryobiological suspension, of the near emergence of strong artificial intelligence and of various other forms of technical augmentation of the human body for the purposes of achieving immortality—or at least, much more life.~{ See the World Transhumanist Association, http://transhumanism.org/ (accessed 1 December 2003) or the Extropy Institute, http://www.extropy.org/ (accessed 1 December 2003). See also Doyle, Wetwares, and Battaglia, "For Those Who Are Not Afraid of the Future," for a sidelong glance. }~ +={ artificial intelligence +6 } + +Various groups could be reasonably included under this label. There are the most ardent purveyors of the vision, the Extropians; there are a broad class of people who call themselves transhumanists; there is a French-Canadian subclass, the Raelians, who are more an alien-worshiping cult than a strictly scientific one and are bitterly denounced by the first two; there are also the variety of cosmologists and engineers who do not formally consider themselves ,{[pg 87]}, transhumanist, but whose beliefs participate in some way or another: Stephen Hawking, Frank Tipler and John Barrow (famous for their anthropic cosmological principle), Hans Moravic, Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and down the line through those who embrace the cognitive sciences, the philosophy of artificial intelligence, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and so forth. +={ Extropians ; + Raelians +} + +Historically speaking, the line of descent is diffuse. Teilhard de Chardin is broadly influential, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not (depending on the amount of mysticism allowed). A more generally recognized starting point is Julian Huxley’s article "Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine.~{ Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, 13-18. }~ Huxley’s transhumanism, like Teilhard’s, has a strange whiff of Nietzsche about it, though it tends much more strongly in the direction of the evolutionary emergence of the superman than in the more properly moral sense Nietzsche gave it. After Huxley, the notion of transhumanism is too easily identified with eugenics, and it has become one of a series of midcentury subcultural currents which finds expression largely in small, non-mainstream places, from the libertarians to Esalen.~{ The computer scientist Bill Joy wrote a long piece in Wired warning of the outcomes of research conducted without ethical safeguards and the dangers of eugenics in the past, "Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us," Wired 8.4 [April 2000], http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html (accessed 27 June 2005). }~ +={ Huxley, Julian ; + Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre ; + transhumanism : + Julian Huxley and +} + +For many observers, transhumanists are a lunatic fringe, bounded on either side by alien abductees and Ayn Rand-spouting objectivists. However, like so much of the fringe, it merely represents in crystalline form attitudes that seem to permeate discussions more broadly, whether as beliefs professed or as beliefs attributed. Transhumanism, while probably anathema to most people, actually reveals a very specific attitude toward technical innovation, technical intervention, and political life that is widespread among technically adept individuals. It is a belief that has everything to do also with the timeline of progress and the role of technology in it. +={ progress +5 } + +The transhumanist understanding of technological progress can best be understood through the sometimes serious and sometimes playful concept of the "singularity," popularized by the science-fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge.~{ Vinge, "The Coming Technological Singularity." }~ The "singularity" is the point at which the speed of technical progress is faster than human comprehension of that progress (and, by implication, than human control over the course). It is a kind of cave-man parable, perhaps most beautifully rendered by Stanley Kubrik’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (in particular, in the jump-cut early in the film that turns a hurled bone into a spinning space station, recapitulating the remarkable adventure of technology in two short seconds of an otherwise seemingly endless film). +={ singularity +9 ; + transhumanism : + singularity and +4 ; + time : + singularity and +4 ; + Vinge, Vernor +} + +% ,{[pg 88]}, + +{ 2bits_02_01-100.png }image ~[* Illustration © 2005 Ray Kurzweil. Modifications © 2007 by C. Kelty. Original work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PPTCountdowntoSingularityLog.jpg. ]~ + +In figure 1, on the left hand of the timeline, there is history, or rather, there is a string of technological inventions (by which is implied that previous inventions set the stage for later ones) spaced such that they produce a logarithmic curve that can look very much like the doomsday population curves that started to appear in the 1960s. Each invention is associated with a name or sometimes a nation. Beyond the edge of the graph to the right side is the future: history changes here from a series of inventions to an autonomous self-inventing technology associated not with individual inventors but with a complex system of evolutionary adaptation that includes technological as well as biological forms. It is a future in which "humans" are no longer necessary to the progress of science and technology: technology-as-extension-of-humans on the left, a Borg-like autonomous technical intelligence on the right. The fundamental ,{[pg 89]}, operation in constructing the "singularity" is the "reasoned extrapolation" familiar to the "hard science fiction" writer or the futurist. One takes present technology as the initial condition for future possibilities and extrapolates based on the (haphazardly handled) evidence of past technical speed-up and change. + +The position of the observer is always a bit uncertain, since he or she is naturally projected at the highest (or lowest, depending on your orientation) point of this curve, but one implication is clear: that the function or necessity of human reflection on the present will disappear at the same time that humans do, rendering enlightenment a quaint, but necessary, step on the route to superrational, transhuman immortality. + +Strangely, the notion that technical progress has acceleration seems to precede any sense of what the velocity of progress might mean in the first instance; technology is presumed to exist in absolute time—from the Big Bang to the heat death of the universe—and not in any relationship with human life or consciousness. The singularity is always described from the point of view of a god who is not God. The fact of technological speed-up is generally treated as the most obvious thing in the world, reinforced by the constant refrain in the media of the incredible pace of change in contemporary society. + +Why is the singularity important? Because it always implies that the absolute fact of technical acceleration—this knowing glance into the future—should order the kinds of interventions that occur in the present. It is not mute waiting or eschatological certainty that governs this attitude; rather, it is a mode of historical consciousness that privileges the inevitability of technological progress over the inevitability of human power. Only by looking into the future can one manipulate the present in a way that will be widely meaningful, an attitude that could be expressed as something like "Those who do not learn from the future are condemned to suffer in it." Since it is a philosophy based on the success of human rationality and ingenuity, rationality and ingenuity are still clearly essential in the future. They lead, however, to a kind of posthuman state of constant technological becoming which is inconceivable to the individual human mind—and can only be comprehended by a transcendental intelligence that is not God. + +Such is a fair description of some strands of transhumanism, and the reason I highlight them is to characterize the kinds of attitudes ,{[pg 90]}, toward technology-as-intervention and the ideas of moral and technical order that geeks can evince. On the far side of polymathy, geeks are too close to the machine to see a big picture or to think about imponderable philosophical issues; on the transhuman side, by contrast, one is constantly reassessing the arcane details of everyday technical change with respect to a vision of the whole—a vision of the evolution of technology and its relationship to the humans that (for the time being) must create and attempt to channel it. +={ moral and technical order } + +My favorite transhumanist is Eugen Leitl (who is, in fact, an authentic transhumanist and has been vice-chair of the World Transhumanist Association). Eugen is Russian-born, lives in Munich, and once worked in a cryobiology research lab. He is well versed in chemistry, nanotechnology, artificial-intelligence (AI) research, computational- and network-complexity research, artificial organs, cryobiology, materials engineering, and science fiction. He writes, for example, +={ artificial intelligence ; + Leitl, Eugene +8 +} + +_1 If you consider AI handcoded by humans, yes. However, given considerable computational resources (~cubic meter of computronium), and using suitable start population, you can coevolve machine intelligence on a time scale of much less than a year. After it achieves about a human level, it is potentially capable of entering an autofeedback loop. Given that even autoassembly-grade computronium is capable of running a human-grade intellect in a volume ranging from a sugar cube to an orange at a speed ranging from 10^4 . . . 10^6 it is easy to see that the autofeedback loop has explosive dynamics. + +_1 (I hope above is intelligible, I’ve been exposed to weird memes for far too long).~{ Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 16 May 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2410. }~ + +Eugen is also a polymath (and an autodidact to boot), but in the conventional sense. Eugen’s polymathy is an avocational necessity: transhumanists need to keep up with all advances in technology and science in order to better assess what kinds of human-augmenting or human-obsolescing technologies are out there. It is not for work in this world that the transhumanist expands his or her knowledge, nor quite for the next, but for a "this world" yet to arrive. + +Eugen and I were introduced during the Napster debates of 2001, which seemed at the time to be a knock-down, drag-out conflagration, but Eugen has been involved in so many online flame wars that he probably experienced it as a mere blip in an otherwise constant struggle with less-evolved intelligences like mine. Nonetheless, ,{[pg 91]}, it was one of the more clarifying examples of how geeks think, and think differently, about technology, infrastructure, networks, and software. Transhumanism has no truck with old-fashioned humanism. +={ Napster } + +group{ + + > >From: Ramu Narayan . . . + > >I don’t like the + > >notion of technology as an unstoppable force with a will of its own that + > >has nothing to do with the needs of real people. + +}group + +_1 [Eugen Leitl:] Emergent large-scale behaviour is nothing new. How do you intend to control individual behaviour of a large population of only partially rational agents? They don’t come with too many convenient behaviour-modifying hooks (pheromones as in social insects, but notice menarche-synch in females sharing quarters), and for a good reason. The few hooks we have (mob, war, politics, religion) have been notoriously abused, already. Analogous to apoptosis, metaindividuals may function using processes deletorious[sic] to its components (us).~{ Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 7 August 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2932. }~ +={ gender } + +Eugen’s understanding of what "technological progress" means is sufficiently complex to confound most of his interlocutors. For one surprising thing, it is not exactly inevitable. The manner in which Leitl argues with people is usually a kind of machine-gun prattle of coevolutionary, game-theoretic, cryptographic sorites. Eugen piles on the scientific and transhumanist reasoning, and his interlocutors slowly peel away from the discussion. But it isn’t craziness, hype, or half-digested popular science—Eugen generally knows his stuff—it just fits together in a way that almost no one else can quite grasp. Eugen sees the large-scale adoption and proliferation of technologies (particularly self-replicating molecular devices and evolutionary software algorithms) as a danger that transcends all possibility of control at the individual or state level. Billions of individual decisions do not "average" into one will, but instead produce complex dynamics and hang perilously on initial conditions. In discussing the possibility of the singularity, Eugen suggests, "It could literally be a science-fair project [that causes the singularity]." If Francis Bacon’s understanding of the relation between Man and Nature was that of master and possessor, Eugen’s is its radicalization: Man is a powerful but ultimately arbitrary force in the progress of Life-Intelligence. Man is fully incorporated into Nature in this story, ,{[pg 92]}, so much so that he dissolves into it. Eugen writes, when "life crosses over into this petri dish which is getting readied, things will become a lot more lively. . . . I hope we’ll make it." +={ progress +7 ; + time : + initial conditions and +1 ; + geeks : + as moderns +3 +} + +% check "geeks as moderns, problem pinpointing + +For Eugen, the arguments about technology that the polymaths involve themselves in couldn’t be more parochial. They are important only insofar as they will set the "initial conditions" for the grand coevolutionary adventure of technology ahead of us. For the transhumanist, technology does not dissolve. Instead, it is the solution within which humans are dissolved. Suffering, allocation, decision making—all these are inessential to the ultimate outcome of technological progress; they are worldly affairs, even if they concern life and death, and as such, they can be either denounced or supported, but only with respect to fine-tuning the acceleration toward the singularity. For the transhumanist, one can’t fight the inevitability of technical evolution, but one certainly can contribute to it. Technical progress is thus both law-like and subject to intelligent manipulation; technical progress is inevitable, but only because of the power of massively parallel human curiosity. +={ technology : + as argument +1 ; + usable pasts +6 +} + +% check on usable pasts, appears in conclusion + +Considered as one of the modes of thought present in this-worldly political discussion, the transhumanist (like the polymath) turns technology into a rhetorical argument. Technology is the more powerful political argument because "it works." It is pointless to argue "about" technology, but not pointless to argue through and with it. It is pointless to talk about whether stopping technology is good or bad, because someone will simply build a technology that will invalidate your argument. + +There is still a role for technical invention, but it is strongly distinguished from political, legal, cultural, or social interventions. For most transhumanists, there is no rhetoric here, no sophistry, just the pure truth of "it works": the pure, undeniable, unstoppable, and undeconstructable reality of technology. For the transhumanist attitude, the reality of "working code" has a reality that other assertions about the world do not. Extreme transhumanism replaces the life-world with the world of the computer, where bad (ethically bad) ideas won’t compile. Less-staunch versions of transhumanism simply allow the confusion to operate opportunistically: the progress of technology is unquestionable (omniscient), and only its effects on humans are worth investigating. + +The pure transhumanist, then, is a countermodern. The transhumanist despises the present for its intolerably slow descent into the ,{[pg 93]}, future of immortality and superhuman self-improvement, and fears destruction because of too much turbulent (and ignorant) human resistance. One need have no individual conception of the present, no reflection on or synthetic understanding of it. One only need contribute to it correctly. One might even go so far as to suggest that forms of reflection on the present that do not contribute to technical progress endanger the very future of life-intelligence. Curiosity and technical innovation are not historical features of Western science, but natural features of a human animal that has created its own conditions for development. Thus, the transhumanists’ historical consciousness consists largely of a timeline that makes ordered sense of our place on the progress toward the Singularity. + +The moral of the story is not just that technology determines history, however. Transhumanism is a radically antihumanist position in which human agency or will—if it even exists—is not ontologically distinct from the agency of machines and animals and life itself. Even if it is necessary to organize, do things, make choices, participate, build, hack, innovate, this does not amount to a belief in the ability of humans to control their destiny, individually or collectively. In the end, the transhumanist cannot quite pinpoint exactly what part of this story is inevitable—except perhaps the story itself. Technology does not develop without millions of distributed humans contributing to it; humans cannot evolve without the explicit human adoption of life-altering and identity-altering technologies; evolution cannot become inevitable without the manipulation of environments and struggles for fitness. As in the dilemma of Calvinism (wherein one cannot know if one is saved by one’s good works), the transhumanist must still create technology according to the particular and parochial demands of the day, but this by no means determines the eventual outcome of technological progress. It is a sentiment well articulated by Adam Ferguson and highlighted repeatedly by Friederich Hayek with respect to human society: "the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design."~{ Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1:20. }~ +={ Calvinism ; + Hayek, Friedrich +} + +2~ Conclusion + +To many observers, geeks exhibit a perhaps bewildering mix of liberalism, libertarianism, anarchism, idealism, and pragmatism, ,{[pg 94]}, yet tend to fall firmly into one or another constituted political category (liberal, conservative, socialist, capitalist, neoliberal, etc.). By showing how geeks make use of the Protestant Reformation as a usable past and how they occupy a spectrum of beliefs about progress, liberty, and intervention, I hope to resist this urge to classify. Geeks are an interesting case precisely because they are involved in the creation of new things that change the meaning of our constituted political categories. Their politics are mixed up and combined with the technical details of the Internet, Free Software, and the various and sundry organizations, laws, people, and practices that they deal with on a regular basis: operating systems and social systems. But such mixing does not make Geeks merely technoliberals or technoconservatives. Rather, it reveals how they think through the specific, historically unique situation of the Internet to the general problems of knowledge and power, liberty and enlightenment, progress and intervention. +={ allegory, of Protestant Reformation ; + geeks +1 +} + +Geeks are not a kind of person: geeks are geeks only insofar as they come together in new, technically mediated forms of their own creation and in ways that are not easy to identify (not language, not culture, not markets, not nations, not telephone books or databases). While their affinity is very clearly constituted through the Internet, the Internet is not the only reason for that affinity. It is this collective affinity that I refer to as a recursive public. Because it is impossible to understand this affinity by trying to identify particular types of people, it is necessary to turn to historically specific sets of practices that form the substance of their affinity. Free Software is an exemplary case—perhaps the exemplar—of a recursive public. To understand Free Software through its changing practices not only gives better access to the life-world of the geek but also reveals how the structure of a recursive public comes into being and manages to persist and transform, how it can become a powerful form of life that extends its affinities beyond technophile geeks into the realms of ordinary life. +={ affinity (of geeks) } + +:B~ Part II free software + +1~ 3. The Movement +={ Free Software +55 } + +Part II of Two Bits describes what Free Software is and where it came from, with each of its five chapters detailing the historical narrative of a particular kind of practice: creating a movement, sharing source code, conceptualizing openness or open systems, writing copyright (and copyleft) licenses, and coordinating collaborations. Taken together, the stories describe Free Software. The stories have their endpoint (or starting point, genealogically speaking) in the years 1998-99, when Free Software burst onto the scene: on the cover of Forbes magazine, as part of the dotcom boom, and in the boardrooms of venture-capital firms and corporations like IBM and Netscape. While the chapters that make up part II can be read discretely to understand the practices that are the sine qua non of Free Software, they can also be read continuously, as a meandering story of the history of software and networks stretching from the late 1950s to the present. +={ Free Software : + as experimental system +1 ; + movement (component of Free Software) +3 ; + practices : + five components of Free Software +} + +% ,{[pg 98]}, + +Rather than define what makes Free Software free or Open Source open, Two Bits treats the five practices as parts of a collective technical experimental system: each component has its own history, development, and temporality, but they come together as a package and emerge as a recognizable thing around 1998-99. As with any experimental system, changing the components changes the operation and outcomes of the whole. Free Software so conceived is a kind of experimental system: its practices can be adopted, adapted, and modulated in new contexts and new places, but it is one whose rules are collectively determined and frequently modified. It is possible to see in each of the five practices where choices about how to do Free Software reached, or surpassed, certain limits, but nonetheless remained part of a system whose identity finally firmed up in the period 1998-99 and after. +={ experiment, collective technical } + +The first of these practices—the making of Free Software into a movement—is both the most immediately obvious and the most difficult to grasp. By the term movement I refer to the practice, among geeks, of arguing about and discussing the structure and meaning of Free Software: what it consists of, what it is for, and whether or not it is a movement. Some geeks call Free Software a movement, and some don’t; some talk about the ideology and goals of Free Software, and some don’t; some call it Free Software, while others call it Open Source. Amid all this argument, however, Free Software geeks recognize that they are all doing the same thing: the practice of creating a movement is the practice of talking about the meaning and necessity of the other four practices. It was in 1998-99 that geeks came to recognize that they were all doing the same thing and, almost immediately, to argue about why.~{ For instance, Richard Stallman writes, "The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are like two political camps within the free software community. Radical groups in the 1960s developed a reputation for factionalism: organizations split because of disagreements on details of strategy, and then treated each other as enemies. Or at least, such is the ,{[pg 322]}, image people have of them, whether or not it was true. The relationship between the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement is just the opposite of that picture. We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects. We don’t think of the Open Source movement as an enemy. The enemy is proprietary software" ("Why ‘Free Software’ Is Better than ‘Open Source,’" GNU’s Not Unix! http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html [accessed 9 July 2006]). By contrast, the Open Source Initiative characterizes the relationship as follows: "How is ‘open source’ related to ‘free software’? The Open Source Initiative is a marketing program for free software. It’s a pitch for ‘free software’ because it works, not because it’s the only right thing to do. We’re selling freedom on its merits" (http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.php [accessed 9 July 2006]). There are a large number of definitions of Free Software: canonical definitions include Richard Stallman’s writings on the Free Software Foundation’s Web site, www.fsf.org, including the "Free Software Definition" and "Confusing Words and Phrases that Are Worth Avoiding." From the Open Source side there is the "Open Source Definition" (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/). Unaffiliated definitions can be found at www.freedomdefined.org. }~ + +One way to understand the movement is through the story of Netscape and the Mozilla Web browser (now known as Firefox). Not only does this story provide some context for the stories of geeks presented in part I—and I move here from direct participant observation to historical and archival research on a phenomenon that was occurring at roughly the same time—but it also contains all the elements necessary to understand Free Software. It is full of discussion and argument about the practices that make up Free Software: sharing source code, conceiving of openness, writing licenses, and coordinating collaborations. +={ Firefox ; + Netscape +26 ; + Netscape Navigator (application) +26 +} + +% ,{[pg 99]}, + +2~ Forking Free Software, 1997-2000 + +Free Software forked in 1998 when the term Open Source suddenly appeared (a term previously used only by the CIA to refer to unclassified sources of intelligence). The two terms resulted in two separate kinds of narratives: the first, regarding Free Software, stretched back into the 1980s, promoting software freedom and resistance to proprietary software "hoarding," as Richard Stallman, the head of the Free Software Foundation, refers to it; the second, regarding Open Source, was associated with the dotcom boom and the evangelism of the libertarian pro-business hacker Eric Raymond, who focused on the economic value and cost savings that Open Source Software represented, including the pragmatic (and polymathic) approach that governed the everyday use of Free Software in some of the largest online start-ups (Amazon, Yahoo!, HotWired, and others all "promoted" Free Software by using it to run their shops). +={ Free Software : + open source vs. +1 ; + Free Software Foundation +1 ; + Open Source : + Free Software vs. ; + Raymond, Eric Steven ; + Stallman, Richard +1 +} + +A critical point in the emergence of Free Software occurred in 1998-99: new names, new narratives, but also new wealth and new stakes. "Open Source" was premised on dotcom promises of cost-cutting and "disintermediation" and various other schemes to make money on it (Cygnus Solutions, an early Free Software company, playfully tagged itself as "Making Free Software More Affordable"). VA Linux, for instance, which sold personal-computer systems pre-installed with Open Source operating systems, had the largest single initial public offering (IPO) of the stock-market bubble, seeing a 700 percent share-price increase in one day. "Free Software" by contrast fanned kindling flames of worry over intellectual-property expansionism and hitched itself to a nascent legal resistance to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Prior to 1998, Free Software referred either to the Free Software Foundation (and the watchful, micromanaging eye of Stallman) or to one of thousands of different commercial, avocational, or university-research projects, processes, licenses, and ideologies that had a variety of names: sourceware, freeware, shareware, open software, public domain software, and so on. The term Open Source, by contrast, sought to encompass them all in one movement. +={ Cygnus Solutions (corporation) ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ; + intellectual property ; + VA Linux (corporation) +} + +The event that precipitated this attempted semantic coup d’état was the release of the source code for Netscape’s Communicator ,{[pg 100]}, Web browser. It’s tough to overestimate the importance of Netscape to the fortunes of Free Software. Netscape is justly famous for its 1995 IPO and its decision to offer its core product, Netscape Navigator, for free (meaning a compiled, binary version could be downloaded and installed "for zero dollars"). But Netscape is far more famous among geeks for giving away something else, in 1998: the source code to Netscape Communicator (née Navigator). Giving away the Navigator application endeared Netscape to customers and confused investors. Giving away the Communicator source code in 1998 endeared Netscape to geeks and confused investors; it was ignored by customers. +={ geeks +3 } + +Netscape is important from a number of perspectives. Businesspeople and investors knew Netscape as the pet project of the successful businessman Jim Clarke, who had founded the specialty computer manufacturer, Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI). To computer scientists and engineers, especially in the small university town of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, Netscape was known as the highest bidder for the WWW team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. That team—Marc Andreessen, Rob McCool, Eric Bina, Jon Mittelhauser, Aleks Totic, and Chris Houck—had created Mosaic, the first and most fondly remembered "graphical browser" for surfing the World Wide Web. Netscape was thus first known as Mosaic Communications Corporation and switched its name only after legal threats from NCSA and a rival firm, Spyglass. Among geeks, Netscape was known as home to a number of Free Software hackers and advocates, most notably Jamie Zawinski, who had rather flamboyantly broken rank with the Free Software Foundation by forking the GNU EMACS code to create what was first known as Lucid Emacs and later as XEmacs. Zawinski would go on to lead the newly free Netscape browser project, now known as Mozilla. +={ Andreessen, Marc +3 ; + McCool, Rob ; + Mosaic (web browser) +3 ; + Mozilla +23 ; + National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA) +3 ; + Zawinski, Jamie +5 +} + +Meanwhile, most regular computer users remember Netscape both as an emblem of the dotcom boom’s venture-fed insanity and as yet another of Microsoft’s victims. Although Netscape exploded onto the scene in 1995, offering a feature-rich browser that was an alternative to the bare-bones Mosaic browser, it soon began to lose ground to Microsoft, which relatively quickly adopted the strategy of giving away its browser, Internet Explorer, as if it were part of the Windows operating system; this was a practice that the U.S. Department of Justice eventually found to be in violation of ,{[pg 101]}, antitrust laws and for which Microsoft was convicted, but never punished. +={ Justice, Department of ; + Microsoft : + Internet Explorer +1 +} + +The nature of Netscape’s decision to release the source code differs based on which perspective it is seen from. It could appear to be a business plan modeled on the original success: give away your product and make money in the stock market. It could appear to be a strategic, last-gasp effort to outcompete Microsoft. It could also appear, and did appear to many geeks, to be an attempt to regain some of that "hacker-cred" it once had acquired by poaching the NCSA team, or even to be an attempt to "do the right thing" by making one of the world’s most useful tools into Free Software. But why would Netscape reach such a conclusion? By what reasoning would such a decision seem to be correct? The reasons for Netscape’s decision to "free the source" recapitulate the five core practices of Free Software—and provided key momentum for the new movement. + +!_ Sharing Source Code +Netscape’s decision to share its source code could only seem surprising in the context of the widespread practice of keeping source code secret; secrecy was a practice followed largely in order to prevent competitors from copying a program and competing with it, but also as a means to control the market itself. The World Wide Web that Andreessen’s team at NCSA had cut their teeth on was itself designed to be "platform independent" and accessible by any device on the network. In practice, however, this meant that someone needed to create "browsers" for each different computer or device. Mosaic was initially created for UNIX, using the Motif library of the X11 Window System—in short, a very specific kind of access. Netscape, by contrast, prided itself on "porting" Netscape Navigator to nearly all available computer architectures. Indeed, by 1997, plans were under way to create a version of the browser—written in Java, the programming language created by Sun Microsystems to "write once, run anywhere"—that would be completely platform independent. +={ secrecy +6 ; + Sun Microsystems ; + World Wide Web (www) +} + +The Java-based Navigator (called Javagator, of course) created a problem, however, with respect to the practice of keeping source code secret. Whenever a program in Java was run, it created a set of "bytecodes" that were easy to reverse-engineer because they had to be transmitted from the server to the machine that ran the program and were thus visible to anyone who might know how and where to look. Netscape engineers flirted with the idea of deliberately ,{[pg 102]}, obfuscating these bytecodes to deter competitors from copying them. How can one compete, the logic goes, if anyone can copy your program and make their own ersatz version? + +Zawinski, among others, suggested that this was a bad idea: why not just share the source code and get people to help make it better? As a longtime participant in Free Software, Zawinski understood the potential benefits of receiving help from a huge pool of potential contributors. He urged his peers at Netscape to see the light. However, although he told them stories and showed them successes, he could never make the case that this was an intelligent business plan, only that it was an efficient software-engineering plan. From the perspective of management and investors, such a move seemed tantamount to simply giving away the intellectual property of the company itself. +={ intellectual property } + +Frank Hecker, a sales manager, made the link between the developers and management: "It was obvious to [developers] why it was important. It wasn’t really clear from a senior management level why releasing the source code could be of use because nobody ever made the business case."~{ Moody, Rebel Code, 193. }~ Hecker penned a document called "Netscape Source Code as Netscape Product" and circulated it to various people, including Andreessen and Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale. As the title suggests, the business case was that the source code could also be a product, and in the context of Netscape, whose business model was "give it away and make it up on the stock market," such a proposal seemed less insane than it otherwise might have: "When Netscape first made Navigator available for unrestricted download over the Internet, many saw this as flying in the face of conventional wisdom for the commercial software business, and questioned how we could possibly make money ‘giving our software away.’ Now of course this strategy is seen in retrospect as a successful innovation that was a key factor in Netscape’s rapid growth, and rare is the software company today that does not emulate our strategy in one way or another. Among other things, this provokes the following question: What if we were to repeat this scenario, only this time with source code?"~{ Frank Hecker, quoted in Hamerly and Paquin, "Freeing the Source," 198. }~ +={ Hecker, Frank +1 } + +Under the influence of Hecker, Zawinski, and CTO Eric Hahn (who had also written various internal "heresy documents" suggesting similar approaches), Netscape eventually made the decision to share their source code with the outside world, a decision that resulted in a famous January 1998 press release describing the aims ,{[pg 103]}, and benefits of doing so. The decision, at that particular point in Netscape’s life, and in the midst of the dotcom boom, was certainly momentous, but it did not lead either to a financial windfall or to a suddenly superior product.~{ See Moody, Rebel Code, chap. 11, for a more detailed version of the story. }~ +={ Hahn, Eric } + +!_ Conceptualizing Open Systems +Releasing the source code was, in a way, an attempt to regain the trust of the people who had first imagined the www. Tim Berners-Lee, the initial architect of the www, was always adamant that the protocol and all its implementations should be freely available (meaning either "in the public domain" or "released as Free Software"). Indeed, Berners-Lee had done just that with his first bare-bones implementations of the www, proudly declaring them to be in the public domain. +={ Berners-Lee, Tim +1 ; + Open Systems +2 ; + public domain ; + World Wide Web (www) +} + +Over the course of the 1990s, the "browser wars" caused both Netscape and Microsoft to stray far from this vision: each had implemented its own extensions and "features" to the browsers and servers, extensions not present in the protocol that Berners-Lee had created or in the subsequent standards created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Included in the implementations were various kinds of "evil" that could make browsers fail to work on certain operating systems or with certain kinds of servers. The "browser wars" repeated an open-systems battle from the 1980s, one in which the attempt to standardize a network operating system (UNIX) was stymied by competition and secrecy, at the same time that consortiums devoted to "openness" were forming in order to try to prevent the spread of evil. Despite the fact that both Microsoft and Netscape were members of the W3C, the noncompatibility of their browsers clearly represented the manipulation of the standards process in the name of competitive advantage. +={ evil ; + Microsoft ; + World Wide Web consortium (w3c) ; + standards : + ownership of +} + +Releasing the source code for Communicator was thus widely seen as perhaps the only way to bypass the poisoned well of competitively tangled, nonstandard browser implementations. An Open Source browser could be made to comply with the standards—if not by the immediate members involved with its creation, then by creating a "fork" of the program that was standards compliant—because of the rights of redistribution associated with an Open Source license. Open Source would be the solution to an open-systems problem that had never been solved because it had never confronted the issue of intellectual property directly. Free Software, by contrast, had a well-developed solution in the GNU General Public License, ,{[pg 104]}, also known as copyleft license, that would allow the software to remain free and revive hope for maintaining open standards. +={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) +4 ; + General Public License (GPL) +3 ; + intellectual property +} + +!_ Writing Licenses +Herein lies the rub, however: Netscape was immediately embroiled in controversy among Free Software hackers because it chose to write its own bespoke licenses for distributing the source code. Rather than rely on one of the existing licenses, such as the GNU GPL or the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) or MIT licenses, they created their own: the Netscape Public License (NPL) and the Mozilla Public License. The immediate concerns of Netscape had to do with their existing network of contracts and agreements with other, third-party developers—both those who had in the past contributed parts of the existing source code that Netscape might not have the rights to redistribute as Free Software, and those who were expecting in the future to buy and redistribute a commercial version. Existing Free Software licenses were either too permissive, giving to third parties rights that Netscape itself might not have, or too restrictive, binding Netscape to make source code freely available (the GPL) when it had already signed contracts with buyers of the nonfree code. +={ BSD License ; + Mozilla Public License (MPL) +2 ; + Netscape Public License (NPL) +} + +It was a complex and specific business situation—a network of existing contracts and licensed code—that created the need for Netscape to write its own license. The NPL thus contained a clause that allowed Netscape special permission to relicense any particular contribution to the source code as a proprietary product in order to appease its third-party contracts; it essentially gave Netscape special rights that no other licensee would have. While this did not necessarily undermine the Free Software licenses—and it was certainly Netscape’s prerogative—it was contrary to the spirit of Free Software: it broke the "recursive public" into two halves. In order to appease Free Software geeks, Netscape wrote one license for existing code (the NPL) and a different license for new contributions: the Mozilla Public License. +={ recursive public } + +Neither Stallman nor any other Free Software hacker was entirely happy with this situation. Stallman pointed out three flaws: "One flaw sends a bad philosophical message, another puts the free software community in a weak position, while the third creates a major practical problem within the free software community. Two of the flaws apply to the Mozilla Public License as well." He urged people ,{[pg 105]}, not to use the NPL. Similarly, Bruce Perens suggested, "Many companies have adopted a variation of the MPL [sic] for their own programs. This is unfortunate, because the NPL was designed for the specific business situation that Netscape was in at the time it was written, and is not necessarily appropriate for others to use. It should remain the license of Netscape and Mozilla, and others should use the GPL or the BSD or X licenses."~{ Bruce Perens, "The Open Source Definition," 184. }~ +={ BSD License ; + Stallman, Richard ; + Perens, Bruce +} + +Arguments about the fine details of licenses may seem scholastic, but the decision had a huge impact on the structure of the new product. As Steven Weber has pointed out, the choice of license tracks the organization of a product and can determine who and what kinds of contributions can be made to a project.~{ Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source. }~ It is not an idle choice; every new license is scrutinized with the same intensity or denounced with the same urgency. +={ Weber, Steven } + +!_ Coordinating Collaborations +One of the selling points of Free Software, and especially of its marketing as Open Source, is that it leverages the work of thousands or hundreds of thousands of volunteer contributors across the Internet. Such a claim almost inevitably leads to spurious talk of "self-organizing" systems and emergent properties of distributed collaboration. The Netscape press release promised to "harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet by incorporating their best enhancements," and it quoted CEO Jim Barksdale as saying, "By giving away the source code for future versions, we can ignite the creative energies of the entire Net community and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market."~{ "Netscape Announces Plans to Make Next-Generation Communicator Source Code Available Free on the Net," Netscape press release, 22 January 1998, http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html (accessed 25 Sept 2007). }~ But as anyone who has ever tried to start or run a Free Software project knows, it never works out that way. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) +6 } + +Software engineering is a notoriously hard problem.~{ On the history of software development methodologies, see Mahoney, "The Histories of Computing(s)" and "The Roots of Software Engineering." }~ The halls of the software industry are lined with the warning corpses of dead software methodologies. Developing software in the dotcom boom was no different, except that the speed of release cycles and the velocity of funding (the "burn rate") was faster than ever before. Netscape’s in-house development methodologies were designed to meet these pressures, and as many who work in this field will attest, that method is some version of a semistructured, deadline-driven, caffeine- and smart-drink-fueled race to "ship."~{ Especially good descriptions of what this cycle is like can be found in Ullman, Close to the Machine and The Bug. }~ +={ software development +2 } + +Releasing the Mozilla code, therefore, required a system of coordination that would differ from the normal practice of in-house ,{[pg 106]}, software development by paid programmers. It needed to incorporate the contributions of outsiders—developers who didn’t work for Netscape. It also needed to entice people to contribute, since that was the bargain on which the decision to free the source was based, and to allow them to track their contributions, so they could verify that their contributions were included or rejected for legitimate reasons. In short, if any magical Open Source self-organization were to take place, it would require a thoroughly transparent, Internet-based coordination system. + +% no reference here to firefox or netscape, rather to mozilla + +At the outset, this meant practical things: obtaining the domain name mozilla.org; setting up (and in turn releasing the source code for) the version-control system (the Free Software standard cvs), the version-control interface (Bonsai), the "build system" that managed and displayed the various trees and (broken) branches of a complex software project (Tinderbox), and a bug-reporting system for tracking bugs submitted by users and developers (Bugzilla). It required an organizational system within the Mozilla project, in which paid developers would be assigned to check submissions from inside and outside, and maintainers or editors would be designated to look at and verify that these contributions should be used. +={ bugs ; + Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) ; + software tools +} + +In the end, the release of the Mozilla source code was both a success and a failure. Its success was long in coming: by 2004, the Firefox Web browser, based on Mozilla, had started to creep up the charts of most popular browsers, and it has become one of the most visible and widely used Free Software applications. The failure, however, was more immediate: Mozilla failed to reap the massive benefits for Netscape that the 1995 give-away of Netscape Navigator had. Zawinski, in a public letter of resignation in April 1999 (one year after the release), expressed this sense of failure. He attributed Netscape’s decline after 1996 to the fact that it had "stopped innovating" and become too large to be creative, and described the decision to free the Mozilla source code as a return to this innovation: "[The announcement] was a beacon of hope to me. . . . [I]t was so crazy, it just might work. I took my cue and ran with it, registering the domain that night, designing the structure of the organization, writing the first version of the web site, and, along with my co-conspirators, explaining to room after room of Netscape employees and managers how free software worked, and what we had to do to make it work."~{ Jamie Zawinski, "resignation and postmortem," 31 March 1999, http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html. }~ For Zawinski, the decision was both a chance for Netscape to return to its glory and an opportunity ,{[pg 107]}, to prove the power of Free Software: "I saw it as a chance for the code to actually prosper. By making it not be a Netscape project, but rather, be a public project to which Netscape was merely a contributor, the fact that Netscape was no longer capable of building products wouldn’t matter: the outsiders would show Netscape how it’s done. By putting control of the web browser into the hands of anyone who cared to step up to the task, we would ensure that those people would keep it going, out of their own self-interest."~{ Ibid. }~ +={ Zawinski, Jamie +3 ; + Firefox +1 : + see also Netscape Navigator ; + Netscape Navigator +1 +} + +% netscape navigator index link added + +But this promise didn’t come true—or, at least, it didn’t come true at the speed that Zawinski and others in the software world were used to. Zawinski offered various reasons: the project was primarily made up of Netscape employees and thus still appeared to be a Netscape thing; it was too large a project for outsiders to dive into and make small changes to; the code was too "crufty," that is, too complicated, overwritten, and unclean. Perhaps most important, though, the source code was not actually working: "We never distributed the source code to a working web browser, more importantly, to the web browser that people were actually using."~{ Ibid. }~ + +Netscape failed to entice. As Zawinski put it, "If someone were running a web browser, then stopped, added a simple new command to the source, recompiled, and had that same web browser plus their addition, they would be motivated to do this again, and possibly to tackle even larger projects."~{ Ibid. }~ For Zawinski, the failure to "ship" a working browser was the biggest failure, and he took pains to suggest that this failure was not an indictment of Free Software as such: "Let me assure you that whatever problems the Mozilla project is having are not because open source doesn’t work. Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If there’s a cautionary tale here, it is that you can’t take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ‘open source,’ and have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The issues aren’t that simple."~{ Ibid. }~ + +!_ Fomenting Movements +The period from 1 April 1998, when the Mozilla source code was first released, to 1 April 1999, when Zawinski announced its failure, couldn’t have been a headier, more exciting time for participants in Free Software. Netscape’s decision to release the source code was a tremendous opportunity for geeks involved in Free Software. It came in the midst of the rollicking dotcom bubble. It also came in the midst of the widespread adoption of ,{[pg 108]}, key Free Software tools: the Linux operating system for servers, the Apache Web server for Web pages, the perl and python scripting languages for building quick Internet applications, and a number of other lower-level tools like Bind (an implementation of the DNS protocol) or sendmail for e-mail. +={ movement (component of Free Software) +24 ; + Apache (Free Software project) ; + Domain Name System (DNS) ; + Linux (Free Software project) +} + +Perhaps most important, Netscape’s decision came in a period of fevered and intense self-reflection among people who had been involved in Free Software in some way, stretching back to the mid-1980s. Eric Raymond’s article "The Cathedral and The Bazaar," delivered at the Linux Kongress in 1997 and the O’Reilly Perl Conference the same year, had started a buzz among Free Software hackers. It was cited by Frank Hecker and Eric Hahn at Netscape as one of the sources for their thinking about the decision to free Mozilla; Raymond and Bruce Perens had both been asked to consult with Netscape on Free Software strategy. In April of the same year Tim O’Reilly, a publisher of handbooks for Free Software, organized a conference called the Freeware Summit. +={ Freeware summit +5 ; + Hahn, Eric ; + Hecker, Frank ; + O’Reilly, Tim ; + O’Reilly Press +1 ; + Perens, Bruce ; + perl (programming language) ; + Raymond, Eric Steven ; + Cathedral and the Bazaar +} + +The Freeware Summit’s very name indicated some of the concern about definition and direction. Stallman, despite his obvious centrality, but also because of it, was not invited to the Freeware Summit, and the Free Software Foundation was not held up as the core philosophical guide of this event. Rather, according to the press release distributed after the meeting, "The meeting’s purpose was to facilitate a high-level discussion of the successes and challenges facing the developers. While this type of software has often been called ‘freeware’ or ‘free software’ in the past, the developers agreed that commercial development of the software is part of the picture, and that the terms ‘open source’ or ‘sourceware’ best describe the development method they support."~{ "Open Source Pioneers Meet in Historic Summit," press release, 14 April 1998, O’Reilly Press, http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/796. }~ +={ Open Source : + "Open Source Definition" +1 ; + Stallman, Richard ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +It was at this summit that Raymond’s suggestion of "Open Source" as an alternative name was first publicly debated.~{ See Hamerly and Paquin, "Freeing the Source." The story is elegantly related in Moody, Rebel Code, 182-204. Raymond gives Christine Petersen of the Foresight Institute credit for the term open source. }~ Shortly thereafter, Raymond and Perens created the Open Source Initiative and penned "The Open Source Definition." All of this self-reflection was intended to capitalize on the waves of attention being directed at Free Software in the wake of Netscape’s announcement. +={ Open Source Initiative ; + Raymond, Eric Steven +} + +The motivations for these changes came from a variety of sources—ranging from a desire to be included in the dotcom boom to a powerful (ideological) resistance to being ideological. Linus Torvalds loudly proclaimed that the reason to do Free Software was because it was "fun"; others insisted that it made better business ,{[pg 109]}, sense or that the stability of infrastructures like the Internet depended on a robust ability to improve them from any direction. But none of them questioned how Free Software got done or proposed to change it. +={ Torvalds, Linus } + +Raymond’s paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" quickly became the most widely told story of how Open Source works and why it is important; it emphasizes the centrality of novel forms of coordination over the role of novel copyright licenses or practices of sharing source code. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" reports Raymond’s experiments with Free Software (the bazaar model) and reflects on the difference between it and methodologies adopted by industry (the cathedral model). The paper does not truck with talk of freedom and has no denunciations of software hoarding à la Stallman. Significantly, it also has no discussion of issues of licensing. Being a hacker, however, Raymond did give his paper a "revision-history," which proudly displays revision 1.29, 9 February 1998: "Changed ‘free software’ to ‘open source.’"~{ From Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The changelog is available online only: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/. }~ +={ Stallman, Richard +3 ; + Raymond, Eric Steven +3 ; + Cathedral and the Bazaar +3 ; + Software development +7 +} + +Raymond was determined to reject the philosophy of liberty that Stallman and the Free Software Foundation represented, but not in order to create a political movement of his own. Rather, Raymond (and the others at the Freeware Summit) sought to cash in on the rising tide of the Internet economy by turning the creation of Free Software into something that made more sense to investors, venture capitalists, and the stock-buying public. To Raymond, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation represented not freedom or liberty, but a kind of dogmatic, impossible communism. As Raymond was a committed libertarian, one might expect his core beliefs in the necessity of strong property rights to conflict with the strange communalism of Free Software—and, indeed, his rhetoric was focused on pragmatic, business-minded, profit-driven, and market-oriented uses of Free Software. For Raymond, the essentially interesting component of Free Software was not its enhancement of human liberty, but the innovation in software production that it represented (the "development model"). It was clear that Free Software achieved something amazing through a clever inversion of strong property rights, an inversion which could be expected to bring massive revenue in some other form, either through cost-cutting or, Netscape-style, through the stock market. +={ Free Software Foundation ; + intellectual property +1 ; + libertarianism +} + +Raymond wanted the business world and the mainstream industry to recognize Free Software’s potential, but he felt that Stallman’s ,{[pg 110]}, rhetoric was getting in the way. Stallman’s insistence, for example, on calling corporate intellectual-property protection of software "hoarding" was doing more damage than good in terms of Free Software’s acceptance among businesses, as a practice, if not exactly a product. + +Raymond’s papers channeled the frustration of an entire generation of Free Software hackers who may or may not have shared Stallman’s dogmatic philosophical stance, but who nonetheless wanted to participate in the creation of Free Software. Raymond’s paper, the Netscape announcement, and the Freeware Summit all played into a palpable anxiety: that in the midst of the single largest creation of paper wealth in U.S. history, those being enriched through Free Software and the Internet were not those who built it, who maintained it, or who got it. +={ hackers +4 ; + Netscape +1 +} + +The Internet giveaway was a conflict of propriety: hackers and geeks who had built the software that made it work, under the sign of making it free for all, were seeing that software generate untold wealth for people who had not built it (and furthermore, who had no intention of keeping it free for all). Underlying the creation of wealth was a commitment to a kind of permanent technical freedom—a moral order—not shared by those who were reaping the most profit. This anxiety regarding the expropriation of work (even if it had been a labor of love) was ramified by Netscape’s announcement. +={ moral and technical order } + +All through 1998 and 1999, buzz around Open Source built. Little-known companies such as Red Hat, VA Linux, Cygnus, Slackware, and SuSe, which had been providing Free Software support and services to customers, suddenly entered media and business consciousness. Articles in the mainstream press circulated throughout the spring and summer of 1998, often attempting to make sense of the name change and whether it meant a corresponding change in practice. A front-cover article in Forbes, which featured photos of Stallman, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, and Torvalds (figure 2), was noncommittal, cycling between Free Software, Open Source, and Freeware.~{ Josh McHugh, "For the Love of Hacking," Forbes, 10 August 1998, 94-100. }~ +={ Behlendorf, Brian +2 ; + Cygnus Solutions (corporation) ; + dotcom era +4 ; + Red Hat (corporation) ; + VA Linux (corporation) +3 ; + Wall, Larry ; + Stallman, Richard +2 ; + Torvalds, Linus +} + +{ 2bits_03_02-100.png }image ~[* "Peace, Love and Software," cover of Forbes, 10 August 1998. Used with permission of Forbes and Nathaniel Welch. ]~ + +By early 1999, O’Reilly Press published Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, a hastily written but widely read book. It included a number of articles—this time including one by Stallman—that cobbled together the first widely available public history of Free Software, both the practice and the technologies ,{[pg 111]}, involved. Kirk McKusick’s article detailed the history of important technologies like the BSD version of UNIX, while an article by Brian Behlendorf, of Apache, detailed the practical challenges of running Free Software projects. Raymond provided a history of hackers and a self-aggrandizing article about his own importance in creating the movement, while Stallman’s contribution told his own version of the rise of Free Software. +={ Apache (Free Software project) ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) ; + Open Sources ; + O’Reilly Press ; + Raymond, Eric Steven +1 ; + Raymond, Eric Steven +1 ; + usable pasts +} + +By December 1999, the buzz had reached a fever pitch. When VA Linux, a legitimate company which actually made something real—computers with Linux installed on them—went public, its shares’ value gained 700 percent in one day and was the single ,{[pg 112]}, most valuable initial public offering of the era. VA Linux took the unconventional step of allowing contributors to the Linux kernel to buy into the stock before the IPO, thus bringing at least a partial set of these contributors into the mainstream Ponzi scheme of the Internet dotcom economy. Those who managed to sell their stock ended up benefiting from the boom, whether or not their contributions to Free Software truly merited it. In a roundabout way, Raymond, O’Reilly, Perens, and others behind the name change had achieved recognition for the central role of Free Software in the success of the Internet—and now its true name could be known: Open Source. +={ Linux (Free Software project) ; + Open Source : + Free Software vs. +11 +} + +Yet nothing much changed in terms of the way things actually got done. Sharing source code, conceiving openness, writing licenses, coordinating projects—all these continued as before with no significant differences between those flashing the heroic mantle of freedom and those donning the pragmatic tunic of methodology. Now, however, stories proliferated; definitions, distinctions, details, and detractions filled the ether of the Internet, ranging from the philosophical commitments of Free Software to the parables of science as the "original open source" software. Free Software proponents refined their message concerning rights, while Open Source advocates refined their claims of political agnosticism or nonideological commitments to "fun." All these stories served to create movements, to evangelize and advocate and, as Eugen Leitl would say, to "corrupt young minds" and convert them to the cause. The fact that there are different narratives for identical practices is an advantageous fact: regardless of why people think they are doing what they are doing, they are all nonetheless contributing to the same mysterious thing. +={ Leitl, Eugene } + +2~ A Movement? + +To most onlookers, Free Software and Open Source seem to be overwhelmed with frenzied argument; the flame wars and disputes, online and off, seem to dominate everything. To attend a conference where geeks—especially high-profile geeks like Raymond, Stallman, and Torvalds—are present, one might suspect that the very detailed practices of Free Software are overseen by the brow-beating, histrionic antics of a few charismatic leaders and that ideological commitments result in divergent, incompatible, and affect-laden ,{[pg 113]}, opposition which must of necessity take specific and incompatible forms. Strangely, this is far from the case: all this sound and fury doesn’t much change what people do, even if it is a requirement of apprenticeship. It truly is all over but for the shouting. +={ Raymond, Eric Steven ; + Stallman, Richard ; + Torvalds, Linus ; + Free Software : + open source vs. +8 ; + practices +4 +} + +According to most of the scholarly literature, the function of a movement is to narrate the shared goals and to recruit new members. But is this what happens in Free Software or Open Source?~{ On social movements—the closest analog, developed long ago—see Gerlach and Hine, People, Power, Change, and Freeman and Johnson, Waves of Protest. However, the Free Software and Open Source Movements do not have "causes" of the kind that conventional movements do, other than the perpetuation of Free and Open Source Software (see Coleman, "Political Agnosticism"; Chan, "Coding Free Software"). Similarly, there is no single development methodology that would cover only Open Source. Advocates of Open Source are all too willing to exclude those individuals or organizations who follow the same "development methodology" but do not use a Free Software license—such as Microsoft’s oft-mocked "shared-source" program. The list of licenses approved by both the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative is substantially the same. Further, the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the "Open Source Definition" are almost identical (compare http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html with http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ [both accessed 30 June 2006]). }~ To begin with, movement is an awkward word; not all participants would define their participation this way. Richard Stallman suggests that Free Software is social movement, while Open Source is a development methodology. Similarly some Open Source proponents see it as a pragmatic methodology and Free Software as a dogmatic philosophy. While there are specific entities like the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, they do not comprise all Free Software or Open Source. Free Software and Open Source are neither corporations nor organizations nor consortia (for there are no organizations to consort); they are neither national, subnational, nor international; they are not "collectives" because no membership is required or assumed—indeed to hear someone assert "I belong" to Free Software or Open Source would sound absurd to anyone who does. Neither are they shady bands of hackers, crackers, or thieves meeting in the dead of night, which is to say that they are not an "informal" organization, because there is no formal equivalent to mimic or annul. Nor are they quite a crowd, for a crowd can attract participants who have no idea what the goal of the crowd is; also, crowds are temporary, while movements extend over time. It may be that movement is the best term of the lot, but unlike social movements, whose organization and momentum are fueled by shared causes or broken by ideological dispute, Free Software and Open Source share practices first, and ideologies second. It is this fact that is the strongest confirmation that they are a recursive public, a form of public that is as concerned with the material practical means of becoming public as it is with any given public debate. +={ affinity (of geeks) +1 ; + movement (component of Free Software) : + function of +3 ; + social movement, theories of ; + Software development +1 +} + +The movement, as a practice of argument and discussion, is thus centered around core agreements about the other four kinds of practices. The discussion and argument have a specific function: to tie together divergent practices according to a wide consensus which tries to capture the why of Free Software. Why is it different from normal software development? Why is it necessary? Why now? ,{[pg 114]}, Why do people do it? Why do people use it? Can it be preserved and enhanced? None of these questions address the how: how should source code circulate? How should a license be written? Who should be in charge? All of these "hows" change slowly and experimentally through the careful modulation of the practices, but the "whys" are turbulent and often distracting. Nonetheless, people engaged in Free Software—users, developers, supporters, and observers—could hardly remain silent on this point, despite the frequent demand to just "shut up and show me the code." "Figuring out" Free Software also requires a practice of reflecting on what is central to it and what is outside of it. +={ figuring out +2 } + +The movement, as a practice of discussion and argument, is made up of stories. It is a practice of storytelling: affect- and intellect-laden lore that orients existing participants toward a particular problem, contests other histories, parries attacks from outside, and draws in new recruits.~{ It is, in the terms of Actor Network Theory, a process of "enrollment" in which participants find ways to rhetorically align—and to disalign—their interests. It does not constitute the substance of their interest, however. See Latour, Science in Action; Callon, "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation." }~ This includes proselytism and evangelism (and the usable pasts of protestant reformations, singularities, rebellion and iconoclasm are often salient here), whether for the reform of intellectual-property law or for the adoption of Linux in the trenches of corporate America. It includes both heartfelt allegiance in the name of social justice as well as political agnosticism stripped of all ideology.~{ Coleman, "Political Agnosticism." }~ Every time Free Software is introduced to someone, discussed in the media, analyzed in a scholarly work, or installed in a workplace, a story of either Free Software or Open Source is used to explain its purpose, its momentum, and its temporality. At the extremes are the prophets and proselytes themselves: Eric Raymond describes Open Source as an evolutionarily necessary outcome of the natural tendency of human societies toward economies of abundance, while Richard Stallman describes it as a defense of the fundamental freedoms of creativity and speech, using a variety of philosophical theories of liberty, justice, and the defense of freedom.~{ See, respectively, Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Williams, Free as in Freedom. }~ Even scholarly analyses must begin with a potted history drawn from the self-narration of geeks who make or advocate free software.~{ For example, Castells, The Internet Galaxy, and Weber, The Success of Open Source both tell versions of the same story of origins and development. }~ Indeed, as a methodological aside, one reason it is so easy to track such stories and narratives is because geeks like to tell and, more important, like to archive such stories—to create Web pages, definitions, encyclopedia entries, dictionaries, and mini-histories and to save every scrap of correspondence, every fight, and every resolution related to their activities. This "archival hubris" yields a very peculiar and specific kind of fieldsite: one in which a kind ,{[pg 115]}, of "as-it-happens" ethnographic observation is possible not only through "being there" in the moment but also by being there in the massive, proliferating archives of moments past. Understanding the movement as a changing entity requires constantly glancing back at its future promises and the conditions of their making. +={ Actor Network Theory ; + allegory, of Protestant Reformation ; + ethnography +1 ; + geeks : + self-representation +1 ; + practices : + "archival hubris" | stories as ; + Raymond, Eric Steven ; + Stallman, Richard +} + +Stories of the movement are also stories of a recursive public. The fact that movement isn’t quite the right word is evidence of a kind of grasping, a figuring out of why these practices make sense to all these geeks, in this place and time; it is a practice that is not so different from my own ethnographic engagement with it. Note that both Free Software and Open Source tell stories of movement(s): they are not divided by a commercial-noncommercial line, even if they are divided by ill-defined and hazy notions of their ultimate goals. The problem of a recursive public (or, in an alternate language, a recursive market) as a social imaginary of moral and technical order is common to both of them as part of their practices. Thus, stories about "the movement" are detailed stories about the technical and moral order that geeks inhabit, and they are bound up with the functions and fates of the Internet. Often these stories are themselves practices of inclusion and exclusion (e.g., "this license is not a Free Software license" or "that software is not an open system"); sometimes the stories are normative definitions about how Free Software should look. But they are, always, stories that reveal the shared moral and technical imaginations that make up Free Software as a recursive public. +={ moral and technical order ; + recursive public ; + social imaginary } + +2~ Conclusion + +Before 1998, there was no movement. There was the Free Software Foundation, with its peculiar goals, and a very wide array of other projects, people, software, and ideas. Then, all of a sudden, in the heat of the dotcom boom, Free Software was a movement. Suddenly, it was a problem, a danger, a job, a calling, a dogma, a solution, a philosophy, a liberation, a methodology, a business plan, a success, and an alternative. Suddenly, it was Open Source or Free Software, and it became necessary to choose sides. After 1998, debates about definition exploded; denunciations and manifestos and journalistic hagiography proliferated. Ironically, the creation of two names allowed people to identify one thing, for ,{[pg 116]}, these two names referred to identical practices, licenses, tools, and organizations. Free Software and Open Source shared everything "material," but differed vocally and at great length with respect to ideology. Stallman was denounced as a kook, a communist, an idealist, and a dogmatic holding back the successful adoption of Open Source by business; Raymond and users of "open source" were charged with selling out the ideals of freedom and autonomy, with the dilution of the principles and the promise of Free Software, as well as with being stooges of capitalist domination. Meanwhile, both groups proceeded to create objects—principally software—using tools that they agreed on, concepts of openness that they agreed on, licenses that they agreed on, and organizational schemes that they agreed on. Yet never was there fiercer debate about the definition of Free Software. +={ Raymond, Eric Steven ; + Stallman, Richard ; + usable pasts +} + +On the one hand, the Free Software Foundation privileges the liberty and creativity of individual geeks, geeks engaged in practices of self-fashioning through the creation of software. It gives precedence to the liberal claim that without freedom of expression, individuals are robbed of their ability to self-determine. On the other hand, Open Source privileges organizations and processes, that is, geeks who are engaged in building businesses, nonprofit organizations, or governmental and public organizations of some form or another. It gives precedence to the pragmatist (or polymathic) view that getting things done requires flexible principles and negotiation, and that the public practice of building and running things should be separate from the private practice of ethical and political beliefs. Both narratives give geeks ways of making sense of a practice that they share in almost all of its details; both narratives give geeks a way to understand how Free Software or Open Source Software is different from the mainstream, proprietary software development that dominates their horizons. The narratives turn the haphazard participation and sharing that existed before 1998 into meaningful, goal-directed practices in the present, turning a class-in-itself into a class-for-itself, to use a terminology for the most part unwelcome among geeks. +={ geeks } + +If two radically opposed ideologies can support people engaged in identical practices, then it seems obvious that the real space of politics and contestation is at the level of these practices and their emergence. These practices emerge as a response to a reorientation of power and knowledge, a reorientation somewhat impervious to ,{[pg 117]}, conventional narratives of freedom and liberty, or to pragmatic claims of methodological necessity or market-driven innovation. Were these conventional narratives sufficient, the practices would be merely bureaucratic affairs, rather than the radical transformations they are. +={ reorientation of power and knowledge } + +1~ 4. Sharing Source Code + +% ,{[pg 118]}, + +Free Software would be nothing without shared source code. The idea is built into the very name "Open Source," and it is a requirement of all Free Software licenses that source code be open to view, not "welded shut." Perhaps ironically, source code is the most material of the five components of Free Software; it is both an expressive medium, like writing or speech, and a tool that performs concrete actions. It is a mnemonic that translates between the illegible electron-speed doings of our machines and our lingering ability to partially understand and control them as human agents. Many Free Software programmers and advocates suggest that "information wants to be free" and that sharing is a natural condition of human life, but I argue something contrary: sharing produces its own kind of moral and technical order, that is, "information makes people want freedom" and how they want it is related to how that information is created and circulated. In this chapter I explore the ,{[pg 119]}, twisted and contingent history of how source code and its sharing have come to take the technical, legal, and pedagogical forms they have today, and how the norms of sharing have come to seem so natural to geeks. +={ moral and technical order ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) +50 ; + pedagogy : + operating systems and +2 +} + +Source code is essential to Free Software because of the historically specific ways in which it has come to be shared, "ported," and "forked." Nothing about the nature of source code requires that it be shared, either by corporations for whom secrecy and jealous protection are the norm or by academics and geeks for whom source code is usually only one expression, or implementation, of a greater idea worth sharing. However, in the last thirty years, norms of sharing source code—technical, legal, and pedagogical norms—have developed into a seemingly natural practice. They emerged through attempts to make software into a product, such as IBM’s 1968 "unbundling" of software and hardware, through attempts to define and control it legally through trade secret, copyright, and patent law, and through attempts to teach engineers how to understand and to create more software. +={ implementation of software ; + Secrecy +7 ; + unbundling ; + Intellectual property ; + International Business Machines (IBM) +} + +The story of the norms of sharing source code is, not by accident, also the history of the UNIX operating system.~{ "Sharing" source code is not the only kind of sharing among geeks (e.g., informal sharing to communicate ideas), and UNIX is not the only ,{[pg 324]}, shared software. Other examples that exhibit this kind of proliferation (e.g., the LISP programming language, the TeX text-formatting system) are as ubiquitous as UNIX today. The inverse of my argument here is that selling produces a different kind of order: many products that existed in much larger numbers than UNIX have since disappeared because they were never ported or forked; they are now part of dead-computer museums and collections, if they have survived at all. }~ The UNIX operating system is a monstrous academic-corporate hybrid, an experiment in portability and sharing whose impact is widely and reverently acknowledged by geeks, but underappreciated more generally. The story of UNIX demonstrates the details of how source code has come to be shared, technically, legally, and pedagogically. In technical terms UNIX and the programming language C in which it was written demonstrated several key ideas in operating-systems theory and practice, and they led to the widespread "porting" of UNIX to virtually every kind of hardware available in the 1970s, all around the world. In legal terms UNIX’s owner, AT&T, licensed it widely and liberally, in both binary and source-code form; the legal definition of UNIX as a product, however, was not the same as the technical definition of UNIX as an evolving experiment in portable operating systems—a tension that has continued throughout its lifetime. In pedagogical terms UNIX became the very paradigm of an "operating system" and was thereby ported not only in the technical sense from one machine to another, but from machines to minds, as computer-science students learning the meaning of "operating system" studied the details of the quasi-legally shared UNIX source code.~{ The story of UNIX has not been told, and yet it has been told hundreds of thousands of times. Every hacker, programmer, computer scientist, and geek tells a version of UNIX history—a usable past. Thus, the sources for this chapter include these stories, heard and recorded throughout my fieldwork, but also easily accessible in academic work on Free Software, which enthusiastically participates in this potted-history retailing. See, for example, Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source; Castells, The Internet Galaxy; Himanen, The Hacker Ethic; Benkler, The Wealth of Networks. To date there is but one detailed history of UNIX—A Quarter Century of UNIX, by Peter Salus—which I rely on extensively. Matt Ratto’s dissertation, "The Pressure of Openness," also contains an excellent analytic history of the events told in this chapter. }~ +={ operating systems, history of +40 ; + programming languages +46 ; + UNIX operating system +3 ; + AT&T +2 ; + C (programming language) ; + programming +11 +} + +% ,{[pg 120]}, + +The proliferation of UNIX was also a hybrid commercial-academic undertaking: it was neither a "public domain" object shared solely among academics, nor was it a conventional commercial product. Proliferation occurred through novel forms of academic sharing as well as through licensing schemes constrained by the peculiar status of AT&T, a regulated monopoly forbidden to enter the computer and software industry before 1984. Thus proliferation was not mere replication: it was not the sale of copies of UNIX, but a complex web of shared and re-shared chunks of source code, and the reimplementation of an elegant and simple conceptual scheme. As UNIX proliferated, it was stabilized in multiple ways: by academics seeking to keep it whole and self-compatible through contributions of source code; by lawyers at AT&T seeking to define boundaries that mapped onto laws, licenses, versions, and regulations; and by professors seeking to define it as an exemplar of the core concepts of operating-system theory. In all these ways, UNIX was a kind of primal recursive public, drawing together people for whom the meaning of their affiliation was the use, modification, and stabilization of UNIX. +={ public domain ; + recursive public : + precursors of ; + monopoly ; + proliferation of software +1 +} + +The obverse of proliferation is differentiation: forking. UNIX is admired for its integrity as a conceptual thing and despised (or marveled at) for its truly tangled genealogical tree of ports and forks: new versions of UNIX, some based directly on the source code, some not, some licensed directly from AT&T, some sublicensed or completely independent. +={ differentiation of software } + +Forking, like random mutation, has had both good and bad effects; on the one hand, it ultimately created versions of UNIX that were not compatible with themselves (a kind of autoimmune response), but it also allowed the merger of UNIX and the Arpanet, creating a situation wherein UNIX operating systems came to be not only the paradigm of operating systems but also the paradigm of networked computers, through its intersection with the development of the TCP/IP protocols that are at the core of the Internet.~{ The intersection of UNIX and TCP/IP occurred around 1980 and led to the famous switch from the Network Control Protocol (NCP) to the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol that occurred on 1 January 1983 (see Salus, Casting the Net). }~ By the mid-1980s, UNIX was a kind of obligatory passage point for anyone interested in networking, operating systems, the Internet, and especially, modes of creating, sharing, and modifying source code—so much so that UNIX has become known among geeks not just as an operating system but as a philosophy, an answer to a very old question in new garb: how shall we live, among a new world of machines, software, and networks? +={ Arpanet (network) ; + protocols : + distinguished from standards and implementation ; + Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) : + TCP/IP ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) ; + UNIX operating system : + relationship to Arpanet ; + UNIX philosophy +} + +% ,{[pg 121]}, + +2~ Before Source + +In the early days of computing machinery, there was no such thing as source code. Alan Turing purportedly liked to talk to the machine in binary. Grace Hopper, who invented an early compiler, worked as close to the Harvard Mark I as she could get: flipping switches and plugging and unplugging relays that made up the "code" of what the machine would do. Such mechanical and meticulous work hardly merits the terms reading and writing; there were no GOTO statements, no line numbers, only calculations that had to be translated from the pseudo-mathematical writing of engineers and human computers to a physical or mechanical configuration.~{ Light, "When Computers Were Women"; Grier, When Computers Were Human. }~ Writing and reading source code and programming languages was a long, slow development that became relatively widespread only by the mid-1970s. So-called higher-level languages began to appear in the late 1950s: FORTRAN, COBOL, Algol, and the "compilers" which allowed for programs written in them to be transformed into the illegible mechanical and valvular representations of the machine. It was in this era that the terms source language and target language emerged to designate the activity of translating higher to lower level languages.~{ There is a large and growing scholarly history of software: Wexelblat, History of Programming Languages and Bergin and Gibson, History of Programming Languages 2 are collected papers by historians and participants. Key works in history include Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog; Akera and Nebeker, From 0 to 1; Hashagen, Keil-Slawik, and Norberg, History of Computing—Software Issues; Donald A. MacKenzie, Mechanizing Proof. Michael Mahoney has written by far the most about the early history of software; his relevant works include "The Roots of Software Engineering," "The Structures of Computation," "In Our Own Image," and "Finding a History for Software Engineering." On UNIX in particular, there is shockingly little historical work. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray devote a mere two pages in their general history Computer. As early as 1978, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were reflecting on the "history" of UNIX in "The UNIX Time-Sharing System: A Retrospective." Ritchie maintains a Web site that contains a valuable collection of early documents and his own reminiscences (http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/ ,{[pg 325]}, ). Mahoney has also conducted interviews with the main participants in the development of UNIX at Bell Labs. These interviews have not been published anywhere, but are drawn on as background in this chapter (interviews are in Mahoney’s personal files). }~ +={ FORTRAN (programming language) ; + Hopper, Grace ; + Turing, Alan +2 ; + translation of source code +5 ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + before Software +5 ; + source code : + translation of +5 +} + +There is a certain irony about the computer, not often noted: the unrivaled power of the computer, if the ubiquitous claims are believed, rests on its general programmability; it can be made to do any calculation, in principle. The so-called universal Turing machine provides the mathematical proof.~{ Turing, "On Computable Numbers." See also Davis, Engines of Logic, for a basic explanation. }~ Despite the abstract power of such certainty, however, we do not live in the world of The Computer—we live in a world of computers. The hardware systems that manufacturers created from the 1950s onward were so specific and idiosyncratic that it was inconceivable that one might write a program for one machine and then simply run it on another. "Programming" became a bespoke practice, tailored to each new machine, and while programmers of a particular machine may well have shared programs with each other, they would not have seen much point in sharing with users of a different machine. Likewise, computer scientists shared mathematical descriptions of algorithms and ideas for automation with as much enthusiasm as corporations jealously guarded theirs, but this sharing, or secrecy, did not extend to the sharing of the program itself. The need to "rewrite" a program for each machine was not just a historical accident, but ,{[pg 122]}, was determined by the needs of designers and engineers and the vicissitudes of the market for such expensive machines.~{ Sharing programs makes sense in this period only in terms of user groups such as SHARE (IBM) and USE (DEC). These groups were indeed sharing source code and sharing programs they had written (see Akera, "Volunteerism and the Fruits of Collaboration"), but they were constituted around specific machines and manufacturers; brand loyalty and customization were familiar pursuits, but sharing source code across dissimilar computers was not. }~ + +In the good old days of computers-the-size-of-rooms, the languages that humans used to program computers were mnemonics; they did not exist in the computer, but on a piece of paper or a specially designed code sheet. The code sheet gave humans who were not Alan Turing a way to keep track of, to share with other humans, and to think systematically about the invisible light-speed calculations of a complicated device. Such mnemonics needed to be "coded" on punch cards or tape; if engineers conferred, they conferred over sheets of paper that matched up with wires, relays, and switches—or, later, printouts of the various machine-specific codes that represented program and data. + +With the introduction of programming languages, the distinction between a "source" language and a "target" language entered the practice: source languages were "translated" into the illegible target language of the machine. Such higher-level source languages were still mnemonics of sorts—they were certainly easier for humans to read and write, mostly on yellowing tablets of paper or special code sheets—but they were also structured enough that a source language could be input into a computer and translated into a target language which the designers of the hardware had specified. Inputting commands and cards and source code required a series of actions specific to each machine: a particular card reader or, later, a keypunch with a particular "editor" for entering the commands. Properly input and translated source code provided the machine with an assembled binary program that would, in fact, run (calculate, operate, control). It was a separation, an abstraction that allowed for a certain division of labor between the ingenious human authors and the fast and mechanical translating machines. +={ text editors +1 } + +Even after the invention of programming languages, programming "on" a computer—sitting at a glowing screen and hacking through the night—was still a long time in coming. For example, only by about 1969 was it possible to sit at a keyboard, write source code, instruct the computer to compile it, then run the program—all without leaving the keyboard—an activity that was all but unimaginable in the early days of "batch processing."~{ See Waldrop, The Dream Machine, 142-47. }~ Very few programmers worked in such a fashion before the mid-1970s, when text editors that allowed programmers to see the text on a screen rather ,{[pg 123]}, than on a piece of paper started to proliferate.~{ A large number of editors were created in the 1970s; Richard Stallman’s EMACS and Bill Joy’s vi remain the most well known. Douglas Engelbart is somewhat too handsomely credited with the creation of the interactive computer, but the work of Butler Lampson and Peter Deutsch in Berkeley, as well as that of the Multics team, Ken Thompson, and others on early on-screen editors is surely more substantial in terms of the fundamental ideas and problems of manipulating text files on a screen. This story is largely undocumented, save for in the computer-science literature itself. On Engelbart, see Bardini, Bootstrapping. }~ We are, by now, so familiar with the image of the man or woman sitting at a screen interacting with this device that it is nearly impossible to imagine how such a seemingly obvious practice was achieved in the first place—through the slow accumulation of the tools and techniques for working on a new kind of writing—and how that practice exploded into a Babel of languages and machines that betrayed the promise of the general-purpose computing machine. +={ proliferation of software +2 ; + source code : + batch processing ; + standards : + programming languages +3 +} + +The proliferation of different machines with different architectures drove a desire, among academics especially, for the standardization of programming languages, not so much because any single language was better than another, but because it seemed necessary to most engineers and computer users to share an emerging corpus of algorithms, solutions, and techniques of all kinds, necessary to avoid reinventing the wheel with each new machine. Algol, a streamlined language suited to algorithmic and algebraic representations, emerged in the early 1960s as a candidate for international standardization. Other languages competed on different strengths: FORTRAN and COBOL for general business use; LISP for symbolic processing. At the same time, the desire for a standard "higher-level" language necessitated a bestiary of translating programs: compilers, parsers, lexical analyzers, and other tools designed to transform the higher-level (human-readable) language into a machine-specific lower-level language, that is, machine language, assembly language, and ultimately the mystical zeroes and ones that course through our machines. The idea of a standard language and the necessity of devising specific tools for translation are the origin of the problem of portability: the ability to move software—not just good ideas, but actual programs, written in a standard language—from one machine to another. +={ COBOL (programming language) ; + FORTRAN (programming language) ; + LISP (programming language) ; + portability, of operating systems +8 +} + +A standard source language was seen as a way to counteract the proliferation of different machines with subtly different architectures. Portable source code would allow programmers to imagine their programs as ships, stopping in at ports of call, docking on different platforms, but remaining essentially mobile and unchanged by these port-calls. Portable source code became the Esperanto of humans who had wrought their own Babel of tribal hardware machines. +={ source code +7 } + +Meanwhile, for the computer industry in the 1960s, portable source code was largely a moot point. Software and hardware were ,{[pg 124]}, two sides of single, extremely expensive coin—no one, except engineers, cared what language the code was in, so long as it performed the task at hand for the customer. Each new machine needed to be different, faster, and, at first, bigger, and then smaller, than the last. The urge to differentiate machines from each other was not driven by academic experiment or aesthetic purity, but by a demand for marketability, competitive advantage, and the transformation of machines and software into products. Each machine had to do something really well, and it needed to be developed in secret, in order to beat out the designs and innovations of competitors. In the 1950s and 1960s the software was a core component of this marketable object; it was not something that in itself was differentiated or separately distributed—until IBM’s famous decision in 1968 to "unbundle" software and hardware. +={ unbundling +2 } + +Before the 1970s, employees of a computer corporation wrote software in-house. The machine was the product, and the software was just an extra line-item on the invoice. IBM was not the first to conceive of software as an independent product with its own market, however. Two companies, Informatics and Applied Data Research, had explored the possibilities of a separate market in software.~{ See Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog. }~ Informatics, in particular, developed the first commercially successful software product, a business-management system called Mark IV, which in 1967 cost $30,000. Informatics’ president Walter Bauer "later recalled that potential buyers were ‘astounded’ by the price of Mark IV. In a world accustomed to free software the price of $30,000 was indeed high."~{ Ibid., 107. }~ +={ Applied Data Research (corporation) ; + Informatics (corporation) +} + +IBM’s unbundling decision marked a watershed, the point at which "portable" source code became a conceivable idea, if not a practical reality, to many in the industry.~{ Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, 203-5. }~ Rather than providing a complete package of hardware and software, IBM decided to differentiate its products: to sell software and hardware separately to consumers.~{ Ultimately, the Department of Justice case against IBM used bundling as evidence of monopolistic behavior, in addition to claims about the creation of so-called Plug Compatible Machines, devices that were reverse-engineered by meticulously constructing both the mechanical interface and the software that would communicate with IBM mainframes. See Franklin M. Fischer, Folded, Spindled, and Mutilated; Brock, The Second Information Revolution. }~ But portability was not simply a technical issue; it was a political-economic one as well. IBM’s decision was driven both by its desire to create IBM software that ran on all IBM machines (a central goal of the famous OS/360 project overseen and diagnosed by Frederick Brooks) and as response to an antitrust suit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice.~{ The story of this project and the lessons Brooks learned are the subject of one of the most famous software-development handbooks, The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick Brooks. }~ The antitrust suit included as part of its claims the suggestion that the close tying of software and hardware represented a form of monopolistic behavior, and it prompted IBM to consider strategies to "unbundle" its product. +={ antitrust ; + Brooks, Frederick ; + Justice, Department of ; + monopoly +} + +% ,{[pg 125]}, + +Portability in the business world meant something specific, however. Even if software could be made portable at a technical level—transferable between two different IBM machines—this was certainly no guarantee that it would be portable between customers. One company’s accounting program, for example, may not suit another’s practices. Portability was therefore hindered both by the diversity of machine architectures and by the diversity of business practices and organization. IBM and other manufacturers therefore saw no benefit to standardizing source code, as it could only provide an advantage to competitors.~{ The computer industry has always relied heavily on trade secret, much less so on patent and copyright. Trade secret also produces its own form of order, access, and circulation, which was carried over into the early software industry as well. See Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine for a classic account of secrecy and competition in the computer industry. }~ + +Portability was thus not simply a technical problem—the problem of running one program on multiple architectures—but also a kind of political-economic problem. The meaning of product was not always the same as the meaning of hardware or software, but was usually some combination of the two. At that early stage, the outlines of a contest over the meaning of portable or shareable source code are visible, both in the technical challenges of creating high-level languages and in the political-economic challenges that corporations faced in creating distinctive proprietary products. + +2~ The UNIX Time-Sharing System +={ UNIX operating system : + history of +18 +} + +Set against this backdrop, the invention, success, and proliferation of the UNIX operating system seems quite monstrous, an aberration of both academic and commercial practice that should have failed in both realms, instead of becoming the most widely used portable operating system in history and the very paradigm of an "operating system" in general. The story of UNIX demonstrates how portability became a reality and how the particular practice of sharing UNIX source code became a kind of de facto standard in its wake. + +UNIX was first written in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Telephone Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. UNIX was the dénouement of the MIT project Multics, which Bell Labs had funded in part and to which Ken Thompson had been assigned. Multics was one of the earliest complete time-sharing operating systems, a demonstration platform for a number of early innovations in time-sharing (multiple simultaneous users on one computer).~{ On time sharing, see Lee et al., "Project MAC." Multics makes an appearance in nearly all histories of computing, the best resource by far being Tom van Vleck’s Web site http://www.multicians.org/. }~ By 1968, Bell Labs had pulled its support—including Ken Thompson—from the project and placed him back in Murray Hill, where he and ,{[pg 126]}, Dennis Ritchie were stuck without a machine, without any money, and without a project. They were specialists in operating systems, languages, and machine architecture in a research group that had no funding or mandate to pursue these areas. Through the creative use of some discarded equipment, and in relative isolation from the rest of the lab, Thompson and Ritchie created, in the space of about two years, a complete operating system, a programming language called C, and a host of tools that are still in extremely wide use today. The name UNIX (briefly, UNICS) was, among other things, a puerile pun: a castrated Multics. +={ C (programming language) ; + Multics +1 ; + Ritchie, Dennis +19 ; + Thompson, Ken +16 +} + +The absence of an economic or corporate mandate for Thompson’s and Ritchie’s creativity and labor was not unusual for Bell Labs; researchers were free to work on just about anything, so long as it possessed some kind of vague relation to the interests of AT&T. However, the lack of funding for a more powerful machine did restrict the kind of work Thompson and Ritchie could accomplish. In particular, it influenced the design of the system, which was oriented toward a super-slim control unit (a kernel) that governed the basic operation of the machine and an expandable suite of small, independent tools, each of which did one thing well and which could be strung together to accomplish more complex and powerful tasks.~{ Some widely admired technical innovations (many of which were borrowed from Multics) include: the hierarchical file system, the command shell for interacting with the system; the decision to treat everything, including external devices, as the same kind of entity (a file), the "pipe" operator which allowed the output of one tool to be "piped" as input to another tool, facilitating the easy creation of complex tasks from simple tools. }~ With the help of Joseph Ossana, Douglas McIlroy, and others, Thompson and Ritchie eventually managed to agitate for a new PDP-11/20 based not on the technical merits of the UNIX operating system itself, but on its potential applications, in particular, those of the text-preparation group, who were interested in developing tools for formatting, typesetting, and printing, primarily for the purpose of creating patent applications, which was, for Bell Labs, and for AT&T more generally, obviously a laudable goal.~{ Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX, 33-37. }~ +={ AT&T +14 ; + McIlroy, Douglas +} + +UNIX was unique for many technical reasons, but also for a specific economic reason: it was never quite academic and never quite commercial. Martin Campbell-Kelly notes that UNIX was a "non-proprietary operating system of major significance."~{ Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog, 143. }~ Kelly’s use of "non-proprietary" is not surprising, but it is incorrect. Although business-speak regularly opposed open to proprietary throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (and UNIX was definitely the former), Kelly’s slip marks clearly the confusion between software ownership and software distribution that permeates both popular and academic understandings. UNIX was indeed proprietary—it was copyrighted and wholly owned by Bell Labs and in turn by Western Electric ,{[pg 127]}, and AT&T—but it was not exactly commercialized or marketed by them. Instead, AT&T allowed individuals and corporations to install UNIX and to create UNIX-like derivatives for very low licensing fees. Until about 1982, UNIX was licensed to academics very widely for a very small sum: usually royalty-free with a minimal service charge (from about $150 to $800).~{ Ritchie’s Web site contains a copy of a 1974 license (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/licenses.html) and a series of ads that exemplify the uneasy positioning of UNIX as a commercial product (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/unixad.html). According to Don Libes and Sandy Ressler, "The original licenses were source licenses. . . . [C]ommercial institutions paid fees on the order of $20,000. If you owned more than one machine, you had to buy binary licenses for every additional machine [i.e., you were not allowed to copy the source and install it] you wanted to install UNIX on. They were fairly pricey at $8000, considering you couldn’t resell them. On the other hand, educational institutions could buy source licenses for several hundred dollars—just enough to cover Bell Labs’ administrative overhead and the cost of the tapes" (Life with UNIX, 20-21). }~ The conditions of this license allowed researchers to do what they liked with the software so long as they kept it secret: they could not distribute or use it outside of their university labs (or use it to create any commercial product or process), nor publish any part of it. As a result, throughout the 1970s UNIX was developed both by Thompson and Ritchie inside Bell Labs and by users around the world in a relatively informal manner. Bell Labs followed such a liberal policy both because it was one of a small handful of industry-academic research and development centers and because AT&T was a government monopoly that provided phone service to the country and was therefore forbidden to directly enter the computer software market.~{ According to Salus, this licensing practice was also a direct result of Judge Thomas Meaney’s 1956 antitrust consent decree which required AT&T to reveal and to license its patents for nominal fees (A Quarter Century of UNIX, 56); see also Brock, The Second Information Revolution, 116-20. }~ +={ AT&T : + Bell Laboratories +13 ; + licensing, of UNIX +6 ; + proprietary systems : + open vs. ; + monopoly +} + +Being on the border of business and academia meant that UNIX was, on the one hand, shielded from the demands of management and markets, allowing it to achieve the conceptual integrity that made it so appealing to designers and academics. On the other, it also meant that AT&T treated it as a potential product in the emerging software industry, which included new legal questions from a changing intellectual-property regime, novel forms of marketing and distribution, and new methods of developing, supporting, and distributing software. + +Despite this borderline status, UNIX was a phenomenal success. The reasons why UNIX was so popular are manifold; it was widely admired aesthetically, for its size, and for its clever design and tools. But the fact that it spread so widely and quickly is testament also to the existing community of eager computer scientists and engineers (and a few amateurs) onto which it was bootstrapped, users for whom a powerful, flexible, low-cost, modifiable, and fast operating system was a revelation of sorts. It was an obvious alternative to the complex, poorly documented, buggy operating systems that routinely shipped standard with the machines that universities and research organizations purchased. "It worked," in other words. + +A key feature of the popularity of UNIX was the inclusion of the source code. When Bell Labs licensed UNIX, they usually provided a tape that contained the documentation (i.e., documentation that ,{[pg 128]}, was part of the system, not a paper technical manual external to it), a binary version of the software, and the source code for the software. The practice of distributing the source code encouraged people to maintain it, extend it, document it—and to contribute those changes to Thompson and Ritchie as well. By doing so, users developed an interest in maintaining and supporting the project precisely because it gave them an opportunity and the tools to use their computer creatively and flexibly. Such a globally distributed community of users organized primarily by their interest in maintaining an operating system is a precursor to the recursive public, albeit confined to the world of computer scientists and researchers with access to still relatively expensive machines. As such, UNIX was not only a widely shared piece of quasi-commercial software (i.e., distributed in some form other than through a price-based retail market), but also the first to systematically include the source code as part of that distribution as well, thus appealing more to academics and engineers.~{ Even in computer science, source code was rarely formally shared, and more likely presented in the form of theorems and proofs, or in various idealized higher-level languages such as Donald Knuth’s MIX language for presenting algorithms (Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming). Snippets of actual source code are much more likely to be found in printed form in handbooks, manuals, how-to guides, and other professional publications aimed at training programmers. }~ +={ recursive public : + precursors of +} + +Throughout the 1970s, the low licensing fees, the inclusion of the source code, and its conceptual integrity meant that UNIX was ported to a remarkable number of other machines. In many ways, academics found it just as appealing, if not more, to be involved in the creation and improvement of a cutting-edge system by licensing and porting the software themselves, rather than by having it provided to them, without the source code, by a company. Peter Salus, for instance, suggests that people experienced the lack of support from Bell Labs as a kind of spur to develop and share their own fixes. The means by which source code was shared, and the norms and practices of sharing, porting, forking, and modifying source code were developed in this period as part of the development of UNIX itself—the technical design of the system facilitates and in some cases mirrors the norms and practices of sharing that developed: operating systems and social systems.~{ The simultaneous development of the operating system and the norms for creating, sharing, documenting, and extending it are often referred to as the "UNIX philosophy." It includes the central idea that one should build on the ideas (software) of others (see Gancarz, The Unix Philosophy and Linux and the UNIX Philosophy). See also Raymond, The Art of UNIX Programming. }~ +={ Salus, Peter +6 } + +2~ Sharing UNIX + +Over the course of 1974-77 the spread and porting of UNIX was phenomenal for an operating system that had no formal system of distribution and no official support from the company that owned it, and that evolved in a piecemeal way through the contributions ,{[pg 129]}, of people from around the world. By 1975, a user’s group had developed: USENIX.~{ Bell Labs threatened the nascent UNIX NEWS newsletter with trademark infringement, so "USENIX" was a concession that harkened back to the original USE users’ group for DEC machines, but avoided explicitly using the name UNIX. Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 9. }~ UNIX had spread to Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan, and a number of new tools and applications were being both independently circulated and, significantly, included in the frequent releases by Bell Labs itself. All during this time, AT&T’s licensing department sought to find a balance between allowing this circulation and innovation to continue, and attempting to maintain trade-secret status for the software. UNIX was, by 1980, without a doubt the most widely and deeply understood trade secret in computing history. +={ Free Software : + passim ; + software tools +2 ; + trade secret law ; + Usenix (user group) +} + +The manner in which the circulation of and contribution to UNIX occurred is not well documented, but it includes both technical and pedagogical forms of sharing. On the technical side, distribution took a number of forms, both in resistance to AT&T’s attempts to control it and facilitated by its unusually liberal licensing of the software. On the pedagogical side, UNIX quickly became a paradigmatic object for computer-science students precisely because it was a working operating system that included the source code and that was simple enough to explore in a semester or two. +={ sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + pedagogical aspects +} + +In A Quarter Century of UNIX Salus provides a couple of key stories (from Ken Thompson and Lou Katz) about how exactly the technical sharing of UNIX worked, how sharing, porting, and forking can be distinguished, and how it was neither strictly legal nor deliberately illegal in this context. First, from Ken Thompson: "The first thing to realize is that the outside world ran on releases of UNIX (V4, V5, V6, V7) but we did not. Our view was a continuum. V5 was what we had at some point in time and was probably out of date simply by the activity required to put it in shape to export. After V6, I was preparing to go to Berkeley to teach for a year. I was putting together a system to take. Since it was almost a release, I made a diff with V6 [a tape containing only the differences between the last release and the one Ken was taking with him]. On the way to Berkeley I stopped by Urbana-Champaign to keep an eye on Greg Chesson. . . . I left the diff tape there and I told him that I wouldn’t mind if it got around."~{ Salus, A Quarter Century of Unix, 138. }~ +={ diff (software tool) +2 ; + Katz, Lou +3 ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + legal aspects +4 | technical aspects +5 +} + +The need for a magnetic tape to "get around" marks the difference between the 1970s and the present: the distribution of software involved both the material transport of media and the digital copying of information. The desire to distribute bug fixes (the "diff " tape) resonates with the future emergence of Free Software: the ,{[pg 130]}, fact that others had fixed problems and contributed them back to Thompson and Ritchie produced an obligation to see that the fixes were shared as widely as possible, so that they in turn might be ported to new machines. Bell Labs, on the other hand, would have seen this through the lens of software development, requiring a new release, contract renegotiation, and a new license fee for a new version. Thompson’s notion of a "continuum," rather than a series of releases also marks the difference between the idea of an evolving common set of objects stewarded by multiple people in far-flung locales and the idea of a shrink-wrapped "productized" software package that was gaining ascendance as an economic commodity at the same time. When Thompson says "the outside world," he is referring not only to people outside of Bell Labs but to the way the world was seen from within Bell Labs by the lawyers and marketers who would create a new version. For the lawyers, the circulation of source code was a problem because it needed to be stabilized, not so much for commercial reasons as for legal ones—one license for one piece of software. Distributing updates, fixes, and especially new tools and additions written by people who were not employed by Bell Labs scrambled the legal clarity even while it strengthened the technical quality. Lou Katz makes this explicit. + +_1 A large number of bug fixes was collected, and rather than issue them one at a time, a collection tape ("the 50 fixes") was put together by Ken [the same "diff tape," presumably]. Some of the fixes were quite important, though I don’t remember any in particular. I suspect that a significant fraction of the fixes were actually done by non-Bell people. Ken tried to send it out, but the lawyers kept stalling and stalling and stalling. Finally, in complete disgust, someone "found a tape on Mountain Avenue" [the location of Bell Labs] which had the fixes. When the lawyers found out about it, they called every licensee and threatened them with dire consequences if they didn’t destroy the tape, after trying to find out how they got the tape. I would guess that no one would actually tell them how they came by the tape (I didn’t).~{ Ibid., emphasis added. }~ + +Distributing the fixes involved not just a power struggle between the engineers and management, but was in fact clearly motivated by the fact that, as Katz says, "a significant fraction of the fixes were done by non-Bell people." This meant two things: first, that there was an obvious incentive to return the updated system to these ,{[pg 131]}, people and to others; second, that it was not obvious that AT&T actually owned or could claim rights over these fixes—or, if they did, they needed to cover their legal tracks, which perhaps in part explains the stalling and threatening of the lawyers, who may have been buying time to make a "legal" version, with the proper permissions. + +The struggle should be seen not as one between the rebel forces of UNIX development and the evil empire of lawyers and managers, but as a struggle between two modes of stabilizing the object known as UNIX. For the lawyers, stability implied finding ways to make UNIX look like a product that would meet the existing legal framework and the peculiar demands of being a regulated monopoly unable to freely compete with other computer manufacturers; the ownership of bits and pieces, ideas and contributions had to be strictly accountable. For the programmers, stability came through redistributing the most up-to-date operating system and sharing all innovations with all users so that new innovations might also be portable. The lawyers saw urgency in making UNIX legally stable; the engineers saw urgency in making UNIX technically stable and compatible with itself, that is, to prevent the forking of UNIX, the death knell for portability. The tension between achieving legal stability of the object and promoting its technical portability and stability is one that has repeated throughout the life of UNIX and its derivatives—and that has ramifications in other areas as well. +={ ontology : + of UNIX operating system +2 +} + +The identity and boundaries of UNIX were thus intricately formed through its sharing and distribution. Sharing produced its own form of moral and technical order. Troubling questions emerged immediately: were the versions that had been fixed, extended, and expanded still UNIX, and hence still under the control of AT&T? Or were the differences great enough that something else (not-UNIX) was emerging? If a tape full of fixes, contributed by non-Bell employees, was circulated to people who had licensed UNIX, and those fixes changed the system, was it still UNIX? Was it still UNIX in a legal sense or in a technical sense or both? While these questions might seem relatively scholastic, the history of the development of UNIX suggests something far more interesting: just about every possible modification has been made, legally and technically, but the concept of UNIX has remained remarkably stable. +={ moral and technical order } + +% ,{[pg 132]}, + +2~ Porting UNIX + +Technical portability accounts for only part of UNIX’s success. As a pedagogical resource, UNIX quickly became an indispensable tool for academics around the world. As it was installed and improved, it was taught and learned. The fact that UNIX spread first to university computer-science departments, and not to businesses, government, or nongovernmental organizations, meant that it also became part of the core pedagogical practice of a generation of programmers and computer scientists; over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, UNIX came to exemplify the very concept of an operating system, especially time-shared, multi-user operating systems. Two stories describe the porting of UNIX from machines to minds and illustrate the practice as it developed and how it intersected with the technical and legal attempts to stabilize UNIX as an object: the story of John Lions’s Commentary on Unix 6th Edition and the story of Andrew Tanenbaum’s Minix. +={ Lions, John +10 ; + Tanenbaum, Andrew +1 ; + UNIX philosophy +1 +} + +The development of a pedagogical UNIX lent a new stability to the concept of UNIX as opposed to its stability as a body of source code or as a legal entity. The porting of UNIX was so successful that even in cases where a ported version of UNIX shares none of the same source code as the original, it is still considered UNIX. The monstrous and promiscuous nature of UNIX is most clear in the stories of Lions and Tanenbaum, especially when contrasted with the commercial, legal, and technical integrity of something like Microsoft Windows, which generally exists in only a small number of forms (NT, ME, XP, 95, 98, etc.), possessing carefully controlled source code, immured in legal protection, and distributed only through sales and service packs to customers or personal-computer manufacturers. While Windows is much more widely used than UNIX, it is far from having become a paradigmatic pedagogical object; its integrity is predominantly legal, not technical or pedagogical. Or, in pedagogical terms, Windows is to fish as UNIX is to fishing lessons. +={ Microsoft : + Windows operating system ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + pedagogical aspects +9 ; + UNIX operating system : + Windows operating system vs. +} + +Lions’s Commentary is also known as "the most photocopied document in computer science." Lions was a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales in the early 1970s; after reading the first paper by Ritchie and Thompson on UNIX, he convinced his colleagues to purchase a license from AT&T.~{ Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, "The Unix Operating System," Bell Systems Technical Journal (1974). }~ Lions, like many researchers, was impressed by the quality of the system, and he was, like all of the UNIX users of that period, intimately ,{[pg 133]}, familiar with the UNIX source code—a necessity in order to install, run, or repair it. Lions began using the system to teach his classes on operating systems, and in the course of doing so he produced a textbook of sorts, which consisted of the entire source code of UNIX version 6 (V6), along with elaborate, line-by-line commentary and explanation. The value of this textbook can hardly be underestimated. Access to machines and software that could be used to understand how a real system worked was very limited: "Real computers with real operating systems were locked up in machine rooms and committed to processing twenty four hours a day. UNIX changed that."~{ Greg Rose, quoted in Lions, Commentary, n.p. }~ Berny Goodheart, in an appreciation of Lions’s Commentary, reiterated this sense of the practical usefulness of the source code and commentary: "It is important to understand the significance of John’s work at that time: for students studying computer science in the 1970s, complex issues such as process scheduling, security, synchronization, file systems and other concepts were beyond normal comprehension and were extremely difficult to teach—there simply wasn’t anything available with enough accessibility for students to use as a case study. Instead a student’s discipline in computer science was earned by punching holes in cards, collecting fan-fold paper printouts, and so on. Basically, a computer operating system in that era was considered to be a huge chunk of inaccessible proprietary code."~{ Lions, Commentary, n.p. }~ +={ intellectual property +3 } + +Lions’s commentary was a unique document in the world of computer science, containing a kind of key to learning about a central component of the computer, one that very few people would have had access to in the 1970s. It shows how UNIX was ported not only to machines (which were scarce) but also to the minds of young researchers and student programmers (which were plentiful). Several generations of both academic computer scientists and students who went on to work for computer or software corporations were trained on photocopies of UNIX source code, with a whiff of toner and illicit circulation: a distributed operating system in the textual sense. + +Unfortunately, Commentary was also legally restricted in its distribution. AT&T and Western Electric, in hopes that they could maintain trade-secret status for UNIX, allowed only very limited circulation of the book. At first, Lions was given permission to distribute single copies only to people who already possessed a license for UNIX V6; later Bell Labs itself would distribute Commentary ,{[pg 134]}, briefly, but only to licensed users, and not for sale, distribution, or copying. Nonetheless, nearly everyone seems to have possessed a dog-eared, nth-generation copy. Peter Reintjes writes, "We soon came into possession of what looked like a fifth generation photocopy and someone who shall remain nameless spent all night in the copier room spawning a sixth, an act expressly forbidden by a carefully worded disclaimer on the first page. Four remarkable things were happening at the same time. One, we had discovered the first piece of software that would inspire rather than annoy us; two, we had acquired what amounted to a literary criticism of that computer software; three, we were making the single most significant advancement of our education in computer science by actually reading an entire operating system; and four, we were breaking the law."~{ Ibid. }~ +={ trade secret law +1 } + +Thus, these generations of computer-science students and academics shared a secret—a trade secret become open secret. Every student who learned the essentials of the UNIX operating system from a photocopy of Lions’s commentary, also learned about AT&T’s attempt to control its legal distribution on the front cover of their textbook. The parallel development of photocopying has a nice resonance here; together with home cassette taping of music and the introduction of the video-cassette recorder, photocopying helped drive the changes to copyright law adopted in 1976. +={ copyright : + changes in 1976 +} + +Thirty years later, and long after the source code in it had been completely replaced, Lions’s Commentary is still widely admired by geeks. Even though Free Software has come full circle in providing students with an actual operating system that can be legally studied, taught, copied, and implemented, the kind of "literary criticism" that Lions’s work represents is still extremely rare; even reading obsolete code with clear commentary is one of the few ways to truly understand the design elements and clever implementations that made the UNIX operating system so different from its predecessors and even many of its successors, few, if any of which have been so successfully ported to the minds of so many students. +={ design +2 } + +Lions’s Commentary contributed to the creation of a worldwide community of people whose connection to each other was formed by a body of source code, both in its implemented form and in its textual, photocopied form. This nascent recursive public not only understood itself as belonging to a technical elite which was constituted by its creation, understanding, and promotion of a particular ,{[pg 135]}, technical tool, but also recognized itself as "breaking the law," a community constituted in opposition to forms of power that governed the circulation, distribution, modification, and creation of the very tools they were learning to make as part of their vocation. The material connection shared around the world by UNIX-loving geeks to their source code is not a mere technical experience, but a social and legal one as well. +={ recursive public +6 } + +Lions was not the only researcher to recognize that teaching the source code was the swiftest route to comprehension. The other story of the circulation of source code concerns Andrew Tanenbaum, a well-respected computer scientist and an author of standard textbooks on computer architecture, operating systems, and networking.~{ Tanenbaum’s two most famous textbooks are Operating Systems and Computer Networks, which have seen three and four editions respectively. }~ In the 1970s Tanenbaum had also used UNIX as a teaching tool in classes at the Vrije Universiteit, in Amsterdam. Because the source code was distributed with the binary code, he could have his students explore directly the implementations of the system, and he often used the source code and the Lions book in his classes. But, according to his Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (1987), "When AT&T released Version 7 [ca. 1979], it began to realize that UNIX was a valuable commercial product, so it issued Version 7 with a license that prohibited the source code from being studied in courses, in order to avoid endangering its status as a trade secret. Many universities complied by simply dropping the study of UNIX, and teaching only theory" (13). For Tanenbaum, this was an unacceptable alternative—but so, apparently, was continuing to break the law by teaching UNIX in his courses. And so he proceeded to create a completely new UNIX-like operating system that used not a single line of AT&T source code. He called his creation Minix. It was a stripped-down version intended to run on personal computers (IBM PCs), and to be distributed along with the textbook Operating Systems, published by Prentice Hall.~{ Tanenbaum was not the only person to follow this route. The other acknowledged giant in the computer-science textbook world, Douglas Comer, created Xinu and Xinu-PC (UNIX spelled backwards) in Operating Systems Design in 1984. }~ +={ Minix (operating system) +2 ; + Tanenbaum, Andrew : + Minix and +5 ; + textbooks : + on operating systems and networks +1 ; + UNIX operating system : + as commercial product +} + +Minix became as widely used in the 1980s as a teaching tool as Lions’s source code had been in the 1970s. According to Tanenbaum, the Usenet group comp.os.minix had reached 40,000 members by the late 1980s, and he was receiving constant suggestions for changes and improvements to the operating system. His own commitment to teaching meant that he incorporated few of these suggestions, an effort to keep the system simple enough to be printed in a textbook and understood by undergraduates. Minix ,{[pg 136]}, was freely available as source code, and it was a fully functioning operating system, even a potential alternative to UNIX that would run on a personal computer. Here was a clear example of the conceptual integrity of UNIX being communicated to another generation of computer-science students: Tanenbaum’s textbook is not called "UNIX Operating Systems"—it is called Operating Systems. The clear implication is that UNIX represented the clearest example of the principles that should guide the creation of any operating system: it was, for all intents and purposes, state of the art even twenty years after it was first conceived. +={ ontology : + of UNIX operating system +} + +Minix was not commercial software, but nor was it Free Software. It was copyrighted and controlled by Tanenbaum’s publisher, Prentice Hall. Because it used no AT&T source code, Minix was also legally independent, a legal object of its own. The fact that it was intended to be legally distinct from, yet conceptually true to UNIX is a clear indication of the kinds of tensions that govern the creation and sharing of source code. The ironic apotheosis of Minix as the pedagogical gold standard for studying UNIX came in 1991-92, when a young Linus Torvalds created a "fork" of Minix, also rewritten from scratch, that would go on to become the paradigmatic piece of Free Software: Linux. Tanenbaum’s purpose for Minix was that it remain a pedagogically useful operating system—small, concise, and illustrative—whereas Torvalds wanted to extend and expand his version of Minix to take full advantage of the kinds of hardware being produced in the 1990s. Both, however, were committed to source-code visibility and sharing as the swiftest route to complete comprehension of operating-systems principles. +={ Linux (Free Software project) : + origins in Minix +} + +2~ Forking UNIX +={ forking +13 } + +Tanenbaum’s need to produce Minix was driven by a desire to share the source code of UNIX with students, a desire AT&T was manifestly uncomfortable with and which threatened the trade-secret status of their property. The fact that Minix might be called a fork of UNIX is a key aspect of the political economy of operating systems and social systems. Forking generally refers to the creation of new, modified source code from an original base of source code, resulting in two distinct programs with the same parent. Whereas the modification of an engine results only in a modified engine, the ,{[pg 137]}, modification of source code implies differentiation and reproduction, because of the ease with which it can be copied. +={ Minix (operating system) +1 ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) +15 ; + trade secret law +1 +} + +How could Minix—a complete rewrite—still be considered the same object? Considered solely from the perspective of trade-secret law, the two objects were distinct, though from the perspective of copyright there was perhaps a case for infringement, although AT&T did not rely on copyright as much as on trade secret. From a technical perspective, the functions and processes that the software accomplishes are the same, but the means by which they are coded to do so are different. And from a pedagogical standpoint, the two are identical—they exemplify certain core features of an operating system (file-system structure, memory paging, process management)—all the rest is optimization, or bells and whistles. Understanding the nature of forking requires also that UNIX be understood from a social perspective, that is, from the perspective of an operating system created and modified by user-developers around the world according to particular and partial demands. It forms the basis for the emergence of a robust recursive public. + +One of the more important instances of the forking of UNIX’s perambulatory source code and the developing community of UNIX co-developers is the story of the Berkeley Software Distribution and its incorporation of the TCP/IP protocols. In 1975 Ken Thompson took a sabbatical in his hometown of Berkeley, California, where he helped members of the computer-science department with their installations of UNIX, arriving with V6 and the "50 bug fixes" diff tape. Ken had begun work on a compiler for the Pascal programming language that would run on UNIX, and this work was taken up by two young graduate students: Bill Joy and Chuck Hartley. (Joy would later co-found Sun Microsystems, one of the most successful UNIX-based workstation companies in the history of the industry.) +={ diff (software tool) ; + Joy, Bill +9 ; + Sun Microsystems ; + Thompson, Ken +1 ; + Pascal (programming language) +2 ; + protocols : + distinguished from standards and implementation ; + Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) : + TCP/IP +6 ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) : + included in BSD +6 +} + +Joy, above nearly all others, enthusiastically participated in the informal distribution of source code. With a popular and well-built Pascal system, and a new text editor called ex (later vi), he created the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a set of tools that could be used in combination with the UNIX operating system. They were extensions to the original UNIX operating system, but not a complete, rewritten version that might replace it. By all accounts, Joy served as a kind of one-man software-distribution house, making tapes and posting them, taking orders and cashing checks—all in ,{[pg 138]}, addition to creating software.~{ McKusick, "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix," 32. }~ UNIX users around the world soon learned of this valuable set of extensions to the system, and before long, many were differentiating between AT&T UNIX and BSD UNIX. +={ AT&T : + version of UNIX +1 ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) +9 ; + differentiation of software ; + text editors +1 ; + UNIX operating system : + relationship to Arpanet +7 ; + vi (text editor) +1 +} + +According to Don Libes, Bell Labs allowed Berkeley to distribute its extensions to UNIX so long as the recipients also had a license from Bell Labs for the original UNIX (an arrangement similar to the one that governed Lions’s Commentary).~{ Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 16-17. }~ From about 1976 until about 1981, BSD slowly became an independent distribution—indeed, a complete version of UNIX—well-known for the vi editor and the Pascal compiler, but also for the addition of virtual memory and its implementation on DEC’s VAX machines.~{ A recent court case between the Utah-based SCO—the current owner of the legal rights to the original UNIX source code—and IBM raised yet again the question of how much of the original UNIX source code exists in the BSD distribution. SCO alleges that IBM (and Linus Torvalds) inserted SCO-owned UNIX source code into the Linux kernel. However, the incredibly circuitous route of the "original" source code makes these claims hard to ferret out: it was developed at Bell Labs, licensed to multiple universities, used as a basis for BSD, sold to an earlier version of the company SCO (then known as the Santa Cruz Operation), which created a version called Xenix in cooperation with Microsoft. See the diagram by Eric Lévénez at http://www.levenez.com/unix/. For more detail on this case, see www.groklaw.com. }~ It should be clear that the unusual quasi-commercial status of AT&T’s UNIX allowed for this situation in a way that a fully commercial computer corporation would never have allowed. Consider, for instance, the fact that many UNIX users—students at a university, for instance—could not essentially know whether they were using an AT&T product or something called BSD UNIX created at Berkeley. The operating system functioned in the same way and, except for the presence of copyright notices that occasionally flashed on the screen, did not make any show of asserting its brand identity (that would come later, in the 1980s). Whereas a commercial computer manufacturer would have allowed something like BSD only if it were incorporated into and distributed as a single, marketable, and identifiable product with a clever name, AT&T turned something of a blind eye to the proliferation and spread of AT&T UNIX and the result were forks in the project: distinct bodies of source code, each an instance of something called UNIX. + +As BSD developed, it gained different kinds of functionality than the UNIX from which it was spawned. The most significant development was the inclusion of code that allowed it to connect computers to the Arpanet, using the TCP/IP protocols designed by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. The TCP/IP protocols were a key feature of the Arpanet, overseen by the Information Processing and Techniques Office (IPTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from its inception in 1967 until about 1977. The goal of the protocols was to allow different networks, each with its own machines and administrative boundaries, to be connected to each other.~{ See Vinton G. Cerf and Robert Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection." For the history, see Abbate, Inventing the Internet; Norberg and O’Neill, A History of the Information Techniques Processing Office. Also see chapters 1 and 5 herein for more detail on the role of these protocols and the RFC process. }~ Although there is a common heritage—in the form of J. C. R. Licklider—which ties the imagination of the time-sharing operating ,{[pg 139]}, system to the creation of the "galactic network," the Arpanet initially developed completely independent of UNIX.~{ Waldrop, The Dream Machine, chaps. 5 and 6. }~ As a time-sharing operating system, UNIX was meant to allow the sharing of resources on a single computer, whether mainframe or minicomputer, but it was not initially intended to be connected to a network of other computers running UNIX, as is the case today.~{ The exception being a not unimportant tool called Unix to Unix Copy Protocol, or uucp, which was widely used to transmit data by phone and formed the bases for the creation of the Usenet. See Hauben and Hauben, Netizens. }~ The goal of Arpanet, by contrast, was explicitly to achieve the sharing of resources located on diverse machines across diverse networks. +={ Arpanet (network) +7 ; + Cerf, Vinton ; + Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) +7 ; + Kahn, Robert ; + Licklider, J. C. R. +} + +To achieve the benefits of TCP/IP, the resources needed to be implemented in all of the different operating systems that were connected to the Arpanet—whatever operating system and machine happened to be in use at each of the nodes. However, by 1977, the original machines used on the network were outdated and increasingly difficult to maintain and, according to Kirk McKusick, the greatest expense was that of porting the old protocol software to new machines. Hence, IPTO decided to pursue in part a strategy of achieving coordination at the operating-system level, and they chose UNIX as one of the core platforms on which to standardize. In short, they had seen the light of portability. In about 1978 IPTO granted a contract to Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN), one of the original Arpanet contractors, to integrate the TCP/IP protocols into the UNIX operating system. +={ Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) } + +But then something odd happened, according to Salus: "An initial prototype was done by BBN and given to Berkeley. Bill [Joy] immediately started hacking on it because it would only run an Ethernet at about 56K/sec utilizing 100% of the CPU on a 750. . . . Bill lobotomized the code and increased its performance to on the order of 700KB/sec. This caused some consternation with BBN when they came in with their ‘finished’ version, and Bill wouldn’t accept it. There were battles for years after, about which version would be in the system. The Berkeley version ultimately won."~{ Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX, 161. }~ +={ Salus, Peter } + +Although it is not clear, it appears BBN intended to give Joy the code in order to include it in his BSD version of UNIX for distribution, and that Joy and collaborators intended to cooperate with Rob Gurwitz of BBN on a final implementation, but Berkeley insisted on "improving" the code to make it perform more to their needs, and BBN apparently dissented from this.~{ TCP/IP Digest 1.6 (11 November 1981) contains Joy’s explanation of Berkeley’s intentions (Message-ID: { anews.aucbvax.5236 }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=anews.aucbvax.5236 ). }~ One result of this scuffle between BSD and BBN was a genuine fork: two bodies of code that did the same thing, competing with each other to become the standard UNIX implementation of TCP/IP. Here, then, was a ,{[pg 140]}, case of sharing source code that led to the creation of different versions of software—sharing without collaboration. Some sites used the BBN code, some used the Berkeley code. + +Forking, however, does not imply permanent divergence, and the continual improvement, porting, and sharing of software can have odd consequences when forks occur. On the one hand, there are particular pieces of source code: they must be identifiable and exact, and prepended with a copyright notice, as was the case of the Berkeley code, which was famously and vigorously policed by the University of California regents, who allowed for a very liberal distribution of BSD code on the condition that the copyright notice was retained. On the other hand, there are particular named collections of code that work together (e.g., UNIX™, or DARPA-approved UNIX, or later, Certified Open Source [sm]) and are often identified by a trademark symbol intended, legally speaking, to differentiate products, not to assert ownership of particular instances of a product. +={ BSD License +2 ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) ; + intellectual property +2 ; + trademark law +} + +The odd consequence is this: Bill Joy’s specific TCP/IP code was incorporated not only into BSD UNIX, but also into other versions of UNIX, including the UNIX distributed by AT&T (which had originally licensed UNIX to Berkeley) with the Berkeley copyright notice removed. This bizarre, tangled bank of licenses and code resulted in a famous suit and countersuit between AT&T and Berkeley, in which the intricacies of this situation were sorted out.~{ See Andrew Leonard, "BSD Unix: Power to the People, from the Code," Salon, 16 May 2000, http://archive.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/. }~ An innocent bystander, expecting UNIX to be a single thing, might be surprised to find that it takes different forms for reasons that are all but impossible to identify, but the cause of which is clear: different versions of sharing in conflict with one another; different moral and technical imaginations of order that result in complex entanglements of value and code. +={ moral and technical order +5 } + +The BSD fork of UNIX (and the subfork of TCP/IP) was only one of many to come. By the early 1980s, a proliferation of UNIX forks had emerged and would be followed shortly by a very robust commercialization. At the same time, the circulation of source code started to slow, as corporations began to compete by adding features and creating hardware specifically designed to run UNIX (such as the Sun Sparc workstation and the Solaris operating system, the result of Joy’s commercialization of BSD in the 1980s). The question of how to make all of these versions work together eventually became the subject of the open-systems discussions that would dominate the workstation and networking sectors of the computer ,{[pg 141]}, market from the early 1980s to 1993, when the dual success of Windows NT and the arrival of the Internet into public consciousness changed the fortunes of the UNIX industry. +={ Microsoft : + Windows operating system ; + Solaris (operating system) ; + Sparc (computer workstation) +} + +A second, and more important, effect of the struggle between BBN and BSD was simply the widespread adoption of the TCP/IP protocols. An estimated 98 percent of computer-science departments in the United States and many such departments around the world incorporated the TCP/IP protocols into their UNIX systems and gained instant access to Arpanet.~{ Norberg and O’Neill, A History of the Information Techniques Processing Office, 184-85. They cite Comer, Internetworking with TCP/IP, 6 for the figure. }~ The fact that this occurred when it did is important: a few years later, during the era of the commercialization of UNIX, these protocols might very well not have been widely implemented (or more likely implemented in incompatible, nonstandard forms) by manufacturers, whereas before 1983, university computer scientists saw every benefit in doing so if it meant they could easily connect to the largest single computer network on the planet. The large, already functioning, relatively standard implementation of TCP/IP on UNIX (and the ability to look at the source code) gave these protocols a tremendous advantage in terms of their survival and success as the basis of a global and singular network. + +2~ Conclusion + +The UNIX operating system is not just a technical achievement; it is the creation of a set of norms for sharing source code in an unusual environment: quasi-commercial, quasi-academic, networked, and planetwide. Sharing UNIX source code has taken three basic forms: porting source code (transferring it from one machine to another); teaching source code, or "porting" it to students in a pedagogical setting where the use of an actual working operating system vastly facilitates the teaching of theory and concepts; and forking source code (modifying the existing source code to do something new or different). This play of proliferation and differentiation is essential to the remarkably stable identity of UNIX, but that identity exists in multiple forms: technical (as a functioning, self-compatible operating system), legal (as a license-circumscribed version subject to intellectual property and commercial law), and pedagogical (as a conceptual exemplar, the paradigm of an operating system). Source code shared in this manner is essentially unlike any other kind of ,{[pg 142]}, source code in the world of computers, whether academic or commercial. It raises troubling questions about standardization, about control and audit, and about legitimacy that haunts not only UNIX but the Internet and its various "open" protocols as well. +={ differentiation of software +1 ; + ontology : + of UNIX operating system +1 ; + pedagogy : + operating systems and +1 ; + proliferation of software +1 ; + openness (component of Free Software) ; + standards processes +} + +Sharing source code in Free Software looks the way it does today because of UNIX. But UNIX looks the way it does not because of the inventive genius of Thompson and Ritchie, or the marketing and management brilliance of AT&T, but because sharing produces its own kind of order: operating systems and social systems. The fact that geeks are wont to speak of "the UNIX philosophy" means that UNIX is not just an operating system but a way of organizing the complex relations of life and work through technical means; a way of charting and breaching the boundaries between the academic, the aesthetic, and the commercial; a way of implementing ideas of a moral and technical order. What’s more, as source code comes to include more and more of the activities of everyday communication and creation—as it comes to replace writing and supplement thinking—the genealogy of its portability and the history of its forking will illuminate the kinds of order emerging in practices and technologies far removed from operating systems—but tied intimately to the UNIX philosophy. +={ Ritchie, Dennis ; + Thompson, Ken ; + UNIX philosophy +} + +1~ 5. Conceiving Open Systems +={ Open Systems +99 ; + openness (component of Free Software) +28 +} + +% ,{[pg 143]}, + +_1 The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.~{ Quoted in Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 67, and also in Critchley and Batty, Open Systems, 17. I first heard it in an interview with Sean Doyle in 1998. }~ +={ standards +2 } + +Openness is an unruly concept. While free tends toward ambiguity (free as in speech, or free as in beer?), open tends toward obfuscation. Everyone claims to be open, everyone has something to share, everyone agrees that being open is the obvious thing to do—after all, openness is the other half of "open source"—but for all its obviousness, being "open" is perhaps the most complex component of Free Software. It is never quite clear whether being open is a means or an end. Worse, the opposite of open in this case (specifically, "open systems") is not closed, but "proprietary"—signaling the complicated imbrication of the technical, the legal, and the commercial. +={ proprietary systems : + open vs. +2 +} + +In this chapter I tell the story of the contest over the meaning of "open systems" from 1980 to 1993, a contest to create a simultaneously moral and technical infrastructure within the computer ,{[pg 144]}, industry.~{ Moral in this usage signals the "moral and social order" I explored through the concept of social imaginaries in chapter 1. Or, in the Scottish Enlightenment sense of Adam Smith, it points to the right organization and relations of exchange among humans. }~ The infrastructure in question includes technical components—the UNIX operating system and the TCP/IP protocols of the Internet as open systems—but it also includes "moral" components, including the demand for structures of fair and open competition, antimonopoly and open markets, and open-standards processes for high-tech networked computers and software in the 1980s.~{ There is, of course, a relatively robust discourse of open systems in biology, sociology, systems theory, and cybernetics; however, that meaning of open systems is more or less completely distinct from what openness and open systems came to mean in the computer industry in the period book-ended by the arrivals of the personal computer and the explosion of the Internet (ca. 1980-93). One relevant overlap between these two meanings can be found in the work of Carl Hewitt at the MIT Media Lab and in the interest in "agorics" taken by K. Eric Drexler, Bernardo Huberman, and Mark S. Miller. See Huberman, The Ecology of Computation. }~ By moral, I mean imaginations of the proper order of collective political and commercial action; referring to much more than simply how individuals should act, moral signifies a vision of how economy and society should be ordered collectively. +={ infrastructure ; + moral and technical order +3 ; + monopoly +1 ; +} + +The open-systems story is also a story of the blind spot of open systems—in that blind spot is intellectual property. The story reveals a tension between incompatible moral-technical orders: on the one hand, the promise of multiple manufacturers and corporations creating interoperable components and selling them in an open, heterogeneous market; on the other, an intellectual-property system that encouraged jealous guarding and secrecy, and granted monopoly status to source code, designs, and ideas in order to differentiate products and promote competition. The tension proved irresolvable: without shared source code, for instance, interoperable operating systems are impossible. Without interoperable operating systems, internetworking and portable applications are impossible. Without portable applications that can run on any system, open markets are impossible. Without open markets, monopoly power reigns. +={ intellectual property ; + interoperability +21 ; + openness (component of Free Software) : + intellectual property and +} + +Standardization was at the heart of the contest, but by whom and by what means was never resolved. The dream of open systems, pursued in an entirely unregulated industry, resulted in a complicated experiment in novel forms of standardization and cooperation. The creation of a "standard" operating system based on UNIX is the story of a failure, a kind of "figuring out" gone haywire, which resulted in huge consortia of computer manufacturers attempting to work together and compete with each other at the same time. Meanwhile, the successful creation of a "standard" networking protocol—known as the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model (OSI)—is a story of failure that hides a larger success; OSI was eclipsed in the same period by the rapid and ad hoc adoption of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which used a radically different standardization process and which succeeded for a number of surprising reasons, allowing the Internet ,{[pg 145]}, to take the form it did in the 1990s and ultimately exemplifying the moral-technical imaginary of a recursive public—and one at the heart of the practices of Free Software. +={ figuring out ; + Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) : + as reference model ; + Openness (component of Free Software) : + standardization and ; + protocols : + Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) | TCP/IP ; + standards organizations ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) +} + +The conceiving of openness, which is the central plot of these two stories, has become an essential component of the contemporary practice and power of Free Software. These early battles created a kind of widespread readiness for Free Software in the 1990s, a recognition of Free Software as a removal of open systems’ blind spot, as much as an exploitation of its power. The geek ideal of openness and a moral-technical order (the one that made Napster so significant an event) was forged in the era of open systems; without this concrete historical conception of how to maintain openness in technical and moral terms, the recursive public of geeks would be just another hierarchical closed organization—a corporation manqué—and not an independent public serving as a check on the kinds of destructive power that dominated the open-systems contest. +={ Napster } + +2~ Hopelessly Plural + +Big iron, silos, legacy systems, turnkey systems, dinosaurs, mainframes: with the benefit of hindsight, the computer industry of the 1960s to the 1980s appears to be backward and closed, to have literally painted itself into a corner, as an early Intel advertisement suggests (figure 3). Contemporary observers who show disgust and impatience with the form that computers took in this era are without fail supporters of open systems and opponents of proprietary systems that "lock in" customers to specific vendors and create artificial demands for support, integration, and management of resources. Open systems (were it allowed to flourish) would solve all these problems. +={ Intel (corporation) +2 ; + proprietary systems : + lock-in and ; + mainframes +4 +} + +Given the promise of a "general-purpose computer," it should seem ironic at best that open systems needed to be created. But the general-purpose computer never came into being. We do not live in the world of The Computer, but in a world of computers: myriad, incompatible, specific machines. The design of specialized machines (or "architectures") was, and still is, key to a competitive industry in computers. It required CPUs and components and associated software that could be clearly qualified and marketed ,{[pg 146]}, ,{[pg 147]}, as distinct products: the DEC PDP-11 or the IBM 360 or the CDC 6600. On the Fordist model of automobile production, the computer industry’s mission was to render desired functions (scientific calculation, bookkeeping, reservations management) in a large box with a button on it (or a very large number of buttons on increasingly smaller boxes). Despite the theoretical possibility, such computers were not designed to do anything, but, rather, to do specific kinds of calculations exceedingly well. They were objects customized to particular markets. +={ Digital Equipment Corporation (corporation) +1 ; + International Business Machines (IBM) +1 +} + +{ 2bits_05_03-100.png }image ~[* Open systems is the solution to painting yourself into a corner. Intel advertisement, Wall Street Journal, 30 May 1984. ]~ + +% image placed under paragraph + +The marketing strategy was therefore extremely stable from about 1955 to about 1980: identify customers with computing needs, build a computer to serve them, provide them with all of the equipment, software, support, or peripherals they need to do the job—and charge a large amount. Organizationally speaking, it was an industry dominated by "IBM and the seven dwarfs": Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, Control Data, General Electric, NCR, RCA, Univac, and Burroughs, with a few upstarts like DEC in the wings. + +By the 1980s, however, a certain inversion had happened. Computers had become smaller and faster; there were more and more of them, and it was becoming increasingly clear to the "big iron" manufacturers that what was most valuable to users was the information they generated, not the machines that did the generating. Such a realization, so the story goes, leads to a demand for interchangeability, interoperability, information sharing, and networking. It also presents the nightmarish problems of conversion between a bewildering, heterogeneous, and rapidly growing array of hardware, software, protocols, and systems. As one conference paper on the subject of evaluating open systems put it, "At some point a large enterprise will look around and see a huge amount of equipment and software that will not work together. Most importantly, the information stored on these diverse platforms is not being shared, leading to unnecessary duplication and lost profit."~{ Keves, "Open Systems Formal Evaluation Process," 87. }~ +={ microcomputers +2 } + +Open systems emerged in the 1980s as the name of the solution to this problem: an approach to the design of systems that, if all participants were to adopt it, would lead to widely interoperable, integrated machines that could send, store, process, and receive the user’s information. In marketing and public-relations terms, it would provide "seamless integration." +={ standards : + as form of competition +1 +} + +In theory, open systems was simply a question of standards adoption. For instance, if all the manufacturers of UNIX systems could ,{[pg 148]}, be convinced to adopt the same basic standard for the operating system, then seamless integration would naturally follow as all the various applications could be written once to run on any variant UNIX system, regardless of which company made it. In reality, such a standard was far from obvious, difficult to create, and even more difficult to enforce. As such, the meaning of open systems was "hopelessly plural," and the term came to mean an incredibly diverse array of things. + +"Openness" is precisely the kind of concept that wavers between end and means. Is openness good in itself, or is openness a means to achieve something else—and if so what? Who wants to achieve openness, and for what purpose? Is openness a goal? Or is it a means by which a different goal—say, "interoperability" or "integration"—is achieved? Whose goals are these, and who sets them? Are the goals of corporations different from or at odds with the goals of university researchers or government officials? Are there large central visions to which the activities of all are ultimately subordinate? +={ openness (component of Free Software) : + goals of +} + +Between 1980 and 1993, no person or company or computer industry consortium explicitly set openness as the goal that organizations, corporations, or programmers should aim at, but, by the same token, hardly anyone dissented from the demand for openness. As such, it appears clearly as a kind of cultural imperative, reflecting a longstanding social imaginary with roots in liberal democratic notions, versions of a free market and ideals of the free exchange of knowledge, but confronting changed technical conditions that bring the moral ideas of order into relief, and into question. +={ social imaginary } + +In the 1980s everyone seemed to want some kind of openness, whether among manufacturers or customers, from General Motors to the armed forces.~{ General Motors stirred strong interest in open systems by creating, in 1985, its Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP), which was built on UNIX. At the time, General Motors was the second-largest purchaser of computer equipment after the government. The Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force also adopted and required POSIX-compliant UNIX systems early on. }~ The debates, both rhetorical and technical, about the meaning of open systems have produced a slough of writings, largely directed at corporate IT managers and CIOs. For instance, Terry A. Critchley and K. C. Batty, the authors of Open Systems: The Reality (1993), claim to have collected over a hundred definitions of open systems. The definitions stress different aspects—from interoperability of heterogeneous machines, to compatibility of different applications, to portability of operating systems, to legitimate standards with open-interface definitions—including those that privilege ideologies of a free market, as does Bill Gates’s definition: "There’s nothing more open than the PC market. . . . [U]sers can choose the latest and greatest software." The range ,{[pg 149]}, of meanings was huge and oriented along multiple axes: what, to whom, how, and so on. Open systems could mean that source code was open to view or that only the specifications or interfaces were; it could mean "available to certain third parties" or "available to everyone, including competitors"; it could mean self-publishing, well-defined interfaces and application programming interfaces (APIs), or it could mean sticking to standards set by governments and professional societies. To cynics, it simply meant that the marketing department liked the word open and used it a lot. +={ General Motors (GM) } + +One part of the definition, however, was both consistent and extremely important: the opposite of an "open system" was not a "closed system" but a "proprietary system." In industries other than networking and computing the word proprietary will most likely have a positive valence, as in "our exclusive proprietary technology." But in the context of computers and networks such a usage became anathema in the 1980s and 1990s; what customers reportedly wanted was a system that worked nicely with other systems, and that system had to be by definition open since no single company could provide all of the possible needs of a modern business or government agency. And even if it could, it shouldn’t be allowed to. For instance, "In the beginning was the word and the word was ‘proprietary.’ IBM showed the way, purveying machines that existed in splendid isolation. They could not be operated using programs written for any other computer; they could not communicate with the machines of competitors. If your company started out buying computers of various sizes from the International Business Machines Corporation because it was the biggest and best, you soon found yourself locked as securely to Big Blue as a manacled wretch in a medieval dungeon. When an IBM rival unveiled a technologically advanced product, you could only sigh; it might be years before the new technology showed up in the IBM line."~{ Paul Fusco, "The Gospel According to Joy," New York Times, 27 March 1988, Sunday Magazine, 28. }~ +={ Joy, Bill +1 ; + Openness (component of Free Software) : + proprietary vs. +2 ; + openness (component of Free Software) : + definition of +7 +} + +With the exception of IBM (and to some extent its closest competitors: Hewlett-Packard, Burroughs, and Unisys), computer corporations in the 1980s sought to distance themselves from such "medieval" proprietary solutions (such talk also echoes that of usable pasts of the Protestant Reformation often used by geeks). New firms like Sun and Apollo deliberately berated the IBM model. Bill Joy reportedly called one of IBM’s new releases in the 1980s a "grazing dinosaur ‘with a truck outside pumping its bodily fluids through it.’"~{ "Dinosaur" entry, The Jargon File, http://catb.org/jargon/html/D/dinosaur.html. }~ +={ allegory, of Protestant Reformation ; + Protestant Reformation ; + usable pasts +} + +% ,{[pg 150]}, + +Open systems was never a simple solution though: all that complexity in hardware, software, components, and peripherals could only be solved by pushing hard for standards—even for a single standard. Or, to put it differently, during the 1980s, everyone agreed that open systems was a great idea, but no one agreed on which open systems. As one of the anonymous speakers in Open Systems: The Reality puts it, "It took me a long time to understand what (the industry) meant by open vs. proprietary, but I finally figured it out. From the perspective of any one supplier, open meant ‘our products.’ Proprietary meant ‘everyone else’s products.’"~{ Crichtley and Batty, Open Systems, 10. }~ +={ openness (component of Free Software) : + closure vs. +8 ; + Open Systems : + intellectual property and +8 +} + +For most supporters of open systems, the opposition between open and proprietary had a certain moral force: it indicated that corporations providing the latter were dangerously close to being evil, immoral, perhaps even criminal monopolists. Adrian Gropper and Sean Doyle, the principals in Amicas, an Internet teleradiology company, for instance, routinely referred to the large proprietary healthcare-information systems they confronted in these terms: open systems are the way of light, not dark. Although there are no doubt arguments for closed systems—security, privacy, robustness, control—the demand for interoperability does not mean that such closure will be sacrificed.~{ An excellent counterpoint here is Paul Edwards’s The Closed World, which clearly demonstrates the appeal of a thoroughly and hierarchically controlled system such as the Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) of the Department of Defense against the emergence of more "green world" models of openness. }~ Closure was also a choice. That is, open systems was an issue of sovereignty, involving the right, in a moral sense, of a customer to control a technical order hemmed in by firm standards that allowed customers to combine a number of different pieces of hardware and software purchased in an open market and to control the configuration themselves—not enforced openness, but the right to decide oneself on whether and how to be open or closed. +={ Amicas (corporation) ; + Doyle, Sean ; + Evil ; + Gropper, Adrian ; + moral and technical order +1 ; + Monopoly +} + +The open-systems idea of moral order conflicts, however, with an idea of moral order represented by intellectual property: the right, encoded in law, to assert ownership over and control particular bits of source code, software, and hardware. The call for and the market in open systems were never imagined as being opposed to intellectual property as such, even if the opposition between open and proprietary seemed to indicate a kind of subterranean recognition of the role of intellectual property. The issue was never explicitly broached. Of the hundred definitions in Open Systems, only one definition comes close to including legal issues: "Speaker at Interop ’90 (paraphrased and maybe apocryphal): ‘If you ask to gain access to a technology and the response you get back is a price list, then ,{[pg 151]}, that technology is "open." If what you get back is a letter from a lawyer, then it’s not "open."’"~{ Crichtley and Batty, Open Systems, 13. }~ +={ intellectual property +6 } + +Openness here is not equated with freedom to copy and modify, but with the freedom to buy access to any aspect of a system without signing a contract, a nondisclosure agreement, or any other legal document besides a check. The ground rules of competition are unchallenged: the existing system of intellectual property—a system that was expanded and strengthened in this period—was a sine qua non of competition. +={ standards : + as form of competition +1 +} + +Openness understood in this manner means an open market in which it is possible to buy standardized things which are neither obscure nor secret, but can be examined and judged—a "commodity" market, where products have functions, where quality is comparable and forms the basis for vigorous competition. What this notion implies is freedom from monopoly control by corporations over products, a freedom that is nearly impossible to maintain when the entire industry is structured around the monopoly control of intellectual property through trade secret, patent, or copyright. The blind spot hides the contradiction between an industry imagined on the model of manufacturing distinct and tangible products, and the reality of an industry that wavers somewhere between service and product, dealing in intangible intellectual property whose boundaries and identity are in fact defined by how they are exchanged, circulated, and shared, as in the case of the proliferation and differentiation of the UNIX operating system. +={ monopoly +3 ; + standards +4 +} + +There was no disagreement about the necessity of intellectual property in the computer industry of the 1980s, and there was no perceived contradiction in the demands for openness. Indeed, openness could only make sense if it were built on top of a stable system of intellectual property that allowed competitors to maintain clear definitions of the boundaries of their products. But the creation of interoperable components seemed to demand a relaxation of the secrecy and guardedness necessary to "protect" intellectual property. Indeed, for some observers, the problem of openness created the opportunity for the worst kinds of cynical logic, as in this example from Regis McKenna’s Who’s Afraid of Big Blue? +={ McKenna, Regis +1 } + +_1 Users want open environments, so the vendors had better comply. In fact, it is a good idea to support new standards early. That way, you can help control the development of standards. Moreover, you can ,{[pg 152]}, take credit for driving the standard. Supporting standards is a way to demonstrate that you’re on the side of users. On the other hand, companies cannot compete on the basis of standards alone. Companies that live by standards can die by standards. Other companies, adhering to the same standards, could win on the basis of superior manufacturing technology. If companies do nothing but adhere to standards, then all computers will become commodities, and nobody will be able to make any money. Thus, companies must keep something proprietary, something to differentiate their products.~{ McKenna, Who’s Afraid of Big Blue? 178, emphasis added. McKenna goes on to suggest that computer companies can differentiate themselves by adding services, better interfaces, or higher reliability—ironically similar to arguments that the Open Source Initiative would make ten years later. }~ + +By such an account, open systems would be tantamount to economic regression, a state of pure competition on the basis of manufacturing superiority, and not on the basis of the competitive advantage granted by the monopoly of intellectual property, the clear hallmark of a high-tech industry.~{ Richard Stallman, echoing the image of medieval manacled wretches, characterized the blind spot thus: "Unix does not give the user any more legal freedom than Windows does. What they mean by ‘open systems’ is that you can mix and match components, so you can decide to have, say, a Sun chain on your right leg and some other company’s chain on your left leg, and maybe some third company’s chain on your right arm, and this is supposed to be better than having to choose to have Sun chains on all your limbs, or Microsoft chains on all your limbs. You know, I don’t care whose chains are on each limb. What I want is not to be chained by anyone" ("Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-certified Genius," interview by Michael Gross, Cambridge, Mass., 1999, 5, http://www.mgross.com/MoreThgsChng/interviews/stallman1.html). }~ It was an irresolvable tension between the desire for a cooperative, market-based infrastructure and the structure of an intellectual-property system ill-suited to the technical realities within which companies and customers operated—a tension revealing the reorientation of knowledge and power with respect to creation, dissemination, and modification of knowledge. +={ modifiability +1 ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +} + +From the perspective of intellectual property, ideas, designs, and source code are everything—if a company were to release the source code, and allow other vendors to build on it, then what exactly would they be left to sell? Open systems did not mean anything like free, open-source, or public-domain computing. But the fact that competition required some form of collaboration was obvious as well: standard software and network systems were needed; standard markets were needed; standard norms of innovation within the constraints of standards were needed. In short, the challenge was not just the creation of competitive products but the creation of a standard infrastructure, dealing with the technical questions of availability, modifiability, and reusability of components, and the moral questions of the proper organization of competition and collaboration across diverse domains: engineers, academics, the computer industry, and the industries it computerized. What follows is the story of how UNIX entered the open-systems fray, a story in which the tension between the conceiving of openness and the demands of intellectual property is revealed. +={ availability : + open systems and ; + collaboration : + competition vs. ; + modifiability ; + Source code +2 +} + +% ,{[pg 153]}, + +2~ Open Systems One: Operating Systems +={ UNIX operating system : + history of +37 | Open Systems and +37 | standardization and +37 +} + +In 1980 UNIX was by all accounts the most obvious choice for a standard operating system for a reason that seemed simple at the outset: it ran on more than one kind of hardware. It had been installed on DEC machines and IBM machines and Intel processors and Motorola processors—a fact exciting to many professional programmers, university computer scientists, and system administrators, many of whom also considered UNIX to be the best designed of the available operating systems. + +There was a problem, however (there always is): UNIX belonged to AT&T, and AT&T had licensed it to multiple manufacturers over the years, in addition to allowing the source code to circulate more or less with abandon throughout the world and to be ported to a wide variety of different machine architectures. Such proliferation, albeit haphazard, was a dream come true: a single, interoperable operating system running on all kinds of hardware. Unfortunately, proliferation would also undo that dream, because it meant that as the markets for workstations and operating systems heated up, the existing versions of UNIX hardened into distinct and incompatible versions with different features and interfaces. By the mid 1980s, there were multiple competing efforts to standardize UNIX, an endeavour that eventually went haywire, resulting in the so-called UNIX wars, in which "gangs" of vendors (some on both sides of the battle) teamed up to promote competing standards. The story of how this happened is instructive, for it is a story that has been reiterated several times in the computer industry.~{ A similar story can be told about the emergence, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, of manufacturers of "plug-compatible" devices, peripherals that plugged into IBM machines (see Takahashi, "The Rise and Fall of the Plug Compatible Manufacturers"). Similarly, in the 1990s the story of browser compatibility and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards is another recapitulation. }~ +={ standards : + as form of competition +7 +} + +As a hybrid commercial-academic system, UNIX never entered the market as a single thing. It was licensed in various ways to different people, both academic and commercial, and contained additions and tools and other features that may or may not have originated at (or been returned to) Bell Labs. By the early 1980s, the Berkeley Software Distribution was in fact competing with the AT&T version, even though BSD was a sublicensee—and it was not the only one. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of corporations had licensed UNIX from AT&T for use on new machines. Microsoft licensed it (and called it Xenix, rather than licensing the name UNIX as well) to be installed on Intel-based machines. IBM, Unisys, Amdahl, Sun, DEC, and Hewlett-Packard all followed suit and ,{[pg 154]}, created their own versions and names: HP-UX, A/UX, AIX, Ultrix, and so on. Given the ground rules of trade secrecy and intellectual property, each of these licensed versions needed to be made legally distinct—if they were to compete with each other. Even if "UNIX" remained conceptually pure in an academic or pedagogical sense, every manufacturer would nonetheless have to tweak, to extend, to optimize in order to differentiate. After all, "if companies do nothing but adhere to standards, then all computers will become commodities, and nobody will be able to make any money."~{ McKenna, Who’s Afraid of Big Blue? 178. }~ +={ AT&T : + version of UNIX ; + portability, of operating systems +4 ; + UNIX wars ; + workstations +} + +It was thus unlikely that any of these corporations would contribute the changes they made to UNIX back into a common pool, and certainly not back to AT&T which subsequent to the 1984 divestiture finally released their own commercial version of UNIX, called UNIX System V. Very quickly, the promising "open" UNIX of the 1970s became a slough of alternative operating systems, each incompatible with the next thanks to the addition of market-differentiating features and hardware-specific tweaks. According to Pamela Gray, "By the mid-1980s, there were more than 100 versions in active use" centered around the three market leaders, AT&T’s System V, Microsoft/SCO Xenix, and the BSD.~{ Pamela Gray, Open Systems. }~ By 1984, the differences in systems had become significant—as in the case of the BSD additions of the TCP/IP protocols, the vi editor, and the Pascal compiler—and created not only differentiation in terms of quality but also incompatibility at both the software and networking levels. +={ AT&T : + divestiture in 1984 ; + Open Systems : + operating systems and +32 +} + +Different systems of course had different user communities, based on who was the customer of whom. Eric Raymond suggests that in the mid-1980s, independent hackers, programmers, and computer scientists largely followed the fortunes of BSD: "The divide was roughly between longhairs and shorthairs; programmers and technical people tended to line up with Berkeley and BSD, more business-oriented types with AT&T and System V. The longhairs, repeating a theme from Unix’s early days ten years before, liked to see themselves as rebels against a corporate empire; one of the small companies put out a poster showing an X-wing-like space fighter marked "BSD" speeding away from a huge AT&T ‘death star’ logo left broken and in flames."~{ Eric Raymond, "Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995," The Art of UNIX Programming, http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch02s01.html#id2880014. }~ +={ Raymond, Eric Steven ; + UNIX operating system : + allegiance to versions of +1 +} + +So even though UNIX had become the standard operating system of choice for time-sharing, multi-user, high-performance computers by the mid-1980s, there was no such thing as UNIX. Competitors ,{[pg 155]}, in the UNIX market could hardly expect the owner of the system, AT&T, to standardize it and compete with them at the same time, and the rest of the systems were in some legal sense still derivations from the original AT&T system. Indeed, in its licensing pamphlets, AT&T even insisted that UNIX was not a noun, but an adjective, as in "the UNIX system."~{ Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 22. Also noted in Tanenbaum, "The UNIX Marketplace in 1987," 419. }~ +={ UNIX operating system : + as part of speech +} + +The dawning realization that the proliferation of systems was not only spreading UNIX around the world but also spreading it thin and breaking it apart led to a series of increasingly startling and high-profile attempts to "standardize" UNIX. Given that the three major branches (BSD, which would become the industry darling as Sun’s Solaris operating system; Microsoft, and later SCO Xenix; and AT&T’s System V) all emerged from the same AT&T and Berkeley work done largely by Thompson, Ritchie, and Joy, one would think that standardization would be a snap. It was anything but. +={ SCO (corporation) ; + Solaris (operating system) +} + +2~ Figuring Out Goes Haywire +={ figuring out +1 } + +Figuring out the moral and technical order of open systems went haywire around 1986-88, when there were no fewer than four competing international standards, represented by huge consortia of computer manufacturers (many of whom belonged to multiple consortia): POSIX, the X/Open consortium, the Open Software Foundation, and UNIX International. The blind spot of open systems had much to do with this crazy outcome: academics, industry, and government could not find ways to agree on standardization. One goal of standardization was to afford customers choice; another was to allow competition unconstrained by "artificial" means. A standard body of source code was impossible; a standard "interface definition" was open to too much interpretation; government and academic standards were too complex and expensive; no particular corporation’s standard could be trusted (because they could not be trusted to reveal it in advance of their own innovations); and worst of all, customers kept buying, and vendors kept shipping, and the world was increasingly filled with diversity, not standardization. +={ moral and technical order ; + Open Software Foundation (OSF) ; + POSIX (standard) ; + standards : + interface definition as +6 ; + X/Open Consortium ; + UNIX International +} + +UNIX proliferated quickly because of porting, leading to multiple instances of an operating system with substantially similar source code shared by academics and licensed by AT&T. But it differentiated ,{[pg 156]}, just as quickly because of forking, as particular features were added to different ports. Some features were reincorporated into the "main" branch—the one Thompson and Ritchie worked on—but the bulk of these mutations spread in a haphazard way, shared through users directly or implemented in newly formed commercial versions. Some features were just that, features, but others could extend the system in ways that might make an application possible on one version, but not on another. +={ differentiation of software +1 ; + proliferation of software +1 +} + +The proliferation and differentiation of UNIX, the operating system, had peculiar effects on the emerging market for UNIX, the product: technical issues entailed design and organizational issues. The original UNIX looked the way it did because of the very peculiar structure of the organization that created and sustained UNIX: Bell Labs and the worldwide community of users and developers. The newly formed competitors, conceiving of UNIX as a product distinct from the original UNIX, adopted it precisely because of its portability and because of the promise of open systems as an alternative to "big iron" mainframes. But as UNIX was funneled into existing corporations with their own design and organizational structures, it started to become incompatible with itself, and the desire for competition in open systems necessitated efforts at UNIX standardization. +={ standards organizations +26 } + +The first step in the standardization of open systems and UNIX was the creation of what was called an "interface definition," a standard that enumerated the minimum set of functions that any version of UNIX should support at the interface level, meaning that any programmer who wrote an application could expect to interact with any version of UNIX on any machine in the same way and get the same response from the machine (regardless of the specific implementation of the operating system or the source code that was used). Interface definitions, and extensions to them, were ideally to be published and freely available. + +The interface definition was a standard that emphasized portability, not at the source-code or operating-system level, but at the application level, allowing applications built on any version of UNIX to be installed and run on any other. The push for such a standard came first from a UNIX user group founded in 1980 by Bob Marsh and called, after the convention of file hierarchies in the UNIX interface, "/usr/group" (later renamed Uniforum). The 1984 /usr/group standard defined a set of system calls, which, however, "was ,{[pg 157]}, immediately ignored and, for all practical purposes, useless."~{ Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 67. }~ It seemed the field was changing too fast and UNIX proliferating and innovating too widely for such a standard to work. +={ user groups +1 : + /usr/group +4 +} + +The /usr/group standard nevertheless provided a starting point for more traditional standards organizations—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)—to take on the task. Both institutions took the /usr/group standard as a basis for what would be called IEEE P1003 Portable Operating System Interface for Computer Environments (POSIX). Over the next three years, from 1984 to 1987, POSIX would work diligently at providing a standard interface definition for UNIX. +={ American National Standards Institute (ANSI) +1 ; + Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) +3 ; + POSIX (standard) +1 +} + +Alongside this development, the AT&T version of UNIX became the basis for a different standard, the System V Interface Definition (SVID), which attempted to standardize a set of functions similar but not identical to the /usr/group and POSIX standards. Thus emerged two competing definitions for a standard interface to a system that was rapidly proliferating into hundreds of tiny operating-system fiefdoms.~{ A case might be made that a third definition, the ANSI standard for the C programming language, also covered similar ground, which of course it would have had to in order to allow applications written on one ,{[pg 330]}, operating system to be compiled and run on another (see Gray, Open Systems, 55-58; Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 70-75). }~ The danger of AT&T setting the standard was not lost on any of the competing manufacturers. Even if they created a thoroughly open standard-interface definition, AT&T’s version of UNIX would be the first to implement it, and they would continually have privileged knowledge of any changes: if they sought to change the implementation, they could change the standard; if they received demands that the standard be changed, they could change their implementation before releasing the new standard. +={ standards : + as form of competition +24 | implementation ; + System V Interface Definition (SVID) +} + +In response to this threat, a third entrant into the standards race emerged: X/Open, which comprised a variety of European computer manufacturers (including AT&T!) and sought to develop a standard that encompassed both SVID and POSIX. The X/Open initiative grew out of European concern about the dominance of IBM and originally included Bull, Ericsson, ICL, Nixdorf, Olivetti, Philips, and Siemens. In keeping with a certain 1980s taste for the integration of European economic activity vis-à-vis the United States and Japan, these manufacturers banded together both to distribute a unified UNIX operating system in Europe (based initially on the BSD and Sun versions of UNIX) and to attempt to standardize it at the same time. +={ Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) ; + X/Open Consortium +20 ; + International Business Machines (IBM) +2 +} + +X/Open represented a subtle transformation of standardization efforts and of the organizational definition of open systems. While ,{[pg 158]}, the /usr/group standard was developed by individuals who used UNIX, and the POSIX standard by an acknowledged professional society (IEEE), the X/Open group was a collective of computer corporations that had banded together to fund an independent entity to help further the cause of a standard UNIX. This paradoxical situation—of a need to share a standard among all the competitors and the need to keep the details of that standardized product secret to maintain an advantage—was one that many manufacturers, especially the Europeans with their long experience of IBM’s monopoly, understood as mutually destructive. Hence, the solution was to engage in a kind of organizational innovation, to create a new form of metacorporate structure that could strategically position itself as at least temporarily interested in collaboration with other firms, rather than in competition. Thus did stories and promises of open systems wend their way from the details of technical design to those of organizational design to the moral order of competition and collaboration, power and strategy. "Standards" became products that corporations sought to "sell" to their own industry through the intermediary of the consortium. +={ collaboration : + competition vs. +22 ; + monopoly +} + +In 1985 and 1986 the disarrayed state of UNIX was also frustrating to the major U.S. manufacturers, especially to Sun Microsystems, which had been founded on the creation of a market for UNIX-based "workstations," high-powered networked computers that could compete with mainframes and personal computers at the same time. Founded by Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla, and Andreas Bechtolsheim, Sun had very quickly become an extraordinarily successful computer company. The business pages and magazines were keen to understand whether workstations were viable competitors to PCs, in particular to those of IBM and Microsoft, and the de facto standard DOS operating system, for which a variety of extremely successful business-, personal-, and home-computer applications were written. +={ Joy, Bill ; + Microsoft ; + Sun Microsystems +9 ; + workstations +3 +} + +Sun seized on the anxiety around open systems, as is evident in the ad it ran during the summer of 1987 (figure 4). The ad plays subtly on two anxieties: the first is directed at the consumer and suggests that only with Sun can one actually achieve interoperability among all of one business’ computers, much less across a network or industry; the second is more subtle and plays to fears within the computer industry itself, the anxiety that Sun might merge with one ,{[pg 159]}, of the big corporations, AT&T or Unisys, and corner the market in open systems by producing the de facto standard. +={ interoperability ; + mergers +2 ; + Unisys +2 +} + +{ 2bits_05_04-100.png }image ~[* 4a and 4b. Open systems anxiety around mergers and compatibility. Sun Microsystems advertisement, Wall Street Journal, 9 July 1987. ]~ + +In fact, in October 1987 Sun announced that it had made a deal with AT&T. AT&T would distribute a workstation based on Sun’s SPARC line of workstations and would acquire 20 percent of Sun.~{ "AT&T Deal with Sun Seen," New York Times, 19 October 1987, D8. }~ As part of this announcement, Sun and AT&T made clear that they intended to merge two of the dominant versions of UNIX on the market: AT&T’s System V and the BSD-derived Solaris. This move clearly frightened the rest of the manufacturers interested in UNIX and open systems, as it suggested a kind of super-power alignment that would restructure (and potentially dominate) the market. A 1988 article in the New York Times quotes an industry analyst who characterizes the merger as "a matter of concern at the highest levels of every major computer company in the United States, and possibly the world," and it suggests that competing manufacturers "also fear that AT&T will gradually make Unix a proprietary product, usable only on AT&T or Sun machines."~{ Thomas C. Hayesdallas, "AT&T’s Unix Is a Hit at Last, and Other Companies Are Wary," New York Times, 24 February 1988, D8. }~ The industry anxiety was great enough that in March Unisys (a computer manufacturer, formerly Burroughs-Sperry) announced that it would work with AT&T and Sun to bring UNIX to its mainframes and to make its ,{[pg 160]}, business applications run on UNIX. Such a move was tantamount to Unisys admitting that there would be no future in proprietary high-end computing—the business on which it had hitherto built its reputation—unless it could be part of the consortium that could own the standard.~{ "Unisys Obtains Pacts for Unix Capabilities," New York Times, 10 March 1988, D4. }~ +={ AT&T +7 ; + Solaris (operating system) +} + +In response to this perceived collusion a group of U.S. and European companies banded together to form another rival organization—one that partially overlapped with X/Open but now included IBM—this one called the Open Software Foundation. A nonprofit corporation, the foundation included IBM, Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, Bull, Nixdorf, Siemens, and Apollo Computer (Sun’s most direct competitor in the workstation market). Their goal was explicitly to create a "competing standard" for UNIX that would be available on the hardware they manufactured (and based, according to some newspaper reports, on IBM’s AIX, which was to be called OSF/1). AT&T appeared at first to support the foundation, suggesting that if the Open Software Foundation could come up with a standard, then AT&T would make System V compatible with it. Thus, 1988 was the summer of open love. Every major computer manufacturer in the world was now part of some consortium or another, and some were part of two—each promoting a separate standard. +={ X/Open Consortium } + +Of all the corporations, Sun did the most to brand itself as the originator of the open-systems concept. They made very broad claims for the success of open-systems standardization, as for instance in an ad from August 1988 (figure 5), which stated in part: +={ openness (component of Free Software) : + proprietary vs. +} + +_1 But what’s more, those sales confirm a broad acceptance of the whole idea behind Sun. + +_1 The Open Systems idea. Systems based on standards so universally accepted that they allow combinations of hardware and software from literally thousands of independent vendors. . . . So for the first time, you’re no longer locked into the company who made your computers. Even if it’s us. + +The ad goes on to suggest that "in a free market, the best products win out," even as Sun played both sides of every standardization battle, cooperating with both AT&T and with the Open Software Foundation. But by October of that year, it was clear to Sun that ,{[pg 161]}, ,{[pg 162]}, the idea hadn’t really become "so universal" just yet. In that month AT&T and Sun banded together with seventeen other manufacturers and formed a rival consortium: Unix International, a coalition of the willing that would back the AT&T UNIX System V version as the one true open standard. In a full-page advertisement from Halloween of 1988 (figure 6), run simultaneously in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, the rhetoric of achieved success remained, but now instead of "the Open Systems idea," it was "your demand for UNIX System V-based solutions that ushered in the era of open architecture." Instead of a standard for all open systems, it was a war of all against all, a war to assure customers that they had made, not the right choice of hardware or software, but the right choice of standard. +={ UNIX International +3 ; + UNIX wars +3 +} + +{ 2bits_05_05-100.png }image ~[* It pays to be open: Sun’s version of profitable and successful open systems. Sun Microsystems advertisement, New York Times, 2 August 1988. ]~ + +% image placed after paragraph + +The proliferation of standards and standards consortia is often referred to as the UNIX wars of the late 1980s, but the creation of such consortia did not indicate clearly drawn lines. Another metaphor that seems to have been very popular in the press at the time was that of "gang" warfare (no doubt helped along by the creation of another industry consortia informally called the Gang of Nine, which were involved in a dispute over whether MicroChannel or EISA buses should be installed in PCs). The idea of a number of companies forming gangs to fight with each other, Bloods-and-Crips style—or perhaps more Jets-and-Sharks style, minus the singing—was no doubt an appealing metaphor at the height of Los Angeles’s very real and high-profile gang warfare. But as one article in the New York Times pointed out, these were strange gangs: "Since ‘openness’ and ‘cooperation’ are the buzzwords behind these alliances, the gang often asks its enemy to join. Often the enemy does so, either so that it will not seem to be opposed to openness or to keep tabs on the group. IBM was invited to join the corporation for Open Systems, even though the clear if unstated motive of the group was to dilute IBM’s influence in the market. AT&T negotiated to join the Open Software Foundation, but the talks collapsed recently. Some companies find it completely consistent to be members of rival gangs. . . . About 10 companies are members of both the Open Software Foundation and its archrival Unix International."~{ Andrew Pollack, "Computer Gangs Stake Out Turf," New York Times, 13 December 1988, D1. See also Evelyn Richards, "Computer Firms Get a Taste of ‘Gang Warfare,’" Washington Post, 11 December 1988, K1; Brit Hume, "IBM, Once the Bully on the Block, Faces a Tough New PC Gang," Washington Post, 3 October 1988, E24. }~ +={ openness (component of Free Software) : + standardization and +} + +{ 2bits_05_06-100.png }image ~[* The UNIX Wars, Halloween 1988. UNIX International advertisement, Wall Street Journal and New York Times, 31 October 1988. ]~ + +% image placed above paragraph + +The proliferation of these consortia can be understood in various ways. One could argue that they emerged at a time—during the Reagan administration—when antitrust policing had diminished to ,{[pg 163]}, ,{[pg 164]}, the point where computer corporations did not see such collusion as a risky activity vis-à-vis antitrust policing. One could also argue that these consortia represented a recognition that the focus on hardware control (the meaning of proprietary) had been replaced with a focus on the control of the "open standard" by one or several manufacturers, that is, that competition was no longer based on superior products, but on "owning the standard." It is significant that the industry consortia quickly overwhelmed national efforts, such as the IEEE POSIX standard, in the media, an indication that no one was looking to government or nonprofits, or to university professional societies, to settle the dispute by declaring a standard, but rather to industry itself to hammer out a standard, de facto or otherwise. Yet another way to understand the emergence of these consortia is as a kind of mutual policing of the market, a kind of paranoid strategy of showing each other just enough to make sure that no one would leapfrog ahead and kill the existing, fragile competition. +={ antitrust +2 ; + standards : + ownership of ; + Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) +} + +What this proliferation of UNIX standards and consortia most clearly represents, however, is the blind spot of open systems: the difficulty of having collaboration and competition at the same time in the context of intellectual-property rules that incompletely capture the specific and unusual characteristics of software. For participants in this market, the structure of intellectual property was unassailable—without it, most participants assumed, innovation would cease and incentives disappear. Despite the fact that secrecy haunted the industry, its customers sought both openness and compatibility. These conflicting demands proved irresolvable. +={ secrecy } + +2~ Denouement + +Ironically, the UNIX wars ended not with the emergence of a winner, but with the reassertion of proprietary computing: Microsoft Windows and Windows NT. Rather than open systems emerging victorious, ushering in the era of seamless integration of diverse components, the reverse occurred: Microsoft managed to grab a huge share of computer markets, both desktop and high-performance, by leveraging its brand, the ubiquity of DOS, and application-software developers’ dependence on the "Wintel" monster (Windows plus Intel chips). Microsoft triumphed, largely for the same reasons the open-systems dream failed: the legal structure of intellectual ,{[pg 165]}, property favored a strong corporate monopoly on a single, branded product over a weak array of "open" and competing components. There was no large gain to investors, or to corporations, from an industry of nice guys sharing the source code and making the components work together. Microsoft, on the other hand, had decided to do so internal to itself; it did not necessarily need to form consortia or standardize its operating systems, if it could leverage its dominance in the market to spread the operating system far and wide. It was, as standards observers like to say, the triumph of de facto standardization over de jure. It was a return to the manacled wretches of IBM’s monopoly—but with a new dungeon master. +={ Intel (corporation) ; + Microsoft : + Windows operating system ; + Openness (component of Free Software) : + proprietary vs. ; + monopoly ; + openness (component of Free Software) +10 +} + +The denouement of the UNIX standards story was swift: AT&T sold its UNIX System Labs (including all of the original source and rights) to Novell in 1993, who sold it in turn to SCO two years later. Novell sold (or transferred) the trademark name UNIX™ to the X/Open group, which continued to fight for standardization, including a single universal UNIX specification. In 1996 X/Open and the Open Software Foundation merged to form the Open Group.~{ "What Is Unix?" The Unix System, http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html. }~ The Open Group eventually joined forces with IEEE to turn POSIX into a single UNIX specification in 2001. They continue to push the original vision of open systems, though they carefully avoid using the name or concept, referring instead to the trademarked mouthful "Boundaryless Information Flow" and employing an updated and newly inscrutable rhetoric: "Boundaryless Information Flow, a shorthand representation of ‘access to integrated information to support business process improvements’ represents a desired state of an enterprise’s infrastructure and is specific to the business needs of the organization."~{ "About the Open Group," The Open Group, http://www.opengroup.org/overview/vision-mission.htm. }~ +={ AT&T ; + Novell ; + SCO (corporation) +} + +The Open Group, as well as many other participants in the history of open systems, recognize the emergence of "open source" as a return to the now one true path of boundaryless information flow. Eric Raymond, of course, sees continuity and renewal (not least of which in his own participation in the Open Source movement) and in his Art of UNIX Programming says, "The Open Source movement is building on this stable foundation and is creating a resurgence of enthusiasm for the UNIX philosophy. In many ways Open Source can be seen as the true delivery of Open Systems that will ensure it continues to go from strength to strength."~{ "What Is Unix?" The Unix System, http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html. }~ +={ Open Source } + +This continuity, of course, deliberately disavows the centrality of the legal component, just as Raymond and the Open Source ,{[pg 166]}, Initiative had in 1998. The distinction between a robust market in UNIX operating systems and a standard UNIX-based infrastructure on which other markets and other activities can take place still remains unclear to even those closest to the money and machines. It does not yet exist, and may well never come to. +={ infrastructure +1 } + +The growth of Free Software in the 1980s and 1990s depended on openness as a concept and component that was figured out during the UNIX wars. It was during these wars that the Free Software Foundation (and other groups, in different ways) began to recognize the centrality of the issue of intellectual property to the goal of creating an infrastructure for the successful creation of open systems.~{ Larry McVoy was an early voice, within Sun, arguing for solving the open-systems problem by turning to Free Software. Larry McVoy, "The Sourceware Operating System Proposal," 9 November 1993, http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html. }~ The GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) project in particular, but also the X Windows system at MIT, the Remote Procedure Call and Network File System (NFS) systems created by Sun, and tools like sendmail and BIND were each in their own way experiments with alternative licensing arrangements and were circulating widely on a variety of the UNIX versions in the late 1980s. Thus, the experience of open systems, while technically a failure as far as UNIX was concerned, was nonetheless a profound learning experience for an entire generation of engineers, hackers, geeks, and entrepreneurs. Just as the UNIX operating system had a pedagogic life of its own, inculcating itself into the minds of engineers as the paradigm of an operating system, open systems had much the same effect, realizing an inchoate philosophy of openness, interconnection, compatibility, interoperability—in short, availability and modifiability—that was in conflict with intellectual-property structures as they existed. To put it in Freudian terms: the neurosis of open systems wasn’t cured, but the structure of its impossibility had become much clearer to everyone. UNIX, the operating system, did not disappear at all—but UNIX, the market, did. +={ modifiability +5 ; + availability : + open systems and +5 ; + Free software : + components of ; + GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) ; + interoperability ; + modifiability +4 ; + pedagogy : + operating systems and ; + X Windows +} + +2~ Open Systems Two: Networks +={ Open Systems : + networks and +28 +} + +The struggle to standardize UNIX as a platform for open systems was not the only open-systems struggle; alongside the UNIX wars, another "religious war" was raging. The attempt to standardize networks—in particular, protocols for the inter-networking of multiple, diverse, and autonomous networks of computers—was also a key aspect of the open-systems story of the 1980s.~{ The distinction between a protocol, an implementation and a standard is important: Protocols are descriptions of the precise terms by which two computers can communicate (i.e., a dictionary and a handbook for communicating). An implementation is the creation of software that uses a protocol (i.e., actually does the communicating; thus two implementations using the same protocol should be able to share data. A standard defines which protocol should be used by which computers, for what purposes. It may or may not define the protocol, but will set limits on changes to that protocol. }~ The war ,{[pg 167]}, between the TCP/IP and OSI was also a story of failure and surprising success: the story of a successful standard with international approval (the OSI protocols) eclipsed by the experimental, military-funded TCP/IP, which exemplified an alternative and unusual standards process. The moral-technical orders expressed by OSI and TCP/IP are, like that of UNIX, on the border between government, university, and industry; they represent conflicting social imaginaries in which power and legitimacy are organized differently and, as a result, expressed differently in the technology. +={ moral and technical order ; + Networks : + protools for +3 ; + Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) : + as reference model +27 ; + protocols : + Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) +27 | TCP/IP ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) +27 ; + religious wars +3 ; + social imaginary ; + standards processes +3 +} + +OSI and TCP/IP started with different goals: OSI was intended to satisfy everyone, to be the complete and comprehensive model against which all competing implementations would be validated; TCP/IP, by contrast, emphasized the easy and robust interconnection of diverse networks. TCP/IP is a protocol developed by bootstrapping between standard and implementation, a mode exemplified by the Requests for Comments system that developed alongside them as part of the Arpanet project. OSI was a "model" or reference standard developed by internationally respected standards organizations. +={ Arpanet (network) +18 ; + Request for Comments (RFC) +} + +In the mid-1980s OSI was en route to being adopted internationally, but by 1993 it had been almost completely eclipsed by TCP/IP. The success of TCP/IP is significant for three reasons: (1) availability—TCP/IP was itself available via the network and development open to anyone, whereas OSI was a bureaucratically confined and expensive standard and participation was confined to state and corporate representatives, organized through ISO in Geneva; (2) modifiability—TCP/IP could be copied from an existing implementation (such as the BSD version of UNIX) and improved, whereas OSI was a complex standard that had few existing implementations available to copy; and (3) serendipity—new uses that took advantage of availability and modifiability sprouted, including the "killer app" that was the World Wide Web, which was built to function on existing TCP/IP-based networks, convincing many manufacturers to implement that protocol instead of, or in addition to, OSI. +={ World Wide Web (www) } + +The success of TCP/IP over OSI was also significant because of the difference in the standardization processes that it exemplified. The OSI standard (like all official international standards) is conceived and published as an aid to industrial growth: it was imagined according to the ground rules of intellectual property and as an attempt to facilitate the expansion of markets in networking. ,{[pg 168]}, OSI would be a "vendor-neutral" standard: vendors would create their own, secret implementations that could be validated by OSI and thereby be expected to interoperate with other OSI-validated systems. By stark contrast, the TCP/IP protocols were not published (in any conventional sense), nor were the implementations validated by a legitimate international-standards organization; instead, the protocols are themselves represented by implementations that allow connection to the network itself (where the TCP/IP protocols and implementations are themselves made available). The fact that one can only join the network if one possesses or makes an implementation of the protocol is generally seen as the ultimate in validation: it works.~{ The advantages of such an unplanned and unpredictable network have come to be identified in hindsight as a design principle. See Gillespie, "Engineering a Principle" for an excellent analysis of the history of "end to end" or "stupid" networks. }~ In this sense, the struggle between TCP/IP and OSI is indicative of a very familiar twentieth-century struggle over the role and extent of government planning and regulation (versus entrepreneurial activity and individual freedom), perhaps best represented by the twin figures of Friedrich Hayek and Maynard Keynes. In this story, it is Hayek’s aversion to planning and the subsequent privileging of spontaneous order that eventually triumphs, not Keynes’s paternalistic view of the government as a neutral body that absorbs or encourages the swings of the market. +={ Hayek, Friedrich ; + Keynes, John Maynard ; + standards : + validation of +} + +2~ Bootstrapping Networks + +The "religious war" between TCP/IP and OSI occurred in the context of intense competition among computer manufacturers and during a period of vibrant experimentation with computer networks worldwide. As with most developments in computing, IBM was one of the first manufacturers to introduce a networking system for its machines in the early 1970s: the System Network Architecture (SNA). DEC followed suit with Digital Network Architecture (DECnet or DNA), as did Univac with Distributed Communications Architecture (DCA), Burroughs with Burroughs Network Architecture (BNA), and others. These architectures were, like the proprietary operating systems of the same era, considered closed networks, networks that interconnected a centrally planned and specified number of machines of the same type or made by the same manufacturer. The goal of such networks was to make connections internal to a firm, even if that involved geographically widespread systems (e.g., from branch to headquarters). Networks were also to be products. +={ Digital Equipment Corporation (corporation) : + DECNet ; + Networks : + as products | varieties of +4 +} + +The 1970s and 1980s saw extraordinarily vibrant experimentation with academic, military, and commercial networks. Robert Metcalfe had developed Ethernet at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s, and IBM later created a similar technology called "token ring." In the 1980s the military discovered that the Arpanet was being used predominantly by computer scientists and not just for military applications, and decided to break it into MILNET and CSNET.~{ William Broad, "Global Network Split as Safeguard," New York Times, 5 October 1983, A13. }~ Bulletin Board Services, which connected PCs to each other via modems to download files, appeared in the late 1970s. Out of this grew Tom Jennings’s very successful experiment called FidoNet.~{ See the incomparable BBS: The Documentary, DVD, directed by Jason Scott (Boston: Bovine Ignition Systems, 2005), http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/. }~ In the 1980s an existing social network of university faculty on the East Coast of the United States started a relatively successful network called BITNET (Because It’s There Network) in the mid-1980s.~{ Grier and Campbell, "A Social History of Bitnet and Listserv 1985-1991." }~ The Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (uucp), which initially enabled the Usenet, was developed in the late 1970s and widely used until the mid-1980s to connect UNIX computers together. In 1984 the NSF began a program to fund research in networking and created the first large backbones for NSFNet, successor to the CSNET and Arpanet.~{ On Usenet, see Hauben and Hauben, Netizens. See also Pfaffenberger, "‘A Standing Wave in the Web of Our Communications.’" }~ +={ Sparc (computer workstation) ; + Unix to Unix copy protocol (uucp) ; + Usenet ; + Xerox PARC +} + +In the 1970s telecommunications companies and spin-off start-ups experimented widely with what were called "videotex" systems, of which the most widely implemented and well-known is Minitel in France.~{ Schmidt and Werle, Coordinating Technology, chap. 7. }~ Such systems were designed for consumer users and often provided many of the now widespread services available on the Internet in a kind of embryonic form (from comparison shopping for cars, to directory services, to pornography).~{ See, for example, Martin, Viewdata and the Information Society. }~ By the late 1970s, videotex systems were in the process of being standardized by the Commité Consultative de Information, Technologie et Télécommunications (CCITT) at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva. These standards efforts would eventually be combined with work of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) on OSI, which had originated from work done at Honeywell.~{ There is little information on the development of open systems; there is, however, a brief note from William Stallings, author of perhaps the most widely used textbook on networking, at "The Origins of OSI," http://williamstallings.com/Extras/OSI.html. }~ +={ Commité Consultative de Information, Technologie et Télécommunications (CCITT) ; + International Telecommunications Union (ITU) +6 ; + Internet : + early development +5 ; + International Organization for Standardization (ISO) +4 ; + regulation : + telecommunications +3 ; + telecommunications industry +5 +} + +One important feature united almost all of these experiments: the networks of the computer manufacturers were generally piggybacked, or bootstrapped, onto existing telecommunications infrastructures built by state-run or regulated monopoly telecommunications firms. This situation inevitably spelled grief, for telecommunications providers are highly regulated entities, while the computer industry has been almost totally unregulated from its ,{[pg 170]}, inception. Since an increasingly core part of the computer industry’s business involved transporting signals through telecommunications systems without being regulated to do so, the telecommunications industry naturally felt themselves at a disadvantage.~{ Brock, The Second Information Revolution is a good introductory source for this conflict, at least in its policy outlines. The Federal Communications Commission issued two decisions (known as "Computer 1" and "Computer 2") that attempted to deal with this conflict by trying to define what counted as voice communication and what as data. }~ Telecommunications companies were not slow to respond to the need for data communications, but their ability to experiment with products and practices outside the scope of telephony and telegraphy was often hindered by concerns about antitrust and monopoly.~{ Brock, The Second Information Revolution, chap. 10. }~ The unregulated computer industry, by contrast, saw the tentativeness of the telecommunications industry (or national PTTs) as either bureaucratic inertia or desperate attempts to maintain control and power over existing networks—though no computer manufacturer relished the idea of building their own physical network when so many already existed. +={ antitrust } + +TCP/IP and OSI have become emblematic of the split between the worlds of telecommunications and computing; the metaphors of religious wars or of blood feuds and cold wars were common.~{ Drake, "The Internet Religious War." }~ A particularly arch account from this period is Carl Malamud’s Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue, which documents Malamud’s (physical) visits to Internet sites around the globe, discussions (and beer) with networking researchers on technical details of the networks they have created, and his own typically geeky, occasionally offensive takes on cultural difference.~{ Malamud, Exploring the Internet; see also Michael M. J. Fischer, "Worlding Cyberspace." }~ A subtheme of the story is the religious war between Geneva (in particular the ITU) and the Internet: Malamud tells the story of asking the ITU to release its 19,000-page "blue book" of standards on the Internet, to facilitate its adoption and spread. +={ Malmud, Carl +1 ; + standards processes +4 +} + +The resistance of the ITU and Malamud’s heroic if quixotic attempts are a parable of the moral-technical imaginaries of openness—and indeed, his story draws specifically on the usable past of Giordano Bruno.~{ The usable past of Giordano Bruno is invoked by Malamud to signal the heretical nature of his own commitment to openly publishing standards that ISO was opposed to releasing. Bruno’s fate at the hands of the Roman Inquisition hinged in some part on his acceptance of the Copernican cosmology, so he has been, like Galileo, a natural figure for revolutionary claims during the 1990s. }~ The "bruno" project demonstrates the gulf that exists between two models of legitimacy—those of ISO and the ITU—in which standards represent the legal and legitimate consensus of a regulated industry, approved by member nations, paid for and enforced by governments, and implemented and adhered to by corporations. +={ Bruno, Giordano ; + Usable pasts ; + International Organization for Standardization (ISO) +3 +} + +Opposite ISO is the ad hoc, experimental style of Arpanet and Internet researchers, in which standards are freely available and implementations represent the mode of achieving consensus, rather than the outcome of the consensus. In reality, such a rhetorical ,{[pg 171]}, opposition is far from absolute: many ISO standards are used on the Internet, and ISO remains a powerful, legitimate standards organization. But the clash of established (telecommunications) and emergent (computer-networking) industries is an important context for understanding the struggle between OSI and TCP/IP. + +The need for standard networking protocols is unquestioned: interoperability is the bread and butter of a network. Nonetheless, the goals of the OSI and the TCP/IP protocols differed in important ways, with profound implications for the shape of that interoperability. OSI’s goals were completeness, control, and comprehensiveness. OSI grew out of the telecommunications industry, which had a long history of confronting the vicissitudes of linking up networks and facilitating communication around the world, a problem that required a strong process of consensus and negotiation among large, powerful, government-run entities, as well as among smaller manufacturers and providers. OSI’s feet were firmly planted in the international standardization organizations like OSI and the ITU (an organization as old as telecommunications itself, dating to the 1860s). +={ interoperability +12 } + +Even if they were oft-mocked as slow, bureaucratic, or cumbersome, the processes of ISO and ITU—based in consensus, international agreement, and thorough technical specification—are processes of unquestioned legitimacy. The representatives of nations and corporations who attend ISO and ITU standards discussions, and who design, write, and vote on these standards, are usually not bureaucrats, but engineers and managers directly concerned with the needs of their constituency. The consensus-oriented process means that ISO and ITU standards attempt to satisfy all members’ goals, and as such they tend to be very large, complex, and highly specific documents. They are generally sold to corporations and others who need to use them, rather than made freely available, a fact that until recently reflected their legitimacy, rather than lack thereof. + +TCP/IP, on the other hand, emerged from very different conditions.~{ Abbate, Inventing the Internet; Salus, Casting the Net; Galloway, Protocol; and Brock, The Second Information Revolution. For practitioner histories, see Kahn et al., "The Evolution of the Internet as a Global Information System"; Clark, "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols." }~ These protocols were part of a Department of Defense-funded experimental research project: Arpanet. The initial Arpanet protocols (the Network Control Protocol, or NCP) were insufficient, and TCP/IP was an experiment in interconnecting two different "packet-switched networks": the ground-line-based Arpanet network and a radio-wave network called Packet Radio.~{ Kahn et al., "The Evolution of the Internet as a Global Information System," 134-140; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 114-36. }~ The ,{[pg 172]}, problem facing the designers was not how to accommodate everyone, but merely how to solve a specific problem: interconnecting two technically diverse networks, each with autonomous administrative boundaries, but forcing neither of them to give up the system or the autonomy. +={ Defense, Department of +11 ; + Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) +1 ; + packet-switching +1 +} + +Until the mid-1980s, the TCP/IP protocols were resolutely research-oriented, and not the object of mainstream commercial interest. Their development reflected a core set of goals shared by researchers and ultimately promoted by the central funding agency, the Department of Defense. The TCP/IP protocols are often referred to as enabling packet-switched networks, but this is only partially correct; the real innovation of this set of protocols was a design for an "inter-network," a system that would interconnect several diverse and autonomous networks (packet-switched or circuit-switched), without requiring them to be transformed, redesigned, or standardized—in short, by requiring only standardization of the intercommunication between networks, not standardization of the network itself. In the first paper describing the protocol Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf motivated the need for TCP/IP thus: "Even though many different and complex problems must be solved in the design of an individual packet-switching network, these problems are manifestly compounded when dissimilar networks are interconnected. Issues arise which may have no direct counterpart in an individual network and which strongly influence the way in which Internetwork communication can take place."~{ Kahn and Cerf, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication," 637. }~ +={ Cerf, Vinton +2 ; + Kahn, Robert ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) : + goals of +2 +} + +The explicit goal of TCP/IP was thus to share computer resources, not necessarily to connect two individuals or firms together, or to create a competitive market in networks or networking software. Sharing between different kinds of networks implied allowing the different networks to develop autonomously (as their creators and maintainers saw best), but without sacrificing the ability to continue sharing. Years later, David Clark, chief Internet engineer for several years in the 1980s, gave a much more explicit explanation of the goals that led to the TCP/IP protocols. In particular, he suggested that the main overarching goal was not just to share resources but "to develop an effective technique for multiplexed utilization of existing interconnected networks," and he more explicitly stated the issue of control that faced the designers: "Networks represent administrative boundaries of control, and it was an ambition of this project to come to grips with the problem of integrating a number ,{[pg 173]}, of separately administrated entities into a common utility."~{ Clark, "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols," 54-55. }~ By placing the goal of expandability first, the TCP/IP protocols were designed with a specific kind of simplicity in mind: the test of the protocols’ success was simply the ability to connect. +={ Clark, David } + +By setting different goals, TCP/IP and OSI thus differed in terms of technical details; but they also differed in terms of their context and legitimacy, one being a product of international-standards bodies, the other of military-funded research experiments. The technical and organizational differences imply different processes for standardization, and it is the peculiar nature of the so-called Requests for Comments (RFC) process that gave TCP/IP one of its most distinctive features. The RFC system is widely recognized as a unique and serendipitous outcome of the research process of Arpanet.~{ RFCs are archived in many places, but the official site is RFC Editor, http://www.rfc-editor.org/. }~ In a thirty-year retrospective (published, naturally, as an RFC: RFC 2555), Vint Cerf says, "Hiding in the history of the RFCs is the history of human institutions for achieving cooperative work." He goes on to describe their evolution over the years: "When the RFCs were first produced, they had an almost 19th century character to them—letters exchanged in public debating the merits of various design choices for protocols in the ARPANET. As email and bulletin boards emerged from the fertile fabric of the network, the far-flung participants in this historic dialog began to make increasing use of the online medium to carry out the discussion—reducing the need for documenting the debate in the RFCs and, in some respects, leaving historians somewhat impoverished in the process. RFCs slowly became conclusions rather than debates."~{ RFC Editor, RFC 2555, 6. }~ +={ standards processes ; + Request for Comments (RFC) +2 +} + +Increasingly, they also became part of a system of discussion and implementation in which participants created working software as part of an experiment in developing the standard, after which there was more discussion, then perhaps more implementation, and finally, a standard. The RFC process was a way to condense the process of standardization and validation into implementation; which is to say, the proof of open systems was in the successful connection of diverse networks, and the creation of a standard became a kind of ex post facto rubber-stamping of this demonstration. Any further improvement of the standard hinged on an improvement on the standard implementation because the standards that resulted were freely and widely available: "A user could request an RFC by email from his host computer and have it automatically delivered to his mailbox. . . . RFCs were also shared freely with official standards ,{[pg 174]}, bodies, manufacturers and vendors, other working groups, and universities. None of the RFCs were ever restricted or classified. This was no mean feat when you consider that they were being funded by DoD during the height of the Cold War."~{ Ibid., 11. }~ +={ Software : + implementation of ; + standards : + implementation +9 | validation of ; + Secrecy +1 +} + +The OSI protocols were not nearly so freely available. The ironic reversal—the transparency of a military-research program versus the opacity of a Geneva-based international-standards organization—goes a long way toward explaining the reasons why geeks might find the story of TCP/IP’s success to be so appealing. It is not that geeks are secretly militaristic, but that they delight in such surprising reversals, especially when those reversals exemplify the kind of ad hoc, clever solution to problems of coordination that the RFC process does. The RFC process is not the only alternative to a consensus-oriented model of standardization pioneered in the international organizations of Geneva, but it is a specific response to a reorientation of power and knowledge that was perhaps more "intuitively obvious" to the creators of Arpanet and the Internet, with its unusual design goals and context, than it would have been to the purveyors of telecommunications systems with over a hundred years of experience in connecting people in very specific and established ways. +={ geeks ; + reorientation of power and knowledge ; + standards organizations +} + +2~ Success as Failure + +By 1985, OSI was an official standard, one with widespread acceptance by engineers, by the government and military (the "GOSIP" standard), and by a number of manufacturers, the most significant of which was General Motors, with its Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP). In textbooks and handbooks of the late 1980s and early 1990s, OSI was routinely referred to as the inevitable standard—which is to say, it had widespread legitimacy as the standard that everyone should be implementing—but few implementations existed. Many of the textbooks on networking from the late 1980s, especially those slanted toward a theoretical introduction, give elaborate detail of the OSI reference model—a generation of students in networking was no doubt trained to understand the world in terms of OSI—but the ambivalence continued. Indeed, the most enduring legacy of the creation of the OSI protocols is not the protocols themselves (some of which, like ASN.1, are still ,{[pg 175]}, widely used today), but the pedagogical model: the "7 layer stack" that is as ubiquitous in networking classes and textbooks as UNIX is in operating-systems classes.~{ This can be clearly seen, for instance, by comparing the various editions of the main computer-networking textbooks: cf. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 1st ed. (1981), 2d ed. (1988), 3d ed. (1996), and 4th ed. (2003); Stallings, Data and Computer Communications, 1st ed. (1985), 2d ed. (1991), ,{[pg 332]}, 3d ed. (1994), 4th ed. (1997), and 5th ed. (2004); and Comer, Internetworking with TCP/IP (four editions between 1991 and 1999). }~ +={ General Motors (GM) } + +But in the late 1980s, the ambivalence turned to confusion. With OSI widely recognized as the standard, TCP/IP began to show up in more and more actually existing systems. For example, in Computer Network Architectures and Protocols, Carl Sunshine says, "Now in the late 1980s, much of the battling seems over. CCITT and ISO have aligned their efforts, and the research community seems largely to have resigned itself to OSI." But immediately afterward he adds: "It is ironic that while a consensus has developed that OSI is indeed inevitable, the TCP/IP protocol suite has achieved widespread deployment, and now serves as a de facto interoperability standard. . . . It appears that the vendors were unable to bring OSI products to market quickly enough to satisfy the demand for interoperable systems, and TCP/IP were there to fill the need."~{ Sunshine, Computer Network Architectures and Protocols, 5. }~ +={ Commité Consultative de Information, Technologie et Télécommunications (CCITT) ; + pedagogy : + network protocols and +} + +The more implementations that appeared, the less secure the legitimate standard seemed to be. By many accounts the OSI specifications were difficult to implement, and the yearly networking-industry "Interop" conferences became a regular locale for the religious war between TCP/IP and OSI. The success of TCP/IP over OSI reflects the reorientation of knowledge and power to which Free Software is also a response. The reasons for the success are no doubt complex, but the significance of the success of TCP/IP illustrates three issues: availability, modifiability, and serendipity. + +!_ Availability +The TCP/IP standards themselves were free to anyone and available over TCP/IP networks, exemplifying one of the aspects of a recursive public: that the only test of participation in a TCP/IP-based internetwork is the fact that one possesses or has created a device that implements TCP/IP. Access to the network is contingent on the interoperability of the networks. The standards were not "published" in a conventional sense, but made available through the network itself, without any explicit intellectual property restrictions, and without any fees or restrictions on who could access them. By contrast, ISO standards are generally not circulated freely, but sold for relatively high prices, as a source of revenue, and under the general theory that only legitimate corporations or government agencies would need access to them. +={ availability : + open systems and +1 ; + recursive public +3 +} + +% ,{[pg 176]}, + +Related to the availability of the standards is the fact that the standards process that governed TCP/IP was itself open to anyone, whether corporate, military or academic. The structure of governance of the Internet Engineering Task Force (the IETF) and the Internet Society (ISOC) allowed for anyone with the means available to attend the "working group" meetings that would decide on the standards that would be approved. Certainly this does not mean that the engineers and defense contractors responsible actively sought out corporate stakeholders or imagined the system to be "public" in any dramatic fashion; however, compared to the system in place at most standards bodies (in which members are usually required to be the representatives of corporations or governments), the IETF allowed individuals to participate qua individuals.~{ The structure of the IETF, the Internet Architecture Board, and the ISOC is detailed in Comer, Internetworking with TCP/IP, 8-13; also in Schmidt and Werle, Coordinating Technology, 53-58. }~ +={ Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ; + Internet Society (ISOC) +} + +!_ Modifiability +Implementations of TCP/IP were widely available, bootstrapped from machine to machine along with the UNIX operating system and other tools (e.g., the implementation of TCP/IP in BSD 4.2, the BSD version of UNIX), generally including the source code. An existing implementation is a much more expressive and usable object than a specification for an implementation, and though ISO generally prepares reference implementations for such standards, in the case of OSI there were many fewer implementations to work with or build on. Because multiple implementations of TCP/IP already existed, it was easy to validate: did your (modified) implementation work with the other existing implementations? By contrast, OSI would provide independent validation, but the in situ validation through connection to other OSI networks was much harder to achieve, there being too few of them, or access being restricted. It is far easier to build on an existing implementation and to improve on it piecemeal, or even to rewrite it completely, using its faults as a template (so to speak), than it is to create an implementation based solely on a standard. The existence of the TCP/IP protocols in BSD 4.2 not only meant that people who installed that operating system could connect to the Internet easily, at a time when it was by no means standard to be able to do so, but it also meant that manufacturers or tinkerers could examine the implementation in BSD 4.2 as the basis for a modified, or entirely new, implementation. +={ modifiability ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) ; + standards : + validation of +} + +!_ Serendipity +Perhaps most significant, the appearance of widespread and popular applications that were dependent on TCP/IP ,{[pg 177]}, gave those protocols an inertia that OSI, with relatively few such applications, did not have. The most important of these by far was the World Wide Web (the http protocol, the HTML mark-up language, and implementations of both servers, such as libwww, and clients, such as Mosaic and Netscape). The basic components of the Web were made to work on top of the TCP/IP networks, like other services that had already been designed (ftp, telnet, gopher, archie, etc.); thus, Tim Berners-Lee, who co-invented the World Wide Web, could also rely on the availability and openness of previous work for his own protocols. In addition, Berners-Lee and CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) dedicated their work to the public domain more or less immediately, essentially allowing anyone to do anything they wished with the system they had cobbled together.~{ Message-ID: { 673c43e160cia758@sluvca.slu.edu. }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=673c43e160cia758@sluvca.slu.edu See also Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web. }~ From the perspective of the tension between TCP/IP and OSI, the World Wide Web was thus what engineers call a "killer app," because its existence actually drove individuals and corporations to make decisions (in favor of TCP/IP) that it might not have made otherwise. +={ Berners-Lee, Tim ; + Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) ; + Mosaic (web browser) ; + Netscape Navigator (application) ; + World Wide Web (www) +} + +2~ Conclusion + +Openness and open systems are key to understanding the practices of Free Software: the open-systems battles of the 1980s set the context for Free Software, leaving in their wake a partially articulated infrastructure of operating systems, networks, and markets that resulted from figuring out open systems. The failure to create a standard UNIX operating system opened the door for Microsoft Windows NT, but it also set the stage for the emergence of the Linux-operating-system kernel to emerge and spread. The success of the TCP/IP protocols forced multiple competing networking schemes into a single standard—and a singular entity, the Internet—which carried with it a set of built-in goals that mirror the moral-technical order of Free Software. +={ Linux (Free Software project) ; + moral and technical order +} + +This "infrastructure" is at once technical (protocols and standards and implementations) and moral (expressing ideas about the proper order and organization of commercial efforts to provide high-tech software, networks, and computing power). As with the invention of UNIX, the opposition commercial-noncommercial (or its doppelgangers public-private, profit-nonprofit, capitalist-socialist, etc.) ,{[pg 178]}, doesn’t capture the context. Constraints on the ability to collaborate, compete, or withdraw are in the making here through the technical and moral imaginations of the actors involved: from the corporate behemoths like IBM to (onetime) startups like Sun to the independent academics and amateurs and geeks with stakes in the new high-tech world of networks and software. +={ geeks } + +The creation of a UNIX market failed. The creation of a legitimate international networking standard failed. But they were local failures only. They opened the doors to new forms of commercial practice (exemplified by Netscape and the dotcom boom) and new kinds of politicotechnical fractiousness (ICANN, IPv6, and "net neutrality"). But the blind spot of open systems—intellectual property—at the heart of these failures also provided the impetus for some geeks, entrepreneurs, and lawyers to start figuring out the legal and economic aspects of Free Software, and it initiated a vibrant experimentation with copyright licensing and with forms of innovative coordination and collaboration built on top of the rapidly spreading protocols of the Internet. +={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) } + +1~ 6. Writing Copyright Licenses +={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) +110 ; + General Public License (GPL) +110 ; + Stallman, Richard +110 ; + intellectual property +110 +} + +% ,{[pg 179]}, + +_1 To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. - Preamble to the GNU General Public License + +The use of novel, unconventional copyright licenses is, without a doubt, the most widely recognized and exquisitely refined component of Free Software. The GNU General Public License (GPL), written initially by Richard Stallman, is often referred to as a beautiful, clever, powerful "hack" of intellectual-property law—when it isn’t being denounced as a viral, infectious object threatening the very fabric of economy and society. The very fact that something so boring, so arcane, and so legalistic as a copyright license can become an object of both devotional reverence and bilious scorn means there is much more than fine print at stake. ,{[pg 180]}, + +By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were hundreds of different Free Software licenses, each with subtle legal and technical differences, and an enormous legal literature to explain their details, motivation, and impact.~{ The legal literature on Free Software expands constantly and quickly, and it addresses a variety of different legal issues. Two excellent starting points are Vetter, "The Collaborative Integrity of Open-Source Software" and "‘Infectious’ Open Source Software." }~ Free Software licenses differ from conventional copyright licenses on software because they usually restrict only the terms of distribution, while so-called End User License Agreements (EULAs) that accompany most proprietary software restrict what users can do with the software. Ethnographically speaking, licenses show up everywhere in the field, and contemporary hackers are some of the most legally sophisticated non-lawyers in the world. Indeed, apprenticeship in the world of hacking is now impossible, as Gabriella Coleman has shown, without a long, deep study of intellectual-property law.~{ Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom." }~ +={ Coleman, Gabriella ; + End User License Agreements (EULAs) +} + +But how did it come to be this way? As with the example of sharing UNIX source code, Free Software licenses are often explained as a reaction to expanding intellectual-property laws and resistance to rapacious corporations. The text of the GPL itself begins deep in such assumptions: "The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it."~{ "The GNU General Public Licence, Version 2.0," http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html. }~ But even if corporations are rapacious, sharing and modifying software are by no means natural human activities. The ideas of sharing and of common property and its relation to freedom must always be produced through specific practices of sharing, before being defended. The GPL is a precise example of how geeks fit together the practices of sharing and modifying software with the moral and technical orders—the social imaginaries—of freedom and autonomy. It is at once an exquisitely precise legal document and the expression of an idea of how software should be made available, shareable, and modifiable. +={ practices ; + social imaginary ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) +} + +In this chapter I tell the story of the creation of the GPL, the first Free Software license, during a controversy over EMACS, a very widely used and respected piece of software; the controversy concerned the reuse of bits of copyrighted source code in a version of EMACS ported to UNIX. There are two reasons to retell this story carefully. The first is simply to articulate the details of the origin of the Free Software license itself, as a central component of Free Software, details that should be understood in the context of changing copyright law and the UNIX and open-systems struggles of the 1980s. Second, although the story of the GPL is also an oft-told story of the "hacker ethic," the GPL is not an "expression" of this ,{[pg 181]}, ethic, as if the ethic were genotype to a legal phenotype. Opposite the familiar story of ethics, I explain how the GPL was "figured out" in the controversy over EMACS, how it was formed in response to a complicated state of affairs, both legal and technical, and in a medium new to all the participants: the online mailing lists and discussion lists of Usenet and Arpanet.~{ All existing accounts of the hacker ethic come from two sources: from Stallman himself and from the colorful and compelling chapter about Stallman in Steven Levy’s Hackers. Both acknowledge a prehistory to the ethic. Levy draws it back in time to the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club of the 1950s, while Stallman is more likely to describe it as reaching back to the scientific revolution or earlier. The stories of early hackerdom at MIT are avowedly Edenic, and in them hackers live in a world of uncontested freedom and collegial competition—something like a writer’s commune without the alcohol or the brawling. There are stories about a printer whose software needed fixing but was only available under a nondisclosure agreement; about a requirement to use passwords (Stallman refused, chose as his password, and hacked the system to encourage others to do the same); about a programming war between different LISP machines; and about the replacement of the Incompatible Time-Sharing System with DEC’s TOPS-20 ("Twenex") operating system. These stories are oft-told usable pasts, but they are not representative. Commercial constraints have always been part of academic life in computer science and engineering: hardware and software were of necessity purchased from commercial manufacturers and often controlled by them, even if they offered "academic" or "educational" licenses. }~ +={ EMACS (text editor) +105 ; + Hacker ethic +1 ; + Open Systems ; + Usenet ; + Arpanet (network) ; + hackers : + hacks and +7 ; + ethnographic data : + availability of | mailing lists and +1 +} + +The story of the creation of the GNU General Public License ultimately affirms the hacker ethic, not as a story of the ethical hacker genius, but as a historically specific event with a duration and a context, as something that emerges in response to the reorientation of knowledge and power, and through the active modulation of existing practices among both human and nonhuman actors. While hackers themselves might understand the hacker ethic as an unchanging set of moral norms, their practices belie this belief and demonstrate how ethics and norms can emerge suddenly and sharply, undergo repeated transformations, and bifurcate into ideologically distinct camps (Free Software vs. Open Source), even as the practices remain stable relative to them. The hacker ethic does not descend from the heights of philosophy like the categorical imperative—hackers have no Kant, nor do they want one. Rather, as Manuel Delanda has suggested, the philosophy of Free Software is the fact of Free Software itself, its practices and its things. If there is a hacker ethic, it is Free Software itself, it is the recursive public itself, which is much more than a list of norms.~{ Delanda, "Open Source." }~ By understanding it in this way, it becomes possible to track the proliferation and differentiation of the hacker ethic into new and surprising realms, instead of assuming its static universal persistence as a mere procedure that hackers execute. +={ Delanda, Manuel ; + practices : + five components of Free Software +2 ; + Kant, Immanuel ; + recursive public ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +} + +2~ Free Software Licenses, Once More with Feeling + +In lecturing on liberalism in 1935, John Dewey said the following of Jeremy Bentham: "He was, we might say, the first great muck-raker in the field of law . . . but he was more than that, whenever he saw a defect, he proposed a remedy. He was an inventor in law and administration, as much so as any contemporary in mechanical production."~{ Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action. }~ Dewey’s point was that the liberal reforms attributed to Bentham came not so much from his theories as from his direct involvement in administrative and legal reform—his experimentation. ,{[pg 182]}, Whether or not Bentham’s influence is best understood this way, it nonetheless captures an important component of liberal reform in Europe and America that is also a key component in the story of Free Software: that the route to achieving change is through direct experiment with the system of law and administration. +={ Bentham, Jeremy +1 ; + Dewey, John ; + experimentation : + administrative reform as +1 ; + figuring out +} + +A similar story might be told of Richard Stallman, hacker hero and founder of the Free Software Foundation, creator of (among many other things) the GNU C Compiler and GNU EMACS, two of the most widely used and tested Free Software tools in the world. Stallman is routinely abused for holding what many perceive to be "dogmatic" or "intractable" ideological positions about freedom and the right of individuals to do what they please with software. While it is no doubt quite true that his speeches and writings clearly betray a certain fervor and fanaticism, it would be a mistake to assume that his speeches, ideas, or belligerent demands concerning word choice constitute the real substance of his reform. In fact, it is the software he has created and the licenses he has written and rewritten which are the key to his Bentham-like inventiveness. Unlike Bentham, however, Stallman is not a creator of law and administrative structure, but a hacker. +={ GNU C Compiler (gcc) } + +Stallman’s GNU General Public License "hacks" the federal copyright law, as is often pointed out. It does this by taking advantage of the very strong rights granted by federal law to actually loosen the restrictions normally associated with ownership. Because the statutes grant owners strong powers to create restrictions, Stallman’s GPL contains the restriction that anybody can use the licensed material, for any purpose, so long as they subsequently offer the same restriction. Hacks (after which hackers are named) are clever solutions to problems or shortcomings in technology. Hacks are work-arounds, clever, shortest-path solutions that take advantage of characteristics of the system that may or may not have been obvious to the people who designed it. Hacks range from purely utilitarian to mischievously pointless, but they always depend on an existing system or tool through which they achieve their point. To call Free Software a hack is to point out that it would be nothing without the existence of intellectual-property law: it relies on the structure of U.S. copyright law (USC§17) in order to subvert it. Free Software licenses are, in a sense, immanent to copyright laws—there is nothing illegal or even legally arcane about what they accomplish—but there is nonetheless a kind of lingering sense ,{[pg 183]}, that this particular use of copyright was not how the law was intended to function. +={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + as hack of copyright law +1 ; + Copyright +1 +} + +Like all software since the 1980 copyright amendments, Free Software is copyrightable—and what’s more, automatically copyrighted as it is written (there is no longer any requirement to register). Copyright law grants the author (or the employer of the author) a number of strong rights over the dispensation of what has been written: rights to copy, distribute, and change the work.~{ Copyright Act of 1976, Pub. L. No. 94-553, 90 Stat. 2541, enacted 19 October 1976; and Copyright Amendments, Pub. L. No. 96-517, 94 Stat. 3015, 3028 (amending §101 and §117, title 17, United States Code, regarding computer programs), enacted 12 December 1980. All amendments since 1976 are listed at http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92preface.html. }~ Free Software’s hack is to immediately make use of these rights in order to abrogate the rights the programmer has been given, thus granting all subsequent licensees rights to copy, distribute, modify, and use the copyrighted software. Some licenses, like the GPL, add the further restriction that every licensee must offer the same terms to any subsequent licensee, others make no such restriction on subsequent uses. Thus, while statutory law suggests that individuals need strong rights and grants them, Free Software licenses effectively annul them in favor of other activities, such as sharing, porting, and forking software. It is for this reason that they have earned the name "copyleft."~{ The history of the copyright and software is discussed in Litman, Digital Copyright; Cohen et al., Copyright in a Global Information Economy; and Merges, Menell, and Lemley, Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age. }~ +={ Copyright : + changes in 1976 | rights granted by +} + +This is a convenient ex post facto description, however. Neither Stallman nor anyone else started out with the intention of hacking copyright law. The hack of the Free Software licenses was a response to a complicated controversy over a very important invention, a tool that in turn enabled an invention called EMACS. The story of the controversy is well-known among hackers and geeks, but not often told, and not in any rich detail, outside of these small circles.~{ See Wayner, Free for All; Moody, Rebel Code; and Williams, Free as in Freedom. Although this story could be told simply by interviewing Stallman and James Gosling, both of whom are still alive and active in the software world, I have chosen to tell it through a detailed analysis of the Usenet and Arpanet archives of the controversy. The trade-off is between a kind of incomplete, fly-on-the-wall access to a moment in history and the likely revisionist retellings of those who lived through it. All of the messages referenced here are cited by their "Message-ID," which should allow anyone interested to access the original messages through Google Groups (http://groups.google.com). }~ + +2~ EMACS, the Extensible, Customizable, Self-documenting, Real-time Display Editor +={ text editors +13 ; + EMACS (text editor) : + modularity and extensibility of +7 +} + +EMACS is a text editor; it is also something like a religion. As one of the two most famous text editors, it is frequently lauded by its devoted users and attacked by detractors who prefer its competitor (Bill Joy’s vi, also created in the late 1970s). EMACS is more than just a tool for writing text; for many programmers, it was (and still is) the principal interface to the operating system. For instance, it allows a programmer not only to write a program but also to debug it, to compile it, to run it, and to e-mail it to another user, ,{[pg 184]}, all from within the same interface. What’s more, it allows users to quickly and easily write extensions to EMACS itself, extensions that automate frequent tasks and in turn become core features of the software. It can do almost anything, but it can also frustrate almost anyone. The name itself is taken from its much admired extensibility: EMACS stands for "editing macros" because it allows programmers to quickly record a series of commands and bundle them into a macro that can be called with a simple key combination. In fact, it was one of the first editors (if not the first) to take advantage of keys like ctrl and meta, as in the now ubiquitous ctrl-S familiar to users of non-free word processors like Microsoft Word™. +={ Joy, Bill ; + vi (text editor) +} + +Appreciate the innovation represented by EMACS: before the UNIX-dominated minicomputer era, there were very few programs for directly manipulating text on a display. To conceive of source code as independent of a program running on a machine meant first conceiving of it as typed, printed, or hand-scrawled code which programmers would scrutinize in its more tangible, paper-based form. Editors that allowed programmers to display the code in front of them on a screen, to manipulate it directly, and to save changes to those files were an innovation of the mid- to late 1960s and were not widespread until the mid-1970s (and this only for bleeding-edge academics and computer corporations). Along with a few early editors, such as QED (originally created by Butler Lampson and Peter Deutsch, and rewritten for UNIX by Ken Thompson), one of the most famous of these was TECO (text editor and corrector), written by Dan Murphy for DEC’s PDP-1 computer in 1962-63. Over the years, TECO was transformed (ported and extended) to a wide variety of machines, including machines at Berkeley and MIT, and to other DEC hardware and operating systems. By the early 1970s, there was a version of TECO running on the Incompatible Time-sharing System (ITS), the system in use at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab, and it formed the basis for EMACS. (Thus, EMACS was itself conceived of as a series of macros for a separate editor: Editing MACroS for TECO.) +={ Artificial Intelligence Lab (AI Lab), at MIT +10 ; + QED (text editor) ; + TECO (text editor and programming language) +1 +} + +Like all projects on ITS at the AI Lab, many people contributed to the extension and maintenance of EMACS (including Guy Steele, Dave Moon, Richard Greenblatt, and Charles Frankston), but there is a clear recognition that Stallman made it what it was. The earliest AI Lab memo on EMACS, by Eugene Ciccarelli, says: "Finally, of all the people who have contributed to the development of EMACS, ,{[pg 185]}, and the TECO behind it, special mention and appreciation go to Richard M. Stallman. He not only gave TECO the power and generality it has, but brought together the good ideas of many different Teco-function packages, added a tremendous amount of new ideas and environment, and created EMACS. Personally one of the joys of my avocational life has been writing Teco/EMACS functions; what makes this fun and not painful is the rich set of tools to work with, all but a few of which have an ‘RMS’ chiseled somewhere on them."~{ Eugene Ciccarelli, "An Introduction to the EMACS Editor," MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 447, 1978, 2. }~ + +At this point, in 1978, EMACS lived largely on ITS, but its reputation soon spread, and it was ported to DEC’s TOPS-20 (Twenex) operating system and rewritten for Multics and the MIT’s LISP machine, on which it was called EINE (Eine Is Not EMACS), and which was followed by ZWEI (Zwei Was Eine Initially). +={ Multics ; + proliferation of software +1 +} + +The proliferation of EMACS was both pleasing and frustrating to Stallman, since it meant that the work fragmented into different projects, each of them EMACS-like, rather than building on one core project, and in a 1981 report he said, "The proliferation of such superficial facsimiles of EMACS has an unfortunate confusing effect: their users, not knowing that they are using an imitation of EMACS and never having seen EMACS itself, are led to believe they are enjoying all the advantages of EMACS. Since any real-time display editor is a tremendous improvement over what they probably had before, they believe this readily. To prevent such confusion, we urge everyone to refer to a nonextensible imitation of EMACS as an ‘ersatz EMACS.’ "~{ Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor," MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 519a, 26 March 1981, 19. Also published as Richard M. Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor," Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA Symposium on Text Manipulation, 8-10 June (ACM, 1981), 147-56. }~ +={ EMACS (text editor) : + ersatz versions +} + +Thus, while EMACS in its specific form on ITS was a creation of Stallman, the idea of EMACS or of any "real-time display editor" was proliferating in different forms and on different machines. The porting of EMACS, like the porting of UNIX, was facilitated by both its conceptual design integrity and its widespread availability. +={ design +1 } + +The phrase "nonextensible imitation" captures the combination of design philosophy and moral philosophy that EMACS represented. Extensibility was not just a useful feature for the individual computer user; it was a way to make the improvements of each new user easily available equally to all by providing a standard way for users to add extensions and to learn how to use new extensions that were added (the "self-documenting" feature of the system). The program had a conceptual integrity that was compromised when it was copied imperfectly. EMACS has a modular, extensible design ,{[pg 186]}, that by its very nature invites users to contribute to it, to extend it, and to make it perform all manner of tasks—to literally copy and modify it, instead of imitating it. For Stallman, this was not only a fantastic design for a text editor, but an expression of the way he had always done things in the small-scale setting of the AI Lab. The story of Stallman’s moral commitments stresses his resistance to secrecy in software production, and EMACS is, both in its design and in Stallman’s distribution of it an example of this resistance. +={ modifiability : + EMACS and +12 ; + moral and technical order +7 ; + Secrecy +} + +Not everyone shared Stallman’s sense of communal order, however. In order to facilitate the extension of EMACS through sharing, Stallman started something he called the "EMACS commune." At the end of the 1981 report—"EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor," dated 26 March—he explained the terms of distribution for EMACS: "It is distributed on a basis of communal sharing, which means that all improvements must be given back to me to be incorporated and distributed. Those who are interested should contact me. Further information about how EMACS works is available in the same way."~{ Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor," MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 519a, 26 March 1981, 24. }~ +={ EMACS commune +19 } + +In another report, intended as a user’s manual for EMACS, Stallman gave more detailed and slightly more colorful instructions: + +_1 EMACS does not cost anything; instead, you are joining the EMACS software-sharing commune. The conditions of membership are that you must send back any improvements you make to EMACS, including any libraries you write, and that you must not redistribute the system except exactly as you got it, complete. (You can also distribute your customizations, separately.) Please do not attempt to get a copy of EMACS, for yourself or anyone else, by dumping it off of your local system. It is almost certain to be incomplete or inconsistent. It is pathetic to hear from sites that received incomplete copies lacking the sources [source code], asking me years later whether sources are available. (All sources are distributed, and should be on line at every site so that users can read them and copy code from them). If you wish to give away a copy of EMACS, copy a distribution tape from MIT, or mail me a tape and get a new one.~{ Richard M. Stallman, "EMACS Manual for ITS Users," MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 554, 22 October 1981, 163. }~ + +Because EMACS was so widely admired and respected, Stallman had a certain amount of power over this commune. If it had been an obscure, nonextensible tool, useful for a single purpose, no one would have heeded such demands, but because EMACS was by nature the kind of tool that was both useful for all kinds of tasks and ,{[pg 187]}, customizable for specific ones, Stallman was not the only person who benefited from this communal arrangement. Two disparate sites may well have needed the same macro extension, and therefore many could easily see the social benefit in returning extensions for inclusion, as well as in becoming a kind of co-developer of such a powerful system. As a result, the demands of the EMACS commune, while unusual and autocratic, were of obvious value to the flock. In terms of the concept of recursive public, EMACS was itself the tool through which it was possible for users to extend EMACS, the medium of their affinity; users had a natural incentive to share their contributions so that all might receive the maximum benefit. +={ affinity (of geeks) ; + recursive public +} + +The terms of the EMACS distribution agreement were not quite legally binding; nothing compelled participation except Stallman’s reputation, his hectoring, or a user’s desire to reciprocate. On the one hand, Stallman had not yet chosen to, or been forced to, understand the details of the legal system, and so the EMACS commune was the next best thing. On the other hand, the state of intellectual-property law was in great flux at the time, and it was not clear to anyone, whether corporate or academic, exactly what kind of legal arrangements would be legitimate (the 1976 changes to copyright law were some of the most drastic in seventy years, and a 1980 amendment made software copyrightable, but no court cases had yet tested these changes). Stallman’s "agreement" was a set of informal rules that expressed the general sense of mutual aid that was a feature of both the design of the system and Stallman’s own experience at the AI Lab. It was an expression of the way Stallman expected others to behave, and his attempts to punish or shame people amounted to informal enforcement of these expectations. The small scale of the community worked in Stallman’s favor. +={ Copyright : + changes in 1976 | changes in 1980 +} + +At its small scale, Stallman’s commune was confronting many of the same issues that haunted the open-systems debates emerging at the same time, issues of interoperability, source-code sharing, standardization, portability, and forking. In particular, Stallman was acutely aware of the blind spot of open systems: the conflict of moral-technical orders represented by intellectual property. While UNIX vendors left intellectual-property rules unchallenged and simply assumed that they were the essential ground rules of debate, Stallman made them the substance of his experiment and, like Bentham, became something of a legal muckraker as a result. +={ Open Systems } + +% ,{[pg 188]}, + +Stallman’s communal model could not completely prevent the porting and forking of software. Despite Stallman’s request that imitators refer to their versions of EMACS as ersatz EMACS, few did. In the absence of legal threats over a trademarked term there was not much to stop people from calling their ports and forks EMACS, a problem of success not unlike that of Kleenex or Xerox. Few people took the core ideas of EMACS, implemented them in an imitation, and then called it something else (EINE and ZWEI were exceptions). In the case of UNIX the proliferation of forked versions of the software did not render them any less UNIX, even when AT&T insisted on ownership of the trademarked name. But as time went on, EMACS was ported, forked, rewritten, copied, or imitated on different operating systems and different computer architectures in universities and corporations around the world; within five or six years, many versions of EMACS were in wide use. It was this situation of successful adoption that would provide the context for the controversy that occurred between 1983 and 1985. +={ EMACS (text editor) : + ersatz versions +6 | controversy about +43 +} + +2~ The Controversy + +In brief the controversy was this: in 1983 James Gosling decided to sell his version of EMACS—a version written in C for UNIX called GOSMACS—to a commercial software vendor called Unipress. GOSMACS, the second most famous implementation of EMACS (after Stallman’s itself ), was written when Gosling was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. For years, Gosling had distributed GOSMACS by himself and had run a mailing list on Usenet, on which he answered queries and discussed extensions. Gosling had explicitly asked people not to redistribute the program, but to come back to him (or send interested parties to him directly) for new versions, making GOSMACS more of a benevolent dictatorship than a commune. Gosling maintained his authority, but graciously accepted revisions and bug-fixes and extensions from users, incorporating them into new releases. Stallman’s system, by contrast, allowed users to distribute their extensions themselves, as well as have them included in the "official" EMACS. By 1983, Gosling had decided he was unable to effectively maintain and support GOSMACS—a task he considered the proper role of a corporation. +={ Gosling, James +64 ; + GOSMACS (version of EMACS) +41 ; + Unipress +41 +} + +% ,{[pg 189]}, + +For Stallman, Gosling’s decision to sell GOSMACS to Unipress was "software sabotage." Even though Gosling had been substantially responsible for writing GOSMACS, Stallman felt somewhat proprietorial toward this ersatz version—or, at the very least, was irked that no noncommercial UNIX version of EMACS existed. So Stallman wrote one himself (as part of a project he announced around the same time, called GNU [GNU’s Not UNIX], to create a complete non-AT&T version of UNIX). He called his version GNU EMACS and released it under the same EMACS commune terms. The crux of the debate hinged on the fact that Stallman used, albeit ostensibly with permission, a small piece of Gosling’s code in his new version of EMACS, a fact that led numerous people, including the new commercial suppliers of EMACS, to cry foul. Recriminations and legal threats ensued and the controversy was eventually resolved when Stallman rewrote the offending code, thus creating an entirely "Gosling-free" version that went on to become the standard UNIX version of EMACS. +={ GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) +40 ; + EMACS (text editor) : + ersatz versions +} + +The story raises several questions with respect to the changing legal context. In particular, it raises questions about the difference between "law on the books" and "law in action," that is, the difference between the actions of hackers and commercial entities, advised by lawyers and legally minded friends, and the text and interpretation of statutes as they are written by legislators and interpreted by courts and lawyers. The legal issues span trade secret, patent, and trademark, but copyright is especially significant. Three issues were undecided at the time: the copyrightability of software, the definition of what counts as software and what doesn’t, and the meaning of copyright infringement. While the controversy did not resolve any of these issues (the first two would be resolved by Congress and the courts, the third remains somewhat murky), it did clarify the legal issues for Stallman sufficiently that he could leave behind the informal EMACS commune and create the first version of a Free Software license, the GNU General Public License, which first started appearing in 1985. +={ Copyright : + software and copyrightability | legal definition of software and +70 | infringement and software +70 ; + software : + copyrightability of +70 ; + trademark law ; + trade secret law +} + +Gosling’s decision to sell GOSMACS, announced in April of 1983, played into a growing EMACS debate being carried out on the GOSMACS mailing list, a Usenet group called net.emacs. Since net.emacs was forwarded to the Arpanet via a gateway maintained by John Gilmore at Sun Microsystems, a fairly large community ,{[pg 190]}, of EMACS users were privy to Gosling’s announcement. Prior to his declaration, there had been quite a bit of discussion regarding different versions of EMACS, including an already "commercial" version called CCA EMACS, written by Steve Zimmerman, of Computer Corporation of America (CCA).~{ Back in January of 1983, Steve Zimmerman had announced that the company he worked for, CCA, had created a commercial version of EMACS called CCA EMACS (Message-ID: { 385@yetti.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=385@yetti.uucp ). Zimmerman had not written this version entirely, but had taken a version written by Warren Montgomery at Bell Labs (written for UNIX on PDP-11s) and created the version that was being used by programmers at CCA. Zimmerman had apparently distributed it by ftp at first, but when CCA determined that it might be worth something, they decided to exploit it commercially, rather than letting Zimmerman distribute it "freely." By Zimmerman’s own ,{[pg 334]}, account, this whole procedure required ensuring that there was nothing left of the original code by Warren Montgomery that Bell Labs owned (Message-ID: { 730@masscomp.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=730@masscomp.uucp ). }~ Some readers wanted comparisons between CCA EMACS and GOSMACS; others objected that it was improper to discuss a commercial version on the list: was such activity legitimate, or should it be carried out as part of the commercial company’s support activities? Gosling’s announcement was therefore a surprise, since it was already perceived to be the "noncommercial" version. +={ net.emacs (mailing list) +38 ; + Computer Corporation of America (CCA) +60 ; + Zimmerman, Steve +60 +} + +group{ + +Date: Tue Apr 12 04:51:12 1983 + +Subject: EMACS goes commercial + + The version of EMACS that I wrote is now available commercially through a company called Unipress. . . . They will be doing development, maintenance and will be producing a real manual. EMACS will be available on many machines (it already runs on VAXen under Unix and VMS, SUNs, codatas, and Microsoft Xenix). Along with this, I regret to say that I will no longer be distributing it. + + This is a hard step to take, but I feel that it is necessary. I can no longer look after it properly, there are too many demands on my time. EMACS has grown to be completely unmanageable. Its popularity has made it impossible to distribute free: just the task of writing tapes and stuffing them into envelopes is more than I can handle. + + The alternative of abandoning it to the public domain is unacceptable. Too many other programs have been destroyed that way. + + Please support these folks. The effort that they can afford to put into looking after EMACS is directly related to the support they get. Their prices are reasonable. + +James.~{ Message-ID for Gosling: { bnews.sri-arpa.865. }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bnews.sri-arpa.865 }~ + +}group +={ Microsoft : + Xenix (version of UNIX) ; + public domain : + meaning in EMACS controversy +59 +} + +The message is worth paying careful attention to: Gosling’s work of distributing the tapes had become "unmanageable," and the work of maintenance, upkeep, and porting (making it available on multiple architectures) is something he clearly believes should be done by a commercial enterprise. Gosling, it is clear, did not understand his effort in creating and maintaining EMACS to have emerged from a communal sharing of bits of code—even if he had done a Sisyphean amount of work to incorporate all the changes and suggestions his users had made—but he did long have a commitment ,{[pg 191]}, to distributing it for free, a commitment that resulted in many people contributing bits and pieces to GOSMACS. + +"Free," however, did not mean "public domain," as is clear from his statement that "abandoning it" to the public domain would destroy the program. The distinction is an important one that was, and continues to be, lost on many sophisticated members of net.emacs. Here, free means without charge, but Gosling had no intention of letting that word suggest that he was not the author, owner, maintainer, distributor, and sole beneficiary of whatever value GOSMACS had. Public domain, by contrast, implied giving up all these rights.~{ The thread starting at Message-ID: { 969@sdcsvax.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=969@sdcsvax.uucp contains one example of a discussion over the difference between public-domain and commercial software. }~ His decision to sell GOSMACS to Unipress was a decision to transfer these rights to a company that would then charge for all the labor he had previously provided for no charge (for "free"). Such a distinction was not clear to everyone; many people considered the fact that GOSMACS was free to imply that it was in the public domain.~{ In particular, a thread discussing this in detail starts at Message-ID: { 172@encore.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=172@encore.uucp and includes Message-ID: { 137@osu-eddie.UUCP }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=137@osu-eddie.UUCP, Message-ID: { 1127@godot.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1127@godot.uucp, Message-ID: { 148@osu-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=148@osu-eddie.uucp. }~ Not least of these was Richard Stallman, who referred to Gosling’s act as "software sabotage" and urged people to avoid using the "semi-ersatz" Unipress version.~{ Message-ID: bnews.sri-arpa.988. }~ +={ Public domain : + contrasted with free +12 +} + +To Stallman, the advancing commercialization of EMACS, both by CCA and by Unipress, was a frustrating state of affairs. The commercialization of CCA had been of little concern so long as GOSMACS remained free, but with Gosling’s announcement, there was no longer a UNIX version of EMACS available. To Stallman, however, "free" meant something more than either "public domain" or "for no cost." The EMACS commune was designed to keep EMACS alive and growing as well as to provide it for free—it was an image of community stewardship, a community that had included Gosling until April 1983. + +The disappearance of a UNIX version of EMACS, as well as the sudden commercial interest in making UNIX into a marketable operating system, fed into Stallman’s nascent plan to create a completely new, noncommercial, non-AT&T UNIX operating system that he would give away free to anyone who could use it. He announced his intention on 27 September 1983:~{ Message-ID: { 771@mit-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=771@mit-eddie.uucp, announced on net.unix-wizards and net.usoft. }~ +={ GNU Manifesto +7 } + +group{ + +Free Unix! + + Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed. + +}group + +% ,{[pg 192]}, + +His justifications were simple. + +group{ + +Why I Must Write GNU + + I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. + + So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.~{ Message-ID: { 771@mit-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=771@mit-eddie.uucp. }~ + +}group + +At that point, it is clear, there was no "free software license." There was the word free, but not the term public domain. There was the "golden rule," and there was a resistance to nondisclosure and license arrangements in general, but certainly no articulated conception of copyleft of Free Software as a legally distinct entity. And yet Stallman hardly intended to "abandon it" to the public domain, as Gosling suggested. Instead, Stallman likely intended to require the same EMACS commune rules to apply to Free Software, rules that he would be able to control largely by overseeing (in a nonlegal sense) who was sent or sold what and by demanding (in the form of messages attached to the software) that any modifications or improvements come in the form of donations. It was during the period 1983-85 that the EMACS commune morphed into the GPL, as Stallman began adding copyrights and appending messages that made explicit what people could do with the software.~{ Various other people seem to have conceived of a similar scheme around the same time (if the Usenet archives are any guide), including Guido Van Rossum (who would later become famous for the creation of the Python scripting language). The following is from Message-ID: 5568@mcvax.uucp: \\ /* This software is copyright (c) Mathematical Centre, Amsterdam, \\ * 1983. \\ * Permission is granted to use and copy this software, but not for * profit, \\ * and provided that these same conditions are imposed on any person \\ * receiving or using the software. \\ */ }~ +={ EMACS commune } + +The GNU project initially received little attention, however; scattered messages to net.unix-wizards over the course of 1983-84 periodically ask about the status and how to contact them, often in the context of discussions of AT&T UNIX licensing practices that were unfolding as UNIX was divested and began to market its own version of UNIX.~{ For example, Message-ID: { 6818@brl-tgr.arpa }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6818@brl-tgr.arpa. }~ Stallman’s original plan for GNU was to start with the core operating system, the kernel, but his extensive work on EMACS and the sudden need for a free EMACS for UNIX led him to start with a UNIX version of EMACS. In 1984 and into 1985, he and others began work on a UNIX version of GNU EMACS. The two commercial versions of UNIX EMACS (CCA EMACS and Unipress EMACS) continued to circulate and improve in parallel. DEC users meanwhile used the original free version created by Stallman. And, as often happens, life went on: Zimmerman left CCA in August ,{[pg 193]}, 1984, and Gosling moved to Sun, neither of them remaining closely involved in the software they had created, but leaving the new owners to do so. +={ AT&T ; + Digital Equipment Corporation (corporation) +1 ; + Sun Microsystems +1 +} + +By March 1985, Stallman had a complete version (version 15) of GNU EMACS running on the BSD 4.2 version of UNIX (the version Bill Joy had helped create and had taken with him to form the core of Sun’s version of UNIX), running on DEC’s VAX computers. Stallman announced this software in a characteristically flamboyant manner, publishing in the computer programmers’ monthly magazine Dr. Dobbs an article entitled "The GNU Manifesto."~{ Stallman, "The GNU Manifesto." Available at GNU’s Not Unix!, http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html. }~ +={ Joy, Bill } + +Stallman’s announcement that a free version of UNIX EMACS was available caused some concern among commercial distributors. The main such concern was that GNU EMACS 15.34 contained code marked "Copyright (c) James Gosling," code used to make EMACS display on screen.~{ The main file of the controversy was called display.c. A version that was modified by Chris Torek appears in net.sources, Message-ID: { 424@umcp-cs.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=424@umcp-cs.uucp. A separate example of a piece of code written by Gosling bears a note that claims he had declared it public domain, but did not "include the infamous Stallman anti-copyright clause" (Message-ID: { 78@tove.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=78@tove.uucp ). }~ The "discovery" (not so difficult, since Stallman always distributed the source code along with the binary) that this code had been reused by Stallman led to extensive discussion among EMACS users of issues such as the mechanics of copyright, the nature of infringement, the definition of software, the meaning of public domain, the difference between patent, copyright, and trade secret, and the mechanics of permission and its granting—in short, a discussion that would be repeatedly recapitulated in nearly every software and intellectual property controversy in the future. +={ Copyright infringement : + EMACS controversy and ; + EMACS (text editor) : + legal status of +48 ; + rumor on Usenet +7 ; + Usenet : + rumor on +7 +} + +The story of the controversy reveals the structure of rumor on the Usenet to be a bit like the child’s game of Chinese Whispers, except that the translations are all archived. GNU EMACS 15.34 was released in March 1985. Between March and early June there was no mention of its legal status, but around June 3 messages on the subject began to proliferate. The earliest mention of the issue appeared not on net.emacs, but on fa.info-vax—a newsgroup devoted to discussions of VAX computer systems ("fa" stands for "from Arpanet")—and it included a dialogue, between Ron Natalie and Marty Sasaki, labeled "GNU EMACS: How Public Domain?": "FOO, don’t expect that GNU EMACS is really in the public domain. UNIPRESS seems rather annoyed that there are large portions of it that are marked copyright James Gosling."~{ Message-ID: { 7773@ucbvax.arpa. }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=7773@ucbvax.arpa }~ This message was reprinted on 4 June 1985 on net.emacs, with the addendum: "RMS’s work is based on a version of Gosling code that existed before Unipress got it. Gosling had put that code into the public domain. Any ,{[pg 194]}, work taking off from the early Gosling code is therefore also public domain."~{ Message-ID: { 11400007@inmet.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=11400007@inmet.uucp. }~ + +The addendum was then followed by an extensive reply from Zimmerman, whose CCA EMACS had been based on Warren Montgomery’s Bell Labs EMACS but rewritten to avoid reusing the code, which may account for why his understanding of the issue seems to have been both deep and troubling for him. +={ Montgomery, Warren } + +_1 This is completely contrary to Gosling’s public statements. Before he made his arrangements with Unipress, Gosling’s policy was that he would send a free copy of his EMACS to anyone who asked, but he did not (publicly, at least) give anyone else permission to make copies. Once Unipress started selling Gosling’s EMACS, Gosling stopped distributing free copies and still did not grant anyone else permission to make them; instead, he suggested that people buy EMACS from Unipress. All versions of Gosling’s EMACS distributed by him carry his copyright notice, and therefore none of them are in the public domain. Removing copyright notices without the author’s permission is, of course, illegal. Now, a quick check of my GNU EMACS sources shows that sure enough, a number of files have Gosling’s copyright notice in them. What this all means is that unless RMS got written permission from Gosling to distribute his code, all copies of GNU EMACS constitute violations of the copyright law. All those people making such copies, including those people who allow them to be copied off their machines, could each be liable for large sums of money. I think that RMS had better tell us if he has Gosling’s written permission to make these copies. If so, why has he not stated this earlier (preferably in the distribution itself ) and thereby cleared up a potentially major point of confusion? If not, why has he gone ahead and made many, many people liable for criminal prosecution by recommending that they distribute this code without even warning them of their liability? (People who distribute this code would be liable even if they claim that they didn’t see Gosling’s notices; the fact that the notices are there is sufficient. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse.") +={ AT&T : + version of EMACS ; + Copyright infringement : + permissions and +45 +} + +_1 Now, I have nothing against free software; it’s a free country and people can do what they want. It’s just that people who do distribute free software had better be sure that they have the legal right to do so, or be prepared to face the consequences. (Jun 9, 1985).~{ Message-ID: { 717@masscomp.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=717@masscomp.uucp. }~ + +Stallman replied the next day. ,{[pg 195]}, + +_1 Nobody has any reason to be afraid to use or distribute GNU EMACS. It is well known that I do not believe any software is anyone’s property. However, for the GNU project, I decided it was necessary to obey the law. I have refused to look at code I did not have permission to distribute. About 5% of GNU EMACS is close to (though quite a bit changed from) an old version of Gosling EMACS. I am distributing it for Fen Labalme, who received permission from Gosling to distribute it. It is therefore legal for me to do so. To be scrupulously legal, I put statements at the front of the files concerned, describing this situation. +={ Labalme, Fen +8 } + +_1 I don’t see anything I should warn people about—except that Zimmerman is going to try to browbeat them.~{ Message-ID: { 4421@mit-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4421@mit-eddie.uucp. }~ + +Stallman’s original defense for using Gosling’s code was that he had permission to do so. According to him, Fen Labalme had received written permission—whether to make use of or to redistribute is not clear—the display code that was included in GNU EMACS 15.34. According to Stallman, versions of Labalme’s version of Gosling’s version of EMACS were in use in various places (including at Labalme’s employer, Megatest), and Stallman and Labalme considered this a legally defensible position.~{ Message-ID: { 4486@mit-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4486@mit-eddie.uucp. Stallman also recounts this version of events in "RMS Lecture at KTH (Sweden)," 30 October 1986, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html. }~ +={ AT&T : + version of EMACS +} + +Over the next two weeks, a slew of messages attempted to pick apart and understand the issues of copyright, ownership, distribution, and authorship. Gosling wrote to clarify that GOSMACS had never been in the public domain, but that "unfortunately, two moves have left my records in a shambles," and he is therefore silent on the question of whether he granted permission.~{ Message-ID: { 2334@sun.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2334@sun.uucp. }~ Gosling’s claim could well be strategic: giving permission, had he done so, might have angered Unipress, which expected exclusive control over the version he had sold; by the same token, he may well have approved of Stallman’s re-creation, but not have wanted to affirm this in any legally actionable way. Meanwhile, Zimmerman relayed an anonymous message suggesting that some lawyers somewhere found the "third hand redistribution" argument was legally "all wet."~{ Message-ID: { 732@masscomp.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=732@masscomp.uucp. }~ +={ authorship ; + intellectual property : + strategy and +17 +} + +Stallman’s biggest concern was not so much the legality of his own actions as the possibility that people would choose not to use the software because of legal threats (even if such threats were issued only as rumors by former employees of companies that distributed software they had written). Stallman wanted users not only ,{[pg 196]}, to feel safe using his software but to adopt his view that software exists to be shared and improved and that anything that hinders this is a loss for everyone, which necessitates an EMACS commune. +={ Copyright infringement : + legal threats and ; + EMACS commune +1 +} + +Stallman’s legal grounds for using Gosling’s code may or may not have been sound. Zimmerman did his best throughout to explain in detail what kind of permission Stallman and Labalme would have needed, drawing on his own experience with the CCA lawyers and AT&T Bell Labs, all the while berating Stallman for not creating the display code himself. Meanwhile, Unipress posted an official message that said, "UniPress wants to inform the community that portions of the GNU EMACS program are most definitely not public domain, and that use and/or distribution of the GNU EMACS program is not necessarily proper."~{ Message-ID: { 103@unipress.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=103@unipress.uucp. }~ The admittedly vague tone of the message left most people wondering what that meant—and whether Unipress intended to sue anyone. Strategically speaking, the company may have wished to maintain good will among hackers and readers of net.emacs, an audience likely composed of many potential customers. Furthermore, if Gosling had given permission to Stallman, then Unipress would themselves have been on uncertain legal ground, unable to firmly and definitively threaten users of GNU EMACS with legal action. In either case, the question of whether or not permission was needed was not in question—only the question of whether it had been granted.~{ With the benefit of hindsight, the position that software could be in the public domain also seems legally uncertain, given that the 1976 changes to USC§17 abolished the requirement to register and, by the same token, to render uncertain the status of code contributed to Gosling and incorporated into GOSMACS. }~ +={ AT&T : + version of EMACS ; + Copyright infringement : + EMACS controversy and +18 +} + +However, a more complicated legal issue also arose as a result, one concerning the status of code contributed to Gosling by others. Fen Labalme wrote a message to net.emacs, which, although it did not clarify the legal status of Gosling’s code (Labalme was also unable to find his "permission" from Gosling), did raise a related issue: the fact that he and others had made significant contributions to GOSMACS, which Gosling had incorporated into his version, then sold to Unipress without their permission: "As one of the ‘others’ who helped to bring EMACS [GOSMACS] up to speed, I was distressed when Jim sold the editor to UniPress. This seemed to be a direct violation of the trust that I and others had placed in Jim as we sent him our improvements, modifications, and bug fixes. I am especially bothered by the general mercenary attitude surrounding EMACS which has taken over from the once proud ‘hacker’ ethic—EMACS is a tool that can make all of our lives better. Let’s help it to grow!"~{ Message-ID: { 18@megatest }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=18@megatest. Note here the use of "once proud hacker ethic," which seems to confirm the perpetual feeling that the ethic has been compromised. }~ +={ Hacker ethic +2 } + +% ,{[pg 197]}, + +Labalme’s implication, though he may not even have realized this himself, is that Gosling may have infringed on the rights of others in selling the code to Unipress, as a separate message from Joaquim Martillo makes clear: "The differences between current version of Unipress EMACS and Gnu EMACS display.c (a 19 page module) is about 80%. For all the modules which Fen LeBalme [sic] gave RMS permission to use, the differences are similar. Unipress is not even using the disputed software anymore! Now, these modules contain code people like Chris Torek and others contributed when Gosling’s emacs was in the public domain. I must wonder whether these people would have contributed had they known their freely-given code was going to become part of someone’s product."~{ Message-ID: { 287@mit-athena.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=287@mit-athena.uucp. }~ + +Indeed, the general irony of this complicated situation was certainly not as evident as it might have been given the emotional tone of the debates: Stallman was using code from Gosling based on permission Gosling had given to Labalme, but Labalme had written code for Gosling which Gosling had commercialized without telling Labalme—conceivably, but not likely, the same code. Furthermore, all of them were creating software that had been originally conceived in large part by Stallman (but based on ideas and work on TECO, an editor written twenty years before EMACS), who was now busy rewriting the very software Gosling had rewritten for UNIX. The "once proud hacker ethic" that Labalme mentions would thus amount not so much to an explicit belief in sharing so much as a fast-and-loose practice of making contributions and fixes without documenting them, giving oral permission to use and reuse, and "losing" records that may or may not have existed—hardly a noble enterprise. +={ TECO (text editor and programming language) } + +But by 27 June 1985, all of the legal discussion was rendered moot when Stallman announced that he would completely rewrite the display code in EMACS. + +_1 I have decided to replace the Gosling code in GNU EMACS, even though I still believe Fen and I have permission to distribute that code, in order to keep people’s confidence in the GNU project. + +_1 I came to this decision when I found, this night, that I saw how to rewrite the parts that had seemed hard. I expect to have the job done by the weekend.~{ Message-ID: { 4559@mit-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4559@mit-eddie.uucp. }~ + +On 5 July, Stallman sent out a message that said: ,{[pg 198]}, + +_1 Celebrate our independence from Unipress! + +_1 EMACS version 16, 100% Gosling-free, is now being tested at several places. It appears to work solidly on Vaxes, but some other machines have not been tested yet.~{ Message-ID: { 4605@mit-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4605@mit-eddie.uucp. }~ + +The fact that it only took one week to create the code is a testament to Stallman’s widely recognized skills in creating great software—it doesn’t appear to have indicated any (legal) threat or urgency. Indeed, even though Unipress seems also to have been concerned about their own reputation, and despite the implication made by Stallman that they had forced this issue to happen, they took a month to respond. At that point, the Unipress employee Mike Gallaher wrote to insist, somewhat after the fact, that Unipress had no intention of suing anyone—as long as they were using the Gosling-free EMACS version 16 and higher. + +_1 UniPress has no quarrel with the Gnu project. It bothers me that people seem to think we are trying to hinder it. In fact, we hardly did or said much at all, except to point out that the Gnumacs code had James Gosling’s copyright in it. We have not done anything to keep anyone from using Gnumacs, nor do we intend to now that it is "Gosling-free" (version 16.56). + +_1 You can consider this to be an official statement from UniPress: There is nothing in Gnumacs version 16.56 that could possibly cause UniPress to get upset. If you were afraid to use Gnumacs because you thought we would hassle you, don’t be, on the basis of version 16.56.~{ Message-ID: { 104@unipress.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=104@unipress.uucp. }~ + +Both Stallman and Unipress received various attacks and defenses from observers of the controversy. Many people pointed out that Stallman should get credit for "inventing" EMACS and that the issue of him infringing on his own invention was therefore ironic. Others proclaimed the innocence and moral character of Unipress, which, it was claimed, was providing more of a service (support for EMACS) than the program itself. +={ Copyright infringement : + infringement on own invention +} + +Some readers interpreted the fact that Stallman had rewritten the display code, whether under pressure from Unipress or not, as confirmation of the ideas expressed in "The GNU Manifesto," namely, that commercial software stifles innovation. According to this logic, precisely because Stallman was forced to rewrite the code, rather than build on something that he himself assumed he had permission ,{[pg 199]}, to do, there was no innovation, only fear-induced caution.~{ Joaquim Martillo, Message-ID: { 287@mit-athena.uucpp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=287@mit-athena.uucpp : + "Trying to forbid RMS from using discarded code so that he must spend time to reinvent the wheel supports his contention that ‘software hoarders’ are slowing down progress in computer science." }~ On the other hand, latent within this discussion is a deep sense of propriety about what people had created; many people, not only Stallman and Gosling and Zimmerman, had contributed to making EMACS what it was, and most had done so under the assumption, legally correct or not, that it would not be taken away from them or, worse, that others might profit by it. +={ GNU Manifesto } + +Gosling’s sale of EMACS is thus of a different order from his participation in the common stewardship of EMACS. The distinction between creating software and maintaining it is a commercial fiction driven in large part by the structure of intellectual property. It mirrors the experience of open systems. Maintaining software can mean improving it, and improving it can mean incorporating the original work and ideas of others. To do so by the rules of a changing intellectual-property structure forces different choices than to do so according to an informal hacker ethic or an experimental "commune." One programmer’s minor improvement is another programmer’s original contribution. +={ software development : + creating vs. maintaining +} + +2~ The Context of Copyright + +The EMACS controversy occurred in a period just after some of the largest changes to U.S. intellectual-property law in seventy years. Two aspects of this context are worth emphasizing: (1) practices and knowledge about the law change slowly and do not immediately reflect the change in either the law or the strategies of actors; (2) U.S. law creates a structural form of uncertainty in which the interplay between legislation and case law is never entirely certain. In the former aspect, programmers who grew up in the 1970s saw a commercial practice entirely dominated by trade secret and patent protection, and very rarely by copyright; thus, the shift to widespread use of copyright law (facilitated by the 1976 and 1980 changes to the law) to protect software was a shift in thinking that only slowly dawned on many participants, even the most legally astute, since it was a general shift in strategy as well as a statutory change. In the latter aspect, the 1976 and 1980 changes to the copyright law contained a number of uncertainties that would take over a decade to be worked out in case law, issues such as the copyrightability of software, the definition of software, and the meaning ,{[pg 200]}, of infringement in software copyright, to say nothing of the impact of the codification of fair use and the removal of the requirement to register (issues that arguably went unnoticed until the turn of the millennium). Both aspects set the stage for the EMACS controversy and Stallman’s creation of the GPL. +={ patents on software +1 ; + practices : + opposed to legal changes +2 ; + Trade secret law +6 ; + uncertainty, in the law +20 ; + copyright infringement ; + Copyright : + changes in 1976 +20 | changes in 1980 +20 | requirement to register : + software and copyrightability +3 ; + fair use +1 ; + software : + registration of copyright +} + +Legally speaking, the EMACS controversy was about copyright, permission, and the meanings of a public domain and the reuse of software (and, though never explicitly mentioned, fair use). Software patenting and trade-secret law are not directly concerned, but they nonetheless form a background to the controversy. Many of the participants expressed a legal and conventional orthodoxy that software was not patentable, that is, that algorithms, ideas, or fundamental equations fell outside the scope of patent, even though the 1981 case Diamond v. Diehr is generally seen as the first strong support by the courts for forcing the United States Patent and Trademark Office to grant patents on software.~{ Diamond V. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981), the Supreme Court decision, forced the patent office to grant patents on software. Interestingly, software patents had been granted much earlier, but went either uncontested or unenforced. An excellent example is patent 3,568,156, held by Ken Thompson, on regular expression pattern matching, granted in 1971. }~ Software, this orthodoxy went, was better protected by trade-secret law (a state-by-state law, not a federal statute), which provided protection for any intellectual property that an owner reasonably tried to maintain as a secret. The trade-secret status of UNIX, for example, meant that all the educational licensees who were given the source code of UNIX had agreed to keep it secret, even though it was manifestly circulating the world over; one could therefore run afoul of trade-secret rules if one looked at the source code (e.g., signed a nondisclosure license or was shown the code by an employee) and then implemented something similar. +={ source code +1 } + +By contrast, copyright law was rarely deployed in matters of software production. The first copyright registration of software occurred in 1964, but the desirability of relying on copyright over trade secret was uncertain well into the 1970s.~{ Calvin Mooers, in his 1975 article "Computer Software and Copyright," suggests that the IBM unbundling decision opened the doors to thinking about copyright protection. }~ Some corporations, like IBM, routinely marked all source code with a copyright symbol. Others asserted it only on the binaries they distributed or in the license agreements. The case of software on the UNIX operating system and its derivatives is particularly haphazard, and the existence of copyright notices by the authors varies widely. An informal survey by Barry Gold singled out only James Gosling, Walter Tichy (author of rcs), and the RAND Corporation as having adequately labeled source code with copyright notices.~{ Message-ID: { 933@sdcrdcf.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=933@sdcrdcf.uucp. }~ Gosling was also the first to register EMACS as copyrighted software in 1983, ,{[pg 201]}, while Stallman registered GNU EMACS just after version 15.34 was released in May 1985.~{ Gosling’s EMACS 264 (Stallman copied EMACS 84) is registered with the Library of Congress, as is GNU EMACS 15.34. Gosling’s EMACS Library of Congress registration number is TX-3-407-458, registered in 1992. Stallman’s registration number is TX-1-575-302, registered in May 1985. The listed dates are uncertain, however, since there are periodic re-registrations and updates. }~ + +The uncertainty of the change from reliance on trade secret to reliance on copyright is clear in some of the statements made by Stallman around the reuse of Gosling’s code. Since neither Stallman nor Gosling sought to keep the program secret in any form—either by licensing it or by requiring users to keep it secret—there could be no claims of trade-secret status on either program. Nonetheless, there was frequent concern about whether one had seen any code (especially code from a UNIX operating system, which is covered by trade secret) and whether code that someone else had seen, rewritten, or distributed publicly was therefore "in the public domain."~{ This is particularly confusing in the case of "dbx." Message-ID: { 4437@mit-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4437@mit-eddie.uucp, Message-ID: { 6238@shasta.arpa }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6238@shasta.arpa, and Message-ID: { 730@masscomp.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=730@masscomp.uucp. }~ But, at the same time, Stallman was concerned that rewriting Gosling’s display code would be too difficult: "Any display code would have a considerable resemblance to that display code, just by virtue of doing the same job. Without any clear idea of exactly how much difference there would have to be to reassure you users, I cannot tell whether the rewrite would accomplish that. The law is not any guidance here. . . . Writing display code that is significantly different is not easy."~{ Message-ID: { 4489@mit-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4489@mit-eddie.uucp. }~ +={ trade secret law : + relationship to public domain +3 +} + +Stallman’s strategy for rewriting software, including his plan for the GNU operating system, also involved "not looking at" anyone else’s code, so as to ensure that no trade-secret violations would occur. Although it was clear that Gosling’s code was not a trade secret, it was also not obvious that it was "in the public domain," an assumption that might be made about other kinds of software protected by trade secret. Under trade-secret rules, Gosling’s public distribution of GOSMACS appears to give the green light for its reuse, but under copyright law, a law of strict liability, any unauthorized use is a violation, regardless of how public the software may have been.~{ A standard practice well into the 1980s, and even later, was the creation of so-called clean-room versions of software, in which new programmers and designers who had not seen the offending code were hired to ,{[pg 336]}, re-implement it in order to avoid the appearance of trade-secret violation. Copyright law is a strict liability law, meaning that ignorance does not absolve the infringer, so the practice of "clean-room engineering" seems not to have been as successful in the case of copyright, as the meaning of infringement remains murky. }~ + +The fact of trade-secret protection was nonetheless an important aspect of the EMACS controversy: the version of EMACS that Warren Montgomery had created at Bell Labs (and on which Zimmerman’s CCA version would be based) was the subject of trade-secret protection by AT&T, by virtue of being distributed with UNIX and under a nondisclosure agreement. AT&T was at the time still a year away from divestiture and thus unable to engage in commercial exploitation of the software. When CCA sought to commercialize ,{[pg 202]}, the version of UNIX Zimmerman had based on Montgomery’s, it was necessary to remove any AT&T code in order to avoid violating their trade-secret status. CCA in turn distributed their EMACS as either binary or as source (the former costing about $1,000, the latter as much as $7,000) and relied on copyright rather than trade-secret protection to prevent unauthorized uses of their software.~{ Message-ID: { 730@masscomp.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=730@masscomp.uucp. AT&T was less concerned about copyright infringement than they were about the status of their trade secrets. Zimmerman quotes a statement (from Message-ID: { 108@emacs.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=108@emacs.uucp ) that he claims indicates this: "Beginning with CCA EMACS version 162.36z, CCA EMACS no longer contained any of the code from Mr. Montgomery’s EMACS, or any methods or concepts which would be known only by programmers familiar with BTL [Bell Labs] EMACS of any version." The statement did not mention copyright, but implied that CCA EMACS did not contain any AT&T trade secrets, thus preserving their software’s trade-secret status. The fact that EMACS was a conceptual design—a particular kind of interface, a LISP interpreter, and extensibility—that was very widely imitated had no apparent bearing on the legal status of these secrets. }~ +={ AT&T : + divestiture in ; + Computer Corporation of America (CCA) ; + Montgomery, Warren ; + Zimmerman, Steve +} + +The uncertainty over copyright was thus in part a reflection of a changing strategy in the computer-software industry, a kind of uneven development in which copyright slowly and haphazardly came to replace trade secret as the main form of intellectual-property protection. This switch had consequences for how noncommercial programmers, researchers, and amateurs might interpret their own work, as well as for the companies whose lawyers were struggling with the same issues. Of course, copyright and trade-secret protection are not mutually exclusive, but they structure the need for secrecy in different ways, and they make different claims on issues like similarity, reuse, and modification. +={ intellectual property : + strategy and +1 ; + modifiability ; + secrecy +} + +The 1976 changes to copyright law were therefore extremely significant in setting out a new set of boundaries and possibilities for intellectual-property arguments, arguments that created a different kind of uncertainty from that of a changing commercial strategy: a structural uncertainty created by the need for a case law to develop around the statutory changes implemented by Congress. + +The Copyright Act of 1976 introduced a number of changes that had been some ten years in the making, largely organized around new technologies like photocopier machines, home audiotaping, and the new videocassette recorders. It codified fair-use rights, it removed the requirement to register, and it expanded the scope of copyrightable materials considerably. It did not, however, explicitly address software, an oversight that frustrated many in the computer industry, in particular the young software industry. Pursuant to this oversight, the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyright (CONTU) was charged with making suggestions for changes to the law with respect to software. It was therefore only in 1980 that Congress implemented these changes, adding software to title 17 of the U.S. copyright statute as something that could be considered copyrightable by law.~{ CONTU Final Report, http://digital-law-online.info/CONTU/contu1.html (accessed 8 December 2006). }~ +={ CONTU report } + +The 1980 amendment to the copyright law answered one of three lingering questions about the copyrightability of software: the simple question of whether it was copyrightable material at all. Congress ,{[pg 203]}, answered yes. It did not, however, designate what constituted "software." During the 1980s, a series of court cases helped specify what counted as software, including source code, object code (binaries), screen display and output, look and feel, and microcode and firmware.~{ The cases that determine the meaning of the 1976 and 1980 amendments begin around 1986: Whelan Associates, Inc. v. Jaslow Dental Laboratory, Inc., et al., U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, 4 August 1986, 797 F.2d 1222, 230 USPQ 481, affirming that "structure (or sequence or organization)" of software is copyrightable, not only the literal software code; Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc., U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals, 22 June 1992, 982 F.2d 693, 23 USPQ 2d 1241, arguing that the structure test in Whelan was not sufficient to determine infringement and thus proposing a three-part "abstraction-filiation-comparison" test; Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp, U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, 1994, 35 F.3d 1435, finding that the "desktop metaphor" used in Macintosh and Windows was not identical and thus did not constitute infringement; Lotus Development Corporation v. Borland International, Inc. (94-2003), 1996, 513 U.S. 233, finding that the "look and feel" of a menu interface was not copyrightable. }~ The final question, which the courts are still faced with adjudicating, concerns how much similarity constitutes an infringement in each of these cases. The implications of the codification of fair use and the requirement to register continue to unfold even into the present. +={ fair use ; + intellectual property +20 ; + source code : + legal definition and +5 ; + Software : + legal definition of source code and +5 | registration of copyright +1 +} + +The EMACS controversy confronts all three of these questions. Stallman’s initial creation of EMACS was accomplished under conditions in which it was unclear whether copyright would apply (i.e., before 1980). Stallman, of course, did not attempt to copyright the earliest versions of EMACS, but the 1976 amendments removed the requirement to register, thus rendering everything written after 1978 automatically copyrighted. Registration represented only an additional effort to assert ownership in cases of suspected infringement. + +Throughout this period, the question of whether software was copyrightable—or copyrighted—was being answered differently in different cases: AT&T was relying on trade-secret status; Gosling, Unipress, and CCA negotiated over copyrighted material; and Stallman was experimenting with his "commune." Although the uncertainty was answered statutorily by the 1980 amendment, not everyone instantly grasped this new fact or changed practices based on it. There is ample evidence throughout the Usenet archive that the 1976 changes were poorly understood, especially by comparison with the legal sophistication of hackers in the 1990s and 2000s. Although the law changed in 1980, practices changed more slowly, and justifications crystallized in the context of experiments like that of GNU EMACS. +={ trade secret law ; + Usenet +} + +Further, a tension emerged between the meaning of source code and the meaning of software. On the one hand was the question of whether the source code or the binary code was copyrightable, and on the other was the question of defining the boundaries of software in a context wherein all software relies on other software in order to run at all. For instance, EMACS was originally built on top of TECO, which was referred to both as an editor and as a programming language; even seemingly obvious distinctions (e.g., application vs. programming language) were not necessarily always clear. ,{[pg 204]}, If EMACS was an application written in TECO qua programming language, then it would seem that EMACS should have its own copyright, distinct from any other program written in TECO. But if EMACS was an extension or modification of TECO qua editor, then it would seem that EMACS was a derivative work and would require the explicit permission of the copyright holder. +={ TECO (text editor and programming language) } + +Further, each version of EMACS, in order to be EMACS, needed a LISP interpreter in order to make the extensible interface similar across all versions. But not all versions used the same LISP interpreter. Gosling’s used an interpreter called MOCKLISP (mlisp in the trademarked Unipress version), for instance. The question of whether the LISP interpreter was a core component of the software or an "environment" needed in order to extend the application was thus also uncertain and unspecified in the law. While both might be treated as software suitable for copyright protection, both might also be understood as necessary components out of which copyrightable software would be built.~{ The relationship between the definition of source and target befuddles software law to this day, one of the most colorful examples being the DeCSS case. See Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom," chap. 1: Gallery of CSS Descramblers, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/gallery/. }~ +={ LISP (programming language) : + interpreter in EMACS ; + Unipress +} + +What’s more, both the 1976 and 1980 amendments are silent on the copyright status of source code vs. binary code. While all the versions of EMACS were distributed in binary, Stallman and Gosling both included the source to allow users to modify it and extend it, but they differed on the proper form of redistribution. The threshold between modifying software for oneself and copyright infringement was not yet clear, and it hung on the meaning of redistribution. Changing the software for use on a single computer might be necessary to get it to run, but by the early days of the Arpanet, innocently placing that code in a public directory on one computer could look like mass distribution.~{ An interesting addendum here is that the manual for EMACS was also released at around the same time as EMACS 16 and was available ,{[pg 337]}, as a TeX file. Stallman also attempted to deal with the paper document in the same fashion (see Message-ID: 4734@mit-eddie.uucp, 19 July 1985), and this would much later become a different and trickier issue that would result in the GNU Free Documentation License. }~ +={ copyright infringement : + redistribution of software as ; + redistribution of software +4 +} + +Finally, the question of what constitutes infringement was at the heart of this controversy and was not resolved by law or by legal adjudication, but simply by rewriting the code to avoid the question. Stallman’s use of Gosling’s code, his claim of third-hand permission, the presence or absence of written permission, the sale of GOSMACS to Unipress when it most likely contained code not written by Gosling but copyrighted in his name—all of these issues complicated the question of infringement to the point where Stallman’s only feasible option for continuing to create software was to avoid using anyone else’s code at all. Indeed, Stallman’s decision to use Gosling’s code (which he claims to have changed in significant portions) might have come to nothing if he had unethically ,{[pg 205]}, and illegally chosen not to include the copyright notice at all (under the theory that the code was original to Stallman, or an imitation, rather than a portion of Gosling’s work). Indeed, Chris Torek received Gosling’s permission to remove Gosling’s name and copyright from the version of display.c he had heavily modified, but he chose not to omit them: "The only reason I didn’t do so is that I feel that he should certainly be credited as the inspiration (at the very least) for the code."~{ Message-ID: { 659@umcp-cs.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=659@umcp-cs.uucp. }~ Likewise, Stallman was most likely concerned to obey the law and to give credit where credit was due, and therefore left the copyright notice attached—a clear case of blurred meanings of authorship and ownership. +={ GOSMACS (version of EMACS) ; + authorship : + ownership vs. ; + Torek, Chris +} + +In short, the interplay between new statutes and their settlement in court or in practice was a structural uncertainty that set novel constraints on the meaning of copyright, and especially on the norms and forms of permission and reuse. GNU EMACS 15.34 was the safest option—a completely new version that performed the same tasks, but in a different manner, using different algorithms and code. + +Even as it resolved the controversy, however, GNU EMACS posed new problems for Stallman: how would the EMACS commune survive if it wasn’t clear whether one could legally use another person’s code, even if freely contributed? Was Gosling’s action in selling work by others to Unipress legitimate? Would Stallman be able to enforce its opposite, namely, prevent people from commercializing EMACS code they contributed to him? How would Stallman avoid the future possibility of his own volunteers and contributors later asserting that he had infringed on their copyright? +={ copyright infringement : + legal threats and +2 +} + +By 1986, Stallman was sending out a letter that recorded the formal transfer of copyright to the Free Software Foundation (which he had founded in late 1985), with equal rights to nonexclusive use of the software.~{ Message-ID: { 8605202356.aa12789@ucbvax.berkeley.edu }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=8605202356.aa12789@ucbvax.berkeley.edu. }~ While such a demand for the expropriation of copyright might seem contrary to the aims of the GNU project, in the context of the unfolding copyright law and the GOSMACS controversy it made perfect sense. Having been accused himself of not having proper permission to use someone else’s copyrighted material in his free version of GNU EMACS, Stallman took steps to forestall such an event in the future. +={ copyright : + transfer of ; + Free Software Foundation +8 +} + +The interplay between technical and legal issues and "ethical" concerns was reflected in the practical issues of fear, intimidation, and common-sense (mis)understandings of intellectual-property ,{[pg 206]}, law. Zimmerman’s veiled threats of legal liability were directed not only at Stallman but at anyone who was using the program Stallman had written; breaking the law was, for Zimmerman, an ethical lapse, not a problem of uncertainty and change. Whether or not such an interpretation of the law was correct, it did reveal the mechanisms whereby a low level of detailed knowledge about the law—and a law in flux, at that (not to mention the litigious reputation of the U.S. legal system worldwide)—often seemed to justify a sense that buying software was simply a less risky option than acquiring it for free. Businesses, not customers, it was assumed, would be liable for such infringements. By the same token, the sudden concern of software programmers (rather than lawyers) with the detailed mechanics of copyright law meant that a very large number of people found themselves asserting common-sense notions, only to be involved in a flame war over what the copyright law "actually says." +={ Zimmerman, Steve } + +Such discussion has continued and grown exponentially over the last twenty years, to the point that Free Software hackers are now nearly as deeply educated about intellectual property law as they are about software code.~{ See Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom," chap. 6, on the Debian New Maintainer Process, for an example of how induction into a Free Software project stresses the legal as much as the technical, if not more. }~ Far from representing the triumph of the hacker ethic, the GNU General Public License represents the concrete, tangible outcome of a relatively wide-ranging cultural conversation hemmed in by changing laws, court decisions, practices both commercial and academic, and experiments with the limits and forms of new media and new technology. +={ experimentation ; + hacker ethic +9 ; + hackers +} + +2~ Conclusion + +The rest of the story is quickly told: Stallman resigned from the AI Lab at MIT and started the Free Software Foundation in 1985; he created a raft of new tools, but ultimately no full UNIX operating system, and issued General Public License 1.0 in 1989. In 1990 he was awarded a MacArthur "genius grant." During the 1990s, he was involved in various high-profile battles among a new generation of hackers; those controversies included the debate around Linus Torvalds’s creation of Linux (which Stallman insisted be referred to as GNU/Linux), the forking of EMACS into Xemacs, and Stallman’s own participation in—and exclusion from—conferences and events devoted to Free Software. ,{[pg 207]}, +={ artificial Intelligence Lab (AI Lab), at MIT +6 ; + Linux (Free Software project) ; + Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) +6 ; + Torvalds, Linus +} + +Between 1986 and 1990, the Free Software Foundation and its software became extremely well known among geeks. Much of this had to do with the wealth of software that they produced and distributed via Usenet and Arpanet. And as the software circulated and was refined, so were the new legal constraints and the process of teaching users to understand what they could and could not do with the software—and why it was not in the public domain. +={ Arpanet (network) ; + geeks ; + Usenet +} + +Each time a new piece of software was released, it was accompanied by one or more text files which explained what its legal status was. At first, there was a file called DISTRIB, which contained an explanation of the rights the new owner had to modify and redistribute the software.~{ For example, Message-ID: { 5745@ucbvax.arpa }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=5745@ucbvax.arpa. }~ DISTRIB referenced a file called COPYING, which contained the "GNU EMACS copying permission notice," also known as the GNU EMACS GPL. The first of these licenses listed the copyright holder as Richard Stallman (in 1985), but by 1986 all licenses referred to the Free Software Foundation as the copyright holder. +={ General Public License (GPL) : + development of +2 +} + +As the Free Software Foundation released other pieces of software, the license was renamed—GNU CC GPL, a GNU Bison GPL, a GNU GDB GPL, and so on, all of which were essentially the same terms—in a file called COPYING, which was meant to be distributed along with the software. In 1988, after the software and the licenses had become considerably more widely available, Stallman made a few changes to the license that relaxed some of the terms and specified others.~{ See Message-ID: { 8803031948.aa01085@venus.berkeley.edu }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=8803031948.aa01085@venus.berkeley.edu. }~ This new version would become the GNU GPL 1.0. By the time Free Software emerged into the public consciousness in the late 1990s, the GPL had reached version 2.0, and the Free Software Foundation had its own legal staff. + +The creation of the GPL and the Free Software Foundation are often understood as expressions of the hacker ethic, or of Stallman’s ideological commitment to freedom. But the story of EMACS and the complex technical and legal details that structure it illustrate how the GPL is more than just a hack: it was a novel, privately ordered legal "commune." It was a space thoroughly independent of, but insinuated into the existing bedrock of rules and practices of the world of corporate and university software, and carved out of the slippery, changing substance of intellectual-property statutes. At a time when the giants of the software industry were fighting to create a different kind of openness—one that preserved and would even strengthen existing relations of intellectual property—this ,{[pg 208]}, hack was a radical alternative that emphasized the sovereignty not of a national or corporate status quo, but of self-fashioning individuals who sought to opt out of that national-corporate unity. The creation of the GNU GPL was not a return to a golden age of small-scale communities freed from the dominating structures of bureaucratic modernity, but the creation of something new out of those structures. It relied on and emphasized, not their destruction, but their stability—at least until they are no longer necessary. +={ Open Systems } + +The significance of the GPL is due to its embedding within and emergence from the legal and technical infrastructure. Such a practice of situated reworking is what gives Free Software—and perhaps all forms of engineering and creative practice—its warp and weft. Stallman’s decision to resign from the AI Lab and start the Free Software Foundation is a good example; it allowed Stallman no only to devote energy to Free Software but also to formally differentiate the organizations, to forestall at least the potential threat that MIT (which still provided him with office space, equipment, and network connection) might decide to claim ownership over his work. One might think that the hacker ethic and the image of self-determining free individuals would demand the total absence of organizations, but it requires instead their proliferation and modulation. Stallman himself was never so purely free: he relied on the largesse of MIT’s AI Lab, without which he would have had no office, no computer, no connection to the network, and indeed, for a while, no home. +={ infrastructure ; + proliferation of software +} + +The Free Software Foundation represents a recognition on his part that individual and communal independence would come at the price of a legally and bureaucratically recognizable entity, set apart from MIT and responsible only to itself. The Free Software Foundation took a classic form: a nonprofit organization with a hierarchy. But by the early 1990s, a new set of experiments would begin that questioned the look of such an entity. The stories of Linux and Apache reveal how these ventures both depended on the work of the Free Software Foundation and departed from the hierarchical tradition it represented, in order to innovate new similarly embedded sociotechnical forms of coordination. +={ Free Software Foundation : + Linux and Apache vs. +1 +} + +The EMACS text editor is still widely used, in version 22.1 as of 2007, and ported to just about every conceivable operating system. The controversy with Unipress has faded into the distance, as newer and more intense controversies have faced Stallman and Free Software, ,{[pg 209]}, but the GPL has become the most widely used and most finely scrutinized of the legal licenses. More important, the EMACS controversy was by no means the only one to have erupted in the lives of software programmers; indeed, it has become virtually a rite of passage for young geeks to be involved in such debates, because it is the only way in which the technical details and the legal details that confront geeks can be explored in the requisite detail. Not all such arguments end in the complete rewriting of source code, and today many of them concern the attempt to convince or evangelize for the release of source code under a Free Software license. The EMACS controversy was in some ways a primal scene—a traumatic one, for sure—that determined the outcome of many subsequent fights by giving form to the Free Software license and its uses. + +1~ 7. Coordinating Collaborations +={ coordination (component of Free Software) +3 } + +% ,{[pg 210]}, + +The final component of Free Software is coordination. For many participants and observers, this is the central innovation and essential significance of Open Source: the possibility of enticing potentially huge numbers of volunteers to work freely on a software project, leveraging the law of large numbers, "peer production," "gift economies," and "self-organizing social economies."~{ Research on coordination in Free Software forms the central core of recent academic work. Two of the most widely read pieces, Yochai Benkler’s "Coase’s Penguin" and Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source, are directed at classic research questions about collective action. Rishab Ghosh’s "Cooking Pot Markets" and Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar set many of the terms of debate. Josh Lerner’s and Jean Tirole’s "Some Simple Economics of Open Source" was an early contribution. Other important works on the subject are Feller et al., Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software; Tuomi, Networks of Innovation; Von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation. }~ Coordination in Free Software is of a distinct kind that emerged in the 1990s, directly out of the issues of sharing source code, conceiving open systems, and writing copyright licenses—all necessary precursors to the practices of coordination. The stories surrounding these issues find continuation in those of the Linux operating-system kernel, of the Apache Web server, and of Source Code Management tools (SCMs); together these stories reveal how coordination worked and what it looked like in the 1990s. +={ Free Software : + open source vs. ; + Open Source : + Free Software vs. ; + peer production ; + practices : + five components of Free Software +2 ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) +} + +Coordination is important because it collapses and resolves the distinction between technical and social forms into a meaningful ,{[pg 211]}, whole for participants. On the one hand, there is the coordination and management of people; on the other, there is the coordination of source code, patches, fixes, bug reports, versions, and distributions—but together there is a meaningful technosocial practice of managing, decision-making, and accounting that leads to the collaborative production of complex software and networks. Such coordination would be unexceptional, essentially mimicking long-familiar corporate practices of engineering, except for one key fact: it has no goals. Coordination in Free Software privileges adaptability over planning. This involves more than simply allowing any kind of modification; the structure of Free Software coordination actually gives precedence to a generalized openness to change, rather than to the following of shared plans, goals, or ideals dictated or controlled by a hierarchy of individuals.~{ On the distinction between adaptability and adaptation, see Federico Iannacci, "The Linux Managing Model," http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/iannacci2.pdf. Matt Ratto characterizes the activity of Linux-kernel developers as a "culture of re-working" and a "design for re-design," and captures the exquisite details of such a practice both in coding and in the discussion between developers, an activity he dubs the "pressure of openness" that "results as a contradiction between the need to maintain productive collaborative activity and the simultaneous need to remain open to new development directions" ("The Pressure of Openness," 112-38). }~ +={ adaptability : + planning vs. +1 | as a form of critique +1 | adaptation vs. ; + coordination (component of Free Software) : + individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +2 ; + critique, Free Software as +1 ; + goals, lack of in Free Software +1 ; + hackers : + curiosity and virtuosity of +1 ; + hierarchy, in coordination +5 ; + planning +1 +} + +Adaptability does not mean randomness or anarchy, however; it is a very specific way of resolving the tension between the individual curiosity and virtuosity of hackers, and the collective coordination necessary to create and use complex software and networks. No man is an island, but no archipelago is a nation, so to speak. Adaptability preserves the "joy" and "fun" of programming without sacrificing the careful engineering of a stable product. Linux and Apache should be understood as the results of this kind of coordination: experiments with adaptability that have worked, to the surprise of many who have insisted that complexity requires planning and hierarchy. Goals and planning are the province of governance—the practice of goal-setting, orientation, and definition of control—but adaptability is the province of critique, and this is why Free Software is a recursive public: it stands outside power and offers powerful criticism in the form of working alternatives. It is not the domain of the new—after all Linux is just a rewrite of UNIX—but the domain of critical and responsive public direction of a collective undertaking. +={ Linux (Free Software project) +8 ; + novelty, of Free Software ; + recursive public +1 +} + +Linux and Apache are more than pieces of software; they are organizations of an unfamiliar kind. My claim that they are "recursive publics" is useful insofar as it gives a name to a practice that is neither corporate nor academic, neither profit nor nonprofit, neither governmental nor nongovernmental. The concept of recursive public includes, within the spectrum of political activity, the creation, modification, and maintenance of software, networks, and legal documents. While a "public" in most theories is a body of ,{[pg 212]}, people and a discourse that give expressive form to some concern, "recursive public" is meant to suggest that geeks not only give expressive form to some set of concerns (e.g., that software should be free or that intellectual property rights are too expansive) but also give concrete infrastructural form to the means of expression itself. Linux and Apache are tools for creating networks by which expression of new kinds can be guaranteed and by which further infrastructural experimentation can be pursued. For geeks, hacking and programming are variants of free speech and freedom of assembly. +={ public sphere : + theories of ; + Apache (Free Software project) +4 ; + experimentation ; + infrastructure +} + +2~ From UNIX to Minix to Linux +={ Minix (operating system) +1 ; + Tanenbaum, Andrew +27 +} + +Linux and Apache are the two paradigmatic cases of Free Software in the 1990s, both for hackers and for scholars of Free Software. Linux is a UNIX-like operating-system kernel, bootstrapped out of the Minix operating system created by Andrew Tanenbaum.~{ Linux is often called an operating system, which Stallman objects to on the theory that a kernel is only one part of an operating system. Stallman suggests that it be called GNU/Linux to reflect the use of GNU operating-system tools in combination with the Linux kernel. This not-so-subtle ploy to take credit for Linux reveals the complexity of the distinctions. The kernel is at the heart of hundreds of different "distributions"—such as Debian, Red Hat, SuSe, and Ubuntu Linux—all of which also use GNU tools, but ,{[pg 338]}, which are often collections of software larger than just an operating system. Everyone involved seems to have an intuitive sense of what an operating system is (thanks to the pedagogical success of UNIX), but few can draw any firm lines around the object itself. }~ Apache is the continuation of the original National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) project to create a Web server (Rob McCool’s original program, called httpd), bootstrapped out of a distributed collection of people who were using and improving that software. +={ McCool, Rob ; + httpd ; + modulation : + of Free Software ; + National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA) ; + Apache (Free Software project) +3 +} + +Linux and Apache are both experiments in coordination. Both projects evolved decision-making systems through experiment: a voting system in Apache’s case and a structured hierarchy of decision-makers, with Linus Torvalds as benevolent dictator, in Linux’s case. Both projects also explored novel technical tools for coordination, especially Source Code Management (SCM) tools such as Concurrent Versioning System (cvs). Both are also cited as exemplars of how "fun," "joy," or interest determine individual participation and of how it is possible to maintain and encourage that participation and mutual aid instead of narrowing the focus or eliminating possible routes for participation. +={ Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) ; + experimentation +1 ; + fun, and development of Linux ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) ; + Torvalds, Linus +3 +} + +Beyond these specific experiments, the stories of Linux and Apache are detailed here because both projects were actively central to the construction and expansion of the Internet of the 1990s by allowing a massive number of both corporate and noncorporate sites to cheaply install and run servers on the Internet. Were Linux and Apache nothing more than hobbyist projects with a few thousand ,{[pg 213]}, interested tinkerers, rather than the core technical components of an emerging planetary network, they would probably not represent the same kind of revolutionary transformation ultimately branded a "movement" in 1998-99. +={ movement (component of Free Software) } + +Linus Torvalds’s creation of the Linux kernel is often cited as the first instance of the real "Open Source" development model, and it has quickly become the most studied of the Free Software projects.~{ Eric Raymond directed attention primarily to Linux in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Many other projects preceded Torvalds’s kernel, however, including the tools that form the core of both UNIX and the Internet: Paul Vixie’s implementation of the Domain Name System (DNS) known as BIND; Eric Allman’s sendmail for routing e-mail; the scripting languages perl (created by Larry Wall), python (Guido von Rossum), and tcl/tk (John Ousterhout); the X Windows research project at MIT; and the derivatives of the original BSD UNIX, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. On the development model of FreeBSD, see Jorgensen, "Putting It All in the Trunk" and "Incremental and Decentralized Integration in FreeBSD." The story of the genesis of Linux is very nicely told in Moody, Rebel Code, and Williams, Free as in Freedom; there are also a number of papers—available through Free/Opensource Research Community, http://freesoftware.mit.edu/—that analyze the development dynamics of the Linux kernel. See especially Ratto, "Embedded Technical Expression" and "The Pressure of Openness." I have conducted much of my analysis of Linux by reading the Linux Kernel Mailing List archives, http://lkml.org. There are also annotated summaries of the Linux Kernel Mailing List discussions at http://kerneltraffic.org. }~ Following its appearance in late 1991, Linux grew quickly from a small, barely working kernel to a fully functional replacement for the various commercial UNIX systems that had resulted from the UNIX wars of the 1980s. It has become versatile enough to be used on desktop PCs with very little memory and small CPUs, as well as in "clusters" that allow for massively parallel computing power. +={ perl (programming language) ; + python (programming language) ; + tcl/tk (programming language) +} + +When Torvalds started, he was blessed with an eager audience of hackers keen on seeing a UNIX system run on desktop computers and a personal style of encouragement that produced enormous positive feedback. Torvalds is often given credit for creating, through his "management style," a "new generation" of Free Software—a younger generation than that of Stallman and Raymond. Linus and Linux are not in fact the causes of this change, but the results of being at the right place at the right time and joining together a number of existing components. Indeed, the title of Torvalds’s semi-autobiographical reflection on Linux—Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary—captures some of the character of its genesis. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) +9 ; + hackers +1 ; + Raymond, Eric Steven ; + Stallman, Richard ; + Torvalds, Linus : + autobiography of ; + UNIX operating system +} + +The "fun" referred to in the title reflects the privileging of adaptability over planning. Projects, tools, people, and code that were fun were those that were not dictated by existing rules and ideas. Fun, for geeks, was associated with the sudden availability, especially for university students and amateur hackers, of a rapidly expanding underground world of networks and software—Usenet and the Internet especially, but also university-specific networks, online environments and games, and tools for navigating information of all kinds. Much of this activity occurred without the benefit of any explicit theorization, with the possible exception of the discourse of "community" (given print expression by Howard Rheingold in 1993 and present in nascent form in the pages of Wired and Mondo 2000) that took place through much of the 1990s.~{ Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community. On the prehistory of this period and the cultural location of some key aspects, see Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. }~ The late 1980s and early 1990s gave rise to vast experimentation with the collaborative possibilities of the Internet as a medium. Particularly attractive was ,{[pg 214]}, that this medium was built using freely available tools, and the tools themselves were open to modification and creative reuse. It was a style that reflected the quasi-academic and quasi-commercial environment, of which the UNIX operating system was an exemplar— not pure research divorced from commercial context, nor entirely the domain of commercial rapacity and intellectual property. +={ adaptability : + planning vs. ; + Internet : + early development +1 | relation to Free Software +1 ; + Rheingold, Howard ; + rumor on Usenet +8 ; + Usenet : + rumor on +8 +} + +Fun included the creation of mailing lists by the spread of software such as list-serv and majordomo; the collaborative maintenance and policing of Usenet; and the creation of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and MUD Object Orienteds (MOOs), both of which gave game players and Internet geeks a way to co-create software environments and discover many of the problems of management and policing that thereby emerged.~{ Julian Dibbell’s "A Rape in Cyberspace" and Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen are two classic examples of the detailed forms of life and collaborative ethical creation that preoccupied denizens of these worlds. }~ It also included the increasing array of "information services" that were built on top of the Internet, like archie, gopher, Veronica, WAIS, ftp, IRC—all of which were necessary to access the growing information wealth of the underground community lurking on the Internet. The meaning and practice of coordination in all of these projects was up for grabs: some were organized strictly as university research projects (gopher), while others were more fluid and open to participation and even control by contributing members (MOOs and MUDs). Licensing issues were explicit in some, unclear in some, and completely ignored in others. Some projects had autocratic leaders, while others experimented with everything from representative democracy to anarchism. +={ anarchism ; + communities ; + Multi-User Dungeons (MUDS) +} + +During this period (roughly 1987 to 1993), the Free Software Foundation attained a mythic cult status—primarily among UNIX and EMACS users. Part of this status was due to the superiority of the tools Stallman and his collaborators had already created: the GNU C Compiler (gcc), GNU EMACS, the GNU Debugger (gdb), GNU Bison, and loads of smaller utilities that replaced the original AT&T UNIX versions. The GNU GPL had also acquired a life of its own by this time, having reached maturity as a license and become the de facto choice for those committed to Free Software and the Free Software Foundation. By 1991, however, the rumors of the imminent appearance of Stallman’s replacement UNIX operating system had started to sound empty—it had been six years since his public announcement of his intention. Most hackers were skeptical of Stallman’s operating-system project, even if they acknowledged the success of all the other tools necessary to create a full-fledged operating system, and Stallman himself was stymied by the development ,{[pg 215]}, of one particular component: the kernel itself, called GNU Hurd. +={ EMACS (text editor) ; + Free Software Foundation : + cult status of +9 ; + General Public License (GPL) ; + GNU C Compiler (gcc) ; + GNU Hurd (kernel) +} + +% cult status of + +Linus Torvalds’s project was not initially imagined as a contribution to the Free Software Foundation: it was a Helsinki university student’s late-night project in learning the ins and outs of the relatively new Intel 386/486 microprocessor. Torvalds, along with tens of thousands of other computer-science students, was being schooled in UNIX through the pedagogy of Andrew Tanenbaum’s Minix, Douglas Comer’s Xinu-PC, and a handful of other such teaching versions designed to run on IBM PCs. Along with the classroom pedagogy in the 1980s came the inevitable connection to, lurking on, and posting to the Usenet and Arpanet mailing lists devoted to technical (and nontechnical) topics of all sorts.~{ The yearly influx of students to the Usenet and Arpanet in September earned that month the title "the longest month," due to the need to train new users in use and etiquette on the newsgroups. Later in the 1990s, when AOL allowed subscribers access to the Usenet hierarchy, it became known as "eternal September." See "September that Never Ended," Jargon File, http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html. }~ Torvalds was subscribed, naturally, to comp.os.minix, the newsgroup for users of Minix. +={ Arpanet (network) ; + Linux (Free Software project) : + origins in Minix +19 ; + Minix (operating systems) +19 ; + pedagogy : + operating systems and +1 ; + Tanenbaum, Andrew : + Minix and +} + +The fact of Linus Torvalds’s pedagogical embedding in the world of UNIX, Minix, the Free Software Foundation, and the Usenet should not be underestimated, as it often is in hagiographical accounts of the Linux operating system. Without this relatively robust moral-technical order or infrastructure within which it was possible to be at the right place at the right time, Torvalds’s late-night dorm-room project would have amounted to little more than that—but the pieces were all in place for his modest goals to be transformed into something much more significant. +={ infrastructure ; + moral and technical order +} + +Consider his announcement on 25 August 1991: + +_1 Hello everybody out there using minix—I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-) + +_1 Linus . . . + +_1 PS. Yes—it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.~{ Message-ID: { 1991aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1991aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi. }~ + +% ,{[pg 216]}, + +Torvalds’s announcement is telling as to where his project fit into the existing context: "just a hobby," not "big and professional like gnu" (a comment that suggests the stature that Stallman and the Free Software Foundation had achieved, especially since they were in reality anything but "big and professional"). The announcement was posted to the Minix list and thus was essentially directed at Minix users; but Torvalds also makes a point of insisting that the system would be free of cost, and his postscript furthermore indicates that it would be free of Minix code, just as Minix had been free of AT&T code. +={ AT&T ; + coordination (component of Free Software) : + of Linux vs. Minix +12 +} + +Torvalds also mentions that he has ported "bash" and "gcc," software created and distributed by the Free Software Foundation and tools essential for interacting with the computer and compiling new versions of the kernel. Torvalds’s decision to use these utilities, rather than write his own, reflects both the boundaries of his project (an operating-system kernel) and his satisfaction with the availability and reusability of software licensed under the GPL. +={ GNU C Compiler (gcc) ; + modifiability +2 +} + +So the system is based on Minix, just as Minix had been based on UNIX—piggy-backed or bootstrapped, rather than rewritten in an entirely different fashion, that is, rather than becoming a different kind of operating system. And yet there are clearly concerns about the need to create something that is not Minix, rather than simply extending or "debugging" Minix. This concern is key to understanding what happened to Linux in 1991. +={ debugging +5 } + +Tanenbaum’s Minix, since its inception in 1984, was always intended to allow students to see and change the source code of Minix in order to learn how an operating system worked, but it was not Free Software. It was copyrighted and owned by Prentice Hall, which distributed the textbooks. Tanenbaum made the case—similar to Gosling’s case for Unipress—that Prentice Hall was distributing the system far wider than if it were available only on the Internet: "A point which I don’t think everyone appreciates is that making something available by FTP is not necessarily the way to provide the widest distribution. The Internet is still a highly elite group. Most computer users are NOT on it. . . . MINIX is also widely used in Eastern Europe, Japan, Israel, South America, etc. Most of these people would never have gotten it if there hadn’t been a company selling it."~{ Message-ID: { 12595@star.cs.vu.nl }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=12595@star.cs.vu.nl. }~ +={ Tanenbaum, Andrew : + Minix and +9 ; + File Transfer Protocol (ftp) ; + Prentice Hall +1 ; + textbooks : + on operating systems and networks +1 +} + +% larger index range provided for tanenbaum + +By all accounts, Prentice Hall was not restrictive in its sublicensing of the operating system, if people wanted to create an "enhanced" ,{[pg 217]}, version of Minix. Similarly, Tanenbaum’s frequent presence on comp.os.minix testified to his commitment to sharing his knowledge about the system with anyone who wanted it—not just paying customers. Nonetheless, Torvalds’s pointed use of the word free and his decision not to reuse any of the code is a clear indication of his desire to build a system completely unencumbered by restrictions, based perhaps on a kind of intuitive folkloric sense of the dangers associated with cases like that of EMACS.~{ Indeed, initially, Torvalds’s terms of distribution for Linux were more restrictive than the GPL, including limitations on distributing it for a fee or for handling costs. Torvalds eventually loosened the restrictions and switched to the GPL in February 1992. Torvalds’s release notes for Linux 0.12 say, "The Linux copyright will change: I’ve had a couple of requests ,{[pg 339]}, to make it compatible with the GNU copyleft, removing the ‘you may not distribute it for money’ condition. I agree. I propose that the copyright be changed so that it conforms to GNU—pending approval of the persons who have helped write code. I assume this is going to be no problem for anybody: If you have grievances (‘I wrote that code assuming the copyright would stay the same’) mail me. Otherwise The GNU copyleft takes effect as of the first of February. If you do not know the gist of the GNU copyright—read it" (http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.12). }~ +={ comp.os.minix } + +The most significant aspect of Torvalds’s initial message, however, is his request: "I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them." Torvalds’s announcement and the subsequent interest it generated clearly reveal the issues of coordination and organization that would come to be a feature of Linux. The reason Torvalds had so many eager contributors to Linux, from the very start, was because he enthusiastically took them off of Tanenbaum’s hands. + +2~ Design and Adaptability +={ adaptability : + planning vs. +18 +} + +Tanenbaum’s role in the story of Linux is usually that of the straw man—a crotchety old computer-science professor who opposes the revolutionary young Torvalds. Tanenbaum did have a certain revolutionary reputation himself, since Minix was used in classrooms around the world and could be installed on IBM PCs (something no other commercial UNIX vendors had achieved), but he was also a natural target for people like Torvalds: the tenured professor espousing the textbook version of an operating system. So, despite the fact that a very large number of people were using or knew of Minix as a UNIX operating system (estimates of comp.os.minix subscribers were at 40,000), Tanenbaum was emphatically not interested in collaboration or collaborative debugging, especially if debugging also meant creating extensions and adding features that would make the system bigger and harder to use as a stripped-down tool for teaching. For Tanenbaum, this point was central: "I’ve been repeatedly offered virtual memory, paging, symbolic links, window systems, and all manner of features. I have usually declined because I am still trying to keep the system simple enough for students to understand. You can put all this stuff in your version, but I won’t ,{[pg 218]}, put it in mine. I think it is this point which irks the people who say ‘MINIX is not free,’ not the $60."~{ Message-ID: { 12667@star.cs.vu.nl }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=12667@star.cs.vu.nl. }~ +={ pedagogy : + Minix and +3 ; + comp.os.minix +} + +So while Tanenbaum was in sympathy with the Free Software Foundation’s goals (insofar as he clearly wanted people to be able to use, update, enhance, and learn from software), he was not in sympathy with the idea of having 40,000 strangers make his software "better." Or, to put it differently, the goals of Minix remained those of a researcher and a textbook author: to be useful in classrooms and cheap enough to be widely available and usable on the largest number of cheap computers. +={ Minix (operating system) : + goals of +4 ; + Free Software Foundation +1 +} + +By contrast, Torvalds’s "fun" project had no goals. Being a cocky nineteen-year-old student with little better to do (no textbooks to write, no students, grants, research projects, or committee meetings), Torvalds was keen to accept all the ready-made help he could find to make his project better. And with 40,000 Minix users, he had a more or less instant set of contributors. Stallman’s audience for EMACS in the early 1980s, by contrast, was limited to about a hundred distinct computers, which may have translated into thousands, but certainly not tens of thousands of users. Tanenbaum’s work in creating a generation of students who not only understood the internals of an operating system but, more specifically, understood the internals of the UNIX operating system created a huge pool of competent and eager UNIX hackers. It was the work of porting UNIX not only to various machines but to a generation of minds as well that set the stage for this event—and this is an essential, though often overlooked component of the success of Linux. +={ EMACS (text editor) : + number of users ; + Stallman,Richard ; + fun, and development of Linux +1 +} + +Many accounts of the Linux story focus on the fight between Torvalds and Tanenbaum, a fight carried out on comp.os.minix with the subject line "Linux is obsolete."~{ Message-ID: { 12595@star.cs.vu.nl }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=12595@star.cs.vu.nl. Key parts of the controversy were reprinted in Dibona et al. Open Sources. }~ Tanenbaum argued that Torvalds was reinventing the wheel, writing an operating system that, as far as the state of the art was concerned, was now obsolete. Torvalds, by contrast, asserted that it was better to make something quick and dirty that worked, invite contributions, and worry about making it state of the art later. Far from illustrating some kind of outmoded conservatism on Tanenbaum’s part, the debate highlights the distinction between forms of coordination and the meanings of collaboration. For Tanenbaum, the goals of Minix were either pedagogical or academic: to teach operating-system essentials or to explore new possibilities in operating-system design. By this model, Linux could do neither; it couldn’t be used in the classroom because ,{[pg 219]}, it would quickly become too complex and feature-laden to teach, and it wasn’t pushing the boundaries of research because it was an out-of-date operating system. Torvalds, by contrast, had no goals. What drove his progress was a commitment to fun and to a largely inarticulate notion of what interested him and others, defined at the outset almost entirely against Minix and other free operating systems, like FreeBSD. In this sense, it could only emerge out of the context—which set the constraints on its design—of UNIX, open systems, Minix, GNU, and BSD. +={ comp.os.minix : + "Linux is obsolete" debate on ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) : + FreeBSD ; + FreeBSD +} + +Both Tanenbaum and Torvalds operated under a model of coordination in which one person was ultimately responsible for the entire project: Tanenbaum oversaw Minix and ensured that it remained true to its goals of serving a pedagogical audience; Torvalds would oversee Linux, but he would incorporate as many different features as users wanted or could contribute. Very quickly—with a pool of 40,000 potential contributors—Torvalds would be in the same position Tanenbaum was in, that is, forced to make decisions about the goals of Linux and about which enhancements would go into it and which would not. What makes the story of Linux so interesting to observers is that it appears that Torvalds made no decision: he accepted almost everything. + +Tanenbaum’s goals and plans for Minix were clear and autocratically formed. Control, hierarchy, and restriction are after all appropriate in the classroom. But Torvalds wanted to do more. He wanted to go on learning and to try out alternatives, and with Minix as the only widely available way to do so, his decision to part ways starts to make sense; clearly he was not alone in his desire to explore and extend what he had learned. Nonetheless, Torvalds faced the problem of coordinating a new project and making similar decisions about its direction. On this point, Linux has been the subject of much reflection by both insiders and outsiders. Despite images of Linux as either an anarchic bazaar or an autocratic dictatorship, the reality is more subtle: it includes a hierarchy of contributors, maintainers, and "trusted lieutenants" and a sophisticated, informal, and intuitive sense of "good taste" gained through reading and incorporating the work of co-developers. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) : + individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +10 ; + hierarchy, in coordination +10 +} + +While it was possible for Torvalds to remain in charge as an individual for the first few years of Linux (1991-95, roughly), he eventually began to delegate some of that control to people who would make decisions about different subcomponents of the kernel. ,{[pg 220]}, It was thus possible to incorporate more of the "patches" (pieces of code) contributed by volunteers, by distributing some of the work of evaluating them to people other than Torvalds. This informal hierarchy slowly developed into a formal one, as Steven Weber points out: "The final de facto ‘grant’ of authority came when Torvalds began publicly to reroute relevant submissions to the lieutenants. In 1996 the decision structure became more formal with an explicit differentiation between ‘credited developers’ and ‘maintainers.’ . . . If this sounds very much like a hierarchical decision structure, that is because it is one—albeit one in which participation is strictly voluntary."~{ Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source, 164. }~ +={ patches (software) +3 ; + Weber, Steven ; + Linux (Free Software project) : + process of decision making +4 +} + +Almost all of the decisions made by Torvalds and lieutenants were of a single kind: whether or not to incorporate a piece of code submitted by a volunteer. Each such decision was technically complex: insert the code, recompile the kernel, test to see if it works or if it produces any bugs, decide whether it is worth keeping, issue a new version with a log of the changes that were made. Although the various official leaders were given the authority to make such changes, coordination was still technically informal. Since they were all working on the same complex technical object, one person (Torvalds) ultimately needed to verify a final version, containing all the subparts, in order to make sure that it worked without breaking. + +Such decisions had very little to do with any kind of design goals or plans, only with whether the submitted patch "worked," a term that reflects at once technical, aesthetic, legal, and design criteria that are not explicitly recorded anywhere in the project—hence, the privileging of adaptability over planning. At no point were the patches assigned or solicited, although Torvalds is justly famous for encouraging people to work on particular problems, but only if they wanted to. As a result, the system morphed in subtle, unexpected ways, diverging from its original, supposedly backwards "monolithic" design and into a novel configuration that reflected the interests of the volunteers and the implicit criteria of the leaders. +={ design ; + Linux (Free Software project) : + planning vs. adaptability in +9 +} + +By 1995-96, Torvalds and lieutenants faced considerable challenges with regard to hierarchy and decision-making, as the project had grown in size and complexity. The first widely remembered response to the ongoing crisis of benevolent dictatorship in Linux was the creation of "loadable kernel modules," conceived as a way to release some of the constant pressure to decide which patches would be incorporated into the kernel. The decision to modularize ,{[pg 221]}, Linux was simultaneously technical and social: the software-code base would be rewritten to allow for external loadable modules to be inserted "on the fly," rather than all being compiled into one large binary chunk; at the same time, it meant that the responsibility to ensure that the modules worked devolved from Torvalds to the creator of the module. The decision repudiated Torvalds’s early opposition to Tanenbaum in the "monolithic vs. microkernel" debate by inviting contributors to separate core from peripheral functions of an operating system (though the Linux kernel remains monolithic compared to classic microkernels). It also allowed for a significant proliferation of new ideas and related projects. It both contracted and distributed the hierarchy; now Linus was in charge of a tighter project, but more people could work with him according to structured technical and social rules of responsibility. +={ modifiability : + modularity in software +1 +} + +Creating loadable modules changed the look of Linux, but not because of any planning or design decisions set out in advance. The choice is an example of the privileged adaptability of the Linux, resolving the tension between the curiosity and virtuosity of individual contributors to the project and the need for hierarchical control in order to manage complexity. The commitment to adaptability dissolves the distinction between the technical means of coordination and the social means of management. It is about producing a meaningful whole by which both people and code can be coordinated—an achievement vigorously defended by kernel hackers. +={ design : + evolution, and +7 +} + +The adaptable organization and structure of Linux is often described in evolutionary terms, as something without teleological purpose, but responding to an environment. Indeed, Torvalds himself has a weakness for this kind of explanation. + +_1 Let’s just be honest, and admit that it [Linux] wasn’t designed. + +_1 Sure, there’s design too—the design of UNIX made a scaffolding for the system, and more importantly it made it easier for people to communicate because people had a mental model for what the system was like, which means that it’s much easier to discuss changes. + +_1 But that’s like saying that you know that you’re going to build a car with four wheels and headlights—it’s true, but the real bitch is in the details. + +_1 And I know better than most that what I envisioned 10 years ago has nothing in common with what Linux is today. There was certainly no premeditated design there.~{ Quoted in Zack Brown, "Kernel Traffic #146 for 17Dec2001," Kernel Traffic, http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt20011217_146.html; also quoted in Federico Iannacci, "The Linux Managing Model," http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/iannacci2.pdf. }~ + +% ,{[pg 222]}, + +Adaptability does not answer the questions of intelligent design. Why, for example, does a car have four wheels and two headlights? Often these discussions are polarized: either technical objects are designed, or they are the result of random mutations. What this opposition overlooks is the fact that design and the coordination of collaboration go hand in hand; one reveals the limits and possibilities of the other. Linux represents a particular example of such a problematic—one that has become the paradigmatic case of Free Software—but there have been many others, including UNIX, for which the engineers created a system that reflected the distributed collaboration of users around the world even as the lawyers tried to make it conform to legal rules about licensing and practical concerns about bookkeeping and support. + +Because it privileges adaptability over planning, Linux is a recursive public: operating systems and social systems. It privileges openness to new directions, at every level. It privileges the right to propose changes by actually creating them and trying to convince others to use and incorporate them. It privileges the right to fork the software into new and different kinds of systems. Given what it privileges, Linux ends up evolving differently than do systems whose life and design are constrained by corporate organization, or by strict engineering design principles, or by legal or marketing definitions of products—in short, by clear goals. What makes this distinction between the goal-oriented design principle and the principle of adaptability important is its relationship to politics. Goals and planning are the subject of negotiation and consensus, or of autocratic decision-making; adaptability is the province of critique. It should be remembered that Linux is by no means an attempt to create something radically new; it is a rewrite of a UNIX operating system, as Torvalds points out, but one that through adaptation can end up becoming something new. +={ critique, Free Software as ; + ontology : + of linux ; + recursive public +} + +2~ Patch and Vote +={ Apache (Free Software project) +28 ; + patches (software) : + voting in software development and +28 ; + software development : + patch and vote method +28 +} + +The Apache Web server and the Apache Group (now called the Apache Software Foundation) provide a second illuminating example of the how and why of coordination in Free Software of the 1990s. As with the case of Linux, the development of the Apache project illustrates how adaptability is privileged over planning ,{[pg 223]}, and, in particular, how this privileging is intended to resolve the tensions between individual curiosity and virtuosity and collective control and decision-making. It is also the story of the progressive evolution of coordination, the simultaneously technical and social mechanisms of coordinating people and code, patches and votes. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) : + individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +3 +} + +The Apache project emerged out of a group of users of the original httpd (HyperText Transmission Protocol Daemon) Web server created by Rob McCool at NCSA, based on the work of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web project at CERN. Berners-Lee had written a specification for the World Wide Web that included the mark-up language HTML, the transmission protocol http, and a set of libraries that implemented the code known as libwww, which he had dedicated to the public domain.~{ Message-ID: { 673c43e160C1a758@sluvca.slu.edu }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=673c43e160C1a758@sluvca.slu.edu. See also, Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web. }~ +={ Berners-Lee, Tim ; + httpd +22 ; + Hypertext Transfer Mark-up Language (HTML) ; + Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) ; + McCool, Rob +3 ; + World Wide Web (www) +2 +} + +The NCSA, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, picked up both www projects, subsequently creating both the first widely used browser, Mosaic, directed by Marc Andreessen, and httpd. Httpd was public domain up until version 1.3. Development slowed when McCool was lured to Netscape, along with the team that created Mosaic. By early 1994, when the World Wide Web had started to spread, many individuals and groups ran Web servers that used httpd; some of them had created extensions and fixed bugs. They ranged from university researchers to corporations like Wired Ventures, which launched the online version of its magazine (HotWired.com) in 1994. Most users communicated primarily through Usenet, on the comp.infosystems.www.* newsgroups, sharing experiences, instructions, and updates in the same manner as other software projects stretching back to the beginning of the Usenet and Arpanet newsgroups. +={ Andreessen, Marc ; + Arpanet (network) ; + Mosaic (web browser) ; + National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA) +2 ; + Rumor on Usenet ; + Usenet : + rumor on ; + User groups ; + Wired (magazine) : + HotWired (online version of Wired) +1 +} + +When NCSA failed to respond to most of the fixes and extensions being proposed, a group of several of the most active users of httpd began to communicate via a mailing list called new-httpd in 1995. The list was maintained by Brian Behlendorf, the webmaster for HotWired, on a server he maintained called hyperreal; its participants were those who had debugged httpd, created extensions, or added functionality. The list was the primary means of association and communication for a diverse group of people from various locations around the world. During the next year, participants hashed out issues related to coordination, to the identity of and the processes involved in patching the "new" httpd, version 1.3.~{ The original Apache Group included Brian Behlendorf, Roy T. Fielding, Rob Harthill, David Robinson, Cliff Skolnick, Randy Terbush, Robert S. Thau, Andrew Wilson, Eric Hagberg, Frank Peters, and Nicolas Pioch. The mailing list new-httpd eventually became the Apache developers list. The archives are available at http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/httpd-dev/ and cited hereafter as "Apache developer mailing list," followed by sender, subject, date, and time. }~ ,{[pg 224]}, +={ Behlendorf, Brian : + as head of Apache +24 ; + new httpd (mailing list) +24 +} + +Patching a piece of software is a peculiar activity, akin to debugging, but more like a form of ex post facto design. Patching covers the spectrum of changes that can be made: from fixing security holes and bugs that prevent the software from compiling to feature and performance enhancements. A great number of the patches that initially drew this group together grew out of needs that each individual member had in making a Web server function. These patches were not due to any design or planning decisions by NCSA, McCool, or the assembled group, but most were useful enough that everyone gained from using them, because they fixed problems that everyone would or could encounter. As a result, the need for a coordinated new-httpd release was key to the group’s work. This new version of NCSA httpd had no name initially, but apache was a persistent candidate; the somewhat apocryphal origin of the name is that it was "a patchy webserver."~{ For another version of the story, see Moody, Rebel Code, 127-28. The official story honors the Apache Indian tribes for "superior skills in warfare strategy and inexhaustible endurance." Evidence of the concern of the original members over the use of the name is clearly visible in the archives of the Apache project. See esp. Apache developer mailing list, Robert S. Thau, Subject: The political correctness question . . . , 22 April 1995, 21:06 EDT. }~ +={ bugs ; + debugging : + patching vs. ; + patches (software) : + debugging vs. ; + coordination (component of Free Software) +50 ; + software development : + Apache project +17 +} + +At the outset, in February and March 1995, the pace of work of the various members of new-httpd differed a great deal, but was in general extremely rapid. Even before there was an official release of a new httpd, process issues started to confront the group, as Roy Fielding later explained: "Apache began with a conscious attempt to solve the process issues first, before development even started, because it was clear from the very beginning that a geographically distributed set of volunteers, without any traditional organizational ties, would require a unique development process in order to make decisions."~{ Mockus, Fielding, and Herbsleb, "Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development," 3. }~ + +The need for process arose more or less organically, as the group developed mechanisms for managing the various patches: assigning them IDs, testing them, and incorporating them "by hand" into the main source-code base. As this happened, members of the list would occasionally find themselves lost, confused by the process or the efficiency of other members, as in this message from Andrew Wilson concerning Cliff Skolnick’s management of the list of bugs: +={ Wilson, Andrew +2 ; + Skolnick, Cliff +} + +_1 Cliff, can you concentrate on getting an uptodate copy of the bug/improvement list please. I’ve already lost track of just what the heck is meant to be going on. Also what’s the status of this pre-pre-pre release Apache stuff. It’s either a pre or it isn’t surely? AND is the pre-pre-etc thing the same as the thing Cliff is meant to be working on? + +_1 Just what the fsck is going on anyway? Ay, ay ay! Andrew Wilson.~{ Apache developer mailing list, Andrew Wilson, Subject: Re: httpd patch B5 updated, 14 March 1995, 21:49 GMT. }~ ,{[pg 225]}, + +To which Rob Harthill replied, "It is getting messy. I still think we should all implement one patch at a time together. At the rate (and hours) some are working we can probably manage a couple of patches a day. . . . If this is acceptable to the rest of the group, I think we should order the patches, and start a systematic processes of discussion, implementations and testing."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: Re: httpd patch B5 updated, 14 March 1995, 15:10 MST. }~ +={ Harthill, Rob +12 } + +Some members found the pace of work exciting, while others appealed for slowing or stopping in order to take stock. Cliff Skolnick created a system for managing the patches and proposed that list-members vote in order to determine which patches be included.~{ Apache developer mailing list, Cliff Skolnick, Subject: Process (please read), 15 March 1995, 3:11 PST; and Subject: Patch file format, 15 March 1995, 3:40 PST. }~ Rob Harthill voted first. +={ Skolnick, Cliff } + +group{ + + Here are my votes for the current patch list shown at http://www.hyperreal.com/httpd/patchgen/list.cgi + + I’ll use a vote of + + -1 have a problem with it + + 0 haven’t tested it yet (failed to understand it or whatever) + + +1 tried it, liked it, have no problem with it. + + [Here Harthill provides a list of votes on each patch.] + + If this voting scheme makes sense, lets use it to filter out the stuff we’re happy with. A "-1" vote should veto any patch. There seems to be about 6 or 7 of us actively commenting on patches, so I’d suggest that once a patch gets a vote of +4 (with no vetos), we can add it to an alpha.~{ Apache developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: patch list vote, 15 March 1995, 13:21:24 MST. }~ + +}group + +Harthill’s votes immediately instigated discussion about various patches, further voting, and discussion about the process (i.e., how many votes or vetoes were needed), all mixed together in a flurry of e-mail messages. The voting process was far from perfect, but it did allow some consensus on what "apache" would be, that is, which patches would be incorporated into an "official" (though not very public) release: Apache 0.2 on 18 March.~{ Apache developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: apache-0.2 on hyperreal, 18 March 1995, 18:46 MST. }~ Without a voting system, the group of contributors could have gone on applying patches individually, each in his own context, fixing the problems that ailed each user, but ignoring those that were irrelevant or unnecessary in that context. With a voting process, however, a convergence on a tested and approved new-httpd could emerge. As the process was refined, members sought a volunteer to take votes, to open and close the voting once a week, and to build a new version of Apache when the voting was done. (Andrew Wilson was the first volunteer, to which Cliff Skolnick replied, "I guess the first vote is ,{[pg 226]}, voting Andrew as the vote taker :-).")~{ Apache developer mailing list, Cliff Skolnick, Subject: Re: patch list vote, 21 March 1995, 2:47 PST. }~ The patch-and-vote process that emerged in the early stages of Apache was not entirely novel; many contributors noted that the FreeBSD project used a similar process, and some suggested the need for a "patch coordinator" and others worried that "using patches gets very ugly, very quickly."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Paul Richards, Subject: Re: vote counting, 21 March 1995, 22:24 GMT. }~ +={ Wilson, Andrew ; + Skolnick, Cliff ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) : + FreeBSD ; + FreeBSD +} + +The significance of the patch-and-vote system was that it clearly represented the tension between the virtuosity of individual developers and a group process aimed at creating and maintaining a common piece of software. It was a way of balancing the ability of each separate individual’s expertise against a common desire to ship and promote a stable, bug-free, public-domain Web server. As Roy Fielding and others would describe it in hindsight, this tension was part of Apache’s advantage. + +_1 Although the Apache Group makes decisions as a whole, all of the actual work of the project is done by individuals. The group does not write code, design solutions, document products, or provide support to our customers; individual people do that. The group provides an environment for collaboration and an excellent trial-by-fire for ideas and code, but the creative energy needed to solve a particular problem, redesign a piece of the system, or fix a given bug is almost always contributed by individual volunteers working on their own, for their own purposes, and not at the behest of the group. Competitors mistakenly assume Apache will be unable to take on new or unusual tasks because of the perception that we act as a group rather than follow a single leader. What they fail to see is that, by remaining open to new contributors, the group has an unlimited supply of innovative ideas, and it is the individuals who chose to pursue their own ideas who are the real driving force for innovation.~{ Roy T. Fielding, "Shared Leadership in the Apache Project." }~ +={ Apache (Free Software project) : + individual vs. group innovation +1 +} + +Although openness is widely touted as the key to the innovations of Apache, the claim is somewhat disingenuous: patches are just that, patches. Any large-scale changes to the code could not be accomplished by applying patches, especially if each patch must be subjected to a relatively harsh vote to be included. The only way to make sweeping changes—especially changes that require iteration and testing to get right—is to engage in separate "branches" of a project or to differentiate between internal and external releases—in short, to fork the project temporarily in hopes that it would soon rejoin its stable parent. Apache encountered this problem very early on with the "Shambhala" rewrite of httpd by Robert Thau. ,{[pg 227]}, +={ Shambhala +6 ; + Thau, Robert +6 ; + differentiation of software : + in Apache +6 | see also forking and sharing source code +6 ; + forking : + in Apache +6 +} + +Shambhala was never quite official: Thau called it his "noodling" server, or a "garage" project. It started as his attempt to rewrite httpd as a server which could handle and process multiple requests at the same time. As an experiment, it was entirely his own project, which he occasionally referred to on the new-httpd list: "Still hacking Shambhala, and laying low until it works well enough to talk about."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Robert S. Thau, Subject: Re: 0.7.2b, 7 June 1995, 17:27 EDT. }~ By mid-June of 1995, he had a working version that he announced, quite modestly, to the list as "a garage project to explore some possible new directions I thought *might* be useful for the group to pursue."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Robert S. Thau, Subject: My Garage Project, 12 June 1995, 21:14 GMT. }~ Another list member, Randy Terbush, tried it out and gave it rave reviews, and by the end of June there were two users exclaiming its virtues. But since it hadn’t ever really been officially identified as a fork, or an alternate development pathway, this led Rob Harthill to ask: "So what’s the situation regarding Shambhala and Apache, are those of you who have switched to it giving up on Apache and this project? If so, do you need a separate list to discuss Shambhala?"~{ Apache developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: Re: Shambhala, 30 June 1995, 9:44 MDT. }~ +={ Terbush, Randy } + +Harthill had assumed that the NCSA code-base was "tried and tested" and that Shambhala represented a split, a fork: "The question is, should we all go in one direction, continue as things stand or Shambahla [sic] goes off on its own?"~{ Apache developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: Re: Shambhala, 30 June 1995, 14:50 MDT. }~ His query drew out the miscommunication in detail: that Thau had planned it as a "drop-in" replacement for the NCSA httpd, and that his intentions were to make it the core of the Apache server, if he could get it to work. Harthill, who had spent no small amount of time working hard at patching the existing server code, was not pleased, and made the core issues explicit. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) : + individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +4 +} + +_1 Maybe it was rst’s [Robert Thau’s] choice of phrases, such as "garage project" and it having a different name, maybe I didn’t read his mailings thoroughly enough, maybe they weren’t explicit enough, whatever. . . . It’s a shame that nobody using Shambhala (who must have realized what was going on) didn’t raise these issues weeks ago. I can only presume that rst was too modest to push Shambhala, or at least discussion of it, onto us more vigourously. I remember saying words to the effect of "this is what I plan to do, stop me if you think this isn’t a good idea." Why the hell didn’t anyone say something? . . . [D]id others get the same impression about rst’s work as I did? Come on people, if you want to be part of this group, collaborate!~{ Apache developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: Re: Shambhala, 30 June 1995, 16:48 GMT. }~ ,{[pg 228]}, +={ collaboration : + different meanings of +2 +} + +Harthill’s injunction to collaborate seems surprising in the context of a mailing list and project created to facilitate collaboration, but the injunction is specific: collaborate by making plans and sharing goals. Implicit in his words is the tension between a project with clear plans and goals, an overarching design to which everyone contributes, as opposed to a group platform without clear goals that provides individuals with a setting to try out alternatives. Implicit in his words is the spectrum between debugging an existing piece of software with a stable identity and rewriting the fundamental aspects of it to make it something new. The meaning of collaboration bifurcates here: on the one hand, the privileging of the autonomous work of individuals which is submitted to a group peer review and then incorporated; on the other, the privileging of a set of shared goals to which the actions and labor of individuals is subordinated.~{ Gabriella Coleman captures this nicely in her discussion of the tension between the individual virtuosity of the hacker and the corporate populism of groups like Apache or, in her example, the Debian distribution of Linux. See Coleman, The Social Construction of Freedom. }~ +={ debugging : + patching vs. +2 ; + goals, lack of in Free Software +2 +} + +Indeed, the very design of Shambhala reflects the former approach of privileging individual work: like UNIX and EMACS before it, Shambhala was designed as a modular system, one that could "make some of that process [the patch-and-vote process] obsolete, by allowing stuff which is not universally applicable (e.g., database back-ends), controversial, or just half-baked, to be shipped anyway as optional modules."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Robert S. Thau, Subject: Re: Shambhala, 1 July 1995, 14:42 EDT. }~ Such a design separates the core platform from the individual experiments that are conducted on it, rather than creating a design that is modular in the hierarchical sense of each contributor working on an assigned section of a project. Undoubtedly, the core platform requires coordination, but extensions and modifications can happen without needing to transform the whole project.~{ A slightly different explanation of the role of modularity is discussed in Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source, 173-75. }~ Shambhala represents a certain triumph of the "shut up and show me the code" aesthetic: Thau’s "modesty" is instead a recognition that he should be quiet until it "works well enough to talk about," whereas Harthill’s response is frustration that no one has talked about what Thau was planning to do before it was even attempted. The consequence was that Harthill’s work seemed to be in vain, replaced by the work of a more virtuosic hacker’s demonstration of a superior direction. +={ modifiability : + modularity in software +} + +In the case of Apache one can see how coordination in Free Software is not just an afterthought or a necessary feature of distributed work, but is in fact at the core of software production itself, governing the norms and forms of life that determine what will count as good software, how it will progress with respect to a context and ,{[pg 229]}, background, and how people will be expected to interact around the topic of design decisions. The privileging of adaptability brings with it a choice in the mode of collaboration: it resolves the tension between the agonistic competitive creation of software, such as Robert Thau’s creation of Shambhala, and the need for collective coordination of complexity, such as Harthill’s plea for collaboration to reduce duplicated or unnecessary work. + +2~ Check Out and Commit +={ Linux (Free Software project) : + Source Code Management tools and +21 ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) +21 +} + +The technical and social forms that Linux and Apache take are enabled by the tools they build and use, from bug-tracking tools and mailing lists to the Web servers and kernels themselves. One such tool plays a very special role in the emergence of these organizations: Source Code Management systems (SCMs). SCMs are tools for coordinating people and code; they allow multiple people in dispersed locales to work simultaneously on the same object, the same source code, without the need for a central coordinating overseer and without the risk of stepping on each other’s toes. The history of SCMs—especially in the case of Linux—also illustrates the recursive-depth problem: namely, is Free Software still free if it is created with non-free tools? +={ Source Code Management tools (SCMs) : + definition of +1 ; + recursive public : + layers of +} + +SCM tools, like the Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) and Subversion, have become extremely common tools for Free Software programmers; indeed, it is rare to find a project, even a project conducted by only one individual, which does not make use of these tools. Their basic function is to allow two or more programmers to work on the same files at the same time and to provide feedback on where their edits conflict. When the number of programmers grows large, an SCM can become a tool for managing complexity. It keeps track of who has "checked out" files; it enables users to lock files if they want to ensure that no one else makes changes at the same time; it can keep track of and display the conflicting changes made by two users to the same file; it can be used to create "internal" forks or "branches" that may be incompatible with each other, but still allows programmers to try out new things and, if all goes well, merge the branches into the trunk later on. In sophisticated forms it can be used to "animate" successive changes to a piece of code, in order to visualize its evolution. ,{[pg 230]}, +={ Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) : + see also Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) +} + +Beyond mere coordination functions, SCMs are also used as a form of distribution; generally SCMs allow anyone to check out the code, but restrict those who can check in or "commit" the code. The result is that users can get instant access to the most up-to-date version of a piece of software, and programmers can differentiate between stable releases, which have few bugs, and "unstable" or experimental versions that are under construction and will need the help of users willing to test and debug the latest versions. SCM tools automate certain aspects of coordination, not only reducing the labor involved but opening up new possibilities for coordination. +={ bugs ; + software tools +1 ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) : + as tool for distribution +1 +} + +The genealogy of SCMs can be seen in the example of Ken Thompson’s creation of a diff tape, which he used to distribute changes that had been contributed to UNIX. Where Thompson saw UNIX as a spectrum of changes and the legal department at Bell Labs saw a series of versions, SCM tools combine these two approaches by minutely managing the revisions, assigning each change (each diff) a new version number, and storing the history of all of those changes so that software changes might be precisely undone in order to discover which changes cause problems. Written by Douglas McIlroy, "diff" is itself a piece of software, one of the famed small UNIX tools that do one thing well. The program diff compares two files, line by line, and prints out the differences between them in a structured format (showing a series of lines with codes that indicate changes, additions, or removals). Given two versions of a text, one could run diff to find the differences and make the appropriate changes to synchronize them, a task that is otherwise tedious and, given the exactitude of source code, prone to human error. A useful side-effect of diff (when combined with an editor like ed or EMACS) is that when someone makes a set of changes to a file and runs diff on both the original and the changed file, the output (i.e., the changes only) can be used to reconstruct the original file from the changed file. Diff thus allows for a clever, space-saving way to save all the changes ever made to a file, rather than retaining full copies of every new version, one saves only the changes. Ergo, version control. diff—and programs like it—became the basis for managing the complexity of large numbers of programmers working on the same text at the same time. +={ McIlroy, Douglas ; + AT&T : + Bell Laboratories ; + diff (software tool) : + history of +2 ; + Thompson, Ken +} + +One of the first attempts to formalize version control was Walter Tichy’s Revision Control System (RCS), from 1985.~{ Tichy, "RCS." }~ RCS kept track of the changes to different files using diff and allowed programmers ,{[pg 231]}, to see all of the changes that had been made to that file. RCS, however, could not really tell the difference between the work of one programmer and another. All changes were equal, in that sense, and any questions that might arise about why a change was made could remain unanswered. +={ RCS (software tool) +1 : + see also Source Code Management tools +} + +In order to add sophistication to RCS, Dick Grune, at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, began writing scripts that used RCS as a multi-user, Internet-accessible version-control system, a system that eventually became the Concurrent Versioning System. cvs allowed multiple users to check out a copy, make changes, and then commit those changes, and it would check for and either prevent or flag conflicting changes. Ultimately, cvs became most useful when programmers could use it remotely to check out source code from anywhere on the Internet. It allowed people to work at different speeds, different times, and in different places, without needing a central person in charge of checking and comparing the changes. cvs created a form of decentralized version control for very-large-scale collaboration; developers could work offline on software, and always on the most updated version, yet still be working on the same object. +={ Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) : + history of +1 ; + Grune, Dick +} + +Both the Apache project and the Linux kernel project use SCMs. In the case of Apache the original patch-and-vote system quickly began to strain the patience, time, and energy of participants as the number of contributors and patches began to grow. From the very beginning of the project, the contributor Paul Richards had urged the group to make use of cvs. He had extensive experience with the system in the Free-BSD project and was convinced that it provided a superior alternative to the patch-and-vote system. Few other contributors had much experience with it, however, so it wasn’t until over a year after Richards began his admonitions that cvs was eventually adopted. However, cvs is not a simple replacement for a patch-and-vote system; it necessitates a different kind of organization. Richards recognized the trade-off. The patch-and-vote system created a very high level of quality assurance and peer review of the patches that people submitted, while the cvs system allowed individuals to make more changes that might not meet the same level of quality assurance. The cvs system allowed branches—stable, testing, experimental—with different levels of quality assurance, while the patch-and-vote system was inherently directed at one final and stable version. As the case of Shambhala ,{[pg 232]}, exhibited, under the patch-and-vote system experimental versions would remain unofficial garage projects, rather than serve as official branches with people responsible for committing changes. +={ Richards, Paul ; + Shambhala : + see also Apache ; + Apache (Free Software project) +1 ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) : + FreeBSD ; + FreeBSD ; + Linux (Free Software project) ; + software development : + patch and vote method ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) : + right to "commit" change +1 +} + +While SCMs are in general good for managing conflicting changes, they can do so only up to a point. To allow anyone to commit a change, however, could result in a chaotic mess, just as difficult to disentangle as it would be without an SCM. In practice, therefore, most projects designate a handful of people as having the right to "commit" changes. The Apache project retained its voting scheme, for instance, but it became a way of voting for "committers" instead for patches themselves. Trusted committers—those with the mysterious "good taste," or technical intuition—became the core members of the group. + +The Linux kernel has also struggled with various issues surrounding SCMs and the management of responsibility they imply. The story of the so-called VGER tree and the creation of a new SCM called Bitkeeper is exemplary in this respect.~{ See Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source, 117-19; Moody, Rebel Code, 172-78. See also Shaikh and Cornford, "Version Management Tools." }~ By 1997, Linux developers had begun to use cvs to manage changes to the source code, though not without resistance. Torvalds was still in charge of the changes to the official stable tree, but as other "lieutenants" came on board, the complexity of the changes to the kernel grew. One such lieutenant was Dave Miller, who maintained a "mirror" of the stable Linux kernel tree, the VGER tree, on a server at Rutgers. In September 1998 a fight broke out among Linux kernel developers over two related issues: one, the fact that Torvalds was failing to incorporate (patch) contributions that had been forwarded to him by various people, including his lieutenants; and two, as a result, the VGER cvs repository was no longer in synch with the stable tree maintained by Torvalds. Two different versions of Linux threatened to emerge. +={ Miller, Dave ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) : + see also Bitkeeper ; + Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) : + Linux and ; + Linux (Free Software project) : + VGER tree and +2 ; + Bitkeeper (Source Code Management software) +12 ; + Torvalds, Linus : + in bitkeeper controversy +12 +} + +A great deal of yelling ensued, as nicely captured in Moody’s Rebel Code, culminating in the famous phrase, uttered by Larry McVoy: "Linus does not scale." The meaning of this phrase is that the ability of Linux to grow into an ever larger project with increasing complexity, one which can handle myriad uses and functions (to "scale" up), is constrained by the fact that there is only one Linus Torvalds. By all accounts, Linus was and is excellent at what he does—but there is only one Linus. The danger of this situation is the danger of a fork. A fork would mean one or more new versions would proliferate under new leadership, a situation much like ,{[pg 233]}, the spread of UNIX. Both the licenses and the SCMs are designed to facilitate this, but only as a last resort. Forking also implies dilution and confusion—competing versions of the same thing and potentially unmanageable incompatibilities. +={ McVoy, Larry +11 ; + Moody, Glyn ; + forking : + in Linux +1 +} + +The fork never happened, however, but only because Linus went on vacation, returning renewed and ready to continue and to be more responsive. But the crisis had been real, and it drove developers into considering new modes of coordination. Larry McVoy offered to create a new form of SCM, one that would allow a much more flexible response to the problem that the VGER tree represented. However, his proposed solution, called Bitkeeper, would create far more controversy than the one that precipitated it. + +McVoy was well-known in geek circles before Linux. In the late stages of the open-systems era, as an employee of Sun, he had penned an important document called "The Sourceware Operating System Proposal." It was an internal Sun Microsystems document that argued for the company to make its version of UNIX freely available. It was a last-ditch effort to save the dream of open systems. It was also the first such proposition within a company to "go open source," much like the documents that would urge Netscape to Open Source its software in 1998. Despite this early commitment, McVoy chose not to create Bitkeeper as a Free Software project, but to make it quasi-proprietary, a decision that raised a very central question in ideological terms: can one, or should one, create Free Software using non-free tools? +={ Free Software : + nonfree tools and +9 ; + Sun Microsystems +} + +On one side of this controversy, naturally, was Richard Stallman and those sharing his vision of Free Software. On the other were pragmatists like Torvalds claiming no goals and no commitment to "ideology"—only a commitment to "fun." The tension laid bare the way in which recursive publics negotiate and modulate the core components of Free Software from within. Torvalds made a very strong and vocal statement concerning this issue, responding to Stallman’s criticisms about the use of non-free software to create Free Software: "Quite frankly, I don’t _want_ people using Linux for ideological reasons. I think ideology sucks. This world would be a much better place if people had less ideology, and a whole lot more ‘I do this because it’s FUN and because others might find it useful, not because I got religion.’"~{ Linus Torvalds, "Re: [PATCH] Remove Bitkeeper Documentation from Linux Tree," 20 April 2002, http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0204.2/1018.html. Quoted in Shaikh and Cornford, "Version Management Tools." }~ +={ coordination (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +8 ; + Fun, and development of Linux ; + Stallman, Richard +} + +Torvalds emphasizes pragmatism in terms of coordination: the right tool for the job is the right tool for the job. In terms of licenses, ,{[pg 234]}, however, such pragmatism does not play, and Torvalds has always been strongly committed to the GPL, refusing to let non-GPL software into the kernel. This strategic pragmatism is in fact a recognition of where experimental changes might be proposed, and where practices are settled. The GPL was a stable document, sharing source code widely was a stable practice, but coordinating a project using SCMs was, during this period, still in flux, and thus Bitkeeper was a tool well worth using so long as it remained suitable to Linux development. Torvalds was experimenting with the meaning of coordination: could a non-free tool be used to create Free Software? +={ General Public License (GPL) : + passim +} + +McVoy, on the other hand, was on thin ice. He was experimenting with the meaning of Free Software licenses. He created three separate licenses for Bitkeeper in an attempt to play both sides: a commercial license for paying customers, a license for people who sell Bitkeeper, and a license for "free users." The free-user license allowed Linux developers to use the software for free—though it required them to use the latest version—and prohibited them from working on a competing project at the same time. McVoy’s attempt to have his cake and eat it, too, created enormous tension in the developer community, a tension that built from 2002, when Torvalds began using Bitkeeper in earnest, to 2005, when he announced he would stop. + +The tension came from two sources: the first was debates among developers addressing the moral question of using non-free software to create Free Software. The moral question, as ever, was also a technical one, as the second source of tension, the license restrictions, would reveal. + +The developer Andrew Trigdell, well known for his work on a project called Samba and his reverse engineering of a Microsoft networking protocol, began a project to reverse engineer Bitkeeper by looking at the metadata it produced in the course of being used for the Linux project. By doing so, he crossed a line set up by McVoy’s experimental licensing arrangement: the "free as long as you don’t copy me" license. Lawyers advised Trigdell to stay silent on the topic while Torvalds publicly berated him for "willful destruction" and a moral lapse of character in trying to reverse engineer Bitkeeper. Bruce Perens defended Trigdell and censured Torvalds for his seemingly contradictory ethics.~{ Andrew Orlowski, "‘Cool it, Linus’—Bruce Perens," Register, 15 April 2005, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/15/perens_on_torvalds/page2.html. }~ McVoy never sued Trigdell, and Bitkeeper has limped along as a commercial project, because, ,{[pg 235]}, much like the EMACS controversy of 1985, the Bitkeeper controversy of 2005 ended with Torvalds simply deciding to create his own SCM, called git. +={ Perens, Bruce ; + Trigdell, Andrew ; + reverse engineering ; + EMACS (text editor) : + controversy about +} + +The story of the VGER tree and Bitkeeper illustrate common tensions within recursive publics, specifically, the depth of the meaning of free. On the one hand, there is Linux itself, an exemplary Free Software project made freely available; on the other hand, however, there is the ability to contribute to this process, a process that is potentially constrained by the use of Bitkeeper. So long as the function of Bitkeeper is completely circumscribed—that is, completely planned—there can be no problem. However, the moment one user sees a way to change or improve the process, and not just the kernel itself, then the restrictions and constraints of Bitkeeper can come into play. While it is not clear that Bitkeeper actually prevented anything, it is also clear that developers clearly recognized it as a potential drag on a generalized commitment to adaptability. Or to put it in terms of recursive publics, only one layer is properly open, that of the kernel itself; the layer beneath it, the process of its construction, is not free in the same sense. It is ironic that Torvalds—otherwise the spokesperson for antiplanning and adaptability—willingly adopted this form of constraint, but not at all surprising that it was collectively rejected. +={ adaptability : + as a form of critique +3 ; + critique, Free Software as +3 ; + recursive public : + layers of +1 +} + +The Bitkeeper controversy can be understood as a kind of experiment, a modulation on the one hand of the kinds of acceptable licenses (by McVoy) and on the other of acceptable forms of coordination (Torvalds’s decision to use Bitkeeper). The experiment was a failure, but a productive one, as it identified one kind of non-free software that is not safe to use in Free Software development: the SCM that coordinates the people and the code they contribute. In terms of recursive publics the experiment identified the proper depth of recursion. Although it might be possible to create Free Software using some kinds of non-free tools, SCMs are not among them; both the software created and the software used to create it need to be free.~{ Similar debates have regularly appeared around the use of non-free compilers, non-free debuggers, non-free development environments, and so forth. There are, however, a large number of people who write and promote Free Software that runs on proprietary operating systems like Macintosh and Windows, as well as a distinction between tools and formats. So, ,{[pg 341]}, for instance, using Adobe Photoshop to create icons is fine so long as they are in standard open formats like PNG or JPG, and not proprietary forms such as GIF or photoshop. }~ + +The Bitkeeper controversy illustrates again that adaptability is not about radical invention, but about critique and response. Whereas controlled design and hierarchical planning represent the domain of governance—control through goal-setting and orientation of a collective or a project—adaptability privileges politics, properly speaking, the ability to critique existing design and to ,{[pg 236]}, propose alternatives without restriction. The tension between goal-setting and adaptability is also part of the dominant ideology of intellectual property. According to this ideology, IP laws promote invention of new products and ideas, but restrict the re-use or transformation of existing ones; defining where novelty begins is a core test of the law. McVoy made this tension explicit in his justifications for Bitkeeper: "Richard [Stallman] might want to consider the fact that developing new software is extremely expensive. He’s very proud of the collection of free software, but that’s a collection of re-implementations, but no profoundly new ideas or products. . . . What if the free software model simply can’t support the costs of developing new ideas?"~{ Quoted in Jeremy Andrews, "Interview: Larry McVoy," Kernel Trap, 28 May 2002, http://Kerneltrap.org/node/222. }~ +={ novelty, of Free Software +1 } + +Novelty, both in the case of Linux and in intellectual property law more generally, is directly related to the interplay of social and technical coordination: goal direction vs. adaptability. The ideal of adaptability promoted by Torvalds suggests a radical alternative to the dominant ideology of creation embedded in contemporary intellectual-property systems. If Linux is "new," it is new through adaptation and the coordination of large numbers of creative contributors who challenge the "design" of an operating system from the bottom up, not from the top down. By contrast, McVoy represents a moral imagination of design in which it is impossible to achieve novelty without extremely expensive investment in top-down, goal-directed, unpolitical design—and it is this activity that the intellectual-property system is designed to reward. Both are engaged, however, in an experiment; both are engaged in "figuring out" what the limits of Free Software are. +={ figuring out ; + moral and technical order +} + +2~ Coordination Is Design + +Many popular accounts of Free Software skip quickly over the details of its mechanism to suggest that it is somehow inevitable or obvious that Free Software should work—a self-organizing, emergent system that manages complexity through distributed contributions by hundreds of thousands of people. In The Success of Open Source Steven Weber points out that when people refer to Open Source as a self-organizing system, they usually mean something more like "I don’t understand how it works."~{ Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source, 132. }~ ,{[pg 237]}, +={ Weber, Steven } + +Eric Raymond, for instance, suggests that Free Software is essentially the emergent, self-organizing result of "collaborative debugging": "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."~{ Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. }~ The phrase implies that the core success of Free Software is the distributed, isolated, labor of debugging, and that design and planning happen elsewhere (when a developer "scratches an itch" or responds to a personal need). On the surface, such a distinction seems quite obvious: designing is designing, and debugging is removing bugs from software, and presto!—Free Software. At the extreme end, it is an understanding by which only individual geniuses are capable of planning and design, and if the initial conditions are properly set, then collective wisdom will fill in the details. +={ Raymond, Eric Steven ; + adaptability : + planning vs. +5 ; + bugs +5 ; + debugging : + patching vs. +5 +} + +However, the actual practice and meaning of collective or collaborative debugging is incredibly elastic. Sometimes debugging means fixing an error; sometimes it means making the software do something different or new. (A common joke, often made at Microsoft’s expense, captures some of this elasticity: whenever something doesn’t seem to work right, one says, "That’s a feature, not a bug.") Some programmers see a design decision as a stupid mistake and take action to correct it, whereas others simply learn to use the software as designed. Debugging can mean something as simple as reading someone else’s code and helping them understand why it does not work; it can mean finding bugs in someone else’s software; it can mean reliably reproducing bugs; it can mean pinpointing the cause of the bug in the source code; it can mean changing the source to eliminate the bug; or it can, at the limit, mean changing or even re-creating the software to make it do something different or better.~{ Gabriella Coleman, in "The Social Construction of Freedom," provides an excellent example of a programmer’s frustration with font-lock in EMACS, something that falls in between a bug and a feature. The programmer’s frustration is directed at the stupidity of the design (and implied designers), but his solution is not a fix, but a work-around—and it illustrates how debugging does not always imply collaboration. }~ For academics, debugging can be a way to build a career: "Find bug. Write paper. Fix bug. Write paper. Repeat."~{ Dan Wallach, interview, 3 October 2003. }~ For commercial software vendors, by contrast, debugging is part of a battery of tests intended to streamline a product. +={ Microsoft } + +Coordination in Free Software is about adaptability over planning. It is a way of resolving the tension between individual virtuosity in creation and the social benefit in shared labor. If all software were created, maintained, and distributed only by individuals, coordination would be superfluous, and software would indeed be part of the domain of poetry. But even the paradigmatic cases of virtuosic creation—EMACS by Richard Stallman, UNIX by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie—clearly represent the need for creative forms ,{[pg 238]}, of coordination and the fundamental practice of reusing, reworking, rewriting, and imitation. UNIX was not created de novo, but was an attempt to streamline and rewrite Multics, itself a system that evolved out of Project MAC and the early mists of time-sharing and computer hacking.~{ Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream Machine details the family history well. }~ EMACS was a reworking of the TECO editor. Both examples are useful for understanding the evolution of modes of coordination and the spectrum of design and debugging. +={ Ritchie, Dennis +2 ; + Adaptability : + planning vs. +5 ; + coordination (component of Free Software) : + individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +1 ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) +1 ; + modifiability +3 ; + planning +2 ; + UNIX operating system : + development of +1 +} + +UNIX was initially ported and shared through mixed academic and commercial means, through the active participation of computer scientists who both received updates and contributed fixes back to Thompson and Ritchie. No formal system existed to manage this process. When Thompson speaks of his understanding of UNIX as a "spectrum" and not as a series of releases (V1, V2, etc.), the implication is that work on UNIX was continuous, both within Bell Labs and among its widespread users. Thompson’s use of the diff tape encapsulates the core problem of coordination: how to collect and redistribute the changes made to the system by its users. +={ AT&T : + Bell Laboratories +1 ; + diff (software tool) +} + +Similarly, Bill Joy’s distribution of BSD and James Gosling’s distribution of GOSMACS were both ad hoc, noncorporate experiments in "releasing early and often." These distribution schemes had a purpose (beyond satisfying demand for the software). The frequent distribution of patches, fixes, and extensions eased the pain of debugging software and satisfied users’ demands for new features and extensions (by allowing them to do both themselves). Had Thompson and Ritchie followed the conventional corporate model of software production, they would have been held responsible for thoroughly debugging and testing the software they distributed, and AT&T or Bell Labs would have been responsible for coming up with all innovations and extensions as well, based on marketing and product research. Such an approach would have sacrificed adaptability in favor of planning. But Thompson’s and Ritchie’s model was different: both the extension and the debugging of software became shared responsibilities of the users and the developers. Stallman’s creation of EMACS followed a similar pattern; since EMACS was by design extensible and intended to satisfy myriad unforeseen needs, the responsibility rested on the users to address those needs, and sharing their extensions and fixes had obvious social benefit. +={ Gosling, James ; + Joy, Bill ; + GOSMACS (version of EMACS) +} + +The ability to see development of software as a spectrum implies more than just continuous work on a product; it means seeing the ,{[pg 239]}, product itself as something fluid, built out of previous ideas and products and transforming, differentiating into new ones. Debugging, from this perspective, is not separate from design. Both are part of a spectrum of changes and improvements whose goals and direction are governed by the users and developers themselves, and the patterns of coordination they adopt. It is in the space between debugging and design that Free Software finds its niche. +={ software development : + as spectrum +} + +2~ Conclusion: Experiments and Modulations +={ experimentation +2 } + +% experimentation index link added + +Coordination is a key component of Free Software, and is frequently identified as the central component. Free Software is the result of a complicated story of experimentation and construction, and the forms that coordination takes in Free Software are specific outcomes of this longer story. Apache and Linux are both experiments—not scientific experiments per se but collective social experiments in which there are complex technologies and legal tools, systems of coordination and governance, and moral and technical orders already present. + +Free Software is an experimental system, a practice that changes with the results of new experiments. The privileging of adaptability makes it a peculiar kind of experiment, however, one not directed by goals, plans, or hierarchical control, but more like what John Dewey suggested throughout his work: the experimental praxis of science extended to the social organization of governance in the service of improving the conditions of freedom. What gives this experimentation significance is the centrality of Free Software—and specifically of Linux and Apache—to the experimental expansion of the Internet. As an infrastructure or a milieu, the Internet is changing the conditions of social organization, changing the relationship of knowledge to power, and changing the orientation of collective life toward governance. Free Software is, arguably, the best example of an attempt to make this transformation public, to ensure that it uses the advantages of adaptability as critique to counter the power of planning as control. Free Software, as a recursive public, proceeds by proposing and providing alternatives. It is a bit like Kant’s version of enlightenment: insofar as geeks speak (or hack) as scholars, in a public realm, they have a right to propose criticisms and changes of any sort; as soon as they relinquish ,{[pg 240]}, that commitment, they become private employees or servants of the sovereign, bound by conscience and power to carry out the duties of their given office. The constitution of a public realm is not a universal activity, however, but a historically specific one: Free Software confronts the specific contemporary technical and legal infrastructure by which it is possible to propose criticisms and offer alternatives. What results is a recursive public filled not only with individuals who govern their own actions but also with code and concepts and licenses and forms of coordination that turn these actions into viable, concrete technical forms of life useful to inhabitants of the present. +={ Dewey, John ; + Kant, Immanuel ; + critique, Free Software as ; + geeks : + as moderns ; + reorientation of power and knowledge ; + recursive public +} + +:B~ Part III modulations + +1~part_iii [Part III] -# + +_1 The question cannot be answered by argument. Experimental method means experiment, and the question can be answered only by trying, by organized effort. The reasons for making the trial are not abstract or recondite. They are found in the confusion, uncertainty and conflict that mark the modern world. . . . The task is to go on, and not backward, until the method of intelligence and experimental control is the rule in social relations and social direction. - john dewey, Liberalism and Social Action +={ Dewey, John ; + experimentation +} + +1~ 8. "If We Succeed, We Will Disappear" + +% ,{[pg 243]}, + +In early 2002, after years of reading and learning about Open Source and Free Software, I finally had a chance to have dinner with famed libertarian, gun-toting, Open Source-founding impresario Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and other amateur anthropological musings on the subject of Free Software. He had come to Houston, to Rice University, to give a talk at the behest of the Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI). Visions of a mortal confrontation between two anthropologists-manqué filled my head. I imagined explaining point by point why his references to self-organization and evolutionary psychology were misguided, and how the long tradition of economic anthropology contradicted basically everything he had to say about gift-exchange. Alas, two things conspired against this epic, if bathetic, showdown. +={ Raymond, Eric Steven +4 ; + Cathedral and the Bazaar ; + Free Software : + anthropology and +1 ; + Rice University +3 +} + +% cath baz, left out quotation marks for current index sort + +First, there was the fact that (as so often happens in meetings among geeks) there was only one woman present at dinner; she was ,{[pg 244]}, young, perhaps unmarried, but not a student—an interested female hacker. Raymond seated himself beside this woman, turned toward her, and with a few one-minute-long exceptions proceeded to lavish her with all of his available attention. The second reason was that I was seated next to Richard Baraniuk and Brent Hendricks. All at once, Raymond looked like the past of Free Software, arguing the same arguments, using the same rhetoric of his online publications, while Baraniuk and Hendricks looked like its future, posing questions about the transformation—the modulation—of Free Software into something surprising and new. +={ Baraniuk, Richard +36 ; + gender ; + Hendricks, Brent +36 ; + modulation : + of Free Software ; + participant observation +} + +Baraniuk, a professor of electrical engineering and a specialist in digital signal processing, and Hendricks, an accomplished programmer, had started a project called Connexions, an "open content repository of educational materials." Far more interesting to me than Raymond’s amateur philosophizing was this extant project to extend the ideas of Free Software to the creation of educational materials—textbooks, in particular. +={ Connexions project +7 ; + Digital signal processing (DSP) ; + textbooks +} + +Rich and Brent were, by the looks of it, equally excited to be seated next to me, perhaps because I was answering their questions, whereas Raymond was not, or perhaps because I was a new hire at Rice University, which meant we could talk seriously about collaboration. Rich and Brent (and Jan Odegard, who, as director of CITI, had organized the dinner) were keen to know what I could add to help them understand the "social" aspects of what they wanted to do with Connexions, and I, in return, was equally eager to learn how they conceptualized their Free Software-like project: what had they kept the same and what had they changed in their own experiment? Whatever they meant by "social" (and sometimes it meant ethical, sometimes legal, sometimes cultural, and so on), they were clear that there were domains of expertise in which they felt comfortable (programming, project management, teaching, and a particular kind of research in computer science and electrical engineering) and domains in which they did not (the "norms" of academic life outside their disciplines, intellectual-property law, "culture"). Although I tried to explain the nature of my own expertise in social theory, philosophy, history, and ethnographic research, the academic distinctions were far less important than the fact that I could ask detailed and pointed questions about the project, questions that indicated to them that I must have some kind of stake in the domains that they needed filled—in particular, ,{[pg 245]}, around the question of whether Connexions was the same thing as Free Software, and what the implications of that might be. +={ culture } + +Raymond courted and chattered on, then left, the event of his talk and dinner of fading significance, but over the following weeks, as I caught up with Brent and Rich, I became (surprisingly quickly) part of their novel experiment. + +2~ After Free Software + +My nonmeeting with Raymond is an allegory of sorts: an allegory of what comes after Free Software. The excitement around that table was not so much about Free Software or Open Source, but about a certain possibility, a kind of genotypic urge of which Free Software seemed a fossil phenotype and Connexions a live one. Rich and Brent were people in the midst of figuring something out. They were engaged in modulating the practices of Free Software. By modulation I mean exploring in detail the concrete practices—the how—of Free Software in order to ask what can be changed, and what cannot, in order to maintain something (openness?) that no one can quite put his finger on. What drew me immediately to Connexions was that it was related to Free Software, not metaphorically or ideologically, but concretely, practically, and experimentally, a relationship that was more about emergence out of than it was about the reproduction of forms. But the opposition between emergence and reproduction immediately poses a question, not unlike that of the identity of species in evolution: if Free Software is no longer software, what exactly is it? +={ experimentation +1 : + see also modulations ; + modulation : + practices of +4 ; + practices : + five components of Free Software +} + +In part III I confront this question directly. Indeed, it was this question that necessitated part II, the analytic decomposition of the practices and histories of Free Software. In order to answer the question "Is Connexions Free Software?" (or vice versa) it was necessary to rethink Free Software as itself a collective, technical experiment, rather than as an expression of any ideology or culture. To answer yes, or no, however, merely begs the question "What is Free Software?" What is the cultural significance of these practices? The concept of a recursive public is meant to reveal in part the significance of both Free Software and emergent projects like Connexions; it is meant to help chart when these emergent projects branch off absolutely (cease to be public) and when they do not, by ,{[pg 246]}, focusing on how they modulate the five components that give Free Software its contemporary identity. +={ cultural significance ; + recursive public +3 ; + Free Software : + components of +1 +} + +Connexions modulates all of the components except that of the movement (there is, as of yet, no real "Free Textbook" movement, but the "Open Access" movement is a close second cousin).~{ In January 2005, when I first wrote this analysis, this was true. By April 2006, the Hewlett Foundation had convened the Open Educational Resources "movement" as something that would transform the production and circulation of textbooks like those created by Connexions. Indeed, in Rich Baraniuk’s report for Hewlett, the first paragraph reads: "A grassroots movement is on the verge of sweeping through the academic world. The open education movement is based on a set of intuitions that are shared by a remarkably wide range of academics: that knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people should receive credit and kudos for contributing to education and research; and that concepts and ideas are linked in unusual and surprising ways and not the simple linear forms that textbooks present. Open education promises to fundamentally change the way authors, instructors, and students interact worldwide" (Baraniuk and King, "Connexions"). (In a nice confirmation of just how embedded participation can become in anthropology, Baraniuk cribbed the second sentence from something I had written two years earlier as part of a description of what I thought Connexions hoped to achieve.) The "movement" as such still does not quite exist, but the momentum for it is clearly part of the actions that Hewlett hopes to achieve. }~ Perhaps the most complex modulation concerns coordination—changes to the practice of coordination and collaboration in academic-textbook creation in particular, and more generally to the nature of collaboration and coordination of knowledge in science and scholarship generally. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) ; + movement (component of Free Software) +2 +} + +Connexions emerged out of Free Software, and not, as one might expect, out of education, textbook writing, distance education, or any of those areas that are topically connected to pedagogy. That is to say, the people involved did not come to their project by attempting to deal with a problem salient to education and teaching as much as they did so through the problems raised by Free Software and the question of how those problems apply to university textbooks. Similarly, a second project, Creative Commons, also emerged out of a direct engagement with and exploration of Free Software, and not out of any legal movement or scholarly commitment to the critique of intellectual-property law or, more important, out of any desire to transform the entertainment industry. Both projects are resolutely committed to experimenting with the given practices of Free Software—to testing their limits and changing them where they can—and this is what makes them vibrant, risky, and potentially illuminating as cases of a recursive public. +={ affinity (of geeks) ; + commons +1 ; + Creative Commons +1 ; + pedagogy ; + recursive public : + examples of +1 +} + +While both initiatives are concerned with conventional subject areas (educational materials and cultural productions), they enter the fray orthogonally, armed with anxiety about the social and moral order in which they live, and an urge to transform it by modulating Free Software. This binds such projects across substantive domains, in that they are forced to be oppositional, not because they want to be (the movement comes last), but because they enter the domains of education and the culture industry as outsiders. They are in many ways intuitively troubled by the existing state of affairs, and their organizations, tools, legal licenses, and movements are seen as alternative imaginations of social order, especially concerning creative freedom and the continued existence of a commons of scholarly knowledge. To the extent that these projects ,{[pg 247]}, remain in an orthogonal relationship, they are making a recursive public appear—something the textbook industry and the entertainment industry are, by contrast, not at all interested in doing, for obvious financial and political reasons. +={ moral and technical order } + +2~ Stories of Connexion +={ Connexions project : + history and genesis of +26 +} + +I’m at dinner again. This time, a windowless hotel conference room in the basement maybe, or perhaps high up in the air. Lawyers, academics, activists, policy experts, and foundation people are semi-excitedly working their way through the hotel’s steam-table fare. I’m trying to tell a story to the assembled group—a story that I have heard Rich Baraniuk tell a hundred times—but I’m screwing it up. Rich always gets enthusiastic stares of wonder, light-bulbs going off everywhere, a subvocalized "Aha!" or a vigorous nod. I, on the other hand, am clearly making it too complicated. Faces and foreheads are squirmed up into lines of failed comprehension, people stare at the gravy-sodden food they’re soldiering through, weighing the option of taking another bite against listening to me complicate an already complicated world. I wouldn’t be doing this, except that Rich is on a plane, or in a taxi, delayed by snow or engineers or perhaps at an eponymous hotel in another city. Meanwhile, our co-organizer Laurie Racine, has somehow convinced herself that I have the childlike enthusiasm necessary to channel Rich. I’m flattered, but unconvinced. After about twenty minutes, so is she, and as I try to answer a question, she stops me and interjects, "Rich really needs to be here. He should really be telling this story." + +Miraculously, he shows up and, before he can even say hello, is conscripted into telling his story properly. I sigh in relief and pray that I’ve not done any irreparable damage and that I can go back to my role as straight man. I can let the superaltern speak for himself. The downside of participant observation is being asked to participate in what one had hoped first of all to observe. I do know the story—I have heard it a hundred times. But somehow what I hear, ears tuned to academic questions and marveling at some of the stranger claims he makes, somehow this is not the ear for enlightenment that his practiced and boyish charm delivers to those hearing it for the first time; it is instead an ear tuned to questions ,{[pg 248]}, of why: why this project? Why now? And even, somewhat convolutedly, why are people so fascinated when he tells the story? How could I tell it like Rich? + +Rich is an engineer, in particular, a specialist in Digital Signal Processing (DSP). DSP is the science of signals. It is in everything, says Rich: your cell phones, your cars, your CD players, all those devices. It is a mathematical discipline, but it is also an intensely practical one, and it’s connected to all kinds of neighboring fields of knowledge. It is the kind of discipline that can connect calculus, bioinformatics, physics, and music. The statistical and analytical techniques come from all sorts of research and end up in all kinds of interesting devices. So Rich often finds himself trying to teach students to make these kinds of connections—to understand that a Fourier transform is not just another chapter in calculus but a tool for manipulating signals, whether in bioinformatics or in music. +={ Digital signal processing (DSP) } + +Around 1998 or 1999, Rich decided that it was time for him to write a textbook on DSP, and he went to the dean of engineering, Sidney Burris, to tell him about the idea. Burris, who is also a DSP man and longtime member of the Rice University community, said something like, "Rich, why don’t you do something useful?" By which he meant: there are a hundred DSP textbooks out there, so why do you want to write the hundred and first? Burris encouraged Rich to do something bigger, something ambitious enough to put Rice on the map. I mention this because it is important to note that even a university like Rice, with a faculty and graduate students on par with the major engineering universities of the country, perceives that it gets no respect. Burris was, and remains, an inveterate supporter of Connexions, precisely because it might put Rice "in the history books" for having invented something truly novel. +={ Burris, C. Sidney ; + Connexions project : + textbooks and +4 ; + Rice University +} + +At about the same time as his idea for a textbook, Rich’s research group was switching over to Linux, and Rich was first learning about Open Source and the emergence of a fully free operating system created entirely by volunteers. It isn’t clear what Rich’s aha! moment was, other than simply when he came to an understanding that such a thing as Linux was actually possible. Nonetheless, at some point, Rich had the idea that his textbook could be an Open Source textbook, that is, a textbook created not just by him, but by DSP researchers all over the world, and made available to everyone to make use of and modify and improve as they saw fit, just like Linux. Together with Brent Hendricks, Yan David Erlich, ,{[pg 249]}, and Ross Reedstrom, all of whom, as geeks, had a deep familiarity with the history and practices of Free and Open Source Software, Rich started to conceptualize a system; they started to think about modulations of different components of Free and Open Source Software. The idea of a Free Software textbook repository slowly took shape. +={ Linux (Free Software project) ; + Open Source : + inspiration for Connexions +27 ; + Reedstrom, Ross +} + +Thus, Connexions: an "open content repository of high-quality educational materials." These "textbooks" very quickly evolved into something else: "modules" of content, something that has never been sharply defined, but which corresponds more or less to a small chunk of teachable information, like two or three pages in a textbook. Such modules are much easier to conceive of in sciences like mathematics or biology, in which textbooks are often multiauthored collections, finely divided into short chapters with diagrams, exercises, theorems, or programs. Modules lend themselves much less well to a model of humanities or social-science scholarship based in reading texts, discussion, critique, and comparison—and this bias is a clear reflection of what Brent, Ross, and Rich knew best in terms of teaching and writing. Indeed, the project’s frequent recourse to the image of an assembly-line model of knowledge production often confirms the worst fears of humanists and educators when they first encounter Connexions. The image suggests that knowledge comes in prepackaged and colorfully branded tidbits for the delectation of undergrads, rather than characterizing knowledge as a state of being or as a process. +={ Connexions project : + model of learning in | modules in +1 +} + +The factory image (figure 7) is a bit misleading. Rich’s and Brent’s imaginations are in fact much broader, which shows whenever they demo the project, or give a talk, or chat at a party about it. Part of my failure to communicate excitement when I tell the story of Connexions is that I skip the examples, which is where Rich starts: what if, he says, you are a student taking Calculus 101 and, at the same time, Intro to Signals and Systems—no one is going to explain to you how Fourier transforms form a bridge, or connection, between them. "Our brains aren’t organized in linear, chapter-by-chapter ways," Rich always says, "so why are our textbooks?" How can we give students a way to see the connection between statistics and genetics, between architecture and biology, between intellectual-property law and chemical engineering? Rich is always looking for new examples: a music class for kids that uses information from physics, or vice versa, for instance. Rich’s great hope is that the ,{[pg 250]}, ,{[pg 251]}, more modules there are in the Connexions commons, the more fantastic and fascinating might be the possibilities for such novel—and natural—connections. +={ Connexions project : + as "factory of knowledge" +3 +} + +% image placed after end of paragraph + +{ 2bits_08_07-100.png }image ~[* The Connexions textbook as a factory. Illustration by Jenn Drummond, Ross Reedstrom, Max Starkenberg, and others, 1999-2004. Used with permission. ]~ + +Free Software—and, in particular, Open Source in the guise of "self-organizing" distributed systems of coordination—provide a particular promise of meeting the challenges of teaching and learning that Rich thinks we face. Rich’s commitment is not to a certain kind of pedagogical practice, but to the "social" or "community" benefits of thousands of people working "together" on a textbook. Indeed, Connexions did not emerge out of education or educational technology; it was not aligned with any particular theory of learning (though Rich eventually developed a rhetoric of linked, networked, connected knowledge—hence the name Connexions—that he uses often to sell the project). There is no school of education at Rice, nor a particular constituency for such a project (teacher-training programs, say, or administrative requirements for online education). What makes Rich’s sell even harder is that the project emerged at about the same time as the high-profile failure of dotcom bubble-fueled schemes to expand university education into online education, distance education, and other systems of expanding the paying student body without actually inviting them onto campus. The largest of these failed experiments by far was the project at Columbia, which had reached the stage of implementation at the time the bubble burst in 2000.~{ See Chris Beam, "Fathom.com Shuts Down as Columbia Withdraws," Columbia Spectator, 27 January 2003, http://www.columbiaspectator.com/. Also see David Noble’s widely read critique, "Digital Diploma Mills." }~ +={ Connexions project : + relationship to education +2 ; + distance learning +2 +} + +Thus, Rich styled Connexions as more than just a factory of knowledge—it would be a community or culture developing richly associative and novel kinds of textbooks—and as much more than just distance education. Indeed, Connexions was not the only such project busy differentiating itself from the perceived dangers of distance education. In April 2001 MIT had announced that it would make the content of all of its courses available for free online in a project strategically called OpenCourseWare (OCW). Such news could only bring attention to MIT, which explicitly positioned the announcement as a kind of final death blow to the idea of distance education, by saying that what students pay $35,000 and up for per year is not "knowledge"—which is free—but the experience of being at MIT. The announcement created pure profit from the perspective of MIT’s reputation as a generator and disseminator of scientific knowledge, but the project did not emerge directly out of an interest in mimicking the success of Open Source. That angle was ,{[pg 252]}, provided ultimately by the computer-science professor Hal Abelson, whose deep understanding of the history and growth of Free Software came from his direct involvement in it as a long-standing member of the computer-science community at MIT. OCW emerged most proximately from the strange result of a committee report, commissioned by the provost, on how MIT should position itself in the "distance/e-learning" field. The surprising response: don’t do it, give the content away and add value to the campus teaching and research experience instead.~{ "Provost Announces Formation of Council on Educational Technology," MIT Tech Talk, 29 September 1999, http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/council-0929.html. }~ +={ Abelson, Hal ; + Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) : + open courseware and +2 ; + Open CourseWare (OCW) +2 ; + Connexions project : + Open CourseWare +2 +} + +OCW, Connexions, and distance learning, therefore, while all ostensibly interested in combining education with the networks and software, emerged out of different demands and different places. While the profit-driven demand of distance learning fueled many attempts around the country, it stalled in the case of OCW, largely because the final MIT Council on Educational Technology report that recommended OCW was issued at the same time as the first plunge in the stock market (April 2000). Such issues were not a core factor in the development of Connexions, which is not to say that the problems of funding and sustainability have not always been important concerns, only that genesis of the project was not at the administrative level or due to concerns about distance education. For Rich, Brent, and Ross the core commitment was to openness and to the success of Open Source as an experiment with massive, distributed, Internet-based, collaborative production of software—their commitment to this has been, from the beginning, completely and adamantly unwavering. Neverthless, the project has involved modulations of the core features of Free Software. Such modulations depend, to a certain extent, on being a project that emerges out of the ideas and practices of Free Software, rather than, as in the case of OCW, one founded as a result of conflicting goals (profit and academic freedom) and resulting in a strategic use of public relations to increase the symbolic power of the university over its fiscal growth. +={ Reedstrom, Ross } + +% what of ich and brent? ross in index at this location + +When Rich recounts the story of Connexions, though, he doesn’t mention any of this background. Instead, like a good storyteller, he waits for the questions to pose themselves and lets his demonstration answer them. Usually someone asks, "How is Connexions different from OCW?" And, every time, Rich says something similar: Connexions is about "communities," about changing the way scholars collaborate and create knowledge, whereas OCW is simply ,{[pg 253]}, an attempt to transfer existing courses to a Web format in order to make the content of those courses widely available. Connexions is a radical experiment in the collaborative creation of educational materials, one that builds on the insights of Open Source and that actually encompasses the OCW project. In retrospective terms, it is clear that OCW was interested only in modulating the meaning of source code and the legal license, whereas Connexions seeks also to modulate the practice of coordination, with respect to academic textbooks. +={ communities ; + coordination (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + modulation : + practices of +3 ; + practices : + five components of Free Software +3 ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +3 +} + +Rich’s story of the origin of Connexions usually segues into a demonstration of the system, in which he outlines the various technical, legal, and educational concepts that distinguish it. Connexions uses a standardized document format, the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML), and a Creative Commons copyright license on every module; the Creative Commons license allows people not only to copy and distribute the information but to modify it and even to use it for commercial gain (an issue that causes repeated discussion among the team members). The material ranges from detailed explanations of DSP concepts (naturally) to K-12 music education (the most popular set of modules). Some contributors have added entire courses; others have created a few modules here and there. Contributors can set up workgroups to manage the creation of modules, and they can invite other users to join. Connexions uses a version-control system so that all of the changes are recorded; thus, if a module used in one class is changed, the person using it for another class can continue to use the older version if they wish. The number of detailed and clever solutions embodied in the system never ceases to thoroughly impress anyone who takes the time to look at it. +={ Connexions project : + model of learning +2 ; + copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +2 +} + +But what always animates people is the idea of random and flexible connection, the idea that a textbook author might be able to build on the work of hundreds of others who have already contributed, to create new classes, new modules, and creative connections between them, or surprising juxtapositions—from the biologist teaching a class on bioinformatics who needs to remind students of certain parts of calculus without requiring a whole course; to the architect who wants a studio to study biological form, not necessarily in order to do experiments in biology, but to understand buildings differently; to the music teacher who wants students to understand just enough physics to get the concepts of pitch and ,{[pg 254]}, timbre; to or the physicist who needs a concrete example for the explanation of waves and oscillation. + +The idea of such radical recombinations is shocking for some (more often for humanities and social-science scholars, rather than scientists or engineers, for reasons that clearly have to do with an ideology of authentic and individualized creative ability). The questions that result—regarding copyright, plagiarism, control, unauthorized use, misuse, misconstrual, misreading, defamation, and so on—generally emerge with surprising force and speed. If Rich were trying to sell a version of "distance learning," skepticism and suspicion would quickly overwhelm the project; but as it is, Connexions inverts almost all of the expectations people have developed about textbooks, classroom practice, collaboration, and copyright. More often than not people leave the discussion converted—no doubt helped along by Rich’s storytelling gift. + +2~ Modulations: From Free Software to Connexions +={ modulation : + practices of +10 ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +10 +} + +Connexions surprises people for some of the same reasons as Free Software surprises people, emerging, as it does, directly out of the same practices and the same components. Free Software provides a template made up of the five components: shared source code, a concept of openness, copyleft licenses, forms of coordination, and a movement or ideology. Connexions starts with the idea of modulating a shared "source code," one that is not software, but educational textbook modules that academics will share, port, and fork. The experiment that results has implications for the other four components as well. The implications lead to new questions, new constraints, and new ideas. +={ copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + communities ; + coordination (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + practices : + five components of Free Software ; + Connexions project : + as Free Software project +3 +} + +% added index + +The modulation of source code introduces a specific and potentially confusing difference from Free Software projects: Connexions is both a conventional Free Software project and an unconventional experiment based on Free Software. There is, of course, plenty of normal source code, that is, a number of software components that need to be combined in order to allow the creation of digital documents (the modules) and to display, store, transmit, archive, and measure the creation of modules. The creation and management of this software is expected to function more or less like all Free Software projects: it is licensed using Free Software licenses, it is ,{[pg 255]}, built on open standards of various kinds, and it is set up to take contributions from other users and developers. The software system for managing modules is itself built on a variety of other Free Software components (and a commitment to using only Free Software). Connexions has created various components, which are either released like conventional Free Software or contributed to another Free Software project. The economy of contribution and release is a complex one; issues of support and maintenance, as well as of reputation and recognition, figure into each decision. Others are invited to contribute, just as they are invited to contribute to any Free Software project.~{ The software consists of a collection of different Open Source Software cobbled together to provide the basic platform (the Zope and Plone content-management frameworks, the PostGresQL database, the python programming language, and the cvs version-control software). }~ +={ openness (component of Free Software) +2 : + modulations of +4 +} + +At the same time, there is "content," the ubiquitous term for digital creations that are not software. The creation of content modules, on the other hand (which the software system makes technically possible), is intended to function like a Free Software project, in which, for instance, a group of engineering professors might get together to collaborate on pieces of a textbook on DSP. The Connexions project does not encompass or initiate such collaborations, but, rather, proceeds from the assumption that such activity is already happening and that Connexions can provide a kind of alternative platform—an alternative infrastructure even—which textbook-writing academics can make use of instead of the current infrastructure of publishing. The current infrastructure and technical model of textbook writing, this implies, is one that both prevents people from taking advantage of the Open Source model of collaborative development and makes academic work "non-free." The shared objects of content are not source code that can be compiled, like source code in C, but documents marked up with XML and filled with "educational" content, then "displayed" either on paper or onscreen. +={ content +5 ; + infrastructure : + of publishing +3 ; + textbooks : + model in Connexions +3 +} + +The modulated meaning of source code creates all kinds of new questions—specifically with respect to the other four components. In terms of openness, for instance, Connexions modulates this component very little; most of the actors involved are devoted to the ideals of open systems and open standards, insofar as it is a Free Software project of a conventional type. It builds on UNIX (Linux) and the Internet, and the project leaders maintain a nearly fanatical devotion to openness at every level: applications, programming languages, standards, protocols, mark-up languages, interface tools. Every place where there is an open (as opposed to a ,{[pg 256]}, proprietary) solution—that choice trumps all others (with one noteworthy exception).~{ The most significant exception has been the issue of tools for authoring content in XML. For most of the life of the Connexions project, the XML mark-up language has been well-defined and clear, but there has been no way to write a module in XML, short of directly writing the text and the tags in a text editor. For all but a very small number of possible users, this feels too much like programming, and they experience it as too frustrating to be worth it. The solution (albeit temporary) was to encourage users to make use of a proprietary XML editor (like a word processor, but capable of creating XML content). Indeed, the Connexions project’s devotion to openness was tested by one of the most important decisions its participants made: to pursue the creation of an Open Source XML text editor in order to provide access to completely open tools for creating completely open content. }~ James Boyle recently stated it well: "Wherever possible, design the system to run with open content, on open protocols, to be potentially available to the largest possible number of users, and to accept the widest possible range of experimental modifications from users who can themselves determine the development of the technology."~{ Boyle, "Mertonianism Unbound," 14. }~ +={ Boyle, James ; + enlightenment ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +6 ; + modifiability +4 ; + openness (component of Free Software) : + proprietary vs. +4 | sustainability vs. +4 +} + +With respect to content, the devotion to openness is nearly identical, because conventional textbook publishers "lock in" customers (students) through the creation of new editions and useless "enhanced" content, which jacks up prices and makes it difficult for educators to customize their own courses. "Openness" in this sense trades on the same reasoning as it did in the 1980s: the most important aspect of the project is the information people create, and any proprietary system locks up content and prevents people from taking it elsewhere or using it in a different context. + +Indeed, so firm is the commitment to openness that Rich and Brent often say something like, "If we are successful, we will disappear." They do not want to become a famous online textbook publisher; they want to become a famous publishing infrastructure. Being radically open means that any other competitor can use your system—but it means they are using your system, and this is the goal. Being open means not only sharing the "source code" (content and modules), but devising ways to ensure the perpetual openness of that content, that is, to create a recursive public devoted to the maintenance and modifiability of the medium or infrastructure by which it communicates. Openness trumps "sustainability" (i.e., the self-perpetuation of the financial feasibility of a particular organization), and where it fails to, the commitment to openness has been compromised. + +The commitment to openness and the modulation of the meaning of source code thus create implications for the meaning of Free Software licenses: do such licenses cover this kind of content? Are new licenses necessary? What should they look like? Connexions was by no means the first project to stimulate questions about the applicability of Free Software licenses to texts and documents. In the case of EMACS and the GPL, for example, Richard Stallman had faced the problem of licensing the manual at the same time as the source code for the editor. Indeed, such issues would ultimately result in a GNU Free Documentation License intended narrowly to ,{[pg 257]}, cover software manuals. Stallman, due to his concern, had clashed during the 1990s with Tim O’Reilly, publisher and head of O’Reilly Press, which had long produced books and manuals for Free Software programs. O’Reilly argued that the principles reflected in Free Software licenses should not be applied to instructional books, because such books provided a service, a way for more people to learn how to use Free Software, and in turn created a larger audience. Stallman argued the opposite: manuals, just like the software they served, needed to be freely modifiable to remain useful. +={ Stallman, Richard ; + EMACS (text editor) ; + Free Documentation License (FDL) +1 ; + General Public License (GPL) : + passim ; + Free Documentation License (FDL) +1 ; + Software manuals +} + +By the late 1990s, after Free Software and Open Source had been splashed across the headlines of the mainstream media, a number of attempts to create licenses modeled on Free Software, but applicable to other things, were under way. One of the earliest and most general was the Open Content License, written by the educational-technology researcher David Wiley. Wiley’s license was intended for use on any kind of content. Content could include text, digital photos, movies, music, and so on. Such a license raises new issues. For example, can one designate some parts of a text as "invariant" in order to prevent them from being changed, while allowing other parts of the text to be changed (the model eventually adopted by the GNU Free Documentation License)? What might the relationship between the "original" and the modified version be? Can one expect the original author to simply incorporate suggested changes? What kinds of forking are possible? Where do the "moral rights" of an author come into play (regarding the "integrity" of a work)? +={ Wiley, Davis ; + authorship : + moral rights of ; + Open content licenses +} + +At the same time, the modulation of source code to include academic textbooks has extremely complex implications for the meaning and context of coordination: scholars do not write textbooks like programmers write code, so should they coordinate in the same ways? Coordination of a textbook or a course in Connexions requires novel experiments in textbook writing. Does it lend itself to academic styles of work, and in which disciplines, for what kinds of projects? In order to cash in on the promise of distributed, collaborative creation, it would be necessary to find ways to coordinate scholars. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +} + +So, when Rich and Brent recognized in me, at dinner, someone who might know how to think about these issues, they were acknowledging that the experiment they had started had created a certain turbulence in their understanding of Free Software and, ,{[pg 258]}, in turn, a need to examine the kinds of legal, cultural, and social practices that would be at stake.~{ The movement is the component that remains unmodulated: there is no "free textbook" movement associated with Connexions, even though many of the same arguments that lead to a split between Free Software and Open Source occur here: the question of whether the term free is confusing, for example, or the role of for-profit publishers or textbook companies. In the end, most (though not all) of the Connexions staff and many of its users are content to treat it as a useful tool for composing novel kinds of digital educational material—not as a movement for the liberation of educational content. }~ + +2~ Modulations: From Connexions to Creative Commons + +I’m standing in a parking lot in 100 degree heat and 90 percent humidity. It is spring in Houston. I am looking for my car, and I cannot find it. James Boyle, author of Shamans, Software, and Spleens and distinguished professor of law at Duke University, is standing near me, staring at me, wearing a wool suit, sweating and watching me search for my car under the blazing sun. His look says simply, "If I don’t disembowel you with my Palm Pilot stylus, I am going to relish telling this humiliating story to your friends at every opportunity I can." Boyle is a patient man, with the kind of arch Scottish humor that can make you feel like his best friend, even as his stories of the folly of man unfold with perfect comic pitch and turn out to be about you. Having laughed my way through many an uproarious tale of the foibles of my fellow creatures, I am aware that I have just taken a seat among them in Boyle’s theater of human weakness. I repeatedly press the panic button on my key chain, in the hopes that I am near enough to my car that it will erupt in a frenzy of honking and flashing that will end the humiliation. +={ Boyle, James +3 ; + Connexions project : + connection to Creative Commons +2 ; + Creative Commons +26 : + connection to Connexions +2 +} + +The day had started well. Boyle had folded himself into my Volkswagen (he is tall), and we had driven to campus, parked the car in what no doubt felt like a memorable space at 9 A.M., and happily gone to the scheduled meeting—only to find that it had been mistakenly scheduled for the following day. Not my fault, though now, certainly, my problem. The ostensible purpose of Boyle’s visit was to meet the Connexions team and learn about what they were doing. Boyle had proposed the visit himself, as he was planning to pass through Houston anyway. I had intended to pester him with questions about the politics and possibilities of licensing the content in Connexions and with comparisons to MIT’s OCW and other such commons projects that Boyle knew of. + +Instead of attending the meeting, I took him back to my office, where I learned more about why he was interested in Connexions. Boyle’s interest was not entirely altruistic (nor was it designed to spend valuable quarter hours standing in a scorched parking lot as I looked for my subcompact car). What interested Boyle was finding ,{[pg 259]}, a constituency of potential users for Creative Commons, the nonprofit organization he was establishing with Larry Lessig, Hal Abelson, Michael Carroll, Eric Eldred, and others—largely because he recognized the need for a ready constituency in order to make Creative Commons work. The constituency was needed both to give the project legitimacy and to allow its founders to understand what exactly was needed, legally speaking, for the creation of a whole new set of Free Software-like licenses. +={ Abelson, Hal +2 ; + Eldred, Eric +3 ; + Lessig, Lawrence +24 +} + +Creative Commons, as an organization and as a movement, had been building for several years. In some ways, Creative Commons represented a simple modulation of the Free Software license: a broadening of the license’s concept to cover other types of content. But the impetus behind it was not simply a desire to copy and extend Free Software. Rather, all of the people involved in Creative Commons were those who had been troubling issues of intellectual property, information technology, and notions of commons, public domains, and freedom of information for many years. Boyle had made his name with a book on the construction of the information society by its legal (especially intellectual property) structures. Eldred was a publisher of public-domain works and the lead plaintiff in a court case that went to the Supreme Court in 2002 to determine whether the recent extension of copyright term limits was constitutional. Abelson was a computer scientist with an active interest in issues of privacy, freedom, and law "on the electronic frontier." And Larry Lessig was originally interested in constitutional law, a clerk for Judge Richard Posner, and a self-styled cyberlaw scholar, who was, during the 1990s, a driving force for the explosion of interest in cyberlaw, much of it carried out at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. +={ Berkman Center for Internet and Society +1 ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + Creative Commons : + origin and history of +4 +} + +With the exception of Abelson—who, in addition to being a famous computer scientist, worked for years in the same building that Richard Stallman camped out in and chaired the committee that wrote the report recommending OCW—none of the members of Creative Commons cut their teeth on Free Software projects (they were lawyers and activists, primarily) and yet the emergence of Open Source into the public limelight in 1998 was an event that made more or less instant and intuitive sense to all of them. During this time, Lessig and members of the Berkman Center began an "open law" project designed to mimic the Internet-based collaboration of the Open Source project among lawyers who might want to ,{[pg 260]}, contribute to the Eldred case. Creative Commons was thus built as much on a commitment to a notion of collaborative creation—the use of the Internet especially—but more generally on the ability of individuals to work together to create new things, and especially to coordinate the creation of these things by the use of novel licensing agreements. + +Creative Commons provided more than licenses, though. It was part of a social imaginary of a moral and technical order that extended beyond software to include creation of all kinds; notions of technical and moral freedom to make use of one’s own "culture" became more and more prominent as Larry Lessig became more and more involved in struggles with the entertainment industry over the "control of culture." But for Lessig, Creative Commons was a fall-back option; the direct route to a transformation of the legal structure of intellectual property was through the Eldred case, a case that built huge momentum throughout 2001 and 2002, was granted cert by the Supreme Court, and was heard in October of 2002. One of the things that made the case remarkable was the series of strange bedfellows it produced; among the economists and lawyers supporting the repeal of the 1998 "Sonny Bono" Copyright Term Extension Act were the arch free-marketeers and Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Kenneth Arrow, Ronald Coase, and George Akerlof. As Boyle pointed out in print, conservatives and liberals and libertarians all have reasons to be in favor of scaling back copyright expansion.~{ Boyle, "Conservatives and Intellectual Property." }~ Lessig and his team lost the case, and the Supreme Court essentially affirmed Congress’s interpretation of the Constitution that "for limited times" meant only that the time period be limited, not that it be short. +={ moral and technical order ; + social imaginary +} + +Creative Commons was thus a back-door approach: if the laws could not be changed, then people should be given the tools they needed to work around those laws. Understanding how Creative Commons was conceived requires seeing it as a modulation of both the notion of "source code" and the modulation of "copyright licenses." But the modulations take place in that context of a changing legal system that was so unfamiliar to Stallman and his EMACS users, a legal system responding to new forms of software, networks, and devices. For instance, the changes to the Copyright Act of 1976 created an unintended effect that Creative Commons would ultimately seize on. By eliminating the requirement to register copyrighted works (essentially granting copyright as soon as the ,{[pg 261]}, work is "fixed in a tangible medium"), the copyright law created a situation wherein there was no explicit way in which a work could be intentionally placed in the public domain. Practically speaking an author could declare that a work was in the public domain, but legally speaking the risk would be borne entirely by the person who sought to make use of that work: to copy it, transform it, sell it, and so on. With the explosion of interest in the Internet, the problem ramified exponentially; it became impossible to know whether someone who had placed a text, an image, a song, or a video online intended for others to make use of it—even if the author explicitly declared it "in the public domain." Creative Commons licenses were thus conceived and rhetorically positioned as tools for making explicit exactly what uses could be made of a specific work. They protected the rights of people who sought to make use of "culture" (i.e., materials and ideas and works they had not authored), an approach that Lessig often summed up by saying, "Culture always builds on the past." +={ copyright : + requirement to register ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + Creative Commons : + activism of +1 ; + public domain +4 +} + +The background to and context of the emergence of Creative Commons was of course much more complicated and fraught. Concerns ranged from the plights of university libraries with regard to high-priced journals, to the problem of documentary filmmakers unable to afford, or even find the owners of, rights to use images or snippets in films, to the high-profile fights over online music trading, Napster, and the RIAA. Over the course of four years, Lessig and the other founders of Creative Commons would address all of these issues in books, in countless talks and presentations and conferences around the world, online and off, among audiences ranging from software developers to entrepreneurs to musicians to bloggers to scientists. +={ Napster ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) +} + +Often, the argument for Creative Commons draws heavily on the concept of culture besieged by the content industries. A story which Lessig enjoys telling—one that I heard on several occasions when I saw him speak at conferences—was that of Mickey Mouse. An interesting, quasi-conspiratorial feature of the twentieth-century expansion of intellectual-property law is that term limits seem to have been extended right around the time Mickey Mouse was about to become public property. True or not, the point Lessig likes to make is that the Mouse is not the de novo creation of the mind of Walt Disney that intellectual-property law likes to pretend it is, but built on the past of culture, in particular, on Steamboat Willie, ,{[pg 262]}, Charlie Chaplin, Krazy Kat, and other such characters, some as inspiration, some as explicit material. The greatness in Disney’s creation comes not from the mind of Disney, but from the culture from which it emerged. Lessig will often illustrate this in videos and images interspersed with black-typewriter-font-bestrewn slides and a machine-gun style that makes you think he’s either a beat-poet manqué or running for office, or maybe both. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + style of presentations +1 ; + Disney, Walt ; + Mickey Mouse +} + +Other examples of intellectual-property issues fill the books and talks of Creative Commons advocates, stories of blocked innovation, stifled creativity, and—the scariest point of all (at least for economist-lawyers)—inefficiency due to over-expansive intellectual-property laws and overzealous corporate lawyer-hordes.~{ Lessig’s output has been prodigious. His books include Code and Other Laws of Cyber Space, The Future of Ideas, Free Culture, and Code: Version 2.0. He has also written a large number of articles and is an active blogger (http://www.lessig.org/blog/). }~ Lessig often preaches to the converted (at venues like South by Southwest Interactive and the O’Reilly Open Source conferences), and the audiences are always outraged at the state of affairs and eager to learn what they can do. Often, getting involved in the Creative Commons is the answer. Indeed, within a couple of years, Creative Commons quickly became more of a movement (a modulation of the Free/Open Source movement) than an experiment in writing licenses. + +On that hot May day in 2002, however, Creative Commons was still under development. Later in the day, Boyle did get a chance to meet with the Connexions project team members. The Connexions team had already realized that in pursuing an experimental project in which Free Software was used as a template they created a need for new kinds of licenses. They had already approached the Rice University legal counsel, who, though well-meaning, were not grounded at all in a deep understanding of Free Software and were thus naturally suspicious of it. Boyle’s presence and his detailed questions about the project were like a revelation—a revelation that there were already people out there thinking about the very problem the Connexions team faced and that the team would not need to solve the problem themselves or make the Rice University legal counsel write new open-content licenses. What Boyle offered was the possibility for Connexions, as well as for myself as intermediary, to be involved in the detailed planning and license writing that was under way at Creative Commons. At the same time, it gave Creative Commons an extremely willing "early-adopter" for the license, and one from an important corner of the world: scholarly research and teaching.~{ There were few such projects under way, though there were many in the planning stages. Within a year, the Public Library of Science had launched itself, spearheaded by Harold Varmus, the former director of the National Institutes of Health. At the time, however, the only other large scholarly project was the MIT Open Course Ware project, which, although it had already agreed to use Creative Commons licenses, had demanded a peculiar one-off license. }~ My task, after recovering from the ,{[pg 263]}, shame of being unable to find my car, was to organize a workshop in August at which members of Creative Commons, Connexions, MIT’s OCW, and any other such projects would be invited to talk about license issues. +={ Boyle, James ; + Connexions project : + connection to Creative Commons +2 | Open CourseWare +2 ; + Creative Commons : + connection to Connexions +2 ; + Rice University : + legal counsel of ; + Open CourseWare (OCW) +2 +} + +2~ Participant Figuring Out +={ figuring out +15 } + +The workshop I organized in August 2002 was intended to allow Creative Commons, Connexions, and MIT’s OCW project to try to articulate what each might want from the other. It was clear what Creative Commons wanted: to convince as many people as possible to use their licenses. But what Connexions and OCW might have wanted, from each other as well as from Creative Commons, was less clear. Given the different goals and trajectories of the two projects, their needs for the licenses differed in substantial ways—enough so that the very idea of using the same license was, at least temporarily, rendered impossible by MIT. While OCW was primarily concerned about obtaining permissions to place existing copyrighted work on the Web, Connexions was more concerned about ensuring that new work remain available and modifiable. +={ moral and technical order +1 } + +In retrospect, this workshop clarified the novel questions and problems that emerged from the process of modulating the components of Free Software for different domains, different kinds of content, and different practices of collaboration and sharing. Since then, my own involvement in this activity has been aimed at resolving some of these issues in accordance with an imagination of openness, an imagination of social order, that I had learned from my long experience with geeks, and not from my putative expertise as an anthropologist or a science-studies scholar. The fiction that I had at first adopted—that I was bringing scholarly knowledge to the table—became harder and harder to maintain the more I realized that it was my understanding of Free Software, gained through ongoing years of ethnographic apprenticeship, that was driving my involvement. +={ geeks ; + social imaginary +1 +} + +Indeed, the research I describe here was just barely undertaken as a research project. I could not have conceived of it as a fundable activity in advance of discovering it; I could not have imagined the course of events in any of the necessary detail to write a proper proposal for research. Instead, it was an outgrowth of thinking and ,{[pg 264]}, participating that was already under way, participation that was driven largely by intuition and a feeling for the problem represented by Free Software. I wanted to help figure something out. I wanted to see how "figuring out" happens. While I could have organized a fundable research project in which I picked a mature Free Software project, articulated a number of questions, and spent time answering them among this group, such a project would not have answered the questions I was trying to form at the time: what is happening to Free Software as it spreads beyond the world of hackers and software? How is it being modulated? What kinds of limits are breached when software is no longer the central component? What other domains of thought and practice were or are "readied" to receive and understand Free Software and its implications?~{ The fact that I organized a workshop to which I invited "informants" and to which I subsequently refer as research might strike some, both in anthropology and outside it, as wrong. But it is precisely the kind of occasion I would argue has become central to the problematics of method in cultural anthropology today. On this subject, see Holmes and Marcus, "Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization." Such strategic and seemingly ad hoc participation does not exclude one from attempting to later disentangle oneself from such participation, in order to comment on the value and significance, and especially to offer critique. Such is the attempt to achieve objectivity in social science, an objectivity that goes beyond the basic notions of bias and observer-effect so common in the social sciences. "Objectivity" in a broader social sense includes the observation of the conceptual linkages that both precede such a workshop (constituted the need for it to happen) and follow on it, independent of any particular meeting. The complexity of mobilizing objectivity in discussions of the value and significance of social or economic phenomena was well articulated a century ago by Max Weber, and problems of method in the sense raised by him seem to me to be no less fraught today. See Max Weber, "Objectivity in the Social Sciences." }~ +={ modifiability +6 ; + modulation : + practices of +2 +} + +My experience—my participant-observation—with Creative Commons was therefore primarily done as an intermediary between the Connexions project (and, by implication, similar projects under way elsewhere) and Creative Commons with respect to the writing of licenses. In many ways this detailed, specific practice was the most challenging and illuminating aspect of my participation, but in retrospect it was something of a red herring. It was not only the modulation of the meaning of source code and of legal licenses that differentiated these projects, but, more important, the meaning of collaboration, reuse, coordination, and the cultural practice of sharing and building on knowledge that posed the trickiest of the problems. + +My contact at Creative Commons was not James Boyle or Larry Lessig, but Glenn Otis Brown, the executive director of that organization (as of summer 2002). I first met Glenn over the phone, as I tried to explain to him what Connexions was about and why he should join us in Houston in August to discuss licensing issues related to scholarly material. Convincing him to come to Texas was an easier sell than explaining Connexions (given my penchant for complicating it unnecessarily), as Glenn was an Austin native who had been educated at the University of Texas before heading off to Harvard Law School and its corrupting influence at the hands of Lessig, Charlie Nesson, and John Perry Barlow. +={ Barlow, John Perry ; + Brown, Glen Otis +10 ; + Nesson, Charlie +} + +Glenn galvanized the project. With his background as a lawyer, and especially his keen interest in intellectual-property law, and his long-standing love of music of all kinds Glenn lent incredible enthusiasm to his work. Prior to joining Creative Commons, he had ,{[pg 265]}, clerked for the Hon. Stanley Marcus on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in Miami, where he worked on the so-called Wind Done Gone case.~{ Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin Co., U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, 2001, 252 F. 3d 1165. }~ His participation in the workshop was an experiment of his own; he was working on a story that he would tell countless times and which would become one of the core examples of the kind of practice Creative Commons wanted to encourage. + +A New York Times story describes how the band the White Stripes had allowed Steven McDonald, the bassist from Redd Kross, to lay a bass track onto the songs that made up the album White Blood Cells. In a line that would eventually become a kind of mantra for Creative Commons, the article stated: "Mr. McDonald began putting these copyrighted songs online without permission from the White Stripes or their record label; during the project, he bumped into Jack White, who gave him spoken assent to continue. It can be that easy when you skip the intermediaries."~{ Neil Strauss, "An Uninvited Bassist Takes to the Internet," New York Times, 25 August 2002, sec. 2, 23. }~ The ease with which these two rockers could collaborate to create a modified work (called, of course, Redd Blood Cells) without entering a studio, or, more salient, a law firm, was emblematic of the notion that "culture builds on the past" and that it need not be difficult to do so. +={ Redd, Kross ; + White Stripes +1 +} + +Glenn told the story with obvious and animated enthusiasm, ending with the assertion that the White Stripes didn’t have to give up all their rights to do this, but they didn’t have to keep them all either; instead of "All Rights Reserved," he suggested, they could say "Some Rights Reserved." The story not only manages to capture the message and aims of Creative Commons, but is also a nice indication of the kind of dual role that Glenn played, first as a lawyer, and second as a kind of marketing genius and message man. The possibility of there being more than a handful of people like Glenn around was not lost on anyone, and his ability to switch between the language of law and that of nonprofit populist marketing was phenomenal.~{ Indeed, in a more self-reflective moment, Glenn once excitedly wrote to me to explain that what he was doing was "code-switching" and that he thought that geeks who constantly involved themselves in technology, law, music, gaming, and so on would be prime case studies for a code-switching study by anthropologists. }~ +={ Creative Commons : + marketing of +} + +At the workshop, participants had a chance to hash out a number of different issues related to the creation of licenses that would be appropriate to scholarly content: questions of attribution and commercial use, modification and warranty; differences between federal copyright law concerning licenses and state law concerning commercial contracts. The starting point for most people was Free Software, but this was not the only starting point. There were at least two other broad threads that fed into the discussion and into the general understanding of the state of affairs facing projects like ,{[pg 266]}, Connexions or OCW. The first thread was that of digital libraries, hypertext, human-computer interaction research, and educational technology. These disciplines and projects often make common reference to two pioneers, Douglas Englebart and Theodore Nelson, and more proximately to things like Apple’s HyperCard program and a variety of experiments in personal academic computing. The debates and history that lead up to the possibility of Connexions are complex and detailed, but they generally lack attention to legal detail. With the exception of a handful of people in library and information science who have made "digital" copyright into a subspecialty, few such projects, over the last twenty-five years, have made the effort to understand, much less incorporate, issues of intellectual property into their purview. +={ attribution : + copyright licenses and ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + commercial use and | derivative uses and ; + Connexions project : + relationship to hypertext +} + +The other thread combines a number of more scholarly interests that come out of the disciplines of economics and legal theory: institutional economics, critical legal realism, law and economics—these are the scholastic designations. Boyle and Lessig, for example, are both academics; Boyle does not practice law, and Lessig has tried few cases. Nonetheless, they are both inheritors of a legal and philosophical pragmatism in which value is measured by the transformation of policy and politics, not by the mere extension or specification of conceptual issues. Although both have penned a large number of complicated theoretical articles (and Boyle is well known in several academic fields for his book Shamans, Software, and Spleens and his work on authorship and the law), neither, I suspect, would ever sacrifice the chance to make a set of concrete changes in legal or political practice given the choice. This point was driven home for me in a conversation I had with Boyle and others at dinner on the night of the launch of Creative Commons, in December 2002. During that conversation, Boyle said something to the effect of, "We actually made something; we didn’t just sit around writing articles and talking about the dangers that face us—we made something." He was referring as much to the organization as to the legal licenses they had created, and in this sense Boyle qualifies very much as a polymathic geek whose understanding of technology is that it is an intervention into an already constituted state of affairs, one that demonstrates its value by being created and installed, not by being assessed in the court of scholarly opinions. ,{[pg 267]}, +={ Boyle, James +2 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + law and economics and +2 ; + institutional economics +2 ; + intervention, technology as ; + polymaths ; + technology : + as argument +3 +} + +Similarly, Lessig’s approach to writing and speaking is unabashedly aimed at transforming the way people approach intellectual-property law and, even more generally, the way they understand the relationship between their rights and their culture.~{ See Kelty, "Punt to Culture." }~ Lessig’s approach, at a scholarly level, is steeped in the teachings of law and economics (although, as he has playfully pointed out, a "second" Chicago school) but is focused more on the understanding and manipulation of norms and customs ("culture") than on law narrowly conceived.~{ Lessig, "The New Chicago School." }~ + +Informing both thinkers is a somewhat heterodox economic consensus drawn primarily from institutional economics, which is routinely used to make policy arguments about the efficacy or efficiency of the intellectual-property system. Both are also informed by an emerging consensus on treating the public domain in the same manner in which environmentalists treated the environment in the 1960s.~{ Hence, Boyle’s "Second Enclosure Movement" and "copyright conservancy" concepts (see Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement"; Bollier, Silent Theft). Perhaps the most sophisticated and compelling expression of the institutional-economics approach to understanding Free Software is the work of Yochai Benkler, especially "Sharing Nicely" and "Coase’s Penguin." See also Benkler, Wealth of Networks. }~ These approaches begin with long-standing academic and policy concerns about the status and nature of "public goods," not directly with the problem of Free Software or the Internet. In some ways, the concern with public goods, commons, the public domain, and collective action are part of the same "reorientation of power and knowledge" I identify throughout Two Bits: namely, the legitimation of the media of knowledge creation, communication, and circulation. Most scholars of institutional economics and public policy are, however, just as surprised and bewildered by the fact of Free Software as the rest of the world has been, and they have sought to square the existing understanding of public goods and collective action with this new phenomenon.~{ Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source is exemplary. }~ +={ public domain : + environmentalism and ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +} + +All of these threads form the weft of the experiment to modulate the components of Free Software to create different licenses that cover a broader range of objects and that deal with people and organizations that are not software developers. Rather than attempt to carry on arguments at the level of theory, however, my aim in participating was to see how and what was argued in practice by the people constructing these experiments, to observe what constraints, arguments, surprises, or bafflements emerged in the course of thinking through the creation of both new licenses and a new form of authorship of scholarly material. Like those who study "science in action" or the distinction between "law on the books" and "law in action," I sought to observe the realities of a practice ,{[pg 268]}, heavily determined by textual and epistemological frameworks of various sorts.~{ Carrington and King, "Law and the Wisconsin Idea." }~ +={ modulation : + of Free Software ; + experimentation +1 ; + participant observation +1 +} + +In my years with Connexions I eventually came to see it as something in between a natural experiment and a thought experiment: it was conducted in the open, and it invited participation from working scholars and teachers (a natural experiment, in that it was not a closed, scholarly endeavor aimed at establishing specific results, but an essentially unbounded, functioning system that people could and would come to depend on), and yet it proceeded by making a series of strategic guesses (a thought experiment) about three related things: (1) what it is (and will be) possible to do technically; (2) what it is (and will be) possible to do legally; and (3) what scholars and educators have done and now do in the normal course of their activities. + +At the same time, this experiment gave shape to certain legal questions that I channeled in the direction of Creative Commons, issues that ranged from technical questions about the structure of digital documents, requirements of attribution, and URLs to questions about moral rights, rights of disavowal, and the meaning of "modification." The story of the interplay between Connexions and Creative Commons was, for me, a lesson in a particular mode of legal thinking which has been described in more scholarly terms as the difference between the Roman or, more proximately, the Napoleonic tradition of legal rationalism and the Anglo-American common-law tradition.~{ In particular, Glenn Brown suggested Oliver Wendell Holmes as a kind of origin point both for critical legal realism and for law and economics, a kind of filter through which lawyers get both their Nietzsche ,{[pg 344]}, and their liberalism (see Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Path of the Law"). Glenn’s opinion was that what he called "punting to culture" (by which he meant writing minimalist laws which allow social custom to fill in the details) descended more or less directly from the kind of legal reasoning embodied in Holmes: "Note that [Holmes] is probably best known in legal circles for arguing that questions of morality be removed from legal analysis and left to the field of ethics. this is what makes him the godfather of both the posners of the world, and the crits, and the strange hybrids like lessig" (Glenn Brown, personal communication, 11 August 2003). }~ It was a practical experience of what exactly the difference is between legal code and software code, with respect to how those two things can be made flexible or responsive. + +1~ 9. Reuse, Modification, and the Nonexistence of Norms +={ norms +12 } + +% ,{[pg 269]}, + +The Connexions project was an experiment in modulating the practices of Free Software. It was not inspired by so much as it was based on a kind of template drawn from the experience of people who had some experience with Free Software, including myself. But how exactly do such templates get used? What is traced and what is changed? In terms of the cultural significance of Free Software, what are the implications of these changes? Do they maintain the orientation of a recursive public, or are they attempts to apply Free Software for other private concerns? And if they are successful, what are the implications for the domains they affect: education, scholarship, scientific knowledge, and cultural production? What effects do these changes have on the norms of work and the meaning and shape of knowledge in these domains? ,{[pg 270]}, +={ recursive public +2 ; + cultural significance +} + +In this chapter I explore in ethnographic detail how the modulations of Free Software undertaken by Connexions and Creative Commons are related to the problems of reuse, modification, and the norms of scholarly production. I present these two projects as responses to the contemporary reorientation of knowledge and power; they are recursive publics just as Free Software is, but they expand the domain of practice in new directions, that is, into the scholarly world of textbooks and research and into the legal domains of cultural production more generally. +={ reorientation of power and knowledge +2 } + +In the course of "figuring out" what they are doing, these two projects encounter a surprising phenomenon: the changing meaning of the finality of a scholarly or creative work. Finality is not certainty. While certainty is a problematic that is well and often studied in the philosophy of science and in science studies, finality is less so. What makes a work stay a work? What makes a fact stay a fact? How does something, certain or not, achieve stability and identity? Such finality, the very paradigm of which is the published book, implies stability. But Connexions and Creative Commons, through their experiments with Free Software, confront the problem of how to stabilize a work in an unstable context: that of shareable source code, an open Internet, copyleft licenses, and new forms of coordination and collaboration.~{ Actor-network theory comes closest to dealing with such "ontological" issues as, for example, airplanes in John Law’s Aircraft Stories, the disease atheroscleroris in Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple, or in vitro fertilization in Charis Thompson’s Making Parents. The focus here on finality is closely related, but aims at revealing the temporal characteristics of highly modifiable kinds of knowledge-objects, like textbooks or databases, as in Geoffrey Bowker’s Memory Practices in the Sciences. }~ The meaning of finality will have important effects on the ability to constitute a politics around any given work, whether a work of art or a work of scholarship and science. The actors in Creative Commons and Connexions realize this, and they therefore form yet another instance of a recursive public, precisely because they seek ways to define the meaning of finality publicly and openly—and to make modifiability an irreversible aspect of the process of stabilizing knowledge. +={ Actor Network Theory ; + figuring out ; + finality +57 : + certainty and stability vs. ; + modifiability : + implications for finality +40 +} + +The modulations of Free Software performed by Connexions and Creative Commons reveal two significant issues. The first is the troublesome matter of the meaning of reuse, as in the reuse of concepts, ideas, writings, articles, papers, books, and so on for the creation of new objects of knowledge. Just as software source code can be shared, ported, and forked to create new versions with new functions, and just as software and people can be coordinated in new ways using the Internet, so too can scholarly and scientific content. I explore the implications of this comparison in this chapter. The central gambit of both Connexions and Creative Commons (and much of scientific practice generally) is that new work builds on ,{[pg 271]}, previous work. In the sciences the notion that science is cumulative is not at issue, but exactly how scientific knowledge accumulates is far from clear. Even if "standing on the shoulders of giants" can be revealed to hide machinations, secret dealings, and Machiavellian maneuvering of the most craven sort, the very concept of cumulative knowledge is sound. Building a fact, a result, a machine, or a theory out of other, previous works—this kind of reuse as progress is not in question. But the actual material practice of writing, publication, and the reuse of other results and works is something that, until very recently, has been hidden from view, or has been so naturalized that the norms of practice are nearly invisible to practitioners themselves. +={ norms : + existence of +1 ; + publication : + transformation by Internet +39 ; + participant observation +1 +} + +This raises the other central concern of this chapter: that of the existence or nonexistence of norms. For an anthropologist to query whether or not norms exist might seem to theorize oneself out of a job; one definition of anthropology is, after all, the making explicit of cultural norms. But the turn to "practices" in anthropology and science studies has in part been a turn away from "norms" in their classic sociological and specifically Mertonian fashion. Robert Merton’s suggestion that science has been governed by norms—disinterestedness, communalism, organized skepticism, objectivity—has been repeatedly and roundly criticized by a generation of scholars in the sociology of scientific knowledge who note that even if such norms are asserted by actors, they are often subverted in the doing.~{ Merton, "The Normative Structure of Science." }~ But a striking thing has happened recently; those Mertonian norms of science have in fact become the more or less explicit goals in practice of scientists, engineers, and geeks in the wake of Free Software. If Mertonian norms do not exist, then they are being invented. This, of course, raises novel questions: can one create norms? What exactly would this mean? How are norms different from culture or from legal and technical constraints? Both Connexions and Creative Commons explicitly pose this question and search for ways to identify, change, or work with norms as they understand them, in the context of reuse. +={ Goals, lack of in Free Software : + norms as ; + Merton, Robert : + Mertonian norms +} + +2~ Whiteboards: What Was Publication? + +More than once, I have found myself in a room with Rich Baraniuk and Brent Hendricks and any number of other employees of the ,{[pg 272]}, Connexions project, staring at a whiteboard on which a number of issues and notes have been scrawled. Usually, the notes have a kind of palimpsestic quality, on account of the array of previous conversations that are already there, rewritten in tiny precise script in a corner, or just barely erased beneath our discussion. These conversations are often precipitated by a series of questions that Brent, Ross Reedstrom, and the development team have encountered as they build and refine the system. They are never simple questions. A visitor staring at the whiteboard might catch a glimpse of the peculiar madness that afflicts the project: a mixture of legal terms, technical terms, and terms like scholarly culture or DSP communities. I’m consulted whenever this mixture of terms starts to worry the developers in terms of legality, culture, or the relationship between the two. I’m generally put in the position of speaking either as a lawyer (which, legally speaking, I am not supposed to do) or as an anthropologist (which I do mainly by virtue of holding a position in an anthropology department). Rarely are the things I say met with assent: Brent and Ross, like most hackers, are insanely well versed in the details of intellectual-property law, and they routinely correct me when I make bold but not-quite-true assertions about it. Nonetheless, they rarely feel well versed enough to make decisions about legal issues on their own, and often I have been called—on again as a thoughtful sounding board, and off again as intermediary with Creative Commons. +={ Baraniuk, Richard ; + Hendricks, Brent ; + Reedstrom, Ross ; + Digital signal processing (DSP) +} + +This process, I have come to realize, is about figuring something out. It is not just a question of solving technical problems to which I might have some specific domain knowledge. Figuring out is modulation; it is template-work. When Free Software functions as a template for projects like Connexions, it does so literally, by allowing us to trace a known form of practice (Free Software) onto a less well known, seemingly chaotic background and to see where the forms match up and where they do not. One very good way to understand what this means in a particular case—that is, to see more clearly the modulations that Connexions has performed—is to consider the practice and institution of scholarly publication through the template of Free Software. +={ Free Software : + modulations of +} + +Consider the ways scholars have understood the meaning and significance of print and publication in the past, prior to the Internet and the contemporary reorientation of knowledge and power. The list of ambitious historians and theorists of the relationship ,{[pg 273]}, of media to knowledge is long: Lucien Febvre, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Jack Goody, Roger Chartier, Friedrich Kittler, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Adrian Johns, to name a few.~{ See Johns, The Nature of the Book; Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media; Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book; Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue; Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France and The Order of Books; Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. }~ With the exception of Johns, however, the history of publication does not start with the conventional, legal, and formal practices of publication so much as it does with the material practices and structure of the media themselves, which is to say the mechanics and technology of the printed book.~{ There is less communication between the theorists and historians of copyright and authorship and those of the book; the former are also rich in analyses, such as Jaszi and Woodmansee, The Construction of Authorship; Mark Rose, Authors and Owners; St. Amour, The Copywrights; Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs. }~ Ong’s theories of literacy and orality, Kittler’s re-theorization of the structure of media evolution, Goody’s anthropology of the media of accounting and writing—all are focused on the tangible media as the dependent variable of change. By contrast, Johns’s The Nature of the Book uncovers the contours of the massive endeavor involved in making the book a reliable and robust form for the circulation of knowledge in the seventeenth century and after. +={ Goody, Jack ; + Eisenstein, Elizabeth +1 ; + Johns, Adrian +3 ; + Kittler, Friedrich ; + Ong, Walter ; + reorientation of power and knowledge ; + printing press +2 +} + +Prior to Johns’s work, arguments about the relationship of print and power fell primarily into two camps: one could overestimate the role of print and the printing press by suggesting that the "fixity" of a text and the creation of multiple copies led automatically to the spread of ideas and the rise of enlightenment. Alternately, one could underestimate the role of the book by suggesting that it was merely a transparent media form with no more or less effect on the circulation or evaluation of ideas than manuscripts or television. Johns notes in particular the influence of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s scholarship on the printing press (and Bruno Latour’s dependence on this in turn), which very strongly identified the characteristics of the printed work with the cultural changes seen to follow, including the success of the scientific revolution and the experimental method.~{ Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Eisenstein’s work makes direct reference to McLuhan’s thesis in The Gutenberg Galaxy, and Latour relies on these works and others in "Drawing Things Together." }~ For example, Eisenstein argued that fixity—the fact that a set of printed books can be exact copies of each other—implied various transformations in knowledge. Johns, however, is at pains to show just how unreliable texts are often perceived to be. From which sources do they come? Are they legitimate? Do they have the backing or support of scholars or the crown? In short, fixity can imply sound knowledge only if there is a system of evaluation already in place. Johns suggests a reversal of this now common-sense notion: "We may consider fixity not as an inherent quality, but as a transitive one. . . . We may adopt the principle that fixity exists only inasmuch as it is recognized and acted upon by people—and not otherwise. The consequence of this change in perspective is that print culture itself is immediately laid open to analysis. It becomes ,{[pg 274]}, a result of manifold representations, practices and conflicts, rather than just the manifold cause with which we are often presented. In contrast to talk of a ‘print logic’ imposed on humanity, this approach allows us to recover the construction of different print cultures in particular historical circumstances."~{ Johns, The Nature of the Book, 19-20. }~ +={ Latour, Bruno ; + enlightenment ; + fixity +7 +} + +Johns’s work focuses on the elaborate and difficult cultural, social, and economic work involved, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in transforming the European book into the kind of authority it is taken to be across the globe today. The creation and standardization not just of books but of a publishing infrastructure involved the kind of careful social engineering, reputation management, and skills of distinction, exclusion, and consensus that science studies has effectively explored in science and engineering. Hence, Johns focuses on "print-in-the-making" and the relationship of the print culture of that period to the reliability of knowledge. Instead of making broad claims for the transformation of knowledge by print (eerily similar in many respects to the broad claims made for the Internet), Johns explores the clash of representations and practices necessary to create the sense, in the twentieth century, that there really is or was only one print culture. +={ infrastructure : + of publishing +} + +The problem of publication that Connexions confronts is thus not simply caused by the invention or spread of the Internet, much less that of Free Software. Rather, it is a confrontation with the problems of producing stability and finality under very different technical, legal, and social conditions—a problem more complex even than the "different print cultures in particular historical circumstances" that Johns speaks of in regard to the book. Connexions faces two challenges: that of figuring out the difference that today introduces with respect to yesterday, and that of creating or modifying an infrastructure in order to satisfy the demands of a properly authoritative knowledge. Connexions textbooks of necessity look different from conventional textbooks; they consist of digital documents, or "modules," that are strung together and made available through the Web, under a Creative Commons license that allows for free use, reuse, and modification. This version of "publication" clearly has implications for the meaning of authorship, ownership, stewardship, editing, validation, collaboration, and verification. +={ authorship ; + Connexions project : + textbooks and +15 ; + Connexions project : + meaning of publication +15 ; + publication : + as notional event +1 +} + +The conventional appearance of a book—in bookstores, through mail-order, in book clubs, libraries, or universities—was an event that signified, as the name suggests, its official public appearance ,{[pg 275]}, in the world. Prior to this event, the text circulated only privately, which is to say only among the relatively small network of people who could make copies of it or who were involved in its writing, editing, proofreading, reviewing, typesetting, and so on. With the Internet, the same text can be made instantly available at each of these stages to just as many or more potential readers. It effectively turns the event of publication into a notional event—the click of a button—rather than a highly organized, material event. Although it is clear that the practice of publication has become denaturalized or destabilized by the appearance of new information technologies, this hardly implies that the work of stabilizing the meaning of publication—and producing authoritative knowledge as a result—has ceased. The tricky part comes in understanding how Free Software is used as a template by which the authority of publication in the Gutenberg Galaxy is being transformed into the authority of publication in the Turing Universe. +={ Connexions project : + stages of producing a document in +} + +2~ Publication in Connexions + +In the case of Connexions there are roughly three stages to the creation of content. The first, temporally speaking, is whatever happens before Connexions is involved, that is, the familiar practices of what I would call composition, rather than simply writing. Some project must be already under way, perhaps started under the constraints of and in the era of the book, perhaps conceived as a digital textbook or an online textbook, but still, as of yet, written on paper or saved in a Word document or in LaTeX, on a scholar’s desktop. It could be an individual project, as in the case of Rich’s initial plan to write a DSP textbook, or it could be a large collaborative project to write a textbook. +={ LaTeX (typesetting language) ; + Connexions project : + stages of producing a document in +3 +} + +The second stage is the one in which the document or set of documents is translated ("Connexified") into the mark-up system used by Connexions. Connexions uses the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML), in particular a subset of tags that are appropriate to textbooks. These "semantic" tags (e.g., ) refer only to the meaning of the text they enclose, not to the "presentation" or syntactic look of what they enclose; they give the document the necessary structure it needs to be transformed in a number of creative ways. Because XML is related only to content, and not to ,{[pg 276]}, presentation (it is sometimes referred to as "agnostic"), the same document in Connexions can be automatically made to look a number of different ways, as an onscreen presentation in a browser, as a pdf document, or as an on-demand published work that can be printed out as a book, complete with continuous page numbering, footnotes (instead of links), front and back matter, and an index. Therein lies much of Connexions’s technical wizardry. +={ Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) +1 } + +During the second stage, that of being marked up in XML, the document is not quite public, although it is on the Internet; it is in what is called a workgroup, where only those people with access to the particular workgroup (and those have been invited to collaborate) can see the document. It is only when the document is finished, ready to be distributed, that it will enter the third, "published" stage—the stage at which anyone on the Internet can ask for the XML document and the software will display it, using style sheets or software converters, as an HTML page, a pdf document for printing, or as a section of a larger course. However, publication does not here signify finality; indeed, one of the core advantages of Connexions is that the document is rendered less stable than the book-object it mimics: it can be updated, changed, corrected, deleted, copied, and so on, all without any of the rigmarole associated with changing a published book or article. Indeed, the very powerful notion of fixity theorized by McLuhan and Eisenstein is rendered moot here. The fact that a document has been printed (and printed as a book) no longer means that all copies will be the same; indeed, it may well change from hour to hour, depending on how many people contribute (as in the case of Free Software, which can go through revisions and updates as fast, or faster, than one can download and install new versions). With Wikipedia entries that are extremely politicized or active, for example, a "final" text is impossible, although the dynamics of revision and counter-revision do suggest outlines for the emergence of some kinds of stability. But Connexions differs from Wikipedia with respect to this finality as well, because of the insertion of the second stage, during which a self-defined group of people can work on a nonpublic text before committing changes that a public can see. +={ Eisenstein, Elizabeth ; + McLuhan, Marshall ; + Hypertext Transfer Mark-up Language (HTML) ; + Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia) +1 ; + finality : + in Wikipedia and Connexions +1 +} + +It should be clear, given the example of Connexions, or any similar project such as Wikipedia, that the changing meaning of "publication" in the era of the Internet has significant implications, both practical (they affect the way people can both write and publish ,{[pg 277]}, their works) and legal (they fit uneasily into the categories established for previous media). The tangibility of a textbook is quite obviously transformed by these changes, but so too is the cultural significance of the practice of writing a textbook. And if textbooks are written differently, using new forms of collaboration and allowing novel kinds of transformation, then the validation, certification, and structure of authority of textbooks also change, inviting new forms of open and democratic participation in writing, teaching, and learning. No longer are all of the settled practices of authorship, collaboration, and publication configured around the same institutional and temporal scheme (e.g., the book and its publishing infrastructure). In a colloquial sense, this is obvious, for instance, to any musician today: recording and releasing a song to potentially millions of listeners is now technically possible for anyone, but how that fact changes the cultural significance of music creation is not yet clear. For most musicians, creating music hasn’t changed much with the introduction of digital tools, since new recording and composition technologies largely mimic the recording practices that preceded them (for example, a program like Garage Band literally looks like a four-track recorder on the screen). Similarly, much of the practice of digital publication has been concerned with recreating something that looks like traditional publication.~{ On this subject, cf. Pablo Boczkowski’s study of the digitization of newspapers, Digitizing the News. }~ +={ music : + production +} + +Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Connexions team spent a great deal of time at the outset of the project creating a pdf-document-creation system that would essentially mimic the creation of a conventional textbook, with the push of a button.~{ Conventional here is actually quite historically proximate: the system creates a pdf document by translating the XML document into a LaTeX document, then into a pdf document. LaTeX has been, for some twenty years, a standard text-formatting and typesetting language used by some ,{[pg 345]}, sectors of the publishing industry (notably mathematics, engineering, and computer science). Were it not for the existence of this standard from which to bootstrap, the Connexions project would have faced a considerably more difficult challenge, but much of the infrastructure of publishing has already been partially transformed into a computer-mediated and -controlled system whose final output is a printed book. Later in Connexions’s lifetime, the group coordinated with an Internet-publishing startup called Qoop.com to take the final step and make Connexions courses available as print-on-demand, cloth-bound textbooks, complete with ISBNs and back-cover blurbs. }~ But even this process causes a subtle transformation: the concept of "edition" becomes much harder to track. While a conventional textbook is a stable entity that goes through a series of printings and editions, each of which is marked on its publication page, a Connexions document can go through as many versions as an author wants to make changes, all the while without necessarily changing editions. In this respect, the modulation of the concept of source code translates the practices of updating and "versioning" into the realm of textbook writing. Recall the cases ranging from the "continuum" of UNIX versions discussed by Ken Thompson to the complex struggles over version control in the Linux and Apache projects. In the case of writing source code, exactitude demands that the change of even a single character be tracked and labeled as a version change, whereas a ,{[pg 278]}, conventional-textbook spelling correction or errata issuance would hardly create the need for a new edition. +={ Apache (Free Software project) ; + editions, print vs. electronic +3 : + see also versions ; + Linux (Free Software project) ; + UNIX operating system : + allegiance to versions of +} + +In the Connexions repository all changes to a text are tracked and noted, but the identity of the module does not change. "Editions" have thus become "versions," whereas a substantially revised or changed module might require not reissuance but a forking of that module to create one with a new identity. Editions in publishing are not a feature of the medium per se; they are necessitated by the temporal and spatial practices of publication as an event, though this process is obviously made visible only in the book itself. In the same way, versioning is now used to manage a process, but it results in a very different configuration of the medium and the material available in that medium. Connexions traces the template of software production (sharing, porting, and forking and the norms and forms of coordination in Free Software) directly onto older forms of publication. Where the practices match, no change occurs, and where they don’t, it is the reorientation of knowledge and power and the emergence of recursive publics that serves as a guide to the development of the system. +={ reorientation of power and knowledge +4 } + +Legally speaking, the change from editions to versions and forks raises troubling questions about the boundaries and status of a copyrighted work. It is a peculiar feature of copyright law that it needs to be updated regularly each time the media change, in order to bring certain old practices into line with new possibilities. Scattered throughout the copyright statutes is evidence of old new media: gramophones, jukeboxes, cable TV, photocopiers, peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, and so on. Each new form of communication shifts the assumptions of past media enough that they require a reevaluation of the putative underlying balance of the constitutional mandate that gives (U.S.) intellectual-property law its inertia. Each new device needs to be understood in terms of creation, storage, distribution, production, consumption, and tangibility, in order to assess the dangers it poses to the rights of inventors and artists. +={ copyright : + specificity of media and +1 +} + +Because copyright law "hard codes" the particular media into the statutes, copyright law is comfortable with, for example, book editions or musical recordings. But in Connexions, new questions arise: how much change constitutes a new work, and thus demands a new copyright license? If a licensee receives one copy of a work, to which versions will he or she retain rights after changes? Because ,{[pg 279]}, of the complexity of the software involved, there are also questions that the law simply cannot deal with (just as it had not been able to do in the late 1970s with respect to the definition of software): is the XML document equivalent to the viewable document, or must the style sheet also be included? Where does the "content" begin and the "software" end? Until the statutes either incorporate these new technologies or are changed to govern a more general process, rather than a particular medium, these questions will continue to emerge as part of the practice of writing. +={ Connexions project : + line between content and software +} + +This denaturalization of the notion of "publication" is responsible for much of the surprise and concern that greets Connexions and projects like it. Often, when I have shown the system to scholars, they have displayed boredom mixed with fear and frustration: "It can never replace the book." On the one hand, Connexions has made an enormous effort to make its output look as much like conventional books as possible; on the other hand, the anxiety evinced is justified, because what Connexions seeks to replace is not the book, which is merely ink and paper, but the entire publishing process. The fact that it is not replacing the book per se, but the entire process whereby manuscripts are made into stable and tangible objects called books is too overwhelming for most scholars to contemplate—especially scholars who have already mastered the existing process of book writing and creation. The fact that the legal system is built to safeguard something prior to and not fully continuous with the practice of Connexions only adds to the concern that such a transformation is immodest and risky, that it endangers a practice with centuries of stability behind it. Connexions, however, is not the cause of destabilization; rather, it is a response to or recognition of a problem. It is not a new problem, but one that periodically reemerges: a reorientation of knowledge and power that includes questions of enlightenment and rationality, democracy and self-governance, liberal values and problems of the authority and validation of knowledge. The salient moments of correlation are not the invention of the printing press and the Internet, but the struggle to make published books into a source of authoritative knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the struggle to find ways to do the same with the Internet today.~{ See Johns, The Nature of the Book; Warner, The Letters of the Republic. }~ +={ printing press } + +Connexions is, in many ways, understood by its practitioners to be both a response to the changing relations of knowledge and power, ,{[pg 280]}, one that reaffirms the fundamental values of academic freedom and the circulation of knowledge, and also an experiment with, even a radicalization of, the ideals of both Free Software and Mertonian science. The transformation of the meaning of publication implies a fundamental shift in the status, in the finality of knowledge. It seeks to make of knowledge (knowledge in print, not in minds) something living and constantly changing, as opposed to something static and final. The fact that publication no longer signifies finality—that is, no longer signifies a state of fixity that is assumed in theory (and frequently in practice) to account for a text’s reliability—has implications for how the text is used, reused, interpreted, valued, and trusted.~{ On fixity, see Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change which cites McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy. The stability of texts is also questioned routinely by textual scholars, especially those who work with manuscripts and complicated varoria (for an excellent introduction, see Bornstein and Williams, Palimpsest). Michel Foucault’s "What Is an Author?" addresses a related but orthogonal problematic and is unconcerned with the relatively sober facts of a changing medium. }~ Whereas the traditional form of the book is the same across all printed versions or else follows an explicit practice of appearing in editions (complete with new prefaces and forewords), a Connexions document might very well look different from week to week or year to year.~{ A salient and recent point of comparison can be found in the form of Lawrence Lessig’s "second edition" of his book Code, which is titled Code: Version 2.0 (version is used in the title, but edition is used in the text). The first book was published in 1999 ("ancient history in Internet time"), and Lessig convinced the publisher to make it available as a wiki, a collaborative Web site which can be directly edited by anyone with access. The wiki was edited and updated by hordes of geeks, then "closed" and reedited into a second edition with a new preface. It is a particularly tightly controlled example of collaboration; although the wiki and the book were freely available, the modification and transformation of them did not amount to a simple free-for-all. Instead, Lessig leveraged his own authority, his authorial voice, and the power of Basic Books to create something that looks very much like a traditional second edition, although it was created by processes unimaginable ten years ago. }~ While a textbook might also change significantly to reflect the changing state of knowledge in a given field, it is an explicit goal of Connexions to allow this to happen "in real time," which is to say, to allow educators to update textbooks as fast as they do scientific knowledge.~{ The most familiar comparison is Wikipedia, which was started after Connexions, but grew far more quickly and dynamically, largely due to the ease of use of the system (a bone of some contention among the Connexions team). Wikipedia has come under assault primarily for being unreliable. The suspicion and fear that surround Wikipedia are similar to those that face Connexions, but in the case of Wikipedia entries, the commitment to openness is stubbornly meritocratic: any article can be edited by anyone at anytime, and it matters not how firmly one is identified as an expert by rank, title, degree, or experience—a twelve year old’s knowledge of the Peloponnesian War is given the same access and status as an eighty-year-old classicist’s. Articles are not owned by individuals, and ,{[pg 346]}, all work is pseudonymous and difficult to track. The range of quality is therefore great, and the mainstream press has focused largely on whether Wikipedia is more or less reliable than conventional encyclopedias, not on the process of knowledge production. See, for instance, George Johnson, "The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts," New York Times, 3 January 2006, Late Edition—Final, F2; Robert McHenry, "The Faith-based Encyclopedia," TCS Daily, 15 November 2004, http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html. }~ +={ Merton, Robert : + Mertonian norms ; + Connexions project : + roles in ; + finality : + fixity vs. ; + fixity +} + +These implications are not lost on the Connexions team, but neither are they understood as goals or as having simple solutions. There is a certain immodest, perhaps even reckless, enthusiasm surrounding these implications, an enthusiasm that can take both polymath and transhumanist forms. For instance, the destabilization of the contemporary textbook-publishing system that Connexions represents is (according to Rich) a more accurate way to represent the connections between concepts than a linear textbook format. Connexions thus represents a use of technology as an intervention into an existing context of practice. The fact that Connexions could also render the reliability or trustworthiness of scholarly knowledge unstable is sometimes discussed as an inevitable outcome of technical change—something that the world at large, not Connexions, must learn to deal with. +={ intervention, technology as ; + polymaths ; + transhumanism +} + +To put it differently, the "goal" of Connexions was never to destroy publishing, but it has been structured by the same kind of imaginations of moral and technical order that pervade Free Software and the construction of the Internet. In this sense Rich, Brent, and others are geeks in the same sense as Free Software geeks: they ,{[pg 281]}, share a recursive public devoted to achieving a moral and technical order in which openness and modifiability are core values ("If we are successful, we will disappear"). The implication is that the existing model and infrastructure for the publication of textbooks is of a different moral and technical order, and thus that Connexions needs to innovate not only the technology (the source code or the openness of the system) or the legal arrangements (licenses) but also the very norms and forms of textbook writing itself (coordination and, eventually, a movement). If publication once implied the appearance of reliable, final texts—even if the knowledge therein could be routinely contested by writing more texts and reviews and critiques—Connexions implies the denaturalization of not knowledge per se, but of the process whereby that knowledge is stabilized and rendered reliable, trustworthy. +={ Hendricks, Brent ; + geeks ; + communities : + norms and +1 ; + recursive public +} + +A keyword for the transformation of textbook writing is community, as in the tagline of the Connexions project: "Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities." Building implies that such communities do not yet exist and that the technology will enable them; however, Connexions began with the assumption that there exist standard academic practices and norms of creating teaching materials. As a result, Connexions both enables these practices and norms, by facilitating a digital version of the textbook, and intervenes in them, by creating a different process for creating a textbook. Communities are both assumed and desired. Sometimes they are real (a group of DSP engineers, networked around Rich and others who work in his subspecialty), and sometimes they are imagined (as when in the process of grant writing we claim that the most important component of the success of the project is the "seeding" of scholarly communities). Communities, furthermore, are not audiences or consumers, and sometimes not even students or learners. They are imagined to be active, creative producers and users of teaching materials, whether for teaching or for the further creation of such materials. The structure of the community has little to do with issues of governance, solidarity, or pedagogy, and much more to do with a set of relationships that might obtain with respect to the creation of teaching materials—a community of collaborative production or collaborative debugging, as in the modulation of forms of coordination, modulated to include the activity of creating teaching materials. ,{[pg 282]}, +={ norms : + academic ; + coordination (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + Digital signal processing (DSP) +} + +2~ Agency and Structure in Connexions +={ Authorship +29 ; + Connexions project : + roles in +29 ; + Roles, in Connexions +29 +} + +One of the most animated whiteboard conversations I remember having with Brent and Ross concerned difference between the possible "roles" that a Connexions user might occupy and the implications this could have for both the technical features of the system and the social norms that Connexions attempts to maintain and replicate. Most software systems are content to designate only "users," a generic name-and-password account that can be given a set of permissions (and which has behind it a long and robust tradition in computer-operating-system and security research). Users are users, even if they may have access to different programs and files. What Connexions needed was a way to designate that the same person might have two different exogenous roles: a user might be the author, but not the owner of the content, and vice versa. For instance, perhaps Rice University maintains the copyright for a work, but the author is credited for its creation. Such a situation—known, in legal terms, as "work for hire"—is routine in some universities and most corporations. So while the author is generally given the freedom and authority to create and modify the text as he or she sees fit, the university asserts copyright ownership in order to retain the right to commercially exploit the work. Such a situation is far from settled and is, of course, politically fraught, but the Connexions system, in order to be useful at all to anyone, needed to accommodate this fact. Taking an oppositional political stand would render the system useless in too many cases or cause it to become precisely the kind of authorless, creditless system as Wikipedia—a route not desired by many academics. In a perfectly open world all Connexions modules might each have identical authors and owners, but pragmatism demands that the two roles be kept separate. +={ Hendricks, Brent +14 ; + copyright : + works for hire ; + credit +5 ; + users, status in Connexions ; + Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia) +} + +Furthermore, there are many people involved every day in the creation of academic work who are neither the author nor the owner: graduate students and undergraduates, research scientists, technicians, and others in the grand, contested, complex academic ecology. In some disciplines, all contributors may get authorship credit and some of them may even share ownership, but often many of those who do the work get mentioned only in acknowledgments, or not at all. Again, although the impulse of the creators of Connexions might be to level the playing field and allow only one kind of user, the fact of the matter is that academics simply would not use ,{[pg 283]}, such a system.~{ Again, a comparison with Wikipedia is apposite. Wikipedia is, morally speaking, and especially in the persona of its chief editor, Jimbo Wales, totally devoted to merit-based equality, with users getting no special designation beyond the amount and perceived quality of the material they contribute. Degrees or special positions of employment are anathema. It is a quintessentially American, anti-intellectual-fueled, Horatio Alger-style approach in which the slate is wiped clean and contributors are given a chance to prove themselves independent of background. Connexions, by contrast, draws specifically from the ranks of intellectuals or academics and seeks to replace the infrastructure of publishing. Wikipedia is interested only in creating a better encyclopedia. In this respect, it is transhumanist in character, attributing its distinctiveness and success to the advances in technology (the Internet, wiki, broadband connections, Google). Connexions on the other hand is more polymathic, devoted to intervening into the already complexly constituted organizational practice of scholarship and academia. }~ The need for a role such as "maintainer" (which might also include "editor"), which was different from author or owner, thus also presented itself. +={ Connexions project : + roles in +} + +As Brent, Ross, and I stared at the whiteboard, the discovery of the need for multiple exogenous roles hit all of us in a kind of slow-motion shockwave. It was not simply that the content needed to have different labels attached to it to keep track of these people in a database—something deeper was at work: the law and the practice of authorship actually dictated, to a certain extent, what the software itself should look like. All of sudden, the questions were preformatted, so to speak, by the law and by certain kinds of practices that had been normalized and thus were nearly invisible: who should have permission to change what? Who will have permission to add or drop authors? Who will be allowed to make what changes, and who will have the legal right to do so and who the moral or customary right? What implications follow from the choices the designers make and the choices we present to authors or maintainers? +={ permission +9 } + +The Creative Commons licenses were key to revealing many of these questions. The licenses were in themselves modulations of Free Software licenses, but created with people like artists, musicians, scholars, and filmmakers in mind. Without them, the content in Connexions would be unlicensed, perhaps intended to be in the public domain, but ultimately governed by copyright statutes that provided no clear answers to any of these questions, as those statutes were designed to deal with older media and a different publication process. Using the Creative Commons licenses, on the other hand, meant that the situation of the content in Connexions became well-defined enough, in a legal sense, to be used as a constraint in defining the structure of the software system. The license itself provided the map of the territory by setting parameters for things such as distribution, modification, attribution, and even display, reading, or copying. +={ attribution : + copyright licensing and +3 ; + Creative Commons +2 ; + public domain : + Creative Commons licenses and +2 +} + +For instance, when the author and owner are different, it is not at all obvious who should be given credit. Authors, especially academic authors, expect to be given credit (which is often all they get) for an article or a textbook they have written, yet universities often retain ownership of those textbooks, and ownership would seem to imply a legal right to be identified as both owner and author (e.g., Forrester Research reports or UNESCO reports, which hide the ,{[pg 284]}, identity of authors). In the absence of any licenses, such a scenario has no obvious solution or depends entirely on the specific context. However, the Creative Commons licenses specified the meaning of attribution and the requirement to maintain the copyright notice, thus outlining a procedure that gave the Connexions designers fixed constraints against which to measure how they would implement their system. +={ authorship : + ownership vs. +3 +} + +A positive result of such constraints is that they allow for a kind of institutional flexibility that would not otherwise be possible. Whether a university insists on expropriating copyright or allows scholars to keep their copyrights, both can use Connexions. Connexions is more "open" than traditional textbook publishing because it allows a greater number of heterogeneous contributors to participate, but it is also more "open" than something like Wikipedia, which is ideologically committed to a single definition of authorship and ownership (anonymous, reciprocally licensed collaborative creation by authors who are also the owners of their work). While Wikipedia makes such an ideological commitment, it cannot be used by institutions that have made the decision to operate as expropriators of content, or even in cases wherein authors willingly allow someone else to take credit. If authors and owners must be identical, then either the author is identified as the owner, which is illegal in some cases, or the owner is identified as the author, a situation no academic is willing to submit to. + +The need for multiple roles also revealed other peculiar and troubling problems, such as the issue of giving an "identity" to long-dead authors whose works are out of copyright. So, for instance, a piece by A. E. Housman was included as a module for a class, and while it is clear that Housman is the author, the work is no longer under copyright, so Housman is no longer the copyright holder (nor is the society which published it in 1921). Yet Connexions requires that a copyright be attached to each module to allow it to be licensed openly. This particular case, of a dead author, necessitated two interesting interventions. Someone has to actually create an account for Housman and also issue the work as an "edition" or derivative under a new copyright. In this case, the two other authors are Scott McGill and Christopher Kelty. A curious question arose in this context: should we be listed both as authors and owners (and maintainers), or only as owners and maintainers? And if someone uses the module in a new context (as they have the right to do, ,{[pg 285]}, under the license), will they be required to give attribution only to Housman, or also to McGill and Kelty as well? What rights to ownership do McGill and Kelty have over the digital version of the public-domain text by Housman?~{ An even more technical feature concerned the issue of the order of authorship. The designers at first decided to allow Connexions to simply display the authors in alphabetical order, a practice adopted by some disciplines, like computer science. However, in the case of the Housman example this resulted in what looked like a module authored principally by me, and only secondarily by A. E. Housman. And without the ability to explicitly designate order of authorship, many disciplines had no way to express their conventions along these lines. As a result, the system was redesigned to allow users to designate the order of authorship as well. }~ +={ Housman, A. E. ; + McGill, Scott ; + public domain : + literary texts in +} + +The discussion of roles circulated fluidly across concepts like law (and legal licenses), norms, community, and identity. Brent and Ross and others involved had developed sophisticated imaginations of how Connexions would fit into the existing ecology of academia, constrained all the while by both standard goals, like usability and efficiency, and by novel legal licenses and concerns about the changing practices of authors and scholars. The question, for instance, of how a module can be used (technically, legally) is often confused with, or difficult to disentangle from, how a module should be used (technically, legally, or, more generally, "socially"—with usage shaped by the community who uses it). In order to make sense of this, Connexions programmers and participants like myself are prone to using the language of custom and norm, and the figure of community, as in "the customary norms of a scholarly community." +={ communities : + norms and +} + +2~ From Law and Technology to Norm +={ communities : + norms and +20 +} + +The meaning of publication in Connexions and the questions about roles and their proper legal status emerged from the core concern with reuse, which is the primary modulation of Free Software that Connexions carries out: the modulation of the meaning of source code to include textbook writing. What makes source code such a central component of Free Software is the manner in which it is shared and transformed, not the technical features of any particular language or program. So the modulation of source code to include textbooks is not just an attempt to make textbooks exact, algorithmic, or digital, but an experiment in sharing textbook writing in a similar fashion. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +9 ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + modifiability +3 +} + +This modulation also affects the other components: it creates a demand for openness in textbook creation and circulation; it demands new kinds of copyright licenses (the Creative Commons licenses); and it affects the meaning of coordination among scholars, ranging from explicit forms of collaboration and co-creation to the entire spectrum of uses and reuses that scholars normally make of their ,{[pg 286]}, peers’ works. It is this modulation of coordination that leads to the second core concern of Connexions: that of the existence of "norms" of scholarly creation, use, reuse, publication, and circulation. +={ copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + modulations of | derivative uses and +7 ; + openness (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + norms : + coordination and +} + +Since software programmers and engineers are prone to thinking about things in concrete, practical, and detailed ways, discussions of creation, use, and circulation are rarely conducted at the level of philosophical abstraction. They are carried out on whiteboards, using diagrams. +={ figuring out +3 } + +The whiteboard diagram transcribed in figure 8 was precipitated by a fairly precise question: "When is the reuse of something in a module (or of an entire module) governed by ‘academic norms’ and when is it subject to the legal constraints of the licenses?" For someone to quote a piece of text from one module in another is considered normal practice and thus shouldn’t involve concerns about legal rights and duties to fork the module (create a new modified version, perhaps containing only the section cited, which is something legal licenses explicitly allow). But what if someone borrows, say, all of the equations in a module about information theory and uses them to illustrate a very different point in a different module. Does he or she have either a normal or a legal right to do so? Should the equations be cited? What should that citation look like? What if the equations are particularly hard to mark-up in the MathML language and therefore represent a significant investment in time on the part of the original author? Should the law govern this activity, or should norms? +={ forking : + in Connexions +16 ; + norms : + academic +5 +} + +{ 2bits_09_08-100.png }image ~[* Whiteboard diagram: the cascade of reuse in Connexions. Conception by Ross Reedstrom, Brent Hendricks, and Christopher Kelty. Transcribed in the author’s fieldnotes, 2003. ]~ + +There is a natural tendency among geeks to answer these questions solely with respect to the law; it is, after all, highly codified and seemingly authoritative on such issues. However, there is often no need to engage the law, because of the presumed consensus ("academic norms") about how to proceed, even if those norms conflict with the law. But these norms are nowhere codified, and this makes geeks (and, increasingly, academics themselves) uneasy. As in the case of a requirement of attribution, the constraints of a written license are perceived to be much more stable and reliable than those of culture, precisely because culture is what remains contested and contestable. So the idea of creating a new "version" of a text is easier to understand when it is clearly circumscribed as a legally defined "derivative work." The Connexions software was therefore implemented in such a way that the legal right to create a derived work (to fork a module) could be done with the press of ,{[pg 287]}, a button: a distinct module is automatically created, and it retains the name of the original author and the original owner, but now also includes the new author’s name as author and maintainer. That new author can proceed to make any number of changes. +={ attribution : + copyright licenses and +} + +But is forking always necessary? What if the derivative work contains only a few spelling corrections and slightly updated information? Why not change the existing module (where such changes would be more akin to issuing a new edition), rather than create a legally defined derivative work? Why not simply suggest the changes to the original author? Why not collaborate? While a legal license gives people the right to do all of these things without ever consulting the person who licensed it, there may well be occasions ,{[pg 288]}, when it makes much more sense to ignore those rights in favor of other norms. The answers to these questions depend a great deal on the kind and the intent of the reuse. A refined version of the whiteboard diagram, depicted in figure 9, attempts to capture the various kinds of reuse and their intersection with laws, norms, and technologies. +={ collaboration : + forking vs. +3 ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + forking and +} + +{ 2bits_09_09-100.png }image ~[* Whiteboard diagram transformed: forms of reuse in Connexions. Conception by Christopher Kelty, 2004. ]~ + +The center of the diagram contains a list of different kinds of imaginable reuses, arrayed from least interventionist at the top to most interventionist at the bottom, and it implies that as the intended transformations become more drastic, the likelihood of collaboration with the original author decreases. The arrow on the left indicates the legal path from cultural norms to protected fair uses; the arrow on the right indicates the technical path from built-in legal constraints based on the licenses to software tools that make collaboration (according to presumed scholarly norms) easier than the alternative (exercising the legal right to make a derivative work). With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that the arrows on either side should actually be a circle that connect laws, technologies, and norms in a chain of influence and constraint, since it is clear in retrospect that the norms of authorial practice have actually changed (or at least have been made explicit) based on the existence of licenses and the types of tools available (such as blogs and Wikipedia). +={ experimentation +1 ; + Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia) +} + +The diagram can best be understood as a way of representing, to Connexions itself (and its funders), the experiment under way with the components of Free Software. By modulating source code to include the writing of scholarly textbooks, Connexions made visible the need for new copyright licenses appropriate to this content; by making the system Internet-based and relying on open standards such as XML and Open Source components, Connexions also modulated the concept of openness to include textbook publication; and by making the system possible as an open repository of freely licensed textbook modules, Connexions made visible the changed conditions of coordination, not just between two collaborating authors, but within the entire system of publication, citation, use, reuse, borrowing, building on, plagiarizing, copying, emulating, and so on. Such changes to coordination may or may not take hold. For many scholars, they pose an immodest challenge to a working system that has developed over centuries, but for others they represent the removal of arbitrary constraints that prevent ,{[pg 289]}, novel and innovative forms of knowledge creation and association rendered possible in the last thirty to forty years (and especially in the last ten). For some, these modulations might form the basis for a final modulation—a Free Textbooks movement—but as yet no such movement exists. +={ Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) ; + movement (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +2 +} + +In the case of shared software source code, one of the principal reasons for sharing it was to reuse it: to build on it, to link to it, to employ it in ways that made building more complex objects into an easier task. The very design philosophy of UNIX well articulates the necessity of modularity and reuse, and the idea is no less powerful in other areas, such as textbooks. But just as the reuse of software is not simply a feature of software’s technical characteristics, the idea of "reusing" scholarly materials implies all kinds of questions that are not simply questions of recombining texts. The ability to share source code—and the ability to create complex software based on it—requires modulations of both the legal meaning of software, as in the case of EMACS, and the organizational form, as in the ,{[pg 290]}, emergence of Free Software projects other than the Free Software Foundation (the Linux kernel, Perl, Apache, etc.). +={ Free Software Foundation +1 ; + textbooks : + model in Connexions +1 +} + +In the case of textbook reuse (but only after Free Software), the technical and the legal problems that Connexions addresses are relatively well specified: what software to use, whether to use XML, the need for an excellent user interface, and so on. However, the organizational, cultural, or practical meaning of reuse is not yet entirely clear (a point made by figures 8 and 9). In many ways, the recognition that there are cultural norms among academics mirrors the (re)discovery of norms and ethics among Free Software hackers.~{ I refer here to Eric Raymond’s "discovery" that hackers possess unstated norms that govern what they do, in addition to the legal licenses and technical practices they engage in (see Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere"). For a critique and background on hacker ethics and norms, see Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom." }~ But the label "cultural norms" is a mere catch-all for a problem that is probably better understood as a mixture of concrete technical, organizational, and legal questions and as more or less abstract social imaginaries through which a particular kind of material order is understood and pursued—the creation of a recursive public. How do programmers, lawyers, engineers, and Free Software advocates (and anthropologists) "figure out" how norms work? How do they figure out ways to operationalize or make use of them? How do they figure out how to change them? How do they figure out how to create new norms? They do so through the modulations of existing practices, guided by imaginaries of moral and technical order. Connexions does not tend toward becoming Free Software, but it does tend toward becoming a recursive public with respect to textbooks, education, and the publication of pedagogical techniques and knowledge. The problematic of creating an independent, autonomous public is thus the subterranean ground of both Free Software and Connexions. +={ figuring out ; + norms : + cultural | practices and technology vs. +8 ; + practices : + norms vs. +8 ; + recursive public ; + public : + autotelic and independent : + see also recursive public +} + +To some extent, then, the matter of reuse raises a host of questions about the borders and boundaries in and of academia. Brent, Ross, and I assumed at the outset that communities have both borders and norms, and that the two are related. But, as it turns out, this is not a safe assumption. At neither the technical nor the legal level is the use of the software restricted to academics—indeed, there is no feasible way to do that and still offer it on the Internet—nor does anyone involved wish it to be so restricted. However, there is an implicit sense that the people who will contribute content will primarily be academics and educators (just as Free Software participants are expected, but not required to be programmers). As figure 9 makes clear, there may well be tremendous variation in the kinds of reuse that people wish to make, even within academia. ,{[pg 291]}, Scholars in the humanities, for instance, are loath to even imagine others creating derivative works with articles they have written and can envision their work being used only in the conventional manner of being read, cited, and critiqued. Scholars in engineering, biology, or computer science, on the other hand, may well take pleasure in the idea or act of reuse, if it is adequately understood to be a "scientific result" or a suitably stable concept on which to build.~{ Bruno Latour’s Science in Action makes a strong case for the centrality of "black boxes" in science and engineering for precisely this reason. }~ Reuse can have a range of different meanings depending not only on whether it is used by scholars or academics, but within that heterogeneous group itself. +={ Hendricks, Brent ; + Reedstrom, Ross ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + derivative uses and +} + +The Connexions software does not, however, enforce disciplinary differences. If anything it makes very strong and troubling claims that knowledge is knowledge and that disciplinary constraints are arbitrary. Thus, for instance, if a biologist wishes to transform a literary scholar’s article on Darwin’s tropes to make it reflect current evolutionary theory, he or she could do so; it is entirely possible, both legally and technically. The literary scholar could react in a number of ways, including outrage that the biologist has misread or misunderstood the work or pleasure in seeing the work refined. Connexions adheres rigorously to its ideas of openness in this regard; it neither encourages nor censures such behavior. +={ modifiability : + relation of different disciplines to +} + +By contrast, as figure 9 suggests, the relationship between these two scholars can be governed either by the legal specification of rights contained in the licenses (a privately ordered legal regime dependent on a national-cum-global statutory regime) or by the customary means of collaboration enabled, perhaps enhanced, by software tools. The former is the domain of the state, the legal profession, and a moral and technical order that, for lack of a better word, might be called modernity. The latter, however, is the domain of the cultural, the informal, the practical, the interpersonal; it is the domain of ethics (prior to its modernization, perhaps) and of tradition. +={ modernity : + tradition and +1 ; + moral and technical order +} + +If figure 9 is a recapitulation of modernity and tradition (what better role for an anthropologist to play!), then the presumptive boundaries around "communities" define which groups possess which norms. But the very design of Connexions—its technical and legal exactitude—immediately brings a potentially huge variety of traditions into conflict with one another. Can the biologist and the literary scholar be expected to occupy the same universe of norms? Does the fact of being academics, employees of a university, ,{[pg 292]}, or readers of Darwin ensure this sharing of norms? How are the boundaries policed and the norms communicated and reinforced? +={ norms +4 : + existence of +4 +} + +The problem of reuse therefore raises a much broader and more complex question: do norms actually exist? In particular, do they exist independent of the particular technical, legal, or organizational practice in which groups of people exist—outside the coordinated infrastructure of scholarship and science? And if Connexions raises this question, can the same question not also be asked of the elaborate system of professions, disciplines, and organizations that coordinate the scholarship of different communities? Are these norms, or are they "technical" and "legal" practices? What difference does formalization make? What difference does bureaucratization make?~{ I should note, in my defense, that my efforts to get my informants to read Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, Henry Maine, or Emile Durkheim ,{[pg 347]}, proved far less successful than my creation of nice Adobe Illustrator diagrams that made explicit the reemergence of issues addressed a century ago. It was not for lack of trying, however. }~ + +The question can also be posed this way: should norms be understood as historically changing constructs or as natural features of human behavior (regular patterns, or conventions, which emerge inevitably wherever human beings interact). Are they a feature of changing institutions, laws, and technologies, or do they form and persist in the same way wherever people congregate? Are norms features of a "calculative agency," as Michael Callon puts it, or are they features of the evolved human mind, as Marc Hauser argues?~{ Callon, The Laws of the Markets; Hauser, Moral Minds. }~ +={ norms +4 : + evolution and +2 +} + +The answer that my informants give, in practice, concerning the mode of existence of cultural norms is neither. On the one hand, in the Connexions project the question of the mode of existence of academic norms is unanswered; the basic assumption is that certain actions are captured and constrained neither by legal constraints nor technical barriers, and that it takes people who know or study "communities" (i.e., nonlegal and nontechnical constraints) to figure out what those actions may be. On some days, the project is modestly understood to enable academics to do what they do faster and better, but without fundamentally changing anything about the practice, institutions, or legal relations; on other days, however, it is a radically transformative project, changing how people think about creating scholarly work, a project that requires educating people and potentially "changing the culture" of scholarly work, including its technology, its legal relations, and its practices. +={ norms : + cultural +1 +} + +In stark contrast (despite the very large degree of simpatico), the principal members of Creative Commons answer the question of the existence of norms quite differently than do those in Connexions: ,{[pg 293]}, they assert that norms not only change but are manipulated and/or channeled by the modulation of technical and legal practices (this is the novel version of law and economics that Creative Commons is founded on). Such an assertion leaves very little for norms or for culture; there may be a deep evolutionary role for rule following or for choosing socially sanctioned behavior over socially unacceptable behavior, but the real action happens in the legal and technical domains. In Creative Commons the question of the existence of norms is answered firmly in the phrase coined by Glenn Brown: "punt to culture." For Creative Commons, norms are a prelegal and pretechnical substrate upon which the licenses they create operate. Norms must exist for the strategy employed in the licenses to make sense—as the following story illustrates. +={ Brown, Glen Otis ; + norms : + channeling by legal means +} + +2~ On the Nonexistence of Norms in the Culture of No Culture +={ culture : + punting to +24 +} + +More than once, I have found myself on the telephone with Glenn Brown, staring at notes, a diagram, or some inscrutable collection of legalese. Usually, the conversations wander from fine legal points to music and Texas politics to Glenn’s travels around the globe. They are often precipitated by some previous conversation and by Glenn’s need to remind himself (and me) what we are in the middle of creating. Or destroying. His are never simple questions. While the Connexions project started with a repository of scholarly content in need of a license, Creative Commons started with licenses in need of particular kinds of content. But both projects required participants to delve into the details of both licenses and the structure of digital content, which qualified me, for both projects, as the intermediary who could help explore these intersections. My phone conversations with Glenn, then, were much like the whiteboard conversations at Connexions: filled with a mix of technical and legal terminology, and conducted largely in order to give Glenn the sense that he had cross-checked his plans with someone presumed to know better. I can’t count the number of times I have hung up the phone or left the conference room wondering, "Have I just sanctioned something mad?" Yet rarely have I felt that my interventions served to do more than confirm suspicions or derail already unstable arguments. ,{[pg 294]}, +={ Brown, Glen Otis +23 } + +In one particular conversation—the "punt to culture" conversation—I found myself bewildered by a sudden understanding of the process of writing legal licenses and of the particular assumptions about human behavior that need to be present in order to imagine creating these licenses or ensuring that they will be beneficial to the people who will use them. + +These discussions (which often included other lawyers) happened in a kind of hypothetical space of legal imagination, a space highly structured by legal concepts, statutes, and precedents, and one extraordinarily carefully attuned to the fine details of semantics. A core aspect of operating within this imagination is the distinction between law as an abstract semantic entity and law as a practical fact that people may or may not deal with. To be sure, not all lawyers operate this way, but the warrant for thinking this way comes from no less eminent an authority than Oliver Wendell Holmes, for whom the "Path of Law" was always from practice to abstract rule, and not the reverse.~{ Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Path of Law." }~ The opposition is unstable, but I highlight it here because it was frequently used as a strategy for constructing precise legal language. The ability to imagine the difference between an abstract rule designating legality and a rule encountered in practice was a first step toward seeing how the language of the rule should be constructed. +={ Holmes, Oliver Wendell } + +I helped write, read, and think about the first of the Creative Commons licenses, and it was through this experience that I came to understand how the crafting of legal language works, and in particular how the mode of existence of cultural or social norms relates to the crafting of legal language. Creative Commons licenses are not a familiar legal entity, however. They are modulations of the Free Software license, but they differ in important ways. +={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + Creative Commons version +20 ; + Creative Commons : + writing of licenses +20 ; + participant observation : + writing copyright licenses as +20 +} + +The Creative Commons licenses allow authors to grant the use of their work in about a dozen different ways—that is, the license itself comes in versions. One can, for instance, require attribution, prohibit commercial exploitation, allow derivative or modified works to be made and circulated, or some combination of all these. These different combinations actually create different licenses, each of which grants intellectual-property rights under slightly different conditions. For example, say Marshall Sahlins decides to write a paper about how the Internet is cultural; he copyrights the paper ("© 2004 Marshall Sahlins"), he requires that any use of it or any copies of it maintain the copyright notice and the attribution of ,{[pg 295]}, authorship (these can be different), and he furthermore allows for commercial use of the paper. It would then be legal for a publishing house to take the paper off Sahlins’s Linux-based Web server and publish it in a collection without having to ask permission, as long as the paper remains unchanged and he is clearly and unambiguously listed as author of the paper. The publishing house would not get any rights to the work, and Sahlins would not get any royalties. If he had specified noncommercial use, the publisher would instead have needed to contact him and arrange for a separate license (Creative Commons licenses are nonexclusive), under which he could demand some share of revenue and his name on the cover of the book.~{ In December 2006 Creative Commons announced a set of licenses that facilitate the "follow up" licensing of a work, especially one initially issued under a noncommercial license. }~ But say he was, instead, a young scholar seeking only peer recognition and approbation—then royalties would be secondary to maximum circulation. Creative Commons allows authors to assert, as its members put it, "some rights reserved" or even "no rights reserved." +={ intellectual property : + strategy and +16 ; + Sahlins, Marshall +2 ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + derivative uses and +2 | disavowal clause in +6 ; + attribution : + dissavowal of +6 ; + credit +6 : + see also attribution +} + +But what if Sahlins had chosen a license that allowed modification of his work. This would mean that I, Christopher Kelty, whether in agreement with or in objection to his work, could download the paper, rewrite large sections of it, add in my own baroque and idiosyncratic scholarship, and write a section that purports to debunk (or, what could amount to the same, augment) Sahlins’s arguments. I would then be legally entitled to re-release the paper as "© 2004 Marshall Sahlins, with modifications © 2007 Christopher Kelty," so long as Sahlins is identified as the author of the paper. The nature or extent of the modifications is not legally restricted, but both the original and the modified version would be legally attributed to Sahlins (even though he would own only the first paper). + +In the course of a number of e-mails, chat sessions, and phone conversations with Glenn, I raised this example and proposed that the licenses needed a way to account for it, since it seemed to me entirely possible that were I to produce a modified work that so distorted Sahlins’s original argument that he did not want to be associated with the modified paper, then he should have the right also to repudiate his identification as author. Sahlins should, legally speaking, be able to ask me to remove his name from all subsequent versions of my misrepresentation, thus clearing his good name and providing me the freedom to continue sullying mine into obscurity. After hashing it out with the expensive Palo Alto legal firm that was officially drafting the licenses, we came up with text that said: ,{[pg 296]}, "If You create a Derivative Work, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Derivative Work any reference to such Licensor or the Original Author, as requested." +={ norms : + academic +5 +} + +The bulk of our discussion centered around the need for the phrase, "to the extent practicable." Glenn asked me, "How is the original author supposed to monitor all the possible uses of her name? How will she enforce this clause? Isn’t it going to be difficult to remove the name from every copy?" Glenn was imagining a situation of strict adherence, one in which the presence of the name on the paper was the same as the reputation of the individual, regardless of who actually read it. On this theory, until all traces of the author’s name were expunged from each of these teratomata circulating in the world, there could be no peace, and no rest for the wronged. + +I paused, then gave the kind of sigh meant to imply that I had come to my hard-won understandings of culture through arduous dissertation research: "It probably won’t need to be strictly enforced in all cases—only in the significant ones. Scholars tend to respond to each other only in very circumscribed cases, by writing letters to the editor or by sending responses or rebuttals to the journal that published the work. It takes a lot of work to really police a reputation, and it differs from discipline to discipline. Sometimes, drastic action might be needed, usually not. There is so much misuse and abuse of people’s arguments and work going on all the time that people only react when they are directly confronted with serious abuses. And even so, it is only in cases of negative criticism or misuse that people need respond. When a scholar uses someone’s work approvingly, but incorrectly, it is usually considered petulant (at best) to correct them publicly." + +"In short," I said, leaning back in my chair and acting the part of expert, "it’s like, you know, c’mon—it isn’t all law, there are a bunch of, you know, informal rules of civility and stuff that govern that sort of thing." + +Then Glenn said., "Oh, okay, well that’s when we punt to culture." + +When I heard this phrase, I leaned too far back and fell over, joyfully stunned. Glenn had managed to capture what no amount of fieldwork, with however many subjects, could have. Some combination of American football, a twist of Hobbes or Holmes, and a lived understanding of what exactly these copyright licenses are ,{[pg 297]}, meant to achieve gave this phrase a luminosity I usually associate only with Balinese cock-fights. It encapsulated, almost as a slogan, a very precise explanation of what Creative Commons had undertaken. It was not a theory Glenn proposed with this phrase, but a strategy in which a particular, if vague, theory of culture played a role. +={ culture : + Creative Commons version of +12 +} + +For those unfamiliar, a bit of background on U.S. football may help. When two teams square off on the football field, the offensive team gets four attempts, called "downs," to move the ball either ten yards forward or into the end zone for a score. The first three downs usually involve one of two strategies: run or pass, run or pass. On the fourth down, however, the offensive team must either "go for it" (run or pass), kick a field goal (if close enough to the end zone), or "punt" the ball to the other team. Punting is a somewhat disappointing option, because it means giving up possession of the ball to the other team, but it has the advantage of putting the other team as far back on the playing field as possible, thus decreasing its likelihood of scoring. + +To "punt to culture," then, suggests that copyright licenses try three times to legally restrict what a user or consumer of a work can make of it. By using the existing federal intellectual-property laws and the rules of license and contract writing, copyright licenses articulate to people what they can and cannot do with that work according to law. While the licenses do not (they cannot) force people, in any tangible sense, to do one thing or another, they can use the language of law and contract to warn people, and perhaps obliquely, to threaten them. If the licenses end up silent on a point—if there is no "score," to continue the analogy—then it’s time to punt to culture. Rather than make more law, or call in the police, the license strategy relies on culture to fill in the gaps with people’s own understandings of what is right and wrong, beyond the law. It operationalizes a theory of culture, a theory that emphasizes the sovereignty of nonstate customs and the diversity of systems of cultural norms. Creative Commons would prefer that its licenses remain legally minimalist. It would much prefer to assume—indeed, the licenses implicitly require—the robust, powerful existence of this multifarious, hetero-physiognomic, and formidable opponent to the law with neither uniform nor mascot, hunched at the far end of the field, preparing to, so to speak, clean law’s clock. ,{[pg 298]}, +={ norms : + cultural +} + +Creative Commons’s "culture" thus seems to be a somewhat vague mixture of many familiar theories. Culture is an unspecified but finely articulated set of given, evolved, designed, informal, practiced, habitual, local, social, civil, or historical norms that are expected to govern the behavior of individuals in the absence of a state, a court, a king, or a police force, at one of any number of scales. It is not monolithic (indeed, my self-assured explanation concerned only the norms of "academia"), but assumes a diversity beyond enumeration. It employs elements of relativism—any culture should be able to trump the legal rules. It is not a hereditary biological theory, but one that assumes historical contingency and arbitrary structures. +={ norms : + channeling by legal means +6 +} + +Certainly, whatever culture is, it is separate from law. Law is, to borrow Sharon Traweek’s famous phrase, "a culture of no culture" in this sense. It is not the cultural and normative practices of legal scholars, judges, lawyers, legislators, and lobbyists that determine what laws will look like, but their careful, expert, noncultural ratiocination. In this sense, punting to culture implies that laws are the result of human design, whereas culture is the result of human action, but not of human design. Law is systematic and tractable; culture may have a deep structure, but it is intractable to human design. It can, however, be channeled and tracked, nudged or guided, by law. +={ Traweek, Sharon ; + culture : + law vs. +3 +} + +Thus, Lawrence Lessig, one of the founders of Creative Commons has written extensively about the "regulation of social meaning," using cases such as those involving the use or nonuse of seatbelts or whether or not to allow smoking in public places. The decision not to wear a seatbelt, for instance, may have much more to do with the contextual meaning of putting on a seatbelt (don’t you trust the cab driver?) than with either the existence of the seatbelt (or automatic seatbelts, for that matter) or with laws demanding their use. According to Lessig, the best law can do in the face of custom is to change the meaning of wearing the seatbelt: to give the refusal a dishonorable rather than an honorable meaning. Creative Commons licenses are based on a similar assumption: the law is relatively powerless in the face of entrenched academic or artistic customs, and so the best the licenses can do is channel the meaning of sharing and reuse, of copyright control or infringement. As Glenn explained in the context of a discussion about a license that would allow music sampling. ,{[pg 299]}, +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + law and economics and ; + meaning, regulation through law ; + music +3 ; + sampling, musical +3 +} + +_1 We anticipate that the phrase "as appropriate to the medium, genre, and market niche" might prompt some anxiety, as it leaves things relatively undefined. But there’s more method here than you might expect: The definition of "sampling" or "collage" varies across different media. Rather than try to define all possible scenarios (including ones that haven’t happened yet)—which would have the effect of restricting the types of re-uses to a limited set—we took the more laissez faire approach. + +_1 This sort of deference to community values—think of it as "punting to culture"—is very common in everyday business and contract law. The idea is that when lawyers have trouble defining the specialized terms of certain subcultures, they should get out of the way and let those subcultures work them out. It’s probably not a surprise Creative Commons likes this sort of notion a lot.~{ Message from the cc-sampling mailing list, Glenn Brown, Subject: BACKGROUND: "AS APPROPRIATE TO THE MEDIUM, GENRE, AND MARKET NICHE," 23 May 2003, http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-sampling/2003-May/000004.html. }~ + +As in the case of reuse in Connexions, sampling in the music world can imply a number of different, perhaps overlapping, customary meanings of what is acceptable and what is not. For Connexions, the trick was to differentiate the cases wherein collaboration should be encouraged from the cases wherein the legal right to "sample"—to fork or to create a derived work—was the appropriate course of action. For Creative Commons, the very structure of the licenses attempts to capture this distinction as such and to allow for individuals to make determinations about the meaning of sampling themselves.~{ Sampling offers a particularly clear example of how Creative Commons differs from the existing practice and infrastructure of music creation and intellectual-property law. The music industry has actually long recognized the fact of sampling as something musicians do and has attempted to deal with it by making it an explicit economic practice; the music industry thus encourages sampling by facilitating the sale between labels and artists of rights to make a sample. Record companies will negotiate prices, lengths, quality, and quantity of sampling and settle on a price. \\ This practice is set opposite the assumption, also codified in law, that the public has a right to a fair use of copyrighted material without payment or permission. Sampling a piece of music might seem to fall into this category of use, except that one of the tests of fair use is that the use not impact any existing market for such uses, and the fact that the music industry has effectively created a market for the buying and selling of samples means that sampling now routinely falls outside the fair uses codified in the statute, thus removing sampling from the domain of fair use. Creative Commons licenses, on the other hand, say that owners should be able to designate their material as "sample-able," to give permission ahead of time, and by this practice to encourage others to do the same. They give an "honorable" meaning to the practice of sampling for free, rather than the dishonorable one created by the industry. It thus becomes a war over the meaning of norms, in the law-and-economics language of Creative Commons and its founders. }~ + +At stake, then, is the construction of both technologies and legal licenses that, as Brent and Rich would assert, "make it easy for users to do the right thing." The "right thing," however, is precisely what goes unstated: the moral and technical order that guides the design of both licenses and tools. Connexions users are given tools that facilitate citation, acknowledgment, attribution, and certain kinds of reuse instead of tools that privilege anonymity or facilitate proliferation or encourage nonreciprocal collaborations. By the same token, Creative Commons licenses, while legally binding, are created with the aim of changing norms: they promote attribution and citation; they promote fair use and clearly designated uses; they are written to give users flexibility to decide what kinds of things should be allowed and what kinds shouldn’t. Without a doubt, the "right thing" is right for some people and not for others—and it is thus political. But the criteria for what is right are not ,{[pg 300]}, merely political; the criteria are what constitute the affinity of these geeks in the first place, what makes them a recursive public. They see in these instruments the possibility for the creation of authentic publics whose role is to stand outside power, outside markets, and to participate in sovereignty, and through this participation to produce liberty without sacrificing stability. +={ Baraniuk, Richard ; + Hendricks, Brent ; + affinity (of geeks) ; + fair use ; + moral and technical order ; + recursive public +} + +2~ Conclusion + +What happens when geeks modulate the practices that make up Free Software? What is the intuition or the cultural significance of Free Software that makes people want to emulate and modulate it? Creative Commons and Connexions modulate the practices of Free Software and extend them in new ways. They change the meaning of shared source code to include shared nonsoftware, and they try to apply the practices of license writing, coordination, and openness to new domains. At one level, such an activity is fascinating simply because of what it reveals: in the case of Connexions, it reveals the problem of determining the finality of a work. How should the authority, stability, and reliability of knowledge be assessed when work can be rendered permanently modifiable? It is an activity that reveals the complexity of the system of authorization and evaluation that has been built in the past. + +The intuition that Connexions and Creative Commons draw from Free Software is an intuition about the authority of knowledge, about a reorientation of knowledge and power that demands a response. That response needs to be technical and legal, to be sure, but it also needs to be public—a response that defines the meaning of finality publicly and openly and makes modifiability an irreversible aspect of the process of stabilizing knowledge. Such a commitment is incompatible with the provision of stable knowledge by unaccountable private parties, whether individuals or corporations or governments, or by technical fiat. There must always remain the possibility that someone can question, change, reuse, and modify according to their needs. + +1~conclusion Conclusion + +% ,{[pg 301]}, + +2~ The Cultural Consequences of Free Software + +Free Software is changing. In all aspects it looks very different from when I started, and in many ways the Free Software described herein is not the Free Software readers will encounter if they turn to the Internet to find it. But how could it be otherwise? If the argument I make in Two Bits is at all correct, then modulation must constantly be occurring, for experimentation never seeks its own conclusion. A question remains, though: in changing, does Free Software and its kin preserve the imagination of moral and technical order that created it? Is the recursive public something that survives, orders, or makes sense of these changes? Does Free Software exist for more than its own sake? +={ modulation : + of Free Software +5 ; + moral and technical order +} + +In Two Bits I have explored not only the history of Free Software but also the question of where such future changes will have come ,{[pg 302]}, from. I argue for seeing continuity in certain practices of everyday life precisely because the Internet and Free Software pervade everyday life to a remarkable, and growing, degree. Every day, from here to there, new projects and ideas and tools and goals emerge everywhere out of the practices that I trace through Free Software: Connexions and Creative Commons, open access, Open Source synthetic biology, free culture, access to knowledge (a2k), open cola, open movies, science commons, open business, Open Source yoga, Open Source democracy, open educational resources, the One Laptop Per Child project, to say nothing of the proliferation of wiki-everything or the "peer production" of scientific data or consumer services—all new responses to a widely felt reorientation of knowledge and power.~{ See http://cnx.org, http://www.creativecommons.org, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm, http://www.biobricks.org, http://www.freebeer.org, http://freeculture.org, http://www.cptech.org/a2k, ,{[pg 348]}, http://www.colawp.com/colas/400/cola467_recipe.html, http://www.elephantsdream.org, http://www.sciencecommons.org, http://www.plos.org, http://www.openbusiness.cc, http://www.yogaunity.org, http://osdproject.com, http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/oer/, and http://olpc.com. }~ How is one to know the difference between all these things? How is one to understand the cultural significance and consequence of them? Can one distinguish between projects that promote a form of public sphere that can direct the actions of our society versus those that favor corporate, individual, or hierarchical control over decision making? +={ practices +2 : + five components of Free Software +2 ; + public +5 : + see also recursive public +5 ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +19 +} + +Often the first response to such emerging projects is to focus on the promises and ideology of the people involved. On the one hand, claiming to be open or free or public or democratic is something nearly everyone does (including unlikely candidates such as the defense intelligence agencies of the United States), and one should therefore be suspicious and critical of all such claims.~{ See Clive Thompson, "Open Source Spying," New York Times Magazine, 3 December 2006, 54. }~ While such arguments and ideological claims are important, it would be a grave mistake to focus only on these statements. The "movement"—the ideological, critical, or promissory aspect—is just one component of Free Software and, indeed, the one that has come last, after the other practices were figured out and made legible, replicable, and modifiable. On the other hand, it is easy for geeks and Free Software advocates to denounce emerging projects, to say, "But that isn’t really Open Source or Free Software." And while it may be tempting to fix the definition of Free Software once and for all in order to ensure a clear dividing line between the true sons and the carpetbaggers, to do so would reduce Free Software to mere repetition without difference, would sacrifice its most powerful and distinctive attribute: its responsive, emergent, public character. + +But what questions should one ask? Where should scholars or curious onlookers focus their attention in order to see whether or not a recursive public is at work? Many of these questions are simple, ,{[pg 303]}, practical ones: are software and networks involved at any level? Do the participants claim to understand Free Software or Open Source, either in their details or as an inspiration? Is intellectual-property law a key problem? Are participants trying to coordinate each other through the Internet, and are they trying to take advantage of voluntary, self-directed contributions of some kind? More specifically, are participants modulating one of these practices? Are they thinking about something in terms of source code, or source and binary? Are they changing or creating new forms of licenses, contracts, or privately ordered legal arrangements? Are they experimenting with forms of coordinating the voluntary actions of large numbers of unevenly distributed people? Are the people who are contributing aware of or actively pursuing questions of ideology, distinction, movement, or opposition? Are these practices recognized as something that creates the possibility for affinity, rather than simply arcane "technical" practices that are too complex to understand or appreciate? +={ affinity (of geeks) +2 } + +In the last few years, talk of "social software" or "Web 2.0" has dominated the circuit of geek and entrepreneur conferences and discussions: Wikipedia, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube, for example. For instance, there are scores and scores of "social" music sites, with collaborative rating, music sharing, music discovery, and so forth. Many of these directly use or take inspiration from Free Software. For all of them, intellectual property is a central and dominating concern. Key to their novelty is the leveraging and coordinating of massive numbers of people along restricted lines (i.e., music preferences that guide music discovery). Some even advocate or lobby for free(er) access to digital music. But they are not (yet) what I would identify as recursive publics: most of them are commercial entities whose structure and technical specifications are closely guarded and not open to modification. While some such entities may deal in freely licensed content (for instance, Creative Commons-licensed music), few are interested in allowing strangers to participate in, modulate, or modify the system as such; they are interested in allowing users to become consumers in more and more sophisticated ways, and not necessarily in facilitating a public culture of music. They want information and knowledge to be free, to be sure, but not necessarily the infrastructure that makes that information available and knowledge possible. Such entities lack the "recursive" commitment. ,{[pg 304]}, +={ music : + recursive public and +} + +By contrast, some corners of the open-access movement are more likely to meet this criteria. As the appellation suggests, participants see it as a movement, not a corporate or state entity, a movement founded on practices of copyleft and the modulation of Free Software licensing ideas. The use of scientific data and the tools for making sense of open access are very often at the heart of controversy in science (a point often reiterated by science and technology studies), and so there is often an argument about not only the availability of data but its reuse, modification, and modulation as well. Projects like the BioBricks Foundation (biobricks.org) and new organizations like the Public Library of Science (plos.org) are committed to both availability and certain forms of collective modification. The commitment to becoming a recursive public, however, raises unprecedented issues about the nature of quality, reliability, and finality of scientific data and results—questions that will reverberate throughout the sciences as a result. +={ movement (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + open access : + recursive public and +} + +Farther afield, questions of "traditional heritage" claims, the compulsory licensing of pharmaceuticals, or new forms of "crowdsourcing" in labor markets are also open to analysis in the terms I offer in Two Bits.~{ See especially Christen, "Tracking Properness" and "Gone Digital"; Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? and "Heritage as Property." Crowdsourcing fits into other novel forms of labor arrangements, ranging from conventional outsourcing and off-shoring to newer forms of bodyshopping and "virtual migration" (see Aneesh, Virtual Migration; Xiang, "Global Bodyshopping" ). }~ Virtual worlds like Second Life, "a 3D digital world imagined, created, and owned by its residents," are increasingly laboratories for precisely the kinds of questions raised here: such worlds are far less virtual than most people realize, and the experiments conducted there far more likely to migrate into the so-called real world before we know it—including both economic and democratic experiments.~{ Golub, "Copyright and Taboo"; Dibbell, Play Money. }~ How far will Second Life go in facilitating a recursive public sphere? Can it survive both as a corporation and as a "world"? And of course, there is the question of the "blogosphere" as a public sphere, as a space of opinion and discussion that is radically open to the voices of massive numbers of people. Blogging gives the lie to conventional journalism’s self-image as the public sphere, but it is by no means immune to the same kinds of problematic dynamics and polarizations, no more "rational-critical" than FOX News, and yet . . . +={ blogosphere, as recursive public ; + Second Life, as recursive public +} + +Such examples should indicate the degree to which Two Bits is focused on a much longer time span than simply the last couple of years and on much broader issues of political legitimacy and cultural change. Rather than offer immediate policy prescriptions or seek to change the way people think about an issue, I have approached ,{[pg 305]}, Two Bits as a work of history and anthropology, making it less immediately applicable in the hopes that it is more lastingly usable. The stories I have told reach back at least forty years, if not longer. While it is clear that the Internet as most people know it is only ten to fifteen years old, it has been "in preparation" since at least the late 1950s. Students in my classes—especially hip geeks deep in Free Software apprenticeship—are bewildered to learn that the arguments and usable pasts they are rehearsing are refinements and riffs on stories that are as old or older than their parents. This deeper stability is where the cultural significance of Free Software lies: what difference does Free Software today introduce with respect to knowledge and power yesterday? +={ cultural significance ; + legitimacy, circulation of knowledge and +6 +} + +Free Software is a response to a problem, in much the same way that the Royal Society in the sixteenth century, the emergence of a publishing industry in the eighteenth century, and the institutions of the public sphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were responses. They responded to the collective challenge of creating regimes of governance that required—and encouraged—reliable empirical knowledge as a basis for their political legitimacy. Such political legitimacy is not an eternal or theoretical problem; it is a problem of constant real-world practice in creating the infrastructures by which individuals come to inhabit and understand their own governance, whether by states, corporations, or machines. If power seeks consent of the governed—and especially the consent of the democratic, self-governing kind that has become the global dominant ideal since the seventeenth century—it must also seek to ensure the stability and reliability of the knowledge on which that consent is propped. +={ public sphere : + recursive public vs. +4 : + see also public, recursive public +4 +} + +Debates about the nature and history of publics and public spheres have served as one of the main arenas for this kind of questioning, but, as I hope I have shown here, it is a question not only of public spheres but of practices, technologies, laws, and movements, of going concerns which undergo modulation and experimentation in accord with a social imagination of order both moral and technical. "Recursive public" as a concept is not meant to replace that of public sphere. I intend neither for actors nor really for many scholars to find it generally applicable. I would not want to see it suddenly discovered everywhere, but principally in tracking the transformation, proliferation, and differentiation of Free Software and its derivatives. ,{[pg 306]}, +={ social imaginary } + +Several threads from the three parts of Two Bits can now be tied together. The detailed descriptions of Free Software and its modulations should make clear that (1) the reason the Internet looks the way it does is due to the work of figuring out Free Software, both before and after it was recognized as such; (2) neither the Internet nor the computer is the cause of a reorientation of knowledge and power, but both are tools that render possible modulations of settled practices, modulations that reveal a much older problem regarding the legitimacy of the means of circulation and production of knowledge; (3) Free Software is not an ethical stance, but a practical response to the revelation of these older problems; and (4) the best way to understand this response is to see it as a kind of public sphere, a recursive public that is specific to the technical and moral imaginations of order in the contemporary world of geeks. +={ figuring out } + +It is possible now to return to the practical and political meaning of the "singularity" of the Internet, that is, to the fact that there is only one Internet. This does not mean that there are no other networks, but only that the Internet is a singular entity and not an instance of a general type. How is it that the Internet is open in the same way to everyone, whether an individual or a corporate or a national entity? How has it become extensible (and, by extension, defensible) by and to everyone, regardless of their identity, locale, context, or degree of power? +={ Internet : + singularity of +7 +} + +The singularity of the Internet is both an ontological and an epistemological fact; it is a feature of the Internet’s technical configurations and modes of ordering the actions of humans and machines by protocols and software. But it is also a feature of the technical and moral imaginations of the people who build, manage, inhabit, and expand the Internet. Ontologically, the creation and dissemination of standardized protocols, and novel standard-setting processes are at the heart of the story. In the case of the Internet, differences in standards-setting processes are revealed clearly in the form of the famous Request for Comments system of creating, distributing, and modifying Internet protocols. The RFC system, just as much as the Geneva-based International Organization for Standards, reveal the fault lines of international legitimacy in complex societies dependent on networks, software, and other high-tech forms of knowledge production, organization, and governance. The legitimacy of standards has massive significance for the abilities of individual actors to participate in their own recursive publics, whether they ,{[pg 307]}, be publics that address software and networks or those that address education and development. But like the relationship between "law on the books" and "law in action," standards depend on the coordinated action and order of human practices. +={ International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ; + Request for Comments (RFC) ; + standards processes +1 ; + standards +1 +} + +What’s more, the seemingly obvious line between a legitimate standard and a marketable product based on these standards causes nothing but trouble. The case of open systems in the 1980s high-end computer industry demonstrates how the logic of standardization is not at all clearly distinguished from the logic of the market. The open-systems battles resulted in novel forms of cooperation-within-competition that sought both standardization and competitive advantage at the same time. Open systems was an attempt to achieve a kind of "singularity," not only for a network but for a market infrastructure as well. Open systems sought ways to reform technologies and markets in tandem. What it ignored was the legal structure of intellectual property. The failure of open systems reveals the centrality of the moral and technical order of intellectual property—to both technology and markets—and shows how a reliance on this imagination of order literally renders impossible the standardization of singular market infrastructure. By contrast, the success of the Internet as a market infrastructure and as a singular entity comes in part because of the recognition of the limitations of the intellectual-property system—and Free Software in the 1990s was the main experimental arena for trying out alternatives. +={ collaboration : + competition vs. ; + intellectual property +3 ; + moral and technical order +5 ; + Open Systems +3 +} + +The singularity of the Internet rests in turn on a counterintuitive multiplicity: the multiplicity of the UNIX operating system and its thousands of versions and imitations and reimplementations. UNIX is a great example of how novel, unexpected kinds of order can emerge from high-tech practices. UNIX is neither an academic (gift) nor a market phenomenon; it is a hybrid model of sharing that emerged from a very unusual technical and legal context. UNIX demonstrates how structured practices of sharing produce their own kind of order. Contrary to the current scholarly consensus that Free Software and its derivatives are a kind of "shadow economy" (a "sharing" economy, a "peer production" economy, a "noncommercial" economy), UNIX was never entirely outside of the mainstream market. The meanings of sharing, distribution, and profitability are related to the specific technical, legal, and organizational context. Because AT&T was prevented from commercializing UNIX, because UNIX users were keen to expand and ,{[pg 308]}, adapt it for their own uses, and because its developers were keen to encourage and assist in such adaptations, UNIX proliferated and differentiated in ways that few commercial products could have. But it was never "free" in any sense. Rather, in combination with open systems, it set the stage for what "free" could come to mean in the 1980s and 1990s. It was a nascent recursive public, confronting the technical and legal challenges that would come to define the practices of Free Software. To suggest that it represents some kind of "outside" to a functioning economic market based in money is to misperceive how transformative of markets UNIX and the Internet (and Free Software) have been. They have initiated an imagination of moral and technical order that is not at all opposed to ideologies of market-based governance. Indeed, if anything, what UNIX and Free Software represent is an imagination of how to change an entire market-based governance structure—not just specific markets in things—to include a form of public sphere, a check on the power of existing authority. +={ AT&T ; + peer production ; + UNIX operating system : + allegiance to versions of ; + proliferation of software +} + +UNIX and Open Systems should thus be seen as early stages of a collective technical experiment in transforming our imaginations of order, especially of the moral order of publics, markets, and self-governing peoples. The continuities and the gradualness of the change are more apparent in these events than any sudden rupture or discontinuity that the "invention of the Internet" or the passing of new intellectual-property laws might suggest. The "reorientation of knowledge and power" is more dance than earthquake; it is stratified in time, complex in its movements, and takes an experimental form whose concrete traces are the networks, infrastructures, machines, laws, and standards left in the wake of the experiments. +={ availability : + reorientation of power knowledge and +5 ; + experiment, collective technical +3 ; + infrastructure +} + +Availability, reusability, and modifiability are at the heart of this reorientation. The experiments of UNIX and open systems would have come to nothing if they had not also prompted a concurrent experimentation with intellectual-property law, of which the copyleft license is the central and key variable. Richard Stallman’s creation of GNU EMACS and the controversy over propriety that it engendered was in many ways an attempt to deal with exactly the same problem that UNIX vendors and open-systems advocates faced: how to build extensibility into the software market—except that Stallman never saw it as a market. For him, software was and is part of the human itself, constitutive of our very freedom and, hence, inalienable. Extending software, through collective mutual ,{[pg 309]}, aid, is thus tantamount to vitality, progress, and self-actualization. But even for those who insist on seeing software as mere product, the problem of extensibility remains. Standardization, standards processes, and market entry all appear as political problems as soon as extensibility is denied—and thus the legal solution represented by copyleft appears as an option, even though it raises new and troubling questions about the nature of competition and profitability. +={ Stallman, Richard ; + EMACS (text editor) : + controversy about ; + modifiability +4 ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) +} + +New questions about competition and profitability have emerged from the massive proliferation of hybrid commercial and academic forms, forms that bring with them different traditions of sharing, credit, reputation, control, creation, and dissemination of knowledge and products that require it. The new economic demands on the university—all too easily labeled neoliberalization or corporatization—mirror changing demands on industry that it come to look more like universities, that is, that it give away more, circulate more, and cooperate more. The development of UNIX, in its details, is a symptom of these changes, and the success of Free Software is an unambiguous witness to them. +={ credit : + see also attribution +} + +The proliferation of hybrid commercial-academic forms in an era of modifiability and reusability, among the debris of standards, standards processes, and new experiments in intellectual property, results in a playing field with a thousand different games, all of which revolve around renewed experimentation with coordination, collaboration, adaptability, design, evolution, gaming, playing, worlds, and worlding. These games are indicative of the triumph of the American love of entrepreneurialism and experimentalism; they relinquish the ideals of planning and hierarchy almost absolutely in favor of a kind of embedded, technically and legally complex anarchism. It is here that the idea of a public reemerges: the ambivalence between relinquishing control absolutely and absolute distrust of government by the few. A powerful public is a response, and a solution, so long as it remains fundamentally independent of control by the few. Hence, a commitment, widespread and growing, to a recursive public, an attempt to maintain and extend the kinds of independent, authentic, autotelic public spheres that people encounter when they come to an understanding of how Free Software and the Internet have evolved. +={ anarchism ; + entrepreneurialism +} + +The open-access movement, and examples like Connexions, are attempts at maintaining such publics. Some are conceived as bulwarks ,{[pg 310]}, against encroaching corporatization, while others see themselves as novel and innovative, but most share some of the practices hashed out in the evolution of Free Software and the Internet. In terms of scholarly publishing and open access, the movement has reignited discussions of ethics, norms, and method. The Mertonian ideals are in place once more, this time less as facts of scientific method than as goals. The problem of stabilizing collective knowledge has moved from being an inherent feature of science to being a problem that needs our attention. The reorientation of knowledge and power and the proliferation of hybrid commercial-academic entities in an era of massive dependence on scientific knowledge and information leads to a question about the stabilization of that knowledge. +={ Merton, Robert : + Mertonian norms +} + +Understanding how Free Software works and how it has developed along with the Internet and certain practices of legal and cultural critique may be essential to understanding the reliable foundation of knowledge production and circulation on which we still seek to ground legitimate forms of governance. Without Free Software, the only response to the continuing forms of excess we associate with illegitimate, unaccountable, unjust forms of governance might just be mute cynicism. With it, we are in possession of a range of practical tools, structured responses and clever ways of working through our complexity toward the promises of a shared imagination of legitimate and just governance. There is no doubt room for critique—and many scholars will demand it—but scholarly critique will have to learn how to sit, easily or uneasily, with Free Software as critique. Free Software can also exclude, just as any public or public sphere can, but this is not, I think, cause for resistance, but cause for joining. The alternative would be to create no new rules, no new practices, no new procedures—that is, to have what we already have. 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A much earlier version of chapter 1 was published as "Geeks, Social Imaginaries and Recursive Publics," Cultural Anthropology 20.2 (summer 2005); chapter 6 as "The EMACS Controversy," in Mario Biagioli, Martha Woodmansee, and Peter Jaszi, eds., Contexts of Invention (forthcoming); and parts of chapter 9 as "Punt to Culture," Anthropological Quarterly 77.3. + +:B~ Library of Congress + +1~loc Library of Congress Catalog + +% ,{[pg 380]}, + +group{ + +christopher m. kelty +is an assistant professor of anthropology +at Rice University. + +Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data +Kelty, Christopher M. + +Two bits : + the cultural significance of free software / Christopher M. Kelty. p. cm. --(Experimental futures) +Includes bibliographical references and index. +ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-4242-7 (cloth : + alk. paper) +ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-4264-9 (pbk. : + alk. paper) +1. Information society. 2. Open source software—Social aspects. I. Title. +HM851K45 2008 +303.48'33—dc22 2007049447 + +}group + +% errata? text uses Leitl, Eugen index uses Leitl, Eugene diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/un_contracts_international_sale_of_goods_convention_1980.sst b/data/samples/current/en/un_contracts_international_sale_of_goods_convention_1980.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c2ca89e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/un_contracts_international_sale_of_goods_convention_1980.sst @@ -0,0 +1,782 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: United Nations Convention On Contracts For The International Sale Of Goods, 1980 (CISG) + +@creator: + :author: United Nations + :url: http://www.un.org/ + +@original: + :source: UNCITRAL, United Nations + +@date: + :published: 1980 + +@classify: + :subject: UNCITRAL, United Nations, sale of goods + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:convention;law:international:uniform law|sales law|CISG;CISG + :keywords: UNCITRAL, United Nations, sale of goods + +@make: + :headings: PART; Chapter; Section; Article; + :breaks: new=:A,:B; break=:C + +:A~ United Nations Convention On Contracts For The International Sale Of Goods, 1980 (CISG) + +1~pre [Preamble]-# + +THE STATES PARTIES TO THIS CONVENTION, + +BEARING IN MIND the broad objectives in the resolutions adopted by the sixth special session of the General Assembly of the United Nations on the establishment of a New International Economic Order, + +CONSIDERING that the development of international trade on the basis of equality and mutual benefit is an important element in promoting friendly relations among States, + +BEING OF THE OPINION that the adoption of uniform rules which govern contracts for the international sale of goods and take into account the different social, economic and legal systems would contribute to the removal of legal barriers in international trade and promote the development of international trade, + +HAVE DECREED as follows: + +PART I - Sphere of Application and General Provisions + +Chapter I - Sphere of Application + +Article 1 + +(1) This Convention applies to contracts of sale of goods between parties whose places of business are in different States: + +(a) when the States are Contracting States; or + +(b) when the rules of private international law lead to the application of the law of a Contracting State. + +(2) The fact that the parties have their places of business in different States is to be disregarded whenever this fact does not appear either from the contract or from any dealings between, or from information disclosed by, the parties at any time before or at the conclusion of the contract. + +(3) Neither the nationality of the parties nor the civil or commercial character of the parties or of the contract is to be taken into consideration in determining the application of this Convention. + +Article 2 + +This Convention does not apply to sales: + +(a) of goods bought for personal, family or household use, unless the seller, at any time before or at the conclusion of the contract, neither knew nor ought to have known that the goods were bought for any such use; + +(b) by auction; + +(c) on execution or otherwise by authority of law; + +(d) of stocks, shares, investment securities, negotiable instruments or money; + +(e) of ships, vessels, hovercraft or aircraft; + +(f) of electricity. + +Article 3 + +(1) Contracts for the supply of goods to be manufactured or produced are to be considered sales unless the party who orders the goods undertakes to supply a substantial part of the materials necessary for such manufacture or production. + +(2) This Convention does not apply to contracts in which the preponderant part of the obligations of the party who furnishes the goods consists in the supply of labour or other services. + +Article 4 + +This Convention governs only the formation of the contract of sale and the rights and obligations of the seller and the buyer arising from such a contract. In particular, except as otherwise expressly provided in this Convention, it is not concerned with: + +(a) the validity of the contract or of any of its provisions or of any usage; + +(b) the effect which the contract may have on the property in the goods sold. + +Article 5 + +This Convention does not apply to the liability of the seller for death or personal injury caused by the goods to any person. + +Article 6 + +The parties may exclude the application of this Convention or, subject to article 12, derogate from or vary the effect of any of its provisions. + +Chapter II - General Provisions + +Article 7 + +(1) In the interpretation of this Convention, regard is to be had to its international character and to the need to promote uniformity in its application and the observance of good faith in international trade. + +(2) Questions concerning matters governed by this Convention which are not expressly settled in it are to be settled in conformity with the general principles on which it is based or, in the absence of such principles, in conformity with the law applicable by virtue of the rules of private international law. + +Article 8 + +(1) For the purposes of this Convention statements made by and other conduct of a party are to be interpreted according to his intent where the other party knew or could not have been unaware what that intent was. + +(2) If the preceding paragraph is not applicable, statements made by and other conduct of a party are to be interpreted according to the understanding that a reasonable person of the same kind as the other party would have had in the same circumstances. + +(3) In determining the intent of a party or the understanding a reasonable person would have had, due consideration is to be given to all relevant circumstances of the case including the negotiations, any practices which the parties have established between themselves, usages and any subsequent conduct of the parties. + +Article 9 + +(1) The parties are bound by any usage to which they have agreed and by any practices which they have established between themselves. + +(2) The parties are considered, unless otherwise agreed, to have impliedly made applicable to their contract or its formation a usage of which the parties knew or ought to have known and which in international trade is widely known to, and regularly observed by, parties to contracts of the type involved in the particular trade concerned. + +Article 10 + +For the purposes of this Convention: + +(a) if a party has more than one place of business, the place of business is that which has the closest relationship to the contract and its performance, having regard to the circumstances known to or contemplated by the parties at any time before or at the conclusion of the contract; + +(b) if a party does not have a place of business, reference is to be made to his habitual residence. + +Article 11 + +A contract of sale need not be concluded in or evidenced by writing and is not subject to any other requirement as to form. It may be proved by any means, including witnesses. + +Article 12 + +Any provision of article 11, article 29 or Part II of this Convention that allows a contract of sale or its modification or termination by agreement or any offer, acceptance or other indication of intention to be made in any form other than in writing does not apply where any party has his place of business in a Contracting State which has made a declaration under article 96 of this Convention. The parties may not derogate from or vary the effect or this article. + +Article 13 + +For the purposes of this Convention "writing" includes telegram and telex. + +PART II - Formation of the Contract + +Article 14 + +(1) A proposal for concluding a contract addressed to one or more specific persons constitutes an offer if it is sufficiently definite and indicates the intention of the offeror to be bound in case of acceptance. A proposal is sufficiently definite if it indicates the goods and expressly or implicitly fixes or makes provision for determining the quantity and the price. + +(2) A proposal other than one addressed to one or more specific persons is to be considered merely as an invitation to make offers, unless the contrary is clearly indicated by the person making the proposal. + +Article 15 + +(1) An offer becomes effective when it reaches the offeree. + +(2) An offer, even if it is irrevocable, may be withdrawn if the withdrawal reaches the offeree before or at the same time as the offer. + +Article 16 + +(1) Until a contract is concluded an offer may be revoked if the revocation reaches the offeree before he has dispatched an acceptance. + +(2) However, an offer cannot be revoked: + +(a) if it indicates, whether by stating a fixed time for acceptance or otherwise, that it is irrevocable; or + +(b) if it was reasonable for the offeree to rely on the offer as being irrevocable and the offeree has acted in reliance on the offer. + +Article 17 + +An offer, even if it is irrevocable, is terminated when a rejection reaches the offeror. + +Article 18 + +(1) A statement made by or other conduct of the offeree indicating assent to an offer is an acceptance. Silence or inactivity does not in itself amount to acceptance. + +(2) An acceptance of an offer becomes effective at the moment the indication of assent reaches the offeror. An acceptance is not effective if the indication of assent does not reach the offeror within the time he has fixed or, if no time is fixed, within a reasonable time, due account being taken of the circumstances of the transaction, including the rapidity of the means of communication employed by the offeror. An oral offer must be accepted immediately unless the circumstances indicate otherwise. + +(3) However, if, by virtue of the offer or as a result of practices which the parties have established between themselves or of usage, the offeree may indicate assent by performing an act, such as one relating to the dispatch of the goods or payment of the price, without notice to the offeror, the acceptance is effective at the moment the act is performed, provided that the act is performed within the period of time laid down in the preceding paragraph. + +Article 19 + +(1) A reply to an offer which purports to be an acceptance but contains additions, limitations or other modifications is a rejection of the offer and constitutes a counter-offer. + +(2) However, a reply to an offer which purports to be an acceptance but contains additional or different terms which do not materially alter the terms of the offer constitutes an acceptance, unless the offeror, without undue delay, objects orally to the discrepancy or dispatches a notice to that effect. If he does not so object, the terms of the contract are the terms of the offer with the modifications contained in the acceptance. + +(3) Additional or different terms relating, among other things, to the price, payment, quality and quantity of the goods, place and time of delivery, extent of one party's liability to the other or the settlement of disputes are considered to alter the terms of the offer materially. + +Article 20 + +(1) A period of time for acceptance fixed by the offeror in a telegram or a letter begins to run from the moment the telegram is handed in for dispatch or from the date shown on the letter or, if no such date is shown, from the date shown on the envelope. A period of time for acceptance fixed by the offeror by telephone, telex or other means of instantaneous communication, begins to run from the moment that the offer reaches the offeree. + +(2) Official holidays or non-business days occurring during the period for acceptance are included in calculating the period. However, if a notice of acceptance cannot be delivered at the address of the offeror on the last day of the period because that day falls on an official holiday or a non-business day at the place of business of the offeror, the period is extended until the first business day which follows. + +Article 21 + +(1) A late acceptance is nevertheless effective as an acceptance if without delay the offeror orally so informs the offeree or dispatches a notice to that effect. + +(2) If a letter or other writing containing a late acceptance shows that it has been sent in such circumstances that if its transmission had been normal it would have reached the offeror in due time, the late acceptance is effective as an acceptance unless, without delay, the offeror orally informs the offeree that he considers his offer as having lapsed or dispatches a notice to that effect. + +Article 22 + +An acceptance may be withdrawn if the withdrawal reaches the offeror before or at the same time as the acceptance would have become effective. + +Article 23 + +A contract is concluded at the moment when an acceptance of an offer becomes effective in accordance with the provisions of this Convention. + +Article 24 + +For the purposes of this Part of the Convention, an offer, declaration of acceptance or any other indication of intention "reaches" the addressee when it is made orally to him or delivered by any other means to him personally, to his place of business or mailing address or, if he does not have a place of business or mailing address, to his habitual residence. + +PART III - Sale of Goods + +Chapter I - General Provisions + +Article 25 + +A breach of contract committed by one of the parties is fundamental if it results in such detriment to the other party as substantially to deprive him of what he is entitled to expect under the contract, unless the party in breach did not foresee and a reasonable person of the same kind in the same circumstances would not have foreseen such a result. + +Article 26 + +A declaration of avoidance of the contract is effective only if made by notice to the other party. + +Article 27 + +Unless otherwise expressly provided in this Part of the Convention, if any notice, request or other communication is given or made by a party in accordance with this Part and by means appropriate in the circumstances, a delay or error in the transmission of the communication or its failure to arrive does not deprive that party of the right to rely on the communication. + +Article 28 + +If, in accordance with the provisions of this Convention, one party is entitled to require performance of any obligation by the other party, a court is not bound to enter a judgement for specific performance unless the court would do so under its own law in respect of similar contracts of sale not governed by this Convention. + +Article 29 + +(1) A contract may be modified or terminated by the mere agreement of the parties. + +(2) A contract in writing which contains a provision requiring any modification or termination by agreement to be in writing may not be otherwise modified or terminated by agreement. However, a party may be precluded by his conduct from asserting such a provision to the extent that the other party has relied on that conduct. + +Chapter II - Obligations of the Seller + +Article 30 + +The seller must deliver the goods, hand over any documents relating to them and transfer the property in the goods, as required by the contract and this Convention. + +Section I - Delivery of the goods and handing over of documents + +Article 31 + +If the seller is not bound to deliver the goods at any other particular place, his obligation to deliver consists: + +(a) if the contract of sale involves carriage of the goods - in handing the goods over to the first carrier for transmission to the buyer; + +(b) if, in cases not within the preceding subparagraph, the contract related to specific goods, or unidentified goods to be drawn from a specific stock or to be manufactured or produced, and at the time of the conclusion of the contract the parties knew that the goods were at, or were to be manufactured or produced at, a particular place - in placing the goods at the buyer's disposal at that place; + +(c) in other cases - in placing the goods at the buyer's disposal at the place where the seller had his place of business at the time of the conclusion of the contract. + +Article 32 + +(1) If the seller, in accordance with the contract or this Convention, hands the goods over to a carrier and if the goods are not clearly identified to the contract by markings on the goods, by shipping documents or otherwise, the seller must give the buyer notice of the consignment specifying the goods. + +(2) If the seller is bound to arrange for carriage of the goods, he must make such contracts as are necessary for carriage to the place fixed by means of transportation appropriate in the circumstances and according to the usual terms for such transportation. + +(3) If the seller is not bound to effect insurance in respect of the carriage of the goods, he must, at the buyer's request, provide him with all available information necessary to enable him to effect such insurance. + +Article 33 + +The seller must deliver the goods: + +(a) if a date is fixed by or determinable from the contract, on that date; + +(b) if a period of time is fixed by or determinable from the contract, at any time within that period unless circumstances indicate that the buyer is to choose a date; or + +(c) in any other case, within a reasonable time after the conclusion of the contract. + +Article 34 + +If the seller is bound to hand over documents relating to the goods, he must hand them over at the time and place and in the form required by the contract. If the seller has handed over documents before that time, he may, up to that time, cure any lack of conformity in the documents, if the exercise of this right does not cause the buyer unreasonable inconvenience or unreasonable expense. However, the buyer retains any right to claim damages as provided for in this Convention. + +Section II - Conformity of the goods and third party claims + +Article 35 + +(1) The seller must deliver goods which are of the quantity, quality and description required by the contract and which are contained or packaged in the manner required by the contract. + +(2) Except where the parties have agreed otherwise, the goods do not conform with the contract unless they: + +(a) are fit for the purposes for which goods of the same description would ordinarily be used; + +(b) are fit for any particular purpose expressly or impliedly made known to the seller at the time of the conclusion of the contract, except where the circumstances show that the buyer did not rely, or that it was unreasonable for him to rely, on the seller's skill and judgement; + +(c) possess the qualities of goods which the seller has held out to the buyer as a sample or model; + +(d) are contained or packaged in the manner usual for such goods or, where there is no such manner, in a manner adequate to preserve and protect the goods. + +(3) The seller is not liable under subparagraphs (a) to (d) of the preceding paragraph for any lack of conformity of the goods if at the time of the conclusion of the contract the buyer knew or could not have been unaware of such lack of conformity. + +Article 36 + +(1) The seller is liable in accordance with the contract and this Convention for any lack of conformity which exists at the time when the risk passes to the buyer, even though the lack of conformity becomes apparent only after that time. + +(2) The seller is also liable for any lack of conformity which occurs after the time indicated in the preceding paragraph and which is due to a breach of any of his obligations, including a breach of any guarantee that for a period of time the goods will remain fit for their ordinary purpose or for some particular purpose or will retain specified qualities or characteristics. + +Article 37 + +If the seller has delivered goods before the date for delivery, he may, up to that date, deliver any missing part or make up any deficiency in the quantity of the goods delivered, or deliver goods in replacement of any non-conforming goods delivered or remedy any lack of conformity in the goods delivered, provided that the exercise of this right does not cause the buyer unreasonable inconvenience or unreasonable expense. However, the buyer retains any right to claim damages as provided for in this Convention. + +Article 38 + +(1) The buyer must examine the goods, or cause them to be examined, within as short a period as is practicable in the circumstances. + +(2) If the contract involves carriage of the goods, examination may be deferred until after the goods have arrived at their destination. + +(3) If the goods are redirected in transit or redispatched by the buyer without a reasonable opportunity for examination by him and at the time of the conclusion of the contract the seller knew or ought to have known of the possibility of such redirection or redispatch, examination may be deferred until after the goods have arrived at the new destination. + +Article 39 + +(1) The buyer loses the right to rely on a lack of conformity of the goods if he does not give notice to the seller specifying the nature of the lack of conformity within a reasonable time after he has discovered it or ought to have discovered it. + +(2) In any event, the buyer loses the right to rely on a lack of conformity of the goods if he does not give the seller notice thereof at the latest within a period of two years from the date on which the goods were actually handed over to the buyer, unless this time-limit is inconsistent with a contractual period of guarantee. + +Article 40 + +The seller is not entitled to rely on the provisions of articles 38 and 39 if the lack of conformity relates to facts of which he knew or could not have been unaware and which he did not disclose to the buyer. + +Article 41 + +The seller must deliver goods which are free from any right or claim of a third party, unless the buyer agreed to take the goods subject to that right or claim. However, if such right or claim is based on industrial property or other intellectual property, the seller's obligation is governed by article 42. + +Article 42 + +(1) The seller must deliver goods which are free from any right or claim of a third party based on industrial property or other intellectual property, of which at the time of the conclusion of the contract the seller knew or could not have been unaware, provided that the right or claim is based on industrial property or other intellectual property: + +(a) under the law of the State where the goods will be resold or otherwise used, if it was contemplated by the parties at the time of the conclusion of the contract that the goods would be resold or otherwise used in that State; or + +(b) in any other case, under the law of the State where the buyer has his place of business. + +(2) The obligation of the seller under the preceding paragraph does not extend to cases where: + +(a) at the time of the conclusion of the contract the buyer knew or could not have been unaware of the right or claim; or + +(b) the right or claim results from the seller's compliance with technical drawings, designs, formulae or other such specifications furnished by the buyer. + +Article 43 + +(1) The buyer loses the right to rely on the provisions of article 41 or article 42 if he does not give notice to the seller specifying the nature of the right or claim of the third party within a reasonable time after he has become aware or ought to have become aware of the right or claim. + +(2) The seller is not entitled to rely on the provisions of the preceding paragraph if he knew of the right or claim of the third party and the nature of it. + +Article 44 + +Notwithstanding the provisions of paragraph (1) of article 39 and paragraph (1) of article 43, the buyer may reduce the price in accordance with article 50 or claim damages, except for loss of profit, if he has a reasonable excuse for his failure to give the required notice. + +Section III - Remedies for breach of contract by the seller + +Article 45 + +(1) If the seller fails to perform any of his obligations under the contract or this Convention, the buyer may: + +(a) exercise the rights provided in articles 46 to 52; + +(b) claim damages as provided in articles 74 to 77. + +(2) The buyer is not deprived of any right he may have to claim damages by exercising his right to other remedies. + +(3) No period of grace may be granted to the seller by a court or arbitral tribunal when the buyer resorts to a remedy for breach of contract. + +Article 46 + +(1) The buyer may require performance by the seller of his obligations unless the buyer has resorted to a remedy which is inconsistent with this requirement. + +(2) If the goods do not conform with the contract, the buyer may require delivery of substitute goods only if the lack of conformity constitutes a fundamental breach of contract and a request for substitute goods is made either in conjunction with notice given under article 39 or within a reasonable time thereafter. + +(3) If the goods do not conform with the contract, the buyer may require the seller to remedy the lack of conformity by repair, unless this is unreasonable having regard to all the circumstances. A request for repair must be made either in conjunction with notice given under article 39 or within a reasonable time thereafter. + +Article 47 + +(1) The buyer may fix an additional period of time of reasonable length for performance by the seller of his obligations. + +(2) Unless the buyer has received notice from the seller that he will not perform within the period so fixed, the buyer may not, during that period, resort to any remedy for breach of contract. However, the buyer is not deprived thereby of any right he may have to claim damages for delay in performance. + +Article 48 + +(1) Subject to article 49, the seller may, even after the date for delivery, remedy at his own expense any failure to perform his obligations, if he can do so without unreasonable delay and without causing the buyer unreasonable inconvenience or uncertainty of reimbursement by the seller of expenses advanced by the buyer. However, the buyer retains any right to claim damages as provided for in this Convention. + +(2) If the seller requests the buyer to make known whether he will accept performance and the buyer does not comply with the request within a reasonable time, the seller may perform within the time indicated in his request. The buyer may not, during that period of time, resort to any remedy which is inconsistent with performance by the seller. + +(3) A notice by the seller that he will perform within a specified period of time is assumed to include a request, under the preceding paragraph, that the buyer make known his decision. + +(4) A request or notice by the seller under paragraph (2) or (3) of this article is not effective unless received by the buyer. + +Article 49 + +(1) The buyer may declare the contract avoided: + +(a) if the failure by the seller to perform any of his obligations under the contract or this Convention amounts to a fundamental breach of contract; or + +(b) in case of non-delivery, if the seller does not deliver the goods within the additional period of time fixed by the buyer in accordance with paragraph (1) of article 47 or declares that he will not deliver within the period so fixed. + +(2) However, in cases where the seller has delivered the goods, the buyer loses the right to declare the contract avoided unless he does so: + +(a) in respect of late delivery, within a reasonable time after he has become aware that delivery has been made; + +(b) in respect of any breach other than late delivery, within a reasonable time: + +(i) after he knew or ought to have known of the breach; + +(ii) after the expiration of any additional period of time fixed by the buyer in accordance with paragraph (1) of article 47, or after the seller has declared that he will not perform his obligations within such an additional period; or + +(iii) after the expiration of any additional period of time indicated by the seller in accordance with paragraph (2) of article 48, or after the buyer has declared that he will not accept performance. + +Article 50 + +If the goods do not conform with the contract and whether or not the price has already been paid, the buyer may reduce the price in the same proportion as the value that the goods actually delivered had at the time of the delivery bears to the value that conforming goods would have had at that time. However, if the seller remedies any failure to perform his obligations in accordance with article 37 or article 48 or if the buyer refuses to accept performance by the seller in accordance with those articles, the buyer may not reduce the price. + +Article 51 + +(1) If the seller delivers only a part of the goods or if only a part of the goods delivered is in conformity with the contract, articles 46 to 50 apply in respect of the part which is missing or which does not conform. + +(2) The buyer may declare the contract avoided in its entirety only if the failure to make delivery completely or in conformity with the contract amounts to a fundamental breach of the contract. + +Article 52 + +(1) If the seller delivers the goods before the date fixed, the buyer may take delivery or refuse to take delivery. + +(2) If the seller delivers a quantity of goods greater than that provided for in the contract, the buyer may take delivery or refuse to take delivery of the excess quantity. If the buyer takes delivery of all or part of the excess quantity, he must pay for it at the contract rate. + +Chapter III - Obligations of the Buyer + +Article 53 + +The buyer must pay the price for the goods and take delivery of them as required by the contract and this Convention. + +Section I - Payment of the price + +Article 54 + +The buyer's obligation to pay the price includes taking such steps and complying with such formalities as may be required under the contract or any laws and regulations to enable payment to be made. + +Article 55 + +Where a contract has been validly concluded but does not expressly or implicitly fix or make provision for determining the price, the parties are considered, in the absence of any indication to the contrary, to have impliedly made reference to the price generally charged at the time of the conclusion of the contract for such goods sold under comparable circumstances in the trade concerned. + +Article 56 + +If the price is fixed according to the weight of the goods, in case of doubt it is to be determined by the net weight. + +Article 57 + +(1) If the buyer is not bound to pay the price at any other particular place, he must pay it to the seller: + +(a) at the seller's place of business; or + +(b) if the payment is to be made against the handing over of the goods or of documents, at the place where the handing over takes place. + +(2) The seller must bear any increases in the expenses incidental to payment which is caused by a change in his place of business subsequent to the conclusion of the contract. + +Article 58 + +(1) If the buyer is not bound to pay the price at any other specific time, he must pay it when the seller places either the goods or documents controlling their disposition at the buyer's disposal in accordance with the contract and this Convention. The seller may make such payment a condition for handing over the goods or documents. + +(2) If the contract involves carriage of the goods, the seller may dispatch the goods on terms whereby the goods, or documents controlling their disposition, will not be handed over to the buyer except against payment of the price. + +(3) The buyer is not bound to pay the price until he has had an opportunity to examine the goods, unless the procedures for delivery or payment agreed upon by the parties are inconsistent with his having such an opportunity. + +Article 59 + +The buyer must pay the price on the date fixed by or determinable from the contract and this Convention without the need for any request or compliance with any formality on the part of the seller. + +Section II - Taking delivery + +Article 60 + +The buyer's obligation to take delivery consists: + +(a) in doing all the acts which could reasonably be expected of him in order to enable the seller to make delivery; and + +(b) in taking over the goods. + +Section III - Remedies for breach of contract by the buyer + +Article 61 + +(1) If the buyer fails to perform any of his obligations under the contract or this Convention, the seller may: + +(a) exercise the rights provided in articles 62 to 65; + +(b) claim damages as provided in articles 74 to 77. + +(2) The seller is not deprived of any right he may have to claim damages by exercising his right to other remedies. + +(3) No period of grace may be granted to the buyer by a court or arbitral tribunal when the seller resorts to a remedy for breach of contract. + +Article 62 + +The seller may require the buyer to pay the price, take delivery or perform his other obligations, unless the seller has resorted to a remedy which is inconsistent with this requirement. + +Article 63 + +(1) The seller may fix an additional period of time of reasonable length for performance by the buyer of his obligations. + +(2) Unless the seller has received notice from the buyer that he will not perform within the period so fixed, the seller may not, during that period, resort to any remedy for breach of contract. However, the seller is not deprived thereby of any right he may have to claim damages for delay in performance. + +Article 64 + +(1) The seller may declare the contract avoided: + +(a) if the failure by the buyer to perform any of his obligations under the contract or this Convention amounts to a fundamental breach of contract; or + +(b) if the buyer does not, within the additional period of time fixed by the seller in accordance with paragraph (1) of article 63, perform his obligation to pay the price or take delivery of the goods, or if he declares that he will not do so within the period so fixed. + +(2) However, in cases where the buyer has paid the price, the seller loses the right to declare the contract avoided unless he does so: + +(a) in respect of late performance by the buyer, before the seller has become aware that performance has been rendered; or + +(b) in respect of any breach other than late performance by the buyer, within a reasonable time: + +(i) after the seller knew or ought to have known of the breach; or + +(ii) after the expiration of any additional period of time fixed by the seller in accordance with paragraph (1) or article 63, or after the buyer has declared that he will not perform his obligations within such an additional period. + +Article 65 + +(1) If under the contract the buyer is to specify the form, measurement or other features of the goods and he fails to make such specification either on the date agreed upon or within a reasonable time after receipt of a request from the seller, the seller may, without prejudice to any other rights he may have, make the specification himself in accordance with the requirements of the buyer that may be known to him. + +(2) If the seller makes the specification himself, he must inform the buyer of the details thereof and must fix a reasonable time within which the buyer may make a different specification. If, after receipt of such a communication, the buyer fails to do so within the time so fixed, the specification made by the seller is binding. + +Chapter IV - Passing of Risk + +Article 66 + +Loss of or damage to the goods after the risk has passed to the buyer does not discharge him from his obligation to pay the price, unless the loss or damage is due to an act or omission of the seller. + +Article 67 + +(1) If the contract of sale involves carriage of the goods and the seller is not bound to hand them over at a particular place, the risk passes to the buyer when the goods are handed over to the first carrier for transmission to the buyer in accordance with the contract of sale. If the seller is bound to hand the goods over to a carrier at a particular place, the risk does not pass to the buyer until the goods are handed over to the carrier at that place. The fact that the seller is authorized to retain documents controlling the disposition of the goods does not affect the passage of the risk. + +(2) Nevertheless, the risk does not pass to the buyer until the goods are clearly identified to the contract, whether by markings on the goods, by shipping documents, by notice given to the buyer or otherwise. + +Article 68 + +The risk in respect of goods sold in transit passes to the buyer from the time of the conclusion of the contract. However, if the circumstances so indicate, the risk is assumed by the buyer from the time the goods were handed over to the carrier who issued the documents embodying the contract of carriage. Nevertheless, if at the time of the conclusion of the contract of sale the seller knew or ought to have known that the goods had been lost or damaged and did not disclose this to the buyer, the loss or damage is at the risk of the seller. + +Article 69 + +(1) In cases not within articles 67 and 68, the risk passes to the buyer when he takes over the goods or, if he does not do so in due time, from the time when the goods are placed at his disposal and he commits a breach of contract by failing to take delivery. + +(2) However, if the buyer is bound to take over the goods at a place other than a place of business of the seller, the risk passes when delivery is due and the buyer is aware of the fact that the goods are placed at his disposal at that place. + +(3) If the contract relates to goods not then identified, the goods are considered not to be placed at the disposal of the buyer until they are clearly identified to the contract. + +Article 70 + +If the seller has committed a fundamental breach of contract, articles 67, 68 and 69 do not impair the remedies available to the buyer on account of the breach. + +Chapter V - Provisions Common to the Obligations of the Seller and of the Buyer + +Section I - Anticipatory breach and instalment contracts + +Article 71 + +(1) A party may suspend the performance of his obligations if, after the conclusion of the contract, it becomes apparent that the other party will not perform a substantial part of his obligations as a result of: + +(a) a serious deficiency in his ability to perform or in his creditworthiness; or + +(b) his conduct in preparing to perform or in performing the contract. + +(2) If the seller has already dispatched the goods before the grounds described in the preceding paragraph become evident, he may prevent the handing over of the goods to the buyer even though the buyer holds a document which entitles him to obtain them. The present paragraph relates only to the rights in the goods as between the buyer and the seller. + +(3) A party suspending performance, whether before or after dispatch of the goods, must immediately give notice of the suspension to the other party and must continue with performance if the other party provides adequate assurance of his performance. + +Article 72 + +(1) If prior to the date for performance of the contract it is clear that one of the parties will commit a fundamental breach of contract, the other party may declare the contract avoided. + +(2) If time allows, the party intending to declare the contract avoided must give reasonable notice to the other party in order to permit him to provide adequate assurance of his performance. + +(3) The requirements of the preceding paragraph do not apply if the other party has declared that he will not perform his obligations. + +Article 73 + +(1) In the case of a contract for delivery of goods by instalments, if the failure of one party to perform any of his obligations in respect of any instalment constitutes a fundamental breach of contract with respect to that instalment, the other party may declare the contract avoided with respect to that instalment. + +(2) If one party's failure to perform any of his obligations in respect of any instalment gives the other party good grounds to conclude that a fundamental breach of contract will occur with respect to future instalments, he may declare the contract avoided for the future, provided that he does so within a reasonable time. + +(3) A buyer who declares the contract avoided in respect of any delivery may, at the same time, declare it avoided in respect of deliveries already made or of future deliveries if, by reason of their interdependence, those deliveries could not be used for the purpose contemplated by the parties at the time of the conclusion of the contract. + +Section II - Damages + +Article 74 + +Damages for breach of contract by one party consist of a sum equal to the loss, including loss of profit, suffered by the other party as a consequence of the breach. Such damages may not exceed the loss which the party in breach foresaw or ought to have foreseen at the time of the conclusion of the contract, in the light of the facts and matters of which he then knew or ought to have known, as a possible consequence of the breach of contract. + +Article 75 + +If the contract is avoided and if, in a reasonable manner and within a reasonable time after avoidance, the buyer has bought goods in replacement or the seller has resold the goods, the party claiming damages may recover the difference between the contract price and the price in the substitute transaction as well as any further damages recoverable under article 74. + +Article 76 + +(1) If the contract is avoided and there is a current price for the goods, the party claiming damages may, if he has not made a purchase or resale under article 75, recover the difference between the price fixed by the contract and the current price at the time of avoidance as well as any further damages recoverable under article 74. If, however, the party claiming damages has avoided the contract after taking over the goods, the current price at the time of such taking over shall be applied instead of the current price at the time of avoidance. + +(2) For the purposes of the preceding paragraph, the current price is the price prevailing at the place where delivery of the goods should have been made or, if there is no current price at that place, the price at such other place as serves as a reasonable substitute, making due allowance for differences in the cost of transporting the goods. + +Article 77 + +A party who relies on a breach of contract must take such measures as are reasonable in the circumstances to mitigate the loss, including loss of profit, resulting from the breach. If he fails to take such measures, the party in breach may claim a reduction in the damages in the amount by which the loss should have been mitigated. + +Section III - Interest + +Article 78 + +If a party fails to pay the price or any other sum that is in arrears, the other party is entitled to interest on it, without prejudice to any claim for damages recoverable under article 74. + +Section IV - Exemptions + +Article 79 + +(1) A party is not liable for a failure to perform any of his obligations if he proves that the failure was due to an impediment beyond his control and that he could not reasonably be expected to have taken the impediment into account at the time of the conclusion of the contract or to have avoided or overcome it or its consequences. + +(2) If the party's failure is due to the failure by a third person whom he has engaged to perform the whole or a part of the contract, that party is exempt from liability only if: + +(a) he is exempt under the preceding paragraph; and + +(b) the person whom he has so engaged would be so exempt if the provisions of that paragraph were applied to him. + +(3) The exemption provided by this article has effect for the period during which the impediment exists. + +(4) The party who fails to perform must give notice to the other party of the impediment and its effect on his ability to perform. If the notice is not received by the other party within a reasonable time after the party who fails to perform knew or ought to have known of the impediment, he is liable for damages resulting from such non-receipt. + +(5) Nothing in this article prevents either party from exercising any right other than to claim damages under this Convention. + +Article 80 + +A party may not rely on a failure of the other party to perform, to the extent that such failure was caused by the first party's act or omission. + +Section V - Effects of avoidance + +Article 81 + +(1) Avoidance of the contract releases both parties from their obligations under it, subject to any damages which may be due. Avoidance does not affect any provision of the contract for the settlement of disputes or any other provision of the contract governing the rights and obligations of the parties consequent upon the avoidance of the contract. + +(2) A party who has performed the contract either wholly or in part may claim restitution from the other party of whatever the first party has supplied or paid under the contract. If both parties are bound to make restitution, they must do so concurrently. + +Article 82 + +(1) The buyer loses the right to declare the contract avoided or to require the seller to deliver substitute goods if it is impossible for him to make restitution of the goods substantially in the condition in which he received them. + +(2) The preceding paragraph does not apply: + +(a) if the impossibility of making restitution of the goods or of making restitution of the goods substantially in the condition in which the buyer received them is not due to his act or omission; + +(b) if the goods or part of the goods have perished or deteriorated as a result of the examination provided for in article 38; or + +(c) if the goods or part of the goods have been sold in the normal course of business or have been consumed or transformed by the buyer in the course normal use before he discovered or ought to have discovered the lack of conformity. + +Article 83 + +A buyer who has lost the right to declare the contract avoided or to require the seller to deliver substitute goods in accordance with article 82 retains all other remedies under the contract and this Convention. + +Article 84 + +(1) If the seller is bound to refund the price, he must also pay interest on it, from the date on which the price was paid. + +(2) The buyer must account to the seller for all benefits which he has derived from the goods or part of them: + +(a) if he must make restitution of the goods or part of them; or + +(b) if it is impossible for him to make restitution of all or part of the goods or to make restitution of all or part of the goods substantially in the condition in which he received them, but he has nevertheless declared the contract avoided or required the seller to deliver substitute goods. + +Section VI - Preservation of the goods + +Article 85 + +If the buyer is in delay in taking delivery of the goods or, where payment of the price and delivery of the goods are to be made concurrently, if he fails to pay the price, and the seller is either in possession of the goods or otherwise able to control their disposition, the seller must take such steps as are reasonable in the circumstances to preserve them. He is entitled to retain them until he has been reimbursed his reasonable expenses by the buyer. + +Article 86 + +(1) If the buyer has received the goods and intends to exercise any right under the contract or this Convention to reject them, he must take such steps to preserve them as are reasonable in the circumstances. He is entitled to retain them until he has been reimbursed his reasonable expenses by the seller. + +(2) If goods dispatched to the buyer have been placed at his disposal at their destination and he exercises the right to reject them, he must take possession of them on behalf of the seller, provided that this can be done without payment of the price and without unreasonable inconvenience or unreasonable expense. This provision does not apply if the seller or a person authorized to take charge of the goods on his behalf is present at the destination. If the buyer takes possession of the goods under this paragraph, his rights and obligations are governed by the preceding paragraph. + +Article 87 + +A party who is bound to take steps to preserve the goods may deposit them in a warehouse of a third person at the expense of the other party provided that the expense incurred is not unreasonable. + +Article 88 + +(1) A party who is bound to preserve the goods in accordance with article 85 or 86 may sell them by any appropriate means if there has been an unreasonable delay by the other party in taking possession of the goods or in taking them back or in paying the price or the cost of preservation, provided that reasonable notice of the intention to sell has been given to the other party. + +(2) If the goods are subject to rapid deterioration or their preservation would involve unreasonable expense, a party who is bound to preserve the goods in accordance with article 85 or 86 must take reasonable measures to sell them. To the extent possible he must give notice to the other party of his intention to sell. + +(3) A party selling the goods has the right to retain out of the proceeds of sale an amount equal to the reasonable expenses of preserving the goods and of selling them. He must account to the other party for the balance. + +PART IV - Final Provisions + +Article 89 + +The Secretary-General of the United Nations is hereby designated as the depositary for this Convention. + +Article 90 + +This Convention does not prevail over any international agreement which has already been or may be entered into and which contains provisions concerning the matters governed by this Convention, provided that the parties have their places of business in States parties to such agreement. + +Article 91 + +(1) This Convention is open for signature at the concluding meeting of the United Nations Conference on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and will remain open for signature by all States at the Headquarters of the United Nations, New York until 30 September 1981. + +(2) This Convention is subject to ratification, acceptance or approval by the signatory States. + +(3) This Convention is open for accession by all States which are not signatory States as from the date it is open for signature. + +(4) Instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval and accession are to be deposited with the Secretary-General of the United Nations. + +Article 92 + +(1) A Contracting State may declare at the time of signature, ratification, acceptance, approval or accession that it will not be bound by Part II of this Convention or that it will not be bound by Part III of this Convention. + +(2) A Contracting State which makes a declaration in accordance with the preceding paragraph in respect of Part II or Part III of this Convention is not to be considered a Contracting State within paragraph (1) of article 1 of this Convention in respect of matters governed by the Part to which the declaration applies. + +Article 93 + +(1) If a Contracting State has two or more territorial units in which, according to its constitution, different systems of law are applicable in relation to the matters dealt with in this Convention, it may, at the time of signature, ratification, acceptance, approval or accession, declare that this Convention is to extend to all its territorial units or only to one or more of them, and may amend its declaration by submitting another declaration at any time. + +(2) These declarations are to be notified to the depositary and are to state expressly the territorial units to which the Convention extends. + +(3) If, by virtue of a declaration under this article, this Convention extends to one or more but not all of the territorial units of a Contracting State, and if the place of business of a party is located in that State, this place of business, for the purposes of this Convention, is considered not to be in a Contracting State, unless it is in a territorial unit to which the Convention extends. + +(4) If a Contracting State makes no declaration under paragraph (1) of this article, the Convention is to extend to all territorial units of that State. + +Article 94 + +(1) Two or more Contracting States which have the same or closely related legal rules on matters governed by this Convention may at any time declare that the Convention is not to apply to contracts of sale or to their formation where the parties have their places of business in those States. Such declarations may be made jointly or by reciprocal unilateral declarations. + +(2) A Contracting State which has the same or closely related legal rules on matters governed by this Convention as one or more non-Contracting States may at any time declare that the Convention is not to apply to contracts of sale or to their formation where the parties have their places of business in those States. + +(3) If a State which is the object of a declaration under the preceding paragraph subsequently becomes a Contracting State, the declaration made will, as from the date on which the Convention enters into force in respect of the new Contracting State, have the effect of a declaration made under paragraph (1), provided that the new Contracting State joins in such declaration or makes a reciprocal unilateral declaration. + +Article 95 + +Any State may declare at the time of the deposit of its instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession that it will not be bound by subparagraph (1)(b) of article 1 of this Convention. + +Article 96 + +A Contracting State whose legislation requires contracts of sale to be concluded in or evidenced by writing may at any time make a declaration in accordance with article 12 that any provision of article 11, article 29, or Part II of this Convention, that allows a contract of sale or its modification or termination by agreement or any offer, acceptance, or other indication of intention to be made in any form other than in writing, does not apply where any party has his place of business in that State. + +Article 97 + +(1) Declarations made under this Convention at the time of signature are subject to confirmation upon ratification, acceptance or approval. + +(2) Declarations and confirmations of declarations are to be in writing and be formally notified to the depositary. + +(3) A declaration takes effect simultaneously with the entry into force of this Convention in respect of the State concerned. However, a declaration of which the depositary receives formal notification after such entry into force takes effect on the first day of the month following the expiration of six months after the date of its receipt by the depositary. Reciprocal unilateral declarations under article 94 take effect on the first day of the month following the expiration of six months after the receipt of the latest declaration by the depositary. + +(4) Any State which makes a declaration under this Convention may withdraw it at any time by a formal notification in writing addressed to the depositary. Such withdrawal is to take effect on the first day of the month following the expiration of six months after the date of the receipt of the notification by the depositary. + +(5) A withdrawal of a declaration made under article 94 renders inoperative, as from the date on which the withdrawal takes effect, any reciprocal declaration made by another State under that article. + +Article 98 + +No reservations are permitted except those expressly authorized in this Convention. + +Article 99 + +(1) This Convention enters into force, subject to the provisions of paragraph (6) of this article, on the first day of the month following the expiration of twelve months after the date of deposit of the tenth instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession, including an instrument which contains a declaration made under article 92. + +(2) When a State ratifies, accepts, approves or accedes to this Convention after the deposit of the tenth instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession, this Convention, with the exception of the Part excluded, enters into force in respect of that State, subject to the provisions of paragraph (6) of this article, on the first day of the month following the expiration of twelve months after the date of the deposit of its instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession. + +(3) A State which ratifies, accepts, approves or accedes to this Convention and is a party to either or both the Convention relating to a Uniform Law on the Formation of Contracts for the International Sale of Goods done at The Hague on 1 July 1964 (1964 Hague Formation Convention) and the Convention relating to a Uniform Law on the International Sale of Goods done at The Hague on 1 July 1964 (1964 Hague Sales Convention) shall at the same time denounce, as the case may be, either or both the 1964 Hague Sales Convention and the 1964 Hague Formation Convention by notifying the Government of the Netherlands to that effect. + +(4) A State party to the 1964 Hague Sales Convention which ratifies, accepts, approves or accedes to the present Convention and declares or has declared under article 52 that it will not be bound by Part II of this Convention shall at the time of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession denounce the 1964 Hague Sales Convention by notifying the Government of the Netherlands to that effect. + +(5) A State party to the 1964 Hague Formation Convention which ratifies, accepts, approves or accedes to the present Convention and declares or has declared under article 92 that it will not be bound by Part III of this Convention shall at the time of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession denounce the 1964 Hague Formation Convention by notifying the Government of the Netherlands to that effect. + +(6) For the purpose of this article, ratifications, acceptances, approvals and accessions in respect of this Convention by States parties to the 1964 Hague Formation Convention or to the 1964 Hague Sales Convention shall not be effective until such denunciations as may be required on the part of those States in respect of the latter two Conventions have themselves become effective. The depositary of this Convention shall consult with the Government of the Netherlands, as the depositary of the 1964 Conventions, so as to ensure necessary co-ordination in this respect. + +Article 100 + +(1) This Convention applies to the formation of a contract only when the proposal for concluding the contract is made on or after the date when the Convention enters into force in respect of the Contracting States referred to in subparagraph (1)(a) or the Contracting State referred to in subparagraph (1)(b) of article 1. + +(2) This Convention applies only to contracts concluded on or after the date when the Convention enters into force in respect of the Contracting States referred to in subparagraph (1)(a) or the Contracting State referred to in subparagraph (1)(b) of article 1. + +Article 101 + +(1) A Contracting State may denounce this Convention, or Part II or Part III of the Convention, by a formal notification in writing addressed to the depositary. + +(2) The denunciation takes effect on the first day of the month following the expiration of twelve months after the notification is received by the depositary. Where a longer period for the denunciation to take effect is specified in the notification, the denunciation takes effect upon the expiration of such longer period after the notification is received by the depositary. + +:B~ [Post Provisions]-# + +1~post [Post Clauses (If any: Signed; Witnessed; Done; Authentic Texts; & Deposited Clauses)]-# + +DONE at Vienna, this day of eleventh day of April, one thousand nine hundred and eighty, in a single original, of which the Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish texts are equally authentic. + +IN WITNESS WHEREOF the undersigned plenipotentiaries, being duly authorized by their respective Governments, have signed this Convention. diff --git a/data/samples/current/en/viral_spiral.david_bollier.sst b/data/samples/current/en/viral_spiral.david_bollier.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e82418e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/current/en/viral_spiral.david_bollier.sst @@ -0,0 +1,5154 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Viral Spiral + :subtitle: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own + :language: US + +@creator: + :author: Bollier, David + +@date: + :published: 2008 + +@rights: + :copyright: © 2008 by David Bollier All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher. The author has made an online version of the book available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. It can be accessed at http://www.viralspiral.cc and http://www.onthecommons.org. Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013. Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2008 Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York ISBN 978-1-59558-396-3 (hc.) CIP data available The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large, commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry. The New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain, and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable. www.thenewpress.com A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org. + :license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;networks;Internet:social aspects|copyright|intellectual property;intellectual property:patents|public domain;intellectual property:copyright:creative commons;society:information society;copyright:creative commons|public domain|licenses;patents;book:subject:information society|information networks|society|copyright|creative commons|patents|culture;open source software:social aspects;software:free software|GPL|open source;license:GPL;programming;democracy;democratization;creative commons;public domain:copyright law (U.S.);free culture;culture + +@identifier: + :oclc: 227016731 + +@links: + { Viral Spiral }http://viralspiral.cc/ + { David Bollier }http://www.bollier.org/ + { David Bollier @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bollier + { Viral Spiral @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Viral-Spiral-Commoners-Digital-Republic/dp/1595583963 + { Viral Spiral @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=1595583963 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:B,C; break=1 + :texpdf_font: Liberation Sans + :home_button_text: {Viral Spiral}http://viralspiral.cc/; {David Bollier}http://www.bollier.org/ + :footer: {Viral Spiral}http://viralspiral.cc/; {David Bollier}http://www.bollier.org/ + +:A~ @title @author + +1~attribution Attribution~# + +To Norman Lear, dear friend and intrepid explorer of the frontiers of democratic practice -# + +1~acknowledgments ACKNOWLEDGMENTS + +In this book, as with any book, dozens of barely visible means of support conspired to help me. It has been hard work, but any author with sufficient honesty and self-awareness realizes the extent to which he or she is a lens that refracts the experiences, insights, and writings of others. It is a pleasure to pay tribute to those who have been helpful to me. + +I am grateful to Larry Lessig, a singular visionary in developing the commons as a new paradigm, for helping to make this book possible. He submitted to several interviews, facilitated my research within the Creative Commons community, and, despite our shared involvements in various projects over the years, scrupulously respected my independence. It is also a pleasure to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for generously helping to cover my research, reporting, and travel expenses. + +I interviewed or consulted with more than one hundred people in the course of writing this book. I want to thank each of them for carving out some time to speak with me and openly sharing their thoughts. The Creative Commons and iCommons staff were particularly helpful in making time for me, pointing me toward useful documents and Web sites and sharing their expertise. I must single out Glenn Otis Brown, Mia Garlick, Joichi Ito, Heather Ford, Tomislav Medak, Ronaldo Lemos, and Hal Abelson for their special assistance. + +Since writing a book resembles parachuting into a forest and then trying to find one’s way out, I was pleased to have many friends who recommended some useful paths to follow. After reading some or all of my manuscript, the following friends and colleagues offered many invaluable suggestions and criticisms: Charles Schweik, Elliot E. Maxwell, John Seely Brown, Emily Levine, Peter Suber, Julie Ristau, Jay Walljasper, Jonathan Rowe, Kathryn Milun, Laurie Racine, and Gigi Sohn. It hardly requires saying that none of these astute readers bears any responsibility for the choices that I ultimately made. + +For the past seven years, the Tomales Bay Institute, recently renamed On the Commons, has nurtured my thinking and commitment to the commons. (On the Commons has no formal affiliation to the Creative Commons world, but it enthusiastically shares its commitments to the commons.) I am grateful to my colleagues Peter Barnes, Harriet Barlow, and Julie Ristau for their unflagging support of my book over the past three years, even when it impinged on my other responsibilities. + +In the early stages of this book, Elaine Pagels was unusually generous in offering her help, and my conversations with Nick Bromell helped pry loose some important insights used in my conclusion. Cherry Alvarado was of extraordinary help to me as she transcribed scores of interviews with unfailing good humor and precision. I also wish to thank Andrew Ryder for resourceful assistance in the early stages of my research. + +I have dedicated this book to my dear friend and mentor Norman Lear. The zeal, imagination, and grace that he brings to the simple imperatives of citizenship have been more instructive and inspirational than he perhaps realizes. He has also been of incalculable support to me in my headstrong explorations of the commons. + +Finally, at the end of the day, when I emerge from my writer’s lair or return from yet another research and reporting trip, it is Ellen and my sons Sam and Tom who indulge my absences, mental and physical, and reacquaint me with the things that matter most. I could not wish for more. David Bollier Amherst, Massachusetts May 1, 2008 + +1~introduction INTRODUCTION + +It started with that great leap forward in human history the Internet, which gave rise to free software in the 1980s and then the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. The shockingly open Internet, fortified by these tools, began empowering a brash new culture of rank amateurs — you and me. And this began to reverse the fierce tide of twentieth-century media. Ordinary people went online, if only to escape the incessant blare of television and radio, the intrusive ads and the narrow spectrum of expression. People started to discover their own voices . . . and their own capabilities . . . and one another. +={ free software +2 } + +As the commoners began to take charge of their lives, they discovered anew that traditional markets, governments, and laws were often not serving their needs very well. And so some pioneers had the audacity to invent an infrastructure to host new alternatives: free and open-source software. Private licenses to enable sharing and bypass the oppressive complications of copyright law. A crazy quilt of Web applications. And new types of companies that thrive on servicing social communities on open platforms. + +At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the commoners began to make some headway. More people were shifting their attention away from commercial media to homegrown genres — listservs, Web sites, chat rooms, instant messaging, and later, blogs, podcasts, and wikis. A swirling mass of artists, legal scholars, techies, activists, and even scientists and businesses began to create their own online commons. They self-organized themselves into a loosely coordinated movement dedicated to “free culture.” + +The viral spiral was under way. + +Viral spiral? /{Viral}/, a term borrowed from medical science, refers to the way in which new ideas and innovations on the Internet can proliferate with astonishing speed. A video clip, a blog post, an advertisement released on the Internet tumbles into other people’s consciousness in unexpected ways and becomes the raw feedstock for new creativity and culture. This is one reason the Internet is so powerful — it virally propagates creativity. A novel idea that is openly released in the networked environment can often find its way to a distant person or improbable project that can really benefit from it. This recombinative capacity — efficiently coordinated through search engines, Web logs, informal social networks, and other means— radically accelerates the process of innovation. It enlivens democratic culture by hosting egalitarian encounters among strangers and voluntary associations of citizens. Alexis de Tocqueville would be proud. + +The /{spiral}/ of /{viral spiral}/ refers to the way in which the innovation of one Internet cohort rapidly becomes a platform used by later generations to build their own follow-on innovations. It is a corkscrew paradigm of change: /{viral}/ networking feeds an upward /{spiral}/ of innovation. The cutting-edge thread achieves one twist of change, positioning a later thread to leverage another twist, which leverages yet another. Place these spirals in the context of an open Internet, where they can sweep across vast domains of life and catalyze new principles of order and social practice, and you begin to get a sense of the transformative power of viral spirals. + +The term /{viral spiral}/ is apt, additionally, because it suggests a process of change that is anything but clean, direct, and mechanical. In the networked environment, there is rarely a direct cause-andeffect. Things happen in messy, irregular, indeterminate, serendipitous ways. Life on the Internet does not take place on a stable Cartesian grid — orderly, timeless, universal — but on a constantly pulsating, dynamic, and labyrinthine /{web}/ of finely interconnected threads radiating through countless nodes. Here the context is as rich and generative as any individual, /{Viral spiral}/ calls attention to the holistic and historical dynamics of life on the Web, which has a very different metaphysical feel than the world of twentieth-century media. + +The viral spiral began with free software (code that is free to use, not code at no cost) and later produced the Web. Once these open platforms had sufficiently matured, tech wizards realized that software’s great promise is not as a stand-alone tool on PCs, but as a social platform for Web-based sharing and collaboration. The commoners could then begin to imagine: How might these tools be used to overcome the arbitrary and confusing limitations of copyright law? One answer, the Creative Commons (CC) licenses, a free set of public licenses for sharing content, helped mitigate the legal risks of sharing of works under copyright law. This innovation, in turn, helped unleash a massive wave of follow-on innovations. +={ free software ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses +} + +Web 2.0 applications flourished, many of them relying upon sharing made legal through CC licenses. By avoiding the costly overhead of centralized production and marketing, and tapping into the social vitality of a commons, Web 2.0 platforms have enabled ordinary people to share photos (Flickr), favorite browser bookmarks (del.icio.us), favorite news stories (Digg, Reddit), and homemade videos (YouTube). They let people access user-created archives (Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Ourmedia.org), collaborate in news gathering (OhmyNews, Assignment Zero), participate in immersive communities (Second Life), and build open-business models (Magnatune, Revver, Jamendo). +={ web 2.0 : + applications +} + +This book seeks to trace the long arc of change wrought by a kaleidoscopic swarm of commoners besieged by oppressive copyright laws, empowered by digital technologies, and possessed of a vision for a more open, democratic society. Their movement has been fired by the rhetoric of freedom and actualized by digital technologies connected by the Internet. These systems have made it extremely cheap and easy for ordinary people to copy and share things, and to collaborate and organize. They have democratized creativity on a global scale, challenging the legitimacy and power of all sorts of centralized, hierarchical institutions. + +This larger story has rarely been told in its larger scope. It is at base a story of visionary individuals determined to protect the shared code, content, and social community that they have collectively generated. Richard Stallman pioneered the development of free software; Lawrence Lessig waged challenges against excessive copyright protection and led the development of the Creative Commons licenses; citizen-archivist Eric Eldred fought to preserve his online body of public-domain literature and the community that grew up around it. These are simply the better-known leaders of a movement that has attracted thousands of commoners who are building legally defensible commons into which to pour their creative energies and live their lives. +={ free software ; + commoners : + concept of +5 ; + commons : + concept of +1 +} + +The commons — a hazy concept to many people — is a new paradigm for creating value and organizing a community of shared interest. It is a vehicle by which new sorts of self-organized publics can gather together and exercise new types of citizenship. The commons can even serve as a viable alternative to markets that have grown stodgy, manipulative, and coercive. A commons arises whenever a given community decides that it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use, and sustainability. The commons is a means by which individuals can band together with like-minded souls and express a sovereignty of their own. + +Self-styled commoners can now be found in dozens of nations around the world. They are locally rooted but internationally aware citizens of the Internet. They don’t just tolerate diversity (ethnic, cultural, aesthetic, intellectual), they celebrate it. Although commoners may have their personal affinities — free software, open-access publishing, remix music, or countless others — they tend to see themselves as part of a larger movement. They share an enthusiasm for innovation and change that burbles up from the bottom, and are known to roll their eyes at the thick-headedness of the mainstream media, which always seem to be a few steps behind. +={ free software } + +If there is an element of self-congratulatory elitism at times, it stems from the freedom of commoners to negotiate their own rules and the pleasure of outmaneuvering conventional institutions. The commoners know how to plug into the specialized Web sites and practitioner communities that can provide just-in-time, highly specialized expertise. As Herbert Simon, the computer-oriented social scientist, once put it, “The meaning of ‘knowing’ today has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it.” ~{Cited by John Seely Brown, former chief scientist, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, at Open Educational Resources conference, Houston, Texas, March 29, 2007.}~ Commoners realize that this other way of being, outside hierarchical institutions, in the open space where viral spirals of innovation are free to materialize, is an important source of their insurgent power. +={ Herbert, Simon } + +It is perilous to generalize about a movement that has so many disparate parts pushing and pulling and innovating in so many different directions at once. Yet it is safe to say that the commoners— a digital embodiment of /{e pluribus unum}/ — share a common goal. They wish to transcend the limitations of copyright law in order to build their own online communities. It’s not as if the commoners are necessarily hostile to copyright law, markets, or centralized institutions. Indeed, many of them work for large corporations and universities; many rely on copyright to earn a livelihood; many are entrepreneurs. +={ commoners : + goal +} + +Yet the people who are inventing new commons have some deeper aspirations and allegiances. They glimpse the liberating potential of the Internet, and they worry about the totalizing inclinations of large corporations and the state, especially their tendency to standardize and coerce behavior. They object as well to processes that are not transparent. They dislike the impediments to direct access and participation, the limitations of credentialed expertise and arbitrary curbs on people’s freedom. + +One of the first major gatherings of international commoners occurred in June 2006, when several hundred people from fifty nations converged on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the iCommons Summit. The people of this multinational, eclectic vanguard blend the sophistication of the establishment in matters of power and politics with the bravado and playfulness of Beat poets. There were indie musicians who can deconstruct the terms of a record company licensing agreement with Talmudic precision. There were Web designers who understand the political implications of arcane rules made by the World Wide Web Consortium, a technical standards body. The lawyers and law professors who discourse about Section 114 of the Copyright Act are likely to groove on the remix career of Danger Mouse and the appropriationist antics of Negativland, a sound-collage band. James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, two law scholars at Duke Law School, even published a superhero comic book, /{Down by Law!}/, which demystifies the vagaries of the “fair use doctrine” through a filmmaker character resembling video game heroine Lara Croft.~{Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins, /{Down by Law!}/ at http://www.duke.edu/cspd/comics. }~ (Fair use is a provision of copyright law that makes it legal to excerpt portions of a copyrighted work for noncommercial, educational, and personal purposes.) +={ commoners : + gatherings of +} + +2~ The Rise of Socially Created Value +={ socially created value +5 } + +The salience of electronic commerce has, at times, obscured an important fact — that the commons is one of the most potent forces driving innovation in our time. Individuals working with one another via social networks are a growing force in our economy and society. This phenomenon has many manifestations, and goes by many names — “peer production,” “social production,” “smart mobs,” the “wisdom of crowds,” “crowdsourcing,” and “the commons.”~{“Social production” and “peer production” are associated with the work of Yale law professor Yochai Benkler, especially in his 2006 book, /{The Wealth of Networks}/. “Smart mobs” is a coinage of Howard Rheingold, author of a 2003 book by the same name.“Crowdsourcing” is the name of a blog run by Jeff Howe and the title of a June 2006 /{Wired}/ article on the topic.“Wisdom of crowds” is a term coined by James Surowiecki and used as the title of his 2004 book.}~ The basic point is that /{socially created value}/ is increasingly competing with conventional markets, as GNU/Linux has famously shown. Through an open, accessible commons, one can efficiently tap into the “wisdom of the crowd,” nurture experimentation, accelerate innovation, and foster new forms of democratic practice. +={ commons : + sources of new ideas, as +1 +} + +This is why so many ordinary people — without necessarily having degrees, institutional affiliations, or wealth — are embarking upon projects that, in big and small ways, are building a new order of culture and commerce. It is an emerging universe of economic, social, and cultural activity animated by self-directed amateurs, citizens, artists, entrepreneurs, and irregulars. + +Hugh McGuire, a Montreal-based writer and Web designer, is one. In 2005, he started LibriVox, a digital library of free public-domain audio books that are read and recorded by volunteers. More than ten thousand people a day visit the Web site to download audio files of Twain, Kafka, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and others, in nearly a dozen languages.~{ http://www.librivox.org. }~ The Faulkes Telescope Project in Australia lets high school students connect with other students, and with professional astronomers, to scan the skies with robotic, online telescopes.~{ http://faulkes-telescope.com. }~ In a similar type of learning commons, the Bugscope project in the United States enables students to operate a scanning electronic microscope in real time, using a simple Web browser on a classroom computer connected to the Internet.~{ http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu. }~ +={ Bugscope ; + LibriVox ; + McGuire, Hugh ; + Faulkes Telescope Project +} + +Thousands of individual authors, musicians, and filmmakers are using Web tools and Creative Commons licenses to transform markets for creative works — or, more accurately, to blend the market and commons into integrated hybrids. A nonprofit humanitarian group dedicated to doing reconstructive surgery for children in poor countries, Interplast, produced an Oscar-winning film, /{A Story of Healing}/, in 1997. Ten years later, it released the film under a Creative Commons license as a way to publicize Interplast’s work while retaining ownership of the film: a benefit for both film buffs and Interplast.~{ http://www.interplast.org and http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/2007/04/%E2%80%9Ca-story-of-healing%E2%80%9D-becomes-first-acad emy-award%C2%AE-winning-film-released-under-a-creative-commons-li cense. }~ +={ Interplast } + +Scoopt, a Glasgow, Scotland–based photography agency, acts as a broker to help bloggers and amateurs sell newsworthy photos and videos to the commercial media.~{ http://www.scoopt.com. }~ The Boston band Two Ton Shoe released its music on the Web for free to market its concerts. Out of the blue, a South Korean record label called one day to say it loved the band and could it come over to Seoul, all expenses paid, to perform four concerts? Each one sold out.~{ http://www.twotonshoe.com/news.html. }~ Boing Boing blogger and cyber-activist Cory Doctorow released his 2003 science-fiction novel, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, under a CC license, reaping a whirlwind of worldwide exposure.~{ See Doctorow’s preface to the second release of the book, February 12, 2004, Tor Books. See also his blog Craphound.com, September 9, 2006, at http://www.craphound.com/?=p=1681. }~ +={ Doctorow, Cory ; + Scoopt +} + +2~ The Commoners Build a Digital Republic of Their Own +={ commons : + achievement of +11 +} + +The profusion of commons on the Internet may appear to be a spontaneous and natural development. In fact, it is a hard-won achievement. An infrastructure of software, legal rights, practical expertise, and social ethics had to be imagined, built, and defended. In a sense, the commoners had to invent themselves as commoners. They had to learn to recognize their own distinct interests — in how to control their creative works, how to organize their communities, and how to engage with market players without being co-opted. They have, in fact, invented a new sort of democratic polity within the edifice of the conventional nation-state. + +The commoners differ from most of their corporate brethren in their enthusiasm for sharing. They prefer to freely distribute their writing, music, and videos. As a general rule, they don’t like to encase their work in airtight bubbles of property rights reinforced by technological locks. They envision cyberspace more as a peaceable, sociable kingdom than as a take-no-prisoners market. They honor the individual while respecting community norms. They are enthusiastic about sharing while respecting the utility of markets. Idealistic yet pragmatic, they share a commitment to open platforms, social cooperation, and elemental human freedoms. +={ commoners : + sharing by +1 +} + +It is all very well to spout such lofty goals. But how to actualize them? That is the story that the following pages recount. It has been the work of a generation, some visionary leaders, and countless individuals to articulate a loosely shared vision, build the infrastructure, and develop the social practices and norms. This project has not been animated by a grand political ideology, but rather is the result of countless initiatives, grand and incremental, of an extended global family of hackers, lawyers, bloggers, artists, and other supporters of free culture. +={ commons : + political implications of +3 +} + +And yet, despite its focus on culture and its aversion to conventional politics, the growth of this movement is starting to have political implications. In an influential 2003 essay, James F. Moore announced the arrival of “an emerging second superpower.”~{ James F. Moore, “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head,” March 31, 2003, available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html. }~ It was not a nation, but the coalescence of people from around the world who were asserting common values, and forming new public identities, via online networks. The people of this emerging “superpower,” Moore said, are concerned with improving the environment, public health, human rights, and social development. He cited as early examples the international campaign to ban land mines and the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. The power and legitimacy of this “second superpower” do not derive from the constitutional framework of a nation-state, but from its ability to capture and project people’s everyday feelings, social values, and creativity onto the world stage. Never in history has the individual had such cheap, unfettered access to global audiences, big and small. +={ Moore, James } + +The awakening superpower described in /{Viral Spiral}/ is not a conventional political or ideological movement that focuses on legislation and a clutch of “issues.” While commoners do not dismiss these activities as unimportant, most are focused on the freedom of their peer communities to create, communicate, and share. When defending these freedoms requires wading into conventional politics and law, they are prepared to go there. But otherwise, the commoners are more intent on building a kind of parallel social order, inscribed within the regnant political economy but animated by their own values. Even now, the political/cultural sensibilities of this order are only vaguely understood by governments, politicians, and corporate leaders. The idea of “freedom without anarchy, control without government, consensus without power” — as Lawrence Lessig put it in 1999~{ Lawrence Lessig, /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/ (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 4. }~ —is just too counterintuitive for the conventionally minded to take seriously. +={ commoners : + sharing by +1 ; + Lessig, Lawrence +2 +} + +Very early on, the commoners identified copyright law as a major impediment to their vision of a “sharing economy.” It is not that they revile copyright law as such; indeed, many commoners defend the importance of copyright law to creative endeavor. The problem, they insist, is that large corporations with vast inventories of copyrighted works — film studios, record labels, book publishers, software companies — have used their political power unfairly to extend the scope and term of copyright privileges. A limited monopoly granted by the U.S. Constitution has morphed into an expansive, near-perpetual monopoly, enforced by intrusive technologies and draconian penalties. +={ copyright law : + sharing economy vs. +3 +} + +The resulting curbs on citizen freedom, as large entertainment and media corporations gain legal privileges at the expense of the public, is a complicated issue that I return to in chapter 2. But it is worth noting briefly why copyright law has been particularly harmful to the commons in the digital age. When Congress enacted a major revision of U.S. copyright law in 1976, it eliminated a longstanding requirement that works had to be formally registered in order to receive copyright protection.~{ The effect of the elimination of formal registration in copyright law is cogently discussed by Lessig in /{Free Culture}/ (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 170–73, and pp. 248–53. }~ Under the new law, /{everything}/ became automatically copyrighted upon creation. This meant that all information and artistic work created after 1978 (when the law took effect) has been born into an invisible envelope of property rights. It sounds appealing to eliminate bureaucratic formalities like registration. But the shift to automatic copyright has meant that every digital scribble is born with a © branded on its side. /{Culture = private property}/. +={ Copyright Act (1976) ; + copyright law : + automatic +1 | revision of (1976) +1 | and property rights +1 ; + property rights, and copyright law +} + +The various industries that rely on copyrights have welcomed this development because it helps them portray their ownership rights as all-encompassing. They can cast the public’s right to use works without permission or payment — traditionally guaranteed under the fair use doctrine and the public domain — as exceptions to the general rule of absolute property rights. “What could be wrong with enclosing works in ever-stronger packages of property rights?” the music and film industries argue. “That’s how new economic wealth is created.” The media oligopolies that control most of television, film, music, and news gathering naturally want to protect their commercial content. It is the fruit of a vast system of fixed investment — equipment, high-priced stars, lawyers, distribution channels, advertising, etc. — and copyright law is an important tool for protecting that value. + +The Internet has profoundly disrupted this model of market production, however. The Internet is a distributed media system of low-cost capital (your personal computer) strung together with inexpensive transmission and software. Instead of being run by a centralized corporation that relies upon professionals and experts above all else, the Internet is a noncommercial infrastructure that empowers amateurs, citizens, and ordinary individuals in all their quirky, authentic variety. The mass media have long regarded people as a commodifiable audience to be sold to advertisers in tidy demographic units. +={ Internet : + empowerment by +2 +} + +Now, thanks to the Internet, “the people formerly known as the audience” (in Jay Rosen’s wonderful phrase) are morphing into a differentiated organism of flesh-and-blood, idiosyncratic individuals, as if awakening from a spell. Newly empowered to speak as they wish, in their own distinctive, personal voices to a global public of whoever cares to listen, people are creating their own transnational tribes. They are reclaiming culture from the tyranny of mass-media economics and national boundaries. In Lessig’s words, Internet users are overthrowing the “read only” culture that characterized the “weirdly totalitarian” communications of the twentieth century. In its place they are installing the “read/write” culture that invites everyone to be a creator, as well as a consumer and sharer, of culture.~{ Lawrence Lessig, “The Read-Write Society,” delivered at the Wizards of OS4 conference in Berlin, Germany, on September 5, 2006. Available at http://www.wizards-of-os.org/programm/panels/authorship_amp_culture/keynote_the_read_write_society/the_read_write_society.html. }~ A new online citizenry is arising, one that regards its socially negotiated rules and norms as at least as legitimate as those established by conventional law. +={ Rosen, Jay } + +Two profoundly incommensurate media systems are locked in a struggle for survival or supremacy, depending upon your perspective or, perhaps, mutual accommodation. For the moment, we live in a confusing interregnum — a transition that pits the dwindling power and often desperate strategies of Centralized Media against the callow, experimental vigor of Internet-based media. This much is clear, however: a world organized around centralized control, strict intellectual property rights, and hierarchies of credentialed experts is under siege. A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant. Or to put it more precisely, we are stumbling into a strange hybrid order that combines both worlds — mass media and online networks — on terms that have yet to be negotiated. + +2~ The Rise of the Commoners +={ commoners : + rise of +21 +} + +But who shall do the negotiating? Who will set forth a compelling alternative to centralized media, and build it? That task has fallen to a loosely coordinated global federation of digital tribes — the free software and open-source hackers, the Wikipedians, the bloggers and citizen-journalists, the remix musicians and filmmakers, the avant-garde artists and political dissidents, the educators and scientists, and many others. It is a spontaneous folk-tech conspiracy that belongs to everyone and no one. + +As we will see in chapter 1, Richard Stallman, the legendary hacker, played an indispensable first-mover role by creating a sovereign domain from which to negotiate with commercial players: free software. The software commons and later digital commons inspired by it owe an incalculable debt to Stallman’s ingenious legal innovation, the General Public License, or GPL, launched in 1989. The GPL is a license for authorizing anyone to use a copyrighted software program so long as any copies or derivative versions are also made available on the same terms. This fairly simple license enables programmers to contribute code to a common pool without fear that someone might privatize and destroy the commons. +={ General Public License (GPL) } + +As the computer revolution continued through the 1980s and the Internet went wide in the 1990s, the antisocial, antidemocratic implications of copyright law in networked spaces became more evident. As we will see in chapter 2, a growing community of progressive legal scholars blew the whistle on some nasty developments in copyright law that were shrinking the public’s fair use rights and the public domain. Scholars such as James Boyle, Pamela Samuelson, Jessica Litman, Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, and Peter Jaszi provided invaluable legal analyses about the imperiled democratic polity of cyberspace. +={ Lessig, Lawrence +2 } + +By the late 1990s, this legal scholarship was in full flower, Internet usage was soaring, and the free software movement produced its first significant free operating system, GNU/Linux. The commoners were ready to take practical action. Lessig, then a professor at Harvard Law School, engineered a major constitutional test case, /{Eldred v. Reno}/ (later /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/), to try to strike down a twentyyear extension of copyright terms — a case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002. At the same time, Lessig and a number of his colleagues, including MIT computer scientist Hal Abelson, Duke law professor James Boyle, and Villanova law professor Michael W. Carroll, came together to explore innovative ways to protect the public domain. It was a rare moment in history in which an ad hoc salon of brilliant, civic-minded thinkers from diverse fields of endeavor found one another, gave themselves the freedom to dream big thoughts, and embarked upon practical plans to make them real. +={ GNU/Linux ; + Linux : + see also GNU/Linux ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft +} + +The immediate upshot of their legal and techno ingenuity, as we will see in chapters 3 and 4, was the drafting of the Creative Commons licenses and the organization that would promote them. The purpose of these free, standardized public licenses was, and is, to get beyond the binary choice imposed by copyright law. Why must a work be considered either a chunk of privately owned property or a kind of nonproperty completely open to anyone without constraint (“in the public domain”)? The CC licenses overcome this stifling either/or logic by articulating a new middle ground of ownership that sanctions sharing and collaboration under specified terms. To stress its difference from copyright law, which declares “All Rights Reserved,” the Creative Commons licenses bear the tagline “Some Rights Reserved.” +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses +2 : + copyright law, and +2 ; + Copyright law : + CC licenses +2 +} + +Like free software, the CC licenses paradoxically rely upon copyright law to legally protect the commons. The licenses use the rights of ownership granted by copyright law not to exclude others, but to invite them to share. The licenses recognize authors’ interests in owning and controlling their work — but they also recognize that new creativity owes many social and intergenerational debts. Creativity is not something that emanates solely from the mind of the “romantic author,” as copyright mythology has it; it also derives from artistic communities and previous generations of authors and artists. The CC licenses provide a legal means to allow works to circulate so that people can create something new. /{Share, reuse, and remix, legally}/, as Creative Commons puts it. + +After the licenses were introduced in December 2002, they proliferated throughout the Internet and dozens of nations as if by spontaneous combustion. It turns out that the licenses have been more than a legal fix for the limitations of copyright law. They are a powerful form of social signaling. The licenses have proven to be a flag for commoners to advertise their identities as members of a culturally insurgent sharing economy — an aesthetic/political underground, one might say. Attaching the CC logo to one’s blog, video, MP3 file, or laptop case became a way to proclaim one’s support for free culture. Suddenly, all sorts of participatory projects could be seen as elements of a larger movement. By 2007, authors had applied one or more of six CC licenses to 90 million works, by one conservative estimate, or more than 220 million works by another estimate. Collectively, CC-licensed works constitute a class of cultural works that are “born free” to be legally shared and reused with few impediments. + +A great deal of the Creative Commons story revolves around its founder, the cerebral yet passionate Larry Lessig, a constitutional law professor at Harvard in the mid-1990s until a move to Stanford Law School in 2000. As a scholar with a sophisticated grasp of digital technologies, Lessig was one of the first to recognize that as computers became the infrastructure for society, software code was acquiring the force of law. His 1999 classic, /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/, is renowned for offering a deep theoretical framework for understanding how politics, law, technology, and social norms shape the character of cyberspace — and in turn, any society. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +} + +In popularizing this message, it didn’t hurt that Lessig, an experienced classroom lecturer, is a poised and spellbinding performer. On the tech and copyright circuit, in fact, he has become something of a rock star. With his expansive forehead and wire glasses, Lessig looks every bit the professor he is. Yet in his signature black jeans and sport jacket, delivering punchy one-liners punctuated by arresting visuals projected on a big screen behind him, Lessig makes a powerful impression. He’s a geek-chic techie, intellectual, legal activist, and showman all rolled into one. + +From the beginning, Lessig and his colleagues wondered, How far can the sharing ethic be engineered? Just how far can the idea of free culture extend? As it turns out, quite far. At first, of course, the free culture project was applied mostly to Web-based text and music. But as we see in chapters 5 through 12, the technologies and ethic of free culture have rapidly taken root in many creative sectors of society — video, music, books, science, education — and even business and international arts and culture. + +!{/{Remix culture.}/}! Thanks to digital technologies, musicians can sample verbatim snippets of other musicians’ work in their own works, producing “remixes” that blend sounds from a number of copyrighted songs. It’s all patently illegal, of course, unless you’re wealthy enough to pay for the rights to use a sample. But that hasn’t stopped artists. +={ music : + remixes +2 ; + remix works +2 +} + +In fact, the underground remix scene has become so robust that even established artists feel obliged to engage with it to bolster their street cred. With a wink and a nudge from record labels, major rap stars like Jay-Z and Eminem have released instrumental tracks of their records in the hope and expectation that remix /{auteurs}/ will recycle the tracks. Record labels have quietly relied on mixtapes— personalized compilations of tracks — to gain exposure and credibility.~{ See, e.g., Joanna Demers, /{Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity}/ (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); Kelefa Sanneh, “Mixtapes Mix in Marketing,” New York Times, July 20, 2006. }~ To help an illegal social art go legit, many artists are using Creative Commons licenses and public-domain sound clips to build a legal body of remix works. + +In the video world, too, the remix impulse has found expression in its own form of derivative creativity, the mashup. From underground remakes of /{Star Wars}/ films to parodies of celebrities, citizenamateurs are taking original video clips and mixing them with other images, pop music tracks, and their own narrations. When Alaska senator Ted Stevens compared the Internet to a “series of tubes,” video clips of his rambling speech were mashed up and set to a techno dance beat. Beyond this playful subculture, serious filmmakers are using CC licenses on their works to develop innovative distribution systems that attract large audiences and earn money. Machinima animations — a filmmaking technique that uses computer game action sequences, shot with in-game cameras and then edited together — are pioneering a new market niche, in part through their free distribution under a CC license. +={ Machinima animations ; + Stevens, Ted +} + +!{/{Open business.}/}! One of the most surprising recent developments has been the rise of “open business” models. Unlike traditional businesses that depend upon proprietary technology or content, a new breed of businesses see lucrative opportunities in exploiting open, participatory networks. The pioneer in this strategy was IBM, which in 2000 embraced GNU/Linux, the open-source computer operating system, as the centerpiece of its service and consulting business.~{ Steve Lohr, “IBM to Give Free Access to 500 Patents, /{New York Times}/, July 11, 2005. See also Steven Weber, /{The Success of Open Source Software}/ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 202–3. See also Pamela Samuelson, “IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source,” /{Communications of the ACM}/ 49, no. 21 (October 2006). }~ Dozens of small, Internet-based companies are now exploiting open networks to build more flexible, sustainable enterprises. +={ GNU/Linux : + IBM, and ; + IBM : + GNU/Linux, and ; + open business models +1 +} + +The key insight about many open-platform businesses is that they no longer look to copyright or patent law as tools to assert market control. Their goal is not to exclude others, but to amass large communities. Open businesses understand that exclusive property rights can stifle the value creation that comes with mass participation, and so they strive to find ways to “honor the commons” while making money in socially acceptable forms of advertising, subscriptions, or consulting services. The brave new economics of “peer production” is enabling forward-thinking businesses to use social collaboration among thousands, or even millions, of people to create social communities that are the foundation for significant profits. /{BusinessWeek}/ heralded this development in a major cover story in 2005, “The Power of Us,” and called sharing “the net’s next disruption.”~{ Robert D. Hof, “The Power of Us: Mass Collaboration on the Internet Is Shaking Up Business,” /{BusinessWeek}/, June 20, 2005, pp. 73–82. }~ + +!{/{Science}/}! as a commons. The world of scientific research has long depended on open sharing and collaboration. But increasingly, copyrights, patents, and university rules are limiting the flow of scientific knowledge. The resulting gridlock of rights in knowledge is impeding new discoveries and innovation. Because of copyright restrictions and software incompatibilities, scientists studying genetics, proteins, and marine biology often cannot access databases containing vital research. Or they cannot easily share physical samples of lab samples. When the maker of Golden Rice, a vitamin-enhanced bioengineered rice, tried to distribute its seeds to millions of people in poor countries, it first had to get permissions from seventy patent holders and obtain six Material Transfer Agreements (which govern the sharing of biomedical research substances).~{ Interview with John Wilbanks, “Science Commons Makes Sharing Easier,” /{Open Access Now}/, December 20, 2004, available at http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/archive/?page=features&issue=23. }~ +={ Wilbanks, John +1 ; + Science Commons : + CC Commons spinoff, and +1 +} + +The problem of acquiring, organizing, and sharing scientific knowledge is becoming more acute, paradoxically enough, as more scientific disciplines become dependent on computers and the networked sharing of data. To help deal with some of these issues, the Creative Commons in 2005 launched a new project known as the Science Commons to try to redesign the information infrastructure for scientific research. The basic idea is to “break down barriers to sharing that are hindering innovation in the sciences,” says John Wilbanks, executive director of Science Commons. Working with the National Academy of Sciences and other research bodies, Wilbanks is collaborating with astronomers, archaeologists, microbiologists, and medical researchers to develop better ways to make vast scientific literatures more computer-friendly, and databases technically compatible, so that they can be searched, organized, and used more effectively. + +!{/{Open education and learning.}/}! A new class of knowledge commons is poised to join free and open-source software, the Creative Commons and Wikipedia as a coherent social movement. The new groundswell goes by the awkward name “Open Educational Resources,” or OER.~{ See, e.g., Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, “A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New Opportunities,” February 2007, available at http://www.oerderves.org/?p=23. }~ One of the earlier pioneers of the movement was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which has put virtually all of its course materials on the Web, for free, through its OpenCourseWare initiative. The practice has now spread to scores of colleges and universities around the world, and inspired a broader set of OER initiatives: digital repositories for articles, reports, and data; open-access scholarly journals that bypass expensive commercial publishers; and collaborative Web sites for developing teaching materials. There are wikis for students and scholars working together, sites to share multimedia presentations, and much more. +={ education : + OER movement +1 ; + pen Educational Resources (OER) movement +1 ; + Wikipedia : + social movement, as +1 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + social movement, as +1 +} + +The OER movement has particular importance for people who want to learn but don’t have the money or resources — scholars in developing countries, students struggling to pay for their educations, people in remote or rural locations, people with specialized learning needs. OER is based on the proposition that it will not only be cheaper or perhaps free if teachers and students can share their materials through the Web, it will also enable more effective types of learning. So the OER movement is dedicated to making learning tools cheaper and more accessible. The revolutionary idea behind OER is to transform traditional education — teachers imparting information to passive students — into a more learnerdriven process facilitated by teachers. Self-directed, socially driven learning supplants formal, hierarchical modes of teaching. + +!{/{The international sharing economy.}/}! Shortly after the first CC licenses were released in 2002, dozens of exceptionally capable volunteers — from Japan, Finland, Brazil, South Africa, and other countries — came knocking on the door of CC. How can we adapt the American CC licenses to our respective national legal systems? they asked. This unexpected turn prompted the Creative Commons to inaugurate Creative Commons International, based in Berlin, Germany, to supervise the complicated task of “porting” the U.S. licenses to other legal jurisdictions. To date, CC affiliates in fortyseven nations have adapted the U.S. licenses to their legal systems, and another seventeen have porting projects under way. +={ Creative Commons International +1 } + +The volunteers include avant-garde artists in Croatia, free software programmers in the Netherlands, South Korean judges, Italian law professors, South African musicians, Malaysian citizenjournalists, Bulgarian filmmakers, and Taiwanese songwriters. The passionate international licensing movement has even been embraced by the Brazilian government, which has proclaimed itself the first Free Culture Nation. As usage of the licenses spreads, they are effectively becoming the default international legal structure of the sharing economy. + +2~ A New Type of Emergent Democracy? + +Peter Suber, a leading champion of open-access scholarly publishing, once explained to me why a disparate, rambunctious crowd of commoners spread around the globe might wish to work together to do something about their plight. “People are taking back their culture,” Peter said. “People who have not been served by the current law have quietly endured it until they saw that they didn’t have to.”~{ Interview with Peter Suber, June 28, 2006. }~ The Creative Commons has become both a symbol and a tool for people to reclaim creativity and culture from the mass-media leviathans. The licenses and the organization have become instruments to advance a participatory, sharing economy and culture. +={ Suber, Peter } + +How far can it go? Will it significantly affect conventional politics and government? Can it bring market forces and social needs into a more positive alignment? + +This book is about the struggle to imagine this new world and push it as far as it can go. It is, in one sense, a history, but “history” suggests that the story is over and done. The truth is that the commons movement is tremendously robust and expansive right now. The early history about free software, the public domain, and the Creative Commons is simply a necessary foundation for understanding the propulsive logic of what is happening. + +The story told in these pages is not entirely new; it has been told in fragments and through the restless lens of journalism. But it has not been told in its larger conceptual and historical sweep. That’s partly because most of its players are usually seen in isolation from one another, and not put in the context of the larger open-platform revolution. It’s also because the free culture movement, nothwithstanding its vigor, is generally eclipsed by the bigmoney corporate developments that are ostensibly more important. But that is precisely the problem: conventional economics does not understand the actual significance of open platforms and the commons. We need to understand what the online commons represent: a powerful sociotechnological paradigm that is reordering some basic dynamics of creative practice, culture, politics, and everyday life. + +I am no bystander in this story, it must be said, but a commoner who has grappled with the quandaries of copyright law and the public domain for nearly twenty years. In 2001, after co-founding Public Knowledge, a Washington advocacy group to defend the public’s stake in copyright and Internet policies, I went on to write books on the market enclosure of myriad commons and on the absurd expansions of copyright and trademark law. Over the course of this work, I discovered how a commons analysis can help us understand the digital revolution. It can help us see that it is not just about technological innovation, but about social and legal innovations. Reading Elinor Ostrom and Yochai Benkler, in particular — two leading theorists of the commons — I came to realize that social communities, and not just markets, must be recognized as powerful vehicles for creating value. I realized that many basic assumptions about property rights, as embedded in copyright law and neoclassical economics, fail to take account of the generative power of online communities. +={ Public Knowledge } + +How then shall we create the commons and protect it? That question lies at the core of this book and the history of the commoners in cyberspace. I am mostly interested in exploring how the Creative Commons has galvanized a variety of interrelated crusades to build a digital republic of, by, and for the commoners. One reason why a small licensing project has grown into a powerful global brand is that, at a time of mass-media dominance and political stalemate, free culture offers an idealistic alternative vision. Something you can do. A movement in which everyone can play some useful role. The free culture movement stands for reclaiming culture by making it yourself and for reviving democracy by starting in your own digital backyard. CC stands for personal authenticity and diversity in a world of stale, mass-marketed product. It stands for good fun and the joys of sharing. + +Put the CC logo on your blog or music CD or video, and you too can belong to a movement that slyly sticks it to Big Media without getting into an ugly brawl. Don’t get mad, the CC community seems to whisper. Just affiliate with a growing virtual nation of creative renegades. Transcend a rigged game by migrating to a commons of your own making. Build therefore your own world, in the manner of Henry David Thoreau — then imagine its embrace by many others. Imagine it radiating into conventional politics with a refreshing ethic of open accountability and earned rewards, a contempt for coercive business practices and governmental abuses, and an insistence upon transparency, participation, and the consent of the governed. You may be an entrepreneur who just wants to build a profitable business, or a scientist who just wants to find better ways to research Huntington’s disease. The commons has some solutions in these areas, too. This big-tent movement is unabashedly ecumenical. + +This is the vision now exploding around the world anyway. The recurring question in its earliest days, and now, remains — How can we build it out? /{Can}/ it be built out? And how far? For the commoners, just asking the question is halfway to answering it. + +:B~ PART I + +:C~ Harbingers of the Sharing Economy + +1~intro_i [Intro] -# + +The rise of the sharing economy had its roots among the renegades living on the periphery of mainstream culture. At the time, they were largely invisible to one another. They had few ways of making common cause and no shared language for even naming the forces that troubled them. It was the 1990s, after all, a time of alluring mercantile fantasies about the limitless possibilities of the laissez-faire “information superhighway.” Even for those who could pierce the mystifications, the new technologies were so new, powerful, and perplexing that it was difficult to understand their full implications. + +The renegades, while sharing a vision of technological progress, were disturbed by many on-the-ground realities. A small network of hackers, for example, was enraged to learn that software was becoming a closed, proprietary product. Companies could prohibit interested individuals from tinkering with their own, legally purchased software. On both creative and political grounds, this development was odious to Richard Stallman, a brilliant programmer who soon hatched a dream of building a protected kingdom of “free software,” the subject of chapter 1. +={ software : + proprietary ; + Stallman, Richard +} + +Meanwhile, a loose community of legal scholars and tech activists was becoming alarmed by the antisocial, anti-democratic tendencies of copyright law and digital technology. Scholars such as Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, and Hal Abelson began to realize that copyright law and software code were acquiring unsuspected powers to redesign our political and social order. They also began to understand the ways in which the public domain is not a wasteland, as conventional minds had long supposed, but a highly generative zone of culture. This intellectual journey is described in chapter 2. +={ Abelson, Hal ; + Boyle, James ; + Lessig, Lawrence +1 +} + +Finally, it was becoming painfully apparent to yet another amorphous band of renegades — artists, musicians, writers, scientists, educators, citizens — that copyright law and technological controls were artificially restricting their creative freedoms. With scant public attention, the music, film, and publishing industries were using their clout to protect their archaic business models at the expense of innovation and the commons. This onslaught ultimately provoked one exemplary commoner, Eric Eldred, to team up with legal scholar Lawrence Lessig to mount an unprecedented constitutional challenge to copyright law, the focus of chapter 3. + +None of these surges of innovative dissent was well funded or particularly promising. For the most part, they were improvisational experiments undertaken by public-spirited individuals determined to vindicate their visions for a better society. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that while many of these initiatives were only partially successful, each was indispensable to the larger, later task of imagining and building a digital republic to secure basic human freedoms, the subject of Part II. + +1~ 1 IN THE BEGINNING WAS FREE SOFTWARE +={ Stallman, Richard +34 ; + General Public License (GPL) +1 +} + +/{Richard Stallman's mythic struggle to protect the commons of code set the viral spiral in motion.}/ + +The struggle to imagine and invent the software commons, which later set in motion a viral spiral now known as free culture, began with Richard Stallman, a brilliant, eccentric MIT computer programmer. Stallman’s history as a hacker and legal innovator has by now become the stuff of legend. As one of the first people to confront the deep tensions between proprietary control and the public domain in software development, Stallman has achieved that rare pinnacle in the high-tech world, the status of celebrity geek. Besides his programming prowess, he is renowned for devising the GNU General Public License, more commonly known as the GPL, an ingenious legal mechanism to protect shared software code. +={ free culture +33 } + +Stallman — or RMS, as he likes to be called — has become an iconic figure in the history of free culture in part because he showed courageous leadership in protecting the commons well before anyone else realized that there was even a serious problem. He was a lone voice in the wilderness for at least ten years before the Internet became a mass medium, and so has earned enormous credibility as a leader on matters of free culture. He has also been reviled by some as an autocratic zealot with bad manners and strident rhetoric. + +It is perhaps fitting that Stallman could be mistaken for an Old Testament prophet. He is a shaggy, intense, and fiercely stubborn guy. On his Web site, visitors can find a gag photo of him posed as Saint IGNUcius, with his hand raised in mock genuflection and his head encircled by a gold aureole (held in place by two admiring acoyltes). He has been known to deliver lectures barefoot, sleep on the couch in a borrowed office for weeks at a time, and excoriate admirers for using taboo phrases like “intellectual property” and “copyright protection.” Stallman explains that “intellectual property” incorrectly conflates three distinct bodies of law — copyright, patent, and trademark — and emphasizes individual property rights over public rights. “Copyright protection” is misleading, he says, because it implies a positive, necessary act of /{defending}/ something rather than an acquisitive, aggressive act of a monopolist. Stallman considers /{content}/ to be a disparaging word, better replaced by “works of authorship.” He has even made a list of fourteen words that he urges people to avoid because of their politically misleading valences.~{ Joshua Gray, editor, /{Free Software Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman}/ (Boston: GNU Press, 2002), pp. 190–91. }~ +={ authorship ; + intellectual property +} + +Even though Stallman frequently speaks to august academic and scientific gatherings, and meets with the heads of state in developing countries, he resembles a defiant hippie, Yet for his visionary role in developing free software and the free software philosophy, Stallman is treated as if he were a head of state . . . which, in a way, he is. His story has irresistible mythological resonances — the hero’s journey through hardship and scorn, later vindicated by triumph and acclaim. But for many, including his most ardent admirers, Stallman’s stubborn idealism can also be supremely maddening. +={ free software } + +His first encounter with the creeping ethic of proprietary control, in the late 1970s, is an oft-told part of his story. The Xerox Corporation had donated an experimental laser printer to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, where Stallman was then a graduate student. The printer was constantly jamming, causing frustration and wasting everyone’s time. Stallman wanted to devise a software fix but he discovered that the source code was proprietary. Determined to find out who was responsible and force them to fix it, he tracked down a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who had supposedly written the code — but the professor refused to help him; he had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Xerox prohibiting him from sharing the code. +={ Xerox Corporation +1 ; + software : + proprietary +1 +} + +Stallman considered Xerox’s lockup of code a profound moral offense that violated the integrity of the hacker community. (Among practitioners, /{hacker}/ is a term of respect for an ingenious, resourceful programmer, not an accusation of criminality.) Not only did it prevent people from fixing their own equipment and software, the nondisclosure agreement flouted the Golden Rule. It prohibited sharing with one’s neighbor. The proprietary ethic was not just immoral, by Stallman’s lights, but a barrier to developing great software. +={ hackers : + use of term +} + +By the late 1970s, he had developed a breakthrough text editor, Emacs, in collaboration with a large community of programmers. “Everybody and his brother was writing his own collection of redefined screen-editor commands, a command for everything he typically liked to do,” Stallman wrote. “People would pass them around and improve them, making them more powerful and more general. The collections of redefinitions gradually became system programs in their own right.”~{ Sam Williams, /{Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software}/ (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates 2002), pp. 76–88. }~ Emacs was one of the first software projects to demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale software collaboration and the deep well of innovative ideas that it could yield. Emacs enabled programmers to add new features with great ease, and to constantly upgrade and customize the program with the latest improvements. The Emacs experiment demonstrated that /{sharing}/ and /{interoperability}/ are vital principles for a flourishing online commons. +={ Emacs +2 ; + Stallman, Richard : + Emacs, and +2 +} + +Two problems quickly emerged, however. If people did not communicate their innovations back to the group, divergent streams of incompatible code would produce a Tower of Babel effect. Second, if the code and its derivations were not shared with everyone, the usefulness of the program would slowly decline. The flow of innovation would dissipate. + +To solve these problems, Stallman invented a user contract that he called the “Emacs Commune.” It declared to all users that Emacs was “distributed on a basis of communal sharing, which means that all improvements must be given back to me to be incorporated and distributed.” He enforced the provisions of the contract with an iron hand. As Stallman biographer Sam Williams writes, when the administrators for the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science instituted a new password system — which Stallman considered an antisocial power grab — he “initiated a software ‘strike,’ refusing to send lab members the latest version of Emacs until they rejected the security system on the lab’s computers. The move did little to improve Stallman’s growing reputation as an extremist, but it got the point across: commune members were expected to speak up for basic hacker values.” +={ Williams, Sam } + +Stallman was groping for a way to sustain the hacker ethic of community and sharing in the face of new types of top-down control. Some programmers were beginning to install code that would turn off access to a program unless money was paid. Others were copyrighting programs that had been developed by the community of programmers. Bill Gates, as an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1970s, was nearly expelled for using publicly funded labs to create commercial software. He was forced to put his code into the public domain, whereupon he left the university to found an obscure Albuquerque company called Micro-Soft. +={ authorship : + community access ; + Gates, Bill ; + hackers : + use of term +5 +} + +Software was simply becoming too lucrative for it to remain a shared resource — an attitude that enraged Stallman. He was determined to preserve the integrity of what we would now call the software commons. It was an immense challenge because copyright law makes no provisions for community ownership of creative work beyond “joint authorship” among named individuals. Stallman wanted to devise a way to ensure that all the talent and innovation created by commoners would /{stay}/ in the commons. The idea that an outsider — a university administrator, software entrepreneur, or large company — could intrude upon a hacker community and take its work was an appalling injustice to Stallman. +={ authorship : + joint ; + copyright law : + community authorship vs. ; + commons : + copyright law vs. +} + +Yet this was precisely what was happening to the hacker community at MIT’s AI Lab in the early 1980s. It was slowly disintegrating as one programmer after another trooped off to join commercial software ventures; the software itself was becoming annexed into the marketplace. Software for personal computers, which was just then appearing on the market, was sold as a proprietary product. This meant that the source code — the deep design architecture of the program that operated everything — was inaccessible.~{ Steven Levy, /{Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution}/ (New York: Delta, 1993), pp. 425, 427. }~ Perhaps most disturbing to Stallman at the time was that the leading mainframe operating system, Unix, was locking up its source code. Unix had been developed by AT&T with generous federal funding, and had been generally available for free within academic computing circles. At the time, most mainframe software was given away to encourage buyers to purchase the computer hardware. But when the Department of Justice broke up AT&T in 1984 to spur competition, it also enabled AT&T to enter other lines of business. Naturally, the company was eager to maximize its profits, so in 1985 it began to charge a licensing fee for Unix. +={ AT&T ; + Unix ; + software : + source code for +} + +Stallman grieved at the disintegration of the hacker community at the AI Lab as closed software programs inexorably became the norm. As he wrote at the time: + +_1 The people remaining at the lab were the professors, students, and non-hacker researchers, who did not know how to maintain the system, or the hardware, or want to know. Machines began to break and never be fixed; sometimes they just got thrown out. Needed changes in software could not be made. The non-hackers reacted to this by turning to commercial systems, bringing with them fascism and license agreements. I used to wander through the lab, through the rooms so empty at night where they used to be full, and think, “Oh my poor AI lab! You are dying and I can’t save you.” + +Stallman compared himself to Ishi, “the last survivor of a dead [Native American] culture. And I don’t really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.” + +Stallman decided to leave MIT — why stay? — but with a brash plan: to develop a free software operating system that would be compatible with Unix. It would be his brave, determined effort to preserve the hacker ethic. He dubbed his initiative the GNU Project, with “GNU” standing for “GNU’s Not Unix” — a recursive hacker’s pun. He also started, in 1985, the Free Software Foundation to help develop GNU software projects and distribute them for free to anyone. (The foundation now occupies a fifth-floor office on a narrow commercial street in downtown Boston.) +={ Unix ; + free software ; + Free Software Foundation ; + GNU Project +3 ; + Stallman, Richard : + free software, and | GNU Project, and +3 +} + +The Emacs Commune experience had taught Stallman about the limits of informal social norms in protecting the software commons. It also revealed the difficulties of being the central coordinator of all code changes. This time, in developing a set of software programs for his GNU Project, Stallman came up with a better idea — a legally enforceable license. The goal was to ensure that people could have free access to all derivative works and share and reuse software. The licensing rights were based on the rights of ownership conferred by copyright law. +={ Emacs ; + Stallman, Richard : + Emacs, and ; + authorship : + community access ; + copyright law : + community authorship vs. +2 | licensing rights +2 +} + +Stallman called his license the GNU General Public License, or GPL. He puckishly referred to it as “copyleft,” and illustrated it with a reverse copyright symbol (a backward c in a circle). Just as programmers pride themselves on coming up with ingenious hacks to solve a software problem, so the GPL is regarded as a world-class hack around copyright law. Copyright law has no provisions for protecting works developed by a large community of creators. Nor does it offer a way to prevent works from being made proprietary. Indeed, that’s the point of copyright law — to create private property rights. +={ software : + proprietary ; + copyright law : + property rights, and ; + General Public License (GPL) +14 ; + property rights, and copyright law ; + Stallman, Richard : + GPL, and +14 +} + +The GPL bypasses these structural limitations of copyright law by carving out a new zone of collective ownership. A work licensed under the GPL permits users to run any program, copy it, modify it, and distribute it in any modified form. The only limitation is that any derivative work must also be licensed under the GPL. This provision of the GPL means that the license is /{automatically}/ applied to any derivative work, and to any derivative of a derivative, and so on — hence its viral nature.~[* Stallman told me he considers it “a common calumny to compare the GNU GPL to a virus. That is not only insulting (I have a virus infection in my throat right now and it is no fun), it is also inaccurate, because the GPL does not spread like a virus. It spreads like a spider plant: if you cut off a piece and plant it over here, it grows over here.]~ The GPL ensures that the value created by a given group of commoners shall stay within the commons. To guarantee the viral power of the license, users of GPL’d works cannot modify the licensing terms. No one has to pay to use a GPL’d work — but as a condition for using it, people are legally obliged to license any derivative versions under the GPL. In this way, a GPL’d work is born and forever protected as “shareable.” +={ collective ownership ; + General Public License (GPL) : + viral nature of ; + software : + user freedoms ; + Stallman, Richard : + freedom, and +} + +Version 1.0 of the GPL was first published in 1989. It was significant, writes Sam Williams, because it “demonstrated the intellectual similarity between legal code and software code. Implicit within the GPL’s preamble was a profound message: instead of viewing copyright law with suspicion, hackers should view it as yet another system begging to be hacked.”~{ Williams, /{Free as in Freedom}/, p. 127. }~ The GPL also served to articulate, as a matter of law, the value of collaborative work. A universe of code that might previously have been regarded as part of the “public domain” — subject to free and unrestricted access — could now be seen in a subtly different light. +={ authorship : + community access ; + Williams, Sam ; + public domain : + GPL, and +} + + +A GPL’d work is not part of the public domain, because the public domain has no rules constraining how a work may be used. Works in the public domain are open to anyone. The GPL is similar, but with one very important restriction: no private appropriation is allowed. Any follow-on uses must remain free for others to use (a provision that some property rights libertarians regard as “coercive”). Works in the public domain, by contrast, are vulnerable to privatization because someone need only add a smidgen of “originality” to the work and she would own a copyright in the resulting work. A GPL’d work and its derivatives stay free forever — because anyone who tries to privatize a GPL’d work is infringing on the license. + +For Stallman, the GPL became the symbol and tool for enacting his distinct political vision of “freedom.” The license rests on four kinds of freedoms for users of software (which he lists using computer protocols): +={ software : + user freedoms +4 ; + Stallman, Richard : + freedom, and +5 +} + +_1 Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose; + +_1 Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and to adapt it to your needs. (Access to the source code is a precondition for this); +={ authorship : + community access +} + +_1 Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor; and + +_1 Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (Access to the source code is a precondition for this.) +={ authorship : + community access +} + +Stallman has become an evangelist for the idea of freedom embodied in all the GNU programs. He refuses to use any software programs that are not “free,” and he has refused to allow his appearances to be Webcast if the software being used was not “free.” “If I am to be an honest advocate for free software,” said Stallman, “I can hardly go around giving speeches, then put pressure on people to use nonfree software. I’d be undermining my own cause. And if I don’t show that I take my principles seriously, I can’t expect anybody else to take them seriously.”~{ Stallman at MIT forum, “Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks,” April 19, 2001, available at http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/forums/copyright/transcript.html. }~ +={ Stallman, Richard : + free software, and +2 +} + +Stallman has no problems with people making money off software. He just wants to guarantee that a person can legally use, copy, modify, and distribute the source code. There is thus an important distinction between software that is commercial (possibly free) and software that is proprietary (never free). Stallman tries to explain the distinction in a catchphrase that has become something of a mantra in free software circles: /{“free as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer.’”}/ The point is that code must be freely accessible, not that it should be free of charge. (This is why “freeware” is not the same as free software. Freeware may be free of charge, but it does not necessarily make its source code accessible.) +={ freeware vs. free software ; + software : + proprietary | source code for +} + +Eben Moglen, a professor of law at Columbia University and general counsel for the Free Software Foundation since 1994, calls the provisions of the GPL “elegant and simple. They respond to the proposition that when the marginal cost of goods is zero, any nonzero cost of barbed wire is too high. That’s a fact about the twentyfirst century, and everybody had better get used to it. Yet as you know, there are enormous cultural enterprises profoundly committed to the proposition that more and more barbed wire is necessary. And their basic strategy is to get that barbed wire paid for by the public everywhere.”~{ Eben Moglen, “Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture,” June 29, 2003, available at http://emoglen.law/columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.html. }~ +={ Moglen, Eben ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +The GPL truly was something new under the sun: a legally enforceable tool to vouchsafe a commons of software code. The license is based on copyright law yet it cleverly turns copyright law against itself, limiting its reach and carving out a legally protected zone to build and protect the public domain. In the larger scheme of things, the GPL was an outgrowth of the “gift economy” ethic that has governed academic life for centuries and computer science for decades. What made the GPL different from these (abridgeable) social norms was its legal enforceability. +={ gift economy ; + Internet : + gift economy of +1 ; + General Public License (GPL) : + legal enforceability of +} + +The GPL might well have remained an interesting but arcane curiosity of the software world but for two related developments: the rise of the Internet in the 1990s and software’s growing role as core infrastructure in modern society. As the computer and Internet revolutions have transformed countless aspects of daily life, it has become evident that software is not just another product. Its design architecture is seminally important to our civic freedoms and democratic culture. Or as Lawrence Lessig famously put it in his 1999 book /{Code}/, “code is law.” Software can affect how a business can function, how information is organized and presented, and how individuals can think, connect with one another, and collaborate. Code invisibly structures people’s relationships, and thus serves as a kind of digital constitutional order. As an economic force, software has become as critical as steel or transportation in previous eras: a building block for the basic activities of the economy, businesses, households, and personal life. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ; + code : + as law ; + free culture : + Internet, of the +2 ; + law : + code as ; + Internet : + rise of ; + software : + core infrastructure, as +} + +Stallman’s atavistic zeal to preserve the hacker community, embodied in the GPL, did not immediately inspire others. In fact, most of the tech world was focused on how to convert software into a marketable product. Initially, the GPL functioned like a spore lying dormant, waiting until a more hospitable climate could activate its full potential. Outside of the tech world, few people knew about the GPL, or cared.~[* The GPL is not the only software license around, of course, although it was, and remains, the most demanding in terms of protecting the commons of code. Other popular open-source licenses include the MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses, but each of these permit, but do not require, that the source code of derivative works also be freely available. The GPL, however, became the license used for Linux, a quirk of history that has had far-reaching implications.]~ And even most techies were oblivious to the political implications of free software. +={ hackers : + community of +} + +Working under the banner of the Free Software Foundation, Stallman continued through the 1980s and 1990s to write a wide number of programs needed to build a completely free operating system. But just as Lennon’s music was better after finding McCartney, Stallman’s free software needed to find Linus Torvalds’s kernel for a Unix-like operating system. (A kernel is the core element of an operating system that controls how the various applications and utilities that comprise the system will run.) +={ Free Software Foundation ; + Torvalds, Linus +1 ; + Unix +1 +} + +In 1991, Torvalds was a twenty-one-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, in Finland. Frustrated by the expense and complexity of Unix, and its inability to work on personal computers, Torvalds set out to build a Unix-like operating system on his IBM AT, which had a 33-megahertz processor and four megabytes of memory. Torvalds released a primitive version of his program to an online newsgroup and was astonished when a hundred hackers responded within a few months to offer suggestions and additions. Over the next few years, hundreds of additional programmers joined the project, which he named “Linux” by combining his first name, “Linus,” with “Unix.” The first official release of his program came in 1994.~{ One useful history of Torvalds and Linux is Glyn Moody, /{Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution}/ (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001). }~ +={ hackers : + community of +3 ; + Linux : + development of +7 +} + +The Linux kernel, when combined with the GNU programs developed by Stallman and his free software colleagues, constituted a complete computer operating system — an astonishing and unexpected achievement. Even wizened computer scientists could hardly believe that something as complex as an operating system could be developed by thousands of strangers dispersed around the globe, cooperating via the Internet. Everyone assumed that a software program had to be organized by a fairly small group of leaders actively supervising the work of subordinates through a hierarchical authority system — that is, by a single corporation. Yet here was a virtual community of hackers, with no payroll or corporate structure, coming together in a loose, voluntary, quasi-egalitarian way, led by leaders who had earned the trust and respect of some highly talented programmers. + +The real innovation of Linux, writes Eric S. Raymond, a leading analyst of the technology, was “not technical, but sociological”: +={ Linux : + sociological effect of +1 +} + +_1 Linux was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from hundreds of users within days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers. To the amazement of almost everyone, this worked quite well.~{ Eric S. Raymond, “A Brief History of Hackerdom,” http://www.catb.org/~est/writings/cathedral-bazaar/hacker-history/ar01s06.html. }~ + +The Free Software Foundation had a nominal project to develop a kernel, but it was not progressing very quickly. The Linux kernel, while primitive, “was running and ready for experimentation,” writes Steven Weber in his book /{The Success of Open Source}/: “Its crude functionality was interesting enough to make people believe that it could, with work, evolve into something important. That promise was critical and drove the broader development process from early on.”~{ Steven Weber, /{The Success of Open Source}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 100. }~ +={ Weber, Steven : + The Success of Open Source ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +There were other powerful forces driving the development of Linux. Throughout the 1990s, Microsoft continued to leverage its monopoly grip over the operating system of personal computers, eventually attracting the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice, which filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company. Software competitors such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and IBM found that rallying behind an open-source alternative — one that was legally protected against being taken private by anyone else— offered a terrific way to compete against Microsoft. +={ Hewlett-Packard ; + IBM : + open source, and ; + Microsoft : + antitrust lawsuit against | competition against +2 +} + +Meanwhile, the once-free Unix software program was becoming a fragmented mess. So many different versions of Unix were being sold that users were frustrated by the proliferation of incompatible proprietary versions. In the words of a Sun Microsystems executive at the time, users were unhappy with the “duplication of effort around different implementations, leading to high prices; poor compatibility; and worst of all, slower development as each separate Unix vendor had to solve the same kinds of problems independently. Unix has become stagnant. . . .”~{ Williams, /{Free as in Freedom}/, p. 100.}~ +={ Unix +1 ; + Sun Microsystems +} + +Given these problems, there was great appeal in a Unix-like operating system with freely available source code. Linux helped address the fragmentation of Unix implementations and the difficulties of competing against the Microsoft monopoly. Knowing that Linux was GPL’d, hackers, academics, and software companies could all contribute to its development without fear that someone might take it private, squander their contributions, or use it in hostile ways. A commons of software code offered a highly pragmatic solution to a market dysfunction. +={ General Public License (GPL) : + Linux, and ; + GNU/Linux +5 ; + Linux : + GPL, and +} + +Stallman’s GNU Project and Torvalds’s Linux software were clearly synergistic, but they represented very different styles. The GNU Project was a slower, more centrally run project compared to the “release early and often” developmental approach used by the Linux community. In addition, Stallman and Torvalds had temperamental and leadership differences. Stallman has tended to be more overbearing and directive than Torvalds, who does not bring a political analysis to the table and is said to be more tolerant of diverse talents.~{ Torvalds included a brief essay, “Linux kernel management style,” dated October 10, 2004, in the files of the Linux source code, with the annotation, “Wisdom passed down the ages on clay tablets.” It was included as an epilogue in the book /{Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source}/, by Henrik Ingo, and is available at http://www.openlife.cc/node/43. }~ +={ Torvalds, Linus ; + GNU Project ; + Stallman, Richard : + GNU Project, and +} + +So despite their natural affinities, the Free Software Community and the Linux community never found their way to a grand merger. Stallman has applauded Linux’s success, but he has also resented the eclipse of GNU programs used in the operating system by the Linux name. This prompted Stallman to rechristen the program “GNU/Linux,” a formulation that many people now choose to honor. + +Yet many hackers, annoyed at Stallman’s political crusades and crusty personal style, committed their own linguistic raid by renaming “free software” as “open source software,” with a twist. As GNU/Linux became more widely used in the 1990s, and more corporations began to seriously consider using it, the word /{free}/ in “free software” was increasingly seen as a problem. The “free as in free speech, not as in free beer” slogan never quite dispelled popular misconceptions about the intended sense of the word /{free}/. Corporate information technology (IT) managers were highly wary about putting mission-critical corporate systems in the hands of software that could be had for /{free}/. Imagine telling the boss that you put the company’s fate in the hands of a program you downloaded from the Internet for free! +={ free software : + open source software, as +6 ; + software : + open source +6 ; + free software : + uses of term +6 +} + +Many corporate executives clearly recognized the practical value of free software; they just had no interest in joining Stallman’s ideological crusade or being publicly associated with him. They did not necessarily want to become champions of the “four freedoms” or the political vision implicit in free software. They simply wanted code that works well. As Eric Raymond wrote: “It seemed clear to us in retrospect that the term ‘free software’ had done our movement tremendous damage over the years. Part of this stemmed from the well-known ‘free speech/free beer’ ambiguity. Most of it came from something worse — the strong association of the term ‘free software’ with hostility to intellectual property rights, communism, and other ideas hardly likely to endear themselves to an MIS [management information systems] manager.”~{ Eric S. Raymond, “The Revenge of the Hackers,” in Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone, eds., /{Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution}/ (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates, 1999), p. 212. }~ +={ Stallman, Richard : + free software, and +5 ; + Raymond, Eric S. +} + +One response to this issue was the rebranding of free software as “open-source” software. A number of leading free software programmers, most notably Bruce Perens, launched an initiative to set forth a consensus definition of software that would be called “opensource.” At the time, Perens was deeply involved with a community of hackers in developing a version of Linux known as the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Perens and other leading hackers not only wanted to shed the off-putting political dimensions of “free software,” they wanted to help people deal with the confusing proliferation of licenses. A lot of software claimed to be free, but who could really tell what that meant when the terms were so complicated and legalistic? +={ Debian GNU/Linux distribution ; + Perens, Bruce +} + +The Open Source Initiative, begun in 1998, helped solve this problem by enumerating criteria that it considered significant in judging a program to be “open.”~{ http://www.opensource.org. }~ Its criteria, drawn from the Debian community, helped standardize and stabilize the definition of open-source software. Unlike the GPL, permissive software licenses such as BSD and MIT /{allow}/ a program to be freely copied, modified, and distributed but don’t /{require}/ it. A programmer can choose to make a proprietary derivative without violating the license. +={ Open Source Initiative +2 } + +The Open Source Initiative has focused more on the practical, technical merits of software than on the moral or political concerns that have consumed Stallman. Free software, as Stallman conceived it, is about building a cohesive moral community of programmers dedicated to “freedom.” The backers of open-source software are not necessarily hostile to those ideals but are more interested in building reliable, marketable software and improving business performance. As Elliot Maxwell described the free software/open source schism: +={ Maxwell, Elliot +1 } + +_1 [S]upporters of the Open Source Initiative were willing to acknowledge a role for proprietary software and unwilling to ban any link between open-source software and proprietary software. Richard Stallman aptly characterized the differences: “We disagree on the basic principles but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects.”~{ Elliot Maxwell, citing Wikipedia entry on “Open Source Movement,” in “Open Standards Open Source and Open Innovation,” in /{Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization}/ 1, no. 3 (Summer 2006), p. 134, note 56. }~ + +The philosophical rift between free software and open-source software amounts to a “friendly schism,” a set of divergent approaches that has been bridged in some respects by language.~{ Richard Stallman has outlined his problems with the “open source” definition of software development in an essay, “Why ‘Open Source’ Misses the Point of Free Software,” http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-thepoint.html. }~ Observers often use the acronym FOSS to refer to both free software and open-source software, or sometimes FLOSS — the L stands for the French word /{libre}/, which avoids the double meaning of the English word /{free}/. Whatever term is used, free and open-source software has become a critical tool for making online marketplaces more competitive, and for creating open, accessible spaces for experimentation. In his classic essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Raymond explains how the licenses help elicit important noneconomic, personal energies: +={ FOSS/FLOSS +3 ; + free software : + FOSS/FLOSS +3 ; + Raymond, Eric S. +1 ; + Linux : + sociological effect of +1 +} + + +_1 The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a selfcorrecting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. . . . The utility function Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers.~{ Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” available at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html. }~ + +It turns out that an accessible collaborative process, FOSS, can elicit passions and creativity that entrenched markets often cannot. In this respect, FOSS is more than a type of freely usable software; it reunites two vectors of human behavior that economists have long considered separate, and points to the need for new, more integrated theories of economic and social behavior. +={ free software : + economic effects of +1 +} + +FOSS represents a new breed of “social production,” one that draws upon social energies that neoclassical economists have long discounted or ignored. It mobilizes the personal passions and moral idealism of individuals, going beyond the overt economic incentives that economists consider indispensable to wealth creation. The eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith would be pleased. He realized, in his 1776 book /{The Wealth of Nations}/, that people are naturally given to “truck, barter and exchange” — but he also recognized, in his earlier /{The Theory of Moral Sentiments}/, written in 1759, that people are motivated by deep impulses of human sympathy and morality. Neoclassical economists have long segregated these as two divergent classes of human behavior, regarding altruism and social sympathies as subordinate to the rational, utility-maximizing, selfserving behavior. FOSS embodies a new synthesis — and a challenge to economists to rethink their crude model of human behavior, /{Homo economicus}/. Free software may have started as mere software, but it has become an existence proof that individual and collective goals, and the marketplace and the commons, are not such distinct arenas.~{ I am grateful to Nicholas Gruen for this insight, taken from his essay “Geeks Bearing Gifts: Open Source Software and Its Enemies,” in /{Policy}/ 21, no. 2 (Winter 2005), pp. 39–48. }~ They are tightly intertwined, but in ways we do not fully understand. This is a golden thread that will reappear in later chapters. +={ Smith, Adam : + The Theory of Moral Sentiments ; + social production +6 +} + +Red Hat, a company founded in 1993 by Robert Young, was the first to recognize the potential of selling a custom version (or “distribution”) of GNU/Linux as a branded product, along with technical support. A few years later, IBM became one of the first large corporations to recognize the social realities of GNU/Linux and its larger strategic and competitive implications in the networked environment. In 1998 IBM presciently saw that the new software development ecosystem was becoming far too variegated and robust for any single company to dominate. It understood that its proprietary mainframe software could not dominate the burgeoning, diversified Internet-driven marketplace, and so the company adopted the open-source Apache Web server program in its new line of WebSphere business software. +={ Red Hat ; + Young, Robert ; + GNU/Linux : + IBM, and +1 | Red Hat, and ; + IBM : + GNU/Linux, and +1 ; + Apache Web server ; + open source software : + functions of +2 +} + +It was a daring move that began to bring the corporate and open-source worlds closer together. Two years later, in 2000, IBM announced that it would spend $1 billion to help develop GNU/Linux for its customer base. IBM shrewdly realized that its customers wanted to slash costs, overcome system incompatibilities, and avoid expensive technology “lock-ins” to single vendors. GNU/Linux filled this need well. IBM also realized that GNU/Linux could help it compete against Microsoft. By assigning its property rights to the commons, IBM could eliminate expensive property rights litigation, entice other companies to help it improve the code (they could be confident that IBM could not take the code private), and unleash a worldwide torrent of creative energy focused on GNU/Linux. Way ahead of the curve, IBM decided to reposition itself for the emerging networked marketplace by making money through tech service and support, rather than through proprietary software alone.~{ Andrew Leonard, “How Big Blue Fell for Linux,” Salon.com, September 12, 2000, available at http://www.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/09/12/chapter_7_part_one.print.html. The competitive logic behind IBM’s moves are explored in Pamela Samuelson, “IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source,” /{Communications of the ACM}/ 49, no. 21 (October 2006), and Robert P. Merges, “A New Dynamism in the Public Domain,” /{University of Chicago Law Review}/ 71, no. 183 (Winter 2004). }~ +={ Microsoft : + competition against +} + +It was not long before other large tech companies realized the benefits of going open source. Amazon and eBay both saw that they could not affordably expand their large computer infrastructures without converting to GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is now used in everything from Motorola cell phones to NASA supercomputers to laptop computers. In 2005, /{BusinessWeek}/ magazine wrote, “Linux may bring about the greatest power shift in the computer industry since the birth of the PC, because it lets companies replace expensive proprietary systems with cheap commodity servers.”~{ Steve Hamm, “Linux Inc.,” /{BusinessWeek}/, January 31, 2005. }~ As many as one-third of the programmers working on open-source projects are corporate employees, according to a 2002 survey.~{ Cited by Elliot Maxwell in “Open Standards Open Source and Open Innovation,” note 80, Berlecon Research, /{Free/Libre Open Source Software: Survey and Study — Firms’ Open Source Activities: Motivations and Policy Implications}/, FLOSS Final Report, Part 2, at www.berlecon.de/studien/downloads/200207FLOSS _Activities.pdf. }~ +={ Amazon ; + eBay +} + +With faster computing speeds and cost savings of 50 percent or more on hardware and 20 percent on software, GNU/Linux has demonstrated the value proposition of the commons. Open source demonstrated that it can be cheaper and more efficacious to collaborate in the production of a shared resource based on common standards than to strictly buy and own it as private property. +={ commons : + value proposition of ; + value : + creation of +1 : + see also Great Value Shift +} + +But how does open source work without a conventional market apparatus? The past few years have seen a proliferation of sociological and economic theories about how open-source communities create value. One formulation, by Rishab Ghosh, compares free software development to a “cooking pot,” in which you can give a little to the pot yet take a lot — with no one else being the poorer. “Value” is not measured economically at the point of transaction, as in a market, but in the nonmonetary /{flow}/ of value that a project elicits (via volunteers) and generates (through shared software).~{ Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, “Cooking Pot Markets and Balanced Value Flows,” in Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, ed., /{CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy}/ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 153–68. }~ Another important formulation, which we will revisit later, comes from Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, who has written that the Internet makes it cheap and easy to access expertise anywhere on the network, rendering conventional forms of corporate organization costly and cumbersome for many functions. Communities based on social trust and reciprocity are capable of mobilizing creativity and commitment in ways that market incentives often cannot — and this can have profound economic implications.~{ See, e.g., Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” /{Yale Law Journal}/ 112, no. 369 (2002); Benkler, “ ‘Sharing Nicely’: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production,” Yale Law Journal 114, no. 273 (2004).}~ Benkler’s analysis helps explain how a global corps of volunteers could create an operating system that, in many respects, outperforms software created by a well-paid army of Microsoft employees. +={ Benkler, Yochai : + open networks, on ; + FOSS/FLOSS ; + free software : + FOSS/FLOSS ; + Ghosh, Rishab ; + open source software : + economic implications of | uses of term +4 +} + +A funny thing happened to free and open-source software as it matured. It became hip. It acquired a cultural cachet that extends well beyond the cloistered precincts of computing. “Open source” has become a universal signifier for any activity that is participatory, collaborative, democratic, and accountable. Innovators within filmmaking, politics, education, biological research, and drug development, among other fields, have embraced the term to describe their own attempts to transform hidebound, hierarchical systems into open, accessible, and distributed meritocracies. Open source has become so much of a cultural meme — a self-replicating symbol and idea — that when the Bikram yoga franchise sought to shut down unlicensed uses of its yoga techniques, dissident yoga teachers organized themselves into a nonprofit that they called Open Source Yoga Unity. To tweak the supremacy of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, culture jammers even developed nonproprietary recipes for a cola drink and beer called “open source cola” and “open source beer.”~{ Open Source Yoga Unity, http://www.yogaunity.org; open-source cola, http://alfredo.octavio.net/soft_drink_formula.pdf; open-source beer, Vores OI (Danish for “Our Beer”), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vores_%C3%981. See also http://freebeer.org/blog and http://www.project21.ch/freebeer. }~ +={ free software : + uses of term +5 +} + +Stallman’s radical acts of dissent in the 1980s, regarded with bemusement and incredulity at the time, have become, twenty-five years later, a widely embraced ideal. Small-/{d}/ democrats everywhere invoke open source to lambaste closed and corrupt political systems and to express their aspirations for political transcendence. People invoke open source to express a vision of life free from overcommercialization and corporate manipulation. The term enables one to champion bracing democratic ideals without seeming naïve or flaky because, after all, free software is solid stuff. Moreover, despite its image as the software of choice for granola-loving hippies, free and open-source software is entirely compatible with the commercial marketplace. How suspect can open source be when it has been embraced by the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems? +={ Stallman, Richard : + influence of | free software, and +4 ; + Hewlett-Packard ; + IBM : + open source, and ; + Sun Microsystems +} + +The appeal of “openness” has become so great that it is sometimes difficult to recognize that /{limits}/ on openness are not only necessary but desirable. The dark side of openness is the spam that clogs the Internet, the ability to commit fraud and identity theft, and the opportunities for disturbed adults to prey sexually upon children. Still, the virtues of an open environment are undeniable; what is more difficult is negotiating the proper levels of openness for a given realm of online life. +={ openness : + limitations of +} + +Nearly twenty years after the introduction of the GPL, free software has expanded phenomenally. It has given rise to countless FOSS software applications, many of which are major viral hits such as Thunderbird (e-mail), Firefox (Web browser), Ubuntu (desktop GNU/Linux), and Asterisk (Internet telephony). FOSS has set in motion, directly or indirectly, some powerful viral spirals such as the Creative Commons licenses, the iCommons/free culture movement, the Science Commons project, the open educational resource movement, and a new breed of open-business ventures, Yet Richard Stallman sees little connection between these various “open” movements and free software; he regards “open” projects as too vaguely defined to guarantee that their work is truly “free” in the free software sense of the term. “Openness and freedom are not the same thing,” said Stallman, who takes pains to differentiate free software from open-source software, emphasizing the political freedoms that lie at the heart of the former.~{ Interview with Richard Stallman, January 21, 2008. }~ +={ FOSS/FLOSS ; + free software : + FOSS/FLOSS | expansion of ; + Stallman, Richard : + influence of | freedom, and +} + +Any revolution is not just about new tools and social practices, however. It is also about developing new ways of understanding the world. People must begin to /{see}/ things in a new perspective and /{talk}/ with a new vocabulary. In the 1990s, as Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, and other media giants realized how disruptive the Internet might be, the public was generally oblivious that it might have a direct stake in the outcome of Internet and copyright policy battles. Big Media was flexing its muscles to institute all sorts of self-serving, protectionist fixes — copy-protection technologies, broader copyright privileges, one-sided software and Web licenses, and much more — and most public-interest groups and civic organizations were nowhere to be seen. + +Fortunately, a small but fierce and keenly intelligent corps of progressive copyright scholars were beginning to discover one another in the 1990s. Just as the hacker community had had to recognize the enclosure of its commons of software code, and embrace the GPL and other licenses as defensive remedies, so progressive copyright scholars and tech activists were grappling with how to defend against a related set of enclosures, The relentless expansion of copyright law was eroding huge swaths of the public domain and fair use doctrine. Tackling this problem required asking a question that few in the legal or political establishments considered worth anyone’s time — namely, What’s so valuable about the public domain, anyway? + +1~ 2 THE DISCOVERY OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN +={ public domain +93 } + +/{How a band of irregulars demonstrated that the public domain is enormously valuable after all.}/ + +For decades, the public domain was regarded as something of a wasteland, a place where old books, faded posters, loopy music from the early twentieth century, and boring government reports go to die. It was a dump on the outskirts of respectable culture. If anything in the public domain had any value, someone would sell it for money. Or so goes the customary conception of the public domain. + +Jack Valenti, the longtime head of the Motion Picture Association of America, once put it this way: “A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. Who, then, will invest the funds to renovate and nourish its future life when no one owns it?”~{ Jack Valenti, “A Plea for Keeping Alive the U.S. Film Industry’s Competitive Energy, ” testimony on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of America to extend the term of copyright protection, Senate Judiciary Committee, September 20, 1995, at http://instructors.cwrl.utexas.edu/~martin/Valenti.pdf. }~ (Valenti was arguing that longer copyright terms would give film studios the incentive to digitize old celluloid films that would otherwise enter the public domain and physically disintegrate.) +={ Valenti, Jack } + +One of the great, unexplained mysteries of copyright law is how a raffish beggar grew up to be King Midas. How did a virtually ignored realm of culture — little studied and undertheorized— become a subject of intense scholarly interest and great practical importance to commoners and businesses alike? How did the actual value of the public domain become known? The idea that the public domain might be valuable in its own right — and therefore be worth protecting — was a fringe idea in the 1990s and before. So how did a transformation of legal and cultural meaning occur? +={ public domain : + emergence of +4 | copyright law, and +3 +} + +Unlike Richard Stallman’s crusade to create a sustainable public domain of code,~[* Free software constitutes a “sustainable public domain” because the General Public License protects the code and its derivatives from private appropriation yet otherwise makes the code free for anyone to use. The public domain, by contrast, is vulnerable to private appropriation in practice if a company has sufficient market power (e.g., Disney’s appropriation of fairy tales) or if it uses the public domain to make derivative works and then copyrights them (e.g., vendors who mix government data with proprietary enhancements).]~ the discovery of the public domain for cultural works was not led by a single protagonist or group. It emerged over time through a loose network of legal scholars, techies, activists, and some businesses, who were increasingly concerned about worrisome expansions of copyright and patent law. Slowly, a conversation that was occurring in a variety of academic and tech communities began to intensify, and then coalesce into a more coherent story. +={ copyright law : + expansion of +} + +Scholarship about copyright law is not exactly gripping stuff. But it has played an important role in the viral spiral. Before anyone could begin to imagine how an online commons could be structured and protected, someone needed to explain how intellectual property law had become “uncontrolled to the point of recklessness” — as law professor David Lange put it in 1981, well before the proprietarian explosion of the late 1980s and 1990s. +={ Lange, David ; + copyright law : + scholarship about +} + +Fortunately, a new breed of public-spirited professors was reaching a critical mass just as the Internet was becoming culturally important. These professors, collaborating with programmers and activists, were among the first to understand the ways in which copyright law, historically an arcane backwater of law, was starting to pose serious threats to democracy-loving citizens and Internet users. The full complexity of this legal literature over the past generation cannot be unpacked here, but it is important to understand how progressive copyright scholarship played a critical role in identifying dangerous trends in law and technology — and in constructing a new narrative for what copyright law should be. + +This legal scholarship reconceptualized the public domain— then a vague notion of nonproperty — and developed it into an affirmative theory. It gave the public domain sharper definition and empirical grounding. Thinkers like Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School), Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law), and James Boyle (Duke Law) developed bracing new theories that recognize the power of social communities, and not just the individual, in the creative process. Others, such as Julie Cohen (Georgetown Law Center) and Pamela Samuelson (Boalt Hall), have respectively explored the need to develop a new social theory of creative practice~{ Julie E. Cohen, “Copyright, Commodification and Culture: Locating the Public Domain,” in Lucie Guibaut and P. Bernt Hugenholtz eds. /{The Future of the Public Domain: Identifying the Commons in Information Law}/ (The Netherlands: Kluwer Law International, 2006), pp. 121–66. }~ and the theoretical challenges of “mapping” the public domain.~{ Pamela Samuelson, “Challenges in Mapping the Public Domain,” in Guibault and Hugenholtz, eds. /{The Future of the Public Domain}/, pp. 7–26. }~ All of this thinking, mostly confined to scholarly workshops, law reviews, and tech journals, served as a vital platform for imagining the commons in general and the Creative Commons in particular. +={ Boyle, James ; + Cohen, Julie ; + Lessig, Lawrence ; + Samuelson, Pamela +} + +2~ The Elusive Quest for “Balance” +={ copyright law : + balance of public and private rights +19 | public domain vs. +19 ; + public domain : + copyright law, and +19 +} + +Historically, copyright has been regarded as a “bargain” between the public and authors. The public gives authors a set of monopoly rights to help them sell their works and earn rewards for their hard work. In return, the public gets the marketable output of creators— books, films, music — and certain rights of free access and use. The primary justification of copyright law is not to protect the fortunes of authors; it is to promote new creative works and innovation. By giving authors a property right in their works — and so helping them to sell those works in the marketplace — copyright law aims to promote the “progress of human knowledge.” +={ property rights : + copyright law, and ; + copyright law : + property rights, and +} + +That’s the author’s side of the bargain. The public’s stake is to have certain limited rights to use copyrighted works. Under the “fair use” doctrine (or “fair dealing” in some countries), people are entitled to excerpt copyrighted works for noncommercial purposes such as journalism, scholarship, reviews, and personal use. People are also entitled to resell the physical copies of copyrighted works such as books and videos. (This right is granted under the “first sale doctrine,” which enables libraries and DVD rental stores to exist.) The public also has the right to use copyrighted works for free after the term of a copyright has expired — that is, after a work has “entered the public domain.” This general scheme is said to establish a balance in copyright law between the private rights of authors and the needs of the public and future authors. +={ copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and | first sale doctrine, and ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and ; + first sale doctrine +} + +This “balance” has been more rhetorical than real, however. For decades, critics have complained that the public’s side of the copyright bargain is being abridged. Content industries have steadily expanded their rights under copyright law at the expense of the public’s modest access rights. + +What is notable about the long history of seeking “balance” in copyright law is the singular failure of critics to make much headway (until recently) in redressing the problem. The public’s interests in copyright law — and those of authors’ — have never been given that much attention or respect. From the authors of eighteenth-century England, whose formal rights were in practice controlled by booksellers, to the rhythm-and-blues singers of the 1940s whose music was exploited for a pittance by record labels, to academics whose copyrights must often be ceded to commercial journals, authors have generally gotten the short end of the stick. No surprise here. Business practices and copyright policy have usually been crafted by the wealthiest, most politically connected players: book publishers, film studios, record labels, broadcasters, cable operators, news organizations. The public’s lack of organized political power was reflected in its lack of a coherent language for even describing its own interests in copyright law. + +For most of the twentieth century, the forging of copyright law was essentially an insider contest among various copyright-dependent industries for market advantage. Congress hosted a process to oversee the squabbling and negotiation, and nudged the players now and again. This is what happened in the fifteen-year run-up to congressional enactment of the Copyright Act of 1976, for example. For the most part, Congress has preferred to ratify the compromises that industry players hammer out among themselves. The unorganized public has been treated as an ignorant bystander. +={ Copyright Act (1976) +3 ; + copyright law : + revision of (1976) +3 +} + +Naturally, this has strengthened the hand of commercial interests. Copyright disputes could be argued within a congenial intellectual framework and closely managed by a priesthood of lawyer-experts, industry lobbyists, and friendly politicians. The interests of citizens and consumers, blessedly absent from most debates, could be safely bracketed as marginal. + +But letting industries negotiate their own solutions has its own problems, as Professor Jessica Litman has pointed out: “Each time we rely on current stakeholders to agree on a statutory scheme, they produce a scheme designed to protect themselves against the rest of us. Its rigidity leads to its breakdown; the statute’s drafters have incorporated too few general principles to guide courts in effecting repairs.”~{ Jessica Litman, /{Digital Copyright}/ (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000), p. 62. }~ By letting the affected industries negotiate a series of fact specific solutions, each reflecting that moment in history, Congress has in effect let copyright law become an agglomeration of complex and irregular political compromises — or, as some might say, a philosophically incoherent mess. +={ copyright law : + expansion of +8 ; + Litman, Jessica +} + +Perhaps because it is so attentive to its industry benefactors, Congress has generally regarded the fair use doctrine and the public domain as a sideshow. Under the Copyright Act of 1976, for example, fair use is set forth only as an affirmative defense to accusations of copyright infringement, not as an affirmative right. Moreover, fair use is defined by four general statutory guidelines, which courts have proceeded to interpret in wildly inconsistent ways. In real life, Lawrence Lessig has quipped, fair use amounts to “the right to hire a lawyer.” +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + fair use, on ; + copyright use : + fair use doctrine, and ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +} + +Congress has shown a similarly low regard for the public domain. After extending the term of copyright law eleven times since 1961, the copyright monopoly now lasts for an author’s lifetime plus seventy years (ninety-five years for corporations). For Congress, writes Professor Tyler Ochoa, “allowing works to enter the public domain was something to be condemned, or at least only grudgingly tolerated, rather than something to be celebrated.”~{ Tyler Ochoa, “Origins and Meanings of the Public Domain,” /{Dayton Law Review}/ 28, no. 215 (2002). }~ Congress’s most hostile act toward the public domain — and to the public’s rights of access — was the elimination of the registration requirement for copyright protection.~{ Lawrence Lessig explains the impact of eliminating the copyright registration requirement in Lessig, /{Free Culture}/ (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 222–23. }~ Since 1978, copyright holders have not had to formally register their works in order to receive protection. Doodle on a scratch pad, record your guitar strumming, and it’s automatically copyrighted. +={ copyright law : + automatic +1 ; + Ochoa, Tyler +} + +Sounds great . . . but this provision had especially nasty consequences once the digital revolution kicked into high gear in the 1990s, because every digital byte was born, by default, as a form of property. Automatic copyright protection dramatically reversed the previous default, where most everything was born in the public domain and was free to use unless registered. Today, anyone wishing to reuse a work legally has to get permission and possibly pay a fee. To make matters worse, since there is no longer a central registry of who owns what copyrighted works, it is often impossible to locate the copyright holder. Such books, films, and images are known as “orphan works.” +={ copyright law : + "orphan works" +} + +Thirty years ago, the idea of throwing a net of copyright over all information and culture was not alarming in the least. As Jessica Litman recalled, “When I started teaching in 1984, we were at what was about to be the crest of a high-protectionist wave. That is, if you looked at the scholarship being written then, people were writing about how we should expand copyright protection, not only to cover useful articles and fashions and semiconductor chips and computer programs, but also recombinant DNA. The Chicago School of scholarship was beginning to be quite influential. People were reconceiving copyright in Chicago Law and Economics terms, and things like fair use were seen to be ‘free riding.’ ”~{ Interview with Jessica Litman, November 16, 2006. }~ +={ Litman, Jessica +1 } + +Yet the effects of this protectionist surge, at least for the short term, were muted for a number of reasons. First, corporate lobbying on copyright issues was extremely low-key. “I started going to congressional hearings in 1986,” said Litman, “and no one was there. There were no members of Congress; there was no press. The witnesses would come and they’d talk, and staffers would take notes. And that would be it.”~{ Ibid. }~ The big-ticket lobbying — receptions, slick reports, legislative junkets, private movie screenings with Jack Valenti — did not really begin to kick in until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when trade associations for every conceivable faction stepped up their Washington advocacy. When the Internet’s commercial implications became clear in the mid-1990s, copyright-dependent industries ratcheted up their campaign contributions and lobbying to another level entirely. +={ Valenti, Jack } + +The protectionist surge in copyright law in the 1980s was mitigated by two stalwart public servants: Representative Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, the chair of the House judiciary subcommittee that oversaw copyright legislation, and Dorothy Schrader, the longtime general counsel of the U.S. Copyright Office. Both considered it their job to protect the public from grasping copyright industries. When Kastenmeier lost his reelection bid in 1990 and Schrader retired in 1994, the film, music, broadcast, cable, and publishing industries would henceforth have staunch allies— sometimes their former lawyer-lobbyists — in key congressional staff positions and copyright policy jobs. Government officials no longer saw their jobs as protecting consumers from overbearing, revenuehungry media industries, but as helping copyright owners chase down and prosecute “pirates.” Copyright law was recast as a form of industrial policy — a way to retain American jobs and improve the U.S. balance of trade — not as an instrument that affects social equity, consumer rights, and democratic values. +={ Kastenmeier, Robert ; + Schrader, Dorothy ; + piracy +} + +Ironically, the mercantilist view of copyright was gaining ground at precisely the time when the public’s stake in copyright law was growing. An explosion of consumer electronics in the 1980s was giving the public new reasons to care about their fair use rights and the public domain. The introduction of the videocassette recorder, the proliferation of cable television, personal computers, software and electronics devices, and then the introduction of the Web in 1993 all invited people to control their own creative and cultural lives. The new media meant that the baroque encrustations of copyright law that had accumulated over decades were now starting to interfere with people’s daily activities. +={ fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +1 ; + copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and +1 | mercantilist view of +2 +} + +Yet rather than negotiate a new copyright bargain to take account of the public’s needs and interests, copyright industries stepped up their demands on Congress to ram through even stronger copyright, trademark, and patent privileges for themselves. Their basic goal was, and generally remains, a more perfect control over all downstream uses of works. Content industries generally do not concede that there is any presumptive “free use zone” of culture, notwithstanding the existence of the fair use doctrine. Works that citizens may regard as fair-use entitlements industry often regards as chunks of information that no one has yet figured out how to turn into marketable property. + +Most content industries, then and now, do not see any “imbalance” in copyright law; they prefer to talk in different terms entirely. They liken copyrighted works to personal property or real estate, as in “and you wouldn’t steal a CD or use my house without permission, would you?” A copyrighted work is analogized to a finite physical object, But the essential point about works in the digital age is that they can’t be “used up” in the same way that physical objects can. They are “nondepletable” and “nonrival,” as economists put it. A digital work can be reproduced and shared for virtually nothing, without depriving another person of it. +={ property rights : + copyright law, and +1 ; + copyright law : + property rights, and +} + +Nonetheless, a new narrative was being launched — copyrighted works as property. The idea of copyright law reflecting a policy bargain between the public and authors/corporations was being supplanted by a new story that casts copyright as property that is nearly absolute in scope and virtually perpetual in term. In hindsight, for those scholars who cared enough to see, a disquieting number of federal court cases were strengthening the hand of copyright holders at the expense of the public. James Boyle, in a much-cited essay, called this the “second enclosure movement” — the first one, of course, being the English enclosure movement of common lands in medieval times and into the nineteenth century.~{ James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain,” /{Law and Contemporary Problems}/ 66 (Winter–Spring 2003), pp. 33–74, at http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?66+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+33+ (WinterSpring+2003). }~ +={ Boyle, James : + enclosure movement, on ; + commons : + enclosure of +1 ; + enclosure movement +1 ; + copyright law : + enclosure movement, and +1 +} + +Enclosure took many forms. Copyright scholar Peter Jaszi recalls, “Sometime in the mid-1980s, the professoriate started getting worried about software copyright.”~{ Interview with Peter Jaszi, October 17, 2007. }~ It feared that copyrights for software would squelch competition and prevent others from using existing code to innovate. This battle was lost, however. Several years later, the battle entered round two as copyright scholars and programmers sought to protect reverse-engineering as fair use. This time, they won.~{ /{Sega Enterprises v. Accolade}/, 977 F.2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1993). }~ +={ Jaszi, Peter ; + fair use doctrine : + reverse engineering, and ; + software : + copyright of ; + copyright law : + digital age, in +} + +Then, in 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was not fair use for the /{Nation}/ magazine to excerpt three hundred words from President Ford’s 200,000-word memoir. The /{Nation}/ had acquired a copy of Ford’s book before its publication and published an article of highlights, including a handful of quotations. The material, derived from Ford’s official duties as president, was of obvious value to the democratic process. But by a 6-3 margin the Court held that the /{Nation}/ had violated Ford’s copyright.~{ /{Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises}/, 471 U.S. 539 (1985). }~ The proprietary tilt of copyright law only intensified in the following years. Companies claimed copyrights for all sorts of dubious forms of “originality” — the page numbers of federal court decisions, the names and numbers in telephone directories, and facts compiled in databases. +={ Ford, Gerald R. ; + Nation (magazine) +} + +2~ The Great Expansion of Intellectual Property +={ intellectual property : + protection of +14 ; + copyright law : + expansion of +14 +} + +These expansions of proprietary control in the 1980s proved to be a prelude to much more aggressive expansions of copyright, patent, and trademark law in the 1990s. Congress and the courts were granting property rights to all sorts of things that had previously been considered unowned or unownable. The Supreme Court had opened this door in 1980 when it recognized the patentability of a genetically modified bacterium. This led to ethically and economically dubious patents for genes and life-forms. Then businesses began to win patents for “business methods” — ideas and theoretical systems — that would otherwise be in the public domain. Mathematical algorithms, if embedded in software, could now be owned. Amazon.com’s patent on “one-click shopping” on its Web site became the symbol of this trend. Boat manufacturers won a special /{sui generis}/ (“in a class by itself ”) form of protection for the design of boat hulls in 1998. Celebrities and talent agencies prevailed upon state legislatures to extend the scope of ownership of celebrity names and likenesses, which had long been considered in the public domain. +={ Amazon ; + copyright law : + proprietary rights ; + software : + copyright of +1 ; + software : + copyright of +1 ; + property rights : + copyright law, and +} + +Companies developed still other strategies to assert greater proprietary control over works. Software companies began to rely upon mass-market licenses — often referred to as “shrink wrap” contracts and “click-through” Web agreements — to expand their rights at the expense of consumers and the public domain. Various computer companies sought to enact a model state law that, in Samuelson’s words, would “give themselves more rights than intellectual property law would do and avoid the burdens of public interest limitations.”~{ Samuelson, “Digital Information, Digital Networks, and the Public Domain,” p. 92. }~ Consumers could in effect be forced to surrender their fair use rights, the right to criticize the product or their right to sue, because of a “contract” they ostensibly agreed to. +={ Samuelson, Pamela ; + copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +} + +Trademarks, originally designed to help people identify brands and prevent fraud in the marketplace, acquired a new power in 1995 — the ability to control public meanings. For years, large corporations had wanted to extend the scope of their trademark protection to include “dilution” — a fuzzy concept that would prohibit the use of a trademark without permission, even for legitimate public commentary or parody, if it “dilutes” the recognized public associations and meanings of a trademark. For a decade or more, Kastenmeier had prevented antidilution legislation from moving forward. After Kastenmeier left Congress, the trademark lobby succeeded in getting Congress to enact the legislation. This made it much easier for Mattel to threaten people who did parodies of Barbie dolls. The /{Village Voice}/ could more credibly threaten the /{Cape Cod Voice}/ for trademark infringement. Wal-Mart could prevent others from using “its” smiley-face logo (itself taken from the cultural commons).~{ See, e.g., David Bollier, /{Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture}/ (New York: Wiley, 2005).}~ +={ Kastenmeier, Robert ; + trademarks : + dilution of +} + +The election of Bill Clinton as president in 1992 gave content industries new opportunities to expand their copyright privileges. The Clinton administration launched a major policy effort to build what it called the National Information Infrastructure (NII), more commonly known as the Information Superhighway. Today, of course, we call it the Internet. A task force of industry heavyweights was convened to determine what policies should be adopted to help build the NII.~{ Jessica Litman has an excellent historical account of the NII campaign in her book /{Digital Copyright}/ (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000). }~ Vice President Al Gore cast himself as a visionary futurist and laid out astonishing scenarios for what the NII could deliver: access to every book in the Library of Congress, the ability of doctors to share medical information online, new strides against inequality as everyone goes online. +={ Clinton, Bill ; + Gore, Al ; + Information Superhighway +6 ; + Internet : + rise of +1 ; + National Information Infrastructure (NII) +6 +} + +The NII project was a classic case of incumbent industries trying to protect their profit centers. Executives and lobbyists associated with broadcasting, film, and music were being asked how to structure the Information Superhighway. Predictably, they came up with fantasies of digital television with five hundred channels, programs to sell products, and self-serving scenarios of even stronger copyright protection and penalties. Few had any inkling of the transformative power of open networks or the power of the sharing economy — and if they did, the possibilities certainly were not appealing to them. + +One part of the NII campaign was a working group on intellectual property headed by Bruce Lehman, a former congressional staffer, lobbyist for the software industry, and commissioner of patents and trademarks. The Lehman panel spent two years developing a sweeping set of copyright policies for the Information Superhighway. When the panel’s report was released in September 1995, anyone who cared about open culture and democracy was livid. The White Paper, as it was called, recommended a virtual elimination of fair use rights in digital content and broader rights over any copyrighted transmissions. It called for the elimination of first-sale rights for digitally transmitted documents (which would prevent the sharing of digital files) and endorsed digital rights management systems for digital works (in order to monitor and prosecute illegal sharing). The White Paper even sought to reinterpret existing law so that transient copies in the random-access memory of computers would be considered illegal unless they had a license — essentially outlawing Web browsing without a license. With visions of Soviet-style indoctrination, the document also recommended an ambitious public education program to teach Americans to properly respect copyright laws. +={ Lehman, Bruce ; + White Paper [on copyright] +4 ; + Clinton administration : + White Paper +4 ; + first sale doctrine ; + copyright : + first sale, and | fair use doctrine, and ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +1 | White Paper vs. +5 +} + +Litman wrote a revealing history of the misbegotten NII project in her book /{Digital Copyright}/. Her chapter title “Copyright Lawyers Set Out to Colonize Cyberspace” says it all.~{ Litman, /{Digital Copyright}/, pp. 89–100. }~ Samuelson alerted the readers of /{Wired}/ about the outrageous proposals of the White Paper in her devastating January 1996 article “The Copyright Grab.”~{ Pamela Samuelson, “The Copyright Grab,” /{Wired}/, January 1996. }~ If the NII proposals are enacted, warned Samuelson, “your traditional user rights to browse, share or make private noncommercial copies of copyrighted works will be rescinded. Not only that, your online service provider will be forced to snoop through your files, ready to cut you off and turn you in if it finds any unlicensed material there. The White Paper regards digital technology as so threatening to the future of the publishing industry that the public must be stripped of all the rights copyright law has long recognized — including the rights of privacy. Vice President Al Gore has promised that the National Information Infrastructure will dramatically enhance public access to information; now we find out that it will be available only on a pay-per-use basis.”~{ Ibid. }~ +={ Litman, Jessica ; + Samuelson, Pamela ; + Gore, Al +} + +The White Paper was not just an effort by Old Media to domesticate or eliminate the freedoms emerging on the Information Superhighway; it sought to set the stage for the internationalization of strict copyright norms, so that American-style copyright law would prevail around the world. To counter this effort, American University law professor Peter Jaszi convened a group of law professors, library organizations, and computer and consumer electronics makers, who promptly organized themselves as the Digital Future Coalition (DFC), the first broad-based coalition in support of the public’s stake in copyright law. +={ Jaszi, Peter ; + Digital Future Coalition (DFC) +1 ; + copyright law : + international +} + +The DFC attacked the White Paper as a copyright-maximalist nightmare and sought to rally civil liberties groups, Internet service providers, and electronics manufacturers. With modest industry support, the DFC was largely responsible for slowing progress on legislation that would have enacted Lehman’s proposals. As domestic opposition grew, Lehman shrewdly decided to push for a new global copyright treaty that would embody similar principles. In the end, however, the World Intellectual Property Organization demurred. +={ Lehman, Bruce ; + World Intellectual Property Organization +} + +By that time, however, the terms of debate had been set, and there was serious congressional momentum to adopt some variant of the White Paper agenda. The ultimate result, enacted in October 1998, was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the crowning achievement of the copyright-maximalist decade. It contained dozens of highly specific provisos and qualifications to satisfy every special pleader. The law in effect authorized companies to eliminate the public’s fair use rights in digital content by putting a “digital lock” around the content, however weak. Circumventing the lock, providing the software to do so, or even telling someone how to do so became a criminal offense. +={ copyright : + fair use doctrine, and +1 ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +1 ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) [1998] +4 ; + copyright law : + DMCA +4 +} + +The DMCA has been roundly denounced by software programmers, music fans, and Internet users for prohibiting them from making personal copies, fair use excerpts, and doing reverse engineering on software, even with legally purchased products. Using digital rights management systems sanctioned by the DMCA, for example, many CDs and DVDs are now coded with geographic codes that prevent consumers from operating them on devices on other continents. DVDs may contain code to prevent them from running on Linux-based computers. Digital journals may “expire” after a given period of time, wiping out library holdings unless another payment is made. Digital textbooks may go blank at the end of the school year, preventing their reuse or resale. + +Critics also argue that the DMCA gives large corporations a powerful legal tool to thwart competition and interoperability. Some companies programmed garage door openers and printer cartridges so that the systems would not accept generic replacements (until a federal court found this behavior anticompetitive). Naturally, this sort of behavior, which the DMCA facilitates, lets companies avoid open competition on open platforms with smaller companies and entrepreneurs. It also gives companies a legal pretext for bullying Web site owners into taking down copyrighted materials that may in fact be legal to use. + +In her excellent history of the political run-up to the DMCA, Litman notes, “There is no overarching vision of the public interest animating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. None. Instead, what we have is what a variety of different private parties were able to extract from each other in the course of an incredibly complicated four-year multiparty negotiation.”~{ Litman, /{Digital Copyright}/, pp. 144–45. }~ The DMCA represents a new frontier of proprietarian control — the sanctioning of technological locks that can unilaterally override the copyright bargain. Companies asked themselves, Why rely on copyrights alone when technology can embed even stricter controls into the very design of products? +={ Litman, Jessica } + +The year 1998 was an especially bad year for the public domain. Besides enacting the trademark dilution bill and DMCA, the Walt Disney Company and other large media corporations succeeded in their six-year campaign to enact the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.~{ See Wikipedia entry for the Copyright Term Extension Act, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act. See also /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), F. 3d 849 (2001). }~ The legislation, named after the late House legislator and former husband of the singer Cher, retroactively extended the terms of existing copyrights by twenty years. As we will see in chapter 3, this law became the improbable catalyst for a new commons movement. +={ trademarks : + dilution of ; + Walt Disney Company ; + Copyright Term Extension Act +} + +2~ Confronting the Proprietarian Juggernaut +={ copyright law : + property rights, and +13 ; + property rights : + copyright law, and +13 +} + +If there was ever a need for independent scholarship on copyright law and activism to challenge the new excesses, this was such a time. Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, recalls, “Peggy Radin taught the first cyber-law class at Stanford Law School in 1995, and I was her research assistant. And at the end of that semester, I had read everything that had ever been written about the intersection of the Internet and the law — not just in the legal literature, but in almost all the literature. It filled about two boxes, and that was it. That was all there was.”~{ Interview with Fred von Lohmann, March 20, 2006. }~ +={ Lohmann, Fred von ; + Radin, Margaret Jane +} + +In about a dozen years, those two boxes of literature have grown into many shelves and countless filing cabinets of case law and commentary. Much of the legal scholarship was the fruit of a new generation of copyright professors who rose to the challenge of the time. An earlier generation of copyright scholars — Melville Nimmer, Alan Latman, Paul Goldstein — were highly respected titans, but they also enjoyed busy consulting practices with the various creative industries that they wrote about. Protecting the public domain was not their foremost concern. +={ Goldstein, Paul ; + Latman, Alan ; + Nimmer, Melville +} + +By the 1980s, as law schools become more like graduate schools and less like professional schools, copyright commentary began to get more scholarly and independent of the industries it studied. People like Pamela Samuelson, Peter Jaszi, Jerome H. Reichman, Jessica Litman, L. Ray Patterson, and Wendy Gordon were among this cohort, who were soon joined in the 1990s by a new wave of thinkers such as James Boyle, Lawrence Lessig, Julie Cohen, Niva Elkin-Koren, and Yochai Benkler. Still others, such as Rosemary Coombe and Keith Aoki, approached copyright issues from cross-cultural and globalization perspectives. These scholars were frankly hostile to the large copyright industries, and greatly concerned with how the law was harming democracy, science, culture, and consumers. +={ Litman, Jessica ; + Samuelson, Pamela ; + Jaszi, Peter ; + Benkler, Yochai ; + Boyle, James ; + Cohen, Julie ; + Coombe, Rosemary ; + Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + Gordon, Wendy ; + Lessig, Lawrence ; + Patterson, L. Ray ; + Reichman, Jerome H. ; + Aoki, Keith +} + +A number of activist voices were also coming forward at this time to challenge the proprietarian juggernaut. As the Internet became a popular medium, ordinary people began to realize that the new copyright laws were curtailing their creative freedoms and free speech rights. The obscure complexities of copyright law started to become a far more public and political issue. The pioneering activist organization was the Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF was founded in 1990 by tech entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, the famed inventor of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet in the 1980s; John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and hacker; and John Gilmore, a leading privacy/cryptography activist and free software entrepreneur. +={ Barlow, John Perry +4 ; + Gilmore, John ; + Kapor, Mitch ; + Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) +} + +The organization was oriented to hackers and cyberlibertarians, who increasingly realized that they needed an organized presence to defend citizen freedoms in cyberspace. (Barlow adapted the term /{cyberspace}/ from science-fiction writer William Gibson in 1990 and applied it to the then-unnamed cultural life on the Internet.) Initially, the EFF was concerned with hacker freedom, individual privacy, and Internet censorship. It later went through some growing pains as it moved offices, changed directors, and sought to develop a strategic focus for its advocacy and litigation. In more recent years, EFF, now based in San Francisco, has become the leading litigator of copyright, trademark, and Internet free expression issues. It also has more than ten thousand members and spirited outreach programs to the press and public. +={ Gibson, William ; + cyberspace : + use of term +} + +John Perry Barlow was an important visionary and populizer of the time. His March 1994 article “The Economy of Ideas” is one of the most prophetic yet accessible accounts of how the Internet was changing the economics of information. He astutely realized that information is not a “product” like most physical property, but rather a social experience or form of life unto itself. “Information is a verb, not a noun,” he wrote. “Freed of its containers, information obviously is not a thing. In fact, it is something that happens in the field of interaction between minds or objects or other pieces of information. . . . Sharks are said to die of suffocation if they stop swimming, and the same is nearly true of information.”~{22. John Perry Barlow, “The Economy of Ideas,” /{Wired}/, March 1994, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html. }~ + +Instead of the sober polemics of law professors, Barlow — a retired Wyoming cattle rancher who improbably doubled as a tech intellectual and rock hipster — spiced his analysis of information with colorful metaphors and poetic aphorisms. Comparing information to DNA helices, Barlow wrote, “Information replicates into the cracks of possibility, always seeking new opportunities for /{Lebensraum}/.” Digital information, he said, “is a continuing process more like the metaphorphosing tales of prehistory than anything that will fit in shrink-wrap.” + +Since hyperbole is an occupational reflex among cyberjournalists, Barlow’s /{Wired}/ piece bore the obligatory subtitle, “Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.” Yet reading Barlow more than a decade later confirms that, posturing aside, he /{was}/ on to the big story of our time: “Notions of property, value, ownership and the nature of wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain. Only a very few people are aware of the enormity of this shift, and fewer of them are lawyers or public officials.”~{ Ibid. }~ + +With a nod to Professor Samuelson, Barlow was prescient enough to compare the vulnerability of indigenous peoples to the coming dispossession of Internet communities: “Western countries may legally appropriate the music, designs and biomedical lore of aboriginal people without compensation to their tribes of origins since those tribes are not an ‘author’ or ‘investors.’ But soon most information will be generated collaboratively by the cyber-tribal hunter-gatherers of cyberspace. Our arrogant legal dismissal of the rights of ‘primitives’ will soon return to haunt us.” +={ Samuelson, Pamela } + +No account of cyberactivism in the 1990s is complete without mention of James Love, a feisty advocate with a brilliant strategic mind and an extraordinary ability to open up broad new policy fronts. For example, Love, as director of the Ralph Nader–founded Consumer Project on Technology, worked with tech activist Carl Malamud to force the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to put its EDGAR database of corporate filings online in 1994, at a time when the SEC was planning to give the data to private vendors to sell. By prevailing at the SEC, Love and Malamud set an important precedent that government agencies should post their information on the Internet for free. A few years later, in 1997, Love convened a conference to assess Microsoft’s troubling monopoly power, an event that emboldened the Department of Justice to launch its antitrust lawsuit against the company. Love later played a key role in persuading an Indian drugmaker to sell generic HIV/AIDS drugs to South Africa, putting Big Pharma on the defensive for its callous patent and trade policies and exorbitant drug prices. Love’s timely gambit in 1996 to organize broader advocacy for the public domain failed, however. He co-founded the Union for the Public Domain, with a board that included Richard Stallman, but the project never developed a political following or raised much money. +={ Love, James ; + EDGAR database ; + Malamud, Carl ; + Microsoft : + antitrust lawsuit against +} + +The American Library Association was the largest and bestfunded advocate on copyright issues in the 1990s, but its collaborations with other Washington allies tended to be modest, and its grassroots mobilization disappointing. Libraries are respected in the public mind precisely because they are stable, apolitical civic institutions — that is, not activists. Despite its valuable presence on copyright and Internet policy issues, the library lobby was temperamentally disinclined to get too far ahead of the curve. +={ American Library Association ; + libraries +} + +By the end of the decade, a muscular, dissenting discourse about copyright law was starting to take shape. On one side was a complicated body of industry-crafted copyright law that claimed imperial powers to regulate more and more aspects of daily life — your Web site, your music CDs, your electronic devices, your computer practices. On the other side were ordinary people who loved how the Internet and digital devices were empowering them to be creators and publishers in their own right. They just wanted to indulge their natural human urge to share, tinker, reuse, and transform culture. +={ copyright law : + expansion of +} + +The dissent of the progressive copyright scholars and activists, though pungent, was hardly insurrectionist. These critics were reformers, not bomb throwers. Most objected to the overreaching scope and draconian enforcement of copyright law, not to its philosophical foundations. They generally argued that the problem wasn’t copyright law per se, but the misapplication and overextension of its core principles. + +2~ A New Story About the Public Domain +={ copyright law : + public domain vs. +15 ; + public domain : + copyright law, and +15 | emergence of +21 +} + +One of the most notable outgrowths of all this activity was the development of a new story about the public domain. Scholars took a range of legal doctrines that were scattered among the sprawling oeuvre of copyright law and consolidated them under one banner, /{the public domain}/. The new framing helped give the public’s rights in cultural works a new moral standing and intellectual clarity. + +Even though copyright law has existed for three centuries, the term “public domain” did not surface in a U.S. Supreme Court decision until 1896. The public domain was first mentioned in U.S. copyright law in 1909, and while it occasionally merited passing reference or discussion in later decades, the concept was not the subject of a significant law review article until 1981. That article was “Recognizing the Public Domain,” by Professor David Lange.~{ David Lange, “Recognizing the Public Domain,” /{Law and Contemporary Problems}/ 44 (Autumn 1981). }~ “David’s article was an absolutely lovely piece that sunk without a trace,” recalls Jessica Litman. “When a bunch of us discovered [Lange’s article] in the late 1980s, it had been neither cited nor excerpted nor reprinted nor anything — because nobody was looking for a defense of the public domain. People were looking for arguments for extending copyright protection. David was ahead of his time.” + +The main reason that the public domain was ignored was that it was generally regarded as a nullity. “Public domain in the fields of literature, drama, music and art is the other side of the coin of copyright,” wrote M. William Krasilovsky in 1967.~{ M. William Krasilovsky, “Observations on the Public Domain,” /{Bulletin of the Copyright Society}/ 14, no. 205 (1967). }~ “It is best defined in negative terms.” Edward Samuels wrote that the public domain “is simply whatever remains after all methods of protection are taken into account.”~{ Edward Samuels, “The Public Domain in Copyright Law,” /{Journal of the Copyright Society}/ 41, no. 137 (1993), p. 138. }~ + +Lange himself acknowledged this conventional wisdom when he wrote that the public domain “amounts to a dark star in the constellation of intellectual property.” He took issue with this history, however, and insisted upon the affirmative value of the public domain. Lange dredged up a number of “publicity rights” cases and commentary to shed light on the problem: Bela Lugosi’s widow and son claimed that they, not Universal Pictures, should own the rights to the character Dracula. Representatives of the deceased Marx Brothers sought to stop a Broadway production spoofing 1930s musicals from using the Marx Brothers’ characters. DC Comics, owner of a trademark in the Superman character, sued to prevent a group of Chicago college students from calling their newspaper /{The Daily Planet}/. And so on. +={ DC Comics ; + Lugosi, Bela ; + Marx Brothers +1 +} + +From such examples, Lange drove home a commonsense lesson about the derivative nature of creativity: we all depend on others to generate “new” works. Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx couldn’t “invent” their stage personas until, in classic vaudevillian tradition, they had adapted jokes and shtick from their peers. “In time,” Groucho wrote in his memoirs, “if [a comedian] was any good, he would emerge from the routine character he had started with and evolve into a distinct personality of his own. This has been my experience and also that of my brothers, and I believe this has been true of most of the other comedians.” + +To which Lange added, “Of course, what Groucho is saying in this passage is that although he and his brothers began as borrowers they ended as inventors. . . . It is a central failing in the contemporary intellectual property literature and case law that that lesson, so widely acknowledged, is so imperfectly understood.”~{ Lange, “Recognizing the Public Domain,” p. 162. }~ + +In example after example, Lange made the point that “as access to the public domain is choked, or even closed off altogether, the public loses too: loses the rich heritage of its culture, the rich presence of new works derived from that culture, and the rich promise of works to come.” Lange warned that “courts must dispel” the “impression of insubstantiality” from which the public domain suffers. Nothing will be resolved, he warned, “until the courts have come to see the public domain not merely as an unexplored abstraction but as a field of individual rights as important as any of the new property rights.” + +2~ What Is “Authorship”? +={ authorship +13 ; + copyright law : + authorship, and +13 | originality, and +13 +} + +Besides honoring the public domain, copyright reformers sought to develop a second, more subversive narrative. They questioned the very idea of individual “authorship” and “originality,” two central pillars of copyright law, The standard moral justification for granting authors exclusive rights in their works is the personal originality that they supposedly show in creating new works. But can “originality” and “authorship” be so neatly determined? What of the role of past generations and creative communities in enabling the creation of new works? Don’t we all, in the words of Isaac Newton, stand on the shoulders of giants? +={ Newton, Isaac } + +The idea that sharing, collaboration, and adaptation may actually be important to creativity, and not merely incidental, was a somewhat daring theme in the early 1990s, if only because it had little recognition in copyright scholarship. While this line of analysis preceded the Internet, the arrival of the World Wide Web changed the debate dramatically. Suddenly there was a powerful, real-life platform for /{collective}/ authorship. Within fifteen years, sharing and collaboration has become a standard creative practice, as seen in Wikipedia, remix music, video mashups, machinima films, Google map mashups, social networking, and much else. +={ orld Wide Web : + collective authorship, and ; + authorship : + collective +} + +Of course, in the early 1990s, the promise of online networks was only dimly understood. But for Jessica Litman, the tightening noose of proprietary control had troubling implications for fair use and the ability of people to create and share culture: “Copyright law was no longer as open and porous as it had been, so I felt compelled to try to defend the open spaces that nobody was paying attention to.” Litman published a major article on the public domain in 1990, instigating a fresh round of interest in it and establishing lines of analysis that continue to this day.~{ Jessica Litman, “The Public Domain,” /{Emory Law Journal}/ 39, no. 965 (Fall 1990). }~ +={ Litman, Jessica ; + copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +} + +She made the then-startling claim, for example, that “the very act of authorship in /{any}/ medium is more akin to translation and recombination than it is to creating Aphrodite from the foam of the sea. Composers recombine sounds they have heard before; playwrights base their characters on bits and pieces drawn from real human beings and other playwrights’ characters. . . . This is not parasitism; it is the essence of authorship. And, in the absence of a vigorous public domain, much of it would be illegal.” Litman argued that the public domain is immensely important because all authors depend upon it for their raw material, Shrink the public domain and you impoverish the creative process. + +The problem, said Litman, is that copyright law contains a structural contradiction that no one wants to acknowledge. The law requires “originality” in order for a work to be protected — but it cannot truly determine what is “original.” If authors could assert that their works were entirely original, and courts conscientiously enforced this notion, copyright law would soon collapse. Everyone would be claiming property rights in material that had origins elsewhere. Shakespeare’s estate might claim that Leonard Bernstein’s /{West Side Story}/ violates its rights in /{Romeo and Juliet}/; Beethoven would prevent the Bee Gees from using the opening chords of his Fifth Symphony. + +When one person’s copyright claims appear to threaten another person’s ability to create, the courts have historically invoked the public domain in order to set limits on the scope of copyright protection. In this backhanded way, the public domain helps copyright law escape from its own contradictions and ensures that basic creative elements remain available to all. As Litman explained: + +_1 Because we have a public domain, we can permit authors to avoid the harsh light of a genuine search for provenance, and thus maintain the illusion that their works are indeed their own creations. We can tolerate the grant of overbroad and overlapping deeds through the expedient assumption that each author took her raw material from the commons, rather than from the property named in prior deeds.~{ Litman, “The Public Domain,” p. 1012. }~ + +In effect, copyright law sets up a sleight of hand: it invites authors to plunder the commons with the assurance that their borrowings will be politely ignored — but then it declares the resulting work of authorship “original” and condemns any further follow-on uses as “piracy.” This roughly describes the early creative strategy of the Walt Disney Company, which built an empire by rummaging through the public domain of fairy tales and folklore, adding its own creative flourishes, and then claiming sole ownership in the resulting characters and stories. +={ authorship +3 ; + Walt Disney Company +} + +As Litman unpacked the realities of “authorship,” she showed how the idea of “originality” serves as a useful fiction. Any author must draw upon aspects of culture and recombine them without ever being able to identify the specific antecedents, she pointed out. Judges, for their part, can never really make a rigorous factual determination about what is “original” and what is taken from the public domain. In reality, said Litman, authorship amounts to “a combination of absorption, astigmatism and amnesia.” The public domain is vague and shifting precisely because it must constantly disguise the actual limits of individual “originality.” + +English professor Martha Woodmansee and law professor Peter Jaszi helped expose many of the half-truths about “authorship” and “originality.” Their 1994 anthology of essays, /{The Construction of Authorship}/, showed how social context is an indispensable element of “authorship,” one that copyright law essentially ignores.~{ Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, eds., /{The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature}/ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). }~ Thus, even though indigenous cultures collectively create stories, music, and designs, and folk cultures generate works in a collaborative fashion, copyright law simply does not recognize such acts of collective authorship. And so they go unprotected. They are vulnerable to private appropriation and enclosure, much as Stallman’s hacker community at MIT saw its commons of code destroyed by enclosure. +={ Jaszi, Peter ; + Woodmansee, Martha ; + commons : + enclosure of ; + enclosure movement +} + +Before the Internet, the collaborative dimensions of creativity were hardly given much thought. An “author” was self-evidently an individual endowed with unusual creative skills. As the World Wide Web and digital technologies have proliferated, however, copyright’s traditional notions of “authorship” and “originality” have come to seem terribly crude and limited. The individual creator still matters and deserves protection, of course. But when dozens of people contribute to a single entry of Wikipedia, or thousands contribute to an open-source software program, how then shall we determine who is the “author”?~{ Henry Miller writes: “We carry within us so many entities, so many voices, that rare indeed is the man who can say he speaks with his own voice. In the final analysis, is that iota of uniqueness which we boast of as ‘ours’ really ours? Whatever real or unique contribution we make stems from the same inscrutable source whence everything derives. We contribute nothing but our understanding, which is a way of saying — our acceptance.” Miller, /{The Books in My Life}/ (New York: New Directions), p. 198. }~ By the lights of copyright law, how shall the value of the public domain, reconstituted as a commons, be assessed?~{ Rufus Pollock, “The Value of the Public Domain,” report for Institute for Public Policy Research, London, July 2006, at http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/value_of_public_domain.ippr.pdf. }~ +={ World Wide Web : + collective authorship, and ; + creativity : + collaborative +} + +The Bellagio Declaration, the outgrowth of a conference organized by Woodmansee and Jaszi in 1993, called attention to the sweeping deficiencies of copyright law as applied. One key point stated, “In general, systems built around the author paradigm tend to obscure or undervalue the importance of the ‘public domain,’ the intellectual and cultural commons from which future works will be constructed. Each intellectual property right, in effect, fences off some portion of the public domain, making it unavailable to future creators.”~{ See James Boyle, /{Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 192. }~ +={ Jaszi, Peter ; + Woodmansee, Martha ; + Bellagio Declaration ; + Boyle, James : + Shamans, Software and Spleens, by +1 ; + intellectual property : + public domain vs. +} + +Another fusillade of flaming arrows engulfed the fortress of “authorship” and “originality” in 1996, when James Boyle published /{Shamans, Software, and Spleens}/. With sly wit and deep analysis, this landmark book identified many of the philosophical paradoxes and absurdities of property rights in indigenous knowledge, software, genes, and human tissue. Boyle deftly exposed the discourse of IP law as a kind of Möbius strip, a smooth strip of logic that confusingly turns back on itself. “If a geography metaphor is appropriate at all,” said Boyle, “the most likely cartographers would be Dali, Magritte and Escher.”~{ James Boyle, “A Theory of Law and Information: Copyright, Spleens, Blackmail and Insider Trading,” /{California Law Review}/ 80, no. 1413 (1992), at http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/law&info.htm. }~ +={ copyright law : + philosophical challenges to +} + +2~ “You Have No Sovereignty Where We Gather” +={ copyright law : + philosophical challenges to +13 +} + +The deconstruction of copyright law over the past twenty years has been a significant intellectual achievement. It has exposed the copyright law’s philosophical deficiencies, showed how social practice deviates from it, and revealed the antisocial effects of expanding copyright protection. Critics knew that it would be impossible to defend the fledgling cyberculture without first documenting how copyright law was metastasizing at the expense of free expression, creative innovation, consumer rights, and market competition. + +But as the millennium drew near, the tech-minded legal community — and law-minded techies — knew that critiques and carping could only achieve so much. A winnable confrontation with copyright maximalists was needed. A compelling counternarrative and a viable long-term political strategy had to be devised. And then somehow they had to be pushed out to the wider world and made real. + +That task was made easier by the intensifying cultural squeeze. The proprietarian lockdown was starting to annoy and anger people in their everyday use of music, software, DVDs, and the Web. And the property claims were growing more extreme. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers had demanded that Girl Scout camps pay a public performance license for singing around the campfire. Ralph Lauren challenged the U.S. Polo Association for ownership of the word /{polo}/. McDonald’s succeeded in controlling the Scottish prefix Mc as applied to restaurants and motels, such as “McVegan” and “McSleep.”~{ These examples can be found in Bollier, /{Brand Name Bullies}/. }~ +={ Lauren, Ralph } + +The mounting sense of frustration fueled a series of conferences between 1999 and 2001 that helped crystallize the disparate energies of legal scholarship into something resembling an intellectual movement. “A number of us [legal scholars] were still doing our own thing, but we were beginning to get a sense of something,” recalls Yochai Benkler, “It was no longer Becky Eisenberg working on DNA sequences and Pamela Samuelson on computer programs and Jamie Boyle on ‘environmentalism for the ’Net’ and me working on spectrum on First Amendment issues,” said Benkler. “There was a sense of movement.”~{ Interview with Yochai Benkler, February 7, 2006.}~ (“Environmentalism for the ’Net” was an influential piece that Boyle wrote in 1998, calling for the equivalent of an environmental movement to protect the openness and freedom of the Internet.)~{ James Boyle, “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net,” /{Duke Law Journal}/ 47, no. 1 (October 1997), pp. 87–116, at http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/Intprop.htm. }~ +={ Boyle, James +1 ; + Benkler, Yochai +1 ; + Eisenberg, Rebecca ; + Samuelson, Pamela +} + +“The place where things started to get even crisper,” said Benkler, “was a conference at Yale that Jamie Boyle organized in April 1999, which was already planned as a movement-building event.” That conference, Private Censorship/Perfect Choice, looked at the threats to free speech on the Web and how the public might resist. It took inspiration from John Perry Barlow’s 1996 manifesto “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” It is worth quoting at length from Barlow’s lyrical cri de coeur — first published in /{Wired}/ and widely cited — because it expresses the growing sense of thwarted idealism among Internet users, and a yearning for greater self-determination and self-governance among commoners. Barlow wrote: +={ Barlow, John Perry +6 } + +_1 Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone, You are not welcome among us, You have no sovereignty where we gather. + +_1 We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. + +_1 Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you, You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project, You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. + +_1 You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. + +_1 You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve, You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. + +As Barlow made clear, the Internet was posing profound new questions — not just about politics, but about the democratic polity itself. What would be the terms of moral legitimacy and democratic process in cyberspace? Would the new order be imposed by a Congress beholden to incumbent industries and their political action committees, or would it be a new social contract negotiated by the commoners themselves? In posing such questions, and doing it with such rhetorical panache, Barlow earned comparisons to Thomas Jefferson. + +The stirrings of a movement were evident in May 2000, when Benkler convened a small conference of influential intellectual property scholars at New York University Law School on “A Free Information Ecology.” This was followed in November 2001 by a large gathering at Duke Law School, the first major conference ever held on the public domain. It attracted several hundred people and permanently rescued the public domain from the netherworld of “nonproperty.” People from diverse corners of legal scholarship, activism, journalism, and philanthropy found each other and began to reenvision their work in a larger, shared framework. +={ Benkler, Yochai ; + public domain : + conferences about +1 +} + +Over three decades, copyright scholarship had become more incisive, impassioned, and focused on the public good — but much of the talk remained within the rarefied circles of the academy. What to do about the disturbing enclosures of the cultural commons remained a vexing, open question. The 1990s saw an eclectic smattering of initiatives, from EFF lawsuits and visionary manifestos to underfunded advocacy efforts and sporadic acts of hacker mischief and civil disobedience. All were worthwhile forms of engagement and exploratory learning. None were terribly transformative. Free software was growing in popularity in the 1990s, but its relevance to broader copyright struggles and the Internet was not yet recognized. Congress and the courts remained captive to the copyright-maximalist worldview. The idea of organizing a counter-constituency to lay claim to the public domain and forge a new social contract for cyberspace was a fantasy. Copyright law was just too obscure to excite the general public and most creators and techies. The commoners were too scattered and diverse to see themselves as an insurgent force, let alone imagine they might create a movement. + +1~ 3 WHEN LARRY LESSIG MET ERIC ELDRED + +/{A constitutional test case becomes the seed for a movement.}/ + +Once the value of the public domain became evident, and a few visionaries realized that the commons needed to be protected somehow, an important strategic question arose: Which arena would offer the best hope for success — politics, culture, technology, or law? + +The real answer, of course, was all of the above. Building a new digital republic would require a wholesale engagement with the politics of effecting democratic change and the challenges of building a cultural movement. It would require the invention of a shared technological infrastructure, and the development of legal tools to secure the commons. All were intertwined. But as a practical matter, anyone who aspired to stop the mass-media-driven expansions of copyright law had to choose where to invest his or her energy. In the mid-1990s, Lawrence Lessig decided that the greatest leverage would come through law. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + law in contemporary context, and +2 +} + +Lessig, usually referred to as Larry, had the knowledge, talent, and good timing to conceptualize the politics of digital technologies at a ripe moment, the late 1990s, when the World Wide Web was exploding and people were struggling to understand its significance. However, Lessig was not content to play the sage law professor dispensing expertise at rarefied professional and scholarly gatherings; he aimed to become a public intellectual and highbrow activist. Through a punishing schedule of public speaking and a series of high-profile initiatives starting in 1998 and 1999, Lessig became a roving demigod-pundit on matters of the Internet, intellectual property, and cultural freedom. + +In the course of his frequent travels, he had a particularly significant rendezvous at the Starbucks on Church Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was November 1998. A month earlier, Congress had enacted the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Lessig was eager to meet with one Eric Eldred, a retired navy contractor, to see if he would agree to be a plaintiff in the first federal case to challenge the constitutionality of the copyright clause. +={ Copyright Term Extension Act ; + Eldred, Eric : + Lessig, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred, and +} + +Eldred was a book enthusiast and computer programmer who had reached the end of his rope. Three years earlier, in 1995, he had launched a simple but brilliant project: a free online archive of classic American literature. Using his PC and a server in his home in New Hampshire, Eldred posted the books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and dozens of other great authors whose works were in the public domain. Eldred figured it would be a great service to humanity to post the texts on the World Wide Web, which was just beginning to go mainstream. + +Eldred had previously worked for Apollo Computer and Hewlett-Packard and was experienced in many aspects of computers and software. In the late 1980s, in fact, he had developed a system that enabled users to post electronic text files and then browse and print them on demand. When the World Wide Web arrived, Eldred was understandably excited. “It seemed to me that there was a possibility of having a system for electronic books that was similar to what I had done before. I was interested in experimenting with this to see if it was possible.”~{ Interview with Eric Eldred, August 1, 2006; Daren Fonda, “Copyright Crusader,” /{Boston Globe Magazine}/, August 29, 1999, available at http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/8-29/featurestory1.shtml; and Eric Eldred, “Battle of the Books: The Ebook vs. the Antibook,” November 15, 1998, at http://www.eldritchpress.org/battle.html. }~ + +So Eldred set out to build his own archive of public-domain books: “I got books from the library or wherever, and I learned how to do copyright research and how to scan books, do OCR [opticalcharacter recognition] and mark them up as HTML [the programming language used on the Web],” he said. “I just wanted to make books more accessible to readers.”~{ Interview with Eric Eldred, August 1, 2006. }~ + +Eldred didn’t realize it at the time, but his brave little archive, Eldritch Press, embodied a dawning cultural archetype — the selfpublished digital work meant to be freely shared with anyone in the world, via the Internet. Thanks to the magic of “network effects” — the convenience and value that are generated as more people join a network — Eldred’s Web site was soon receiving more than twenty thousand hits a day. A growing community of book lovers came together through the site. They offered annotations to the online books, comments, and links to foreign translations and other materials. In 1997, the National Endowment for the Humanities considered the site so educational and exemplary that it formally cited Eldritch Press as one of the top twenty humanities sites on the Web. +={ Eldritch Press +12 ; + Internet : + communication system, as +3 +} + +Although it was only a one-person project, Eldritch Press was not just an idiosyncratic innovation. The convergence of telecommunications, personal computers, and software in the 1990s, otherwise known as the Internet, was facilitating an explosion of new genres of public expression. We are still grappling with how this new type of media system is different from broadcasting and other mass media. But we do know this: it invites mass participation because the system doesn’t require a lot of capital or professional talent to use. The system favors decentralized interactivity over centralized control and one-way communication. Ordinary people find it relatively inexpensive and versatile. Since everyone has roughly the same access and distribution capacities, the Internet is perhaps the most populist communication platform and egalitarian marketplace in human history. +={ Internet : + mass participation in +} + +This was not the goal of the computer scientists who invented the Internet, of course. Working under the auspices of the U.S. military, they were chiefly concerned with building a communications system that would allow academic researchers to share computerized information cheaply and easily. The idea was that intelligence and innovation would arise from the “edges” of a “dumb” network, and not be controlled by a centralized elite in the manner of broadcasting or book publishing. The Internet — a network of networks — would be a platform open to anyone who used a shared set of freely accessible “protocols,” or standardized code, for computer hardware and software.~[* The Internet protocols that enable different computers and networks to connect despite their differences is TCP/IP, which stands for TransmissionControl Protocol/Internet Protocol. These protocols enabled the commons known as the Internet to emerge and function, and in turn to host countless other commons “on top” of it.]~ +={ Internet : + protocols of +1 +} + +What was radically new about the network architecture was its freedom: No special qualifications or permissions were needed to communicate or “publish.” No one needed to pay special fees based on usage. Anyone could build her own innovative software on top of the open protocols, It is a measure of the system’s power that it has spawned all sorts of innovations that were not foreseen at the outset: in the 1990s, the World Wide Web, instant messaging, peer-to-peer file sharing, and Web logs, and, in the 2000s, podcasts, wikis, social networking software, and countless other applications. The open, shared protocols of the Internet provided an indispensable communications platform for each of these innovations to arise. +={ free culture : + Internet, of the ; + Internet : + architecture of +} + +In building his online archive, Eric Eldred was part of this new cultural cohort of innovators. He not only shared Richard Stallman’s dream — to build an open, sharing community. He also came to share Stallman’s contempt for the long arm of copyright law. The problem, in Eldred’s case, was the corporate privatization of large portions of the public domain. In the 1990s, the Walt Disney Company was worried that its flagship cartoon character, Mickey Mouse, would enter the public domain and be freely available for anyone to use. Mickey, originally copyrighted in 1928, was nearing the end of his seventy-five-year term of copyright and was due to enter the public domain in 2003. +={ copyright law : + public domain vs. +6 ; + Eldred, Eric : + public domain, and ; + public domain : + copyright law, and +6 | privatization of +2 ; + Stallman, Richard : + influence of ; + Walt Disney Company +} + +Disney led a concerted campaign to extend the term of copyrights by twenty years. Under the new law, all works copyrighted after January 1, 1923, would be privately controlled for another twenty years. Corporations would be able to copyright their works for ninety-five years instead of seventy-five years, and the works of individual authors would be a private monopoly for the author’s lifetime plus seventy years. Thousands of works that were expected to enter the public domain in 1999 and following years would remain under copyright until 2019 and beyond. + +Congress readily enacted this twenty-year giveaway of monopoly rights on a unanimous vote, and without any public hearings or debate. Disney was the most visible beneficiary of the law, prompting critics to dub it the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. But its more significant impact was to deprive Americans of access to an estimated four hundred thousand cultural works from the 1920s and 1930s. Books by Sherwood Anderson, music by George Gershwin, poems by Robert Frost, and tens of thousands of other works would remain under private control for no good reason. The law was the eleventh time in the course of four decades that Congress had extended the term of copyright protection. American University law professor Peter Jaszi complained that copyright protection had become “perpetual on the installment plan.” +={ Copyright Term Extension Act +6 ; + Jaszi, Peter ; + copyright law : + expansion of | purpose of +3 +} + +The law was astonishingly inefficient and inequitable as well. To preserve the property rights of the 2 percent of works from this period that still had commercial value, the law also locked up the remaining 98 percent of works (whose owners are often unknown or unable to be located in order to grant permissions). Indeed, it was these “orphan works” — works still under copyright but not commercially available, and with owners who often could not be found — that represent an important “feedstock” for new creativity. The Sonny Bono Act showered a windfall worth billions of dollars to the largest entertainment businesses and authors’ estates. +={ copyright law : + orphan works +} + +At a more basic level, the copyright term extension showed contempt for the very rationale of copyright law. Copyrights are intended as an inducement to authors to create works. It is a government grant of monopoly property rights meant to help authors earn money for producing books, music, film, and other works. But, as Lessig pointed out, “You can’t incent a dead person. No matter what we do, Hawthorne will not produce any more works, no matter how much we pay him.” Jack Valenti replied that longer copyright terms would give Hollywood the incentive to preserve old films from deteriorating and make them available. + +The copyright term extension act privatized so many of the public domain books on the Eldritch Press Web site, and so offended Eldred’s sense of justice, that in November 1998 he decided to close his site in protest. The new law meant that he would not be able to add any works published since 1923 to his Web site until 2019. “I can no longer accomplish what I set out to do,” said Eldred.~{ Ibid. }~ +={ Eldred, Eric : + public domain, and | Lessig, and +3 ; + Lessig, Lawrence +3 : + Eldred, and +3 +} + +As luck had it, Larry Lessig was looking for an Everyman of the Internet. Lessig, then a thirty-seven-year-old professor at Harvard Law School, was looking for a suitable plaintiff for his envisioned constitutional test case. He had initially approached Michael S. Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free electronic books. At the time, the project had nearly six thousand public-domain books available online. (It now has twenty thousand books; about 3 million books are downloaded every month.) Hart was receptive to the case but had his own ideas about how the case should be argued. He wanted the legal complaint to include a stirring populist manifesto railing against rapacious copyright holders. Lessig demurred and went in search of another plaintiff.~{ Richard Poynder interview with Lawrence Lessig, “The Basement Interviews: Free Culture,” April 7, 2006, p. 26, available at http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/basement-interviews.html. See also Steven Levy, “Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown,” /{Wired}/, October 2002, pp. 140–45, 154–56, available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/lessig.html. Project Gutenberg is at http://wwwgutenberg.org. }~ +={ Hart, Michael S. ; + Project Gutenberg +} + +After reading about Eldred’s protests in the /{Boston Globe}/, and meeting with him over coffee, Lessig asked Eldred if he would be willing to be the plaintiff in his envisioned case. Eldred readily agreed. As a conscientious objector and draft resister during the Vietnam War, he was ready to go to great lengths to fight the Sonny Bono Act. “Initially, I volunteered to violate the law if necessary and get arrested and go to jail,” Eldred said. “But Larry told me that was not necessary.” A good thing, because under the No Electronic Theft Act, passed in 1997, Eldred could be charged with a felony. “I could face jail, fines, seizure of my computer, termination of my Internet service without notice — and so all the e-books on the Web site could be instantly lost,” he said. +={ No Electronic Theft Act (1997) } + +It was the beginning of a landmark challenge to the unchecked expansion of copyright law. The case would turbocharge Lessig’s unusual career and educate the press and public about copyright law’s impact on democratic culture. Most significantly, it would, in time, spur the growth of an international free culture movement. +={ copyright law : + expansion of ; + Eldred, Eric : + copyright law, and +} + +2~ Larry Lessig’s Improbable Journey +={ Lessig, Lawrence +49 } + +Since Lessig looms so large in this story, it is worth pausing to understand his roots. Raised by culturally conservative, rock-ribbed Republican parents in central Pennsylvania, Lessig was a bright kid with a deep enthusiasm for politics. “I grew up a right-wing lunatic Republican,” Lessig told journalist Steven Levy, noting that he once belonged to the National Teen Age Republicans, ran a candidate’s unsuccessful campaign for the Pennsylvania state senate, and attended the 1980 Republican National Convention, which nominated Ronald Reagan for president. Larry’s father, Jack, was an engineer who once built Minuteman missile silos in South Dakota (where Lessig was born in 1961), and who later bought a steelfabrication company in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.~{ Wikipedia entry, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessig; Levy, “Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown.” }~ +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + background of +4 +} + + +Lessig initially thought he would follow in his father’s footsteps, and so he went to the University of Pennsylvania to earn degrees in economics and management. Later, studying philosophy at Trinity College in Cambridge, England, he faced growing doubts about his deep-seated libertarian worldview. Hitchhiking through Eastern Bloc countries, Lessig gained a new appreciation for the role of law in guaranteeing freedom and making power accountable. “There were many times when people in Eastern Europe would tell me stories about the history of the United States that I had never been taught: things like the history of how we treated Native Americans; and the history of our intervention in South America; and the nature of our intervention in South East Asia,” Lessig told Richard Poynder in 2006. “All of those were stories that we didn’t tell ourselves in the most accurate and vivid forms.” These experiences, said Lessig, “opened up a channel of skepticism in my head.”~{ Poynder interview with Lessig, April 7, 2006. }~ + +Lessig’s sister Leslie once told a reporter that Larry came back from Cambridge a very different person: “His views of politics, religion, and his career had totally flipped.”~{ Levy, “Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown.” }~ No longer aspiring to be a businessman or a philosopher, Lessig set his sights on law and entered the University of Chicago Law School in 1986. He transferred the next year to Yale Law School (to be near a girlfriend), groomed himself to be a constitutional law scholar, and graduated in 1989. + +Although he now considered himself a liberal, Lessig spent the next two years in the service of two of the law’s most formidable conservatives. He clerked for circuit court judge Richard Posner in 1988–89, followed by a year clerking for Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia during the 1990–91 term. His educational odyssey complete, the thirty-year-old Lessig settled into the life of a tenured law professor at the University of Chicago Law School. +={ Posner, Richard ; + Scalia, Antonin +} + +One of Lessig’s early scholarly concerns — adjudication — was not exactly a warm-up for tub-thumping activism. But it did curiously prefigure his later interest in using law as a tool to effect political change. In a 1993 law review article, Lessig wondered how courts should interpret the law when public sentiment and practice have changed. If a judge is going to be true to the original meaning of a law, Lessig argued, he must make a conscientious “translation” of the law by taking account of the contemporary context. A new translation of the law is entirely justified, and should supplant an old interpretation, Lessig argued, if prevailing social practices and understandings have changed, The important thing in interpreting law, therefore, is “fidelity in translation.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Fidelity in Translation,” /{Texas Law Review}/ 71, no. 1165 (May 1993). }~ +={ law : + social change, and +8 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + law in contemporary context, and +8 +} + +Lessig elaborated on this theme in a 1997 article that spent twenty-seven dense pages pondering how two different Supreme Courts, separated by nearly a century, could look to identical words in the Constitution and reach precisely opposite conclusions.~[* The Erie ruling held that federal common law, previously recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1842, was unconstitutional.]~ It is not as if one Court or the other was unprincipled or wrong, Lessig wrote. Rather, any court must take account of contemporary social norms and circumstances in “translating” an old law for new times. Lessig called this dynamic the "/{Erie}/-effect," a reference to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1938 ruling in /{Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins}/. The /{Erie}/-effect is about the emergence of “a kind of contestability about a practice within a legal institution,” which prompts “a restructuring of that practice to avoid the rhetorical costs of that contestability.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Erie-Effects of Volume 110: An Essay on Context in Interpretive Theory,” /{Harvard Law Review}/ 110, no. 1785 (1997). }~ +={ Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins +1 } + +Lessig described how an /{Erie}/-effect might be exploited to catalyze a political shift (paraphrased here): /{identify}/ a socially contested law, aim to /{force}/ the conflicting social practice into the foreground by /{inflaming}/ conventional discourse, and then /{argue}/ for a change in legal interpretation in order to relieve the contestability that has been alleged.~{ Ibid., p. 1809. }~ If the conflict between the law and actual social practice can be made vivid enough, a court will feel pressure to reinterpret the law. Or the court will defer to the legislature because the very contestability of the law makes the issue a political question that is inappropriate for a court to resolve. One notable instance of the /{Erie}/-effect in our times, Lessig pointed out, was the successful campaign by feminist law scholar Catherine MacKinnon to define sexual harassment in the workplace as a form of illegal discrimination. The point was to transform popular understanding of the issue and then embody it in law. +={ MacKinnon, Catherine } + +Lessig was not especially focused on tech issues until he ran across Julian Dibbell’s article “A Rape in Cyberspace,” which appeared in the /{Village Voice}/ in December 1993.~{ Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turns a Database into a Society,” /{Village Voice}/, December 21, 1993, pp. 36–42, reprinted in Mark Stefik, /{Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors}/ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 293–315, Dibbell quote at p. 296. }~ The piece described the social havoc that ensued in an online space, LambdaMOO, hosted at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. One pseudonymous character “raped” another in the virtual space, using cruel words and graphic manipulations. The incident provoked an uproar among the thousand members of LambdaMOO, and had real emotional and social consequences. Yet, as Dibbell pointed out, “No bodies touched. Whatever physical interaction occurred consisted of a mingling of electronic signals sent from sites spread out between New York City and Sydney, Australia.” +={ Dibbell, Julian : + "A Rape in Cyberspace" +1 ; + law : + cyberspace, of +3 +} + +For Lessig, the LambdaMOO “rape” had an obvious resonance with Catherine MacKinnon’s arguments in her 1993 book /{Only Words}/. Does a rape in cyberspace resemble the harms inflicted on real women through pornography? Lessig saw intriguing parallels: “I really saw cyberspace as a fantastic opportunity to get people to think about things without recognizing the political valences. That’s all I was interested in; it was purely pedagogical.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, March 20, 2006. }~ +={ MacKinnon, Catherine } + +To explore the issues further, Lessig developed one of the first courses on the law of cyberspace. He taught it in the spring semester of 1995 at Yale Law School, where he was a visiting professor, and later at the University of Chicago and Harvard law schools. During the Yale class, an exchange with a student, Andrew Shapiro, jarred his thinking in a new direction: “I was constantly thinking about the way that changing suppositions of constitutional eras had to be accounted for in the interpretation of the Constitution across time. Andrew made this point about how there’s an equivalent in the technical infrastructure [of the Internet] that you have to think about. And then I began to think about how there were norms and law and infrastructure — and then I eventually added markets into this — which combine to frame what policymaking is in any particular context.”~{ Ibid. }~ +={ Shapiro, Andrew } + +This line of analysis became a central theme of Lessig’s startling first book, /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/, published in 1999.~{ Lessig, /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/ (New York: Basic Books, 1999). }~ /{Code}/ took on widespread assumptions that the Internet would usher in a new libertarian, free-market utopia. Cyberlibertarian futurists such as Alvin Toffler, Esther Dyson, George Gilder, and John Gilmore had routinely invoked cyberspace as a revolutionary force that would render government, regulation, and social welfare programs obsolete and unleash the transformative power of free markets.~{ Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” Progress and Freedom Foundation, August 1994, available at http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/futureinsights/fil.2magnacarta.html. }~ In the libertarian scenario, individual freedom can flourish only if government gets the hell out of the way and lets individuals create, consume, and interact as they see fit, without any paternalistic or tyrannical constraints. Prosperity can prevail and scarcity disappear only if meddling bureaucrats and politicians leave the citizens of the Internet to their own devices. As Louis Rossetto, the founder and publisher of /{Wired}/, bluntly put it: “The idea that we need to worry about anyone being ‘left out’ is entirely atavistic to me, a product of that old economics of scarcity and the 19th century social thinking that grew out of it.”~{ David Hudson, interview with Louis Rossetto, “What Kind of Libertarian,” /{Rewired}/ (Macmillan, 1997), p. 255. }~ +={ code : + law, as +4 ; + law : + code as +4 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +4 ; + Dyson, Esther ; + Gilder, George ; + Gilmore, John ; + Rossetto, Louis ; + Toffler, Alvin ; + Internet : + architecture of +2 | freedom of +1 ; + cyberspace : + economic effects of +} + +Lessig was more wary. In /{Code}/, he constructed a sweeping theoretical framework to show how freedom on the Internet must be actively, deliberately constructed; it won’t simply happen on its own. Inspired by conversations with computer programmer Mitch Kapor, who declared that “architecture is politics” in 1991, Lessig’s book showed how software code was supplanting the regulatory powers previously enjoyed by sovereign nation-states and governments. The design of the Internet and software applications was becoming more influential than conventional sources of policymaking — Congress, the courts, federal agencies. /{Code is law}/, as Lessig famously put it. +={ Kapor, Mitch } + +What was worrisome, Lessig warned, was how relatively small changes in software code could alter the “architecture of control” governing the Internet. The current architecture was not necessarily stable and secure, in other words. Moreover, any future changes were likely to be animated by private, commercial forces and not publicly accountable and democratic ones. Lessig illustrated this point with a disarmingly simple drawing of a dot representing an individual, whose range of behaviors is affected by four distinct forces: software architecture, the market, law, and social norms. Each of these factors conspires to regulate behaviors on the Internet, Lessig argued — and commercial forces would clearly have the upper hand. + +/{Code}/ was a powerful and sobering rebuttal to libertarian assumptions that “keeping government out” would safeguard individual freedom. Its analysis quickly became the default conceptual model for talking about governance on the Internet. It helped situate many existing policy debates — Internet censorship, digital privacy, copyright disputes — in a larger political and policy framework. Although many readers did not share Lessig’s pessimism, /{Code}/ helped expose an unsettling truth — that a great many legislators, federal agencies, and courts were largely oblivious to the regulatory power of software code. They didn’t have a clue about the technical structures or social dynamics affecting life on the Internet, let alone how existing law would comport with this alien domain. +={ Internet : + freedom of +} + +/{Code}/ was widely praised and widely read. But it was only one project of that period that catapulted Lessig to international prominence. In the mid-1990s, Charles Nesson, a bold-thinking, highflying evidence professor at Harvard Law School, was organizing the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The new project aspired to study “the most difficult and fundamental problems of the digital age,” and show public-interest leadership in addressing them. Nesson, who had become modestly famous for his role in the W. R. Grace litigation chronicled in Jonathan Harr’s /{A Civil Action}/, recruited Lessig to be the Berkman Center’s marquee star in 1997. It was an irresistibly prestigious and visible perch. +={ Berkman Center for Internet & Society ; + Nesson, Charles +} + +This was demonstrated within months, when Judge Penfield Jackson tapped Lessig to be a “special master” in one of the most important antitrust cases in a generation, /{U.S. v. Microsoft}/.~{ Steven Levy, “The Great Liberator,” /{Wired}/, October 2002, and Poynder interview with Lessig, April 7, 2006. }~ Lessig’s assignment was to sift through the welter of technical claims and counterclaims in the case and produce a report with recommendations to the court. The government alleged that Microsoft had abused its monopoly power in its sales of its operating system and Web browser, particularly in “bundling” the browser with the Windows operating system. +={ Jackson, Penfield ; + Microsoft : + antitrust lawsuit against +1 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Microsoft lawsuit, and +1 +} + +Microsoft soon raised questions about Lessig’s neutrality as a special master. Among other objections, the company cited his book’s claim that software code is political and a passage that said Microsoft was “absolutely closed” compared to an open-standards body. It also dredged up an e-mail in which Lessig facetiously equated using Micosoft’s Internet Explorer with “selling one’s soul.” After nearly eight weeks on the job, the Court of Appeals, citing a technicality, took Lessig off the case, to his enduring disappointment. He has been deeply frustrated by the implication that he had been removed for bias (the court made no such finding) and by his abrupt banishment from a plum role in a landmark case. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +} + +2~ Waging the /{Eldred}/ Case + +Back at the Berkman Center, however, there were plenty of opportunities to influence the digital future. The center was a hothouse of venturesome ideas and eccentric visionaries. It was a place where John Perry Barlow could drop by to talk with Lessig and Berkman co-founder Jonathan Zittrain, one of the early cyberlaw experts. The center drew upon the ideas of intellectual property guru William (Terry) Fisher; Charles Nesson, who specialized in launching Big Ideas; and a self-renewing batch of bright law students eager to make their mark on a hip and emerging field of law. Richard Stallman at nearby MIT was an occasional visitor, as was MIT computer scientist Hal Abelson, who combined deep technical expertise with an appreciation of the social and democratic implications of digital technologies. It was during this time, in 1998, that Lessig and Abelson jointly taught The Law of Cyberspace: Social Protocols at Harvard Law School. The class was an attempt to make sense of some novel legal quandaries exploding on the Internet, such as computer crime, identity authentication, digital privacy, and intellectual property. +={ Berkman Center for Internet & Society +5 ; + Nesson, Charles ; + Abelson, Hal : + cyberlaw, and ; + Barlow, John Perry ; + Fisher, William (Terry) ; + Stallman, Richard ; + Zittrain, Jonathan ; + Internet : + legal quandaries arising on ; + law : + cyberspace, of +} + +While nourished by the work of his academic colleagues, Lessig was determined to come up with ingenious ways to /{do something}/ about the distressing drift of copyright law. It was important to take the offensive. Notwithstanding the pessimism of /{Code}/, Lessig’s decidedly optimistic answer was to gin up a constitutional challenge to copyright law. Many legal experts and even sympathetic colleagues were skeptical. Peter Jaszi, a leading intellectual law professor at American University, told a reporter at the time, “It’s not so much that we thought it was a terrible idea but that it was just unprecedented. Congress has been extending copyright for 180 years, and this is the first time someone said it violated the Constitution.”~{ David Streitfeld, “The Cultural Anarchist vs. the Hollywood Police State,” /{Los Angeles Times Magazine}/, September 22, 2002, p. 32. }~ Others worried that an adverse ruling could set back the larger cause of copyright reform. +={ Jaszi, Peter ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ; + law : + social change, and +3 ; + copyright law : + expansion of +} + +In the spirit of the commons, Lessig and his Berkman Center colleagues decided that the very process for mounting the /{Eldred}/ lawsuit would be different: “Rather than the secret battles of lawyers going to war, we will argue this case in the open. This is a case about the commons; we will litigate it in the commons. Our arguments and strategy will be developed online, in a space called ‘openlaw.org.’ Key briefs will be drafted online, with participants given the opportunity to criticize the briefs and suggest other arguments. . . . Building on the model of open source software, we are working from the hypothesis that an open development process best harnesses the distributed resources of the Internet community. By using the Internet, we hope to enable the public interest to speak as loudly as the interests of corporations.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Commons Law,” June 24, 1999, posted on www.intellectu alcapital.com/issues/issue251/item5505.asp, and Open Law archive at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw. }~ +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft +28 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred v. Reno, and +28 | law in contemporary context, and +1 +} + +Emulating the open-source development model was a nice touch, and perhaps useful; dozens of people around the world registered at the Openlaw site and posted suggestions. Some of the examples and legal critiques were used in developing the case, and the model was later used by lawyers in the so-called DeCSS case, in which a hacker broke the encryption of a DVD. But it turns out that open, distributed creativity has its limits in the baroque dance of litigation; it can’t work when secrecy and confidentiality are important, for example. + +The case, /{Eldred v. Reno}/ — later renamed /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/ when the Bush II administration took office — was filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C., on January 11, 1999.~{ /{Eldred v. Reno}/ (later, Eldred v. Ashcroft), 537 U.S. 186 (2003), affirming 239 F. 3d 372. }~ The complaint argued that the Copyright Term Extension Act violated Article 1, section 8, clause 8, of the Constitution, which provides that copyright protection shall be of limited duration. It also argued that the Term Extension Act violated the free speech clause of the First Amendment. In some respects, the case could never have been waged without the foundation of legal scholarship produced in the 1990s, which rehearsed a great many of the arguments presented to the Court. In opposition were motion picture studios, the music industry, and book publishers. They argued that Congress had full authority under the Constitution to extend copyright terms, as it had done since the beginning of the republic. +={ copyright law : + expansion of ; + Copyright Term Extension Act ; + Copyright Clause, U.S. Constitution +} + +In October 1999, the U.S. District Court brusquely dismissed the case without even holding a trial. Lessig and his Berkman colleagues were not entirely surprised, and quickly set about filing an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Going beyond the Openlaw experiment at Berkman, they enlisted the support of several lawyers at Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue. On appeal, Lessig was allowed to argue the case personally to a panel of judges. But once again, in February 2001, the case was dismissed. Lessig considered it a significant victory that it was a 2-1 ruling, however, which meant that a further appeal was possible. Lessig was also encouraged that the dissenter had been the court’s most conservative member, Judge David Sentelle. Lessig requested that the full circuit court hear the case — a petition that was also rejected, this time after picking up support from a liberal dissenter, Judge David Tatel. +={ Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue +4 ; + Sentelle, David ; + Tatel, David +} + +Normally, this would have been the end of the road for a case. Very few appeals court cases are accepted for review by the U.S. Supreme Court, particularly when the case has not even been argued at trial and no other courts have passed judgment on the statute. So it was quite surprising when the Supreme Court, in February 2002, accepted /{Eldred}/ for review and scheduled oral arguments for October 2002. +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + Supreme Court, and +11 +} + +At this point, Lessig realized he needed the advice and support of some experienced Supreme Court litigators. He enlisted help from additional lawyers at Jones, Day; Alan Morrison of Public Citizen Litigation Group; Kathleen Sullivan, the dean of Stanford Law School; and Charles Fried, a former solicitor general under President Reagan. Professor Peter Jaszi and the students of his law clinic drafted an amicus brief. +={ orrison, Alan ; + Fried, Charles ; + Jaszi, Peter ; + Sullivan, Kathleen +} + +A key concern was how to frame the arguments. Attorney Don Ayer of Jones, Day repeatedly urged Lessig to stress the dramatic harm that the Bono Act was inflicting on free speech and free culture. But as Lessig later confessed, “I hate this view of the law. . . . I was not persuaded that we had to sell our case like soap.”~{ Lessig, “How I Lost the Big One,” /{Legal Affairs}/, March/April 2004, available at http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp. }~ Lessig was convinced that the only way /{Eldred}/ could prevail at the Supreme Court would be to win over the conservative justices with a matter of principle. To Lessig, the harm was obvious; what needed emphasis was how the Sonny Bono Act violated “originalist” principles of jurisprudence. (Originalist judges claim to interpret the Constitution based on its “original” meanings in 1791, which includes a belief that Congress has strictly enumerated powers, not broad legislative discretion.) +={ Ayer, Don ; + law : + originalist principles of +2 +} + +“We tried to make an argument that if you were an originalist— in the way these conservative judges said they were in many other cases — then you should look to the original values in the Copyright Clause,” said Lessig. “And we argued that if you did that then you had to conclude that Congress had wildly overstepped its constitutional authority, and so the law should be struck down.”~{ Lessig interview with Richard Poynder, April 7, 2006, p. 25. }~ Flaunting the harm caused by the copyright term extension struck Lessig as showy and gratuitous; he considered the harm more or less selfevident. In the aftermath of a public debate that Lessig once had with Jack Valenti, a questioner on Slashdot, a hacker Web site, suggested that Lessig would be more persuasive if he asserted “a clear conception of direct harm . . . than the secondary harm of the copyright holders getting a really sweet deal.” Lessig conceded that such a focus “has been a weakness of mine for a long time. In my way of looking at the world, the point is a matter of principle, not pragmatics. . . . There are many others who are better at this pragmatism stuff. To me, it just feels insulting.”~{ “Lawrence Lessig Answers Your Questions,” Slashdot.org, December 21, 2001, Question 1, “The question of harm,” posted by “caduguid,” with Lessig response, available at http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/21/155221. }~ +={ copyright law : + expansion of ; + Copyright Clause, U.S. Constitution ; + Valenti, Jack +} + +And so, despite warnings to the contrary, Lessig’s legal strategy relied on a call to uphold originalist principles. Having clerked for Justice Scalia and Judge Posner, Lessig felt that he understood the mind-set and sympathies of the conservative jurists. “If we get to the Supreme Court,” Lessig told Slashdot readers in December 2001, “I am certain that we will win. This is not a left/right issue. The conservatives on the Court will look at the framers’ Constitution— which requires that copyrights be granted for ‘limited times’ — and see that the current practice of Congress . . . makes a mockery of the framers’ plan. And the liberals will look at the effect of these never-ending copyrights on free speech, and conclude that Congress is not justified in this regulation of speech. The Supreme Court doesn’t give a hoot about Hollywood; they will follow the law.”~{ Lessig response to question 11, Slashdot.org, “Will the extension of copyright continue?” posed by “Artifice_Eternity,” available at http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/21/155221. }~ +={ Posner, Richard ; + Scalia, Antonin ; + Copyright Clause, U.S. Constitution ; + copyright law : + expansion of +5 ; + Copyright Term Extension Act +5 +} + +Lessig took pride in the fact that thirty-eight amicus briefs were filed on behalf of /{Eldred}/. They included a wide range of authors, computer and consumer electronics companies, and organizations devoted to arts, culture, education, and journalism. Besides the usual suspects like the Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge, supporting briefs were filed by fifteen economists including Kenneth Arrow and Milton Friedman, Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum, and the Intel Corporation. + +At oral arguments, Lessig immediately confronted a skeptical bench. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor worried about overturning years of previous copyright term extensions. Justice William Rehnquist proposed. “You want the right to copy verbatim other people’s books, don’t you?” And when Justice Anthony Kennedy invited Lessig to expound upon the great harm that the law was inflicting on free speech and culture, Lessig declined the opportunity. He instead restated his core constitutional argument, that copyright terms cannot be perpetual. “This was a correct answer, but it wasn’t the right answer,” Lessig later confessed in a candid postmortem of the case. “The right answer was to say that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had been written about it. Kennedy wanted to hear it. And here was where Don Ayer’s advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a miss.”~{ See http://www.supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/01-618.pdf. See also Lessig, “How I Lost the Big One,” and Linda Greenhouse, “Justices Hear Arguments in Challenge to Copyrights,” /{New York Times}/, October 10, 2002. A number of Supreme Court opinions in the /{Eldred}/ case can be found at the Openlaw archive at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvreno. The /{Loyola Los Angeles Law Review}/ held a symposium on /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/, available at http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v36-issue1. }~ No justices spoke in defense of the Sonny Bono Act. +={ Ayer, Don ; + Kennedy, Anthony ; + O’Connor, Sandra Day ; + Rehnquist, William +} + +Yet they had clear reservations about the Supreme Court’s authority to dictate the length of copyright terms. + +A few months later, on January 15, 2003, the Supreme Court announced its ruling: a 7-2 defeat for Eldred. The majority opinion, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did not even raise the “enumerated powers” argument or engage with originalist philosophy. “We are not at liberty to second-guess Congressional determinations and policy judgments of this order, however debatable or arguably unwise they may be,” Ginsburg wrote.~{ 537 U.S. 186 (1993). See also “Court Majority Says It Won’t Second-Guess Congress,” /{New York Times}/, January 16, 2007, p. A22. }~ She likewise ignored the idea that there is a “copyright bargain” between the American people and copyright holders, which entitles the public to certain rights of access to the public domain. As for copyright’s impact on free speech, Ginsburg invoked the fair use doctrine and the “idea/expression dichotomy” (the notion that ideas are freely available but expression can be copyrighted) as sufficient protections for the public. She ignored the fact that both doctrines were (and are) under fierce assault. +={ Ginsburg, Ruth Bader ; + law : + originalist principles of ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and ; + copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and | balance of public and private rights +} + +Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens accepted Lessig’s arguments, and wrote separate dissents. Breyer — a respected scholar of copyright law since his famous 1970 essay “The Uneasy Case for Copyright”~{ Stephen Breyer, “The Uneasy Case for Copyright,” /{Harvard Law Review}/ 84, no. 281 (1970). }~ —agreed that copyright terms had effectively become perpetual, and that the law was therefore unconstitutional. Stevens complained that the majority decision reneged on the copyright bargain and made copyright law “for all intents and purposes judicially unreviewable.” +={ Breyer, Stephen ; + Stevens, John Paul +} + +In assessing the broad impact of the /{Eldred}/ ruling, copyright scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan cited law professor Shubha Ghosh’s observation that the /{Eldred}/ ruling had effectively “deconstitutionalized” copyright law. /{Eldred}/ pushed copyright law +={ Ghosh, Shubha ; + Vaidhyanathan, Siva +1 +} + +_1 farther into the realm of policy and power battles and away from principles that have anchored the system for two centuries. That means public interest advocates and activists must take their battles to the public sphere and the halls of Congress. We can’t appeal to the Founders’ wishes or republican ideals. We will have to make pragmatic arguments in clear language about the effects of excessive copyright on research, teaching, art and journalism. And we will have to make naked mass power arguments with echoes of “we want our MP3” and “it takes an industry of billions to hold us back.”~{ Siva Vaidhyanathan, “After the Copyright Smackdown: What Next?” /{Salon}/, January 17, 2003, at http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/01/17/copyright.print.html. }~ +={ copyright law : + balance of public and private rights +} + +2~ A Movement Is Born +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + effects of +12 +} + +The /{Eldred}/ case had a paradoxical effect. Early on, Lessig had said, “We didn’t want to make it a big political cause. We just wanted to make it an extension of the existing Supreme Court jurisprudence, because we realized that the only way to win the case was to win the conservatives’ view, and the conservatives were not likely to be motivated by great attacks on media concentration.”~{ Interview with Poynder, April 7, 2006, p. 25. }~ The upshot of the Court’s ruling was to intensify the political battles over copyright law. While such resistance was already growing, the /{Eldred}/ ruling and the publicity surrounding it spawned a new generation of “copyfighters.” Lessig had wanted to protect the commons through law, only to find that the courts were unwilling to offer any help. Any answers would now have to be pursued through politics, culture, and technology — and ingenious uses of law where feasible. How to proceed in this uncharted territory became the next challenge, as we see in chapter 4. + +After four years of relentless work, Lessig was frustrated and dejected. “I had failed to convince [the Supreme Court] that the issue was important,” he wrote in a frank confessional, “and I had failed to recognize that however much I might hate a system in which the court gets to pick the constitutional values that it will respect, that is the system we have.”~{ Lessig, “How I Lost the Big One.” See also Lessig, /{Free Culture}/ (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 228–48. }~ For a constitutional law scholar, it was a rude awakening: constitutional originalists could not be taken at their word! Scalia and fellow justice Clarence Thomas had declined to stand behind their jurisprudential principles. +={ law : + originalist principles of +1 ; + Scalia, Antonin ; + Thomas, Clarence +} + +Yet Lessig had certainly been correct that /{Eldred}/ would not succeed unless it convinced the Court’s conservative majority. The fact that the originalist gambit failed was perhaps the strongest message of all: /{nothing}/ would convince this Court to rein in the excesses of copyright law. + +Even before the Supreme Court had delivered its ruling, Lessig admitted his misgivings about the power of law to solve copyright’s failings: “The more I’m in this battle, the less I believe that constitutional law on its own can solve the problem. If Americans can’t see the value of freedom without the help of lawyers, then we don’t deserve freedom.”~{ Lessig response to Question 11, “Cyberspace Amendment,” posed by “kzinti,” in Slashdot, available at http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/21/155221. }~ Yet mobilizing freedom-loving Americans to seek redress from Congress was also likely to be doomed. Hollywood film studios and record companies had showered some $16.6 million and $1.8 million, respectively, on federal candidates and parties in 1998. Legislators know who butters their bread, and the public was not an organized influence on this issue. No wonder a progressive copyright reform agenda was going nowhere. +={ Copyright Term Extension Act +1 ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + Supreme Court, and ; + law : + limited power of ; + copyright law : + expansion of +1 +} + +Four years after the /{Eldred}/ ruling, Lessig had some second thoughts about the “Mickey Mouse” messaging strategy. Opponents of the copyright term extension, including Lessig, had often flaunted Mickey motifs in their dealings with the press and railed at the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.” Yet in 2006, Lessig lamented to one interviewer that “the case got framed as one about Mickey Mouse. Whereas the reality is, who gives a damn about Mickey Mouse? The really destructive feature of the Sonny Bono law is the way it locks up culture that has no continuing commercial value at all. It orphaned culture. So by focusing on Mickey Mouse, the Court thought this was an issue of whether you believed in property or not. If, however, we had focused people on all the culture that is being lost because it is locked up by copyright, we might have succeeded.”~{ Interview with Poynder, April 7, 2006, pp. 26–27. }~ + +The lasting impact of the /{Eldred}/ case, ironically, may have less to do with the law than with the cultural movement it engendered. The lawsuit provided a powerful platform for educating the American people about copyright law. A subject long regarded as arcane and complicated was now the subject of prominent articles in the /{New York Times}/, /{Salon}/, computer magazines, wire services, and countless other publications and Web sites. A cover story for the /{Los Angeles Times}/'s Sunday magazine explained how the case could “change the way Hollywood makes money — and the way we experience art.” /{Wired}/ magazine headlined its profile of Lessig “The Great Liberator.” Lessig himself barnstormed the country giving dozens of presentations to librarians, technologists, computer programmers, filmmakers, college students, and many others. Even Lessig’s adversary at the district court level, Arthur R. Miller, a Harvard Law School professor, agreed, “The case has sparked a public discussion that wasn’t happening before.” +={ Miller, Arthur R. } + +Lessig’s orations often provoked the fervor of a revival meeting — and led to more than a few conversions. This may appear surprising because Lessig, with his receding hairline and wireframe glasses, strikes an unprepossessing pose. In the professorial tradition, he can sometimes be didactic and patronizing. But on the stage, Lessig is stylish, poised, and mesmerizing. His carefully crafted talks are intellectual but entertaining, sophisticated but plainspoken— and always simmering with moral passion. He typically uses a customized version of Keynote, a Macintosh-based program similar to PowerPoint, to punctuate his dramatic delivery with witty visuals and quick flashes of words. (Experts in professional presentations have dubbed this style the “Lessig Method,” and likened it to the Takahashi Method in Japan because slides often use a single word, short quote, or photo.)~{ Garr Reynolds’s blog on professional presentation design, “The ‘Lessig Method’ of Presentation,” October 5, 2005, available at http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/10/the_lessig_meth.html. }~ + +More than a sidebar, Lessig’s public speaking has been an important aspect of his leadership in building a commons movement. His talks have helped some fairly sequestered constituencies in technical fields — computer programming, library science, Internet policy, copyright law — understand the larger political and cultural significance of their work. The results have sometimes been galvanizing. As one veteran hacker told me in 2006, “There’s a whole connoisseurship of Lessig talks. He’s a little past his peak right now — but there was a period where, like when he gave the lecture at OSCON [a conference of open-source programmers], when he was done, they wanted to start a riot. People were literally milling around, looking for things to smash. He was saying to these people who worked on open source, ‘There’s a larger world context to your work. The government is doing things — and you can stop them!’ ”~{ Interview with Aaron Swartz, October 10, 2006. }~ +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + public speaker, as +} + +Following oral arguments before the Supreme Court, the movement — such as it was — had a rare gathering of its leaders. Public Knowledge co-hosted a luncheon for those who had aided the lawsuit. The diners spanned the worlds of libraries, computers, Internet publishing, public-interest advocacy, and many other fields. The event was held at Washington’s Sewall-Belmont House, where the National Woman’s Party once led the fight for women’s suffrage. This prompted Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, to declare, “We, too, are building a movement.”~{ Amy Harmon, “Challenge in Copyright Case May Be Just a Beginning,” /{New York Times}/, October 14, 2002. }~ +={ Sohn, Gigi } + +So after arguing — and losing — before the U.S. Supreme Court, what does a copyright superstar do for an encore? + +A seed had already been planted at the Starbucks meeting four years earlier. Eldred recalls telling Lessig, “I think this case is very important, and I think you’re the right guy for this. But at the same time, I’d like to talk to you about something else. I really think that we need to start up some sort of a copyright conservancy, which would be sort of like a nature conservancy. It would allow people to donate books to the public domain; we could then take ownership of them. They could maybe have a tax deduction for them, and we could — instead of having the book privately owned — they would be in the public domain, maybe before the copyright term expired. We could sort of have an independent group maintain this conservancy, and allow the books to be put on the Internet for free.” +={ copyright conservancy ; + Eldred, Eric : + copyright conservancy, and | Lessig, and +1 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred, and +1 ; + Eldred, Eric : + Lessig, and | public domain, and +} + +Eldred remembers that Lessig “was sort of stunned. He didn’t have anything to say for a little while. We sort of looked at each other, and I think he was very shocked and surprised that I said that. And he said, ‘I don’t think we can do it until we’ve done the work on the copyright term extension act suit, but I promise to do it.’”~{ Interview with Eric Eldred, August 1, 2006. }~ + +:B~ PART II + +:C~ The Rise of Free Culture + +1~intro_ii [Intro] -# + +To the commoners seeking to build a new cultural universe, the failure of the /{Eldred}/ case in the U.S. Supreme Court was both depressing and liberating. It confirmed what the legal scholars of the 1990s had long suspected— that both Congress and the courts were captives to a backward-looking vision of copyright law. Government was tacitly committed to a world of centralized and commercial mass media managed by elite gatekeepers. That was not likely to change soon. +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + effects of : + Supreme Court, and +} + +As for helping build a new digital republic with a more open, democratic character, the Clinton administration made its intentions clear in its infamous White Paper. It wanted to convert the gift economy of the Internet into a wall-to-wall marketplace. It wanted to give sellers absolute control over content and limit the disruptions of innovative newcomers. The government, acting on behalf of the film, record, and book industries, had no desire to legitimize or fortify the sharing culture that was fast gaining a hold on the Internet. Quite the contrary: strengthening the public’s fair use rights, access to the public domain, and online free speech rights might interfere with the perceived imperatives of electronic commerce. /{Freedom}/ would therefore have to be defined as the freedom of consumers to buy what incumbents were selling, not as a robust civic freedom exercised by a sovereign citizenry. +={ Clinton administration : + White Paper ; + fair use doctrine : + White Paper vs. ; + White Paper [on copyright] ; + gift economy ; + Internet : + gift economy of ; + free culture : + Internet, of the +} + +By the conclusion of /{Eldred}/, in 2003, it was clear that the copyright dissidents were not just confronting one policy battle or another; they were confronting an antiquated and entrenched worldview. While Lessig, Eldred, and the growing band of commoners realized that it was important to pay close attention to pending legislation and lawsuits, many of them also realized that the real challenge was to develop a new vision — and then try to actualize it. +={ Eldred, Eric : + copyright law, and +} + +A more affirmative, comprehensive vision was needed to supersede the limited intellectual parameters of copyright law.Copyright law was a mode of property discourse, after all, and that discourse simply could not adequately express the aspirations of hackers, citizen-journalists, librarians, academics, artists, democrats, and others trying to secure open online spaces for themselves. The online insurgents acknowledged the great importance of fair use and the public domain, but they also considered such doctrines to be vestiges of an archaic, fraying legal order. It was time to salvage what was valuable from that order, but otherwise instigate a new language, a new aesthetic, a new legal regime, a new worldview. +={ copyright law : + property rights, and ; + property rights : + copyright law, and +} + +This meant venturing into risky, unknown territory. Law professors accustomed to working within the comfort of the academy would have to clamber onto public stages and set forth idealistic, politically inflected scenarios for Internet culture. Activists accustomed to rhetorical critiques would have to initiate pragmatic, results-driven projects. Free software hackers would have to invent new software and digital protocols. Volunteers would need to be enlisted and organized and funding secured to sustain bare-boned organizational structures. Wholly new constituencies would have to be imagined and mobilized and brought together into something resembling a new movement. Part II, The Rise of Free Culture, describes the building of this foundation from 2000 to 2005. + +1~ 4 INVENTING THE CREATIVE COMMONS + +/{A public-spirited cabal schemes for a way to legalize sharing.}/ + +Larry Lessig remembers his Starbucks conversation with Eric Eldred as a “crystallizing moment,” a revelation that the stakes in copyright reform were much higher than he had originally imagined. Both Lessig and Eldred obviously wanted to win the lawsuit and recognized its importance. But Eldred had made clear that he didn’t just want to roll back regressive laws; he wanted to develop an affirmative and sustainable alternative. +={ copyright law : + property rights, and +1 ; + property rights : + copyright law, and +1 ; + Eldred, Eric : + copyright law, and +2 | Lessig, and +16 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred, and +16 +} + +This got Lessig thinking: “So, okay — you get the Supreme Court to strike the laws down, but you still live in a world where people think that everything is property and has to be owned. If nobody has a political awareness about why the judicial response makes sense, then it’s a pretty empty result.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, March 20, 2006. }~ Throughout the /{Eldred}/ case, paradoxically enough, Lessig says he was “skeptical” of the traditional liberal strategy of seeking redress through the courts. +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + Supreme Court, and +} + + +The turning point for him, Lessig recalled, was in recognizing that Eldred was not just a plaintiff in a test case but “someone trying to build a movement around a practice of making things available in a way that took advantage of the infrastructure of the Net.”~{ Ibid. }~ True, Eldritch Press resembled an old-style archive of canonical works. Yet Eldred’s goal all along had been to host an active social community of book lovers, not just provide a repository for old texts. The Web site’s real importance was in the social activity it represented — the fact that thousands of participant-readers could come together around a self-selected amateur eager to build a new type of social community and information genre. +={ Eldritch Press ; + World Wide Web : + social activity on +7 +} + +Lessig told me that when he recognized Eldred’s Web site as a new type of social practice, it helped define the challenge: “The question became a very technical, legal one: How could we instantiate that movement?” Lessig said he needed to find a way to “disambiguate the social practice.” By that bit of tech-legalese, he meant, How could the practices and values animating Eldred’s Web site be articulated in law, denoted on the Web, and thereby be seen for what they were: a new mode of social practice and cultural freedom? + +It helps to remember that in 1998 and the following years, the legality of sharing online works and downloading them was highly ambiguous. Prevailing legal discourse set forth a rather stark, dualistic world: either a work is copyrighted with “all rights reserved,” or a work is in the public domain, available to anyone without restriction. The mental categories of the time offered no room for a “constituency of the reasonable,” in Lessig’s words. +={ copyright law : + public domain vs. ; + public domain : + copyright law, and +} + +Copyright law made nominal provisions for a middle ground in the form of the fair use doctrine and the public domain. But Lessig realized that fair use was “just a terrible structure on which to build freedom. There are basically no bright lines; everything is a constant debate. Of course, we don’t want to erase or compromise or weaken [these doctrines] in any sense. But it’s very important to build an infrastructure that doesn’t depend upon four years of litigation.” Or as Lessig was wont to put it in his impassioned performances on the stump: “Fuck fair use.”~{ Robert S. Boynton, “Righting Copyright: Fair Use and Digital Environmentalism,” /{Bookforum}/, February/March 2005, available at http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=1. }~ +={ copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and +2 ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +2 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + fair use, on +2 +} + +This was a theatrical flourish, of course. Back in Palo Alto, Lessig in 2001 had launched the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School, which actively takes on lawsuits seeking to vindicate the public’s fair use rights, among other things. One notable case was against Stephen Joyce, the grandson of novelist James Joyce. As executor of the Joyce literary estate, Stephen Joyce steadfastly prevented dozens of scholars from quoting from the great writer’s archive of unpublished letters.~{ See, e.g., D. T. Max, “The Injustice Collector,” /{New Yorker}/, June 19, 2006, pp. 34ff. }~ (After losing a key court ruling in February 2007, the Joyce estate settled the case on terms favorable to a scholar who had been denied access to the Joyce papers.) +={ Joyce, Stephen } + +But Lessig’s intemperance toward fair use has more to do with the almost subliminal void in legal discourse and political culture. There was no way to talk about the social behaviors exemplified by Eldred’s Web site except through crabbed, legalistic rules. The only available language, the default vocabulary, is copyright law and its sanctioned zones of freedom, such as fair use. Lessig wanted to open up a new, more bracing line of discourse. “We wanted to rename the social practice,” he said. It sounds embarrassingly grandiose to state it so bluntly, but in later years it became clear to Lessig and his loose confederation of colleagues that the real goal was to /{imagine and build a legal and technical infrastructure of freedom}/. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + freedom, and | law in contemporary context, and +2 +} + +Initially, the goal was more exploratory and improvisational — an earnest attempt to find leverage points for dealing with the intolerable constraints of copyright law. Fortunately, there were instructive precedents, most notably free software, which by 2000, in its opensource guise, was beginning to find champions among corporate IT managers and the business press. Mainstream programmers and corporations started to recognize the virtues of GNU/Linux and opensource software more generally. Moreover, a growing number of people were internalizing the lessons of Code, that the architecture of software and the Internet really does matter. +={ free software : + open source software, as ; + GNU/Linux ; + software : + open source ; + Internet : + architecture of +1 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +} + +Even as he sought to prevail in /{Eldred}/, Lessig understood that enduring solutions could not be conferred by the U.S. Supreme Court; they had to be made real through people’s everyday habits. The commoners needed to build a new set of tools to actualize freedom on the Internet, and to develop a new language, a new epistemology, a new vision, for describing the value proposition of sharing and collaboration. The big surprise, as we will see in chapter 6, was the latent social energies poised to support this vision. +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft +7 : + Supreme Court, and ; + Internet : + freedom of ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred v. Reno, and | freedom, and +} + +2~ What If . . . ? + +Shortly after the /{Eldred}/ case was filed in January 1999, a number of Harvard Law students working with Lessig announced the formation of a new group, “Copyright’s Commons.”~{ The Copyright’s Commons Web site is now defunct but can be found at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc. }~ Led by Jennifer Love and Ashley Morgan, Copyright’s Commons published a monthly Web newsletter that provided updates on the progress of the /{Eldred}/ case and miscellaneous news about the public domain. +={ Love, Jennifer ; + Morgan, Ashley ; + Copyright’s Commons +3 : + See also Creative Commons ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + Copyright’s Commons, as +3 ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + Copyright’s Commons, and +3 +} + +Copyright’s Commons described itself as “a coalition devoted to promoting the public availability of literature, art, music, and film.” It was actually a named plaintiff in the /{Eldred}/ case. + +That spring, Copyright’s Commons announced a new project that it called the “counter-copyright [cc] campaign.” Billed as “an alternative to the exclusivity of copyright,” the campaign invited the general public to “show your support for the public domain by marking your work with a [cc] and a link to the Copyright’s Commons website. . . . If you place the [cc] icon at the end of your work, you signal to others that you are allowing them to use, modify, edit, adapt and redistribute the work that you created.” +={ counter-copyright (cc) campaign } + +The project may have been an imaginative call to arms, but there was no infrastructure behind it except one Web page, and no background material except a Web link to the Open Source Initiative. Wendy Seltzer, a Harvard Law student at the time, recalled that the [cc] symbol produced by Copyright’s Commons “was supposed to be a public domain dedication, but nobody had yet gone through all of the thinking about what was actually required to put something into the public domain, and did this satisfy the ‘affirmative act’ requirements [of the law]? Part of the germ of the Creative Commons was thinking about what would it take to make this — the [cc] symbol — an actual, meaningful, legally binding statement.”~{ Interview with Wendy Seltzer, September 28, 2006. }~ +={ Seltzer, Wendy } + +Lessig, in the meantime, was keeping a frenetic schedule. He was overseeing the progress of the /{Eldred}/ lawsuit; traveling to give speeches to dozens of conferences and forums every year; promoting his book Code; and writing a monthly column in the /{Industry Standard}/ until it went under with the tech bubble collapse in 2001. The year before, Kathleen Sullivan of Stanford Law School persuaded Lessig to join its faculty and supervise a new law clinic, the Center for Internet and Society.~{ Ross Hanig, “Luring Lessig to Stanford Law School,” /{Recorder}/, October 17, 2001, at http://www.law.com. }~ Along the way Lessig also got married to Bettina Neuefeind, a human rights lawyer. +={ Sullivan, Kathleen ; + Neuefeind, Bettina ; + Center for Internet and Society ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred v. Reno, and +1 +} + +Work on /{Eldred}/ intensified after the district court dismissed the case in October 1999. Lessig embarked on a new round of legal strategizing with colleagues to prepare the appeals court brief, which was submitted in May 2000. Throughout this period, intellectual property (IP) thinkers and tech activists — especially those in the Lessig/Cambridge/Stanford axis — were highly attuned to the gathering storm in copyright and software policy. + +One of the most tumultuous developments was Napster, a homemade file-sharing software program that had become an international sensation. Released in June 1999, Napster was the creation of hacker Shawn Fanning, then a student at Northeastern University in Boston. Within a year, the free program had been downloaded by an estimated 70 million users, drawing fierce denunciations by the recording industry and Washington officials. Napster used centralized file directories on the Internet to connect users to music files on thousands of individual computers. By enabling people to download virtually any recorded music in existence, for free, it was as if the fabled “cosmic jukebox” had arrived. Of course, much of the copying was blatantly illegal. Yet consumers welcomed Napster as one of the few vehicles they had for thumbing their nose at a reactionary music industry that refused to offer digital downloads. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster in December 1999, and succeeded in shutting it down in July 2001.~{ Wikipedia entry, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster. }~ +={ Fanning, Shawn ; + Napster +2 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) +1 +} + +The Napster craze intensified the polarized property discourse that Lessig and his colleagues were trying to transcend. Napster encouraged an either/or debate by suggesting that a song is either private property or contraband; there was no middle ground for fair use or the public domain. While the RIAA and acts like Metallica and Madonna railed against massive copyright infringements, defenders of Napster were quick to point out its promotional power. An album produced by the English rock band Radiohead, for example, was downloaded for free by millions of people before its release — a fact that many credit with pushing the album, Kid A, to the top of the Billboard CD sales chart. But such claims carried little weight against those defending what they considered their property rights. +={ Radiohead ; + property rights : + copyright law, and +2 ; + copyright law : + property rights, and +2 | public domain vs. +1 ; + public domain : + copyright law, and +1 +} + +The controversy over Napster was clearly influential in shaping the debate over how to protect the public domain. Berkman Center co-director Jonathan Zittrain recalls, “If we’re trying to hang the hopes of the community on the right just to copy stuff, we’re going to lose — and maybe we should. [The issue] is actually about the right to manipulate the symbols and talismans of our culture” — what Professor Terry Fisher likes to call “semiotic democracy.”~{ Interview with Jonathan Zittrain, September 28, 2006. }~ +={ Zittrain, Jonathan ; + Fisher, William (Terry) ; + free culture : + sharing ethic of +1 ; + copyright law : + sharing economy vs. +1 ; + democracy : + semiotic +} + +The problem was that copyright discourse, at least in the hands of the record and film industries, refused to acknowledge that the sharing and reuse of works might be necessary, desirable, or legal. The concept did not compute. There was a conspicuous void in the prevailing terms of debate. So the challenge facing the Cambridge copyright cabal was really a riddle about epistemology, law, and culture rolled into one. How could a new type of free culture, independent of the market, be brought into existence? And how could the creative works of this imagined culture be made legally “shareable” instead of being automatically treated as private property? + +This was an unprecedented challenge. When culture was chiefly a set of analog media — books, records, film — there had been affirmative legal limits on the scope of copyright. Before 1978, the law regulated only commercial uses of a work and only works that had been formally registered, which meant that most works automatically remained in the public domain. Moreover, there was a natural, physical “friction” preventing copyright holders from over-controlling how a work could circulate and be used. When words were fixed in books and sounds embedded in vinyl, people could circulate those objects freely, without having to ask permission from copyright holders. In the digital world, however, the physical constraints of analog media disappeared. Copyright holders now claimed that every digital blip, however transient, constituted a “copyright event” subject to their unilateral control. In practice, this greatly weakened the rights a person could enjoy under the fair use doctrine. +={ copyright law : + public domain vs. +3 ; + public domain : + copyright law, and +3 ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +1 | digital age, in +1 ; + copyright law : + digital age, in +1 | fair use doctrine, and +1 | limits on the scope of +} + +In a sense, the entire legal and cultural framework for free culture needed to be reimagined so it could function in the digital environment. The terms of fair use essentially had to be renegotiated — an undertaking that copyright law had never had to tackle in the past. But how might that be achieved when both Congress and the courts were beholden to the copyright maximalists’ worldview? + +Such were the kinds of conversations that swirled around the Berkman Center, Harvard Law School, MIT, and a handful of progressive intellectual property circles. Such discussions had been going on for years, especially in the context of free software and public-domain scholarship, but now they were reaching the lay public. The Napster and /{Eldred}/ cases were vehicles for educating the press and the public, and Lessig’s book /{Code}/ was becoming must reading for anyone who cared about Internet governance and digital culture. +={ Berkman Center for Internet & Society ; + Napster ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +} + +Amid this swirl of copyright controversy, MIT professor Hal Abelson had lunch with Lessig at the Harvard Faculty Club in July 2000. The two had co-taught a class on cyberlaw two years earlier and shared many interests in the confluence of copyright and technology. One topic that day was Eric Eldred’s idea of a copyright conservancy — a “land trust” for public-domain works. On August 1, 2000, Abelson sent Zittrain an e-mail: +={ Abelson, Hal : + copyright conservancy idea, and +5 | cyberlaw, and +5 ; + Eldred, Eric : + copyright conservancy, and ; + Zittrain, Jonathan ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + effects of ; + copyright conservancy +35 +} + +_1 /{Here’s an idea that we might be able to get going, and where the Berkman Center could help.}/ + +_1 /{Let’s set up a tax-free, charitable foundation to which artists and record label companies could donate the copyright for recorded music. I’m thinking of all the old music for which there isn’t currently an active market.}/ + +_1 /{The foundation would arrange for this stuff to be loaded for free onto the internet and give the public permission to use it. The artists and record labels get a tax writeoff. The RIAA and Napster hug and kiss, and everyone goes home happy.}/ +={ Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) } + +_1 /{What do you think?}/ + +_1 /{Hal}/ + +Zittrain loved the idea, and suggested that it might make a great clinical project for Harvard Law students that fall. But he wondered if the Copyright Clearinghouse Center — a licensing and permissions organization for music — already offered such a service (it didn’t). Lessig proposed that Stanford and Harvard law schools jointly develop the program. He immediately identified one glaring problem: it would be difficult to “establish a process for valuing gifts of copyrighted stuff that would be clearly understood and would be accepted by the IRS.” +={ Zittrain, Jonathan +1 } + +What ensued was a lengthy and irregular series of e-mail conversations and social encounters through which the idea was chewed over and refined. Lessig acted as the “supernode” among a small group of participants that initially included Zittrain, Eldred, Nesson, and Diane Cabell, a lawyer and administrator at the Berkman Center. Within a month, others were invited into the conversation: Richard Stallman; Duke Law professors James Boyle and Jerome H. Reichman; and documentary film producer Eric Saltzman, who had just become director of the Berkman Center. +={ Berkman Center for Internet & Society ; + Boyle, James : + CC formation, and ; + Cabell, Diane ; + Reichman, Jerome H. ; + Nesson, Charles ; + Saltzman, Eric ; + Stallman, Richard : + Copyright’s Commons, and ; + Eldred, Eric : + copyright conservancy, and +} + +A digital archive for donated and public-domain works had great appeal. Just as land trusts acted as trustees of donated plots of land, so the Copyright’s Commons (as Lessig proposed that it be named) would be a “conservancy” for film, books, music, and other works that were either in the public domain or donated. Six weeks after Abelson’s original suggestion, Lessig produced a “Proposal for an Intellectual Property Conservancy” for discussion purposes.~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Proposal for the Intellectual Property Conservancy,” e-mail to ipcommons group, November 12, 2000. }~ He now called the concept “an IP commons” — “the establishment of an intellectual property conservancy to facilitate the collection and distribution under a GPL-like license of all forms of intellectual property.” As elaborated by two Harvard Law School students, Chris Babbitt and Claire Prestel, “The conservancy will attempt to bridge the gap between authors, corporate copyright holders and public domain advocates by providing a repository of donated works which we believe will create a more perfect ‘market’ for intellectual property.”~{ Chris Babbitt and Claire Prestel, “Memorandum to Michael Carroll, Wilmer Cutler Pickering, ‘IP Conservancy,’ ” October 24, 2000. }~ +={ belson, Hal : + copyright conservancy idea, and +2 ; + Babbitt, Chris ; + Prestel, Claire ; + Copyright’s Commons +27 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + Copyright’s Commons, as +27 ; + IP Commons +27 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Copyright’s Commons, and +27 +} + +Friendly critiques started arriving immediately. Stallman considered the proposal a “good idea overall,” but as usual he objected to the words, such as “intellectual property” and “copyright protection,” which he considered “propaganda for the other side.”~{ E-mail from Richard Stallman to Lessig, September 11, 2000. See also http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html. Stallman suggested calling the project the “Copyright and Patent Conservancy.” }~ Abelson, a friend and colleague of Stallman’s at MIT, was not finicky about word choices, but he did believe that software donations should be directed to the Free Software Foundation, not to the envisioned project. FSF already existed, for one thing, but in addition, said Abelson, “It may be detrimental to have people initially associate this [new project] too closely with the FSF. . . . We need to craft a public position that will unify people. An FSF-style ‘let’s undo the effects of all those evil people licensing software’ is not what we want here.”~{ E-mail from Hal Abelson to Lessig, September 12, 2000. }~ Some people suggested attracting people to the conservancy by having “jewels” such as material from the estates of deceased artists. Another suggested hosting special licenses, such as the Open Audio License, a license issued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2001 that lets musicians authorize the copying and reuse of their songs so long as credit is given and derivative songs can be shared. +={ Stallman, Richard : + Copyright’s Commons, and ; + Abelson, Hal : + Free Software Foundation, and +1 ; + Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +The most difficult issue, said Abelson, was the economics of the project. The care and maintenance of donations, such as the master version of films, could be potentially huge expenses. Digitizing donated works could also be expensive. Finally, there were questions about the economic incentives to potential donors. Would people really wish to donate works that have significant cash value? + +Answers to such questions were hardly self-evident, but there were encouraging signs. After Lessig gave a speech at the University of Michigan in September 2000, a man came up to him and announced, “I’m one of the people who benefited by the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.” It was Robert Frost, Jr., son of the great poet. Frost said, “I obviously need to check with my family, but we may be interested in becoming a contributor to your conservancy.”~{ E-mail from Lawrence Lessig to ipcommons group, September 8, 2000. }~ If Robert Frost’s estate could come forward with his literary legacy, perhaps there were others willing to do the same. +={ Frost, Robert, Jr. ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + public speaker, as ; + Copyright Term Extension Act +} + +When Berkman Center director Eric Saltzman joined the conversation, he raised a series of difficult questions about the whole idea: +={ Saltzman, Eric +1 } + +_1 Why would a person or corp. donate copyrighted materials? Larry’s draft implies a benefit to the IP owner — does this mean broader Internet facilitated use, and not merely a tax deduction? Under what circumstances, if any, does the Conservancy charge for use of its IP? If a user modifies a story, say, producing a screenplay, to whom does that screenplay belong? Would a motion picture based upon that screenplay owe $$ to the Conservancy? If so, how much (this is the damages phase of the /{Rear Window}/ case)?~{ This case, /{Stewart v. Abend}/, 100 S. Ct. 1750 (1990), required the copyright owners of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie /{Rear Window}/ to pay damages to the author of a book upon which the film was based. Saltzman was concerned that the conservancy would be liable for any illicit derivative works. See Daniel A. Saunders, “Copyright Law’s Broken Rear Window: An Appraisal of Damage and Estimate of Repair,” /{California Law Review}/ 80, no. 1 (January 1992), pp. 179–245. }~ Wouldn’t a new, hopeful band prefer to allow free use of its song(s) on a commercially promoted site like MP3.com rather than the Conservancy site? All asking: How to make the Conservancy into a useful garden, not a well-meaning weed patch of unwanted, neglected IP?~{ E-mail to ipcommons group, September 18, 2000. }~ + +By early October 2001, some of these questions had been provisionally answered. For example: Only digital works would be accepted initially. No limitations or restrictions would be set on the use of donated works. Prospective academic partners would include the University of California at Berkeley, Duke, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. Lessig suggested both Richard Stallman and Jack Valenti as possible board members. The central goal was to develop a new sort of noncommercial space in cyberspace for the sharing and reuse of music, visual art, film, literature, nonfiction, academic work, software, and science.~{ E-mail from Lawrence Lessig to ipcommons group, November 12, 2000. }~ +={ Valenti, Jack ; + Stallman, Richard : + Copyright’s Commons, and +} + +But many questions still hung in the air. Could the free software ethic really translate to other creative genres? Would tax incentives elicit donations of works? Would independent appraisals of donated works be needed? How would the conservancy search the titles of works and get permissions clearances? + +For all of its brainpower and commitment, Lessig’s rump caucus might not have gotten far if it had not found a venturesome source of money, the Center for the Public Domain. The center — originally the Red Hat Center — was a foundation created by entrepreneur Robert Young in 2000 following a highly successful initial public offering of Red Hat stock. As the founder of Red Hat, a commercial vendor of GNU/Linux, Young was eager to repay his debt to the fledgling public-domain subculture. He also realized, with the foresight of an Internet entrepreneur, that strengthening the public domain would only enhance his business prospects over the long term. (It has; Young later founded a print-on-demand publishing house, Lulu.com, that benefits from the free circulation of electronic texts, while making money from printing hard copies.) +={ Young, Robert ; + Red Hat ; + GNU/Linux : + Red Hat, and ; + enter for the Public Domain +2 ; + public domain : + Center for Public Domain +2 +} + +The director of the center, Laurie Racine, a former geneticist and business professor, was skilled at making shrewd strategic grants and “character bets” in public-domain activism. Because the center was not hobbled by the bureaucracy or timidity that afflicts many large foundations, it was able to make swift decisions and bold bets on innovative projects. (I came to work closely with Racine on a number of projects, including the co-founding of Public Knowledge, in 2001.) +={ Racine, Laurie +1 } + +Lessig met with Racine in October 2000. On a napkin, he sketched his idea for expanding copyright for authors. He came away with funding for a meeting at the Berkman Center and, later, a $100,000 commitment to launch the IP conservancy; the Center for the Public Domain eventually put up $1 million to get the project going, well before other funders saw the promise of the idea. Racine wanted her new center to be associated with “a project that has broad vision, credibility, range and staying power.” She saw Lessig’s project as having all of those things.~{ E-mail from Lawrence Lessig to ipcommons group, October 11, 2000, which contained e-mail from Laurie Racine to Lessig, October 25, 2000. }~ The grant was based more on the concept than a specific plan, however. At the time it was not entirely clear if the project would own and manage digital works, host Web services that made things freely available, or provide legal and software tools — or something else.~{ E-mail from Lawrence Lessig to ipcommons group, November 12, 2000. }~ There was, nonetheless, a great sense of mission and urgency to get under way. + +Interestingly, two similar initiatives were also in the early stages of development. The Knowledge Conservancy, led by David Bearman at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, had a similar model of accepting donations of materials and making them available online. It focused more on sponsorship donations and memberships, while Lessig’s group was more oriented toward legal research and Web hosting of works. Another project, OpenCulture.org, planned to compensate artists for contributions to the public domain, but apparently it never took off.~{ http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://Openculture.org. }~ Lessig and his group were not averse to joining forces with others, but they were intent on vetting their own business model, such as it was, before joining anyone else’s venture. +={ Bearman, David ; + OpenCulture.org ; + Knowledge Conservancy +} + +One turning point came in January 2001 after Saltzman had met with several lawyers at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, a prominent law firm in Washington, D.C.~{ Contained in e-mail from Christina Ritchie to ipcommons group, December 15, 2000. }~ After conversations with attorneys David Johnson and Michael W. Carroll, it became clear that a nonprofit trust managing donated material could face considerable liability if it turned out that the donors did not actually own the works. To explore this issue, Carroll produced a much-praised legal memo that raised a red flag: “What if we were fools, and the person who gave us the rights [to a work] actually never had the rights and suddenly we get sued for infringement?” asked Carroll.~{ Michael Carroll, “Potential Copyright Liability and DMCA Safe Harbor Relief for Creative Commons,” appendix to “Briefing Book for Creative Commons Inaugural Meeting,” May 7, 2001. }~ One successful lawsuit could sink the whole enterprise. +={ Carroll, Michael W. ; + Johnson, David R. ; + Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering ; + Saltzman, Eric +8 +} + +The project was caught in a conundrum. It wanted to legalize a whole set of social practices for sharing and reusing creative works — but establishing a content intermediary for that purpose appeared to be financially prohibitive under the law. It could be hugely expensive to clear titles and indemnify the organization and future users against copyright infringement risks. +={ copyright law : + sharing economy vs. +1 +} + +For a few months, various people in Lessig’s orbit suggested complicated schemes to try to finesse the legal problems. For example, one way that the conservancy could reduce its liability would be to simply point to the Web locations of public-domain materials, in the style of Napster’s centralized index of songs. This would also avoid the nuisance and expense of clearing titles on thousands of works. Another idea was to create a “three zone system” of content — Zone A for content that the conservancy owned and licensed; Zone B for content that was merely hosted at the conservancy site with no copyright representations; and Zone C, a simple search engine with links to public-domain content. Each of these zones, in turn, raised a flurry of complicated, speculative legal issues.~{ E-mail from Eric Saltzman to ipcommons group, January 19, 2001. }~ +={ Napster ; + Copyright’s Commons : + three zone system of +} + +None of the proposed alternatives got much traction, especially when Saltzman took a closer look at the realities of tax deductions for donors. Saltzman came to see that tax breaks would have very little incentive value for most potential donors, and establishing the cash value of donations would be difficult in any case. Moreover, if donors were getting little in return for their donations, they would be wary of signing a form indemnifying the conservancy against legal liability. On top of all this, Saltzman, like others, had misgiving about “the idea of the federal treasury contributing public money [in the form of tax expenditures].” In short, the conservancy approach seemed plagued with many complicated and perhaps insoluble problems. + +As if to keep the pot boiling, newcomers kept adding new thoughts. Two leading thinkers about the public domain in science, Paul Uhlir and Jerome H. Reichman, urged that the group expand its mission to include scientific research and take an international perspective.~{ E-mail from Paul Uhlir and Jerry Reichman, January 30, 2001. }~ (Uhlir directs the international scientific and technical information programs at the National Academy of Sciences/ National Research Council; Reichman is an intellectual property professor at Duke Law School.) Both were keenly aware of the dangers to scientific progress if copyright and patent protection continued to expand. +={ Reichman, Jerome H. ; + Uhlir, Paul ; + copyright law : + expansion of +} + +In January 2001, the caucus reached one point of consensus— that the primary function of this commons should be “to facilitate free/low-cost public use of original works.” It also agreed upon a name. Asked to vote on a name from a list that included IP Commons, Dot-commons, Sui Generous, IP Conservancy, and Public Works, Saltzman piped up, “May I suggest another name? CREATIVE COMMONS.” When the final poll results were counted, Creative Commons was the clear winner with five votes, with one vote apiece for the remaining names. A later poll pitted “The Constitution’s Commons” against “Creative Commons” (CC) in a final runoff. The vote tally is lost to history, but we do know which name prevailed.~{ E-mails from ipcommons listserv to ipcommons group, January 11, 12, 13, 16, 2001. }~ +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + development of +10 | function of +} + +Viewpoints quickly diverged on how a commons ought to be structured and what metrics of success should be used. Should it seek to maximize the number of donations or the number of downloads? Should it develop quality holdings in a given field or provide the widest possible breadth of content? Should it focus on social interaction and creative reuses of works? Should the focus be on producers or consumers of intellectual property? Should the organization focus on individuals or institutions? And how would it be different from other rights clearance organizations and content archives? The group seemed mired in a great cloud of uncertainty. + +For the next nine months, the group intensified its debate about how to build the envisioned conservancy. After law student Dotan Oliar sketched out possible “business models,” Saltzman persuaded a friend at McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, to provide a pro bono assessment.~{ Dotan Oliar, “Memo on Creative Commons — Towards Formulating a Business Plan,” March 19, 2001. }~ “The McKinsey folks were very skeptical and, I think, had a hard time fitting this into their [business] framework,” recalled one student at the meeting, Chris Babbitt. After the meeting, he was convinced that Creative Commons could not possibly host a content commons: “It would just be huge amounts of material, huge costs, and we didn’t have the money for that.” ~{ Interview with Chris Babbitt, September 14, 2006. }~ +={ Babbitt, Chris +1 ; + McKinsey & Company ; + Oliar, Dotan +} + +Feeling the need to force some concrete decisions, Saltzman and Lessig convened twenty-eight people for an all-day meeting in Hauser Hall at Harvard Law School, on May 11, 2001, to hash out plans. “What we’re trying to do here is /{brand the public domain}/,” Lessig said. A briefing book prepared by Chris Babbitt posed a pivotal question to the group: Should Creative Commons be structured as a centralized Web site or as an distributed, open-source licensing protocol that would allow content to be spread across cyberspace? The centralized model could be “an eBay for opensource IP” or a more niche-based commons for out-of-print books, film, or poetry. A mock Web site was actually prepared to illustrate the scenario. The home page read: “The member sites listed on the CommonExchange have been certified by Creative Commons to offer high-quality, non-infringing content on an unrestricted basis. Please feel free to use and pass these works along to others. We invite you to donate works of your own to help maintain the digital Commons.”~{ The mock-up can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/creativecommons/site.htm. }~ +={ public domain : + branding of +} + +The distributed commons model would resemble the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the New York Stock Exchange — “a trusted matchmaker to facilitate the transaction of securing rights,” according to the briefing book. “Just as corporations or commodities producers must meet certain criteria before they are listed on the Exchange, we could condition ‘listing’ in the Commons on similar criteria, albeit reflecting open source rather than financial values.”~{ “Briefing Book for Creative Commons Inaugural Meeting,” May 7,2001, p.10. }~ The virtue of the distributed model was that it would shift costs, quality control, and digitization to users. Creative Commons would serve mostly as a credentialing service and facilitator. On the other hand, giving up control would be fraught with peril — and what if Creative Commons’ intentions were ignored? + +Several participants remember Lessig, Nesson, and Zittrain pushing for the distributed model, which seemed a bolder and riskier option. “Larry was the lead advocate for a distributed commons, where it would be focused on a license mechanism that we then would release to the world, and we let the world do with it what it will,” one attendee recalled. “At the time, I think, XML-type capabilities were just coming around, and Larry was very confident that that was the direction to go.”~{ Interview with Chris Babbitt, September 14, 2006. }~ XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a programming language that uses self-created “tags” that help Internet users aggregate and share digital content residing on different computer systems. Lessig envisioned XML tags embedded in any Creative Commons–licensed work, which could then be used to identify shareable content on the Internet. +={ Nesson, Charles ; + Zittrain, Jonathan ; + XML (Extensible Markup Language) ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses +3 +} + +This perspective carried the day, and the “conservancy” model of the commons was formally abandoned. CC would serve as a licensing agent. The licenses would enable authors’ works to be made available online in an easy, low-cost way without the full restrictions of copyright law. A standardized set of licenses would overcome the ambiguities of the fair use doctrine without overriding it. Creators could voluntarily forfeit certain copyright rights in advance— and signal that choice — so that others could freely reuse, share, and distribute CC-licensed works. +={ authorship : + Creative Commons, and +2 +} + +Jonathan Zittrain remembers being skeptical at first: “So this whole thing is just about some tags? It’s about /{licensing}/? How boring.” Upon reflection, however, he saw the value of CC licensing as a way to create a new default. “As soon as you realize — ‘Well, wait a minute! It’s just about authors being able to express their desires!’”~{ Interview with Jonathan Zittrain, September 28, 2006. }~ + +More than a menu of individual choices, the licenses would constitute an embryonic cultural order — a “constitutional system” to direct how text, images, and music could circulate in the online world, based on authors’ individual choices. But the new focus on licenses raised its own set of novel quandaries. What options should an author be able to choose? What suite of licenses made sense? While licensing terms may be boring and legalistic, the architecture could have potentially profound implications for cultural freedom — which is why the legal minds involved in the licenses spent so much time arguing seemingly obscure points. +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + function of +} + +However these debates were resolved, everyone agreed that it was time to incorporate Creative Commons as a nonprofit group, assemble a board, recruit a chief executive officer, and of course raise more money. The stated goal: “to expand the shrinking public domain, to strengthen the social values of sharing, of openness and of advancing knowledge and individual creativity.”~{ Oren Bracha and Dotan Oliar, “Memo: May 7th Consensus Regarding the Creative Commons Project,” August 20, 2001, p. 1. }~ +={ public domain : + CC licenses, and +1 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + public domain, and +1 +} + +There was a certain audacity if not unreality to the whole venture. Law professors don’t go around inventing ambitious public projects to revamp the social applications of copyright law. They don’t generally muck around with software, contract law, and artists to build an imagined “sharing economy.” “There was always this lingering suspicion in the back of my mind,” recalled Babbitt in 2006, “that it [Creative Commons] would be kind of a rich man’s folly, and this would just be some little thing — a niche experiment — that really wouldn’t turn out to have merited the sort of sustained interest of this high-caliber group of people.”~{ Interview with Chris Babbitt, September 14, 2006. }~ +={ Babbitt, Chris } + +2~ Crafting the Licenses +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses +14 } + +If Creative Commons licenses were going to enable artists to determine future uses of their works — on less restrictive terms than copyright law — what did actual artists think of the whole idea? To get a crude baseline of opinion, Laura Bjorkland, a friend of Lessig’s and manager of a used-book store in Salem, Massachusetts, conducted an unscientific survey. She asked about a dozen writers, photographers, painters, filmmakers, and a sculptor if they would be interested in donating their works to a commons, or using material from one? Most of them replied, “I’ve never even /{thought}/ of this before. . . .”~{ Laura Bjorkland, “Regarding Creative Commons: Report from the Creative Community,” in “Briefing Book for Creative Commons Inaugural Meeting,” May 7, 2001, pp. 16–19. }~ +={ Bjorkland, Laura ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + function of +} + +A classical composer said he “loved the idea of a Nigerian high school chamber group playing one of my string quartets without paying royalties . . . but I would not want a film studio or pop song writer using one of my themes on a commercial project, even if my name’s attached, without royalties.” Some artists worried about others making money off derivatives of their work. Many complained that artists earn so little anyway, why should they start giving away their work? Others were reluctant to see their work altered or used for violence or pornography. Photographers and visual artists found it “a little scary” to let their signature style be used by anyone. + +In short, there was no stampede for starting a public-domain conservancy or a set of licenses. Some worried that the CC licenses would be a “case of innovation where’s there’s no current demand.” Another person pointed out, more hopefully, that it could be a case of “changing the market demand with a new model.”~{ Oren Bracha and Dotan Oliar, “Memo: May 7th Consensus Regarding the Creative Commons Project,” August 20, 2001, p. 3, note 9. }~ + +The Lessig caucus was clearly struggling with how best to engage with the networked environment. Napster had demonstrated that, in the dawning Internet age, creativity would increasingly be born, distributed, and viewed on the Web; print and mass media would be secondary venues. For a society still deeply rooted in print and mass media, this was a difficult concept to grasp. But Michael Carroll, the Washington lawyer who had earlier vetted the conservancy’s liability issues, shrewdly saw network dynamics as a potentially powerful tool for building new types of digital commons. In 2001, he had noticed how a bit of Internet folk art had become an overnight sensation. Mike Collins, an amateur cartoonist from Elmira, New York, had posted the cartoon below on Taterbrains, a Web site.~{ http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/funnypictures/ig/100-Funny-Pictures/Confusing-Florida-Ballot.htm. }~ The image suddenly rocketed throughout the cyberlandscape. Everyone was copying it and sharing it with friends. +={ Carroll, Michael W. +4 ; + Collins, Mike +4 ; + Napster +} + +{ vs_db_1.png }http://viralspiral.cc/ + +% group{ +% +% Official Florida Presidential Ballot +% Follow the arrow and Punch the appropriate dot. +% +% Bush Buchanan Gore Nadar +% (c) 2000 Mike Collins, Taterbrains.com +% +% }group + +Carroll observed: + +_1 [Collins] distributed his design initially without a motive to profit from it. But the scale of distribution surpassed what he imagined, and in a subsequent interview he expressed some resentment over those who had made money from T-shirts and other paraphernalia using his design. But he appears to have taken no actions to enforce his copyright, the notice notwithstanding. Copyright lawyers would consider the unlicensed distribution of this work “leakage” — that is, a violation of law but not worth pursuing. + +_1 But if we could take steps to make it cheap, easy and desirable for the Mike Collinses of the world to stick a CC tag on something like this before sending it out, “leakage” becomes legal, changing the terms of the debate.~{ E-mail from Michael Carroll to Molly Van Houweling and Larry Lessig, October 15, 2001. }~ + +CC tags could make nonproprietary culture the default, reversing the presumption of copyright law. Everyone agreed with this general approach, but implementing it was rife with difficult questions. As Saltzman recalled: “What kind of relationship did we want to encourage between the creator/licensor and the user? Should it be totally automated? Should it invite some back-and-forth? Should there be a requirement that licensors provide contact information?”~{ Interview with Eric Saltzman, April 11, 2006. }~ The General Public License for software had shown the feasibility of a license for safeguarding a commons of shared code. Could it work in other creative sectors? It would be critical to strike the right balance. As law student Chris Babbitt put it, “Too little protection for the donor’s interests and no one will donate; too little room for the users to use the work, and the service is useless.”~{ “Briefing Book,” p. 12. }~ +={ Babbitt, Chris ; + Saltzman, Eric ; + General Public License (GPL) : + legal enforceability of +} + +If there were going to be several licenses, the next question was how many, and of what sort? There are many different types of creativity, after all. Should each one have its own set of special licenses? The Berkman conclave agreed that there should be a publicdomain license enabling creators to grant a nonexclusive, royaltyfree license on their works, without the viral conditions of the GPL. As for other licenses, five ideas were put on the table for consideration: a license authorizing free reuses of a work so long as proper attribution is given to the author; a license authorizing noncommercial uses; and a license authorizing free reuses but prohibiting derivative uses. Other suggestions included a license authorizing academic uses only and a “timed donations” license, which would allow an artist to revoke a work from the commons after a stipulated number of years.~{ Ibid. }~ Neither of these two licenses gained support from the group. + +There were also lots of open questions about how to structure the specific terms of the licenses. Should they be perpetual? Will the licensor be liable for “downstream” uses of a work that are deemed an infringement? Will licensors be required to identify themselves? Should licensors be able to add their own separate warranties and representations? Crafting the licenses meant going beyond the abstract rhetoric of the commons. These licenses had to be serious, operational legal instruments that courts would recognize as valid. + +Another concern was making the new CC licenses compatible with existing licenses seeking similar goals. MIT had produced the first such license for its OpenCourseWare initiative, which allows Internet users to use the university’s curricula and syllabi (see chapter 12). To ensure that CC- and MIT-licensed content would be compatible, the CC lawyers deliberately wrote a license that would meet MIT’s needs. Another license, the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), was being used on Wikipedia, among other online sites. But the FDL, originally intended for software documentation materials, was incompatible with the CC licenses. Stallman refused to alter the FDL, and Wikpedia was already under way and committed to the FDL. This quirk of history meant that Wikipedia content and CC-licensed content could not legally be combined. As we will see in chapter 9, this was the beginning of a rancorous schism in the free culture world, and the beginning of a heated philosophical/ political debate over which licenses truly promote “freedom.” +={ ree Documentation License ; + GNU Project : + GNU FDL ; + Stallman, Richard : + GNU Project, and ; + Wikipedia : + GNU FDL, and +} + +As this overview suggests, licensing complexities can quickly soar out of control and become overwhelming. Yet the very point of the Creative Commons licenses was to simplify the sharing and reuse of digital material. CC planners wanted to help ordinary people bypass the layers of mind-numbing legalese that make copyright law so impenetrable and inaccessible. The Creative Commons was all about empowering individuals and avoiding lawyers. A proliferation of licensing choices would only lead to license incompatibilities, a Balkanization of content on the Internet, and more lawyers. Sharing and interoperability go together, as Stallman’s early experiences with his Emacs Commune showed. +={ Emacs ; + Stallman, Richard : + Emacs, and +} + +Somehow, therefore, the licenses had to thread three needles at once. They needed to align (1) the technical dynamics of the Internet with (2) the legal realities of copyright law and (3) the everyday needs of people. The ingenious solution was to create licenses on three layers: a “lawyer-readable” license that could stand up in court, a “human-readable” license that could be understood by ordinary people, and a “machine-readable” license that could be recognized by search engines and other software on the Internet. Each “layer” expressed the same license terms in a different way — an unexpected twist on Lessig’s concern for “fidelity in translation.” The formal license was called the “Legal Code” (or “legal source code”); the machine-readable translation of the license was called “Digital Code”; and the plain-language summary of the license, with corresponding icons, was the “Commons Deed” (or the “happy deed”). + +2~ Branding the Public Domain in Code +={ code : + branding the public domain in +8 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + code, and +8 ; + public domain : + branding of +8 +} + +As the lawyers brooded and debated the licensing terms, another complicated debate was unfolding on the tech side of CC: how to brand the public domain in software code. If code is law, then it was imperative for Creative Commons to find some way to represent CC licenses in digital code. Abelson, Lessig, and others understood that the future of the Internet was likely to include all sorts of automated, computer-to-computer functions. One of the best ways to promote a new body of “free content” on the Web, therefore, would be to develop machine-readable code that could be inserted into any digital artifact using a Creative Commons license. That way, search engines could more easily identify CC-licensed works by their terms of use, and help assemble a functionally accessible oeuvre of digital content that was free to use. +={ code : + law, as ; + law : + code as +1 ; + Abelson, Hal : + CC licensing, and ; + Internet : + freedom of ; + Internet : + future of ; + Lessig, LawrenceCC licenses, and ; + World Wide Web : + free content on +} + +At this time, in 2001, the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, and others at the World Wide Web Consortium, based at MIT, were trying to conceptualize the protocols for a new “logical layer” of code on top of the World Wide Web. They called it the Semantic Web. The idea is to enable people to identify and retrieve information that is strewn across the Internet but not readily located through conventional computer searches. Through a software format known as RDF/XML,~[* RDF, or Resource Description Framework, is a way to make a statement about content in a digital artifact. XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a way to write a specialized document format to send across the Web, in which certain content can be marked up, or emphasized, so that other computers can “read” it.]~ digital content could be tagged with machine-readable statements that would in effect say, “This database contains information about x and y.” Through Semantic Web protocols and metatags on content, it would be possible to conduct searches across many types of digital content — Web pages, databases, software programs, even digital sensors — that could yield highly specific and useful results. +={ Berners-Lee, Tim ; + Semantic Web +6 ; + World Wide Web : + Semantic Web +6 | protocols for +6 ; + RDF/XML +} + +Unfortunately, progress in developing the Semantic Web has been bogged down in years of technical disagreement and indifference among the larger Web community. Some critics argue that the project has stalled because it was being driven by a small corps of elite software theorists focused on databases, and not by a wider pool of decentralized Web practitioners. In any case, the Creative Commons became one of the first test cases of trying to implement RDF/XML for the Semantic Web.~{ For background, see “The Semantic Web: An Introduction,” at http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro; Aaron Swartz and James Hendler, “The Semantic Web: A Network of Content for the Digital City,” at http://blogspace.com/rdf/SwartzHendler; and John Markoff, “Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense,” /{New York Times}/, November 12, 2006. }~ The project was led initially by Lisa Rein, a thirty-three-year-old data modeler who met Lessig at an O’Reilly open-source software conference. Lessig hired her as CC’s first technical director in late 2001 to embed the CC legal licenses in machine-readable formats. +={ Rein, Lisa +2 ; + Swartz, Aaron ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +} + +Writing the XML code was not so difficult, said Rein; the real challenge was “deciding what needed to be included and how you represent the licenses as simply as possible.”~{ Interview with Lisa Rein, December 20, 2006. }~ This required the lawyers and the techies to have intense dialogues about how the law should be faithfully translated into software code, and vice versa. Once again, there were complicated problems to sort through: Should there be a central database of CC-licensed content? How could machine-readable code be adapted if the legal licenses were later modified? + +Rein got an unexpected assist in the project from programming whiz Aaron Swartz, who had heard about Creative Commons and volunteered to help write the RDF/XML code. Swartz was an esteemed member of the RDF core working group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and so was intimately involved in Semantic Web deliberations. He was also a fifteen-year-old junior high school student living with his parents in Chicago. “I remember these moments when I was sitting in the locker room, typing on my laptop, in these [W3C] debates, and having to close it because the bell rang and I had to get back to class,” Swartz recalled. At CC, he was given the title of “Volunteer Metadata Coordinator.” His job was “to design the RDF schema and what the XML documents would look like, and work that out with my friends at the W3C and get their approval on things.”~{ Interview with Aaron Swartz, October 10, 2006. }~ For his troubles, Swartz received an in-kind donation of a laptop computer and travel expenses, rather than a salary. “At the time, I felt bad,” said Swartz. “They were a nonprofit doing work I believe in. I didn’t feel I should be taking their money when I didn’t need it.” With later help from Ben Adida, the CC team managed to develop an RDF that could attach CC licenses to Web pages. But since the Semantic Web protocols were still in flux, and not widely used, the effort amounted to a speculative gamble on future and widespread adoption of those protocols. +={ RDF/XML +3 ; + Adida, Ben ; + Swartz, Aaron ; + World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ; + Internet : + future of | protocols of +3 +} + +Although inspired by the Semantic Web and by Lessig’s analysis in /{Code}/, the RDF/XML coding was also provoked by the growing specter of digital rights management (DRM), the reviled systems used by film and music companies to lock up their content. The Creative Commons dreamed of developing an “anti-DRM” code to express the idea, “This content is and shall remain free.” Professor Hal Abelson remembered that “we even used the phrase, ‘DRM of the public domain.’”~{ Interview with Hal Abelson, April 14, 2007. }~ The coinage that Lessig later popularized is “digital rights expression” — metadata that indicate that a digital object can be shared and reused. There was a passing fear that CC’s digital rights expression code might infringe on DRM patents; one company known for its aggressive patent defense raised concerns. But once it was made clear that the CC’s RDF code amounted to a label, and did not execute online rights on a person’s computer, the problem disappeared. +={ Abelson, Hal : + digital rights management, and ; + digital rights management (DRM) ; + copyright law : + digital age, in ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +} + +The machine-readable CC licenses were one of the first major buildouts of RDF protocols. Swartz ruefully recalled the reaction of his friends at W3C: “I got the sense that they thought it was sort of a silly project, that they were thinking about bigger and longer-term things.” Adida, who later replaced Swartz as the CC representative at the W3C, played a major role in helping develop the metatags and protocols. +={ Adida, Ben ; + Swartz, Aaron +1 +} + +The RDF/XML coding was part of a larger CC strategy to brand the public domain via software code. Since RDF code alone is like a nail without a hammer, Creative Commons decided to develop a specialized search engine so that Internet users could locate CC-licensed content. Without such a search engine, Lessig said in April 2002, “there will be no way to demonstrate that we’ve produced anything useful.”~{ E-mail from Lawrence Lessig to Hal Abelson, April 22, 2002. }~ Swartz, who was not involved in the project, said, “I was impressed that they did it, because it was probably the biggest programming job I’d seen them do at the time.” In the meantime, the CC began a series of overtures to Google and Yahoo in an attempt to get their search engines to search for CC-licensed content. After years of lukewarm interest, both Google and Yahoo added CC-search capabilities in 2005. Creative Commons also nurtured the hope that once enough content contained CC metadata, software developers would develop new applications to let people browse, use, and distribute CC-tagged content. +={ Google ; + Yahoo ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +} + +2~ The Action Shifts to Palo Alto +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + evolution of +31 +} + +By the fall of 2001, Creative Commons was still an idea without definition. The project gained new momentum in September 2001 when Lessig hired a former student, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, to be the first director of the organization. Van Houweling, a sophisticated yet plainspoken law scholar with strong executive skills, had just finished clerking for Supreme Court justice David Souter. She set about incorporating the Creative Commons, organizing the board, building a Web site, and hammering out final versions of the licenses. +={ Souter, David ; + Van Houweling, Molly Shaffer +5 +} + +Once a key foundation grant was secured — $1 million from the Center for the Public Domain — the Creative Commons was incorporated in Massachusetts (home to many key backers of the project) on December 21, 2001. The first board members included several legal scholars (Boyle, Carroll, Lessig), a computer scientist (Abelson), two filmmakers (Saltzman and Davis Guggenheim, a friend of Lessig’s), and a Web publisher (Eldred). Charged with breathing life into a fragile idea, Van Houweling settled into a small office on the third floor of Stanford Law School (before the project was reassigned to basement offices). +={ Abelson, Hal ; + Boyle, James : + CC board, on | CC formation, and ; + Carroll, Michael W. ; + Center for Public Domain ; + public domain : + Center for Public Domain ; + Saltzman, Eric ; + Eldred, Eric : + Creative Commons, and ; + Guggenheim, Davis +} + +In January 2002, Glenn Otis Brown, a lawyer and former student of Lessig’s, was hired as assistant director. Brown had been a law student at Harvard Law School, where he had known Van Houweling and taken a constitutional law course from Lessig. An affable Texan who had flirted with a journalism career, Brown had just finished a year of clerking for a circuit court judge. He was due to start a job in New York City the following week when he got a call from Van Houweling. “She and Larry were starting something to do with copyright at Stanford,” recalled Brown. “I knew pretty much nothing else about it except it was a nonprofit and it was going to be a fulltime job. . . . The next thing I knew, I was moving to California.”~{ Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, June 9, 2006. }~ +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC formation, and +1 +} + +Lessig, Van Houweling, and Brown took the menu of licenses proposed by two graduate students, Dotan Oliar and Oren Bracha, and sought to refine them and make them as legally bulletproof as possible.~{ Oren Bracha and Dotan Oliar, “Memo: Presentation of Two Possible Creative Commons Layer 1 Architectures,” October 1, 2001. }~ They were torn about the process to adopt. “We didn’t want to do a collective drafting process with the entire Internet community,” said Van Houweling. “That didn’t seem practical. And yet we were a little nervous, I think, about not knowing what our potential user base would want to use.” Lessig was unfazed. Release of the licenses “isn’t going to be like a movie premiere,” he told Van Houweling, but more of an evolutionary process. The idea was to get the licenses in circulation, monitor their progress, and make changes as necessary.~{ Interview with Molly Van Houweling, March 21, 2006. }~ +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +1 ; + Bracha, Oren ; + Oliar, Dotan ; + Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC licensing, and +} + +Two of the most prestigious law firms in Silicon Valley, Cooley Godward Kronish and Wilson, Sonsini, offered pro bono legal assistance to the effort. Attorney John Brockland, an expert in opensource software licenses at Cooley Godward and a former student of Lessig’s, was the architect of the final licenses, assisted by Catherine Kirkman, a licensing attorney at Wilson, Sonsini. Brockland recalled, “One of the drafting challenges was to write something that could be broadly useful across a wide range of copyrighted works and would not be tied to particular nuances of the way the copyright statute works.”~{ Interview with John Brockland, January 5, 2007. }~ Most copyright licenses are drafted for specific clients and particular circumstances, not for the general public and all types of copyrighted works. +={ Brockland, John ; + Cooley Godward Kronish ; + Kirkman, Catherine ; + Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati ; + copyright law : + licenses for ; + open source software : + legal implications of +} + +Much of the discussion, said Van Houweling, “revolved around the values that we wanted to embed in the licenses, and what were the outer limits of those values?” Ultimately, she said, “we opted for a menu of licenses that was weighted toward the nonproprietary [content]. . . . We wanted to subsidize a certain set of choices that are otherwise underserved.”~{ Interview with Molly Van Houweling, March 21, 2006.}~ The point was to facilitate the rise of a sharing culture, after all, not to replicate the baroque dysfunctions of copyright law. +={ copyright law : + purpose of +} + +Since the CC licenses were trying to articulate a new “middle ground” of voluntary choices for sharing, it had to grapple with all sorts of fine legal complexities. How exactly should they define a derivative work? What should be considered a noncommercial reuse of a work? Can you dedicate a work to the public domain? + +Some artists felt that they ought to be able to prohibit derivative uses of their works in pornography or hate speech. Hal Abelson adamantly disagreed. If the licenses had an “offensive uses” clause, as either a standard or optional term, it would open up a can of worms and put Creative Commons on the side of censors. That view readily prevailed. +={ Abelson, Hal } + +A primary concern was anticipating how the licenses might be interpreted by the courts. Wendy Seltzer was worried that the CC licenses might become entangled with court cases involving the fair use doctrine. She wanted to make sure that the CC licenses were not seen as limiting or waiving a person’s fair use rights in any way. Her concern, shared by many others, resulted in an explicit disclaimer stating that intention. “I’m really glad that we did that,” recalled Glenn Brown, then the assistant director of CC, “because we ended up pointing to that over and over and over again — to make clear that this was something that went above and beyond fair use.”~{ Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, June 9, 2007. }~ +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + fair use, and ; + Seltzer, Wendy ; + fair use doctrine : + CC licenses, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + fair use, and +} + +To ensure that the licenses would be enforceable, the CC lawyers built on the same legal base as the GPL; the licenses were crafted not as contracts, but as conditional permissions based on copyright law. A contract requires that the licensee have the opportunity to accept or reject the terms of an agreement, which would not be the case here. A conditional permission, by contrast, is the legal prerogative of a copyright holder. She is simply offering advance permission to use a CC-licensed work (to share, modify, distribute, etc.) so long as the specified terms are respected. +={ General Public License (GPL) : + legal enforceability of ; + copyright law : + conditional permission license | enforceability of | CC licenses, and +21 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + copyright law, and +21 | version 1.0 of +21 | enforceability of +} + +Countless lawyerly refinements of a very technical nature were made to the licenses to ensure that they would be specific as needed, vague enough to be versatile, and rigorous enough to survive a court’s scrutiny.~{ The lawyers also wrestled with a host of imponderables that had no obvious answers, such as: What if people started spoofing the licenses by using them in inappropriate ways? Should the Creative Commons establish a central registry for CC-licensed works as a way to ensure the credibility of the project? (After long debate, the idea was ultimately rejected.) Would the Creative Commons be held liable for contributory negligence if someone used a CC license on a copyrighted song? (The CC took its chances.) Would the Creative Commons lose its trademark if it allowed anyone to use its trademarked logo? (Several lawyers warned that CC licensing of its trademark could not be properly policed.) Glenn Otis Brown worried that the board might be sued for facilitating the unauthorized practice of law. “I don’t know how long I spent calling up different insurance brokers trying to get a quote,” he recalled. “People had no idea what I was talking about. We ended up going all the way to Lloyd’s of London to ask them,” said Brown, laughing. “They wrote back and said, ‘You can’t insure that.’ ” }~ + +The first set of licenses, version 1.0, was completed in the spring of 2002 and included eleven choices. The six basic licenses, listed here in order of least restrictive to most restrictive, included: +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + types of +12 +} + +!_ Attribution (BY). +Authorizes free reuses (download, distribution, modifications, commercial uses, etc.) so long as the author is credited for the original creation. + +!_ ShareAlike (SA). +Authorizes free reuses so long as credit is given and the new work is licensed under the same terms. + +!_ No Derivatives (ND). +Authorizes free reuses so long as the new work is unchanged and in whole. + +!_ NonCommercial (NC). +Authorizes free reuses so long as they are not commercial in nature. + +!_ NonCommercial ShareAlike (NC-SA). +Requires free reuses so long as the new work is passed along on the identical terms as the original work (so, for example, works that use a NonCommercial ShareAlike work will also have to be distributed as NonCommercial ShareAlike works). + +!_ NonCommercial No Derivatives (NC-ND). +Authorizes free reuses so long as credit is given, no changes are made, the work is kept intact, and it is not used commercially. This is the most restrictive CC license. + +Because each of these six basic choices can be combined with other CC licenses, copyright holders had five additional choices: + +!_ Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA). +Authorizes free reuses so long as the author is credited and the new work is licensed under the same terms. + +!_ Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC). +Authorizes free reuses so long as the author is credited and the new work is used for noncommercial purposes. + +!_ Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NCSA). +Authorizes free reuses so long as the author is credited, the new work is used for noncommercial purposes, and the new work is passed along using this same license. + +!_ Attribution-No Derivatives (BY-ND). +Authorizes free reuses so long as the author is credited and the new work is unchanged and in whole. + +!_ Attribution No Derivatives-ShareAlike (BY-ND-SA). +Authorizes free reuses so long as the author is credited, the new work is unchanged and in whole, and the new work is passed along using this same license. + +It soon became clear that very few people were choosing any of the five licenses that did not require attribution of the author (the SA, ND, NC, NC-SA, and NC-ND licenses). So in May 2004 Creative Commons decided to “retire” those licenses, leaving the six most commonly used ones today (BY, BY-SA, BY-NC, BY-NC-SA, BY-ND, and BY-ND-SA). + +Still another choice was offered to copyright holders, a “public domain dedication,” which is not a license so much as “an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity” of any rights in the work. The public domain dedication places no restrictions whatsoever on subsequent reuses of the work. +={ public domain dedication } + +To the first-time user, the licenses may seem a little daunting.~{ A FAQ at the Creative Commons Web site answers the most frequent user questions about the licenses. It is available at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/. }~ The full implications of using one or another license are not immediately obvious. The tagline for the licenses, “Some Rights Reserved,” while catchy, was not really self-explanatory. This became the next big challenge to Creative Commons, as we see in chapter 6: how to educate creators about a solution when they may not have realized they even had a problem. + +By December 2002, the three levels of code — legal, digital, and human — had been coordinated and finalized as version 1.0. The organization was set to go public, which it did at a splashy coming-out party in San Francisco. The gala featured appearances by the likes of rapper DJ Spooky (an ardent advocate for remix culture) and a London multimedia jam group, People Like Us. Lessig proudly introduced the licenses as “delivering on our vision of promoting the innovative reuse of all types of intellectual works, unlocking the potential of sharing and transforming others’ work.”~{ http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/3476. }~ +={ DJ Spooky ; + People Like Us ; + code : + levels of ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +2 +} + +Perhaps the biggest surprise was a set of video testimonials from both ends of the copyright spectrum — John Perry Barlow of Electronic Frontier Foundation and Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America. With uncharacteristic solemnity, Barlow said: “I personally think there is something deeply oxymoronic about the term ‘intellectual property.’ But as long as we have set up a huge matrix of laws and social understandings that traffic in that assumption, we have to meet the conditions as we have found them and use what exists to preserve the human patrimony.” The silvermaned Valenti saluted the “Lessig compact” that is both “respectful of, and supports, copyright” while allowing people “to give up some of their copyrighted material, or all of it, and put it on the creative commons for others to view it or hear it.” “Larry, I hope that my supporting you in this doesn’t ruin your reputation,” Valenti joked.~{ See http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/cc-barlow-valenti.mov. }~ +={ Barlow, John Perry ; + Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ; + Valenti, Jack +1 +} + +Many copyfighters were not thrilled to have an arch-adversary like Valenti praise their efforts at their moment of triumph. Yet that was a deliberate part of Lessig’s strategy: to assert a politically neutral middle ground from which to remake the social landscape of creativity. The question raised in some people’s mind was whether something so politically unassailable could have significant impact. Still others saw it as a welcome base upon which to build a new sharing economy. + +The CC launch party can be seen as a watershed moment in the struggle to protect the public domain. It announced a novel gambit to transcend the political impasse over copyright reform, a way to address copyright abuses without getting embroiled in a pitched and unwinnable confrontation. It legitimized all sorts of activities that had historically been seen as morally problematic, if not illegal. While building on the idea of the public domain developed over the preceding twenty years, Creative Commons inaugurated a new story about the commons, creativity, and the value of sharing. Watching the rocking party and savoring the hard work completed, Glenn Brown remembers a friend musing to him, “I wonder if we’ll see another legal hack like this in our careers.” +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + launch of | public domain, and ; + public domain : + CC licenses, and +} + +1~ 5 NAVIGATING THE GREAT VALUE SHIFT + +/{Amateurs discover new tools for creating value: open networks and self-organized commons.}/ + +“It was never really clear to me what was going to happen after we launched the licenses,” recalled Glenn Otis Brown. “Would our work be done?” The intense push to craft the licenses and release them now over, Brown and his colleagues were only too happy to ease up in their work. (Van Houweling had left in 2002 to teach law; she is now at the University of California at Berkeley.) Despite his enthusiasm for the licenses, Brown had his private doubts about their future success. “To be honest, I was pretty scared,” he said. “I was worried they were going to go nowhere, and that I was going to be blamed for that.”~{ Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, August 10, 2006. }~ +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC licensing, and +1 ; + Van Houweling, Molly Shaffer ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + evolution of +10 +} + +In January 2003, a month after the CC licenses were announced, however, the project took on a new urgency. The Supreme Court handed down its /{Eldred}/ ruling, sending a clear signal that the courts were not much interested in reforming copyright law. Soon after this crushing disappointment, Lessig began to intensify his focus on the Creative Commons. “The pressure really increased,” said Brown, “but that’s also when things started to get a lot more fun. That’s when the staff started working on things /{all the time}/ and we got a stable, permanent staff, instead of contractors.” +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + Copyright’s Commons, and | Supreme Court, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +9 +} + +What began as a modest licensing experiment began to take on the character of a permanent campaign. Working from the themes in /{The Future of Ideas}/, Lessig came to see the Creative Commons as more than a nonprofit custodian of some free public licenses; it was a champion for a bracing new vision of culture. This broader orientation meant reaching out to various creative sectors and the general public with messages that were both practical (“here’s how to use the licenses”) and idealistic (“you, too, can build a better world”). +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + The Future of Ideas ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + function of +5 | social movement, as +5 +} + +The band of enterprising law scholars and techies who once saw their challenge as one of bolstering the public domain began to widen their gaze to the vast world of creativity and democratic culture. Social practice, not theory, became the animating force in their work. + +This meant reaching out to writers, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, librarians, academics, and other creators. All faced worrisome threats to their freedoms in the digital environment, as we saw in chapter 2. Lessig and the small Creative Commons staff made it their job to speak to these threats, promote the licenses, and set forth an alternative to the corporate media’s vision of culture. + +“Our single, overarching aim,” said Lessig in December 2002, “is to build the public domain, by building projects that expand the range of creative work available for others to build upon.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons press release, December 19, 2002; “CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on How It All Began” [weekly e-mail series], October 12, 2005. }~ In an attempt to credential the licenses, the Creative Commons touted endorsements by a number of educational institutions (MIT, Rice University, Stanford Law School), public-spirited tech enterprises (iBiblio, the Internet Archive, O’Reilly & Associates), and venturesome musicians (DJ Spooky, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds). +={ DJ Spooky ; + McGuinn, Roger ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + public domain, and ; + public domain : + CC licenses, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + public domain, and +} + +As if by spontaneous replication, people from far-flung corners of the Internet began to use the licenses on their blogs, their MP3 music files, their photographs, their books. Week after week, the Creative Commons’s blog trumpeted the new recruits — the blog for book designers (Foreword), the database of metadata about music (MusicBrainz), the online storytelling Web site (Fray), the 2004 presidential campaign of Dennis Kucinich. +={ Kucinich, Dennis } + +But the larger challenge for Creative Commons was finding ways to reach new constituencies who knew little about technology or copyright law. Why should they bother to use a CC license? This was a major public education challenge. Besides appearing at many conferences and cultivating press coverage, Glenn Brown spent a lot of time developing a Web site that could explain the licenses clearly. Great pains were taken to develop a precise, intuitive user interface to help people learn about the licenses and choose the right one for them. Copyright law was complicated enough; the CC licenses had to be seen as a simple alternative. +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC licensing, and +1 ; + copyright law : + licenses, and +3 +} + +Advertisers have plenty of trouble communicating the virtues of mouthwash in a crowded public sphere. Could something as dry and forbidding as copyright law ever be made lucid and even hip? Although not a trained marketer, Glenn Brown had a knack for communicating things simply.Working with graphic designer Ryan Junell and Web designer Matt Haughey, Brown developed a site that combined a certain institutional authority with contemporary pizzazz. This style was on abundant display in a series of jaunty and entertaining Flash animations that explained the rationale for Creative Commons. +={ Haughey, Matt ; + Junell, Ryan +1 +} + +Junell designed the now-familiar CC logo as a deliberate counterpoint to the copyright logo, ©. “I thought that Creative Commons should have something like the copyright logo since it deals with the same stuff,” said Junell. “It should be something really simple and pure.”~{ Interview with Ryan Junell, September 23, 2006. }~ Junell set his sights on making the CC logo a standard, ubiquitous symbol. He hoped that it would eventually be incorporated into the Unicode, an international registry for every character in any language used in software, from % to ∆ to ≠. +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + logo of ; + Unicode +} + +In promoting its licenses, Creative Commons fashioned itself as a neutral, respectable defender of individual choice. “Our tools are just that — tools,” said Haughey, who was then developing the CC Web site. “Our model intentionally depends on copyright holders to take responsibility for how they use those tools. Or how they don’t use them: If you’re unsure and want to keep your full copyright, fine. If you choose to allow others to re-use your work, great.”~{ Matthew Haughey, “Blogging in the Public Domain,” Creative Commons blog post, February 5, 2003, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3601. }~ While many CC users were enthusiastically bashing copyright law, Lessig and the CC staff made it a point to defend the basic principles of copyright law — while extolling the value of collaborative creativity and sharing under CC licenses. +={ Haughey, Matt } + +Despite praise by the heads of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, the licenses nonetheless did attract critics. Some in the music industry regarded the licenses as a Trojan horse that would dupe unsuspecting artists. David Israelite, president and CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association, told /{Billboard}/, “My concern is that many who support Creative Commons also support a point of view that would take away people’s choices about what to do with their own property.”~{ Susan Butler, “Movement to Share Creative Works Raises Concerns in Music Circles,” /{Billboard}/, May 28, 2005.}~ /{Billboard}/ went on to cite the cautionary tale of a songwriter who was being kept alive by his AIDS medications, thanks to the royalties from a highly successful song. “No one should let artists give up their rights,” said Andy Fraser of the rock group Free. Other critics, such as John Dvorak of /{PC Magazine}/, called the CC licenses “humbug” and accused them of adding “some artificial paperwork and complexity to the mechanism [of copyright],” while weakening the rights that an author would otherwise enjoy.~{ John C. Dvorak, “Creative Commons Humbug: This Scheme Doesn’t Seem to Benefit the Public,” PC Magazine, July 28, 2005. }~ Still others had cultural scores to settle and criticized “anything advocated by clever, sleek young lawyers.”~{ Researchers at the Economic Observatory of the University of Openness, “Commercial Commons,” on the online journal /{Metamute}/, at http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/Commercial-Commons. }~ +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + critics of ; + sraelite, David ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) ; + Dvorak, John ; + Fraser, Andy +} + +Putting aside such quibbles and prejudices, the CC licenses seemed a benign enough idea. Given its reliance on copyright law, how could any entertainment lawyer object? Yet the real significance of the licenses was only appreciated by those who realized that a Great Value Shift was kicking in. For them, the licenses were a useful legal tool and cultural flag for building a new sharing economy. +={ Great Value Shift } + +2~ The Great Value Shift +={ Great Value Shift +9 ; + Inernet : + Great Value Shift, and +9 +} + +In retrospect, the CC licenses could not have been launched at a more propitious moment. Networked culture was exploding in 2003. Broadband was rapidly supplanting dial-up Internet access, enabling users to navigate the Web and share information at much faster speeds. Prices for personal computers were dropping even as computing speeds and memory capacity were soaring. Sophisticated new software applications were enabling users to collaborate in more powerful, user-friendly ways. The infrastructure for sharing was reaching a flashpoint. + +Put another way, the original promise of the Internet as a gift economy was coming into its own. Originally built as a platform for efficient sharing among academic researchers, the Internet by 2003 was being used by some 600 million people worldwide.~{ Nielsen/Net Ratings estimated 585 million Internet users in 2002; the International Telecommunications Union estimated 665 million. See http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/proiects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm. }~ The open framework for sharing was no longer just a plaything of technophiles and academics; it was now insinuated into most significant corners of the economy and social life. As it scaled and grew new muscles and limbs, the Internet began to radically change the ways in which wealth is generated and allocated. +={ Internet : + gift economy of +1 +} + +I call this the Great Value Shift — a deep structural change in how valuable things are created for commerce and culture. The shift is not only a fundamental shift in business strategy and organizational behavior, but in the very definition of wealth. On the Internet, wealth is not just financial wealth, nor is it necessarily privately held. Wealth generated through open platforms is often /{socially created value}/ that is shared, evolving, and nonmonetized. It hovers in the air, so to speak, accessible to everyone. +={ Internet : + socially created value of +1 ; + value : + creation of +} + +Creative Commons had the good fortune to introduce its licenses just as the Great Value Shift was picking up momentum. The types of distributed innovation first seen in free software were now popping up in every imaginable corner of cyberspace. The social content was not just about listservs and newsgroups, but instant messaging networks, Web logs, podcasts, wikis, social networking sites, collaborative archives, online gaming communities, and much else. +={ free software : + Great Value Shift, and +} + +“What we are seeing now,” wrote Yochai Benkler in his book, /{The Wealth of Networks}/, “is the emergence of more effective collective action practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the price system or a managerial structure for coordination.” Benkler’s preferred term is “commons-based peer production.” By that, he means systems that are collaborative and non-proprietary, and based on “sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other.”~{ Yochai Benkler, /{The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom}/ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 60. }~ +={ Benkler, Yochai : + The Wealth of Networks +1 ; + commoners : + sharing by ; + commons-based peer production +} + +Informal social relationships, working in the unregimented, free space of open platforms, were beginning to change economic production and culture. “Behaviors that were once on the periphery— social motivations, cooperation, friendship, decency — move to the very core of economic life,” Benkler argued.~{ Benkler at the iCommons Summit, Dubrovnik, Croatia, June 15, 2007. }~ Money and markets do not necessarily control the circulation of creativity; increasingly, online communities — large numbers of people interacting with one another on open platforms — are the engines that create value. + +The CC licenses were launched at a moment when the new modes of value creation were just gaining a foothold. + +We do not yet have well-accepted theoretical models for understanding this new “socioeconomic space”; the online environments are still so new, and much is still in flux.~{ An excellent overview of these new spaces is Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, /{Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything}/ (New York: Portfolio, 2006). }~ But it has not escaped the notice of major corporations that online social dynamics can result in some radically more effective models for organizing employees and engaging with customers. A /{BusinessWeek}/ cover story touted “The Power of Us” in June 2005, profiling the ways in which companies like Procter & Gamble use mass collaboration for R&D; Hewlett-Packard had created a virtual stock market among its staff to gather collective estimates that have improved sales forecasts.~{ Robert D. Hof, “The Power of Us: Mass Collaboration on the Internet Is Shaking Up Business,” /{BusinessWeek}/, June 20, 2005, pp. 73–82. }~ The /{Economist}/ has written about the “fortune of the commons” that can result when there are open technical standards, and business professors such as Henry Chesbrough have examined new “open business models.”~{ “The Fortune of the Commons,” Economist, May 8, 2003; Henry Chesbrough, /{Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2006). }~ +={ Chesbrough, Henry ; + Hewlett-Packard ; + Procter & Gamble +} + +Before looking at the many creative sectors that have adopted the CC licenses — the focus of chapter 6 — it helps to understand the Great Value Shift that open networks have catalyzed. In one market after another, open networks have helped new competitors slash all sorts of business costs while enhancing their capacity to innovate and respond to changing consumer demand. Open networks have also given rise to new types of social platforms on the Web, often known as Web 2.0, which are making it economically attractive to serve niche markets. This is the so-called Long Tail. Yet even these sweeping changes in market structure are facing a qualitatively different kind of competition — from the commons sector. It turns out that informal online communities based on trust, reciprocity, and shared social norms can perform a great many tasks more efficiently than markets, and with some measure of social pleasure and fun. +={ Long Tail ; + Web 2.0 : + Great Value Shift, and +} + +2~ The Endangered Economics of Centralized Media +={ Centralized Media +7 ; + media : + See also Centralized Media +} + +The dominant systems of communications in the twentieth century — radio, broadcast and cable television, recorded music, theatrical film — required large amounts of centralized capital, corporate management, and professional control. These media have very different business models and practices, but they all rely upon centralized control of capital and distribution to large, fairly undifferentiated audiences. Each depends upon efficiencies derived from high-volume sales and a limited spectrum of commercial choices. + +Centralized Media also dictate certain economic and social identities for people. There are “sellers,” who are the prime source of expertise, innovation, and production, and there are “consumers,” who passively buy, or don’t buy, what is offered. Sellers mostly determine what choices are offered to buyers, and they tend to have greater market power and information than consumers. Interactions between sellers and consumers are mostly brief and transactional; there is little ongoing conversation or relationship between seller and buyer. + +Much of the strength of the Centralized Media derives from its control of critical “choke points” of product development and distribution. By controlling the technical standards for a product, its retail distribution or its brand identity, a company can maximize its competitive advantages and limit competition. The high concentration of capital needed to communicate through a Centralized Media outlet is itself a useful way to limit competition. No surprise that only large, publicly traded corporations and rich individuals own and control Centralized Media — and that their messages tend to be overtly commercial or commercial-friendly. +={ Centralized Media : + choke points of | competition, and +4 +} + +While this paradigm is obviously quite attractive for those investors with a piece of the action, it also entails some very large costs that are not readily evident. Companies have to spend a lot on advertising to build a brand identity that can enhance sales. Their “blockbuster” business model entails large upfront costs in order to reap large financial returns. Centralized Media require expensive systems for finding, recruiting, and developing stars; an elaborate marketing apparatus to find and retain customers; and legal and technological means to identify and prosecute “piracy” of creative works. +={ Centralized Media : + piracy, and ; + piracy +} + +In a more static environment, this model worked fairly well. But as the Internet revolution proceeded in the 2000s, distributed media started to undercut the economic logic of Centralized Media. Your personal computer, connected to other computers via inexpensive telecommunications and software, can do things more cheaply. Distributed online media not only avoid the costly overhead needed by Centralized Media, they can generate dynamic, interactive, and sociable types of communication: /{user-generated content!}/ While this amateur content is wildly variable in quality, it does have this virtue: it is more culturally diverse and authentic than the homogenous, overproduced programming of Centralized Media. And because distributed media are not economically driven to amass large, undifferentiated audiences, the content can be more idiosyncratic, passionate, and, in its own ways, creative. There is no “fifty-seven channels and nothing on” problem. The problem is how to locate what you want from among millions of choices. +={ Centralized Media : + Internet vs. ; + Internet : + Centralized Media vs. +} + +For all these reasons — but mostly because of the economics— conventional media are becoming more vulnerable to the most advanced Internet-based competitors (Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo) as well as to new types of nonmarket social production (e.g., Craigslist, Wikipedia, special-interest affinity groups). We may even be approaching a point at which the historic cost structures and risk management strategies of major media companies are no longer sustainable. Some analysts fret about the long-term viability of American newspapers, whose stock value fell by 42 percent, or $23 billion, between 2005 and 2008. Broadcast and cable television have similar fears. They worry, correctly, that Internet venues are siphoning away “eyeballs” by providing more timely and convenient alternatives. While the amateur videos of YouTube may not have the production quality of NBC, broadcast and cable television cannot ignore an upstart platform that in 2006 was attracting more than 100 million video downloads /{per day}/ and had a market valuation of $1.65 billion when bought by Google that year. No wonder Cable News Network co-hosted a presidential debate with YouTube in 2007; it needed to reassert its cultural relevance. +={ Amazon ; + eBay ; + Google ; + Yahoo ; + Craigslist ; + Wikipedia ; + YouTube +} + +Large media companies are struggling to support some huge financial, administrative, and marketing burdens simply to “tread water” and retain some measure of their customary market dominance. This helps explain why Centralized Media are so keenly focused on influencing Congress and the Federal Communications Commission. They want to lock in competitive advantages through regulation. (Consider the fierce battles over media ownership rules, spectrum allocation policies, anticopying technology mandates such as the “broadcast flag,” new copyright and trademark protections, must-carry rules for cable operators, and on and on.) Centralized Media’s great interest in securing legal and regulatory privileges for themselves suggests their relative weakness and decline. For them, it is easier to chase market advantages through political interventions than through innovation, superior performance, and price. +={ Centralized Media : + ownership rules for ; + media : + ownership of +3 +} + +2~ The Economic Advantages of Open Media +={ Centralized Media : + Internet vs. +7 ; + Internet : + Centralized Media vs. +7 ; + media : + open +7 +} + +By contrast, a profusion of new ventures are finding that a company can thrive on the open networks of the Internet. Even a startup without brand recognition or regulatory preferences can compete on the merits — price, quality, responsiveness — against entrenched giants. They can leverage user-generated content and the vast reservoir of value previously known as the public domain. The success of thousands of new Internet businesses reflects an epochal shift in the terms of competition — a Great Shift in how value is created. +={ Great Value Shift } + +The most significant shifts in the history of capitalism have come when new mechanisms lower the costs of managing risk and serving latent market demand. We are apparently in such a stage of economic transformation today. The genius of the Renaissance banks and the Dutch insurance and shipping companies, for example, was to reinvent the structure of markets through new financial and legal instruments that enabled commercial trust and transparency to work on a larger scale. The limited liability corporation was also a powerful innovation for diversifying risk, coordinating people, and deploying capital on a scale that was previously impossible.~{ I am indebted to my friend John Clippinger for this insight, as explained in his book /{A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity}/ (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), chapter 7, “Transforming Trust: Social Commerce in Renaissance Florence,” pp. 97–114. }~ +={ markets : + restructuring +1 +} + +In like fashion, the Internet is now facilitating some deep shifts in the cost structures and scale of markets. Innovative online business models are significantly undercutting the (expensive) cost structures of traditional Centralized Media, and in the process sometimes creating entirely new sorts of markets (search engine advertising, discounted travel, specialty niches) and more open, competitive markets. +={ Internet : + socially created value of +3 +} + +One of the most intriguing developments is a set of “open business models” that shun closed, proprietary technical standards and content restrictions. Unlike the classic industrial business models of the twentieth century, the new open business models make money by aggressively insinuating themselves into open networks. They are able to identify new trends, mobilize talent, interact with customers, and develop customized products more rapidly than competitors. They are also building ingenious new business models “on top of ” social behaviors of online users. (See chapter 10.) +={ open business models } + +MySpace, for example, hosts a social network of more than 100 million “friends” (a claim that, even if inflated by inactive user accounts, is indisputably huge). eBay consolidated the world’s garage sales and flea markets into a more efficient market by developing Web-based software that “manages” social trust and reputation and evolves with user interests. Amazon has become a premier online retail Web site by hosting a platform open to all sorts of online vendors and spurred by the recommendations and collective purchase records of buyers. Google devised its famous PageRank search algorithms to aggregate the Web-surfing “wisdom of the crowd,” making online searches vastly more useful. +={ Amazon : + eBay ; + Google ; + MySpace +} + +The basic point is that open media platforms are significantly reducing business coordination and communication costs by leveraging people’s natural social behaviors in ways that conventional businesses simply cannot. Open Web platforms allow large and diverse groups to organize themselves and their projects more easily. Individuals have greater self-defined choice and the capacity to express their own market demand; they need not be constrained by the choices presented to them in the market. The Internet has opened up gushing channels of virtual word of mouth, which is a more trusted form of consumer information than advertising. Those companies with excellent products use favorable word of mouth to reduce their marketing and distribution costs. “Smart mobs” can elevate obscure bloggers and Web sites because they regard them as more trustworthy, expert, and authentic (or entertaining) than those of Centralized Media. Many conservatives now trust the Drudge Report and Free Republic more than CBS News, just as many liberals trust DailyKos and Huffington Post more than CBS News. Indeed, the very genre of “objective journalism” — an artifact of the economic necessity of appealing to broad, lowest-commondenominator audiences — is now in jeopardy. +={ Internet : + virtual word of mouth on ; + media : + participatory ; + Centralized Media : + competition, and +3 ; + markets : + restructuring +1 +} + +As people migrate to the Web, advertising revenues for Centralized Media are eroding further, setting off a scramble to devise new advertising vehicles to reach fugitive Internet users. It is a chase that cannot be avoided because that’s where the eyeballs are. Moreover, the value proposition of open networks is too attractive to ignore. But because that value proposition is so radically different from conventional media — a company must revamp its organizational structures, strategies, marketing, etc. —it raises some wrenching choices for Centralized Media: Should they “go native” and let their products loose on open networks? Or would that destroy their entrenched business models for television shows, theatrical films, music CDs, and other content? The vast infrastructure and business practices of Centralized Media cannot be summarily abandoned, but neither can they remain economically tenable over the long haul without significant changes. For now, Centralized Media are attempting an ungainly straddle of both worlds. +={ Centralized Media : + alternatives vs. +} + +2~ Web 2.0: A New Breed of Participatory Media +={ media : + participatory +17 ; + Centralized Media : + alternatives vs. +17 ; + Web 2.0 : + applications +17 +} + +At the time, Eric Eldred’s Web repository of public-domain books could be seen as a modest little experiment. In retrospect, it can be seen as a dawning cultural archetype. It betokened the power of the amateur.~{ Dan Hunter and F. Gregory Lastowka, “Amateur-to-Amateur,” /{William and Mary Law Review}/ 46, no. 951 (December 2004). }~ While Centralized Media continue to have greater resources, talent, and political clout, amateurs are finding their voices and new online venues. A significant cultural emancipation is under way. Creative expression need no longer cater to corporate gatekeepers and the imperatives of the mass market. A no-name amateur can produce useful and influential work without having to go through New York, Los Angeles, London, or Tokyo. The do-ityourself culture is flourishing and expanding. With little money or marketing, anyone can launch a viral spiral that, with enough luck and panache, can sweep across global culture. +={ Eldritch Press } + +It is only now dawning on some media chieftains that the biggest threat to Centralized Media is not piracy or online competitors, but /{nonmarket alternatives}/: you, me, and the online friends that we can attract. Hollywood and record labels might rail against “pirates” and demand stronger copyright protection, but the real longterm threat to their business models is the migration of consumer attention to amateur creativity and social communication. Social production on open networks has become a powerful creative and economic force in its own right. Ordinary people can now find their own voices and develop folk cultures of their own that may or may not use the market. +={ piracy ; + Centralized Media : + piracy, and +} + +After the tech bubble of 2000–2001 burst, the surviving techies and entrepreneurs developed a remarkable range of cheap, versatile software that took to heart the lessons of free software and open networks. Blogs, wikis, social networking software, peer-to-peer file-sharing and metadata tools began to migrate from the tech fringe to the mainstream. There have been many conceptual frames and buzzwords associated with this new order — “smart mobs” (Howard Rheingold), “the wisdom of crowds” (James Surowiecki), “wikinomics” (Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams) — but the catchphrase that has gained the most currency is “Web 2.0,” a term launched by Tim O’Reilly in a canonical 2003 essay.~{ Tim O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software,” O’Reilly Media Web site, September 30, 2005, at http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-isweb-20.html. }~ +={ O’Reilly, Tim ; + Rheingold, Howard ; + Surowiecki, James ; + Tapscott, Don ; + Williams, Anthony D. ; + free software : + economic effects of ; + open source software : + economic implications of +} + +O’Reilly, a prominent publisher of books on open-source software, coined Web 2.0 to describe the fluid social dynamics that occur on open Web platforms — wikis, blogs, social networking Web sites, and other open, collaborative platforms — where people have the freedom to share and reuse work. Web 2.0 amounts to a worldview that celebrates open participation as a way to create valuable collective resources. It regards open technical protocols and content as the basis for this process (whether managed as a commons or a business), and dismisses closed, proprietary regimes as both socially and economically questionable. In essence, Web 2.0 honors socially created value as the basis for value creation, which market players may or may not be able to exploit. +={ Web 2.0 : + coining of term +} + +Blogging is more of a social medium than is generally supposed, for example. It is not just the outburst of some ranter in his pajamas, as the stereotype has it, but a social medium that connects people in new ways. Most blogs have a blogroll — a list of admired blogs— which enables the readers of one blog to identify other bloggers engaged in similar conversations. Permalinks — stable Web addresses for blog content — enable people to make reliable Web citations of content, which means that people can coalesce around a shared body of work. And RSS feeds— “Really Simple Syndication” — allow people to “subscribe” to individual blogs and Web sites, enabling them to keep abreast of a sprawling set of communities. +={ blogging +1 ; + permalinks ; + RSS feeds +} + +The rise of blog-tracking companies like Technorati and Alexa has also helped blogging become a durable social genre. These companies inventory and rank blogs, and help people discover blogs for virtually any subject of interest — cocktail mixing, high-energy physics, needlework design. By 2007, there were an estimated 100 million blogs in existence (although many were inactive or abandoned), making the blogosphere a powerful cultural force in its own right. There was also a flood of online “news aggregators” — Web sites that cherry-pick their own mix of pieces from the wire services, newspapers, Web sites, blogs, and other online sources. With huge audiences, news aggregators like the Drudge Report (1.6 million unique monthly visitors) and the Huffington Post (773,000 visitors) have begun to rival major daily newspapers in reach and influence. + +Another seminal social innovation has been Wikipedia, a strange and wondrous cultural eruption. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in January 2001, the English-language Wikipedia began to gain serious momentum in the months after the CC licenses were released, and by early 2003 hosted 100,000 articles. (A “wiki” is a special type of Web site that allows anyone who accesses it to add or modify its contents.) After two years, Wikipedia had amassed a collection of 400,000 articles and inspired the launch of affiliated Wikipedias in more than 100 languages. In May 2008, +={ Sanger, Larry ; + Wales, Jimmy ; + Wikipedia : + social movement, as +2 +} + +Wikipedia featured 10.2 million articles in 255 languages; 2.3 million of the articles were in English. By harnessing the energies of tens of thousands of volunteers to write an infinitely expandable “encyclopedia,” Wikipedia has become the leading symbol for a radically new way of compiling and editing knowledge.~{ Wikipedia statistics from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About. }~ Remarkably, the Wikimedia Foundation, the umbrella organization that funds Wikipedia and many sister projects, had fewer than twenty paid employees in 2008 and a budget of less than $2 million. + +Wikipedia has also spun off affiliated multilingual, free-content wikis on various subjects. Wikispecies is compiling an inventory of the world’s species, Wikiquote is collecting thousands of memorable quotations, the Wikimedia Commons is providing freely usable media files, and Wikibooks is assembling open-content textbooks. Wiki software has been adopted by dozens of different online communities, giving rise to scores of collaborative Web sites such as Conservapedia (for American political conservatives), Intellipedia (for U.S. intelligence agencies), Wookieepedia (for Star Wars fans), Wikitravel (for travelers), and OpenWetWare (for biological researchers). + +In the months following the launch of the CC licenses, peer-topeer (P2P) file sharing was also expanding rapidly. Long associated with illicit sharing of copyrighted music, P2P software in fact has many entirely legitimate uses in science, education, and diverse creative sectors. One of the key attractions of P2P software is its efficiency. It does not need to route information through centralized servers; information can be rapidly shared by routing digital files directly to participants, computer to computer, or by passing it through key nodes in an on-the-fly manner. Even after the courts shut down Napster in 2002, a variety of other P2P software applications — Grokster, Lime Wire, KaZaA, Gnutella, BitTorrent — continued to facilitate online sharing and collaboration. Some thirty-five companies, including Hollywood studios, are sufficiently impressed with the efficiencies of P2P that they have licensed BitTorrent technology to distribute their video content. +={ Napster ; + software : + P2P +} + +Peer-to-peer file sharing has also unleashed radically new types of knowledge creation: volunteers who join the NASA Clickworkers project to count and classify craters on Mars, “citizen scientists” who help compile an interactive database of butterfly and bird sightings, or geneticists from around the world who submit data to the Human Genome Project and share access to the database. + +Although the tech world and some Internet users had known about various networking tools for years, the general public was largely in the dark until the presidential campaign of Vermont governor Howard Dean in 2002 and 2003. At the time, Dean was considered a long-shot antiwar candidate with little base and little money. Within a few short months, however, thanks to Dean’s outspoken style and his campaign’s skillful use of the Internet, he became the front-runner in a field of twelve candidates. Dean did not use the Internet as a simple publishing tool, but as a way to stimulate decentralized collaboration and thereby organize a diverse community of supporters. The campaign was not just about Dean, but about the participation of 640,000 volunteers who virtually organized themselves through various online tools. The campaign became a dynamic conversation between the candidate and voters — and generated a gusher of more than $50 million, most of it donations of a hundred dollars or less. So much was raised that Dean famously asked his supporters whether he should forgo federal matching funds, and instead raise more money from them. They agreed. The campaign ultimately imploded, of course, after his famous “Dean’s Scream” speech — itself a complex story — but what is notable is how the Dean campaign vividly demonstrated the speed and power of viral networks. +={ Dean, Howard ; + Interenet : + political campaigns on +} + +By 2003 many ordinary people knew about the Napster controversy, the record industry’s scorched-earth litigation tactics against consumers, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in the /{Eldred}/ case. So people welcomed blogs, wikis, and other Web 2.0 applications as tools to emancipate themselves culturally. In the mass media era, people had few tools or sufficient money to speak to the general public or organize their own communities of interest. But now, using a lightweight infrastructure of software code and telecommunications, people could build stable online communities that reflected their own values and social practices. No permission or payment necessary. No expensive capital investments. +={ Napster ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft ; + Internet : + socially created value of +4 ; + communities : + online +4 +} + +In many instances, amazingly, virtual communities are performing tasks that existing markets are not performing as efficiently or with as much social trust and goodwill. Craigslist, the free want-ad service that has significantly undercut classified advertising in newspapers, is one of the more stellar examples. In South Korea, OhmyNews.org uses thirty-six thousand citizen-journalists to write up to two hundred online stories a day. The publication is considered the sixth-most influential media outlet in Korea, based on a national magazine poll. Countless specialty blogs are considered more expert and timely sources of information and analysis than mainstream newspapers and magazines. +={ OhmyNews.org ; + Craigslist ; + blogging +} + +Taken together, the new participatory media platforms constitute something new under the sun — a globally accessible space that is both personal and public, individual and social. The riot of unfiltered expression that has materialized on the Internet is often dismissed as stupid, unreliable, and silly; or praised as brilliant, stylish, and specialized; or simply accepted as idiosyncratic, irregular, and local. It is all of these things, of course, and that is precisely the point. +={ Internet : + mass participation in +1 +} + +If print culture honors the ethic of “edit, then publish,” the Internet inverts it: /{anything}/ can be made public . . . and then it is up to users to become their own editors. On the Internet, people do not “consume” content, they become active writers, editors, and critics in their own right. They use search engines, news aggregators, and favorite bloggers to identify what they want — or they create their own content, as desired. They are /{participants}/, not merely informed consumers who choose what some professional editor offers to them. +={ blogging } + +The Web 2.0 environment was quite hospitable for the spread of the CC licenses. It enabled people to signal their willingness to share and their enthusiasm for cool niche fare as opposed to massaudience kitsch.Members of online communities could confidently share their work on wikis and collaborative Web sites, knowing that no one could appropriate their content and take it private. Socially, the licenses let people announce their social identity to others and build a countercultural ethos of sharing. The ethos became hipper and more attractive with every new antipiracy measure that Centralized Media instigated. +={ Web 2.0 : + CC licenses, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + Web 2.0 environment, and +} + +% Creative Commons (CC) licenses not separated from Creative Commons (CC) in index, try fix above this point + +2~ Open Networks and the Long Tail +={ open networks +6 } + +While technology and economics have been driving forces in shaping the new participatory platforms, much of their appeal has been frankly cultural. Amateur content on the Net may be raw and irregular, but it also tends to be more interesting and authentic than the highly produced, homogenized fare of commercial media. Some of it vastly outshines the lowest common denominator of mass media. Again, the cheap connectivity of the Internet has been key. It has made it possible for people with incredibly specialized interests to find one another and organize themselves into niche communities. For closeted homosexuals in repressive countries or isolated fans of the actor Wallace Beery, the Internet has enabled them to find one another and mutually feed their narrow interests. You name it, there are sites for it: the fans of obscure musicians, the collectors of beer cans, Iranian exiles, kite flyers. Freed of the economic imperative of attracting huge audiences with broad fare, niche-driven Internet content is able to connect with people’s personal passions and interests: a powerful foundation not just for social communities, but for durable markets. +={ Internet : + communication system, as +1 +} + +This, truly, is one of the more profound effects of networking technologies: the subversion of the “blockbuster” economics of the mass media. It is becoming harder and more expensive for film studios and broadcast networks to amass the huge, cross-demographic audiences that they once could. In the networked environment, it turns out that a diversified set of niche markets can be eminently profitable with lower-volume sales. While Centralized Media require a supply-side “push” of content, the Internet enables a demand-side “pull” of content by users. This radically reduces transaction costs and enhances the economic appeal of niche production. It is easier and cheaper for a company (or single creator) to “pull” niche audiences through word of mouth than it is to pay for expensive “push” advertising campaigns. Specialty interests and products that once were dismissed as too marginal or idiosyncratic to be profitable can now flourish in small but robust “pull markets.”~{ David Bollier, “When Push Comes to Pull: The New Economy and Culture of Networking Technology” (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 2006), at http://www.aspeninstitute.org/atf/cf/%7BDEB6F227-659B-4EC8-8F84-8DF23CA704F5%7D/2005InfoTechText.pdf. }~ +={ Centralized Media : + Internet vs. ; + Internet : + Centralized Media vs. +} + +The term associated with this phenomenon is the “Long Tail” — the title of a much-cited article by Chris Anderson in the October 2004 issue of /{Wired}/ magazine, later expanded into a book. Anderson explained the “grand transition” now under way: +={ Anderson, Chris +2 ; + Long Tail +3 +} + +_1 For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowestcommon-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching — a market response to inefficient distribution. . . . Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. . . .~{ Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” /{Wired}/, October 2004, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html. }~ + +The “Long Tail” refers to the huge potential markets that can be created for low-volume niche books, CD, DVDs, and other products. More than half of Amazon’s book sales, for example, come from books that rank below its top 130,000 titles. The implication is that “the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are,” writes Anderson. “In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity.” +={ Amazon } + +Unconstrained by the size and tastes of a local customer base or by limited shelf space, online retailers such as Amazon, Netflix (DVDs), Rhapsody (music), and iTunes (music) are showing that the Long Tail can be a very attractive business model. These companies have developed new tools, such as collaborative filtering software and user recommendations, to drive demand for lesser-known titles at the far end of the Long Tail. This is just another instance of using new technologies that leverage people’s natural social dynamics, and in so doing inventing new types of markets. +={ Amazon } + + +2~ Another Vehicle for Niche Communities: The Commons +={ commons : + niche communities as +13 ; + communities : + commons, and +13 +} + +If the Long Tail is a market vehicle for amassing niche communities, the commons is the social analogue. A commons does not revolve around money and market exchange, but around collective participation and shared values. It does not use property rights and contracts in order to generate value; it uses gift exchange and moral commitments to build a community of trust and common purpose. Such communities, it turns out, can generate significant “wealth” — as Richard Stallman demonstrated with free software. +={ Stallman, Richard : + free software, and ; + free software : + economic effects of +} + +Generically speaking, a commons is a governance regime for managing collective resources sustainably and equitably. The commons is generally associated with open fields, forests, and other natural resources that were collectively used by villagers for their subsistence needs. During the “enclosure movement” in medieval times and extending through the eighteenth century, British gentry and entrepreneurs began to privatize the commons and convert its resources into marketable commodities. Enclosures essentially dispossessed the commoners and installed a new market regime to manage resources that were previously shared. The commoners, unable to feed themselves or participate in markets, migrated to the industrial cities of England to become the wage slaves and beggars who populate Charles Dickens’s novels. +={ commons : + enclosure of +2 | tragedy of +2 ; + enclosure movement +2 +} + +Although markets tend to be more efficient than commons, they also tend to focus on that which can be sold and converted into cash. Markets presume that deserts and the public domain have no value because they have no marketable output. Markets also presume that a commons cannot be sustained because inevitably someone will overuse a shared resource — a practice known as “free riding” —and ruin it. This is the famous “tragedy of the commons” notion popularized by biologist Garret Hardin in a 1968 essay, which described how a few farmers will let their sheep overgraze a common pasture and so destroy it. +={ Hardin, Garret ; + free riding ; + markets : + efficiency of +} + +The “tragedy of the commons” metaphor has ossified into a truism of neoclassical economics. It takes for granted that shared resources cannot be managed sustainably, and that private property regimes are much better stewards of resources. This prejudice was powerfully rebutted by political scientist Elinor Ostrom in her noted 1990 book /{Governing the Commons}/, which marshaled many empirical examples of natural resource commons that have been managed responsibly for decades or even hundreds of years. Ostrom’s scholarship has since given rise to a great deal of academic study of commons, particularly through the International Association for the Study of the Commons and the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. It also inspired thinking about the commons by law scholars like Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, and James Boyle, who saw close parallels with the commons as they watched corporations use copyright law to enclose culture and information. +={ Benkler, Yochai ; + Boyle, James ; + Ostrom, Elinor, Governing the Commons ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + law in contemporary context, and ; + commons : + types of +2 +} + +Cultural commons differ significantly from natural resource commons in this key respect: they are not finite, depletable resources like pastures or forests. Online commons tend to grow in value as more people participate, provided there is sufficient governance and common technical standards to enable sharing. Online commons, in short, are less susceptible to the dreaded “tragedy of the commons” and, indeed, tend to be highly generative of value. Their output does not get “used up” the way natural resources do. +={ commons : + online +} + +The burden of Lessig’s 2001 book /{The Future of Ideas}/ was to argue that the Internet constitutes a great, underappreciated commons. It can serve as the infrastructure for tremendous wealth and innovation if its “layers” — the hardware, software, and content— remain sufficiently open and usable by all. The problem, he warned with great prescience, is that policymakers are generally blind to the value of the commons and markets are too eager to reap short-term individual gains. They fail to appreciate that too much private control at any “layer” of the Internet — through proprietary hardware or software, or excessive copyright or patent protection — can stifle personal freedom, market competition, and innovation. Lessig wanted to name the book /{Dot.commons}/, but his publisher rejected it as too obscure. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + The Future of Ideas +} + +One of the key advantages of treating key infrastructure (such as Internet transmission protocols and computer operating systems) as a commons is that people have the freedom to modify and improve them, with resulting benefits for all. Innovation and competition can flourish more readily. At the content layer, much of the appeal of the commons is the creative freedom, above and beyond what the market may enable. Precisely because it is a commons, and not a market, people’s freedoms are not constrained by marketability. A commons is a noncommercial, nongovernmental space that is free from corporate manipulations and government meddling. It offers a qualitatively different type of experience than the marketplace or government power. A commons tends to be more informal, a place where people know you by name, and where your contributions are known and welcomed. A commons based on relationships of trust and reciprocity can undertake actions that a business organization requiring extreme control and predictable performance cannot. +={ commons : + concept of +1 +} + +Precisely because a commons is open and not organized to maximize profit, its members are often willing to experiment and innovate; new ideas can emerge from the periphery. Value is created through a process that honors individual self-selection for tasks, passionate engagement, serendipitous discovery, experimental creativity, and peer-based recognition of achievement. The Open Prosthetics Project, for example, invites anyone to contribute to the design of a prosthetic limb and/or the specification of limbs that ought to be designed, even if they don’t know how to do it.~{ http://www.openprosthetics.org. }~ This has generated such unexpected innovations as limbs specifically adapted for rock climbers and an arm designed for fishing. Athletes who engage in “extreme sports” — skiing, biking, surfing — have been a rich source of ideas for new products, just as software hackers are among the first to come up with innovative programming ideas. +={ commoners : + sef-selection of ; + commons : + value proposition of +1 ; + value : + creation of +1 +} + +Part of the value proposition of the commons at the content layer is that it can host a more diverse range of expression — personal, social, and creative — than the market, in part because it does not have the burden of having to sustain costly overhead and sell a product. It has other goals — the personal interests and whims of the commoners — and it can often meet those needs inexpensively. Yet the commons does in fact generate many marketable innovations, thanks to its open accessibility, the social relationships it enables and the free sharing and circulation of work. + +Seeing the success of online commons, Centralized Media have tried to fight back by embracing elements of user participation. They invite audiences to vote in polls (/{American Idol}/), publish lists of “most e-mailed” articles (major newspapers), and direct radio listeners to their Web sites for more information (National Public Radio). /{Time}/ magazine’s choice for the “Person of the Year” in 2006 — “You,” the primary driver of Web sites like MySpace and YouTube — was a landmark moment in media history: with a pinched smile and backhanded assertion of its cultural authority, Centralized Media formally acknowledged its most powerful competitor, Decentralized Media! +={ Centralized Media : + competition, and +2 ; + commons : + online ; + Time (magazine) +} + +Yet for all the celebration of “you” as the master of your own fate in cyberspace, the question that is skirted is whether “you” can indeed retain control of your stuff in a Centralized Media environment. The point of conventional business models, after all, is to engineer a proprietary lock-in of customers through technological dependence, binding contract terms, frequent-buyer credits, brand loyalty, etc. That’s how companies have traditionally secured a more durable customer base and preempted competition. + +But the commons is about securing user freedoms, and not necessarily about prevailing in a market. Web 2.0 may or may not protect both concerns. Like the commons, Web 2.0 relies upon user-generated content, network effects, and bottom-up innovation. But Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, at the end of the day, need to make money. Their sites need to adopt business practices that protect revenue streams. Facebook is catering to advertisers, not users, when they sift through masses of users’ personal data in order to sell targeted advertising. MySpace at one point refused to let its users connect to rival Web sites and outside software “widgets.”~{ Rachel Rosmarin, “Why MySpace Blinked,” /{Forbes}/, April 24, 2007. }~ In this sense, Web 2.0 media may be “open,” but they are not necessarily “free,” as in freedom. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs are more likely to focus on protecting their market advantages than advancing user freedoms. The two issues may overlap substantially, but they are not identical. +={ commons : + concept of ; + Facebook ; + MySpace ; + Web 2.0 : + purposes of +1 +} + +Science-fiction writer William Gibson once wrote, “The future is already here; it’s just not well-distributed yet.” That sums up the Great Value Shift circa 2003. The efficiencies and affordances made possible by the Internet were there. They were enabling all sorts of pioneers to build new business models, new creative genres, and new online communities — but these innovations were unevenly distributed. More to the point, their potential was unevenly perceived, especially in many precincts of Washington officialdom and the corporate world. The challenge for amateurs venturing onto open platforms was to validate the new sorts of socially created value enabled by the Internet. +={ Gibson, William ; + Great Value Shift ; + Internet : + Great Value Shift, and +} + +1~ 6 CREATORS TAKE CHARGE + +/{Rip, remix, burn, mashup — legally. The CC licenses facilitate new Internet genres and business models.}/ + +The first users of CC licenses understood that something different was going on; a different order was taking shape. More than just a legal tool, the CC licenses gave the tech vanguard a way to express their inchoate sense that a new and better world was possible, at least on the Internet. They yearned for a noncommercial sharing economy with a different moral calculus than mass media markets, and for markets that are more open, accountable, and respectful of customers. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + first users of +9 | books, for +19 +} + +The early adopters were unusually informed about the politics of technology, skeptical of Big Media, and passionate about the artistic freedoms and social responsibility. They were a locally engaged but globally aware network of tech sophisticates, avant-garde artists, clued-in bloggers, small-/{d}/ democratic activists, and the rebellious of spirit: the perfect core group for branding the Creative Commons and instigating a movement. + +It only made sense that Cory Doctorow — copyfighter, sciencefiction writer, tech analyst, co-editor of the popular Boing Boing blog — became the first book author to use a CC license. Doctorow — then a thirty-two-year-old native of Canada, the son of Trotskyite schoolteachers, the European representative for the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2002 to 2006 — is a singular character on the tech/intellectual property/free culture circuit. He can hold forth with intelligence, wry wit, and bravado on digital rights management, Internet economics, or the goofy gadgets and pop culture artifacts that he regularly showcases on Boing Boing. + +In January 2003, a month after the CC licenses were released, Doctorow published his first novel, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, under an Attribution, NonCommercial, No Derivative Works license (BY-NC-ND). Simultaneously, his progressive-minded publisher, Tor Books of New York City, sold hard copies of the book. “Why am I doing this thing?” Doctorow asked rhetorically: +={ Doctorow, Cory : + Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom +5 +} + +_1 Well, it’s a long story, but to shorten it up: first-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don’t have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word-of-mouth. I’m not bad at word-of-mouth. I have a blog, Boing Boing (http://boingboingnet), where I do a /{lot}/ of word-ofmouthing. I compulsively tell friends and strangers about things I like. And telling people about stuff is /{way, way}/ easier if I can just send it to ’em. Way easier.~{ Cory Doctorow, “A Note About This Book,” February 12, 2004, and “A Note About This Book,” January 9, 2003, in /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, available at http://www.craphound.com/down. }~ + +A year later, Doctorow announced that his “grand experiment” was a success; in fact, he said, “my career is turning over like a goddamned locomotive engine.” More than thirty thousand people had downloaded the book within a day of its posting. He proceeded to release a collection of short stories and a second novel under a CC license. He also rereleased /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/ under a less restrictive CC license — an Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA), which allows readers to make their own translations, radio and film adaptations, sequels, and other remixes of the novel, so long as they are made available on the same terms.~{ Anna Weinberg,“Buying the Cow, Though the Milk Is Free: Why Some Publishers are Digitizing Themselves,” June 24, 2005, /{Book Standard}/, June 24, 2005, available at http://www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/news/publisher/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000968186. }~ + +With some sheepish candor, Doctorow conceded: “I wanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing that stands between us and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I had the intellectual intuition that a ‘some rights reserved’ regime would serve me well, I still couldn’t shake the atavistic fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed.” + +By June 2006, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/ had been downloaded more than seven hundred thousand times. It had gone through six printings, many foreign translations, and two competing online audio adaptations made by fans. “Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it,” Doctorow conceded, “but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales. I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treats the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book — those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treats the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.”~{ Cory Doctorow, “Giving it Away,” Forbes.com, December 1, 2006, available at http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tech-media_cz_cd_books06_1201doctorow.html. }~ In 2008, Doctorow’s marketing strategy of giving away online books to stimulate sales of physical books paid off in an even bigger way. His novel for teenagers, /{Little Brother}/, about a youthful hacker who takes on the U.S. government after it becomes a police state, spent weeks on the /{New York Times}/ bestseller list for children’s books. + +It is perhaps easier for a sci-fi futurist like Doctorow than a publishing business to take such a wild leap into the unknown. But that, too, is an important insight: artists are more likely to lead the way into the sharing economy than entrenched industries. “I’d rather stake my future on a literature that people care about enough to steal,” said Doctorow, “than devote my life to a form that has no home in the dominant medium of the century.” Book lovers and authors will pioneer the future; corporate publishing will grudgingly follow, or be left behind. + +Over the past few years, a small but growing number of pioneering authors have followed Doctorow’s lead and published books under Creative Commons licenses. While the hard evidence is scarce, many authors who use CC licenses believe that releasing free electronic versions of their books does not hurt, and probably helps, the sales of physical copies of their books. Lessig released his 2004 book, /{Free Culture}/, under an Attribution, NonCommercial license (BY-NC), and scores of authors and established publishers have since released books under CC licenses. Among the more notable titles: Yochai Benkler’s /{The Wealth of Networks}/ (Yale University Press, 2006), Kembrew McLeod’s /{Freedom of Expression}/ (Doubleday, 2005), Peter Barnes’s /{Capitalism 3.0}/ (Berrett-Koehler, 2006), and Dan Gillmor’s /{We the Media}/ (O’Reilly Media, 2004). +={ Barnes, Peter : + Capitalism 3.0 ; + Benkler, Yochai : + The Wealth of Networks ; + Gillmor, Dan : + We the Media ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Free Culture ; + McLeod, Kembrew : + Freedom of Expression +} + +In 2006, Paulo Coelho, author of a bestselling book, /{The Alchemist}/, created a “pirate” blog site that invited readers to use BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks to download free copies of his books. After he put the Russian translation of /{The Alchemist}/ online, sales of hardcover copies in Russia went from around 1,000 a year to 100,000, and then to more than 1 million. Coelho attributes the success of foreign translations of his book to their free availability online.~{ Smaran, “Alchemist Author Pirates His Own Book,” TorrentFreak blog, January 24, 2008, at http://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-author-pirates-own-books080124. }~ Experiments such as these were likely influential in the launch of LegalTorrents, a site for the legal peer-to-peer distribution of CC-licensed text, audio, video games, and other content. +={ blogging ; + Coelho, Paulo +} + +The CC licenses have been useful, not just for helping individual authors promote their books, but in fueling open-access scholarly publishing. As we will see in chapter 11, the CC licenses help scientists put their “royalty-free literature” on the Internet — a move that enlarges their readership, enhances their reputations, and still enables them to retain copyrights in their works. + +Free culture publishing models are popping up in many unusual quarters these days. LibriVox, to take one instance, is a nonprofit digital library of public-domain audio books that are read and recorded by volunteers.~{ Mia Garlick, “LibriVox,” Creative Commons blog, December 5, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/text/librivox. }~ Since it started in 2005, the group has recorded more than 150 books by classic authors from Dostoyevsky and Descartes to Jane Austen and Abraham Lincoln. All of them are free. Most are in English but many are in German, Spanish, Chinese, and other languages. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Free Culture +1 +} + +Founder Hugh McGuire said the inspiration for LibriVox was a distributed recording of Lessig’s book /{Free Culture}/ read by bloggers and podcasters, chapter by chapter. “After listening to that, it took me a while to figure out how to record things on my computer (which I finally did, thanks to free software Audacity). Brewster Kahle’s call for ‘Universal Access to all human knowledge’ was another inspiration, and the free hosting provided by archive.org and ibiblio.org meant that LibriVox was possible: there was no worry about bandwidth and storage. So the project was started with an investment of $0, which continues to be our global budget.” LibriVox’s mission, said McGuire, is the “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.” +={ Kahle, Brewster ; + LibriVox ; + McGuire, Hugh ; + bloging +} + +Several publishing businesses now revolve around CC licenses. Wikitravel is a collaborative Web site that amasses content about cities and regions around the world; content is licensed under the CC Attribution, ShareAlike license (BY-SA).~{ “Wikitravel Press launches,” Creative Commons blog, August 3, 2007, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7596. See also Mia Garlick, “Wikitravel,” Creative Commons blog, June 20, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/text/wikitravel. }~ In 2007, its founder joined with a travel writer to start Wikitravel Press, which now publishes travel books in a number of languages. Like the Wikitravel Web pages, the text in the books can be freely copied and reused. +={ Wikitravel Press } + +Another new business using CC licenses is Lulu, a technology company started by Robert Young, the founder of the Linux vendor Red Hat and benefactor for the Center for the Public Domain.Lulu lets individuals publish and distribute their own books, which can be printed on demand or downloaded. Lulu handles all the details of the publishing process but lets people control their content and rights. Hundreds of people have licensed their works under the CC ShareAlike license and Public Domain Dedication, and under the GNU Project’s Free Documentation License.~{ Mia Garlick, “Lulu,” Creative Commons blog, May 17, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/text/lulu. }~ +={ Lulu ; + Red Hat ; + Young, Robert ; + Center for the Public Domain ; + GNU Project : + GNU FDL ; + public domain : + Center for Public Domain +} + +As more of culture and commerce move to the Internet, the question facing the book industry now is whether the text of a book is more valuable as a physical object (a codex) or as a digital file (intangible bits that can circulate freely), or some combination of the two. Kevin Kelly, the former editor of /{Wired}/ magazine, once explained: “In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies lose value. They are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work.”~{ Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book!” /{New York Times Magazine}/, May 14, 2006, p. 43. }~ +={ Kelly, Kevin +1 } + +What this means in practice, Kelly has pointed out, is that books become more valuable as they become more broadly known and socially circulated — the very functionalities that the Internet facilitates. If people can discover a book online and read portions of it, share it with friends, and add annotations and links to related materials, it makes a book more desirable than a hard-copy version that is an inert text on a shelf. As Kelly writes: “When books are digitized, reading becomes a community activity. Bookmarks can be shared with fellow readers. Marginalia can be broadcast. Bibliographies swapped. You might get an alert that your friend Carl has annotated a favorite book of yours. A moment later, his links are yours.”~{ Ibid., p. 45. }~ + +Needless to say, most book publishers and authors’ organizations are not yet prepared to embrace this newfangled value proposition. It seems way too iffy. A “sharing” business model would seemingly cannibalize their current revenues and copyright control with little guarantee of doing better in an open, online milieu. The bigger problem may be the cultural prejudice that an absolute right of control over any possible uses of a book is the best way to make money. +={ open business models } + +In general, the publishing trade remains skeptical of the Internet, clueless about how to harness its marketing power, and strangers to CC licenses. And it could be years before mainstream publishing accepts some of the counterintuitive notions that special-interest Internet communities will drive publishing in the future. In a presentation that caused a stir in the book industry, futurist Mike Shatzkin said in May 2007 that this is already happening in general trade publishing: “We’re close to a tipping point, or maybe we’re past it . . . where Web-based branding will have more credibility than print, because print, needing more horizontal reach to be viable, won’t deliver the attention of the real experts and megaphones in each field.”~{ Mike Shatzkin, “The End of General Trade Publishing Houses: Death or Rebirth in a Niche-by-Niche World,” presented to the Book Expo America, New York, May 31, 2007, available at http://www.idealog.com/speeches/endoftrade.htm. }~ +={ Shatzkin, Mike } + +2~ DIY Videos and Film +={ Internet : + videos and films on +12 ; + videos and film +12 ; + World Wide Web : + videos and film on +12 +} + +One of the biggest cultural explosions of the past decade has been amateur video on the Web. The volume of online video has been so great that there are actually many distinct genres of amateur video: short videos on YouTube, video mashups, “machinima” (a combination of video and online gaming images), amateur pornography, and hybrid forms that combine user videos with conventional broadcast and cable television shows. Just as the Great Value Shift has empowered musicians, so it is giving video- and filmmakers new powers to express themselves as they wish, and reach huge audiences via the Internet. This power represents a potentially major threat to the cultural dominance of the television and film industries, as reflected in various schemes by the networks and studios to establish their own online presences. The threat of do-it-yourself (DIY) video and film is big enough that Viacom alleged that YouTube’s copyright infringements of Viacom-owned video should entitle Viacom to $1 billion in damages. The entertainment industry and the Writers Guild of America endured a long, bitter strike in 2007–2008 precisely because the projected revenues from Internet video are so large. +={ Great Value Shift ; + Internet : + Great Value Shift, and ; + YouTube +2 ; + Viacom ; + Writers Guild of America +} + +It is too early to know which new video styles will be flash-inthe-pan novelties and which will ripen into popular, and perhaps lucrative, genres. But rarely has a culture seen so many diverse experiments in amateur and indie video expression. One site, Justin.tv, is a free platform for broadcasting and viewing live video. Some people make round-the-clock “life casts” of their daily activities; others have used it to broadcast live from Baghdad, showing war-related events. Yahoo and Reuters have entered into a partnership to host amateur photojournalism by people using their digital cameras and camera phones. Machinima video, the product of the underground gaming community, blends filmmaking with online games to produce computer-generated imagery. As John Seely Brown describes it, “Basically, you can take Second Life or Worlds of Warcraft and have a set of avatars run all over the world, that come together and create their own movie, and then you can ‘YouTube’ the movie.”~{ Cited in David Bollier, /{The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized Cocreation of Value as a New Paradigm in Commerce and Culture}/ (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, 2007), p. 27. }~ +={ Brown, John Seely } + +As amateur video and film proliferate, thanks to inexpensive technologies and Internet access, the CC licenses have obvious value in letting the creator retain a copyright in the video while inviting its duplication and reuse by millions of people online. To industry traditionalists locked into binary options, the free circulation of a work precludes any moneymaking opportunities. But of course, that is precisely what is now being negotiated: how to devise ingenious new schemes to make money from freely circulating video. One option is to own the platform, as YouTube does. But there are also competitors such as Revver and blip.tv, which have established their own approaches based on advertising and commercial licensing of works. There are also schemes that use Internet exposure to drive paying customers into theaters and advertisers to buy commercial licenses. For some amateurs, DIY video is simply a way to get noticed and hired by a conventional media company. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + video and film, for +8 +} + +That’s what the Los Angeles–based comedy collective The Lonely Island did to promote themselves to national attention. They posted their comedy shorts and songs to their Web site using Creative Commons licenses. Soon other artists began making remixes of their songs. The remixes in effect served as free marketing, which caught the attention of the Fox Broadcasting Company, which in turn hired them to create a comedy pilot TV episode. In the end, Fox did not pick up the show, but as /{Wired News}/ recounted, “Instead of letting the show wither on a shelf somewhere, the group posted the full video both cut and uncut. The edgy, quirky short— Awesometown — spread like wildfire online and eventually landed all three performers an audition spot for /{Saturday Night Live}/.”~{ Matt Haughey, “From LA’s Awesometown to New York City’s SNL,” /{Wired News}/, October 1, 2005. }~ + +Perhaps the most successful example of leveraging free Internet exposure to reap commercial benefits is the sci-fi parody /{Star Wreck}/. Finnish producer Samuli Torssonen took seven years to shoot a fulllength movie using a Sony DVCAM, computer-generated graphics, and a makeshift studio. Some three hundred people were involved in the project, including some professional actors and many amateurs. When /{Star Wreck}/ was deliberately posted to the Internet in 2005, tagged with a CC-BY-NC-ND license (Attribution, NonCommercial, No Derivatives), it was eventually downloaded 5 million times and became the most-watched Finnish film in history. Fans in Russia, China, and Japan soon copied the film, which stimulated broader viewer demand and led to commercial deals to distribute the film. /{Star Wreck}/ became so popular that Universal Pictures, the American studio, signed a deal in 2006 to distribute DVD versions of the film. Torssonen says that the film has earned a 20to-1 return on investment. “I wouldn’t call free distribution stupid, as some people say, but a success,” he told an audience in 2007.~{ Samuli Torssonen presentation at iCommons Summit 2007, Dubrovnik, Croatia, June 15, 2007. See also www.starwreck.com. }~ +={ Star Wreck Studios +1 ; + Torssonen, Samuli +} + +The lesson for Stephen Lee, CEO of Star Wreck Studios, is that “you don’t need millions to make a quality movie. You need an active, passionate community.” Lee says the plan for a peer-produced model of “wrecking a movie” is to develop an Internet collaboration, make the film popular through viral marketing, and then license it commercially. Star Wreck Studios is now developing a new movie, /{Iron Sky}/, about a Nazi base on the far side of the moon. +={ Lee, Stephen } + +One of the more daring experiments in film production is being pioneered by the Blender Institute, a studio for open-content animation and game projects located in the Amsterdam docklands. Started in August 2007, the Institute employs fourteen full-time people who are obsessed with improving its three-dimensional open-source software, the so-called Blender 3D suite. The software is widely used by a large international user community for modeling, animation, rendering, editing, and other tasks associated with 3D computer-generated animation. +={ Blender Institute +2 } + +Ton Roosendaal, who directs the Blender Institute, is trying to demonstrate that a small studio can develop a virtuous cycle of economically sustainable creativity using open-source software, Creative Commons licenses, and talented programmers and artists from around the world. “We give programmers the freedom to do their best, and what they want to do is improve the technology,” he said. “The market is too hyper-rational and nailed down and filled with limits,” he argues, referring to his peers at major animation studios. “Open source is free of most of these constraints.”~{ Ton Roosendaal remarks at conference, “Economies of the Commons,” De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam, April 10–12, 2008. }~ +={ Roosendaal, Ton } + +In April 2008, the Blender Institute released a ten-minute animated short, /{Big Buck Bunny}/, which features a kind-hearted, fat white bunny who endures the abuse of three stone-throwing rodents until they smash a beautiful butterfly with a rock — at which point the bunny rallies to teach the bullies a lesson.~{ The film can be downloaded at http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download. }~ The film uses cutting-edge computer-generated animation techniques that rival anything produced by Pixar, the Hollywood studio responsible for /{Toy Story}/, /{Cars}/, and /{Ratatouille}/. /{Big Buck Bunny}/ is licensed under a CC Attribution license, which means the digital content can be used by anyone for any purpose so long as credit is given to the Blender Institute. +={ Big Buck Bunny (animated short) +1 } + +/{Big Buck Bunny}/ was initially distributed to upfront investors as a DVD set that includes extras such as interviews, outtakes, deleted scenes, and the entire database used in making the film. Then, to pique wider interest in sales of the DVD set, priced at thirty-four euros, a trailer was released on the Internet. This resulted in extensive international press coverage and blog exposure. Early signs are promising that Blender will be able to continue to make highquality animation on a fairly modest budget without worries about illegal downloads or a digital rights management system. The Blender production model also has the virtue of enabling access to top creative talent and cutting-edge animation technologies as well as efficient distribution to paying audiences on a global scale. + +While CC-licensed films are not common, neither are they rare. Davis Guggenheim, the filmmaker who directed /{An Inconvenient Truth}/, made a short film, /{Teach}/, to encourage talented people to become teachers. The film was released in 2006 under a CC BY-NCND license because Guggenheim wanted the film widely available to the public yet also wanted to preserve the integrity of the stories told, hence the NoDerivatives provision. A Spanish short film, /{Lo que tú Quieras Oír}/, became YouTube’s fifth most-viewed video— more than 38 million views. The film’s viral diffusion may have been helped by the CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike) license, which allows viewers not only to share the film, but to remix for noncommercial purposes so long as they use the same license. +={ Guggenheim, Davis ; + YouTube +} + +In Brazil, director Bruno Vianna released his first full-length film, /{Cafuné}/, under a CC BY-NC-SA license (Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike) and put it on file-sharing networks at the same time that it was exhibited in a handful of theaters.~{ Mia Garlick, CC blog, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/6048; see also “Cafuné breaking the limits for open business models,” iCommons blog, at http://www.icommons.org/static/2006/11/22/cafune-breakingthe-limits-for-open-business-models. }~ Each release had different endings; downloaders were invited to remix the ending as they wished. The film was financed by the government’s culture ministry as part of a competition for low-budget films, but only about fifty Brazilian films are released to commercial theaters each year. Vianna saw the Internet release as a great way to build an audience for his debut film . . . which is exactly what happened. For some weeks, it made it into the list of twenty most-watched films in the country. +={ Vianna, Bruno } + +2~ Letting the Music Flow +={ music : + CC licenses for +18 | remixes +18 ; + remix works +18 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + music, for +18 +} + +Media reform activist Harold Feld offers a succinct overview of why creativity in music — and therefore the business of selling recorded music — has suffered over the past two decades: +={ Feld, Harold +2 } + +_1 The 1990s saw a number of factors that allowed the major labels to push out independents and dominate the market with their own outrageously priced and poorly produced products: consolidation in the music industry, the whole “studio system” of pumping a few big stars to the exclusion of others, the consolidation in music outlets from mom-andpop record stores to chains like Tower Records and retail giants like Wal-Mart that exclude indies and push the recordings promoted by major labels, and the consolidation of radio — which further killed indie exposure and allowed the labels to artificially pump their selected “hits” through payola. All this created a cozy cartel that enjoyed monopoly profits. +={ music : + music industry +1 +} + +_1 As a result, the major labels, the mainstream retailers, and the radio broadcasters grew increasingly out of touch with what listeners actually wanted. But as long as the music cartel controlled what the vast majority of people got to hear, it didn’t matter . . . The music cartel remained the de facto only game in town.~{ Harold Feld, “CD Sales Dead? Not for Indies!” blog post on Public Knowledge Web site, March 27, 2007, at http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/890. }~ + +Changing the music industry is obviously a major challenge that is not going to be solved overnight. Still, there is a growing effort led by indie musicians, small record labels, Internet music entrepreneurs, and advocacy groups such as the Future of Music Coalition to address these problems. Creative Commons is clearly sympathetic, but has largely focused on a more modest agenda — enabling a new universe of shareable music to arise. Its chief tools for this mission, beyond the CC licenses, are new software platforms for legal music remixes, online commons that legally share music, and new business models that respect the interests of both fans and artists. Ultimately, it is hoped that a global oeuvre of shareable music will emerge. Once this body of music matures, attracting more artists and fans in a self-sustaining viral spiral, the record industry may be forced to give up its dreams of perfect control of how music may circulate and adopt fan-friendly business practices. +={ Future of Music Coalition } + +This, at least, is the theory, as Lessig explains it. He calls it the “BMI strategy,” a reference to the strategy that broadcasters and musicians used to fight ASCAP’s monopoly control over radio music in the early 1940s. ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, is a nonprofit organization that collects royalties for musical performances. At the time, ASCAP required artists to have five hits before it would serve as a collection agency for them, a rule that privileged the playing of pop music on the radio at the expense of rhythm and blues, jazz, hillbilly, and ethnic music. Then, over the course of eight years, ASCAP raised its rates by 450 percent between 1931 and 1939 — at which point, ASCAP then proposed /{doubling}/ its rates for 1940. In protest, many radio stations refused to play ASCAP-licensed music. They formed a new performance-rights body, BMI, or Broadcast Music, Inc., which sought to break the ASCAP monopoly by offering free arrangements of public-domain music to radio stations. They also charged lower rates than ASCAP for licensing music and offered better contracts for artists.~{ Donald Clarke, /{The Rise and Fall of Popular Music}/, chapter 11. }~ +={ ASCAP +1 ; + BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) +3 ; + music : + ASCAP+l ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +2 | music, and +2 +} + +“The Internet is today’s broadcasters,” said Lessig in a 2006 speech. “They are facing the same struggle.”~{ Lessig explained his BMI strategy at a speech, “On Free, and the Differences Between Culture and Code,” at the 23d Chaos Communications Conference (23C3) in Berlin, Germany, December 30, 2006; video can be watched at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7661663613180520595&q=23c3. }~ Just as ASCAP used its monopoly power to control what music could be heard and at what prices, he said, so today’s media corporations want to leverage their control over content to gain control of the business models and technologies of digital environments. When Google bought YouTube, one-third of the purchase price of $1.65 billion was allegedly a financial reserve to deal with any copyright litigation, said Lessig. This is how the incumbent media world is trying to stifle the emergence of free culture. +={ Google ; + YouTube +} + +The same questions that once confronted broadcasters are now facing Internet innovators, Lessig argues: “How do we free the future from the dead hand of the past? What do we do to make it so they can’t control how technology evolves?” With copyright terms lasting so long, it is not really feasible to try to use public-domain materials to compete with a commercial cartel. Lessig’s answer is a BMI-inspired solution that uses the CC licenses to create a new body of “free” works that, over time, can begin to compete with popular works. The legendary record producer Jerry Wexler recalled how ASCAP marginalized R & B, country, folk, and ethnic music, but “once the lid was lifted — which happened when BMI entered the picture — the vacuum was filled by all these archetypal musics. BMI turned out to be the mechanism that released all those primal American forms of music that fused and became rock-androll.”~{ From BMI, Inc., Web site, at http://www.bmi.com/genres/entry/533380. }~ Lessig clearly has similar ambitions for Creative Commons. +={ Wexler, Jerry } + +For now, the subculture of CC-licensed music remains something of a fringe movement. It is easy to patronize it as small, amateurish, and quirky. Yet its very existence stands as a challenge to the music industry by showing the feasibility of a more artist- and fanfriendly way of distributing music. Is it visionary to believe that free culture artists will force the major labels to change — just as BMI forced ASCAP to lower prices — and make them more competitive and inclusive? +={ ASCAP ; + music : + ASCAP +1 ; + music : + music industry +} + +Creative Commons’s primary task is practical — to help musicians reach audiences directly and reap more of the financial rewards of their music. So far, a wide range of indie bands, hip-hop artists, and bohemian experimentalists of all stripes have used the licenses. One of the most popular is the Attribution, NonCommercial license, which lets artists share their works while getting credit and retaining commercial rights. A number of marquee songwriters and performers — David Byrne, Gilberto Gil, the Beastie Boys, Chuck D — have also used CC licenses as a gesture of solidarity with free culture artists and as an enlightened marketing strategy. Inviting people to remix your songs is a great way to engage your fan base and sell more records. And tagging your music with a CC license, at least for now, wraps an artist in a mantle of tech sophistication and artistic integrity. +={ Beastie Boys ; + Byrne, David ; + Chuck D ; + Gil, Gilberto +} + +Guitarist Jake Shapiro was one of the first musicians to show the marketing potential of unleashing free music on the Internet. In 1995, Shapiro put MP3 files of music by his band, Two Ton Shoe, on the group’s Web site. Within a few years, Two Ton Shoe was one of the most-downloaded bands on the Internet, developing fan bases in Italy, Brazil, Russia, and South Korea. One day Shapiro received a phone call out of the blue from a South Korean concert promoter. He wanted to know if the band would fly over to Seoul to perform four concerts. It turned out that fans in South Korea, where fast broadband connections are the norm, had discovered Two Ton Shoe through file sharing. A local CD retailer kept getting requests for the band’s music, which led him to contact a concert promoter. In August 2005, Shapiro and his buddies arrived in Seoul as conquering rock stars, selling out all four of their concerts. “The kids who showed up knew all the words to the songs,” Shapiro recalled. A year later, the band signed a deal to distribute a double CD to East Asia.~{ Shapiro described his experiences at the “Identity Mashup Conference,” June 19–21, 2006, hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2006/06/28/id-mashup-2006-day-two-the-commons-open-apis-meshups-and-mashups. His band’s Web site is at http://www.twotonshoe.com. }~ +={ Shapiro, Jake ; + Two Ton Shoe +} + +While such stories of viral marketing success are not common, neither are they rare. Lots of bands now promote themselves, and find admiring (paying) fans, by posting their music, for free, on Web sites and file-sharing sites. Perhaps the most scrutinized example was Radiohead’s decision to release its album /{In Rainbows}/ for free online, while inviting fans to pay whatever they wanted. (The band did not release any numbers, but considered the move a success. They later released the album through conventional distribution channels as well.)~{ Jon Pareles, “Pay What You Want for This Article,” /{New York Times}/, December 9, 2007. }~ +={ Radiohead } + +Just as previous generations of fans came together around FM radio or live performance venues, the Internet is the new gathering place for discovering interesting, fresh, and authentic talent. The lesson that the record industry hasn’t quite learned is that music is not just a commodity but a /{social experience}/ — and social experiences lose their appeal if overly controlled and commercialized. If the music marketplace does not provide a place for fans to congregate and share in a somewhat open, unregimented way — if the commodity ethic overwhelms everything else — the music dies. Or more accurately, it migrates underground, outside the marketplace, to sustain itself. This is why so much of the best new music is happening on the fringes of the stagnant commercial mainstream. +={ music : + social experience, as +4 +} + +It is also why the Creative Commons licenses have acquired such cachet. They have come to be associated with musicians who honor the integrity of music making. They symbolize the collective nature of creativity and the importance of communing freely with one’s fans. Nimrod Lev, a prominent Israeli musician and supporter of the CC licenses, received considerable press coverage in his country for a speech that lamented the “cunning arrangement” (in Israeli slang, /{combina}/) by which the music industry has betrayed people’s love of music, making it “only a matter of business and commerce.” Said Lev: +={ music : + music industry +1 ; + Lev, Nimrod +2 +} + +_1 The music industry treats its consumer as a consumer of sex, not of love, the love of music. Just like everything else: a vacuum without values or meaning. But it is still love that everyone wants and seeks. . . . The music vendors knew then [a generation ago] what they have forgotten today, namely that we must have cultural heroes: artists that are not cloned in a manner out to get our money. There was an added value with a meaning: someone who spoke to our hearts in difficult moments, and with that someone, we would walk hand in hand for a while. We had loyalty and love, and it all meant something.~{ Nimrod Lev, “The Combina Industry,” November 16, 2004, at http://law.haifa.ac.il/techlaw/new/try/eng/nimrod.htm. }~ + +At the risk of sounding naïve, Lev said he wanted to stand up for the importance of “authenticity and empathy and my own truth” in making music. It is a complaint that echoes throughout the artistic community globally. A few years ago, Patti Smith, the punk rocker renowned for her artistic integrity, decried the “loss of our cultural voice” as the radio industry consolidated and as music television became a dominant force. She grieved for the scarcity of places for her to “feel connected” to a larger musical community of artists and fans.~{ Patti Smith at a panel at the National Conference for Media Reform, St. Louis, sponsored by Free Press, May 14, 2005. }~ +={ Smith, Patti } + +The classic example of music as social experience — music as a vehicle for a community of shared values — is the Grateful Dead. The band famously invited its fans to record all of its concerts and even provided them with an authorized “tapers’ section” in which to place their microphones and equipment. Fans were also allowed to circulate their homemade tapes so long as the music was shared, and not sold. This had the effect of building a large and committed fan base, which avidly archived, edited, and traded Grateful Dead cassettes. One reason that the Dead’s “customer base” has been so lucrative and durable over several decades is that the fans were not treated as mere customers or potential pirates, but as a community of shared values. The music belonged to the fans as much as to the band, even though Deadheads were only too happy to pay to attend concerts and buy the officially released CDs and t-shirts.~{ A fascinating collision of the Grateful Dead’s sharing ethic and the copyright business model occurred in 2005, when the Internet Archive placed a huge cache of fan recordings online, available for free download. When Grateful Dead Merchandising objected, Deadheads accused the band’s representatives of betraying the band’s long-established sharing ethic. Paradoxically, the band’s merchandisers may also have jeopardized the band’s commercial appeal by prohibiting the downloads. As music critic Jon Pareles put it, “The Dead had created an anarchy of trust, going not by statute but by instinct and turning fans into co-conspirators, spreading their music and buying tickets, T-shirts and official CDs to show their loyalty. The new approach . . . removes what could crassly be called brand value from the Dead’s legacy by reducing them to one more band with products to sell. Will the logic of copyright law be more profitable, in the end, than the logic of sharing? That’s the Dead’s latest improvisational experiment.” Jon Pareles, “The Dead’s Gamble: Free Music for Sale,” /{New York Times}/, December 3, 2005. }~ +={ Grateful Dead +1 } + +While the Grateful Dead may be an outlier case, it exemplifies the sharing ethic that the Internet is facilitating: the formation of communities of amateurs that flourish by sharing and celebrating music. Artists can make some money through CD sales, but much more through performances, merchandising, endorsements, and sales to films, television, and advertisers. If established singers and bands are reluctant to make a transition to this new business model, hungry newcomers are not. + +The Mountain Goats, an indie rock group, authorized the Internet Archive to host their live shows on the Web because they realized the videos seed market demand for their music. The group’s front man, John Darnielle, said, “I am totally in favor of tape trading, and file sharing never did anything wrong by me. People got into The Mountain Goats after downloading my stuff.”~{ Creative Commons blog, “Musicians Large and Small on Internet Downloading,” by Matt Haughey, July 26, 2004. }~ In 2001, two newcomers working out of a basement produced a cover version of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” which two years later went to the top of the British pop charts.~{ http://news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/entertainment/3352667.stm. }~ In a world where amateur creativity can easily migrate to the commercial mainstream, tagging works with a NonCommercial CC license is a valuable option. By requiring uses that fall outside the scope of the license to pay as usual, it can help artists get visibility while retaining their potential to earn money. A larger restructuring of the music industry, alas, will take longer to achieve. +={ Darnielle, John ; + Mountain Goats +} + +2~ Music as Remix +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + music, for +18 ; + music : + remixes +18 ; + remix works +18 +} + +If any segment of the music world really understands the social dynamics of musical creativity, it is hip-hop artists. As Joanna Demers documents in her book about “transformative appropriation” in music, /{Steal This Music}/, hip-hop was born as a remix genre in the 1970s and 1980s.~{ Joanna Demers, /{Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity}/ (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006). }~ In defiance of copyright law, which considers unauthorized borrowing as presumptively illegal, hip-hop artists used turntable scratching and digital sampling to transform existing songs into something new, which in time grew into a lucrative market segment. Hip-hop illustrates how the commons and the market need to freely interact, without undue restrictions, in order for both to flourish. It works because sampling is not a simple matter of “theft” but a mode of creativity, a way of carrying on a cultural conversation. Sampling is a way of paying tribute to musical heroes, mocking rivals, alluding to an historical moment, or simply experimenting with an arresting sound. When the rap group Run-DMC used Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” as the basis for a remix, it was not only a salute to the group’s musical influence and a new turn of the creative wheel, it revived Aerosmith’s sagging career (or, in economist’s terms, it “created new value”). +={ Demers, Joanna : + Steal This Music +1 ; + music : + hip-hop +1 +} + +The problem, of course, is that most remix culture (and the value it creates) is illegal. By the late 1980s, in fact, the freedom of the commons that gave birth to hip-hop was coming under siege. Musicians and record labels were routinely invoking copyright law to demand permission and payments for the tiniest samples of music. Only wealthy artists could afford to clear the rights of familiar songs, and basement amateurs (who had given rise to the genre in the first place) were being marginalized. When George Clinton’s group Funkadelic succeeded in its lawsuit against the rap group N.W.A. for using a nearly inaudible sample of a three-note, two-second clip from “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” — the infamous /{Bridgeport v. Dimension Films}/ decision, in 2004 — it became clear that the commons of hip-hop music was being enclosed.~{ This story is told by Demers in Steal This Music. The court ruling is /{Bridgeport v. Dimension Films}/, 383 F. 3d 390 (6th Circ. 2004). }~ Critics like Siva Vaidhyanathan and Kembrew McLeod believe that the legal crusade against sampling has significantly harmed the creative vitality of hip-hop. Something is clearly amiss when the one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2005 — /{The Grey Album}/, a remix collection by DJ Danger Mouse — cannot be legally released. /{The Grey Album}/ artfully combined music from the Beatles’s /{White Album}/ with lyrics from Jay-Z’s /{Black Album}/, resulting in “the most popular album in rock history that virtually no one paid for,” according to /{Entertainment Weekly}/.~{ DJ Danger Mouse’s remix received considerable press attention. A good overview is by Chuck Klosterman, “The DJ Auteur,” /{New York Times Magazine}/, June 18, 2006, pp. 40–45. }~ +={ Bridgeport v. Dimension Films ; + Clinton, George ; + Funkadelic ; + McLeod, Kembrew ; + Vaidhyanathan, Siva ; + DJ Danger Mouse +} + +The impetus for a solution to the sampling problem started with Negativland, an irreverent “sound collage” band known as much for its zany culture jamming as for its anticopyright manifestos. (One of its CDs includes a polemical booklet about fair use along with a whoopee cushion with a © symbol printed on it.) Negativland gained notoriety in the 1990s for its protracted legal battle with the band U2 and Island Records over Negativland’s release of a parody song called “U2.” Island Records claimed it was an infringement of copyright and trademark law, among other things. Negativland claimed that no one should be able to own the letter U and the numeral 2, and cited the fair use doctrine as protecting its song and title. The case was eventually settled.~{ See Negativland’s book, /{Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2}/ (Concord, CA: Seeland, 1995). }~ +={ Negativland +1 } + +As an experienced sampler of music, Negativland and collagist People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) asked Creative Commons if it would develop and offer a music sampling license. Don Joyce of Negativland explained: +={ Joyce, Don } + +_1 This would be legally acknowledging the now obvious state of modern audio/visual creativity in which quoting, sampling, direct referencing, copying and collaging have become a major part of modern inspiration. [A sampling option would] stop legally suppressing it and start culturally encouraging it — because it’s here to stay. That’s our idea for encouraging a more democratic media for all of us, from corporations to the individual.~{ Glenn Otis Brown, “Mmm . . . Free Samples (Innovation la),” Creative Commons blog, March 11, 2003, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3631. }~ + +With legal help from Cooley Godward Kronish and Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, Creative Commons did just that. During its consultations with the remix community, Creative Commons learned that Gilberto Gil, the renowned /{tropicalismo}/ musician and at the time the Brazilian minister of culture, had been thinking along similar lines, and so it received valuable suggestions and support from him. +={ Cooley Godward Kronish ; + Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati ; + Gil, Gilberto +} + +In 2005, Creative Commons issued the Sampling license as a way to let people take pieces of a work for any purpose except advertising.~{ Creative Commons Web site, at http://creativecommons.org/about/sampling. See also Ethan Smith, “Can Copyright Be Saved?” /{Wall Street Journal}/, October 20, 2003. }~ It also prohibited copying and distribution of the entire work.~[* A “Sampling Plus” license was also issued to allow noncommercial copying and distribution of an entire work, which means it could be distributed via file-sharing networks. Finally, a “NonCommercial Sampling Plus” license was devised to let people sample and transform pieces of a work, and copy and distribute the entire work, so long as it was for noncommercial purposes.]~ For example, an artist could take a snippet of music, a clip of film, or a piece of a photograph, and use the sample in a new creation. Since its release, the Sampling license has been criticized on philosophical grounds by some commoners who say it does not truly enhance people’s freedom because it prohibits copying and distribution of the entire work. This concern reached serious enough proportions that in 2007 Creative Commons “retired” the license; I’ll revisit this controversy in chapter 9. + +The CC Sampling license only whetted the imagination of people who wanted to find new ways to sample, share, and transform music. Neeru Paharia, then the assistant director of the Creative Commons, came up with the idea of developing ccMixter, a software platform for remixing music on the Web.~{ See http://wiki.creativecommons.org/ccMixter. Interview with Mike Linksvayer, February 7, 2007, and Neeru Paharia, April 13, 2007. }~ Paharia realized one day that “this whole remixing and sharing ecology is about getting feedback on who’s using your work and how it’s evolving. That’s almost half the pleasure.”~{ Interview with Neeru Paharia, April 13, 2007. }~ So the organization developed a Web site that would allow people to upload music that could be sampled and remixed. The site has about five thousand registered users, which is not terribly large, but it is an enthusiastic and active community of remix artists that acts as a great proof of concept while promoting the CC licenses. There are other, much larger remix sites on the Internet, such as Sony’s ACIDplanet, but such sites are faux commons. They retain ownership in the sounds and remixes that users make, and no derivative or commercial versions are allowed. +={ Paharia, Neeru } + +One feature of viral spirals is their propensity to call forth a jumble of new projects and unexpected partners. The CC licenses have done just that for music. ccMixter has joined with Opsound to offer a joint “sound pool” of clips licensed under an Attribution ShareAlike license. It also supports Freesound, a repository of more than twenty thousand CC-licensed samples ranging from waterfalls to crickets to music.~{ Neeru Paharia, “Opsound’s Sal Randolph,” Creative Commons blog, October 1, 2005, at http://creativecommons.org/audio/opsound; Mike Linksvayer, “Freesound,” Creative Commons blog, October 1, 2005, at http://creativecommons.org/audio/freesound; Matt Haughey, “Free Online Music Booms as SoundClick Offers Creative Commons Licenses,” Creative Commons blog, August 11, 2004. }~ + +Runoff Records, Inc., a record label, discovered a remix artist who teaches physics and calculus and goes by the name of Minus Kelvin. Runoff heard a podcast of Kelvin’s CC-licensed music, and signed him up, along with another ccMixter contributor, to do music for three seasons of the television show /{America’s Next Top Model}/.~{ Neeru Paharia, “Minus Kelvin Discovered on ccMixter,” Creative Commons blog, May 17, 2005, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/archive/2005/5. }~ A few months later, two ccMixter fans based in Poland and Holland started an online record label, DiSfish, that gives 5 percent of all sale proceeds to CC, another 5 percent to charity, with the remainder split between the label and the artist. All music on the label is licensed under CC.~{ Cezary Ostrowski from Poland and Marco Raaphorst from Holland met online at ccMixter and decided to go into business together. They started an online label called DiSfish. }~ + +The CC licenses are not just the province of daring remix artists and other experimentalists. Disappointed by its CD sales through traditional channels, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra released its performance of Handel’s 1736 opera, /{Atalanta}/, exclusively through the online record label Magnatune, using a CC license. Conductor Nicholas McGegan said the Internet “has potentially given the industry a tremendous shot in the arm,” letting orchestras reach “new audiences, including ones that are unlikely to hear you in person.”~{ Mia Garlick, “Classical Music Goes Digital (& CC),” May 3, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5883. }~ A company that specializes in Catalan music collaborated with the Catalonian government to release two CDs full of CC-licensed music.~{ The Enderrock Group, a company that specializes in Catalan music and publishes three popular music magazines, released the two CDs, /{Música Lliure and Música Lliure II}/, free within the page of its magazines. See Margot Kaminski, “Enderrock,” Creative Commons Web site, January 17, 2007, at http://creativecommons.org/audio/enderrock. }~ A group of Gamelan musicians from central Java who perform in North Carolina decided to release their recordings under a CC license.~{ The group, Gamelan Nyai Saraswait, was blogged about by Matt Haughey on February 1, 2003, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3599. }~ +={ McGegan, Nicholas } + +Big-name artists have gotten into the licenses as well. DJ Vadim created a splash when he released all the original solo, individual instrumental, and a cappella studio tracks of his album /{The Sound Catcher}/ under an Attribution, NonCommercial license, so that remixers could have at it.~{ Victor Stone, “DJ Vadim Releases Album Tracks Under CC,” August 20, 2007, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7619. }~ In 2004, /{Wired}/ magazine released a CD with sixteen tracks by the likes of David Byrne, Gilberto Gil, and the Beastie Boys. “By contributing a track to /{The Wired CD}/., these musicians acknowledge that for an art form to thrive, it needs to be open, fluid and alive,” wrote /{Wired}/. “These artists — and soon, perhaps, many more like them — would rather have people share their work than steal it.”~{ Thomas Goetz, “Sample the Future,” /{Wired}/, November 2004, pp. 181–83. }~ +={ Byrne, David ; + Gil, Gilberto +1 ; + DJ Vadim ; + Beastie Boys +} + +Soon thereafter, Byrne and Gil went so far as to host a gala benefit concert for Creative Commons in New York City. In a fitting fusion of styles, Gil sang a Brazilian arrangement of Cole Porter’s cowboy song, “Don’t Fence Me In.” The crowd of 1,500 was high on the transcultural symbolism, said Glenn Brown: “Musical superstars from North and South, jamming together, building earlier works into new creations, in real time. Lawyers on the sidelines and in the audience, where they belong. The big Creative Commons logo smiling overhead.”~{ Glenn Otis Brown, “WIRED Concert and CD: A Study in Collaboration,” September 24, 2004, available at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4415. }~ The description captures the CC enterprise to a fault: the fusion of some clap-your-hands populism and hardheaded legal tools, inflected with an idealistic call to action to build a better world. +={ Brown, Glenn Otis ; + Porter, Cole +} + +By 2008 the power of open networks had persuaded the major record labels to abandon digital rights management of music CDs, and more major artists were beginning to venture forth with their own direct distribution plans, bypassing the standard record label deals. Prince, Madonna, and others found it more lucrative to run their own business affairs and deal with concert venues and merchandisers. In a major experiment that suggests a new business model for major music acts, Nine Inch Nails released its album /{Ghosts I-IV}/ under a Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike license, and posted audio files of the album on its official Web site, inviting free downloads. It did not do advertising or promotion. Despite the free distribution — or because of it — the group made money by selling 2,500 copies of an “Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition” of the album for $300; the edition sold out in less than three days. There were also nonlimited sales of a “deluxe edition” for $75 and a $10 CD. The scheme showed how free access to the music can be used to drive sales for something that remains scarce, such as a “special edition” CD or a live performance. One week after the album’s release, the Nine Inch Nails’ Web site reported that the group had made over $1.6 million from over 750,000 purchase and download transactions. Considering that an artist generally makes only $1.60 on the sale of a $15.99 CD, Nine Inch Nails made a great deal more money from a “free” album distribution than it otherwise would have made through a standard record deal.~{ See, e.g., Wikipedia entry, “Ghosts I-IV,” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_I-IV. }~ +={ Nine Inch Nails } + +It is too early to know if Lessig’s “BMI strategy” will in fact catalyze a structural transformation in the entertainment industries. But Lessig apparently feels that it is the only feasible strategy. As he said in a 2006 speech, intensified hacking to break systems of proprietary control will not work; new campaigns to win progressive legislation won’t succeed within the next twenty years; and litigation is “a long-term losing strategy,” as the /{Eldred}/ case demonstrated. For Lessig and much of the free culture community, the long-term project of building one’s own open, commons-friendly infrastructure is the only enduring solution. +={ BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + effects of ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred v. Reno, and | music, and +1 +} + +In the music industry, the early signs seem to support this approach. When digital guru Don Tapscott surveyed the events of 2006, he concluded that “the losers built digital music stores and the winners built vibrant communities based on music. The losers built walled gardens while the winners built public squares. The losers were busy guarding their intellectual property while the winners were busy getting everyone’s attention.” In a penetrating analysis in 2007, music industry blogger Gerd Leonhard wrote: “In music, it’s always been about interaction, about sharing, about engaging — not Sell-Sell-Sell right from the start. Stop the sharing and you kill the music business — it’s that simple. When the fan/user/listener stops engaging with the music, it’s all over.”~{ Gerd Leonhard, “Open Letter to the Independent Music Industry: Music 2.0 and the Future of Music,” July 1, 2007, at http://www.gerdleonhard.net/2007/07/gerd-leonhards.html. }~ +={ Leonhard, Gerd ; + Tapscott, Don +} + +Serious change is in the air when the producer/consumer dichotomy is no longer the only paradigm, and a vast network of ordinary people and talented creators are becoming active participants in making their own culture. They are sharing and co-creating. Markets are no longer so separate from social communities; indeed, the two are blurring into each other. Although we may live in a complicated interregnum between Centralized Media and distributed media, the future is likely to favor those creators and businesses who build on open platforms. As Dan Hunter and F. Gregory Lastowka write: “It is clear that two parallel spheres of information production exist today. One is a traditional, copyright-based and profit-driven model that is struggling with technological change. The second is a newly enabled, decentralized amateur production sphere, in which individual authors or small groups freely release their work.”~{ Dan Hunter and F. Gregory Lastowka, “Amateur-to-Amateur,” /{William and Mary Law Review}/ 46, no. 951 (December 2004), pp. 1029–30. }~ +={ Hunter, Dan +1 ; + Lastowka, F. Gregory +} + +Hunter and Lastowka liken copyright law today to the Roman Empire in decline: “It is meaningless to ask whether the unitary might of imperial Rome was preferable to the distributed, messy agglomeration of tribes and states that eventually emerged after Rome fell. It was not better, just different.” That is certainly a debatable conclusion, depending upon one’s cultural tastes and sense of history. But the Rome metaphor does capture the fragmentation and democratization of creativity that is now under way. And that, in fact, is something of the point of the CC licenses: to make access and use of culture more open and egalitarian. For all his commitment to law and the CC licenses, Lessig ultimately throws his lot in with social practice: “Remember, it’s the /{activity}/ that the licenses make possible that matters, not the licenses themselves. The point is to change the existing discourse by growing a new discourse.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, September 14, 2006. }~ +={ copyright law : + decline of ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + social practice, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +} + +1~ 7 THE MACHINE AND THE MOVEMENT +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + social movement, as +10 +} + +/{An infrastructure of code gives rise to a movement for free culture.}/ + +When the CC licenses were first launched, many regarded them as a boring legal license that may or may not really matter. The real surprise was how the CC licenses became a focal object for organizing a movement. As more users began to adopt the licenses in 2003 and 2004, they ceased being just a set of legal permissions and became a cool social brand. The CC licenses and logo became symbols of resistance against the highly controlled, heavily marketed, Big Brother worldview that Hollywood and the record industry seem to embody. The CC licenses offered a way to talk about one’s legal and creative rights in the Internet age, and to cite to a positive alternative — the sharing economy. With no paid advertising to speak of, the CC logo came to symbolize an ethic and identity, one that stood for artistic integrity, democratic transparency, and innovation. + +Glenn Otis Brown recalls how people spontaneously took up the license to express their anger at the media establishment and their yearning for a more wholesome alternative: “If you’re frustrated with the way the world works now, frustrated with the way the media is becoming more democratized but all these laws aren’t really facilitating that,” said Brown, “you can just cast a little virtual vote for a different sort of copyright system by putting the ‘Some Rights Reserved’ tag on your Web page. But also, practically, you can help create pools of content that people can work with and make it so much easier to participate.” Without really planning it, the Creative Commons became much more than a system of free licenses for sharing. It became a symbol for a movement. Communities of social practice began to organize themselves around the CC project. +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC licensing, and +3 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + social practice, and +} + +“Inside of the organization, we always talked about how we really had /{two}/ organizations,” said Brown. “One was Creative Commons, the /{movement}/; and one was Creative Commons, the /{machine}/.”~{ Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, June 9, 2006. }~ The machine was about meeting utilitarian needs through licenses and software; the movement was about motivating people and transforming culture. Just as the GPL had given rise to the free software community and a hacker political philosophy (which in turn inspired the Creative Commons’s organizers), so the CC licenses were spontaneously igniting different pockets of the culture: Web designers, bloggers, musicians, book authors, videographers, filmmakers, and amateurs of all stripes. The viral spiral was proceeding apace. +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC as movement and “machine,”, and +3 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + growth of +3 | “machine”, as +3 ; + General Public License (GPL)free software, and +1 ; + hackers : + political philosophy +} + +The tension between the machine and the movement has been an animating force in the evolution of the Creative Commons. “You want to have something that’s actually useful to people,” said Brown, “but you also have to get people excited about it, and build up your constituency.”~{ Ibid. }~ Some CC initiatives have had strong symbolic resonances but little practical value, while other initiatives were quite useful but not very sexy. For example, embedding CC metadata into software applications and Web services is complicated and technical — but highly effective in extending the practices of free culture. On the other hand, the Creative Commons’s release of specialty licenses for music sampling, developing nations, and a CC version of the General Public License for software (as discussed below) were discretionary moves of some utility that were probably more important as gestures of solidarity to allies. + +This has been a recurrent motif for the organization — pragmatic, improvisational outreach to distinct constituencies as part of a larger attempt to build a movement. There has always been a corresponding pull, however, “not to put ‘the machine’ at risk by incorporating the new licenses into every last one of our software tools,” said Brown. The integrity of “the machine” ultimately needs to be respected. + +Even as the machine was getting built, Lessig was taking steps to stoke up a movement. In 2004, Lessig published his third book in five years, /{Free Culture}/. The book described, as the subtitle put it, “how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity.” Lessig’s earlier books, /{Code}/ and /{The Future of Ideas}/, had critiqued the alarming trends in copyright law, explained the importance of the commons, and set forth a philosophical rationale for what became the CC licenses. Now /{Free Culture}/ provided a wide-ranging survey of how incumbent industries with old business models — for recorded music, film, broadcasting, cable television — were (and are) curbing traditional creative freedoms and technological innovations. Drawing explicitly on the ideas of freedom developed by Richard Stallman in the 1980s, and upon legal history, politics, and colorful stories, Lessig argued that industry protectionism poses a profound harm to creators, business, and democratic culture — and that action needed to be taken. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Free Culture +2 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace | The Future of Ideas | CC licenses, and | law in contemporary context, and ; + Stallman, Richard : + influence of | freedom, and +} + +Although /{Free Culture}/ repeats many of the fundamental arguments made in his earlier books, Lessig’s arguments this time did not sound like a law professor’s or academic’s, but more like an activist trying to rally a social movement. “This movement must begin in the streets,” he writes. “It must recruit a significant number of parents, teachers, librarians, creators, authors, musicians, filmmakers, scientists — all to tell their story in their own words, and to tell their neighbors why this battle is so important. . . . We will not reclaim a free culture by individual action alone. It will take important reforms of laws. We have a long way to go before the politicians will listen to these ideas and implement these reforms. But that also means that we have time to build awareness around the changes that we need.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, /{Free Culture}/ (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 275, 287. }~ The preeminent challenge for this would-be movement, Lessig wrote, is “rebuilding freedoms previously presumed” and “rebuilding free culture.” + +Lessig had reason to think that his analysis and exhortations would find receptive ears. He was now a leading voice on copyright and Internet issues, and well known through his earlier books, public speaking, and /{Eldred}/ advocacy. The launch of the Creative Commons was thrusting him into the spotlight again. Adoption of the CC licenses was steadily growing in 2003 and 2004 based on the most comprehensive sources at the time, search engines. Yahoo was reporting in September 2004 that there were 4.7 million links to CC licenses on the Web. This number shot up to 14 million only six months later, and by August 2005 it had grown to 53 million.~{ CC license statistics, on CC wiki page, at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_statistics. }~ These numbers offer only a crude estimate of actual license usage, but they nonetheless indicated a consistent trend. Usage was also being propelled by new types of Web 2.0 sites featuring usergenerated content. For example, Flickr, the photo-sharing site, had 4.1 million photos tagged with CC licenses at the end of 2004, a number that has soared to an estimated 75 million by 2008. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and ; + Yahoo ; + Web 2.0 : + CC licenses, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + Web 2.0 environment, and +} + +The decisive choice, four years earlier, to build a suite of licenses that could propagate themselves via open networks was bearing fruit. + +2~ Building the CC Machine +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + “machine”, as +22 +} + +It was a pleasant surprise for the organization to learn that a great deal of individual usage of the CC licenses was fairly spontaneous. Persuading large companies and respected institutions to use the CC licenses was a more difficult proposition. Lessig therefore spent a fair amount of time trying to get prominent institutions to adopt the licenses and give them some validation. Among the early converts were MIT, Rice University, Stanford Law School, and Sun Microsystems, supplemented by some relatively new organizations such as Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive and the Public Library of Science, a publisher of open-access journals. + +Personal diplomacy can accomplish only so much, however, and in any case the Internet itself needed to be leveraged to disseminate the licenses and educate the public. One challenge, for example, was to introduce the CC licenses — which are not, after all, a self-evident need for most people — in a clear, compelling way. Most authors and artists have little idea what licenses they may want to choose, and their implications for how they might be able to sell or share works in the future. People needed a quick and easy way to make intelligent choices. It fell to Lisa Rein, the first technical director at CC, in late 2001, to develop a license-generating interface for the Web site. The quandary she faced was how to maximize user choice in selecting licenses while minimizing complexity. +={ Rein, Lisa } + +The Web interface for the licenses has steadily improved over the years, but in a sense, those improvements have been offset by a growing complexity and number of CC licenses. Some critics have complained that the whole CC scheme can be a bit daunting. Yes, the licenses can ensure certain freedoms without your having to hire an attorney, which is clearly an improvement over relying on the fair use doctrine. But that does not mean that anyone can immediately understand the implications of using a NonCommercial or ShareAlike license for a given work. Any lurker on a CC listserv soon encounters head-scratching questions like “Can I use a BY-NC photo from Flickr on my blog if the blog is hosted by a company whose terms of service require me to grant them a worldwide, nonexclusive license to use any work hosted by their service, including for commercial use?” +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + complexity of | fair use, and ; + fair use doctrine : + CC licenses, and +} + +By far the more important vehicle for promoting usage of the CC licenses has been software code. Lessig and the CC team realized that if the licenses could become an embedded element of leading search engines, Web publishing tools, and Web 2.0 platforms, it could powerfully promote license use. Integrating the code into existing Web sites and software can pose some serious technical challenges, however. Figuring out how to integrate the CC licenses with popular software applications, Web services, and digital file formats has fallen chiefly to Nathan Yergler, the chief technology officer of Creative Commons. Over the years, he and other CC developers have come up with a variety of applications to help make software infrastructures more friendly. One program that was developed, ccHost, is a content management system that has licensing and remix tracking built into its core. JsWidget is a simple javascript widget that developers can easily integrate into their sites to enable users to choose a license without leaving the site. Creative Commons has made it a standard practice to coordinate its work with technology volunteers, startup companies, and nonprofits with a stake in digitally enabling open licensing. It does this work through a CC development wiki, the cc-devel mailing list, Internet Relay Chat, World Wide Web Consortium working groups, and participation in Google’s annual “Summer of Code” program for student programmers. +={ code : + CC licenses, and +7 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + software code, and +7 | Web 2.0 environment, and ; + Web 2.0 : + CC licenses, and ; + Google ; + software : + CC licenses, and +7 +} + +Lessig and top CC staff have worked hard at convincing executives at major software enterprises to incorporate the CC licenses into a software application or Web site. One early triumph came when the makers of Movable Type, a blogging platform, agreed to make it easy for users to tack a CC license onto their blogs. Two months later, the O’Reilly empire of software blogs adopted the CC licenses. Then programmer Dave Winer embedded the licenses in his new Web log software in 2003. Blogs may not be core infrastructure for the Internet, but they are plentiful and popular, and have given Creative Commons enormous visibility and a high adoption curve. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +6 ; + O’Reilly, Tim ; + blogging ; + Winer, Dave +} + +It had always been Lessig’s ambition that the major search engines would be reengineered to help people find CC-tagged content. To help prove that it could be done, Creative Commons built its own jerry-rigged search engine that retrieved content tagged with CC metadata. Lessig and Brown, meanwhile, made numerous diplomatic overtures to Google and Yahoo executives and software engineers. After two years of off-and-on conversations, both search engine companies agreed in 2005 to incorporate changes into their advanced searches so that users could locate CC-licensed content. (The Google advanced search does not use the Creative Commons name, but simply asks users if they want content that is “free to use or share,” among other options.) The search engine exposure was a serious breakthrough for Creative Commons’s visibility and legitimacy. +={ Brown, Glenn Otis +2 ; + Google ; + Yahoo +} + +After a few years, the CC licenses were integrated into a number of other software platforms. It became possible to search for CClicensed images (Flickr), video programs (blip.tv), music (Owl), and old Web content (Internet Archive, SpinXpress). With these search tools, Internet users had a practical way to locate blues tunes that could be remixed, photos of the Eiffel Tower that could be modified and sold, and articles about flower arrangements that could be legally republished. Advertisers, publishers, and other companies could search for images, songs, and text that could be licensed for commercial use. + +Lessig and Brown worked hard to get other major Web and software companies to make it easy for users to tag content with CC licenses. The ultimate goal was to make it easy for users to automate their preferences. Joi Ito, a Japanese venture capitalist and democratic reformer who became the chair of the Creative Commons’s board of directors in 2006, put it this way: “Every input device that you have, whether it’s a camera phone, a digital camera or PowerPoint software, should allow you to automatically set it to the CC license that you want. And the minute you take that picture, you’ve already expressed how you would want that picture to be used.” +={ Ito, Joichi } + +Creative Commons also urged open-source software communities to incorporate CC-made software into their applications so that users can more easily tag content with the licenses or find licensed works. Firefox, for example, has integrated a Creative Commons search function into the drop-down menu of its browser search interface. It also has a plug-in module called MozCC that scans for any CC metadata as you browse Web pages, and then reports on the browser status bar how content is licensed. CC licenses have been integrated into other software as well, such as Songbird, a free software media player, and Inkscape, a free vector-graphics program similar to Adobe Illustrator. +={ open source software : + CC licenses, and +2 +} + +Application by application, Web site by Web site, the Creative Commons board and staff have tried to insinuate the licenses into as many software applications and Web services as they could, in a kind of behind-the-scenes enactment of Lessig’s book /{Code}/. If code is law, then let’s write it ourselves! The diffusion of the licenses has tended to occur through personal connections of Lessig, CC board members, and friendly tech entrepreneurs and programmers. Joi Ito used his contacts at Sony to persuade it to develop a video remix Web site in Japan that uses CC licenses as the default choice. For Sony, the licenses help the company avoid any whiff of legal impropriety because users must stipulate whether their video remixes may be shared or not. +={ code : + as law ; + law : + code as ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ; + Ito, Joichi +} + +In 2006, Microsoft went so far as to come out with a plug-in module for its Word program, enabling writers to tag their text documents with CC licenses. At the time, many CC fans grumbled at the hypocrisy of Microsoft, the five-hundred-pound gorilla of proprietary software, embracing the Creative Commons, even in such a modest way. But for Lessig and CC board members, any business that chooses to advance the reach of free culture — in this case, by accessing the 400 million users of Microsoft Office — is welcomed. While this ecumenical tolerance has made the Creative Commons a big-tent movement with an eclectic assortment of players, it has also provoked bitter complaints in free software and Wikipedia circles that the Creative Commons promotes a fuzzy, incoherent vision of “freedom” in the digital world (an issue to which I return in chapter 9). +={ Microsoft : + CC licenses, and +} + +One vexing problem that CC developers confronted was how to digitally tag stand-alone files as CC-licensed work if they are not on the Web. How could one tag an MP3 file, for example, to show that the music is under a CC license? One problem with just inserting a CC tag onto the MP3 file is that anyone could fraudulently mark the file as CC-licensed. To prevent scams, Neeru Paharia, then CC assistant director, and other developers came up with a solution that requires any stand-alone digital files that are embedded with CC licenses to include a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that links to a Web page verifying the assertions made on the file. +={ Paharia, Neeru } + +The practice of embedding CC license information on digital files has been called /{digital rights expression}/ — a kind of benign analogue to digital rights management. The purpose is to embed information about the copyright status of a work /{in}/ the digital file. Unlike DRM, the goal is not to try to build an infrastructure for enforcing those rights or controlling how people may use a work. “Instead of using technology to ensure that the consumer can’t do anything with it,” said Mike Linksvayer, CC vice president and former chief technology officer, “we’re trying to use technology to ensure that people can find a CC-licensed work. If they’re looking, for instance, for music that can remixed, then this information will help a search engine locate that information.”~{ Interview with Mike Linksvayer, February 7, 2007. }~ +={ Linksvayer, Mike ; + digital rights expression ; + digital rights management (DRM) +} + +Perhaps the neatest self-promotional trick that the Creative Commons has devised is to rely upon companies whose very business plans revolve around CC licenses. We will examine “open business” enterprises in chapter 10, but for now it is worth noting that a number of innovative companies use the licenses as a core element of their business strategy. These enterprises include Flickr (photo sharing), Magnatune (an online record label), Jamendo (a Luxembourg-based music site), and Revver (a video-sharing site that shares advertising revenues with creators). + +Infrastructure grows old and occasionally needs to be updated and improved. The CC licenses have been no exception. As users have incorporated them into one medium after another, the unwitting omissions and infelicitous legal language of some parts of the licenses needed revisiting. After many months of discussions with many parts of the CC world, the Creative Commons issued a new set of 2.0 licenses in May 2004.~{ Glenn Otis Brown, “Announcing (and explaining) our new 2.0 licenses,” CC blog, May 25, 2004, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4216. }~ They did not differ substantially from the original ones, and in fact the changes would probably bore most nonlawyers. For example, version 2.0 included a provision that allows a licensor to require licensees to provide a link back to the licensor’s work. The 2.0 licenses also clarify many complicated license options affecting music rights, and make clear that licensors make no warranties of title, merchantability, or fitness for use. Perhaps the biggest change in version 2.0 was the elimination of the choice of Attribution licenses. Since nearly 98 percent of all licensors chose Attribution, the Creative Commons decided to drop licenses without the Attribution requirement, thereby reducing the number of CC licenses from eleven to six. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + version 2.0 of +} + +Another set of major revisions to the licenses was taken up for discussion in 2006, and agreed upon in February 2007.~{ 7. Mia Garlick, “Version 3.0 Launched,” CC blog, http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7249. }~ Once again, the layperson would care little for the debates leading to the changes, but considerable, sometimes heated discussion went into the revisions. In general, the 3.0 tweaks sought to make the licenses clearer, more useful, and more enforceable. The issue of “moral rights” under copyright law — an issue in many European countries — is explicitly addressed, as are the complications of the CC licenses and collecting societies. New legal language was introduced to ensure that people who remix works under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), would be able to also use CC-licensed materials in the same work — an important provision for preventing free culture from devolving into “autistic islands” of legally incomptabile material. Besides helping align the CC world with Wikipedia (which uses the GNU FDL license), the 3.0 revisions also made harmonizing legal changes to take account of MIT and the Debian software development community. +={ GNU Project : + GNU FDL ; + copyright law : + moral rights, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + version 3.0 of +} + +By getting the CC licenses integrated into so many types of software and Web services, and even leveraging market players to embrace the sharing ethic, Creative Commons has managed to kill at least three birds with one stone. It has enlarged the universe of shareable Internet content. It has educated people to consider how copyright law affects them personally. And it has given visibility to its larger vision of free culture. +={ copyright law : + CC licenses, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + copyright law, and ; + Internet : + communication system, as +1 ; + ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + growth of +2 +} + +In one sense, the CC “machine” composed of the licenses, the CC-developed software, and the CC-friendly protocol was the engine for change. In another sense, the influence that Creative Commons has acquired derives from the social communities that gradually began to use its infrastructure. The social practice infused power into the “machine” even as the machine expanded the social practice. A virtuous cycle took hold, as the CC community used its self-devised legal and technological infrastructure to advance their shared cultural agenda. +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + influence of +} + +Driving this cycle was an ever-growing staff and new managers working out of offices in downtown San Francisco. Although Lessig has been the chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Creative Commons for most of its existence, most day-to-day operating responsibilities fell to executive director Glenn Otis Brown until his departure in 2005, and then to general counsel Mia Garlick, who left in 2007. (Both took jobs at Google.) Key executives at Creative Commons in 2008 included Mike Linksvayer, vice president; Eric Steuer, creative director; Diane Peters, general counsel; Nathan Yergler, chief technology officer; and Jennifer Yip, operations manager. The annual budget, which was $750,000 in 2003, had grown to $3.6 million in 2008 (a sum that included the Science Commons project). Much of this funding came from foundations such as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Omidyar Network. +={ Linksvayer, Mike ; + Brown, Glenn Otis : + executive director, as ; + Peters, Diane ; + Steuer, Eric ; + Yergler, Nathan ; + Yip, Jennifer ; + John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ; + Garlick, Mia ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +2 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + funding of ; + Omidyar Network ; + Rockefeller Foundation ; + William and Flora Hewlett Foundation +} + +Once the CC machine had secured its footing, Lessig and the CC staff paid close attention to the movement — the social communities that find utility and meaning through Creative Commons— and to developing new software and projects that these early adopters would welcome. In 2006, the organization hit upon the idea of hosting a series of “salons” in major cities. The gatherings have become a big success, and are now replicated in cities throughout the world. Artists talk about how they use CC licenses; entrepreneurs explain how their business models work; remix artists perform their work. The events, free and open to the public, combine testimonials about free culture, personal networking, entrepreneurial idea-mongering, live performances, and partying. The CC crowd seems to enjoy partying; they do it well. Every December, there are gala anniversary parties in groovy San Francisco hot spots. There have been virtual parties in the immersive online world, Second Life. Because CC users tend to include some of the most adventurous artistic talent and eclectic innovators around — people who know where the truly cool night spots are — CC parties tend to be lively, good times. The parties in Rio and Dubrovnik, at the iCommons Summits, were memorable international happenings, for example — occasions, as one self-styled Lothario boasted to me, “where a guy could dance with a woman from every continent of the world in a single evening.” +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + social movement, as +2 | CC Salons +} + +Add to the mix tech-oriented college students, another key sector of free culture activism, and there is even more youthful energy. Hundreds of college students participate in a nationwide student organization, FreeCulture.org, later renamed Students for Free Culture. The group got its start in 2004 when some students at Swarthmore College began investigating the reliability of Diebold electronic voting machines; the company invoked copyright law in an attempt to keep the problems secret, leading to a public confrontation that Diebold lost. Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, who were also inspired by Lessig’s advocacy, co-founded the group, which has since spawned over thirty quasi-autonomous chapters on campuses across the United States and a few foreign nations. The organization tries to be a grassroots force on Internet, digital technology, and copyright issues. It has mounted protests against CDs with digital rights management, for example, and hosted film remixing contests and exhibits of CC-licensed art at NYU and Harvard. Students for Free Culture also organized a “no-profit record company/recording collective,” the Antenna Alliance, which gave bands free recording space and distributed their CC-licensed music to college radio stations. +={ Pavlosky, Nelson ; + Smith, Luke ; + Students for Free Culture +} + +We have looked at the machine and many parts of the movement, but not at one of the most significant forces fueling Creative Commons — the dozens of national projects to adapt the licenses to legal systems around the world. The long-term reverberations of this movement — which includes activists in Brazil, Croatia, South Africa, Egypt, Peru, Scotland, and dozens of other countries — are only beginning to be felt. + +2~ 8 FREE CULTURE GOES GLOBAL +={ Creative Commons International +79 } + +/{The commoners mount a transnational mobilization to build their own digital commons.}/ + +It is a measure of Lessig’s ambition for Creative Commons that only five months after the release of the licenses, in April 2003, he instigated a move to take the idea global. Glenn Brown remembers objecting, “I don’t know how we’re going to get this done! Larry was like, ‘We have no other choice. We /{have}/ to do this. This needs to be an international organization.’”~{ Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, June 9, 2006. }~ +={ Boyle, James : + CC International, and +1 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +1 +} + +Professor James Boyle, a board member, was aghast. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said upon hearing the idea. “I was practically foaming at the mouth,” he recalled, noting that it was “just insane” to try to adapt the licenses to the mind-boggling complexities of copyright laws in scores of nations.~{ Interview with James Boyle, August 15, 2006. }~ But Lessig, determined to make the Creative Commons an international project, proceeded to hire Christiane Asschenfeldt (now Christiane Henckel von Donnersmarck), a Berlin-based copyright lawyer whom he had met the previous summer at an iLaw (Internet Law) conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He charged her with helping project leaders in different countries adapt the licenses (or, in computerese, “port” them) to their respective national legal codes. +={ Asschenfeldt, Christiane +1 ; + copyright law : + international +} + +Asschenfeldt set about inventing a system for gathering teams of volunteers, usually associated with a law school or technology institute, to become CC affiliates. Once an affiliate institution and project lead are chosen, the project lead produces a first draft of the licenses, which then undergoes public discussion, rewriting, and a final review by the new international arm of Creative Commons, CC International.~{ The procedures for porting a CC license to another jurisdiction are outlined in a document, “Welcome to Creative Commons International,” undated, at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Worldwide_Overview. }~ (Confusingly, this project was originally called “iCommons,” a name that in 2006 was reassigned to a new CC spinoff group that convenes the international free culture movement.) +={ free culture : + international +} + +In a pre-Internet context, the whole idea of a creating a new international license architecture and network of legal experts might seem ridiculously unrealistic. But by 2003 there were enough examples of “distributed intelligence” popping up that it no longer seemed so crazy to think that a passionate corps of dispersed volunteers could collaborate as catalysts for change. In any case, following the /{Eldred}/ defeat, Lessig and Brown came to believe, as discussed earlier, that the Creative Commons needed to be both a machine and a movement. +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC as movement and “machine,”, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + “machine”, as | social movement, as ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + effects of ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred v. Reno, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +1 +} + +Going international with the licenses offered an appealing way to grow both simultaneously without forcing unpleasant trade-offs between the two, at least initially. Drafting the licenses for a country, for example, helps convene top lawyers committed to the idea of legal sharing and collaboration while also mobilizing diverse constituencies who are the potential leaders of a movement. + +According to Jonathan Zittrain, an early collaborator on the project and a board member, Creative Commons at the international level is more of a “persuasive, communicative enterprise than a legal licensing one.”~{ Interview with Jonathan Zittrain, September 28, 2006. }~ It is a vehicle for starting a process for engaging public-spirited lawyers, law scholars, and all manner of creators. The licenses do have specific legal meanings in their respective legal jurisdictions, of course, or are believed to have legal application. (Only three courts, in the Netherlands and Spain, have ever ruled on the legal status of the CC licenses. In two instances the courts enforced the licenses; in the other case, in which the defendant lost, the validity of the licenses was not at issue.)~{ The most famous court case involving the CC licenses is /{A. Curry v. Audax/Weekend}/, in which Adam Curry sued the publishers of a Dutch tabloid magazine and two senior editors for using four photos of his family on his Flickr account that had been licensed under a BY-NC-SA license. See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5944 and http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5823. A District Court of Amsterdam upheld Curry’s usage of the CC licenses in a March 9, 2006, decision; see http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/judgements/Curry-Audax-English.pdf. There have been two Spanish cases involving CC licenses. In both cases, a collecting society, the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), sued cafés for playing “free music” licensed under CC licenses; SGAE claimed that it was owed royalties for the public performance of music because artists cannot legally apply a CC license to their work (or even release it online) without the consent of their collecting society. In both instances, the cases turned on evidentiary issues, not on the enforceability of CC licenses. See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5830 and http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7228. }~ Apart from their legal meaning, the licenses’ most important function may be as a social signaling device. They let people announce, “I participate in and celebrate the sharing economy.” The internationalization of the CC licenses has also been a way of “localizing” the free culture movement. +={ Zittrain, Jonathan } + +The first nation to port the CC licenses was Japan. This was partly an outgrowth of a five-month sabbatical that Lessig had spent in Tokyo, from late 2002 through early 2003. There were already stirrings of dissatisfaction with copyright law in Japan. Koichiro Hayashi, a professor who had once worked for the telecom giant NTT, had once proposed a so-called d-mark system to allow copyright owners to forfeit the statutory term of copyright protection and voluntarily declare a shorter term for their works. In the spring of 2003, a team of Japanese lawyers associated with a technology research institute, the Global Communications Center (GLOCOM), working with CC International in Berlin, set about porting the licenses to Japanese law. +={ Creative Commons International : + Japan +2 ; + Global Communications Center (GLOCOM) ; + Hayashi, Koichiro +} + +Yuko Noguchi, a former Lessig student and lawyer who later became the legal project lead, explained that the CC licenses are a culturally attractive way for Japanese to address the structural problems of copyright law. Japan is a country that prizes harmony and dislikes confrontation. The licenses offer a way to promote legal sharing without forcing bitter public policy conflicts with major content industries.~{ Interview with Yuko Noguchi, September 12, 2007. }~ (Partly for such reasons, CC Japan shifted its affiliation to the University of Tokyo in 2006.) In a culture that enjoys the sharing of comics, animation, haiku, and other works, the CC Japan licenses, launched in January 2004, have been used by a diverse range of artists and companies. +={ Noguchi, Yuko } + +During his sojourn in Japan, Lessig had a fateful meeting with Joichi Ito, who in many ways embodies the tech sophistication, democratic zeal, and cosmopolitan style of the international Creative Commons movement. Widely known as Joi (pronounced “Joey”), Ito, forty-two, was born in Japan and educated in the United States. Disaffected with formal education in the U.S., where he studied computer science and physics, he dropped out and began his highly unusual career in Japan as an activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He has worked as a nightclub disc jockey, and brought industrial music and the rave scene to Japan, but he has also become a talented venture capitalist and early stage investor in such companies as Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, and Rupture. Lessig and Ito became close friends; Ito later joined the Creative Commons board. He was appointed chairman of the board in 2007 and then, in 2008, he became chief executive officer when Lessig left to start a congressional reform project. Duke law professor James Boyle, a board member, replaced Ito as chairman. +={ Ito, Joichi +1 ; + Boyle, James : + as chairman +} + +Once it went public, the very idea of Creative Commons attracted many other people like Ito to its ranks: educated, tech-savvy, culturally fluent, activist-minded. In fact, following the American launch of Creative Commons, volunteers from many countries began to approach the organization, asking if they could port the licenses to their own legal systems. Finland became the second nation to adopt the licenses, in May 2004, followed a month later by Germany. In Europe, the early adopters included Denmark, Hungary, Scotland, Slovenia, Sweden, and Malta. In South America, CC licenses were introduced in Argentina, Chile, and Peru. In Asia, Malaysia and China ported the licenses, as did Australia. Israel was the first Middle Eastern country to port the licenses. + +As each jurisdiction introduces its licenses, it typically hosts a gala public event to celebrate and publicize free culture. News media and government officials are invited. There are panel discussions about copyright law and digital culture; performances by musicians who use the licenses; and endorsements by prominent universities, cultural institutions, and authors. Lessig has made it a practice to fly in and deliver an inspirational speech. Few international launches of CC licenses have been more spectacular or consequential than the one staged by Brazil in March 2004. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + public speaker, as | CC International, and +} + +2~ Brazil, the First Free Culture Nation +={ Brazil : + free culture in +23 ; + Creative Commons International : + Brazil +23 +} + +Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had just been elected president of Brazil, and he was eager to stake out a new set of development policies to allow his nation to plot its own economic and cultural future. His government, reflecting his electoral mandate, resented the coercive effects of international copyright law and patent law. To tackle some of these issues on the copyright front, President Lula appointed Gilberto Gil, the renowned singer-songwriter, as his minister of culture. +={ Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio ; + Gil, Gilberto +11 +} + +Gil became a revered cultural figure when he helped launch a new musical style, /{tropicalismo}/, in the late 1960s, giving Brazil a fresh, international cachet. The music blended national styles of music with pop culture and was inflected with political and moral themes. As one commentator put it, /{tropicalismo}/ was “a very ’60s attempt to capture the chaotic, swirling feel of Brazil’s perennially uneven modernization, its jumble of wealth and poverty, of rural and urban, of local and global. . . . They cut and pasted styles with an abandon that, amid today’s sample-happy music scene, sounds up-to-theminute.”~{ Wikipedia entry, “Tropicalismo,” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropicalismo. }~ The military dictatorship then running the government considered /{tropicalismo}/ sufficiently threatening that it imprisoned Gil for several months before forcing him into exile, in London. Gil continued writing and recording music, however, and eventually returned to Brazil.~{ For a history of Gil, see his personal Web site at http://www.gilbertogil.com.br/index.php?language=en; the Wikipedia entry on him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilberto_Gil; and Larry Rohter, “Gilberto Gil Hears the Future, Some Rights Reserved,” /{New York Times}/, March 11, 2007. }~ + +This history matters, because when Gil was appointed culture minister, he brought with him a rare political sophistication and public veneration. His moral stature and joyous humanity allowed him to transcend politics as conventionally practiced. “Gil wears shoulder-length dreadlocks and is apt to show up at his ministerial offices dressed in the simple white linens that identify him as a follower of the Afro-Brazilian religion /{candomblé}/,” wrote American journalist Julian Dibbell in 2004. “Slouching in and out of the elegant Barcelona chairs that furnish his office, taking the occasional sip from a cup of pinkish herbal tea, he looks — and talks — less like an elder statesman than the posthippie, multiculturalist, Taoist intellectual he is.”~{ Julian Dibbell, “We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin,” /{Wired}/, November 2004, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/linux_pr.html. }~ +={ Dibbell, Julian +1 } + +As luck had it, Dibbell — author of the article on cyber-rape that had enticed Lessig to investigate digital culture in the first place (see chapter 3) — was living in Rio at the time. He was friendly with Hermano Vianna, a prominent intellectual who knew Gil and was deeply into the music scene and digital technology. Between Dibbell and Vianna, a flurry of introductions was made, and within months Larry Lessig, John Perry Barlow, and Harvard law professor William Fisher were sitting with Gil, Vianna, and Dibbell in Gil’s Rio de Janeiro penthouse across from the beach.~{ Ibid. }~ Lessig’s mission was to pitch the Creative Commons licenses to Gil, and in particular, get Gil’s thoughts about a new CC Sampling license that would let musicians authorize sampling of their songs. +={ Fisher, William (Terry) ; + Vianna, Hermano +1 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +3 ; + Barlow, John Perry : + CC International, and +} + +“Gil knew that sampling was a central driving power for contemporary creativity well before digital instruments came along,” recalled Vianna. "/{Tropicalismo}/ was all about sampling different ideas and different cultures. /{Tropicalismo}/ was about juxtapositions, not fusions, and in this sense was heir to a long tradition of Brazilian modern thought and art that began with the cultural anthropology of the early modernists, in the 1920s and 1930s, and can be traced back to all debates about Brazilian identity in the 20th century."~{ E-mail from Hermano Vianna, January 8, 2007. }~ + +Lessig did not need to argue his case. Gil immediately understood what Creative Commons was trying to accomplish culturally and politically. He was enthusiastic about CC licenses, the proposed Sampling license, and the prospect of using his ministry to advance a vision of free culture. + +By further coincidence, Ronaldo Lemos da Silva, then a Brazilian law student who has been described as a “Lessig of the Southern Hemisphere,” had just completed his studies at Harvard Law School. He was well acquainted with Creative Commons and was considering his future when friends at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), a Rio de Janeiro university, urged him to join them in founding a new law school. The school would host a new Center for Technology and Society to study law and technology from the perspective of developing nations like Brazil. Lemos accepted, and the center soon became the host for CC Brazil and myriad free culture projects. +={ Lemos da Silva, Ronaldo } + +This alignment of intellectual firepower, artistic authority, and political clout was extraordinary — and a major coup for Creative Commons. The culture minister of the world’s fifth-largest country and tenth-largest economy — whose own forty-year career was based on a remix sensibility — became a spirited champion of the CC licenses and free culture. Unlike most culture ministers, who treat culture chiefly as an aesthetic amenity, Gil took the economic and technological bases of creativity seriously. He wanted to show how creativity can be a tool for political and cultural emancipation, and how government can foster that goal. It turned out that Brazil, with its mix of African, Portuguese, and indigenous cultures and its colorful mix of vernacular traditions, was a perfect laboratory for such experimentation. + +One of the first collaborations between Creative Commons and the Brazilian government involved the release of a special CC-GPL license in December 2003.~{ Creative Commons press release, “Brazilian Government First to Adopt New ‘CC-GPL,’ ” December 2, 2003. }~ This license adapted the General Public License for software by translating it into Portuguese and putting it into the CC’s customary “three layers” — a plain-language version, a lawyers’ version compatible with the national copyright law, and a machine-readable metadata expression of the license. The CC-GPL license, released in conjunction with the Free Software Foundation, was an important international event because it gave the imprimatur of a major world government to free software and the social ethic of sharing and reuse. Brazil has since become a champion of GNU/Linux and free software in government agencies and the judiciary. It regards free software and open standards as part of a larger fight for a “development agenda” at the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization. In a related vein, Brazil has famously challenged patent and trade policies that made HIV/AIDS drugs prohibitively expensive for thousands of sick Brazilians. +={ free software : + international licensing, and +1 ; + GNU/Linux : + Brazil, in ; + World Trade Organization ; + World Intellectual Property Organization ; + open networks : + international +} + +When the full set of CC Brazil licenses was finally launched— at the Fifth International Free Software Forum, in Port Alegre on June 4, 2004 — it was a major national event. Brazilian celebrities, government officials, and an enthusiastic crowd of nearly two thousand people showed up. Gil, flying in from a cabinet meeting in Brasília, arrived late. When he walked into the auditorium, the panel discussion under way immediately stopped, and there was a spontaneous standing ovation.~{ A ten-minute video of the CC Brazil opening can be seen at http://support.creativecommons.org/videos#brasil. }~ “It was like a boxer entering the arena for a heavyweight match,” recalled Glenn Otis Brown. “He had security guards on both sides of him as he walked up the middle aisle. There were flashbulbs, and admirers trailing him, and this wave of people in the audience cresting as he walked by.”~{ Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, August 10, 2006. }~ +={ Brown, Glenn Otis, CC International, and +1 } + +Gil originally planned to release three of his songs under the new CC Sampling license — dubbed the “Recombo” license — but his record label, Warner Bros., balked. He eventually released one song, “Oslodum,” that he had recorded for an indie label. “One way to think about it,” said Brown, “is that now, anybody in the world can jam with Gilberto Gil.”~{ Film about CC Brazil launch, at http://support.creativecommons.org/videos#brasil. }~ + +As culture minister, Gil released all materials from his agency under a CC license, and persuaded the Ministry of Education as well as Radiobrás, the government media agency, to do the same. He also initiated the Cultural Points (Pontos de Cultura) program, which has given small grants to scores of community centers in poor neighborhoods so that residents can learn how to produce their own music and video works. Since industry concentration and payola make it virtually impossible for newcomers to get radio play and commercially distribute their CDs, according to many observers, the project has been valuable in allowing a fresh wave of grassroots music to “go public” and reach new audiences. + +For developing countries, the real challenge is finding ways to tap the latent creativity of the “informal” economy operating on the periphery of formal market systems. Brazil is rich with such creative communities, as exemplified by the flourishing /{tecnobrega}/ music scene in the northeast and north regions of Brazil. Ronaldo Lemos says that /{tecnobrega}/ — “a romantic sound with a techno-beat and electronica sound”~{ Interview with Ronaldo Lemos da Silva, September 15, 2006. }~ —arose on the fringes of the mainstream music marketplace through “sound system parties” attended by thousands of people every weekend. Local artists produce and sell about four hundred new CDs every year, but both the production and distribution take place outside the traditional music industry. The CDs can’t be found in retail stores but are sold entirely by street vendors for only $1.50. The CDs serve as advertising for the weekend parties. The music is “born free” in the sense that the /{tecnobrega}/ scene doesn’t consider copyrights as part of its business model and does not enforce copyrights on their CDs; it invites and authorizes people to share and reuse the content.~{ The /{tecnobrega}/ scene is described by Ronaldo Lemos in “From Legal Commons to Social Commons: Developing Countries and the Cultural Industry in the 21st Century,” http://icommons.org/banco/from-legal-commons-tosocial-commons-brazil-and-the-cultural-industry-1. }~ (The /{tecnobrega}/ business model is discussed at greater length in chapter 10.) +={ Lemos da Silva, Ronaldo +6 } + +Lemos believes the CC licenses are an important tool for helping grassroots creativity in Brazil to “go legitimate.” He explains, “Creative Commons provides a simple, non-bureaucratic structure for intellectual property that might help to integrate the massive marginal culture that is arising in the peripheries, with the ‘official,’ ‘formal’ structures of the Brazilian economy.”~{ Ibid. }~ Freed of the blockbuster imperatives of the current music market, the CC licenses allow creativity in the informal “social commons” to flow — yet not be appropriated by commercial vendors. People can experiment, generate new works, and learn what resonates with music fans. All of this is a predicate for building new types of open markets, says Lemos. /{Tecnobrega}/ is just one of many open-business models that use the free circulation of music to make money. + +Since its launch in June 2004, Lemos and the CC Brazil office have instigated a number of projects to demonstrate how sharing and collaboration can spur economic and cultural development. They have promoted free software and open business models for music and film and started collaborations with allies in other developing nations. Nigerian filmmakers inspired the People’s Cinema in Brazil, a project to help people use audio-video technology to produce their own films and develop audiences for them. The /{culture-livre}/ (free culture) project, a joint effort of Creative Commons in Brazil and South Africa, is using the ccMixter software to encourage young musicians to mix traditional African instruments with contemporary sensibilities, and launch their careers.~{ http://www.ccmixter.co.za. }~ + +In Brazil, there are open-publishing projects for scientific journals;~{ http://www.scielo.br. }~ a Web site that brings together a repository of short films;~{ http://www.portacurtas.comb.br. }~ and Overmundo,a popular site for cultural commentary by Internet users.~{ http://www.overmundo.com.br }~ TramaVirtual, an open-platform record label that lets musicians upload their music and fans download it for free, now features more than thirty-five thousand artists.~{ http://tramavirtual.uol.com.br. }~ (By contrast, the largest commercial label in Brazil, Sony-BMG, released only twelve CDs of Brazilian music in 2006, according to Lemos.) + +“Cultural production is becoming increasingly disconnected from traditional media forms,” said Lemos, because mass media institutions “are failing to provide the adequate incentives for culture to be produced and circulated. . . . Cultural production is migrating to civil society and/or the peripheries, which more or less already operate in a ‘social commons’ environment, and do not depend on intellectual property within their business models.”~{ Ronaldo Lemos, “From Legal Commons to Social Commons: Developing Countries and the Cultural Industry in the 21st Century,” http://icommons.org/banco/from-legal-commons-to-social-commons-brazil-and-the-culturalindustry-1. }~ + +As more people have adopted legal modes of copying and sharing under CC licenses, it is changing the social and political climate for copyright reform. Now that CC Brazil can cite all sorts of successful free culture ventures, it can more persuasively advocate for a Brazilian version of the fair use doctrine and press for greater photocopying privileges in educational settings (which are legally quite restrictive). +={ free culture : + international +2 +} + +Although the CC licenses are now familiar to many Brazilians, they have encountered some resistance, mostly from lawyers. “Among all other audiences — musicians, artists, writers — they were extremely well received,” said Lemos. When he presented the CC licenses to an audience of three hundred lawyers, however, he recalls that a famous law professor publicly scoffed: “You’re saying this because you’re young, foolish, and communist.” Three years later, Lemos discovered that the professor was using his intellectual property textbook in her class. + +As a unique global ambassador of creative sharing, Gilberto Gil did a lot to take the CC licenses to other nations and international forums such as the World Intellectual Property Organization. The day before his 2004 benefit concert for the Creative Commons in New York City with David Byrne, Gil delivered a powerful speech explaining the political implications of free culture: +={ Byrne, David ; + Gil, Gilberto +3 ; + World Intellectual Property Organization +} + +_1 A global movement has risen up in affirmation of digital culture. This movement bears the banners of free software and digital inclusion, as well as the banner of the endless expansion of the circulation of information and creation, and it is the perfect model for a Latin-American developmental cultural policy (other developments are possible) of the most anti-xenophobic, anti-authoritarian, anti-bureaucratizing, anti-centralizing, and for the very reason, profoundly democratic and transformative sort.~{ Gil remarks at New York University, September 19, 2004, at http://www.nyu.edu/fas/NewsEvents/Events/Minister_Gil_speech.pdf. }~ + +The Brazilian government was making digital culture “one of its strategic public policies,” Gil said, because “the most important political battle that is being fought today in the technological, economic, social and cultural fields has to do with free software and with the method digital freedom has put in place for the production of shared knowledge. This battle may even signify a change in subjectivity, with critical consequences for the very concept of civilization we shall be using in the near future.”~{ Ibid. }~ + +To advance this new paradigm, Gil, who left his post as culture minister in 2008, called for the rise of “new creative /{mestizo}/ [hybrid] industries” that break with the entrenched habits of the past. Such businesses “have to be flexible and dynamic; they have to be negotiated and re-negotiated, so that they may contemplate the richness, the complexity, the dynamism and the speed of reality itself and of society itself, without becoming impositions.”~{ Ibid. }~ + +2~ National Variations of a Global Idea + +When it comes to free culture, Brazil is clearly a special case. But citizens in more than seventy nations have stepped forward to build a CC presence in their societies. Each has shown its own distinctive interests. + +Tomislav Medak, a philosopher by training and a copyfighter by circumstance, runs the Multimedia Institute in Zagreb, Croatia, a cultural center that consists mostly of a performance space, a lounge, and a café. The organization survives on donations from the likes of George Soros’s Open Society Institute, but it thrives because it is the gathering place for an avant-garde corps of electronic musicmakers, publishers, performers, and hackers. Mainstream Croats would probably describe the community as a bunch of “cyberSerbian-gay-Communists,” said Medak, which he concedes is not inaccurate.~{ Interview with Tomislav Medak, CC Croatia, June 25, 2006. }~ But the institute is not just a coalition of minority interests; it is also broad-spectrum champion of cultural freedom. It sees free software, civil liberties, and artists’ rights as core elements of a democratic society that it would like to build. +={ Creative Commons International : + Croatia +1 ; + Croatia : + CC licenses in +1 ; + Medak, Tomislav +2 ; + Open Society Institute ; + Soros, George +} + +The Multimedia Institute was understandably excited when it learned about Creative Commons and Lessig’s vision of free culture. With help from some lawyer friends, the institute in January 2004 ported the CC licenses to Croatian law, primarily as a way to empower artists and counteract the dominance of corporate media and expansive copyright laws. “We are a country where the IP framework is very young, and most of the policies are protection-driven. Most policies are dictated by official institutions that just translate international documents into local legislation,” Medak said.~{ Ibid. }~ This commercial/copyright regime tends to stifle the interests of emerging artists, amateurs, consumers and local culture. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +} + +“In the post-socialist period,” said Medak, “our society has been hugely depleted of the public domain, or commons. The privatization process and the colonizing of cultural spaces have been blatant over the last couple of years, especially in Zagreb. So the Creative Commons has fit into a larger effort to try to recapture some of those public needs that were available, at least ideologically, in socialist societies. Now they are for real.”~{ Ibid. }~ Medak has since gone on to become a leader of iCommons and the host of the international iCommons Summit in 2007, which brought several hundred commoners from fifty nations to Dubrovnik. + +In Scotland, government and other public-sector institutions have been huge fans of the CC licenses. In fact, museums, archives, and educational repositories have been the primary advocates of the CC Scotland licenses, says Andrés Guadamuz, a law professor at the Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh. “People who want to try to share information in the public sector are turning to Creative Commons because they realize that here is a license that is already made.”~{ Interview with Andrés Guadamuz of CC Scotland, December 19, 2006. }~ +={ Guadamuz, Andrés ; + Scotland : + CC licenses in ; + Creative Commons International : + Scotland +} + +The BBC was a pioneer in making its archived television and radio programs available to the public for free. In 2003, inspired by the CC licenses, the BBC drafted its own “Creative Archive” license as a way to open up its vast collection of taxpayer-financed television and radio programs.~{ See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/4527506.stm, and interview with Paula Le Dieu, joint director of the BBC Creative Archive project, May 28, 2004, at http://digital-lifestyles.info/2004/05/28/exclusive-providing-the-fuel-fora-creative-nation-an-interview-with-paula-le-dieu-joint-director-on-the-bbccreative-archive. }~ The license was later adopted by Channel 4, the Open University, the British Film Institute, and the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council. Although the Creative Archive license has similar goals as the CC licenses, it contains several significant differences: it restricts use of video programs to United Kingdom citizens only, and it prohibits use of materials for political or charitable campaigns and for any derogatory purposes. +={ BBC } + +The CC licenses have proven useful, also, to the British Museum and National Archives. In 2004, these and other British educational institutions were pondering how they should make their publicly funded digital resources available for reuse. A special government panel, the Common Information Environment, recommended usage of the CC licenses because they were already international in scope. The panel liked that the licenses allow Web links in licensed materials, which could help users avoid the complications of formal registration. The panel also cited the virtues of “human readable deeds” and machine-readable metadata.~{ Intrallect Ltd and AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law, University of Edinburgh, “The Common Information Environment and Creative Commons,” October 10, 2005, at http://www.intrallect.com/index.php/intrallect/content/download/632/2631/file/CIE _CC_Final_Report.pdf. }~ + +As it happened, a team of Scottish legal scholars led by a private attorney, Jonathan Mitchell, successfully ported the licenses and released them a few months later, in December 2005. The Scottish effort had been initiated a year earlier when Mitchell and his colleagues objected that the U.K. CC licenses then being drafted were too rooted in English law and not sufficiently attuned to Scottish law. Since the introduction of the CC Scotland licenses, publicsector institutions have enthusiastically embraced them. Museums use the licenses on MP3 files that contain audio tours, for example, as well as on Web pages, exhibition materials, and photographs of artworks. Interestingly, in England and Wales, individual artists and creative communities seem to be more active than public-sector institutions in using the licenses. +={ Scotland : + CC licenses in ; + Creative Commons International : + Scotland ; + Mitchell, Jonathan +} + +The use of CC licenses for government information and publicly funded materials is inspiring similar efforts in other countries. Governments are coming to realize that they are one of the primary stewards of intellectual property, and that the wide dissemination of their work — statistics, research, reports, legislation, judicial decisions — can stimulate economic innovation, scientific progress, education, and cultural development. Unfortunately, as Anne Fitzgerald, Brian Fitzgerald, and Jessica Coates of Australia have pointed out, “putting all such material into the public domain runs the risk that material which is essentially a public and national asset will be appropriated by the private sector, without any benefit to either the government or the taxpayers.”~{ iCommons annual report, 2007, http://www.icommons.org/annual07. }~ For example, the private sector may incorporate the public-domain material into a value-added proprietary model and find other means to take the information private. The classic instance of this is West Publishing’s dominance in the republishing of U.S. federal court decisions. Open-content licenses offer a solution by ensuring that taxpayerfinanced works will be available to and benefit the general public. +={ Coates, Jessica ; + Fitzgerald, Anne ; + Fitzgerald, Brian ; + West Publishing +} + +In the United States, the National Institutes of Health has pursued a version of this policy by requiring that federally funded research be placed in an open-access archive or journal within twelve months of its commercial publication. The European Commission announced in 2007 that it plans to build a major open-access digital repository for publicly funded research.~{ Michael Geist, “Push for Open Access to Research, BBC News, February 28, 2007, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/~/2/hi/technology/6404429. }~ In Mexico, the Sistema Internet de la Presidencia, or Presidency Internet System (SIP), decided in 2006 to adopt CC licenses for all content generated by the Mexican presidency on the Internet — chiefly the president’s various Web sites, Internet radio station, and documents.~{ Creative Commons blog, Alex Roberts, March 8, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/text/sip. }~ In Italy, CC Italy is exploring legislation to open up national and local government archives. It also wants new contract terms for those who develop publicly funded information so that it will automatically be available in the future.~{ Interview with Juan Carlos de Martin, CC Italy, July 17, 2007. }~ +={ Creative Commons International : + Italy | Mexico ; + Italy : + CC licenses in ; + Mexico : + CC licenses in +} + +2~ Laboratories of Free Culture +={ Creative Commons International : + laboratories for free culture, as +7 +} + +In 2005, about two years after the launch of CC International, twenty-one jurisdictions around the world had adopted the licenses. (A legal jurisdiction is not necessarily the same as a nation because places like Scotland, Puerto Rico, and Catalonia — which have their own CC licenses — are not separate nations.) Under a new director of CC International, copyright attorney Catharina Maracke, who took over the license-porting project in 2006, the pace of license adoption has continued. By August 2008, fortyseven jurisdictions had ported the CC licenses, and a few dozen more had their projects under way. The CC affiliates have now reached a sufficient critical mass that they represent a new sort of international constituency for the sharing economy. The CC network of legal scholars, public institutions, artistic sectors, and Internet users is not just a motivated global community of talent, but a new sort of transnational cultural movement: a digital republic of commoners. +={ Maracke, Catharina } + +To be sure, some nations have more institutional backing than others, and some have more enthusiastic and active projects than others. CC Poland reported in 2006 that its biggest challenge was “a complete lack of financial and organizational support, in particular from our partner organization.”~{ iCommons ’06 conference booklet, p. 77. }~ (This was remedied in 2008 when CC Poland entered into a partnership with an interdisciplinary center at the University of Warsaw and with a law firm.) CC affiliates in smaller developing countries with fewer resources — especially in Africa — often have to beg and scrape to pull together resources to supplement the work of volunteers. + +Not surprisingly, the American CC licenses — a version of which was spun off as a generic license, as opposed to jurisdictionspecific licenses — are the most used. In a pioneering study of license usage in January 2007, Giorgos Cheliotis of Singapore Management University and his co-authors conservatively estimated that there were 60 million distinct items of CC content on the Internet — a sum that rose to 90 million by the end of 2007. Over 80 percent of these items use a license that is not jurisdiction-specific; the remaining 20 percent are spread among the thirty-three nations included in the study.~{ Giorgos Cheliotis, Warren Chik, Ankit Guglani, and Girl Kumar Tayi, “Taking Stock of the Creative Commons Experiment: Monitoring the Use of Creative Commons Licenses and Evaluating Its Implications for the Future of Creative Commons and for Copyright Law,” paper presented at 35th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC), September 28–30, 2007. Paper dated August 15, 2007. }~ The highest volume of license usage per capita can be found in European nations — particularly Spain, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, and Croatia — which were among the earliest adopters of the licenses. In absolute terms, the heaviest usage can be seen in Spain, Germany, France, South Korea, Italy, and Japan.~{ Cheliotis, “Taking Stock,” pp. 20–22. }~ Overall, however, CC usage outside of the United States is still fairly new, and usage and growth rates vary immensely from country to country. +={ Cheliotis, Giorgos +1 } + +As a fledgling network, the international CC community is a rudimentary platform for change. Its members are still groping toward a shared understanding of their work and devising new systems of communication and collaboration. But a great deal of cross-border collaboration is occurring. A variety of free culture advocates have constituted themselves as the Asia Commons and met in Bangkok to collaborate on issues of free software, citizen access to government information, and industry antipiracy propaganda. CC Italy has invited leaders of neighboring countries— France, Switzerland, Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia — to share their experiences and work together. A CC Latin America project started /{Scripta}/, a new Spanish-language journal based in Ecuador, to discuss free software and free culture issues affecting the continent. +={ Creative Commons International : + cross-border collaboration +1 +} + +CC leaders in Finland, France, and Australia have published books about their licensing projects.~{ The French book is Danièle Bourcier and Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, eds., /{International Commons at the Digital Age}/ (Paris: Romillat, 2004), at http://fr.creativecommons.org/icommons_book.htm. The Finnish book is Herkko Hietanen et al., /{Community Created Content: Law, Business and Policy}/ (Turre Publishing, 2007), at http://www.turre.com/images/stories/books/webkirja_koko_optimoitu2.pdf. The Australian book is Brian Fitzgerald, /{Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons}/ (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2007). }~ CC Brazil and CC South Africa have collaborated on a project about copyright and developing nations. CC Canada is working with partners to develop an online, globally searchable database of Canadian works in the Canadian public domain. CC Salons have been held in Amsterdam, Toronto, Berlin, Beijing, London, Warsaw, Seoul, Taipei, and Johannesburg. + +In the Netherlands, CC project lead Paul Keller engineered a breakthrough that may overcome the persistent objections of European collecting societies to CC-licensed content. Collecting societies in Europe generally insist that any musician that they represent transfer all of their copyrights to the collective. This means that professional musicians cannot distribute their works under a CC license. Artists who are already using CC licenses cannot join the collecting societies in order to receive royalties for commercial uses of their works. In this manner, collecting societies in many European nations have effectively prevented many musicians from using the CC licenses. +={ Keller, Paul ; + collecting societies +1 : + see also ASCAP +} + +In 2007, however, CC Netherlands negotiated a one-year pilot program with two Dutch collecting societies, Buma and Stemra, to let artists use CC NonCommercial licenses for parts of their repertoire.~{ Creative Commons Netherlands press release, “Buma/Stemra and Creative Commons Netherlands Launch a Pilot,” August 23, 2007; e-mail by Paul Keller, CC Netherlands, to CC International listserv, August 23, 2007. }~ As a result, artists will have greater choice in the release of their works and the ability to easily manage their rights via a Web site. Other European CC affiliates hope that this Dutch experiment will break the long stalemate on this issue and persuade their collecting societies to be more flexible. + +2~ The Developing Nations License +={ Creative Commons International : + Developing Nations license +9 +} + +One of the boldest experiments in the CC world was the creation of the Developing Nations license, launched in September 2004. A year earlier, Lessig had approached James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International (previously the Consumer Project on Technology), to ask him to craft a CC license that might help developing countries. Love proposed that the CC offer a “rider” at the end of its existing licenses so that people using the licenses could exempt developing nations from, say, the NonCommercial or NoDerivatives license restrictions. So, for example, if a textbook author wanted to let developing nations copy her book for either commercial or noncommercial purposes, she could add a rider authorizing this practice. +={ Love, James +3 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +} + +Love was trying to do for books and journal articles what is already possible for drugs — the legalization of a commercial market for generic equivalents. Love had seen how generic drugs could reach people only because for-profit companies were able to produce and sell the drugs; nonprofit or philanthropic distribution is just not powerful enough. But the market for generic drugs is possible only because of laws that authorize companies to make legal knockoffs of proprietary drugs once the patent terms expire. Love hoped to do the same via a Developing Nations license for copyrighted works: “It would create an opportunity for the publishing equivalent of generic drug manufacturers who make ‘generic’ books. In developing countries, you have whole libraries full of photocopied books. You would not have libraries there if people didn’t engage in these practices.”~{ Interview with James P. Love, June 13, 2006. }~ + +In the end, Creative Commons offered the Developing Nations license as a separate license, not a rider. It had simple terms: “You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)” — and the license was valid only in non–high income nations, as determined by United Nations’ statistics. Although the release of the license got considerable press coverage, actual usage of the license was extremely small. The most prominent use was totally unexpected — for architectural designs. Architecture for Humanity, a California nonprofit, used the license for its designs of low-cost housing and health centers. The organization wanted to give away its architectural plans to poor countries while not letting its competitors in the U.S. use them for free.~{ Creative Commons blog, Kathryn Frankel, “Commoners: Architecture for Humanity,” June 30, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/education/architecture. }~ +={ United Nations } + +The expected uses of the Developing Nations license never materialized. In 2006, Love said, “The license is there, but people who might be willing to use it are not really aware of it.” He worried that the license “hasn’t really been explained in a way that would be obvious to them,” and ventured that there may be “a need for a re-marketing campaign.” By this time, however, the license had attracted the ire of Richard Stallman for its limitations on “freedom.”~{ See Lessig on Creative Commons blog, December 7, 2005, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/archive/2005/12/page/3. }~ It prohibited copying of a work in certain circumstances (in high-income countries) even for noncommercial purposes, and so authorized only a partial grant of freedom, not a universal one. “Well, the whole point was /{not}/ to be universal,” said Love. “The license is for people that are unwilling to share with high-income countries, but are willing to share with developing countries. So it actually expands the commons, but only in developing countries.”~{ Interview with James Love, June 13, 2006. }~ +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +1 ; + Stallman, Richard : + freedom, and +2 +} + +The controversy that grew up around the Developing Nations license illuminates the different approaches to movement building that Lessig and Stallman represent. Lessig’s advocacy for free culture has been an exploratory journey in pragmatic idealism; Stallman’s advocacy for free software has been more of a crusade of true believers in a core philosophy. For Stallman, the principles of “freedom” are unitary and clear, and so the path forward is fairly self-evident and unassailable. For Lessig, the principles of freedom are more situational and evolving and subject to the consensus of key creative communities. The flexibility has enabled a broad-spectrum movement to emerge, but it does not have the ideological coherence of, say, the free software movement. +={ Richard : + free software, and ; + free software : + international licensing, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + freedom, and +} + +Several factors converged to make it attractive for Creative Commons to revoke the Developing Nations license. Some people in the open-access publishing movement disliked the license because it did not comply with its stated standards of openness. In addition, Richard Stallman’s increasingly strident objections to Creative Commons licenses were starting to alarm some segments of the “free world.” What if Internet content became Balkanized through a series of incompatible licenses, and the movement were riven with sectarian strife? Stallman objected not only to the Developing Nations license, but to attempts by Creative Commons to get Wikipedia to make its content, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation license, compatible with the CC licenses. By 2007 this dispute had been simmering for four years (see pages 212–217). +={ Wikipedia : + CC licenses, and ; + Stallman, Richard : + influence of +} + +Finally, many CC staff members regarded the Developing Nations and Sampling licenses as misbegotten experiments. Fewer than 0.01 percent of uses of CC licenses at the time involved the Developing Nations license, and the Sampling license was used by a relatively small community of remix artists and musicians. If eliminating two little-used niche licenses could neutralize objections from the open access and free software movements and achieve a greater philosophical and political solidarity in the “free world,” many CC partisans regarded a rescission of the licenses as a modest sacrifice, if not a net gain. +={ remix works +1 ; + music : + remixes ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + music, for +} + +In June 2007, Creative Commons announced that it was officially retiring the two licenses.~{ Creative Commons “retired licenses page,” at http://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses. }~ In a formal statement, Lessig explained, “These licenses do not meet the minimum standards of the Open Access movement. Because this movement is so important to the spread of science and knowledge, we no longer believe it correct to promote a standalone version of this license.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Retiring standalone DevNations and One Sampling License,” message to CC International listserv, June 4, 2007. }~ The Creative Commons also revoked the Sampling license because it “only permits the remix of the licensed work, not the freedom to share it.” (Two other sampling licenses that permit noncommercial sharing— SamplingPlus and NonCommercial SamplingPlus — were retained.) +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +} + +Anyone could still use the Sampling or Developing Nations license if they wished; they still exist, after all. It’s just that the Creative Commons no longer supports them. While the actual impact of the license revocations was minor, it did have major symbolic and political significance in the commons world. It signaled that the Creative Commons was capitulating to objections by free software advocates and the concerns of open access publishing activists. + +2~ The iCommons Network +={ iCommons +13 ; + Creative Commons International : + iCommons network +13 +} + +As an international network of CC affiliates grew, it naturally spawned new pockets of activism. Lessig explained: “Once a country gets launched, it becomes a cell of activism. Sometimes it is very traditional — Creative Commons Korea is made up of a bunch of federal judges — and sometimes it is very radical — Creative Commons Croatia is made of up a bunch of real activists who want to change copyright. Creative Commons Poland, too, is a bunch of really smart law graduates. But then there is the artist community, on the other side, many of whom want to blow up copyright; they just think it is ridiculous. +={ Croatia : + CC licenses in ; + Korea : + CC licenses in ; + Creative Commons International : + Croatia | Korea | Poland ; + Poland : + CC licenses in ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +1 | iCommons, and +1 +} + +“So the opportunity and problem we faced at that point,” said Lessig, “was, ‘Well, what are we going to do with these activists?’ Because Creative Commons wanted to facilitate activism, of course, but it wasn’t as if we could bring activism into our core because it would make it more suspect.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, March 20, 2006. }~ + +The first steps toward organizing this protocommunity of activists came in March 2005, when eighty people from the various international licensing projects convened in Boston to talk about their shared challenges.~{ http://icommons.org/isummit05. }~ It quickly became clear that everyone wanted a forum in which to learn from one another, coordinate their work, and see themselves as something larger . . . perhaps a new sort of movement. +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + social movement, as +1 +} + +Here again was the tension between “the movement” and “the machine.” As neutral stewards of the licenses, the CC affiliates could not become full-throated advocates of a new international free culture movement. Their mission was preserving the integrity and utility of the licenses for all users, not advocacy. To avoid this problem, the Creative Commons, with an infusion of seed money and CC leaders, in 2006 started a new nonprofit organization, iCommons. +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + “machine”, as +} + +iCommons, a registered charity in the United Kingdom, is led by Heather Ford, a South African who met Lessig at Stanford and went back to her country to evangelize the Creative Commons licenses. Working out of Johannesburg, Ford is the activist counterpart to her Berlin licensing colleagues. She is a gregarious, spirited organizer who keeps tabs on activist gambits in dozens of nations and pulls together annual iCommons “summits.” +={ Ford, Heather } + +The iCommons conferences are something of a staging area for a new type of global citizenship in the digital “free world.” The first conference, in Rio de Janeiro in June 2006, attracted more than three hundred commoners from fifty nations.~{ http://icommons.org/isummit06. }~ The second one, in Dubrovnik, Croatia, drew a somewhat larger and still more diverse crowd, and a third was held in Sapporo, Japan, in 2008. The free and open-source software community and the Creative Commons network are two of the largest, most influential blocs participating in iCommons, although Wikipedians represent a growing sector. But there are many other factions. There are musicians from the indie music, netlabels, and the remix scene. Filmmakers trying to reform fair use legal norms and video artists who are into mashups. Bloggers and citizen-journalists and social-networking fans. Gamers and participants in immersive environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft. Open business entrepreneurs who regard free software and CC licenses as key elements of their competitive, profit-making strategies. +={ Wikipedia : + iCommons, and +} + +From Japan, there were anime artists who are into remixes. From South Africa, print-on-demand research publishers. A bare-chested Brazilian guitarist traded thoughts about copyright law with a Zagreb performer. An Amsterdam hacker with a punk t-shirt shared a smoke with an American academic. From India, there was Lawrence Liang, founder of the Alternative Law Forum, a leading intellectual about copyright law and economic and social inequality. From Syria, there was Anas Tawileh, who is working to produce the Arab Commons, a directory of Arabic works released under any of the CC licenses. He hopes it will counteract “the weak representation of the Arabic language on the Internet, the shallow nature of Arabic content currently available and the consumption rather than the production of knowledge.” From the United States, there was Michael Smolens, an entrepreneur who started dotSUB, a captioning system to make any film available in any language. +={ Liang, Lawrence ; + Tawileh, Anas ; + Smolens, Michael ; + Smolens, Michael +} + +The convergence of so many players in the nascent sharing economy, assembled in the flesh, was a bracing glimpse into a new kind of cosmopolitan, democratic sensibility. The program organizers stated their aspirations this way: “How do we help one another to build a commons that nurtures local communities while respecting the needs of others? How can we move towards the growth of a ‘Global Commons Community’?”~{ iCommons Summit ’06 program. }~ + +Although most international commoners seem to be culturally progressive and politically engaged, they cannot be situated along a left-right ideological spectrum. This is because commoners tend to be more pragmatic and improvisational than ideological. They are focused on building specific projects to facilitate sharing and creativity, based on open-source principles. Their enthusiasm is for cool software, effective legal interventions, and activist innovations, not sectarian debate. + +It is not as if politics has been banished. For example, some critics have questioned the “elite” origins and governance structure of iCommons, which was hatched by CC board members and leaders. David Berry, a free culture advocate who teaches at the University of Sussex, complained on a listserv that iCommons was “creating a corporate machine rather than a democratic one.”~{ David Berry, “The iCommons Lab Report,” sent to UK FreeCulture listserv, November 9, 2006. }~ He cited ambiguity in the powers of the organization, the murky process by which the iCommons code of conduct was adopted, and the board’s selection of community council members. Still other critics have grumbled at the Creative Commons’s collaboration with Microsoft in developing a licensing feature within the Word application. +={ Berry, David ; + Microsoft : + CC licenses, and +} + +When pressed at the 2006 iCommons Summit to develop more formal organizational structure, Lessig begged off for the time being, saying that “trust and faith in each other” was a better approach than rigid rules and system. “We need a recognition that we have a common purpose. Don’t tell me that I need to tell you what that is, because we’ll never agree, but we do have a common purpose.”~{ Becky Hogge, “What Moves a Movement,” OpenDemocracy.org, June 27, 2006, at www.opendemocracy.net/media-commons/movement_3686.jsp. }~ This provoked Tom Chance, a free software and free culture advocate, to complain that “Lessig’s call to base the organization on ‘trust and faith in each other’ is too idealistic and undemocratic.” +={ Chance, Tom ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + iCommons, and +} + +The encounter nicely captures the quandaries of leadership and governance in the networked environment. How can the effectiveness and clarity of leadership be combined with networked participation and the legitimacy that it provides? How should an organization draw philosophical boundaries to define itself while remaining open to new ideas? How should participation in online collectives be structured to generate collective wisdom and legitimacy and avoid collective stupidity and bureaucratic paralysis? In this case, iCommons diversified its governance in late 2007. It invited the Free Software Foundation Europe, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and Instituto Overmundo, a Brazilian nonprofit dedicated to cultural diversity, to join Creative Commons as full-fledged partners in managing the organization. Despite its broadened leadership, iCommons remains more of a convener of annual forums and discussion host than the democratically sanctioned voice of an international movement. + +This is not surprising. The international commons community is still a fledgling enterprise trying to forge an identity and agenda. The resources for many CC affiliates are quite modest and the bonds of cooperation remain rudimentary. That said, the international explosion of free culture projects, above and beyond the CC licenses themselves, is nothing short of remarkable. It represents a “vast, transnational mobilization in favor of digital freedom,” as Gilberto Gil put it. In the early stages of the viral spiral, no one could have imagined that a corps of passionate, self-selected volunteers cooperating through the Internet could accomplish so much. And it continues, unabated. +={ Gil, Gilberto ; + free culture : + international +} + +1~ 9 THE MANY FACES OF THE COMMONS + +/{As the “free world” grows and diversifies, so does debate over how to build the commons.}/ + +As the Creative Commons insinuated itself into one creative sector after another, and throughout dozens of nations, the variety of licenses proliferated. By one count in 2006, there were once eighteen distinct CC licenses, not counting version changes.~[* The eighteen licenses once offered include the core six licenses; a nonattribution version of five of those six licenses (now retired); three sampling licenses (one of which has been retired); the Developing Nations license (now retired); and a public domain dedication (which is otherwise not possible under copyright statutes). There was also a “Music Sharing license,” which was just another name for the Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license, and a “Founders’ Copyright,” which is not a license but a contract between an author and Creative Commons to place a particular work in the public domain after fourteen years (or twenty-eight years, if the author opts for a fourteen-year extension)]~ In the meantime, other parties were offering their own licenses. While the Creative Commons licenses had become the most-used licenses on the Internet, many people were choosing to use Free Software Foundation licenses for text (the GNU Free Documentation License, or FDL), the European Art Libre license, and special licenses that various institutions have devised for the arts, music, and educational works. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + types of +6 +} + +In theory, a proliferation of licenses is not a bad thing. By the lights of free-market economics and complexity theory, in fact, the best way to identify the most useful licenses is to introduce a variety of them and then let them compete for supremacy. Let natural selection in an ecosystem of licenses cull the losers and elevate the most useful ones. + +Unfortunately, this libertarian vision of diverse licenses competing for supremacy in the cultural ecosystem can run up against a harsh reality of the Internet. Too many disparate licenses may make it /{harder}/ for people to share content in an easy, interoperable way. It is not the proliferation of licenses per se that is problematic, it is the absence of a mechanism to enable differently licensed works to “play together” so that they can commingle and be used to produce new things. If bodies of works released under a CC license cannot be combined with works licensed under other licenses, it defeats one of the key value propositions of the Internet, easy interoperability and facile sharing and reuse. Despite its best intentions, license proliferation has the effect of “fencing off the commons,” because the different license terms keep different bodies of work in separate ghettos. + +Incompatibility is a problem both within the suite of CC licenses and between CC licenses and other licenses. Within the CC suite of licenses, for example, a work licensed under the AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA) cannot legally be combined with a work licensed under the Attribution-No Derivatives license (BY-ND) or an Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC). The former license requires that any derivative works be licensed under the same license, period. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + incompatibility of +3 +} + +Some observers are not disturbed by the internal incompatibilities of the CC suite of licenses. They regard the different licenses as tools for various communities to build their own “subeconomies” of content, based on their own distinct needs and priorities. A scientist may not want his research articles altered or combined with other material. A musician may want to promote noncommercial usage on the Internet but retain commercial rights so that he can benefit from any CD sales. Not all creative sectors want to distribute their work in the same ways. + +The incompatibility between CC-licensed work and other freecontent licenses is arguably more problematic. At a conference in Spain in the summer of 2005, Lessig recalls having a “Homer Simpson moment” — /{D’oh!}/ — when he realized where license proliferation was heading. The incompatibility of licenses, and therefore bodies of content, could lead to an irretrievably fragmented universe of content. Lessig saw license proliferation as analogous to the Balkanization of technical standards that once plagued mainframe computing. IBM computers couldn’t communicate with DEC, which couldn’t communicate with Data General.~{ Ibid. }~ “The legal framework of the licensing world is basically a pre-Internet framework,” said Lessig in 2007. “We don’t have interoperability at the layer of legal infrastructure.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, October 23, 2007. }~ +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +1 +} + +_1 In my view [said Lessig], there’s a critical need for the free culture movement to achieve interoperability. And until it achieves interoperability, there’s a huge problem — because we’re creating these kinds of autistic islands of freedom. Basically, the stuff produced in the Wikimedia world is free, but can only be used in the Wikimedia world; the stuff created in the Creative Commons world is free, but can only be used in the Creative Commons world — and never the two will meet. That’s very destructive, because what we want is a kind of invisible platform of freedom that everybody can then build on. It’s been my objective from the very beginning to find the way to assure that we would get that platform.~{ Ibid. }~ + +A critic might call it “the revenge of choice” — the inevitable outcome of a neoliberal philosophy that privileges individualism and choice, rather than a collective concern for the commons. This is the view of Niva Elkin-Koren, a law professor at the University of Haifa (which coincidentally is the host of CC Israel). Elkin-Koren argues that the Creative Commons is replicating and reinforcing property rights discourse and failing to advance the cause of copyright reform. Because the Creative Commons is plagued by an “ideological fuzziness” that does not adequately set forth a philosophical vision of freedom or the commons, Elkin-Koren believes the CC project threatens to “spread and strengthen the proprietary regime in information.”~{ Niva Elkin-Koren, “Exploring Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit,” chapter XIV in Lucie Guibault and P. Bernt Hugenholtz, editors, /{The Future of the Public Domain: Identifying the Commons in Information Law}/ (Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands: Kluwer Law International BV, 2006). }~ +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + critics of +5 +} + +This critique was at the heart of one of the most serious internecine squabbles in the movement, the struggle to make Wikipedia content — licensed under the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Free Documentation License — compatible with CC-licensed content. The failure to find a solution, after four years of negotiation, threatened to keep two great bodies of Internet content from legally commingling and cause further fragmentation of open content. +={ Wikipedia : + CC licenses, and ; + GNU Project : + GNU FDL ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +There are other controversies. Anticapitalist leftists periodically take the Creative Commons to task for being too politically respectable. Friendly voices from underdeveloped nations of the Southern Hemisphere have raised alarms that the public domain is just another excuse for corporate exploitation of their resources. Others from the South argue that the informal, social commons inhabited by poor people — the “nonlegal commons” — deserve respect, too. And then there are copyright traditionalists, who believe that a redoubled effect to fortify the fair use doctrine should be a top priority. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + public domain, and ; + public domain : + CC licenses, and +} + +For the most part, the general public is oblivious to these internecine disputes. Who cares about the relative merits of using a GNU Free Documentation License for Wikipedia entries instead of a Creative Commons license? The layperson may not understand the long-term implications of vesting individual authors with the choice of how to share a work (in the style of the Creative Commons) as opposed to vesting communities of practice with those rights (in the style of the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License). Yet tech sophisticates realize that, in the context of the Internet, uninformed choices today can have serious practical consequences tomorrow. The terms of a license or the design of a software application or digital appliance can prevent people from sharing or reusing works. Bodies of content may become legally incompatible. Consumer freedoms to innovate and distribute may be limited. And then there are second-order questions that have great symbolic importance within the movement, such as, Whose vision of “freedom” in digital spaces shall we endorse? What is philosophically desirable and consistent? +={ Wikipedia : + CC licenses, and ; + free culture : + sharing ethic of ; + Internet : + future of +} + +For a movement that aspires to simplify copyright law, the free culture movement has gotten embroiled in knotty debates that might give lawyers headaches. It is not easy to tell if the disputants are persnickety zealots who have spent too much time in front of their screens or latter-day Jeffersons, Madisons, and Hamiltons— brilliant thinkers who are astute enough to understand the longterm implications of some difficult issues and passionate enough to take a stand. One person’s arcana can be another person’s foundational principle, and one person’s quest for intellectual clarity is another person’s distraction from the messy challenges of building a movement. + +That is the basic problem of the crazy-quilt network that constitutes the free world. There are, in fact, so many divergent, sometimes competing, sometimes congruent agendas that it can be difficult to orchestrate them into a single, harmonious song. For better or worse, the passions that animate culture jammers, copyright reformers, hackers, law scholars, artists, scientists, and countless others in seventy-plus countries are widely divergent. Although the intramovement disagreements may sometimes seem gratuitous, sectarian, and overblown, they are, in fact, understandable. The commoners tend to see their projects as part of a larger, ennobling enterprise— the construction of a new democratic polity and cultural ecology. It makes sense to fret about the technical, legal, and philosophical details when so much is potentially at stake. + +2~ Individual Choice Versus the Commons +={ commons : + individual choice vs. +8 +} + +It turns out that overcoming license incompatibilities is not such an easy task. Any attempt to bridge differences immediately runs into mind-bending legal complexities. Crafting new licensing language can trigger philosophical disagreements, some of which may be proxies for turf issues and personal control. One of the major philosophical disagreements involves the one raised by Elkin-Koren: the merits of individual choice versus the commons. Should individuals be allowed to choose how their work may circulate in the wider world, or is such legal partitioning of culture an affront to the value proposition of the commons and its sharing ethic? Why should the choices of individual creators be privileged over the creative needs of the general culture? +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + incompatibility of +4 +} + +The question is a divisive one. The answer that you give, Yochai Benkler of Harvard Law School told me, “depends on whether you think that what you’re doing is building a political movement or whether you’re building a commons that has narrower appeal, but is potentially, more functionally unitary.”~{ Interview with Yochai Benkler, February 7, 2006. }~ A movement is about building a “big tent,” he said — a vision that accommodates many different types of people with different preferences. If you are building a movement, then you will use terminologies that are attractive to a very broad range of liberal and illiberal conceptions of choice, he said. +={ Benkler, Yochai : + social movements, on ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + social movement, as +} + +But a commons — of the sort that Richard Stallman’s GPL enables for software code — requires that its members honor a community’s social and moral priorities. A commons does not cater to individual preferences; its first priority is to advance the shared goals and relationships of the community. A commons is not oblivious to the self-interest of individuals. It just fulfills that self-interest in a different way. A commons does not confer benefits through individual negotiations or transactions, but instead through an individual’s good-faith participation in an ongoing, collective process. There is no individual quid pro quo, in other words. A person’s contributions accrue to the collective — and benefits flow from belonging to that collective. This is not an exotic or communistic model; it more or less resembles a scientist’s relationship with his research discipline. In the style of a gift economy, a scientist’s articles and lectures are gifts to the discipline; in return, he enjoys privileged access to his colleagues and their research. +={ Stallman, Richard : + GPL, and ; + General Public License (GPL) : + free software, and +3 ; + Internet : + gift economy +} + +It is worth noting that a commons does not necessarily preclude making money from the fruit of the commons; it’s just that any commercial activity cannot interfere with the integrity of social relationships within the commons. In the case of GPL’d software, for example, Red Hat is able to sell its own versions of GNU/Linux only because it does not “take private” any code or inhibit sharing within the commons. The source code is always available to everyone. By contrast, scientists who patent knowledge that they glean from their participation in a scientific community may be seen as “stealing” community knowledge for private gain. The quest for individual profit may also induce ethical corner-cutting, which undermines the integrity of research in the commons. +={ Red Hat ; + GNU/Linux : + Red Hat, and ; + code : + free access to ; + commoners : + sharing by +} + +Ironically, the Creative Commons is not itself a commons, nor do its licenses necessarily produce a commons in the strict sense of the term. The licenses are /{tools}/ for creating commons. But the tools do not require the creation of a commons (unlike the GPL). In this sense, a commons of CC-licensed content may be a “lesser” type of commons because it may have restrictions on what content may be shared, and how. The choices of individual authors, not the preexisting claims of the community, are considered paramount. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + tools for creating commons, as +3 +} + +Is one type of commons superior to the others? Does one offer a superior vision of “freedom”? This philosophical issue has been a recurrent source of tension between the Free Software Foundation, the steward of the GPL, and the Creative Commons, whose licenses cater to individual choice. + +Strictly speaking, a commons essentially offers a binary choice, explained Benkler: “You’re in the commons or you’re out of the commons.” By broadening that binary choice, the CC licenses make the commons a more complicated and ambiguous enterprise. This is precisely what some critics like Stallman have found objectionable about certain CC licenses. They don’t necessarily help forge a community of shared values and commitments. Or as two British critics, David Berry and Giles Moss, have put it, the CC licenses create “commons without commonality.”~{ David Berry and Giles Moss, “On the ‘Creative Commons’: A Critique of the Commons without Commonality,” Free Software Magazine, July 15, 2005, at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/commons_without_commonality. }~ +={ Benkler, Yochai : + social movements, on ; + Berry, David ; + Moss, Giles ; + Stallman, Richard : + criticisms by +} + +Inviting authors to choose how their work may circulate can result in different types of “commons economies” that may or may not be interoperable. ShareAlike content is isolated from NoDerivatives content; NonCommercial content cannot be used for commercial purposes without explicit permission; and so on. CC-licensed works may themselves be incompatible with content licensed under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License. + +2~ Freedom, the Commons, and Movement Building +={ free culture +9 } + +The slightly confused layperson may ask, Why does all of this matter? The answer may depend on your commitment to the commons as a different (better?) way of creating value. Do you believe in individual freedom and choice, as conceived by contemporary liberal societies? Or do you believe in the /{different type of freedom}/ that comes through participation in a community of shared values? +={ commons : + individual choice vs. +8 +} + +Does this state the choice too starkly, as an either/or proposition? Some believe that it does. Perhaps a broader taxonomy of commons is possible. Perhaps a commons can accommodate some measure of individual choice. Or is that an oxymoron? + +These are pivotal questions. The answers point toward different visions of free culture and different strategic ideas about movement building. Is it enough to put forward a demanding, utopian ideal of the commons, and hope that it will attract a corps of true believers willing to toil away in the face of general indifference or hostility? This is essentially what Stallman has done. Or is it better to build a “coalition of the reasonable,” so that a more accessible, practical vision can gain widespread social acceptance and political traction in a relatively short period of time? This is the vision that drives Larry Lessig and his allies. +={ Stallman, Richard : + criticisms by | freedom, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + freedom, and ; + free culture : + differing visions of +3 +} + +Some critics accuse Creative Commons of betraying the full potential of the commons because its licenses empower individual authors to decide how “shareable” their works can be. The licenses do not place the needs of the general culture or the commons first, as a matter of universal policy, and some licenses restrict how a work may be used. The lamentable result, say critics like Niva Elkin-Koren, is a segmented body of culture that encourages people to think of cultural works as property. People internalize the norms, such as “This is /{my work}/ and /{I’ll}/ decide how it shall be used by others.” +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + commoners : + sharing by +1 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + critics of +2 +} + +This can be seen in the actual choices that CC licensors tend to use. Some 67 percent of CC-licensed works do not allow commercial usage.~{ Based on Yahoo queries, June 13, 2006, at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_Statistics. }~ Arguments go back and forth about whether the NC restriction enhances or shrinks freedom. Many musicians and writers want to promote their works on the Internet while retaining the possibility of commercial gain, however remote; this would seem a strike for freedom. Yet critics note that the NC license is often used indiscriminately, even when commercial sales are a remote possibility. This precludes even modest commercial reuses of a work, such as reposting of content on a blog with advertising.~{ Eric Muller, “The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons–NC License,” at http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC. }~ + +The larger point of criticism is that the Creative Commons licenses do not “draw a line in the sand” about what types of freedoms are inherent to the commons. In the interest of building a broad movement, Creative Commons does not insist upon a clear standard of freedom or prescribe how a commons should be structured. + +“While ideological diversity may be crucial for the successes of a social movement,” observed Elkin-Koren, “it may impair attempts to make creative works more accessible. The lack of a core perception of freedom in information, may lead to ideological fuzziness. This could interfere with the goal of offering a workable and sustainable alternative to copyright.”~{ Niva Elkin-Koren, “Exploring Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit,” chapter 14 in Lucie Guibault and P. Bernt Hugenholtz, editors, /{The Future of the Public Domain: Identifying the Commons in Information Law}/ (The Netherlands: Kluwer Law International BV, 2006), p. 326. }~ In an essay that offers “a skeptical view of a worthy pursuit,” Elkin-Koren says that the CC regime encourages narrow calculations of self-interest and the same attitudes toward property and individual transactions as the market economy; it does not promote a coherent vision of “freedom” that fortifies the commons as such. +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva +2 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + social movement, as +} + +“The normative message that we communicate by using Creative Commons licenses is the strategy of choice,” Elkin-Koren told me. “You’re the owner, you’re the author, and therefore, you are entitled to govern your work. . . . No one tells you that maybe it’s wrong; maybe you should allow people to use your work.” By using the CC licenses, she continued, we internalize these norms. “We are teaching ourselves and others that our works are simply commodities, and like every other commodity, everyone has to acquire a license in order to use it.”~{ Interview with Niva Elkin-Koren, January 30, 2007. }~ +={ authorship : + control, and +} + +But champions of the Creative Commons licenses celebrate their approach as a pragmatic and effective way to break free from the stifling “all rights reserved” ethic of copyright law. Historically, of course, not much else has been successful in challenging copyright norms — which is precisely why Lessig and others find the CC strategy attractive. “If I believed that there was a different discourse that had political purchase in someplace other than tiny corners of law faculty commons rooms, I’d be willing to undertake it,” said Lessig. He concedes that his viewpoint may be affected by his living in the United States instead of Israel (where Elkin-Koren lives) but, in the end, he considers the Creative Commons as “just my judgment about what’s going to be effective.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, October 23, 2007. }~ +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +} + +2~ The Splintering of the Free World? +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + critics of +20 +} + +At one point, the philosophical disagreements between the Creative Commons and its critics did not matter so much. There was enough shared purpose and common history that everyone could agree to disagree. And since the project was still young, the stakes were not so high. But then it became clear that the CC licenses would be quite popular indeed. When the Creative Commons issued its Developing Nations and Sampling licenses in 2003, it brought Richard Stallman’s simmering dissatisfaction with the organization to a boil, threatening a serious schism. Pointing to the “four freedoms” that define the free software movement, Stallman criticized the new CC licenses as “not free” because they do not allow universal copying of a work. +={ Stallman, Richard : + criticisms by +2 | freedom, and +2 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + popularity of ; + Creative Commons International : + Developing Nations license +} + +Stallman objected to the Sampling license because, while it allowed a remix of a licensed work, it did not allow the freedom to share it. The Developing Nations license was objectionable because its freedoms to copy are limited to people in the developing world, and do not extend to everyone. Stallman also disliked the fact that the CC tag that licensors affix to their works did not specify /{which}/ license they were using. With no clear standard of “freedom” and now a mix of licenses that included two “non-free” licenses, Stallman regarded the CC tag as meaningless and the organization itself problematic. + +“I used to support Creative Commons,” said Stallman on his blog in July 2005, “but then it adopted some additional licenses which do not give everyone that minimum freedom, and now I no longer endorse it as an activity. I agree with Mako Hill that they are taking the wrong approach by not insisting on any specific freedoms for the public.”~{ Richard Stallman, “Fireworks in Montreal,” at http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/entry-20050920.html. }~ + +Mako Hill is a brilliant young hacker and Stallman acolyte who wrote a 2005 essay, “Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement,”~{ Benjamin Mako Hill, “Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement,” /{Advogato}/, July 29, 2005, at http://www.advogato.org/article/851.html. }~ a piece that shares Elkin-Koren’s complaint about the CC’s “ideological fuzziness.” Then enrolled in a graduate program at the MIT Media Lab, Hill has written a number of essays on the philosophy and social values of free software. (When he was an undergraduate at Hampshire College, I was an outside advisor for his senior thesis and remain friends with him.) +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + Hill, Benjamin Mako +2 ; + free culture : + differing visions of +31 ; + free software : + social movement, as +31 +} + +In his “Freedom’s Standard” essay, Hill wrote: “[D]espite CC’s stated desire to learn from and build upon the example of the free software movement, CC sets no defined limits and promises no freedoms, no rights, and no fixed qualities. Free software’s success is built on an ethical position. CC sets no such standard.” While CC prides itself on its more open-minded “some rights reserved” standard, Hill says that a real movement for freedom must make a bolder commitment to the rights of the audience and other creators— namely, that “essential rights are unreservable.”~{ Interview with Benjamin Mako Hill, June 1, 2007. }~ + +By this, Hill means that certain essential freedoms should not be restricted by copyright law or any license. The problem with the CC licenses, argued Hill, is that they cannot commit to any "/{defined}/ spirit of sharing" (emphasis in original). This is not the way to build a transformative, sustainable movement, said Hill.~{ Ibid. See also Hill, “Freedom’s Standard Advanced?” /{Mute}/, November 23, 2005, at http://www.metamute.org/en/node/5597. }~ + +But what, then, about the choice of authors? Doesn’t that freedom count for anything? CC partisans have responded. Joi Ito, the chair of the Creative Commons, wrote in 2007, “CC is about providing choice. FSF is mostly about getting people to make /{their}/ choice. I realize it’s not THAT clear-cut, but I think the point of CC is to provide a platform for choice. . . . I realize that we are headed in the same general free culture direction and many of us debate what choices should be allowed, but I think we are more ‘tolerant’ and support more diverse views than the FSF.”~{ Joichi Ito, message on iCommons listserv, June 1, 2007. }~ +={ Ito, Joichi } + +Lessig has argued many times that, just as the free software community decided for itself how its content ought to be distributed, so other artistic sectors — musicians, photographers, filmmakers, etc. — must make such decisions themselves. If they can’t have certain choices, then they will have little interest in joining a movement for free culture, said Lessig at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. “We don’t have the standing to tell photographers or musicians what ‘freedom’ is.” Why should the Free Software Foundation, or any other group, be able to dictate to an artistic community how their works should circulate? +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + freedom, and ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +Elkin-Koren is not so sure we can segment the world according to creative sectors and let each determine how works shall circulate. “I don’t think we can separate the different sectors, as if we work in different sectors,” she told me. “We all work in the production of information. My ideas on copyright are really affected by the art that I use and the music that I listen to. . . . Information is essential not only for creating something functional or for selling a work of art, but for our citizenship and for our ability to participate in society. So it’s not as if we can say, ‘Well, this sector can decide for themselves.’”~{ Interview with Niva Elkin-Koren, January 30, 2007. }~ +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva } + +As Wikipedia began to take off in popularity, what might have been an unpleasant philosophical rift grew into a more serious fissure with potentially significant consequences. All Wikipedia content is licensed under the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Free Documentation License, or FDL,~{ Wikipedia entry on GNU Free Documentation license, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License. }~ largely because the CC licenses did not exist when Wikipedia was launched in 2001. The FDL, originally intended for the documentation manuals that explicate software applications, is essentially the same as the CC ShareAlike license (any derivative works must also be released under the same license granting the freedom to share). But using the FDL can get cumbersome, especially as more video, audio, and photos are incorporated into a text; each artifact would require that the license be posted on it. As more content is shared, the potential for misuse of the content, and lawsuits over violations of licensing agreements, would grow.~{ Michael Fitzgerald, “Copyleft Hits a Snag,” /{Technology Review}/, December 21, 2005. }~ +={ Free Documentation License +10 ; + GNU Project +10 ; + Wikipedia : + GNU FDL, and +10 | CC licenses, and +10 +} + +Unfortunately, as a legal matter, the FDL is incompatible with the CC licenses. This means that all content on Wikipedia and its sister Wikimedia projects (Wikispecies, Wikiquote, Wikinews, among other projects) cannot legally be combined with works licensed under CC licenses. Angered by the two “non-free” CC licenses, Stallman dug in his heels and defended Wikipedia’s use of the FDL. He also made it clear that he would remain a critic of Creative Commons unless it revoked or changed its licenses to conform with the Free Software Foundation’s standards of “freedom.” +={ Free Software Foundation ; + Stallman, Richard : + criticisms by +5 | Wikipedia, and +5 +} + +Thus began a four-year search for a resolution. Lessig recalled, “We started to think about a way that Wikimedia could migrate to a license that we would then deem as compatible to a Creative Commons license. That took two years of negotiation, basically.” One proposed solution was for Wikimedia projects to offer both licenses, the FDL and CC BY-SA, for the same work. However, it was determined that derivative works licensed under one license would still be incompatible with dual-licensed works, resulting in “project bleed” (new works would migrate away the existing corpus of works). Another approach was for a “one-way compatibility” of licenses, so that people creating works under the FDL could use CC-licensed content. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +4 | freedom, and +4 +} + +But Lessig realized that these solutions dealt only with the issue at hand; the real challenge was finding a more systemic solution. As various players engaged with the FDL/CC controversy, it grew from a licensing squabble into an intertribal confrontation. It became a symbol for everything that Stallman found politically unacceptable about the Creative Commons’s vision of freedom. + +From 2005 to 2007, the issue roiled many factions within the free culture/free software communities. The debate and invective flew back and forth in various venues, and there were proposals, negotiations, and political maneuvers. MIT computer scientist (and CC board member) Hal Abelson rejoined the FSF board. Lessig and other CC staff entered into talks with the FSF general counsel, Eben Moglen. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales joined the Creative Commons board. Yet Stallman continued to resist, and the Wikimedia board would not approve any proposed solutions. +={ Abelson, Hal : + CC board, on | Free Software Foundation, and ; + Moglen, Eben ; + Wales, Jimmy +} + +The stalemate was broken in June 4, 2007, when Lessig made a surprise announcement that the Creative Commons was “retiring” the Developing Nations and Sampling licenses.~{ Lessig post to CC International listserv, June 4, 2007. More about the CC’s retired licenses can be seen at http://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses. }~ One reason was a lack of interest in the licenses: only 0.01 percent of CC licensors were using each license. But, without alluding to the Free Software Foundation or Stallman, Lessig also noted that the two licenses did not ensure a minimal freedom to share a work noncommercially— a standard met by all other CC licenses. In addition, Lessig pointed out to me, some publishers were beginning to see the Developing Nations license as a subterfuge to avoid meeting open-access publishing standards. +={ Free Software Foundation ; + Creative Commons International : + Developing Nations license +} + +For Creative Commons, the revocation of the two licenses was at least a shrewd political move; it also affirmed a stricter standard of “freedom” in the ability to use digital materials. In return for sacrificing two little-used licenses, the organization gained Stallman’s eventual support for a deal that would let the FDL be treated as compatible with the CC ShareAlike license. This was a major triumph because it could avoid the contorted, legalistic solutions that had been previously proposed and rejected. It was also a breakthrough because it averted a major rift between two growing bodies of open content and avoided a slow drift into a wider Balkanization of content across the Internet. “I kind of thought that no matter what we did, Richard would find a reason to object,” recalled Lessig, “but he didn’t. He stuck to his principles, so I give credit to him.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, October 23, 2007. }~ +={ open networks : + license incompatibility, and +} + +The debates about “freedom” produced several specific results. In November 2006, when Creative Commons released an updated legal version of its licenses, version 3.0, it formally recognized other licenses as legally compatible with the ShareAlike license if they have the same purpose, meaning, and effect, and if the other license recognizes the CC license. The move should help avoid future strife over interoperability. + +A few months later, the Creative Commons also adopted a “Free Cultural Works” definition and seal as a way to recognize works that are “free,” as understood by the Free Software Foundation. The definition declares that works with either the CC Attribution or Attribution-ShareAlike licenses should be considered “free” because they give people the freedom to modify works without any discrimination against specific uses or users. The definition and seal /{exclude}/ the CC NonCommercial and NoDerivatives licenses, however, because those licenses do not allow this sort of freedom. The purpose of the seal is not to denigrate use of the NC and ND licenses, but to educate users about the less restrictive licenses and to assert a philosophical solidarity with the free software community. +={ Free Software Foundation } + +As part of this larger effort, the Creative Commons also issued a draft statement in April 2008 declaring the special importance of the ShareAlike license in the free culture movement and the organization’s intentions in its stewardship of the license. The statement amounted to a diplomatic peace treaty, to be finalized in the months ahead. +={ free culture : + sharing ethic of +1 +} + +By May 2008 the details of the agreement to make Wikipedia’s entries, licensed under the FDL, legally compatible with materials licensed under the CC ShareAlike license had not been consummated. But it was expected that the legal technicalities would be ironed out, and two great bodies of open content would no longer be legally off-limits to each other. + +2~ Criticism from the Left and from the South + +As the Creative Commons has grown in popularity, a longer line has formed to take issue with some of its fundamental strategies. One line of criticism comes from anticapitalist ideologues, another from scholars of the underdeveloped nations of the South. + +British academics Berry and Moss apparently hanker for a more bracing revolution in culture;they object to the commodification of culture in any form and to the role that copyright law plays in this drama. To them, Lessig is distressingly centrist. He is “always very keen to disassociate himself and the Creative Commons from the (diabolical) insinuation that he is (God forbid!) anti-market, anticapitalist, or communist,” Berry and Moss complain.~{ David Berry and Giles Moss, “On the ‘Creative Commons’: A Critique of the Commons Without Commonality,” /{Free Software Magazine}/, July 15, 2005, at http://www.freesoftwaremagagine.com/articles/commons_without_commonality }~ The gist of their objection: Why is Lessig collaborating with media corporations and neoclassical economists when there is a larger, more profound revolution that needs to be fought? A new social ethic and political struggle are needed, they write, “not lawyers exercising their legal vernacular and skills on complicated licenses, court cases and precedents.” +={ Berry, David ; + Moss, Giles ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +} + +Dense diatribes against the antirevolutionary character of Creative Commons can be heard in various hacker venues and cultural blogs and Web sites. The argument tends to go along the lines sketched here by Anna Nimus of Berlin, Germany: +={ Nimus, Anna +1 } + +_1 Creative Commons preserves Romanticism’s ideas of originality, creativity and property rights, and similarly considers “free culture” to be a separate sphere existing in splendid isolation from the world of material production. Ever since the 18th century, the ideas of “creativity” and “originality” have been inextricably linked to an anti-commons of knowledge. Creative Commons is no exception. There’s no doubt that Creative Commons can shed light on some of the issues in the continuing struggle against intellectual property. But it is insufficient at best, and, at its worst, it’s just another attempt by the apologists of property to confuse the discourse, poison the well, and crowd out any revolutionary analysis.~{ Anna Nimus, “Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons,” at http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html. }~ + +To ensure that her revolutionary analysis gets out, Nimus released her piece under a self-styled “Anticopyright” notation, with the added phrase, “All rights dispersed.” + +A more penetrating brand of criticism has come from the South, which fears that the West’s newfound enthusiasm for the commons may not necessarily benefit the people of developing nations; indeed, it could simply legitimate new thefts of their shared resources. In an important 2004 law review article, “The Romance of the Public Domain,” law professors Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder argue that “public domain advocates seem to accept that because a resource is open to all by force of law, that resource will indeed be exploited by all. In practice, however, differing circumstances — including knowledge, wealth, power and ability — render some better able than others to exploit a commons. We describe this popular scholarly conception of the commons as ‘romantic.’ . . . It is celebratory, even euphoric, about the emancipatory potential of the commons. But it is also naïve, idealistic and removed from reality.”~{ Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder, “The Romance of the Public Domain,” California Law Review 92, no. 1131 (2004), p. 1341. }~ +={ Chander, Anupam +2 ; + Sunder, Madhavi +2 ; + free culture : + international +2 ; + public domain +3 : + commons, and +3 +} + +If genes, seeds, indigenous medicines, agricultural innovations, artistic designs, music, and the various ecological and cultural resources of the South are not treated as private property, but instead as elements of the public domain, then anyone can exploit them freely. This can lead to serious injustices, as powerful corporations swoop in to exploit resources that are available to all in the public domain. + +Chander and Sunder write: “By presuming that leaving information and ideas in the public domain enhances ‘semiotic democracy’ — a world in which all people, not just the powerful, have the ability to make cultural meanings — law turns a blind eye to the fact that for centuries the public domain has been a source for exploiting the labor and bodies of the disempowered — namely, people of color, the poor, women and people from the global South.”~{ Ibid., p. 1343. }~ Chander and Sunder argue that the binary logic of copyright law — something is either private property or in the public domain — “masks the ways in which the commons often functions more in the interests of traditional property owners than in the interests of commoners.” +={ democracy : + semiotic +} + +This critique makes clear why the distinction between the public domain and the commons matters. The public domain is an open-access regime available to all; it has no property rights or governance rules. The commons, however, is a legal regime for ensuring that the fruits of collective efforts remain under the control of that collective. The GPL, the CC licenses, databases of traditional knowledge, and sui generis national statutes for protecting biological diversity all represent innovative legal strategies for protecting the commons. The powerful can exploit and overwhelm the public domain, but they are not likely to overwhelm a commons that has a legal regime to protect a collective’s shared resources. +={ commons : + protection of ; + General Public License (GPL) : + commons, and +} + +A more radical and profound critique of the commons came in an open letter to “inhabitants of the ‘legal’ Commons” from “Denizens of Non Legal Commons, and those who travel to and from them.” The three-page letter, drafted by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, a filmmaker and writer with the Raqs Media Collective in New Delhi, is a plea for recognizing the informal sharing economy that flourishes beneath the oblivious gaze of mainstream society, and certainly beyond the reach of property rights and law. +={ Sengupta, Shuddhabrata } + +“Greetings!” the letter opens. “This missive arrives at your threshold from the proverbial Asiatic street, located in the shadow of an improvised bazaar, where all manner of oriental pirates and other dodgy characters gather to trade in what many amongst you consider to be stolen goods.” To this /{other}/ commons, stolen goods are really “borrowed,” because nothing is really “owned” — and therefore nothing can be “stolen.” This is the realm of “the great circulating public library of the Asiatic street.” The letter continues: + +_1 We appreciate and admire the determination with which you nurture your garden of licenses. The proliferation and variety of flowering contracts and clauses in your hothouses is astounding. But we find the paradox of a space that is called a commons and yet so fenced in, and in so many ways, somewhat intriguing. The number of times we had to ask for permission, and the number of security check posts we had to negotiate to enter even a corner of your commons was impressive. . . . Sometimes we found that when people spoke of “Common Property” it was hard to know where the commons ended and where property began . . . + +_1 Strangely, the capacity to name something as “mine,” even if in order to “share” it, requires a degree of attainments that is not in itself evenly distributed. Not everyone comes into the world with the confidence that anything is “theirs” to share. This means that the “commons,” in your parlance, consists of an arrangement wherein only those who are in the magic circle of confident owners effectively get a share in that which is essentially, still a configuration of different bits of fenced in property. What they do is basically effect a series of swaps, based on a mutual understanding of their exclusive property rights. So I give you something of what I own, in exchange for which, I get something of what you own. The good or item in question never exits the circuit of property, even, paradoxically, when it is shared. Goods that are not owned, or those that have been taken outside the circuit of ownership, effectively cannot be shared, or even circulated.~{ “A Letter to the Commons, from the participants of the ‘Shades of the Commons Workshop,’ ” in /{In the Shade of the Commons:Towards a Culture of Open Networks}/ (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Waag Society, 2006), at http://www3.fis.utoronto.ca/research/iprp/cracin/publications/pdfs/final/werbin_InThe Shade.pdf. }~ + +The letter invites a deeper consideration of how humans form commons. However ingenious and useful the jerry-rigged legal mechanisms of the GPL and Creative Commons, the disembodied voice of the Non Legal Commons speaks, as if through the sewer grate, to remind us that the commons is about much more than law and civil society. It is part of the human condition. Yet the chaotic Asiatic street is not likely to yield conventional economic development without the rule of law, civil institutions, and some forms of legal property. The question posed by the informal commons remains a necessary one to ponder: What balance of commons and property rights, and in what forms, is best for a society? + +2~ Fair Use and the Creative Commons +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + fair use, and +15 ; + fair use doctrine : + CC licenses, and +15 +} + +Walk through the blossoming schools of commons thought and it quickly becomes clear that the commons is no monolithic ideal but a many-splendored mosaic of perspectives. To the befuddlement of conventional observers, the perspectives are not necessarily adversarial or mutually exclusive. More often than not, they are fractal— interesting variations of familiar commons themes. In our fascination with newfangled commons, it is easy to overlook a more traditionally minded defender of the commons: the champion of fair use. It is all well and good to promote works that are “born free” under CC licenses, say these friendly critics. But the hard fact of the matter is that for the foreseeable future, creators will still need access to copyrighted content — and this requires a strong fair use doctrine and aggressive public education. + +It is a compelling argument, but in fact only an indirect criticism of Creative Commons. For filmmakers who need to use film clips from existing films and musicians who want to use a riff from another performer, the fair use doctrine is indeed more important than any CC license. Peter Jaszi, the law professor at American University’s Washington School of Law, believes that even with growing bodies of CC-licensed content, “teachers, filmmakers, editors, freelance critics and others need to do things with proprietary content.” As a practical matter, they need a strong, clear set of fair use guidelines. +={ Jaszi, Peter +2 } + +Jaszi and his colleague Pat Aufderheide, a communications professor who runs the Center for Social Media at American University, have dedicated themselves to clarifying the scope and certainty of fair use. They have launched a major fair use project to get specific creative communities to define their “best practices in fair use.” If filmmakers, for example, can articulate their own artistic needs and professional interests in copying and sharing, then the courts are more likely to take those standards into consideration when they rule what is protected under the fair use doctrine.~{ Center for Social Media, at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse. See also Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, “Fair Use and Best Practices: Surprising Success,” /{Intellectual Property Today}/, October 2007, at http://www.iptoday.com/articles/2007-10-aufderheide.asp; and Peter Jaszi, “Copyright, Fair Use and Motion Pictures,” /{Utah Law Review}/ 3, no. 715 (2007), and which also appeared in R. Kolker, ed., /{Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies}/ (2007), at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/files/pdf/fairuse_motionpictures.pdf. }~ A set of respectable standards for a given field can help stabilize and expand the application of fair use. +={ Aufderheide, Pat +1 } + +Inspired in part by a professional code developed by news broadcasters, some of the nation’s most respected filmmakers prepared the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, which was released in November 2005. The guidelines have since been embraced by the film industry, television programmers, and insurance companies (who insure against copyright violations) as a default definition about what constitutes fair use in documentary filmmaking.~{ Aufderheide and Jaszi, /{Intellectual Property Today}/, October 2007, at http://www.iptoday.com/articles/2007-10-aufderheide.asp. }~ Aufderheide and Jaszi are currently exploring fair use projects for other fields, such as teaching, as a way to make fair use a more reliable legal tool for sharing and reuse of works. + +Lessig has been highly supportive of the fair use project and, indeed, he oversees his own fair use law clinic at Stanford Law School, which litigates cases frequently. “It’s not as if I don’t think fair use is important,” said Lessig, “but I do think that if the movement focuses on fair use, we don’t attract the people we need. . . . From my perspective, long-term success in changing the fundamental perspectives around copyright depends on something like Creative Commons as opposed to legal action, and even quasi-legal action, like the Fair Use Project.” +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + fair use, on +5 +} + +For Lessig, fair use is deeply flawed as the basis for building a political movement to reform copyright law. He argues that its advocates are dogged by the (unfair) perception that they are “just a bunch of people who want to get stuff for free, without paying for it. . . . It’s too easy to dismiss that movement.” Lessig recalled the time that the head of a major record label snorted, “Fair use is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Fair use defenders obviously take issue with this characterization, but the accusation nonetheless pushes fair use champions into a rhetorical corner from which it is difficult to escape. + +A more appealing alternative, Lessig argues, is to use the credibility of copyright ownership to argue the point in a different way. He cited the successful campaign by European software engineers in the 1980s to fight attempts to expand patent protection for software. Their campaign did not resemble “a bunch of peer-to-peer downloaders who are saying, ‘Yeah, I want my music for free,’” said Lessig. “It was a bunch of people who are the /{beneficiaries}/ of patent rights saying, ‘Look, we /{don’t want}/ these rights.’ That creates a kind of credibility.” From a moral and political standpoint, Lessig argued, a movement based on copyright owners declaring that they want to forfeit certain rights in order to /{share}/ and promote creativity, has greater credibility than a campaign seeking to “balance” the public’s rights against private copyright privileges. + +“I imagine a world where there are one hundred million Creative Commons–licensed artists out there, creating works according to Creative Commons views,” he said. Then, when Hollywood pressures Congress for stronger copyright protections, he said, “there would be all these people out there who are creating according to a radically different model. [Hollywood’s] claims about extremism would just not be true for a large number of creators.” Instead of a copyright debate that pits “creators” against “pirates,” Lessig said, “I want to create this world where there is a third category of people who are creators, but who create according to different values, values that emphasize the importance of sharing and building upon the past.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, October 23, 2007. }~ +={ piracy } + +In the larger scheme of things, the tensions between the fair use and free culture advocates are not mutually exclusive. In the end, the two approaches complement each other with different contributions. Both seek to promote sharing and reuse, but the former works within the traditional framework of copyright law; the latter is trying to build a whole new body of culture and discourse. There is a kind of gentleman’s agreement between the fair use and free culture communities to work on different sides of the street, while traveling a parallel path down the same road. +={ free culture : + fair use vs. +2 ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and ; + copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and +} + +For Lessig, there is little advantage in shirking the property rights discourse of copyright law, as Elkin-Koren and the “Non Legal Commons” urge. Indeed, he sees a distinct strategic advantage in /{embracing}/ that discourse — and then trying to turn it to different ends. This, in a way, is what Stallman succeeded in doing with the GPL, a license based on copyright law. Yet, while Stallman attracted a somewhat homogeneous community of programmers to his movement, Creative Commons has attracted a sprawling community of eclectic interests, diverse priorities, and no agreed-upon philosophical core. +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + copyright law : + property rights, and ; + property rights : + copyright law, and ; + free software : + social movement, as +} + +By choosing a middle path that embraces but seeks to transform property discourse, Creative Commons may avoid the marginalization of ardent leftists and the modest agenda of fair use activism. It remains an open question whether the ideological fuzziness at the core of Creative Commons, or the limitations of its licenses, is offset by its success in popularizing a new cultural vision. Yochai Benkler, the great commons theorist, understands the legal criticisms, and agrees with them to an extent. But ultimately, the significance of Creative Commons, he believes, has been “in galvanizing a movement, in symbolizing it and in providing a place to organize around. From my perspective, if I care about Creative Commons, it is as a cultural icon for a movement, more than as a set of licenses. Which is why I am less bothered than some, about the people who are beginning to criticize Creative Commons and how good the licenses really are, and how compatible they are.”~{ Interview with Yochai Benkler, February 7, 2006. }~ +={ Benkler, Yochai : + social movements, on ; + free culture : + social movement, as +4 +} + +For Cory Doctorow, the copyfighter and sci-fi writer, the eclectic viewpoints within the free culture movement is a decisive strength: “The difference between a movement and an organization,” he wrote on the iCommons listserv, “is that an organization is a group of people who want the same thing for the same reason. A movement is a collection of groups of people who want the same thing for different reasons. Movements are infinitely more powerful than organizations.” +={ Doctorow, Cory : + free culture movemement, and +1 +} + +The reason the environmental movement is so powerful, Doctorow continued, is the very fact that it encompasses “anticapitalists, green investors, spiritualists, scientists, hunters and fishers, parents worried about environmental toxins, labor reformers, proglobalists, anti-globalists, etc. . . . Denuding the ideological landscape of the environmental movement in a purge to eliminate all those save the ones who support environmentalism /{qua}/ environmentalism would be the worst setback environmentalism could suffer. Likewise copyfighters: there are Marxists, anarchists, Ayn Rand objectivists, economists, artists, free marketeers, libertarians, liberal democrats, etc., who see copyright liberalization as serving their agenda. If we insist that copyright reform is about copyright reform and nothing else, there will be no copyright reform movement.”~{ Cory Doctorow, iCommons listserv [thread, “Andrew Orlowski Attacks Lessig], June 1, 2007. }~ +={ Rand, Ayn } + +There is a price to be paid for all this diversity, however. Diversity means constant debate. Debate can escalate into strife and sectarianism. And in the free culture movement, where so many people are feverishly improvising and inventing, nearly everything is open for debate. It turns out that this business of inventing the commons is complicated stuff; there are many ways to construct a commons. It is only natural for people to have their own ideas about how to build the digital republic. + +The fundamental question may be whether the existing framework of copyright law and property discourse can be adequately reformed — or whether its very categories of thought are the problem. The late poet and activist Audre Lorde, in the context of feminist struggle, declared that the prevailing discourse must be overthrown, not reformed, because, in her words, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Within the free software and free culture movements, however, there are those who believe that copyright law can be sufficiently adapted to build a sharing economy, a more competitive marketplace, and a more humane democratic culture. Others are convinced that the legal discourse of property rights, however modified, will simply entrench the very principles that they wish to transcend. As the movement grows and diversifies, debates over what constitutes the most strategic, morally honorable path forward are likely to intensify. +={ Lorde, Audre ; + copyright law : + property rights, and ; + property rights : + copyright law, and ; + free software : + social movement, as +} + +:B~ PART III + +:C~ A Viral Spiral of New Commons + +1~intro_iii [Intro] -# + +By 2008 the viral spiral had come a long way. Richard Stallman’s fringe movement to build a commons for code became an enormous success, partly inspiring Lawrence Lessig and his compatriots to develop the Creative Commons licenses and a larger vision of free culture. Empowered by these tools, ordinary people began to develop some exciting new models for creativity and sharing. New types of commons arose. Soon there was a popular discourse about the sharing economy, a politics of open networks, and a new international social movement. The movement was so successful at diversifying itself that it was able to engage in serious internecine squabbles. +={ Stallman, Richard : + influence of ; + code : + free access to ; + commons : + achievement of ; + free culture ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and ; + open networks +1 +} + +As the commons movement matured, and people came to understand the sensibilities of open networks, the viral spiral seemed to acquire new speed and powers. Over the past few years, it has advanced into all sorts of new arenas. Part III examines three of the most exciting ones — business, science, and education. Each has taken the tools and insights developed by the commons movement — free software, CC licenses, collaborative models — and adapted them to its own special needs. + +These spin-off movements of entrepreneurs, scientists, and educators recognize their debt to the free software and CC licenses, but none feels confined by that history or beholden to its leaders. Each is too intent on adapting the tools to its own circumstances. Just as CC licenses have been used in some ways by musicians, and in other ways by filmmakers, and in still other ways by bloggers, so the commoners in the worlds of business, science, and education are forging their own paths. Development requires differentiation. It is fascinating to watch how the principles of the commons are being crafted to meet the distinctive needs of the marketplace, the academy, the research lab, and the classroom. + +What may be most notable about these developments is the blurring of these very categories. On open platforms, social communities are becoming sites for market activity. Scientists are increasingly collaborating with people outside their disciplines, including amateurs. Formal education is becoming more focused on learning, and learning is moving out of the classroom and into more informal and practice-driven venues. + +If there is a common denominator in each of the domains examined in Part III, it is the use of distributed networks, social community, and digital technologies to enhance the goals at hand. The new open business models seek to bring consumer and seller interests into closer alignment. The new science commons seek to create more powerful types of research collaboration. The open educational resources movement wants knowledge to circulate more freely and students to direct their own learning. + +For the short term, the fledgling models in these fields are likely to be seen as interesting novelties on the periphery of the mainstream. In time, however, given what we know about network dynamics, the new models are likely to supplant or significantly transform many basic parameters of business, science, and education. The participatory practices that open networks enable are showing that knowledge is more about socially dynamic relationships than about fixed bodies of information. These relationships are also spawning new challenges to institutional authority and expertise. If one looks closely enough, the matrix for a very different order of knowledge, institutional life, and personal engagement can be seen. + +1~ 10 THE NEW OPEN BUSINESS MODELS +={ open business models +79 } + +/{The commons and the market can be great partners if each shows respect for the other and ingenuity in working together.}/ + +Entrepreneur John Buckman concedes that his Internet record label, Magnatune, amounts to “building a business model on top of chaos.”~{ John Buckman presentation at iCommons Summit, Dubrovnik, Croatia, June 15, 2007. }~ That is to say, he makes money by honoring open networks and people’s natural social inclinations. The company rejects the proprietary muscle games used by its mainstream rivals, and instead holds itself to an ethical standard that verges on the sanctimonious: “We are not evil.” In the music industry these days, a straight shooter apparently has to be that blunt. +={ Buckman, John +4 ; + Magnatune +8 ; + music : + CC licenses for +8 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + music, for +8 +} + +Magnatune is a four-person enterprise based in Berkeley, California, that since 2003 has been pioneering a new open business model for identifying and distributing high-quality new music. It does not lock up the music with anticopying technology or digital rights management. It does not exploit its artists with coercive, unfair contracts. It does not harass its customers for making unauthorized copies. Internet users can in fact listen to all of Magnatune’s music for free (not just music snippets) via online streaming.~{ John Buckman entry in Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Buckman. }~ + +Buckman, a former software programmer turned entrepreneur in his thirties, previously founded and ran Lyris Technologies, an e-mail list management company that he sold in 2005. In deciding to start Magnatune, he took note of the obvious realities that the music industry has tried to ignore: radio is boring, CDs cost too much, record labels exploit their artists, file sharing is not going to go away, people love to share music, and listening to music on the Internet is too much work. “I thought, why not make a record label that has a clue?” said Buckman.~{ John Buckman at Magnatune home page, at http://www.magnatune.com/info/why. }~ + +Well before the band Radiohead released its In /{Rainbows}/ album with a “pay what you want” experiment, Magnatune was inviting its customers to choose the amount they would be willing to pay, from $5 to $18, for any of Magnatune’s 547 albums. Buckman explains that the arrangement signals a respect for customers who, after all, have lots of free music choices. It also gives them a chance to express their appreciation for artists, who receive 50 percent of the sales price. “It turns out that people are quite generous and they pay on average about $8.40, and they really don’t get anything more for paying more other than feeling like they’re doing the right thing,” said Buckman.~{ John Buckman, interview with Matthew Magee of Out-Law.com, radio podcast, September 13, 2007, at http://www.out-law.com/page-8468. }~ About 20 percent pay more than $12.~{ John Buckman at iCommons, June 15, 2007. For an extensive profile of Buckman and Magnatune, see http://www.openrightsgroup.org/creativebusiness/index.php/John_Buckman:_Magnatune. }~ +={ Radiohead } + +“The reality is today nobody really needs to pay for music at all,” he acknowledges. “If you choose to hit the ‘buy’ button at Magnatune then you’re one of the people who has decided to actually pay for music. Shouldn’t we reflect that honest behavior back and say, well, if you’re one of the honest people how much do you want to pay?”~{ John Buckman, interview with Matthew Magee, September 13, 2007. }~ The set-your-own-price approach is part of Magnatune’s larger strategy of building the business by cultivating open, interactive relationships with its customers and artists. “If you set up a trusting world,” explains Buckman, “you can be rewarded.” + +Magnatune’s business model embraces the openness of the Internet and makes it a virtue, rather than treating it as a bothersome liability that must be elaborately suppressed. All of Magnatune’s music is released as MP3 files, with no digital rights management, under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This means that customers can legally make their own remixes and covers of songs, and take samples, so long as the uses are noncommercial and carry the same CC license. Magnatune also invites customers to give free downloads of purchased music to three friends. Podcasters have free access to the entire Magnatune catalog. + +By using a CC license, Magnatune saves a bundle by not having to oversee complex terms and conditions for usage of music. Nor does it have to maintain a DRM system and police the behavior of its customers, both of which squander a key marketing asset: consumer goodwill. Instead, the music circulates freely and, in so doing, expands public awareness of Magnatune’s 244 artists. + +Two-thirds of Magnatune’s revenues comes from licensing its music to films, ads, television, and shops. Like so many open business models, it has carved out a mid-tier niche between “expensive and proprietary” and “cheap and crummy.” Most mainstream music licensing involves either expensive, highly lawyered deals with record labels or insipid stock music from royalty-free CDs. Magnatune’s innovation is to offer high-quality music in multiple genres at flatrate licenses for sixteen different usage scenarios. The deals can be easily consummated via the Web; artists share in half the proceeds. No accounting flimflam. To date, Magnatune has licensed its music to more than one thousand indie films and many commercials. + +Magnatune is a small, fledgling enterprise in the $4 billion music industry. It does not have all the answers, and it may be sideswiped by bigger players at some point. But Magnatune is lean, nimble, profitable, and growing. It has shown how innovative business models can flourish in the open environment of the Internet. Unlike its bloated, besieged competitors, Magnatune is willing to listen closely to its customers, artists, and licensing clients. It is fair-minded and straightforward; it wants to share the wealth and let the music flow. + +2~ Open Networks Spur New Business Models +={ open networks : + new business models in +16 ; + open business models : + open networks and +16 +} + +Openness does not come intuitively to many businesses. Competitive advantage has long been associated with exclusive control and secrecy. But as the Internet’s power expands, conventional businesses are feeling pressures to rethink their “closed” business models. A new breed of “open businesses” is demonstrating that a reliance on open-source software, open content, and an ethic of transparency in dealings with all corporate stakeholders can be tremendously competitive. +={ open business models : + transparency in ; + transparency ; + Internet : + rise of +} + +Open businesses understand the Great Value Shift discussed in chapter 5 — that working through open networks and commons is likely to generate greater consumer attention, engagement, and loyalty — and thus sales — and may outperform a more exclusive regime of control. Working on an open network is also the best way for a company to get smarter faster, and to stay alert to changing market conditions. It bears noting that business models are not an either/or choice — that is, all open or all closed. There is a continuum of choices, as we will see below. Sometimes there are heated strategic and moral debates about what level of openness to adopt, yet the general trend in business today is clear: toward openness. +={ Great Value Shift ; + open business models : + Great Value Shift, and +} + +Even as broadcast networks decry the posting of copyrighted television programs on YouTube, they clearly welcome the ratings spikes that ensue. Wireless telephony is fragmented among many proprietary systems, but pressures are now growing to make them compete on an open platform.~{ See,e.g., Walter S.Mossberg, “Free My Phone,” /{Wall Street Journal}/, October 22, 2007, p. R1. }~ European regulators are calling for “open document format” standards to prevent Microsoft from abusing its proprietary standards in its Office suite of software. There are even calls for open standards for avatars in virtual worlds like Second Life, The Lounge, and Entropia Universe, so that our digital alter egos can glide from one virtual community to another.~{ Steve Lohr, “Free the Avatars,” New York Times, October 15, 2007. }~ +={ YouTube ; + Microsoft : + competition against ; + open business models : + interoperability of +1 +} + +Why this inexorable trend toward openness? Because on open networks, excessive control can be counterproductive. The overall value that can be created through interoperability is usually greater than the value that any single player may reap from maintaining its own “walled network.”~{ See Elliot E. Maxwell, “Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness,” /{Innovations:Technology, Governance, Globalization}/ 1, no. 3 (Summer 2006), at http://www.emaxwell.net. }~ For a company to reap value from interoperability, however, it must be willing to compete on an open platform and it must be willing to share technical standards, infrastructure, or content with others. Once this occurs, proprietary gains come from competing to find more sophisticated ways to add value in the production chain, rather than fighting to monopolize basic resources. Advantage also accrues to the company that develops trusting relationships with a community of customers. +={ open business models : + value created in +9 ; + value : + creation of +9 +} + +Free software was one of the earliest demonstrations of the power of online commons as a way to create value. In his classic 1997 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” hacker Eric S. Raymond provided a seminal analysis explaining how open networks make software development more cost-effective and innovative than software developed by a single firm.~{ Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” May 1997, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar. The essay has been translated into nineteen languages to date. }~ A wide-open “bazaar” such as the global Linux community can construct a more versatile operating system than one designed by a closed “cathedral” such as Microsoft. “With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow,” Raymond famously declared. Yochai Benkler gave a more formal economic reckoning of the value proposition of open networks in his pioneering 2002 essay “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm.”~{ Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” /{Yale Law Journal}/ 112, no. 369 (2002), at http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html. }~ The title is a puckish commentary on how GNU/Linux, whose mascot is a penguin, poses an empirical challenge to economist Ronald Coase’s celebrated “transaction cost” theory of the firm. In 1937, Coase stated that the economic rationale for forming a business enterprise is its ability to assert clear property rights and manage employees and production more efficiently than contracting out to the marketplace. +={ Benkler, Yochai : + open networks, on +3 ; + Raymond, Eric S. : + “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” ; + free software : + creation of value, and ; + Linux : + open business models, and ; + Microsoft : + competition against ; + Coase, Ronald ; + GNU/Linux : + open business models, and ; + transaction costs : + theory of ; + open business models : + “transaction cost” theory, and +} + +What is remarkable about peer production on open networks, said Benkler, is that it undercuts the economic rationale for the firm; commons-based peer production can perform certain tasks more efficiently than a corporation. Those tasks must be modular and divisible into small components and capable of being efficiently integrated, Benkler stipulated. The larger point is that value is created on open networks in very different ways than in conventional markets. Asserting proprietary control on network platforms may prevent huge numbers of people from giving your work (free) social visibility, contributing new value to it, or remixing it. “The only thing worse than being sampled on the Internet,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, with apologies to Oscar Wilde, “is not being sampled on the Internet.” +={ Vaidhyanathan, Siva } + +The /{New York Times}/'s experience with its paid subscription service, TimesSelect, offers a great example. The /{Times}/ once charged about fifty dollars a year for online access to its premier columnists and news archives. Despite attracting more than 227,000 subscribers and generating about $10 million a year in revenue, the /{Times}/ discontinued the service in 2007.~{ Richard Pérez-Peña, “Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site,” /{New York Times}/, September 18, 2007. }~ A /{Times}/ executive explained that lost subscription revenues would be more than offset by advertising to a much larger online readership with free access. The /{Financial Times}/ and the /{Economist}/ have dropped their paywalls, and the /{Wall Street Journal}/ in effect has done so by allowing free access via search engines and link sites. From some leading citadels of capitalism, a rough consensus had emerged: exclusivity can /{decrease}/ the value of online content.~{ Frank Ahrens, “Web Sites, Tear Down That Wall,” /{Washington Post}/, November 16, 2007, p. D1. See also Farhad Manjoo, “The Wall Street Journal’s Website Is Already (Secretly) Free,” /{Salon}/, March 21, 2008, at http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/03/21/wsj/index.html. }~ +={ New York Times } + +While enormous value can be created on open networks, it can take different forms, notes David P. Reed, who studies information architectures.~{ David P. Reed, “The Sneaky Exponential — Beyond Metcalfe’s Law to the Power of Community Building,” at http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html. }~ One of the most powerful types of network value is what Reed calls “Group-Forming Networks,” or GFNs — or what Benkler might call commons-based peer production and I would call, less precisely, the commons. Reed talks about “scale-driven value shifts” that occur as a network grows in size. Greater value is created as a network moves from a broadcast model (where “content is king”) to peer production (where transactions dominate) and finally, to a group-forming network or commons (where jointly constructed value is produced and shared). +={ Reed, David P. ; + Benkler, Yochai : + The Wealth of Networks ; + commons-based peer production +3 ; + group-forming networks (GFNs) +} + +It is unclear, as a theoretical matter, how to characterize the size and behavior of various “value networks” on the Web today. For simplicity’s stake — and because Web platforms are evolving so rapidly — I refer to two general value propositions, Web 2.0 and the commons. Web 2.0 is about creating new types of value through participation in distributed open networks; the commons is a subset of Web 2.0 that describes fairly distinct, self-governed communities that focus on their own interests, which usually do not involve moneymaking. +={ Web 2.0 : + open business, and +4 +} + +The rise of Web 2.0 platforms and the commons clearly has some serious implications for business strategy and organization. Just consider how Craigslist is displacing millions of dollars of classified newspaper ads; how open-access journals are threatening the economic base of commercial academic journals; and how usergenerated content is competing with network television. At the same time, activities that once occurred through informal social means (finding a date, organizing a gathering, obtaining word-ofmouth recommendations) are increasingly becoming commercial endeavors on the Web. Especially when the commons has strong mechanisms to preserve its value-creating capacity, such as the GPL, open networks are helping to convert more market activity into commons-based activity, or at least shifting the boundary between commodity markets and proprietary, high-value-added markets. As this dynamic proceeds, the social and the commercial are blurring more than ever before. + +Many “value chains” that have long sustained conventional businesses are being disrupted. As described in chapter 5, more efficient types of distributed media are disrupting the production/distribution chain that sustains Centralized Media. The Long Tail lets online consumers “pull” niche products that they want rather than enduring a relentless marketing “push” of products they don’t want. Commons-based peer production is a nonmarket version of the Long Tail: dispersed communities of people with niche interests can find one another, form social communities, bypass the market, and collaborate to create the niche resources that they want. +={ Long Tail ; + Centralized Media : + production/distribution chain of +} + +The question facing many businesses is how to develop stable, long-term business models that can coexist with productive commons, if not leverage them for market gain. Their goal is to find ingenious ways to “monetize” the social relationships of online communities (by selling targeted advertising, personal data, niche products, etc.). Open businesses aim to do this in a respectful, public-spirited way; other, more traditional firms may have fewer scruples because, for them, “it’s all about the money.” + +But here’s the rub: a company can go only so far in monetizing the value-generating capacities of a commons without enclosing it or enraging the commoners. A company may consider itself shrewd for acquiring the copyrights for user-generated content, for example, or for blocking user access to third-party widgets that it disapproves of.~{ See, e.g., Paula Lehman, “MySpace Plays Chicken with Users,” BusinessWeek Online, April 12, 2007. }~ But participants in Web 2.0 communities will protest or simply leave if a corporate host starts to dictate obnoxious policies. A company can try to run its Web 2.0 platform as a feudal fiefdom, but it risks inciting users to revolt and start their own (nonmarket) online communities, reinventing themselves as commoners. Although there is an implicit social ethic to Web 2.0 platforms, none is necessarily “free” in the Stallman sense of “freedom.” +={ Stallman, Richard : + freedom, and +} + +Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus about how exactly to define an “open business.” Accordingly, assessments of their social, political, or economic virtue can be slippery. Some analysts such as Henry Chesbrough regard a business as “open” if it relaxes or modifies its intellectual property controls, or changes its organizational practices, as a way to reap value from open networks.~{ Henry Chesbrough, /{Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2006). }~ Others believe that an open business should use open-source software, and support the copying and sharing of works through CC or other open-content licenses. Sometimes the idea of open business is yoked to a vaguely defined notion of “social responsibility.” It is not always clear whether this ethic is a moral gloss or a structural feature, but in general open businesses strive to practice a more open, accountable, and socially enlightened vision of commerce. +={ Chesbrough, Henry ; + open business models : + definition, no consensus +2 | social responsibility, and +} + +One champion of this vision is OpenBusiness, a Web site jointly created by Creative Commons UK in partnership with CC Brazil and the FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The mission of OpenBusiness is to “analyze and explain models by which people can share their knowledge and creativity with others whilst at the same time enjoying the more traditional incentives of profit, individual success and societal advancement.”~{ http://www.openbusiness.org. }~ By its lights, an open business is commons-friendly if it is committed to “transparency,” “sustainable systems,” and to putting “the health and welfare of people above everything else.” An open business also tries to generate as many “positive externalities” as possible — knowledge, social relationships, revenues — which it is willing to share with its stakeholders. +={ OpenBusiness ; + commoners : + sharing by ; + open business models : + international +} + +It is perhaps best to approach open businesses as an eclectic social phenomenon in search of a theory. As it has been said about Wikipedia, “It works in practice, but not in theory.”~{ From blog of Professor Karim Lakhani, Harvard Business School, April 27, 2007. }~ It is risky to overtheorize phenomena that are still fluid and emerging. Still, specific examples of open business can help us understand some basic principles of open networks, and how some businesses are using CC licenses to build innovative sorts of enterprises. +={ Wikipedia : + social movement, as +} + +2~ Share the Wealth, Grow a Commercial Ecosystem +={ open business models : + commercial ecosystem, as +5 +} + +The idea that a company can make money by giving away something for free seems so counterintuitive, if not ridiculous, that conventional business people tend to dismiss it. Sometimes they protesteth too much, as when Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer compared the GNU GPL to a “cancer” and lambasted open-source software as having “characteristics of communism.”~{ Joe Wilcox and Stephen Shankland, “Why Microsoft is wary of open source,” CNET, June 18, 2001; and Lea, Graham, “MS’ Ballmer: Linux is communism,” /{Register}/ (U.K.), July 31, 2000. }~ In truth, “sharing the wealth” has become a familiar strategy for companies seeking to develop new technology markets. The company that is the first mover in an emerging commercial ecosystem is likely to become the dominant player, which may enable it to extract a disproportionate share of future market rents. Giving away one’s code or content can be a great way to become a dominant first mover. +={ Ballmer, Steve ; + General Public License (GPL) : + critics of ; + open business models : + first movers +1 ; + Microsoft : + competition against +1 +} + +Netscape was one of the first to demonstrate the power of this model with its release of its famous Navigator browser in 1994. The free distribution to Internet users helped develop the Web as a social and technological ecosystem, while helping fuel sales of Netscape’s Web server software. (This was before Microsoft arrived on the scene with its Internet Explorer, but that’s another story.) At a much larger scale, IBM saw enormous opportunities for building a better product by using GNU/Linux. The system would let IBM leverage other people’s talents at a fraction of the cost and strengthen its service relationships with customers. The company now earns more than $2 billion a year from Linux-related services.~{ Yochai Benkler, /{The Wealth of Networks}/ (Yale University Press, 2006), Figure 2.1 on p. 47. }~ +={ GNU/Linux : + IBM, and ; + IBM : + GNU/Linux, and ; + Netscape ; + World Wide Web : + social activity on +} + +Today, sharing and openness are key to many business strategies. “Open Source: Now It’s an Ecosystem,” wrote /{BusinessWeek}/ in 2005, describing the “gold rush” of venture capital firms investing in startups with open-source products. Most of them planned to give away their software via the Web and charge for premium versions or for training, maintenance, and support.~{ “Open Source: Now It’s an Ecosystem,” BusinessWeek Online, October 3, 2005. }~ + +The pioneers in using open platforms to develop commercial ecosystems on the Internet are Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and eBay. Each has devised systems that let third-party software developers and businesses extend their platform with new applications and business synergies. Each uses systems that dynamically leverage users’ social behaviors and so stimulate business — for example, customer recommendations about books, search algorithms that identify the most popular Web sites, and reputation systems that enhance consumer confidence in sellers. Even Microsoft, eager to expand the ecology of developers using its products, has released 150 of its source code distributions under three “Shared Source” licenses, two of which meet the Free Software Foundation’s definition of “free.”~{ Microsoft’s Shared Source Licenses, at http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/licensingbasics/sharedsourcelicenses.mspx; see also Lessig blog, “Microsoft Releases Under ShareAlike,” June 24, 2005, at http://lessig.org/blog/2005/06/microsoft_releases_under_share.html. }~ +={ Amazon ; + eBay ; + Microsoft : + “Shared Source” licenses of ; + Yahoo ; + Google ; + World Wide Web : + social activity on +} + +More recently, Facebook has used its phenomenal reach — more than 80 million active users worldwide — as a platform for growing a diversified ecology of applications. The company allows software developers to create custom software programs that do such things as let users share reviews of favorite books, play Scrabble or poker with others online, or send virtual gifts to friends. Some apps are just for fun; others are the infrastructure for independent businesses that sell products and services or advertise. In September 2007, Facebook had more than two thousand software applications being used by at least one hundred people.~{ Vauhini Vara, “Facebook Gets Help from Its Friends,” Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2007. See also Riva Richmond, “Why So Many Want to Create Facebook Applications,” /{Wall Street Journal}/, September 4, 2007. }~ +={ Facebook } + +2~ Open Content as a Gateway to Commercial Opportunities + +Of course, not every business can own a major platform, as Google, eBay, and Facebook do. Still, there are many other opportunities. One of the most popular is to use open platforms to attract an audience, and then strike a deal with an advertiser or commercial distributor, or sell premium services (“get discovered”). Another approach is to use open content to forge a spirited community to which things may be sold (“build a market on a commons”). +={ eBay ; + Facebook +1 ; + Google +} + +!{/{Get discovered.}/}! This dynamic has been played out countless times on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and other high-traffic social networking sites. An unknown remix artist suddenly becomes famous when his track is discovered by a network swarm: the story of DJ Danger Mouse that we saw in chapter 6. A band attracts a huge following through viral word of mouth: the story of Jake Shapiro and Two Ton Shoe’s stardom in South Korea. There are even calculated scams to get discovered, like the lonelygirl15 series of videos purportedly shot by a teenage girl in her bedroom, which became a huge Internet sensation in 2006.~{ Joshua Davis, “The Secret World of Lonelygirl,” Wired, December 2006, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/lonelygirl.html. }~ +={ DJ Danger Mouse ; + MySpace ; + YouTube ; + Shapiro, Jake ; + Two Ton Shoe ; + Internet : + virtual word of mouth on ; + open business models : + using open platforms to get discovered +15 +} + +As any television network will tell you, the capacity to aggregate audiences is worth a lot of money. The customary way of monetizing this talent is to sell advertising. Or one can parlay newfound name recognition into side deals with the mass media, which have always depended upon “star power” as a draw. Thus, Ana Marie Cox was able to parley her notoriety as a political gossip on her Wonkette blog into a job as Washington editor of /{Time}/ magazine. Perez Hilton, a Hollywood blogger who attracted a following, was offered a lucrative perch at the E! cable television channel. We saw in chapter 6 how producer Samuli Torssonen’s /{Star Wreck}/ attracted millions of Internet viewers, enabling him to strike a deal with Universal Studios to distribute a DVD version. With the same visions of stardom, or at least paying gigs, in mind, thousands of bands now have fan sites, music downloads, and banner ads on MySpace and other sites to promote themselves.~{ Elizabeth Holmes, “Famous, Online,” /{Wall Street Journal}/, August 8, 2006. }~ +={ Cox, Ana Marie ; + Hilton, Perez ; + MySpace ; + Star Wreck Studios ; + Torssonen, Samuli +} + +The CC NonCommercial license is one way to help pursue the “get discovered” business strategy. The license allows authors to seek a global Internet audience without having to cede rights to any commercial opportunities. It is not, however, a terribly reliable way to make money, which is why some artists, especially musicians, find fault with the implicit promise of the NC license. Many serious artists regard the NC license as too speculative a mechanism to get paid for one’s creative work. It is a fair complaint, as far as it goes. The real problem is the closed, highly concentrated music industry, which has a hammerlock on marketing, radio play, and distribution. Newcomers and mid-tier talent cannot get past the corporate gatekeepers to reach an audience, let alone make money. + +In an attempt to bridge the sharing economy with the market, and thereby open up some new channels of commercial distribution for commoners, the Creative Commons in late 2007 introduced a new protocol, CC+. The new project aims to make it easier for the owners of NC-licensed content to signal that agreements, products, or services beyond the scope of the CC licenses are on offer — for example, commercial licensing, warranties, or higherquality copies. A photographer who has hundreds of NC-licensed photos on Flickr would be able to continue to let people use those photos for noncommercial purposes — but through CC+, he could also sell licensing rights to those who want to use the photos for commercial purposes. CC+ is a metadata architecture and standard that allows third-party intermediaries to develop services for consummating commercial transactions. People can use CC+ as a simple “click-through” mechanism for acquiring commercial rights for music, photos, text, and other content. +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + CC+, and +2 +} + +One of the earliest “copyright management” companies to take advantage of the CC+ standard was RightsAgent, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company founded by Rudy Rouhana. RightsAgent essentially acts as a go-between for people who create NC-licensed works on the Web and those who wish to buy rights to use them for commercial purposes. Just as PayPal facilitates the exchange of money on the Internet, so RightsAgent aspires to be a paid intermediary for facilitating the sale of user-generated content. +={ Rouhana, Rudy ; + RightsAgent +} + +The rise of CC+ and associated companies brings to mind Niva Elkin-Koren’s warning that the Creative Commons licenses can be a slippery slope that merely promotes a property-oriented, transactional mentality — the opposite of the commons. On the other hand, many people operating in the noncommercial sharing economy, such as musicians and photographers, have long complained that, as much as they enjoy participating in the commons, they still need to earn a livelihood. +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + critics of +} + +Revver is another company that has developed an ingenious way to promote the sharing of content, yet still monetize it based on the scale of its circulation. Revver is a Los Angeles–based startup that hosts user-generated video. All videos are embedded with a special tracking tag that displays an ad at the end. Like Google’s AdWords system, which charges advertisers for user “click-throughs” on ad links adjacent to Web content, Revver charges advertisers for every time a viewer clicks on an ad. The number of ad views can be tabulated, and Revver splits ad revenues 50-50 with video creators. Key to the whole business model is the use of the CC AttributionNonCommercial-No Derivatives license. The license allows the videos to be legally shared, but prohibits anyone from modifying them or using them for commercial purposes. +={ Revver +2 ; + Google ; + videos and film +2 ; + Internet : + videos and films on +2 ; + World Wide Web : + videos and film on +2 +} + +One of the most-viewed videos on Revver sparked a minor pop trend. It showed kids dropping Mentos candies into bottles of CocaCola, which produces an explosive chemical reaction. The video is said to have generated around $30,000.~{ Revver entry at Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revver. }~ So is new media going to feature silly cat videos and stupid stunts? Steven Starr, a co-founder of Revver, concedes the ubiquity of such videos, but is quick to point to “budding auteurs like Goodnight Burbank, Happy Slip, Studio8 and LoadingReadyRun, all building audiences.” He also notes that online, creators “can take incredible risks with format and genre, can grow their own audience at a fraction of network costs, can enjoy free syndication, hosting, audience-building and ad services at their disposal.”~{ Interview with Steven Starr, “Is Web TV a Threat to TV?” Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2007, at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118530221391976425.html. }~ +={ Starr, Steven } + +Blip.tv is another video content-sharing Web site that splits ad revenues with video creators (although it is not automatic; users must “opt in”). Unlike many videos on YouTube and Revver, blip.tv tends to feature more professional-quality productions and serialized episodes, in part because its founders grew out of the “videoblogging” community. Blip.tv espouses an open business ethic, with shout-outs to “democratization, openness, and sustainability.” While there is a tradition for companies to spout their high-minded principles, blip.tv puts some bite into this claim by offering an open platform that supports many video formats and open metadata standards. And it allows content to be downloaded and shared on other sites. Users can also apply Creative Commons licenses to their videos, which can then be identified by CC-friendly search engines. For all these reasons, Lessig has singled out blip.tv as a “true sharing site,” in contrast to YouTube, which he calls a “faking sharing site” that “gives you tools to /{make}/ it seem as if there’s sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single site.”~{ Lessig blog post, “The Ethics of Web 2.0,” October 20, 2006, at http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003570.shtml. }~ +={ blip.tv +1 ; + YouTube +1 ; + Web 2.0 : + open business, and +3 ; + open business models : + open networks and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + open business sites, and +4 +} + +Lessig’s blog post on blip.tv provoked a heated response from blogger Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of the /{Harvard Business Review}/. The contretemps is worth a close look because it illuminates the tensions between Web 2.0 as a business platform and Web 2.0 as a commons platform. In castigating YouTube as a “fake sharing site,” Carr accused Lessig of sounding like Chairman Mao trying to root out counterrevolutionary forces (that is, capitalism) with “the ideology of digital communalism.” +={ Carr, Nicholas +2 ; + Web 2.0 : + commons platform, as +3 +} + +_1 Like Mao, Lessig and his comrades are not only on the wrong side of human nature and the wrong side of culture; they’re also on the wrong side of history. They fooled themselves into believing that Web 2.0 was introducing a new economic system — a system of “social production” — that would serve as the foundation of a democratic, utopian model of culture creation. They were wrong. Web 2.0’s economic system has turned out to be, in effect if not intent, a system of exploitation rather than a system of emancipation. By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few. + +_1 The Cultural Revolution is over. It ended before it even began. The victors are the counterrevolutionaries. And they have $1.65 billion [a reference to the sale price of YouTube to Google] to prove it.~{ Nicholas G. Carr, “Web 2.0lier than Thou,” Rough Type blog, October 23, 2006. Joichi Ito has a thoughtful response in his blog, “Is YouTube Web 2.0?” October 22, 2006, at http://joi.ito.com/archives/2006/10/22/is_youtube_web_20.html; and Lessig responded to Carr in his blog, at http://lessig.org/blog/2006/10/stuck_in_the_20th_century_or_t.html. The “communism discourse” persists, and not just among critics of free culture. Lawrence Liang of CC India used this epigraph in a book on open-content licenses: “There is a specter haunting cultural production, the specter of open content licensing.” which he attributes to “Karl Marx (reworked for the digital era).” From Liang, /{Guide to Open Content Licenses}/ (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Piet Zwart Institute, Institute for Postgraduate Studies and Research, Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool, 2004). }~ + +Lessig’s response, a warm-up for a new book, /{Remix}/, released in late 2008, pointed out that there are really /{three}/ different economies on the Internet — commercial, sharing, and hybrid. The hybrid economy now emerging is difficult to understand, he suggested, because it “neither gives away everything, nor does it keep everything.” The challenge of open business models, Lessig argues, is to discover the “golden mean.” +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Remix ; + Internet : + hybrid economy enabled by +1 | sharing economy of +1 | commercial economy of +1 +} + +It can be hard to conceptualize a “hybrid sector” when we are accustomed to dividing the world into “private” and “public” sectors, and “profit-making” and “nonprofit” enterprises. Open business models quickly run up against deep-seated prejudices that associate property with “freedom” and sharing with “communism.” How can there be a middle ground? Although some like Nicholas Carr seem to hanker for the predatory enterprises of an earlier capitalism, only this time on Web 2.0 platforms, that is not likely to happen in a world of distributed computing. Power is too dispersed for predators to survive very long, and besides, the commoners are too empowered. + +!{/{ Build a market on a commons.}/}! A number of online business models are based on building communities of deep social affection and respect, and then using the community as a platform for selling merchandise, advertising, or products. Interestingly, some of the most successful “customer relationship” models revolve around music. The Grateful Dead’s strategy of building a business around a rabid fan base (discussed in chapter 6) occurred well before the Internet became prevalent. It is paradigmatic of the digital age, nonetheless. If the band had locked up its music and prohibited free taping of its concert performances and sharing of homemade tapes, it would have effectively weakened the fan base that sustained its business model. Sharing concert tapes actually made Deadheads more inclined to buy t-shirts, official music releases, and concert tickets because the tape sharing deepened the community’s identity and quasi-spiritual ethic. The Grateful Dead’s focus on touring as opposed to studio albums not only intensified the sharing ethic of its fan base, it obliged the band to “keep on truckin’ ” in order to keep earning money. +={ commons : + building a market on +11 ; + open business models : + building a market on a commons +11 ; + communities : + commons, and ; + Grateful Dead ; + music : + market building on a commons +11 +} + +The Brazilian /{tecnobrega}/ music scene discussed briefly in chapter 7 is another example of artists making money through respectful, in-person relationships with their fans. In the town of Belém, Brazil, /{tecnobrega}/ artists release about four hundred CDs every year, but none are sold in stores; street vendors sell them for $1.50 apiece. The CDs function mostly as advertising for live “sound system” parties on the outskirts of town that attract as many as five thousand people and use state-of-the-art audio technology. Immediately following the performances, some artists also sell a significant number of “instant CDs” that are of better quality (and more expensive) than those sold in the streets. (Interestingly, street sales do not compete with after-concert sales.) +={ Brazil : + tecnobrega music scene in +6 +} + +“In their live presentations, the tecnobrega DJ’s usually acknowledge the presence of people from various neighborhoods, and this acknowledgement is of great value to the audience, leading thousands of buy copies of the recorded live presentation,” said Ronaldo Lemos of CC Brazil, who has studied Brazil’s record industry.~{ Interview with Ronaldo Lemos, September 15, 2006. }~ The same basic model is also at work in other grassroots musical genres in Brazil, such as baile funk, which originated in the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. +={ Lemos da Silva, Ronaldo +4 } + +Artists make most of their money from these live performances, not from CDs, said Lemos. Bands earn an average of $1,100 per solo performance at these events, and $700 when playing with other bands — this, in a region where the average monthly income is $350. Altogether, Lemos estimates that the sound system parties as a business sector earn $1.5 million per month, on fixed assets of $8 million. + +“The band Calypso has been approached several times by traditional record labels,” said Lemos, “but they turned down all the offers. The reason is that they make more money by means of the existing business model. In an interview with the largest Brazilian newspaper, the singer of the band said, ‘We do not fight the pirates. We have become big /{because}/ of piracy, which has taken our music to cities where they would never have been.’ ” Calypso has sold more than 5 million albums in Brazil and is known for attracting as many as fifty thousand people to its concerts, Lemos said.~{ Ronaldo Lemos, “From Legal Commons to Social Commons: Developing Countries and the Cultural Industry in the 21st Century,” 2006, at http://www.icommons.org/resources/from-legal-commons-to-social-commons-brazil-and-the-cultural-industry-1. See Paula Martini post on iCommons blog, “Over the Top: The New (and Bigger) Cultural Industry in Brazil,” September 28, 2007, at http://www.icommons.org/articles/over-the-top-thenew-and-bigger-cultural-industry-in-brazil. }~ +={ piracy } + +Another highly successful open business model in the Brazilian music scene is TramaVirtual, an open platform on which more than 15,000 musicians have uploaded some 35,000 albums. Fans can then download the music for free. While this does not sound like a promising business proposition, it makes a lot of sense in the context of Brazil’s music marketplace. Major record labels release a minuscule number of new Brazilian music CDs each year, and they sell for about $10 to $15.~{ Ibid. }~ Only the cultured elite can afford music CDs, and the native musical talent — which is plentiful in Brazil — has no place to go. With such a constricted marketplace, TramaVirtual has become hugely popular by showcasing new and interesting music. +={ TramaVirtual +2 } + +TramaVirtual’s artistic and social cachet — itself the product of open sharing in a commons — has enabled it to develop a highly respected brand identity. “By exploiting the trademark,” said Lemos, “Trama has been able to create parallel businesses that work with music, but not in the same way that a record label does.”~{ Interview with Ronaldo Lemos, November 6, 2006. }~ For instance, Trama created a business that sponsors free concerts at universities under its trademark sponsorship. It then sells marketing rights at the concerts to cosmetic makers and car companies. Musicians have gained wide public exposure through Trama, and then used that association to negotiate international record and marketing deals for themselves. CSS (Cansei de Ser Sexy) won a record contract with the American label Sub Pop, for example. + +For the past five years, a related business model for music on an international scale has been emerging in Luxembourg. In only three years, Jamendo has amassed a huge international following in much the same way as TramaVirtual — by attracting music fans to its open platform for free music sharing. (The name /{Jamendo}/ is a mix of the words /{jam}/ and /{crescendo}/.) The site is not a music retailer but a repository for free music — with a business model overlay to pay the bills. Jamendo’s purpose is not to maximize returns to shareholders, in other words, but to service musicians and fans in a self-sustaining way. It makes most of its money from “tip jar” donations from fans and from advertising on the Web pages and streamed music. Ad revenues are shared 50-50 with artists, and any donations are passed along to individual artists, minus a small transaction fee. +={ Jamendo +4 } + +The Jamendo community is sizable and growing. By 2008 it had more than 357,000 active members from around the world. Part of the draw is the catalog of more than 10,000 albums, all free. Unlike Magnatune, Jamendo does not select the artists that are featured on its site; everyone is welcome to upload his or her music. To help fans identify music they like, the site offers many sophisticated tools. There are some 60,000 member-written reviews, custom playlists, community ratings of albums, and “folksonomy” tags for albums and songs.~[* Folksonomies, a cross of /{taxonomy}/ and /{folk}/, are essentially user-generated tags attached to each song and album, which enables categories of music to emerge from the “bottom up,” as fans regard the music, rather than through top-down marketing categories.]~ Fans are /{urged}/ to download music through peerto-peer networks such as BitTorrent and eMule because it reduces Jamendo’s bandwidth expenses. +={ Magnatune ; + music : + “folksonomy” tags in +} + +“Users can listen, download, review, remix, and ‘widgetize,’” said Sylvain Zimmer, the founder and chief technology officer of Jamendo. As part of its commitment to musicians, the site has a forum for artists and listings of concerts, as well as open APIs~[* An API is an “application programming interface,” a set of protocols that enable a software application to operate on a computer operating system, library, or service. Many companies use proprietary APIs to retain control over who may develop applications that will interoperate with their software. Other companies that wish to encourage development of compatible applications— and thus promote a software ecosystem entwined with the operating system or service — use open APIs.]~ so the Jamendo ecosystem can be integrated into other software. +={ Zimmer, Sylvain +2 ; + APIs (application programming interfaces) +} + +What’s striking about Jamendo is its nonchalant international feel, as if it were only natural to browse for “deathmetal,” “powerpop,” “hypnotique,” “ambient,” “psytrance,” and “jazzrock” on the same site. (These are just a few of the scores of folksonomy tags that can be used to browse the catalog.) “We are a Babel, not a label,” said Zimmer, who reports that India and Japan are heavy downloaders of Jamendo music. Complete, official versions of the site are available in French, the original language for the site, and now English and German. Incomplete versions of the site are available in Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Italian, Swedish, Czech, and Ukrainian. +={ music : + “folksonomy” tags in +} + +Virtually all the albums on Jamendo use one or more of the six basic CC licenses. The CC ethic is a perfect match for the company’s community-driven business model, said Zimmer. “The best way of detecting CC-incompatible content and commercial uses of NC-licensed work is the community. The Creative Commons makes the community feel more confident and active.”~{ Sylvain Zimmer of Jamendo, presentation at iCommons Summit, Dubrovnik, Croatia, June 15, 2007. }~ He adds that if the site’s managers run too many ads, “the community will tell you.” + +2~ Commoners as Co-creators of Value +={ open business models : + value created in +13 ; + value : + creation of +13 +} + +For businesses operating on open networks, it is a mistake to regard people merely as customers; they are collaborators and even coinvestors. As more companies learn to interact closely with their customers, it is only natural that conversations about the product or service become more intimate and collaborative. The roles of the “consumer” and “producer” are starting to blur, leading to what some business analysts call the “prosumer”~{ Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, /{Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything}/ (New York Portfolio, 2006), chapter 5, “The Prosumers.” }~ and the “decentralized co-creation of value.”~{ David Bollier, /{The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized Co-creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture}/ (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, 2008).}~ The basic idea is that online social communities are becoming staging areas for the advancement of business objectives. Businesses see these communities as cost-effective ways to identify promising innovations, commercialize them more rapidly, tap into more reliable market intelligence, and nurture customer goodwill. + +Amateurs who share with one another through a loose social commons have always been a source of fresh ideas. Tech analyst Elliot Maxwell (citing Lessig) notes how volunteers helped compile the /{Oxford English Dictionary}/ by contributing examples of vernacular usage; how the Homebrew Computer Club in the San Francisco Bay area developed many elements of the first successful personal computer; and how sharing among auto enthusiasts helped generate many of the most important early automotive innovations.~{ Elliot Maxwell, “Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness,” /{Innovations:Technology, Governance, Globalization}/ 1, no. 3 (Summer 2006), at http://www.emaxwell.net, p. 150. }~ In our time, hackers were the ones who developed ingenious ways to use unlicensed electromagnetic spectrum as a commons, which we now know as Wi-Fi. They tinkered with the iPod to come up with podcasts, a new genre of broadcasting that commercial broadcasters now emulate.~{ Elliot E. Maxwell drew my attention to these examples in his excellent essay “Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation.” }~ Numerous self-organized commons have incubated profitable businesses. Two movie buffs created the Internet Movie Database as separate Usenet newsgroups in 1989; six years later they had grown so large that they had merged and converted into a business that was later sold to Amazon.~{ Wikipedia entry, IMDB, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Movie_Database. }~ The Compact Disc Database was a free database of software applications that looks up information about audio CDs via the Internet. It was originally developed by a community of music fans as a shared database, but in 2000 it had grown big enough that it was sold and renamed Gracenote.~{ Wikipedia entry, CDDB, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB. }~ +={ Amazon ; + Gracenote ; + Homebrew Computer Club ; + iPod ; + Maxwell, Elliot ; + Oxford English Dictionary ; + Wi-Fi ; + hackers : + community of ; + commons : + sources of new ideas, as +11 +} + +A commons can be highly generative because its participants are tinkering and innovating for their own sake — for fun, to meet a challenge, to help someone out. Amateurs are not constrained by conventional business ideas about what may be marketable and profitable. They do not have to meet the investment expectations of venture capitalists and Wall Street. Yet once promising new ideas do surface in the commons, market players can play a useful role in supplying capital and management expertise to develop, improve, and commercialize an invention. + +Because online commons are such a rich source of new ideas, the most farsighted companies are trying to learn how they might be harnessed to help them innovate and compete more effectively. MIT professor Eric von Hippel is one of the foremost researchers of this process. His 2005 book /{Democratizing Innovation}/ describes how the leading participants in high-performance sports — extreme skiing, mountain biking, skateboarding, surfing, and hot-rodding — are forming “innovation communities” that work closely with manufacturers.~{ Eric von Hippel, /{Democratizing Innovation}/ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), available at http://mitpress.mit.edu/democratizing_innovation_pdf. }~ The most active practitioners of these sports are intimately familiar with the equipment and have their own imaginative ideas about what types of innovations the sport needs. Indeed, many of them have already jerry-rigged their own innovations — better cockpit ventilation in sailplanes, improved boot and bindings on snowboards, a method for cutting loose a trapped rope used by canyon climbers. For companies willing to listen to and collaborate with users, says von Hippel, “communities of interest are morphing into communities of creation and communities of production.” +={ von Hippel, Eric +1 } + +“Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents,” von Hippel writes. “Moreover, individuals users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed and freely shared by others.”~{ Ibid., p. 1 }~ Besides finding empirical examples of this trend, von Hippel has developed a theoretical vocabulary for understanding how collaborative innovation occurs. He probes the user motivations for “free revealing” of their knowledge, the attractive economics that fuel “users’ low-cost innovation niches,” and the public policies that sometimes thwart user-driven innovation (patent rights for a field may be fragmented, anticopying restrictions such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may prevent user tinkering, etc.). +={ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) [1998] } + +User-driven innovation is not as esoteric as the “extreme sports” examples may suggest. It is, in fact, a growing paradigm. In one of the more celebrated examples, Lego, the Danish toymaker, invited some of its most fanatic users to help it redesign its Mindstorms robotics kit. The kits are meant to let kids (and adults) build a variety of customized robots out of a wild assortment of plastic Lego pieces, programmable software, sensors, and motors.~{ Tapscott and Williams, /{Wikinomics}/, pp. 130–31. }~ In 2004, when some Lego users reverse-engineered the robotic “brain” for the Mindstorms kit and put their findings on the Internet, Lego at first contemplated legal action. Upon reflection, however, Lego realized that hackers could be a valuable source of new ideas for making its forthcoming Mindstorms kit more interesting and cool. +={ Lego +1 ; + hackers : + innovations by +1 +} + +Lego decided to write a “right to hack” provision into the Mindstorms software license, “giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild,” as Brendan I. Koerner wrote in /{Wired}/ magazine. “Soon, dozens of Web sites were hosting thirdparty programs that help Mindstorms users build robots that Lego had never dreamed of: soda machines, blackjack dealers, even toilet scrubbers. Hardware mavens designed sensors that were far more sophisticated than the touch and light sensors included in the factory kit.”~{ Brendan I. Koerner, “Geeks in Toyland,” /{Wired}/, February 2006. }~ It turns out that not only are Lego fans happy to advise the company, the open process “engenders goodwill and creates a buzz among the zealots, a critical asset for products like Mindstorms that rely on word-of-mouth evangelism,” said Koerner. In the end, he concluded, the Mindstorm community of fanatics has done “far more to add value to Lego’s robotics kit than the company itself.” +={ Koerner, Brendan I. ; + Internet : + virtual word of mouth on +} + +Another improbable success in distributed, user-driven innovation is Threadless, a Chicago-based t-shirt company. Threadless sells hundreds of original t-shirt designs, each of which is selected by the user community from among more than eight hundred designs submitted every week. The proposed designs are rated on a scale of one to five by the Web site’s more than 600,000 active users. Winners receive cash awards, recognition on the Web site, and their names on the t-shirt label. Every week, Threadless offers six to ten new t-shirts featuring the winning designs. +={ Threadless +1 } + +In 2006, the company sold more than 1.5 million t-shirts without any traditional kind of marketing. Its business model is so rooted in the user community that Threadless co-founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart have declined offers to sell their t-shirts through conventional, big-name retailers. Threadless’s business model has helped it overcome two major challenges in the apparel industry, write Harvard Business School professor Karim R. Lakhani and consultant Jill A. Panetta — the ability “to attract the right design talent at the right time to create recurring fashion hits,” and the ability “to forecast sales so as to be better able to match production cycles with demand cycles.”~{ Karim R. Lakhani and Jill A. Panetta, “The Principles of Distributed Innovation,” Research Publication No. 2007-7, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School, October 2007, at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract_id=1021034. See also Darren Dahl, “Nice Threads,” /{Southwest Airlines Spirit}/, December 2006. }~ +={ DeHart, Jacob ; + Nickell, Jake ; + Lakhani, Karim R. ; + Panetta, Jill A. +} + +A number of companies have started successful enterprises based on the use of wikis, the open Web platforms that allow anyone to contribute and edit content and collaborate. Evan Prodromou, the founder of Wikitravel, a free set of worldwide travel guides, has identified four major types of wiki businesses: service providers who sell access to wikis (Wikispace, wetpaint, PBwiki); content hosters of wikis (wikiHow, Wikitravel, Wikia); consultants who advise companies how to run their own wikis (Socialtext); and content developers (WikiBiz, an offshoot of Wikipedia). +={ Prodromou, Evan +1 ; + wikis +1 +} + +Since the success of a wiki-based business depends upon honoring the integrity of wiki users, Prodromou scorns what he sees as the backhanded strategies of business models based on “wikinomics” and “crowdsourcing.” He sees such models as sly attempts to get “suckers” to do free work for the entrepreneur owning the business. A sustainable commercial wiki, said Prodromou at a conference, respects the community of users and does not try to exploit them. It strives to fulfill a “noble purpose” for users and demonstrate in a transparent way that it offers value. Any hint of trickery or calculation begins to sow distrust and erode the community. Yet any wiki-based business must be able to set boundaries that allow the owners to make responsible business decisions; those decisions, however, must respect the wiki community’s values.~{ Evan Prodromou presentation, “Commercialization of Wikis: Open Community that Pays the Bills,” South by Southwest Interactive conference, March 10, 2007. }~ + +It is hard to predict what new models of “decentralized cocreation of value” will take root and flourish, but the experiments are certainly proliferating. Staples, the office supplies store, now hosts a contest inviting the public to suggest inventions that Staples can develop and sell under the its brand name.~{ William J. Bulkeley, “Got a Better Letter Opener?” /{Wall Street Journal}/, July 13, 2006. }~ A number of massmarket advertisers have hosted competitions inviting users to create ads for their products. One of the more interesting frontiers in userdriven innovation is tapping the audience for investment capital. +={ Staples } + +SellaBand (“You are the record company”) is a Web site that invites bands to recruit five thousand “Believers” to invest $10 apiece in their favorite bands; upon reaching the $50,000 mark, a band can make a professional recording, which is then posted on the SellaBand site for free downloads. Bands and fans can split advertising revenues with SellaBand.~{ http://www.sellaband.com. }~ Robert Greenwald, the activist documentary filmmaker, used e-mail solicitations, social networks, and the blogosphere to ask ordinary citizens to help finance his 2006 film /{Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers}/.~{ William Booth, “His Fans Greenlight the Project,” /{Washington Post}/, August 20, 2006. }~ +={ Greenwald, Robert ; + SellaBand +} + +2~ Reintegrating the Sharing and Commercial Economies + +If there is persistent skepticism about the very idea of open business models, from both business traditionalists focused on the bottom line and commoners committed to sharing, it is because the commons and the commercial economy seem to represent such divergent moral values and social orders. One depends upon reciprocal exchanges of monetary value, with the help of individual property rights and contracts; the other depends upon the informal social circulation of value, without individual property rights or quid pro quos. A market is impersonal, transactional, and oriented to a bottom line; a commons tends to be personal and social and oriented to continuous relationships, shared values, and identity. + +Yet, as the examples above show, the market and the commons interpenetrate each other, yin/yang style. Each “adds value” to the other in synergistic ways. Historically, this has always been true. Adam Smith, the author of /{The Wealth of Nations}/, was also the author of /{The Theory of Moral Sentiments}/, about the moral and social norms that undergird market activity. The market has always depended upon the hidden subsidies of the commons (folk stories, vernacular motifs, amateur creativity) to drive its engine of wealth creation. And the commons builds its sharing regimes amid the material wealth produced by the market (free software is developed on commercially produced computers). +={ Smith, Adam : + The Theory of Moral Sentiments +} + +What has changed in recent years is our perceptions. The actual role of the commons in creative endeavors has become more culturally legible. For businesses to function well on Web 2.0 platforms, they must more consciously integrate social and market relationships in functional, sustainable ways. If the results sometimes seem novel, if not bizarre, it is partly because networking technologies are making us more aware that markets are not ahistorical, universal entities; they are rooted in social relationships. Open business models recognize this very elemental truth, and in this sense represent a grand gambit to go back to the future. +={ open business models : + open networks and ; + Web 2.0 : + open business, and +} + +1~ 11 SCIENCE AS A COMMONS +={ Science Commons +90 } + +/{Web 2.0 tools, open access, and CC licenses are helping to accelerate scientific discovery.}/ + +It was one of those embarrassing episodes in science: Two sets of researchers published papers in a German organic chemistry journal, /{Angewandte Chemie}/, announcing that they had synthesized a strange new substance with “12-membered rings.” Then, as blogger and chemist Derek Lowe tells the story, “Professor Manfred Cristl of Wurzburg, who apparently knows his pyridinium chemistry pretty well, recognized this as an old way to make further pyridinium salts, not funky twelve-membered rings. He recounts how over the last couple of months he exchanged awkward emails with the two sets of authors, pointing out that they seem to have rediscovered a 100-year-old reaction. . . .”~{ Derek Lowe, “Neat! Wish It Were True!” /{In the Pipeline}/ [blog], November 29, 2007, at http://pipeline.corante.com. See also, Donna Wentworth, “Why We Need to Figure Out What We Already Know,” Science Commons blog, January 4, 2008, at http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/01/04/why-we-need-to-figure-out-what-we-already-know. }~ +={ Lowe, Derek } + +In the Internet age, people generally assume that these kinds of things can’t happen. All you have to do is run a Web search for “pyridinium,” right? But as scientists in every field are discovering, the existence of some shard of highly specialized knowledge does not necessarily mean that it can be located or understood. After all, a Google search for “pyridinium” turns up 393,000 results. And even peer reviewers for journals (who may have been partly at fault in this instance) have the same problem as any researcher: the unfathomable vastness of the scientific and technical literature makes it difficult to know what humankind has already discovered. + +Paradoxically, even though academic science played the central role in incubating the Internet (in conjunction with the military), it has not fared very well in developing it to advance research. Most search engines are too crude. Journal articles can be expensive and inaccessible. They do not link to relevant Web resources or invite reader comment. Nor do they contain metadata to facilitate computer-based searches, collaborative filtering, and text mining. Scientific databases are plentiful but often incompatible with one another, preventing researchers from exploring new lines of inquiry. Lab researchers who need to share physical specimens still have to shuffle papers through a bureaucratic maze and negotiate with lawyers, without the help of eBay- or Craigslist-like intermediaries. + +“The World Wide Web was designed in a scientific laboratory to facilitate access to scientific knowledge,” observed Duke law professor James Boyle in 2007. “In every other area of life — commercial, social networking, pornography — it has been a smashing success. But in the world of science itself? With the virtues of the open Web all around us, we have proceeded to build an endless set of walled gardens, something that looks a lot like Compuserv or Minitel and very little like a world wide web for science.”~{ James Boyle, “The Irony of a Web Without Science,” /{Financial Times}/, September 4, 2007, at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/39166e30-5a7f-11dc-9bcd0000779fd2ac.html. }~ +={ Boyle, James : + Science Commons, and ; + science : + scientific knowledge +2 +} + +Therein lies a fascinating, complicated story. To be sure, various scientific bodies have made great progress in recent years in adapting the principles of free software, free culture, and Web 2.0 applications to their research. Open-access journals, institutional repositories, specialty wikis, new platforms for collaborative research, new metatagging systems: all are moving forward in different, fitful ways. Yet, for a field of inquiry that has long honored the ethic of sharing and “standing on the shoulders of giants,” academic science has lagged behind most other sectors. + +Part of the problem is the very nature of scientific knowledge. While the conventional Web works fairly well for simple kinds of commerce and social purposes, the Research Web for science requires a more fine-grained, deliberately crafted structure.~{ John Wilbanks, director of the Science Commons, introduced me to this term. }~ Science involves /{practices}/, after all; it is not just about information. The “wisdom of the crowds” is not good enough. Scientific knowledge tends to be significantly more specialized and structured than cultural information or product recommendations. The Web systems for organizing, manipulating, and accessing that knowledge, accordingly, need to be more hierarchical and structured, often in quite specific ways depending upon the discipline. A scientist cannot just type “signal transduction genes in pyramidal neurons” into a search engine; she needs to be able to locate specific genes and annotations of them. Data may be strewn across dozens of different data systems, and those are not likely to be interoperable. This means that technical standards need to be coordinated, or some metasystem developed to allow different data reservoirs to communicate with one another. A scientist must be able to use computers to browse and organize a vast literature. And so on. + +Much as scientists would like to build new types of Internet-based commons, they have quickly run up against a thicket of interrelated problems: overly broad copyright and patent limitations; access and usage restrictions by commercial journal publishers and database owners; and university rules that limit how cell lines, test animals, bioassays, and other research tools may be shared. In a sense, scientists and universities face a classic collective-action problem. Everyone would clearly be better off if a more efficient infrastructure and enlightened social ethic could be adopted — but few single players have the resources, incentive, or stature to buck the prevailing order. There is no critical mass for instigating a new platform for scientific inquiry and “knowledge management.” +={ copyright law : + property rights, and +1 | science, in ; + property rights : + copyright law, and +1 ; + science : + copyright and patent restrictions in +1 +} + +Like so many other sectors confronting the Great Value Shift, science in the late 1990s found itself caught in a riptide. The proprietarian ethic of copyright and patent law was intensifying (as we saw in chapter 2), spurring scientists and universities to claim private ownership in knowledge that was previously treated as a shared resource.~{ See, e.g., Jennifer Washburn, /{University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education}/ (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Derek Bok, /{Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education}/ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Sheldon Krimsky, /{Science in the Private Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research}/ (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); and Corynne McSherry, /{Who Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of Intellectual Property}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). }~ Yet at the same time the Internet was demonstrating the remarkable power of open sharing and collaboration. Even as market players sought to turn data, genetic knowledge, and much else into private property rights, a growing number of scientists realized that the best ideals of science would be fulfilled by recommitting itself to its core values of openness and sharing. Open platforms could also strengthen the social relationships that are essential to so much scientific inquiry.~{ John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, /{The Social Life of Information}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Pulishing, 2000). See also, e.g., Jane E. Fountain, “Social Capital: Its Relationship to Innovation in Science and Technology,” /{Science and Public Policy}/ 25, no. 2 (April 1998), pp. 103–15. }~ +={ Great Value Shift } + +Perhaps the most salient example of the power of open science was the Human Genome Project (HGP), a publicly funded research project to map the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome. Many other scientific projects have been attracted by the stunning efficacy and efficiency of the open research model. For example, the HapMap project is a government-supported research effort to map variations in the human genome that occur in certain clusters, or haplotypes. There is also the SNP Consortium, a public-private partnership seeking to identify single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that may be used to identify genetic sources of disease. Both projects use licenses that put the genomic data into the public domain. +={ Human Genome Project (HGP) ; + science : + Human Genome Project +} + +A 2008 report by the Committee for Economic Development identified a number of other notable open research projects.~{ Committee for Economic Development, /{Harnessing Openness to Transform American Health Care}/ (Washington, DC: CED, 2008). }~ There is the PubChem database, which amasses data on chemical genomics from a network of researchers; the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, a network of several dozen cancer research centers and other organizations that shares data, research tools, and software applications; and TDR Targets a Web clearinghouse sponsored by the World Health Organization that lets researchers share genetic data on neglected diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness. It is telling that Bill Gates, who in his commercial life is a staunch advocate of proprietary control of information, has been a leader, through his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in requiring research grantees to share their data. +={ Gates, Bill } + +There has even been the emergence of open-source biotechnology, which is applying the principles of free software development to agricultural biotech and pharmaceutical development.~{ See, e.g., Rockefeller Foundation, “2005 Bellagio Meeting on Open Source Models of Collaborative Innovation in the Life Sciences” [report], Bellagio, Italy, September 2005. See also Janet Elizabeth Hope, “Open Source Biotechnology,” Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, December 2004. }~ Richard Jefferson, the founder of Cambia, a nonprofit research institute in Australia, launched the “kernel” of what he calls the first opensource biotech toolkit. It includes patented technologies such as TransBacter, which is a method for transferring genes to plants, and GUSPlus, which is a tool for visualizing genes and understanding their functions.~{ Interview with Richard Jefferson, September 7, 2006. See also http://www.cambia.org. }~ By licensing these patented research tools for open use, Jefferson hopes to enable researchers anywhere in the world— not just at large biotech companies or universities — to develop their own crop improvement technologies. +={ Jefferson, Richard } + +2~ The Viral Spiral in Science + +Sociologist Robert Merton is often credited with identifying the social values and norms that make science such a creative, productive enterprise. In a notable 1942 essay, Merton described scientific knowledge as “common property” that depends critically upon an open, ethical, peer-driven process.~{ Robert Merton, “Science and Democratic Social Structure,” in /{Social Theory and Social Structure}/, 3d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 604–15. }~ Science is an engine of discovery precisely because research is available for all to see and replicate. It has historically tried to keep some distance from the marketplace for fear that corporate copyrights, patents, or contractual agreements will lock up knowledge that should be available to everyone, especially future scientists.~{ Richard R. Nelson, “The Market Economy and the Scientific Commons,” /{Research Policy}/ 33, no. 3 (April 2004), pp. 455–71. See also Karim R. Lakhani et al., “The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving,” Harvard Business School Working Paper 07-050, January 2007, at http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-050.pdf. }~ Secrecy can also make it difficult for the scientific community to verify research results. +={ Merton, Robert ; + science : + cientific knowledge +2 +} + +Although scientific knowledge eventually becomes publicly available, it usually flows in semi-restricted ways, at least initially, because scientists usually like to claim personal credit for their discoveries. They may refuse to share their latest research lest a rival team of scientists gain a competitive advantage. They may wish to claim patent rights in their discoveries. + +So scientific knowledge is not born into the public sphere, but there is a strong presumption that it ought to be treated as a shared resource as quickly as possible. As law scholar Robert Merges noted in 1996, “Science is not so much given freely to the public as shared under a largely implicit code of conduct among a more or less well identified circle of similarly situated scientists. In other words . . . science is more like a limited-access commons than a truly open public domain.”~{ Robert Merges, “Property Rights Theory and the Commons: The Case of Scientific Research,” /{Social Philosophy and Policy}/ 13, no. 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 145–61. }~ In certain disciplines, especially those involving large capital equipment such as telescopes and particle accelerators, the sharing of research is regarded as a kind of membership rule for belonging to a club. +={ Merges, Robert } + +As Web 2.0 innovations have demonstrated the power of the Great Value Shift, the convergence of open source, open access, and open science has steadily gained momentum.~{ John Willinsky, “The Unacknowledged Convergence of Open Source, Open Access and Open Science,” /{First Monday}/ 10, no. 8 (August 2005), at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_8/willinsky/index.html. }~ Creative Commons was mindful of this convergence from its beginnings, but it faced formidable practical challenges in doing anything about it. “From the very first meetings of Creative Commons,” recalled law professor James Boyle, a CC board member, “we thought that science could be the killer app. We thought that science could be the place where Creative Commons could really make a difference, save lives, and have a dramatic impact on the world. There is massive, unnecessary friction in science and we think we can deal with it. Plus, there’s the Mertonian ideal of science, with which Creative Commons couldn’t fit more perfectly.”~{ Interview with James Boyle, August 15, 2006. }~ +={ Merton, Robert ; + Boyle, James : + Science Commons, and +1 ; + Great Value Shift ; + Web 2.0 : + Great Value Shift, and +} + +But despite its early interest in making the Web more research-friendly, Creative Commons realized that science is a special culture unto itself, one that has so many major players and niche variations that it would be foolhardy for an upstart nonprofit to try to engage with it. So in 2002 Creative Commons shelved its ambitions to grapple with science as a commons, and focused instead on artistic and cultural sectors. By January 2005, however, the success of the CC licenses emboldened the organization to revisit its initial idea. As a result of deep personal engagement by several Creative Commons board members — computer scientist Hal Abelson, law professors James Boyle and Michael Carroll, and film producer Eric Saltzman — Creative Commons decided to launch a spin-off project, Science Commons. The new initiative would work closely with scientific disciplines and organizations to try to build what it now calls “the Research Web.” +={ Abelson, Hall : + CC board, on ; + Carroll, Michael W. ; + Saltzman, Eric ; + Science Commons : + CC Commons spinoff, and +5 +} + +Science Commons aims to redesign the “information space” — the technologies, legal rules, institutional practices, and social norms — so that researchers can more easily share their articles, datasets, and other resources. The idea is to reimagine and reinvent the “cognitive infrastructures” that are so critical to scientific inquiry. Dismayed by the pressures exerted by commercial journal publishers, open-access publishing advocate Jean-Claude Guédon has called on librarians to become “epistemological engineers.”~{ Jean-Claude Guédon, “In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers and the Control of Scientific Publishing,” at http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/mmproceedings/138guedon.shtml. }~ They need to design better systems (technical, institutional, legal, and social) for identifying, organizing, and using knowledge. The payoff? Speedier research and greater scientific discovery and innovation. It turns out that every scientific discipline has its own special set of impediments to address. The recurring problem is massive, unnecessary transaction costs. There is an enormous waste of time, expense, bureaucracy, and logistics in acquiring journal articles, datasets, presentations, and physical specimens. +={ Science Commons : + libraries, and +5 ; + science : + transaction costs in +1 ; + transaction costs : + in science +1 ; + libraries : + Science Commons, and +} + +If transaction costs could be overcome, scientists could vastly accelerate their research cycles. They could seek answers in unfamiliar bodies of research literature. They could avoid duplicating other people’s flawed research strategies. They could formulate more imaginative hypotheses and test them more rapidly. They could benefit from a broader, more robust conversation (as in free software — “with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow”) and use computer networks to augment and accelerate the entire scientific process. + +That is the vision of open science that Science Commons wanted to address in 2005. It recognized that science is a large, sprawling world of many institutional stakeholders controlling vast sums of money driving incommensurate agendas. In such a milieu, it is not easy to redesign some of the most basic processes and norms for conducting research. Science Commons nonetheless believed it could play a constructive role as a catalyst. + +It was fortunate to have some deep expertise not just from its board members, but from two Nobel Prize winners on its scientific advisory panel (Sir John Sulston and Joshua Lederberg) and several noted scholars (patent scholar Arti Rai, innovation economist Paul David, and open-access publishing expert Michael B. Eisen). The director of Science Commons, John Wilbanks, brought a rare mix of talents and connections. He was once a software engineer at the World Wide Web Consortium, specializing in the Semantic Web; he had founded and run a company dealing in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence; he had worked for a member of Congress; and he was formerly assistant director of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. +={ David, Paul ; + Eisen, Michael B. ; + Lederberg, Joshua ; + Rai, Arti ; + Sulston, Sir John ; + Wilbanks, John +1 +} + +After obtaining free office space at MIT, Wilbanks set off to instigate change within the scientific world — and then get out of the way. “We’re designing Science Commons to outstrip ourselves,” Wilbanks told me. “We don’t want to control any of this; we’re designing it to be decentralized. If we try to control it, we’ll fail.” + +With a staff of seven and a budget of only $800,000 in 2008, Science Commons is not an ocean liner like the National Academy of Science and the National Science Foundation; it’s more of a tug-boat. Its strategic interventions try to nudge the big players into new trajectories. It is unencumbered by bureaucracy and entrenched stakeholders, yet it has the expertise, via Creative Commons, to develop standard licensing agreements for disparate communities. It knows how to craft legal solutions that can work with technology and be understood by nonlawyers. + +In 2006, Science Commons embarked upon three “proof of concept” projects that it hopes will be models for other scientific fields. The first initiative, the Scholar’s Copyright Project, aspires to give scientists the “freedom to archive and reuse scholarly works on the Internet.” It is also seeking to make the vast quantities of data on computerized databases more accessible and interoperable, as a way to advance scientific discovery and innovation. +={ Scholar’s Copyright Project ; + Science Commons : + Scholar’s Copyright Project, and +} + +A second project, the Neurocommons, is a bold experiment that aims to use the Semantic Web to make a sprawling body of neurological research on the Web more accessible. The project is developing a new kind of Internet platform so that researchers will be able to do sophisticated searches of neuroscience-related journal articles and explore datasets across multiple databases. +={ Neurocommons ; + Science Commons : + Neurocommons, and the +} + +Finally, Science Commons is trying to make it cheaper and easier for researchers to share physical materials such as genes, proteins, chemicals, tissues, model animals, and reagents, which is currently a cumbersome process. The Biological Materials Transfer Project resembles an attempt to convert the pony express into a kind of Federal Express, so that researchers can use an integrated electronic data system to obtain lab materials with a minimum of legal complications and logistical delays. +={ Biological Materials Transfer Project } + +In many instances, Science Commons has been a newcomer to reform initiatives already under way to build open repositories of scientific literature or data. One of the most significant is the openaccess publishing movement, which has been a diverse, flourishing effort in academic circles since the 1990s. It is useful to review the history of the open access (OA) movement because it has been an important pacesetter and inspiration for the open-science ethic. +={ education : + open access movement ; + open access (OA) movement +22 ; + Science Commons : + open access movement, and +} + +2~ The Open-Access Movement +={ open access (OA) movement +19 ; + Science Commons : + open access movement, and +19 +} + +The open-access movement has a fairly simple goal: to get the scientific record online and available to everyone. It regards this task as one of the most fundamental challenges in science. Open-access publishing generally consists of two modes of digital access — openaccess archives (or “repositories”) and open-access journals. In both instances, the publisher or host institution pays the upfront costs of putting material on the Web so that Internet users can access the literature at no charge.~[* “Open access” can be a confusing term. In the context of a rivalrous, depletable natural resource like timber or grazing land, an open-access regime means that anyone can use and appropriate the resource, resulting in its overexploitation and ruin. An /{open-access regime}/ is not the same as a /{commons}/, however, because a commons does have rules, boundaries, sanctions against free riders, etc., to govern the resource. However, in the context of an infinite, nonrivalrous resource like information, which can be copied and distributed at virtually no cost, an open-access regime does not result in overexploitation of the resource. For this reason, open access in an Internet context is often conflated with the commons — even though “open access,” in a natural resource context, tends to produce very different outcomes.]~ + +The appeal of OA publishing stems from the Great Value Shift described in chapter 5. “OA owes its origin and part of its deep appeal to the fact that publishing to the Internet permits both wider dissemination and lower costs than any previous form of publishing,” writes Peter Suber, author of /{Open Access News}/ and a leading champion of OA.~{ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html. }~ “The revolutionary conjunction is too good to pass up. But even lower costs must be recovered if OA is to be sustainable.” In most cases, publishing costs are met by scientific and academic institutions and/or by subsidies folded into research grants. Sometimes an OA journal will defray its publishing costs by charging authors (or their grant funders) a processing fee for articles that they accept. +={ Great Value Shift ; + Suber, Peter +} + +Just as free software and music downloads have disrupted their respective industries, so OA publishing has not been a welcome development among large academic publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Kluwer, and Wiley. Online publishing usually costs much less than traditional print publishing and it allows authors to retain control over their copyrights. Both of these are a big incentive for disciplines and universities to start up their own OA journals. In addition, OA publishing makes it easier for research to circulate, and for authors to reach larger readerships. This not only augments the practical goals of science, it bolsters the reputation system and open ethic that science depends upon. + +Commercial publishers have historically emphasized their shared interests with scholars and scientists, and the system was amicable and symbiotic. Academics would produce new work, validate its quality through peer review, and then, in most cases, give the work to publishers at no charge. Publishers shouldered the expense of editorial production, distribution, and marketing and reaped the bulk of revenues generated. The arrangement worked fairly well for everyone until journal prices began to rise in the early 1970s. Then, as subscription rates continued to soar, placing unbearable burdens on university libraries in the 1990s, the Internet facilitated an extremely attractive alternative: open-access journals. Suddenly, conventional business models for scholarly publishing had a serious rival, one that shifts the balance of power back to scientists and their professional communities. + +Publishers have long insisted upon acquiring the copyright of journal articles and treating them as “works for hire.” This transfer of ownership enables the publisher, not the author, to determine how a work may circulate. Access to an article can then be limited by the subscription price for a journal, the licensing fees for online access, and pay-per-view fees for viewing an individual article. Publishers may also limit the reuse, republication, and general circulation of an article by charging high subscription or licensing fees, or by using digital rights management. If a university cannot afford the journal, or if a scholar cannot afford to buy individual articles, research into a given topic is effectively stymied. + +Open-access champion John Willinsky notes, “The publishing economy of scholarly journals is dominated by a rather perverse property relation, in which the last investor in the research production chain — consisting of university, researcher, funding agency and /{publisher}/ — owns the resulting work outright through a very small investment in relation to the work’s overall cost and value.”~{ Willinsky, “The Unacknowledged Convergence.” }~ Scientists and scholars virtually never earn money from their journal articles, and only occasionally from their books. Unlike commercial writers, this is no problem for academics, whose salaries are intended to free them to study all sorts of niche interests despite the lack of “market demand.” Their works are not so much “intellectual property” that must yield maximum revenues as “royaltyfree literature,” as Peter Suber calls it. Academics write and publish to contribute to their fields and enhance their standing among their peers. +={ Suber, Peter ; + Willinsky, John +} + +Not surprisingly, many commercial publishers regard OA publishing as a disruptive threat. It can, after all, subvert existing revenue models for scholarly publishing. This does not mean that OA publishing cannot support a viable business model. Much of OA publishing is sustained through “author-side payments” to publishers. In certain fields that are funded by research grants, such as biomedicine, grant makers fold publishing payments into their grants so that the research can be made permanently available in open-access journals. A leading commercial publisher, BioMed Central, now publishes over 140 OA journals in this manner. Hindawi Publishing Corporation, based in Cairo, Egypt, publishes more than one hundred OA journals and turns a profit. And Medknow Publications, based in Mumbai, India, is also profitable as a publisher of more than forty OA journals. + +It remains an open question whether the OA business model will work in fields where little research is directly funded (and thus upfront payments are not easily made). As Suber reports, “There are hundreds of OA journals in the humanities, but very, very few of them charge a fee on the author’s side; most of them have institutional subsidies from a university say, or a learned society.”~{ Interview with Peter Suber, June 28, 2006. }~ Yet such subsidies, in the overall scheme of things, may be more attractive to universities or learned societies than paying high subscription fees for journals or online access. +={ Suber, Peter +1 } + +The tension between commercial publishers and academic authors has intensified over the past decade, fueling interest in OA alternatives. The most salient point of tension is the so-called “serials crisis.” From 1986 to 2006, libraries that belong to the Association of Research Libraries saw the cost of serial journals rise 321 percent, or about 7.5 percent a year for twenty consecutive years.~{ Association of Research Libraries, /{ARL Statistics}/ 2005–06, at http://www.arl.org/stats/annualsurveys/ar/stats/arlstats06.shtml. }~ This rate is four times higher than the inflation rate for those years. Some commercial journal publishers reap profits of nearly 40 percent a year.~{ Peter Suber, “Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access,” in Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, eds., /{Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice}/ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 175. }~ By 2000 subscription rates were so crushing that the Association of American Universities and the Association of Research Libraries issued a joint statement that warned, “The current system of scholarly publishing has become too costly for the academic community to sustain.”~{ Association of Research Libraries, “Tempe Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing,” May 10, 2000, at http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/tempe/index.shtml. }~ Three years later, the high price of journals prompted Harvard, the University of California, Cornell, MIT, Duke, and other elite research universities to cancel hundreds of journal subscriptions — a conspicuous act of rebellion by the library community. +={ libraries : + “serials crisis”, and | Science Commons, and ; + Science Commons : + libraries, and +} + +As journal prices have risen, the appeal of OA publishing has only intensified. Unfortunately, migrating to OA journals is not simply an economic issue. Within academia, the reputation of a journal is deeply entwined with promotion and tenure decisions. A scientist who publishes an article in /{Cell}/ or /{Nature}/ earns far more prestige than she might for publishing in a little-known OA journal. + +So while publishing in OA journals may be economically attractive, it flouts the institutional traditions and social habits that scientists have come to rely on for evaluating scientific achievement. The OA movement’s challenge has been to document how OA models can help a university, and so it has collaborated with university administrators to showcase exemplary successes and work out new revenue models. It is urging promotion and tenure committees, for example, to modify their criteria to stop discriminating against new journals just because they are new, and hence to stop discriminating against OA journals (which are all new). Much of this work has fallen to key OA leaders like the Open Society Institute, the Hewlett Foundation, Mellon Foundation and the library-oriented SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) as well as individuals such as John Willinsky, Jean-Claude Guédon, Stevan Harnad, and Peter Suber. +={ Suber, Peter ; + Willinsky, John ; + Guédon, Jean-Claude ; + Harnad, Stevan +} + +One of the first major salvos of the movement came in 2000, when biomedical scientists Harold E. Varmus, Patrick O. Brown, and Michael B. Eisen called on scientific publishers to make their literature available through free online public archives such as the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central. Despite garnering support from nearly 34,000 scientists in 180 countries, the measure did not stimulate the change sought. It did alert the scientific world, governments, and publishers about the virtues of OA publishing, however, and galvanized scientists to explore next steps. +={ Brown, Patrick O. ; + Varmus, Harold E. +} + +At the time, a number of free, online peer-reviewed journals and free online archives were under way.~{ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm. }~ But much of the momentum for organized OA movement began in 2001, when the Open Society Institute convened a group of leading librarians, scientists, and other academics in Hungary. In February 2002 the group released the Budapest Open Access Initiative, a statement that formally describes “open access” as the freedom of users to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts of . . . articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself.”~{ The Budapest Open Access Initiative can be found at http://www.soros.org/openaccess. }~ Two subsequent statements, the Bethesda Declaration and the Berlin Declaration, in June 2003 and October 2003, respectively, expanded upon the definitions of open access and gave the idea new prominence. (Suber calls the three documents the “BBB definition” of open access.)~{ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm. }~ +={ Suber, Peter ; + Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) ; + libraries : + open access movement, and +} + +Creative Commons licenses have been critical tools in the evolution of OA publishing because they enable scientists and scholars to authorize in advance the sharing, copying, and reuse of their work, compatible with the BBB definition. The Attribution (BY) and Attribution-Non-Commercial (BY-NC) licenses are frequently used; many OA advocates regard the Attribution license as the preferred choice. The protocols for “metadata harvesting” issued by the Open Archives Initiative are another useful set of tools in OA publishing. When adopted by an OA journal, these standardized protocols help users more easily find research materials without knowing in advance which archives they reside in, or what they contain. + +There is no question that OA is transforming the market for scholarly publishing, especially as pioneering models develop. The Public Library of Science announced its first two open-access journals in December 2002. The journals represented a bold, high-profile challenge by highly respected scientists to the subscription-based model that has long dominated scientific publishing. Although Elsevier and other publishers scoffed at the economic model, the project has expanded and now publishes seven OA journals, for biology, computational biology, genetics, pathogens, and neglected tropical diseases, among others. + +OA received another big boost in 2004 when the National Institutes for Health proposed that all NIH-funded research be made available for free one year after its publication in a commercial journal. The $28 billion that the NIH spends on research each year (more than the domestic budget of 142 nations!) results in about 65,000 peer-reviewed articles, or 178 every day. Unfortunately, commercial journal publishers succeeded in making the proposed OA policy voluntary. The battle continued in Congress, but it became clear that the voluntary approach was not working. Only 4 percent of researchers published their work under OA standards, largely because busy, working scientists did not consider it a priority and their publishers were not especially eager to help. So Congress in December 2007 required NIH to mandate open access for its research within a year of publication.~{ Peter Suber has an excellent account of the final OA legislation in /{SPARC Open Access Newsletter}/, no. 17, January 2, 2008, at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-08.htm. }~ +={ National Institutes for Health (NIH) } + +What may sound like an arcane policy battle in fact has serious implications for ordinary Americans. The breast cancer patient seeking the best peer-reviewed articles online, or the family of a person with Huntington’s disease, can clearly benefit if they can acquire, for free, the latest medical research. Scientists, journalists, health-care workers, physicians, patients, and many others cannot access the vast literature of publicly funded scientific knowledge because of high subscription rates or per-article fees. A freely available body of online literature is the best, most efficient way to help science generate more reliable answers, new discoveries, and commercial innovations. + +While large publishers continue to dominate the journal market, OA publishing has made significant advances in recent years. In June 2008, the Directory of Open Access Journals listed more than 3,400 open-access journals containing 188,803 articles. In some fields such as biology and bioinformatics, OA journals are among the top-cited journals. In fact, this is one of the great advantages of OA literature. In the networked environment, articles published in OA journals are more likely to be discovered by others and cited, which enhances the so-called impact of an article and the reputation of an author. + +Although journals may or may not choose to honor OA principles, any scientist, as the copyright holder of his articles, can choose to “self-archive” his work under open-access terms. But commercial publishers generally don’t like to cede certain rights, and authors usually don’t know what rights to ask for, how to assert them in legal language, and how to negotiate with publishers. So it is difficult for most academics to assert their real preferences for open access. To help make things simpler, SPARC and MIT developed what is called an “author’s addendum.” It is a standard legal contract that authors can attach to their publishing contracts, in which they reserve certain key rights to publish their works in OA-compliant ways. + +2~ The Scholar’s Copyright Project +={ Scholar’s Copyright Project +18 ; + Science Commons : + Scholar’s Copyright Project, and +18 +} + +In an attempt to help the open-access movement, Science Commons in 2007 developed its own suite of amendments to publishing contracts. The goal has been to ensure that “at a minimum, scholarly authors retain enough rights to archive their work on the Web. Every Science Commons Addendum ensures the freedom to use scholarly articles for educational purposes, conference presentations, in other scholarly works or in professional activities.”~{ Science Commons brochure [undated]. }~ The ultimate goal is to enable authors “to have the clear and unambiguous freedom to engage in their normal everyday scholarly activities without contending with complex technology, continuous amendments to contracts or the need for a lawyer.”~{ Science Commons, “Scholar’s Copyright Project — Background Briefing,” at http://sciencecommons.org/literature/scholars_copyright.html. }~ +={ open access (OA) movement } + +To make the whole process easier for scientists, Science Commons developed the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine. This point-and-click Web-based tool lets authors publish in traditional, subscription-based journals while retaining their rights to post copies on the Internet for download, without most copyright and financial restrictions. There are also options for “drag and drop” self-archiving to repositories such as MIT’s DSpace and the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central. Besides making selfarchiving easier and more prevalent, Science Commons hopes to standardize the legal terms and procedures for self-archiving to avoid a proliferation of incompatible rights regimes and document formats. “The engine seems to be generating a dialogue between authors and publishers that never existed,” said John Wilbanks. “It’s not being rejected out of hand, which is really cool. To the extent that the addendum becomes a norm, it will start to open up the [contractual] limitations on self-archiving.”~{ Interview with John Wilbanks, November 19, 2007. }~ +={ Wilbanks, John } + +Harvard University gave self-archiving a big boost in February 2008 when its faculty unanimously voted to require all faculty to distribute their scholarship through an online, open-access repository operated by the Harvard library unless a professor chooses to “opt out” and publish exclusively with a commercial journal. Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard library, said, “In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, [the open-access rule] will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn.”~{ Patricia Cohen, “At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on the Web,” /{New York Times}/, February 12, 2008. See also Peter Suber’s coverage of the decision in Open Access News, at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/02/moreon-imminent-oa-mandate-at-harvard.html, and subsequent days. }~ Harvard’s move was the first time that a university faculty, and not just the administration, initiated action to take greater control of its scholarly publishing. While some critics complain the new policy does not go far enough, most OA advocates hailed the decision as a major step toward developing alternative distribution models for academic scholarship. +={ Darnton, Robert ; + Harvard University ; + open access (OA) movement +} + +By far, the more ambitious aspect of the Scholar’s Copyright project is the attempt to free databases from a confusing tangle of copyright claims. In every imaginable field of science — from anthropology and marine biology to chemistry and genetics — databases are vital tools for organizing and manipulating vast collections of empirical data. The flood of data has vastly increased as computers have become ubiquitous research tools and as new technologies are deployed to generate entirely new sorts of digital data streams— measurements from remote sensors, data streams from space, and much more. But the incompatibility of databases — chiefly for technical and copyright reasons — is needlessly Balkanizing research to the detriment of scientific progress. “There is plenty of data out there,” says Richard Wallis of Talis, a company that has built a Semantic Web technology platform for open data, “but it is often trapped in silos or hidden behind logins, subscriptions or just plain difficult to get hold of.” He added that there is a lot of data that is “just out there,” but the terms of access may be dubious.~{ Donna Wentworth blog post, “Ensuring the freedom to integrate — why we need an ‘open data’ protocol,” Science Commons blog, December 20, 2007, at http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2007/12/20/ensuring-thefreedom-to-integrate. }~ +={ Wallis, Richard ; + science : + databases +14 ; + Science Commons : + ownership of data, and +14 +} + +Questions immediately arise: Can a database be legally used? Who owns it? Will the database continue to be accessible? Will access require payment later on? Since data now reside anywhere in the world, any potential user of data also has to consider the wide variations of copyright protection for databases around the world. + +The question of how data shall be owned, controlled, and shared is a profoundly perplexing one. History has shown the virtue of sharing scientific data — yet individual scientists, universities, and corporations frequently have their own interests in limiting how databases may be used. Scientists want to ensure the integrity of the data and any additions to it; they may want to ensure preferential access to key researchers; companies may consider the data a lucrative asset to be privately exploited. Indeed, if there is not some mechanism of control, database producers worry that free riders will simply appropriate useful compilations and perhaps sell it or use it for their own competitive advantage. Or they may fail to properly credit the scientists who compiled the data in the first place. Inadequate database protection could discourage people from creating new databases in the future. + +A National Research Council report in 1999 described the problem this way: “Currently many for-profit and not-for-profit database producers are concerned about the possibility that significant portions of their databases will be copied or used in substantial part by others to create ‘new’ derivative databases. If an identical or substantially similar database is then either re-disseminated broadly or sold and used in direct competition with the original rights holder’s database, the rights holder’s revenues will be undermined, or in extreme cases, the rights holder will be put out of business.”~{ National Research Council, /{A Question of Balance: Private Rights and the Public Interest in Scientific and Technical Databases}/ (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), p. 14. }~ + +In the late 1990s, when the Human Genome Project and a private company, Celera, were competing to map the human genome, the publicly funded researchers were eager to publish the genome sequencing data as quickly as possible in order to prevent Celera or any other company from claiming exclusive control over the information. They wanted the data to be treated as “the common heritage of humanity” so that it would remain openly accessible to everyone, including commercial researchers. When Sir John Sulston of the Human Genome Project broached the idea of putting his team’s research under a GPL-like license, it provoked objections that ownership of the data would set a worrisome precedent. A GPL for data amounts to a “reach-through” requirement on how data may be used in the future. This might not only imply that data can be owned — flouting the legal tradition that facts cannot be owned — it might discourage future data producers from depositing their data into public databases.~{ John Sulston and Georgina Ferry, /{The Common Threat: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome}/ (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2002), pp. 212–13. }~ +={ Human Genome Project (HGP) ; + science : + Human Genome Project ; + Sulston, Sir John ; + General Public License (GPL) : + “reach-through” requirement +} + +The International HapMap Project attempted such a copyleft strategy with its database of genotypes; its goal is to compare the genetic sequences of different individuals to identify chromosomal regions where genetic variants are shared.~{ http://www.hapmap.org. }~ The project initially required users to register and agree to certain contract terms in order to use the database. One key term prohibited users from patenting any genetic information from the database or using patents to block usage of HapMap data.~{ Andrés Guadamuz González, “Open Science: Open Source Licenses in Scientific Research,” /{North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology}/ 7, no. 2 (Spring 2006), pp. 349–50. }~ This viral, open-content license for data seemed to provide a solution to the problem of how to keep data in the commons. But in time the HapMap Project found that its license inhibited people’s willingness to integrate their own data with the HapMap database. It therefore abandoned its license and now places all of its data into the public domain; it is now available to be used by anyone for any purpose, although it has issued guidelines for the “responsible use and publication” of the data.~{ http://www.hapmap.org/guidelines_hapmap_data.html.en. }~ +={ International HapMap Project } + +The basic problem with applying copyright law to databases is how to draw the line between what is private property and what remains in the commons. “If you try to impose a Creative Commons license or free-software-style licensing regime on a database of uncopyrightable facts,” explained John Wilbanks, “you create an enormous amount of confusion in the user about where the rights start and stop.”~{ Interview with John Wilbanks, November 19, 2007. }~ It is not very practical for a working scientist to determine whether copyright protection applies only to the data itself, to the database model (the structure and organization of the data), or to the data entry and output sheet. A scientist might reasonably presume that his data are covered by copyright law, and then use that right to apply a CC ShareAlike license to the data. But in fact, the data could be ineligible for copyright protection and so the CC license would be misleading; other scientists could ignore its terms with impunity. At the other extreme, other scientists may be unwilling to share their data at all lest the data circulate with no controls whatsoever. Data are either overprotected or underprotected, but in either case there is great ambiguity and confusion. +={ Wilbanks, John ; + copyright law : + science, in +1 ; + science : + copyright and patent restrictions in +1 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + applied to databases +} + +For two years, Science Commons wrestled with the challenge of applying the CC licenses to databases. Ultimately, the project came to the conclusion that “copyright licenses and contractual restrictions are simply the wrong tool, even if those licenses are used with the best of intentions.” There is just too much uncertainty about the scope and applicability of copyright — and thus questions about any licenses based on it. For example, it is not entirely clear what constitutes a “derivative work” in the context of databases. If one were to query hundreds of databases using the Semantic Web, would the federated results be considered a derivative work that requires copyright permissions from each database owner? There is also the problem of “attribution stacking,” in which a query made to multiple databases might require giving credit to scores of databases. Different CC licenses for different databases could also create legal incompatibilities among data. Data licensed under a CC ShareAlike license, for example, cannot be legally combined with data licensed under a different license. Segregating data into different “legal boxes” could turn out to impede, not advance, the freedom to integrate data on the Web. +={ attribution stacking ; + copyright law : + attribution stacking in databases, and | derivative works, on ; + derivative works +} + +After meeting with a variety of experts in scientific databases, particularly in the life sciences, biodiversity, and geospatial research, the Science Commons came up with an ingenious solution to the gnarly difficulties. Instead of relying on either copyright law or licenses, Science Commons in late 2007 announced a new legal tool, CC0 (CC Zero), which creates a legal and technical platform for a scientific community to develop its own reputation system for sharing data. +={ CC Zero (CC0) +6 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + CC0 (CC Zero), and +6 ; + Science Commons : + CC0 (CC Zero), and +6 +} + +CC0 is not a license but a set of protocols. The protocols require that a database producer waive all rights to the data based on intellectual property law — copyrights, patents, unfair competition claims, unfair infringement rights — a “quitclaim” that covers everything. Then it requires that the database producer affirmatively declare that it is not using contracts to encumber future uses of the data. Once a database is certified as complying with the protocols, as determined by Science Commons, it is entitled to use a Science Commons trademark, “Open Access Data,” and CC0 metadata. The trademark signals to other scientists that the database meets certain basic standards of interoperability, legal certainty, ease of use, and low transaction costs. The metadata is a functional software tool that enables different databases to share their data. + +“What we are doing,” said John Wilbanks, “is reconstructing, contractually, the public domain. The idea is that with any conforming implementation — any licensed database — you have complete freedom to integrate with anything else. It creates a zone of certainty for data integration.”~{ Ibid. }~ Unlike public-domain data, the databases that Science Commons certifies as meeting open-data protocols cannot be taken private or legally encumbered. To qualify to use the Open Access Data mark, databases must be interoperable with other databases licensed under the protocols. If someone falsely represents that his data are covered by the license, Science Commons could pursue a trademark infringement case. +={ Wilbanks, John ; + public domain : + reconstructing +4 +} + +To develop this scheme, Science Commons’s attorney Thinh Nguyen worked closely with Talis, a company that has built a Semantic Web technology platform for open data and developed its own open database license. Nguyen also worked with the company’s legal team, Jordan Hatcher and Charlotte Waelde, and with the Open Knowledge Foundation, which has developed the Open Knowledge Definition. +={ Nguyen, Thinh ; + Hatcher, Jordan ; + Waelde, Charlotte ; + Open Knowledge Definition +} + +The CC0 approach to data represents something of a breakthrough because it avoids rigid, prescriptive legal standards for a type of content (data) that is highly variable and governed by different community norms. CC0 abandons the vision of crafting a single, all-purpose copyright license or contract for thousands of different databases in different legal jurisdictions. Instead it tries to create a legal framework that can honor a range of variable social norms that converge on the public domain. Each research community can determine for itself how to meet the CC0 protocols, based on its own distinctive research needs and traditions. Different norms can agree to a equivalency of public-domain standards without any one discipline constraining the behaviors of another. +={ public domain : + social norms, and +} + +The system is clever because it provides legal reliability without being overly prescriptive. It is simple to use but still able to accommodate complex variations among disciplines. And it has low transaction costs for both producers and users of data. Over time, the databases that comply with the CC0 protocols are likely to grow into a large universe of interoperable open data. +={ science : + transaction costs in ; + transaction costs : + science, in +} + +It is still too early to judge how well the CC0 program is working, but initial reactions have been positive. “The solution is at once obvious and radical,” said Glyn Moody, a British journalist who writes about open-source software. “It is this pragmatism, rooted in how science actually works, that makes the current protocol particularly important.” Deepak Singh, the co-founder of Bioscreencast, a free online video tutorial library for the scientific community, said, “I consider just the announcement to be a monumental moment.”~{ Moody and Singh quotations from Donna Wentworth, Science Commons blog post, December 20, 2007. }~ +={ Moody, Glyn ; + Singh, Deepak +} + +2~ The Neurocommons + +Every day there is so much new scientific literature generated that it would take a single person 106 years to read it all.~{ Brian Athey, University of Michigan, presentation at Commons of Science conference, National Academy of Science, Washington, DC, October 3, 2006. }~ In a single year, over twenty-four thousand peer-reviewed journals publish about 2.5 million research articles.~{ Stevan Harnad, “Maximizing Research Impact Through Institutional and National Open-Access Self-Archiving Mandates,” /{Electronics & Computer Science E-Prints Repository}/, May 2006, available at http://eprints.ecs.soron.ac.uk/12093/02/harnad-crisrey.pdf. }~ Our ability to generate content has far outstripped our ability to comprehend it. We are suffering from a cognitive overload — one that can only be addressed by using software and computer networks in innovative ways to organize, search, and access information. For many years, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the celebrated inventor of the World Wide Web, and his colleagues at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based at MIT, have been trying to solve the problem of information overload by developing a “new layer” of code for the Web. +={ Berners-Lee, Tim ; + World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) +} + +This visionary project, the so-called Semantic Web, aspires to develop a framework for integrating a variety of systems, so they can communicate with one another, machine to machine. The goal is to enable computers to identify and capture information from anywhere on the Web, and then organize the results in sophisticated and customized ways. “If you search for ‘signal transduction genes in parameter neurons,’ ” said John Wilbanks of Science Commons, “Google sucks. It will get you 190,000 Web pages.” The goal of the Semantic Web is to deliver a far more targeted and useful body of specialized information. +={ Semantic Web +6 ; + Science Commons : + Semantic Web, and the +6 ; + World Wide Web : + Semantic Web +6 ; + ilbanks, John +} + +A key tool is the Unique Resource Identifier, or URI, which is analogous to the Unique Resource Locator, or URL, used by the Web. Affix a URI to any bit of information on the Web, and the Semantic Web will (so it is hoped) let you mix and match information tagged with that URI with countless other bits of information tagged with other URIs. It would not matter if the bit of information resides in a journal article, database, clinical image, statistical analysis, or video; the point is that the URI would identify a precise bit of information. By enabling cross-linking among different types of information, the idea is that scientists will be able to make all sorts of unexpected and serendipitous insights. +={ Unique Resource Identifier (URI) ; + Unique Resource Locator (URL) +} + +For example, geneticists studying Huntington’s disease, a rare neurodegenerative disorder, and experts studying Alzheimer’s disease are both exploring many of the same genes and proteins of the brain. But because of the specialization of their disciplines, the chances are good that they read entirely different scientific journals and attend different conferences. There is no easy or systematic way for scientists in one specialty to explore the knowledge that has developed in another specialty. The Semantic Web could probably help. + +Unfortunately, for a grand dream that has been touted since the 1990s, very little has developed. The W3C has been embroiled in the design challenges of the Semantic Web for so long that many companies and computer experts now scoff at the whole idea of the Semantic Web. There have been too many arcane, inconclusive debates about computer syntax, ontology language, and philosophical design choices that no one is holding their breath anymore, waiting for the Semantic Web to arrive. (Wikipedia defines a computer ontology as “a data model that represents a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the objects within that domain.”) The vision of the Semantic Web may have the potential to revolutionize science, but few people have seen much practical value in it over the near term, and so it has garnered little support. +={ World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) +1 } + +Wilbanks, who once worked at the W3C, was frustrated by this state of affairs. Although he has long believed in the promise of the Semantic Web, he also realized that it is not enough to extol its virtues. One must demonstrate its practicality. “The way to herd cats is not to herd cats,” he said, citing a colleague, “but to put a bowl of cream on your back stoop and run like hell.” For Wilbanks, the bowl of cream is the Neurocommons knowledge base, a project that seeks to integrate a huge amount of neuroscientific research using Semantic Web protocols and is easy to use. +={ Neurocommons +5 ; + Science Commons : + Neurocommons, and the +5 ; + Wilbanks, John +4 +} + +“The way to overcome the inertia that the Semantic Web critics rightly point out, is not to sit down and argue about ontologies,” said Wilbanks. “It’s to release something that’s useful enough that it’s worth wiring your database into the commons system. If I want to get precise answers to complicated questions that might be found in my own database, among others, now I can do that. I simply have to wire it into the Neurocommons. You don’t need to come to some magical agreement about ontology; you just need to spend a couple of days converting your database to RDF [Resource Description Framework, a set of Semantic Web specifications], and then— boom! — I’ve got all of the other databases integrated with mine.” By getting the ball rolling, Science Commons is betting that enough neuroscience fields will integrate their literature to the Neurocommons protocols and make the new commons a lively, sustainable, and growing organism of knowledge. +={ RDF (Resource Description Framework) } + +Using the “open wiring” of the Semantic Web, the Neurocommons has already integrated information from fifteen of the top twenty databases in the life sciences and neuroscience. The data have been reformatted to conform to Semantic Web protocols and the scientific literature, where possible, has been tagged so that it can be “text-mined” (searched for specific information via URI tags). “We have put all this stuff into a database that we give away,” said Wilbanks. “It’s already been mirrored in Ireland, and more mirrors are going up. It’s sort of like a ‘knowledge server,’ instead of a Web server.” +={ Unique Resource Identifier (URI) } + +Commercial journal publishers already recognize the potential power of owning and controlling metadata in scientific literature and datasets. To leverage this control many are starting to make copyright claims in certain kinds of metadata, and to amend their contracts with libraries in order to limit how they may retrieve electronic information. “There is a lot at stake here,” says Villanova law professor Michael Carroll. “What Science Commons wants to do is make sure that metadata is an open resource.”~{ Interview with Michael Carroll, August 7, 2006. }~ +={ Carroll, Michael W. ; + libraries : + Science Commons, and ; + Science Commons : + libraries, and +} + +Wilbanks has high hopes that the Neurocommons project, by providing a useful demonstration of Semantic Web tools, will hasten the interoperability of specialized knowledge that is currently isolated from related fields. It comes down to how to motivate a convergence of knowledge. Instead of arguing about which discipline’s ontology of specialized knowledge is superior to another’s — and making little headway toward a consensus — Wilbanks has a strategy to build a knowledge tool that is useful. Period. His bet is that a useful “knowledge server” of integrated neuroscientific information will be a powerful incentive for adjacent disciplines to adapt their own literature and databases to be compatible. The point is to get the commons going — while allowing the freedom for it to evolve. Then, if people have disagreements or quibbles, they will be free to change the ontologies as they see fit. “The version [of the Neurocommons] that we are building is useful and it is free,” Wilbanks said. “That means that if you want to integrate with it, you can. It means that if you want to redo our work your way, you can— as long as you use the right technical formats. You can reuse all of our software.” + +The problem with a field like neuroscience, which has so many exploding frontiers, is that no single company or proprietary software platform can adequately manage the knowledge. The information is simply too copious and complex. Like so many other fields of knowledge that are large and complicated, it appears that only an open-source model can successfully curate the relevant information sources. A Web-based commons can be remarkably efficient, effective, and scalable. This has been the lesson of free and open-source software, wikis, and the Web itself. Although it is too early to tell how the Neurocommons project will evolve, the initial signs are promising. A number of foundations that support research for specific diseases — Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, autism, epilepsy, Huntington’s disease — have already expressed interest in the Neurocommons as a potential model for advancing research in their respective fields. + +2~ Open Physical Tools +={ Science Commons : + open physical tools in +10 +} + +Science is not just about text and data, of course. It also involves lots of tangible /{stuff}/ needed to conduct experiments. Typical materials include cell lines, monoclonal antibodies, reagents, animal models, synthetic materials, nano-materials, clones, laboratory equipment, and much else. Here, too, sharing and collaboration are important to the advance of science. But unlike digital bits, which are highly malleable, the physical materials needed for experiments have to be located, approved for use, and shipped. Therein lies another tale of high transaction costs impeding the progress of science. As Thinh Nguyen, counsel for Science Commons, describes the problem: +={ Nguyen, Thinh +1 } + +_1 The ability to locate materials based on their descriptions in journal articles is often limited by lack of sufficient information about origin and availability, and there is no standard citation for such materials. In addition, the process of legal negotiation that may follow can be lengthy and unpredictable. This can have important implications for science policy, especially when delays or inability to obtain research materials result in lost time, productivity and research opportunities.~{ Thinh Nguyen, “Science Commons: Material Transfer Agreement Project,” /{Innovations}/, Summer 2007, pp. 137–43, at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/itgg.2007.2.3.137. }~ + +To the nonscientist, this transactional subculture is largely invisible. But to scientists whose lab work requires access to certain physical materials, the uncertainties, variations, and delays can be crippling. Normally, the transfer of materials from one scientist to another occurs through a Material Transfer Agreement, or MTA. The technology transfer office at one research university will grant, or not grant, an MTA so that a cell line or tissue specimen can be shipped to a researcher at another university. Typically, permission must be granted for the researcher to publish, disseminate, or use research results, and to license their use for commercialization. +={ Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs) +7 ; + science : + Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs) +7 +} + +While certain types of transactions involve material that could conceivably generate high royalty revenues, a great many transactions are fairly low-value, routine transfers of material for basic research. Paradoxically, that can make it all the harder to obtain the material because consummating an MTA is not a high priority for the tech transfer office. In other cases, sharing the material is subject to special agreements whose terms are not known in advance. + +Corporations sometimes have MTAs with onerous terms that prevent academic researchers from using a reagent or research tool. Individual scientists sometimes balk at sharing a substance because of the time and effort needed to ship it. Or they may wish to prevent another scientist from being the first to publish research results. Whatever the motivation, MTAs can act as a serious impediment to verification of scientific findings. They can also prevent new types of exploratory research and innovation. + +Wilbanks describes the existing system as an inefficient, artisanal one that needs to becomes more of a streamlined industrial system. Just as Creative Commons sought to lower the transaction costs for sharing creative works, through the use of standard public licenses, so Science Commons is now trying to standardize the process for sharing research materials. The idea is to reduce the transaction costs and legal risks by, in Nguyen’s words, “creating a voluntary and scalable infrastructure for rights representation and contracting.”~{ Ibid. }~ Like the CC licenses, the Science Commons MTAs will consist of “three layers” of licenses — the standard legal agreement, the machine-readable metadata version, and the “humanreadable deed” that nonlawyers can understand. +={ Wilbanks, John ; + Nguyen, Thinh ; + science : + transaction costs in ; + transaction costs : + science, in +} + +There are already some successful systems in place for sharing research materials, most notably the Uniform Biological Material Transfer Agreement (UBMTA), which some 320 institutions have accepted, as well as a Simple Letter Agreement developed by the National Institutes of Health. The problem with these systems is that they cannot be used for transfers of materials between academic and for-profit researchers. In addition, there are many instances in which UBMTA signatories can opt out of the system to make modifications to the UBMTA on a case-by-case basis. +={ National Institutes for Health (NIH) ; + Uniform Biological Material Transfer Agreement (UBMTA) +} + +To help standardize and streamline the whole system for sharing research materials, Science Commons is working with a consortium of ten research universities, the iBridge Network, to develop a prototype system. The hope is that by introducing metadata to the system, and linking that information to standard contracts and human-readable deeds, scientists will be able to acquire research materials much more rapidly by avoiding bureaucratic and legal hassles. Just as eBay, Amazon, and Federal Express use metadata to allow customers to track the status of their orders, so the Science Commons MTA project wants to develop a system that will allow searching, tracking, and indexing of specific shipments. It is also hoped that metadata links will be inserted into journal articles, enabling scientists to click on a given research material in order to determine the legal and logistical terms for obtaining the material. +={ iBridge Network ; + Science Commons : + iBridge Network, and +} + +Wilbanks envisions a new market of third-party intermediaries to facilitate materials transfers: “There’s an emerging network of third parties — think of them as ‘biology greenhouses’ — who are funded to take in copies of research materials and manufacture them on demand — to grow a quantity and mail them out. What Science Commons is trying to do with the Materials Transfer Project is to put together a functional system where materials can go to greenhouses under standard contracts, with digital identifiers, so that the materials can be cross-linked into the digital information commons. Anytime you see a list of genes, for example, you will be able to right-click and see the stuff that’s available from the greenhouses under standard contract, and the cost of manufacture and delivery in order to access the tool. Research materials need to be available under a standard contract, discoverable with a digital identifier, and fulfillable by a third party. And there needs to be some sort of acknowledgment, like a citation system.” +={ Wilbanks, John } + +At one level, it is ironic that one of the oldest commons-based communities, academic science, has taken so long to reengineer its digital infrastructure to take advantage of the Internet and open digital systems. Yet academic disciplines have always clung tightly to their special ways of knowing and organizing themselves. The arrival of the Internet has been disruptive to this tradition by blurring academic boundaries and inviting new types of cross-boundary research and conversation. If only to improve the conversation, more scientists are discovering the value of establishing working protocols to let the diverse tribes of science communicate with one another more easily. Now that the examples of networked collaboration are proliferating, demonstrating the enormous power that can be unleashed through sharing and openness, the momentum for change is only going to intensify. The resulting explosion of knowledge and innovation should be quite a spectacle. + +1~ 12 OPEN EDUCATION AND LEARNING +={ education +44 } + +/{Managing educational resources as a commons can make learning more affordable and exciting.}/ + +In the late 1990s, as Richard Baraniuk taught electrical engineering to undergraduates at Rice University, the furthest thing from his mind was revolutionizing learning. He just wanted to make digital signal processing a more palatable subject for his students. Baraniuk, an affable professor with a venturesome spirit, was frustrated that half of his undergraduate class would glaze over when he taught signal processing, perhaps because it involves a lot of math. But then he explained the social ramifications of signal processing — for wiretapping, the Internet, the airwaves, radar, and much more. Students got excited. +={ Baraniuk, Richard +13 ; + Rice University +13 +} + +“If I wanted to reach a broader class of people, outside of Rice University,” Baraniuk said, “that would be very difficult. The standard thing is to write your own book.” But he quickly realized that writing the 176th book ever written on signal processing (he counted) would not be very efficient or effective. It would take years to write, and then additional years to traverse the editorial, production, and distribution process. And even if the book were successful, it would reach only five thousand readers. Finally, it would be a static artifact, lacking the timeliness and interactivity of online dialogue. A book, Baraniuk ruefully observed, “redisconnects things.”~{ Interview with Richard Baraniuk, January 21, 2008. }~ + +As chance had it, Baraniuk’s research group at Rice was just discovering open-source software. “It was 1999, and we were moving all of our workstations to Linux,” he recalled. “It was just so robust and high-quality, even at that time, and it was being worked on by thousands of people.” Baraniuk remembers having an epiphany: “What if we took books and ‘chunked them apart,’ just like software? And what if we made the IP open so that the books would be free to re-use and remix in different ways?’” +={ Linux : + education, and +} + +The vision was exciting, but the tools for realizing it were virtually nonexistent. The technologies for collaborative authoring and the legal licenses for sharing, not to mention the financing and outreach for the idea, would all have to be developed. Fortunately, the Rice University administration understood the huge potential and helped Baraniuk raise $1 million to put together a skunk works of colleagues to devise a suitable software architecture and nonprofit plan. A colleague, Don Johnson, dubbed the enterprise “Connexions.” +={ Connexions +10 ; + education : + Connexions +10 ; + Johnson, Don +} + +The group made a number of choices that turned out to be remarkably shrewd. Instead of organizing teaching materials into a “course” or a “textbook,” for example, the Connexions planners decided to build an open ecosystem of shared knowledge. Just as the Web is “small pieces loosely joined,” as David Weinberger’s 2003 book put it, so Connexions decided that the best way to structure its educational content was as discrete modules (such as “signal processing”) that could be reused in any number of contexts. The planners also decided to build a system on the open Semantic Web format rather than a simple interlinking of PDF files. This choice meant that the system would not be tethered to a proprietary or static way of displaying information, but could adapt and scale in the networked environment. Modules of content could be more easily identified and used for many different purposes, in flexible ways. +={ education : + Semantic Web, and ; + Semantic Web ; + World Wide Web : + Semantic Web ; + Weinberger, David +} + +By the summer of 2000, the first version of Connexions went live with two Rice University courses, Fundamentals of Electronic Engineering and Introduction to Physical Electronics. The goal was to let anyone create educational materials and put them in the repository. Anyone could copy and customize material on the site, or mix it with new material in order to create new books and courses. Materials could even be used to make commercial products such as Web courses, CD-ROMs, and printed books. By the end of 2000, two hundred course modules were available on Connexions: a modest but promising start. + +It turned out to be an auspicious moment to launch an open platform for sharing. A wave of Web 2.0 applications and tools was just beginning to appear on the Internet. Innovators with the savvy to take advantage of open networks, in the style of free and open software, could amass huge participatory communities in very short order. For Connexions, the living proof was Kitty Schmidt-Jones, a private piano teacher from Champaign, Illinois. She discovered Connexions through her husband and posted a 276-page book on music theory to the site. “Kitty is not the kind of person who would be a music textbook author,” said Baraniuk, “but she thought that music education is important, and said, ‘I can do this, too!’ By 2007 /{Understanding Basic Music Theory}/ had been downloaded more than 7.5 million times from people around the world. A Connexions staffer attending a conference in Lithuania met an educator from Mongolia who lit up at the mention of Schmidt-Jones. “We use her work in our schools!” he said. +={ education : + Web 2.0 applications, and ; + Web 2.0 : + applications : + education, and ; + Schmidt-Jones, Kitty +} + +Besides curating a collection of educational content, Connexions has developed a variety of open-source applications to let authors create, remix, share, and print content easily. The project has also developed systems to let users rate the quality of materials. Professional societies, editorial boards of journals, and even informal groups can use a customizable software “lens” to tag the quality of Connexions modules, which can then be organized and retrieved according to a given lens. + +It was a stroke of good fortune when Baraniuk and his associates learned, in 2002, that Lawrence Lessig was developing a new licensing project called Creative Commons. As the CC team drafted its licenses, Connexions helped it understand academic needs and then became one of the very first institutional adopters of the CC licenses. Connexions decided to require that its contributors license their works under the least restrictive CC license, CC-BY (Attribution). This was a simple decision because most textbook authors write to reach large readerships, not to make money. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +} + +The real expansion of Connexions as a major international repository of teaching materials did not occur until early 2004, when the software platform had been sufficiently refined. Then, with virtually no publicity, global usage of the Connexions site took off. It helped that Rice University has never sought to “own” the project. Although it administers the project, the university has deliberately encouraged grassroots participation from around the world and across institutions. Electrical engineering faculty at ten major universities are cooperating in developing curricula, for example, and diverse communities of authors are adding to content collections in music, engineering, physics, chemistry, bioinformatics, nanotechnology, and history. In 2008, Connexions had 5,801 learning modules woven into 344 collections. More than 1 million people from 194 countries are using the materials, many of which are written in Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and other languages. + +One of Connexion’s neatest tricks is offering printed textbooks for a fraction of the price of conventional textbooks. Because the content is drawn from the commons, a 300-page hardback engineering textbook that normally sells for $125 can be bought for $25, through a print-on-demand publishing partner, QOOP.com. Ten percent of the purchase price is earmarked to support Connexions, and another 10 percent helps disadvantaged students obtain textbooks for free. Unlike conventional textbooks, which may be a year or two old, Connexions materials are generally up-to-date. + +By providing an alternative to the spiraling costs of academic publishing, Connexions’s publishing model may actually help a number of academic disciplines pursue their scholarly missions. Over the past decade, some sixty university presses have closed or downsized for economic reasons. “If you’re in art history, anthropology, or the humanities, you get tenure based on your monographs published by a university press,” Baraniuk said. “The problem is that, as university presses shut down, there’s nowhere to publish books anymore.” It is often financially prohibitive to publish art history books, for example, because such books typically require highquality production and small press runs. An overly expensive market structure is blocking the flow of new scholarly publishing. +={ education : + university presses +1 +} + +One solution: a new all-digital hybrid business model for academic publishing. As the Connexions platform has proved itself, Rice University saw the virtue of reopening Rice University Press (RUP), which it had closed ten years earlier.~{ Rice University Press homepage, at http://www.ricepress.rice.edu. }~ The new RUP retains the editorial structure, high standards, and focus on special fields of a conventional academic press, but it now works within a “branded partition” of Connexions. RUP posts all of its books online as soon as the manuscripts are finalized, and all books are licensed under a CC-BY (Attribution) license. The press does not have to pay for any warehouse or distribution costs because any physical copies of the books are printed on demand. The sales price includes a mission-support fee for RUP and the author’s royalty. “Because the RUP has eliminated all the back-end costs,” said Baraniuk, “they figure they can run it from five to ten times more cheaply than a regular university press.” + +The Connexions publishing model has inspired a group of more than twenty community colleges to develop its own publicdomain textbooks to compete with expensive commercial textbooks. The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources~{ http://cccoer.pbwiki.com. }~ —led by Foothill–De Anza Community College District in Los Altos, California — plans to publish the ten most popular textbooks used in community colleges, and expand from there. The consortium will make the books available for free online and sell hardcover versions for less than thirty dollars. Even if the effort gains only a small slice of the textbook market, it will help hold down the prices of commercial textbooks and demonstrate the viability of a new publishing model. More to the point, by slashing one of the biggest costs facing community college students, the project will help thousands of lower-income students to stay in college. + +2~ MIT’s OpenCourseWare Initiative +={ MIT OpenCourseWare +8 ; + OpenCourseWare +8 ; + education : + OpenCourseWare +8 +} + +The other pioneering visionary in open education has been MIT. In April 2001, MIT president Charles Vest shocked the world when he announced that MIT would begin to put the materials for all two thousand of its courses online for anyone to use, for free. The new initiative, called OpenCourseWare, would cover a wide array of instructional materials: lecture notes, class assignments, problem sets, syllabi, simulations, exams, and video lectures. Putting the materials online in a searchable, consistent format was expected to take ten years and cost tens of millions of dollars. (The Hewlett and Mellon foundations initially stepped forward with two $5.5 million grants, supplemented by $1 million from MIT.) +={ Vest, Charles +1 } + +The project had its origins two years earlier, in 1999, when President Vest charged a study group with exploring how the university might develop online educational modules for lifelong learning. The assumption was that it would sell MIT-branded course materials to the budding “e-learning” market. At the time, Columbia University was developing Fathom.com, a bold for-profit co-venture with thirteen other institutions, to sell a wide variety of digital content. Publishers and universities alike envisioned a lucrative new market for academic and cultural materials. + +OpenCourseWare (OCW) was a startling move because it flatly rejected this ambition, and appeared to be either a foolish or magnanimous giveaway of extremely valuable information. Knowledge was assumed to be a species of property that should be sold for as dear a price as possible; few people at the time recognized that the Great Value Shift on the Internet was reversing this logic. The idea that giving information away might actually yield greater gains— by enhancing an institution’s visibility, respect, and influence on a global scale — was not seen as credible. After all, where’s the money? +={ Great Value Shift ; + Internet : + Great Value Shift, and +} + +After studying the matter closely, MIT decided that the online market was not likely to be a boon, and that posting course materials online would send a strong message about MIT’s values. President Vest conceded that the plan “looks counter-intuitive in a market-driven world.” But he stressed that OpenCourseWare would combine “the traditional openness and outreach and democratizing influence of American education and the ability of the Web to make vast amounts of information instantly available.”~{ MIT press release, “MIT to make nearly all course materials available free on the World Wide Web,” April 4, 2001.}~ Professor Steven Lerman, one of the architects of the OCW plan, told the /{New York Times}/, “Selling content for profit, or trying in some ways to commercialize one of the core intellectual activities of the university, seemed less attractive to people at a deep level than finding ways to disseminate it as broadly as possible.”~{ Carey Goldberg, “Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free,” /{New York Times}/, April 4, 2001, p. 1. }~ +={ Vest, Charles ; + Lerman, Steven +} + +MIT also realized the dangers of propertizing college courses and teaching materials, said computer scientist Hal Abelson, another member of the OCW study group (and a CC board member). Ownership, he said, “can be profoundly destructive to the idea of a university community . . . The more people can stop talking about property and start talking about the nature of a faculty member’s commitment to the institution, the healthier the discussion will be. It’s not really about what you own as a faculty member; it’s about what you do as a faculty member.”~{ Interview with Hal Abelson, “OpenCourseWare and the Mission of MIT,” /{Academe}/, September/October 2002, pp. 25–26. }~ +={ Abelson, Hal : + OpenCourseWare, and +} + +School officials stressed that using MIT courseware on the Web is not the same as an MIT education. Indeed, the free materials underscore the fact that what really distinguishes an MIT education is one’s participation in a learning community. Unlike the Connexions content, MIT’s OpenCourseWare is a fairly static set of course materials; they are not modular or constantly updated. In addition, they are licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA (AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike.) license. While this prevents businesses from profiting from MIT course materials, it also prevents other educational institutions from remixing them into new courses or textbooks. +={ communities : + learning ; + education : + learning community, in a +} + +Despite these limitations, MIT’s OCW materials have been profoundly influential. The course Laboratory in Software Engineering, for example, has been used by students in Karachi, Pakistan; the island of Mauritius; Vienna, Austria; and Kansas City, Missouri, among scores of other places around the world.~{ David Diamond, “MIT Everyware,” /{Wired}/, September 2003. }~ Ten of the leading Chinese universities now use hundreds of MIT courses, leading three noted OER experts, Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, to conclude that MIT’s OCW “has had a major impact on Chinese education.”~{ Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, “A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New Opportunities,” February 2007, at http://www.oerderves.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/a-review-of-the-open-educational-re sources-oer-movement_final.pdf, p. 23. }~ Noting the life-changing impact that OCW has had on students in rural villages in China and West Africa, Atkins and his co-authors cite “the power of the OCW as a means for cross-cultural engagement.” Over the course of four years, from October 2003 through 2007, the OCW site received nearly 16 million visits; half were newcomers and half were repeat visits. +={ Atkins, Daniel E. ; + Brown, John Seely ; + Hammond, Allen L. ; + education : + OER movement ; + Open Educational Resources (OER) movement +} + +OCW is becoming a more pervasive international ethic now that more than 120 educational institutions in twenty nations have banded together to form the OpenCourseWare Consortium. Its goal is to create “a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.”~{ OpenCourseWare Consortium, at http://www.ocwconsortium.org. }~ Although plenty of universities are still trying to make money from distance education courses, a growing number of colleges and universities realize that OCW helps faculty connect with other interested faculty around the world, build a college’s public recognition and recruitment, and advance knowledge as a public good. + +2~ The Rise of the Open Educational Resources Movement +={ education : + OER movement +19 ; + Open Educational Resources (OER) movement +19 +} + +While Connexions and MIT’s OpenCourseWare have understandably garnered a great deal of attention, all sorts of fascinating educational projects, big and small, have popped up on the Internet as Web 2.0 innovations matured. Some of these projects have become celebrated, such as Wikipedia, the Public Library of Science, and the Internet Archive. Others, though less celebrated, represent a dazzling mosaic of educational innovation and new possibilities. In a sense, the Long Tail has come to education; even the most obscure subjects have a sustainable niche on the Internet. The groundswell has even produced its own theorists, conveners, and infrastructure builders. Utah State University hosts the Center for Open Sustainable Learning, which is a clearinghouse for open educational tools. Carnegie Mellon has an Open Learning Initiative that designs educational courses. And so on. +={ Long Tail ; + Wikipedia +} + +While American institutions and educators have been the first movers in this field, it has quickly taken on an international grassroots flavor. Thousands of commoners from around the world have started their own projects. MathWorld has become the Web’s most extensive mathematical resource. Curriki is a wiki that offers lessons plans and guidance for teachers. The British Library’s Online Gallery features digitized versions of Mozart’s musical diary and sketches by Leonardo da Vinci. U.K. and Australian high school students can now use the Internet to operate the Faulkes Telescope on the island of Maui, Hawaii. Students around the world do much the same with Bugscope, a scanning electronic microscope that can be operated remotely. + +It is hard to set a precise date when the practitioners in this area realized that such wildly diverse projects might constitute a coherent movement with a shared agenda. But as more grantees began to discover each other, the movement-in-formation adopted a rather ungainly name to describe itself — “Open Educational Resources,” or OER. + +Most OER projects share a simple and powerful idea — “that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the World Wide Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use and reuse knowledge.” That is how Atkins and his co-authors define OER. It consists of “teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.”~{ Ibid. }~ +={ Atkins, Daniel E. ; + Brown +} + +The heart of the OER movement is, of course, open sharing and collaboration. OER advocates regard learning as an intrinsically social process, and so they believe that knowledge and learning tools ought to freely circulate. Inspired by the GPL and the CC licenses, OER advocates believe they should be free to copy, modify, and improve their learning tools and pass them forward to others. There is a presumption that artificial barriers to the free flow of information should be eliminated, and that teachers and learners should be empowered to create their own knowledge commons. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + tools for creating commons, as +} + +The OER movement has a special importance for people who want to learn but don’t have the money or resources, which is to say, people in developing nations, low-income people, and people with specialized learning needs. For the 4 billion people who live in the developing world, schooling is a privilege, textbooks are rare, and money is scarce. In many African nations, there would not be libraries if books were not photocopied. The OER movement aspires to address these needs. OER projects can provide important benefits in industrialized nations, too, where subscriptions to research journals are often prohibitively expensive and many community college students drop out because textbooks cost more than tuition. + +The OER movement is currently in a formative stage, still trying to make sense of the many players in the movement and understand the complex impediments to its progress. Some of this could be seen at a “speed geeking” session at the iCommons Summit in 2007 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Speed geeking, a puckish variation on “speed dating,” consists of people listening to a short presentation, asking questions and then moving on to the next presentation. After five minutes, a moderator blows a whistle and shouts, “Everyone move — now!” A speed geek can learn about twelve different projects, and meet twelve interesting people, in a single hour. +={ Croatia } + +% added Croatia missing Croatia reference in source book index + +In this case, the speed geeking took place in a sweltering loft space without air-conditioning, in a medieval building overlooking the Adriatic Sea. At the first station, a group of participants marveled at a sturdy lime-green laptop of a kind that was about to be distributed to millions of children around the world. The One Laptop Per Child project, the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte of MIT’s Media Lab, is an ambitious nonprofit initiative to build a sturdy, kidfriendly laptop filled with open-source software and Wi-Fi capabilities for $100.~{ See, e.g., John Markoff, “For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs a Big Debate,” /{New York Times}/, November 30, 2006. }~ (The cost turned out to be $188, but is expected to decline as production volume grows.) Hundreds of thousands of the so-called XO laptops have now been distributed to kids in Peru, Uruguay, Mexico and other poor nations. +={ Negroponte, Nicholas ; + One Laptop Per Child +} + +/{Tweet!}/ Next stop: the Free High School Science Textbooks project in South Africa is developing a free set of science textbooks for students in grades ten through twelve. The project depends on volunteers to write modules of text about various physics, chemistry, and mathematical topics. Paid editors then craft the text into a coherent, high-quality textbook; printing is funded by donations. +={ Free High School Science Textbooks } + +Five minutes later, it was on to Educalibre, a Chilean project that is installing free software on old computers so that they can be reused in classrooms. Educalibre is also trying to integrate free software into high school curricula, especially math. The project seeks to bring open-source software principles into formal education. + +Next, Delia Browne of the National Education Access Licence for Schools, or NEALS, explained that some ten thousand Australian schools pay millions of dollars each year to collecting societies in order to reprint materials that the Australian schools themselves have produced. NEALS wants to eliminate this expense, as well as millions of dollars in photocopying expenses, by creating a vast new commons of freely shareable educational materials. Its solution is to persuade Australian schools, as copyright holders, to adopt a special license so that participating schools can copy and share each other’s materials. +={ Browne, Delia ; + National Education Access Licence for Schools (NEALS) +} + +/{Tweet!}/ At the next station, Ed Bice of San Francisco explained how his nonprofit group, Meedan.net, is developing a “virtual town square” for Arabic- and English-speaking Internet users. Using realtime translation and social networking tools, the site aspires to open up a new global conversation between Arabs and the rest of the world. It plans to break down cultural barriers while opening up educational opportunities to Arab populations. +={ Bice, Ed } + +/{Tweet! Tweet!}/ Neeru Paharia, a former executive director of the Creative Commons, introduced her fledgling project, AcaWiki. Paharia is concerned that too many academic articles are locked behind paywalls and are not readily accessible to everyone. AcaWiki plans to recruit graduate students, academics, and citizens to write summaries of academic papers. Since many grad students make abstracts as part of their routine research, it would not be difficult to pool thousands of summaries into a highly useful, searchable Web collection. +={ Paharia, Neeru } + +The speed geekers in Dubrovnik were sweaty and overstimulated at the end, but gratified to learn that there are a great many OER projects under way throughout the world; they just aren’t very well known or coordinated with one another. Two of the participants — J. Philipp Schmidt of the University of the Western Cape and Mark Surman of the Shuttleworth Foundation, both of South Africa — conceded that “there is still a great deal of fuzziness about what this movement includes,” and that “we don’t yet have a good ‘map’ of open education.” But the significance of grassroots initiatives is unmistakable. “There is a movement afoot here,” they concluded, “and it is movement with an aim no less than making learning accessible and adaptable for all.”~{ J. Philipp Schmidt and Mark Surman, “Open Sourcing Education: Learning and Wisdom from the iSummit 2007,” September 2, 2007, at http://icommons.org/download_banco/open-sourcing-education-learning-and-wisdom-from-isummit-2007. }~ “Education,” another participant predicted, “will drive the future of the Commons movement.” +={ Schmidt, J. Philipp ; + Surman, Mark +} + +In a sign that the OER movement is getting serious as a movement, thirty of its leaders met in Cape Town, South Africa, and in January 2008 issued the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.~{ http://www.capetowndeclaration.org. Schmidt and Surman, “Open Sourcing Education.” }~ The declaration is a call to make learning materials more freely available online, and to improve education and learning by making them more collaborative, flexible, and locally relevant. The declaration outlines the challenge: “Many educators remain unaware of the growing pool of open educational resources. Many governments and educational institutions are either unaware or unconvinced of the benefits of open education. Differences among licensing schemes for open resources create confusion and incompatibility. And, of course, the majority of the world does not have access to the computers and networks that are integral to most current open education efforts.” + +New funding support is materializing from foundations like the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation, and the Creative Commons has instigated a new project, ccLearn, headed by Ahrash Bissell, to help coordinate OER factions and tackle barriers to further progress. +={ Bissell, Ahrash } + +Despite the challenges it faces, the Open Educational Resources movement has a promising future if only because it has such an appealing ethos and practical value. It offers to lower the costs and increase the efficiencies of learning. It helps to generate high-quality materials that address specific learning needs. Where markets are too expensive or unresponsive, collective provisioning through the commons can meet needs effectively and in socially convivial ways. + +Such intangible satisfactions may be one of the secrets of the OER movement’s success to date. Institutions and individuals take pleasure in contributing to the public good. There is pleasure in helping people who thirst for an education, whether in Africa or in a community college, to acquire the resources they need. For learners, the OER movement offers new, more flexible styles of learning. Over time, it seems likely that OER projects will transform the familiar “information transfer” models of formal education into more informal and participatory learning communities. Passive students will more easily become passionate, self-directed learners. + +Finally, at a time of great geopolitical rivalries and cultural animosities, the OER movement holds itself forth as an arena of transnational cooperation. It regards diversity as a strength and social inequity as a challenge to be squarely met. It is a measure of the movement’s idealism that Schmidt and Surman, the South African OER commoners, compare open education to “a flock of migratory geese, moving back and forth between North and South. The flock combines birds from all places. Each goose takes a turn leading the flock, taking the strain, and then handing over to their peers. The flock is not confined to just the North, or the South. It flourishes as a global movement.” 14 +={ Schmidt, J. Philipp ; + Surman, Mark +} + +1~ CONCLUSION: THE DIGITAL REPUBLIC AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRATIC CULTURE +={ free culture +56 } + +/{You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. —R. Buckminster Fuller}/ +={ Fuller, R. Buckminster } + +Legend has it that, upon leaving Independence Hall on the final day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was approached by a woman, who asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a Republic or a Monarchy?” Franklin famously replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” The American colonies had imagined and engineered a new constitutional order, but its survival would depend on countless new struggles and innovations. An American civic culture had to be invented. +={ Franklin, Benjamin +1 } + +The Franklin vignette might well be applied to the digital republic that the commoners have built. Except that, instead of asking, “Well, Mr. Stallman and Professor Lessig, what have we got — a free culture or a proprietary tyranny?” the question might better be posed to the commoners themselves. Their very existence answers the question, Tyranny or freedom? Free culture exists. It exists to the extent that people practice its ideals. It is not pervasive; many people have no idea what it is; it overlaps in fuzzy ways with the market. But it is flourishing wherever online communities have devised satisfactory commons structures — through law, software, and social norms — to capture the value that they create. Or, as the American Framers put it, to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. +={ commoners : + influence of +3 +} + +As the preceding chapters make clear, the commoners are now a respected force in culture, politics, and economics. Their influence can be felt in varying degrees in the worlds of music, video, photography, and books; in software, Web design, and Internet policies; in social networks and peer-to-peer communities; in business, science, and education; and in scores of countries that have ported the Creative Commons licenses and developed their own commons-based projects. + +Thanks to the Internet, the commons is now a distinct sector of economic production and social experience. It is a source of “value creation” that both complements and competes with markets. It is an arena of social association, self-governance, and collective provisioning that is responsive and trustworthy in ways that government often is not. In a sense, the commons sector is a recapitulation of civil society, as described by Alexis de Tocqueville, but with different capacities. +={ Tocqueville, Alexis de ; + Internet : + socially created value of +} + +Yet even with the great advances that the commoners have made in building their own shared platforms, tools, and content, the digital republic is not secure. In most countries, the commoners have less conventional political power than corporations, which means that the interests of citizens, consumers, and users are scanted in the policies that govern market competition, intellectual property, and life on the Internet.~{ For a nice overview of these policy contests, see Yochai Benkler, /{The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom}/ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), chapter 11, “The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment,” pp. 383–459. }~ Faced with the Great Value Shift, mass-media and entertainment corporations are not eager to surrender their historic market franchises to newcomers without a fight; they are resisting competition from open business models and the commons. +={ Great Value Shift ; + value ; + Centralized Media : + competition, and ; + Internet : + attempts to control +3 +} + +In the United States, cable broadcast operators and telephone carriers are threatening the very future of the Internet as a commons infrastructure. They wish to assert greater control over Web access and traffic, and so are staunchly resisting “net neutrality” rules that would require them to act as nondiscriminatory common carriers. They would like to leverage their roles as oligopolistic gatekeepers to the Internet, and boost their revenues, by choosing whose Web sites will receive superior transmission and whose communications may be censored or put in the “slow lane.” +={ Internet : + net neutrality rules on | future of +} + +At a further extreme, authoritarian countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Singapore have shown that national governments still retain great powers to censor and control Internet communications.~{ Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas, /{Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule}/ (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003). }~ Even the United States government is reportedly engaged in extensive surveillance of Internet traffic, ostensibly for antiterrorism purposes. Meanwhile, many poor nations, especially in Africa and Asia, are struggling simply to get online and create their own digital commons. + +These battles are all part of a larger struggle over “the institutional ecology of the digital environment,” in Yochai Benkler’s words — a struggle that is likely to continue for many years. What powers and capabilities will the commoners and their institutions have relative to business and government, and how will they be able to protect and enhance the value created within the commons? +={ Benkler, Yochai : + social movements, on +} + +2~ A New Species of Citizenship +={ citizenship : + new species of +22 ; + democracy : + new species of citizenship +22 ; + free culture : + new species of citizenship, as +22 +} + +Perhaps the most enduring contribution of the free software, free culture, and other “open movements” has been their invention of a new species of citizenship. Despite significant differences of philosophy and implementation, these commons share some basic values about access, use, and reuse of creative works and information. No matter their special passions, the commoners tend to be improvisational, resourceful, self-directed, collaborative, and committed to democratic ideals. They celebrate a diversity of aesthetics, viewpoints, and cultures. They are egalitarian in spirit yet respectful of talent and achievement. There is a strong predilection to share because the accrual of digital contributions (code, content, metatags) will lead to a greater good for all and perhaps even democratic change. But there is no hostility to commercial activity — indeed, there is a lively admiration for entrepreneurialism — so long as it does not violate basic creative and civic freedoms or core principles of the Internet (openness, interoperability, sharing). The disagreements that do exist center on how best to achieve those goals. +={ free culture : + sharing ethic of +} + +As this book has shown, the Internet is enabling a new species of citizenship in modern life. It is not just a “nice thing.” It is a powerful force for change. The new technologies have been instrumental in helping the commoners imagine and build a digital republic of their own. Over the long term, this citizenship and the culture that it is fostering are likely to be a politically transformative force. They just might help real-world democracies restore a measure of their waning legitimacy and competence.~{ David Bollier, /{The Rise of Netpolitik: How the Internet Is Changing International Politics and Diplomacy}/ (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, 2003). }~ +={ Internet : + mass participation in +} + +David R. Johnson, a lawyer and scholar, describes the citizen of the Internet — the “netizen” — as a significant historical development because he or she can potentially compete with government as a source of binding rule sets. In a brilliant essay, “The Life of the Law Online,” Johnson writes that “we haven’t had a real competition for survival among rule sets. The competition is only between the rule of (our one) law and, presumably, anarchy. So the tendency of all rule sets to become more complicated over time, especially when written by people considering only parts of the system in analytical isolation, has not been checked by evolutionary forces.”~{ David R. Johnson, “The Life of the Law Online,” /{First Monday}/ 11, no. 2 (February 2006), at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_2/johnson/index.html. }~ Government has an unchecked monopoly on lawmaking even though its relationship to the governed, whose consent is vital, is now greatly attenuated. +={ Johnson, David R. +1 ; + commoners : + “netizens” +1 +} + +One evolutionary “competitor” to government-made law and to markets is the netizen — or, in my terms, the commoner. For the most part, members of a commons generate and maintain the rules that govern their collective. By Johnson’s reckoning, the commons must be considered a new social metabolism for creating law; it is a new type of “legal organism.” It is, in Johnson’s words, “a selfcausing legal order composed of systems that adopt goals that serve the values of those they regulate, without excessively imposing those goals on others.” +={ commons : + new type of legal organism ; + law : + commons as new type of legal organism +} + +A commons is a kind of biological entity operating in a complex cultural ecosystem. It has its own internal systems for managing its affairs, interacting with its environment, repairing itself, and defining its own persistent identity. It is a force by which ordinary people can express their deepest interests and passions, directly and without institutional mediation, on a global stage. This is an unprecedented capacity in communications, culture, and, indeed, human history. +={ commons : + definition of +} + +To understand why the commoner represents a great leap forward in citizenship, it helps to consider the history of citizenship in the oldest democracy in the world, the United States. In his book /{The Good Citizen}/, sociologist Michael Schudson describes the evolution of three distinct types of citizenship over the past three centuries: +={ Schudson, Michael +2 ; + citizenship : + history-making +16 ; + Internet : + citizenship, and +16 +} + +_1 When the nation was founded, being a citizen meant little more than for property-owning white males to delegate authority to a local gentleman — and accept his complimentary glass of rum on election day. This “politics of assent” gave way early in the nineteenth century to a “politics of parties.” Parties conducted elaborate campaigns of torchlight processions and monster meetings; voting day was filled with banter, banners, fighting and drinking. . . . The third model of citizenship, ushered in by Progressive reformers, was a “politics of information.” Campaigning became less emotional and more educational. Voting was by secret ballot.~{ Michael Schudson, /{The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life}/ (New York: Free Press, 1998), dust jacket. }~ + +We are heirs to the “politics of information,” a model of citizenship that presumes, as economics does, that we are rational actors who, if armed with sufficient quantities of high-quality information, will make educated decisions and optimize civic outcomes. But as Walter Lippmann noted and Schudson echoes, “if democracy requires omnicompetence and omniscience from its citizens, it is a lost cause.”~{ Ibid., p. 310. }~ Life is too busy, fast, and complex. A new type of citizenship is needed. Schudson offers a fairly weak prescription — the “monitorial citizen,” a watchdog who vigilantly monitors the behavior of power. +={ Lippmann, Walter } + +But it is precisely here that the Internet is offering up a new, more muscular model of citizenship. I call it /{history-making citizenship}/. The rise of the blogosphere over the past ten years is emblematic of this new paradigm of citizenship. So is citizen-journalism, free software, Wikipedia, the Open Educational Resources movement, open business models like Jamendo and Flickr, and the Creative Commons and iCommons communities. In one sense, the citizenship that these groups practice is “monitorial” in that their members spend a great deal of time watching and discussing. But “monitoring” barely begins to describe their activities. The commoners have the ability — rare in pre-Internet civic life — to publish and incite others to action, and then organize and follow through, using a growing variety of powerful tools. With the advent of blogs, meetups, social networking, text messaging, and many other digital systems, citizens are able to communicate, coordinate, organize, and take timely action on a wide range of matters, including matters of public and political concern. +={ commoners : + influence of +1 +} + +I call the new sorts of citizen behaviors “history-making” because ordinary people are able to assert moral agency and participate in making change.~{ I am inspired in this choice of terms by Charles Spinosa, Frnando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus in their book, /{Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity}/ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). }~ This capacity is not reserved chiefly to large, impersonal institutions such as corporations, government agencies, and other bureaucracies. It is not a mere “participatory citizenship” in which people can volunteer their energies to a larger a more influential leader, political party, or institution in order to help out. It is a citizenship in which /{the commoners themselves}/ choose projects that suit their talents and passions. Dispersed, unorganized groups of strangers can build their own platforms and social norms for pursuing their goals; instigate public action that would not otherwise occur (and that may clash with the practices of existing institutions); and push forward their own distinctive agenda. +={ commons : + political implications of +} + +These behaviors exist in some measure in offline realms, of course, but they are a growing norm in the digital republic. A few examples will suffice to make the point. The Web helped create and propel a handful of cause-oriented candidacies — Howard Dean, Ron Paul, Ned Lamont~[* Lamont was an insurgent candidate for U.S. Senate from Connecticut challenging Senator Joseph Lieberman in a campaign that helped culturally validate opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq.]~ — who rapidly raised enormous sums of money, galvanized large numbers of passionate supporters, and altered mainstream political discourse. Although none prevailed in their races, Barack Obama made a quantum leap in online organizing in 2008, raising $50 million in a single month from supporters via the Internet. Obama’s candidacy was buoyed by the rise of the “netroots” — Web activists with a progressive political agenda— whose size and credibility enable them to sway votes in Congress, raise significant amounts of campaign funds, and influence local activism. The stories are now legion about blogs affecting political life — from the resignation of Senate majority leader Trent Lott after he praised the racist past of Senator Strom Thurmond at his hundredth birthday party, to the electoral defeat of Senate candidate George Allen after his uttering of an ethnic slur, /{macaca}/, was posted on YouTube. +={ Dean, Howard ; + Lamont, Ned ; + Obama, Barack ; + Paul, Ron ; + Internet : + political campaigns on ; + Allen, George ; + Lott, Trent ; + YouTube +} + +Citizens are now able to initiate their own policy initiatives without first persuading the mainstream media or political parties to validate them as worthy. For example, a handful of citizens troubled by evidence of “hackable” electronic voting machines exposed the defects of the Diebold machines and the company’s efforts to thwart public scrutiny and reforms.~{ See, e.g.,Yochai Benkler, /{The Wealth of Networks}/, pp. 225–32. }~ (The effort has led to a nationwide citizen effort, www.blackboxvoting.org, to expose security problems with voting machines and vote counting.) An ad hoc group of activists, lawyers, academics, and journalists spontaneously formed around a public wiki dealing with the lethal side effects of a bestselling antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, and the manufacturer’s allegedly illegal conduct in suppressing evidence of the drug’s risks. (Prosecutors later sought a $1 billion fine against Eli Lilly.)~{ Jonah Bossewitch, “The Zyprexa Kills Campaign: Peer Production and the Frontiers of Radical Pedagogy,” /{Re-public}/, at http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=144. }~ + +The Web is giving individuals extra-institutional public platforms for articulating their own facts and interpretations of culture. It is enabling them to go far beyond voting and citizen vigilance, to mount citizen-led interventions in politics and governance. History-making citizens can compete with the mass media as an arbiter of cultural and political reality. They can expose the factual errors and lack of independence of /{New York Times}/ reporters; reveal the editorial biases of the “MSM” — mainstream media — by offering their own videotape snippets on YouTube; they can even be pacesetters for the MSM, as the blog Firedoglake did in its relentless reporting of the “Scooter” Libby trial (Libby, one of Vice President Cheney’s top aides, was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with press leaks about CIA agent Valerie Plame.) Citizen-journalists, amateur videographers, genuine experts who have created their own Web platforms, parodists, dirty tricksters, and countless others are challenging elite control of the news agenda. It is no wonder that commercial journalism is suffering an identity crisis. Institutional authority is being trumped by the “social warranting” of online communities, many of which function as a kind of participatory meritocracy. +={ Libby, “Scooter” ; + YouTube +} + +History-making citizenship is not without its deficiencies. Rumors, misinformation, and polarized debate are common in this more open, unmediated environment. Its crowning virtue is its potential ability to mobilize the energies and creativity of huge numbers of people. GNU/Linux improbably drew upon the talents of tens of thousands of programmers; certainly our contemporary world with its countless problems could use some of this elixir— platforms that can elicit distributed creativity, specialized talent, passionate commitment, and social legitimacy. In 2005 Joi Ito, then chairman of the board of the Creative Commons, wrote: “Traditional forms of representative democracy can barely manage the scale, complexity and speed of the issues in the world today. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach informed, viable consensus.”~{ Joichi Ito, “Emergent Democracy,” chapter 1 in John Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe, eds., /{Extreme Democracy}/ (Durham, NC: Lulu.com, 2005), at http://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20One-Ito.pdf. }~ Ito concluded that a new, not-yetunderstood model of “emergent democracy” is likely to materialize as the digital revolution proceeds. A civic order consisting of “intentional blog communities, ad hoc advocacy coalitions and activist networks” could begin to tackle many urgent problems. +={ Ito, Joichi ; + NU/Linux ; + democracy : + emergent +1 | traditional forms of +5 +} + +Clearly, the first imperative in developing a new framework to host representative democracy is to ensure that the electronic commons be allowed to exist in the first place. Without net neutrality, citizens could very well be stifled in their ability to participate on their own terms, in their own voices. If proprietary policies or technologies are allowed to override citizen interests (Verizon Wireless in 2007 prevented the transmission of abortion rights messages on its text-messaging system, for example~{ Adam Liptak, “Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Messages,” /{New York Times}/, September 27, 2007, at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/business/27cnd-verizon.html. }~), then any hope for historymaking citizenship will be stillborn. + +Beyond such near-term concerns, however, the emerging digital republic is embroiled in a much larger structural tension with –terrestrial “real world” governments. The commoner is likely to regard the rules forged in online commons as more legitimate and appropriate than those mandated by government. Again, David R. Johnson: +={ Johnson, David R. } + +_1 The goals of a successful legal organism must be agreed upon by those who live within it, because a legal system is nothing more than a collective conversation about shared values. When it ceases to be that kind of internally entailed organism, the law becomes mere power, social “order” becomes tyranny, and the only option, over the long term at least, is war. + +_1 Organisms can’t be repaired from the outside. But, with reference to interactions that take place primarily online, among willing participants who seek primarily to regulate their own affairs, that’s exactly where existing governments are situated — outside the vibrant, self-regulating online spaces they seek to regulate. Their efforts to engineer the Internet as if it were a mechanism are not only fundamentally illegitimate but doomed by the very nature of the thing they seek to regulate. They are trying to create social order, of course. But they have not recognized . . . that order in complex systems creates itself.~{ Johnson, “The Life of the Law Online.” }~ + +After all, he or she is likely to have had a more meaningful personal role in crafting those rules. Now, of course, people live their lives in both online and terrestrial environments; there is no strict division between the two. That said, as people’s lives become more implicated in Internet spaces, citizens are likely to prefer the freedoms and affordances of the open-networked environment to the stunted correlates of offline politics, governance, and law. + +Indeed, this may be why so many activists and idealists are attracted to online venues. There is a richer sense of possibility. Contemporary politics and government have been captured by big money, professionals, and concentrated power. By contrast, in the digital republic, the ethic of transparency deals harshly with institutional manipulations, deceptions, and bad faith. They literally become part of your “permanent record,” forever available via a Google search. More fundamentally, the digital republic has a basic respect for everyone’s ability to contribute. It respects the principle of open access for all. The “consent of the governed” really matters. How sobering it is, then, to return to the “real world” of the American polity — or most other national governments — and realize that “money talks and bullshit walks.” How depressing to realize that the system is highly resistant to ordinary citizen action, such is the mismatch of resources. +={ transparency +1 ; + open business models : + transparency in +} + +The growing dissonance between the American system of governance, as practiced, and the more open, meritocratic online world was surely a factor in Lessig’s decision in 2007 to step down as CEO of Creative Commons, a move that eventually took place in April 2008. Lessig’s crushing responsibilities as the leader of Creative Commons — the international travel, the fund-raising, the strategic planning, the public events and movement obligations — had surely taken its toll. Feeling a personal need for new challenges as well as a responsibility to let new leaders emerge within the CC world, Lessig announced an ambitious new agenda for himself — tackling the “systemic corruption” of the democratic process in Congress. He joined with Joe Trippi, the campaign manager for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run, to launch a new organization, Change Congress, which seeks to ban special-interest campaign contributions, secure public financing for campaigns, and bring greater transparency to congressional proceedings. In a shuffle of roles, longtime board member James Boyle — who had been especially active on science and education initiatives — became the new chairman of Creative Commons. Board member Joi Ito, who had been chairman for a brief period, became CEO. +={ Boyle, James : + CC board, on | chairman, as ; + Change Congress (organization) ; + Dean, Howard ; + democracy : + corruption in | traditional forms of +1 ; + Trippi, Joe ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + political activity of +} + +If Lessig is going to succeed in using the tools of the digital republic to reform and rejuvenate the American polity (and perhaps inspire other governments as well), he will have to confront the rather deeply rooted premises of the official constitutional order. The fast-paced, commons-based governance of the digital republic is naturally going to clash with a system of governance that revolves around bureaucratic hierarchies, a slow-moving system of law, archaic types of political intermediaries, and electoral principles designed for eighteenth-century life. Can the two be reconciled? The structural tensions are likely to be a significant and persistent issue for many, many years. + +2~ A Long-Term Power Shift? +={ free culture : + political nature of +23 +} + +It is hard to get a fix on this long-term transformation because the struggles to actualize an emergent democracy, as envisioned by Ito, are strangely apolitical and intensely political at the same time. They are apolitical in the sense that commoners are chiefly focused on the pragmatic technical challenges of their individual projects; they are not usually involved in official policymaking in legislatures or before courts and government agencies. Yet free software and free culture projects are highly political in the sense that commons projects, taken together over time, represent a profound challenge to the conventional market order and political culture. For example, Wikitravel, Jamendo, and open-access journals arguably provide better value than the commercial alternatives. The success of free software punctures the foundational assumptions of copyright law, making it easier to challenge new expansions of copyright law. Participatory commons are diverting viewer “eyeballs” away from commercial media and its genres of culture, spurring the growth of new hybrid forms of user-generated content. These kinds of effects, which advance project by project, month by month, are likely to have a longterm transformational impact. A new social ethic is taking root. +={ Ito, Joichi ; + free software : + FOSS/FLOSS +2 ; + FOSS/FLOSS +2 ; + copyright law : + assumptions of ; + democracy : + emergent +} + +Free culture, though culturally progressive, is fairly nonjudgmental about ideological politics. When American conservatives decided they wanted to start Conservapedia because they found Wikipedia too liberal, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was happy to bless it: “Free culture knows no bounds . . . We welcome the reuse of our work to build variants. That’s directly in line with our mission.”~{ Robert Mackey, “Conservapedia: The Word Says it All,” /{New York Times}/, March 8, 2007, at http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/conservapedia-the-word-says-it-all/?scp=1&sq=wales+conservapedia. }~ Anthropology professor E. Gabriella Coleman has found a similar ecumenicism in the free software movement, which is agnostic about conventional politics but adamant about its own polity of freedom.~{ E. Gabriella Coleman, “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast,” /{Anthropology Quarterly}/ 77, no. 3 (Summer 2004), pp. 507–19. See also her Ph.D. dissertation, “The Social Construction of Freedom in Free and Open Source Software: Hackers, Ethics and the Liberal Tradition,” abstract at http://healthhacker.org/biella/coleman-abstract.pdf. }~ Thus, the FOSS movement has no position with respect to social justice or globalization issues, but it does demand a strict commitment to the “four freedoms” of software development. Johan Söderberg makes much the same case in his book /{Hacking Capitalism}/.~{ Johan Söderberg, /{Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement}/ (New York: Routledge, 2007). }~ +={ Coleman, E. Gabriella ; + Wales, Jimmy ; + Söderberg, Johan +} + +As projects like GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, open courseware, open-access journals, open databases, municipal Wi-Fi, collections of CC-licensed content, and other commons begin to cross-link and coalesce, the commons paradigm is migrating from the margins of culture to the center. The viral spiral, after years of building its infrastructure and social networks, may be approaching a Cambrian explosion, an evolutionary leap. +={ commons : + force for change, as +5 +} + +History suggests that any new style of politics and polity will arrive through models developed /{from within}/ the edifice of existing law, markets, and culture. A revolutionary coup or showdown with existing institutions will not be necessary. Superior working models — running code and a healthy commons — will trump polemics and exhortation. + +Ideological activists and political professionals are likely to scoff at this scenario. After all, they are suspicious of distributed political power, if not hostile to it. They prefer the levers of consolidated power (laws, court rulings, police powers) that are within their sphere of influence to the dispersed, sovereign powers of an online multitude. The latter is highly resistant to capture and control, and in that sense, profoundly threatening to the traditional configurations of political power. We have already seen how the mandarins of journalism, politics, and business are quick to lash out at the noncredentialed masses who dare to put forward their own interpretations of the world. + +However necessary it is to engage in the official governance of a nation, corrupted though it may be, the commoners have shown that building their own functioning commons can be a powerful force for change as well. A commons of technical standards for the Web — how mundane! — can achieve more than most antitrust lawsuits. A common pool of information can prevent a company from reaping easy monopoly rents from the control of a public good. Instead, the company must “move upstream” to provide more specialized forms of value (for example, sophisticated graphing of the information or data analysis). A commons may also be affirmatively helpful to businesses, as Eric von Hippel has shown, by aggregating a body of aficionados into a social community that can articulate customer needs and preferences in highly efficient ways: the commons as a cheap form of R & D and marketing. + +In either case, the rise of a commons can be disruptive not just because it changes how market power is exercised, but because it may disperse power to a broader community of participants. Recall Johnson’s observation that a commons is a “self-causing legal order” that competes with other legal orders. Individuals who affiliate with an online community may acquire the ability to manage their own social relationships and group identity. +={ Johnson, David R. ; + commons : + new type of legal organism +1 ; + law : + commons as new type of legal organism +1 | political implications of +1 ; + democracy : + power of the commons in +1 +} + +This is not just a form of marketplace power, it is a form of /{political}/ power. In effect, a group may be able to neutralize the power of corporations to use brands to organize their identities. By developing its own discourse and identity, an online community can reject their treatment as a demographic cohort of consumers. They can assert their broader, nonmarket concerns. As a group of commoners, they are less susceptible to propaganda, ideology, and commercial journalism as tools for organizing their political allegiances. They have greater civic sovereignty. + +“Free cooperation aims at distributing power,” argues Geert Lovink, a Dutch media theorist: +={ Lovink, Geert +1 } + +_1 I am not saying that power as such disappears, but there is certainly a shift, away from the formal into the informal, from accountable structures towards a voluntary and temporal connection. We have to reconcile with the fact that these structures undermine the establishment, but not through recognizable forms of resistance. The “anti” element often misses. This is what makes traditional, unreconstructed lefties so suspicious, as these networks just do their thing and do not fit into this or that ideology, be it neoliberal or autonomous Marxist. Their vagueness escapes any attempt to deconstruct their intention either as proto-capitalist or subversive.~{ Geert Lovink, “Theses on Wiki Politics,” an exchange with Pavlos Hatzopoulos, /{Re-public}/, at http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=135. }~ + +This can be disorienting. Energies are not focused on resisting an oppressor, but rather on building innovative, positive alternatives. In Buckminster Fuller’s terms, free culture is mostly about building new models that make the existing models obsolete. Instead of forging an identity in relation to an adversary, the movement has built an identity around an affirmative vision and the challenge of /{becoming}/. People feel fairly comfortable with a certain level of ambiguity because the whole environment is so protean, diverse, evolving, and dynamic. +={ Fuller, R. Buckminster } + +The GPL and the CC licenses are ingenious hacks because they navigate this indeterminate ideological space with legally enforceable tools, while looking to informal social practice and norms to provide stable governance. (“Order without law,” in law professor Robert Ellickson’s formulation.)~{ Robert Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). }~ The licenses use the existing legal order to achieve their goals (the sharing of tools and content), and so the strategies are not seen as politically provocative. Yet the licenses are nonetheless politically transformative because they help new communities of practice to organize themselves and do work that may question core premises of copyright law, conventional economics, and government policy in general. +={ Ellickson, Robert } + +The beauty of this “ideological straddle” is that it enables a diverse array of players into the same tent without inciting sectarian acrimony. (There is some, of course, but mostly at the margins.) Ecumenical tolerance is the norm because orthodoxies cannot take root at the periphery where innovation is constantly being incubated. In any case, there is a widespread realization in the networked world that shared goals are likely to require variable implementations, depending on specific needs and contexts. + +It may appear that the free software hacker, blogger, tech entrepreneur, celebrity musician, college professor, and biological researcher have nothing in common. In truth, each is participating in social practices that are incrementally and collectively bringing into being a new sort of democratic polity. French sociologist Bruno Latour calls it the “pixellation of politics,”~{ Bruno Latour, “We Are All Reactionaries Today,” Re-public, at http://www.republic.gr/en/?p=129. }~ which conjures up a pointillist painting slowly materializing. The new polity is more open, participatory, dynamically responsive, and morally respected by “the governed” than the nominal democracies of nation-states. The bureaucratic state tends to be too large and remote to be responsive to local circumstances and complex issues; it is ridiculed and endured. But who dares to aspire to transcend it? +={ Latour, Bruno } + +Sooner or later, history-making citizenship is likely to take up such a challenge. It already has. What is the digital republic, after all, but a federation of self-organized communities, each seeking to fulfill its members’ dreams by developing its own indigenous set of tools, rules, and ethics? The power of the commons stems from its role as an organizing template, and not an ideology. Because it is able to host a diverse and robust ecosystem of talent without squeezing it into an ideological straitjacket, the commons is flexible and resilient. It is based on people’s sincerest passions, not on remote institutional imperatives or ideological shibboleths. It therefore has a foundational support and energy that can outperform “mainstream” institutions. +={ citizenship : + history-making +1 ; + commons : + political implications of +1 +} + +This, truly, is the animating force of the viral spiral: the capacity to build one’s own world and participate on a public stage. (Cicero: “Freedom is participation in power.”) When such energies are let loose in an open, networked environment, all sorts of new and interesting innovations emerge. Since an online commons does not have the burden of turning a profit or supporting huge overhead, it can wait for serendipity, passion, and idiosyncratic brilliance to surface, and then rely on the Internet to propagate the fruits virally. +={ Cicero : + on freedom +} + +Oddly enough, entrenched commercial interests do not seem to be alarmed by the disruptive long-term implications of free culture. If the users of CC licenses genuflect before the altar of copyright law, it would appear, that is sufficient. Due respect is being shown. Meanwhile, at the level of social practice, the commoners are gradually building a very different moral economy that converges, from different paths, on a new type of civic order. In /{Code}/, Lessig called it “freedom without anarchy, control without government, consensus without power.” +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace | freedom, and +} + +It is not entirely clear how the special capacities of bottom-up networks — a “non-totalizing system of structure that nonetheless acts as a whole,” in Mark Taylor’s words — can be integrated with conventional government and institutions of power. It is easy to imagine a future confrontation in the political culture, however, as the citizens of the digital republic confront the stodgy bureaucratic state (corporate and governmental). The latter will have the advantages of constitutional authority and state and economic power, but the former are likely to have the advantages of social legitimacy, superior on-the-ground information, and creative energy. How the digital republic will confront the old regime, or supplant it gradually as archaic institutions collapse over time, is the stuff of future history. +={ Taylor, Mark ; + citizenship : + history-making +1 +} + +Theory has its limits. The building of the digital republic was in many ways animated by theory, of course, chiefly the rejection of certain theories of copyright law and the invention of new narratives about creativity and the commons. But this project has not been an intellectual, theory-driven enterprise so much as a vast, collective enterprise of history-making citizenship. Using the affordances of digital technologies, individuals have stepped out of their customary or assigned roles to invent entirely new vehicles for creativity, social life, business, politics, science, and education. Individuals have come together to make some remarkable new tools and institutions to serve their needs and preferences. +={ commons : + sources of new ideas, as +3 +} + +The story of the commons is, in this sense, the story of a series of public-spirited individuals who are determined to build new vehicles for protecting shared wealth and social energies. It is the story of Richard Stallman fighting the privatization of software and the disenfranchisement of the hacker community. It is the story of Eric Eldred’s determination to go to jail if necessary to defend his ability to build a Web site for great American literature. The viral spiral, as I have called it, truly gained momentum when Lawrence Lessig, as a boundary-breaking law professor, decided to mount a constitutional test case and then to assemble a larger effort to imagine and build a new licensing scheme for sharing. +={ Stallman, Richard ; + Eldred, Eric : + public domain, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + law in contemporary context, and ; + software : + proprietary +} + +The viral spiral then spins off in dozens of directions as newly empowered people discover the freedoms and satisfactions that can accrue to them through this ancient yet now rediscovered and refurbished social vessel. Taken together, countless commons projects are validating some new models of human aspiration. Instead of presuming that a society must revolve around competitive individuals seeking private, material gain (the height of “rationality,” economists tell us), the commons affirms a broader, more complex, and more enlightened paradigm of human self-interest. If the Invisible Hand presumes to align private interest and the public good, the commons has shown that cooperation and sharing can also serve this goal with great versatility and sophistication. +={ commoners : + sharing by +} + +Over the long term, the real meaning of the viral spiral may lie in our discovery that the new platforms that we use to create and organize knowledge, and relate to one another, is changing how we think and how we conceptualize our place in the world. John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox PARC, has said, “From my perspective, a key property of participatory cultures is that they help to create both a culture of learning and a culture of doing. The social basis of doing (e.g. networked communities of interest/ practice) that you see emerging here actually form reflective practicum(s). This, in turn, ends up grounding epistemology — ways of knowing — and provides a pathway back to a kind of pragmatism that Dewey first talked about that is situated between realism and idealism. This is the pathway to creating a learning society and a culture that can embrace change by unleashing and affording productive inquiry in powerful and exciting ways.”~{ John Seely Brown, personal communication, January 26, 2008. }~ +={ Brown, John Seely ; + Dewey, John +} + +By empowering us to “step into history” and take greater responsibility for more aspects of our lives, it is no exaggeration to say that the commons encourages us to become more integrated human beings. We learn to integrate our production with our consumption, our learning with our doing, and our ideals with practical realities. This is surely why the viral spiral has been so powerfully transformative. It has helped bring our personal needs and interests into a closer, more congenial alignment with the institutions that serve us. We may be caught in a messy transition, and there remains much to negotiate and debate, but we should count our blessings. Few generations are as fortunate in being able to imagine and build a new commons sector of such liberating potential. +={ citizenship : + history-making +} + diff --git a/data/samples/minimal/README b/data/samples/minimal/README new file mode 100644 index 0000000..23357e6 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/minimal/README @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +This directory contains a few document samples (including two large ones found +only here) that use (and require) very minimal sisu markup. In these samples +hardly hardly any markup is required, and for the most part they look like +ordinary text files. 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PART; VOLUME; Chapter; + :breaks: new=:C; break=1 + +% SiSU: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu +% SiSU markup for 0.16 and later, header 0~links 0.20.4. may drop image dimensions (rmagick) 0.22.0, utf-8 (save as utf-8, with Unix line endings) 0.23.0 ß +% SiSU markup: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/sample +% Output: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/don_quixote.miguel_de_cervantes + +:A~ @title @creator + +PART I. - +DON QUIXOTE Volume I. Complete by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by John Ormsby + +1~ Translator's Preface + +2~ I: About this Translation + +It was with considerable reluctance that I abandoned in favour of the +present undertaking what had long been a favourite project: that of a new +edition of Shelton's "Don Quixote," which has now become a somewhat +scarce book. There are some--and I confess myself to be one--for whom +Shelton's racy old version, with all its defects, has a charm that no +modern translation, however skilful or correct, could possess. Shelton +had the inestimable advantage of belonging to the same generation as +Cervantes; "Don Quixote" had to him a vitality that only a contemporary +could feel; it cost him no dramatic effort to see things as Cervantes saw +them; there is no anachronism in his language; he put the Spanish of +Cervantes into the English of Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself most +likely knew the book; he may have carried it home with him in his +saddle-bags to Stratford on one of his last journeys, and under the +mulberry tree at New Place joined hands with a kindred genius in its +pages. + +But it was soon made plain to me that to hope for even a moderate +popularity for Shelton was vain. His fine old crusted English would, no +doubt, be relished by a minority, but it would be only by a minority. His +warmest admirers must admit that he is not a satisfactory representative +of Cervantes. His translation of the First Part was very hastily made and +was never revised by him. It has all the freshness and vigour, but also a +full measure of the faults, of a hasty production. It is often very +literal--barbarously literal frequently--but just as often very loose. He +had evidently a good colloquial knowledge of Spanish, but apparently not +much more. It never seems to occur to him that the same translation of a +word will not suit in every case. + +It is often said that we have no satisfactory translation of "Don +Quixote." To those who are familiar with the original, it savours of +truism or platitude to say so, for in truth there can be no thoroughly +satisfactory translation of "Don Quixote" into English or any other +language. It is not that the Spanish idioms are so utterly unmanageable, +or that the untranslatable words, numerous enough no doubt, are so +superabundant, but rather that the sententious terseness to which the +humour of the book owes its flavour is peculiar to Spanish, and can at +best be only distantly imitated in any other tongue. + +The history of our English translations of "Don Quixote" is instructive. +Shelton's, the first in any language, was made, apparently, about 1608, +but not published till 1612. This of course was only the First Part. It +has been asserted that the Second, published in 1620, is not the work of +Shelton, but there is nothing to support the assertion save the fact that +it has less spirit, less of what we generally understand by "go," about +it than the first, which would be only natural if the first were the work +of a young man writing currente calamo, and the second that of a +middle-aged man writing for a bookseller. On the other hand, it is closer +and more literal, the style is the same, the very same translations, or +mistranslations, occur in it, and it is extremely unlikely that a new +translator would, by suppressing his name, have allowed Shelton to carry +off the credit. + +In 1687 John Phillips, Milton's nephew, produced a "Don Quixote" "made +English," he says, "according to the humour of our modern language." His +"Quixote" is not so much a translation as a travesty, and a travesty that +for coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost unexampled even in +the literature of that day. + +Ned Ward's "Life and Notable Adventures of Don Quixote, merrily +translated into Hudibrastic Verse" (1700), can scarcely be reckoned a +translation, but it serves to show the light in which "Don Quixote" was +regarded at the time. + +A further illustration may be found in the version published in 1712 by +Peter Motteux, who had then recently combined tea-dealing with +literature. It is described as "translated from the original by several +hands," but if so all Spanish flavour has entirely evaporated under the +manipulation of the several hands. The flavour that it has, on the other +hand, is distinctly Franco-cockney. Anyone who compares it carefully with +the original will have little doubt that it is a concoction from Shelton +and the French of Filleau de Saint Martin, eked out by borrowings from +Phillips, whose mode of treatment it adopts. It is, to be sure, more +decent and decorous, but it treats "Don Quixote" in the same fashion as a +comic book that cannot be made too comic. + +To attempt to improve the humour of "Don Quixote" by an infusion of +cockney flippancy and facetiousness, as Motteux's operators did, is not +merely an impertinence like larding a sirloin of prize beef, but an +absolute falsification of the spirit of the book, and it is a proof of +the uncritical way in which "Don Quixote" is generally read that this +worse than worthless translation--worthless as failing to represent, +worse than worthless as misrepresenting--should have been favoured as it +has been. + +It had the effect, however, of bringing out a translation undertaken and +executed in a very different spirit, that of Charles Jervas, the portrait +painter, and friend of Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay. Jervas has been +allowed little credit for his work, indeed it may be said none, for it is +known to the world in general as Jarvis's. It was not published until +after his death, and the printers gave the name according to the current +pronunciation of the day. It has been the most freely used and the most +freely abused of all the translations. It has seen far more editions than +any other, it is admitted on all hands to be by far the most faithful, +and yet nobody seems to have a good word to say for it or for its author. +Jervas no doubt prejudiced readers against himself in his preface, where +among many true words about Shelton, Stevens, and Motteux, he rashly and +unjustly charges Shelton with having translated not from the Spanish, but +from the Italian version of Franciosini, which did not appear until ten +years after Shelton's first volume. A suspicion of incompetence, too, +seems to have attached to him because he was by profession a painter and +a mediocre one (though he has given us the best portrait we have of +Swift), and this may have been strengthened by Pope's remark that he +"translated 'Don Quixote' without understanding Spanish." He has been +also charged with borrowing from Shelton, whom he disparaged. It is true +that in a few difficult or obscure passages he has followed Shelton, and +gone astray with him; but for one case of this sort, there are fifty +where he is right and Shelton wrong. As for Pope's dictum, anyone who +examines Jervas's version carefully, side by side with the original, will +see that he was a sound Spanish scholar, incomparably a better one than +Shelton, except perhaps in mere colloquial Spanish. He was, in fact, an +honest, faithful, and painstaking translator, and he has left a version +which, whatever its shortcomings may be, is singularly free from errors +and mistranslations. + +The charge against it is that it is stiff, dry--"wooden" in a word,-and +no one can deny that there is a foundation for it. But it may be pleaded +for Jervas that a good deal of this rigidity is due to his abhorrence of +the light, flippant, jocose style of his predecessors. He was one of the +few, very few, translators that have shown any apprehension of the +unsmiling gravity which is the essence of Quixotic humour; it seemed to +him a crime to bring Cervantes forward smirking and grinning at his own +good things, and to this may be attributed in a great measure the ascetic +abstinence from everything savouring of liveliness which is the +characteristic of his translation. In most modern editions, it should be +observed, his style has been smoothed and smartened, but without any +reference to the original Spanish, so that if he has been made to read +more agreeably he has also been robbed of his chief merit of fidelity. + +Smollett's version, published in 1755, may be almost counted as one of +these. At any rate it is plain that in its construction Jervas's +translation was very freely drawn upon, and very little or probably no +heed given to the original Spanish. + +The later translations may be dismissed in a few words. George Kelly's, +which appeared in 1769, "printed for the Translator," was an impudent +imposture, being nothing more than Motteux's version with a few of the +words, here and there, artfully transposed; Charles Wilmot's (1774) was +only an abridgment like Florian's, but not so skilfully executed; and the +version published by Miss Smirke in 1818, to accompany her brother's +plates, was merely a patchwork production made out of former +translations. On the latest, Mr. A. J. Duffield's, it would be in every +sense of the word impertinent in me to offer an opinion here. I had not +even seen it when the present undertaking was proposed to me, and since +then I may say vidi tantum, having for obvious reasons resisted the +temptation which Mr. Duffield's reputation and comely volumes hold out to +every lover of Cervantes. + +From the foregoing history of our translations of "Don Quixote," it will +be seen that there are a good many people who, provided they get the mere +narrative with its full complement of facts, incidents, and adventures +served up to them in a form that amuses them, care very little whether +that form is the one in which Cervantes originally shaped his ideas. On +the other hand, it is clear that there are many who desire to have not +merely the story he tells, but the story as he tells it, so far at least +as differences of idiom and circumstances permit, and who will give a +preference to the conscientious translator, even though he may have +acquitted himself somewhat awkwardly. + +But after all there is no real antagonism between the two classes; there +is no reason why what pleases the one should not please the other, or why +a translator who makes it his aim to treat "Don Quixote" with the respect +due to a great classic, should not be as acceptable even to the careless +reader as the one who treats it as a famous old jest-book. It is not a +question of caviare to the general, or, if it is, the fault rests with +him who makes so. The method by which Cervantes won the ear of the +Spanish people ought, mutatis mutandis, to be equally effective with the +great majority of English readers. At any rate, even if there are readers +to whom it is a matter of indifference, fidelity to the method is as much +a part of the translator's duty as fidelity to the matter. If he can +please all parties, so much the better; but his first duty is to those +who look to him for as faithful a representation of his author as it is +in his power to give them, faithful to the letter so long as fidelity is +practicable, faithful to the spirit so far as he can make it. + +My purpose here is not to dogmatise on the rules of translation, but to +indicate those I have followed, or at least tried to the best of my +ability to follow, in the present instance. One which, it seems to me, +cannot be too rigidly followed in translating "Don Quixote," is to avoid +everything that savours of affectation. The book itself is, indeed, in +one sense a protest against it, and no man abhorred it more than +Cervantes. For this reason, I think, any temptation to use antiquated or +obsolete language should be resisted. It is after all an affectation, and +one for which there is no warrant or excuse. Spanish has probably +undergone less change since the seventeenth century than any language in +Europe, and by far the greater and certainly the best part of "Don +Quixote" differs but little in language from the colloquial Spanish of +the present day. Except in the tales and Don Quixote's speeches, the +translator who uses the simplest and plainest everyday language will +almost always be the one who approaches nearest to the original. + +Seeing that the story of "Don Quixote" and all its characters and +incidents have now been for more than two centuries and a half familiar +as household words in English mouths, it seems to me that the old +familiar names and phrases should not be changed without good reason. Of +course a translator who holds that "Don Quixote" should receive the +treatment a great classic deserves, will feel himself bound by the +injunction laid upon the Morisco in Chap. IX not to omit or add anything. + +2~ II: About Cervantes and Don Quixote + +Four generations had laughed over "Don Quixote" before it occurred to +anyone to ask, who and what manner of man was this Miguel de Cervantes +Saavedra whose name is on the title-page; and it was too late for a +satisfactory answer to the question when it was proposed to add a life of +the author to the London edition published at Lord Carteret's instance in +1738. All traces of the personality of Cervantes had by that time +disappeared. Any floating traditions that may once have existed, +transmitted from men who had known him, had long since died out, and of +other record there was none; for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries +were incurious as to "the men of the time," a reproach against which the +nineteenth has, at any rate, secured itself, if it has produced no +Shakespeare or Cervantes. All that Mayans y Siscar, to whom the task was +entrusted, or any of those who followed him, Rios, Pellicer, or +Navarrete, could do was to eke out the few allusions Cervantes makes to +himself in his various prefaces with such pieces of documentary evidence +bearing upon his life as they could find. + +This, however, has been done by the last-named biographer to such good +purpose that he has superseded all predecessors. Thoroughness is the +chief characteristic of Navarrete's work. Besides sifting, testing, and +methodising with rare patience and judgment what had been previously +brought to light, he left, as the saying is, no stone unturned under +which anything to illustrate his subject might possibly be found. +Navarrete has done all that industry and acumen could do, and it is no +fault of his if he has not given us what we want. What Hallam says of +Shakespeare may be applied to the almost parallel case of Cervantes: "It +is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the +orthography of his name that we seek; no letter of his writing, no record +of his conversation, no character of him drawn ... by a contemporary has +been produced." + +It is only natural, therefore, that the biographers of Cervantes, forced +to make brick without straw, should have recourse largely to conjecture, +and that conjecture should in some instances come by degrees to take the +place of established fact. All that I propose to do here is to separate +what is matter of fact from what is matter of conjecture, and leave it to +the reader's judgment to decide whether the data justify the inference or +not. + +The men whose names by common consent stand in the front rank of Spanish +literature, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Calderon, Garcilaso de la +Vega, the Mendozas, Gongora, were all men of ancient families, and, +curiously, all, except the last, of families that traced their origin to +the same mountain district in the North of Spain. The family of Cervantes +is commonly said to have been of Galician origin, and unquestionably it +was in possession of lands in Galicia at a very early date; but I think +the balance of the evidence tends to show that the "solar," the original +site of the family, was at Cervatos in the north-west corner of Old +Castile, close to the junction of Castile, Leon, and the Asturias. As it +happens, there is a complete history of the Cervantes family from the +tenth century down to the seventeenth extant under the title of +"Illustrious Ancestry, Glorious Deeds, and Noble Posterity of the Famous +Nuno Alfonso, Alcaide of Toledo," written in 1648 by the industrious +genealogist Rodrigo Mendez Silva, who availed himself of a manuscript +genealogy by Juan de Mena, the poet laureate and historiographer of John +II. + +The origin of the name Cervantes is curious. Nuno Alfonso was almost as +distinguished in the struggle against the Moors in the reign of Alfonso +VII as the Cid had been half a century before in that of Alfonso VI, and +was rewarded by divers grants of land in the neighbourhood of Toledo. On +one of his acquisitions, about two leagues from the city, he built +himself a castle which he called Cervatos, because "he was lord of the +solar of Cervatos in the Montana," as the mountain region extending from +the Basque Provinces to Leon was always called. At his death in battle in +1143, the castle passed by his will to his son Alfonso Munio, who, as +territorial or local surnames were then coming into vogue in place of the +simple patronymic, took the additional name of Cervatos. His eldest son +Pedro succeeded him in the possession of the castle, and followed his +example in adopting the name, an assumption at which the younger son, +Gonzalo, seems to have taken umbrage. + +Everyone who has paid even a flying visit to Toledo will remember the +ruined castle that crowns the hill above the spot where the bridge of +Alcantara spans the gorge of the Tagus, and with its broken outline and +crumbling walls makes such an admirable pendant to the square solid +Alcazar towering over the city roofs on the opposite side. It was built, +or as some say restored, by Alfonso VI shortly after his occupation of +Toledo in 1085, and called by him San Servando after a Spanish martyr, a +name subsequently modified into San Servan (in which form it appears in +the "Poem of the Cid"), San Servantes, and San Cervantes: with regard to +which last the "Handbook for Spain" warns its readers against the +supposition that it has anything to do with the author of "Don Quixote." +Ford, as all know who have taken him for a companion and counsellor on +the roads of Spain, is seldom wrong in matters of literature or history. +In this instance, however, he is in error. It has everything to do with +the author of "Don Quixote," for it is in fact these old walls that have +given to Spain the name she is proudest of to-day. Gonzalo, above +mentioned, it may be readily conceived, did not relish the appropriation +by his brother of a name to which he himself had an equal right, for +though nominally taken from the castle, it was in reality derived from +the ancient territorial possession of the family, and as a set-off, and +to distinguish himself (diferenciarse) from his brother, he took as a +surname the name of the castle on the bank of the Tagus, in the building +of which, according to a family tradition, his great-grandfather had a +share. + +Both brothers founded families. The Cervantes branch had more tenacity; +it sent offshoots in various directions, Andalusia, Estremadura, Galicia, +and Portugal, and produced a goodly line of men distinguished in the +service of Church and State. Gonzalo himself, and apparently a son of +his, followed Ferdinand III in the great campaign of 1236-48 that gave +Cordova and Seville to Christian Spain and penned up the Moors in the +kingdom of Granada, and his descendants intermarried with some of the +noblest families of the Peninsula and numbered among them soldiers, +magistrates, and Church dignitaries, including at least two +cardinal-archbishops. + +Of the line that settled in Andalusia, Deigo de Cervantes, Commander of +the Order of Santiago, married Juana Avellaneda, daughter of Juan Arias +de Saavedra, and had several sons, of whom one was Gonzalo Gomez, +Corregidor of Jerez and ancestor of the Mexican and Columbian branches of +the family; and another, Juan, whose son Rodrigo married Dona Leonor de +Cortinas, and by her had four children, Rodrigo, Andrea, Luisa, and +Miguel, our author. + +The pedigree of Cervantes is not without its bearing on "Don Quixote." A +man who could look back upon an ancestry of genuine knights-errant +extending from well-nigh the time of Pelayo to the siege of Granada was +likely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry of +the romances. It gives a point, too, to what he says in more than one +place about families that have once been great and have tapered away +until they have come to nothing, like a pyramid. It was the case of his +own. + +He was born at Alcala de Henares and baptised in the church of Santa +Maria Mayor on the 9th of October, 1547. Of his boyhood and youth we know +nothing, unless it be from the glimpse he gives us in the preface to his +"Comedies" of himself as a boy looking on with delight while Lope de +Rueda and his company set up their rude plank stage in the plaza and +acted the rustic farces which he himself afterwards took as the model of +his interludes. This first glimpse, however, is a significant one, for it +shows the early development of that love of the drama which exercised +such an influence on his life and seems to have grown stronger as he grew +older, and of which this very preface, written only a few months before +his death, is such a striking proof. He gives us to understand, too, that +he was a great reader in his youth; but of this no assurance was needed, +for the First Part of "Don Quixote" alone proves a vast amount of +miscellaneous reading, romances of chivalry, ballads, popular poetry, +chronicles, for which he had no time or opportunity except in the first +twenty years of his life; and his misquotations and mistakes in matters +of detail are always, it may be noticed, those of a man recalling the +reading of his boyhood. + +Other things besides the drama were in their infancy when Cervantes was a +boy. The period of his boyhood was in every way a transition period for +Spain. The old chivalrous Spain had passed away. The new Spain was the +mightiest power the world had seen since the Roman Empire and it had not +yet been called upon to pay the price of its greatness. By the policy of +Ferdinand and Ximenez the sovereign had been made absolute, and the +Church and Inquisition adroitly adjusted to keep him so. The nobles, who +had always resisted absolutism as strenuously as they had fought the +Moors, had been divested of all political power, a like fate had befallen +the cities, the free constitutions of Castile and Aragon had been swept +away, and the only function that remained to the Cortes was that of +granting money at the King's dictation. + +The transition extended to literature. Men who, like Garcilaso de la Vega +and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, followed the Italian wars, had brought back +from Italy the products of the post-Renaissance literature, which took +root and flourished and even threatened to extinguish the native growths. +Damon and Thyrsis, Phyllis and Chloe had been fairly naturalised in +Spain, together with all the devices of pastoral poetry for investing +with an air of novelty the idea of a dispairing shepherd and inflexible +shepherdess. As a set-off against this, the old historical and +traditional ballads, and the true pastorals, the songs and ballads of +peasant life, were being collected assiduously and printed in the +cancioneros that succeeded one another with increasing rapidity. But the +most notable consequence, perhaps, of the spread of printing was the +flood of romances of chivalry that had continued to pour from the press +ever since Garci Ordonez de Montalvo had resuscitated "Amadis of Gaul" at +the beginning of the century. + +For a youth fond of reading, solid or light, there could have been no +better spot in Spain than Alcala de Henares in the middle of the +sixteenth century. It was then a busy, populous university town, +something more than the enterprising rival of Salamanca, and altogether a +very different place from the melancholy, silent, deserted Alcala the +traveller sees now as he goes from Madrid to Saragossa. Theology and +medicine may have been the strong points of the university, but the town +itself seems to have inclined rather to the humanities and light +literature, and as a producer of books Alcala was already beginning to +compete with the older presses of Toledo, Burgos, Salamanca and Seville. + +A pendant to the picture Cervantes has given us of his first playgoings +might, no doubt, have been often seen in the streets of Alcala at that +time; a bright, eager, tawny-haired boy peering into a book-shop where +the latest volumes lay open to tempt the public, wondering, it may be, +what that little book with the woodcut of the blind beggar and his boy, +that called itself "Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, segunda impresion," +could be about; or with eyes brimming over with merriment gazing at one +of those preposterous portraits of a knight-errant in outrageous panoply +and plumes with which the publishers of chivalry romances loved to +embellish the title-pages of their folios. If the boy was the father of +the man, the sense of the incongruous that was strong at fifty was lively +at ten, and some such reflections as these may have been the true genesis +of "Don Quixote." + +For his more solid education, we are told, he went to Salamanca. But why +Rodrigo de Cervantes, who was very poor, should have sent his son to a +university a hundred and fifty miles away when he had one at his own +door, would be a puzzle, if we had any reason for supposing that he did +so. The only evidence is a vague statement by Professor Tomas Gonzalez, +that he once saw an old entry of the matriculation of a Miguel de +Cervantes. This does not appear to have been ever seen again; but even if +it had, and if the date corresponded, it would prove nothing, as there +were at least two other Miguels born about the middle of the century; one +of them, moreover, a Cervantes Saavedra, a cousin, no doubt, who was a +source of great embarrassment to the biographers. + +That he was a student neither at Salamanca nor at Alcala is best proved +by his own works. No man drew more largely upon experience than he did, +and he has nowhere left a single reminiscence of student life-for the +"Tia Fingida," if it be his, is not one--nothing, not even "a college +joke," to show that he remembered days that most men remember best. All +that we know positively about his education is that Juan Lopez de Hoyos, +a professor of humanities and belles-lettres of some eminence, calls him +his "dear and beloved pupil." This was in a little collection of verses +by different hands on the death of Isabel de Valois, second queen of +Philip II, published by the professor in 1569, to which Cervantes +contributed four pieces, including an elegy, and an epitaph in the form +of a sonnet. It is only by a rare chance that a "Lycidas" finds its way +into a volume of this sort, and Cervantes was no Milton. His verses are +no worse than such things usually are; so much, at least, may be said for +them. + +By the time the book appeared he had left Spain, and, as fate ordered it, +for twelve years, the most eventful ones of his life. Giulio, afterwards +Cardinal, Acquaviva had been sent at the end of 1568 to Philip II by the +Pope on a mission, partly of condolence, partly political, and on his +return to Rome, which was somewhat brusquely expedited by the King, he +took Cervantes with him as his camarero (chamberlain), the office he +himself held in the Pope's household. The post would no doubt have led to +advancement at the Papal Court had Cervantes retained it, but in the +summer of 1570 he resigned it and enlisted as a private soldier in +Captain Diego Urbina's company, belonging to Don Miguel de Moncada's +regiment, but at that time forming a part of the command of Marc Antony +Colonna. What impelled him to this step we know not, whether it was +distaste for the career before him, or purely military enthusiasm. It may +well have been the latter, for it was a stirring time; the events, +however, which led to the alliance between Spain, Venice, and the Pope, +against the common enemy, the Porte, and to the victory of the combined +fleets at Lepanto, belong rather to the history of Europe than to the +life of Cervantes. He was one of those that sailed from Messina, in +September 1571, under the command of Don John of Austria; but on the +morning of the 7th of October, when the Turkish fleet was sighted, he was +lying below ill with fever. At the news that the enemy was in sight he +rose, and, in spite of the remonstrances of his comrades and superiors, +insisted on taking his post, saying he preferred death in the service of +God and the King to health. His galley, the Marquesa, was in the thick of +the fight, and before it was over he had received three gunshot wounds, +two in the breast and one in the left hand or arm. On the morning after +the battle, according to Navarrete, he had an interview with the +commander-in-chief, Don John, who was making a personal inspection of the +wounded, one result of which was an addition of three crowns to his pay, +and another, apparently, the friendship of his general. + +How severely Cervantes was wounded may be inferred from the fact, that +with youth, a vigorous frame, and as cheerful and buoyant a temperament +as ever invalid had, he was seven months in hospital at Messina before he +was discharged. He came out with his left hand permanently disabled; he +had lost the use of it, as Mercury told him in the "Viaje del Parnaso" +for the greater glory of the right. This, however, did not absolutely +unfit him for service, and in April 1572 he joined Manuel Ponce de Leon's +company of Lope de Figueroa's regiment, in which, it seems probable, his +brother Rodrigo was serving, and shared in the operations of the next +three years, including the capture of the Goletta and Tunis. Taking +advantage of the lull which followed the recapture of these places by the +Turks, he obtained leave to return to Spain, and sailed from Naples in +September 1575 on board the Sun galley, in company with his brother +Rodrigo, Pedro Carrillo de Quesada, late Governor of the Goletta, and +some others, and furnished with letters from Don John of Austria and the +Duke of Sesa, the Viceroy of Sicily, recommending him to the King for the +command of a company, on account of his services; a dono infelice as +events proved. On the 26th they fell in with a squadron of Algerine +galleys, and after a stout resistance were overpowered and carried into +Algiers. + +By means of a ransomed fellow-captive the brothers contrived to inform +their family of their condition, and the poor people at Alcala at once +strove to raise the ransom money, the father disposing of all he +possessed, and the two sisters giving up their marriage portions. But +Dali Mami had found on Cervantes the letters addressed to the King by Don +John and the Duke of Sesa, and, concluding that his prize must be a +person of great consequence, when the money came he refused it scornfully +as being altogether insufficient. The owner of Rodrigo, however, was more +easily satisfied; ransom was accepted in his case, and it was arranged +between the brothers that he should return to Spain and procure a vessel +in which he was to come back to Algiers and take off Miguel and as many +of their comrades as possible. This was not the first attempt to escape +that Cervantes had made. Soon after the commencement of his captivity he +induced several of his companions to join him in trying to reach Oran, +then a Spanish post, on foot; but after the first day's journey, the Moor +who had agreed to act as their guide deserted them, and they had no +choice but to return. The second attempt was more disastrous. In a garden +outside the city on the sea-shore, he constructed, with the help of the +gardener, a Spaniard, a hiding-place, to which he brought, one by one, +fourteen of his fellow-captives, keeping them there in secrecy for +several months, and supplying them with food through a renegade known as +El Dorador, "the Gilder." How he, a captive himself, contrived to do all +this, is one of the mysteries of the story. Wild as the project may +appear, it was very nearly successful. The vessel procured by Rodrigo +made its appearance off the coast, and under cover of night was +proceeding to take off the refugees, when the crew were alarmed by a +passing fishing boat, and beat a hasty retreat. On renewing the attempt +shortly afterwards, they, or a portion of them at least, were taken +prisoners, and just as the poor fellows in the garden were exulting in +the thought that in a few moments more freedom would be within their +grasp, they found themselves surrounded by Turkish troops, horse and +foot. The Dorador had revealed the whole scheme to the Dey Hassan. + +When Cervantes saw what had befallen them, he charged his companions to +lay all the blame upon him, and as they were being bound he declared +aloud that the whole plot was of his contriving, and that nobody else had +any share in it. Brought before the Dey, he said the same. He was +threatened with impalement and with torture; and as cutting off ears and +noses were playful freaks with the Algerines, it may be conceived what +their tortures were like; but nothing could make him swerve from his +original statement that he and he alone was responsible. The upshot was +that the unhappy gardener was hanged by his master, and the prisoners +taken possession of by the Dey, who, however, afterwards restored most of +them to their masters, but kept Cervantes, paying Dali Mami 500 crowns +for him. He felt, no doubt, that a man of such resource, energy, and +daring, was too dangerous a piece of property to be left in private +hands; and he had him heavily ironed and lodged in his own prison. If he +thought that by these means he could break the spirit or shake the +resolution of his prisoner, he was soon undeceived, for Cervantes +contrived before long to despatch a letter to the Governor of Oran, +entreating him to send him some one that could be trusted, to enable him +and three other gentlemen, fellow-captives of his, to make their escape; +intending evidently to renew his first attempt with a more trustworthy +guide. Unfortunately the Moor who carried the letter was stopped just +outside Oran, and the letter being found upon him, he was sent back to +Algiers, where by the order of the Dey he was promptly impaled as a +warning to others, while Cervantes was condemned to receive two thousand +blows of the stick, a number which most likely would have deprived the +world of "Don Quixote," had not some persons, who they were we know not, +interceded on his behalf. + +After this he seems to have been kept in still closer confinement than +before, for nearly two years passed before he made another attempt. This +time his plan was to purchase, by the aid of a Spanish renegade and two +Valencian merchants resident in Algiers, an armed vessel in which he and +about sixty of the leading captives were to make their escape; but just +as they were about to put it into execution one Doctor Juan Blanco de +Paz, an ecclesiastic and a compatriot, informed the Dey of the plot. +Cervantes by force of character, by his self-devotion, by his untiring +energy and his exertions to lighten the lot of his companions in misery, +had endeared himself to all, and become the leading spirit in the captive +colony, and, incredible as it may seem, jealousy of his influence and the +esteem in which he was held, moved this man to compass his destruction by +a cruel death. The merchants finding that the Dey knew all, and fearing +that Cervantes under torture might make disclosures that would imperil +their own lives, tried to persuade him to slip away on board a vessel +that was on the point of sailing for Spain; but he told them they had +nothing to fear, for no tortures would make him compromise anybody, and +he went at once and gave himself up to the Dey. + +As before, the Dey tried to force him to name his accomplices. Everything +was made ready for his immediate execution; the halter was put round his +neck and his hands tied behind him, but all that could be got from him +was that he himself, with the help of four gentlemen who had since left +Algiers, had arranged the whole, and that the sixty who were to accompany +him were not to know anything of it until the last moment. Finding he +could make nothing of him, the Dey sent him back to prison more heavily +ironed than before. + +The poverty-stricken Cervantes family had been all this time trying once +more to raise the ransom money, and at last a sum of three hundred ducats +was got together and entrusted to the Redemptorist Father Juan Gil, who +was about to sail for Algiers. The Dey, however, demanded more than +double the sum offered, and as his term of office had expired and he was +about to sail for Constantinople, taking all his slaves with him, the +case of Cervantes was critical. He was already on board heavily ironed, +when the Dey at length agreed to reduce his demand by one-half, and +Father Gil by borrowing was able to make up the amount, and on September +19, 1580, after a captivity of five years all but a week, Cervantes was +at last set free. Before long he discovered that Blanco de Paz, who +claimed to be an officer of the Inquisition, was now concocting on false +evidence a charge of misconduct to be brought against him on his return +to Spain. To checkmate him Cervantes drew up a series of twenty-five +questions, covering the whole period of his captivity, upon which he +requested Father Gil to take the depositions of credible witnesses before +a notary. Eleven witnesses taken from among the principal captives in +Algiers deposed to all the facts above stated and to a great deal more +besides. There is something touching in the admiration, love, and +gratitude we see struggling to find expression in the formal language of +the notary, as they testify one after another to the good deeds of +Cervantes, how he comforted and helped the weak-hearted, how he kept up +their drooping courage, how he shared his poor purse with this deponent, +and how "in him this deponent found father and mother." + +On his return to Spain he found his old regiment about to march for +Portugal to support Philip's claim to the crown, and utterly penniless +now, had no choice but to rejoin it. He was in the expeditions to the +Azores in 1582 and the following year, and on the conclusion of the war +returned to Spain in the autumn of 1583, bringing with him the manuscript +of his pastoral romance, the "Galatea," and probably also, to judge by +internal evidence, that of the first portion of "Persiles and +Sigismunda." He also brought back with him, his biographers assert, an +infant daughter, the offspring of an amour, as some of them with great +circumstantiality inform us, with a Lisbon lady of noble birth, whose +name, however, as well as that of the street she lived in, they omit to +mention. The sole foundation for all this is that in 1605 there certainly +was living in the family of Cervantes a Dona Isabel de Saavedra, who is +described in an official document as his natural daughter, and then +twenty years of age. + +With his crippled left hand promotion in the army was hopeless, now that +Don John was dead and he had no one to press his claims and services, and +for a man drawing on to forty life in the ranks was a dismal prospect; he +had already a certain reputation as a poet; he made up his mind, +therefore, to cast his lot with literature, and for a first venture +committed his "Galatea" to the press. It was published, as Salva y Mallen +shows conclusively, at Alcala, his own birth-place, in 1585 and no doubt +helped to make his name more widely known, but certainly did not do him +much good in any other way. + +While it was going through the press, he married Dona Catalina de +Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a lady of Esquivias near Madrid, and +apparently a friend of the family, who brought him a fortune which may +possibly have served to keep the wolf from the door, but if so, that was +all. The drama had by this time outgrown market-place stages and +strolling companies, and with his old love for it he naturally turned to +it for a congenial employment. In about three years he wrote twenty or +thirty plays, which he tells us were performed without any throwing of +cucumbers or other missiles, and ran their course without any hisses, +outcries, or disturbance. In other words, his plays were not bad enough +to be hissed off the stage, but not good enough to hold their own upon +it. Only two of them have been preserved, but as they happen to be two of +the seven or eight he mentions with complacency, we may assume they are +favourable specimens, and no one who reads the "Numancia" and the "Trato +de Argel" will feel any surprise that they failed as acting dramas. +Whatever merits they may have, whatever occasional they may show, they +are, as regards construction, incurably clumsy. How completely they +failed is manifest from the fact that with all his sanguine temperament +and indomitable perseverance he was unable to maintain the struggle to +gain a livelihood as a dramatist for more than three years; nor was the +rising popularity of Lope the cause, as is often said, notwithstanding +his own words to the contrary. When Lope began to write for the stage is +uncertain, but it was certainly after Cervantes went to Seville. + +Among the "Nuevos Documentos" printed by Senor Asensio y Toledo is one +dated 1592, and curiously characteristic of Cervantes. It is an agreement +with one Rodrigo Osorio, a manager, who was to accept six comedies at +fifty ducats (about 6l.) apiece, not to be paid in any case unless it +appeared on representation that the said comedy was one of the best that +had ever been represented in Spain. The test does not seem to have been +ever applied; perhaps it was sufficiently apparent to Rodrigo Osorio that +the comedies were not among the best that had ever been represented. +Among the correspondence of Cervantes there might have been found, no +doubt, more than one letter like that we see in the "Rake's Progress," +"Sir, I have read your play, and it will not doo." + +He was more successful in a literary contest at Saragossa in 1595 in +honour of the canonisation of St. Jacinto, when his composition won the +first prize, three silver spoons. The year before this he had been +appointed a collector of revenues for the kingdom of Granada. In order to +remit the money he had collected more conveniently to the treasury, he +entrusted it to a merchant, who failed and absconded; and as the +bankrupt's assets were insufficient to cover the whole, he was sent to +prison at Seville in September 1597. The balance against him, however, +was a small one, about 26l., and on giving security for it he was +released at the end of the year. + +It was as he journeyed from town to town collecting the king's taxes, +that he noted down those bits of inn and wayside life and character that +abound in the pages of "Don Quixote:" the Benedictine monks with +spectacles and sunshades, mounted on their tall mules; the strollers in +costume bound for the next village; the barber with his basin on his +head, on his way to bleed a patient; the recruit with his breeches in his +bundle, tramping along the road singing; the reapers gathered in the +venta gateway listening to "Felixmarte of Hircania" read out to them; and +those little Hogarthian touches that he so well knew how to bring in, the +ox-tail hanging up with the landlord's comb stuck in it, the wine-skins +at the bed-head, and those notable examples of hostelry art, Helen going +off in high spirits on Paris's arm, and Dido on the tower dropping tears +as big as walnuts. Nay, it may well be that on those journeys into remote +regions he came across now and then a specimen of the pauper gentleman, +with his lean hack and his greyhound and his books of chivalry, dreaming +away his life in happy ignorance that the world had changed since his +great-grandfather's old helmet was new. But it was in Seville that he +found out his true vocation, though he himself would not by any means +have admitted it to be so. It was there, in Triana, that he was first +tempted to try his hand at drawing from life, and first brought his +humour into play in the exquisite little sketch of "Rinconete y +Cortadillo," the germ, in more ways than one, of "Don Quixote." + +Where and when that was written, we cannot tell. After his imprisonment +all trace of Cervantes in his official capacity disappears, from which it +may be inferred that he was not reinstated. That he was still in Seville +in November 1598 appears from a satirical sonnet of his on the elaborate +catafalque erected to testify the grief of the city at the death of +Philip II, but from this up to 1603 we have no clue to his movements. The +words in the preface to the First Part of "Don Quixote" are generally +held to be conclusive that he conceived the idea of the book, and wrote +the beginning of it at least, in a prison, and that he may have done so +is extremely likely. + +There is a tradition that Cervantes read some portions of his work to a +select audience at the Duke of Bejar's, which may have helped to make the +book known; but the obvious conclusion is that the First Part of "Don +Quixote" lay on his hands some time before he could find a publisher bold +enough to undertake a venture of so novel a character; and so little +faith in it had Francisco Robles of Madrid, to whom at last he sold it, +that he did not care to incur the expense of securing the copyright for +Aragon or Portugal, contenting himself with that for Castile. The +printing was finished in December, and the book came out with the new +year, 1605. It is often said that "Don Quixote" was at first received +coldly. The facts show just the contrary. No sooner was it in the hands +of the public than preparations were made to issue pirated editions at +Lisbon and Valencia, and to bring out a second edition with the +additional copyrights for Aragon and Portugal, which he secured in +February. + +No doubt it was received with something more than coldness by certain +sections of the community. Men of wit, taste, and discrimination among +the aristocracy gave it a hearty welcome, but the aristocracy in general +were not likely to relish a book that turned their favourite reading into +ridicule and laughed at so many of their favourite ideas. The dramatists +who gathered round Lope as their leader regarded Cervantes as their +common enemy, and it is plain that he was equally obnoxious to the other +clique, the culto poets who had Gongora for their chief. Navarrete, who +knew nothing of the letter above mentioned, tries hard to show that the +relations between Cervantes and Lope were of a very friendly sort, as +indeed they were until "Don Quixote" was written. Cervantes, indeed, to +the last generously and manfully declared his admiration of Lope's +powers, his unfailing invention, and his marvellous fertility; but in the +preface of the First Part of "Don Quixote" and in the verses of "Urganda +the Unknown," and one or two other places, there are, if we read between +the lines, sly hits at Lope's vanities and affectations that argue no +personal good-will; and Lope openly sneers at "Don Quixote" and +Cervantes, and fourteen years after his death gives him only a few lines +of cold commonplace in the "Laurel de Apolo," that seem all the colder +for the eulogies of a host of nonentities whose names are found nowhere +else. + +In 1601 Valladolid was made the seat of the Court, and at the beginning +of 1603 Cervantes had been summoned thither in connection with the +balance due by him to the Treasury, which was still outstanding. He +remained at Valladolid, apparently supporting himself by agencies and +scrivener's work of some sort; probably drafting petitions and drawing up +statements of claims to be presented to the Council, and the like. So, at +least, we gather from the depositions taken on the occasion of the death +of a gentleman, the victim of a street brawl, who had been carried into +the house in which he lived. In these he himself is described as a man +who wrote and transacted business, and it appears that his household then +consisted of his wife, the natural daughter Isabel de Saavedra already +mentioned, his sister Andrea, now a widow, her daughter Constanza, a +mysterious Magdalena de Sotomayor calling herself his sister, for whom +his biographers cannot account, and a servant-maid. + +Meanwhile "Don Quixote" had been growing in favour, and its author's name +was now known beyond the Pyrenees. In 1607 an edition was printed at +Brussels. Robles, the Madrid publisher, found it necessary to meet the +demand by a third edition, the seventh in all, in 1608. The popularity of +the book in Italy was such that a Milan bookseller was led to bring out +an edition in 1610; and another was called for in Brussels in 1611. It +might naturally have been expected that, with such proofs before him that +he had hit the taste of the public, Cervantes would have at once set +about redeeming his rather vague promise of a second volume. + +But, to all appearance, nothing was farther from his thoughts. He had +still by him one or two short tales of the same vintage as those he had +inserted in "Don Quixote" and instead of continuing the adventures of Don +Quixote, he set to work to write more of these "Novelas Exemplares" as he +afterwards called them, with a view to making a book of them. + +The novels were published in the summer of 1613, with a dedication to the +Conde de Lemos, the Maecenas of the day, and with one of those chatty +confidential prefaces Cervantes was so fond of. In this, eight years and +a half after the First Part of "Don Quixote" had appeared, we get the +first hint of a forthcoming Second Part. "You shall see shortly," he +says, "the further exploits of Don Quixote and humours of Sancho Panza." +His idea of "shortly" was a somewhat elastic one, for, as we know by the +date to Sancho's letter, he had barely one-half of the book completed +that time twelvemonth. + +But more than poems, or pastorals, or novels, it was his dramatic +ambition that engrossed his thoughts. The same indomitable spirit that +kept him from despair in the bagnios of Algiers, and prompted him to +attempt the escape of himself and his comrades again and again, made him +persevere in spite of failure and discouragement in his efforts to win +the ear of the public as a dramatist. The temperament of Cervantes was +essentially sanguine. The portrait he draws in the preface to the novels, +with the aquiline features, chestnut hair, smooth untroubled forehead, +and bright cheerful eyes, is the very portrait of a sanguine man. Nothing +that the managers might say could persuade him that the merits of his +plays would not be recognised at last if they were only given a fair +chance. The old soldier of the Spanish Salamis was bent on being the +Aeschylus of Spain. He was to found a great national drama, based on the +true principles of art, that was to be the envy of all nations; he was to +drive from the stage the silly, childish plays, the "mirrors of nonsense +and models of folly" that were in vogue through the cupidity of the +managers and shortsightedness of the authors; he was to correct and +educate the public taste until it was ripe for tragedies on the model of +the Greek drama--like the "Numancia" for instance--and comedies that +would not only amuse but improve and instruct. All this he was to do, +could he once get a hearing: there was the initial difficulty. + +He shows plainly enough, too, that "Don Quixote" and the demolition of +the chivalry romances was not the work that lay next his heart. He was, +indeed, as he says himself in his preface, more a stepfather than a +father to "Don Quixote." Never was great work so neglected by its author. +That it was written carelessly, hastily, and by fits and starts, was not +always his fault, but it seems clear he never read what he sent to the +press. He knew how the printers had blundered, but he never took the +trouble to correct them when the third edition was in progress, as a man +who really cared for the child of his brain would have done. He appears +to have regarded the book as little more than a mere libro de +entretenimiento, an amusing book, a thing, as he says in the "Viaje," "to +divert the melancholy moody heart at any time or season." No doubt he had +an affection for his hero, and was very proud of Sancho Panza. It would +have been strange indeed if he had not been proud of the most humorous +creation in all fiction. He was proud, too, of the popularity and success +of the book, and beyond measure delightful is the naivete with which he +shows his pride in a dozen passages in the Second Part. But it was not +the success he coveted. In all probability he would have given all the +success of "Don Quixote," nay, would have seen every copy of "Don +Quixote" burned in the Plaza Mayor, for one such success as Lope de Vega +was enjoying on an average once a week. + +And so he went on, dawdling over "Don Quixote," adding a chapter now and +again, and putting it aside to turn to "Persiles and Sigismunda"--which, +as we know, was to be the most entertaining book in the language, and the +rival of "Theagenes and Chariclea"--or finishing off one of his darling +comedies; and if Robles asked when "Don Quixote" would be ready, the +answer no doubt was: En breve-shortly, there was time enough for that. At +sixty-eight he was as full of life and hope and plans for the future as a +boy of eighteen. + +Nemesis was coming, however. He had got as far as Chapter LIX, which at +his leisurely pace he could hardly have reached before October or +November 1614, when there was put into his hand a small octave lately +printed at Tarragona, and calling itself "Second Volume of the Ingenious +Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licentiate Alonso Fernandez de +Avellaneda of Tordesillas." The last half of Chapter LIX and most of the +following chapters of the Second Part give us some idea of the effect +produced upon him, and his irritation was not likely to be lessened by +the reflection that he had no one to blame but himself. Had Avellaneda, +in fact, been content with merely bringing out a continuation to "Don +Quixote," Cervantes would have had no reasonable grievance. His own +intentions were expressed in the very vaguest language at the end of the +book; nay, in his last words, "forse altro cantera con miglior plettro," +he seems actually to invite some one else to continue the work, and he +made no sign until eight years and a half had gone by; by which time +Avellaneda's volume was no doubt written. + +In fact Cervantes had no case, or a very bad one, as far as the mere +continuation was concerned. But Avellaneda chose to write a preface to +it, full of such coarse personal abuse as only an ill-conditioned man +could pour out. He taunts Cervantes with being old, with having lost his +hand, with having been in prison, with being poor, with being friendless, +accuses him of envy of Lope's success, of petulance and querulousness, +and so on; and it was in this that the sting lay. Avellaneda's reason for +this personal attack is obvious enough. Whoever he may have been, it is +clear that he was one of the dramatists of Lope's school, for he has the +impudence to charge Cervantes with attacking him as well as Lope in his +criticism on the drama. His identification has exercised the best critics +and baffled all the ingenuity and research that has been brought to bear +on it. Navarrete and Ticknor both incline to the belief that Cervantes +knew who he was; but I must say I think the anger he shows suggests an +invisible assailant; it is like the irritation of a man stung by a +mosquito in the dark. Cervantes from certain solecisms of language +pronounces him to be an Aragonese, and Pellicer, an Aragonese himself, +supports this view and believes him, moreover, to have been an +ecclesiastic, a Dominican probably. + +Any merit Avellaneda has is reflected from Cervantes, and he is too dull +to reflect much. "Dull and dirty" will always be, I imagine, the verdict +of the vast majority of unprejudiced readers. He is, at best, a poor +plagiarist; all he can do is to follow slavishly the lead given him by +Cervantes; his only humour lies in making Don Quixote take inns for +castles and fancy himself some legendary or historical personage, and +Sancho mistake words, invert proverbs, and display his gluttony; all +through he shows a proclivity to coarseness and dirt, and he has +contrived to introduce two tales filthier than anything by the sixteenth +century novellieri and without their sprightliness. + +But whatever Avellaneda and his book may be, we must not forget the debt +we owe them. But for them, there can be no doubt, "Don Quixote" would +have come to us a mere torso instead of a complete work. Even if +Cervantes had finished the volume he had in hand, most assuredly he would +have left off with a promise of a Third Part, giving the further +adventures of Don Quixote and humours of Sancho Panza as shepherds. It is +plain that he had at one time an intention of dealing with the pastoral +romances as he had dealt with the books of chivalry, and but for +Avellaneda he would have tried to carry it out. But it is more likely +that, with his plans, and projects, and hopefulness, the volume would +have remained unfinished till his death, and that we should have never +made the acquaintance of the Duke and Duchess, or gone with Sancho to +Barataria. + +From the moment the book came into his hands he seems to have been +haunted by the fear that there might be more Avellanedas in the field, +and putting everything else aside, he set himself to finish off his task +and protect Don Quixote in the only way he could, by killing him. The +conclusion is no doubt a hasty and in some places clumsy piece of work +and the frequent repetition of the scolding administered to Avellaneda +becomes in the end rather wearisome; but it is, at any rate, a conclusion +and for that we must thank Avellaneda. + +The new volume was ready for the press in February, but was not printed +till the very end of 1615, and during the interval Cervantes put together +the comedies and interludes he had written within the last few years, +and, as he adds plaintively, found no demand for among the managers, and +published them with a preface, worth the book it introduces tenfold, in +which he gives an account of the early Spanish stage, and of his own +attempts as a dramatist. It is needless to say they were put forward by +Cervantes in all good faith and full confidence in their merits. The +reader, however, was not to suppose they were his last word or final +effort in the drama, for he had in hand a comedy called "Engano a los +ojos," about which, if he mistook not, there would be no question. + +Of this dramatic masterpiece the world has no opportunity of judging; his +health had been failing for some time, and he died, apparently of dropsy, +on the 23rd of April, 1616, the day on which England lost Shakespeare, +nominally at least, for the English calendar had not yet been reformed. +He died as he had lived, accepting his lot bravely and cheerfully. + +Was it an unhappy life, that of Cervantes? His biographers all tell us +that it was; but I must say I doubt it. It was a hard life, a life of +poverty, of incessant struggle, of toil ill paid, of disappointment, but +Cervantes carried within himself the antidote to all these evils. His was +not one of those light natures that rise above adversity merely by virtue +of their own buoyancy; it was in the fortitude of a high spirit that he +was proof against it. It is impossible to conceive Cervantes giving way +to despondency or prostrated by dejection. As for poverty, it was with +him a thing to be laughed over, and the only sigh he ever allows to +escape him is when he says, "Happy he to whom Heaven has given a piece of +bread for which he is not bound to give thanks to any but Heaven itself." +Add to all this his vital energy and mental activity, his restless +invention and his sanguine temperament, and there will be reason enough +to doubt whether his could have been a very unhappy life. He who could +take Cervantes' distresses together with his apparatus for enduring them +would not make so bad a bargain, perhaps, as far as happiness in life is +concerned. + +Of his burial-place nothing is known except that he was buried, in +accordance with his will, in the neighbouring convent of Trinitarian +nuns, of which it is supposed his daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, was an +inmate, and that a few years afterwards the nuns removed to another +convent, carrying their dead with them. But whether the remains of +Cervantes were included in the removal or not no one knows, and the clue +to their resting-place is now lost beyond all hope. This furnishes +perhaps the least defensible of the items in the charge of neglect +brought against his contemporaries. In some of the others there is a good +deal of exaggeration. To listen to most of his biographers one would +suppose that all Spain was in league not only against the man but against +his memory, or at least that it was insensible to his merits, and left +him to live in misery and die of want. To talk of his hard life and +unworthy employments in Andalusia is absurd. What had he done to +distinguish him from thousands of other struggling men earning a +precarious livelihood? True, he was a gallant soldier, who had been +wounded and had undergone captivity and suffering in his country's cause, +but there were hundreds of others in the same case. He had written a +mediocre specimen of an insipid class of romance, and some plays which +manifestly did not comply with the primary condition of pleasing: were +the playgoers to patronise plays that did not amuse them, because the +author was to produce "Don Quixote" twenty years afterwards? + +The scramble for copies which, as we have seen, followed immediately on +the appearance of the book, does not look like general insensibility to +its merits. No doubt it was received coldly by some, but if a man writes +a book in ridicule of periwigs he must make his account with being coldly +received by the periwig wearers and hated by the whole tribe of +wigmakers. If Cervantes had the chivalry-romance readers, the +sentimentalists, the dramatists, and the poets of the period all against +him, it was because "Don Quixote" was what it was; and if the general +public did not come forward to make him comfortable for the rest of his +days, it is no more to be charged with neglect and ingratitude than the +English-speaking public that did not pay off Scott's liabilities. It did +the best it could; it read his book and liked it and bought it, and +encouraged the bookseller to pay him well for others. + +It has been also made a reproach to Spain that she has erected no +monument to the man she is proudest of; no monument, that is to say, of +him; for the bronze statue in the little garden of the Plaza de las +Cortes, a fair work of art no doubt, and unexceptionable had it been set +up to the local poet in the market-place of some provincial town, is not +worthy of Cervantes or of Madrid. But what need has Cervantes of "such +weak witness of his name;" or what could a monument do in his case except +testify to the self-glorification of those who had put it up? Si +monumentum quoeris, circumspice. The nearest bookseller's shop will show +what bathos there would be in a monument to the author of "Don Quixote." + +Nine editions of the First Part of "Don Quixote" had already appeared +before Cervantes died, thirty thousand copies in all, according to his +own estimate, and a tenth was printed at Barcelona the year after his +death. So large a number naturally supplied the demand for some time, but +by 1634 it appears to have been exhausted; and from that time down to the +present day the stream of editions has continued to flow rapidly and +regularly. The translations show still more clearly in what request the +book has been from the very outset. In seven years from the completion of +the work it had been translated into the four leading languages of +Europe. Except the Bible, in fact, no book has been so widely diffused as +"Don Quixote." The "Imitatio Christi" may have been translated into as +many different languages, and perhaps "Robinson Crusoe" and the "Vicar of +Wakefield" into nearly as many, but in multiplicity of translations and +editions "Don Quixote" leaves them all far behind. + +Still more remarkable is the character of this wide diffusion. "Don +Quixote" has been thoroughly naturalised among people whose ideas about +knight-errantry, if they had any at all, were of the vaguest, who had +never seen or heard of a book of chivalry, who could not possibly feel +the humour of the burlesque or sympathise with the author's purpose. +Another curious fact is that this, the most cosmopolitan book in the +world, is one of the most intensely national. "Manon Lescaut" is not more +thoroughly French, "Tom Jones" not more English, "Rob Roy" not more +Scotch, than "Don Quixote" is Spanish, in character, in ideas, in +sentiment, in local colour, in everything. What, then, is the secret of +this unparalleled popularity, increasing year by year for well-nigh three +centuries? One explanation, no doubt, is that of all the books in the +world, "Don Quixote" is the most catholic. There is something in it for +every sort of reader, young or old, sage or simple, high or low. As +Cervantes himself says with a touch of pride, "It is thumbed and read and +got by heart by people of all sorts; the children turn its leaves, the +young people read it, the grown men understand it, the old folk praise +it." + +But it would be idle to deny that the ingredient which, more than its +humour, or its wisdom, or the fertility of invention or knowledge of +human nature it displays, has insured its success with the multitude, is +the vein of farce that runs through it. It was the attack upon the sheep, +the battle with the wine-skins, Mambrino's helmet, the balsam of +Fierabras, Don Quixote knocked over by the sails of the windmill, Sancho +tossed in the blanket, the mishaps and misadventures of master and man, +that were originally the great attraction, and perhaps are so still to +some extent with the majority of readers. It is plain that "Don Quixote" +was generally regarded at first, and indeed in Spain for a long time, as +little more than a queer droll book, full of laughable incidents and +absurd situations, very amusing, but not entitled to much consideration +or care. All the editions printed in Spain from 1637 to 1771, when the +famous printer Ibarra took it up, were mere trade editions, badly and +carelessly printed on vile paper and got up in the style of chap-books +intended only for popular use, with, in most instances, uncouth +illustrations and clap-trap additions by the publisher. + +To England belongs the credit of having been the first country to +recognise the right of "Don Quixote" to better treatment than this. The +London edition of 1738, commonly called Lord Carteret's from having been +suggested by him, was not a mere edition de luxe. It produced "Don +Quixote" in becoming form as regards paper and type, and embellished with +plates which, if not particularly happy as illustrations, were at least +well intentioned and well executed, but it also aimed at correctness of +text, a matter to which nobody except the editors of the Valencia and +Brussels editions had given even a passing thought; and for a first +attempt it was fairly successful, for though some of its emendations are +inadmissible, a good many of them have been adopted by all subsequent +editors. + +The zeal of publishers, editors, and annotators brought about a +remarkable change of sentiment with regard to "Don Quixote." A vast +number of its admirers began to grow ashamed of laughing over it. It +became almost a crime to treat it as a humorous book. The humour was not +entirely denied, but, according to the new view, it was rated as an +altogether secondary quality, a mere accessory, nothing more than the +stalking-horse under the presentation of which Cervantes shot his +philosophy or his satire, or whatever it was he meant to shoot; for on +this point opinions varied. All were agreed, however, that the object he +aimed at was not the books of chivalry. He said emphatically in the +preface to the First Part and in the last sentence of the Second, that he +had no other object in view than to discredit these books, and this, to +advanced criticism, made it clear that his object must have been +something else. + +One theory was that the book was a kind of allegory, setting forth the +eternal struggle between the ideal and the real, between the spirit of +poetry and the spirit of prose; and perhaps German philosophy never +evolved a more ungainly or unlikely camel out of the depths of its inner +consciousness. Something of the antagonism, no doubt, is to be found in +"Don Quixote," because it is to be found everywhere in life, and +Cervantes drew from life. It is difficult to imagine a community in which +the never-ceasing game of cross-purposes between Sancho Panza and Don +Quixote would not be recognized as true to nature. In the stone age, +among the lake dwellers, among the cave men, there were Don Quixotes and +Sancho Panzas; there must have been the troglodyte who never could see +the facts before his eyes, and the troglodyte who could see nothing else. +But to suppose Cervantes deliberately setting himself to expound any such +idea in two stout quarto volumes is to suppose something not only very +unlike the age in which he lived, but altogether unlike Cervantes +himself, who would have been the first to laugh at an attempt of the sort +made by anyone else. + +The extraordinary influence of the romances of chivalry in his day is +quite enough to account for the genesis of the book. Some idea of the +prodigious development of this branch of literature in the sixteenth +century may be obtained from the scrutiny of Chapter VII, if the reader +bears in mind that only a portion of the romances belonging to by far the +largest group are enumerated. As to its effect upon the nation, there is +abundant evidence. From the time when the Amadises and Palmerins began to +grow popular down to the very end of the century, there is a steady +stream of invective, from men whose character and position lend weight to +their words, against the romances of chivalry and the infatuation of +their readers. Ridicule was the only besom to sweep away that dust. + +That this was the task Cervantes set himself, and that he had ample +provocation to urge him to it, will be sufficiently clear to those who +look into the evidence; as it will be also that it was not chivalry +itself that he attacked and swept away. Of all the absurdities that, +thanks to poetry, will be repeated to the end of time, there is no +greater one than saying that "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away." In +the first place there was no chivalry for him to smile away. Spain's +chivalry had been dead for more than a century. Its work was done when +Granada fell, and as chivalry was essentially republican in its nature, +it could not live under the rule that Ferdinand substituted for the free +institutions of mediaeval Spain. What he did smile away was not chivalry +but a degrading mockery of it. + +The true nature of the "right arm" and the "bright array," before which, +according to the poet, "the world gave ground," and which Cervantes' +single laugh demolished, may be gathered from the words of one of his own +countrymen, Don Felix Pacheco, as reported by Captain George Carleton, in +his "Military Memoirs from 1672 to 1713." "Before the appearance in the +world of that labour of Cervantes," he said, "it was next to an +impossibility for a man to walk the streets with any delight or without +danger. There were seen so many cavaliers prancing and curvetting before +the windows of their mistresses, that a stranger would have imagined the +whole nation to have been nothing less than a race of knight-errants. But +after the world became a little acquainted with that notable history, the +man that was seen in that once celebrated drapery was pointed at as a Don +Quixote, and found himself the jest of high and low. And I verily believe +that to this, and this only, we owe that dampness and poverty of spirit +which has run through all our councils for a century past, so little +agreeable to those nobler actions of our famous ancestors." + +To call "Don Quixote" a sad book, preaching a pessimist view of life, +argues a total misconception of its drift. It would be so if its moral +were that, in this world, true enthusiasm naturally leads to ridicule and +discomfiture. But it preaches nothing of the sort; its moral, so far as +it can be said to have one, is that the spurious enthusiasm that is born +of vanity and self-conceit, that is made an end in itself, not a means to +an end, that acts on mere impulse, regardless of circumstances and +consequences, is mischievous to its owner, and a very considerable +nuisance to the community at large. To those who cannot distinguish +between the one kind and the other, no doubt "Don Quixote" is a sad book; +no doubt to some minds it is very sad that a man who had just uttered so +beautiful a sentiment as that "it is a hard case to make slaves of those +whom God and Nature made free," should be ungratefully pelted by the +scoundrels his crazy philanthropy had let loose on society; but to others +of a more judicial cast it will be a matter of regret that reckless +self-sufficient enthusiasm is not oftener requited in some such way for +all the mischief it does in the world. + +A very slight examination of the structure of "Don Quixote" will suffice +to show that Cervantes had no deep design or elaborate plan in his mind +when he began the book. When he wrote those lines in which "with a few +strokes of a great master he sets before us the pauper gentleman," he had +no idea of the goal to which his imagination was leading him. There can +be little doubt that all he contemplated was a short tale to range with +those he had already written, a tale setting forth the ludicrous results +that might be expected to follow the attempt of a crazy gentleman to act +the part of a knight-errant in modern life. + +It is plain, for one thing, that Sancho Panza did not enter into the +original scheme, for had Cervantes thought of him he certainly would not +have omitted him in his hero's outfit, which he obviously meant to be +complete. Him we owe to the landlord's chance remark in Chapter III that +knights seldom travelled without squires. To try to think of a Don +Quixote without Sancho Panza is like trying to think of a one-bladed pair +of scissors. + +The story was written at first, like the others, without any division and +without the intervention of Cide Hamete Benengeli; and it seems not +unlikely that Cervantes had some intention of bringing Dulcinea, or +Aldonza Lorenzo, on the scene in person. It was probably the ransacking +of the Don's library and the discussion on the books of chivalry that +first suggested it to him that his idea was capable of development. What, +if instead of a mere string of farcical misadventures, he were to make +his tale a burlesque of one of these books, caricaturing their style, +incidents, and spirit? + +In pursuance of this change of plan, he hastily and somewhat clumsily +divided what he had written into chapters on the model of "Amadis," +invented the fable of a mysterious Arabic manuscript, and set up Cide +Hamete Benengeli in imitation of the almost invariable practice of the +chivalry-romance authors, who were fond of tracing their books to some +recondite source. In working out the new ideas, he soon found the value +of Sancho Panza. Indeed, the keynote, not only to Sancho's part, but to +the whole book, is struck in the first words Sancho utters when he +announces his intention of taking his ass with him. "About the ass," we +are told, "Don Quixote hesitated a little, trying whether he could call +to mind any knight-errant taking with him an esquire mounted on ass-back; +but no instance occurred to his memory." We can see the whole scene at a +glance, the stolid unconsciousness of Sancho and the perplexity of his +master, upon whose perception the incongruity has just forced itself. +This is Sancho's mission throughout the book; he is an unconscious +Mephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his master's +aspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by some +unintentional ad absurdum, always bringing him back to the world of fact +and commonplace by force of sheer stolidity. + +By the time Cervantes had got his volume of novels off his hands, and +summoned up resolution enough to set about the Second Part in earnest, +the case was very much altered. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza had not +merely found favour, but had already become, what they have never since +ceased to be, veritable entities to the popular imagination. There was no +occasion for him now to interpolate extraneous matter; nay, his readers +told him plainly that what they wanted of him was more Don Quixote and +more Sancho Panza, and not novels, tales, or digressions. To himself, +too, his creations had become realities, and he had become proud of them, +especially of Sancho. He began the Second Part, therefore, under very +different conditions, and the difference makes itself manifest at once. +Even in translation the style will be seen to be far easier, more +flowing, more natural, and more like that of a man sure of himself and of +his audience. Don Quixote and Sancho undergo a change also. In the First +Part, Don Quixote has no character or individuality whatever. He is +nothing more than a crazy representative of the sentiments of the +chivalry romances. In all that he says and does he is simply repeating +the lesson he has learned from his books; and therefore, it is absurd to +speak of him in the gushing strain of the sentimental critics when they +dilate upon his nobleness, disinterestedness, dauntless courage, and so +forth. It was the business of a knight-errant to right wrongs, redress +injuries, and succour the distressed, and this, as a matter of course, he +makes his business when he takes up the part; a knight-errant was bound +to be intrepid, and so he feels bound to cast fear aside. Of all Byron's +melodious nonsense about Don Quixote, the most nonsensical statement is +that "'t is his virtue makes him mad!" The exact opposite is the truth; +it is his madness makes him virtuous. + +In the Second Part, Cervantes repeatedly reminds the reader, as if it was +a point upon which he was anxious there should be no mistake, that his +hero's madness is strictly confined to delusions on the subject of +chivalry, and that on every other subject he is discreto, one, in fact, +whose faculty of discernment is in perfect order. The advantage of this +is that he is enabled to make use of Don Quixote as a mouthpiece for his +own reflections, and so, without seeming to digress, allow himself the +relief of digression when he requires it, as freely as in a commonplace +book. + +It is true the amount of individuality bestowed upon Don Quixote is not +very great. There are some natural touches of character about him, such +as his mixture of irascibility and placability, and his curious affection +for Sancho together with his impatience of the squire's loquacity and +impertinence; but in the main, apart from his craze, he is little more +than a thoughtful, cultured gentleman, with instinctive good taste and a +great deal of shrewdness and originality of mind. + +As to Sancho, it is plain, from the concluding words of the preface to +the First Part, that he was a favourite with his creator even before he +had been taken into favour by the public. An inferior genius, taking him +in hand a second time, would very likely have tried to improve him by +making him more comical, clever, amiable, or virtuous. But Cervantes was +too true an artist to spoil his work in this way. Sancho, when he +reappears, is the old Sancho with the old familiar features; but with a +difference; they have been brought out more distinctly, but at the same +time with a careful avoidance of anything like caricature; the outline +has been filled in where filling in was necessary, and, vivified by a few +touches of a master's hand, Sancho stands before us as he might in a +character portrait by Velazquez. He is a much more important and +prominent figure in the Second Part than in the First; indeed, it is his +matchless mendacity about Dulcinea that to a great extent supplies the +action of the story. + +His development in this respect is as remarkable as in any other. In the +First Part he displays a great natural gift of lying. His lies are not of +the highly imaginative sort that liars in fiction commonly indulge in; +like Falstaff's, they resemble the father that begets them; they are +simple, homely, plump lies; plain working lies, in short. But in the +service of such a master as Don Quixote he develops rapidly, as we see +when he comes to palm off the three country wenches as Dulcinea and her +ladies in waiting. It is worth noticing how, flushed by his success in +this instance, he is tempted afterwards to try a flight beyond his powers +in his account of the journey on Clavileno. + +In the Second Part it is the spirit rather than the incidents of the +chivalry romances that is the subject of the burlesque. Enchantments of +the sort travestied in those of Dulcinea and the Trifaldi and the cave of +Montesinos play a leading part in the later and inferior romances, and +another distinguishing feature is caricatured in Don Quixote's blind +adoration of Dulcinea. In the romances of chivalry love is either a mere +animalism or a fantastic idolatry. Only a coarse-minded man would care to +make merry with the former, but to one of Cervantes' humour the latter +was naturally an attractive subject for ridicule. Like everything else in +these romances, it is a gross exaggeration of the real sentiment of +chivalry, but its peculiar extravagance is probably due to the influence +of those masters of hyperbole, the Provencal poets. When a troubadour +professed his readiness to obey his lady in all things, he made it +incumbent upon the next comer, if he wished to avoid the imputation of +tameness and commonplace, to declare himself the slave of her will, which +the next was compelled to cap by some still stronger declaration; and so +expressions of devotion went on rising one above the other like biddings +at an auction, and a conventional language of gallantry and theory of +love came into being that in time permeated the literature of Southern +Europe, and bore fruit, in one direction in the transcendental worship of +Beatrice and Laura, and in another in the grotesque idolatry which found +exponents in writers like Feliciano de Silva. This is what Cervantes +deals with in Don Quixote's passion for Dulcinea, and in no instance has +he carried out the burlesque more happily. By keeping Dulcinea in the +background, and making her a vague shadowy being of whose very existence +we are left in doubt, he invests Don Quixote's worship of her virtues and +charms with an additional extravagance, and gives still more point to the +caricature of the sentiment and language of the romances. + +One of the great merits of "Don Quixote," and one of the qualities that +have secured its acceptance by all classes of readers and made it the +most cosmopolitan of books, is its simplicity. There are, of course, +points obvious enough to a Spanish seventeenth century audience which do +not immediately strike a reader now-a-days, and Cervantes often takes it +for granted that an allusion will be generally understood which is only +intelligible to a few. For example, on many of his readers in Spain, and +most of his readers out of it, the significance of his choice of a +country for his hero is completely lost. It would be going too far to say +that no one can thoroughly comprehend "Don Quixote" without having seen +La Mancha, but undoubtedly even a glimpse of La Mancha will give an +insight into the meaning of Cervantes such as no commentator can give. Of +all the regions of Spain it is the last that would suggest the idea of +romance. Of all the dull central plateau of the Peninsula it is the +dullest tract. There is something impressive about the grim solitudes of +Estremadura; and if the plains of Leon and Old Castile are bald and +dreary, they are studded with old cities renowned in history and rich in +relics of the past. But there is no redeeming feature in the Manchegan +landscape; it has all the sameness of the desert without its dignity; the +few towns and villages that break its monotony are mean and commonplace, +there is nothing venerable about them, they have not even the +picturesqueness of poverty; indeed, Don Quixote's own village, +Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive respectability in the prim +regularity of its streets and houses; everything is ignoble; the very +windmills are the ugliest and shabbiest of the windmill kind. + +To anyone who knew the country well, the mere style and title of "Don +Quixote of La Mancha" gave the key to the author's meaning at once. La +Mancha as the knight's country and scene of his chivalries is of a piece +with the pasteboard helmet, the farm-labourer on ass-back for a squire, +knighthood conferred by a rascally ventero, convicts taken for victims of +oppression, and the rest of the incongruities between Don Quixote's world +and the world he lived in, between things as he saw them and things as +they were. + +It is strange that this element of incongruity, underlying the whole +humour and purpose of the book, should have been so little heeded by the +majority of those who have undertaken to interpret "Don Quixote." It has +been completely overlooked, for example, by the illustrators. To be sure, +the great majority of the artists who illustrated "Don Quixote" knew +nothing whatever of Spain. To them a venta conveyed no idea but the +abstract one of a roadside inn, and they could not therefore do full +justice to the humour of Don Quixote's misconception in taking it for a +castle, or perceive the remoteness of all its realities from his ideal. +But even when better informed they seem to have no apprehension of the +full force of the discrepancy. Take, for instance, Gustave Dore's drawing +of Don Quixote watching his armour in the inn-yard. Whether or not the +Venta de Quesada on the Seville road is, as tradition maintains, the inn +described in "Don Quixote," beyond all question it was just such an +inn-yard as the one behind it that Cervantes had in his mind's eye, and +it was on just such a rude stone trough as that beside the primitive +draw-well in the corner that he meant Don Quixote to deposit his armour. +Gustave Dore makes it an elaborate fountain such as no arriero ever +watered his mules at in the corral of any venta in Spain, and thereby +entirely misses the point aimed at by Cervantes. It is the mean, prosaic, +commonplace character of all the surroundings and circumstances that +gives a significance to Don Quixote's vigil and the ceremony that +follows. + +Cervantes' humour is for the most part of that broader and simpler sort, +the strength of which lies in the perception of the incongruous. It is +the incongruity of Sancho in all his ways, words, and works, with the +ideas and aims of his master, quite as much as the wonderful vitality and +truth to nature of the character, that makes him the most humorous +creation in the whole range of fiction. That unsmiling gravity of which +Cervantes was the first great master, "Cervantes' serious air," which +sits naturally on Swift alone, perhaps, of later humourists, is essential +to this kind of humour, and here again Cervantes has suffered at the +hands of his interpreters. Nothing, unless indeed the coarse buffoonery +of Phillips, could be more out of place in an attempt to represent +Cervantes, than a flippant, would-be facetious style, like that of +Motteux's version for example, or the sprightly, jaunty air, French +translators sometimes adopt. It is the grave matter-of-factness of the +narrative, and the apparent unconsciousness of the author that he is +saying anything ludicrous, anything but the merest commonplace, that give +its peculiar flavour to the humour of Cervantes. His, in fact, is the +exact opposite of the humour of Sterne and the self-conscious humourists. +Even when Uncle Toby is at his best, you are always aware of "the man +Sterne" behind him, watching you over his shoulder to see what effect he +is producing. Cervantes always leaves you alone with Don Quixote and +Sancho. He and Swift and the great humourists always keep themselves out +of sight, or, more properly speaking, never think about themselves at +all, unlike our latter-day school of humourists, who seem to have revived +the old horse-collar method, and try to raise a laugh by some grotesque +assumption of ignorance, imbecility, or bad taste. + +It is true that to do full justice to Spanish humour in any other +language is well-nigh an impossibility. There is a natural gravity and a +sonorous stateliness about Spanish, be it ever so colloquial, that make +an absurdity doubly absurd, and give plausibility to the most +preposterous statement. This is what makes Sancho Panza's drollery the +despair of the conscientious translator. Sancho's curt comments can never +fall flat, but they lose half their flavour when transferred from their +native Castilian into any other medium. But if foreigners have failed to +do justice to the humour of Cervantes, they are no worse than his own +countrymen. Indeed, were it not for the Spanish peasant's relish of "Don +Quixote," one might be tempted to think that the great humourist was not +looked upon as a humourist at all in his own country. + +The craze of Don Quixote seems, in some instances, to have communicated +itself to his critics, making them see things that are not in the book +and run full tilt at phantoms that have no existence save in their own +imaginations. Like a good many critics now-a-days, they forget that +screams are not criticism, and that it is only vulgar tastes that are +influenced by strings of superlatives, three-piled hyperboles, and +pompous epithets. But what strikes one as particularly strange is that +while they deal in extravagant eulogies, and ascribe all manner of +imaginary ideas and qualities to Cervantes, they show no perception of +the quality that ninety-nine out of a hundred of his readers would rate +highest in him, and hold to be the one that raises him above all rivalry. + +To speak of "Don Quixote" as if it were merely a humorous book would be a +manifest misdescription. Cervantes at times makes it a kind of +commonplace book for occasional essays and criticisms, or for the +observations and reflections and gathered wisdom of a long and stirring +life. It is a mine of shrewd observation on mankind and human nature. +Among modern novels there may be, here and there, more elaborate studies +of character, but there is no book richer in individualised character. +What Coleridge said of Shakespeare in minimis is true of Cervantes; he +never, even for the most temporary purpose, puts forward a lay figure. +There is life and individuality in all his characters, however little +they may have to do, or however short a time they may be before the +reader. Samson Carrasco, the curate, Teresa Panza, Altisidora, even the +two students met on the road to the cave of Montesinos, all live and move +and have their being; and it is characteristic of the broad humanity of +Cervantes that there is not a hateful one among them all. Even poor +Maritornes, with her deplorable morals, has a kind heart of her own and +"some faint and distant resemblance to a Christian about her;" and as for +Sancho, though on dissection we fail to find a lovable trait in him, +unless it be a sort of dog-like affection for his master, who is there +that in his heart does not love him? + +But it is, after all, the humour of "Don Quixote" that distinguishes it +from all other books of the romance kind. It is this that makes it, as +one of the most judicial-minded of modern critics calls it, "the best +novel in the world beyond all comparison." It is its varied humour, +ranging from broad farce to comedy as subtle as Shakespeare's or +Moliere's that has naturalised it in every country where there are +readers, and made it a classic in every language that has a literature. + +!_ Some Commendatory Verses + +!_ Urganda the Unknown + +poem{ + +To the book of Don Quixote of la Mancha + + If to be welcomed by the good, + O Book! thou make thy steady aim, + No empty chatterer will dare + To question or dispute thy claim. + But if perchance thou hast a mind + To win of idiots approbation, + Lost labour will be thy reward, + Though they'll pretend appreciation. + + They say a goodly shade he finds + Who shelters 'neath a goodly tree; + And such a one thy kindly star + In Bejar bath provided thee: + A royal tree whose spreading boughs + A show of princely fruit display; + A tree that bears a noble Duke, + The Alexander of his day. + + Of a Manchegan gentleman + Thy purpose is to tell the story, + Relating how he lost his wits + O'er idle tales of love and glory, + Of "ladies, arms, and cavaliers:" + A new Orlando Furioso- + Innamorato, rather--who + Won Dulcinea del Toboso. + + Put no vain emblems on thy shield; + All figures--that is bragging play. + A modest dedication make, + And give no scoffer room to say, + "What! Alvaro de Luna here? + Or is it Hannibal again? + Or does King Francis at Madrid + Once more of destiny complain?" + + Since Heaven it hath not pleased on thee + Deep erudition to bestow, + Or black Latino's gift of tongues, + No Latin let thy pages show. + Ape not philosophy or wit, + Lest one who cannot comprehend, + Make a wry face at thee and ask, + "Why offer flowers to me, my friend?" + + Be not a meddler; no affair + Of thine the life thy neighbours lead: + Be prudent; oft the random jest + Recoils upon the jester's head. + Thy constant labour let it be + To earn thyself an honest name, + For fooleries preserved in print + Are perpetuity of shame. + + A further counsel bear in mind: + If that thy roof be made of glass, + It shows small wit to pick up stones + To pelt the people as they pass. + Win the attention of the wise, + And give the thinker food for thought; + Whoso indites frivolities, + Will but by simpletons be sought. + +}poem + +!_ Amadis of Gaul + +poem{ + +To Don Quixote of la Mancha + +SONNET + + Thou that didst imitate that life of mine + When I in lonely sadness on the great + Rock Pena Pobre sat disconsolate, + In self-imposed penance there to pine; + Thou, whose sole beverage was the bitter brine + Of thine own tears, and who withouten plate + Of silver, copper, tin, in lowly state + Off the bare earth and on earth's fruits didst dine; + Live thou, of thine eternal glory sure. + So long as on the round of the fourth sphere + The bright Apollo shall his coursers steer, + In thy renown thou shalt remain secure, + Thy country's name in story shall endure, + And thy sage author stand without a peer. + +}poem + +!_ Don Belianis of Greece + +poem{ + +To Don Quixote of la Mancha + +SONNET + + In slashing, hewing, cleaving, word and deed, + I was the foremost knight of chivalry, + Stout, bold, expert, as e'er the world did see; + Thousands from the oppressor's wrong I freed; + Great were my feats, eternal fame their meed; + In love I proved my truth and loyalty; + The hugest giant was a dwarf for me; + Ever to knighthood's laws gave I good heed. + My mastery the Fickle Goddess owned, + And even Chance, submitting to control, + Grasped by the forelock, yielded to my will. + Yet--though above yon horned moon enthroned + My fortune seems to sit--great Quixote, still + Envy of thy achievements fills my soul. + +}poem + +!_ The Lady of Oriana + +poem{ + +To Dulcinea del Toboso + +SONNET + + Oh, fairest Dulcinea, could it be! + It were a pleasant fancy to suppose so-- + Could Miraflores change to El Toboso, + And London's town to that which shelters thee! + Oh, could mine but acquire that livery + Of countless charms thy mind and body show so! + Or him, now famous grown--thou mad'st him grow so-- + Thy knight, in some dread combat could I see! + Oh, could I be released from Amadis + By exercise of such coy chastity + As led thee gentle Quixote to dismiss! + Then would my heavy sorrow turn to joy; + None would I envy, all would envy me, + And happiness be mine without alloy. + +}poem + +!_ Gandalin, Squire of Amadis of Gaul, + +poem{ + +To Sancho Panza, squire of Don Quixote + +SONNET + + All hail, illustrious man! Fortune, when she + Bound thee apprentice to the esquire trade, + Her care and tenderness of thee displayed, + Shaping thy course from misadventure free. + No longer now doth proud knight-errantry + Regard with scorn the sickle and the spade; + Of towering arrogance less count is made + Than of plain esquire-like simplicity. + I envy thee thy Dapple, and thy name, + And those alforjas thou wast wont to stuff + With comforts that thy providence proclaim. + Excellent Sancho! hail to thee again! + To thee alone the Ovid of our Spain + Does homage with the rustic kiss and cuff. + +}poem + +!_ From el Donoso, the Motley Poet, + +poem{ + +On Sancho Panza and Rocinante + +ON SANCHO + +I am the esquire Sancho Pan-- +Who served Don Quixote of La Man--; +But from his service I retreat-, +Resolved to pass my life discreet-; +For Villadiego, called the Si--, +Maintained that only in reti-- +Was found the secret of well-be--, +According to the "Celesti--:" +A book divine, except for sin-- +By speech too plain, in my opin-- + +ON ROCINANTE + +I am that Rocinante fa--, +Great-grandson of great Babie--, +Who, all for being lean and bon--, +Had one Don Quixote for an own--; +But if I matched him well in weak--, +I never took short commons meek--, +But kept myself in corn by steal--, +A trick I learned from Lazaril--, +When with a piece of straw so neat-- +The blind man of his wine he cheat--. + +}poem + +!_ Orlando Furioso + +poem{ + +To Don Quixote of La Mancha + +SONNET + + If thou art not a Peer, peer thou hast none; + Among a thousand Peers thou art a peer; + Nor is there room for one when thou art near, + Unvanquished victor, great unconquered one! + Orlando, by Angelica undone, + Am I; o'er distant seas condemned to steer, + And to Fame's altars as an offering bear + Valour respected by Oblivion. + I cannot be thy rival, for thy fame + And prowess rise above all rivalry, + Albeit both bereft of wits we go. + But, though the Scythian or the Moor to tame + Was not thy lot, still thou dost rival me: + Love binds us in a fellowship of woe. + +}poem + +!_ The Knight of Phoebus + +poem{ + +To Don Quixote of La Mancha + + My sword was not to be compared with thine + Phoebus of Spain, marvel of courtesy, + Nor with thy famous arm this hand of mine + That smote from east to west as lightnings fly. + I scorned all empire, and that monarchy + The rosy east held out did I resign + For one glance of Claridiana's eye, + The bright Aurora for whose love I pine. + A miracle of constancy my love; + And banished by her ruthless cruelty, + This arm had might the rage of Hell to tame. + But, Gothic Quixote, happier thou dost prove, + For thou dost live in Dulcinea's name, + And famous, honoured, wise, she lives in thee. + +}poem + +!_ From Solisdan + +poem{ + +To Don Quixote of La Mancha + +SONNET + + Your fantasies, Sir Quixote, it is true, + That crazy brain of yours have quite upset, + But aught of base or mean hath never yet + Been charged by any in reproach to you. + Your deeds are open proof in all men's view; + For you went forth injustice to abate, + And for your pains sore drubbings did you get + From many a rascally and ruffian crew. + If the fair Dulcinea, your heart's queen, + Be unrelenting in her cruelty, + If still your woe be powerless to move her, + In such hard case your comfort let it be + That Sancho was a sorry go-between: + A booby he, hard-hearted she, and you no lover. + +}poem + +!_ Dialogue + +poem{ + +Between Babieca and Rocinante + +SONNET + +B. "How comes it, Rocinante, you're so lean?" +R. "I'm underfed, with overwork I'm worn." +B. "But what becomes of all the hay and corn?" +R. "My master gives me none; he's much too mean." +B. "Come, come, you show ill-breeding, sir, I ween; + 'T is like an ass your master thus to scorn." +R. He is an ass, will die an ass, an ass was born; + Why, he's in love; what's what's plainer to be seen?" +B. "To be in love is folly?"--R. "No great sense." +B. "You're metaphysical."--R. "From want of food." +B. "Rail at the squire, then."--R. "Why, what's the good? + I might indeed complain of him, I grant ye, + But, squire or master, where's the difference? + They're both as sorry hacks as Rocinante." + +}poem + +1~ The Author's Preface + +Idle reader: thou mayest believe me without any oath that I would this +book, as it is the child of my brain, were the fairest, gayest, and +cleverest that could be imagined. But I could not counteract Nature's law +that everything shall beget its like; and what, then, could this sterile, +illtilled wit of mine beget but the story of a dry, shrivelled, whimsical +offspring, full of thoughts of all sorts and such as never came into any +other imagination--just what might be begotten in a prison, where every +misery is lodged and every doleful sound makes its dwelling? +Tranquillity, a cheerful retreat, pleasant fields, bright skies, +murmuring brooks, peace of mind, these are the things that go far to make +even the most barren muses fertile, and bring into the world births that +fill it with wonder and delight. Sometimes when a father has an ugly, +loutish son, the love he bears him so blindfolds his eyes that he does +not see his defects, or, rather, takes them for gifts and charms of mind +and body, and talks of them to his friends as wit and grace. I, +however--for though I pass for the father, I am but the stepfather to +"Don Quixote"--have no desire to go with the current of custom, or to +implore thee, dearest reader, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, +to pardon or excuse the defects thou wilt perceive in this child of mine. +Thou art neither its kinsman nor its friend, thy soul is thine own and +thy will as free as any man's, whate'er he be, thou art in thine own +house and master of it as much as the king of his taxes and thou knowest +the common saying, "Under my cloak I kill the king;" all which exempts +and frees thee from every consideration and obligation, and thou canst +say what thou wilt of the story without fear of being abused for any ill +or rewarded for any good thou mayest say of it. + +My wish would be simply to present it to thee plain and unadorned, +without any embellishment of preface or uncountable muster of customary +sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies, such as are commonly put at the +beginning of books. For I can tell thee, though composing it cost me some +labour, I found none greater than the making of this Preface thou art now +reading. Many times did I take up my pen to write it, and many did I lay +it down again, not knowing what to write. One of these times, as I was +pondering with the paper before me, a pen in my ear, my elbow on the +desk, and my cheek in my hand, thinking of what I should say, there came +in unexpectedly a certain lively, clever friend of mine, who, seeing me +so deep in thought, asked the reason; to which I, making no mystery of +it, answered that I was thinking of the Preface I had to make for the +story of "Don Quixote," which so troubled me that I had a mind not to +make any at all, nor even publish the achievements of so noble a knight. + +"For, how could you expect me not to feel uneasy about what that ancient +lawgiver they call the Public will say when it sees me, after slumbering +so many years in the silence of oblivion, coming out now with all my +years upon my back, and with a book as dry as a rush, devoid of +invention, meagre in style, poor in thoughts, wholly wanting in learning +and wisdom, without quotations in the margin or annotations at the end, +after the fashion of other books I see, which, though all fables and +profanity, are so full of maxims from Aristotle, and Plato, and the whole +herd of philosophers, that they fill the readers with amazement and +convince them that the authors are men of learning, erudition, and +eloquence. And then, when they quote the Holy Scriptures!--anyone would +say they are St. Thomases or other doctors of the Church, observing as +they do a decorum so ingenious that in one sentence they describe a +distracted lover and in the next deliver a devout little sermon that it +is a pleasure and a treat to hear and read. Of all this there will be +nothing in my book, for I have nothing to quote in the margin or to note +at the end, and still less do I know what authors I follow in it, to +place them at the beginning, as all do, under the letters A, B, C, +beginning with Aristotle and ending with Xenophon, or Zoilus, or Zeuxis, +though one was a slanderer and the other a painter. Also my book must do +without sonnets at the beginning, at least sonnets whose authors are +dukes, marquises, counts, bishops, ladies, or famous poets. Though if I +were to ask two or three obliging friends, I know they would give me +them, and such as the productions of those that have the highest +reputation in our Spain could not equal. + +"In short, my friend," I continued, "I am determined that Senor Don +Quixote shall remain buried in the archives of his own La Mancha until +Heaven provide some one to garnish him with all those things he stands in +need of; because I find myself, through my shallowness and want of +learning, unequal to supplying them, and because I am by nature shy and +careless about hunting for authors to say what I myself can say without +them. Hence the cogitation and abstraction you found me in, and reason +enough, what you have heard from me." + +Hearing this, my friend, giving himself a slap on the forehead and +breaking into a hearty laugh, exclaimed, "Before God, Brother, now am I +disabused of an error in which I have been living all this long time I +have known you, all through which I have taken you to be shrewd and +sensible in all you do; but now I see you are as far from that as the +heaven is from the earth. It is possible that things of so little moment +and so easy to set right can occupy and perplex a ripe wit like yours, +fit to break through and crush far greater obstacles? By my faith, this +comes, not of any want of ability, but of too much indolence and too +little knowledge of life. Do you want to know if I am telling the truth? +Well, then, attend to me, and you will see how, in the opening and +shutting of an eye, I sweep away all your difficulties, and supply all +those deficiencies which you say check and discourage you from bringing +before the world the story of your famous Don Quixote, the light and +mirror of all knight-errantry." + +"Say on," said I, listening to his talk; "how do you propose to make up +for my diffidence, and reduce to order this chaos of perplexity I am in?" + +To which he made answer, "Your first difficulty about the sonnets, +epigrams, or complimentary verses which you want for the beginning, and +which ought to be by persons of importance and rank, can be removed if +you yourself take a little trouble to make them; you can afterwards +baptise them, and put any name you like to them, fathering them on +Prester John of the Indies or the Emperor of Trebizond, who, to my +knowledge, were said to have been famous poets: and even if they were +not, and any pedants or bachelors should attack you and question the +fact, never care two maravedis for that, for even if they prove a lie +against you they cannot cut off the hand you wrote it with. + +"As to references in the margin to the books and authors from whom you +take the aphorisms and sayings you put into your story, it is only +contriving to fit in nicely any sentences or scraps of Latin you may +happen to have by heart, or at any rate that will not give you much +trouble to look up; so as, when you speak of freedom and captivity, to +insert + +_Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro;_ + +and then refer in the margin to Horace, or whoever said it; or, if you +allude to the power of death, to come in with-- + +_Pallida mors Aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas, +Regumque turres._ + +"If it be friendship and the love God bids us bear to our enemy, go at +once to the Holy Scriptures, which you can do with a very small amount of +research, and quote no less than the words of God himself: Ego autem dico +vobis: diligite inimicos vestros. If you speak of evil thoughts, turn to +the Gospel: De corde exeunt cogitationes malae. If of the fickleness of +friends, there is Cato, who will give you his distich: + +_Donec eris felix multos numerabis amicos, +Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris._ + +"With these and such like bits of Latin they will take you for a +grammarian at all events, and that now-a-days is no small honour and +profit. + +"With regard to adding annotations at the end of the book, you may safely +do it in this way. If you mention any giant in your book contrive that it +shall be the giant Goliath, and with this alone, which will cost you +almost nothing, you have a grand note, for you can put--The giant Golias +or Goliath was a Philistine whom the shepherd David slew by a mighty +stone-cast in the Terebinth valley, as is related in the Book of +Kings--in the chapter where you find it written. + +"Next, to prove yourself a man of erudition in polite literature and +cosmography, manage that the river Tagus shall be named in your story, +and there you are at once with another famous annotation, setting +forth--The river Tagus was so called after a King of Spain: it has its +source in such and such a place and falls into the ocean, kissing the +walls of the famous city of Lisbon, and it is a common belief that it has +golden sands, etc. If you should have anything to do with robbers, I will +give you the story of Cacus, for I have it by heart; if with loose women, +there is the Bishop of Mondonedo, who will give you the loan of Lamia, +Laida, and Flora, any reference to whom will bring you great credit; if +with hard-hearted ones, Ovid will furnish you with Medea; if with witches +or enchantresses, Homer has Calypso, and Virgil Circe; if with valiant +captains, Julius Caesar himself will lend you himself in his own +'Commentaries,' and Plutarch will give you a thousand Alexanders. If you +should deal with love, with two ounces you may know of Tuscan you can go +to Leon the Hebrew, who will supply you to your heart's content; or if +you should not care to go to foreign countries you have at home Fonseca's +'Of the Love of God,' in which is condensed all that you or the most +imaginative mind can want on the subject. In short, all you have to do is +to manage to quote these names, or refer to these stories I have +mentioned, and leave it to me to insert the annotations and quotations, +and I swear by all that's good to fill your margins and use up four +sheets at the end of the book. + +"Now let us come to those references to authors which other books have, +and you want for yours. The remedy for this is very simple: You have only +to look out for some book that quotes them all, from A to Z as you say +yourself, and then insert the very same alphabet in your book, and though +the imposition may be plain to see, because you have so little need to +borrow from them, that is no matter; there will probably be some simple +enough to believe that you have made use of them all in this plain, +artless story of yours. At any rate, if it answers no other purpose, this +long catalogue of authors will serve to give a surprising look of +authority to your book. Besides, no one will trouble himself to verify +whether you have followed them or whether you have not, being no way +concerned in it; especially as, if I mistake not, this book of yours has +no need of any one of those things you say it wants, for it is, from +beginning to end, an attack upon the books of chivalry, of which +Aristotle never dreamt, nor St. Basil said a word, nor Cicero had any +knowledge; nor do the niceties of truth nor the observations of astrology +come within the range of its fanciful vagaries; nor have geometrical +measurements or refutations of the arguments used in rhetoric anything to +do with it; nor does it mean to preach to anybody, mixing up things human +and divine, a sort of motley in which no Christian understanding should +dress itself. It has only to avail itself of truth to nature in its +composition, and the more perfect the imitation the better the work will +be. And as this piece of yours aims at nothing more than to destroy the +authority and influence which books of chivalry have in the world and +with the public, there is no need for you to go a-begging for aphorisms +from philosophers, precepts from Holy Scripture, fables from poets, +speeches from orators, or miracles from saints; but merely to take care +that your style and diction run musically, pleasantly, and plainly, with +clear, proper, and well-placed words, setting forth your purpose to the +best of your power, and putting your ideas intelligibly, without +confusion or obscurity. Strive, too, that in reading your story the +melancholy may be moved to laughter, and the merry made merrier still; +that the simple shall not be wearied, that the judicious shall admire the +invention, that the grave shall not despise it, nor the wise fail to +praise it. Finally, keep your aim fixed on the destruction of that +ill-founded edifice of the books of chivalry, hated by some and praised +by many more; for if you succeed in this you will have achieved no small +success." + +In profound silence I listened to what my friend said, and his +observations made such an impression on me that, without attempting to +question them, I admitted their soundness, and out of them I determined +to make this Preface; wherein, gentle reader, thou wilt perceive my +friend's good sense, my good fortune in finding such an adviser in such a +time of need, and what thou hast gained in receiving, without addition or +alteration, the story of the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, who is held +by all the inhabitants of the district of the Campo de Montiel to have +been the chastest lover and the bravest knight that has for many years +been seen in that neighbourhood. I have no desire to magnify the service +I render thee in making thee acquainted with so renowned and honoured a +knight, but I do desire thy thanks for the acquaintance thou wilt make +with the famous Sancho Panza, his squire, in whom, to my thinking, I have +given thee condensed all the squirely drolleries that are scattered +through the swarm of the vain books of chivalry. And so--may God give +thee health, and not forget me. Vale. + +1~ Dedication of Volume I + +TO THE DUKE OF BEJAR, MARQUIS OF GIBRALEON, COUNT OF BENALCAZAR AND +BANARES, VICECOUNT OF THE PUEBLA DE ALCOCER, MASTER OF THE TOWNS OF +CAPILLA, CURIEL AND BURGUILLOS + +In belief of the good reception and honours that Your Excellency bestows +on all sort of books, as prince so inclined to favor good arts, chiefly +those who by their nobleness do not submit to the service and bribery of +the vulgar, I have determined bringing to light The Ingenious Gentleman +Don Quixote of la Mancha, in shelter of Your Excellency's glamorous name, +to whom, with the obeisance I owe to such grandeur, I pray to receive it +agreeably under his protection, so that in this shadow, though deprived +of that precious ornament of elegance and erudition that clothe the works +composed in the houses of those who know, it dares appear with assurance +in the judgment of some who, trespassing the bounds of their own +ignorance, use to condemn with more rigour and less justice the writings +of others. It is my earnest hope that Your Excellency's good counsel in +regard to my honourable purpose, will not disdain the littleness of so +humble a service. + +Miguel de Cervantes + +VOLUME I. + +Chapter I. - +Which treats of the character and pursuits of the famous gentleman Don +Quixote of La Mancha + +In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to +mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance +in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for +coursing. An olla of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most +nights, scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so extra +on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income. The rest of it +went in a doublet of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to match +for holidays, while on week-days he made a brave figure in his best +homespun. He had in his house a housekeeper past forty, a niece under +twenty, and a lad for the field and market-place, who used to saddle the +hack as well as handle the bill-hook. The age of this gentleman of ours +was bordering on fifty; he was of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured, a +very early riser and a great sportsman. They will have it his surname was +Quixada or Quesada (for here there is some difference of opinion among +the authors who write on the subject), although from reasonable +conjectures it seems plain that he was called Quexana. This, however, is +of but little importance to our tale; it will be enough not to stray a +hair's breadth from the truth in the telling of it. + +You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at +leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to reading +books of chivalry with such ardour and avidity that he almost entirely +neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the management of his +property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that +he sold many an acre of tillageland to buy books of chivalry to read, and +brought home as many of them as he could get. But of all there were none +he liked so well as those of the famous Feliciano de Silva's composition, +for their lucidity of style and complicated conceits were as pearls in +his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and +cartels, where he often found passages like "the reason of the unreason +with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I +murmur at your beauty;" or again, "the high heavens, that of your +divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the +desert your greatness deserves." Over conceits of this sort the poor +gentleman lost his wits, and used to lie awake striving to understand +them and worm the meaning out of them; what Aristotle himself could not +have made out or extracted had he come to life again for that special +purpose. He was not at all easy about the wounds which Don Belianis gave +and took, because it seemed to him that, great as were the surgeons who +had cured him, he must have had his face and body covered all over with +seams and scars. He commended, however, the author's way of ending his +book with the promise of that interminable adventure, and many a time was +he tempted to take up his pen and finish it properly as is there +proposed, which no doubt he would have done, and made a successful piece +of work of it too, had not greater and more absorbing thoughts prevented +him. + +Many an argument did he have with the curate of his village (a learned +man, and a graduate of Siguenza) as to which had been the better knight, +Palmerin of England or Amadis of Gaul. Master Nicholas, the village +barber, however, used to say that neither of them came up to the Knight +of Phoebus, and that if there was any that could compare with him it was +Don Galaor, the brother of Amadis of Gaul, because he had a spirit that +was equal to every occasion, and was no finikin knight, nor lachrymose +like his brother, while in the matter of valour he was not a whit behind +him. In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his +nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring +over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so +dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read +about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, +wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so +possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read +of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it. +He used to say the Cid Ruy Diaz was a very good knight, but that he was +not to be compared with the Knight of the Burning Sword who with one +back-stroke cut in half two fierce and monstrous giants. He thought more +of Bernardo del Carpio because at Roncesvalles he slew Roland in spite of +enchantments, availing himself of the artifice of Hercules when he +strangled Antaeus the son of Terra in his arms. He approved highly of the +giant Morgante, because, although of the giant breed which is always +arrogant and ill-conditioned, he alone was affable and well-bred. But +above all he admired Reinaldos of Montalban, especially when he saw him +sallying forth from his castle and robbing everyone he met, and when +beyond the seas he stole that image of Mahomet which, as his history +says, was entirely of gold. To have a bout of kicking at that traitor of +a Ganelon he would have given his housekeeper, and his niece into the +bargain. + +In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion +that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it +was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honour as for +the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of +himself, roaming the world over in full armour and on horseback in quest +of adventures, and putting in practice himself all that he had read of as +being the usual practices of knights-errant; righting every kind of +wrong, and exposing himself to peril and danger from which, in the issue, +he was to reap eternal renown and fame. Already the poor man saw himself +crowned by the might of his arm Emperor of Trebizond at least; and so, +led away by the intense enjoyment he found in these pleasant fancies, he +set himself forthwith to put his scheme into execution. + +The first thing he did was to clean up some armour that had belonged to +his great-grandfather, and had been for ages lying forgotten in a corner +eaten with rust and covered with mildew. He scoured and polished it as +best he could, but he perceived one great defect in it, that it had no +closed helmet, nothing but a simple morion. This deficiency, however, his +ingenuity supplied, for he contrived a kind of half-helmet of pasteboard +which, fitted on to the morion, looked like a whole one. It is true that, +in order to see if it was strong and fit to stand a cut, he drew his +sword and gave it a couple of slashes, the first of which undid in an +instant what had taken him a week to do. The ease with which he had +knocked it to pieces disconcerted him somewhat, and to guard against that +danger he set to work again, fixing bars of iron on the inside until he +was satisfied with its strength; and then, not caring to try any more +experiments with it, he passed it and adopted it as a helmet of the most +perfect construction. + +He next proceeded to inspect his hack, which, with more quartos than a +real and more blemishes than the steed of Gonela, that "tantum pellis et +ossa fuit," surpassed in his eyes the Bucephalus of Alexander or the +Babieca of the Cid. Four days were spent in thinking what name to give +him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse +belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, +should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as +to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant, and +what he then was; for it was only reasonable that, his master taking a +new character, he should take a new name, and that it should be a +distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting the new order and calling +he was about to follow. And so, after having composed, struck out, +rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names out of his +memory and fancy, he decided upon calling him Rocinante, a name, to his +thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack +before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks +in the world. + +Having got a name for his horse so much to his taste, he was anxious to +get one for himself, and he was eight days more pondering over this +point, till at last he made up his mind to call himself "Don Quixote," +whence, as has been already said, the authors of this veracious history +have inferred that his name must have been beyond a doubt Quixada, and +not Quesada as others would have it. Recollecting, however, that the +valiant Amadis was not content to call himself curtly Amadis and nothing +more, but added the name of his kingdom and country to make it famous, +and called himself Amadis of Gaul, he, like a good knight, resolved to +add on the name of his, and to style himself Don Quixote of La Mancha, +whereby, he considered, he described accurately his origin and country, +and did honour to it in taking his surname from it. + +So then, his armour being furbished, his morion turned into a helmet, his +hack christened, and he himself confirmed, he came to the conclusion that +nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady to be in love +with; for a knight-errant without love was like a tree without leaves or +fruit, or a body without a soul. As he said to himself, "If, for my sins, +or by my good fortune, I come across some giant hereabouts, a common +occurrence with knights-errant, and overthrow him in one onslaught, or +cleave him asunder to the waist, or, in short, vanquish and subdue him, +will it not be well to have some one I may send him to as a present, that +he may come in and fall on his knees before my sweet lady, and in a +humble, submissive voice say, 'I am the giant Caraculiambro, lord of the +island of Malindrania, vanquished in single combat by the never +sufficiently extolled knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, who has commanded +me to present myself before your Grace, that your Highness dispose of me +at your pleasure'?" Oh, how our good gentleman enjoyed the delivery of +this speech, especially when he had thought of some one to call his Lady! +There was, so the story goes, in a village near his own a very +good-looking farm-girl with whom he had been at one time in love, though, +so far as is known, she never knew it nor gave a thought to the matter. +Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo, and upon her he thought fit to confer the +title of Lady of his Thoughts; and after some search for a name which +should not be out of harmony with her own, and should suggest and +indicate that of a princess and great lady, he decided upon calling her +Dulcinea del Toboso--she being of El Toboso--a name, to his mind, +musical, uncommon, and significant, like all those he had already +bestowed upon himself and the things belonging to him. + +Chapter II. - +Which Treats of the first sally the ingenious Don Quixote made from home + +These preliminaries settled, he did not care to put off any longer the +execution of his design, urged on to it by the thought of all the world +was losing by his delay, seeing what wrongs he intended to right, +grievances to redress, injustices to repair, abuses to remove, and duties +to discharge. So, without giving notice of his intention to anyone, and +without anybody seeing him, one morning before the dawning of the day +(which was one of the hottest of the month of July) he donned his suit of +armour, mounted Rocinante with his patched-up helmet on, braced his +buckler, took his lance, and by the back door of the yard sallied forth +upon the plain in the highest contentment and satisfaction at seeing with +what ease he had made a beginning with his grand purpose. But scarcely +did he find himself upon the open plain, when a terrible thought struck +him, one all but enough to make him abandon the enterprise at the very +outset. It occurred to him that he had not been dubbed a knight, and that +according to the law of chivalry he neither could nor ought to bear arms +against any knight; and that even if he had been, still he ought, as a +novice knight, to wear white armour, without a device upon the shield +until by his prowess he had earned one. These reflections made him waver +in his purpose, but his craze being stronger than any reasoning, he made +up his mind to have himself dubbed a knight by the first one he came +across, following the example of others in the same case, as he had read +in the books that brought him to this pass. As for white armour, he +resolved, on the first opportunity, to scour his until it was whiter than +an ermine; and so comforting himself he pursued his way, taking that +which his horse chose, for in this he believed lay the essence of +adventures. + +Thus setting out, our new-fledged adventurer paced along, talking to +himself and saying, "Who knows but that in time to come, when the +veracious history of my famous deeds is made known, the sage who writes +it, when he has to set forth my first sally in the early morning, will do +it after this fashion? 'Scarce had the rubicund Apollo spread o'er the +face of the broad spacious earth the golden threads of his bright hair, +scarce had the little birds of painted plumage attuned their notes to +hail with dulcet and mellifluous harmony the coming of the rosy Dawn, +that, deserting the soft couch of her jealous spouse, was appearing to +mortals at the gates and balconies of the Manchegan horizon, when the +renowned knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, quitting the lazy down, mounted +his celebrated steed Rocinante and began to traverse the ancient and +famous Campo de Montiel;'" which in fact he was actually traversing. +"Happy the age, happy the time," he continued, "in which shall be made +known my deeds of fame, worthy to be moulded in brass, carved in marble, +limned in pictures, for a memorial for ever. And thou, O sage magician, +whoever thou art, to whom it shall fall to be the chronicler of this +wondrous history, forget not, I entreat thee, my good Rocinante, the +constant companion of my ways and wanderings." Presently he broke out +again, as if he were love-stricken in earnest, "O Princess Dulcinea, lady +of this captive heart, a grievous wrong hast thou done me to drive me +forth with scorn, and with inexorable obduracy banish me from the +presence of thy beauty. O lady, deign to hold in remembrance this heart, +thy vassal, that thus in anguish pines for love of thee." + +So he went on stringing together these and other absurdities, all in the +style of those his books had taught him, imitating their language as well +as he could; and all the while he rode so slowly and the sun mounted so +rapidly and with such fervour that it was enough to melt his brains if he +had any. Nearly all day he travelled without anything remarkable +happening to him, at which he was in despair, for he was anxious to +encounter some one at once upon whom to try the might of his strong arm. + +Writers there are who say the first adventure he met with was that of +Puerto Lapice; others say it was that of the windmills; but what I have +ascertained on this point, and what I have found written in the annals of +La Mancha, is that he was on the road all day, and towards nightfall his +hack and he found themselves dead tired and hungry, when, looking all +around to see if he could discover any castle or shepherd's shanty where +he might refresh himself and relieve his sore wants, he perceived not far +out of his road an inn, which was as welcome as a star guiding him to the +portals, if not the palaces, of his redemption; and quickening his pace +he reached it just as night was setting in. At the door were standing two +young women, girls of the district as they call them, on their way to +Seville with some carriers who had chanced to halt that night at the inn; +and as, happen what might to our adventurer, everything he saw or imaged +seemed to him to be and to happen after the fashion of what he read of, +the moment he saw the inn he pictured it to himself as a castle with its +four turrets and pinnacles of shining silver, not forgetting the +drawbridge and moat and all the belongings usually ascribed to castles of +the sort. To this inn, which to him seemed a castle, he advanced, and at +a short distance from it he checked Rocinante, hoping that some dwarf +would show himself upon the battlements, and by sound of trumpet give +notice that a knight was approaching the castle. But seeing that they +were slow about it, and that Rocinante was in a hurry to reach the +stable, he made for the inn door, and perceived the two gay damsels who +were standing there, and who seemed to him to be two fair maidens or +lovely ladies taking their ease at the castle gate. + +At this moment it so happened that a swineherd who was going through the +stubbles collecting a drove of pigs (for, without any apology, that is +what they are called) gave a blast of his horn to bring them together, +and forthwith it seemed to Don Quixote to be what he was expecting, the +signal of some dwarf announcing his arrival; and so with prodigious +satisfaction he rode up to the inn and to the ladies, who, seeing a man +of this sort approaching in full armour and with lance and buckler, were +turning in dismay into the inn, when Don Quixote, guessing their fear by +their flight, raising his pasteboard visor, disclosed his dry dusty +visage, and with courteous bearing and gentle voice addressed them, "Your +ladyships need not fly or fear any rudeness, for that it belongs not to +the order of knighthood which I profess to offer to anyone, much less to +highborn maidens as your appearance proclaims you to be." The girls were +looking at him and straining their eyes to make out the features which +the clumsy visor obscured, but when they heard themselves called maidens, +a thing so much out of their line, they could not restrain their +laughter, which made Don Quixote wax indignant, and say, "Modesty becomes +the fair, and moreover laughter that has little cause is great silliness; +this, however, I say not to pain or anger you, for my desire is none +other than to serve you." + +The incomprehensible language and the unpromising looks of our cavalier +only increased the ladies' laughter, and that increased his irritation, +and matters might have gone farther if at that moment the landlord had +not come out, who, being a very fat man, was a very peaceful one. He, +seeing this grotesque figure clad in armour that did not match any more +than his saddle, bridle, lance, buckler, or corselet, was not at all +indisposed to join the damsels in their manifestations of amusement; but, +in truth, standing in awe of such a complicated armament, he thought it +best to speak him fairly, so he said, "Senor Caballero, if your worship +wants lodging, bating the bed (for there is not one in the inn) there is +plenty of everything else here." Don Quixote, observing the respectful +bearing of the Alcaide of the fortress (for so innkeeper and inn seemed +in his eyes), made answer, "Sir Castellan, for me anything will suffice, +for + +poem{ + +'My armour is my only wear, +My only rest the fray.'" + +}poem + +The host fancied he called him Castellan because he took him for a +"worthy of Castile," though he was in fact an Andalusian, and one from +the strand of San Lucar, as crafty a thief as Cacus and as full of tricks +as a student or a page. "In that case," said he, + +poem{ + +"'Your bed is on the flinty rock, +Your sleep to watch alway;' + +}poem + +and if so, you may dismount and safely reckon upon any quantity of +sleeplessness under this roof for a twelvemonth, not to say for a single +night." So saying, he advanced to hold the stirrup for Don Quixote, who +got down with great difficulty and exertion (for he had not broken his +fast all day), and then charged the host to take great care of his horse, +as he was the best bit of flesh that ever ate bread in this world. The +landlord eyed him over but did not find him as good as Don Quixote said, +nor even half as good; and putting him up in the stable, he returned to +see what might be wanted by his guest, whom the damsels, who had by this +time made their peace with him, were now relieving of his armour. They +had taken off his breastplate and backpiece, but they neither knew nor +saw how to open his gorget or remove his make-shift helmet, for he had +fastened it with green ribbons, which, as there was no untying the knots, +required to be cut. This, however, he would not by any means consent to, +so he remained all the evening with his helmet on, the drollest and +oddest figure that can be imagined; and while they were removing his +armour, taking the baggages who were about it for ladies of high degree +belonging to the castle, he said to them with great sprightliness: + +poem{ + +"Oh, never, surely, was there knight + So served by hand of dame, +As served was he, Don Quixote hight, + When from his town he came; +With maidens waiting on himself, + Princesses on his hack-- + +}poem + +or Rocinante, for that, ladies mine, is my horse's name, and Don Quixote +of La Mancha is my own; for though I had no intention of declaring myself +until my achievements in your service and honour had made me known, the +necessity of adapting that old ballad of Lancelot to the present occasion +has given you the knowledge of my name altogether prematurely. A time, +however, will come for your ladyships to command and me to obey, and then +the might of my arm will show my desire to serve you." + +The girls, who were not used to hearing rhetoric of this sort, had +nothing to say in reply; they only asked him if he wanted anything to +eat. "I would gladly eat a bit of something," said Don Quixote, "for I +feel it would come very seasonably." The day happened to be a Friday, and +in the whole inn there was nothing but some pieces of the fish they call +in Castile "abadejo," in Andalusia "bacallao," and in some places +"curadillo," and in others "troutlet;" so they asked him if he thought he +could eat troutlet, for there was no other fish to give him. "If there be +troutlets enough," said Don Quixote, "they will be the same thing as a +trout; for it is all one to me whether I am given eight reals in small +change or a piece of eight; moreover, it may be that these troutlets are +like veal, which is better than beef, or kid, which is better than goat. +But whatever it be let it come quickly, for the burden and pressure of +arms cannot be borne without support to the inside." They laid a table +for him at the door of the inn for the sake of the air, and the host +brought him a portion of ill-soaked and worse cooked stockfish, and a +piece of bread as black and mouldy as his own armour; but a laughable +sight it was to see him eating, for having his helmet on and the beaver +up, he could not with his own hands put anything into his mouth unless +some one else placed it there, and this service one of the ladies +rendered him. But to give him anything to drink was impossible, or would +have been so had not the landlord bored a reed, and putting one end in +his mouth poured the wine into him through the other; all which he bore +with patience rather than sever the ribbons of his helmet. + +While this was going on there came up to the inn a sowgelder, who, as he +approached, sounded his reed pipe four or five times, and thereby +completely convinced Don Quixote that he was in some famous castle, and +that they were regaling him with music, and that the stockfish was trout, +the bread the whitest, the wenches ladies, and the landlord the castellan +of the castle; and consequently he held that his enterprise and sally had +been to some purpose. But still it distressed him to think he had not +been dubbed a knight, for it was plain to him he could not lawfully +engage in any adventure without receiving the order of knighthood. + +Chapter III. - +Wherein is related the droll way in which Don Quixote had himself dubbed +a Knight + +Harassed by this reflection, he made haste with his scanty pothouse +supper, and having finished it called the landlord, and shutting himself +into the stable with him, fell on his knees before him, saying, "From +this spot I rise not, valiant knight, until your courtesy grants me the +boon I seek, one that will redound to your praise and the benefit of the +human race." The landlord, seeing his guest at his feet and hearing a +speech of this kind, stood staring at him in bewilderment, not knowing +what to do or say, and entreating him to rise, but all to no purpose +until he had agreed to grant the boon demanded of him. "I looked for no +less, my lord, from your High Magnificence," replied Don Quixote, "and I +have to tell you that the boon I have asked and your liberality has +granted is that you shall dub me knight to-morrow morning, and that +to-night I shall watch my arms in the chapel of this your castle; thus +tomorrow, as I have said, will be accomplished what I so much desire, +enabling me lawfully to roam through all the four quarters of the world +seeking adventures on behalf of those in distress, as is the duty of +chivalry and of knights-errant like myself, whose ambition is directed to +such deeds." + +The landlord, who, as has been mentioned, was something of a wag, and had +already some suspicion of his guest's want of wits, was quite convinced +of it on hearing talk of this kind from him, and to make sport for the +night he determined to fall in with his humour. So he told him he was +quite right in pursuing the object he had in view, and that such a motive +was natural and becoming in cavaliers as distinguished as he seemed and +his gallant bearing showed him to be; and that he himself in his younger +days had followed the same honourable calling, roaming in quest of +adventures in various parts of the world, among others the Curing-grounds +of Malaga, the Isles of Riaran, the Precinct of Seville, the Little +Market of Segovia, the Olivera of Valencia, the Rondilla of Granada, the +Strand of San Lucar, the Colt of Cordova, the Taverns of Toledo, and +divers other quarters, where he had proved the nimbleness of his feet and +the lightness of his fingers, doing many wrongs, cheating many widows, +ruining maids and swindling minors, and, in short, bringing himself under +the notice of almost every tribunal and court of justice in Spain; until +at last he had retired to this castle of his, where he was living upon +his property and upon that of others; and where he received all +knights-errant of whatever rank or condition they might be, all for the +great love he bore them and that they might share their substance with +him in return for his benevolence. He told him, moreover, that in this +castle of his there was no chapel in which he could watch his armour, as +it had been pulled down in order to be rebuilt, but that in a case of +necessity it might, he knew, be watched anywhere, and he might watch it +that night in a courtyard of the castle, and in the morning, God willing, +the requisite ceremonies might be performed so as to have him dubbed a +knight, and so thoroughly dubbed that nobody could be more so. He asked +if he had any money with him, to which Don Quixote replied that he had +not a farthing, as in the histories of knights-errant he had never read +of any of them carrying any. On this point the landlord told him he was +mistaken; for, though not recorded in the histories, because in the +author's opinion there was no need to mention anything so obvious and +necessary as money and clean shirts, it was not to be supposed therefore +that they did not carry them, and he might regard it as certain and +established that all knights-errant (about whom there were so many full +and unimpeachable books) carried well-furnished purses in case of +emergency, and likewise carried shirts and a little box of ointment to +cure the wounds they received. For in those plains and deserts where they +engaged in combat and came out wounded, it was not always that there was +some one to cure them, unless indeed they had for a friend some sage +magician to succour them at once by fetching through the air upon a cloud +some damsel or dwarf with a vial of water of such virtue that by tasting +one drop of it they were cured of their hurts and wounds in an instant +and left as sound as if they had not received any damage whatever. But in +case this should not occur, the knights of old took care to see that +their squires were provided with money and other requisites, such as lint +and ointments for healing purposes; and when it happened that knights had +no squires (which was rarely and seldom the case) they themselves carried +everything in cunning saddle-bags that were hardly seen on the horse's +croup, as if it were something else of more importance, because, unless +for some such reason, carrying saddle-bags was not very favourably +regarded among knights-errant. He therefore advised him (and, as his +godson so soon to be, he might even command him) never from that time +forth to travel without money and the usual requirements, and he would +find the advantage of them when he least expected it. + +Don Quixote promised to follow his advice scrupulously, and it was +arranged forthwith that he should watch his armour in a large yard at one +side of the inn; so, collecting it all together, Don Quixote placed it on +a trough that stood by the side of a well, and bracing his buckler on his +arm he grasped his lance and began with a stately air to march up and +down in front of the trough, and as he began his march night began to +fall. + +The landlord told all the people who were in the inn about the craze of +his guest, the watching of the armour, and the dubbing ceremony he +contemplated. Full of wonder at so strange a form of madness, they +flocked to see it from a distance, and observed with what composure he +sometimes paced up and down, or sometimes, leaning on his lance, gazed on +his armour without taking his eyes off it for ever so long; and as the +night closed in with a light from the moon so brilliant that it might vie +with his that lent it, everything the novice knight did was plainly seen +by all. + +Meanwhile one of the carriers who were in the inn thought fit to water +his team, and it was necessary to remove Don Quixote's armour as it lay +on the trough; but he seeing the other approach hailed him in a loud +voice, "O thou, whoever thou art, rash knight that comest to lay hands on +the armour of the most valorous errant that ever girt on sword, have a +care what thou dost; touch it not unless thou wouldst lay down thy life +as the penalty of thy rashness." The carrier gave no heed to these words +(and he would have done better to heed them if he had been heedful of his +health), but seizing it by the straps flung the armour some distance from +him. Seeing this, Don Quixote raised his eyes to heaven, and fixing his +thoughts, apparently, upon his lady Dulcinea, exclaimed, "Aid me, lady +mine, in this the first encounter that presents itself to this breast +which thou holdest in subjection; let not thy favour and protection fail +me in this first jeopardy;" and, with these words and others to the same +purpose, dropping his buckler he lifted his lance with both hands and +with it smote such a blow on the carrier's head that he stretched him on +the ground, so stunned that had he followed it up with a second there +would have been no need of a surgeon to cure him. This done, he picked up +his armour and returned to his beat with the same serenity as before. + +Shortly after this, another, not knowing what had happened (for the +carrier still lay senseless), came with the same object of giving water +to his mules, and was proceeding to remove the armour in order to clear +the trough, when Don Quixote, without uttering a word or imploring aid +from anyone, once more dropped his buckler and once more lifted his +lance, and without actually breaking the second carrier's head into +pieces, made more than three of it, for he laid it open in four. At the +noise all the people of the inn ran to the spot, and among them the +landlord. Seeing this, Don Quixote braced his buckler on his arm, and +with his hand on his sword exclaimed, "O Lady of Beauty, strength and +support of my faint heart, it is time for thee to turn the eyes of thy +greatness on this thy captive knight on the brink of so mighty an +adventure." By this he felt himself so inspired that he would not have +flinched if all the carriers in the world had assailed him. The comrades +of the wounded perceiving the plight they were in began from a distance +to shower stones on Don Quixote, who screened himself as best he could +with his buckler, not daring to quit the trough and leave his armour +unprotected. The landlord shouted to them to leave him alone, for he had +already told them that he was mad, and as a madman he would not be +accountable even if he killed them all. Still louder shouted Don Quixote, +calling them knaves and traitors, and the lord of the castle, who allowed +knights-errant to be treated in this fashion, a villain and a low-born +knight whom, had he received the order of knighthood, he would call to +account for his treachery. "But of you," he cried, "base and vile rabble, +I make no account; fling, strike, come on, do all ye can against me, ye +shall see what the reward of your folly and insolence will be." This he +uttered with so much spirit and boldness that he filled his assailants +with a terrible fear, and as much for this reason as at the persuasion of +the landlord they left off stoning him, and he allowed them to carry off +the wounded, and with the same calmness and composure as before resumed +the watch over his armour. + +But these freaks of his guest were not much to the liking of the +landlord, so he determined to cut matters short and confer upon him at +once the unlucky order of knighthood before any further misadventure +could occur; so, going up to him, he apologised for the rudeness which, +without his knowledge, had been offered to him by these low people, who, +however, had been well punished for their audacity. As he had already +told him, he said, there was no chapel in the castle, nor was it needed +for what remained to be done, for, as he understood the ceremonial of the +order, the whole point of being dubbed a knight lay in the accolade and +in the slap on the shoulder, and that could be administered in the middle +of a field; and that he had now done all that was needful as to watching +the armour, for all requirements were satisfied by a watch of two hours +only, while he had been more than four about it. Don Quixote believed it +all, and told him he stood there ready to obey him, and to make an end of +it with as much despatch as possible; for, if he were again attacked, and +felt himself to be dubbed knight, he would not, he thought, leave a soul +alive in the castle, except such as out of respect he might spare at his +bidding. + +Thus warned and menaced, the castellan forthwith brought out a book in +which he used to enter the straw and barley he served out to the +carriers, and, with a lad carrying a candle-end, and the two damsels +already mentioned, he returned to where Don Quixote stood, and bade him +kneel down. Then, reading from his account-book as if he were repeating +some devout prayer, in the middle of his delivery he raised his hand and +gave him a sturdy blow on the neck, and then, with his own sword, a smart +slap on the shoulder, all the while muttering between his teeth as if he +was saying his prayers. Having done this, he directed one of the ladies +to gird on his sword, which she did with great self-possession and +gravity, and not a little was required to prevent a burst of laughter at +each stage of the ceremony; but what they had already seen of the novice +knight's prowess kept their laughter within bounds. On girding him with +the sword the worthy lady said to him, "May God make your worship a very +fortunate knight, and grant you success in battle." Don Quixote asked her +name in order that he might from that time forward know to whom he was +beholden for the favour he had received, as he meant to confer upon her +some portion of the honour he acquired by the might of his arm. She +answered with great humility that she was called La Tolosa, and that she +was the daughter of a cobbler of Toledo who lived in the stalls of +Sanchobienaya, and that wherever she might be she would serve and esteem +him as her lord. Don Quixote said in reply that she would do him a favour +if thenceforward she assumed the "Don" and called herself Dona Tolosa. +She promised she would, and then the other buckled on his spur, and with +her followed almost the same conversation as with the lady of the sword. +He asked her name, and she said it was La Molinera, and that she was the +daughter of a respectable miller of Antequera; and of her likewise Don +Quixote requested that she would adopt the "Don" and call herself Dona +Molinera, making offers to her further services and favours. + +Having thus, with hot haste and speed, brought to a conclusion these +never-till-now-seen ceremonies, Don Quixote was on thorns until he saw +himself on horseback sallying forth in quest of adventures; and saddling +Rocinante at once he mounted, and embracing his host, as he returned +thanks for his kindness in knighting him, he addressed him in language so +extraordinary that it is impossible to convey an idea of it or report it. +The landlord, to get him out of the inn, replied with no less rhetoric +though with shorter words, and without calling upon him to pay the +reckoning let him go with a Godspeed. + +Chapter IV. - +Of what happened to our Knight when he left the inn + +Day was dawning when Don Quixote quitted the inn, so happy, so gay, so +exhilarated at finding himself now dubbed a knight, that his joy was like +to burst his horse-girths. However, recalling the advice of his host as +to the requisites he ought to carry with him, especially that referring +to money and shirts, he determined to go home and provide himself with +all, and also with a squire, for he reckoned upon securing a +farm-labourer, a neighbour of his, a poor man with a family, but very +well qualified for the office of squire to a knight. With this object he +turned his horse's head towards his village, and Rocinante, thus reminded +of his old quarters, stepped out so briskly that he hardly seemed to +tread the earth. + +He had not gone far, when out of a thicket on his right there seemed to +come feeble cries as of some one in distress, and the instant he heard +them he exclaimed, "Thanks be to heaven for the favour it accords me, +that it so soon offers me an opportunity of fulfilling the obligation I +have undertaken, and gathering the fruit of my ambition. These cries, no +doubt, come from some man or woman in want of help, and needing my aid +and protection;" and wheeling, he turned Rocinante in the direction +whence the cries seemed to proceed. He had gone but a few paces into the +wood, when he saw a mare tied to an oak, and tied to another, and +stripped from the waist upwards, a youth of about fifteen years of age, +from whom the cries came. Nor were they without cause, for a lusty farmer +was flogging him with a belt and following up every blow with scoldings +and commands, repeating, "Your mouth shut and your eyes open!" while the +youth made answer, "I won't do it again, master mine; by God's passion I +won't do it again, and I'll take more care of the flock another time." + +Seeing what was going on, Don Quixote said in an angry voice, +"Discourteous knight, it ill becomes you to assail one who cannot defend +himself; mount your steed and take your lance" (for there was a lance +leaning against the oak to which the mare was tied), "and I will make you +know that you are behaving as a coward." The farmer, seeing before him +this figure in full armour brandishing a lance over his head, gave +himself up for dead, and made answer meekly, "Sir Knight, this youth that +I am chastising is my servant, employed by me to watch a flock of sheep +that I have hard by, and he is so careless that I lose one every day, and +when I punish him for his carelessness and knavery he says I do it out of +niggardliness, to escape paying him the wages I owe him, and before God, +and on my soul, he lies." + +"Lies before me, base clown!" said Don Quixote. "By the sun that shines +on us I have a mind to run you through with this lance. Pay him at once +without another word; if not, by the God that rules us I will make an end +of you, and annihilate you on the spot; release him instantly." + +The farmer hung his head, and without a word untied his servant, of whom +Don Quixote asked how much his master owed him. + +He replied, nine months at seven reals a month. Don Quixote added it up, +found that it came to sixty-three reals, and told the farmer to pay it +down immediately, if he did not want to die for it. + +The trembling clown replied that as he lived and by the oath he had sworn +(though he had not sworn any) it was not so much; for there were to be +taken into account and deducted three pairs of shoes he had given him, +and a real for two blood-lettings when he was sick. + +"All that is very well," said Don Quixote; "but let the shoes and the +blood-lettings stand as a setoff against the blows you have given him +without any cause; for if he spoiled the leather of the shoes you paid +for, you have damaged that of his body, and if the barber took blood from +him when he was sick, you have drawn it when he was sound; so on that +score he owes you nothing." + +"The difficulty is, Sir Knight, that I have no money here; let Andres +come home with me, and I will pay him all, real by real." + +"I go with him!" said the youth. "Nay, God forbid! No, senor, not for the +world; for once alone with me, he would ray me like a Saint Bartholomew." + +"He will do nothing of the kind," said Don Quixote; "I have only to +command, and he will obey me; and as he has sworn to me by the order of +knighthood which he has received, I leave him free, and I guarantee the +payment." + +"Consider what you are saying, senor," said the youth; "this master of +mine is not a knight, nor has he received any order of knighthood; for he +is Juan Haldudo the Rich, of Quintanar." + +"That matters little," replied Don Quixote; "there may be Haldudos +knights; moreover, everyone is the son of his works." + +"That is true," said Andres; "but this master of mine--of what works is +he the son, when he refuses me the wages of my sweat and labour?" + +"I do not refuse, brother Andres," said the farmer, "be good enough to +come along with me, and I swear by all the orders of knighthood there are +in the world to pay you as I have agreed, real by real, and perfumed." + +"For the perfumery I excuse you," said Don Quixote; "give it to him in +reals, and I shall be satisfied; and see that you do as you have sworn; +if not, by the same oath I swear to come back and hunt you out and punish +you; and I shall find you though you should lie closer than a lizard. And +if you desire to know who it is lays this command upon you, that you be +more firmly bound to obey it, know that I am the valorous Don Quixote of +La Mancha, the undoer of wrongs and injustices; and so, God be with you, +and keep in mind what you have promised and sworn under those penalties +that have been already declared to you." + +So saying, he gave Rocinante the spur and was soon out of reach. The +farmer followed him with his eyes, and when he saw that he had cleared +the wood and was no longer in sight, he turned to his boy Andres, and +said, "Come here, my son, I want to pay you what I owe you, as that +undoer of wrongs has commanded me." + +"My oath on it," said Andres, "your worship will be well advised to obey +the command of that good knight--may he live a thousand years--for, as he +is a valiant and just judge, by Roque, if you do not pay me, he will come +back and do as he said." + +"My oath on it, too," said the farmer; "but as I have a strong affection +for you, I want to add to the debt in order to add to the payment;" and +seizing him by the arm, he tied him up again, and gave him such a +flogging that he left him for dead. + +"Now, Master Andres," said the farmer, "call on the undoer of wrongs; you +will find he won't undo that, though I am not sure that I have quite done +with you, for I have a good mind to flay you alive." But at last he +untied him, and gave him leave to go look for his judge in order to put +the sentence pronounced into execution. + +Andres went off rather down in the mouth, swearing he would go to look +for the valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha and tell him exactly what had +happened, and that all would have to be repaid him sevenfold; but for all +that, he went off weeping, while his master stood laughing. + +Thus did the valiant Don Quixote right that wrong, and, thoroughly +satisfied with what had taken place, as he considered he had made a very +happy and noble beginning with his knighthood, he took the road towards +his village in perfect self-content, saying in a low voice, "Well mayest +thou this day call thyself fortunate above all on earth, O Dulcinea del +Toboso, fairest of the fair! since it has fallen to thy lot to hold +subject and submissive to thy full will and pleasure a knight so renowned +as is and will be Don Quixote of La Mancha, who, as all the world knows, +yesterday received the order of knighthood, and hath to-day righted the +greatest wrong and grievance that ever injustice conceived and cruelty +perpetrated: who hath to-day plucked the rod from the hand of yonder +ruthless oppressor so wantonly lashing that tender child." + +He now came to a road branching in four directions, and immediately he +was reminded of those cross-roads where knights-errant used to stop to +consider which road they should take. In imitation of them he halted for +a while, and after having deeply considered it, he gave Rocinante his +head, submitting his own will to that of his hack, who followed out his +first intention, which was to make straight for his own stable. After he +had gone about two miles Don Quixote perceived a large party of people, +who, as afterwards appeared, were some Toledo traders, on their way to +buy silk at Murcia. There were six of them coming along under their +sunshades, with four servants mounted, and three muleteers on foot. +Scarcely had Don Quixote descried them when the fancy possessed him that +this must be some new adventure; and to help him to imitate as far as he +could those passages he had read of in his books, here seemed to come one +made on purpose, which he resolved to attempt. So with a lofty bearing +and determination he fixed himself firmly in his stirrups, got his lance +ready, brought his buckler before his breast, and planting himself in the +middle of the road, stood waiting the approach of these knights-errant, +for such he now considered and held them to be; and when they had come +near enough to see and hear, he exclaimed with a haughty gesture, "All +the world stand, unless all the world confess that in all the world there +is no maiden fairer than the Empress of La Mancha, the peerless Dulcinea +del Toboso." + +The traders halted at the sound of this language and the sight of the +strange figure that uttered it, and from both figure and language at once +guessed the craze of their owner; they wished, however, to learn quietly +what was the object of this confession that was demanded of them, and one +of them, who was rather fond of a joke and was very sharp-witted, said to +him, "Sir Knight, we do not know who this good lady is that you speak of; +show her to us, for, if she be of such beauty as you suggest, with all +our hearts and without any pressure we will confess the truth that is on +your part required of us." + +"If I were to show her to you," replied Don Quixote, "what merit would +you have in confessing a truth so manifest? The essential point is that +without seeing her you must believe, confess, affirm, swear, and defend +it; else ye have to do with me in battle, ill-conditioned, arrogant +rabble that ye are; and come ye on, one by one as the order of knighthood +requires, or all together as is the custom and vile usage of your breed, +here do I bide and await you relying on the justice of the cause I +maintain." + +"Sir Knight," replied the trader, "I entreat your worship in the name of +this present company of princes, that, to save us from charging our +consciences with the confession of a thing we have never seen or heard +of, and one moreover so much to the prejudice of the Empresses and Queens +of the Alcarria and Estremadura, your worship will be pleased to show us +some portrait of this lady, though it be no bigger than a grain of wheat; +for by the thread one gets at the ball, and in this way we shall be +satisfied and easy, and you will be content and pleased; nay, I believe +we are already so far agreed with you that even though her portrait +should show her blind of one eye, and distilling vermilion and sulphur +from the other, we would nevertheless, to gratify your worship, say all +in her favour that you desire." + +"She distils nothing of the kind, vile rabble," said Don Quixote, burning +with rage, "nothing of the kind, I say, only ambergris and civet in +cotton; nor is she one-eyed or humpbacked, but straighter than a +Guadarrama spindle: but ye must pay for the blasphemy ye have uttered +against beauty like that of my lady." + +And so saying, he charged with levelled lance against the one who had +spoken, with such fury and fierceness that, if luck had not contrived +that Rocinante should stumble midway and come down, it would have gone +hard with the rash trader. Down went Rocinante, and over went his master, +rolling along the ground for some distance; and when he tried to rise he +was unable, so encumbered was he with lance, buckler, spurs, helmet, and +the weight of his old armour; and all the while he was struggling to get +up he kept saying, "Fly not, cowards and caitiffs! stay, for not by my +fault, but my horse's, am I stretched here." + +One of the muleteers in attendance, who could not have had much good +nature in him, hearing the poor prostrate man blustering in this style, +was unable to refrain from giving him an answer on his ribs; and coming +up to him he seized his lance, and having broken it in pieces, with one +of them he began so to belabour our Don Quixote that, notwithstanding and +in spite of his armour, he milled him like a measure of wheat. His +masters called out not to lay on so hard and to leave him alone, but the +muleteers blood was up, and he did not care to drop the game until he had +vented the rest of his wrath, and gathering up the remaining fragments of +the lance he finished with a discharge upon the unhappy victim, who all +through the storm of sticks that rained on him never ceased threatening +heaven, and earth, and the brigands, for such they seemed to him. At last +the muleteer was tired, and the traders continued their journey, taking +with them matter for talk about the poor fellow who had been cudgelled. +He when he found himself alone made another effort to rise; but if he was +unable when whole and sound, how was he to rise after having been +thrashed and well-nigh knocked to pieces? And yet he esteemed himself +fortunate, as it seemed to him that this was a regular knight-errant's +mishap, and entirely, he considered, the fault of his horse. However, +battered in body as he was, to rise was beyond his power. + +Chapter V. - +In which the narrative of our Knight's mishap is continued + +Finding, then, that, in fact he could not move, he thought himself of +having recourse to his usual remedy, which was to think of some passage +in his books, and his craze brought to his mind that about Baldwin and +the Marquis of Mantua, when Carloto left him wounded on the mountain +side, a story known by heart by the children, not forgotten by the young +men, and lauded and even believed by the old folk; and for all that not a +whit truer than the miracles of Mahomet. This seemed to him to fit +exactly the case in which he found himself, so, making a show of severe +suffering, he began to roll on the ground and with feeble breath repeat +the very words which the wounded knight of the wood is said to have +uttered: + +poem{ + +Where art thou, lady mine, that thou + My sorrow dost not rue? +Thou canst not know it, lady mine, + Or else thou art untrue. + +}poem + +And so he went on with the ballad as far as the lines: + +poem{ + +O noble Marquis of Mantua, + My Uncle and liege lord! + +}poem + +As chance would have it, when he had got to this line there happened to +come by a peasant from his own village, a neighbour of his, who had been +with a load of wheat to the mill, and he, seeing the man stretched there, +came up to him and asked him who he was and what was the matter with him +that he complained so dolefully. + +Don Quixote was firmly persuaded that this was the Marquis of Mantua, his +uncle, so the only answer he made was to go on with his ballad, in which +he told the tale of his misfortune, and of the loves of the Emperor's son +and his wife all exactly as the ballad sings it. + +The peasant stood amazed at hearing such nonsense, and relieving him of +the visor, already battered to pieces by blows, he wiped his face, which +was covered with dust, and as soon as he had done so he recognised him +and said, "Senor Quixada" (for so he appears to have been called when he +was in his senses and had not yet changed from a quiet country gentleman +into a knight-errant), "who has brought your worship to this pass?" But +to all questions the other only went on with his ballad. + +Seeing this, the good man removed as well as he could his breastplate and +backpiece to see if he had any wound, but he could perceive no blood nor +any mark whatever. He then contrived to raise him from the ground, and +with no little difficulty hoisted him upon his ass, which seemed to him +to be the easiest mount for him; and collecting the arms, even to the +splinters of the lance, he tied them on Rocinante, and leading him by the +bridle and the ass by the halter he took the road for the village, very +sad to hear what absurd stuff Don Quixote was talking. + +Nor was Don Quixote less so, for what with blows and bruises he could not +sit upright on the ass, and from time to time he sent up sighs to heaven, +so that once more he drove the peasant to ask what ailed him. And it +could have been only the devil himself that put into his head tales to +match his own adventures, for now, forgetting Baldwin, he bethought +himself of the Moor Abindarraez, when the Alcaide of Antequera, Rodrigo +de Narvaez, took him prisoner and carried him away to his castle; so that +when the peasant again asked him how he was and what ailed him, he gave +him for reply the same words and phrases that the captive Abindarraez +gave to Rodrigo de Narvaez, just as he had read the story in the "Diana" +of Jorge de Montemayor where it is written, applying it to his own case +so aptly that the peasant went along cursing his fate that he had to +listen to such a lot of nonsense; from which, however, he came to the +conclusion that his neighbour was mad, and so made all haste to reach the +village to escape the wearisomeness of this harangue of Don Quixote's; +who, at the end of it, said, "Senor Don Rodrigo de Narvaez, your worship +must know that this fair Xarifa I have mentioned is now the lovely +Dulcinea del Toboso, for whom I have done, am doing, and will do the most +famous deeds of chivalry that in this world have been seen, are to be +seen, or ever shall be seen." + +To this the peasant answered, "Senor--sinner that I am!--cannot your +worship see that I am not Don Rodrigo de Narvaez nor the Marquis of +Mantua, but Pedro Alonso your neighbour, and that your worship is neither +Baldwin nor Abindarraez, but the worthy gentleman Senor Quixada?" + +"I know who I am," replied Don Quixote, "and I know that I may be not +only those I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France and even all +the Nine Worthies, since my achievements surpass all that they have done +all together and each of them on his own account." + +With this talk and more of the same kind they reached the village just as +night was beginning to fall, but the peasant waited until it was a little +later that the belaboured gentleman might not be seen riding in such a +miserable trim. When it was what seemed to him the proper time he entered +the village and went to Don Quixote's house, which he found all in +confusion, and there were the curate and the village barber, who were +great friends of Don Quixote, and his housekeeper was saying to them in a +loud voice, "What does your worship think can have befallen my master, +Senor Licentiate Pero Perez?" for so the curate was called; "it is three +days now since anything has been seen of him, or the hack, or the +buckler, lance, or armour. Miserable me! I am certain of it, and it is as +true as that I was born to die, that these accursed books of chivalry he +has, and has got into the way of reading so constantly, have upset his +reason; for now I remember having often heard him saying to himself that +he would turn knight-errant and go all over the world in quest of +adventures. To the devil and Barabbas with such books, that have brought +to ruin in this way the finest understanding there was in all La Mancha!" + +The niece said the same, and, more: "You must know, Master Nicholas"--for +that was the name of the barber--"it was often my uncle's way to stay two +days and nights together poring over these unholy books of misventures, +after which he would fling the book away and snatch up his sword and fall +to slashing the walls; and when he was tired out he would say he had +killed four giants like four towers; and the sweat that flowed from him +when he was weary he said was the blood of the wounds he had received in +battle; and then he would drink a great jug of cold water and become calm +and quiet, saying that this water was a most precious potion which the +sage Esquife, a great magician and friend of his, had brought him. But I +take all the blame upon myself for never having told your worships of my +uncle's vagaries, that you might put a stop to them before things had +come to this pass, and burn all these accursed books--for he has a great +number--that richly deserve to be burned like heretics." + +"So say I too," said the curate, "and by my faith to-morrow shall not +pass without public judgment upon them, and may they be condemned to the +flames lest they lead those that read to behave as my good friend seems +to have behaved." + +All this the peasant heard, and from it he understood at last what was +the matter with his neighbour, so he began calling aloud, "Open, your +worships, to Senor Baldwin and to Senor the Marquis of Mantua, who comes +badly wounded, and to Senor Abindarraez, the Moor, whom the valiant +Rodrigo de Narvaez, the Alcaide of Antequera, brings captive." + +At these words they all hurried out, and when they recognised their +friend, master, and uncle, who had not yet dismounted from the ass +because he could not, they ran to embrace him. + +"Hold!" said he, "for I am badly wounded through my horse's fault; carry +me to bed, and if possible send for the wise Urganda to cure and see to +my wounds." + +"See there! plague on it!" cried the housekeeper at this: "did not my +heart tell the truth as to which foot my master went lame of? To bed with +your worship at once, and we will contrive to cure you here without +fetching that Hurgada. A curse I say once more, and a hundred times more, +on those books of chivalry that have brought your worship to such a +pass." + +They carried him to bed at once, and after searching for his wounds could +find none, but he said they were all bruises from having had a severe +fall with his horse Rocinante when in combat with ten giants, the biggest +and the boldest to be found on earth. + +"So, so!" said the curate, "are there giants in the dance? By the sign of +the Cross I will burn them to-morrow before the day over." + +They put a host of questions to Don Quixote, but his only answer to all +was--give him something to eat, and leave him to sleep, for that was what +he needed most. They did so, and the curate questioned the peasant at +great length as to how he had found Don Quixote. He told him, and the +nonsense he had talked when found and on the way home, all which made the +licentiate the more eager to do what he did the next day, which was to +summon his friend the barber, Master Nicholas, and go with him to Don +Quixote's house. + +Chapter VI. - +Of the diverting and important scrutiny which the curate and the barber +made in the library of our ingenious gentleman + +He was still sleeping; so the curate asked the niece for the keys of the +room where the books, the authors of all the mischief, were, and right +willingly she gave them. They all went in, the housekeeper with them, and +found more than a hundred volumes of big books very well bound, and some +other small ones. The moment the housekeeper saw them she turned about +and ran out of the room, and came back immediately with a saucer of holy +water and a sprinkler, saying, "Here, your worship, senor licentiate, +sprinkle this room; don't leave any magician of the many there are in +these books to bewitch us in revenge for our design of banishing them +from the world." + +The simplicity of the housekeeper made the licentiate laugh, and he +directed the barber to give him the books one by one to see what they +were about, as there might be some to be found among them that did not +deserve the penalty of fire. + +"No," said the niece, "there is no reason for showing mercy to any of +them; they have every one of them done mischief; better fling them out of +the window into the court and make a pile of them and set fire to them; +or else carry them into the yard, and there a bonfire can be made without +the smoke giving any annoyance." The housekeeper said the same, so eager +were they both for the slaughter of those innocents, but the curate would +not agree to it without first reading at any rate the titles. + +The first that Master Nicholas put into his hand was "The four books of +Amadis of Gaul." "This seems a mysterious thing," said the curate, "for, +as I have heard say, this was the first book of chivalry printed in +Spain, and from this all the others derive their birth and origin; so it +seems to me that we ought inexorably to condemn it to the flames as the +founder of so vile a sect." + +"Nay, sir," said the barber, "I too, have heard say that this is the best +of all the books of this kind that have been written, and so, as +something singular in its line, it ought to be pardoned." + +"True," said the curate; "and for that reason let its life be spared for +the present. Let us see that other which is next to it." + +"It is," said the barber, "the 'Sergas de Esplandian,' the lawful son of +Amadis of Gaul." + +"Then verily," said the curate, "the merit of the father must not be put +down to the account of the son. Take it, mistress housekeeper; open the +window and fling it into the yard and lay the foundation of the pile for +the bonfire we are to make." + +The housekeeper obeyed with great satisfaction, and the worthy +"Esplandian" went flying into the yard to await with all patience the +fire that was in store for him. + +"Proceed," said the curate. + +"This that comes next," said the barber, "is 'Amadis of Greece,' and, +indeed, I believe all those on this side are of the same Amadis lineage." + +"Then to the yard with the whole of them," said the curate; "for to have +the burning of Queen Pintiquiniestra, and the shepherd Darinel and his +eclogues, and the bedevilled and involved discourses of his author, I +would burn with them the father who begot me if he were going about in +the guise of a knight-errant." + +"I am of the same mind," said the barber. + +"And so am I," added the niece. + +"In that case," said the housekeeper, "here, into the yard with them!" + +They were handed to her, and as there were many of them, she spared +herself the staircase, and flung them down out of the window. + +"Who is that tub there?" said the curate. + +"This," said the barber, "is 'Don Olivante de Laura.'" + +"The author of that book," said the curate, "was the same that wrote 'The +Garden of Flowers,' and truly there is no deciding which of the two books +is the more truthful, or, to put it better, the less lying; all I can say +is, send this one into the yard for a swaggering fool." + +"This that follows is 'Florismarte of Hircania,'" said the barber. + +"Senor Florismarte here?" said the curate; "then by my faith he must take +up his quarters in the yard, in spite of his marvellous birth and +visionary adventures, for the stiffness and dryness of his style deserve +nothing else; into the yard with him and the other, mistress +housekeeper." + +"With all my heart, senor," said she, and executed the order with great +delight. + +"This," said the barber, "is The Knight Platir.'" + +"An old book that," said the curate, "but I find no reason for clemency +in it; send it after the others without appeal;" which was done. + +Another book was opened, and they saw it was entitled, "The Knight of the +Cross." + +"For the sake of the holy name this book has," said the curate, "its +ignorance might be excused; but then, they say, 'behind the cross there's +the devil; to the fire with it." + +Taking down another book, the barber said, "This is 'The Mirror of +Chivalry.'" + +"I know his worship," said the curate; "that is where Senor Reinaldos of +Montalvan figures with his friends and comrades, greater thieves than +Cacus, and the Twelve Peers of France with the veracious historian +Turpin; however, I am not for condemning them to more than perpetual +banishment, because, at any rate, they have some share in the invention +of the famous Matteo Boiardo, whence too the Christian poet Ludovico +Ariosto wove his web, to whom, if I find him here, and speaking any +language but his own, I shall show no respect whatever; but if he speaks +his own tongue I will put him upon my head." + +"Well, I have him in Italian," said the barber, "but I do not understand +him." + +"Nor would it be well that you should understand him," said the curate, +"and on that score we might have excused the Captain if he had not +brought him into Spain and turned him into Castilian. He robbed him of a +great deal of his natural force, and so do all those who try to turn +books written in verse into another language, for, with all the pains +they take and all the cleverness they show, they never can reach the +level of the originals as they were first produced. In short, I say that +this book, and all that may be found treating of those French affairs, +should be thrown into or deposited in some dry well, until after more +consideration it is settled what is to be done with them; excepting +always one 'Bernardo del Carpio' that is going about, and another called +'Roncesvalles;' for these, if they come into my hands, shall pass at once +into those of the housekeeper, and from hers into the fire without any +reprieve." + +To all this the barber gave his assent, and looked upon it as right and +proper, being persuaded that the curate was so staunch to the Faith and +loyal to the Truth that he would not for the world say anything opposed +to them. Opening another book he saw it was "Palmerin de Oliva," and +beside it was another called "Palmerin of England," seeing which the +licentiate said, "Let the Olive be made firewood of at once and burned +until no ashes even are left; and let that Palm of England be kept and +preserved as a thing that stands alone, and let such another case be made +for it as that which Alexander found among the spoils of Darius and set +aside for the safe keeping of the works of the poet Homer. This book, +gossip, is of authority for two reasons, first because it is very good, +and secondly because it is said to have been written by a wise and witty +king of Portugal. All the adventures at the Castle of Miraguarda are +excellent and of admirable contrivance, and the language is polished and +clear, studying and observing the style befitting the speaker with +propriety and judgment. So then, provided it seems good to you, Master +Nicholas, I say let this and 'Amadis of Gaul' be remitted the penalty of +fire, and as for all the rest, let them perish without further question +or query." + +"Nay, gossip," said the barber, "for this that I have here is the famous +'Don Belianis.'" + +"Well," said the curate, "that and the second, third, and fourth parts +all stand in need of a little rhubarb to purge their excess of bile, and +they must be cleared of all that stuff about the Castle of Fame and other +greater affectations, to which end let them be allowed the over-seas +term, and, according as they mend, so shall mercy or justice be meted out +to them; and in the mean time, gossip, do you keep them in your house and +let no one read them." + +"With all my heart," said the barber; and not caring to tire himself with +reading more books of chivalry, he told the housekeeper to take all the +big ones and throw them into the yard. It was not said to one dull or +deaf, but to one who enjoyed burning them more than weaving the broadest +and finest web that could be; and seizing about eight at a time, she +flung them out of the window. + +In carrying so many together she let one fall at the feet of the barber, +who took it up, curious to know whose it was, and found it said, "History +of the Famous Knight, Tirante el Blanco." + +"God bless me!" said the curate with a shout, "'Tirante el Blanco' here! +Hand it over, gossip, for in it I reckon I have found a treasury of +enjoyment and a mine of recreation. Here is Don Kyrieleison of Montalvan, +a valiant knight, and his brother Thomas of Montalvan, and the knight +Fonseca, with the battle the bold Tirante fought with the mastiff, and +the witticisms of the damsel Placerdemivida, and the loves and wiles of +the widow Reposada, and the empress in love with the squire Hipolito--in +truth, gossip, by right of its style it is the best book in the world. +Here knights eat and sleep, and die in their beds, and make their wills +before dying, and a great deal more of which there is nothing in all the +other books. Nevertheless, I say he who wrote it, for deliberately +composing such fooleries, deserves to be sent to the galleys for life. +Take it home with you and read it, and you will see that what I have said +is true." + +"As you will," said the barber; "but what are we to do with these little +books that are left?" + +"These must be, not chivalry, but poetry," said the curate; and opening +one he saw it was the "Diana" of Jorge de Montemayor, and, supposing all +the others to be of the same sort, "these," he said, "do not deserve to +be burned like the others, for they neither do nor can do the mischief +the books of chivalry have done, being books of entertainment that can +hurt no one." + +"Ah, senor!" said the niece, "your worship had better order these to be +burned as well as the others; for it would be no wonder if, after being +cured of his chivalry disorder, my uncle, by reading these, took a fancy +to turn shepherd and range the woods and fields singing and piping; or, +what would be still worse, to turn poet, which they say is an incurable +and infectious malady." + +"The damsel is right," said the curate, "and it will be well to put this +stumbling-block and temptation out of our friend's way. To begin, then, +with the 'Diana' of Montemayor. I am of opinion it should not be burned, +but that it should be cleared of all that about the sage Felicia and the +magic water, and of almost all the longer pieces of verse: let it keep, +and welcome, its prose and the honour of being the first of books of the +kind." + +"This that comes next," said the barber, "is the 'Diana,' entitled the +'Second Part, by the Salamancan,' and this other has the same title, and +its author is Gil Polo." + +"As for that of the Salamancan," replied the curate, "let it go to swell +the number of the condemned in the yard, and let Gil Polo's be preserved +as if it came from Apollo himself: but get on, gossip, and make haste, +for it is growing late." + +"This book," said the barber, opening another, "is the ten books of the +'Fortune of Love,' written by Antonio de Lofraso, a Sardinian poet." + +"By the orders I have received," said the curate, "since Apollo has been +Apollo, and the Muses have been Muses, and poets have been poets, so +droll and absurd a book as this has never been written, and in its way it +is the best and the most singular of all of this species that have as yet +appeared, and he who has not read it may be sure he has never read what +is delightful. Give it here, gossip, for I make more account of having +found it than if they had given me a cassock of Florence stuff." + +He put it aside with extreme satisfaction, and the barber went on, "These +that come next are 'The Shepherd of Iberia,' 'Nymphs of Henares,' and +'The Enlightenment of Jealousy.'" + +"Then all we have to do," said the curate, "is to hand them over to the +secular arm of the housekeeper, and ask me not why, or we shall never +have done." + +"This next is the 'Pastor de Filida.'" + +"No Pastor that," said the curate, "but a highly polished courtier; let +it be preserved as a precious jewel." + +"This large one here," said the barber, "is called 'The Treasury of +various Poems.'" + +"If there were not so many of them," said the curate, "they would be more +relished: this book must be weeded and cleansed of certain vulgarities +which it has with its excellences; let it be preserved because the author +is a friend of mine, and out of respect for other more heroic and loftier +works that he has written." + +"This," continued the barber, "is the 'Cancionero' of Lopez de +Maldonado." + +"The author of that book, too," said the curate, "is a great friend of +mine, and his verses from his own mouth are the admiration of all who +hear them, for such is the sweetness of his voice that he enchants when +he chants them: it gives rather too much of its eclogues, but what is +good was never yet plentiful: let it be kept with those that have been +set apart. But what book is that next it?" + +"The 'Galatea' of Miguel de Cervantes," said the barber. + +"That Cervantes has been for many years a great friend of mine, and to my +knowledge he has had more experience in reverses than in verses. His book +has some good invention in it, it presents us with something but brings +nothing to a conclusion: we must wait for the Second Part it promises: +perhaps with amendment it may succeed in winning the full measure of +grace that is now denied it; and in the mean time do you, senor gossip, +keep it shut up in your own quarters." + +"Very good," said the barber; "and here come three together, the +'Araucana' of Don Alonso de Ercilla, the 'Austriada' of Juan Rufo, +Justice of Cordova, and the 'Montserrate' of Christobal de Virues, the +Valencian poet." + +"These three books," said the curate, "are the best that have been +written in Castilian in heroic verse, and they may compare with the most +famous of Italy; let them be preserved as the richest treasures of poetry +that Spain possesses." + +The curate was tired and would not look into any more books, and so he +decided that, "contents uncertified," all the rest should be burned; but +just then the barber held open one, called "The Tears of Angelica." + +"I should have shed tears myself," said the curate when he heard the +title, "had I ordered that book to be burned, for its author was one of +the famous poets of the world, not to say of Spain, and was very happy in +the translation of some of Ovid's fables." + +Chapter VII. - +Of the second sally of our worthy knight Don Quixote of La Mancha + +At this instant Don Quixote began shouting out, "Here, here, valiant +knights! here is need for you to put forth the might of your strong arms, +for they of the Court are gaining the mastery in the tourney!" Called +away by this noise and outcry, they proceeded no farther with the +scrutiny of the remaining books, and so it is thought that "The Carolea," +"The Lion of Spain," and "The Deeds of the Emperor," written by Don Luis +de Avila, went to the fire unseen and unheard; for no doubt they were +among those that remained, and perhaps if the curate had seen them they +would not have undergone so severe a sentence. + +When they reached Don Quixote he was already out of bed, and was still +shouting and raving, and slashing and cutting all round, as wide awake as +if he had never slept. + +They closed with him and by force got him back to bed, and when he had +become a little calm, addressing the curate, he said to him, "Of a truth, +Senor Archbishop Turpin, it is a great disgrace for us who call ourselves +the Twelve Peers, so carelessly to allow the knights of the Court to gain +the victory in this tourney, we the adventurers having carried off the +honour on the three former days." + +"Hush, gossip," said the curate; "please God, the luck may turn, and what +is lost to-day may be won to-morrow; for the present let your worship +have a care of your health, for it seems to me that you are +over-fatigued, if not badly wounded." + +"Wounded no," said Don Quixote, "but bruised and battered no doubt, for +that bastard Don Roland has cudgelled me with the trunk of an oak tree, +and all for envy, because he sees that I alone rival him in his +achievements. But I should not call myself Reinaldos of Montalvan did he +not pay me for it in spite of all his enchantments as soon as I rise from +this bed. For the present let them bring me something to eat, for that, I +feel, is what will be more to my purpose, and leave it to me to avenge +myself." + +They did as he wished; they gave him something to eat, and once more he +fell asleep, leaving them marvelling at his madness. + +That night the housekeeper burned to ashes all the books that were in the +yard and in the whole house; and some must have been consumed that +deserved preservation in everlasting archives, but their fate and the +laziness of the examiner did not permit it, and so in them was verified +the proverb that the innocent suffer for the guilty. + +One of the remedies which the curate and the barber immediately applied +to their friend's disorder was to wall up and plaster the room where the +books were, so that when he got up he should not find them (possibly the +cause being removed the effect might cease), and they might say that a +magician had carried them off, room and all; and this was done with all +despatch. Two days later Don Quixote got up, and the first thing he did +was to go and look at his books, and not finding the room where he had +left it, he wandered from side to side looking for it. He came to the +place where the door used to be, and tried it with his hands, and turned +and twisted his eyes in every direction without saying a word; but after +a good while he asked his housekeeper whereabouts was the room that held +his books. + +The housekeeper, who had been already well instructed in what she was to +answer, said, "What room or what nothing is it that your worship is +looking for? There are neither room nor books in this house now, for the +devil himself has carried all away." + +"It was not the devil," said the niece, "but a magician who came on a +cloud one night after the day your worship left this, and dismounting +from a serpent that he rode he entered the room, and what he did there I +know not, but after a little while he made off, flying through the roof, +and left the house full of smoke; and when we went to see what he had +done we saw neither book nor room: but we remember very well, the +housekeeper and I, that on leaving, the old villain said in a loud voice +that, for a private grudge he owed the owner of the books and the room, +he had done mischief in that house that would be discovered by-and-by: he +said too that his name was the Sage Munaton." + +"He must have said Friston," said Don Quixote. + +"I don't know whether he called himself Friston or Friton," said the +housekeeper, "I only know that his name ended with 'ton.'" + +"So it does," said Don Quixote, "and he is a sage magician, a great enemy +of mine, who has a spite against me because he knows by his arts and lore +that in process of time I am to engage in single combat with a knight +whom he befriends and that I am to conquer, and he will be unable to +prevent it; and for this reason he endeavours to do me all the ill turns +that he can; but I promise him it will be hard for him to oppose or avoid +what is decreed by Heaven." + +"Who doubts that?" said the niece; "but, uncle, who mixes you up in these +quarrels? Would it not be better to remain at peace in your own house +instead of roaming the world looking for better bread than ever came of +wheat, never reflecting that many go for wool and come back shorn?" + +"Oh, niece of mine," replied Don Quixote, "how much astray art thou in +thy reckoning: ere they shear me I shall have plucked away and stripped +off the beards of all who dare to touch only the tip of a hair of mine." + +The two were unwilling to make any further answer, as they saw that his +anger was kindling. + +In short, then, he remained at home fifteen days very quietly without +showing any signs of a desire to take up with his former delusions, and +during this time he held lively discussions with his two gossips, the +curate and the barber, on the point he maintained, that knights-errant +were what the world stood most in need of, and that in him was to be +accomplished the revival of knight-errantry. The curate sometimes +contradicted him, sometimes agreed with him, for if he had not observed +this precaution he would have been unable to bring him to reason. + +Meanwhile Don Quixote worked upon a farm labourer, a neighbour of his, an +honest man (if indeed that title can be given to him who is poor), but +with very little wit in his pate. In a word, he so talked him over, and +with such persuasions and promises, that the poor clown made up his mind +to sally forth with him and serve him as esquire. Don Quixote, among +other things, told him he ought to be ready to go with him gladly, +because any moment an adventure might occur that might win an island in +the twinkling of an eye and leave him governor of it. On these and the +like promises Sancho Panza (for so the labourer was called) left wife and +children, and engaged himself as esquire to his neighbour. + +Don Quixote next set about getting some money; and selling one thing and +pawning another, and making a bad bargain in every case, he got together +a fair sum. He provided himself with a buckler, which he begged as a loan +from a friend, and, restoring his battered helmet as best he could, he +warned his squire Sancho of the day and hour he meant to set out, that he +might provide himself with what he thought most needful. Above all, he +charged him to take alforjas with him. The other said he would, and that +he meant to take also a very good ass he had, as he was not much given to +going on foot. About the ass, Don Quixote hesitated a little, trying +whether he could call to mind any knight-errant taking with him an +esquire mounted on ass-back, but no instance occurred to his memory. For +all that, however, he determined to take him, intending to furnish him +with a more honourable mount when a chance of it presented itself, by +appropriating the horse of the first discourteous knight he encountered. +Himself he provided with shirts and such other things as he could, +according to the advice the host had given him; all which being done, +without taking leave, Sancho Panza of his wife and children, or Don +Quixote of his housekeeper and niece, they sallied forth unseen by +anybody from the village one night, and made such good way in the course +of it that by daylight they held themselves safe from discovery, even +should search be made for them. + +Sancho rode on his ass like a patriarch, with his alforjas and bota, and +longing to see himself soon governor of the island his master had +promised him. Don Quixote decided upon taking the same route and road he +had taken on his first journey, that over the Campo de Montiel, which he +travelled with less discomfort than on the last occasion, for, as it was +early morning and the rays of the sun fell on them obliquely, the heat +did not distress them. + +And now said Sancho Panza to his master, "Your worship will take care, +Senor Knight-errant, not to forget about the island you have promised me, +for be it ever so big I'll be equal to governing it." + +To which Don Quixote replied, "Thou must know, friend Sancho Panza, that +it was a practice very much in vogue with the knights-errant of old to +make their squires governors of the islands or kingdoms they won, and I +am determined that there shall be no failure on my part in so liberal a +custom; on the contrary, I mean to improve upon it, for they sometimes, +and perhaps most frequently, waited until their squires were old, and +then when they had had enough of service and hard days and worse nights, +they gave them some title or other, of count, or at the most marquis, of +some valley or province more or less; but if thou livest and I live, it +may well be that before six days are over, I may have won some kingdom +that has others dependent upon it, which will be just the thing to enable +thee to be crowned king of one of them. Nor needst thou count this +wonderful, for things and chances fall to the lot of such knights in ways +so unexampled and unexpected that I might easily give thee even more than +I promise thee." + +"In that case," said Sancho Panza, "if I should become a king by one of +those miracles your worship speaks of, even Juana Gutierrez, my old +woman, would come to be queen and my children infantes." + +"Well, who doubts it?" said Don Quixote. + +"I doubt it," replied Sancho Panza, "because for my part I am persuaded +that though God should shower down kingdoms upon earth, not one of them +would fit the head of Mari Gutierrez. Let me tell you, senor, she is not +worth two maravedis for a queen; countess will fit her better, and that +only with God's help." + +"Leave it to God, Sancho," returned Don Quixote, "for he will give her +what suits her best; but do not undervalue thyself so much as to come to +be content with anything less than being governor of a province." + +"I will not, senor," answered Sancho, "specially as I have a man of such +quality for a master in your worship, who will know how to give me all +that will be suitable for me and that I can bear." + +Chapter VIII. - +Of the good fortune which the valiant Don Quixote had in the terrible and +undreamt-of adventure of the windmills, with other occurrences worthy to +be fitly recorded + +At this point they came in sight of thirty forty windmills that there are +on plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, +"Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our +desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or +more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in +battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our +fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to +sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth." + +"What giants?" said Sancho Panza. + +"Those thou seest there," answered his master, "with the long arms, and +some have them nearly two leagues long." + +"Look, your worship," said Sancho; "what we see there are not giants but +windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by +the wind make the millstone go." + +"It is easy to see," replied Don Quixote, "that thou art not used to this +business of adventures; those are giants; and if thou art afraid, away +with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I engage them in +fierce and unequal combat." + +So saying, he gave the spur to his steed Rocinante, heedless of the cries +his squire Sancho sent after him, warning him that most certainly they +were windmills and not giants he was going to attack. He, however, was so +positive they were giants that he neither heard the cries of Sancho, nor +perceived, near as he was, what they were, but made at them shouting, +"Fly not, cowards and vile beings, for a single knight attacks you." + +A slight breeze at this moment sprang up, and the great sails began to +move, seeing which Don Quixote exclaimed, "Though ye flourish more arms +than the giant Briareus, ye have to reckon with me." + +So saying, and commending himself with all his heart to his lady +Dulcinea, imploring her to support him in such a peril, with lance in +rest and covered by his buckler, he charged at Rocinante's fullest gallop +and fell upon the first mill that stood in front of him; but as he drove +his lance-point into the sail the wind whirled it round with such force +that it shivered the lance to pieces, sweeping with it horse and rider, +who went rolling over on the plain, in a sorry condition. Sancho hastened +to his assistance as fast as his ass could go, and when he came up found +him unable to move, with such a shock had Rocinante fallen with him. + +"God bless me!" said Sancho, "did I not tell your worship to mind what +you were about, for they were only windmills? and no one could have made +any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in his +head." + +"Hush, friend Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "the fortunes of war more +than any other are liable to frequent fluctuations; and moreover I think, +and it is the truth, that that same sage Friston who carried off my study +and books, has turned these giants into mills in order to rob me of the +glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity he bears me; but in the end +his wicked arts will avail but little against my good sword." + +"God order it as he may," said Sancho Panza, and helping him to rise got +him up again on Rocinante, whose shoulder was half out; and then, +discussing the late adventure, they followed the road to Puerto Lapice, +for there, said Don Quixote, they could not fail to find adventures in +abundance and variety, as it was a great thoroughfare. For all that, he +was much grieved at the loss of his lance, and saying so to his squire, +he added, "I remember having read how a Spanish knight, Diego Perez de +Vargas by name, having broken his sword in battle, tore from an oak a +ponderous bough or branch, and with it did such things that day, and +pounded so many Moors, that he got the surname of Machuca, and he and his +descendants from that day forth were called Vargas y Machuca. I mention +this because from the first oak I see I mean to rend such another branch, +large and stout like that, with which I am determined and resolved to do +such deeds that thou mayest deem thyself very fortunate in being found +worthy to come and see them, and be an eyewitness of things that will +with difficulty be believed." + +"Be that as God will," said Sancho, "I believe it all as your worship +says it; but straighten yourself a little, for you seem all on one side, +may be from the shaking of the fall." + +"That is the truth," said Don Quixote, "and if I make no complaint of the +pain it is because knights-errant are not permitted to complain of any +wound, even though their bowels be coming out through it." + +"If so," said Sancho, "I have nothing to say; but God knows I would +rather your worship complained when anything ailed you. For my part, I +confess I must complain however small the ache may be; unless this rule +about not complaining extends to the squires of knights-errant also." + +Don Quixote could not help laughing at his squire's simplicity, and he +assured him he might complain whenever and however he chose, just as he +liked, for, so far, he had never read of anything to the contrary in the +order of knighthood. + +Sancho bade him remember it was dinner-time, to which his master answered +that he wanted nothing himself just then, but that he might eat when he +had a mind. With this permission Sancho settled himself as comfortably as +he could on his beast, and taking out of the alforjas what he had stowed +away in them, he jogged along behind his master munching deliberately, +and from time to time taking a pull at the bota with a relish that the +thirstiest tapster in Malaga might have envied; and while he went on in +this way, gulping down draught after draught, he never gave a thought to +any of the promises his master had made him, nor did he rate it as +hardship but rather as recreation going in quest of adventures, however +dangerous they might be. Finally they passed the night among some trees, +from one of which Don Quixote plucked a dry branch to serve him after a +fashion as a lance, and fixed on it the head he had removed from the +broken one. All that night Don Quixote lay awake thinking of his lady +Dulcinea, in order to conform to what he had read in his books, how many +a night in the forests and deserts knights used to lie sleepless +supported by the memory of their mistresses. Not so did Sancho Panza +spend it, for having his stomach full of something stronger than chicory +water he made but one sleep of it, and, if his master had not called him, +neither the rays of the sun beating on his face nor all the cheery notes +of the birds welcoming the approach of day would have had power to waken +him. On getting up he tried the bota and found it somewhat less full than +the night before, which grieved his heart because they did not seem to be +on the way to remedy the deficiency readily. Don Quixote did not care to +break his fast, for, as has been already said, he confined himself to +savoury recollections for nourishment. + +They returned to the road they had set out with, leading to Puerto +Lapice, and at three in the afternoon they came in sight of it. "Here, +brother Sancho Panza," said Don Quixote when he saw it, "we may plunge +our hands up to the elbows in what they call adventures; but observe, +even shouldst thou see me in the greatest danger in the world, thou must +not put a hand to thy sword in my defence, unless indeed thou perceivest +that those who assail me are rabble or base folk; for in that case thou +mayest very properly aid me; but if they be knights it is on no account +permitted or allowed thee by the laws of knighthood to help me until thou +hast been dubbed a knight." + +"Most certainly, senor," replied Sancho, "your worship shall be fully +obeyed in this matter; all the more as of myself I am peaceful and no +friend to mixing in strife and quarrels: it is true that as regards the +defence of my own person I shall not give much heed to those laws, for +laws human and divine allow each one to defend himself against any +assailant whatever." + +"That I grant," said Don Quixote, "but in this matter of aiding me +against knights thou must put a restraint upon thy natural impetuosity." + +"I will do so, I promise you," answered Sancho, "and will keep this +precept as carefully as Sunday." + +While they were thus talking there appeared on the road two friars of the +order of St. Benedict, mounted on two dromedaries, for not less tall were +the two mules they rode on. They wore travelling spectacles and carried +sunshades; and behind them came a coach attended by four or five persons +on horseback and two muleteers on foot. In the coach there was, as +afterwards appeared, a Biscay lady on her way to Seville, where her +husband was about to take passage for the Indies with an appointment of +high honour. The friars, though going the same road, were not in her +company; but the moment Don Quixote perceived them he said to his squire, +"Either I am mistaken, or this is going to be the most famous adventure +that has ever been seen, for those black bodies we see there must be, and +doubtless are, magicians who are carrying off some stolen princess in +that coach, and with all my might I must undo this wrong." + +"This will be worse than the windmills," said Sancho. "Look, senor; those +are friars of St. Benedict, and the coach plainly belongs to some +travellers: I tell you to mind well what you are about and don't let the +devil mislead you." + +"I have told thee already, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "that on the +subject of adventures thou knowest little. What I say is the truth, as +thou shalt see presently." + +So saying, he advanced and posted himself in the middle of the road along +which the friars were coming, and as soon as he thought they had come +near enough to hear what he said, he cried aloud, "Devilish and unnatural +beings, release instantly the highborn princesses whom you are carrying +off by force in this coach, else prepare to meet a speedy death as the +just punishment of your evil deeds." + +The friars drew rein and stood wondering at the appearance of Don Quixote +as well as at his words, to which they replied, "Senor Caballero, we are +not devilish or unnatural, but two brothers of St. Benedict following our +road, nor do we know whether or not there are any captive princesses +coming in this coach." + +"No soft words with me, for I know you, lying rabble," said Don Quixote, +and without waiting for a reply he spurred Rocinante and with levelled +lance charged the first friar with such fury and determination, that, if +the friar had not flung himself off the mule, he would have brought him +to the ground against his will, and sore wounded, if not killed outright. +The second brother, seeing how his comrade was treated, drove his heels +into his castle of a mule and made off across the country faster than the +wind. + +Sancho Panza, when he saw the friar on the ground, dismounting briskly +from his ass, rushed towards him and began to strip off his gown. At that +instant the friars muleteers came up and asked what he was stripping him +for. Sancho answered them that this fell to him lawfully as spoil of the +battle which his lord Don Quixote had won. The muleteers, who had no idea +of a joke and did not understand all this about battles and spoils, +seeing that Don Quixote was some distance off talking to the travellers +in the coach, fell upon Sancho, knocked him down, and leaving hardly a +hair in his beard, belaboured him with kicks and left him stretched +breathless and senseless on the ground; and without any more delay helped +the friar to mount, who, trembling, terrified, and pale, as soon as he +found himself in the saddle, spurred after his companion, who was +standing at a distance looking on, watching the result of the onslaught; +then, not caring to wait for the end of the affair just begun, they +pursued their journey making more crosses than if they had the devil +after them. + +Don Quixote was, as has been said, speaking to the lady in the coach: +"Your beauty, lady mine," said he, "may now dispose of your person as may +be most in accordance with your pleasure, for the pride of your ravishers +lies prostrate on the ground through this strong arm of mine; and lest +you should be pining to know the name of your deliverer, know that I am +called Don Quixote of La Mancha, knight-errant and adventurer, and +captive to the peerless and beautiful lady Dulcinea del Toboso: and in +return for the service you have received of me I ask no more than that +you should return to El Toboso, and on my behalf present yourself before +that lady and tell her what I have done to set you free." + +One of the squires in attendance upon the coach, a Biscayan, was +listening to all Don Quixote was saying, and, perceiving that he would +not allow the coach to go on, but was saying it must return at once to El +Toboso, he made at him, and seizing his lance addressed him in bad +Castilian and worse Biscayan after his fashion, "Begone, caballero, and +ill go with thee; by the God that made me, unless thou quittest coach, +slayest thee as art here a Biscayan." + +Don Quixote understood him quite well, and answered him very quietly, "If +thou wert a knight, as thou art none, I should have already chastised thy +folly and rashness, miserable creature." To which the Biscayan returned, +"I no gentleman!--I swear to God thou liest as I am Christian: if thou +droppest lance and drawest sword, soon shalt thou see thou art carrying +water to the cat: Biscayan on land, hidalgo at sea, hidalgo at the devil, +and look, if thou sayest otherwise thou liest." + +"'"You will see presently," said Agrajes,'" replied Don Quixote; and +throwing his lance on the ground he drew his sword, braced his buckler on +his arm, and attacked the Biscayan, bent upon taking his life. + +The Biscayan, when he saw him coming on, though he wished to dismount +from his mule, in which, being one of those sorry ones let out for hire, +he had no confidence, had no choice but to draw his sword; it was lucky +for him, however, that he was near the coach, from which he was able to +snatch a cushion that served him for a shield; and they went at one +another as if they had been two mortal enemies. The others strove to make +peace between them, but could not, for the Biscayan declared in his +disjointed phrase that if they did not let him finish his battle he would +kill his mistress and everyone that strove to prevent him. The lady in +the coach, amazed and terrified at what she saw, ordered the coachman to +draw aside a little, and set herself to watch this severe struggle, in +the course of which the Biscayan smote Don Quixote a mighty stroke on the +shoulder over the top of his buckler, which, given to one without armour, +would have cleft him to the waist. Don Quixote, feeling the weight of +this prodigious blow, cried aloud, saying, "O lady of my soul, Dulcinea, +flower of beauty, come to the aid of this your knight, who, in fulfilling +his obligations to your beauty, finds himself in this extreme peril." To +say this, to lift his sword, to shelter himself well behind his buckler, +and to assail the Biscayan was the work of an instant, determined as he +was to venture all upon a single blow. The Biscayan, seeing him come on +in this way, was convinced of his courage by his spirited bearing, and +resolved to follow his example, so he waited for him keeping well under +cover of his cushion, being unable to execute any sort of manoeuvre with +his mule, which, dead tired and never meant for this kind of game, could +not stir a step. + +On, then, as aforesaid, came Don Quixote against the wary Biscayan, with +uplifted sword and a firm intention of splitting him in half, while on +his side the Biscayan waited for him sword in hand, and under the +protection of his cushion; and all present stood trembling, waiting in +suspense the result of blows such as threatened to fall, and the lady in +the coach and the rest of her following were making a thousand vows and +offerings to all the images and shrines of Spain, that God might deliver +her squire and all of them from this great peril in which they found +themselves. But it spoils all, that at this point and crisis the author +of the history leaves this battle impending, giving as excuse that he +could find nothing more written about these achievements of Don Quixote +than what has been already set forth. It is true the second author of +this work was unwilling to believe that a history so curious could have +been allowed to fall under the sentence of oblivion, or that the wits of +La Mancha could have been so undiscerning as not to preserve in their +archives or registries some documents referring to this famous knight; +and this being his persuasion, he did not despair of finding the +conclusion of this pleasant history, which, heaven favouring him, he did +find in a way that shall be related in the Second Part. + +Chapter IX. - +In which is concluded and finished the terrific battle between the +gallant Biscayan and the valiant Manchegan + +In the First Part of this history we left the valiant Biscayan and the +renowned Don Quixote with drawn swords uplifted, ready to deliver two +such furious slashing blows that if they had fallen full and fair they +would at least have split and cleft them asunder from top to toe and laid +them open like a pomegranate; and at this so critical point the +delightful history came to a stop and stood cut short without any +intimation from the author where what was missing was to be found. + +This distressed me greatly, because the pleasure derived from having read +such a small portion turned to vexation at the thought of the poor chance +that presented itself of finding the large part that, so it seemed to me, +was missing of such an interesting tale. It appeared to me to be a thing +impossible and contrary to all precedent that so good a knight should +have been without some sage to undertake the task of writing his +marvellous achievements; a thing that was never wanting to any of those +knights-errant who, they say, went after adventures; for every one of +them had one or two sages as if made on purpose, who not only recorded +their deeds but described their most trifling thoughts and follies, +however secret they might be; and such a good knight could not have been +so unfortunate as not to have what Platir and others like him had in +abundance. And so I could not bring myself to believe that such a gallant +tale had been left maimed and mutilated, and I laid the blame on Time, +the devourer and destroyer of all things, that had either concealed or +consumed it. + +On the other hand, it struck me that, inasmuch as among his books there +had been found such modern ones as "The Enlightenment of Jealousy" and +the "Nymphs and Shepherds of Henares," his story must likewise be modern, +and that though it might not be written, it might exist in the memory of +the people of his village and of those in the neighbourhood. This +reflection kept me perplexed and longing to know really and truly the +whole life and wondrous deeds of our famous Spaniard, Don Quixote of La +Mancha, light and mirror of Manchegan chivalry, and the first that in our +age and in these so evil days devoted himself to the labour and exercise +of the arms of knight-errantry, righting wrongs, succouring widows, and +protecting damsels of that sort that used to ride about, whip in hand, on +their palfreys, with all their virginity about them, from mountain to +mountain and valley to valley--for, if it were not for some ruffian, or +boor with a hood and hatchet, or monstrous giant, that forced them, there +were in days of yore damsels that at the end of eighty years, in all +which time they had never slept a day under a roof, went to their graves +as much maids as the mothers that bore them. I say, then, that in these +and other respects our gallant Don Quixote is worthy of everlasting and +notable praise, nor should it be withheld even from me for the labour and +pains spent in searching for the conclusion of this delightful history; +though I know well that if Heaven, chance and good fortune had not helped +me, the world would have remained deprived of an entertainment and +pleasure that for a couple of hours or so may well occupy him who shall +read it attentively. The discovery of it occurred in this way. + +One day, as I was in the Alcana of Toledo, a boy came up to sell some +pamphlets and old papers to a silk mercer, and, as I am fond of reading +even the very scraps of paper in the streets, led by this natural bent of +mine I took up one of the pamphlets the boy had for sale, and saw that it +was in characters which I recognised as Arabic, and as I was unable to +read them though I could recognise them, I looked about to see if there +were any Spanish-speaking Morisco at hand to read them for me; nor was +there any great difficulty in finding such an interpreter, for even had I +sought one for an older and better language I should have found him. In +short, chance provided me with one, who when I told him what I wanted and +put the book into his hands, opened it in the middle and after reading a +little in it began to laugh. I asked him what he was laughing at, and he +replied that it was at something the book had written in the margin by +way of a note. I bade him tell it to me; and he still laughing said, "In +the margin, as I told you, this is written: 'This Dulcinea del Toboso so +often mentioned in this history, had, they say, the best hand of any +woman in all La Mancha for salting pigs.'" + +When I heard Dulcinea del Toboso named, I was struck with surprise and +amazement, for it occurred to me at once that these pamphlets contained +the history of Don Quixote. With this idea I pressed him to read the +beginning, and doing so, turning the Arabic offhand into Castilian, he +told me it meant, "History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by Cide +Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian." It required great caution to hide +the joy I felt when the title of the book reached my ears, and snatching +it from the silk mercer, I bought all the papers and pamphlets from the +boy for half a real; and if he had had his wits about him and had known +how eager I was for them, he might have safely calculated on making more +than six reals by the bargain. I withdrew at once with the Morisco into +the cloister of the cathedral, and begged him to turn all these pamphlets +that related to Don Quixote into the Castilian tongue, without omitting +or adding anything to them, offering him whatever payment he pleased. He +was satisfied with two arrobas of raisins and two bushels of wheat, and +promised to translate them faithfully and with all despatch; but to make +the matter easier, and not to let such a precious find out of my hands, I +took him to my house, where in little more than a month and a half he +translated the whole just as it is set down here. + +In the first pamphlet the battle between Don Quixote and the Biscayan was +drawn to the very life, they planted in the same attitude as the history +describes, their swords raised, and the one protected by his buckler, the +other by his cushion, and the Biscayan's mule so true to nature that it +could be seen to be a hired one a bowshot off. The Biscayan had an +inscription under his feet which said, "Don Sancho de Azpeitia," which no +doubt must have been his name; and at the feet of Rocinante was another +that said, "Don Quixote." Rocinante was marvellously portrayed, so long +and thin, so lank and lean, with so much backbone and so far gone in +consumption, that he showed plainly with what judgment and propriety the +name of Rocinante had been bestowed upon him. Near him was Sancho Panza +holding the halter of his ass, at whose feet was another label that said, +"Sancho Zancas," and according to the picture, he must have had a big +belly, a short body, and long shanks, for which reason, no doubt, the +names of Panza and Zancas were given him, for by these two surnames the +history several times calls him. Some other trifling particulars might be +mentioned, but they are all of slight importance and have nothing to do +with the true relation of the history; and no history can be bad so long +as it is true. + +If against the present one any objection be raised on the score of its +truth, it can only be that its author was an Arab, as lying is a very +common propensity with those of that nation; though, as they are such +enemies of ours, it is conceivable that there were omissions rather than +additions made in the course of it. And this is my own opinion; for, +where he could and should give freedom to his pen in praise of so worthy +a knight, he seems to me deliberately to pass it over in silence; which +is ill done and worse contrived, for it is the business and duty of +historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion, and +neither interest nor fear, hatred nor love, should make them swerve from +the path of truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of +deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and +warning for the future. In this I know will be found all that can be +desired in the pleasantest, and if it be wanting in any good quality, I +maintain it is the fault of its hound of an author and not the fault of +the subject. To be brief, its Second Part, according to the translation, +began in this way: + +With trenchant swords upraised and poised on high, it seemed as though +the two valiant and wrathful combatants stood threatening heaven, and +earth, and hell, with such resolution and determination did they bear +themselves. The fiery Biscayan was the first to strike a blow, which was +delivered with such force and fury that had not the sword turned in its +course, that single stroke would have sufficed to put an end to the +bitter struggle and to all the adventures of our knight; but that good +fortune which reserved him for greater things, turned aside the sword of +his adversary, so that although it smote him upon the left shoulder, it +did him no more harm than to strip all that side of its armour, carrying +away a great part of his helmet with half of his ear, all which with +fearful ruin fell to the ground, leaving him in a sorry plight. + +Good God! Who is there that could properly describe the rage that filled +the heart of our Manchegan when he saw himself dealt with in this +fashion? All that can be said is, it was such that he again raised +himself in his stirrups, and, grasping his sword more firmly with both +hands, he came down on the Biscayan with such fury, smiting him full over +the cushion and over the head, that--even so good a shield proving +useless--as if a mountain had fallen on him, he began to bleed from nose, +mouth, and ears, reeling as if about to fall backwards from his mule, as +no doubt he would have done had he not flung his arms about its neck; at +the same time, however, he slipped his feet out of the stirrups and then +unclasped his arms, and the mule, taking fright at the terrible blow, +made off across the plain, and with a few plunges flung its master to the +ground. Don Quixote stood looking on very calmly, and, when he saw him +fall, leaped from his horse and with great briskness ran to him, and, +presenting the point of his sword to his eyes, bade him surrender, or he +would cut his head off. The Biscayan was so bewildered that he was unable +to answer a word, and it would have gone hard with him, so blind was Don +Quixote, had not the ladies in the coach, who had hitherto been watching +the combat in great terror, hastened to where he stood and implored him +with earnest entreaties to grant them the great grace and favour of +sparing their squire's life; to which Don Quixote replied with much +gravity and dignity, "In truth, fair ladies, I am well content to do what +ye ask of me; but it must be on one condition and understanding, which is +that this knight promise me to go to the village of El Toboso, and on my +behalf present himself before the peerless lady Dulcinea, that she deal +with him as shall be most pleasing to her." + +The terrified and disconsolate ladies, without discussing Don Quixote's +demand or asking who Dulcinea might be, promised that their squire should +do all that had been commanded. + +"Then, on the faith of that promise," said Don Quixote, "I shall do him +no further harm, though he well deserves it of me." + +Chapter X. - +Of the pleasant discourse that passed between Don Quixote and his Squire +Sancho Panza + +Now by this time Sancho had risen, rather the worse for the handling of +the friars' muleteers, and stood watching the battle of his master, Don +Quixote, and praying to God in his heart that it might be his will to +grant him the victory, and that he might thereby win some island to make +him governor of, as he had promised. Seeing, therefore, that the struggle +was now over, and that his master was returning to mount Rocinante, he +approached to hold the stirrup for him, and, before he could mount, he +went on his knees before him, and taking his hand, kissed it saying, "May +it please your worship, Senor Don Quixote, to give me the government of +that island which has been won in this hard fight, for be it ever so big +I feel myself in sufficient force to be able to govern it as much and as +well as anyone in the world who has ever governed islands." + +To which Don Quixote replied, "Thou must take notice, brother Sancho, +that this adventure and those like it are not adventures of islands, but +of cross-roads, in which nothing is got except a broken head or an ear +the less: have patience, for adventures will present themselves from +which I may make you, not only a governor, but something more." + +Sancho gave him many thanks, and again kissing his hand and the skirt of +his hauberk, helped him to mount Rocinante, and mounting his ass himself, +proceeded to follow his master, who at a brisk pace, without taking +leave, or saying anything further to the ladies belonging to the coach, +turned into a wood that was hard by. Sancho followed him at his ass's +best trot, but Rocinante stepped out so that, seeing himself left behind, +he was forced to call to his master to wait for him. Don Quixote did so, +reining in Rocinante until his weary squire came up, who on reaching him +said, "It seems to me, senor, it would be prudent in us to go and take +refuge in some church, for, seeing how mauled he with whom you fought has +been left, it will be no wonder if they give information of the affair to +the Holy Brotherhood and arrest us, and, faith, if they do, before we +come out of gaol we shall have to sweat for it." + +"Peace," said Don Quixote; "where hast thou ever seen or heard that a +knight-errant has been arraigned before a court of justice, however many +homicides he may have committed?" + +"I know nothing about omecils," answered Sancho, "nor in my life have had +anything to do with one; I only know that the Holy Brotherhood looks +after those who fight in the fields, and in that other matter I do not +meddle." + +"Then thou needst have no uneasiness, my friend," said Don Quixote, "for +I will deliver thee out of the hands of the Chaldeans, much more out of +those of the Brotherhood. But tell me, as thou livest, hast thou seen a +more valiant knight than I in all the known world; hast thou read in +history of any who has or had higher mettle in attack, more spirit in +maintaining it, more dexterity in wounding or skill in overthrowing?" + +"The truth is," answered Sancho, "that I have never read any history, for +I can neither read nor write, but what I will venture to bet is that a +more daring master than your worship I have never served in all the days +of my life, and God grant that this daring be not paid for where I have +said; what I beg of your worship is to dress your wound, for a great deal +of blood flows from that ear, and I have here some lint and a little +white ointment in the alforjas." + +"All that might be well dispensed with," said Don Quixote, "if I had +remembered to make a vial of the balsam of Fierabras, for time and +medicine are saved by one single drop." + +"What vial and what balsam is that?" said Sancho Panza. + +"It is a balsam," answered Don Quixote, "the receipt of which I have in +my memory, with which one need have no fear of death, or dread dying of +any wound; and so when I make it and give it to thee thou hast nothing to +do when in some battle thou seest they have cut me in half through the +middle of the body--as is wont to happen frequently,--but neatly and with +great nicety, ere the blood congeal, to place that portion of the body +which shall have fallen to the ground upon the other half which remains +in the saddle, taking care to fit it on evenly and exactly. Then thou +shalt give me to drink but two drops of the balsam I have mentioned, and +thou shalt see me become sounder than an apple." + +"If that be so," said Panza, "I renounce henceforth the government of the +promised island, and desire nothing more in payment of my many and +faithful services than that your worship give me the receipt of this +supreme liquor, for I am persuaded it will be worth more than two reals +an ounce anywhere, and I want no more to pass the rest of my life in ease +and honour; but it remains to be told if it costs much to make it." + +"With less than three reals, six quarts of it may be made," said Don +Quixote. + +"Sinner that I am!" said Sancho, "then why does your worship put off +making it and teaching it to me?" + +"Peace, friend," answered Don Quixote; "greater secrets I mean to teach +thee and greater favours to bestow upon thee; and for the present let us +see to the dressing, for my ear pains me more than I could wish." + +Sancho took out some lint and ointment from the alforjas; but when Don +Quixote came to see his helmet shattered, he was like to lose his senses, +and clapping his hand upon his sword and raising his eyes to heaven, be +said, "I swear by the Creator of all things and the four Gospels in their +fullest extent, to do as the great Marquis of Mantua did when he swore to +avenge the death of his nephew Baldwin (and that was not to eat bread +from a table-cloth, nor embrace his wife, and other points which, though +I cannot now call them to mind, I here grant as expressed) until I take +complete vengeance upon him who has committed such an offence against +me." + +Hearing this, Sancho said to him, "Your worship should bear in mind, +Senor Don Quixote, that if the knight has done what was commanded him in +going to present himself before my lady Dulcinea del Toboso, he will have +done all that he was bound to do, and does not deserve further punishment +unless he commits some new offence." + +"Thou hast said well and hit the point," answered Don Quixote; and so I +recall the oath in so far as relates to taking fresh vengeance on him, +but I make and confirm it anew to lead the life I have said until such +time as I take by force from some knight another helmet such as this and +as good; and think not, Sancho, that I am raising smoke with straw in +doing so, for I have one to imitate in the matter, since the very same +thing to a hair happened in the case of Mambrino's helmet, which cost +Sacripante so dear." + +"Senor," replied Sancho, "let your worship send all such oaths to the +devil, for they are very pernicious to salvation and prejudicial to the +conscience; just tell me now, if for several days to come we fall in with +no man armed with a helmet, what are we to do? Is the oath to be observed +in spite of all the inconvenience and discomfort it will be to sleep in +your clothes, and not to sleep in a house, and a thousand other +mortifications contained in the oath of that old fool the Marquis of +Mantua, which your worship is now wanting to revive? Let your worship +observe that there are no men in armour travelling on any of these roads, +nothing but carriers and carters, who not only do not wear helmets, but +perhaps never heard tell of them all their lives." + +"Thou art wrong there," said Don Quixote, "for we shall not have been +above two hours among these cross-roads before we see more men in armour +than came to Albraca to win the fair Angelica." + +"Enough," said Sancho; "so be it then, and God grant us success, and that +the time for winning that island which is costing me so dear may soon +come, and then let me die." + +"I have already told thee, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "not to give +thyself any uneasiness on that score; for if an island should fail, there +is the kingdom of Denmark, or of Sobradisa, which will fit thee as a ring +fits the finger, and all the more that, being on terra firma, thou wilt +all the better enjoy thyself. But let us leave that to its own time; see +if thou hast anything for us to eat in those alforjas, because we must +presently go in quest of some castle where we may lodge to-night and make +the balsam I told thee of, for I swear to thee by God, this ear is giving +me great pain." + +"I have here an onion and a little cheese and a few scraps of bread," +said Sancho, "but they are not victuals fit for a valiant knight like +your worship." + +"How little thou knowest about it," answered Don Quixote; "I would have +thee to know, Sancho, that it is the glory of knights-errant to go +without eating for a month, and even when they do eat, that it should be +of what comes first to hand; and this would have been clear to thee hadst +thou read as many histories as I have, for, though they are very many, +among them all I have found no mention made of knights-errant eating, +unless by accident or at some sumptuous banquets prepared for them, and +the rest of the time they passed in dalliance. And though it is plain +they could not do without eating and performing all the other natural +functions, because, in fact, they were men like ourselves, it is plain +too that, wandering as they did the most part of their lives through +woods and wilds and without a cook, their most usual fare would be rustic +viands such as those thou now offer me; so that, friend Sancho, let not +that distress thee which pleases me, and do not seek to make a new world +or pervert knight-errantry." + +"Pardon me, your worship," said Sancho, "for, as I cannot read or write, +as I said just now, I neither know nor comprehend the rules of the +profession of chivalry: henceforward I will stock the alforjas with every +kind of dry fruit for your worship, as you are a knight; and for myself, +as I am not one, I will furnish them with poultry and other things more +substantial." + +"I do not say, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "that it is imperative on +knights-errant not to eat anything else but the fruits thou speakest of; +only that their more usual diet must be those, and certain herbs they +found in the fields which they knew and I know too." + +"A good thing it is," answered Sancho, "to know those herbs, for to my +thinking it will be needful some day to put that knowledge into +practice." + +And here taking out what he said he had brought, the pair made their +repast peaceably and sociably. But anxious to find quarters for the +night, they with all despatch made an end of their poor dry fare, mounted +at once, and made haste to reach some habitation before night set in; but +daylight and the hope of succeeding in their object failed them close by +the huts of some goatherds, so they determined to pass the night there, +and it was as much to Sancho's discontent not to have reached a house, as +it was to his master's satisfaction to sleep under the open heaven, for +he fancied that each time this happened to him he performed an act of +ownership that helped to prove his chivalry. + +Chapter XI. - +What befell Don quixote with certain goatherds + +He was cordially welcomed by the goatherds, and Sancho, having as best he +could put up Rocinante and the ass, drew towards the fragrance that came +from some pieces of salted goat simmering in a pot on the fire; and +though he would have liked at once to try if they were ready to be +transferred from the pot to the stomach, he refrained from doing so as +the goatherds removed them from the fire, and laying sheepskins on the +ground, quickly spread their rude table, and with signs of hearty +good-will invited them both to share what they had. Round the skins six +of the men belonging to the fold seated themselves, having first with +rough politeness pressed Don Quixote to take a seat upon a trough which +they placed for him upside down. Don Quixote seated himself, and Sancho +remained standing to serve the cup, which was made of horn. Seeing him +standing, his master said to him: + +"That thou mayest see, Sancho, the good that knight-errantry contains in +itself, and how those who fill any office in it are on the high road to +be speedily honoured and esteemed by the world, I desire that thou seat +thyself here at my side and in the company of these worthy people, and +that thou be one with me who am thy master and natural lord, and that +thou eat from my plate and drink from whatever I drink from; for the same +may be said of knight-errantry as of love, that it levels all." + +"Great thanks," said Sancho, "but I may tell your worship that provided I +have enough to eat, I can eat it as well, or better, standing, and by +myself, than seated alongside of an emperor. And indeed, if the truth is +to be told, what I eat in my corner without form or fuss has much more +relish for me, even though it be bread and onions, than the turkeys of +those other tables where I am forced to chew slowly, drink little, wipe +my mouth every minute, and cannot sneeze or cough if I want or do other +things that are the privileges of liberty and solitude. So, senor, as for +these honours which your worship would put upon me as a servant and +follower of knight-errantry, exchange them for other things which may be +of more use and advantage to me; for these, though I fully acknowledge +them as received, I renounce from this moment to the end of the world." + +"For all that," said Don Quixote, "thou must seat thyself, because him +who humbleth himself God exalteth;" and seizing him by the arm he forced +him to sit down beside himself. + +The goatherds did not understand this jargon about squires and +knights-errant, and all they did was to eat in silence and stare at their +guests, who with great elegance and appetite were stowing away pieces as +big as one's fist. The course of meat finished, they spread upon the +sheepskins a great heap of parched acorns, and with them they put down a +half cheese harder than if it had been made of mortar. All this while the +horn was not idle, for it went round so constantly, now full, now empty, +like the bucket of a water-wheel, that it soon drained one of the two +wine-skins that were in sight. When Don Quixote had quite appeased his +appetite he took up a handful of the acorns, and contemplating them +attentively delivered himself somewhat in this fashion: + +"Happy the age, happy the time, to which the ancients gave the name of +golden, not because in that fortunate age the gold so coveted in this our +iron one was gained without toil, but because they that lived in it knew +not the two words "mine" and "thine"! In that blessed age all things were +in common; to win the daily food no labour was required of any save to +stretch forth his hand and gather it from the sturdy oaks that stood +generously inviting him with their sweet ripe fruit. The clear streams +and running brooks yielded their savoury limpid waters in noble +abundance. The busy and sagacious bees fixed their republic in the clefts +of the rocks and hollows of the trees, offering without usance the +plenteous produce of their fragrant toil to every hand. The mighty cork +trees, unenforced save of their own courtesy, shed the broad light bark +that served at first to roof the houses supported by rude stakes, a +protection against the inclemency of heaven alone. Then all was peace, +all friendship, all concord; as yet the dull share of the crooked plough +had not dared to rend and pierce the tender bowels of our first mother +that without compulsion yielded from every portion of her broad fertile +bosom all that could satisfy, sustain, and delight the children that then +possessed her. Then was it that the innocent and fair young shepherdess +roamed from vale to vale and hill to hill, with flowing locks, and no +more garments than were needful modestly to cover what modesty seeks and +ever sought to hide. Nor were their ornaments like those in use to-day, +set off by Tyrian purple, and silk tortured in endless fashions, but the +wreathed leaves of the green dock and ivy, wherewith they went as bravely +and becomingly decked as our Court dames with all the rare and +far-fetched artifices that idle curiosity has taught them. Then the +love-thoughts of the heart clothed themselves simply and naturally as the +heart conceived them, nor sought to commend themselves by forced and +rambling verbiage. Fraud, deceit, or malice had then not yet mingled with +truth and sincerity. Justice held her ground, undisturbed and unassailed +by the efforts of favour and of interest, that now so much impair, +pervert, and beset her. Arbitrary law had not yet established itself in +the mind of the judge, for then there was no cause to judge and no one to +be judged. Maidens and modesty, as I have said, wandered at will alone +and unattended, without fear of insult from lawlessness or libertine +assault, and if they were undone it was of their own will and pleasure. +But now in this hateful age of ours not one is safe, not though some new +labyrinth like that of Crete conceal and surround her; even there the +pestilence of gallantry will make its way to them through chinks or on +the air by the zeal of its accursed importunity, and, despite of all +seclusion, lead them to ruin. In defence of these, as time advanced and +wickedness increased, the order of knights-errant was instituted, to +defend maidens, to protect widows and to succour the orphans and the +needy. To this order I belong, brother goatherds, to whom I return thanks +for the hospitality and kindly welcome ye offer me and my squire; for +though by natural law all living are bound to show favour to +knights-errant, yet, seeing that without knowing this obligation ye have +welcomed and feasted me, it is right that with all the good-will in my +power I should thank you for yours." + +All this long harangue (which might very well have been spared) our +knight delivered because the acorns they gave him reminded him of the +golden age; and the whim seized him to address all this unnecessary +argument to the goatherds, who listened to him gaping in amazement +without saying a word in reply. Sancho likewise held his peace and ate +acorns, and paid repeated visits to the second wine-skin, which they had +hung up on a cork tree to keep the wine cool. + +Don Quixote was longer in talking than the supper in finishing, at the +end of which one of the goatherds said, "That your worship, senor +knight-errant, may say with more truth that we show you hospitality with +ready good-will, we will give you amusement and pleasure by making one of +our comrades sing: he will be here before long, and he is a very +intelligent youth and deep in love, and what is more he can read and +write and play on the rebeck to perfection." + +The goatherd had hardly done speaking, when the notes of the rebeck +reached their ears; and shortly after, the player came up, a very +good-looking young man of about two-and-twenty. His comrades asked him if +he had supped, and on his replying that he had, he who had already made +the offer said to him: + +"In that case, Antonio, thou mayest as well do us the pleasure of singing +a little, that the gentleman, our guest, may see that even in the +mountains and woods there are musicians: we have told him of thy +accomplishments, and we want thee to show them and prove that we say +true; so, as thou livest, pray sit down and sing that ballad about thy +love that thy uncle the prebendary made thee, and that was so much liked +in the town." + +"With all my heart," said the young man, and without waiting for more +pressing he seated himself on the trunk of a felled oak, and tuning his +rebeck, presently began to sing to these words. + +poem{ + +ANTONIO'S BALLAD + +Thou dost love me well, Olalla; + Well I know it, even though +Love's mute tongues, thine eyes, have never + By their glances told me so. + +For I know my love thou knowest, + Therefore thine to claim I dare: +Once it ceases to be secret, + Love need never feel despair. + +True it is, Olalla, sometimes + Thou hast all too plainly shown +That thy heart is brass in hardness, + And thy snowy bosom stone. + +Yet for all that, in thy coyness, + And thy fickle fits between, +Hope is there--at least the border + Of her garment may be seen. + +Lures to faith are they, those glimpses, + And to faith in thee I hold; +Kindness cannot make it stronger, + Coldness cannot make it cold. + +If it be that love is gentle, + In thy gentleness I see +Something holding out assurance + To the hope of winning thee. + +If it be that in devotion + Lies a power hearts to move, +That which every day I show thee, + Helpful to my suit should prove. + +Many a time thou must have noticed-- + If to notice thou dost care-- +How I go about on Monday + Dressed in all my Sunday wear. + +Love's eyes love to look on brightness; + Love loves what is gaily drest; +Sunday, Monday, all I care is + Thou shouldst see me in my best. + +No account I make of dances, + Or of strains that pleased thee so, +Keeping thee awake from midnight + Till the cocks began to crow; + +Or of how I roundly swore it + That there's none so fair as thou; +True it is, but as I said it, + By the girls I'm hated now. + +For Teresa of the hillside + At my praise of thee was sore; +Said, "You think you love an angel; + It's a monkey you adore; + +"Caught by all her glittering trinkets, + And her borrowed braids of hair, +And a host of made-up beauties + That would Love himself ensnare." + +'T was a lie, and so I told her, + And her cousin at the word +Gave me his defiance for it; + And what followed thou hast heard. + +Mine is no high-flown affection, + Mine no passion par amours-- +As they call it--what I offer + Is an honest love, and pure. + +Cunning cords the holy Church has, + Cords of softest silk they be; +Put thy neck beneath the yoke, dear; + Mine will follow, thou wilt see. + +Else--and once for all I swear it + By the saint of most renown-- +If I ever quit the mountains, + 'T will be in a friar's gown. + +}poem + +Here the goatherd brought his song to an end, and though Don Quixote +entreated him to sing more, Sancho had no mind that way, being more +inclined for sleep than for listening to songs; so said he to his master, +"Your worship will do well to settle at once where you mean to pass the +night, for the labour these good men are at all day does not allow them +to spend the night in singing." + +"I understand thee, Sancho," replied Don Quixote; "I perceive clearly +that those visits to the wine-skin demand compensation in sleep rather +than in music." + +"It's sweet to us all, blessed be God," said Sancho. + +"I do not deny it," replied Don Quixote; "but settle thyself where thou +wilt; those of my calling are more becomingly employed in watching than +in sleeping; still it would be as well if thou wert to dress this ear for +me again, for it is giving me more pain than it need." + +Sancho did as he bade him, but one of the goatherds, seeing the wound, +told him not to be uneasy, as he would apply a remedy with which it would +be soon healed; and gathering some leaves of rosemary, of which there was +a great quantity there, he chewed them and mixed them with a little salt, +and applying them to the ear he secured them firmly with a bandage, +assuring him that no other treatment would be required, and so it proved. + +Chapter XII. - +Of what a goatherd related to those with Don Quixote + +Just then another young man, one of those who fetched their provisions +from the village, came up and said, "Do you know what is going on in the +village, comrades?" + +"How could we know it?" replied one of them. + +"Well, then, you must know," continued the young man, "this morning that +famous student-shepherd called Chrysostom died, and it is rumoured that +he died of love for that devil of a village girl the daughter of +Guillermo the Rich, she that wanders about the wolds here in the dress of +a shepherdess." + +"You mean Marcela?" said one. + +"Her I mean," answered the goatherd; "and the best of it is, he has +directed in his will that he is to be buried in the fields like a Moor, +and at the foot of the rock where the Cork-tree spring is, because, as +the story goes (and they say he himself said so), that was the place +where he first saw her. And he has also left other directions which the +clergy of the village say should not and must not be obeyed because they +savour of paganism. To all which his great friend Ambrosio the student, +he who, like him, also went dressed as a shepherd, replies that +everything must be done without any omission according to the directions +left by Chrysostom, and about this the village is all in commotion; +however, report says that, after all, what Ambrosio and all the shepherds +his friends desire will be done, and to-morrow they are coming to bury +him with great ceremony where I said. I am sure it will be something +worth seeing; at least I will not fail to go and see it even if I knew I +should not return to the village tomorrow." + +"We will do the same," answered the goatherds, "and cast lots to see who +must stay to mind the goats of all." + +"Thou sayest well, Pedro," said one, "though there will be no need of +taking that trouble, for I will stay behind for all; and don't suppose it +is virtue or want of curiosity in me; it is that the splinter that ran +into my foot the other day will not let me walk." + +"For all that, we thank thee," answered Pedro. + +Don Quixote asked Pedro to tell him who the dead man was and who the +shepherdess, to which Pedro replied that all he knew was that the dead +man was a wealthy gentleman belonging to a village in those mountains, +who had been a student at Salamanca for many years, at the end of which +he returned to his village with the reputation of being very learned and +deeply read. "Above all, they said, he was learned in the science of the +stars and of what went on yonder in the heavens and the sun and the moon, +for he told us of the cris of the sun and moon to exact time." + +"Eclipse it is called, friend, not cris, the darkening of those two +luminaries," said Don Quixote; but Pedro, not troubling himself with +trifles, went on with his story, saying, "Also he foretold when the year +was going to be one of abundance or estility." + +"Sterility, you mean," said Don Quixote. + +"Sterility or estility," answered Pedro, "it is all the same in the end. +And I can tell you that by this his father and friends who believed him +grew very rich because they did as he advised them, bidding them 'sow +barley this year, not wheat; this year you may sow pulse and not barley; +the next there will be a full oil crop, and the three following not a +drop will be got.'" + +"That science is called astrology," said Don Quixote. + +"I do not know what it is called," replied Pedro, "but I know that he +knew all this and more besides. But, to make an end, not many months had +passed after he returned from Salamanca, when one day he appeared dressed +as a shepherd with his crook and sheepskin, having put off the long gown +he wore as a scholar; and at the same time his great friend, Ambrosio by +name, who had been his companion in his studies, took to the shepherd's +dress with him. I forgot to say that Chrysostom, who is dead, was a great +man for writing verses, so much so that he made carols for Christmas Eve, +and plays for Corpus Christi, which the young men of our village acted, +and all said they were excellent. When the villagers saw the two scholars +so unexpectedly appearing in shepherd's dress, they were lost in wonder, +and could not guess what had led them to make so extraordinary a change. +About this time the father of our Chrysostom died, and he was left heir +to a large amount of property in chattels as well as in land, no small +number of cattle and sheep, and a large sum of money, of all of which the +young man was left dissolute owner, and indeed he was deserving of it +all, for he was a very good comrade, and kind-hearted, and a friend of +worthy folk, and had a countenance like a benediction. Presently it came +to be known that he had changed his dress with no other object than to +wander about these wastes after that shepherdess Marcela our lad +mentioned a while ago, with whom the deceased Chrysostom had fallen in +love. And I must tell you now, for it is well you should know it, who +this girl is; perhaps, and even without any perhaps, you will not have +heard anything like it all the days of your life, though you should live +more years than sarna." + +"Say Sarra," said Don Quixote, unable to endure the goatherd's confusion +of words. + +"The sarna lives long enough," answered Pedro; "and if, senor, you must +go finding fault with words at every step, we shall not make an end of it +this twelvemonth." + +"Pardon me, friend," said Don Quixote; "but, as there is such a +difference between sarna and Sarra, I told you of it; however, you have +answered very rightly, for sarna lives longer than Sarra: so continue +your story, and I will not object any more to anything." + +"I say then, my dear sir," said the goatherd, "that in our village there +was a farmer even richer than the father of Chrysostom, who was named +Guillermo, and upon whom God bestowed, over and above great wealth, a +daughter at whose birth her mother died, the most respected woman there +was in this neighbourhood; I fancy I can see her now with that +countenance which had the sun on one side and the moon on the other; and +moreover active, and kind to the poor, for which I trust that at the +present moment her soul is in bliss with God in the other world. Her +husband Guillermo died of grief at the death of so good a wife, leaving +his daughter Marcela, a child and rich, to the care of an uncle of hers, +a priest and prebendary in our village. The girl grew up with such beauty +that it reminded us of her mother's, which was very great, and yet it was +thought that the daughter's would exceed it; and so when she reached the +age of fourteen to fifteen years nobody beheld her but blessed God that +had made her so beautiful, and the greater number were in love with her +past redemption. Her uncle kept her in great seclusion and retirement, +but for all that the fame of her great beauty spread so that, as well for +it as for her great wealth, her uncle was asked, solicited, and +importuned, to give her in marriage not only by those of our town but of +those many leagues round, and by the persons of highest quality in them. +But he, being a good Christian man, though he desired to give her in +marriage at once, seeing her to be old enough, was unwilling to do so +without her consent, not that he had any eye to the gain and profit which +the custody of the girl's property brought him while he put off her +marriage; and, faith, this was said in praise of the good priest in more +than one set in the town. For I would have you know, Sir Errant, that in +these little villages everything is talked about and everything is carped +at, and rest assured, as I am, that the priest must be over and above +good who forces his parishioners to speak well of him, especially in +villages." + +"That is the truth," said Don Quixote; "but go on, for the story is very +good, and you, good Pedro, tell it with very good grace." + +"May that of the Lord not be wanting to me," said Pedro; "that is the one +to have. To proceed; you must know that though the uncle put before his +niece and described to her the qualities of each one in particular of the +many who had asked her in marriage, begging her to marry and make a +choice according to her own taste, she never gave any other answer than +that she had no desire to marry just yet, and that being so young she did +not think herself fit to bear the burden of matrimony. At these, to all +appearance, reasonable excuses that she made, her uncle ceased to urge +her, and waited till she was somewhat more advanced in age and could mate +herself to her own liking. For, said he--and he said quite right--parents +are not to settle children in life against their will. But when one least +looked for it, lo and behold! one day the demure Marcela makes her +appearance turned shepherdess; and, in spite of her uncle and all those +of the town that strove to dissuade her, took to going a-field with the +other shepherd-lasses of the village, and tending her own flock. And so, +since she appeared in public, and her beauty came to be seen openly, I +could not well tell you how many rich youths, gentlemen and peasants, +have adopted the costume of Chrysostom, and go about these fields making +love to her. One of these, as has been already said, was our deceased +friend, of whom they say that he did not love but adore her. But you must +not suppose, because Marcela chose a life of such liberty and +independence, and of so little or rather no retirement, that she has +given any occasion, or even the semblance of one, for disparagement of +her purity and modesty; on the contrary, such and so great is the +vigilance with which she watches over her honour, that of all those that +court and woo her not one has boasted, or can with truth boast, that she +has given him any hope however small of obtaining his desire. For +although she does not avoid or shun the society and conversation of the +shepherds, and treats them courteously and kindly, should any one of them +come to declare his intention to her, though it be one as proper and holy +as that of matrimony, she flings him from her like a catapult. And with +this kind of disposition she does more harm in this country than if the +plague had got into it, for her affability and her beauty draw on the +hearts of those that associate with her to love her and to court her, but +her scorn and her frankness bring them to the brink of despair; and so +they know not what to say save to proclaim her aloud cruel and +hard-hearted, and other names of the same sort which well describe the +nature of her character; and if you should remain here any time, senor, +you would hear these hills and valleys resounding with the laments of the +rejected ones who pursue her. Not far from this there is a spot where +there are a couple of dozen of tall beeches, and there is not one of them +but has carved and written on its smooth bark the name of Marcela, and +above some a crown carved on the same tree as though her lover would say +more plainly that Marcela wore and deserved that of all human beauty. +Here one shepherd is sighing, there another is lamenting; there love +songs are heard, here despairing elegies. One will pass all the hours of +the night seated at the foot of some oak or rock, and there, without +having closed his weeping eyes, the sun finds him in the morning bemused +and bereft of sense; and another without relief or respite to his sighs, +stretched on the burning sand in the full heat of the sultry summer +noontide, makes his appeal to the compassionate heavens, and over one and +the other, over these and all, the beautiful Marcela triumphs free and +careless. And all of us that know her are waiting to see what her pride +will come to, and who is to be the happy man that will succeed in taming +a nature so formidable and gaining possession of a beauty so supreme. All +that I have told you being such well-established truth, I am persuaded +that what they say of the cause of Chrysostom's death, as our lad told +us, is the same. And so I advise you, senor, fail not to be present +to-morrow at his burial, which will be well worth seeing, for Chrysostom +had many friends, and it is not half a league from this place to where he +directed he should be buried." + +"I will make a point of it," said Don Quixote, "and I thank you for the +pleasure you have given me by relating so interesting a tale." + +"Oh," said the goatherd, "I do not know even the half of what has +happened to the lovers of Marcela, but perhaps to-morrow we may fall in +with some shepherd on the road who can tell us; and now it will be well +for you to go and sleep under cover, for the night air may hurt your +wound, though with the remedy I have applied to you there is no fear of +an untoward result." + +Sancho Panza, who was wishing the goatherd's loquacity at the devil, on +his part begged his master to go into Pedro's hut to sleep. He did so, +and passed all the rest of the night in thinking of his lady Dulcinea, in +imitation of the lovers of Marcela. Sancho Panza settled himself between +Rocinante and his ass, and slept, not like a lover who had been +discarded, but like a man who had been soundly kicked. + +Chapter XIII. - +In which is ended the story of the shepherdess Marcela, with other +incidents + +Bit hardly had day begun to show itself through the balconies of the +east, when five of the six goatherds came to rouse Don Quixote and tell +him that if he was still of a mind to go and see the famous burial of +Chrysostom they would bear him company. Don Quixote, who desired nothing +better, rose and ordered Sancho to saddle and pannel at once, which he +did with all despatch, and with the same they all set out forthwith. They +had not gone a quarter of a league when at the meeting of two paths they +saw coming towards them some six shepherds dressed in black sheepskins +and with their heads crowned with garlands of cypress and bitter +oleander. Each of them carried a stout holly staff in his hand, and along +with them there came two men of quality on horseback in handsome +travelling dress, with three servants on foot accompanying them. +Courteous salutations were exchanged on meeting, and inquiring one of the +other which way each party was going, they learned that all were bound +for the scene of the burial, so they went on all together. + +One of those on horseback addressing his companion said to him, "It seems +to me, Senor Vivaldo, that we may reckon as well spent the delay we shall +incur in seeing this remarkable funeral, for remarkable it cannot but be +judging by the strange things these shepherds have told us, of both the +dead shepherd and homicide shepherdess." + +"So I think too," replied Vivaldo, "and I would delay not to say a day, +but four, for the sake of seeing it." + +Don Quixote asked them what it was they had heard of Marcela and +Chrysostom. The traveller answered that the same morning they had met +these shepherds, and seeing them dressed in this mournful fashion they +had asked them the reason of their appearing in such a guise; which one +of them gave, describing the strange behaviour and beauty of a +shepherdess called Marcela, and the loves of many who courted her, +together with the death of that Chrysostom to whose burial they were +going. In short, he repeated all that Pedro had related to Don Quixote. + +This conversation dropped, and another was commenced by him who was +called Vivaldo asking Don Quixote what was the reason that led him to go +armed in that fashion in a country so peaceful. To which Don Quixote +replied, "The pursuit of my calling does not allow or permit me to go in +any other fashion; easy life, enjoyment, and repose were invented for +soft courtiers, but toil, unrest, and arms were invented and made for +those alone whom the world calls knights-errant, of whom I, though +unworthy, am the least of all." + +The instant they heard this all set him down as mad, and the better to +settle the point and discover what kind of madness his was, Vivaldo +proceeded to ask him what knights-errant meant. + +"Have not your worships," replied Don Quixote, "read the annals and +histories of England, in which are recorded the famous deeds of King +Arthur, whom we in our popular Castilian invariably call King Artus, with +regard to whom it is an ancient tradition, and commonly received all over +that kingdom of Great Britain, that this king did not die, but was +changed by magic art into a raven, and that in process of time he is to +return to reign and recover his kingdom and sceptre; for which reason it +cannot be proved that from that time to this any Englishman ever killed a +raven? Well, then, in the time of this good king that famous order of +chivalry of the Knights of the Round Table was instituted, and the amour +of Don Lancelot of the Lake with the Queen Guinevere occurred, precisely +as is there related, the go-between and confidante therein being the +highly honourable dame Quintanona, whence came that ballad so well known +and widely spread in our Spain-- + +poem{ + +O never surely was there knight + So served by hand of dame, +As served was he Sir Lancelot hight + When he from Britain came-- + +}poem + +with all the sweet and delectable course of his achievements in love and +war. Handed down from that time, then, this order of chivalry went on +extending and spreading itself over many and various parts of the world; +and in it, famous and renowned for their deeds, were the mighty Amadis of +Gaul with all his sons and descendants to the fifth generation, and the +valiant Felixmarte of Hircania, and the never sufficiently praised +Tirante el Blanco, and in our own days almost we have seen and heard and +talked with the invincible knight Don Belianis of Greece. This, then, +sirs, is to be a knight-errant, and what I have spoken of is the order of +his chivalry, of which, as I have already said, I, though a sinner, have +made profession, and what the aforesaid knights professed that same do I +profess, and so I go through these solitudes and wilds seeking +adventures, resolved in soul to oppose my arm and person to the most +perilous that fortune may offer me in aid of the weak and needy." + +By these words of his the travellers were able to satisfy themselves of +Don Quixote's being out of his senses and of the form of madness that +overmastered him, at which they felt the same astonishment that all felt +on first becoming acquainted with it; and Vivaldo, who was a person of +great shrewdness and of a lively temperament, in order to beguile the +short journey which they said was required to reach the mountain, the +scene of the burial, sought to give him an opportunity of going on with +his absurdities. So he said to him, "It seems to me, Senor Knight-errant, +that your worship has made choice of one of the most austere professions +in the world, and I imagine even that of the Carthusian monks is not so +austere." + +"As austere it may perhaps be," replied our Don Quixote, "but so +necessary for the world I am very much inclined to doubt. For, if the +truth is to be told, the soldier who executes what his captain orders +does no less than the captain himself who gives the order. My meaning, +is, that churchmen in peace and quiet pray to Heaven for the welfare of +the world, but we soldiers and knights carry into effect what they pray +for, defending it with the might of our arms and the edge of our swords, +not under shelter but in the open air, a target for the intolerable rays +of the sun in summer and the piercing frosts of winter. Thus are we God's +ministers on earth and the arms by which his justice is done therein. And +as the business of war and all that relates and belongs to it cannot be +conducted without exceeding great sweat, toil, and exertion, it follows +that those who make it their profession have undoubtedly more labour than +those who in tranquil peace and quiet are engaged in praying to God to +help the weak. I do not mean to say, nor does it enter into my thoughts, +that the knight-errant's calling is as good as that of the monk in his +cell; I would merely infer from what I endure myself that it is beyond a +doubt a more laborious and a more belaboured one, a hungrier and +thirstier, a wretcheder, raggeder, and lousier; for there is no reason to +doubt that the knights-errant of yore endured much hardship in the course +of their lives. And if some of them by the might of their arms did rise +to be emperors, in faith it cost them dear in the matter of blood and +sweat; and if those who attained to that rank had not had magicians and +sages to help them they would have been completely baulked in their +ambition and disappointed in their hopes." + +"That is my own opinion," replied the traveller; "but one thing among +many others seems to me very wrong in knights-errant, and that is that +when they find themselves about to engage in some mighty and perilous +adventure in which there is manifest danger of losing their lives, they +never at the moment of engaging in it think of commending themselves to +God, as is the duty of every good Christian in like peril; instead of +which they commend themselves to their ladies with as much devotion as if +these were their gods, a thing which seems to me to savour somewhat of +heathenism." + +"Sir," answered Don Quixote, "that cannot be on any account omitted, and +the knight-errant would be disgraced who acted otherwise: for it is usual +and customary in knight-errantry that the knight-errant, who on engaging +in any great feat of arms has his lady before him, should turn his eyes +towards her softly and lovingly, as though with them entreating her to +favour and protect him in the hazardous venture he is about to undertake, +and even though no one hear him, he is bound to say certain words between +his teeth, commending himself to her with all his heart, and of this we +have innumerable instances in the histories. Nor is it to be supposed +from this that they are to omit commending themselves to God, for there +will be time and opportunity for doing so while they are engaged in their +task." + +"For all that," answered the traveller, "I feel some doubt still, because +often I have read how words will arise between two knights-errant, and +from one thing to another it comes about that their anger kindles and +they wheel their horses round and take a good stretch of field, and then +without any more ado at the top of their speed they come to the charge, +and in mid-career they are wont to commend themselves to their ladies; +and what commonly comes of the encounter is that one falls over the +haunches of his horse pierced through and through by his antagonist's +lance, and as for the other, it is only by holding on to the mane of his +horse that he can help falling to the ground; but I know not how the dead +man had time to commend himself to God in the course of such rapid work +as this; it would have been better if those words which he spent in +commending himself to his lady in the midst of his career had been +devoted to his duty and obligation as a Christian. Moreover, it is my +belief that all knights-errant have not ladies to commend themselves to, +for they are not all in love." + +"That is impossible," said Don Quixote: "I say it is impossible that +there could be a knight-errant without a lady, because to such it is as +natural and proper to be in love as to the heavens to have stars: most +certainly no history has been seen in which there is to be found a +knight-errant without an amour, and for the simple reason that without +one he would be held no legitimate knight but a bastard, and one who had +gained entrance into the stronghold of the said knighthood, not by the +door, but over the wall like a thief and a robber." + +"Nevertheless," said the traveller, "if I remember rightly, I think I +have read that Don Galaor, the brother of the valiant Amadis of Gaul, +never had any special lady to whom he might commend himself, and yet he +was not the less esteemed, and was a very stout and famous knight." + +To which our Don Quixote made answer, "Sir, one solitary swallow does not +make summer; moreover, I know that knight was in secret very deeply in +love; besides which, that way of falling in love with all that took his +fancy was a natural propensity which he could not control. But, in short, +it is very manifest that he had one alone whom he made mistress of his +will, to whom he commended himself very frequently and very secretly, for +he prided himself on being a reticent knight." + +"Then if it be essential that every knight-errant should be in love," +said the traveller, "it may be fairly supposed that your worship is so, +as you are of the order; and if you do not pride yourself on being as +reticent as Don Galaor, I entreat you as earnestly as I can, in the name +of all this company and in my own, to inform us of the name, country, +rank, and beauty of your lady, for she will esteem herself fortunate if +all the world knows that she is loved and served by such a knight as your +worship seems to be." + +At this Don Quixote heaved a deep sigh and said, "I cannot say positively +whether my sweet enemy is pleased or not that the world should know I +serve her; I can only say in answer to what has been so courteously asked +of me, that her name is Dulcinea, her country El Toboso, a village of La +Mancha, her rank must be at least that of a princess, since she is my +queen and lady, and her beauty superhuman, since all the impossible and +fanciful attributes of beauty which the poets apply to their ladies are +verified in her; for her hairs are gold, her forehead Elysian fields, her +eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her +teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her +fairness snow, and what modesty conceals from sight such, I think and +imagine, as rational reflection can only extol, not compare." + +"We should like to know her lineage, race, and ancestry," said Vivaldo. + +To which Don Quixote replied, "She is not of the ancient Roman Curtii, +Caii, or Scipios, nor of the modern Colonnas or Orsini, nor of the +Moncadas or Requesenes of Catalonia, nor yet of the Rebellas or +Villanovas of Valencia; Palafoxes, Nuzas, Rocabertis, Corellas, Lunas, +Alagones, Urreas, Foces, or Gurreas of Aragon; Cerdas, Manriques, +Mendozas, or Guzmans of Castile; Alencastros, Pallas, or Meneses of +Portugal; but she is of those of El Toboso of La Mancha, a lineage that +though modern, may furnish a source of gentle blood for the most +illustrious families of the ages that are to come, and this let none +dispute with me save on the condition that Zerbino placed at the foot of +the trophy of Orlando's arms, saying, + +'These let none move Who dareth not his might with Roland prove.'" + +"Although mine is of the Cachopins of Laredo," said the traveller, "I +will not venture to compare it with that of El Toboso of La Mancha, +though, to tell the truth, no such surname has until now ever reached my +ears." + +"What!" said Don Quixote, "has that never reached them?" + +The rest of the party went along listening with great attention to the +conversation of the pair, and even the very goatherds and shepherds +perceived how exceedingly out of his wits our Don Quixote was. Sancho +Panza alone thought that what his master said was the truth, knowing who +he was and having known him from his birth; and all that he felt any +difficulty in believing was that about the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, +because neither any such name nor any such princess had ever come to his +knowledge though he lived so close to El Toboso. They were going along +conversing in this way, when they saw descending a gap between two high +mountains some twenty shepherds, all clad in sheepskins of black wool, +and crowned with garlands which, as afterwards appeared, were, some of +them of yew, some of cypress. Six of the number were carrying a bier +covered with a great variety of flowers and branches, on seeing which one +of the goatherds said, "Those who come there are the bearers of +Chrysostom's body, and the foot of that mountain is the place where he +ordered them to bury him." They therefore made haste to reach the spot, +and did so by the time those who came had laid the bier upon the ground, +and four of them with sharp pickaxes were digging a grave by the side of +a hard rock. They greeted each other courteously, and then Don Quixote +and those who accompanied him turned to examine the bier, and on it, +covered with flowers, they saw a dead body in the dress of a shepherd, to +all appearance of one thirty years of age, and showing even in death that +in life he had been of comely features and gallant bearing. Around him on +the bier itself were laid some books, and several papers open and folded; +and those who were looking on as well as those who were opening the grave +and all the others who were there preserved a strange silence, until one +of those who had borne the body said to another, "Observe carefully, +Ambrosia if this is the place Chrysostom spoke of, since you are anxious +that what he directed in his will should be so strictly complied with." + +"This is the place," answered Ambrosia "for in it many a time did my poor +friend tell me the story of his hard fortune. Here it was, he told me, +that he saw for the first time that mortal enemy of the human race, and +here, too, for the first time he declared to her his passion, as +honourable as it was devoted, and here it was that at last Marcela ended +by scorning and rejecting him so as to bring the tragedy of his wretched +life to a close; here, in memory of misfortunes so great, he desired to +be laid in the bowels of eternal oblivion." Then turning to Don Quixote +and the travellers he went on to say, "That body, sirs, on which you are +looking with compassionate eyes, was the abode of a soul on which Heaven +bestowed a vast share of its riches. That is the body of Chrysostom, who +was unrivalled in wit, unequalled in courtesy, unapproached in gentle +bearing, a phoenix in friendship, generous without limit, grave without +arrogance, gay without vulgarity, and, in short, first in all that +constitutes goodness and second to none in all that makes up misfortune. +He loved deeply, he was hated; he adored, he was scorned; he wooed a wild +beast, he pleaded with marble, he pursued the wind, he cried to the +wilderness, he served ingratitude, and for reward was made the prey of +death in the mid-course of life, cut short by a shepherdess whom he +sought to immortalise in the memory of man, as these papers which you see +could fully prove, had he not commanded me to consign them to the fire +after having consigned his body to the earth." + +"You would deal with them more harshly and cruelly than their owner +himself," said Vivaldo, "for it is neither right nor proper to do the +will of one who enjoins what is wholly unreasonable; it would not have +been reasonable in Augustus Caesar had he permitted the directions left +by the divine Mantuan in his will to be carried into effect. So that, +Senor Ambrosia while you consign your friend's body to the earth, you +should not consign his writings to oblivion, for if he gave the order in +bitterness of heart, it is not right that you should irrationally obey +it. On the contrary, by granting life to those papers, let the cruelty of +Marcela live for ever, to serve as a warning in ages to come to all men +to shun and avoid falling into like danger; or I and all of us who have +come here know already the story of this your love-stricken and +heart-broken friend, and we know, too, your friendship, and the cause of +his death, and the directions he gave at the close of his life; from +which sad story may be gathered how great was the cruelty of Marcela, the +love of Chrysostom, and the loyalty of your friendship, together with the +end awaiting those who pursue rashly the path that insane passion opens +to their eyes. Last night we learned the death of Chrysostom and that he +was to be buried here, and out of curiosity and pity we left our direct +road and resolved to come and see with our eyes that which when heard of +had so moved our compassion, and in consideration of that compassion and +our desire to prove it if we might by condolence, we beg of you, +excellent Ambrosia, or at least I on my own account entreat you, that +instead of burning those papers you allow me to carry away some of them." + +And without waiting for the shepherd's answer, he stretched out his hand +and took up some of those that were nearest to him; seeing which Ambrosio +said, "Out of courtesy, senor, I will grant your request as to those you +have taken, but it is idle to expect me to abstain from burning the +remainder." + +Vivaldo, who was eager to see what the papers contained, opened one of +them at once, and saw that its title was "Lay of Despair." + +Ambrosio hearing it said, "That is the last paper the unhappy man wrote; +and that you may see, senor, to what an end his misfortunes brought him, +read it so that you may be heard, for you will have time enough for that +while we are waiting for the grave to be dug." + +"I will do so very willingly," said Vivaldo; and as all the bystanders +were equally eager they gathered round him, and he, reading in a loud +voice, found that it ran as follows. + +Chapter XIV. - +Wherein are inserted the despairing verses of the dead shepherd, together +with other incidents not looked for + +poem{ + +THE LAY OF CHRYSOSTOM + + Since thou dost in thy cruelty desire +The ruthless rigour of thy tyranny +From tongue to tongue, from land to land proclaimed, +The very Hell will I constrain to lend +This stricken breast of mine deep notes of woe +To serve my need of fitting utterance. +And as I strive to body forth the tale +Of all I suffer, all that thou hast done, +Forth shall the dread voice roll, and bear along +Shreds from my vitals torn for greater pain. +Then listen, not to dulcet harmony, +But to a discord wrung by mad despair +Out of this bosom's depths of bitterness, +To ease my heart and plant a sting in thine. + + The lion's roar, the fierce wolf's savage howl, +The horrid hissing of the scaly snake, +The awesome cries of monsters yet unnamed, +The crow's ill-boding croak, the hollow moan +Of wild winds wrestling with the restless sea, +The wrathful bellow of the vanquished bull, +The plaintive sobbing of the widowed dove, +The envied owl's sad note, the wail of woe +That rises from the dreary choir of Hell, +Commingled in one sound, confusing sense, +Let all these come to aid my soul's complaint, +For pain like mine demands new modes of song. + + No echoes of that discord shall be heard +Where Father Tagus rolls, or on the banks +Of olive-bordered Betis; to the rocks +Or in deep caverns shall my plaint be told, +And by a lifeless tongue in living words; +Or in dark valleys or on lonely shores, +Where neither foot of man nor sunbeam falls; +Or in among the poison-breathing swarms +Of monsters nourished by the sluggish Nile. +For, though it be to solitudes remote +The hoarse vague echoes of my sorrows sound +Thy matchless cruelty, my dismal fate +Shall carry them to all the spacious world. + + Disdain hath power to kill, and patience dies +Slain by suspicion, be it false or true; +And deadly is the force of jealousy; +Long absence makes of life a dreary void; +No hope of happiness can give repose +To him that ever fears to be forgot; +And death, inevitable, waits in hall. +But I, by some strange miracle, live on +A prey to absence, jealousy, disdain; +Racked by suspicion as by certainty; +Forgotten, left to feed my flame alone. +And while I suffer thus, there comes no ray +Of hope to gladden me athwart the gloom; +Nor do I look for it in my despair; +But rather clinging to a cureless woe, +All hope do I abjure for evermore. + + Can there be hope where fear is? Were it well, +When far more certain are the grounds of fear? +Ought I to shut mine eyes to jealousy, +If through a thousand heart-wounds it appears? +Who would not give free access to distrust, +Seeing disdain unveiled, and--bitter change!-- +All his suspicions turned to certainties, +And the fair truth transformed into a lie? +Oh, thou fierce tyrant of the realms of love, +Oh, Jealousy! put chains upon these hands, +And bind me with thy strongest cord, Disdain. +But, woe is me! triumphant over all, +My sufferings drown the memory of you. + + And now I die, and since there is no hope +Of happiness for me in life or death, +Still to my fantasy I'll fondly cling. +I'll say that he is wise who loveth well, +And that the soul most free is that most bound +In thraldom to the ancient tyrant Love. +I'll say that she who is mine enemy +In that fair body hath as fair a mind, +And that her coldness is but my desert, +And that by virtue of the pain he sends +Love rules his kingdom with a gentle sway. +Thus, self-deluding, and in bondage sore, +And wearing out the wretched shred of life +To which I am reduced by her disdain, +I'll give this soul and body to the winds, +All hopeless of a crown of bliss in store. + + Thou whose injustice hath supplied the cause +That makes me quit the weary life I loathe, +As by this wounded bosom thou canst see +How willingly thy victim I become, +Let not my death, if haply worth a tear, +Cloud the clear heaven that dwells in thy bright eyes; +I would not have thee expiate in aught +The crime of having made my heart thy prey; +But rather let thy laughter gaily ring +And prove my death to be thy festival. +Fool that I am to bid thee! well I know +Thy glory gains by my untimely end. + + And now it is the time; from Hell's abyss +Come thirsting Tantalus, come Sisyphus +Heaving the cruel stone, come Tityus +With vulture, and with wheel Ixion come, +And come the sisters of the ceaseless toil; +And all into this breast transfer their pains, +And (if such tribute to despair be due) +Chant in their deepest tones a doleful dirge +Over a corse unworthy of a shroud. +Let the three-headed guardian of the gate, +And all the monstrous progeny of hell, +The doleful concert join: a lover dead +Methinks can have no fitter obsequies. + + Lay of despair, grieve not when thou art gone +Forth from this sorrowing heart: my misery +Brings fortune to the cause that gave thee birth; +Then banish sadness even in the tomb. + +}poem + +The "Lay of Chrysostom" met with the approbation of the listeners, though +the reader said it did not seem to him to agree with what he had heard of +Marcela's reserve and propriety, for Chrysostom complained in it of +jealousy, suspicion, and absence, all to the prejudice of the good name +and fame of Marcela; to which Ambrosio replied as one who knew well his +friend's most secret thoughts, "Senor, to remove that doubt I should tell +you that when the unhappy man wrote this lay he was away from Marcela, +from whom he had voluntarily separated himself, to try if absence would +act with him as it is wont; and as everything distresses and every fear +haunts the banished lover, so imaginary jealousies and suspicions, +dreaded as if they were true, tormented Chrysostom; and thus the truth of +what report declares of the virtue of Marcela remains unshaken, and with +her envy itself should not and cannot find any fault save that of being +cruel, somewhat haughty, and very scornful." + +"That is true," said Vivaldo; and as he was about to read another paper +of those he had preserved from the fire, he was stopped by a marvellous +vision (for such it seemed) that unexpectedly presented itself to their +eyes; for on the summit of the rock where they were digging the grave +there appeared the shepherdess Marcela, so beautiful that her beauty +exceeded its reputation. Those who had never till then beheld her gazed +upon her in wonder and silence, and those who were accustomed to see her +were not less amazed than those who had never seen her before. But the +instant Ambrosio saw her he addressed her, with manifest indignation: + +"Art thou come, by chance, cruel basilisk of these mountains, to see if +in thy presence blood will flow from the wounds of this wretched being +thy cruelty has robbed of life; or is it to exult over the cruel work of +thy humours that thou art come; or like another pitiless Nero to look +down from that height upon the ruin of his Rome in embers; or in thy +arrogance to trample on this ill-fated corpse, as the ungrateful daughter +trampled on her father Tarquin's? Tell us quickly for what thou art come, +or what it is thou wouldst have, for, as I know the thoughts of +Chrysostom never failed to obey thee in life, I will make all these who +call themselves his friends obey thee, though he be dead." + +"I come not, Ambrosia for any of the purposes thou hast named," replied +Marcela, "but to defend myself and to prove how unreasonable are all +those who blame me for their sorrow and for Chrysostom's death; and +therefore I ask all of you that are here to give me your attention, for +will not take much time or many words to bring the truth home to persons +of sense. Heaven has made me, so you say, beautiful, and so much so that +in spite of yourselves my beauty leads you to love me; and for the love +you show me you say, and even urge, that I am bound to love you. By that +natural understanding which God has given me I know that everything +beautiful attracts love, but I cannot see how, by reason of being loved, +that which is loved for its beauty is bound to love that which loves it; +besides, it may happen that the lover of that which is beautiful may be +ugly, and ugliness being detestable, it is very absurd to say, "I love +thee because thou art beautiful, thou must love me though I be ugly." But +supposing the beauty equal on both sides, it does not follow that the +inclinations must be therefore alike, for it is not every beauty that +excites love, some but pleasing the eye without winning the affection; +and if every sort of beauty excited love and won the heart, the will +would wander vaguely to and fro unable to make choice of any; for as +there is an infinity of beautiful objects there must be an infinity of +inclinations, and true love, I have heard it said, is indivisible, and +must be voluntary and not compelled. If this be so, as I believe it to +be, why do you desire me to bend my will by force, for no other reason +but that you say you love me? Nay--tell me--had Heaven made me ugly, as it +has made me beautiful, could I with justice complain of you for not +loving me? Moreover, you must remember that the beauty I possess was no +choice of mine, for, be it what it may, Heaven of its bounty gave it me +without my asking or choosing it; and as the viper, though it kills with +it, does not deserve to be blamed for the poison it carries, as it is a +gift of nature, neither do I deserve reproach for being beautiful; for +beauty in a modest woman is like fire at a distance or a sharp sword; the +one does not burn, the other does not cut, those who do not come too +near. Honour and virtue are the ornaments of the mind, without which the +body, though it be so, has no right to pass for beautiful; but if modesty +is one of the virtues that specially lend a grace and charm to mind and +body, why should she who is loved for her beauty part with it to gratify +one who for his pleasure alone strives with all his might and energy to +rob her of it? I was born free, and that I might live in freedom I chose +the solitude of the fields; in the trees of the mountains I find society, +the clear waters of the brooks are my mirrors, and to the trees and +waters I make known my thoughts and charms. I am a fire afar off, a sword +laid aside. Those whom I have inspired with love by letting them see me, +I have by words undeceived, and if their longings live on hope--and I +have given none to Chrysostom or to any other--it cannot justly be said +that the death of any is my doing, for it was rather his own obstinacy +than my cruelty that killed him; and if it be made a charge against me +that his wishes were honourable, and that therefore I was bound to yield +to them, I answer that when on this very spot where now his grave is made +he declared to me his purity of purpose, I told him that mine was to live +in perpetual solitude, and that the earth alone should enjoy the fruits +of my retirement and the spoils of my beauty; and if, after this open +avowal, he chose to persist against hope and steer against the wind, what +wonder is it that he should sink in the depths of his infatuation? If I +had encouraged him, I should be false; if I had gratified him, I should +have acted against my own better resolution and purpose. He was +persistent in spite of warning, he despaired without being hated. Bethink +you now if it be reasonable that his suffering should be laid to my +charge. Let him who has been deceived complain, let him give way to +despair whose encouraged hopes have proved vain, let him flatter himself +whom I shall entice, let him boast whom I shall receive; but let not him +call me cruel or homicide to whom I make no promise, upon whom I practise +no deception, whom I neither entice nor receive. It has not been so far +the will of Heaven that I should love by fate, and to expect me to love +by choice is idle. Let this general declaration serve for each of my +suitors on his own account, and let it be understood from this time forth +that if anyone dies for me it is not of jealousy or misery he dies, for +she who loves no one can give no cause for jealousy to any, and candour +is not to be confounded with scorn. Let him who calls me wild beast and +basilisk, leave me alone as something noxious and evil; let him who calls +me ungrateful, withhold his service; who calls me wayward, seek not my +acquaintance; who calls me cruel, pursue me not; for this wild beast, +this basilisk, this ungrateful, cruel, wayward being has no kind of +desire to seek, serve, know, or follow them. If Chrysostom's impatience +and violent passion killed him, why should my modest behaviour and +circumspection be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the society of the +trees, why should he who would have me preserve it among men, seek to rob +me of it? I have, as you know, wealth of my own, and I covet not that of +others; my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I +neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or +trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd +girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my +desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it +is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul +travels to its primeval abode." + +With these words, and not waiting to hear a reply, she turned and passed +into the thickest part of a wood that was hard by, leaving all who were +there lost in admiration as much of her good sense as of her beauty. +Some--those wounded by the irresistible shafts launched by her bright +eyes--made as though they would follow her, heedless of the frank +declaration they had heard; seeing which, and deeming this a fitting +occasion for the exercise of his chivalry in aid of distressed damsels, +Don Quixote, laying his hand on the hilt of his sword, exclaimed in a +loud and distinct voice: + +"Let no one, whatever his rank or condition, dare to follow the beautiful +Marcela, under pain of incurring my fierce indignation. She has shown by +clear and satisfactory arguments that little or no fault is to be found +with her for the death of Chrysostom, and also how far she is from +yielding to the wishes of any of her lovers, for which reason, instead of +being followed and persecuted, she should in justice be honoured and +esteemed by all the good people of the world, for she shows that she is +the only woman in it that holds to such a virtuous resolution." + +Whether it was because of the threats of Don Quixote, or because Ambrosio +told them to fulfil their duty to their good friend, none of the +shepherds moved or stirred from the spot until, having finished the grave +and burned Chrysostom's papers, they laid his body in it, not without +many tears from those who stood by. They closed the grave with a heavy +stone until a slab was ready which Ambrosio said he meant to have +prepared, with an epitaph which was to be to this effect: + +poem{ + +Beneath the stone before your eyes +The body of a lover lies; +In life he was a shepherd swain, +In death a victim to disdain. +Ungrateful, cruel, coy, and fair, +Was she that drove him to despair, +And Love hath made her his ally +For spreading wide his tyranny. + +}poem + +They then strewed upon the grave a profusion of flowers and branches, and +all expressing their condolence with his friend ambrosio, took their +Vivaldo and his companion did the same; and Don Quixote bade farewell to +his hosts and to the travellers, who pressed him to come with them to +Seville, as being such a convenient place for finding adventures, for +they presented themselves in every street and round every corner oftener +than anywhere else. Don Quixote thanked them for their advice and for the +disposition they showed to do him a favour, and said that for the present +he would not, and must not go to Seville until he had cleared all these +mountains of highwaymen and robbers, of whom report said they were full. +Seeing his good intention, the travellers were unwilling to press him +further, and once more bidding him farewell, they left him and pursued +their journey, in the course of which they did not fail to discuss the +story of Marcela and Chrysostom as well as the madness of Don Quixote. +He, on his part, resolved to go in quest of the shepherdess Marcela, and +make offer to her of all the service he could render her; but things did +not fall out with him as he expected, according to what is related in the +course of this veracious history, of which the Second Part ends here. + +Chapter XV. - +In which is related the unfortunate adventure that Don Quixote fell in +with when he fell out with certain heartless Yanguesans + +The sage Cide Hamete Benengeli relates that as soon as Don Quixote took +leave of his hosts and all who had been present at the burial of +Chrysostom, he and his squire passed into the same wood which they had +seen the shepherdess Marcela enter, and after having wandered for more +than two hours in all directions in search of her without finding her, +they came to a halt in a glade covered with tender grass, beside which +ran a pleasant cool stream that invited and compelled them to pass there +the hours of the noontide heat, which by this time was beginning to come +on oppressively. Don Quixote and Sancho dismounted, and turning Rocinante +and the ass loose to feed on the grass that was there in abundance, they +ransacked the alforjas, and without any ceremony very peacefully and +sociably master and man made their repast on what they found in them. + +Sancho had not thought it worth while to hobble Rocinante, feeling sure, +from what he knew of his staidness and freedom from incontinence, that +all the mares in the Cordova pastures would not lead him into an +impropriety. Chance, however, and the devil, who is not always asleep, so +ordained it that feeding in this valley there was a drove of Galician +ponies belonging to certain Yanguesan carriers, whose way it is to take +their midday rest with their teams in places and spots where grass and +water abound; and that where Don Quixote chanced to be suited the +Yanguesans' purpose very well. It so happened, then, that Rocinante took +a fancy to disport himself with their ladyships the ponies, and +abandoning his usual gait and demeanour as he scented them, he, without +asking leave of his master, got up a briskish little trot and hastened to +make known his wishes to them; they, however, it seemed, preferred their +pasture to him, and received him with their heels and teeth to such +effect that they soon broke his girths and left him naked without a +saddle to cover him; but what must have been worse to him was that the +carriers, seeing the violence he was offering to their mares, came +running up armed with stakes, and so belaboured him that they brought him +sorely battered to the ground. + +By this time Don Quixote and Sancho, who had witnessed the drubbing of +Rocinante, came up panting, and said Don Quixote to Sancho: + +"So far as I can see, friend Sancho, these are not knights but base folk +of low birth: I mention it because thou canst lawfully aid me in taking +due vengeance for the insult offered to Rocinante before our eyes." + +"What the devil vengeance can we take," answered Sancho, "if they are +more than twenty, and we no more than two, or, indeed, perhaps not more +than one and a half?" + +"I count for a hundred," replied Don Quixote, and without more words he +drew his sword and attacked the Yanguesans and excited and impelled by +the example of his master, Sancho did the same; and to begin with, Don +Quixote delivered a slash at one of them that laid open the leather +jerkin he wore, together with a great portion of his shoulder. The +Yanguesans, seeing themselves assaulted by only two men while they were +so many, betook themselves to their stakes, and driving the two into the +middle they began to lay on with great zeal and energy; in fact, at the +second blow they brought Sancho to the ground, and Don Quixote fared the +same way, all his skill and high mettle availing him nothing, and fate +willed it that he should fall at the feet of Rocinante, who had not yet +risen; whereby it may be seen how furiously stakes can pound in angry +boorish hands. + +Then, seeing the mischief they had done, the Yanguesans with all the +haste they could loaded their team and pursued their journey, leaving the +two adventurers a sorry sight and in sorrier mood. + +Sancho was the first to come to, and finding himself close to his master +he called to him in a weak and doleful voice, "Senor Don Quixote, ah, +Senor Don Quixote!" + +"What wouldst thou, brother Sancho?" answered Don Quixote in the same +feeble suffering tone as Sancho. + +"I would like, if it were possible," answered Sancho Panza, "your worship +to give me a couple of sups of that potion of the fiery Blas, if it be +that you have any to hand there; perhaps it will serve for broken bones +as well as for wounds." + +"If I only had it here, wretch that I am, what more should we want?" said +Don Quixote; "but I swear to thee, Sancho Panza, on the faith of a +knight-errant, ere two days are over, unless fortune orders otherwise, I +mean to have it in my possession, or my hand will have lost its cunning." + +"But in how many does your worship think we shall have the use of our +feet?" answered Sancho Panza. + +"For myself I must say I cannot guess how many," said the battered knight +Don Quixote; "but I take all the blame upon myself, for I had no business +to put hand to sword against men who where not dubbed knights like +myself, and so I believe that in punishment for having transgressed the +laws of chivalry the God of battles has permitted this chastisement to be +administered to me; for which reason, brother Sancho, it is well thou +shouldst receive a hint on the matter which I am now about to mention to +thee, for it is of much importance to the welfare of both of us. It is at +when thou shalt see rabble of this sort offering us insult thou art not +to wait till I draw sword against them, for I shall not do so at all; but +do thou draw sword and chastise them to thy heart's content, and if any +knights come to their aid and defence I will take care to defend thee and +assail them with all my might; and thou hast already seen by a thousand +signs and proofs what the might of this strong arm of mine is equal +to"--so uplifted had the poor gentleman become through the victory over +the stout Biscayan. + +But Sancho did not so fully approve of his master's admonition as to let +it pass without saying in reply, "Senor, I am a man of peace, meek and +quiet, and I can put up with any affront because I have a wife and +children to support and bring up; so let it be likewise a hint to your +worship, as it cannot be a mandate, that on no account will I draw sword +either against clown or against knight, and that here before God I +forgive the insults that have been offered me, whether they have been, +are, or shall be offered me by high or low, rich or poor, noble or +commoner, not excepting any rank or condition whatsoever." + +To all which his master said in reply, "I wish I had breath enough to +speak somewhat easily, and that the pain I feel on this side would abate +so as to let me explain to thee, Panza, the mistake thou makest. Come +now, sinner, suppose the wind of fortune, hitherto so adverse, should +turn in our favour, filling the sails of our desires so that safely and +without impediment we put into port in some one of those islands I have +promised thee, how would it be with thee if on winning it I made thee +lord of it? Why, thou wilt make it well-nigh impossible through not being +a knight nor having any desire to be one, nor possessing the courage nor +the will to avenge insults or defend thy lordship; for thou must know +that in newly conquered kingdoms and provinces the minds of the +inhabitants are never so quiet nor so well disposed to the new lord that +there is no fear of their making some move to change matters once more, +and try, as they say, what chance may do for them; so it is essential +that the new possessor should have good sense to enable him to govern, +and valour to attack and defend himself, whatever may befall him." + +"In what has now befallen us," answered Sancho, "I'd have been well +pleased to have that good sense and that valour your worship speaks of, +but I swear on the faith of a poor man I am more fit for plasters than +for arguments. See if your worship can get up, and let us help Rocinante, +though he does not deserve it, for he was the main cause of all this +thrashing. I never thought it of Rocinante, for I took him to be a +virtuous person and as quiet as myself. After all, they say right that it +takes a long time to come to know people, and that there is nothing sure +in this life. Who would have said that, after such mighty slashes as your +worship gave that unlucky knight-errant, there was coming, travelling +post and at the very heels of them, such a great storm of sticks as has +fallen upon our shoulders?" + +"And yet thine, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "ought to be used to such +squalls; but mine, reared in soft cloth and fine linen, it is plain they +must feel more keenly the pain of this mishap, and if it were not that I +imagine--why do I say imagine?--know of a certainty that all these +annoyances are very necessary accompaniments of the calling of arms, I +would lay me down here to die of pure vexation." + +To this the squire replied, "Senor, as these mishaps are what one reaps +of chivalry, tell me if they happen very often, or if they have their own +fixed times for coming to pass; because it seems to me that after two +harvests we shall be no good for the third, unless God in his infinite +mercy helps us." + +"Know, friend Sancho," answered Don Quixote, "that the life of +knights-errant is subject to a thousand dangers and reverses, and neither +more nor less is it within immediate possibility for knights-errant to +become kings and emperors, as experience has shown in the case of many +different knights with whose histories I am thoroughly acquainted; and I +could tell thee now, if the pain would let me, of some who simply by +might of arm have risen to the high stations I have mentioned; and those +same, both before and after, experienced divers misfortunes and miseries; +for the valiant Amadis of Gaul found himself in the power of his mortal +enemy Arcalaus the magician, who, it is positively asserted, holding him +captive, gave him more than two hundred lashes with the reins of his +horse while tied to one of the pillars of a court; and moreover there is +a certain recondite author of no small authority who says that the Knight +of Phoebus, being caught in a certain pitfall, which opened under his +feet in a certain castle, on falling found himself bound hand and foot in +a deep pit underground, where they administered to him one of those +things they call clysters, of sand and snow-water, that well-nigh +finished him; and if he had not been succoured in that sore extremity by +a sage, a great friend of his, it would have gone very hard with the poor +knight; so I may well suffer in company with such worthy folk, for +greater were the indignities which they had to suffer than those which we +suffer. For I would have thee know, Sancho, that wounds caused by any +instruments which happen by chance to be in hand inflict no indignity, +and this is laid down in the law of the duel in express words: if, for +instance, the cobbler strikes another with the last which he has in his +hand, though it be in fact a piece of wood, it cannot be said for that +reason that he whom he struck with it has been cudgelled. I say this lest +thou shouldst imagine that because we have been drubbed in this affray we +have therefore suffered any indignity; for the arms those men carried, +with which they pounded us, were nothing more than their stakes, and not +one of them, so far as I remember, carried rapier, sword, or dagger." + +"They gave me no time to see that much," answered Sancho, "for hardly had +I laid hand on my tizona when they signed the cross on my shoulders with +their sticks in such style that they took the sight out of my eyes and +the strength out of my feet, stretching me where I now lie, and where +thinking of whether all those stake-strokes were an indignity or not +gives me no uneasiness, which the pain of the blows does, for they will +remain as deeply impressed on my memory as on my shoulders." + +"For all that let me tell thee, brother Panza," said Don Quixote, "that +there is no recollection which time does not put an end to, and no pain +which death does not remove." + +"And what greater misfortune can there be," replied Panza, "than the one +that waits for time to put an end to it and death to remove it? If our +mishap were one of those that are cured with a couple of plasters, it +would not be so bad; but I am beginning to think that all the plasters in +a hospital almost won't be enough to put us right." + +"No more of that: pluck strength out of weakness, Sancho, as I mean to +do," returned Don Quixote, "and let us see how Rocinante is, for it seems +to me that not the least share of this mishap has fallen to the lot of +the poor beast." + +"There is nothing wonderful in that," replied Sancho, "since he is a +knight-errant too; what I wonder at is that my beast should have come off +scot-free where we come out scotched." + +"Fortune always leaves a door open in adversity in order to bring relief +to it," said Don Quixote; "I say so because this little beast may now +supply the want of Rocinante, carrying me hence to some castle where I +may be cured of my wounds. And moreover I shall not hold it any dishonour +to be so mounted, for I remember having read how the good old Silenus, +the tutor and instructor of the gay god of laughter, when he entered the +city of the hundred gates, went very contentedly mounted on a handsome +ass." + +"It may be true that he went mounted as your worship says," answered +Sancho, "but there is a great difference between going mounted and going +slung like a sack of manure." + +To which Don Quixote replied, "Wounds received in battle confer honour +instead of taking it away; and so, friend Panza, say no more, but, as I +told thee before, get up as well as thou canst and put me on top of thy +beast in whatever fashion pleases thee best, and let us go hence ere +night come on and surprise us in these wilds." + +"And yet I have heard your worship say," observed Panza, "that it is very +meet for knights-errant to sleep in wastes and deserts, and that they +esteem it very good fortune." + +"That is," said Don Quixote, "when they cannot help it, or when they are +in love; and so true is this that there have been knights who have +remained two years on rocks, in sunshine and shade and all the +inclemencies of heaven, without their ladies knowing anything of it; and +one of these was Amadis, when, under the name of Beltenebros, he took up +his abode on the Pena Pobre for--I know not if it was eight years or +eight months, for I am not very sure of the reckoning; at any rate he +stayed there doing penance for I know not what pique the Princess Oriana +had against him; but no more of this now, Sancho, and make haste before a +mishap like Rocinante's befalls the ass." + +"The very devil would be in it in that case," said Sancho; and letting +off thirty "ohs," and sixty sighs, and a hundred and twenty maledictions +and execrations on whomsoever it was that had brought him there, he +raised himself, stopping half-way bent like a Turkish bow without power +to bring himself upright, but with all his pains he saddled his ass, who +too had gone astray somewhat, yielding to the excessive licence of the +day; he next raised up Rocinante, and as for him, had he possessed a +tongue to complain with, most assuredly neither Sancho nor his master +would have been behind him. + +To be brief, Sancho fixed Don Quixote on the ass and secured Rocinante +with a leading rein, and taking the ass by the halter, he proceeded more +or less in the direction in which it seemed to him the high road might +be; and, as chance was conducting their affairs for them from good to +better, he had not gone a short league when the road came in sight, and +on it he perceived an inn, which to his annoyance and to the delight of +Don Quixote must needs be a castle. Sancho insisted that it was an inn, +and his master that it was not one, but a castle, and the dispute lasted +so long that before the point was settled they had time to reach it, and +into it Sancho entered with all his team without any further controversy. + +Chapter XVI. - +Of what happened to the ingenious gentleman in the inn which he took to +be a castle + +The innkeeper, seeing Don Quixote slung across the ass, asked Sancho what +was amiss with him. Sancho answered that it was nothing, only that he had +fallen down from a rock and had his ribs a little bruised. The innkeeper +had a wife whose disposition was not such as those of her calling +commonly have, for she was by nature kind-hearted and felt for the +sufferings of her neighbours, so she at once set about tending Don +Quixote, and made her young daughter, a very comely girl, help her in +taking care of her guest. There was besides in the inn, as servant, an +Asturian lass with a broad face, flat poll, and snub nose, blind of one +eye and not very sound in the other. The elegance of her shape, to be +sure, made up for all her defects; she did not measure seven palms from +head to foot, and her shoulders, which overweighted her somewhat, made +her contemplate the ground more than she liked. This graceful lass, then, +helped the young girl, and the two made up a very bad bed for Don Quixote +in a garret that showed evident signs of having formerly served for many +years as a straw-loft, in which there was also quartered a carrier whose +bed was placed a little beyond our Don Quixote's, and, though only made +of the pack-saddles and cloths of his mules, had much the advantage of +it, as Don Quixote's consisted simply of four rough boards on two not +very even trestles, a mattress, that for thinness might have passed for a +quilt, full of pellets which, were they not seen through the rents to be +wool, would to the touch have seemed pebbles in hardness, two sheets made +of buckler leather, and a coverlet the threads of which anyone that chose +might have counted without missing one in the reckoning. + +On this accursed bed Don Quixote stretched himself, and the hostess and +her daughter soon covered him with plasters from top to toe, while +Maritornes--for that was the name of the Asturian--held the light for +them, and while plastering him, the hostess, observing how full of wheals +Don Quixote was in some places, remarked that this had more the look of +blows than of a fall. + +It was not blows, Sancho said, but that the rock had many points and +projections, and that each of them had left its mark. "Pray, senora," he +added, "manage to save some tow, as there will be no want of some one to +use it, for my loins too are rather sore." + +"Then you must have fallen too," said the hostess. + +"I did not fall," said Sancho Panza, "but from the shock I got at seeing +my master fall, my body aches so that I feel as if I had had a thousand +thwacks." + +"That may well be," said the young girl, "for it has many a time happened +to me to dream that I was falling down from a tower and never coming to +the ground, and when I awoke from the dream to find myself as weak and +shaken as if I had really fallen." + +"There is the point, senora," replied Sancho Panza, "that I without +dreaming at all, but being more awake than I am now, find myself with +scarcely less wheals than my master, Don Quixote." + +"How is the gentleman called?" asked Maritornes the Asturian. + +"Don Quixote of La Mancha," answered Sancho Panza, "and he is a +knight-adventurer, and one of the best and stoutest that have been seen +in the world this long time past." + +"What is a knight-adventurer?" said the lass. + +"Are you so new in the world as not to know?" answered Sancho Panza. +"Well, then, you must know, sister, that a knight-adventurer is a thing +that in two words is seen drubbed and emperor, that is to-day the most +miserable and needy being in the world, and to-morrow will have two or +three crowns of kingdoms to give his squire." + +"Then how is it," said the hostess, "that belonging to so good a master +as this, you have not, to judge by appearances, even so much as a +county?" + +"It is too soon yet," answered Sancho, "for we have only been a month +going in quest of adventures, and so far we have met with nothing that +can be called one, for it will happen that when one thing is looked for +another thing is found; however, if my master Don Quixote gets well of +this wound, or fall, and I am left none the worse of it, I would not +change my hopes for the best title in Spain." + +To all this conversation Don Quixote was listening very attentively, and +sitting up in bed as well as he could, and taking the hostess by the hand +he said to her, "Believe me, fair lady, you may call yourself fortunate +in having in this castle of yours sheltered my person, which is such that +if I do not myself praise it, it is because of what is commonly said, +that self-praise debaseth; but my squire will inform you who I am. I only +tell you that I shall preserve for ever inscribed on my memory the +service you have rendered me in order to tender you my gratitude while +life shall last me; and would to Heaven love held me not so enthralled +and subject to its laws and to the eyes of that fair ingrate whom I name +between my teeth, but that those of this lovely damsel might be the +masters of my liberty." + +The hostess, her daughter, and the worthy Maritornes listened in +bewilderment to the words of the knight-errant; for they understood about +as much of them as if he had been talking Greek, though they could +perceive they were all meant for expressions of good-will and +blandishments; and not being accustomed to this kind of language, they +stared at him and wondered to themselves, for he seemed to them a man of +a different sort from those they were used to, and thanking him in +pothouse phrase for his civility they left him, while the Asturian gave +her attention to Sancho, who needed it no less than his master. + +The carrier had made an arrangement with her for recreation that night, +and she had given him her word that when the guests were quiet and the +family asleep she would come in search of him and meet his wishes +unreservedly. And it is said of this good lass that she never made +promises of the kind without fulfilling them, even though she made them +in a forest and without any witness present, for she plumed herself +greatly on being a lady and held it no disgrace to be in such an +employment as servant in an inn, because, she said, misfortunes and +ill-luck had brought her to that position. The hard, narrow, wretched, +rickety bed of Don Quixote stood first in the middle of this star-lit +stable, and close beside it Sancho made his, which merely consisted of a +rush mat and a blanket that looked as if it was of threadbare canvas +rather than of wool. Next to these two beds was that of the carrier, made +up, as has been said, of the pack-saddles and all the trappings of the +two best mules he had, though there were twelve of them, sleek, plump, +and in prime condition, for he was one of the rich carriers of Arevalo, +according to the author of this history, who particularly mentions this +carrier because he knew him very well, and they even say was in some +degree a relation of his; besides which Cide Hamete Benengeli was a +historian of great research and accuracy in all things, as is very +evident since he would not pass over in silence those that have been +already mentioned, however trifling and insignificant they might be, an +example that might be followed by those grave historians who relate +transactions so curtly and briefly that we hardly get a taste of them, +all the substance of the work being left in the inkstand from +carelessness, perverseness, or ignorance. A thousand blessings on the +author of "Tablante de Ricamonte" and that of the other book in which the +deeds of the Conde Tomillas are recounted; with what minuteness they +describe everything! + +To proceed, then: after having paid a visit to his team and given them +their second feed, the carrier stretched himself on his pack-saddles and +lay waiting for his conscientious Maritornes. Sancho was by this time +plastered and had lain down, and though he strove to sleep the pain of +his ribs would not let him, while Don Quixote with the pain of his had +his eyes as wide open as a hare's. + +The inn was all in silence, and in the whole of it there was no light +except that given by a lantern that hung burning in the middle of the +gateway. This strange stillness, and the thoughts, always present to our +knight's mind, of the incidents described at every turn in the books that +were the cause of his misfortune, conjured up to his imagination as +extraordinary a delusion as can well be conceived, which was that he +fancied himself to have reached a famous castle (for, as has been said, +all the inns he lodged in were castles to his eyes), and that the +daughter of the innkeeper was daughter of the lord of the castle, and +that she, won by his high-bred bearing, had fallen in love with him, and +had promised to come to his bed for a while that night without the +knowledge of her parents; and holding all this fantasy that he had +constructed as solid fact, he began to feel uneasy and to consider the +perilous risk which his virtue was about to encounter, and he resolved in +his heart to commit no treason to his lady Dulcinea del Toboso, even +though the queen Guinevere herself and the dame Quintanona should present +themselves before him. + +While he was taken up with these vagaries, then, the time and the +hour--an unlucky one for him--arrived for the Asturian to come, who in +her smock, with bare feet and her hair gathered into a fustian coif, with +noiseless and cautious steps entered the chamber where the three were +quartered, in quest of the carrier; but scarcely had she gained the door +when Don Quixote perceived her, and sitting up in his bed in spite of his +plasters and the pain of his ribs, he stretched out his arms to receive +his beauteous damsel. The Asturian, who went all doubled up and in +silence with her hands before her feeling for her lover, encountered the +arms of Don Quixote, who grasped her tightly by the wrist, and drawing +her towards him, while she dared not utter a word, made her sit down on +the bed. He then felt her smock, and although it was of sackcloth it +appeared to him to be of the finest and softest silk: on her wrists she +wore some glass beads, but to him they had the sheen of precious Orient +pearls: her hair, which in some measure resembled a horse's mane, he +rated as threads of the brightest gold of Araby, whose refulgence dimmed +the sun himself: her breath, which no doubt smelt of yesterday's stale +salad, seemed to him to diffuse a sweet aromatic fragrance from her +mouth; and, in short, he drew her portrait in his imagination with the +same features and in the same style as that which he had seen in his +books of the other princesses who, smitten by love, came with all the +adornments that are here set down, to see the sorely wounded knight; and +so great was the poor gentleman's blindness that neither touch, nor +smell, nor anything else about the good lass that would have made any but +a carrier vomit, were enough to undeceive him; on the contrary, he was +persuaded he had the goddess of beauty in his arms, and holding her +firmly in his grasp he went on to say in low, tender voice: + +"Would that found myself, lovely and exalted lady, in a position to repay +such a favour as that which you, by the sight of your great beauty, have +granted me; but fortune, which is never weary of persecuting the good, +has chosen to place me upon this bed, where I lie so bruised and broken +that though my inclination would gladly comply with yours it is +impossible; besides, to this impossibility another yet greater is to be +added, which is the faith that I have pledged to the peerless Dulcinea +del Toboso, sole lady of my most secret thoughts; and were it not that +this stood in the way I should not be so insensible a knight as to miss +the happy opportunity which your great goodness has offered me." + +Maritornes was fretting and sweating at finding herself held so fast by +Don Quixote, and not understanding or heeding the words he addressed to +her, she strove without speaking to free herself. The worthy carrier, +whose unholy thoughts kept him awake, was aware of his doxy the moment +she entered the door, and was listening attentively to all Don Quixote +said; and jealous that the Asturian should have broken her word with him +for another, drew nearer to Don Quixote's bed and stood still to see what +would come of this talk which he could not understand; but when he +perceived the wench struggling to get free and Don Quixote striving to +hold her, not relishing the joke he raised his arm and delivered such a +terrible cuff on the lank jaws of the amorous knight that he bathed all +his mouth in blood, and not content with this he mounted on his ribs and +with his feet tramped all over them at a pace rather smarter than a trot. +The bed which was somewhat crazy and not very firm on its feet, unable to +support the additional weight of the carrier, came to the ground, and at +the mighty crash of this the innkeeper awoke and at once concluded that +it must be some brawl of Maritornes', because after calling loudly to her +he got no answer. With this suspicion he got up, and lighting a lamp +hastened to the quarter where he had heard the disturbance. The wench, +seeing that her master was coming and knowing that his temper was +terrible, frightened and panic-stricken made for the bed of Sancho Panza, +who still slept, and crouching upon it made a ball of herself. + +The innkeeper came in exclaiming, "Where art thou, strumpet? Of course +this is some of thy work." At this Sancho awoke, and feeling this mass +almost on top of him fancied he had the nightmare and began to distribute +fisticuffs all round, of which a certain share fell upon Maritornes, who, +irritated by the pain and flinging modesty aside, paid back so many in +return to Sancho that she woke him up in spite of himself. He then, +finding himself so handled, by whom he knew not, raising himself up as +well as he could, grappled with Maritornes, and he and she between them +began the bitterest and drollest scrimmage in the world. The carrier, +however, perceiving by the light of the innkeeper candle how it fared +with his ladylove, quitting Don Quixote, ran to bring her the help she +needed; and the innkeeper did the same but with a different intention, +for his was to chastise the lass, as he believed that beyond a doubt she +alone was the cause of all the harmony. And so, as the saying is, cat to +rat, rat to rope, rope to stick, the carrier pounded Sancho, Sancho the +lass, she him, and the innkeeper her, and all worked away so briskly that +they did not give themselves a moment's rest; and the best of it was that +the innkeeper's lamp went out, and as they were left in the dark they all +laid on one upon the other in a mass so unmercifully that there was not a +sound spot left where a hand could light. + +It so happened that there was lodging that night in the inn a caudrillero +of what they call the Old Holy Brotherhood of Toledo, who, also hearing +the extraordinary noise of the conflict, seized his staff and the tin +case with his warrants, and made his way in the dark into the room +crying: "Hold! in the name of the Jurisdiction! Hold! in the name of the +Holy Brotherhood!" + +The first that he came upon was the pummelled Don Quixote, who lay +stretched senseless on his back upon his broken-down bed, and, his hand +falling on the beard as he felt about, he continued to cry, "Help for the +Jurisdiction!" but perceiving that he whom he had laid hold of did not +move or stir, he concluded that he was dead and that those in the room +were his murderers, and with this suspicion he raised his voice still +higher, calling out, "Shut the inn gate; see that no one goes out; they +have killed a man here!" This cry startled them all, and each dropped the +contest at the point at which the voice reached him. The innkeeper +retreated to his room, the carrier to his pack-saddles, the lass to her +crib; the unlucky Don Quixote and Sancho alone were unable to move from +where they were. The cuadrillero on this let go Don Quixote's beard, and +went out to look for a light to search for and apprehend the culprits; +but not finding one, as the innkeeper had purposely extinguished the +lantern on retreating to his room, he was compelled to have recourse to +the hearth, where after much time and trouble he lit another lamp. + +Chapter XVII. - +In which are contained the innumerable troubles which the brave Don +Quixote and his good Squire Sancho Panza endured in the inn, which to his +misfortune he took to be a castle + +By this time Don Quixote had recovered from his swoon; and in the same +tone of voice in which he had called to his squire the day before when he +lay stretched "in the vale of the stakes," he began calling to him now, +"Sancho, my friend, art thou asleep? sleepest thou, friend Sancho?" + +"How can I sleep, curses on it!" returned Sancho discontentedly and +bitterly, "when it is plain that all the devils have been at me this +night?" + +"Thou mayest well believe that," answered Don Quixote, "because, either I +know little, or this castle is enchanted, for thou must know-but this +that I am now about to tell thee thou must swear to keep secret until +after my death." + +"I swear it," answered Sancho. + +"I say so," continued Don Quixote, "because I hate taking away anyone's +good name." + +"I say," replied Sancho, "that I swear to hold my tongue about it till +the end of your worship's days, and God grant I may be able to let it out +tomorrow." + +"Do I do thee such injuries, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that thou +wouldst see me dead so soon?" + +"It is not for that," replied Sancho, "but because I hate keeping things +long, and I don't want them to grow rotten with me from over-keeping." + +"At any rate," said Don Quixote, "I have more confidence in thy affection +and good nature; and so I would have thee know that this night there +befell me one of the strangest adventures that I could describe, and to +relate it to thee briefly thou must know that a little while ago the +daughter of the lord of this castle came to me, and that she is the most +elegant and beautiful damsel that could be found in the wide world. What +I could tell thee of the charms of her person! of her lively wit! of +other secret matters which, to preserve the fealty I owe to my lady +Dulcinea del Toboso, I shall pass over unnoticed and in silence! I will +only tell thee that, either fate being envious of so great a boon placed +in my hands by good fortune, or perhaps (and this is more probable) this +castle being, as I have already said, enchanted, at the time when I was +engaged in the sweetest and most amorous discourse with her, there came, +without my seeing or knowing whence it came, a hand attached to some arm +of some huge giant, that planted such a cuff on my jaws that I have them +all bathed in blood, and then pummelled me in such a way that I am in a +worse plight than yesterday when the carriers, on account of Rocinante's +misbehaviour, inflicted on us the injury thou knowest of; whence +conjecture that there must be some enchanted Moor guarding the treasure +of this damsel's beauty, and that it is not for me." + +"Not for me either," said Sancho, "for more than four hundred Moors have +so thrashed me that the drubbing of the stakes was cakes and fancy-bread +to it. But tell me, senor, what do you call this excellent and rare +adventure that has left us as we are left now? Though your worship was +not so badly off, having in your arms that incomparable beauty you spoke +of; but I, what did I have, except the heaviest whacks I think I had in +all my life? Unlucky me and the mother that bore me! for I am not a +knight-errant and never expect to be one, and of all the mishaps, the +greater part falls to my share." + +"Then thou hast been thrashed too?" said Don Quixote. + +"Didn't I say so? worse luck to my line!" said Sancho. + +"Be not distressed, friend," said Don Quixote, "for I will now make the +precious balsam with which we shall cure ourselves in the twinkling of an +eye." + +By this time the cuadrillero had succeeded in lighting the lamp, and came +in to see the man that he thought had been killed; and as Sancho caught +sight of him at the door, seeing him coming in his shirt, with a cloth on +his head, and a lamp in his hand, and a very forbidding countenance, he +said to his master, "Senor, can it be that this is the enchanted Moor +coming back to give us more castigation if there be anything still left +in the ink-bottle?" + +"It cannot be the Moor," answered Don Quixote, "for those under +enchantment do not let themselves be seen by anyone." + +"If they don't let themselves be seen, they let themselves be felt," said +Sancho; "if not, let my shoulders speak to the point." + +"Mine could speak too," said Don Quixote, "but that is not a sufficient +reason for believing that what we see is the enchanted Moor." + +The officer came up, and finding them engaged in such a peaceful +conversation, stood amazed; though Don Quixote, to be sure, still lay on +his back unable to move from pure pummelling and plasters. The officer +turned to him and said, "Well, how goes it, good man?" + +"I would speak more politely if I were you," replied Don Quixote; "is it +the way of this country to address knights-errant in that style, you +booby?" + +The cuadrillero finding himself so disrespectfully treated by such a +sorry-looking individual, lost his temper, and raising the lamp full of +oil, smote Don Quixote such a blow with it on the head that he gave him a +badly broken pate; then, all being in darkness, he went out, and Sancho +Panza said, "That is certainly the enchanted Moor, Senor, and he keeps +the treasure for others, and for us only the cuffs and lamp-whacks." + +"That is the truth," answered Don Quixote, "and there is no use in +troubling oneself about these matters of enchantment or being angry or +vexed at them, for as they are invisible and visionary we shall find no +one on whom to avenge ourselves, do what we may; rise, Sancho, if thou +canst, and call the alcaide of this fortress, and get him to give me a +little oil, wine, salt, and rosemary to make the salutiferous balsam, for +indeed I believe I have great need of it now, because I am losing much +blood from the wound that phantom gave me." + +Sancho got up with pain enough in his bones, and went after the innkeeper +in the dark, and meeting the officer, who was looking to see what had +become of his enemy, he said to him, "Senor, whoever you are, do us the +favour and kindness to give us a little rosemary, oil, salt, and wine, +for it is wanted to cure one of the best knights-errant on earth, who +lies on yonder bed wounded by the hands of the enchanted Moor that is in +this inn." + +When the officer heard him talk in this way, he took him for a man out of +his senses, and as day was now beginning to break, he opened the inn +gate, and calling the host, he told him what this good man wanted. The +host furnished him with what he required, and Sancho brought it to Don +Quixote, who, with his hand to his head, was bewailing the pain of the +blow of the lamp, which had done him no more harm than raising a couple +of rather large lumps, and what he fancied blood was only the sweat that +flowed from him in his sufferings during the late storm. To be brief, he +took the materials, of which he made a compound, mixing them all and +boiling them a good while until it seemed to him they had come to +perfection. He then asked for some vial to pour it into, and as there was +not one in the inn, he decided on putting it into a tin oil-bottle or +flask of which the host made him a free gift; and over the flask he +repeated more than eighty paternosters and as many more ave-marias, +salves, and credos, accompanying each word with a cross by way of +benediction, at all which there were present Sancho, the innkeeper, and +the cuadrillero; for the carrier was now peacefully engaged in attending +to the comfort of his mules. + +This being accomplished, he felt anxious to make trial himself, on the +spot, of the virtue of this precious balsam, as he considered it, and so +he drank near a quart of what could not be put into the flask and +remained in the pigskin in which it had been boiled; but scarcely had he +done drinking when he began to vomit in such a way that nothing was left +in his stomach, and with the pangs and spasms of vomiting he broke into a +profuse sweat, on account of which he bade them cover him up and leave +him alone. They did so, and he lay sleeping more than three hours, at the +end of which he awoke and felt very great bodily relief and so much ease +from his bruises that he thought himself quite cured, and verily believed +he had hit upon the balsam of Fierabras; and that with this remedy he +might thenceforward, without any fear, face any kind of destruction, +battle, or combat, however perilous it might be. + +Sancho Panza, who also regarded the amendment of his master as +miraculous, begged him to give him what was left in the pigskin, which +was no small quantity. Don Quixote consented, and he, taking it with both +hands, in good faith and with a better will, gulped down and drained off +very little less than his master. But the fact is, that the stomach of +poor Sancho was of necessity not so delicate as that of his master, and +so, before vomiting, he was seized with such gripings and retchings, and +such sweats and faintness, that verily and truly be believed his last +hour had come, and finding himself so racked and tormented he cursed the +balsam and the thief that had given it to him. + +Don Quixote seeing him in this state said, "It is my belief, Sancho, that +this mischief comes of thy not being dubbed a knight, for I am persuaded +this liquor cannot be good for those who are not so." + +"If your worship knew that," returned Sancho--"woe betide me and all my +kindred!--why did you let me taste it?" + +At this moment the draught took effect, and the poor squire began to +discharge both ways at such a rate that the rush mat on which he had +thrown himself and the canvas blanket he had covering him were fit for +nothing afterwards. He sweated and perspired with such paroxysms and +convulsions that not only he himself but all present thought his end had +come. This tempest and tribulation lasted about two hours, at the end of +which he was left, not like his master, but so weak and exhausted that he +could not stand. Don Quixote, however, who, as has been said, felt +himself relieved and well, was eager to take his departure at once in +quest of adventures, as it seemed to him that all the time he loitered +there was a fraud upon the world and those in it who stood in need of his +help and protection, all the more when he had the security and confidence +his balsam afforded him; and so, urged by this impulse, he saddled +Rocinante himself and put the pack-saddle on his squire's beast, whom +likewise he helped to dress and mount the ass; after which he mounted his +horse and turning to a corner of the inn he laid hold of a pike that +stood there, to serve him by way of a lance. All that were in the inn, +who were more than twenty persons, stood watching him; the innkeeper's +daughter was likewise observing him, and he too never took his eyes off +her, and from time to time fetched a sigh that he seemed to pluck up from +the depths of his bowels; but they all thought it must be from the pain +he felt in his ribs; at any rate they who had seen him plastered the +night before thought so. + +As soon as they were both mounted, at the gate of the inn, he called to +the host and said in a very grave and measured voice, "Many and great are +the favours, Senor Alcaide, that I have received in this castle of yours, +and I remain under the deepest obligation to be grateful to you for them +all the days of my life; if I can repay them in avenging you of any +arrogant foe who may have wronged you, know that my calling is no other +than to aid the weak, to avenge those who suffer wrong, and to chastise +perfidy. Search your memory, and if you find anything of this kind you +need only tell me of it, and I promise you by the order of knighthood +which I have received to procure you satisfaction and reparation to the +utmost of your desire." + +The innkeeper replied to him with equal calmness, "Sir Knight, I do not +want your worship to avenge me of any wrong, because when any is done me +I can take what vengeance seems good to me; the only thing I want is that +you pay me the score that you have run up in the inn last night, as well +for the straw and barley for your two beasts, as for supper and beds." + +"Then this is an inn?" said Don Quixote. + +"And a very respectable one," said the innkeeper. + +"I have been under a mistake all this time," answered Don Quixote, "for +in truth I thought it was a castle, and not a bad one; but since it +appears that it is not a castle but an inn, all that can be done now is +that you should excuse the payment, for I cannot contravene the rule of +knights-errant, of whom I know as a fact (and up to the present I have +read nothing to the contrary) that they never paid for lodging or +anything else in the inn where they might be; for any hospitality that +might be offered them is their due by law and right in return for the +insufferable toil they endure in seeking adventures by night and by day, +in summer and in winter, on foot and on horseback, in hunger and thirst, +cold and heat, exposed to all the inclemencies of heaven and all the +hardships of earth." + +"I have little to do with that," replied the innkeeper; "pay me what you +owe me, and let us have no more talk of chivalry, for all I care about is +to get my money." + +"You are a stupid, scurvy innkeeper," said Don Quixote, and putting spurs +to Rocinante and bringing his pike to the slope he rode out of the inn +before anyone could stop him, and pushed on some distance without looking +to see if his squire was following him. + +The innkeeper when he saw him go without paying him ran to get payment of +Sancho, who said that as his master would not pay neither would he, +because, being as he was squire to a knight-errant, the same rule and +reason held good for him as for his master with regard to not paying +anything in inns and hostelries. At this the innkeeper waxed very wroth, +and threatened if he did not pay to compel him in a way that he would not +like. To which Sancho made answer that by the law of chivalry his master +had received he would not pay a rap, though it cost him his life; for the +excellent and ancient usage of knights-errant was not going to be +violated by him, nor should the squires of such as were yet to come into +the world ever complain of him or reproach him with breaking so just a +privilege. + +The ill-luck of the unfortunate Sancho so ordered it that among the +company in the inn there were four woolcarders from Segovia, three +needle-makers from the Colt of Cordova, and two lodgers from the Fair of +Seville, lively fellows, tender-hearted, fond of a joke, and playful, +who, almost as if instigated and moved by a common impulse, made up to +Sancho and dismounted him from his ass, while one of them went in for the +blanket of the host's bed; but on flinging him into it they looked up, +and seeing that the ceiling was somewhat lower what they required for +their work, they decided upon going out into the yard, which was bounded +by the sky, and there, putting Sancho in the middle of the blanket, they +began to raise him high, making sport with him as they would with a dog +at Shrovetide. + +The cries of the poor blanketed wretch were so loud that they reached the +ears of his master, who, halting to listen attentively, was persuaded +that some new adventure was coming, until he clearly perceived that it +was his squire who uttered them. Wheeling about he came up to the inn +with a laborious gallop, and finding it shut went round it to see if he +could find some way of getting in; but as soon as he came to the wall of +the yard, which was not very high, he discovered the game that was being +played with his squire. He saw him rising and falling in the air with +such grace and nimbleness that, had his rage allowed him, it is my belief +he would have laughed. He tried to climb from his horse on to the top of +the wall, but he was so bruised and battered that he could not even +dismount; and so from the back of his horse he began to utter such +maledictions and objurgations against those who were blanketing Sancho as +it would be impossible to write down accurately: they, however, did not +stay their laughter or their work for this, nor did the flying Sancho +cease his lamentations, mingled now with threats, now with entreaties but +all to little purpose, or none at all, until from pure weariness they +left off. They then brought him his ass, and mounting him on top of it +they put his jacket round him; and the compassionate Maritornes, seeing +him so exhausted, thought fit to refresh him with a jug of water, and +that it might be all the cooler she fetched it from the well. Sancho took +it, and as he was raising it to his mouth he was stopped by the cries of +his master exclaiming, "Sancho, my son, drink not water; drink it not, my +son, for it will kill thee; see, here I have the blessed balsam (and he +held up the flask of liquor), and with drinking two drops of it thou wilt +certainly be restored." + +At these words Sancho turned his eyes asquint, and in a still louder +voice said, "Can it be your worship has forgotten that I am not a knight, +or do you want me to end by vomiting up what bowels I have left after +last night? Keep your liquor in the name of all the devils, and leave me +to myself!" and at one and the same instant he left off talking and began +drinking; but as at the first sup he perceived it was water he did not +care to go on with it, and begged Maritornes to fetch him some wine, +which she did with right good will, and paid for it with her own money; +for indeed they say of her that, though she was in that line of life, +there was some faint and distant resemblance to a Christian about her. +When Sancho had done drinking he dug his heels into his ass, and the gate +of the inn being thrown open he passed out very well pleased at having +paid nothing and carried his point, though it had been at the expense of +his usual sureties, his shoulders. It is true that the innkeeper detained +his alforjas in payment of what was owing to him, but Sancho took his +departure in such a flurry that he never missed them. The innkeeper, as +soon as he saw him off, wanted to bar the gate close, but the blanketers +would not agree to it, for they were fellows who would not have cared two +farthings for Don Quixote, even had he been really one of the +knights-errant of the Round Table. + +Chapter XVIII. - +In which is related the discourse Sancho Panza held with his master, Don +Quixote, and other adventures worth relating + +Sancho reached his master so limp and faint that he could not urge on his +beast. When Don Quixote saw the state he was in he said, "I have now come +to the conclusion, good Sancho, that this castle or inn is beyond a doubt +enchanted, because those who have so atrociously diverted themselves with +thee, what can they be but phantoms or beings of another world? and I +hold this confirmed by having noticed that when I was by the wall of the +yard witnessing the acts of thy sad tragedy, it was out of my power to +mount upon it, nor could I even dismount from Rocinante, because they no +doubt had me enchanted; for I swear to thee by the faith of what I am +that if I had been able to climb up or dismount, I would have avenged +thee in such a way that those braggart thieves would have remembered +their freak for ever, even though in so doing I knew that I contravened +the laws of chivalry, which, as I have often told thee, do not permit a +knight to lay hands on him who is not one, save in case of urgent and +great necessity in defence of his own life and person." + +"I would have avenged myself too if I could," said Sancho, "whether I had +been dubbed knight or not, but I could not; though for my part I am +persuaded those who amused themselves with me were not phantoms or +enchanted men, as your worship says, but men of flesh and bone like +ourselves; and they all had their names, for I heard them name them when +they were tossing me, and one was called Pedro Martinez, and another +Tenorio Hernandez, and the innkeeper, I heard, was called Juan Palomeque +the Left-handed; so that, senor, your not being able to leap over the +wall of the yard or dismount from your horse came of something else +besides enchantments; and what I make out clearly from all this is, that +these adventures we go seeking will in the end lead us into such +misadventures that we shall not know which is our right foot; and that +the best and wisest thing, according to my small wits, would be for us to +return home, now that it is harvest-time, and attend to our business, and +give over wandering from Zeca to Mecca and from pail to bucket, as the +saying is." + +"How little thou knowest about chivalry, Sancho," replied Don Quixote; +"hold thy peace and have patience; the day will come when thou shalt see +with thine own eyes what an honourable thing it is to wander in the +pursuit of this calling; nay, tell me, what greater pleasure can there be +in the world, or what delight can equal that of winning a battle, and +triumphing over one's enemy? None, beyond all doubt." + +"Very likely," answered Sancho, "though I do not know it; all I know is +that since we have been knights-errant, or since your worship has been +one (for I have no right to reckon myself one of so honourable a number) +we have never won any battle except the one with the Biscayan, and even +out of that your worship came with half an ear and half a helmet the +less; and from that till now it has been all cudgellings and more +cudgellings, cuffs and more cuffs, I getting the blanketing over and +above, and falling in with enchanted persons on whom I cannot avenge +myself so as to know what the delight, as your worship calls it, of +conquering an enemy is like." + +"That is what vexes me, and what ought to vex thee, Sancho," replied Don +Quixote; "but henceforward I will endeavour to have at hand some sword +made by such craft that no kind of enchantments can take effect upon him +who carries it, and it is even possible that fortune may procure for me +that which belonged to Amadis when he was called 'The Knight of the +Burning Sword,' which was one of the best swords that ever knight in the +world possessed, for, besides having the said virtue, it cut like a +razor, and there was no armour, however strong and enchanted it might be, +that could resist it." + +"Such is my luck," said Sancho, "that even if that happened and your +worship found some such sword, it would, like the balsam, turn out +serviceable and good for dubbed knights only, and as for the squires, +they might sup sorrow." + +"Fear not that, Sancho," said Don Quixote: "Heaven will deal better by +thee." + +Thus talking, Don Quixote and his squire were going along, when, on the +road they were following, Don Quixote perceived approaching them a large +and thick cloud of dust, on seeing which he turned to Sancho and said: + +"This is the day, Sancho, on which will be seen the boon my fortune is +reserving for me; this, I say, is the day on which as much as on any +other shall be displayed the might of my arm, and on which I shall do +deeds that shall remain written in the book of fame for all ages to come. +Seest thou that cloud of dust which rises yonder? Well, then, all that is +churned up by a vast army composed of various and countless nations that +comes marching there." + +"According to that there must be two," said Sancho, "for on this opposite +side also there rises just such another cloud of dust." + +Don Quixote turned to look and found that it was true, and rejoicing +exceedingly, he concluded that they were two armies about to engage and +encounter in the midst of that broad plain; for at all times and seasons +his fancy was full of the battles, enchantments, adventures, crazy feats, +loves, and defiances that are recorded in the books of chivalry, and +everything he said, thought, or did had reference to such things. Now the +cloud of dust he had seen was raised by two great droves of sheep coming +along the same road in opposite directions, which, because of the dust, +did not become visible until they drew near, but Don Quixote asserted so +positively that they were armies that Sancho was led to believe it and +say, "Well, and what are we to do, senor?" + +"What?" said Don Quixote: "give aid and assistance to the weak and those +who need it; and thou must know, Sancho, that this which comes opposite +to us is conducted and led by the mighty emperor Alifanfaron, lord of the +great isle of Trapobana; this other that marches behind me is that of his +enemy the king of the Garamantas, Pentapolin of the Bare Arm, for he +always goes into battle with his right arm bare." + +"But why are these two lords such enemies?" + +"They are at enmity," replied Don Quixote, "because this Alifanfaron is a +furious pagan and is in love with the daughter of Pentapolin, who is a +very beautiful and moreover gracious lady, and a Christian, and her +father is unwilling to bestow her upon the pagan king unless he first +abandons the religion of his false prophet Mahomet, and adopts his own." + +"By my beard," said Sancho, "but Pentapolin does quite right, and I will +help him as much as I can." + +"In that thou wilt do what is thy duty, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "for +to engage in battles of this sort it is not requisite to be a dubbed +knight." + +"That I can well understand," answered Sancho; "but where shall we put +this ass where we may be sure to find him after the fray is over? for I +believe it has not been the custom so far to go into battle on a beast of +this kind." + +"That is true," said Don Quixote, "and what you had best do with him is +to leave him to take his chance whether he be lost or not, for the horses +we shall have when we come out victors will be so many that even +Rocinante will run a risk of being changed for another. But attend to me +and observe, for I wish to give thee some account of the chief knights +who accompany these two armies; and that thou mayest the better see and +mark, let us withdraw to that hillock which rises yonder, whence both +armies may be seen." + +They did so, and placed themselves on a rising ground from which the two +droves that Don Quixote made armies of might have been plainly seen if +the clouds of dust they raised had not obscured them and blinded the +sight; nevertheless, seeing in his imagination what he did not see and +what did not exist, he began thus in a loud voice: + +"That knight whom thou seest yonder in yellow armour, who bears upon his +shield a lion crowned crouching at the feet of a damsel, is the valiant +Laurcalco, lord of the Silver Bridge; that one in armour with flowers of +gold, who bears on his shield three crowns argent on an azure field, is +the dreaded Micocolembo, grand duke of Quirocia; that other of gigantic +frame, on his right hand, is the ever dauntless Brandabarbaran de +Boliche, lord of the three Arabias, who for armour wears that serpent +skin, and has for shield a gate which, according to tradition, is one of +those of the temple that Samson brought to the ground when by his death +he revenged himself upon his enemies. But turn thine eyes to the other +side, and thou shalt see in front and in the van of this other army the +ever victorious and never vanquished Timonel of Carcajona, prince of New +Biscay, who comes in armour with arms quartered azure, vert, white, and +yellow, and bears on his shield a cat or on a field tawny with a motto +which says Miau, which is the beginning of the name of his lady, who +according to report is the peerless Miaulina, daughter of the duke +Alfeniquen of the Algarve; the other, who burdens and presses the loins +of that powerful charger and bears arms white as snow and a shield blank +and without any device, is a novice knight, a Frenchman by birth, Pierres +Papin by name, lord of the baronies of Utrique; that other, who with +iron-shod heels strikes the flanks of that nimble parti-coloured zebra, +and for arms bears azure vair, is the mighty duke of Nerbia, +Espartafilardo del Bosque, who bears for device on his shield an +asparagus plant with a motto in Castilian that says, Rastrea mi suerte." +And so he went on naming a number of knights of one squadron or the other +out of his imagination, and to all he assigned off-hand their arms, +colours, devices, and mottoes, carried away by the illusions of his +unheard-of craze; and without a pause, he continued, "People of divers +nations compose this squadron in front; here are those that drink of the +sweet waters of the famous Xanthus, those that scour the woody Massilian +plains, those that sift the pure fine gold of Arabia Felix, those that +enjoy the famed cool banks of the crystal Thermodon, those that in many +and various ways divert the streams of the golden Pactolus, the +Numidians, faithless in their promises, the Persians renowned in archery, +the Parthians and the Medes that fight as they fly, the Arabs that ever +shift their dwellings, the Scythians as cruel as they are fair, the +Ethiopians with pierced lips, and an infinity of other nations whose +features I recognise and descry, though I cannot recall their names. In +this other squadron there come those that drink of the crystal streams of +the olive-bearing Betis, those that make smooth their countenances with +the water of the ever rich and golden Tagus, those that rejoice in the +fertilising flow of the divine Genil, those that roam the Tartesian +plains abounding in pasture, those that take their pleasure in the +Elysian meadows of Jerez, the rich Manchegans crowned with ruddy ears of +corn, the wearers of iron, old relics of the Gothic race, those that +bathe in the Pisuerga renowned for its gentle current, those that feed +their herds along the spreading pastures of the winding Guadiana famed +for its hidden course, those that tremble with the cold of the pineclad +Pyrenees or the dazzling snows of the lofty Apennine; in a word, as many +as all Europe includes and contains." + +Good God! what a number of countries and nations he named! giving to each +its proper attributes with marvellous readiness; brimful and saturated +with what he had read in his lying books! Sancho Panza hung upon his +words without speaking, and from time to time turned to try if he could +see the knights and giants his master was describing, and as he could not +make out one of them he said to him: + +"Senor, devil take it if there's a sign of any man you talk of, knight or +giant, in the whole thing; maybe it's all enchantment, like the phantoms +last night." + +"How canst thou say that!" answered Don Quixote; "dost thou not hear the +neighing of the steeds, the braying of the trumpets, the roll of the +drums?" + +"I hear nothing but a great bleating of ewes and sheep," said Sancho; +which was true, for by this time the two flocks had come close. + +"The fear thou art in, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "prevents thee from +seeing or hearing correctly, for one of the effects of fear is to derange +the senses and make things appear different from what they are; if thou +art in such fear, withdraw to one side and leave me to myself, for alone +I suffice to bring victory to that side to which I shall give my aid;" +and so saying he gave Rocinante the spur, and putting the lance in rest, +shot down the slope like a thunderbolt. Sancho shouted after him, crying, +"Come back, Senor Don Quixote; I vow to God they are sheep and ewes you +are charging! Come back! Unlucky the father that begot me! what madness +is this! Look, there is no giant, nor knight, nor cats, nor arms, nor +shields quartered or whole, nor vair azure or bedevilled. What are you +about? Sinner that I am before God!" But not for all these entreaties did +Don Quixote turn back; on the contrary he went on shouting out, "Ho, +knights, ye who follow and fight under the banners of the valiant emperor +Pentapolin of the Bare Arm, follow me all; ye shall see how easily I +shall give him his revenge over his enemy Alifanfaron of the Trapobana." + +So saying, he dashed into the midst of the squadron of ewes, and began +spearing them with as much spirit and intrepidity as if he were +transfixing mortal enemies in earnest. The shepherds and drovers +accompanying the flock shouted to him to desist; seeing it was no use, +they ungirt their slings and began to salute his ears with stones as big +as one's fist. Don Quixote gave no heed to the stones, but, letting drive +right and left kept saying: + +"Where art thou, proud Alifanfaron? Come before me; I am a single knight +who would fain prove thy prowess hand to hand, and make thee yield thy +life a penalty for the wrong thou dost to the valiant Pentapolin +Garamanta." Here came a sugar-plum from the brook that struck him on the +side and buried a couple of ribs in his body. Feeling himself so smitten, +he imagined himself slain or badly wounded for certain, and recollecting +his liquor he drew out his flask, and putting it to his mouth began to +pour the contents into his stomach; but ere he had succeeded in +swallowing what seemed to him enough, there came another almond which +struck him on the hand and on the flask so fairly that it smashed it to +pieces, knocking three or four teeth and grinders out of his mouth in its +course, and sorely crushing two fingers of his hand. Such was the force +of the first blow and of the second, that the poor knight in spite of +himself came down backwards off his horse. The shepherds came up, and +felt sure they had killed him; so in all haste they collected their flock +together, took up the dead beasts, of which there were more than seven, +and made off without waiting to ascertain anything further. + +All this time Sancho stood on the hill watching the crazy feats his +master was performing, and tearing his beard and cursing the hour and the +occasion when fortune had made him acquainted with him. Seeing him, then, +brought to the ground, and that the shepherds had taken themselves off, +he ran to him and found him in very bad case, though not unconscious; and +said he: + +"Did I not tell you to come back, Senor Don Quixote; and that what you +were going to attack were not armies but droves of sheep?" + +"That's how that thief of a sage, my enemy, can alter and falsify +things," answered Don Quixote; "thou must know, Sancho, that it is a very +easy matter for those of his sort to make us believe what they choose; +and this malignant being who persecutes me, envious of the glory he knew +I was to win in this battle, has turned the squadrons of the enemy into +droves of sheep. At any rate, do this much, I beg of thee, Sancho, to +undeceive thyself, and see that what I say is true; mount thy ass and +follow them quietly, and thou shalt see that when they have gone some +little distance from this they will return to their original shape and, +ceasing to be sheep, become men in all respects as I described them to +thee at first. But go not just yet, for I want thy help and assistance; +come hither, and see how many of my teeth and grinders are missing, for I +feel as if there was not one left in my mouth." + +Sancho came so close that he almost put his eyes into his mouth; now just +at that moment the balsam had acted on the stomach of Don Quixote, so, at +the very instant when Sancho came to examine his mouth, he discharged all +its contents with more force than a musket, and full into the beard of +the compassionate squire. + +"Holy Mary!" cried Sancho, "what is this that has happened me? Clearly +this sinner is mortally wounded, as he vomits blood from the mouth;" but +considering the matter a little more closely he perceived by the colour, +taste, and smell, that it was not blood but the balsam from the flask +which he had seen him drink; and he was taken with such a loathing that +his stomach turned, and he vomited up his inside over his very master, +and both were left in a precious state. Sancho ran to his ass to get +something wherewith to clean himself, and relieve his master, out of his +alforjas; but not finding them, he well-nigh took leave of his senses, +and cursed himself anew, and in his heart resolved to quit his master and +return home, even though he forfeited the wages of his service and all +hopes of the promised island. + +Don Quixote now rose, and putting his left hand to his mouth to keep his +teeth from falling out altogether, with the other he laid hold of the +bridle of Rocinante, who had never stirred from his master's side--so +loyal and well-behaved was he--and betook himself to where the squire +stood leaning over his ass with his hand to his cheek, like one in deep +dejection. Seeing him in this mood, looking so sad, Don Quixote said to +him: + +"Bear in mind, Sancho, that one man is no more than another, unless he +does more than another; all these tempests that fall upon us are signs +that fair weather is coming shortly, and that things will go well with +us, for it is impossible for good or evil to last for ever; and hence it +follows that the evil having lasted long, the good must be now nigh at +hand; so thou must not distress thyself at the misfortunes which happen +to me, since thou hast no share in them." + +"How have I not?" replied Sancho; "was he whom they blanketed yesterday +perchance any other than my father's son? and the alforjas that are +missing to-day with all my treasures, did they belong to any other but +myself?" + +"What! are the alforjas missing, Sancho?" said Don Quixote. + +"Yes, they are missing," answered Sancho. + +"In that case we have nothing to eat to-day," replied Don Quixote. + +"It would be so," answered Sancho, "if there were none of the herbs your +worship says you know in these meadows, those with which knights-errant +as unlucky as your worship are wont to supply such-like shortcomings." + +"For all that," answered Don Quixote, "I would rather have just now a +quarter of bread, or a loaf and a couple of pilchards' heads, than all +the herbs described by Dioscorides, even with Doctor Laguna's notes. +Nevertheless, Sancho the Good, mount thy beast and come along with me, +for God, who provides for all things, will not fail us (more especially +when we are so active in his service as we are), since he fails not the +midges of the air, nor the grubs of the earth, nor the tadpoles of the +water, and is so merciful that he maketh his sun to rise on the good and +on the evil, and sendeth rain on the unjust and on the just." + +"Your worship would make a better preacher than knight-errant," said +Sancho. + +"Knights-errant knew and ought to know everything, Sancho," said Don +Quixote; "for there were knights-errant in former times as well qualified +to deliver a sermon or discourse in the middle of an encampment, as if +they had graduated in the University of Paris; whereby we may see that +the lance has never blunted the pen, nor the pen the lance." + +"Well, be it as your worship says," replied Sancho; "let us be off now +and find some place of shelter for the night, and God grant it may be +somewhere where there are no blankets, nor blanketeers, nor phantoms, nor +enchanted Moors; for if there are, may the devil take the whole concern." + +"Ask that of God, my son," said Don Quixote; "and do thou lead on where +thou wilt, for this time I leave our lodging to thy choice; but reach me +here thy hand, and feel with thy finger, and find out how many of my +teeth and grinders are missing from this right side of the upper jaw, for +it is there I feel the pain." + +Sancho put in his fingers, and feeling about asked him, "How many +grinders used your worship have on this side?" + +"Four," replied Don Quixote, "besides the back-tooth, all whole and quite +sound." + +"Mind what you are saying, senor." + +"I say four, if not five," answered Don Quixote, "for never in my life +have I had tooth or grinder drawn, nor has any fallen out or been +destroyed by any decay or rheum." + +"Well, then," said Sancho, "in this lower side your worship has no more +than two grinders and a half, and in the upper neither a half nor any at +all, for it is all as smooth as the palm of my hand." + +"Luckless that I am!" said Don Quixote, hearing the sad news his squire +gave him; "I had rather they despoiled me of an arm, so it were not the +sword-arm; for I tell thee, Sancho, a mouth without teeth is like a mill +without a millstone, and a tooth is much more to be prized than a +diamond; but we who profess the austere order of chivalry are liable to +all this. Mount, friend, and lead the way, and I will follow thee at +whatever pace thou wilt." + +Sancho did as he bade him, and proceeded in the direction in which he +thought he might find refuge without quitting the high road, which was +there very much frequented. As they went along, then, at a slow pace--for +the pain in Don Quixote's jaws kept him uneasy and ill-disposed for +speed--Sancho thought it well to amuse and divert him by talk of some +kind, and among the things he said to him was that which will be told in +the following chapter. + +Chapter XIX. - +Of the shrewd discourse which Sancho held with his master, and of the +adventure that befell him with a dead body, together with other notable +occurrences + +"It seems to me, senor, that all these mishaps that have befallen us of +late have been without any doubt a punishment for the offence committed +by your worship against the order of chivalry in not keeping the oath you +made not to eat bread off a tablecloth or embrace the queen, and all the +rest of it that your worship swore to observe until you had taken that +helmet of Malandrino's, or whatever the Moor is called, for I do not very +well remember." + +"Thou art very right, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "but to tell the truth, +it had escaped my memory; and likewise thou mayest rely upon it that the +affair of the blanket happened to thee because of thy fault in not +reminding me of it in time; but I will make amends, for there are ways of +compounding for everything in the order of chivalry." + +"Why! have I taken an oath of some sort, then?" said Sancho. + +"It makes no matter that thou hast not taken an oath," said Don Quixote; +"suffice it that I see thou art not quite clear of complicity; and +whether or no, it will not be ill done to provide ourselves with a +remedy." + +"In that case," said Sancho, "mind that your worship does not forget this +as you did the oath; perhaps the phantoms may take it into their heads to +amuse themselves once more with me; or even with your worship if they see +you so obstinate." + +While engaged in this and other talk, night overtook them on the road +before they had reached or discovered any place of shelter; and what made +it still worse was that they were dying of hunger, for with the loss of +the alforjas they had lost their entire larder and commissariat; and to +complete the misfortune they met with an adventure which without any +invention had really the appearance of one. It so happened that the night +closed in somewhat darkly, but for all that they pushed on, Sancho +feeling sure that as the road was the king's highway they might +reasonably expect to find some inn within a league or two. Going along, +then, in this way, the night dark, the squire hungry, the master +sharp-set, they saw coming towards them on the road they were travelling +a great number of lights which looked exactly like stars in motion. +Sancho was taken aback at the sight of them, nor did Don Quixote +altogether relish them: the one pulled up his ass by the halter, the +other his hack by the bridle, and they stood still, watching anxiously to +see what all this would turn out to be, and found that the lights were +approaching them, and the nearer they came the greater they seemed, at +which spectacle Sancho began to shake like a man dosed with mercury, and +Don Quixote's hair stood on end; he, however, plucking up spirit a +little, said: + +"This, no doubt, Sancho, will be a most mighty and perilous adventure, in +which it will be needful for me to put forth all my valour and +resolution." + +"Unlucky me!" answered Sancho; "if this adventure happens to be one of +phantoms, as I am beginning to think it is, where shall I find the ribs +to bear it?" + +"Be they phantoms ever so much," said Don Quixote, "I will not permit +them to touch a thread of thy garments; for if they played tricks with +thee the time before, it was because I was unable to leap the walls of +the yard; but now we are on a wide plain, where I shall be able to wield +my sword as I please." + +"And if they enchant and cripple you as they did the last time," said +Sancho, "what difference will it make being on the open plain or not?" + +"For all that," replied Don Quixote, "I entreat thee, Sancho, to keep a +good heart, for experience will tell thee what mine is." + +"I will, please God," answered Sancho, and the two retiring to one side +of the road set themselves to observe closely what all these moving +lights might be; and very soon afterwards they made out some twenty +encamisados, all on horseback, with lighted torches in their hands, the +awe-inspiring aspect of whom completely extinguished the courage of +Sancho, who began to chatter with his teeth like one in the cold fit of +an ague; and his heart sank and his teeth chattered still more when they +perceived distinctly that behind them there came a litter covered over +with black and followed by six more mounted figures in mourning down to +the very feet of their mules--for they could perceive plainly they were +not horses by the easy pace at which they went. And as the encamisados +came along they muttered to themselves in a low plaintive tone. This +strange spectacle at such an hour and in such a solitary place was quite +enough to strike terror into Sancho's heart, and even into his master's; +and (save in Don Quixote's case) did so, for all Sancho's resolution had +now broken down. It was just the opposite with his master, whose +imagination immediately conjured up all this to him vividly as one of the +adventures of his books. + +He took it into his head that the litter was a bier on which was borne +some sorely wounded or slain knight, to avenge whom was a task reserved +for him alone; and without any further reasoning he laid his lance in +rest, fixed himself firmly in his saddle, and with gallant spirit and +bearing took up his position in the middle of the road where the +encamisados must of necessity pass; and as soon as he saw them near at +hand he raised his voice and said: + +"Halt, knights, or whosoever ye may be, and render me account of who ye +are, whence ye come, where ye go, what it is ye carry upon that bier, +for, to judge by appearances, either ye have done some wrong or some +wrong has been done to you, and it is fitting and necessary that I should +know, either that I may chastise you for the evil ye have done, or else +that I may avenge you for the injury that has been inflicted upon you." + +"We are in haste," answered one of the encamisados, "and the inn is far +off, and we cannot stop to render you such an account as you demand;" and +spurring his mule he moved on. + +Don Quixote was mightily provoked by this answer, and seizing the mule by +the bridle he said, "Halt, and be more mannerly, and render an account of +what I have asked of you; else, take my defiance to combat, all of you." + +The mule was shy, and was so frightened at her bridle being seized that +rearing up she flung her rider to the ground over her haunches. An +attendant who was on foot, seeing the encamisado fall, began to abuse Don +Quixote, who now moved to anger, without any more ado, laying his lance +in rest charged one of the men in mourning and brought him badly wounded +to the ground, and as he wheeled round upon the others the agility with +which he attacked and routed them was a sight to see, for it seemed just +as if wings had that instant grown upon Rocinante, so lightly and proudly +did he bear himself. The encamisados were all timid folk and unarmed, so +they speedily made their escape from the fray and set off at a run across +the plain with their lighted torches, looking exactly like maskers +running on some gala or festival night. The mourners, too, enveloped and +swathed in their skirts and gowns, were unable to bestir themselves, and +so with entire safety to himself Don Quixote belaboured them all and +drove them off against their will, for they all thought it was no man but +a devil from hell come to carry away the dead body they had in the +litter. + +Sancho beheld all this in astonishment at the intrepidity of his lord, +and said to himself, "Clearly this master of mine is as bold and valiant +as he says he is." + +A burning torch lay on the ground near the first man whom the mule had +thrown, by the light of which Don Quixote perceived him, and coming up to +him he presented the point of the lance to his face, calling on him to +yield himself prisoner, or else he would kill him; to which the prostrate +man replied, "I am prisoner enough as it is; I cannot stir, for one of my +legs is broken: I entreat you, if you be a Christian gentleman, not to +kill me, which will be committing grave sacrilege, for I am a licentiate +and I hold first orders." + +"Then what the devil brought you here, being a churchman?" said Don +Quixote. + +"What, senor?" said the other. "My bad luck." + +"Then still worse awaits you," said Don Quixote, "if you do not satisfy +me as to all I asked you at first." + +"You shall be soon satisfied," said the licentiate; "you must know, then, +that though just now I said I was a licentiate, I am only a bachelor, and +my name is Alonzo Lopez; I am a native of Alcobendas, I come from the +city of Baeza with eleven others, priests, the same who fled with the +torches, and we are going to the city of Segovia accompanying a dead body +which is in that litter, and is that of a gentleman who died in Baeza, +where he was interred; and now, as I said, we are taking his bones to +their burial-place, which is in Segovia, where he was born." + +"And who killed him?" asked Don Quixote. + +"God, by means of a malignant fever that took him," answered the +bachelor. + +"In that case," said Don Quixote, "the Lord has relieved me of the task +of avenging his death had any other slain him; but, he who slew him +having slain him, there is nothing for it but to be silent, and shrug +one's shoulders; I should do the same were he to slay myself; and I would +have your reverence know that I am a knight of La Mancha, Don Quixote by +name, and it is my business and calling to roam the world righting wrongs +and redressing injuries." + +"I do not know how that about righting wrongs can be," said the bachelor, +"for from straight you have made me crooked, leaving me with a broken leg +that will never see itself straight again all the days of its life; and +the injury you have redressed in my case has been to leave me injured in +such a way that I shall remain injured for ever; and the height of +misadventure it was to fall in with you who go in search of adventures." + +"Things do not all happen in the same way," answered Don Quixote; "it all +came, Sir Bachelor Alonzo Lopez, of your going, as you did, by night, +dressed in those surplices, with lighted torches, praying, covered with +mourning, so that naturally you looked like something evil and of the +other world; and so I could not avoid doing my duty in attacking you, and +I should have attacked you even had I known positively that you were the +very devils of hell, for such I certainly believed and took you to be." + +"As my fate has so willed it," said the bachelor, "I entreat you, sir +knight-errant, whose errand has been such an evil one for me, to help me +to get from under this mule that holds one of my legs caught between the +stirrup and the saddle." + +"I would have talked on till to-morrow," said Don Quixote; "how long were +you going to wait before telling me of your distress?" + +He at once called to Sancho, who, however, had no mind to come, as he was +just then engaged in unloading a sumpter mule, well laden with provender, +which these worthy gentlemen had brought with them. Sancho made a bag of +his coat, and, getting together as much as he could, and as the bag would +hold, he loaded his beast, and then hastened to obey his master's call, +and helped him to remove the bachelor from under the mule; then putting +him on her back he gave him the torch, and Don Quixote bade him follow +the track of his companions, and beg pardon of them on his part for the +wrong which he could not help doing them. + +And said Sancho, "If by chance these gentlemen should want to know who +was the hero that served them so, your worship may tell them that he is +the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, otherwise called the Knight of the +Rueful Countenance." + +The bachelor then took his departure. + +I forgot to mention that before he did so he said to Don Quixote, +"Remember that you stand excommunicated for having laid violent hands on +a holy thing, juxta illud, si quis, suadente diabolo." + +"I do not understand that Latin," answered Don Quixote, "but I know well +I did not lay hands, only this pike; besides, I did not think I was +committing an assault upon priests or things of the Church, which, like a +Catholic and faithful Christian as I am, I respect and revere, but upon +phantoms and spectres of the other world; but even so, I remember how it +fared with Cid Ruy Diaz when he broke the chair of the ambassador of that +king before his Holiness the Pope, who excommunicated him for the same; +and yet the good Roderick of Vivar bore himself that day like a very +noble and valiant knight." + +On hearing this the bachelor took his departure, as has been said, +without making any reply; and Don Quixote asked Sancho what had induced +him to call him the "Knight of the Rueful Countenance" more then than at +any other time. + +"I will tell you," answered Sancho; "it was because I have been looking +at you for some time by the light of the torch held by that unfortunate, +and verily your worship has got of late the most ill-favoured countenance +I ever saw: it must be either owing to the fatigue of this combat, or +else to the want of teeth and grinders." + +"It is not that," replied Don Quixote, "but because the sage whose duty +it will be to write the history of my achievements must have thought it +proper that I should take some distinctive name as all knights of yore +did; one being 'He of the Burning Sword,' another 'He of the Unicorn,' +this one 'He of the Damsels,' that 'He of the Phoenix,' another 'The +Knight of the Griffin,' and another 'He of the Death,' and by these names +and designations they were known all the world round; and so I say that +the sage aforesaid must have put it into your mouth and mind just now to +call me 'The Knight of the Rueful Countenance,' as I intend to call +myself from this day forward; and that the said name may fit me better, I +mean, when the opportunity offers, to have a very rueful countenance +painted on my shield." + +"There is no occasion, senor, for wasting time or money on making that +countenance," said Sancho; "for all that need be done is for your worship +to show your own, face to face, to those who look at you, and without +anything more, either image or shield, they will call you 'Him of the +Rueful Countenance' and believe me I am telling you the truth, for I +assure you, senor (and in good part be it said), hunger and the loss of +your grinders have given you such an ill-favoured face that, as I say, +the rueful picture may be very well spared." + +Don Quixote laughed at Sancho's pleasantry; nevertheless he resolved to +call himself by that name, and have his shield or buckler painted as he +had devised. + +Don Quixote would have looked to see whether the body in the litter were +bones or not, but Sancho would not have it, saying: + +"Senor, you have ended this perilous adventure more safely for yourself +than any of those I have seen: perhaps these people, though beaten and +routed, may bethink themselves that it is a single man that has beaten +them, and feeling sore and ashamed of it may take heart and come in +search of us and give us trouble enough. The ass is in proper trim, the +mountains are near at hand, hunger presses, we have nothing more to do +but make good our retreat, and, as the saying is, the dead to the grave +and the living to the loaf." + +And driving his ass before him he begged his master to follow, who, +feeling that Sancho was right, did so without replying; and after +proceeding some little distance between two hills they found themselves +in a wide and retired valley, where they alighted, and Sancho unloaded +his beast, and stretched upon the green grass, with hunger for sauce, +they breakfasted, dined, lunched, and supped all at once, satisfying +their appetites with more than one store of cold meat which the dead +man's clerical gentlemen (who seldom put themselves on short allowance) +had brought with them on their sumpter mule. But another piece of +ill-luck befell them, which Sancho held the worst of all, and that was +that they had no wine to drink, nor even water to moisten their lips; and +as thirst tormented them, Sancho, observing that the meadow where they +were was full of green and tender grass, said what will be told in the +following chapter. + +Chapter XX. - +Of the unexampled and unheard-of adventure which was achieved by the +valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha with less peril than any ever achieved +by any famous Knight in the world + +"It cannot be, senor, but that this grass is a proof that there must be +hard by some spring or brook to give it moisture, so it would be well to +move a little farther on, that we may find some place where we may quench +this terrible thirst that plagues us, which beyond a doubt is more +distressing than hunger." + +The advice seemed good to Don Quixote, and, he leading Rocinante by the +bridle and Sancho the ass by the halter, after he had packed away upon +him the remains of the supper, they advanced the meadow feeling their +way, for the darkness of the night made it impossible to see anything; +but they had not gone two hundred paces when a loud noise of water, as if +falling from great rocks, struck their ears. The sound cheered them +greatly; but halting to make out by listening from what quarter it came +they heard unseasonably another noise which spoiled the satisfaction the +sound of the water gave them, especially for Sancho, who was by nature +timid and faint-hearted. They heard, I say, strokes falling with a +measured beat, and a certain rattling of iron and chains that, together +with the furious din of the water, would have struck terror into any +heart but Don Quixote's. The night was, as has been said, dark, and they +had happened to reach a spot in among some tall trees, whose leaves +stirred by a gentle breeze made a low ominous sound; so that, what with +the solitude, the place, the darkness, the noise of the water, and the +rustling of the leaves, everything inspired awe and dread; more +especially as they perceived that the strokes did not cease, nor the wind +lull, nor morning approach; to all which might be added their ignorance +as to where they were. + +But Don Quixote, supported by his intrepid heart, leaped on Rocinante, +and bracing his buckler on his arm, brought his pike to the slope, and +said, "Friend Sancho, know that I by Heaven's will have been born in this +our iron age to revive revive in it the age of gold, or the golden as it +is called; I am he for whom perils, mighty achievements, and valiant +deeds are reserved; I am, I say again, he who is to revive the Knights of +the Round Table, the Twelve of France and the Nine Worthies; and he who +is to consign to oblivion the Platirs, the Tablantes, the Olivantes and +Tirantes, the Phoebuses and Belianises, with the whole herd of famous +knights-errant of days gone by, performing in these in which I live such +exploits, marvels, and feats of arms as shall obscure their brightest +deeds. Thou dost mark well, faithful and trusty squire, the gloom of this +night, its strange silence, the dull confused murmur of those trees, the +awful sound of that water in quest of which we came, that seems as though +it were precipitating and dashing itself down from the lofty mountains of +the Moon, and that incessant hammering that wounds and pains our ears; +which things all together and each of itself are enough to instil fear, +dread, and dismay into the breast of Mars himself, much more into one not +used to hazards and adventures of the kind. Well, then, all this that I +put before thee is but an incentive and stimulant to my spirit, making my +heart burst in my bosom through eagerness to engage in this adventure, +arduous as it promises to be; therefore tighten Rocinante's girths a +little, and God be with thee; wait for me here three days and no more, +and if in that time I come not back, thou canst return to our village, +and thence, to do me a favour and a service, thou wilt go to El Toboso, +where thou shalt say to my incomparable lady Dulcinea that her captive +knight hath died in attempting things that might make him worthy of being +called hers." + +When Sancho heard his master's words he began to weep in the most +pathetic way, saying: + +"Senor, I know not why your worship wants to attempt this so dreadful +adventure; it is night now, no one sees us here, we can easily turn about +and take ourselves out of danger, even if we don't drink for three days +to come; and as there is no one to see us, all the less will there be +anyone to set us down as cowards; besides, I have many a time heard the +curate of our village, whom your worship knows well, preach that he who +seeks danger perishes in it; so it is not right to tempt God by trying so +tremendous a feat from which there can be no escape save by a miracle, +and Heaven has performed enough of them for your worship in delivering +you from being blanketed as I was, and bringing you out victorious and +safe and sound from among all those enemies that were with the dead man; +and if all this does not move or soften that hard heart, let this thought +and reflection move it, that you will have hardly quitted this spot when +from pure fear I shall yield my soul up to anyone that will take it. I +left home and wife and children to come and serve your worship, trusting +to do better and not worse; but as covetousness bursts the bag, it has +rent my hopes asunder, for just as I had them highest about getting that +wretched unlucky island your worship has so often promised me, I see that +instead and in lieu of it you mean to desert me now in a place so far +from human reach: for God's sake, master mine, deal not so unjustly by +me, and if your worship will not entirely give up attempting this feat, +at least put it off till morning, for by what the lore I learned when I +was a shepherd tells me it cannot want three hours of dawn now, because +the mouth of the Horn is overhead and makes midnight in the line of the +left arm." + +"How canst thou see, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "where it makes that +line, or where this mouth or this occiput is that thou talkest of, when +the night is so dark that there is not a star to be seen in the whole +heaven?" + +"That's true," said Sancho, "but fear has sharp eyes, and sees things +underground, much more above in heavens; besides, there is good reason to +show that it now wants but little of day." + +"Let it want what it may," replied Don Quixote, "it shall not be said of +me now or at any time that tears or entreaties turned me aside from doing +what was in accordance with knightly usage; and so I beg of thee, Sancho, +to hold thy peace, for God, who has put it into my heart to undertake now +this so unexampled and terrible adventure, will take care to watch over +my safety and console thy sorrow; what thou hast to do is to tighten +Rocinante's girths well, and wait here, for I shall come back shortly, +alive or dead." + +Sancho perceiving it his master's final resolve, and how little his +tears, counsels, and entreaties prevailed with him, determined to have +recourse to his own ingenuity and compel him, if he could, to wait till +daylight; and so, while tightening the girths of the horse, he quietly +and without being felt, with his ass' halter tied both Rocinante's legs, +so that when Don Quixote strove to go he was unable as the horse could +only move by jumps. Seeing the success of his trick, Sancho Panza said: + +"See there, senor! Heaven, moved by my tears and prayers, has so ordered +it that Rocinante cannot stir; and if you will be obstinate, and spur and +strike him, you will only provoke fortune, and kick, as they say, against +the pricks." + +Don Quixote at this grew desperate, but the more he drove his heels into +the horse, the less he stirred him; and not having any suspicion of the +tying, he was fain to resign himself and wait till daybreak or until +Rocinante could move, firmly persuaded that all this came of something +other than Sancho's ingenuity. So he said to him, "As it is so, Sancho, +and as Rocinante cannot move, I am content to wait till dawn smiles upon +us, even though I weep while it delays its coming." + +"There is no need to weep," answered Sancho, "for I will amuse your +worship by telling stories from this till daylight, unless indeed you +like to dismount and lie down to sleep a little on the green grass after +the fashion of knights-errant, so as to be fresher when day comes and the +moment arrives for attempting this extraordinary adventure you are +looking forward to." + +"What art thou talking about dismounting or sleeping for?" said Don +Quixote. "Am I, thinkest thou, one of those knights that take their rest +in the presence of danger? Sleep thou who art born to sleep, or do as +thou wilt, for I will act as I think most consistent with my character." + +"Be not angry, master mine," replied Sancho, "I did not mean to say +that;" and coming close to him he laid one hand on the pommel of the +saddle and the other on the cantle so that he held his master's left +thigh in his embrace, not daring to separate a finger's width from him; +so much afraid was he of the strokes which still resounded with a regular +beat. Don Quixote bade him tell some story to amuse him as he had +proposed, to which Sancho replied that he would if his dread of what he +heard would let him; "Still," said he, "I will strive to tell a story +which, if I can manage to relate it, and nobody interferes with the +telling, is the best of stories, and let your worship give me your +attention, for here I begin. What was, was; and may the good that is to +come be for all, and the evil for him who goes to look for it--your +worship must know that the beginning the old folk used to put to their +tales was not just as each one pleased; it was a maxim of Cato Zonzorino +the Roman, that says 'the evil for him that goes to look for it,' and it +comes as pat to the purpose now as ring to finger, to show that your +worship should keep quiet and not go looking for evil in any quarter, and +that we should go back by some other road, since nobody forces us to +follow this in which so many terrors affright us." + +"Go on with thy story, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "and leave the choice +of our road to my care." + +"I say then," continued Sancho, "that in a village of Estremadura there +was a goat-shepherd--that is to say, one who tended goats--which shepherd +or goatherd, as my story goes, was called Lope Ruiz, and this Lope Ruiz +was in love with a shepherdess called Torralva, which shepherdess called +Torralva was the daughter of a rich grazier, and this rich grazier-" + +"If that is the way thou tellest thy tale, Sancho," said Don Quixote, +"repeating twice all thou hast to say, thou wilt not have done these two +days; go straight on with it, and tell it like a reasonable man, or else +say nothing." + +"Tales are always told in my country in the very way I am telling this," +answered Sancho, "and I cannot tell it in any other, nor is it right of +your worship to ask me to make new customs." + +"Tell it as thou wilt," replied Don Quixote; "and as fate will have it +that I cannot help listening to thee, go on." + +"And so, lord of my soul," continued Sancho, as I have said, this +shepherd was in love with Torralva the shepherdess, who was a wild buxom +lass with something of the look of a man about her, for she had little +moustaches; I fancy I see her now." + +"Then you knew her?" said Don Quixote. + +"I did not know her," said Sancho, "but he who told me the story said it +was so true and certain that when I told it to another I might safely +declare and swear I had seen it all myself. And so in course of time, the +devil, who never sleeps and puts everything in confusion, contrived that +the love the shepherd bore the shepherdess turned into hatred and +ill-will, and the reason, according to evil tongues, was some little +jealousy she caused him that crossed the line and trespassed on forbidden +ground; and so much did the shepherd hate her from that time forward +that, in order to escape from her, he determined to quit the country and +go where he should never set eyes on her again. Torralva, when she found +herself spurned by Lope, was immediately smitten with love for him, +though she had never loved him before." + +"That is the natural way of women," said Don Quixote, "to scorn the one +that loves them, and love the one that hates them: go on, Sancho." + +"It came to pass," said Sancho, "that the shepherd carried out his +intention, and driving his goats before him took his way across the +plains of Estremadura to pass over into the Kingdom of Portugal. +Torralva, who knew of it, went after him, and on foot and barefoot +followed him at a distance, with a pilgrim's staff in her hand and a +scrip round her neck, in which she carried, it is said, a bit of +looking-glass and a piece of a comb and some little pot or other of paint +for her face; but let her carry what she did, I am not going to trouble +myself to prove it; all I say is, that the shepherd, they say, came with +his flock to cross over the river Guadiana, which was at that time +swollen and almost overflowing its banks, and at the spot he came to +there was neither ferry nor boat nor anyone to carry him or his flock to +the other side, at which he was much vexed, for he perceived that +Torralva was approaching and would give him great annoyance with her +tears and entreaties; however, he went looking about so closely that he +discovered a fisherman who had alongside of him a boat so small that it +could only hold one person and one goat; but for all that he spoke to him +and agreed with him to carry himself and his three hundred goats across. +The fisherman got into the boat and carried one goat over; he came back +and carried another over; he came back again, and again brought over +another--let your worship keep count of the goats the fisherman is taking +across, for if one escapes the memory there will be an end of the story, +and it will be impossible to tell another word of it. To proceed, I must +tell you the landing place on the other side was miry and slippery, and +the fisherman lost a great deal of time in going and coming; still he +returned for another goat, and another, and another." + +"Take it for granted he brought them all across," said Don Quixote, "and +don't keep going and coming in this way, or thou wilt not make an end of +bringing them over this twelvemonth." + +"How many have gone across so far?" said Sancho. + +"How the devil do I know?" replied Don Quixote. + +"There it is," said Sancho, "what I told you, that you must keep a good +count; well then, by God, there is an end of the story, for there is no +going any farther." + +"How can that be?" said Don Quixote; "is it so essential to the story to +know to a nicety the goats that have crossed over, that if there be a +mistake of one in the reckoning, thou canst not go on with it?" + +"No, senor, not a bit," replied Sancho; "for when I asked your worship to +tell me how many goats had crossed, and you answered you did not know, at +that very instant all I had to say passed away out of my memory, and, +faith, there was much virtue in it, and entertainment." + +"So, then," said Don Quixote, "the story has come to an end?" + +"As much as my mother has," said Sancho. + +"In truth," said Don Quixote, "thou hast told one of the rarest stories, +tales, or histories, that anyone in the world could have imagined, and +such a way of telling it and ending it was never seen nor will be in a +lifetime; though I expected nothing else from thy excellent +understanding. But I do not wonder, for perhaps those ceaseless strokes +may have confused thy wits." + +"All that may be," replied Sancho, "but I know that as to my story, all +that can be said is that it ends there where the mistake in the count of +the passage of the goats begins." + +"Let it end where it will, well and good," said Don Quixote, "and let us +see if Rocinante can go;" and again he spurred him, and again Rocinante +made jumps and remained where he was, so well tied was he. + +Just then, whether it was the cold of the morning that was now +approaching, or that he had eaten something laxative at supper, or that +it was only natural (as is most likely), Sancho felt a desire to do what +no one could do for him; but so great was the fear that had penetrated +his heart, he dared not separate himself from his master by as much as +the black of his nail; to escape doing what he wanted was, however, also +impossible; so what he did for peace's sake was to remove his right hand, +which held the back of the saddle, and with it to untie gently and +silently the running string which alone held up his breeches, so that on +loosening it they at once fell down round his feet like fetters; he then +raised his shirt as well as he could and bared his hind quarters, no slim +ones. But, this accomplished, which he fancied was all he had to do to +get out of this terrible strait and embarrassment, another still greater +difficulty presented itself, for it seemed to him impossible to relieve +himself without making some noise, and he ground his teeth and squeezed +his shoulders together, holding his breath as much as he could; but in +spite of his precautions he was unlucky enough after all to make a little +noise, very different from that which was causing him so much fear. + +Don Quixote, hearing it, said, "What noise is that, Sancho?" + +"I don't know, senor," said he; "it must be something new, for adventures +and misadventures never begin with a trifle." Once more he tried his +luck, and succeeded so well, that without any further noise or +disturbance he found himself relieved of the burden that had given him so +much discomfort. But as Don Quixote's sense of smell was as acute as his +hearing, and as Sancho was so closely linked with him that the fumes rose +almost in a straight line, it could not be but that some should reach his +nose, and as soon as they did he came to its relief by compressing it +between his fingers, saying in a rather snuffing tone, "Sancho, it +strikes me thou art in great fear." + +"I am," answered Sancho; "but how does your worship perceive it now more +than ever?" + +"Because just now thou smellest stronger than ever, and not of +ambergris," answered Don Quixote. + +"Very likely," said Sancho, "but that's not my fault, but your worship's, +for leading me about at unseasonable hours and at such unwonted paces." + +"Then go back three or four, my friend," said Don Quixote, all the time +with his fingers to his nose; "and for the future pay more attention to +thy person and to what thou owest to mine; for it is my great familiarity +with thee that has bred this contempt." + +"I'll bet," replied Sancho, "that your worship thinks I have done +something I ought not with my person." + +"It makes it worse to stir it, friend Sancho," returned Don Quixote. + +With this and other talk of the same sort master and man passed the +night, till Sancho, perceiving that daybreak was coming on apace, very +cautiously untied Rocinante and tied up his breeches. As soon as +Rocinante found himself free, though by nature he was not at all +mettlesome, he seemed to feel lively and began pawing--for as to +capering, begging his pardon, he knew not what it meant. Don Quixote, +then, observing that Rocinante could move, took it as a good sign and a +signal that he should attempt the dread adventure. By this time day had +fully broken and everything showed distinctly, and Don Quixote saw that +he was among some tall trees, chestnuts, which cast a very deep shade; he +perceived likewise that the sound of the strokes did not cease, but could +not discover what caused it, and so without any further delay he let +Rocinante feel the spur, and once more taking leave of Sancho, he told +him to wait for him there three days at most, as he had said before, and +if he should not have returned by that time, he might feel sure it had +been God's will that he should end his days in that perilous adventure. +He again repeated the message and commission with which he was to go on +his behalf to his lady Dulcinea, and said he was not to be uneasy as to +the payment of his services, for before leaving home he had made his +will, in which he would find himself fully recompensed in the matter of +wages in due proportion to the time he had served; but if God delivered +him safe, sound, and unhurt out of that danger, he might look upon the +promised island as much more than certain. Sancho began to weep afresh on +again hearing the affecting words of his good master, and resolved to +stay with him until the final issue and end of the business. From these +tears and this honourable resolve of Sancho Panza's the author of this +history infers that he must have been of good birth and at least an old +Christian; and the feeling he displayed touched his but not so much as to +make him show any weakness; on the contrary, hiding what he felt as well +as he could, he began to move towards that quarter whence the sound of +the water and of the strokes seemed to come. + +Sancho followed him on foot, leading by the halter, as his custom was, +his ass, his constant comrade in prosperity or adversity; and advancing +some distance through the shady chestnut trees they came upon a little +meadow at the foot of some high rocks, down which a mighty rush of water +flung itself. At the foot of the rocks were some rudely constructed +houses looking more like ruins than houses, from among which came, they +perceived, the din and clatter of blows, which still continued without +intermission. Rocinante took fright at the noise of the water and of the +blows, but quieting him Don Quixote advanced step by step towards the +houses, commending himself with all his heart to his lady, imploring her +support in that dread pass and enterprise, and on the way commending +himself to God, too, not to forget him. Sancho who never quitted his +side, stretched his neck as far as he could and peered between the legs +of Rocinante to see if he could now discover what it was that caused him +such fear and apprehension. They went it might be a hundred paces +farther, when on turning a corner the true cause, beyond the possibility +of any mistake, of that dread-sounding and to them awe-inspiring noise +that had kept them all the night in such fear and perplexity, appeared +plain and obvious; and it was (if, reader, thou art not disgusted and +disappointed) six fulling hammers which by their alternate strokes made +all the din. + +When Don Quixote perceived what it was, he was struck dumb and rigid from +head to foot. Sancho glanced at him and saw him with his head bent down +upon his breast in manifest mortification; and Don Quixote glanced at +Sancho and saw him with his cheeks puffed out and his mouth full of +laughter, and evidently ready to explode with it, and in spite of his +vexation he could not help laughing at the sight of him; and when Sancho +saw his master begin he let go so heartily that he had to hold his sides +with both hands to keep himself from bursting with laughter. Four times +he stopped, and as many times did his laughter break out afresh with the +same violence as at first, whereat Don Quixote grew furious, above all +when he heard him say mockingly, "Thou must know, friend Sancho, that of +Heaven's will I was born in this our iron age to revive in it the golden +or age of gold; I am he for whom are reserved perils, mighty +achievements, valiant deeds;" and here he went on repeating the words +that Don Quixote uttered the first time they heard the awful strokes. + +Don Quixote, then, seeing that Sancho was turning him into ridicule, was +so mortified and vexed that he lifted up his pike and smote him two such +blows that if, instead of catching them on his shoulders, he had caught +them on his head there would have been no wages to pay, unless indeed to +his heirs. Sancho seeing that he was getting an awkward return in earnest +for his jest, and fearing his master might carry it still further, said +to him very humbly, "Calm yourself, sir, for by God I am only joking." + +"Well, then, if you are joking I am not," replied Don Quixote. "Look +here, my lively gentleman, if these, instead of being fulling hammers, +had been some perilous adventure, have I not, think you, shown the +courage required for the attempt and achievement? Am I, perchance, being, +as I am, a gentleman, bound to know and distinguish sounds and tell +whether they come from fulling mills or not; and that, when perhaps, as +is the case, I have never in my life seen any as you have, low boor as +you are, that have been born and bred among them? But turn me these six +hammers into six giants, and bring them to beard me, one by one or all +together, and if I do not knock them head over heels, then make what +mockery you like of me." + +"No more of that, senor," returned Sancho; "I own I went a little too far +with the joke. But tell me, your worship, now that peace is made between +us (and may God bring you out of all the adventures that may befall you +as safe and sound as he has brought you out of this one), was it not a +thing to laugh at, and is it not a good story, the great fear we were +in?--at least that I was in; for as to your worship I see now that you +neither know nor understand what either fear or dismay is." + +"I do not deny," said Don Quixote, "that what happened to us may be worth +laughing at, but it is not worth making a story about, for it is not +everyone that is shrewd enough to hit the right point of a thing." + +"At any rate," said Sancho, "your worship knew how to hit the right point +with your pike, aiming at my head and hitting me on the shoulders, thanks +be to God and my own smartness in dodging it. But let that pass; all will +come out in the scouring; for I have heard say 'he loves thee well that +makes thee weep;' and moreover that it is the way with great lords after +any hard words they give a servant to give him a pair of breeches; though +I do not know what they give after blows, unless it be that +knights-errant after blows give islands, or kingdoms on the mainland." + +"It may be on the dice," said Don Quixote, "that all thou sayest will +come true; overlook the past, for thou art shrewd enough to know that our +first movements are not in our own control; and one thing for the future +bear in mind, that thou curb and restrain thy loquacity in my company; +for in all the books of chivalry that I have read, and they are +innumerable, I never met with a squire who talked so much to his lord as +thou dost to thine; and in fact I feel it to be a great fault of thine +and of mine: of thine, that thou hast so little respect for me; of mine, +that I do not make myself more respected. There was Gandalin, the squire +of Amadis of Gaul, that was Count of the Insula Firme, and we read of him +that he always addressed his lord with his cap in his hand, his head +bowed down and his body bent double, more turquesco. And then, what shall +we say of Gasabal, the squire of Galaor, who was so silent that in order +to indicate to us the greatness of his marvellous taciturnity his name is +only once mentioned in the whole of that history, as long as it is +truthful? From all I have said thou wilt gather, Sancho, that there must +be a difference between master and man, between lord and lackey, between +knight and squire: so that from this day forward in our intercourse we +must observe more respect and take less liberties, for in whatever way I +may be provoked with you it will be bad for the pitcher. The favours and +benefits that I have promised you will come in due time, and if they do +not your wages at least will not be lost, as I have already told you." + +"All that your worship says is very well," said Sancho, "but I should +like to know (in case the time of favours should not come, and it might +be necessary to fall back upon wages) how much did the squire of a +knight-errant get in those days, and did they agree by the month, or by +the day like bricklayers?" + +"I do not believe," replied Don Quixote, "that such squires were ever on +wages, but were dependent on favour; and if I have now mentioned thine in +the sealed will I have left at home, it was with a view to what may +happen; for as yet I know not how chivalry will turn out in these +wretched times of ours, and I do not wish my soul to suffer for trifles +in the other world; for I would have thee know, Sancho, that in this +there is no condition more hazardous than that of adventurers." + +"That is true," said Sancho, "since the mere noise of the hammers of a +fulling mill can disturb and disquiet the heart of such a valiant errant +adventurer as your worship; but you may be sure I will not open my lips +henceforward to make light of anything of your worship's, but only to +honour you as my master and natural lord." + +"By so doing," replied Don Quixote, "shalt thou live long on the face of +the earth; for next to parents, masters are to be respected as though +they were parents." + +Chapter XXI. - +Which treats of the exalted adventure and rich prize of Mambrino's +helmet, together with other things that happened to our invincible Knight + +It now began to rain a little, and Sancho was for going into the fulling +mills, but Don Quixote had taken such an abhorrence to them on account of +the late joke that he would not enter them on any account; so turning +aside to right they came upon another road, different from that which +they had taken the night before. Shortly afterwards Don Quixote perceived +a man on horseback who wore on his head something that shone like gold, +and the moment he saw him he turned to Sancho and said: + +"I think, Sancho, there is no proverb that is not true, all being maxims +drawn from experience itself, the mother of all the sciences, especially +that one that says, 'Where one door shuts, another opens.' I say so +because if last night fortune shut the door of the adventure we were +looking for against us, cheating us with the fulling mills, it now opens +wide another one for another better and more certain adventure, and if I +do not contrive to enter it, it will be my own fault, and I cannot lay it +to my ignorance of fulling mills, or the darkness of the night. I say +this because, if I mistake not, there comes towards us one who wears on +his head the helmet of Mambrino, concerning which I took the oath thou +rememberest." + +"Mind what you say, your worship, and still more what you do," said +Sancho, "for I don't want any more fulling mills to finish off fulling +and knocking our senses out." + +"The devil take thee, man," said Don Quixote; "what has a helmet to do +with fulling mills?" + +"I don't know," replied Sancho, "but, faith, if I might speak as I used, +perhaps I could give such reasons that your worship would see you were +mistaken in what you say." + +"How can I be mistaken in what I say, unbelieving traitor?" returned Don +Quixote; "tell me, seest thou not yonder knight coming towards us on a +dappled grey steed, who has upon his head a helmet of gold?" + +"What I see and make out," answered Sancho, "is only a man on a grey ass +like my own, who has something that shines on his head." + +"Well, that is the helmet of Mambrino," said Don Quixote; "stand to one +side and leave me alone with him; thou shalt see how, without saying a +word, to save time, I shall bring this adventure to an issue and possess +myself of the helmet I have so longed for." + +"I will take care to stand aside," said Sancho; "but God grant, I say +once more, that it may be marjoram and not fulling mills." + +"I have told thee, brother, on no account to mention those fulling mills +to me again," said Don Quixote, "or I vow--and I say no more-I'll full +the soul out of you." + +Sancho held his peace in dread lest his master should carry out the vow +he had hurled like a bowl at him. + +The fact of the matter as regards the helmet, steed, and knight that Don +Quixote saw, was this. In that neighbourhood there were two villages, one +of them so small that it had neither apothecary's shop nor barber, which +the other that was close to it had, so the barber of the larger served +the smaller, and in it there was a sick man who required to be bled and +another man who wanted to be shaved, and on this errand the barber was +going, carrying with him a brass basin; but as luck would have it, as he +was on the way it began to rain, and not to spoil his hat, which probably +was a new one, he put the basin on his head, and being clean it glittered +at half a league's distance. He rode upon a grey ass, as Sancho said, and +this was what made it seem to Don Quixote to be a dapple-grey steed and a +knight and a golden helmet; for everything he saw he made to fall in with +his crazy chivalry and ill-errant notions; and when he saw the poor +knight draw near, without entering into any parley with him, at +Rocinante's top speed he bore down upon him with the pike pointed low, +fully determined to run him through and through, and as he reached him, +without checking the fury of his charge, he cried to him: + +"Defend thyself, miserable being, or yield me of thine own accord that +which is so reasonably my due." + +The barber, who without any expectation or apprehension of it saw this +apparition coming down upon him, had no other way of saving himself from +the stroke of the lance but to let himself fall off his ass; and no +sooner had he touched the ground than he sprang up more nimbly than a +deer and sped away across the plain faster than the wind. + +He left the basin on the ground, with which Don Quixote contented +himself, saying that the pagan had shown his discretion and imitated the +beaver, which finding itself pressed by the hunters bites and cuts off +with its teeth that for which, by its natural instinct, it knows it is +pursued. + +He told Sancho to pick up the helmet, and he taking it in his hands said: + +"By God the basin is a good one, and worth a real of eight if it is worth +a maravedis," and handed it to his master, who immediately put it on his +head, turning it round, now this way, now that, in search of fitment, and +not finding it he said, "Clearly the pagan to whose measure this famous +head-piece was first forged must have had a very large head; but the +worst of it is half of it is wanting." + +When Sancho heard him call the basin a headpiece he was unable to +restrain his laughter, but remembering his master's wrath he checked +himself in the midst of it. + +"What art thou laughing at, Sancho?" said Don Quixote. + +"I am laughing," said he, "to think of the great head the pagan must have +had who owned this helmet, for it looks exactly like a regular barber's +basin." + +"Dost thou know what I suspect, Sancho?" said Don Quixote; "that this +wonderful piece of this enchanted helmet must by some strange accident +have come into the hands of some one who was unable to recognise or +realise its value, and who, not knowing what he did, and seeing it to be +of the purest gold, must have melted down one half for the sake of what +it might be worth, and of the other made this which is like a barber's +basin as thou sayest; but be it as it may, to me who recognise it, its +transformation makes no difference, for I will set it to rights at the +first village where there is a blacksmith, and in such style that that +helmet the god of smithies forged for the god of battles shall not +surpass it or even come up to it; and in the meantime I will wear it as +well as I can, for something is better than nothing; all the more as it +will be quite enough to protect me from any chance blow of a stone." + +"That is," said Sancho, "if it is not shot with a sling as they were in +the battle of the two armies, when they signed the cross on your +worship's grinders and smashed the flask with that blessed draught that +made me vomit my bowels up." + +"It does not grieve me much to have lost it," said Don Quixote, "for thou +knowest, Sancho, that I have the receipt in my memory." + +"So have I," answered Sancho, "but if ever I make it, or try it again as +long as I live, may this be my last hour; moreover, I have no intention +of putting myself in the way of wanting it, for I mean, with all my five +senses, to keep myself from being wounded or from wounding anyone: as to +being blanketed again I say nothing, for it is hard to prevent mishaps of +that sort, and if they come there is nothing for it but to squeeze our +shoulders together, hold our breath, shut our eyes, and let ourselves go +where luck and the blanket may send us." + +"Thou art a bad Christian, Sancho," said Don Quixote on hearing this, +"for once an injury has been done thee thou never forgettest it: but know +that it is the part of noble and generous hearts not to attach importance +to trifles. What lame leg hast thou got by it, what broken rib, what +cracked head, that thou canst not forget that jest? For jest and sport it +was, properly regarded, and had I not seen it in that light I would have +returned and done more mischief in revenging thee than the Greeks did for +the rape of Helen, who, if she were alive now, or if my Dulcinea had +lived then, might depend upon it she would not be so famous for her +beauty as she is;" and here he heaved a sigh and sent it aloft; and said +Sancho, "Let it pass for a jest as it cannot be revenged in earnest, but +I know what sort of jest and earnest it was, and I know it will never be +rubbed out of my memory any more than off my shoulders. But putting that +aside, will your worship tell me what are we to do with this dapple-grey +steed that looks like a grey ass, which that Martino that your worship +overthrew has left deserted here? for, from the way he took to his heels +and bolted, he is not likely ever to come back for it; and by my beard +but the grey is a good one." + +"I have never been in the habit," said Don Quixote, "of taking spoil of +those whom I vanquish, nor is it the practice of chivalry to take away +their horses and leave them to go on foot, unless indeed it be that the +victor have lost his own in the combat, in which case it is lawful to +take that of the vanquished as a thing won in lawful war; therefore, +Sancho, leave this horse, or ass, or whatever thou wilt have it to be; +for when its owner sees us gone hence he will come back for it." + +"God knows I should like to take it," returned Sancho, "or at least to +change it for my own, which does not seem to me as good a one: verily the +laws of chivalry are strict, since they cannot be stretched to let one +ass be changed for another; I should like to know if I might at least +change trappings." + +"On that head I am not quite certain," answered Don Quixote, "and the +matter being doubtful, pending better information, I say thou mayest +change them, if so be thou hast urgent need of them." + +"So urgent is it," answered Sancho, "that if they were for my own person +I could not want them more;" and forthwith, fortified by this licence, he +effected the mutatio capparum, rigging out his beast to the ninety-nines +and making quite another thing of it. This done, they broke their fast on +the remains of the spoils of war plundered from the sumpter mule, and +drank of the brook that flowed from the fulling mills, without casting a +look in that direction, in such loathing did they hold them for the alarm +they had caused them; and, all anger and gloom removed, they mounted and, +without taking any fixed road (not to fix upon any being the proper thing +for true knights-errant), they set out, guided by Rocinante's will, which +carried along with it that of his master, not to say that of the ass, +which always followed him wherever he led, lovingly and sociably; +nevertheless they returned to the high road, and pursued it at a venture +without any other aim. + +As they went along, then, in this way Sancho said to his master, "Senor, +would your worship give me leave to speak a little to you? For since you +laid that hard injunction of silence on me several things have gone to +rot in my stomach, and I have now just one on the tip of my tongue that I +don't want to be spoiled." + +"Say, on, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "and be brief in thy discourse, for +there is no pleasure in one that is long." + +"Well then, senor," returned Sancho, "I say that for some days past I +have been considering how little is got or gained by going in search of +these adventures that your worship seeks in these wilds and cross-roads, +where, even if the most perilous are victoriously achieved, there is no +one to see or know of them, and so they must be left untold for ever, to +the loss of your worship's object and the credit they deserve; therefore +it seems to me it would be better (saving your worship's better judgment) +if we were to go and serve some emperor or other great prince who may +have some war on hand, in whose service your worship may prove the worth +of your person, your great might, and greater understanding, on +perceiving which the lord in whose service we may be will perforce have +to reward us, each according to his merits; and there you will not be at +a loss for some one to set down your achievements in writing so as to +preserve their memory for ever. Of my own I say nothing, as they will not +go beyond squirely limits, though I make bold to say that, if it be the +practice in chivalry to write the achievements of squires, I think mine +must not be left out." + +"Thou speakest not amiss, Sancho," answered Don Quixote, "but before that +point is reached it is requisite to roam the world, as it were on +probation, seeking adventures, in order that, by achieving some, name and +fame may be acquired, such that when he betakes himself to the court of +some great monarch the knight may be already known by his deeds, and that +the boys, the instant they see him enter the gate of the city, may all +follow him and surround him, crying, 'This is the Knight of the Sun'-or +the Serpent, or any other title under which he may have achieved great +deeds. 'This,' they will say, 'is he who vanquished in single combat the +gigantic Brocabruno of mighty strength; he who delivered the great +Mameluke of Persia out of the long enchantment under which he had been +for almost nine hundred years.' So from one to another they will go +proclaiming his achievements; and presently at the tumult of the boys and +the others the king of that kingdom will appear at the windows of his +royal palace, and as soon as he beholds the knight, recognising him by +his arms and the device on his shield, he will as a matter of course say, +'What ho! Forth all ye, the knights of my court, to receive the flower of +chivalry who cometh hither!' At which command all will issue forth, and +he himself, advancing half-way down the stairs, will embrace him closely, +and salute him, kissing him on the cheek, and will then lead him to the +queen's chamber, where the knight will find her with the princess her +daughter, who will be one of the most beautiful and accomplished damsels +that could with the utmost pains be discovered anywhere in the known +world. Straightway it will come to pass that she will fix her eyes upon +the knight and he his upon her, and each will seem to the other something +more divine than human, and, without knowing how or why they will be +taken and entangled in the inextricable toils of love, and sorely +distressed in their hearts not to see any way of making their pains and +sufferings known by speech. Thence they will lead him, no doubt, to some +richly adorned chamber of the palace, where, having removed his armour, +they will bring him a rich mantle of scarlet wherewith to robe himself, +and if he looked noble in his armour he will look still more so in a +doublet. When night comes he will sup with the king, queen, and princess; +and all the time he will never take his eyes off her, stealing stealthy +glances, unnoticed by those present, and she will do the same, and with +equal cautiousness, being, as I have said, a damsel of great discretion. +The tables being removed, suddenly through the door of the hall there +will enter a hideous and diminutive dwarf followed by a fair dame, +between two giants, who comes with a certain adventure, the work of an +ancient sage; and he who shall achieve it shall be deemed the best knight +in the world. + +"The king will then command all those present to essay it, and none will +bring it to an end and conclusion save the stranger knight, to the great +enhancement of his fame, whereat the princess will be overjoyed and will +esteem herself happy and fortunate in having fixed and placed her +thoughts so high. And the best of it is that this king, or prince, or +whatever he is, is engaged in a very bitter war with another as powerful +as himself, and the stranger knight, after having been some days at his +court, requests leave from him to go and serve him in the said war. The +king will grant it very readily, and the knight will courteously kiss his +hands for the favour done to him; and that night he will take leave of +his lady the princess at the grating of the chamber where she sleeps, +which looks upon a garden, and at which he has already many times +conversed with her, the go-between and confidante in the matter being a +damsel much trusted by the princess. He will sigh, she will swoon, the +damsel will fetch water, much distressed because morning approaches, and +for the honour of her lady he would not that they were discovered; at +last the princess will come to herself and will present her white hands +through the grating to the knight, who will kiss them a thousand and a +thousand times, bathing them with his tears. It will be arranged between +them how they are to inform each other of their good or evil fortunes, +and the princess will entreat him to make his absence as short as +possible, which he will promise to do with many oaths; once more he +kisses her hands, and takes his leave in such grief that he is well-nigh +ready to die. He betakes him thence to his chamber, flings himself on his +bed, cannot sleep for sorrow at parting, rises early in the morning, goes +to take leave of the king, queen, and princess, and, as he takes his +leave of the pair, it is told him that the princess is indisposed and +cannot receive a visit; the knight thinks it is from grief at his +departure, his heart is pierced, and he is hardly able to keep from +showing his pain. The confidante is present, observes all, goes to tell +her mistress, who listens with tears and says that one of her greatest +distresses is not knowing who this knight is, and whether he is of kingly +lineage or not; the damsel assures her that so much courtesy, gentleness, +and gallantry of bearing as her knight possesses could not exist in any +save one who was royal and illustrious; her anxiety is thus relieved, and +she strives to be of good cheer lest she should excite suspicion in her +parents, and at the end of two days she appears in public. Meanwhile the +knight has taken his departure; he fights in the war, conquers the king's +enemy, wins many cities, triumphs in many battles, returns to the court, +sees his lady where he was wont to see her, and it is agreed that he +shall demand her in marriage of her parents as the reward of his +services; the king is unwilling to give her, as he knows not who he is, +but nevertheless, whether carried off or in whatever other way it may be, +the princess comes to be his bride, and her father comes to regard it as +very good fortune; for it so happens that this knight is proved to be the +son of a valiant king of some kingdom, I know not what, for I fancy it is +not likely to be on the map. The father dies, the princess inherits, and +in two words the knight becomes king. And here comes in at once the +bestowal of rewards upon his squire and all who have aided him in rising +to so exalted a rank. He marries his squire to a damsel of the +princess's, who will be, no doubt, the one who was confidante in their +amour, and is daughter of a very great duke." + +"That's what I want, and no mistake about it!" said Sancho. "That's what +I'm waiting for; for all this, word for word, is in store for your +worship under the title of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance." + +"Thou needst not doubt it, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "for in the same +manner, and by the same steps as I have described here, knights-errant +rise and have risen to be kings and emperors; all we want now is to find +out what king, Christian or pagan, is at war and has a beautiful +daughter; but there will be time enough to think of that, for, as I have +told thee, fame must be won in other quarters before repairing to the +court. There is another thing, too, that is wanting; for supposing we +find a king who is at war and has a beautiful daughter, and that I have +won incredible fame throughout the universe, I know not how it can be +made out that I am of royal lineage, or even second cousin to an emperor; +for the king will not be willing to give me his daughter in marriage +unless he is first thoroughly satisfied on this point, however much my +famous deeds may deserve it; so that by this deficiency I fear I shall +lose what my arm has fairly earned. True it is I am a gentleman of known +house, of estate and property, and entitled to the five hundred sueldos +mulct; and it may be that the sage who shall write my history will so +clear up my ancestry and pedigree that I may find myself fifth or sixth +in descent from a king; for I would have thee know, Sancho, that there +are two kinds of lineages in the world; some there be tracing and +deriving their descent from kings and princes, whom time has reduced +little by little until they end in a point like a pyramid upside down; +and others who spring from the common herd and go on rising step by step +until they come to be great lords; so that the difference is that the one +were what they no longer are, and the others are what they formerly were +not. And I may be of such that after investigation my origin may prove +great and famous, with which the king, my father-in-law that is to be, +ought to be satisfied; and should he not be, the princess will so love me +that even though she well knew me to be the son of a water-carrier, she +will take me for her lord and husband in spite of her father; if not, +then it comes to seizing her and carrying her off where I please; for +time or death will put an end to the wrath of her parents." + +"It comes to this, too," said Sancho, "what some naughty people say, +'Never ask as a favour what thou canst take by force;' though it would +fit better to say, 'A clear escape is better than good men's prayers.' I +say so because if my lord the king, your worship's father-in-law, will +not condescend to give you my lady the princess, there is nothing for it +but, as your worship says, to seize her and transport her. But the +mischief is that until peace is made and you come into the peaceful +enjoyment of your kingdom, the poor squire is famishing as far as rewards +go, unless it be that the confidante damsel that is to be his wife comes +with the princess, and that with her he tides over his bad luck until +Heaven otherwise orders things; for his master, I suppose, may as well +give her to him at once for a lawful wife." + +"Nobody can object to that," said Don Quixote. + +"Then since that may be," said Sancho, "there is nothing for it but to +commend ourselves to God, and let fortune take what course it will." + +"God guide it according to my wishes and thy wants," said Don Quixote, +"and mean be he who thinks himself mean." + +"In God's name let him be so," said Sancho: "I am an old Christian, and +to fit me for a count that's enough." + +"And more than enough for thee," said Don Quixote; "and even wert thou +not, it would make no difference, because I being the king can easily +give thee nobility without purchase or service rendered by thee, for when +I make thee a count, then thou art at once a gentleman; and they may say +what they will, but by my faith they will have to call thee 'your +lordship,' whether they like it or not." + +"Not a doubt of it; and I'll know how to support the tittle," said +Sancho. + +"Title thou shouldst say, not tittle," said his master. + +"So be it," answered Sancho. "I say I will know how to behave, for once +in my life I was beadle of a brotherhood, and the beadle's gown sat so +well on me that all said I looked as if I was to be steward of the same +brotherhood. What will it be, then, when I put a duke's robe on my back, +or dress myself in gold and pearls like a count? I believe they'll come a +hundred leagues to see me." + +"Thou wilt look well," said Don Quixote, "but thou must shave thy beard +often, for thou hast it so thick and rough and unkempt, that if thou dost +not shave it every second day at least, they will see what thou art at +the distance of a musket shot." + +"What more will it be," said Sancho, "than having a barber, and keeping +him at wages in the house? and even if it be necessary, I will make him +go behind me like a nobleman's equerry." + +"Why, how dost thou know that noblemen have equerries behind them?" asked +Don Quixote. + +"I will tell you," answered Sancho. "Years ago I was for a month at the +capital and there I saw taking the air a very small gentleman who they +said was a very great man, and a man following him on horseback in every +turn he took, just as if he was his tail. I asked why this man did not +join the other man, instead of always going behind him; they answered me +that he was his equerry, and that it was the custom with nobles to have +such persons behind them, and ever since then I know it, for I have never +forgotten it." + +"Thou art right," said Don Quixote, "and in the same way thou mayest +carry thy barber with thee, for customs did not come into use all +together, nor were they all invented at once, and thou mayest be the +first count to have a barber to follow him; and, indeed, shaving one's +beard is a greater trust than saddling one's horse." + +"Let the barber business be my look-out," said Sancho; "and your +worship's be it to strive to become a king, and make me a count." + +"So it shall be," answered Don Quixote, and raising his eyes he saw what +will be told in the following chapter. + +Chapter XXII. - +Of the freedom Don Quixote conferred on several unfortunates who against +their will were being carried where they had no wish to go + +Cide Hamete Benengeli, the Arab and Manchegan author, relates in this +most grave, high-sounding, minute, delightful, and original history that +after the discussion between the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha and his +squire Sancho Panza which is set down at the end of chapter twenty-one, +Don Quixote raised his eyes and saw coming along the road he was +following some dozen men on foot strung together by the neck, like beads, +on a great iron chain, and all with manacles on their hands. With them +there came also two men on horseback and two on foot; those on horseback +with wheel-lock muskets, those on foot with javelins and swords, and as +soon as Sancho saw them he said: + +"That is a chain of galley slaves, on the way to the galleys by force of +the king's orders." + +"How by force?" asked Don Quixote; "is it possible that the king uses +force against anyone?" + +"I do not say that," answered Sancho, "but that these are people +condemned for their crimes to serve by force in the king's galleys." + +"In fact," replied Don Quixote, "however it may be, these people are +going where they are taking them by force, and not of their own will." + +"Just so," said Sancho. + +"Then if so," said Don Quixote, "here is a case for the exercise of my +office, to put down force and to succour and help the wretched." + +"Recollect, your worship," said Sancho, "Justice, which is the king +himself, is not using force or doing wrong to such persons, but punishing +them for their crimes." + +The chain of galley slaves had by this time come up, and Don Quixote in +very courteous language asked those who were in custody of it to be good +enough to tell him the reason or reasons for which they were conducting +these people in this manner. One of the guards on horseback answered that +they were galley slaves belonging to his majesty, that they were going to +the galleys, and that was all that was to be said and all he had any +business to know. + +"Nevertheless," replied Don Quixote, "I should like to know from each of +them separately the reason of his misfortune;" to this he added more to +the same effect to induce them to tell him what he wanted so civilly that +the other mounted guard said to him: + +"Though we have here the register and certificate of the sentence of +every one of these wretches, this is no time to take them out or read +them; come and ask themselves; they can tell if they choose, and they +will, for these fellows take a pleasure in doing and talking about +rascalities." + +With this permission, which Don Quixote would have taken even had they +not granted it, he approached the chain and asked the first for what +offences he was now in such a sorry case. + +He made answer that it was for being a lover. + +"For that only?" replied Don Quixote; "why, if for being lovers they send +people to the galleys I might have been rowing in them long ago." + +"The love is not the sort your worship is thinking of," said the galley +slave; "mine was that I loved a washerwoman's basket of clean linen so +well, and held it so close in my embrace, that if the arm of the law had +not forced it from me, I should never have let it go of my own will to +this moment; I was caught in the act, there was no occasion for torture, +the case was settled, they treated me to a hundred lashes on the back, +and three years of gurapas besides, and that was the end of it." + +"What are gurapas?" asked Don Quixote. + +"Gurapas are galleys," answered the galley slave, who was a young man of +about four-and-twenty, and said he was a native of Piedrahita. + +Don Quixote asked the same question of the second, who made no reply, so +downcast and melancholy was he; but the first answered for him, and said, +"He, sir, goes as a canary, I mean as a musician and a singer." + +"What!" said Don Quixote, "for being musicians and singers are people +sent to the galleys too?" + +"Yes, sir," answered the galley slave, "for there is nothing worse than +singing under suffering." + +"On the contrary, I have heard say," said Don Quixote, "that he who sings +scares away his woes." + +"Here it is the reverse," said the galley slave; "for he who sings once +weeps all his life." + +"I do not understand it," said Don Quixote; but one of the guards said to +him, "Sir, to sing under suffering means with the non sancta fraternity +to confess under torture; they put this sinner to the torture and he +confessed his crime, which was being a cuatrero, that is a +cattle-stealer, and on his confession they sentenced him to six years in +the galleys, besides two bundred lashes that he has already had on the +back; and he is always dejected and downcast because the other thieves +that were left behind and that march here ill-treat, and snub, and jeer, +and despise him for confessing and not having spirit enough to say nay; +for, say they, 'nay' has no more letters in it than 'yea,' and a culprit +is well off when life or death with him depends on his own tongue and not +on that of witnesses or evidence; and to my thinking they are not very +far out." + +"And I think so too," answered Don Quixote; then passing on to the third +he asked him what he had asked the others, and the man answered very +readily and unconcernedly, "I am going for five years to their ladyships +the gurapas for the want of ten ducats." + +"I will give twenty with pleasure to get you out of that trouble," said +Don Quixote. + +"That," said the galley slave, "is like a man having money at sea when he +is dying of hunger and has no way of buying what he wants; I say so +because if at the right time I had had those twenty ducats that your +worship now offers me, I would have greased the notary's pen and +freshened up the attorney's wit with them, so that to-day I should be in +the middle of the plaza of the Zocodover at Toledo, and not on this road +coupled like a greyhound. But God is great; patience--there, that's +enough of it." + +Don Quixote passed on to the fourth, a man of venerable aspect with a +white beard falling below his breast, who on hearing himself asked the +reason of his being there began to weep without answering a word, but the +fifth acted as his tongue and said, "This worthy man is going to the +galleys for four years, after having gone the rounds in ceremony and on +horseback." + +"That means," said Sancho Panza, "as I take it, to have been exposed to +shame in public." + +"Just so," replied the galley slave, "and the offence for which they gave +him that punishment was having been an ear-broker, nay body-broker; I +mean, in short, that this gentleman goes as a pimp, and for having +besides a certain touch of the sorcerer about him." + +"If that touch had not been thrown in," said Don Quixote, "he would not +deserve, for mere pimping, to row in the galleys, but rather to command +and be admiral of them; for the office of pimp is no ordinary one, being +the office of persons of discretion, one very necessary in a well-ordered +state, and only to be exercised by persons of good birth; nay, there +ought to be an inspector and overseer of them, as in other offices, and +recognised number, as with the brokers on change; in this way many of the +evils would be avoided which are caused by this office and calling being +in the hands of stupid and ignorant people, such as women more or less +silly, and pages and jesters of little standing and experience, who on +the most urgent occasions, and when ingenuity of contrivance is needed, +let the crumbs freeze on the way to their mouths, and know not which is +their right hand. I should like to go farther, and give reasons to show +that it is advisable to choose those who are to hold so necessary an +office in the state, but this is not the fit place for it; some day I +will expound the matter to some one able to see to and rectify it; all I +say now is, that the additional fact of his being a sorcerer has removed +the sorrow it gave me to see these white hairs and this venerable +countenance in so painful a position on account of his being a pimp; +though I know well there are no sorceries in the world that can move or +compel the will as some simple folk fancy, for our will is free, nor is +there herb or charm that can force it. All that certain silly women and +quacks do is to turn men mad with potions and poisons, pretending that +they have power to cause love, for, as I say, it is an impossibility to +compel the will." + +"It is true," said the good old man, "and indeed, sir, as far as the +charge of sorcery goes I was not guilty; as to that of being a pimp I +cannot deny it; but I never thought I was doing any harm by it, for my +only object was that all the world should enjoy itself and live in peace +and quiet, without quarrels or troubles; but my good intentions were +unavailing to save me from going where I never expect to come back from, +with this weight of years upon me and a urinary ailment that never gives +me a moment's ease;" and again he fell to weeping as before, and such +compassion did Sancho feel for him that he took out a real of four from +his bosom and gave it to him in alms. + +Don Quixote went on and asked another what his crime was, and the man +answered with no less but rather much more sprightliness than the last +one. + +"I am here because I carried the joke too far with a couple of cousins of +mine, and with a couple of other cousins who were none of mine; in short, +I carried the joke so far with them all that it ended in such a +complicated increase of kindred that no accountant could make it clear: +it was all proved against me, I got no favour, I had no money, I was near +having my neck stretched, they sentenced me to the galleys for six years, +I accepted my fate, it is the punishment of my fault; I am a young man; +let life only last, and with that all will come right. If you, sir, have +anything wherewith to help the poor, God will repay it to you in heaven, +and we on earth will take care in our petitions to him to pray for the +life and health of your worship, that they may be as long and as good as +your amiable appearance deserves." + +This one was in the dress of a student, and one of the guards said he was +a great talker and a very elegant Latin scholar. + +Behind all these there came a man of thirty, a very personable fellow, +except that when he looked, his eyes turned in a little one towards the +other. He was bound differently from the rest, for he had to his leg a +chain so long that it was wound all round his body, and two rings on his +neck, one attached to the chain, the other to what they call a +"keep-friend" or "friend's foot," from which hung two irons reaching to +his waist with two manacles fixed to them in which his hands were secured +by a big padlock, so that he could neither raise his hands to his mouth +nor lower his head to his hands. Don Quixote asked why this man carried +so many more chains than the others. The guard replied that it was +because he alone had committed more crimes than all the rest put +together, and was so daring and such a villain, that though they marched +him in that fashion they did not feel sure of him, but were in dread of +his making his escape. + +"What crimes can he have committed," said Don Quixote, "if they have not +deserved a heavier punishment than being sent to the galleys?" + +"He goes for ten years," replied the guard, "which is the same thing as +civil death, and all that need be said is that this good fellow is the +famous Gines de Pasamonte, otherwise called Ginesillo de Parapilla." + +"Gently, senor commissary," said the galley slave at this, "let us have +no fixing of names or surnames; my name is Gines, not Ginesillo, and my +family name is Pasamonte, not Parapilla as you say; let each one mind his +own business, and he will be doing enough." + +"Speak with less impertinence, master thief of extra measure," replied +the commissary, "if you don't want me to make you hold your tongue in +spite of your teeth." + +"It is easy to see," returned the galley slave, "that man goes as God +pleases, but some one shall know some day whether I am called Ginesillo +de Parapilla or not." + +"Don't they call you so, you liar?" said the guard. + +"They do," returned Gines, "but I will make them give over calling me so, +or I will be shaved, where, I only say behind my teeth. If you, sir, have +anything to give us, give it to us at once, and God speed you, for you +are becoming tiresome with all this inquisitiveness about the lives of +others; if you want to know about mine, let me tell you I am Gines de +Pasamonte, whose life is written by these fingers." + +"He says true," said the commissary, "for he has himself written his +story as grand as you please, and has left the book in the prison in pawn +for two hundred reals." + +"And I mean to take it out of pawn," said Gines, "though it were in for +two hundred ducats." + +"Is it so good?" said Don Quixote. + +"So good is it," replied Gines, "that a fig for 'Lazarillo de Tormes,' +and all of that kind that have been written, or shall be written compared +with it: all I will say about it is that it deals with facts, and facts +so neat and diverting that no lies could match them." + +"And how is the book entitled?" asked Don Quixote. + +"The 'Life of Gines de Pasamonte,'" replied the subject of it. + +"And is it finished?" asked Don Quixote. + +"How can it be finished," said the other, "when my life is not yet +finished? All that is written is from my birth down to the point when +they sent me to the galleys this last time." + +"Then you have been there before?" said Don Quixote. + +"In the service of God and the king I have been there for four years +before now, and I know by this time what the biscuit and courbash are +like," replied Gines; "and it is no great grievance to me to go back to +them, for there I shall have time to finish my book; I have still many +things left to say, and in the galleys of Spain there is more than enough +leisure; though I do not want much for what I have to write, for I have +it by heart." + +"You seem a clever fellow," said Don Quixote. + +"And an unfortunate one," replied Gines, "for misfortune always +persecutes good wit." + +"It persecutes rogues," said the commissary. + +"I told you already to go gently, master commissary," said Pasamonte; +"their lordships yonder never gave you that staff to ill-treat us +wretches here, but to conduct and take us where his majesty orders you; +if not, by the life of-never mind-; it may be that some day the stains +made in the inn will come out in the scouring; let everyone hold his +tongue and behave well and speak better; and now let us march on, for we +have had quite enough of this entertainment." + +The commissary lifted his staff to strike Pasamonte in return for his +threats, but Don Quixote came between them, and begged him not to ill-use +him, as it was not too much to allow one who had his hands tied to have +his tongue a trifle free; and turning to the whole chain of them he said: + +"From all you have told me, dear brethren, make out clearly that though +they have punished you for your faults, the punishments you are about to +endure do not give you much pleasure, and that you go to them very much +against the grain and against your will, and that perhaps this one's want +of courage under torture, that one's want of money, the other's want of +advocacy, and lastly the perverted judgment of the judge may have been +the cause of your ruin and of your failure to obtain the justice you had +on your side. All which presents itself now to my mind, urging, +persuading, and even compelling me to demonstrate in your case the +purpose for which Heaven sent me into the world and caused me to make +profession of the order of chivalry to which I belong, and the vow I took +therein to give aid to those in need and under the oppression of the +strong. But as I know that it is a mark of prudence not to do by foul +means what may be done by fair, I will ask these gentlemen, the guards +and commissary, to be so good as to release you and let you go in peace, +as there will be no lack of others to serve the king under more +favourable circumstances; for it seems to me a hard case to make slaves +of those whom God and nature have made free. Moreover, sirs of the +guard," added Don Quixote, "these poor fellows have done nothing to you; +let each answer for his own sins yonder; there is a God in Heaven who +will not forget to punish the wicked or reward the good; and it is not +fitting that honest men should be the instruments of punishment to +others, they being therein no way concerned. This request I make thus +gently and quietly, that, if you comply with it, I may have reason for +thanking you; and, if you will not voluntarily, this lance and sword +together with the might of my arm shall compel you to comply with it by +force." + +"Nice nonsense!" said the commissary; "a fine piece of pleasantry he has +come out with at last! He wants us to let the king's prisoners go, as if +we had any authority to release them, or he to order us to do so! Go your +way, sir, and good luck to you; put that basin straight that you've got +on your head, and don't go looking for three feet on a cat." + +"'Tis you that are the cat, rat, and rascal," replied Don Quixote, and +acting on the word he fell upon him so suddenly that without giving him +time to defend himself he brought him to the ground sorely wounded with a +lance-thrust; and lucky it was for him that it was the one that had the +musket. The other guards stood thunderstruck and amazed at this +unexpected event, but recovering presence of mind, those on horseback +seized their swords, and those on foot their javelins, and attacked Don +Quixote, who was waiting for them with great calmness; and no doubt it +would have gone badly with him if the galley slaves, seeing the chance +before them of liberating themselves, had not effected it by contriving +to break the chain on which they were strung. Such was the confusion, +that the guards, now rushing at the galley slaves who were breaking +loose, now to attack Don Quixote who was waiting for them, did nothing at +all that was of any use. Sancho, on his part, gave a helping hand to +release Gines de Pasamonte, who was the first to leap forth upon the +plain free and unfettered, and who, attacking the prostrate commissary, +took from him his sword and the musket, with which, aiming at one and +levelling at another, he, without ever discharging it, drove every one of +the guards off the field, for they took to flight, as well to escape +Pasamonte's musket, as the showers of stones the now released galley +slaves were raining upon them. Sancho was greatly grieved at the affair, +because he anticipated that those who had fled would report the matter to +the Holy Brotherhood, who at the summons of the alarm-bell would at once +sally forth in quest of the offenders; and he said so to his master, and +entreated him to leave the place at once, and go into hiding in the +sierra that was close by. + +"That is all very well," said Don Quixote, "but I know what must be done +now;" and calling together all the galley slaves, who were now running +riot, and had stripped the commissary to the skin, he collected them +round him to hear what he had to say, and addressed them as follows: "To +be grateful for benefits received is the part of persons of good birth, +and one of the sins most offensive to God is ingratitude; I say so +because, sirs, ye have already seen by manifest proof the benefit ye have +received of me; in return for which I desire, and it is my good pleasure +that, laden with that chain which I have taken off your necks, ye at once +set out and proceed to the city of El Toboso, and there present +yourselves before the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, and say to her that her +knight, he of the Rueful Countenance, sends to commend himself to her; +and that ye recount to her in full detail all the particulars of this +notable adventure, up to the recovery of your longed-for liberty; and +this done ye may go where ye will, and good fortune attend you." + +Gines de Pasamonte made answer for all, saying, "That which you, sir, our +deliverer, demand of us, is of all impossibilities the most impossible to +comply with, because we cannot go together along the roads, but only +singly and separate, and each one his own way, endeavouring to hide +ourselves in the bowels of the earth to escape the Holy Brotherhood, +which, no doubt, will come out in search of us. What your worship may do, +and fairly do, is to change this service and tribute as regards the lady +Dulcinea del Toboso for a certain quantity of ave-marias and credos which +we will say for your worship's intention, and this is a condition that +can be complied with by night as by day, running or resting, in peace or +in war; but to imagine that we are going now to return to the flesh-pots +of Egypt, I mean to take up our chain and set out for El Toboso, is to +imagine that it is now night, though it is not yet ten in the morning, +and to ask this of us is like asking pears of the elm tree." + +"Then by all that's good," said Don Quixote (now stirred to wrath), "Don +son of a bitch, Don Ginesillo de Paropillo, or whatever your name is, you +will have to go yourself alone, with your tail between your legs and the +whole chain on your back." + +Pasamonte, who was anything but meek (being by this time thoroughly +convinced that Don Quixote was not quite right in his head as he had +committed such a vagary as to set them free), finding himself abused in +this fashion, gave the wink to his companions, and falling back they +began to shower stones on Don Quixote at such a rate that he was quite +unable to protect himself with his buckler, and poor Rocinante no more +heeded the spur than if he had been made of brass. Sancho planted himself +behind his ass, and with him sheltered himself from the hailstorm that +poured on both of them. Don Quixote was unable to shield himself so well +but that more pebbles than I could count struck him full on the body with +such force that they brought him to the ground; and the instant he fell +the student pounced upon him, snatched the basin from his head, and with +it struck three or four blows on his shoulders, and as many more on the +ground, knocking it almost to pieces. They then stripped him of a jacket +that he wore over his armour, and they would have stripped off his +stockings if his greaves had not prevented them. From Sancho they took +his coat, leaving him in his shirt-sleeves; and dividing among themselves +the remaining spoils of the battle, they went each one his own way, more +solicitous about keeping clear of the Holy Brotherhood they dreaded, than +about burdening themselves with the chain, or going to present themselves +before the lady Dulcinea del Toboso. The ass and Rocinante, Sancho and +Don Quixote, were all that were left upon the spot; the ass with drooping +head, serious, shaking his ears from time to time as if he thought the +storm of stones that assailed them was not yet over; Rocinante stretched +beside his master, for he too had been brought to the ground by a stone; +Sancho stripped, and trembling with fear of the Holy Brotherhood; and Don +Quixote fuming to find himself so served by the very persons for whom he +had done so much. + +Chapter XXIII. - +Of what befell Don Quixote in the Sierra Morena, which was one of the +rarest adventures related in this veracious history + +Seeing himself served in this way, Don Quixote said to his squire, "I +have always heard it said, Sancho, that to do good to boors is to throw +water into the sea. If I had believed thy words, I should have avoided +this trouble; but it is done now, it is only to have patience and take +warning for the future." + +"Your worship will take warning as much as I am a Turk," returned Sancho; +"but, as you say this mischief might have been avoided if you had +believed me, believe me now, and a still greater one will be avoided; for +I tell you chivalry is of no account with the Holy Brotherhood, and they +don't care two maravedis for all the knights-errant in the world; and I +can tell you I fancy I hear their arrows whistling past my ears this +minute." + +"Thou art a coward by nature, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "but lest thou +shouldst say I am obstinate, and that I never do as thou dost advise, +this once I will take thy advice, and withdraw out of reach of that fury +thou so dreadest; but it must be on one condition, that never, in life or +in death, thou art to say to anyone that I retired or withdrew from this +danger out of fear, but only in compliance with thy entreaties; for if +thou sayest otherwise thou wilt lie therein, and from this time to that, +and from that to this, I give thee lie, and say thou liest and wilt lie +every time thou thinkest or sayest it; and answer me not again; for at +the mere thought that I am withdrawing or retiring from any danger, above +all from this, which does seem to carry some little shadow of fear with +it, I am ready to take my stand here and await alone, not only that Holy +Brotherhood you talk of and dread, but the brothers of the twelve tribes +of Israel, and the Seven Maccabees, and Castor and Pollux, and all the +brothers and brotherhoods in the world." + +"Senor," replied Sancho, "to retire is not to flee, and there is no +wisdom in waiting when danger outweighs hope, and it is the part of wise +men to preserve themselves to-day for to-morrow, and not risk all in one +day; and let me tell you, though I am a clown and a boor, I have got some +notion of what they call safe conduct; so repent not of having taken my +advice, but mount Rocinante if you can, and if not I will help you; and +follow me, for my mother-wit tells me we have more need of legs than +hands just now." + +Don Quixote mounted without replying, and, Sancho leading the way on his +ass, they entered the side of the Sierra Morena, which was close by, as +it was Sancho's design to cross it entirely and come out again at El Viso +or Almodovar del Campo, and hide for some days among its crags so as to +escape the search of the Brotherhood should they come to look for them. +He was encouraged in this by perceiving that the stock of provisions +carried by the ass had come safe out of the fray with the galley slaves, +a circumstance that he regarded as a miracle, seeing how they pillaged +and ransacked. + +That night they reached the very heart of the Sierra Morena, where it +seemed prudent to Sancho to pass the night and even some days, at least +as many as the stores he carried might last, and so they encamped between +two rocks and among some cork trees; but fatal destiny, which, according +to the opinion of those who have not the light of the true faith, +directs, arranges, and settles everything in its own way, so ordered it +that Gines de Pasamonte, the famous knave and thief who by the virtue and +madness of Don Quixote had been released from the chain, driven by fear +of the Holy Brotherhood, which he had good reason to dread, resolved to +take hiding in the mountains; and his fate and fear led him to the same +spot to which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza had been led by theirs, just +in time to recognise them and leave them to fall asleep: and as the +wicked are always ungrateful, and necessity leads to evildoing, and +immediate advantage overcomes all considerations of the future, Gines, +who was neither grateful nor well-principled, made up his mind to steal +Sancho Panza's ass, not troubling himself about Rocinante, as being a +prize that was no good either to pledge or sell. While Sancho slept he +stole his ass, and before day dawned he was far out of reach. + +Aurora made her appearance bringing gladness to the earth but sadness to +Sancho Panza, for he found that his Dapple was missing, and seeing +himself bereft of him he began the saddest and most doleful lament in the +world, so loud that Don Quixote awoke at his exclamations and heard him +saying, "O son of my bowels, born in my very house, my children's +plaything, my wife's joy, the envy of my neighbours, relief of my +burdens, and lastly, half supporter of myself, for with the +six-and-twenty maravedis thou didst earn me daily I met half my charges." + +Don Quixote, when he heard the lament and learned the cause, consoled +Sancho with the best arguments he could, entreating him to be patient, +and promising to give him a letter of exchange ordering three out of five +ass-colts that he had at home to be given to him. Sancho took comfort at +this, dried his tears, suppressed his sobs, and returned thanks for the +kindness shown him by Don Quixote. He on his part was rejoiced to the +heart on entering the mountains, as they seemed to him to be just the +place for the adventures he was in quest of. They brought back to his +memory the marvellous adventures that had befallen knights-errant in like +solitudes and wilds, and he went along reflecting on these things, so +absorbed and carried away by them that he had no thought for anything +else. + +Nor had Sancho any other care (now that he fancied he was travelling in a +safe quarter) than to satisfy his appetite with such remains as were left +of the clerical spoils, and so he marched behind his master laden with +what Dapple used to carry, emptying the sack and packing his paunch, and +so long as he could go that way, he would not have given a farthing to +meet with another adventure. + +While so engaged he raised his eyes and saw that his master had halted, +and was trying with the point of his pike to lift some bulky object that +lay upon the ground, on which he hastened to join him and help him if it +were needful, and reached him just as with the point of the pike he was +raising a saddle-pad with a valise attached to it, half or rather wholly +rotten and torn; but so heavy were they that Sancho had to help to take +them up, and his master directed him to see what the valise contained. +Sancho did so with great alacrity, and though the valise was secured by a +chain and padlock, from its torn and rotten condition he was able to see +its contents, which were four shirts of fine holland, and other articles +of linen no less curious than clean; and in a handkerchief he found a +good lot of gold crowns, and as soon as he saw them he exclaimed: + +"Blessed be all Heaven for sending us an adventure that is good for +something!" + +Searching further he found a little memorandum book richly bound; this +Don Quixote asked of him, telling him to take the money and keep it for +himself. Sancho kissed his hands for the favour, and cleared the valise +of its linen, which he stowed away in the provision sack. Considering the +whole matter, Don Quixote observed: + +"It seems to me, Sancho--and it is impossible it can be otherwise-that +some strayed traveller must have crossed this sierra and been attacked +and slain by footpads, who brought him to this remote spot to bury him." + +"That cannot be," answered Sancho, "because if they had been robbers they +would not have left this money." + +"Thou art right," said Don Quixote, "and I cannot guess or explain what +this may mean; but stay; let us see if in this memorandum book there is +anything written by which we may be able to trace out or discover what we +want to know." + +He opened it, and the first thing he found in it, written roughly but in +a very good hand, was a sonnet, and reading it aloud that Sancho might +hear it, he found that it ran as follows: + +poem{ + +SONNET + +Or Love is lacking in intelligence, + Or to the height of cruelty attains, + Or else it is my doom to suffer pains +Beyond the measure due to my offence. +But if Love be a God, it follows thence + That he knows all, and certain it remains + No God loves cruelty; then who ordains +This penance that enthrals while it torments? +It were a falsehood, Chloe, thee to name; + Such evil with such goodness cannot live; +And against Heaven I dare not charge the blame, + I only know it is my fate to die. + To him who knows not whence his malady + A miracle alone a cure can give. + +}poem + +"There is nothing to be learned from that rhyme," said Sancho, "unless by +that clue there's in it, one may draw out the ball of the whole matter." + +"What clue is there?" said Don Quixote. + +"I thought your worship spoke of a clue in it," said Sancho. + +"I only said Chloe," replied Don Quixote; "and that no doubt, is the name +of the lady of whom the author of the sonnet complains; and, faith, he +must be a tolerable poet, or I know little of the craft." + +"Then your worship understands rhyming too?" + +"And better than thou thinkest," replied Don Quixote, "as thou shalt see +when thou carriest a letter written in verse from beginning to end to my +lady Dulcinea del Toboso, for I would have thee know, Sancho, that all or +most of the knights-errant in days of yore were great troubadours and +great musicians, for both of these accomplishments, or more properly +speaking gifts, are the peculiar property of lovers-errant: true it is +that the verses of the knights of old have more spirit than neatness in +them." + +"Read more, your worship," said Sancho, "and you will find something that +will enlighten us." + +Don Quixote turned the page and said, "This is prose and seems to be a +letter." + +"A correspondence letter, senor?" + +"From the beginning it seems to be a love letter," replied Don Quixote. + +"Then let your worship read it aloud," said Sancho, "for I am very fond +of love matters." + +"With all my heart," said Don Quixote, and reading it aloud as Sancho had +requested him, he found it ran thus: + +Thy false promise and my sure misfortune carry me to a place whence the +news of my death will reach thy ears before the words of my complaint. +Ungrateful one, thou hast rejected me for one more wealthy, but not more +worthy; but if virtue were esteemed wealth I should neither envy the +fortunes of others nor weep for misfortunes of my own. What thy beauty +raised up thy deeds have laid low; by it I believed thee to be an angel, +by them I know thou art a woman. Peace be with thee who hast sent war to +me, and Heaven grant that the deceit of thy husband be ever hidden from +thee, so that thou repent not of what thou hast done, and I reap not a +revenge I would not have. + +When he had finished the letter, Don Quixote said, "There is less to be +gathered from this than from the verses, except that he who wrote it is +some rejected lover;" and turning over nearly all the pages of the book +he found more verses and letters, some of which he could read, while +others he could not; but they were all made up of complaints, laments, +misgivings, desires and aversions, favours and rejections, some +rapturous, some doleful. While Don Quixote examined the book, Sancho +examined the valise, not leaving a corner in the whole of it or in the +pad that he did not search, peer into, and explore, or seam that he did +not rip, or tuft of wool that he did not pick to pieces, lest anything +should escape for want of care and pains; so keen was the covetousness +excited in him by the discovery of the crowns, which amounted to near a +hundred; and though he found no more booty, he held the blanket flights, +balsam vomits, stake benedictions, carriers' fisticuffs, missing +alforjas, stolen coat, and all the hunger, thirst, and weariness he had +endured in the service of his good master, cheap at the price; as he +considered himself more than fully indemnified for all by the payment he +received in the gift of the treasure-trove. + +The Knight of the Rueful Countenance was still very anxious to find out +who the owner of the valise could be, conjecturing from the sonnet and +letter, from the money in gold, and from the fineness of the shirts, that +he must be some lover of distinction whom the scorn and cruelty of his +lady had driven to some desperate course; but as in that uninhabited and +rugged spot there was no one to be seen of whom he could inquire, he saw +nothing else for it but to push on, taking whatever road Rocinante +chose--which was where he could make his way--firmly persuaded that among +these wilds he could not fail to meet some rare adventure. As he went +along, then, occupied with these thoughts, he perceived on the summit of +a height that rose before their eyes a man who went springing from rock +to rock and from tussock to tussock with marvellous agility. As well as +he could make out he was unclad, with a thick black beard, long tangled +hair, and bare legs and feet, his thighs were covered by breeches +apparently of tawny velvet but so ragged that they showed his skin in +several places. + +He was bareheaded, and notwithstanding the swiftness with which he passed +as has been described, the Knight of the Rueful Countenance observed and +noted all these trifles, and though he made the attempt, he was unable to +follow him, for it was not granted to the feebleness of Rocinante to make +way over such rough ground, he being, moreover, slow-paced and sluggish +by nature. Don Quixote at once came to the conclusion that this was the +owner of the saddle-pad and of the valise, and made up his mind to go in +search of him, even though he should have to wander a year in those +mountains before he found him, and so he directed Sancho to take a short +cut over one side of the mountain, while he himself went by the other, +and perhaps by this means they might light upon this man who had passed +so quickly out of their sight. + +"I could not do that," said Sancho, "for when I separate from your +worship fear at once lays hold of me, and assails me with all sorts of +panics and fancies; and let what I now say be a notice that from this +time forth I am not going to stir a finger's width from your presence." + +"It shall be so," said he of the Rueful Countenance, "and I am very glad +that thou art willing to rely on my courage, which will never fail thee, +even though the soul in thy body fail thee; so come on now behind me +slowly as well as thou canst, and make lanterns of thine eyes; let us +make the circuit of this ridge; perhaps we shall light upon this man that +we saw, who no doubt is no other than the owner of what we found." + +To which Sancho made answer, "Far better would it be not to look for him, +for, if we find him, and he happens to be the owner of the money, it is +plain I must restore it; it would be better, therefore, that without +taking this needless trouble, I should keep possession of it until in +some other less meddlesome and officious way the real owner may be +discovered; and perhaps that will be when I shall have spent it, and then +the king will hold me harmless." + +"Thou art wrong there, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for now that we have a +suspicion who the owner is, and have him almost before us, we are bound +to seek him and make restitution; and if we do not see him, the strong +suspicion we have as to his being the owner makes us as guilty as if he +were so; and so, friend Sancho, let not our search for him give thee any +uneasiness, for if we find him it will relieve mine." + +And so saying he gave Rocinante the spur, and Sancho followed him on foot +and loaded, and after having partly made the circuit of the mountain they +found lying in a ravine, dead and half devoured by dogs and pecked by +jackdaws, a mule saddled and bridled, all which still further +strengthened their suspicion that he who had fled was the owner of the +mule and the saddle-pad. + +As they stood looking at it they heard a whistle like that of a shepherd +watching his flock, and suddenly on their left there appeared a great +number of goats and behind them on the summit of the mountain the +goatherd in charge of them, a man advanced in years. Don Quixote called +aloud to him and begged him to come down to where they stood. He shouted +in return, asking what had brought them to that spot, seldom or never +trodden except by the feet of goats, or of the wolves and other wild +beasts that roamed around. Sancho in return bade him come down, and they +would explain all to him. + +The goatherd descended, and reaching the place where Don Quixote stood, +he said, "I will wager you are looking at that hack mule that lies dead +in the hollow there, and, faith, it has been lying there now these six +months; tell me, have you come upon its master about here?" + +"We have come upon nobody," answered Don Quixote, "nor on anything except +a saddle-pad and a little valise that we found not far from this." + +"I found it too," said the goatherd, "but I would not lift it nor go near +it for fear of some ill-luck or being charged with theft, for the devil +is crafty, and things rise up under one's feet to make one fall without +knowing why or wherefore." + +"That's exactly what I say," said Sancho; "I found it too, and I would +not go within a stone's throw of it; there I left it, and there it lies +just as it was, for I don't want a dog with a bell." + +"Tell me, good man," said Don Quixote, "do you know who is the owner of +this property?" + +"All I can tell you," said the goatherd, "is that about six months ago, +more or less, there arrived at a shepherd's hut three leagues, perhaps, +away from this, a youth of well-bred appearance and manners, mounted on +that same mule which lies dead here, and with the same saddle-pad and +valise which you say you found and did not touch. He asked us what part +of this sierra was the most rugged and retired; we told him that it was +where we now are; and so in truth it is, for if you push on half a league +farther, perhaps you will not be able to find your way out; and I am +wondering how you have managed to come here, for there is no road or path +that leads to this spot. I say, then, that on hearing our answer the +youth turned about and made for the place we pointed out to him, leaving +us all charmed with his good looks, and wondering at his question and the +haste with which we saw him depart in the direction of the sierra; and +after that we saw him no more, until some days afterwards he crossed the +path of one of our shepherds, and without saying a word to him, came up +to him and gave him several cuffs and kicks, and then turned to the ass +with our provisions and took all the bread and cheese it carried, and +having done this made off back again into the sierra with extraordinary +swiftness. When some of us goatherds learned this we went in search of +him for about two days through the most remote portion of this sierra, at +the end of which we found him lodged in the hollow of a large thick cork +tree. He came out to meet us with great gentleness, with his dress now +torn and his face so disfigured and burned by the sun, that we hardly +recognised him but that his clothes, though torn, convinced us, from the +recollection we had of them, that he was the person we were looking for. +He saluted us courteously, and in a few well-spoken words he told us not +to wonder at seeing him going about in this guise, as it was binding upon +him in order that he might work out a penance which for his many sins had +been imposed upon him. We asked him to tell us who he was, but we were +never able to find out from him: we begged of him too, when he was in +want of food, which he could not do without, to tell us where we should +find him, as we would bring it to him with all good-will and readiness; +or if this were not to his taste, at least to come and ask it of us and +not take it by force from the shepherds. He thanked us for the offer, +begged pardon for the late assault, and promised for the future to ask it +in God's name without offering violence to anybody. As for fixed abode, +he said he had no other than that which chance offered wherever night +might overtake him; and his words ended in an outburst of weeping so +bitter that we who listened to him must have been very stones had we not +joined him in it, comparing what we saw of him the first time with what +we saw now; for, as I said, he was a graceful and gracious youth, and in +his courteous and polished language showed himself to be of good birth +and courtly breeding, and rustics as we were that listened to him, even +to our rusticity his gentle bearing sufficed to make it plain. + +"But in the midst of his conversation he stopped and became silent, +keeping his eyes fixed upon the ground for some time, during which we +stood still waiting anxiously to see what would come of this abstraction; +and with no little pity, for from his behaviour, now staring at the +ground with fixed gaze and eyes wide open without moving an eyelid, again +closing them, compressing his lips and raising his eyebrows, we could +perceive plainly that a fit of madness of some kind had come upon him; +and before long he showed that what we imagined was the truth, for he +arose in a fury from the ground where he had thrown himself, and attacked +the first he found near him with such rage and fierceness that if we had +not dragged him off him, he would have beaten or bitten him to death, all +the while exclaiming, 'Oh faithless Fernando, here, here shalt thou pay +the penalty of the wrong thou hast done me; these hands shall tear out +that heart of thine, abode and dwelling of all iniquity, but of deceit +and fraud above all; and to these he added other words all in effect +upbraiding this Fernando and charging him with treachery and +faithlessness. + +"We forced him to release his hold with no little difficulty, and without +another word he left us, and rushing off plunged in among these brakes +and brambles, so as to make it impossible for us to follow him; from this +we suppose that madness comes upon him from time to time, and that some +one called Fernando must have done him a wrong of a grievous nature such +as the condition to which it had brought him seemed to show. All this has +been since then confirmed on those occasions, and they have been many, on +which he has crossed our path, at one time to beg the shepherds to give +him some of the food they carry, at another to take it from them by +force; for when there is a fit of madness upon him, even though the +shepherds offer it freely, he will not accept it but snatches it from +them by dint of blows; but when he is in his senses he begs it for the +love of God, courteously and civilly, and receives it with many thanks +and not a few tears. And to tell you the truth, sirs," continued the +goatherd, "it was yesterday that we resolved, I and four of the lads, two +of them our servants, and the other two friends of mine, to go in search +of him until we find him, and when we do to take him, whether by force or +of his own consent, to the town of Almodovar, which is eight leagues from +this, and there strive to cure him (if indeed his malady admits of a +cure), or learn when he is in his senses who he is, and if he has +relatives to whom we may give notice of his misfortune. This, sirs, is +all I can say in answer to what you have asked me; and be sure that the +owner of the articles you found is he whom you saw pass by with such +nimbleness and so naked." + +For Don Quixote had already described how he had seen the man go bounding +along the mountain side, and he was now filled with amazement at what he +heard from the goatherd, and more eager than ever to discover who the +unhappy madman was; and in his heart he resolved, as he had done before, +to search for him all over the mountain, not leaving a corner or cave +unexamined until he had found him. But chance arranged matters better +than he expected or hoped, for at that very moment, in a gorge on the +mountain that opened where they stood, the youth he wished to find made +his appearance, coming along talking to himself in a way that would have +been unintelligible near at hand, much more at a distance. His garb was +what has been described, save that as he drew near, Don Quixote perceived +that a tattered doublet which he wore was amber-tanned, from which he +concluded that one who wore such garments could not be of very low rank. + +Approaching them, the youth greeted them in a harsh and hoarse voice but +with great courtesy. Don Quixote returned his salutation with equal +politeness, and dismounting from Rocinante advanced with well-bred +bearing and grace to embrace him, and held him for some time close in his +arms as if he had known him for a long time. The other, whom we may call +the Ragged One of the Sorry Countenance, as Don Quixote was of the +Rueful, after submitting to the embrace pushed him back a little and, +placing his hands on Don Quixote's shoulders, stood gazing at him as if +seeking to see whether he knew him, not less amazed, perhaps, at the +sight of the face, figure, and armour of Don Quixote than Don Quixote was +at the sight of him. To be brief, the first to speak after embracing was +the Ragged One, and he said what will be told farther on. + +Chapter XXIV. - +In which is continued the adventure of the Sierra Morena + +The history relates that it was with the greatest attention Don Quixote +listened to the ragged knight of the Sierra, who began by saying: + +"Of a surety, senor, whoever you are, for I know you not, I thank you for +the proofs of kindness and courtesy you have shown me, and would I were +in a condition to requite with something more than good-will that which +you have displayed towards me in the cordial reception you have given me; +but my fate does not afford me any other means of returning kindnesses +done me save the hearty desire to repay them." + +"Mine," replied Don Quixote, "is to be of service to you, so much so that +I had resolved not to quit these mountains until I had found you, and +learned of you whether there is any kind of relief to be found for that +sorrow under which from the strangeness of your life you seem to labour; +and to search for you with all possible diligence, if search had been +necessary. And if your misfortune should prove to be one of those that +refuse admission to any sort of consolation, it was my purpose to join +you in lamenting and mourning over it, so far as I could; for it is still +some comfort in misfortune to find one who can feel for it. And if my +good intentions deserve to be acknowledged with any kind of courtesy, I +entreat you, senor, by that which I perceive you possess in so high a +degree, and likewise conjure you by whatever you love or have loved best +in life, to tell me who you are and the cause that has brought you to +live or die in these solitudes like a brute beast, dwelling among them in +a manner so foreign to your condition as your garb and appearance show. +And I swear," added Don Quixote, "by the order of knighthood which I have +received, and by my vocation of knight-errant, if you gratify me in this, +to serve you with all the zeal my calling demands of me, either in +relieving your misfortune if it admits of relief, or in joining you in +lamenting it as I promised to do." + +The Knight of the Thicket, hearing him of the Rueful Countenance talk in +this strain, did nothing but stare at him, and stare at him again, and +again survey him from head to foot; and when he had thoroughly examined +him, he said to him: + +"If you have anything to give me to eat, for God's sake give it me, and +after I have eaten I will do all you ask in acknowledgment of the +goodwill you have displayed towards me." + +Sancho from his sack, and the goatherd from his pouch, furnished the +Ragged One with the means of appeasing his hunger, and what they gave him +he ate like a half-witted being, so hastily that he took no time between +mouthfuls, gorging rather than swallowing; and while he ate neither he +nor they who observed him uttered a word. As soon as he had done he made +signs to them to follow him, which they did, and he led them to a green +plot which lay a little farther off round the corner of a rock. On +reaching it he stretched himself upon the grass, and the others did the +same, all keeping silence, until the Ragged One, settling himself in his +place, said: + +"If it is your wish, sirs, that I should disclose in a few words the +surpassing extent of my misfortunes, you must promise not to break the +thread of my sad story with any question or other interruption, for the +instant you do so the tale I tell will come to an end." + +These words of the Ragged One reminded Don Quixote of the tale his squire +had told him, when he failed to keep count of the goats that had crossed +the river and the story remained unfinished; but to return to the Ragged +One, he went on to say: + +"I give you this warning because I wish to pass briefly over the story of +my misfortunes, for recalling them to memory only serves to add fresh +ones, and the less you question me the sooner shall I make an end of the +recital, though I shall not omit to relate anything of importance in +order fully to satisfy your curiosity." + +Don Quixote gave the promise for himself and the others, and with this +assurance he began as follows: + +"My name is Cardenio, my birthplace one of the best cities of this +Andalusia, my family noble, my parents rich, my misfortune so great that +my parents must have wept and my family grieved over it without being +able by their wealth to lighten it; for the gifts of fortune can do +little to relieve reverses sent by Heaven. In that same country there was +a heaven in which love had placed all the glory I could desire; such was +the beauty of Luscinda, a damsel as noble and as rich as I, but of +happier fortunes, and of less firmness than was due to so worthy a +passion as mine. This Luscinda I loved, worshipped, and adored from my +earliest and tenderest years, and she loved me in all the innocence and +sincerity of childhood. Our parents were aware of our feelings, and were +not sorry to perceive them, for they saw clearly that as they ripened +they must lead at last to a marriage between us, a thing that seemed +almost prearranged by the equality of our families and wealth. We grew +up, and with our growth grew the love between us, so that the father of +Luscinda felt bound for propriety's sake to refuse me admission to his +house, in this perhaps imitating the parents of that Thisbe so celebrated +by the poets, and this refusal but added love to love and flame to flame; +for though they enforced silence upon our tongues they could not impose +it upon our pens, which can make known the heart's secrets to a loved one +more freely than tongues; for many a time the presence of the object of +love shakes the firmest will and strikes dumb the boldest tongue. Ah +heavens! how many letters did I write her, and how many dainty modest +replies did I receive! how many ditties and love-songs did I compose in +which my heart declared and made known its feelings, described its ardent +longings, revelled in its recollections and dallied with its desires! At +length growing impatient and feeling my heart languishing with longing to +see her, I resolved to put into execution and carry out what seemed to me +the best mode of winning my desired and merited reward, to ask her of her +father for my lawful wife, which I did. To this his answer was that he +thanked me for the disposition I showed to do honour to him and to regard +myself as honoured by the bestowal of his treasure; but that as my father +was alive it was his by right to make this demand, for if it were not in +accordance with his full will and pleasure, Luscinda was not to be taken +or given by stealth. I thanked him for his kindness, reflecting that +there was reason in what he said, and that my father would assent to it +as soon as I should tell him, and with that view I went the very same +instant to let him know what my desires were. When I entered the room +where he was I found him with an open letter in his hand, which, before I +could utter a word, he gave me, saying, 'By this letter thou wilt see, +Cardenio, the disposition the Duke Ricardo has to serve thee.' This Duke +Ricardo, as you, sirs, probably know already, is a grandee of Spain who +has his seat in the best part of this Andalusia. I took and read the +letter, which was couched in terms so flattering that even I myself felt +it would be wrong in my father not to comply with the request the duke +made in it, which was that he would send me immediately to him, as he +wished me to become the companion, not servant, of his eldest son, and +would take upon himself the charge of placing me in a position +corresponding to the esteem in which he held me. On reading the letter my +voice failed me, and still more when I heard my father say, 'Two days +hence thou wilt depart, Cardenio, in accordance with the duke's wish, and +give thanks to God who is opening a road to thee by which thou mayest +attain what I know thou dost deserve; and to these words he added others +of fatherly counsel. The time for my departure arrived; I spoke one night +to Luscinda, I told her all that had occurred, as I did also to her +father, entreating him to allow some delay, and to defer the disposal of +her hand until I should see what the Duke Ricardo sought of me: he gave +me the promise, and she confirmed it with vows and swoonings unnumbered. +Finally, I presented myself to the duke, and was received and treated by +him so kindly that very soon envy began to do its work, the old servants +growing envious of me, and regarding the duke's inclination to show me +favour as an injury to themselves. But the one to whom my arrival gave +the greatest pleasure was the duke's second son, Fernando by name, a +gallant youth, of noble, generous, and amorous disposition, who very soon +made so intimate a friend of me that it was remarked by everybody; for +though the elder was attached to me, and showed me kindness, he did not +carry his affectionate treatment to the same length as Don Fernando. It +so happened, then, that as between friends no secret remains unshared, +and as the favour I enjoyed with Don Fernando had grown into friendship, +he made all his thoughts known to me, and in particular a love affair +which troubled his mind a little. He was deeply in love with a peasant +girl, a vassal of his father's, the daughter of wealthy parents, and +herself so beautiful, modest, discreet, and virtuous, that no one who +knew her was able to decide in which of these respects she was most +highly gifted or most excelled. The attractions of the fair peasant +raised the passion of Don Fernando to such a point that, in order to gain +his object and overcome her virtuous resolutions, he determined to pledge +his word to her to become her husband, for to attempt it in any other way +was to attempt an impossibility. Bound to him as I was by friendship, I +strove by the best arguments and the most forcible examples I could think +of to restrain and dissuade him from such a course; but perceiving I +produced no effect I resolved to make the Duke Ricardo, his father, +acquainted with the matter; but Don Fernando, being sharp-witted and +shrewd, foresaw and apprehended this, perceiving that by my duty as a +good servant I was bound not to keep concealed a thing so much opposed to +the honour of my lord the duke; and so, to mislead and deceive me, he +told me he could find no better way of effacing from his mind the beauty +that so enslaved him than by absenting himself for some months, and that +he wished the absence to be effected by our going, both of us, to my +father's house under the pretence, which he would make to the duke, of +going to see and buy some fine horses that there were in my city, which +produces the best in the world. When I heard him say so, even if his +resolution had not been so good a one I should have hailed it as one of +the happiest that could be imagined, prompted by my affection, seeing +what a favourable chance and opportunity it offered me of returning to +see my Luscinda. With this thought and wish I commended his idea and +encouraged his design, advising him to put it into execution as quickly +as possible, as, in truth, absence produced its effect in spite of the +most deeply rooted feelings. But, as afterwards appeared, when he said +this to me he had already enjoyed the peasant girl under the title of +husband, and was waiting for an opportunity of making it known with +safety to himself, being in dread of what his father the duke would do +when he came to know of his folly. It happened, then, that as with young +men love is for the most part nothing more than appetite, which, as its +final object is enjoyment, comes to an end on obtaining it, and that +which seemed to be love takes to flight, as it cannot pass the limit +fixed by nature, which fixes no limit to true love--what I mean is that +after Don Fernando had enjoyed this peasant girl his passion subsided and +his eagerness cooled, and if at first he feigned a wish to absent himself +in order to cure his love, he was now in reality anxious to go to avoid +keeping his promise. + +"The duke gave him permission, and ordered me to accompany him; we +arrived at my city, and my father gave him the reception due to his rank; +I saw Luscinda without delay, and, though it had not been dead or +deadened, my love gathered fresh life. To my sorrow I told the story of +it to Don Fernando, for I thought that in virtue of the great friendship +he bore me I was bound to conceal nothing from him. I extolled her +beauty, her gaiety, her wit, so warmly, that my praises excited in him a +desire to see a damsel adorned by such attractions. To my misfortune I +yielded to it, showing her to him one night by the light of a taper at a +window where we used to talk to one another. As she appeared to him in +her dressing-gown, she drove all the beauties he had seen until then out +of his recollection; speech failed him, his head turned, he was +spell-bound, and in the end love-smitten, as you will see in the course +of the story of my misfortune; and to inflame still further his passion, +which he hid from me and revealed to Heaven alone, it so happened that +one day he found a note of hers entreating me to demand her of her father +in marriage, so delicate, so modest, and so tender, that on reading it he +told me that in Luscinda alone were combined all the charms of beauty and +understanding that were distributed among all the other women in the +world. It is true, and I own it now, that though I knew what good cause +Don Fernando had to praise Luscinda, it gave me uneasiness to hear these +praises from his mouth, and I began to fear, and with reason to feel +distrust of him, for there was no moment when he was not ready to talk of +Luscinda, and he would start the subject himself even though he dragged +it in unseasonably, a circumstance that aroused in me a certain amount of +jealousy; not that I feared any change in the constancy or faith of +Luscinda; but still my fate led me to forebode what she assured me +against. Don Fernando contrived always to read the letters I sent to +Luscinda and her answers to me, under the pretence that he enjoyed the +wit and sense of both. It so happened, then, that Luscinda having begged +of me a book of chivalry to read, one that she was very fond of, Amadis +of Gaul-" + +Don Quixote no sooner heard a book of chivalry mentioned, than he said: + +"Had your worship told me at the beginning of your story that the Lady +Luscinda was fond of books of chivalry, no other laudation would have +been requisite to impress upon me the superiority of her understanding, +for it could not have been of the excellence you describe had a taste for +such delightful reading been wanting; so, as far as I am concerned, you +need waste no more words in describing her beauty, worth, and +intelligence; for, on merely hearing what her taste was, I declare her to +be the most beautiful and the most intelligent woman in the world; and I +wish your worship had, along with Amadis of Gaul, sent her the worthy Don +Rugel of Greece, for I know the Lady Luscinda would greatly relish +Daraida and Garaya, and the shrewd sayings of the shepherd Darinel, and +the admirable verses of his bucolics, sung and delivered by him with such +sprightliness, wit, and ease; but a time may come when this omission can +be remedied, and to rectify it nothing more is needed than for your +worship to be so good as to come with me to my village, for there I can +give you more than three hundred books which are the delight of my soul +and the entertainment of my life;--though it occurs to me that I have not +got one of them now, thanks to the spite of wicked and envious +enchanters;--but pardon me for having broken the promise we made not to +interrupt your discourse; for when I hear chivalry or knights-errant +mentioned, I can no more help talking about them than the rays of the sun +can help giving heat, or those of the moon moisture; pardon me, +therefore, and proceed, for that is more to the purpose now." + +While Don Quixote was saying this, Cardenio allowed his head to fall upon +his breast, and seemed plunged in deep thought; and though twice Don +Quixote bade him go on with his story, he neither looked up nor uttered a +word in reply; but after some time he raised his head and said, "I cannot +get rid of the idea, nor will anyone in the world remove it, or make me +think otherwise--and he would be a blockhead who would hold or believe +anything else than that that arrant knave Master Elisabad made free with +Queen Madasima." + +"That is not true, by all that's good," said Don Quixote in high wrath, +turning upon him angrily, as his way was; "and it is a very great +slander, or rather villainy. Queen Madasima was a very illustrious lady, +and it is not to be supposed that so exalted a princess would have made +free with a quack; and whoever maintains the contrary lies like a great +scoundrel, and I will give him to know it, on foot or on horseback, armed +or unarmed, by night or by day, or as he likes best." + +Cardenio was looking at him steadily, and his mad fit having now come +upon him, he had no disposition to go on with his story, nor would Don +Quixote have listened to it, so much had what he had heard about Madasima +disgusted him. Strange to say, he stood up for her as if she were in +earnest his veritable born lady; to such a pass had his unholy books +brought him. Cardenio, then, being, as I said, now mad, when he heard +himself given the lie, and called a scoundrel and other insulting names, +not relishing the jest, snatched up a stone that he found near him, and +with it delivered such a blow on Don Quixote's breast that he laid him on +his back. Sancho Panza, seeing his master treated in this fashion, +attacked the madman with his closed fist; but the Ragged One received him +in such a way that with a blow of his fist he stretched him at his feet, +and then mounting upon him crushed his ribs to his own satisfaction; the +goatherd, who came to the rescue, shared the same fate; and having beaten +and pummelled them all he left them and quietly withdrew to his +hiding-place on the mountain. Sancho rose, and with the rage he felt at +finding himself so belaboured without deserving it, ran to take vengeance +on the goatherd, accusing him of not giving them warning that this man +was at times taken with a mad fit, for if they had known it they would +have been on their guard to protect themselves. The goatherd replied that +he had said so, and that if he had not heard him, that was no fault of +his. Sancho retorted, and the goatherd rejoined, and the altercation +ended in their seizing each other by the beard, and exchanging such +fisticuffs that if Don Quixote had not made peace between them, they +would have knocked one another to pieces. + +"Leave me alone, Sir Knight of the Rueful Countenance," said Sancho, +grappling with the goatherd, "for of this fellow, who is a clown like +myself, and no dubbed knight, I can safely take satisfaction for the +affront he has offered me, fighting with him hand to hand like an honest +man." + +"That is true," said Don Quixote, "but I know that he is not to blame for +what has happened." + +With this he pacified them, and again asked the goatherd if it would be +possible to find Cardenio, as he felt the greatest anxiety to know the +end of his story. The goatherd told him, as he had told him before, that +there was no knowing of a certainty where his lair was; but that if he +wandered about much in that neighbourhood he could not fail to fall in +with him either in or out of his senses. + +Chapter XXV. - +Which treats of the strange things that happened to the stout Knight of +La Mancha in the Sierra Morena, and of his imitation of the penance of +Beltenebros + +Don Quixote took leave of the goatherd, and once more mounting Rocinante +bade Sancho follow him, which he having no ass, did very discontentedly. +They proceeded slowly, making their way into the most rugged part of the +mountain, Sancho all the while dying to have a talk with his master, and +longing for him to begin, so that there should be no breach of the +injunction laid upon him; but unable to keep silence so long he said to +him: + +"Senor Don Quixote, give me your worship's blessing and dismissal, for +I'd like to go home at once to my wife and children with whom I can at +any rate talk and converse as much as I like; for to want me to go +through these solitudes day and night and not speak to you when I have a +mind is burying me alive. If luck would have it that animals spoke as +they did in the days of Guisopete, it would not be so bad, because I +could talk to Rocinante about whatever came into my head, and so put up +with my ill-fortune; but it is a hard case, and not to be borne with +patience, to go seeking adventures all one's life and get nothing but +kicks and blanketings, brickbats and punches, and with all this to have +to sew up one's mouth without daring to say what is in one's heart, just +as if one were dumb." + +"I understand thee, Sancho," replied Don Quixote; "thou art dying to have +the interdict I placed upon thy tongue removed; consider it removed, and +say what thou wilt while we are wandering in these mountains." + +"So be it," said Sancho; "let me speak now, for God knows what will +happen by-and-by; and to take advantage of the permit at once, I ask, +what made your worship stand up so for that Queen Majimasa, or whatever +her name is, or what did it matter whether that abbot was a friend of +hers or not? for if your worship had let that pass--and you were not a +judge in the matter--it is my belief the madman would have gone on with +his story, and the blow of the stone, and the kicks, and more than half a +dozen cuffs would have been escaped." + +"In faith, Sancho," answered Don Quixote, "if thou knewest as I do what +an honourable and illustrious lady Queen Madasima was, I know thou +wouldst say I had great patience that I did not break in pieces the mouth +that uttered such blasphemies, for a very great blasphemy it is to say or +imagine that a queen has made free with a surgeon. The truth of the story +is that that Master Elisabad whom the madman mentioned was a man of great +prudence and sound judgment, and served as governor and physician to the +queen, but to suppose that she was his mistress is nonsense deserving +very severe punishment; and as a proof that Cardenio did not know what he +was saying, remember when he said it he was out of his wits." + +"That is what I say," said Sancho; "there was no occasion for minding the +words of a madman; for if good luck had not helped your worship, and he +had sent that stone at your head instead of at your breast, a fine way we +should have been in for standing up for my lady yonder, God confound her! +And then, would not Cardenio have gone free as a madman?" + +"Against men in their senses or against madmen," said Don Quixote, "every +knight-errant is bound to stand up for the honour of women, whoever they +may be, much more for queens of such high degree and dignity as Queen +Madasima, for whom I have a particular regard on account of her amiable +qualities; for, besides being extremely beautiful, she was very wise, and +very patient under her misfortunes, of which she had many; and the +counsel and society of the Master Elisabad were a great help and support +to her in enduring her afflictions with wisdom and resignation; hence the +ignorant and ill-disposed vulgar took occasion to say and think that she +was his mistress; and they lie, I say it once more, and will lie two +hundred times more, all who think and say so." + +"I neither say nor think so," said Sancho; "let them look to it; with +their bread let them eat it; they have rendered account to God whether +they misbehaved or not; I come from my vineyard, I know nothing; I am not +fond of prying into other men's lives; he who buys and lies feels it in +his purse; moreover, naked was I born, naked I find myself, I neither +lose nor gain; but if they did, what is that to me? many think there are +flitches where there are no hooks; but who can put gates to the open +plain? moreover they said of God-" + +"God bless me," said Don Quixote, "what a set of absurdities thou art +stringing together! What has what we are talking about got to do with the +proverbs thou art threading one after the other? for God's sake hold thy +tongue, Sancho, and henceforward keep to prodding thy ass and don't +meddle in what does not concern thee; and understand with all thy five +senses that everything I have done, am doing, or shall do, is well +founded on reason and in conformity with the rules of chivalry, for I +understand them better than all the world that profess them." + +"Senor," replied Sancho, "is it a good rule of chivalry that we should go +astray through these mountains without path or road, looking for a madman +who when he is found will perhaps take a fancy to finish what he began, +not his story, but your worship's head and my ribs, and end by breaking +them altogether for us?" + +"Peace, I say again, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for let me tell thee it +is not so much the desire of finding that madman that leads me into these +regions as that which I have of performing among them an achievement +wherewith I shall win eternal name and fame throughout the known world; +and it shall be such that I shall thereby set the seal on all that can +make a knight-errant perfect and famous." + +"And is it very perilous, this achievement?" + +"No," replied he of the Rueful Countenance; "though it may be in the dice +that we may throw deuce-ace instead of sixes; but all will depend on thy +diligence." + +"On my diligence!" said Sancho. + +"Yes," said Don Quixote, "for if thou dost return soon from the place +where I mean to send thee, my penance will be soon over, and my glory +will soon begin. But as it is not right to keep thee any longer in +suspense, waiting to see what comes of my words, I would have thee know, +Sancho, that the famous Amadis of Gaul was one of the most perfect +knights-errant--I am wrong to say he was one; he stood alone, the first, +the only one, the lord of all that were in the world in his time. A fig +for Don Belianis, and for all who say he equalled him in any respect, +for, my oath upon it, they are deceiving themselves! I say, too, that +when a painter desires to become famous in his art he endeavours to copy +the originals of the rarest painters that he knows; and the same rule +holds good for all the most important crafts and callings that serve to +adorn a state; thus must he who would be esteemed prudent and patient +imitate Ulysses, in whose person and labours Homer presents to us a +lively picture of prudence and patience; as Virgil, too, shows us in the +person of AEneas the virtue of a pious son and the sagacity of a brave +and skilful captain; not representing or describing them as they were, +but as they ought to be, so as to leave the example of their virtues to +posterity. In the same way Amadis was the polestar, day-star, sun of +valiant and devoted knights, whom all we who fight under the banner of +love and chivalry are bound to imitate. This, then, being so, I consider, +friend Sancho, that the knight-errant who shall imitate him most closely +will come nearest to reaching the perfection of chivalry. Now one of the +instances in which this knight most conspicuously showed his prudence, +worth, valour, endurance, fortitude, and love, was when he withdrew, +rejected by the Lady Oriana, to do penance upon the Pena Pobre, changing +his name into that of Beltenebros, a name assuredly significant and +appropriate to the life which he had voluntarily adopted. So, as it is +easier for me to imitate him in this than in cleaving giants asunder, +cutting off serpents' heads, slaying dragons, routing armies, destroying +fleets, and breaking enchantments, and as this place is so well suited +for a similar purpose, I must not allow the opportunity to escape which +now so conveniently offers me its forelock." + +"What is it in reality," said Sancho, "that your worship means to do in +such an out-of-the-way place as this?" + +"Have I not told thee," answered Don Quixote, "that I mean to imitate +Amadis here, playing the victim of despair, the madman, the maniac, so as +at the same time to imitate the valiant Don Roland, when at the fountain +he had evidence of the fair Angelica having disgraced herself with Medoro +and through grief thereat went mad, and plucked up trees, troubled the +waters of the clear springs, slew destroyed flocks, burned down huts, +levelled houses, dragged mares after him, and perpetrated a hundred +thousand other outrages worthy of everlasting renown and record? And +though I have no intention of imitating Roland, or Orlando, or Rotolando +(for he went by all these names), step by step in all the mad things he +did, said, and thought, I will make a rough copy to the best of my power +of all that seems to me most essential; but perhaps I shall content +myself with the simple imitation of Amadis, who without giving way to any +mischievous madness but merely to tears and sorrow, gained as much fame +as the most famous." + +"It seems to me," said Sancho, "that the knights who behaved in this way +had provocation and cause for those follies and penances; but what cause +has your worship for going mad? What lady has rejected you, or what +evidence have you found to prove that the lady Dulcinea del Toboso has +been trifling with Moor or Christian?" + +"There is the point," replied Don Quixote, "and that is the beauty of +this business of mine; no thanks to a knight-errant for going mad when he +has cause; the thing is to turn crazy without any provocation, and let my +lady know, if I do this in the dry, what I would do in the moist; +moreover I have abundant cause in the long separation I have endured from +my lady till death, Dulcinea del Toboso; for as thou didst hear that +shepherd Ambrosio say the other day, in absence all ills are felt and +feared; and so, friend Sancho, waste no time in advising me against so +rare, so happy, and so unheard-of an imitation; mad I am, and mad I must +be until thou returnest with the answer to a letter that I mean to send +by thee to my lady Dulcinea; and if it be such as my constancy deserves, +my insanity and penance will come to an end; and if it be to the opposite +effect, I shall become mad in earnest, and, being so, I shall suffer no +more; thus in whatever way she may answer I shall escape from the +struggle and affliction in which thou wilt leave me, enjoying in my +senses the boon thou bearest me, or as a madman not feeling the evil thou +bringest me. But tell me, Sancho, hast thou got Mambrino's helmet safe? +for I saw thee take it up from the ground when that ungrateful wretch +tried to break it in pieces but could not, by which the fineness of its +temper may be seen." + +To which Sancho made answer, "By the living God, Sir Knight of the Rueful +Countenance, I cannot endure or bear with patience some of the things +that your worship says; and from them I begin to suspect that all you +tell me about chivalry, and winning kingdoms and empires, and giving +islands, and bestowing other rewards and dignities after the custom of +knights-errant, must be all made up of wind and lies, and all pigments or +figments, or whatever we may call them; for what would anyone think that +heard your worship calling a barber's basin Mambrino's helmet without +ever seeing the mistake all this time, but that one who says and +maintains such things must have his brains addled? I have the basin in my +sack all dinted, and I am taking it home to have it mended, to trim my +beard in it, if, by God's grace, I am allowed to see my wife and children +some day or other." + +"Look here, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "by him thou didst swear by just +now I swear thou hast the most limited understanding that any squire in +the world has or ever had. Is it possible that all this time thou hast +been going about with me thou hast never found out that all things +belonging to knights-errant seem to be illusions and nonsense and +ravings, and to go always by contraries? And not because it really is so, +but because there is always a swarm of enchanters in attendance upon us +that change and alter everything with us, and turn things as they please, +and according as they are disposed to aid or destroy us; thus what seems +to thee a barber's basin seems to me Mambrino's helmet, and to another it +will seem something else; and rare foresight it was in the sage who is on +my side to make what is really and truly Mambrine's helmet seem a basin +to everybody, for, being held in such estimation as it is, all the world +would pursue me to rob me of it; but when they see it is only a barber's +basin they do not take the trouble to obtain it; as was plainly shown by +him who tried to break it, and left it on the ground without taking it, +for, by my faith, had he known it he would never have left it behind. +Keep it safe, my friend, for just now I have no need of it; indeed, I +shall have to take off all this armour and remain as naked as I was born, +if I have a mind to follow Roland rather than Amadis in my penance." + +Thus talking they reached the foot of a high mountain which stood like an +isolated peak among the others that surrounded it. Past its base there +flowed a gentle brook, all around it spread a meadow so green and +luxuriant that it was a delight to the eyes to look upon it, and forest +trees in abundance, and shrubs and flowers, added to the charms of the +spot. Upon this place the Knight of the Rueful Countenance fixed his +choice for the performance of his penance, and as he beheld it exclaimed +in a loud voice as though he were out of his senses: + +"This is the place, oh, ye heavens, that I select and choose for +bewailing the misfortune in which ye yourselves have plunged me: this is +the spot where the overflowings of mine eyes shall swell the waters of +yon little brook, and my deep and endless sighs shall stir unceasingly +the leaves of these mountain trees, in testimony and token of the pain my +persecuted heart is suffering. Oh, ye rural deities, whoever ye be that +haunt this lone spot, give ear to the complaint of a wretched lover whom +long absence and brooding jealousy have driven to bewail his fate among +these wilds and complain of the hard heart of that fair and ungrateful +one, the end and limit of all human beauty! Oh, ye wood nymphs and +dryads, that dwell in the thickets of the forest, so may the nimble +wanton satyrs by whom ye are vainly wooed never disturb your sweet +repose, help me to lament my hard fate or at least weary not at listening +to it! Oh, Dulcinea del Toboso, day of my night, glory of my pain, guide +of my path, star of my fortune, so may Heaven grant thee in full all thou +seekest of it, bethink thee of the place and condition to which absence +from thee has brought me, and make that return in kindness that is due to +my fidelity! Oh, lonely trees, that from this day forward shall bear me +company in my solitude, give me some sign by the gentle movement of your +boughs that my presence is not distasteful to you! Oh, thou, my squire, +pleasant companion in my prosperous and adverse fortunes, fix well in thy +memory what thou shalt see me do here, so that thou mayest relate and +report it to the sole cause of all," and so saying he dismounted from +Rocinante, and in an instant relieved him of saddle and bridle, and +giving him a slap on the croup, said, "He gives thee freedom who is +bereft of it himself, oh steed as excellent in deed as thou art +unfortunate in thy lot; begone where thou wilt, for thou bearest written +on thy forehead that neither Astolfo's hippogriff, nor the famed Frontino +that cost Bradamante so dear, could equal thee in speed." + +Seeing this Sancho said, "Good luck to him who has saved us the trouble +of stripping the pack-saddle off Dapple! By my faith he would not have +gone without a slap on the croup and something said in his praise; though +if he were here I would not let anyone strip him, for there would be no +occasion, as he had nothing of the lover or victim of despair about him, +inasmuch as his master, which I was while it was God's pleasure, was +nothing of the sort; and indeed, Sir Knight of the Rueful Countenance, if +my departure and your worship's madness are to come off in earnest, it +will be as well to saddle Rocinante again in order that he may supply the +want of Dapple, because it will save me time in going and returning: for +if I go on foot I don't know when I shall get there or when I shall get +back, as I am, in truth, a bad walker." + +"I declare, Sancho," returned Don Quixote, "it shall be as thou wilt, for +thy plan does not seem to me a bad one, and three days hence thou wilt +depart, for I wish thee to observe in the meantime what I do and say for +her sake, that thou mayest be able to tell it." + +"But what more have I to see besides what I have seen?" said Sancho. + +"Much thou knowest about it!" said Don Quixote. "I have now got to tear +up my garments, to scatter about my armour, knock my head against these +rocks, and more of the same sort of thing, which thou must witness." + +"For the love of God," said Sancho, "be careful, your worship, how you +give yourself those knocks on the head, for you may come across such a +rock, and in such a way, that the very first may put an end to the whole +contrivance of this penance; and I should think, if indeed knocks on the +head seem necessary to you, and this business cannot be done without +them, you might be content--as the whole thing is feigned, and +counterfeit, and in joke--you might be content, I say, with giving them +to yourself in the water, or against something soft, like cotton; and +leave it all to me; for I'll tell my lady that your worship knocked your +head against a point of rock harder than a diamond." + +"I thank thee for thy good intentions, friend Sancho," answered Don +Quixote, "but I would have thee know that all these things I am doing are +not in joke, but very much in earnest, for anything else would be a +transgression of the ordinances of chivalry, which forbid us to tell any +lie whatever under the penalties due to apostasy; and to do one thing +instead of another is just the same as lying; so my knocks on the head +must be real, solid, and valid, without anything sophisticated or +fanciful about them, and it will be needful to leave me some lint to +dress my wounds, since fortune has compelled us to do without the balsam +we lost." + +"It was worse losing the ass," replied Sancho, "for with him lint and all +were lost; but I beg of your worship not to remind me again of that +accursed liquor, for my soul, not to say my stomach, turns at hearing the +very name of it; and I beg of you, too, to reckon as past the three days +you allowed me for seeing the mad things you do, for I take them as seen +already and pronounced upon, and I will tell wonderful stories to my +lady; so write the letter and send me off at once, for I long to return +and take your worship out of this purgatory where I am leaving you." + +"Purgatory dost thou call it, Sancho?" said Don Quixote, "rather call it +hell, or even worse if there be anything worse." + +"For one who is in hell," said Sancho, "nulla est retentio, as I have +heard say." + +"I do not understand what retentio means," said Don Quixote. + +"Retentio," answered Sancho, "means that whoever is in hell never comes +nor can come out of it, which will be the opposite case with your worship +or my legs will be idle, that is if I have spurs to enliven Rocinante: +let me once get to El Toboso and into the presence of my lady Dulcinea, +and I will tell her such things of the follies and madnesses (for it is +all one) that your worship has done and is still doing, that I will +manage to make her softer than a glove though I find her harder than a +cork tree; and with her sweet and honeyed answer I will come back through +the air like a witch, and take your worship out of this purgatory that +seems to be hell but is not, as there is hope of getting out of it; +which, as I have said, those in hell have not, and I believe your worship +will not say anything to the contrary." + +"That is true," said he of the Rueful Countenance, "but how shall we +manage to write the letter?" + +"And the ass-colt order too," added Sancho. + +"All shall be included," said Don Quixote; "and as there is no paper, it +would be well done to write it on the leaves of trees, as the ancients +did, or on tablets of wax; though that would be as hard to find just now +as paper. But it has just occurred to me how it may be conveniently and +even more than conveniently written, and that is in the note-book that +belonged to Cardenio, and thou wilt take care to have it copied on paper, +in a good hand, at the first village thou comest to where there is a +schoolmaster, or if not, any sacristan will copy it; but see thou give it +not to any notary to copy, for they write a law hand that Satan could not +make out." + +"But what is to be done about the signature?" said Sancho. + +"The letters of Amadis were never signed," said Don Quixote. + +"That is all very well," said Sancho, "but the order must needs be +signed, and if it is copied they will say the signature is false, and I +shall be left without ass-colts." + +"The order shall go signed in the same book," said Don Quixote, "and on +seeing it my niece will make no difficulty about obeying it; as to the +loveletter thou canst put by way of signature, 'Yours till death, the +Knight of the Rueful Countenance.' And it will be no great matter if it +is in some other person's hand, for as well as I recollect Dulcinea can +neither read nor write, nor in the whole course of her life has she seen +handwriting or letter of mine, for my love and hers have been always +platonic, not going beyond a modest look, and even that so seldom that I +can safely swear I have not seen her four times in all these twelve years +I have been loving her more than the light of these eyes that the earth +will one day devour; and perhaps even of those four times she has not +once perceived that I was looking at her: such is the retirement and +seclusion in which her father Lorenzo Corchuelo and her mother Aldonza +Nogales have brought her up." + +"So, so!" said Sancho; "Lorenzo Corchuelo's daughter is the lady Dulcinea +del Toboso, otherwise called Aldonza Lorenzo?" + +"She it is," said Don Quixote, "and she it is that is worthy to be lady +of the whole universe." + +"I know her well," said Sancho, "and let me tell you she can fling a +crowbar as well as the lustiest lad in all the town. Giver of all good! +but she is a brave lass, and a right and stout one, and fit to be +helpmate to any knight-errant that is or is to be, who may make her his +lady: the whoreson wench, what sting she has and what a voice! I can tell +you one day she posted herself on the top of the belfry of the village to +call some labourers of theirs that were in a ploughed field of her +father's, and though they were better than half a league off they heard +her as well as if they were at the foot of the tower; and the best of her +is that she is not a bit prudish, for she has plenty of affability, and +jokes with everybody, and has a grin and a jest for everything. So, Sir +Knight of the Rueful Countenance, I say you not only may and ought to do +mad freaks for her sake, but you have a good right to give way to despair +and hang yourself; and no one who knows of it but will say you did well, +though the devil should take you; and I wish I were on my road already, +simply to see her, for it is many a day since I saw her, and she must be +altered by this time, for going about the fields always, and the sun and +the air spoil women's looks greatly. But I must own the truth to your +worship, Senor Don Quixote; until now I have been under a great mistake, +for I believed truly and honestly that the lady Dulcinea must be some +princess your worship was in love with, or some person great enough to +deserve the rich presents you have sent her, such as the Biscayan and the +galley slaves, and many more no doubt, for your worship must have won +many victories in the time when I was not yet your squire. But all things +considered, what good can it do the lady Aldonza Lorenzo, I mean the lady +Dulcinea del Toboso, to have the vanquished your worship sends or will +send coming to her and going down on their knees before her? Because may +be when they came she'd be hackling flax or threshing on the threshing +floor, and they'd be ashamed to see her, and she'd laugh, or resent the +present." + +"I have before now told thee many times, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that +thou art a mighty great chatterer, and that with a blunt wit thou art +always striving at sharpness; but to show thee what a fool thou art and +how rational I am, I would have thee listen to a short story. Thou must +know that a certain widow, fair, young, independent, and rich, and above +all free and easy, fell in love with a sturdy strapping young +lay-brother; his superior came to know of it, and one day said to the +worthy widow by way of brotherly remonstrance, 'I am surprised, senora, +and not without good reason, that a woman of such high standing, so fair, +and so rich as you are, should have fallen in love with such a mean, low, +stupid fellow as So-and-so, when in this house there are so many masters, +graduates, and divinity students from among whom you might choose as if +they were a lot of pears, saying this one I'll take, that I won't take;' +but she replied to him with great sprightliness and candour, 'My dear +sir, you are very much mistaken, and your ideas are very old-fashioned, +if you think that I have made a bad choice in So-and-so, fool as he +seems; because for all I want with him he knows as much and more +philosophy than Aristotle.' In the same way, Sancho, for all I want with +Dulcinea del Toboso she is just as good as the most exalted princess on +earth. It is not to be supposed that all those poets who sang the praises +of ladies under the fancy names they give them, had any such mistresses. +Thinkest thou that the Amarillises, the Phillises, the Sylvias, the +Dianas, the Galateas, the Filidas, and all the rest of them, that the +books, the ballads, the barber's shops, the theatres are full of, were +really and truly ladies of flesh and blood, and mistresses of those that +glorify and have glorified them? Nothing of the kind; they only invent +them for the most part to furnish a subject for their verses, and that +they may pass for lovers, or for men valiant enough to be so; and so it +suffices me to think and believe that the good Aldonza Lorenzo is fair +and virtuous; and as to her pedigree it is very little matter, for no one +will examine into it for the purpose of conferring any order upon her, +and I, for my part, reckon her the most exalted princess in the world. +For thou shouldst know, Sancho, if thou dost not know, that two things +alone beyond all others are incentives to love, and these are great +beauty and a good name, and these two things are to be found in Dulcinea +in the highest degree, for in beauty no one equals her and in good name +few approach her; and to put the whole thing in a nutshell, I persuade +myself that all I say is as I say, neither more nor less, and I picture +her in my imagination as I would have her to be, as well in beauty as in +condition; Helen approaches her not nor does Lucretia come up to her, nor +any other of the famous women of times past, Greek, Barbarian, or Latin; +and let each say what he will, for if in this I am taken to task by the +ignorant, I shall not be censured by the critical." + +"I say that your worship is entirely right," said Sancho, "and that I am +an ass. But I know not how the name of ass came into my mouth, for a rope +is not to be mentioned in the house of him who has been hanged; but now +for the letter, and then, God be with you, I am off." + +Don Quixote took out the note-book, and, retiring to one side, very +deliberately began to write the letter, and when he had finished it he +called to Sancho, saying he wished to read it to him, so that he might +commit it to memory, in case of losing it on the road; for with evil +fortune like his anything might be apprehended. To which Sancho replied, +"Write it two or three times there in the book and give it to me, and I +will carry it very carefully, because to expect me to keep it in my +memory is all nonsense, for I have such a bad one that I often forget my +own name; but for all that repeat it to me, as I shall like to hear it, +for surely it will run as if it was in print." + +"Listen," said Don Quixote, "this is what it says: + +"DON QUIXOTE'S LETTER TO DULCINEA DEL TOBOSO + +"Sovereign and exalted Lady,--The pierced by the point of absence, the +wounded to the heart's core, sends thee, sweetest Dulcinea del Toboso, +the health that he himself enjoys not. If thy beauty despises me, if thy +worth is not for me, if thy scorn is my affliction, though I be +sufficiently long-suffering, hardly shall I endure this anxiety, which, +besides being oppressive, is protracted. My good squire Sancho will +relate to thee in full, fair ingrate, dear enemy, the condition to which +I am reduced on thy account: if it be thy pleasure to give me relief, I +am thine; if not, do as may be pleasing to thee; for by ending my life I +shall satisfy thy cruelty and my desire. + +"Thine till death, + +"The Knight of the Rueful Countenance." + +"By the life of my father," said Sancho, when he heard the letter, "it is +the loftiest thing I ever heard. Body of me! how your worship says +everything as you like in it! And how well you fit in 'The Knight of the +Rueful Countenance' into the signature. I declare your worship is indeed +the very devil, and there is nothing you don't know." + +"Everything is needed for the calling I follow," said Don Quixote. + +"Now then," said Sancho, "let your worship put the order for the three +ass-colts on the other side, and sign it very plainly, that they may +recognise it at first sight." + +"With all my heart," said Don Quixote, and as he had written it he read +it to this effect: + +"Mistress Niece,--By this first of ass-colts please pay to Sancho Panza, +my squire, three of the five I left at home in your charge: said three +ass-colts to be paid and delivered for the same number received here in +hand, which upon this and upon his receipt shall be duly paid. Done in +the heart of the Sierra Morena, the twenty-seventh of August of this +present year." + +"That will do," said Sancho; "now let your worship sign it." + +"There is no need to sign it," said Don Quixote, "but merely to put my +flourish, which is the same as a signature, and enough for three asses, +or even three hundred." + +"I can trust your worship," returned Sancho; "let me go and saddle +Rocinante, and be ready to give me your blessing, for I mean to go at +once without seeing the fooleries your worship is going to do; I'll say I +saw you do so many that she will not want any more." + +"At any rate, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "I should like--and there is +reason for it--I should like thee, I say, to see me stripped to the skin +and performing a dozen or two of insanities, which I can get done in less +than half an hour; for having seen them with thine own eyes, thou canst +then safely swear to the rest that thou wouldst add; and I promise thee +thou wilt not tell of as many as I mean to perform." + +"For the love of God, master mine," said Sancho, "let me not see your +worship stripped, for it will sorely grieve me, and I shall not be able +to keep from tears, and my head aches so with all I shed last night for +Dapple, that I am not fit to begin any fresh weeping; but if it is your +worship's pleasure that I should see some insanities, do them in your +clothes, short ones, and such as come readiest to hand; for I myself want +nothing of the sort, and, as I have said, it will be a saving of time for +my return, which will be with the news your worship desires and deserves. +If not, let the lady Dulcinea look to it; if she does not answer +reasonably, I swear as solemnly as I can that I will fetch a fair answer +out of her stomach with kicks and cuffs; for why should it be borne that +a knight-errant as famous as your worship should go mad without rhyme or +reason for a--? Her ladyship had best not drive me to say it, for by God +I will speak out and let off everything cheap, even if it doesn't sell: I +am pretty good at that! she little knows me; faith, if she knew me she'd +be in awe of me." + +"In faith, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "to all appearance thou art no +sounder in thy wits than I." + +"I am not so mad," answered Sancho, "but I am more peppery; but apart +from all this, what has your worship to eat until I come back? Will you +sally out on the road like Cardenio to force it from the shepherds?" + +"Let not that anxiety trouble thee," replied Don Quixote, "for even if I +had it I should not eat anything but the herbs and the fruits which this +meadow and these trees may yield me; the beauty of this business of mine +lies in not eating, and in performing other mortifications." + +"Do you know what I am afraid of?" said Sancho upon this; "that I shall +not be able to find my way back to this spot where I am leaving you, it +is such an out-of-the-way place." + +"Observe the landmarks well," said Don Quixote, "for I will try not to go +far from this neighbourhood, and I will even take care to mount the +highest of these rocks to see if I can discover thee returning; however, +not to miss me and lose thyself, the best plan will be to cut some +branches of the broom that is so abundant about here, and as thou goest +to lay them at intervals until thou hast come out upon the plain; these +will serve thee, after the fashion of the clue in the labyrinth of +Theseus, as marks and signs for finding me on thy return." + +"So I will," said Sancho Panza, and having cut some, he asked his +master's blessing, and not without many tears on both sides, took his +leave of him, and mounting Rocinante, of whom Don Quixote charged him +earnestly to have as much care as of his own person, he set out for the +plain, strewing at intervals the branches of broom as his master had +recommended him; and so he went his way, though Don Quixote still +entreated him to see him do were it only a couple of mad acts. He had not +gone a hundred paces, however, when he returned and said: + +"I must say, senor, your worship said quite right, that in order to be +able to swear without a weight on my conscience that I had seen you do +mad things, it would be well for me to see if it were only one; though in +your worship's remaining here I have seen a very great one." + +"Did I not tell thee so?" said Don Quixote. "Wait, Sancho, and I will do +them in the saying of a credo," and pulling off his breeches in all haste +he stripped himself to his skin and his shirt, and then, without more +ado, he cut a couple of gambados in the air, and a couple of somersaults, +heels over head, making such a display that, not to see it a second time, +Sancho wheeled Rocinante round, and felt easy, and satisfied in his mind +that he could swear he had left his master mad; and so we will leave him +to follow his road until his return, which was a quick one. + +Chapter XXVI. - +In which are continued the refinements wherewith Don Quixote played the +part of a lover in the Sierra Morena + +Returning to the proceedings of him of the Rueful Countenance when he +found himself alone, the history says that when Don Quixote had completed +the performance of the somersaults or capers, naked from the waist down +and clothed from the waist up, and saw that Sancho had gone off without +waiting to see any more crazy feats, he climbed up to the top of a high +rock, and there set himself to consider what he had several times before +considered without ever coming to any conclusion on the point, namely +whether it would be better and more to his purpose to imitate the +outrageous madness of Roland, or the melancholy madness of Amadis; and +communing with himself he said: + +"What wonder is it if Roland was so good a knight and so valiant as +everyone says he was, when, after all, he was enchanted, and nobody could +kill him save by thrusting a corking pin into the sole of his foot, and +he always wore shoes with seven iron soles? Though cunning devices did +not avail him against Bernardo del Carpio, who knew all about them, and +strangled him in his arms at Roncesvalles. But putting the question of +his valour aside, let us come to his losing his wits, for certain it is +that he did lose them in consequence of the proofs he discovered at the +fountain, and the intelligence the shepherd gave him of Angelica having +slept more than two siestas with Medoro, a little curly-headed Moor, and +page to Agramante. If he was persuaded that this was true, and that his +lady had wronged him, it is no wonder that he should have gone mad; but +I, how am I to imitate him in his madness, unless I can imitate him in +the cause of it? For my Dulcinea, I will venture to swear, never saw a +Moor in her life, as he is, in his proper costume, and she is this day as +the mother that bore her, and I should plainly be doing her a wrong if, +fancying anything else, I were to go mad with the same kind of madness as +Roland the Furious. On the other hand, I see that Amadis of Gaul, without +losing his senses and without doing anything mad, acquired as a lover as +much fame as the most famous; for, according to his history, on finding +himself rejected by his lady Oriana, who had ordered him not to appear in +her presence until it should be her pleasure, all he did was to retire to +the Pena Pobre in company with a hermit, and there he took his fill of +weeping until Heaven sent him relief in the midst of his great grief and +need. And if this be true, as it is, why should I now take the trouble to +strip stark naked, or do mischief to these trees which have done me no +harm, or why am I to disturb the clear waters of these brooks which will +give me to drink whenever I have a mind? Long live the memory of Amadis +and let him be imitated so far as is possible by Don Quixote of La +Mancha, of whom it will be said, as was said of the other, that if he did +not achieve great things, he died in attempting them; and if I am not +repulsed or rejected by my Dulcinea, it is enough for me, as I have said, +to be absent from her. And so, now to business; come to my memory ye +deeds of Amadis, and show me how I am to begin to imitate you. I know +already that what he chiefly did was to pray and commend himself to God; +but what am I to do for a rosary, for I have not got one?" + +And then it occurred to him how he might make one, and that was by +tearing a great strip off the tail of his shirt which hung down, and +making eleven knots on it, one bigger than the rest, and this served him +for a rosary all the time he was there, during which he repeated +countless ave-marias. But what distressed him greatly was not having +another hermit there to confess him and receive consolation from; and so +he solaced himself with pacing up and down the little meadow, and writing +and carving on the bark of the trees and on the fine sand a multitude of +verses all in harmony with his sadness, and some in praise of Dulcinea; +but, when he was found there afterwards, the only ones completely legible +that could be discovered were those that follow here: + +poem{ + +Ye on the mountain side that grow, + Ye green things all, trees, shrubs, and bushes, +Are ye aweary of the woe + That this poor aching bosom crushes? +If it disturb you, and I owe + Some reparation, it may be a +Defence for me to let you know +Don Quixote's tears are on the flow, + And all for distant Dulcinea + Del Toboso. + +The lealest lover time can show, + Doomed for a lady-love to languish, +Among these solitudes doth go, + A prey to every kind of anguish. +Why Love should like a spiteful foe + Thus use him, he hath no idea, +But hogsheads full--this doth he know-- +Don Quixote's tears are on the flow, + And all for distant Dulcinea + Del Toboso. + +Adventure-seeking doth he go + Up rugged heights, down rocky valleys, +But hill or dale, or high or low, + Mishap attendeth all his sallies: +Love still pursues him to and fro, + And plies his cruel scourge--ah me! a +Relentless fate, an endless woe; +Don Quixote's tears are on the flow, + And all for distant Dulcinea + Del Toboso. + +}poem + +The addition of "Del Toboso" to Dulcinea's name gave rise to no little +laughter among those who found the above lines, for they suspected Don +Quixote must have fancied that unless he added "del Toboso" when he +introduced the name of Dulcinea the verse would be unintelligible; which +was indeed the fact, as he himself afterwards admitted. He wrote many +more, but, as has been said, these three verses were all that could be +plainly and perfectly deciphered. In this way, and in sighing and calling +on the fauns and satyrs of the woods and the nymphs of the streams, and +Echo, moist and mournful, to answer, console, and hear him, as well as in +looking for herbs to sustain him, he passed his time until Sancho's +return; and had that been delayed three weeks, as it was three days, the +Knight of the Rueful Countenance would have worn such an altered +countenance that the mother that bore him would not have known him: and +here it will be well to leave him, wrapped up in sighs and verses, to +relate how Sancho Panza fared on his mission. + +As for him, coming out upon the high road, he made for El Toboso, and the +next day reached the inn where the mishap of the blanket had befallen +him. As soon as he recognised it he felt as if he were once more living +through the air, and he could not bring himself to enter it though it was +an hour when he might well have done so, for it was dinner-time, and he +longed to taste something hot as it had been all cold fare with him for +many days past. This craving drove him to draw near to the inn, still +undecided whether to go in or not, and as he was hesitating there came +out two persons who at once recognised him, and said one to the other: + +"Senor licentiate, is not he on the horse there Sancho Panza who, our +adventurer's housekeeper told us, went off with her master as esquire?" + +"So it is," said the licentiate, "and that is our friend Don Quixote's +horse;" and if they knew him so well it was because they were the curate +and the barber of his own village, the same who had carried out the +scrutiny and sentence upon the books; and as soon as they recognised +Sancho Panza and Rocinante, being anxious to hear of Don Quixote, they +approached, and calling him by his name the curate said, "Friend Sancho +Panza, where is your master?" + +Sancho recognised them at once, and determined to keep secret the place +and circumstances where and under which he had left his master, so he +replied that his master was engaged in a certain quarter on a certain +matter of great importance to him which he could not disclose for the +eyes in his head. + +"Nay, nay," said the barber, "if you don't tell us where he is, Sancho +Panza, we will suspect as we suspect already, that you have murdered and +robbed him, for here you are mounted on his horse; in fact, you must +produce the master of the hack, or else take the consequences." + +"There is no need of threats with me," said Sancho, "for I am not a man +to rob or murder anybody; let his own fate, or God who made him, kill +each one; my master is engaged very much to his taste doing penance in +the midst of these mountains;" and then, offhand and without stopping, he +told them how he had left him, what adventures had befallen him, and how +he was carrying a letter to the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, the daughter of +Lorenzo Corchuelo, with whom he was over head and ears in love. They were +both amazed at what Sancho Panza told them; for though they were aware of +Don Quixote's madness and the nature of it, each time they heard of it +they were filled with fresh wonder. They then asked Sancho Panza to show +them the letter he was carrying to the lady Dulcinea del Toboso. He said +it was written in a note-book, and that his master's directions were that +he should have it copied on paper at the first village he came to. On +this the curate said if he showed it to him, he himself would make a fair +copy of it. Sancho put his hand into his bosom in search of the note-book +but could not find it, nor, if he had been searching until now, could he +have found it, for Don Quixote had kept it, and had never given it to +him, nor had he himself thought of asking for it. When Sancho discovered +he could not find the book his face grew deadly pale, and in great haste +he again felt his body all over, and seeing plainly it was not to be +found, without more ado he seized his beard with both hands and plucked +away half of it, and then, as quick as he could and without stopping, +gave himself half a dozen cuffs on the face and nose till they were +bathed in blood. + +Seeing this, the curate and the barber asked him what had happened him +that he gave himself such rough treatment. + +"What should happen me?" replied Sancho, "but to have lost from one hand +to the other, in a moment, three ass-colts, each of them like a castle?" + +"How is that?" said the barber. + +"I have lost the note-book," said Sancho, "that contained the letter to +Dulcinea, and an order signed by my master in which he directed his niece +to give me three ass-colts out of four or five he had at home;" and he +then told them about the loss of Dapple. + +The curate consoled him, telling him that when his master was found he +would get him to renew the order, and make a fresh draft on paper, as was +usual and customary; for those made in notebooks were never accepted or +honoured. + +Sancho comforted himself with this, and said if that were so the loss of +Dulcinea's letter did not trouble him much, for he had it almost by +heart, and it could be taken down from him wherever and whenever they +liked. + +"Repeat it then, Sancho," said the barber, "and we will write it down +afterwards." + +Sancho Panza stopped to scratch his head to bring back the letter to his +memory, and balanced himself now on one foot, now the other, one moment +staring at the ground, the next at the sky, and after having half gnawed +off the end of a finger and kept them in suspense waiting for him to +begin, he said, after a long pause, "By God, senor licentiate, devil a +thing can I recollect of the letter; but it said at the beginning, +'Exalted and scrubbing Lady.'" + +"It cannot have said 'scrubbing,'" said the barber, "but 'superhuman' or +'sovereign.'" + +"That is it," said Sancho; "then, as well as I remember, it went on, 'The +wounded, and wanting of sleep, and the pierced, kisses your worship's +hands, ungrateful and very unrecognised fair one; and it said something +or other about health and sickness that he was sending her; and from that +it went tailing off until it ended with 'Yours till death, the Knight of +the Rueful Countenance." + +It gave them no little amusement, both of them, to see what a good memory +Sancho had, and they complimented him greatly upon it, and begged him to +repeat the letter a couple of times more, so that they too might get it +by heart to write it out by-and-by. Sancho repeated it three times, and +as he did, uttered three thousand more absurdities; then he told them +more about his master but he never said a word about the blanketing that +had befallen himself in that inn, into which he refused to enter. He told +them, moreover, how his lord, if he brought him a favourable answer from +the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, was to put himself in the way of +endeavouring to become an emperor, or at least a monarch; for it had been +so settled between them, and with his personal worth and the might of his +arm it was an easy matter to come to be one: and how on becoming one his +lord was to make a marriage for him (for he would be a widower by that +time, as a matter of course) and was to give him as a wife one of the +damsels of the empress, the heiress of some rich and grand state on the +mainland, having nothing to do with islands of any sort, for he did not +care for them now. All this Sancho delivered with so much +composure--wiping his nose from time to time--and with so little +common-sense that his two hearers were again filled with wonder at the +force of Don Quixote's madness that could run away with this poor man's +reason. They did not care to take the trouble of disabusing him of his +error, as they considered that since it did not in any way hurt his +conscience it would be better to leave him in it, and they would have all +the more amusement in listening to his simplicities; and so they bade him +pray to God for his lord's health, as it was a very likely and a very +feasible thing for him in course of time to come to be an emperor, as he +said, or at least an archbishop or some other dignitary of equal rank. + +To which Sancho made answer, "If fortune, sirs, should bring things about +in such a way that my master should have a mind, instead of being an +emperor, to be an archbishop, I should like to know what +archbishops-errant commonly give their squires?" + +"They commonly give them," said the curate, some simple benefice or cure, +or some place as sacristan which brings them a good fixed income, not +counting the altar fees, which may be reckoned at as much more." + +"But for that," said Sancho, "the squire must be unmarried, and must +know, at any rate, how to help at mass, and if that be so, woe is me, for +I am married already and I don't know the first letter of the A B C. What +will become of me if my master takes a fancy to be an archbishop and not +an emperor, as is usual and customary with knights-errant?" + +"Be not uneasy, friend Sancho," said the barber, "for we will entreat +your master, and advise him, even urging it upon him as a case of +conscience, to become an emperor and not an archbishop, because it will +be easier for him as he is more valiant than lettered." + +"So I have thought," said Sancho; "though I can tell you he is fit for +anything: what I mean to do for my part is to pray to our Lord to place +him where it may be best for him, and where he may be able to bestow most +favours upon me." + +"You speak like a man of sense," said the curate, "and you will be acting +like a good Christian; but what must now be done is to take steps to coax +your master out of that useless penance you say he is performing; and we +had best turn into this inn to consider what plan to adopt, and also to +dine, for it is now time." + +Sancho said they might go in, but that he would wait there outside, and +that he would tell them afterwards the reason why he was unwilling, and +why it did not suit him to enter it; but he begged them to bring him out +something to eat, and to let it be hot, and also to bring barley for +Rocinante. They left him and went in, and presently the barber brought +him out something to eat. By-and-by, after they had between them +carefully thought over what they should do to carry out their object, the +curate hit upon an idea very well adapted to humour Don Quixote, and +effect their purpose; and his notion, which he explained to the barber, +was that he himself should assume the disguise of a wandering damsel, +while the other should try as best he could to pass for a squire, and +that they should thus proceed to where Don Quixote was, and he, +pretending to be an aggrieved and distressed damsel, should ask a favour +of him, which as a valiant knight-errant he could not refuse to grant; +and the favour he meant to ask him was that he should accompany her +whither she would conduct him, in order to redress a wrong which a wicked +knight had done her, while at the same time she should entreat him not to +require her to remove her mask, nor ask her any question touching her +circumstances until he had righted her with the wicked knight. And he had +no doubt that Don Quixote would comply with any request made in these +terms, and that in this way they might remove him and take him to his own +village, where they would endeavour to find out if his extraordinary +madness admitted of any kind of remedy. + +Chapter XXVII. - +Of how the curate and the barber proceeded with their scheme; together +with other matters worthy of record in this great history + +The curate's plan did not seem a bad one to the barber, but on the +contrary so good that they immediately set about putting it in execution. +They begged a petticoat and hood of the landlady, leaving her in pledge a +new cassock of the curate's; and the barber made a beard out of a +grey-brown or red ox-tail in which the landlord used to stick his comb. +The landlady asked them what they wanted these things for, and the curate +told her in a few words about the madness of Don Quixote, and how this +disguise was intended to get him away from the mountain where he then +was. The landlord and landlady immediately came to the conclusion that +the madman was their guest, the balsam man and master of the blanketed +squire, and they told the curate all that had passed between him and +them, not omitting what Sancho had been so silent about. Finally the +landlady dressed up the curate in a style that left nothing to be +desired; she put on him a cloth petticoat with black velvet stripes a +palm broad, all slashed, and a bodice of green velvet set off by a +binding of white satin, which as well as the petticoat must have been +made in the time of king Wamba. The curate would not let them hood him, +but put on his head a little quilted linen cap which he used for a +night-cap, and bound his forehead with a strip of black silk, while with +another he made a mask with which he concealed his beard and face very +well. He then put on his hat, which was broad enough to serve him for an +umbrella, and enveloping himself in his cloak seated himself +woman-fashion on his mule, while the barber mounted his with a beard down +to the waist of mingled red and white, for it was, as has been said, the +tail of a clay-red ox. + +They took leave of all, and of the good Maritornes, who, sinner as she +was, promised to pray a rosary of prayers that God might grant them +success in such an arduous and Christian undertaking as that they had in +hand. But hardly had he sallied forth from the inn when it struck the +curate that he was doing wrong in rigging himself out in that fashion, as +it was an indecorous thing for a priest to dress himself that way even +though much might depend upon it; and saying so to the barber he begged +him to change dresses, as it was fitter he should be the distressed +damsel, while he himself would play the squire's part, which would be +less derogatory to his dignity; otherwise he was resolved to have nothing +more to do with the matter, and let the devil take Don Quixote. Just at +this moment Sancho came up, and on seeing the pair in such a costume he +was unable to restrain his laughter; the barber, however, agreed to do as +the curate wished, and, altering their plan, the curate went on to +instruct him how to play his part and what to say to Don Quixote to +induce and compel him to come with them and give up his fancy for the +place he had chosen for his idle penance. The barber told him he could +manage it properly without any instruction, and as he did not care to +dress himself up until they were near where Don Quixote was, he folded up +the garments, and the curate adjusted his beard, and they set out under +the guidance of Sancho Panza, who went along telling them of the +encounter with the madman they met in the Sierra, saying nothing, +however, about the finding of the valise and its contents; for with all +his simplicity the lad was a trifle covetous. + +The next day they reached the place where Sancho had laid the +broom-branches as marks to direct him to where he had left his master, +and recognising it he told them that here was the entrance, and that they +would do well to dress themselves, if that was required to deliver his +master; for they had already told him that going in this guise and +dressing in this way were of the highest importance in order to rescue +his master from the pernicious life he had adopted; and they charged him +strictly not to tell his master who they were, or that he knew them, and +should he ask, as ask he would, if he had given the letter to Dulcinea, +to say that he had, and that, as she did not know how to read, she had +given an answer by word of mouth, saying that she commanded him, on pain +of her displeasure, to come and see her at once; and it was a very +important matter for himself, because in this way and with what they +meant to say to him they felt sure of bringing him back to a better mode +of life and inducing him to take immediate steps to become an emperor or +monarch, for there was no fear of his becoming an archbishop. All this +Sancho listened to and fixed it well in his memory, and thanked them +heartily for intending to recommend his master to be an emperor instead +of an archbishop, for he felt sure that in the way of bestowing rewards +on their squires emperors could do more than archbishops-errant. He said, +too, that it would be as well for him to go on before them to find him, +and give him his lady's answer; for that perhaps might be enough to bring +him away from the place without putting them to all this trouble. They +approved of what Sancho proposed, and resolved to wait for him until he +brought back word of having found his master. + +Sancho pushed on into the glens of the Sierra, leaving them in one +through which there flowed a little gentle rivulet, and where the rocks +and trees afforded a cool and grateful shade. It was an August day with +all the heat of one, and the heat in those parts is intense, and the hour +was three in the afternoon, all which made the spot the more inviting and +tempted them to wait there for Sancho's return, which they did. They were +reposing, then, in the shade, when a voice unaccompanied by the notes of +any instrument, but sweet and pleasing in its tone, reached their ears, +at which they were not a little astonished, as the place did not seem to +them likely quarters for one who sang so well; for though it is often +said that shepherds of rare voice are to be found in the woods and +fields, this is rather a flight of the poet's fancy than the truth. And +still more surprised were they when they perceived that what they heard +sung were the verses not of rustic shepherds, but of the polished wits of +the city; and so it proved, for the verses they heard were these: + +poem{ + +What makes my quest of happiness seem vain? + Disdain. +What bids me to abandon hope of ease? + Jealousies. +What holds my heart in anguish of suspense? + Absence. + If that be so, then for my grief + Where shall I turn to seek relief, + When hope on every side lies slain + By Absence, Jealousies, Disdain? + +What the prime cause of all my woe doth prove? + Love. +What at my glory ever looks askance? + Chance. +Whence is permission to afflict me given? + Heaven. + If that be so, I but await + The stroke of a resistless fate, + Since, working for my woe, these three, + Love, Chance and Heaven, in league I see. + +What must I do to find a remedy? + Die. +What is the lure for love when coy and strange? + Change. +What, if all fail, will cure the heart of sadness? + Madness. + If that be so, it is but folly + To seek a cure for melancholy: + Ask where it lies; the answer saith + In Change, in Madness, or in Death. + +}poem + +The hour, the summer season, the solitary place, the voice and skill of +the singer, all contributed to the wonder and delight of the two +listeners, who remained still waiting to hear something more; finding, +however, that the silence continued some little time, they resolved to go +in search of the musician who sang with so fine a voice; but just as they +were about to do so they were checked by the same voice, which once more +fell upon their ears, singing this + +poem{ + +SONNET + +When heavenward, holy Friendship, thou didst go + Soaring to seek thy home beyond the sky, + And take thy seat among the saints on high, +It was thy will to leave on earth below +Thy semblance, and upon it to bestow + Thy veil, wherewith at times hypocrisy, + Parading in thy shape, deceives the eye, +And makes its vileness bright as virtue show. +Friendship, return to us, or force the cheat + That wears it now, thy livery to restore, + By aid whereof sincerity is slain. +If thou wilt not unmask thy counterfeit, + This earth will be the prey of strife once more, + As when primaeval discord held its reign. + +}poem + +The song ended with a deep sigh, and again the listeners remained waiting +attentively for the singer to resume; but perceiving that the music had +now turned to sobs and heart-rending moans they determined to find out +who the unhappy being could be whose voice was as rare as his sighs were +piteous, and they had not proceeded far when on turning the corner of a +rock they discovered a man of the same aspect and appearance as Sancho +had described to them when he told them the story of Cardenio. He, +showing no astonishment when he saw them, stood still with his head bent +down upon his breast like one in deep thought, without raising his eyes +to look at them after the first glance when they suddenly came upon him. +The curate, who was aware of his misfortune and recognised him by the +description, being a man of good address, approached him and in a few +sensible words entreated and urged him to quit a life of such misery, +lest he should end it there, which would be the greatest of all +misfortunes. Cardenio was then in his right mind, free from any attack of +that madness which so frequently carried him away, and seeing them +dressed in a fashion so unusual among the frequenters of those wilds, +could not help showing some surprise, especially when he heard them speak +of his case as if it were a well-known matter (for the curate's words +gave him to understand as much) so he replied to them thus: + +"I see plainly, sirs, whoever you may be, that Heaven, whose care it is +to succour the good, and even the wicked very often, here, in this remote +spot, cut off from human intercourse, sends me, though I deserve it not, +those who seek to draw me away from this to some better retreat, showing +me by many and forcible arguments how unreasonably I act in leading the +life I do; but as they know, that if I escape from this evil I shall fall +into another still greater, perhaps they will set me down as a +weak-minded man, or, what is worse, one devoid of reason; nor would it be +any wonder, for I myself can perceive that the effect of the recollection +of my misfortunes is so great and works so powerfully to my ruin, that in +spite of myself I become at times like a stone, without feeling or +consciousness; and I come to feel the truth of it when they tell me and +show me proofs of the things I have done when the terrible fit +overmasters me; and all I can do is bewail my lot in vain, and idly curse +my destiny, and plead for my madness by telling how it was caused, to any +that care to hear it; for no reasonable beings on learning the cause will +wonder at the effects; and if they cannot help me at least they will not +blame me, and the repugnance they feel at my wild ways will turn into +pity for my woes. If it be, sirs, that you are here with the same design +as others have come wah, before you proceed with your wise arguments, I +entreat you to hear the story of my countless misfortunes, for perhaps +when you have heard it you will spare yourselves the trouble you would +take in offering consolation to grief that is beyond the reach of it." + +As they, both of them, desired nothing more than to hear from his own +lips the cause of his suffering, they entreated him to tell it, promising +not to do anything for his relief or comfort that he did not wish; and +thereupon the unhappy gentleman began his sad story in nearly the same +words and manner in which he had related it to Don Quixote and the +goatherd a few days before, when, through Master Elisabad, and Don +Quixote's scrupulous observance of what was due to chivalry, the tale was +left unfinished, as this history has already recorded; but now +fortunately the mad fit kept off, allowed him to tell it to the end; and +so, coming to the incident of the note which Don Fernando had found in +the volume of "Amadis of Gaul," Cardenio said that he remembered it +perfectly and that it was in these words: + +"Luscinda to Cardenio. + +"Every day I discover merits in you that oblige and compel me to hold you +in higher estimation; so if you desire to relieve me of this obligation +without cost to my honour, you may easily do so. I have a father who +knows you and loves me dearly, who without putting any constraint on my +inclination will grant what will be reasonable for you to have, if it be +that you value me as you say and as I believe you do." + +"By this letter I was induced, as I told you, to demand Luscinda for my +wife, and it was through it that Luscinda came to be regarded by Don +Fernando as one of the most discreet and prudent women of the day, and +this letter it was that suggested his design of ruining me before mine +could be carried into effect. I told Don Fernando that all Luscinda's +father was waiting for was that mine should ask her of him, which I did +not dare to suggest to him, fearing that he would not consent to do so; +not because he did not know perfectly well the rank, goodness, virtue, +and beauty of Luscinda, and that she had qualities that would do honour +to any family in Spain, but because I was aware that he did not wish me +to marry so soon, before seeing what the Duke Ricardo would do for me. In +short, I told him I did not venture to mention it to my father, as well +on account of that difficulty, as of many others that discouraged me +though I knew not well what they were, only that it seemed to me that +what I desired was never to come to pass. To all this Don Fernando +answered that he would take it upon himself to speak to my father, and +persuade him to speak to Luscinda's father. O, ambitious Marius! O, cruel +Catiline! O, wicked Sylla! O, perfidious Ganelon! O, treacherous Vellido! +O, vindictive Julian! O, covetous Judas! Traitor, cruel, vindictive, and +perfidious, wherein had this poor wretch failed in his fidelity, who with +such frankness showed thee the secrets and the joys of his heart? What +offence did I commit? What words did I utter, or what counsels did I give +that had not the furtherance of thy honour and welfare for their aim? +But, woe is me, wherefore do I complain? for sure it is that when +misfortunes spring from the stars, descending from on high they fall upon +us with such fury and violence that no power on earth can check their +course nor human device stay their coming. Who could have thought that +Don Fernando, a highborn gentleman, intelligent, bound to me by gratitude +for my services, one that could win the object of his love wherever he +might set his affections, could have become so obdurate, as they say, as +to rob me of my one ewe lamb that was not even yet in my possession? But +laying aside these useless and unavailing reflections, let us take up the +broken thread of my unhappy story. + +"To proceed, then: Don Fernando finding my presence an obstacle to the +execution of his treacherous and wicked design, resolved to send me to +his elder brother under the pretext of asking money from him to pay for +six horses which, purposely, and with the sole object of sending me away +that he might the better carry out his infernal scheme, he had purchased +the very day he offered to speak to my father, and the price of which he +now desired me to fetch. Could I have anticipated this treachery? Could I +by any chance have suspected it? Nay; so far from that, I offered with +the greatest pleasure to go at once, in my satisfaction at the good +bargain that had been made. That night I spoke with Luscinda, and told +her what had been agreed upon with Don Fernando, and how I had strong +hopes of our fair and reasonable wishes being realised. She, as +unsuspicious as I was of the treachery of Don Fernando, bade me try to +return speedily, as she believed the fulfilment of our desires would be +delayed only so long as my father put off speaking to hers. I know not +why it was that on saying this to me her eyes filled with tears, and +there came a lump in her throat that prevented her from uttering a word +of many more that it seemed to me she was striving to say to me. I was +astonished at this unusual turn, which I never before observed in her. +for we always conversed, whenever good fortune and my ingenuity gave us +the chance, with the greatest gaiety and cheerfulness, mingling tears, +sighs, jealousies, doubts, or fears with our words; it was all on my part +a eulogy of my good fortune that Heaven should have given her to me for +my mistress; I glorified her beauty, I extolled her worth and her +understanding; and she paid me back by praising in me what in her love +for me she thought worthy of praise; and besides we had a hundred +thousand trifles and doings of our neighbours and acquaintances to talk +about, and the utmost extent of my boldness was to take, almost by force, +one of her fair white hands and carry it to my lips, as well as the +closeness of the low grating that separated us allowed me. But the night +before the unhappy day of my departure she wept, she moaned, she sighed, +and she withdrew leaving me filled with perplexity and amazement, +overwhelmed at the sight of such strange and affecting signs of grief and +sorrow in Luscinda; but not to dash my hopes I ascribed it all to the +depth of her love for me and the pain that separation gives those who +love tenderly. At last I took my departure, sad and dejected, my heart +filled with fancies and suspicions, but not knowing well what it was I +suspected or fancied; plain omens pointing to the sad event and +misfortune that was awaiting me. + +"I reached the place whither I had been sent, gave the letter to Don +Fernando's brother, and was kindly received but not promptly dismissed, +for he desired me to wait, very much against my will, eight days in some +place where the duke his father was not likely to see me, as his brother +wrote that the money was to be sent without his knowledge; all of which +was a scheme of the treacherous Don Fernando, for his brother had no want +of money to enable him to despatch me at once. + +"The command was one that exposed me to the temptation of disobeying it, +as it seemed to me impossible to endure life for so many days separated +from Luscinda, especially after leaving her in the sorrowful mood I have +described to you; nevertheless as a dutiful servant I obeyed, though I +felt it would be at the cost of my well-being. But four days later there +came a man in quest of me with a letter which he gave me, and which by +the address I perceived to be from Luscinda, as the writing was hers. I +opened it with fear and trepidation, persuaded that it must be something +serious that had impelled her to write to me when at a distance, as she +seldom did so when I was near. Before reading it I asked the man who it +was that had given it to him, and how long he had been upon the road; he +told me that as he happened to be passing through one of the streets of +the city at the hour of noon, a very beautiful lady called to him from a +window, and with tears in her eyes said to him hurriedly, 'Brother, if +you are, as you seem to be, a Christian, for the love of God I entreat +you to have this letter despatched without a moment's delay to the place +and person named in the address, all which is well known, and by this you +will render a great service to our Lord; and that you may be at no +inconvenience in doing so take what is in this handkerchief;' and said +he, 'with this she threw me a handkerchief out of the window in which +were tied up a hundred reals and this gold ring which I bring here +together with the letter I have given you. And then without waiting for +any answer she left the window, though not before she saw me take the +letter and the handkerchief, and I had by signs let her know that I would +do as she bade me; and so, seeing myself so well paid for the trouble I +would have in bringing it to you, and knowing by the address that it was +to you it was sent (for, senor, I know you very well), and also unable to +resist that beautiful lady's tears, I resolved to trust no one else, but +to come myself and give it to you, and in sixteen hours from the time +when it was given me I have made the journey, which, as you know, is +eighteen leagues.' + +"All the while the good-natured improvised courier was telling me this, I +hung upon his words, my legs trembling under me so that I could scarcely +stand. However, I opened the letter and read these words: + +"'The promise Don Fernando gave you to urge your father to speak to mine, +he has fulfilled much more to his own satisfaction than to your +advantage. I have to tell you, senor, that he has demanded me for a wife, +and my father, led away by what he considers Don Fernando's superiority +over you, has favoured his suit so cordially, that in two days hence the +betrothal is to take place with such secrecy and so privately that the +only witnesses are to be the Heavens above and a few of the household. +Picture to yourself the state I am in; judge if it be urgent for you to +come; the issue of the affair will show you whether I love you or not. +God grant this may come to your hand before mine shall be forced to link +itself with his who keeps so ill the faith that he has pledged.' + +"Such, in brief, were the words of the letter, words that made me set out +at once without waiting any longer for reply or money; for I now saw +clearly that it was not the purchase of horses but of his own pleasure +that had made Don Fernando send me to his brother. The exasperation I +felt against Don Fernando, joined with the fear of losing the prize I had +won by so many years of love and devotion, lent me wings; so that almost +flying I reached home the same day, by the hour which served for speaking +with Luscinda. I arrived unobserved, and left the mule on which I had +come at the house of the worthy man who had brought me the letter, and +fortune was pleased to be for once so kind that I found Luscinda at the +grating that was the witness of our loves. She recognised me at once, and +I her, but not as she ought to have recognised me, or I her. But who is +there in the world that can boast of having fathomed or understood the +wavering mind and unstable nature of a woman? Of a truth no one. To +proceed: as soon as Luscinda saw me she said, 'Cardenio, I am in my +bridal dress, and the treacherous Don Fernando and my covetous father are +waiting for me in the hall with the other witnesses, who shall be the +witnesses of my death before they witness my betrothal. Be not +distressed, my friend, but contrive to be present at this sacrifice, and +if that cannot be prevented by my words, I have a dagger concealed which +will prevent more deliberate violence, putting an end to my life and +giving thee a first proof of the love I have borne and bear thee.' I +replied to her distractedly and hastily, in fear lest I should not have +time to reply, 'May thy words be verified by thy deeds, lady; and if thou +hast a dagger to save thy honour, I have a sword to defend thee or kill +myself if fortune be against us.' + +"I think she could not have heard all these words, for I perceived that +they called her away in haste, as the bridegroom was waiting. Now the +night of my sorrow set in, the sun of my happiness went down, I felt my +eyes bereft of sight, my mind of reason. I could not enter the house, nor +was I capable of any movement; but reflecting how important it was that I +should be present at what might take place on the occasion, I nerved +myself as best I could and went in, for I well knew all the entrances and +outlets; and besides, with the confusion that in secret pervaded the +house no one took notice of me, so, without being seen, I found an +opportunity of placing myself in the recess formed by a window of the +hall itself, and concealed by the ends and borders of two tapestries, +from between which I could, without being seen, see all that took place +in the room. Who could describe the agitation of heart I suffered as I +stood there--the thoughts that came to me--the reflections that passed +through my mind? They were such as cannot be, nor were it well they +should be, told. Suffice it to say that the bridegroom entered the hall +in his usual dress, without ornament of any kind; as groomsman he had +with him a cousin of Luscinda's and except the servants of the house +there was no one else in the chamber. Soon afterwards Luscinda came out +from an antechamber, attended by her mother and two of her damsels, +arrayed and adorned as became her rank and beauty, and in full festival +and ceremonial attire. My anxiety and distraction did not allow me to +observe or notice particularly what she wore; I could only perceive the +colours, which were crimson and white, and the glitter of the gems and +jewels on her head dress and apparel, surpassed by the rare beauty of her +lovely auburn hair that vying with the precious stones and the light of +the four torches that stood in the hall shone with a brighter gleam than +all. Oh memory, mortal foe of my peace! why bring before me now the +incomparable beauty of that adored enemy of mine? Were it not better, +cruel memory, to remind me and recall what she then did, that stirred by +a wrong so glaring I may seek, if not vengeance now, at least to rid +myself of life? Be not weary, sirs, of listening to these digressions; my +sorrow is not one of those that can or should be told tersely and +briefly, for to me each incident seems to call for many words." + +To this the curate replied that not only were they not weary of listening +to him, but that the details he mentioned interested them greatly, being +of a kind by no means to be omitted and deserving of the same attention +as the main story. + +"To proceed, then," continued Cardenio: "all being assembled in the hall, +the priest of the parish came in and as he took the pair by the hand to +perform the requisite ceremony, at the words, 'Will you, Senora Luscinda, +take Senor Don Fernando, here present, for your lawful husband, as the +holy Mother Church ordains?' I thrust my head and neck out from between +the tapestries, and with eager ears and throbbing heart set myself to +listen to Luscinda's answer, awaiting in her reply the sentence of death +or the grant of life. Oh, that I had but dared at that moment to rush +forward crying aloud, 'Luscinda, Luscinda! have a care what thou dost; +remember what thou owest me; bethink thee thou art mine and canst not be +another's; reflect that thy utterance of "Yes" and the end of my life +will come at the same instant. O, treacherous Don Fernando! robber of my +glory, death of my life! What seekest thou? Remember that thou canst not +as a Christian attain the object of thy wishes, for Luscinda is my bride, +and I am her husband!' Fool that I am! now that I am far away, and out of +danger, I say I should have done what I did not do: now that I have +allowed my precious treasure to be robbed from me, I curse the robber, on +whom I might have taken vengeance had I as much heart for it as I have +for bewailing my fate; in short, as I was then a coward and a fool, +little wonder is it if I am now dying shame-stricken, remorseful, and +mad. + +"The priest stood waiting for the answer of Luscinda, who for a long time +withheld it; and just as I thought she was taking out the dagger to save +her honour, or struggling for words to make some declaration of the truth +on my behalf, I heard her say in a faint and feeble voice, 'I will:' Don +Fernando said the same, and giving her the ring they stood linked by a +knot that could never be loosed. The bridegroom then approached to +embrace his bride; and she, pressing her hand upon her heart, fell +fainting in her mother's arms. It only remains now for me to tell you the +state I was in when in that consent that I heard I saw all my hopes +mocked, the words and promises of Luscinda proved falsehoods, and the +recovery of the prize I had that instant lost rendered impossible for +ever. I stood stupefied, wholly abandoned, it seemed, by Heaven, declared +the enemy of the earth that bore me, the air refusing me breath for my +sighs, the water moisture for my tears; it was only the fire that +gathered strength so that my whole frame glowed with rage and jealousy. +They were all thrown into confusion by Luscinda's fainting, and as her +mother was unlacing her to give her air a sealed paper was discovered in +her bosom which Don Fernando seized at once and began to read by the +light of one of the torches. As soon as he had read it he seated himself +in a chair, leaning his cheek on his hand in the attitude of one deep in +thought, without taking any part in the efforts that were being made to +recover his bride from her fainting fit. + +"Seeing all the household in confusion, I ventured to come out regardless +whether I were seen or not, and determined, if I were, to do some +frenzied deed that would prove to all the world the righteous indignation +of my breast in the punishment of the treacherous Don Fernando, and even +in that of the fickle fainting traitress. But my fate, doubtless +reserving me for greater sorrows, if such there be, so ordered it that +just then I had enough and to spare of that reason which has since been +wanting to me; and so, without seeking to take vengeance on my greatest +enemies (which might have been easily taken, as all thought of me was so +far from their minds), I resolved to take it upon myself, and on myself +to inflict the pain they deserved, perhaps with even greater severity +than I should have dealt out to them had I then slain them; for sudden +pain is soon over, but that which is protracted by tortures is ever +slaying without ending life. In a word, I quitted the house and reached +that of the man with whom I had left my mule; I made him saddle it for +me, mounted without bidding him farewell, and rode out of the city, like +another Lot, not daring to turn my head to look back upon it; and when I +found myself alone in the open country, screened by the darkness of the +night, and tempted by the stillness to give vent to my grief without +apprehension or fear of being heard or seen, then I broke silence and +lifted up my voice in maledictions upon Luscinda and Don Fernando, as if +I could thus avenge the wrong they had done me. I called her cruel, +ungrateful, false, thankless, but above all covetous, since the wealth of +my enemy had blinded the eyes of her affection, and turned it from me to +transfer it to one to whom fortune had been more generous and liberal. +And yet, in the midst of this outburst of execration and upbraiding, I +found excuses for her, saying it was no wonder that a young girl in the +seclusion of her parents' house, trained and schooled to obey them +always, should have been ready to yield to their wishes when they offered +her for a husband a gentleman of such distinction, wealth, and noble +birth, that if she had refused to accept him she would have been thought +out of her senses, or to have set her affection elsewhere, a suspicion +injurious to her fair name and fame. But then again, I said, had she +declared I was her husband, they would have seen that in choosing me she +had not chosen so ill but that they might excuse her, for before Don +Fernando had made his offer, they themselves could not have desired, if +their desires had been ruled by reason, a more eligible husband for their +daughter than I was; and she, before taking the last fatal step of giving +her hand, might easily have said that I had already given her mine, for I +should have come forward to support any assertion of hers to that effect. +In short, I came to the conclusion that feeble love, little reflection, +great ambition, and a craving for rank, had made her forget the words +with which she had deceived me, encouraged and supported by my firm hopes +and honourable passion. + +"Thus soliloquising and agitated, I journeyed onward for the remainder of +the night, and by daybreak I reached one of the passes of these +mountains, among which I wandered for three days more without taking any +path or road, until I came to some meadows lying on I know not which side +of the mountains, and there I inquired of some herdsmen in what direction +the most rugged part of the range lay. They told me that it was in this +quarter, and I at once directed my course hither, intending to end my +life here; but as I was making my way among these crags, my mule dropped +dead through fatigue and hunger, or, as I think more likely, in order to +have done with such a worthless burden as it bore in me. I was left on +foot, worn out, famishing, without anyone to help me or any thought of +seeking help: and so thus I lay stretched on the ground, how long I know +not, after which I rose up free from hunger, and found beside me some +goatherds, who no doubt were the persons who had relieved me in my need, +for they told me how they had found me, and how I had been uttering +ravings that showed plainly I had lost my reason; and since then I am +conscious that I am not always in full possession of it, but at times so +deranged and crazed that I do a thousand mad things, tearing my clothes, +crying aloud in these solitudes, cursing my fate, and idly calling on the +dear name of her who is my enemy, and only seeking to end my life in +lamentation; and when I recover my senses I find myself so exhausted and +weary that I can scarcely move. Most commonly my dwelling is the hollow +of a cork tree large enough to shelter this miserable body; the herdsmen +and goatherds who frequent these mountains, moved by compassion, furnish +me with food, leaving it by the wayside or on the rocks, where they think +I may perhaps pass and find it; and so, even though I may be then out of +my senses, the wants of nature teach me what is required to sustain me, +and make me crave it and eager to take it. At other times, so they tell +me when they find me in a rational mood, I sally out upon the road, and +though they would gladly give it me, I snatch food by force from the +shepherds bringing it from the village to their huts. Thus do pass the +wretched life that remains to me, until it be Heaven's will to bring it +to a close, or so to order my memory that I no longer recollect the +beauty and treachery of Luscinda, or the wrong done me by Don Fernando; +for if it will do this without depriving me of life, I will turn my +thoughts into some better channel; if not, I can only implore it to have +full mercy on my soul, for in myself I feel no power or strength to +release my body from this strait in which I have of my own accord chosen +to place it. + +"Such, sirs, is the dismal story of my misfortune: say if it be one that +can be told with less emotion than you have seen in me; and do not +trouble yourselves with urging or pressing upon me what reason suggests +as likely to serve for my relief, for it will avail me as much as the +medicine prescribed by a wise physician avails the sick man who will not +take it. I have no wish for health without Luscinda; and since it is her +pleasure to be another's, when she is or should be mine, let it be mine +to be a prey to misery when I might have enjoyed happiness. She by her +fickleness strove to make my ruin irretrievable; I will strive to gratify +her wishes by seeking destruction; and it will show generations to come +that I alone was deprived of that of which all others in misfortune have +a superabundance, for to them the impossibility of being consoled is +itself a consolation, while to me it is the cause of greater sorrows and +sufferings, for I think that even in death there will not be an end of +them." + +Here Cardenio brought to a close his long discourse and story, as full of +misfortune as it was of love; but just as the curate was going to address +some words of comfort to him, he was stopped by a voice that reached his +ear, saying in melancholy tones what will be told in the Fourth Part of +this narrative; for at this point the sage and sagacious historian, Cide +Hamete Benengeli, brought the Third to a conclusion. + +Chapter XXVIII. - +Which treats of the strange and delightful adventure that befell the +curate and the barber in the same Sierra + +Happy and fortunate were the times when that most daring knight Don +Quixote of La Mancha was sent into the world; for by reason of his having +formed a resolution so honourable as that of seeking to revive and +restore to the world the long-lost and almost defunct order of +knight-errantry, we now enjoy in this age of ours, so poor in light +entertainment, not only the charm of his veracious history, but also of +the tales and episodes contained in it which are, in a measure, no less +pleasing, ingenious, and truthful, than the history itself; which, +resuming its thread, carded, spun, and wound, relates that just as the +curate was going to offer consolation to Cardenio, he was interrupted by +a voice that fell upon his ear saying in plaintive tones: + +"O God! is it possible I have found a place that may serve as a secret +grave for the weary load of this body that I support so unwillingly? If +the solitude these mountains promise deceives me not, it is so; ah! woe +is me! how much more grateful to my mind will be the society of these +rocks and brakes that permit me to complain of my misfortune to Heaven, +than that of any human being, for there is none on earth to look to for +counsel in doubt, comfort in sorrow, or relief in distress!" + +All this was heard distinctly by the curate and those with him, and as it +seemed to them to be uttered close by, as indeed it was, they got up to +look for the speaker, and before they had gone twenty paces they +discovered behind a rock, seated at the foot of an ash tree, a youth in +the dress of a peasant, whose face they were unable at the moment to see +as he was leaning forward, bathing his feet in the brook that flowed +past. They approached so silently that he did not perceive them, being +fully occupied in bathing his feet, which were so fair that they looked +like two pieces of shining crystal brought forth among the other stones +of the brook. The whiteness and beauty of these feet struck them with +surprise, for they did not seem to have been made to crush clods or to +follow the plough and the oxen as their owner's dress suggested; and so, +finding they had not been noticed, the curate, who was in front, made a +sign to the other two to conceal themselves behind some fragments of rock +that lay there; which they did, observing closely what the youth was +about. He had on a loose double-skirted dark brown jacket bound tight to +his body with a white cloth; he wore besides breeches and gaiters of +brown cloth, and on his head a brown montera; and he had the gaiters +turned up as far as the middle of the leg, which verily seemed to be of +pure alabaster. + +As soon as he had done bathing his beautiful feet, he wiped them with a +towel he took from under the montera, on taking off which he raised his +face, and those who were watching him had an opportunity of seeing a +beauty so exquisite that Cardenio said to the curate in a whisper: + +"As this is not Luscinda, it is no human creature but a divine being." + +The youth then took off the montera, and shaking his head from side to +side there broke loose and spread out a mass of hair that the beams of +the sun might have envied; by this they knew that what had seemed a +peasant was a lovely woman, nay the most beautiful the eyes of two of +them had ever beheld, or even Cardenio's if they had not seen and known +Luscinda, for he afterwards declared that only the beauty of Luscinda +could compare with this. The long auburn tresses not only covered her +shoulders, but such was their length and abundance, concealed her all +round beneath their masses, so that except the feet nothing of her form +was visible. She now used her hands as a comb, and if her feet had seemed +like bits of crystal in the water, her hands looked like pieces of driven +snow among her locks; all which increased not only the admiration of the +three beholders, but their anxiety to learn who she was. With this object +they resolved to show themselves, and at the stir they made in getting +upon their feet the fair damsel raised her head, and parting her hair +from before her eyes with both hands, she looked to see who had made the +noise, and the instant she perceived them she started to her feet, and +without waiting to put on her shoes or gather up her hair, hastily +snatched up a bundle as though of clothes that she had beside her, and, +scared and alarmed, endeavoured to take flight; but before she had gone +six paces she fell to the ground, her delicate feet being unable to bear +the roughness of the stones; seeing which, the three hastened towards +her, and the curate addressing her first said: + +"Stay, senora, whoever you may be, for those whom you see here only +desire to be of service to you; you have no need to attempt a flight so +heedless, for neither can your feet bear it, nor we allow it." + +Taken by surprise and bewildered, she made no reply to these words. They, +however, came towards her, and the curate taking her hand went on to say: + +"What your dress would hide, senora, is made known to us by your hair; a +clear proof that it can be no trifling cause that has disguised your +beauty in a garb so unworthy of it, and sent it into solitudes like these +where we have had the good fortune to find you, if not to relieve your +distress, at least to offer you comfort; for no distress, so long as life +lasts, can be so oppressive or reach such a height as to make the +sufferer refuse to listen to comfort offered with good intention. And so, +senora, or senor, or whatever you prefer to be, dismiss the fears that +our appearance has caused you and make us acquainted with your good or +evil fortunes, for from all of us together, or from each one of us, you +will receive sympathy in your trouble." + +While the curate was speaking, the disguised damsel stood as if +spell-bound, looking at them without opening her lips or uttering a word, +just like a village rustic to whom something strange that he has never +seen before has been suddenly shown; but on the curate addressing some +further words to the same effect to her, sighing deeply she broke silence +and said: + +"Since the solitude of these mountains has been unable to conceal me, and +the escape of my dishevelled tresses will not allow my tongue to deal in +falsehoods, it would be idle for me now to make any further pretence of +what, if you were to believe me, you would believe more out of courtesy +than for any other reason. This being so, I say I thank you, sirs, for +the offer you have made me, which places me under the obligation of +complying with the request you have made of me; though I fear the account +I shall give you of my misfortunes will excite in you as much concern as +compassion, for you will be unable to suggest anything to remedy them or +any consolation to alleviate them. However, that my honour may not be +left a matter of doubt in your minds, now that you have discovered me to +be a woman, and see that I am young, alone, and in this dress, things +that taken together or separately would be enough to destroy any good +name, I feel bound to tell what I would willingly keep secret if I +could." + +All this she who was now seen to be a lovely woman delivered without any +hesitation, with so much ease and in so sweet a voice that they were not +less charmed by her intelligence than by her beauty, and as they again +repeated their offers and entreaties to her to fulfil her promise, she +without further pressing, first modestly covering her feet and gathering +up her hair, seated herself on a stone with the three placed around her, +and, after an effort to restrain some tears that came to her eyes, in a +clear and steady voice began her story thus: + +"In this Andalusia there is a town from which a duke takes a title which +makes him one of those that are called Grandees of Spain. This nobleman +has two sons, the elder heir to his dignity and apparently to his good +qualities; the younger heir to I know not what, unless it be the +treachery of Vellido and the falsehood of Ganelon. My parents are this +lord's vassals, lowly in origin, but so wealthy that if birth had +conferred as much on them as fortune, they would have had nothing left to +desire, nor should I have had reason to fear trouble like that in which I +find myself now; for it may be that my ill fortune came of theirs in not +having been nobly born. It is true they are not so low that they have any +reason to be ashamed of their condition, but neither are they so high as +to remove from my mind the impression that my mishap comes of their +humble birth. They are, in short, peasants, plain homely people, without +any taint of disreputable blood, and, as the saying is, old rusty +Christians, but so rich that by their wealth and free-handed way of life +they are coming by degrees to be considered gentlefolk by birth, and even +by position; though the wealth and nobility they thought most of was +having me for their daughter; and as they have no other child to make +their heir, and are affectionate parents, I was one of the most indulged +daughters that ever parents indulged. + +"I was the mirror in which they beheld themselves, the staff of their old +age, and the object in which, with submission to Heaven, all their wishes +centred, and mine were in accordance with theirs, for I knew their worth; +and as I was mistress of their hearts, so was I also of their +possessions. Through me they engaged or dismissed their servants; through +my hands passed the accounts and returns of what was sown and reaped; the +oil-mills, the wine-presses, the count of the flocks and herds, the +beehives, all in short that a rich farmer like my father has or can have, +I had under my care, and I acted as steward and mistress with an +assiduity on my part and satisfaction on theirs that I cannot well +describe to you. The leisure hours left to me after I had given the +requisite orders to the head-shepherds, overseers, and other labourers, I +passed in such employments as are not only allowable but necessary for +young girls, those that the needle, embroidery cushion, and spinning +wheel usually afford, and if to refresh my mind I quitted them for a +while, I found recreation in reading some devotional book or playing the +harp, for experience taught me that music soothes the troubled mind and +relieves weariness of spirit. Such was the life I led in my parents' +house and if I have depicted it thus minutely, it is not out of +ostentation, or to let you know that I am rich, but that you may see how, +without any fault of mine, I have fallen from the happy condition I have +described, to the misery I am in at present. The truth is, that while I +was leading this busy life, in a retirement that might compare with that +of a monastery, and unseen as I thought by any except the servants of the +house (for when I went to Mass it was so early in the morning, and I was +so closely attended by my mother and the women of the household, and so +thickly veiled and so shy, that my eyes scarcely saw more ground than I +trod on), in spite of all this, the eyes of love, or idleness, more +properly speaking, that the lynx's cannot rival, discovered me, with the +help of the assiduity of Don Fernando; for that is the name of the +younger son of the duke I told of." + +The moment the speaker mentioned the name of Don Fernando, Cardenio +changed colour and broke into a sweat, with such signs of emotion that +the curate and the barber, who observed it, feared that one of the mad +fits which they heard attacked him sometimes was coming upon him; but +Cardenio showed no further agitation and remained quiet, regarding the +peasant girl with fixed attention, for he began to suspect who she was. +She, however, without noticing the excitement of Cardenio, continuing her +story, went on to say: + +"And they had hardly discovered me, when, as he owned afterwards, he was +smitten with a violent love for me, as the manner in which it displayed +itself plainly showed. But to shorten the long recital of my woes, I will +pass over in silence all the artifices employed by Don Fernando for +declaring his passion for me. He bribed all the household, he gave and +offered gifts and presents to my parents; every day was like a holiday or +a merry-making in our street; by night no one could sleep for the music; +the love letters that used to come to my hand, no one knew how, were +innumerable, full of tender pleadings and pledges, containing more +promises and oaths than there were letters in them; all which not only +did not soften me, but hardened my heart against him, as if he had been +my mortal enemy, and as if everything he did to make me yield were done +with the opposite intention. Not that the high-bred bearing of Don +Fernando was disagreeable to me, or that I found his importunities +wearisome; for it gave me a certain sort of satisfaction to find myself +so sought and prized by a gentleman of such distinction, and I was not +displeased at seeing my praises in his letters (for however ugly we women +may be, it seems to me it always pleases us to hear ourselves called +beautiful) but that my own sense of right was opposed to all this, as +well as the repeated advice of my parents, who now very plainly perceived +Don Fernando's purpose, for he cared very little if all the world knew +it. They told me they trusted and confided their honour and good name to +my virtue and rectitude alone, and bade me consider the disparity between +Don Fernando and myself, from which I might conclude that his intentions, +whatever he might say to the contrary, had for their aim his own pleasure +rather than my advantage; and if I were at all desirous of opposing an +obstacle to his unreasonable suit, they were ready, they said, to marry +me at once to anyone I preferred, either among the leading people of our +own town, or of any of those in the neighbourhood; for with their wealth +and my good name, a match might be looked for in any quarter. This offer, +and their sound advice strengthened my resolution, and I never gave Don +Fernando a word in reply that could hold out to him any hope of success, +however remote. + +"All this caution of mine, which he must have taken for coyness, had +apparently the effect of increasing his wanton appetite--for that is the +name I give to his passion for me; had it been what he declared it to be, +you would not know of it now, because there would have been no occasion +to tell you of it. At length he learned that my parents were +contemplating marriage for me in order to put an end to his hopes of +obtaining possession of me, or at least to secure additional protectors +to watch over me, and this intelligence or suspicion made him act as you +shall hear. One night, as I was in my chamber with no other companion +than a damsel who waited on me, with the doors carefully locked lest my +honour should be imperilled through any carelessness, I know not nor can +conceive how it happened, but, with all this seclusion and these +precautions, and in the solitude and silence of my retirement, I found +him standing before me, a vision that so astounded me that it deprived my +eyes of sight, and my tongue of speech. I had no power to utter a cry, +nor, I think, did he give me time to utter one, as he immediately +approached me, and taking me in his arms (for, overwhelmed as I was, I +was powerless, I say, to help myself), he began to make such professions +to me that I know not how falsehood could have had the power of dressing +them up to seem so like truth; and the traitor contrived that his tears +should vouch for his words, and his sighs for his sincerity. + +"I, a poor young creature alone, ill versed among my people in cases such +as this, began, I know not how, to think all these lying protestations +true, though without being moved by his sighs and tears to anything more +than pure compassion; and so, as the first feeling of bewilderment passed +away, and I began in some degree to recover myself, I said to him with +more courage than I thought I could have possessed, 'If, as I am now in +your arms, senor, I were in the claws of a fierce lion, and my +deliverance could be procured by doing or saying anything to the +prejudice of my honour, it would no more be in my power to do it or say +it, than it would be possible that what was should not have been; so +then, if you hold my body clasped in your arms, I hold my soul secured by +virtuous intentions, very different from yours, as you will see if you +attempt to carry them into effect by force. I am your vassal, but I am +not your slave; your nobility neither has nor should have any right to +dishonour or degrade my humble birth; and low-born peasant as I am, I +have my self-respect as much as you, a lord and gentleman: with me your +violence will be to no purpose, your wealth will have no weight, your +words will have no power to deceive me, nor your sighs or tears to soften +me: were I to see any of the things I speak of in him whom my parents +gave me as a husband, his will should be mine, and mine should be bounded +by his; and my honour being preserved even though my inclinations were +not would willingly yield him what you, senor, would now obtain by force; +and this I say lest you should suppose that any but my lawful husband +shall ever win anything of me.' 'If that,' said this disloyal gentleman, +'be the only scruple you feel, fairest Dorothea' (for that is the name of +this unhappy being), 'see here I give you my hand to be yours, and let +Heaven, from which nothing is hid, and this image of Our Lady you have +here, be witnesses of this pledge.'" + +When Cardenio heard her say she was called Dorothea, he showed fresh +agitation and felt convinced of the truth of his former suspicion, but he +was unwilling to interrupt the story, and wished to hear the end of what +he already all but knew, so he merely said: + +"What! is Dorothea your name, senora? I have heard of another of the same +name who can perhaps match your misfortunes. But proceed; by-and-by I may +tell you something that will astonish you as much as it will excite your +compassion." + +Dorothea was struck by Cardenio's words as well as by his strange and +miserable attire, and begged him if he knew anything concerning her to +tell it to her at once, for if fortune had left her any blessing it was +courage to bear whatever calamity might fall upon her, as she felt sure +that none could reach her capable of increasing in any degree what she +endured already. + +"I would not let the occasion pass, senora," replied Cardenio, "of +telling you what I think, if what I suspect were the truth, but so far +there has been no opportunity, nor is it of any importance to you to know +it." + +"Be it as it may," replied Dorothea, "what happened in my story was that +Don Fernando, taking an image that stood in the chamber, placed it as a +witness of our betrothal, and with the most binding words and extravagant +oaths gave me his promise to become my husband; though before he had made +an end of pledging himself I bade him consider well what he was doing, +and think of the anger his father would feel at seeing him married to a +peasant girl and one of his vassals; I told him not to let my beauty, +such as it was, blind him, for that was not enough to furnish an excuse +for his transgression; and if in the love he bore me he wished to do me +any kindness, it would be to leave my lot to follow its course at the +level my condition required; for marriages so unequal never brought +happiness, nor did they continue long to afford the enjoyment they began +with. + +"All this that I have now repeated I said to him, and much more which I +cannot recollect; but it had no effect in inducing him to forego his +purpose; he who has no intention of paying does not trouble himself about +difficulties when he is striking the bargain. At the same time I argued +the matter briefly in my own mind, saying to myself, 'I shall not be the +first who has risen through marriage from a lowly to a lofty station, nor +will Don Fernando be the first whom beauty or, as is more likely, a blind +attachment, has led to mate himself below his rank. Then, since I am +introducing no new usage or practice, I may as well avail myself of the +honour that chance offers me, for even though his inclination for me +should not outlast the attainment of his wishes, I shall be, after all, +his wife before God. And if I strive to repel him by scorn, I can see +that, fair means failing, he is in a mood to use force, and I shall be +left dishonoured and without any means of proving my innocence to those +who cannot know how innocently I have come to be in this position; for +what arguments would persuade my parents that this gentleman entered my +chamber without my consent?' + +"All these questions and answers passed through my mind in a moment; but +the oaths of Don Fernando, the witnesses he appealed to, the tears he +shed, and lastly the charms of his person and his high-bred grace, which, +accompanied by such signs of genuine love, might well have conquered a +heart even more free and coy than mine--these were the things that more +than all began to influence me and lead me unawares to my ruin. I called +my waiting-maid to me, that there might be a witness on earth besides +those in Heaven, and again Don Fernando renewed and repeated his oaths, +invoked as witnesses fresh saints in addition to the former ones, called +down upon himself a thousand curses hereafter should he fail to keep his +promise, shed more tears, redoubled his sighs and pressed me closer in +his arms, from which he had never allowed me to escape; and so I was left +by my maid, and ceased to be one, and he became a traitor and a perjured +man. + +"The day which followed the night of my misfortune did not come so +quickly, I imagine, as Don Fernando wished, for when desire has attained +its object, the greatest pleasure is to fly from the scene of pleasure. I +say so because Don Fernando made all haste to leave me, and by the +adroitness of my maid, who was indeed the one who had admitted him, +gained the street before daybreak; but on taking leave of me he told me, +though not with as much earnestness and fervour as when he came, that I +might rest assured of his faith and of the sanctity and sincerity of his +oaths; and to confirm his words he drew a rich ring off his finger and +placed it upon mine. He then took his departure and I was left, I know +not whether sorrowful or happy; all I can say is, I was left agitated and +troubled in mind and almost bewildered by what had taken place, and I had +not the spirit, or else it did not occur to me, to chide my maid for the +treachery she had been guilty of in concealing Don Fernando in my +chamber; for as yet I was unable to make up my mind whether what had +befallen me was for good or evil. I told Don Fernando at parting, that as +I was now his, he might see me on other nights in the same way, until it +should be his pleasure to let the matter become known; but, except the +following night, he came no more, nor for more than a month could I catch +a glimpse of him in the street or in church, while I wearied myself with +watching for one; although I knew he was in the town, and almost every +day went out hunting, a pastime he was very fond of. I remember well how +sad and dreary those days and hours were to me; I remember well how I +began to doubt as they went by, and even to lose confidence in the faith +of Don Fernando; and I remember, too, how my maid heard those words in +reproof of her audacity that she had not heard before, and how I was +forced to put a constraint on my tears and on the expression of my +countenance, not to give my parents cause to ask me why I was so +melancholy, and drive me to invent falsehoods in reply. But all this was +suddenly brought to an end, for the time came when all such +considerations were disregarded, and there was no further question of +honour, when my patience gave way and the secret of my heart became known +abroad. The reason was, that a few days later it was reported in the town +that Don Fernando had been married in a neighbouring city to a maiden of +rare beauty, the daughter of parents of distinguished position, though +not so rich that her portion would entitle her to look for so brilliant a +match; it was said, too, that her name was Luscinda, and that at the +betrothal some strange things had happened." + +Cardenio heard the name of Luscinda, but he only shrugged his shoulders, +bit his lips, bent his brows, and before long two streams of tears +escaped from his eyes. Dorothea, however, did not interrupt her story, +but went on in these words: + +"This sad intelligence reached my ears, and, instead of being struck with +a chill, with such wrath and fury did my heart burn that I scarcely +restrained myself from rushing out into the streets, crying aloud and +proclaiming openly the perfidy and treachery of which I was the victim; +but this transport of rage was for the time checked by a resolution I +formed, to be carried out the same night, and that was to assume this +dress, which I got from a servant of my father's, one of the zagals, as +they are called in farmhouses, to whom I confided the whole of my +misfortune, and whom I entreated to accompany me to the city where I +heard my enemy was. He, though he remonstrated with me for my boldness, +and condemned my resolution, when he saw me bent upon my purpose, offered +to bear me company, as he said, to the end of the world. I at once packed +up in a linen pillow-case a woman's dress, and some jewels and money to +provide for emergencies, and in the silence of the night, without letting +my treacherous maid know, I sallied forth from the house, accompanied by +my servant and abundant anxieties, and on foot set out for the city, but +borne as it were on wings by my eagerness to reach it, if not to prevent +what I presumed to be already done, at least to call upon Don Fernando to +tell me with what conscience he had done it. I reached my destination in +two days and a half, and on entering the city inquired for the house of +Luscinda's parents. The first person I asked gave me more in reply than I +sought to know; he showed me the house, and told me all that had occurred +at the betrothal of the daughter of the family, an affair of such +notoriety in the city that it was the talk of every knot of idlers in the +street. He said that on the night of Don Fernando's betrothal with +Luscinda, as soon as she had consented to be his bride by saying 'Yes,' +she was taken with a sudden fainting fit, and that on the bridegroom +approaching to unlace the bosom of her dress to give her air, he found a +paper in her own handwriting, in which she said and declared that she +could not be Don Fernando's bride, because she was already Cardenio's, +who, according to the man's account, was a gentleman of distinction of +the same city; and that if she had accepted Don Fernando, it was only in +obedience to her parents. In short, he said, the words of the paper made +it clear she meant to kill herself on the completion of the betrothal, +and gave her reasons for putting an end to herself all which was +confirmed, it was said, by a dagger they found somewhere in her clothes. +On seeing this, Don Fernando, persuaded that Luscinda had befooled, +slighted, and trifled with him, assailed her before she had recovered +from her swoon, and tried to stab her with the dagger that had been +found, and would have succeeded had not her parents and those who were +present prevented him. It was said, moreover, that Don Fernando went away +at once, and that Luscinda did not recover from her prostration until the +next day, when she told her parents how she was really the bride of that +Cardenio I have mentioned. I learned besides that Cardenio, according to +report, had been present at the betrothal; and that upon seeing her +betrothed contrary to his expectation, he had quitted the city in +despair, leaving behind him a letter declaring the wrong Luscinda had +done him, and his intention of going where no one should ever see him +again. All this was a matter of notoriety in the city, and everyone spoke +of it; especially when it became known that Luscinda was missing from her +father's house and from the city, for she was not to be found anywhere, +to the distraction of her parents, who knew not what steps to take to +recover her. What I learned revived my hopes, and I was better pleased +not to have found Don Fernando than to find him married, for it seemed to +me that the door was not yet entirely shut upon relief in my case, and I +thought that perhaps Heaven had put this impediment in the way of the +second marriage, to lead him to recognise his obligations under the +former one, and reflect that as a Christian he was bound to consider his +soul above all human objects. All this passed through my mind, and I +strove to comfort myself without comfort, indulging in faint and distant +hopes of cherishing that life that I now abhor. + +"But while I was in the city, uncertain what to do, as I could not find +Don Fernando, I heard notice given by the public crier offering a great +reward to anyone who should find me, and giving the particulars of my age +and of the very dress I wore; and I heard it said that the lad who came +with me had taken me away from my father's house; a thing that cut me to +the heart, showing how low my good name had fallen, since it was not +enough that I should lose it by my flight, but they must add with whom I +had fled, and that one so much beneath me and so unworthy of my +consideration. The instant I heard the notice I quitted the city with my +servant, who now began to show signs of wavering in his fidelity to me, +and the same night, for fear of discovery, we entered the most thickly +wooded part of these mountains. But, as is commonly said, one evil calls +up another and the end of one misfortune is apt to be the beginning of +one still greater, and so it proved in my case; for my worthy servant, +until then so faithful and trusty when he found me in this lonely spot, +moved more by his own villainy than by my beauty, sought to take +advantage of the opportunity which these solitudes seemed to present him, +and with little shame and less fear of God and respect for me, began to +make overtures to me; and finding that I replied to the effrontery of his +proposals with justly severe language, he laid aside the entreaties which +he had employed at first, and began to use violence. + +"But just Heaven, that seldom fails to watch over and aid good intentions, +so aided mine that with my slight strength and with little exertion I +pushed him over a precipice, where I left him, whether dead or alive I +know not; and then, with greater speed than seemed possible in my terror +and fatigue, I made my way into the mountains, without any other thought +or purpose save that of hiding myself among them, and escaping my father +and those despatched in search of me by his orders. It is now I know not +how many months since with this object I came here, where I met a +herdsman who engaged me as his servant at a place in the heart of this +Sierra, and all this time I have been serving him as herd, striving to +keep always afield to hide these locks which have now unexpectedly +betrayed me. But all my care and pains were unavailing, for my master +made the discovery that I was not a man, and harboured the same base +designs as my servant; and as fortune does not always supply a remedy in +cases of difficulty, and I had no precipice or ravine at hand down which +to fling the master and cure his passion, as I had in the servant's case, +I thought it a lesser evil to leave him and again conceal myself among +these crags, than make trial of my strength and argument with him. So, as +I say, once more I went into hiding to seek for some place where I might +with sighs and tears implore Heaven to have pity on my misery, and grant +me help and strength to escape from it, or let me die among the +solitudes, leaving no trace of an unhappy being who, by no fault of hers, +has furnished matter for talk and scandal at home and abroad." + +Chapter XXIX. - +Which treats of the droll device and method adopted to extricate our +love-stricken Knight from the severe penance he had imposed upon himself + +"Such, sirs, is the true story of my sad adventures; judge for yourselves +now whether the sighs and lamentations you heard, and the tears that +flowed from my eyes, had not sufficient cause even if I had indulged in +them more freely; and if you consider the nature of my misfortune you +will see that consolation is idle, as there is no possible remedy for it. +All I ask of you is, what you may easily and reasonably do, to show me +where I may pass my life unharassed by the fear and dread of discovery by +those who are in search of me; for though the great love my parents bear +me makes me feel sure of being kindly received by them, so great is my +feeling of shame at the mere thought that I cannot present myself before +them as they expect, that I had rather banish myself from their sight for +ever than look them in the face with the reflection that they beheld mine +stripped of that purity they had a right to expect in me." + +With these words she became silent, and the colour that overspread her +face showed plainly the pain and shame she was suffering at heart. In +theirs the listeners felt as much pity as wonder at her misfortunes; but +as the curate was just about to offer her some consolation and advice +Cardenio forestalled him, saying, "So then, senora, you are the fair +Dorothea, the only daughter of the rich Clenardo?" Dorothea was +astonished at hearing her father's name, and at the miserable appearance +of him who mentioned it, for it has been already said how wretchedly clad +Cardenio was; so she said to him: + +"And who may you be, brother, who seem to know my father's name so well? +For so far, if I remember rightly, I have not mentioned it in the whole +story of my misfortunes." + +"I am that unhappy being, senora," replied Cardenio, "whom, as you have +said, Luscinda declared to be her husband; I am the unfortunate Cardenio, +whom the wrong-doing of him who has brought you to your present condition +has reduced to the state you see me in, bare, ragged, bereft of all human +comfort, and what is worse, of reason, for I only possess it when Heaven +is pleased for some short space to restore it to me. I, Dorothea, am he +who witnessed the wrong done by Don Fernando, and waited to hear the +'Yes' uttered by which Luscinda owned herself his betrothed: I am he who +had not courage enough to see how her fainting fit ended, or what came of +the paper that was found in her bosom, because my heart had not the +fortitude to endure so many strokes of ill-fortune at once; and so losing +patience I quitted the house, and leaving a letter with my host, which I +entreated him to place in Luscinda's hands, I betook myself to these +solitudes, resolved to end here the life I hated as if it were my mortal +enemy. But fate would not rid me of it, contenting itself with robbing me +of my reason, perhaps to preserve me for the good fortune I have had in +meeting you; for if that which you have just told us be true, as I +believe it to be, it may be that Heaven has yet in store for both of us a +happier termination to our misfortunes than we look for; because seeing +that Luscinda cannot marry Don Fernando, being mine, as she has herself +so openly declared, and that Don Fernando cannot marry her as he is +yours, we may reasonably hope that Heaven will restore to us what is +ours, as it is still in existence and not yet alienated or destroyed. And +as we have this consolation springing from no very visionary hope or wild +fancy, I entreat you, senora, to form new resolutions in your better +mind, as I mean to do in mine, preparing yourself to look forward to +happier fortunes; for I swear to you by the faith of a gentleman and a +Christian not to desert you until I see you in possession of Don +Fernando, and if I cannot by words induce him to recognise his obligation +to you, in that case to avail myself of the right which my rank as a +gentleman gives me, and with just cause challenge him on account of the +injury he has done you, not regarding my own wrongs, which I shall leave +to Heaven to avenge, while I on earth devote myself to yours." + +Cardenio's words completed the astonishment of Dorothea, and not knowing +how to return thanks for such an offer, she attempted to kiss his feet; +but Cardenio would not permit it, and the licentiate replied for both, +commended the sound reasoning of Cardenio, and lastly, begged, advised, +and urged them to come with him to his village, where they might furnish +themselves with what they needed, and take measures to discover Don +Fernando, or restore Dorothea to her parents, or do what seemed to them +most advisable. Cardenio and Dorothea thanked him, and accepted the kind +offer he made them; and the barber, who had been listening to all +attentively and in silence, on his part some kindly words also, and with +no less good-will than the curate offered his services in any way that +might be of use to them. He also explained to them in a few words the +object that had brought them there, and the strange nature of Don +Quixote's madness, and how they were waiting for his squire, who had gone +in search of him. Like the recollection of a dream, the quarrel he had +had with Don Quixote came back to Cardenio's memory, and he described it +to the others; but he was unable to say what the dispute was about. + +At this moment they heard a shout, and recognised it as coming from +Sancho Panza, who, not finding them where he had left them, was calling +aloud to them. They went to meet him, and in answer to their inquiries +about Don Quixote, he told them how he had found him stripped to his +shirt, lank, yellow, half dead with hunger, and sighing for his lady +Dulcinea; and although he had told him that she commanded him to quit +that place and come to El Toboso, where she was expecting him, he had +answered that he was determined not to appear in the presence of her +beauty until he had done deeds to make him worthy of her favour; and if +this went on, Sancho said, he ran the risk of not becoming an emperor as +in duty bound, or even an archbishop, which was the least he could be; +for which reason they ought to consider what was to be done to get him +away from there. The licentiate in reply told him not to be uneasy, for +they would fetch him away in spite of himself. He then told Cardenio and +Dorothea what they had proposed to do to cure Don Quixote, or at any rate +take him home; upon which Dorothea said that she could play the +distressed damsel better than the barber; especially as she had there the +dress in which to do it to the life, and that they might trust to her +acting the part in every particular requisite for carrying out their +scheme, for she had read a great many books of chivalry, and knew exactly +the style in which afflicted damsels begged boons of knights-errant. + +"In that case," said the curate, "there is nothing more required than to +set about it at once, for beyond a doubt fortune is declaring itself in +our favour, since it has so unexpectedly begun to open a door for your +relief, and smoothed the way for us to our object." + +Dorothea then took out of her pillow-case a complete petticoat of some +rich stuff, and a green mantle of some other fine material, and a +necklace and other ornaments out of a little box, and with these in an +instant she so arrayed herself that she looked like a great and rich +lady. All this, and more, she said, she had taken from home in case of +need, but that until then she had had no occasion to make use of it. They +were all highly delighted with her grace, air, and beauty, and declared +Don Fernando to be a man of very little taste when he rejected such +charms. But the one who admired her most was Sancho Panza, for it seemed +to him (what indeed was true) that in all the days of his life he had +never seen such a lovely creature; and he asked the curate with great +eagerness who this beautiful lady was, and what she wanted in these +out-of-the-way quarters. + +"This fair lady, brother Sancho," replied the curate, "is no less a +personage than the heiress in the direct male line of the great kingdom +of Micomicon, who has come in search of your master to beg a boon of him, +which is that he redress a wrong or injury that a wicked giant has done +her; and from the fame as a good knight which your master has acquired +far and wide, this princess has come from Guinea to seek him." + +"A lucky seeking and a lucky finding!" said Sancho Panza at this; +"especially if my master has the good fortune to redress that injury, and +right that wrong, and kill that son of a bitch of a giant your worship +speaks of; as kill him he will if he meets him, unless, indeed, he +happens to be a phantom; for my master has no power at all against +phantoms. But one thing among others I would beg of you, senor +licentiate, which is, that, to prevent my master taking a fancy to be an +archbishop, for that is what I'm afraid of, your worship would recommend +him to marry this princess at once; for in this way he will be disabled +from taking archbishop's orders, and will easily come into his empire, +and I to the end of my desires; I have been thinking over the matter +carefully, and by what I can make out I find it will not do for me that +my master should become an archbishop, because I am no good for the +Church, as I am married; and for me now, having as I have a wife and +children, to set about obtaining dispensations to enable me to hold a +place of profit under the Church, would be endless work; so that, senor, +it all turns on my master marrying this lady at once--for as yet I do not +know her grace, and so I cannot call her by her name." + +"She is called the Princess Micomicona," said the curate; "for as her +kingdom is Micomicon, it is clear that must be her name." + +"There's no doubt of that," replied Sancho, "for I have known many to +take their name and title from the place where they were born and call +themselves Pedro of Alcala, Juan of Ubeda, and Diego of Valladolid; and +it may be that over there in Guinea queens have the same way of taking +the names of their kingdoms." + +"So it may," said the curate; "and as for your master's marrying, I will +do all in my power towards it:" with which Sancho was as much pleased as +the curate was amazed at his simplicity and at seeing what a hold the +absurdities of his master had taken of his fancy, for he had evidently +persuaded himself that he was going to be an emperor. + +By this time Dorothea had seated herself upon the curate's mule, and the +barber had fitted the ox-tail beard to his face, and they now told Sancho +to conduct them to where Don Quixote was, warning him not to say that he +knew either the licentiate or the barber, as his master's becoming an +emperor entirely depended on his not recognising them; neither the curate +nor Cardenio, however, thought fit to go with them; Cardenio lest he +should remind Don Quixote of the quarrel he had with him, and the curate +as there was no necessity for his presence just yet, so they allowed the +others to go on before them, while they themselves followed slowly on +foot. The curate did not forget to instruct Dorothea how to act, but she +said they might make their minds easy, as everything would be done +exactly as the books of chivalry required and described. + +They had gone about three-quarters of a league when they discovered Don +Quixote in a wilderness of rocks, by this time clothed, but without his +armour; and as soon as Dorothea saw him and was told by Sancho that that +was Don Quixote, she whipped her palfrey, the well-bearded barber +following her, and on coming up to him her squire sprang from his mule +and came forward to receive her in his arms, and she dismounting with +great ease of manner advanced to kneel before the feet of Don Quixote; +and though he strove to raise her up, she without rising addressed him in +this fashion: + +"From this spot I will not rise, valiant and doughty knight, until your +goodness and courtesy grant me a boon, which will redound to the honour +and renown of your person and render a service to the most disconsolate +and afflicted damsel the sun has seen; and if the might of your strong +arm corresponds to the repute of your immortal fame, you are bound to aid +the helpless being who, led by the savour of your renowned name, hath +come from far distant lands to seek your aid in her misfortunes." + +"I will not answer a word, beauteous lady," replied Don Quixote, "nor +will I listen to anything further concerning you, until you rise from the +earth." + +"I will not rise, senor," answered the afflicted damsel, "unless of your +courtesy the boon I ask is first granted me." + +"I grant and accord it," said Don Quixote, "provided without detriment or +prejudice to my king, my country, or her who holds the key of my heart +and freedom, it may be complied with." + +"It will not be to the detriment or prejudice of any of them, my worthy +lord," said the afflicted damsel; and here Sancho Panza drew close to his +master's ear and said to him very softly, "Your worship may very safely +grant the boon she asks; it's nothing at all; only to kill a big giant; +and she who asks it is the exalted Princess Micomicona, queen of the +great kingdom of Micomicon of Ethiopia." + +"Let her be who she may," replied Don Quixote, "I will do what is my +bounden duty, and what my conscience bids me, in conformity with what I +have professed;" and turning to the damsel he said, "Let your great +beauty rise, for I grant the boon which you would ask of me." + +"Then what I ask," said the damsel, "is that your magnanimous person +accompany me at once whither I will conduct you, and that you promise not +to engage in any other adventure or quest until you have avenged me of a +traitor who against all human and divine law, has usurped my kingdom." + +"I repeat that I grant it," replied Don Quixote; "and so, lady, you may +from this day forth lay aside the melancholy that distresses you, and let +your failing hopes gather new life and strength, for with the help of God +and of my arm you will soon see yourself restored to your kingdom, and +seated upon the throne of your ancient and mighty realm, notwithstanding +and despite of the felons who would gainsay it; and now hands to the +work, for in delay there is apt to be danger." + +The distressed damsel strove with much pertinacity to kiss his hands; but +Don Quixote, who was in all things a polished and courteous knight, would +by no means allow it, but made her rise and embraced her with great +courtesy and politeness, and ordered Sancho to look to Rocinante's +girths, and to arm him without a moment's delay. Sancho took down the +armour, which was hung up on a tree like a trophy, and having seen to the +girths armed his master in a trice, who as soon as he found himself in +his armour exclaimed: + +"Let us be gone in the name of God to bring aid to this great lady." + +The barber was all this time on his knees at great pains to hide his +laughter and not let his beard fall, for had it fallen maybe their fine +scheme would have come to nothing; but now seeing the boon granted, and +the promptitude with which Don Quixote prepared to set out in compliance +with it, he rose and took his lady's hand, and between them they placed +her upon the mule. Don Quixote then mounted Rocinante, and the barber +settled himself on his beast, Sancho being left to go on foot, which made +him feel anew the loss of his Dapple, finding the want of him now. But he +bore all with cheerfulness, being persuaded that his master had now +fairly started and was just on the point of becoming an emperor; for he +felt no doubt at all that he would marry this princess, and be king of +Micomicon at least. The only thing that troubled him was the reflection +that this kingdom was in the land of the blacks, and that the people they +would give him for vassals would be all black; but for this he soon found +a remedy in his fancy, and said he to himself, "What is it to me if my +vassals are blacks? What more have I to do than make a cargo of them and +carry them to Spain, where I can sell them and get ready money for them, +and with it buy some title or some office in which to live at ease all +the days of my life? Not unless you go to sleep and haven't the wit or +skill to turn things to account and sell three, six, or ten thousand +vassals while you would be talking about it! By God I will stir them up, +big and little, or as best I can, and let them be ever so black I'll turn +them into white or yellow. Come, come, what a fool I am!" And so he +jogged on, so occupied with his thoughts and easy in his mind that he +forgot all about the hardship of travelling on foot. + +Cardenio and the curate were watching all this from among some bushes, +not knowing how to join company with the others; but the curate, who was +very fertile in devices, soon hit upon a way of effecting their purpose, +and with a pair of scissors he had in a case he quickly cut off +Cardenio's beard, and putting on him a grey jerkin of his own he gave him +a black cloak, leaving himself in his breeches and doublet, while +Cardenio's appearance was so different from what it had been that he +would not have known himself had he seen himself in a mirror. Having +effected this, although the others had gone on ahead while they were +disguising themselves, they easily came out on the high road before them, +for the brambles and awkward places they encountered did not allow those +on horseback to go as fast as those on foot. They then posted themselves +on the level ground at the outlet of the Sierra, and as soon as Don +Quixote and his companions emerged from it the curate began to examine +him very deliberately, as though he were striving to recognise him, and +after having stared at him for some time he hastened towards him with +open arms exclaiming, "A happy meeting with the mirror of chivalry, my +worthy compatriot Don Quixote of La Mancha, the flower and cream of high +breeding, the protection and relief of the distressed, the quintessence +of knights-errant!" And so saying he clasped in his arms the knee of Don +Quixote's left leg. He, astonished at the stranger's words and behaviour, +looked at him attentively, and at length recognised him, very much +surprised to see him there, and made great efforts to dismount. This, +however, the curate would not allow, on which Don Quixote said, "Permit +me, senor licentiate, for it is not fitting that I should be on horseback +and so reverend a person as your worship on foot." + +"On no account will I allow it," said the curate; "your mightiness must +remain on horseback, for it is on horseback you achieve the greatest +deeds and adventures that have been beheld in our age; as for me, an +unworthy priest, it will serve me well enough to mount on the haunches of +one of the mules of these gentlefolk who accompany your worship, if they +have no objection, and I will fancy I am mounted on the steed Pegasus, or +on the zebra or charger that bore the famous Moor, Muzaraque, who to this +day lies enchanted in the great hill of Zulema, a little distance from +the great Complutum." + +"Nor even that will I consent to, senor licentiate," answered Don +Quixote, "and I know it will be the good pleasure of my lady the +princess, out of love for me, to order her squire to give up the saddle +of his mule to your worship, and he can sit behind if the beast will bear +it." + +"It will, I am sure," said the princess, "and I am sure, too, that I need +not order my squire, for he is too courteous and considerate to allow a +Churchman to go on foot when he might be mounted." + +"That he is," said the barber, and at once alighting, he offered his +saddle to the curate, who accepted it without much entreaty; but +unfortunately as the barber was mounting behind, the mule, being as it +happened a hired one, which is the same thing as saying ill-conditioned, +lifted its hind hoofs and let fly a couple of kicks in the air, which +would have made Master Nicholas wish his expedition in quest of Don +Quixote at the devil had they caught him on the breast or head. As it +was, they so took him by surprise that he came to the ground, giving so +little heed to his beard that it fell off, and all he could do when he +found himself without it was to cover his face hastily with both his +hands and moan that his teeth were knocked out. Don Quixote when he saw +all that bundle of beard detached, without jaws or blood, from the face +of the fallen squire, exclaimed: + +"By the living God, but this is a great miracle! it has knocked off and +plucked away the beard from his face as if it had been shaved off +designedly." + +The curate, seeing the danger of discovery that threatened his scheme, at +once pounced upon the beard and hastened with it to where Master Nicholas +lay, still uttering moans, and drawing his head to his breast had it on +in an instant, muttering over him some words which he said were a certain +special charm for sticking on beards, as they would see; and as soon as +he had it fixed he left him, and the squire appeared well bearded and +whole as before, whereat Don Quixote was beyond measure astonished, and +begged the curate to teach him that charm when he had an opportunity, as +he was persuaded its virtue must extend beyond the sticking on of beards, +for it was clear that where the beard had been stripped off the flesh +must have remained torn and lacerated, and when it could heal all that it +must be good for more than beards. + +"And so it is," said the curate, and he promised to teach it to him on +the first opportunity. They then agreed that for the present the curate +should mount, and that the three should ride by turns until they reached +the inn, which might be about six leagues from where they were. + +Three then being mounted, that is to say, Don Quixote, the princess, and +the curate, and three on foot, Cardenio, the barber, and Sancho Panza, +Don Quixote said to the damsel: + +"Let your highness, lady, lead on whithersoever is most pleasing to you;" +but before she could answer the licentiate said: + +"Towards what kingdom would your ladyship direct our course? Is it +perchance towards that of Micomicon? It must be, or else I know little +about kingdoms." + +She, being ready on all points, understood that she was to answer "Yes," +so she said "Yes, senor, my way lies towards that kingdom." + +"In that case," said the curate, "we must pass right through my village, +and there your worship will take the road to Cartagena, where you will be +able to embark, fortune favouring; and if the wind be fair and the sea +smooth and tranquil, in somewhat less than nine years you may come in +sight of the great lake Meona, I mean Meotides, which is little more than +a hundred days' journey this side of your highness's kingdom." + +"Your worship is mistaken, senor," said she; "for it is not two years +since I set out from it, and though I never had good weather, +nevertheless I am here to behold what I so longed for, and that is my +lord Don Quixote of La Mancha, whose fame came to my ears as soon as I +set foot in Spain and impelled me to go in search of him, to commend +myself to his courtesy, and entrust the justice of my cause to the might +of his invincible arm." + +"Enough; no more praise," said Don Quixote at this, "for I hate all +flattery; and though this may not be so, still language of the kind is +offensive to my chaste ears. I will only say, senora, that whether it has +might or not, that which it may or may not have shall be devoted to your +service even to death; and now, leaving this to its proper season, I +would ask the senor licentiate to tell me what it is that has brought him +into these parts, alone, unattended, and so lightly clad that I am filled +with amazement." + +"I will answer that briefly," replied the curate; "you must know then, +Senor Don Quixote, that Master Nicholas, our friend and barber, and I +were going to Seville to receive some money that a relative of mine who +went to the Indies many years ago had sent me, and not such a small sum +but that it was over sixty thousand pieces of eight, full weight, which +is something; and passing by this place yesterday we were attacked by +four footpads, who stripped us even to our beards, and them they stripped +off so that the barber found it necessary to put on a false one, and even +this young man here"-pointing to Cardenio--"they completely transformed. +But the best of it is, the story goes in the neighbourhood that those who +attacked us belong to a number of galley slaves who, they say, were set +free almost on the very same spot by a man of such valour that, in spite +of the commissary and of the guards, he released the whole of them; and +beyond all doubt he must have been out of his senses, or he must be as +great a scoundrel as they, or some man without heart or conscience to let +the wolf loose among the sheep, the fox among the hens, the fly among the +honey. He has defrauded justice, and opposed his king and lawful master, +for he opposed his just commands; he has, I say, robbed the galleys of +their feet, stirred up the Holy Brotherhood which for many years past has +been quiet, and, lastly, has done a deed by which his soul may be lost +without any gain to his body." Sancho had told the curate and the barber +of the adventure of the galley slaves, which, so much to his glory, his +master had achieved, and hence the curate in alluding to it made the most +of it to see what would be said or done by Don Quixote; who changed +colour at every word, not daring to say that it was he who had been the +liberator of those worthy people. "These, then," said the curate, "were +they who robbed us; and God in his mercy pardon him who would not let +them go to the punishment they deserved." + +Chapter XXX. - +Which treats of address displayed by the fair Dorothea, with other +matters pleasant and amusing + +The curate had hardly ceased speaking, when Sancho said, "In faith, then, +senor licentiate, he who did that deed was my master; and it was not for +want of my telling him beforehand and warning him to mind what he was +about, and that it was a sin to set them at liberty, as they were all on +the march there because they were special scoundrels." + +"Blockhead!" said Don Quixote at this, "it is no business or concern of +knights-errant to inquire whether any persons in affliction, in chains, +or oppressed that they may meet on the high roads go that way and suffer +as they do because of their faults or because of their misfortunes. It +only concerns them to aid them as persons in need of help, having regard +to their sufferings and not to their rascalities. I encountered a chaplet +or string of miserable and unfortunate people, and did for them what my +sense of duty demands of me, and as for the rest be that as it may; and +whoever takes objection to it, saving the sacred dignity of the senor +licentiate and his honoured person, I say he knows little about chivalry +and lies like a whoreson villain, and this I will give him to know to the +fullest extent with my sword;" and so saying he settled himself in his +stirrups and pressed down his morion; for the barber's basin, which +according to him was Mambrino's helmet, he carried hanging at the +saddle-bow until he could repair the damage done to it by the galley +slaves. + +Dorothea, who was shrewd and sprightly, and by this time thoroughly +understood Don Quixote's crazy turn, and that all except Sancho Panza +were making game of him, not to be behind the rest said to him, on +observing his irritation, "Sir Knight, remember the boon you have +promised me, and that in accordance with it you must not engage in any +other adventure, be it ever so pressing; calm yourself, for if the +licentiate had known that the galley slaves had been set free by that +unconquered arm he would have stopped his mouth thrice over, or even +bitten his tongue three times before he would have said a word that +tended towards disrespect of your worship." + +"That I swear heartily," said the curate, "and I would have even plucked +off a moustache." + +"I will hold my peace, senora," said Don Quixote, "and I will curb the +natural anger that had arisen in my breast, and will proceed in peace and +quietness until I have fulfilled my promise; but in return for this +consideration I entreat you to tell me, if you have no objection to do +so, what is the nature of your trouble, and how many, who, and what are +the persons of whom I am to require due satisfaction, and on whom I am to +take vengeance on your behalf?" + +"That I will do with all my heart," replied Dorothea, "if it will not be +wearisome to you to hear of miseries and misfortunes." + +"It will not be wearisome, senora," said Don Quixote; to which Dorothea +replied, "Well, if that be so, give me your attention." As soon as she +said this, Cardenio and the barber drew close to her side, eager to hear +what sort of story the quick-witted Dorothea would invent for herself; +and Sancho did the same, for he was as much taken in by her as his +master; and she having settled herself comfortably in the saddle, and +with the help of coughing and other preliminaries taken time to think, +began with great sprightliness of manner in this fashion. + +"First of all, I would have you know, sirs, that my name is-" and here +she stopped for a moment, for she forgot the name the curate had given +her; but he came to her relief, seeing what her difficulty was, and said, +"It is no wonder, senora, that your highness should be confused and +embarrassed in telling the tale of your misfortunes; for such afflictions +often have the effect of depriving the sufferers of memory, so that they +do not even remember their own names, as is the case now with your +ladyship, who has forgotten that she is called the Princess Micomicona, +lawful heiress of the great kingdom of Micomicon; and with this cue your +highness may now recall to your sorrowful recollection all you may wish +to tell us." + +"That is the truth," said the damsel; "but I think from this on I shall +have no need of any prompting, and I shall bring my true story safe into +port, and here it is. The king my father, who was called Tinacrio the +Sapient, was very learned in what they call magic arts, and became aware +by his craft that my mother, who was called Queen Jaramilla, was to die +before he did, and that soon after he too was to depart this life, and I +was to be left an orphan without father or mother. But all this, he +declared, did not so much grieve or distress him as his certain knowledge +that a prodigious giant, the lord of a great island close to our kingdom, +Pandafilando of the Scowl by name--for it is averred that, though his +eyes are properly placed and straight, he always looks askew as if he +squinted, and this he does out of malignity, to strike fear and terror +into those he looks at--that he knew, I say, that this giant on becoming +aware of my orphan condition would overrun my kingdom with a mighty force +and strip me of all, not leaving me even a small village to shelter me; +but that I could avoid all this ruin and misfortune if I were willing to +marry him; however, as far as he could see, he never expected that I +would consent to a marriage so unequal; and he said no more than the +truth in this, for it has never entered my mind to marry that giant, or +any other, let him be ever so great or enormous. My father said, too, +that when he was dead, and I saw Pandafilando about to invade my kingdom, +I was not to wait and attempt to defend myself, for that would be +destructive to me, but that I should leave the kingdom entirely open to +him if I wished to avoid the death and total destruction of my good and +loyal vassals, for there would be no possibility of defending myself +against the giant's devilish power; and that I should at once with some +of my followers set out for Spain, where I should obtain relief in my +distress on finding a certain knight-errant whose fame by that time would +extend over the whole kingdom, and who would be called, if I remember +rightly, Don Azote or Don Gigote." + +"'Don Quixote,' he must have said, senora," observed Sancho at this, +"otherwise called the Knight of the Rueful Countenance." + +"That is it," said Dorothea; "he said, moreover, that he would be tall of +stature and lank featured; and that on his right side under the left +shoulder, or thereabouts, he would have a grey mole with hairs like +bristles." + +On hearing this, Don Quixote said to his squire, "Here, Sancho my son, +bear a hand and help me to strip, for I want to see if I am the knight +that sage king foretold." + +"What does your worship want to strip for?" said Dorothea. + +"To see if I have that mole your father spoke of," answered Don Quixote. + +"There is no occasion to strip," said Sancho; "for I know your worship +has just such a mole on the middle of your backbone, which is the mark of +a strong man." + +"That is enough," said Dorothea, "for with friends we must not look too +closely into trifles; and whether it be on the shoulder or on the +backbone matters little; it is enough if there is a mole, be it where it +may, for it is all the same flesh; no doubt my good father hit the truth +in every particular, and I have made a lucky hit in commending myself to +Don Quixote; for he is the one my father spoke of, as the features of his +countenance correspond with those assigned to this knight by that wide +fame he has acquired not only in Spain but in all La Mancha; for I had +scarcely landed at Osuna when I heard such accounts of his achievements, +that at once my heart told me he was the very one I had come in search +of." + +"But how did you land at Osuna, senora," asked Don Quixote, "when it is +not a seaport?" + +But before Dorothea could reply the curate anticipated her, saying, "The +princess meant to say that after she had landed at Malaga the first place +where she heard of your worship was Osuna." + +"That is what I meant to say," said Dorothea. + +"And that would be only natural," said the curate. "Will your majesty +please proceed?" + +"There is no more to add," said Dorothea, "save that in finding Don +Quixote I have had such good fortune, that I already reckon and regard +myself queen and mistress of my entire dominions, since of his courtesy +and magnanimity he has granted me the boon of accompanying me +whithersoever I may conduct him, which will be only to bring him face to +face with Pandafilando of the Scowl, that he may slay him and restore to +me what has been unjustly usurped by him: for all this must come to pass +satisfactorily since my good father Tinacrio the Sapient foretold it, who +likewise left it declared in writing in Chaldee or Greek characters (for +I cannot read them), that if this predicted knight, after having cut the +giant's throat, should be disposed to marry me I was to offer myself at +once without demur as his lawful wife, and yield him possession of my +kingdom together with my person." + +"What thinkest thou now, friend Sancho?" said Don Quixote at this. +"Hearest thou that? Did I not tell thee so? See how we have already got a +kingdom to govern and a queen to marry!" + +"On my oath it is so," said Sancho; "and foul fortune to him who won't +marry after slitting Senor Pandahilado's windpipe! And then, how +ill-favoured the queen is! I wish the fleas in my bed were that sort!" + +And so saying he cut a couple of capers in the air with every sign of +extreme satisfaction, and then ran to seize the bridle of Dorothea's +mule, and checking it fell on his knees before her, begging her to give +him her hand to kiss in token of his acknowledgment of her as his queen +and mistress. Which of the bystanders could have helped laughing to see +the madness of the master and the simplicity of the servant? Dorothea +therefore gave her hand, and promised to make him a great lord in her +kingdom, when Heaven should be so good as to permit her to recover and +enjoy it, for which Sancho returned thanks in words that set them all +laughing again. + +"This, sirs," continued Dorothea, "is my story; it only remains to tell +you that of all the attendants I took with me from my kingdom I have none +left except this well-bearded squire, for all were drowned in a great +tempest we encountered when in sight of port; and he and I came to land +on a couple of planks as if by a miracle; and indeed the whole course of +my life is a miracle and a mystery as you may have observed; and if I +have been over minute in any respect or not as precise as I ought, let it +be accounted for by what the licentiate said at the beginning of my tale, +that constant and excessive troubles deprive the sufferers of their +memory." + +"They shall not deprive me of mine, exalted and worthy princess," said +Don Quixote, "however great and unexampled those which I shall endure in +your service may be; and here I confirm anew the boon I have promised +you, and I swear to go with you to the end of the world until I find +myself in the presence of your fierce enemy, whose haughty head I trust +by the aid of my arm to cut off with the edge of this--I will not say +good sword, thanks to Gines de Pasamonte who carried away mine"--(this he +said between his teeth, and then continued), "and when it has been cut +off and you have been put in peaceful possession of your realm it shall +be left to your own decision to dispose of your person as may be most +pleasing to you; for so long as my memory is occupied, my will enslaved, +and my understanding enthralled by her-I say no more--it is impossible +for me for a moment to contemplate marriage, even with a Phoenix." + +The last words of his master about not wanting to marry were so +disagreeable to Sancho that raising his voice he exclaimed with great +irritation: + +"By my oath, Senor Don Quixote, you are not in your right senses; for how +can your worship possibly object to marrying such an exalted princess as +this? Do you think Fortune will offer you behind every stone such a piece +of luck as is offered you now? Is my lady Dulcinea fairer, perchance? Not +she; nor half as fair; and I will even go so far as to say she does not +come up to the shoe of this one here. A poor chance I have of getting +that county I am waiting for if your worship goes looking for dainties in +the bottom of the sea. In the devil's name, marry, marry, and take this +kingdom that comes to hand without any trouble, and when you are king +make me a marquis or governor of a province, and for the rest let the +devil take it all." + +Don Quixote, when he heard such blasphemies uttered against his lady +Dulcinea, could not endure it, and lifting his pike, without saying +anything to Sancho or uttering a word, he gave him two such thwacks that +he brought him to the ground; and had it not been that Dorothea cried out +to him to spare him he would have no doubt taken his life on the spot. + +"Do you think," he said to him after a pause, "you scurvy clown, that you +are to be always interfering with me, and that you are to be always +offending and I always pardoning? Don't fancy it, impious scoundrel, for +that beyond a doubt thou art, since thou hast set thy tongue going +against the peerless Dulcinea. Know you not, lout, vagabond, beggar, that +were it not for the might that she infuses into my arm I should not have +strength enough to kill a flea? Say, scoffer with a viper's tongue, what +think you has won this kingdom and cut off this giant's head and made you +a marquis (for all this I count as already accomplished and decided), but +the might of Dulcinea, employing my arm as the instrument of her +achievements? She fights in me and conquers in me, and I live and breathe +in her, and owe my life and being to her. O whoreson scoundrel, how +ungrateful you are, you see yourself raised from the dust of the earth to +be a titled lord, and the return you make for so great a benefit is to +speak evil of her who has conferred it upon you!" + +Sancho was not so stunned but that he heard all his master said, and +rising with some degree of nimbleness he ran to place himself behind +Dorothea's palfrey, and from that position he said to his master: + +"Tell me, senor; if your worship is resolved not to marry this great +princess, it is plain the kingdom will not be yours; and not being so, +how can you bestow favours upon me? That is what I complain of. Let your +worship at any rate marry this queen, now that we have got her here as if +showered down from heaven, and afterwards you may go back to my lady +Dulcinea; for there must have been kings in the world who kept +mistresses. As to beauty, I have nothing to do with it; and if the truth +is to be told, I like them both; though I have never seen the lady +Dulcinea." + +"How! never seen her, blasphemous traitor!" exclaimed Don Quixote; "hast +thou not just now brought me a message from her?" + +"I mean," said Sancho, "that I did not see her so much at my leisure that +I could take particular notice of her beauty, or of her charms piecemeal; +but taken in the lump I like her." + +"Now I forgive thee," said Don Quixote; "and do thou forgive me the +injury I have done thee; for our first impulses are not in our control." + +"That I see," replied Sancho, "and with me the wish to speak is always +the first impulse, and I cannot help saying, once at any rate, what I +have on the tip of my tongue." + +"For all that, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "take heed of what thou sayest, +for the pitcher goes so often to the well--I need say no more to thee." + +"Well, well," said Sancho, "God is in heaven, and sees all tricks, and +will judge who does most harm, I in not speaking right, or your worship +in not doing it." + +"That is enough," said Dorothea; "run, Sancho, and kiss your lord's hand +and beg his pardon, and henceforward be more circumspect with your praise +and abuse; and say nothing in disparagement of that lady Toboso, of whom +I know nothing save that I am her servant; and put your trust in God, for +you will not fail to obtain some dignity so as to live like a prince." + +Sancho advanced hanging his head and begged his master's hand, which Don +Quixote with dignity presented to him, giving him his blessing as soon as +he had kissed it; he then bade him go on ahead a little, as he had +questions to ask him and matters of great importance to discuss with him. +Sancho obeyed, and when the two had gone some distance in advance Don +Quixote said to him, "Since thy return I have had no opportunity or time +to ask thee many particulars touching thy mission and the answer thou +hast brought back, and now that chance has granted us the time and +opportunity, deny me not the happiness thou canst give me by such good +news." + +"Let your worship ask what you will," answered Sancho, "for I shall find +a way out of all as as I found a way in; but I implore you, senor, not +not to be so revengeful in future." + +"Why dost thou say that, Sancho?" said Don Quixote. + +"I say it," he returned, "because those blows just now were more because +of the quarrel the devil stirred up between us both the other night, than +for what I said against my lady Dulcinea, whom I love and reverence as I +would a relic--though there is nothing of that about her--merely as +something belonging to your worship." + +"Say no more on that subject for thy life, Sancho," said Don Quixote, +"for it is displeasing to me; I have already pardoned thee for that, and +thou knowest the common saying, 'for a fresh sin a fresh penance.'" + +While this was going on they saw coming along the road they were +following a man mounted on an ass, who when he came close seemed to be a +gipsy; but Sancho Panza, whose eyes and heart were there wherever he saw +asses, no sooner beheld the man than he knew him to be Gines de +Pasamonte; and by the thread of the gipsy he got at the ball, his ass, +for it was, in fact, Dapple that carried Pasamonte, who to escape +recognition and to sell the ass had disguised himself as a gipsy, being +able to speak the gipsy language, and many more, as well as if they were +his own. Sancho saw him and recognised him, and the instant he did so he +shouted to him, "Ginesillo, you thief, give up my treasure, release my +life, embarrass thyself not with my repose, quit my ass, leave my +delight, be off, rip, get thee gone, thief, and give up what is not +thine." + +There was no necessity for so many words or objurgations, for at the +first one Gines jumped down, and at a like racing speed made off and got +clear of them all. Sancho hastened to his Dapple, and embracing him he +said, "How hast thou fared, my blessing, Dapple of my eyes, my comrade?" +all the while kissing him and caressing him as if he were a human being. +The ass held his peace, and let himself be kissed and caressed by Sancho +without answering a single word. They all came up and congratulated him +on having found Dapple, Don Quixote especially, who told him that +notwithstanding this he would not cancel the order for the three +ass-colts, for which Sancho thanked him. + +While the two had been going along conversing in this fashion, the curate +observed to Dorothea that she had shown great cleverness, as well in the +story itself as in its conciseness, and the resemblance it bore to those +of the books of chivalry. She said that she had many times amused herself +reading them; but that she did not know the situation of the provinces or +seaports, and so she had said at haphazard that she had landed at Osuna. + +"So I saw," said the curate, "and for that reason I made haste to say +what I did, by which it was all set right. But is it not a strange thing +to see how readily this unhappy gentleman believes all these figments and +lies, simply because they are in the style and manner of the absurdities +of his books?" + +"So it is," said Cardenio; "and so uncommon and unexampled, that were one +to attempt to invent and concoct it in fiction, I doubt if there be any +wit keen enough to imagine it." + +"But another strange thing about it," said the curate, "is that, apart +from the silly things which this worthy gentleman says in connection with +his craze, when other subjects are dealt with, he can discuss them in a +perfectly rational manner, showing that his mind is quite clear and +composed; so that, provided his chivalry is not touched upon, no one +would take him to be anything but a man of thoroughly sound +understanding." + +While they were holding this conversation Don Quixote continued his with +Sancho, saying: + +"Friend Panza, let us forgive and forget as to our quarrels, and tell me +now, dismissing anger and irritation, where, how, and when didst thou +find Dulcinea? What was she doing? What didst thou say to her? What did +she answer? How did she look when she was reading my letter? Who copied +it out for thee? and everything in the matter that seems to thee worth +knowing, asking, and learning; neither adding nor falsifying to give me +pleasure, nor yet curtailing lest you should deprive me of it." + +"Senor," replied Sancho, "if the truth is to be told, nobody copied out +the letter for me, for I carried no letter at all." + +"It is as thou sayest," said Don Quixote, "for the note-book in which I +wrote it I found in my own possession two days after thy departure, which +gave me very great vexation, as I knew not what thou wouldst do on +finding thyself without any letter; and I made sure thou wouldst return +from the place where thou didst first miss it." + +"So I should have done," said Sancho, "if I had not got it by heart when +your worship read it to me, so that I repeated it to a sacristan, who +copied it out for me from hearing it, so exactly that he said in all the +days of his life, though he had read many a letter of excommunication, he +had never seen or read so pretty a letter as that." + +"And hast thou got it still in thy memory, Sancho?" said Don Quixote. + +"No, senor," replied Sancho, "for as soon as I had repeated it, seeing +there was no further use for it, I set about forgetting it; and if I +recollect any of it, it is that about 'Scrubbing,'I mean to say +'Sovereign Lady,' and the end 'Yours till death, the Knight of the Rueful +Countenance;' and between these two I put into it more than three hundred +'my souls' and 'my life's' and 'my eyes." + +Chapter XXXI. - +Of the delectable discussion between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, his +squire, together with other incidents + +"All that is not unsatisfactory to me," said Don Quixote. "Go on; thou +didst reach her; and what was that queen of beauty doing? Surely thou +didst find her stringing pearls, or embroidering some device in gold +thread for this her enslaved knight." + +"I did not," said Sancho, "but I found her winnowing two bushels of wheat +in the yard of her house." + +"Then depend upon it," said Don Quixote, "the grains of that wheat were +pearls when touched by her hands; and didst thou look, friend? was it +white wheat or brown?" + +"It was neither, but red," said Sancho. + +"Then I promise thee," said Don Quixote, "that, winnowed by her hands, +beyond a doubt the bread it made was of the whitest; but go on; when thou +gavest her my letter, did she kiss it? Did she place it on her head? Did +she perform any ceremony befitting it, or what did she do?" + +"When I went to give it to her," replied Sancho, "she was hard at it +swaying from side to side with a lot of wheat she had in the sieve, and +she said to me, 'Lay the letter, friend, on the top of that sack, for I +cannot read it until I have done sifting all this." + +"Discreet lady!" said Don Quixote; "that was in order to read it at her +leisure and enjoy it; proceed, Sancho; while she was engaged in her +occupation what converse did she hold with thee? What did she ask about +me, and what answer didst thou give? Make haste; tell me all, and let not +an atom be left behind in the ink-bottle." + +"She asked me nothing," said Sancho; "but I told her how your worship was +left doing penance in her service, naked from the waist up, in among +these mountains like a savage, sleeping on the ground, not eating bread +off a tablecloth nor combing your beard, weeping and cursing your +fortune." + +"In saying I cursed my fortune thou saidst wrong," said Don Quixote; "for +rather do I bless it and shall bless it all the days of my life for +having made me worthy of aspiring to love so lofty a lady as Dulcinea del +Toboso." + +"And so lofty she is," said Sancho, "that she overtops me by more than a +hand's-breadth." + +"What! Sancho," said Don Quixote, "didst thou measure with her?" + +"I measured in this way," said Sancho; "going to help her to put a sack +of wheat on the back of an ass, we came so close together that I could +see she stood more than a good palm over me." + +"Well!" said Don Quixote, "and doth she not of a truth accompany and +adorn this greatness with a thousand million charms of mind! But one +thing thou wilt not deny, Sancho; when thou camest close to her didst +thou not perceive a Sabaean odour, an aromatic fragrance, a, I know not +what, delicious, that I cannot find a name for; I mean a redolence, an +exhalation, as if thou wert in the shop of some dainty glover?" + +"All I can say is," said Sancho, "that I did perceive a little odour, +something goaty; it must have been that she was all in a sweat with hard +work." + +"It could not be that," said Don Quixote, "but thou must have been +suffering from cold in the head, or must have smelt thyself; for I know +well what would be the scent of that rose among thorns, that lily of the +field, that dissolved amber." + +"Maybe so," replied Sancho; "there often comes from myself that same +odour which then seemed to me to come from her grace the lady Dulcinea; +but that's no wonder, for one devil is like another." + +"Well then," continued Don Quixote, "now she has done sifting the corn +and sent it to the mill; what did she do when she read the letter?" + +"As for the letter," said Sancho, "she did not read it, for she said she +could neither read nor write; instead of that she tore it up into small +pieces, saying that she did not want to let anyone read it lest her +secrets should become known in the village, and that what I had told her +by word of mouth about the love your worship bore her, and the +extraordinary penance you were doing for her sake, was enough; and, to +make an end of it, she told me to tell your worship that she kissed your +hands, and that she had a greater desire to see you than to write to you; +and that therefore she entreated and commanded you, on sight of this +present, to come out of these thickets, and to have done with carrying on +absurdities, and to set out at once for El Toboso, unless something else +of greater importance should happen, for she had a great desire to see +your worship. She laughed greatly when I told her how your worship was +called The Knight of the Rueful Countenance; I asked her if that Biscayan +the other day had been there; and she told me he had, and that he was an +honest fellow; I asked her too about the galley slaves, but she said she +had not seen any as yet." + +"So far all goes well," said Don Quixote; "but tell me what jewel was it +that she gave thee on taking thy leave, in return for thy tidings of me? +For it is a usual and ancient custom with knights and ladies errant to +give the squires, damsels, or dwarfs who bring tidings of their ladies to +the knights, or of their knights to the ladies, some rich jewel as a +guerdon for good news,' and acknowledgment of the message." + +"That is very likely," said Sancho, "and a good custom it was, to my +mind; but that must have been in days gone by, for now it would seem to +be the custom only to give a piece of bread and cheese; because that was +what my lady Dulcinea gave me over the top of the yard-wall when I took +leave of her; and more by token it was sheep's-milk cheese." + +"She is generous in the extreme," said Don Quixote, "and if she did not +give thee a jewel of gold, no doubt it must have been because she had not +one to hand there to give thee; but sleeves are good after Easter; I +shall see her and all shall be made right. But knowest thou what amazes +me, Sancho? It seems to me thou must have gone and come through the air, +for thou hast taken but little more than three days to go to El Toboso +and return, though it is more than thirty leagues from here to there. +From which I am inclined to think that the sage magician who is my +friend, and watches over my interests (for of necessity there is and must +be one, or else I should not be a right knight-errant), that this same, I +say, must have helped thee to travel without thy knowledge; for some of +these sages will catch up a knight-errant sleeping in his bed, and +without his knowing how or in what way it happened, he wakes up the next +day more than a thousand leagues away from the place where he went to +sleep. And if it were not for this, knights-errant would not be able to +give aid to one another in peril, as they do at every turn. For a knight, +maybe, is fighting in the mountains of Armenia with some dragon, or +fierce serpent, or another knight, and gets the worst of the battle, and +is at the point of death; but when he least looks for it, there appears +over against him on a cloud, or chariot of fire, another knight, a friend +of his, who just before had been in England, and who takes his part, and +delivers him from death; and at night he finds himself in his own +quarters supping very much to his satisfaction; and yet from one place to +the other will have been two or three thousand leagues. And all this is +done by the craft and skill of the sage enchanters who take care of those +valiant knights; so that, friend Sancho, I find no difficulty in +believing that thou mayest have gone from this place to El Toboso and +returned in such a short time, since, as I have said, some friendly sage +must have carried thee through the air without thee perceiving it." + +"That must have been it," said Sancho, "for indeed Rocinante went like a +gipsy's ass with quicksilver in his ears." + +"Quicksilver!" said Don Quixote, "aye and what is more, a legion of +devils, folk that can travel and make others travel without being weary, +exactly as the whim seizes them. But putting this aside, what thinkest +thou I ought to do about my lady's command to go and see her? For though +I feel that I am bound to obey her mandate, I feel too that I am debarred +by the boon I have accorded to the princess that accompanies us, and the +law of chivalry compels me to have regard for my word in preference to my +inclination; on the one hand the desire to see my lady pursues and +harasses me, on the other my solemn promise and the glory I shall win in +this enterprise urge and call me; but what I think I shall do is to +travel with all speed and reach quickly the place where this giant is, +and on my arrival I shall cut off his head, and establish the princess +peacefully in her realm, and forthwith I shall return to behold the light +that lightens my senses, to whom I shall make such excuses that she will +be led to approve of my delay, for she will see that it entirely tends to +increase her glory and fame; for all that I have won, am winning, or +shall win by arms in this life, comes to me of the favour she extends to +me, and because I am hers." + +"Ah! what a sad state your worship's brains are in!" said Sancho. "Tell +me, senor, do you mean to travel all that way for nothing, and to let +slip and lose so rich and great a match as this where they give as a +portion a kingdom that in sober truth I have heard say is more than +twenty thousand leagues round about, and abounds with all things +necessary to support human life, and is bigger than Portugal and Castile +put together? Peace, for the love of God! Blush for what you have said, +and take my advice, and forgive me, and marry at once in the first +village where there is a curate; if not, here is our licentiate who will +do the business beautifully; remember, I am old enough to give advice, +and this I am giving comes pat to the purpose; for a sparrow in the hand +is better than a vulture on the wing, and he who has the good to his hand +and chooses the bad, that the good he complains of may not come to him." + +"Look here, Sancho," said Don Quixote. "If thou art advising me to marry, +in order that immediately on slaying the giant I may become king, and be +able to confer favours on thee, and give thee what I have promised, let +me tell thee I shall be able very easily to satisfy thy desires without +marrying; for before going into battle I will make it a stipulation that, +if I come out of it victorious, even I do not marry, they shall give me a +portion portion of the kingdom, that I may bestow it upon whomsoever I +choose, and when they give it to me upon whom wouldst thou have me bestow +it but upon thee?" + +"That is plain speaking," said Sancho; "but let your worship take care to +choose it on the seacoast, so that if I don't like the life, I may be +able to ship off my black vassals and deal with them as I have said; +don't mind going to see my lady Dulcinea now, but go and kill this giant +and let us finish off this business; for by God it strikes me it will be +one of great honour and great profit." + +"I hold thou art in the right of it, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "and I +will take thy advice as to accompanying the princess before going to see +Dulcinea; but I counsel thee not to say anything to any one, or to those +who are with us, about what we have considered and discussed, for as +Dulcinea is so decorous that she does not wish her thoughts to be known +it is not right that I or anyone for me should disclose them." + +"Well then, if that be so," said Sancho, "how is it that your worship +makes all those you overcome by your arm go to present themselves before +my lady Dulcinea, this being the same thing as signing your name to it +that you love her and are her lover? And as those who go must perforce +kneel before her and say they come from your worship to submit themselves +to her, how can the thoughts of both of you be hid?" + +"O, how silly and simple thou art!" said Don Quixote; "seest thou not, +Sancho, that this tends to her greater exaltation? For thou must know +that according to our way of thinking in chivalry, it is a high honour to +a lady to have many knights-errant in her service, whose thoughts never +go beyond serving her for her own sake, and who look for no other reward +for their great and true devotion than that she should be willing to +accept them as her knights." + +"It is with that kind of love," said Sancho, "I have heard preachers say +we ought to love our Lord, for himself alone, without being moved by the +hope of glory or the fear of punishment; though for my part, I would +rather love and serve him for what he could do." + +"The devil take thee for a clown!" said Don Quixote, "and what shrewd +things thou sayest at times! One would think thou hadst studied." + +"In faith, then, I cannot even read." + +Master Nicholas here called out to them to wait a while, as they wanted +to halt and drink at a little spring there was there. Don Quixote drew +up, not a little to the satisfaction of Sancho, for he was by this time +weary of telling so many lies, and in dread of his master catching him +tripping, for though he knew that Dulcinea was a peasant girl of El +Toboso, he had never seen her in all his life. Cardenio had now put on +the clothes which Dorothea was wearing when they found her, and though +they were not very good, they were far better than those he put off. They +dismounted together by the side of the spring, and with what the curate +had provided himself with at the inn they appeased, though not very well, +the keen appetite they all of them brought with them. + +While they were so employed there happened to come by a youth passing on +his way, who stopping to examine the party at the spring, the next moment +ran to Don Quixote and clasping him round the legs, began to weep freely, +saying, "O, senor, do you not know me? Look at me well; I am that lad +Andres that your worship released from the oak-tree where I was tied." + +Don Quixote recognised him, and taking his hand he turned to those +present and said: "That your worships may see how important it is to have +knights-errant to redress the wrongs and injuries done by tyrannical and +wicked men in this world, I may tell you that some days ago passing +through a wood, I heard cries and piteous complaints as of a person in +pain and distress; I immediately hastened, impelled by my bounden duty, +to the quarter whence the plaintive accents seemed to me to proceed, and +I found tied to an oak this lad who now stands before you, which in my +heart I rejoice at, for his testimony will not permit me to depart from +the truth in any particular. He was, I say, tied to an oak, naked from +the waist up, and a clown, whom I afterwards found to be his master, was +scarifying him by lashes with the reins of his mare. As soon as I saw him +I asked the reason of so cruel a flagellation. The boor replied that he +was flogging him because he was his servant and because of carelessness +that proceeded rather from dishonesty than stupidity; on which this boy +said, 'Senor, he flogs me only because I ask for my wages.' The master +made I know not what speeches and explanations, which, though I listened +to them, I did not accept. In short, I compelled the clown to unbind him, +and to swear he would take him with him, and pay him real by real, and +perfumed into the bargain. Is not all this true, Andres my son? Didst +thou not mark with what authority I commanded him, and with what humility +he promised to do all I enjoined, specified, and required of him? Answer +without hesitation; tell these gentlemen what took place, that they may +see that it is as great an advantage as I say to have knights-errant +abroad." + +"All that your worship has said is quite true," answered the lad; "but +the end of the business turned out just the opposite of what your worship +supposes." + +"How! the opposite?" said Don Quixote; "did not the clown pay thee then?" + +"Not only did he not pay me," replied the lad, "but as soon as your +worship had passed out of the wood and we were alone, he tied me up again +to the same oak and gave me a fresh flogging, that left me like a flayed +Saint Bartholomew; and every stroke he gave me he followed up with some +jest or gibe about having made a fool of your worship, and but for the +pain I was suffering I should have laughed at the things he said. In +short he left me in such a condition that I have been until now in a +hospital getting cured of the injuries which that rascally clown +inflicted on me then; for all which your worship is to blame; for if you +had gone your own way and not come where there was no call for you, nor +meddled in other people's affairs, my master would have been content with +giving me one or two dozen lashes, and would have then loosed me and paid +me what he owed me; but when your worship abused him so out of measure, +and gave him so many hard words, his anger was kindled; and as he could +not revenge himself on you, as soon as he saw you had left him the storm +burst upon me in such a way, that I feel as if I should never be a man +again." + +"The mischief," said Don Quixote, "lay in my going away; for I should not +have gone until I had seen thee paid; because I ought to have known well +by long experience that there is no clown who will keep his word if he +finds it will not suit him to keep it; but thou rememberest, Andres, that +I swore if he did not pay thee I would go and seek him, and find him +though he were to hide himself in the whale's belly." + +"That is true," said Andres; "but it was of no use." + +"Thou shalt see now whether it is of use or not," said Don Quixote; and +so saying, he got up hastily and bade Sancho bridle Rocinante, who was +browsing while they were eating. Dorothea asked him what he meant to do. +He replied that he meant to go in search of this clown and chastise him +for such iniquitous conduct, and see Andres paid to the last maravedi, +despite and in the teeth of all the clowns in the world. To which she +replied that he must remember that in accordance with his promise he +could not engage in any enterprise until he had concluded hers; and that +as he knew this better than anyone, he should restrain his ardour until +his return from her kingdom. + +"That is true," said Don Quixote, "and Andres must have patience until my +return as you say, senora; but I once more swear and promise not to stop +until I have seen him avenged and paid." + +"I have no faith in those oaths," said Andres; "I would rather have now +something to help me to get to Seville than all the revenges in the +world; if you have here anything to eat that I can take with me, give it +me, and God be with your worship and all knights-errant; and may their +errands turn out as well for themselves as they have for me." + +Sancho took out from his store a piece of bread and another of cheese, +and giving them to the lad he said, "Here, take this, brother Andres, for +we have all of us a share in your misfortune." + +"Why, what share have you got?" + +"This share of bread and cheese I am giving you," answered Sancho; "and +God knows whether I shall feel the want of it myself or not; for I would +have you know, friend, that we squires to knights-errant have to bear a +great deal of hunger and hard fortune, and even other things more easily +felt than told." + +Andres seized his bread and cheese, and seeing that nobody gave him +anything more, bent his head, and took hold of the road, as the saying +is. However, before leaving he said, "For the love of God, sir +knight-errant, if you ever meet me again, though you may see them cutting +me to pieces, give me no aid or succour, but leave me to my misfortune, +which will not be so great but that a greater will come to me by being +helped by your worship, on whom and all the knights-errant that have ever +been born God send his curse." + +Don Quixote was getting up to chastise him, but he took to his heels at +such a pace that no one attempted to follow him; and mightily chapfallen +was Don Quixote at Andres' story, and the others had to take great care +to restrain their laughter so as not to put him entirely out of +countenance. + +Chapter XXXII. - +Which treats of what befell Don Quixote's party at the inn + +Their dainty repast being finished, they saddled at once, and without any +adventure worth mentioning they reached next day the inn, the object of +Sancho Panza's fear and dread; but though he would have rather not +entered it, there was no help for it. The landlady, the landlord, their +daughter, and Maritornes, when they saw Don Quixote and Sancho coming, +went out to welcome them with signs of hearty satisfaction, which Don +Quixote received with dignity and gravity, and bade them make up a better +bed for him than the last time: to which the landlady replied that if he +paid better than he did the last time she would give him one fit for a +prince. Don Quixote said he would, so they made up a tolerable one for +him in the same garret as before; and he lay down at once, being sorely +shaken and in want of sleep. + +No sooner was the door shut upon him than the landlady made at the +barber, and seizing him by the beard, said: + +"By my faith you are not going to make a beard of my tail any longer; you +must give me back tail, for it is a shame the way that thing of my +husband's goes tossing about on the floor; I mean the comb that I used to +stick in my good tail." + +But for all she tugged at it the barber would not give it up until the +licentiate told him to let her have it, as there was now no further +occasion for that stratagem, because he might declare himself and appear +in his own character, and tell Don Quixote that he had fled to this inn +when those thieves the galley slaves robbed him; and should he ask for +the princess's squire, they could tell him that she had sent him on +before her to give notice to the people of her kingdom that she was +coming, and bringing with her the deliverer of them all. On this the +barber cheerfully restored the tail to the landlady, and at the same time +they returned all the accessories they had borrowed to effect Don +Quixote's deliverance. All the people of the inn were struck with +astonishment at the beauty of Dorothea, and even at the comely figure of +the shepherd Cardenio. The curate made them get ready such fare as there +was in the inn, and the landlord, in hope of better payment, served them +up a tolerably good dinner. All this time Don Quixote was asleep, and +they thought it best not to waken him, as sleeping would now do him more +good than eating. + +While at dinner, the company consisting of the landlord, his wife, their +daughter, Maritornes, and all the travellers, they discussed the strange +craze of Don Quixote and the manner in which he had been found; and the +landlady told them what had taken place between him and the carrier; and +then, looking round to see if Sancho was there, when she saw he was not, +she gave them the whole story of his blanketing, which they received with +no little amusement. But on the curate observing that it was the books of +chivalry which Don Quixote had read that had turned his brain, the +landlord said: + +"I cannot understand how that can be, for in truth to my mind there is no +better reading in the world, and I have here two or three of them, with +other writings that are the very life, not only of myself but of plenty +more; for when it is harvest-time, the reapers flock here on holidays, +and there is always one among them who can read and who takes up one of +these books, and we gather round him, thirty or more of us, and stay +listening to him with a delight that makes our grey hairs grow young +again. At least I can say for myself that when I hear of what furious and +terrible blows the knights deliver, I am seized with the longing to do +the same, and I would like to be hearing about them night and day." + +"And I just as much," said the landlady, "because I never have a quiet +moment in my house except when you are listening to some one reading; for +then you are so taken up that for the time being you forget to scold." + +"That is true," said Maritornes; "and, faith, I relish hearing these +things greatly too, for they are very pretty; especially when they +describe some lady or another in the arms of her knight under the orange +trees, and the duenna who is keeping watch for them half dead with envy +and fright; all this I say is as good as honey." + +"And you, what do you think, young lady?" said the curate turning to the +landlord's daughter. + +"I don't know indeed, senor," said she; "I listen too, and to tell the +truth, though I do not understand it, I like hearing it; but it is not +the blows that my father likes that I like, but the laments the knights +utter when they are separated from their ladies; and indeed they +sometimes make me weep with the pity I feel for them." + +"Then you would console them if it was for you they wept, young lady?" +said Dorothea. + +"I don't know what I should do," said the girl; "I only know that there +are some of those ladies so cruel that they call their knights tigers and +lions and a thousand other foul names: and Jesus! I don't know what sort +of folk they can be, so unfeeling and heartless, that rather than bestow +a glance upon a worthy man they leave him to die or go mad. I don't know +what is the good of such prudery; if it is for honour's sake, why not +marry them? That's all they want." + +"Hush, child," said the landlady; "it seems to me thou knowest a great +deal about these things, and it is not fit for girls to know or talk so +much." + +"As the gentleman asked me, I could not help answering him," said the +girl. + +"Well then," said the curate, "bring me these books, senor landlord, for +I should like to see them." + +"With all my heart," said he, and going into his own room he brought out +an old valise secured with a little chain, on opening which the curate +found in it three large books and some manuscripts written in a very good +hand. The first that he opened he found to be "Don Cirongilio of Thrace," +and the second "Don Felixmarte of Hircania," and the other the "History +of the Great Captain Gonzalo Hernandez de Cordova, with the Life of Diego +Garcia de Paredes." + +When the curate read the two first titles he looked over at the barber +and said, "We want my friend's housekeeper and niece here now." + +"Nay," said the barber, "I can do just as well to carry them to the yard +or to the hearth, and there is a very good fire there." + +"What! your worship would burn my books!" said the landlord. + +"Only these two," said the curate, "Don Cirongilio, and Felixmarte." + +"Are my books, then, heretics or phlegmaties that you want to burn them?" +said the landlord. + +"Schismatics you mean, friend," said the barber, "not phlegmatics." + +"That's it," said the landlord; "but if you want to burn any, let it be +that about the Great Captain and that Diego Garcia; for I would rather +have a child of mine burnt than either of the others." + +"Brother," said the curate, "those two books are made up of lies, and are +full of folly and nonsense; but this of the Great Captain is a true +history, and contains the deeds of Gonzalo Hernandez of Cordova, who by +his many and great achievements earned the title all over the world of +the Great Captain, a famous and illustrious name, and deserved by him +alone; and this Diego Garcia de Paredes was a distinguished knight of the +city of Trujillo in Estremadura, a most gallant soldier, and of such +bodily strength that with one finger he stopped a mill-wheel in full +motion; and posted with a two-handed sword at the foot of a bridge he +kept the whole of an immense army from passing over it, and achieved such +other exploits that if, instead of his relating them himself with the +modesty of a knight and of one writing his own history, some free and +unbiassed writer had recorded them, they would have thrown into the shade +all the deeds of the Hectors, Achilleses, and Rolands." + +"Tell that to my father," said the landlord. "There's a thing to be +astonished at! Stopping a mill-wheel! By God your worship should read +what I have read of Felixmarte of Hircania, how with one single +backstroke he cleft five giants asunder through the middle as if they had +been made of bean-pods like the little friars the children make; and +another time he attacked a very great and powerful army, in which there +were more than a million six hundred thousand soldiers, all armed from +head to foot, and he routed them all as if they had been flocks of sheep. + +"And then, what do you say to the good Cirongilio of Thrace, that was so +stout and bold; as may be seen in the book, where it is related that as +he was sailing along a river there came up out of the midst of the water +against him a fiery serpent, and he, as soon as he saw it, flung himself +upon it and got astride of its scaly shoulders, and squeezed its throat +with both hands with such force that the serpent, finding he was +throttling it, had nothing for it but to let itself sink to the bottom of +the river, carrying with it the knight who would not let go his hold; and +when they got down there he found himself among palaces and gardens so +pretty that it was a wonder to see; and then the serpent changed itself +into an old ancient man, who told him such things as were never heard. +Hold your peace, senor; for if you were to hear this you would go mad +with delight. A couple of figs for your Great Captain and your Diego +Garcia!" + +Hearing this Dorothea said in a whisper to Cardenio, "Our landlord is +almost fit to play a second part to Don Quixote." + +"I think so," said Cardenio, "for, as he shows, he accepts it as a +certainty that everything those books relate took place exactly as it is +written down; and the barefooted friars themselves would not persuade him +to the contrary." + +"But consider, brother," said the curate once more, "there never was any +Felixmarte of Hircania in the world, nor any Cirongilio of Thrace, or any +of the other knights of the same sort, that the books of chivalry talk +of; the whole thing is the fabrication and invention of idle wits, +devised by them for the purpose you describe of beguiling the time, as +your reapers do when they read; for I swear to you in all seriousness +there never were any such knights in the world, and no such exploits or +nonsense ever happened anywhere." + +"Try that bone on another dog," said the landlord; "as if I did not know +how many make five, and where my shoe pinches me; don't think to feed me +with pap, for by God I am no fool. It is a good joke for your worship to +try and persuade me that everything these good books say is nonsense and +lies, and they printed by the license of the Lords of the Royal Council, +as if they were people who would allow such a lot of lies to be printed +all together, and so many battles and enchantments that they take away +one's senses." + +"I have told you, friend," said the curate, "that this is done to divert +our idle thoughts; and as in well-ordered states games of chess, fives, +and billiards are allowed for the diversion of those who do not care, or +are not obliged, or are unable to work, so books of this kind are allowed +to be printed, on the supposition that, what indeed is the truth, there +can be nobody so ignorant as to take any of them for true stories; and if +it were permitted me now, and the present company desired it, I could say +something about the qualities books of chivalry should possess to be good +ones, that would be to the advantage and even to the taste of some; but I +hope the time will come when I can communicate my ideas to some one who +may be able to mend matters; and in the meantime, senor landlord, believe +what I have said, and take your books, and make up your mind about their +truth or falsehood, and much good may they do you; and God grant you may +not fall lame of the same foot your guest Don Quixote halts on." + +"No fear of that," returned the landlord; "I shall not be so mad as to +make a knight-errant of myself; for I see well enough that things are not +now as they used to be in those days, when they say those famous knights +roamed about the world." + +Sancho had made his appearance in the middle of this conversation, and he +was very much troubled and cast down by what he heard said about +knights-errant being now no longer in vogue, and all books of chivalry +being folly and lies; and he resolved in his heart to wait and see what +came of this journey of his master's, and if it did not turn out as +happily as his master expected, he determined to leave him and go back to +his wife and children and his ordinary labour. + +The landlord was carrying away the valise and the books, but the curate +said to him, "Wait; I want to see what those papers are that are written +in such a good hand." The landlord taking them out handed them to him to +read, and he perceived they were a work of about eight sheets of +manuscript, with, in large letters at the beginning, the title of "Novel +of the Ill-advised Curiosity." The curate read three or four lines to +himself, and said, "I must say the title of this novel does not seem to +me a bad one, and I feel an inclination to read it all." To which the +landlord replied, "Then your reverence will do well to read it, for I can +tell you that some guests who have read it here have been much pleased +with it, and have begged it of me very earnestly; but I would not give +it, meaning to return it to the person who forgot the valise, books, and +papers here, for maybe he will return here some time or other; and though +I know I shall miss the books, faith I mean to return them; for though I +am an innkeeper, still I am a Christian." + +"You are very right, friend," said the curate; "but for all that, if the +novel pleases me you must let me copy it." + +"With all my heart," replied the host. + +While they were talking Cardenio had taken up the novel and begun to read +it, and forming the same opinion of it as the curate, he begged him to +read it so that they might all hear it. + +"I would read it," said the curate, "if the time would not be better +spent in sleeping." + +"It will be rest enough for me," said Dorothea, "to while away the time +by listening to some tale, for my spirits are not yet tranquil enough to +let me sleep when it would be seasonable." + +"Well then, in that case," said the curate, "I will read it, if it were +only out of curiosity; perhaps it may contain something pleasant." + +Master Nicholas added his entreaties to the same effect, and Sancho too; +seeing which, and considering that he would give pleasure to all, and +receive it himself, the curate said, "Well then, attend to me everyone, +for the novel begins thus." + +Chapter XXXIII. - +In which is related the novel of "the ill-advised curiosity" + +In Florence, a rich and famous city of Italy in the province called +Tuscany, there lived two gentlemen of wealth and quality, Anselmo and +Lothario, such great friends that by way of distinction they were called +by all that knew them "The Two Friends." They were unmarried, young, of +the same age and of the same tastes, which was enough to account for the +reciprocal friendship between them. Anselmo, it is true, was somewhat +more inclined to seek pleasure in love than Lothario, for whom the +pleasures of the chase had more attraction; but on occasion Anselmo would +forego his own tastes to yield to those of Lothario, and Lothario would +surrender his to fall in with those of Anselmo, and in this way their +inclinations kept pace one with the other with a concord so perfect that +the best regulated clock could not surpass it. + +Anselmo was deep in love with a high-born and beautiful maiden of the +same city, the daughter of parents so estimable, and so estimable +herself, that he resolved, with the approval of his friend Lothario, +without whom he did nothing, to ask her of them in marriage, and did so, +Lothario being the bearer of the demand, and conducting the negotiation +so much to the satisfaction of his friend that in a short time he was in +possession of the object of his desires, and Camilla so happy in having +won Anselmo for her husband, that she gave thanks unceasingly to heaven +and to Lothario, by whose means such good fortune had fallen to her. The +first few days, those of a wedding being usually days of merry-making, +Lothario frequented his friend Anselmo's house as he had been wont, +striving to do honour to him and to the occasion, and to gratify him in +every way he could; but when the wedding days were over and the +succession of visits and congratulations had slackened, he began +purposely to leave off going to the house of Anselmo, for it seemed to +him, as it naturally would to all men of sense, that friends' houses +ought not to be visited after marriage with the same frequency as in +their masters' bachelor days: because, though true and genuine friendship +cannot and should not be in any way suspicious, still a married man's +honour is a thing of such delicacy that it is held liable to injury from +brothers, much more from friends. Anselmo remarked the cessation of +Lothario's visits, and complained of it to him, saying that if he had +known that marriage was to keep him from enjoying his society as he used, +he would have never married; and that, if by the thorough harmony that +subsisted between them while he was a bachelor they had earned such a +sweet name as that of "The Two Friends," he should not allow a title so +rare and so delightful to be lost through a needless anxiety to act +circumspectly; and so he entreated him, if such a phrase was allowable +between them, to be once more master of his house and to come in and go +out as formerly, assuring him that his wife Camilla had no other desire +or inclination than that which he would wish her to have, and that +knowing how sincerely they loved one another she was grieved to see such +coldness in him. + +To all this and much more that Anselmo said to Lothario to persuade him +to come to his house as he had been in the habit of doing, Lothario +replied with so much prudence, sense, and judgment, that Anselmo was +satisfied of his friend's good intentions, and it was agreed that on two +days in the week, and on holidays, Lothario should come to dine with him; +but though this arrangement was made between them Lothario resolved to +observe it no further than he considered to be in accordance with the +honour of his friend, whose good name was more to him than his own. He +said, and justly, that a married man upon whom heaven had bestowed a +beautiful wife should consider as carefully what friends he brought to +his house as what female friends his wife associated with, for what +cannot be done or arranged in the market-place, in church, at public +festivals or at stations (opportunities that husbands cannot always deny +their wives), may be easily managed in the house of the female friend or +relative in whom most confidence is reposed. Lothario said, too, that +every married man should have some friend who would point out to him any +negligence he might be guilty of in his conduct, for it will sometimes +happen that owing to the deep affection the husband bears his wife either +he does not caution her, or, not to vex her, refrains from telling her to +do or not to do certain things, doing or avoiding which may be a matter +of honour or reproach to him; and errors of this kind he could easily +correct if warned by a friend. But where is such a friend to be found as +Lothario would have, so judicious, so loyal, and so true? + +Of a truth I know not; Lothario alone was such a one, for with the utmost +care and vigilance he watched over the honour of his friend, and strove +to diminish, cut down, and reduce the number of days for going to his +house according to their agreement, lest the visits of a young man, +wealthy, high-born, and with the attractions he was conscious of +possessing, at the house of a woman so beautiful as Camilla, should be +regarded with suspicion by the inquisitive and malicious eyes of the idle +public. For though his integrity and reputation might bridle slanderous +tongues, still he was unwilling to hazard either his own good name or +that of his friend; and for this reason most of the days agreed upon he +devoted to some other business which he pretended was unavoidable; so +that a great portion of the day was taken up with complaints on one side +and excuses on the other. It happened, however, that on one occasion when +the two were strolling together outside the city, Anselmo addressed the +following words to Lothario. + +"Thou mayest suppose, Lothario my friend, that I am unable to give +sufficient thanks for the favours God has rendered me in making me the +son of such parents as mine were, and bestowing upon me with no niggard +hand what are called the gifts of nature as well as those of fortune, and +above all for what he has done in giving me thee for a friend and Camilla +for a wife--two treasures that I value, if not as highly as I ought, at +least as highly as I am able. And yet, with all these good things, which +are commonly all that men need to enable them to live happily, I am the +most discontented and dissatisfied man in the whole world; for, I know +not how long since, I have been harassed and oppressed by a desire so +strange and so unusual, that I wonder at myself and blame and chide +myself when I am alone, and strive to stifle it and hide it from my own +thoughts, and with no better success than if I were endeavouring +deliberately to publish it to all the world; and as, in short, it must +come out, I would confide it to thy safe keeping, feeling sure that by +this means, and by thy readiness as a true friend to afford me relief, I +shall soon find myself freed from the distress it causes me, and that thy +care will give me happiness in the same degree as my own folly has caused +me misery." + +The words of Anselmo struck Lothario with astonishment, unable as he was +to conjecture the purport of such a lengthy preamble; and though be +strove to imagine what desire it could be that so troubled his friend, +his conjectures were all far from the truth, and to relieve the anxiety +which this perplexity was causing him, he told him he was doing a +flagrant injustice to their great friendship in seeking circuitous +methods of confiding to him his most hidden thoughts, for he well knew he +might reckon upon his counsel in diverting them, or his help in carrying +them into effect. + +"That is the truth," replied Anselmo, "and relying upon that I will tell +thee, friend Lothario, that the desire which harasses me is that of +knowing whether my wife Camilla is as good and as perfect as I think her +to be; and I cannot satisfy myself of the truth on this point except by +testing her in such a way that the trial may prove the purity of her +virtue as the fire proves that of gold; because I am persuaded, my +friend, that a woman is virtuous only in proportion as she is or is not +tempted; and that she alone is strong who does not yield to the promises, +gifts, tears, and importunities of earnest lovers; for what thanks does a +woman deserve for being good if no one urges her to be bad, and what +wonder is it that she is reserved and circumspect to whom no opportunity +is given of going wrong and who knows she has a husband that will take +her life the first time he detects her in an impropriety? I do not +therefore hold her who is virtuous through fear or want of opportunity in +the same estimation as her who comes out of temptation and trial with a +crown of victory; and so, for these reasons and many others that I could +give thee to justify and support the opinion I hold, I am desirous that +my wife Camilla should pass this crisis, and be refined and tested by the +fire of finding herself wooed and by one worthy to set his affections +upon her; and if she comes out, as I know she will, victorious from this +struggle, I shall look upon my good fortune as unequalled, I shall be +able to say that the cup of my desire is full, and that the virtuous +woman of whom the sage says 'Who shall find her?' has fallen to my lot. +And if the result be the contrary of what I expect, in the satisfaction +of knowing that I have been right in my opinion, I shall bear without +complaint the pain which my so dearly bought experience will naturally +cause me. And, as nothing of all thou wilt urge in opposition to my wish +will avail to keep me from carrying it into effect, it is my desire, +friend Lothario, that thou shouldst consent to become the instrument for +effecting this purpose that I am bent upon, for I will afford thee +opportunities to that end, and nothing shall be wanting that I may think +necessary for the pursuit of a virtuous, honourable, modest and +high-minded woman. And among other reasons, I am induced to entrust this +arduous task to thee by the consideration that if Camilla be conquered by +thee the conquest will not be pushed to extremes, but only far enough to +account that accomplished which from a sense of honour will be left +undone; thus I shall not be wronged in anything more than intention, and +my wrong will remain buried in the integrity of thy silence, which I know +well will be as lasting as that of death in what concerns me. If, +therefore, thou wouldst have me enjoy what can be called life, thou wilt +at once engage in this love struggle, not lukewarmly nor slothfully, but +with the energy and zeal that my desire demands, and with the loyalty our +friendship assures me of." + +Such were the words Anselmo addressed to Lothario, who listened to them +with such attention that, except to say what has been already mentioned, +he did not open his lips until the other had finished. Then perceiving +that he had no more to say, after regarding him for awhile, as one would +regard something never before seen that excited wonder and amazement, he +said to him, "I cannot persuade myself, Anselmo my friend, that what thou +hast said to me is not in jest; if I thought that thou wert speaking +seriously I would not have allowed thee to go so far; so as to put a stop +to thy long harangue by not listening to thee I verily suspect that +either thou dost not know me, or I do not know thee; but no, I know well +thou art Anselmo, and thou knowest that I am Lothario; the misfortune is, +it seems to me, that thou art not the Anselmo thou wert, and must have +thought that I am not the Lothario I should be; for the things that thou +hast said to me are not those of that Anselmo who was my friend, nor are +those that thou demandest of me what should be asked of the Lothario thou +knowest. True friends will prove their friends and make use of them, as a +poet has said, usque ad aras; whereby he meant that they will not make +use of their friendship in things that are contrary to God's will. If +this, then, was a heathen's feeling about friendship, how much more +should it be a Christian's, who knows that the divine must not be +forfeited for the sake of any human friendship? And if a friend should go +so far as to put aside his duty to Heaven to fulfil his duty to his +friend, it should not be in matters that are trifling or of little +moment, but in such as affect the friend's life and honour. Now tell me, +Anselmo, in which of these two art thou imperilled, that I should hazard +myself to gratify thee, and do a thing so detestable as that thou seekest +of me? Neither forsooth; on the contrary, thou dost ask of me, so far as +I understand, to strive and labour to rob thee of honour and life, and to +rob myself of them at the same time; for if I take away thy honour it is +plain I take away thy life, as a man without honour is worse than dead; +and being the instrument, as thou wilt have it so, of so much wrong to +thee, shall not I, too, be left without honour, and consequently without +life? Listen to me, Anselmo my friend, and be not impatient to answer me +until I have said what occurs to me touching the object of thy desire, +for there will be time enough left for thee to reply and for me to hear." + +"Be it so," said Anselmo, "say what thou wilt." + +Lothario then went on to say, "It seems to me, Anselmo, that thine is +just now the temper of mind which is always that of the Moors, who can +never be brought to see the error of their creed by quotations from the +Holy Scriptures, or by reasons which depend upon the examination of the +understanding or are founded upon the articles of faith, but must have +examples that are palpable, easy, intelligible, capable of proof, not +admitting of doubt, with mathematical demonstrations that cannot be +denied, like, 'If equals be taken from equals, the remainders are equal:' +and if they do not understand this in words, and indeed they do not, it +has to be shown to them with the hands, and put before their eyes, and +even with all this no one succeeds in convincing them of the truth of our +holy religion. This same mode of proceeding I shall have to adopt with +thee, for the desire which has sprung up in thee is so absurd and remote +from everything that has a semblance of reason, that I feel it would be a +waste of time to employ it in reasoning with thy simplicity, for at +present I will call it by no other name; and I am even tempted to leave +thee in thy folly as a punishment for thy pernicious desire; but the +friendship I bear thee, which will not allow me to desert thee in such +manifest danger of destruction, keeps me from dealing so harshly by thee. +And that thou mayest clearly see this, say, Anselmo, hast thou not told +me that I must force my suit upon a modest woman, decoy one that is +virtuous, make overtures to one that is pure-minded, pay court to one +that is prudent? Yes, thou hast told me so. Then, if thou knowest that +thou hast a wife, modest, virtuous, pure-minded and prudent, what is it +that thou seekest? And if thou believest that she will come forth +victorious from all my attacks--as doubtless she would--what higher +titles than those she possesses now dost thou think thou canst upon her +then, or in what will she be better then than she is now? Either thou +dost not hold her to be what thou sayest, or thou knowest not what thou +dost demand. If thou dost not hold her to be what thou why dost thou seek +to prove her instead of treating her as guilty in the way that may seem +best to thee? but if she be as virtuous as thou believest, it is an +uncalled-for proceeding to make trial of truth itself, for, after trial, +it will but be in the same estimation as before. Thus, then, it is +conclusive that to attempt things from which harm rather than advantage +may come to us is the part of unreasoning and reckless minds, more +especially when they are things which we are not forced or compelled to +attempt, and which show from afar that it is plainly madness to attempt +them. + +"Difficulties are attempted either for the sake of God or for the sake of +the world, or for both; those undertaken for God's sake are those which +the saints undertake when they attempt to live the lives of angels in +human bodies; those undertaken for the sake of the world are those of the +men who traverse such a vast expanse of water, such a variety of +climates, so many strange countries, to acquire what are called the +blessings of fortune; and those undertaken for the sake of God and the +world together are those of brave soldiers, who no sooner do they see in +the enemy's wall a breach as wide as a cannon ball could make, than, +casting aside all fear, without hesitating, or heeding the manifest peril +that threatens them, borne onward by the desire of defending their faith, +their country, and their king, they fling themselves dauntlessly into the +midst of the thousand opposing deaths that await them. Such are the +things that men are wont to attempt, and there is honour, glory, gain, in +attempting them, however full of difficulty and peril they may be; but +that which thou sayest it is thy wish to attempt and carry out will not +win thee the glory of God nor the blessings of fortune nor fame among +men; for even if the issue he as thou wouldst have it, thou wilt be no +happier, richer, or more honoured than thou art this moment; and if it be +otherwise thou wilt be reduced to misery greater than can be imagined, +for then it will avail thee nothing to reflect that no one is aware of +the misfortune that has befallen thee; it will suffice to torture and +crush thee that thou knowest it thyself. And in confirmation of the truth +of what I say, let me repeat to thee a stanza made by the famous poet +Luigi Tansillo at the end of the first part of his 'Tears of Saint +Peter,' which says thus: + +The anguish and the shame but greater grew In Peter's heart as morning +slowly came; No eye was there to see him, well he knew, Yet he himself +was to himself a shame; Exposed to all men's gaze, or screened from view, +A noble heart will feel the pang the same; A prey to shame the sinning +soul will be, Though none but heaven and earth its shame can see. + +Thus by keeping it secret thou wilt not escape thy sorrow, but rather +thou wilt shed tears unceasingly, if not tears of the eyes, tears of +blood from the heart, like those shed by that simple doctor our poet +tells us of, that tried the test of the cup, which the wise Rinaldo, +better advised, refused to do; for though this may be a poetic fiction it +contains a moral lesson worthy of attention and study and imitation. +Moreover by what I am about to say to thee thou wilt be led to see the +great error thou wouldst commit. + +"Tell me, Anselmo, if Heaven or good fortune had made thee master and +lawful owner of a diamond of the finest quality, with the excellence and +purity of which all the lapidaries that had seen it had been satisfied, +saying with one voice and common consent that in purity, quality, and +fineness, it was all that a stone of the kind could possibly be, thou +thyself too being of the same belief, as knowing nothing to the contrary, +would it be reasonable in thee to desire to take that diamond and place +it between an anvil and a hammer, and by mere force of blows and strength +of arm try if it were as hard and as fine as they said? And if thou +didst, and if the stone should resist so silly a test, that would add +nothing to its value or reputation; and if it were broken, as it might +be, would not all be lost? Undoubtedly it would, leaving its owner to be +rated as a fool in the opinion of all. Consider, then, Anselmo my friend, +that Camilla is a diamond of the finest quality as well in thy estimation +as in that of others, and that it is contrary to reason to expose her to +the risk of being broken; for if she remains intact she cannot rise to a +higher value than she now possesses; and if she give way and be unable to +resist, bethink thee now how thou wilt be deprived of her, and with what +good reason thou wilt complain of thyself for having been the cause of +her ruin and thine own. Remember there is no jewel in the world so +precious as a chaste and virtuous woman, and that the whole honour of +women consists in reputation; and since thy wife's is of that high +excellence that thou knowest, wherefore shouldst thou seek to call that +truth in question? Remember, my friend, that woman is an imperfect +animal, and that impediments are not to be placed in her way to make her +trip and fall, but that they should be removed, and her path left clear +of all obstacles, so that without hindrance she may run her course freely +to attain the desired perfection, which consists in being virtuous. +Naturalists tell us that the ermine is a little animal which has a fur of +purest white, and that when the hunters wish to take it, they make use of +this artifice. Having ascertained the places which it frequents and +passes, they stop the way to them with mud, and then rousing it, drive it +towards the spot, and as soon as the ermine comes to the mud it halts, +and allows itself to be taken captive rather than pass through the mire, +and spoil and sully its whiteness, which it values more than life and +liberty. The virtuous and chaste woman is an ermine, and whiter and purer +than snow is the virtue of modesty; and he who wishes her not to lose it, +but to keep and preserve it, must adopt a course different from that +employed with the ermine; he must not put before her the mire of the +gifts and attentions of persevering lovers, because perhaps--and even +without a perhaps--she may not have sufficient virtue and natural +strength in herself to pass through and tread under foot these +impediments; they must be removed, and the brightness of virtue and the +beauty of a fair fame must be put before her. A virtuous woman, too, is +like a mirror, of clear shining crystal, liable to be tarnished and +dimmed by every breath that touches it. She must be treated as relics +are; adored, not touched. She must be protected and prized as one +protects and prizes a fair garden full of roses and flowers, the owner of +which allows no one to trespass or pluck a blossom; enough for others +that from afar and through the iron grating they may enjoy its fragrance +and its beauty. Finally let me repeat to thee some verses that come to my +mind; I heard them in a modern comedy, and it seems to me they bear upon +the point we are discussing. A prudent old man was giving advice to +another, the father of a young girl, to lock her up, watch over her and +keep her in seclusion, and among other arguments he used these: + +poem{ + +Woman is a thing of glass; +But her brittleness 'tis best +Not too curiously to test: +Who knows what may come to pass? + +Breaking is an easy matter, +And it's folly to expose +What you cannot mend to blows; +What you can't make whole to shatter. + +This, then, all may hold as true, +And the reason's plain to see; +For if Danaes there be, +There are golden showers too. + +}poem + +"All that I have said to thee so far, Anselmo, has had reference to what +concerns thee; now it is right that I should say something of what +regards myself; and if I be prolix, pardon me, for the labyrinth into +which thou hast entered and from which thou wouldst have me extricate +thee makes it necessary. + +"Thou dost reckon me thy friend, and thou wouldst rob me of honour, a +thing wholly inconsistent with friendship; and not only dost thou aim at +this, but thou wouldst have me rob thee of it also. That thou wouldst rob +me of it is clear, for when Camilla sees that I pay court to her as thou +requirest, she will certainly regard me as a man without honour or right +feeling, since I attempt and do a thing so much opposed to what I owe to +my own position and thy friendship. That thou wouldst have me rob thee of +it is beyond a doubt, for Camilla, seeing that I press my suit upon her, +will suppose that I have perceived in her something light that has +encouraged me to make known to her my base desire; and if she holds +herself dishonoured, her dishonour touches thee as belonging to her; and +hence arises what so commonly takes place, that the husband of the +adulterous woman, though he may not be aware of or have given any cause +for his wife's failure in her duty, or (being careless or negligent) have +had it in his power to prevent his dishonour, nevertheless is stigmatised +by a vile and reproachful name, and in a manner regarded with eyes of +contempt instead of pity by all who know of his wife's guilt, though they +see that he is unfortunate not by his own fault, but by the lust of a +vicious consort. But I will tell thee why with good reason dishonour +attaches to the husband of the unchaste wife, though he know not that she +is so, nor be to blame, nor have done anything, or given any provocation +to make her so; and be not weary with listening to me, for it will be for +thy good. + +"When God created our first parent in the earthly paradise, the Holy +Scripture says that he infused sleep into Adam and while he slept took a +rib from his left side of which he formed our mother Eve, and when Adam +awoke and beheld her he said, 'This is flesh of my flesh, and bone of my +bone.' And God said 'For this shall a man leave his father and his +mother, and they shall be two in one flesh; and then was instituted the +divine sacrament of marriage, with such ties that death alone can loose +them. And such is the force and virtue of this miraculous sacrament that +it makes two different persons one and the same flesh; and even more than +this when the virtuous are married; for though they have two souls they +have but one will. And hence it follows that as the flesh of the wife is +one and the same with that of her husband the stains that may come upon +it, or the injuries it incurs fall upon the husband's flesh, though he, +as has been said, may have given no cause for them; for as the pain of +the foot or any member of the body is felt by the whole body, because all +is one flesh, as the head feels the hurt to the ankle without having +caused it, so the husband, being one with her, shares the dishonour of +the wife; and as all worldly honour or dishonour comes of flesh and +blood, and the erring wife's is of that kind, the husband must needs bear +his part of it and be held dishonoured without knowing it. See, then, +Anselmo, the peril thou art encountering in seeking to disturb the peace +of thy virtuous consort; see for what an empty and ill-advised curiosity +thou wouldst rouse up passions that now repose in quiet in the breast of +thy chaste wife; reflect that what thou art staking all to win is little, +and what thou wilt lose so much that I leave it undescribed, not having +the words to express it. But if all I have said be not enough to turn +thee from thy vile purpose, thou must seek some other instrument for thy +dishonour and misfortune; for such I will not consent to be, though I +lose thy friendship, the greatest loss that I can conceive." + +Having said this, the wise and virtuous Lothario was silent, and Anselmo, +troubled in mind and deep in thought, was unable for a while to utter a +word in reply; but at length he said, "I have listened, Lothario my +friend, attentively, as thou hast seen, to what thou hast chosen to say +to me, and in thy arguments, examples, and comparisons I have seen that +high intelligence thou dost possess, and the perfection of true +friendship thou hast reached; and likewise I see and confess that if I am +not guided by thy opinion, but follow my own, I am flying from the good +and pursuing the evil. This being so, thou must remember that I am now +labouring under that infirmity which women sometimes suffer from, when +the craving seizes them to eat clay, plaster, charcoal, and things even +worse, disgusting to look at, much more to eat; so that it will be +necessary to have recourse to some artifice to cure me; and this can be +easily effected if only thou wilt make a beginning, even though it be in +a lukewarm and make-believe fashion, to pay court to Camilla, who will +not be so yielding that her virtue will give way at the first attack: +with this mere attempt I shall rest satisfied, and thou wilt have done +what our friendship binds thee to do, not only in giving me life, but in +persuading me not to discard my honour. And this thou art bound to do for +one reason alone, that, being, as I am, resolved to apply this test, it +is not for thee to permit me to reveal my weakness to another, and so +imperil that honour thou art striving to keep me from losing; and if +thine may not stand as high as it ought in the estimation of Camilla +while thou art paying court to her, that is of little or no importance, +because ere long, on finding in her that constancy which we expect, thou +canst tell her the plain truth as regards our stratagem, and so regain +thy place in her esteem; and as thou art venturing so little, and by the +venture canst afford me so much satisfaction, refuse not to undertake it, +even if further difficulties present themselves to thee; for, as I have +said, if thou wilt only make a beginning I will acknowledge the issue +decided." + +Lothario seeing the fixed determination of Anselmo, and not knowing what +further examples to offer or arguments to urge in order to dissuade him +from it, and perceiving that he threatened to confide his pernicious +scheme to some one else, to avoid a greater evil resolved to gratify him +and do what he asked, intending to manage the business so as to satisfy +Anselmo without corrupting the mind of Camilla; so in reply he told him +not to communicate his purpose to any other, for he would undertake the +task himself, and would begin it as soon as he pleased. Anselmo embraced +him warmly and affectionately, and thanked him for his offer as if he had +bestowed some great favour upon him; and it was agreed between them to +set about it the next day, Anselmo affording opportunity and time to +Lothario to converse alone with Camilla, and furnishing him with money +and jewels to offer and present to her. He suggested, too, that he should +treat her to music, and write verses in her praise, and if he was +unwilling to take the trouble of composing them, he offered to do it +himself. Lothario agreed to all with an intention very different from +what Anselmo supposed, and with this understanding they returned to +Anselmo's house, where they found Camilla awaiting her husband anxiously +and uneasily, for he was later than usual in returning that day. Lothario +repaired to his own house, and Anselmo remained in his, as well satisfied +as Lothario was troubled in mind; for he could see no satisfactory way +out of this ill-advised business. That night, however, he thought of a +plan by which he might deceive Anselmo without any injury to Camilla. The +next day he went to dine with his friend, and was welcomed by Camilla, +who received and treated him with great cordiality, knowing the affection +her husband felt for him. When dinner was over and the cloth removed, +Anselmo told Lothario to stay there with Camilla while he attended to +some pressing business, as he would return in an hour and a half. Camilla +begged him not to go, and Lothario offered to accompany him, but nothing +could persuade Anselmo, who on the contrary pressed Lothario to remain +waiting for him as he had a matter of great importance to discuss with +him. At the same time he bade Camilla not to leave Lothario alone until +he came back. In short he contrived to put so good a face on the reason, +or the folly, of his absence that no one could have suspected it was a +pretence. + +Anselmo took his departure, and Camilla and Lothario were left alone at +the table, for the rest of the household had gone to dinner. Lothario saw +himself in the lists according to his friend's wish, and facing an enemy +that could by her beauty alone vanquish a squadron of armed knights; +judge whether he had good reason to fear; but what he did was to lean his +elbow on the arm of the chair, and his cheek upon his hand, and, asking +Camilla's pardon for his ill manners, he said he wished to take a little +sleep until Anselmo returned. Camilla in reply said he could repose more +at his ease in the reception-room than in his chair, and begged of him to +go in and sleep there; but Lothario declined, and there he remained +asleep until the return of Anselmo, who finding Camilla in her own room, +and Lothario asleep, imagined that he had stayed away so long as to have +afforded them time enough for conversation and even for sleep, and was +all impatience until Lothario should wake up, that he might go out with +him and question him as to his success. Everything fell out as he wished; +Lothario awoke, and the two at once left the house, and Anselmo asked +what he was anxious to know, and Lothario in answer told him that he had +not thought it advisable to declare himself entirely the first time, and +therefore had only extolled the charms of Camilla, telling her that all +the city spoke of nothing else but her beauty and wit, for this seemed to +him an excellent way of beginning to gain her good-will and render her +disposed to listen to him with pleasure the next time, thus availing +himself of the device the devil has recourse to when he would deceive one +who is on the watch; for he being the angel of darkness transforms +himself into an angel of light, and, under cover of a fair seeming, +discloses himself at length, and effects his purpose if at the beginning +his wiles are not discovered. All this gave great satisfaction to +Anselmo, and he said he would afford the same opportunity every day, but +without leaving the house, for he would find things to do at home so that +Camilla should not detect the plot. + +Thus, then, several days went by, and Lothario, without uttering a word +to Camilla, reported to Anselmo that he had talked with her and that he +had never been able to draw from her the slightest indication of consent +to anything dishonourable, nor even a sign or shadow of hope; on the +contrary, he said she would inform her husband of it. + +"So far well," said Anselmo; "Camilla has thus far resisted words; we +must now see how she will resist deeds. I will give you to-morrow two +thousand crowns in gold for you to offer or even present, and as many +more to buy jewels to lure her, for women are fond of being becomingly +attired and going gaily dressed, and all the more so if they are +beautiful, however chaste they may be; and if she resists this +temptation, I will rest satisfied and will give you no more trouble." + +Lothario replied that now he had begun he would carry on the undertaking +to the end, though he perceived he was to come out of it wearied and +vanquished. The next day he received the four thousand crowns, and with +them four thousand perplexities, for he knew not what to say by way of a +new falsehood; but in the end he made up his mind to tell him that +Camilla stood as firm against gifts and promises as against words, and +that there was no use in taking any further trouble, for the time was all +spent to no purpose. + +But chance, directing things in a different manner, so ordered it that +Anselmo, having left Lothario and Camilla alone as on other occasions, +shut himself into a chamber and posted himself to watch and listen +through the keyhole to what passed between them, and perceived that for +more than half an hour Lothario did not utter a word to Camilla, nor +would utter a word though he were to be there for an age; and he came to +the conclusion that what his friend had told him about the replies of +Camilla was all invention and falsehood, and to ascertain if it were so, +he came out, and calling Lothario aside asked him what news he had and in +what humour Camilla was. Lothario replied that he was not disposed to go +on with the business, for she had answered him so angrily and harshly +that he had no heart to say anything more to her. + +"Ah, Lothario, Lothario," said Anselmo, "how ill dost thou meet thy +obligations to me, and the great confidence I repose in thee! I have been +just now watching through this keyhole, and I have seen that thou has not +said a word to Camilla, whence I conclude that on the former occasions +thou hast not spoken to her either, and if this be so, as no doubt it is, +why dost thou deceive me, or wherefore seekest thou by craft to deprive +me of the means I might find of attaining my desire?" + +Anselmo said no more, but he had said enough to cover Lothario with shame +and confusion, and he, feeling as it were his honour touched by having +been detected in a lie, swore to Anselmo that he would from that moment +devote himself to satisfying him without any deception, as he would see +if he had the curiosity to watch; though he need not take the trouble, +for the pains he would take to satisfy him would remove all suspicions +from his mind. Anselmo believed him, and to afford him an opportunity +more free and less liable to surprise, he resolved to absent himself from +his house for eight days, betaking himself to that of a friend of his who +lived in a village not far from the city; and, the better to account for +his departure to Camilla, he so arranged it that the friend should send +him a very pressing invitation. + +Unhappy, shortsighted Anselmo, what art thou doing, what art thou +plotting, what art thou devising? Bethink thee thou art working against +thyself, plotting thine own dishonour, devising thine own ruin. Thy wife +Camilla is virtuous, thou dost possess her in peace and quietness, no one +assails thy happiness, her thoughts wander not beyond the walls of thy +house, thou art her heaven on earth, the object of her wishes, the +fulfilment of her desires, the measure wherewith she measures her will, +making it conform in all things to thine and Heaven's. If, then, the mine +of her honour, beauty, virtue, and modesty yields thee without labour all +the wealth it contains and thou canst wish for, why wilt thou dig the +earth in search of fresh veins, of new unknown treasure, risking the +collapse of all, since it but rests on the feeble props of her weak +nature? Bethink thee that from him who seeks impossibilities that which +is possible may with justice be withheld, as was better expressed by a +poet who said: + +poem{ + +'Tis mine to seek for life in death, +Health in disease seek I, +I seek in prison freedom's breath, +In traitors loyalty. +So Fate that ever scorns to grant +Or grace or boon to me, +Since what can never be I want, +Denies me what might be. + +}poem + +The next day Anselmo took his departure for the village, leaving +instructions with Camilla that during his absence Lothario would come to +look after his house and to dine with her, and that she was to treat him +as she would himself. Camilla was distressed, as a discreet and +right-minded woman would be, at the orders her husband left her, and bade +him remember that it was not becoming that anyone should occupy his seat +at the table during his absence, and if he acted thus from not feeling +confidence that she would be able to manage his house, let him try her +this time, and he would find by experience that she was equal to greater +responsibilities. Anselmo replied that it was his pleasure to have it so, +and that she had only to submit and obey. Camilla said she would do so, +though against her will. + +Anselmo went, and the next day Lothario came to his house, where he was +received by Camilla with a friendly and modest welcome; but she never +suffered Lothario to see her alone, for she was always attended by her +men and women servants, especially by a handmaid of hers, Leonela by +name, to whom she was much attached (for they had been brought up +together from childhood in her father's house), and whom she had kept +with her after her marriage with Anselmo. The first three days Lothario +did not speak to her, though he might have done so when they removed the +cloth and the servants retired to dine hastily; for such were Camilla's +orders; nay more, Leonela had directions to dine earlier than Camilla and +never to leave her side. She, however, having her thoughts fixed upon +other things more to her taste, and wanting that time and opportunity for +her own pleasures, did not always obey her mistress's commands, but on +the contrary left them alone, as if they had ordered her to do so; but +the modest bearing of Camilla, the calmness of her countenance, the +composure of her aspect were enough to bridle the tongue of Lothario. But +the influence which the many virtues of Camilla exerted in imposing +silence on Lothario's tongue proved mischievous for both of them, for if +his tongue was silent his thoughts were busy, and could dwell at leisure +upon the perfections of Camilla's goodness and beauty one by one, charms +enough to warm with love a marble statue, not to say a heart of flesh. +Lothario gazed upon her when he might have been speaking to her, and +thought how worthy of being loved she was; and thus reflection began +little by little to assail his allegiance to Anselmo, and a thousand +times he thought of withdrawing from the city and going where Anselmo +should never see him nor he see Camilla. But already the delight he found +in gazing on her interposed and held him fast. He put a constraint upon +himself, and struggled to repel and repress the pleasure he found in +contemplating Camilla; when alone he blamed himself for his weakness, +called himself a bad friend, nay a bad Christian; then he argued the +matter and compared himself with Anselmo; always coming to the conclusion +that the folly and rashness of Anselmo had been worse than his +faithlessness, and that if he could excuse his intentions as easily +before God as with man, he had no reason to fear any punishment for his +offence. + +In short the beauty and goodness of Camilla, joined with the opportunity +which the blind husband had placed in his hands, overthrew the loyalty of +Lothario; and giving heed to nothing save the object towards which his +inclinations led him, after Anselmo had been three days absent, during +which he had been carrying on a continual struggle with his passion, he +began to make love to Camilla with so much vehemence and warmth of +language that she was overwhelmed with amazement, and could only rise +from her place and retire to her room without answering him a word. But +the hope which always springs up with love was not weakened in Lothario +by this repelling demeanour; on the contrary his passion for Camilla +increased, and she discovering in him what she had never expected, knew +not what to do; and considering it neither safe nor right to give him the +chance or opportunity of speaking to her again, she resolved to send, as +she did that very night, one of her servants with a letter to Anselmo, in +which she addressed the following words to him. + +Chapter XXXIV. - +In which is continued the novel of "the ill-advised curiosity" + +"It is commonly said that an army looks ill without its general and a +castle without its castellan, and I say that a young married woman looks +still worse without her husband unless there are very good reasons for +it. I find myself so ill at ease without you, and so incapable of +enduring this separation, that unless you return quickly I shall have to +go for relief to my parents' house, even if I leave yours without a +protector; for the one you left me, if indeed he deserved that title, +has, I think, more regard to his own pleasure than to what concerns you: +as you are possessed of discernment I need say no more to you, nor indeed +is it fitting I should say more." + +Anselmo received this letter, and from it he gathered that Lothario had +already begun his task and that Camilla must have replied to him as he +would have wished; and delighted beyond measure at such intelligence he +sent word to her not to leave his house on any account, as he would very +shortly return. Camilla was astonished at Anselmo's reply, which placed +her in greater perplexity than before, for she neither dared to remain in +her own house, nor yet to go to her parents'; for in remaining her virtue +was imperilled, and in going she was opposing her husband's commands. +Finally she decided upon what was the worse course for her, to remain, +resolving not to fly from the presence of Lothario, that she might not +give food for gossip to her servants; and she now began to regret having +written as she had to her husband, fearing he might imagine that Lothario +had perceived in her some lightness which had impelled him to lay aside +the respect he owed her; but confident of her rectitude she put her trust +in God and in her own virtuous intentions, with which she hoped to resist +in silence all the solicitations of Lothario, without saying anything to +her husband so as not to involve him in any quarrel or trouble; and she +even began to consider how to excuse Lothario to Anselmo when he should +ask her what it was that induced her to write that letter. With these +resolutions, more honourable than judicious or effectual, she remained +the next day listening to Lothario, who pressed his suit so strenuously +that Camilla's firmness began to waver, and her virtue had enough to do +to come to the rescue of her eyes and keep them from showing signs of a +certain tender compassion which the tears and appeals of Lothario had +awakened in her bosom. Lothario observed all this, and it inflamed him +all the more. In short he felt that while Anselmo's absence afforded time +and opportunity he must press the siege of the fortress, and so he +assailed her self-esteem with praises of her beauty, for there is nothing +that more quickly reduces and levels the castle towers of fair women's +vanity than vanity itself upon the tongue of flattery. In fact with the +utmost assiduity he undermined the rock of her purity with such engines +that had Camilla been of brass she must have fallen. He wept, he +entreated, he promised, he flattered, he importuned, he pretended with so +much feeling and apparent sincerity, that he overthrew the virtuous +resolves of Camilla and won the triumph he least expected and most longed +for. Camilla yielded, Camilla fell; but what wonder if the friendship of +Lothario could not stand firm? A clear proof to us that the passion of +love is to be conquered only by flying from it, and that no one should +engage in a struggle with an enemy so mighty; for divine strength is +needed to overcome his human power. Leonela alone knew of her mistress's +weakness, for the two false friends and new lovers were unable to conceal +it. Lothario did not care to tell Camilla the object Anselmo had in view, +nor that he had afforded him the opportunity of attaining such a result, +lest she should undervalue his love and think that it was by chance and +without intending it and not of his own accord that he had made love to +her. + +A few days later Anselmo returned to his house and did not perceive what +it had lost, that which he so lightly treated and so highly prized. He +went at once to see Lothario, and found him at home; they embraced each +other, and Anselmo asked for the tidings of his life or his death. + +"The tidings I have to give thee, Anselmo my friend," said Lothario, "are +that thou dost possess a wife that is worthy to be the pattern and crown +of all good wives. The words that I have addressed to her were borne away +on the wind, my promises have been despised, my presents have been +refused, such feigned tears as I shed have been turned into open +ridicule. In short, as Camilla is the essence of all beauty, so is she +the treasure-house where purity dwells, and gentleness and modesty abide +with all the virtues that can confer praise, honour, and happiness upon a +woman. Take back thy money, my friend; here it is, and I have had no need +to touch it, for the chastity of Camilla yields not to things so base as +gifts or promises. Be content, Anselmo, and refrain from making further +proof; and as thou hast passed dryshod through the sea of those doubts +and suspicions that are and may be entertained of women, seek not to +plunge again into the deep ocean of new embarrassments, or with another +pilot make trial of the goodness and strength of the bark that Heaven has +granted thee for thy passage across the sea of this world; but reckon +thyself now safe in port, moor thyself with the anchor of sound +reflection, and rest in peace until thou art called upon to pay that debt +which no nobility on earth can escape paying." + +Anselmo was completely satisfied by the words of Lothario, and believed +them as fully as if they had been spoken by an oracle; nevertheless he +begged of him not to relinquish the undertaking, were it but for the sake +of curiosity and amusement; though thenceforward he need not make use of +the same earnest endeavours as before; all he wished him to do was to +write some verses to her, praising her under the name of Chloris, for he +himself would give her to understand that he was in love with a lady to +whom he had given that name to enable him to sing her praises with the +decorum due to her modesty; and if Lothario were unwilling to take the +trouble of writing the verses he would compose them himself. + +"That will not be necessary," said Lothario, "for the muses are not such +enemies of mine but that they visit me now and then in the course of the +year. Do thou tell Camilla what thou hast proposed about a pretended +amour of mine; as for the verses will make them, and if not as good as +the subject deserves, they shall be at least the best I can produce." An +agreement to this effect was made between the friends, the ill-advised +one and the treacherous, and Anselmo returning to his house asked Camilla +the question she already wondered he had not asked before--what it was +that had caused her to write the letter she had sent him. Camilla replied +that it had seemed to her that Lothario looked at her somewhat more +freely than when he had been at home; but that now she was undeceived and +believed it to have been only her own imagination, for Lothario now +avoided seeing her, or being alone with her. Anselmo told her she might +be quite easy on the score of that suspicion, for he knew that Lothario +was in love with a damsel of rank in the city whom he celebrated under +the name of Chloris, and that even if he were not, his fidelity and their +great friendship left no room for fear. Had not Camilla, however, been +informed beforehand by Lothario that this love for Chloris was a +pretence, and that he himself had told Anselmo of it in order to be able +sometimes to give utterance to the praises of Camilla herself, no doubt +she would have fallen into the despairing toils of jealousy; but being +forewarned she received the startling news without uneasiness. + +The next day as the three were at table Anselmo asked Lothario to recite +something of what he had composed for his mistress Chloris; for as +Camilla did not know her, he might safely say what he liked. + +"Even did she know her," returned Lothario, "I would hide nothing, for +when a lover praises his lady's beauty, and charges her with cruelty, he +casts no imputation upon her fair name; at any rate, all I can say is +that yesterday I made a sonnet on the ingratitude of this Chloris, which +goes thus: + +poem{ + +SONNET + +At midnight, in the silence, when the eyes + Of happier mortals balmy slumbers close, + The weary tale of my unnumbered woes +To Chloris and to Heaven is wont to rise. +And when the light of day returning dyes + The portals of the east with tints of rose, + With undiminished force my sorrow flows +In broken accents and in burning sighs. +And when the sun ascends his star-girt throne, + And on the earth pours down his midday beams, + Noon but renews my wailing and my tears; +And with the night again goes up my moan. + Yet ever in my agony it seems + To me that neither Heaven nor Chloris hears." + +}poem + +The sonnet pleased Camilla, and still more Anselmo, for he praised it and +said the lady was excessively cruel who made no return for sincerity so +manifest. On which Camilla said, "Then all that love-smitten poets say is +true?" + +"As poets they do not tell the truth," replied Lothario; "but as lovers +they are not more defective in expression than they are truthful." + +"There is no doubt of that," observed Anselmo, anxious to support and +uphold Lothario's ideas with Camilla, who was as regardless of his design +as she was deep in love with Lothario; and so taking delight in anything +that was his, and knowing that his thoughts and writings had her for +their object, and that she herself was the real Chloris, she asked him to +repeat some other sonnet or verses if he recollected any. + +"I do," replied Lothario, "but I do not think it as good as the first +one, or, more correctly speaking, less bad; but you can easily judge, for +it is this. + +poem{ + +SONNET + +I know that I am doomed; death is to me + As certain as that thou, ungrateful fair, + Dead at thy feet shouldst see me lying, ere +My heart repented of its love for thee. +If buried in oblivion I should be, + Bereft of life, fame, favour, even there + It would be found that I thy image bear +Deep graven in my breast for all to see. +This like some holy relic do I prize + To save me from the fate my truth entails, + Truth that to thy hard heart its vigour owes. +Alas for him that under lowering skies, + In peril o'er a trackless ocean sails, + Where neither friendly port nor pole-star shows." + +}poem + +Anselmo praised this second sonnet too, as he had praised the first; and +so he went on adding link after link to the chain with which he was +binding himself and making his dishonour secure; for when Lothario was +doing most to dishonour him he told him he was most honoured; and thus +each step that Camilla descended towards the depths of her abasement, she +mounted, in his opinion, towards the summit of virtue and fair fame. + +It so happened that finding herself on one occasion alone with her maid, +Camilla said to her, "I am ashamed to think, my dear Leonela, how lightly +I have valued myself that I did not compel Lothario to purchase by at +least some expenditure of time that full possession of me that I so +quickly yielded him of my own free will. I fear that he will think ill of +my pliancy or lightness, not considering the irresistible influence he +brought to bear upon me." + +"Let not that trouble you, my lady," said Leonela, "for it does not take +away the value of the thing given or make it the less precious to give it +quickly if it be really valuable and worthy of being prized; nay, they +are wont to say that he who gives quickly gives twice." + +"They say also," said Camilla, "that what costs little is valued less." + +"That saying does not hold good in your case," replied Leonela, "for +love, as I have heard say, sometimes flies and sometimes walks; with this +one it runs, with that it moves slowly; some it cools, others it burns; +some it wounds, others it slays; it begins the course of its desires, and +at the same moment completes and ends it; in the morning it will lay +siege to a fortress and by night will have taken it, for there is no +power that can resist it; so what are you in dread of, what do you fear, +when the same must have befallen Lothario, love having chosen the absence +of my lord as the instrument for subduing you? and it was absolutely +necessary to complete then what love had resolved upon, without affording +the time to let Anselmo return and by his presence compel the work to be +left unfinished; for love has no better agent for carrying out his +designs than opportunity; and of opportunity he avails himself in all his +feats, especially at the outset. All this I know well myself, more by +experience than by hearsay, and some day, senora, I will enlighten you on +the subject, for I am of your flesh and blood too. Moreover, lady +Camilla, you did not surrender yourself or yield so quickly but that +first you saw Lothario's whole soul in his eyes, in his sighs, in his +words, his promises and his gifts, and by it and his good qualities +perceived how worthy he was of your love. This, then, being the case, let +not these scrupulous and prudish ideas trouble your imagination, but be +assured that Lothario prizes you as you do him, and rest content and +satisfied that as you are caught in the noose of love it is one of worth +and merit that has taken you, and one that has not only the four S's that +they say true lovers ought to have, but a complete alphabet; only listen +to me and you will see how I can repeat it by rote. He is to my eyes and +thinking, Amiable, Brave, Courteous, Distinguished, Elegant, Fond, Gay, +Honourable, Illustrious, Loyal, Manly, Noble, Open, Polite, Quickwitted, +Rich, and the S's according to the saying, and then Tender, Veracious: X +does not suit him, for it is a rough letter; Y has been given already; +and Z Zealous for your honour." + +Camilla laughed at her maid's alphabet, and perceived her to be more +experienced in love affairs than she said, which she admitted, confessing +to Camilla that she had love passages with a young man of good birth of +the same city. Camilla was uneasy at this, dreading lest it might prove +the means of endangering her honour, and asked whether her intrigue had +gone beyond words, and she with little shame and much effrontery said it +had; for certain it is that ladies' imprudences make servants shameless, +who, when they see their mistresses make a false step, think nothing of +going astray themselves, or of its being known. All that Camilla could do +was to entreat Leonela to say nothing about her doings to him whom she +called her lover, and to conduct her own affairs secretly lest they +should come to the knowledge of Anselmo or of Lothario. Leonela said she +would, but kept her word in such a way that she confirmed Camilla's +apprehension of losing her reputation through her means; for this +abandoned and bold Leonela, as soon as she perceived that her mistress's +demeanour was not what it was wont to be, had the audacity to introduce +her lover into the house, confident that even if her mistress saw him she +would not dare to expose him; for the sins of mistresses entail this +mischief among others; they make themselves the slaves of their own +servants, and are obliged to hide their laxities and depravities; as was +the case with Camilla, who though she perceived, not once but many times, +that Leonela was with her lover in some room of the house, not only did +not dare to chide her, but afforded her opportunities for concealing him +and removed all difficulties, lest he should be seen by her husband. She +was unable, however, to prevent him from being seen on one occasion, as +he sallied forth at daybreak, by Lothario, who, not knowing who he was, +at first took him for a spectre; but, as soon as he saw him hasten away, +muffling his face with his cloak and concealing himself carefully and +cautiously, he rejected this foolish idea, and adopted another, which +would have been the ruin of all had not Camilla found a remedy. It did +not occur to Lothario that this man he had seen issuing at such an +untimely hour from Anselmo's house could have entered it on Leonela's +account, nor did he even remember there was such a person as Leonela; all +he thought was that as Camilla had been light and yielding with him, so +she had been with another; for this further penalty the erring woman's +sin brings with it, that her honour is distrusted even by him to whose +overtures and persuasions she has yielded; and he believes her to have +surrendered more easily to others, and gives implicit credence to every +suspicion that comes into his mind. All Lothario's good sense seems to +have failed him at this juncture; all his prudent maxims escaped his +memory; for without once reflecting rationally, and without more ado, in +his impatience and in the blindness of the jealous rage that gnawed his +heart, and dying to revenge himself upon Camilla, who had done him no +wrong, before Anselmo had risen he hastened to him and said to him, +"Know, Anselmo, that for several days past I have been struggling with +myself, striving to withhold from thee what it is no longer possible or +right that I should conceal from thee. Know that Camilla's fortress has +surrendered and is ready to submit to my will; and if I have been slow to +reveal this fact to thee, it was in order to see if it were some light +caprice of hers, or if she sought to try me and ascertain if the love I +began to make to her with thy permission was made with a serious +intention. I thought, too, that she, if she were what she ought to be, +and what we both believed her, would have ere this given thee information +of my addresses; but seeing that she delays, I believe the truth of the +promise she has given me that the next time thou art absent from the +house she will grant me an interview in the closet where thy jewels are +kept (and it was true that Camilla used to meet him there); but I do not +wish thee to rush precipitately to take vengeance, for the sin is as yet +only committed in intention, and Camilla's may change perhaps between +this and the appointed time, and repentance spring up in its place. As +hitherto thou hast always followed my advice wholly or in part, follow +and observe this that I will give thee now, so that, without mistake, and +with mature deliberation, thou mayest satisfy thyself as to what may seem +the best course; pretend to absent thyself for two or three days as thou +hast been wont to do on other occasions, and contrive to hide thyself in +the closet; for the tapestries and other things there afford great +facilities for thy concealment, and then thou wilt see with thine own +eyes and I with mine what Camilla's purpose may be. And if it be a guilty +one, which may be feared rather than expected, with silence, prudence, +and discretion thou canst thyself become the instrument of punishment for +the wrong done thee." + +Anselmo was amazed, overwhelmed, and astounded at the words of Lothario, +which came upon him at a time when he least expected to hear them, for he +now looked upon Camilla as having triumphed over the pretended attacks of +Lothario, and was beginning to enjoy the glory of her victory. He +remained silent for a considerable time, looking on the ground with fixed +gaze, and at length said, "Thou hast behaved, Lothario, as I expected of +thy friendship: I will follow thy advice in everything; do as thou wilt, +and keep this secret as thou seest it should be kept in circumstances so +unlooked for." + +Lothario gave him his word, but after leaving him he repented altogether +of what he had said to him, perceiving how foolishly he had acted, as he +might have revenged himself upon Camilla in some less cruel and degrading +way. He cursed his want of sense, condemned his hasty resolution, and +knew not what course to take to undo the mischief or find some ready +escape from it. At last he decided upon revealing all to Camilla, and, as +there was no want of opportunity for doing so, he found her alone the +same day; but she, as soon as she had the chance of speaking to him, +said, "Lothario my friend, I must tell thee I have a sorrow in my heart +which fills it so that it seems ready to burst; and it will be a wonder +if it does not; for the audacity of Leonela has now reached such a pitch +that every night she conceals a gallant of hers in this house and remains +with him till morning, at the expense of my reputation; inasmuch as it is +open to anyone to question it who may see him quitting my house at such +unseasonable hours; but what distresses me is that I cannot punish or +chide her, for her privity to our intrigue bridles my mouth and keeps me +silent about hers, while I am dreading that some catastrophe will come of +it." + +As Camilla said this Lothario at first imagined it was some device to +delude him into the idea that the man he had seen going out was Leonela's +lover and not hers; but when he saw how she wept and suffered, and begged +him to help her, he became convinced of the truth, and the conviction +completed his confusion and remorse; however, he told Camilla not to +distress herself, as he would take measures to put a stop to the +insolence of Leonela. At the same time he told her what, driven by the +fierce rage of jealousy, he had said to Anselmo, and how he had arranged +to hide himself in the closet that he might there see plainly how little +she preserved her fidelity to him; and he entreated her pardon for this +madness, and her advice as to how to repair it, and escape safely from +the intricate labyrinth in which his imprudence had involved him. Camilla +was struck with alarm at hearing what Lothario said, and with much anger, +and great good sense, she reproved him and rebuked his base design and +the foolish and mischievous resolution he had made; but as woman has by +nature a nimbler wit than man for good and for evil, though it is apt to +fail when she sets herself deliberately to reason, Camilla on the spur of +the moment thought of a way to remedy what was to all appearance +irremediable, and told Lothario to contrive that the next day Anselmo +should conceal himself in the place he mentioned, for she hoped from his +concealment to obtain the means of their enjoying themselves for the +future without any apprehension; and without revealing her purpose to him +entirely she charged him to be careful, as soon as Anselmo was concealed, +to come to her when Leonela should call him, and to all she said to him +to answer as he would have answered had he not known that Anselmo was +listening. Lothario pressed her to explain her intention fully, so that +he might with more certainty and precaution take care to do what he saw +to be needful. + +"I tell you," said Camilla, "there is nothing to take care of except to +answer me what I shall ask you;" for she did not wish to explain to him +beforehand what she meant to do, fearing lest he should be unwilling to +follow out an idea which seemed to her such a good one, and should try or +devise some other less practicable plan. + +Lothario then retired, and the next day Anselmo, under pretence of going +to his friend's country house, took his departure, and then returned to +conceal himself, which he was able to do easily, as Camilla and Leonela +took care to give him the opportunity; and so he placed himself in hiding +in the state of agitation that it may be imagined he would feel who +expected to see the vitals of his honour laid bare before his eyes, and +found himself on the point of losing the supreme blessing he thought he +possessed in his beloved Camilla. Having made sure of Anselmo's being in +his hiding-place, Camilla and Leonela entered the closet, and the instant +she set foot within it Camilla said, with a deep sigh, "Ah! dear Leonela, +would it not be better, before I do what I am unwilling you should know +lest you should seek to prevent it, that you should take Anselmo's dagger +that I have asked of you and with it pierce this vile heart of mine? But +no; there is no reason why I should suffer the punishment of another's +fault. I will first know what it is that the bold licentious eyes of +Lothario have seen in me that could have encouraged him to reveal to me a +design so base as that which he has disclosed regardless of his friend +and of my honour. Go to the window, Leonela, and call him, for no doubt +he is in the street waiting to carry out his vile project; but mine, +cruel it may be, but honourable, shall be carried out first." + +"Ah, senora," said the crafty Leonela, who knew her part, "what is it you +want to do with this dagger? Can it be that you mean to take your own +life, or Lothario's? for whichever you mean to do, it will lead to the +loss of your reputation and good name. It is better to dissemble your +wrong and not give this wicked man the chance of entering the house now +and finding us alone; consider, senora, we are weak women and he is a +man, and determined, and as he comes with such a base purpose, blind and +urged by passion, perhaps before you can put yours into execution he may +do what will be worse for you than taking your life. Ill betide my +master, Anselmo, for giving such authority in his house to this shameless +fellow! And supposing you kill him, senora, as I suspect you mean to do, +what shall we do with him when he is dead?" + +"What, my friend?" replied Camilla, "we shall leave him for Anselmo to +bury him; for in reason it will be to him a light labour to hide his own +infamy under ground. Summon him, make haste, for all the time I delay in +taking vengeance for my wrong seems to me an offence against the loyalty +I owe my husband." + +Anselmo was listening to all this, and every word that Camilla uttered +made him change his mind; but when he heard that it was resolved to kill +Lothario his first impulse was to come out and show himself to avert such +a disaster; but in his anxiety to see the issue of a resolution so bold +and virtuous he restrained himself, intending to come forth in time to +prevent the deed. At this moment Camilla, throwing herself upon a bed +that was close by, swooned away, and Leonela began to weep bitterly, +exclaiming, "Woe is me! that I should be fated to have dying here in my +arms the flower of virtue upon earth, the crown of true wives, the +pattern of chastity!" with more to the same effect, so that anyone who +heard her would have taken her for the most tender-hearted and faithful +handmaid in the world, and her mistress for another persecuted Penelope. + +Camilla was not long in recovering from her fainting fit and on coming to +herself she said, "Why do you not go, Leonela, to call hither that +friend, the falsest to his friend the sun ever shone upon or night +concealed? Away, run, haste, speed! lest the fire of my wrath burn itself +out with delay, and the righteous vengeance that I hope for melt away in +menaces and maledictions." + +"I am just going to call him, senora," said Leonela; "but you must first +give me that dagger, lest while I am gone you should by means of it give +cause to all who love you to weep all their lives." + +"Go in peace, dear Leonela, I will not do so," said Camilla, "for rash +and foolish as I may be, to your mind, in defending my honour, I am not +going to be so much so as that Lucretia who they say killed herself +without having done anything wrong, and without having first killed him +on whom the guilt of her misfortune lay. I shall die, if I am to die; but +it must be after full vengeance upon him who has brought me here to weep +over audacity that no fault of mine gave birth to." + +Leonela required much pressing before she would go to summon Lothario, +but at last she went, and while awaiting her return Camilla continued, as +if speaking to herself, "Good God! would it not have been more prudent to +have repulsed Lothario, as I have done many a time before, than to allow +him, as I am now doing, to think me unchaste and vile, even for the short +time I must wait until I undeceive him? No doubt it would have been +better; but I should not be avenged, nor the honour of my husband +vindicated, should he find so clear and easy an escape from the strait +into which his depravity has led him. Let the traitor pay with his life +for the temerity of his wanton wishes, and let the world know (if haply +it shall ever come to know) that Camilla not only preserved her +allegiance to her husband, but avenged him of the man who dared to wrong +him. Still, I think it might be better to disclose this to Anselmo. But +then I have called his attention to it in the letter I wrote to him in +the country, and, if he did nothing to prevent the mischief I there +pointed out to him, I suppose it was that from pure goodness of heart and +trustfulness he would not and could not believe that any thought against +his honour could harbour in the breast of so stanch a friend; nor indeed +did I myself believe it for many days, nor should I have ever believed it +if his insolence had not gone so far as to make it manifest by open +presents, lavish promises, and ceaseless tears. But why do I argue thus? +Does a bold determination stand in need of arguments? Surely not. Then +traitors avaunt! Vengeance to my aid! Let the false one come, approach, +advance, die, yield up his life, and then befall what may. Pure I came to +him whom Heaven bestowed upon me, pure I shall leave him; and at the +worst bathed in my own chaste blood and in the foul blood of the falsest +friend that friendship ever saw in the world;" and as she uttered these +words she paced the room holding the unsheathed dagger, with such +irregular and disordered steps, and such gestures that one would have +supposed her to have lost her senses, and taken her for some violent +desperado instead of a delicate woman. + +Anselmo, hidden behind some tapestries where he had concealed himself, +beheld and was amazed at all, and already felt that what he had seen and +heard was a sufficient answer to even greater suspicions; and he would +have been now well pleased if the proof afforded by Lothario's coming +were dispensed with, as he feared some sudden mishap; but as he was on +the point of showing himself and coming forth to embrace and undeceive +his wife he paused as he saw Leonela returning, leading Lothario. Camilla +when she saw him, drawing a long line in front of her on the floor with +the dagger, said to him, "Lothario, pay attention to what I say to thee: +if by any chance thou darest to cross this line thou seest, or even +approach it, the instant I see thee attempt it that same instant will I +pierce my bosom with this dagger that I hold in my hand; and before thou +answerest me a word desire thee to listen to a few from me, and +afterwards thou shalt reply as may please thee. First, I desire thee to +tell me, Lothario, if thou knowest my husband Anselmo, and in what light +thou regardest him; and secondly I desire to know if thou knowest me too. +Answer me this, without embarrassment or reflecting deeply what thou wilt +answer, for they are no riddles I put to thee." + +Lothario was not so dull but that from the first moment when Camilla +directed him to make Anselmo hide himself he understood what she intended +to do, and therefore he fell in with her idea so readily and promptly +that between them they made the imposture look more true than truth; so +he answered her thus: "I did not think, fair Camilla, that thou wert +calling me to ask questions so remote from the object with which I come; +but if it is to defer the promised reward thou art doing so, thou mightst +have put it off still longer, for the longing for happiness gives the +more distress the nearer comes the hope of gaining it; but lest thou +shouldst say that I do not answer thy questions, I say that I know thy +husband Anselmo, and that we have known each other from our earliest +years; I will not speak of what thou too knowest, of our friendship, that +I may not compel myself to testify against the wrong that love, the +mighty excuse for greater errors, makes me inflict upon him. Thee I know +and hold in the same estimation as he does, for were it not so I had not +for a lesser prize acted in opposition to what I owe to my station and +the holy laws of true friendship, now broken and violated by me through +that powerful enemy, love." + +"If thou dost confess that," returned Camilla, "mortal enemy of all that +rightly deserves to be loved, with what face dost thou dare to come +before one whom thou knowest to be the mirror wherein he is reflected on +whom thou shouldst look to see how unworthily thou him? But, woe is me, I +now comprehend what has made thee give so little heed to what thou owest +to thyself; it must have been some freedom of mine, for I will not call +it immodesty, as it did not proceed from any deliberate intention, but +from some heedlessness such as women are guilty of through inadvertence +when they think they have no occasion for reserve. But tell me, traitor, +when did I by word or sign give a reply to thy prayers that could awaken +in thee a shadow of hope of attaining thy base wishes? When were not thy +professions of love sternly and scornfully rejected and rebuked? When +were thy frequent pledges and still more frequent gifts believed or +accepted? But as I am persuaded that no one can long persevere in the +attempt to win love unsustained by some hope, I am willing to attribute +to myself the blame of thy assurance, for no doubt some thoughtlessness +of mine has all this time fostered thy hopes; and therefore will I punish +myself and inflict upon myself the penalty thy guilt deserves. And that +thou mayest see that being so relentless to myself I cannot possibly be +otherwise to thee, I have summoned thee to be a witness of the sacrifice +I mean to offer to the injured honour of my honoured husband, wronged by +thee with all the assiduity thou wert capable of, and by me too through +want of caution in avoiding every occasion, if I have given any, of +encouraging and sanctioning thy base designs. Once more I say the +suspicion in my mind that some imprudence of mine has engendered these +lawless thoughts in thee, is what causes me most distress and what I +desire most to punish with my own hands, for were any other instrument of +punishment employed my error might become perhaps more widely known; but +before I do so, in my death I mean to inflict death, and take with me one +that will fully satisfy my longing for the revenge I hope for and have; +for I shall see, wheresoever it may be that I go, the penalty awarded by +inflexible, unswerving justice on him who has placed me in a position so +desperate." + +As she uttered these words, with incredible energy and swiftness she flew +upon Lothario with the naked dagger, so manifestly bent on burying it in +his breast that he was almost uncertain whether these demonstrations were +real or feigned, for he was obliged to have recourse to all his skill and +strength to prevent her from striking him; and with such reality did she +act this strange farce and mystification that, to give it a colour of +truth, she determined to stain it with her own blood; for perceiving, or +pretending, that she could not wound Lothario, she said, "Fate, it seems, +will not grant my just desire complete satisfaction, but it will not be +able to keep me from satisfying it partially at least;" and making an +effort to free the hand with the dagger which Lothario held in his grasp, +she released it, and directing the point to a place where it could not +inflict a deep wound, she plunged it into her left side high up close to +the shoulder, and then allowed herself to fall to the ground as if in a +faint. + +Leonela and Lothario stood amazed and astounded at the catastrophe, and +seeing Camilla stretched on the ground and bathed in her blood they were +still uncertain as to the true nature of the act. Lothario, terrified and +breathless, ran in haste to pluck out the dagger; but when he saw how +slight the wound was he was relieved of his fears and once more admired +the subtlety, coolness, and ready wit of the fair Camilla; and the better +to support the part he had to play he began to utter profuse and doleful +lamentations over her body as if she were dead, invoking maledictions not +only on himself but also on him who had been the means of placing him in +such a position: and knowing that his friend Anselmo heard him he spoke +in such a way as to make a listener feel much more pity for him than for +Camilla, even though he supposed her dead. Leonela took her up in her +arms and laid her on the bed, entreating Lothario to go in quest of some +one to attend to her wound in secret, and at the same time asking his +advice and opinion as to what they should say to Anselmo about his lady's +wound if he should chance to return before it was healed. He replied they +might say what they liked, for he was not in a state to give advice that +would be of any use; all he could tell her was to try and stanch the +blood, as he was going where he should never more be seen; and with every +appearance of deep grief and sorrow he left the house; but when he found +himself alone, and where there was nobody to see him, he crossed himself +unceasingly, lost in wonder at the adroitness of Camilla and the +consistent acting of Leonela. He reflected how convinced Anselmo would be +that he had a second Portia for a wife, and he looked forward anxiously +to meeting him in order to rejoice together over falsehood and truth the +most craftily veiled that could be imagined. + +Leonela, as he told her, stanched her lady's blood, which was no more +than sufficed to support her deception; and washing the wound with a +little wine she bound it up to the best of her skill, talking all the +time she was tending her in a strain that, even if nothing else had been +said before, would have been enough to assure Anselmo that he had in +Camilla a model of purity. To Leonela's words Camilla added her own, +calling herself cowardly and wanting in spirit, since she had not enough +at the time she had most need of it to rid herself of the life she so +much loathed. She asked her attendant's advice as to whether or not she +ought to inform her beloved husband of all that had happened, but the +other bade her say nothing about it, as she would lay upon him the +obligation of taking vengeance on Lothario, which he could not do but at +great risk to himself; and it was the duty of a true wife not to give her +husband provocation to quarrel, but, on the contrary, to remove it as far +as possible from him. + +Camilla replied that she believed she was right and that she would follow +her advice, but at any rate it would be well to consider how she was to +explain the wound to Anselmo, for he could not help seeing it; to which +Leonela answered that she did not know how to tell a lie even in jest. + +"How then can I know, my dear?" said Camilla, "for I should not dare to +forge or keep up a falsehood if my life depended on it. If we can think +of no escape from this difficulty, it will be better to tell him the +plain truth than that he should find us out in an untrue story." + +"Be not uneasy, senora," said Leonela; "between this and to-morrow I will +think of what we must say to him, and perhaps the wound being where it is +it can be hidden from his sight, and Heaven will be pleased to aid us in +a purpose so good and honourable. Compose yourself, senora, and endeavour +to calm your excitement lest my lord find you agitated; and leave the +rest to my care and God's, who always supports good intentions." + +Anselmo had with the deepest attention listened to and seen played out +the tragedy of the death of his honour, which the performers acted with +such wonderfully effective truth that it seemed as if they had become the +realities of the parts they played. He longed for night and an +opportunity of escaping from the house to go and see his good friend +Lothario, and with him give vent to his joy over the precious pearl he +had gained in having established his wife's purity. Both mistress and +maid took care to give him time and opportunity to get away, and taking +advantage of it he made his escape, and at once went in quest of +Lothario, and it would be impossible to describe how he embraced him when +he found him, and the things he said to him in the joy of his heart, and +the praises he bestowed upon Camilla; all which Lothario listened to +without being able to show any pleasure, for he could not forget how +deceived his friend was, and how dishonourably he had wronged him; and +though Anselmo could see that Lothario was not glad, still he imagined it +was only because he had left Camilla wounded and had been himself the +cause of it; and so among other things he told him not to be distressed +about Camilla's accident, for, as they had agreed to hide it from him, +the wound was evidently trifling; and that being so, he had no cause for +fear, but should henceforward be of good cheer and rejoice with him, +seeing that by his means and adroitness he found himself raised to the +greatest height of happiness that he could have ventured to hope for, and +desired no better pastime than making verses in praise of Camilla that +would preserve her name for all time to come. Lothario commended his +purpose, and promised on his own part to aid him in raising a monument so +glorious. + +And so Anselmo was left the most charmingly hoodwinked man there could be +in the world. He himself, persuaded he was conducting the instrument of +his glory, led home by the hand him who had been the utter destruction of +his good name; whom Camilla received with averted countenance, though +with smiles in her heart. The deception was carried on for some time, +until at the end of a few months Fortune turned her wheel and the guilt +which had been until then so skilfully concealed was published abroad, +and Anselmo paid with his life the penalty of his ill-advised curiosity. + +Chapter XXXV. - +Which treats of the heroic and prodigious battle Don Quixote had with +certain skins of red wine, and brings the novel of "the ill-advised +curiosity" to a close + +There remained but little more of the novel to be read, when Sancho Panza +burst forth in wild excitement from the garret where Don Quixote was +lying, shouting, "Run, sirs! quick; and help my master, who is in the +thick of the toughest and stiffest battle I ever laid eyes on. By the +living God he has given the giant, the enemy of my lady the Princess +Micomicona, such a slash that he has sliced his head clean off as if it +were a turnip." + +"What are you talking about, brother?" said the curate, pausing as he was +about to read the remainder of the novel. "Are you in your senses, +Sancho? How the devil can it be as you say, when the giant is two +thousand leagues away?" + +Here they heard a loud noise in the chamber, and Don Quixote shouting +out, "Stand, thief, brigand, villain; now I have got thee, and thy +scimitar shall not avail thee!" And then it seemed as though he were +slashing vigorously at the wall. + +"Don't stop to listen," said Sancho, "but go in and part them or help my +master: though there is no need of that now, for no doubt the giant is +dead by this time and giving account to God of his past wicked life; for +I saw the blood flowing on the ground, and the head cut off and fallen on +one side, and it is as big as a large wine-skin." + +"May I die," said the landlord at this, "if Don Quixote or Don Devil has +not been slashing some of the skins of red wine that stand full at his +bed's head, and the spilt wine must be what this good fellow takes for +blood;" and so saying he went into the room and the rest after him, and +there they found Don Quixote in the strangest costume in the world. He +was in his shirt, which was not long enough in front to cover his thighs +completely and was six fingers shorter behind; his legs were very long +and lean, covered with hair, and anything but clean; on his head he had a +little greasy red cap that belonged to the host, round his left arm he +had rolled the blanket of the bed, to which Sancho, for reasons best +known to himself, owed a grudge, and in his right hand he held his +unsheathed sword, with which he was slashing about on all sides, uttering +exclamations as if he were actually fighting some giant: and the best of +it was his eyes were not open, for he was fast asleep, and dreaming that +he was doing battle with the giant. For his imagination was so wrought +upon by the adventure he was going to accomplish, that it made him dream +he had already reached the kingdom of Micomicon, and was engaged in +combat with his enemy; and believing he was laying on the giant, he had +given so many sword cuts to the skins that the whole room was full of +wine. On seeing this the landlord was so enraged that he fell on Don +Quixote, and with his clenched fist began to pummel him in such a way, +that if Cardenio and the curate had not dragged him off, he would have +brought the war of the giant to an end. But in spite of all the poor +gentleman never woke until the barber brought a great pot of cold water +from the well and flung it with one dash all over his body, on which Don +Quixote woke up, but not so completely as to understand what was the +matter. Dorothea, seeing how short and slight his attire was, would not +go in to witness the battle between her champion and her opponent. As for +Sancho, he went searching all over the floor for the head of the giant, +and not finding it he said, "I see now that it's all enchantment in this +house; for the last time, on this very spot where I am now, I got ever so +many thumps without knowing who gave them to me, or being able to see +anybody; and now this head is not to be seen anywhere about, though I saw +it cut off with my own eyes and the blood running from the body as if +from a fountain." + +"What blood and fountains are you talking about, enemy of God and his +saints?" said the landlord. "Don't you see, you thief, that the blood and +the fountain are only these skins here that have been stabbed and the red +wine swimming all over the room?--and I wish I saw the soul of him that +stabbed them swimming in hell." + +"I know nothing about that," said Sancho; "all I know is it will be my +bad luck that through not finding this head my county will melt away like +salt in water;"--for Sancho awake was worse than his master asleep, so +much had his master's promises addled his wits. + +The landlord was beside himself at the coolness of the squire and the +mischievous doings of the master, and swore it should not be like the +last time when they went without paying; and that their privileges of +chivalry should not hold good this time to let one or other of them off +without paying, even to the cost of the plugs that would have to be put +to the damaged wine-skins. The curate was holding Don Quixote's hands, +who, fancying he had now ended the adventure and was in the presence of +the Princess Micomicona, knelt before the curate and said, "Exalted and +beauteous lady, your highness may live from this day forth fearless of +any harm this base being could do you; and I too from this day forth am +released from the promise I gave you, since by the help of God on high +and by the favour of her by whom I live and breathe, I have fulfilled it +so successfully." + +"Did not I say so?" said Sancho on hearing this. "You see I wasn't drunk; +there you see my master has already salted the giant; there's no doubt +about the bulls; my county is all right!" + +Who could have helped laughing at the absurdities of the pair, master and +man? And laugh they did, all except the landlord, who cursed himself; but +at length the barber, Cardenio, and the curate contrived with no small +trouble to get Don Quixote on the bed, and he fell asleep with every +appearance of excessive weariness. They left him to sleep, and came out +to the gate of the inn to console Sancho Panza on not having found the +head of the giant; but much more work had they to appease the landlord, +who was furious at the sudden death of his wine-skins; and said the +landlady half scolding, half crying, "At an evil moment and in an unlucky +hour he came into my house, this knight-errant--would that I had never +set eyes on him, for dear he has cost me; the last time he went off with +the overnight score against him for supper, bed, straw, and barley, for +himself and his squire and a hack and an ass, saying he was a knight +adventurer--God send unlucky adventures to him and all the adventurers in +the world--and therefore not bound to pay anything, for it was so settled +by the knight-errantry tariff: and then, all because of him, came the +other gentleman and carried off my tail, and gives it back more than two +cuartillos the worse, all stripped of its hair, so that it is no use for +my husband's purpose; and then, for a finishing touch to all, to burst my +wine-skins and spill my wine! I wish I saw his own blood spilt! But let +him not deceive himself, for, by the bones of my father and the shade of +my mother, they shall pay me down every quarts; or my name is not what it +is, and I am not my father's daughter." All this and more to the same +effect the landlady delivered with great irritation, and her good maid +Maritornes backed her up, while the daughter held her peace and smiled +from time to time. The curate smoothed matters by promising to make good +all losses to the best of his power, not only as regarded the wine-skins +but also the wine, and above all the depreciation of the tail which they +set such store by. Dorothea comforted Sancho, telling him that she +pledged herself, as soon as it should appear certain that his master had +decapitated the giant, and she found herself peacefully established in +her kingdom, to bestow upon him the best county there was in it. With +this Sancho consoled himself, and assured the princess she might rely +upon it that he had seen the head of the giant, and more by token it had +a beard that reached to the girdle, and that if it was not to be seen now +it was because everything that happened in that house went by +enchantment, as he himself had proved the last time he had lodged there. +Dorothea said she fully believed it, and that he need not be uneasy, for +all would go well and turn out as he wished. All therefore being +appeased, the curate was anxious to go on with the novel, as he saw there +was but little more left to read. Dorothea and the others begged him to +finish it, and he, as he was willing to please them, and enjoyed reading +it himself, continued the tale in these words: + +The result was, that from the confidence Anselmo felt in Camilla's +virtue, he lived happy and free from anxiety, and Camilla purposely +looked coldly on Lothario, that Anselmo might suppose her feelings +towards him to be the opposite of what they were; and the better to +support the position, Lothario begged to be excused from coming to the +house, as the displeasure with which Camilla regarded his presence was +plain to be seen. But the befooled Anselmo said he would on no account +allow such a thing, and so in a thousand ways he became the author of his +own dishonour, while he believed he was insuring his happiness. Meanwhile +the satisfaction with which Leonela saw herself empowered to carry on her +amour reached such a height that, regardless of everything else, she +followed her inclinations unrestrainedly, feeling confident that her +mistress would screen her, and even show her how to manage it safely. At +last one night Anselmo heard footsteps in Leonela's room, and on trying +to enter to see who it was, he found that the door was held against him, +which made him all the more determined to open it; and exerting his +strength he forced it open, and entered the room in time to see a man +leaping through the window into the street. He ran quickly to seize him +or discover who he was, but he was unable to effect either purpose, for +Leonela flung her arms round him crying, "Be calm, senor; do not give way +to passion or follow him who has escaped from this; he belongs to me, and +in fact he is my husband." + +Anselmo would not believe it, but blind with rage drew a dagger and +threatened to stab Leonela, bidding her tell the truth or he would kill +her. She, in her fear, not knowing what she was saying, exclaimed, "Do +not kill me, senor, for I can tell you things more important than any you +can imagine." + +"Tell me then at once or thou diest," said Anselmo. + +"It would be impossible for me now," said Leonela, "I am so agitated: +leave me till to-morrow, and then you shall hear from me what will fill +you with astonishment; but rest assured that he who leaped through the +window is a young man of this city, who has given me his promise to +become my husband." + +Anselmo was appeased with this, and was content to wait the time she +asked of him, for he never expected to hear anything against Camilla, so +satisfied and sure of her virtue was he; and so he quitted the room, and +left Leonela locked in, telling her she should not come out until she had +told him all she had to make known to him. He went at once to see +Camilla, and tell her, as he did, all that had passed between him and her +handmaid, and the promise she had given him to inform him matters of +serious importance. + +There is no need of saying whether Camilla was agitated or not, for so +great was her fear and dismay, that, making sure, as she had good reason +to do, that Leonela would tell Anselmo all she knew of her faithlessness, +she had not the courage to wait and see if her suspicions were confirmed; +and that same night, as soon as she thought that Anselmo was asleep, she +packed up the most valuable jewels she had and some money, and without +being observed by anybody escaped from the house and betook herself to +Lothario's, to whom she related what had occurred, imploring him to +convey her to some place of safety or fly with her where they might be +safe from Anselmo. The state of perplexity to which Camilla reduced +Lothario was such that he was unable to utter a word in reply, still less +to decide upon what he should do. At length he resolved to conduct her to +a convent of which a sister of his was prioress; Camilla agreed to this, +and with the speed which the circumstances demanded, Lothario took her to +the convent and left her there, and then himself quitted the city without +letting anyone know of his departure. + +As soon as daylight came Anselmo, without missing Camilla from his side, +rose cager to learn what Leonela had to tell him, and hastened to the +room where he had locked her in. He opened the door, entered, but found +no Leonela; all he found was some sheets knotted to the window, a plain +proof that she had let herself down from it and escaped. He returned, +uneasy, to tell Camilla, but not finding her in bed or anywhere in the +house he was lost in amazement. He asked the servants of the house about +her, but none of them could give him any explanation. As he was going in +search of Camilla it happened by chance that he observed her boxes were +lying open, and that the greater part of her jewels were gone; and now he +became fully aware of his disgrace, and that Leonela was not the cause of +his misfortune; and, just as he was, without delaying to dress himself +completely, he repaired, sad at heart and dejected, to his friend +Lothario to make known his sorrow to him; but when he failed to find him +and the servants reported that he had been absent from his house all +night and had taken with him all the money he had, he felt as though he +were losing his senses; and to make all complete on returning to his own +house he found it deserted and empty, not one of all his servants, male +or female, remaining in it. He knew not what to think, or say, or do, and +his reason seemed to be deserting him little by little. He reviewed his +position, and saw himself in a moment left without wife, friend, or +servants, abandoned, he felt, by the heaven above him, and more than all +robbed of his honour, for in Camilla's disappearance he saw his own ruin. +After long reflection he resolved at last to go to his friend's village, +where he had been staying when he afforded opportunities for the +contrivance of this complication of misfortune. He locked the doors of +his house, mounted his horse, and with a broken spirit set out on his +journey; but he had hardly gone half-way when, harassed by his +reflections, he had to dismount and tie his horse to a tree, at the foot +of which he threw himself, giving vent to piteous heartrending sighs; and +there he remained till nearly nightfall, when he observed a man +approaching on horseback from the city, of whom, after saluting him, he +asked what was the news in Florence. + +The citizen replied, "The strangest that have been heard for many a day; +for it is reported abroad that Lothario, the great friend of the wealthy +Anselmo, who lived at San Giovanni, carried off last night Camilla, the +wife of Anselmo, who also has disappeared. All this has been told by a +maid-servant of Camilla's, whom the governor found last night lowering +herself by a sheet from the windows of Anselmo's house. I know not +indeed, precisely, how the affair came to pass; all I know is that the +whole city is wondering at the occurrence, for no one could have expected +a thing of the kind, seeing the great and intimate friendship that +existed between them, so great, they say, that they were called 'The Two +Friends.'" + +"Is it known at all," said Anselmo, "what road Lothario and Camilla +took?" + +"Not in the least," said the citizen, "though the governor has been very +active in searching for them." + +"God speed you, senor," said Anselmo. + +"God be with you," said the citizen and went his way. + +This disastrous intelligence almost robbed Anselmo not only of his senses +but of his life. He got up as well as he was able and reached the house +of his friend, who as yet knew nothing of his misfortune, but seeing him +come pale, worn, and haggard, perceived that he was suffering some heavy +affliction. Anselmo at once begged to be allowed to retire to rest, and +to be given writing materials. His wish was complied with and he was left +lying down and alone, for he desired this, and even that the door should +be locked. Finding himself alone he so took to heart the thought of his +misfortune that by the signs of death he felt within him he knew well his +life was drawing to a close, and therefore he resolved to leave behind +him a declaration of the cause of his strange end. He began to write, but +before he had put down all he meant to say, his breath failed him and he +yielded up his life, a victim to the suffering which his ill-advised +curiosity had entailed upon him. The master of the house observing that +it was now late and that Anselmo did not call, determined to go in and +ascertain if his indisposition was increasing, and found him lying on his +face, his body partly in the bed, partly on the writing-table, on which +he lay with the written paper open and the pen still in his hand. Having +first called to him without receiving any answer, his host approached +him, and taking him by the hand, found that it was cold, and saw that he +was dead. Greatly surprised and distressed he summoned the household to +witness the sad fate which had befallen Anselmo; and then he read the +paper, the handwriting of which he recognised as his, and which contained +these words: + +"A foolish and ill-advised desire has robbed me of life. If the news of +my death should reach the ears of Camilla, let her know that I forgive +her, for she was not bound to perform miracles, nor ought I to have +required her to perform them; and since I have been the author of my own +dishonour, there is no reason why-" + +So far Anselmo had written, and thus it was plain that at this point, +before he could finish what he had to say, his life came to an end. The +next day his friend sent intelligence of his death to his relatives, who +had already ascertained his misfortune, as well as the convent where +Camilla lay almost on the point of accompanying her husband on that +inevitable journey, not on account of the tidings of his death, but +because of those she received of her lover's departure. Although she saw +herself a widow, it is said she refused either to quit the convent or +take the veil, until, not long afterwards, intelligence reached her that +Lothario had been killed in a battle in which M. de Lautrec had been +recently engaged with the Great Captain Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordova in +the kingdom of Naples, whither her too late repentant lover had repaired. +On learning this Camilla took the veil, and shortly afterwards died, worn +out by grief and melancholy. This was the end of all three, an end that +came of a thoughtless beginning. + +"I like this novel," said the curate; "but I cannot persuade myself of +its truth; and if it has been invented, the author's invention is faulty, +for it is impossible to imagine any husband so foolish as to try such a +costly experiment as Anselmo's. If it had been represented as occurring +between a gallant and his mistress it might pass; but between husband and +wife there is something of an impossibility about it. As to the way in +which the story is told, however, I have no fault to find." + +Chapter XXXVI. - +Which treats of more curious incidents that occurred at the inn + +Just at that instant the landlord, who was standing at the gate of the +inn, exclaimed, "Here comes a fine troop of guests; if they stop here we +may say gaudeamus." + +"What are they?" said Cardenio. + +"Four men," said the landlord, "riding a la jineta, with lances and +bucklers, and all with black veils, and with them there is a woman in +white on a side-saddle, whose face is also veiled, and two attendants on +foot." + +"Are they very near?" said the curate. + +"So near," answered the landlord, "that here they come." + +Hearing this Dorothea covered her face, and Cardenio retreated into Don +Quixote's room, and they hardly had time to do so before the whole party +the host had described entered the inn, and the four that were on +horseback, who were of highbred appearance and bearing, dismounted, and +came forward to take down the woman who rode on the side-saddle, and one +of them taking her in his arms placed her in a chair that stood at the +entrance of the room where Cardenio had hidden himself. All this time +neither she nor they had removed their veils or spoken a word, only on +sitting down on the chair the woman gave a deep sigh and let her arms +fall like one that was ill and weak. The attendants on foot then led the +horses away to the stable. Observing this the curate, curious to know who +these people in such a dress and preserving such silence were, went to +where the servants were standing and put the question to one of them, who +answered him. + +"Faith, sir, I cannot tell you who they are, I only know they seem to be +people of distinction, particularly he who advanced to take the lady you +saw in his arms; and I say so because all the rest show him respect, and +nothing is done except what he directs and orders." + +"And the lady, who is she?" asked the curate. + +"That I cannot tell you either," said the servant, "for I have not seen +her face all the way: I have indeed heard her sigh many times and utter +such groans that she seems to be giving up the ghost every time; but it +is no wonder if we do not know more than we have told you, as my comrade +and I have only been in their company two days, for having met us on the +road they begged and persuaded us to accompany them to Andalusia, +promising to pay us well." + +"And have you heard any of them called by his name?" asked the curate. + +"No, indeed," replied the servant; "they all preserve a marvellous +silence on the road, for not a sound is to be heard among them except the +poor lady's sighs and sobs, which make us pity her; and we feel sure that +wherever it is she is going, it is against her will, and as far as one +can judge from her dress she is a nun or, what is more likely, about to +become one; and perhaps it is because taking the vows is not of her own +free will, that she is so unhappy as she seems to be." + +"That may well be," said the curate, and leaving them he returned to +where Dorothea was, who, hearing the veiled lady sigh, moved by natural +compassion drew near to her and said, "What are you suffering from, +senora? If it be anything that women are accustomed and know how to +relieve, I offer you my services with all my heart." + +To this the unhappy lady made no reply; and though Dorothea repeated her +offers more earnestly she still kept silence, until the gentleman with +the veil, who, the servant said, was obeyed by the rest, approached and +said to Dorothea, "Do not give yourself the trouble, senora, of making +any offers to that woman, for it is her way to give no thanks for +anything that is done for her; and do not try to make her answer unless +you want to hear some lie from her lips." + +"I have never told a lie," was the immediate reply of her who had been +silent until now; "on the contrary, it is because I am so truthful and so +ignorant of lying devices that I am now in this miserable condition; and +this I call you yourself to witness, for it is my unstained truth that +has made you false and a liar." + +Cardenio heard these words clearly and distinctly, being quite close to +the speaker, for there was only the door of Don Quixote's room between +them, and the instant he did so, uttering a loud exclamation he cried, +"Good God! what is this I hear? What voice is this that has reached my +ears?" Startled at the voice the lady turned her head; and not seeing the +speaker she stood up and attempted to enter the room; observing which the +gentleman held her back, preventing her from moving a step. In her +agitation and sudden movement the silk with which she had covered her +face fell off and disclosed a countenance of incomparable and marvellous +beauty, but pale and terrified; for she kept turning her eyes, everywhere +she could direct her gaze, with an eagerness that made her look as if she +had lost her senses, and so marked that it excited the pity of Dorothea +and all who beheld her, though they knew not what caused it. The +gentleman grasped her firmly by the shoulders, and being so fully +occupied with holding her back, he was unable to put a hand to his veil +which was falling off, as it did at length entirely, and Dorothea, who +was holding the lady in her arms, raising her eyes saw that he who +likewise held her was her husband, Don Fernando. The instant she +recognised him, with a prolonged plaintive cry drawn from the depths of +her heart, she fell backwards fainting, and but for the barber being +close by to catch her in his arms, she would have fallen completely to +the ground. The curate at once hastened to uncover her face and throw +water on it, and as he did so Don Fernando, for he it was who held the +other in his arms, recognised her and stood as if death-stricken by the +sight; not, however, relaxing his grasp of Luscinda, for it was she that +was struggling to release herself from his hold, having recognised +Cardenio by his voice, as he had recognised her. Cardenio also heard +Dorothea's cry as she fell fainting, and imagining that it came from his +Luscinda burst forth in terror from the room, and the first thing he saw +was Don Fernando with Luscinda in his arms. Don Fernando, too, knew +Cardenio at once; and all three, Luscinda, Cardenio, and Dorothea, stood +in silent amazement scarcely knowing what had happened to them. + +They gazed at one another without speaking, Dorothea at Don Fernando, Don +Fernando at Cardenio, Cardenio at Luscinda, and Luscinda at Cardenio. The +first to break silence was Luscinda, who thus addressed Don Fernando: +"Leave me, Senor Don Fernando, for the sake of what you owe to yourself; +if no other reason will induce you, leave me to cling to the wall of +which I am the ivy, to the support from which neither your importunities, +nor your threats, nor your promises, nor your gifts have been able to +detach me. See how Heaven, by ways strange and hidden from our sight, has +brought me face to face with my true husband; and well you know by +dear-bought experience that death alone will be able to efface him from +my memory. May this plain declaration, then, lead you, as you can do +nothing else, to turn your love into rage, your affection into +resentment, and so to take my life; for if I yield it up in the presence +of my beloved husband I count it well bestowed; it may be by my death he +will be convinced that I kept my faith to him to the last moment of +life." + +Meanwhile Dorothea had come to herself, and had heard Luscinda's words, +by means of which she divined who she was; but seeing that Don Fernando +did not yet release her or reply to her, summoning up her resolution as +well as she could she rose and knelt at his feet, and with a flood of +bright and touching tears addressed him thus: + +"If, my lord, the beams of that sun that thou holdest eclipsed in thine +arms did not dazzle and rob thine eyes of sight thou wouldst have seen by +this time that she who kneels at thy feet is, so long as thou wilt have +it so, the unhappy and unfortunate Dorothea. I am that lowly peasant girl +whom thou in thy goodness or for thy pleasure wouldst raise high enough +to call herself thine; I am she who in the seclusion of innocence led a +contented life until at the voice of thy importunity, and thy true and +tender passion, as it seemed, she opened the gates of her modesty and +surrendered to thee the keys of her liberty; a gift received by thee but +thanklessly, as is clearly shown by my forced retreat to the place where +thou dost find me, and by thy appearance under the circumstances in which +I see thee. Nevertheless, I would not have thee suppose that I have come +here driven by my shame; it is only grief and sorrow at seeing myself +forgotten by thee that have led me. It was thy will to make me thine, and +thou didst so follow thy will, that now, even though thou repentest, thou +canst not help being mine. Bethink thee, my lord, the unsurpassable +affection I bear thee may compensate for the beauty and noble birth for +which thou wouldst desert me. Thou canst not be the fair Luscinda's +because thou art mine, nor can she be thine because she is Cardenio's; +and it will be easier, remember, to bend thy will to love one who adores +thee, than to lead one to love thee who abhors thee now. Thou didst +address thyself to my simplicity, thou didst lay siege to my virtue, thou +wert not ignorant of my station, well dost thou know how I yielded wholly +to thy will; there is no ground or reason for thee to plead deception, +and if it be so, as it is, and if thou art a Christian as thou art a +gentleman, why dost thou by such subterfuges put off making me as happy +at last as thou didst at first? And if thou wilt not have me for what I +am, thy true and lawful wife, at least take and accept me as thy slave, +for so long as I am thine I will count myself happy and fortunate. Do not +by deserting me let my shame become the talk of the gossips in the +streets; make not the old age of my parents miserable; for the loyal +services they as faithful vassals have ever rendered thine are not +deserving of such a return; and if thou thinkest it will debase thy blood +to mingle it with mine, reflect that there is little or no nobility in +the world that has not travelled the same road, and that in illustrious +lineages it is not the woman's blood that is of account; and, moreover, +that true nobility consists in virtue, and if thou art wanting in that, +refusing me what in justice thou owest me, then even I have higher claims +to nobility than thine. To make an end, senor, these are my last words to +thee: whether thou wilt, or wilt not, I am thy wife; witness thy words, +which must not and ought not to be false, if thou dost pride thyself on +that for want of which thou scornest me; witness the pledge which thou +didst give me, and witness Heaven, which thou thyself didst call to +witness the promise thou hadst made me; and if all this fail, thy own +conscience will not fail to lift up its silent voice in the midst of all +thy gaiety, and vindicate the truth of what I say and mar thy highest +pleasure and enjoyment." + +All this and more the injured Dorothea delivered with such earnest +feeling and such tears that all present, even those who came with Don +Fernando, were constrained to join her in them. Don Fernando listened to +her without replying, until, ceasing to speak, she gave way to such sobs +and sighs that it must have been a heart of brass that was not softened +by the sight of so great sorrow. Luscinda stood regarding her with no +less compassion for her sufferings than admiration for her intelligence +and beauty, and would have gone to her to say some words of comfort to +her, but was prevented by Don Fernando's grasp which held her fast. He, +overwhelmed with confusion and astonishment, after regarding Dorothea for +some moments with a fixed gaze, opened his arms, and, releasing Luscinda, +exclaimed: + +"Thou hast conquered, fair Dorothea, thou hast conquered, for it is +impossible to have the heart to deny the united force of so many truths." + +Luscinda in her feebleness was on the point of falling to the ground when +Don Fernando released her, but Cardenio, who stood near, having retreated +behind Don Fernando to escape recognition, casting fear aside and +regardless of what might happen, ran forward to support her, and said as +he clasped her in his arms, "If Heaven in its compassion is willing to +let thee rest at last, mistress of my heart, true, constant, and fair, +nowhere canst thou rest more safely than in these arms that now receive +thee, and received thee before when fortune permitted me to call thee +mine." + +At these words Luscinda looked up at Cardenio, at first beginning to +recognise him by his voice and then satisfying herself by her eyes that +it was he, and hardly knowing what she did, and heedless of all +considerations of decorum, she flung her arms around his neck and +pressing her face close to his, said, "Yes, my dear lord, you are the +true master of this your slave, even though adverse fate interpose again, +and fresh dangers threaten this life that hangs on yours." + +A strange sight was this for Don Fernando and those that stood around, +filled with surprise at an incident so unlooked for. Dorothea fancied +that Don Fernando changed colour and looked as though he meant to take +vengeance on Cardenio, for she observed him put his hand to his sword; +and the instant the idea struck her, with wonderful quickness she clasped +him round the knees, and kissing them and holding him so as to prevent +his moving, she said, while her tears continued to flow, "What is it thou +wouldst do, my only refuge, in this unforeseen event? Thou hast thy wife +at thy feet, and she whom thou wouldst have for thy wife is in the arms +of her husband: reflect whether it will be right for thee, whether it +will be possible for thee to undo what Heaven has done, or whether it +will be becoming in thee to seek to raise her to be thy mate who in spite +of every obstacle, and strong in her truth and constancy, is before thine +eyes, bathing with the tears of love the face and bosom of her lawful +husband. For God's sake I entreat of thee, for thine own I implore thee, +let not this open manifestation rouse thy anger; but rather so calm it as +to allow these two lovers to live in peace and quiet without any +interference from thee so long as Heaven permits them; and in so doing +thou wilt prove the generosity of thy lofty noble spirit, and the world +shall see that with thee reason has more influence than passion." + +All the time Dorothea was speaking, Cardenio, though he held Luscinda in +his arms, never took his eyes off Don Fernando, determined, if he saw him +make any hostile movement, to try and defend himself and resist as best +he could all who might assail him, though it should cost him his life. +But now Don Fernando's friends, as well as the curate and the barber, who +had been present all the while, not forgetting the worthy Sancho Panza, +ran forward and gathered round Don Fernando, entreating him to have +regard for the tears of Dorothea, and not suffer her reasonable hopes to +be disappointed, since, as they firmly believed, what she said was but +the truth; and bidding him observe that it was not, as it might seem, by +accident, but by a special disposition of Providence that they had all +met in a place where no one could have expected a meeting. And the curate +bade him remember that only death could part Luscinda from Cardenio; that +even if some sword were to separate them they would think their death +most happy; and that in a case that admitted of no remedy his wisest +course was, by conquering and putting a constraint upon himself, to show +a generous mind, and of his own accord suffer these two to enjoy the +happiness Heaven had granted them. He bade him, too, turn his eyes upon +the beauty of Dorothea and he would see that few if any could equal much +less excel her; while to that beauty should be added her modesty and the +surpassing love she bore him. But besides all this, he reminded him that +if he prided himself on being a gentleman and a Christian, he could not +do otherwise than keep his plighted word; and that in doing so he would +obey God and meet the approval of all sensible people, who know and +recognised it to be the privilege of beauty, even in one of humble birth, +provided virtue accompany it, to be able to raise itself to the level of +any rank, without any slur upon him who places it upon an equality with +himself; and furthermore that when the potent sway of passion asserts +itself, so long as there be no mixture of sin in it, he is not to be +blamed who gives way to it. + +To be brief, they added to these such other forcible arguments that Don +Fernando's manly heart, being after all nourished by noble blood, was +touched, and yielded to the truth which, even had he wished it, he could +not gainsay; and he showed his submission, and acceptance of the good +advice that had been offered to him, by stooping down and embracing +Dorothea, saying to her, "Rise, dear lady, it is not right that what I +hold in my heart should be kneeling at my feet; and if until now I have +shown no sign of what I own, it may have been by Heaven's decree in order +that, seeing the constancy with which you love me, I may learn to value +you as you deserve. What I entreat of you is that you reproach me not +with my transgression and grievous wrong-doing; for the same cause and +force that drove me to make you mine impelled me to struggle against +being yours; and to prove this, turn and look at the eyes of the now +happy Luscinda, and you will see in them an excuse for all my errors: and +as she has found and gained the object of her desires, and I have found +in you what satisfies all my wishes, may she live in peace and +contentment as many happy years with her Cardenio, as on my knees I pray +Heaven to allow me to live with my Dorothea;" and with these words he +once more embraced her and pressed his face to hers with so much +tenderness that he had to take great heed to keep his tears from +completing the proof of his love and repentance in the sight of all. Not +so Luscinda, and Cardenio, and almost all the others, for they shed so +many tears, some in their own happiness, some at that of the others, that +one would have supposed a heavy calamity had fallen upon them all. Even +Sancho Panza was weeping; though afterwards he said he only wept because +he saw that Dorothea was not as he fancied the queen Micomicona, of whom +he expected such great favours. Their wonder as well as their weeping +lasted some time, and then Cardenio and Luscinda went and fell on their +knees before Don Fernando, returning him thanks for the favour he had +rendered them in language so grateful that he knew not how to answer +them, and raising them up embraced them with every mark of affection and +courtesy. + +He then asked Dorothea how she had managed to reach a place so far +removed from her own home, and she in a few fitting words told all that +she had previously related to Cardenio, with which Don Fernando and his +companions were so delighted that they wished the story had been longer; +so charmingly did Dorothea describe her misadventures. When she had +finished Don Fernando recounted what had befallen him in the city after +he had found in Luscinda's bosom the paper in which she declared that she +was Cardenio's wife, and never could be his. He said he meant to kill +her, and would have done so had he not been prevented by her parents, and +that he quitted the house full of rage and shame, and resolved to avenge +himself when a more convenient opportunity should offer. The next day he +learned that Luscinda had disappeared from her father's house, and that +no one could tell whither she had gone. Finally, at the end of some +months he ascertained that she was in a convent and meant to remain there +all the rest of her life, if she were not to share it with Cardenio; and +as soon as he had learned this, taking these three gentlemen as his +companions, he arrived at the place where she was, but avoided speaking +to her, fearing that if it were known he was there stricter precautions +would be taken in the convent; and watching a time when the porter's +lodge was open he left two to guard the gate, and he and the other +entered the convent in quest of Luscinda, whom they found in the +cloisters in conversation with one of the nuns, and carrying her off +without giving her time to resist, they reached a place with her where +they provided themselves with what they required for taking her away; all +which they were able to do in complete safety, as the convent was in the +country at a considerable distance from the city. He added that when +Luscinda found herself in his power she lost all consciousness, and after +returning to herself did nothing but weep and sigh without speaking a +word; and thus in silence and tears they reached that inn, which for him +was reaching heaven where all the mischances of earth are over and at an +end. + +Chapter XXXVII. - +In which is continued the story of the famous Princess Micomicona, with +other droll adventures + +To all this Sancho listened with no little sorrow at heart to see how his +hopes of dignity were fading away and vanishing in smoke, and how the +fair Princess Micomicona had turned into Dorothea, and the giant into Don +Fernando, while his master was sleeping tranquilly, totally unconscious +of all that had come to pass. Dorothea was unable to persuade herself +that her present happiness was not all a dream; Cardenio was in a similar +state of mind, and Luscinda's thoughts ran in the same direction. Don +Fernando gave thanks to Heaven for the favour shown to him and for having +been rescued from the intricate labyrinth in which he had been brought so +near the destruction of his good name and of his soul; and in short +everybody in the inn was full of contentment and satisfaction at the +happy issue of such a complicated and hopeless business. The curate as a +sensible man made sound reflections upon the whole affair, and +congratulated each upon his good fortune; but the one that was in the +highest spirits and good humour was the landlady, because of the promise +Cardenio and the curate had given her to pay for all the losses and +damage she had sustained through Don Quixote's means. Sancho, as has been +already said, was the only one who was distressed, unhappy, and dejected; +and so with a long face he went in to his master, who had just awoke, and +said to him: + +"Sir Rueful Countenance, your worship may as well sleep on as much as you +like, without troubling yourself about killing any giant or restoring her +kingdom to the princess; for that is all over and settled now." + +"I should think it was," replied Don Quixote, "for I have had the most +prodigious and stupendous battle with the giant that I ever remember +having had all the days of my life; and with one back-stroke-swish!--I +brought his head tumbling to the ground, and so much blood gushed forth +from him that it ran in rivulets over the earth like water." + +"Like red wine, your worship had better say," replied Sancho; "for I +would have you know, if you don't know it, that the dead giant is a +hacked wine-skin, and the blood four-and-twenty gallons of red wine that +it had in its belly, and the cut-off head is the bitch that bore me; and +the devil take it all." + +"What art thou talking about, fool?" said Don Quixote; "art thou in thy +senses?" + +"Let your worship get up," said Sancho, "and you will see the nice +business you have made of it, and what we have to pay; and you will see +the queen turned into a private lady called Dorothea, and other things +that will astonish you, if you understand them." + +"I shall not be surprised at anything of the kind," returned Don Quixote; +"for if thou dost remember the last time we were here I told thee that +everything that happened here was a matter of enchantment, and it would +be no wonder if it were the same now." + +"I could believe all that," replied Sancho, "if my blanketing was the +same sort of thing also; only it wasn't, but real and genuine; for I saw +the landlord, Who is here to-day, holding one end of the blanket and +jerking me up to the skies very neatly and smartly, and with as much +laughter as strength; and when it comes to be a case of knowing people, I +hold for my part, simple and sinner as I am, that there is no enchantment +about it at all, but a great deal of bruising and bad luck." + +"Well, well, God will give a remedy," said Don Quixote; "hand me my +clothes and let me go out, for I want to see these transformations and +things thou speakest of." + +Sancho fetched him his clothes; and while he was dressing, the curate +gave Don Fernando and the others present an account of Don Quixote's +madness and of the stratagem they had made use of to withdraw him from +that Pena Pobre where he fancied himself stationed because of his lady's +scorn. He described to them also nearly all the adventures that Sancho +had mentioned, at which they marvelled and laughed not a little, thinking +it, as all did, the strangest form of madness a crazy intellect could be +capable of. But now, the curate said, that the lady Dorothea's good +fortune prevented her from proceeding with their purpose, it would be +necessary to devise or discover some other way of getting him home. + +Cardenio proposed to carry out the scheme they had begun, and suggested +that Luscinda would act and support Dorothea's part sufficiently well. + +"No," said Don Fernando, "that must not be, for I want Dorothea to follow +out this idea of hers; and if the worthy gentleman's village is not very +far off, I shall be happy if I can do anything for his relief." + +"It is not more than two days' journey from this," said the curate. + +"Even if it were more," said Don Fernando, "I would gladly travel so far +for the sake of doing so good a work. + +"At this moment Don Quixote came out in full panoply, with Mambrino's +helmet, all dinted as it was, on his head, his buckler on his arm, and +leaning on his staff or pike. The strange figure he presented filled Don +Fernando and the rest with amazement as they contemplated his lean yellow +face half a league long, his armour of all sorts, and the solemnity of +his deportment. They stood silent waiting to see what he would say, and +he, fixing his eyes on the air Dorothea, addressed her with great gravity +and composure: + +"I am informed, fair lady, by my squire here that your greatness has been +annihilated and your being abolished, since, from a queen and lady of +high degree as you used to be, you have been turned into a private +maiden. If this has been done by the command of the magician king your +father, through fear that I should not afford you the aid you need and +are entitled to, I may tell you he did not know and does not know half +the mass, and was little versed in the annals of chivalry; for, if he had +read and gone through them as attentively and deliberately as I have, he +would have found at every turn that knights of less renown than mine have +accomplished things more difficult: it is no great matter to kill a whelp +of a giant, however arrogant he may be; for it is not many hours since I +myself was engaged with one, and-I will not speak of it, that they may +not say I am lying; time, however, that reveals all, will tell the tale +when we least expect it." + +"You were engaged with a couple of wine-skins, and not a giant," said the +landlord at this; but Don Fernando told him to hold his tongue and on no +account interrupt Don Quixote, who continued, "I say in conclusion, high +and disinherited lady, that if your father has brought about this +metamorphosis in your person for the reason I have mentioned, you ought +not to attach any importance to it; for there is no peril on earth +through which my sword will not force a way, and with it, before many +days are over, I will bring your enemy's head to the ground and place on +yours the crown of your kingdom." + +Don Quixote said no more, and waited for the reply of the princess, who +aware of Don Fernando's determination to carry on the deception until Don +Quixote had been conveyed to his home, with great ease of manner and +gravity made answer, "Whoever told you, valiant Knight of the Rueful +Countenance, that I had undergone any change or transformation did not +tell you the truth, for I am the same as I was yesterday. It is true that +certain strokes of good fortune, that have given me more than I could +have hoped for, have made some alteration in me; but I have not therefore +ceased to be what I was before, or to entertain the same desire I have +had all through of availing myself of the might of your valiant and +invincible arm. And so, senor, let your goodness reinstate the father +that begot me in your good opinion, and be assured that he was a wise and +prudent man, since by his craft he found out such a sure and easy way of +remedying my misfortune; for I believe, senor, that had it not been for +you I should never have lit upon the good fortune I now possess; and in +this I am saying what is perfectly true; as most of these gentlemen who +are present can fully testify. All that remains is to set out on our +journey to-morrow, for to-day we could not make much way; and for the +rest of the happy result I am looking forward to, I trust to God and the +valour of your heart." + +So said the sprightly Dorothea, and on hearing her Don Quixote turned to +Sancho, and said to him, with an angry air, "I declare now, little +Sancho, thou art the greatest little villain in Spain. Say, thief and +vagabond, hast thou not just now told me that this princess had been +turned into a maiden called Dorothea, and that the head which I am +persuaded I cut off from a giant was the bitch that bore thee, and other +nonsense that put me in the greatest perplexity I have ever been in all +my life? I vow" (and here he looked to heaven and ground his teeth) "I +have a mind to play the mischief with thee, in a way that will teach +sense for the future to all lying squires of knights-errant in the +world." + +"Let your worship be calm, senor," returned Sancho, "for it may well be +that I have been mistaken as to the change of the lady princess +Micomicona; but as to the giant's head, or at least as to the piercing of +the wine-skins, and the blood being red wine, I make no mistake, as sure +as there is a God; because the wounded skins are there at the head of +your worship's bed, and the wine has made a lake of the room; if not you +will see when the eggs come to be fried; I mean when his worship the +landlord calls for all the damages: for the rest, I am heartily glad that +her ladyship the queen is as she was, for it concerns me as much as +anyone." + +"I tell thee again, Sancho, thou art a fool," said Don Quixote; "forgive +me, and that will do." + +"That will do," said Don Fernando; "let us say no more about it; and as +her ladyship the princess proposes to set out to-morrow because it is too +late to-day, so be it, and we will pass the night in pleasant +conversation, and to-morrow we will all accompany Senor Don Quixote; for +we wish to witness the valiant and unparalleled achievements he is about +to perform in the course of this mighty enterprise which he has +undertaken." + +"It is I who shall wait upon and accompany you," said Don Quixote; "and I +am much gratified by the favour that is bestowed upon me, and the good +opinion entertained of me, which I shall strive to justify or it shall +cost me my life, or even more, if it can possibly cost me more." + +Many were the compliments and expressions of politeness that passed +between Don Quixote and Don Fernando; but they were brought to an end by +a traveller who at this moment entered the inn, and who seemed from his +attire to be a Christian lately come from the country of the Moors, for +he was dressed in a short-skirted coat of blue cloth with half-sleeves +and without a collar; his breeches were also of blue cloth, and his cap +of the same colour, and he wore yellow buskins and had a Moorish cutlass +slung from a baldric across his breast. Behind him, mounted upon an ass, +there came a woman dressed in Moorish fashion, with her face veiled and a +scarf on her head, and wearing a little brocaded cap, and a mantle that +covered her from her shoulders to her feet. The man was of a robust and +well-proportioned frame, in age a little over forty, rather swarthy in +complexion, with long moustaches and a full beard, and, in short, his +appearance was such that if he had been well dressed he would have been +taken for a person of quality and good birth. On entering he asked for a +room, and when they told him there was none in the inn he seemed +distressed, and approaching her who by her dress seemed to be a Moor he +her down from saddle in his arms. Luscinda, Dorothea, the landlady, her +daughter and Maritornes, attracted by the strange, and to them entirely +new costume, gathered round her; and Dorothea, who was always kindly, +courteous, and quick-witted, perceiving that both she and the man who had +brought her were annoyed at not finding a room, said to her, "Do not be +put out, senora, by the discomfort and want of luxuries here, for it is +the way of road-side inns to be without them; still, if you will be +pleased to share our lodging with us (pointing to Luscinda) perhaps you +will have found worse accommodation in the course of your journey." + +To this the veiled lady made no reply; all she did was to rise from her +seat, crossing her hands upon her bosom, bowing her head and bending her +body as a sign that she returned thanks. From her silence they concluded +that she must be a Moor and unable to speak a Christian tongue. + +At this moment the captive came up, having been until now otherwise +engaged, and seeing that they all stood round his companion and that she +made no reply to what they addressed to her, he said, "Ladies, this +damsel hardly understands my language and can speak none but that of her +own country, for which reason she does not and cannot answer what has +been asked of her." + +"Nothing has been asked of her," returned Luscinda; "she has only been +offered our company for this evening and a share of the quarters we +occupy, where she shall be made as comfortable as the circumstances +allow, with the good-will we are bound to show all strangers that stand +in need of it, especially if it be a woman to whom the service is +rendered." + +"On her part and my own, senora," replied the captive, "I kiss your +hands, and I esteem highly, as I ought, the favour you have offered, +which, on such an occasion and coming from persons of your appearance, +is, it is plain to see, a very great one." + +"Tell me, senor," said Dorothea, "is this lady a Christian or a Moor? for +her dress and her silence lead us to imagine that she is what we could +wish she was not." + +"In dress and outwardly," said he, "she is a Moor, but at heart she is a +thoroughly good Christian, for she has the greatest desire to become +one." + +"Then she has not been baptised?" returned Luscinda. + +"There has been no opportunity for that," replied the captive, "since she +left Algiers, her native country and home; and up to the present she has +not found herself in any such imminent danger of death as to make it +necessary to baptise her before she has been instructed in all the +ceremonies our holy mother Church ordains; but, please God, ere long she +shall be baptised with the solemnity befitting her which is higher than +her dress or mine indicates." + +By these words he excited a desire in all who heard him, to know who the +Moorish lady and the captive were, but no one liked to ask just then, +seeing that it was a fitter moment for helping them to rest themselves +than for questioning them about their lives. Dorothea took the Moorish +lady by the hand and leading her to a seat beside herself, requested her +to remove her veil. She looked at the captive as if to ask him what they +meant and what she was to do. He said to her in Arabic that they asked +her to take off her veil, and thereupon she removed it and disclosed a +countenance so lovely, that to Dorothea she seemed more beautiful than +Luscinda, and to Luscinda more beautiful than Dorothea, and all the +bystanders felt that if any beauty could compare with theirs it was the +Moorish lady's, and there were even those who were inclined to give it +somewhat the preference. And as it is the privilege and charm of beauty +to win the heart and secure good-will, all forthwith became eager to show +kindness and attention to the lovely Moor. + +Don Fernando asked the captive what her name was, and he replied that it +was Lela Zoraida; but the instant she heard him, she guessed what the +Christian had asked, and said hastily, with some displeasure and energy, +"No, not Zoraida; Maria, Maria!" giving them to understand that she was +called "Maria" and not "Zoraida." These words, and the touching +earnestness with which she uttered them, drew more than one tear from +some of the listeners, particularly the women, who are by nature +tender-hearted and compassionate. Luscinda embraced her affectionately, +saying, "Yes, yes, Maria, Maria," to which the Moor replied, "Yes, yes, +Maria; Zoraida macange," which means "not Zoraida." + +Night was now approaching, and by the orders of those who accompanied Don +Fernando the landlord had taken care and pains to prepare for them the +best supper that was in his power. The hour therefore having arrived they +all took their seats at a long table like a refectory one, for round or +square table there was none in the inn, and the seat of honour at the +head of it, though he was for refusing it, they assigned to Don Quixote, +who desired the lady Micomicona to place herself by his side, as he was +her protector. Luscinda and Zoraida took their places next her, opposite +to them were Don Fernando and Cardenio, and next the captive and the +other gentlemen, and by the side of the ladies, the curate and the +barber. And so they supped in high enjoyment, which was increased when +they observed Don Quixote leave off eating, and, moved by an impulse like +that which made him deliver himself at such length when he supped with +the goatherds, begin to address them: + +"Verily, gentlemen, if we reflect upon it, great and marvellous are the +things they see, who make profession of the order of knight-errantry. +Say, what being is there in this world, who entering the gate of this +castle at this moment, and seeing us as we are here, would suppose or +imagine us to be what we are? Who would say that this lady who is beside +me was the great queen that we all know her to be, or that I am that +Knight of the Rueful Countenance, trumpeted far and wide by the mouth of +Fame? Now, there can be no doubt that this art and calling surpasses all +those that mankind has invented, and is the more deserving of being held +in honour in proportion as it is the more exposed to peril. Away with +those who assert that letters have the preeminence over arms; I will tell +them, whosoever they may be, that they know not what they say. For the +reason which such persons commonly assign, and upon which they chiefly +rest, is, that the labours of the mind are greater than those of the +body, and that arms give employment to the body alone; as if the calling +were a porter's trade, for which nothing more is required than sturdy +strength; or as if, in what we who profess them call arms, there were not +included acts of vigour for the execution of which high intelligence is +requisite; or as if the soul of the warrior, when he has an army, or the +defence of a city under his care, did not exert itself as much by mind as +by body. Nay; see whether by bodily strength it be possible to learn or +divine the intentions of the enemy, his plans, stratagems, or obstacles, +or to ward off impending mischief; for all these are the work of the +mind, and in them the body has no share whatever. Since, therefore, arms +have need of the mind, as much as letters, let us see now which of the +two minds, that of the man of letters or that of the warrior, has most to +do; and this will be seen by the end and goal that each seeks to attain; +for that purpose is the more estimable which has for its aim the nobler +object. The end and goal of letters--I am not speaking now of divine +letters, the aim of which is to raise and direct the soul to Heaven; for +with an end so infinite no other can be compared--I speak of human +letters, the end of which is to establish distributive justice, give to +every man that which is his, and see and take care that good laws are +observed: an end undoubtedly noble, lofty, and deserving of high praise, +but not such as should be given to that sought by arms, which have for +their end and object peace, the greatest boon that men can desire in this +life. The first good news the world and mankind received was that which +the angels announced on the night that was our day, when they sang in the +air, 'Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to men of +good-will;' and the salutation which the great Master of heaven and earth +taught his disciples and chosen followers when they entered any house, +was to say, 'Peace be on this house;' and many other times he said to +them, 'My peace I give unto you, my peace I leave you, peace be with +you;' a jewel and a precious gift given and left by such a hand: a jewel +without which there can be no happiness either on earth or in heaven. +This peace is the true end of war; and war is only another name for arms. +This, then, being admitted, that the end of war is peace, and that so far +it has the advantage of the end of letters, let us turn to the bodily +labours of the man of letters, and those of him who follows the +profession of arms, and see which are the greater." + +Don Quixote delivered his discourse in such a manner and in such correct +language, that for the time being he made it impossible for any of his +hearers to consider him a madman; on the contrary, as they were mostly +gentlemen, to whom arms are an appurtenance by birth, they listened to +him with great pleasure as he continued: "Here, then, I say is what the +student has to undergo; first of all poverty: not that all are poor, but +to put the case as strongly as possible: and when I have said that he +endures poverty, I think nothing more need be said about his hard +fortune, for he who is poor has no share of the good things of life. This +poverty he suffers from in various ways, hunger, or cold, or nakedness, +or all together; but for all that it is not so extreme but that he gets +something to eat, though it may be at somewhat unseasonable hours and +from the leavings of the rich; for the greatest misery of the student is +what they themselves call 'going out for soup,' and there is always some +neighbour's brazier or hearth for them, which, if it does not warm, at +least tempers the cold to them, and lastly, they sleep comfortably at +night under a roof. I will not go into other particulars, as for example +want of shirts, and no superabundance of shoes, thin and threadbare +garments, and gorging themselves to surfeit in their voracity when good +luck has treated them to a banquet of some sort. By this road that I have +described, rough and hard, stumbling here, falling there, getting up +again to fall again, they reach the rank they desire, and that once +attained, we have seen many who have passed these Syrtes and Scyllas and +Charybdises, as if borne flying on the wings of favouring fortune; we +have seen them, I say, ruling and governing the world from a chair, their +hunger turned into satiety, their cold into comfort, their nakedness into +fine raiment, their sleep on a mat into repose in holland and damask, the +justly earned reward of their virtue; but, contrasted and compared with +what the warrior undergoes, all they have undergone falls far short of +it, as I am now about to show." + +Chapter XXXVIII. - +Which treats of the curious discourse Don Quixote delivered on arms and +letters + +Continuing his discourse Don Quixote said: "As we began in the student's +case with poverty and its accompaniments, let us see now if the soldier +is richer, and we shall find that in poverty itself there is no one +poorer; for he is dependent on his miserable pay, which comes late or +never, or else on what he can plunder, seriously imperilling his life and +conscience; and sometimes his nakedness will be so great that a slashed +doublet serves him for uniform and shirt, and in the depth of winter he +has to defend himself against the inclemency of the weather in the open +field with nothing better than the breath of his mouth, which I need not +say, coming from an empty place, must come out cold, contrary to the laws +of nature. To be sure he looks forward to the approach of night to make +up for all these discomforts on the bed that awaits him, which, unless by +some fault of his, never sins by being over narrow, for he can easily +measure out on the ground as he likes, and roll himself about in it to +his heart's content without any fear of the sheets slipping away from +him. Then, after all this, suppose the day and hour for taking his degree +in his calling to have come; suppose the day of battle to have arrived, +when they invest him with the doctor's cap made of lint, to mend some +bullet-hole, perhaps, that has gone through his temples, or left him with +a crippled arm or leg. Or if this does not happen, and merciful Heaven +watches over him and keeps him safe and sound, it may be he will be in +the same poverty he was in before, and he must go through more +engagements and more battles, and come victorious out of all before he +betters himself; but miracles of that sort are seldom seen. For tell me, +sirs, if you have ever reflected upon it, by how much do those who have +gained by war fall short of the number of those who have perished in it? +No doubt you will reply that there can be no comparison, that the dead +cannot be numbered, while the living who have been rewarded may be summed +up with three figures. All which is the reverse in the case of men of +letters; for by skirts, to say nothing of sleeves, they all find means of +support; so that though the soldier has more to endure, his reward is +much less. But against all this it may be urged that it is easier to +reward two thousand soldiers, for the former may be remunerated by giving +them places, which must perforce be conferred upon men of their calling, +while the latter can only be recompensed out of the very property of the +master they serve; but this impossibility only strengthens my argument. + +"Putting this, however, aside, for it is a puzzling question for which it +is difficult to find a solution, let us return to the superiority of arms +over letters, a matter still undecided, so many are the arguments put +forward on each side; for besides those I have mentioned, letters say +that without them arms cannot maintain themselves, for war, too, has its +laws and is governed by them, and laws belong to the domain of letters +and men of letters. To this arms make answer that without them laws +cannot be maintained, for by arms states are defended, kingdoms +preserved, cities protected, roads made safe, seas cleared of pirates; +and, in short, if it were not for them, states, kingdoms, monarchies, +cities, ways by sea and land would be exposed to the violence and +confusion which war brings with it, so long as it lasts and is free to +make use of its privileges and powers. And then it is plain that whatever +costs most is valued and deserves to be valued most. To attain to +eminence in letters costs a man time, watching, hunger, nakedness, +headaches, indigestions, and other things of the sort, some of which I +have already referred to. But for a man to come in the ordinary course of +things to be a good soldier costs him all the student suffers, and in an +incomparably higher degree, for at every step he runs the risk of losing +his life. For what dread of want or poverty that can reach or harass the +student can compare with what the soldier feels, who finds himself +beleaguered in some stronghold mounting guard in some ravelin or +cavalier, knows that the enemy is pushing a mine towards the post where +he is stationed, and cannot under any circumstances retire or fly from +the imminent danger that threatens him? All he can do is to inform his +captain of what is going on so that he may try to remedy it by a +counter-mine, and then stand his ground in fear and expectation of the +moment when he will fly up to the clouds without wings and descend into +the deep against his will. And if this seems a trifling risk, let us see +whether it is equalled or surpassed by the encounter of two galleys stem +to stem, in the midst of the open sea, locked and entangled one with the +other, when the soldier has no more standing room than two feet of the +plank of the spur; and yet, though he sees before him threatening him as +many ministers of death as there are cannon of the foe pointed at him, +not a lance length from his body, and sees too that with the first +heedless step he will go down to visit the profundities of Neptune's +bosom, still with dauntless heart, urged on by honour that nerves him, he +makes himself a target for all that musketry, and struggles to cross that +narrow path to the enemy's ship. And what is still more marvellous, no +sooner has one gone down into the depths he will never rise from till the +end of the world, than another takes his place; and if he too falls into +the sea that waits for him like an enemy, another and another will +succeed him without a moment's pause between their deaths: courage and +daring the greatest that all the chances of war can show. Happy the blest +ages that knew not the dread fury of those devilish engines of artillery, +whose inventor I am persuaded is in hell receiving the reward of his +diabolical invention, by which he made it easy for a base and cowardly +arm to take the life of a gallant gentleman; and that, when he knows not +how or whence, in the height of the ardour and enthusiasm that fire and +animate brave hearts, there should come some random bullet, discharged +perhaps by one who fled in terror at the flash when he fired off his +accursed machine, which in an instant puts an end to the projects and +cuts off the life of one who deserved to live for ages to come. And thus +when I reflect on this, I am almost tempted to say that in my heart I +repent of having adopted this profession of knight-errant in so +detestable an age as we live in now; for though no peril can make me +fear, still it gives me some uneasiness to think that powder and lead may +rob me of the opportunity of making myself famous and renowned throughout +the known earth by the might of my arm and the edge of my sword. But +Heaven's will be done; if I succeed in my attempt I shall be all the more +honoured, as I have faced greater dangers than the knights-errant of yore +exposed themselves to." + +All this lengthy discourse Don Quixote delivered while the others supped, +forgetting to raise a morsel to his lips, though Sancho more than once +told him to eat his supper, as he would have time enough afterwards to +say all he wanted. It excited fresh pity in those who had heard him to +see a man of apparently sound sense, and with rational views on every +subject he discussed, so hopelessly wanting in all, when his wretched +unlucky chivalry was in question. The curate told him he was quite right +in all he had said in favour of arms, and that he himself, though a man +of letters and a graduate, was of the same opinion. + +They finished their supper, the cloth was removed, and while the hostess, +her daughter, and Maritornes were getting Don Quixote of La Mancha's +garret ready, in which it was arranged that the women were to be +quartered by themselves for the night, Don Fernando begged the captive to +tell them the story of his life, for it could not fail to be strange and +interesting, to judge by the hints he had let fall on his arrival in +company with Zoraida. To this the captive replied that he would very +willingly yield to his request, only he feared his tale would not give +them as much pleasure as he wished; nevertheless, not to be wanting in +compliance, he would tell it. The curate and the others thanked him and +added their entreaties, and he finding himself so pressed said there was +no occasion ask, where a command had such weight, and added, "If your +worships will give me your attention you will hear a true story which, +perhaps, fictitious ones constructed with ingenious and studied art +cannot come up to." These words made them settle themselves in their +places and preserve a deep silence, and he seeing them waiting on his +words in mute expectation, began thus in a pleasant quiet voice. + +Chapter XXXIX. - +Wherein the captive relates his life and adventures + +My family had its origin in a village in the mountains of Leon, and +nature had been kinder and more generous to it than fortune; though in +the general poverty of those communities my father passed for being even +a rich man; and he would have been so in reality had he been as clever in +preserving his property as he was in spending it. This tendency of his to +be liberal and profuse he had acquired from having been a soldier in his +youth, for the soldier's life is a school in which the niggard becomes +free-handed and the free-handed prodigal; and if any soldiers are to be +found who are misers, they are monsters of rare occurrence. My father +went beyond liberality and bordered on prodigality, a disposition by no +means advantageous to a married man who has children to succeed to his +name and position. My father had three, all sons, and all of sufficient +age to make choice of a profession. Finding, then, that he was unable to +resist his propensity, he resolved to divest himself of the instrument +and cause of his prodigality and lavishness, to divest himself of wealth, +without which Alexander himself would have seemed parsimonious; and so +calling us all three aside one day into a room, he addressed us in words +somewhat to the following effect: + +"My sons, to assure you that I love you, no more need be known or said +than that you are my sons; and to encourage a suspicion that I do not +love you, no more is needed than the knowledge that I have no +self-control as far as preservation of your patrimony is concerned; +therefore, that you may for the future feel sure that I love you like a +father, and have no wish to ruin you like a stepfather, I propose to do +with you what I have for some time back meditated, and after mature +deliberation decided upon. You are now of an age to choose your line of +life or at least make choice of a calling that will bring you honour and +profit when you are older; and what I have resolved to do is to divide my +property into four parts; three I will give to you, to each his portion +without making any difference, and the other I will retain to live upon +and support myself for whatever remainder of life Heaven may be pleased +to grant me. But I wish each of you on taking possession of the share +that falls to him to follow one of the paths I shall indicate. In this +Spain of ours there is a proverb, to my mind very true--as they all are, +being short aphorisms drawn from long practical experience--and the one I +refer to says, 'The church, or the sea, or the king's house;' as much as +to say, in plainer language, whoever wants to flourish and become rich, +let him follow the church, or go to sea, adopting commerce as his +calling, or go into the king's service in his household, for they say, +'Better a king's crumb than a lord's favour.' I say so because it is my +will and pleasure that one of you should follow letters, another trade, +and the third serve the king in the wars, for it is a difficult matter to +gain admission to his service in his household, and if war does not bring +much wealth it confers great distinction and fame. Eight days hence I +will give you your full shares in money, without defrauding you of a +farthing, as you will see in the end. Now tell me if you are willing to +follow out my idea and advice as I have laid it before you." + +Having called upon me as the eldest to answer, I, after urging him not to +strip himself of his property but to spend it all as he pleased, for we +were young men able to gain our living, consented to comply with his +wishes, and said that mine were to follow the profession of arms and +thereby serve God and my king. My second brother having made the same +proposal, decided upon going to the Indies, embarking the portion that +fell to him in trade. The youngest, and in my opinion the wisest, said he +would rather follow the church, or go to complete his studies at +Salamanca. As soon as we had come to an understanding, and made choice of +our professions, my father embraced us all, and in the short time he +mentioned carried into effect all he had promised; and when he had given +to each his share, which as well as I remember was three thousand ducats +apiece in cash (for an uncle of ours bought the estate and paid for it +down, not to let it go out of the family), we all three on the same day +took leave of our good father; and at the same time, as it seemed to me +inhuman to leave my father with such scanty means in his old age, I +induced him to take two of my three thousand ducats, as the remainder +would be enough to provide me with all a soldier needed. My two brothers, +moved by my example, gave him each a thousand ducats, so that there was +left for my father four thousand ducats in money, besides three thousand, +the value of the portion that fell to him which he preferred to retain in +land instead of selling it. Finally, as I said, we took leave of him, and +of our uncle whom I have mentioned, not without sorrow and tears on both +sides, they charging us to let them know whenever an opportunity offered +how we fared, whether well or ill. We promised to do so, and when he had +embraced us and given us his blessing, one set out for Salamanca, the +other for Seville, and I for Alicante, where I had heard there was a +Genoese vessel taking in a cargo of wool for Genoa. + +It is now some twenty-two years since I left my father's house, and all +that time, though I have written several letters, I have had no news +whatever of him or of my brothers; my own adventures during that period I +will now relate briefly. I embarked at Alicante, reached Genoa after a +prosperous voyage, and proceeded thence to Milan, where I provided myself +with arms and a few soldier's accoutrements; thence it was my intention +to go and take service in Piedmont, but as I was already on the road to +Alessandria della Paglia, I learned that the great Duke of Alva was on +his way to Flanders. I changed my plans, joined him, served under him in +the campaigns he made, was present at the deaths of the Counts Egmont and +Horn, and was promoted to be ensign under a famous captain of +Guadalajara, Diego de Urbina by name. Some time after my arrival in +Flanders news came of the league that his Holiness Pope Pius V of happy +memory, had made with Venice and Spain against the common enemy, the +Turk, who had just then with his fleet taken the famous island of Cyprus, +which belonged to the Venetians, a loss deplorable and disastrous. It was +known as a fact that the Most Serene Don John of Austria, natural brother +of our good king Don Philip, was coming as commander-in-chief of the +allied forces, and rumours were abroad of the vast warlike preparations +which were being made, all which stirred my heart and filled me with a +longing to take part in the campaign which was expected; and though I had +reason to believe, and almost certain promises, that on the first +opportunity that presented itself I should be promoted to be captain, I +preferred to leave all and betake myself, as I did, to Italy; and it was +my good fortune that Don John had just arrived at Genoa, and was going on +to Naples to join the Venetian fleet, as he afterwards did at Messina. I +may say, in short, that I took part in that glorious expedition, promoted +by this time to be a captain of infantry, to which honourable charge my +good luck rather than my merits raised me; and that day--so fortunate for +Christendom, because then all the nations of the earth were disabused of +the error under which they lay in imagining the Turks to be invincible on +sea-on that day, I say, on which the Ottoman pride and arrogance were +broken, among all that were there made happy (for the Christians who died +that day were happier than those who remained alive and victorious) I +alone was miserable; for, instead of some naval crown that I might have +expected had it been in Roman times, on the night that followed that +famous day I found myself with fetters on my feet and manacles on my +hands. + +It happened in this way: El Uchali, the king of Algiers, a daring and +successful corsair, having attacked and taken the leading Maltese galley +(only three knights being left alive in it, and they badly wounded), the +chief galley of John Andrea, on board of which I and my company were +placed, came to its relief, and doing as was bound to do in such a case, +I leaped on board the enemy's galley, which, sheering off from that which +had attacked it, prevented my men from following me, and so I found +myself alone in the midst of my enemies, who were in such numbers that I +was unable to resist; in short I was taken, covered with wounds; El +Uchali, as you know, sirs, made his escape with his entire squadron, and +I was left a prisoner in his power, the only sad being among so many +filled with joy, and the only captive among so many free; for there were +fifteen thousand Christians, all at the oar in the Turkish fleet, that +regained their longed-for liberty that day. + +They carried me to Constantinople, where the Grand Turk, Selim, made my +master general at sea for having done his duty in the battle and carried +off as evidence of his bravery the standard of the Order of Malta. The +following year, which was the year seventy-two, I found myself at +Navarino rowing in the leading galley with the three lanterns. There I +saw and observed how the opportunity of capturing the whole Turkish fleet +in harbour was lost; for all the marines and janizzaries that belonged to +it made sure that they were about to be attacked inside the very harbour, +and had their kits and pasamaques, or shoes, ready to flee at once on +shore without waiting to be assailed, in so great fear did they stand of +our fleet. But Heaven ordered it otherwise, not for any fault or neglect +of the general who commanded on our side, but for the sins of +Christendom, and because it was God's will and pleasure that we should +always have instruments of punishment to chastise us. As it was, El +Uchali took refuge at Modon, which is an island near Navarino, and +landing forces fortified the mouth of the harbour and waited quietly +until Don John retired. On this expedition was taken the galley called +the Prize, whose captain was a son of the famous corsair Barbarossa. It +was taken by the chief Neapolitan galley called the She-wolf, commanded +by that thunderbolt of war, that father of his men, that successful and +unconquered captain Don Alvaro de Bazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz; and I +cannot help telling you what took place at the capture of the Prize. + +The son of Barbarossa was so cruel, and treated his slaves so badly, +that, when those who were at the oars saw that the She-wolf galley was +bearing down upon them and gaining upon them, they all at once dropped +their oars and seized their captain who stood on the stage at the end of +the gangway shouting to them to row lustily; and passing him on from +bench to bench, from the poop to the prow, they so bit him that before he +had got much past the mast his soul had already got to hell; so great, as +I said, was the cruelty with which he treated them, and the hatred with +which they hated him. + +We returned to Constantinople, and the following year, seventy-three, it +became known that Don John had seized Tunis and taken the kingdom from +the Turks, and placed Muley Hamet in possession, putting an end to the +hopes which Muley Hamida, the cruelest and bravest Moor in the world, +entertained of returning to reign there. The Grand Turk took the loss +greatly to heart, and with the cunning which all his race possess, he +made peace with the Venetians (who were much more eager for it than he +was), and the following year, seventy-four, he attacked the Goletta and +the fort which Don John had left half built near Tunis. While all these +events were occurring, I was labouring at the oar without any hope of +freedom; at least I had no hope of obtaining it by ransom, for I was +firmly resolved not to write to my father telling him of my misfortunes. +At length the Goletta fell, and the fort fell, before which places there +were seventy-five thousand regular Turkish soldiers, and more than four +hundred thousand Moors and Arabs from all parts of Africa, and in the +train of all this great host such munitions and engines of war, and so +many pioneers that with their hands they might have covered the Goletta +and the fort with handfuls of earth. The first to fall was the Goletta, +until then reckoned impregnable, and it fell, not by any fault of its +defenders, who did all that they could and should have done, but because +experiment proved how easily entrenchments could be made in the desert +sand there; for water used to be found at two palms depth, while the +Turks found none at two yards; and so by means of a quantity of sandbags +they raised their works so high that they commanded the walls of the +fort, sweeping them as if from a cavalier, so that no one was able to +make a stand or maintain the defence. + +It was a common opinion that our men should not have shut themselves up +in the Goletta, but should have waited in the open at the landing-place; +but those who say so talk at random and with little knowledge of such +matters; for if in the Goletta and in the fort there were barely seven +thousand soldiers, how could such a small number, however resolute, sally +out and hold their own against numbers like those of the enemy? And how +is it possible to help losing a stronghold that is not relieved, above +all when surrounded by a host of determined enemies in their own country? +But many thought, and I thought so too, that it was special favour and +mercy which Heaven showed to Spain in permitting the destruction of that +source and hiding place of mischief, that devourer, sponge, and moth of +countless money, fruitlessly wasted there to no other purpose save +preserving the memory of its capture by the invincible Charles V; as if +to make that eternal, as it is and will be, these stones were needed to +support it. The fort also fell; but the Turks had to win it inch by inch, +for the soldiers who defended it fought so gallantly and stoutly that the +number of the enemy killed in twenty-two general assaults exceeded +twenty-five thousand. Of three hundred that remained alive not one was +taken unwounded, a clear and manifest proof of their gallantry and +resolution, and how sturdily they had defended themselves and held their +post. A small fort or tower which was in the middle of the lagoon under +the command of Don Juan Zanoguera, a Valencian gentleman and a famous +soldier, capitulated upon terms. They took prisoner Don Pedro +Puertocarrero, commandant of the Goletta, who had done all in his power +to defend his fortress, and took the loss of it so much to heart that he +died of grief on the way to Constantinople, where they were carrying him +a prisoner. They also took the commandant of the fort, Gabrio Cerbellon +by name, a Milanese gentleman, a great engineer and a very brave soldier. +In these two fortresses perished many persons of note, among whom was +Pagano Doria, knight of the Order of St. John, a man of generous +disposition, as was shown by his extreme liberality to his brother, the +famous John Andrea Doria; and what made his death the more sad was that +he was slain by some Arabs to whom, seeing that the fort was now lost, he +entrusted himself, and who offered to conduct him in the disguise of a +Moor to Tabarca, a small fort or station on the coast held by the Genoese +employed in the coral fishery. These Arabs cut off his head and carried +it to the commander of the Turkish fleet, who proved on them the truth of +our Castilian proverb, that "though the treason may please, the traitor +is hated;" for they say he ordered those who brought him the present to +be hanged for not having brought him alive. + +Among the Christians who were taken in the fort was one named Don Pedro +de Aguilar, a native of some place, I know not what, in Andalusia, who +had been ensign in the fort, a soldier of great repute and rare +intelligence, who had in particular a special gift for what they call +poetry. I say so because his fate brought him to my galley and to my +bench, and made him a slave to the same master; and before we left the +port this gentleman composed two sonnets by way of epitaphs, one on the +Goletta and the other on the fort; indeed, I may as well repeat them, for +I have them by heart, and I think they will be liked rather than +disliked. + +The instant the captive mentioned the name of Don Pedro de Aguilar, Don +Fernando looked at his companions and they all three smiled; and when he +came to speak of the sonnets one of them said, "Before your worship +proceeds any further I entreat you to tell me what became of that Don +Pedro de Aguilar you have spoken of." + +"All I know is," replied the captive, "that after having been in +Constantinople two years, he escaped in the disguise of an Arnaut, in +company with a Greek spy; but whether he regained his liberty or not I +cannot tell, though I fancy he did, because a year afterwards I saw the +Greek at Constantinople, though I was unable to ask him what the result +of the journey was." + +"Well then, you are right," returned the gentleman, "for that Don Pedro +is my brother, and he is now in our village in good health, rich, +married, and with three children." + +"Thanks be to God for all the mercies he has shown him," said the +captive; "for to my mind there is no happiness on earth to compare with +recovering lost liberty." + +"And what is more," said the gentleman, "I know the sonnets my brother +made." + +"Then let your worship repeat them," said the captive, "for you will +recite them better than I can." + +"With all my heart," said the gentleman; "that on the Goletta runs thus." + +Chapter XL. - +In which the story of the captive is continued. + +poem{ + +SONNET + +"Blest souls, that, from this mortal husk set free, + In guerdon of brave deeds beatified, + Above this lowly orb of ours abide +Made heirs of heaven and immortality, +With noble rage and ardour glowing ye + Your strength, while strength was yours, in battle plied, + And with your own blood and the foeman's dyed +The sandy soil and the encircling sea. +It was the ebbing life-blood first that failed +The weary arms; the stout hearts never quailed. + Though vanquished, yet ye earned the victor's crown: +Though mourned, yet still triumphant was your fall +For there ye won, between the sword and wall, + In Heaven glory and on earth renown." + +}poem + +"That is it exactly, according to my recollection," said the captive. + +"Well then, that on the fort," said the gentleman, "if my memory serves +me, goes thus: + +poem{ + +SONNET + +"Up from this wasted soil, this shattered shell, + Whose walls and towers here in ruin lie, + Three thousand soldier souls took wing on high, +In the bright mansions of the blest to dwell. +The onslaught of the foeman to repel + By might of arm all vainly did they try, + And when at length 'twas left them but to die, +Wearied and few the last defenders fell. +And this same arid soil hath ever been +A haunt of countless mournful memories, + As well in our day as in days of yore. +But never yet to Heaven it sent, I ween, +From its hard bosom purer souls than these, + Or braver bodies on its surface bore." + +}poem + +The sonnets were not disliked, and the captive was rejoiced at the +tidings they gave him of his comrade, and continuing his tale, he went on +to say: + +The Goletta and the fort being thus in their hands, the Turks gave orders +to dismantle the Goletta--for the fort was reduced to such a state that +there was nothing left to level--and to do the work more quickly and +easily they mined it in three places; but nowhere were they able to blow +up the part which seemed to be the least strong, that is to say, the old +walls, while all that remained standing of the new fortifications that +the Fratin had made came to the ground with the greatest ease. Finally +the fleet returned victorious and triumphant to Constantinople, and a few +months later died my master, El Uchali, otherwise Uchali Fartax, which +means in Turkish "the scabby renegade;" for that he was; it is the +practice with the Turks to name people from some defect or virtue they +may possess; the reason being that there are among them only four +surnames belonging to families tracing their descent from the Ottoman +house, and the others, as I have said, take their names and surnames +either from bodily blemishes or moral qualities. This "scabby one" rowed +at the oar as a slave of the Grand Signor's for fourteen years, and when +over thirty-four years of age, in resentment at having been struck by a +Turk while at the oar, turned renegade and renounced his faith in order +to be able to revenge himself; and such was his valour that, without +owing his advancement to the base ways and means by which most favourites +of the Grand Signor rise to power, he came to be king of Algiers, and +afterwards general-on-sea, which is the third place of trust in the +realm. He was a Calabrian by birth, and a worthy man morally, and he +treated his slaves with great humanity. He had three thousand of them, +and after his death they were divided, as he directed by his will, +between the Grand Signor (who is heir of all who die and shares with the +children of the deceased) and his renegades. I fell to the lot of a +Venetian renegade who, when a cabin boy on board a ship, had been taken +by Uchali and was so much beloved by him that he became one of his most +favoured youths. He came to be the most cruel renegade I ever saw: his +name was Hassan Aga, and he grew very rich and became king of Algiers. +With him I went there from Constantinople, rather glad to be so near +Spain, not that I intended to write to anyone about my unhappy lot, but +to try if fortune would be kinder to me in Algiers than in +Constantinople, where I had attempted in a thousand ways to escape +without ever finding a favourable time or chance; but in Algiers I +resolved to seek for other means of effecting the purpose I cherished so +dearly; for the hope of obtaining my liberty never deserted me; and when +in my plots and schemes and attempts the result did not answer my +expectations, without giving way to despair I immediately began to look +out for or conjure up some new hope to support me, however faint or +feeble it might be. + +In this way I lived on immured in a building or prison called by the +Turks a bano in which they confine the Christian captives, as well those +that are the king's as those belonging to private individuals, and also +what they call those of the Almacen, which is as much as to say the +slaves of the municipality, who serve the city in the public works and +other employments; but captives of this kind recover their liberty with +great difficulty, for, as they are public property and have no particular +master, there is no one with whom to treat for their ransom, even though +they may have the means. To these banos, as I have said, some private +individuals of the town are in the habit of bringing their captives, +especially when they are to be ransomed; because there they can keep them +in safety and comfort until their ransom arrives. The king's captives +also, that are on ransom, do not go out to work with the rest of the +crew, unless when their ransom is delayed; for then, to make them write +for it more pressingly, they compel them to work and go for wood, which +is no light labour. + +I, however, was one of those on ransom, for when it was discovered that I +was a captain, although I declared my scanty means and want of fortune, +nothing could dissuade them from including me among the gentlemen and +those waiting to be ransomed. They put a chain on me, more as a mark of +this than to keep me safe, and so I passed my life in that bano with +several other gentlemen and persons of quality marked out as held to +ransom; but though at times, or rather almost always, we suffered from +hunger and scanty clothing, nothing distressed us so much as hearing and +seeing at every turn the unexampled and unheard-of cruelties my master +inflicted upon the Christians. Every day he hanged a man, impaled one, +cut off the ears of another; and all with so little provocation, or so +entirely without any, that the Turks acknowledged he did it merely for +the sake of doing it, and because he was by nature murderously disposed +towards the whole human race. The only one that fared at all well with +him was a Spanish soldier, something de Saavedra by name, to whom he +never gave a blow himself, or ordered a blow to be given, or addressed a +hard word, although he had done things that will dwell in the memory of +the people there for many a year, and all to recover his liberty; and for +the least of the many things he did we all dreaded that he would be +impaled, and he himself was in fear of it more than once; and only that +time does not allow, I could tell you now something of what that soldier +did, that would interest and astonish you much more than the narration of +my own tale. + +To go on with my story; the courtyard of our prison was overlooked by the +windows of the house belonging to a wealthy Moor of high position; and +these, as is usual in Moorish houses, were rather loopholes than windows, +and besides were covered with thick and close lattice-work. It so +happened, then, that as I was one day on the terrace of our prison with +three other comrades, trying, to pass away the time, how far we could +leap with our chains, we being alone, for all the other Christians had +gone out to work, I chanced to raise my eyes, and from one of these +little closed windows I saw a reed appear with a cloth attached to the +end of it, and it kept waving to and fro, and moving as if making signs +to us to come and take it. We watched it, and one of those who were with +me went and stood under the reed to see whether they would let it drop, +or what they would do, but as he did so the reed was raised and moved +from side to side, as if they meant to say "no" by a shake of the head. +The Christian came back, and it was again lowered, making the same +movements as before. Another of my comrades went, and with him the same +happened as with the first, and then the third went forward, but with the +same result as the first and second. Seeing this I did not like not to +try my luck, and as soon as I came under the reed it was dropped and fell +inside the bano at my feet. I hastened to untie the cloth, in which I +perceived a knot, and in this were ten cianis, which are coins of base +gold, current among the Moors, and each worth ten reals of our money. + +It is needless to say I rejoiced over this godsend, and my joy was not +less than my wonder as I strove to imagine how this good fortune could +have come to us, but to me specially; for the evident unwillingness to +drop the reed for any but me showed that it was for me the favour was +intended. I took my welcome money, broke the reed, and returned to the +terrace, and looking up at the window, I saw a very white hand put out +that opened and shut very quickly. From this we gathered or fancied that +it must be some woman living in that house that had done us this +kindness, and to show that we were grateful for it, we made salaams after +the fashion of the Moors, bowing the head, bending the body, and crossing +the arms on the breast. Shortly afterwards at the same window a small +cross made of reeds was put out and immediately withdrawn. This sign led +us to believe that some Christian woman was a captive in the house, and +that it was she who had been so good to us; but the whiteness of the hand +and the bracelets we had perceived made us dismiss that idea, though we +thought it might be one of the Christian renegades whom their masters +very often take as lawful wives, and gladly, for they prefer them to the +women of their own nation. In all our conjectures we were wide of the +truth; so from that time forward our sole occupation was watching and +gazing at the window where the cross had appeared to us, as if it were +our pole-star; but at least fifteen days passed without our seeing either +it or the hand, or any other sign and though meanwhile we endeavoured +with the utmost pains to ascertain who it was that lived in the house, +and whether there were any Christian renegade in it, nobody could ever +tell us anything more than that he who lived there was a rich Moor of +high position, Hadji Morato by name, formerly alcaide of La Pata, an +office of high dignity among them. But when we least thought it was going +to rain any more cianis from that quarter, we saw the reed suddenly +appear with another cloth tied in a larger knot attached to it, and this +at a time when, as on the former occasion, the bano was deserted and +unoccupied. + +We made trial as before, each of the same three going forward before I +did; but the reed was delivered to none but me, and on my approach it was +let drop. I untied the knot and I found forty Spanish gold crowns with a +paper written in Arabic, and at the end of the writing there was a large +cross drawn. I kissed the cross, took the crowns and returned to the +terrace, and we all made our salaams; again the hand appeared, I made +signs that I would read the paper, and then the window was closed. We +were all puzzled, though filled with joy at what had taken place; and as +none of us understood Arabic, great was our curiosity to know what the +paper contained, and still greater the difficulty of finding some one to +read it. At last I resolved to confide in a renegade, a native of Murcia, +who professed a very great friendship for me, and had given pledges that +bound him to keep any secret I might entrust to him; for it is the custom +with some renegades, when they intend to return to Christian territory, +to carry about them certificates from captives of mark testifying, in +whatever form they can, that such and such a renegade is a worthy man who +has always shown kindness to Christians, and is anxious to escape on the +first opportunity that may present itself. Some obtain these testimonials +with good intentions, others put them to a cunning use; for when they go +to pillage on Christian territory, if they chance to be cast away, or +taken prisoners, they produce their certificates and say that from these +papers may be seen the object they came for, which was to remain on +Christian ground, and that it was to this end they joined the Turks in +their foray. In this way they escape the consequences of the first +outburst and make their peace with the Church before it does them any +harm, and then when they have the chance they return to Barbary to become +what they were before. Others, however, there are who procure these +papers and make use of them honestly, and remain on Christian soil. This +friend of mine, then, was one of these renegades that I have described; +he had certificates from all our comrades, in which we testified in his +favour as strongly as we could; and if the Moors had found the papers +they would have burned him alive. + +I knew that he understood Arabic very well, and could not only speak but +also write it; but before I disclosed the whole matter to him, I asked +him to read for me this paper which I had found by accident in a hole in +my cell. He opened it and remained some time examining it and muttering +to himself as he translated it. I asked him if he understood it, and he +told me he did perfectly well, and that if I wished him to tell me its +meaning word for word, I must give him pen and ink that he might do it +more satisfactorily. We at once gave him what he required, and he set +about translating it bit by bit, and when he had done he said: + +"All that is here in Spanish is what the Moorish paper contains, and you +must bear in mind that when it says 'Lela Marien' it means 'Our Lady the +Virgin Mary.'" + +We read the paper and it ran thus: + +"When I was a child my father had a slave who taught me to pray the +Christian prayer in my own language, and told me many things about Lela +Marien. The Christian died, and I know that she did not go to the fire, +but to Allah, because since then I have seen her twice, and she told me +to go to the land of the Christians to see Lela Marien, who had great +love for me. I know not how to go. I have seen many Christians, but +except thyself none has seemed to me to be a gentleman. I am young and +beautiful, and have plenty of money to take with me. See if thou canst +contrive how we may go, and if thou wilt thou shalt be my husband there, +and if thou wilt not it will not distress me, for Lela Marien will find +me some one to marry me. I myself have written this: have a care to whom +thou givest it to read: trust no Moor, for they are all perfidious. I am +greatly troubled on this account, for I would not have thee confide in +anyone, because if my father knew it he would at once fling me down a +well and cover me with stones. I will put a thread to the reed; tie the +answer to it, and if thou hast no one to write for thee in Arabic, tell +it to me by signs, for Lela Marien will make me understand thee. She and +Allah and this cross, which I often kiss as the captive bade me, protect +thee." + +Judge, sirs, whether we had reason for surprise and joy at the words of +this paper; and both one and the other were so great, that the renegade +perceived that the paper had not been found by chance, but had been in +reality addressed to some one of us, and he begged us, if what he +suspected were the truth, to trust him and tell him all, for he would +risk his life for our freedom; and so saying he took out from his breast +a metal crucifix, and with many tears swore by the God the image +represented, in whom, sinful and wicked as he was, he truly and +faithfully believed, to be loyal to us and keep secret whatever we chose +to reveal to him; for he thought and almost foresaw that by means of her +who had written that paper, he and all of us would obtain our liberty, +and he himself obtain the object he so much desired, his restoration to +the bosom of the Holy Mother Church, from which by his own sin and +ignorance he was now severed like a corrupt limb. The renegade said this +with so many tears and such signs of repentance, that with one consent we +all agreed to tell him the whole truth of the matter, and so we gave him +a full account of all, without hiding anything from him. We pointed out +to him the window at which the reed appeared, and he by that means took +note of the house, and resolved to ascertain with particular care who +lived in it. We agreed also that it would be advisable to answer the +Moorish lady's letter, and the renegade without a moment's delay took +down the words I dictated to him, which were exactly what I shall tell +you, for nothing of importance that took place in this affair has escaped +my memory, or ever will while life lasts. This, then, was the answer +returned to the Moorish lady: + +"The true Allah protect thee, Lady, and that blessed Marien who is the +true mother of God, and who has put it into thy heart to go to the land +of the Christians, because she loves thee. Entreat her that she be +pleased to show thee how thou canst execute the command she gives thee, +for she will, such is her goodness. On my own part, and on that of all +these Christians who are with me, I promise to do all that we can for +thee, even to death. Fail not to write to me and inform me what thou dost +mean to do, and I will always answer thee; for the great Allah has given +us a Christian captive who can speak and write thy language well, as thou +mayest see by this paper; without fear, therefore, thou canst inform us +of all thou wouldst. As to what thou sayest, that if thou dost reach the +land of the Christians thou wilt be my wife, I give thee my promise upon +it as a good Christian; and know that the Christians keep their promises +better than the Moors. Allah and Marien his mother watch over thee, my +Lady." + +The paper being written and folded I waited two days until the bano was +empty as before, and immediately repaired to the usual walk on the +terrace to see if there were any sign of the reed, which was not long in +making its appearance. As soon as I saw it, although I could not +distinguish who put it out, I showed the paper as a sign to attach the +thread, but it was already fixed to the reed, and to it I tied the paper; +and shortly afterwards our star once more made its appearance with the +white flag of peace, the little bundle. It was dropped, and I picked it +up, and found in the cloth, in gold and silver coins of all sorts, more +than fifty crowns, which fifty times more strengthened our joy and +doubled our hope of gaining our liberty. That very night our renegade +returned and said he had learned that the Moor we had been told of lived +in that house, that his name was Hadji Morato, that he was enormously +rich, that he had one only daughter the heiress of all his wealth, and +that it was the general opinion throughout the city that she was the most +beautiful woman in Barbary, and that several of the viceroys who came +there had sought her for a wife, but that she had been always unwilling +to marry; and he had learned, moreover, that she had a Christian slave +who was now dead; all which agreed with the contents of the paper. We +immediately took counsel with the renegade as to what means would have to +be adopted in order to carry off the Moorish lady and bring us all to +Christian territory; and in the end it was agreed that for the present we +should wait for a second communication from Zoraida (for that was the +name of her who now desires to be called Maria), because we saw clearly +that she and no one else could find a way out of all these difficulties. +When we had decided upon this the renegade told us not to be uneasy, for +he would lose his life or restore us to liberty. For four days the bano +was filled with people, for which reason the reed delayed its appearance +for four days, but at the end of that time, when the bano was, as it +generally was, empty, it appeared with the cloth so bulky that it +promised a happy birth. Reed and cloth came down to me, and I found +another paper and a hundred crowns in gold, without any other coin. The +renegade was present, and in our cell we gave him the paper to read, +which was to this effect: + +"I cannot think of a plan, senor, for our going to Spain, nor has Lela +Marien shown me one, though I have asked her. All that can be done is for +me to give you plenty of money in gold from this window. With it ransom +yourself and your friends, and let one of you go to the land of the +Christians, and there buy a vessel and come back for the others; and he +will find me in my father's garden, which is at the Babazon gate near the +seashore, where I shall be all this summer with my father and my +servants. You can carry me away from there by night without any danger, +and bring me to the vessel. And remember thou art to be my husband, else +I will pray to Marien to punish thee. If thou canst not trust anyone to +go for the vessel, ransom thyself and do thou go, for I know thou wilt +return more surely than any other, as thou art a gentleman and a +Christian. Endeavour to make thyself acquainted with the garden; and when +I see thee walking yonder I shall know that the bano is empty and I will +give thee abundance of money. Allah protect thee, senor." + +These were the words and contents of the second paper, and on hearing +them, each declared himself willing to be the ransomed one, and promised +to go and return with scrupulous good faith; and I too made the same +offer; but to all this the renegade objected, saying that he would not on +any account consent to one being set free before all went together, as +experience had taught him how ill those who have been set free keep +promises which they made in captivity; for captives of distinction +frequently had recourse to this plan, paying the ransom of one who was to +go to Valencia or Majorca with money to enable him to arm a bark and +return for the others who had ransomed him, but who never came back; for +recovered liberty and the dread of losing it again efface from the memory +all the obligations in the world. And to prove the truth of what he said, +he told us briefly what had happened to a certain Christian gentleman +almost at that very time, the strangest case that had ever occurred even +there, where astonishing and marvellous things are happening every +instant. In short, he ended by saying that what could and ought to be +done was to give the money intended for the ransom of one of us +Christians to him, so that he might with it buy a vessel there in Algiers +under the pretence of becoming a merchant and trader at Tetuan and along +the coast; and when master of the vessel, it would be easy for him to hit +on some way of getting us all out of the bano and putting us on board; +especially if the Moorish lady gave, as she said, money enough to ransom +all, because once free it would be the easiest thing in the world for us +to embark even in open day; but the greatest difficulty was that the +Moors do not allow any renegade to buy or own any craft, unless it be a +large vessel for going on roving expeditions, because they are afraid +that anyone who buys a small vessel, especially if he be a Spaniard, only +wants it for the purpose of escaping to Christian territory. This however +he could get over by arranging with a Tagarin Moor to go shares with him +in the purchase of the vessel, and in the profit on the cargo; and under +cover of this he could become master of the vessel, in which case he +looked upon all the rest as accomplished. But though to me and my +comrades it had seemed a better plan to send to Majorca for the vessel, +as the Moorish lady suggested, we did not dare to oppose him, fearing +that if we did not do as he said he would denounce us, and place us in +danger of losing all our lives if he were to disclose our dealings with +Zoraida, for whose life we would have all given our own. We therefore +resolved to put ourselves in the hands of God and in the renegade's; and +at the same time an answer was given to Zoraida, telling her that we +would do all she recommended, for she had given as good advice as if Lela +Marien had delivered it, and that it depended on her alone whether we +were to defer the business or put it in execution at once. I renewed my +promise to be her husband; and thus the next day that the bano chanced to +be empty she at different times gave us by means of the reed and cloth +two thousand gold crowns and a paper in which she said that the next +Juma, that is to say Friday, she was going to her father's garden, but +that before she went she would give us more money; and if it were not +enough we were to let her know, as she would give us as much as we asked, +for her father had so much he would not miss it, and besides she kept all +the keys. + +We at once gave the renegade five hundred crowns to buy the vessel, and +with eight hundred I ransomed myself, giving the money to a Valencian +merchant who happened to be in Algiers at the time, and who had me +released on his word, pledging it that on the arrival of the first ship +from Valencia he would pay my ransom; for if he had given the money at +once it would have made the king suspect that my ransom money had been +for a long time in Algiers, and that the merchant had for his own +advantage kept it secret. In fact my master was so difficult to deal with +that I dared not on any account pay down the money at once. The Thursday +before the Friday on which the fair Zoraida was to go to the garden she +gave us a thousand crowns more, and warned us of her departure, begging +me, if I were ransomed, to find out her father's garden at once, and by +all means to seek an opportunity of going there to see her. I answered in +a few words that I would do so, and that she must remember to commend us +to Lela Marien with all the prayers the captive had taught her. This +having been done, steps were taken to ransom our three comrades, so as to +enable them to quit the bano, and lest, seeing me ransomed and themselves +not, though the money was forthcoming, they should make a disturbance +about it and the devil should prompt them to do something that might +injure Zoraida; for though their position might be sufficient to relieve +me from this apprehension, nevertheless I was unwilling to run any risk +in the matter; and so I had them ransomed in the same way as I was, +handing over all the money to the merchant so that he might with safety +and confidence give security; without, however, confiding our arrangement +and secret to him, which might have been dangerous. + +Chapter XLI. - +In which the captive still continues his adventures + +Before fifteen days were over our renegade had already purchased an +excellent vessel with room for more than thirty persons; and to make the +transaction safe and lend a colour to it, he thought it well to make, as +he did, a voyage to a place called Shershel, twenty leagues from Algiers +on the Oran side, where there is an extensive trade in dried figs. Two or +three times he made this voyage in company with the Tagarin already +mentioned. The Moors of Aragon are called Tagarins in Barbary, and those +of Granada Mudejars; but in the Kingdom of Fez they call the Mudejars +Elches, and they are the people the king chiefly employs in war. To +proceed: every time he passed with his vessel he anchored in a cove that +was not two crossbow shots from the garden where Zoraida was waiting; and +there the renegade, together with the two Moorish lads that rowed, used +purposely to station himself, either going through his prayers, or else +practising as a part what he meant to perform in earnest. And thus he +would go to Zoraida's garden and ask for fruit, which her father gave +him, not knowing him; but though, as he afterwards told me, he sought to +speak to Zoraida, and tell her who he was, and that by my orders he was +to take her to the land of the Christians, so that she might feel +satisfied and easy, he had never been able to do so; for the Moorish +women do not allow themselves to be seen by any Moor or Turk, unless +their husband or father bid them: with Christian captives they permit +freedom of intercourse and communication, even more than might be +considered proper. But for my part I should have been sorry if he had +spoken to her, for perhaps it might have alarmed her to find her affairs +talked of by renegades. But God, who ordered it otherwise, afforded no +opportunity for our renegade's well-meant purpose; and he, seeing how +safely he could go to Shershel and return, and anchor when and how and +where he liked, and that the Tagarin his partner had no will but his, and +that, now I was ransomed, all we wanted was to find some Christians to +row, told me to look out for any I should be willing to take with me, +over and above those who had been ransomed, and to engage them for the +next Friday, which he fixed upon for our departure. On this I spoke to +twelve Spaniards, all stout rowers, and such as could most easily leave +the city; but it was no easy matter to find so many just then, because +there were twenty ships out on a cruise and they had taken all the rowers +with them; and these would not have been found were it not that their +master remained at home that summer without going to sea in order to +finish a galliot that he had upon the stocks. To these men I said nothing +more than that the next Friday in the evening they were to come out +stealthily one by one and hang about Hadji Morato's garden, waiting for +me there until I came. These directions I gave each one separately, with +orders that if they saw any other Christians there they were not to say +anything to them except that I had directed them to wait at that spot. + +This preliminary having been settled, another still more necessary step +had to be taken, which was to let Zoraida know how matters stood that she +might be prepared and forewarned, so as not to be taken by surprise if we +were suddenly to seize upon her before she thought the Christians' vessel +could have returned. I determined, therefore, to go to the garden and try +if I could speak to her; and the day before my departure I went there +under the pretence of gathering herbs. The first person I met was her +father, who addressed me in the language that all over Barbary and even +in Constantinople is the medium between captives and Moors, and is +neither Morisco nor Castilian, nor of any other nation, but a mixture of +all languages, by means of which we can all understand one another. In +this sort of language, I say, he asked me what I wanted in his garden, +and to whom I belonged. I replied that I was a slave of the Arnaut Mami +(for I knew as a certainty that he was a very great friend of his), and +that I wanted some herbs to make a salad. He asked me then whether I were +on ransom or not, and what my master demanded for me. While these +questions and answers were proceeding, the fair Zoraida, who had already +perceived me some time before, came out of the house in the garden, and +as Moorish women are by no means particular about letting themselves be +seen by Christians, or, as I have said before, at all coy, she had no +hesitation in coming to where her father stood with me; moreover her +father, seeing her approaching slowly, called to her to come. It would be +beyond my power now to describe to you the great beauty, the high-bred +air, the brilliant attire of my beloved Zoraida as she presented herself +before my eyes. I will content myself with saying that more pearls hung +from her fair neck, her ears, and her hair than she had hairs on her +head. On her ankles, which as is customary were bare, she had carcajes +(for so bracelets or anklets are called in Morisco) of the purest gold, +set with so many diamonds that she told me afterwards her father valued +them at ten thousand doubloons, and those she had on her wrists were +worth as much more. The pearls were in profusion and very fine, for the +highest display and adornment of the Moorish women is decking themselves +with rich pearls and seed-pearls; and of these there are therefore more +among the Moors than among any other people. Zoraida's father had to the +reputation of possessing a great number, and the purest in all Algiers, +and of possessing also more than two hundred thousand Spanish crowns; and +she, who is now mistress of me only, was mistress of all this. Whether +thus adorned she would have been beautiful or not, and what she must have +been in her prosperity, may be imagined from the beauty remaining to her +after so many hardships; for, as everyone knows, the beauty of some women +has its times and its seasons, and is increased or diminished by chance +causes; and naturally the emotions of the mind will heighten or impair +it, though indeed more frequently they totally destroy it. In a word she +presented herself before me that day attired with the utmost splendour, +and supremely beautiful; at any rate, she seemed to me the most beautiful +object I had ever seen; and when, besides, I thought of all I owed to her +I felt as though I had before me some heavenly being come to earth to +bring me relief and happiness. + +As she approached her father told her in his own language that I was a +captive belonging to his friend the Arnaut Mami, and that I had come for +salad. + +She took up the conversation, and in that mixture of tongues I have +spoken of she asked me if I was a gentleman, and why I was not ransomed. + +I answered that I was already ransomed, and that by the price it might be +seen what value my master set on me, as I had given one thousand five +hundred zoltanis for me; to which she replied, "Hadst thou been my +father's, I can tell thee, I would not have let him part with thee for +twice as much, for you Christians always tell lies about yourselves and +make yourselves out poor to cheat the Moors." + +"That may be, lady," said I; "but indeed I dealt truthfully with my +master, as I do and mean to do with everybody in the world." + +"And when dost thou go?" said Zoraida. + +"To-morrow, I think," said I, "for there is a vessel here from France +which sails to-morrow, and I think I shall go in her." + +"Would it not be better," said Zoraida, "to wait for the arrival of ships +from Spain and go with them and not with the French who are not your +friends?" + +"No," said I; "though if there were intelligence that a vessel were now +coming from Spain it is true I might, perhaps, wait for it; however, it +is more likely I shall depart to-morrow, for the longing I feel to return +to my country and to those I love is so great that it will not allow me +to wait for another opportunity, however more convenient, if it be +delayed." + +"No doubt thou art married in thine own country," said Zoraida, "and for +that reason thou art anxious to go and see thy wife." + +"I am not married," I replied, "but I have given my promise to marry on +my arrival there." + +"And is the lady beautiful to whom thou hast given it?" said Zoraida. + +"So beautiful," said I, "that, to describe her worthily and tell thee the +truth, she is very like thee." + +At this her father laughed very heartily and said, "By Allah, Christian, +she must be very beautiful if she is like my daughter, who is the most +beautiful woman in all this kingdom: only look at her well and thou wilt +see I am telling the truth." + +Zoraida's father as the better linguist helped to interpret most of these +words and phrases, for though she spoke the bastard language, that, as I +have said, is employed there, she expressed her meaning more by signs +than by words. + +While we were still engaged in this conversation, a Moor came running up, +exclaiming that four Turks had leaped over the fence or wall of the +garden, and were gathering the fruit though it was not yet ripe. The old +man was alarmed and Zoraida too, for the Moors commonly, and, so to +speak, instinctively have a dread of the Turks, but particularly of the +soldiers, who are so insolent and domineering to the Moors who are under +their power that they treat them worse than if they were their slaves. +Her father said to Zoraida, "Daughter, retire into the house and shut +thyself in while I go and speak to these dogs; and thou, Christian, pick +thy herbs, and go in peace, and Allah bring thee safe to thy own +country." + +I bowed, and he went away to look for the Turks, leaving me alone with +Zoraida, who made as if she were about to retire as her father bade her; +but the moment he was concealed by the trees of the garden, turning to me +with her eyes full of tears she said, "Tameji, cristiano, tameji?" that is +to say, "Art thou going, Christian, art thou going?" + +I made answer, "Yes, lady, but not without thee, come what may: be on the +watch for me on the next Juma, and be not alarmed when thou seest us; for +most surely we shall go to the land of the Christians." + +This I said in such a way that she understood perfectly all that passed +between us, and throwing her arm round my neck she began with feeble +steps to move towards the house; but as fate would have it (and it might +have been very unfortunate if Heaven had not otherwise ordered it), just +as we were moving on in the manner and position I have described, with +her arm round my neck, her father, as he returned after having sent away +the Turks, saw how we were walking and we perceived that he saw us; but +Zoraida, ready and quickwitted, took care not to remove her arm from my +neck, but on the contrary drew closer to me and laid her head on my +breast, bending her knees a little and showing all the signs and tokens +of fainting, while I at the same time made it seem as though I were +supporting her against my will. Her father came running up to where we +were, and seeing his daughter in this state asked what was the matter +with her; she, however, giving no answer, he said, "No doubt she has +fainted in alarm at the entrance of those dogs," and taking her from mine +he drew her to his own breast, while she sighing, her eyes still wet with +tears, said again, "Ameji, cristiano, ameji"--"Go, Christian, go." To +this her father replied, "There is no need, daughter, for the Christian +to go, for he has done thee no harm, and the Turks have now gone; feel no +alarm, there is nothing to hurt thee, for as I say, the Turks at my +request have gone back the way they came." + +"It was they who terrified her, as thou hast said, senor," said I to her +father; "but since she tells me to go, I have no wish to displease her: +peace be with thee, and with thy leave I will come back to this garden +for herbs if need be, for my master says there are nowhere better herbs +for salad then here." + +"Come back for any thou hast need of," replied Hadji Morato; "for my +daughter does not speak thus because she is displeased with thee or any +Christian: she only meant that the Turks should go, not thou; or that it +was time for thee to look for thy herbs." + +With this I at once took my leave of both; and she, looking as though her +heart were breaking, retired with her father. While pretending to look +for herbs I made the round of the garden at my ease, and studied +carefully all the approaches and outlets, and the fastenings of the house +and everything that could be taken advantage of to make our task easy. + +Having done so I went and gave an account of all that had taken place to +the renegade and my comrades, and looked forward with impatience to the +hour when, all fear at an end, I should find myself in possession of the +prize which fortune held out to me in the fair and lovely Zoraida. The +time passed at length, and the appointed day we so longed for arrived; +and, all following out the arrangement and plan which, after careful +consideration and many a long discussion, we had decided upon, we +succeeded as fully as we could have wished; for on the Friday following +the day upon which I spoke to Zoraida in the garden, the renegade +anchored his vessel at nightfall almost opposite the spot where she was. +The Christians who were to row were ready and in hiding in different +places round about, all waiting for me, anxious and elated, and eager to +attack the vessel they had before their eyes; for they did not know the +renegade's plan, but expected that they were to gain their liberty by +force of arms and by killing the Moors who were on board the vessel. As +soon, then, as I and my comrades made our appearance, all those that were +in hiding seeing us came and joined us. It was now the time when the city +gates are shut, and there was no one to be seen in all the space outside. +When we were collected together we debated whether it would be better +first to go for Zoraida, or to make prisoners of the Moorish rowers who +rowed in the vessel; but while we were still uncertain our renegade came +up asking us what kept us, as it was now the time, and all the Moors were +off their guard and most of them asleep. We told him why we hesitated, +but he said it was of more importance first to secure the vessel, which +could be done with the greatest ease and without any danger, and then we +could go for Zoraida. We all approved of what he said, and so without +further delay, guided by him we made for the vessel, and he leaping on +board first, drew his cutlass and said in Morisco, "Let no one stir from +this if he does not want it to cost him his life." By this almost all the +Christians were on board, and the Moors, who were fainthearted, hearing +their captain speak in this way, were cowed, and without any one of them +taking to his arms (and indeed they had few or hardly any) they submitted +without saying a word to be bound by the Christians, who quickly secured +them, threatening them that if they raised any kind of outcry they would +be all put to the sword. This having been accomplished, and half of our +party being left to keep guard over them, the rest of us, again taking +the renegade as our guide, hastened towards Hadji Morato's garden, and as +good luck would have it, on trying the gate it opened as easily as if it +had not been locked; and so, quite quietly and in silence, we reached the +house without being perceived by anybody. The lovely Zoraida was watching +for us at a window, and as soon as she perceived that there were people +there, she asked in a low voice if we were "Nizarani," as much as to say +or ask if we were Christians. I answered that we were, and begged her to +come down. As soon as she recognised me she did not delay an instant, but +without answering a word came down immediately, opened the door and +presented herself before us all, so beautiful and so richly attired that +I cannot attempt to describe her. The moment I saw her I took her hand +and kissed it, and the renegade and my two comrades did the same; and the +rest, who knew nothing of the circumstances, did as they saw us do, for +it only seemed as if we were returning thanks to her, and recognising her +as the giver of our liberty. The renegade asked her in the Morisco +language if her father was in the house. She replied that he was and that +he was asleep. + +"Then it will be necessary to waken him and take him with us," said the +renegade, "and everything of value in this fair mansion." + +"Nay," said she, "my father must not on any account be touched, and there +is nothing in the house except what I shall take, and that will be quite +enough to enrich and satisfy all of you; wait a little and you shall +see," and so saying she went in, telling us she would return immediately +and bidding us keep quiet making any noise. + +I asked the renegade what had passed between them, and when he told me, I +declared that nothing should be done except in accordance with the wishes +of Zoraida, who now came back with a little trunk so full of gold crowns +that she could scarcely carry it. Unfortunately her father awoke while +this was going on, and hearing a noise in the garden, came to the window, +and at once perceiving that all those who were there were Christians, +raising a prodigiously loud outcry, he began to call out in Arabic, +"Christians, Christians! thieves, thieves!" by which cries we were all +thrown into the greatest fear and embarrassment; but the renegade seeing +the danger we were in and how important it was for him to effect his +purpose before we were heard, mounted with the utmost quickness to where +Hadji Morato was, and with him went some of our party; I, however, did +not dare to leave Zoraida, who had fallen almost fainting in my arms. To +be brief, those who had gone upstairs acted so promptly that in an +instant they came down, carrying Hadji Morato with his hands bound and a +napkin tied over his mouth, which prevented him from uttering a word, +warning him at the same time that to attempt to speak would cost him his +life. When his daughter caught sight of him she covered her eyes so as +not to see him, and her father was horror-stricken, not knowing how +willingly she had placed herself in our hands. But it was now most +essential for us to be on the move, and carefully and quickly we regained +the vessel, where those who had remained on board were waiting for us in +apprehension of some mishap having befallen us. It was barely two hours +after night set in when we were all on board the vessel, where the cords +were removed from the hands of Zoraida's father, and the napkin from his +mouth; but the renegade once more told him not to utter a word, or they +would take his life. He, when he saw his daughter there, began to sigh +piteously, and still more when he perceived that I held her closely +embraced and that she lay quiet without resisting or complaining, or +showing any reluctance; nevertheless he remained silent lest they should +carry into effect the repeated threats the renegade had addressed to him. + +Finding herself now on board, and that we were about to give way with the +oars, Zoraida, seeing her father there, and the other Moors bound, bade +the renegade ask me to do her the favour of releasing the Moors and +setting her father at liberty, for she would rather drown herself in the +sea than suffer a father that had loved her so dearly to be carried away +captive before her eyes and on her account. The renegade repeated this to +me, and I replied that I was very willing to do so; but he replied that +it was not advisable, because if they were left there they would at once +raise the country and stir up the city, and lead to the despatch of swift +cruisers in pursuit, and our being taken, by sea or land, without any +possibility of escape; and that all that could be done was to set them +free on the first Christian ground we reached. On this point we all +agreed; and Zoraida, to whom it was explained, together with the reasons +that prevented us from doing at once what she desired, was satisfied +likewise; and then in glad silence and with cheerful alacrity each of our +stout rowers took his oar, and commending ourselves to God with all our +hearts, we began to shape our course for the island of Majorca, the +nearest Christian land. Owing, however, to the Tramontana rising a +little, and the sea growing somewhat rough, it was impossible for us to +keep a straight course for Majorca, and we were compelled to coast in the +direction of Oran, not without great uneasiness on our part lest we +should be observed from the town of Shershel, which lies on that coast, +not more than sixty miles from Algiers. Moreover we were afraid of +meeting on that course one of the galliots that usually come with goods +from Tetuan; although each of us for himself and all of us together felt +confident that, if we were to meet a merchant galliot, so that it were +not a cruiser, not only should we not be lost, but that we should take a +vessel in which we could more safely accomplish our voyage. As we pursued +our course Zoraida kept her head between my hands so as not to see her +father, and I felt that she was praying to Lela Marien to help us. + +We might have made about thirty miles when daybreak found us some three +musket-shots off the land, which seemed to us deserted, and without +anyone to see us. For all that, however, by hard rowing we put out a +little to sea, for it was now somewhat calmer, and having gained about +two leagues the word was given to row by batches, while we ate something, +for the vessel was well provided; but the rowers said it was not a time +to take any rest; let food be served out to those who were not rowing, +but they would not leave their oars on any account. This was done, but +now a stiff breeze began to blow, which obliged us to leave off rowing +and make sail at once and steer for Oran, as it was impossible to make +any other course. All this was done very promptly, and under sail we ran +more than eight miles an hour without any fear, except that of coming +across some vessel out on a roving expedition. We gave the Moorish rowers +some food, and the renegade comforted them by telling them that they were +not held as captives, as we should set them free on the first +opportunity. + +The same was said to Zoraida's father, who replied, "Anything else, +Christian, I might hope for or think likely from your generosity and good +behaviour, but do not think me so simple as to imagine you will give me +my liberty; for you would have never exposed yourselves to the danger of +depriving me of it only to restore it to me so generously, especially as +you know who I am and the sum you may expect to receive on restoring it; +and if you will only name that, I here offer you all you require for +myself and for my unhappy daughter there; or else for her alone, for she +is the greatest and most precious part of my soul." + +As he said this he began to weep so bitterly that he filled us all with +compassion and forced Zoraida to look at him, and when she saw him +weeping she was so moved that she rose from my feet and ran to throw her +arms round him, and pressing her face to his, they both gave way to such +an outburst of tears that several of us were constrained to keep them +company. + +But when her father saw her in full dress and with all her jewels about +her, he said to her in his own language, "What means this, my daughter? +Last night, before this terrible misfortune in which we are plunged +befell us, I saw thee in thy everyday and indoor garments; and now, +without having had time to attire thyself, and without my bringing thee +any joyful tidings to furnish an occasion for adorning and bedecking +thyself, I see thee arrayed in the finest attire it would be in my power +to give thee when fortune was most kind to us. Answer me this; for it +causes me greater anxiety and surprise than even this misfortune itself." + +The renegade interpreted to us what the Moor said to his daughter; she, +however, returned him no answer. But when he observed in one corner of +the vessel the little trunk in which she used to keep her jewels, which +he well knew he had left in Algiers and had not brought to the garden, he +was still more amazed, and asked her how that trunk had come into our +hands, and what there was in it. To which the renegade, without waiting +for Zoraida to reply, made answer, "Do not trouble thyself by asking thy +daughter Zoraida so many questions, senor, for the one answer I will give +thee will serve for all; I would have thee know that she is a Christian, +and that it is she who has been the file for our chains and our deliverer +from captivity. She is here of her own free will, as glad, I imagine, to +find herself in this position as he who escapes from darkness into the +light, from death to life, and from suffering to glory." + +"Daughter, is this true, what he says?" cried the Moor. + +"It is," replied Zoraida. + +"That thou art in truth a Christian," said the old man, "and that thou +hast given thy father into the power of his enemies?" + +To which Zoraida made answer, "A Christian I am, but it is not I who have +placed thee in this position, for it never was my wish to leave thee or +do thee harm, but only to do good to myself." + +"And what good hast thou done thyself, daughter?" said he. + +"Ask thou that," said she, "of Lela Marien, for she can tell thee better +than I." + +The Moor had hardly heard these words when with marvellous quickness he +flung himself headforemost into the sea, where no doubt he would have +been drowned had not the long and full dress he wore held him up for a +little on the surface of the water. Zoraida cried aloud to us to save +him, and we all hastened to help, and seizing him by his robe we drew him +in half drowned and insensible, at which Zoraida was in such distress +that she wept over him as piteously and bitterly as though he were +already dead. We turned him upon his face and he voided a great quantity +of water, and at the end of two hours came to himself. Meanwhile, the +wind having changed we were compelled to head for the land, and ply our +oars to avoid being driven on shore; but it was our good fortune to reach +a creek that lies on one side of a small promontory or cape, called by +the Moors that of the "Cava rumia," which in our language means "the +wicked Christian woman;" for it is a tradition among them that La Cava, +through whom Spain was lost, lies buried at that spot; "cava" in their +language meaning "wicked woman," and "rumia" "Christian;" moreover, they +count it unlucky to anchor there when necessity compels them, and they +never do so otherwise. For us, however, it was not the resting-place of +the wicked woman but a haven of safety for our relief, so much had the +sea now got up. We posted a look-out on shore, and never let the oars out +of our hands, and ate of the stores the renegade had laid in, imploring +God and Our Lady with all our hearts to help and protect us, that we +might give a happy ending to a beginning so prosperous. At the entreaty +of Zoraida orders were given to set on shore her father and the other +Moors who were still bound, for she could not endure, nor could her +tender heart bear to see her father in bonds and her fellow-countrymen +prisoners before her eyes. We promised her to do this at the moment of +departure, for as it was uninhabited we ran no risk in releasing them at +that place. + +Our prayers were not so far in vain as to be unheard by Heaven, for after +a while the wind changed in our favour, and made the sea calm, inviting +us once more to resume our voyage with a good heart. Seeing this we +unbound the Moors, and one by one put them on shore, at which they were +filled with amazement; but when we came to land Zoraida's father, who had +now completely recovered his senses, he said: + +"Why is it, think ye, Christians, that this wicked woman is rejoiced at +your giving me my liberty? Think ye it is because of the affection she +bears me? Nay verily, it is only because of the hindrance my presence +offers to the execution of her base designs. And think not that it is her +belief that yours is better than ours that has led her to change her +religion; it is only because she knows that immodesty is more freely +practised in your country than in ours." Then turning to Zoraida, while I +and another of the Christians held him fast by both arms, lest he should +do some mad act, he said to her, "Infamous girl, misguided maiden, +whither in thy blindness and madness art thou going in the hands of these +dogs, our natural enemies? Cursed be the hour when I begot thee! Cursed +the luxury and indulgence in which I reared thee!" + +But seeing that he was not likely soon to cease I made haste to put him +on shore, and thence he continued his maledictions and lamentations +aloud; calling on Mohammed to pray to Allah to destroy us, to confound +us, to make an end of us; and when, in consequence of having made sail, +we could no longer hear what he said we could see what he did; how he +plucked out his beard and tore his hair and lay writhing on the ground. +But once he raised his voice to such a pitch that we were able to hear +what he said. "Come back, dear daughter, come back to shore; I forgive +thee all; let those men have the money, for it is theirs now, and come +back to comfort thy sorrowing father, who will yield up his life on this +barren strand if thou dost leave him." + +All this Zoraida heard, and heard with sorrow and tears, and all she +could say in answer was, "Allah grant that Lela Marien, who has made me +become a Christian, give thee comfort in thy sorrow, my father. Allah +knows that I could not do otherwise than I have done, and that these +Christians owe nothing to my will; for even had I wished not to accompany +them, but remain at home, it would have been impossible for me, so +eagerly did my soul urge me on to the accomplishment of this purpose, +which I feel to be as righteous as to thee, dear father, it seems +wicked." + +But neither could her father hear her nor we see him when she said this; +and so, while I consoled Zoraida, we turned our attention to our voyage, +in which a breeze from the right point so favoured us that we made sure +of finding ourselves off the coast of Spain on the morrow by daybreak. +But, as good seldom or never comes pure and unmixed, without being +attended or followed by some disturbing evil that gives a shock to it, +our fortune, or perhaps the curses which the Moor had hurled at his +daughter (for whatever kind of father they may come from these are always +to be dreaded), brought it about that when we were now in mid-sea, and +the night about three hours spent, as we were running with all sail set +and oars lashed, for the favouring breeze saved us the trouble of using +them, we saw by the light of the moon, which shone brilliantly, a +square-rigged vessel in full sail close to us, luffing up and standing +across our course, and so close that we had to strike sail to avoid +running foul of her, while they too put the helm hard up to let us pass. +They came to the side of the ship to ask who we were, whither we were +bound, and whence we came, but as they asked this in French our renegade +said, "Let no one answer, for no doubt these are French corsairs who +plunder all comers." + +Acting on this warning no one answered a word, but after we had gone a +little ahead, and the vessel was now lying to leeward, suddenly they +fired two guns, and apparently both loaded with chain-shot, for with one +they cut our mast in half and brought down both it and the sail into the +sea, and the other, discharged at the same moment, sent a ball into our +vessel amidships, staving her in completely, but without doing any +further damage. We, however, finding ourselves sinking began to shout for +help and call upon those in the ship to pick us up as we were beginning +to fill. They then lay to, and lowering a skiff or boat, as many as a +dozen Frenchmen, well armed with match-locks, and their matches burning, +got into it and came alongside; and seeing how few we were, and that our +vessel was going down, they took us in, telling us that this had come to +us through our incivility in not giving them an answer. Our renegade took +the trunk containing Zoraida's wealth and dropped it into the sea without +anyone perceiving what he did. In short we went on board with the +Frenchmen, who, after having ascertained all they wanted to know about +us, rifled us of everything we had, as if they had been our bitterest +enemies, and from Zoraida they took even the anklets she wore on her +feet; but the distress they caused her did not distress me so much as the +fear I was in that from robbing her of her rich and precious jewels they +would proceed to rob her of the most precious jewel that she valued more +than all. The desires, however, of those people do not go beyond money, +but of that their covetousness is insatiable, and on this occasion it was +carried to such a pitch that they would have taken even the clothes we +wore as captives if they had been worth anything to them. It was the +advice of some of them to throw us all into the sea wrapped up in a sail; +for their purpose was to trade at some of the ports of Spain, giving +themselves out as Bretons, and if they brought us alive they would be +punished as soon as the robbery was discovered; but the captain (who was +the one who had plundered my beloved Zoraida) said he was satisfied with +the prize he had got, and that he would not touch at any Spanish port, +but pass the Straits of Gibraltar by night, or as best he could, and make +for La Rochelle, from which he had sailed. So they agreed by common +consent to give us the skiff belonging to their ship and all we required +for the short voyage that remained to us, and this they did the next day +on coming in sight of the Spanish coast, with which, and the joy we felt, +all our sufferings and miseries were as completely forgotten as if they +had never been endured by us, such is the delight of recovering lost +liberty. + +It may have been about mid-day when they placed us in the boat, giving us +two kegs of water and some biscuit; and the captain, moved by I know not +what compassion, as the lovely Zoraida was about to embark, gave her some +forty gold crowns, and would not permit his men to take from her those +same garments which she has on now. We got into the boat, returning them +thanks for their kindness to us, and showing ourselves grateful rather +than indignant. They stood out to sea, steering for the straits; we, +without looking to any compass save the land we had before us, set +ourselves to row with such energy that by sunset we were so near that we +might easily, we thought, land before the night was far advanced. But as +the moon did not show that night, and the sky was clouded, and as we knew +not whereabouts we were, it did not seem to us a prudent thing to make +for the shore, as several of us advised, saying we ought to run ourselves +ashore even if it were on rocks and far from any habitation, for in this +way we should be relieved from the apprehensions we naturally felt of the +prowling vessels of the Tetuan corsairs, who leave Barbary at nightfall +and are on the Spanish coast by daybreak, where they commonly take some +prize, and then go home to sleep in their own houses. But of the +conflicting counsels the one which was adopted was that we should +approach gradually, and land where we could if the sea were calm enough +to permit us. This was done, and a little before midnight we drew near to +the foot of a huge and lofty mountain, not so close to the sea but that +it left a narrow space on which to land conveniently. We ran our boat up +on the sand, and all sprang out and kissed the ground, and with tears of +joyful satisfaction returned thanks to God our Lord for all his +incomparable goodness to us on our voyage. We took out of the boat the +provisions it contained, and drew it up on the shore, and then climbed a +long way up the mountain, for even there we could not feel easy in our +hearts, or persuade ourselves that it was Christian soil that was now +under our feet. + +The dawn came, more slowly, I think, than we could have wished; we +completed the ascent in order to see if from the summit any habitation or +any shepherds' huts could be discovered, but strain our eyes as we might, +neither dwelling, nor human being, nor path nor road could we perceive. +However, we determined to push on farther, as it could not but be that +ere long we must see some one who could tell us where we were. But what +distressed me most was to see Zoraida going on foot over that rough +ground; for though I once carried her on my shoulders, she was more +wearied by my weariness than rested by the rest; and so she would never +again allow me to undergo the exertion, and went on very patiently and +cheerfully, while I led her by the hand. We had gone rather less than a +quarter of a league when the sound of a little bell fell on our ears, a +clear proof that there were flocks hard by, and looking about carefully +to see if any were within view, we observed a young shepherd tranquilly +and unsuspiciously trimming a stick with his knife at the foot of a cork +tree. We called to him, and he, raising his head, sprang nimbly to his +feet, for, as we afterwards learned, the first who presented themselves +to his sight were the renegade and Zoraida, and seeing them in Moorish +dress he imagined that all the Moors of Barbary were upon him; and +plunging with marvellous swiftness into the thicket in front of him, he +began to raise a prodigious outcry, exclaiming, "The Moors--the Moors +have landed! To arms, to arms!" We were all thrown into perplexity by +these cries, not knowing what to do; but reflecting that the shouts of +the shepherd would raise the country and that the mounted coast-guard +would come at once to see what was the matter, we agreed that the +renegade must strip off his Turkish garments and put on a captive's +jacket or coat which one of our party gave him at once, though he himself +was reduced to his shirt; and so commending ourselves to God, we followed +the same road which we saw the shepherd take, expecting every moment that +the coast-guard would be down upon us. Nor did our expectation deceive +us, for two hours had not passed when, coming out of the brushwood into +the open ground, we perceived some fifty mounted men swiftly approaching +us at a hand-gallop. As soon as we saw them we stood still, waiting for +them; but as they came close and, instead of the Moors they were in quest +of, saw a set of poor Christians, they were taken aback, and one of them +asked if it could be we who were the cause of the shepherd having raised +the call to arms. I said "Yes," and as I was about to explain to him what +had occurred, and whence we came and who we were, one of the Christians +of our party recognised the horseman who had put the question to us, and +before I could say anything more he exclaimed: + +"Thanks be to God, sirs, for bringing us to such good quarters; for, if I +do not deceive myself, the ground we stand on is that of Velez Malaga +unless, indeed, all my years of captivity have made me unable to +recollect that you, senor, who ask who we are, are Pedro de Bustamante, +my uncle." + +The Christian captive had hardly uttered these words, when the horseman +threw himself off his horse, and ran to embrace the young man, crying: + +"Nephew of my soul and life! I recognise thee now; and long have I +mourned thee as dead, I, and my sister, thy mother, and all thy kin that +are still alive, and whom God has been pleased to preserve that they may +enjoy the happiness of seeing thee. We knew long since that thou wert in +Algiers, and from the appearance of thy garments and those of all this +company, I conclude that ye have had a miraculous restoration to +liberty." + +"It is true," replied the young man, "and by-and-by we will tell you +all." + +As soon as the horsemen understood that we were Christian captives, they +dismounted from their horses, and each offered his to carry us to the +city of Velez Malaga, which was a league and a half distant. Some of them +went to bring the boat to the city, we having told them where we had left +it; others took us up behind them, and Zoraida was placed on the horse of +the young man's uncle. The whole town came out to meet us, for they had +by this time heard of our arrival from one who had gone on in advance. +They were not astonished to see liberated captives or captive Moors, for +people on that coast are well used to see both one and the other; but +they were astonished at the beauty of Zoraida, which was just then +heightened, as well by the exertion of travelling as by joy at finding +herself on Christian soil, and relieved of all fear of being lost; for +this had brought such a glow upon her face, that unless my affection for +her were deceiving me, I would venture to say that there was not a more +beautiful creature in the world--at least, that I had ever seen. We went +straight to the church to return thanks to God for the mercies we had +received, and when Zoraida entered it she said there were faces there +like Lela Marien's. We told her they were her images; and as well as he +could the renegade explained to her what they meant, that she might adore +them as if each of them were the very same Lela Marien that had spoken to +her; and she, having great intelligence and a quick and clear instinct, +understood at once all he said to her about them. Thence they took us +away and distributed us all in different houses in the town; but as for +the renegade, Zoraida, and myself, the Christian who came with us brought +us to the house of his parents, who had a fair share of the gifts of +fortune, and treated us with as much kindness as they did their own son. + +We remained six days in Velez, at the end of which the renegade, having +informed himself of all that was requisite for him to do, set out for the +city of Granada to restore himself to the sacred bosom of the Church +through the medium of the Holy Inquisition. The other released captives +took their departures, each the way that seemed best to him, and Zoraida +and I were left alone, with nothing more than the crowns which the +courtesy of the Frenchman had bestowed upon Zoraida, out of which I +bought the beast on which she rides; and, I for the present attending her +as her father and squire and not as her husband, we are now going to +ascertain if my father is living, or if any of my brothers has had better +fortune than mine has been; though, as Heaven has made me the companion +of Zoraida, I think no other lot could be assigned to me, however happy, +that I would rather have. The patience with which she endures the +hardships that poverty brings with it, and the eagerness she shows to +become a Christian, are such that they fill me with admiration, and bind +me to serve her all my life; though the happiness I feel in seeing myself +hers, and her mine, is disturbed and marred by not knowing whether I +shall find any corner to shelter her in my own country, or whether time +and death may not have made such changes in the fortunes and lives of my +father and brothers, that I shall hardly find anyone who knows me, if +they are not alive. + +I have no more of my story to tell you, gentlemen; whether it be an +interesting or a curious one let your better judgments decide; all I can +say is I would gladly have told it to you more briefly; although my fear +of wearying you has made me leave out more than one circumstance. + +Chapter XLII. - +Which treats of what further took place in the inn, and of several other +things worth knowing + +With these words the captive held his peace, and Don Fernando said to +him, "In truth, captain, the manner in which you have related this +remarkable adventure has been such as befitted the novelty and +strangeness of the matter. The whole story is curious and uncommon, and +abounds with incidents that fill the hearers with wonder and +astonishment; and so great is the pleasure we have found in listening to +it that we should be glad if it were to begin again, even though +to-morrow were to find us still occupied with the same tale." And while +he said this Cardenio and the rest of them offered to be of service to +him in any way that lay in their power, and in words and language so +kindly and sincere that the captain was much gratified by their +good-will. In particular Don Fernando offered, if he would go back with +him, to get his brother the marquis to become godfather at the baptism of +Zoraida, and on his own part to provide him with the means of making his +appearance in his own country with the credit and comfort he was entitled +to. For all this the captive returned thanks very courteously, although +he would not accept any of their generous offers. + +By this time night closed in, and as it did, there came up to the inn a +coach attended by some men on horseback, who demanded accommodation; to +which the landlady replied that there was not a hand's breadth of the +whole inn unoccupied. + +"Still, for all that," said one of those who had entered on horseback, +"room must be found for his lordship the Judge here." + +At this name the landlady was taken aback, and said, "Senor, the fact is +I have no beds; but if his lordship the Judge carries one with him, as no +doubt he does, let him come in and welcome; for my husband and I will +give up our room to accommodate his worship." + +"Very good, so be it," said the squire; but in the meantime a man had got +out of the coach whose dress indicated at a glance the office and post he +held, for the long robe with ruffled sleeves that he wore showed that he +was, as his servant said, a Judge of appeal. He led by the hand a young +girl in a travelling dress, apparently about sixteen years of age, and of +such a high-bred air, so beautiful and so graceful, that all were filled +with admiration when she made her appearance, and but for having seen +Dorothea, Luscinda, and Zoraida, who were there in the inn, they would +have fancied that a beauty like that of this maiden's would have been +hard to find. Don Quixote was present at the entrance of the Judge with +the young lady, and as soon as he saw him he said, "Your worship may with +confidence enter and take your ease in this castle; for though the +accommodation be scanty and poor, there are no quarters so cramped or +inconvenient that they cannot make room for arms and letters; above all +if arms and letters have beauty for a guide and leader, as letters +represented by your worship have in this fair maiden, to whom not only +ought castles to throw themselves open and yield themselves up, but rocks +should rend themselves asunder and mountains divide and bow themselves +down to give her a reception. Enter, your worship, I say, into this +paradise, for here you will find stars and suns to accompany the heaven +your worship brings with you, here you will find arms in their supreme +excellence, and beauty in its highest perfection." + +The Judge was struck with amazement at the language of Don Quixote, whom +he scrutinized very carefully, no less astonished by his figure than by +his talk; and before he could find words to answer him he had a fresh +surprise, when he saw opposite to him Luscinda, Dorothea, and Zoraida, +who, having heard of the new guests and of the beauty of the young lady, +had come to see her and welcome her; Don Fernando, Cardenio, and the +curate, however, greeted him in a more intelligible and polished style. +In short, the Judge made his entrance in a state of bewilderment, as well +with what he saw as what he heard, and the fair ladies of the inn gave +the fair damsel a cordial welcome. On the whole he could perceive that +all who were there were people of quality; but with the figure, +countenance, and bearing of Don Quixote he was at his wits' end; and all +civilities having been exchanged, and the accommodation of the inn +inquired into, it was settled, as it had been before settled, that all +the women should retire to the garret that has been already mentioned, +and that the men should remain outside as if to guard them; the Judge, +therefore, was very well pleased to allow his daughter, for such the +damsel was, to go with the ladies, which she did very willingly; and with +part of the host's narrow bed and half of what the Judge had brought with +him, they made a more comfortable arrangement for the night than they had +expected. + +The captive, whose heart had leaped within him the instant he saw the +Judge, telling him somehow that this was his brother, asked one of the +servants who accompanied him what his name was, and whether he knew from +what part of the country he came. The servant replied that he was called +the Licentiate Juan Perez de Viedma, and that he had heard it said he +came from a village in the mountains of Leon. From this statement, and +what he himself had seen, he felt convinced that this was his brother who +had adopted letters by his father's advice; and excited and rejoiced, he +called Don Fernando and Cardenio and the curate aside, and told them how +the matter stood, assuring them that the judge was his brother. The +servant had further informed him that he was now going to the Indies with +the appointment of Judge of the Supreme Court of Mexico; and he had +learned, likewise, that the young lady was his daughter, whose mother had +died in giving birth to her, and that he was very rich in consequence of +the dowry left to him with the daughter. He asked their advice as to what +means he should adopt to make himself known, or to ascertain beforehand +whether, when he had made himself known, his brother, seeing him so poor, +would be ashamed of him, or would receive him with a warm heart. + +"Leave it to me to find out that," said the curate; "though there is no +reason for supposing, senor captain, that you will not be kindly +received, because the worth and wisdom that your brother's bearing shows +him to possess do not make it likely that he will prove haughty or +insensible, or that he will not know how to estimate the accidents of +fortune at their proper value." + +"Still," said the captain, "I would not make myself known abruptly, but +in some indirect way." + +"I have told you already," said the curate, "that I will manage it in a +way to satisfy us all." + +By this time supper was ready, and they all took their seats at the +table, except the captive, and the ladies, who supped by themselves in +their own room. In the middle of supper the curate said: + +"I had a comrade of your worship's name, Senor Judge, in Constantinople, +where I was a captive for several years, and that same comrade was one of +the stoutest soldiers and captains in the whole Spanish infantry; but he +had as large a share of misfortune as he had of gallantry and courage." + +"And how was the captain called, senor?" asked the Judge. + +"He was called Ruy Perez de Viedma," replied the curate, "and he was born +in a village in the mountains of Leon; and he mentioned a circumstance +connected with his father and his brothers which, had it not been told me +by so truthful a man as he was, I should have set down as one of those +fables the old women tell over the fire in winter; for he said his father +had divided his property among his three sons and had addressed words of +advice to them sounder than any of Cato's. But I can say this much, that +the choice he made of going to the wars was attended with such success, +that by his gallant conduct and courage, and without any help save his +own merit, he rose in a few years to be captain of infantry, and to see +himself on the high-road and in position to be given the command of a +corps before long; but Fortune was against him, for where he might have +expected her favour he lost it, and with it his liberty, on that glorious +day when so many recovered theirs, at the battle of Lepanto. I lost mine +at the Goletta, and after a variety of adventures we found ourselves +comrades at Constantinople. Thence he went to Algiers, where he met with +one of the most extraordinary adventures that ever befell anyone in the +world." + +Here the curate went on to relate briefly his brother's adventure with +Zoraida; to all which the Judge gave such an attentive hearing that he +never before had been so much of a hearer. The curate, however, only went +so far as to describe how the Frenchmen plundered those who were in the +boat, and the poverty and distress in which his comrade and the fair Moor +were left, of whom he said he had not been able to learn what became of +them, or whether they had reached Spain, or been carried to France by the +Frenchmen. + +The captain, standing a little to one side, was listening to all the +curate said, and watching every movement of his brother, who, as soon as +he perceived the curate had made an end of his story, gave a deep sigh +and said with his eyes full of tears, "Oh, senor, if you only knew what +news you have given me and how it comes home to me, making me show how I +feel it with these tears that spring from my eyes in spite of all my +worldly wisdom and self-restraint! That brave captain that you speak of +is my eldest brother, who, being of a bolder and loftier mind than my +other brother or myself, chose the honourable and worthy calling of arms, +which was one of the three careers our father proposed to us, as your +comrade mentioned in that fable you thought he was telling you. I +followed that of letters, in which God and my own exertions have raised +me to the position in which you see me. My second brother is in Peru, so +wealthy that with what he has sent to my father and to me he has fully +repaid the portion he took with him, and has even furnished my father's +hands with the means of gratifying his natural generosity, while I too +have been enabled to pursue my studies in a more becoming and creditable +fashion, and so to attain my present standing. My father is still alive, +though dying with anxiety to hear of his eldest son, and he prays God +unceasingly that death may not close his eyes until he has looked upon +those of his son; but with regard to him what surprises me is, that +having so much common sense as he had, he should have neglected to give +any intelligence about himself, either in his troubles and sufferings, or +in his prosperity, for if his father or any of us had known of his +condition he need not have waited for that miracle of the reed to obtain +his ransom; but what now disquiets me is the uncertainty whether those +Frenchmen may have restored him to liberty, or murdered him to hide the +robbery. All this will make me continue my journey, not with the +satisfaction in which I began it, but in the deepest melancholy and +sadness. Oh dear brother! that I only knew where thou art now, and I +would hasten to seek thee out and deliver thee from thy sufferings, +though it were to cost me suffering myself! Oh that I could bring news to +our old father that thou art alive, even wert thou the deepest dungeon of +Barbary; for his wealth and my brother's and mine would rescue thee +thence! Oh beautiful and generous Zoraida, that I could repay thy good +goodness to a brother! That I could be present at the new birth of thy +soul, and at thy bridal that would give us all such happiness!" + +All this and more the Judge uttered with such deep emotion at the news he +had received of his brother that all who heard him shared in it, showing +their sympathy with his sorrow. The curate, seeing, then, how well he had +succeeded in carrying out his purpose and the captain's wishes, had no +desire to keep them unhappy any longer, so he rose from the table and +going into the room where Zoraida was he took her by the hand, Luscinda, +Dorothea, and the Judge's daughter following her. The captain was waiting +to see what the curate would do, when the latter, taking him with the +other hand, advanced with both of them to where the Judge and the other +gentlemen were and said, "Let your tears cease to flow, Senor Judge, and +the wish of your heart be gratified as fully as you could desire, for you +have before you your worthy brother and your good sister-in-law. He whom +you see here is the Captain Viedma, and this is the fair Moor who has +been so good to him. The Frenchmen I told you of have reduced them to the +state of poverty you see that you may show the generosity of your kind +heart." + +The captain ran to embrace his brother, who placed both hands on his +breast so as to have a good look at him, holding him a little way off but +as soon as he had fully recognised him he clasped him in his arms so +closely, shedding such tears of heartfelt joy, that most of those present +could not but join in them. The words the brothers exchanged, the emotion +they showed can scarcely be imagined, I fancy, much less put down in +writing. They told each other in a few words the events of their lives; +they showed the true affection of brothers in all its strength; then the +judge embraced Zoraida, putting all he possessed at her disposal; then he +made his daughter embrace her, and the fair Christian and the lovely Moor +drew fresh tears from every eye. And there was Don Quixote observing all +these strange proceedings attentively without uttering a word, and +attributing the whole to chimeras of knight-errantry. Then they agreed +that the captain and Zoraida should return with his brother to Seville, +and send news to his father of his having been delivered and found, so as +to enable him to come and be present at the marriage and baptism of +Zoraida, for it was impossible for the Judge to put off his journey, as +he was informed that in a month from that time the fleet was to sail from +Seville for New Spain, and to miss the passage would have been a great +inconvenience to him. In short, everybody was well pleased and glad at +the captive's good fortune; and as now almost two-thirds of the night +were past, they resolved to retire to rest for the remainder of it. Don +Quixote offered to mount guard over the castle lest they should be +attacked by some giant or other malevolent scoundrel, covetous of the +great treasure of beauty the castle contained. Those who understood him +returned him thanks for this service, and they gave the Judge an account +of his extraordinary humour, with which he was not a little amused. +Sancho Panza alone was fuming at the lateness of the hour for retiring to +rest; and he of all was the one that made himself most comfortable, as he +stretched himself on the trappings of his ass, which, as will be told +farther on, cost him so dear. + +The ladies, then, having retired to their chamber, and the others having +disposed themselves with as little discomfort as they could, Don Quixote +sallied out of the inn to act as sentinel of the castle as he had +promised. It happened, however, that a little before the approach of dawn +a voice so musical and sweet reached the ears of the ladies that it +forced them all to listen attentively, but especially Dorothea, who had +been awake, and by whose side Dona Clara de Viedma, for so the Judge's +daughter was called, lay sleeping. No one could imagine who it was that +sang so sweetly, and the voice was unaccompanied by any instrument. At +one moment it seemed to them as if the singer were in the courtyard, at +another in the stable; and as they were all attention, wondering, +Cardenio came to the door and said, "Listen, whoever is not asleep, and +you will hear a muleteer's voice that enchants as it chants." + +"We are listening to it already, senor," said Dorothea; on which Cardenio +went away; and Dorothea, giving all her attention to it, made out the +words of the song to be these: + +Chapter XLIII. - +Wherein is related the pleasant story of the muleteer, together with +other strange things that came to pass in the inn + +poem{ + +Ah me, Love's mariner am I + On Love's deep ocean sailing; +I know not where the haven lies, + I dare not hope to gain it. + +One solitary distant star + Is all I have to guide me, +A brighter orb than those of old + That Palinurus lighted. + +And vaguely drifting am I borne, + I know not where it leads me; +I fix my gaze on it alone, + Of all beside it heedless. + +But over-cautious prudery, + And coyness cold and cruel, +When most I need it, these, like clouds, + Its longed-for light refuse me. + +Bright star, goal of my yearning eyes + As thou above me beamest, +When thou shalt hide thee from my sight + I'll know that death is near me. + +}poem + +The singer had got so far when it struck Dorothea that it was not fair to +let Clara miss hearing such a sweet voice, so, shaking her from side to +side, she woke her, saying: + +"Forgive me, child, for waking thee, but I do so that thou mayest have +the pleasure of hearing the best voice thou hast ever heard, perhaps, in +all thy life." + +Clara awoke quite drowsy, and not understanding at the moment what +Dorothea said, asked her what it was; she repeated what she had said, and +Clara became attentive at once; but she had hardly heard two lines, as +the singer continued, when a strange trembling seized her, as if she were +suffering from a severe attack of quartan ague, and throwing her arms +round Dorothea she said: + +"Ah, dear lady of my soul and life! why did you wake me? The greatest +kindness fortune could do me now would be to close my eyes and ears so as +neither to see or hear that unhappy musician." + +"What art thou talking about, child?" said Dorothea. "Why, they say this +singer is a muleteer!" + +"Nay, he is the lord of many places," replied Clara, "and that one in my +heart which he holds so firmly shall never be taken from him, unless he +be willing to surrender it." + +Dorothea was amazed at the ardent language of the girl, for it seemed to +be far beyond such experience of life as her tender years gave any +promise of, so she said to her: + +"You speak in such a way that I cannot understand you, Senora Clara; +explain yourself more clearly, and tell me what is this you are saying +about hearts and places and this musician whose voice has so moved you? +But do not tell me anything now; I do not want to lose the pleasure I get +from listening to the singer by giving my attention to your transports, +for I perceive he is beginning to sing a new strain and a new air." + +"Let him, in Heaven's name," returned Clara; and not to hear him she +stopped both ears with her hands, at which Dorothea was again surprised; +but turning her attention to the song she found that it ran in this +fashion: + +poem{ + + Sweet Hope, my stay, +That onward to the goal of thy intent + Dost make thy way, +Heedless of hindrance or impediment, + Have thou no fear +If at each step thou findest death is near. + + No victory, +No joy of triumph doth the faint heart know; + Unblest is he +That a bold front to Fortune dares not show, + But soul and sense +In bondage yieldeth up to indolence. + + If Love his wares +Do dearly sell, his right must be contest; + What gold compares +With that whereon his stamp he hath imprest? + And all men know +What costeth little that we rate but low. + + Love resolute +Knows not the word "impossibility;" + And though my suit +Beset by endless obstacles I see, + Yet no despair +Shall hold me bound to earth while heaven is there. + +}poem + +Here the voice ceased and Clara's sobs began afresh, all which excited +Dorothea's curiosity to know what could be the cause of singing so sweet +and weeping so bitter, so she again asked her what it was she was going +to say before. On this Clara, afraid that Luscinda might overhear her, +winding her arms tightly round Dorothea put her mouth so close to her ear +that she could speak without fear of being heard by anyone else, and +said: + +"This singer, dear senora, is the son of a gentleman of Aragon, lord of +two villages, who lives opposite my father's house at Madrid; and though +my father had curtains to the windows of his house in winter, and +lattice-work in summer, in some way--I know not how--this gentleman, who +was pursuing his studies, saw me, whether in church or elsewhere, I +cannot tell, and, in fact, fell in love with me, and gave me to know it +from the windows of his house, with so many signs and tears that I was +forced to believe him, and even to love him, without knowing what it was +he wanted of me. One of the signs he used to make me was to link one hand +in the other, to show me he wished to marry me; and though I should have +been glad if that could be, being alone and motherless I knew not whom to +open my mind to, and so I left it as it was, showing him no favour, +except when my father, and his too, were from home, to raise the curtain +or the lattice a little and let him see me plainly, at which he would +show such delight that he seemed as if he were going mad. Meanwhile the +time for my father's departure arrived, which he became aware of, but not +from me, for I had never been able to tell him of it. He fell sick, of +grief I believe, and so the day we were going away I could not see him to +take farewell of him, were it only with the eyes. But after we had been +two days on the road, on entering the posada of a village a day's journey +from this, I saw him at the inn door in the dress of a muleteer, and so +well disguised, that if I did not carry his image graven on my heart it +would have been impossible for me to recognise him. But I knew him, and I +was surprised, and glad; he watched me, unsuspected by my father, from +whom he always hides himself when he crosses my path on the road, or in +the posadas where we halt; and, as I know what he is, and reflect that +for love of me he makes this journey on foot in all this hardship, I am +ready to die of sorrow; and where he sets foot there I set my eyes. I +know not with what object he has come; or how he could have got away from +his father, who loves him beyond measure, having no other heir, and +because he deserves it, as you will perceive when you see him. And +moreover, I can tell you, all that he sings is out of his own head; for I +have heard them say he is a great scholar and poet; and what is more, +every time I see him or hear him sing I tremble all over, and am +terrified lest my father should recognise him and come to know of our +loves. I have never spoken a word to him in my life; and for all that I +love him so that I could not live without him. This, dear senora, is all +I have to tell you about the musician whose voice has delighted you so +much; and from it alone you might easily perceive he is no muleteer, but +a lord of hearts and towns, as I told you already." + +"Say no more, Dona Clara," said Dorothea at this, at the same time +kissing her a thousand times over, "say no more, I tell you, but wait +till day comes; when I trust in God to arrange this affair of yours so +that it may have the happy ending such an innocent beginning deserves." + +"Ah, senora," said Dona Clara, "what end can be hoped for when his father +is of such lofty position, and so wealthy, that he would think I was not +fit to be even a servant to his son, much less wife? And as to marrying +without the knowledge of my father, I would not do it for all the world. +I would not ask anything more than that this youth should go back and +leave me; perhaps with not seeing him, and the long distance we shall +have to travel, the pain I suffer now may become easier; though I daresay +the remedy I propose will do me very little good. I don't know how the +devil this has come about, or how this love I have for him got in; I such +a young girl, and he such a mere boy; for I verily believe we are both of +an age, and I am not sixteen yet; for I will be sixteen Michaelmas Day, +next, my father says." + +Dorothea could not help laughing to hear how like a child Dona Clara +spoke. "Let us go to sleep now, senora," said she, "for the little of the +night that I fancy is left to us: God will soon send us daylight, and we +will set all to rights, or it will go hard with me." + +With this they fell asleep, and deep silence reigned all through the inn. +The only persons not asleep were the landlady's daughter and her servant +Maritornes, who, knowing the weak point of Don Quixote's humour, and that +he was outside the inn mounting guard in armour and on horseback, +resolved, the pair of them, to play some trick upon him, or at any rate +to amuse themselves for a while by listening to his nonsense. As it so +happened there was not a window in the whole inn that looked outwards +except a hole in the wall of a straw-loft through which they used to +throw out the straw. At this hole the two demi-damsels posted themselves, +and observed Don Quixote on his horse, leaning on his pike and from time +to time sending forth such deep and doleful sighs, that he seemed to +pluck up his soul by the roots with each of them; and they could hear +him, too, saying in a soft, tender, loving tone, "Oh my lady Dulcinea del +Toboso, perfection of all beauty, summit and crown of discretion, +treasure house of grace, depositary of virtue, and finally, ideal of all +that is good, honourable, and delectable in this world! What is thy grace +doing now? Art thou, perchance, mindful of thy enslaved knight who of his +own free will hath exposed himself to so great perils, and all to serve +thee? Give me tidings of her, oh luminary of the three faces! Perhaps at +this moment, envious of hers, thou art regarding her, either as she paces +to and fro some gallery of her sumptuous palaces, or leans over some +balcony, meditating how, whilst preserving her purity and greatness, she +may mitigate the tortures this wretched heart of mine endures for her +sake, what glory should recompense my sufferings, what repose my toil, +and lastly what death my life, and what reward my services? And thou, oh +sun, that art now doubtless harnessing thy steeds in haste to rise +betimes and come forth to see my lady; when thou seest her I entreat of +thee to salute her on my behalf: but have a care, when thou shalt see her +and salute her, that thou kiss not her face; for I shall be more jealous +of thee than thou wert of that light-footed ingrate that made thee sweat +and run so on the plains of Thessaly, or on the banks of the Peneus (for +I do not exactly recollect where it was thou didst run on that occasion) +in thy jealousy and love." + +Don Quixote had got so far in his pathetic speech when the landlady's +daughter began to signal to him, saying, "Senor, come over here, please." + +At these signals and voice Don Quixote turned his head and saw by the +light of the moon, which then was in its full splendour, that some one +was calling to him from the hole in the wall, which seemed to him to be a +window, and what is more, with a gilt grating, as rich castles, such as +he believed the inn to be, ought to have; and it immediately suggested +itself to his imagination that, as on the former occasion, the fair +damsel, the daughter of the lady of the castle, overcome by love for him, +was once more endeavouring to win his affections; and with this idea, not +to show himself discourteous, or ungrateful, he turned Rocinante's head +and approached the hole, and as he perceived the two wenches he said: + +"I pity you, beauteous lady, that you should have directed your thoughts +of love to a quarter from whence it is impossible that such a return can +be made to you as is due to your great merit and gentle birth, for which +you must not blame this unhappy knight-errant whom love renders incapable +of submission to any other than her whom, the first moment his eyes +beheld her, he made absolute mistress of his soul. Forgive me, noble +lady, and retire to your apartment, and do not, by any further +declaration of your passion, compel me to show myself more ungrateful; +and if, of the love you bear me, you should find that there is anything +else in my power wherein I can gratify you, provided it be not love +itself, demand it of me; for I swear to you by that sweet absent enemy of +mine to grant it this instant, though it be that you require of me a lock +of Medusa's hair, which was all snakes, or even the very beams of the sun +shut up in a vial." + +"My mistress wants nothing of that sort, sir knight," said Maritornes at +this. + +"What then, discreet dame, is it that your mistress wants?" replied Don +Quixote. + +"Only one of your fair hands," said Maritornes, "to enable her to vent +over it the great passion passion which has brought her to this loophole, +so much to the risk of her honour; for if the lord her father had heard +her, the least slice he would cut off her would be her ear." + +"I should like to see that tried," said Don Quixote; "but he had better +beware of that, if he does not want to meet the most disastrous end that +ever father in the world met for having laid hands on the tender limbs of +a love-stricken daughter." + +Maritornes felt sure that Don Quixote would present the hand she had +asked, and making up her mind what to do, she got down from the hole and +went into the stable, where she took the halter of Sancho Panza's ass, +and in all haste returned to the hole, just as Don Quixote had planted +himself standing on Rocinante's saddle in order to reach the grated +window where he supposed the lovelorn damsel to be; and giving her his +hand, he said, "Lady, take this hand, or rather this scourge of the +evil-doers of the earth; take, I say, this hand which no other hand of +woman has ever touched, not even hers who has complete possession of my +entire body. I present it to you, not that you may kiss it, but that you +may observe the contexture of the sinews, the close network of the +muscles, the breadth and capacity of the veins, whence you may infer what +must be the strength of the arm that has such a hand." + +"That we shall see presently," said Maritornes, and making a running knot +on the halter, she passed it over his wrist and coming down from the hole +tied the other end very firmly to the bolt of the door of the straw-loft. + +Don Quixote, feeling the roughness of the rope on his wrist, exclaimed, +"Your grace seems to be grating rather than caressing my hand; treat it +not so harshly, for it is not to blame for the offence my resolution has +given you, nor is it just to wreak all your vengeance on so small a part; +remember that one who loves so well should not revenge herself so +cruelly." + +But there was nobody now to listen to these words of Don Quixote's, for +as soon as Maritornes had tied him she and the other made off, ready to +die with laughing, leaving him fastened in such a way that it was +impossible for him to release himself. + +He was, as has been said, standing on Rocinante, with his arm passed +through the hole and his wrist tied to the bolt of the door, and in +mighty fear and dread of being left hanging by the arm if Rocinante were +to stir one side or the other; so he did not dare to make the least +movement, although from the patience and imperturbable disposition of +Rocinante, he had good reason to expect that he would stand without +budging for a whole century. Finding himself fast, then, and that the +ladies had retired, he began to fancy that all this was done by +enchantment, as on the former occasion when in that same castle that +enchanted Moor of a carrier had belaboured him; and he cursed in his +heart his own want of sense and judgment in venturing to enter the castle +again, after having come off so badly the first time; it being a settled +point with knights-errant that when they have tried an adventure, and +have not succeeded in it, it is a sign that it is not reserved for them +but for others, and that therefore they need not try it again. +Nevertheless he pulled his arm to see if he could release himself, but it +had been made so fast that all his efforts were in vain. It is true he +pulled it gently lest Rocinante should move, but try as he might to seat +himself in the saddle, he had nothing for it but to stand upright or pull +his hand off. Then it was he wished for the sword of Amadis, against +which no enchantment whatever had any power; then he cursed his ill +fortune; then he magnified the loss the world would sustain by his +absence while he remained there enchanted, for that he believed he was +beyond all doubt; then he once more took to thinking of his beloved +Dulcinea del Toboso; then he called to his worthy squire Sancho Panza, +who, buried in sleep and stretched upon the pack-saddle of his ass, was +oblivious, at that moment, of the mother that bore him; then he called +upon the sages Lirgandeo and Alquife to come to his aid; then he invoked +his good friend Urganda to succour him; and then, at last, morning found +him in such a state of desperation and perplexity that he was bellowing +like a bull, for he had no hope that day would bring any relief to his +suffering, which he believed would last for ever, inasmuch as he was +enchanted; and of this he was convinced by seeing that Rocinante never +stirred, much or little, and he felt persuaded that he and his horse were +to remain in this state, without eating or drinking or sleeping, until +the malign influence of the stars was overpast, or until some other more +sage enchanter should disenchant him. + +But he was very much deceived in this conclusion, for daylight had hardly +begun to appear when there came up to the inn four men on horseback, well +equipped and accoutred, with firelocks across their saddle-bows. They +called out and knocked loudly at the gate of the inn, which was still +shut; on seeing which, Don Quixote, even there where he was, did not +forget to act as sentinel, and said in a loud and imperious tone, +"Knights, or squires, or whatever ye be, ye have no right to knock at the +gates of this castle; for it is plain enough that they who are within are +either asleep, or else are not in the habit of throwing open the fortress +until the sun's rays are spread over the whole surface of the earth. +Withdraw to a distance, and wait till it is broad daylight, and then we +shall see whether it will be proper or not to open to you." + +"What the devil fortress or castle is this," said one, "to make us stand +on such ceremony? If you are the innkeeper bid them open to us; we are +travellers who only want to feed our horses and go on, for we are in +haste." + +"Do you think, gentlemen, that I look like an innkeeper?" said Don +Quixote. + +"I don't know what you look like," replied the other; "but I know that +you are talking nonsense when you call this inn a castle." + +"A castle it is," returned Don Quixote, "nay, more, one of the best in +this whole province, and it has within it people who have had the sceptre +in the hand and the crown on the head." + +"It would be better if it were the other way," said the traveller, "the +sceptre on the head and the crown in the hand; but if so, may be there is +within some company of players, with whom it is a common thing to have +those crowns and sceptres you speak of; for in such a small inn as this, +and where such silence is kept, I do not believe any people entitled to +crowns and sceptres can have taken up their quarters." + +"You know but little of the world," returned Don Quixote, "since you are +ignorant of what commonly occurs in knight-errantry." + +But the comrades of the spokesman, growing weary of the dialogue with Don +Quixote, renewed their knocks with great vehemence, so much so that the +host, and not only he but everybody in the inn, awoke, and he got up to +ask who knocked. It happened at this moment that one of the horses of the +four who were seeking admittance went to smell Rocinante, who melancholy, +dejected, and with drooping ears stood motionless, supporting his sorely +stretched master; and as he was, after all, flesh, though he looked as if +he were made of wood, he could not help giving way and in return smelling +the one who had come to offer him attentions. But he had hardly moved at +all when Don Quixote lost his footing; and slipping off the saddle, he +would have come to the ground, but for being suspended by the arm, which +caused him such agony that he believed either his wrist would be cut +through or his arm torn off; and he hung so near the ground that he could +just touch it with his feet, which was all the worse for him; for, +finding how little was wanted to enable him to plant his feet firmly, he +struggled and stretched himself as much as he could to gain a footing; +just like those undergoing the torture of the strappado, when they are +fixed at "touch and no touch," who aggravate their own sufferings by +their violent efforts to stretch themselves, deceived by the hope which +makes them fancy that with a very little more they will reach the ground. + +Chapter XLIV. - +In which are continued the unheard-of adventures of the inn + +So loud, in fact, were the shouts of Don Quixote, that the landlord +opening the gate of the inn in all haste, came out in dismay, and ran to +see who was uttering such cries, and those who were outside joined him. +Maritornes, who had been by this time roused up by the same outcry, +suspecting what it was, ran to the loft and, without anyone seeing her, +untied the halter by which Don Quixote was suspended, and down he came to +the ground in the sight of the landlord and the travellers, who +approaching asked him what was the matter with him that he shouted so. He +without replying a word took the rope off his wrist, and rising to his +feet leaped upon Rocinante, braced his buckler on his arm, put his lance +in rest, and making a considerable circuit of the plain came back at a +half-gallop exclaiming: + +"Whoever shall say that I have been enchanted with just cause, provided +my lady the Princess Micomicona grants me permission to do so, I give him +the lie, challenge him and defy him to single combat." + +The newly arrived travellers were amazed at the words of Don Quixote; but +the landlord removed their surprise by telling them who he was, and not +to mind him as he was out of his senses. They then asked the landlord if +by any chance a youth of about fifteen years of age had come to that inn, +one dressed like a muleteer, and of such and such an appearance, +describing that of Dona Clara's lover. The landlord replied that there +were so many people in the inn he had not noticed the person they were +inquiring for; but one of them observing the coach in which the Judge had +come, said, "He is here no doubt, for this is the coach he is following: +let one of us stay at the gate, and the rest go in to look for him; or +indeed it would be as well if one of us went round the inn, lest he +should escape over the wall of the yard." "So be it," said another; and +while two of them went in, one remained at the gate and the other made +the circuit of the inn; observing all which, the landlord was unable to +conjecture for what reason they were taking all these precautions, though +he understood they were looking for the youth whose description they had +given him. + +It was by this time broad daylight; and for that reason, as well as in +consequence of the noise Don Quixote had made, everybody was awake and +up, but particularly Dona Clara and Dorothea; for they had been able to +sleep but badly that night, the one from agitation at having her lover so +near her, the other from curiosity to see him. Don Quixote, when he saw +that not one of the four travellers took any notice of him or replied to +his challenge, was furious and ready to die with indignation and wrath; +and if he could have found in the ordinances of chivalry that it was +lawful for a knight-errant to undertake or engage in another enterprise, +when he had plighted his word and faith not to involve himself in any +until he had made an end of the one to which he was pledged, he would +have attacked the whole of them, and would have made them return an +answer in spite of themselves. But considering that it would not become +him, nor be right, to begin any new emprise until he had established +Micomicona in her kingdom, he was constrained to hold his peace and wait +quietly to see what would be the upshot of the proceedings of those same +travellers; one of whom found the youth they were seeking lying asleep by +the side of a muleteer, without a thought of anyone coming in search of +him, much less finding him. + +The man laid hold of him by the arm, saying, "It becomes you well indeed, +Senor Don Luis, to be in the dress you wear, and well the bed in which I +find you agrees with the luxury in which your mother reared you." + +The youth rubbed his sleepy eyes and stared for a while at him who held +him, but presently recognised him as one of his father's servants, at +which he was so taken aback that for some time he could not find or utter +a word; while the servant went on to say, "There is nothing for it now, +Senor Don Luis, but to submit quietly and return home, unless it is your +wish that my lord, your father, should take his departure for the other +world, for nothing else can be the consequence of the grief he is in at +your absence." + +"But how did my father know that I had gone this road and in this dress?" +said Don Luis. + +"It was a student to whom you confided your intentions," answered the +servant, "that disclosed them, touched with pity at the distress he saw +your father suffer on missing you; he therefore despatched four of his +servants in quest of you, and here we all are at your service, better +pleased than you can imagine that we shall return so soon and be able to +restore you to those eyes that so yearn for you." + +"That shall be as I please, or as heaven orders," returned Don Luis. + +"What can you please or heaven order," said the other, "except to agree +to go back? Anything else is impossible." + +All this conversation between the two was overheard by the muleteer at +whose side Don Luis lay, and rising, he went to report what had taken +place to Don Fernando, Cardenio, and the others, who had by this time +dressed themselves; and told them how the man had addressed the youth as +"Don," and what words had passed, and how he wanted him to return to his +father, which the youth was unwilling to do. With this, and what they +already knew of the rare voice that heaven had bestowed upon him, they +all felt very anxious to know more particularly who he was, and even to +help him if it was attempted to employ force against him; so they +hastened to where he was still talking and arguing with his servant. +Dorothea at this instant came out of her room, followed by Dona Clara all +in a tremor; and calling Cardenio aside, she told him in a few words the +story of the musician and Dona Clara, and he at the same time told her +what had happened, how his father's servants had come in search of him; +but in telling her so, he did not speak low enough but that Dona Clara +heard what he said, at which she was so much agitated that had not +Dorothea hastened to support her she would have fallen to the ground. +Cardenio then bade Dorothea return to her room, as he would endeavour to +make the whole matter right, and they did as he desired. All the four who +had come in quest of Don Luis had now come into the inn and surrounded +him, urging him to return and console his father at once and without a +moment's delay. He replied that he could not do so on any account until +he had concluded some business in which his life, honour, and heart were +at stake. The servants pressed him, saying that most certainly they would +not return without him, and that they would take him away whether he +liked it or not. + +"You shall not do that," replied Don Luis, "unless you take me dead; +though however you take me, it will be without life." + +By this time most of those in the inn had been attracted by the dispute, +but particularly Cardenio, Don Fernando, his companions, the Judge, the +curate, the barber, and Don Quixote; for he now considered there was no +necessity for mounting guard over the castle any longer. Cardenio being +already acquainted with the young man's story, asked the men who wanted +to take him away, what object they had in seeking to carry off this youth +against his will. + +"Our object," said one of the four, "is to save the life of his father, +who is in danger of losing it through this gentleman's disappearance." + +Upon this Don Luis exclaimed, "There is no need to make my affairs public +here; I am free, and I will return if I please; and if not, none of you +shall compel me." + +"Reason will compel your worship," said the man, "and if it has no power +over you, it has power over us, to make us do what we came for, and what +it is our duty to do." + +"Let us hear what the whole affair is about," said the Judge at this; but +the man, who knew him as a neighbour of theirs, replied, "Do you not know +this gentleman, Senor Judge? He is the son of your neighbour, who has run +away from his father's house in a dress so unbecoming his rank, as your +worship may perceive." + +The judge on this looked at him more carefully and recognised him, and +embracing him said, "What folly is this, Senor Don Luis, or what can have +been the cause that could have induced you to come here in this way, and +in this dress, which so ill becomes your condition?" + +Tears came into the eyes of the young man, and he was unable to utter a +word in reply to the Judge, who told the four servants not to be uneasy, +for all would be satisfactorily settled; and then taking Don Luis by the +hand, he drew him aside and asked the reason of his having come there. + +But while he was questioning him they heard a loud outcry at the gate of +the inn, the cause of which was that two of the guests who had passed the +night there, seeing everybody busy about finding out what it was the four +men wanted, had conceived the idea of going off without paying what they +owed; but the landlord, who minded his own affairs more than other +people's, caught them going out of the gate and demanded his reckoning, +abusing them for their dishonesty with such language that he drove them +to reply with their fists, and so they began to lay on him in such a +style that the poor man was forced to cry out, and call for help. The +landlady and her daughter could see no one more free to give aid than Don +Quixote, and to him the daughter said, "Sir knight, by the virtue God has +given you, help my poor father, for two wicked men are beating him to a +mummy." + +To which Don Quixote very deliberately and phlegmatically replied, "Fair +damsel, at the present moment your request is inopportune, for I am +debarred from involving myself in any adventure until I have brought to a +happy conclusion one to which my word has pledged me; but that which I +can do for you is what I will now mention: run and tell your father to +stand his ground as well as he can in this battle, and on no account to +allow himself to be vanquished, while I go and request permission of the +Princess Micomicona to enable me to succour him in his distress; and if +she grants it, rest assured I will relieve him from it." + +"Sinner that I am," exclaimed Maritornes, who stood by; "before you have +got your permission my master will be in the other world." + +"Give me leave, senora, to obtain the permission I speak of," returned +Don Quixote; "and if I get it, it will matter very little if he is in the +other world; for I will rescue him thence in spite of all the same world +can do; or at any rate I will give you such a revenge over those who +shall have sent him there that you will be more than moderately +satisfied;" and without saying anything more he went and knelt before +Dorothea, requesting her Highness in knightly and errant phrase to be +pleased to grant him permission to aid and succour the castellan of that +castle, who now stood in grievous jeopardy. The princess granted it +graciously, and he at once, bracing his buckler on his arm and drawing +his sword, hastened to the inn-gate, where the two guests were still +handling the landlord roughly; but as soon as he reached the spot he +stopped short and stood still, though Maritornes and the landlady asked +him why he hesitated to help their master and husband. + +"I hesitate," said Don Quixote, "because it is not lawful for me to draw +sword against persons of squirely condition; but call my squire Sancho to +me; for this defence and vengeance are his affair and business." + +Thus matters stood at the inn-gate, where there was a very lively +exchange of fisticuffs and punches, to the sore damage of the landlord +and to the wrath of Maritornes, the landlady, and her daughter, who were +furious when they saw the pusillanimity of Don Quixote, and the hard +treatment their master, husband and father was undergoing. But let us +leave him there; for he will surely find some one to help him, and if +not, let him suffer and hold his tongue who attempts more than his +strength allows him to do; and let us go back fifty paces to see what Don +Luis said in reply to the Judge whom we left questioning him privately as +to his reasons for coming on foot and so meanly dressed. + +To which the youth, pressing his hand in a way that showed his heart was +troubled by some great sorrow, and shedding a flood of tears, made +answer: + +"Senor, I have no more to tell you than that from the moment when, +through heaven's will and our being near neighbours, I first saw Dona +Clara, your daughter and my lady, from that instant I made her the +mistress of my will, and if yours, my true lord and father, offers no +impediment, this very day she shall become my wife. For her I left my +father's house, and for her I assumed this disguise, to follow her +whithersoever she may go, as the arrow seeks its mark or the sailor the +pole-star. She knows nothing more of my passion than what she may have +learned from having sometimes seen from a distance that my eyes were +filled with tears. You know already, senor, the wealth and noble birth of +my parents, and that I am their sole heir; if this be a sufficient +inducement for you to venture to make me completely happy, accept me at +once as your son; for if my father, influenced by other objects of his +own, should disapprove of this happiness I have sought for myself, time +has more power to alter and change things, than human will." + +With this the love-smitten youth was silent, while the Judge, after +hearing him, was astonished, perplexed, and surprised, as well at the +manner and intelligence with which Don Luis had confessed the secret of +his heart, as at the position in which he found himself, not knowing what +course to take in a matter so sudden and unexpected. All the answer, +therefore, he gave him was to bid him to make his mind easy for the +present, and arrange with his servants not to take him back that day, so +that there might be time to consider what was best for all parties. Don +Luis kissed his hands by force, nay, bathed them with his tears, in a way +that would have touched a heart of marble, not to say that of the Judge, +who, as a shrewd man, had already perceived how advantageous the marriage +would be to his daughter; though, were it possible, he would have +preferred that it should be brought about with the consent of the father +of Don Luis, who he knew looked for a title for his son. + +The guests had by this time made peace with the landlord, for, by +persuasion and Don Quixote's fair words more than by threats, they had +paid him what he demanded, and the servants of Don Luis were waiting for +the end of the conversation with the Judge and their master's decision, +when the devil, who never sleeps, contrived that the barber, from whom +Don Quixote had taken Mambrino's helmet, and Sancho Panza the trappings +of his ass in exchange for those of his own, should at this instant enter +the inn; which said barber, as he led his ass to the stable, observed +Sancho Panza engaged in repairing something or other belonging to the +pack-saddle; and the moment he saw it he knew it, and made bold to attack +Sancho, exclaiming, "Ho, sir thief, I have caught you! hand over my basin +and my pack-saddle, and all my trappings that you robbed me of." + +Sancho, finding himself so unexpectedly assailed, and hearing the abuse +poured upon him, seized the pack-saddle with one hand, and with the other +gave the barber a cuff that bathed his teeth in blood. The barber, +however, was not so ready to relinquish the prize he had made in the +pack-saddle; on the contrary, he raised such an outcry that everyone in +the inn came running to know what the noise and quarrel meant. "Here, in +the name of the king and justice!" he cried, "this thief and highwayman +wants to kill me for trying to recover my property." + +"You lie," said Sancho, "I am no highwayman; it was in fair war my master +Don Quixote won these spoils." + +Don Quixote was standing by at the time, highly pleased to see his +squire's stoutness, both offensive and defensive, and from that time +forth he reckoned him a man of mettle, and in his heart resolved to dub +him a knight on the first opportunity that presented itself, feeling sure +that the order of chivalry would be fittingly bestowed upon him. + +In the course of the altercation, among other things the barber said, +"Gentlemen, this pack-saddle is mine as surely as I owe God a death, and +I know it as well as if I had given birth to it, and here is my ass in +the stable who will not let me lie; only try it, and if it does not fit +him like a glove, call me a rascal; and what is more, the same day I was +robbed of this, they robbed me likewise of a new brass basin, never yet +handselled, that would fetch a crown any day." + +At this Don Quixote could not keep himself from answering; and +interposing between the two, and separating them, he placed the +pack-saddle on the ground, to lie there in sight until the truth was +established, and said, "Your worships may perceive clearly and plainly +the error under which this worthy squire lies when he calls a basin which +was, is, and shall be the helmet of Mambrino which I won from him in air +war, and made myself master of by legitimate and lawful possession. With +the pack-saddle I do not concern myself; but I may tell you on that head +that my squire Sancho asked my permission to strip off the caparison of +this vanquished poltroon's steed, and with it adorn his own; I allowed +him, and he took it; and as to its having been changed from a caparison +into a pack-saddle, I can give no explanation except the usual one, that +such transformations will take place in adventures of chivalry. To +confirm all which, run, Sancho my son, and fetch hither the helmet which +this good fellow calls a basin." + +"Egad, master," said Sancho, "if we have no other proof of our case than +what your worship puts forward, Mambrino's helmet is just as much a basin +as this good fellow's caparison is a pack-saddle." + +"Do as I bid thee," said Don Quixote; "it cannot be that everything in +this castle goes by enchantment." + +Sancho hastened to where the basin was, and brought it back with him, and +when Don Quixote saw it, he took hold of it and said: + +"Your worships may see with what a face this squire can assert that this +is a basin and not the helmet I told you of; and I swear by the order of +chivalry I profess, that this helmet is the identical one I took from +him, without anything added to or taken from it." + +"There is no doubt of that," said Sancho, "for from the time my master +won it until now he has only fought one battle in it, when he let loose +those unlucky men in chains; and if had not been for this basin-helmet he +would not have come off over well that time, for there was plenty of +stone-throwing in that affair." + +Chapter XLV. - +In which the doubtful question of Mambrino's helmet and the pack-saddle +is finally settled, with other adventures that occurred in truth and +earnest + +"What do you think now, gentlemen," said the barber, "of what these +gentles say, when they want to make out that this is a helmet?" + +"And whoever says the contrary," said Don Quixote, "I will let him know +he lies if he is a knight, and if he is a squire that he lies again a +thousand times." + +Our own barber, who was present at all this, and understood Don Quixote's +humour so thoroughly, took it into his head to back up his delusion and +carry on the joke for the general amusement; so addressing the other +barber he said: + +"Senor barber, or whatever you are, you must know that I belong to your +profession too, and have had a licence to practise for more than twenty +years, and I know the implements of the barber craft, every one of them, +perfectly well; and I was likewise a soldier for some time in the days of +my youth, and I know also what a helmet is, and a morion, and a headpiece +with a visor, and other things pertaining to soldiering, I meant to say +to soldiers' arms; and I say-saving better opinions and always with +submission to sounder judgments--that this piece we have now before us, +which this worthy gentleman has in his hands, not only is no barber's +basin, but is as far from being one as white is from black, and truth +from falsehood; I say, moreover, that this, although it is a helmet, is +not a complete helmet." + +"Certainly not," said Don Quixote, "for half of it is wanting, that is to +say the beaver." + +"It is quite true," said the curate, who saw the object of his friend the +barber; and Cardenio, Don Fernando and his companions agreed with him, +and even the Judge, if his thoughts had not been so full of Don Luis's +affair, would have helped to carry on the joke; but he was so taken up +with the serious matters he had on his mind that he paid little or no +attention to these facetious proceedings. + +"God bless me!" exclaimed their butt the barber at this; "is it possible +that such an honourable company can say that this is not a basin but a +helmet? Why, this is a thing that would astonish a whole university, +however wise it might be! That will do; if this basin is a helmet, why, +then the pack-saddle must be a horse's caparison, as this gentleman has +said." + +"To me it looks like a pack-saddle," said Don Quixote; "but I have +already said that with that question I do not concern myself." + +"As to whether it be pack-saddle or caparison," said the curate, "it is +only for Senor Don Quixote to say; for in these matters of chivalry all +these gentlemen and I bow to his authority." + +"By God, gentlemen," said Don Quixote, "so many strange things have +happened to me in this castle on the two occasions on which I have +sojourned in it, that I will not venture to assert anything positively in +reply to any question touching anything it contains; for it is my belief +that everything that goes on within it goes by enchantment. The first +time, an enchanted Moor that there is in it gave me sore trouble, nor did +Sancho fare well among certain followers of his; and last night I was +kept hanging by this arm for nearly two hours, without knowing how or why +I came by such a mishap. So that now, for me to come forward to give an +opinion in such a puzzling matter, would be to risk a rash decision. As +regards the assertion that this is a basin and not a helmet I have +already given an answer; but as to the question whether this is a +pack-saddle or a caparison I will not venture to give a positive opinion, +but will leave it to your worships' better judgment. Perhaps as you are +not dubbed knights like myself, the enchantments of this place have +nothing to do with you, and your faculties are unfettered, and you can +see things in this castle as they really and truly are, and not as they +appear to me." + +"There can be no question," said Don Fernando on this, "but that Senor +Don Quixote has spoken very wisely, and that with us rests the decision +of this matter; and that we may have surer ground to go on, I will take +the votes of the gentlemen in secret, and declare the result clearly and +fully." + +To those who were in the secret of Don Quixote's humour all this afforded +great amusement; but to those who knew nothing about it, it seemed the +greatest nonsense in the world, in particular to the four servants of Don +Luis, as well as to Don Luis himself, and to three other travellers who +had by chance come to the inn, and had the appearance of officers of the +Holy Brotherhood, as indeed they were; but the one who above all was at +his wits' end, was the barber basin, there before his very eyes, had been +turned into Mambrino's helmet, and whose pack-saddle he had no doubt +whatever was about to become a rich caparison for a horse. All laughed to +see Don Fernando going from one to another collecting the votes, and +whispering to them to give him their private opinion whether the treasure +over which there had been so much fighting was a pack-saddle or a +caparison; but after he had taken the votes of those who knew Don +Quixote, he said aloud, "The fact is, my good fellow, that I am tired +collecting such a number of opinions, for I find that there is not one of +whom I ask what I desire to know, who does not tell me that it is absurd +to say that this is the pack-saddle of an ass, and not the caparison of a +horse, nay, of a thoroughbred horse; so you must submit, for, in spite of +you and your ass, this is a caparison and no pack-saddle, and you have +stated and proved your case very badly." + +"May I never share heaven," said the poor barber, "if your worships are +not all mistaken; and may my soul appear before God as that appears to me +a pack-saddle and not a caparison; but, 'laws go,'-I say no more; and +indeed I am not drunk, for I am fasting, except it be from sin." + +The simple talk of the barber did not afford less amusement than the +absurdities of Don Quixote, who now observed: + +"There is no more to be done now than for each to take what belongs to +him, and to whom God has given it, may St. Peter add his blessing." + +But said one of the four servants, "Unless, indeed, this is a deliberate +joke, I cannot bring myself to believe that men so intelligent as those +present are, or seem to be, can venture to declare and assert that this +is not a basin, and that not a pack-saddle; but as I perceive that they +do assert and declare it, I can only come to the conclusion that there is +some mystery in this persistence in what is so opposed to the evidence of +experience and truth itself; for I swear by"--and here he rapped out a +round oath-"all the people in the world will not make me believe that +this is not a barber's basin and that a jackass's pack-saddle." + +"It might easily be a she-ass's," observed the curate. + +"It is all the same," said the servant; "that is not the point; but +whether it is or is not a pack-saddle, as your worships say." + +On hearing this one of the newly arrived officers of the Brotherhood, who +had been listening to the dispute and controversy, unable to restrain his +anger and impatience, exclaimed, "It is a pack-saddle as sure as my +father is my father, and whoever has said or will say anything else must +be drunk." + +"You lie like a rascally clown," returned Don Quixote; and lifting his +pike, which he had never let out of his hand, he delivered such a blow at +his head that, had not the officer dodged it, it would have stretched him +at full length. The pike was shivered in pieces against the ground, and +the rest of the officers, seeing their comrade assaulted, raised a shout, +calling for help for the Holy Brotherhood. The landlord, who was of the +fraternity, ran at once to fetch his staff of office and his sword, and +ranged himself on the side of his comrades; the servants of Don Luis +clustered round him, lest he should escape from them in the confusion; +the barber, seeing the house turned upside down, once more laid hold of +his pack-saddle and Sancho did the same; Don Quixote drew his sword and +charged the officers; Don Luis cried out to his servants to leave him +alone and go and help Don Quixote, and Cardenio and Don Fernando, who +were supporting him; the curate was shouting at the top of his voice, the +landlady was screaming, her daughter was wailing, Maritornes was weeping, +Dorothea was aghast, Luscinda terror-stricken, and Dona Clara in a faint. +The barber cudgelled Sancho, and Sancho pommelled the barber; Don Luis +gave one of his servants, who ventured to catch him by the arm to keep +him from escaping, a cuff that bathed his teeth in blood; the Judge took +his part; Don Fernando had got one of the officers down and was +belabouring him heartily; the landlord raised his voice again calling for +help for the Holy Brotherhood; so that the whole inn was nothing but +cries, shouts, shrieks, confusion, terror, dismay, mishaps, sword-cuts, +fisticuffs, cudgellings, kicks, and bloodshed; and in the midst of all +this chaos, complication, and general entanglement, Don Quixote took it +into his head that he had been plunged into the thick of the discord of +Agramante's camp; and, in a voice that shook the inn like thunder, he +cried out: + +"Hold all, let all sheathe their swords, let all be calm and attend to me +as they value their lives!" + +All paused at his mighty voice, and he went on to say, "Did I not tell +you, sirs, that this castle was enchanted, and that a legion or so of +devils dwelt in it? In proof whereof I call upon you to behold with your +own eyes how the discord of Agramante's camp has come hither, and been +transferred into the midst of us. See how they fight, there for the +sword, here for the horse, on that side for the eagle, on this for the +helmet; we are all fighting, and all at cross purposes. Come then, you, +Senor Judge, and you, senor curate; let the one represent King Agramante +and the other King Sobrino, and make peace among us; for by God Almighty +it is a sorry business that so many persons of quality as we are should +slay one another for such trifling cause." The officers, who did not +understand Don Quixote's mode of speaking, and found themselves roughly +handled by Don Fernando, Cardenio, and their companions, were not to be +appeased; the barber was, however, for both his beard and his pack-saddle +were the worse for the struggle; Sancho like a good servant obeyed the +slightest word of his master; while the four servants of Don Luis kept +quiet when they saw how little they gained by not being so. The landlord +alone insisted upon it that they must punish the insolence of this +madman, who at every turn raised a disturbance in the inn; but at length +the uproar was stilled for the present; the pack-saddle remained a +caparison till the day of judgment, and the basin a helmet and the inn a +castle in Don Quixote's imagination. + +All having been now pacified and made friends by the persuasion of the +Judge and the curate, the servants of Don Luis began again to urge him to +return with them at once; and while he was discussing the matter with +them, the Judge took counsel with Don Fernando, Cardenio, and the curate +as to what he ought to do in the case, telling them how it stood, and +what Don Luis had said to him. It was agreed at length that Don Fernando +should tell the servants of Don Luis who he was, and that it was his +desire that Don Luis should accompany him to Andalusia, where he would +receive from the marquis his brother the welcome his quality entitled him +to; for, otherwise, it was easy to see from the determination of Don Luis +that he would not return to his father at present, though they tore him +to pieces. On learning the rank of Don Fernando and the resolution of Don +Luis the four then settled it between themselves that three of them +should return to tell his father how matters stood, and that the other +should remain to wait upon Don Luis, and not leave him until they came +back for him, or his father's orders were known. Thus by the authority of +Agramante and the wisdom of King Sobrino all this complication of +disputes was arranged; but the enemy of concord and hater of peace, +feeling himself slighted and made a fool of, and seeing how little he had +gained after having involved them all in such an elaborate entanglement, +resolved to try his hand once more by stirring up fresh quarrels and +disturbances. + +It came about in this wise: the officers were pacified on learning the +rank of those with whom they had been engaged, and withdrew from the +contest, considering that whatever the result might be they were likely +to get the worst of the battle; but one of them, the one who had been +thrashed and kicked by Don Fernando, recollected that among some warrants +he carried for the arrest of certain delinquents, he had one against Don +Quixote, whom the Holy Brotherhood had ordered to be arrested for setting +the galley slaves free, as Sancho had, with very good reason, +apprehended. Suspecting how it was, then, he wished to satisfy himself as +to whether Don Quixote's features corresponded; and taking a parchment +out of his bosom he lit upon what he was in search of, and setting +himself to read it deliberately, for he was not a quick reader, as he +made out each word he fixed his eyes on Don Quixote, and went on +comparing the description in the warrant with his face, and discovered +that beyond all doubt he was the person described in it. As soon as he +had satisfied himself, folding up the parchment, he took the warrant in +his left hand and with his right seized Don Quixote by the collar so +tightly that he did not allow him to breathe, and shouted aloud, "Help +for the Holy Brotherhood! and that you may see I demand it in earnest, +read this warrant which says this highwayman is to be arrested." + +The curate took the warrant and saw that what the officer said was true, +and that it agreed with Don Quixote's appearance, who, on his part, when +he found himself roughly handled by this rascally clown, worked up to the +highest pitch of wrath, and all his joints cracking with rage, with both +hands seized the officer by the throat with all his might, so that had he +not been helped by his comrades he would have yielded up his life ere Don +Quixote released his hold. The landlord, who had perforce to support his +brother officers, ran at once to aid them. The landlady, when she saw her +husband engaged in a fresh quarrel, lifted up her voice afresh, and its +note was immediately caught up by Maritornes and her daughter, calling +upon heaven and all present for help; and Sancho, seeing what was going +on, exclaimed, "By the Lord, it is quite true what my master says about +the enchantments of this castle, for it is impossible to live an hour in +peace in it!" + +Don Fernando parted the officer and Don Quixote, and to their mutual +contentment made them relax the grip by which they held, the one the coat +collar, the other the throat of his adversary; for all this, however, the +officers did not cease to demand their prisoner and call on them to help, +and deliver him over bound into their power, as was required for the +service of the King and of the Holy Brotherhood, on whose behalf they +again demanded aid and assistance to effect the capture of this robber +and footpad of the highways. + +Don Quixote smiled when he heard these words, and said very calmly, "Come +now, base, ill-born brood; call ye it highway robbery to give freedom to +those in bondage, to release the captives, to succour the miserable, to +raise up the fallen, to relieve the needy? Infamous beings, who by your +vile grovelling intellects deserve that heaven should not make known to +you the virtue that lies in knight-errantry, or show you the sin and +ignorance in which ye lie when ye refuse to respect the shadow, not to +say the presence, of any knight-errant! Come now; band, not of officers, +but of thieves; footpads with the licence of the Holy Brotherhood; tell +me who was the ignoramus who signed a warrant of arrest against such a +knight as I am? Who was he that did not know that knights-errant are +independent of all jurisdictions, that their law is their sword, their +charter their prowess, and their edicts their will? Who, I say again, was +the fool that knows not that there are no letters patent of nobility that +confer such privileges or exemptions as a knight-errant acquires the day +he is dubbed a knight, and devotes himself to the arduous calling of +chivalry? What knight-errant ever paid poll-tax, duty, queen's pin-money, +king's dues, toll or ferry? What tailor ever took payment of him for +making his clothes? What castellan that received him in his castle ever +made him pay his shot? What king did not seat him at his table? What +damsel was not enamoured of him and did not yield herself up wholly to +his will and pleasure? And, lastly, what knight-errant has there been, is +there, or will there ever be in the world, not bold enough to give, +single-handed, four hundred cudgellings to four hundred officers of the +Holy Brotherhood if they come in his way?" + +Chapter XLVI. - +Of the end of the notable adventure of the officers of the holy +brotherhood; and of the great ferocity of our worthy Knight, Don Quixote + +While Don Quixote was talking in this strain, the curate was endeavouring +to persuade the officers that he was out of his senses, as they might +perceive by his deeds and his words, and that they need not press the +matter any further, for even if they arrested him and carried him off, +they would have to release him by-and-by as a madman; to which the holder +of the warrant replied that he had nothing to do with inquiring into Don +Quixote's madness, but only to execute his superior's orders, and that +once taken they might let him go three hundred times if they liked. + +"For all that," said the curate, "you must not take him away this time, +nor will he, it is my opinion, let himself be taken away." + +In short, the curate used such arguments, and Don Quixote did such mad +things, that the officers would have been more mad than he was if they +had not perceived his want of wits, and so they thought it best to allow +themselves to be pacified, and even to act as peacemakers between the +barber and Sancho Panza, who still continued their altercation with much +bitterness. In the end they, as officers of justice, settled the question +by arbitration in such a manner that both sides were, if not perfectly +contented, at least to some extent satisfied; for they changed the +pack-saddles, but not the girths or head-stalls; and as to Mambrino's +helmet, the curate, under the rose and without Don Quixote's knowing it, +paid eight reals for the basin, and the barber executed a full receipt +and engagement to make no further demand then or thenceforth for +evermore, amen. These two disputes, which were the most important and +gravest, being settled, it only remained for the servants of Don Luis to +consent that three of them should return while one was left to accompany +him whither Don Fernando desired to take him; and good luck and better +fortune, having already begun to solve difficulties and remove +obstructions in favour of the lovers and warriors of the inn, were +pleased to persevere and bring everything to a happy issue; for the +servants agreed to do as Don Luis wished; which gave Dona Clara such +happiness that no one could have looked into her face just then without +seeing the joy of her heart. Zoraida, though she did not fully comprehend +all she saw, was grave or gay without knowing why, as she watched and +studied the various countenances, but particularly her Spaniard's, whom +she followed with her eyes and clung to with her soul. The gift and +compensation which the curate gave the barber had not escaped the +landlord's notice, and he demanded Don Quixote's reckoning, together with +the amount of the damage to his wine-skins, and the loss of his wine, +swearing that neither Rocinante nor Sancho's ass should leave the inn +until he had been paid to the very last farthing. The curate settled all +amicably, and Don Fernando paid; though the Judge had also very readily +offered to pay the score; and all became so peaceful and quiet that the +inn no longer reminded one of the discord of Agramante's camp, as Don +Quixote said, but of the peace and tranquillity of the days of +Octavianus: for all which it was the universal opinion that their thanks +were due to the great zeal and eloquence of the curate, and to the +unexampled generosity of Don Fernando. + +Finding himself now clear and quit of all quarrels, his squire's as well +as his own, Don Quixote considered that it would be advisable to continue +the journey he had begun, and bring to a close that great adventure for +which he had been called and chosen; and with this high resolve he went +and knelt before Dorothea, who, however, would not allow him to utter a +word until he had risen; so to obey her he rose, and said, "It is a +common proverb, fair lady, that 'diligence is the mother of good +fortune,' and experience has often shown in important affairs that the +earnestness of the negotiator brings the doubtful case to a successful +termination; but in nothing does this truth show itself more plainly than +in war, where quickness and activity forestall the devices of the enemy, +and win the victory before the foe has time to defend himself. All this I +say, exalted and esteemed lady, because it seems to me that for us to +remain any longer in this castle now is useless, and may be injurious to +us in a way that we shall find out some day; for who knows but that your +enemy the giant may have learned by means of secret and diligent spies +that I am going to destroy him, and if the opportunity be given him he +may seize it to fortify himself in some impregnable castle or stronghold, +against which all my efforts and the might of my indefatigable arm may +avail but little? Therefore, lady, let us, as I say, forestall his +schemes by our activity, and let us depart at once in quest of fair +fortune; for your highness is only kept from enjoying it as fully as you +could desire by my delay in encountering your adversary." + +Don Quixote held his peace and said no more, calmly awaiting the reply of +the beauteous princess, who, with commanding dignity and in a style +adapted to Don Quixote's own, replied to him in these words, "I give you +thanks, sir knight, for the eagerness you, like a good knight to whom it +is a natural obligation to succour the orphan and the needy, display to +afford me aid in my sore trouble; and heaven grant that your wishes and +mine may be realised, so that you may see that there are women in this +world capable of gratitude; as to my departure, let it be forthwith, for +I have no will but yours; dispose of me entirely in accordance with your +good pleasure; for she who has once entrusted to you the defence of her +person, and placed in your hands the recovery of her dominions, must not +think of offering opposition to that which your wisdom may ordain." + +"On, then, in God's name," said Don Quixote; "for, when a lady humbles +herself to me, I will not lose the opportunity of raising her up and +placing her on the throne of her ancestors. Let us depart at once, for +the common saying that in delay there is danger, lends spurs to my +eagerness to take the road; and as neither heaven has created nor hell +seen any that can daunt or intimidate me, saddle Rocinante, Sancho, and +get ready thy ass and the queen's palfrey, and let us take leave of the +castellan and these gentlemen, and go hence this very instant." + +Sancho, who was standing by all the time, said, shaking his head, "Ah! +master, master, there is more mischief in the village than one hears of, +begging all good bodies' pardon." + +"What mischief can there be in any village, or in all the cities of the +world, you booby, that can hurt my reputation?" said Don Quixote. + +"If your worship is angry," replied Sancho, "I will hold my tongue and +leave unsaid what as a good squire I am bound to say, and what a good +servant should tell his master." + +"Say what thou wilt," returned Don Quixote, "provided thy words be not +meant to work upon my fears; for thou, if thou fearest, art behaving like +thyself; but I like myself, in not fearing." + +"It is nothing of the sort, as I am a sinner before God," said Sancho, +"but that I take it to be sure and certain that this lady, who calls +herself queen of the great kingdom of Micomicon, is no more so than my +mother; for, if she was what she says, she would not go rubbing noses +with one that is here every instant and behind every door." + +Dorothea turned red at Sancho's words, for the truth was that her husband +Don Fernando had now and then, when the others were not looking, gathered +from her lips some of the reward his love had earned, and Sancho seeing +this had considered that such freedom was more like a courtesan than a +queen of a great kingdom; she, however, being unable or not caring to +answer him, allowed him to proceed, and he continued, "This I say, senor, +because, if after we have travelled roads and highways, and passed bad +nights and worse days, one who is now enjoying himself in this inn is to +reap the fruit of our labours, there is no need for me to be in a hurry +to saddle Rocinante, put the pad on the ass, or get ready the palfrey; +for it will be better for us to stay quiet, and let every jade mind her +spinning, and let us go to dinner." + +Good God, what was the indignation of Don Quixote when he heard the +audacious words of his squire! So great was it, that in a voice +inarticulate with rage, with a stammering tongue, and eyes that flashed +living fire, he exclaimed, "Rascally clown, boorish, insolent, and +ignorant, ill-spoken, foul-mouthed, impudent backbiter and slanderer! +Hast thou dared to utter such words in my presence and in that of these +illustrious ladies? Hast thou dared to harbour such gross and shameless +thoughts in thy muddled imagination? Begone from my presence, thou born +monster, storehouse of lies, hoard of untruths, garner of knaveries, +inventor of scandals, publisher of absurdities, enemy of the respect due +to royal personages! Begone, show thyself no more before me under pain of +my wrath;" and so saying he knitted his brows, puffed out his cheeks, +gazed around him, and stamped on the ground violently with his right +foot, showing in every way the rage that was pent up in his heart; and at +his words and furious gestures Sancho was so scared and terrified that he +would have been glad if the earth had opened that instant and swallowed +him, and his only thought was to turn round and make his escape from the +angry presence of his master. + +But the ready-witted Dorothea, who by this time so well understood Don +Quixote's humour, said, to mollify his wrath, "Be not irritated at the +absurdities your good squire has uttered, Sir Knight of the Rueful +Countenance, for perhaps he did not utter them without cause, and from +his good sense and Christian conscience it is not likely that he would +bear false witness against anyone. We may therefore believe, without any +hesitation, that since, as you say, sir knight, everything in this castle +goes and is brought about by means of enchantment, Sancho, I say, may +possibly have seen, through this diabolical medium, what he says he saw +so much to the detriment of my modesty." + +"I swear by God Omnipotent," exclaimed Don Quixote at this, "your +highness has hit the point; and that some vile illusion must have come +before this sinner of a Sancho, that made him see what it would have been +impossible to see by any other means than enchantments; for I know well +enough, from the poor fellow's goodness and harmlessness, that he is +incapable of bearing false witness against anybody." + +"True, no doubt," said Don Fernando, "for which reason, Senor Don +Quixote, you ought to forgive him and restore him to the bosom of your +favour, sicut erat in principio, before illusions of this sort had taken +away his senses." + +Don Quixote said he was ready to pardon him, and the curate went for +Sancho, who came in very humbly, and falling on his knees begged for the +hand of his master, who having presented it to him and allowed him to +kiss it, gave him his blessing and said, "Now, Sancho my son, thou wilt +be convinced of the truth of what I have many a time told thee, that +everything in this castle is done by means of enchantment." + +"So it is, I believe," said Sancho, "except the affair of the blanket, +which came to pass in reality by ordinary means." + +"Believe it not," said Don Quixote, "for had it been so, I would have +avenged thee that instant, or even now; but neither then nor now could I, +nor have I seen anyone upon whom to avenge thy wrong." + +They were all eager to know what the affair of the blanket was, and the +landlord gave them a minute account of Sancho's flights, at which they +laughed not a little, and at which Sancho would have been no less out of +countenance had not his master once more assured him it was all +enchantment. For all that his simplicity never reached so high a pitch +that he could persuade himself it was not the plain and simple truth, +without any deception whatever about it, that he had been blanketed by +beings of flesh and blood, and not by visionary and imaginary phantoms, +as his master believed and protested. + +The illustrious company had now been two days in the inn; and as it +seemed to them time to depart, they devised a plan so that, without +giving Dorothea and Don Fernando the trouble of going back with Don +Quixote to his village under pretence of restoring Queen Micomicona, the +curate and the barber might carry him away with them as they proposed, +and the curate be able to take his madness in hand at home; and in +pursuance of their plan they arranged with the owner of an oxcart who +happened to be passing that way to carry him after this fashion. They +constructed a kind of cage with wooden bars, large enough to hold Don +Quixote comfortably; and then Don Fernando and his companions, the +servants of Don Luis, and the officers of the Brotherhood, together with +the landlord, by the directions and advice of the curate, covered their +faces and disguised themselves, some in one way, some in another, so as +to appear to Don Quixote quite different from the persons he had seen in +the castle. This done, in profound silence they entered the room where he +was asleep, taking his his rest after the past frays, and advancing to +where he was sleeping tranquilly, not dreaming of anything of the kind +happening, they seized him firmly and bound him fast hand and foot, so +that, when he awoke startled, he was unable to move, and could only +marvel and wonder at the strange figures he saw before him; upon which he +at once gave way to the idea which his crazed fancy invariably conjured +up before him, and took it into his head that all these shapes were +phantoms of the enchanted castle, and that he himself was unquestionably +enchanted as he could neither move nor help himself; precisely what the +curate, the concoctor of the scheme, expected would happen. Of all that +were there Sancho was the only one who was at once in his senses and in +his own proper character, and he, though he was within very little of +sharing his master's infirmity, did not fail to perceive who all these +disguised figures were; but he did not dare to open his lips until he saw +what came of this assault and capture of his master; nor did the latter +utter a word, waiting to the upshot of his mishap; which was that +bringing in the cage, they shut him up in it and nailed the bars so +firmly that they could not be easily burst open. + +They then took him on their shoulders, and as they passed out of the room +an awful voice--as much so as the barber, not he of the pack-saddle but +the other, was able to make it--was heard to say, "O Knight of the Rueful +Countenance, let not this captivity in which thou art placed afflict +thee, for this must needs be, for the more speedy accomplishment of the +adventure in which thy great heart has engaged thee; the which shall be +accomplished when the raging Manchegan lion and the white Tobosan dove +shall be linked together, having first humbled their haughty necks to the +gentle yoke of matrimony. And from this marvellous union shall come forth +to the light of the world brave whelps that shall rival the ravening +claws of their valiant father; and this shall come to pass ere the +pursuer of the flying nymph shall in his swift natural course have twice +visited the starry signs. And thou, O most noble and obedient squire that +ever bore sword at side, beard on face, or nose to smell with, be not +dismayed or grieved to see the flower of knight-errantry carried away +thus before thy very eyes; for soon, if it so please the Framer of the +universe, thou shalt see thyself exalted to such a height that thou shalt +not know thyself, and the promises which thy good master has made thee +shall not prove false; and I assure thee, on the authority of the sage +Mentironiana, that thy wages shall be paid thee, as thou shalt see in due +season. Follow then the footsteps of the valiant enchanted knight, for it +is expedient that thou shouldst go to the destination assigned to both of +you; and as it is not permitted to me to say more, God be with thee; for +I return to that place I wot of;" and as he brought the prophecy to a +close he raised his voice to a high pitch, and then lowered it to such a +soft tone, that even those who knew it was all a joke were almost +inclined to take what they heard seriously. + +Don Quixote was comforted by the prophecy he heard, for he at once +comprehended its meaning perfectly, and perceived it was promised to him +that he should see himself united in holy and lawful matrimony with his +beloved Dulcinea del Toboso, from whose blessed womb should proceed the +whelps, his sons, to the eternal glory of La Mancha; and being thoroughly +and firmly persuaded of this, he lifted up his voice, and with a deep +sigh exclaimed, "Oh thou, whoever thou art, who hast foretold me so much +good, I implore of thee that on my part thou entreat that sage enchanter +who takes charge of my interests, that he leave me not to perish in this +captivity in which they are now carrying me away, ere I see fulfilled +promises so joyful and incomparable as those which have been now made me; +for, let this but come to pass, and I shall glory in the pains of my +prison, find comfort in these chains wherewith they bind me, and regard +this bed whereon they stretch me, not as a hard battle-field, but as a +soft and happy nuptial couch; and touching the consolation of Sancho +Panza, my squire, I rely upon his goodness and rectitude that he will not +desert me in good or evil fortune; for if, by his ill luck or mine, it +may not happen to be in my power to give him the island I have promised, +or any equivalent for it, at least his wages shall not be lost; for in my +will, which is already made, I have declared the sum that shall be paid +to him, measured, not by his many faithful services, but by the means at +my disposal." + +Sancho bowed his head very respectfully and kissed both his hands, for, +being tied together, he could not kiss one; and then the apparitions +lifted the cage upon their shoulders and fixed it upon the ox-cart. + +Chapter XLVII. - +Of the strange manner in which Don Quixote of La Mancha was carried away +enchanted, together with other remarkable incidents + +When Don Quixote saw himself caged and hoisted on the cart in this way, +he said, "Many grave histories of knights-errant have I read; but never +yet have I read, seen, or heard of their carrying off enchanted +knights-errant in this fashion, or at the slow pace that these lazy, +sluggish animals promise; for they always take them away through the air +with marvellous swiftness, enveloped in a dark thick cloud, or on a +chariot of fire, or it may be on some hippogriff or other beast of the +kind; but to carry me off like this on an ox-cart! By God, it puzzles me! +But perhaps the chivalry and enchantments of our day take a different +course from that of those in days gone by; and it may be, too, that as I +am a new knight in the world, and the first to revive the already +forgotten calling of knight-adventurers, they may have newly invented +other kinds of enchantments and other modes of carrying off the +enchanted. What thinkest thou of the matter, Sancho my son?" + +"I don't know what to think," answered Sancho, "not being as well read as +your worship in errant writings; but for all that I venture to say and +swear that these apparitions that are about us are not quite catholic." + +"Catholic!" said Don Quixote. "Father of me! how can they be Catholic +when they are all devils that have taken fantastic shapes to come and do +this, and bring me to this condition? And if thou wouldst prove it, touch +them, and feel them, and thou wilt find they have only bodies of air, and +no consistency except in appearance." + +"By God, master," returned Sancho, "I have touched them already; and that +devil, that goes about there so busily, has firm flesh, and another +property very different from what I have heard say devils have, for by +all accounts they all smell of brimstone and other bad smells; but this +one smells of amber half a league off." Sancho was here speaking of Don +Fernando, who, like a gentleman of his rank, was very likely perfumed as +Sancho said. + +"Marvel not at that, Sancho my friend," said Don Quixote; "for let me +tell thee devils are crafty; and even if they do carry odours about with +them, they themselves have no smell, because they are spirits; or, if +they have any smell, they cannot smell of anything sweet, but of +something foul and fetid; and the reason is that as they carry hell with +them wherever they go, and can get no ease whatever from their torments, +and as a sweet smell is a thing that gives pleasure and enjoyment, it is +impossible that they can smell sweet; if, then, this devil thou speakest +of seems to thee to smell of amber, either thou art deceiving thyself, or +he wants to deceive thee by making thee fancy he is not a devil." + +Such was the conversation that passed between master and man; and Don +Fernando and Cardenio, apprehensive of Sancho's making a complete +discovery of their scheme, towards which he had already gone some way, +resolved to hasten their departure, and calling the landlord aside, they +directed him to saddle Rocinante and put the pack-saddle on Sancho's ass, +which he did with great alacrity. In the meantime the curate had made an +arrangement with the officers that they should bear them company as far +as his village, he paying them so much a day. Cardenio hung the buckler +on one side of the bow of Rocinante's saddle and the basin on the other, +and by signs commanded Sancho to mount his ass and take Rocinante's +bridle, and at each side of the cart he placed two officers with their +muskets; but before the cart was put in motion, out came the landlady and +her daughter and Maritornes to bid Don Quixote farewell, pretending to +weep with grief at his misfortune; and to them Don Quixote said: + +"Weep not, good ladies, for all these mishaps are the lot of those who +follow the profession I profess; and if these reverses did not befall me +I should not esteem myself a famous knight-errant; for such things never +happen to knights of little renown and fame, because nobody in the world +thinks about them; to valiant knights they do, for these are envied for +their virtue and valour by many princes and other knights who compass the +destruction of the worthy by base means. Nevertheless, virtue is of +herself so mighty, that, in spite of all the magic that Zoroaster its +first inventor knew, she will come victorious out of every trial, and +shed her light upon the earth as the sun does upon the heavens. Forgive +me, fair ladies, if, through inadvertence, I have in aught offended you; +for intentionally and wittingly I have never done so to any; and pray to +God that he deliver me from this captivity to which some malevolent +enchanter has consigned me; and should I find myself released therefrom, +the favours that ye have bestowed upon me in this castle shall be held in +memory by me, that I may acknowledge, recognise, and requite them as they +deserve." + +While this was passing between the ladies of the castle and Don Quixote, +the curate and the barber bade farewell to Don Fernando and his +companions, to the captain, his brother, and the ladies, now all made +happy, and in particular to Dorothea and Luscinda. They all embraced one +another, and promised to let each other know how things went with them, +and Don Fernando directed the curate where to write to him, to tell him +what became of Don Quixote, assuring him that there was nothing that +could give him more pleasure than to hear of it, and that he too, on his +part, would send him word of everything he thought he would like to know, +about his marriage, Zoraida's baptism, Don Luis's affair, and Luscinda's +return to her home. The curate promised to comply with his request +carefully, and they embraced once more, and renewed their promises. + +The landlord approached the curate and handed him some papers, saying he +had discovered them in the lining of the valise in which the novel of +"The Ill-advised Curiosity" had been found, and that he might take them +all away with him as their owner had not since returned; for, as he could +not read, he did not want them himself. The curate thanked him, and +opening them he saw at the beginning of the manuscript the words, "Novel +of Rinconete and Cortadillo," by which he perceived that it was a novel, +and as that of "The Ill-advised Curiosity" had been good he concluded +this would be so too, as they were both probably by the same author; so +he kept it, intending to read it when he had an opportunity. He then +mounted and his friend the barber did the same, both masked, so as not to +be recognised by Don Quixote, and set out following in the rear of the +cart. The order of march was this: first went the cart with the owner +leading it; at each side of it marched the officers of the Brotherhood, +as has been said, with their muskets; then followed Sancho Panza on his +ass, leading Rocinante by the bridle; and behind all came the curate and +the barber on their mighty mules, with faces covered, as aforesaid, and a +grave and serious air, measuring their pace to suit the slow steps of the +oxen. Don Quixote was seated in the cage, with his hands tied and his +feet stretched out, leaning against the bars as silent and as patient as +if he were a stone statue and not a man of flesh. Thus slowly and +silently they made, it might be, two leagues, until they reached a valley +which the carter thought a convenient place for resting and feeding his +oxen, and he said so to the curate, but the barber was of opinion that +they ought to push on a little farther, as at the other side of a hill +which appeared close by he knew there was a valley that had more grass +and much better than the one where they proposed to halt; and his advice +was taken and they continued their journey. + +Just at that moment the curate, looking back, saw coming on behind them +six or seven mounted men, well found and equipped, who soon overtook +them, for they were travelling, not at the sluggish, deliberate pace of +oxen, but like men who rode canons' mules, and in haste to take their +noontide rest as soon as possible at the inn which was in sight not a +league off. The quick travellers came up with the slow, and courteous +salutations were exchanged; and one of the new comers, who was, in fact, +a canon of Toledo and master of the others who accompanied him, observing +the regular order of the procession, the cart, the officers, Sancho, +Rocinante, the curate and the barber, and above all Don Quixote caged and +confined, could not help asking what was the meaning of carrying the man +in that fashion; though, from the badges of the officers, he already +concluded that he must be some desperate highwayman or other malefactor +whose punishment fell within the jurisdiction of the Holy Brotherhood. +One of the officers to whom he had put the question, replied, "Let the +gentleman himself tell you the meaning of his going this way, senor, for +we do not know." + +Don Quixote overheard the conversation and said, "Haply, gentlemen, you +are versed and learned in matters of errant chivalry? Because if you are +I will tell you my misfortunes; if not, there is no good in my giving +myself the trouble of relating them;" but here the curate and the barber, +seeing that the travellers were engaged in conversation with Don Quixote, +came forward, in order to answer in such a way as to save their stratagem +from being discovered. + +The canon, replying to Don Quixote, said, "In truth, brother, I know more +about books of chivalry than I do about Villalpando's elements of logic; +so if that be all, you may safely tell me what you please." + +"In God's name, then, senor," replied Don Quixote; "if that be so, I +would have you know that I am held enchanted in this cage by the envy and +fraud of wicked enchanters; for virtue is more persecuted by the wicked +than loved by the good. I am a knight-errant, and not one of those whose +names Fame has never thought of immortalising in her record, but of those +who, in defiance and in spite of envy itself, and all the magicians that +Persia, or Brahmans that India, or Gymnosophists that Ethiopia ever +produced, will place their names in the temple of immortality, to serve +as examples and patterns for ages to come, whereby knights-errant may see +the footsteps in which they must tread if they would attain the summit +and crowning point of honour in arms." + +"What Senor Don Quixote of La Mancha says," observed the curate, "is the +truth; for he goes enchanted in this cart, not from any fault or sins of +his, but because of the malevolence of those to whom virtue is odious and +valour hateful. This, senor, is the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, if +you have ever heard him named, whose valiant achievements and mighty +deeds shall be written on lasting brass and imperishable marble, +notwithstanding all the efforts of envy to obscure them and malice to +hide them." + +When the canon heard both the prisoner and the man who was at liberty +talk in such a strain he was ready to cross himself in his astonishment, +and could not make out what had befallen him; and all his attendants were +in the same state of amazement. + +At this point Sancho Panza, who had drawn near to hear the conversation, +said, in order to make everything plain, "Well, sirs, you may like or +dislike what I am going to say, but the fact of the matter is, my master, +Don Quixote, is just as much enchanted as my mother. He is in his full +senses, he eats and he drinks, and he has his calls like other men and as +he had yesterday, before they caged him. And if that's the case, what do +they mean by wanting me to believe that he is enchanted? For I have heard +many a one say that enchanted people neither eat, nor sleep, nor talk; +and my master, if you don't stop him, will talk more than thirty +lawyers." Then turning to the curate he exclaimed, "Ah, senor curate, +senor curate! do you think I don't know you? Do you think I don't guess +and see the drift of these new enchantments? Well then, I can tell you I +know you, for all your face is covered, and I can tell you I am up to +you, however you may hide your tricks. After all, where envy reigns +virtue cannot live, and where there is niggardliness there can be no +liberality. Ill betide the devil! if it had not been for your worship my +master would be married to the Princess Micomicona this minute, and I +should be a count at least; for no less was to be expected, as well from +the goodness of my master, him of the Rueful Countenance, as from the +greatness of my services. But I see now how true it is what they say in +these parts, that the wheel of fortune turns faster than a mill-wheel, +and that those who were up yesterday are down to-day. I am sorry for my +wife and children, for when they might fairly and reasonably expect to +see their father return to them a governor or viceroy of some island or +kingdom, they will see him come back a horse-boy. I have said all this, +senor curate, only to urge your paternity to lay to your conscience your +ill-treatment of my master; and have a care that God does not call you to +account in another life for making a prisoner of him in this way, and +charge against you all the succours and good deeds that my lord Don +Quixote leaves undone while he is shut up. + +"Trim those lamps there!" exclaimed the barber at this; "so you are of +the same fraternity as your master, too, Sancho? By God, I begin to see +that you will have to keep him company in the cage, and be enchanted like +him for having caught some of his humour and chivalry. It was an evil +hour when you let yourself be got with child by his promises, and that +island you long so much for found its way into your head." + +"I am not with child by anyone," returned Sancho, "nor am I a man to let +myself be got with child, if it was by the King himself. Though I am poor +I am an old Christian, and I owe nothing to nobody, and if I long for an +island, other people long for worse. Each of us is the son of his own +works; and being a man I may come to be pope, not to say governor of an +island, especially as my master may win so many that he will not know +whom to give them to. Mind how you talk, master barber; for shaving is +not everything, and there is some difference between Peter and Peter. I +say this because we all know one another, and it will not do to throw +false dice with me; and as to the enchantment of my master, God knows the +truth; leave it as it is; it only makes it worse to stir it." + +The barber did not care to answer Sancho lest by his plain speaking he +should disclose what the curate and he himself were trying so hard to +conceal; and under the same apprehension the curate had asked the canon +to ride on a little in advance, so that he might tell him the mystery of +this man in the cage, and other things that would amuse him. The canon +agreed, and going on ahead with his servants, listened with attention to +the account of the character, life, madness, and ways of Don Quixote, +given him by the curate, who described to him briefly the beginning and +origin of his craze, and told him the whole story of his adventures up to +his being confined in the cage, together with the plan they had of taking +him home to try if by any means they could discover a cure for his +madness. The canon and his servants were surprised anew when they heard +Don Quixote's strange story, and when it was finished he said, "To tell +the truth, senor curate, I for my part consider what they call books of +chivalry to be mischievous to the State; and though, led by idle and +false taste, I have read the beginnings of almost all that have been +printed, I never could manage to read any one of them from beginning to +end; for it seems to me they are all more or less the same thing; and one +has nothing more in it than another; this no more than that. And in my +opinion this sort of writing and composition is of the same species as +the fables they call the Milesian, nonsensical tales that aim solely at +giving amusement and not instruction, exactly the opposite of the +apologue fables which amuse and instruct at the same time. And though it +may be the chief object of such books to amuse, I do not know how they +can succeed, when they are so full of such monstrous nonsense. For the +enjoyment the mind feels must come from the beauty and harmony which it +perceives or contemplates in the things that the eye or the imagination +brings before it; and nothing that has any ugliness or disproportion +about it can give any pleasure. What beauty, then, or what proportion of +the parts to the whole, or of the whole to the parts, can there be in a +book or fable where a lad of sixteen cuts down a giant as tall as a tower +and makes two halves of him as if he was an almond cake? And when they +want to give us a picture of a battle, after having told us that there +are a million of combatants on the side of the enemy, let the hero of the +book be opposed to them, and we have perforce to believe, whether we like +it or not, that the said knight wins the victory by the single might of +his strong arm. And then, what shall we say of the facility with which a +born queen or empress will give herself over into the arms of some +unknown wandering knight? What mind, that is not wholly barbarous and +uncultured, can find pleasure in reading of how a great tower full of +knights sails away across the sea like a ship with a fair wind, and will +be to-night in Lombardy and to-morrow morning in the land of Prester John +of the Indies, or some other that Ptolemy never described nor Marco Polo +saw? And if, in answer to this, I am told that the authors of books of +the kind write them as fiction, and therefore are not bound to regard +niceties of truth, I would reply that fiction is all the better the more +it looks like truth, and gives the more pleasure the more probability and +possibility there is about it. Plots in fiction should be wedded to the +understanding of the reader, and be constructed in such a way that, +reconciling impossibilities, smoothing over difficulties, keeping the +mind on the alert, they may surprise, interest, divert, and entertain, so +that wonder and delight joined may keep pace one with the other; all +which he will fail to effect who shuns verisimilitude and truth to +nature, wherein lies the perfection of writing. I have never yet seen any +book of chivalry that puts together a connected plot complete in all its +numbers, so that the middle agrees with the beginning, and the end with +the beginning and middle; on the contrary, they construct them with such +a multitude of members that it seems as though they meant to produce a +chimera or monster rather than a well-proportioned figure. And besides +all this they are harsh in their style, incredible in their achievements, +licentious in their amours, uncouth in their courtly speeches, prolix in +their battles, silly in their arguments, absurd in their travels, and, in +short, wanting in everything like intelligent art; for which reason they +deserve to be banished from the Christian commonwealth as a worthless +breed." + +The curate listened to him attentively and felt that he was a man of +sound understanding, and that there was good reason in what he said; so +he told him that, being of the same opinion himself, and bearing a grudge +to books of chivalry, he had burned all Don Quixote's, which were many; +and gave him an account of the scrutiny he had made of them, and of those +he had condemned to the flames and those he had spared, with which the +canon was not a little amused, adding that though he had said so much in +condemnation of these books, still he found one good thing in them, and +that was the opportunity they afforded to a gifted intellect for +displaying itself; for they presented a wide and spacious field over +which the pen might range freely, describing shipwrecks, tempests, +combats, battles, portraying a valiant captain with all the +qualifications requisite to make one, showing him sagacious in foreseeing +the wiles of the enemy, eloquent in speech to encourage or restrain his +soldiers, ripe in counsel, rapid in resolve, as bold in biding his time +as in pressing the attack; now picturing some sad tragic incident, now +some joyful and unexpected event; here a beauteous lady, virtuous, wise, +and modest; there a Christian knight, brave and gentle; here a lawless, +barbarous braggart; there a courteous prince, gallant and gracious; +setting forth the devotion and loyalty of vassals, the greatness and +generosity of nobles. "Or again," said he, "the author may show himself +to be an astronomer, or a skilled cosmographer, or musician, or one +versed in affairs of state, and sometimes he will have a chance of coming +forward as a magician if he likes. He can set forth the craftiness of +Ulysses, the piety of AEneas, the valour of Achilles, the misfortunes of +Hector, the treachery of Sinon, the friendship of Euryalus, the +generosity of Alexander, the boldness of Caesar, the clemency and truth +of Trajan, the fidelity of Zopyrus, the wisdom of Cato, and in short all +the faculties that serve to make an illustrious man perfect, now uniting +them in one individual, again distributing them among many; and if this +be done with charm of style and ingenious invention, aiming at the truth +as much as possible, he will assuredly weave a web of bright and varied +threads that, when finished, will display such perfection and beauty that +it will attain the worthiest object any writing can seek, which, as I +said before, is to give instruction and pleasure combined; for the +unrestricted range of these books enables the author to show his powers, +epic, lyric, tragic, or comic, and all the moods the sweet and winning +arts of poesy and oratory are capable of; for the epic may be written in +prose just as well as in verse." + +Chapter XLVIII. - +In which the Canon pursues the subject of the books of chivalry, with +other matters worthy of his wit + +"It is as you say, senor canon," said the curate; "and for that reason +those who have hitherto written books of the sort deserve all the more +censure for writing without paying any attention to good taste or the +rules of art, by which they might guide themselves and become as famous +in prose as the two princes of Greek and Latin poetry are in verse." + +"I myself, at any rate," said the canon, "was once tempted to write a +book of chivalry in which all the points I have mentioned were to be +observed; and if I must own the truth I have more than a hundred sheets +written; and to try if it came up to my own opinion of it, I showed them +to persons who were fond of this kind of reading, to learned and +intelligent men as well as to ignorant people who cared for nothing but +the pleasure of listening to nonsense, and from all I obtained flattering +approval; nevertheless I proceeded no farther with it, as well because it +seemed to me an occupation inconsistent with my profession, as because I +perceived that the fools are more numerous than the wise; and, though it +is better to be praised by the wise few than applauded by the foolish +many, I have no mind to submit myself to the stupid judgment of the silly +public, to whom the reading of such books falls for the most part. + +"But what most of all made me hold my hand and even abandon all idea of +finishing it was an argument I put to myself taken from the plays that +are acted now-a-days, which was in this wise: if those that are now in +vogue, as well those that are pure invention as those founded on history, +are, all or most of them, downright nonsense and things that have neither +head nor tail, and yet the public listens to them with delight, and +regards and cries them up as perfection when they are so far from it; and +if the authors who write them, and the players who act them, say that +this is what they must be, for the public wants this and will have +nothing else; and that those that go by rule and work out a plot +according to the laws of art will only find some half-dozen intelligent +people to understand them, while all the rest remain blind to the merit +of their composition; and that for themselves it is better to get bread +from the many than praise from the few; then my book will fare the same +way, after I have burnt off my eyebrows in trying to observe the +principles I have spoken of, and I shall be 'the tailor of the corner.' +And though I have sometimes endeavoured to convince actors that they are +mistaken in this notion they have adopted, and that they would attract +more people, and get more credit, by producing plays in accordance with +the rules of art, than by absurd ones, they are so thoroughly wedded to +their own opinion that no argument or evidence can wean them from it. + +"I remember saying one day to one of these obstinate fellows, 'Tell me, +do you not recollect that a few years ago, there were three tragedies +acted in Spain, written by a famous poet of these kingdoms, which were +such that they filled all who heard them with admiration, delight, and +interest, the ignorant as well as the wise, the masses as well as the +higher orders, and brought in more money to the performers, these three +alone, than thirty of the best that have been since produced?' + +"'No doubt,' replied the actor in question, 'you mean the "Isabella," the +"Phyllis," and the "Alexandra."' + +"'Those are the ones I mean,' said I; 'and see if they did not observe +the principles of art, and if, by observing them, they failed to show +their superiority and please all the world; so that the fault does not +lie with the public that insists upon nonsense, but with those who don't +know how to produce something else. "The Ingratitude Revenged" was not +nonsense, nor was there any in "The Numantia," nor any to be found in +"The Merchant Lover," nor yet in "The Friendly Fair Foe," nor in some +others that have been written by certain gifted poets, to their own fame +and renown, and to the profit of those that brought them out;' some +further remarks I added to these, with which, I think, I left him rather +dumbfoundered, but not so satisfied or convinced that I could disabuse +him of his error." + +"You have touched upon a subject, senor canon," observed the curate here, +"that has awakened an old enmity I have against the plays in vogue at the +present day, quite as strong as that which I bear to the books of +chivalry; for while the drama, according to Tully, should be the mirror +of human life, the model of manners, and the image of the truth, those +which are presented now-a-days are mirrors of nonsense, models of folly, +and images of lewdness. For what greater nonsense can there be in +connection with what we are now discussing than for an infant to appear +in swaddling clothes in the first scene of the first act, and in the +second a grown-up bearded man? Or what greater absurdity can there be +than putting before us an old man as a swashbuckler, a young man as a +poltroon, a lackey using fine language, a page giving sage advice, a king +plying as a porter, a princess who is a kitchen-maid? And then what shall +I say of their attention to the time in which the action they represent +may or can take place, save that I have seen a play where the first act +began in Europe, the second in Asia, the third finished in Africa, and no +doubt, had it been in four acts, the fourth would have ended in America, +and so it would have been laid in all four quarters of the globe? And if +truth to life is the main thing the drama should keep in view, how is it +possible for any average understanding to be satisfied when the action is +supposed to pass in the time of King Pepin or Charlemagne, and the +principal personage in it they represent to be the Emperor Heraclius who +entered Jerusalem with the cross and won the Holy Sepulchre, like Godfrey +of Bouillon, there being years innumerable between the one and the other? +or, if the play is based on fiction and historical facts are introduced, +or bits of what occurred to different people and at different times mixed +up with it, all, not only without any semblance of probability, but with +obvious errors that from every point of view are inexcusable? And the +worst of it is, there are ignorant people who say that this is +perfection, and that anything beyond this is affected refinement. And +then if we turn to sacred dramas--what miracles they invent in them! What +apocryphal, ill-devised incidents, attributing to one saint the miracles +of another! And even in secular plays they venture to introduce miracles +without any reason or object except that they think some such miracle, or +transformation as they call it, will come in well to astonish stupid +people and draw them to the play. All this tends to the prejudice of the +truth and the corruption of history, nay more, to the reproach of the +wits of Spain; for foreigners who scrupulously observe the laws of the +drama look upon us as barbarous and ignorant, when they see the absurdity +and nonsense of the plays we produce. Nor will it be a sufficient excuse +to say that the chief object well-ordered governments have in view when +they permit plays to be performed in public is to entertain the people +with some harmless amusement occasionally, and keep it from those evil +humours which idleness is apt to engender; and that, as this may be +attained by any sort of play, good or bad, there is no need to lay down +laws, or bind those who write or act them to make them as they ought to +be made, since, as I say, the object sought for may be secured by any +sort. To this I would reply that the same end would be, beyond all +comparison, better attained by means of good plays than by those that are +not so; for after listening to an artistic and properly constructed play, +the hearer will come away enlivened by the jests, instructed by the +serious parts, full of admiration at the incidents, his wits sharpened by +the arguments, warned by the tricks, all the wiser for the examples, +inflamed against vice, and in love with virtue; for in all these ways a +good play will stimulate the mind of the hearer be he ever so boorish or +dull; and of all impossibilities the greatest is that a play endowed with +all these qualities will not entertain, satisfy, and please much more +than one wanting in them, like the greater number of those which are +commonly acted now-a-days. Nor are the poets who write them to be blamed +for this; for some there are among them who are perfectly well aware of +their faults, and know what they ought to do; but as plays have become a +salable commodity, they say, and with truth, that the actors will not buy +them unless they are after this fashion; and so the poet tries to adapt +himself to the requirements of the actor who is to pay him for his work. +And that this is the truth may be seen by the countless plays that a most +fertile wit of these kingdoms has written, with so much brilliancy, so +much grace and gaiety, such polished versification, such choice language, +such profound reflections, and in a word, so rich in eloquence and +elevation of style, that he has filled the world with his fame; and yet, +in consequence of his desire to suit the taste of the actors, they have +not all, as some of them have, come as near perfection as they ought. +Others write plays with such heedlessness that, after they have been +acted, the actors have to fly and abscond, afraid of being punished, as +they often have been, for having acted something offensive to some king +or other, or insulting to some noble family. All which evils, and many +more that I say nothing of, would be removed if there were some +intelligent and sensible person at the capital to examine all plays +before they were acted, not only those produced in the capital itself, +but all that were intended to be acted in Spain; without whose approval, +seal, and signature, no local magistracy should allow any play to be +acted. In that case actors would take care to send their plays to the +capital, and could act them in safety, and those who write them would be +more careful and take more pains with their work, standing in awe of +having to submit it to the strict examination of one who understood the +matter; and so good plays would be produced and the objects they aim at +happily attained; as well the amusement of the people, as the credit of +the wits of Spain, the interest and safety of the actors, and the saving +of trouble in inflicting punishment on them. And if the same or some +other person were authorised to examine the newly written books of +chivalry, no doubt some would appear with all the perfections you have +described, enriching our language with the gracious and precious treasure +of eloquence, and driving the old books into obscurity before the light +of the new ones that would come out for the harmless entertainment, not +merely of the idle but of the very busiest; for the bow cannot be always +bent, nor can weak human nature exist without some lawful amusement." + +The canon and the curate had proceeded thus far with their conversation, +when the barber, coming forward, joined them, and said to the curate, +"This is the spot, senor licentiate, that I said was a good one for fresh +and plentiful pasture for the oxen, while we take our noontide rest." + +"And so it seems," returned the curate, and he told the canon what he +proposed to do, on which he too made up his mind to halt with them, +attracted by the aspect of the fair valley that lay before their eyes; +and to enjoy it as well as the conversation of the curate, to whom he had +begun to take a fancy, and also to learn more particulars about the +doings of Don Quixote, he desired some of his servants to go on to the +inn, which was not far distant, and fetch from it what eatables there +might be for the whole party, as he meant to rest for the afternoon where +he was; to which one of his servants replied that the sumpter mule, which +by this time ought to have reached the inn, carried provisions enough to +make it unnecessary to get anything from the inn except barley. + +"In that case," said the canon, "take all the beasts there, and bring the +sumpter mule back." + +While this was going on, Sancho, perceiving that he could speak to his +master without having the curate and the barber, of whom he had his +suspicions, present all the time, approached the cage in which Don +Quixote was placed, and said, "Senor, to ease my conscience I want to +tell you the state of the case as to your enchantment, and that is that +these two here, with their faces covered, are the curate of our village +and the barber; and I suspect they have hit upon this plan of carrying +you off in this fashion, out of pure envy because your worship surpasses +them in doing famous deeds; and if this be the truth it follows that you +are not enchanted, but hoodwinked and made a fool of. And to prove this I +want to ask you one thing; and if you answer me as I believe you will +answer, you will be able to lay your finger on the trick, and you will +see that you are not enchanted but gone wrong in your wits." + +"Ask what thou wilt, Sancho my son," returned Don Quixote, "for I will +satisfy thee and answer all thou requirest. As to what thou sayest, that +these who accompany us yonder are the curate and the barber, our +neighbours and acquaintances, it is very possible that they may seem to +be those same persons; but that they are so in reality and in fact, +believe it not on any account; what thou art to believe and think is +that, if they look like them, as thou sayest, it must be that those who +have enchanted me have taken this shape and likeness; for it is easy for +enchanters to take any form they please, and they may have taken those of +our friends in order to make thee think as thou dost, and lead thee into +a labyrinth of fancies from which thou wilt find no escape though thou +hadst the cord of Theseus; and they may also have done it to make me +uncertain in my mind, and unable to conjecture whence this evil comes to +me; for if on the one hand thou dost tell me that the barber and curate +of our village are here in company with us, and on the other I find +myself shut up in a cage, and know in my heart that no power on earth +that was not supernatural would have been able to shut me in, what +wouldst thou have me say or think, but that my enchantment is of a sort +that transcends all I have ever read of in all the histories that deal +with knights-errant that have been enchanted? So thou mayest set thy mind +at rest as to the idea that they are what thou sayest, for they are as +much so as I am a Turk. But touching thy desire to ask me something, say +on, and I will answer thee, though thou shouldst ask questions from this +till to-morrow morning." + +"May Our Lady be good to me!" said Sancho, lifting up his voice; "and is +it possible that your worship is so thick of skull and so short of brains +that you cannot see that what I say is the simple truth, and that malice +has more to do with your imprisonment and misfortune than enchantment? +But as it is so, I will prove plainly to you that you are not enchanted. +Now tell me, so may God deliver you from this affliction, and so may you +find yourself when you least expect it in the arms of my lady Dulcinea-" + +"Leave off conjuring me," said Don Quixote, "and ask what thou wouldst +know; I have already told thee I will answer with all possible +precision." + +"That is what I want," said Sancho; "and what I would know, and have you +tell me, without adding or leaving out anything, but telling the whole +truth as one expects it to be told, and as it is told, by all who profess +arms, as your worship professes them, under the title of knights-errant-" + +"I tell thee I will not lie in any particular," said Don Quixote; "finish +thy question; for in truth thou weariest me with all these asseverations, +requirements, and precautions, Sancho." + +"Well, I rely on the goodness and truth of my master," said Sancho; "and +so, because it bears upon what we are talking about, I would ask, +speaking with all reverence, whether since your worship has been shut up +and, as you think, enchanted in this cage, you have felt any desire or +inclination to go anywhere, as the saying is?" + +"I do not understand 'going anywhere,'" said Don Quixote; "explain +thyself more clearly, Sancho, if thou wouldst have me give an answer to +the point." + +"Is it possible," said Sancho, "that your worship does not understand +'going anywhere'? Why, the schoolboys know that from the time they were +babes. Well then, you must know I mean have you had any desire to do what +cannot be avoided?" + +"Ah! now I understand thee, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "yes, often, and +even this minute; get me out of this strait, or all will not go right." + +Chapter XLIX. - +Which treats of the shrewd conversation which Sancho Panza held with his +master Don Quixote + +"Aha, I have caught you," said Sancho; "this is what in my heart and soul +I was longing to know. Come now, senor, can you deny what is commonly +said around us, when a person is out of humour, 'I don't know what ails +so-and-so, that he neither eats, nor drinks, nor sleeps, nor gives a +proper answer to any question; one would think he was enchanted'? From +which it is to be gathered that those who do not eat, or drink, or sleep, +or do any of the natural acts I am speaking of-that such persons are +enchanted; but not those that have the desire your worship has, and drink +when drink is given them, and eat when there is anything to eat, and +answer every question that is asked them." + +"What thou sayest is true, Sancho," replied Don Quixote; "but I have +already told thee there are many sorts of enchantments, and it may be +that in the course of time they have been changed one for another, and +that now it may be the way with enchanted people to do all that I do, +though they did not do so before; so it is vain to argue or draw +inferences against the usage of the time. I know and feel that I am +enchanted, and that is enough to ease my conscience; for it would weigh +heavily on it if I thought that I was not enchanted, and that in a +faint-hearted and cowardly way I allowed myself to lie in this cage, +defrauding multitudes of the succour I might afford to those in need and +distress, who at this very moment may be in sore want of my aid and +protection." + +"Still for all that," replied Sancho, "I say that, for your greater and +fuller satisfaction, it would be well if your worship were to try to get +out of this prison (and I promise to do all in my power to help, and even +to take you out of it), and see if you could once more mount your good +Rocinante, who seems to be enchanted too, he is so melancholy and +dejected; and then we might try our chance in looking for adventures +again; and if we have no luck there will be time enough to go back to the +cage; in which, on the faith of a good and loyal squire, I promise to +shut myself up along with your worship, if so be you are so unfortunate, +or I so stupid, as not to be able to carry out my plan." + +"I am content to do as thou sayest, brother Sancho," said Don Quixote, +"and when thou seest an opportunity for effecting my release I will obey +thee absolutely; but thou wilt see, Sancho, how mistaken thou art in thy +conception of my misfortune." + +The knight-errant and the ill-errant squire kept up their conversation +till they reached the place where the curate, the canon, and the barber, +who had already dismounted, were waiting for them. The carter at once +unyoked the oxen and left them to roam at large about the pleasant green +spot, the freshness of which seemed to invite, not enchanted people like +Don Quixote, but wide-awake, sensible folk like his squire, who begged +the curate to allow his master to leave the cage for a little; for if +they did not let him out, the prison might not be as clean as the +propriety of such a gentleman as his master required. The curate +understood him, and said he would very gladly comply with his request, +only that he feared his master, finding himself at liberty, would take to +his old courses and make off where nobody could ever find him again. + +"I will answer for his not running away," said Sancho. + +"And I also," said the canon, "especially if he gives me his word as a +knight not to leave us without our consent." + +Don Quixote, who was listening to all this, said, "I give it;-moreover +one who is enchanted as I am cannot do as he likes with himself; for he +who had enchanted him could prevent his moving from one place for three +ages, and if he attempted to escape would bring him back flying."--And +that being so, they might as well release him, particularly as it would +be to the advantage of all; for, if they did not let him out, he +protested he would be unable to avoid offending their nostrils unless +they kept their distance. + +The canon took his hand, tied together as they both were, and on his word +and promise they unbound him, and rejoiced beyond measure he was to find +himself out of the cage. The first thing he did was to stretch himself +all over, and then he went to where Rocinante was standing and giving him +a couple of slaps on the haunches said, "I still trust in God and in his +blessed mother, O flower and mirror of steeds, that we shall soon see +ourselves, both of us, as we wish to be, thou with thy master on thy +back, and I mounted upon thee, following the calling for which God sent +me into the world." And so saying, accompanied by Sancho, he withdrew to +a retired spot, from which he came back much relieved and more eager than +ever to put his squire's scheme into execution. + +The canon gazed at him, wondering at the extraordinary nature of his +madness, and that in all his remarks and replies he should show such +excellent sense, and only lose his stirrups, as has been already said, +when the subject of chivalry was broached. And so, moved by compassion, +he said to him, as they all sat on the green grass awaiting the arrival +of the provisions: + +"Is it possible, gentle sir, that the nauseous and idle reading of books +of chivalry can have had such an effect on your worship as to upset your +reason so that you fancy yourself enchanted, and the like, all as far +from the truth as falsehood itself is? How can there be any human +understanding that can persuade itself there ever was all that infinity +of Amadises in the world, or all that multitude of famous knights, all +those emperors of Trebizond, all those Felixmartes of Hircania, all those +palfreys, and damsels-errant, and serpents, and monsters, and giants, and +marvellous adventures, and enchantments of every kind, and battles, and +prodigious encounters, splendid costumes, love-sick princesses, squires +made counts, droll dwarfs, love letters, billings and cooings, +swashbuckler women, and, in a word, all that nonsense the books of +chivalry contain? For myself, I can only say that when I read them, so +long as I do not stop to think that they are all lies and frivolity, they +give me a certain amount of pleasure; but when I come to consider what +they are, I fling the very best of them at the wall, and would fling it +into the fire if there were one at hand, as richly deserving such +punishment as cheats and impostors out of the range of ordinary +toleration, and as founders of new sects and modes of life, and teachers +that lead the ignorant public to believe and accept as truth all the +folly they contain. And such is their audacity, they even dare to +unsettle the wits of gentlemen of birth and intelligence, as is shown +plainly by the way they have served your worship, when they have brought +you to such a pass that you have to be shut up in a cage and carried on +an ox-cart as one would carry a lion or a tiger from place to place to +make money by showing it. Come, Senor Don Quixote, have some compassion +for yourself, return to the bosom of common sense, and make use of the +liberal share of it that heaven has been pleased to bestow upon you, +employing your abundant gifts of mind in some other reading that may +serve to benefit your conscience and add to your honour. And if, still +led away by your natural bent, you desire to read books of achievements +and of chivalry, read the Book of Judges in the Holy Scriptures, for +there you will find grand reality, and deeds as true as they are heroic. +Lusitania had a Viriatus, Rome a Caesar, Carthage a Hannibal, Greece an +Alexander, Castile a Count Fernan Gonzalez, Valencia a Cid, Andalusia a +Gonzalo Fernandez, Estremadura a Diego Garcia de Paredes, Jerez a Garci +Perez de Vargas, Toledo a Garcilaso, Seville a Don Manuel de Leon, to +read of whose valiant deeds will entertain and instruct the loftiest +minds and fill them with delight and wonder. Here, Senor Don Quixote, +will be reading worthy of your sound understanding; from which you will +rise learned in history, in love with virtue, strengthened in goodness, +improved in manners, brave without rashness, prudent without cowardice; +and all to the honour of God, your own advantage and the glory of La +Mancha, whence, I am informed, your worship derives your birth." + +Don Quixote listened with the greatest attention to the canon's words, +and when he found he had finished, after regarding him for some time, he +replied to him: + +"It appears to me, gentle sir, that your worship's discourse is intended +to persuade me that there never were any knights-errant in the world, and +that all the books of chivalry are false, lying, mischievous and useless +to the State, and that I have done wrong in reading them, and worse in +believing them, and still worse in imitating them, when I undertook to +follow the arduous calling of knight-errantry which they set forth; for +you deny that there ever were Amadises of Gaul or of Greece, or any other +of the knights of whom the books are full." + +"It is all exactly as you state it," said the canon; to which Don Quixote +returned, "You also went on to say that books of this kind had done me +much harm, inasmuch as they had upset my senses, and shut me up in a +cage, and that it would be better for me to reform and change my studies, +and read other truer books which would afford more pleasure and +instruction." + +"Just so," said the canon. + +"Well then," returned Don Quixote, "to my mind it is you who are the one +that is out of his wits and enchanted, as you have ventured to utter such +blasphemies against a thing so universally acknowledged and accepted as +true that whoever denies it, as you do, deserves the same punishment +which you say you inflict on the books that irritate you when you read +them. For to try to persuade anybody that Amadis, and all the other +knights-adventurers with whom the books are filled, never existed, would +be like trying to persuade him that the sun does not yield light, or ice +cold, or earth nourishment. What wit in the world can persuade another +that the story of the Princess Floripes and Guy of Burgundy is not true, +or that of Fierabras and the bridge of Mantible, which happened in the +time of Charlemagne? For by all that is good it is as true as that it is +daylight now; and if it be a lie, it must be a lie too that there was a +Hector, or Achilles, or Trojan war, or Twelve Peers of France, or Arthur +of England, who still lives changed into a raven, and is unceasingly +looked for in his kingdom. One might just as well try to make out that +the history of Guarino Mezquino, or of the quest of the Holy Grail, is +false, or that the loves of Tristram and the Queen Yseult are apocryphal, +as well as those of Guinevere and Lancelot, when there are persons who +can almost remember having seen the Dame Quintanona, who was the best +cupbearer in Great Britain. And so true is this, that I recollect a +grandmother of mine on the father's side, whenever she saw any dame in a +venerable hood, used to say to me, 'Grandson, that one is like Dame +Quintanona,' from which I conclude that she must have known her, or at +least had managed to see some portrait of her. Then who can deny that the +story of Pierres and the fair Magalona is true, when even to this day may +be seen in the king's armoury the pin with which the valiant Pierres +guided the wooden horse he rode through the air, and it is a trifle +bigger than the pole of a cart? And alongside of the pin is Babieca's +saddle, and at Roncesvalles there is Roland's horn, as large as a large +beam; whence we may infer that there were Twelve Peers, and a Pierres, +and a Cid, and other knights like them, of the sort people commonly call +adventurers. Or perhaps I shall be told, too, that there was no such +knight-errant as the valiant Lusitanian Juan de Merlo, who went to +Burgundy and in the city of Arras fought with the famous lord of Charny, +Mosen Pierres by name, and afterwards in the city of Basle with Mosen +Enrique de Remesten, coming out of both encounters covered with fame and +honour; or adventures and challenges achieved and delivered, also in +Burgundy, by the valiant Spaniards Pedro Barba and Gutierre Quixada (of +whose family I come in the direct male line), when they vanquished the +sons of the Count of San Polo. I shall be told, too, that Don Fernando de +Guevara did not go in quest of adventures to Germany, where he engaged in +combat with Micer George, a knight of the house of the Duke of Austria. I +shall be told that the jousts of Suero de Quinones, him of the 'Paso,' +and the emprise of Mosen Luis de Falces against the Castilian knight, Don +Gonzalo de Guzman, were mere mockeries; as well as many other +achievements of Christian knights of these and foreign realms, which are +so authentic and true, that, I repeat, he who denies them must be totally +wanting in reason and good sense." + +The canon was amazed to hear the medley of truth and fiction Don Quixote +uttered, and to see how well acquainted he was with everything relating +or belonging to the achievements of his knight-errantry; so he said in +reply: + +"I cannot deny, Senor Don Quixote, that there is some truth in what you +say, especially as regards the Spanish knights-errant; and I am willing +to grant too that the Twelve Peers of France existed, but I am not +disposed to believe that they did all the things that the Archbishop +Turpin relates of them. For the truth of the matter is they were knights +chosen by the kings of France, and called 'Peers' because they were all +equal in worth, rank and prowess (at least if they were not they ought to +have been), and it was a kind of religious order like those of Santiago +and Calatrava in the present day, in which it is assumed that those who +take it are valiant knights of distinction and good birth; and just as we +say now a Knight of St. John, or of Alcantara, they used to say then a +Knight of the Twelve Peers, because twelve equals were chosen for that +military order. That there was a Cid, as well as a Bernardo del Carpio, +there can be no doubt; but that they did the deeds people say they did, I +hold to be very doubtful. In that other matter of the pin of Count +Pierres that you speak of, and say is near Babieca's saddle in the +Armoury, I confess my sin; for I am either so stupid or so short-sighted, +that, though I have seen the saddle, I have never been able to see the +pin, in spite of it being as big as your worship says it is." + +"For all that it is there, without any manner of doubt," said Don +Quixote; "and more by token they say it is inclosed in a sheath of +cowhide to keep it from rusting." + +"All that may be," replied the canon; "but, by the orders I have +received, I do not remember seeing it. However, granting it is there, +that is no reason why I am bound to believe the stories of all those +Amadises and of all that multitude of knights they tell us about, nor is +it reasonable that a man like your worship, so worthy, and with so many +good qualities, and endowed with such a good understanding, should allow +himself to be persuaded that such wild crazy things as are written in +those absurd books of chivalry are really true." + +Chapter L. - +Of the shrewd controversy which Don Quixote and the Canon held, together +with other incidents + +"A good joke, that!" returned Don Quixote. "Books that have been printed +with the king's licence, and with the approbation of those to whom they +have been submitted, and read with universal delight, and extolled by +great and small, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, gentle and simple, +in a word by people of every sort, of whatever rank or condition they may +be--that these should be lies! And above all when they carry such an +appearance of truth with them; for they tell us the father, mother, +country, kindred, age, place, and the achievements, step by step, and day +by day, performed by such a knight or knights! Hush, sir; utter not such +blasphemy; trust me I am advising you now to act as a sensible man +should; only read them, and you will see the pleasure you will derive +from them. For, come, tell me, can there be anything more delightful than +to see, as it were, here now displayed before us a vast lake of bubbling +pitch with a host of snakes and serpents and lizards, and ferocious and +terrible creatures of all sorts swimming about in it, while from the +middle of the lake there comes a plaintive voice saying: 'Knight, +whosoever thou art who beholdest this dread lake, if thou wouldst win the +prize that lies hidden beneath these dusky waves, prove the valour of thy +stout heart and cast thyself into the midst of its dark burning waters, +else thou shalt not be worthy to see the mighty wonders contained in the +seven castles of the seven Fays that lie beneath this black expanse;' and +then the knight, almost ere the awful voice has ceased, without stopping +to consider, without pausing to reflect upon the danger to which he is +exposing himself, without even relieving himself of the weight of his +massive armour, commending himself to God and to his lady, plunges into +the midst of the boiling lake, and when he little looks for it, or knows +what his fate is to be, he finds himself among flowery meadows, with +which the Elysian fields are not to be compared. + +"The sky seems more transparent there, and the sun shines with a strange +brilliancy, and a delightful grove of green leafy trees presents itself +to the eyes and charms the sight with its verdure, while the ear is +soothed by the sweet untutored melody of the countless birds of gay +plumage that flit to and fro among the interlacing branches. Here he sees +a brook whose limpid waters, like liquid crystal, ripple over fine sands +and white pebbles that look like sifted gold and purest pearls. There he +perceives a cunningly wrought fountain of many-coloured jasper and +polished marble; here another of rustic fashion where the little +mussel-shells and the spiral white and yellow mansions of the snail +disposed in studious disorder, mingled with fragments of glittering +crystal and mock emeralds, make up a work of varied aspect, where art, +imitating nature, seems to have outdone it. + +"Suddenly there is presented to his sight a strong castle or gorgeous +palace with walls of massy gold, turrets of diamond and gates of jacinth; +in short, so marvellous is its structure that though the materials of +which it is built are nothing less than diamonds, carbuncles, rubies, +pearls, gold, and emeralds, the workmanship is still more rare. And after +having seen all this, what can be more charming than to see how a bevy of +damsels comes forth from the gate of the castle in gay and gorgeous +attire, such that, were I to set myself now to depict it as the histories +describe it to us, I should never have done; and then how she who seems +to be the first among them all takes the bold knight who plunged into the +boiling lake by the hand, and without addressing a word to him leads him +into the rich palace or castle, and strips him as naked as when his +mother bore him, and bathes him in lukewarm water, and anoints him all +over with sweet-smelling unguents, and clothes him in a shirt of the +softest sendal, all scented and perfumed, while another damsel comes and +throws over his shoulders a mantle which is said to be worth at the very +least a city, and even more? How charming it is, then, when they tell us +how, after all this, they lead him to another chamber where he finds the +tables set out in such style that he is filled with amazement and wonder; +to see how they pour out water for his hands distilled from amber and +sweet-scented flowers; how they seat him on an ivory chair; to see how +the damsels wait on him all in profound silence; how they bring him such +a variety of dainties so temptingly prepared that the appetite is at a +loss which to select; to hear the music that resounds while he is at +table, by whom or whence produced he knows not. And then when the repast +is over and the tables removed, for the knight to recline in the chair, +picking his teeth perhaps as usual, and a damsel, much lovelier than any +of the others, to enter unexpectedly by the chamber door, and herself by +his side, and begin to tell him what the castle is, and how she is held +enchanted there, and other things that amaze the knight and astonish the +readers who are perusing his history. + +"But I will not expatiate any further upon this, as it may be gathered +from it that whatever part of whatever history of a knight-errant one +reads, it will fill the reader, whoever he be, with delight and wonder; +and take my advice, sir, and, as I said before, read these books and you +will see how they will banish any melancholy you may feel and raise your +spirits should they be depressed. For myself I can say that since I have +been a knight-errant I have become valiant, polite, generous, well-bred, +magnanimous, courteous, dauntless, gentle, patient, and have learned to +bear hardships, imprisonments, and enchantments; and though it be such a +short time since I have seen myself shut up in a cage like a madman, I +hope by the might of my arm, if heaven aid me and fortune thwart me not, +to see myself king of some kingdom where I may be able to show the +gratitude and generosity that dwell in my heart; for by my faith, senor, +the poor man is incapacitated from showing the virtue of generosity to +anyone, though he may possess it in the highest degree; and gratitude +that consists of disposition only is a dead thing, just as faith without +works is dead. For this reason I should be glad were fortune soon to +offer me some opportunity of making myself an emperor, so as to show my +heart in doing good to my friends, particularly to this poor Sancho +Panza, my squire, who is the best fellow in the world; and I would gladly +give him a county I have promised him this ever so long, only that I am +afraid he has not the capacity to govern his realm." + +Sancho partly heard these last words of his master, and said to him, +"Strive hard you, Senor Don Quixote, to give me that county so often +promised by you and so long looked for by me, for I promise you there +will be no want of capacity in me to govern it; and even if there is, I +have heard say there are men in the world who farm seigniories, paying so +much a year, and they themselves taking charge of the government, while +the lord, with his legs stretched out, enjoys the revenue they pay him, +without troubling himself about anything else. That's what I'll do, and +not stand haggling over trifles, but wash my hands at once of the whole +business, and enjoy my rents like a duke, and let things go their own +way." + +"That, brother Sancho," said the canon, "only holds good as far as the +enjoyment of the revenue goes; but the lord of the seigniory must attend +to the administration of justice, and here capacity and sound judgment +come in, and above all a firm determination to find out the truth; for if +this be wanting in the beginning, the middle and the end will always go +wrong; and God as commonly aids the honest intentions of the simple as he +frustrates the evil designs of the crafty." + +"I don't understand those philosophies," returned Sancho Panza; "all I +know is I would I had the county as soon as I shall know how to govern +it; for I have as much soul as another, and as much body as anyone, and I +shall be as much king of my realm as any other of his; and being so I +should do as I liked, and doing as I liked I should please myself, and +pleasing myself I should be content, and when one is content he has +nothing more to desire, and when one has nothing more to desire there is +an end of it; so let the county come, and God he with you, and let us see +one another, as one blind man said to the other." + +"That is not bad philosophy thou art talking, Sancho," said the canon; +"but for all that there is a good deal to be said on this matter of +counties." + +To which Don Quixote returned, "I know not what more there is to be said; +I only guide myself by the example set me by the great Amadis of Gaul, +when he made his squire count of the Insula Firme; and so, without any +scruples of conscience, I can make a count of Sancho Panza, for he is one +of the best squires that ever knight-errant had." + +The canon was astonished at the methodical nonsense (if nonsense be +capable of method) that Don Quixote uttered, at the way in which he had +described the adventure of the knight of the lake, at the impression that +the deliberate lies of the books he read had made upon him, and lastly he +marvelled at the simplicity of Sancho, who desired so eagerly to obtain +the county his master had promised him. + +By this time the canon's servants, who had gone to the inn to fetch the +sumpter mule, had returned, and making a carpet and the green grass of +the meadow serve as a table, they seated themselves in the shade of some +trees and made their repast there, that the carter might not be deprived +of the advantage of the spot, as has been already said. As they were +eating they suddenly heard a loud noise and the sound of a bell that +seemed to come from among some brambles and thick bushes that were close +by, and the same instant they observed a beautiful goat, spotted all over +black, white, and brown, spring out of the thicket with a goatherd after +it, calling to it and uttering the usual cries to make it stop or turn +back to the fold. The fugitive goat, scared and frightened, ran towards +the company as if seeking their protection and then stood still, and the +goatherd coming up seized it by the horns and began to talk to it as if +it were possessed of reason and understanding: "Ah wanderer, wanderer, +Spotty, Spotty; how have you gone limping all this time? What wolves have +frightened you, my daughter? Won't you tell me what is the matter, my +beauty? But what else can it be except that you are a she, and cannot +keep quiet? A plague on your humours and the humours of those you take +after! Come back, come back, my darling; and if you will not be so happy, +at any rate you will be safe in the fold or with your companions; for if +you who ought to keep and lead them, go wandering astray, what will +become of them?" + +The goatherd's talk amused all who heard it, but especially the canon, +who said to him, "As you live, brother, take it easy, and be not in such +a hurry to drive this goat back to the fold; for, being a female, as you +say, she will follow her natural instinct in spite of all you can do to +prevent it. Take this morsel and drink a sup, and that will soothe your +irritation, and in the meantime the goat will rest herself," and so +saying, he handed him the loins of a cold rabbit on a fork. + +The goatherd took it with thanks, and drank and calmed himself, and then +said, "I should be sorry if your worships were to take me for a simpleton +for having spoken so seriously as I did to this animal; but the truth is +there is a certain mystery in the words I used. I am a clown, but not so +much of one but that I know how to behave to men and to beasts." + +"That I can well believe," said the curate, "for I know already by +experience that the woods breed men of learning, and shepherds' harbour +philosophers." + +"At all events, senor," returned the goatherd, "they shelter men of +experience; and that you may see the truth of this and grasp it, though I +may seem to put myself forward without being asked, I will, if it will +not tire you, gentlemen, and you will give me your attention for a +little, tell you a true story which will confirm this gentleman's word +(and he pointed to the curate) as well as my own." + +To this Don Quixote replied, "Seeing that this affair has a certain +colour of chivalry about it, I for my part, brother, will hear you most +gladly, and so will all these gentlemen, from the high intelligence they +possess and their love of curious novelties that interest, charm, and +entertain the mind, as I feel quite sure your story will do. So begin, +friend, for we are all prepared to listen." + +"I draw my stakes," said Sancho, "and will retreat with this pasty to the +brook there, where I mean to victual myself for three days; for I have +heard my lord, Don Quixote, say that a knight-errant's squire should eat +until he can hold no more, whenever he has the chance, because it often +happens them to get by accident into a wood so thick that they cannot +find a way out of it for six days; and if the man is not well filled or +his alforjas well stored, there he may stay, as very often he does, +turned into a dried mummy." + +"Thou art in the right of it, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "go where thou +wilt and eat all thou canst, for I have had enough, and only want to give +my mind its refreshment, as I shall by listening to this good fellow's +story." + +"It is what we shall all do," said the canon; and then begged the +goatherd to begin the promised tale. + +The goatherd gave the goat which he held by the horns a couple of slaps +on the back, saying, "Lie down here beside me, Spotty, for we have time +enough to return to our fold." The goat seemed to understand him, for as +her master seated himself, she stretched herself quietly beside him and +looked up in his face to show him she was all attention to what he was +going to say, and then in these words he began his story. + +Chapter LI. - +Which deals with what the goatherd told those who were carrying off Don +Quixote + +Three leagues from this valley there is a village which, though small, is +one of the richest in all this neighbourhood, and in it there lived a +farmer, a very worthy man, and so much respected that, although to be so +is the natural consequence of being rich, he was even more respected for +his virtue than for the wealth he had acquired. But what made him still +more fortunate, as he said himself, was having a daughter of such +exceeding beauty, rare intelligence, gracefulness, and virtue, that +everyone who knew her and beheld her marvelled at the extraordinary gifts +with which heaven and nature had endowed her. As a child she was +beautiful, she continued to grow in beauty, and at the age of sixteen she +was most lovely. The fame of her beauty began to spread abroad through +all the villages around--but why do I say the villages around, merely, +when it spread to distant cities, and even made its way into the halls of +royalty and reached the ears of people of every class, who came from all +sides to see her as if to see something rare and curious, or some +wonder-working image? + +Her father watched over her and she watched over herself; for there are +no locks, or guards, or bolts that can protect a young girl better than +her own modesty. The wealth of the father and the beauty of the daughter +led many neighbours as well as strangers to seek her for a wife; but he, +as one might well be who had the disposal of so rich a jewel, was +perplexed and unable to make up his mind to which of her countless +suitors he should entrust her. I was one among the many who felt a desire +so natural, and, as her father knew who I was, and I was of the same +town, of pure blood, in the bloom of life, and very rich in possessions, +I had great hopes of success. There was another of the same place and +qualifications who also sought her, and this made her father's choice +hang in the balance, for he felt that on either of us his daughter would +be well bestowed; so to escape from this state of perplexity he resolved +to refer the matter to Leandra (for that is the name of the rich damsel +who has reduced me to misery), reflecting that as we were both equal it +would be best to leave it to his dear daughter to choose according to her +inclination--a course that is worthy of imitation by all fathers who wish +to settle their children in life. I do not mean that they ought to leave +them to make a choice of what is contemptible and bad, but that they +should place before them what is good and then allow them to make a good +choice as they please. I do not know which Leandra chose; I only know her +father put us both off with the tender age of his daughter and vague +words that neither bound him nor dismissed us. My rival is called Anselmo +and I myself Eugenio--that you may know the names of the personages that +figure in this tragedy, the end of which is still in suspense, though it +is plain to see it must be disastrous. + +About this time there arrived in our town one Vicente de la Roca, the son +of a poor peasant of the same town, the said Vicente having returned from +service as a soldier in Italy and divers other parts. A captain who +chanced to pass that way with his company had carried him off from our +village when he was a boy of about twelve years, and now twelve years +later the young man came back in a soldier's uniform, arrayed in a +thousand colours, and all over glass trinkets and fine steel chains. +To-day he would appear in one gay dress, to-morrow in another; but all +flimsy and gaudy, of little substance and less worth. The peasant folk, +who are naturally malicious, and when they have nothing to do can be +malice itself, remarked all this, and took note of his finery and +jewellery, piece by piece, and discovered that he had three suits of +different colours, with garters and stockings to match; but he made so +many arrangements and combinations out of them, that if they had not +counted them, anyone would have sworn that he had made a display of more +than ten suits of clothes and twenty plumes. Do not look upon all this +that I am telling you about the clothes as uncalled for or spun out, for +they have a great deal to do with the story. He used to seat himself on a +bench under the great poplar in our plaza, and there he would keep us all +hanging open-mouthed on the stories he told us of his exploits. There was +no country on the face of the globe he had not seen, nor battle he had +not been engaged in; he had killed more Moors than there are in Morocco +and Tunis, and fought more single combats, according to his own account, +than Garcilaso, Diego Garcia de Paredes and a thousand others he named, +and out of all he had come victorious without losing a drop of blood. On +the other hand he showed marks of wounds, which, though they could not be +made out, he said were gunshot wounds received in divers encounters and +actions. Lastly, with monstrous impudence he used to say "you" to his +equals and even those who knew what he was, and declare that his arm was +his father and his deeds his pedigree, and that being a soldier he was as +good as the king himself. And to add to these swaggering ways he was a +trifle of a musician, and played the guitar with such a flourish that +some said he made it speak; nor did his accomplishments end here, for he +was something of a poet too, and on every trifle that happened in the +town he made a ballad a league long. + +This soldier, then, that I have described, this Vicente de la Roca, this +bravo, gallant, musician, poet, was often seen and watched by Leandra +from a window of her house which looked out on the plaza. The glitter of +his showy attire took her fancy, his ballads bewitched her (for he gave +away twenty copies of every one he made), the tales of his exploits which +he told about himself came to her ears; and in short, as the devil no +doubt had arranged it, she fell in love with him before the presumption +of making love to her had suggested itself to him; and as in love-affairs +none are more easily brought to an issue than those which have the +inclination of the lady for an ally, Leandra and Vicente came to an +understanding without any difficulty; and before any of her numerous +suitors had any suspicion of her design, she had already carried it into +effect, having left the house of her dearly beloved father (for mother +she had none), and disappeared from the village with the soldier, who +came more triumphantly out of this enterprise than out of any of the +large number he laid claim to. All the village and all who heard of it +were amazed at the affair; I was aghast, Anselmo thunderstruck, her +father full of grief, her relations indignant, the authorities all in a +ferment, the officers of the Brotherhood in arms. They scoured the roads, +they searched the woods and all quarters, and at the end of three days +they found the flighty Leandra in a mountain cave, stript to her shift, +and robbed of all the money and precious jewels she had carried away from +home with her. + +They brought her back to her unhappy father, and questioned her as to her +misfortune, and she confessed without pressure that Vicente de la Roca +had deceived her, and under promise of marrying her had induced her to +leave her father's house, as he meant to take her to the richest and most +delightful city in the whole world, which was Naples; and that she, +ill-advised and deluded, had believed him, and robbed her father, and +handed over all to him the night she disappeared; and that he had carried +her away to a rugged mountain and shut her up in the eave where they had +found her. She said, moreover, that the soldier, without robbing her of +her honour, had taken from her everything she had, and made off, leaving +her in the cave, a thing that still further surprised everybody. It was +not easy for us to credit the young man's continence, but she asserted it +with such earnestness that it helped to console her distressed father, +who thought nothing of what had been taken since the jewel that once lost +can never be recovered had been left to his daughter. The same day that +Leandra made her appearance her father removed her from our sight and +took her away to shut her up in a convent in a town near this, in the +hope that time may wear away some of the disgrace she has incurred. +Leandra's youth furnished an excuse for her fault, at least with those to +whom it was of no consequence whether she was good or bad; but those who +knew her shrewdness and intelligence did not attribute her misdemeanour +to ignorance but to wantonness and the natural disposition of women, +which is for the most part flighty and ill-regulated. + +Leandra withdrawn from sight, Anselmo's eyes grew blind, or at any rate +found nothing to look at that gave them any pleasure, and mine were in +darkness without a ray of light to direct them to anything enjoyable +while Leandra was away. Our melancholy grew greater, our patience grew +less; we cursed the soldier's finery and railed at the carelessness of +Leandra's father. At last Anselmo and I agreed to leave the village and +come to this valley; and, he feeding a great flock of sheep of his own, +and I a large herd of goats of mine, we pass our life among the trees, +giving vent to our sorrows, together singing the fair Leandra's praises, +or upbraiding her, or else sighing alone, and to heaven pouring forth our +complaints in solitude. Following our example, many more of Leandra's +lovers have come to these rude mountains and adopted our mode of life, +and they are so numerous that one would fancy the place had been turned +into the pastoral Arcadia, so full is it of shepherds and sheep-folds; +nor is there a spot in it where the name of the fair Leandra is not +heard. Here one curses her and calls her capricious, fickle, and +immodest, there another condemns her as frail and frivolous; this pardons +and absolves her, that spurns and reviles her; one extols her beauty, +another assails her character, and in short all abuse her, and all adore +her, and to such a pitch has this general infatuation gone that there are +some who complain of her scorn without ever having exchanged a word with +her, and even some that bewail and mourn the raging fever of jealousy, +for which she never gave anyone cause, for, as I have already said, her +misconduct was known before her passion. There is no nook among the +rocks, no brookside, no shade beneath the trees that is not haunted by +some shepherd telling his woes to the breezes; wherever there is an echo +it repeats the name of Leandra; the mountains ring with "Leandra," +"Leandra" murmur the brooks, and Leandra keeps us all bewildered and +bewitched, hoping without hope and fearing without knowing what we fear. +Of all this silly set the one that shows the least and also the most +sense is my rival Anselmo, for having so many other things to complain +of, he only complains of separation, and to the accompaniment of a +rebeck, which he plays admirably, he sings his complaints in verses that +show his ingenuity. I follow another, easier, and to my mind wiser +course, and that is to rail at the frivolity of women, at their +inconstancy, their double dealing, their broken promises, their unkept +pledges, and in short the want of reflection they show in fixing their +affections and inclinations. This, sirs, was the reason of words and +expressions I made use of to this goat when I came up just now; for as +she is a female I have a contempt for her, though she is the best in all +my fold. This is the story I promised to tell you, and if I have been +tedious in telling it, I will not be slow to serve you; my hut is close +by, and I have fresh milk and dainty cheese there, as well as a variety +of toothsome fruit, no less pleasing to the eye than to the palate. + +Chapter LII. - +Of the quarrel that don quixote had with the goatherd, together with the +rare adventure of the penitents, which with an expenditure of sweat he +brought to a happy conclusion + +The goatherd's tale gave great satisfaction to all the hearers, and the +canon especially enjoyed it, for he had remarked with particular +attention the manner in which it had been told, which was as unlike the +manner of a clownish goatherd as it was like that of a polished city wit; +and he observed that the curate had been quite right in saying that the +woods bred men of learning. They all offered their services to Eugenio +but he who showed himself most liberal in this way was Don Quixote, who +said to him, "Most assuredly, brother goatherd, if I found myself in a +position to attempt any adventure, I would, this very instant, set out on +your behalf, and would rescue Leandra from that convent (where no doubt +she is kept against her will), in spite of the abbess and all who might +try to prevent me, and would place her in your hands to deal with her +according to your will and pleasure, observing, however, the laws of +chivalry which lay down that no violence of any kind is to be offered to +any damsel. But I trust in God our Lord that the might of one malignant +enchanter may not prove so great but that the power of another better +disposed may prove superior to it, and then I promise you my support and +assistance, as I am bound to do by my profession, which is none other +than to give aid to the weak and needy." + +The goatherd eyed him, and noticing Don Quixote's sorry appearance and +looks, he was filled with wonder, and asked the barber, who was next him, +"Senor, who is this man who makes such a figure and talks in such a +strain?" + +"Who should it be," said the barber, "but the famous Don Quixote of La +Mancha, the undoer of injustice, the righter of wrongs, the protector of +damsels, the terror of giants, and the winner of battles?" + +"That," said the goatherd, "sounds like what one reads in the books of +the knights-errant, who did all that you say this man does; though it is +my belief that either you are joking, or else this gentleman has empty +lodgings in his head." + +"You are a great scoundrel," said Don Quixote, "and it is you who are +empty and a fool. I am fuller than ever was the whoreson bitch that bore +you;" and passing from words to deeds, he caught up a loaf that was near +him and sent it full in the goatherd's face, with such force that he +flattened his nose; but the goatherd, who did not understand jokes, and +found himself roughly handled in such good earnest, paying no respect to +carpet, tablecloth, or diners, sprang upon Don Quixote, and seizing him +by the throat with both hands would no doubt have throttled him, had not +Sancho Panza that instant come to the rescue, and grasping him by the +shoulders flung him down on the table, smashing plates, breaking glasses, +and upsetting and scattering everything on it. Don Quixote, finding +himself free, strove to get on top of the goatherd, who, with his face +covered with blood, and soundly kicked by Sancho, was on all fours +feeling about for one of the table-knives to take a bloody revenge with. +The canon and the curate, however, prevented him, but the barber so +contrived it that he got Don Quixote under him, and rained down upon him +such a shower of fisticuffs that the poor knight's face streamed with +blood as freely as his own. The canon and the curate were bursting with +laughter, the officers were capering with delight, and both the one and +the other hissed them on as they do dogs that are worrying one another in +a fight. Sancho alone was frantic, for he could not free himself from the +grasp of one of the canon's servants, who kept him from going to his +master's assistance. + +At last, while they were all, with the exception of the two bruisers who +were mauling each other, in high glee and enjoyment, they heard a trumpet +sound a note so doleful that it made them all look in the direction +whence the sound seemed to come. But the one that was most excited by +hearing it was Don Quixote, who though sorely against his will he was +under the goatherd, and something more than pretty well pummelled, said +to him, "Brother devil (for it is impossible but that thou must be one +since thou hast had might and strength enough to overcome mine), I ask +thee to agree to a truce for but one hour for the solemn note of yonder +trumpet that falls on our ears seems to me to summon me to some new +adventure." The goatherd, who was by this time tired of pummelling and +being pummelled, released him at once, and Don Quixote rising to his feet +and turning his eyes to the quarter where the sound had been heard, +suddenly saw coming down the slope of a hill several men clad in white +like penitents. + +The fact was that the clouds had that year withheld their moisture from +the earth, and in all the villages of the district they were organising +processions, rogations, and penances, imploring God to open the hands of +his mercy and send the rain; and to this end the people of a village that +was hard by were going in procession to a holy hermitage there was on one +side of that valley. Don Quixote when he saw the strange garb of the +penitents, without reflecting how often he had seen it before, took it +into his head that this was a case of adventure, and that it fell to him +alone as a knight-errant to engage in it; and he was all the more +confirmed in this notion, by the idea that an image draped in black they +had with them was some illustrious lady that these villains and +discourteous thieves were carrying off by force. As soon as this occurred +to him he ran with all speed to Rocinante who was grazing at large, and +taking the bridle and the buckler from the saddle-bow, he had him bridled +in an instant, and calling to Sancho for his sword he mounted Rocinante, +braced his buckler on his arm, and in a loud voice exclaimed to those who +stood by, "Now, noble company, ye shall see how important it is that +there should be knights in the world professing the of knight-errantry; +now, I say, ye shall see, by the deliverance of that worthy lady who is +borne captive there, whether knights-errant deserve to be held in +estimation," and so saying he brought his legs to bear on Rocinante--for +he had no spurs--and at a full canter (for in all this veracious history +we never read of Rocinante fairly galloping) set off to encounter the +penitents, though the curate, the canon, and the barber ran to prevent +him. But it was out of their power, nor did he even stop for the shouts +of Sancho calling after him, "Where are you going, Senor Don Quixote? +What devils have possessed you to set you on against our Catholic faith? +Plague take me! mind, that is a procession of penitents, and the lady +they are carrying on that stand there is the blessed image of the +immaculate Virgin. Take care what you are doing, senor, for this time it +may be safely said you don't know what you are about." Sancho laboured in +vain, for his master was so bent on coming to quarters with these sheeted +figures and releasing the lady in black that he did not hear a word; and +even had he heard, he would not have turned back if the king had ordered +him. He came up with the procession and reined in Rocinante, who was +already anxious enough to slacken speed a little, and in a hoarse, +excited voice he exclaimed, "You who hide your faces, perhaps because you +are not good subjects, pay attention and listen to what I am about to say +to you." The first to halt were those who were carrying the image, and +one of the four ecclesiastics who were chanting the Litany, struck by the +strange figure of Don Quixote, the leanness of Rocinante, and the other +ludicrous peculiarities he observed, said in reply to him, "Brother, if +you have anything to say to us say it quickly, for these brethren are +whipping themselves, and we cannot stop, nor is it reasonable we should +stop to hear anything, unless indeed it is short enough to be said in two +words." + +"I will say it in one," replied Don Quixote, "and it is this; that at +once, this very instant, ye release that fair lady whose tears and sad +aspect show plainly that ye are carrying her off against her will, and +that ye have committed some scandalous outrage against her; and I, who +was born into the world to redress all such like wrongs, will not permit +you to advance another step until you have restored to her the liberty +she pines for and deserves." + +From these words all the hearers concluded that he must be a madman, and +began to laugh heartily, and their laughter acted like gunpowder on Don +Quixote's fury, for drawing his sword without another word he made a rush +at the stand. One of those who supported it, leaving the burden to his +comrades, advanced to meet him, flourishing a forked stick that he had +for propping up the stand when resting, and with this he caught a mighty +cut Don Quixote made at him that severed it in two; but with the portion +that remained in his hand he dealt such a thwack on the shoulder of Don +Quixote's sword arm (which the buckler could not protect against the +clownish assault) that poor Don Quixote came to the ground in a sad +plight. + +Sancho Panza, who was coming on close behind puffing and blowing, seeing +him fall, cried out to his assailant not to strike him again, for he was +poor enchanted knight, who had never harmed anyone all the days of his +life; but what checked the clown was, not Sancho's shouting, but seeing +that Don Quixote did not stir hand or foot; and so, fancying he had +killed him, he hastily hitched up his tunic under his girdle and took to +his heels across the country like a deer. + +By this time all Don Quixote's companions had come up to where he lay; +but the processionists seeing them come running, and with them the +officers of the Brotherhood with their crossbows, apprehended mischief, +and clustering round the image, raised their hoods, and grasped their +scourges, as the priests did their tapers, and awaited the attack, +resolved to defend themselves and even to take the offensive against +their assailants if they could. Fortune, however, arranged the matter +better than they expected, for all Sancho did was to fling himself on his +master's body, raising over him the most doleful and laughable +lamentation that ever was heard, for he believed he was dead. The curate +was known to another curate who walked in the procession, and their +recognition of one another set at rest the apprehensions of both parties; +the first then told the other in two words who Don Quixote was, and he +and the whole troop of penitents went to see if the poor gentleman was +dead, and heard Sancho Panza saying, with tears in his eyes, "Oh flower +of chivalry, that with one blow of a stick hast ended the course of thy +well-spent life! Oh pride of thy race, honour and glory of all La Mancha, +nay, of all the world, that for want of thee will be full of evil-doers, +no longer in fear of punishment for their misdeeds! Oh thou, generous +above all the Alexanders, since for only eight months of service thou +hast given me the best island the sea girds or surrounds! Humble with the +proud, haughty with the humble, encounterer of dangers, endurer of +outrages, enamoured without reason, imitator of the good, scourge of the +wicked, enemy of the mean, in short, knight-errant, which is all that can +be said!" + +At the cries and moans of Sancho, Don Quixote came to himself, and the +first word he said was, "He who lives separated from you, sweetest +Dulcinea, has greater miseries to endure than these. Aid me, friend +Sancho, to mount the enchanted cart, for I am not in a condition to press +the saddle of Rocinante, as this shoulder is all knocked to pieces." + +"That I will do with all my heart, senor," said Sancho; "and let us +return to our village with these gentlemen, who seek your good, and there +we will prepare for making another sally, which may turn out more +profitable and creditable to us." + +"Thou art right, Sancho," returned Don Quixote; "It will be wise to let +the malign influence of the stars which now prevails pass off." + +The canon, the curate, and the barber told him he would act very wisely +in doing as he said; and so, highly amused at Sancho Panza's +simplicities, they placed Don Quixote in the cart as before. The +procession once more formed itself in order and proceeded on its road; +the goatherd took his leave of the party; the officers of the Brotherhood +declined to go any farther, and the curate paid them what was due to +them; the canon begged the curate to let him know how Don Quixote did, +whether he was cured of his madness or still suffered from it, and then +begged leave to continue his journey; in short, they all separated and +went their ways, leaving to themselves the curate and the barber, Don +Quixote, Sancho Panza, and the good Rocinante, who regarded everything +with as great resignation as his master. The carter yoked his oxen and +made Don Quixote comfortable on a truss of hay, and at his usual +deliberate pace took the road the curate directed, and at the end of six +days they reached Don Quixote's village, and entered it about the middle +of the day, which it so happened was a Sunday, and the people were all in +the plaza, through which Don Quixote's cart passed. They all flocked to +see what was in the cart, and when they recognised their townsman they +were filled with amazement, and a boy ran off to bring the news to his +housekeeper and his niece that their master and uncle had come back all +lean and yellow and stretched on a truss of hay on an ox-cart. It was +piteous to hear the cries the two good ladies raised, how they beat their +breasts and poured out fresh maledictions on those accursed books of +chivalry; all which was renewed when they saw Don Quixote coming in at +the gate. + +At the news of Don Quixote's arrival Sancho Panza's wife came running, +for she by this time knew that her husband had gone away with him as his +squire, and on seeing Sancho, the first thing she asked him was if the +ass was well. Sancho replied that he was, better than his master was. + +"Thanks be to God," said she, "for being so good to me; but now tell me, +my friend, what have you made by your squirings? What gown have you +brought me back? What shoes for your children?" + +"I bring nothing of that sort, wife," said Sancho; "though I bring other +things of more consequence and value." + +"I am very glad of that," returned his wife; "show me these things of +more value and consequence, my friend; for I want to see them to cheer my +heart that has been so sad and heavy all these ages that you have been +away." + +"I will show them to you at home, wife," said Sancho; "be content for the +present; for if it please God that we should again go on our travels in +search of adventures, you will soon see me a count, or governor of an +island, and that not one of those everyday ones, but the best that is to +be had." + +"Heaven grant it, husband," said she, "for indeed we have need of it. But +tell me, what's this about islands, for I don't understand it?" + +"Honey is not for the mouth of the ass," returned Sancho; "all in good +time thou shalt see, wife--nay, thou wilt be surprised to hear thyself +called 'your ladyship' by all thy vassals." + +"What are you talking about, Sancho, with your ladyships, islands, and +vassals?" returned Teresa Panza--for so Sancho's wife was called, though +they were not relations, for in La Mancha it is customary for wives to +take their husbands' surnames. + +"Don't be in such a hurry to know all this, Teresa," said Sancho; "it is +enough that I am telling you the truth, so shut your mouth. But I may +tell you this much by the way, that there is nothing in the world more +delightful than to be a person of consideration, squire to a +knight-errant, and a seeker of adventures. To be sure most of those one +finds do not end as pleasantly as one could wish, for out of a hundred, +ninety-nine will turn out cross and contrary. I know it by experience, +for out of some I came blanketed, and out of others belaboured. Still, +for all that, it is a fine thing to be on the look-out for what may +happen, crossing mountains, searching woods, climbing rocks, visiting +castles, putting up at inns, all at free quarters, and devil take the +maravedi to pay." + +While this conversation passed between Sancho Panza and his wife, Don +Quixote's housekeeper and niece took him in and undressed him and laid +him in his old bed. He eyed them askance, and could not make out where he +was. The curate charged his niece to be very careful to make her uncle +comfortable and to keep a watch over him lest he should make his escape +from them again, telling her what they had been obliged to do to bring +him home. On this the pair once more lifted up their voices and renewed +their maledictions upon the books of chivalry, and implored heaven to +plunge the authors of such lies and nonsense into the midst of the +bottomless pit. They were, in short, kept in anxiety and dread lest their +uncle and master should give them the slip the moment he found himself +somewhat better, and as they feared so it fell out. + +But the author of this history, though he has devoted research and +industry to the discovery of the deeds achieved by Don Quixote in his +third sally, has been unable to obtain any information respecting them, +at any rate derived from authentic documents; tradition has merely +preserved in the memory of La Mancha the fact that Don Quixote, the third +time he sallied forth from his home, betook himself to Saragossa, where +he was present at some famous jousts which came off in that city, and +that he had adventures there worthy of his valour and high intelligence. +Of his end and death he could learn no particulars, nor would he have +ascertained it or known of it, if good fortune had not produced an old +physician for him who had in his possession a leaden box, which, +according to his account, had been discovered among the crumbling +foundations of an ancient hermitage that was being rebuilt; in which box +were found certain parchment manuscripts in Gothic character, but in +Castilian verse, containing many of his achievements, and setting forth +the beauty of Dulcinea, the form of Rocinante, the fidelity of Sancho +Panza, and the burial of Don Quixote himself, together with sundry +epitaphs and eulogies on his life and character; but all that could be +read and deciphered were those which the trustworthy author of this new +and unparalleled history here presents. And the said author asks of those +that shall read it nothing in return for the vast toil which it has cost +him in examining and searching the Manchegan archives in order to bring +it to light, save that they give him the same credit that people of sense +give to the books of chivalry that pervade the world and are so popular; +for with this he will consider himself amply paid and fully satisfied, +and will be encouraged to seek out and produce other histories, if not as +truthful, at least equal in invention and not less entertaining. The +first words written on the parchment found in the leaden box were these: + +poem{ + + THE ACADEMICIANS OF + ARGAMASILLA, A VILLAGE OF + LA MANCHA, + ON THE LIFE AND DEATH + OF DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA, + HOC SCRIPSERUNT +MONICONGO, ACADEMICIAN OF ARGAMASILLA, + +ON THE TOMB OF DON QUIXOTE +EPITAPH + +}poem + +poem{ + +The scatterbrain that gave La Mancha more + Rich spoils than Jason's; who a point so keen + Had to his wit, and happier far had been +If his wit's weathercock a blunter bore; +The arm renowned far as Gaeta's shore, + Cathay, and all the lands that lie between; + The muse discreet and terrible in mien +As ever wrote on brass in days of yore; +He who surpassed the Amadises all, + And who as naught the Galaors accounted, + Supported by his love and gallantry: +Who made the Belianises sing small, + And sought renown on Rocinante mounted; + Here, underneath this cold stone, doth he lie. + +}poem + +PANIAGUADO, +ACADEMICIAN OF ARGAMASILLA, +IN LAUDEM DULCINEAE DEL TOBOSO + +poem{ + +SONNET + +She, whose full features may be here descried, + High-bosomed, with a bearing of disdain, + Is Dulcinea, she for whom in vain +The great Don Quixote of La Mancha sighed. +For her, Toboso's queen, from side to side + He traversed the grim sierra, the champaign + Of Aranjuez, and Montiel's famous plain: +On Rocinante oft a weary ride. +Malignant planets, cruel destiny, + Pursued them both, the fair Manchegan dame, +And the unconquered star of chivalry. + Nor youth nor beauty saved her from the claim +Of death; he paid love's bitter penalty, + And left the marble to preserve his name. + +}poem + +CAPRICHOSO, A MOST ACUTE ACADEMICIAN +OF ARGAMASILLA, IN PRAISE OF ROCINANTE, +STEED OF DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA + +poem{ + +SONNET + +On that proud throne of diamantine sheen, + Which the blood-reeking feet of Mars degrade, +The mad Manchegan's banner now hath been + By him in all its bravery displayed. + There hath he hung his arms and trenchant blade +Wherewith, achieving deeds till now unseen, + He slays, lays low, cleaves, hews; but art hath made +A novel style for our new paladin. +If Amadis be the proud boast of Gaul, + If by his progeny the fame of Greece + Through all the regions of the earth be spread, +Great Quixote crowned in grim Bellona's hall + To-day exalts La Mancha over these, + And above Greece or Gaul she holds her head. +Nor ends his glory here, for his good steed +Doth Brillador and Bayard far exceed; +As mettled steeds compared with Rocinante, +The reputation they have won is scanty. + +}poem + +BURLADOR, ACADEMICIAN OF ARGAMASILLA, +ON SANCHO PANZA + +poem{ + +SONNET + + The worthy Sancho Panza here you see; + A great soul once was in that body small, + Nor was there squire upon this earthly ball +So plain and simple, or of guile so free. +Within an ace of being Count was he, + And would have been but for the spite and gall + Of this vile age, mean and illiberal, +That cannot even let a donkey be. +For mounted on an ass (excuse the word), + By Rocinante's side this gentle squire + Was wont his wandering master to attend. +Delusive hopes that lure the common herd + With promises of ease, the heart's desire, + In shadows, dreams, and smoke ye always end. + +}poem + +CACHIDIABLO, +ACADEMICIAN OF ARGAMASILLA, +ON THE TOMB OF DON QUIXOTE +EPITAPH + +poem{ + +The knight lies here below, + Ill-errant and bruised sore, + Whom Rocinante bore +In his wanderings to and fro. +By the side of the knight is laid + Stolid man Sancho too, + Than whom a squire more true +Was not in the esquire trade. + +}poem + + TIQUITOC, + ACADEMICIAN OF ARGAMASILLA, +ON THE TOMB OF DULCINEA DEL TOBOSO + +poem{ + + EPITAPH +Here Dulcinea lies. + Plump was she and robust: + Now she is ashes and dust: +The end of all flesh that dies. +A lady of high degree, + With the port of a lofty dame, + And the great Don Quixote's flame, +And the pride of her village was she. + +}poem + +These were all the verses that could be deciphered; the rest, the writing +being worm-eaten, were handed over to one of the Academicians to make out +their meaning conjecturally. We have been informed that at the cost of +many sleepless nights and much toil he has succeeded, and that he means +to publish them in hopes of Don Quixote's third sally. + +"Forse altro cantera con miglior plectro." + +END OF PART I. + +DON QUIXOTE + +PART II. - +DON QUIXOTE Volume II. Complete by Miguel de Cervantes Translated by John Ormsby + +1~ DEDICATION OF PART II. + +TO THE COUNT OF LEMOS: + +These days past, when sending Your Excellency my plays, that had appeared +in print before being shown on the stage, I said, if I remember well, +that Don Quixote was putting on his spurs to go and render homage to Your +Excellency. Now I say that "with his spurs, he is on his way." Should he +reach destination methinks I shall have rendered some service to Your +Excellency, as from many parts I am urged to send him off, so as to +dispel the loathing and disgust caused by another Don Quixote who, under +the name of Second Part, has run masquerading through the whole world. +And he who has shown the greatest longing for him has been the great +Emperor of China, who wrote me a letter in Chinese a month ago and sent +it by a special courier. He asked me, or to be truthful, he begged me to +send him Don Quixote, for he intended to found a college where the +Spanish tongue would be taught, and it was his wish that the book to be +read should be the History of Don Quixote. He also added that I should go +and be the rector of this college. I asked the bearer if His Majesty had +afforded a sum in aid of my travel expenses. He answered, "No, not even +in thought." + +"Then, brother," I replied, "you can return to your China, post haste or +at whatever haste you are bound to go, as I am not fit for so long a +travel and, besides being ill, I am very much without money, while +Emperor for Emperor and Monarch for Monarch, I have at Naples the great +Count of Lemos, who, without so many petty titles of colleges and +rectorships, sustains me, protects me and does me more favour than I can +wish for." + +Thus I gave him his leave and I beg mine from you, offering Your +Excellency the "Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda," a book I shall finish +within four months, Deo volente, and which will be either the worst or +the best that has been composed in our language, I mean of those intended +for entertainment; at which I repent of having called it the worst, for, +in the opinion of friends, it is bound to attain the summit of possible +quality. May Your Excellency return in such health that is wished you; +Persiles will be ready to kiss your hand and I your feet, being as I am, +Your Excellency's most humble servant. + +From Madrid, this last day of October of the year one thousand six +hundred and fifteen. + +At the service of Your Excellency: + +MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA + +VOLUME II. +THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE + +God bless me, gentle (or it may be plebeian) reader, how eagerly must +thou be looking forward to this preface, expecting to find there +retaliation, scolding, and abuse against the author of the second Don +Quixote--I mean him who was, they say, begotten at Tordesillas and born +at Tarragona! Well then, the truth is, I am not going to give thee that +satisfaction; for, though injuries stir up anger in humbler breasts, in +mine the rule must admit of an exception. Thou wouldst have me call him +ass, fool, and malapert, but I have no such intention; let his offence be +his punishment, with his bread let him eat it, and there's an end of it. +What I cannot help taking amiss is that he charges me with being old and +one-handed, as if it had been in my power to keep time from passing over +me, or as if the loss of my hand had been brought about in some tavern, +and not on the grandest occasion the past or present has seen, or the +future can hope to see. If my wounds have no beauty to the beholder's +eye, they are, at least, honourable in the estimation of those who know +where they were received; for the soldier shows to greater advantage dead +in battle than alive in flight; and so strongly is this my feeling, that +if now it were proposed to perform an impossibility for me, I would +rather have had my share in that mighty action, than be free from my +wounds this minute without having been present at it. Those the soldier +shows on his face and breast are stars that direct others to the heaven +of honour and ambition of merited praise; and moreover it is to be +observed that it is not with grey hairs that one writes, but with the +understanding, and that commonly improves with years. I take it amiss, +too, that he calls me envious, and explains to me, as if I were ignorant, +what envy is; for really and truly, of the two kinds there are, I only +know that which is holy, noble, and high-minded; and if that be so, as it +is, I am not likely to attack a priest, above all if, in addition, he +holds the rank of familiar of the Holy Office. And if he said what he did +on account of him on whose behalf it seems he spoke, he is entirely +mistaken; for I worship the genius of that person, and admire his works +and his unceasing and strenuous industry. After all, I am grateful to +this gentleman, the author, for saying that my novels are more satirical +than exemplary, but that they are good; for they could not be that unless +there was a little of everything in them. + +I suspect thou wilt say that I am taking a very humble line, and keeping +myself too much within the bounds of my moderation, from a feeling that +additional suffering should not be inflicted upon a sufferer, and that +what this gentleman has to endure must doubtless be very great, as he +does not dare to come out into the open field and broad daylight, but +hides his name and disguises his country as if he had been guilty of some +lese majesty. If perchance thou shouldst come to know him, tell him from +me that I do not hold myself aggrieved; for I know well what the +temptations of the devil are, and that one of the greatest is putting it +into a man's head that he can write and print a book by which he will get +as much fame as money, and as much money as fame; and to prove it I will +beg of you, in your own sprightly, pleasant way, to tell him this story. + +There was a madman in Seville who took to one of the drollest absurdities +and vagaries that ever madman in the world gave way to. It was this: he +made a tube of reed sharp at one end, and catching a dog in the street, +or wherever it might be, he with his foot held one of its legs fast, and +with his hand lifted up the other, and as best he could fixed the tube +where, by blowing, he made the dog as round as a ball; then holding it in +this position, he gave it a couple of slaps on the belly, and let it go, +saying to the bystanders (and there were always plenty of them): "Do your +worships think, now, that it is an easy thing to blow up a dog?"--Does +your worship think now, that it is an easy thing to write a book? + +And if this story does not suit him, you may, dear reader, tell him this +one, which is likewise of a madman and a dog. + +In Cordova there was another madman, whose way it was to carry a piece of +marble slab or a stone, not of the lightest, on his head, and when he +came upon any unwary dog he used to draw close to him and let the weight +fall right on top of him; on which the dog in a rage, barking and +howling, would run three streets without stopping. It so happened, +however, that one of the dogs he discharged his load upon was a +cap-maker's dog, of which his master was very fond. The stone came down +hitting it on the head, the dog raised a yell at the blow, the master saw +the affair and was wroth, and snatching up a measuring-yard rushed out at +the madman and did not leave a sound bone in his body, and at every +stroke he gave him he said, "You dog, you thief! my lurcher! Don't you +see, you brute, that my dog is a lurcher?" and so, repeating the word +"lurcher" again and again, he sent the madman away beaten to a jelly. The +madman took the lesson to heart, and vanished, and for more than a month +never once showed himself in public; but after that he came out again +with his old trick and a heavier load than ever. He came up to where +there was a dog, and examining it very carefully without venturing to let +the stone fall, he said: "This is a lurcher; ware!" In short, all the +dogs he came across, be they mastiffs or terriers, he said were lurchers; +and he discharged no more stones. Maybe it will be the same with this +historian; that he will not venture another time to discharge the weight +of his wit in books, which, being bad, are harder than stones. Tell him, +too, that I do not care a farthing for the threat he holds out to me of +depriving me of my profit by means of his book; for, to borrow from the +famous interlude of "The Perendenga," I say in answer to him, "Long life +to my lord the Veintiquatro, and Christ be with us all." Long life to the +great Conde de Lemos, whose Christian charity and well-known generosity +support me against all the strokes of my curst fortune; and long life to +the supreme benevolence of His Eminence of Toledo, Don Bernardo de +Sandoval y Rojas; and what matter if there be no printing-presses in the +world, or if they print more books against me than there are letters in +the verses of Mingo Revulgo! These two princes, unsought by any adulation +or flattery of mine, of their own goodness alone, have taken it upon them +to show me kindness and protect me, and in this I consider myself happier +and richer than if Fortune had raised me to her greatest height in the +ordinary way. The poor man may retain honour, but not the vicious; +poverty may cast a cloud over nobility, but cannot hide it altogether; +and as virtue of itself sheds a certain light, even though it be through +the straits and chinks of penury, it wins the esteem of lofty and noble +spirits, and in consequence their protection. Thou needst say no more to +him, nor will I say anything more to thee, save to tell thee to bear in +mind that this Second Part of "Don Quixote" which I offer thee is cut by +the same craftsman and from the same cloth as the First, and that in it I +present thee Don Quixote continued, and at length dead and buried, so +that no one may dare to bring forward any further evidence against him, +for that already produced is sufficient; and suffice it, too, that some +reputable person should have given an account of all these shrewd +lunacies of his without going into the matter again; for abundance, even +of good things, prevents them from being valued; and scarcity, even in +the case of what is bad, confers a certain value. I was forgetting to +tell thee that thou mayest expect the "Persiles," which I am now +finishing, and also the Second Part of "Galatea." + +Chapter I. - +Of the interview the curate and the barber had with Don Quixote about his +malady + +Cide Hamete Benengeli, in the Second Part of this history, and third +sally of Don Quixote, says that the curate and the barber remained nearly +a month without seeing him, lest they should recall or bring back to his +recollection what had taken place. They did not, however, omit to visit +his niece and housekeeper, and charge them to be careful to treat him +with attention, and give him comforting things to eat, and such as were +good for the heart and the brain, whence, it was plain to see, all his +misfortune proceeded. The niece and housekeeper replied that they did so, +and meant to do so with all possible care and assiduity, for they could +perceive that their master was now and then beginning to show signs of +being in his right mind. This gave great satisfaction to the curate and +the barber, for they concluded they had taken the right course in +carrying him off enchanted on the ox-cart, as has been described in the +First Part of this great as well as accurate history, in the last chapter +thereof. So they resolved to pay him a visit and test the improvement in +his condition, although they thought it almost impossible that there +could be any; and they agreed not to touch upon any point connected with +knight-errantry so as not to run the risk of reopening wounds which were +still so tender. + +They came to see him consequently, and found him sitting up in bed in a +green baize waistcoat and a red Toledo cap, and so withered and dried up +that he looked as if he had been turned into a mummy. They were very +cordially received by him; they asked him after his health, and he talked +to them about himself very naturally and in very well-chosen language. In +the course of their conversation they fell to discussing what they call +State-craft and systems of government, correcting this abuse and +condemning that, reforming one practice and abolishing another, each of +the three setting up for a new legislator, a modern Lycurgus, or a +brand-new Solon; and so completely did they remodel the State, that they +seemed to have thrust it into a furnace and taken out something quite +different from what they had put in; and on all the subjects they dealt +with, Don Quixote spoke with such good sense that the pair of examiners +were fully convinced that he was quite recovered and in his full senses. + +The niece and housekeeper were present at the conversation and could not +find words enough to express their thanks to God at seeing their master +so clear in his mind; the curate, however, changing his original plan, +which was to avoid touching upon matters of chivalry, resolved to test +Don Quixote's recovery thoroughly, and see whether it were genuine or +not; and so, from one subject to another, he came at last to talk of the +news that had come from the capital, and, among other things, he said it +was considered certain that the Turk was coming down with a powerful +fleet, and that no one knew what his purpose was, or when the great storm +would burst; and that all Christendom was in apprehension of this, which +almost every year calls us to arms, and that his Majesty had made +provision for the security of the coasts of Naples and Sicily and the +island of Malta. + +To this Don Quixote replied, "His Majesty has acted like a prudent +warrior in providing for the safety of his realms in time, so that the +enemy may not find him unprepared; but if my advice were taken I would +recommend him to adopt a measure which at present, no doubt, his Majesty +is very far from thinking of." + +The moment the curate heard this he said to himself, "God keep thee in +his hand, poor Don Quixote, for it seems to me thou art precipitating +thyself from the height of thy madness into the profound abyss of thy +simplicity." + +But the barber, who had the same suspicion as the curate, asked Don +Quixote what would be his advice as to the measures that he said ought to +be adopted; for perhaps it might prove to be one that would have to be +added to the list of the many impertinent suggestions that people were in +the habit of offering to princes. + +"Mine, master shaver," said Don Quixote, "will not be impertinent, but, +on the contrary, pertinent." + +"I don't mean that," said the barber, "but that experience has shown that +all or most of the expedients which are proposed to his Majesty are +either impossible, or absurd, or injurious to the King and to the +kingdom." + +"Mine, however," replied Don Quixote, "is neither impossible nor absurd, +but the easiest, the most reasonable, the readiest and most expeditious +that could suggest itself to any projector's mind." + +"You take a long time to tell it, Senor Don Quixote," said the curate. + +"I don't choose to tell it here, now," said Don Quixote, "and have it +reach the ears of the lords of the council to-morrow morning, and some +other carry off the thanks and rewards of my trouble." + +"For my part," said the barber, "I give my word here and before God that +I will not repeat what your worship says, to King, Rook or earthly +man--an oath I learned from the ballad of the curate, who, in the +prelude, told the king of the thief who had robbed him of the hundred +gold crowns and his pacing mule." + +"I am not versed in stories," said Don Quixote; "but I know the oath is a +good one, because I know the barber to be an honest fellow." + +"Even if he were not," said the curate, "I will go bail and answer for +him that in this matter he will be as silent as a dummy, under pain of +paying any penalty that may be pronounced." + +"And who will be security for you, senor curate?" said Don Quixote. + +"My profession," replied the curate, "which is to keep secrets." + +"Ods body!" said Don Quixote at this, "what more has his Majesty to do +but to command, by public proclamation, all the knights-errant that are +scattered over Spain to assemble on a fixed day in the capital, for even +if no more than half a dozen come, there may be one among them who alone +will suffice to destroy the entire might of the Turk. Give me your +attention and follow me. Is it, pray, any new thing for a single +knight-errant to demolish an army of two hundred thousand men, as if they +all had but one throat or were made of sugar paste? Nay, tell me, how +many histories are there filled with these marvels? If only (in an evil +hour for me: I don't speak for anyone else) the famous Don Belianis were +alive now, or any one of the innumerable progeny of Amadis of Gaul! If +any these were alive today, and were to come face to face with the Turk, +by my faith, I would not give much for the Turk's chance. But God will +have regard for his people, and will provide some one, who, if not so +valiant as the knights-errant of yore, at least will not be inferior to +them in spirit; but God knows what I mean, and I say no more." + +"Alas!" exclaimed the niece at this, "may I die if my master does not +want to turn knight-errant again;" to which Don Quixote replied, "A +knight-errant I shall die, and let the Turk come down or go up when he +likes, and in as strong force as he can, once more I say, God knows what +I mean." But here the barber said, "I ask your worships to give me leave +to tell a short story of something that happened in Seville, which comes +so pat to the purpose just now that I should like greatly to tell it." +Don Quixote gave him leave, and the rest prepared to listen, and he began +thus: + +"In the madhouse at Seville there was a man whom his relations had placed +there as being out of his mind. He was a graduate of Osuna in canon law; +but even if he had been of Salamanca, it was the opinion of most people +that he would have been mad all the same. This graduate, after some years +of confinement, took it into his head that he was sane and in his full +senses, and under this impression wrote to the Archbishop, entreating him +earnestly, and in very correct language, to have him released from the +misery in which he was living; for by God's mercy he had now recovered +his lost reason, though his relations, in order to enjoy his property, +kept him there, and, in spite of the truth, would make him out to be mad +until his dying day. The Archbishop, moved by repeated sensible, +well-written letters, directed one of his chaplains to make inquiry of +the madhouse as to the truth of the licentiate's statements, and to have +an interview with the madman himself, and, if it should appear that he +was in his senses, to take him out and restore him to liberty. The +chaplain did so, and the governor assured him that the man was still mad, +and that though he often spoke like a highly intelligent person, he would +in the end break out into nonsense that in quantity and quality +counterbalanced all the sensible things he had said before, as might be +easily tested by talking to him. The chaplain resolved to try the +experiment, and obtaining access to the madman conversed with him for an +hour or more, during the whole of which time he never uttered a word that +was incoherent or absurd, but, on the contrary, spoke so rationally that +the chaplain was compelled to believe him to be sane. Among other things, +he said the governor was against him, not to lose the presents his +relations made him for reporting him still mad but with lucid intervals; +and that the worst foe he had in his misfortune was his large property; +for in order to enjoy it his enemies disparaged and threw doubts upon the +mercy our Lord had shown him in turning him from a brute beast into a +man. In short, he spoke in such a way that he cast suspicion on the +governor, and made his relations appear covetous and heartless, and +himself so rational that the chaplain determined to take him away with +him that the Archbishop might see him, and ascertain for himself the +truth of the matter. Yielding to this conviction, the worthy chaplain +begged the governor to have the clothes in which the licentiate had +entered the house given to him. The governor again bade him beware of +what he was doing, as the licentiate was beyond a doubt still mad; but +all his cautions and warnings were unavailing to dissuade the chaplain +from taking him away. The governor, seeing that it was the order of the +Archbishop, obeyed, and they dressed the licentiate in his own clothes, +which were new and decent. He, as soon as he saw himself clothed like one +in his senses, and divested of the appearance of a madman, entreated the +chaplain to permit him in charity to go and take leave of his comrades +the madmen. The chaplain said he would go with him to see what madmen +there were in the house; so they went upstairs, and with them some of +those who were present. Approaching a cage in which there was a furious +madman, though just at that moment calm and quiet, the licentiate said to +him, 'Brother, think if you have any commands for me, for I am going +home, as God has been pleased, in his infinite goodness and mercy, +without any merit of mine, to restore me my reason. I am now cured and in +my senses, for with God's power nothing is impossible. Have strong hope +and trust in him, for as he has restored me to my original condition, so +likewise he will restore you if you trust in him. I will take care to +send you some good things to eat; and be sure you eat them; for I would +have you know I am convinced, as one who has gone through it, that all +this madness of ours comes of having the stomach empty and the brains +full of wind. Take courage! take courage! for despondency in misfortune +breaks down health and brings on death.' + +"To all these words of the licentiate another madman in a cage opposite +that of the furious one was listening; and raising himself up from an old +mat on which he lay stark naked, he asked in a loud voice who it was that +was going away cured and in his senses. The licentiate answered, 'It is +I, brother, who am going; I have now no need to remain here any longer, +for which I return infinite thanks to Heaven that has had so great mercy +upon me.' + +"'Mind what you are saying, licentiate; don't let the devil deceive you,' +replied the madman. 'Keep quiet, stay where you are, and you will save +yourself the trouble of coming back.' + +"'I know I am cured,' returned the licentiate, 'and that I shall not have +to go stations again.' + +"'You cured!' said the madman; 'well, we shall see; God be with you; but +I swear to you by Jupiter, whose majesty I represent on earth, that for +this crime alone, which Seville is committing to-day in releasing you +from this house, and treating you as if you were in your senses, I shall +have to inflict such a punishment on it as will be remembered for ages +and ages, amen. Dost thou not know, thou miserable little licentiate, +that I can do it, being, as I say, Jupiter the Thunderer, who hold in my +hands the fiery bolts with which I am able and am wont to threaten and +lay waste the world? But in one way only will I punish this ignorant +town, and that is by not raining upon it, nor on any part of its district +or territory, for three whole years, to be reckoned from the day and +moment when this threat is pronounced. Thou free, thou cured, thou in thy +senses! and I mad, I disordered, I bound! I will as soon think of sending +rain as of hanging myself. + +"Those present stood listening to the words and exclamations of the +madman; but our licentiate, turning to the chaplain and seizing him by +the hands, said to him, 'Be not uneasy, senor; attach no importance to +what this madman has said; for if he is Jupiter and will not send rain, +I, who am Neptune, the father and god of the waters, will rain as often +as it pleases me and may be needful.' + +"The governor and the bystanders laughed, and at their laughter the +chaplain was half ashamed, and he replied, 'For all that, Senor Neptune, +it will not do to vex Senor Jupiter; remain where you are, and some other +day, when there is a better opportunity and more time, we will come back +for you.' So they stripped the licentiate, and he was left where he was; +and that's the end of the story." + +"So that's the story, master barber," said Don Quixote, "which came in so +pat to the purpose that you could not help telling it? Master shaver, +master shaver! how blind is he who cannot see through a sieve. Is it +possible that you do not know that comparisons of wit with wit, valour +with valour, beauty with beauty, birth with birth, are always odious and +unwelcome? I, master barber, am not Neptune, the god of the waters, nor +do I try to make anyone take me for an astute man, for I am not one. My +only endeavour is to convince the world of the mistake it makes in not +reviving in itself the happy time when the order of knight-errantry was +in the field. But our depraved age does not deserve to enjoy such a +blessing as those ages enjoyed when knights-errant took upon their +shoulders the defence of kingdoms, the protection of damsels, the succour +of orphans and minors, the chastisement of the proud, and the recompense +of the humble. With the knights of these days, for the most part, it is +the damask, brocade, and rich stuffs they wear, that rustle as they go, +not the chain mail of their armour; no knight now-a-days sleeps in the +open field exposed to the inclemency of heaven, and in full panoply from +head to foot; no one now takes a nap, as they call it, without drawing +his feet out of the stirrups, and leaning upon his lance, as the +knights-errant used to do; no one now, issuing from the wood, penetrates +yonder mountains, and then treads the barren, lonely shore of the +sea--mostly a tempestuous and stormy one--and finding on the beach a +little bark without oars, sail, mast, or tackling of any kind, in the +intrepidity of his heart flings himself into it and commits himself to +the wrathful billows of the deep sea, that one moment lift him up to +heaven and the next plunge him into the depths; and opposing his breast +to the irresistible gale, finds himself, when he least expects it, three +thousand leagues and more away from the place where he embarked; and +leaping ashore in a remote and unknown land has adventures that deserve +to be written, not on parchment, but on brass. But now sloth triumphs +over energy, indolence over exertion, vice over virtue, arrogance over +courage, and theory over practice in arms, which flourished and shone +only in the golden ages and in knights-errant. For tell me, who was more +virtuous and more valiant than the famous Amadis of Gaul? Who more +discreet than Palmerin of England? Who more gracious and easy than +Tirante el Blanco? Who more courtly than Lisuarte of Greece? Who more +slashed or slashing than Don Belianis? Who more intrepid than Perion of +Gaul? Who more ready to face danger than Felixmarte of Hircania? Who more +sincere than Esplandian? Who more impetuous than Don Cirongilio of +Thrace? Who more bold than Rodamonte? Who more prudent than King Sobrino? +Who more daring than Reinaldos? Who more invincible than Roland? and who +more gallant and courteous than Ruggiero, from whom the dukes of Ferrara +of the present day are descended, according to Turpin in his +'Cosmography.' All these knights, and many more that I could name, senor +curate, were knights-errant, the light and glory of chivalry. These, or +such as these, I would have to carry out my plan, and in that case his +Majesty would find himself well served and would save great expense, and +the Turk would be left tearing his beard. And so I will stay where I am, +as the chaplain does not take me away; and if Jupiter, as the barber has +told us, will not send rain, here am I, and I will rain when I please. I +say this that Master Basin may know that I understand him." + +"Indeed, Senor Don Quixote," said the barber, "I did not mean it in that +way, and, so help me God, my intention was good, and your worship ought +not to be vexed." + +"As to whether I ought to be vexed or not," returned Don Quixote, "I +myself am the best judge." + +Hereupon the curate observed, "I have hardly said a word as yet; and I +would gladly be relieved of a doubt, arising from what Don Quixote has +said, that worries and works my conscience." + +"The senor curate has leave for more than that," returned Don Quixote, +"so he may declare his doubt, for it is not pleasant to have a doubt on +one's conscience." + +"Well then, with that permission," said the curate, "I say my doubt is +that, all I can do, I cannot persuade myself that the whole pack of +knights-errant you, Senor Don Quixote, have mentioned, were really and +truly persons of flesh and blood, that ever lived in the world; on the +contrary, I suspect it to be all fiction, fable, and falsehood, and +dreams told by men awakened from sleep, or rather still half asleep." + +"That is another mistake," replied Don Quixote, "into which many have +fallen who do not believe that there ever were such knights in the world, +and I have often, with divers people and on divers occasions, tried to +expose this almost universal error to the light of truth. Sometimes I +have not been successful in my purpose, sometimes I have, supporting it +upon the shoulders of the truth; which truth is so clear that I can +almost say I have with my own eyes seen Amadis of Gaul, who was a man of +lofty stature, fair complexion, with a handsome though black beard, of a +countenance between gentle and stern in expression, sparing of words, +slow to anger, and quick to put it away from him; and as I have depicted +Amadis, so I could, I think, portray and describe all the knights-errant +that are in all the histories in the world; for by the perception I have +that they were what their histories describe, and by the deeds they did +and the dispositions they displayed, it is possible, with the aid of +sound philosophy, to deduce their features, complexion, and stature." + +"How big, in your worship's opinion, may the giant Morgante have been, +Senor Don Quixote?" asked the barber. + +"With regard to giants," replied Don Quixote, "opinions differ as to +whether there ever were any or not in the world; but the Holy Scripture, +which cannot err by a jot from the truth, shows us that there were, when +it gives us the history of that big Philistine, Goliath, who was seven +cubits and a half in height, which is a huge size. Likewise, in the +island of Sicily, there have been found leg-bones and arm-bones so large +that their size makes it plain that their owners were giants, and as tall +as great towers; geometry puts this fact beyond a doubt. But, for all +that, I cannot speak with certainty as to the size of Morgante, though I +suspect he cannot have been very tall; and I am inclined to be of this +opinion because I find in the history in which his deeds are particularly +mentioned, that he frequently slept under a roof and as he found houses +to contain him, it is clear that his bulk could not have been anything +excessive." + +"That is true," said the curate, and yielding to the enjoyment of hearing +such nonsense, he asked him what was his notion of the features of +Reinaldos of Montalban, and Don Roland and the rest of the Twelve Peers +of France, for they were all knights-errant. + +"As for Reinaldos," replied Don Quixote, "I venture to say that he was +broad-faced, of ruddy complexion, with roguish and somewhat prominent +eyes, excessively punctilious and touchy, and given to the society of +thieves and scapegraces. With regard to Roland, or Rotolando, or Orlando +(for the histories call him by all these names), I am of opinion, and +hold, that he was of middle height, broad-shouldered, rather bow-legged, +swarthy-complexioned, red-bearded, with a hairy body and a severe +expression of countenance, a man of few words, but very polite and +well-bred." + +"If Roland was not a more graceful person than your worship has +described," said the curate, "it is no wonder that the fair Lady Angelica +rejected him and left him for the gaiety, liveliness, and grace of that +budding-bearded little Moor to whom she surrendered herself; and she +showed her sense in falling in love with the gentle softness of Medoro +rather than the roughness of Roland." + +"That Angelica, senor curate," returned Don Quixote, "was a giddy damsel, +flighty and somewhat wanton, and she left the world as full of her +vagaries as of the fame of her beauty. She treated with scorn a thousand +gentlemen, men of valour and wisdom, and took up with a smooth-faced +sprig of a page, without fortune or fame, except such reputation for +gratitude as the affection he bore his friend got for him. The great poet +who sang her beauty, the famous Ariosto, not caring to sing her +adventures after her contemptible surrender (which probably were not over +and above creditable), dropped her where he says: + +How she received the sceptre of Cathay, +Some bard of defter quill may sing some day; + +and this was no doubt a kind of prophecy, for poets are also called +vates, that is to say diviners; and its truth was made plain; for since +then a famous Andalusian poet has lamented and sung her tears, and +another famous and rare poet, a Castilian, has sung her beauty." + +"Tell me, Senor Don Quixote," said the barber here, "among all those who +praised her, has there been no poet to write a satire on this Lady +Angelica?" + +"I can well believe," replied Don Quixote, "that if Sacripante or Roland +had been poets they would have given the damsel a trimming; for it is +naturally the way with poets who have been scorned and rejected by their +ladies, whether fictitious or not, in short by those whom they select as +the ladies of their thoughts, to avenge themselves in satires and +libels--a vengeance, to be sure, unworthy of generous hearts; but up to +the present I have not heard of any defamatory verse against the Lady +Angelica, who turned the world upside down." + +"Strange," said the curate; but at this moment they heard the housekeeper +and the niece, who had previously withdrawn from the conversation, +exclaiming aloud in the courtyard, and at the noise they all ran out. + +Chapter II. - +Which treats of the notable altercation which Sancho Panza had with Don +Quixote's niece, and housekeeper, together with other droll matters + +The history relates that the outcry Don Quixote, the curate, and the +barber heard came from the niece and the housekeeper exclaiming to +Sancho, who was striving to force his way in to see Don Quixote while +they held the door against him, "What does the vagabond want in this +house? Be off to your own, brother, for it is you, and no one else, that +delude my master, and lead him astray, and take him tramping about the +country." + +To which Sancho replied, "Devil's own housekeeper! it is I who am +deluded, and led astray, and taken tramping about the country, and not +thy master! He has carried me all over the world, and you are mightily +mistaken. He enticed me away from home by a trick, promising me an +island, which I am still waiting for." + +"May evil islands choke thee, thou detestable Sancho," said the niece; +"What are islands? Is it something to eat, glutton and gormandiser that +thou art?" + +"It is not something to eat," replied Sancho, "but something to govern +and rule, and better than four cities or four judgeships at court." + +"For all that," said the housekeeper, "you don't enter here, you bag of +mischief and sack of knavery; go govern your house and dig your +seed-patch, and give over looking for islands or shylands." + +The curate and the barber listened with great amusement to the words of +the three; but Don Quixote, uneasy lest Sancho should blab and blurt out +a whole heap of mischievous stupidities, and touch upon points that might +not be altogether to his credit, called to him and made the other two +hold their tongues and let him come in. Sancho entered, and the curate +and the barber took their leave of Don Quixote, of whose recovery they +despaired when they saw how wedded he was to his crazy ideas, and how +saturated with the nonsense of his unlucky chivalry; and said the curate +to the barber, "You will see, gossip, that when we are least thinking of +it, our gentleman will be off once more for another flight." + +"I have no doubt of it," returned the barber; "but I do not wonder so +much at the madness of the knight as at the simplicity of the squire, who +has such a firm belief in all that about the island, that I suppose all +the exposures that could be imagined would not get it out of his head." + +"God help them," said the curate; "and let us be on the look-out to see +what comes of all these absurdities of the knight and squire, for it +seems as if they had both been cast in the same mould, and the madness of +the master without the simplicity of the man would not be worth a +farthing." + +"That is true," said the barber, "and I should like very much to know +what the pair are talking about at this moment." + +"I promise you," said the curate, "the niece or the housekeeper will tell +us by-and-by, for they are not the ones to forget to listen." + +Meanwhile Don Quixote shut himself up in his room with Sancho, and when +they were alone he said to him, "It grieves me greatly, Sancho, that thou +shouldst have said, and sayest, that I took thee out of thy cottage, when +thou knowest I did not remain in my house. We sallied forth together, we +took the road together, we wandered abroad together; we have had the same +fortune and the same luck; if they blanketed thee once, they belaboured +me a hundred times, and that is the only advantage I have of thee." + +"That was only reasonable," replied Sancho, "for, by what your worship +says, misfortunes belong more properly to knights-errant than to their +squires." + +"Thou art mistaken, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "according to the maxim +quando caput dolet, etc." + +"I don't understand any language but my own," said Sancho. + +"I mean to say," said Don Quixote, "that when the head suffers all the +members suffer; and so, being thy lord and master, I am thy head, and +thou a part of me as thou art my servant; and therefore any evil that +affects or shall affect me should give thee pain, and what affects thee +give pain to me." + +"It should be so," said Sancho; "but when I was blanketed as a member, my +head was on the other side of the wall, looking on while I was flying +through the air, and did not feel any pain whatever; and if the members +are obliged to feel the suffering of the head, it should be obliged to +feel their sufferings." + +"Dost thou mean to say now, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that I did not +feel when they were blanketing thee? If thou dost, thou must not say so +or think so, for I felt more pain then in spirit than thou didst in body. +But let us put that aside for the present, for we shall have +opportunities enough for considering and settling the point; tell me, +Sancho my friend, what do they say about me in the village here? What do +the common people think of me? What do the hidalgos? What do the +caballeros? What do they say of my valour; of my achievements; of my +courtesy? How do they treat the task I have undertaken in reviving and +restoring to the world the now forgotten order of chivalry? In short, +Sancho, I would have thee tell me all that has come to thine ears on this +subject; and thou art to tell me, without adding anything to the good or +taking away anything from the bad; for it is the duty of loyal vassals to +tell the truth to their lords just as it is and in its proper shape, not +allowing flattery to add to it or any idle deference to lessen it. And I +would have thee know, Sancho, that if the naked truth, undisguised by +flattery, came to the ears of princes, times would be different, and +other ages would be reckoned iron ages more than ours, which I hold to be +the golden of these latter days. Profit by this advice, Sancho, and +report to me clearly and faithfully the truth of what thou knowest +touching what I have demanded of thee." + +"That I will do with all my heart, master," replied Sancho, "provided +your worship will not be vexed at what I say, as you wish me to say it +out in all its nakedness, without putting any more clothes on it than it +came to my knowledge in." + +"I will not be vexed at all," returned Don Quixote; "thou mayest speak +freely, Sancho, and without any beating about the bush." + +"Well then," said he, "first of all, I have to tell you that the common +people consider your worship a mighty great madman, and me no less a +fool. The hidalgos say that, not keeping within the bounds of your +quality of gentleman, you have assumed the 'Don,' and made a knight of +yourself at a jump, with four vine-stocks and a couple of acres of land, +and never a shirt to your back. The caballeros say they do not want to +have hidalgos setting up in opposition to them, particularly squire +hidalgos who polish their own shoes and darn their black stockings with +green silk." + +"That," said Don Quixote, "does not apply to me, for I always go well +dressed and never patched; ragged I may be, but ragged more from the wear +and tear of arms than of time." + +"As to your worship's valour, courtesy, accomplishments, and task, there +is a variety of opinions. Some say, 'mad but droll;' others, 'valiant but +unlucky;' others, 'courteous but meddling,' and then they go into such a +number of things that they don't leave a whole bone either in your +worship or in myself." + +"Recollect, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that wherever virtue exists in an +eminent degree it is persecuted. Few or none of the famous men that have +lived escaped being calumniated by malice. Julius Caesar, the boldest, +wisest, and bravest of captains, was charged with being ambitious, and +not particularly cleanly in his dress, or pure in his morals. Of +Alexander, whose deeds won him the name of Great, they say that he was +somewhat of a drunkard. Of Hercules, him of the many labours, it is said +that he was lewd and luxurious. Of Don Galaor, the brother of Amadis of +Gaul, it was whispered that he was over quarrelsome, and of his brother +that he was lachrymose. So that, O Sancho, amongst all these calumnies +against good men, mine may be let pass, since they are no more than thou +hast said." + +"That's just where it is, body of my father!" + +"Is there more, then?" asked Don Quixote. + +"There's the tail to be skinned yet," said Sancho; "all so far is cakes +and fancy bread; but if your worship wants to know all about the +calumnies they bring against you, I will fetch you one this instant who +can tell you the whole of them without missing an atom; for last night +the son of Bartholomew Carrasco, who has been studying at Salamanca, came +home after having been made a bachelor, and when I went to welcome him, +he told me that your worship's history is already abroad in books, with +the title of THE INGENIOUS GENTLEMAN DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA; and he +says they mention me in it by my own name of Sancho Panza, and the lady +Dulcinea del Toboso too, and divers things that happened to us when we +were alone; so that I crossed myself in my wonder how the historian who +wrote them down could have known them." + +"I promise thee, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "the author of our history +will be some sage enchanter; for to such nothing that they choose to +write about is hidden." + +"What!" said Sancho, "a sage and an enchanter! Why, the bachelor Samson +Carrasco (that is the name of him I spoke of) says the author of the +history is called Cide Hamete Berengena." + +"That is a Moorish name," said Don Quixote. + +"May be so," replied Sancho; "for I have heard say that the Moors are +mostly great lovers of berengenas." + +"Thou must have mistaken the surname of this 'Cide'--which means in +Arabic 'Lord'--Sancho," observed Don Quixote. + +"Very likely," replied Sancho, "but if your worship wishes me to fetch +the bachelor I will go for him in a twinkling." + +"Thou wilt do me a great pleasure, my friend," said Don Quixote, "for +what thou hast told me has amazed me, and I shall not eat a morsel that +will agree with me until I have heard all about it." + +"Then I am off for him," said Sancho; and leaving his master he went in +quest of the bachelor, with whom he returned in a short time, and, all +three together, they had a very droll colloquy. + +Chapter III. - +Of the laughable conversation that passed between Don Quixote, Sancho +Panza, and the bachelor Samson Carrasco + +Don Quixote remained very deep in thought, waiting for the bachelor +Carrasco, from whom he was to hear how he himself had been put into a +book as Sancho said; and he could not persuade himself that any such +history could be in existence, for the blood of the enemies he had slain +was not yet dry on the blade of his sword, and now they wanted to make +out that his mighty achievements were going about in print. For all that, +he fancied some sage, either a friend or an enemy, might, by the aid of +magic, have given them to the press; if a friend, in order to magnify and +exalt them above the most famous ever achieved by any knight-errant; if +an enemy, to bring them to naught and degrade them below the meanest ever +recorded of any low squire, though as he said to himself, the +achievements of squires never were recorded. If, however, it were the +fact that such a history were in existence, it must necessarily, being +the story of a knight-errant, be grandiloquent, lofty, imposing, grand +and true. With this he comforted himself somewhat, though it made him +uncomfortable to think that the author was a Moor, judging by the title +of "Cide;" and that no truth was to be looked for from Moors, as they are +all impostors, cheats, and schemers. He was afraid he might have dealt +with his love affairs in some indecorous fashion, that might tend to the +discredit and prejudice of the purity of his lady Dulcinea del Toboso; he +would have had him set forth the fidelity and respect he had always +observed towards her, spurning queens, empresses, and damsels of all +sorts, and keeping in check the impetuosity of his natural impulses. +Absorbed and wrapped up in these and divers other cogitations, he was +found by Sancho and Carrasco, whom Don Quixote received with great +courtesy. + +The bachelor, though he was called Samson, was of no great bodily size, +but he was a very great wag; he was of a sallow complexion, but very +sharp-witted, somewhere about four-and-twenty years of age, with a round +face, a flat nose, and a large mouth, all indications of a mischievous +disposition and a love of fun and jokes; and of this he gave a sample as +soon as he saw Don Quixote, by falling on his knees before him and +saying, "Let me kiss your mightiness's hand, Senor Don Quixote of La +Mancha, for, by the habit of St. Peter that I wear, though I have no more +than the first four orders, your worship is one of the most famous +knights-errant that have ever been, or will be, all the world over. A +blessing on Cide Hamete Benengeli, who has written the history of your +great deeds, and a double blessing on that connoisseur who took the +trouble of having it translated out of the Arabic into our Castilian +vulgar tongue for the universal entertainment of the people!" + +Don Quixote made him rise, and said, "So, then, it is true that there is +a history of me, and that it was a Moor and a sage who wrote it?" + +"So true is it, senor," said Samson, "that my belief is there are more +than twelve thousand volumes of the said history in print this very day. +Only ask Portugal, Barcelona, and Valencia, where they have been printed, +and moreover there is a report that it is being printed at Antwerp, and I +am persuaded there will not be a country or language in which there will +not be a translation of it." + +"One of the things," here observed Don Quixote, "that ought to give most +pleasure to a virtuous and eminent man is to find himself in his lifetime +in print and in type, familiar in people's mouths with a good name; I say +with a good name, for if it be the opposite, then there is no death to be +compared to it." + +"If it goes by good name and fame," said the bachelor, "your worship +alone bears away the palm from all the knights-errant; for the Moor in +his own language, and the Christian in his, have taken care to set before +us your gallantry, your high courage in encountering dangers, your +fortitude in adversity, your patience under misfortunes as well as +wounds, the purity and continence of the platonic loves of your worship +and my lady Dona Dulcinea del Toboso-" + +"I never heard my lady Dulcinea called Dona," observed Sancho here; +"nothing more than the lady Dulcinea del Toboso; so here already the +history is wrong." + +"That is not an objection of any importance," replied Carrasco. + +"Certainly not," said Don Quixote; "but tell me, senor bachelor, what +deeds of mine are they that are made most of in this history?" + +"On that point," replied the bachelor, "opinions differ, as tastes do; +some swear by the adventure of the windmills that your worship took to be +Briareuses and giants; others by that of the fulling mills; one cries up +the description of the two armies that afterwards took the appearance of +two droves of sheep; another that of the dead body on its way to be +buried at Segovia; a third says the liberation of the galley slaves is +the best of all, and a fourth that nothing comes up to the affair with +the Benedictine giants, and the battle with the valiant Biscayan." + +"Tell me, senor bachelor," said Sancho at this point, "does the adventure +with the Yanguesans come in, when our good Rocinante went hankering after +dainties?" + +"The sage has left nothing in the ink-bottle," replied Samson; "he tells +all and sets down everything, even to the capers that worthy Sancho cut +in the blanket." + +"I cut no capers in the blanket," returned Sancho; "in the air I did, and +more of them than I liked." + +"There is no human history in the world, I suppose," said Don Quixote, +"that has not its ups and downs, but more than others such as deal with +chivalry, for they can never be entirely made up of prosperous +adventures." + +"For all that," replied the bachelor, "there are those who have read the +history who say they would have been glad if the author had left out some +of the countless cudgellings that were inflicted on Senor Don Quixote in +various encounters." + +"That's where the truth of the history comes in," said Sancho. + +"At the same time they might fairly have passed them over in silence," +observed Don Quixote; "for there is no need of recording events which do +not change or affect the truth of a history, if they tend to bring the +hero of it into contempt. AEneas was not in truth and earnest so pious as +Virgil represents him, nor Ulysses so wise as Homer describes him." + +"That is true," said Samson; "but it is one thing to write as a poet, +another to write as a historian; the poet may describe or sing things, +not as they were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian has +to write them down, not as they ought to have been, but as they were, +without adding anything to the truth or taking anything from it." + +"Well then," said Sancho, "if this senor Moor goes in for telling the +truth, no doubt among my master's drubbings mine are to be found; for +they never took the measure of his worship's shoulders without doing the +same for my whole body; but I have no right to wonder at that, for, as my +master himself says, the members must share the pain of the head." + +"You are a sly dog, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "i' faith, you have no +want of memory when you choose to remember." + +"If I were to try to forget the thwacks they gave me," said Sancho, "my +weals would not let me, for they are still fresh on my ribs." + +"Hush, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "and don't interrupt the bachelor, whom +I entreat to go on and tell all that is said about me in this history." + +"And about me," said Sancho, "for they say, too, that I am one of the +principal presonages in it." + +"Personages, not presonages, friend Sancho," said Samson. + +"What! Another word-catcher!" said Sancho; "if that's to be the way we +shall not make an end in a lifetime." + +"May God shorten mine, Sancho," returned the bachelor, "if you are not +the second person in the history, and there are even some who would +rather hear you talk than the cleverest in the whole book; though there +are some, too, who say you showed yourself over-credulous in believing +there was any possibility in the government of that island offered you by +Senor Don Quixote." + +"There is still sunshine on the wall," said Don Quixote; "and when Sancho +is somewhat more advanced in life, with the experience that years bring, +he will be fitter and better qualified for being a governor than he is at +present." + +"By God, master," said Sancho, "the island that I cannot govern with the +years I have, I'll not be able to govern with the years of Methuselah; +the difficulty is that the said island keeps its distance somewhere, I +know not where; and not that there is any want of head in me to govern +it." + +"Leave it to God, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for all will be and perhaps +better than you think; no leaf on the tree stirs but by God's will." + +"That is true," said Samson; "and if it be God's will, there will not be +any want of a thousand islands, much less one, for Sancho to govern." + +"I have seen governors in these parts," said Sancho, "that are not to be +compared to my shoe-sole; and for all that they are called 'your +lordship' and served on silver." + +"Those are not governors of islands," observed Samson, "but of other +governments of an easier kind: those that govern islands must at least +know grammar." + +"I could manage the gram well enough," said Sancho; "but for the mar I +have neither leaning nor liking, for I don't know what it is; but leaving +this matter of the government in God's hands, to send me wherever it may +be most to his service, I may tell you, senor bachelor Samson Carrasco, +it has pleased me beyond measure that the author of this history should +have spoken of me in such a way that what is said of me gives no offence; +for, on the faith of a true squire, if he had said anything about me that +was at all unbecoming an old Christian, such as I am, the deaf would have +heard of it." + +"That would be working miracles," said Samson. + +"Miracles or no miracles," said Sancho, "let everyone mind how he speaks +or writes about people, and not set down at random the first thing that +comes into his head." + +"One of the faults they find with this history," said the bachelor, "is +that its author inserted in it a novel called 'The Ill-advised +Curiosity;' not that it is bad or ill-told, but that it is out of place +and has nothing to do with the history of his worship Senor Don Quixote." + +"I will bet the son of a dog has mixed the cabbages and the baskets," +said Sancho. + +"Then, I say," said Don Quixote, "the author of my history was no sage, +but some ignorant chatterer, who, in a haphazard and heedless way, set +about writing it, let it turn out as it might, just as Orbaneja, the +painter of Ubeda, used to do, who, when they asked him what he was +painting, answered, 'What it may turn out.' Sometimes he would paint a +cock in such a fashion, and so unlike, that he had to write alongside of +it in Gothic letters, 'This is a cock; and so it will be with my history, +which will require a commentary to make it intelligible." + +"No fear of that," returned Samson, "for it is so plain that there is +nothing in it to puzzle over; the children turn its leaves, the young +people read it, the grown men understand it, the old folk praise it; in a +word, it is so thumbed, and read, and got by heart by people of all +sorts, that the instant they see any lean hack, they say, 'There goes +Rocinante.' And those that are most given to reading it are the pages, +for there is not a lord's ante-chamber where there is not a 'Don Quixote' +to be found; one takes it up if another lays it down; this one pounces +upon it, and that begs for it. In short, the said history is the most +delightful and least injurious entertainment that has been hitherto seen, +for there is not to be found in the whole of it even the semblance of an +immodest word, or a thought that is other than Catholic." + +"To write in any other way," said Don Quixote, "would not be to write +truth, but falsehood, and historians who have recourse to falsehood ought +to be burned, like those who coin false money; and I know not what could +have led the author to have recourse to novels and irrelevant stories, +when he had so much to write about in mine; no doubt he must have gone by +the proverb 'with straw or with hay, etc,' for by merely setting forth my +thoughts, my sighs, my tears, my lofty purposes, my enterprises, he might +have made a volume as large, or larger than all the works of El Tostado +would make up. In fact, the conclusion I arrive at, senor bachelor, is, +that to write histories, or books of any kind, there is need of great +judgment and a ripe understanding. To give expression to humour, and +write in a strain of graceful pleasantry, is the gift of great geniuses. +The cleverest character in comedy is the clown, for he who would make +people take him for a fool, must not be one. History is in a measure a +sacred thing, for it should be true, and where the truth is, there God +is; but notwithstanding this, there are some who write and fling books +broadcast on the world as if they were fritters." + +"There is no book so bad but it has something good in it," said the +bachelor. + +"No doubt of that," replied Don Quixote; "but it often happens that those +who have acquired and attained a well-deserved reputation by their +writings, lose it entirely, or damage it in some degree, when they give +them to the press." + +"The reason of that," said Samson, "is, that as printed works are +examined leisurely, their faults are easily seen; and the greater the +fame of the writer, the more closely are they scrutinised. Men famous for +their genius, great poets, illustrious historians, are always, or most +commonly, envied by those who take a particular delight and pleasure in +criticising the writings of others, without having produced any of their +own." + +"That is no wonder," said Don Quixote; "for there are many divines who +are no good for the pulpit, but excellent in detecting the defects or +excesses of those who preach." + +"All that is true, Senor Don Quixote," said Carrasco; "but I wish such +fault-finders were more lenient and less exacting, and did not pay so +much attention to the spots on the bright sun of the work they grumble +at; for if aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus, they should remember how +long he remained awake to shed the light of his work with as little shade +as possible; and perhaps it may be that what they find fault with may be +moles, that sometimes heighten the beauty of the face that bears them; +and so I say very great is the risk to which he who prints a book exposes +himself, for of all impossibilities the greatest is to write one that +will satisfy and please all readers." + +"That which treats of me must have pleased few," said Don Quixote. + +"Quite the contrary," said the bachelor; "for, as stultorum infinitum est +numerus, innumerable are those who have relished the said history; but +some have brought a charge against the author's memory, inasmuch as he +forgot to say who the thief was who stole Sancho's Dapple; for it is not +stated there, but only to be inferred from what is set down, that he was +stolen, and a little farther on we see Sancho mounted on the same ass, +without any reappearance of it. They say, too, that he forgot to state +what Sancho did with those hundred crowns that he found in the valise in +the Sierra Morena, as he never alludes to them again, and there are many +who would be glad to know what he did with them, or what he spent them +on, for it is one of the serious omissions of the work." + +"Senor Samson, I am not in a humour now for going into accounts or +explanations," said Sancho; "for there's a sinking of the stomach come +over me, and unless I doctor it with a couple of sups of the old stuff it +will put me on the thorn of Santa Lucia. I have it at home, and my old +woman is waiting for me; after dinner I'll come back, and will answer you +and all the world every question you may choose to ask, as well about the +loss of the ass as about the spending of the hundred crowns;" and without +another word or waiting for a reply he made off home. + +Don Quixote begged and entreated the bachelor to stay and do penance with +him. The bachelor accepted the invitation and remained, a couple of young +pigeons were added to the ordinary fare, at dinner they talked chivalry, +Carrasco fell in with his host's humour, the banquet came to an end, they +took their afternoon sleep, Sancho returned, and their conversation was +resumed. + +Chapter IV. - +In which Sancho Panza gives a satisfactory reply to the doubts and +questions of the bachelor Samson Carrasco, together with other matters +worth knowing and telling + +Sancho came back to Don Quixote's house, and returning to the late +subject of conversation, he said, "As to what Senor Samson said, that he +would like to know by whom, or how, or when my ass was stolen, I say in +reply that the same night we went into the Sierra Morena, flying from the +Holy Brotherhood after that unlucky adventure of the galley slaves, and +the other of the corpse that was going to Segovia, my master and I +ensconced ourselves in a thicket, and there, my master leaning on his +lance, and I seated on my Dapple, battered and weary with the late frays +we fell asleep as if it had been on four feather mattresses; and I in +particular slept so sound, that, whoever he was, he was able to come and +prop me up on four stakes, which he put under the four corners of the +pack-saddle in such a way that he left me mounted on it, and took away +Dapple from under me without my feeling it." + +"That is an easy matter," said Don Quixote, "and it is no new occurrence, +for the same thing happened to Sacripante at the siege of Albracca; the +famous thief, Brunello, by the same contrivance, took his horse from +between his legs." + +"Day came," continued Sancho, "and the moment I stirred the stakes gave +way and I fell to the ground with a mighty come down; I looked about for +the ass, but could not see him; the tears rushed to my eyes and I raised +such a lamentation that, if the author of our history has not put it in, +he may depend upon it he has left out a good thing. Some days after, I +know not how many, travelling with her ladyship the Princess Micomicona, +I saw my ass, and mounted upon him, in the dress of a gipsy, was that +Gines de Pasamonte, the great rogue and rascal that my master and I freed +from the chain." + +"That is not where the mistake is," replied Samson; "it is, that before +the ass has turned up, the author speaks of Sancho as being mounted on +it." + +"I don't know what to say to that," said Sancho, "unless that the +historian made a mistake, or perhaps it might be a blunder of the +printer's." + +"No doubt that's it," said Samson; "but what became of the hundred +crowns? Did they vanish?" + +To which Sancho answered, "I spent them for my own good, and my wife's, +and my children's, and it is they that have made my wife bear so +patiently all my wanderings on highways and byways, in the service of my +master, Don Quixote; for if after all this time I had come back to the +house without a rap and without the ass, it would have been a poor +look-out for me; and if anyone wants to know anything more about me, here +I am, ready to answer the king himself in person; and it is no affair of +anyone's whether I took or did not take, whether I spent or did not +spend; for the whacks that were given me in these journeys were to be +paid for in money, even if they were valued at no more than four +maravedis apiece, another hundred crowns would not pay me for half of +them. Let each look to himself and not try to make out white black, and +black white; for each of us is as God made him, aye, and often worse." + +"I will take care," said Carrasco, "to impress upon the author of the +history that, if he prints it again, he must not forget what worthy +Sancho has said, for it will raise it a good span higher." + +"Is there anything else to correct in the history, senor bachelor?" asked +Don Quixote. + +"No doubt there is," replied he; "but not anything that will be of the +same importance as those I have mentioned." + +"Does the author promise a second part at all?" said Don Quixote. + +"He does promise one," replied Samson; "but he says he has not found it, +nor does he know who has got it; and we cannot say whether it will appear +or not; and so, on that head, as some say that no second part has ever +been good, and others that enough has been already written about Don +Quixote, it is thought there will be no second part; though some, who are +jovial rather than saturnine, say, 'Let us have more Quixotades, let Don +Quixote charge and Sancho chatter, and no matter what it may turn out, we +shall be satisfied with that.'" + +"And what does the author mean to do?" said Don Quixote. + +"What?" replied Samson; "why, as soon as he has found the history which +he is now searching for with extraordinary diligence, he will at once +give it to the press, moved more by the profit that may accrue to him +from doing so than by any thought of praise." + +Whereat Sancho observed, "The author looks for money and profit, does he? +It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry, +with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are +never finished as perfectly as they ought to be. Let master Moor, or +whatever he is, pay attention to what he is doing, and I and my master +will give him as much grouting ready to his hand, in the way of +adventures and accidents of all sorts, as would make up not only one +second part, but a hundred. The good man fancies, no doubt, that we are +fast asleep in the straw here, but let him hold up our feet to be shod +and he will see which foot it is we go lame on. All I say is, that if my +master would take my advice, we would be now afield, redressing outrages +and righting wrongs, as is the use and custom of good knights-errant." + +Sancho had hardly uttered these words when the neighing of Rocinante fell +upon their ears, which neighing Don Quixote accepted as a happy omen, and +he resolved to make another sally in three or four days from that time. +Announcing his intention to the bachelor, he asked his advice as to the +quarter in which he ought to commence his expedition, and the bachelor +replied that in his opinion he ought to go to the kingdom of Aragon, and +the city of Saragossa, where there were to be certain solemn joustings at +the festival of St. George, at which he might win renown above all the +knights of Aragon, which would be winning it above all the knights of the +world. He commended his very praiseworthy and gallant resolution, but +admonished him to proceed with greater caution in encountering dangers, +because his life did not belong to him, but to all those who had need of +him to protect and aid them in their misfortunes. + +"There's where it is, what I abominate, Senor Samson," said Sancho here; +"my master will attack a hundred armed men as a greedy boy would half a +dozen melons. Body of the world, senor bachelor! there is a time to +attack and a time to retreat, and it is not to be always 'Santiago, and +close Spain!' Moreover, I have heard it said (and I think by my master +himself, if I remember rightly) that the mean of valour lies between the +extremes of cowardice and rashness; and if that be so, I don't want him +to fly without having good reason, or to attack when the odds make it +better not. But, above all things, I warn my master that if he is to take +me with him it must be on the condition that he is to do all the +fighting, and that I am not to be called upon to do anything except what +concerns keeping him clean and comfortable; in this I will dance +attendance on him readily; but to expect me to draw sword, even against +rascally churls of the hatchet and hood, is idle. I don't set up to be a +fighting man, Senor Samson, but only the best and most loyal squire that +ever served knight-errant; and if my master Don Quixote, in consideration +of my many faithful services, is pleased to give me some island of the +many his worship says one may stumble on in these parts, I will take it +as a great favour; and if he does not give it to me, I was born like +everyone else, and a man must not live in dependence on anyone except +God; and what is more, my bread will taste as well, and perhaps even +better, without a government than if I were a governor; and how do I know +but that in these governments the devil may have prepared some trip for +me, to make me lose my footing and fall and knock my grinders out? Sancho +I was born and Sancho I mean to die. But for all that, if heaven were to +make me a fair offer of an island or something else of the kind, without +much trouble and without much risk, I am not such a fool as to refuse it; +for they say, too, 'when they offer thee a heifer, run with a halter; and +'when good luck comes to thee, take it in.'" + +"Brother Sancho," said Carrasco, "you have spoken like a professor; but, +for all that, put your trust in God and in Senor Don Quixote, for he will +give you a kingdom, not to say an island." + +"It is all the same, be it more or be it less," replied Sancho; "though I +can tell Senor Carrasco that my master would not throw the kingdom he +might give me into a sack all in holes; for I have felt my own pulse and +I find myself sound enough to rule kingdoms and govern islands; and I +have before now told my master as much." + +"Take care, Sancho," said Samson; "honours change manners, and perhaps +when you find yourself a governor you won't know the mother that bore +you." + +"That may hold good of those that are born in the ditches," said Sancho, +"not of those who have the fat of an old Christian four fingers deep on +their souls, as I have. Nay, only look at my disposition, is that likely +to show ingratitude to anyone?" + +"God grant it," said Don Quixote; "we shall see when the government +comes; and I seem to see it already." + +He then begged the bachelor, if he were a poet, to do him the favour of +composing some verses for him conveying the farewell he meant to take of +his lady Dulcinea del Toboso, and to see that a letter of her name was +placed at the beginning of each line, so that, at the end of the verses, +"Dulcinea del Toboso" might be read by putting together the first +letters. The bachelor replied that although he was not one of the famous +poets of Spain, who were, they said, only three and a half, he would not +fail to compose the required verses; though he saw a great difficulty in +the task, as the letters which made up the name were seventeen; so, if he +made four ballad stanzas of four lines each, there would be a letter +over, and if he made them of five, what they called decimas or +redondillas, there were three letters short; nevertheless he would try to +drop a letter as well as he could, so that the name "Dulcinea del Toboso" +might be got into four ballad stanzas. + +"It must be, by some means or other," said Don Quixote, "for unless the +name stands there plain and manifest, no woman would believe the verses +were made for her." + +They agreed upon this, and that the departure should take place in three +days from that time. Don Quixote charged the bachelor to keep it a +secret, especially from the curate and Master Nicholas, and from his +niece and the housekeeper, lest they should prevent the execution of his +praiseworthy and valiant purpose. Carrasco promised all, and then took +his leave, charging Don Quixote to inform him of his good or evil +fortunes whenever he had an opportunity; and thus they bade each other +farewell, and Sancho went away to make the necessary preparations for +their expedition. + +Chapter V. - +Of the shrewd and droll conversation that passed between Sancho Panza and +his wife Teresa Panza, and other matters worthy of being duly recorded + +The translator of this history, when he comes to write this fifth +chapter, says that he considers it apocryphal, because in it Sancho Panza +speaks in a style unlike that which might have been expected from his +limited intelligence, and says things so subtle that he does not think it +possible he could have conceived them; however, desirous of doing what +his task imposed upon him, he was unwilling to leave it untranslated, and +therefore he went on to say: + +Sancho came home in such glee and spirits that his wife noticed his +happiness a bowshot off, so much so that it made her ask him, "What have +you got, Sancho friend, that you are so glad?" + +To which he replied, "Wife, if it were God's will, I should be very glad +not to be so well pleased as I show myself." + +"I don't understand you, husband," said she, "and I don't know what you +mean by saying you would be glad, if it were God's will, not to be well +pleased; for, fool as I am, I don't know how one can find pleasure in not +having it." + +"Hark ye, Teresa," replied Sancho, "I am glad because I have made up my +mind to go back to the service of my master Don Quixote, who means to go +out a third time to seek for adventures; and I am going with him again, +for my necessities will have it so, and also the hope that cheers me with +the thought that I may find another hundred crowns like those we have +spent; though it makes me sad to have to leave thee and the children; and +if God would be pleased to let me have my daily bread, dry-shod and at +home, without taking me out into the byways and cross-roads--and he could +do it at small cost by merely willing it--it is clear my happiness would +be more solid and lasting, for the happiness I have is mingled with +sorrow at leaving thee; so that I was right in saying I would be glad, if +it were God's will, not to be well pleased." + +"Look here, Sancho," said Teresa; "ever since you joined on to a +knight-errant you talk in such a roundabout way that there is no +understanding you." + +"It is enough that God understands me, wife," replied Sancho; "for he is +the understander of all things; that will do; but mind, sister, you must +look to Dapple carefully for the next three days, so that he may be fit +to take arms; double his feed, and see to the pack-saddle and other +harness, for it is not to a wedding we are bound, but to go round the +world, and play at give and take with giants and dragons and monsters, +and hear hissings and roarings and bellowings and howlings; and even all +this would be lavender, if we had not to reckon with Yanguesans and +enchanted Moors." + +"I know well enough, husband," said Teresa, "that squires-errant don't +eat their bread for nothing, and so I will be always praying to our Lord +to deliver you speedily from all that hard fortune." + +"I can tell you, wife," said Sancho, "if I did not expect to see myself +governor of an island before long, I would drop down dead on the spot." + +"Nay, then, husband," said Teresa; "let the hen live, though it be with +her pip, live, and let the devil take all the governments in the world; +you came out of your mother's womb without a government, you have lived +until now without a government, and when it is God's will you will go, or +be carried, to your grave without a government. How many there are in the +world who live without a government, and continue to live all the same, +and are reckoned in the number of the people. The best sauce in the world +is hunger, and as the poor are never without that, they always eat with a +relish. But mind, Sancho, if by good luck you should find yourself with +some government, don't forget me and your children. Remember that +Sanchico is now full fifteen, and it is right he should go to school, if +his uncle the abbot has a mind to have him trained for the Church. +Consider, too, that your daughter Mari-Sancha will not die of grief if we +marry her; for I have my suspicions that she is as eager to get a husband +as you to get a government; and, after all, a daughter looks better ill +married than well whored." + +"By my faith," replied Sancho, "if God brings me to get any sort of a +government, I intend, wife, to make such a high match for Mari-Sancha +that there will be no approaching her without calling her 'my lady." + +"Nay, Sancho," returned Teresa; "marry her to her equal, that is the +safest plan; for if you put her out of wooden clogs into high-heeled +shoes, out of her grey flannel petticoat into hoops and silk gowns, out +of the plain 'Marica' and 'thou,' into 'Dona So-and-so' and 'my lady,' +the girl won't know where she is, and at every turn she will fall into a +thousand blunders that will show the thread of her coarse homespun +stuff." + +"Tut, you fool," said Sancho; "it will be only to practise it for two or +three years; and then dignity and decorum will fit her as easily as a +glove; and if not, what matter? Let her he 'my lady,' and never mind what +happens." + +"Keep to your own station, Sancho," replied Teresa; "don't try to raise +yourself higher, and bear in mind the proverb that says, 'wipe the nose +of your neigbbour's son, and take him into your house.' A fine thing it +would be, indeed, to marry our Maria to some great count or grand +gentleman, who, when the humour took him, would abuse her and call her +clown-bred and clodhopper's daughter and spinning wench. I have not been +bringing up my daughter for that all this time, I can tell you, husband. +Do you bring home money, Sancho, and leave marrying her to my care; there +is Lope Tocho, Juan Tocho's son, a stout, sturdy young fellow that we +know, and I can see he does not look sour at the girl; and with him, one +of our own sort, she will be well married, and we shall have her always +under our eyes, and be all one family, parents and children, +grandchildren and sons-in-law, and the peace and blessing of God will +dwell among us; so don't you go marrying her in those courts and grand +palaces where they won't know what to make of her, or she what to make of +herself." + +"Why, you idiot and wife for Barabbas," said Sancho, "what do you mean by +trying, without why or wherefore, to keep me from marrying my daughter to +one who will give me grandchildren that will be called 'your lordship'? +Look ye, Teresa, I have always heard my elders say that he who does not +know how to take advantage of luck when it comes to him, has no right to +complain if it gives him the go-by; and now that it is knocking at our +door, it will not do to shut it out; let us go with the favouring breeze +that blows upon us." + +It is this sort of talk, and what Sancho says lower down, that made the +translator of the history say he considered this chapter apocryphal. + +"Don't you see, you animal," continued Sancho, "that it will be well for +me to drop into some profitable government that will lift us out of the +mire, and marry Mari-Sancha to whom I like; and you yourself will find +yourself called 'Dona Teresa Panza,' and sitting in church on a fine +carpet and cushions and draperies, in spite and in defiance of all the +born ladies of the town? No, stay as you are, growing neither greater nor +less, like a tapestry figure--Let us say no more about it, for Sanchica +shall be a countess, say what you will." + +"Are you sure of all you say, husband?" replied Teresa. "Well, for all +that, I am afraid this rank of countess for my daughter will be her ruin. +You do as you like, make a duchess or a princess of her, but I can tell +you it will not be with my will and consent. I was always a lover of +equality, brother, and I can't bear to see people give themselves airs +without any right. They called me Teresa at my baptism, a plain, simple +name, without any additions or tags or fringes of Dons or Donas; Cascajo +was my father's name, and as I am your wife, I am called Teresa Panza, +though by right I ought to be called Teresa Cascajo; but 'kings go where +laws like,' and I am content with this name without having the 'Don' put +on top of it to make it so heavy that I cannot carry it; and I don't want +to make people talk about me when they see me go dressed like a countess +or governor's wife; for they will say at once, 'See what airs the slut +gives herself! Only yesterday she was always spinning flax, and used to +go to mass with the tail of her petticoat over her head instead of a +mantle, and there she goes to-day in a hooped gown with her broaches and +airs, as if we didn't know her!' If God keeps me in my seven senses, or +five, or whatever number I have, I am not going to bring myself to such a +pass; go you, brother, and be a government or an island man, and swagger +as much as you like; for by the soul of my mother, neither my daughter +nor I are going to stir a step from our village; a respectable woman +should have a broken leg and keep at home; and to be busy at something is +a virtuous damsel's holiday; be off to your adventures along with your +Don Quixote, and leave us to our misadventures, for God will mend them +for us according as we deserve it. I don't know, I'm sure, who fixed the +'Don' to him, what neither his father nor grandfather ever had." + +"I declare thou hast a devil of some sort in thy body!" said Sancho. "God +help thee, what a lot of things thou hast strung together, one after the +other, without head or tail! What have Cascajo, and the broaches and the +proverbs and the airs, to do with what I say? Look here, fool and dolt +(for so I may call you, when you don't understand my words, and run away +from good fortune), if I had said that my daughter was to throw herself +down from a tower, or go roaming the world, as the Infanta Dona Urraca +wanted to do, you would be right in not giving way to my will; but if in +an instant, in less than the twinkling of an eye, I put the 'Don' and 'my +lady' on her back, and take her out of the stubble, and place her under a +canopy, on a dais, and on a couch, with more velvet cushions than all the +Almohades of Morocco ever had in their family, why won't you consent and +fall in with my wishes?" + +"Do you know why, husband?" replied Teresa; "because of the proverb that +says 'who covers thee, discovers thee.' At the poor man people only throw +a hasty glance; on the rich man they fix their eyes; and if the said rich +man was once on a time poor, it is then there is the sneering and the +tattle and spite of backbiters; and in the streets here they swarm as +thick as bees." + +"Look here, Teresa," said Sancho, "and listen to what I am now going to +say to you; maybe you never heard it in all your life; and I do not give +my own notions, for what I am about to say are the opinions of his +reverence the preacher, who preached in this town last Lent, and who +said, if I remember rightly, that all things present that our eyes +behold, bring themselves before us, and remain and fix themselves on our +memory much better and more forcibly than things past." + +These observations which Sancho makes here are the other ones on account +of which the translator says he regards this chapter as apocryphal, +inasmuch as they are beyond Sancho's capacity. + +"Whence it arises," he continued, "that when we see any person well +dressed and making a figure with rich garments and retinue of servants, +it seems to lead and impel us perforce to respect him, though memory may +at the same moment recall to us some lowly condition in which we have +seen him, but which, whether it may have been poverty or low birth, being +now a thing of the past, has no existence; while the only thing that has +any existence is what we see before us; and if this person whom fortune +has raised from his original lowly state (these were the very words the +padre used) to his present height of prosperity, be well bred, generous, +courteous to all, without seeking to vie with those whose nobility is of +ancient date, depend upon it, Teresa, no one will remember what he was, +and everyone will respect what he is, except indeed the envious, from +whom no fair fortune is safe." + +"I do not understand you, husband," replied Teresa; "do as you like, and +don't break my head with any more speechifying and rethoric; and if you +have revolved to do what you say-" + +"Resolved, you should say, woman," said Sancho, "not revolved." + +"Don't set yourself to wrangle with me, husband," said Teresa; "I speak +as God pleases, and don't deal in out-of-the-way phrases; and I say if +you are bent upon having a government, take your son Sancho with you, and +teach him from this time on how to hold a government; for sons ought to +inherit and learn the trades of their fathers." + +"As soon as I have the government," said Sancho, "I will send for him by +post, and I will send thee money, of which I shall have no lack, for +there is never any want of people to lend it to governors when they have +not got it; and do thou dress him so as to hide what he is and make him +look what he is to be." + +"You send the money," said Teresa, "and I'll dress him up for you as fine +as you please." + +"Then we are agreed that our daughter is to be a countess," said Sancho. + +"The day that I see her a countess," replied Teresa, "it will be the same +to me as if I was burying her; but once more I say do as you please, for +we women are born to this burden of being obedient to our husbands, +though they be dogs;" and with this she began to weep in earnest, as if +she already saw Sanchica dead and buried. + +Sancho consoled her by saying that though he must make her a countess, he +would put it off as long as possible. Here their conversation came to an +end, and Sancho went back to see Don Quixote, and make arrangements for +their departure. + +Chapter VI. - +Of what took place between Don Quixote and his niece and housekeeper; one +of the most important chapters in the whole history + +While Sancho Panza and his wife, Teresa Cascajo, held the above +irrelevant conversation, Don Quixote's niece and housekeeper were not +idle, for by a thousand signs they began to perceive that their uncle and +master meant to give them the slip the third time, and once more betake +himself to his, for them, ill-errant chivalry. They strove by all the +means in their power to divert him from such an unlucky scheme; but it +was all preaching in the desert and hammering cold iron. Nevertheless, +among many other representations made to him, the housekeeper said to +him, "In truth, master, if you do not keep still and stay quiet at home, +and give over roaming mountains and valleys like a troubled spirit, +looking for what they say are called adventures, but what I call +misfortunes, I shall have to make complaint to God and the king with loud +supplication to send some remedy." + +To which Don Quixote replied, "What answer God will give to your +complaints, housekeeper, I know not, nor what his Majesty will answer +either; I only know that if I were king I should decline to answer the +numberless silly petitions they present every day; for one of the +greatest among the many troubles kings have is being obliged to listen to +all and answer all, and therefore I should be sorry that any affairs of +mine should worry him." + +Whereupon the housekeeper said, "Tell us, senor, at his Majesty's court +are there no knights?" + +"There are," replied Don Quixote, "and plenty of them; and it is right +there should be, to set off the dignity of the prince, and for the +greater glory of the king's majesty." + +"Then might not your worship," said she, "be one of those that, without +stirring a step, serve their king and lord in his court?" + +"Recollect, my friend," said Don Quixote, "all knights cannot be +courtiers, nor can all courtiers be knights-errant, nor need they be. +There must be all sorts in the world; and though we may be all knights, +there is a great difference between one and another; for the courtiers, +without quitting their chambers, or the threshold of the court, range the +world over by looking at a map, without its costing them a farthing, and +without suffering heat or cold, hunger or thirst; but we, the true +knights-errant, measure the whole earth with our own feet, exposed to the +sun, to the cold, to the air, to the inclemencies of heaven, by day and +night, on foot and on horseback; nor do we only know enemies in pictures, +but in their own real shapes; and at all risks and on all occasions we +attack them, without any regard to childish points or rules of single +combat, whether one has or has not a shorter lance or sword, whether one +carries relics or any secret contrivance about him, whether or not the +sun is to be divided and portioned out, and other niceties of the sort +that are observed in set combats of man to man, that you know nothing +about, but I do. And you must know besides, that the true knight-errant, +though he may see ten giants, that not only touch the clouds with their +heads but pierce them, and that go, each of them, on two tall towers by +way of legs, and whose arms are like the masts of mighty ships, and each +eye like a great mill-wheel, and glowing brighter than a glass furnace, +must not on any account be dismayed by them. On the contrary, he must +attack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart, +and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have for +armour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder than +diamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascus +steel, or clubs studded with spikes also of steel, such as I have more +than once seen. All this I say, housekeeper, that you may see the +difference there is between the one sort of knight and the other; and it +would be well if there were no prince who did not set a higher value on +this second, or more properly speaking first, kind of knights-errant; +for, as we read in their histories, there have been some among them who +have been the salvation, not merely of one kingdom, but of many." + +"Ah, senor," here exclaimed the niece, "remember that all this you are +saying about knights-errant is fable and fiction; and their histories, if +indeed they were not burned, would deserve, each of them, to have a +sambenito put on it, or some mark by which it might be known as infamous +and a corrupter of good manners." + +"By the God that gives me life," said Don Quixote, "if thou wert not my +full niece, being daughter of my own sister, I would inflict a +chastisement upon thee for the blasphemy thou hast uttered that all the +world should ring with. What! can it be that a young hussy that hardly +knows how to handle a dozen lace-bobbins dares to wag her tongue and +criticise the histories of knights-errant? What would Senor Amadis say if +he heard of such a thing? He, however, no doubt would forgive thee, for +he was the most humble-minded and courteous knight of his time, and +moreover a great protector of damsels; but some there are that might have +heard thee, and it would not have been well for thee in that case; for +they are not all courteous or mannerly; some are ill-conditioned +scoundrels; nor is it everyone that calls himself a gentleman, that is so +in all respects; some are gold, others pinchbeck, and all look like +gentlemen, but not all can stand the touchstone of truth. There are men +of low rank who strain themselves to bursting to pass for gentlemen, and +high gentlemen who, one would fancy, were dying to pass for men of low +rank; the former raise themselves by their ambition or by their virtues, +the latter debase themselves by their lack of spirit or by their vices; +and one has need of experience and discernment to distinguish these two +kinds of gentlemen, so much alike in name and so different in conduct." + +"God bless me!" said the niece, "that you should know so much, +uncle--enough, if need be, to get up into a pulpit and go preach in the +streets--and yet that you should fall into a delusion so great and a +folly so manifest as to try to make yourself out vigorous when you are +old, strong when you are sickly, able to put straight what is crooked +when you yourself are bent by age, and, above all, a caballero when you +are not one; for though gentlefolk may be so, poor men are nothing of the +kind!" + +"There is a great deal of truth in what you say, niece," returned Don +Quixote, "and I could tell you somewhat about birth that would astonish +you; but, not to mix up things human and divine, I refrain. Look you, my +dears, all the lineages in the world (attend to what I am saying) can be +reduced to four sorts, which are these: those that had humble beginnings, +and went on spreading and extending themselves until they attained +surpassing greatness; those that had great beginnings and maintained +them, and still maintain and uphold the greatness of their origin; those, +again, that from a great beginning have ended in a point like a pyramid, +having reduced and lessened their original greatness till it has come to +nought, like the point of a pyramid, which, relatively to its base or +foundation, is nothing; and then there are those--and it is they that are +the most numerous--that have had neither an illustrious beginning nor a +remarkable mid-course, and so will have an end without a name, like an +ordinary plebeian line. Of the first, those that had an humble origin and +rose to the greatness they still preserve, the Ottoman house may serve as +an example, which from an humble and lowly shepherd, its founder, has +reached the height at which we now see it. For examples of the second +sort of lineage, that began with greatness and maintains it still without +adding to it, there are the many princes who have inherited the dignity, +and maintain themselves in their inheritance, without increasing or +diminishing it, keeping peacefully within the limits of their states. Of +those that began great and ended in a point, there are thousands of +examples, for all the Pharaohs and Ptolemies of Egypt, the Caesars of +Rome, and the whole herd (if I may such a word to them) of countless +princes, monarchs, lords, Medes, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and +barbarians, all these lineages and lordships have ended in a point and +come to nothing, they themselves as well as their founders, for it would +be impossible now to find one of their descendants, and, even should we +find one, it would be in some lowly and humble condition. Of plebeian +lineages I have nothing to say, save that they merely serve to swell the +number of those that live, without any eminence to entitle them to any +fame or praise beyond this. From all I have said I would have you gather, +my poor innocents, that great is the confusion among lineages, and that +only those are seen to be great and illustrious that show themselves so +by the virtue, wealth, and generosity of their possessors. I have said +virtue, wealth, and generosity, because a great man who is vicious will +be a great example of vice, and a rich man who is not generous will be +merely a miserly beggar; for the possessor of wealth is not made happy by +possessing it, but by spending it, and not by spending as he pleases, but +by knowing how to spend it well. The poor gentleman has no way of showing +that he is a gentleman but by virtue, by being affable, well-bred, +courteous, gentle-mannered, and kindly, not haughty, arrogant, or +censorious, but above all by being charitable; for by two maravedis given +with a cheerful heart to the poor, he will show himself as generous as he +who distributes alms with bell-ringing, and no one that perceives him to +be endowed with the virtues I have named, even though he know him not, +will fail to recognise and set him down as one of good blood; and it +would be strange were it not so; praise has ever been the reward of +virtue, and those who are virtuous cannot fail to receive commendation. +There are two roads, my daughters, by which men may reach wealth and +honours; one is that of letters, the other that of arms. I have more of +arms than of letters in my composition, and, judging by my inclination to +arms, was born under the influence of the planet Mars. I am, therefore, +in a measure constrained to follow that road, and by it I must travel in +spite of all the world, and it will be labour in vain for you to urge me +to resist what heaven wills, fate ordains, reason requires, and, above +all, my own inclination favours; for knowing as I do the countless toils +that are the accompaniments of knight-errantry, I know, too, the infinite +blessings that are attained by it; I know that the path of virtue is very +narrow, and the road of vice broad and spacious; I know their ends and +goals are different, for the broad and easy road of vice ends in death, +and the narrow and toilsome one of virtue in life, and not transitory +life, but in that which has no end; I know, as our great Castilian poet +says, that-- + +It is by rugged paths like these they go +That scale the heights of immortality, +Unreached by those that falter here below." + +"Woe is me!" exclaimed the niece, "my lord is a poet, too! He knows +everything, and he can do everything; I will bet, if he chose to turn +mason, he could make a house as easily as a cage." + +"I can tell you, niece," replied Don Quixote, "if these chivalrous +thoughts did not engage all my faculties, there would be nothing that I +could not do, nor any sort of knickknack that would not come from my +hands, particularly cages and tooth-picks." + +At this moment there came a knocking at the door, and when they asked who +was there, Sancho Panza made answer that it was he. The instant the +housekeeper knew who it was, she ran to hide herself so as not to see +him; in such abhorrence did she hold him. The niece let him in, and his +master Don Quixote came forward to receive him with open arms, and the +pair shut themselves up in his room, where they had another conversation +not inferior to the previous one. + +Chapter VII. - +Of what passed between Don Quixote and his Squire, together with other +very notable incidents + +The instant the housekeeper saw Sancho Panza shut himself in with her +master, she guessed what they were about; and suspecting that the result +of the consultation would be a resolve to undertake a third sally, she +seized her mantle, and in deep anxiety and distress, ran to find the +bachelor Samson Carrasco, as she thought that, being a well-spoken man, +and a new friend of her master's, he might be able to persuade him to +give up any such crazy notion. She found him pacing the patio of his +house, and, perspiring and flurried, she fell at his feet the moment she +saw him. + +Carrasco, seeing how distressed and overcome she was, said to her, "What +is this, mistress housekeeper? What has happened to you? One would think +you heart-broken." + +"Nothing, Senor Samson," said she, "only that my master is breaking out, +plainly breaking out." + +"Whereabouts is he breaking out, senora?" asked Samson; "has any part of +his body burst?" + +"He is only breaking out at the door of his madness," she replied; "I +mean, dear senor bachelor, that he is going to break out again (and this +will be the third time) to hunt all over the world for what he calls +ventures, though I can't make out why he gives them that name. The first +time he was brought back to us slung across the back of an ass, and +belaboured all over; and the second time he came in an ox-cart, shut up +in a cage, in which he persuaded himself he was enchanted, and the poor +creature was in such a state that the mother that bore him would not have +known him; lean, yellow, with his eyes sunk deep in the cells of his +skull; so that to bring him round again, ever so little, cost me more +than six hundred eggs, as God knows, and all the world, and my hens too, +that won't let me tell a lie." + +"That I can well believe," replied the bachelor, "for they are so good +and so fat, and so well-bred, that they would not say one thing for +another, though they were to burst for it. In short then, mistress +housekeeper, that is all, and there is nothing the matter, except what it +is feared Don Quixote may do?" + +"No, senor," said she. + +"Well then," returned the bachelor, "don't be uneasy, but go home in +peace; get me ready something hot for breakfast, and while you are on the +way say the prayer of Santa Apollonia, that is if you know it; for I will +come presently and you will see miracles." + +"Woe is me," cried the housekeeper, "is it the prayer of Santa Apollonia +you would have me say? That would do if it was the toothache my master +had; but it is in the brains, what he has got." + +"I know what I am saying, mistress housekeeper; go, and don't set +yourself to argue with me, for you know I am a bachelor of Salamanca, and +one can't be more of a bachelor than that," replied Carrasco; and with +this the housekeeper retired, and the bachelor went to look for the +curate, and arrange with him what will be told in its proper place. + +While Don Quixote and Sancho were shut up together, they had a discussion +which the history records with great precision and scrupulous exactness. +Sancho said to his master, "Senor, I have educed my wife to let me go +with your worship wherever you choose to take me." + +"Induced, you should say, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "not educed." + +"Once or twice, as well as I remember," replied Sancho, "I have begged of +your worship not to mend my words, if so be as you understand what I mean +by them; and if you don't understand them to say 'Sancho,' or 'devil,' 'I +don't understand thee; and if I don't make my meaning plain, then you may +correct me, for I am so focile-" + +"I don't understand thee, Sancho," said Don Quixote at once; "for I know +not what 'I am so focile' means." + +"'So focile' means I am so much that way," replied Sancho. + +"I understand thee still less now," said Don Quixote. + +"Well, if you can't understand me," said Sancho, "I don't know how to put +it; I know no more, God help me." + +"Oh, now I have hit it," said Don Quixote; "thou wouldst say thou art so +docile, tractable, and gentle that thou wilt take what I say to thee, and +submit to what I teach thee." + +"I would bet," said Sancho, "that from the very first you understood me, +and knew what I meant, but you wanted to put me out that you might hear +me make another couple of dozen blunders." + +"May be so," replied Don Quixote; "but to come to the point, what does +Teresa say?" + +"Teresa says," replied Sancho, "that I should make sure with your +worship, and 'let papers speak and beards be still,' for 'he who binds +does not wrangle,' since one 'take' is better than two 'I'll give +thee's;' and I say a woman's advice is no great thing, and he who won't +take it is a fool." + +"And so say I," said Don Quixote; "continue, Sancho my friend; go on; you +talk pearls to-day." + +"The fact is," continued Sancho, "that, as your worship knows better than +I do, we are all of us liable to death, and to-day we are, and to-morrow +we are not, and the lamb goes as soon as the sheep, and nobody can +promise himself more hours of life in this world than God may be pleased +to give him; for death is deaf, and when it comes to knock at our life's +door, it is always urgent, and neither prayers, nor struggles, nor +sceptres, nor mitres, can keep it back, as common talk and report say, +and as they tell us from the pulpits every day." + +"All that is very true," said Don Quixote; "but I cannot make out what +thou art driving at." + +"What I am driving at," said Sancho, "is that your worship settle some +fixed wages for me, to be paid monthly while I am in your service, and +that the same he paid me out of your estate; for I don't care to stand on +rewards which either come late, or ill, or never at all; God help me with +my own. In short, I would like to know what I am to get, be it much or +little; for the hen will lay on one egg, and many littles make a much, +and so long as one gains something there is nothing lost. To be sure, if +it should happen (what I neither believe nor expect) that your worship +were to give me that island you have promised me, I am not so ungrateful +nor so grasping but that I would be willing to have the revenue of such +island valued and stopped out of my wages in due promotion." + +"Sancho, my friend," replied Don Quixote, "sometimes proportion may be as +good as promotion." + +"I see," said Sancho; "I'll bet I ought to have said proportion, and not +promotion; but it is no matter, as your worship has understood me." + +"And so well understood," returned Don Quixote, "that I have seen into +the depths of thy thoughts, and know the mark thou art shooting at with +the countless shafts of thy proverbs. Look here, Sancho, I would readily +fix thy wages if I had ever found any instance in the histories of the +knights-errant to show or indicate, by the slightest hint, what their +squires used to get monthly or yearly; but I have read all or the best +part of their histories, and I cannot remember reading of any +knight-errant having assigned fixed wages to his squire; I only know that +they all served on reward, and that when they least expected it, if good +luck attended their masters, they found themselves recompensed with an +island or something equivalent to it, or at the least they were left with +a title and lordship. If with these hopes and additional inducements you, +Sancho, please to return to my service, well and good; but to suppose +that I am going to disturb or unhinge the ancient usage of +knight-errantry, is all nonsense. And so, my Sancho, get you back to your +house and explain my intentions to your Teresa, and if she likes and you +like to be on reward with me, bene quidem; if not, we remain friends; for +if the pigeon-house does not lack food, it will not lack pigeons; and +bear in mind, my son, that a good hope is better than a bad holding, and +a good grievance better than a bad compensation. I speak in this way, +Sancho, to show you that I can shower down proverbs just as well as +yourself; and in short, I mean to say, and I do say, that if you don't +like to come on reward with me, and run the same chance that I run, God +be with you and make a saint of you; for I shall find plenty of squires +more obedient and painstaking, and not so thickheaded or talkative as you +are." + +When Sancho heard his master's firm, resolute language, a cloud came over +the sky with him and the wings of his heart drooped, for he had made sure +that his master would not go without him for all the wealth of the world; +and as he stood there dumbfoundered and moody, Samson Carrasco came in +with the housekeeper and niece, who were anxious to hear by what +arguments he was about to dissuade their master from going to seek +adventures. The arch wag Samson came forward, and embracing him as he had +done before, said with a loud voice, "O flower of knight-errantry! O +shining light of arms! O honour and mirror of the Spanish nation! may God +Almighty in his infinite power grant that any person or persons, who +would impede or hinder thy third sally, may find no way out of the +labyrinth of their schemes, nor ever accomplish what they most desire!" +And then, turning to the housekeeper, he said, "Mistress housekeeper may +just as well give over saying the prayer of Santa Apollonia, for I know +it is the positive determination of the spheres that Senor Don Quixote +shall proceed to put into execution his new and lofty designs; and I +should lay a heavy burden on my conscience did I not urge and persuade +this knight not to keep the might of his strong arm and the virtue of his +valiant spirit any longer curbed and checked, for by his inactivity he is +defrauding the world of the redress of wrongs, of the protection of +orphans, of the honour of virgins, of the aid of widows, and of the +support of wives, and other matters of this kind appertaining, belonging, +proper and peculiar to the order of knight-errantry. On, then, my lord +Don Quixote, beautiful and brave, let your worship and highness set out +to-day rather than to-morrow; and if anything be needed for the execution +of your purpose, here am I ready in person and purse to supply the want; +and were it requisite to attend your magnificence as squire, I should +esteem it the happiest good fortune." + +At this, Don Quixote, turning to Sancho, said, "Did I not tell thee, +Sancho, there would be squires enough and to spare for me? See now who +offers to become one; no less than the illustrious bachelor Samson +Carrasco, the perpetual joy and delight of the courts of the Salamancan +schools, sound in body, discreet, patient under heat or cold, hunger or +thirst, with all the qualifications requisite to make a knight-errant's +squire! But heaven forbid that, to gratify my own inclination, I should +shake or shatter this pillar of letters and vessel of the sciences, and +cut down this towering palm of the fair and liberal arts. Let this new +Samson remain in his own country, and, bringing honour to it, bring +honour at the same time on the grey heads of his venerable parents; for I +will be content with any squire that comes to hand, as Sancho does not +deign to accompany me." + +"I do deign," said Sancho, deeply moved and with tears in his eyes; "it +shall not be said of me, master mine," he continued, "'the bread eaten +and the company dispersed.' Nay, I come of no ungrateful stock, for all +the world knows, but particularly my own town, who the Panzas from whom I +am descended were; and, what is more, I know and have learned, by many +good words and deeds, your worship's desire to show me favour; and if I +have been bargaining more or less about my wages, it was only to please +my wife, who, when she sets herself to press a point, no hammer drives +the hoops of a cask as she drives one to do what she wants; but, after +all, a man must be a man, and a woman a woman; and as I am a man anyhow, +which I can't deny, I will be one in my own house too, let who will take +it amiss; and so there's nothing more to do but for your worship to make +your will with its codicil in such a way that it can't be provoked, and +let us set out at once, to save Senor Samson's soul from suffering, as he +says his conscience obliges him to persuade your worship to sally out +upon the world a third time; so I offer again to serve your worship +faithfully and loyally, as well and better than all the squires that +served knights-errant in times past or present." + +The bachelor was filled with amazement when he heard Sancho's phraseology +and style of talk, for though he had read the first part of his master's +history he never thought that he could be so droll as he was there +described; but now, hearing him talk of a "will and codicil that could +not be provoked," instead of "will and codicil that could not be +revoked," he believed all he had read of him, and set him down as one of +the greatest simpletons of modern times; and he said to himself that two +such lunatics as master and man the world had never seen. In fine, Don +Quixote and Sancho embraced one another and made friends, and by the +advice and with the approval of the great Carrasco, who was now their +oracle, it was arranged that their departure should take place three days +thence, by which time they could have all that was requisite for the +journey ready, and procure a closed helmet, which Don Quixote said he +must by all means take. Samson offered him one, as he knew a friend of +his who had it would not refuse it to him, though it was more dingy with +rust and mildew than bright and clean like burnished steel. + +The curses which both housekeeper and niece poured out on the bachelor +were past counting; they tore their hair, they clawed their faces, and in +the style of the hired mourners that were once in fashion, they raised a +lamentation over the departure of their master and uncle, as if it had +been his death. Samson's intention in persuading him to sally forth once +more was to do what the history relates farther on; all by the advice of +the curate and barber, with whom he had previously discussed the subject. +Finally, then, during those three days, Don Quixote and Sancho provided +themselves with what they considered necessary, and Sancho having +pacified his wife, and Don Quixote his niece and housekeeper, at +nightfall, unseen by anyone except the bachelor, who thought fit to +accompany them half a league out of the village, they set out for El +Toboso, Don Quixote on his good Rocinante and Sancho on his old Dapple, +his alforjas furnished with certain matters in the way of victuals, and +his purse with money that Don Quixote gave him to meet emergencies. +Samson embraced him, and entreated him to let him hear of his good or +evil fortunes, so that he might rejoice over the former or condole with +him over the latter, as the laws of friendship required. Don Quixote +promised him he would do so, and Samson returned to the village, and the +other two took the road for the great city of El Toboso. + +Chapter VIII. - +Wherein is related what befell don quixote on his way to see his lady +Dulcinea Del Toboso + +"Blessed be Allah the all-powerful!" says Hamete Benengeli on beginning +this eighth chapter; "blessed be Allah!" he repeats three times; and he +says he utters these thanksgivings at seeing that he has now got Don +Quixote and Sancho fairly afield, and that the readers of his delightful +history may reckon that the achievements and humours of Don Quixote and +his squire are now about to begin; and he urges them to forget the former +chivalries of the ingenious gentleman and to fix their eyes on those that +are to come, which now begin on the road to El Toboso, as the others +began on the plains of Montiel; nor is it much that he asks in +consideration of all he promises, and so he goes on to say: + +Don Quixote and Sancho were left alone, and the moment Samson took his +departure, Rocinante began to neigh, and Dapple to sigh, which, by both +knight and squire, was accepted as a good sign and a very happy omen; +though, if the truth is to be told, the sighs and brays of Dapple were +louder than the neighings of the hack, from which Sancho inferred that +his good fortune was to exceed and overtop that of his master, building, +perhaps, upon some judicial astrology that he may have known, though the +history says nothing about it; all that can be said is, that when he +stumbled or fell, he was heard to say he wished he had not come out, for +by stumbling or falling there was nothing to be got but a damaged shoe or +a broken rib; and, fool as he was, he was not much astray in this. + +Said Don Quixote, "Sancho, my friend, night is drawing on upon us as we +go, and more darkly than will allow us to reach El Toboso by daylight; +for there I am resolved to go before I engage in another adventure, and +there I shall obtain the blessing and generous permission of the peerless +Dulcinea, with which permission I expect and feel assured that I shall +conclude and bring to a happy termination every perilous adventure; for +nothing in life makes knights-errant more valorous than finding +themselves favoured by their ladies." + +"So I believe," replied Sancho; "but I think it will be difficult for +your worship to speak with her or see her, at any rate where you will be +able to receive her blessing; unless, indeed, she throws it over the wall +of the yard where I saw her the time before, when I took her the letter +that told of the follies and mad things your worship was doing in the +heart of Sierra Morena." + +"Didst thou take that for a yard wall, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "where +or at which thou sawest that never sufficiently extolled grace and +beauty? It must have been the gallery, corridor, or portico of some rich +and royal palace." + +"It might have been all that," returned Sancho, "but to me it looked like +a wall, unless I am short of memory." + +"At all events, let us go there, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "for, so that +I see her, it is the same to me whether it be over a wall, or at a +window, or through the chink of a door, or the grate of a garden; for any +beam of the sun of her beauty that reaches my eyes will give light to my +reason and strength to my heart, so that I shall be unmatched and +unequalled in wisdom and valour." + +"Well, to tell the truth, senor," said Sancho, "when I saw that sun of +the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, it was not bright enough to throw out beams +at all; it must have been, that as her grace was sifting that wheat I +told you of, the thick dust she raised came before her face like a cloud +and dimmed it." + +"What! dost thou still persist, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "in saying, +thinking, believing, and maintaining that my lady Dulcinea was sifting +wheat, that being an occupation and task entirely at variance with what +is and should be the employment of persons of distinction, who are +constituted and reserved for other avocations and pursuits that show +their rank a bowshot off? Thou hast forgotten, O Sancho, those lines of +our poet wherein he paints for us how, in their crystal abodes, those +four nymphs employed themselves who rose from their loved Tagus and +seated themselves in a verdant meadow to embroider those tissues which +the ingenious poet there describes to us, how they were worked and woven +with gold and silk and pearls; and something of this sort must have been +the employment of my lady when thou sawest her, only that the spite which +some wicked enchanter seems to have against everything of mine changes +all those things that give me pleasure, and turns them into shapes unlike +their own; and so I fear that in that history of my achievements which +they say is now in print, if haply its author was some sage who is an +enemy of mine, he will have put one thing for another, mingling a +thousand lies with one truth, and amusing himself by relating +transactions which have nothing to do with the sequence of a true +history. O envy, root of all countless evils, and cankerworm of the +virtues! All the vices, Sancho, bring some kind of pleasure with them; +but envy brings nothing but irritation, bitterness, and rage." + +"So I say too," replied Sancho; "and I suspect in that legend or history +of us that the bachelor Samson Carrasco told us he saw, my honour goes +dragged in the dirt, knocked about, up and down, sweeping the streets, as +they say. And yet, on the faith of an honest man, I never spoke ill of +any enchanter, and I am not so well off that I am to be envied; to be +sure, I am rather sly, and I have a certain spice of the rogue in me; but +all is covered by the great cloak of my simplicity, always natural and +never acted; and if I had no other merit save that I believe, as I always +do, firmly and truly in God, and all the holy Roman Catholic Church holds +and believes, and that I am a mortal enemy of the Jews, the historians +ought to have mercy on me and treat me well in their writings. But let +them say what they like; naked was I born, naked I find myself, I neither +lose nor gain; nay, while I see myself put into a book and passed on from +hand to hand over the world, I don't care a fig, let them say what they +like of me." + +"That, Sancho," returned Don Quixote, "reminds me of what happened to a +famous poet of our own day, who, having written a bitter satire against +all the courtesan ladies, did not insert or name in it a certain lady of +whom it was questionable whether she was one or not. She, seeing she was +not in the list of the poet, asked him what he had seen in her that he +did not include her in the number of the others, telling him he must add +to his satire and put her in the new part, or else look out for the +consequences. The poet did as she bade him, and left her without a shred +of reputation, and she was satisfied by getting fame though it was +infamy. In keeping with this is what they relate of that shepherd who set +fire to the famous temple of Diana, by repute one of the seven wonders of +the world, and burned it with the sole object of making his name live in +after ages; and, though it was forbidden to name him, or mention his name +by word of mouth or in writing, lest the object of his ambition should be +attained, nevertheless it became known that he was called Erostratus. And +something of the same sort is what happened in the case of the great +emperor Charles V and a gentleman in Rome. The emperor was anxious to see +that famous temple of the Rotunda, called in ancient times the temple 'of +all the gods,' but now-a-days, by a better nomenclature, 'of all the +saints,' which is the best preserved building of all those of pagan +construction in Rome, and the one which best sustains the reputation of +mighty works and magnificence of its founders. It is in the form of a +half orange, of enormous dimensions, and well lighted, though no light +penetrates it save that which is admitted by a window, or rather round +skylight, at the top; and it was from this that the emperor examined the +building. A Roman gentleman stood by his side and explained to him the +skilful construction and ingenuity of the vast fabric and its wonderful +architecture, and when they had left the skylight he said to the emperor, +'A thousand times, your Sacred Majesty, the impulse came upon me to seize +your Majesty in my arms and fling myself down from yonder skylight, so as +to leave behind me in the world a name that would last for ever.' 'I am +thankful to you for not carrying such an evil thought into effect,' said +the emperor, 'and I shall give you no opportunity in future of again +putting your loyalty to the test; and I therefore forbid you ever to +speak to me or to be where I am; and he followed up these words by +bestowing a liberal bounty upon him. My meaning is, Sancho, that the +desire of acquiring fame is a very powerful motive. What, thinkest thou, +was it that flung Horatius in full armour down from the bridge into the +depths of the Tiber? What burned the hand and arm of Mutius? What +impelled Curtius to plunge into the deep burning gulf that opened in the +midst of Rome? What, in opposition to all the omens that declared against +him, made Julius Caesar cross the Rubicon? And to come to more modern +examples, what scuttled the ships, and left stranded and cut off the +gallant Spaniards under the command of the most courteous Cortes in the +New World? All these and a variety of other great exploits are, were and +will be, the work of fame that mortals desire as a reward and a portion +of the immortality their famous deeds deserve; though we Catholic +Christians and knights-errant look more to that future glory that is +everlasting in the ethereal regions of heaven than to the vanity of the +fame that is to be acquired in this present transitory life; a fame that, +however long it may last, must after all end with the world itself, which +has its own appointed end. So that, O Sancho, in what we do we must not +overpass the bounds which the Christian religion we profess has assigned +to us. We have to slay pride in giants, envy by generosity and nobleness +of heart, anger by calmness of demeanour and equanimity, gluttony and +sloth by the spareness of our diet and the length of our vigils, lust and +lewdness by the loyalty we preserve to those whom we have made the +mistresses of our thoughts, indolence by traversing the world in all +directions seeking opportunities of making ourselves, besides Christians, +famous knights. Such, Sancho, are the means by which we reach those +extremes of praise that fair fame carries with it." + +"All that your worship has said so far," said Sancho, "I have understood +quite well; but still I would be glad if your worship would dissolve a +doubt for me, which has just this minute come into my mind." + +"Solve, thou meanest, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "say on, in God's name, +and I will answer as well as I can." + +"Tell me, senor," Sancho went on to say, "those Julys or Augusts, and all +those venturous knights that you say are now dead--where are they now?" + +"The heathens," replied Don Quixote, "are, no doubt, in hell; the +Christians, if they were good Christians, are either in purgatory or in +heaven." + +"Very good," said Sancho; "but now I want to know--the tombs where the +bodies of those great lords are, have they silver lamps before them, or +are the walls of their chapels ornamented with crutches, winding-sheets, +tresses of hair, legs and eyes in wax? Or what are they ornamented with?" + +To which Don Quixote made answer: "The tombs of the heathens were +generally sumptuous temples; the ashes of Julius Caesar's body were +placed on the top of a stone pyramid of vast size, which they now call in +Rome Saint Peter's needle. The emperor Hadrian had for a tomb a castle as +large as a good-sized village, which they called the Moles Adriani, and +is now the castle of St. Angelo in Rome. The queen Artemisia buried her +husband Mausolus in a tomb which was reckoned one of the seven wonders of +the world; but none of these tombs, or of the many others of the +heathens, were ornamented with winding-sheets or any of those other +offerings and tokens that show that they who are buried there are +saints." + +"That's the point I'm coming to," said Sancho; "and now tell me, which is +the greater work, to bring a dead man to life or to kill a giant?" + +"The answer is easy," replied Don Quixote; "it is a greater work to bring +to life a dead man." + +"Now I have got you," said Sancho; "in that case the fame of them who +bring the dead to life, who give sight to the blind, cure cripples, +restore health to the sick, and before whose tombs there are lamps +burning, and whose chapels are filled with devout folk on their knees +adoring their relics be a better fame in this life and in the other than +that which all the heathen emperors and knights-errant that have ever +been in the world have left or may leave behind them?" + +"That I grant, too," said Don Quixote. + +"Then this fame, these favours, these privileges, or whatever you call +it," said Sancho, "belong to the bodies and relics of the saints who, +with the approbation and permission of our holy mother Church, have +lamps, tapers, winding-sheets, crutches, pictures, eyes and legs, by +means of which they increase devotion and add to their own Christian +reputation. Kings carry the bodies or relics of saints on their +shoulders, and kiss bits of their bones, and enrich and adorn their +oratories and favourite altars with them." + +"What wouldst thou have me infer from all thou hast said, Sancho?" asked +Don Quixote. + +"My meaning is," said Sancho, "let us set about becoming saints, and we +shall obtain more quickly the fair fame we are striving after; for you +know, senor, yesterday or the day before yesterday (for it is so lately +one may say so) they canonised and beatified two little barefoot friars, +and it is now reckoned the greatest good luck to kiss or touch the iron +chains with which they girt and tortured their bodies, and they are held +in greater veneration, so it is said, than the sword of Roland in the +armoury of our lord the King, whom God preserve. So that, senor, it is +better to be an humble little friar of no matter what order, than a +valiant knight-errant; with God a couple of dozen of penance lashings are +of more avail than two thousand lance-thrusts, be they given to giants, +or monsters, or dragons." + +"All that is true," returned Don Quixote, "but we cannot all be friars, +and many are the ways by which God takes his own to heaven; chivalry is a +religion, there are sainted knights in glory." + +"Yes," said Sancho, "but I have heard say that there are more friars in +heaven than knights-errant." + +"That," said Don Quixote, "is because those in religious orders are more +numerous than knights." + +"The errants are many," said Sancho. + +"Many," replied Don Quixote, "but few they who deserve the name of +knights." + +With these, and other discussions of the same sort, they passed that +night and the following day, without anything worth mention happening to +them, whereat Don Quixote was not a little dejected; but at length the +next day, at daybreak, they descried the great city of El Toboso, at the +sight of which Don Quixote's spirits rose and Sancho's fell, for he did +not know Dulcinea's house, nor in all his life had he ever seen her, any +more than his master; so that they were both uneasy, the one to see her, +the other at not having seen her, and Sancho was at a loss to know what +he was to do when his master sent him to El Toboso. In the end, Don +Quixote made up his mind to enter the city at nightfall, and they waited +until the time came among some oak trees that were near El Toboso; and +when the moment they had agreed upon arrived, they made their entrance +into the city, where something happened them that may fairly be called +something. + +Chapter IX. - +Wherein is related what will be seen there + +'Twas at the very midnight hour--more or less--when Don Quixote and +Sancho quitted the wood and entered El Toboso. The town was in deep +silence, for all the inhabitants were asleep, and stretched on the broad +of their backs, as the saying is. The night was darkish, though Sancho +would have been glad had it been quite dark, so as to find in the +darkness an excuse for his blundering. All over the place nothing was to +be heard except the barking of dogs, which deafened the ears of Don +Quixote and troubled the heart of Sancho. Now and then an ass brayed, +pigs grunted, cats mewed, and the various noises they made seemed louder +in the silence of the night; all which the enamoured knight took to be of +evil omen; nevertheless he said to Sancho, "Sancho, my son, lead on to +the palace of Dulcinea, it may be that we shall find her awake." + +"Body of the sun! what palace am I to lead to," said Sancho, "when what I +saw her highness in was only a very little house?" + +"Most likely she had then withdrawn into some small apartment of her +palace," said Don Quixote, "to amuse herself with damsels, as great +ladies and princesses are accustomed to do." + +"Senor," said Sancho, "if your worship will have it in spite of me that +the house of my lady Dulcinea is a palace, is this an hour, think you, to +find the door open; and will it be right for us to go knocking till they +hear us and open the door; making a disturbance and confusion all through +the household? Are we going, do you fancy, to the house of our wenches, +like gallants who come and knock and go in at any hour, however late it +may be?" + +"Let us first of all find out the palace for certain," replied Don +Quixote, "and then I will tell thee, Sancho, what we had best do; but +look, Sancho, for either I see badly, or that dark mass that one sees +from here should be Dulcinea's palace." + +"Then let your worship lead the way," said Sancho, "perhaps it may be so; +though I see it with my eyes and touch it with my hands, I'll believe it +as much as I believe it is daylight now." + +Don Quixote took the lead, and having gone a matter of two hundred paces +he came upon the mass that produced the shade, and found it was a great +tower, and then he perceived that the building in question was no palace, +but the chief church of the town, and said he, "It's the church we have +lit upon, Sancho." + +"So I see," said Sancho, "and God grant we may not light upon our graves; +it is no good sign to find oneself wandering in a graveyard at this time +of night; and that, after my telling your worship, if I don't mistake, +that the house of this lady will be in an alley without an outlet." + +"The curse of God on thee for a blockhead!" said Don Quixote; "where hast +thou ever heard of castles and royal palaces being built in alleys +without an outlet?" + +"Senor," replied Sancho, "every country has a way of its own; perhaps +here in El Toboso it is the way to build palaces and grand buildings in +alleys; so I entreat your worship to let me search about among these +streets or alleys before me, and perhaps, in some corner or other, I may +stumble on this palace--and I wish I saw the dogs eating it for leading +us such a dance." + +"Speak respectfully of what belongs to my lady, Sancho," said Don +Quixote; "let us keep the feast in peace, and not throw the rope after +the bucket." + +"I'll hold my tongue," said Sancho, "but how am I to take it patiently +when your worship wants me, with only once seeing the house of our +mistress, to know always, and find it in the middle of the night, when +your worship can't find it, who must have seen it thousands of times?" + +"Thou wilt drive me to desperation, Sancho," said Don Quixote. "Look +here, heretic, have I not told thee a thousand times that I have never +once in my life seen the peerless Dulcinea or crossed the threshold of +her palace, and that I am enamoured solely by hearsay and by the great +reputation she bears for beauty and discretion?" + +"I hear it now," returned Sancho; "and I may tell you that if you have +not seen her, no more have I." + +"That cannot be," said Don Quixote, "for, at any rate, thou saidst, on +bringing back the answer to the letter I sent by thee, that thou sawest +her sifting wheat." + +"Don't mind that, senor," said Sancho; "I must tell you that my seeing +her and the answer I brought you back were by hearsay too, for I can no +more tell who the lady Dulcinea is than I can hit the sky." + +"Sancho, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "there are times for jests and times +when jests are out of place; if I tell thee that I have neither seen nor +spoken to the lady of my heart, it is no reason why thou shouldst say +thou hast not spoken to her or seen her, when the contrary is the case, +as thou well knowest." + +While the two were engaged in this conversation, they perceived some one +with a pair of mules approaching the spot where they stood, and from the +noise the plough made, as it dragged along the ground, they guessed him +to be some labourer who had got up before daybreak to go to his work, and +so it proved to be. He came along singing the ballad that says-- + +Ill did ye fare, ye men of France, In Roncesvalles chase-- + +"May I die, Sancho," said Don Quixote, when he heard him, "if any good +will come to us tonight! Dost thou not hear what that clown is singing?" + +"I do," said Sancho, "but what has Roncesvalles chase to do with what we +have in hand? He might just as well be singing the ballad of Calainos, +for any good or ill that can come to us in our business." + +By this time the labourer had come up, and Don Quixote asked him, "Can +you tell me, worthy friend, and God speed you, whereabouts here is the +palace of the peerless princess Dona Dulcinea del Toboso?" + +"Senor," replied the lad, "I am a stranger, and I have been only a few +days in the town, doing farm work for a rich farmer. In that house +opposite there live the curate of the village and the sacristan, and both +or either of them will be able to give your worship some account of this +lady princess, for they have a list of all the people of El Toboso; +though it is my belief there is not a princess living in the whole of it; +many ladies there are, of quality, and in her own house each of them may +be a princess." + +"Well, then, she I am inquiring for will be one of these, my friend," +said Don Quixote. + +"May be so," replied the lad; "God be with you, for here comes the +daylight;" and without waiting for any more of his questions, he whipped +on his mules. + +Sancho, seeing his master downcast and somewhat dissatisfied, said to +him, "Senor, daylight will be here before long, and it will not do for us +to let the sun find us in the street; it will be better for us to quit +the city, and for your worship to hide in some forest in the +neighbourhood, and I will come back in the daytime, and I won't leave a +nook or corner of the whole village that I won't search for the house, +castle, or palace, of my lady, and it will be hard luck for me if I don't +find it; and as soon as I have found it I will speak to her grace, and +tell her where and how your worship is waiting for her to arrange some +plan for you to see her without any damage to her honour and reputation." + +"Sancho," said Don Quixote, "thou hast delivered a thousand sentences +condensed in the compass of a few words; I thank thee for the advice thou +hast given me, and take it most gladly. Come, my son, let us go look for +some place where I may hide, while thou dost return, as thou sayest, to +seek, and speak with my lady, from whose discretion and courtesy I look +for favours more than miraculous." + +Sancho was in a fever to get his master out of the town, lest he should +discover the falsehood of the reply he had brought to him in the Sierra +Morena on behalf of Dulcinea; so he hastened their departure, which they +took at once, and two miles out of the village they found a forest or +thicket wherein Don Quixote ensconced himself, while Sancho returned to +the city to speak to Dulcinea, in which embassy things befell him which +demand fresh attention and a new chapter. + +Chapter X. - +Wherein is related the crafty device Sancho adopted to enchant the lady +Dulcinea, and other incidents as ludicrous as they are true + +When the author of this great history comes to relate what is set down in +this chapter he says he would have preferred to pass it over in silence, +fearing it would not be believed, because here Don Quixote's madness +reaches the confines of the greatest that can be conceived, and even goes +a couple of bowshots beyond the greatest. But after all, though still +under the same fear and apprehension, he has recorded it without adding +to the story or leaving out a particle of the truth, and entirely +disregarding the charges of falsehood that might be brought against him; +and he was right, for the truth may run fine but will not break, and +always rises above falsehood as oil above water; and so, going on with +his story, he says that as soon as Don Quixote had ensconced himself in +the forest, oak grove, or wood near El Toboso, he bade Sancho return to +the city, and not come into his presence again without having first +spoken on his behalf to his lady, and begged of her that it might be her +good pleasure to permit herself to be seen by her enslaved knight, and +deign to bestow her blessing upon him, so that he might thereby hope for +a happy issue in all his encounters and difficult enterprises. Sancho +undertook to execute the task according to the instructions, and to bring +back an answer as good as the one he brought back before. + +"Go, my son," said Don Quixote, "and be not dazed when thou findest +thyself exposed to the light of that sun of beauty thou art going to +seek. Happy thou, above all the squires in the world! Bear in mind, and +let it not escape thy memory, how she receives thee; if she changes +colour while thou art giving her my message; if she is agitated and +disturbed at hearing my name; if she cannot rest upon her cushion, +shouldst thou haply find her seated in the sumptuous state chamber proper +to her rank; and should she be standing, observe if she poises herself +now on one foot, now on the other; if she repeats two or three times the +reply she gives thee; if she passes from gentleness to austerity, from +asperity to tenderness; if she raises her hand to smooth her hair though +it be not disarranged. In short, my son, observe all her actions and +motions, for if thou wilt report them to me as they were, I will gather +what she hides in the recesses of her heart as regards my love; for I +would have thee know, Sancho, if thou knowest it not, that with lovers +the outward actions and motions they give way to when their loves are in +question are the faithful messengers that carry the news of what is going +on in the depths of their hearts. Go, my friend, may better fortune than +mine attend thee, and bring thee a happier issue than that which I await +in dread in this dreary solitude." + +"I will go and return quickly," said Sancho; "cheer up that little heart +of yours, master mine, for at the present moment you seem to have got one +no bigger than a hazel nut; remember what they say, that a stout heart +breaks bad luck, and that where there are no fletches there are no pegs; +and moreover they say, the hare jumps up where it's not looked for. I say +this because, if we could not find my lady's palaces or castles to-night, +now that it is daylight I count upon finding them when I least expect it, +and once found, leave it to me to manage her." + +"Verily, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "thou dost always bring in thy +proverbs happily, whatever we deal with; may God give me better luck in +what I am anxious about." + +With this, Sancho wheeled about and gave Dapple the stick, and Don +Quixote remained behind, seated on his horse, resting in his stirrups and +leaning on the end of his lance, filled with sad and troubled +forebodings; and there we will leave him, and accompany Sancho, who went +off no less serious and troubled than he left his master; so much so, +that as soon as he had got out of the thicket, and looking round saw that +Don Quixote was not within sight, he dismounted from his ass, and seating +himself at the foot of a tree began to commune with himself, saying, +"Now, brother Sancho, let us know where your worship is going. Are you +going to look for some ass that has been lost? Not at all. Then what are +you going to look for? I am going to look for a princess, that's all; and +in her for the sun of beauty and the whole heaven at once. And where do +you expect to find all this, Sancho? Where? Why, in the great city of El +Toboso. Well, and for whom are you going to look for her? For the famous +knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, who rights wrongs, gives food to those +who thirst and drink to the hungry. That's all very well, but do you know +her house, Sancho? My master says it will be some royal palace or grand +castle. And have you ever seen her by any chance? Neither I nor my master +ever saw her. And does it strike you that it would be just and right if +the El Toboso people, finding out that you were here with the intention +of going to tamper with their princesses and trouble their ladies, were +to come and cudgel your ribs, and not leave a whole bone in you? They +would, indeed, have very good reason, if they did not see that I am under +orders, and that 'you are a messenger, my friend, no blame belongs to +you.' Don't you trust to that, Sancho, for the Manchegan folk are as +hot-tempered as they are honest, and won't put up with liberties from +anybody. By the Lord, if they get scent of you, it will be worse for you, +I promise you. Be off, you scoundrel! Let the bolt fall. Why should I go +looking for three feet on a cat, to please another man; and what is more, +when looking for Dulcinea will be looking for Marica in Ravena, or the +bachelor in Salamanca? The devil, the devil and nobody else, has mixed me +up in this business!" + +Such was the soliloquy Sancho held with himself, and all the conclusion +he could come to was to say to himself again, "Well, there's remedy for +everything except death, under whose yoke we have all to pass, whether we +like it or not, when life's finished. I have seen by a thousand signs +that this master of mine is a madman fit to be tied, and for that matter, +I too, am not behind him; for I'm a greater fool than he is when I follow +him and serve him, if there's any truth in the proverb that says, 'Tell +me what company thou keepest, and I'll tell thee what thou art,' or in +that other, 'Not with whom thou art bred, but with whom thou art fed.' +Well then, if he be mad, as he is, and with a madness that mostly takes +one thing for another, and white for black, and black for white, as was +seen when he said the windmills were giants, and the monks' mules +dromedaries, flocks of sheep armies of enemies, and much more to the same +tune, it will not be very hard to make him believe that some country +girl, the first I come across here, is the lady Dulcinea; and if he does +not believe it, I'll swear it; and if he should swear, I'll swear again; +and if he persists I'll persist still more, so as, come what may, to have +my quoit always over the peg. Maybe, by holding out in this way, I may +put a stop to his sending me on messages of this kind another time; or +maybe he will think, as I suspect he will, that one of those wicked +enchanters, who he says have a spite against him, has changed her form +for the sake of doing him an ill turn and injuring him." + +With this reflection Sancho made his mind easy, counting the business as +good as settled, and stayed there till the afternoon so as to make Don +Quixote think he had time enough to go to El Toboso and return; and +things turned out so luckily for him that as he got up to mount Dapple, +he spied, coming from El Toboso towards the spot where he stood, three +peasant girls on three colts, or fillies--for the author does not make +the point clear, though it is more likely they were she-asses, the usual +mount with village girls; but as it is of no great consequence, we need +not stop to prove it. + +To be brief, the instant Sancho saw the peasant girls, he returned full +speed to seek his master, and found him sighing and uttering a thousand +passionate lamentations. When Don Quixote saw him he exclaimed, "What +news, Sancho, my friend? Am I to mark this day with a white stone or a +black?" + +"Your worship," replied Sancho, "had better mark it with ruddle, like the +inscriptions on the walls of class rooms, that those who see it may see +it plain." + +"Then thou bringest good news," said Don Quixote. + +"So good," replied Sancho, "that your worship has only to spur Rocinante +and get out into the open field to see the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, who, +with two others, damsels of hers, is coming to see your worship." + +"Holy God! what art thou saying, Sancho, my friend?" exclaimed Don +Quixote. "Take care thou art not deceiving me, or seeking by false joy to +cheer my real sadness." + +"What could I get by deceiving your worship," returned Sancho, +"especially when it will so soon be shown whether I tell the truth or +not? Come, senor, push on, and you will see the princess our mistress +coming, robed and adorned--in fact, like what she is. Her damsels and she +are all one glow of gold, all bunches of pearls, all diamonds, all +rubies, all cloth of brocade of more than ten borders; with their hair +loose on their shoulders like so many sunbeams playing with the wind; and +moreover, they come mounted on three piebald cackneys, the finest sight +ever you saw." + +"Hackneys, you mean, Sancho," said Don Quixote. + +"There is not much difference between cackneys and hackneys," said +Sancho; "but no matter what they come on, there they are, the finest +ladies one could wish for, especially my lady the princess Dulcinea, who +staggers one's senses." + +"Let us go, Sancho, my son," said Don Quixote, "and in guerdon of this +news, as unexpected as it is good, I bestow upon thee the best spoil I +shall win in the first adventure I may have; or if that does not satisfy +thee, I promise thee the foals I shall have this year from my three mares +that thou knowest are in foal on our village common." + +"I'll take the foals," said Sancho; "for it is not quite certain that the +spoils of the first adventure will be good ones." + +By this time they had cleared the wood, and saw the three village lasses +close at hand. Don Quixote looked all along the road to El Toboso, and as +he could see nobody except the three peasant girls, he was completely +puzzled, and asked Sancho if it was outside the city he had left them. + +"How outside the city?" returned Sancho. "Are your worship's eyes in the +back of your head, that you can't see that they are these who are coming +here, shining like the very sun at noonday?" + +"I see nothing, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "but three country girls on +three jackasses." + +"Now, may God deliver me from the devil!" said Sancho, "and can it be +that your worship takes three hackneys--or whatever they're called-as +white as the driven snow, for jackasses? By the Lord, I could tear my +beard if that was the case!" + +"Well, I can only say, Sancho, my friend," said Don Quixote, "that it is +as plain they are jackasses--or jennyasses--as that I am Don Quixote, and +thou Sancho Panza: at any rate, they seem to me to be so." + +"Hush, senor," said Sancho, "don't talk that way, but open your eyes, and +come and pay your respects to the lady of your thoughts, who is close +upon us now;" and with these words he advanced to receive the three +village lasses, and dismounting from Dapple, caught hold of one of the +asses of the three country girls by the halter, and dropping on both +knees on the ground, he said, "Queen and princess and duchess of beauty, +may it please your haughtiness and greatness to receive into your favour +and good-will your captive knight who stands there turned into marble +stone, and quite stupefied and benumbed at finding himself in your +magnificent presence. I am Sancho Panza, his squire, and he the vagabond +knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, otherwise called 'The Knight of the +Rueful Countenance.'" + +Don Quixote had by this time placed himself on his knees beside Sancho, +and, with eyes starting out of his head and a puzzled gaze, was regarding +her whom Sancho called queen and lady; and as he could see nothing in her +except a village lass, and not a very well-favoured one, for she was +platter-faced and snub-nosed, he was perplexed and bewildered, and did +not venture to open his lips. The country girls, at the same time, were +astonished to see these two men, so different in appearance, on their +knees, preventing their companion from going on. She, however, who had +been stopped, breaking silence, said angrily and testily, "Get out of the +way, bad luck to you, and let us pass, for we are in a hurry." + +To which Sancho returned, "Oh, princess and universal lady of El Toboso, +is not your magnanimous heart softened by seeing the pillar and prop of +knight-errantry on his knees before your sublimated presence?" + +On hearing this, one of the others exclaimed, "Woa then! why, I'm rubbing +thee down, she-ass of my father-in-law! See how the lordlings come to +make game of the village girls now, as if we here could not chaff as well +as themselves. Go your own way, and let us go ours, and it will be better +for you." + +"Get up, Sancho," said Don Quixote at this; "I see that fortune, 'with +evil done to me unsated still,' has taken possession of all the roads by +which any comfort may reach 'this wretched soul' that I carry in my +flesh. And thou, highest perfection of excellence that can be desired, +utmost limit of grace in human shape, sole relief of this afflicted heart +that adores thee, though the malign enchanter that persecutes me has +brought clouds and cataracts on my eyes, and to them, and them only, +transformed thy unparagoned beauty and changed thy features into those of +a poor peasant girl, if so be he has not at the same time changed mine +into those of some monster to render them loathsome in thy sight, refuse +not to look upon me with tenderness and love; seeing in this submission +that I make on my knees to thy transformed beauty the humility with which +my soul adores thee." + +"Hey-day! My grandfather!" cried the girl, "much I care for your +love-making! Get out of the way and let us pass, and we'll thank you." + +Sancho stood aside and let her go, very well pleased to have got so well +out of the hobble he was in. The instant the village lass who had done +duty for Dulcinea found herself free, prodding her "cackney" with a spike +she had at the end of a stick, she set off at full speed across the +field. The she-ass, however, feeling the point more acutely than usual, +began cutting such capers, that it flung the lady Dulcinea to the ground; +seeing which, Don Quixote ran to raise her up, and Sancho to fix and +girth the pack-saddle, which also had slipped under the ass's belly. The +pack-saddle being secured, as Don Quixote was about to lift up his +enchanted mistress in his arms and put her upon her beast, the lady, +getting up from the ground, saved him the trouble, for, going back a +little, she took a short run, and putting both hands on the croup of the +ass she dropped into the saddle more lightly than a falcon, and sat +astride like a man, whereat Sancho said, "Rogue! but our lady is lighter +than a lanner, and might teach the cleverest Cordovan or Mexican how to +mount; she cleared the back of the saddle in one jump, and without spurs +she is making the hackney go like a zebra; and her damsels are no way +behind her, for they all fly like the wind;" which was the truth, for as +soon as they saw Dulcinea mounted, they pushed on after her, and sped +away without looking back, for more than half a league. + +Don Quixote followed them with his eyes, and when they were no longer in +sight, he turned to Sancho and said, "How now, Sancho? thou seest how I +am hated by enchanters! And see to what a length the malice and spite +they bear me go, when they seek to deprive me of the happiness it would +give me to see my lady in her own proper form. The fact is I was born to +be an example of misfortune, and the target and mark at which the arrows +of adversity are aimed and directed. Observe too, Sancho, that these +traitors were not content with changing and transforming my Dulcinea, but +they transformed and changed her into a shape as mean and ill-favoured as +that of the village girl yonder; and at the same time they robbed her of +that which is such a peculiar property of ladies of distinction, that is +to say, the sweet fragrance that comes of being always among perfumes and +flowers. For I must tell thee, Sancho, that when I approached to put +Dulcinea upon her hackney (as thou sayest it was, though to me it +appeared a she-ass), she gave me a whiff of raw garlic that made my head +reel, and poisoned my very heart." + +"O scum of the earth!" cried Sancho at this, "O miserable, spiteful +enchanters! O that I could see you all strung by the gills, like sardines +on a twig! Ye know a great deal, ye can do a great deal, and ye do a +great deal more. It ought to have been enough for you, ye scoundrels, to +have changed the pearls of my lady's eyes into oak galls, and her hair of +purest gold into the bristles of a red ox's tail, and in short, all her +features from fair to foul, without meddling with her smell; for by that +we might somehow have found out what was hidden underneath that ugly +rind; though, to tell the truth, I never perceived her ugliness, but only +her beauty, which was raised to the highest pitch of perfection by a mole +she had on her right lip, like a moustache, with seven or eight red hairs +like threads of gold, and more than a palm long." + +"From the correspondence which exists between those of the face and those +of the body," said Don Quixote, "Dulcinea must have another mole +resembling that on the thick of the thigh on that side on which she has +the one on her ace; but hairs of the length thou hast mentioned are very +long for moles." + +"Well, all I can say is there they were as plain as could be," replied +Sancho. + +"I believe it, my friend," returned Don Quixote; "for nature bestowed +nothing on Dulcinea that was not perfect and well-finished; and so, if +she had a hundred moles like the one thou hast described, in her they +would not be moles, but moons and shining stars. But tell me, Sancho, +that which seemed to me to be a pack-saddle as thou wert fixing it, was +it a flat-saddle or a side-saddle?" + +"It was neither," replied Sancho, "but a jineta saddle, with a field +covering worth half a kingdom, so rich is it." + +"And that I could not see all this, Sancho!" said Don Quixote; "once more +I say, and will say a thousand times, I am the most unfortunate of men." + +Sancho, the rogue, had enough to do to hide his laughter, at hearing the +simplicity of the master he had so nicely befooled. At length, after a +good deal more conversation had passed between them, they remounted their +beasts, and followed the road to Saragossa, which they expected to reach +in time to take part in a certain grand festival which is held every year +in that illustrious city; but before they got there things happened to +them, so many, so important, and so strange, that they deserve to be +recorded and read, as will be seen farther on. + +Chapter XI. - +Of the strange adventure which the valiant Don Quixote had with the car +or cart of "the cortes of death" + +Dejected beyond measure did Don Quixote pursue his journey, turning over +in his mind the cruel trick the enchanters had played him in changing his +lady Dulcinea into the vile shape of the village lass, nor could he think +of any way of restoring her to her original form; and these reflections +so absorbed him, that without being aware of it he let go Rocinante's +bridle, and he, perceiving the liberty that was granted him, stopped at +every step to crop the fresh grass with which the plain abounded. + +Sancho recalled him from his reverie. "Melancholy, senor," said he, "was +made, not for beasts, but for men; but if men give way to it overmuch +they turn to beasts; control yourself, your worship; be yourself again; +gather up Rocinante's reins; cheer up, rouse yourself and show that +gallant spirit that knights-errant ought to have. What the devil is this? +What weakness is this? Are we here or in France? The devil fly away with +all the Dulcineas in the world; for the well-being of a single +knight-errant is of more consequence than all the enchantments and +transformations on earth." + +"Hush, Sancho," said Don Quixote in a weak and faint voice, "hush and +utter no blasphemies against that enchanted lady; for I alone am to blame +for her misfortune and hard fate; her calamity has come of the hatred the +wicked bear me." + +"So say I," returned Sancho; "his heart rend in twain, I trow, who saw +her once, to see her now." + +"Thou mayest well say that, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "as thou sawest +her in the full perfection of her beauty; for the enchantment does not go +so far as to pervert thy vision or hide her loveliness from thee; against +me alone and against my eyes is the strength of its venom directed. +Nevertheless, there is one thing which has occurred to me, and that is +that thou didst ill describe her beauty to me, for, as well as I +recollect, thou saidst that her eyes were pearls; but eyes that are like +pearls are rather the eyes of a sea-bream than of a lady, and I am +persuaded that Dulcinea's must be green emeralds, full and soft, with two +rainbows for eyebrows; take away those pearls from her eyes and transfer +them to her teeth; for beyond a doubt, Sancho, thou hast taken the one +for the other, the eyes for the teeth." + +"Very likely," said Sancho; "for her beauty bewildered me as much as her +ugliness did your worship; but let us leave it all to God, who alone +knows what is to happen in this vale of tears, in this evil world of +ours, where there is hardly a thing to be found without some mixture of +wickedness, roguery, and rascality. But one thing, senor, troubles me +more than all the rest, and that is thinking what is to be done when your +worship conquers some giant, or some other knight, and orders him to go +and present himself before the beauty of the lady Dulcinea. Where is this +poor giant, or this poor wretch of a vanquished knight, to find her? I +think I can see them wandering all over El Toboso, looking like noddies, +and asking for my lady Dulcinea; and even if they meet her in the middle +of the street they won't know her any more than they would my father." + +"Perhaps, Sancho," returned Don Quixote, "the enchantment does not go so +far as to deprive conquered and presented giants and knights of the power +of recognising Dulcinea; we will try by experiment with one or two of the +first I vanquish and send to her, whether they see her or not, by +commanding them to return and give me an account of what happened to them +in this respect." + +"I declare, I think what your worship has proposed is excellent," said +Sancho; "and that by this plan we shall find out what we want to know; +and if it be that it is only from your worship she is hidden, the +misfortune will be more yours than hers; but so long as the lady Dulcinea +is well and happy, we on our part will make the best of it, and get on as +well as we can, seeking our adventures, and leaving Time to take his own +course; for he is the best physician for these and greater ailments." + +Don Quixote was about to reply to Sancho Panza, but he was prevented by a +cart crossing the road full of the most diverse and strange personages +and figures that could be imagined. He who led the mules and acted as +carter was a hideous demon; the cart was open to the sky, without a tilt +or cane roof, and the first figure that presented itself to Don Quixote's +eyes was that of Death itself with a human face; next to it was an angel +with large painted wings, and at one side an emperor, with a crown, to +all appearance of gold, on his head. At the feet of Death was the god +called Cupid, without his bandage, but with his bow, quiver, and arrows; +there was also a knight in full armour, except that he had no morion or +helmet, but only a hat decked with plumes of divers colours; and along +with these there were others with a variety of costumes and faces. All +this, unexpectedly encountered, took Don Quixote somewhat aback, and +struck terror into the heart of Sancho; but the next instant Don Quixote +was glad of it, believing that some new perilous adventure was presenting +itself to him, and under this impression, and with a spirit prepared to +face any danger, he planted himself in front of the cart, and in a loud +and menacing tone, exclaimed, "Carter, or coachman, or devil, or whatever +thou art, tell me at once who thou art, whither thou art going, and who +these folk are thou carriest in thy wagon, which looks more like Charon's +boat than an ordinary cart." + +To which the devil, stopping the cart, answered quietly, "Senor, we are +players of Angulo el Malo's company; we have been acting the play of 'The +Cortes of Death' this morning, which is the octave of Corpus Christi, in +a village behind that hill, and we have to act it this afternoon in that +village which you can see from this; and as it is so near, and to save +the trouble of undressing and dressing again, we go in the costumes in +which we perform. That lad there appears as Death, that other as an +angel, that woman, the manager's wife, plays the queen, this one the +soldier, that the emperor, and I the devil; and I am one of the principal +characters of the play, for in this company I take the leading parts. If +you want to know anything more about us, ask me and I will answer with +the utmost exactitude, for as I am a devil I am up to everything." + +"By the faith of a knight-errant," replied Don Quixote, "when I saw this +cart I fancied some great adventure was presenting itself to me; but I +declare one must touch with the hand what appears to the eye, if +illusions are to be avoided. God speed you, good people; keep your +festival, and remember, if you demand of me ought wherein I can render +you a service, I will do it gladly and willingly, for from a child I was +fond of the play, and in my youth a keen lover of the actor's art." + +While they were talking, fate so willed it that one of the company in a +mummers' dress with a great number of bells, and armed with three blown +ox-bladders at the end of a stick, joined them, and this merry-andrew +approaching Don Quixote, began flourishing his stick and banging the +ground with the bladders and cutting capers with great jingling of the +bells, which untoward apparition so startled Rocinante that, in spite of +Don Quixote's efforts to hold him in, taking the bit between his teeth he +set off across the plain with greater speed than the bones of his anatomy +ever gave any promise of. + +Sancho, who thought his master was in danger of being thrown, jumped off +Dapple, and ran in all haste to help him; but by the time he reached him +he was already on the ground, and beside him was Rocinante, who had come +down with his master, the usual end and upshot of Rocinante's vivacity +and high spirits. But the moment Sancho quitted his beast to go and help +Don Quixote, the dancing devil with the bladders jumped up on Dapple, and +beating him with them, more by the fright and the noise than by the pain +of the blows, made him fly across the fields towards the village where +they were going to hold their festival. Sancho witnessed Dapple's career +and his master's fall, and did not know which of the two cases of need he +should attend to first; but in the end, like a good squire and good +servant, he let his love for his master prevail over his affection for +his ass; though every time he saw the bladders rise in the air and come +down on the hind quarters of his Dapple he felt the pains and terrors of +death, and he would have rather had the blows fall on the apples of his +own eyes than on the least hair of his ass's tail. In this trouble and +perplexity he came to where Don Quixote lay in a far sorrier plight than +he liked, and having helped him to mount Rocinante, he said to him, +"Senor, the devil has carried off my Dapple." + +"What devil?" asked Don Quixote. + +"The one with the bladders," said Sancho. + +"Then I will recover him," said Don Quixote, "even if he be shut up with +him in the deepest and darkest dungeons of hell. Follow me, Sancho, for +the cart goes slowly, and with the mules of it I will make good the loss +of Dapple." + +"You need not take the trouble, senor," said Sancho; "keep cool, for as I +now see, the devil has let Dapple go and he is coming back to his old +quarters;" and so it turned out, for, having come down with Dapple, in +imitation of Don Quixote and Rocinante, the devil made off on foot to the +town, and the ass came back to his master. + +"For all that," said Don Quixote, "it will be well to visit the +discourtesy of that devil upon some of those in the cart, even if it were +the emperor himself." + +"Don't think of it, your worship," returned Sancho; "take my advice and +never meddle with actors, for they are a favoured class; I myself have +known an actor taken up for two murders, and yet come off scot-free; +remember that, as they are merry folk who give pleasure, everyone favours +and protects them, and helps and makes much of them, above all when they +are those of the royal companies and under patent, all or most of whom in +dress and appearance look like princes." + +"Still, for all that," said Don Quixote, "the player devil must not go +off boasting, even if the whole human race favours him." + +So saying, he made for the cart, which was now very near the town, +shouting out as he went, "Stay! halt! ye merry, jovial crew! I want to +teach you how to treat asses and animals that serve the squires of +knights-errant for steeds." + +So loud were the shouts of Don Quixote, that those in the cart heard and +understood them, and, guessing by the words what the speaker's intention +was, Death in an instant jumped out of the cart, and the emperor, the +devil carter and the angel after him, nor did the queen or the god Cupid +stay behind; and all armed themselves with stones and formed in line, +prepared to receive Don Quixote on the points of their pebbles. Don +Quixote, when he saw them drawn up in such a gallant array with uplifted +arms ready for a mighty discharge of stones, checked Rocinante and began +to consider in what way he could attack them with the least danger to +himself. As he halted Sancho came up, and seeing him disposed to attack +this well-ordered squadron, said to him, "It would be the height of +madness to attempt such an enterprise; remember, senor, that against sops +from the brook, and plenty of them, there is no defensive armour in the +world, except to stow oneself away under a brass bell; and besides, one +should remember that it is rashness, and not valour, for a single man to +attack an army that has Death in it, and where emperors fight in person, +with angels, good and bad, to help them; and if this reflection will not +make you keep quiet, perhaps it will to know for certain that among all +these, though they look like kings, princes, and emperors, there is not a +single knight-errant." + +"Now indeed thou hast hit the point, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "which +may and should turn me from the resolution I had already formed. I cannot +and must not draw sword, as I have many a time before told thee, against +anyone who is not a dubbed knight; it is for thee, Sancho, if thou wilt, +to take vengeance for the wrong done to thy Dapple; and I will help thee +from here by shouts and salutary counsels." + +"There is no occasion to take vengeance on anyone, senor," replied +Sancho; "for it is not the part of good Christians to revenge wrongs; and +besides, I will arrange it with my ass to leave his grievance to my +good-will and pleasure, and that is to live in peace as long as heaven +grants me life." + +"Well," said Don Quixote, "if that be thy determination, good Sancho, +sensible Sancho, Christian Sancho, honest Sancho, let us leave these +phantoms alone and turn to the pursuit of better and worthier adventures; +for, from what I see of this country, we cannot fail to find plenty of +marvellous ones in it." + +He at once wheeled about, Sancho ran to take possession of his Dapple, +Death and his flying squadron returned to their cart and pursued their +journey, and thus the dread adventure of the cart of Death ended happily, +thanks to the advice Sancho gave his master; who had, the following day, +a fresh adventure, of no less thrilling interest than the last, with an +enamoured knight-errant. + +Chapter XII. - +Of the strange adventure which befell the valiant Don Quixote with the +bold Knight of the mirrors + +The night succeeding the day of the encounter with Death, Don Quixote and +his squire passed under some tall shady trees, and Don Quixote at +Sancho's persuasion ate a little from the store carried by Dapple, and +over their supper Sancho said to his master, "Senor, what a fool I should +have looked if I had chosen for my reward the spoils of the first +adventure your worship achieved, instead of the foals of the three mares. +After all, 'a sparrow in the hand is better than a vulture on the wing.'" + +"At the same time, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "if thou hadst let me +attack them as I wanted, at the very least the emperor's gold crown and +Cupid's painted wings would have fallen to thee as spoils, for I should +have taken them by force and given them into thy hands." + +"The sceptres and crowns of those play-actor emperors," said Sancho, +"were never yet pure gold, but only brass foil or tin." + +"That is true," said Don Quixote, "for it would not be right that the +accessories of the drama should be real, instead of being mere fictions +and semblances, like the drama itself; towards which, Sancho-and, as a +necessary consequence, towards those who represent and produce it--I +would that thou wert favourably disposed, for they are all instruments of +great good to the State, placing before us at every step a mirror in +which we may see vividly displayed what goes on in human life; nor is +there any similitude that shows us more faithfully what we are and ought +to be than the play and the players. Come, tell me, hast thou not seen a +play acted in which kings, emperors, pontiffs, knights, ladies, and +divers other personages were introduced? One plays the villain, another +the knave, this one the merchant, that the soldier, one the sharp-witted +fool, another the foolish lover; and when the play is over, and they have +put off the dresses they wore in it, all the actors become equal." + +"Yes, I have seen that," said Sancho. + +"Well then," said Don Quixote, "the same thing happens in the comedy and +life of this world, where some play emperors, others popes, and, in +short, all the characters that can be brought into a play; but when it is +over, that is to say when life ends, death strips them all of the +garments that distinguish one from the other, and all are equal in the +grave." + +"A fine comparison!" said Sancho; "though not so new but that I have +heard it many and many a time, as well as that other one of the game of +chess; how, so long as the game lasts, each piece has its own particular +office, and when the game is finished they are all mixed, jumbled up and +shaken together, and stowed away in the bag, which is much like ending +life in the grave." + +"Thou art growing less doltish and more shrewd every day, Sancho," said +Don Quixote. + +"Ay," said Sancho; "it must be that some of your worship's shrewdness +sticks to me; land that, of itself, is barren and dry, will come to yield +good fruit if you dung it and till it; what I mean is that your worship's +conversation has been the dung that has fallen on the barren soil of my +dry wit, and the time I have been in your service and society has been +the tillage; and with the help of this I hope to yield fruit in abundance +that will not fall away or slide from those paths of good breeding that +your worship has made in my parched understanding." + +Don Quixote laughed at Sancho's affected phraseology, and perceived that +what he said about his improvement was true, for now and then he spoke in +a way that surprised him; though always, or mostly, when Sancho tried to +talk fine and attempted polite language, he wound up by toppling over +from the summit of his simplicity into the abyss of his ignorance; and +where he showed his culture and his memory to the greatest advantage was +in dragging in proverbs, no matter whether they had any bearing or not +upon the subject in hand, as may have been seen already and will be +noticed in the course of this history. + +In conversation of this kind they passed a good part of the night, but +Sancho felt a desire to let down the curtains of his eyes, as he used to +say when he wanted to go to sleep; and stripping Dapple he left him at +liberty to graze his fill. He did not remove Rocinante's saddle, as his +master's express orders were, that so long as they were in the field or +not sleeping under a roof Rocinante was not to be stripped--the ancient +usage established and observed by knights-errant being to take off the +bridle and hang it on the saddle-bow, but to remove the saddle from the +horse--never! Sancho acted accordingly, and gave him the same liberty he +had given Dapple, between whom and Rocinante there was a friendship so +unequalled and so strong, that it is handed down by tradition from father +to son, that the author of this veracious history devoted some special +chapters to it, which, in order to preserve the propriety and decorum due +to a history so heroic, he did not insert therein; although at times he +forgets this resolution of his and describes how eagerly the two beasts +would scratch one another when they were together and how, when they were +tired or full, Rocinante would lay his neck across Dapple's, stretching +half a yard or more on the other side, and the pair would stand thus, +gazing thoughtfully on the ground, for three days, or at least so long as +they were left alone, or hunger did not drive them to go and look for +food. I may add that they say the author left it on record that he +likened their friendship to that of Nisus and Euryalus, and Pylades and +Orestes; and if that be so, it may be perceived, to the admiration of +mankind, how firm the friendship must have been between these two +peaceful animals, shaming men, who preserve friendships with one another +so badly. This was why it was said-- + +For friend no longer is there friend; +The reeds turn lances now. + +And some one else has sung-- + +Friend to friend the bug, etc. + +And let no one fancy that the author was at all astray when he compared +the friendship of these animals to that of men; for men have received +many lessons from beasts, and learned many important things, as, for +example, the clyster from the stork, vomit and gratitude from the dog, +watchfulness from the crane, foresight from the ant, modesty from the +elephant, and loyalty from the horse. + +Sancho at last fell asleep at the foot of a cork tree, while Don Quixote +dozed at that of a sturdy oak; but a short time only had elapsed when a +noise he heard behind him awoke him, and rising up startled, he listened +and looked in the direction the noise came from, and perceived two men on +horseback, one of whom, letting himself drop from the saddle, said to the +other, "Dismount, my friend, and take the bridles off the horses, for, so +far as I can see, this place will furnish grass for them, and the +solitude and silence my love-sick thoughts need of." As he said this he +stretched himself upon the ground, and as he flung himself down, the +armour in which he was clad rattled, whereby Don Quixote perceived that +he must be a knight-errant; and going over to Sancho, who was asleep, he +shook him by the arm and with no small difficulty brought him back to his +senses, and said in a low voice to him, "Brother Sancho, we have got an +adventure." + +"God send us a good one," said Sancho; "and where may her ladyship the +adventure be?" + +"Where, Sancho?" replied Don Quixote; "turn thine eyes and look, and thou +wilt see stretched there a knight-errant, who, it strikes me, is not over +and above happy, for I saw him fling himself off his horse and throw +himself on the ground with a certain air of dejection, and his armour +rattled as he fell." + +"Well," said Sancho, "how does your worship make out that to be an +adventure?" + +"I do not mean to say," returned Don Quixote, "that it is a complete +adventure, but that it is the beginning of one, for it is in this way +adventures begin. But listen, for it seems he is tuning a lute or guitar, +and from the way he is spitting and clearing his chest he must be getting +ready to sing something." + +"Faith, you are right," said Sancho, "and no doubt he is some enamoured +knight." + +"There is no knight-errant that is not," said Don Quixote; "but let us +listen to him, for, if he sings, by that thread we shall extract the ball +of his thoughts; because out of the abundance of the heart the mouth +speaketh." + +Sancho was about to reply to his master, but the Knight of the Grove's +voice, which was neither very bad nor very good, stopped him, and +listening attentively the pair heard him sing this + +poem{ + +SONNET + +Your pleasure, prithee, lady mine, unfold; + Declare the terms that I am to obey; +My will to yours submissively I mould, + And from your law my feet shall never stray. + Would you I die, to silent grief a prey? +Then count me even now as dead and cold; + Would you I tell my woes in some new way? +Then shall my tale by Love itself be told. +The unison of opposites to prove, + Of the soft wax and diamond hard am I; +But still, obedient to the laws of love, + Here, hard or soft, I offer you my breast, + Whate'er you grave or stamp thereon shall rest + Indelible for all eternity. + +}poem + +With an "Ah me!" that seemed to be drawn from the inmost recesses of his +heart, the Knight of the Grove brought his lay to an end, and shortly +afterwards exclaimed in a melancholy and piteous voice, "O fairest and +most ungrateful woman on earth! What! can it be, most serene Casildea de +Vandalia, that thou wilt suffer this thy captive knight to waste away and +perish in ceaseless wanderings and rude and arduous toils? It is not +enough that I have compelled all the knights of Navarre, all the Leonese, +all the Tartesians, all the Castilians, and finally all the knights of La +Mancha, to confess thee the most beautiful in the world?" + +"Not so," said Don Quixote at this, "for I am of La Mancha, and I have +never confessed anything of the sort, nor could I nor should I confess a +thing so much to the prejudice of my lady's beauty; thou seest how this +knight is raving, Sancho. But let us listen, perhaps he will tell us more +about himself." + +"That he will," returned Sancho, "for he seems in a mood to bewail +himself for a month at a stretch." + +But this was not the case, for the Knight of the Grove, hearing voices +near him, instead of continuing his lamentation, stood up and exclaimed +in a distinct but courteous tone, "Who goes there? What are you? Do you +belong to the number of the happy or of the miserable?" + +"Of the miserable," answered Don Quixote. + +"Then come to me," said he of the Grove, "and rest assured that it is to +woe itself and affliction itself you come." + +Don Quixote, finding himself answered in such a soft and courteous +manner, went over to him, and so did Sancho. + +The doleful knight took Don Quixote by the arm, saying, "Sit down here, +sir knight; for, that you are one, and of those that profess +knight-errantry, it is to me a sufficient proof to have found you in this +place, where solitude and night, the natural couch and proper retreat of +knights-errant, keep you company." To which Don made answer, "A knight I +am of the profession you mention, and though sorrows, misfortunes, and +calamities have made my heart their abode, the compassion I feel for the +misfortunes of others has not been thereby banished from it. From what +you have just now sung I gather that yours spring from love, I mean from +the love you bear that fair ingrate you named in your lament." + +In the meantime, they had seated themselves together on the hard ground +peaceably and sociably, just as if, as soon as day broke, they were not +going to break one another's heads. + +"Are you, sir knight, in love perchance?" asked he of the Grove of Don +Quixote. + +"By mischance I am," replied Don Quixote; "though the ills arising from +well-bestowed affections should be esteemed favours rather than +misfortunes." + +"That is true," returned he of the Grove, "if scorn did not unsettle our +reason and understanding, for if it be excessive it looks like revenge." + +"I was never scorned by my lady," said Don Quixote. + +"Certainly not," said Sancho, who stood close by, "for my lady is as a +lamb, and softer than a roll of butter." + +"Is this your squire?" asked he of the Grove. + +"He is," said Don Quixote. + +"I never yet saw a squire," said he of the Grove, "who ventured to speak +when his master was speaking; at least, there is mine, who is as big as +his father, and it cannot be proved that he has ever opened his lips when +I am speaking." + +"By my faith then," said Sancho, "I have spoken, and am fit to speak, in +the presence of one as much, or even--but never mind--it only makes it +worse to stir it." + +The squire of the Grove took Sancho by the arm, saying to him, "Let us +two go where we can talk in squire style as much as we please, and leave +these gentlemen our masters to fight it out over the story of their +loves; and, depend upon it, daybreak will find them at it without having +made an end of it." + +"So be it by all means," said Sancho; "and I will tell your worship who I +am, that you may see whether I am to be reckoned among the number of the +most talkative squires." + +With this the two squires withdrew to one side, and between them there +passed a conversation as droll as that which passed between their masters +was serious. + +Chapter XIII. - +In which is continued the adventure of the Knight of the Grove, together +with the sensible, original, and tranquil colloquy that passed between +the two Squires + +The knights and the squires made two parties, these telling the story of +their lives, the others the story of their loves; but the history relates +first of all the conversation of the servants, and afterwards takes up +that of the masters; and it says that, withdrawing a little from the +others, he of the Grove said to Sancho, "A hard life it is we lead and +live, senor, we that are squires to knights-errant; verily, we eat our +bread in the sweat of our faces, which is one of the curses God laid on +our first parents." + +"It may be said, too," added Sancho, "that we eat it in the chill of our +bodies; for who gets more heat and cold than the miserable squires of +knight-errantry? Even so it would not be so bad if we had something to +eat, for woes are lighter if there's bread; but sometimes we go a day or +two without breaking our fast, except with the wind that blows." + +"All that," said he of the Grove, "may be endured and put up with when we +have hopes of reward; for, unless the knight-errant he serves is +excessively unlucky, after a few turns the squire will at least find +himself rewarded with a fine government of some island or some fair +county." + +"I," said Sancho, "have already told my master that I shall be content +with the government of some island, and he is so noble and generous that +he has promised it to me ever so many times." + +"I," said he of the Grove, "shall be satisfied with a canonry for my +services, and my master has already assigned me one." + +"Your master," said Sancho, "no doubt is a knight in the Church line, and +can bestow rewards of that sort on his good squire; but mine is only a +layman; though I remember some clever, but, to my mind, designing people, +strove to persuade him to try and become an archbishop. He, however, +would not be anything but an emperor; but I was trembling all the time +lest he should take a fancy to go into the Church, not finding myself fit +to hold office in it; for I may tell you, though I seem a man, I am no +better than a beast for the Church." + +"Well, then, you are wrong there," said he of the Grove; "for those +island governments are not all satisfactory; some are awkward, some are +poor, some are dull, and, in short, the highest and choicest brings with +it a heavy burden of cares and troubles which the unhappy wight to whose +lot it has fallen bears upon his shoulders. Far better would it be for us +who have adopted this accursed service to go back to our own houses, and +there employ ourselves in pleasanter occupations--in hunting or fishing, +for instance; for what squire in the world is there so poor as not to +have a hack and a couple of greyhounds and a fishingrod to amuse himself +with in his own village?" + +"I am not in want of any of those things," said Sancho; "to be sure I +have no hack, but I have an ass that is worth my master's horse twice +over; God send me a bad Easter, and that the next one I am to see, if I +would swap, even if I got four bushels of barley to boot. You will laugh +at the value I put on my Dapple--for dapple is the colour of my beast. As +to greyhounds, I can't want for them, for there are enough and to spare +in my town; and, moreover, there is more pleasure in sport when it is at +other people's expense." + +"In truth and earnest, sir squire," said he of the Grove, "I have made up +my mind and determined to have done with these drunken vagaries of these +knights, and go back to my village, and bring up my children; for I have +three, like three Oriental pearls." + +"I have two," said Sancho, "that might be presented before the Pope +himself, especially a girl whom I am breeding up for a countess, please +God, though in spite of her mother." + +"And how old is this lady that is being bred up for a countess?" asked he +of the Grove. + +"Fifteen, a couple of years more or less," answered Sancho; "but she is +as tall as a lance, and as fresh as an April morning, and as strong as a +porter." + +"Those are gifts to fit her to be not only a countess but a nymph of the +greenwood," said he of the Grove; "whoreson strumpet! what pith the rogue +must have!" + +To which Sancho made answer, somewhat sulkily, "She's no strumpet, nor +was her mother, nor will either of them be, please God, while I live; +speak more civilly; for one bred up among knights-errant, who are +courtesy itself, your words don't seem to me to be very becoming." + +"O how little you know about compliments, sir squire," returned he of the +Grove. "What! don't you know that when a horseman delivers a good lance +thrust at the bull in the plaza, or when anyone does anything very well, +the people are wont to say, 'Ha, whoreson rip! how well he has done it!' +and that what seems to be abuse in the expression is high praise? Disown +sons and daughters, senor, who don't do what deserves that compliments of +this sort should be paid to their parents." + +"I do disown them," replied Sancho, "and in this way, and by the same +reasoning, you might call me and my children and my wife all the +strumpets in the world, for all they do and say is of a kind that in the +highest degree deserves the same praise; and to see them again I pray God +to deliver me from mortal sin, or, what comes to the same thing, to +deliver me from this perilous calling of squire into which I have fallen +a second time, decayed and beguiled by a purse with a hundred ducats that +I found one day in the heart of the Sierra Morena; and the devil is +always putting a bag full of doubloons before my eyes, here, there, +everywhere, until I fancy at every stop I am putting my hand on it, and +hugging it, and carrying it home with me, and making investments, and +getting interest, and living like a prince; and so long as I think of +this I make light of all the hardships I endure with this simpleton of a +master of mine, who, I well know, is more of a madman than a knight." + +"There's why they say that 'covetousness bursts the bag,'" said he of the +Grove; "but if you come to talk of that sort, there is not a greater one +in the world than my master, for he is one of those of whom they say, +'the cares of others kill the ass;' for, in order that another knight may +recover the senses he has lost, he makes a madman of himself and goes +looking for what, when found, may, for all I know, fly in his own face." +"And is he in love perchance?" asked Sancho. + +"He is," said of the Grove, "with one Casildea de Vandalia, the rawest +and best roasted lady the whole world could produce; but that rawness is +not the only foot he limps on, for he has greater schemes rumbling in his +bowels, as will be seen before many hours are over." + +"There's no road so smooth but it has some hole or hindrance in it," said +Sancho; "in other houses they cook beans, but in mine it's by the potful; +madness will have more followers and hangers-on than sound sense; but if +there be any truth in the common saying, that to have companions in +trouble gives some relief, I may take consolation from you, inasmuch as +you serve a master as crazy as my own." + +"Crazy but valiant," replied he of the Grove, "and more roguish than +crazy or valiant." + +"Mine is not that," said Sancho; "I mean he has nothing of the rogue in +him; on the contrary, he has the soul of a pitcher; he has no thought of +doing harm to anyone, only good to all, nor has he any malice whatever in +him; a child might persuade him that it is night at noonday; and for this +simplicity I love him as the core of my heart, and I can't bring myself +to leave him, let him do ever such foolish things." + +"For all that, brother and senor," said he of the Grove, "if the blind +lead the blind, both are in danger of falling into the pit. It is better +for us to beat a quiet retreat and get back to our own quarters; for +those who seek adventures don't always find good ones." + +Sancho kept spitting from time to time, and his spittle seemed somewhat +ropy and dry, observing which the compassionate squire of the Grove said, +"It seems to me that with all this talk of ours our tongues are sticking +to the roofs of our mouths; but I have a pretty good loosener hanging +from the saddle-bow of my horse," and getting up he came back the next +minute with a large bota of wine and a pasty half a yard across; and this +is no exaggeration, for it was made of a house rabbit so big that Sancho, +as he handled it, took it to be made of a goat, not to say a kid, and +looking at it he said, "And do you carry this with you, senor?" + +"Why, what are you thinking about?" said the other; "do you take me for +some paltry squire? I carry a better larder on my horse's croup than a +general takes with him when he goes on a march." + +Sancho ate without requiring to be pressed, and in the dark bolted +mouthfuls like the knots on a tether, and said he, "You are a proper +trusty squire, one of the right sort, sumptuous and grand, as this +banquet shows, which, if it has not come here by magic art, at any rate +has the look of it; not like me, unlucky beggar, that have nothing more +in my alforjas than a scrap of cheese, so hard that one might brain a +giant with it, and, to keep it company, a few dozen carobs and as many +more filberts and walnuts; thanks to the austerity of my master, and the +idea he has and the rule he follows, that knights-errant must not live or +sustain themselves on anything except dried fruits and the herbs of the +field." + +"By my faith, brother," said he of the Grove, "my stomach is not made for +thistles, or wild pears, or roots of the woods; let our masters do as +they like, with their chivalry notions and laws, and eat what those +enjoin; I carry my prog-basket and this bota hanging to the saddle-bow, +whatever they may say; and it is such an object of worship with me, and I +love it so, that there is hardly a moment but I am kissing and embracing +it over and over again;" and so saying he thrust it into Sancho's hands, +who raising it aloft pointed to his mouth, gazed at the stars for a +quarter of an hour; and when he had done drinking let his head fall on +one side, and giving a deep sigh, exclaimed, "Ah, whoreson rogue, how +catholic it is!" + +"There, you see," said he of the Grove, hearing Sancho's exclamation, +"how you have called this wine whoreson by way of praise." + +"Well," said Sancho, "I own it, and I grant it is no dishonour to call +anyone whoreson when it is to be understood as praise. But tell me, +senor, by what you love best, is this Ciudad Real wine?" + +"O rare wine-taster!" said he of the Grove; "nowhere else indeed does it +come from, and it has some years' age too." + +"Leave me alone for that," said Sancho; "never fear but I'll hit upon the +place it came from somehow. What would you say, sir squire, to my having +such a great natural instinct in judging wines that you have only to let +me smell one and I can tell positively its country, its kind, its flavour +and soundness, the changes it will undergo, and everything that +appertains to a wine? But it is no wonder, for I have had in my family, +on my father's side, the two best wine-tasters that have been known in La +Mancha for many a long year, and to prove it I'll tell you now a thing +that happened them. They gave the two of them some wine out of a cask, to +try, asking their opinion as to the condition, quality, goodness or +badness of the wine. One of them tried it with the tip of his tongue, the +other did no more than bring it to his nose. The first said the wine had +a flavour of iron, the second said it had a stronger flavour of cordovan. +The owner said the cask was clean, and that nothing had been added to the +wine from which it could have got a flavour of either iron or leather. +Nevertheless, these two great wine-tasters held to what they had said. +Time went by, the wine was sold, and when they came to clean out the +cask, they found in it a small key hanging to a thong of cordovan; see +now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his +opinion in such like cases." + +"Therefore, I say," said he of the Grove, "let us give up going in quest +of adventures, and as we have loaves let us not go looking for cakes, but +return to our cribs, for God will find us there if it be his will." + +"Until my master reaches Saragossa," said Sancho, "I'll remain in his +service; after that we'll see." + +The end of it was that the two squires talked so much and drank so much +that sleep had to tie their tongues and moderate their thirst, for to +quench it was impossible; and so the pair of them fell asleep clinging to +the now nearly empty bota and with half-chewed morsels in their mouths; +and there we will leave them for the present, to relate what passed +between the Knight of the Grove and him of the Rueful Countenance. + +Chapter XIV. - +Wherein is continued the adventure of the Knight of the Grove + +Among the things that passed between Don Quixote and the Knight of the +Wood, the history tells us he of the Grove said to Don Quixote, "In fine, +sir knight, I would have you know that my destiny, or, more properly +speaking, my choice led me to fall in love with the peerless Casildea de +Vandalia. I call her peerless because she has no peer, whether it be in +bodily stature or in the supremacy of rank and beauty. This same +Casildea, then, that I speak of, requited my honourable passion and +gentle aspirations by compelling me, as his stepmother did Hercules, to +engage in many perils of various sorts, at the end of each promising me +that, with the end of the next, the object of my hopes should be +attained; but my labours have gone on increasing link by link until they +are past counting, nor do I know what will be the last one that is to be +the beginning of the accomplishment of my chaste desires. On one occasion +she bade me go and challenge the famous giantess of Seville, La Giralda +by name, who is as mighty and strong as if made of brass, and though +never stirring from one spot, is the most restless and changeable woman +in the world. I came, I saw, I conquered, and I made her stay quiet and +behave herself, for nothing but north winds blew for more than a week. +Another time I was ordered to lift those ancient stones, the mighty bulls +of Guisando, an enterprise that might more fitly be entrusted to porters +than to knights. Again, she bade me fling myself into the cavern of +Cabra--an unparalleled and awful peril--and bring her a minute account of +all that is concealed in those gloomy depths. I stopped the motion of the +Giralda, I lifted the bulls of Guisando, I flung myself into the cavern +and brought to light the secrets of its abyss; and my hopes are as dead +as dead can be, and her scorn and her commands as lively as ever. To be +brief, last of all she has commanded me to go through all the provinces +of Spain and compel all the knights-errant wandering therein to confess +that she surpasses all women alive to-day in beauty, and that I am the +most valiant and the most deeply enamoured knight on earth; in support of +which claim I have already travelled over the greater part of Spain, and +have there vanquished several knights who have dared to contradict me; +but what I most plume and pride myself upon is having vanquished in +single combat that so famous knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, and made +him confess that my Casildea is more beautiful than his Dulcinea; and in +this one victory I hold myself to have conquered all the knights in the +world; for this Don Quixote that I speak of has vanquished them all, and +I having vanquished him, his glory, his fame, and his honour have passed +and are transferred to my person; for + +poem{ + + The more the vanquished hath of fair renown, + The greater glory gilds the victor's crown. + +}poem + +Thus the innumerable achievements of the said Don Quixote are now set +down to my account and have become mine." + +Don Quixote was amazed when he heard the Knight of the Grove, and was a +thousand times on the point of telling him he lied, and had the lie +direct already on the tip of his tongue; but he restrained himself as +well as he could, in order to force him to confess the lie with his own +lips; so he said to him quietly, "As to what you say, sir knight, about +having vanquished most of the knights of Spain, or even of the whole +world, I say nothing; but that you have vanquished Don Quixote of La +Mancha I consider doubtful; it may have been some other that resembled +him, although there are few like him." + +"How! not vanquished?" said he of the Grove; "by the heaven that is above +us I fought Don Quixote and overcame him and made him yield; and he is a +man of tall stature, gaunt features, long, lank limbs, with hair turning +grey, an aquiline nose rather hooked, and large black drooping +moustaches; he does battle under the name of 'The Countenance,' and he +has for squire a peasant called Sancho Panza; he presses the loins and +rules the reins of a famous steed called Rocinante; and lastly, he has +for the mistress of his will a certain Dulcinea del Toboso, once upon a +time called Aldonza Lorenzo, just as I call mine Casildea de Vandalia +because her name is Casilda and she is of Andalusia. If all these tokens +are not enough to vindicate the truth of what I say, here is my sword, +that will compel incredulity itself to give credence to it." + +"Calm yourself, sir knight," said Don Quixote, "and give ear to what I am +about to say to you. I would have you know that this Don Quixote you +speak of is the greatest friend I have in the world; so much so that I +may say I regard him in the same light as my own person; and from the +precise and clear indications you have given I cannot but think that he +must be the very one you have vanquished. On the other hand, I see with +my eyes and feel with my hands that it is impossible it can have been the +same; unless indeed it be that, as he has many enemies who are +enchanters, and one in particular who is always persecuting him, some one +of these may have taken his shape in order to allow himself to be +vanquished, so as to defraud him of the fame that his exalted +achievements as a knight have earned and acquired for him throughout the +known world. And in confirmation of this, I must tell you, too, that it +is but ten hours since these said enchanters his enemies transformed the +shape and person of the fair Dulcinea del Toboso into a foul and mean +village lass, and in the same way they must have transformed Don Quixote; +and if all this does not suffice to convince you of the truth of what I +say, here is Don Quixote himself, who will maintain it by arms, on foot +or on horseback or in any way you please." + +And so saying he stood up and laid his hand on his sword, waiting to see +what the Knight of the Grove would do, who in an equally calm voice said +in reply, "Pledges don't distress a good payer; he who has succeeded in +vanquishing you once when transformed, Sir Don Quixote, may fairly hope +to subdue you in your own proper shape; but as it is not becoming for +knights to perform their feats of arms in the dark, like highwaymen and +bullies, let us wait till daylight, that the sun may behold our deeds; +and the conditions of our combat shall be that the vanquished shall be at +the victor's disposal, to do all that he may enjoin, provided the +injunction be such as shall be becoming a knight." + +"I am more than satisfied with these conditions and terms," replied Don +Quixote; and so saying, they betook themselves to where their squires +lay, and found them snoring, and in the same posture they were in when +sleep fell upon them. They roused them up, and bade them get the horses +ready, as at sunrise they were to engage in a bloody and arduous single +combat; at which intelligence Sancho was aghast and thunderstruck, +trembling for the safety of his master because of the mighty deeds he had +heard the squire of the Grove ascribe to his; but without a word the two +squires went in quest of their cattle; for by this time the three horses +and the ass had smelt one another out, and were all together. + +On the way, he of the Grove said to Sancho, "You must know, brother, that +it is the custom with the fighting men of Andalusia, when they are +godfathers in any quarrel, not to stand idle with folded arms while their +godsons fight; I say so to remind you that while our masters are +fighting, we, too, have to fight, and knock one another to shivers." + +"That custom, sir squire," replied Sancho, "may hold good among those +bullies and fighting men you talk of, but certainly not among the squires +of knights-errant; at least, I have never heard my master speak of any +custom of the sort, and he knows all the laws of knight-errantry by +heart; but granting it true that there is an express law that squires are +to fight while their masters are fighting, I don't mean to obey it, but +to pay the penalty that may be laid on peacefully minded squires like +myself; for I am sure it cannot be more than two pounds of wax, and I +would rather pay that, for I know it will cost me less than the lint I +shall be at the expense of to mend my head, which I look upon as broken +and split already; there's another thing that makes it impossible for me +to fight, that I have no sword, for I never carried one in my life." + +"I know a good remedy for that," said he of the Grove; "I have here two +linen bags of the same size; you shall take one, and I the other, and we +will fight at bag blows with equal arms." + +"If that's the way, so be it with all my heart," said Sancho, "for that +sort of battle will serve to knock the dust out of us instead of hurting +us." + +"That will not do," said the other, "for we must put into the bags, to +keep the wind from blowing them away, half a dozen nice smooth pebbles, +all of the same weight; and in this way we shall be able to baste one +another without doing ourselves any harm or mischief." + +"Body of my father!" said Sancho, "see what marten and sable, and pads of +carded cotton he is putting into the bags, that our heads may not be +broken and our bones beaten to jelly! But even if they are filled with +toss silk, I can tell you, senor, I am not going to fight; let our +masters fight, that's their lookout, and let us drink and live; for time +will take care to ease us of our lives, without our going to look for +fillips so that they may be finished off before their proper time comes +and they drop from ripeness." + +"Still," returned he of the Grove, "we must fight, if it be only for half +an hour." + +"By no means," said Sancho; "I am not going to be so discourteous or so +ungrateful as to have any quarrel, be it ever so small, with one I have +eaten and drunk with; besides, who the devil could bring himself to fight +in cold blood, without anger or provocation?" + +"I can remedy that entirely," said he of the Grove, "and in this way: +before we begin the battle, I will come up to your worship fair and +softly, and give you three or four buffets, with which I shall stretch +you at my feet and rouse your anger, though it were sleeping sounder than +a dormouse." + +"To match that plan," said Sancho, "I have another that is not a whit +behind it; I will take a cudgel, and before your worship comes near +enough to waken my anger I will send yours so sound to sleep with whacks, +that it won't waken unless it be in the other world, where it is known +that I am not a man to let my face be handled by anyone; let each look +out for the arrow--though the surer way would be to let everyone's anger +sleep, for nobody knows the heart of anyone, and a man may come for wool +and go back shorn; God gave his blessing to peace and his curse to +quarrels; if a hunted cat, surrounded and hard pressed, turns into a +lion, God knows what I, who am a man, may turn into; and so from this +time forth I warn you, sir squire, that all the harm and mischief that +may come of our quarrel will be put down to your account." + +"Very good," said he of the Grove; "God will send the dawn and we shall +be all right." + +And now gay-plumaged birds of all sorts began to warble in the trees, and +with their varied and gladsome notes seemed to welcome and salute the +fresh morn that was beginning to show the beauty of her countenance at +the gates and balconies of the east, shaking from her locks a profusion +of liquid pearls; in which dulcet moisture bathed, the plants, too, +seemed to shed and shower down a pearly spray, the willows distilled +sweet manna, the fountains laughed, the brooks babbled, the woods +rejoiced, and the meadows arrayed themselves in all their glory at her +coming. But hardly had the light of day made it possible to see and +distinguish things, when the first object that presented itself to the +eyes of Sancho Panza was the squire of the Grove's nose, which was so big +that it almost overshadowed his whole body. It is, in fact, stated, that +it was of enormous size, hooked in the middle, covered with warts, and of +a mulberry colour like an egg-plant; it hung down two fingers' length +below his mouth, and the size, the colour, the warts, and the bend of it, +made his face so hideous, that Sancho, as he looked at him, began to +tremble hand and foot like a child in convulsions, and he vowed in his +heart to let himself be given two hundred buffets, sooner than be +provoked to fight that monster. Don Quixote examined his adversary, and +found that he already had his helmet on and visor lowered, so that he +could not see his face; he observed, however, that he was a sturdily +built man, but not very tall in stature. Over his armour he wore a +surcoat or cassock of what seemed to be the finest cloth of gold, all +bespangled with glittering mirrors like little moons, which gave him an +extremely gallant and splendid appearance; above his helmet fluttered a +great quantity of plumes, green, yellow, and white, and his lance, which +was leaning against a tree, was very long and stout, and had a steel +point more than a palm in length. + +Don Quixote observed all, and took note of all, and from what he saw and +observed he concluded that the said knight must be a man of great +strength, but he did not for all that give way to fear, like Sancho +Panza; on the contrary, with a composed and dauntless air, he said to the +Knight of the Mirrors, "If, sir knight, your great eagerness to fight has +not banished your courtesy, by it I would entreat you to raise your visor +a little, in order that I may see if the comeliness of your countenance +corresponds with that of your equipment." + +"Whether you come victorious or vanquished out of this emprise, sir +knight," replied he of the Mirrors, "you will have more than enough time +and leisure to see me; and if now I do not comply with your request, it +is because it seems to me I should do a serious wrong to the fair +Casildea de Vandalia in wasting time while I stopped to raise my visor +before compelling you to confess what you are already aware I maintain." + +"Well then," said Don Quixote, "while we are mounting you can at least +tell me if I am that Don Quixote whom you said you vanquished." + +"To that we answer you," said he of the Mirrors, "that you are as like +the very knight I vanquished as one egg is like another, but as you say +enchanters persecute you, I will not venture to say positively whether +you are the said person or not." + +"That," said Don Quixote, "is enough to convince me that you are under a +deception; however, entirely to relieve you of it, let our horses be +brought, and in less time than it would take you to raise your visor, if +God, my lady, and my arm stand me in good stead, I shall see your face, +and you shall see that I am not the vanquished Don Quixote you take me to +be." + +With this, cutting short the colloquy, they mounted, and Don Quixote +wheeled Rocinante round in order to take a proper distance to charge back +upon his adversary, and he of the Mirrors did the same; but Don Quixote +had not moved away twenty paces when he heard himself called by the +other, and, each returning half-way, he of the Mirrors said to him, +"Remember, sir knight, that the terms of our combat are, that the +vanquished, as I said before, shall be at the victor's disposal." + +"I am aware of it already," said Don Quixote; "provided what is commanded +and imposed upon the vanquished be things that do not transgress the +limits of chivalry." + +"That is understood," replied he of the Mirrors. + +At this moment the extraordinary nose of the squire presented itself to +Don Quixote's view, and he was no less amazed than Sancho at the sight; +insomuch that he set him down as a monster of some kind, or a human being +of some new species or unearthly breed. Sancho, seeing his master +retiring to run his course, did not like to be left alone with the nosy +man, fearing that with one flap of that nose on his own the battle would +be all over for him and he would be left stretched on the ground, either +by the blow or with fright; so he ran after his master, holding on to +Rocinante's stirrup-leather, and when it seemed to him time to turn +about, he said, "I implore of your worship, senor, before you turn to +charge, to help me up into this cork tree, from which I will be able to +witness the gallant encounter your worship is going to have with this +knight, more to my taste and better than from the ground." + +"It seems to me rather, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that thou wouldst +mount a scaffold in order to see the bulls without danger." + +"To tell the truth," returned Sancho, "the monstrous nose of that squire +has filled me with fear and terror, and I dare not stay near him." + +"It is," said Don Quixote, "such a one that were I not what I am it would +terrify me too; so, come, I will help thee up where thou wilt." + +While Don Quixote waited for Sancho to mount into the cork tree he of the +Mirrors took as much ground as he considered requisite, and, supposing +Don Quixote to have done the same, without waiting for any sound of +trumpet or other signal to direct them, he wheeled his horse, which was +not more agile or better-looking than Rocinante, and at his top speed, +which was an easy trot, he proceeded to charge his enemy; seeing him, +however, engaged in putting Sancho up, he drew rein, and halted in mid +career, for which his horse was very grateful, as he was already unable +to go. Don Quixote, fancying that his foe was coming down upon him +flying, drove his spurs vigorously into Rocinante's lean flanks and made +him scud along in such style that the history tells us that on this +occasion only was he known to make something like running, for on all +others it was a simple trot with him; and with this unparalleled fury he +bore down where he of the Mirrors stood digging his spurs into his horse +up to buttons, without being able to make him stir a finger's length from +the spot where he had come to a standstill in his course. At this lucky +moment and crisis, Don Quixote came upon his adversary, in trouble with +his horse, and embarrassed with his lance, which he either could not +manage, or had no time to lay in rest. Don Quixote, however, paid no +attention to these difficulties, and in perfect safety to himself and +without any risk encountered him of the Mirrors with such force that he +brought him to the ground in spite of himself over the haunches of his +horse, and with so heavy a fall that he lay to all appearance dead, not +stirring hand or foot. The instant Sancho saw him fall he slid down from +the cork tree, and made all haste to where his master was, who, +dismounting from Rocinante, went and stood over him of the Mirrors, and +unlacing his helmet to see if he was dead, and to give him air if he +should happen to be alive, he saw--who can say what he saw, without +filling all who hear it with astonishment, wonder, and awe? He saw, the +history says, the very countenance, the very face, the very look, the +very physiognomy, the very effigy, the very image of the bachelor Samson +Carrasco! As soon as he saw it he called out in a loud voice, "Make haste +here, Sancho, and behold what thou art to see but not to believe; quick, +my son, and learn what magic can do, and wizards and enchanters are +capable of." + +Sancho came up, and when he saw the countenance of the bachelor Carrasco, +he fell to crossing himself a thousand times, and blessing himself as +many more. All this time the prostrate knight showed no signs of life, +and Sancho said to Don Quixote, "It is my opinion, senor, that in any +case your worship should take and thrust your sword into the mouth of +this one here that looks like the bachelor Samson Carrasco; perhaps in +him you will kill one of your enemies, the enchanters." + +"Thy advice is not bad," said Don Quixote, "for of enemies the fewer the +better;" and he was drawing his sword to carry into effect Sancho's +counsel and suggestion, when the squire of the Mirrors came up, now +without the nose which had made him so hideous, and cried out in a loud +voice, "Mind what you are about, Senor Don Quixote; that is your friend, +the bachelor Samson Carrasco, you have at your feet, and I am his +squire." + +"And the nose?" said Sancho, seeing him without the hideous feature he +had before; to which he replied, "I have it here in my pocket," and +putting his hand into his right pocket, he pulled out a masquerade nose +of varnished pasteboard of the make already described; and Sancho, +examining him more and more closely, exclaimed aloud in a voice of +amazement, "Holy Mary be good to me! Isn't it Tom Cecial, my neighbour +and gossip?" + +"Why, to be sure I am!" returned the now unnosed squire; "Tom Cecial I +am, gossip and friend Sancho Panza; and I'll tell you presently the means +and tricks and falsehoods by which I have been brought here; but in the +meantime, beg and entreat of your master not to touch, maltreat, wound, +or slay the Knight of the Mirrors whom he has at his feet; because, +beyond all dispute, it is the rash and ill-advised bachelor Samson +Carrasco, our fellow townsman." + +At this moment he of the Mirrors came to himself, and Don Quixote +perceiving it, held the naked point of his sword over his face, and said +to him, "You are a dead man, knight, unless you confess that the peerless +Dulcinea del Toboso excels your Casildea de Vandalia in beauty; and in +addition to this you must promise, if you should survive this encounter +and fall, to go to the city of El Toboso and present yourself before her +on my behalf, that she deal with you according to her good pleasure; and +if she leaves you free to do yours, you are in like manner to return and +seek me out (for the trail of my mighty deeds will serve you as a guide +to lead you to where I may be), and tell me what may have passed between +you and her-conditions which, in accordance with what we stipulated +before our combat, do not transgress the just limits of knight-errantry." + +"I confess," said the fallen knight, "that the dirty tattered shoe of the +lady Dulcinea del Toboso is better than the ill-combed though clean beard +of Casildea; and I promise to go and to return from her presence to +yours, and to give you a full and particular account of all you demand of +me." + +"You must also confess and believe," added Don Quixote, "that the knight +you vanquished was not and could not be Don Quixote of La Mancha, but +some one else in his likeness, just as I confess and believe that you, +though you seem to be the bachelor Samson Carrasco, are not so, but some +other resembling him, whom my enemies have here put before me in his +shape, in order that I may restrain and moderate the vehemence of my +wrath, and make a gentle use of the glory of my victory." + +"I confess, hold, and think everything to be as you believe, hold, and +think it," the crippled knight; "let me rise, I entreat you; if, indeed, +the shock of my fall will allow me, for it has left me in a sorry plight +enough." + +Don Quixote helped him to rise, with the assistance of his squire Tom +Cecial; from whom Sancho never took his eyes, and to whom he put +questions, the replies to which furnished clear proof that he was really +and truly the Tom Cecial he said; but the impression made on Sancho's +mind by what his master said about the enchanters having changed the face +of the Knight of the Mirrors into that of the bachelor Samson Carrasco, +would not permit him to believe what he saw with his eyes. In fine, both +master and man remained under the delusion; and, down in the mouth, and +out of luck, he of the Mirrors and his squire parted from Don Quixote and +Sancho, he meaning to go look for some village where he could plaster and +strap his ribs. Don Quixote and Sancho resumed their journey to +Saragossa, and on it the history leaves them in order that it may tell +who the Knight of the Mirrors and his long-nosed squire were. + +Chapter XV. - +Wherein it is told and known who the Knight of the Mirrors and his Squire +were + +Don Quixote went off satisfied, elated, and vain-glorious in the highest +degree at having won a victory over such a valiant knight as he fancied +him of the Mirrors to be, and one from whose knightly word he expected to +learn whether the enchantment of his lady still continued; inasmuch as +the said vanquished knight was bound, under the penalty of ceasing to be +one, to return and render him an account of what took place between him +and her. But Don Quixote was of one mind, he of the Mirrors of another, +for he just then had no thought of anything but finding some village +where he could plaster himself, as has been said already. The history +goes on to say, then, that when the bachelor Samson Carrasco recommended +Don Quixote to resume his knight-errantry which he had laid aside, it was +in consequence of having been previously in conclave with the curate and +the barber on the means to be adopted to induce Don Quixote to stay at +home in peace and quiet without worrying himself with his ill-starred +adventures; at which consultation it was decided by the unanimous vote of +all, and on the special advice of Carrasco, that Don Quixote should be +allowed to go, as it seemed impossible to restrain him, and that Samson +should sally forth to meet him as a knight-errant, and do battle with +him, for there would be no difficulty about a cause, and vanquish him, +that being looked upon as an easy matter; and that it should be agreed +and settled that the vanquished was to be at the mercy of the victor. +Then, Don Quixote being vanquished, the bachelor knight was to command +him to return to his village and his house, and not quit it for two +years, or until he received further orders from him; all which it was +clear Don Quixote would unhesitatingly obey, rather than contravene or +fail to observe the laws of chivalry; and during the period of his +seclusion he might perhaps forget his folly, or there might be an +opportunity of discovering some ready remedy for his madness. Carrasco +undertook the task, and Tom Cecial, a gossip and neighbour of Sancho +Panza's, a lively, feather-headed fellow, offered himself as his squire. +Carrasco armed himself in the fashion described, and Tom Cecial, that he +might not be known by his gossip when they met, fitted on over his own +natural nose the false masquerade one that has been mentioned; and so +they followed the same route Don Quixote took, and almost came up with +him in time to be present at the adventure of the cart of Death and +finally encountered them in the grove, where all that the sagacious +reader has been reading about took place; and had it not been for the +extraordinary fancies of Don Quixote, and his conviction that the +bachelor was not the bachelor, senor bachelor would have been +incapacitated for ever from taking his degree of licentiate, all through +not finding nests where he thought to find birds. + +Tom Cecial, seeing how ill they had succeeded, and what a sorry end their +expedition had come to, said to the bachelor, "Sure enough, Senor Samson +Carrasco, we are served right; it is easy enough to plan and set about an +enterprise, but it is often a difficult matter to come well out of it. +Don Quixote a madman, and we sane; he goes off laughing, safe, and sound, +and you are left sore and sorry! I'd like to know now which is the +madder, he who is so because he cannot help it, or he who is so of his +own choice?" + +To which Samson replied, "The difference between the two sorts of madmen +is, that he who is so will he nil he, will be one always, while he who is +so of his own accord can leave off being one whenever he likes." + +"In that case," said Tom Cecial, "I was a madman of my own accord when I +volunteered to become your squire, and, of my own accord, I'll leave off +being one and go home." + +"That's your affair," returned Samson, "but to suppose that I am going +home until I have given Don Quixote a thrashing is absurd; and it is not +any wish that he may recover his senses that will make me hunt him out +now, but a wish for the sore pain I am in with my ribs won't let me +entertain more charitable thoughts." + +Thus discoursing, the pair proceeded until they reached a town where it +was their good luck to find a bone-setter, with whose help the +unfortunate Samson was cured. Tom Cecial left him and went home, while he +stayed behind meditating vengeance; and the history will return to him +again at the proper time, so as not to omit making merry with Don Quixote +now. + +Chapter XVI. - +Of what befell Don Quixote with a discreet gentleman of La Mancha + +Don Quixote pursued his journey in the high spirits, satisfaction, and +self-complacency already described, fancying himself the most valorous +knight-errant of the age in the world because of his late victory. All +the adventures that could befall him from that time forth he regarded as +already done and brought to a happy issue; he made light of enchantments +and enchanters; he thought no more of the countless drubbings that had +been administered to him in the course of his knight-errantry, nor of the +volley of stones that had levelled half his teeth, nor of the ingratitude +of the galley slaves, nor of the audacity of the Yanguesans and the +shower of stakes that fell upon him; in short, he said to himself that +could he discover any means, mode, or way of disenchanting his lady +Dulcinea, he would not envy the highest fortune that the most fortunate +knight-errant of yore ever reached or could reach. + +He was going along entirely absorbed in these fancies, when Sancho said +to him, "Isn't it odd, senor, that I have still before my eyes that +monstrous enormous nose of my gossip, Tom Cecial?" + +"And dost thou, then, believe, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that the +Knight of the Mirrors was the bachelor Carrasco, and his squire Tom +Cecial thy gossip?" + +"I don't know what to say to that," replied Sancho; "all I know is that +the tokens he gave me about my own house, wife and children, nobody else +but himself could have given me; and the face, once the nose was off, was +the very face of Tom Cecial, as I have seen it many a time in my town and +next door to my own house; and the sound of the voice was just the same." + +"Let us reason the matter, Sancho," said Don Quixote. "Come now, by what +process of thinking can it be supposed that the bachelor Samson Carrasco +would come as a knight-errant, in arms offensive and defensive, to fight +with me? Have I ever been by any chance his enemy? Have I ever given him +any occasion to owe me a grudge? Am I his rival, or does he profess arms, +that he should envy the fame I have acquired in them?" + +"Well, but what are we to say, senor," returned Sancho, "about that +knight, whoever he is, being so like the bachelor Carrasco, and his +squire so like my gossip, Tom Cecial? And if that be enchantment, as your +worship says, was there no other pair in the world for them to take the +likeness of?" + +"It is all," said Don Quixote, "a scheme and plot of the malignant +magicians that persecute me, who, foreseeing that I was to be victorious +in the conflict, arranged that the vanquished knight should display the +countenance of my friend the bachelor, in order that the friendship I +bear him should interpose to stay the edge of my sword and might of my +arm, and temper the just wrath of my heart; so that he who sought to take +my life by fraud and falsehood should save his own. And to prove it, thou +knowest already, Sancho, by experience which cannot lie or deceive, how +easy it is for enchanters to change one countenance into another, turning +fair into foul, and foul into fair; for it is not two days since thou +sawest with thine own eyes the beauty and elegance of the peerless +Dulcinea in all its perfection and natural harmony, while I saw her in +the repulsive and mean form of a coarse country wench, with cataracts in +her eyes and a foul smell in her mouth; and when the perverse enchanter +ventured to effect so wicked a transformation, it is no wonder if he +effected that of Samson Carrasco and thy gossip in order to snatch the +glory of victory out of my grasp. For all that, however, I console +myself, because, after all, in whatever shape he may have been, I have +victorious over my enemy." + +"God knows what's the truth of it all," said Sancho; and knowing as he +did that the transformation of Dulcinea had been a device and imposition +of his own, his master's illusions were not satisfactory to him; but he +did not like to reply lest he should say something that might disclose +his trickery. + +As they were engaged in this conversation they were overtaken by a man +who was following the same road behind them, mounted on a very handsome +flea-bitten mare, and dressed in a gaban of fine green cloth, with tawny +velvet facings, and a montera of the same velvet. The trappings of the +mare were of the field and jineta fashion, and of mulberry colour and +green. He carried a Moorish cutlass hanging from a broad green and gold +baldric; the buskins were of the same make as the baldric; the spurs were +not gilt, but lacquered green, and so brightly polished that, matching as +they did the rest of his apparel, they looked better than if they had +been of pure gold. + +When the traveller came up with them he saluted them courteously, and +spurring his mare was passing them without stopping, but Don Quixote +called out to him, "Gallant sir, if so be your worship is going our road, +and has no occasion for speed, it would be a pleasure to me if we were to +join company." + +"In truth," replied he on the mare, "I would not pass you so hastily but +for fear that horse might turn restive in the company of my mare." + +"You may safely hold in your mare, senor," said Sancho in reply to this, +"for our horse is the most virtuous and well-behaved horse in the world; +he never does anything wrong on such occasions, and the only time he +misbehaved, my master and I suffered for it sevenfold; I say again your +worship may pull up if you like; for if she was offered to him between +two plates the horse would not hanker after her." + +The traveller drew rein, amazed at the trim and features of Don Quixote, +who rode without his helmet, which Sancho carried like a valise in front +of Dapple's pack-saddle; and if the man in green examined Don Quixote +closely, still more closely did Don Quixote examine the man in green, who +struck him as being a man of intelligence. In appearance he was about +fifty years of age, with but few grey hairs, an aquiline cast of +features, and an expression between grave and gay; and his dress and +accoutrements showed him to be a man of good condition. What he in green +thought of Don Quixote of La Mancha was that a man of that sort and shape +he had never yet seen; he marvelled at the length of his hair, his lofty +stature, the lankness and sallowness of his countenance, his armour, his +bearing and his gravity--a figure and picture such as had not been seen +in those regions for many a long day. + +Don Quixote saw very plainly the attention with which the traveller was +regarding him, and read his curiosity in his astonishment; and courteous +as he was and ready to please everybody, before the other could ask him +any question he anticipated him by saying, "The appearance I present to +your worship being so strange and so out of the common, I should not be +surprised if it filled you with wonder; but you will cease to wonder when +I tell you, as I do, that I am one of those knights who, as people say, +go seeking adventures. I have left my home, I have mortgaged my estate, I +have given up my comforts, and committed myself to the arms of Fortune, +to bear me whithersoever she may please. My desire was to bring to life +again knight-errantry, now dead, and for some time past, stumbling here, +falling there, now coming down headlong, now raising myself up again, I +have carried out a great portion of my design, succouring widows, +protecting maidens, and giving aid to wives, orphans, and minors, the +proper and natural duty of knights-errant; and, therefore, because of my +many valiant and Christian achievements, I have been already found worthy +to make my way in print to well-nigh all, or most, of the nations of the +earth. Thirty thousand volumes of my history have been printed, and it is +on the high-road to be printed thirty thousand thousands of times, if +heaven does not put a stop to it. In short, to sum up all in a few words, +or in a single one, I may tell you I am Don Quixote of La Mancha, +otherwise called 'The Knight of the Rueful Countenance;' for though +self-praise is degrading, I must perforce sound my own sometimes, that is +to say, when there is no one at hand to do it for me. So that, gentle +sir, neither this horse, nor this lance, nor this shield, nor this +squire, nor all these arms put together, nor the sallowness of my +countenance, nor my gaunt leanness, will henceforth astonish you, now +that you know who I am and what profession I follow." + +With these words Don Quixote held his peace, and, from the time he took +to answer, the man in green seemed to be at a loss for a reply; after a +long pause, however, he said to him, "You were right when you saw +curiosity in my amazement, sir knight; but you have not succeeded in +removing the astonishment I feel at seeing you; for although you say, +senor, that knowing who you are ought to remove it, it has not done so; +on the contrary, now that I know, I am left more amazed and astonished +than before. What! is it possible that there are knights-errant in the +world in these days, and histories of real chivalry printed? I cannot +realise the fact that there can be anyone on earth now-a-days who aids +widows, or protects maidens, or defends wives, or succours orphans; nor +should I believe it had I not seen it in your worship with my own eyes. +Blessed be heaven! for by means of this history of your noble and genuine +chivalrous deeds, which you say has been printed, the countless stories +of fictitious knights-errant with which the world is filled, so much to +the injury of morality and the prejudice and discredit of good histories, +will have been driven into oblivion." + +"There is a good deal to be said on that point," said Don Quixote, "as to +whether the histories of the knights-errant are fiction or not." + +"Why, is there anyone who doubts that those histories are false?" said +the man in green. + +"I doubt it," said Don Quixote, "but never mind that just now; if our +journey lasts long enough, I trust in God I shall show your worship that +you do wrong in going with the stream of those who regard it as a matter +of certainty that they are not true." + +From this last observation of Don Quixote's, the traveller began to have +a suspicion that he was some crazy being, and was waiting him to confirm +it by something further; but before they could turn to any new subject +Don Quixote begged him to tell him who he was, since he himself had +rendered account of his station and life. To this, he in the green gaban +replied "I, Sir Knight of the Rueful Countenance, am a gentleman by +birth, native of the village where, please God, we are going to dine +today; I am more than fairly well off, and my name is Don Diego de +Miranda. I pass my life with my wife, children, and friends; my pursuits +are hunting and fishing, but I keep neither hawks nor greyhounds, nothing +but a tame partridge or a bold ferret or two; I have six dozen or so of +books, some in our mother tongue, some Latin, some of them history, +others devotional; those of chivalry have not as yet crossed the +threshold of my door; I am more given to turning over the profane than +the devotional, so long as they are books of honest entertainment that +charm by their style and attract and interest by the invention they +display, though of these there are very few in Spain. Sometimes I dine +with my neighbours and friends, and often invite them; my entertainments +are neat and well served without stint of anything. I have no taste for +tattle, nor do I allow tattling in my presence; I pry not into my +neighbours' lives, nor have I lynx-eyes for what others do. I hear mass +every day; I share my substance with the poor, making no display of good +works, lest I let hypocrisy and vainglory, those enemies that subtly take +possession of the most watchful heart, find an entrance into mine. I +strive to make peace between those whom I know to be at variance; I am +the devoted servant of Our Lady, and my trust is ever in the infinite +mercy of God our Lord." + +Sancho listened with the greatest attention to the account of the +gentleman's life and occupation; and thinking it a good and a holy life, +and that he who led it ought to work miracles, he threw himself off +Dapple, and running in haste seized his right stirrup and kissed his foot +again and again with a devout heart and almost with tears. + +Seeing this the gentleman asked him, "What are you about, brother? What +are these kisses for?" + +"Let me kiss," said Sancho, "for I think your worship is the first saint +in the saddle I ever saw all the days of my life." + +"I am no saint," replied the gentleman, "but a great sinner; but you are, +brother, for you must be a good fellow, as your simplicity shows." + +Sancho went back and regained his pack-saddle, having extracted a laugh +from his master's profound melancholy, and excited fresh amazement in Don +Diego. Don Quixote then asked him how many children he had, and observed +that one of the things wherein the ancient philosophers, who were without +the true knowledge of God, placed the summum bonum was in the gifts of +nature, in those of fortune, in having many friends, and many and good +children. + +"I, Senor Don Quixote," answered the gentleman, "have one son, without +whom, perhaps, I should count myself happier than I am, not because he is +a bad son, but because he is not so good as I could wish. He is eighteen +years of age; he has been for six at Salamanca studying Latin and Greek, +and when I wished him to turn to the study of other sciences I found him +so wrapped up in that of poetry (if that can be called a science) that +there is no getting him to take kindly to the law, which I wished him to +study, or to theology, the queen of them all. I would like him to be an +honour to his family, as we live in days when our kings liberally reward +learning that is virtuous and worthy; for learning without virtue is a +pearl on a dunghill. He spends the whole day in settling whether Homer +expressed himself correctly or not in such and such a line of the Iliad, +whether Martial was indecent or not in such and such an epigram, whether +such and such lines of Virgil are to be understood in this way or in +that; in short, all his talk is of the works of these poets, and those of +Horace, Perseus, Juvenal, and Tibullus; for of the moderns in our own +language he makes no great account; but with all his seeming indifference +to Spanish poetry, just now his thoughts are absorbed in making a gloss +on four lines that have been sent him from Salamanca, which I suspect are +for some poetical tournament." + +To all this Don Quixote said in reply, "Children, senor, are portions of +their parents' bowels, and therefore, be they good or bad, are to be +loved as we love the souls that give us life; it is for the parents to +guide them from infancy in the ways of virtue, propriety, and worthy +Christian conduct, so that when grown up they may be the staff of their +parents' old age, and the glory of their posterity; and to force them to +study this or that science I do not think wise, though it may be no harm +to persuade them; and when there is no need to study for the sake of pane +lucrando, and it is the student's good fortune that heaven has given him +parents who provide him with it, it would be my advice to them to let him +pursue whatever science they may see him most inclined to; and though +that of poetry is less useful than pleasurable, it is not one of those +that bring discredit upon the possessor. Poetry, gentle sir, is, as I +take it, like a tender young maiden of supreme beauty, to array, bedeck, +and adorn whom is the task of several other maidens, who are all the rest +of the sciences; and she must avail herself of the help of all, and all +derive their lustre from her. But this maiden will not bear to be +handled, nor dragged through the streets, nor exposed either at the +corners of the market-places, or in the closets of palaces. She is the +product of an Alchemy of such virtue that he who is able to practise it, +will turn her into pure gold of inestimable worth. He that possesses her +must keep her within bounds, not permitting her to break out in ribald +satires or soulless sonnets. She must on no account be offered for sale, +unless, indeed, it be in heroic poems, moving tragedies, or sprightly and +ingenious comedies. She must not be touched by the buffoons, nor by the +ignorant vulgar, incapable of comprehending or appreciating her hidden +treasures. And do not suppose, senor, that I apply the term vulgar here +merely to plebeians and the lower orders; for everyone who is ignorant, +be he lord or prince, may and should be included among the vulgar. He, +then, who shall embrace and cultivate poetry under the conditions I have +named, shall become famous, and his name honoured throughout all the +civilised nations of the earth. And with regard to what you say, senor, +of your son having no great opinion of Spanish poetry, I am inclined to +think that he is not quite right there, and for this reason: the great +poet Homer did not write in Latin, because he was a Greek, nor did Virgil +write in Greek, because he was a Latin; in short, all the ancient poets +wrote in the language they imbibed with their mother's milk, and never +went in quest of foreign ones to express their sublime conceptions; and +that being so, the usage should in justice extend to all nations, and the +German poet should not be undervalued because he writes in his own +language, nor the Castilian, nor even the Biscayan, for writing in his. +But your son, senor, I suspect, is not prejudiced against Spanish poetry, +but against those poets who are mere Spanish verse writers, without any +knowledge of other languages or sciences to adorn and give life and +vigour to their natural inspiration; and yet even in this he may be +wrong; for, according to a true belief, a poet is born one; that is to +say, the poet by nature comes forth a poet from his mother's womb; and +following the bent that heaven has bestowed upon him, without the aid of +study or art, he produces things that show how truly he spoke who said, +'Est Deus in nobis,' etc. At the same time, I say that the poet by nature +who calls in art to his aid will be a far better poet, and will surpass +him who tries to be one relying upon his knowledge of art alone. The +reason is, that art does not surpass nature, but only brings it to +perfection; and thus, nature combined with art, and art with nature, will +produce a perfect poet. To bring my argument to a close, I would say +then, gentle sir, let your son go on as his star leads him, for being so +studious as he seems to be, and having already successfully surmounted +the first step of the sciences, which is that of the languages, with +their help he will by his own exertions reach the summit of polite +literature, which so well becomes an independent gentleman, and adorns, +honours, and distinguishes him, as much as the mitre does the bishop, or +the gown the learned counsellor. If your son write satires reflecting on +the honour of others, chide and correct him, and tear them up; but if he +compose discourses in which he rebukes vice in general, in the style of +Horace, and with elegance like his, commend him; for it is legitimate for +a poet to write against envy and lash the envious in his verse, and the +other vices too, provided he does not single out individuals; there are, +however, poets who, for the sake of saying something spiteful, would run +the risk of being banished to the coast of Pontus. If the poet be pure in +his morals, he will be pure in his verses too; the pen is the tongue of +the mind, and as the thought engendered there, so will be the things that +it writes down. And when kings and princes observe this marvellous +science of poetry in wise, virtuous, and thoughtful subjects, they +honour, value, exalt them, and even crown them with the leaves of that +tree which the thunderbolt strikes not, as if to show that they whose +brows are honoured and adorned with such a crown are not to be assailed +by anyone." + +He of the green gaban was filled with astonishment at Don Quixote's +argument, so much so that he began to abandon the notion he had taken up +about his being crazy. But in the middle of the discourse, it being not +very much to his taste, Sancho had turned aside out of the road to beg a +little milk from some shepherds, who were milking their ewes hard by; and +just as the gentleman, highly pleased, was about to renew the +conversation, Don Quixote, raising his head, perceived a cart covered +with royal flags coming along the road they were travelling; and +persuaded that this must be some new adventure, he called aloud to Sancho +to come and bring him his helmet. Sancho, hearing himself called, quitted +the shepherds, and, prodding Dapple vigorously, came up to his master, to +whom there fell a terrific and desperate adventure. + +Chapter XVII. - +Wherein is shown the furthest and highest point which the unexampled +courage of Don Quixote reached or could reach; together with the happily +achieved adventure of the lions + +The history tells that when Don Quixote called out to Sancho to bring him +his helmet, Sancho was buying some curds the shepherds agreed to sell +him, and flurried by the great haste his master was in did not know what +to do with them or what to carry them in; so, not to lose them, for he +had already paid for them, he thought it best to throw them into his +master's helmet, and acting on this bright idea he went to see what his +master wanted with him. He, as he approached, exclaimed to him: + +"Give me that helmet, my friend, for either I know little of adventures, +or what I observe yonder is one that will, and does, call upon me to arm +myself." + +He of the green gaban, on hearing this, looked in all directions, but +could perceive nothing, except a cart coming towards them with two or +three small flags, which led him to conclude it must be carrying treasure +of the King's, and he said so to Don Quixote. He, however, would not +believe him, being always persuaded and convinced that all that happened +to him must be adventures and still more adventures; so he replied to the +gentleman, "He who is prepared has his battle half fought; nothing is +lost by my preparing myself, for I know by experience that I have +enemies, visible and invisible, and I know not when, or where, or at what +moment, or in what shapes they will attack me;" and turning to Sancho he +called for his helmet; and Sancho, as he had no time to take out the +curds, had to give it just as it was. Don Quixote took it, and without +perceiving what was in it thrust it down in hot haste upon his head; but +as the curds were pressed and squeezed the whey began to run all over his +face and beard, whereat he was so startled that he cried out to Sancho: + +"Sancho, what's this? I think my head is softening, or my brains are +melting, or I am sweating from head to foot! If I am sweating it is not +indeed from fear. I am convinced beyond a doubt that the adventure which +is about to befall me is a terrible one. Give me something to wipe myself +with, if thou hast it, for this profuse sweat is blinding me." + +Sancho held his tongue, and gave him a cloth, and gave thanks to God at +the same time that his master had not found out what was the matter. Don +Quixote then wiped himself, and took off his helmet to see what it was +that made his head feel so cool, and seeing all that white mash inside +his helmet he put it to his nose, and as soon as he had smelt it he +exclaimed: + +"By the life of my lady Dulcinea del Toboso, but it is curds thou hast +put here, thou treacherous, impudent, ill-mannered squire!" + +To which, with great composure and pretended innocence, Sancho replied, +"If they are curds let me have them, your worship, and I'll eat them; but +let the devil eat them, for it must have been he who put them there. I +dare to dirty your helmet! You have guessed the offender finely! Faith, +sir, by the light God gives me, it seems I must have enchanters too, that +persecute me as a creature and limb of your worship, and they must have +put that nastiness there in order to provoke your patience to anger, and +make you baste my ribs as you are wont to do. Well, this time, indeed, +they have missed their aim, for I trust to my master's good sense to see +that I have got no curds or milk, or anything of the sort; and that if I +had it is in my stomach I would put it and not in the helmet." + +"May be so," said Don Quixote. All this the gentleman was observing, and +with astonishment, more especially when, after having wiped himself +clean, his head, face, beard, and helmet, Don Quixote put it on, and +settling himself firmly in his stirrups, easing his sword in the +scabbard, and grasping his lance, he cried, "Now, come who will, here am +I, ready to try conclusions with Satan himself in person!" + +By this time the cart with the flags had come up, unattended by anyone +except the carter on a mule, and a man sitting in front. Don Quixote +planted himself before it and said, "Whither are you going, brothers? +What cart is this? What have you got in it? What flags are those?" + +To this the carter replied, "The cart is mine; what is in it is a pair of +wild caged lions, which the governor of Oran is sending to court as a +present to his Majesty; and the flags are our lord the King's, to show +that what is here is his property." + +"And are the lions large?" asked Don Quixote. + +"So large," replied the man who sat at the door of the cart, "that +larger, or as large, have never crossed from Africa to Spain; I am the +keeper, and I have brought over others, but never any like these. They +are male and female; the male is in that first cage and the female in the +one behind, and they are hungry now, for they have eaten nothing to-day, +so let your worship stand aside, for we must make haste to the place +where we are to feed them." + +Hereupon, smiling slightly, Don Quixote exclaimed, "Lion-whelps to me! to +me whelps of lions, and at such a time! Then, by God! those gentlemen who +send them here shall see if I am a man to be frightened by lions. Get +down, my good fellow, and as you are the keeper open the cages, and turn +me out those beasts, and in the midst of this plain I will let them know +who Don Quixote of La Mancha is, in spite and in the teeth of the +enchanters who send them to me." + +"So, so," said the gentleman to himself at this; "our worthy knight has +shown of what sort he is; the curds, no doubt, have softened his skull +and brought his brains to a head." + +At this instant Sancho came up to him, saying, "Senor, for God's sake do +something to keep my master, Don Quixote, from tackling these lions; for +if he does they'll tear us all to pieces here." + +"Is your master then so mad," asked the gentleman, "that you believe and +are afraid he will engage such fierce animals?" + +"He is not mad," said Sancho, "but he is venturesome." + +"I will prevent it," said the gentleman; and going over to Don Quixote, +who was insisting upon the keeper's opening the cages, he said to him, +"Sir knight, knights-errant should attempt adventures which encourage the +hope of a successful issue, not those which entirely withhold it; for +valour that trenches upon temerity savours rather of madness than of +courage; moreover, these lions do not come to oppose you, nor do they +dream of such a thing; they are going as presents to his Majesty, and it +will not be right to stop them or delay their journey." + +"Gentle sir," replied Don Quixote, "you go and mind your tame partridge +and your bold ferret, and leave everyone to manage his own business; this +is mine, and I know whether these gentlemen the lions come to me or not;" +and then turning to the keeper he exclaimed, "By all that's good, sir +scoundrel, if you don't open the cages this very instant, I'll pin you to +the cart with this lance." + +The carter, seeing the determination of this apparition in armour, said +to him, "Please your worship, for charity's sake, senor, let me unyoke +the mules and place myself in safety along with them before the lions are +turned out; for if they kill them on me I am ruined for life, for all I +possess is this cart and mules." + +"O man of little faith," replied Don Quixote, "get down and unyoke; you +will soon see that you are exerting yourself for nothing, and that you +might have spared yourself the trouble." + +The carter got down and with all speed unyoked the mules, and the keeper +called out at the top of his voice, "I call all here to witness that +against my will and under compulsion I open the cages and let the lions +loose, and that I warn this gentleman that he will be accountable for all +the harm and mischief which these beasts may do, and for my salary and +dues as well. You, gentlemen, place yourselves in safety before I open, +for I know they will do me no harm." + +Once more the gentleman strove to persuade Don Quixote not to do such a +mad thing, as it was tempting God to engage in such a piece of folly. To +this, Don Quixote replied that he knew what he was about. The gentleman +in return entreated him to reflect, for he knew he was under a delusion. + +"Well, senor," answered Don Quixote, "if you do not like to be a +spectator of this tragedy, as in your opinion it will be, spur your +flea-bitten mare, and place yourself in safety." + +Hearing this, Sancho with tears in his eyes entreated him to give up an +enterprise compared with which the one of the windmills, and the awful +one of the fulling mills, and, in fact, all the feats he had attempted in +the whole course of his life, were cakes and fancy bread. "Look ye, +senor," said Sancho, "there's no enchantment here, nor anything of the +sort, for between the bars and chinks of the cage I have seen the paw of +a real lion, and judging by that I reckon the lion such a paw could +belong to must be bigger than a mountain." + +"Fear at any rate," replied Don Quixote, "will make him look bigger to +thee than half the world. Retire, Sancho, and leave me; and if I die here +thou knowest our old compact; thou wilt repair to Dulcinea--I say no +more." To these he added some further words that banished all hope of his +giving up his insane project. He of the green gaban would have offered +resistance, but he found himself ill-matched as to arms, and did not +think it prudent to come to blows with a madman, for such Don Quixote now +showed himself to be in every respect; and the latter, renewing his +commands to the keeper and repeating his threats, gave warning to the +gentleman to spur his mare, Sancho his Dapple, and the carter his mules, +all striving to get away from the cart as far as they could before the +lions broke loose. Sancho was weeping over his master's death, for this +time he firmly believed it was in store for him from the claws of the +lions; and he cursed his fate and called it an unlucky hour when he +thought of taking service with him again; but with all his tears and +lamentations he did not forget to thrash Dapple so as to put a good space +between himself and the cart. The keeper, seeing that the fugitives were +now some distance off, once more entreated and warned him as before; but +he replied that he heard him, and that he need not trouble himself with +any further warnings or entreaties, as they would be fruitless, and bade +him make haste. + +During the delay that occurred while the keeper was opening the first +cage, Don Quixote was considering whether it would not be well to do +battle on foot, instead of on horseback, and finally resolved to fight on +foot, fearing that Rocinante might take fright at the sight of the lions; +he therefore sprang off his horse, flung his lance aside, braced his +buckler on his arm, and drawing his sword, advanced slowly with +marvellous intrepidity and resolute courage, to plant himself in front of +the cart, commending himself with all his heart to God and to his lady +Dulcinea. + +It is to be observed, that on coming to this passage, the author of this +veracious history breaks out into exclamations. "O doughty Don Quixote! +high-mettled past extolling! Mirror, wherein all the heroes of the world +may see themselves! Second modern Don Manuel de Leon, once the glory and +honour of Spanish knighthood! In what words shall I describe this dread +exploit, by what language shall I make it credible to ages to come, what +eulogies are there unmeet for thee, though they be hyperboles piled on +hyperboles! On foot, alone, undaunted, high-souled, with but a simple +sword, and that no trenchant blade of the Perrillo brand, a shield, but +no bright polished steel one, there stoodst thou, biding and awaiting the +two fiercest lions that Africa's forests ever bred! Thy own deeds be thy +praise, valiant Manchegan, and here I leave them as they stand, wanting +the words wherewith to glorify them!" + +Here the author's outburst came to an end, and he proceeded to take up +the thread of his story, saying that the keeper, seeing that Don Quixote +had taken up his position, and that it was impossible for him to avoid +letting out the male without incurring the enmity of the fiery and daring +knight, flung open the doors of the first cage, containing, as has been +said, the lion, which was now seen to be of enormous size, and grim and +hideous mien. The first thing he did was to turn round in the cage in +which he lay, and protrude his claws, and stretch himself thoroughly; he +next opened his mouth, and yawned very leisurely, and with near two +palms' length of tongue that he had thrust forth, he licked the dust out +of his eyes and washed his face; having done this, he put his head out of +the cage and looked all round with eyes like glowing coals, a spectacle +and demeanour to strike terror into temerity itself. Don Quixote merely +observed him steadily, longing for him to leap from the cart and come to +close quarters with him, when he hoped to hew him in pieces. + +So far did his unparalleled madness go; but the noble lion, more +courteous than arrogant, not troubling himself about silly bravado, after +having looked all round, as has been said, turned about and presented his +hind-quarters to Don Quixote, and very coolly and tranquilly lay down +again in the cage. Seeing this, Don Quixote ordered the keeper to take a +stick to him and provoke him to make him come out. + +"That I won't," said the keeper; "for if I anger him, the first he'll +tear in pieces will be myself. Be satisfied, sir knight, with what you +have done, which leaves nothing more to be said on the score of courage, +and do not seek to tempt fortune a second time. The lion has the door +open; he is free to come out or not to come out; but as he has not come +out so far, he will not come out to-day. Your worship's great courage has +been fully manifested already; no brave champion, so it strikes me, is +bound to do more than challenge his enemy and wait for him on the field; +if his adversary does not come, on him lies the disgrace, and he who +waits for him carries off the crown of victory." + +"That is true," said Don Quixote; "close the door, my friend, and let me +have, in the best form thou canst, what thou hast seen me do, by way of +certificate; to wit, that thou didst open for the lion, that I waited for +him, that he did not come out, that I still waited for him, and that +still he did not come out, and lay down again. I am not bound to do more; +enchantments avaunt, and God uphold the right, the truth, and true +chivalry! Close the door as I bade thee, while I make signals to the +fugitives that have left us, that they may learn this exploit from thy +lips." + +The keeper obeyed, and Don Quixote, fixing on the point of his lance the +cloth he had wiped his face with after the deluge of curds, proceeded to +recall the others, who still continued to fly, looking back at every +step, all in a body, the gentleman bringing up the rear. Sancho, however, +happening to observe the signal of the white cloth, exclaimed, "May I +die, if my master has not overcome the wild beasts, for he is calling to +us." + +They all stopped, and perceived that it was Don Quixote who was making +signals, and shaking off their fears to some extent, they approached +slowly until they were near enough to hear distinctly Don Quixote's voice +calling to them. They returned at length to the cart, and as they came +up, Don Quixote said to the carter, "Put your mules to once more, +brother, and continue your journey; and do thou, Sancho, give him two +gold crowns for himself and the keeper, to compensate for the delay they +have incurred through me." + +"That will I give with all my heart," said Sancho; "but what has become +of the lions? Are they dead or alive?" + +The keeper, then, in full detail, and bit by bit, described the end of +the contest, exalting to the best of his power and ability the valour of +Don Quixote, at the sight of whom the lion quailed, and would not and +dared not come out of the cage, although he had held the door open ever +so long; and showing how, in consequence of his having represented to the +knight that it was tempting God to provoke the lion in order to force him +out, which he wished to have done, he very reluctantly, and altogether +against his will, had allowed the door to be closed. + +"What dost thou think of this, Sancho?" said Don Quixote. "Are there any +enchantments that can prevail against true valour? The enchanters may be +able to rob me of good fortune, but of fortitude and courage they +cannot." + +Sancho paid the crowns, the carter put to, the keeper kissed Don +Quixote's hands for the bounty bestowed upon him, and promised to give an +account of the valiant exploit to the King himself, as soon as he saw him +at court. + +"Then," said Don Quixote, "if his Majesty should happen to ask who +performed it, you must say THE KNIGHT OF THE LIONS; for it is my desire +that into this the name I have hitherto borne of Knight of the Rueful +Countenance be from this time forward changed, altered, transformed, and +turned; and in this I follow the ancient usage of knights-errant, who +changed their names when they pleased, or when it suited their purpose." + +The cart went its way, and Don Quixote, Sancho, and he of the green gaban +went theirs. All this time, Don Diego de Miranda had not spoken a word, +being entirely taken up with observing and noting all that Don Quixote +did and said, and the opinion he formed was that he was a man of brains +gone mad, and a madman on the verge of rationality. The first part of his +history had not yet reached him, for, had he read it, the amazement with +which his words and deeds filled him would have vanished, as he would +then have understood the nature of his madness; but knowing nothing of +it, he took him to be rational one moment, and crazy the next, for what +he said was sensible, elegant, and well expressed, and what he did, +absurd, rash, and foolish; and said he to himself, "What could be madder +than putting on a helmet full of curds, and then persuading oneself that +enchanters are softening one's skull; or what could be greater rashness +and folly than wanting to fight lions tooth and nail?" + +Don Quixote roused him from these reflections and this soliloquy by +saying, "No doubt, Senor Don Diego de Miranda, you set me down in your +mind as a fool and a madman, and it would be no wonder if you did, for my +deeds do not argue anything else. But for all that, I would have you take +notice that I am neither so mad nor so foolish as I must have seemed to +you. A gallant knight shows to advantage bringing his lance to bear +adroitly upon a fierce bull under the eyes of his sovereign, in the midst +of a spacious plaza; a knight shows to advantage arrayed in glittering +armour, pacing the lists before the ladies in some joyous tournament, and +all those knights show to advantage that entertain, divert, and, if we +may say so, honour the courts of their princes by warlike exercises, or +what resemble them; but to greater advantage than all these does a +knight-errant show when he traverses deserts, solitudes, cross-roads, +forests, and mountains, in quest of perilous adventures, bent on bringing +them to a happy and successful issue, all to win a glorious and lasting +renown. To greater advantage, I maintain, does the knight-errant show +bringing aid to some widow in some lonely waste, than the court knight +dallying with some city damsel. All knights have their own special parts +to play; let the courtier devote himself to the ladies, let him add +lustre to his sovereign's court by his liveries, let him entertain poor +gentlemen with the sumptuous fare of his table, let him arrange +joustings, marshal tournaments, and prove himself noble, generous, and +magnificent, and above all a good Christian, and so doing he will fulfil +the duties that are especially his; but let the knight-errant explore the +corners of the earth and penetrate the most intricate labyrinths, at each +step let him attempt impossibilities, on desolate heaths let him endure +the burning rays of the midsummer sun, and the bitter inclemency of the +winter winds and frosts; let no lions daunt him, no monsters terrify him, +no dragons make him quail; for to seek these, to attack those, and to +vanquish all, are in truth his main duties. I, then, as it has fallen to +my lot to be a member of knight-errantry, cannot avoid attempting all +that to me seems to come within the sphere of my duties; thus it was my +bounden duty to attack those lions that I just now attacked, although I +knew it to be the height of rashness; for I know well what valour is, +that it is a virtue that occupies a place between two vicious extremes, +cowardice and temerity; but it will be a lesser evil for him who is +valiant to rise till he reaches the point of rashness, than to sink until +he reaches the point of cowardice; for, as it is easier for the prodigal +than for the miser to become generous, so it is easier for a rash man to +prove truly valiant than for a coward to rise to true valour; and believe +me, Senor Don Diego, in attempting adventures it is better to lose by a +card too many than by a card too few; for to hear it said, 'such a knight +is rash and daring,' sounds better than 'such a knight is timid and +cowardly.'" + +"I protest, Senor Don Quixote," said Don Diego, "everything you have said +and done is proved correct by the test of reason itself; and I believe, +if the laws and ordinances of knight-errantry should be lost, they might +be found in your worship's breast as in their own proper depository and +muniment-house; but let us make haste, and reach my village, where you +shall take rest after your late exertions; for if they have not been of +the body they have been of the spirit, and these sometimes tend to +produce bodily fatigue." + +"I take the invitation as a great favour and honour, Senor Don Diego," +replied Don Quixote; and pressing forward at a better pace than before, +at about two in the afternoon they reached the village and house of Don +Diego, or, as Don Quixote called him, "The Knight of the Green Gaban." + +Chapter XVIII. - +Of what happened Don Quixote in the castle or house of the Knight of the +Green Gaban, together with other matters out of the common + +Don Quixote found Don Diego de Miranda's house built in village style, +with his arms in rough stone over the street door; in the patio was the +store-room, and at the entrance the cellar, with plenty of wine-jars +standing round, which, coming from El Toboso, brought back to his memory +his enchanted and transformed Dulcinea; and with a sigh, and not thinking +of what he was saying, or in whose presence he was, he exclaimed-- + +poem{ + + "O ye sweet treasures, to my sorrow found! + Once sweet and welcome when 'twas heaven's good-will. + + "O ye Tobosan jars, how ye bring back to my memory the + sweet object of my bitter regrets!" + +}poem + +The student poet, Don Diego's son, who had come out with his mother to +receive him, heard this exclamation, and both mother and son were filled +with amazement at the extraordinary figure he presented; he, however, +dismounting from Rocinante, advanced with great politeness to ask +permission to kiss the lady's hand, while Don Diego said, "Senora, pray +receive with your wonted kindness Senor Don Quixote of La Mancha, whom +you see before you, a knight-errant, and the bravest and wisest in the +world." + +The lady, whose name was Dona Christina, received him with every sign of +good-will and great courtesy, and Don Quixote placed himself at her +service with an abundance of well-chosen and polished phrases. Almost the +same civilities were exchanged between him and the student, who listening +to Don Quixote, took him to be a sensible, clear-headed person. + +Here the author describes minutely everything belonging to Don Diego's +mansion, putting before us in his picture the whole contents of a rich +gentleman-farmer's house; but the translator of the history thought it +best to pass over these and other details of the same sort in silence, as +they are not in harmony with the main purpose of the story, the strong +point of which is truth rather than dull digressions. + +They led Don Quixote into a room, and Sancho removed his armour, leaving +him in loose Walloon breeches and chamois-leather doublet, all stained +with the rust of his armour; his collar was a falling one of scholastic +cut, without starch or lace, his buskins buff-coloured, and his shoes +polished. He wore his good sword, which hung in a baldric of sea-wolf's +skin, for he had suffered for many years, they say, from an ailment of +the kidneys; and over all he threw a long cloak of good grey cloth. But +first of all, with five or six buckets of water (for as regard the number +of buckets there is some dispute), he washed his head and face, and still +the water remained whey-coloured, thanks to Sancho's greediness and +purchase of those unlucky curds that turned his master so white. Thus +arrayed, and with an easy, sprightly, and gallant air, Don Quixote passed +out into another room, where the student was waiting to entertain him +while the table was being laid; for on the arrival of so distinguished a +guest, Dona Christina was anxious to show that she knew how and was able +to give a becoming reception to those who came to her house. + +While Don Quixote was taking off his armour, Don Lorenzo (for so Don +Diego's son was called) took the opportunity to say to his father, "What +are we to make of this gentleman you have brought home to us, sir? For +his name, his appearance, and your describing him as a knight-errant have +completely puzzled my mother and me." + +"I don't know what to say, my son," replied. Don Diego; "all I can tell +thee is that I have seen him act the acts of the greatest madman in the +world, and heard him make observations so sensible that they efface and +undo all he does; do thou talk to him and feel the pulse of his wits, and +as thou art shrewd, form the most reasonable conclusion thou canst as to +his wisdom or folly; though, to tell the truth, I am more inclined to +take him to be mad than sane." + +With this Don Lorenzo went away to entertain Don Quixote as has been +said, and in the course of the conversation that passed between them Don +Quixote said to Don Lorenzo, "Your father, Senor Don Diego de Miranda, +has told me of the rare abilities and subtle intellect you possess, and, +above all, that you are a great poet." + +"A poet, it may be," replied Don Lorenzo, "but a great one, by no means. +It is true that I am somewhat given to poetry and to reading good poets, +but not so much so as to justify the title of 'great' which my father +gives me." + +"I do not dislike that modesty," said Don Quixote; "for there is no poet +who is not conceited and does not think he is the best poet in the +world." + +"There is no rule without an exception," said Don Lorenzo; "there may be +some who are poets and yet do not think they are." + +"Very few," said Don Quixote; "but tell me, what verses are those which +you have now in hand, and which your father tells me keep you somewhat +restless and absorbed? If it be some gloss, I know something about +glosses, and I should like to hear them; and if they are for a poetical +tournament, contrive to carry off the second prize; for the first always +goes by favour or personal standing, the second by simple justice; and so +the third comes to be the second, and the first, reckoning in this way, +will be third, in the same way as licentiate degrees are conferred at the +universities; but, for all that, the title of first is a great +distinction." + +"So far," said Don Lorenzo to himself, "I should not take you to be a +madman; but let us go on." So he said to him, "Your worship has +apparently attended the schools; what sciences have you studied?" + +"That of knight-errantry," said Don Quixote, "which is as good as that of +poetry, and even a finger or two above it." + +"I do not know what science that is," said Don Lorenzo, "and until now I +have never heard of it." + +"It is a science," said Don Quixote, "that comprehends in itself all or +most of the sciences in the world, for he who professes it must be a +jurist, and must know the rules of justice, distributive and equitable, +so as to give to each one what belongs to him and is due to him. He must +be a theologian, so as to be able to give a clear and distinctive reason +for the Christian faith he professes, wherever it may be asked of him. He +must be a physician, and above all a herbalist, so as in wastes and +solitudes to know the herbs that have the property of healing wounds, for +a knight-errant must not go looking for some one to cure him at every +step. He must be an astronomer, so as to know by the stars how many hours +of the night have passed, and what clime and quarter of the world he is +in. He must know mathematics, for at every turn some occasion for them +will present itself to him; and, putting it aside that he must be adorned +with all the virtues, cardinal and theological, to come down to minor +particulars, he must, I say, be able to swim as well as Nicholas or +Nicolao the Fish could, as the story goes; he must know how to shoe a +horse, and repair his saddle and bridle; and, to return to higher +matters, he must be faithful to God and to his lady; he must be pure in +thought, decorous in words, generous in works, valiant in deeds, patient +in suffering, compassionate towards the needy, and, lastly, an upholder +of the truth though its defence should cost him his life. Of all these +qualities, great and small, is a true knight-errant made up; judge then, +Senor Don Lorenzo, whether it be a contemptible science which the knight +who studies and professes it has to learn, and whether it may not compare +with the very loftiest that are taught in the schools." + +"If that be so," replied Don Lorenzo, "this science, I protest, surpasses +all." + +"How, if that be so?" said Don Quixote. + +"What I mean to say," said Don Lorenzo, "is, that I doubt whether there +are now, or ever were, any knights-errant, and adorned with such +virtues." + +"Many a time," replied Don Quixote, "have I said what I now say once +more, that the majority of the world are of opinion that there never were +any knights-errant in it; and as it is my opinion that, unless heaven by +some miracle brings home to them the truth that there were and are, all +the pains one takes will be in vain (as experience has often proved to +me), I will not now stop to disabuse you of the error you share with the +multitude. All I shall do is to pray to heaven to deliver you from it, +and show you how beneficial and necessary knights-errant were in days of +yore, and how useful they would be in these days were they but in vogue; +but now, for the sins of the people, sloth and indolence, gluttony and +luxury are triumphant." + +"Our guest has broken out on our hands," said Don Lorenzo to himself at +this point; "but, for all that, he is a glorious madman, and I should be +a dull blockhead to doubt it." + +Here, being summoned to dinner, they brought their colloquy to a close. +Don Diego asked his son what he had been able to make out as to the wits +of their guest. To which he replied, "All the doctors and clever scribes +in the world will not make sense of the scrawl of his madness; he is a +madman full of streaks, full of lucid intervals." + +They went in to dinner, and the repast was such as Don Diego said on the +road he was in the habit of giving to his guests, neat, plentiful, and +tasty; but what pleased Don Quixote most was the marvellous silence that +reigned throughout the house, for it was like a Carthusian monastery. + +When the cloth had been removed, grace said and their hands washed, Don +Quixote earnestly pressed Don Lorenzo to repeat to him his verses for the +poetical tournament, to which he replied, "Not to be like those poets +who, when they are asked to recite their verses, refuse, and when they +are not asked for them vomit them up, I will repeat my gloss, for which I +do not expect any prize, having composed it merely as an exercise of +ingenuity." + +"A discerning friend of mine," said Don Quixote, "was of opinion that no +one ought to waste labour in glossing verses; and the reason he gave was +that the gloss can never come up to the text, and that often or most +frequently it wanders away from the meaning and purpose aimed at in the +glossed lines; and besides, that the laws of the gloss were too strict, +as they did not allow interrogations, nor 'said he,' nor 'I say,' nor +turning verbs into nouns, or altering the construction, not to speak of +other restrictions and limitations that fetter gloss-writers, as you no +doubt know." + +"Verily, Senor Don Quixote," said Don Lorenzo, "I wish I could catch your +worship tripping at a stretch, but I cannot, for you slip through my +fingers like an eel." + +"I don't understand what you say, or mean by slipping," said Don Quixote. + +"I will explain myself another time," said Don Lorenzo; "for the present +pray attend to the glossed verses and the gloss, which run thus: + +poem{ + +Could 'was' become an 'is' for me, +Then would I ask no more than this; +Or could, for me, the time that is +Become the time that is to be!-- + +GLOSS + +Dame Fortune once upon a day + To me was bountiful and kind; + But all things change; she changed her mind, +And what she gave she took away. +O Fortune, long I've sued to thee; + The gifts thou gavest me restore, + For, trust me, I would ask no more, +Could 'was' become an 'is' for me. + +No other prize I seek to gain, + No triumph, glory, or success, + Only the long-lost happiness, +The memory whereof is pain. +One taste, methinks, of bygone bliss + The heart-consuming fire might stay; + And, so it come without delay, +Then would I ask no more than this. + +I ask what cannot be, alas! + That time should ever be, and then + Come back to us, and be again, +No power on earth can bring to pass; +For fleet of foot is he, I wis, + And idly, therefore, do we pray + That what for aye hath left us may +Become for us the time that is. + +Perplexed, uncertain, to remain + 'Twixt hope and fear, is death, not life; + 'Twere better, sure, to end the strife, +And dying, seek release from pain. +And yet, thought were the best for me. + Anon the thought aside I fling, + And to the present fondly cling, +And dread the time that is to be." + +}poem + +When Don Lorenzo had finished reciting his gloss, Don Quixote stood up, +and in a loud voice, almost a shout, exclaimed as he grasped Don +Lorenzo's right hand in his, "By the highest heavens, noble youth, but +you are the best poet on earth, and deserve to be crowned with laurel, +not by Cyprus or by Gaeta--as a certain poet, God forgive him, said--but +by the Academies of Athens, if they still flourished, and by those that +flourish now, Paris, Bologna, Salamanca. Heaven grant that the judges who +rob you of the first prize--that Phoebus may pierce them with his arrows, +and the Muses never cross the thresholds of their doors. Repeat me some +of your long-measure verses, senor, if you will be so good, for I want +thoroughly to feel the pulse of your rare genius." + +Is there any need to say that Don Lorenzo enjoyed hearing himself praised +by Don Quixote, albeit he looked upon him as a madman? power of flattery, +how far-reaching art thou, and how wide are the bounds of thy pleasant +jurisdiction! Don Lorenzo gave a proof of it, for he complied with Don +Quixote's request and entreaty, and repeated to him this sonnet on the +fable or story of Pyramus and Thisbe. + +poem{ + +SONNET + +The lovely maid, she pierces now the wall; + Heart-pierced by her young Pyramus doth lie; + And Love spreads wing from Cyprus isle to fly, +A chink to view so wondrous great and small. +There silence speaketh, for no voice at all + Can pass so strait a strait; but love will ply + Where to all other power 'twere vain to try; +For love will find a way whate'er befall. +Impatient of delay, with reckless pace + The rash maid wins the fatal spot where she +Sinks not in lover's arms but death's embrace. + So runs the strange tale, how the lovers twain +One sword, one sepulchre, one memory, + Slays, and entombs, and brings to life again. + +}poem + +"Blessed be God," said Don Quixote when he had heard Don Lorenzo's +sonnet, "that among the hosts there are of irritable poets I have found +one consummate one, which, senor, the art of this sonnet proves to me +that you are!" + +For four days was Don Quixote most sumptuously entertained in Don Diego's +house, at the end of which time he asked his permission to depart, +telling him he thanked him for the kindness and hospitality he had +received in his house, but that, as it did not become knights-errant to +give themselves up for long to idleness and luxury, he was anxious to +fulfill the duties of his calling in seeking adventures, of which he was +informed there was an abundance in that neighbourhood, where he hoped to +employ his time until the day came round for the jousts at Saragossa, for +that was his proper destination; and that, first of all, he meant to +enter the cave of Montesinos, of which so many marvellous things were +reported all through the country, and at the same time to investigate and +explore the origin and true source of the seven lakes commonly called the +lakes of Ruidera. + +Don Diego and his son commended his laudable resolution, and bade him +furnish himself with all he wanted from their house and belongings, as +they would most gladly be of service to him; which, indeed, his personal +worth and his honourable profession made incumbent upon them. + +The day of his departure came at length, as welcome to Don Quixote as it +was sad and sorrowful to Sancho Panza, who was very well satisfied with +the abundance of Don Diego's house, and objected to return to the +starvation of the woods and wilds and the short-commons of his +ill-stocked alforjas; these, however, he filled and packed with what he +considered needful. On taking leave, Don Quixote said to Don Lorenzo, "I +know not whether I have told you already, but if I have I tell you once +more, that if you wish to spare yourself fatigue and toil in reaching the +inaccessible summit of the temple of fame, you have nothing to do but to +turn aside out of the somewhat narrow path of poetry and take the still +narrower one of knight-errantry, wide enough, however, to make you an +emperor in the twinkling of an eye." + +In this speech Don Quixote wound up the evidence of his madness, but +still better in what he added when he said, "God knows, I would gladly +take Don Lorenzo with me to teach him how to spare the humble, and +trample the proud under foot, virtues that are part and parcel of the +profession I belong to; but since his tender age does not allow of it, +nor his praiseworthy pursuits permit it, I will simply content myself +with impressing it upon your worship that you will become famous as a +poet if you are guided by the opinion of others rather than by your own; +because no fathers or mothers ever think their own children ill-favoured, +and this sort of deception prevails still more strongly in the case of +the children of the brain." + +Both father and son were amazed afresh at the strange medley Don Quixote +talked, at one moment sense, at another nonsense, and at the pertinacity +and persistence he displayed in going through thick and thin in quest of +his unlucky adventures, which he made the end and aim of his desires. +There was a renewal of offers of service and civilities, and then, with +the gracious permission of the lady of the castle, they took their +departure, Don Quixote on Rocinante, and Sancho on Dapple. + +Chapter XIX. - +In which is related the adventure of the enamoured shepherd, together +with other truly droll incidents + +Don Quixote had gone but a short distance beyond Don Diego's village, +when he fell in with a couple of either priests or students, and a couple +of peasants, mounted on four beasts of the ass kind. One of the students +carried, wrapped up in a piece of green buckram by way of a portmanteau, +what seemed to be a little linen and a couple of pairs of-ribbed +stockings; the other carried nothing but a pair of new fencing-foils with +buttons. The peasants carried divers articles that showed they were on +their way from some large town where they had bought them, and were +taking them home to their village; and both students and peasants were +struck with the same amazement that everybody felt who saw Don Quixote +for the first time, and were dying to know who this man, so different +from ordinary men, could be. Don Quixote saluted them, and after +ascertaining that their road was the same as his, made them an offer of +his company, and begged them to slacken their pace, as their young asses +travelled faster than his horse; and then, to gratify them, he told them +in a few words who he was and the calling and profession he followed, +which was that of a knight-errant seeking adventures in all parts of the +world. He informed them that his own name was Don Quixote of La Mancha, +and that he was called, by way of surname, the Knight of the Lions. + +All this was Greek or gibberish to the peasants, but not so to the +students, who very soon perceived the crack in Don Quixote's pate; for +all that, however, they regarded him with admiration and respect, and one +of them said to him, "If you, sir knight, have no fixed road, as it is +the way with those who seek adventures not to have any, let your worship +come with us; you will see one of the finest and richest weddings that up +to this day have ever been celebrated in La Mancha, or for many a league +round." + +Don Quixote asked him if it was some prince's, that he spoke of it in +this way. "Not at all," said the student; "it is the wedding of a farmer +and a farmer's daughter, he the richest in all this country, and she the +fairest mortal ever set eyes on. The display with which it is to be +attended will be something rare and out of the common, for it will be +celebrated in a meadow adjoining the town of the bride, who is called, +par excellence, Quiteria the fair, as the bridegroom is called Camacho +the rich. She is eighteen, and he twenty-two, and they are fairly +matched, though some knowing ones, who have all the pedigrees in the +world by heart, will have it that the family of the fair Quiteria is +better than Camacho's; but no one minds that now-a-days, for wealth can +solder a great many flaws. At any rate, Camacho is free-handed, and it is +his fancy to screen the whole meadow with boughs and cover it in +overhead, so that the sun will have hard work if he tries to get in to +reach the grass that covers the soil. He has provided dancers too, not +only sword but also bell-dancers, for in his own town there are those who +ring the changes and jingle the bells to perfection; of shoe-dancers I +say nothing, for of them he has engaged a host. But none of these things, +nor of the many others I have omitted to mention, will do more to make +this a memorable wedding than the part which I suspect the despairing +Basilio will play in it. This Basilio is a youth of the same village as +Quiteria, and he lived in the house next door to that of her parents, of +which circumstance Love took advantage to reproduce to the word the +long-forgotten loves of Pyramus and Thisbe; for Basilio loved Quiteria +from his earliest years, and she responded to his passion with countless +modest proofs of affection, so that the loves of the two children, +Basilio and Quiteria, were the talk and the amusement of the town. As +they grew up, the father of Quiteria made up his mind to refuse Basilio +his wonted freedom of access to the house, and to relieve himself of +constant doubts and suspicions, he arranged a match for his daughter with +the rich Camacho, as he did not approve of marrying her to Basilio, who +had not so large a share of the gifts of fortune as of nature; for if the +truth be told ungrudgingly, he is the most agile youth we know, a mighty +thrower of the bar, a first-rate wrestler, and a great ball-player; he +runs like a deer, and leaps better than a goat, bowls over the nine-pins +as if by magic, sings like a lark, plays the guitar so as to make it +speak, and, above all, handles a sword as well as the best." + +"For that excellence alone," said Don Quixote at this, "the youth +deserves to marry, not merely the fair Quiteria, but Queen Guinevere +herself, were she alive now, in spite of Launcelot and all who would try +to prevent it." + +"Say that to my wife," said Sancho, who had until now listened in +silence, "for she won't hear of anything but each one marrying his equal, +holding with the proverb 'each ewe to her like.' What I would like is +that this good Basilio (for I am beginning to take a fancy to him +already) should marry this lady Quiteria; and a blessing and good luck--I +meant to say the opposite--on people who would prevent those who love one +another from marrying." + +"If all those who love one another were to marry," said Don Quixote, "it +would deprive parents of the right to choose, and marry their children to +the proper person and at the proper time; and if it was left to daughters +to choose husbands as they pleased, one would be for choosing her +father's servant, and another, some one she has seen passing in the +street and fancies gallant and dashing, though he may be a drunken bully; +for love and fancy easily blind the eyes of the judgment, so much wanted +in choosing one's way of life; and the matrimonial choice is very liable +to error, and it needs great caution and the special favour of heaven to +make it a good one. He who has to make a long journey, will, if he is +wise, look out for some trusty and pleasant companion to accompany him +before he sets out. Why, then, should not he do the same who has to make +the whole journey of life down to the final halting-place of death, more +especially when the companion has to be his companion in bed, at board, +and everywhere, as the wife is to her husband? The companionship of one's +wife is no article of merchandise, that, after it has been bought, may be +returned, or bartered, or changed; for it is an inseparable accident that +lasts as long as life lasts; it is a noose that, once you put it round +your neck, turns into a Gordian knot, which, if the scythe of Death does +not cut it, there is no untying. I could say a great deal more on this +subject, were I not prevented by the anxiety I feel to know if the senor +licentiate has anything more to tell about the story of Basilio." + +To this the student, bachelor, or, as Don Quixote called him, licentiate, +replied, "I have nothing whatever to say further, but that from the +moment Basilio learned that the fair Quiteria was to be married to +Camacho the rich, he has never been seen to smile, or heard to utter +rational word, and he always goes about moody and dejected, talking to +himself in a way that shows plainly he is out of his senses. He eats +little and sleeps little, and all he eats is fruit, and when he sleeps, +if he sleeps at all, it is in the field on the hard earth like a brute +beast. Sometimes he gazes at the sky, at other times he fixes his eyes on +the earth in such an abstracted way that he might be taken for a clothed +statue, with its drapery stirred by the wind. In short, he shows such +signs of a heart crushed by suffering, that all we who know him believe +that when to-morrow the fair Quiteria says 'yes,' it will be his sentence +of death." + +"God will guide it better," said Sancho, "for God who gives the wound +gives the salve; nobody knows what will happen; there are a good many +hours between this and to-morrow, and any one of them, or any moment, the +house may fall; I have seen the rain coming down and the sun shining all +at one time; many a one goes to bed in good health who can't stir the +next day. And tell me, is there anyone who can boast of having driven a +nail into the wheel of fortune? No, faith; and between a woman's 'yes' +and 'no' I wouldn't venture to put the point of a pin, for there would +not be room for it; if you tell me Quiteria loves Basilio heart and soul, +then I'll give him a bag of good luck; for love, I have heard say, looks +through spectacles that make copper seem gold, poverty wealth, and blear +eyes pearls." + +"What art thou driving at, Sancho? curses on thee!" said Don Quixote; +"for when thou takest to stringing proverbs and sayings together, no one +can understand thee but Judas himself, and I wish he had thee. Tell me, +thou animal, what dost thou know about nails or wheels, or anything +else?" + +"Oh, if you don't understand me," replied Sancho, "it is no wonder my +words are taken for nonsense; but no matter; I understand myself, and I +know I have not said anything very foolish in what I have said; only your +worship, senor, is always gravelling at everything I say, nay, everything +I do." + +"Cavilling, not gravelling," said Don Quixote, "thou prevaricator of +honest language, God confound thee!" + +"Don't find fault with me, your worship," returned Sancho, "for you know +I have not been bred up at court or trained at Salamanca, to know whether +I am adding or dropping a letter or so in my words. Why! God bless me, +it's not fair to force a Sayago-man to speak like a Toledan; maybe there +are Toledans who do not hit it off when it comes to polished talk." + +"That is true," said the licentiate, "for those who have been bred up in +the Tanneries and the Zocodover cannot talk like those who are almost all +day pacing the cathedral cloisters, and yet they are all Toledans. Pure, +correct, elegant and lucid language will be met with in men of courtly +breeding and discrimination, though they may have been born in +Majalahonda; I say of discrimination, because there are many who are not +so, and discrimination is the grammar of good language, if it be +accompanied by practice. I, sirs, for my sins have studied canon law at +Salamanca, and I rather pique myself on expressing my meaning in clear, +plain, and intelligible language." + +"If you did not pique yourself more on your dexterity with those foils +you carry than on dexterity of tongue," said the other student, "you +would have been head of the degrees, where you are now tail." + +"Look here, bachelor Corchuelo," returned the licentiate, "you have the +most mistaken idea in the world about skill with the sword, if you think +it useless." + +"It is no idea on my part, but an established truth," replied Corchuelo; +"and if you wish me to prove it to you by experiment, you have swords +there, and it is a good opportunity; I have a steady hand and a strong +arm, and these joined with my resolution, which is not small, will make +you confess that I am not mistaken. Dismount and put in practice your +positions and circles and angles and science, for I hope to make you see +stars at noonday with my rude raw swordsmanship, in which, next to God, I +place my trust that the man is yet to be born who will make me turn my +back, and that there is not one in the world I will not compel to give +ground." + +"As to whether you turn your back or not, I do not concern myself," +replied the master of fence; "though it might be that your grave would be +dug on the spot where you planted your foot the first time; I mean that +you would be stretched dead there for despising skill with the sword." + +"We shall soon see," replied Corchuelo, and getting off his ass briskly, +he drew out furiously one of the swords the licentiate carried on his +beast. + +"It must not be that way," said Don Quixote at this point; "I will be the +director of this fencing match, and judge of this often disputed +question;" and dismounting from Rocinante and grasping his lance, he +planted himself in the middle of the road, just as the licentiate, with +an easy, graceful bearing and step, advanced towards Corchuelo, who came +on against him, darting fire from his eyes, as the saying is. The other +two of the company, the peasants, without dismounting from their asses, +served as spectators of the mortal tragedy. The cuts, thrusts, down +strokes, back strokes and doubles, that Corchuelo delivered were past +counting, and came thicker than hops or hail. He attacked like an angry +lion, but he was met by a tap on the mouth from the button of the +licentiate's sword that checked him in the midst of his furious onset, +and made him kiss it as if it were a relic, though not as devoutly as +relics are and ought to be kissed. The end of it was that the licentiate +reckoned up for him by thrusts every one of the buttons of the short +cassock he wore, tore the skirts into strips, like the tails of a +cuttlefish, knocked off his hat twice, and so completely tired him out, +that in vexation, anger, and rage, he took the sword by the hilt and +flung it away with such force, that one of the peasants that were there, +who was a notary, and who went for it, made an affidavit afterwards that +he sent it nearly three-quarters of a league, which testimony will serve, +and has served, to show and establish with all certainty that strength is +overcome by skill. + +Corchuelo sat down wearied, and Sancho approaching him said, "By my +faith, senor bachelor, if your worship takes my advice, you will never +challenge anyone to fence again, only to wrestle and throw the bar, for +you have the youth and strength for that; but as for these fencers as +they call them, I have heard say they can put the point of a sword +through the eye of a needle." + +"I am satisfied with having tumbled off my donkey," said Corchuelo, "and +with having had the truth I was so ignorant of proved to me by +experience;" and getting up he embraced the licentiate, and they were +better friends than ever; and not caring to wait for the notary who had +gone for the sword, as they saw he would be a long time about it, they +resolved to push on so as to reach the village of Quiteria, to which they +all belonged, in good time. + +During the remainder of the journey the licentiate held forth to them on +the excellences of the sword, with such conclusive arguments, and such +figures and mathematical proofs, that all were convinced of the value of +the science, and Corchuelo cured of his dogmatism. + +It grew dark; but before they reached the town it seemed to them all as +if there was a heaven full of countless glittering stars in front of it. +They heard, too, the pleasant mingled notes of a variety of instruments, +flutes, drums, psalteries, pipes, tabors, and timbrels, and as they drew +near they perceived that the trees of a leafy arcade that had been +constructed at the entrance of the town were filled with lights +unaffected by the wind, for the breeze at the time was so gentle that it +had not power to stir the leaves on the trees. The musicians were the +life of the wedding, wandering through the pleasant grounds in separate +bands, some dancing, others singing, others playing the various +instruments already mentioned. In short, it seemed as though mirth and +gaiety were frisking and gambolling all over the meadow. Several other +persons were engaged in erecting raised benches from which people might +conveniently see the plays and dances that were to be performed the next +day on the spot dedicated to the celebration of the marriage of Camacho +the rich and the obsequies of Basilio. Don Quixote would not enter the +village, although the peasant as well as the bachelor pressed him; he +excused himself, however, on the grounds, amply sufficient in his +opinion, that it was the custom of knights-errant to sleep in the fields +and woods in preference to towns, even were it under gilded ceilings; and +so turned aside a little out of the road, very much against Sancho's +will, as the good quarters he had enjoyed in the castle or house of Don +Diego came back to his mind. + +Chapter XX. - +Wherein an account is given of the wedding of Camacho the rich, together +with the incident of Basilio the poor + +Scarce had the fair Aurora given bright Phoebus time to dry the liquid +pearls upon her golden locks with the heat of his fervent rays, when Don +Quixote, shaking off sloth from his limbs, sprang to his feet and called +to his squire Sancho, who was still snoring; seeing which Don Quixote ere +he roused him thus addressed him: "Happy thou, above all the dwellers on +the face of the earth, that, without envying or being envied, sleepest +with tranquil mind, and that neither enchanters persecute nor +enchantments affright. Sleep, I say, and will say a hundred times, +without any jealous thoughts of thy mistress to make thee keep ceaseless +vigils, or any cares as to how thou art to pay the debts thou owest, or +find to-morrow's food for thyself and thy needy little family, to +interfere with thy repose. Ambition breaks not thy rest, nor doth this +world's empty pomp disturb thee, for the utmost reach of thy anxiety is +to provide for thy ass, since upon my shoulders thou hast laid the +support of thyself, the counterpoise and burden that nature and custom +have imposed upon masters. The servant sleeps and the master lies awake +thinking how he is to feed him, advance him, and reward him. The distress +of seeing the sky turn brazen, and withhold its needful moisture from the +earth, is not felt by the servant but by the master, who in time of +scarcity and famine must support him who has served him in times of +plenty and abundance." + +To all this Sancho made no reply because he was asleep, nor would he have +wakened up so soon as he did had not Don Quixote brought him to his +senses with the butt of his lance. He awoke at last, drowsy and lazy, and +casting his eyes about in every direction, observed, "There comes, if I +don't mistake, from the quarter of that arcade a steam and a smell a +great deal more like fried rashers than galingale or thyme; a wedding +that begins with smells like that, by my faith, ought to be plentiful and +unstinting." + +"Have done, thou glutton," said Don Quixote; "come, let us go and witness +this bridal, and see what the rejected Basilio does." + +"Let him do what he likes," returned Sancho; "be he not poor, he would +marry Quiteria. To make a grand match for himself, and he without a +farthing; is there nothing else? Faith, senor, it's my opinion the poor +man should be content with what he can get, and not go looking for +dainties in the bottom of the sea. I will bet my arm that Camacho could +bury Basilio in reals; and if that be so, as no doubt it is, what a fool +Quiteria would be to refuse the fine dresses and jewels Camacho must have +given her and will give her, and take Basilio's bar-throwing and +sword-play. They won't give a pint of wine at the tavern for a good cast +of the bar or a neat thrust of the sword. Talents and accomplishments +that can't be turned into money, let Count Dirlos have them; but when +such gifts fall to one that has hard cash, I wish my condition of life +was as becoming as they are. On a good foundation you can raise a good +building, and the best foundation in the world is money." + +"For God's sake, Sancho," said Don Quixote here, "stop that harangue; it +is my belief, if thou wert allowed to continue all thou beginnest every +instant, thou wouldst have no time left for eating or sleeping; for thou +wouldst spend it all in talking." + +"If your worship had a good memory," replied Sancho, "you would remember +the articles of our agreement before we started from home this last time; +one of them was that I was to be let say all I liked, so long as it was +not against my neighbour or your worship's authority; and so far, it +seems to me, I have not broken the said article." + +"I remember no such article, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "and even if it +were so, I desire you to hold your tongue and come along; for the +instruments we heard last night are already beginning to enliven the +valleys again, and no doubt the marriage will take place in the cool of +the morning, and not in the heat of the afternoon." + +Sancho did as his master bade him, and putting the saddle on Rocinante +and the pack-saddle on Dapple, they both mounted and at a leisurely pace +entered the arcade. The first thing that presented itself to Sancho's +eyes was a whole ox spitted on a whole elm tree, and in the fire at which +it was to be roasted there was burning a middling-sized mountain of +faggots, and six stewpots that stood round the blaze had not been made in +the ordinary mould of common pots, for they were six half wine-jars, each +fit to hold the contents of a slaughter-house; they swallowed up whole +sheep and hid them away in their insides without showing any more sign of +them than if they were pigeons. Countless were the hares ready skinned +and the plucked fowls that hung on the trees for burial in the pots, +numberless the wildfowl and game of various sorts suspended from the +branches that the air might keep them cool. Sancho counted more than +sixty wine skins of over six gallons each, and all filled, as it proved +afterwards, with generous wines. There were, besides, piles of the +whitest bread, like the heaps of corn one sees on the threshing-floors. +There was a wall made of cheeses arranged like open brick-work, and two +cauldrons full of oil, bigger than those of a dyer's shop, served for +cooking fritters, which when fried were taken out with two mighty +shovels, and plunged into another cauldron of prepared honey that stood +close by. Of cooks and cook-maids there were over fifty, all clean, +brisk, and blithe. In the capacious belly of the ox were a dozen soft +little sucking-pigs, which, sewn up there, served to give it tenderness +and flavour. The spices of different kinds did not seem to have been +bought by the pound but by the quarter, and all lay open to view in a +great chest. In short, all the preparations made for the wedding were in +rustic style, but abundant enough to feed an army. + +Sancho observed all, contemplated all, and everything won his heart. The +first to captivate and take his fancy were the pots, out of which he +would have very gladly helped himself to a moderate pipkinful; then the +wine skins secured his affections; and lastly, the produce of the +frying-pans, if, indeed, such imposing cauldrons may be called +frying-pans; and unable to control himself or bear it any longer, he +approached one of the busy cooks and civilly but hungrily begged +permission to soak a scrap of bread in one of the pots; to which the cook +made answer, "Brother, this is not a day on which hunger is to have any +sway, thanks to the rich Camacho; get down and look about for a ladle and +skim off a hen or two, and much good may they do you." + +"I don't see one," said Sancho. + +"Wait a bit," said the cook; "sinner that I am! how particular and +bashful you are!" and so saying, he seized a bucket and plunging it into +one of the half jars took up three hens and a couple of geese, and said +to Sancho, "Fall to, friend, and take the edge off your appetite with +these skimmings until dinner-time comes." + +"I have nothing to put them in," said Sancho. + +"Well then," said the cook, "take spoon and all; for Camacho's wealth and +happiness furnish everything." + +While Sancho fared thus, Don Quixote was watching the entrance, at one +end of the arcade, of some twelve peasants, all in holiday and gala +dress, mounted on twelve beautiful mares with rich handsome field +trappings and a number of little bells attached to their petrals, who, +marshalled in regular order, ran not one but several courses over the +meadow, with jubilant shouts and cries of "Long live Camacho and +Quiteria! he as rich as she is fair; and she the fairest on earth!" + +Hearing this, Don Quixote said to himself, "It is easy to see these folk +have never seen my Dulcinea del Toboso; for if they had they would be +more moderate in their praises of this Quiteria of theirs." + +Shortly after this, several bands of dancers of various sorts began to +enter the arcade at different points, and among them one of sword-dancers +composed of some four-and-twenty lads of gallant and high-spirited mien, +clad in the finest and whitest of linen, and with handkerchiefs +embroidered in various colours with fine silk; and one of those on the +mares asked an active youth who led them if any of the dancers had been +wounded. "As yet, thank God, no one has been wounded," said he, "we are +all safe and sound;" and he at once began to execute complicated figures +with the rest of his comrades, with so many turns and so great dexterity, +that although Don Quixote was well used to see dances of the same kind, +he thought he had never seen any so good as this. He also admired another +that came in composed of fair young maidens, none of whom seemed to be +under fourteen or over eighteen years of age, all clad in green stuff, +with their locks partly braided, partly flowing loose, but all of such +bright gold as to vie with the sunbeams, and over them they wore garlands +of jessamine, roses, amaranth, and honeysuckle. At their head were a +venerable old man and an ancient dame, more brisk and active, however, +than might have been expected from their years. The notes of a Zamora +bagpipe accompanied them, and with modesty in their countenances and in +their eyes, and lightness in their feet, they looked the best dancers in +the world. + +Following these there came an artistic dance of the sort they call +"speaking dances." It was composed of eight nymphs in two files, with the +god Cupid leading one and Interest the other, the former furnished with +wings, bow, quiver and arrows, the latter in a rich dress of gold and +silk of divers colours. The nymphs that followed Love bore their names +written on white parchment in large letters on their backs. "Poetry" was +the name of the first, "Wit" of the second, "Birth" of the third, and +"Valour" of the fourth. Those that followed Interest were distinguished +in the same way; the badge of the first announced "Liberality," that of +the second "Largess," the third "Treasure," and the fourth "Peaceful +Possession." In front of them all came a wooden castle drawn by four wild +men, all clad in ivy and hemp stained green, and looking so natural that +they nearly terrified Sancho. On the front of the castle and on each of +the four sides of its frame it bore the inscription "Castle of Caution." +Four skillful tabor and flute players accompanied them, and the dance +having been opened, Cupid, after executing two figures, raised his eyes +and bent his bow against a damsel who stood between the turrets of the +castle, and thus addressed her: + +poem{ + +I am the mighty God whose sway + Is potent over land and sea. +The heavens above us own me; nay, + The shades below acknowledge me. +I know not fear, I have my will, + Whate'er my whim or fancy be; +For me there's no impossible, + I order, bind, forbid, set free. + +}poem + +Having concluded the stanza he discharged an arrow at the top of the +castle, and went back to his place. Interest then came forward and went +through two more figures, and as soon as the tabors ceased, he said: + +poem{ + +But mightier than Love am I, + Though Love it be that leads me on, +Than mine no lineage is more high, + Or older, underneath the sun. +To use me rightly few know how, + To act without me fewer still, +For I am Interest, and I vow + For evermore to do thy will. + +}poem + +Interest retired, and Poetry came forward, and when she had gone through +her figures like the others, fixing her eyes on the damsel of the castle, +she said: + +poem{ + +With many a fanciful conceit, + Fair Lady, winsome Poesy +Her soul, an offering at thy feet, + Presents in sonnets unto thee. +If thou my homage wilt not scorn, + Thy fortune, watched by envious eyes, +On wings of poesy upborne + Shall be exalted to the skies. + +}poem + +Poetry withdrew, and on the side of Interest Liberality advanced, and +after having gone through her figures, said: + +poem{ + +To give, while shunning each extreme, + The sparing hand, the over-free, +Therein consists, so wise men deem, + The virtue Liberality. +But thee, fair lady, to enrich, + Myself a prodigal I'll prove, +A vice not wholly shameful, which + May find its fair excuse in love. + +}poem + +In the same manner all the characters of the two bands advanced and +retired, and each executed its figures, and delivered its verses, some of +them graceful, some burlesque, but Don Quixote's memory (though he had an +excellent one) only carried away those that have been just quoted. All +then mingled together, forming chains and breaking off again with +graceful, unconstrained gaiety; and whenever Love passed in front of the +castle he shot his arrows up at it, while Interest broke gilded pellets +against it. At length, after they had danced a good while, Interest drew +out a great purse, made of the skin of a large brindled cat and to all +appearance full of money, and flung it at the castle, and with the force +of the blow the boards fell asunder and tumbled down, leaving the damsel +exposed and unprotected. Interest and the characters of his band +advanced, and throwing a great chain of gold over her neck pretended to +take her and lead her away captive, on seeing which, Love and his +supporters made as though they would release her, the whole action being +to the accompaniment of the tabors and in the form of a regular dance. +The wild men made peace between them, and with great dexterity readjusted +and fixed the boards of the castle, and the damsel once more ensconced +herself within; and with this the dance wound up, to the great enjoyment +of the beholders. + +Don Quixote asked one of the nymphs who it was that had composed and +arranged it. She replied that it was a beneficiary of the town who had a +nice taste in devising things of the sort. "I will lay a wager," said Don +Quixote, "that the same bachelor or beneficiary is a greater friend of +Camacho's than of Basilio's, and that he is better at satire than at +vespers; he has introduced the accomplishments of Basilio and the riches +of Camacho very neatly into the dance." Sancho Panza, who was listening +to all this, exclaimed, "The king is my cock; I stick to Camacho." "It is +easy to see thou art a clown, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "and one of that +sort that cry 'Long life to the conqueror.'" + +"I don't know of what sort I am," returned Sancho, "but I know very well +I'll never get such elegant skimmings off Basilio's pots as these I have +got off Camacho's;" and he showed him the bucketful of geese and hens, +and seizing one began to eat with great gaiety and appetite, saying, "A +fig for the accomplishments of Basilio! As much as thou hast so much art +thou worth, and as much as thou art worth so much hast thou. As a +grandmother of mine used to say, there are only two families in the +world, the Haves and the Haven'ts; and she stuck to the Haves; and to +this day, Senor Don Quixote, people would sooner feel the pulse of +'Have,' than of 'Know;' an ass covered with gold looks better than a +horse with a pack-saddle. So once more I say I stick to Camacho, the +bountiful skimmings of whose pots are geese and hens, hares and rabbits; +but of Basilio's, if any ever come to hand, or even to foot, they'll be +only rinsings." + +"Hast thou finished thy harangue, Sancho?" said Don Quixote. "Of course I +have finished it," replied Sancho, "because I see your worship takes +offence at it; but if it was not for that, there was work enough cut out +for three days." + +"God grant I may see thee dumb before I die, Sancho," said Don Quixote. + +"At the rate we are going," said Sancho, "I'll be chewing clay before +your worship dies; and then, maybe, I'll be so dumb that I'll not say a +word until the end of the world, or, at least, till the day of judgment." + +"Even should that happen, O Sancho," said Don Quixote, "thy silence will +never come up to all thou hast talked, art talking, and wilt talk all thy +life; moreover, it naturally stands to reason, that my death will come +before thine; so I never expect to see thee dumb, not even when thou art +drinking or sleeping, and that is the utmost I can say." + +"In good faith, senor," replied Sancho, "there's no trusting that +fleshless one, I mean Death, who devours the lamb as soon as the sheep, +and, as I have heard our curate say, treads with equal foot upon the +lofty towers of kings and the lowly huts of the poor. That lady is more +mighty than dainty, she is no way squeamish, she devours all and is ready +for all, and fills her alforjas with people of all sorts, ages, and +ranks. She is no reaper that sleeps out the noontide; at all times she is +reaping and cutting down, as well the dry grass as the green; she never +seems to chew, but bolts and swallows all that is put before her, for she +has a canine appetite that is never satisfied; and though she has no +belly, she shows she has a dropsy and is athirst to drink the lives of +all that live, as one would drink a jug of cold water." + +"Say no more, Sancho," said Don Quixote at this; "don't try to better it, +and risk a fall; for in truth what thou hast said about death in thy +rustic phrase is what a good preacher might have said. I tell thee, +Sancho, if thou hadst discretion equal to thy mother wit, thou mightst +take a pulpit in hand, and go about the world preaching fine sermons." +"He preaches well who lives well," said Sancho, "and I know no more +theology than that." + +"Nor needst thou," said Don Quixote, "but I cannot conceive or make out +how it is that, the fear of God being the beginning of wisdom, thou, who +art more afraid of a lizard than of him, knowest so much." + +"Pass judgment on your chivalries, senor," returned Sancho, "and don't +set yourself up to judge of other men's fears or braveries, for I am as +good a fearer of God as my neighbours; but leave me to despatch these +skimmings, for all the rest is only idle talk that we shall be called to +account for in the other world;" and so saying, he began a fresh attack +on the bucket, with such a hearty appetite that he aroused Don Quixote's, +who no doubt would have helped him had he not been prevented by what must +be told farther on. + +Chapter XXI. - +In which Camacho's wedding is continued, with other delightful incidents + +While Don Quixote and Sancho were engaged in the discussion set forth the +last chapter, they heard loud shouts and a great noise, which were +uttered and made by the men on the mares as they went at full gallop, +shouting, to receive the bride and bridegroom, who were approaching with +musical instruments and pageantry of all sorts around them, and +accompanied by the priest and the relatives of both, and all the most +distinguished people of the surrounding villages. When Sancho saw the +bride, he exclaimed, "By my faith, she is not dressed like a country +girl, but like some fine court lady; egad, as well as I can make out, the +patena she wears rich coral, and her green Cuenca stuff is thirty-pile +velvet; and then the white linen trimming--by my oath, but it's satin! +Look at her hands--jet rings on them! May I never have luck if they're +not gold rings, and real gold, and set with pearls as white as a curdled +milk, and every one of them worth an eye of one's head! Whoreson baggage, +what hair she has! if it's not a wig, I never saw longer or fairer all +the days of my life. See how bravely she bears herself--and her shape! +Wouldn't you say she was like a walking palm tree loaded with clusters of +dates? for the trinkets she has hanging from her hair and neck look just +like them. I swear in my heart she is a brave lass, and fit 'to pass over +the banks of Flanders.'" + +Don Quixote laughed at Sancho's boorish eulogies and thought that, saving +his lady Dulcinea del Toboso, he had never seen a more beautiful woman. +The fair Quiteria appeared somewhat pale, which was, no doubt, because of +the bad night brides always pass dressing themselves out for their +wedding on the morrow. They advanced towards a theatre that stood on one +side of the meadow decked with carpets and boughs, where they were to +plight their troth, and from which they were to behold the dances and +plays; but at the moment of their arrival at the spot they heard a loud +outcry behind them, and a voice exclaiming, "Wait a little, ye, as +inconsiderate as ye are hasty!" At these words all turned round, and +perceived that the speaker was a man clad in what seemed to be a loose +black coat garnished with crimson patches like flames. He was crowned (as +was presently seen) with a crown of gloomy cypress, and in his hand he +held a long staff. As he approached he was recognised by everyone as the +gay Basilio, and all waited anxiously to see what would come of his +words, in dread of some catastrophe in consequence of his appearance at +such a moment. He came up at last weary and breathless, and planting +himself in front of the bridal pair, drove his staff, which had a steel +spike at the end, into the ground, and, with a pale face and eyes fixed +on Quiteria, he thus addressed her in a hoarse, trembling voice: + +"Well dost thou know, ungrateful Quiteria, that according to the holy law +we acknowledge, so long as live thou canst take no husband; nor art thou +ignorant either that, in my hopes that time and my own exertions would +improve my fortunes, I have never failed to observe the respect due to +thy honour; but thou, casting behind thee all thou owest to my true love, +wouldst surrender what is mine to another whose wealth serves to bring +him not only good fortune but supreme happiness; and now to complete it +(not that I think he deserves it, but inasmuch as heaven is pleased to +bestow it upon him), I will, with my own hands, do away with the obstacle +that may interfere with it, and remove myself from between you. Long live +the rich Camacho! many a happy year may he live with the ungrateful +Quiteria! and let the poor Basilio die, Basilio whose poverty clipped the +wings of his happiness, and brought him to the grave!" + +And so saying, he seized the staff he had driven into the ground, and +leaving one half of it fixed there, showed it to be a sheath that +concealed a tolerably long rapier; and, what may be called its hilt being +planted in the ground, he swiftly, coolly, and deliberately threw himself +upon it, and in an instant the bloody point and half the steel blade +appeared at his back, the unhappy man falling to the earth bathed in his +blood, and transfixed by his own weapon. + +His friends at once ran to his aid, filled with grief at his misery and +sad fate, and Don Quixote, dismounting from Rocinante, hastened to +support him, and took him in his arms, and found he had not yet ceased to +breathe. They were about to draw out the rapier, but the priest who was +standing by objected to its being withdrawn before he had confessed him, +as the instant of its withdrawal would be that of this death. Basilio, +however, reviving slightly, said in a weak voice, as though in pain, "If +thou wouldst consent, cruel Quiteria, to give me thy hand as my bride in +this last fatal moment, I might still hope that my rashness would find +pardon, as by its means I attained the bliss of being thine." + +Hearing this the priest bade him think of the welfare of his soul rather +than of the cravings of the body, and in all earnestness implore God's +pardon for his sins and for his rash resolve; to which Basilio replied +that he was determined not to confess unless Quiteria first gave him her +hand in marriage, for that happiness would compose his mind and give him +courage to make his confession. + +Don Quixote hearing the wounded man's entreaty, exclaimed aloud that what +Basilio asked was just and reasonable, and moreover a request that might +be easily complied with; and that it would be as much to Senor Camacho's +honour to receive the lady Quiteria as the widow of the brave Basilio as +if he received her direct from her father. + +"In this case," said he, "it will be only to say 'yes,' and no +consequences can follow the utterance of the word, for the nuptial couch +of this marriage must be the grave." + +Camacho was listening to all this, perplexed and bewildered and not +knowing what to say or do; but so urgent were the entreaties of Basilio's +friends, imploring him to allow Quiteria to give him her hand, so that +his soul, quitting this life in despair, should not be lost, that they +moved, nay, forced him, to say that if Quiteria were willing to give it +he was satisfied, as it was only putting off the fulfillment of his +wishes for a moment. At once all assailed Quiteria and pressed her, some +with prayers, and others with tears, and others with persuasive +arguments, to give her hand to poor Basilio; but she, harder than marble +and more unmoved than any statue, seemed unable or unwilling to utter a +word, nor would she have given any reply had not the priest bade her +decide quickly what she meant to do, as Basilio now had his soul at his +teeth, and there was no time for hesitation. + +On this the fair Quiteria, to all appearance distressed, grieved, and +repentant, advanced without a word to where Basilio lay, his eyes already +turned in his head, his breathing short and painful, murmuring the name +of Quiteria between his teeth, and apparently about to die like a heathen +and not like a Christian. Quiteria approached him, and kneeling, demanded +his hand by signs without speaking. Basilio opened his eyes and gazing +fixedly at her, said, "O Quiteria, why hast thou turned compassionate at +a moment when thy compassion will serve as a dagger to rob me of life, +for I have not now the strength left either to bear the happiness thou +givest me in accepting me as thine, or to suppress the pain that is +rapidly drawing the dread shadow of death over my eyes? What I entreat of +thee, O thou fatal star to me, is that the hand thou demandest of me and +wouldst give me, be not given out of complaisance or to deceive me +afresh, but that thou confess and declare that without any constraint +upon thy will thou givest it to me as to thy lawful husband; for it is +not meet that thou shouldst trifle with me at such a moment as this, or +have recourse to falsehoods with one who has dealt so truly by thee." + +While uttering these words he showed such weakness that the bystanders +expected each return of faintness would take his life with it. Then +Quiteria, overcome with modesty and shame, holding in her right hand the +hand of Basilio, said, "No force would bend my will; as freely, +therefore, as it is possible for me to do so, I give thee the hand of a +lawful wife, and take thine if thou givest it to me of thine own free +will, untroubled and unaffected by the calamity thy hasty act has brought +upon thee." + +"Yes, I give it," said Basilio, "not agitated or distracted, but with +unclouded reason that heaven is pleased to grant me, thus do I give +myself to be thy husband." + +"And I give myself to be thy wife," said Quiteria, "whether thou livest +many years, or they carry thee from my arms to the grave." + +"For one so badly wounded," observed Sancho at this point, "this young +man has a great deal to say; they should make him leave off billing and +cooing, and attend to his soul; for to my thinking he has it more on his +tongue than at his teeth." + +Basilio and Quiteria having thus joined hands, the priest, deeply moved +and with tears in his eyes, pronounced the blessing upon them, and +implored heaven to grant an easy passage to the soul of the newly wedded +man, who, the instant he received the blessing, started nimbly to his +feet and with unparalleled effrontery pulled out the rapier that had been +sheathed in his body. All the bystanders were astounded, and some, more +simple than inquiring, began shouting, "A miracle, a miracle!" But +Basilio replied, "No miracle, no miracle; only a trick, a trick!" The +priest, perplexed and amazed, made haste to examine the wound with both +hands, and found that the blade had passed, not through Basilio's flesh +and ribs, but through a hollow iron tube full of blood, which he had +adroitly fixed at the place, the blood, as was afterwards ascertained, +having been so prepared as not to congeal. In short, the priest and +Camacho and most of those present saw they were tricked and made fools +of. The bride showed no signs of displeasure at the deception; on the +contrary, hearing them say that the marriage, being fraudulent, would not +be valid, she said that she confirmed it afresh, whence they all +concluded that the affair had been planned by agreement and understanding +between the pair, whereat Camacho and his supporters were so mortified +that they proceeded to revenge themselves by violence, and a great number +of them drawing their swords attacked Basilio, in whose protection as +many more swords were in an instant unsheathed, while Don Quixote taking +the lead on horseback, with his lance over his arm and well covered with +his shield, made all give way before him. Sancho, who never found any +pleasure or enjoyment in such doings, retreated to the wine-jars from +which he had taken his delectable skimmings, considering that, as a holy +place, that spot would be respected. + +"Hold, sirs, hold!" cried Don Quixote in a loud voice; "we have no right +to take vengeance for wrongs that love may do to us: remember love and +war are the same thing, and as in war it is allowable and common to make +use of wiles and stratagems to overcome the enemy, so in the contests and +rivalries of love the tricks and devices employed to attain the desired +end are justifiable, provided they be not to the discredit or dishonour +of the loved object. Quiteria belonged to Basilio and Basilio to Quiteria +by the just and beneficent disposal of heaven. Camacho is rich, and can +purchase his pleasure when, where, and as it pleases him. Basilio has but +this ewe-lamb, and no one, however powerful he may be, shall take her +from him; these two whom God hath joined man cannot separate; and he who +attempts it must first pass the point of this lance;" and so saying he +brandished it so stoutly and dexterously that he overawed all who did not +know him. + +But so deep an impression had the rejection of Quiteria made on Camacho's +mind that it banished her at once from his thoughts; and so the counsels +of the priest, who was a wise and kindly disposed man, prevailed with +him, and by their means he and his partisans were pacified and +tranquillised, and to prove it put up their swords again, inveighing +against the pliancy of Quiteria rather than the craftiness of Basilio; +Camacho maintaining that, if Quiteria as a maiden had such a love for +Basilio, she would have loved him too as a married woman, and that he +ought to thank heaven more for having taken her than for having given +her. + +Camacho and those of his following, therefore, being consoled and +pacified, those on Basilio's side were appeased; and the rich Camacho, to +show that he felt no resentment for the trick, and did not care about it, +desired the festival to go on just as if he were married in reality. +Neither Basilio, however, nor his bride, nor their followers would take +any part in it, and they withdrew to Basilio's village; for the poor, if +they are persons of virtue and good sense, have those who follow, honour, +and uphold them, just as the rich have those who flatter and dance +attendance on them. With them they carried Don Quixote, regarding him as +a man of worth and a stout one. Sancho alone had a cloud on his soul, for +he found himself debarred from waiting for Camacho's splendid feast and +festival, which lasted until night; and thus dragged away, he moodily +followed his master, who accompanied Basilio's party, and left behind him +the flesh-pots of Egypt; though in his heart he took them with him, and +their now nearly finished skimmings that he carried in the bucket +conjured up visions before his eyes of the glory and abundance of the +good cheer he was losing. And so, vexed and dejected though not hungry, +without dismounting from Dapple he followed in the footsteps of +Rocinante. + +Chapter XXII. - +Wherin is related the grand adventure of the cave of montesinos in the +heart of La Mancha, which the valiant Don Quixote brought to a happy +termination + +Many and great were the attentions shown to Don Quixote by the newly +married couple, who felt themselves under an obligation to him for coming +forward in defence of their cause; and they exalted his wisdom to the +same level with his courage, rating him as a Cid in arms, and a Cicero in +eloquence. Worthy Sancho enjoyed himself for three days at the expense of +the pair, from whom they learned that the sham wound was not a scheme +arranged with the fair Quiteria, but a device of Basilio's, who counted +on exactly the result they had seen; he confessed, it is true, that he +had confided his idea to some of his friends, so that at the proper time +they might aid him in his purpose and insure the success of the +deception. + +"That," said Don Quixote, "is not and ought not to be called deception +which aims at virtuous ends;" and the marriage of lovers he maintained to +be a most excellent end, reminding them, however, that love has no +greater enemy than hunger and constant want; for love is all gaiety, +enjoyment, and happiness, especially when the lover is in the possession +of the object of his love, and poverty and want are the declared enemies +of all these; which he said to urge Senor Basilio to abandon the practice +of those accomplishments he was skilled in, for though they brought him +fame, they brought him no money, and apply himself to the acquisition of +wealth by legitimate industry, which will never fail those who are +prudent and persevering. The poor man who is a man of honour (if indeed a +poor man can be a man of honour) has a jewel when he has a fair wife, and +if she is taken from him, his honour is taken from him and slain. The +fair woman who is a woman of honour, and whose husband is poor, deserves +to be crowned with the laurels and crowns of victory and triumph. Beauty +by itself attracts the desires of all who behold it, and the royal eagles +and birds of towering flight stoop on it as on a dainty lure; but if +beauty be accompanied by want and penury, then the ravens and the kites +and other birds of prey assail it, and she who stands firm against such +attacks well deserves to be called the crown of her husband. "Remember, O +prudent Basilio," added Don Quixote, "it was the opinion of a certain +sage, I know not whom, that there was not more than one good woman in the +whole world; and his advice was that each one should think and believe +that this one good woman was his own wife, and in this way he would live +happy. I myself am not married, nor, so far, has it ever entered my +thoughts to be so; nevertheless I would venture to give advice to anyone +who might ask it, as to the mode in which he should seek a wife such as +he would be content to marry. The first thing I would recommend him, +would be to look to good name rather than to wealth, for a good woman +does not win a good name merely by being good, but by letting it be seen +that she is so, and open looseness and freedom do much more damage to a +woman's honour than secret depravity. If you take a good woman into your +house it will be an easy matter to keep her good, and even to make her +still better; but if you take a bad one you will find it hard work to +mend her, for it is no very easy matter to pass from one extreme to +another. I do not say it is impossible, but I look upon it as difficult." + +Sancho, listening to all this, said to himself, "This master of mine, +when I say anything that has weight and substance, says I might take a +pulpit in hand, and go about the world preaching fine sermons; but I say +of him that, when he begins stringing maxims together and giving advice +not only might he take a pulpit in hand, but two on each finger, and go +into the market-places to his heart's content. Devil take you for a +knight-errant, what a lot of things you know! I used to think in my heart +that the only thing he knew was what belonged to his chivalry; but there +is nothing he won't have a finger in." + +Sancho muttered this somewhat aloud, and his master overheard him, and +asked, "What art thou muttering there, Sancho?" + +"I'm not saying anything or muttering anything," said Sancho; "I was only +saying to myself that I wish I had heard what your worship has said just +now before I married; perhaps I'd say now, 'The ox that's loose licks +himself well.'" + +"Is thy Teresa so bad then, Sancho?" + +"She is not very bad," replied Sancho; "but she is not very good; at +least she is not as good as I could wish." + +"Thou dost wrong, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "to speak ill of thy wife; +for after all she is the mother of thy children." "We are quits," +returned Sancho; "for she speaks ill of me whenever she takes it into her +head, especially when she is jealous; and Satan himself could not put up +with her then." + +In fine, they remained three days with the newly married couple, by whom +they were entertained and treated like kings. Don Quixote begged the +fencing licentiate to find him a guide to show him the way to the cave of +Montesinos, as he had a great desire to enter it and see with his own +eyes if the wonderful tales that were told of it all over the country +were true. The licentiate said he would get him a cousin of his own, a +famous scholar, and one very much given to reading books of chivalry, who +would have great pleasure in conducting him to the mouth of the very +cave, and would show him the lakes of Ruidera, which were likewise famous +all over La Mancha, and even all over Spain; and he assured him he would +find him entertaining, for he was a youth who could write books good +enough to be printed and dedicated to princes. The cousin arrived at +last, leading an ass in foal, with a pack-saddle covered with a +parti-coloured carpet or sackcloth; Sancho saddled Rocinante, got Dapple +ready, and stocked his alforjas, along with which went those of the +cousin, likewise well filled; and so, commending themselves to God and +bidding farewell to all, they set out, taking the road for the famous +cave of Montesinos. + +On the way Don Quixote asked the cousin of what sort and character his +pursuits, avocations, and studies were, to which he replied that he was +by profession a humanist, and that his pursuits and studies were making +books for the press, all of great utility and no less entertainment to +the nation. One was called "The Book of Liveries," in which he described +seven hundred and three liveries, with their colours, mottoes, and +ciphers, from which gentlemen of the court might pick and choose any they +fancied for festivals and revels, without having to go a-begging for them +from anyone, or puzzling their brains, as the saying is, to have them +appropriate to their objects and purposes; "for," said he, "I give the +jealous, the rejected, the forgotten, the absent, what will suit them, +and fit them without fail. I have another book, too, which I shall call +'Metamorphoses, or the Spanish Ovid,' one of rare and original invention, +for imitating Ovid in burlesque style, I show in it who the Giralda of +Seville and the Angel of the Magdalena were, what the sewer of +Vecinguerra at Cordova was, what the bulls of Guisando, the Sierra +Morena, the Leganitos and Lavapies fountains at Madrid, not forgetting +those of the Piojo, of the Cano Dorado, and of the Priora; and all with +their allegories, metaphors, and changes, so that they are amusing, +interesting, and instructive, all at once. Another book I have which I +call 'The Supplement to Polydore Vergil,' which treats of the invention +of things, and is a work of great erudition and research, for I establish +and elucidate elegantly some things of great importance which Polydore +omitted to mention. He forgot to tell us who was the first man in the +world that had a cold in his head, and who was the first to try +salivation for the French disease, but I give it accurately set forth, +and quote more than five-and-twenty authors in proof of it, so you may +perceive I have laboured to good purpose and that the book will be of +service to the whole world." + +Sancho, who had been very attentive to the cousin's words, said to him, +"Tell me, senor--and God give you luck in printing your books-can you +tell me (for of course you know, as you know everything) who was the +first man that scratched his head? For to my thinking it must have been +our father Adam." + +"So it must," replied the cousin; "for there is no doubt but Adam had a +head and hair; and being the first man in the world he would have +scratched himself sometimes." + +"So I think," said Sancho; "but now tell me, who was the first tumbler in +the world?" + +"Really, brother," answered the cousin, "I could not at this moment say +positively without having investigated it; I will look it up when I go +back to where I have my books, and will satisfy you the next time we +meet, for this will not be the last time." + +"Look here, senor," said Sancho, "don't give yourself any trouble about +it, for I have just this minute hit upon what I asked you. The first +tumbler in the world, you must know, was Lucifer, when they cast or +pitched him out of heaven; for he came tumbling into the bottomless pit." + +"You are right, friend," said the cousin; and said Don Quixote, "Sancho, +that question and answer are not thine own; thou hast heard them from +some one else." + +"Hold your peace, senor," said Sancho; "faith, if I take to asking +questions and answering, I'll go on from this till to-morrow morning. +Nay! to ask foolish things and answer nonsense I needn't go looking for +help from my neighbours." + +"Thou hast said more than thou art aware of, Sancho," said Don Quixote; +"for there are some who weary themselves out in learning and proving +things that, after they are known and proved, are not worth a farthing to +the understanding or memory." + +In this and other pleasant conversation the day went by, and that night +they put up at a small hamlet whence it was not more than two leagues to +the cave of Montesinos, so the cousin told Don Quixote, adding, that if +he was bent upon entering it, it would be requisite for him to provide +himself with ropes, so that he might be tied and lowered into its depths. +Don Quixote said that even if it reached to the bottomless pit he meant +to see where it went to; so they bought about a hundred fathoms of rope, +and next day at two in the afternoon they arrived at the cave, the mouth +of which is spacious and wide, but full of thorn and wild-fig bushes and +brambles and briars, so thick and matted that they completely close it up +and cover it over. + +On coming within sight of it the cousin, Sancho, and Don Quixote +dismounted, and the first two immediately tied the latter very firmly +with the ropes, and as they were girding and swathing him Sancho said to +him, "Mind what you are about, master mine; don't go burying yourself +alive, or putting yourself where you'll be like a bottle put to cool in a +well; it's no affair or business of your worship's to become the explorer +of this, which must be worse than a Moorish dungeon." + +"Tie me and hold thy peace," said Don Quixote, "for an emprise like this, +friend Sancho, was reserved for me;" and said the guide, "I beg of you, +Senor Don Quixote, to observe carefully and examine with a hundred eyes +everything that is within there; perhaps there may be some things for me +to put into my book of 'Transformations.'" + +"The drum is in hands that will know how to beat it well enough," said +Sancho Panza. + +When he had said this and finished the tying (which was not over the +armour but only over the doublet) Don Quixote observed, "It was careless +of us not to have provided ourselves with a small cattle-bell to be tied +on the rope close to me, the sound of which would show that I was still +descending and alive; but as that is out of the question now, in God's +hand be it to guide me;" and forthwith he fell on his knees and in a low +voice offered up a prayer to heaven, imploring God to aid him and grant +him success in this to all appearance perilous and untried adventure, and +then exclaimed aloud, "O mistress of my actions and movements, +illustrious and peerless Dulcinea del Toboso, if so be the prayers and +supplications of this fortunate lover can reach thy ears, by thy +incomparable beauty I entreat thee to listen to them, for they but ask +thee not to refuse me thy favour and protection now that I stand in such +need of them. I am about to precipitate, to sink, to plunge myself into +the abyss that is here before me, only to let the world know that while +thou dost favour me there is no impossibility I will not attempt and +accomplish." With these words he approached the cavern, and perceived +that it was impossible to let himself down or effect an entrance except +by sheer force or cleaving a passage; so drawing his sword he began to +demolish and cut away the brambles at the mouth of the cave, at the noise +of which a vast multitude of crows and choughs flew out of it so thick +and so fast that they knocked Don Quixote down; and if he had been as +much of a believer in augury as he was a Catholic Christian he would have +taken it as a bad omen and declined to bury himself in such a place. He +got up, however, and as there came no more crows, or night-birds like the +bats that flew out at the same time with the crows, the cousin and Sancho +giving him rope, he lowered himself into the depths of the dread cavern; +and as he entered it Sancho sent his blessing after him, making a +thousand crosses over him and saying, "God, and the Pena de Francia, and +the Trinity of Gaeta guide thee, flower and cream of knights-errant. +There thou goest, thou dare-devil of the earth, heart of steel, arm of +brass; once more, God guide thee and send thee back safe, sound, and +unhurt to the light of this world thou art leaving to bury thyself in the +darkness thou art seeking there;" and the cousin offered up almost the +same prayers and supplications. + +Don Quixote kept calling to them to give him rope and more rope, and they +gave it out little by little, and by the time the calls, which came out +of the cave as out of a pipe, ceased to be heard they had let down the +hundred fathoms of rope. They were inclined to pull Don Quixote up again, +as they could give him no more rope; however, they waited about half an +hour, at the end of which time they began to gather in the rope again +with great ease and without feeling any weight, which made them fancy Don +Quixote was remaining below; and persuaded that it was so, Sancho wept +bitterly, and hauled away in great haste in order to settle the question. +When, however, they had come to, as it seemed, rather more than eighty +fathoms they felt a weight, at which they were greatly delighted; and at +last, at ten fathoms more, they saw Don Quixote distinctly, and Sancho +called out to him, saying, "Welcome back, senor, for we had begun to +think you were going to stop there to found a family." But Don Quixote +answered not a word, and drawing him out entirely they perceived he had +his eyes shut and every appearance of being fast asleep. + +They stretched him on the ground and untied him, but still he did not +awake; however, they rolled him back and forwards and shook and pulled +him about, so that after some time he came to himself, stretching himself +just as if he were waking up from a deep and sound sleep, and looking +about him he said, "God forgive you, friends; ye have taken me away from +the sweetest and most delightful existence and spectacle that ever human +being enjoyed or beheld. Now indeed do I know that all the pleasures of +this life pass away like a shadow and a dream, or fade like the flower of +the field. O ill-fated Montesinos! O sore-wounded Durandarte! O unhappy +Belerma! O tearful Guadiana, and ye O hapless daughters of Ruidera who +show in your waves the tears that flowed from your beauteous eyes!" + +The cousin and Sancho Panza listened with deep attention to the words of +Don Quixote, who uttered them as though with immense pain he drew them up +from his very bowels. They begged of him to explain himself, and tell +them what he had seen in that hell down there. + +"Hell do you call it?" said Don Quixote; "call it by no such name, for it +does not deserve it, as ye shall soon see." + +He then begged them to give him something to eat, as he was very hungry. +They spread the cousin's sackcloth on the grass, and put the stores of +the alforjas into requisition, and all three sitting down lovingly and +sociably, they made a luncheon and a supper of it all in one; and when +the sackcloth was removed, Don Quixote of La Mancha said, "Let no one +rise, and attend to me, my sons, both of you." + +Chapter XXIII. - +Of the wonderful things the incomparable Don Quixote said he saw in the +profound cave of Montesinos, the impossibility and magnitude of which +cause this adventure to be deemed apocryphal + +It was about four in the afternoon when the sun, veiled in clouds, with +subdued light and tempered beams, enabled Don Quixote to relate, without +heat or inconvenience, what he had seen in the cave of Montesinos to his +two illustrious hearers, and he began as follows: + +"A matter of some twelve or fourteen times a man's height down in this +pit, on the right-hand side, there is a recess or space, roomy enough to +contain a large cart with its mules. A little light reaches it through +some chinks or crevices, communicating with it and open to the surface of +the earth. This recess or space I perceived when I was already growing +weary and disgusted at finding myself hanging suspended by the rope, +travelling downwards into that dark region without any certainty or +knowledge of where I was going, so I resolved to enter it and rest myself +for a while. I called out, telling you not to let out more rope until I +bade you, but you cannot have heard me. I then gathered in the rope you +were sending me, and making a coil or pile of it I seated myself upon it, +ruminating and considering what I was to do to lower myself to the +bottom, having no one to hold me up; and as I was thus deep in thought +and perplexity, suddenly and without provocation a profound sleep fell +upon me, and when I least expected it, I know not how, I awoke and found +myself in the midst of the most beautiful, delightful meadow that nature +could produce or the most lively human imagination conceive. I opened my +eyes, I rubbed them, and found I was not asleep but thoroughly awake. +Nevertheless, I felt my head and breast to satisfy myself whether it was +I myself who was there or some empty delusive phantom; but touch, +feeling, the collected thoughts that passed through my mind, all +convinced me that I was the same then and there that I am this moment. +Next there presented itself to my sight a stately royal palace or castle, +with walls that seemed built of clear transparent crystal; and through +two great doors that opened wide therein, I saw coming forth and +advancing towards me a venerable old man, clad in a long gown of +mulberry-coloured serge that trailed upon the ground. On his shoulders +and breast he had a green satin collegiate hood, and covering his head a +black Milanese bonnet, and his snow-white beard fell below his girdle. He +carried no arms whatever, nothing but a rosary of beads bigger than +fair-sized filberts, each tenth bead being like a moderate ostrich egg; +his bearing, his gait, his dignity and imposing presence held me +spellbound and wondering. He approached me, and the first thing he did +was to embrace me closely, and then he said to me, 'For a long time now, +O valiant knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, we who are here enchanted in +these solitudes have been hoping to see thee, that thou mayest make known +to the world what is shut up and concealed in this deep cave, called the +cave of Montesinos, which thou hast entered, an achievement reserved for +thy invincible heart and stupendous courage alone to attempt. Come with +me, illustrious sir, and I will show thee the marvels hidden within this +transparent castle, whereof I am the alcaide and perpetual warden; for I +am Montesinos himself, from whom the cave takes its name.' + +"The instant he told me he was Montesinos, I asked him if the story they +told in the world above here was true, that he had taken out the heart of +his great friend Durandarte from his breast with a little dagger, and +carried it to the lady Belerma, as his friend when at the point of death +had commanded him. He said in reply that they spoke the truth in every +respect except as to the dagger, for it was not a dagger, nor little, but +a burnished poniard sharper than an awl." + +"That poniard must have been made by Ramon de Hoces the Sevillian," said +Sancho. + +"I do not know," said Don Quixote; "it could not have been by that +poniard maker, however, because Ramon de Hoces was a man of yesterday, +and the affair of Roncesvalles, where this mishap occurred, was long ago; +but the question is of no great importance, nor does it affect or make +any alteration in the truth or substance of the story." + +"That is true," said the cousin; "continue, Senor Don Quixote, for I am +listening to you with the greatest pleasure in the world." + +"And with no less do I tell the tale," said Don Quixote; "and so, to +proceed--the venerable Montesinos led me into the palace of crystal, +where, in a lower chamber, strangely cool and entirely of alabaster, was +an elaborately wrought marble tomb, upon which I beheld, stretched at +full length, a knight, not of bronze, or marble, or jasper, as are seen +on other tombs, but of actual flesh and bone. His right hand (which +seemed to me somewhat hairy and sinewy, a sign of great strength in its +owner) lay on the side of his heart; but before I could put any question +to Montesinos, he, seeing me gazing at the tomb in amazement, said to me, +'This is my friend Durandarte, flower and mirror of the true lovers and +valiant knights of his time. He is held enchanted here, as I myself and +many others are, by that French enchanter Merlin, who, they say, was the +devil's son; but my belief is, not that he was the devil's son, but that +he knew, as the saying is, a point more than the devil. How or why he +enchanted us, no one knows, but time will tell, and I suspect that time +is not far off. What I marvel at is, that I know it to be as sure as that +it is now day, that Durandarte ended his life in my arms, and that, after +his death, I took out his heart with my own hands; and indeed it must +have weighed more than two pounds, for, according to naturalists, he who +has a large heart is more largely endowed with valour than he who has a +small one. Then, as this is the case, and as the knight did really die, +how comes it that he now moans and sighs from time to time, as if he were +still alive?' + +"As he said this, the wretched Durandarte cried out in a loud voice: + +poem{ + +O cousin Montesinos! + 'T was my last request of thee, +When my soul hath left the body, + And that lying dead I be, +With thy poniard or thy dagger + Cut the heart from out my breast, +And bear it to Belerma. + This was my last request." + +}poem + +On hearing which, the venerable Montesinos fell on his knees before the +unhappy knight, and with tearful eyes exclaimed, 'Long since, Senor +Durandarte, my beloved cousin, long since have I done what you bade me on +that sad day when I lost you; I took out your heart as well as I could, +not leaving an atom of it in your breast, I wiped it with a lace +handkerchief, and I took the road to France with it, having first laid +you in the bosom of the earth with tears enough to wash and cleanse my +hands of the blood that covered them after wandering among your bowels; +and more by token, O cousin of my soul, at the first village I came to +after leaving Roncesvalles, I sprinkled a little salt upon your heart to +keep it sweet, and bring it, if not fresh, at least pickled, into the +presence of the lady Belerma, whom, together with you, myself, Guadiana +your squire, the duenna Ruidera and her seven daughters and two nieces, +and many more of your friends and acquaintances, the sage Merlin has been +keeping enchanted here these many years; and although more than five +hundred have gone by, not one of us has died; Ruidera and her daughters +and nieces alone are missing, and these, because of the tears they shed, +Merlin, out of the compassion he seems to have felt for them, changed +into so many lakes, which to this day in the world of the living, and in +the province of La Mancha, are called the Lakes of Ruidera. The seven +daughters belong to the kings of Spain and the two nieces to the knights +of a very holy order called the Order of St. John. Guadiana your squire, +likewise bewailing your fate, was changed into a river of his own name, +but when he came to the surface and beheld the sun of another heaven, so +great was his grief at finding he was leaving you, that he plunged into +the bowels of the earth; however, as he cannot help following his natural +course, he from time to time comes forth and shows himself to the sun and +the world. The lakes aforesaid send him their waters, and with these, and +others that come to him, he makes a grand and imposing entrance into +Portugal; but for all that, go where he may, he shows his melancholy and +sadness, and takes no pride in breeding dainty choice fish, only coarse +and tasteless sorts, very different from those of the golden Tagus. All +this that I tell you now, O cousin mine, I have told you many times +before, and as you make no answer, I fear that either you believe me not, +or do not hear me, whereat I feel God knows what grief. I have now news +to give you, which, if it serves not to alleviate your sufferings, will +not in any wise increase them. Know that you have here before you (open +your eyes and you will see) that great knight of whom the sage Merlin has +prophesied such great things; that Don Quixote of La Mancha I mean, who +has again, and to better purpose than in past times, revived in these +days knight-errantry, long since forgotten, and by whose intervention and +aid it may be we shall be disenchanted; for great deeds are reserved for +great men.' + +"'And if that may not be,' said the wretched Durandarte in a low and +feeble voice, 'if that may not be, then, my cousin, I say "patience and +shuffle;"' and turning over on his side, he relapsed into his former +silence without uttering another word. + +"And now there was heard a great outcry and lamentation, accompanied by +deep sighs and bitter sobs. I looked round, and through the crystal wall +I saw passing through another chamber a procession of two lines of fair +damsels all clad in mourning, and with white turbans of Turkish fashion +on their heads. Behind, in the rear of these, there came a lady, for so +from her dignity she seemed to be, also clad in black, with a white veil +so long and ample that it swept the ground. Her turban was twice as large +as the largest of any of the others; her eyebrows met, her nose was +rather flat, her mouth was large but with ruddy lips, and her teeth, of +which at times she allowed a glimpse, were seen to be sparse and ill-set, +though as white as peeled almonds. She carried in her hands a fine cloth, +and in it, as well as I could make out, a heart that had been mummied, so +parched and dried was it. Montesinos told me that all those forming the +procession were the attendants of Durandarte and Belerma, who were +enchanted there with their master and mistress, and that the last, she +who carried the heart in the cloth, was the lady Belerma, who, with her +damsels, four days in the week went in procession singing, or rather +weeping, dirges over the body and miserable heart of his cousin; and that +if she appeared to me somewhat ill-favoured or not so beautiful as fame +reported her, it was because of the bad nights and worse days that she +passed in that enchantment, as I could see by the great dark circles +round her eyes, and her sickly complexion; 'her sallowness, and the rings +round her eyes,' said he, 'are not caused by the periodical ailment usual +with women, for it is many months and even years since she has had any, +but by the grief her own heart suffers because of that which she holds in +her hand perpetually, and which recalls and brings back to her memory the +sad fate of her lost lover; were it not for this, hardly would the great +Dulcinea del Toboso, so celebrated in all these parts, and even in the +world, come up to her for beauty, grace, and gaiety.' + +"'Hold hard!' said I at this, 'tell your story as you ought, Senor Don +Montesinos, for you know very well that all comparisons are odious, and +there is no occasion to compare one person with another; the peerless +Dulcinea del Toboso is what she is, and the lady Dona Belerma is what she +is and has been, and that's enough.' To which he made answer, 'Forgive +me, Senor Don Quixote; I own I was wrong and spoke unadvisedly in saying +that the lady Dulcinea could scarcely come up to the lady Belerma; for it +were enough for me to have learned, by what means I know not, that you +are her knight, to make me bite my tongue out before I compared her to +anything save heaven itself.' After this apology which the great +Montesinos made me, my heart recovered itself from the shock I had +received in hearing my lady compared with Belerma." + +"Still I wonder," said Sancho, "that your worship did not get upon the +old fellow and bruise every bone of him with kicks, and pluck his beard +until you didn't leave a hair in it." + +"Nay, Sancho, my friend," said Don Quixote, "it would not have been right +in me to do that, for we are all bound to pay respect to the aged, even +though they be not knights, but especially to those who are, and who are +enchanted; I only know I gave him as good as he brought in the many other +questions and answers we exchanged." + +"I cannot understand, Senor Don Quixote," remarked the cousin here, "how +it is that your worship, in such a short space of time as you have been +below there, could have seen so many things, and said and answered so +much." + +"How long is it since I went down?" asked Don Quixote. + +"Little better than an hour," replied Sancho. + +"That cannot be," returned Don Quixote, "because night overtook me while +I was there, and day came, and it was night again and day again three +times; so that, by my reckoning, I have been three days in those remote +regions beyond our ken." + +"My master must be right," replied Sancho; "for as everything that has +happened to him is by enchantment, maybe what seems to us an hour would +seem three days and nights there." + +"That's it," said Don Quixote. + +"And did your worship eat anything all that time, senor?" asked the +cousin. + +"I never touched a morsel," answered Don Quixote, "nor did I feel hunger, +or think of it." + +"And do the enchanted eat?" said the cousin. + +"They neither eat," said Don Quixote; "nor are they subject to the +greater excrements, though it is thought that their nails, beards, and +hair grow." + +"And do the enchanted sleep, now, senor?" asked Sancho. + +"Certainly not," replied Don Quixote; "at least, during those three days +I was with them not one of them closed an eye, nor did I either." + +"The proverb, 'Tell me what company thou keepest and I'll tell thee what +thou art,' is to the point here," said Sancho; "your worship keeps +company with enchanted people that are always fasting and watching; what +wonder is it, then, that you neither eat nor sleep while you are with +them? But forgive me, senor, if I say that of all this you have told us +now, may God take me--I was just going to say the devil--if I believe a +single particle." + +"What!" said the cousin, "has Senor Don Quixote, then, been lying? Why, +even if he wished it he has not had time to imagine and put together such +a host of lies." + +"I don't believe my master lies," said Sancho. + +"If not, what dost thou believe?" asked Don Quixote. + +"I believe," replied Sancho, "that this Merlin, or those enchanters who +enchanted the whole crew your worship says you saw and discoursed with +down there, stuffed your imagination or your mind with all this rigmarole +you have been treating us to, and all that is still to come." + +"All that might be, Sancho," replied Don Quixote; "but it is not so, for +everything that I have told you I saw with my own eyes, and touched with +my own hands. But what will you say when I tell you now how, among the +countless other marvellous things Montesinos showed me (of which at +leisure and at the proper time I will give thee an account in the course +of our journey, for they would not be all in place here), he showed me +three country girls who went skipping and capering like goats over the +pleasant fields there, and the instant I beheld them I knew one to be the +peerless Dulcinea del Toboso, and the other two those same country girls +that were with her and that we spoke to on the road from El Toboso! I +asked Montesinos if he knew them, and he told me he did not, but he +thought they must be some enchanted ladies of distinction, for it was +only a few days before that they had made their appearance in those +meadows; but I was not to be surprised at that, because there were a +great many other ladies there of times past and present, enchanted in +various strange shapes, and among them he had recognised Queen Guinevere +and her dame Quintanona, she who poured out the wine for Lancelot when he +came from Britain." + +When Sancho Panza heard his master say this he was ready to take leave of +his senses, or die with laughter; for, as he knew the real truth about +the pretended enchantment of Dulcinea, in which he himself had been the +enchanter and concocter of all the evidence, he made up his mind at last +that, beyond all doubt, his master was out of his wits and stark mad, so +he said to him, "It was an evil hour, a worse season, and a sorrowful +day, when your worship, dear master mine, went down to the other world, +and an unlucky moment when you met with Senor Montesinos, who has sent +you back to us like this. You were well enough here above in your full +senses, such as God had given you, delivering maxims and giving advice at +every turn, and not as you are now, talking the greatest nonsense that +can be imagined." + +"As I know thee, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "I heed not thy words." + +"Nor I your worship's," said Sancho, "whether you beat me or kill me for +those I have spoken, and will speak if you don't correct and mend your +own. But tell me, while we are still at peace, how or by what did you +recognise the lady our mistress; and if you spoke to her, what did you +say, and what did she answer?" + +"I recognised her," said Don Quixote, "by her wearing the same garments +she wore when thou didst point her out to me. I spoke to her, but she did +not utter a word in reply; on the contrary, she turned her back on me and +took to flight, at such a pace that crossbow bolt could not have +overtaken her. I wished to follow her, and would have done so had not +Montesinos recommended me not to take the trouble as it would be useless, +particularly as the time was drawing near when it would be necessary for +me to quit the cavern. He told me, moreover, that in course of time he +would let me know how he and Belerma, and Durandarte, and all who were +there, were to be disenchanted. But of all I saw and observed down there, +what gave me most pain was, that while Montesinos was speaking to me, one +of the two companions of the hapless Dulcinea approached me on one +without my having seen her coming, and with tears in her eyes said to me, +in a low, agitated voice, 'My lady Dulcinea del Toboso kisses your +worship's hands, and entreats you to do her the favour of letting her +know how you are; and, being in great need, she also entreats your +worship as earnestly as she can to be so good as to lend her half a dozen +reals, or as much as you may have about you, on this new dimity petticoat +that I have here; and she promises to repay them very speedily.' I was +amazed and taken aback by such a message, and turning to Senor Montesinos +I asked him, 'Is it possible, Senor Montesinos, that persons of +distinction under enchantment can be in need?' To which he replied, +'Believe me, Senor Don Quixote, that which is called need is to be met +with everywhere, and penetrates all quarters and reaches everyone, and +does not spare even the enchanted; and as the lady Dulcinea del Toboso +sends to beg those six reals, and the pledge is to all appearance a good +one, there is nothing for it but to give them to her, for no doubt she +must be in some great strait.' 'I will take no pledge of her,' I replied, +'nor yet can I give her what she asks, for all I have is four reals; +which I gave (they were those which thou, Sancho, gavest me the other day +to bestow in alms upon the poor I met along the road), and I said, 'Tell +your mistress, my dear, that I am grieved to the heart because of her +distresses, and wish I was a Fucar to remedy them, and that I would have +her know that I cannot be, and ought not be, in health while deprived of +the happiness of seeing her and enjoying her discreet conversation, and +that I implore her as earnestly as I can, to allow herself to be seen and +addressed by this her captive servant and forlorn knight. Tell her, too, +that when she least expects it she will hear it announced that I have +made an oath and vow after the fashion of that which the Marquis of +Mantua made to avenge his nephew Baldwin, when he found him at the point +of death in the heart of the mountains, which was, not to eat bread off a +tablecloth, and other trifling matters which he added, until he had +avenged him; and I will make the same to take no rest, and to roam the +seven regions of the earth more thoroughly than the Infante Don Pedro of +Portugal ever roamed them, until I have disenchanted her.' 'All that and +more, you owe my lady,' the damsel's answer to me, and taking the four +reals, instead of making me a curtsey she cut a caper, springing two full +yards into the air." + +"O blessed God!" exclaimed Sancho aloud at this, "is it possible that +such things can be in the world, and that enchanters and enchantments can +have such power in it as to have changed my master's right senses into a +craze so full of absurdity! O senor, senor, for God's sake, consider +yourself, have a care for your honour, and give no credit to this silly +stuff that has left you scant and short of wits." + +"Thou talkest in this way because thou lovest me, Sancho," said Don +Quixote; "and not being experienced in the things of the world, +everything that has some difficulty about it seems to thee impossible; +but time will pass, as I said before, and I will tell thee some of the +things I saw down there which will make thee believe what I have related +now, the truth of which admits of neither reply nor question." + +Chapter XXIV. - +Wherein are related a thousand trifling matters, as trivial as they are +necessary to the right understanding of this great history + +He who translated this great history from the original written by its +first author, Cide Hamete Benengeli, says that on coming to the chapter +giving the adventures of the cave of Montesinos he found written on the +margin of it, in Hamete's own hand, these exact words: + +"I cannot convince or persuade myself that everything that is written in +the preceding chapter could have precisely happened to the valiant Don +Quixote; and for this reason, that all the adventures that have occurred +up to the present have been possible and probable; but as for this one of +the cave, I see no way of accepting it as true, as it passes all +reasonable bounds. For me to believe that Don Quixote could lie, he being +the most truthful gentleman and the noblest knight of his time, is +impossible; he would not have told a lie though he were shot to death +with arrows. On the other hand, I reflect that he related and told the +story with all the circumstances detailed, and that he could not in so +short a space have fabricated such a vast complication of absurdities; +if, then, this adventure seems apocryphal, it is no fault of mine; and +so, without affirming its falsehood or its truth, I write it down. Decide +for thyself in thy wisdom, reader; for I am not bound, nor is it in my +power, to do more; though certain it is they say that at the time of his +death he retracted, and said he had invented it, thinking it matched and +tallied with the adventures he had read of in his histories." And then he +goes on to say: + +The cousin was amazed as well at Sancho's boldness as at the patience of +his master, and concluded that the good temper the latter displayed arose +from the happiness he felt at having seen his lady Dulcinea, even +enchanted as she was; because otherwise the words and language Sancho had +addressed to him deserved a thrashing; for indeed he seemed to him to +have been rather impudent to his master, to whom he now observed, "I, +Senor Don Quixote of La Mancha, look upon the time I have spent in +travelling with your worship as very well employed, for I have gained +four things in the course of it; the first is that I have made your +acquaintance, which I consider great good fortune; the second, that I +have learned what the cave of Montesinos contains, together with the +transformations of Guadiana and of the lakes of Ruidera; which will be of +use to me for the Spanish Ovid that I have in hand; the third, to have +discovered the antiquity of cards, that they were in use at least in the +time of Charlemagne, as may be inferred from the words you say Durandarte +uttered when, at the end of that long spell while Montesinos was talking +to him, he woke up and said, 'Patience and shuffle.' This phrase and +expression he could not have learned while he was enchanted, but only +before he had become so, in France, and in the time of the aforesaid +emperor Charlemagne. And this demonstration is just the thing for me for +that other book I am writing, the 'Supplement to Polydore Vergil on the +Invention of Antiquities;' for I believe he never thought of inserting +that of cards in his book, as I mean to do in mine, and it will be a +matter of great importance, particularly when I can cite so grave and +veracious an authority as Senor Durandarte. And the fourth thing is, that +I have ascertained the source of the river Guadiana, heretofore unknown +to mankind." + +"You are right," said Don Quixote; "but I should like to know, if by +God's favour they grant you a licence to print those books of yours-which +I doubt--to whom do you mean dedicate them?" + +"There are lords and grandees in Spain to whom they can be dedicated," +said the cousin. + +"Not many," said Don Quixote; "not that they are unworthy of it, but +because they do not care to accept books and incur the obligation of +making the return that seems due to the author's labour and courtesy. One +prince I know who makes up for all the rest, and more-how much more, if I +ventured to say, perhaps I should stir up envy in many a noble breast; +but let this stand over for some more convenient time, and let us go and +look for some place to shelter ourselves in to-night." + +"Not far from this," said the cousin, "there is a hermitage, where there +lives a hermit, who they say was a soldier, and who has the reputation of +being a good Christian and a very intelligent and charitable man. Close +to the hermitage he has a small house which he built at his own cost, but +though small it is large enough for the reception of guests." + +"Has this hermit any hens, do you think?" asked Sancho. + +"Few hermits are without them," said Don Quixote; "for those we see +now-a-days are not like the hermits of the Egyptian deserts who were clad +in palm-leaves, and lived on the roots of the earth. But do not think +that by praising these I am disparaging the others; all I mean to say is +that the penances of those of the present day do not come up to the +asceticism and austerity of former times; but it does not follow from +this that they are not all worthy; at least I think them so; and at the +worst the hypocrite who pretends to be good does less harm than the open +sinner." + +At this point they saw approaching the spot where they stood a man on +foot, proceeding at a rapid pace, and beating a mule loaded with lances +and halberds. When he came up to them, he saluted them and passed on +without stopping. Don Quixote called to him, "Stay, good fellow; you seem +to be making more haste than suits that mule." + +"I cannot stop, senor," answered the man; "for the arms you see I carry +here are to be used tomorrow, so I must not delay; God be with you. But +if you want to know what I am carrying them for, I mean to lodge to-night +at the inn that is beyond the hermitage, and if you be going the same +road you will find me there, and I will tell you some curious things; +once more God be with you;" and he urged on his mule at such a pace that +Don Quixote had no time to ask him what these curious things were that he +meant to tell them; and as he was somewhat inquisitive, and always +tortured by his anxiety to learn something new, he decided to set out at +once, and go and pass the night at the inn instead of stopping at the +hermitage, where the cousin would have had them halt. Accordingly they +mounted and all three took the direct road for the inn, which they +reached a little before nightfall. On the road the cousin proposed they +should go up to the hermitage to drink a sup. The instant Sancho heard +this he steered his Dapple towards it, and Don Quixote and the cousin did +the same; but it seems Sancho's bad luck so ordered it that the hermit +was not at home, for so a sub-hermit they found in the hermitage told +them. They called for some of the best. She replied that her master had +none, but that if they liked cheap water she would give it with great +pleasure. + +"If I found any in water," said Sancho, "there are wells along the road +where I could have had enough of it. Ah, Camacho's wedding, and plentiful +house of Don Diego, how often do I miss you!" + +Leaving the hermitage, they pushed on towards the inn, and a little +farther they came upon a youth who was pacing along in front of them at +no great speed, so that they overtook him. He carried a sword over his +shoulder, and slung on it a budget or bundle of his clothes apparently, +probably his breeches or pantaloons, and his cloak and a shirt or two; +for he had on a short jacket of velvet with a gloss like satin on it in +places, and had his shirt out; his stockings were of silk, and his shoes +square-toed as they wear them at court. His age might have been eighteen +or nineteen; he was of a merry countenance, and to all appearance of an +active habit, and he went along singing seguidillas to beguile the +wearisomeness of the road. As they came up with him he was just finishing +one, which the cousin got by heart and they say ran thus-- + +poem{ + +I'm off to the wars + For the want of pence, +Oh, had I but money + I'd show more sense. + +}poem + +The first to address him was Don Quixote, who said, "You travel very +airily, sir gallant; whither bound, may we ask, if it is your pleasure to +tell us?" + +To which the youth replied, "The heat and my poverty are the reason of my +travelling so airily, and it is to the wars that I am bound." + +"How poverty?" asked Don Quixote; "the heat one can understand." + +"Senor," replied the youth, "in this bundle I carry velvet pantaloons to +match this jacket; if I wear them out on the road, I shall not be able to +make a decent appearance in them in the city, and I have not the +wherewithal to buy others; and so for this reason, as well as to keep +myself cool, I am making my way in this fashion to overtake some +companies of infantry that are not twelve leagues off, in which I shall +enlist, and there will be no want of baggage trains to travel with after +that to the place of embarkation, which they say will be Carthagena; I +would rather have the King for a master, and serve him in the wars, than +serve a court pauper." + +"And did you get any bounty, now?" asked the cousin. + +"If I had been in the service of some grandee of Spain or personage of +distinction," replied the youth, "I should have been safe to get it; for +that is the advantage of serving good masters, that out of the servants' +hall men come to be ancients or captains, or get a good pension. But I, +to my misfortune, always served place-hunters and adventurers, whose keep +and wages were so miserable and scanty that half went in paying for the +starching of one's collars; it would be a miracle indeed if a page +volunteer ever got anything like a reasonable bounty." + +"And tell me, for heaven's sake," asked Don Quixote, "is it possible, my +friend, that all the time you served you never got any livery?" + +"They gave me two," replied the page; "but just as when one quits a +religious community before making profession, they strip him of the dress +of the order and give him back his own clothes, so did my masters return +me mine; for as soon as the business on which they came to court was +finished, they went home and took back the liveries they had given merely +for show." + +"What spilorceria!--as an Italian would say," said Don Quixote; "but for +all that, consider yourself happy in having left court with as worthy an +object as you have, for there is nothing on earth more honourable or +profitable than serving, first of all God, and then one's king and +natural lord, particularly in the profession of arms, by which, if not +more wealth, at least more honour is to be won than by letters, as I have +said many a time; for though letters may have founded more great houses +than arms, still those founded by arms have I know not what superiority +over those founded by letters, and a certain splendour belonging to them +that distinguishes them above all. And bear in mind what I am now about +to say to you, for it will be of great use and comfort to you in time of +trouble; it is, not to let your mind dwell on the adverse chances that +may befall you; for the worst of all is death, and if it be a good death, +the best of all is to die. They asked Julius Caesar, the valiant Roman +emperor, what was the best death. He answered, that which is unexpected, +which comes suddenly and unforeseen; and though he answered like a pagan, +and one without the knowledge of the true God, yet, as far as sparing our +feelings is concerned, he was right; for suppose you are killed in the +first engagement or skirmish, whether by a cannon ball or blown up by +mine, what matters it? It is only dying, and all is over; and according +to Terence, a soldier shows better dead in battle, than alive and safe in +flight; and the good soldier wins fame in proportion as he is obedient to +his captains and those in command over him. And remember, my son, that it +is better for the soldier to smell of gunpowder than of civet, and that +if old age should come upon you in this honourable calling, though you +may be covered with wounds and crippled and lame, it will not come upon +you without honour, and that such as poverty cannot lessen; especially +now that provisions are being made for supporting and relieving old and +disabled soldiers; for it is not right to deal with them after the +fashion of those who set free and get rid of their black slaves when they +are old and useless, and, turning them out of their houses under the +pretence of making them free, make them slaves to hunger, from which they +cannot expect to be released except by death. But for the present I won't +say more than get ye up behind me on my horse as far as the inn, and sup +with me there, and to-morrow you shall pursue your journey, and God give +you as good speed as your intentions deserve." + +The page did not accept the invitation to mount, though he did that to +supper at the inn; and here they say Sancho said to himself, "God be with +you for a master; is it possible that a man who can say things so many +and so good as he has said just now, can say that he saw the impossible +absurdities he reports about the cave of Montesinos? Well, well, we shall +see." + +And now, just as night was falling, they reached the inn, and it was not +without satisfaction that Sancho perceived his master took it for a real +inn, and not for a castle as usual. The instant they entered Don Quixote +asked the landlord after the man with the lances and halberds, and was +told that he was in the stable seeing to his mule; which was what Sancho +and the cousin proceeded to do for their beasts, giving the best manger +and the best place in the stable to Rocinante. + +Chapter XXV. - +Wherein is set down the braying adventure, and the droll one of the +puppet-showman, together with the memorable divinations of the divining +ape + +Don Quixote's bread would not bake, as the common saying is, until he had +heard and learned the curious things promised by the man who carried the +arms. He went to seek him where the innkeeper said he was and having +found him, bade him say now at any rate what he had to say in answer to +the question he had asked him on the road. "The tale of my wonders must +be taken more leisurely and not standing," said the man; "let me finish +foddering my beast, good sir; and then I'll tell you things that will +astonish you." + +"Don't wait for that," said Don Quixote; "I'll help you in everything," +and so he did, sifting the barley for him and cleaning out the manger; a +degree of humility which made the other feel bound to tell him with a +good grace what he had asked; so seating himself on a bench, with Don +Quixote beside him, and the cousin, the page, Sancho Panza, and the +landlord, for a senate and an audience, he began his story in this way: + +"You must know that in a village four leagues and a half from this inn, +it so happened that one of the regidors, by the tricks and roguery of a +servant girl of his (it's too long a tale to tell), lost an ass; and +though he did all he possibly could to find it, it was all to no purpose. +A fortnight might have gone by, so the story goes, since the ass had been +missing, when, as the regidor who had lost it was standing in the plaza, +another regidor of the same town said to him, 'Pay me for good news, +gossip; your ass has turned up.' 'That I will, and well, gossip,' said +the other; 'but tell us, where has he turned up?' 'In the forest,' said +the finder; 'I saw him this morning without pack-saddle or harness of any +sort, and so lean that it went to one's heart to see him. I tried to +drive him before me and bring him to you, but he is already so wild and +shy that when I went near him he made off into the thickest part of the +forest. If you have a mind that we two should go back and look for him, +let me put up this she-ass at my house and I'll be back at once.' 'You +will be doing me a great kindness,' said the owner of the ass, 'and I'll +try to pay it back in the same coin.' It is with all these circumstances, +and in the very same way I am telling it now, that those who know all +about the matter tell the story. Well then, the two regidors set off on +foot, arm in arm, for the forest, and coming to the place where they +hoped to find the ass they could not find him, nor was he to be seen +anywhere about, search as they might. Seeing, then, that there was no +sign of him, the regidor who had seen him said to the other, 'Look here, +gossip; a plan has occurred to me, by which, beyond a doubt, we shall +manage to discover the animal, even if he is stowed away in the bowels of +the earth, not to say the forest. Here it is. I can bray to perfection, +and if you can ever so little, the thing's as good as done.' 'Ever so +little did you say, gossip?' said the other; 'by God, I'll not give in to +anybody, not even to the asses themselves.' 'We'll soon see,' said the +second regidor, 'for my plan is that you should go one side of the +forest, and I the other, so as to go all round about it; and every now +and then you will bray and I will bray; and it cannot be but that the ass +will hear us, and answer us if he is in the forest.' To which the owner +of the ass replied, 'It's an excellent plan, I declare, gossip, and +worthy of your great genius;' and the two separating as agreed, it so +fell out that they brayed almost at the same moment, and each, deceived +by the braying of the other, ran to look, fancying the ass had turned up +at last. When they came in sight of one another, said the loser, 'Is it +possible, gossip, that it was not my ass that brayed?' 'No, it was I,' +said the other. 'Well then, I can tell you, gossip,' said the ass's +owner, 'that between you and an ass there is not an atom of difference as +far as braying goes, for I never in all my life saw or heard anything +more natural.' 'Those praises and compliments belong to you more justly +than to me, gossip,' said the inventor of the plan; 'for, by the God that +made me, you might give a couple of brays odds to the best and most +finished brayer in the world; the tone you have got is deep, your voice +is well kept up as to time and pitch, and your finishing notes come thick +and fast; in fact, I own myself beaten, and yield the palm to you, and +give in to you in this rare accomplishment.' 'Well then,' said the owner, +'I'll set a higher value on myself for the future, and consider that I +know something, as I have an excellence of some sort; for though I always +thought I brayed well, I never supposed I came up to the pitch of +perfection you say.' 'And I say too,' said the second, 'that there are +rare gifts going to loss in the world, and that they are ill bestowed +upon those who don't know how to make use of them.' 'Ours,' said the +owner of the ass, 'unless it is in cases like this we have now in hand, +cannot be of any service to us, and even in this God grant they may be of +some use.' So saying they separated, and took to their braying once more, +but every instant they were deceiving one another, and coming to meet one +another again, until they arranged by way of countersign, so as to know +that it was they and not the ass, to give two brays, one after the other. +In this way, doubling the brays at every step, they made the complete +circuit of the forest, but the lost ass never gave them an answer or even +the sign of one. How could the poor ill-starred brute have answered, +when, in the thickest part of the forest, they found him devoured by +wolves? As soon as he saw him his owner said, 'I was wondering he did not +answer, for if he wasn't dead he'd have brayed when he heard us, or he'd +have been no ass; but for the sake of having heard you bray to such +perfection, gossip, I count the trouble I have taken to look for him well +bestowed, even though I have found him dead.' 'It's in a good hand, +gossip,' said the other; 'if the abbot sings well, the acolyte is not +much behind him.' So they returned disconsolate and hoarse to their +village, where they told their friends, neighbours, and acquaintances +what had befallen them in their search for the ass, each crying up the +other's perfection in braying. The whole story came to be known and +spread abroad through the villages of the neighbourhood; and the devil, +who never sleeps, with his love for sowing dissensions and scattering +discord everywhere, blowing mischief about and making quarrels out of +nothing, contrived to make the people of the other towns fall to braying +whenever they saw anyone from our village, as if to throw the braying of +our regidors in our teeth. Then the boys took to it, which was the same +thing for it as getting into the hands and mouths of all the devils of +hell; and braying spread from one town to another in such a way that the +men of the braying town are as easy to be known as blacks are to be known +from whites, and the unlucky joke has gone so far that several times the +scoffed have come out in arms and in a body to do battle with the +scoffers, and neither king nor rook, fear nor shame, can mend matters. +To-morrow or the day after, I believe, the men of my town, that is, of +the braying town, are going to take the field against another village two +leagues away from ours, one of those that persecute us most; and that we +may turn out well prepared I have bought these lances and halberds you +have seen. These are the curious things I told you I had to tell, and if +you don't think them so, I have got no others;" and with this the worthy +fellow brought his story to a close. + +Just at this moment there came in at the gate of the inn a man entirely +clad in chamois leather, hose, breeches, and doublet, who said in a loud +voice, "Senor host, have you room? Here's the divining ape and the show +of the Release of Melisendra just coming." + +"Ods body!" said the landlord, "why, it's Master Pedro! We're in for a +grand night!" I forgot to mention that the said Master Pedro had his left +eye and nearly half his cheek covered with a patch of green taffety, +showing that something ailed all that side. "Your worship is welcome, +Master Pedro," continued the landlord; "but where are the ape and the +show, for I don't see them?" "They are close at hand," said he in the +chamois leather, "but I came on first to know if there was any room." +"I'd make the Duke of Alva himself clear out to make room for Master +Pedro," said the landlord; "bring in the ape and the show; there's +company in the inn to-night that will pay to see that and the cleverness +of the ape." "So be it by all means," said the man with the patch; "I'll +lower the price, and be well satisfied if I only pay my expenses; and now +I'll go back and hurry on the cart with the ape and the show;" and with +this he went out of the inn. + +Don Quixote at once asked the landlord what this Master Pedro was, and +what was the show and what was the ape he had with him; which the +landlord replied, "This is a famous puppet-showman, who for some time +past has been going about this Mancha de Aragon, exhibiting a show of the +release of Melisendra by the famous Don Gaiferos, one of the best and +best-represented stories that have been seen in this part of the kingdom +for many a year; he has also with him an ape with the most extraordinary +gift ever seen in an ape or imagined in a human being; for if you ask him +anything, he listens attentively to the question, and then jumps on his +master's shoulder, and pressing close to his ear tells him the answer +which Master Pedro then delivers. He says a great deal more about things +past than about things to come; and though he does not always hit the +truth in every case, most times he is not far wrong, so that he makes us +fancy he has got the devil in him. He gets two reals for every question +if the ape answers; I mean if his master answers for him after he has +whispered into his ear; and so it is believed that this same Master Pedro +is very rich. He is a 'gallant man' as they say in Italy, and good +company, and leads the finest life in the world; talks more than six, +drinks more than a dozen, and all by his tongue, and his ape, and his +show." + +Master Pedro now came back, and in a cart followed the show and the +ape--a big one, without a tail and with buttocks as bare as felt, but not +vicious-looking. As soon as Don Quixote saw him, he asked him, "Can you +tell me, sir fortune-teller, what fish do we catch, and how will it be +with us? See, here are my two reals," and he bade Sancho give them to +Master Pedro; but he answered for the ape and said, "Senor, this animal +does not give any answer or information touching things that are to come; +of things past he knows something, and more or less of things present." + +"Gad," said Sancho, "I would not give a farthing to be told what's past +with me, for who knows that better than I do myself? And to pay for being +told what I know would be mighty foolish. But as you know things present, +here are my two reals, and tell me, most excellent sir ape, what is my +wife Teresa Panza doing now, and what is she diverting herself with?" + +Master Pedro refused to take the money, saying, "I will not receive +payment in advance or until the service has been first rendered;" and +then with his right hand he gave a couple of slaps on his left shoulder, +and with one spring the ape perched himself upon it, and putting his +mouth to his master's ear began chattering his teeth rapidly; and having +kept this up as long as one would be saying a credo, with another spring +he brought himself to the ground, and the same instant Master Pedro ran +in great haste and fell upon his knees before Don Quixote, and embracing +his legs exclaimed, "These legs do I embrace as I would embrace the two +pillars of Hercules, O illustrious reviver of knight-errantry, so long +consigned to oblivion! O never yet duly extolled knight, Don Quixote of +La Mancha, courage of the faint-hearted, prop of the tottering, arm of +the fallen, staff and counsel of all who are unfortunate!" + +Don Quixote was thunderstruck, Sancho astounded, the cousin staggered, +the page astonished, the man from the braying town agape, the landlord in +perplexity, and, in short, everyone amazed at the words of the +puppet-showman, who went on to say, "And thou, worthy Sancho Panza, the +best squire and squire to the best knight in the world! Be of good cheer, +for thy good wife Teresa is well, and she is at this moment hackling a +pound of flax; and more by token she has at her left hand a jug with a +broken spout that holds a good drop of wine, with which she solaces +herself at her work." + +"That I can well believe," said Sancho. "She is a lucky one, and if it +was not for her jealousy I would not change her for the giantess +Andandona, who by my master's account was a very clever and worthy woman; +my Teresa is one of those that won't let themselves want for anything, +though their heirs may have to pay for it." + +"Now I declare," said Don Quixote, "he who reads much and travels much +sees and knows a great deal. I say so because what amount of persuasion +could have persuaded me that there are apes in the world that can divine +as I have seen now with my own eyes? For I am that very Don Quixote of La +Mancha this worthy animal refers to, though he has gone rather too far in +my praise; but whatever I may be, I thank heaven that it has endowed me +with a tender and compassionate heart, always disposed to do good to all +and harm to none." + +"If I had money," said the page, "I would ask senor ape what will happen +me in the peregrination I am making." + +To this Master Pedro, who had by this time risen from Don Quixote's feet, +replied, "I have already said that this little beast gives no answer as +to the future; but if he did, not having money would be of no +consequence, for to oblige Senor Don Quixote, here present, I would give +up all the profits in the world. And now, because I have promised it, and +to afford him pleasure, I will set up my show and offer entertainment to +all who are in the inn, without any charge whatever." As soon as he heard +this, the landlord, delighted beyond measure, pointed out a place where +the show might be fixed, which was done at once. + +Don Quixote was not very well satisfied with the divinations of the ape, +as he did not think it proper that an ape should divine anything, either +past or future; so while Master Pedro was arranging the show, he retired +with Sancho into a corner of the stable, where, without being overheard +by anyone, he said to him, "Look here, Sancho, I have been seriously +thinking over this ape's extraordinary gift, and have come to the +conclusion that beyond doubt this Master Pedro, his master, has a pact, +tacit or express, with the devil." + +"If the packet is express from the devil," said Sancho, "it must be a +very dirty packet no doubt; but what good can it do Master Pedro to have +such packets?" + +"Thou dost not understand me, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "I only mean he +must have made some compact with the devil to infuse this power into the +ape, that he may get his living, and after he has grown rich he will give +him his soul, which is what the enemy of mankind wants; this I am led to +believe by observing that the ape only answers about things past or +present, and the devil's knowledge extends no further; for the future he +knows only by guesswork, and that not always; for it is reserved for God +alone to know the times and the seasons, and for him there is neither +past nor future; all is present. This being as it is, it is clear that +this ape speaks by the spirit of the devil; and I am astonished they have +not denounced him to the Holy Office, and put him to the question, and +forced it out of him by whose virtue it is that he divines; because it is +certain this ape is not an astrologer; neither his master nor he sets up, +or knows how to set up, those figures they call judiciary, which are now +so common in Spain that there is not a jade, or page, or old cobbler, +that will not undertake to set up a figure as readily as pick up a knave +of cards from the ground, bringing to nought the marvellous truth of the +science by their lies and ignorance. I know of a lady who asked one of +these figure schemers whether her little lap-dog would be in pup and +would breed, and how many and of what colour the little pups would be. To +which senor astrologer, after having set up his figure, made answer that +the bitch would be in pup, and would drop three pups, one green, another +bright red, and the third parti-coloured, provided she conceived between +eleven and twelve either of the day or night, and on a Monday or +Saturday; but as things turned out, two days after this the bitch died of +a surfeit, and senor planet-ruler had the credit all over the place of +being a most profound astrologer, as most of these planet-rulers have." + +"Still," said Sancho, "I would be glad if your worship would make Master +Pedro ask his ape whether what happened your worship in the cave of +Montesinos is true; for, begging your worship's pardon, I, for my part, +take it to have been all flam and lies, or at any rate something you +dreamt." + +"That may be," replied Don Quixote; "however, I will do what you suggest; +though I have my own scruples about it." + +At this point Master Pedro came up in quest of Don Quixote, to tell him +the show was now ready and to come and see it, for it was worth seeing. +Don Quixote explained his wish, and begged him to ask his ape at once to +tell him whether certain things which had happened to him in the cave of +Montesinos were dreams or realities, for to him they appeared to partake +of both. Upon this Master Pedro, without answering, went back to fetch +the ape, and, having placed it in front of Don Quixote and Sancho, said: +"See here, senor ape, this gentleman wishes to know whether certain +things which happened to him in the cave called the cave of Montesinos +were false or true." On his making the usual sign the ape mounted on his +left shoulder and seemed to whisper in his ear, and Master Pedro said at +once, "The ape says that the things you saw or that happened to you in +that cave are, part of them false, part true; and that he only knows this +and no more as regards this question; but if your worship wishes to know +more, on Friday next he will answer all that may be asked him, for his +virtue is at present exhausted, and will not return to him till Friday, +as he has said." + +"Did I not say, senor," said Sancho, "that I could not bring myself to +believe that all your worship said about the adventures in the cave was +true, or even the half of it?" + +"The course of events will tell, Sancho," replied Don Quixote; "time, +that discloses all things, leaves nothing that it does not drag into the +light of day, though it be buried in the bosom of the earth. But enough +of that for the present; let us go and see Master Pedro's show, for I am +sure there must be something novel in it." + +"Something!" said Master Pedro; "this show of mine has sixty thousand +novel things in it; let me tell you, Senor Don Quixote, it is one of the +best-worth-seeing things in the world this day; but operibus credite et +non verbis, and now let's get to work, for it is growing late, and we +have a great deal to do and to say and show." + +Don Quixote and Sancho obeyed him and went to where the show was already +put up and uncovered, set all around with lighted wax tapers which made +it look splendid and bright. When they came to it Master Pedro ensconced +himself inside it, for it was he who had to work the puppets, and a boy, +a servant of his, posted himself outside to act as showman and explain +the mysteries of the exhibition, having a wand in his hand to point to +the figures as they came out. And so, all who were in the inn being +arranged in front of the show, some of them standing, and Don Quixote, +Sancho, the page, and cousin, accommodated with the best places, the +interpreter began to say what he will hear or see who reads or hears the +next chapter. + +Chapter XXVI. - +Wherein is continued the droll adventure of the puppet-showman, together +with other things in truth right good + +All were silent, Tyrians and Trojans; I mean all who were watching the +show were hanging on the lips of the interpreter of its wonders, when +drums and trumpets were heard to sound inside it and cannon to go off. +The noise was soon over, and then the boy lifted up his voice and said, +"This true story which is here represented to your worships is taken word +for word from the French chronicles and from the Spanish ballads that are +in everybody's mouth, and in the mouth of the boys about the streets. Its +subject is the release by Senor Don Gaiferos of his wife Melisendra, when +a captive in Spain at the hands of the Moors in the city of Sansuena, for +so they called then what is now called Saragossa; and there you may see +how Don Gaiferos is playing at the tables, just as they sing it-- + +At tables playing Don Gaiferos sits, +For Melisendra is forgotten now. + +And that personage who appears there with a crown on his head and a +sceptre in his hand is the Emperor Charlemagne, the supposed father of +Melisendra, who, angered to see his son-in-law's inaction and unconcern, +comes in to chide him; and observe with what vehemence and energy he +chides him, so that you would fancy he was going to give him half a dozen +raps with his sceptre; and indeed there are authors who say he did give +them, and sound ones too; and after having said a great deal to him about +imperilling his honour by not effecting the release of his wife, he said, +so the tale runs, + +Enough I've said, see to it now. + +Observe, too, how the emperor turns away, and leaves Don Gaiferos fuming; +and you see now how in a burst of anger, he flings the table and the +board far from him and calls in haste for his armour, and asks his cousin +Don Roland for the loan of his sword, Durindana, and how Don Roland +refuses to lend it, offering him his company in the difficult enterprise +he is undertaking; but he, in his valour and anger, will not accept it, +and says that he alone will suffice to rescue his wife, even though she +were imprisoned deep in the centre of the earth, and with this he retires +to arm himself and set out on his journey at once. Now let your worships +turn your eyes to that tower that appears there, which is supposed to be +one of the towers of the alcazar of Saragossa, now called the Aljaferia; +that lady who appears on that balcony dressed in Moorish fashion is the +peerless Melisendra, for many a time she used to gaze from thence upon +the road to France, and seek consolation in her captivity by thinking of +Paris and her husband. Observe, too, a new incident which now occurs, +such as, perhaps, never was seen. Do you not see that Moor, who silently +and stealthily, with his finger on his lip, approaches Melisendra from +behind? Observe now how he prints a kiss upon her lips, and what a hurry +she is in to spit, and wipe them with the white sleeve of her smock, and +how she bewails herself, and tears her fair hair as though it were to +blame for the wrong. Observe, too, that the stately Moor who is in that +corridor is King Marsilio of Sansuena, who, having seen the Moor's +insolence, at once orders him (though his kinsman and a great favourite +of his) to be seized and given two hundred lashes, while carried through +the streets of the city according to custom, with criers going before him +and officers of justice behind; and here you see them come out to execute +the sentence, although the offence has been scarcely committed; for among +the Moors there are no indictments nor remands as with us." + +Here Don Quixote called out, "Child, child, go straight on with your +story, and don't run into curves and slants, for to establish a fact +clearly there is need of a great deal of proof and confirmation;" and +said Master Pedro from within, "Boy, stick to your text and do as the +gentleman bids you; it's the best plan; keep to your plain song, and +don't attempt harmonies, for they are apt to break down from being over +fine." + +"I will," said the boy, and he went on to say, "This figure that you see +here on horseback, covered with a Gascon cloak, is Don Gaiferos himself, +whom his wife, now avenged of the insult of the amorous Moor, and taking +her stand on the balcony of the tower with a calmer and more tranquil +countenance, has perceived without recognising him; and she addresses her +husband, supposing him to be some traveller, and holds with him all that +conversation and colloquy in the ballad that runs-- + +If you, sir knight, to France are bound, +Oh! for Gaiferos ask-- + +which I do not repeat here because prolixity begets disgust; suffice it +to observe how Don Gaiferos discovers himself, and that by her joyful +gestures Melisendra shows us she has recognised him; and what is more, we +now see she lowers herself from the balcony to place herself on the +haunches of her good husband's horse. But ah! unhappy lady, the edge of +her petticoat has caught on one of the bars of the balcony and she is +left hanging in the air, unable to reach the ground. But you see how +compassionate heaven sends aid in our sorest need; Don Gaiferos advances, +and without minding whether the rich petticoat is torn or not, he seizes +her and by force brings her to the ground, and then with one jerk places +her on the haunches of his horse, astraddle like a man, and bids her hold +on tight and clasp her arms round his neck, crossing them on his breast +so as not to fall, for the lady Melisendra was not used to that style of +riding. You see, too, how the neighing of the horse shows his +satisfaction with the gallant and beautiful burden he bears in his lord +and lady. You see how they wheel round and quit the city, and in joy and +gladness take the road to Paris. Go in peace, O peerless pair of true +lovers! May you reach your longed-for fatherland in safety, and may +fortune interpose no impediment to your prosperous journey; may the eyes +of your friends and kinsmen behold you enjoying in peace and tranquillity +the remaining days of your life--and that they may be as many as those of +Nestor!" + +Here Master Pedro called out again and said, "Simplicity, boy! None of +your high flights; all affectation is bad." + +The interpreter made no answer, but went on to say, "There was no want of +idle eyes, that see everything, to see Melisendra come down and mount, +and word was brought to King Marsilio, who at once gave orders to sound +the alarm; and see what a stir there is, and how the city is drowned with +the sound of the bells pealing in the towers of all the mosques." + +"Nay, nay," said Don Quixote at this; "on that point of the bells Master +Pedro is very inaccurate, for bells are not in use among the Moors; only +kettledrums, and a kind of small trumpet somewhat like our clarion; to +ring bells this way in Sansuena is unquestionably a great absurdity." + +On hearing this, Master Pedro stopped ringing, and said, "Don't look into +trifles, Senor Don Quixote, or want to have things up to a pitch of +perfection that is out of reach. Are there not almost every day a +thousand comedies represented all round us full of thousands of +inaccuracies and absurdities, and, for all that, they have a successful +run, and are listened to not only with applause, but with admiration and +all the rest of it? Go on, boy, and don't mind; for so long as I fill my +pouch, no matter if I show as many inaccuracies as there are motes in a +sunbeam." + +"True enough," said Don Quixote; and the boy went on: "See what a +numerous and glittering crowd of horsemen issues from the city in pursuit +of the two faithful lovers, what a blowing of trumpets there is, what +sounding of horns, what beating of drums and tabors; I fear me they will +overtake them and bring them back tied to the tail of their own horse, +which would be a dreadful sight." + +Don Quixote, however, seeing such a swarm of Moors and hearing such a +din, thought it would be right to aid the fugitives, and standing up he +exclaimed in a loud voice, "Never, while I live, will I permit foul play +to be practised in my presence on such a famous knight and fearless lover +as Don Gaiferos. Halt! ill-born rabble, follow him not nor pursue him, or +ye will have to reckon with me in battle!" and suiting the action to the +word, he drew his sword, and with one bound placed himself close to the +show, and with unexampled rapidity and fury began to shower down blows on +the puppet troop of Moors, knocking over some, decapitating others, +maiming this one and demolishing that; and among many more he delivered +one down stroke which, if Master Pedro had not ducked, made himself +small, and got out of the way, would have sliced off his head as easily +as if it had been made of almond-paste. Master Pedro kept shouting, "Hold +hard! Senor Don Quixote! can't you see they're not real Moors you're +knocking down and killing and destroying, but only little pasteboard +figures! Look--sinner that I am!--how you're wrecking and ruining all +that I'm worth!" But in spite of this, Don Quixote did not leave off +discharging a continuous rain of cuts, slashes, downstrokes, and +backstrokes, and at length, in less than the space of two credos, he +brought the whole show to the ground, with all its fittings and figures +shivered and knocked to pieces, King Marsilio badly wounded, and the +Emperor Charlemagne with his crown and head split in two. The whole +audience was thrown into confusion, the ape fled to the roof of the inn, +the cousin was frightened, and even Sancho Panza himself was in mighty +fear, for, as he swore after the storm was over, he had never seen his +master in such a furious passion. + +The complete destruction of the show being thus accomplished, Don Quixote +became a little calmer, said, "I wish I had here before me now all those +who do not or will not believe how useful knights-errant are in the +world; just think, if I had not been here present, what would have become +of the brave Don Gaiferos and the fair Melisendra! Depend upon it, by +this time those dogs would have overtaken them and inflicted some outrage +upon them. So, then, long live knight-errantry beyond everything living +on earth this day!" + +"Let it live, and welcome," said Master Pedro at this in a feeble voice, +"and let me die, for I am so unfortunate that I can say with King Don +Rodrigo-- + +poem{ + +Yesterday was I lord of Spain +To-day I've not a turret left +That I may call mine own. + +}poem + +Not half an hour, nay, barely a minute ago, I saw myself lord of kings +and emperors, with my stables filled with countless horses, and my trunks +and bags with gay dresses unnumbered; and now I find myself ruined and +laid low, destitute and a beggar, and above all without my ape, for, by +my faith, my teeth will have to sweat for it before I have him caught; +and all through the reckless fury of sir knight here, who, they say, +protects the fatherless, and rights wrongs, and does other charitable +deeds; but whose generous intentions have been found wanting in my case +only, blessed and praised be the highest heavens! Verily, knight of the +rueful figure he must be to have disfigured mine." + +Sancho Panza was touched by Master Pedro's words, and said to him, "Don't +weep and lament, Master Pedro; you break my heart; let me tell you my +master, Don Quixote, is so catholic and scrupulous a Christian that, if +he can make out that he has done you any wrong, he will own it, and be +willing to pay for it and make it good, and something over and above." + +"Only let Senor Don Quixote pay me for some part of the work he has +destroyed," said Master Pedro, "and I would be content, and his worship +would ease his conscience, for he cannot be saved who keeps what is +another's against the owner's will, and makes no restitution." + +"That is true," said Don Quixote; "but at present I am not aware that I +have got anything of yours, Master Pedro." + +"What!" returned Master Pedro; "and these relics lying here on the bare +hard ground--what scattered and shattered them but the invincible +strength of that mighty arm? And whose were the bodies they belonged to +but mine? And what did I get my living by but by them?" + +"Now am I fully convinced," said Don Quixote, "of what I had many a time +before believed; that the enchanters who persecute me do nothing more +than put figures like these before my eyes, and then change and turn them +into what they please. In truth and earnest, I assure you gentlemen who +now hear me, that to me everything that has taken place here seemed to +take place literally, that Melisendra was Melisendra, Don Gaiferos Don +Gaiferos, Marsilio Marsilio, and Charlemagne Charlemagne. That was why my +anger was roused; and to be faithful to my calling as a knight-errant I +sought to give aid and protection to those who fled, and with this good +intention I did what you have seen. If the result has been the opposite +of what I intended, it is no fault of mine, but of those wicked beings +that persecute me; but, for all that, I am willing to condemn myself in +costs for this error of mine, though it did not proceed from malice; let +Master Pedro see what he wants for the spoiled figures, for I agree to +pay it at once in good and current money of Castile." + +Master Pedro made him a bow, saying, "I expected no less of the rare +Christianity of the valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha, true helper and +protector of all destitute and needy vagabonds; master landlord here and +the great Sancho Panza shall be the arbitrators and appraisers between +your worship and me of what these dilapidated figures are worth or may be +worth." + +The landlord and Sancho consented, and then Master Pedro picked up from +the ground King Marsilio of Saragossa with his head off, and said, "Here +you see how impossible it is to restore this king to his former state, so +I think, saving your better judgments, that for his death, decease, and +demise, four reals and a half may be given me." + +"Proceed," said Don Quixote. + +"Well then, for this cleavage from top to bottom," continued Master +Pedro, taking up the split Emperor Charlemagne, "it would not be much if +I were to ask five reals and a quarter." + +"It's not little," said Sancho. + +"Nor is it much," said the landlord; "make it even, and say five reals." + +"Let him have the whole five and a quarter," said Don Quixote; "for the +sum total of this notable disaster does not stand on a quarter more or +less; and make an end of it quickly, Master Pedro, for it's getting on to +supper-time, and I have some hints of hunger." + +"For this figure," said Master Pedro, "that is without a nose, and wants +an eye, and is the fair Melisendra, I ask, and I am reasonable in my +charge, two reals and twelve maravedis." + +"The very devil must be in it," said Don Quixote, "if Melisendra and her +husband are not by this time at least on the French border, for the horse +they rode on seemed to me to fly rather than gallop; so you needn't try +to sell me the cat for the hare, showing me here a noseless Melisendra +when she is now, may be, enjoying herself at her ease with her husband in +France. God help every one to his own, Master Pedro, and let us all +proceed fairly and honestly; and now go on." + +Master Pedro, perceiving that Don Quixote was beginning to wander, and +return to his original fancy, was not disposed to let him escape, so he +said to him, "This cannot be Melisendra, but must be one of the damsels +that waited on her; so if I'm given sixty maravedis for her, I'll be +content and sufficiently paid." + +And so he went on, putting values on ever so many more smashed figures, +which, after the two arbitrators had adjusted them to the satisfaction of +both parties, came to forty reals and three-quarters; and over and above +this sum, which Sancho at once disbursed, Master Pedro asked for two +reals for his trouble in catching the ape. + +"Let him have them, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "not to catch the ape, but +to get drunk; and two hundred would I give this minute for the good news, +to anyone who could tell me positively, that the lady Dona Melisandra and +Senor Don Gaiferos were now in France and with their own people." + +"No one could tell us that better than my ape," said Master Pedro; "but +there's no devil that could catch him now; I suspect, however, that +affection and hunger will drive him to come looking for me to-night; but +to-morrow will soon be here and we shall see." + +In short, the puppet-show storm passed off, and all supped in peace and +good fellowship at Don Quixote's expense, for he was the height of +generosity. Before it was daylight the man with the lances and halberds +took his departure, and soon after daybreak the cousin and the page came +to bid Don Quixote farewell, the former returning home, the latter +resuming his journey, towards which, to help him, Don Quixote gave him +twelve reals. Master Pedro did not care to engage in any more palaver +with Don Quixote, whom he knew right well; so he rose before the sun, and +having got together the remains of his show and caught his ape, he too +went off to seek his adventures. The landlord, who did not know Don +Quixote, was as much astonished at his mad freaks as at his generosity. +To conclude, Sancho, by his master's orders, paid him very liberally, and +taking leave of him they quitted the inn at about eight in the morning +and took to the road, where we will leave them to pursue their journey, +for this is necessary in order to allow certain other matters to be set +forth, which are required to clear up this famous history. + +Chapter XXVII. - +Wherein it is shown who master pedro and his ape were, together with the +mishap Don Quixote had in the braying adventure, which he did not +conclude as he would have liked or as he had expected + +Cide Hamete, the chronicler of this great history, begins this chapter +with these words, "I swear as a Catholic Christian;" with regard to which +his translator says that Cide Hamete's swearing as a Catholic Christian, +he being--as no doubt he was--a Moor, only meant that, just as a Catholic +Christian taking an oath swears, or ought to swear, what is true, and +tell the truth in what he avers, so he was telling the truth, as much as +if he swore as a Catholic Christian, in all he chose to write about +Quixote, especially in declaring who Master Pedro was and what was the +divining ape that astonished all the villages with his divinations. He +says, then, that he who has read the First Part of this history will +remember well enough the Gines de Pasamonte whom, with other galley +slaves, Don Quixote set free in the Sierra Morena: a kindness for which +he afterwards got poor thanks and worse payment from that evil-minded, +ill-conditioned set. This Gines de Pasamonte--Don Ginesillo de Parapilla, +Don Quixote called him--it was that stole Dapple from Sancho Panza; +which, because by the fault of the printers neither the how nor the when +was stated in the First Part, has been a puzzle to a good many people, +who attribute to the bad memory of the author what was the error of the +press. In fact, however, Gines stole him while Sancho Panza was asleep on +his back, adopting the plan and device that Brunello had recourse to when +he stole Sacripante's horse from between his legs at the siege of +Albracca; and, as has been told, Sancho afterwards recovered him. This +Gines, then, afraid of being caught by the officers of justice, who were +looking for him to punish him for his numberless rascalities and offences +(which were so many and so great that he himself wrote a big book giving +an account of them), resolved to shift his quarters into the kingdom of +Aragon, and cover up his left eye, and take up the trade of a +puppet-showman; for this, as well as juggling, he knew how to practise to +perfection. From some released Christians returning from Barbary, it so +happened, he bought the ape, which he taught to mount upon his shoulder +on his making a certain sign, and to whisper, or seem to do so, in his +ear. Thus prepared, before entering any village whither he was bound with +his show and his ape, he used to inform himself at the nearest village, +or from the most likely person he could find, as to what particular +things had happened there, and to whom; and bearing them well in mind, +the first thing he did was to exhibit his show, sometimes one story, +sometimes another, but all lively, amusing, and familiar. As soon as the +exhibition was over he brought forward the accomplishments of his ape, +assuring the public that he divined all the past and the present, but as +to the future he had no skill. For each question answered he asked two +reals, and for some he made a reduction, just as he happened to feel the +pulse of the questioners; and when now and then he came to houses where +things that he knew of had happened to the people living there, even if +they did not ask him a question, not caring to pay for it, he would make +the sign to the ape and then declare that it had said so and so, which +fitted the case exactly. In this way he acquired a prodigious name and +all ran after him; on other occasions, being very crafty, he would answer +in such a way that the answers suited the questions; and as no one +cross-questioned him or pressed him to tell how his ape divined, he made +fools of them all and filled his pouch. The instant he entered the inn he +knew Don Quixote and Sancho, and with that knowledge it was easy for him +to astonish them and all who were there; but it would have cost him dear +had Don Quixote brought down his hand a little lower when he cut off King +Marsilio's head and destroyed all his horsemen, as related in the +preceeding chapter. + +So much for Master Pedro and his ape; and now to return to Don Quixote of +La Mancha. After he had left the inn he determined to visit, first of +all, the banks of the Ebro and that neighbourhood, before entering the +city of Saragossa, for the ample time there was still to spare before the +jousts left him enough for all. With this object in view he followed the +road and travelled along it for two days, without meeting any adventure +worth committing to writing until on the third day, as he was ascending a +hill, he heard a great noise of drums, trumpets, and musket-shots. At +first he imagined some regiment of soldiers was passing that way, and to +see them he spurred Rocinante and mounted the hill. On reaching the top +he saw at the foot of it over two hundred men, as it seemed to him, armed +with weapons of various sorts, lances, crossbows, partisans, halberds, +and pikes, and a few muskets and a great many bucklers. He descended the +slope and approached the band near enough to see distinctly the flags, +make out the colours and distinguish the devices they bore, especially +one on a standard or ensign of white satin, on which there was painted in +a very life-like style an ass like a little sard, with its head up, its +mouth open and its tongue out, as if it were in the act and attitude of +braying; and round it were inscribed in large characters these two lines-- + +They did not bray in vain, +Our alcaldes twain. + +From this device Don Quixote concluded that these people must be from the +braying town, and he said so to Sancho, explaining to him what was +written on the standard. At the same time he observed that the man who +had told them about the matter was wrong in saying that the two who +brayed were regidors, for according to the lines of the standard they +were alcaldes. To which Sancho replied, "Senor, there's nothing to stick +at in that, for maybe the regidors who brayed then came to be alcaldes of +their town afterwards, and so they may go by both titles; moreover, it +has nothing to do with the truth of the story whether the brayers were +alcaldes or regidors, provided at any rate they did bray; for an alcalde +is just as likely to bray as a regidor." They perceived, in short, +clearly that the town which had been twitted had turned out to do battle +with some other that had jeered it more than was fair or neighbourly. + +Don Quixote proceeded to join them, not a little to Sancho's uneasiness, +for he never relished mixing himself up in expeditions of that sort. The +members of the troop received him into the midst of them, taking him to +be some one who was on their side. Don Quixote, putting up his visor, +advanced with an easy bearing and demeanour to the standard with the ass, +and all the chief men of the army gathered round him to look at him, +staring at him with the usual amazement that everybody felt on seeing him +for the first time. Don Quixote, seeing them examining him so +attentively, and that none of them spoke to him or put any question to +him, determined to take advantage of their silence; so, breaking his own, +he lifted up his voice and said, "Worthy sirs, I entreat you as earnestly +as I can not to interrupt an argument I wish to address to you, until you +find it displeases or wearies you; and if that come to pass, on the +slightest hint you give me I will put a seal upon my lips and a gag upon +my tongue." + +They all bade him say what he liked, for they would listen to him +willingly. + +With this permission Don Quixote went on to say, "I, sirs, am a +knight-errant whose calling is that of arms, and whose profession is to +protect those who require protection, and give help to such as stand in +need of it. Some days ago I became acquainted with your misfortune and +the cause which impels you to take up arms again and again to revenge +yourselves upon your enemies; and having many times thought over your +business in my mind, I find that, according to the laws of combat, you +are mistaken in holding yourselves insulted; for a private individual +cannot insult an entire community; unless it be by defying it +collectively as a traitor, because he cannot tell who in particular is +guilty of the treason for which he defies it. Of this we have an example +in Don Diego Ordonez de Lara, who defied the whole town of Zamora, +because he did not know that Vellido Dolfos alone had committed the +treachery of slaying his king; and therefore he defied them all, and the +vengeance and the reply concerned all; though, to be sure, Senor Don +Diego went rather too far, indeed very much beyond the limits of a +defiance; for he had no occasion to defy the dead, or the waters, or the +fishes, or those yet unborn, and all the rest of it as set forth; but let +that pass, for when anger breaks out there's no father, governor, or +bridle to check the tongue. The case being, then, that no one person can +insult a kingdom, province, city, state, or entire community, it is clear +there is no reason for going out to avenge the defiance of such an +insult, inasmuch as it is not one. A fine thing it would be if the people +of the clock town were to be at loggerheads every moment with everyone +who called them by that name,--or the Cazoleros, Berengeneros, +Ballenatos, Jaboneros, or the bearers of all the other names and titles +that are always in the mouth of the boys and common people! It would be a +nice business indeed if all these illustrious cities were to take huff +and revenge themselves and go about perpetually making trombones of their +swords in every petty quarrel! No, no; God forbid! There are four things +for which sensible men and well-ordered States ought to take up arms, +draw their swords, and risk their persons, lives, and properties. The +first is to defend the Catholic faith; the second, to defend one's life, +which is in accordance with natural and divine law; the third, in defence +of one's honour, family, and property; the fourth, in the service of +one's king in a just war; and if to these we choose to add a fifth (which +may be included in the second), in defence of one's country. To these +five, as it were capital causes, there may be added some others that may +be just and reasonable, and make it a duty to take up arms; but to take +them up for trifles and things to laugh at and he amused by rather than +offended, looks as though he who did so was altogether wanting in common +sense. Moreover, to take an unjust revenge (and there cannot be any just +one) is directly opposed to the sacred law that we acknowledge, wherein +we are commanded to do good to our enemies and to love them that hate us; +a command which, though it seems somewhat difficult to obey, is only so +to those who have in them less of God than of the world, and more of the +flesh than of the spirit; for Jesus Christ, God and true man, who never +lied, and could not and cannot lie, said, as our law-giver, that his yoke +was easy and his burden light; he would not, therefore, have laid any +command upon us that it was impossible to obey. Thus, sirs, you are bound +to keep quiet by human and divine law." + +"The devil take me," said Sancho to himself at this, "but this master of +mine is a tologian; or, if not, faith, he's as like one as one egg is +like another." + +Don Quixote stopped to take breath, and, observing that silence was still +preserved, had a mind to continue his discourse, and would have done so +had not Sancho interposed with his smartness; for he, seeing his master +pause, took the lead, saying, "My lord Don Quixote of La Mancha, who once +was called the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, but now is called the +Knight of the Lions, is a gentleman of great discretion who knows Latin +and his mother tongue like a bachelor, and in everything that he deals +with or advises proceeds like a good soldier, and has all the laws and +ordinances of what they call combat at his fingers' ends; so you have +nothing to do but to let yourselves be guided by what he says, and on my +head be it if it is wrong. Besides which, you have been told that it is +folly to take offence at merely hearing a bray. I remember when I was a +boy I brayed as often as I had a fancy, without anyone hindering me, and +so elegantly and naturally that when I brayed all the asses in the town +would bray; but I was none the less for that the son of my parents who +were greatly respected; and though I was envied because of the gift by +more than one of the high and mighty ones of the town, I did not care two +farthings for it; and that you may see I am telling the truth, wait a bit +and listen, for this art, like swimming, once learnt is never forgotten;" +and then, taking hold of his nose, he began to bray so vigorously that +all the valleys around rang again. + +One of those, however, that stood near him, fancying he was mocking them, +lifted up a long staff he had in his hand and smote him such a blow with +it that Sancho dropped helpless to the ground. Don Quixote, seeing him so +roughly handled, attacked the man who had struck him lance in hand, but +so many thrust themselves between them that he could not avenge him. Far +from it, finding a shower of stones rained upon him, and crossbows and +muskets unnumbered levelled at him, he wheeled Rocinante round and, as +fast as his best gallop could take him, fled from the midst of them, +commending himself to God with all his heart to deliver him out of this +peril, in dread every step of some ball coming in at his back and coming +out at his breast, and every minute drawing his breath to see whether it +had gone from him. The members of the band, however, were satisfied with +seeing him take to flight, and did not fire on him. They put up Sancho, +scarcely restored to his senses, on his ass, and let him go after his +master; not that he was sufficiently in his wits to guide the beast, but +Dapple followed the footsteps of Rocinante, from whom he could not remain +a moment separated. Don Quixote having got some way off looked back, and +seeing Sancho coming, waited for him, as he perceived that no one +followed him. The men of the troop stood their ground till night, and as +the enemy did not come out to battle, they returned to their town +exulting; and had they been aware of the ancient custom of the Greeks, +they would have erected a trophy on the spot. + +Chapter XXVIII. - +Of matters that Benengeli says he who reads them will know, if he reads +them with attention + +When the brave man flees, treachery is manifest and it is for wise men to +reserve themselves for better occasions. This proved to be the case with +Don Quixote, who, giving way before the fury of the townsfolk and the +hostile intentions of the angry troop, took to flight and, without a +thought of Sancho or the danger in which he was leaving him, retreated to +such a distance as he thought made him safe. Sancho, lying across his +ass, followed him, as has been said, and at length came up, having by +this time recovered his senses, and on joining him let himself drop off +Dapple at Rocinante's feet, sore, bruised, and belaboured. Don Quixote +dismounted to examine his wounds, but finding him whole from head to +foot, he said to him, angrily enough, "In an evil hour didst thou take to +braying, Sancho! Where hast thou learned that it is well done to mention +the rope in the house of the man that has been hanged? To the music of +brays what harmonies couldst thou expect to get but cudgels? Give thanks +to God, Sancho, that they signed the cross on thee just now with a stick, +and did not mark thee per signum crucis with a cutlass." + +"I'm not equal to answering," said Sancho, "for I feel as if I was +speaking through my shoulders; let us mount and get away from this; I'll +keep from braying, but not from saying that knights-errant fly and leave +their good squires to be pounded like privet, or made meal of at the +hands of their enemies." + +"He does not fly who retires," returned Don Quixote; "for I would have +thee know, Sancho, that the valour which is not based upon a foundation +of prudence is called rashness, and the exploits of the rash man are to +be attributed rather to good fortune than to courage; and so I own that I +retired, but not that I fled; and therein I have followed the example of +many valiant men who have reserved themselves for better times; the +histories are full of instances of this, but as it would not be any good +to thee or pleasure to me, I will not recount them to thee now." + +Sancho was by this time mounted with the help of Don Quixote, who then +himself mounted Rocinante, and at a leisurely pace they proceeded to take +shelter in a grove which was in sight about a quarter of a league off. +Every now and then Sancho gave vent to deep sighs and dismal groans, and +on Don Quixote asking him what caused such acute suffering, he replied +that, from the end of his back-bone up to the nape of his neck, he was so +sore that it nearly drove him out of his senses. + +"The cause of that soreness," said Don Quixote, "will be, no doubt, that +the staff wherewith they smote thee being a very long one, it caught thee +all down the back, where all the parts that are sore are situated, and +had it reached any further thou wouldst be sorer still." + +"By God," said Sancho, "your worship has relieved me of a great doubt, +and cleared up the point for me in elegant style! Body o' me! is the +cause of my soreness such a mystery that there's any need to tell me I am +sore everywhere the staff hit me? If it was my ankles that pained me +there might be something in going divining why they did, but it is not +much to divine that I'm sore where they thrashed me. By my faith, master +mine, the ills of others hang by a hair; every day I am discovering more +and more how little I have to hope for from keeping company with your +worship; for if this time you have allowed me to be drubbed, the next +time, or a hundred times more, we'll have the blanketings of the other +day over again, and all the other pranks which, if they have fallen on my +shoulders now, will be thrown in my teeth by-and-by. I would do a great +deal better (if I was not an ignorant brute that will never do any good +all my life), I would do a great deal better, I say, to go home to my +wife and children and support them and bring them up on what God may +please to give me, instead of following your worship along roads that +lead nowhere and paths that are none at all, with little to drink and +less to eat. And then when it comes to sleeping! Measure out seven feet +on the earth, brother squire, and if that's not enough for you, take as +many more, for you may have it all your own way and stretch yourself to +your heart's content. Oh that I could see burnt and turned to ashes the +first man that meddled with knight-errantry or at any rate the first who +chose to be squire to such fools as all the knights-errant of past times +must have been! Of those of the present day I say nothing, because, as +your worship is one of them, I respect them, and because I know your +worship knows a point more than the devil in all you say and think." + +"I would lay a good wager with you, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that now +that you are talking on without anyone to stop you, you don't feel a pain +in your whole body. Talk away, my son, say whatever comes into your head +or mouth, for so long as you feel no pain, the irritation your +impertinences give me will be a pleasure to me; and if you are so anxious +to go home to your wife and children, God forbid that I should prevent +you; you have money of mine; see how long it is since we left our village +this third time, and how much you can and ought to earn every month, and +pay yourself out of your own hand." + +"When I worked for Tom Carrasco, the father of the bachelor Samson +Carrasco that your worship knows," replied Sancho, "I used to earn two +ducats a month besides my food; I can't tell what I can earn with your +worship, though I know a knight-errant's squire has harder times of it +than he who works for a farmer; for after all, we who work for farmers, +however much we toil all day, at the worst, at night, we have our olla +supper and sleep in a bed, which I have not slept in since I have been in +your worship's service, if it wasn't the short time we were in Don Diego +de Miranda's house, and the feast I had with the skimmings I took off +Camacho's pots, and what I ate, drank, and slept in Basilio's house; all +the rest of the time I have been sleeping on the hard ground under the +open sky, exposed to what they call the inclemencies of heaven, keeping +life in me with scraps of cheese and crusts of bread, and drinking water +either from the brooks or from the springs we come to on these by-paths +we travel." + +"I own, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that all thou sayest is true; how +much, thinkest thou, ought I to give thee over and above what Tom +Carrasco gave thee?" + +"I think," said Sancho, "that if your worship was to add on two reals a +month I'd consider myself well paid; that is, as far as the wages of my +labour go; but to make up to me for your worship's pledge and promise to +me to give me the government of an island, it would be fair to add six +reals more, making thirty in all." + +"Very good," said Don Quixote; "it is twenty-five days since we left our +village, so reckon up, Sancho, according to the wages you have made out +for yourself, and see how much I owe you in proportion, and pay yourself, +as I said before, out of your own hand." + +"O body o' me!" said Sancho, "but your worship is very much out in that +reckoning; for when it comes to the promise of the island we must count +from the day your worship promised it to me to this present hour we are +at now." + +"Well, how long is it, Sancho, since I promised it to you?" said Don +Quixote. + +"If I remember rightly," said Sancho, "it must be over twenty years, +three days more or less." + +Don Quixote gave himself a great slap on the forehead and began to laugh +heartily, and said he, "Why, I have not been wandering, either in the +Sierra Morena or in the whole course of our sallies, but barely two +months, and thou sayest, Sancho, that it is twenty years since I promised +thee the island. I believe now thou wouldst have all the money thou hast +of mine go in thy wages. If so, and if that be thy pleasure, I give it to +thee now, once and for all, and much good may it do thee, for so long as +I see myself rid of such a good-for-nothing squire I'll be glad to be +left a pauper without a rap. But tell me, thou perverter of the squirely +rules of knight-errantry, where hast thou ever seen or read that any +knight-errant's squire made terms with his lord, 'you must give me so +much a month for serving you'? Plunge, scoundrel, rogue, monster--for +such I take thee to be--plunge, I say, into the mare magnum of their +histories; and if thou shalt find that any squire ever said or thought +what thou hast said now, I will let thee nail it on my forehead, and give +me, over and above, four sound slaps in the face. Turn the rein, or the +halter, of thy Dapple, and begone home; for one single step further thou +shalt not make in my company. O bread thanklessly received! O promises +ill-bestowed! O man more beast than human being! Now, when I was about to +raise thee to such a position, that, in spite of thy wife, they would +call thee 'my lord,' thou art leaving me? Thou art going now when I had a +firm and fixed intention of making thee lord of the best island in the +world? Well, as thou thyself hast said before now, honey is not for the +mouth of the ass. Ass thou art, ass thou wilt be, and ass thou wilt end +when the course of thy life is run; for I know it will come to its close +before thou dost perceive or discern that thou art a beast." + +Sancho regarded Don Quixote earnestly while he was giving him this +rating, and was so touched by remorse that the tears came to his eyes, +and in a piteous and broken voice he said to him, "Master mine, I confess +that, to be a complete ass, all I want is a tail; if your worship will +only fix one on to me, I'll look on it as rightly placed, and I'll serve +you as an ass all the remaining days of my life. Forgive me and have pity +on my folly, and remember I know but little, and, if I talk much, it's +more from infirmity than malice; but he who sins and mends commends +himself to God." + +"I should have been surprised, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "if thou hadst +not introduced some bit of a proverb into thy speech. Well, well, I +forgive thee, provided thou dost mend and not show thyself in future so +fond of thine own interest, but try to be of good cheer and take heart, +and encourage thyself to look forward to the fulfillment of my promises, +which, by being delayed, does not become impossible." + +Sancho said he would do so, and keep up his heart as best he could. They +then entered the grove, and Don Quixote settled himself at the foot of an +elm, and Sancho at that of a beech, for trees of this kind and others +like them always have feet but no hands. Sancho passed the night in pain, +for with the evening dews the blow of the staff made itself felt all the +more. Don Quixote passed it in his never-failing meditations; but, for +all that, they had some winks of sleep, and with the appearance of +daylight they pursued their journey in quest of the banks of the famous +Ebro, where that befell them which will be told in the following chapter. + +Chapter XXIX. - +Of the famous adventure of the enchanted bark + +By stages as already described or left undescribed, two days after +quitting the grove Don Quixote and Sancho reached the river Ebro, and the +sight of it was a great delight to Don Quixote as he contemplated and +gazed upon the charms of its banks, the clearness of its stream, the +gentleness of its current and the abundance of its crystal waters; and +the pleasant view revived a thousand tender thoughts in his mind. Above +all, he dwelt upon what he had seen in the cave of Montesinos; for though +Master Pedro's ape had told him that of those things part was true, part +false, he clung more to their truth than to their falsehood, the very +reverse of Sancho, who held them all to be downright lies. + +As they were thus proceeding, then, they discovered a small boat, without +oars or any other gear, that lay at the water's edge tied to the stem of +a tree growing on the bank. Don Quixote looked all round, and seeing +nobody, at once, without more ado, dismounted from Rocinante and bade +Sancho get down from Dapple and tie both beasts securely to the trunk of +a poplar or willow that stood there. Sancho asked him the reason of this +sudden dismounting and tying. Don Quixote made answer, "Thou must know, +Sancho, that this bark is plainly, and without the possibility of any +alternative, calling and inviting me to enter it, and in it go to give +aid to some knight or other person of distinction in need of it, who is +no doubt in some sore strait; for this is the way of the books of +chivalry and of the enchanters who figure and speak in them. When a +knight is involved in some difficulty from which he cannot be delivered +save by the hand of another knight, though they may be at a distance of +two or three thousand leagues or more one from the other, they either +take him up on a cloud, or they provide a bark for him to get into, and +in less than the twinkling of an eye they carry him where they will and +where his help is required; and so, Sancho, this bark is placed here for +the same purpose; this is as true as that it is now day, and ere this one +passes tie Dapple and Rocinante together, and then in God's hand be it to +guide us; for I would not hold back from embarking, though barefooted +friars were to beg me." + +"As that's the case," said Sancho, "and your worship chooses to give in +to these--I don't know if I may call them absurdities--at every turn, +there's nothing for it but to obey and bow the head, bearing in mind the +proverb, 'Do as thy master bids thee, and sit down to table with him;' +but for all that, for the sake of easing my conscience, I warn your +worship that it is my opinion this bark is no enchanted one, but belongs +to some of the fishermen of the river, for they catch the best shad in +the world here." + +As Sancho said this, he tied the beasts, leaving them to the care and +protection of the enchanters with sorrow enough in his heart. Don Quixote +bade him not be uneasy about deserting the animals, "for he who would +carry themselves over such longinquous roads and regions would take care +to feed them." + +"I don't understand that logiquous," said Sancho, "nor have I ever heard +the word all the days of my life." + +"Longinquous," replied Don Quixote, "means far off; but it is no wonder +thou dost not understand it, for thou art not bound to know Latin, like +some who pretend to know it and don't." + +"Now they are tied," said Sancho; "what are we to do next?" + +"What?" said Don Quixote, "cross ourselves and weigh anchor; I mean, +embark and cut the moorings by which the bark is held;" and the bark +began to drift away slowly from the bank. But when Sancho saw himself +somewhere about two yards out in the river, he began to tremble and give +himself up for lost; but nothing distressed him more than hearing Dapple +bray and seeing Rocinante struggling to get loose, and said he to his +master, "Dapple is braying in grief at our leaving him, and Rocinante is +trying to escape and plunge in after us. O dear friends, peace be with +you, and may this madness that is taking us away from you, turned into +sober sense, bring us back to you." And with this he fell weeping so +bitterly, that Don Quixote said to him, sharply and angrily, "What art +thou afraid of, cowardly creature? What art thou weeping at, heart of +butter-paste? Who pursues or molests thee, thou soul of a tame mouse? +What dost thou want, unsatisfied in the very heart of abundance? Art +thou, perchance, tramping barefoot over the Riphaean mountains, instead +of being seated on a bench like an archduke on the tranquil stream of +this pleasant river, from which in a short space we shall come out upon +the broad sea? But we must have already emerged and gone seven hundred or +eight hundred leagues; and if I had here an astrolabe to take the +altitude of the pole, I could tell thee how many we have travelled, +though either I know little, or we have already crossed or shall shortly +cross the equinoctial line which parts the two opposite poles midway." + +"And when we come to that line your worship speaks of," said Sancho, "how +far shall we have gone?" + +"Very far," said Don Quixote, "for of the three hundred and sixty degrees +that this terraqueous globe contains, as computed by Ptolemy, the +greatest cosmographer known, we shall have travelled one-half when we +come to the line I spoke of." + +"By God," said Sancho, "your worship gives me a nice authority for what +you say, putrid Dolly something transmogrified, or whatever it is." + +Don Quixote laughed at the interpretation Sancho put upon "computed," and +the name of the cosmographer Ptolemy, and said he, "Thou must know, +Sancho, that with the Spaniards and those who embark at Cadiz for the +East Indies, one of the signs they have to show them when they have +passed the equinoctial line I told thee of, is, that the lice die upon +everybody on board the ship, and not a single one is left, or to be found +in the whole vessel if they gave its weight in gold for it; so, Sancho, +thou mayest as well pass thy hand down thy thigh, and if thou comest upon +anything alive we shall be no longer in doubt; if not, then we have +crossed." + +"I don't believe a bit of it," said Sancho; "still, I'll do as your +worship bids me; though I don't know what need there is for trying these +experiments, for I can see with my own eyes that we have not moved five +yards away from the bank, or shifted two yards from where the animals +stand, for there are Rocinante and Dapple in the very same place where we +left them; and watching a point, as I do now, I swear by all that's good, +we are not stirring or moving at the pace of an ant." + +"Try the test I told thee of, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "and don't mind +any other, for thou knowest nothing about colures, lines, parallels, +zodiacs, ecliptics, poles, solstices, equinoxes, planets, signs, +bearings, the measures of which the celestial and terrestrial spheres are +composed; if thou wert acquainted with all these things, or any portion +of them, thou wouldst see clearly how many parallels we have cut, what +signs we have seen, and what constellations we have left behind and are +now leaving behind. But again I tell thee, feel and hunt, for I am +certain thou art cleaner than a sheet of smooth white paper." + +Sancho felt, and passing his hand gently and carefully down to the hollow +of his left knee, he looked up at his master and said, "Either the test +is a false one, or we have not come to where your worship says, nor +within many leagues of it." + +"Why, how so?" asked Don Quixote; "hast thou come upon aught?" + +"Ay, and aughts," replied Sancho; and shaking his fingers he washed his +whole hand in the river along which the boat was quietly gliding in +midstream, not moved by any occult intelligence or invisible enchanter, +but simply by the current, just there smooth and gentle. + +They now came in sight of some large water mills that stood in the middle +of the river, and the instant Don Quixote saw them he cried out, "Seest +thou there, my friend? there stands the castle or fortress, where there +is, no doubt, some knight in durance, or ill-used queen, or infanta, or +princess, in whose aid I am brought hither." + +"What the devil city, fortress, or castle is your worship talking about, +senor?" said Sancho; "don't you see that those are mills that stand in +the river to grind corn?" + +"Hold thy peace, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "though they look like mills +they are not so; I have already told thee that enchantments transform +things and change their proper shapes; I do not mean to say they really +change them from one form into another, but that it seems as though they +did, as experience proved in the transformation of Dulcinea, sole refuge +of my hopes." + +By this time, the boat, having reached the middle of the stream, began to +move less slowly than hitherto. The millers belonging to the mills, when +they saw the boat coming down the river, and on the point of being sucked +in by the draught of the wheels, ran out in haste, several of them, with +long poles to stop it, and being all mealy, with faces and garments +covered with flour, they presented a sinister appearance. They raised +loud shouts, crying, "Devils of men, where are you going to? Are you mad? +Do you want to drown yourselves, or dash yourselves to pieces among these +wheels?" + +"Did I not tell thee, Sancho," said Don Quixote at this, "that we had +reached the place where I am to show what the might of my arm can do? See +what ruffians and villains come out against me; see what monsters oppose +me; see what hideous countenances come to frighten us! You shall soon +see, scoundrels!" And then standing up in the boat he began in a loud +voice to hurl threats at the millers, exclaiming, "Ill-conditioned and +worse-counselled rabble, restore to liberty and freedom the person ye +hold in durance in this your fortress or prison, high or low or of +whatever rank or quality he be, for I am Don Quixote of La Mancha, +otherwise called the Knight of the Lions, for whom, by the disposition of +heaven above, it is reserved to give a happy issue to this adventure;" +and so saying he drew his sword and began making passes in the air at the +millers, who, hearing but not understanding all this nonsense, strove to +stop the boat, which was now getting into the rushing channel of the +wheels. Sancho fell upon his knees devoutly appealing to heaven to +deliver him from such imminent peril; which it did by the activity and +quickness of the millers, who, pushing against the boat with their poles, +stopped it, not, however, without upsetting and throwing Don Quixote and +Sancho into the water; and lucky it was for Don Quixote that he could +swim like a goose, though the weight of his armour carried him twice to +the bottom; and had it not been for the millers, who plunged in and +hoisted them both out, it would have been Troy town with the pair of +them. As soon as, more drenched than thirsty, they were landed, Sancho +went down on his knees and with clasped hands and eyes raised to heaven, +prayed a long and fervent prayer to God to deliver him evermore from the +rash projects and attempts of his master. The fishermen, the owners of +the boat, which the mill-wheels had knocked to pieces, now came up, and +seeing it smashed they proceeded to strip Sancho and to demand payment +for it from Don Quixote; but he with great calmness, just as if nothing +had happened him, told the millers and fishermen that he would pay for +the bark most cheerfully, on condition that they delivered up to him, +free and unhurt, the person or persons that were in durance in that +castle of theirs. + +"What persons or what castle art thou talking of, madman? Art thou for +carrying off the people who come to grind corn in these mills?" + +"That's enough," said Don Quixote to himself, "it would be preaching in +the desert to attempt by entreaties to induce this rabble to do any +virtuous action. In this adventure two mighty enchanters must have +encountered one another, and one frustrates what the other attempts; one +provided the bark for me, and the other upset me; God help us, this world +is all machinations and schemes at cross purposes one with the other. I +can do no more." And then turning towards the mills he said aloud, +"Friends, whoe'er ye be that are immured in that prison, forgive me that, +to my misfortune and yours, I cannot deliver you from your misery; this +adventure is doubtless reserved and destined for some other knight." + +So saying he settled with the fishermen, and paid fifty reals for the +boat, which Sancho handed to them very much against the grain, saying, +"With a couple more bark businesses like this we shall have sunk our +whole capital." + +The fishermen and the millers stood staring in amazement at the two +figures, so very different to all appearance from ordinary men, and were +wholly unable to make out the drift of the observations and questions Don +Quixote addressed to them; and coming to the conclusion that they were +madmen, they left them and betook themselves, the millers to their mills, +and the fishermen to their huts. Don Quixote and Sancho returned to their +beasts, and to their life of beasts, and so ended the adventure of the +enchanted bark. + +Chapter XXX. - +Of Don Quixote's adventure with a fair huntress + +They reached their beasts in low spirits and bad humour enough, knight +and squire, Sancho particularly, for with him what touched the stock of +money touched his heart, and when any was taken from him he felt as if he +was robbed of the apples of his eyes. In fine, without exchanging a word, +they mounted and quitted the famous river, Don Quixote absorbed in +thoughts of his love, Sancho in thinking of his advancement, which just +then, it seemed to him, he was very far from securing; for, fool as he +was, he saw clearly enough that his master's acts were all or most of +them utterly senseless; and he began to cast about for an opportunity of +retiring from his service and going home some day, without entering into +any explanations or taking any farewell of him. Fortune, however, ordered +matters after a fashion very much the opposite of what he contemplated. + +It so happened that the next day towards sunset, on coming out of a wood, +Don Quixote cast his eyes over a green meadow, and at the far end of it +observed some people, and as he drew nearer saw that it was a hawking +party. Coming closer, he distinguished among them a lady of graceful +mien, on a pure white palfrey or hackney caparisoned with green trappings +and a silver-mounted side-saddle. The lady was also in green, and so +richly and splendidly dressed that splendour itself seemed personified in +her. On her left hand she bore a hawk, a proof to Don Quixote's mind that +she must be some great lady and the mistress of the whole hunting party, +which was the fact; so he said to Sancho, "Run Sancho, my son, and say to +that lady on the palfrey with the hawk that I, the Knight of the Lions, +kiss the hands of her exalted beauty, and if her excellence will grant me +leave I will go and kiss them in person and place myself at her service +for aught that may be in my power and her highness may command; and mind, +Sancho, how thou speakest, and take care not to thrust in any of thy +proverbs into thy message." + +"You've got a likely one here to thrust any in!" said Sancho; "leave me +alone for that! Why, this is not the first time in my life I have carried +messages to high and exalted ladies." + +"Except that thou didst carry to the lady Dulcinea," said Don Quixote, "I +know not that thou hast carried any other, at least in my service." + +"That is true," replied Sancho; "but pledges don't distress a good payer, +and in a house where there's plenty supper is soon cooked; I mean there's +no need of telling or warning me about anything; for I'm ready for +everything and know a little of everything." + +"That I believe, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "go and good luck to thee, +and God speed thee." + +Sancho went off at top speed, forcing Dapple out of his regular pace, and +came to where the fair huntress was standing, and dismounting knelt +before her and said, "Fair lady, that knight that you see there, the +Knight of the Lions by name, is my master, and I am a squire of his, and +at home they call me Sancho Panza. This same Knight of the Lions, who was +called not long since the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, sends by me +to say may it please your highness to give him leave that, with your +permission, approbation, and consent, he may come and carry out his +wishes, which are, as he says and I believe, to serve your exalted +loftiness and beauty; and if you give it, your ladyship will do a thing +which will redound to your honour, and he will receive a most +distinguished favour and happiness." + +"You have indeed, squire," said the lady, "delivered your message with +all the formalities such messages require; rise up, for it is not right +that the squire of a knight so great as he of the Rueful Countenance, of +whom we have heard a great deal here, should remain on his knees; rise, +my friend, and bid your master welcome to the services of myself and the +duke my husband, in a country house we have here." + +Sancho got up, charmed as much by the beauty of the good lady as by her +high-bred air and her courtesy, but, above all, by what she had said +about having heard of his master, the Knight of the Rueful Countenance; +for if she did not call him Knight of the Lions it was no doubt because +he had so lately taken the name. "Tell me, brother squire," asked the +duchess (whose title, however, is not known), "this master of yours, is +he not one of whom there is a history extant in print, called 'The +Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote of La Mancha,' who has for the lady of +his heart a certain Dulcinea del Toboso?" + +"He is the same, senora," replied Sancho; "and that squire of his who +figures, or ought to figure, in the said history under the name of Sancho +Panza, is myself, unless they have changed me in the cradle, I mean in +the press." + +"I am rejoiced at all this," said the duchess; "go, brother Panza, and +tell your master that he is welcome to my estate, and that nothing could +happen me that could give me greater pleasure." + +Sancho returned to his master mightily pleased with this gratifying +answer, and told him all the great lady had said to him, lauding to the +skies, in his rustic phrase, her rare beauty, her graceful gaiety, and +her courtesy. Don Quixote drew himself up briskly in his saddle, fixed +himself in his stirrups, settled his visor, gave Rocinante the spur, and +with an easy bearing advanced to kiss the hands of the duchess, who, +having sent to summon the duke her husband, told him while Don Quixote +was approaching all about the message; and as both of them had read the +First Part of this history, and from it were aware of Don Quixote's crazy +turn, they awaited him with the greatest delight and anxiety to make his +acquaintance, meaning to fall in with his humour and agree with +everything he said, and, so long as he stayed with them, to treat him as +a knight-errant, with all the ceremonies usual in the books of chivalry +they had read, for they themselves were very fond of them. + +Don Quixote now came up with his visor raised, and as he seemed about to +dismount Sancho made haste to go and hold his stirrup for him; but in +getting down off Dapple he was so unlucky as to hitch his foot in one of +the ropes of the pack-saddle in such a way that he was unable to free it, +and was left hanging by it with his face and breast on the ground. Don +Quixote, who was not used to dismount without having the stirrup held, +fancying that Sancho had by this time come to hold it for him, threw +himself off with a lurch and brought Rocinante's saddle after him, which +was no doubt badly girthed, and saddle and he both came to the ground; +not without discomfiture to him and abundant curses muttered between his +teeth against the unlucky Sancho, who had his foot still in the shackles. +The duke ordered his huntsmen to go to the help of knight and squire, and +they raised Don Quixote, sorely shaken by his fall; and he, limping, +advanced as best he could to kneel before the noble pair. This, however, +the duke would by no means permit; on the contrary, dismounting from his +horse, he went and embraced Don Quixote, saying, "I am grieved, Sir +Knight of the Rueful Countenance, that your first experience on my ground +should have been such an unfortunate one as we have seen; but the +carelessness of squires is often the cause of worse accidents." + +"That which has happened me in meeting you, mighty prince," replied Don +Quixote, "cannot be unfortunate, even if my fall had not stopped short of +the depths of the bottomless pit, for the glory of having seen you would +have lifted me up and delivered me from it. My squire, God's curse upon +him, is better at unloosing his tongue in talking impertinence than in +tightening the girths of a saddle to keep it steady; but however I may +be, allen or raised up, on foot or on horseback, I shall always be at +your service and that of my lady the duchess, your worthy consort, worthy +queen of beauty and paramount princess of courtesy." + +"Gently, Senor Don Quixote of La Mancha," said the duke; "where my lady +Dona Dulcinea del Toboso is, it is not right that other beauties should +be praised." + +Sancho, by this time released from his entanglement, was standing by, and +before his master could answer he said, "There is no denying, and it must +be maintained, that my lady Dulcinea del Toboso is very beautiful; but +the hare jumps up where one least expects it; and I have heard say that +what we call nature is like a potter that makes vessels of clay, and he +who makes one fair vessel can as well make two, or three, or a hundred; I +say so because, by my faith, my lady the duchess is in no way behind my +mistress the lady Dulcinea del Toboso." + +Don Quixote turned to the duchess and said, "Your highness may conceive +that never had knight-errant in this world a more talkative or a droller +squire than I have, and he will prove the truth of what I say, if your +highness is pleased to accept of my services for a few days." + +To which the duchess made answer, "that worthy Sancho is droll I consider +a very good thing, because it is a sign that he is shrewd; for drollery +and sprightliness, Senor Don Quixote, as you very well know, do not take +up their abode with dull wits; and as good Sancho is droll and sprightly +I here set him down as shrewd." + +"And talkative," added Don Quixote. + +"So much the better," said the duke, "for many droll things cannot be +said in few words; but not to lose time in talking, come, great Knight of +the Rueful Countenance-" + +"Of the Lions, your highness must say," said Sancho, "for there is no +Rueful Countenance nor any such character now." + +"He of the Lions be it," continued the duke; "I say, let Sir Knight of +the Lions come to a castle of mine close by, where he shall be given that +reception which is due to so exalted a personage, and which the duchess +and I are wont to give to all knights-errant who come there." + +By this time Sancho had fixed and girthed Rocinante's saddle, and Don +Quixote having got on his back and the duke mounted a fine horse, they +placed the duchess in the middle and set out for the castle. The duchess +desired Sancho to come to her side, for she found infinite enjoyment in +listening to his shrewd remarks. Sancho required no pressing, but pushed +himself in between them and the duke, who thought it rare good fortune to +receive such a knight-errant and such a homely squire in their castle. + +Chapter XXXI. - +Which treats of many and great matters + +Supreme was the satisfaction that Sancho felt at seeing himself, as it +seemed, an established favourite with the duchess, for he looked forward +to finding in her castle what he had found in Don Diego's house and in +Basilio's; he was always fond of good living, and always seized by the +forelock any opportunity of feasting himself whenever it presented +itself. The history informs us, then, that before they reached the +country house or castle, the duke went on in advance and instructed all +his servants how they were to treat Don Quixote; and so the instant he +came up to the castle gates with the duchess, two lackeys or equerries, +clad in what they call morning gowns of fine crimson satin reaching to +their feet, hastened out, and catching Don Quixote in their arms before +he saw or heard them, said to him, "Your highness should go and take my +lady the duchess off her horse." + +Don Quixote obeyed, and great bandying of compliments followed between +the two over the matter; but in the end the duchess's determination +carried the day, and she refused to get down or dismount from her palfrey +except in the arms of the duke, saying she did not consider herself +worthy to impose so unnecessary a burden on so great a knight. At length +the duke came out to take her down, and as they entered a spacious court +two fair damsels came forward and threw over Don Quixote's shoulders a +large mantle of the finest scarlet cloth, and at the same instant all the +galleries of the court were lined with the men-servants and +women-servants of the household, crying, "Welcome, flower and cream of +knight-errantry!" while all or most of them flung pellets filled with +scented water over Don Quixote and the duke and duchess; at all which Don +Quixote was greatly astonished, and this was the first time that he +thoroughly felt and believed himself to be a knight-errant in reality and +not merely in fancy, now that he saw himself treated in the same way as +he had read of such knights being treated in days of yore. + +Sancho, deserting Dapple, hung on to the duchess and entered the castle, +but feeling some twinges of conscience at having left the ass alone, he +approached a respectable duenna who had come out with the rest to receive +the duchess, and in a low voice he said to her, "Senora Gonzalez, or +however your grace may be called-" + +"I am called Dona Rodriguez de Grijalba," replied the duenna; "what is +your will, brother?" To which Sancho made answer, "I should be glad if +your worship would do me the favour to go out to the castle gate, where +you will find a grey ass of mine; make them, if you please, put him in +the stable, or put him there yourself, for the poor little beast is +rather easily frightened, and cannot bear being alone at all." + +"If the master is as wise as the man," said the duenna, "we have got a +fine bargain. Be off with you, brother, and bad luck to you and him who +brought you here; go, look after your ass, for we, the duennas of this +house, are not used to work of that sort." + +"Well then, in troth," returned Sancho, "I have heard my master, who is +the very treasure-finder of stories, telling the story of Lancelot when +he came from Britain, say that ladies waited upon him and duennas upon +his hack; and, if it comes to my ass, I wouldn't change him for Senor +Lancelot's hack." + +"If you are a jester, brother," said the duenna, "keep your drolleries +for some place where they'll pass muster and be paid for; for you'll get +nothing from me but a fig." + +"At any rate, it will be a very ripe one," said Sancho, "for you won't +lose the trick in years by a point too little." + +"Son of a bitch," said the duenna, all aglow with anger, "whether I'm old +or not, it's with God I have to reckon, not with you, you garlic-stuffed +scoundrel!" and she said it so loud, that the duchess heard it, and +turning round and seeing the duenna in such a state of excitement, and +her eyes flaming so, asked whom she was wrangling with. + +"With this good fellow here," said the duenna, "who has particularly +requested me to go and put an ass of his that is at the castle gate into +the stable, holding it up to me as an example that they did the same I +don't know where--that some ladies waited on one Lancelot, and duennas on +his hack; and what is more, to wind up with, he called me old." + +"That," said the duchess, "I should have considered the greatest affront +that could be offered me;" and addressing Sancho, she said to him, "You +must know, friend Sancho, that Dona Rodriguez is very youthful, and that +she wears that hood more for authority and custom sake than because of +her years." + +"May all the rest of mine be unlucky," said Sancho, "if I meant it that +way; I only spoke because the affection I have for my ass is so great, +and I thought I could not commend him to a more kind-hearted person than +the lady Dona Rodriguez." + +Don Quixote, who was listening, said to him, "Is this proper conversation +for the place, Sancho?" + +"Senor," replied Sancho, "every one must mention what he wants wherever +he may be; I thought of Dapple here, and I spoke of him here; if I had +thought of him in the stable I would have spoken there." + +On which the duke observed, "Sancho is quite right, and there is no +reason at all to find fault with him; Dapple shall be fed to his heart's +content, and Sancho may rest easy, for he shall be treated like himself." + +While this conversation, amusing to all except Don Quixote, was +proceeding, they ascended the staircase and ushered Don Quixote into a +chamber hung with rich cloth of gold and brocade; six damsels relieved +him of his armour and waited on him like pages, all of them prepared and +instructed by the duke and duchess as to what they were to do, and how +they were to treat Don Quixote, so that he might see and believe they +were treating him like a knight-errant. When his armour was removed, +there stood Don Quixote in his tight-fitting breeches and chamois +doublet, lean, lanky, and long, with cheeks that seemed to be kissing +each other inside; such a figure, that if the damsels waiting on him had +not taken care to check their merriment (which was one of the particular +directions their master and mistress had given them), they would have +burst with laughter. They asked him to let himself be stripped that they +might put a shirt on him, but he would not on any account, saying that +modesty became knights-errant just as much as valour. However, he said +they might give the shirt to Sancho; and shutting himself in with him in +a room where there was a sumptuous bed, he undressed and put on the +shirt; and then, finding himself alone with Sancho, he said to him, "Tell +me, thou new-fledged buffoon and old booby, dost thou think it right to +offend and insult a duenna so deserving of reverence and respect as that +one just now? Was that a time to bethink thee of thy Dapple, or are these +noble personages likely to let the beasts fare badly when they treat +their owners in such elegant style? For God's sake, Sancho, restrain +thyself, and don't show the thread so as to let them see what a coarse, +boorish texture thou art of. Remember, sinner that thou art, the master +is the more esteemed the more respectable and well-bred his servants are; +and that one of the greatest advantages that princes have over other men +is that they have servants as good as themselves to wait on them. Dost +thou not see--shortsighted being that thou art, and unlucky mortal that I +am!--that if they perceive thee to be a coarse clown or a dull blockhead, +they will suspect me to be some impostor or swindler? Nay, nay, Sancho +friend, keep clear, oh, keep clear of these stumbling-blocks; for he who +falls into the way of being a chatterbox and droll, drops into a wretched +buffoon the first time he trips; bridle thy tongue, consider and weigh +thy words before they escape thy mouth, and bear in mind we are now in +quarters whence, by God's help, and the strength of my arm, we shall come +forth mightily advanced in fame and fortune." + +Sancho promised him with much earnestness to keep his mouth shut, and to +bite off his tongue before he uttered a word that was not altogether to +the purpose and well considered, and told him he might make his mind easy +on that point, for it should never be discovered through him what they +were. + +Don Quixote dressed himself, put on his baldric with his sword, threw the +scarlet mantle over his shoulders, placed on his head a montera of green +satin that the damsels had given him, and thus arrayed passed out into +the large room, where he found the damsels drawn up in double file, the +same number on each side, all with the appliances for washing the hands, +which they presented to him with profuse obeisances and ceremonies. Then +came twelve pages, together with the seneschal, to lead him to dinner, as +his hosts were already waiting for him. They placed him in the midst of +them, and with much pomp and stateliness they conducted him into another +room, where there was a sumptuous table laid with but four covers. The +duchess and the duke came out to the door of the room to receive him, and +with them a grave ecclesiastic, one of those who rule noblemen's houses; +one of those who, not being born magnates themselves, never know how to +teach those who are how to behave as such; one of those who would have +the greatness of great folk measured by their own narrowness of mind; one +of those who, when they try to introduce economy into the household they +rule, lead it into meanness. One of this sort, I say, must have been the +grave churchman who came out with the duke and duchess to receive Don +Quixote. + +A vast number of polite speeches were exchanged, and at length, taking +Don Quixote between them, they proceeded to sit down to table. The duke +pressed Don Quixote to take the head of the table, and, though he +refused, the entreaties of the duke were so urgent that he had to accept +it. + +The ecclesiastic took his seat opposite to him, and the duke and duchess +those at the sides. All this time Sancho stood by, gaping with amazement +at the honour he saw shown to his master by these illustrious persons; +and observing all the ceremonious pressing that had passed between the +duke and Don Quixote to induce him to take his seat at the head of the +table, he said, "If your worship will give me leave I will tell you a +story of what happened in my village about this matter of seats." + +The moment Sancho said this Don Quixote trembled, making sure that he was +about to say something foolish. Sancho glanced at him, and guessing his +thoughts, said, "Don't be afraid of my going astray, senor, or saying +anything that won't be pat to the purpose; I haven't forgotten the advice +your worship gave me just now about talking much or little, well or ill." + +"I have no recollection of anything, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "say what +thou wilt, only say it quickly." + +"Well then," said Sancho, "what I am going to say is so true that my +master Don Quixote, who is here present, will keep me from lying." + +"Lie as much as thou wilt for all I care, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for +I am not going to stop thee, but consider what thou art going to say." + +"I have so considered and reconsidered," said Sancho, "that the +bell-ringer's in a safe berth; as will be seen by what follows." + +"It would be well," said Don Quixote, "if your highnesses would order +them to turn out this idiot, for he will talk a heap of nonsense." + +"By the life of the duke, Sancho shall not be taken away from me for a +moment," said the duchess; "I am very fond of him, for I know he is very +discreet." + +"Discreet be the days of your holiness," said Sancho, "for the good +opinion you have of my wit, though there's none in me; but the story I +want to tell is this. There was an invitation given by a gentleman of my +town, a very rich one, and one of quality, for he was one of the Alamos +of Medina del Campo, and married to Dona Mencia de Quinones, the daughter +of Don Alonso de Maranon, Knight of the Order of Santiago, that was +drowned at the Herradura--him there was that quarrel about years ago in +our village, that my master Don Quixote was mixed up in, to the best of +my belief, that Tomasillo the scapegrace, the son of Balbastro the smith, +was wounded in.--Isn't all this true, master mine? As you live, say so, +that these gentlefolk may not take me for some lying chatterer." + +"So far," said the ecclesiastic, "I take you to be more a chatterer than +a liar; but I don't know what I shall take you for by-and-by." + +"Thou citest so many witnesses and proofs, Sancho," said Don Quixote, +"that I have no choice but to say thou must be telling the truth; go on, +and cut the story short, for thou art taking the way not to make an end +for two days to come." + +"He is not to cut it short," said the duchess; "on the contrary, for my +gratification, he is to tell it as he knows it, though he should not +finish it these six days; and if he took so many they would be to me the +pleasantest I ever spent." + +"Well then, sirs, I say," continued Sancho, "that this same gentleman, +whom I know as well as I do my own hands, for it's not a bowshot from my +house to his, invited a poor but respectable labourer-" + +"Get on, brother," said the churchman; "at the rate you are going you +will not stop with your story short of the next world." + +"I'll stop less than half-way, please God," said Sancho; "and so I say +this labourer, coming to the house of the gentleman I spoke of that +invited him--rest his soul, he is now dead; and more by token he died the +death of an angel, so they say; for I was not there, for just at that +time I had gone to reap at Tembleque-" + +"As you live, my son," said the churchman, "make haste back from +Tembleque, and finish your story without burying the gentleman, unless +you want to make more funerals." + +"Well then, it so happened," said Sancho, "that as the pair of them were +going to sit down to table--and I think I can see them now plainer than +ever-" + +Great was the enjoyment the duke and duchess derived from the irritation +the worthy churchman showed at the long-winded, halting way Sancho had of +telling his story, while Don Quixote was chafing with rage and vexation. + +"So, as I was saying," continued Sancho, "as the pair of them were going +to sit down to table, as I said, the labourer insisted upon the +gentleman's taking the head of the table, and the gentleman insisted upon +the labourer's taking it, as his orders should be obeyed in his house; +but the labourer, who plumed himself on his politeness and good breeding, +would not on any account, until the gentleman, out of patience, putting +his hands on his shoulders, compelled him by force to sit down, saying, +'Sit down, you stupid lout, for wherever I sit will be the head to you; +and that's the story, and, troth, I think it hasn't been brought in amiss +here." + +Don Quixote turned all colours, which, on his sunburnt face, mottled it +till it looked like jasper. The duke and duchess suppressed their +laughter so as not altogether to mortify Don Quixote, for they saw +through Sancho's impertinence; and to change the conversation, and keep +Sancho from uttering more absurdities, the duchess asked Don Quixote what +news he had of the lady Dulcinea, and if he had sent her any presents of +giants or miscreants lately, for he could not but have vanquished a good +many. + +To which Don Quixote replied, "Senora, my misfortunes, though they had a +beginning, will never have an end. I have vanquished giants and I have +sent her caitiffs and miscreants; but where are they to find her if she +is enchanted and turned into the most ill-favoured peasant wench that can +be imagined?" + +"I don't know," said Sancho Panza; "to me she seems the fairest creature +in the world; at any rate, in nimbleness and jumping she won't give in to +a tumbler; by my faith, senora duchess, she leaps from the ground on to +the back of an ass like a cat." + +"Have you seen her enchanted, Sancho?" asked the duke. + +"What, seen her!" said Sancho; "why, who the devil was it but myself that +first thought of the enchantment business? She is as much enchanted as my +father." + +The ecclesiastic, when he heard them talking of giants and caitiffs and +enchantments, began to suspect that this must be Don Quixote of La +Mancha, whose story the duke was always reading; and he had himself often +reproved him for it, telling him it was foolish to read such fooleries; +and becoming convinced that his suspicion was correct, addressing the +duke, he said very angrily to him, "Senor, your excellence will have to +give account to God for what this good man does. This Don Quixote, or Don +Simpleton, or whatever his name is, cannot, I imagine, be such a +blockhead as your excellence would have him, holding out encouragement to +him to go on with his vagaries and follies." Then turning to address Don +Quixote he said, "And you, num-skull, who put it into your head that you +are a knight-errant, and vanquish giants and capture miscreants? Go your +ways in a good hour, and in a good hour be it said to you. Go home and +bring up your children if you have any, and attend to your business, and +give over going wandering about the world, gaping and making a +laughing-stock of yourself to all who know you and all who don't. Where, +in heaven's name, have you discovered that there are or ever were +knights-errant? Where are there giants in Spain or miscreants in La +Mancha, or enchanted Dulcineas, or all the rest of the silly things they +tell about you?" + +Don Quixote listened attentively to the reverend gentleman's words, and +as soon as he perceived he had done speaking, regardless of the presence +of the duke and duchess, he sprang to his feet with angry looks and an +agitated countenance, and said--But the reply deserves a chapter to +itself. + +Chapter XXXII. - +Of the reply Don Quixote gave his censurer, with other incidents, grave +and droll + +Don Quixote, then, having risen to his feet, trembling from head to foot +like a man dosed with mercury, said in a hurried, agitated voice, "The +place I am in, the presence in which I stand, and the respect I have and +always have had for the profession to which your worship belongs, hold +and bind the hands of my just indignation; and as well for these reasons +as because I know, as everyone knows, that a gownsman's weapon is the +same as a woman's, the tongue, I will with mine engage in equal combat +with your worship, from whom one might have expected good advice instead +of foul abuse. Pious, well-meant reproof requires a different demeanour +and arguments of another sort; at any rate, to have reproved me in +public, and so roughly, exceeds the bounds of proper reproof, for that +comes better with gentleness than with rudeness; and it is not seemly to +call the sinner roundly blockhead and booby, without knowing anything of +the sin that is reproved. Come, tell me, for which of the stupidities you +have observed in me do you condemn and abuse me, and bid me go home and +look after my house and wife and children, without knowing whether I have +any? Is nothing more needed than to get a footing, by hook or by crook, +in other people's houses to rule over the masters (and that, perhaps, +after having been brought up in all the straitness of some seminary, and +without having ever seen more of the world than may lie within twenty or +thirty leagues round), to fit one to lay down the law rashly for +chivalry, and pass judgment on knights-errant? Is it, haply, an idle +occupation, or is the time ill-spent that is spent in roaming the world +in quest, not of its enjoyments, but of those arduous toils whereby the +good mount upwards to the abodes of everlasting life? If gentlemen, great +lords, nobles, men of high birth, were to rate me as a fool I should take +it as an irreparable insult; but I care not a farthing if clerks who have +never entered upon or trod the paths of chivalry should think me foolish. +Knight I am, and knight I will die, if such be the pleasure of the Most +High. Some take the broad road of overweening ambition; others that of +mean and servile flattery; others that of deceitful hypocrisy, and some +that of true religion; but I, led by my star, follow the narrow path of +knight-errantry, and in pursuit of that calling I despise wealth, but not +honour. I have redressed injuries, righted wrongs, punished insolences, +vanquished giants, and crushed monsters; I am in love, for no other +reason than that it is incumbent on knights-errant to be so; but though I +am, I am no carnal-minded lover, but one of the chaste, platonic sort. My +intentions are always directed to worthy ends, to do good to all and evil +to none; and if he who means this, does this, and makes this his practice +deserves to be called a fool, it is for your highnesses to say, O most +excellent duke and duchess." + +"Good, by God!" cried Sancho; "say no more in your own defence, master +mine, for there's nothing more in the world to be said, thought, or +insisted on; and besides, when this gentleman denies, as he has, that +there are or ever have been any knights-errant in the world, is it any +wonder if he knows nothing of what he has been talking about?" + +"Perhaps, brother," said the ecclesiastic, "you are that Sancho Panza +that is mentioned, to whom your master has promised an island?" + +"Yes, I am," said Sancho, "and what's more, I am one who deserves it as +much as anyone; I am one of the sort--'Attach thyself to the good, and +thou wilt be one of them,' and of those, 'Not with whom thou art bred, +but with whom thou art fed,' and of those, 'Who leans against a good +tree, a good shade covers him;' I have leant upon a good master, and I +have been for months going about with him, and please God I shall be just +such another; long life to him and long life to me, for neither will he +be in any want of empires to rule, or I of islands to govern." + +"No, Sancho my friend, certainly not," said the duke, "for in the name of +Senor Don Quixote I confer upon you the government of one of no small +importance that I have at my disposal." + +"Go down on thy knees, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "and kiss the feet of +his excellence for the favour he has bestowed upon thee." + +Sancho obeyed, and on seeing this the ecclesiastic stood up from table +completely out of temper, exclaiming, "By the gown I wear, I am almost +inclined to say that your excellence is as great a fool as these sinners. +No wonder they are mad, when people who are in their senses sanction +their madness! I leave your excellence with them, for so long as they are +in the house, I will remain in my own, and spare myself the trouble of +reproving what I cannot remedy;" and without uttering another word, or +eating another morsel, he went off, the entreaties of the duke and +duchess being entirely unavailing to stop him; not that the duke said +much to him, for he could not, because of the laughter his uncalled-for +anger provoked. + +When he had done laughing, he said to Don Quixote, "You have replied on +your own behalf so stoutly, Sir Knight of the Lions, that there is no +occasion to seek further satisfaction for this, which, though it may look +like an offence, is not so at all, for, as women can give no offence, no +more can ecclesiastics, as you very well know." + +"That is true," said Don Quixote, "and the reason is, that he who is not +liable to offence cannot give offence to anyone. Women, children, and +ecclesiastics, as they cannot defend themselves, though they may receive +offence cannot be insulted, because between the offence and the insult +there is, as your excellence very well knows, this difference: the insult +comes from one who is capable of offering it, and does so, and maintains +it; the offence may come from any quarter without carrying insult. To +take an example: a man is standing unsuspectingly in the street and ten +others come up armed and beat him; he draws his sword and quits himself +like a man, but the number of his antagonists makes it impossible for him +to effect his purpose and avenge himself; this man suffers an offence but +not an insult. Another example will make the same thing plain: a man is +standing with his back turned, another comes up and strikes him, and +after striking him takes to flight, without waiting an instant, and the +other pursues him but does not overtake him; he who received the blow +received an offence, but not an insult, because an insult must be +maintained. If he who struck him, though he did so sneakingly and +treacherously, had drawn his sword and stood and faced him, then he who +had been struck would have received offence and insult at the same time; +offence because he was struck treacherously, insult because he who struck +him maintained what he had done, standing his ground without taking to +flight. And so, according to the laws of the accursed duel, I may have +received offence, but not insult, for neither women nor children can +maintain it, nor can they wound, nor have they any way of standing their +ground, and it is just the same with those connected with religion; for +these three sorts of persons are without arms offensive or defensive, and +so, though naturally they are bound to defend themselves, they have no +right to offend anybody; and though I said just now I might have received +offence, I say now certainly not, for he who cannot receive an insult can +still less give one; for which reasons I ought not to feel, nor do I +feel, aggrieved at what that good man said to me; I only wish he had +stayed a little longer, that I might have shown him the mistake he makes +in supposing and maintaining that there are not and never have been any +knights-errant in the world; had Amadis or any of his countless +descendants heard him say as much, I am sure it would not have gone well +with his worship." + +"I will take my oath of that," said Sancho; "they would have given him a +slash that would have slit him down from top to toe like a pomegranate or +a ripe melon; they were likely fellows to put up with jokes of that sort! +By my faith, I'm certain if Reinaldos of Montalvan had heard the little +man's words he would have given him such a spank on the mouth that he +wouldn't have spoken for the next three years; ay, let him tackle them, +and he'll see how he'll get out of their hands!" + +The duchess, as she listened to Sancho, was ready to die with laughter, +and in her own mind she set him down as droller and madder than his +master; and there were a good many just then who were of the same +opinion. + +Don Quixote finally grew calm, and dinner came to an end, and as the +cloth was removed four damsels came in, one of them with a silver basin, +another with a jug also of silver, a third with two fine white towels on +her shoulder, and the fourth with her arms bared to the elbows, and in +her white hands (for white they certainly were) a round ball of Naples +soap. The one with the basin approached, and with arch composure and +impudence, thrust it under Don Quixote's chin, who, wondering at such a +ceremony, said never a word, supposing it to be the custom of that +country to wash beards instead of hands; he therefore stretched his out +as far as he could, and at the same instant the jug began to pour and the +damsel with the soap rubbed his beard briskly, raising snow-flakes, for +the soap lather was no less white, not only over the beard, but all over +the face, and over the eyes of the submissive knight, so that they were +perforce obliged to keep shut. The duke and duchess, who had not known +anything about this, waited to see what came of this strange washing. The +barber damsel, when she had him a hand's breadth deep in lather, +pretended that there was no more water, and bade the one with the jug go +and fetch some, while Senor Don Quixote waited. She did so, and Don +Quixote was left the strangest and most ludicrous figure that could be +imagined. All those present, and there were a good many, were watching +him, and as they saw him there with half a yard of neck, and that +uncommonly brown, his eyes shut, and his beard full of soap, it was a +great wonder, and only by great discretion, that they were able to +restrain their laughter. The damsels, the concocters of the joke, kept +their eyes down, not daring to look at their master and mistress; and as +for them, laughter and anger struggled within them, and they knew not +what to do, whether to punish the audacity of the girls, or to reward +them for the amusement they had received from seeing Don Quixote in such +a plight. + +At length the damsel with the jug returned and they made an end of +washing Don Quixote, and the one who carried the towels very deliberately +wiped him and dried him; and all four together making him a profound +obeisance and curtsey, they were about to go, when the duke, lest Don +Quixote should see through the joke, called out to the one with the basin +saying, "Come and wash me, and take care that there is water enough." The +girl, sharp-witted and prompt, came and placed the basin for the duke as +she had done for Don Quixote, and they soon had him well soaped and +washed, and having wiped him dry they made their obeisance and retired. +It appeared afterwards that the duke had sworn that if they had not +washed him as they had Don Quixote he would have punished them for their +impudence, which they adroitly atoned for by soaping him as well. + +Sancho observed the ceremony of the washing very attentively, and said to +himself, "God bless me, if it were only the custom in this country to +wash squires' beards too as well as knights'. For by God and upon my soul +I want it badly; and if they gave me a scrape of the razor besides I'd +take it as a still greater kindness." + +"What are you saying to yourself, Sancho?" asked the duchess. + +"I was saying, senora," he replied, "that in the courts of other princes, +when the cloth is taken away, I have always heard say they give water for +the hands, but not lye for the beard; and that shows it is good to live +long that you may see much; to be sure, they say too that he who lives a +long life must undergo much evil, though to undergo a washing of that +sort is pleasure rather than pain." + +"Don't be uneasy, friend Sancho," said the duchess; "I will take care +that my damsels wash you, and even put you in the tub if necessary." + +"I'll be content with the beard," said Sancho, "at any rate for the +present; and as for the future, God has decreed what is to be." + +"Attend to worthy Sancho's request, seneschal," said the duchess, "and do +exactly what he wishes." + +The seneschal replied that Senor Sancho should be obeyed in everything; +and with that he went away to dinner and took Sancho along with him, +while the duke and duchess and Don Quixote remained at table discussing a +great variety of things, but all bearing on the calling of arms and +knight-errantry. + +The duchess begged Don Quixote, as he seemed to have a retentive memory, +to describe and portray to her the beauty and features of the lady +Dulcinea del Toboso, for, judging by what fame trumpeted abroad of her +beauty, she felt sure she must be the fairest creature in the world, nay, +in all La Mancha. + +Don Quixote sighed on hearing the duchess's request, and said, "If I +could pluck out my heart, and lay it on a plate on this table here before +your highness's eyes, it would spare my tongue the pain of telling what +can hardly be thought of, for in it your excellence would see her +portrayed in full. But why should I attempt to depict and describe in +detail, and feature by feature, the beauty of the peerless Dulcinea, the +burden being one worthy of other shoulders than mine, an enterprise +wherein the pencils of Parrhasius, Timantes, and Apelles, and the graver +of Lysippus ought to be employed, to paint it in pictures and carve it in +marble and bronze, and Ciceronian and Demosthenian eloquence to sound its +praises?" + +"What does Demosthenian mean, Senor Don Quixote?" said the duchess; "it +is a word I never heard in all my life." + +"Demosthenian eloquence," said Don Quixote, "means the eloquence of +Demosthenes, as Ciceronian means that of Cicero, who were the two most +eloquent orators in the world." + +"True," said the duke; "you must have lost your wits to ask such a +question. Nevertheless, Senor Don Quixote would greatly gratify us if he +would depict her to us; for never fear, even in an outline or sketch she +will be something to make the fairest envious." + +"I would do so certainly," said Don Quixote, "had she not been blurred to +my mind's eye by the misfortune that fell upon her a short time since, +one of such a nature that I am more ready to weep over it than to +describe it. For your highnesses must know that, going a few days back to +kiss her hands and receive her benediction, approbation, and permission +for this third sally, I found her altogether a different being from the +one I sought; I found her enchanted and changed from a princess into a +peasant, from fair to foul, from an angel into a devil, from fragrant to +pestiferous, from refined to clownish, from a dignified lady into a +jumping tomboy, and, in a word, from Dulcinea del Toboso into a coarse +Sayago wench." + +"God bless me!" said the duke aloud at this, "who can have done the world +such an injury? Who can have robbed it of the beauty that gladdened it, +of the grace and gaiety that charmed it, of the modesty that shed a +lustre upon it?" + +"Who?" replied Don Quixote; "who could it be but some malignant enchanter +of the many that persecute me out of envy--that accursed race born into +the world to obscure and bring to naught the achievements of the good, +and glorify and exalt the deeds of the wicked? Enchanters have persecuted +me, enchanters persecute me still, and enchanters will continue to +persecute me until they have sunk me and my lofty chivalry in the deep +abyss of oblivion; and they injure and wound me where they know I feel it +most. For to deprive a knight-errant of his lady is to deprive him of the +eyes he sees with, of the sun that gives him light, of the food whereby +he lives. Many a time before have I said it, and I say it now once more, +a knight-errant without a lady is like a tree without leaves, a building +without a foundation, or a shadow without the body that causes it." + +"There is no denying it," said the duchess; "but still, if we are to +believe the history of Don Quixote that has come out here lately with +general applause, it is to be inferred from it, if I mistake not, that +you never saw the lady Dulcinea, and that the said lady is nothing in the +world but an imaginary lady, one that you yourself begot and gave birth +to in your brain, and adorned with whatever charms and perfections you +chose." + +"There is a good deal to be said on that point," said Don Quixote; "God +knows whether there be any Dulcinea or not in the world, or whether she +is imaginary or not imaginary; these are things the proof of which must +not be pushed to extreme lengths. I have not begotten nor given birth to +my lady, though I behold her as she needs must be, a lady who contains in +herself all the qualities to make her famous throughout the world, +beautiful without blemish, dignified without haughtiness, tender and yet +modest, gracious from courtesy and courteous from good breeding, and +lastly, of exalted lineage, because beauty shines forth and excels with a +higher degree of perfection upon good blood than in the fair of lowly +birth." + +"That is true," said the duke; "but Senor Don Quixote will give me leave +to say what I am constrained to say by the story of his exploits that I +have read, from which it is to be inferred that, granting there is a +Dulcinea in El Toboso, or out of it, and that she is in the highest +degree beautiful as you have described her to us, as regards the +loftiness of her lineage she is not on a par with the Orianas, +Alastrajareas, Madasimas, or others of that sort, with whom, as you well +know, the histories abound." + +"To that I may reply," said Don Quixote, "that Dulcinea is the daughter +of her own works, and that virtues rectify blood, and that lowly virtue +is more to be regarded and esteemed than exalted vice. Dulcinea, besides, +has that within her that may raise her to be a crowned and sceptred +queen; for the merit of a fair and virtuous woman is capable of +performing greater miracles; and virtually, though not formally, she has +in herself higher fortunes." + +"I protest, Senor Don Quixote," said the duchess, "that in all you say, +you go most cautiously and lead in hand, as the saying is; henceforth I +will believe myself, and I will take care that everyone in my house +believes, even my lord the duke if needs be, that there is a Dulcinea in +El Toboso, and that she is living to-day, and that she is beautiful and +nobly born and deserves to have such a knight as Senor Don Quixote in her +service, and that is the highest praise that it is in my power to give +her or that I can think of. But I cannot help entertaining a doubt, and +having a certain grudge against Sancho Panza; the doubt is this, that the +aforesaid history declares that the said Sancho Panza, when he carried a +letter on your worship's behalf to the said lady Dulcinea, found her +sifting a sack of wheat; and more by token it says it was red wheat; a +thing which makes me doubt the loftiness of her lineage." + +To this Don Quixote made answer, "Senora, your highness must know that +everything or almost everything that happens me transcends the ordinary +limits of what happens to other knights-errant; whether it be that it is +directed by the inscrutable will of destiny, or by the malice of some +jealous enchanter. Now it is an established fact that all or most famous +knights-errant have some special gift, one that of being proof against +enchantment, another that of being made of such invulnerable flesh that +he cannot be wounded, as was the famous Roland, one of the twelve peers +of France, of whom it is related that he could not be wounded except in +the sole of his left foot, and that it must be with the point of a stout +pin and not with any other sort of weapon whatever; and so, when Bernardo +del Carpio slew him at Roncesvalles, finding that he could not wound him +with steel, he lifted him up from the ground in his arms and strangled +him, calling to mind seasonably the death which Hercules inflicted on +Antaeus, the fierce giant that they say was the son of Terra. I would +infer from what I have mentioned that perhaps I may have some gift of +this kind, not that of being invulnerable, because experience has many +times proved to me that I am of tender flesh and not at all impenetrable; +nor that of being proof against enchantment, for I have already seen +myself thrust into a cage, in which all the world would not have been +able to confine me except by force of enchantments. But as I delivered +myself from that one, I am inclined to believe that there is no other +that can hurt me; and so, these enchanters, seeing that they cannot exert +their vile craft against my person, revenge themselves on what I love +most, and seek to rob me of life by maltreating that of Dulcinea in whom +I live; and therefore I am convinced that when my squire carried my +message to her, they changed her into a common peasant girl, engaged in +such a mean occupation as sifting wheat; I have already said, however, +that that wheat was not red wheat, nor wheat at all, but grains of orient +pearl. And as a proof of all this, I must tell your highnesses that, +coming to El Toboso a short time back, I was altogether unable to +discover the palace of Dulcinea; and that the next day, though Sancho, my +squire, saw her in her own proper shape, which is the fairest in the +world, to me she appeared to be a coarse, ill-favoured farm-wench, and by +no means a well-spoken one, she who is propriety itself. And so, as I am +not and, so far as one can judge, cannot be enchanted, she it is that is +enchanted, that is smitten, that is altered, changed, and transformed; in +her have my enemies revenged themselves upon me, and for her shall I live +in ceaseless tears, until I see her in her pristine state. I have +mentioned this lest anybody should mind what Sancho said about Dulcinea's +winnowing or sifting; for, as they changed her to me, it is no wonder if +they changed her to him. Dulcinea is illustrious and well-born, and of +one of the gentle families of El Toboso, which are many, ancient, and +good. Therein, most assuredly, not small is the share of the peerless +Dulcinea, through whom her town will be famous and celebrated in ages to +come, as Troy was through Helen, and Spain through La Cava, though with a +better title and tradition. For another thing; I would have your graces +understand that Sancho Panza is one of the drollest squires that ever +served knight-errant; sometimes there is a simplicity about him so acute +that it is an amusement to try and make out whether he is simple or +sharp; he has mischievous tricks that stamp him rogue, and blundering +ways that prove him a booby; he doubts everything and believes +everything; when I fancy he is on the point of coming down headlong from +sheer stupidity, he comes out with something shrewd that sends him up to +the skies. After all, I would not exchange him for another squire, though +I were given a city to boot, and therefore I am in doubt whether it will +be well to send him to the government your highness has bestowed upon +him; though I perceive in him a certain aptitude for the work of +governing, so that, with a little trimming of his understanding, he would +manage any government as easily as the king does his taxes; and moreover, +we know already ample experience that it does not require much cleverness +or much learning to be a governor, for there are a hundred round about us +that scarcely know how to read, and govern like gerfalcons. The main +point is that they should have good intentions and be desirous of doing +right in all things, for they will never be at a loss for persons to +advise and direct them in what they have to do, like those +knight-governors who, being no lawyers, pronounce sentences with the aid +of an assessor. My advice to him will be to take no bribe and surrender +no right, and I have some other little matters in reserve, that shall be +produced in due season for Sancho's benefit and the advantage of the +island he is to govern." + +The duke, duchess, and Don Quixote had reached this point in their +conversation, when they heard voices and a great hubbub in the palace, +and Sancho burst abruptly into the room all glowing with anger, with a +straining-cloth by way of a bib, and followed by several servants, or, +more properly speaking, kitchen-boys and other underlings, one of whom +carried a small trough full of water, that from its colour and impurity +was plainly dishwater. The one with the trough pursued him and followed +him everywhere he went, endeavouring with the utmost persistence to +thrust it under his chin, while another kitchen-boy seemed anxious to +wash his beard. + +"What is all this, brothers?" asked the duchess. "What is it? What do you +want to do to this good man? Do you forget he is a governor-elect?" + +To which the barber kitchen-boy replied, "The gentleman will not let +himself be washed as is customary, and as my lord and the senor his +master have been." + +"Yes, I will," said Sancho, in a great rage; "but I'd like it to be with +cleaner towels, clearer lye, and not such dirty hands; for there's not so +much difference between me and my master that he should be washed with +angels' water and I with devil's lye. The customs of countries and +princes' palaces are only good so long as they give no annoyance; but the +way of washing they have here is worse than doing penance. I have a clean +beard, and I don't require to be refreshed in that fashion, and whoever +comes to wash me or touch a hair of my head, I mean to say my beard, with +all due respect be it said, I'll give him a punch that will leave my fist +sunk in his skull; for cirimonies and soapings of this sort are more like +jokes than the polite attentions of one's host." + +The duchess was ready to die with laughter when she saw Sancho's rage and +heard his words; but it was no pleasure to Don Quixote to see him in such +a sorry trim, with the dingy towel about him, and the hangers-on of the +kitchen all round him; so making a low bow to the duke and duchess, as if +to ask their permission to speak, he addressed the rout in a dignified +tone: "Holloa, gentlemen! you let that youth alone, and go back to where +you came from, or anywhere else if you like; my squire is as clean as any +other person, and those troughs are as bad as narrow thin-necked jars to +him; take my advice and leave him alone, for neither he nor I understand +joking." + +Sancho took the word out of his mouth and went on, "Nay, let them come +and try their jokes on the country bumpkin, for it's about as likely I'll +stand them as that it's now midnight! Let them bring me a comb here, or +what they please, and curry this beard of mine, and if they get anything +out of it that offends against cleanliness, let them clip me to the +skin." + +Upon this, the duchess, laughing all the while, said, "Sancho Panza is +right, and always will be in all he says; he is clean, and, as he says +himself, he does not require to be washed; and if our ways do not please +him, he is free to choose. Besides, you promoters of cleanliness have +been excessively careless and thoughtless, I don't know if I ought not to +say audacious, to bring troughs and wooden utensils and kitchen +dishclouts, instead of basins and jugs of pure gold and towels of +holland, to such a person and such a beard; but, after all, you are +ill-conditioned and ill-bred, and spiteful as you are, you cannot help +showing the grudge you have against the squires of knights-errant." + +The impudent servitors, and even the seneschal who came with them, took +the duchess to be speaking in earnest, so they removed the +straining-cloth from Sancho's neck, and with something like shame and +confusion of face went off all of them and left him; whereupon he, seeing +himself safe out of that extreme danger, as it seemed to him, ran and +fell on his knees before the duchess, saying, "From great ladies great +favours may be looked for; this which your grace has done me today cannot +be requited with less than wishing I was dubbed a knight-errant, to +devote myself all the days of my life to the service of so exalted a +lady. I am a labouring man, my name is Sancho Panza, I am married, I have +children, and I am serving as a squire; if in any one of these ways I can +serve your highness, I will not be longer in obeying than your grace in +commanding." + +"It is easy to see, Sancho," replied the duchess, "that you have learned +to be polite in the school of politeness itself; I mean to say it is easy +to see that you have been nursed in the bosom of Senor Don Quixote, who +is, of course, the cream of good breeding and flower of ceremony--or +cirimony, as you would say yourself. Fair be the fortunes of such a +master and such a servant, the one the cynosure of knight-errantry, the +other the star of squirely fidelity! Rise, Sancho, my friend; I will +repay your courtesy by taking care that my lord the duke makes good to +you the promised gift of the government as soon as possible." + +With this, the conversation came to an end, and Don Quixote retired to +take his midday sleep; but the duchess begged Sancho, unless he had a +very great desire to go to sleep, to come and spend the afternoon with +her and her damsels in a very cool chamber. Sancho replied that, though +he certainly had the habit of sleeping four or five hours in the heat of +the day in summer, to serve her excellence he would try with all his +might not to sleep even one that day, and that he would come in obedience +to her command, and with that he went off. The duke gave fresh orders +with respect to treating Don Quixote as a knight-errant, without +departing even in smallest particular from the style in which, as the +stories tell us, they used to treat the knights of old. + +Chapter XXXIII. - +Of the delectable discourse which the duchess and her damsels held with +Sancho Panza, well worth reading and noting + +The history records that Sancho did not sleep that afternoon, but in +order to keep his word came, before he had well done dinner, to visit the +duchess, who, finding enjoyment in listening to him, made him sit down +beside her on a low seat, though Sancho, out of pure good breeding, +wanted not to sit down; the duchess, however, told him he was to sit down +as governor and talk as squire, as in both respects he was worthy of even +the chair of the Cid Ruy Diaz the Campeador. Sancho shrugged his +shoulders, obeyed, and sat down, and all the duchess's damsels and +duennas gathered round him, waiting in profound silence to hear what he +would say. It was the duchess, however, who spoke first, saying: + +"Now that we are alone, and that there is nobody here to overhear us, I +should be glad if the senor governor would relieve me of certain doubts I +have, rising out of the history of the great Don Quixote that is now in +print. One is: inasmuch as worthy Sancho never saw Dulcinea, I mean the +lady Dulcinea del Toboso, nor took Don Quixote's letter to her, for it +was left in the memorandum book in the Sierra Morena, how did he dare to +invent the answer and all that about finding her sifting wheat, the whole +story being a deception and falsehood, and so much to the prejudice of +the peerless Dulcinea's good name, a thing that is not at all becoming +the character and fidelity of a good squire?" + +At these words, Sancho, without uttering one in reply, got up from his +chair, and with noiseless steps, with his body bent and his finger on his +lips, went all round the room lifting up the hangings; and this done, he +came back to his seat and said, "Now, senora, that I have seen that there +is no one except the bystanders listening to us on the sly, I will answer +what you have asked me, and all you may ask me, without fear or dread. +And the first thing I have got to say is, that for my own part I hold my +master Don Quixote to be stark mad, though sometimes he says things that, +to my mind, and indeed everybody's that listens to him, are so wise, and +run in such a straight furrow, that Satan himself could not have said +them better; but for all that, really, and beyond all question, it's my +firm belief he is cracked. Well, then, as this is clear to my mind, I can +venture to make him believe things that have neither head nor tail, like +that affair of the answer to the letter, and that other of six or eight +days ago, which is not yet in history, that is to say, the affair of the +enchantment of my lady Dulcinea; for I made him believe she is enchanted, +though there's no more truth in it than over the hills of Ubeda." + +The duchess begged him to tell her about the enchantment or deception, so +Sancho told the whole story exactly as it had happened, and his hearers +were not a little amused by it; and then resuming, the duchess said, "In +consequence of what worthy Sancho has told me, a doubt starts up in my +mind, and there comes a kind of whisper to my ear that says, 'If Don +Quixote be mad, crazy, and cracked, and Sancho Panza his squire knows it, +and, notwithstanding, serves and follows him, and goes trusting to his +empty promises, there can be no doubt he must be still madder and sillier +than his master; and that being so, it will be cast in your teeth, senora +duchess, if you give the said Sancho an island to govern; for how will he +who does not know how to govern himself know how to govern others?'" + +"By God, senora," said Sancho, "but that doubt comes timely; but your +grace may say it out, and speak plainly, or as you like; for I know what +you say is true, and if I were wise I should have left my master long +ago; but this was my fate, this was my bad luck; I can't help it, I must +follow him; we're from the same village, I've eaten his bread, I'm fond +of him, I'm grateful, he gave me his ass-colts, and above all I'm +faithful; so it's quite impossible for anything to separate us, except +the pickaxe and shovel. And if your highness does not like to give me the +government you promised, God made me without it, and maybe your not +giving it to me will be all the better for my conscience, for fool as I +am I know the proverb 'to her hurt the ant got wings,' and it may be that +Sancho the squire will get to heaven sooner than Sancho the governor. +'They make as good bread here as in France,' and 'by night all cats are +grey,' and 'a hard case enough his, who hasn't broken his fast at two in +the afternoon,' and 'there's no stomach a hand's breadth bigger than +another,' and the same can be filled 'with straw or hay,' as the saying +is, and 'the little birds of the field have God for their purveyor and +caterer,' and 'four yards of Cuenca frieze keep one warmer than four of +Segovia broad-cloth,' and 'when we quit this world and are put +underground the prince travels by as narrow a path as the journeyman,' +and 'the Pope's body does not take up more feet of earth than the +sacristan's,' for all that the one is higher than the other; for when we +go to our graves we all pack ourselves up and make ourselves small, or +rather they pack us up and make us small in spite of us, and then--good +night to us. And I say once more, if your ladyship does not like to give +me the island because I'm a fool, like a wise man I will take care to +give myself no trouble about it; I have heard say that 'behind the cross +there's the devil,' and that 'all that glitters is not gold,' and that +from among the oxen, and the ploughs, and the yokes, Wamba the husbandman +was taken to be made King of Spain, and from among brocades, and +pleasures, and riches, Roderick was taken to be devoured by adders, if +the verses of the old ballads don't lie." + +"To be sure they don't lie!" exclaimed Dona Rodriguez, the duenna, who +was one of the listeners. "Why, there's a ballad that says they put King +Rodrigo alive into a tomb full of toads, and adders, and lizards, and +that two days afterwards the king, in a plaintive, feeble voice, cried +out from within the tomb-- + +poem{ + +They gnaw me now, they gnaw me now, +There where I most did sin. + +}poem + +And according to that the gentleman has good reason to say he would +rather be a labouring man than a king, if vermin are to eat him." + +The duchess could not help laughing at the simplicity of her duenna, or +wondering at the language and proverbs of Sancho, to whom she said, +"Worthy Sancho knows very well that when once a knight has made a promise +he strives to keep it, though it should cost him his life. My lord and +husband the duke, though not one of the errant sort, is none the less a +knight for that reason, and will keep his word about the promised island, +in spite of the envy and malice of the world. Let Sancho he of good +cheer; for when he least expects it he will find himself seated on the +throne of his island and seat of dignity, and will take possession of his +government that he may discard it for another of three-bordered brocade. +The charge I give him is to be careful how he governs his vassals, +bearing in mind that they are all loyal and well-born." + +"As to governing them well," said Sancho, "there's no need of charging me +to do that, for I'm kind-hearted by nature, and full of compassion for +the poor; there's no stealing the loaf from him who kneads and bakes;' +and by my faith it won't do to throw false dice with me; I am an old dog, +and I know all about 'tus, tus;' I can be wide-awake if need be, and I +don't let clouds come before my eyes, for I know where the shoe pinches +me; I say so, because with me the good will have support and protection, +and the bad neither footing nor access. And it seems to me that, in +governments, to make a beginning is everything; and maybe, after having +been governor a fortnight, I'll take kindly to the work and know more +about it than the field labour I have been brought up to." + +"You are right, Sancho," said the duchess, "for no one is born ready +taught, and the bishops are made out of men and not out of stones. But to +return to the subject we were discussing just now, the enchantment of the +lady Dulcinea, I look upon it as certain, and something more than +evident, that Sancho's idea of practising a deception upon his master, +making him believe that the peasant girl was Dulcinea and that if he did +not recognise her it must be because she was enchanted, was all a device +of one of the enchanters that persecute Don Quixote. For in truth and +earnest, I know from good authority that the coarse country wench who +jumped up on the ass was and is Dulcinea del Toboso, and that worthy +Sancho, though he fancies himself the deceiver, is the one that is +deceived; and that there is no more reason to doubt the truth of this, +than of anything else we never saw. Senor Sancho Panza must know that we +too have enchanters here that are well disposed to us, and tell us what +goes on in the world, plainly and distinctly, without subterfuge or +deception; and believe me, Sancho, that agile country lass was and is +Dulcinea del Toboso, who is as much enchanted as the mother that bore +her; and when we least expect it, we shall see her in her own proper +form, and then Sancho will be disabused of the error he is under at +present." + +"All that's very possible," said Sancho Panza; "and now I'm willing to +believe what my master says about what he saw in the cave of Montesinos, +where he says he saw the lady Dulcinea del Toboso in the very same dress +and apparel that I said I had seen her in when I enchanted her all to +please myself. It must be all exactly the other way, as your ladyship +says; because it is impossible to suppose that out of my poor wit such a +cunning trick could be concocted in a moment, nor do I think my master is +so mad that by my weak and feeble persuasion he could be made to believe +a thing so out of all reason. But, senora, your excellence must not +therefore think me ill-disposed, for a dolt like me is not bound to see +into the thoughts and plots of those vile enchanters. I invented all that +to escape my master's scolding, and not with any intention of hurting +him; and if it has turned out differently, there is a God in heaven who +judges our hearts." + +"That is true," said the duchess; "but tell me, Sancho, what is this you +say about the cave of Montesinos, for I should like to know." + +Sancho upon this related to her, word for word, what has been said +already touching that adventure, and having heard it the duchess said, +"From this occurrence it may be inferred that, as the great Don Quixote +says he saw there the same country wench Sancho saw on the way from El +Toboso, it is, no doubt, Dulcinea, and that there are some very active +and exceedingly busy enchanters about." + +"So I say," said Sancho, "and if my lady Dulcinea is enchanted, so much +the worse for her, and I'm not going to pick a quarrel with my master's +enemies, who seem to be many and spiteful. The truth is that the one I +saw was a country wench, and I set her down to be a country wench; and if +that was Dulcinea it must not be laid at my door, nor should I be called +to answer for it or take the consequences. But they must go nagging at me +at every step--'Sancho said it, Sancho did it, Sancho here, Sancho +there,' as if Sancho was nobody at all, and not that same Sancho Panza +that's now going all over the world in books, so Samson Carrasco told me, +and he's at any rate one that's a bachelor of Salamanca; and people of +that sort can't lie, except when the whim seizes them or they have some +very good reason for it. So there's no occasion for anybody to quarrel +with me; and then I have a good character, and, as I have heard my master +say, 'a good name is better than great riches;' let them only stick me +into this government and they'll see wonders, for one who has been a good +squire will be a good governor." + +"All worthy Sancho's observations," said the duchess, "are Catonian +sentences, or at any rate out of the very heart of Michael Verino +himself, who florentibus occidit annis. In fact, to speak in his own +style, 'under a bad cloak there's often a good drinker.'" + +"Indeed, senora," said Sancho, "I never yet drank out of wickedness; from +thirst I have very likely, for I have nothing of the hypocrite in me; I +drink when I'm inclined, or, if I'm not inclined, when they offer it to +me, so as not to look either strait-laced or ill-bred; for when a friend +drinks one's health what heart can be so hard as not to return it? But if +I put on my shoes I don't dirty them; besides, squires to knights-errant +mostly drink water, for they are always wandering among woods, forests +and meadows, mountains and crags, without a drop of wine to be had if +they gave their eyes for it." + +"So I believe," said the duchess; "and now let Sancho go and take his +sleep, and we will talk by-and-by at greater length, and settle how he +may soon go and stick himself into the government, as he says." + +Sancho once more kissed the duchess's hand, and entreated her to let good +care be taken of his Dapple, for he was the light of his eyes. + +"What is Dapple?" said the duchess. + +"My ass," said Sancho, "which, not to mention him by that name, I'm +accustomed to call Dapple; I begged this lady duenna here to take care of +him when I came into the castle, and she got as angry as if I had said +she was ugly or old, though it ought to be more natural and proper for +duennas to feed asses than to ornament chambers. God bless me! what a +spite a gentleman of my village had against these ladies!" + +"He must have been some clown," said Dona Rodriguez the duenna; "for if +he had been a gentleman and well-born he would have exalted them higher +than the horns of the moon." + +"That will do," said the duchess; "no more of this; hush, Dona Rodriguez, +and let Senor Panza rest easy and leave the treatment of Dapple in my +charge, for as he is a treasure of Sancho's, I'll put him on the apple of +my eye." + +"It will be enough for him to be in the stable," said Sancho, "for +neither he nor I are worthy to rest a moment in the apple of your +highness's eye, and I'd as soon stab myself as consent to it; for though +my master says that in civilities it is better to lose by a card too many +than a card too few, when it comes to civilities to asses we must mind +what we are about and keep within due bounds." + +"Take him to your government, Sancho," said the duchess, "and there you +will be able to make as much of him as you like, and even release him +from work and pension him off." + +"Don't think, senora duchess, that you have said anything absurd," said +Sancho; "I have seen more than two asses go to governments, and for me to +take mine with me would be nothing new." + +Sancho's words made the duchess laugh again and gave her fresh amusement, +and dismissing him to sleep she went away to tell the duke the +conversation she had had with him, and between them they plotted and +arranged to play a joke upon Don Quixote that was to be a rare one and +entirely in knight-errantry style, and in that same style they practised +several upon him, so much in keeping and so clever that they form the +best adventures this great history contains. + +Chapter XXXIV. - +Which relates how they learned the way in which they were to disenchant +the peerless Dulcinea Del Toboso, which is one of the rarest adventures +in this book + +Great was the pleasure the duke and duchess took in the conversation of +Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; and, more bent than ever upon the plan they +had of practising some jokes upon them that should have the look and +appearance of adventures, they took as their basis of action what Don +Quixote had already told them about the cave of Montesinos, in order to +play him a famous one. But what the duchess marvelled at above all was +that Sancho's simplicity could be so great as to make him believe as +absolute truth that Dulcinea had been enchanted, when it was he himself +who had been the enchanter and trickster in the business. Having, +therefore, instructed their servants in everything they were to do, six +days afterwards they took him out to hunt, with as great a retinue of +huntsmen and beaters as a crowned king. + +They presented Don Quixote with a hunting suit, and Sancho with another +of the finest green cloth; but Don Quixote declined to put his on, saying +that he must soon return to the hard pursuit of arms, and could not carry +wardrobes or stores with him. Sancho, however, took what they gave him, +meaning to sell it the first opportunity. + +The appointed day having arrived, Don Quixote armed himself, and Sancho +arrayed himself, and mounted on his Dapple (for he would not give him up +though they offered him a horse), he placed himself in the midst of the +troop of huntsmen. The duchess came out splendidly attired, and Don +Quixote, in pure courtesy and politeness, held the rein of her palfrey, +though the duke wanted not to allow him; and at last they reached a wood +that lay between two high mountains, where, after occupying various +posts, ambushes, and paths, and distributing the party in different +positions, the hunt began with great noise, shouting, and hallooing, so +that, between the baying of the hounds and the blowing of the horns, they +could not hear one another. The duchess dismounted, and with a sharp +boar-spear in her hand posted herself where she knew the wild boars were +in the habit of passing. The duke and Don Quixote likewise dismounted and +placed themselves one at each side of her. Sancho took up a position in +the rear of all without dismounting from Dapple, whom he dared not desert +lest some mischief should befall him. Scarcely had they taken their stand +in a line with several of their servants, when they saw a huge boar, +closely pressed by the hounds and followed by the huntsmen, making +towards them, grinding his teeth and tusks, and scattering foam from his +mouth. As soon as he saw him Don Quixote, bracing his shield on his arm, +and drawing his sword, advanced to meet him; the duke with boar-spear did +the same; but the duchess would have gone in front of them all had not +the duke prevented her. Sancho alone, deserting Dapple at the sight of +the mighty beast, took to his heels as hard as he could and strove in +vain to mount a tall oak. As he was clinging to a branch, however, +half-way up in his struggle to reach the top, the bough, such was his +ill-luck and hard fate, gave way, and caught in his fall by a broken limb +of the oak, he hung suspended in the air unable to reach the ground. +Finding himself in this position, and that the green coat was beginning +to tear, and reflecting that if the fierce animal came that way he might +be able to get at him, he began to utter such cries, and call for help so +earnestly, that all who heard him and did not see him felt sure he must +be in the teeth of some wild beast. In the end the tusked boar fell +pierced by the blades of the many spears they held in front of him; and +Don Quixote, turning round at the cries of Sancho, for he knew by them +that it was he, saw him hanging from the oak head downwards, with Dapple, +who did not forsake him in his distress, close beside him; and Cide +Hamete observes that he seldom saw Sancho Panza without seeing Dapple, or +Dapple without seeing Sancho Panza; such was their attachment and loyalty +one to the other. Don Quixote went over and unhooked Sancho, who, as soon +as he found himself on the ground, looked at the rent in his huntingcoat +and was grieved to the heart, for he thought he had got a patrimonial +estate in that suit. + +Meanwhile they had slung the mighty boar across the back of a mule, and +having covered it with sprigs of rosemary and branches of myrtle, they +bore it away as the spoils of victory to some large field-tents which had +been pitched in the middle of the wood, where they found the tables laid +and dinner served, in such grand and sumptuous style that it was easy to +see the rank and magnificence of those who had provided it. Sancho, as he +showed the rents in his torn suit to the duchess, observed, "If we had +been hunting hares, or after small birds, my coat would have been safe +from being in the plight it's in; I don't know what pleasure one can find +in lying in wait for an animal that may take your life with his tusk if +he gets at you. I recollect having heard an old ballad sung that says, + +poem{ + + By bears be thou devoured, as erst + Was famous Favila." + +}poem + +"That," said Don Quixote, "was a Gothic king, who, going a-hunting, was +devoured by a bear." + +"Just so," said Sancho; "and I would not have kings and princes expose +themselves to such dangers for the sake of a pleasure which, to my mind, +ought not to be one, as it consists in killing an animal that has done no +harm whatever." + +"Quite the contrary, Sancho; you are wrong there," said the duke; "for +hunting is more suitable and requisite for kings and princes than for +anybody else. The chase is the emblem of war; it has stratagems, wiles, +and crafty devices for overcoming the enemy in safety; in it extreme cold +and intolerable heat have to be borne, indolence and sleep are despised, +the bodily powers are invigorated, the limbs of him who engages in it are +made supple, and, in a word, it is a pursuit which may be followed +without injury to anyone and with enjoyment to many; and the best of it +is, it is not for everybody, as field-sports of other sorts are, except +hawking, which also is only for kings and great lords. Reconsider your +opinion therefore, Sancho, and when you are governor take to hunting, and +you will find the good of it." + +"Nay," said Sancho, "the good governor should have a broken leg and keep +at home;" it would be a nice thing if, after people had been at the +trouble of coming to look for him on business, the governor were to be +away in the forest enjoying himself; the government would go on badly in +that fashion. By my faith, senor, hunting and amusements are more fit for +idlers than for governors; what I intend to amuse myself with is playing +all fours at Eastertime, and bowls on Sundays and holidays; for these +huntings don't suit my condition or agree with my conscience." + +"God grant it may turn out so," said the duke; "because it's a long step +from saying to doing." + +"Be that as it may," said Sancho, "'pledges don't distress a good payer,' +and 'he whom God helps does better than he who gets up early,' and 'it's +the tripes that carry the feet and not the feet the tripes;' I mean to +say that if God gives me help and I do my duty honestly, no doubt I'll +govern better than a gerfalcon. Nay, let them only put a finger in my +mouth, and they'll see whether I can bite or not." + +"The curse of God and all his saints upon thee, thou accursed Sancho!" +exclaimed Don Quixote; "when will the day come--as I have often said to +thee--when I shall hear thee make one single coherent, rational remark +without proverbs? Pray, your highnesses, leave this fool alone, for he +will grind your souls between, not to say two, but two thousand proverbs, +dragged in as much in season, and as much to the purpose as--may God +grant as much health to him, or to me if I want to listen to them!" + +"Sancho Panza's proverbs," said the duchess, "though more in number than +the Greek Commander's, are not therefore less to be esteemed for the +conciseness of the maxims. For my own part, I can say they give me more +pleasure than others that may be better brought in and more seasonably +introduced." + +In pleasant conversation of this sort they passed out of the tent into +the wood, and the day was spent in visiting some of the posts and +hiding-places, and then night closed in, not, however, as brilliantly or +tranquilly as might have been expected at the season, for it was then +midsummer; but bringing with it a kind of haze that greatly aided the +project of the duke and duchess; and thus, as night began to fall, and a +little after twilight set in, suddenly the whole wood on all four sides +seemed to be on fire, and shortly after, here, there, on all sides, a +vast number of trumpets and other military instruments were heard, as if +several troops of cavalry were passing through the wood. The blaze of the +fire and the noise of the warlike instruments almost blinded the eyes and +deafened the ears of those that stood by, and indeed of all who were in +the wood. Then there were heard repeated lelilies after the fashion of +the Moors when they rush to battle; trumpets and clarions brayed, drums +beat, fifes played, so unceasingly and so fast that he could not have had +any senses who did not lose them with the confused din of so many +instruments. The duke was astounded, the duchess amazed, Don Quixote +wondering, Sancho Panza trembling, and indeed, even they who were aware +of the cause were frightened. In their fear, silence fell upon them, and +a postillion, in the guise of a demon, passed in front of them, blowing, +in lieu of a bugle, a huge hollow horn that gave out a horrible hoarse +note. + +"Ho there! brother courier," cried the duke, "who are you? Where are you +going? What troops are these that seem to be passing through the wood?" + +To which the courier replied in a harsh, discordant voice, "I am the +devil; I am in search of Don Quixote of La Mancha; those who are coming +this way are six troops of enchanters, who are bringing on a triumphal +car the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso; she comes under enchantment, +together with the gallant Frenchman Montesinos, to give instructions to +Don Quixote as to how, she the said lady, may be disenchanted." + +"If you were the devil, as you say and as your appearance indicates," +said the duke, "you would have known the said knight Don Quixote of La +Mancha, for you have him here before you." + +"By God and upon my conscience," said the devil, "I never observed it, +for my mind is occupied with so many different things that I was +forgetting the main thing I came about." + +"This demon must be an honest fellow and a good Christian," said Sancho; +"for if he wasn't he wouldn't swear by God and his conscience; I feel +sure now there must be good souls even in hell itself." + +Without dismounting, the demon then turned to Don Quixote and said, "The +unfortunate but valiant knight Montesinos sends me to thee, the Knight of +the Lions (would that I saw thee in their claws), bidding me tell thee to +wait for him wherever I may find thee, as he brings with him her whom +they call Dulcinea del Toboso, that he may show thee what is needful in +order to disenchant her; and as I came for no more I need stay no longer; +demons of my sort be with thee, and good angels with these gentles;" and +so saying he blew his huge horn, turned about and went off without +waiting for a reply from anyone. + +They all felt fresh wonder, but particularly Sancho and Don Quixote; +Sancho to see how, in defiance of the truth, they would have it that +Dulcinea was enchanted; Don Quixote because he could not feel sure +whether what had happened to him in the cave of Montesinos was true or +not; and as he was deep in these cogitations the duke said to him, "Do +you mean to wait, Senor Don Quixote?" + +"Why not?" replied he; "here will I wait, fearless and firm, though all +hell should come to attack me." + +"Well then, if I see another devil or hear another horn like the last, +I'll wait here as much as in Flanders," said Sancho. + +Night now closed in more completely, and many lights began to flit +through the wood, just as those fiery exhalations from the earth, that +look like shooting-stars to our eyes, flit through the heavens; a +frightful noise, too, was heard, like that made by the solid wheels the +ox-carts usually have, by the harsh, ceaseless creaking of which, they +say, the bears and wolves are put to flight, if there happen to be any +where they are passing. In addition to all this commotion, there came a +further disturbance to increase the tumult, for now it seemed as if in +truth, on all four sides of the wood, four encounters or battles were +going on at the same time; in one quarter resounded the dull noise of a +terrible cannonade, in another numberless muskets were being discharged, +the shouts of the combatants sounded almost close at hand, and farther +away the Moorish lelilies were raised again and again. In a word, the +bugles, the horns, the clarions, the trumpets, the drums, the cannon, the +musketry, and above all the tremendous noise of the carts, all made up +together a din so confused and terrific that Don Quixote had need to +summon up all his courage to brave it; but Sancho's gave way, and he fell +fainting on the skirt of the duchess's robe, who let him lie there and +promptly bade them throw water in his face. This was done, and he came to +himself by the time that one of the carts with the creaking wheels +reached the spot. It was drawn by four plodding oxen all covered with +black housings; on each horn they had fixed a large lighted wax taper, +and on the top of the cart was constructed a raised seat, on which sat a +venerable old man with a beard whiter than the very snow, and so long +that it fell below his waist; he was dressed in a long robe of black +buckram; for as the cart was thickly set with a multitude of candles it +was easy to make out everything that was on it. Leading it were two +hideous demons, also clad in buckram, with countenances so frightful that +Sancho, having once seen them, shut his eyes so as not to see them again. +As soon as the cart came opposite the spot the old man rose from his +lofty seat, and standing up said in a loud voice, "I am the sage +Lirgandeo," and without another word the cart then passed on. Behind it +came another of the same form, with another aged man enthroned, who, +stopping the cart, said in a voice no less solemn than that of the first, +"I am the sage Alquife, the great friend of Urganda the Unknown," and +passed on. Then another cart came by at the same pace, but the occupant +of the throne was not old like the others, but a man stalwart and robust, +and of a forbidding countenance, who as he came up said in a voice far +hoarser and more devilish, "I am the enchanter Archelaus, the mortal +enemy of Amadis of Gaul and all his kindred," and then passed on. Having +gone a short distance the three carts halted and the monotonous noise of +their wheels ceased, and soon after they heard another, not noise, but +sound of sweet, harmonious music, of which Sancho was very glad, taking +it to be a good sign; and said he to the duchess, from whom he did not +stir a step, or for a single instant, "Senora, where there's music there +can't be mischief." + +"Nor where there are lights and it is bright," said the duchess; to which +Sancho replied, "Fire gives light, and it's bright where there are +bonfires, as we see by those that are all round us and perhaps may burn +us; but music is a sign of mirth and merrymaking." + +"That remains to be seen," said Don Quixote, who was listening to all +that passed; and he was right, as is shown in the following chapter. + +Chapter XXXV. - +Wherein is continued the instruction given to Don Quixote touching the +disenchantment of Dulcinea, together with other marvellous incidents + +They saw advancing towards them, to the sound of this pleasing music, +what they call a triumphal car, drawn by six grey mules with white linen +housings, on each of which was mounted a penitent, robed also in white, +with a large lighted wax taper in his hand. The car was twice or, +perhaps, three times as large as the former ones, and in front and on the +sides stood twelve more penitents, all as white as snow and all with +lighted tapers, a spectacle to excite fear as well as wonder; and on a +raised throne was seated a nymph draped in a multitude of silver-tissue +veils with an embroidery of countless gold spangles glittering all over +them, that made her appear, if not richly, at least brilliantly, +apparelled. She had her face covered with thin transparent sendal, the +texture of which did not prevent the fair features of a maiden from being +distinguished, while the numerous lights made it possible to judge of her +beauty and of her years, which seemed to be not less than seventeen but +not to have yet reached twenty. Beside her was a figure in a robe of +state, as they call it, reaching to the feet, while the head was covered +with a black veil. But the instant the car was opposite the duke and +duchess and Don Quixote the music of the clarions ceased, and then that +of the lutes and harps on the car, and the figure in the robe rose up, +and flinging it apart and removing the veil from its face, disclosed to +their eyes the shape of Death itself, fleshless and hideous, at which +sight Don Quixote felt uneasy, Sancho frightened, and the duke and +duchess displayed a certain trepidation. Having risen to its feet, this +living death, in a sleepy voice and with a tongue hardly awake, held +forth as follows: + +poem{ + +I am that Merlin who the legends say +The devil had for father, and the lie +Hath gathered credence with the lapse of time. +Of magic prince, of Zoroastric lore +Monarch and treasurer, with jealous eye +I view the efforts of the age to hide +The gallant deeds of doughty errant knights, +Who are, and ever have been, dear to me. + Enchanters and magicians and their kind + +Are mostly hard of heart; not so am I; +For mine is tender, soft, compassionate, +And its delight is doing good to all. +In the dim caverns of the gloomy Dis, +Where, tracing mystic lines and characters, +My soul abideth now, there came to me +The sorrow-laden plaint of her, the fair, +The peerless Dulcinea del Toboso. +I knew of her enchantment and her fate, +From high-born dame to peasant wench transformed +And touched with pity, first I turned the leaves +Of countless volumes of my devilish craft, +And then, in this grim grisly skeleton +Myself encasing, hither have I come +To show where lies the fitting remedy +To give relief in such a piteous case. + O thou, the pride and pink of all that wear + +The adamantine steel! O shining light, +O beacon, polestar, path and guide of all +Who, scorning slumber and the lazy down, +Adopt the toilsome life of bloodstained arms! +To thee, great hero who all praise transcends, +La Mancha's lustre and Iberia's star, +Don Quixote, wise as brave, to thee I say-- +For peerless Dulcinea del Toboso +Her pristine form and beauty to regain, +'T is needful that thy esquire Sancho shall, +On his own sturdy buttocks bared to heaven, +Three thousand and three hundred lashes lay, +And that they smart and sting and hurt him well. +Thus have the authors of her woe resolved. +And this is, gentles, wherefore I have come. + +}poem + +"By all that's good," exclaimed Sancho at this, "I'll just as soon give +myself three stabs with a dagger as three, not to say three thousand, +lashes. The devil take such a way of disenchanting! I don't see what my +backside has got to do with enchantments. By God, if Senor Merlin has not +found out some other way of disenchanting the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, +she may go to her grave enchanted." + +"But I'll take you, Don Clown stuffed with garlic," said Don Quixote, +"and tie you to a tree as naked as when your mother brought you forth, +and give you, not to say three thousand three hundred, but six thousand +six hundred lashes, and so well laid on that they won't be got rid of if +you try three thousand three hundred times; don't answer me a word or +I'll tear your soul out." + +On hearing this Merlin said, "That will not do, for the lashes worthy +Sancho has to receive must be given of his own free will and not by +force, and at whatever time he pleases, for there is no fixed limit +assigned to him; but it is permitted him, if he likes to commute by half +the pain of this whipping, to let them be given by the hand of another, +though it may be somewhat weighty." + +"Not a hand, my own or anybody else's, weighty or weighable, shall touch +me," said Sancho. "Was it I that gave birth to the lady Dulcinea del +Toboso, that my backside is to pay for the sins of her eyes? My master, +indeed, that's a part of her--for, he's always calling her 'my life' and +'my soul,' and his stay and prop--may and ought to whip himself for her +and take all the trouble required for her disenchantment. But for me to +whip myself! Abernuncio!" + +As soon as Sancho had done speaking the nymph in silver that was at the +side of Merlin's ghost stood up, and removing the thin veil from her face +disclosed one that seemed to all something more than exceedingly +beautiful; and with a masculine freedom from embarrassment and in a voice +not very like a lady's, addressing Sancho directly, said, "Thou wretched +squire, soul of a pitcher, heart of a cork tree, with bowels of flint and +pebbles; if, thou impudent thief, they bade thee throw thyself down from +some lofty tower; if, enemy of mankind, they asked thee to swallow a +dozen of toads, two of lizards, and three of adders; if they wanted thee +to slay thy wife and children with a sharp murderous scimitar, it would +be no wonder for thee to show thyself stubborn and squeamish. But to make +a piece of work about three thousand three hundred lashes, what every +poor little charity-boy gets every month--it is enough to amaze, +astonish, astound the compassionate bowels of all who hear it, nay, all +who come to hear it in the course of time. Turn, O miserable, +hard-hearted animal, turn, I say, those timorous owl's eyes upon these of +mine that are compared to radiant stars, and thou wilt see them weeping +trickling streams and rills, and tracing furrows, tracks, and paths over +the fair fields of my cheeks. Let it move thee, crafty, ill-conditioned +monster, to see my blooming youth--still in its teens, for I am not yet +twenty--wasting and withering away beneath the husk of a rude peasant +wench; and if I do not appear in that shape now, it is a special favour +Senor Merlin here has granted me, to the sole end that my beauty may +soften thee; for the tears of beauty in distress turn rocks into cotton +and tigers into ewes. Lay on to that hide of thine, thou great untamed +brute, rouse up thy lusty vigour that only urges thee to eat and eat, and +set free the softness of my flesh, the gentleness of my nature, and the +fairness of my face. And if thou wilt not relent or come to reason for +me, do so for the sake of that poor knight thou hast beside thee; thy +master I mean, whose soul I can this moment see, how he has it stuck in +his throat not ten fingers from his lips, and only waiting for thy +inflexible or yielding reply to make its escape by his mouth or go back +again into his stomach." + +Don Quixote on hearing this felt his throat, and turning to the duke he +said, "By God, senor, Dulcinea says true, I have my soul stuck here in my +throat like the nut of a crossbow." + +"What say you to this, Sancho?" said the duchess. + +"I say, senora," returned Sancho, "what I said before; as for the lashes, +abernuncio!" + +"Abrenuncio, you should say, Sancho, and not as you do," said the duke. + +"Let me alone, your highness," said Sancho. "I'm not in a humour now to +look into niceties or a letter more or less, for these lashes that are to +be given me, or I'm to give myself, have so upset me, that I don't know +what I'm saying or doing. But I'd like to know of this lady, my lady +Dulcinea del Toboso, where she learned this way she has of asking +favours. She comes to ask me to score my flesh with lashes, and she calls +me soul of a pitcher, and great untamed brute, and a string of foul names +that the devil is welcome to. Is my flesh brass? or is it anything to me +whether she is enchanted or not? Does she bring with her a basket of fair +linen, shirts, kerchiefs, socks-not that wear any--to coax me? No, +nothing but one piece of abuse after another, though she knows the +proverb they have here that 'an ass loaded with gold goes lightly up a +mountain,' and that 'gifts break rocks,' and 'praying to God and plying +the hammer,' and that 'one "take" is better than two "I'll give thee's."' +Then there's my master, who ought to stroke me down and pet me to make me +turn wool and carded cotton; he says if he gets hold of me he'll tie me +naked to a tree and double the tale of lashes on me. These tender-hearted +gentry should consider that it's not merely a squire, but a governor they +are asking to whip himself; just as if it was 'drink with cherries.' Let +them learn, plague take them, the right way to ask, and beg, and behave +themselves; for all times are not alike, nor are people always in good +humour. I'm now ready to burst with grief at seeing my green coat torn, +and they come to ask me to whip myself of my own free will, I having as +little fancy for it as for turning cacique." + +"Well then, the fact is, friend Sancho," said the duke, "that unless you +become softer than a ripe fig, you shall not get hold of the government. +It would be a nice thing for me to send my islanders a cruel governor +with flinty bowels, who won't yield to the tears of afflicted damsels or +to the prayers of wise, magisterial, ancient enchanters and sages. In +short, Sancho, either you must be whipped by yourself, or they must whip +you, or you shan't be governor." + +"Senor," said Sancho, "won't two days' grace be given me in which to +consider what is best for me?" + +"No, certainly not," said Merlin; "here, this minute, and on the spot, +the matter must be settled; either Dulcinea will return to the cave of +Montesinos and to her former condition of peasant wench, or else in her +present form shall be carried to the Elysian fields, where she will +remain waiting until the number of stripes is completed." + +"Now then, Sancho!" said the duchess, "show courage, and gratitude for +your master Don Quixote's bread that you have eaten; we are all bound to +oblige and please him for his benevolent disposition and lofty chivalry. +Consent to this whipping, my son; to the devil with the devil, and leave +fear to milksops, for 'a stout heart breaks bad luck,' as you very well +know." + +To this Sancho replied with an irrelevant remark, which, addressing +Merlin, he made to him, "Will your worship tell me, Senor Merlin--when +that courier devil came up he gave my master a message from Senor +Montesinos, charging him to wait for him here, as he was coming to +arrange how the lady Dona Dulcinea del Toboso was to be disenchanted; but +up to the present we have not seen Montesinos, nor anything like him." + +To which Merlin made answer, "The devil, Sancho, is a blockhead and a +great scoundrel; I sent him to look for your master, but not with a +message from Montesinos but from myself; for Montesinos is in his cave +expecting, or more properly speaking, waiting for his disenchantment; for +there's the tail to be skinned yet for him; if he owes you anything, or +you have any business to transact with him, I'll bring him to you and put +him where you choose; but for the present make up your mind to consent to +this penance, and believe me it will be very good for you, for soul as +well for body--for your soul because of the charity with which you +perform it, for your body because I know that you are of a sanguine habit +and it will do you no harm to draw a little blood." + +"There are a great many doctors in the world; even the enchanters are +doctors," said Sancho; "however, as everybody tells me the same +thing--though I can't see it myself--I say I am willing to give myself +the three thousand three hundred lashes, provided I am to lay them on +whenever I like, without any fixing of days or times; and I'll try and +get out of debt as quickly as I can, that the world may enjoy the beauty +of the lady Dulcinea del Toboso; as it seems, contrary to what I thought, +that she is beautiful after all. It must be a condition, too, that I am +not to be bound to draw blood with the scourge, and that if any of the +lashes happen to be fly-flappers they are to count. Item, that, in case I +should make any mistake in the reckoning, Senor Merlin, as he knows +everything, is to keep count, and let me know how many are still wanting +or over the number." + +"There will be no need to let you know of any over," said Merlin, +"because, when you reach the full number, the lady Dulcinea will at once, +and that very instant, be disenchanted, and will come in her gratitude to +seek out the worthy Sancho, and thank him, and even reward him for the +good work. So you have no cause to be uneasy about stripes too many or +too few; heaven forbid I should cheat anyone of even a hair of his head." + +"Well then, in God's hands be it," said Sancho; "in the hard case I'm in +I give in; I say I accept the penance on the conditions laid down." + +The instant Sancho uttered these last words the music of the clarions +struck up once more, and again a host of muskets were discharged, and Don +Quixote hung on Sancho's neck kissing him again and again on the forehead +and cheeks. The duchess and the duke expressed the greatest satisfaction, +the car began to move on, and as it passed the fair Dulcinea bowed to the +duke and duchess and made a low curtsey to Sancho. + +And now bright smiling dawn came on apace; the flowers of the field, +revived, raised up their heads, and the crystal waters of the brooks, +murmuring over the grey and white pebbles, hastened to pay their tribute +to the expectant rivers; the glad earth, the unclouded sky, the fresh +breeze, the clear light, each and all showed that the day that came +treading on the skirts of morning would be calm and bright. The duke and +duchess, pleased with their hunt and at having carried out their plans so +cleverly and successfully, returned to their castle resolved to follow up +their joke; for to them there was no reality that could afford them more +amusement. + +Chapter XXXVI. - +Wherein is related the strange and undreamt-of adventure of the +distressed Duenna, alias the countess Trifaldi, together with a letter +which Sancho Panza wrote to his wife, Teresa Panza + +The duke had a majordomo of a very facetious and sportive turn, and he it +was that played the part of Merlin, made all the arrangements for the +late adventure, composed the verses, and got a page to represent +Dulcinea; and now, with the assistance of his master and mistress, he got +up another of the drollest and strangest contrivances that can be +imagined. + +The duchess asked Sancho the next day if he had made a beginning with his +penance task which he had to perform for the disenchantment of Dulcinea. +He said he had, and had given himself five lashes overnight. + +The duchess asked him what he had given them with. + +He said with his hand. + +"That," said the duchess, "is more like giving oneself slaps than lashes; +I am sure the sage Merlin will not be satisfied with such tenderness; +worthy Sancho must make a scourge with claws, or a cat-o'-nine tails, +that will make itself felt; for it's with blood that letters enter, and +the release of so great a lady as Dulcinea will not be granted so +cheaply, or at such a paltry price; and remember, Sancho, that works of +charity done in a lukewarm and half-hearted way are without merit and of +no avail." + +To which Sancho replied, "If your ladyship will give me a proper scourge +or cord, I'll lay on with it, provided it does not hurt too much; for you +must know, boor as I am, my flesh is more cotton than hemp, and it won't +do for me to destroy myself for the good of anybody else." + +"So be it by all means," said the duchess; "tomorrow I'll give you a +scourge that will be just the thing for you, and will accommodate itself +to the tenderness of your flesh, as if it was its own sister." + +Then said Sancho, "Your highness must know, dear lady of my soul, that I +have a letter written to my wife, Teresa Panza, giving her an account of +all that has happened me since I left her; I have it here in my bosom, +and there's nothing wanting but to put the address to it; I'd be glad if +your discretion would read it, for I think it runs in the governor style; +I mean the way governors ought to write." + +"And who dictated it?" asked the duchess. + +"Who should have dictated but myself, sinner as I am?" said Sancho. + +"And did you write it yourself?" said the duchess. + +"That I didn't," said Sancho; "for I can neither read nor write, though I +can sign my name." + +"Let us see it," said the duchess, "for never fear but you display in it +the quality and quantity of your wit." + +Sancho drew out an open letter from his bosom, and the duchess, taking +it, found it ran in this fashion: + +SANCHO PANZA'S LETTER TO HIS WIFE, TERESA PANZA + +If I was well whipped I went mounted like a gentleman; if I have got a +good government it is at the cost of a good whipping. Thou wilt not +understand this just now, my Teresa; by-and-by thou wilt know what it +means. I may tell thee, Teresa, I mean thee to go in a coach, for that is +a matter of importance, because every other way of going is going on +all-fours. Thou art a governor's wife; take care that nobody speaks evil +of thee behind thy back. I send thee here a green hunting suit that my +lady the duchess gave me; alter it so as to make a petticoat and bodice +for our daughter. Don Quixote, my master, if I am to believe what I hear +in these parts, is a madman of some sense, and a droll blockhead, and I +am no way behind him. We have been in the cave of Montesinos, and the +sage Merlin has laid hold of me for the disenchantment of Dulcinea del +Toboso, her that is called Aldonza Lorenzo over there. With three +thousand three hundred lashes, less five, that I'm to give myself, she +will be left as entirely disenchanted as the mother that bore her. Say +nothing of this to anyone; for, make thy affairs public, and some will +say they are white and others will say they are black. I shall leave this +in a few days for my government, to which I am going with a mighty great +desire to make money, for they tell me all new governors set out with the +same desire; I will feel the pulse of it and will let thee know if thou +art to come and live with me or not. Dapple is well and sends many +remembrances to thee; I am not going to leave him behind though they took +me away to be Grand Turk. My lady the duchess kisses thy hands a thousand +times; do thou make a return with two thousand, for as my master says, +nothing costs less or is cheaper than civility. God has not been pleased +to provide another valise for me with another hundred crowns, like the +one the other day; but never mind, my Teresa, the bell-ringer is in safe +quarters, and all will come out in the scouring of the government; only +it troubles me greatly what they tell me--that once I have tasted it I +will eat my hands off after it; and if that is so it will not come very +cheap to me; though to be sure the maimed have a benefice of their own in +the alms they beg for; so that one way or another thou wilt be rich and +in luck. God give it to thee as he can, and keep me to serve thee. From +this castle, the 20th of July, 1614. + +Thy husband, the governor. + +SANCHO PANZA + +When she had done reading the letter the duchess said to Sancho, "On two +points the worthy governor goes rather astray; one is in saying or +hinting that this government has been bestowed upon him for the lashes +that he is to give himself, when he knows (and he cannot deny it) that +when my lord the duke promised it to him nobody ever dreamt of such a +thing as lashes; the other is that he shows himself here to be very +covetous; and I would not have him a money-seeker, for 'covetousness +bursts the bag,' and the covetous governor does ungoverned justice." + +"I don't mean it that way, senora," said Sancho; "and if you think the +letter doesn't run as it ought to do, it's only to tear it up and make +another; and maybe it will be a worse one if it is left to my gumption." + +"No, no," said the duchess, "this one will do, and I wish the duke to see +it." + +With this they betook themselves to a garden where they were to dine, and +the duchess showed Sancho's letter to the duke, who was highly delighted +with it. They dined, and after the cloth had been removed and they had +amused themselves for a while with Sancho's rich conversation, the +melancholy sound of a fife and harsh discordant drum made itself heard. +All seemed somewhat put out by this dull, confused, martial harmony, +especially Don Quixote, who could not keep his seat from pure +disquietude; as to Sancho, it is needless to say that fear drove him to +his usual refuge, the side or the skirts of the duchess; and indeed and +in truth the sound they heard was a most doleful and melancholy one. +While they were still in uncertainty they saw advancing towards them +through the garden two men clad in mourning robes so long and flowing +that they trailed upon the ground. As they marched they beat two great +drums which were likewise draped in black, and beside them came the fife +player, black and sombre like the others. Following these came a +personage of gigantic stature enveloped rather than clad in a gown of the +deepest black, the skirt of which was of prodigious dimensions. Over the +gown, girdling or crossing his figure, he had a broad baldric which was +also black, and from which hung a huge scimitar with a black scabbard and +furniture. He had his face covered with a transparent black veil, through +which might be descried a very long beard as white as snow. He came on +keeping step to the sound of the drums with great gravity and dignity; +and, in short, his stature, his gait, the sombreness of his appearance +and his following might well have struck with astonishment, as they did, +all who beheld him without knowing who he was. With this measured pace +and in this guise he advanced to kneel before the duke, who, with the +others, awaited him standing. The duke, however, would not on any account +allow him to speak until he had risen. The prodigious scarecrow obeyed, +and standing up, removed the veil from his face and disclosed the most +enormous, the longest, the whitest and the thickest beard that human eyes +had ever beheld until that moment, and then fetching up a grave, sonorous +voice from the depths of his broad, capacious chest, and fixing his eyes +on the duke, he said: + +"Most high and mighty senor, my name is Trifaldin of the White Beard; I +am squire to the Countess Trifaldi, otherwise called the Distressed +Duenna, on whose behalf I bear a message to your highness, which is that +your magnificence will be pleased to grant her leave and permission to +come and tell you her trouble, which is one of the strangest and most +wonderful that the mind most familiar with trouble in the world could +have imagined; but first she desires to know if the valiant and never +vanquished knight, Don Quixote of La Mancha, is in this your castle, for +she has come in quest of him on foot and without breaking her fast from +the kingdom of Kandy to your realms here; a thing which may and ought to +be regarded as a miracle or set down to enchantment; she is even now at +the gate of this fortress or plaisance, and only waits for your +permission to enter. I have spoken." And with that he coughed, and +stroked down his beard with both his hands, and stood very tranquilly +waiting for the response of the duke, which was to this effect: "Many +days ago, worthy squire Trifaldin of the White Beard, we heard of the +misfortune of my lady the Countess Trifaldi, whom the enchanters have +caused to be called the Distressed Duenna. Bid her enter, O stupendous +squire, and tell her that the valiant knight Don Quixote of La Mancha is +here, and from his generous disposition she may safely promise herself +every protection and assistance; and you may tell her, too, that if my +aid be necessary it will not be withheld, for I am bound to give it to +her by my quality of knight, which involves the protection of women of +all sorts, especially widowed, wronged, and distressed dames, such as her +ladyship seems to be." + +On hearing this Trifaldin bent the knee to the ground, and making a sign +to the fifer and drummers to strike up, he turned and marched out of the +garden to the same notes and at the same pace as when he entered, leaving +them all amazed at his bearing and solemnity. Turning to Don Quixote, the +duke said, "After all, renowned knight, the mists of malice and ignorance +are unable to hide or obscure the light of valour and virtue. I say so, +because your excellence has been barely six days in this castle, and +already the unhappy and the afflicted come in quest of you from lands far +distant and remote, and not in coaches or on dromedaries, but on foot and +fasting, confident that in that mighty arm they will find a cure for +their sorrows and troubles; thanks to your great achievements, which are +circulated all over the known earth." + +"I wish, senor duke," replied Don Quixote, "that blessed ecclesiastic, +who at table the other day showed such ill-will and bitter spite against +knights-errant, were here now to see with his own eyes whether knights of +the sort are needed in the world; he would at any rate learn by +experience that those suffering any extraordinary affliction or sorrow, +in extreme cases and unusual misfortunes do not go to look for a remedy +to the houses of jurists or village sacristans, or to the knight who has +never attempted to pass the bounds of his own town, or to the indolent +courtier who only seeks for news to repeat and talk of, instead of +striving to do deeds and exploits for others to relate and record. Relief +in distress, help in need, protection for damsels, consolation for +widows, are to be found in no sort of persons better than in +knights-errant; and I give unceasing thanks to heaven that I am one, and +regard any misfortune or suffering that may befall me in the pursuit of +so honourable a calling as endured to good purpose. Let this duenna come +and ask what she will, for I will effect her relief by the might of my +arm and the dauntless resolution of my bold heart." + +Chapter XXXVII. - +Wherein is continued the notable adventure of the distressed Duenna + +The duke and duchess were extremely glad to see how readily Don Quixote +fell in with their scheme; but at this moment Sancho observed, "I hope +this senora duenna won't be putting any difficulties in the way of the +promise of my government; for I have heard a Toledo apothecary, who +talked like a goldfinch, say that where duennas were mixed up nothing +good could happen. God bless me, how he hated them, that same apothecary! +And so what I'm thinking is, if all duennas, of whatever sort or +condition they may be, are plagues and busybodies, what must they be that +are distressed, like this Countess Three-skirts or Three-tails!--for in +my country skirts or tails, tails or skirts, it's all one." + +"Hush, friend Sancho," said Don Quixote; "since this lady duenna comes in +quest of me from such a distant land she cannot be one of those the +apothecary meant; moreover this is a countess, and when countesses serve +as duennas it is in the service of queens and empresses, for in their own +houses they are mistresses paramount and have other duennas to wait on +them." + +To this Dona Rodriguez, who was present, made answer, "My lady the +duchess has duennas in her service that might be countesses if it was the +will of fortune; 'but laws go as kings like;' let nobody speak ill of +duennas, above all of ancient maiden ones; for though I am not one +myself, I know and am aware of the advantage a maiden duenna has over one +that is a widow; but 'he who clipped us has kept the scissors.'" + +"For all that," said Sancho, "there's so much to be clipped about +duennas, so my barber said, that 'it will be better not to stir the rice +even though it sticks.'" + +"These squires," returned Dona Rodriguez, "are always our enemies; and as +they are the haunting spirits of the antechambers and watch us at every +step, whenever they are not saying their prayers (and that's often +enough) they spend their time in tattling about us, digging up our bones +and burying our good name. But I can tell these walking blocks that we +will live in spite of them, and in great houses too, though we die of +hunger and cover our flesh, be it delicate or not, with widow's weeds, as +one covers or hides a dunghill on a procession day. By my faith, if it +were permitted me and time allowed, I could prove, not only to those here +present, but to all the world, that there is no virtue that is not to be +found in a duenna." + +"I have no doubt," said the duchess, "that my good Dona Rodriguez is +right, and very much so; but she had better bide her time for fighting +her own battle and that of the rest of the duennas, so as to crush the +calumny of that vile apothecary, and root out the prejudice in the great +Sancho Panza's mind." + +To which Sancho replied, "Ever since I have sniffed the governorship I +have got rid of the humours of a squire, and I don't care a wild fig for +all the duennas in the world." + +They would have carried on this duenna dispute further had they not heard +the notes of the fife and drums once more, from which they concluded that +the Distressed Duenna was making her entrance. The duchess asked the duke +if it would be proper to go out to receive her, as she was a countess and +a person of rank. + +"In respect of her being a countess," said Sancho, before the duke could +reply, "I am for your highnesses going out to receive her; but in respect +of her being a duenna, it is my opinion you should not stir a step." + +"Who bade thee meddle in this, Sancho?" said Don Quixote. + +"Who, senor?" said Sancho; "I meddle for I have a right to meddle, as a +squire who has learned the rules of courtesy in the school of your +worship, the most courteous and best-bred knight in the whole world of +courtliness; and in these things, as I have heard your worship say, as +much is lost by a card too many as by a card too few, and to one who has +his ears open, few words." + +"Sancho is right," said the duke; "we'll see what the countess is like, +and by that measure the courtesy that is due to her." + +And now the drums and fife made their entrance as before; and here the +author brought this short chapter to an end and began the next, following +up the same adventure, which is one of the most notable in the history. + +Chapter XXXVIII. - +Wherein is told the distressed Duenna's tale of her misfortunes + +Following the melancholy musicians there filed into the garden as many as +twelve duennas, in two lines, all dressed in ample mourning robes +apparently of milled serge, with hoods of fine white gauze so long that +they allowed only the border of the robe to be seen. Behind them came the +Countess Trifaldi, the squire Trifaldin of the White Beard leading her by +the hand, clad in the finest unnapped black baize, such that, had it a +nap, every tuft would have shown as big as a Martos chickpea; the tail, +or skirt, or whatever it might be called, ended in three points which +were borne up by the hands of three pages, likewise dressed in mourning, +forming an elegant geometrical figure with the three acute angles made by +the three points, from which all who saw the peaked skirt concluded that +it must be because of it the countess was called Trifaldi, as though it +were Countess of the Three Skirts; and Benengeli says it was so, and that +by her right name she was called the Countess Lobuna, because wolves bred +in great numbers in her country; and if, instead of wolves, they had been +foxes, she would have been called the Countess Zorruna, as it was the +custom in those parts for lords to take distinctive titles from the thing +or things most abundant in their dominions; this countess, however, in +honour of the new fashion of her skirt, dropped Lobuna and took up +Trifaldi. + +The twelve duennas and the lady came on at procession pace, their faces +being covered with black veils, not transparent ones like Trifaldin's, +but so close that they allowed nothing to be seen through them. As soon +as the band of duennas was fully in sight, the duke, the duchess, and Don +Quixote stood up, as well as all who were watching the slow-moving +procession. The twelve duennas halted and formed a lane, along which the +Distressed One advanced, Trifaldin still holding her hand. On seeing this +the duke, the duchess, and Don Quixote went some twelve paces forward to +meet her. She then, kneeling on the ground, said in a voice hoarse and +rough, rather than fine and delicate, "May it please your highnesses not +to offer such courtesies to this your servant, I should say to this your +handmaid, for I am in such distress that I shall never be able to make a +proper return, because my strange and unparalleled misfortune has carried +off my wits, and I know not whither; but it must be a long way off, for +the more I look for them the less I find them." + +"He would be wanting in wits, senora countess," said the duke, "who did +not perceive your worth by your person, for at a glance it may be seen it +deserves all the cream of courtesy and flower of polite usage;" and +raising her up by the hand he led her to a seat beside the duchess, who +likewise received her with great urbanity. Don Quixote remained silent, +while Sancho was dying to see the features of Trifaldi and one or two of +her many duennas; but there was no possibility of it until they +themselves displayed them of their own accord and free will. + +All kept still, waiting to see who would break silence, which the +Distressed Duenna did in these words: "I am confident, most mighty lord, +most fair lady, and most discreet company, that my most miserable misery +will be accorded a reception no less dispassionate than generous and +condolent in your most valiant bosoms, for it is one that is enough to +melt marble, soften diamonds, and mollify the steel of the most hardened +hearts in the world; but ere it is proclaimed to your hearing, not to say +your ears, I would fain be enlightened whether there be present in this +society, circle, or company, that knight immaculatissimus, Don Quixote de +la Manchissima, and his squirissimus Panza." + +"The Panza is here," said Sancho, before anyone could reply, "and Don +Quixotissimus too; and so, most distressedest Duenissima, you may say +what you willissimus, for we are all readissimus to do you any +servissimus." + +On this Don Quixote rose, and addressing the Distressed Duenna, said, "If +your sorrows, afflicted lady, can indulge in any hope of relief from the +valour or might of any knight-errant, here are mine, which, feeble and +limited though they be, shall be entirely devoted to your service. I am +Don Quixote of La Mancha, whose calling it is to give aid to the needy of +all sorts; and that being so, it is not necessary for you, senora, to +make any appeal to benevolence, or deal in preambles, only to tell your +woes plainly and straightforwardly: for you have hearers that will know +how, if not to remedy them, to sympathise with them." + +On hearing this, the Distressed Duenna made as though she would throw +herself at Don Quixote's feet, and actually did fall before them and +said, as she strove to embrace them, "Before these feet and legs I cast +myself, O unconquered knight, as before, what they are, the foundations +and pillars of knight-errantry; these feet I desire to kiss, for upon +their steps hangs and depends the sole remedy for my misfortune, O +valorous errant, whose veritable achievements leave behind and eclipse +the fabulous ones of the Amadises, Esplandians, and Belianises!" Then +turning from Don Quixote to Sancho Panza, and grasping his hands, she +said, "O thou, most loyal squire that ever served knight-errant in this +present age or ages past, whose goodness is more extensive than the beard +of Trifaldin my companion here of present, well mayest thou boast thyself +that, in serving the great Don Quixote, thou art serving, summed up in +one, the whole host of knights that have ever borne arms in the world. I +conjure thee, by what thou owest to thy most loyal goodness, that thou +wilt become my kind intercessor with thy master, that he speedily give +aid to this most humble and most unfortunate countess." + +To this Sancho made answer, "As to my goodness, senora, being as long and +as great as your squire's beard, it matters very little to me; may I have +my soul well bearded and moustached when it comes to quit this life, +that's the point; about beards here below I care little or nothing; but +without all these blandishments and prayers, I will beg my master (for I +know he loves me, and, besides, he has need of me just now for a certain +business) to help and aid your worship as far as he can; unpack your woes +and lay them before us, and leave us to deal with them, for we'll be all +of one mind." + +The duke and duchess, as it was they who had made the experiment of this +adventure, were ready to burst with laughter at all this, and between +themselves they commended the clever acting of the Trifaldi, who, +returning to her seat, said, "Queen Dona Maguncia reigned over the famous +kingdom of Kandy, which lies between the great Trapobana and the Southern +Sea, two leagues beyond Cape Comorin. She was the widow of King +Archipiela, her lord and husband, and of their marriage they had issue +the Princess Antonomasia, heiress of the kingdom; which Princess +Antonomasia was reared and brought up under my care and direction, I +being the oldest and highest in rank of her mother's duennas. Time +passed, and the young Antonomasia reached the age of fourteen, and such a +perfection of beauty, that nature could not raise it higher. Then, it +must not be supposed her intelligence was childish; she was as +intelligent as she was fair, and she was fairer than all the world; and +is so still, unless the envious fates and hard-hearted sisters three have +cut for her the thread of life. But that they have not, for Heaven will +not suffer so great a wrong to Earth, as it would be to pluck unripe the +grapes of the fairest vineyard on its surface. Of this beauty, to which +my poor feeble tongue has failed to do justice, countless princes, not +only of that country, but of others, were enamoured, and among them a +private gentleman, who was at the court, dared to raise his thoughts to +the heaven of so great beauty, trusting to his youth, his gallant +bearing, his numerous accomplishments and graces, and his quickness and +readiness of wit; for I may tell your highnesses, if I am not wearying +you, that he played the guitar so as to make it speak, and he was, +besides, a poet and a great dancer, and he could make birdcages so well, +that by making them alone he might have gained a livelihood, had he found +himself reduced to utter poverty; and gifts and graces of this kind are +enough to bring down a mountain, not to say a tender young girl. But all +his gallantry, wit, and gaiety, all his graces and accomplishments, would +have been of little or no avail towards gaining the fortress of my pupil, +had not the impudent thief taken the precaution of gaining me over first. +First, the villain and heartless vagabond sought to win my good-will and +purchase my compliance, so as to get me, like a treacherous warder, to +deliver up to him the keys of the fortress I had in charge. In a word, he +gained an influence over my mind, and overcame my resolutions with I know +not what trinkets and jewels he gave me; but it was some verses I heard +him singing one night from a grating that opened on the street where he +lived, that, more than anything else, made me give way and led to my +fall; and if I remember rightly they ran thus: + +poem{ + + From that sweet enemy of mine + My bleeding heart hath had its wound; + And to increase the pain I'm bound + To suffer and to make no sign. + +}poem + +The lines seemed pearls to me and his voice sweet as syrup; and +afterwards, I may say ever since then, looking at the misfortune into +which I have fallen, I have thought that poets, as Plato advised, ought +to be banished from all well-ordered States; at least the amatory ones, +for they write verses, not like those of 'The Marquis of Mantua,' that +delight and draw tears from the women and children, but sharp-pointed +conceits that pierce the heart like soft thorns, and like the lightning +strike it, leaving the raiment uninjured. Another time he sang: + +poem{ + + Come Death, so subtly veiled that I + Thy coming know not, how or when, + Lest it should give me life again + To find how sweet it is to die. + +}poem + +--and other verses and burdens of the same sort, such as enchant when +sung and fascinate when written. And then, when they condescend to +compose a sort of verse that was at that time in vogue in Kandy, which +they call seguidillas! Then it is that hearts leap and laughter breaks +forth, and the body grows restless and all the senses turn quicksilver. +And so I say, sirs, that these troubadours richly deserve to be banished +to the isles of the lizards. Though it is not they that are in fault, but +the simpletons that extol them, and the fools that believe in them; and +had I been the faithful duenna I should have been, his stale conceits +would have never moved me, nor should I have been taken in by such +phrases as 'in death I live,' 'in ice I burn,' 'in flames I shiver,' +'hopeless I hope,' 'I go and stay,' and paradoxes of that sort which +their writings are full of. And then when they promise the Phoenix of +Arabia, the crown of Ariadne, the horses of the Sun, the pearls of the +South, the gold of Tibar, and the balsam of Panchaia! Then it is they +give a loose to their pens, for it costs them little to make promises +they have no intention or power of fulfilling. But where am I wandering +to? Woe is me, unfortunate being! What madness or folly leads me to speak +of the faults of others, when there is so much to be said about my own? +Again, woe is me, hapless that I am! it was not verses that conquered me, +but my own simplicity; it was not music made me yield, but my own +imprudence; my own great ignorance and little caution opened the way and +cleared the path for Don Clavijo's advances, for that was the name of the +gentleman I have referred to; and so, with my help as go-between, he +found his way many a time into the chamber of the deceived Antonomasia +(deceived not by him but by me) under the title of a lawful husband; for, +sinner though I was, would not have allowed him to approach the edge of +her shoe-sole without being her husband. No, no, not that; marriage must +come first in any business of this sort that I take in hand. But there +was one hitch in this case, which was that of inequality of rank, Don +Clavijo being a private gentleman, and the Princess Antonomasia, as I +said, heiress to the kingdom. The entanglement remained for some time a +secret, kept hidden by my cunning precautions, until I perceived that a +certain expansion of waist in Antonomasia must before long disclose it, +the dread of which made us all there take counsel together, and it was +agreed that before the mischief came to light, Don Clavijo should demand +Antonomasia as his wife before the Vicar, in virtue of an agreement to +marry him made by the princess, and drafted by my wit in such binding +terms that the might of Samson could not have broken it. The necessary +steps were taken; the Vicar saw the agreement, and took the lady's +confession; she confessed everything in full, and he ordered her into the +custody of a very worthy alguacil of the court." + +"Are there alguacils of the court in Kandy, too," said Sancho at this, +"and poets, and seguidillas? I swear I think the world is the same all +over! But make haste, Senora Trifaldi; for it is late, and I am dying to +know the end of this long story." + +"I will," replied the countess. + +Chapter XXXIX. - +In which the Trifaldi continues her marvellous and memorable story + +By every word that Sancho uttered, the duchess was as much delighted as +Don Quixote was driven to desperation. He bade him hold his tongue, and +the Distressed One went on to say: "At length, after much questioning and +answering, as the princess held to her story, without changing or varying +her previous declaration, the Vicar gave his decision in favour of Don +Clavijo, and she was delivered over to him as his lawful wife; which the +Queen Dona Maguncia, the Princess Antonomasia's mother, so took to heart, +that within the space of three days we buried her." + +"She died, no doubt," said Sancho. + +"Of course," said Trifaldin; "they don't bury living people in Kandy, +only the dead." + +"Senor Squire," said Sancho, "a man in a swoon has been known to be +buried before now, in the belief that he was dead; and it struck me that +Queen Maguncia ought to have swooned rather than died; because with life +a great many things come right, and the princess's folly was not so great +that she need feel it so keenly. If the lady had married some page of +hers, or some other servant of the house, as many another has done, so I +have heard say, then the mischief would have been past curing. But to +marry such an elegant accomplished gentleman as has been just now +described to us--indeed, indeed, though it was a folly, it was not such a +great one as you think; for according to the rules of my master here--and +he won't allow me to lie--as of men of letters bishops are made, so of +gentlemen knights, specially if they be errant, kings and emperors may be +made." + +"Thou art right, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for with a knight-errant, if +he has but two fingers' breadth of good fortune, it is on the cards to +become the mightiest lord on earth. But let senora the Distressed One +proceed; for I suspect she has got yet to tell us the bitter part of this +so far sweet story." + +"The bitter is indeed to come," said the countess; "and such bitter that +colocynth is sweet and oleander toothsome in comparison. The queen, then, +being dead, and not in a swoon, we buried her; and hardly had we covered +her with earth, hardly had we said our last farewells, when, quis talia +fando temperet a lachrymis? over the queen's grave there appeared, +mounted upon a wooden horse, the giant Malambruno, Maguncia's first +cousin, who besides being cruel is an enchanter; and he, to revenge the +death of his cousin, punish the audacity of Don Clavijo, and in wrath at +the contumacy of Antonomasia, left them both enchanted by his art on the +grave itself; she being changed into an ape of brass, and he into a +horrible crocodile of some unknown metal; while between the two there +stands a pillar, also of metal, with certain characters in the Syriac +language inscribed upon it, which, being translated into Kandian, and now +into Castilian, contain the following sentence: 'These two rash lovers +shall not recover their former shape until the valiant Manchegan comes to +do battle with me in single combat; for the Fates reserve this unexampled +adventure for his mighty valour alone.' This done, he drew from its +sheath a huge broad scimitar, and seizing me by the hair he made as +though he meant to cut my throat and shear my head clean off. I was +terror-stricken, my voice stuck in my throat, and I was in the deepest +distress; nevertheless I summoned up my strength as well as I could, and +in a trembling and piteous voice I addressed such words to him as induced +him to stay the infliction of a punishment so severe. He then caused all +the duennas of the palace, those that are here present, to be brought +before him; and after having dwelt upon the enormity of our offence, and +denounced duennas, their characters, their evil ways and worse intrigues, +laying to the charge of all what I alone was guilty of, he said he would +not visit us with capital punishment, but with others of a slow nature +which would be in effect civil death for ever; and the very instant he +ceased speaking we all felt the pores of our faces opening, and pricking +us, as if with the points of needles. We at once put our hands up to our +faces and found ourselves in the state you now see." + +Here the Distressed One and the other duennas raised the veils with which +they were covered, and disclosed countenances all bristling with beards, +some red, some black, some white, and some grizzled, at which spectacle +the duke and duchess made a show of being filled with wonder. Don Quixote +and Sancho were overwhelmed with amazement, and the bystanders lost in +astonishment, while the Trifaldi went on to say: "Thus did that +malevolent villain Malambruno punish us, covering the tenderness and +softness of our faces with these rough bristles! Would to heaven that he +had swept off our heads with his enormous scimitar instead of obscuring +the light of our countenances with these wool-combings that cover us! For +if we look into the matter, sirs (and what I am now going to say I would +say with eyes flowing like fountains, only that the thought of our +misfortune and the oceans they have already wept, keep them as dry as +barley spears, and so I say it without tears), where, I ask, can a duenna +with a beard to to? What father or mother will feel pity for her? Who +will help her? For, if even when she has a smooth skin, and a face +tortured by a thousand kinds of washes and cosmetics, she can hardly get +anybody to love her, what will she do when she shows a countenace turned +into a thicket? Oh duennas, companions mine! it was an unlucky moment +when we were born and an ill-starred hour when our fathers begot us!" And +as she said this she showed signs of being about to faint. + +Chapter XL. - +Of matters relating and belonging to this adventure and to this memorable +history + +Verily and truly all those who find pleasure in histories like this ought +show their gratitude to Cide Hamete, its original author, for the +scrupulous care he has taken to set before us all its minute particulars, +not leaving anything, however trifling it may be, that he does not make +clear and plain. He portrays the thoughts, he reveals the fancies, he +answers implied questions, clears up doubts, sets objections at rest, +and, in a word, makes plain the smallest points the most inquisitive can +desire to know. O renowned author! O happy Don Quixote! O famous famous +droll Sancho! All and each, may ye live countless ages for the delight +and amusement of the dwellers on earth! + +The history goes on to say that when Sancho saw the Distressed One faint +he exclaimed: "I swear by the faith of an honest man and the shades of +all my ancestors the Panzas, that never I did see or hear of, nor has my +master related or conceived in his mind, such an adventure as this. A +thousand devils--not to curse thee--take thee, Malambruno, for an +enchanter and a giant! Couldst thou find no other sort of punishment for +these sinners but bearding them? Would it not have been better--it would +have been better for them--to have taken off half their noses from the +middle upwards, even though they'd have snuffled when they spoke, than to +have put beards on them? I'll bet they have not the means of paying +anybody to shave them." + +"That is the truth, senor," said one of the twelve; "we have not the +money to get ourselves shaved, and so we have, some of us, taken to using +sticking-plasters by way of an economical remedy, for by applying them to +our faces and plucking them off with a jerk we are left as bare and +smooth as the bottom of a stone mortar. There are, to be sure, women in +Kandy that go about from house to house to remove down, and trim +eyebrows, and make cosmetics for the use of the women, but we, the +duennas of my lady, would never let them in, for most of them have a +flavour of agents that have ceased to be principals; and if we are not +relieved by Senor Don Quixote we shall be carried to our graves with +beards." + +"I will pluck out my own in the land of the Moors," said Don Quixote, "if +I don't cure yours." + +At this instant the Trifaldi recovered from her swoon and said, "The +chink of that promise, valiant knight, reached my ears in the midst of my +swoon, and has been the means of reviving me and bringing back my senses; +and so once more I implore you, illustrious errant, indomitable sir, to +let your gracious promises be turned into deeds." + +"There shall be no delay on my part," said Don Quixote. "Bethink you, +senora, of what I must do, for my heart is most eager to serve you." + +"The fact is," replied the Distressed One, "it is five thousand leagues, +a couple more or less, from this to the kingdom of Kandy, if you go by +land; but if you go through the air and in a straight line, it is three +thousand two hundred and twenty-seven. You must know, too, that +Malambruno told me that, whenever fate provided the knight our deliverer, +he himself would send him a steed far better and with less tricks than a +post-horse; for he will be that same wooden horse on which the valiant +Pierres carried off the fair Magalona; which said horse is guided by a +peg he has in his forehead that serves for a bridle, and flies through +the air with such rapidity that you would fancy the very devils were +carrying him. This horse, according to ancient tradition, was made by +Merlin. He lent him to Pierres, who was a friend of his, and who made +long journeys with him, and, as has been said, carried off the fair +Magalona, bearing her through the air on its haunches and making all who +beheld them from the earth gape with astonishment; and he never lent him +save to those whom he loved or those who paid him well; and since the +great Pierres we know of no one having mounted him until now. From him +Malambruno stole him by his magic art, and he has him now in his +possession, and makes use of him in his journeys which he constantly +makes through different parts of the world; he is here to-day, to-morrow +in France, and the next day in Potosi; and the best of it is the said +horse neither eats nor sleeps nor wears out shoes, and goes at an ambling +pace through the air without wings, so that he whom he has mounted upon +him can carry a cup full of water in his hand without spilling a drop, so +smoothly and easily does he go, for which reason the fair Magalona +enjoyed riding him greatly." + +"For going smoothly and easily," said Sancho at this, "give me my Dapple, +though he can't go through the air; but on the ground I'll back him +against all the amblers in the world." + +They all laughed, and the Distressed One continued: "And this same horse, +if so be that Malambruno is disposed to put an end to our sufferings, +will be here before us ere the night shall have advanced half an hour; +for he announced to me that the sign he would give me whereby I might +know that I had found the knight I was in quest of, would be to send me +the horse wherever he might be, speedily and promptly." + +"And how many is there room for on this horse?" asked Sancho. + +"Two," said the Distressed One, "one in the saddle, and the other on the +croup; and generally these two are knight and squire, when there is no +damsel that's being carried off." + +"I'd like to know, Senora Distressed One," said Sancho, "what is the name +of this horse?" + +"His name," said the Distressed One, "is not the same as Bellerophon's +horse that was called Pegasus, or Alexander the Great's, called +Bucephalus, or Orlando Furioso's, the name of which was Brigliador, nor +yet Bayard, the horse of Reinaldos of Montalvan, nor Frontino like +Ruggiero's, nor Bootes or Peritoa, as they say the horses of the sun were +called, nor is he called Orelia, like the horse on which the unfortunate +Rodrigo, the last king of the Goths, rode to the battle where he lost his +life and his kingdom." + +"I'll bet," said Sancho, "that as they have given him none of these +famous names of well-known horses, no more have they given him the name +of my master's Rocinante, which for being apt surpasses all that have +been mentioned." + +"That is true," said the bearded countess, "still it fits him very well, +for he is called Clavileno the Swift, which name is in accordance with +his being made of wood, with the peg he has in his forehead, and with the +swift pace at which he travels; and so, as far as name goes, he may +compare with the famous Rocinante." + +"I have nothing to say against his name," said Sancho; "but with what +sort of bridle or halter is he managed?" + +"I have said already," said the Trifaldi, "that it is with a peg, by +turning which to one side or the other the knight who rides him makes him +go as he pleases, either through the upper air, or skimming and almost +sweeping the earth, or else in that middle course that is sought and +followed in all well-regulated proceedings." + +"I'd like to see him," said Sancho; "but to fancy I'm going to mount him, +either in the saddle or on the croup, is to ask pears of the elm tree. A +good joke indeed! I can hardly keep my seat upon Dapple, and on a +pack-saddle softer than silk itself, and here they'd have me hold on upon +haunches of plank without pad or cushion of any sort! Gad, I have no +notion of bruising myself to get rid of anyone's beard; let each one +shave himself as best he can; I'm not going to accompany my master on any +such long journey; besides, I can't give any help to the shaving of these +beards as I can to the disenchantment of my lady Dulcinea." + +"Yes, you can, my friend," replied the Trifaldi; "and so much, that +without you, so I understand, we shall be able to do nothing." + +"In the king's name!" exclaimed Sancho, "what have squires got to do with +the adventures of their masters? Are they to have the fame of such as +they go through, and we the labour? Body o' me! if the historians would +only say, 'Such and such a knight finished such and such an adventure, +but with the help of so and so, his squire, without which it would have +been impossible for him to accomplish it;' but they write curtly, "Don +Paralipomenon of the Three Stars accomplished the adventure of the six +monsters;' without mentioning such a person as his squire, who was there +all the time, just as if there was no such being. Once more, sirs, I say +my master may go alone, and much good may it do him; and I'll stay here +in the company of my lady the duchess; and maybe when he comes back, he +will find the lady Dulcinea's affair ever so much advanced; for I mean in +leisure hours, and at idle moments, to give myself a spell of whipping +without so much as a hair to cover me." + +"For all that you must go if it be necessary, my good Sancho," said the +duchess, "for they are worthy folk who ask you; and the faces of these +ladies must not remain overgrown in this way because of your idle fears; +that would be a hard case indeed." + +"In the king's name, once more!" said Sancho; "If this charitable work +were to be done for the sake of damsels in confinement or charity-girls, +a man might expose himself to some hardships; but to bear it for the sake +of stripping beards off duennas! Devil take it! I'd sooner see them all +bearded, from the highest to the lowest, and from the most prudish to the +most affected." + +"You are very hard on duennas, Sancho my friend," said the duchess; "you +incline very much to the opinion of the Toledo apothecary. But indeed you +are wrong; there are duennas in my house that may serve as patterns of +duennas; and here is my Dona Rodriguez, who will not allow me to say +otherwise." + +"Your excellence may say it if you like," said the Rodriguez; "for God +knows the truth of everything; and whether we duennas are good or bad, +bearded or smooth, we are our mothers' daughters like other women; and as +God sent us into the world, he knows why he did, and on his mercy I rely, +and not on anybody's beard." + +"Well, Senora Rodriguez, Senora Trifaldi, and present company," said Don +Quixote, "I trust in Heaven that it will look with kindly eyes upon your +troubles, for Sancho will do as I bid him. Only let Clavileno come and +let me find myself face to face with Malambruno, and I am certain no +razor will shave you more easily than my sword shall shave Malambruno's +head off his shoulders; for 'God bears with the wicked, but not for +ever." + +"Ah!" exclaimed the Distressed One at this, "may all the stars of the +celestial regions look down upon your greatness with benign eyes, valiant +knight, and shed every prosperity and valour upon your heart, that it may +be the shield and safeguard of the abused and downtrodden race of +duennas, detested by apothecaries, sneered at by squires, and made game +of by pages. Ill betide the jade that in the flower of her youth would +not sooner become a nun than a duenna! Unfortunate beings that we are, we +duennas! Though we may be descended in the direct male line from Hector +of Troy himself, our mistresses never fail to address us as 'you' if they +think it makes queens of them. O giant Malambruno, though thou art an +enchanter, thou art true to thy promises. Send us now the peerless +Clavileno, that our misfortune may be brought to an end; for if the hot +weather sets in and these beards of ours are still there, alas for our +lot!" + +The Trifaldi said this in such a pathetic way that she drew tears from +the eyes of all and even Sancho's filled up; and he resolved in his heart +to accompany his master to the uttermost ends of the earth, if so be the +removal of the wool from those venerable countenances depended upon it. + +Chapter XLI. - +Of the arrival of Clavileno and the end of this protracted adventure + +And now night came, and with it the appointed time for the arrival of the +famous horse Clavileno, the non-appearance of which was already beginning +to make Don Quixote uneasy, for it struck him that, as Malambruno was so +long about sending it, either he himself was not the knight for whom the +adventure was reserved, or else Malambruno did not dare to meet him in +single combat. But lo! suddenly there came into the garden four wild-men +all clad in green ivy bearing on their shoulders a great wooden horse. +They placed it on its feet on the ground, and one of the wild-men said, +"Let the knight who has heart for it mount this machine." + +Here Sancho exclaimed, "I don't mount, for neither have I the heart nor +am I a knight." + +"And let the squire, if he has one," continued the wild-man, "take his +seat on the croup, and let him trust the valiant Malambruno; for by no +sword save his, nor by the malice of any other, shall he be assailed. It +is but to turn this peg the horse has in his neck, and he will bear them +through the air to where Malambruno awaits them; but lest the vast +elevation of their course should make them giddy, their eyes must be +covered until the horse neighs, which will be the sign of their having +completed their journey." + +With these words, leaving Clavileno behind them, they retired with easy +dignity the way they came. As soon as the Distressed One saw the horse, +almost in tears she exclaimed to Don Quixote, "Valiant knight, the +promise of Malambruno has proved trustworthy; the horse has come, our +beards are growing, and by every hair in them all of us implore thee to +shave and shear us, as it is only mounting him with thy squire and making +a happy beginning with your new journey." + +"That I will, Senora Countess Trifaldi," said Don Quixote, "most gladly +and with right goodwill, without stopping to take a cushion or put on my +spurs, so as not to lose time, such is my desire to see you and all these +duennas shaved clean." + +"That I won't," said Sancho, "with good-will or bad-will, or any way at +all; and if this shaving can't be done without my mounting on the croup, +my master had better look out for another squire to go with him, and +these ladies for some other way of making their faces smooth; I'm no +witch to have a taste for travelling through the air. What would my +islanders say when they heard their governor was going, strolling about +on the winds? And another thing, as it is three thousand and odd leagues +from this to Kandy, if the horse tires, or the giant takes huff, we'll be +half a dozen years getting back, and there won't be isle or island in the +world that will know me: and so, as it is a common saying 'in delay +there's danger,' and 'when they offer thee a heifer run with a halter,' +these ladies' beards must excuse me; 'Saint Peter is very well in Rome;' +I mean I am very well in this house where so much is made of me, and I +hope for such a good thing from the master as to see myself a governor." + +"Friend Sancho," said the duke at this, "the island that I have promised +you is not a moving one, or one that will run away; it has roots so +deeply buried in the bowels of the earth that it will be no easy matter +to pluck it up or shift it from where it is; you know as well as I do +that there is no sort of office of any importance that is not obtained by +a bribe of some kind, great or small; well then, that which I look to +receive for this government is that you go with your master Don Quixote, +and bring this memorable adventure to a conclusion; and whether you +return on Clavileno as quickly as his speed seems to promise, or adverse +fortune brings you back on foot travelling as a pilgrim from hostel to +hostel and from inn to inn, you will always find your island on your +return where you left it, and your islanders with the same eagerness they +have always had to receive you as their governor, and my good-will will +remain the same; doubt not the truth of this, Senor Sancho, for that +would be grievously wronging my disposition to serve you." + +"Say no more, senor," said Sancho; "I am a poor squire and not equal to +carrying so much courtesy; let my master mount; bandage my eyes and +commit me to God's care, and tell me if I may commend myself to our Lord +or call upon the angels to protect me when we go towering up there." + +To this the Trifaldi made answer, "Sancho, you may freely commend +yourself to God or whom you will; for Malambruno though an enchanter is a +Christian, and works his enchantments with great circumspection, taking +very good care not to fall out with anyone." + +"Well then," said Sancho, "God and the most holy Trinity of Gaeta give me +help!" + +"Since the memorable adventure of the fulling mills," said Don Quixote, +"I have never seen Sancho in such a fright as now; were I as +superstitious as others his abject fear would cause me some little +trepidation of spirit. But come here, Sancho, for with the leave of these +gentles I would say a word or two to thee in private;" and drawing Sancho +aside among the trees of the garden and seizing both his hands he said, +"Thou seest, brother Sancho, the long journey we have before us, and God +knows when we shall return, or what leisure or opportunities this +business will allow us; I wish thee therefore to retire now to thy +chamber, as though thou wert going to fetch something required for the +road, and in a trice give thyself if it be only five hundred lashes on +account of the three thousand three hundred to which thou art bound; it +will be all to the good, and to make a beginning with a thing is to have +it half finished." + +"By God," said Sancho, "but your worship must be out of your senses! This +is like the common saying, 'You see me with child, and you want me a +virgin.' Just as I'm about to go sitting on a bare board, your worship +would have me score my backside! Indeed, your worship is not reasonable. +Let us be off to shave these duennas; and on our return I promise on my +word to make such haste to wipe off all that's due as will satisfy your +worship; I can't say more." + +"Well, I will comfort myself with that promise, my good Sancho," replied +Don Quixote, "and I believe thou wilt keep it; for indeed though stupid +thou art veracious." + +"I'm not voracious," said Sancho, "only peckish; but even if I was a +little, still I'd keep my word." + +With this they went back to mount Clavileno, and as they were about to do +so Don Quixote said, "Cover thine eyes, Sancho, and mount; for one who +sends for us from lands so far distant cannot mean to deceive us for the +sake of the paltry glory to be derived from deceiving persons who trust +in him; though all should turn out the contrary of what I hope, no malice +will be able to dim the glory of having undertaken this exploit." + +"Let us be off, senor," said Sancho, "for I have taken the beards and +tears of these ladies deeply to heart, and I shan't eat a bit to relish +it until I have seen them restored to their former smoothness. Mount, +your worship, and blindfold yourself, for if I am to go on the croup, it +is plain the rider in the saddle must mount first." + +"That is true," said Don Quixote, and, taking a handkerchief out of his +pocket, he begged the Distressed One to bandage his eyes very carefully; +but after having them bandaged he uncovered them again, saying, "If my +memory does not deceive me, I have read in Virgil of the Palladium of +Troy, a wooden horse the Greeks offered to the goddess Pallas, which was +big with armed knights, who were afterwards the destruction of Troy; so +it would be as well to see, first of all, what Clavileno has in his +stomach." + +"There is no occasion," said the Distressed One; "I will be bail for him, +and I know that Malambruno has nothing tricky or treacherous about him; +you may mount without any fear, Senor Don Quixote; on my head be it if +any harm befalls you." + +Don Quixote thought that to say anything further with regard to his +safety would be putting his courage in an unfavourable light; and so, +without more words, he mounted Clavileno, and tried the peg, which turned +easily; and as he had no stirrups and his legs hung down, he looked like +nothing so much as a figure in some Roman triumph painted or embroidered +on a Flemish tapestry. + +Much against the grain, and very slowly, Sancho proceeded to mount, and, +after settling himself as well as he could on the croup, found it rather +hard, and not at all soft, and asked the duke if it would be possible to +oblige him with a pad of some kind, or a cushion; even if it were off the +couch of his lady the duchess, or the bed of one of the pages; as the +haunches of that horse were more like marble than wood. On this the +Trifaldi observed that Clavileno would not bear any kind of harness or +trappings, and that his best plan would be to sit sideways like a woman, +as in that way he would not feel the hardness so much. + +Sancho did so, and, bidding them farewell, allowed his eyes to be +bandaged, but immediately afterwards uncovered them again, and looking +tenderly and tearfully on those in the garden, bade them help him in his +present strait with plenty of Paternosters and Ave Marias, that God might +provide some one to say as many for them, whenever they found themselves +in a similar emergency. + +At this Don Quixote exclaimed, "Art thou on the gallows, thief, or at thy +last moment, to use pitiful entreaties of that sort? Cowardly, spiritless +creature, art thou not in the very place the fair Magalona occupied, and +from which she descended, not into the grave, but to become Queen of +France; unless the histories lie? And I who am here beside thee, may I +not put myself on a par with the valiant Pierres, who pressed this very +spot that I now press? Cover thine eyes, cover thine eyes, abject animal, +and let not thy fear escape thy lips, at least in my presence." + +"Blindfold me," said Sancho; "as you won't let me commend myself or be +commended to God, is it any wonder if I am afraid there is a region of +devils about here that will carry us off to Peralvillo?" + +They were then blindfolded, and Don Quixote, finding himself settled to +his satisfaction, felt for the peg, and the instant he placed his fingers +on it, all the duennas and all who stood by lifted up their voices +exclaiming, "God guide thee, valiant knight! God be with thee, intrepid +squire! Now, now ye go cleaving the air more swiftly than an arrow! Now +ye begin to amaze and astonish all who are gazing at you from the earth! +Take care not to wobble about, valiant Sancho! Mind thou fall not, for +thy fall will be worse than that rash youth's who tried to steer the +chariot of his father the Sun!" + +As Sancho heard the voices, clinging tightly to his master and winding +his arms round him, he said, "Senor, how do they make out we are going up +so high, if their voices reach us here and they seem to be speaking quite +close to us?" + +"Don't mind that, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "for as affairs of this +sort, and flights like this are out of the common course of things, you +can see and hear as much as you like a thousand leagues off; but don't +squeeze me so tight or thou wilt upset me; and really I know not what +thou hast to be uneasy or frightened at, for I can safely swear I never +mounted a smoother-going steed all the days of my life; one would fancy +we never stirred from one place. Banish fear, my friend, for indeed +everything is going as it ought, and we have the wind astern." + +"That's true," said Sancho, "for such a strong wind comes against me on +this side, that it seems as if people were blowing on me with a thousand +pair of bellows;" which was the case; they were puffing at him with a +great pair of bellows; for the whole adventure was so well planned by the +duke, the duchess, and their majordomo, that nothing was omitted to make +it perfectly successful. + +Don Quixote now, feeling the blast, said, "Beyond a doubt, Sancho, we +must have already reached the second region of the air, where the hail +and snow are generated; the thunder, the lightning, and the thunderbolts +are engendered in the third region, and if we go on ascending at this +rate, we shall shortly plunge into the region of fire, and I know not how +to regulate this peg, so as not to mount up where we shall be burned." + +And now they began to warm their faces, from a distance, with tow that +could be easily set on fire and extinguished again, fixed on the end of a +cane. On feeling the heat Sancho said, "May I die if we are not already +in that fire place, or very near it, for a good part of my beard has been +singed, and I have a mind, senor, to uncover and see whereabouts we are." + +"Do nothing of the kind," said Don Quixote; "remember the true story of +the licentiate Torralva that the devils carried flying through the air +riding on a stick with his eyes shut; who in twelve hours reached Rome +and dismounted at Torre di Nona, which is a street of the city, and saw +the whole sack and storming and the death of Bourbon, and was back in +Madrid the next morning, where he gave an account of all he had seen; and +he said moreover that as he was going through the air, the devil bade him +open his eyes, and he did so, and saw himself so near the body of the +moon, so it seemed to him, that he could have laid hold of it with his +hand, and that he did not dare to look at the earth lest he should be +seized with giddiness. So that, Sancho, it will not do for us to uncover +ourselves, for he who has us in charge will be responsible for us; and +perhaps we are gaining an altitude and mounting up to enable us to +descend at one swoop on the kingdom of Kandy, as the saker or falcon does +on the heron, so as to seize it however high it may soar; and though it +seems to us not half an hour since we left the garden, believe me we must +have travelled a great distance." + +"I don't know how that may be," said Sancho; "all I know is that if the +Senora Magallanes or Magalona was satisfied with this croup, she could +not have been very tender of flesh." + +The duke, the duchess, and all in the garden were listening to the +conversation of the two heroes, and were beyond measure amused by it; and +now, desirous of putting a finishing touch to this rare and +well-contrived adventure, they applied a light to Clavileno's tail with +some tow, and the horse, being full of squibs and crackers, immediately +blew up with a prodigious noise, and brought Don Quixote and Sancho Panza +to the ground half singed. By this time the bearded band of duennas, the +Trifaldi and all, had vanished from the garden, and those that remained +lay stretched on the ground as if in a swoon. Don Quixote and Sancho got +up rather shaken, and, looking about them, were filled with amazement at +finding themselves in the same garden from which they had started, and +seeing such a number of people stretched on the ground; and their +astonishment was increased when at one side of the garden they perceived +a tall lance planted in the ground, and hanging from it by two cords of +green silk a smooth white parchment on which there was the following +inscription in large gold letters: "The illustrious knight Don Quixote of +La Mancha has, by merely attempting it, finished and concluded the +adventure of the Countess Trifaldi, otherwise called the Distressed +Duenna; Malambruno is now satisfied on every point, the chins of the +duennas are now smooth and clean, and King Don Clavijo and Queen +Antonomasia in their original form; and when the squirely flagellation +shall have been completed, the white dove shall find herself delivered +from the pestiferous gerfalcons that persecute her, and in the arms of +her beloved mate; for such is the decree of the sage Merlin, +arch-enchanter of enchanters." + +As soon as Don Quixote had read the inscription on the parchment he +perceived clearly that it referred to the disenchantment of Dulcinea, and +returning hearty thanks to heaven that he had with so little danger +achieved so grand an exploit as to restore to their former complexion the +countenances of those venerable duennas, he advanced towards the duke and +duchess, who had not yet come to themselves, and taking the duke by the +hand he said, "Be of good cheer, worthy sir, be of good cheer; it's +nothing at all; the adventure is now over and without any harm done, as +the inscription fixed on this post shows plainly." + +The duke came to himself slowly and like one recovering consciousness +after a heavy sleep, and the duchess and all who had fallen prostrate +about the garden did the same, with such demonstrations of wonder and +amazement that they would have almost persuaded one that what they +pretended so adroitly in jest had happened to them in reality. The duke +read the placard with half-shut eyes, and then ran to embrace Don Quixote +with-open arms, declaring him to be the best knight that had ever been +seen in any age. Sancho kept looking about for the Distressed One, to see +what her face was like without the beard, and if she was as fair as her +elegant person promised; but they told him that, the instant Clavileno +descended flaming through the air and came to the ground, the whole band +of duennas with the Trifaldi vanished, and that they were already shaved +and without a stump left. + +The duchess asked Sancho how he had fared on that long journey, to which +Sancho replied, "I felt, senora, that we were flying through the region +of fire, as my master told me, and I wanted to uncover my eyes for a bit; +but my master, when I asked leave to uncover myself, would not let me; +but as I have a little bit of curiosity about me, and a desire to know +what is forbidden and kept from me, quietly and without anyone seeing me +I drew aside the handkerchief covering my eyes ever so little, close to +my nose, and from underneath looked towards the earth, and it seemed to +me that it was altogether no bigger than a grain of mustard seed, and +that the men walking on it were little bigger than hazel nuts; so you may +see how high we must have got to then." + +To this the duchess said, "Sancho, my friend, mind what you are saying; +it seems you could not have seen the earth, but only the men walking on +it; for if the earth looked to you like a grain of mustard seed, and each +man like a hazel nut, one man alone would have covered the whole earth." + +"That is true," said Sancho, "but for all that I got a glimpse of a bit +of one side of it, and saw it all." + +"Take care, Sancho," said the duchess, "with a bit of one side one does +not see the whole of what one looks at." + +"I don't understand that way of looking at things," said Sancho; "I only +know that your ladyship will do well to bear in mind that as we were +flying by enchantment so I might have seen the whole earth and all the +men by enchantment whatever way I looked; and if you won't believe this, +no more will you believe that, uncovering myself nearly to the eyebrows, +I saw myself so close to the sky that there was not a palm and a half +between me and it; and by everything that I can swear by, senora, it is +mighty great! And it so happened we came by where the seven goats are, +and by God and upon my soul, as in my youth I was a goatherd in my own +country, as soon as I saw them I felt a longing to be among them for a +little, and if I had not given way to it I think I'd have burst. So I +come and take, and what do I do? without saying anything to anybody, not +even to my master, softly and quietly I got down from Clavileno and +amused myself with the goats--which are like violets, like flowers--for +nigh three-quarters of an hour; and Clavileno never stirred or moved from +one spot." + +"And while the good Sancho was amusing himself with the goats," said the +duke, "how did Senor Don Quixote amuse himself?" + +To which Don Quixote replied, "As all these things and such like +occurrences are out of the ordinary course of nature, it is no wonder +that Sancho says what he does; for my own part I can only say that I did +not uncover my eyes either above or below, nor did I see sky or earth or +sea or shore. It is true I felt that I was passing through the region of +the air, and even that I touched that of fire; but that we passed farther +I cannot believe; for the region of fire being between the heaven of the +moon and the last region of the air, we could not have reached that +heaven where the seven goats Sancho speaks of are without being burned; +and as we were not burned, either Sancho is lying or Sancho is dreaming." + +"I am neither lying nor dreaming," said Sancho; "only ask me the tokens +of those same goats, and you'll see by that whether I'm telling the truth +or not." + +"Tell us them then, Sancho," said the duchess. + +"Two of them," said Sancho, "are green, two blood-red, two blue, and one +a mixture of all colours." + +"An odd sort of goat, that," said the duke; "in this earthly region of +ours we have no such colours; I mean goats of such colours." + +"That's very plain," said Sancho; "of course there must be a difference +between the goats of heaven and the goats of the earth." + +"Tell me, Sancho," said the duke, "did you see any he-goat among those +goats?" + +"No, senor," said Sancho; "but I have heard say that none ever passed the +horns of the moon." + +They did not care to ask him anything more about his journey, for they +saw he was in the vein to go rambling all over the heavens giving an +account of everything that went on there, without having ever stirred +from the garden. Such, in short, was the end of the adventure of the +Distressed Duenna, which gave the duke and duchess laughing matter not +only for the time being, but for all their lives, and Sancho something to +talk about for ages, if he lived so long; but Don Quixote, coming close +to his ear, said to him, "Sancho, as you would have us believe what you +saw in heaven, I require you to believe me as to what I saw in the cave +of Montesinos; I say no more." + +Chapter XLII. - +Of the counsels which Don Quixote gave Sancho Panza before he set out to +govern the island, together with other well-considered matters + +The duke and duchess were so well pleased with the successful and droll +result of the adventure of the Distressed One, that they resolved to +carry on the joke, seeing what a fit subject they had to deal with for +making it all pass for reality. So having laid their plans and given +instructions to their servants and vassals how to behave to Sancho in his +government of the promised island, the next day, that following +Clavileno's flight, the duke told Sancho to prepare and get ready to go +and be governor, for his islanders were already looking out for him as +for the showers of May. + +Sancho made him an obeisance, and said, "Ever since I came down from +heaven, and from the top of it beheld the earth, and saw how little it +is, the great desire I had to be a governor has been partly cooled in me; +for what is there grand in being ruler on a grain of mustard seed, or +what dignity or authority in governing half a dozen men about as big as +hazel nuts; for, so far as I could see, there were no more on the whole +earth? If your lordship would be so good as to give me ever so small a +bit of heaven, were it no more than half a league, I'd rather have it +than the best island in the world." + +"Recollect, Sancho," said the duke, "I cannot give a bit of heaven, no +not so much as the breadth of my nail, to anyone; rewards and favours of +that sort are reserved for God alone. What I can give I give you, and +that is a real, genuine island, compact, well proportioned, and +uncommonly fertile and fruitful, where, if you know how to use your +opportunities, you may, with the help of the world's riches, gain those +of heaven." + +"Well then," said Sancho, "let the island come; and I'll try and be such +a governor, that in spite of scoundrels I'll go to heaven; and it's not +from any craving to quit my own humble condition or better myself, but +from the desire I have to try what it tastes like to be a governor." + +"If you once make trial of it, Sancho," said the duke, "you'll eat your +fingers off after the government, so sweet a thing is it to command and +be obeyed. Depend upon it when your master comes to be emperor (as he +will beyond a doubt from the course his affairs are taking), it will be +no easy matter to wrest the dignity from him, and he will be sore and +sorry at heart to have been so long without becoming one." + +"Senor," said Sancho, "it is my belief it's a good thing to be in +command, if it's only over a drove of cattle." + +"May I be buried with you, Sancho," said the duke, "but you know +everything; I hope you will make as good a governor as your sagacity +promises; and that is all I have to say; and now remember to-morrow is +the day you must set out for the government of the island, and this +evening they will provide you with the proper attire for you to wear, and +all things requisite for your departure." + +"Let them dress me as they like," said Sancho; "however I'm dressed I'll +be Sancho Panza." + +"That's true," said the duke; "but one's dress must be suited to the +office or rank one holds; for it would not do for a jurist to dress like +a soldier, or a soldier like a priest. You, Sancho, shall go partly as a +lawyer, partly as a captain, for, in the island I am giving you, arms are +needed as much as letters, and letters as much as arms." + +"Of letters I know but little," said Sancho, "for I don't even know the A +B C; but it is enough for me to have the Christus in my memory to be a +good governor. As for arms, I'll handle those they give me till I drop, +and then, God be my help!" + +"With so good a memory," said the duke, "Sancho cannot go wrong in +anything." + +Here Don Quixote joined them; and learning what passed, and how soon +Sancho was to go to his government, he with the duke's permission took +him by the hand, and retired to his room with him for the purpose of +giving him advice as to how he was to demean himself in his office. As +soon as they had entered the chamber he closed the door after him, and +almost by force made Sancho sit down beside him, and in a quiet tone thus +addressed him: "I give infinite thanks to heaven, friend Sancho, that, +before I have met with any good luck, fortune has come forward to meet +thee. I who counted upon my good fortune to discharge the recompense of +thy services, find myself still waiting for advancement, while thou, +before the time, and contrary to all reasonable expectation, seest +thyself blessed in the fulfillment of thy desires. Some will bribe, beg, +solicit, rise early, entreat, persist, without attaining the object of +their suit; while another comes, and without knowing why or wherefore, +finds himself invested with the place or office so many have sued for; +and here it is that the common saying, 'There is good luck as well as bad +luck in suits,' applies. Thou, who, to my thinking, art beyond all doubt +a dullard, without early rising or night watching or taking any trouble, +with the mere breath of knight-errantry that has breathed upon thee, +seest thyself without more ado governor of an island, as though it were a +mere matter of course. This I say, Sancho, that thou attribute not the +favour thou hast received to thine own merits, but give thanks to heaven +that disposes matters beneficently, and secondly thanks to the great +power the profession of knight-errantry contains in itself. With a heart, +then, inclined to believe what I have said to thee, attend, my son, to +thy Cato here who would counsel thee and be thy polestar and guide to +direct and pilot thee to a safe haven out of this stormy sea wherein thou +art about to ingulf thyself; for offices and great trusts are nothing +else but a mighty gulf of troubles. + +"First of all, my son, thou must fear God, for in the fear of him is +wisdom, and being wise thou canst not err in aught. + +"Secondly, thou must keep in view what thou art, striving to know +thyself, the most difficult thing to know that the mind can imagine. If +thou knowest thyself, it will follow thou wilt not puff thyself up like +the frog that strove to make himself as large as the ox; if thou dost, +the recollection of having kept pigs in thine own country will serve as +the ugly feet for the wheel of thy folly." + +"That's the truth," said Sancho; "but that was when I was a boy; +afterwards when I was something more of a man it was geese I kept, not +pigs. But to my thinking that has nothing to do with it; for all who are +governors don't come of a kingly stock." + +"True," said Don Quixote, "and for that reason those who are not of noble +origin should take care that the dignity of the office they hold he +accompanied by a gentle suavity, which wisely managed will save them from +the sneers of malice that no station escapes. + +"Glory in thy humble birth, Sancho, and be not ashamed of saying thou art +peasant-born; for when it is seen thou art not ashamed no one will set +himself to put thee to the blush; and pride thyself rather upon being one +of lowly virtue than a lofty sinner. Countless are they who, born of mean +parentage, have risen to the highest dignities, pontifical and imperial, +and of the truth of this I could give thee instances enough to weary +thee. + +"Remember, Sancho, if thou make virtue thy aim, and take a pride in doing +virtuous actions, thou wilt have no cause to envy those who have princely +and lordly ones, for blood is an inheritance, but virtue an acquisition, +and virtue has in itself alone a worth that blood does not possess. + +"This being so, if perchance anyone of thy kinsfolk should come to see +thee when thou art in thine island, thou art not to repel or slight him, +but on the contrary to welcome him, entertain him, and make much of him; +for in so doing thou wilt be approved of heaven (which is not pleased +that any should despise what it hath made), and wilt comply with the laws +of well-ordered nature. + +"If thou carriest thy wife with thee (and it is not well for those that +administer governments to be long without their wives), teach and +instruct her, and strive to smooth down her natural roughness; for all +that may be gained by a wise governor may be lost and wasted by a boorish +stupid wife. + +"If perchance thou art left a widower--a thing which may happen--and in +virtue of thy office seekest a consort of higher degree, choose not one +to serve thee for a hook, or for a fishing-rod, or for the hood of thy +'won't have it;' for verily, I tell thee, for all the judge's wife +receives, the husband will be held accountable at the general calling to +account; where he will have repay in death fourfold, items that in life +he regarded as naught. + +"Never go by arbitrary law, which is so much favoured by ignorant men who +plume themselves on cleverness. + +"Let the tears of the poor man find with thee more compassion, but not +more justice, than the pleadings of the rich. + +"Strive to lay bare the truth, as well amid the promises and presents of +the rich man, as amid the sobs and entreaties of the poor. + +"When equity may and should be brought into play, press not the utmost +rigour of the law against the guilty; for the reputation of the stern +judge stands not higher than that of the compassionate. + +"If perchance thou permittest the staff of justice to swerve, let it be +not by the weight of a gift, but by that of mercy. + +"If it should happen thee to give judgment in the cause of one who is +thine enemy, turn thy thoughts away from thy injury and fix them on the +justice of the case. + +"Let not thine own passion blind thee in another man's cause; for the +errors thou wilt thus commit will be most frequently irremediable; or if +not, only to be remedied at the expense of thy good name and even of thy +fortune. + +"If any handsome woman come to seek justice of thee, turn away thine eyes +from her tears and thine ears from her lamentations, and consider +deliberately the merits of her demand, if thou wouldst not have thy +reason swept away by her weeping, and thy rectitude by her sighs. + +"Abuse not by word him whom thou hast to punish in deed, for the pain of +punishment is enough for the unfortunate without the addition of thine +objurgations. + +"Bear in mind that the culprit who comes under thy jurisdiction is but a +miserable man subject to all the propensities of our depraved nature, and +so far as may be in thy power show thyself lenient and forbearing; for +though the attributes of God are all equal, to our eyes that of mercy is +brighter and loftier than that of justice. + +"If thou followest these precepts and rules, Sancho, thy days will be +long, thy fame eternal, thy reward abundant, thy felicity unutterable; +thou wilt marry thy children as thou wouldst; they and thy grandchildren +will bear titles; thou wilt live in peace and concord with all men; and, +when life draws to a close, death will come to thee in calm and ripe old +age, and the light and loving hands of thy great-grandchildren will close +thine eyes. + +"What I have thus far addressed to thee are instructions for the +adornment of thy mind; listen now to those which tend to that of the +body." + +Chapter XLIII. - +Of the second set of counsels Don Quixote gave Sancho Panza + +Who, hearing the foregoing discourse of Don Quixote, would not have set +him down for a person of great good sense and greater rectitude of +purpose? But, as has been frequently observed in the course of this great +history, he only talked nonsense when he touched on chivalry, and in +discussing all other subjects showed that he had a clear and unbiassed +understanding; so that at every turn his acts gave the lie to his +intellect, and his intellect to his acts; but in the case of these second +counsels that he gave Sancho he showed himself to have a lively turn of +humour, and displayed conspicuously his wisdom, and also his folly. + +Sancho listened to him with the deepest attention, and endeavoured to fix +his counsels in his memory, like one who meant to follow them and by +their means bring the full promise of his government to a happy issue. +Don Quixote, then, went on to say: + +"With regard to the mode in which thou shouldst govern thy person and thy +house, Sancho, the first charge I have to give thee is to be clean, and +to cut thy nails, not letting them grow as some do, whose ignorance makes +them fancy that long nails are an ornament to their hands, as if those +excrescences they neglect to cut were nails, and not the talons of a +lizard-catching kestrel--a filthy and unnatural abuse. + +"Go not ungirt and loose, Sancho; for disordered attire is a sign of an +unstable mind, unless indeed the slovenliness and slackness is to be set +down to craft, as was the common opinion in the case of Julius Caesar. + +"Ascertain cautiously what thy office may be worth; and if it will allow +thee to give liveries to thy servants, give them respectable and +serviceable, rather than showy and gay ones, and divide them between thy +servants and the poor; that is to say, if thou canst clothe six pages, +clothe three and three poor men, and thus thou wilt have pages for heaven +and pages for earth; the vainglorious never think of this new mode of +giving liveries. + +"Eat not garlic nor onions, lest they find out thy boorish origin by the +smell; walk slowly and speak deliberately, but not in such a way as to +make it seem thou art listening to thyself, for all affectation is bad. + +"Dine sparingly and sup more sparingly still; for the health of the whole +body is forged in the workshop of the stomach. + +"Be temperate in drinking, bearing in mind that wine in excess keeps +neither secrets nor promises. + +"Take care, Sancho, not to chew on both sides, and not to eruct in +anybody's presence." + +"Eruct!" said Sancho; "I don't know what that means." + +"To eruct, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "means to belch, and that is one of +the filthiest words in the Spanish language, though a very expressive +one; and therefore nice folk have had recourse to the Latin, and instead +of belch say eruct, and instead of belches say eructations; and if some +do not understand these terms it matters little, for custom will bring +them into use in the course of time, so that they will be readily +understood; this is the way a language is enriched; custom and the public +are all-powerful there." + +"In truth, senor," said Sancho, "one of the counsels and cautions I mean +to bear in mind shall be this, not to belch, for I'm constantly doing +it." + +"Eruct, Sancho, not belch," said Don Quixote. + +"Eruct, I shall say henceforth, and I swear not to forget it," said +Sancho. + +"Likewise, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "thou must not mingle such a +quantity of proverbs in thy discourse as thou dost; for though proverbs +are short maxims, thou dost drag them in so often by the head and +shoulders that they savour more of nonsense than of maxims." + +"God alone can cure that," said Sancho; "for I have more proverbs in me +than a book, and when I speak they come so thick together into my mouth +that they fall to fighting among themselves to get out; that's why my +tongue lets fly the first that come, though they may not be pat to the +purpose. But I'll take care henceforward to use such as befit the dignity +of my office; for 'in a house where there's plenty, supper is soon +cooked,' and 'he who binds does not wrangle,' and 'the bell-ringer's in a +safe berth,' and 'giving and keeping require brains.'" + +"That's it, Sancho!" said Don Quixote; "pack, tack, string proverbs +together; nobody is hindering thee! 'My mother beats me, and I go on with +my tricks.' I am bidding thee avoid proverbs, and here in a second thou +hast shot out a whole litany of them, which have as much to do with what +we are talking about as 'over the hills of Ubeda.' Mind, Sancho, I do not +say that a proverb aptly brought in is objectionable; but to pile up and +string together proverbs at random makes conversation dull and vulgar. + +"When thou ridest on horseback, do not go lolling with thy body on the +back of the saddle, nor carry thy legs stiff or sticking out from the +horse's belly, nor yet sit so loosely that one would suppose thou wert on +Dapple; for the seat on a horse makes gentlemen of some and grooms of +others. + +"Be moderate in thy sleep; for he who does not rise early does not get +the benefit of the day; and remember, Sancho, diligence is the mother of +good fortune, and indolence, its opposite, never yet attained the object +of an honest ambition. + +"The last counsel I will give thee now, though it does not tend to bodily +improvement, I would have thee carry carefully in thy memory, for I +believe it will be no less useful to thee than those I have given thee +already, and it is this--never engage in a dispute about families, at +least in the way of comparing them one with another; for necessarily one +of those compared will be better than the other, and thou wilt be hated +by the one thou hast disparaged, and get nothing in any shape from the +one thou hast exalted. + +"Thy attire shall be hose of full length, a long jerkin, and a cloak a +trifle longer; loose breeches by no means, for they are becoming neither +for gentlemen nor for governors. + +"For the present, Sancho, this is all that has occurred to me to advise +thee; as time goes by and occasions arise my instructions shall follow, +if thou take care to let me know how thou art circumstanced." + +"Senor," said Sancho, "I see well enough that all these things your +worship has said to me are good, holy, and profitable; but what use will +they be to me if I don't remember one of them? To be sure that about not +letting my nails grow, and marrying again if I have the chance, will not +slip out of my head; but all that other hash, muddle, and jumble--I don't +and can't recollect any more of it than of last year's clouds; so it must +be given me in writing; for though I can't either read or write, I'll +give it to my confessor, to drive it into me and remind me of it whenever +it is necessary." + +"Ah, sinner that I am!" said Don Quixote, "how bad it looks in governors +not to know how to read or write; for let me tell thee, Sancho, when a +man knows not how to read, or is left-handed, it argues one of two +things; either that he was the son of exceedingly mean and lowly parents, +or that he himself was so incorrigible and ill-conditioned that neither +good company nor good teaching could make any impression on him. It is a +great defect that thou labourest under, and therefore I would have thee +learn at any rate to sign thy name." "I can sign my name well enough," +said Sancho, "for when I was steward of the brotherhood in my village I +learned to make certain letters, like the marks on bales of goods, which +they told me made out my name. Besides I can pretend my right hand is +disabled and make some one else sign for me, for 'there's a remedy for +everything except death;' and as I shall be in command and hold the +staff, I can do as I like; moreover, 'he who has the alcalde for his +father-,' and I'll be governor, and that's higher than alcalde. Only come +and see! Let them make light of me and abuse me; 'they'll come for wool +and go back shorn;' 'whom God loves, his house is known to Him;' 'the +silly sayings of the rich pass for saws in the world;' and as I'll be +rich, being a governor, and at the same time generous, as I mean to be, +no fault will be seen in me. 'Only make yourself honey and the flies will +suck you;' 'as much as thou hast so much art thou worth,' as my +grandmother used to say; and 'thou canst have no revenge of a man of +substance.'" + +"Oh, God's curse upon thee, Sancho!" here exclaimed Don Quixote; "sixty +thousand devils fly away with thee and thy proverbs! For the last hour +thou hast been stringing them together and inflicting the pangs of +torture on me with every one of them. Those proverbs will bring thee to +the gallows one day, I promise thee; thy subjects will take the +government from thee, or there will be revolts among them. Tell me, where +dost thou pick them up, thou booby? How dost thou apply them, thou +blockhead? For with me, to utter one and make it apply properly, I have +to sweat and labour as if I were digging." + +"By God, master mine," said Sancho, "your worship is making a fuss about +very little. Why the devil should you be vexed if I make use of what is +my own? And I have got nothing else, nor any other stock in trade except +proverbs and more proverbs; and here are three just this instant come +into my head, pat to the purpose and like pears in a basket; but I won't +repeat them, for 'sage silence is called Sancho.'" + +"That, Sancho, thou art not," said Don Quixote; "for not only art thou +not sage silence, but thou art pestilent prate and perversity; still I +would like to know what three proverbs have just now come into thy +memory, for I have been turning over mine own--and it is a good one--and +none occurs to me." + +"What can be better," said Sancho, "than 'never put thy thumbs between +two back teeth;' and 'to "get out of my house" and "what do you want with +my wife?" there is no answer;' and 'whether the pitcher hits the stove, +or the stove the pitcher, it's a bad business for the pitcher;' all which +fit to a hair? For no one should quarrel with his governor, or him in +authority over him, because he will come off the worst, as he does who +puts his finger between two back and if they are not back teeth it makes +no difference, so long as they are teeth; and to whatever the governor +may say there's no answer, any more than to 'get out of my house' and +'what do you want with my wife?' and then, as for that about the stone +and the pitcher, a blind man could see that. So that he 'who sees the +mote in another's eye had need to see the beam in his own,' that it be +not said of himself, 'the dead woman was frightened at the one with her +throat cut;' and your worship knows well that 'the fool knows more in his +own house than the wise man in another's.'" + +"Nay, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "the fool knows nothing, either in his +own house or in anybody else's, for no wise structure of any sort can +stand on a foundation of folly; but let us say no more about it, Sancho, +for if thou governest badly, thine will be the fault and mine the shame; +but I comfort myself with having done my duty in advising thee as +earnestly and as wisely as I could; and thus I am released from my +obligations and my promise. God guide thee, Sancho, and govern thee in +thy government, and deliver me from the misgiving I have that thou wilt +turn the whole island upside down, a thing I might easily prevent by +explaining to the duke what thou art and telling him that all that fat +little person of thine is nothing else but a sack full of proverbs and +sauciness." + +"Senor," said Sancho, "if your worship thinks I'm not fit for this +government, I give it up on the spot; for the mere black of the nail of +my soul is dearer to me than my whole body; and I can live just as well, +simple Sancho, on bread and onions, as governor, on partridges and +capons; and what's more, while we're asleep we're all equal, great and +small, rich and poor. But if your worship looks into it, you will see it +was your worship alone that put me on to this business of governing; for +I know no more about the government of islands than a buzzard; and if +there's any reason to think that because of my being a governor the devil +will get hold of me, I'd rather go Sancho to heaven than governor to +hell." + +"By God, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for those last words thou hast +uttered alone, I consider thou deservest to be governor of a thousand +islands. Thou hast good natural instincts, without which no knowledge is +worth anything; commend thyself to God, and try not to swerve in the +pursuit of thy main object; I mean, always make it thy aim and fixed +purpose to do right in all matters that come before thee, for heaven +always helps good intentions; and now let us go to dinner, for I think my +lord and lady are waiting for us." + +Chapter XLIV. - +How Sancho Panza was conducted to his government, and of the strange +adventure that befell Don Quixote in the castle + +It is stated, they say, in the true original of this history, that when +Cide Hamete came to write this chapter, his interpreter did not translate +it as he wrote it--that is, as a kind of complaint the Moor made against +himself for having taken in hand a story so dry and of so little variety +as this of Don Quixote, for he found himself forced to speak perpetually +of him and Sancho, without venturing to indulge in digressions and +episodes more serious and more interesting. He said, too, that to go on, +mind, hand, pen always restricted to writing upon one single subject, and +speaking through the mouths of a few characters, was intolerable +drudgery, the result of which was never equal to the author's labour, and +that to avoid this he had in the First Part availed himself of the device +of novels, like "The Ill-advised Curiosity," and "The Captive Captain," +which stand, as it were, apart from the story; the others are given there +being incidents which occurred to Don Quixote himself and could not be +omitted. He also thought, he says, that many, engrossed by the interest +attaching to the exploits of Don Quixote, would take none in the novels, +and pass them over hastily or impatiently without noticing the elegance +and art of their composition, which would be very manifest were they +published by themselves and not as mere adjuncts to the crazes of Don +Quixote or the simplicities of Sancho. Therefore in this Second Part he +thought it best not to insert novels, either separate or interwoven, but +only episodes, something like them, arising out of the circumstances the +facts present; and even these sparingly, and with no more words than +suffice to make them plain; and as he confines and restricts himself to +the narrow limits of the narrative, though he has ability; capacity, and +brains enough to deal with the whole universe, he requests that his +labours may not be despised, and that credit be given him, not alone for +what he writes, but for what he has refrained from writing. + +And so he goes on with his story, saying that the day Don Quixote gave +the counsels to Sancho, the same afternoon after dinner he handed them to +him in writing so that he might get some one to read them to him. They +had scarcely, however, been given to him when he let them drop, and they +fell into the hands of the duke, who showed them to the duchess and they +were both amazed afresh at the madness and wit of Don Quixote. To carry +on the joke, then, the same evening they despatched Sancho with a large +following to the village that was to serve him for an island. It happened +that the person who had him in charge was a majordomo of the duke's, a +man of great discretion and humour--and there can be no humour without +discretion--and the same who played the part of the Countess Trifaldi in +the comical way that has been already described; and thus qualified, and +instructed by his master and mistress as to how to deal with Sancho, he +carried out their scheme admirably. Now it came to pass that as soon as +Sancho saw this majordomo he seemed in his features to recognise those of +the Trifaldi, and turning to his master, he said to him, "Senor, either +the devil will carry me off, here on this spot, righteous and believing, +or your worship will own to me that the face of this majordomo of the +duke's here is the very face of the Distressed One." + +Don Quixote regarded the majordomo attentively, and having done so, said +to Sancho, "There is no reason why the devil should carry thee off, +Sancho, either righteous or believing--and what thou meanest by that I +know not; the face of the Distressed One is that of the majordomo, but +for all that the majordomo is not the Distressed One; for his being so +would involve a mighty contradiction; but this is not the time for going +into questions of the sort, which would be involving ourselves in an +inextricable labyrinth. Believe me, my friend, we must pray earnestly to +our Lord that he deliver us both from wicked wizards and enchanters." + +"It is no joke, senor," said Sancho, "for before this I heard him speak, +and it seemed exactly as if the voice of the Trifaldi was sounding in my +ears. Well, I'll hold my peace; but I'll take care to be on the look-out +henceforth for any sign that may be seen to confirm or do away with this +suspicion." + +"Thou wilt do well, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "and thou wilt let me know +all thou discoverest, and all that befalls thee in thy government." + +Sancho at last set out attended by a great number of people. He was +dressed in the garb of a lawyer, with a gaban of tawny watered camlet +over all and a montera cap of the same material, and mounted a la gineta +upon a mule. Behind him, in accordance with the duke's orders, followed +Dapple with brand new ass-trappings and ornaments of silk, and from time +to time Sancho turned round to look at his ass, so well pleased to have +him with him that he would not have changed places with the emperor of +Germany. On taking leave he kissed the hands of the duke and duchess and +got his master's blessing, which Don Quixote gave him with tears, and he +received blubbering. + +Let worthy Sancho go in peace, and good luck to him, Gentle Reader; and +look out for two bushels of laughter, which the account of how he behaved +himself in office will give thee. In the meantime turn thy attention to +what happened his master the same night, and if thou dost not laugh +thereat, at any rate thou wilt stretch thy mouth with a grin; for Don +Quixote's adventures must be honoured either with wonder or with +laughter. + +It is recorded, then, that as soon as Sancho had gone, Don Quixote felt +his loneliness, and had it been possible for him to revoke the mandate +and take away the government from him he would have done so. The duchess +observed his dejection and asked him why he was melancholy; because, she +said, if it was for the loss of Sancho, there were squires, duennas, and +damsels in her house who would wait upon him to his full satisfaction. + +"The truth is, senora," replied Don Quixote, "that I do feel the loss of +Sancho; but that is not the main cause of my looking sad; and of all the +offers your excellence makes me, I accept only the good-will with which +they are made, and as to the remainder I entreat of your excellence to +permit and allow me alone to wait upon myself in my chamber." + +"Indeed, Senor Don Quixote," said the duchess, "that must not be; four of +my damsels, as beautiful as flowers, shall wait upon you." + +"To me," said Don Quixote, "they will not be flowers, but thorns to +pierce my heart. They, or anything like them, shall as soon enter my +chamber as fly. If your highness wishes to gratify me still further, +though I deserve it not, permit me to please myself, and wait upon myself +in my own room; for I place a barrier between my inclinations and my +virtue, and I do not wish to break this rule through the generosity your +highness is disposed to display towards me; and, in short, I will sleep +in my clothes, sooner than allow anyone to undress me." + +"Say no more, Senor Don Quixote, say no more," said the duchess; "I +assure you I will give orders that not even a fly, not to say a damsel, +shall enter your room. I am not the one to undermine the propriety of +Senor Don Quixote, for it strikes me that among his many virtues the one +that is pre-eminent is that of modesty. Your worship may undress and +dress in private and in your own way, as you please and when you please, +for there will be no one to hinder you; and in your chamber you will find +all the utensils requisite to supply the wants of one who sleeps with his +door locked, to the end that no natural needs compel you to open it. May +the great Dulcinea del Toboso live a thousand years, and may her fame +extend all over the surface of the globe, for she deserves to be loved by +a knight so valiant and so virtuous; and may kind heaven infuse zeal into +the heart of our governor Sancho Panza to finish off his discipline +speedily, so that the world may once more enjoy the beauty of so grand a +lady." + +To which Don Quixote replied, "Your highness has spoken like what you +are; from the mouth of a noble lady nothing bad can come; and Dulcinea +will be more fortunate, and better known to the world by the praise of +your highness than by all the eulogies the greatest orators on earth +could bestow upon her." + +"Well, well, Senor Don Quixote," said the duchess, is nearly supper-time, +and the duke is is probably waiting; come let us go to supper, and retire +to rest early, for the journey you made yesterday from Kandy was not such +a short one but that it must have caused you some fatigue." + +"I feel none, senora," said Don Quixote, "for I would go so far as to +swear to your excellence that in all my life I never mounted a quieter +beast, or a pleasanter paced one, than Clavileno; and I don't know what +could have induced Malambruno to discard a steed so swift and so gentle, +and burn it so recklessly as he did." + +"Probably," said the duchess, "repenting of the evil he had done to the +Trifaldi and company, and others, and the crimes he must have committed +as a wizard and enchanter, he resolved to make away with all the +instruments of his craft; and so burned Clavileno as the chief one, and +that which mainly kept him restless, wandering from land to land; and by +its ashes and the trophy of the placard the valour of the great Don +Quixote of La Mancha is established for ever." + +Don Quixote renewed his thanks to the duchess; and having supped, retired +to his chamber alone, refusing to allow anyone to enter with him to wait +on him, such was his fear of encountering temptations that might lead or +drive him to forget his chaste fidelity to his lady Dulcinea; for he had +always present to his mind the virtue of Amadis, that flower and mirror +of knights-errant. He locked the door behind him, and by the light of two +wax candles undressed himself, but as he was taking off his stockings--O +disaster unworthy of such a personage!--there came a burst, not of sighs, +or anything belying his delicacy or good breeding, but of some two dozen +stitches in one of his stockings, that made it look like a +window-lattice. The worthy gentleman was beyond measure distressed, and +at that moment he would have given an ounce of silver to have had half a +drachm of green silk there; I say green silk, because the stockings were +green. + +Here Cide Hamete exclaimed as he was writing, "O poverty, poverty! I know +not what could have possessed the great Cordovan poet to call thee 'holy +gift ungratefully received.' Although a Moor, I know well enough from the +intercourse I have had with Christians that holiness consists in charity, +humility, faith, obedience, and poverty; but for all that, I say he must +have a great deal of godliness who can find any satisfaction in being +poor; unless, indeed, it be the kind of poverty one of their greatest +saints refers to, saying, 'possess all things as though ye possessed them +not;' which is what they call poverty in spirit. But thou, that other +poverty--for it is of thee I am speaking now--why dost thou love to fall +out with gentlemen and men of good birth more than with other people? Why +dost thou compel them to smear the cracks in their shoes, and to have the +buttons of their coats, one silk, another hair, and another glass? Why +must their ruffs be always crinkled like endive leaves, and not crimped +with a crimping iron?" (From this we may perceive the antiquity of starch +and crimped ruffs.) Then he goes on: "Poor gentleman of good family! +always cockering up his honour, dining miserably and in secret, and +making a hypocrite of the toothpick with which he sallies out into the +street after eating nothing to oblige him to use it! Poor fellow, I say, +with his nervous honour, fancying they perceive a league off the patch on +his shoe, the sweat-stains on his hat, the shabbiness of his cloak, and +the hunger of his stomach!" + +All this was brought home to Don Quixote by the bursting of his stitches; +however, he comforted himself on perceiving that Sancho had left behind a +pair of travelling boots, which he resolved to wear the next day. At last +he went to bed, out of spirits and heavy at heart, as much because he +missed Sancho as because of the irreparable disaster to his stockings, +the stitches of which he would have even taken up with silk of another +colour, which is one of the greatest signs of poverty a gentleman can +show in the course of his never-failing embarrassments. He put out the +candles; but the night was warm and he could not sleep; he rose from his +bed and opened slightly a grated window that looked out on a beautiful +garden, and as he did so he perceived and heard people walking and +talking in the garden. He set himself to listen attentively, and those +below raised their voices so that he could hear these words: + +"Urge me not to sing, Emerencia, for thou knowest that ever since this +stranger entered the castle and my eyes beheld him, I cannot sing but +only weep; besides my lady is a light rather than a heavy sleeper, and I +would not for all the wealth of the world that she found us here; and +even if she were asleep and did not waken, my singing would be in vain, +if this strange AEneas, who has come into my neighbourhood to flout me, +sleeps on and wakens not to hear it." + +"Heed not that, dear Altisidora," replied a voice; "the duchess is no +doubt asleep, and everybody in the house save the lord of thy heart and +disturber of thy soul; for just now I perceived him open the grated +window of his chamber, so he must be awake; sing, my poor sufferer, in a +low sweet tone to the accompaniment of thy harp; and even if the duchess +hears us we can lay the blame on the heat of the night." + +"That is not the point, Emerencia," replied Altisidora, "it is that I +would not that my singing should lay bare my heart, and that I should be +thought a light and wanton maiden by those who know not the mighty power +of love; but come what may; better a blush on the cheeks than a sore in +the heart;" and here a harp softly touched made itself heard. As he +listened to all this Don Quixote was in a state of breathless amazement, +for immediately the countless adventures like this, with windows, +gratings, gardens, serenades, lovemakings, and languishings, that he had +read of in his trashy books of chivalry, came to his mind. He at once +concluded that some damsel of the duchess's was in love with him, and +that her modesty forced her to keep her passion secret. He trembled lest +he should fall, and made an inward resolution not to yield; and +commending himself with all his might and soul to his lady Dulcinea he +made up his mind to listen to the music; and to let them know he was +there he gave a pretended sneeze, at which the damsels were not a little +delighted, for all they wanted was that Don Quixote should hear them. So +having tuned the harp, Altisidora, running her hand across the strings, +began this ballad: + +poem{ + +O thou that art above in bed, + Between the holland sheets, +A-lying there from night till morn, + With outstretched legs asleep; + +O thou, most valiant knight of all + The famed Manchegan breed, +Of purity and virtue more + Than gold of Araby; + +Give ear unto a suffering maid, + Well-grown but evil-starr'd, +For those two suns of thine have lit + A fire within her heart. + +Adventures seeking thou dost rove, + To others bringing woe; +Thou scatterest wounds, but, ah, the balm + To heal them dost withhold! + +Say, valiant youth, and so may God + Thy enterprises speed, +Didst thou the light mid Libya's sands + Or Jaca's rocks first see? + +Did scaly serpents give thee suck? + Who nursed thee when a babe? +Wert cradled in the forest rude, + Or gloomy mountain cave? + +O Dulcinea may be proud, + That plump and lusty maid; +For she alone hath had the power + A tiger fierce to tame. + +And she for this shall famous be + From Tagus to Jarama, +From Manzanares to Genil, + From Duero to Arlanza. + +Fain would I change with her, and give + A petticoat to boot, +The best and bravest that I have, + All trimmed with gold galloon. + +O for to be the happy fair + Thy mighty arms enfold, +Or even sit beside thy bed + And scratch thy dusty poll! + +I rave,--to favours such as these + Unworthy to aspire; +Thy feet to tickle were enough + For one so mean as I. + +What caps, what slippers silver-laced, + Would I on thee bestow! +What damask breeches make for thee; + What fine long holland cloaks! + +And I would give thee pearls that should + As big as oak-galls show; +So matchless big that each might well + Be called the great "Alone." + +Manchegan Nero, look not down + From thy Tarpeian Rock +Upon this burning heart, nor add + The fuel of thy wrath. + +A virgin soft and young am I, + Not yet fifteen years old; +(I'm only three months past fourteen, + I swear upon my soul). + +I hobble not nor do I limp, + All blemish I'm without, +And as I walk my lily locks + Are trailing on the ground. + +And though my nose be rather flat, + And though my mouth be wide, +My teeth like topazes exalt + My beauty to the sky. + +Thou knowest that my voice is sweet, + That is if thou dost hear; +And I am moulded in a form + Somewhat below the mean. + +These charms, and many more, are thine, + Spoils to thy spear and bow all; +A damsel of this house am I, + By name Altisidora. + +}poem + +Here the lay of the heart-stricken Altisidora came to an end, while the +warmly wooed Don Quixote began to feel alarm; and with a deep sigh he +said to himself, "O that I should be such an unlucky knight that no +damsel can set eyes on me but falls in love with me! O that the peerless +Dulcinea should be so unfortunate that they cannot let her enjoy my +incomparable constancy in peace! What would ye with her, ye queens? Why +do ye persecute her, ye empresses? Why ye pursue her, ye virgins of from +fourteen to fifteen? Leave the unhappy being to triumph, rejoice and +glory in the lot love has been pleased to bestow upon her in surrendering +my heart and yielding up my soul to her. Ye love-smitten host, know that +to Dulcinea only I am dough and sugar-paste, flint to all others; for her +I am honey, for you aloes. For me Dulcinea alone is beautiful, wise, +virtuous, graceful, and high-bred, and all others are ill-favoured, +foolish, light, and low-born. Nature sent me into the world to be hers +and no other's; Altisidora may weep or sing, the lady for whose sake they +belaboured me in the castle of the enchanted Moor may give way to +despair, but I must be Dulcinea's, boiled or roast, pure, courteous, and +chaste, in spite of all the magic-working powers on earth." And with that +he shut the window with a bang, and, as much out of temper and out of +sorts as if some great misfortune had befallen him, stretched himself on +his bed, where we will leave him for the present, as the great Sancho +Panza, who is about to set up his famous government, now demands our +attention. + +Chapter XLV. - +Of how the great Sancho Panza took possession of his island, and of how +he made a beginning in governing + +O perpetual discoverer of the antipodes, torch of the world, eye of +heaven, sweet stimulator of the water-coolers! Thimbraeus here, Phoebus +there, now archer, now physician, father of poetry, inventor of music; +thou that always risest and, notwithstanding appearances, never settest! +To thee, O Sun, by whose aid man begetteth man, to thee I appeal to help +me and lighten the darkness of my wit that I may be able to proceed with +scrupulous exactitude in giving an account of the great Sancho Panza's +government; for without thee I feel myself weak, feeble, and uncertain. + +To come to the point, then--Sancho with all his attendants arrived at a +village of some thousand inhabitants, and one of the largest the duke +possessed. They informed him that it was called the island of Barataria, +either because the name of the village was Baratario, or because of the +joke by way of which the government had been conferred upon him. On +reaching the gates of the town, which was a walled one, the municipality +came forth to meet him, the bells rang out a peal, and the inhabitants +showed every sign of general satisfaction; and with great pomp they +conducted him to the principal church to give thanks to God, and then +with burlesque ceremonies they presented him with the keys of the town, +and acknowledged him as perpetual governor of the island of Barataria. +The costume, the beard, and the fat squat figure of the new governor +astonished all those who were not in the secret, and even all who were, +and they were not a few. Finally, leading him out of the church they +carried him to the judgment seat and seated him on it, and the duke's +majordomo said to him, "It is an ancient custom in this island, senor +governor, that he who comes to take possession of this famous island is +bound to answer a question which shall be put to him, and which must be a +somewhat knotty and difficult one; and by his answer the people take the +measure of their new governor's wit, and hail with joy or deplore his +arrival accordingly." + +While the majordomo was making this speech Sancho was gazing at several +large letters inscribed on the wall opposite his seat, and as he could +not read he asked what that was that was painted on the wall. The answer +was, "Senor, there is written and recorded the day on which your lordship +took possession of this island, and the inscription says, 'This day, the +so-and-so of such-and-such a month and year, Senor Don Sancho Panza took +possession of this island; many years may he enjoy it.'" + +"And whom do they call Don Sancho Panza?" asked Sancho. + +"Your lordship," replied the majordomo; "for no other Panza but the one +who is now seated in that chair has ever entered this island." + +"Well then, let me tell you, brother," said Sancho, "I haven't got the +'Don,' nor has any one of my family ever had it; my name is plain Sancho +Panza, and Sancho was my father's name, and Sancho was my grandfather's +and they were all Panzas, without any Dons or Donas tacked on; I suspect +that in this island there are more Dons than stones; but never mind; God +knows what I mean, and maybe if my government lasts four days I'll weed +out these Dons that no doubt are as great a nuisance as the midges, +they're so plenty. Let the majordomo go on with his question, and I'll +give the best answer I can, whether the people deplore or not." + +At this instant there came into court two old men, one carrying a cane by +way of a walking-stick, and the one who had no stick said, "Senor, some +time ago I lent this good man ten gold-crowns in gold to gratify him and +do him a service, on the condition that he was to return them to me +whenever I should ask for them. A long time passed before I asked for +them, for I would not put him to any greater straits to return them than +he was in when I lent them to him; but thinking he was growing careless +about payment I asked for them once and several times; and not only will +he not give them back, but he denies that he owes them, and says I never +lent him any such crowns; or if I did, that he repaid them; and I have no +witnesses either of the loan, or the payment, for he never paid me; I +want your worship to put him to his oath, and if he swears he returned +them to me I forgive him the debt here and before God." + +"What say you to this, good old man, you with the stick?" said Sancho. + +To which the old man replied, "I admit, senor, that he lent them to me; +but let your worship lower your staff, and as he leaves it to my oath, +I'll swear that I gave them back, and paid him really and truly." + +The governor lowered the staff, and as he did so the old man who had the +stick handed it to the other old man to hold for him while he swore, as +if he found it in his way; and then laid his hand on the cross of the +staff, saying that it was true the ten crowns that were demanded of him +had been lent him; but that he had with his own hand given them back into +the hand of the other, and that he, not recollecting it, was always +asking for them. + +Seeing this the great governor asked the creditor what answer he had to +make to what his opponent said. He said that no doubt his debtor had told +the truth, for he believed him to be an honest man and a good Christian, +and he himself must have forgotten when and how he had given him back the +crowns; and that from that time forth he would make no further demand +upon him. + +The debtor took his stick again, and bowing his head left the court. +Observing this, and how, without another word, he made off, and observing +too the resignation of the plaintiff, Sancho buried his head in his bosom +and remained for a short space in deep thought, with the forefinger of +his right hand on his brow and nose; then he raised his head and bade +them call back the old man with the stick, for he had already taken his +departure. They brought him back, and as soon as Sancho saw him he said, +"Honest man, give me that stick, for I want it." + +"Willingly," said the old man; "here it is senor," and he put it into his +hand. + +Sancho took it and, handing it to the other old man, said to him, "Go, +and God be with you; for now you are paid." + +"I, senor!" returned the old man; "why, is this cane worth ten +gold-crowns?" + +"Yes," said the governor, "or if not I am the greatest dolt in the world; +now you will see whether I have got the headpiece to govern a whole +kingdom;" and he ordered the cane to be broken in two, there, in the +presence of all. It was done, and in the middle of it they found ten +gold-crowns. All were filled with amazement, and looked upon their +governor as another Solomon. They asked him how he had come to the +conclusion that the ten crowns were in the cane; he replied, that +observing how the old man who swore gave the stick to his opponent while +he was taking the oath, and swore that he had really and truly given him +the crowns, and how as soon as he had done swearing he asked for the +stick again, it came into his head that the sum demanded must be inside +it; and from this he said it might be seen that God sometimes guides +those who govern in their judgments, even though they may be fools; +besides he had himself heard the curate of his village mention just such +another case, and he had so good a memory, that if it was not that he +forgot everything he wished to remember, there would not be such a memory +in all the island. To conclude, the old men went off, one crestfallen, +and the other in high contentment, all who were present were astonished, +and he who was recording the words, deeds, and movements of Sancho could +not make up his mind whether he was to look upon him and set him down as +a fool or as a man of sense. + +As soon as this case was disposed of, there came into court a woman +holding on with a tight grip to a man dressed like a well-to-do cattle +dealer, and she came forward making a great outcry and exclaiming, +"Justice, senor governor, justice! and if I don't get it on earth I'll go +look for it in heaven. Senor governor of my soul, this wicked man caught +me in the middle of the fields here and used my body as if it was an +ill-washed rag, and, woe is me! got from me what I had kept these +three-and-twenty years and more, defending it against Moors and +Christians, natives and strangers; and I always as hard as an oak, and +keeping myself as pure as a salamander in the fire, or wool among the +brambles, for this good fellow to come now with clean hands to handle +me!" + +"It remains to be proved whether this gallant has clean hands or not," +said Sancho; and turning to the man he asked him what he had to say in +answer to the woman's charge. + +He all in confusion made answer, "Sirs, I am a poor pig dealer, and this +morning I left the village to sell (saving your presence) four pigs, and +between dues and cribbings they got out of me little less than the worth +of them. As I was returning to my village I fell in on the road with this +good dame, and the devil who makes a coil and a mess out of everything, +yoked us together. I paid her fairly, but she not contented laid hold of +me and never let go until she brought me here; she says I forced her, but +she lies by the oath I swear or am ready to swear; and this is the whole +truth and every particle of it." + +The governor on this asked him if he had any money in silver about him; +he said he had about twenty ducats in a leather purse in his bosom. The +governor bade him take it out and hand it to the complainant; he obeyed +trembling; the woman took it, and making a thousand salaams to all and +praying to God for the long life and health of the senor governor who had +such regard for distressed orphans and virgins, she hurried out of court +with the purse grasped in both her hands, first looking, however, to see +if the money it contained was silver. + +As soon as she was gone Sancho said to the cattle dealer, whose tears +were already starting and whose eyes and heart were following his purse, +"Good fellow, go after that woman and take the purse from her, by force +even, and come back with it here;" and he did not say it to one who was a +fool or deaf, for the man was off like a flash of lightning, and ran to +do as he was bid. + +All the bystanders waited anxiously to see the end of the case, and +presently both man and woman came back at even closer grips than before, +she with her petticoat up and the purse in the lap of it, and he +struggling hard to take it from her, but all to no purpose, so stout was +the woman's defence, she all the while crying out, "Justice from God and +the world! see here, senor governor, the shamelessness and boldness of +this villain, who in the middle of the town, in the middle of the street, +wanted to take from me the purse your worship bade him give me." + +"And did he take it?" asked the governor. + +"Take it!" said the woman; "I'd let my life be taken from me sooner than +the purse. A pretty child I'd be! It's another sort of cat they must +throw in my face, and not that poor scurvy knave. Pincers and hammers, +mallets and chisels would not get it out of my grip; no, nor lions' +claws; the soul from out of my body first!" + +"She is right," said the man; "I own myself beaten and powerless; I +confess I haven't the strength to take it from her;" and he let go his +hold of her. + +Upon this the governor said to the woman, "Let me see that purse, my +worthy and sturdy friend." She handed it to him at once, and the governor +returned it to the man, and said to the unforced mistress of force, +"Sister, if you had shown as much, or only half as much, spirit and +vigour in defending your body as you have shown in defending that purse, +the strength of Hercules could not have forced you. Be off, and God speed +you, and bad luck to you, and don't show your face in all this island, or +within six leagues of it on any side, under pain of two hundred lashes; +be off at once, I say, you shameless, cheating shrew." + +The woman was cowed and went off disconsolately, hanging her head; and +the governor said to the man, "Honest man, go home with your money, and +God speed you; and for the future, if you don't want to lose it, see that +you don't take it into your head to yoke with anybody." The man thanked +him as clumsily as he could and went his way, and the bystanders were +again filled with admiration at their new governor's judgments and +sentences. + +Next, two men, one apparently a farm labourer, and the other a tailor, +for he had a pair of shears in his hand, presented themselves before him, +and the tailor said, "Senor governor, this labourer and I come before +your worship by reason of this honest man coming to my shop yesterday +(for saving everybody's presence I'm a passed tailor, God be thanked), +and putting a piece of cloth into my hands and asking me, 'Senor, will +there be enough in this cloth to make me a cap?' Measuring the cloth I +said there would. He probably suspected--as I supposed, and I supposed +right--that I wanted to steal some of the cloth, led to think so by his +own roguery and the bad opinion people have of tailors; and he told me to +see if there would be enough for two. I guessed what he would be at, and +I said 'yes.' He, still following up his original unworthy notion, went +on adding cap after cap, and I 'yes' after 'yes,' until we got as far as +five. He has just this moment come for them; I gave them to him, but he +won't pay me for the making; on the contrary, he calls upon me to pay +him, or else return his cloth." + +"Is all this true, brother?" said Sancho. + +"Yes," replied the man; "but will your worship make him show the five +caps he has made me?" + +"With all my heart," said the tailor; and drawing his hand from under his +cloak he showed five caps stuck upon the five fingers of it, and said, +"there are the caps this good man asks for; and by God and upon my +conscience I haven't a scrap of cloth left, and I'll let the work be +examined by the inspectors of the trade." + +All present laughed at the number of caps and the novelty of the suit; +Sancho set himself to think for a moment, and then said, "It seems to me +that in this case it is not necessary to deliver long-winded arguments, +but only to give off-hand the judgment of an honest man; and so my +decision is that the tailor lose the making and the labourer the cloth, +and that the caps go to the prisoners in the gaol, and let there be no +more about it." + +If the previous decision about the cattle dealer's purse excited the +admiration of the bystanders, this provoked their laughter; however, the +governor's orders were after all executed. All this, having been taken +down by his chronicler, was at once despatched to the duke, who was +looking out for it with great eagerness; and here let us leave the good +Sancho; for his master, sorely troubled in mind by Altisidora's music, +has pressing claims upon us now. + +Chapter XLVI. - +Of the terrible bell and cat fright that Don Quixote got in the course of +the enamoured Altisidora's wooing + +We left Don Quixote wrapped up in the reflections which the music of the +enamourned maid Altisidora had given rise to. He went to bed with them, +and just like fleas they would not let him sleep or get a moment's rest, +and the broken stitches of his stockings helped them. But as Time is +fleet and no obstacle can stay his course, he came riding on the hours, +and morning very soon arrived. Seeing which Don Quixote quitted the soft +down, and, nowise slothful, dressed himself in his chamois suit and put +on his travelling boots to hide the disaster to his stockings. He threw +over him his scarlet mantle, put on his head a montera of green velvet +trimmed with silver edging, flung across his shoulder the baldric with +his good trenchant sword, took up a large rosary that he always carried +with him, and with great solemnity and precision of gait proceeded to the +antechamber where the duke and duchess were already dressed and waiting +for him. But as he passed through a gallery, Altisidora and the other +damsel, her friend, were lying in wait for him, and the instant +Altisidora saw him she pretended to faint, while her friend caught her in +her lap, and began hastily unlacing the bosom of her dress. + +Don Quixote observed it, and approaching them said, "I know very well +what this seizure arises from." + +"I know not from what," replied the friend, "for Altisidora is the +healthiest damsel in all this house, and I have never heard her complain +all the time I have known her. A plague on all the knights-errant in the +world, if they be all ungrateful! Go away, Senor Don Quixote; for this +poor child will not come to herself again so long as you are here." + +To which Don Quixote returned, "Do me the favour, senora, to let a lute +be placed in my chamber to-night; and I will comfort this poor maiden to +the best of my power; for in the early stages of love a prompt +disillusion is an approved remedy;" and with this he retired, so as not +to be remarked by any who might see him there. + +He had scarcely withdrawn when Altisidora, recovering from her swoon, +said to her companion, "The lute must be left, for no doubt Don Quixote +intends to give us some music; and being his it will not be bad." + +They went at once to inform the duchess of what was going on, and of the +lute Don Quixote asked for, and she, delighted beyond measure, plotted +with the duke and her two damsels to play him a trick that should be +amusing but harmless; and in high glee they waited for night, which came +quickly as the day had come; and as for the day, the duke and duchess +spent it in charming conversation with Don Quixote. + +When eleven o'clock came, Don Quixote found a guitar in his chamber; he +tried it, opened the window, and perceived that some persons were walking +in the garden; and having passed his fingers over the frets of the guitar +and tuned it as well as he could, he spat and cleared his chest, and then +with a voice a little hoarse but full-toned, he sang the following +ballad, which he had himself that day composed: + +poem{ + +Mighty Love the hearts of maidens + Doth unsettle and perplex, +And the instrument he uses + Most of all is idleness. + +Sewing, stitching, any labour, + Having always work to do, +To the poison Love instilleth + Is the antidote most sure. + +And to proper-minded maidens + Who desire the matron's name +Modesty's a marriage portion, + Modesty their highest praise. + +Men of prudence and discretion, + Courtiers gay and gallant knights, +With the wanton damsels dally, + But the modest take to wife. + +There are passions, transient, fleeting, + Loves in hostelries declar'd, +Sunrise loves, with sunset ended, + When the guest hath gone his way. + +Love that springs up swift and sudden, + Here to-day, to-morrow flown, +Passes, leaves no trace behind it, + Leaves no image on the soul. + +Painting that is laid on painting + Maketh no display or show; +Where one beauty's in possession + There no other can take hold. + +Dulcinea del Toboso + Painted on my heart I wear; +Never from its tablets, never, + Can her image be eras'd. + +The quality of all in lovers + Most esteemed is constancy; +'T is by this that love works wonders, + This exalts them to the skies. + +}poem + +Don Quixote had got so far with his song, to which the duke, the duchess, +Altisidora, and nearly the whole household of the castle were listening, +when all of a sudden from a gallery above that was exactly over his +window they let down a cord with more than a hundred bells attached to +it, and immediately after that discharged a great sack full of cats, +which also had bells of smaller size tied to their tails. Such was the +din of the bells and the squalling of the cats, that though the duke and +duchess were the contrivers of the joke they were startled by it, while +Don Quixote stood paralysed with fear; and as luck would have it, two or +three of the cats made their way in through the grating of his chamber, +and flying from one side to the other, made it seem as if there was a +legion of devils at large in it. They extinguished the candles that were +burning in the room, and rushed about seeking some way of escape; the +cord with the large bells never ceased rising and falling; and most of +the people of the castle, not knowing what was really the matter, were at +their wits' end with astonishment. Don Quixote sprang to his feet, and +drawing his sword, began making passes at the grating, shouting out, +"Avaunt, malignant enchanters! avaunt, ye witchcraft-working rabble! I am +Don Quixote of La Mancha, against whom your evil machinations avail not +nor have any power." And turning upon the cats that were running about +the room, he made several cuts at them. They dashed at the grating and +escaped by it, save one that, finding itself hard pressed by the slashes +of Don Quixote's sword, flew at his face and held on to his nose tooth +and nail, with the pain of which he began to shout his loudest. The duke +and duchess hearing this, and guessing what it was, ran with all haste to +his room, and as the poor gentleman was striving with all his might to +detach the cat from his face, they opened the door with a master-key and +went in with lights and witnessed the unequal combat. The duke ran +forward to part the combatants, but Don Quixote cried out aloud, "Let no +one take him from me; leave me hand to hand with this demon, this wizard, +this enchanter; I will teach him, I myself, who Don Quixote of La Mancha +is." The cat, however, never minding these threats, snarled and held on; +but at last the duke pulled it off and flung it out of the window. Don +Quixote was left with a face as full of holes as a sieve and a nose not +in very good condition, and greatly vexed that they did not let him +finish the battle he had been so stoutly fighting with that villain of an +enchanter. They sent for some oil of John's wort, and Altisidora herself +with her own fair hands bandaged all the wounded parts; and as she did so +she said to him in a low voice. "All these mishaps have befallen thee, +hardhearted knight, for the sin of thy insensibility and obstinacy; and +God grant thy squire Sancho may forget to whip himself, so that that +dearly beloved Dulcinea of thine may never be released from her +enchantment, that thou mayest never come to her bed, at least while I who +adore thee am alive." + +To all this Don Quixote made no answer except to heave deep sighs, and +then stretched himself on his bed, thanking the duke and duchess for +their kindness, not because he stood in any fear of that bell-ringing +rabble of enchanters in cat shape, but because he recognised their good +intentions in coming to his rescue. The duke and duchess left him to +repose and withdrew greatly grieved at the unfortunate result of the +joke; as they never thought the adventure would have fallen so heavy on +Don Quixote or cost him so dear, for it cost him five days of confinement +to his bed, during which he had another adventure, pleasanter than the +late one, which his chronicler will not relate just now in order that he +may turn his attention to Sancho Panza, who was proceeding with great +diligence and drollery in his government. + +Chapter XLVII. - +Wherein is continued the account of how Sancho Panza conducted himself in +his government + +The history says that from the justice court they carried Sancho to a +sumptuous palace, where in a spacious chamber there was a table laid out +with royal magnificence. The clarions sounded as Sancho entered the room, +and four pages came forward to present him with water for his hands, +which Sancho received with great dignity. The music ceased, and Sancho +seated himself at the head of the table, for there was only that seat +placed, and no more than one cover laid. A personage, who it appeared +afterwards was a physician, placed himself standing by his side with a +whalebone wand in his hand. They then lifted up a fine white cloth +covering fruit and a great variety of dishes of different sorts; one who +looked like a student said grace, and a page put a laced bib on Sancho, +while another who played the part of head carver placed a dish of fruit +before him. But hardly had he tasted a morsel when the man with the wand +touched the plate with it, and they took it away from before him with the +utmost celerity. The carver, however, brought him another dish, and +Sancho proceeded to try it; but before he could get at it, not to say +taste it, already the wand had touched it and a page had carried it off +with the same promptitude as the fruit. Sancho seeing this was puzzled, +and looking from one to another asked if this dinner was to be eaten +after the fashion of a jugglery trick. + +To this he with the wand replied, "It is not to be eaten, senor governor, +except as is usual and customary in other islands where there are +governors. I, senor, am a physician, and I am paid a salary in this +island to serve its governors as such, and I have a much greater regard +for their health than for my own, studying day and night and making +myself acquainted with the governor's constitution, in order to be able +to cure him when he falls sick. The chief thing I have to do is to attend +at his dinners and suppers and allow him to eat what appears to me to be +fit for him, and keep from him what I think will do him harm and be +injurious to his stomach; and therefore I ordered that plate of fruit to +be removed as being too moist, and that other dish I ordered to be +removed as being too hot and containing many spices that stimulate +thirst; for he who drinks much kills and consumes the radical moisture +wherein life consists." + +"Well then," said Sancho, "that dish of roast partridges there that seems +so savoury will not do me any harm." + +To this the physician replied, "Of those my lord the governor shall not +eat so long as I live." + +"Why so?" said Sancho. + +"Because," replied the doctor, "our master Hippocrates, the polestar and +beacon of medicine, says in one of his aphorisms omnis saturatio mala, +perdicis autem pessima, which means 'all repletion is bad, but that of +partridge is the worst of all." + +"In that case," said Sancho, "let senor doctor see among the dishes that +are on the table what will do me most good and least harm, and let me eat +it, without tapping it with his stick; for by the life of the governor, +and so may God suffer me to enjoy it, but I'm dying of hunger; and in +spite of the doctor and all he may say, to deny me food is the way to +take my life instead of prolonging it." + +"Your worship is right, senor governor," said the physician; "and +therefore your worship, I consider, should not eat of those stewed +rabbits there, because it is a furry kind of food; if that veal were not +roasted and served with pickles, you might try it; but it is out of the +question." + +"That big dish that is smoking farther off," said Sancho, "seems to me to +be an olla podrida, and out of the diversity of things in such ollas, I +can't fail to light upon something tasty and good for me." + +"Absit," said the doctor; "far from us be any such base thought! There is +nothing in the world less nourishing than an olla podrida; to canons, or +rectors of colleges, or peasants' weddings with your ollas podridas, but +let us have none of them on the tables of governors, where everything +that is present should be delicate and refined; and the reason is, that +always, everywhere and by everybody, simple medicines are more esteemed +than compound ones, for we cannot go wrong in those that are simple, +while in the compound we may, by merely altering the quantity of the +things composing them. But what I am of opinion the governor should cat +now in order to preserve and fortify his health is a hundred or so of +wafer cakes and a few thin slices of conserve of quinces, which will +settle his stomach and help his digestion." + +Sancho on hearing this threw himself back in his chair and surveyed the +doctor steadily, and in a solemn tone asked him what his name was and +where he had studied. + +He replied, "My name, senor governor, is Doctor Pedro Recio de Aguero I +am a native of a place called Tirteafuera which lies between Caracuel and +Almodovar del Campo, on the right-hand side, and I have the degree of +doctor from the university of Osuna." + +To which Sancho, glowing all over with rage, returned, "Then let Doctor +Pedro Recio de Malaguero, native of Tirteafuera, a place that's on the +right-hand side as we go from Caracuel to Almodovar del Campo, graduate +of Osuna, get out of my presence at once; or I swear by the sun I'll take +a cudgel, and by dint of blows, beginning with him, I'll not leave a +doctor in the whole island; at least of those I know to be ignorant; for +as to learned, wise, sensible physicians, them I will reverence and +honour as divine persons. Once more I say let Pedro Recio get out of this +or I'll take this chair I am sitting on and break it over his head. And +if they call me to account for it, I'll clear myself by saying I served +God in killing a bad doctor--a general executioner. And now give me +something to eat, or else take your government; for a trade that does not +feed its master is not worth two beans." + +The doctor was dismayed when he saw the governor in such a passion, and +he would have made a Tirteafuera out of the room but that the same +instant a post-horn sounded in the street; and the carver putting his +head out of the window turned round and said, "It's a courier from my +lord the duke, no doubt with some despatch of importance." + +The courier came in all sweating and flurried, and taking a paper from +his bosom, placed it in the governor's hands. Sancho handed it to the +majordomo and bade him read the superscription, which ran thus: To Don +Sancho Panza, Governor of the Island of Barataria, into his own hands or +those of his secretary. Sancho when he heard this said, "Which of you is +my secretary?" "I am, senor," said one of those present, "for I can read +and write, and am a Biscayan." "With that addition," said Sancho, "you +might be secretary to the emperor himself; open this paper and see what +it says." The new-born secretary obeyed, and having read the contents +said the matter was one to be discussed in private. Sancho ordered the +chamber to be cleared, the majordomo and the carver only remaining; so +the doctor and the others withdrew, and then the secretary read the +letter, which was as follows: + +It has come to my knowledge, Senor Don Sancho Panza, that certain enemies +of mine and of the island are about to make a furious attack upon it some +night, I know not when. It behoves you to be on the alert and keep watch, +that they surprise you not. I also know by trustworthy spies that four +persons have entered the town in disguise in order to take your life, +because they stand in dread of your great capacity; keep your eyes open +and take heed who approaches you to address you, and eat nothing that is +presented to you. I will take care to send you aid if you find yourself +in difficulty, but in all things you will act as may be expected of your +judgment. From this place, the Sixteenth of August, at four in the +morning. + +Your friend, + +THE DUKE + +Sancho was astonished, and those who stood by made believe to be so too, +and turning to the majordomo he said to him, "What we have got to do +first, and it must be done at once, is to put Doctor Recio in the +lock-up; for if anyone wants to kill me it is he, and by a slow death and +the worst of all, which is hunger." + +"Likewise," said the carver, "it is my opinion your worship should not +eat anything that is on this table, for the whole was a present from some +nuns; and as they say, 'behind the cross there's the devil.'" + +"I don't deny it," said Sancho; "so for the present give me a piece of +bread and four pounds or so of grapes; no poison can come in them; for +the fact is I can't go on without eating; and if we are to be prepared +for these battles that are threatening us we must be well provisioned; +for it is the tripes that carry the heart and not the heart the tripes. +And you, secretary, answer my lord the duke and tell him that all his +commands shall be obeyed to the letter, as he directs; and say from me to +my lady the duchess that I kiss her hands, and that I beg of her not to +forget to send my letter and bundle to my wife Teresa Panza by a +messenger; and I will take it as a great favour and will not fail to +serve her in all that may lie within my power; and as you are about it +you may enclose a kiss of the hand to my master Don Quixote that he may +see I am grateful bread; and as a good secretary and a good Biscayan you +may add whatever you like and whatever will come in best; and now take +away this cloth and give me something to eat, and I'll be ready to meet +all the spies and assassins and enchanters that may come against me or my +island." + +At this instant a page entered saying, "Here is a farmer on business, who +wants to speak to your lordship on a matter of great importance, he +says." + +"It's very odd," said Sancho, "the ways of these men on business; is it +possible they can be such fools as not to see that an hour like this is +no hour for coming on business? We who govern and we who are judges--are +we not men of flesh and blood, and are we not to be allowed the time +required for taking rest, unless they'd have us made of marble? By God +and on my conscience, if the government remains in my hands (which I have +a notion it won't), I'll bring more than one man on business to order. +However, tell this good man to come in; but take care first of all that +he is not some spy or one of my assassins." + +"No, my lord," said the page, "for he looks like a simple fellow, and +either I know very little or he is as good as good bread." + +"There is nothing to be afraid of," said the majordomo, "for we are all +here." + +"Would it be possible, carver," said Sancho, "now that Doctor Pedro Recio +is not here, to let me eat something solid and substantial, if it were +even a piece of bread and an onion?" + +"To-night at supper," said the carver, "the shortcomings of the dinner +shall be made good, and your lordship shall be fully contented." + +"God grant it," said Sancho. + +The farmer now came in, a well-favoured man that one might see a thousand +leagues off was an honest fellow and a good soul. The first thing he said +was, "Which is the lord governor here?" + +"Which should it be," said the secretary, "but he who is seated in the +chair?" + +"Then I humble myself before him," said the farmer; and going on his +knees he asked for his hand, to kiss it. Sancho refused it, and bade him +stand up and say what he wanted. The farmer obeyed, and then said, "I am +a farmer, senor, a native of Miguelturra, a village two leagues from +Ciudad Real." + +"Another Tirteafuera!" said Sancho; "say on, brother; I know Miguelturra +very well I can tell you, for it's not very far from my own town." + +"The case is this, senor," continued the farmer, "that by God's mercy I +am married with the leave and licence of the holy Roman Catholic Church; +I have two sons, students, and the younger is studying to become +bachelor, and the elder to be licentiate; I am a widower, for my wife +died, or more properly speaking, a bad doctor killed her on my hands, +giving her a purge when she was with child; and if it had pleased God +that the child had been born, and was a boy, I would have put him to +study for doctor, that he might not envy his brothers the bachelor and +the licentiate." + +"So that if your wife had not died, or had not been killed, you would not +now be a widower," said Sancho. + +"No, senor, certainly not," said the farmer. + +"We've got that much settled," said Sancho; "get on, brother, for it's +more bed-time than business-time." + +"Well then," said the farmer, "this son of mine who is going to be a +bachelor, fell in love in the said town with a damsel called Clara +Perlerina, daughter of Andres Perlerino, a very rich farmer; and this +name of Perlerines does not come to them by ancestry or descent, but +because all the family are paralytics, and for a better name they call +them Perlerines; though to tell the truth the damsel is as fair as an +Oriental pearl, and like a flower of the field, if you look at her on the +right side; on the left not so much, for on that side she wants an eye +that she lost by small-pox; and though her face is thickly and deeply +pitted, those who love her say they are not pits that are there, but the +graves where the hearts of her lovers are buried. She is so cleanly that +not to soil her face she carries her nose turned up, as they say, so that +one would fancy it was running away from her mouth; and with all this she +looks extremely well, for she has a wide mouth; and but for wanting ten +or a dozen teeth and grinders she might compare and compete with the +comeliest. Of her lips I say nothing, for they are so fine and thin that, +if lips might be reeled, one might make a skein of them; but being of a +different colour from ordinary lips they are wonderful, for they are +mottled, blue, green, and purple--let my lord the governor pardon me for +painting so minutely the charms of her who some time or other will be my +daughter; for I love her, and I don't find her amiss." + +"Paint what you will," said Sancho; "I enjoy your painting, and if I had +dined there could be no dessert more to my taste than your portrait." + +"That I have still to furnish," said the farmer; "but a time will come +when we may be able if we are not now; and I can tell you, senor, if I +could paint her gracefulness and her tall figure, it would astonish you; +but that is impossible because she is bent double with her knees up to +her mouth; but for all that it is easy to see that if she could stand up +she'd knock her head against the ceiling; and she would have given her +hand to my bachelor ere this, only that she can't stretch it out, for +it's contracted; but still one can see its elegance and fine make by its +long furrowed nails." + +"That will do, brother," said Sancho; "consider you have painted her from +head to foot; what is it you want now? Come to the point without all this +beating about the bush, and all these scraps and additions." + +"I want your worship, senor," said the farmer, "to do me the favour of +giving me a letter of recommendation to the girl's father, begging him to +be so good as to let this marriage take place, as we are not ill-matched +either in the gifts of fortune or of nature; for to tell the truth, senor +governor, my son is possessed of a devil, and there is not a day but the +evil spirits torment him three or four times; and from having once fallen +into the fire, he has his face puckered up like a piece of parchment, and +his eyes watery and always running; but he has the disposition of an +angel, and if it was not for belabouring and pummelling himself he'd be a +saint." + +"Is there anything else you want, good man?" said Sancho. + +"There's another thing I'd like," said the farmer, "but I'm afraid to +mention it; however, out it must; for after all I can't let it be rotting +in my breast, come what may. I mean, senor, that I'd like your worship to +give me three hundred or six hundred ducats as a help to my bachelor's +portion, to help him in setting up house; for they must, in short, live +by themselves, without being subject to the interferences of their +fathers-in-law." + +"Just see if there's anything else you'd like," said Sancho, "and don't +hold back from mentioning it out of bashfulness or modesty." + +"No, indeed there is not," said the farmer. + +The moment he said this the governor started to his feet, and seizing the +chair he had been sitting on exclaimed, "By all that's good, you +ill-bred, boorish Don Bumpkin, if you don't get out of this at once and +hide yourself from my sight, I'll lay your head open with this chair. You +whoreson rascal, you devil's own painter, and is it at this hour you come +to ask me for six hundred ducats! How should I have them, you stinking +brute? And why should I give them to you if I had them, you knave and +blockhead? What have I to do with Miguelturra or the whole family of the +Perlerines? Get out I say, or by the life of my lord the duke I'll do as +I said. You're not from Miguelturra, but some knave sent here from hell +to tempt me. Why, you villain, I have not yet had the government half a +day, and you want me to have six hundred ducats already!" + +The carver made signs to the farmer to leave the room, which he did with +his head down, and to all appearance in terror lest the governor should +carry his threats into effect, for the rogue knew very well how to play +his part. + +But let us leave Sancho in his wrath, and peace be with them all; and let +us return to Don Quixote, whom we left with his face bandaged and +doctored after the cat wounds, of which he was not cured for eight days; +and on one of these there befell him what Cide Hamete promises to relate +with that exactitude and truth with which he is wont to set forth +everything connected with this great history, however minute it may be. + +Chapter XLVIII. - +Of what befell Don Quixote with Dona Rodriguez, the Duchess's Duenna, +together with other occurrences worthy of record and eternal remembrance + +Exceedingly moody and dejected was the sorely wounded Don Quixote, with +his face bandaged and marked, not by the hand of God, but by the claws of +a cat, mishaps incidental to knight-errantry. + +Six days he remained without appearing in public, and one night as he lay +awake thinking of his misfortunes and of Altisidora's pursuit of him, he +perceived that some one was opening the door of his room with a key, and +he at once made up his mind that the enamoured damsel was coming to make +an assault upon his chastity and put him in danger of failing in the +fidelity he owed to his lady Dulcinea del Toboso. "No," said he, firmly +persuaded of the truth of his idea (and he said it loud enough to be +heard), "the greatest beauty upon earth shall not avail to make me +renounce my adoration of her whom I bear stamped and graved in the core +of my heart and the secret depths of my bowels; be thou, lady mine, +transformed into a clumsy country wench, or into a nymph of golden Tagus +weaving a web of silk and gold, let Merlin or Montesinos hold thee +captive where they will; whereer thou art, thou art mine, and where'er I +am, must be thine." The very instant he had uttered these words, the door +opened. He stood up on the bed wrapped from head to foot in a yellow +satin coverlet, with a cap on his head, and his face and his moustaches +tied up, his face because of the scratches, and his moustaches to keep +them from drooping and falling down, in which trim he looked the most +extraordinary scarecrow that could be conceived. He kept his eyes fixed +on the door, and just as he was expecting to see the love-smitten and +unhappy Altisidora make her appearance, he saw coming in a most venerable +duenna, in a long white-bordered veil that covered and enveloped her from +head to foot. Between the fingers of her left hand she held a short +lighted candle, while with her right she shaded it to keep the light from +her eyes, which were covered by spectacles of great size, and she +advanced with noiseless steps, treading very softly. + +Don Quixote kept an eye upon her from his watchtower, and observing her +costume and noting her silence, he concluded that it must be some witch +or sorceress that was coming in such a guise to work him some mischief, +and he began crossing himself at a great rate. The spectre still +advanced, and on reaching the middle of the room, looked up and saw the +energy with which Don Quixote was crossing himself; and if he was scared +by seeing such a figure as hers, she was terrified at the sight of his; +for the moment she saw his tall yellow form with the coverlet and the +bandages that disfigured him, she gave a loud scream, and exclaiming, +"Jesus! what's this I see?" let fall the candle in her fright, and then +finding herself in the dark, turned about to make off, but stumbling on +her skirts in her consternation, she measured her length with a mighty +fall. + +Don Quixote in his trepidation began saying, "I conjure thee, phantom, or +whatever thou art, tell me what thou art and what thou wouldst with me. +If thou art a soul in torment, say so, and all that my powers can do I +will do for thee; for I am a Catholic Christian and love to do good to +all the world, and to this end I have embraced the order of +knight-errantry to which I belong, the province of which extends to doing +good even to souls in purgatory." + +The unfortunate duenna hearing herself thus conjured, by her own fear +guessed Don Quixote's and in a low plaintive voice answered, "Senor Don +Quixote--if so be you are indeed Don Quixote--I am no phantom or spectre +or soul in purgatory, as you seem to think, but Dona Rodriguez, duenna of +honour to my lady the duchess, and I come to you with one of those +grievances your worship is wont to redress." + +"Tell me, Senora Dona Rodriguez," said Don Quixote, "do you perchance +come to transact any go-between business? Because I must tell you I am +not available for anybody's purpose, thanks to the peerless beauty of my +lady Dulcinea del Toboso. In short, Senora Dona Rodriguez, if you will +leave out and put aside all love messages, you may go and light your +candle and come back, and we will discuss all the commands you have for +me and whatever you wish, saving only, as I said, all seductive +communications." + +"I carry nobody's messages, senor," said the duenna; "little you know me. +Nay, I'm not far enough advanced in years to take to any such childish +tricks. God be praised I have a soul in my body still, and all my teeth +and grinders in my mouth, except one or two that the colds, so common in +this Aragon country, have robbed me of. But wait a little, while I go and +light my candle, and I will return immediately and lay my sorrows before +you as before one who relieves those of all the world;" and without +staying for an answer she quitted the room and left Don Quixote +tranquilly meditating while he waited for her. A thousand thoughts at +once suggested themselves to him on the subject of this new adventure, +and it struck him as being ill done and worse advised in him to expose +himself to the danger of breaking his plighted faith to his lady; and +said he to himself, "Who knows but that the devil, being wily and +cunning, may be trying now to entrap me with a duenna, having failed with +empresses, queens, duchesses, marchionesses, and countesses? Many a time +have I heard it said by many a man of sense that he will sooner offer you +a flat-nosed wench than a roman-nosed one; and who knows but this +privacy, this opportunity, this silence, may awaken my sleeping desires, +and lead me in these my latter years to fall where I have never tripped? +In cases of this sort it is better to flee than to await the battle. But +I must be out of my senses to think and utter such nonsense; for it is +impossible that a long, white-hooded spectacled duenna could stir up or +excite a wanton thought in the most graceless bosom in the world. Is +there a duenna on earth that has fair flesh? Is there a duenna in the +world that escapes being ill-tempered, wrinkled, and prudish? Avaunt, +then, ye duenna crew, undelightful to all mankind. Oh, but that lady did +well who, they say, had at the end of her reception room a couple of +figures of duennas with spectacles and lace-cushions, as if at work, and +those statues served quite as well to give an air of propriety to the +room as if they had been real duennas." + +So saying he leaped off the bed, intending to close the door and not +allow Senora Rodriguez to enter; but as he went to shut it Senora +Rodriguez returned with a wax candle lighted, and having a closer view of +Don Quixote, with the coverlet round him, and his bandages and night-cap, +she was alarmed afresh, and retreating a couple of paces, exclaimed, "Am +I safe, sir knight? for I don't look upon it as a sign of very great +virtue that your worship should have got up out of bed." + +"I may well ask the same, senora," said Don Quixote; "and I do ask +whether I shall be safe from being assailed and forced?" + +"Of whom and against whom do you demand that security, sir knight?" said +the duenna. + +"Of you and against you I ask it," said Don Quixote; "for I am not +marble, nor are you brass, nor is it now ten o'clock in the morning, but +midnight, or a trifle past it I fancy, and we are in a room more secluded +and retired than the cave could have been where the treacherous and +daring AEneas enjoyed the fair soft-hearted Dido. But give me your hand, +senora; I require no better protection than my own continence, and my own +sense of propriety; as well as that which is inspired by that venerable +head-dress;" and so saying he kissed her right hand and took it in his +own, she yielding it to him with equal ceremoniousness. And here Cide +Hamete inserts a parenthesis in which he says that to have seen the pair +marching from the door to the bed, linked hand in hand in this way, he +would have given the best of the two tunics he had. + +Don Quixote finally got into bed, and Dona Rodriguez took her seat on a +chair at some little distance from his couch, without taking off her +spectacles or putting aside the candle. Don Quixote wrapped the +bedclothes round him and covered himself up completely, leaving nothing +but his face visible, and as soon as they had both regained their +composure he broke silence, saying, "Now, Senora Dona Rodriguez, you may +unbosom yourself and out with everything you have in your sorrowful heart +and afflicted bowels; and by me you shall be listened to with chaste +ears, and aided by compassionate exertions." + +"I believe it," replied the duenna; "from your worship's gentle and +winning presence only such a Christian answer could be expected. The fact +is, then, Senor Don Quixote, that though you see me seated in this chair, +here in the middle of the kingdom of Aragon, and in the attire of a +despised outcast duenna, I am from the Asturias of Oviedo, and of a +family with which many of the best of the province are connected by +blood; but my untoward fate and the improvidence of my parents, who, I +know not how, were unseasonably reduced to poverty, brought me to the +court of Madrid, where as a provision and to avoid greater misfortunes, +my parents placed me as seamstress in the service of a lady of quality, +and I would have you know that for hemming and sewing I have never been +surpassed by any all my life. My parents left me in service and returned +to their own country, and a few years later went, no doubt, to heaven, +for they were excellent good Catholic Christians. I was left an orphan +with nothing but the miserable wages and trifling presents that are given +to servants of my sort in palaces; but about this time, without any +encouragement on my part, one of the esquires of the household fell in +love with me, a man somewhat advanced in years, full-bearded and +personable, and above all as good a gentleman as the king himself, for he +came of a mountain stock. We did not carry on our loves with such secrecy +but that they came to the knowledge of my lady, and she, not to have any +fuss about it, had us married with the full sanction of the holy mother +Roman Catholic Church, of which marriage a daughter was born to put an +end to my good fortune, if I had any; not that I died in childbirth, for +I passed through it safely and in due season, but because shortly +afterwards my husband died of a certain shock he received, and had I time +to tell you of it I know your worship would be surprised;" and here she +began to weep bitterly and said, "Pardon me, Senor Don Quixote, if I am +unable to control myself, for every time I think of my unfortunate +husband my eyes fill up with tears. God bless me, with what an air of +dignity he used to carry my lady behind him on a stout mule as black as +jet! for in those days they did not use coaches or chairs, as they say +they do now, and ladies rode behind their squires. This much at least I +cannot help telling you, that you may observe the good breeding and +punctiliousness of my worthy husband. As he was turning into the Calle de +Santiago in Madrid, which is rather narrow, one of the alcaldes of the +Court, with two alguacils before him, was coming out of it, and as soon +as my good squire saw him he wheeled his mule about and made as if he +would turn and accompany him. My lady, who was riding behind him, said to +him in a low voice, 'What are you about, you sneak, don't you see that I +am here?' The alcalde like a polite man pulled up his horse and said to +him, 'Proceed, senor, for it is I, rather, who ought to accompany my lady +Dona Casilda'--for that was my mistress's name. Still my husband, cap in +hand, persisted in trying to accompany the alcalde, and seeing this my +lady, filled with rage and vexation, pulled out a big pin, or, I rather +think, a bodkin, out of her needle-case and drove it into his back with +such force that my husband gave a loud yell, and writhing fell to the +ground with his lady. Her two lacqueys ran to rise her up, and the +alcalde and the alguacils did the same; the Guadalajara gate was all in +commotion--I mean the idlers congregated there; my mistress came back on +foot, and my husband hurried away to a barber's shop protesting that he +was run right through the guts. The courtesy of my husband was noised +abroad to such an extent, that the boys gave him no peace in the street; +and on this account, and because he was somewhat shortsighted, my lady +dismissed him; and it was chagrin at this I am convinced beyond a doubt +that brought on his death. I was left a helpless widow, with a daughter +on my hands growing up in beauty like the sea-foam; at length, however, +as I had the character of being an excellent needlewoman, my lady the +duchess, then lately married to my lord the duke, offered to take me with +her to this kingdom of Aragon, and my daughter also, and here as time +went by my daughter grew up and with her all the graces in the world; she +sings like a lark, dances quick as thought, foots it like a gipsy, reads +and writes like a schoolmaster, and does sums like a miser; of her +neatness I say nothing, for the running water is not purer, and her age +is now, if my memory serves me, sixteen years five months and three days, +one more or less. To come to the point, the son of a very rich farmer, +living in a village of my lord the duke's not very far from here, fell in +love with this girl of mine; and in short, how I know not, they came +together, and under the promise of marrying her he made a fool of my +daughter, and will not keep his word. And though my lord the duke is +aware of it (for I have complained to him, not once but many and many a +time, and entreated him to order the farmer to marry my daughter), he +turns a deaf ear and will scarcely listen to me; the reason being that as +the deceiver's father is so rich, and lends him money, and is constantly +going security for his debts, he does not like to offend or annoy him in +any way. Now, senor, I want your worship to take it upon yourself to +redress this wrong either by entreaty or by arms; for by what all the +world says you came into it to redress grievances and right wrongs and +help the unfortunate. Let your worship put before you the unprotected +condition of my daughter, her youth, and all the perfections I have said +she possesses; and before God and on my conscience, out of all the +damsels my lady has, there is not one that comes up to the sole of her +shoe, and the one they call Altisidora, and look upon as the boldest and +gayest of them, put in comparison with my daughter, does not come within +two leagues of her. For I would have you know, senor, all is not gold +that glitters, and that same little Altisidora has more forwardness than +good looks, and more impudence than modesty; besides being not very +sound, for she has such a disagreeable breath that one cannot bear to be +near her for a moment; and even my lady the duchess--but I'll hold my +tongue, for they say that walls have ears." + +"For heaven's sake, Dona Rodriguez, what ails my lady the duchess?" asked +Don Quixote. + +"Adjured in that way," replied the duenna, "I cannot help answering the +question and telling the whole truth. Senor Don Quixote, have you +observed the comeliness of my lady the duchess, that smooth complexion of +hers like a burnished polished sword, those two cheeks of milk and +carmine, that gay lively step with which she treads or rather seems to +spurn the earth, so that one would fancy she went radiating health +wherever she passed? Well then, let me tell you she may thank, first of +all God, for this, and next, two issues that she has, one in each leg, by +which all the evil humours, of which the doctors say she is full, are +discharged." + +"Blessed Virgin!" exclaimed Don Quixote; "and is it possible that my lady +the duchess has drains of that sort? I would not have believed it if the +barefoot friars had told it me; but as the lady Dona Rodriguez says so, +it must be so. But surely such issues, and in such places, do not +discharge humours, but liquid amber. Verily, I do believe now that this +practice of opening issues is a very important matter for the health." + +Don Quixote had hardly said this, when the chamber door flew open with a +loud bang, and with the start the noise gave her Dona Rodriguez let the +candle fall from her hand, and the room was left as dark as a wolf's +mouth, as the saying is. Suddenly the poor duenna felt two hands seize +her by the throat, so tightly that she could not croak, while some one +else, without uttering a word, very briskly hoisted up her petticoats, +and with what seemed to be a slipper began to lay on so heartily that +anyone would have felt pity for her; but although Don Quixote felt it he +never stirred from his bed, but lay quiet and silent, nay apprehensive +that his turn for a drubbing might be coming. Nor was the apprehension an +idle one; one; for leaving the duenna (who did not dare to cry out) well +basted, the silent executioners fell upon Don Quixote, and stripping him +of the sheet and the coverlet, they pinched him so fast and so hard that +he was driven to defend himself with his fists, and all this in +marvellous silence. The battle lasted nearly half an hour, and then the +phantoms fled; Dona Rodriguez gathered up her skirts, and bemoaning her +fate went out without saying a word to Don Quixote, and he, sorely +pinched, puzzled, and dejected, remained alone, and there we will leave +him, wondering who could have been the perverse enchanter who had reduced +him to such a state; but that shall be told in due season, for Sancho +claims our attention, and the methodical arrangement of the story demands +it. + +Chapter XLIX. - +Of what happened Sancho in making the round of his island + +We left the great governor angered and irritated by that +portrait-painting rogue of a farmer who, instructed the majordomo, as the +majordomo was by the duke, tried to practise upon him; he however, fool, +boor, and clown as he was, held his own against them all, saying to those +round him and to Doctor Pedro Recio, who as soon as the private business +of the duke's letter was disposed of had returned to the room, "Now I see +plainly enough that judges and governors ought to be and must be made of +brass not to feel the importunities of the applicants that at all times +and all seasons insist on being heard, and having their business +despatched, and their own affairs and no others attended to, come what +may; and if the poor judge does not hear them and settle the +matter--either because he cannot or because that is not the time set +apart for hearing them-forthwith they abuse him, and run him down, and +gnaw at his bones, and even pick holes in his pedigree. You silly, stupid +applicant, don't be in a hurry; wait for the proper time and season for +doing business; don't come at dinner-hour, or at bed-time; for judges are +only flesh and blood, and must give to Nature what she naturally demands +of them; all except myself, for in my case I give her nothing to eat, +thanks to Senor Doctor Pedro Recio Tirteafuera here, who would have me +die of hunger, and declares that death to be life; and the same sort of +life may God give him and all his kind--I mean the bad doctors; for the +good ones deserve palms and laurels." + +All who knew Sancho Panza were astonished to hear him speak so elegantly, +and did not know what to attribute it to unless it were that office and +grave responsibility either smarten or stupefy men's wits. At last Doctor +Pedro Recio Agilers of Tirteafuera promised to let him have supper that +night though it might be in contravention of all the aphorisms of +Hippocrates. With this the governor was satisfied and looked forward to +the approach of night and supper-time with great anxiety; and though +time, to his mind, stood still and made no progress, nevertheless the +hour he so longed for came, and they gave him a beef salad with onions +and some boiled calves' feet rather far gone. At this he fell to with +greater relish than if they had given him francolins from Milan, +pheasants from Rome, veal from Sorrento, partridges from Moron, or geese +from Lavajos, and turning to the doctor at supper he said to him, "Look +here, senor doctor, for the future don't trouble yourself about giving me +dainty things or choice dishes to eat, for it will be only taking my +stomach off its hinges; it is accustomed to goat, cow, bacon, hung beef, +turnips and onions; and if by any chance it is given these palace dishes, +it receives them squeamishly, and sometimes with loathing. What the +head-carver had best do is to serve me with what they call ollas podridas +(and the rottener they are the better they smell); and he can put +whatever he likes into them, so long as it is good to eat, and I'll be +obliged to him, and will requite him some day. But let nobody play pranks +on me, for either we are or we are not; let us live and eat in peace and +good-fellowship, for when God sends the dawn, he sends it for all. I mean +to govern this island without giving up a right or taking a bribe; let +everyone keep his eye open, and look out for the arrow; for I can tell +them 'the devil's in Cantillana,' and if they drive me to it they'll see +something that will astonish them. Nay! make yourself honey and the flies +eat you." + +"Of a truth, senor governor," said the carver, "your worship is in the +right of it in everything you have said; and I promise you in the name of +all the inhabitants of this island that they will serve your worship with +all zeal, affection, and good-will, for the mild kind of government you +have given a sample of to begin with, leaves them no ground for doing or +thinking anything to your worship's disadvantage." + +"That I believe," said Sancho; "and they would be great fools if they did +or thought otherwise; once more I say, see to my feeding and my Dapple's +for that is the great point and what is most to the purpose; and when the +hour comes let us go the rounds, for it is my intention to purge this +island of all manner of uncleanness and of all idle good-for-nothing +vagabonds; for I would have you know that lazy idlers are the same thing +in a State as the drones in a hive, that eat up the honey the industrious +bees make. I mean to protect the husbandman, to preserve to the gentleman +his privileges, to reward the virtuous, and above all to respect religion +and honour its ministers. What say you to that, my friends? Is there +anything in what I say, or am I talking to no purpose?" + +"There is so much in what your worship says, senor governor," said the +majordomo, "that I am filled with wonder when I see a man like your +worship, entirely without learning (for I believe you have none at all), +say such things, and so full of sound maxims and sage remarks, very +different from what was expected of your worship's intelligence by those +who sent us or by us who came here. Every day we see something new in +this world; jokes become realities, and the jokers find the tables turned +upon them." + +Night came, and with the permission of Doctor Pedro Recio, the governor +had supper. They then got ready to go the rounds, and he started with the +majordomo, the secretary, the head-carver, the chronicler charged with +recording his deeds, and alguacils and notaries enough to form a +fair-sized squadron. In the midst marched Sancho with his staff, as fine +a sight as one could wish to see, and but a few streets of the town had +been traversed when they heard a noise as of a clashing of swords. They +hastened to the spot, and found that the combatants were but two, who +seeing the authorities approaching stood still, and one of them +exclaimed, "Help, in the name of God and the king! Are men to be allowed +to rob in the middle of this town, and rush out and attack people in the +very streets?" + +"Be calm, my good man," said Sancho, "and tell me what the cause of this +quarrel is; for I am the governor." + +Said the other combatant, "Senor governor, I will tell you in a very few +words. Your worship must know that this gentleman has just now won more +than a thousand reals in that gambling house opposite, and God knows how. +I was there, and gave more than one doubtful point in his favour, very +much against what my conscience told me. He made off with his winnings, +and when I made sure he was going to give me a crown or so at least by +way of a present, as it is usual and customary to give men of quality of +my sort who stand by to see fair or foul play, and back up swindles, and +prevent quarrels, he pocketed his money and left the house. Indignant at +this I followed him, and speaking him fairly and civilly asked him to +give me if it were only eight reals, for he knows I am an honest man and +that I have neither profession nor property, for my parents never brought +me up to any or left me any; but the rogue, who is a greater thief than +Cacus and a greater sharper than Andradilla, would not give me more than +four reals; so your worship may see how little shame and conscience he +has. But by my faith if you had not come up I'd have made him disgorge +his winnings, and he'd have learned what the range of the steel-yard +was." + +"What say you to this?" asked Sancho. The other replied that all his +antagonist said was true, and that he did not choose to give him more +than four reals because he very often gave him money; and that those who +expected presents ought to be civil and take what is given them with a +cheerful countenance, and not make any claim against winners unless they +know them for certain to be sharpers and their winnings to be unfairly +won; and that there could be no better proof that he himself was an +honest man than his having refused to give anything; for sharpers always +pay tribute to lookers-on who know them. + +"That is true," said the majordomo; "let your worship consider what is to +be done with these men." + +"What is to be done," said Sancho, "is this; you, the winner, be you +good, bad, or indifferent, give this assailant of yours a hundred reals +at once, and you must disburse thirty more for the poor prisoners; and +you who have neither profession nor property, and hang about the island +in idleness, take these hundred reals now, and some time of the day +to-morrow quit the island under sentence of banishment for ten years, and +under pain of completing it in another life if you violate the sentence, +for I'll hang you on a gibbet, or at least the hangman will by my orders; +not a word from either of you, or I'll make him feel my hand." + +The one paid down the money and the other took it, and the latter quitted +the island, while the other went home; and then the governor said, +"Either I am not good for much, or I'll get rid of these gambling houses, +for it strikes me they are very mischievous." + +"This one at least," said one of the notaries, "your worship will not be +able to get rid of, for a great man owns it, and what he loses every year +is beyond all comparison more than what he makes by the cards. On the +minor gambling houses your worship may exercise your power, and it is +they that do most harm and shelter the most barefaced practices; for in +the houses of lords and gentlemen of quality the notorious sharpers dare +not attempt to play their tricks; and as the vice of gambling has become +common, it is better that men should play in houses of repute than in +some tradesman's, where they catch an unlucky fellow in the small hours +of the morning and skin him alive." + +"I know already, notary, that there is a good deal to be said on that +point," said Sancho. + +And now a tipstaff came up with a young man in his grasp, and said, +"Senor governor, this youth was coming towards us, and as soon as he saw +the officers of justice he turned about and ran like a deer, a sure proof +that he must be some evil-doer; I ran after him, and had it not been that +he stumbled and fell, I should never have caught him." + +"What did you run for, fellow?" said Sancho. + +To which the young man replied, "Senor, it was to avoid answering all the +questions officers of justice put." + +"What are you by trade?" + +"A weaver." + +"And what do you weave?" + +"Lance heads, with your worship's good leave." + +"You're facetious with me! You plume yourself on being a wag? Very good; +and where were you going just now?" + +"To take the air, senor." + +"And where does one take the air in this island?" + +"Where it blows." + +"Good! your answers are very much to the point; you are a smart youth; +but take notice that I am the air, and that I blow upon you a-stern, and +send you to gaol. Ho there! lay hold of him and take him off; I'll make +him sleep there to-night without air." + +"By God," said the young man, "your worship will make me sleep in gaol +just as soon as make me king." + +"Why shan't I make thee sleep in gaol?" said Sancho. "Have I not the +power to arrest thee and release thee whenever I like?" + +"All the power your worship has," said the young man, "won't be able to +make me sleep in gaol." + +"How? not able!" said Sancho; "take him away at once where he'll see his +mistake with his own eyes, even if the gaoler is willing to exert his +interested generosity on his behalf; for I'll lay a penalty of two +thousand ducats on him if he allows him to stir a step from the prison." + +"That's ridiculous," said the young man; "the fact is, all the men on +earth will not make me sleep in prison." + +"Tell me, you devil," said Sancho, "have you got any angel that will +deliver you, and take off the irons I am going to order them to put upon +you?" + +"Now, senor governor," said the young man in a sprightly manner, "let us +be reasonable and come to the point. Granted your worship may order me to +be taken to prison, and to have irons and chains put on me, and to be +shut up in a cell, and may lay heavy penalties on the gaoler if he lets +me out, and that he obeys your orders; still, if I don't choose to sleep, +and choose to remain awake all night without closing an eye, will your +worship with all your power be able to make me sleep if I don't choose?" + +"No, truly," said the secretary, "and the fellow has made his point." + +"So then," said Sancho, "it would be entirely of your own choice you +would keep from sleeping; not in opposition to my will?" + +"No, senor," said the youth, "certainly not." + +"Well then, go, and God be with you," said Sancho; "be off home to sleep, +and God give you sound sleep, for I don't want to rob you of it; but for +the future, let me advise you don't joke with the authorities, because +you may come across some one who will bring down the joke on your own +skull." + +The young man went his way, and the governor continued his round, and +shortly afterwards two tipstaffs came up with a man in custody, and said, +"Senor governor, this person, who seems to be a man, is not so, but a +woman, and not an ill-favoured one, in man's clothes." They raised two or +three lanterns to her face, and by their light they distinguished the +features of a woman to all appearance of the age of sixteen or a little +more, with her hair gathered into a gold and green silk net, and fair as +a thousand pearls. They scanned her from head to foot, and observed that +she had on red silk stockings with garters of white taffety bordered with +gold and pearl; her breeches were of green and gold stuff, and under an +open jacket or jerkin of the same she wore a doublet of the finest white +and gold cloth; her shoes were white and such as men wear; she carried no +sword at her belt, but only a richly ornamented dagger, and on her +fingers she had several handsome rings. In short, the girl seemed fair to +look at in the eyes of all, and none of those who beheld her knew her, +the people of the town said they could not imagine who she was, and those +who were in the secret of the jokes that were to be practised upon Sancho +were the ones who were most surprised, for this incident or discovery had +not been arranged by them; and they watched anxiously to see how the +affair would end. + +Sancho was fascinated by the girl's beauty, and he asked her who she was, +where she was going, and what had induced her to dress herself in that +garb. She with her eyes fixed on the ground answered in modest confusion, +"I cannot tell you, senor, before so many people what it is of such +consequence to me to have kept secret; one thing I wish to be known, that +I am no thief or evildoer, but only an unhappy maiden whom the power of +jealousy has led to break through the respect that is due to modesty." + +Hearing this the majordomo said to Sancho, "Make the people stand back, +senor governor, that this lady may say what she wishes with less +embarrassment." + +Sancho gave the order, and all except the majordomo, the head-carver, and +the secretary fell back. Finding herself then in the presence of no more, +the damsel went on to say, "I am the daughter, sirs, of Pedro Perez +Mazorca, the wool-farmer of this town, who is in the habit of coming very +often to my father's house." + +"That won't do, senora," said the majordomo; "for I know Pedro Perez very +well, and I know he has no child at all, either son or daughter; and +besides, though you say he is your father, you add then that he comes +very often to your father's house." + +"I had already noticed that," said Sancho. + +"I am confused just now, sirs," said the damsel, "and I don't know what I +am saying; but the truth is that I am the daughter of Diego de la Llana, +whom you must all know." + +"Ay, that will do," said the majordomo; "for I know Diego de la Llana, +and know that he is a gentleman of position and a rich man, and that he +has a son and a daughter, and that since he was left a widower nobody in +all this town can speak of having seen his daughter's face; for he keeps +her so closely shut up that he does not give even the sun a chance of +seeing her; and for all that report says she is extremely beautiful." + +"It is true," said the damsel, "and I am that daughter; whether report +lies or not as to my beauty, you, sirs, will have decided by this time, +as you have seen me;" and with this she began to weep bitterly. + +On seeing this the secretary leant over to the head-carver's ear, and +said to him in a low voice, "Something serious has no doubt happened this +poor maiden, that she goes wandering from home in such a dress and at +such an hour, and one of her rank too." "There can be no doubt about it," +returned the carver, "and moreover her tears confirm your suspicion." +Sancho gave her the best comfort he could, and entreated her to tell them +without any fear what had happened her, as they would all earnestly and +by every means in their power endeavour to relieve her. + +"The fact is, sirs," said she, "that my father has kept me shut up these +ten years, for so long is it since the earth received my mother. Mass is +said at home in a sumptuous chapel, and all this time I have seen but the +sun in the heaven by day, and the moon and the stars by night; nor do I +know what streets are like, or plazas, or churches, or even men, except +my father and a brother I have, and Pedro Perez the wool-farmer; whom, +because he came frequently to our house, I took it into my head to call +my father, to avoid naming my own. This seclusion and the restrictions +laid upon my going out, were it only to church, have been keeping me +unhappy for many a day and month past; I longed to see the world, or at +least the town where I was born, and it did not seem to me that this wish +was inconsistent with the respect maidens of good quality should have for +themselves. When I heard them talking of bull-fights taking place, and of +javelin games, and of acting plays, I asked my brother, who is a year +younger than myself, to tell me what sort of things these were, and many +more that I had never seen; he explained them to me as well as he could, +but the only effect was to kindle in me a still stronger desire to see +them. At last, to cut short the story of my ruin, I begged and entreated +my brother--O that I had never made such an entreaty-" And once more she +gave way to a burst of weeping. + +"Proceed, senora," said the majordomo, "and finish your story of what has +happened to you, for your words and tears are keeping us all in +suspense." + +"I have but little more to say, though many a tear to shed," said the +damsel; "for ill-placed desires can only be paid for in some such way." + +The maiden's beauty had made a deep impression on the head-carver's +heart, and he again raised his lantern for another look at her, and +thought they were not tears she was shedding, but seed-pearl or dew of +the meadow, nay, he exalted them still higher, and made Oriental pearls +of them, and fervently hoped her misfortune might not be so great a one +as her tears and sobs seemed to indicate. The governor was losing +patience at the length of time the girl was taking to tell her story, and +told her not to keep them waiting any longer; for it was late, and there +still remained a good deal of the town to be gone over. + +She, with broken sobs and half-suppressed sighs, went on to say, "My +misfortune, my misadventure, is simply this, that I entreated my brother +to dress me up as a man in a suit of his clothes, and take me some night, +when our father was asleep, to see the whole town; he, overcome by my +entreaties, consented, and dressing me in this suit and himself in +clothes of mine that fitted him as if made for him (for he has not a hair +on his chin, and might pass for a very beautiful young girl), to-night, +about an hour ago, more or less, we left the house, and guided by our +youthful and foolish impulse we made the circuit of the whole town, and +then, as we were about to return home, we saw a great troop of people +coming, and my brother said to me, 'Sister, this must be the round, stir +your feet and put wings to them, and follow me as fast as you can, lest +they recognise us, for that would be a bad business for us;' and so +saying he turned about and began, I cannot say to run but to fly; in less +than six paces I fell from fright, and then the officer of justice came +up and carried me before your worships, where I find myself put to shame +before all these people as whimsical and vicious." + +"So then, senora," said Sancho, "no other mishap has befallen you, nor +was it jealousy that made you leave home, as you said at the beginning of +your story?" + +"Nothing has happened me," said she, "nor was it jealousy that brought me +out, but merely a longing to see the world, which did not go beyond +seeing the streets of this town." + +The appearance of the tipstaffs with her brother in custody, whom one of +them had overtaken as he ran away from his sister, now fully confirmed +the truth of what the damsel said. He had nothing on but a rich petticoat +and a short blue damask cloak with fine gold lace, and his head was +uncovered and adorned only with its own hair, which looked like rings of +gold, so bright and curly was it. The governor, the majordomo, and the +carver went aside with him, and, unheard by his sister, asked him how he +came to be in that dress, and he with no less shame and embarrassment +told exactly the same story as his sister, to the great delight of the +enamoured carver; the governor, however, said to them, "In truth, young +lady and gentleman, this has been a very childish affair, and to explain +your folly and rashness there was no necessity for all this delay and all +these tears and sighs; for if you had said we are so-and-so, and we +escaped from our father's house in this way in order to ramble about, out +of mere curiosity and with no other object, there would have been an end +of the matter, and none of these little sobs and tears and all the rest +of it." + +"That is true," said the damsel, "but you see the confusion I was in was +so great it did not let me behave as I ought." + +"No harm has been done," said Sancho; "come, we will leave you at your +father's house; perhaps they will not have missed you; and another time +don't be so childish or eager to see the world; for a respectable damsel +should have a broken leg and keep at home; and the woman and the hen by +gadding about are soon lost; and she who is eager to see is also eager to +be seen; I say no more." + +The youth thanked the governor for his kind offer to take them home, and +they directed their steps towards the house, which was not far off. On +reaching it the youth threw a pebble up at a grating, and immediately a +woman-servant who was waiting for them came down and opened the door to +them, and they went in, leaving the party marvelling as much at their +grace and beauty as at the fancy they had for seeing the world by night +and without quitting the village; which, however, they set down to their +youth. + +The head-carver was left with a heart pierced through and through, and he +made up his mind on the spot to demand the damsel in marriage of her +father on the morrow, making sure she would not be refused him as he was +a servant of the duke's; and even to Sancho ideas and schemes of marrying +the youth to his daughter Sanchica suggested themselves, and he resolved +to open the negotiation at the proper season, persuading himself that no +husband could be refused to a governor's daughter. And so the night's +round came to an end, and a couple of days later the government, whereby +all his plans were overthrown and swept away, as will be seen farther on. + +Chapter L. - +Wherein is set forth who the enchanters and executioners were who flogged +the Duenna and pinched Don Quixote, and also what befell the page who +carried the letter to Teresa Panza, Sancho Panza's wife + +Cide Hamete, the painstaking investigator of the minute points of this +veracious history, says that when Dona Rodriguez left her own room to go +to Don Quixote's, another duenna who slept with her observed her, and as +all duennas are fond of prying, listening, and sniffing, she followed her +so silently that the good Rodriguez never perceived it; and as soon as +the duenna saw her enter Don Quixote's room, not to fail in a duenna's +invariable practice of tattling, she hurried off that instant to report +to the duchess how Dona Rodriguez was closeted with Don Quixote. The +duchess told the duke, and asked him to let her and Altisidora go and see +what the said duenna wanted with Don Quixote. The duke gave them leave, +and the pair cautiously and quietly crept to the door of the room and +posted themselves so close to it that they could hear all that was said +inside. But when the duchess heard how the Rodriguez had made public the +Aranjuez of her issues she could not restrain herself, nor Altisidora +either; and so, filled with rage and thirsting for vengeance, they burst +into the room and tormented Don Quixote and flogged the duenna in the +manner already described; for indignities offered to their charms and +self-esteem mightily provoke the anger of women and make them eager for +revenge. The duchess told the duke what had happened, and he was much +amused by it; and she, in pursuance of her design of making merry and +diverting herself with Don Quixote, despatched the page who had played +the part of Dulcinea in the negotiations for her disenchantment (which +Sancho Panza in the cares of government had forgotten all about) to +Teresa Panza his wife with her husband's letter and another from herself, +and also a great string of fine coral beads as a present. + +Now the history says this page was very sharp and quick-witted; and eager +to serve his lord and lady he set off very willingly for Sancho's +village. Before he entered it he observed a number of women washing in a +brook, and asked them if they could tell him whether there lived there a +woman of the name of Teresa Panza, wife of one Sancho Panza, squire to a +knight called Don Quixote of La Mancha. At the question a young girl who +was washing stood up and said, "Teresa Panza is my mother, and that +Sancho is my father, and that knight is our master." + +"Well then, miss," said the page, "come and show me where your mother is, +for I bring her a letter and a present from your father." + +"That I will with all my heart, senor," said the girl, who seemed to be +about fourteen, more or less; and leaving the clothes she was washing to +one of her companions, and without putting anything on her head or feet, +for she was bare-legged and had her hair hanging about her, away she +skipped in front of the page's horse, saying, "Come, your worship, our +house is at the entrance of the town, and my mother is there, sorrowful +enough at not having had any news of my father this ever so long." + +"Well," said the page, "I am bringing her such good news that she will +have reason to thank God." + +And then, skipping, running, and capering, the girl reached the town, but +before going into the house she called out at the door, "Come out, mother +Teresa, come out, come out; here's a gentleman with letters and other +things from my good father." At these words her mother Teresa Panza came +out spinning a bundle of flax, in a grey petticoat (so short was it one +would have fancied "they to her shame had cut it short"), a grey bodice +of the same stuff, and a smock. She was not very old, though plainly past +forty, strong, healthy, vigorous, and sun-dried; and seeing her daughter +and the page on horseback, she exclaimed, "What's this, child? What +gentleman is this?" + +"A servant of my lady, Dona Teresa Panza," replied the page; and suiting +the action to the word he flung himself off his horse, and with great +humility advanced to kneel before the lady Teresa, saying, "Let me kiss +your hand, Senora Dona Teresa, as the lawful and only wife of Senor Don +Sancho Panza, rightful governor of the island of Barataria." + +"Ah, senor, get up, do that," said Teresa; "for I'm not a bit of a court +lady, but only a poor country woman, the daughter of a clodcrusher, and +the wife of a squire-errant and not of any governor at all." + +"You are," said the page, "the most worthy wife of a most arch-worthy +governor; and as a proof of what I say accept this letter and this +present;" and at the same time he took out of his pocket a string of +coral beads with gold clasps, and placed it on her neck, and said, "This +letter is from his lordship the governor, and the other as well as these +coral beads from my lady the duchess, who sends me to your worship." + +Teresa stood lost in astonishment, and her daughter just as much, and the +girl said, "May I die but our master Don Quixote's at the bottom of this; +he must have given father the government or county he so often promised +him." + +"That is the truth," said the page; "for it is through Senor Don Quixote +that Senor Sancho is now governor of the island of Barataria, as will be +seen by this letter." + +"Will your worship read it to me, noble sir?" said Teresa; "for though I +can spin I can't read, not a scrap." + +"Nor I either," said Sanchica; "but wait a bit, and I'll go and fetch +some one who can read it, either the curate himself or the bachelor +Samson Carrasco, and they'll come gladly to hear any news of my father." + +"There is no need to fetch anybody," said the page; "for though I can't +spin I can read, and I'll read it;" and so he read it through, but as it +has been already given it is not inserted here; and then he took out the +other one from the duchess, which ran as follows: + +Friend Teresa,--Your husband Sancho's good qualities, of heart as well as +of head, induced and compelled me to request my husband the duke to give +him the government of one of his many islands. I am told he governs like +a gerfalcon, of which I am very glad, and my lord the duke, of course, +also; and I am very thankful to heaven that I have not made a mistake in +choosing him for that same government; for I would have Senora Teresa +know that a good governor is hard to find in this world and may God make +me as good as Sancho's way of governing. Herewith I send you, my dear, a +string of coral beads with gold clasps; I wish they were Oriental pearls; +but "he who gives thee a bone does not wish to see thee dead;" a time +will come when we shall become acquainted and meet one another, but God +knows the future. Commend me to your daughter Sanchica, and tell her from +me to hold herself in readiness, for I mean to make a high match for her +when she least expects it. They tell me there are big acorns in your +village; send me a couple of dozen or so, and I shall value them greatly +as coming from your hand; and write to me at length to assure me of your +health and well-being; and if there be anything you stand in need of, it +is but to open your mouth, and that shall be the measure; and so God keep +you. + +From this place. Your loving friend, THE DUCHESS. + +"Ah, what a good, plain, lowly lady!" said Teresa when she heard the +letter; "that I may be buried with ladies of that sort, and not the +gentlewomen we have in this town, that fancy because they are gentlewomen +the wind must not touch them, and go to church with as much airs as if +they were queens, no less, and seem to think they are disgraced if they +look at a farmer's wife! And see here how this good lady, for all she's a +duchess, calls me 'friend,' and treats me as if I was her equal--and +equal may I see her with the tallest church-tower in La Mancha! And as +for the acorns, senor, I'll send her ladyship a peck and such big ones +that one might come to see them as a show and a wonder. And now, +Sanchica, see that the gentleman is comfortable; put up his horse, and +get some eggs out of the stable, and cut plenty of bacon, and let's give +him his dinner like a prince; for the good news he has brought, and his +own bonny face deserve it all; and meanwhile I'll run out and give the +neighbours the news of our good luck, and father curate, and Master +Nicholas the barber, who are and always have been such friends of thy +father's." + +"That I will, mother," said Sanchica; "but mind, you must give me half of +that string; for I don't think my lady the duchess could have been so +stupid as to send it all to you." + +"It is all for thee, my child," said Teresa; "but let me wear it round my +neck for a few days; for verily it seems to make my heart glad." + +"You will be glad too," said the page, "when you see the bundle there is +in this portmanteau, for it is a suit of the finest cloth, that the +governor only wore one day out hunting and now sends, all for Senora +Sanchica." + +"May he live a thousand years," said Sanchica, "and the bearer as many, +nay two thousand, if needful." + +With this Teresa hurried out of the house with the letters, and with the +string of beads round her neck, and went along thrumming the letters as +if they were a tambourine, and by chance coming across the curate and +Samson Carrasco she began capering and saying, "None of us poor now, +faith! We've got a little government! Ay, let the finest fine lady tackle +me, and I'll give her a setting down!" + +"What's all this, Teresa Panza," said they; "what madness is this, and +what papers are those?" + +"The madness is only this," said she, "that these are the letters of +duchesses and governors, and these I have on my neck are fine coral +beads, with ave-marias and paternosters of beaten gold, and I am a +governess." + +"God help us," said the curate, "we don't understand you, Teresa, or know +what you are talking about." + +"There, you may see it yourselves," said Teresa, and she handed them the +letters. + +The curate read them out for Samson Carrasco to hear, and Samson and he +regarded one another with looks of astonishment at what they had read, +and the bachelor asked who had brought the letters. Teresa in reply bade +them come with her to her house and they would see the messenger, a most +elegant youth, who had brought another present which was worth as much +more. The curate took the coral beads from her neck and examined them +again and again, and having satisfied himself as to their fineness he +fell to wondering afresh, and said, "By the gown I wear I don't know what +to say or think of these letters and presents; on the one hand I can see +and feel the fineness of these coral beads, and on the other I read how a +duchess sends to beg for a couple of dozen of acorns." + +"Square that if you can," said Carrasco; "well, let's go and see the +messenger, and from him we'll learn something about this mystery that has +turned up." + +They did so, and Teresa returned with them. They found the page sifting a +little barley for his horse, and Sanchica cutting a rasher of bacon to be +paved with eggs for his dinner. His looks and his handsome apparel +pleased them both greatly; and after they had saluted him courteously, +and he them, Samson begged him to give them his news, as well of Don +Quixote as of Sancho Panza, for, he said, though they had read the +letters from Sancho and her ladyship the duchess, they were still puzzled +and could not make out what was meant by Sancho's government, and above +all of an island, when all or most of those in the Mediterranean belonged +to his Majesty. + +To this the page replied, "As to Senor Sancho Panza's being a governor +there is no doubt whatever; but whether it is an island or not that he +governs, with that I have nothing to do; suffice it that it is a town of +more than a thousand inhabitants; with regard to the acorns I may tell +you my lady the duchess is so unpretending and unassuming that, not to +speak of sending to beg for acorns from a peasant woman, she has been +known to send to ask for the loan of a comb from one of her neighbours; +for I would have your worships know that the ladies of Aragon, though +they are just as illustrious, are not so punctilious and haughty as the +Castilian ladies; they treat people with greater familiarity." + +In the middle of this conversation Sanchica came in with her skirt full +of eggs, and said she to the page, "Tell me, senor, does my father wear +trunk-hose since he has been governor?" + +"I have not noticed," said the page; "but no doubt he wears them." + +"Ah! my God!" said Sanchica, "what a sight it must be to see my father in +tights! Isn't it odd that ever since I was born I have had a longing to +see my father in trunk-hose?" + +"As things go you will see that if you live," said the page; "by God he +is in the way to take the road with a sunshade if the government only +lasts him two months more." + +The curate and the bachelor could see plainly enough that the page spoke +in a waggish vein; but the fineness of the coral beads, and the hunting +suit that Sancho sent (for Teresa had already shown it to them) did away +with the impression; and they could not help laughing at Sanchica's wish, +and still more when Teresa said, "Senor curate, look about if there's +anybody here going to Madrid or Toledo, to buy me a hooped petticoat, a +proper fashionable one of the best quality; for indeed and indeed I must +do honour to my husband's government as well as I can; nay, if I am put +to it and have to, I'll go to Court and set a coach like all the world; +for she who has a governor for her husband may very well have one and +keep one." + +"And why not, mother!" said Sanchica; "would to God it were to-day +instead of to-morrow, even though they were to say when they saw me +seated in the coach with my mother, 'See that rubbish, that +garlic-stuffed fellow's daughter, how she goes stretched at her ease in a +coach as if she was a she-pope!' But let them tramp through the mud, and +let me go in my coach with my feet off the ground. Bad luck to backbiters +all over the world; 'let me go warm and the people may laugh.' Do I say +right, mother?" + +"To be sure you do, my child," said Teresa; "and all this good luck, and +even more, my good Sancho foretold me; and thou wilt see, my daughter, he +won't stop till he has made me a countess; for to make a beginning is +everything in luck; and as I have heard thy good father say many a time +(for besides being thy father he's the father of proverbs too), 'When +they offer thee a heifer, run with a halter; when they offer thee a +government, take it; when they would give thee a county, seize it; when +they say, "Here, here!" to thee with something good, swallow it.' Oh no! +go to sleep, and don't answer the strokes of good fortune and the lucky +chances that are knocking at the door of your house!" + +"And what do I care," added Sanchica, "whether anybody says when he sees +me holding my head up, 'The dog saw himself in hempen breeches,' and the +rest of it?" + +Hearing this the curate said, "I do believe that all this family of the +Panzas are born with a sackful of proverbs in their insides, every one of +them; I never saw one of them that does not pour them out at all times +and on all occasions." + +"That is true," said the page, "for Senor Governor Sancho utters them at +every turn; and though a great many of them are not to the purpose, still +they amuse one, and my lady the duchess and the duke praise them highly." + +"Then you still maintain that all this about Sancho's government is true, +senor," said the bachelor, "and that there actually is a duchess who +sends him presents and writes to him? Because we, although we have +handled the present and read the letters, don't believe it and suspect it +to be something in the line of our fellow-townsman Don Quixote, who +fancies that everything is done by enchantment; and for this reason I am +almost ready to say that I'd like to touch and feel your worship to see +whether you are a mere ambassador of the imagination or a man of flesh +and blood." + +"All I know, sirs," replied the page, "is that I am a real ambassador, +and that Senor Sancho Panza is governor as a matter of fact, and that my +lord and lady the duke and duchess can give, and have given him this same +government, and that I have heard the said Sancho Panza bears himself +very stoutly therein; whether there be any enchantment in all this or +not, it is for your worships to settle between you; for that's all I know +by the oath I swear, and that is by the life of my parents whom I have +still alive, and love dearly." + +"It may be so," said the bachelor; "but dubitat Augustinus." + +"Doubt who will," said the page; "what I have told you is the truth, and +that will always rise above falsehood as oil above water; if not operibus +credite, et non verbis. Let one of you come with me, and he will see with +his eyes what he does not believe with his ears." + +"It's for me to make that trip," said Sanchica; "take me with you, senor, +behind you on your horse; for I'll go with all my heart to see my +father." + +"Governors' daughters," said the page, "must not travel along the roads +alone, but accompanied by coaches and litters and a great number of +attendants." + +"By God," said Sanchica, "I can go just as well mounted on a she-ass as +in a coach; what a dainty lass you must take me for!" + +"Hush, girl," said Teresa; "you don't know what you're talking about; the +gentleman is quite right, for 'as the time so the behaviour;' when it was +Sancho it was 'Sancha;' when it is governor it's 'senora;' I don't know +if I'm right." + +"Senora Teresa says more than she is aware of," said the page; "and now +give me something to eat and let me go at once, for I mean to return this +evening." + +"Come and do penance with me," said the curate at this; "for Senora +Teresa has more will than means to serve so worthy a guest." + +The page refused, but had to consent at last for his own sake; and the +curate took him home with him very gladly, in order to have an +opportunity of questioning him at leisure about Don Quixote and his +doings. The bachelor offered to write the letters in reply for Teresa; +but she did not care to let him mix himself up in her affairs, for she +thought him somewhat given to joking; and so she gave a cake and a couple +of eggs to a young acolyte who was a penman, and he wrote for her two +letters, one for her husband and the other for the duchess, dictated out +of her own head, which are not the worst inserted in this great history, +as will be seen farther on. + +Chapter LI. - +Of the progress of Sancho's government, and other such entertaining +matters + +Day came after the night of the governor's round; a night which the +head-carver passed without sleeping, so were his thoughts of the face and +air and beauty of the disguised damsel, while the majordomo spent what +was left of it in writing an account to his lord and lady of all Sancho +said and did, being as much amazed at his sayings as at his doings, for +there was a mixture of shrewdness and simplicity in all his words and +deeds. The senor governor got up, and by Doctor Pedro Recio's directions +they made him break his fast on a little conserve and four sups of cold +water, which Sancho would have readily exchanged for a piece of bread and +a bunch of grapes; but seeing there was no help for it, he submitted with +no little sorrow of heart and discomfort of stomach; Pedro Recio having +persuaded him that light and delicate diet enlivened the wits, and that +was what was most essential for persons placed in command and in +responsible situations, where they have to employ not only the bodily +powers but those of the mind also. + +By means of this sophistry Sancho was made to endure hunger, and hunger +so keen that in his heart he cursed the government, and even him who had +given it to him; however, with his hunger and his conserve he undertook +to deliver judgments that day, and the first thing that came before him +was a question that was submitted to him by a stranger, in the presence +of the majordomo and the other attendants, and it was in these words: +"Senor, a large river separated two districts of one and the same +lordship--will your worship please to pay attention, for the case is an +important and a rather knotty one? Well then, on this river there was a +bridge, and at one end of it a gallows, and a sort of tribunal, where +four judges commonly sat to administer the law which the lord of river, +bridge and the lordship had enacted, and which was to this effect, 'If +anyone crosses by this bridge from one side to the other he shall declare +on oath where he is going to and with what object; and if he swears +truly, he shall be allowed to pass, but if falsely, he shall be put to +death for it by hanging on the gallows erected there, without any +remission.' Though the law and its severe penalty were known, many +persons crossed, but in their declarations it was easy to see at once +they were telling the truth, and the judges let them pass free. It +happened, however, that one man, when they came to take his declaration, +swore and said that by the oath he took he was going to die upon that +gallows that stood there, and nothing else. The judges held a +consultation over the oath, and they said, 'If we let this man pass free +he has sworn falsely, and by the law he ought to die; but if we hang him, +as he swore he was going to die on that gallows, and therefore swore the +truth, by the same law he ought to go free.' It is asked of your worship, +senor governor, what are the judges to do with this man? For they are +still in doubt and perplexity; and having heard of your worship's acute +and exalted intellect, they have sent me to entreat your worship on their +behalf to give your opinion on this very intricate and puzzling case." + +To this Sancho made answer, "Indeed those gentlemen the judges that send +you to me might have spared themselves the trouble, for I have more of +the obtuse than the acute in me; but repeat the case over again, so that +I may understand it, and then perhaps I may be able to hit the point." + +The querist repeated again and again what he had said before, and then +Sancho said, "It seems to me I can set the matter right in a moment, and +in this way; the man swears that he is going to die upon the gallows; but +if he dies upon it, he has sworn the truth, and by the law enacted +deserves to go free and pass over the bridge; but if they don't hang him, +then he has sworn falsely, and by the same law deserves to be hanged." + +"It is as the senor governor says," said the messenger; "and as regards a +complete comprehension of the case, there is nothing left to desire or +hesitate about." + +"Well then I say," said Sancho, "that of this man they should let pass +the part that has sworn truly, and hang the part that has lied; and in +this way the conditions of the passage will be fully complied with." + +"But then, senor governor," replied the querist, "the man will have to be +divided into two parts; and if he is divided of course he will die; and +so none of the requirements of the law will be carried out, and it is +absolutely necessary to comply with it." + +"Look here, my good sir," said Sancho; "either I'm a numskull or else +there is the same reason for this passenger dying as for his living and +passing over the bridge; for if the truth saves him the falsehood equally +condemns him; and that being the case it is my opinion you should say to +the gentlemen who sent you to me that as the arguments for condemning him +and for absolving him are exactly balanced, they should let him pass +freely, as it is always more praiseworthy to do good than to do evil; +this I would give signed with my name if I knew how to sign; and what I +have said in this case is not out of my own head, but one of the many +precepts my master Don Quixote gave me the night before I left to become +governor of this island, that came into my mind, and it was this, that +when there was any doubt about the justice of a case I should lean to +mercy; and it is God's will that I should recollect it now, for it fits +this case as if it was made for it." + +"That is true," said the majordomo; "and I maintain that Lycurgus +himself, who gave laws to the Lacedemonians, could not have pronounced a +better decision than the great Panza has given; let the morning's +audience close with this, and I will see that the senor governor has +dinner entirely to his liking." + +"That's all I ask for--fair play," said Sancho; "give me my dinner, and +then let it rain cases and questions on me, and I'll despatch them in a +twinkling." + +The majordomo kept his word, for he felt it against his conscience to +kill so wise a governor by hunger; particularly as he intended to have +done with him that same night, playing off the last joke he was +commissioned to practise upon him. + +It came to pass, then, that after he had dined that day, in opposition to +the rules and aphorisms of Doctor Tirteafuera, as they were taking away +the cloth there came a courier with a letter from Don Quixote for the +governor. Sancho ordered the secretary to read it to himself, and if +there was nothing in it that demanded secrecy to read it aloud. The +secretary did so, and after he had skimmed the contents he said, "It may +well be read aloud, for what Senor Don Quixote writes to your worship +deserves to be printed or written in letters of gold, and it is as +follows." + +DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA'S LETTER TO SANCHO PANZA, GOVERNOR OF THE ISLAND +OF BARATARIA. + +When I was expecting to hear of thy stupidities and blunders, friend +Sancho, I have received intelligence of thy displays of good sense, for +which I give special thanks to heaven that can raise the poor from the +dunghill and of fools to make wise men. They tell me thou dost govern as +if thou wert a man, and art a man as if thou wert a beast, so great is +the humility wherewith thou dost comport thyself. But I would have thee +bear in mind, Sancho, that very often it is fitting and necessary for the +authority of office to resist the humility of the heart; for the seemly +array of one who is invested with grave duties should be such as they +require and not measured by what his own humble tastes may lead him to +prefer. Dress well; a stick dressed up does not look like a stick; I do +not say thou shouldst wear trinkets or fine raiment, or that being a +judge thou shouldst dress like a soldier, but that thou shouldst array +thyself in the apparel thy office requires, and that at the same time it +be neat and handsome. To win the good-will of the people thou governest +there are two things, among others, that thou must do; one is to be civil +to all (this, however, I told thee before), and the other to take care +that food be abundant, for there is nothing that vexes the heart of the +poor more than hunger and high prices. Make not many proclamations; but +those thou makest take care that they be good ones, and above all that +they be observed and carried out; for proclamations that are not observed +are the same as if they did not exist; nay, they encourage the idea that +the prince who had the wisdom and authority to make them had not the +power to enforce them; and laws that threaten and are not enforced come +to be like the log, the king of the frogs, that frightened them at first, +but that in time they despised and mounted upon. Be a father to virtue +and a stepfather to vice. Be not always strict, nor yet always lenient, +but observe a mean between these two extremes, for in that is the aim of +wisdom. Visit the gaols, the slaughter-houses, and the market-places; for +the presence of the governor is of great importance in such places; it +comforts the prisoners who are in hopes of a speedy release, it is the +bugbear of the butchers who have then to give just weight, and it is the +terror of the market-women for the same reason. Let it not be seen that +thou art (even if perchance thou art, which I do not believe) covetous, a +follower of women, or a glutton; for when the people and those that have +dealings with thee become aware of thy special weakness they will bring +their batteries to bear upon thee in that quarter, till they have brought +thee down to the depths of perdition. Consider and reconsider, con and +con over again the advices and the instructions I gave thee before thy +departure hence to thy government, and thou wilt see that in them, if +thou dost follow them, thou hast a help at hand that will lighten for +thee the troubles and difficulties that beset governors at every step. +Write to thy lord and lady and show thyself grateful to them, for +ingratitude is the daughter of pride, and one of the greatest sins we +know of; and he who is grateful to those who have been good to him shows +that he will be so to God also who has bestowed and still bestows so many +blessings upon him. + +My lady the duchess sent off a messenger with thy suit and another +present to thy wife Teresa Panza; we expect the answer every moment. I +have been a little indisposed through a certain scratching I came in for, +not very much to the benefit of my nose; but it was nothing; for if there +are enchanters who maltreat me, there are also some who defend me. Let me +know if the majordomo who is with thee had any share in the Trifaldi +performance, as thou didst suspect; and keep me informed of everything +that happens thee, as the distance is so short; all the more as I am +thinking of giving over very shortly this idle life I am now leading, for +I was not born for it. A thing has occurred to me which I am inclined to +think will put me out of favour with the duke and duchess; but though I +am sorry for it I do not care, for after all I must obey my calling +rather than their pleasure, in accordance with the common saying, amicus +Plato, sed magis amica veritas. I quote this Latin to thee because I +conclude that since thou hast been a governor thou wilt have learned it. +Adieu; God keep thee from being an object of pity to anyone. + +Thy friend, DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA. + +Sancho listened to the letter with great attention, and it was praised +and considered wise by all who heard it; he then rose up from table, and +calling his secretary shut himself in with him in his own room, and +without putting it off any longer set about answering his master Don +Quixote at once; and he bade the secretary write down what he told him +without adding or suppressing anything, which he did, and the answer was +to the following effect. + +SANCHO PANZA'S LETTER TO DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA. + +The pressure of business is so great upon me that I have no time to +scratch my head or even to cut my nails; and I have them so long-God send +a remedy for it. I say this, master of my soul, that you may not be +surprised if I have not until now sent you word of how I fare, well or +ill, in this government, in which I am suffering more hunger than when we +two were wandering through the woods and wastes. + +My lord the duke wrote to me the other day to warn me that certain spies +had got into this island to kill me; but up to the present I have not +found out any except a certain doctor who receives a salary in this town +for killing all the governors that come here; he is called Doctor Pedro +Recio, and is from Tirteafuera; so you see what a name he has to make me +dread dying under his hands. This doctor says of himself that he does not +cure diseases when there are any, but prevents them coming, and the +medicines he uses are diet and more diet until he brings one down to bare +bones; as if leanness was not worse than fever. + +In short he is killing me with hunger, and I am dying myself of vexation; +for when I thought I was coming to this government to get my meat hot and +my drink cool, and take my ease between holland sheets on feather beds, I +find I have come to do penance as if I was a hermit; and as I don't do it +willingly I suspect that in the end the devil will carry me off. + +So far I have not handled any dues or taken any bribes, and I don't know +what to think of it; for here they tell me that the governors that come +to this island, before entering it have plenty of money either given to +them or lent to them by the people of the town, and that this is the +usual custom not only here but with all who enter upon governments. + +Last night going the rounds I came upon a fair damsel in man's clothes, +and a brother of hers dressed as a woman; my head-carver has fallen in +love with the girl, and has in his own mind chosen her for a wife, so he +says, and I have chosen youth for a son-in-law; to-day we are going to +explain our intentions to the father of the pair, who is one Diego de la +Llana, a gentleman and an old Christian as much as you please. + +I have visited the market-places, as your worship advises me, and +yesterday I found a stall-keeper selling new hazel nuts and proved her to +have mixed a bushel of old empty rotten nuts with a bushel of new; I +confiscated the whole for the children of the charity-school, who will +know how to distinguish them well enough, and I sentenced her not to come +into the market-place for a fortnight; they told me I did bravely. I can +tell your worship it is commonly said in this town that there are no +people worse than the market-women, for they are all barefaced, +unconscionable, and impudent, and I can well believe it from what I have +seen of them in other towns. + +I am very glad my lady the duchess has written to my wife Teresa Panza +and sent her the present your worship speaks of; and I will strive to +show myself grateful when the time comes; kiss her hands for me, and tell +her I say she has not thrown it into a sack with a hole in it, as she +will see in the end. I should not like your worship to have any +difference with my lord and lady; for if you fall out with them it is +plain it must do me harm; and as you give me advice to be grateful it +will not do for your worship not to be so yourself to those who have +shown you such kindness, and by whom you have been treated so hospitably +in their castle. + +That about the scratching I don't understand; but I suppose it must be +one of the ill-turns the wicked enchanters are always doing your worship; +when we meet I shall know all about it. I wish I could send your worship +something; but I don't know what to send, unless it be some very curious +clyster pipes, to work with bladders, that they make in this island; but +if the office remains with me I'll find out something to send, one way or +another. If my wife Teresa Panza writes to me, pay the postage and send +me the letter, for I have a very great desire to hear how my house and +wife and children are going on. And so, may God deliver your worship from +evil-minded enchanters, and bring me well and peacefully out of this +government, which I doubt, for I expect to take leave of it and my life +together, from the way Doctor Pedro Recio treats me. + +Your worship's servant + +SANCHO PANZA THE GOVERNOR. + +The secretary sealed the letter, and immediately dismissed the courier; +and those who were carrying on the joke against Sancho putting their +heads together arranged how he was to be dismissed from the government. +Sancho spent the afternoon in drawing up certain ordinances relating to +the good government of what he fancied the island; and he ordained that +there were to be no provision hucksters in the State, and that men might +import wine into it from any place they pleased, provided they declared +the quarter it came from, so that a price might be put upon it according +to its quality, reputation, and the estimation it was held in; and he +that watered his wine, or changed the name, was to forfeit his life for +it. He reduced the prices of all manner of shoes, boots, and stockings, +but of shoes in particular, as they seemed to him to run extravagantly +high. He established a fixed rate for servants' wages, which were +becoming recklessly exorbitant. He laid extremely heavy penalties upon +those who sang lewd or loose songs either by day or night. He decreed +that no blind man should sing of any miracle in verse, unless he could +produce authentic evidence that it was true, for it was his opinion that +most of those the blind men sing are trumped up, to the detriment of the +true ones. He established and created an alguacil of the poor, not to +harass them, but to examine them and see whether they really were so; for +many a sturdy thief or drunkard goes about under cover of a make-believe +crippled limb or a sham sore. In a word, he made so many good rules that +to this day they are preserved there, and are called The constitutions of +the great governor Sancho Panza. + +Chapter LII. - +Wherein is related the adventure of the second distressed or afflicted +Duenna, otherwise called Dona Rodriguez + +Cide Hamete relates that Don Quixote being now cured of his scratches +felt that the life he was leading in the castle was entirely inconsistent +with the order of chivalry he professed, so he determined to ask the duke +and duchess to permit him to take his departure for Saragossa, as the +time of the festival was now drawing near, and he hoped to win there the +suit of armour which is the prize at festivals of the sort. But one day +at table with the duke and duchess, just as he was about to carry his +resolution into effect and ask for their permission, lo and behold +suddenly there came in through the door of the great hall two women, as +they afterwards proved to be, draped in mourning from head to foot, one +of whom approaching Don Quixote flung herself at full length at his feet, +pressing her lips to them, and uttering moans so sad, so deep, and so +doleful that she put all who heard and saw her into a state of +perplexity; and though the duke and duchess supposed it must be some joke +their servants were playing off upon Don Quixote, still the earnest way +the woman sighed and moaned and wept puzzled them and made them feel +uncertain, until Don Quixote, touched with compassion, raised her up and +made her unveil herself and remove the mantle from her tearful face. She +complied and disclosed what no one could have ever anticipated, for she +disclosed the countenance of Dona Rodriguez, the duenna of the house; the +other female in mourning being her daughter, who had been made a fool of +by the rich farmer's son. All who knew her were filled with astonishment, +and the duke and duchess more than any; for though they thought her a +simpleton and a weak creature, they did not think her capable of crazy +pranks. Dona Rodriguez, at length, turning to her master and mistress +said to them, "Will your excellences be pleased to permit me to speak to +this gentleman for a moment, for it is requisite I should do so in order +to get successfully out of the business in which the boldness of an +evil-minded clown has involved me?" + +The duke said that for his part he gave her leave, and that she might +speak with Senor Don Quixote as much as she liked. + +She then, turning to Don Quixote and addressing herself to him said, +"Some days since, valiant knight, I gave you an account of the injustice +and treachery of a wicked farmer to my dearly beloved daughter, the +unhappy damsel here before you, and you promised me to take her part and +right the wrong that has been done her; but now it has come to my hearing +that you are about to depart from this castle in quest of such fair +adventures as God may vouchsafe to you; therefore, before you take the +road, I would that you challenge this froward rustic, and compel him to +marry my daughter in fulfillment of the promise he gave her to become her +husband before he seduced her; for to expect that my lord the duke will +do me justice is to ask pears from the elm tree, for the reason I stated +privately to your worship; and so may our Lord grant you good health and +forsake us not." + +To these words Don Quixote replied very gravely and solemnly, "Worthy +duenna, check your tears, or rather dry them, and spare your sighs, for I +take it upon myself to obtain redress for your daughter, for whom it +would have been better not to have been so ready to believe lovers' +promises, which are for the most part quickly made and very slowly +performed; and so, with my lord the duke's leave, I will at once go in +quest of this inhuman youth, and will find him out and challenge him and +slay him, if so be he refuses to keep his promised word; for the chief +object of my profession is to spare the humble and chastise the proud; I +mean, to help the distressed and destroy the oppressors." + +"There is no necessity," said the duke, "for your worship to take the +trouble of seeking out the rustic of whom this worthy duenna complains, +nor is there any necessity, either, for asking my leave to challenge him; +for I admit him duly challenged, and will take care that he is informed +of the challenge, and accepts it, and comes to answer it in person to +this castle of mine, where I shall afford to both a fair field, observing +all the conditions which are usually and properly observed in such +trials, and observing too justice to both sides, as all princes who offer +a free field to combatants within the limits of their lordships are bound +to do." + +"Then with that assurance and your highness's good leave," said Don +Quixote, "I hereby for this once waive my privilege of gentle blood, and +come down and put myself on a level with the lowly birth of the +wrong-doer, making myself equal with him and enabling him to enter into +combat with me; and so, I challenge and defy him, though absent, on the +plea of his malfeasance in breaking faith with this poor damsel, who was +a maiden and now by his misdeed is none; and say that he shall fulfill +the promise he gave her to become her lawful husband, or else stake his +life upon the question." + +And then plucking off a glove he threw it down in the middle of the hall, +and the duke picked it up, saying, as he had said before, that he +accepted the challenge in the name of his vassal, and fixed six days +thence as the time, the courtyard of the castle as the place, and for +arms the customary ones of knights, lance and shield and full armour, +with all the other accessories, without trickery, guile, or charms of any +sort, and examined and passed by the judges of the field. "But first of +all," he said, "it is requisite that this worthy duenna and unworthy +damsel should place their claim for justice in the hands of Don Quixote; +for otherwise nothing can be done, nor can the said challenge be brought +to a lawful issue." + +"I do so place it," replied the duenna. + +"And I too," added her daughter, all in tears and covered with shame and +confusion. + +This declaration having been made, and the duke having settled in his own +mind what he would do in the matter, the ladies in black withdrew, and +the duchess gave orders that for the future they were not to be treated +as servants of hers, but as lady adventurers who came to her house to +demand justice; so they gave them a room to themselves and waited on them +as they would on strangers, to the consternation of the other +women-servants, who did not know where the folly and imprudence of Dona +Rodriguez and her unlucky daughter would stop. + +And now, to complete the enjoyment of the feast and bring the dinner to a +satisfactory end, lo and behold the page who had carried the letters and +presents to Teresa Panza, the wife of the governor Sancho, entered the +hall; and the duke and duchess were very well pleased to see him, being +anxious to know the result of his journey; but when they asked him the +page said in reply that he could not give it before so many people or in +a few words, and begged their excellences to be pleased to let it wait +for a private opportunity, and in the meantime amuse themselves with +these letters; and taking out the letters he placed them in the duchess's +hand. One bore by way of address, Letter for my lady the Duchess +So-and-so, of I don't know where; and the other To my husband Sancho +Panza, governor of the island of Barataria, whom God prosper longer than +me. The duchess's bread would not bake, as the saying is, until she had +read her letter; and having looked over it herself and seen that it might +be read aloud for the duke and all present to hear, she read out as +follows. + +TERESA PANZA'S LETTER TO THE DUCHESS. + +The letter your highness wrote me, my lady, gave me great pleasure, for +indeed I found it very welcome. The string of coral beads is very fine, +and my husband's hunting suit does not fall short of it. All this village +is very much pleased that your ladyship has made a governor of my good +man Sancho; though nobody will believe it, particularly the curate, and +Master Nicholas the barber, and the bachelor Samson Carrasco; but I don't +care for that, for so long as it is true, as it is, they may all say what +they like; though, to tell the truth, if the coral beads and the suit had +not come I would not have believed it either; for in this village +everybody thinks my husband a numskull, and except for governing a flock +of goats, they cannot fancy what sort of government he can be fit for. +God grant it, and direct him according as he sees his children stand in +need of it. I am resolved with your worship's leave, lady of my soul, to +make the most of this fair day, and go to Court to stretch myself at ease +in a coach, and make all those I have envying me already burst their eyes +out; so I beg your excellence to order my husband to send me a small +trifle of money, and to let it be something to speak of, because one's +expenses are heavy at the Court; for a loaf costs a real, and meat thirty +maravedis a pound, which is beyond everything; and if he does not want me +to go let him tell me in time, for my feet are on the fidgets to be off; +and my friends and neighbours tell me that if my daughter and I make a +figure and a brave show at Court, my husband will come to be known far +more by me than I by him, for of course plenty of people will ask, "Who +are those ladies in that coach?" and some servant of mine will answer, +"The wife and daughter of Sancho Panza, governor of the island of +Barataria;" and in this way Sancho will become known, and I'll be thought +well of, and "to Rome for everything." I am as vexed as vexed can be that +they have gathered no acorns this year in our village; for all that I +send your highness about half a peck that I went to the wood to gather +and pick out one by one myself, and I could find no bigger ones; I wish +they were as big as ostrich eggs. + +Let not your high mightiness forget to write to me; and I will take care +to answer, and let you know how I am, and whatever news there may be in +this place, where I remain, praying our Lord to have your highness in his +keeping and not to forget me. + +Sancha my daughter, and my son, kiss your worship's hands. + +She who would rather see your ladyship than write to you, + +Your servant, + +TERESA PANZA. + +All were greatly amused by Teresa Panza's letter, but particularly the +duke and duchess; and the duchess asked Don Quixote's opinion whether +they might open the letter that had come for the governor, which she +suspected must be very good. Don Quixote said that to gratify them he +would open it, and did so, and found that it ran as follows. + +TERESA PANZA'S LETTER TO HER HUSBAND SANCHO PANZA. + +I got thy letter, Sancho of my soul, and I promise thee and swear as a +Catholic Christian that I was within two fingers' breadth of going mad I +was so happy. I can tell thee, brother, when I came to hear that thou +wert a governor I thought I should have dropped dead with pure joy; and +thou knowest they say sudden joy kills as well as great sorrow; and as +for Sanchica thy daughter, she leaked from sheer happiness. I had before +me the suit thou didst send me, and the coral beads my lady the duchess +sent me round my neck, and the letters in my hands, and there was the +bearer of them standing by, and in spite of all this I verily believed +and thought that what I saw and handled was all a dream; for who could +have thought that a goatherd would come to be a governor of islands? Thou +knowest, my friend, what my mother used to say, that one must live long +to see much; I say it because I expect to see more if I live longer; for +I don't expect to stop until I see thee a farmer of taxes or a collector +of revenue, which are offices where, though the devil carries off those +who make a bad use of them, still they make and handle money. My lady the +duchess will tell thee the desire I have to go to the Court; consider the +matter and let me know thy pleasure; I will try to do honour to thee by +going in a coach. + +Neither the curate, nor the barber, nor the bachelor, nor even the +sacristan, can believe that thou art a governor, and they say the whole +thing is a delusion or an enchantment affair, like everything belonging +to thy master Don Quixote; and Samson says he must go in search of thee +and drive the government out of thy head and the madness out of Don +Quixote's skull; I only laugh, and look at my string of beads, and plan +out the dress I am going to make for our daughter out of thy suit. I sent +some acorns to my lady the duchess; I wish they had been gold. Send me +some strings of pearls if they are in fashion in that island. Here is the +news of the village; La Berrueca has married her daughter to a +good-for-nothing painter, who came here to paint anything that might turn +up. The council gave him an order to paint his Majesty's arms over the +door of the town-hall; he asked two ducats, which they paid him in +advance; he worked for eight days, and at the end of them had nothing +painted, and then said he had no turn for painting such trifling things; +he returned the money, and for all that has married on the pretence of +being a good workman; to be sure he has now laid aside his paint-brush +and taken a spade in hand, and goes to the field like a gentleman. Pedro +Lobo's son has received the first orders and tonsure, with the intention +of becoming a priest. Minguilla, Mingo Silvato's granddaughter, found it +out, and has gone to law with him on the score of having given her +promise of marriage. Evil tongues say she is with child by him, but he +denies it stoutly. There are no olives this year, and there is not a drop +of vinegar to be had in the whole village. A company of soldiers passed +through here; when they left they took away with them three of the girls +of the village; I will not tell thee who they are; perhaps they will come +back, and they will be sure to find those who will take them for wives +with all their blemishes, good or bad. Sanchica is making bonelace; she +earns eight maravedis a day clear, which she puts into a moneybox as a +help towards house furnishing; but now that she is a governor's daughter +thou wilt give her a portion without her working for it. The fountain in +the plaza has run dry. A flash of lightning struck the gibbet, and I wish +they all lit there. I look for an answer to this, and to know thy mind +about my going to the Court; and so, God keep thee longer than me, or as +long, for I would not leave thee in this world without me. + +Thy wife, + +TERESA PANZA. + +The letters were applauded, laughed over, relished, and admired; and +then, as if to put the seal to the business, the courier arrived, +bringing the one Sancho sent to Don Quixote, and this, too, was read out, +and it raised some doubts as to the governor's simplicity. The duchess +withdrew to hear from the page about his adventures in Sancho's village, +which he narrated at full length without leaving a single circumstance +unmentioned. He gave her the acorns, and also a cheese which Teresa had +given him as being particularly good and superior to those of Tronchon. +The duchess received it with greatest delight, in which we will leave +her, to describe the end of the government of the great Sancho Panza, +flower and mirror of all governors of islands. + +Chapter LIII. - +Of the troublous end and termination Sancho Panza's government came to + +To fancy that in this life anything belonging to it will remain for ever +in the same state is an idle fancy; on the contrary, in it everything +seems to go in a circle, I mean round and round. The spring succeeds the +summer, the summer the fall, the fall the autumn, the autumn the winter, +and the winter the spring, and so time rolls with never-ceasing wheel. +Man's life alone, swifter than time, speeds onward to its end without any +hope of renewal, save it be in that other life which is endless and +boundless. Thus saith Cide Hamete the Mahometan philosopher; for there +are many that by the light of nature alone, without the light of faith, +have a comprehension of the fleeting nature and instability of this +present life and the endless duration of that eternal life we hope for; +but our author is here speaking of the rapidity with which Sancho's +government came to an end, melted away, disappeared, vanished as it were +in smoke and shadow. For as he lay in bed on the night of the seventh day +of his government, sated, not with bread and wine, but with delivering +judgments and giving opinions and making laws and proclamations, just as +sleep, in spite of hunger, was beginning to close his eyelids, he heard +such a noise of bell-ringing and shouting that one would have fancied the +whole island was going to the bottom. He sat up in bed and remained +listening intently to try if he could make out what could be the cause of +so great an uproar; not only, however, was he unable to discover what it +was, but as countless drums and trumpets now helped to swell the din of +the bells and shouts, he was more puzzled than ever, and filled with fear +and terror; and getting up he put on a pair of slippers because of the +dampness of the floor, and without throwing a dressing gown or anything +of the kind over him he rushed out of the door of his room, just in time +to see approaching along a corridor a band of more than twenty persons +with lighted torches and naked swords in their hands, all shouting out, +"To arms, to arms, senor governor, to arms! The enemy is in the island in +countless numbers, and we are lost unless your skill and valour come to +our support." + +Keeping up this noise, tumult, and uproar, they came to where Sancho +stood dazed and bewildered by what he saw and heard, and as they +approached one of them called out to him, "Arm at once, your lordship, if +you would not have yourself destroyed and the whole island lost." + +"What have I to do with arming?" said Sancho. "What do I know about arms +or supports? Better leave all that to my master Don Quixote, who will +settle it and make all safe in a trice; for I, sinner that I am, God help +me, don't understand these scuffles." + +"Ah, senor governor," said another, "what slackness of mettle this is! +Arm yourself; here are arms for you, offensive and defensive; come out to +the plaza and be our leader and captain; it falls upon you by right, for +you are our governor." + +"Arm me then, in God's name," said Sancho, and they at once produced two +large shields they had come provided with, and placed them upon him over +his shirt, without letting him put on anything else, one shield in front +and the other behind, and passing his arms through openings they had +made, they bound him tight with ropes, so that there he was walled and +boarded up as straight as a spindle and unable to bend his knees or stir +a single step. In his hand they placed a lance, on which he leant to keep +himself from falling, and as soon as they had him thus fixed they bade +him march forward and lead them on and give them all courage; for with +him for their guide and lamp and morning star, they were sure to bring +their business to a successful issue. + +"How am I to march, unlucky being that I am?" said Sancho, "when I can't +stir my knee-caps, for these boards I have bound so tight to my body +won't let me. What you must do is carry me in your arms, and lay me +across or set me upright in some postern, and I'll hold it either with +this lance or with my body." + +"On, senor governor!" cried another, "it is fear more than the boards +that keeps you from moving; make haste, stir yourself, for there is no +time to lose; the enemy is increasing in numbers, the shouts grow louder, +and the danger is pressing." + +Urged by these exhortations and reproaches the poor governor made an +attempt to advance, but fell to the ground with such a crash that he +fancied he had broken himself all to pieces. There he lay like a tortoise +enclosed in its shell, or a side of bacon between two kneading-troughs, +or a boat bottom up on the beach; nor did the gang of jokers feel any +compassion for him when they saw him down; so far from that, +extinguishing their torches they began to shout afresh and to renew the +calls to arms with such energy, trampling on poor Sancho, and slashing at +him over the shield with their swords in such a way that, if he had not +gathered himself together and made himself small and drawn in his head +between the shields, it would have fared badly with the poor governor, +as, squeezed into that narrow compass, he lay, sweating and sweating +again, and commending himself with all his heart to God to deliver him +from his present peril. Some stumbled over him, others fell upon him, and +one there was who took up a position on top of him for some time, and +from thence as if from a watchtower issued orders to the troops, shouting +out, "Here, our side! Here the enemy is thickest! Hold the breach there! +Shut that gate! Barricade those ladders! Here with your stink-pots of +pitch and resin, and kettles of boiling oil! Block the streets with +feather beds!" In short, in his ardour he mentioned every little thing, +and every implement and engine of war by means of which an assault upon a +city is warded off, while the bruised and battered Sancho, who heard and +suffered all, was saying to himself, "O if it would only please the Lord +to let the island be lost at once, and I could see myself either dead or +out of this torture!" Heaven heard his prayer, and when he least expected +it he heard voices exclaiming, "Victory, victory! The enemy retreats +beaten! Come, senor governor, get up, and come and enjoy the victory, and +divide the spoils that have been won from the foe by the might of that +invincible arm." + +"Lift me up," said the wretched Sancho in a woebegone voice. They helped +him to rise, and as soon as he was on his feet said, "The enemy I have +beaten you may nail to my forehead; I don't want to divide the spoils of +the foe, I only beg and entreat some friend, if I have one, to give me a +sup of wine, for I'm parched with thirst, and wipe me dry, for I'm +turning to water." + +They rubbed him down, fetched him wine and unbound the shields, and he +seated himself upon his bed, and with fear, agitation, and fatigue he +fainted away. Those who had been concerned in the joke were now sorry +they had pushed it so far; however, the anxiety his fainting away had +caused them was relieved by his returning to himself. He asked what +o'clock it was; they told him it was just daybreak. He said no more, and +in silence began to dress himself, while all watched him, waiting to see +what the haste with which he was putting on his clothes meant. + +He got himself dressed at last, and then, slowly, for he was sorely +bruised and could not go fast, he proceeded to the stable, followed by +all who were present, and going up to Dapple embraced him and gave him a +loving kiss on the forehead, and said to him, not without tears in his +eyes, "Come along, comrade and friend and partner of my toils and +sorrows; when I was with you and had no cares to trouble me except +mending your harness and feeding your little carcass, happy were my +hours, my days, and my years; but since I left you, and mounted the +towers of ambition and pride, a thousand miseries, a thousand troubles, +and four thousand anxieties have entered into my soul;" and all the while +he was speaking in this strain he was fixing the pack-saddle on the ass, +without a word from anyone. Then having Dapple saddled, he, with great +pain and difficulty, got up on him, and addressing himself to the +majordomo, the secretary, the head-carver, and Pedro Recio the doctor and +several others who stood by, he said, "Make way, gentlemen, and let me go +back to my old freedom; let me go look for my past life, and raise myself +up from this present death. I was not born to be a governor or protect +islands or cities from the enemies that choose to attack them. Ploughing +and digging, vinedressing and pruning, are more in my way than defending +provinces or kingdoms. 'Saint Peter is very well at Rome; I mean each of +us is best following the trade he was born to. A reaping-hook fits my +hand better than a governor's sceptre; I'd rather have my fill of +gazpacho' than be subject to the misery of a meddling doctor who me with +hunger, and I'd rather lie in summer under the shade of an oak, and in +winter wrap myself in a double sheepskin jacket in freedom, than go to +bed between holland sheets and dress in sables under the restraint of a +government. God be with your worships, and tell my lord the duke that +'naked I was born, naked I find myself, I neither lose nor gain;' I mean +that without a farthing I came into this government, and without a +farthing I go out of it, very different from the way governors commonly +leave other islands. Stand aside and let me go; I have to plaster myself, +for I believe every one of my ribs is crushed, thanks to the enemies that +have been trampling over me to-night." + +"That is unnecessary, senor governor," said Doctor Recio, "for I will +give your worship a draught against falls and bruises that will soon make +you as sound and strong as ever; and as for your diet I promise your +worship to behave better, and let you eat plentifully of whatever you +like." + +"You spoke late," said Sancho. "I'd as soon turn Turk as stay any longer. +Those jokes won't pass a second time. By God I'd as soon remain in this +government, or take another, even if it was offered me between two +plates, as fly to heaven without wings. I am of the breed of the Panzas, +and they are every one of them obstinate, and if they once say 'odds,' +odds it must be, no matter if it is evens, in spite of all the world. +Here in this stable I leave the ant's wings that lifted me up into the +air for the swifts and other birds to eat me, and let's take to level +ground and our feet once more; and if they're not shod in pinked shoes of +cordovan, they won't want for rough sandals of hemp; 'every ewe to her +like,' 'and let no one stretch his leg beyond the length of the sheet;' +and now let me pass, for it's growing late with me." + +To this the majordomo said, "Senor governor, we would let your worship go +with all our hearts, though it sorely grieves us to lose you, for your +wit and Christian conduct naturally make us regret you; but it is well +known that every governor, before he leaves the place where he has been +governing, is bound first of all to render an account. Let your worship +do so for the ten days you have held the government, and then you may go +and the peace of God go with you." + +"No one can demand it of me," said Sancho, "but he whom my lord the duke +shall appoint; I am going to meet him, and to him I will render an exact +one; besides, when I go forth naked as I do, there is no other proof +needed to show that I have governed like an angel." + +"By God the great Sancho is right," said Doctor Recio, "and we should let +him go, for the duke will be beyond measure glad to see him." + +They all agreed to this, and allowed him to go, first offering to bear +him company and furnish him with all he wanted for his own comfort or for +the journey. Sancho said he did not want anything more than a little +barley for Dapple, and half a cheese and half a loaf for himself; for the +distance being so short there was no occasion for any better or bulkier +provant. They all embraced him, and he with tears embraced all of them, +and left them filled with admiration not only at his remarks but at his +firm and sensible resolution. + +Chapter LIV. - +Which deals with matters relating to this history and no other + +The duke and duchess resolved that the challenge Don Quixote had, for the +reason already mentioned, given their vassal, should be proceeded with; +and as the young man was in Flanders, whither he had fled to escape +having Dona Rodriguez for a mother-in-law, they arranged to substitute +for him a Gascon lacquey, named Tosilos, first of all carefully +instructing him in all he had to do. Two days later the duke told Don +Quixote that in four days from that time his opponent would present +himself on the field of battle armed as a knight, and would maintain that +the damsel lied by half a beard, nay a whole beard, if she affirmed that +he had given her a promise of marriage. Don Quixote was greatly pleased +at the news, and promised himself to do wonders in the lists, and +reckoned it rare good fortune that an opportunity should have offered for +letting his noble hosts see what the might of his strong arm was capable +of; and so in high spirits and satisfaction he awaited the expiration of +the four days, which measured by his impatience seemed spinning +themselves out into four hundred ages. Let us leave them to pass as we do +other things, and go and bear Sancho company, as mounted on Dapple, half +glad, half sad, he paced along on his road to join his master, in whose +society he was happier than in being governor of all the islands in the +world. Well then, it so happened that before he had gone a great way from +the island of his government (and whether it was island, city, town, or +village that he governed he never troubled himself to inquire) he saw +coming along the road he was travelling six pilgrims with staves, +foreigners of that sort that beg for alms singing; who as they drew near +arranged themselves in a line and lifting up their voices all together +began to sing in their own language something that Sancho could not with +the exception of one word which sounded plainly "alms," from which he +gathered that it was alms they asked for in their song; and being, as +Cide Hamete says, remarkably charitable, he took out of his alforias the +half loaf and half cheese he had been provided with, and gave them to +them, explaining to them by signs that he had nothing else to give them. +They received them very gladly, but exclaimed, "Geld! Geld!" + +"I don't understand what you want of me, good people," said Sancho. + +On this one of them took a purse out of his bosom and showed it to +Sancho, by which he comprehended they were asking for money, and putting +his thumb to his throat and spreading his hand upwards he gave them to +understand that he had not the sign of a coin about him, and urging +Dapple forward he broke through them. But as he was passing, one of them +who had been examining him very closely rushed towards him, and flinging +his arms round him exclaimed in a loud voice and good Spanish, "God bless +me! What's this I see? Is it possible that I hold in my arms my dear +friend, my good neighbour Sancho Panza? But there's no doubt about it, +for I'm not asleep, nor am I drunk just now." + +Sancho was surprised to hear himself called by his name and find himself +embraced by a foreign pilgrim, and after regarding him steadily without +speaking he was still unable to recognise him; but the pilgrim perceiving +his perplexity cried, "What! and is it possible, Sancho Panza, that thou +dost not know thy neighbour Ricote, the Morisco shopkeeper of thy +village?" + +Sancho upon this looking at him more carefully began to recall his +features, and at last recognised him perfectly, and without getting off +the ass threw his arms round his neck saying, "Who the devil could have +known thee, Ricote, in this mummer's dress thou art in? Tell me, who bas +frenchified thee, and how dost thou dare to return to Spain, where if +they catch thee and recognise thee it will go hard enough with thee?" + +"If thou dost not betray me, Sancho," said the pilgrim, "I am safe; for +in this dress no one will recognise me; but let us turn aside out of the +road into that grove there where my comrades are going to eat and rest, +and thou shalt eat with them there, for they are very good fellows; I'll +have time enough to tell thee then all that has happened me since I left +our village in obedience to his Majesty's edict that threatened such +severities against the unfortunate people of my nation, as thou hast +heard." + +Sancho complied, and Ricote having spoken to the other pilgrims they +withdrew to the grove they saw, turning a considerable distance out of +the road. They threw down their staves, took off their pilgrim's cloaks +and remained in their under-clothing; they were all good-looking young +fellows, except Ricote, who was a man somewhat advanced in years. They +carried alforjas all of them, and all apparently well filled, at least +with things provocative of thirst, such as would summon it from two +leagues off. They stretched themselves on the ground, and making a +tablecloth of the grass they spread upon it bread, salt, knives, walnut, +scraps of cheese, and well-picked ham-bones which if they were past +gnawing were not past sucking. They also put down a black dainty called, +they say, caviar, and made of the eggs of fish, a great thirst-wakener. +Nor was there any lack of olives, dry, it is true, and without any +seasoning, but for all that toothsome and pleasant. But what made the +best show in the field of the banquet was half a dozen botas of wine, for +each of them produced his own from his alforjas; even the good Ricote, +who from a Morisco had transformed himself into a German or Dutchman, +took out his, which in size might have vied with the five others. They +then began to eat with very great relish and very leisurely, making the +most of each morsel--very small ones of everything--they took up on the +point of the knife; and then all at the same moment raised their arms and +botas aloft, the mouths placed in their mouths, and all eyes fixed on +heaven just as if they were taking aim at it; and in this attitude they +remained ever so long, wagging their heads from side to side as if in +acknowledgment of the pleasure they were enjoying while they decanted the +bowels of the bottles into their own stomachs. + +Sancho beheld all, "and nothing gave him pain;" so far from that, acting +on the proverb he knew so well, "when thou art at Rome do as thou seest," +he asked Ricote for his bota and took aim like the rest of them, and with +not less enjoyment. Four times did the botas bear being uplifted, but the +fifth it was all in vain, for they were drier and more sapless than a +rush by that time, which made the jollity that had been kept up so far +begin to flag. + +Every now and then some one of them would grasp Sancho's right hand in +his own saying, "Espanoli y Tudesqui tuto uno: bon compano;" and Sancho +would answer, "Bon compano, jur a Di!" and then go off into a fit of +laughter that lasted an hour, without a thought for the moment of +anything that had befallen him in his government; for cares have very +little sway over us while we are eating and drinking. At length, the wine +having come to an end with them, drowsiness began to come over them, and +they dropped asleep on their very table and tablecloth. Ricote and Sancho +alone remained awake, for they had eaten more and drunk less, and Ricote +drawing Sancho aside, they seated themselves at the foot of a beech, +leaving the pilgrims buried in sweet sleep; and without once falling into +his own Morisco tongue Ricote spoke as follows in pure Castilian: + +"Thou knowest well, neighbour and friend Sancho Panza, how the +proclamation or edict his Majesty commanded to be issued against those of +my nation filled us all with terror and dismay; me at least it did, +insomuch that I think before the time granted us for quitting Spain was +out, the full force of the penalty had already fallen upon me and upon my +children. I decided, then, and I think wisely (just like one who knows +that at a certain date the house he lives in will be taken from him, and +looks out beforehand for another to change into), I decided, I say, to +leave the town myself, alone and without my family, and go to seek out +some place to remove them to comfortably and not in the hurried way in +which the others took their departure; for I saw very plainly, and so did +all the older men among us, that the proclamations were not mere threats, +as some said, but positive enactments which would be enforced at the +appointed time; and what made me believe this was what I knew of the base +and extravagant designs which our people harboured, designs of such a +nature that I think it was a divine inspiration that moved his Majesty to +carry out a resolution so spirited; not that we were all guilty, for some +there were true and steadfast Christians; but they were so few that they +could make no head against those who were not; and it was not prudent to +cherish a viper in the bosom by having enemies in the house. In short it +was with just cause that we were visited with the penalty of banishment, +a mild and lenient one in the eyes of some, but to us the most terrible +that could be inflicted upon us. Wherever we are we weep for Spain; for +after all we were born there and it is our natural fatherland. Nowhere do +we find the reception our unhappy condition needs; and in Barbary and all +the parts of Africa where we counted upon being received, succoured, and +welcomed, it is there they insult and ill-treat us most. We knew not our +good fortune until we lost it; and such is the longing we almost all of +us have to return to Spain, that most of those who like myself know the +language, and there are many who do, come back to it and leave their +wives and children forsaken yonder, so great is their love for it; and +now I know by experience the meaning of the saying, sweet is the love of +one's country. + +"I left our village, as I said, and went to France, but though they gave +us a kind reception there I was anxious to see all I could. I crossed +into Italy, and reached Germany, and there it seemed to me we might live +with more freedom, as the inhabitants do not pay any attention to +trifling points; everyone lives as he likes, for in most parts they enjoy +liberty of conscience. I took a house in a town near Augsburg, and then +joined these pilgrims, who are in the habit of coming to Spain in great +numbers every year to visit the shrines there, which they look upon as +their Indies and a sure and certain source of gain. They travel nearly +all over it, and there is no town out of which they do not go full up of +meat and drink, as the saying is, and with a real, at least, in money, +and they come off at the end of their travels with more than a hundred +crowns saved, which, changed into gold, they smuggle out of the kingdom +either in the hollow of their staves or in the patches of their pilgrim's +cloaks or by some device of their own, and carry to their own country in +spite of the guards at the posts and passes where they are searched. Now +my purpose is, Sancho, to carry away the treasure that I left buried, +which, as it is outside the town, I shall be able to do without risk, and +to write, or cross over from Valencia, to my daughter and wife, who I +know are at Algiers, and find some means of bringing them to some French +port and thence to Germany, there to await what it may be God's will to +do with us; for, after all, Sancho, I know well that Ricota my daughter +and Francisca Ricota my wife are Catholic Christians, and though I am not +so much so, still I am more of a Christian than a Moor, and it is always +my prayer to God that he will open the eyes of my understanding and show +me how I am to serve him; but what amazes me and I cannot understand is +why my wife and daughter should have gone to Barbary rather than to +France, where they could live as Christians." + +To this Sancho replied, "Remember, Ricote, that may not have been open to +them, for Juan Tiopieyo thy wife's brother took them, and being a true +Moor he went where he could go most easily; and another thing I can tell +thee, it is my belief thou art going in vain to look for what thou hast +left buried, for we heard they took from thy brother-in-law and thy wife +a great quantity of pearls and money in gold which they brought to be +passed." + +"That may be," said Ricote; "but I know they did not touch my hoard, for +I did not tell them where it was, for fear of accidents; and so, if thou +wilt come with me, Sancho, and help me to take it away and conceal it, I +will give thee two hundred crowns wherewith thou mayest relieve thy +necessities, and, as thou knowest, I know they are many." + +"I would do it," said Sancho; "but I am not at all covetous, for I gave +up an office this morning in which, if I was, I might have made the walls +of my house of gold and dined off silver plates before six months were +over; and so for this reason, and because I feel I would be guilty of +treason to my king if I helped his enemies, I would not go with thee if +instead of promising me two hundred crowns thou wert to give me four +hundred here in hand." + +"And what office is this thou hast given up, Sancho?" asked Ricote. + +"I have given up being governor of an island," said Sancho, "and such a +one, faith, as you won't find the like of easily." + +"And where is this island?" said Ricote. + +"Where?" said Sancho; "two leagues from here, and it is called the island +of Barataria." + +"Nonsense! Sancho," said Ricote; "islands are away out in the sea; there +are no islands on the mainland." + +"What? No islands!" said Sancho; "I tell thee, friend Ricote, I left it +this morning, and yesterday I was governing there as I pleased like a +sagittarius; but for all that I gave it up, for it seemed to me a +dangerous office, a governor's." + +"And what hast thou gained by the government?" asked Ricote. + +"I have gained," said Sancho, "the knowledge that I am no good for +governing, unless it is a drove of cattle, and that the riches that are +to be got by these governments are got at the cost of one's rest and +sleep, ay and even one's food; for in islands the governors must eat +little, especially if they have doctors to look after their health." + +"I don't understand thee, Sancho," said Ricote; "but it seems to me all +nonsense thou art talking. Who would give thee islands to govern? Is +there any scarcity in the world of cleverer men than thou art for +governors? Hold thy peace, Sancho, and come back to thy senses, and +consider whether thou wilt come with me as I said to help me to take away +treasure I left buried (for indeed it may be called a treasure, it is so +large), and I will give thee wherewithal to keep thee, as I told thee." + +"And I have told thee already, Ricote, that I will not," said Sancho; +"let it content thee that by me thou shalt not be betrayed, and go thy +way in God's name and let me go mine; for I know that well-gotten gain +may be lost, but ill-gotten gain is lost, itself and its owner likewise." + +"I will not press thee, Sancho," said Ricote; "but tell me, wert thou in +our village when my wife and daughter and brother-in-law left it?" + +"I was so," said Sancho; "and I can tell thee thy daughter left it +looking so lovely that all the village turned out to see her, and +everybody said she was the fairest creature in the world. She wept as she +went, and embraced all her friends and acquaintances and those who came +out to see her, and she begged them all to commend her to God and Our +Lady his mother, and this in such a touching way that it made me weep +myself, though I'm not much given to tears commonly; and, faith, many a +one would have liked to hide her, or go out and carry her off on the +road; but the fear of going against the king's command kept them back. +The one who showed himself most moved was Don Pedro Gregorio, the rich +young heir thou knowest of, and they say he was deep in love with her; +and since she left he has not been seen in our village again, and we all +suspect he has gone after her to steal her away, but so far nothing has +been heard of it." + +"I always had a suspicion that gentleman had a passion for my daughter," +said Ricote; "but as I felt sure of my Ricota's virtue it gave me no +uneasiness to know that he loved her; for thou must have heard it said, +Sancho, that the Morisco women seldom or never engage in amours with the +old Christians; and my daughter, who I fancy thought more of being a +Christian than of lovemaking, would not trouble herself about the +attentions of this heir." + +"God grant it," said Sancho, "for it would be a bad business for both of +them; but now let me be off, friend Ricote, for I want to reach where my +master Don Quixote is to-night." + +"God be with thee, brother Sancho," said Ricote; "my comrades are +beginning to stir, and it is time, too, for us to continue our journey;" +and then they both embraced, and Sancho mounted Dapple, and Ricote leant +upon his staff, and so they parted. + +Chapter LV. - +Of what befell Sancho on the road, and other things that cannot be +surpassed + +The length of time he delayed with Ricote prevented Sancho from reaching +the duke's castle that day, though he was within half a league of it when +night, somewhat dark and cloudy, overtook him. This, however, as it was +summer time, did not give him much uneasiness, and he turned aside out of +the road intending to wait for morning; but his ill luck and hard fate so +willed it that as he was searching about for a place to make himself as +comfortable as possible, he and Dapple fell into a deep dark hole that +lay among some very old buildings. As he fell he commended himself with +all his heart to God, fancying he was not going to stop until he reached +the depths of the bottomless pit; but it did not turn out so, for at +little more than thrice a man's height Dapple touched bottom, and he +found himself sitting on him without having received any hurt or damage +whatever. He felt himself all over and held his breath to try whether he +was quite sound or had a hole made in him anywhere, and finding himself +all right and whole and in perfect health he was profuse in his thanks to +God our Lord for the mercy that had been shown him, for he made sure he +had been broken into a thousand pieces. He also felt along the sides of +the pit with his hands to see if it were possible to get out of it +without help, but he found they were quite smooth and afforded no hold +anywhere, at which he was greatly distressed, especially when he heard +how pathetically and dolefully Dapple was bemoaning himself, and no +wonder he complained, nor was it from ill-temper, for in truth he was not +in a very good case. "Alas," said Sancho, "what unexpected accidents +happen at every step to those who live in this miserable world! Who would +have said that one who saw himself yesterday sitting on a throne, +governor of an island, giving orders to his servants and his vassals, +would see himself to-day buried in a pit without a soul to help him, or +servant or vassal to come to his relief? Here must we perish with hunger, +my ass and myself, if indeed we don't die first, he of his bruises and +injuries, and I of grief and sorrow. At any rate I'll not be as lucky as +my master Don Quixote of La Mancha, when he went down into the cave of +that enchanted Montesinos, where he found people to make more of him than +if he had been in his own house; for it seems he came in for a table laid +out and a bed ready made. There he saw fair and pleasant visions, but +here I'll see, I imagine, toads and adders. Unlucky wretch that I am, +what an end my follies and fancies have come to! They'll take up my bones +out of this, when it is heaven's will that I'm found, picked clean, white +and polished, and my good Dapple's with them, and by that, perhaps, it +will be found out who we are, at least by such as have heard that Sancho +Panza never separated from his ass, nor his ass from Sancho Panza. +Unlucky wretches, I say again, that our hard fate should not let us die +in our own country and among our own people, where if there was no help +for our misfortune, at any rate there would be some one to grieve for it +and to close our eyes as we passed away! O comrade and friend, how ill +have I repaid thy faithful services! Forgive me, and entreat Fortune, as +well as thou canst, to deliver us out of this miserable strait we are +both in; and I promise to put a crown of laurel on thy head, and make +thee look like a poet laureate, and give thee double feeds." + +In this strain did Sancho bewail himself, and his ass listened to him, +but answered him never a word, such was the distress and anguish the poor +beast found himself in. At length, after a night spent in bitter moanings +and lamentations, day came, and by its light Sancho perceived that it was +wholly impossible to escape out of that pit without help, and he fell to +bemoaning his fate and uttering loud shouts to find out if there was +anyone within hearing; but all his shouting was only crying in the +wilderness, for there was not a soul anywhere in the neighbourhood to +hear him, and then at last he gave himself up for dead. Dapple was lying +on his back, and Sancho helped him to his feet, which he was scarcely +able to keep; and then taking a piece of bread out of his alforjas which +had shared their fortunes in the fall, he gave it to the ass, to whom it +was not unwelcome, saying to him as if he understood him, "With bread all +sorrows are less." + +And now he perceived on one side of the pit a hole large enough to admit +a person if he stooped and squeezed himself into a small compass. Sancho +made for it, and entered it by creeping, and found it wide and spacious +on the inside, which he was able to see as a ray of sunlight that +penetrated what might be called the roof showed it all plainly. He +observed too that it opened and widened out into another spacious cavity; +seeing which he made his way back to where the ass was, and with a stone +began to pick away the clay from the hole until in a short time he had +made room for the beast to pass easily, and this accomplished, taking him +by the halter, he proceeded to traverse the cavern to see if there was +any outlet at the other end. He advanced, sometimes in the dark, +sometimes without light, but never without fear; "God Almighty help me!" +said he to himself; "this that is a misadventure to me would make a good +adventure for my master Don Quixote. He would have been sure to take +these depths and dungeons for flowery gardens or the palaces of Galiana, +and would have counted upon issuing out of this darkness and imprisonment +into some blooming meadow; but I, unlucky that I am, hopeless and +spiritless, expect at every step another pit deeper than the first to +open under my feet and swallow me up for good; 'welcome evil, if thou +comest alone.'" + +In this way and with these reflections he seemed to himself to have +travelled rather more than half a league, when at last he perceived a dim +light that looked like daylight and found its way in on one side, showing +that this road, which appeared to him the road to the other world, led to +some opening. + +Here Cide Hamete leaves him, and returns to Don Quixote, who in high +spirits and satisfaction was looking forward to the day fixed for the +battle he was to fight with him who had robbed Dona Rodriguez's daughter +of her honour, for whom he hoped to obtain satisfaction for the wrong and +injury shamefully done to her. It came to pass, then, that having sallied +forth one morning to practise and exercise himself in what he would have +to do in the encounter he expected to find himself engaged in the next +day, as he was putting Rocinante through his paces or pressing him to the +charge, he brought his feet so close to a pit that but for reining him in +tightly it would have been impossible for him to avoid falling into it. +He pulled him up, however, without a fall, and coming a little closer +examined the hole without dismounting; but as he was looking at it he +heard loud cries proceeding from it, and by listening attentively was +able to make out that he who uttered them was saying, "Ho, above there! +is there any Christian that hears me, or any charitable gentleman that +will take pity on a sinner buried alive, on an unfortunate disgoverned +governor?" + +It struck Don Quixote that it was the voice of Sancho Panza he heard, +whereat he was taken aback and amazed, and raising his own voice as much +as he could, he cried out, "Who is below there? Who is that complaining?" + +"Who should be here, or who should complain," was the answer, "but the +forlorn Sancho Panza, for his sins and for his ill-luck governor of the +island of Barataria, squire that was to the famous knight Don Quixote of +La Mancha?" + +When Don Quixote heard this his amazement was redoubled and his +perturbation grew greater than ever, for it suggested itself to his mind +that Sancho must be dead, and that his soul was in torment down there; +and carried away by this idea he exclaimed, "I conjure thee by everything +that as a Catholic Christian I can conjure thee by, tell me who thou art; +and if thou art a soul in torment, tell me what thou wouldst have me do +for thee; for as my profession is to give aid and succour to those that +need it in this world, it will also extend to aiding and succouring the +distressed of the other, who cannot help themselves." + +"In that case," answered the voice, "your worship who speaks to me must +be my master Don Quixote of La Mancha; nay, from the tone of the voice it +is plain it can be nobody else." + +"Don Quixote I am," replied Don Quixote, "he whose profession it is to +aid and succour the living and the dead in their necessities; wherefore +tell me who thou art, for thou art keeping me in suspense; because, if +thou art my squire Sancho Panza, and art dead, since the devils have not +carried thee off, and thou art by God's mercy in purgatory, our holy +mother the Roman Catholic Church has intercessory means sufficient to +release thee from the pains thou art in; and I for my part will plead +with her to that end, so far as my substance will go; without further +delay, therefore, declare thyself, and tell me who thou art." + +"By all that's good," was the answer, "and by the birth of whomsoever +your worship chooses, I swear, Senor Don Quixote of La Mancha, that I am +your squire Sancho Panza, and that I have never died all my life; but +that, having given up my government for reasons that would require more +time to explain, I fell last night into this pit where I am now, and +Dapple is witness and won't let me lie, for more by token he is here with +me." + +Nor was this all; one would have fancied the ass understood what Sancho +said, because that moment he began to bray so loudly that the whole cave +rang again. + +"Famous testimony!" exclaimed Don Quixote; "I know that bray as well as +if I was its mother, and thy voice too, my Sancho. Wait while I go to the +duke's castle, which is close by, and I will bring some one to take thee +out of this pit into which thy sins no doubt have brought thee." + +"Go, your worship," said Sancho, "and come back quick for God's sake; for +I cannot bear being buried alive any longer, and I'm dying of fear." + +Don Quixote left him, and hastened to the castle to tell the duke and +duchess what had happened Sancho, and they were not a little astonished +at it; they could easily understand his having fallen, from the +confirmatory circumstance of the cave which had been in existence there +from time immemorial; but they could not imagine how he had quitted the +government without their receiving any intimation of his coming. To be +brief, they fetched ropes and tackle, as the saying is, and by dint of +many hands and much labour they drew up Dapple and Sancho Panza out of +the darkness into the light of day. A student who saw him remarked, +"That's the way all bad governors should come out of their governments, +as this sinner comes out of the depths of the pit, dead with hunger, +pale, and I suppose without a farthing." + +Sancho overheard him and said, "It is eight or ten days, brother growler, +since I entered upon the government of the island they gave me, and all +that time I never had a bellyful of victuals, no not for an hour; doctors +persecuted me and enemies crushed my bones; nor had I any opportunity of +taking bribes or levying taxes; and if that be the case, as it is, I +don't deserve, I think, to come out in this fashion; but 'man proposes +and God disposes;' and God knows what is best, and what suits each one +best; and 'as the occasion, so the behaviour;' and 'let nobody say "I +won't drink of this water;"' and 'where one thinks there are flitches, +there are no pegs;' God knows my meaning and that's enough; I say no +more, though I could." + +"Be not angry or annoyed at what thou hearest, Sancho," said Don Quixote, +"or there will never be an end of it; keep a safe conscience and let them +say what they like; for trying to stop slanderers' tongues is like trying +to put gates to the open plain. If a governor comes out of his government +rich, they say he has been a thief; and if he comes out poor, that he has +been a noodle and a blockhead." + +"They'll be pretty sure this time," said Sancho, "to set me down for a +fool rather than a thief." + +Thus talking, and surrounded by boys and a crowd of people, they reached +the castle, where in one of the corridors the duke and duchess stood +waiting for them; but Sancho would not go up to see the duke until he had +first put up Dapple in the stable, for he said he had passed a very bad +night in his last quarters; then he went upstairs to see his lord and +lady, and kneeling before them he said, "Because it was your highnesses' +pleasure, not because of any desert of my own, I went to govern your +island of Barataria, which 'I entered naked, and naked I find myself; I +neither lose nor gain.' Whether I have governed well or ill, I have had +witnesses who will say what they think fit. I have answered questions, I +have decided causes, and always dying of hunger, for Doctor Pedro Recio +of Tirteafuera, the island and governor doctor, would have it so. Enemies +attacked us by night and put us in a great quandary, but the people of +the island say they came off safe and victorious by the might of my arm; +and may God give them as much health as there's truth in what they say. +In short, during that time I have weighed the cares and responsibilities +governing brings with it, and by my reckoning I find my shoulders can't +bear them, nor are they a load for my loins or arrows for my quiver; and +so, before the government threw me over I preferred to throw the +government over; and yesterday morning I left the island as I found it, +with the same streets, houses, and roofs it had when I entered it. I +asked no loan of anybody, nor did I try to fill my pocket; and though I +meant to make some useful laws, I made hardly any, as I was afraid they +would not be kept; for in that case it comes to the same thing to make +them or not to make them. I quitted the island, as I said, without any +escort except my ass; I fell into a pit, I pushed on through it, until +this morning by the light of the sun I saw an outlet, but not so easy a +one but that, had not heaven sent me my master Don Quixote, I'd have +stayed there till the end of the world. So now my lord and lady duke and +duchess, here is your governor Sancho Panza, who in the bare ten days he +has held the government has come by the knowledge that he would not give +anything to be governor, not to say of an island, but of the whole world; +and that point being settled, kissing your worships' feet, and imitating +the game of the boys when they say, 'leap thou, and give me one,' I take +a leap out of the government and pass into the service of my master Don +Quixote; for after all, though in it I eat my bread in fear and +trembling, at any rate I take my fill; and for my part, so long as I'm +full, it's all alike to me whether it's with carrots or with partridges." + +Here Sancho brought his long speech to an end, Don Quixote having been +the whole time in dread of his uttering a host of absurdities; and when +he found him leave off with so few, he thanked heaven in his heart. The +duke embraced Sancho and told him he was heartily sorry he had given up +the government so soon, but that he would see that he was provided with +some other post on his estate less onerous and more profitable. The +duchess also embraced him, and gave orders that he should be taken good +care of, as it was plain to see he had been badly treated and worse +bruised. + +Chapter LVI. - +Of the prodigious and unparalleled battle that took place between Don +Quixote of la mancha and the Lacquey Tosilos in defence of the daughter +of Dona Rodriguez + +The duke and duchess had no reason to regret the joke that had been +played upon Sancho Panza in giving him the government; especially as +their majordomo returned the same day, and gave them a minute account of +almost every word and deed that Sancho uttered or did during the time; +and to wind up with, eloquently described to them the attack upon the +island and Sancho's fright and departure, with which they were not a +little amused. After this the history goes on to say that the day fixed +for the battle arrived, and that the duke, after having repeatedly +instructed his lacquey Tosilos how to deal with Don Quixote so as to +vanquish him without killing or wounding him, gave orders to have the +heads removed from the lances, telling Don Quixote that Christian +charity, on which he plumed himself, could not suffer the battle to be +fought with so much risk and danger to life; and that he must be content +with the offer of a battlefield on his territory (though that was against +the decree of the holy Council, which prohibits all challenges of the +sort) and not push such an arduous venture to its extreme limits. Don +Quixote bade his excellence arrange all matters connected with the affair +as he pleased, as on his part he would obey him in everything. The dread +day, then, having arrived, and the duke having ordered a spacious stand +to be erected facing the court of the castle for the judges of the field +and the appellant duennas, mother and daughter, vast crowds flocked from +all the villages and hamlets of the neighbourhood to see the novel +spectacle of the battle; nobody, dead or alive, in those parts having +ever seen or heard of such a one. + +The first person to enter the-field and the lists was the master of the +ceremonies, who surveyed and paced the whole ground to see that there was +nothing unfair and nothing concealed to make the combatants stumble or +fall; then the duennas entered and seated themselves, enveloped in +mantles covering their eyes, nay even their bosoms, and displaying no +slight emotion as Don Quixote appeared in the lists. Shortly afterwards, +accompanied by several trumpets and mounted on a powerful steed that +threatened to crush the whole place, the great lacquey Tosilos made his +appearance on one side of the courtyard with his visor down and stiffly +cased in a suit of stout shining armour. The horse was a manifest +Frieslander, broad-backed and flea-bitten, and with half a hundred of +wool hanging to each of his fetlocks. The gallant combatant came well +primed by his master the duke as to how he was to bear himself against +the valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha; being warned that he must on no +account slay him, but strive to shirk the first encounter so as to avoid +the risk of killing him, as he was sure to do if he met him full tilt. He +crossed the courtyard at a walk, and coming to where the duennas were +placed stopped to look at her who demanded him for a husband; the marshal +of the field summoned Don Quixote, who had already presented himself in +the courtyard, and standing by the side of Tosilos he addressed the +duennas, and asked them if they consented that Don Quixote of La Mancha +should do battle for their right. They said they did, and that whatever +he should do in that behalf they declared rightly done, final and valid. +By this time the duke and duchess had taken their places in a gallery +commanding the enclosure, which was filled to overflowing with a +multitude of people eager to see this perilous and unparalleled +encounter. The conditions of the combat were that if Don Quixote proved +the victor his antagonist was to marry the daughter of Dona Rodriguez; +but if he should be vanquished his opponent was released from the promise +that was claimed against him and from all obligations to give +satisfaction. The master of the ceremonies apportioned the sun to them, +and stationed them, each on the spot where he was to stand. The drums +beat, the sound of the trumpets filled the air, the earth trembled under +foot, the hearts of the gazing crowd were full of anxiety, some hoping +for a happy issue, some apprehensive of an untoward ending to the affair, +and lastly, Don Quixote, commending himself with all his heart to God our +Lord and to the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, stood waiting for them to give +the necessary signal for the onset. Our lacquey, however, was thinking of +something very different; he only thought of what I am now going to +mention. + +It seems that as he stood contemplating his enemy she struck him as the +most beautiful woman he had ever seen all his life; and the little blind +boy whom in our streets they commonly call Love had no mind to let slip +the chance of triumphing over a lacquey heart, and adding it to the list +of his trophies; and so, stealing gently upon him unseen, he drove a dart +two yards long into the poor lacquey's left side and pierced his heart +through and through; which he was able to do quite at his ease, for Love +is invisible, and comes in and goes out as he likes, without anyone +calling him to account for what he does. Well then, when they gave the +signal for the onset our lacquey was in an ecstasy, musing upon the +beauty of her whom he had already made mistress of his liberty, and so he +paid no attention to the sound of the trumpet, unlike Don Quixote, who +was off the instant he heard it, and, at the highest speed Rocinante was +capable of, set out to meet his enemy, his good squire Sancho shouting +lustily as he saw him start, "God guide thee, cream and flower of +knights-errant! God give thee the victory, for thou hast the right on thy +side!" But though Tosilos saw Don Quixote coming at him he never stirred +a step from the spot where he was posted; and instead of doing so called +loudly to the marshal of the field, to whom when he came up to see what +he wanted he said, "Senor, is not this battle to decide whether I marry +or do not marry that lady?" "Just so," was the answer. "Well then," said +the lacquey, "I feel qualms of conscience, and I should lay a-heavy +burden upon it if I were to proceed any further with the combat; I +therefore declare that I yield myself vanquished, and that I am willing +to marry the lady at once." + +The marshal of the field was lost in astonishment at the words of +Tosilos; and as he was one of those who were privy to the arrangement of +the affair he knew not what to say in reply. Don Quixote pulled up in mid +career when he saw that his enemy was not coming on to the attack. The +duke could not make out the reason why the battle did not go on; but the +marshal of the field hastened to him to let him know what Tosilos said, +and he was amazed and extremely angry at it. In the meantime Tosilos +advanced to where Dona Rodriguez sat and said in a loud voice, "Senora, I +am willing to marry your daughter, and I have no wish to obtain by strife +and fighting what I can obtain in peace and without any risk to my life." + +The valiant Don Quixote heard him, and said, "As that is the case I am +released and absolved from my promise; let them marry by all means, and +as 'God our Lord has given her, may Saint Peter add his blessing.'" + +The duke had now descended to the courtyard of the castle, and going up +to Tosilos he said to him, "Is it true, sir knight, that you yield +yourself vanquished, and that moved by scruples of conscience you wish to +marry this damsel?" + +"It is, senor," replied Tosilos. + +"And he does well," said Sancho, "for what thou hast to give to the +mouse, give to the cat, and it will save thee all trouble." + +Tosilos meanwhile was trying to unlace his helmet, and he begged them to +come to his help at once, as his power of breathing was failing him, and +he could not remain so long shut up in that confined space. They removed +it in all haste, and his lacquey features were revealed to public gaze. +At this sight Dona Rodriguez and her daughter raised a mighty outcry, +exclaiming, "This is a trick! This is a trick! They have put Tosilos, my +lord the duke's lacquey, upon us in place of the real husband. The +justice of God and the king against such trickery, not to say roguery!" + +"Do not distress yourselves, ladies," said Don Quixote; "for this is no +trickery or roguery; or if it is, it is not the duke who is at the bottom +of it, but those wicked enchanters who persecute me, and who, jealous of +my reaping the glory of this victory, have turned your husband's features +into those of this person, who you say is a lacquey of the duke's; take +my advice, and notwithstanding the malice of my enemies marry him, for +beyond a doubt he is the one you wish for a husband." + +When the duke heard this all his anger was near vanishing in a fit of +laughter, and he said, "The things that happen to Senor Don Quixote are +so extraordinary that I am ready to believe this lacquey of mine is not +one; but let us adopt this plan and device; let us put off the marriage +for, say, a fortnight, and let us keep this person about whom we are +uncertain in close confinement, and perhaps in the course of that time he +may return to his original shape; for the spite which the enchanters +entertain against Senor Don Quixote cannot last so long, especially as it +is of so little advantage to them to practise these deceptions and +transformations." + +"Oh, senor," said Sancho, "those scoundrels are well used to changing +whatever concerns my master from one thing into another. A knight that he +overcame some time back, called the Knight of the Mirrors, they turned +into the shape of the bachelor Samson Carrasco of our town and a great +friend of ours; and my lady Dulcinea del Toboso they have turned into a +common country wench; so I suspect this lacquey will have to live and die +a lacquey all the days of his life." + +Here the Rodriguez's daughter exclaimed, "Let him be who he may, this man +that claims me for a wife; I am thankful to him for the same, for I had +rather be the lawful wife of a lacquey than the cheated mistress of a +gentleman; though he who played me false is nothing of the kind." + +To be brief, all the talk and all that had happened ended in Tosilos +being shut up until it was seen how his transformation turned out. All +hailed Don Quixote as victor, but the greater number were vexed and +disappointed at finding that the combatants they had been so anxiously +waiting for had not battered one another to pieces, just as the boys are +disappointed when the man they are waiting to see hanged does not come +out, because the prosecution or the court has pardoned him. The people +dispersed, the duke and Don Quixote returned to the castle, they locked +up Tosilos, Dona Rodriguez and her daughter remained perfectly contented +when they saw that any way the affair must end in marriage, and Tosilos +wanted nothing else. + +Chapter LVII. - +Which treats of how Don Quixote took leave of the Duke, and of what +followed with the witty and impudent Altisidora, one of the Duchess's +damsels + +Don Quixote now felt it right to quit a life of such idleness as he was +leading in the castle; for he fancied that he was making himself sorely +missed by suffering himself to remain shut up and inactive amid the +countless luxuries and enjoyments his hosts lavished upon him as a +knight, and he felt too that he would have to render a strict account to +heaven of that indolence and seclusion; and so one day he asked the duke +and duchess to grant him permission to take his departure. They gave it, +showing at the same time that they were very sorry he was leaving them. + +The duchess gave his wife's letters to Sancho Panza, who shed tears over +them, saying, "Who would have thought that such grand hopes as the news +of my government bred in my wife Teresa Panza's breast would end in my +going back now to the vagabond adventures of my master Don Quixote of La +Mancha? Still I'm glad to see my Teresa behaved as she ought in sending +the acorns, for if she had not sent them I'd have been sorry, and she'd +have shown herself ungrateful. It is a comfort to me that they can't call +that present a bribe; for I had got the government already when she sent +them, and it's but reasonable that those who have had a good turn done +them should show their gratitude, if it's only with a trifle. After all I +went into the government naked, and I come out of it naked; so I can say +with a safe conscience--and that's no small matter--'naked I was born, +naked I find myself, I neither lose nor gain.'" + +Thus did Sancho soliloquise on the day of their departure, as Don +Quixote, who had the night before taken leave of the duke and duchess, +coming out made his appearance at an early hour in full armour in the +courtyard of the castle. The whole household of the castle were watching +him from the corridors, and the duke and duchess, too, came out to see +him. Sancho was mounted on his Dapple, with his alforjas, valise, and +proven, supremely happy because the duke's majordomo, the same that had +acted the part of the Trifaldi, had given him a little purse with two +hundred gold crowns to meet the necessary expenses of the road, but of +this Don Quixote knew nothing as yet. While all were, as has been said, +observing him, suddenly from among the duennas and handmaidens the +impudent and witty Altisidora lifted up her voice and said in pathetic +tones: + +poem{ + +Give ear, cruel knight; + Draw rein; where's the need +Of spurring the flanks + Of that ill-broken steed? +From what art thou flying? + No dragon I am, +Not even a sheep, + But a tender young lamb. +Thou hast jilted a maiden + As fair to behold +As nymph of Diana + Or Venus of old. + +Bireno, AEneas, what worse shall I call thee? + +Barabbas go with thee! All evil befall thee! + +In thy claws, ruthless robber, + Thou bearest away +The heart of a meek + Loving maid for thy prey, +Three kerchiefs thou stealest, + And garters a pair, +From legs than the whitest + Of marble more fair; +And the sighs that pursue thee + Would burn to the ground +Two thousand Troy Towns, + If so many were found. + +Bireno, AEneas, what worse shall I call thee? + +Barabbas go with thee! All evil befall thee! + +May no bowels of mercy + To Sancho be granted, +And thy Dulcinea + Be left still enchanted, +May thy falsehood to me + Find its punishment in her, +For in my land the just + Often pays for the sinner. +May thy grandest adventures + Discomfitures prove, +May thy joys be all dreams, + And forgotten thy love. + +Bireno, AEneas, what worse shall I call thee? + +Barabbas go with thee! All evil befall thee! + +May thy name be abhorred + For thy conduct to ladies, +From London to England, + From Seville to Cadiz; +May thy cards be unlucky, + Thy hands contain ne'er a +King, seven, or ace + When thou playest primera; +When thy corns are cut + May it be to the quick; +When thy grinders are drawn + May the roots of them stick. + +Bireno, AEneas, what worse shall I call thee? + +Barabbas go with thee! All evil befall thee! + +}poem + +All the while the unhappy Altisidora was bewailing herself in the above +strain Don Quixote stood staring at her; and without uttering a word in +reply to her he turned round to Sancho and said, "Sancho my friend, I +conjure thee by the life of thy forefathers tell me the truth; say, hast +thou by any chance taken the three kerchiefs and the garters this +love-sick maid speaks of?" + +To this Sancho made answer, "The three kerchiefs I have; but the garters, +as much as 'over the hills of Ubeda.'" + +The duchess was amazed at Altisidora's assurance; she knew that she was +bold, lively, and impudent, but not so much so as to venture to make free +in this fashion; and not being prepared for the joke, her astonishment +was all the greater. The duke had a mind to keep up the sport, so he +said, "It does not seem to me well done in you, sir knight, that after +having received the hospitality that has been offered you in this very +castle, you should have ventured to carry off even three kerchiefs, not +to say my handmaid's garters. It shows a bad heart and does not tally +with your reputation. Restore her garters, or else I defy you to mortal +combat, for I am not afraid of rascally enchanters changing or altering +my features as they changed his who encountered you into those of my +lacquey, Tosilos." + +"God forbid," said Don Quixote, "that I should draw my sword against your +illustrious person from which I have received such great favours. The +kerchiefs I will restore, as Sancho says he has them; as to the garters +that is impossible, for I have not got them, neither has he; and if your +handmaiden here will look in her hiding-places, depend upon it she will +find them. I have never been a thief, my lord duke, nor do I mean to be +so long as I live, if God cease not to have me in his keeping. This +damsel by her own confession speaks as one in love, for which I am not to +blame, and therefore need not ask pardon, either of her or of your +excellence, whom I entreat to have a better opinion of me, and once more +to give me leave to pursue my journey." + +"And may God so prosper it, Senor Don Quixote," said the duchess, "that +we may always hear good news of your exploits; God speed you; for the +longer you stay, the more you inflame the hearts of the damsels who +behold you; and as for this one of mine, I will so chastise her that she +will not transgress again, either with her eyes or with her words." + +"One word and no more, O valiant Don Quixote, I ask you to hear," said +Altisidora, "and that is that I beg your pardon about the theft of the +garters; for by God and upon my soul I have got them on, and I have +fallen into the same blunder as he did who went looking for his ass being +all the while mounted on it." + +"Didn't I say so?" said Sancho. "I'm a likely one to hide thefts! Why if +I wanted to deal in them, opportunities came ready enough to me in my +government." + +Don Quixote bowed his head, and saluted the duke and duchess and all the +bystanders, and wheeling Rocinante round, Sancho following him on Dapple, +he rode out of the castle, shaping his course for Saragossa. + +Chapter LVIII. - +Which tells how adventures came crowding on Don Quixote in such numbers +that they gave one another no breathing-time + +When Don Quixote saw himself in open country, free, and relieved from the +attentions of Altisidora, he felt at his ease, and in fresh spirits to +take up the pursuit of chivalry once more; and turning to Sancho he said, +"Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven has +bestowed upon men; no treasures that the earth holds buried or the sea +conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, life may and +should be ventured; and on the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil +that can fall to the lot of man. I say this, Sancho, because thou hast +seen the good cheer, the abundance we have enjoyed in this castle we are +leaving; well then, amid those dainty banquets and snow-cooled beverages +I felt as though I were undergoing the straits of hunger, because I did +not enjoy them with the same freedom as if they had been mine own; for +the sense of being under an obligation to return benefits and favours +received is a restraint that checks the independence of the spirit. Happy +he, to whom heaven has given a piece of bread for which he is not bound +to give thanks to any but heaven itself!" + +"For all your worship says," said Sancho, "it is not becoming that there +should be no thanks on our part for two hundred gold crowns that the +duke's majordomo has given me in a little purse which I carry next my +heart, like a warming plaster or comforter, to meet any chance calls; for +we shan't always find castles where they'll entertain us; now and then we +may light upon roadside inns where they'll cudgel us." + +In conversation of this sort the knight and squire errant were pursuing +their journey, when, after they had gone a little more than half a +league, they perceived some dozen men dressed like labourers stretched +upon their cloaks on the grass of a green meadow eating their dinner. +They had beside them what seemed to be white sheets concealing some +objects under them, standing upright or lying flat, and arranged at +intervals. Don Quixote approached the diners, and, saluting them +courteously first, he asked them what it was those cloths covered. +"Senor," answered one of the party, "under these cloths are some images +carved in relief intended for a retablo we are putting up in our village; +we carry them covered up that they may not be soiled, and on our +shoulders that they may not be broken." + +"With your good leave," said Don Quixote, "I should like to see them; for +images that are carried so carefully no doubt must be fine ones." + +"I should think they were!" said the other; "let the money they cost +speak for that; for as a matter of fact there is not one of them that +does not stand us in more than fifty ducats; and that your worship may +judge; wait a moment, and you shall see with your own eyes;" and getting +up from his dinner he went and uncovered the first image, which proved to +be one of Saint George on horseback with a serpent writhing at his feet +and the lance thrust down its throat with all that fierceness that is +usually depicted. The whole group was one blaze of gold, as the saying +is. On seeing it Don Quixote said, "That knight was one of the best +knights-errant the army of heaven ever owned; he was called Don Saint +George, and he was moreover a defender of maidens. Let us see this next +one." + +The man uncovered it, and it was seen to be that of Saint Martin on his +horse, dividing his cloak with the beggar. The instant Don Quixote saw it +he said, "This knight too was one of the Christian adventurers, but I +believe he was generous rather than valiant, as thou mayest perceive, +Sancho, by his dividing his cloak with the beggar and giving him half of +it; no doubt it was winter at the time, for otherwise he would have given +him the whole of it, so charitable was he." + +"It was not that, most likely," said Sancho, "but that he held with the +proverb that says, 'For giving and keeping there's need of brains.'" + +Don Quixote laughed, and asked them to take off the next cloth, +underneath which was seen the image of the patron saint of the Spains +seated on horseback, his sword stained with blood, trampling on Moors and +treading heads underfoot; and on seeing it Don Quixote exclaimed, "Ay, +this is a knight, and of the squadrons of Christ! This one is called Don +Saint James the Moorslayer, one of the bravest saints and knights the +world ever had or heaven has now." + +They then raised another cloth which it appeared covered Saint Paul +falling from his horse, with all the details that are usually given in +representations of his conversion. When Don Quixote saw it, rendered in +such lifelike style that one would have said Christ was speaking and Paul +answering, "This," he said, "was in his time the greatest enemy that the +Church of God our Lord had, and the greatest champion it will ever have; +a knight-errant in life, a steadfast saint in death, an untiring labourer +in the Lord's vineyard, a teacher of the Gentiles, whose school was +heaven, and whose instructor and master was Jesus Christ himself." + +There were no more images, so Don Quixote bade them cover them up again, +and said to those who had brought them, "I take it as a happy omen, +brothers, to have seen what I have; for these saints and knights were of +the same profession as myself, which is the calling of arms; only there +is this difference between them and me, that they were saints, and fought +with divine weapons, and I am a sinner and fight with human ones. They +won heaven by force of arms, for heaven suffereth violence; and I, so +far, know not what I have won by dint of my sufferings; but if my +Dulcinea del Toboso were to be released from hers, perhaps with mended +fortunes and a mind restored to itself I might direct my steps in a +better path than I am following at present." + +"May God hear and sin be deaf," said Sancho to this. + +The men were filled with wonder, as well at the figure as at the words of +Don Quixote, though they did not understand one half of what he meant by +them. They finished their dinner, took their images on their backs, and +bidding farewell to Don Quixote resumed their journey. + +Sancho was amazed afresh at the extent of his master's knowledge, as much +as if he had never known him, for it seemed to him that there was no +story or event in the world that he had not at his fingers' ends and +fixed in his memory, and he said to him, "In truth, master mine, if this +that has happened to us to-day is to be called an adventure, it has been +one of the sweetest and pleasantest that have befallen us in the whole +course of our travels; we have come out of it unbelaboured and +undismayed, neither have we drawn sword nor have we smitten the earth +with our bodies, nor have we been left famishing; blessed be God that he +has let me see such a thing with my own eyes!" + +"Thou sayest well, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "but remember all times are +not alike nor do they always run the same way; and these things the +vulgar commonly call omens, which are not based upon any natural reason, +will by him who is wise be esteemed and reckoned happy accidents merely. +One of these believers in omens will get up of a morning, leave his +house, and meet a friar of the order of the blessed Saint Francis, and, +as if he had met a griffin, he will turn about and go home. With another +Mendoza the salt is spilt on his table, and gloom is spilt over his +heart, as if nature was obliged to give warning of coming misfortunes by +means of such trivial things as these. The wise man and the Christian +should not trifle with what it may please heaven to do. Scipio on coming +to Africa stumbled as he leaped on shore; his soldiers took it as a bad +omen; but he, clasping the soil with his arms, exclaimed, 'Thou canst not +escape me, Africa, for I hold thee tight between my arms.' Thus, Sancho, +meeting those images has been to me a most happy occurrence." + +"I can well believe it," said Sancho; "but I wish your worship would tell +me what is the reason that the Spaniards, when they are about to give +battle, in calling on that Saint James the Moorslayer, say 'Santiago and +close Spain!' Is Spain, then, open, so that it is needful to close it; or +what is the meaning of this form?" + +"Thou art very simple, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "God, look you, gave +that great knight of the Red Cross to Spain as her patron saint and +protector, especially in those hard struggles the Spaniards had with the +Moors; and therefore they invoke and call upon him as their defender in +all their battles; and in these he has been many a time seen beating +down, trampling under foot, destroying and slaughtering the Hagarene +squadrons in the sight of all; of which fact I could give thee many +examples recorded in truthful Spanish histories." + +Sancho changed the subject, and said to his master, "I marvel, senor, at +the boldness of Altisidora, the duchess's handmaid; he whom they call +Love must have cruelly pierced and wounded her; they say he is a little +blind urchin who, though blear-eyed, or more properly speaking sightless, +if he aims at a heart, be it ever so small, hits it and pierces it +through and through with his arrows. I have heard it said too that the +arrows of Love are blunted and robbed of their points by maidenly modesty +and reserve; but with this Altisidora it seems they are sharpened rather +than blunted." + +"Bear in mind, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that love is influenced by no +consideration, recognises no restraints of reason, and is of the same +nature as death, that assails alike the lofty palaces of kings and the +humble cabins of shepherds; and when it takes entire possession of a +heart, the first thing it does is to banish fear and shame from it; and +so without shame Altisidora declared her passion, which excited in my +mind embarrassment rather than commiseration." + +"Notable cruelty!" exclaimed Sancho; "unheard-of ingratitude! I can only +say for myself that the very smallest loving word of hers would have +subdued me and made a slave of me. The devil! What a heart of marble, +what bowels of brass, what a soul of mortar! But I can't imagine what it +is that this damsel saw in your worship that could have conquered and +captivated her so. What gallant figure was it, what bold bearing, what +sprightly grace, what comeliness of feature, which of these things by +itself, or what all together, could have made her fall in love with you? +For indeed and in truth many a time I stop to look at your worship from +the sole of your foot to the topmost hair of your head, and I see more to +frighten one than to make one fall in love; moreover I have heard say +that beauty is the first and main thing that excites love, and as your +worship has none at all, I don't know what the poor creature fell in love +with." + +"Recollect, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "there are two sorts of beauty, +one of the mind, the other of the body; that of the mind displays and +exhibits itself in intelligence, in modesty, in honourable conduct, in +generosity, in good breeding; and all these qualities are possible and +may exist in an ugly man; and when it is this sort of beauty and not that +of the body that is the attraction, love is apt to spring up suddenly and +violently. I, Sancho, perceive clearly enough that I am not beautiful, +but at the same time I know I am not hideous; and it is enough for an +honest man not to be a monster to be an object of love, if only he +possesses the endowments of mind I have mentioned." + +While engaged in this discourse they were making their way through a wood +that lay beyond the road, when suddenly, without expecting anything of +the kind, Don Quixote found himself caught in some nets of green cord +stretched from one tree to another; and unable to conceive what it could +be, he said to Sancho, "Sancho, it strikes me this affair of these nets +will prove one of the strangest adventures imaginable. May I die if the +enchanters that persecute me are not trying to entangle me in them and +delay my journey, by way of revenge for my obduracy towards Altisidora. +Well then let me tell them that if these nets, instead of being green +cord, were made of the hardest diamonds, or stronger than that wherewith +the jealous god of blacksmiths enmeshed Venus and Mars, I would break +them as easily as if they were made of rushes or cotton threads." But +just as he was about to press forward and break through all, suddenly +from among some trees two shepherdesses of surpassing beauty presented +themselves to his sight--or at least damsels dressed like shepherdesses, +save that their jerkins and sayas were of fine brocade; that is to say, +the sayas were rich farthingales of gold embroidered tabby. Their hair, +that in its golden brightness vied with the beams of the sun itself, fell +loose upon their shoulders and was crowned with garlands twined with +green laurel and red everlasting; and their years to all appearance were +not under fifteen nor above eighteen. + +Such was the spectacle that filled Sancho with amazement, fascinated Don +Quixote, made the sun halt in his course to behold them, and held all +four in a strange silence. One of the shepherdesses, at length, was the +first to speak and said to Don Quixote, "Hold, sir knight, and do not +break these nets; for they are not spread here to do you any harm, but +only for our amusement; and as I know you will ask why they have been put +up, and who we are, I will tell you in a few words. In a village some two +leagues from this, where there are many people of quality and rich +gentlefolk, it was agreed upon by a number of friends and relations to +come with their wives, sons and daughters, neighbours, friends and +kinsmen, and make holiday in this spot, which is one of the pleasantest +in the whole neighbourhood, setting up a new pastoral Arcadia among +ourselves, we maidens dressing ourselves as shepherdesses and the youths +as shepherds. We have prepared two eclogues, one by the famous poet +Garcilasso, the other by the most excellent Camoens, in its own +Portuguese tongue, but we have not as yet acted them. Yesterday was the +first day of our coming here; we have a few of what they say are called +field-tents pitched among the trees on the bank of an ample brook that +fertilises all these meadows; last night we spread these nets in the +trees here to snare the silly little birds that startled by the noise we +make may fly into them. If you please to be our guest, senor, you will be +welcomed heartily and courteously, for here just now neither care nor +sorrow shall enter." + +She held her peace and said no more, and Don Quixote made answer, "Of a +truth, fairest lady, Actaeon when he unexpectedly beheld Diana bathing in +the stream could not have been more fascinated and wonderstruck than I at +the sight of your beauty. I commend your mode of entertainment, and thank +you for the kindness of your invitation; and if I can serve you, you may +command me with full confidence of being obeyed, for my profession is +none other than to show myself grateful, and ready to serve persons of +all conditions, but especially persons of quality such as your appearance +indicates; and if, instead of taking up, as they probably do, but a small +space, these nets took up the whole surface of the globe, I would seek +out new worlds through which to pass, so as not to break them; and that +ye may give some degree of credence to this exaggerated language of mine, +know that it is no less than Don Quixote of La Mancha that makes this +declaration to you, if indeed it be that such a name has reached your +ears." + +"Ah! friend of my soul," instantly exclaimed the other shepherdess, "what +great good fortune has befallen us! Seest thou this gentleman we have +before us? Well then let me tell thee he is the most valiant and the most +devoted and the most courteous gentleman in all the world, unless a +history of his achievements that has been printed and I have read is +telling lies and deceiving us. I will lay a wager that this good fellow +who is with him is one Sancho Panza his squire, whose drolleries none can +equal." + +"That's true," said Sancho; "I am that same droll and squire you speak +of, and this gentleman is my master Don Quixote of La Mancha, the same +that's in the history and that they talk about." + +"Oh, my friend," said the other, "let us entreat him to stay; for it will +give our fathers and brothers infinite pleasure; I too have heard just +what thou hast told me of the valour of the one and the drolleries of the +other; and what is more, of him they say that he is the most constant and +loyal lover that was ever heard of, and that his lady is one Dulcinea del +Toboso, to whom all over Spain the palm of beauty is awarded." + +"And justly awarded," said Don Quixote, "unless, indeed, your unequalled +beauty makes it a matter of doubt. But spare yourselves the trouble, +ladies, of pressing me to stay, for the urgent calls of my profession do +not allow me to take rest under any circumstances." + +At this instant there came up to the spot where the four stood a brother +of one of the two shepherdesses, like them in shepherd costume, and as +richly and gaily dressed as they were. They told him that their companion +was the valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha, and the other Sancho his +squire, of whom he knew already from having read their history. The gay +shepherd offered him his services and begged that he would accompany him +to their tents, and Don Quixote had to give way and comply. And now the +gave was started, and the nets were filled with a variety of birds that +deceived by the colour fell into the danger they were flying from. +Upwards of thirty persons, all gaily attired as shepherds and +shepherdesses, assembled on the spot, and were at once informed who Don +Quixote and his squire were, whereat they were not a little delighted, as +they knew of him already through his history. They repaired to the tents, +where they found tables laid out, and choicely, plentifully, and neatly +furnished. They treated Don Quixote as a person of distinction, giving +him the place of honour, and all observed him, and were full of +astonishment at the spectacle. At last the cloth being removed, Don +Quixote with great composure lifted up his voice and said: + +"One of the greatest sins that men are guilty of is--some will say +pride--but I say ingratitude, going by the common saying that hell is +full of ingrates. This sin, so far as it has lain in my power, I have +endeavoured to avoid ever since I have enjoyed the faculty of reason; and +if I am unable to requite good deeds that have been done me by other +deeds, I substitute the desire to do so; and if that be not enough I make +them known publicly; for he who declares and makes known the good deeds +done to him would repay them by others if it were in his power, and for +the most part those who receive are the inferiors of those who give. +Thus, God is superior to all because he is the supreme giver, and the +offerings of man fall short by an infinite distance of being a full +return for the gifts of God; but gratitude in some degree makes up for +this deficiency and shortcoming. I therefore, grateful for the favour +that has been extended to me here, and unable to make a return in the +same measure, restricted as I am by the narrow limits of my power, offer +what I can and what I have to offer in my own way; and so I declare that +for two full days I will maintain in the middle of this highway leading +to Saragossa, that these ladies disguised as shepherdesses, who are here +present, are the fairest and most courteous maidens in the world, +excepting only the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso, sole mistress of my +thoughts, be it said without offence to those who hear me, ladies and +gentlemen." + +On hearing this Sancho, who had been listening with great attention, +cried out in a loud voice, "Is it possible there is anyone in the world +who will dare to say and swear that this master of mine is a madman? Say, +gentlemen shepherds, is there a village priest, be he ever so wise or +learned, who could say what my master has said; or is there +knight-errant, whatever renown he may have as a man of valour, that could +offer what my master has offered now?" + +Don Quixote turned upon Sancho, and with a countenance glowing with anger +said to him, "Is it possible, Sancho, there is anyone in the whole world +who will say thou art not a fool, with a lining to match, and I know not +what trimmings of impertinence and roguery? Who asked thee to meddle in +my affairs, or to inquire whether I am a wise man or a blockhead? Hold +thy peace; answer me not a word; saddle Rocinante if he be unsaddled; and +let us go to put my offer into execution; for with the right that I have +on my side thou mayest reckon as vanquished all who shall venture to +question it;" and in a great rage, and showing his anger plainly, he rose +from his seat, leaving the company lost in wonder, and making them feel +doubtful whether they ought to regard him as a madman or a rational +being. In the end, though they sought to dissuade him from involving +himself in such a challenge, assuring him they admitted his gratitude as +fully established, and needed no fresh proofs to be convinced of his +valiant spirit, as those related in the history of his exploits were +sufficient, still Don Quixote persisted in his resolve; and mounted on +Rocinante, bracing his buckler on his arm and grasping his lance, he +posted himself in the middle of a high road that was not far from the +green meadow. Sancho followed on Dapple, together with all the members of +the pastoral gathering, eager to see what would be the upshot of his +vainglorious and extraordinary proposal. + +Don Quixote, then, having, as has been said, planted himself in the +middle of the road, made the welkin ring with words to this effect: "Ho +ye travellers and wayfarers, knights, squires, folk on foot or on +horseback, who pass this way or shall pass in the course of the next two +days! Know that Don Quixote of La Mancha, knight-errant, is posted here +to maintain by arms that the beauty and courtesy enshrined in the nymphs +that dwell in these meadows and groves surpass all upon earth, putting +aside the lady of my heart, Dulcinea del Toboso. Wherefore, let him who +is of the opposite opinion come on, for here I await him." + +Twice he repeated the same words, and twice they fell unheard by any +adventurer; but fate, that was guiding affairs for him from better to +better, so ordered it that shortly afterwards there appeared on the road +a crowd of men on horseback, many of them with lances in their hands, all +riding in a compact body and in great haste. No sooner had those who were +with Don Quixote seen them than they turned about and withdrew to some +distance from the road, for they knew that if they stayed some harm might +come to them; but Don Quixote with intrepid heart stood his ground, and +Sancho Panza shielded himself with Rocinante's hind-quarters. The troop +of lancers came up, and one of them who was in advance began shouting to +Don Quixote, "Get out of the way, you son of the devil, or these bulls +will knock you to pieces!" + +"Rabble!" returned Don Quixote, "I care nothing for bulls, be they the +fiercest Jarama breeds on its banks. Confess at once, scoundrels, that +what I have declared is true; else ye have to deal with me in combat." + +The herdsman had no time to reply, nor Don Quixote to get out of the way +even if he wished; and so the drove of fierce bulls and tame bullocks, +together with the crowd of herdsmen and others who were taking them to be +penned up in a village where they were to be run the next day, passed +over Don Quixote and over Sancho, Rocinante and Dapple, hurling them all +to the earth and rolling them over on the ground. Sancho was left +crushed, Don Quixote scared, Dapple belaboured and Rocinante in no very +sound condition. + +They all got up, however, at length, and Don Quixote in great haste, +stumbling here and falling there, started off running after the drove, +shouting out, "Hold! stay! ye rascally rabble, a single knight awaits +you, and he is not of the temper or opinion of those who say, 'For a +flying enemy make a bridge of silver.'" The retreating party in their +haste, however, did not stop for that, or heed his menaces any more than +last year's clouds. Weariness brought Don Quixote to a halt, and more +enraged than avenged he sat down on the road to wait until Sancho, +Rocinante and Dapple came up. When they reached him master and man +mounted once more, and without going back to bid farewell to the mock or +imitation Arcadia, and more in humiliation than contentment, they +continued their journey. + +Chapter LIX. - +Wherein is related the strange thing, which may be regarded as an +adventure, that happened Don Quixote + +A clear limpid spring which they discovered in a cool grove relieved Don +Quixote and Sancho of the dust and fatigue due to the unpolite behaviour +of the bulls, and by the side of this, having turned Dapple and Rocinante +loose without headstall or bridle, the forlorn pair, master and man, +seated themselves. Sancho had recourse to the larder of his alforjas and +took out of them what he called the prog; Don Quixote rinsed his mouth +and bathed his face, by which cooling process his flagging energies were +revived. Out of pure vexation he remained without eating, and out of pure +politeness Sancho did not venture to touch a morsel of what was before +him, but waited for his master to act as taster. Seeing, however, that, +absorbed in thought, he was forgetting to carry the bread to his mouth, +he said never a word, and trampling every sort of good breeding under +foot, began to stow away in his paunch the bread and cheese that came to +his hand. + +"Eat, Sancho my friend," said Don Quixote; "support life, which is of +more consequence to thee than to me, and leave me to die under the pain +of my thoughts and pressure of my misfortunes. I was born, Sancho, to +live dying, and thou to die eating; and to prove the truth of what I say, +look at me, printed in histories, famed in arms, courteous in behaviour, +honoured by princes, courted by maidens; and after all, when I looked +forward to palms, triumphs, and crowns, won and earned by my valiant +deeds, I have this morning seen myself trampled on, kicked, and crushed +by the feet of unclean and filthy animals. This thought blunts my teeth, +paralyses my jaws, cramps my hands, and robs me of all appetite for food; +so much so that I have a mind to let myself die of hunger, the cruelest +death of all deaths." + +"So then," said Sancho, munching hard all the time, "your worship does +not agree with the proverb that says, 'Let Martha die, but let her die +with a full belly.' I, at any rate, have no mind to kill myself; so far +from that, I mean to do as the cobbler does, who stretches the leather +with his teeth until he makes it reach as far as he wants. I'll stretch +out my life by eating until it reaches the end heaven has fixed for it; +and let me tell you, senor, there's no greater folly than to think of +dying of despair as your worship does; take my advice, and after eating +lie down and sleep a bit on this green grass-mattress, and you will see +that when you awake you'll feel something better." + +Don Quixote did as he recommended, for it struck him that Sancho's +reasoning was more like a philosopher's than a blockhead's, and said he, +"Sancho, if thou wilt do for me what I am going to tell thee my ease of +mind would be more assured and my heaviness of heart not so great; and it +is this; to go aside a little while I am sleeping in accordance with thy +advice, and, making bare thy carcase to the air, to give thyself three or +four hundred lashes with Rocinante's reins, on account of the three +thousand and odd thou art to give thyself for the disenchantment of +Dulcinea; for it is a great pity that the poor lady should be left +enchanted through thy carelessness and negligence." + +"There is a good deal to be said on that point," said Sancho; "let us +both go to sleep now, and after that, God has decreed what will happen. +Let me tell your worship that for a man to whip himself in cold blood is +a hard thing, especially if the stripes fall upon an ill-nourished and +worse-fed body. Let my lady Dulcinea have patience, and when she is least +expecting it, she will see me made a riddle of with whipping, and 'until +death it's all life;' I mean that I have still life in me, and the desire +to make good what I have promised." + +Don Quixote thanked him, and ate a little, and Sancho a good deal, and +then they both lay down to sleep, leaving those two inseparable friends +and comrades, Rocinante and Dapple, to their own devices and to feed +unrestrained upon the abundant grass with which the meadow was furnished. +They woke up rather late, mounted once more and resumed their journey, +pushing on to reach an inn which was in sight, apparently a league off. I +say an inn, because Don Quixote called it so, contrary to his usual +practice of calling all inns castles. They reached it, and asked the +landlord if they could put up there. He said yes, with as much comfort +and as good fare as they could find in Saragossa. They dismounted, and +Sancho stowed away his larder in a room of which the landlord gave him +the key. He took the beasts to the stable, fed them, and came back to see +what orders Don Quixote, who was seated on a bench at the door, had for +him, giving special thanks to heaven that this inn had not been taken for +a castle by his master. Supper-time came, and they repaired to their +room, and Sancho asked the landlord what he had to give them for supper. +To this the landlord replied that his mouth should be the measure; he had +only to ask what he would; for that inn was provided with the birds of +the air and the fowls of the earth and the fish of the sea. + +"There's no need of all that," said Sancho; "if they'll roast us a couple +of chickens we'll be satisfied, for my master is delicate and eats +little, and I'm not over and above gluttonous." + +The landlord replied he had no chickens, for the kites had stolen them. + +"Well then," said Sancho, "let senor landlord tell them to roast a +pullet, so that it is a tender one." + +"Pullet! My father!" said the landlord; "indeed and in truth it's only +yesterday I sent over fifty to the city to sell; but saving pullets ask +what you will." + +"In that case," said Sancho, "you will not be without veal or kid." + +"Just now," said the landlord, "there's none in the house, for it's all +finished; but next week there will be enough and to spare." + +"Much good that does us," said Sancho; "I'll lay a bet that all these +short-comings are going to wind up in plenty of bacon and eggs." + +"By God," said the landlord, "my guest's wits must be precious dull; I +tell him I have neither pullets nor hens, and he wants me to have eggs! +Talk of other dainties, if you please, and don't ask for hens again." + +"Body o' me!" said Sancho, "let's settle the matter; say at once what you +have got, and let us have no more words about it." + +"In truth and earnest, senor guest," said the landlord, "all I have is a +couple of cow-heels like calves' feet, or a couple of calves' feet like +cowheels; they are boiled with chick-peas, onions, and bacon, and at this +moment they are crying 'Come eat me, come eat me." + +"I mark them for mine on the spot," said Sancho; "let nobody touch them; +I'll pay better for them than anyone else, for I could not wish for +anything more to my taste; and I don't care a pin whether they are feet +or heels." + +"Nobody shall touch them," said the landlord; "for the other guests I +have, being persons of high quality, bring their own cook and caterer and +larder with them." + +"If you come to people of quality," said Sancho, "there's nobody more so +than my master; but the calling he follows does not allow of larders or +store-rooms; we lay ourselves down in the middle of a meadow, and fill +ourselves with acorns or medlars." + +Here ended Sancho's conversation with the landlord, Sancho not caring to +carry it any farther by answering him; for he had already asked him what +calling or what profession it was his master was of. + +Supper-time having come, then, Don Quixote betook himself to his room, +the landlord brought in the stew-pan just as it was, and he sat himself +down to sup very resolutely. It seems that in another room, which was +next to Don Quixote's, with nothing but a thin partition to separate it, +he overheard these words, "As you live, Senor Don Jeronimo, while they +are bringing supper, let us read another chapter of the Second Part of +'Don Quixote of La Mancha.'" + +The instant Don Quixote heard his own name be started to his feet and +listened with open ears to catch what they said about him, and heard the +Don Jeronimo who had been addressed say in reply, "Why would you have us +read that absurd stuff, Don Juan, when it is impossible for anyone who +has read the First Part of the history of 'Don Quixote of La Mancha' to +take any pleasure in reading this Second Part?" + +"For all that," said he who was addressed as Don Juan, "we shall do well +to read it, for there is no book so bad but it has something good in it. +What displeases me most in it is that it represents Don Quixote as now +cured of his love for Dulcinea del Toboso." + +On hearing this Don Quixote, full of wrath and indignation, lifted up his +voice and said, "Whoever he may be who says that Don Quixote of La Mancha +has forgotten or can forget Dulcinea del Toboso, I will teach him with +equal arms that what he says is very far from the truth; for neither can +the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso be forgotten, nor can forgetfulness have +a place in Don Quixote; his motto is constancy, and his profession to +maintain the same with his life and never wrong it." + +"Who is this that answers us?" said they in the next room. + +"Who should it be," said Sancho, "but Don Quixote of La Mancha himself, +who will make good all he has said and all he will say; for pledges don't +trouble a good payer." + +Sancho had hardly uttered these words when two gentlemen, for such they +seemed to be, entered the room, and one of them, throwing his arms round +Don Quixote's neck, said to him, "Your appearance cannot leave any +question as to your name, nor can your name fail to identify your +appearance; unquestionably, senor, you are the real Don Quixote of La +Mancha, cynosure and morning star of knight-errantry, despite and in +defiance of him who has sought to usurp your name and bring to naught +your achievements, as the author of this book which I here present to you +has done;" and with this he put a book which his companion carried into +the hands of Don Quixote, who took it, and without replying began to run +his eye over it; but he presently returned it saying, "In the little I +have seen I have discovered three things in this author that deserve to +be censured. The first is some words that I have read in the preface; the +next that the language is Aragonese, for sometimes he writes without +articles; and the third, which above all stamps him as ignorant, is that +he goes wrong and departs from the truth in the most important part of +the history, for here he says that my squire Sancho Panza's wife is +called Mari Gutierrez, when she is called nothing of the sort, but Teresa +Panza; and when a man errs on such an important point as this there is +good reason to fear that he is in error on every other point in the +history." + +"A nice sort of historian, indeed!" exclaimed Sancho at this; "he must +know a deal about our affairs when he calls my wife Teresa Panza, Mari +Gutierrez; take the book again, senor, and see if I am in it and if he +has changed my name." + +"From your talk, friend," said Don Jeronimo, "no doubt you are Sancho +Panza, Senor Don Quixote's squire." + +"Yes, I am," said Sancho; "and I'm proud of it." + +"Faith, then," said the gentleman, "this new author does not handle you +with the decency that displays itself in your person; he makes you out a +heavy feeder and a fool, and not in the least droll, and a very different +being from the Sancho described in the First Part of your master's +history." + +"God forgive him," said Sancho; "he might have left me in my corner +without troubling his head about me; 'let him who knows how ring the +bells; 'Saint Peter is very well in Rome.'" + +The two gentlemen pressed Don Quixote to come into their room and have +supper with them, as they knew very well there was nothing in that inn +fit for one of his sort. Don Quixote, who was always polite, yielded to +their request and supped with them. Sancho stayed behind with the stew. +and invested with plenary delegated authority seated himself at the head +of the table, and the landlord sat down with him, for he was no less fond +of cow-heel and calves' feet than Sancho was. + +While at supper Don Juan asked Don Quixote what news he had of the lady +Dulcinea del Toboso, was she married, had she been brought to bed, or was +she with child, or did she in maidenhood, still preserving her modesty +and delicacy, cherish the remembrance of the tender passion of Senor Don +Quixote? + +To this he replied, "Dulcinea is a maiden still, and my passion more +firmly rooted than ever, our intercourse unsatisfactory as before, and +her beauty transformed into that of a foul country wench;" and then he +proceeded to give them a full and particular account of the enchantment +of Dulcinea, and of what had happened him in the cave of Montesinos, +together with what the sage Merlin had prescribed for her disenchantment, +namely the scourging of Sancho. + +Exceedingly great was the amusement the two gentlemen derived from +hearing Don Quixote recount the strange incidents of his history; and if +they were amazed by his absurdities they were equally amazed by the +elegant style in which he delivered them. On the one hand they regarded +him as a man of wit and sense, and on the other he seemed to them a +maundering blockhead, and they could not make up their minds whereabouts +between wisdom and folly they ought to place him. + +Sancho having finished his supper, and left the landlord in the X +condition, repaired to the room where his master was, and as he came in +said, "May I die, sirs, if the author of this book your worships have got +has any mind that we should agree; as he calls me glutton (according to +what your worships say) I wish he may not call me drunkard too." + +"But he does," said Don Jeronimo; "I cannot remember, however, in what +way, though I know his words are offensive, and what is more, lying, as I +can see plainly by the physiognomy of the worthy Sancho before me." + +"Believe me," said Sancho, "the Sancho and the Don Quixote of this +history must be different persons from those that appear in the one Cide +Hamete Benengeli wrote, who are ourselves; my master valiant, wise, and +true in love, and I simple, droll, and neither glutton nor drunkard." + +"I believe it," said Don Juan; "and were it possible, an order should be +issued that no one should have the presumption to deal with anything +relating to Don Quixote, save his original author Cide Hamete; just as +Alexander commanded that no one should presume to paint his portrait save +Apelles." + +"Let him who will paint me," said Don Quixote; "but let him not abuse me; +for patience will often break down when they heap insults upon it." + +"None can be offered to Senor Don Quixote," said Don Juan, "that he +himself will not be able to avenge, if he does not ward it off with the +shield of his patience, which, I take it, is great and strong." + +A considerable portion of the night passed in conversation of this sort, +and though Don Juan wished Don Quixote to read more of the book to see +what it was all about, he was not to be prevailed upon, saying that he +treated it as read and pronounced it utterly silly; and, if by any chance +it should come to its author's ears that he had it in his hand, he did +not want him to flatter himself with the idea that he had read it; for +our thoughts, and still more our eyes, should keep themselves aloof from +what is obscene and filthy. + +They asked him whither he meant to direct his steps. He replied, to +Saragossa, to take part in the harness jousts which were held in that +city every year. Don Juan told him that the new history described how Don +Quixote, let him be who he might, took part there in a tilting at the +ring, utterly devoid of invention, poor in mottoes, very poor in costume, +though rich in sillinesses. + +"For that very reason," said Don Quixote, "I will not set foot in +Saragossa; and by that means I shall expose to the world the lie of this +new history writer, and people will see that I am not the Don Quixote he +speaks of." + +"You will do quite right," said Don Jeronimo; "and there are other jousts +at Barcelona in which Senor Don Quixote may display his prowess." + +"That is what I mean to do," said Don Quixote; "and as it is now time, I +pray your worships to give me leave to retire to bed, and to place and +retain me among the number of your greatest friends and servants." + +"And me too," said Sancho; "maybe I'll be good for something." + +With this they exchanged farewells, and Don Quixote and Sancho retired to +their room, leaving Don Juan and Don Jeronimo amazed to see the medley he +made of his good sense and his craziness; and they felt thoroughly +convinced that these, and not those their Aragonese author described, +were the genuine Don Quixote and Sancho. Don Quixote rose betimes, and +bade adieu to his hosts by knocking at the partition of the other room. +Sancho paid the landlord magnificently, and recommended him either to say +less about the providing of his inn or to keep it better provided. + +Chapter LX. - +Of what happened Don Quixote on his way to Barcelona + +It was a fresh morning giving promise of a cool day as Don Quixote +quitted the inn, first of all taking care to ascertain the most direct +road to Barcelona without touching upon Saragossa; so anxious was he to +make out this new historian, who they said abused him so, to be a liar. +Well, as it fell out, nothing worthy of being recorded happened him for +six days, at the end of which, having turned aside out of the road, he +was overtaken by night in a thicket of oak or cork trees; for on this +point Cide Hamete is not as precise as he usually is on other matters. + +Master and man dismounted from their beasts, and as soon as they had +settled themselves at the foot of the trees, Sancho, who had had a good +noontide meal that day, let himself, without more ado, pass the gates of +sleep. But Don Quixote, whom his thoughts, far more than hunger, kept +awake, could not close an eye, and roamed in fancy to and fro through all +sorts of places. At one moment it seemed to him that he was in the cave +of Montesinos and saw Dulcinea, transformed into a country wench, +skipping and mounting upon her she-ass; again that the words of the sage +Merlin were sounding in his ears, setting forth the conditions to be +observed and the exertions to be made for the disenchantment of Dulcinea. +He lost all patience when he considered the laziness and want of charity +of his squire Sancho; for to the best of his belief he had only given +himself five lashes, a number paltry and disproportioned to the vast +number required. At this thought he felt such vexation and anger that he +reasoned the matter thus: "If Alexander the Great cut the Gordian knot, +saying, 'To cut comes to the same thing as to untie,' and yet did not +fail to become lord paramount of all Asia, neither more nor less could +happen now in Dulcinea's disenchantment if I scourge Sancho against his +will; for, if it is the condition of the remedy that Sancho shall receive +three thousand and odd lashes, what does it matter to me whether he +inflicts them himself, or some one else inflicts them, when the essential +point is that he receives them, let them come from whatever quarter they +may?" + +With this idea he went over to Sancho, having first taken Rocinante's +reins and arranged them so as to be able to flog him with them, and began +to untie the points (the common belief is he had but one in front) by +which his breeches were held up; but the instant he approached him Sancho +woke up in his full senses and cried out, "What is this? Who is touching +me and untrussing me?" + +"It is I," said Don Quixote, "and I come to make good thy shortcomings +and relieve my own distresses; I come to whip thee, Sancho, and wipe off +some portion of the debt thou hast undertaken. Dulcinea is perishing, +thou art living on regardless, I am dying of hope deferred; therefore +untruss thyself with a good will, for mine it is, here, in this retired +spot, to give thee at least two thousand lashes." + +"Not a bit of it," said Sancho; "let your worship keep quiet, or else by +the living God the deaf shall hear us; the lashes I pledged myself to +must be voluntary and not forced upon me, and just now I have no fancy to +whip myself; it is enough if I give you my word to flog and flap myself +when I have a mind." + +"It will not do to leave it to thy courtesy, Sancho," said Don Quixote, +"for thou art hard of heart and, though a clown, tender of flesh;" and at +the same time he strove and struggled to untie him. + +Seeing this Sancho got up, and grappling with his master he gripped him +with all his might in his arms, giving him a trip with the heel stretched +him on the ground on his back, and pressing his right knee on his chest +held his hands in his own so that he could neither move nor breathe. + +"How now, traitor!" exclaimed Don Quixote. "Dost thou revolt against thy +master and natural lord? Dost thou rise against him who gives thee his +bread?" + +"I neither put down king, nor set up king," said Sancho; "I only stand up +for myself who am my own lord; if your worship promises me to be quiet, +and not to offer to whip me now, I'll let you go free and unhindered; if +not-- + +Traitor and Dona Sancha's foe, +Thou diest on the spot." +Don Quixote gave his promise, and swore by the life of his thoughts not +to touch so much as a hair of his garments, and to leave him entirely +free and to his own discretion to whip himself whenever he pleased. + +Sancho rose and removed some distance from the spot, but as he was about +to place himself leaning against another tree he felt something touch his +head, and putting up his hands encountered somebody's two feet with shoes +and stockings on them. He trembled with fear and made for another tree, +where the very same thing happened to him, and he fell a-shouting, +calling upon Don Quixote to come and protect him. Don Quixote did so, and +asked him what had happened to him, and what he was afraid of. Sancho +replied that all the trees were full of men's feet and legs. Don Quixote +felt them, and guessed at once what it was, and said to Sancho, "Thou +hast nothing to be afraid of, for these feet and legs that thou feelest +but canst not see belong no doubt to some outlaws and freebooters that +have been hanged on these trees; for the authorities in these parts are +wont to hang them up by twenties and thirties when they catch them; +whereby I conjecture that I must be near Barcelona;" and it was, in fact, +as he supposed; with the first light they looked up and saw that the +fruit hanging on those trees were freebooters' bodies. + +And now day dawned; and if the dead freebooters had scared them, their +hearts were no less troubled by upwards of forty living ones, who all of +a sudden surrounded them, and in the Catalan tongue bade them stand and +wait until their captain came up. Don Quixote was on foot with his horse +unbridled and his lance leaning against a tree, and in short completely +defenceless; he thought it best therefore to fold his arms and bow his +head and reserve himself for a more favourable occasion and opportunity. +The robbers made haste to search Dapple, and did not leave him a single +thing of all he carried in the alforjas and in the valise; and lucky it +was for Sancho that the duke's crowns and those he brought from home were +in a girdle that he wore round him; but for all that these good folk +would have stripped him, and even looked to see what he had hidden +between the skin and flesh, but for the arrival at that moment of their +captain, who was about thirty-four years of age apparently, strongly +built, above the middle height, of stern aspect and swarthy complexion. +He was mounted upon a powerful horse, and had on a coat of mail, with +four of the pistols they call petronels in that country at his waist. He +saw that his squires (for so they call those who follow that trade) were +about to rifle Sancho Panza, but he ordered them to desist and was at +once obeyed, so the girdle escaped. He wondered to see the lance leaning +against the tree, the shield on the ground, and Don Quixote in armour and +dejected, with the saddest and most melancholy face that sadness itself +could produce; and going up to him he said, "Be not so cast down, good +man, for you have not fallen into the hands of any inhuman Busiris, but +into Roque Guinart's, which are more merciful than cruel." + +"The cause of my dejection," returned Don Quixote, "is not that I have +fallen into thy hands, O valiant Roque, whose fame is bounded by no +limits on earth, but that my carelessness should have been so great that +thy soldiers should have caught me unbridled, when it is my duty, +according to the rule of knight-errantry which I profess, to be always on +the alert and at all times my own sentinel; for let me tell thee, great +Roque, had they found me on my horse, with my lance and shield, it would +not have been very easy for them to reduce me to submission, for I am Don +Quixote of La Mancha, he who hath filled the whole world with his +achievements." + +Roque Guinart at once perceived that Don Quixote's weakness was more akin +to madness than to swagger; and though he had sometimes heard him spoken +of, he never regarded the things attributed to him as true, nor could he +persuade himself that such a humour could become dominant in the heart of +man; he was extremely glad, therefore, to meet him and test at close +quarters what he had heard of him at a distance; so he said to him, +"Despair not, valiant knight, nor regard as an untoward fate the position +in which thou findest thyself; it may be that by these slips thy crooked +fortune will make itself straight; for heaven by strange circuitous ways, +mysterious and incomprehensible to man, raises up the fallen and makes +rich the poor." + +Don Quixote was about to thank him, when they heard behind them a noise +as of a troop of horses; there was, however, but one, riding on which at +a furious pace came a youth, apparently about twenty years of age, clad +in green damask edged with gold and breeches and a loose frock, with a +hat looped up in the Walloon fashion, tight-fitting polished boots, gilt +spurs, dagger and sword, and in his hand a musketoon, and a pair of +pistols at his waist. + +Roque turned round at the noise and perceived this comely figure, which +drawing near thus addressed him, "I came in quest of thee, valiant Roque, +to find in thee if not a remedy at least relief in my misfortune; and not +to keep thee in suspense, for I see thou dost not recognise me, I will +tell thee who I am; I am Claudia Jeronima, the daughter of Simon Forte, +thy good friend, and special enemy of Clauquel Torrellas, who is thine +also as being of the faction opposed to thee. Thou knowest that this +Torrellas has a son who is called, or at least was not two hours since, +Don Vicente Torrellas. Well, to cut short the tale of my misfortune, I +will tell thee in a few words what this youth has brought upon me. He saw +me, he paid court to me, I listened to him, and, unknown to my father, I +loved him; for there is no woman, however secluded she may live or close +she may be kept, who will not have opportunities and to spare for +following her headlong impulses. In a word, he pledged himself to be +mine, and I promised to be his, without carrying matters any further. +Yesterday I learned that, forgetful of his pledge to me, he was about to +marry another, and that he was to go this morning to plight his troth, +intelligence which overwhelmed and exasperated me; my father not being at +home I was able to adopt this costume you see, and urging my horse to +speed I overtook Don Vicente about a league from this, and without +waiting to utter reproaches or hear excuses I fired this musket at him, +and these two pistols besides, and to the best of my belief I must have +lodged more than two bullets in his body, opening doors to let my honour +go free, enveloped in his blood. I left him there in the hands of his +servants, who did not dare and were not able to interfere in his defence, +and I come to seek from thee a safe-conduct into France, where I have +relatives with whom I can live; and also to implore thee to protect my +father, so that Don Vicente's numerous kinsmen may not venture to wreak +their lawless vengeance upon him." + +Roque, filled with admiration at the gallant bearing, high spirit, comely +figure, and adventure of the fair Claudia, said to her, "Come, senora, +let us go and see if thy enemy is dead; and then we will consider what +will be best for thee." Don Quixote, who had been listening to what +Claudia said and Roque Guinart said in reply to her, exclaimed, "Nobody +need trouble himself with the defence of this lady, for I take it upon +myself. Give me my horse and arms, and wait for me here; I will go in +quest of this knight, and dead or alive I will make him keep his word +plighted to so great beauty." + +"Nobody need have any doubt about that," said Sancho, "for my master has +a very happy knack of matchmaking; it's not many days since he forced +another man to marry, who in the same way backed out of his promise to +another maiden; and if it had not been for his persecutors the enchanters +changing the man's proper shape into a lacquey's the said maiden would +not be one this minute." + +Roque, who was paying more attention to the fair Claudia's adventure than +to the words of master or man, did not hear them; and ordering his +squires to restore to Sancho everything they had stripped Dapple of, he +directed them to return to the place where they had been quartered during +the night, and then set off with Claudia at full speed in search of the +wounded or slain Don Vicente. They reached the spot where Claudia met +him, but found nothing there save freshly spilt blood; looking all round, +however, they descried some people on the slope of a hill above them, and +concluded, as indeed it proved to be, that it was Don Vicente, whom +either dead or alive his servants were removing to attend to his wounds +or to bury him. They made haste to overtake them, which, as the party +moved slowly, they were able to do with ease. They found Don Vicente in +the arms of his servants, whom he was entreating in a broken feeble voice +to leave him there to die, as the pain of his wounds would not suffer him +to go any farther. Claudia and Roque threw themselves off their horses +and advanced towards him; the servants were overawed by the appearance of +Roque, and Claudia was moved by the sight of Don Vicente, and going up to +him half tenderly half sternly, she seized his hand and said to him, +"Hadst thou given me this according to our compact thou hadst never come +to this pass." + +The wounded gentleman opened his all but closed eyes, and recognising +Claudia said, "I see clearly, fair and mistaken lady, that it is thou +that hast slain me, a punishment not merited or deserved by my feelings +towards thee, for never did I mean to, nor could I, wrong thee in thought +or deed." + +"It is not true, then," said Claudia, "that thou wert going this morning +to marry Leonora the daughter of the rich Balvastro?" + +"Assuredly not," replied Don Vicente; "my cruel fortune must have carried +those tidings to thee to drive thee in thy jealousy to take my life; and +to assure thyself of this, press my hands and take me for thy husband if +thou wilt; I have no better satisfaction to offer thee for the wrong thou +fanciest thou hast received from me." + +Claudia wrung his hands, and her own heart was so wrung that she lay +fainting on the bleeding breast of Don Vicente, whom a death spasm seized +the same instant. Roque was in perplexity and knew not what to do; the +servants ran to fetch water to sprinkle their faces, and brought some and +bathed them with it. Claudia recovered from her fainting fit, but not so +Don Vicente from the paroxysm that had overtaken him, for his life had +come to an end. On perceiving this, Claudia, when she had convinced +herself that her beloved husband was no more, rent the air with her sighs +and made the heavens ring with her lamentations; she tore her hair and +scattered it to the winds, she beat her face with her hands and showed +all the signs of grief and sorrow that could be conceived to come from an +afflicted heart. "Cruel, reckless woman!" she cried, "how easily wert +thou moved to carry out a thought so wicked! O furious force of jealousy, +to what desperate lengths dost thou lead those that give thee lodging in +their bosoms! O husband, whose unhappy fate in being mine hath borne thee +from the marriage bed to the grave!" + +So vehement and so piteous were the lamentations of Claudia that they +drew tears from Roque's eyes, unused as they were to shed them on any +occasion. The servants wept, Claudia swooned away again and again, and +the whole place seemed a field of sorrow and an abode of misfortune. In +the end Roque Guinart directed Don Vicente's servants to carry his body +to his father's village, which was close by, for burial. Claudia told him +she meant to go to a monastery of which an aunt of hers was abbess, where +she intended to pass her life with a better and everlasting spouse. He +applauded her pious resolution, and offered to accompany her +whithersoever she wished, and to protect her father against the kinsmen +of Don Vicente and all the world, should they seek to injure him. Claudia +would not on any account allow him to accompany her; and thanking him for +his offers as well as she could, took leave of him in tears. The servants +of Don Vicente carried away his body, and Roque returned to his comrades, +and so ended the love of Claudia Jeronima; but what wonder, when it was +the insuperable and cruel might of jealousy that wove the web of her sad +story? + +Roque Guinart found his squires at the place to which he had ordered +them, and Don Quixote on Rocinante in the midst of them delivering a +harangue to them in which he urged them to give up a mode of life so full +of peril, as well to the soul as to the body; but as most of them were +Gascons, rough lawless fellows, his speech did not make much impression +on them. Roque on coming up asked Sancho if his men had returned and +restored to him the treasures and jewels they had stripped off Dapple. +Sancho said they had, but that three kerchiefs that were worth three +cities were missing. + +"What are you talking about, man?" said one of the bystanders; "I have +got them, and they are not worth three reals." + +"That is true," said Don Quixote; "but my squire values them at the rate +he says, as having been given me by the person who gave them." + +Roque Guinart ordered them to be restored at once; and making his men +fall in in line he directed all the clothing, jewellery, and money that +they had taken since the last distribution to be produced; and making a +hasty valuation, and reducing what could not be divided into money, he +made shares for the whole band so equitably and carefully, that in no +case did he exceed or fall short of strict distributive justice. + +When this had been done, and all left satisfied, Roque observed to Don +Quixote, "If this scrupulous exactness were not observed with these +fellows there would be no living with them." + +Upon this Sancho remarked, "From what I have seen here, justice is such a +good thing that there is no doing without it, even among the thieves +themselves." + +One of the squires heard this, and raising the butt-end of his harquebuss +would no doubt have broken Sancho's head with it had not Roque Guinart +called out to him to hold his hand. Sancho was frightened out of his +wits, and vowed not to open his lips so long as he was in the company of +these people. + +At this instant one or two of those squires who were posted as sentinels +on the roads, to watch who came along them and report what passed to +their chief, came up and said, "Senor, there is a great troop of people +not far off coming along the road to Barcelona." + +To which Roque replied, "Hast thou made out whether they are of the sort +that are after us, or of the sort we are after?" + +"The sort we are after," said the squire. + +"Well then, away with you all," said Roque, "and bring them here to me at +once without letting one of them escape." + +They obeyed, and Don Quixote, Sancho, and Roque, left by themselves, +waited to see what the squires brought, and while they were waiting Roque +said to Don Quixote, "It must seem a strange sort of life to Senor Don +Quixote, this of ours, strange adventures, strange incidents, and all +full of danger; and I do not wonder that it should seem so, for in truth +I must own there is no mode of life more restless or anxious than ours. +What led me into it was a certain thirst for vengeance, which is strong +enough to disturb the quietest hearts. I am by nature tender-hearted and +kindly, but, as I said, the desire to revenge myself for a wrong that was +done me so overturns all my better impulses that I keep on in this way of +life in spite of what conscience tells me; and as one depth calls to +another, and one sin to another sin, revenges have linked themselves +together, and I have taken upon myself not only my own but those of +others: it pleases God, however, that, though I see myself in this maze +of entanglements, I do not lose all hope of escaping from it and reaching +a safe port." + +Don Quixote was amazed to hear Roque utter such excellent and just +sentiments, for he did not think that among those who followed such +trades as robbing, murdering, and waylaying, there could be anyone +capable of a virtuous thought, and he said in reply, "Senor Roque, the +beginning of health lies in knowing the disease and in the sick man's +willingness to take the medicines which the physician prescribes; you are +sick, you know what ails you, and heaven, or more properly speaking God, +who is our physician, will administer medicines that will cure you, and +cure gradually, and not of a sudden or by a miracle; besides, sinners of +discernment are nearer amendment than those who are fools; and as your +worship has shown good sense in your remarks, all you have to do is to +keep up a good heart and trust that the weakness of your conscience will +be strengthened. And if you have any desire to shorten the journey and +put yourself easily in the way of salvation, come with me, and I will +show you how to become a knight-errant, a calling wherein so many +hardships and mishaps are encountered that if they be taken as penances +they will lodge you in heaven in a trice." + +Roque laughed at Don Quixote's exhortation, and changing the conversation +he related the tragic affair of Claudia Jeronima, at which Sancho was +extremely grieved; for he had not found the young woman's beauty, +boldness, and spirit at all amiss. + +And now the squires despatched to make the prize came up, bringing with +them two gentlemen on horseback, two pilgrims on foot, and a coach full +of women with some six servants on foot and on horseback in attendance on +them, and a couple of muleteers whom the gentlemen had with them. The +squires made a ring round them, both victors and vanquished maintaining +profound silence, waiting for the great Roque Guinart to speak. He asked +the gentlemen who they were, whither they were going, and what money they +carried with them; "Senor," replied one of them, "we are two captains of +Spanish infantry; our companies are at Naples, and we are on our way to +embark in four galleys which they say are at Barcelona under orders for +Sicily; and we have about two or three hundred crowns, with which we are, +according to our notions, rich and contented, for a soldier's poverty +does not allow a more extensive hoard." + +Roque asked the pilgrims the same questions he had put to the captains, +and was answered that they were going to take ship for Rome, and that +between them they might have about sixty reals. He asked also who was in +the coach, whither they were bound and what money they had, and one of +the men on horseback replied, "The persons in the coach are my lady Dona +Guiomar de Quinones, wife of the regent of the Vicaria at Naples, her +little daughter, a handmaid and a duenna; we six servants are in +attendance upon her, and the money amounts to six hundred crowns." + +"So then," said Roque Guinart, "we have got here nine hundred crowns and +sixty reals; my soldiers must number some sixty; see how much there falls +to each, for I am a bad arithmetician." As soon as the robbers heard this +they raised a shout of "Long life to Roque Guinart, in spite of the +lladres that seek his ruin!" + +The captains showed plainly the concern they felt, the regent's lady was +downcast, and the pilgrims did not at all enjoy seeing their property +confiscated. Roque kept them in suspense in this way for a while; but he +had no desire to prolong their distress, which might be seen a bowshot +off, and turning to the captains he said, "Sirs, will your worships be +pleased of your courtesy to lend me sixty crowns, and her ladyship the +regent's wife eighty, to satisfy this band that follows me, for 'it is by +his singing the abbot gets his dinner;' and then you may at once proceed +on your journey, free and unhindered, with a safe-conduct which I shall +give you, so that if you come across any other bands of mine that I have +scattered in these parts, they may do you no harm; for I have no +intention of doing injury to soldiers, or to any woman, especially one of +quality." + +Profuse and hearty were the expressions of gratitude with which the +captains thanked Roque for his courtesy and generosity; for such they +regarded his leaving them their own money. Senora Dona Guiomar de +Quinones wanted to throw herself out of the coach to kiss the feet and +hands of the great Roque, but he would not suffer it on any account; so +far from that, he begged her pardon for the wrong he had done her under +pressure of the inexorable necessities of his unfortunate calling. The +regent's lady ordered one of her servants to give the eighty crowns that +had been assessed as her share at once, for the captains had already paid +down their sixty. The pilgrims were about to give up the whole of their +little hoard, but Roque bade them keep quiet, and turning to his men he +said, "Of these crowns two fall to each man and twenty remain over; let +ten be given to these pilgrims, and the other ten to this worthy squire +that he may be able to speak favourably of this adventure;" and then +having writing materials, with which he always went provided, brought to +him, he gave them in writing a safe-conduct to the leaders of his bands; +and bidding them farewell let them go free and filled with admiration at +his magnanimity, his generous disposition, and his unusual conduct, and +inclined to regard him as an Alexander the Great rather than a notorious +robber. + +One of the squires observed in his mixture of Gascon and Catalan, "This +captain of ours would make a better friar than highwayman; if he wants to +be so generous another time, let it be with his own property and not +ours." + +The unlucky wight did not speak so low but that Roque overheard him, and +drawing his sword almost split his head in two, saying, "That is the way +I punish impudent saucy fellows." They were all taken aback, and not one +of them dared to utter a word, such deference did they pay him. Roque +then withdrew to one side and wrote a letter to a friend of his at +Barcelona, telling him that the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, the +knight-errant of whom there was so much talk, was with him, and was, he +assured him, the drollest and wisest man in the world; and that in four +days from that date, that is to say, on Saint John the Baptist's Day, he +was going to deposit him in full armour mounted on his horse Rocinante, +together with his squire Sancho on an ass, in the middle of the strand of +the city; and bidding him give notice of this to his friends the Niarros, +that they might divert themselves with him. He wished, he said, his +enemies the Cadells could be deprived of this pleasure; but that was +impossible, because the crazes and shrewd sayings of Don Quixote and the +humours of his squire Sancho Panza could not help giving general pleasure +to all the world. He despatched the letter by one of his squires, who, +exchanging the costume of a highwayman for that of a peasant, made his +way into Barcelona and gave it to the person to whom it was directed. + +Chapter LXI. - +Of what happened Don Quixote on entering Barcelona, together with other +matters that partake of the true rather than of the ingenious + +Don Quixote passed three days and three nights with Roque, and had he +passed three hundred years he would have found enough to observe and +wonder at in his mode of life. At daybreak they were in one spot, at +dinner-time in another; sometimes they fled without knowing from whom, at +other times they lay in wait, not knowing for what. They slept standing, +breaking their slumbers to shift from place to place. There was nothing +but sending out spies and scouts, posting sentinels and blowing the +matches of harquebusses, though they carried but few, for almost all used +flintlocks. Roque passed his nights in some place or other apart from his +men, that they might not know where he was, for the many proclamations +the viceroy of Barcelona had issued against his life kept him in fear and +uneasiness, and he did not venture to trust anyone, afraid that even his +own men would kill him or deliver him up to the authorities; of a truth, +a weary miserable life! At length, by unfrequented roads, short cuts, and +secret paths, Roque, Don Quixote, and Sancho, together with six squires, +set out for Barcelona. They reached the strand on Saint John's Eve during +the night; and Roque, after embracing Don Quixote and Sancho (to whom he +presented the ten crowns he had promised but had not until then given), +left them with many expressions of good-will on both sides. + +Roque went back, while Don Quixote remained on horseback, just as he was, +waiting for day, and it was not long before the countenance of the fair +Aurora began to show itself at the balconies of the east, gladdening the +grass and flowers, if not the ear, though to gladden that too there came +at the same moment a sound of clarions and drums, and a din of bells, and +a tramp, tramp, and cries of "Clear the way there!" of some runners, that +seemed to issue from the city. + +The dawn made way for the sun that with a face broader than a buckler +began to rise slowly above the low line of the horizon; Don Quixote and +Sancho gazed all round them; they beheld the sea, a sight until then +unseen by them; it struck them as exceedingly spacious and broad, much +more so than the lakes of Ruidera which they had seen in La Mancha. They +saw the galleys along the beach, which, lowering their awnings, displayed +themselves decked with streamers and pennons that trembled in the breeze +and kissed and swept the water, while on board the bugles, trumpets, and +clarions were sounding and filling the air far and near with melodious +warlike notes. Then they began to move and execute a kind of skirmish +upon the calm water, while a vast number of horsemen on fine horses and +in showy liveries, issuing from the city, engaged on their side in a +somewhat similar movement. The soldiers on board the galleys kept up a +ceaseless fire, which they on the walls and forts of the city returned, +and the heavy cannon rent the air with the tremendous noise they made, to +which the gangway guns of the galleys replied. The bright sea, the +smiling earth, the clear air--though at times darkened by the smoke of +the guns--all seemed to fill the whole multitude with unexpected delight. +Sancho could not make out how it was that those great masses that moved +over the sea had so many feet. + +And now the horsemen in livery came galloping up with shouts and +outlandish cries and cheers to where Don Quixote stood amazed and +wondering; and one of them, he to whom Roque had sent word, addressing +him exclaimed, "Welcome to our city, mirror, beacon, star and cynosure of +all knight-errantry in its widest extent! Welcome, I say, valiant Don +Quixote of La Mancha; not the false, the fictitious, the apocryphal, that +these latter days have offered us in lying histories, but the true, the +legitimate, the real one that Cide Hamete Benengeli, flower of +historians, has described to us!" + +Don Quixote made no answer, nor did the horsemen wait for one, but +wheeling again with all their followers, they began curvetting round Don +Quixote, who, turning to Sancho, said, "These gentlemen have plainly +recognised us; I will wager they have read our history, and even that +newly printed one by the Aragonese." + +The cavalier who had addressed Don Quixote again approached him and said, +"Come with us, Senor Don Quixote, for we are all of us your servants and +great friends of Roque Guinart's;" to which Don Quixote returned, "If +courtesy breeds courtesy, yours, sir knight, is daughter or very nearly +akin to the great Roque's; carry me where you please; I will have no will +but yours, especially if you deign to employ it in your service." + +The cavalier replied with words no less polite, and then, all closing in +around him, they set out with him for the city, to the music of the +clarions and the drums. As they were entering it, the wicked one, who is +the author of all mischief, and the boys who are wickeder than the wicked +one, contrived that a couple of these audacious irrepressible urchins +should force their way through the crowd, and lifting up, one of them +Dapple's tail and the other Rocinante's, insert a bunch of furze under +each. The poor beasts felt the strange spurs and added to their anguish +by pressing their tails tight, so much so that, cutting a multitude of +capers, they flung their masters to the ground. Don Quixote, covered with +shame and out of countenance, ran to pluck the plume from his poor jade's +tail, while Sancho did the same for Dapple. His conductors tried to +punish the audacity of the boys, but there was no possibility of doing +so, for they hid themselves among the hundreds of others that were +following them. Don Quixote and Sancho mounted once more, and with the +same music and acclamations reached their conductor's house, which was +large and stately, that of a rich gentleman, in short; and there for the +present we will leave them, for such is Cide Hamete's pleasure. + +Chapter LXII. - +Which deals with the adventure of the enchanted head, together with other +trivial matters which cannot be left untold + +Don Quixote's host was one Don Antonio Moreno by name, a gentleman of +wealth and intelligence, and very fond of diverting himself in any fair +and good-natured way; and having Don Quixote in his house he set about +devising modes of making him exhibit his mad points in some harmless +fashion; for jests that give pain are no jests, and no sport is worth +anything if it hurts another. The first thing he did was to make Don +Quixote take off his armour, and lead him, in that tight chamois suit we +have already described and depicted more than once, out on a balcony +overhanging one of the chief streets of the city, in full view of the +crowd and of the boys, who gazed at him as they would at a monkey. The +cavaliers in livery careered before him again as though it were for him +alone, and not to enliven the festival of the day, that they wore it, and +Sancho was in high delight, for it seemed to him that, how he knew not, +he had fallen upon another Camacho's wedding, another house like Don +Diego de Miranda's, another castle like the duke's. Some of Don Antonio's +friends dined with him that day, and all showed honour to Don Quixote and +treated him as a knight-errant, and he becoming puffed up and exalted in +consequence could not contain himself for satisfaction. Such were the +drolleries of Sancho that all the servants of the house, and all who +heard him, were kept hanging upon his lips. While at table Don Antonio +said to him, "We hear, worthy Sancho, that you are so fond of manjar +blanco and forced-meat balls, that if you have any left, you keep them in +your bosom for the next day." + +"No, senor, that's not true," said Sancho, "for I am more cleanly than +greedy, and my master Don Quixote here knows well that we two are used to +live for a week on a handful of acorns or nuts. To be sure, if it so +happens that they offer me a heifer, I run with a halter; I mean, I eat +what I'm given, and make use of opportunities as I find them; but whoever +says that I'm an out-of-the-way eater or not cleanly, let me tell him +that he is wrong; and I'd put it in a different way if I did not respect +the honourable beards that are at the table." + +"Indeed," said Don Quixote, "Sancho's moderation and cleanliness in +eating might be inscribed and graved on plates of brass, to be kept in +eternal remembrance in ages to come. It is true that when he is hungry +there is a certain appearance of voracity about him, for he eats at a +great pace and chews with both jaws; but cleanliness he is always mindful +of; and when he was governor he learned how to eat daintily, so much so +that he eats grapes, and even pomegranate pips, with a fork." + +"What!" said Don Antonio, "has Sancho been a governor?" + +"Ay," said Sancho, "and of an island called Barataria. I governed it to +perfection for ten days; and lost my rest all the time; and learned to +look down upon all the governments in the world; I got out of it by +taking to flight, and fell into a pit where I gave myself up for dead, +and out of which I escaped alive by a miracle." + +Don Quixote then gave them a minute account of the whole affair of +Sancho's government, with which he greatly amused his hearers. + +On the cloth being removed Don Antonio, taking Don Quixote by the hand, +passed with him into a distant room in which there was nothing in the way +of furniture except a table, apparently of jasper, resting on a pedestal +of the same, upon which was set up, after the fashion of the busts of the +Roman emperors, a head which seemed to be of bronze. Don Antonio +traversed the whole apartment with Don Quixote and walked round the table +several times, and then said, "Now, Senor Don Quixote, that I am +satisfied that no one is listening to us, and that the door is shut, I +will tell you of one of the rarest adventures, or more properly speaking +strange things, that can be imagined, on condition that you will keep +what I say to you in the remotest recesses of secrecy." + +"I swear it," said Don Quixote, "and for greater security I will put a +flag-stone over it; for I would have you know, Senor Don Antonio" (he had +by this time learned his name), "that you are addressing one who, though +he has ears to hear, has no tongue to speak; so that you may safely +transfer whatever you have in your bosom into mine, and rely upon it that +you have consigned it to the depths of silence." + +"In reliance upon that promise," said Don Antonio, "I will astonish you +with what you shall see and hear, and relieve myself of some of the +vexation it gives me to have no one to whom I can confide my secrets, for +they are not of a sort to be entrusted to everybody." + +Don Quixote was puzzled, wondering what could be the object of such +precautions; whereupon Don Antonio taking his hand passed it over the +bronze head and the whole table and the pedestal of jasper on which it +stood, and then said, "This head, Senor Don Quixote, has been made and +fabricated by one of the greatest magicians and wizards the world ever +saw, a Pole, I believe, by birth, and a pupil of the famous Escotillo of +whom such marvellous stories are told. He was here in my house, and for a +consideration of a thousand crowns that I gave him he constructed this +head, which has the property and virtue of answering whatever questions +are put to its ear. He observed the points of the compass, he traced +figures, he studied the stars, he watched favourable moments, and at +length brought it to the perfection we shall see to-morrow, for on +Fridays it is mute, and this being Friday we must wait till the next day. +In the interval your worship may consider what you would like to ask it; +and I know by experience that in all its answers it tells the truth." + +Don Quixote was amazed at the virtue and property of the head, and was +inclined to disbelieve Don Antonio; but seeing what a short time he had +to wait to test the matter, he did not choose to say anything except that +he thanked him for having revealed to him so mighty a secret. They then +quitted the room, Don Antonio locked the door, and they repaired to the +chamber where the rest of the gentlemen were assembled. In the meantime +Sancho had recounted to them several of the adventures and accidents that +had happened his master. + +That afternoon they took Don Quixote out for a stroll, not in his armour +but in street costume, with a surcoat of tawny cloth upon him, that at +that season would have made ice itself sweat. Orders were left with the +servants to entertain Sancho so as not to let him leave the house. Don +Quixote was mounted, not on Rocinante, but upon a tall mule of easy pace +and handsomely caparisoned. They put the surcoat on him, and on the back, +without his perceiving it, they stitched a parchment on which they wrote +in large letters, "This is Don Quixote of La Mancha." As they set out +upon their excursion the placard attracted the eyes of all who chanced to +see him, and as they read out, "This is Don Quixote of La Mancha," Don +Quixote was amazed to see how many people gazed at him, called him by his +name, and recognised him, and turning to Don Antonio, who rode at his +side, he observed to him, "Great are the privileges knight-errantry +involves, for it makes him who professes it known and famous in every +region of the earth; see, Don Antonio, even the very boys of this city +know me without ever having seen me." + +"True, Senor Don Quixote," returned Don Antonio; "for as fire cannot be +hidden or kept secret, virtue cannot escape being recognised; and that +which is attained by the profession of arms shines distinguished above +all others." + +It came to pass, however, that as Don Quixote was proceeding amid the +acclamations that have been described, a Castilian, reading the +inscription on his back, cried out in a loud voice, "The devil take thee +for a Don Quixote of La Mancha! What! art thou here, and not dead of the +countless drubbings that have fallen on thy ribs? Thou art mad; and if +thou wert so by thyself, and kept thyself within thy madness, it would +not be so bad; but thou hast the gift of making fools and blockheads of +all who have anything to do with thee or say to thee. Why, look at these +gentlemen bearing thee company! Get thee home, blockhead, and see after +thy affairs, and thy wife and children, and give over these fooleries +that are sapping thy brains and skimming away thy wits." + +"Go your own way, brother," said Don Antonio, "and don't offer advice to +those who don't ask you for it. Senor Don Quixote is in his full senses, +and we who bear him company are not fools; virtue is to be honoured +wherever it may be found; go, and bad luck to you, and don't meddle where +you are not wanted." + +"By God, your worship is right," replied the Castilian; "for to advise +this good man is to kick against the pricks; still for all that it fills +me with pity that the sound wit they say the blockhead has in everything +should dribble away by the channel of his knight-errantry; but may the +bad luck your worship talks of follow me and all my descendants, if, from +this day forth, though I should live longer than Methuselah, I ever give +advice to anybody even if he asks me for it." + +The advice-giver took himself off, and they continued their stroll; but +so great was the press of the boys and people to read the placard, that +Don Antonio was forced to remove it as if he were taking off something +else. + +Night came and they went home, and there was a ladies' dancing party, for +Don Antonio's wife, a lady of rank and gaiety, beauty and wit, had +invited some friends of hers to come and do honour to her guest and amuse +themselves with his strange delusions. Several of them came, they supped +sumptuously, the dance began at about ten o'clock. Among the ladies were +two of a mischievous and frolicsome turn, and, though perfectly modest, +somewhat free in playing tricks for harmless diversion sake. These two +were so indefatigable in taking Don Quixote out to dance that they tired +him down, not only in body but in spirit. It was a sight to see the +figure Don Quixote made, long, lank, lean, and yellow, his garments +clinging tight to him, ungainly, and above all anything but agile. + +The gay ladies made secret love to him, and he on his part secretly +repelled them, but finding himself hard pressed by their blandishments he +lifted up his voice and exclaimed, "Fugite, partes adversae! Leave me in +peace, unwelcome overtures; avaunt, with your desires, ladies, for she +who is queen of mine, the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso, suffers none but +hers to lead me captive and subdue me;" and so saying he sat down on the +floor in the middle of the room, tired out and broken down by all this +exertion in the dance. + +Don Antonio directed him to be taken up bodily and carried to bed, and +the first that laid hold of him was Sancho, saying as he did so, "In an +evil hour you took to dancing, master mine; do you fancy all mighty men +of valour are dancers, and all knights-errant given to capering? If you +do, I can tell you you are mistaken; there's many a man would rather +undertake to kill a giant than cut a caper. If it had been the shoe-fling +you were at I could take your place, for I can do the shoe-fling like a +gerfalcon; but I'm no good at dancing." + +With these and other observations Sancho set the whole ball-room +laughing, and then put his master to bed, covering him up well so that he +might sweat out any chill caught after his dancing. + +The next day Don Antonio thought he might as well make trial of the +enchanted head, and with Don Quixote, Sancho, and two others, friends of +his, besides the two ladies that had tired out Don Quixote at the ball, +who had remained for the night with Don Antonio's wife, he locked himself +up in the chamber where the head was. He explained to them the property +it possessed and entrusted the secret to them, telling them that now for +the first time he was going to try the virtue of the enchanted head; but +except Don Antonio's two friends no one else was privy to the mystery of +the enchantment, and if Don Antonio had not first revealed it to them +they would have been inevitably reduced to the same state of amazement as +the rest, so artfully and skilfully was it contrived. + +The first to approach the ear of the head was Don Antonio himself, and in +a low voice but not so low as not to be audible to all, he said to it, +"Head, tell me by the virtue that lies in thee what am I at this moment +thinking of?" + +The head, without any movement of the lips, answered in a clear and +distinct voice, so as to be heard by all, "I cannot judge of thoughts." + +All were thunderstruck at this, and all the more so as they saw that +there was nobody anywhere near the table or in the whole room that could +have answered. "How many of us are here?" asked Don Antonio once more; +and it was answered him in the same way softly, "Thou and thy wife, with +two friends of thine and two of hers, and a famous knight called Don +Quixote of La Mancha, and a squire of his, Sancho Panza by name." + +Now there was fresh astonishment; now everyone's hair was standing on end +with awe; and Don Antonio retiring from the head exclaimed, "This +suffices to show me that I have not been deceived by him who sold thee to +me, O sage head, talking head, answering head, wonderful head! Let some +one else go and put what question he likes to it." + +And as women are commonly impulsive and inquisitive, the first to come +forward was one of the two friends of Don Antonio's wife, and her +question was, "Tell me, Head, what shall I do to be very beautiful?" and +the answer she got was, "Be very modest." + +"I question thee no further," said the fair querist. + +Her companion then came up and said, "I should like to know, Head, +whether my husband loves me or not;" the answer given to her was, "Think +how he uses thee, and thou mayest guess;" and the married lady went off +saying, "That answer did not need a question; for of course the treatment +one receives shows the disposition of him from whom it is received." + +Then one of Don Antonio's two friends advanced and asked it, "Who am I?" +"Thou knowest," was the answer. "That is not what I ask thee," said the +gentleman, "but to tell me if thou knowest me." "Yes, I know thee, thou +art Don Pedro Noriz," was the reply. + +"I do not seek to know more," said the gentleman, "for this is enough to +convince me, O Head, that thou knowest everything;" and as he retired the +other friend came forward and asked it, "Tell me, Head, what are the +wishes of my eldest son?" + +"I have said already," was the answer, "that I cannot judge of wishes; +however, I can tell thee the wish of thy son is to bury thee." + +"That's 'what I see with my eyes I point out with my finger,'" said the +gentleman, "so I ask no more." + +Don Antonio's wife came up and said, "I know not what to ask thee, Head; +I would only seek to know of thee if I shall have many years of enjoyment +of my good husband;" and the answer she received was, "Thou shalt, for +his vigour and his temperate habits promise many years of life, which by +their intemperance others so often cut short." + +Then Don Quixote came forward and said, "Tell me, thou that answerest, +was that which I describe as having happened to me in the cave of +Montesinos the truth or a dream? Will Sancho's whipping be accomplished +without fail? Will the disenchantment of Dulcinea be brought about?" + +"As to the question of the cave," was the reply, "there is much to be +said; there is something of both in it. Sancho's whipping will proceed +leisurely. The disenchantment of Dulcinea will attain its due +consummation." + +"I seek to know no more," said Don Quixote; "let me but see Dulcinea +disenchanted, and I will consider that all the good fortune I could wish +for has come upon me all at once." + +The last questioner was Sancho, and his questions were, "Head, shall I by +any chance have another government? Shall I ever escape from the hard +life of a squire? Shall I get back to see my wife and children?" To which +the answer came, "Thou shalt govern in thy house; and if thou returnest +to it thou shalt see thy wife and children; and on ceasing to serve thou +shalt cease to be a squire." + +"Good, by God!" said Sancho Panza; "I could have told myself that; the +prophet Perogrullo could have said no more." + +"What answer wouldst thou have, beast?" said Don Quixote; "is it not +enough that the replies this head has given suit the questions put to +it?" + +"Yes, it is enough," said Sancho; "but I should have liked it to have +made itself plainer and told me more." + +The questions and answers came to an end here, but not the wonder with +which all were filled, except Don Antonio's two friends who were in the +secret. This Cide Hamete Benengeli thought fit to reveal at once, not to +keep the world in suspense, fancying that the head had some strange +magical mystery in it. He says, therefore, that on the model of another +head, the work of an image maker, which he had seen at Madrid, Don +Antonio made this one at home for his own amusement and to astonish +ignorant people; and its mechanism was as follows. The table was of wood +painted and varnished to imitate jasper, and the pedestal on which it +stood was of the same material, with four eagles' claws projecting from +it to support the weight more steadily. The head, which resembled a bust +or figure of a Roman emperor, and was coloured like bronze, was hollow +throughout, as was the table, into which it was fitted so exactly that no +trace of the joining was visible. The pedestal of the table was also +hollow and communicated with the throat and neck of the head, and the +whole was in communication with another room underneath the chamber in +which the head stood. Through the entire cavity in the pedestal, table, +throat and neck of the bust or figure, there passed a tube of tin +carefully adjusted and concealed from sight. In the room below +corresponding to the one above was placed the person who was to answer, +with his mouth to the tube, and the voice, as in an ear-trumpet, passed +from above downwards, and from below upwards, the words coming clearly +and distinctly; it was impossible, thus, to detect the trick. A nephew of +Don Antonio's, a smart sharp-witted student, was the answerer, and as he +had been told beforehand by his uncle who the persons were that would +come with him that day into the chamber where the head was, it was an +easy matter for him to answer the first question at once and correctly; +the others he answered by guess-work, and, being clever, cleverly. Cide +Hamete adds that this marvellous contrivance stood for some ten or twelve +days; but that, as it became noised abroad through the city that he had +in his house an enchanted head that answered all who asked questions of +it, Don Antonio, fearing it might come to the ears of the watchful +sentinels of our faith, explained the matter to the inquisitors, who +commanded him to break it up and have done with it, lest the ignorant +vulgar should be scandalised. By Don Quixote, however, and by Sancho the +head was still held to be an enchanted one, and capable of answering +questions, though more to Don Quixote's satisfaction than Sancho's. + +The gentlemen of the city, to gratify Don Antonio and also to do the +honours to Don Quixote, and give him an opportunity of displaying his +folly, made arrangements for a tilting at the ring in six days from that +time, which, however, for reason that will be mentioned hereafter, did +not take place. + +Don Quixote took a fancy to stroll about the city quietly and on foot, +for he feared that if he went on horseback the boys would follow him; so +he and Sancho and two servants that Don Antonio gave him set out for a +walk. Thus it came to pass that going along one of the streets Don +Quixote lifted up his eyes and saw written in very large letters over a +door, "Books printed here," at which he was vastly pleased, for until +then he had never seen a printing office, and he was curious to know what +it was like. He entered with all his following, and saw them drawing +sheets in one place, correcting in another, setting up type here, +revising there; in short all the work that is to be seen in great +printing offices. He went up to one case and asked what they were about +there; the workmen told him, he watched them with wonder, and passed on. +He approached one man, among others, and asked him what he was doing. The +workman replied, "Senor, this gentleman here" (pointing to a man of +prepossessing appearance and a certain gravity of look) "has translated +an Italian book into our Spanish tongue, and I am setting it up in type +for the press." + +"What is the title of the book?" asked Don Quixote; to which the author +replied, "Senor, in Italian the book is called Le Bagatelle." + +"And what does Le Bagatelle import in our Spanish?" asked Don Quixote. + +"Le Bagatelle," said the author, "is as though we should say in Spanish +Los Juguetes; but though the book is humble in name it has good solid +matter in it." + +"I," said Don Quixote, "have some little smattering of Italian, and I +plume myself on singing some of Ariosto's stanzas; but tell me, senor--I +do not say this to test your ability, but merely out of curiosity--have +you ever met with the word pignatta in your book?" + +"Yes, often," said the author. + +"And how do you render that in Spanish?" + +"How should I render it," returned the author, "but by olla?" + +"Body o' me," exclaimed Don Quixote, "what a proficient you are in the +Italian language! I would lay a good wager that where they say in Italian +piace you say in Spanish place, and where they say piu you say mas, and +you translate su by arriba and giu by abajo." + +"I translate them so of course," said the author, "for those are their +proper equivalents." + +"I would venture to swear," said Don Quixote, "that your worship is not +known in the world, which always begrudges their reward to rare wits and +praiseworthy labours. What talents lie wasted there! What genius thrust +away into corners! What worth left neglected! Still it seems to me that +translation from one language into another, if it be not from the queens +of languages, the Greek and the Latin, is like looking at Flemish +tapestries on the wrong side; for though the figures are visible, they +are full of threads that make them indistinct, and they do not show with +the smoothness and brightness of the right side; and translation from +easy languages argues neither ingenuity nor command of words, any more +than transcribing or copying out one document from another. But I do not +mean by this to draw the inference that no credit is to be allowed for +the work of translating, for a man may employ himself in ways worse and +less profitable to himself. This estimate does not include two famous +translators, Doctor Cristobal de Figueroa, in his Pastor Fido, and Don +Juan de Jauregui, in his Aminta, wherein by their felicity they leave it +in doubt which is the translation and which the original. But tell me, +are you printing this book at your own risk, or have you sold the +copyright to some bookseller?" + +"I print at my own risk," said the author, "and I expect to make a +thousand ducats at least by this first edition, which is to be of two +thousand copies that will go off in a twinkling at six reals apiece." + +"A fine calculation you are making!" said Don Quixote; "it is plain you +don't know the ins and outs of the printers, and how they play into one +another's hands. I promise you when you find yourself saddled with two +thousand copies you will feel so sore that it will astonish you, +particularly if the book is a little out of the common and not in any way +highly spiced." + +"What!" said the author, "would your worship, then, have me give it to a +bookseller who will give three maravedis for the copyright and think he +is doing me a favour? I do not print my books to win fame in the world, +for I am known in it already by my works; I want to make money, without +which reputation is not worth a rap." + +"God send your worship good luck," said Don Quixote; and he moved on to +another case, where he saw them correcting a sheet of a book with the +title of "Light of the Soul;" noticing it he observed, "Books like this, +though there are many of the kind, are the ones that deserve to be +printed, for many are the sinners in these days, and lights unnumbered +are needed for all that are in darkness." + +He passed on, and saw they were also correcting another book, and when he +asked its title they told him it was called, "The Second Part of the +Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha," by one of Tordesillas. + +"I have heard of this book already," said Don Quixote, "and verily and on +my conscience I thought it had been by this time burned to ashes as a +meddlesome intruder; but its Martinmas will come to it as it does to +every pig; for fictions have the more merit and charm about them the more +nearly they approach the truth or what looks like it; and true stories, +the truer they are the better they are;" and so saying he walked out of +the printing office with a certain amount of displeasure in his looks. +That same day Don Antonio arranged to take him to see the galleys that +lay at the beach, whereat Sancho was in high delight, as he had never +seen any all his life. Don Antonio sent word to the commandant of the +galleys that he intended to bring his guest, the famous Don Quixote of La +Mancha, of whom the commandant and all the citizens had already heard, +that afternoon to see them; and what happened on board of them will be +told in the next chapter. + +Chapter LXIII. - +Of the mishap that befell Sancho Panza through the visit to the galleys, +and the strange adventure of the fair Morisco + +Profound were Don Quixote's reflections on the reply of the enchanted +head, not one of them, however, hitting on the secret of the trick, but +all concentrated on the promise, which he regarded as a certainty, of +Dulcinea's disenchantment. This he turned over in his mind again and +again with great satisfaction, fully persuaded that he would shortly see +its fulfillment; and as for Sancho, though, as has been said, he hated +being a governor, still he had a longing to be giving orders and finding +himself obeyed once more; this is the misfortune that being in authority, +even in jest, brings with it. + +To resume; that afternoon their host Don Antonio Moreno and his two +friends, with Don Quixote and Sancho, went to the galleys. The commandant +had been already made aware of his good fortune in seeing two such famous +persons as Don Quixote and Sancho, and the instant they came to the shore +all the galleys struck their awnings and the clarions rang out. A skiff +covered with rich carpets and cushions of crimson velvet was immediately +lowered into the water, and as Don Quixote stepped on board of it, the +leading galley fired her gangway gun, and the other galleys did the same; +and as he mounted the starboard ladder the whole crew saluted him (as is +the custom when a personage of distinction comes on board a galley) by +exclaiming "Hu, hu, hu," three times. The general, for so we shall call +him, a Valencian gentleman of rank, gave him his hand and embraced him, +saying, "I shall mark this day with a white stone as one of the happiest +I can expect to enjoy in my lifetime, since I have seen Senor Don Quixote +of La Mancha, pattern and image wherein we see contained and condensed +all that is worthy in knight-errantry." + +Don Quixote delighted beyond measure with such a lordly reception, +replied to him in words no less courteous. All then proceeded to the +poop, which was very handsomely decorated, and seated themselves on the +bulwark benches; the boatswain passed along the gangway and piped all +hands to strip, which they did in an instant. Sancho, seeing such a +number of men stripped to the skin, was taken aback, and still more when +he saw them spread the awning so briskly that it seemed to him as if all +the devils were at work at it; but all this was cakes and fancy bread to +what I am going to tell now. Sancho was seated on the captain's stage, +close to the aftermost rower on the right-hand side. He, previously +instructed in what he was to do, laid hold of Sancho, hoisting him up in +his arms, and the whole crew, who were standing ready, beginning on the +right, proceeded to pass him on, whirling him along from hand to hand and +from bench to bench with such rapidity that it took the sight out of poor +Sancho's eyes, and he made quite sure that the devils themselves were +flying away with him; nor did they leave off with him until they had sent +him back along the left side and deposited him on the poop; and the poor +fellow was left bruised and breathless and all in a sweat, and unable to +comprehend what it was that had happened to him. + +Don Quixote when he saw Sancho's flight without wings asked the general +if this was a usual ceremony with those who came on board the galleys for +the first time; for, if so, as he had no intention of adopting them as a +profession, he had no mind to perform such feats of agility, and if +anyone offered to lay hold of him to whirl him about, he vowed to God he +would kick his soul out; and as he said this he stood up and clapped his +hand upon his sword. At this instant they struck the awning and lowered +the yard with a prodigious rattle. Sancho thought heaven was coming off +its hinges and going to fall on his head, and full of terror he ducked it +and buried it between his knees; nor were Don Quixote's knees altogether +under control, for he too shook a little, squeezed his shoulders together +and lost colour. The crew then hoisted the yard with the same rapidity +and clatter as when they lowered it, all the while keeping silence as +though they had neither voice nor breath. The boatswain gave the signal +to weigh anchor, and leaping upon the middle of the gangway began to lay +on to the shoulders of the crew with his courbash or whip, and to haul +out gradually to sea. + +When Sancho saw so many red feet (for such he took the oars to be) moving +all together, he said to himself, "It's these that are the real chanted +things, and not the ones my master talks of. What can those wretches have +done to be so whipped; and how does that one man who goes along there +whistling dare to whip so many? I declare this is hell, or at least +purgatory!" + +Don Quixote, observing how attentively Sancho regarded what was going on, +said to him, "Ah, Sancho my friend, how quickly and cheaply might you +finish off the disenchantment of Dulcinea, if you would strip to the +waist and take your place among those gentlemen! Amid the pain and +sufferings of so many you would not feel your own much; and moreover +perhaps the sage Merlin would allow each of these lashes, being laid on +with a good hand, to count for ten of those which you must give yourself +at last." + +The general was about to ask what these lashes were, and what was +Dulcinea's disenchantment, when a sailor exclaimed, "Monjui signals that +there is an oared vessel off the coast to the west." + +On hearing this the general sprang upon the gangway crying, "Now then, my +sons, don't let her give us the slip! It must be some Algerine corsair +brigantine that the watchtower signals to us." The three others +immediately came alongside the chief galley to receive their orders. The +general ordered two to put out to sea while he with the other kept in +shore, so that in this way the vessel could not escape them. The crews +plied the oars driving the galleys so furiously that they seemed to fly. +The two that had put out to sea, after a couple of miles sighted a vessel +which, so far as they could make out, they judged to be one of fourteen +or fifteen banks, and so she proved. As soon as the vessel discovered the +galleys she went about with the object and in the hope of making her +escape by her speed; but the attempt failed, for the chief galley was one +of the fastest vessels afloat, and overhauled her so rapidly that they on +board the brigantine saw clearly there was no possibility of escaping, +and the rais therefore would have had them drop their oars and give +themselves up so as not to provoke the captain in command of our galleys +to anger. But chance, directing things otherwise, so ordered it that just +as the chief galley came close enough for those on board the vessel to +hear the shouts from her calling on them to surrender, two Toraquis, that +is to say two Turks, both drunken, that with a dozen more were on board +the brigantine, discharged their muskets, killing two of the soldiers +that lined the sides of our vessel. Seeing this the general swore he +would not leave one of those he found on board the vessel alive, but as +he bore down furiously upon her she slipped away from him underneath the +oars. The galley shot a good way ahead; those on board the vessel saw +their case was desperate, and while the galley was coming about they made +sail, and by sailing and rowing once more tried to sheer off; but their +activity did not do them as much good as their rashness did them harm, +for the galley coming up with them in a little more than half a mile +threw her oars over them and took the whole of them alive. The other two +galleys now joined company and all four returned with the prize to the +beach, where a vast multitude stood waiting for them, eager to see what +they brought back. The general anchored close in, and perceived that the +viceroy of the city was on the shore. He ordered the skiff to push off to +fetch him, and the yard to be lowered for the purpose of hanging +forthwith the rais and the rest of the men taken on board the vessel, +about six-and-thirty in number, all smart fellows and most of them +Turkish musketeers. He asked which was the rais of the brigantine, and +was answered in Spanish by one of the prisoners (who afterwards proved to +be a Spanish renegade), "This young man, senor that you see here is our +rais," and he pointed to one of the handsomest and most gallant-looking +youths that could be imagined. He did not seem to be twenty years of age. + +"Tell me, dog," said the general, "what led thee to kill my soldiers, +when thou sawest it was impossible for thee to escape? Is that the way to +behave to chief galleys? Knowest thou not that rashness is not valour? +Faint prospects of success should make men bold, but not rash." + +The rais was about to reply, but the general could not at that moment +listen to him, as he had to hasten to receive the viceroy, who was now +coming on board the galley, and with him certain of his attendants and +some of the people. + +"You have had a good chase, senor general," said the viceroy. + +"Your excellency shall soon see how good, by the game strung up to this +yard," replied the general. + +"How so?" returned the viceroy. + +"Because," said the general, "against all law, reason, and usages of war +they have killed on my hands two of the best soldiers on board these +galleys, and I have sworn to hang every man that I have taken, but above +all this youth who is the rais of the brigantine," and he pointed to him +as he stood with his hands already bound and the rope round his neck, +ready for death. + +The viceroy looked at him, and seeing him so well-favoured, so graceful, +and so submissive, he felt a desire to spare his life, the comeliness of +the youth furnishing him at once with a letter of recommendation. He +therefore questioned him, saying, "Tell me, rais, art thou Turk, Moor, or +renegade?" + +To which the youth replied, also in Spanish, "I am neither Turk, nor +Moor, nor renegade." + +"What art thou, then?" said the viceroy. + +"A Christian woman," replied the youth. + +"A woman and a Christian, in such a dress and in such circumstances! It +is more marvellous than credible," said the viceroy. + +"Suspend the execution of the sentence," said the youth; "your vengeance +will not lose much by waiting while I tell you the story of my life." + +What heart could be so hard as not to be softened by these words, at any +rate so far as to listen to what the unhappy youth had to say? The +general bade him say what he pleased, but not to expect pardon for his +flagrant offence. With this permission the youth began in these words. + +"Born of Morisco parents, I am of that nation, more unhappy than wise, +upon which of late a sea of woes has poured down. In the course of our +misfortune I was carried to Barbary by two uncles of mine, for it was in +vain that I declared I was a Christian, as in fact I am, and not a mere +pretended one, or outwardly, but a true Catholic Christian. It availed me +nothing with those charged with our sad expatriation to protest this, nor +would my uncles believe it; on the contrary, they treated it as an +untruth and a subterfuge set up to enable me to remain behind in the land +of my birth; and so, more by force than of my own will, they took me with +them. I had a Christian mother, and a father who was a man of sound sense +and a Christian too; I imbibed the Catholic faith with my mother's milk, +I was well brought up, and neither in word nor in deed did I, I think, +show any sign of being a Morisco. To accompany these virtues, for such I +hold them, my beauty, if I possess any, grew with my growth; and great as +was the seclusion in which I lived it was not so great but that a young +gentleman, Don Gaspar Gregorio by name, eldest son of a gentleman who is +lord of a village near ours, contrived to find opportunities of seeing +me. How he saw me, how we met, how his heart was lost to me, and mine not +kept from him, would take too long to tell, especially at a moment when I +am in dread of the cruel cord that threatens me interposing between +tongue and throat; I will only say, therefore, that Don Gregorio chose to +accompany me in our banishment. He joined company with the Moriscoes who +were going forth from other villages, for he knew their language very +well, and on the voyage he struck up a friendship with my two uncles who +were carrying me with them; for my father, like a wise and far-sighted +man, as soon as he heard the first edict for our expulsion, quitted the +village and departed in quest of some refuge for us abroad. He left +hidden and buried, at a spot of which I alone have knowledge, a large +quantity of pearls and precious stones of great value, together with a +sum of money in gold cruzadoes and doubloons. He charged me on no account +to touch the treasure, if by any chance they expelled us before his +return. I obeyed him, and with my uncles, as I have said, and others of +our kindred and neighbours, passed over to Barbary, and the place where +we took up our abode was Algiers, much the same as if we had taken it up +in hell itself. The king heard of my beauty, and report told him of my +wealth, which was in some degree fortunate for me. He summoned me before +him, and asked me what part of Spain I came from, and what money and +jewels I had. I mentioned the place, and told him the jewels and money +were buried there; but that they might easily be recovered if I myself +went back for them. All this I told him, in dread lest my beauty and not +his own covetousness should influence him. While he was engaged in +conversation with me, they brought him word that in company with me was +one of the handsomest and most graceful youths that could be imagined. I +knew at once that they were speaking of Don Gaspar Gregorio, whose +comeliness surpasses the most highly vaunted beauty. I was troubled when +I thought of the danger he was in, for among those barbarous Turks a fair +youth is more esteemed than a woman, be she ever so beautiful. The king +immediately ordered him to be brought before him that he might see him, +and asked me if what they said about the youth was true. I then, almost +as if inspired by heaven, told him it was, but that I would have him to +know it was not a man, but a woman like myself, and I entreated him to +allow me to go and dress her in the attire proper to her, so that her +beauty might be seen to perfection, and that she might present herself +before him with less embarrassment. He bade me go by all means, and said +that the next day we should discuss the plan to be adopted for my return +to Spain to carry away the hidden treasure. I saw Don Gaspar, I told him +the danger he was in if he let it be seen he was a man, I dressed him as +a Moorish woman, and that same afternoon I brought him before the king, +who was charmed when he saw him, and resolved to keep the damsel and make +a present of her to the Grand Signor; and to avoid the risk she might run +among the women of his seraglio, and distrustful of himself, he commanded +her to be placed in the house of some Moorish ladies of rank who would +protect and attend to her; and thither he was taken at once. What we both +suffered (for I cannot deny that I love him) may be left to the +imagination of those who are separated if they love one another dearly. +The king then arranged that I should return to Spain in this brigantine, +and that two Turks, those who killed your soldiers, should accompany me. +There also came with me this Spanish renegade"--and here she pointed to +him who had first spoken--"whom I know to be secretly a Christian, and to +be more desirous of being left in Spain than of returning to Barbary. The +rest of the crew of the brigantine are Moors and Turks, who merely serve +as rowers. The two Turks, greedy and insolent, instead of obeying the +orders we had to land me and this renegade in Christian dress (with which +we came provided) on the first Spanish ground we came to, chose to run +along the coast and make some prize if they could, fearing that if they +put us ashore first, we might, in case of some accident befalling us, +make it known that the brigantine was at sea, and thus, if there happened +to be any galleys on the coast, they might be taken. We sighted this +shore last night, and knowing nothing of these galleys, we were +discovered, and the result was what you have seen. To sum up, there is +Don Gregorio in woman's dress, among women, in imminent danger of his +life; and here am I, with hands bound, in expectation, or rather in +dread, of losing my life, of which I am already weary. Here, sirs, ends +my sad story, as true as it is unhappy; all I ask of you is to allow me +to die like a Christian, for, as I have already said, I am not to be +charged with the offence of which those of my nation are guilty;" and she +stood silent, her eyes filled with moving tears, accompanied by plenty +from the bystanders. The viceroy, touched with compassion, went up to her +without speaking and untied the cord that bound the hands of the Moorish +girl. + +But all the while the Morisco Christian was telling her strange story, an +elderly pilgrim, who had come on board of the galley at the same time as +the viceroy, kept his eyes fixed upon her; and the instant she ceased +speaking he threw himself at her feet, and embracing them said in a voice +broken by sobs and sighs, "O Ana Felix, my unhappy daughter, I am thy +father Ricote, come back to look for thee, unable to live without thee, +my soul that thou art!" + +At these words of his, Sancho opened his eyes and raised his head, which +he had been holding down, brooding over his unlucky excursion; and +looking at the pilgrim he recognised in him that same Ricote he met the +day he quitted his government, and felt satisfied that this was his +daughter. She being now unbound embraced her father, mingling her tears +with his, while he addressing the general and the viceroy said, "This, +sirs, is my daughter, more unhappy in her adventures than in her name. +She is Ana Felix, surnamed Ricote, celebrated as much for her own beauty +as for my wealth. I quitted my native land in search of some shelter or +refuge for us abroad, and having found one in Germany I returned in this +pilgrim's dress, in the company of some other German pilgrims, to seek my +daughter and take up a large quantity of treasure I had left buried. My +daughter I did not find, the treasure I found and have with me; and now, +in this strange roundabout way you have seen, I find the treasure that +more than all makes me rich, my beloved daughter. If our innocence and +her tears and mine can with strict justice open the door to clemency, +extend it to us, for we never had any intention of injuring you, nor do +we sympathise with the aims of our people, who have been justly +banished." + +"I know Ricote well," said Sancho at this, "and I know too that what he +says about Ana Felix being his daughter is true; but as to those other +particulars about going and coming, and having good or bad intentions, I +say nothing." + +While all present stood amazed at this strange occurrence the general +said, "At any rate your tears will not allow me to keep my oath; live, +fair Ana Felix, all the years that heaven has allotted you; but these +rash insolent fellows must pay the penalty of the crime they have +committed;" and with that he gave orders to have the two Turks who had +killed his two soldiers hanged at once at the yard-arm. The viceroy, +however, begged him earnestly not to hang them, as their behaviour +savoured rather of madness than of bravado. The general yielded to the +viceroy's request, for revenge is not easily taken in cold blood. They +then tried to devise some scheme for rescuing Don Gaspar Gregorio from +the danger in which he had been left. Ricote offered for that object more +than two thousand ducats that he had in pearls and gems; they proposed +several plans, but none so good as that suggested by the renegade already +mentioned, who offered to return to Algiers in a small vessel of about +six banks, manned by Christian rowers, as he knew where, how, and when he +could and should land, nor was he ignorant of the house in which Don +Gaspar was staying. The general and the viceroy had some hesitation about +placing confidence in the renegade and entrusting him with the Christians +who were to row, but Ana Felix said she could answer for him, and her +father offered to go and pay the ransom of the Christians if by any +chance they should not be forthcoming. This, then, being agreed upon, the +viceroy landed, and Don Antonio Moreno took the fair Morisco and her +father home with him, the viceroy charging him to give them the best +reception and welcome in his power, while on his own part he offered all +that house contained for their entertainment; so great was the good-will +and kindliness the beauty of Ana Felix had infused into his heart. + +Chapter LXIV. - +Treating of the adventure which gave Don Quixote more unhappiness than +all that had hitherto befallen him + +The wife of Don Antonio Moreno, so the history says, was extremely happy +to see Ana Felix in her house. She welcomed her with great kindness, +charmed as well by her beauty as by her intelligence; for in both +respects the fair Morisco was richly endowed, and all the people of the +city flocked to see her as though they had been summoned by the ringing +of the bells. + +Don Quixote told Don Antonio that the plan adopted for releasing Don +Gregorio was not a good one, for its risks were greater than its +advantages, and that it would be better to land himself with his arms and +horse in Barbary; for he would carry him off in spite of the whole +Moorish host, as Don Gaiferos carried off his wife Melisendra. + +"Remember, your worship," observed Sancho on hearing him say so, "Senor +Don Gaiferos carried off his wife from the mainland, and took her to +France by land; but in this case, if by chance we carry off Don Gregorio, +we have no way of bringing him to Spain, for there's the sea between." + +"There's a remedy for everything except death," said Don Quixote; "if +they bring the vessel close to the shore we shall be able to get on board +though all the world strive to prevent us." + +"Your worship hits it off mighty well and mighty easy," said Sancho; "but +'it's a long step from saying to doing;' and I hold to the renegade, for +he seems to me an honest good-hearted fellow." + +Don Antonio then said that if the renegade did not prove successful, the +expedient of the great Don Quixote's expedition to Barbary should be +adopted. Two days afterwards the renegade put to sea in a light vessel of +six oars a-side manned by a stout crew, and two days later the galleys +made sail eastward, the general having begged the viceroy to let him know +all about the release of Don Gregorio and about Ana Felix, and the +viceroy promised to do as he requested. + +One morning as Don Quixote went out for a stroll along the beach, arrayed +in full armour (for, as he often said, that was "his only gear, his only +rest the fray," and he never was without it for a moment), he saw coming +towards him a knight, also in full armour, with a shining moon painted on +his shield, who, on approaching sufficiently near to be heard, said in a +loud voice, addressing himself to Don Quixote, "Illustrious knight, and +never sufficiently extolled Don Quixote of La Mancha, I am the Knight of +the White Moon, whose unheard-of achievements will perhaps have recalled +him to thy memory. I come to do battle with thee and prove the might of +thy arm, to the end that I make thee acknowledge and confess that my +lady, let her be who she may, is incomparably fairer than thy Dulcinea +del Toboso. If thou dost acknowledge this fairly and openly, thou shalt +escape death and save me the trouble of inflicting it upon thee; if thou +fightest and I vanquish thee, I demand no other satisfaction than that, +laying aside arms and abstaining from going in quest of adventures, thou +withdraw and betake thyself to thine own village for the space of a year, +and live there without putting hand to sword, in peace and quiet and +beneficial repose, the same being needful for the increase of thy +substance and the salvation of thy soul; and if thou dost vanquish me, my +head shall be at thy disposal, my arms and horse thy spoils, and the +renown of my deeds transferred and added to thine. Consider which will be +thy best course, and give me thy answer speedily, for this day is all the +time I have for the despatch of this business." + +Don Quixote was amazed and astonished, as well at the Knight of the White +Moon's arrogance, as at his reason for delivering the defiance, and with +calm dignity he answered him, "Knight of the White Moon, of whose +achievements I have never heard until now, I will venture to swear you +have never seen the illustrious Dulcinea; for had you seen her I know you +would have taken care not to venture yourself upon this issue, because +the sight would have removed all doubt from your mind that there ever has +been or can be a beauty to be compared with hers; and so, not saying you +lie, but merely that you are not correct in what you state, I accept your +challenge, with the conditions you have proposed, and at once, that the +day you have fixed may not expire; and from your conditions I except only +that of the renown of your achievements being transferred to me, for I +know not of what sort they are nor what they may amount to; I am +satisfied with my own, such as they be. Take, therefore, the side of the +field you choose, and I will do the same; and to whom God shall give it +may Saint Peter add his blessing." + +The Knight of the White Moon had been seen from the city, and it was told +the viceroy how he was in conversation with Don Quixote. The viceroy, +fancying it must be some fresh adventure got up by Don Antonio Moreno or +some other gentleman of the city, hurried out at once to the beach +accompanied by Don Antonio and several other gentlemen, just as Don +Quixote was wheeling Rocinante round in order to take up the necessary +distance. The viceroy upon this, seeing that the pair of them were +evidently preparing to come to the charge, put himself between them, +asking them what it was that led them to engage in combat all of a sudden +in this way. The Knight of the White Moon replied that it was a question +of precedence of beauty; and briefly told him what he had said to Don +Quixote, and how the conditions of the defiance agreed upon on both sides +had been accepted. The viceroy went over to Don Antonio, and asked in a +low voice did he know who the Knight of the White Moon was, or was it +some joke they were playing on Don Quixote. Don Antonio replied that he +neither knew who he was nor whether the defiance was in joke or in +earnest. This answer left the viceroy in a state of perplexity, not +knowing whether he ought to let the combat go on or not; but unable to +persuade himself that it was anything but a joke he fell back, saying, +"If there be no other way out of it, gallant knights, except to confess +or die, and Don Quixote is inflexible, and your worship of the White Moon +still more so, in God's hand be it, and fall on." + +He of the White Moon thanked the viceroy in courteous and well-chosen +words for the permission he gave them, and so did Don Quixote, who then, +commending himself with all his heart to heaven and to his Dulcinea, as +was his custom on the eve of any combat that awaited him, proceeded to +take a little more distance, as he saw his antagonist was doing the same; +then, without blast of trumpet or other warlike instrument to give them +the signal to charge, both at the same instant wheeled their horses; and +he of the White Moon, being the swifter, met Don Quixote after having +traversed two-thirds of the course, and there encountered him with such +violence that, without touching him with his lance (for he held it high, +to all appearance purposely), he hurled Don Quixote and Rocinante to the +earth, a perilous fall. He sprang upon him at once, and placing the lance +over his visor said to him, "You are vanquished, sir knight, nay dead +unless you admit the conditions of our defiance." + +Don Quixote, bruised and stupefied, without raising his visor said in a +weak feeble voice as if he were speaking out of a tomb, "Dulcinea del +Toboso is the fairest woman in the world, and I the most unfortunate +knight on earth; it is not fitting that this truth should suffer by my +feebleness; drive your lance home, sir knight, and take my life, since +you have taken away my honour." + +"That will I not, in sooth," said he of the White Moon; "live the fame of +the lady Dulcinea's beauty undimmed as ever; all I require is that the +great Don Quixote retire to his own home for a year, or for so long a +time as shall by me be enjoined upon him, as we agreed before engaging in +this combat." + +The viceroy, Don Antonio, and several others who were present heard all +this, and heard too how Don Quixote replied that so long as nothing in +prejudice of Dulcinea was demanded of him, he would observe all the rest +like a true and loyal knight. The engagement given, he of the White Moon +wheeled about, and making obeisance to the viceroy with a movement of the +head, rode away into the city at a half gallop. The viceroy bade Don +Antonio hasten after him, and by some means or other find out who he was. +They raised Don Quixote up and uncovered his face, and found him pale and +bathed with sweat. + +Rocinante from the mere hard measure he had received lay unable to stir +for the present. Sancho, wholly dejected and woebegone, knew not what to +say or do. He fancied that all was a dream, that the whole business was a +piece of enchantment. Here was his master defeated, and bound not to take +up arms for a year. He saw the light of the glory of his achievements +obscured; the hopes of the promises lately made him swept away like smoke +before the wind; Rocinante, he feared, was crippled for life, and his +master's bones out of joint; for if he were only shaken out of his +madness it would be no small luck. In the end they carried him into the +city in a hand-chair which the viceroy sent for, and thither the viceroy +himself returned, cager to ascertain who this Knight of the White Moon +was who had left Don Quixote in such a sad plight. + +Chapter LXV. - +Wherein is made known who the Knight of the White Moon was; likewise Don +Gregorio's release, and other events + +Don Antonia Moreno followed the Knight of the White Moon, and a number of +boys followed him too, nay pursued him, until they had him fairly housed +in a hostel in the heart of the city. Don Antonio, eager to make his +acquaintance, entered also; a squire came out to meet him and remove his +armour, and he shut himself into a lower room, still attended by Don +Antonio, whose bread would not bake until he had found out who he was. He +of the White Moon, seeing then that the gentleman would not leave him, +said, "I know very well, senor, what you have come for; it is to find out +who I am; and as there is no reason why I should conceal it from you, +while my servant here is taking off my armour I will tell you the true +state of the case, without leaving out anything. You must know, senor, +that I am called the bachelor Samson Carrasco. I am of the same village +as Don Quixote of La Mancha, whose craze and folly make all of us who +know him feel pity for him, and I am one of those who have felt it most; +and persuaded that his chance of recovery lay in quiet and keeping at +home and in his own house, I hit upon a device for keeping him there. +Three months ago, therefore, I went out to meet him as a knight-errant, +under the assumed name of the Knight of the Mirrors, intending to engage +him in combat and overcome him without hurting him, making it the +condition of our combat that the vanquished should be at the disposal of +the victor. What I meant to demand of him (for I regarded him as +vanquished already) was that he should return to his own village, and not +leave it for a whole year, by which time he might be cured. But fate +ordered it otherwise, for he vanquished me and unhorsed me, and so my +plan failed. He went his way, and I came back conquered, covered with +shame, and sorely bruised by my fall, which was a particularly dangerous +one. But this did not quench my desire to meet him again and overcome +him, as you have seen to-day. And as he is so scrupulous in his +observance of the laws of knight-errantry, he will, no doubt, in order to +keep his word, obey the injunction I have laid upon him. This, senor, is +how the matter stands, and I have nothing more to tell you. I implore of +you not to betray me, or tell Don Quixote who I am; so that my honest +endeavours may be successful, and that a man of excellent wits--were he +only rid of the fooleries of chivalry--may get them back again." + +"O senor," said Don Antonio, "may God forgive you the wrong you have done +the whole world in trying to bring the most amusing madman in it back to +his senses. Do you not see, senor, that the gain by Don Quixote's sanity +can never equal the enjoyment his crazes give? But my belief is that all +the senor bachelor's pains will be of no avail to bring a man so +hopelessly cracked to his senses again; and if it were not uncharitable, +I would say may Don Quixote never be cured, for by his recovery we lose +not only his own drolleries, but his squire Sancho Panza's too, any one +of which is enough to turn melancholy itself into merriment. However, +I'll hold my peace and say nothing to him, and we'll see whether I am +right in my suspicion that Senor Carrasco's efforts will be fruitless." + +The bachelor replied that at all events the affair promised well, and he +hoped for a happy result from it; and putting his services at Don +Antonio's commands he took his leave of him; and having had his armour +packed at once upon a mule, he rode away from the city the same day on +the horse he rode to battle, and returned to his own country without +meeting any adventure calling for record in this veracious history. + +Don Antonio reported to the viceroy what Carrasco told him, and the +viceroy was not very well pleased to hear it, for with Don Quixote's +retirement there was an end to the amusement of all who knew anything of +his mad doings. + +Six days did Don Quixote keep his bed, dejected, melancholy, moody and +out of sorts, brooding over the unhappy event of his defeat. Sancho +strove to comfort him, and among other things he said to him, "Hold up +your head, senor, and be of good cheer if you can, and give thanks to +heaven that if you have had a tumble to the ground you have not come off +with a broken rib; and, as you know that 'where they give they take,' and +that 'there are not always fletches where there are pegs,' a fig for the +doctor, for there's no need of him to cure this ailment. Let us go home, +and give over going about in search of adventures in strange lands and +places; rightly looked at, it is I that am the greater loser, though it +is your worship that has had the worse usage. With the government I gave +up all wish to be a governor again, but I did not give up all longing to +be a count; and that will never come to pass if your worship gives up +becoming a king by renouncing the calling of chivalry; and so my hopes +are going to turn into smoke." + +"Peace, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "thou seest my suspension and +retirement is not to exceed a year; I shall soon return to my honoured +calling, and I shall not be at a loss for a kingdom to win and a county +to bestow on thee." + +"May God hear it and sin be deaf," said Sancho; "I have always heard say +that 'a good hope is better than a bad holding." + +As they were talking Don Antonio came in looking extremely pleased and +exclaiming, "Reward me for my good news, Senor Don Quixote! Don Gregorio +and the renegade who went for him have come ashore--ashore do I say? They +are by this time in the viceroy's house, and will be here immediately." + +Don Quixote cheered up a little and said, "Of a truth I am almost ready +to say I should have been glad had it turned out just the other way, for +it would have obliged me to cross over to Barbary, where by the might of +my arm I should have restored to liberty, not only Don Gregorio, but all +the Christian captives there are in Barbary. But what am I saying, +miserable being that I am? Am I not he that has been conquered? Am I not +he that has been overthrown? Am I not he who must not take up arms for a +year? Then what am I making professions for; what am I bragging about; +when it is fitter for me to handle the distaff than the sword?" + +"No more of that, senor," said Sancho; "'let the hen live, even though it +be with her pip; 'today for thee and to-morrow for me;' in these affairs +of encounters and whacks one must not mind them, for he that falls to-day +may get up to-morrow; unless indeed he chooses to lie in bed, I mean +gives way to weakness and does not pluck up fresh spirit for fresh +battles; let your worship get up now to receive Don Gregorio; for the +household seems to be in a bustle, and no doubt he has come by this +time;" and so it proved, for as soon as Don Gregorio and the renegade had +given the viceroy an account of the voyage out and home, Don Gregorio, +eager to see Ana Felix, came with the renegade to Don Antonio's house. +When they carried him away from Algiers he was in woman's dress; on board +the vessel, however, he exchanged it for that of a captive who escaped +with him; but in whatever dress he might be he looked like one to be +loved and served and esteemed, for he was surpassingly well-favoured, and +to judge by appearances some seventeen or eighteen years of age. Ricote +and his daughter came out to welcome him, the father with tears, the +daughter with bashfulness. They did not embrace each other, for where +there is deep love there will never be overmuch boldness. Seen side by +side, the comeliness of Don Gregorio and the beauty of Ana Felix were the +admiration of all who were present. It was silence that spoke for the +lovers at that moment, and their eyes were the tongues that declared +their pure and happy feelings. The renegade explained the measures and +means he had adopted to rescue Don Gregorio, and Don Gregorio at no great +length, but in a few words, in which he showed that his intelligence was +in advance of his years, described the peril and embarrassment he found +himself in among the women with whom he had sojourned. To conclude, +Ricote liberally recompensed and rewarded as well the renegade as the men +who had rowed; and the renegade effected his readmission into the body of +the Church and was reconciled with it, and from a rotten limb became by +penance and repentance a clean and sound one. + +Two days later the viceroy discussed with Don Antonio the steps they +should take to enable Ana Felix and her father to stay in Spain, for it +seemed to them there could be no objection to a daughter who was so good +a Christian and a father to all appearance so well disposed remaining +there. Don Antonio offered to arrange the matter at the capital, whither +he was compelled to go on some other business, hinting that many a +difficult affair was settled there with the help of favour and bribes. + +"Nay," said Ricote, who was present during the conversation, "it will not +do to rely upon favour or bribes, because with the great Don Bernardino +de Velasco, Conde de Salazar, to whom his Majesty has entrusted our +expulsion, neither entreaties nor promises, bribes nor appeals to +compassion, are of any use; for though it is true he mingles mercy with +justice, still, seeing that the whole body of our nation is tainted and +corrupt, he applies to it the cautery that burns rather than the salve +that soothes; and thus, by prudence, sagacity, care and the fear he +inspires, he has borne on his mighty shoulders the weight of this great +policy and carried it into effect, all our schemes and plots, +importunities and wiles, being ineffectual to blind his Argus eyes, ever +on the watch lest one of us should remain behind in concealment, and like +a hidden root come in course of time to sprout and bear poisonous fruit +in Spain, now cleansed, and relieved of the fear in which our vast +numbers kept it. Heroic resolve of the great Philip the Third, and +unparalleled wisdom to have entrusted it to the said Don Bernardino de +Velasco!" + +"At any rate," said Don Antonio, "when I am there I will make all +possible efforts, and let heaven do as pleases it best; Don Gregorio will +come with me to relieve the anxiety which his parents must be suffering +on account of his absence; Ana Felix will remain in my house with my +wife, or in a monastery; and I know the viceroy will be glad that the +worthy Ricote should stay with him until we see what terms I can make." + +The viceroy agreed to all that was proposed; but Don Gregorio on learning +what had passed declared he could not and would not on any account leave +Ana Felix; however, as it was his purpose to go and see his parents and +devise some way of returning for her, he fell in with the proposed +arrangement. Ana Felix remained with Don Antonio's wife, and Ricote in +the viceroy's house. + +The day for Don Antonio's departure came; and two days later that for Don +Quixote's and Sancho's, for Don Quixote's fall did not suffer him to take +the road sooner. There were tears and sighs, swoonings and sobs, at the +parting between Don Gregorio and Ana Felix. Ricote offered Don Gregorio a +thousand crowns if he would have them, but he would not take any save +five which Don Antonio lent him and he promised to repay at the capital. +So the two of them took their departure, and Don Quixote and Sancho +afterwards, as has been already said, Don Quixote without his armour and +in travelling gear, and Sancho on foot, Dapple being loaded with the +armour. + +Chapter LXVI. - +Which treats of what he who reads will see, or what he who has it read to +him will hear + +As he left Barcelona, Don Quixote turned gaze upon the spot where he had +fallen. "Here Troy was," said he; "here my ill-luck, not my cowardice, +robbed me of all the glory I had won; here Fortune made me the victim of +her caprices; here the lustre of my achievements was dimmed; here, in a +word, fell my happiness never to rise again." + +"Senor," said Sancho on hearing this, "it is the part of brave hearts to +be patient in adversity just as much as to be glad in prosperity; I judge +by myself, for, if when I was a governor I was glad, now that I am a +squire and on foot I am not sad; and I have heard say that she whom +commonly they call Fortune is a drunken whimsical jade, and, what is +more, blind, and therefore neither sees what she does, nor knows whom she +casts down or whom she sets up." + +"Thou art a great philosopher, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "thou speakest +very sensibly; I know not who taught thee. But I can tell thee there is +no such thing as Fortune in the world, nor does anything which takes +place there, be it good or bad, come about by chance, but by the special +preordination of heaven; and hence the common saying that 'each of us is +the maker of his own Fortune.' I have been that of mine; but not with the +proper amount of prudence, and my self-confidence has therefore made me +pay dearly; for I ought to have reflected that Rocinante's feeble +strength could not resist the mighty bulk of the Knight of the White +Moon's horse. In a word, I ventured it, I did my best, I was overthrown, +but though I lost my honour I did not lose nor can I lose the virtue of +keeping my word. When I was a knight-errant, daring and valiant, I +supported my achievements by hand and deed, and now that I am a humble +squire I will support my words by keeping the promise I have given. +Forward then, Sancho my friend, let us go to keep the year of the +novitiate in our own country, and in that seclusion we shall pick up +fresh strength to return to the by me never-forgotten calling of arms." + +"Senor," returned Sancho, "travelling on foot is not such a pleasant +thing that it makes me feel disposed or tempted to make long marches. Let +us leave this armour hung up on some tree, instead of some one that has +been hanged; and then with me on Dapple's back and my feet off the ground +we will arrange the stages as your worship pleases to measure them out; +but to suppose that I am going to travel on foot, and make long ones, is +to suppose nonsense." + +"Thou sayest well, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "let my armour be hung up +for a trophy, and under it or round it we will carve on the trees what +was inscribed on the trophy of Roland's armour-- + +These let none move +Who dareth not his might with Roland prove." + +"That's the very thing," said Sancho; "and if it was not that we should +feel the want of Rocinante on the road, it would be as well to leave him +hung up too." + +"And yet, I had rather not have either him or the armour hung up," said +Don Quixote, "that it may not be said, 'for good service a bad return.'" + +"Your worship is right," said Sancho; "for, as sensible people hold, 'the +fault of the ass must not be laid on the pack-saddle;' and, as in this +affair the fault is your worship's, punish yourself and don't let your +anger break out against the already battered and bloody armour, or the +meekness of Rocinante, or the tenderness of my feet, trying to make them +travel more than is reasonable." + +In converse of this sort the whole of that day went by, as did the four +succeeding ones, without anything occurring to interrupt their journey, +but on the fifth as they entered a village they found a great number of +people at the door of an inn enjoying themselves, as it was a holiday. +Upon Don Quixote's approach a peasant called out, "One of these two +gentlemen who come here, and who don't know the parties, will tell us +what we ought to do about our wager." + +"That I will, certainly," said Don Quixote, "and according to the rights +of the case, if I can manage to understand it." + +"Well, here it is, worthy sir," said the peasant; "a man of this village +who is so fat that he weighs twenty stone challenged another, a neighbour +of his, who does not weigh more than nine, to run a race. The agreement +was that they were to run a distance of a hundred paces with equal +weights; and when the challenger was asked how the weights were to be +equalised he said that the other, as he weighed nine stone, should put +eleven in iron on his back, and that in this way the twenty stone of the +thin man would equal the twenty stone of the fat one." + +"Not at all," exclaimed Sancho at once, before Don Quixote could answer; +"it's for me, that only a few days ago left off being a governor and a +judge, as all the world knows, to settle these doubtful questions and +give an opinion in disputes of all sorts." + +"Answer in God's name, Sancho my friend," said Don Quixote, "for I am not +fit to give crumbs to a cat, my wits are so confused and upset." + +With this permission Sancho said to the peasants who stood clustered +round him, waiting with open mouths for the decision to come from his, +"Brothers, what the fat man requires is not in reason, nor has it a +shadow of justice in it; because, if it be true, as they say, that the +challenged may choose the weapons, the other has no right to choose such +as will prevent and keep him from winning. My decision, therefore, is +that the fat challenger prune, peel, thin, trim and correct himself, and +take eleven stone of his flesh off his body, here or there, as he +pleases, and as suits him best; and being in this way reduced to nine +stone weight, he will make himself equal and even with nine stone of his +opponent, and they will be able to run on equal terms." + +"By all that's good," said one of the peasants as he heard Sancho's +decision, "but the gentleman has spoken like a saint, and given judgment +like a canon! But I'll be bound the fat man won't part with an ounce of +his flesh, not to say eleven stone." + +"The best plan will be for them not to run," said another, "so that +neither the thin man break down under the weight, nor the fat one strip +himself of his flesh; let half the wager be spent in wine, and let's take +these gentlemen to the tavern where there's the best, and 'over me be the +cloak when it rains." + +"I thank you, sirs," said Don Quixote; "but I cannot stop for an instant, +for sad thoughts and unhappy circumstances force me to seem discourteous +and to travel apace;" and spurring Rocinante he pushed on, leaving them +wondering at what they had seen and heard, at his own strange figure and +at the shrewdness of his servant, for such they took Sancho to be; and +another of them observed, "If the servant is so clever, what must the +master be? I'll bet, if they are going to Salamanca to study, they'll +come to be alcaldes of the Court in a trice; for it's a mere joke--only +to read and read, and have interest and good luck; and before a man knows +where he is he finds himself with a staff in his hand or a mitre on his +head." + +That night master and man passed out in the fields in the open air, and +the next day as they were pursuing their journey they saw coming towards +them a man on foot with alforjas at the neck and a javelin or spiked +staff in his hand, the very cut of a foot courier; who, as soon as he +came close to Don Quixote, increased his pace and half running came up to +him, and embracing his right thigh, for he could reach no higher, +exclaimed with evident pleasure, "O Senor Don Quixote of La Mancha, what +happiness it will be to the heart of my lord the duke when he knows your +worship is coming back to his castle, for he is still there with my lady +the duchess!" + +"I do not recognise you, friend," said Don Quixote, "nor do I know who +you are, unless you tell me." + +"I am Tosilos, my lord the duke's lacquey, Senor Don Quixote," replied +the courier; "he who refused to fight your worship about marrying the +daughter of Dona Rodriguez." + +"God bless me!" exclaimed Don Quixote; "is it possible that you are the +one whom mine enemies the enchanters changed into the lacquey you speak +of in order to rob me of the honour of that battle?" + +"Nonsense, good sir!" said the messenger; "there was no enchantment or +transformation at all; I entered the lists just as much lacquey Tosilos +as I came out of them lacquey Tosilos. I thought to marry without +fighting, for the girl had taken my fancy; but my scheme had a very +different result, for as soon as your worship had left the castle my lord +the duke had a hundred strokes of the stick given me for having acted +contrary to the orders he gave me before engaging in the combat; and the +end of the whole affair is that the girl has become a nun, and Dona +Rodriguez has gone back to Castile, and I am now on my way to Barcelona +with a packet of letters for the viceroy which my master is sending him. +If your worship would like a drop, sound though warm, I have a gourd here +full of the best, and some scraps of Tronchon cheese that will serve as a +provocative and wakener of your thirst if so be it is asleep." + +"I take the offer," said Sancho; "no more compliments about it; pour out, +good Tosilos, in spite of all the enchanters in the Indies." + +"Thou art indeed the greatest glutton in the world, Sancho," said Don +Quixote, "and the greatest booby on earth, not to be able to see that +this courier is enchanted and this Tosilos a sham one; stop with him and +take thy fill; I will go on slowly and wait for thee to come up with me." + +The lacquey laughed, unsheathed his gourd, unwalletted his scraps, and +taking out a small loaf of bread he and Sancho seated themselves on the +green grass, and in peace and good fellowship finished off the contents +of the alforjas down to the bottom, so resolutely that they licked the +wrapper of the letters, merely because it smelt of cheese. + +Said Tosilos to Sancho, "Beyond a doubt, Sancho my friend, this master of +thine ought to be a madman." + +"Ought!" said Sancho; "he owes no man anything; he pays for everything, +particularly when the coin is madness. I see it plain enough, and I tell +him so plain enough; but what's the use? especially now that it is all +over with him, for here he is beaten by the Knight of the White Moon." + +Tosilos begged him to explain what had happened him, but Sancho replied +that it would not be good manners to leave his master waiting for him; +and that some other day if they met there would be time enough for that; +and then getting up, after shaking his doublet and brushing the crumbs +out of his beard, he drove Dapple on before him, and bidding adieu to +Tosilos left him and rejoined his master, who was waiting for him under +the shade of a tree. + +Chapter LXVII. - +Of the resolution Don Quixote formed to turn shepherd and take to a life +in the fields while the year for which he had given his word was running +its course; with other events truly delectable and happy + +If a multitude of reflections used to harass Don Quixote before he had +been overthrown, a great many more harassed him since his fall. He was +under the shade of a tree, as has been said, and there, like flies on +honey, thoughts came crowding upon him and stinging him. Some of them +turned upon the disenchantment of Dulcinea, others upon the life he was +about to lead in his enforced retirement. Sancho came up and spoke in +high praise of the generous disposition of the lacquey Tosilos. + +"Is it possible, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that thou dost still think +that he yonder is a real lacquey? Apparently it has escaped thy memory +that thou hast seen Dulcinea turned and transformed into a peasant wench, +and the Knight of the Mirrors into the bachelor Carrasco; all the work of +the enchanters that persecute me. But tell me now, didst thou ask this +Tosilos, as thou callest him, what has become of Altisidora, did she weep +over my absence, or has she already consigned to oblivion the love +thoughts that used to afflict her when I was present?" + +"The thoughts that I had," said Sancho, "were not such as to leave time +for asking fool's questions. Body o' me, senor! is your worship in a +condition now to inquire into other people's thoughts, above all love +thoughts?" + +"Look ye, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "there is a great difference between +what is done out of love and what is done out of gratitude. A knight may +very possibly be proof against love; but it is impossible, strictly +speaking, for him to be ungrateful. Altisidora, to all appearance, loved +me truly; she gave me the three kerchiefs thou knowest of; she wept at my +departure, she cursed me, she abused me, casting shame to the winds she +bewailed herself in public; all signs that she adored me; for the wrath +of lovers always ends in curses. I had no hopes to give her, nor +treasures to offer her, for mine are given to Dulcinea, and the treasures +of knights-errant are like those of the fairies,' illusory and deceptive; +all I can give her is the place in my memory I keep for her, without +prejudice, however, to that which I hold devoted to Dulcinea, whom thou +art wronging by thy remissness in whipping thyself and scourging that +flesh--would that I saw it eaten by wolves--which would rather keep +itself for the worms than for the relief of that poor lady." + +"Senor," replied Sancho, "if the truth is to be told, I cannot persuade +myself that the whipping of my backside has anything to do with the +disenchantment of the enchanted; it is like saying, 'If your head aches +rub ointment on your knees;' at any rate I'll make bold to swear that in +all the histories dealing with knight-errantry that your worship has read +you have never come across anybody disenchanted by whipping; but whether +or no I'll whip myself when I have a fancy for it, and the opportunity +serves for scourging myself comfortably." + +"God grant it," said Don Quixote; "and heaven give thee grace to take it +to heart and own the obligation thou art under to help my lady, who is +thine also, inasmuch as thou art mine." + +As they pursued their journey talking in this way they came to the very +same spot where they had been trampled on by the bulls. Don Quixote +recognised it, and said he to Sancho, "This is the meadow where we came +upon those gay shepherdesses and gallant shepherds who were trying to +revive and imitate the pastoral Arcadia there, an idea as novel as it was +happy, in emulation whereof, if so be thou dost approve of it, Sancho, I +would have ourselves turn shepherds, at any rate for the time I have to +live in retirement. I will buy some ewes and everything else requisite +for the pastoral calling; and, I under the name of the shepherd Quixotize +and thou as the shepherd Panzino, we will roam the woods and groves and +meadows singing songs here, lamenting in elegies there, drinking of the +crystal waters of the springs or limpid brooks or flowing rivers. The +oaks will yield us their sweet fruit with bountiful hand, the trunks of +the hard cork trees a seat, the willows shade, the roses perfume, the +widespread meadows carpets tinted with a thousand dyes; the clear pure +air will give us breath, the moon and stars lighten the darkness of the +night for us, song shall be our delight, lamenting our joy, Apollo will +supply us with verses, and love with conceits whereby we shall make +ourselves famed for ever, not only in this but in ages to come." + +"Egad," said Sancho, "but that sort of life squares, nay corners, with my +notions; and what is more the bachelor Samson Carrasco and Master +Nicholas the barber won't have well seen it before they'll want to follow +it and turn shepherds along with us; and God grant it may not come into +the curate's head to join the sheepfold too, he's so jovial and fond of +enjoying himself." + +"Thou art in the right of it, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "and the +bachelor Samson Carrasco, if he enters the pastoral fraternity, as no +doubt he will, may call himself the shepherd Samsonino, or perhaps the +shepherd Carrascon; Nicholas the barber may call himself Niculoso, as old +Boscan formerly was called Nemoroso; as for the curate I don't know what +name we can fit to him unless it be something derived from his title, and +we call him the shepherd Curiambro. For the shepherdesses whose lovers we +shall be, we can pick names as we would pears; and as my lady's name does +just as well for a shepherdess's as for a princess's, I need not trouble +myself to look for one that will suit her better; to thine, Sancho, thou +canst give what name thou wilt." + +"I don't mean to give her any but Teresona," said Sancho, "which will go +well with her stoutness and with her own right name, as she is called +Teresa; and then when I sing her praises in my verses I'll show how +chaste my passion is, for I'm not going to look 'for better bread than +ever came from wheat' in other men's houses. It won't do for the curate +to have a shepherdess, for the sake of good example; and if the bachelor +chooses to have one, that is his look-out." + +"God bless me, Sancho my friend!" said Don Quixote, "what a life we shall +lead! What hautboys and Zamora bagpipes we shall hear, what tabors, +timbrels, and rebecks! And then if among all these different sorts of +music that of the albogues is heard, almost all the pastoral instruments +will be there." + +"What are albogues?" asked Sancho, "for I never in my life heard tell of +them or saw them." + +"Albogues," said Don Quixote, "are brass plates like candlesticks that +struck against one another on the hollow side make a noise which, if not +very pleasing or harmonious, is not disagreeable and accords very well +with the rude notes of the bagpipe and tabor. The word albogue is +Morisco, as are all those in our Spanish tongue that begin with al; for +example, almohaza, almorzar, alhombra, alguacil, alhucema, almacen, +alcancia, and others of the same sort, of which there are not many more; +our language has only three that are Morisco and end in i, which are +borcegui, zaquizami, and maravedi. Alheli and alfaqui are seen to be +Arabic, as well by the al at the beginning as by the they end with. I +mention this incidentally, the chance allusion to albogues having +reminded me of it; and it will be of great assistance to us in the +perfect practice of this calling that I am something of a poet, as thou +knowest, and that besides the bachelor Samson Carrasco is an accomplished +one. Of the curate I say nothing; but I will wager he has some spice of +the poet in him, and no doubt Master Nicholas too, for all barbers, or +most of them, are guitar players and stringers of verses. I will bewail +my separation; thou shalt glorify thyself as a constant lover; the +shepherd Carrascon will figure as a rejected one, and the curate +Curiambro as whatever may please him best; and so all will go as gaily as +heart could wish." + +To this Sancho made answer, "I am so unlucky, senor, that I'm afraid the +day will never come when I'll see myself at such a calling. O what neat +spoons I'll make when I'm a shepherd! What messes, creams, garlands, +pastoral odds and ends! And if they don't get me a name for wisdom, +they'll not fail to get me one for ingenuity. My daughter Sanchica will +bring us our dinner to the pasture. But stay-she's good-looking, and +shepherds there are with more mischief than simplicity in them; I would +not have her 'come for wool and go back shorn;' love-making and lawless +desires are just as common in the fields as in the cities, and in +shepherds' shanties as in royal palaces; 'do away with the cause, you do +away with the sin;' 'if eyes don't see hearts don't break' and 'better a +clear escape than good men's prayers.'" + +"A truce to thy proverbs, Sancho," exclaimed Don Quixote; "any one of +those thou hast uttered would suffice to explain thy meaning; many a time +have I recommended thee not to be so lavish with proverbs and to exercise +some moderation in delivering them; but it seems to me it is only +'preaching in the desert;' 'my mother beats me and I go on with my +tricks." + +"It seems to me," said Sancho, "that your worship is like the common +saying, 'Said the frying-pan to the kettle, Get away, blackbreech.' You +chide me for uttering proverbs, and you string them in couples yourself." + +"Observe, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "I bring in proverbs to the +purpose, and when I quote them they fit like a ring to the finger; thou +bringest them in by the head and shoulders, in such a way that thou dost +drag them in, rather than introduce them; if I am not mistaken, I have +told thee already that proverbs are short maxims drawn from the +experience and observation of our wise men of old; but the proverb that +is not to the purpose is a piece of nonsense and not a maxim. But enough +of this; as nightfall is drawing on let us retire some little distance +from the high road to pass the night; what is in store for us to-morrow +God knoweth." + +They turned aside, and supped late and poorly, very much against Sancho's +will, who turned over in his mind the hardships attendant upon +knight-errantry in woods and forests, even though at times plenty +presented itself in castles and houses, as at Don Diego de Miranda's, at +the wedding of Camacho the Rich, and at Don Antonio Moreno's; he +reflected, however, that it could not be always day, nor always night; +and so that night he passed in sleeping, and his master in waking. + +Chapter LXVIII. - +Of the bristly adventure that befell Don Quixote + +The night was somewhat dark, for though there was a moon in the sky it +was not in a quarter where she could be seen; for sometimes the lady +Diana goes on a stroll to the antipodes, and leaves the mountains all +black and the valleys in darkness. Don Quixote obeyed nature so far as to +sleep his first sleep, but did not give way to the second, very different +from Sancho, who never had any second, because with him sleep lasted from +night till morning, wherein he showed what a sound constitution and few +cares he had. Don Quixote's cares kept him restless, so much so that he +awoke Sancho and said to him, "I am amazed, Sancho, at the unconcern of +thy temperament. I believe thou art made of marble or hard brass, +incapable of any emotion or feeling whatever. I lie awake while thou +sleepest, I weep while thou singest, I am faint with fasting while thou +art sluggish and torpid from pure repletion. It is the duty of good +servants to share the sufferings and feel the sorrows of their masters, +if it be only for the sake of appearances. See the calmness of the night, +the solitude of the spot, inviting us to break our slumbers by a vigil of +some sort. Rise as thou livest, and retire a little distance, and with a +good heart and cheerful courage give thyself three or four hundred lashes +on account of Dulcinea's disenchantment score; and this I entreat of +thee, making it a request, for I have no desire to come to grips with +thee a second time, as I know thou hast a heavy hand. As soon as thou +hast laid them on we will pass the rest of the night, I singing my +separation, thou thy constancy, making a beginning at once with the +pastoral life we are to follow at our village." + +"Senor," replied Sancho, "I'm no monk to get up out of the middle of my +sleep and scourge myself, nor does it seem to me that one can pass from +one extreme of the pain of whipping to the other of music. Will your +worship let me sleep, and not worry me about whipping myself? or you'll +make me swear never to touch a hair of my doublet, not to say my flesh." + +"O hard heart!" said Don Quixote, "O pitiless squire! O bread +ill-bestowed and favours ill-acknowledged, both those I have done thee +and those I mean to do thee! Through me hast thou seen thyself a +governor, and through me thou seest thyself in immediate expectation of +being a count, or obtaining some other equivalent title, for I-post +tenebras spero lucem." + +"I don't know what that is," said Sancho; "all I know is that so long as +I am asleep I have neither fear nor hope, trouble nor glory; and good +luck betide him that invented sleep, the cloak that covers over all a +man's thoughts, the food that removes hunger, the drink that drives away +thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cold that tempers the heat, +and, to wind up with, the universal coin wherewith everything is bought, +the weight and balance that makes the shepherd equal with the king and +the fool with the wise man. Sleep, I have heard say, has only one fault, +that it is like death; for between a sleeping man and a dead man there is +very little difference." + +"Never have I heard thee speak so elegantly as now, Sancho," said Don +Quixote; "and here I begin to see the truth of the proverb thou dost +sometimes quote, 'Not with whom thou art bred, but with whom thou art +fed.'" + +"Ha, by my life, master mine," said Sancho, "it's not I that am stringing +proverbs now, for they drop in pairs from your worship's mouth faster +than from mine; only there is this difference between mine and yours, +that yours are well-timed and mine are untimely; but anyhow, they are all +proverbs." + +At this point they became aware of a harsh indistinct noise that seemed +to spread through all the valleys around. Don Quixote stood up and laid +his hand upon his sword, and Sancho ensconced himself under Dapple and +put the bundle of armour on one side of him and the ass's pack-saddle on +the other, in fear and trembling as great as Don Quixote's perturbation. +Each instant the noise increased and came nearer to the two terrified +men, or at least to one, for as to the other, his courage is known to +all. The fact of the matter was that some men were taking above six +hundred pigs to sell at a fair, and were on their way with them at that +hour, and so great was the noise they made and their grunting and +blowing, that they deafened the ears of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and +they could not make out what it was. The wide-spread grunting drove came +on in a surging mass, and without showing any respect for Don Quixote's +dignity or Sancho's, passed right over the pair of them, demolishing +Sancho's entrenchments, and not only upsetting Don Quixote but sweeping +Rocinante off his feet into the bargain; and what with the trampling and +the grunting, and the pace at which the unclean beasts went, pack-saddle, +armour, Dapple and Rocinante were left scattered on the ground and Sancho +and Don Quixote at their wits' end. + +Sancho got up as well as he could and begged his master to give him his +sword, saying he wanted to kill half a dozen of those dirty unmannerly +pigs, for he had by this time found out that that was what they were. + +"Let them be, my friend," said Don Quixote; "this insult is the penalty +of my sin; and it is the righteous chastisement of heaven that jackals +should devour a vanquished knight, and wasps sting him and pigs trample +him under foot." + +"I suppose it is the chastisement of heaven, too," said Sancho, "that +flies should prick the squires of vanquished knights, and lice eat them, +and hunger assail them. If we squires were the sons of the knights we +serve, or their very near relations, it would be no wonder if the penalty +of their misdeeds overtook us, even to the fourth generation. But what +have the Panzas to do with the Quixotes? Well, well, let's lie down again +and sleep out what little of the night there's left, and God will send us +dawn and we shall be all right." + +"Sleep thou, Sancho," returned Don Quixote, "for thou wast born to sleep +as I was born to watch; and during the time it now wants of dawn I will +give a loose rein to my thoughts, and seek a vent for them in a little +madrigal which, unknown to thee, I composed in my head last night." + +"I should think," said Sancho, "that the thoughts that allow one to make +verses cannot be of great consequence; let your worship string verses as +much as you like and I'll sleep as much as I can;" and forthwith, taking +the space of ground he required, he muffled himself up and fell into a +sound sleep, undisturbed by bond, debt, or trouble of any sort. Don +Quixote, propped up against the trunk of a beech or a cork tree--for Cide +Hamete does not specify what kind of tree it was--sang in this strain to +the accompaniment of his own sighs: + +poem{ + + When in my mind +I muse, O Love, upon thy cruelty, + To death I flee, +In hope therein the end of all to find. + + But drawing near +That welcome haven in my sea of woe, + Such joy I know, +That life revives, and still I linger here. + + Thus life doth slay, +And death again to life restoreth me; + Strange destiny, +That deals with life and death as with a play! + +}poem + +He accompanied each verse with many sighs and not a few tears, just like +one whose heart was pierced with grief at his defeat and his separation +from Dulcinea. + +And now daylight came, and the sun smote Sancho on the eyes with his +beams. He awoke, roused himself up, shook himself and stretched his lazy +limbs, and seeing the havoc the pigs had made with his stores he cursed +the drove, and more besides. Then the pair resumed their journey, and as +evening closed in they saw coming towards them some ten men on horseback +and four or five on foot. Don Quixote's heart beat quick and Sancho's +quailed with fear, for the persons approaching them carried lances and +bucklers, and were in very warlike guise. Don Quixote turned to Sancho +and said, "If I could make use of my weapons, and my promise had not tied +my hands, I would count this host that comes against us but cakes and +fancy bread; but perhaps it may prove something different from what we +apprehend." The men on horseback now came up, and raising their lances +surrounded Don Quixote in silence, and pointed them at his back and +breast, menacing him with death. One of those on foot, putting his finger +to his lips as a sign to him to be silent, seized Rocinante's bridle and +drew him out of the road, and the others driving Sancho and Dapple before +them, and all maintaining a strange silence, followed in the steps of the +one who led Don Quixote. The latter two or three times attempted to ask +where they were taking him to and what they wanted, but the instant he +began to open his lips they threatened to close them with the points of +their lances; and Sancho fared the same way, for the moment he seemed +about to speak one of those on foot punched him with a goad, and Dapple +likewise, as if he too wanted to talk. Night set in, they quickened their +pace, and the fears of the two prisoners grew greater, especially as they +heard themselves assailed with--"Get on, ye Troglodytes;" "Silence, ye +barbarians;" "March, ye cannibals;" "No murmuring, ye Scythians;" "Don't +open your eyes, ye murderous Polyphemes, ye blood-thirsty lions," and +suchlike names with which their captors harassed the ears of the wretched +master and man. Sancho went along saying to himself, "We, tortolites, +barbers, animals! I don't like those names at all; 'it's in a bad wind +our corn is being winnowed;' 'misfortune comes upon us all at once like +sticks on a dog,' and God grant it may be no worse than them that this +unlucky adventure has in store for us." + +Don Quixote rode completely dazed, unable with the aid of all his wits to +make out what could be the meaning of these abusive names they called +them, and the only conclusion he could arrive at was that there was no +good to be hoped for and much evil to be feared. And now, about an hour +after midnight, they reached a castle which Don Quixote saw at once was +the duke's, where they had been but a short time before. "God bless me!" +said he, as he recognised the mansion, "what does this mean? It is all +courtesy and politeness in this house; but with the vanquished good turns +into evil, and evil into worse." + +They entered the chief court of the castle and found it prepared and +fitted up in a style that added to their amazement and doubled their +fears, as will be seen in the following chapter. + +Chapter LXIX. - +Of the strangest and most extraordinary adventure that befell Don Quixote +in the whole course of this great history + +The horsemen dismounted, and, together with the men on foot, without a +moment's delay taking up Sancho and Don Quixote bodily, they carried them +into the court, all round which near a hundred torches fixed in sockets +were burning, besides above five hundred lamps in the corridors, so that +in spite of the night, which was somewhat dark, the want of daylight +could not be perceived. In the middle of the court was a catafalque, +raised about two yards above the ground and covered completely by an +immense canopy of black velvet, and on the steps all round it white wax +tapers burned in more than a hundred silver candlesticks. Upon the +catafalque was seen the dead body of a damsel so lovely that by her +beauty she made death itself look beautiful. She lay with her head +resting upon a cushion of brocade and crowned with a garland of +sweet-smelling flowers of divers sorts, her hands crossed upon her bosom, +and between them a branch of yellow palm of victory. On one side of the +court was erected a stage, where upon two chairs were seated two persons +who from having crowns on their heads and sceptres in their hands +appeared to be kings of some sort, whether real or mock ones. By the side +of this stage, which was reached by steps, were two other chairs on which +the men carrying the prisoners seated Don Quixote and Sancho, all in +silence, and by signs giving them to understand that they too were to be +silent; which, however, they would have been without any signs, for their +amazement at all they saw held them tongue-tied. And now two persons of +distinction, who were at once recognised by Don Quixote as his hosts the +duke and duchess, ascended the stage attended by a numerous suite, and +seated themselves on two gorgeous chairs close to the two kings, as they +seemed to be. Who would not have been amazed at this? Nor was this all, +for Don Quixote had perceived that the dead body on the catafalque was +that of the fair Altisidora. As the duke and duchess mounted the stage +Don Quixote and Sancho rose and made them a profound obeisance, which +they returned by bowing their heads slightly. At this moment an official +crossed over, and approaching Sancho threw over him a robe of black +buckram painted all over with flames of fire, and taking off his cap put +upon his head a mitre such as those undergoing the sentence of the Holy +Office wear; and whispered in his ear that he must not open his lips, or +they would put a gag upon him, or take his life. Sancho surveyed himself +from head to foot and saw himself all ablaze with flames; but as they did +not burn him, he did not care two farthings for them. He took off the +mitre and seeing painted with devils he put it on again, saying to +himself, "Well, so far those don't burn me nor do these carry me off." +Don Quixote surveyed him too, and though fear had got the better of his +faculties, he could not help smiling to see the figure Sancho presented. +And now from underneath the catafalque, so it seemed, there rose a low +sweet sound of flutes, which, coming unbroken by human voice (for there +silence itself kept silence), had a soft and languishing effect. Then, +beside the pillow of what seemed to be the dead body, suddenly appeared a +fair youth in a Roman habit, who, to the accompaniment of a harp which he +himself played, sang in a sweet and clear voice these two stanzas: + +poem{ + +While fair Altisidora, who the sport + Of cold Don Quixote's cruelty hath been, +Returns to life, and in this magic court + The dames in sables come to grace the scene, +And while her matrons all in seemly sort + My lady robes in baize and bombazine, +Her beauty and her sorrows will I sing +With defter quill than touched the Thracian string. + +But not in life alone, methinks, to me + Belongs the office; Lady, when my tongue +Is cold in death, believe me, unto thee + My voice shall raise its tributary song. +My soul, from this strait prison-house set free, + As o'er the Stygian lake it floats along, +Thy praises singing still shall hold its way, +And make the waters of oblivion stay. + +}poem + +At this point one of the two that looked like kings exclaimed, "Enough, +enough, divine singer! It would be an endless task to put before us now +the death and the charms of the peerless Altisidora, not dead as the +ignorant world imagines, but living in the voice of fame and in the +penance which Sancho Panza, here present, has to undergo to restore her +to the long-lost light. Do thou, therefore, O Rhadamanthus, who sittest +in judgment with me in the murky caverns of Dis, as thou knowest all that +the inscrutable fates have decreed touching the resuscitation of this +damsel, announce and declare it at once, that the happiness we look +forward to from her restoration be no longer deferred." + +No sooner had Minos the fellow judge of Rhadamanthus said this, than +Rhadamanthus rising up said: + +"Ho, officials of this house, high and low, great and small, make haste +hither one and all, and print on Sancho's face four-and-twenty smacks, +and give him twelve pinches and six pin thrusts in the back and arms; for +upon this ceremony depends the restoration of Altisidora." + +On hearing this Sancho broke silence and cried out, "By all that's good, +I'll as soon let my face be smacked or handled as turn Moor. Body o' me! +What has handling my face got to do with the resurrection of this damsel? +'The old woman took kindly to the blits; they enchant Dulcinea, and whip +me in order to disenchant her; Altisidora dies of ailments God was +pleased to send her, and to bring her to life again they must give me +four-and-twenty smacks, and prick holes in my body with pins, and raise +weals on my arms with pinches! Try those jokes on a brother-in-law; 'I'm +an old dog, and "tus, tus" is no use with me.'" + +"Thou shalt die," said Rhadamanthus in a loud voice; "relent, thou tiger; +humble thyself, proud Nimrod; suffer and be silent, for no +impossibilities are asked of thee; it is not for thee to inquire into the +difficulties in this matter; smacked thou must be, pricked thou shalt see +thyself, and with pinches thou must be made to howl. Ho, I say, +officials, obey my orders; or by the word of an honest man, ye shall see +what ye were born for." + +At this some six duennas, advancing across the court, made their +appearance in procession, one after the other, four of them with +spectacles, and all with their right hands uplifted, showing four fingers +of wrist to make their hands look longer, as is the fashion now-a-days. +No sooner had Sancho caught sight of them than, bellowing like a bull, he +exclaimed, "I might let myself be handled by all the world; but allow +duennas to touch me--not a bit of it! Scratch my face, as my master was +served in this very castle; run me through the body with burnished +daggers; pinch my arms with red-hot pincers; I'll bear all in patience to +serve these gentlefolk; but I won't let duennas touch me, though the +devil should carry me off!" + +Here Don Quixote, too, broke silence, saying to Sancho, "Have patience, +my son, and gratify these noble persons, and give all thanks to heaven +that it has infused such virtue into thy person, that by its sufferings +thou canst disenchant the enchanted and restore to life the dead." + +The duennas were now close to Sancho, and he, having become more +tractable and reasonable, settling himself well in his chair presented +his face and beard to the first, who delivered him a smack very stoutly +laid on, and then made him a low curtsey. + +"Less politeness and less paint, senora duenna," said Sancho; "by God +your hands smell of vinegar-wash." + +In fine, all the duennas smacked him and several others of the household +pinched him; but what he could not stand was being pricked by the pins; +and so, apparently out of patience, he started up out of his chair, and +seizing a lighted torch that stood near him fell upon the duennas and the +whole set of his tormentors, exclaiming, "Begone, ye ministers of hell; +I'm not made of brass not to feel such out-of-the-way tortures." + +At this instant Altisidora, who probably was tired of having been so long +lying on her back, turned on her side; seeing which the bystanders cried +out almost with one voice, "Altisidora is alive! Altisidora lives!" + +Rhadamanthus bade Sancho put away his wrath, as the object they had in +view was now attained. When Don Quixote saw Altisidora move, he went on +his knees to Sancho saying to him, "Now is the time, son of my bowels, +not to call thee my squire, for thee to give thyself some of those lashes +thou art bound to lay on for the disenchantment of Dulcinea. Now, I say, +is the time when the virtue that is in thee is ripe, and endowed with +efficacy to work the good that is looked for from thee." + +To which Sancho made answer, "That's trick upon trick, I think, and not +honey upon pancakes; a nice thing it would be for a whipping to come now, +on the top of pinches, smacks, and pin-proddings! You had better take a +big stone and tie it round my neck, and pitch me into a well; I should +not mind it much, if I'm to be always made the cow of the wedding for the +cure of other people's ailments. Leave me alone; or else by God I'll +fling the whole thing to the dogs, let come what may." + +Altisidora had by this time sat up on the catafalque, and as she did so +the clarions sounded, accompanied by the flutes, and the voices of all +present exclaiming, "Long life to Altisidora! long life to Altisidora!" +The duke and duchess and the kings Minos and Rhadamanthus stood up, and +all, together with Don Quixote and Sancho, advanced to receive her and +take her down from the catafalque; and she, making as though she were +recovering from a swoon, bowed her head to the duke and duchess and to +the kings, and looking sideways at Don Quixote, said to him, "God forgive +thee, insensible knight, for through thy cruelty I have been, to me it +seems, more than a thousand years in the other world; and to thee, the +most compassionate upon earth, I render thanks for the life I am now in +possession of. From this day forth, friend Sancho, count as thine six +smocks of mine which I bestow upon thee, to make as many shirts for +thyself, and if they are not all quite whole, at any rate they are all +clean." + +Sancho kissed her hands in gratitude, kneeling, and with the mitre in his +hand. The duke bade them take it from him, and give him back his cap and +doublet and remove the flaming robe. Sancho begged the duke to let them +leave him the robe and mitre; as he wanted to take them home for a token +and memento of that unexampled adventure. The duchess said they must +leave them with him; for he knew already what a great friend of his she +was. The duke then gave orders that the court should be cleared, and that +all should retire to their chambers, and that Don Quixote and Sancho +should be conducted to their old quarters. + +Chapter LXX. - +Which follows sixty-nine and deals with matters indispensable for the +clear comprehension of this history + +Sancho slept that night in a cot in the same chamber with Don Quixote, a +thing he would have gladly excused if he could for he knew very well that +with questions and answers his master would not let him sleep, and he was +in no humour for talking much, as he still felt the pain of his late +martyrdom, which interfered with his freedom of speech; and it would have +been more to his taste to sleep in a hovel alone, than in that luxurious +chamber in company. And so well founded did his apprehension prove, and +so correct was his anticipation, that scarcely had his master got into +bed when he said, "What dost thou think of tonight's adventure, Sancho? +Great and mighty is the power of cold-hearted scorn, for thou with thine +own eyes hast seen Altisidora slain, not by arrows, nor by the sword, nor +by any warlike weapon, nor by deadly poisons, but by the thought of the +sternness and scorn with which I have always treated her." + +"She might have died and welcome," said Sancho, "when she pleased and how +she pleased; and she might have left me alone, for I never made her fall +in love or scorned her. I don't know nor can I imagine how the recovery +of Altisidora, a damsel more fanciful than wise, can have, as I have said +before, anything to do with the sufferings of Sancho Panza. Now I begin +to see plainly and clearly that there are enchanters and enchanted people +in the world; and may God deliver me from them, since I can't deliver +myself; and so I beg of your worship to let me sleep and not ask me any +more questions, unless you want me to throw myself out of the window." + +"Sleep, Sancho my friend," said Don Quixote, "if the pinprodding and +pinches thou hast received and the smacks administered to thee will let +thee." + +"No pain came up to the insult of the smacks," said Sancho, "for the +simple reason that it was duennas, confound them, that gave them to me; +but once more I entreat your worship to let me sleep, for sleep is relief +from misery to those who are miserable when awake." + +"Be it so, and God be with thee," said Don Quixote. + +They fell asleep, both of them, and Cide Hamete, the author of this great +history, took this opportunity to record and relate what it was that +induced the duke and duchess to get up the elaborate plot that has been +described. The bachelor Samson Carrasco, he says, not forgetting how he +as the Knight of the Mirrors had been vanquished and overthrown by Don +Quixote, which defeat and overthrow upset all his plans, resolved to try +his hand again, hoping for better luck than he had before; and so, having +learned where Don Quixote was from the page who brought the letter and +present to Sancho's wife, Teresa Panza, he got himself new armour and +another horse, and put a white moon upon his shield, and to carry his +arms he had a mule led by a peasant, not by Tom Cecial his former squire +for fear he should be recognised by Sancho or Don Quixote. He came to the +duke's castle, and the duke informed him of the road and route Don +Quixote had taken with the intention of being present at the jousts at +Saragossa. He told him, too, of the jokes he had practised upon him, and +of the device for the disenchantment of Dulcinea at the expense of +Sancho's backside; and finally he gave him an account of the trick Sancho +had played upon his master, making him believe that Dulcinea was +enchanted and turned into a country wench; and of how the duchess, his +wife, had persuaded Sancho that it was he himself who was deceived, +inasmuch as Dulcinea was really enchanted; at which the bachelor laughed +not a little, and marvelled as well at the sharpness and simplicity of +Sancho as at the length to which Don Quixote's madness went. The duke +begged of him if he found him (whether he overcame him or not) to return +that way and let him know the result. This the bachelor did; he set out +in quest of Don Quixote, and not finding him at Saragossa, he went on, +and how he fared has been already told. He returned to the duke's castle +and told him all, what the conditions of the combat were, and how Don +Quixote was now, like a loyal knight-errant, returning to keep his +promise of retiring to his village for a year, by which time, said the +bachelor, he might perhaps be cured of his madness; for that was the +object that had led him to adopt these disguises, as it was a sad thing +for a gentleman of such good parts as Don Quixote to be a madman. And so +he took his leave of the duke, and went home to his village to wait there +for Don Quixote, who was coming after him. Thereupon the duke seized the +opportunity of practising this mystification upon him; so much did he +enjoy everything connected with Sancho and Don Quixote. He had the roads +about the castle far and near, everywhere he thought Don Quixote was +likely to pass on his return, occupied by large numbers of his servants +on foot and on horseback, who were to bring him to the castle, by fair +means or foul, if they met him. They did meet him, and sent word to the +duke, who, having already settled what was to be done, as soon as he +heard of his arrival, ordered the torches and lamps in the court to be +lit and Altisidora to be placed on the catafalque with all the pomp and +ceremony that has been described, the whole affair being so well arranged +and acted that it differed but little from reality. And Cide Hamete says, +moreover, that for his part he considers the concocters of the joke as +crazy as the victims of it, and that the duke and duchess were not two +fingers' breadth removed from being something like fools themselves when +they took such pains to make game of a pair of fools. + +As for the latter, one was sleeping soundly and the other lying awake +occupied with his desultory thoughts, when daylight came to them bringing +with it the desire to rise; for the lazy down was never a delight to Don +Quixote, victor or vanquished. Altisidora, come back from death to life +as Don Quixote fancied, following up the freak of her lord and lady, +entered the chamber, crowned with the garland she had worn on the +catafalque and in a robe of white taffeta embroidered with gold flowers, +her hair flowing loose over her shoulders, and leaning upon a staff of +fine black ebony. Don Quixote, disconcerted and in confusion at her +appearance, huddled himself up and well-nigh covered himself altogether +with the sheets and counterpane of the bed, tongue-tied, and unable to +offer her any civility. Altisidora seated herself on a chair at the head +of the bed, and, after a deep sigh, said to him in a feeble, soft voice, +"When women of rank and modest maidens trample honour under foot, and +give a loose to the tongue that breaks through every impediment, +publishing abroad the inmost secrets of their hearts, they are reduced to +sore extremities. Such a one am I, Senor Don Quixote of La Mancha, +crushed, conquered, love-smitten, but yet patient under suffering and +virtuous, and so much so that my heart broke with grief and I lost my +life. For the last two days I have been dead, slain by the thought of the +cruelty with which thou hast treated me, obdurate knight, + +O harder thou than marble to my plaint; + +or at least believed to be dead by all who saw me; and had it not been +that Love, taking pity on me, let my recovery rest upon the sufferings of +this good squire, there I should have remained in the other world." + +"Love might very well have let it rest upon the sufferings of my ass, and +I should have been obliged to him," said Sancho. "But tell me, +senora--and may heaven send you a tenderer lover than my master-what did +you see in the other world? What goes on in hell? For of course that's +where one who dies in despair is bound for." + +"To tell you the truth," said Altisidora, "I cannot have died outright, +for I did not go into hell; had I gone in, it is very certain I should +never have come out again, do what I might. The truth is, I came to the +gate, where some dozen or so of devils were playing tennis, all in +breeches and doublets, with falling collars trimmed with Flemish +bonelace, and ruffles of the same that served them for wristbands, with +four fingers' breadth of the arms exposed to make their hands look +longer; in their hands they held rackets of fire; but what amazed me +still more was that books, apparently full of wind and rubbish, served +them for tennis balls, a strange and marvellous thing; this, however, did +not astonish me so much as to observe that, although with players it is +usual for the winners to be glad and the losers sorry, there in that game +all were growling, all were snarling, and all were cursing one another." +"That's no wonder," said Sancho; "for devils, whether playing or not, can +never be content, win or lose." + +"Very likely," said Altisidora; "but there is another thing that +surprises me too, I mean surprised me then, and that was that no ball +outlasted the first throw or was of any use a second time; and it was +wonderful the constant succession there was of books, new and old. To one +of them, a brand-new, well-bound one, they gave such a stroke that they +knocked the guts out of it and scattered the leaves about. 'Look what +book that is,' said one devil to another, and the other replied, 'It is +the "Second Part of the History of Don Quixote of La Mancha," not by Cide +Hamete, the original author, but by an Aragonese who by his own account +is of Tordesillas.' 'Out of this with it,' said the first, 'and into the +depths of hell with it out of my sight.' 'Is it so bad?' said the other. +'So bad is it,' said the first, 'that if I had set myself deliberately to +make a worse, I could not have done it.' They then went on with their +game, knocking other books about; and I, having heard them mention the +name of Don Quixote whom I love and adore so, took care to retain this +vision in my memory." + +"A vision it must have been, no doubt," said Don Quixote, "for there is +no other I in the world; this history has been going about here for some +time from hand to hand, but it does not stay long in any, for everybody +gives it a taste of his foot. I am not disturbed by hearing that I am +wandering in a fantastic shape in the darkness of the pit or in the +daylight above, for I am not the one that history treats of. If it should +be good, faithful, and true, it will have ages of life; but if it should +be bad, from its birth to its burial will not be a very long journey." + +Altisidora was about to proceed with her complaint against Don Quixote, +when he said to her, "I have several times told you, senora that it +grieves me you should have set your affections upon me, as from mine they +can only receive gratitude, but no return. I was born to belong to +Dulcinea del Toboso, and the fates, if there are any, dedicated me to +her; and to suppose that any other beauty can take the place she occupies +in my heart is to suppose an impossibility. This frank declaration should +suffice to make you retire within the bounds of your modesty, for no one +can bind himself to do impossibilities." + +Hearing this, Altisidora, with a show of anger and agitation, exclaimed, +"God's life! Don Stockfish, soul of a mortar, stone of a date, more +obstinate and obdurate than a clown asked a favour when he has his mind +made up, if I fall upon you I'll tear your eyes out! Do you fancy, Don +Vanquished, Don Cudgelled, that I died for your sake? All that you have +seen to-night has been make-believe; I'm not the woman to let the black +of my nail suffer for such a camel, much less die!" + +"That I can well believe," said Sancho; "for all that about lovers pining +to death is absurd; they may talk of it, but as for doing it-Judas may +believe that!" + +While they were talking, the musician, singer, and poet, who had sung the +two stanzas given above came in, and making a profound obeisance to Don +Quixote said, "Will your worship, sir knight, reckon and retain me in the +number of your most faithful servants, for I have long been a great +admirer of yours, as well because of your fame as because of your +achievements?" "Will your worship tell me who you are," replied Don +Quixote, "so that my courtesy may be answerable to your deserts?" The +young man replied that he was the musician and songster of the night +before. "Of a truth," said Don Quixote, "your worship has a most +excellent voice; but what you sang did not seem to me very much to the +purpose; for what have Garcilasso's stanzas to do with the death of this +lady?" + +"Don't be surprised at that," returned the musician; "for with the callow +poets of our day the way is for every one to write as he pleases and +pilfer where he chooses, whether it be germane to the matter or not, and +now-a-days there is no piece of silliness they can sing or write that is +not set down to poetic licence." + +Don Quixote was about to reply, but was prevented by the duke and +duchess, who came in to see him, and with them there followed a long and +delightful conversation, in the course of which Sancho said so many droll +and saucy things that he left the duke and duchess wondering not only at +his simplicity but at his sharpness. Don Quixote begged their permission +to take his departure that same day, inasmuch as for a vanquished knight +like himself it was fitter he should live in a pig-sty than in a royal +palace. They gave it very readily, and the duchess asked him if +Altisidora was in his good graces. + +He replied, "Senora, let me tell your ladyship that this damsel's ailment +comes entirely of idleness, and the cure for it is honest and constant +employment. She herself has told me that lace is worn in hell; and as she +must know how to make it, let it never be out of her hands; for when she +is occupied in shifting the bobbins to and fro, the image or images of +what she loves will not shift to and fro in her thoughts; this is the +truth, this is my opinion, and this is my advice." + +"And mine," added Sancho; "for I never in all my life saw a lace-maker +that died for love; when damsels are at work their minds are more set on +finishing their tasks than on thinking of their loves. I speak from my +own experience; for when I'm digging I never think of my old woman; I +mean my Teresa Panza, whom I love better than my own eyelids." "You say +well, Sancho," said the duchess, "and I will take care that my Altisidora +employs herself henceforward in needlework of some sort; for she is +extremely expert at it." "There is no occasion to have recourse to that +remedy, senora," said Altisidora; "for the mere thought of the cruelty +with which this vagabond villain has treated me will suffice to blot him +out of my memory without any other device; with your highness's leave I +will retire, not to have before my eyes, I won't say his rueful +countenance, but his abominable, ugly looks." "That reminds me of the +common saying, that 'he that rails is ready to forgive,'" said the duke. + +Altisidora then, pretending to wipe away her tears with a handkerchief, +made an obeisance to her master and mistress and quitted the room. + +"Ill luck betide thee, poor damsel," said Sancho, "ill luck betide thee! +Thou hast fallen in with a soul as dry as a rush and a heart as hard as +oak; had it been me, i'faith 'another cock would have crowed to thee.'" + +So the conversation came to an end, and Don Quixote dressed himself and +dined with the duke and duchess, and set out the same evening. + +Chapter LXXI. - +Of what passed between Don Quixote and his Squire Sancho on the way to +their village + +The vanquished and afflicted Don Quixote went along very downcast in one +respect and very happy in another. His sadness arose from his defeat, and +his satisfaction from the thought of the virtue that lay in Sancho, as +had been proved by the resurrection of Altisidora; though it was with +difficulty he could persuade himself that the love-smitten damsel had +been really dead. Sancho went along anything but cheerful, for it grieved +him that Altisidora had not kept her promise of giving him the smocks; +and turning this over in his mind he said to his master, "Surely, senor, +I'm the most unlucky doctor in the world; there's many a physician that, +after killing the sick man he had to cure, requires to be paid for his +work, though it is only signing a bit of a list of medicines, that the +apothecary and not he makes up, and, there, his labour is over; but with +me though to cure somebody else costs me drops of blood, smacks, pinches, +pinproddings, and whippings, nobody gives me a farthing. Well, I swear by +all that's good if they put another patient into my hands, they'll have +to grease them for me before I cure him; for, as they say, 'it's by his +singing the abbot gets his dinner,' and I'm not going to believe that +heaven has bestowed upon me the virtue I have, that I should be dealing +it out to others all for nothing." + +"Thou art right, Sancho my friend," said Don Quixote, "and Altisidora has +behaved very badly in not giving thee the smocks she promised; and +although that virtue of thine is gratis data--as it has cost thee no +study whatever, any more than such study as thy personal sufferings may +be--I can say for myself that if thou wouldst have payment for the lashes +on account of the disenchant of Dulcinea, I would have given it to thee +freely ere this. I am not sure, however, whether payment will comport +with the cure, and I would not have the reward interfere with the +medicine. I think there will be nothing lost by trying it; consider how +much thou wouldst have, Sancho, and whip thyself at once, and pay thyself +down with thine own hand, as thou hast money of mine." + +At this proposal Sancho opened his eyes and his ears a palm's breadth +wide, and in his heart very readily acquiesced in whipping himself, and +said he to his master, "Very well then, senor, I'll hold myself in +readiness to gratify your worship's wishes if I'm to profit by it; for +the love of my wife and children forces me to seem grasping. Let your +worship say how much you will pay me for each lash I give myself." + +"If Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "I were to requite thee as the +importance and nature of the cure deserves, the treasures of Venice, the +mines of Potosi, would be insufficient to pay thee. See what thou hast of +mine, and put a price on each lash." + +"Of them," said Sancho, "there are three thousand three hundred and odd; +of these I have given myself five, the rest remain; let the five go for +the odd ones, and let us take the three thousand three hundred, which at +a quarter real apiece (for I will not take less though the whole world +should bid me) make three thousand three hundred quarter reals; the three +thousand are one thousand five hundred half reals, which make seven +hundred and fifty reals; and the three hundred make a hundred and fifty +half reals, which come to seventy-five reals, which added to the seven +hundred and fifty make eight hundred and twenty-five reals in all. These +I will stop out of what I have belonging to your worship, and I'll return +home rich and content, though well whipped, for 'there's no taking +trout'--but I say no more." + +"O blessed Sancho! O dear Sancho!" said Don Quixote; "how we shall be +bound to serve thee, Dulcinea and I, all the days of our lives that +heaven may grant us! If she returns to her lost shape (and it cannot be +but that she will) her misfortune will have been good fortune, and my +defeat a most happy triumph. But look here, Sancho; when wilt thou begin +the scourging? For if thou wilt make short work of it, I will give thee a +hundred reals over and above." + +"When?" said Sancho; "this night without fail. Let your worship order it +so that we pass it out of doors and in the open air, and I'll scarify +myself." + +Night, longed for by Don Quixote with the greatest anxiety in the world, +came at last, though it seemed to him that the wheels of Apollo's car had +broken down, and that the day was drawing itself out longer than usual, +just as is the case with lovers, who never make the reckoning of their +desires agree with time. They made their way at length in among some +pleasant trees that stood a little distance from the road, and there +vacating Rocinante's saddle and Dapple's pack-saddle, they stretched +themselves on the green grass and made their supper off Sancho's stores, +and he making a powerful and flexible whip out of Dapple's halter and +headstall retreated about twenty paces from his master among some beech +trees. Don Quixote seeing him march off with such resolution and spirit, +said to him, "Take care, my friend, not to cut thyself to pieces; allow +the lashes to wait for one another, and do not be in so great a hurry as +to run thyself out of breath midway; I mean, do not lay on so strenuously +as to make thy life fail thee before thou hast reached the desired +number; and that thou mayest not lose by a card too much or too little, I +will station myself apart and count on my rosary here the lashes thou +givest thyself. May heaven help thee as thy good intention deserves." + +"'Pledges don't distress a good payer,'" said Sancho; "I mean to lay on +in such a way as without killing myself to hurt myself, for in that, no +doubt, lies the essence of this miracle." + +He then stripped himself from the waist upwards, and snatching up the +rope he began to lay on and Don Quixote to count the lashes. He might +have given himself six or eight when he began to think the joke no +trifle, and its price very low; and holding his hand for a moment, he +told his master that he cried off on the score of a blind bargain, for +each of those lashes ought to be paid for at the rate of half a real +instead of a quarter. + +"Go on, Sancho my friend, and be not disheartened," said Don Quixote; +"for I double the stakes as to price." + +"In that case," said Sancho, "in God's hand be it, and let it rain +lashes." But the rogue no longer laid them on his shoulders, but laid on +to the trees, with such groans every now and then, that one would have +thought at each of them his soul was being plucked up by the roots. Don +Quixote, touched to the heart, and fearing he might make an end of +himself, and that through Sancho's imprudence he might miss his own +object, said to him, "As thou livest, my friend, let the matter rest +where it is, for the remedy seems to me a very rough one, and it will be +well to have patience; 'Zamora was not won in an hour.' If I have not +reckoned wrong thou hast given thyself over a thousand lashes; that is +enough for the present; 'for the ass,' to put it in homely phrase, 'bears +the load, but not the overload.'" + +"No, no, senor," replied Sancho; "it shall never be said of me, 'The +money paid, the arms broken;' go back a little further, your worship, and +let me give myself at any rate a thousand lashes more; for in a couple of +bouts like this we shall have finished off the lot, and there will be +even cloth to spare." + +"As thou art in such a willing mood," said Don Quixote, "may heaven aid +thee; lay on and I'll retire." + +Sancho returned to his task with so much resolution that he soon had the +bark stripped off several trees, such was the severity with which he +whipped himself; and one time, raising his voice, and giving a beech a +tremendous lash, he cried out, "Here dies Samson, and all with him!" + +At the sound of his piteous cry and of the stroke of the cruel lash, Don +Quixote ran to him at once, and seizing the twisted halter that served +him for a courbash, said to him, "Heaven forbid, Sancho my friend, that +to please me thou shouldst lose thy life, which is needed for the support +of thy wife and children; let Dulcinea wait for a better opportunity, and +I will content myself with a hope soon to be realised, and have patience +until thou hast gained fresh strength so as to finish off this business +to the satisfaction of everybody." + +"As your worship will have it so, senor," said Sancho, "so be it; but +throw your cloak over my shoulders, for I'm sweating and I don't want to +take cold; it's a risk that novice disciplinants run." + +Don Quixote obeyed, and stripping himself covered Sancho, who slept until +the sun woke him; they then resumed their journey, which for the time +being they brought to an end at a village that lay three leagues farther +on. They dismounted at a hostelry which Don Quixote recognised as such +and did not take to be a castle with moat, turrets, portcullis, and +drawbridge; for ever since he had been vanquished he talked more +rationally about everything, as will be shown presently. They quartered +him in a room on the ground floor, where in place of leather hangings +there were pieces of painted serge such as they commonly use in villages. +On one of them was painted by some very poor hand the Rape of Helen, when +the bold guest carried her off from Menelaus, and on the other was the +story of Dido and AEneas, she on a high tower, as though she were making +signals with a half sheet to her fugitive guest who was out at sea flying +in a frigate or brigantine. He noticed in the two stories that Helen did +not go very reluctantly, for she was laughing slyly and roguishly; but +the fair Dido was shown dropping tears the size of walnuts from her eyes. +Don Quixote as he looked at them observed, "Those two ladies were very +unfortunate not to have been born in this age, and I unfortunate above +all men not to have been born in theirs. Had I fallen in with those +gentlemen, Troy would not have been burned or Carthage destroyed, for it +would have been only for me to slay Paris, and all these misfortunes +would have been avoided." + +"I'll lay a bet," said Sancho, "that before long there won't be a tavern, +roadside inn, hostelry, or barber's shop where the story of our doings +won't be painted up; but I'd like it painted by the hand of a better +painter than painted these." + +"Thou art right, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for this painter is like +Orbaneja, a painter there was at Ubeda, who when they asked him what he +was painting, used to say, 'Whatever it may turn out; and if he chanced +to paint a cock he would write under it, 'This is a cock,' for fear they +might think it was a fox. The painter or writer, for it's all the same, +who published the history of this new Don Quixote that has come out, must +have been one of this sort I think, Sancho, for he painted or wrote +'whatever it might turn out;' or perhaps he is like a poet called Mauleon +that was about the Court some years ago, who used to answer at haphazard +whatever he was asked, and on one asking him what Deum de Deo meant, he +replied De donde diere. But, putting this aside, tell me, Sancho, hast +thou a mind to have another turn at thyself to-night, and wouldst thou +rather have it indoors or in the open air?" + +"Egad, senor," said Sancho, "for what I'm going to give myself, it comes +all the same to me whether it is in a house or in the fields; still I'd +like it to be among trees; for I think they are company for me and help +me to bear my pain wonderfully." + +"And yet it must not be, Sancho my friend," said Don Quixote; "but, to +enable thee to recover strength, we must keep it for our own village; for +at the latest we shall get there the day after tomorrow." + +Sancho said he might do as he pleased; but that for his own part he would +like to finish off the business quickly before his blood cooled and while +he had an appetite, because "in delay there is apt to be danger" very +often, and "praying to God and plying the hammer," and "one take was +better than two I'll give thee's," and "a sparrow in the hand than a +vulture on the wing." + +"For God's sake, Sancho, no more proverbs!" exclaimed Don Quixote; "it +seems to me thou art becoming sicut erat again; speak in a plain, simple, +straight-forward way, as I have often told thee, and thou wilt find the +good of it." + +"I don't know what bad luck it is of mine," argument to my mind; however, +I mean to mend said Sancho, "but I can't utter a word without a proverb +that is not as good as an argument to my mind; however, I mean to mend if +I can;" and so for the present the conversation ended. + +Chapter LXXII. - +Of how Don Quixote and Sancho reached their village + +All that day Don Quixote and Sancho remained in the village and inn +waiting for night, the one to finish off his task of scourging in the +open country, the other to see it accomplished, for therein lay the +accomplishment of his wishes. Meanwhile there arrived at the hostelry a +traveller on horseback with three or four servants, one of whom said to +him who appeared to be the master, "Here, Senor Don Alvaro Tarfe, your +worship may take your siesta to-day; the quarters seem clean and cool." + +When he heard this Don Quixote said to Sancho, "Look here, Sancho; on +turning over the leaves of that book of the Second Part of my history I +think I came casually upon this name of Don Alvaro Tarfe." + +"Very likely," said Sancho; "we had better let him dismount, and +by-and-by we can ask about it." + +The gentleman dismounted, and the landlady gave him a room on the ground +floor opposite Don Quixote's and adorned with painted serge hangings of +the same sort. The newly arrived gentleman put on a summer coat, and +coming out to the gateway of the hostelry, which was wide and cool, +addressing Don Quixote, who was pacing up and down there, he asked, "In +what direction your worship bound, gentle sir?" + +"To a village near this which is my own village," replied Don Quixote; +"and your worship, where are you bound for?" + +"I am going to Granada, senor," said the gentleman, "to my own country." + +"And a goodly country," said Don Quixote; "but will your worship do me +the favour of telling me your name, for it strikes me it is of more +importance to me to know it than I can tell you." + +"My name is Don Alvaro Tarfe," replied the traveller. + +To which Don Quixote returned, "I have no doubt whatever that your +worship is that Don Alvaro Tarfe who appears in print in the Second Part +of the history of Don Quixote of La Mancha, lately printed and published +by a new author." + +"I am the same," replied the gentleman; "and that same Don Quixote, the +principal personage in the said history, was a very great friend of mine, +and it was I who took him away from home, or at least induced him to come +to some jousts that were to be held at Saragossa, whither I was going +myself; indeed, I showed him many kindnesses, and saved him from having +his shoulders touched up by the executioner because of his extreme +rashness." + +"Tell me, Senor Don Alvaro," said Don Quixote, "am I at all like that Don +Quixote you talk of?" + +"No indeed," replied the traveller, "not a bit." + +"And that Don Quixote-" said our one, "had he with him a squire called +Sancho Panza?" + +"He had," said Don Alvaro; "but though he had the name of being very +droll, I never heard him say anything that had any drollery in it." + +"That I can well believe," said Sancho at this, "for to come out with +drolleries is not in everybody's line; and that Sancho your worship +speaks of, gentle sir, must be some great scoundrel, dunderhead, and +thief, all in one; for I am the real Sancho Panza, and I have more +drolleries than if it rained them; let your worship only try; come along +with me for a year or so, and you will find they fall from me at every +turn, and so rich and so plentiful that though mostly I don't know what I +am saying I make everybody that hears me laugh. And the real Don Quixote +of La Mancha, the famous, the valiant, the wise, the lover, the righter +of wrongs, the guardian of minors and orphans, the protector of widows, +the killer of damsels, he who has for his sole mistress the peerless +Dulcinea del Toboso, is this gentleman before you, my master; all other +Don Quixotes and all other Sancho Panzas are dreams and mockeries." + +"By God I believe it," said Don Alvaro; "for you have uttered more +drolleries, my friend, in the few words you have spoken than the other +Sancho Panza in all I ever heard from him, and they were not a few. He +was more greedy than well-spoken, and more dull than droll; and I am +convinced that the enchanters who persecute Don Quixote the Good have +been trying to persecute me with Don Quixote the Bad. But I don't know +what to say, for I am ready to swear I left him shut up in the Casa del +Nuncio at Toledo, and here another Don Quixote turns up, though a very +different one from mine." + +"I don't know whether I am good," said Don Quixote, "but I can safely say +I am not 'the Bad;' and to prove it, let me tell you, Senor Don Alvaro +Tarfe, I have never in my life been in Saragossa; so far from that, when +it was told me that this imaginary Don Quixote had been present at the +jousts in that city, I declined to enter it, in order to drag his +falsehood before the face of the world; and so I went on straight to +Barcelona, the treasure-house of courtesy, haven of strangers, asylum of +the poor, home of the valiant, champion of the wronged, pleasant exchange +of firm friendships, and city unrivalled in site and beauty. And though +the adventures that befell me there are not by any means matters of +enjoyment, but rather of regret, I do not regret them, simply because I +have seen it. In a word, Senor Don Alvaro Tarfe, I am Don Quixote of La +Mancha, the one that fame speaks of, and not the unlucky one that has +attempted to usurp my name and deck himself out in my ideas. I entreat +your worship by your devoir as a gentleman to be so good as to make a +declaration before the alcalde of this village that you never in all your +life saw me until now, and that neither am I the Don Quixote in print in +the Second Part, nor this Sancho Panza, my squire, the one your worship +knew." + +"That I will do most willingly," replied Don Alvaro; "though it amazes me +to find two Don Quixotes and two Sancho Panzas at once, as much alike in +name as they differ in demeanour; and again I say and declare that what I +saw I cannot have seen, and that what happened me cannot have happened." + +"No doubt your worship is enchanted, like my lady Dulcinea del Toboso," +said Sancho; "and would to heaven your disenchantment rested on my giving +myself another three thousand and odd lashes like what I'm giving myself +for her, for I'd lay them on without looking for anything." + +"I don't understand that about the lashes," said Don Alvaro. Sancho +replied that it was a long story to tell, but he would tell him if they +happened to be going the same road. + +By this dinner-time arrived, and Don Quixote and Don Alvaro dined +together. The alcalde of the village came by chance into the inn together +with a notary, and Don Quixote laid a petition before him, showing that +it was requisite for his rights that Don Alvaro Tarfe, the gentleman +there present, should make a declaration before him that he did not know +Don Quixote of La Mancha, also there present, and that he was not the one +that was in print in a history entitled "Second Part of Don Quixote of La +Mancha, by one Avellaneda of Tordesillas." The alcalde finally put it in +legal form, and the declaration was made with all the formalities +required in such cases, at which Don Quixote and Sancho were in high +delight, as if a declaration of the sort was of any great importance to +them, and as if their words and deeds did not plainly show the difference +between the two Don Quixotes and the two Sanchos. Many civilities and +offers of service were exchanged by Don Alvaro and Don Quixote, in the +course of which the great Manchegan displayed such good taste that he +disabused Don Alvaro of the error he was under; and he, on his part, felt +convinced he must have been enchanted, now that he had been brought in +contact with two such opposite Don Quixotes. + +Evening came, they set out from the village, and after about half a +league two roads branched off, one leading to Don Quixote's village, the +other the road Don Alvaro was to follow. In this short interval Don +Quixote told him of his unfortunate defeat, and of Dulcinea's enchantment +and the remedy, all which threw Don Alvaro into fresh amazement, and +embracing Don Quixote and Sancho he went his way, and Don Quixote went +his. That night he passed among trees again in order to give Sancho an +opportunity of working out his penance, which he did in the same fashion +as the night before, at the expense of the bark of the beech trees much +more than of his back, of which he took such good care that the lashes +would not have knocked off a fly had there been one there. The duped Don +Quixote did not miss a single stroke of the count, and he found that +together with those of the night before they made up three thousand and +twenty-nine. The sun apparently had got up early to witness the +sacrifice, and with his light they resumed their journey, discussing the +deception practised on Don Alvaro, and saying how well done it was to +have taken his declaration before a magistrate in such an unimpeachable +form. That day and night they travelled on, nor did anything worth +mention happen them, unless it was that in the course of the night Sancho +finished off his task, whereat Don Quixote was beyond measure joyful. He +watched for daylight, to see if along the road he should fall in with his +already disenchanted lady Dulcinea; and as he pursued his journey there +was no woman he met that he did not go up to, to see if she was Dulcinea +del Toboso, as he held it absolutely certain that Merlin's promises could +not lie. Full of these thoughts and anxieties, they ascended a rising +ground wherefrom they descried their own village, at the sight of which +Sancho fell on his knees exclaiming, "Open thine eyes, longed-for home, +and see how thy son Sancho Panza comes back to thee, if not very rich, +very well whipped! Open thine arms and receive, too, thy son Don Quixote, +who, if he comes vanquished by the arm of another, comes victor over +himself, which, as he himself has told me, is the greatest victory anyone +can desire. I'm bringing back money, for if I was well whipped, I went +mounted like a gentleman." + +"Have done with these fooleries," said Don Quixote; "let us push on +straight and get to our own place, where we will give free range to our +fancies, and settle our plans for our future pastoral life." + +With this they descended the slope and directed their steps to their +village. + +Chapter LXXIII. - +Of the omens Don Quixote had as he entered his own village, and other +incidents that embellish and give a colour to this great history + +At the entrance of the village, so says Cide Hamete, Don Quixote saw two +boys quarrelling on the village threshing-floor one of whom said to the +other, "Take it easy, Periquillo; thou shalt never see it again as long +as thou livest." + +Don Quixote heard this, and said he to Sancho, "Dost thou not mark, +friend, what that boy said, 'Thou shalt never see it again as long as +thou livest'?" + +"Well," said Sancho, "what does it matter if the boy said so?" + +"What!" said Don Quixote, "dost thou not see that, applied to the object +of my desires, the words mean that I am never to see Dulcinea more?" + +Sancho was about to answer, when his attention was diverted by seeing a +hare come flying across the plain pursued by several greyhounds and +sportsmen. In its terror it ran to take shelter and hide itself under +Dapple. Sancho caught it alive and presented it to Don Quixote, who was +saying, "Malum signum, malum signum! a hare flies, greyhounds chase it, +Dulcinea appears not." + +"Your worship's a strange man," said Sancho; "let's take it for granted +that this hare is Dulcinea, and these greyhounds chasing it the malignant +enchanters who turned her into a country wench; she flies, and I catch +her and put her into your worship's hands, and you hold her in your arms +and cherish her; what bad sign is that, or what ill omen is there to be +found here?" + +The two boys who had been quarrelling came over to look at the hare, and +Sancho asked one of them what their quarrel was about. He was answered by +the one who had said, "Thou shalt never see it again as long as thou +livest," that he had taken a cage full of crickets from the other boy, +and did not mean to give it back to him as long as he lived. Sancho took +out four cuartos from his pocket and gave them to the boy for the cage, +which he placed in Don Quixote's hands, saying, "There, senor! there are +the omens broken and destroyed, and they have no more to do with our +affairs, to my thinking, fool as I am, than with last year's clouds; and +if I remember rightly I have heard the curate of our village say that it +does not become Christians or sensible people to give any heed to these +silly things; and even you yourself said the same to me some time ago, +telling me that all Christians who minded omens were fools; but there's +no need of making words about it; let us push on and go into our +village." + +The sportsmen came up and asked for their hare, which Don Quixote gave +them. They then went on, and upon the green at the entrance of the town +they came upon the curate and the bachelor Samson Carrasco busy with +their breviaries. It should be mentioned that Sancho had thrown, by way +of a sumpter-cloth, over Dapple and over the bundle of armour, the +buckram robe painted with flames which they had put upon him at the +duke's castle the night Altisidora came back to life. He had also fixed +the mitre on Dapple's head, the oddest transformation and decoration that +ever ass in the world underwent. They were at once recognised by both the +curate and the bachelor, who came towards them with open arms. Don +Quixote dismounted and received them with a close embrace; and the boys, +who are lynxes that nothing escapes, spied out the ass's mitre and came +running to see it, calling out to one another, "Come here, boys, and see +Sancho Panza's ass figged out finer than Mingo, and Don Quixote's beast +leaner than ever." + +So at length, with the boys capering round them, and accompanied by the +curate and the bachelor, they made their entrance into the town, and +proceeded to Don Quixote's house, at the door of which they found his +housekeeper and niece, whom the news of his arrival had already reached. +It had been brought to Teresa Panza, Sancho's wife, as well, and she with +her hair all loose and half naked, dragging Sanchica her daughter by the +hand, ran out to meet her husband; but seeing him coming in by no means +as good case as she thought a governor ought to be, she said to him, "How +is it you come this way, husband? It seems to me you come tramping and +footsore, and looking more like a disorderly vagabond than a governor." + +"Hold your tongue, Teresa," said Sancho; "often 'where there are pegs +there are no flitches;' let's go into the house and there you'll hear +strange things. I bring money, and that's the main thing, got by my own +industry without wronging anybody." + +"You bring the money, my good husband," said Teresa, "and no matter +whether it was got this way or that; for, however you may have got it, +you'll not have brought any new practice into the world." + +Sanchica embraced her father and asked him if he brought her anything, +for she had been looking out for him as for the showers of May; and she +taking hold of him by the girdle on one side, and his wife by the hand, +while the daughter led Dapple, they made for their house, leaving Don +Quixote in his, in the hands of his niece and housekeeper, and in the +company of the curate and the bachelor. + +Don Quixote at once, without any regard to time or season, withdrew in +private with the bachelor and the curate, and in a few words told them of +his defeat, and of the engagement he was under not to quit his village +for a year, which he meant to keep to the letter without departing a +hair's breadth from it, as became a knight-errant bound by scrupulous +good faith and the laws of knight-errantry; and of how he thought of +turning shepherd for that year, and taking his diversion in the solitude +of the fields, where he could with perfect freedom give range to his +thoughts of love while he followed the virtuous pastoral calling; and he +besought them, if they had not a great deal to do and were not prevented +by more important business, to consent to be his companions, for he would +buy sheep enough to qualify them for shepherds; and the most important +point of the whole affair, he could tell them, was settled, for he had +given them names that would fit them to a T. The curate asked what they +were. Don Quixote replied that he himself was to be called the shepherd +Quixotize and the bachelor the shepherd Carrascon, and the curate the +shepherd Curambro, and Sancho Panza the shepherd Pancino. + +Both were astounded at Don Quixote's new craze; however, lest he should +once more make off out of the village from them in pursuit of his +chivalry, they trusting that in the course of the year he might be cured, +fell in with his new project, applauded his crazy idea as a bright one, +and offered to share the life with him. "And what's more," said Samson +Carrasco, "I am, as all the world knows, a very famous poet, and I'll be +always making verses, pastoral, or courtly, or as it may come into my +head, to pass away our time in those secluded regions where we shall be +roaming. But what is most needful, sirs, is that each of us should choose +the name of the shepherdess he means to glorify in his verses, and that +we should not leave a tree, be it ever so hard, without writing up and +carving her name on it, as is the habit and custom of love-smitten +shepherds." + +"That's the very thing," said Don Quixote; "though I am relieved from +looking for the name of an imaginary shepherdess, for there's the +peerless Dulcinea del Toboso, the glory of these brooksides, the ornament +of these meadows, the mainstay of beauty, the cream of all the graces, +and, in a word, the being to whom all praise is appropriate, be it ever +so hyperbolical." + +"Very true," said the curate; "but we the others must look about for +accommodating shepherdesses that will answer our purpose one way or +another." + +"And," added Samson Carrasco, "if they fail us, we can call them by the +names of the ones in print that the world is filled with, Filidas, +Amarilises, Dianas, Fleridas, Galateas, Belisardas; for as they sell them +in the market-places we may fairly buy them and make them our own. If my +lady, or I should say my shepherdess, happens to be called Ana, I'll sing +her praises under the name of Anarda, and if Francisca, I'll call her +Francenia, and if Lucia, Lucinda, for it all comes to the same thing; and +Sancho Panza, if he joins this fraternity, may glorify his wife Teresa +Panza as Teresaina." + +Don Quixote laughed at the adaptation of the name, and the curate +bestowed vast praise upon the worthy and honourable resolution he had +made, and again offered to bear him company all the time that he could +spare from his imperative duties. And so they took their leave of him, +recommending and beseeching him to take care of his health and treat +himself to a suitable diet. + +It so happened his niece and the housekeeper overheard all the three of +them said; and as soon as they were gone they both of them came in to Don +Quixote, and said the niece, "What's this, uncle? Now that we were +thinking you had come back to stay at home and lead a quiet respectable +life there, are you going to get into fresh entanglements, and turn +'young shepherd, thou that comest here, young shepherd going there?' Nay! +indeed 'the straw is too hard now to make pipes of.'" + +"And," added the housekeeper, "will your worship be able to bear, out in +the fields, the heats of summer, and the chills of winter, and the +howling of the wolves? Not you; for that's a life and a business for +hardy men, bred and seasoned to such work almost from the time they were +in swaddling-clothes. Why, to make choice of evils, it's better to be a +knight-errant than a shepherd! Look here, senor; take my advice--and I'm +not giving it to you full of bread and wine, but fasting, and with fifty +years upon my head--stay at home, look after your affairs, go often to +confession, be good to the poor, and upon my soul be it if any evil comes +to you." + +"Hold your peace, my daughters," said Don Quixote; "I know very well what +my duty is; help me to bed, for I don't feel very well; and rest assured +that, knight-errant now or wandering shepherd to be, I shall never fail +to have a care for your interests, as you will see in the end." And the +good wenches (for that they undoubtedly were), the housekeeper and niece, +helped him to bed, where they gave him something to eat and made him as +comfortable as possible. + +Chapter LXXIV. - +Of how Don Quixote fell sick, and of the will he made, and how he died + +As nothing that is man's can last for ever, but all tends ever downwards +from its beginning to its end, and above all man's life, and as Don +Quixote's enjoyed no special dispensation from heaven to stay its course, +its end and close came when he least looked for it. For-whether it was of +the dejection the thought of his defeat produced, or of heaven's will +that so ordered it--a fever settled upon him and kept him in his bed for +six days, during which he was often visited by his friends the curate, +the bachelor, and the barber, while his good squire Sancho Panza never +quitted his bedside. They, persuaded that it was grief at finding himself +vanquished, and the object of his heart, the liberation and +disenchantment of Dulcinea, unattained, that kept him in this state, +strove by all the means in their power to cheer him up; the bachelor +bidding him take heart and get up to begin his pastoral life, for which +he himself, he said, had already composed an eclogue that would take the +shine out of all Sannazaro had ever written, and had bought with his own +money two famous dogs to guard the flock, one called Barcino and the +other Butron, which a herdsman of Quintanar had sold him. + +But for all this Don Quixote could not shake off his sadness. His friends +called in the doctor, who felt his pulse and was not very well satisfied +with it, and said that in any case it would be well for him to attend to +the health of his soul, as that of his body was in a bad way. Don Quixote +heard this calmly; but not so his housekeeper, his niece, and his squire, +who fell weeping bitterly, as if they had him lying dead before them. The +doctor's opinion was that melancholy and depression were bringing him to +his end. Don Quixote begged them to leave him to himself, as he had a +wish to sleep a little. They obeyed, and he slept at one stretch, as the +saying is, more than six hours, so that the housekeeper and niece thought +he was going to sleep for ever. But at the end of that time he woke up, +and in a loud voice exclaimed, "Blessed be Almighty God, who has shown me +such goodness. In truth his mercies are boundless, and the sins of men +can neither limit them nor keep them back!" + +The niece listened with attention to her uncle's words, and they struck +her as more coherent than what usually fell from him, at least during his +illness, so she asked, "What are you saying, senor? Has anything strange +occurred? What mercies or what sins of men are you talking of?" + +"The mercies, niece," said Don Quixote, "are those that God has this +moment shown me, and with him, as I said, my sins are no impediment to +them. My reason is now free and clear, rid of the dark shadows of +ignorance that my unhappy constant study of those detestable books of +chivalry cast over it. Now I see through their absurdities and +deceptions, and it only grieves me that this destruction of my illusions +has come so late that it leaves me no time to make some amends by reading +other books that might be a light to my soul. Niece, I feel myself at the +point of death, and I would fain meet it in such a way as to show that my +life has not been so ill that I should leave behind me the name of a +madman; for though I have been one, I would not that the fact should be +made plainer at my death. Call in to me, my dear, my good friends the +curate, the bachelor Samson Carrasco, and Master Nicholas the barber, for +I wish to confess and make my will." But his niece was saved the trouble +by the entrance of the three. The instant Don Quixote saw them he +exclaimed, "Good news for you, good sirs, that I am no longer Don Quixote +of La Mancha, but Alonso Quixano, whose way of life won for him the name +of Good. Now am I the enemy of Amadis of Gaul and of the whole countless +troop of his descendants; odious to me now are all the profane stories of +knight-errantry; now I perceive my folly, and the peril into which +reading them brought me; now, by God's mercy schooled into my right +senses, I loathe them." + +When the three heard him speak in this way, they had no doubt whatever +that some new craze had taken possession of him; and said Samson, "What? +Senor Don Quixote! Now that we have intelligence of the lady Dulcinea +being disenchanted, are you taking this line; now, just as we are on the +point of becoming shepherds, to pass our lives singing, like princes, are +you thinking of turning hermit? Hush, for heaven's sake, be rational and +let's have no more nonsense." + +"All that nonsense," said Don Quixote, "that until now has been a reality +to my hurt, my death will, with heaven's help, turn to my good. I feel, +sirs, that I am rapidly drawing near death; a truce to jesting; let me +have a confessor to confess me, and a notary to make my will; for in +extremities like this, man must not trifle with his soul; and while the +curate is confessing me let some one, I beg, go for the notary." + +They looked at one another, wondering at Don Quixote's words; but, though +uncertain, they were inclined to believe him, and one of the signs by +which they came to the conclusion he was dying was this so sudden and +complete return to his senses after having been mad; for to the words +already quoted he added much more, so well expressed, so devout, and so +rational, as to banish all doubt and convince them that he was sound of +mind. The curate turned them all out, and left alone with him confessed +him. The bachelor went for the notary and returned shortly afterwards +with him and with Sancho, who, having already learned from the bachelor +the condition his master was in, and finding the housekeeper and niece +weeping, began to blubber and shed tears. + +The confession over, the curate came out saying, "Alonso Quixano the Good +is indeed dying, and is indeed in his right mind; we may now go in to him +while he makes his will." + +This news gave a tremendous impulse to the brimming eyes of the +housekeeper, niece, and Sancho Panza his good squire, making the tears +burst from their eyes and a host of sighs from their hearts; for of a +truth, as has been said more than once, whether as plain Alonso Quixano +the Good, or as Don Quixote of La Mancha, Don Quixote was always of a +gentle disposition and kindly in all his ways, and hence he was beloved, +not only by those of his own house, but by all who knew him. + +The notary came in with the rest, and as soon as the preamble of the had +been set out and Don Quixote had commended his soul to God with all the +devout formalities that are usual, coming to the bequests, he said, +"Item, it is my will that, touching certain moneys in the hands of Sancho +Panza (whom in my madness I made my squire), inasmuch as between him and +me there have been certain accounts and debits and credits, no claim be +made against him, nor any account demanded of him in respect of them; but +that if anything remain over and above, after he has paid himself what I +owe him, the balance, which will be but little, shall be his, and much +good may it do him; and if, as when I was mad I had a share in giving him +the government of an island, so, now that I am in my senses, I could give +him that of a kingdom, it should be his, for the simplicity of his +character and the fidelity of his conduct deserve it." And then, turning +to Sancho, he said, "Forgive me, my friend, that I led thee to seem as +mad as myself, making thee fall into the same error I myself fell into, +that there were and still are knights-errant in the world." + +"Ah!" said Sancho weeping, "don't die, master, but take my advice and +live many years; for the foolishest thing a man can do in this life is to +let himself die without rhyme or reason, without anybody killing him, or +any hands but melancholy's making an end of him. Come, don't be lazy, but +get up from your bed and let us take to the fields in shepherd's trim as +we agreed. Perhaps behind some bush we shall find the lady Dulcinea +disenchanted, as fine as fine can be. If it be that you are dying of +vexation at having been vanquished, lay the blame on me, and say you were +overthrown because I had girthed Rocinante badly; besides you must have +seen in your books of chivalry that it is a common thing for knights to +upset one another, and for him who is conquered to-day to be conqueror +tomorrow." + +"Very true," said Samson, "and good Sancho Panza's view of these cases is +quite right." + +"Sirs, not so fast," said Don Quixote, "'in last year's nests there are +no birds this year.' I was mad, now I am in my senses; I was Don Quixote +of La Mancha, I am now, as I said, Alonso Quixano the Good; and may my +repentance and sincerity restore me to the esteem you used to have for +me; and now let Master Notary proceed. + +"Item, I leave all my property absolutely to Antonia Quixana my niece, +here present, after all has been deducted from the most available portion +of it that may be required to satisfy the bequests I have made. And the +first disbursement I desire to be made is the payment of the wages I owe +for the time my housekeeper has served me, with twenty ducats, over and +above, for a gown. The curate and the bachelor Samson Carrasco, now +present, I appoint my executors. + +"Item, it is my wish that if Antonia Quixana, my niece, desires to marry, +she shall marry a man of whom it shall be first of all ascertained by +information taken that he does not know what books of chivalry are; and +if it should be proved that he does, and if, in spite of this, my niece +insists upon marrying him, and does marry him, then that she shall +forfeit the whole of what I have left her, which my executors shall +devote to works of charity as they please. + +"Item, I entreat the aforesaid gentlemen my executors, that, if any happy +chance should lead them to discover the author who is said to have +written a history now going about under the title of 'Second Part of the +Achievements of Don Quixote of La Mancha,' they beg of him on my behalf +as earnestly as they can to forgive me for having been, without intending +it, the cause of his writing so many and such monstrous absurdities as he +has written in it; for I am leaving the world with a feeling of +compunction at having provoked him to write them." + +With this he closed his will, and a faintness coming over him he +stretched himself out at full length on the bed. All were in a flutter +and made haste to relieve him, and during the three days he lived after +that on which he made his will he fainted away very often. The house was +all in confusion; but still the niece ate and the housekeeper drank and +Sancho Panza enjoyed himself; for inheriting property wipes out or +softens down in the heir the feeling of grief the dead man might be +expected to leave behind him. + +At last Don Quixote's end came, after he had received all the sacraments, +and had in full and forcible terms expressed his detestation of books of +chivalry. The notary was there at the time, and he said that in no book +of chivalry had he ever read of any knight-errant dying in his bed so +calmly and so like a Christian as Don Quixote, who amid the tears and +lamentations of all present yielded up his spirit, that is to say died. +On perceiving it the curate begged the notary to bear witness that Alonso +Quixano the Good, commonly called Don Quixote of La Mancha, had passed +away from this present life, and died naturally; and said he desired this +testimony in order to remove the possibility of any other author save +Cide Hamete Benengeli bringing him to life again falsely and making +interminable stories out of his achievements. + +Such was the end of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, whose village +Cide Hamete would not indicate precisely, in order to leave all the towns +and villages of La Mancha to contend among themselves for the right to +adopt him and claim him as a son, as the seven cities of Greece contended +for Homer. The lamentations of Sancho and the niece and housekeeper are +omitted here, as well as the new epitaphs upon his tomb; Samson Carrasco, +however, put the following lines: + +poem{ + +A doughty gentleman lies here; +A stranger all his life to fear; +Nor in his death could Death prevail, +In that last hour, to make him quail. +He for the world but little cared; +And at his feats the world was scared; +A crazy man his life he passed, +But in his senses died at last. + +}poem + +And said most sage Cide Hamete to his pen, "Rest here, hung up by this +brass wire, upon this shelf, O my pen, whether of skilful make or clumsy +cut I know not; here shalt thou remain long ages hence, unless +presumptuous or malignant story-tellers take thee down to profane thee. +But ere they touch thee warn them, and, as best thou canst, say to them: + +poem{ + +Hold off! ye weaklings; hold your hands! + Adventure it let none, +For this emprise, my lord the king, + Was meant for me alone. + +}poem + +For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; it was his to act, mine +to write; we two together make but one, notwithstanding and in spite of +that pretended Tordesillesque writer who has ventured or would venture +with his great, coarse, ill-trimmed ostrich quill to write the +achievements of my valiant knight;--no burden for his shoulders, nor +subject for his frozen wit: whom, if perchance thou shouldst come to know +him, thou shalt warn to leave at rest where they lie the weary mouldering +bones of Don Quixote, and not to attempt to carry him off, in opposition +to all the privileges of death, to Old Castile, making him rise from the +grave where in reality and truth he lies stretched at full length, +powerless to make any third expedition or new sally; for the two that he +has already made, so much to the enjoyment and approval of everybody to +whom they have become known, in this as well as in foreign countries, are +quite sufficient for the purpose of turning into ridicule the whole of +those made by the whole set of the knights-errant; and so doing shalt +thou discharge thy Christian calling, giving good counsel to one that +bears ill-will to thee. And I shall remain satisfied, and proud to have +been the first who has ever enjoyed the fruit of his writings as fully as +he could desire; for my desire has been no other than to deliver over to +the detestation of mankind the false and foolish tales of the books of +chivalry, which, thanks to that of my true Don Quixote, are even now +tottering, and doubtless doomed to fall for ever. Farewell." + +% THE END diff --git a/data/samples/minimal/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst b/data/samples/minimal/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst new file mode 120000 index 0000000..3cd8c50 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/minimal/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../generic/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/samples/minimal/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst b/data/samples/minimal/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst new file mode 120000 index 0000000..64e1fae --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/minimal/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +../generic/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/samples/minimal/war_and_peace.leo_tolstoy.sst b/data/samples/minimal/war_and_peace.leo_tolstoy.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a305ce0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/minimal/war_and_peace.leo_tolstoy.sst @@ -0,0 +1,64867 @@ +% SiSU 0.72 + +@title: War and Peace + +@creator: + :author: Tolstoy, Leo + :translator: Maude, Aylmer; Maude, Louise Shanks + +@classify: + :type: Book + :topic_register: SiSU:markup sample:book;book:novel:historical romance|war novel;Russian:original text;original text language:Russian + :pg: 2600 + +% @rights: + +@date: + :published: 1869 + :created: 1865 + :issued: 1865 + :available: 1865 + :modified: 1869 + :added_to_site: 2004-04-12 + +% @date.translated: + +% @language: +% :document: English +% :original: Russian + +@vocabulary: none + +@make: + :headings: none; BOOK|FIRST|SECOND; none; CHAPTER; + :breaks: new=:C; break=1 + +@links: { Wikipedia entry }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_peace +{ War and Peace @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/war.and.peace.leo.tolstoy + +% SiSU: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu +% SiSU markup for 0.16 and later +% SiSU markup: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/sample +% Output: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/war_and_peace.leo_tolstoy + +:A~ @title @creator + +BOOK ONE: 1805 + +CHAPTER I + +"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the +Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, +if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by +that Antichrist- I really believe he is Antichrist- I will have +nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer +my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see +I have frightened you- sit down and tell me all the news." + +It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna +Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Marya +Fedorovna. With these words she greeted Prince Vasili Kuragin, a man +of high rank and importance, who was the first to arrive at her +reception. Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as +she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe being then a new word in +St. Petersburg, used only by the elite. + +All her invitations without exception, written in French, and +delivered by a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows: + +"If you have nothing better to do, Count [or Prince], and if the +prospect of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too +terrible, I shall be very charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10- +Annette Scherer." + +"Heavens! what a virulent attack!" replied the prince, not in the +least disconcerted by this reception. He had just entered, wearing +an embroidered court uniform, knee breeches, and shoes, and had +stars on his breast and a serene expression on his flat face. He spoke +in that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but +thought, and with the gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a +man of importance who had grown old in society and at court. He went +up to Anna Pavlovna, kissed her hand, presenting to her his bald, +scented, and shining head, and complacently seated himself on the +sofa. + +"First of all, dear friend, tell me how you are. Set your friend's +mind at rest," said he without altering his tone, beneath the +politeness and affected sympathy of which indifference and even +irony could be discerned. + +"Can one be well while suffering morally? Can one be calm in times +like these if one has any feeling?" said Anna Pavlovna. "You are +staying the whole evening, I hope?" + +"And the fete at the English ambassador's? Today is Wednesday. I +must put in an appearance there," said the prince. "My daughter is +coming for me to take me there." + +"I thought today's fete had been canceled. I confess all these +festivities and fireworks are becoming wearisome." + +"If they had known that you wished it, the entertainment would +have been put off," said the prince, who, like a wound-up clock, by +force of habit said things he did not even wish to be believed. + +"Don't tease! Well, and what has been decided about Novosiltsev's +dispatch? You know everything." + +"What can one say about it?" replied the prince in a cold, +listless tone. "What has been decided? They have decided that +Buonaparte has burnt his boats, and I believe that we are ready to +burn ours." + +Prince Vasili always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a +stale part. Anna Pavlovna Scherer on the contrary, despite her forty +years, overflowed with animation and impulsiveness. To be an +enthusiast had become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she +did not feel like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to +disappoint the expectations of those who knew her. The subdued smile +which, though it did not suit her faded features, always played +round her lips expressed, as in a spoiled child, a continual +consciousness of her charming defect, which she neither wished, nor +could, nor considered it necessary, to correct. + +In the midst of a conversation on political matters Anna Pavlovna +burst out: + +"Oh, don't speak to me of Austria. Perhaps I don't understand +things, but Austria never has wished, and does not wish, for war. +She is betraying us! Russia alone must save Europe. Our gracious +sovereign recognizes his high vocation and will be true to it. That is +the one thing I have faith in! Our good and wonderful sovereign has to +perform the noblest role on earth, and he is so virtuous and noble +that God will not forsake him. He will fulfill his vocation and +crush the hydra of revolution, which has become more terrible than +ever in the person of this murderer and villain! We alone must +avenge the blood of the just one.... Whom, I ask you, can we rely +on?... England with her commercial spirit will not and cannot +understand the Emperor Alexander's loftiness of soul. She has +refused to evacuate Malta. She wanted to find, and still seeks, some +secret motive in our actions. What answer did Novosiltsev get? None. +The English have not understood and cannot understand the +self-abnegation of our Emperor who wants nothing for himself, but only +desires the good of mankind. And what have they promised? Nothing! And +what little they have promised they will not perform! Prussia has +always declared that Buonaparte is invincible, and that all Europe +is powerless before him.... And I don't believe a word that Hardenburg +says, or Haugwitz either. This famous Prussian neutrality is just a +trap. I have faith only in God and the lofty destiny of our adored +monarch. He will save Europe!" + +She suddenly paused, smiling at her own impetuosity. + +"I think," said the prince with a smile, "that if you had been +sent instead of our dear Wintzingerode you would have captured the +King of Prussia's consent by assault. You are so eloquent. Will you +give me a cup of tea?" + +"In a moment. A propos," she added, becoming calm again, "I am +expecting two very interesting men tonight, le Vicomte de Mortemart, +who is connected with the Montmorencys through the Rohans, one of +the best French families. He is one of the genuine emigres, the good +ones. And also the Abbe Morio. Do you know that profound thinker? He +has been received by the Emperor. Had you heard?" + +"I shall be delighted to meet them," said the prince. "But tell me," +he added with studied carelessness as if it had only just occurred +to him, though the question he was about to ask was the chief motive +of his visit, "is it true that the Dowager Empress wants Baron Funke +to be appointed first secretary at Vienna? The baron by all accounts +is a poor creature." + +Prince Vasili wished to obtain this post for his son, but others +were trying through the Dowager Empress Marya Fedorovna to secure it +for the baron. + +Anna Pavlovna almost closed her eyes to indicate that neither she +nor anyone else had a right to criticize what the Empress desired or +was pleased with. + +"Baron Funke has been recommended to the Dowager Empress by her +sister," was all she said, in a dry and mournful tone. + +As she named the Empress, Anna Pavlovna's face suddenly assumed an +expression of profound and sincere devotion and respect mingled with +sadness, and this occurred every time she mentioned her illustrious +patroness. She added that Her Majesty had deigned to show Baron +Funke beaucoup d'estime, and again her face clouded over with sadness. + +The prince was silent and looked indifferent. But, with the +womanly and courtierlike quickness and tact habitual to her, Anna +Pavlovna wished both to rebuke him (for daring to speak he had done of +a man recommended to the Empress) and at the same time to console him, +so she said: + +"Now about your family. Do you know that since your daughter came +out everyone has been enraptured by her? They say she is amazingly +beautiful." + +The prince bowed to signify his respect and gratitude. + +"I often think," she continued after a short pause, drawing nearer +to the prince and smiling amiably at him as if to show that +political and social topics were ended and the time had come for +intimate conversation- "I often think how unfairly sometimes the +joys of life are distributed. Why has fate given you two such splendid +children? I don't speak of Anatole, your youngest. I don't like +him," she added in a tone admitting of no rejoinder and raising her +eyebrows. "Two such charming children. And really you appreciate +them less than anyone, and so you don't deserve to have them." + +And she smiled her ecstatic smile. + +"I can't help it," said the prince. "Lavater would have said I +lack the bump of paternity." + +"Don't joke; I mean to have a serious talk with you. Do you know I +am dissatisfied with your younger son? Between ourselves" (and her +face assumed its melancholy expression), "he was mentioned at Her +Majesty's and you were pitied...." + +The prince answered nothing, but she looked at him significantly, +awaiting a reply. He frowned. + +"What would you have me do?" he said at last. "You know I did all +a father could for their education, and they have both turned out +fools. Hippolyte is at least a quiet fool, but Anatole is an active +one. That is the only difference between them." He said this smiling +in a way more natural and animated than usual, so that the wrinkles +round his mouth very clearly revealed something unexpectedly coarse +and unpleasant. + +"And why are children born to such men as you? If you were not a +father there would be nothing I could reproach you with," said Anna +Pavlovna, looking up pensively. + +"I am your faithful slave and to you alone I can confess that my +children are the bane of my life. It is the cross I have to bear. That +is how I explain it to myself. It can't be helped!" + +He said no more, but expressed his resignation to cruel fate by a +gesture. Anna Pavlovna meditated. + +"Have you never thought of marrying your prodigal son Anatole?" +she asked. "They say old maids have a mania for matchmaking, and +though I don't feel that weakness in myself as yet,I know a little +person who is very unhappy with her father. She is a relation of +yours, Princess Mary Bolkonskaya." + +Prince Vasili did not reply, though, with the quickness of memory +and perception befitting a man of the world, he indicated by a +movement of the head that he was considering this information. + +"Do you know," he said at last, evidently unable to check the sad +current of his thoughts, "that Anatole is costing me forty thousand +rubles a year? And," he went on after a pause, "what will it be in +five years, if he goes on like this?" Presently he added: "That's what +we fathers have to put up with.... Is this princess of yours rich?" + +"Her father is very rich and stingy. He lives in the country. He +is the well-known Prince Bolkonski who had to retire from the army +under the late Emperor, and was nicknamed 'the King of Prussia.' He is +very clever but eccentric, and a bore. The poor girl is very +unhappy. She has a brother; I think you know him, he married Lise +Meinen lately. He is an aide-de-camp of Kutuzov's and will be here +tonight." + +"Listen, dear Annette," said the prince, suddenly taking Anna +Pavlovna's hand and for some reason drawing it downwards. "Arrange +that affair for me and I shall always be your most devoted slave- +slafe wigh an f, as a village elder of mine writes in his reports. She +is rich and of good family and that's all I want." + +And with the familiarity and easy grace peculiar to him, he raised +the maid of honor's hand to his lips, kissed it, and swung it to and +fro as he lay back in his armchair, looking in another direction. + +"Attendez," said Anna Pavlovna, reflecting, "I'll speak to Lise, +young Bolkonski's wife, this very evening, and perhaps the thing can +be arranged. It shall be on your family's behalf that I'll start my +apprenticeship as old maid." + +CHAPTER II + +Anna Pavlovna's drawing room was gradually filling. The highest +Petersburg society was assembled there: people differing widely in age +and character but alike in the social circle to which they belonged. +Prince Vasili's daughter, the beautiful Helene, came to take her +father to the ambassador's entertainment; she wore a ball dress and +her badge as maid of honor. The youthful little Princess +Bolkonskaya, known as la femme la plus seduisante de Petersbourg,~^ was +also there. She had been married during the previous winter, and being +pregnant did not go to any large gatherings, but only to small +receptions. Prince Vasili's son, Hippolyte, had come with Mortemart, +whom he introduced. The Abbe Morio and many others had also come. + +^~ The most fascinating woman in Petersburg. + +To each new arrival Anna Pavlovna said, "You have not yet seen my +aunt," or "You do not know my aunt?" and very gravely conducted him or +her to a little old lady, wearing large bows of ribbon in her cap, who +had come sailing in from another room as soon as the guests began to +arrive; and slowly turning her eyes from the visitor to her aunt, Anna +Pavlovna mentioned each one's name and then left them. + +Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom +not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of +them cared about; Anna Pavlovna observed these greetings with mournful +and solemn interest and silent approval. The aunt spoke to each of +them in the same words, about their health and her own, and the health +of Her Majesty, "who, thank God, was better today." And each +visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left +the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious +duty and did not return to her the whole evening. + +The young Princess Bolkonskaya had brought some work in a +gold-embroidered velvet bag. Her pretty little upper lip, on which a +delicate dark down was just perceptible, was too short for her +teeth, but it lifted all the more sweetly, and was especially charming +when she occasionally drew it down to meet the lower lip. As is always +the case with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect- the shortness +of her upper lip and her half-open mouth- seemed to be her own special +and peculiar form of beauty. Everyone brightened at the sight of +this pretty young woman, so soon to become a mother, so full of life +and health, and carrying her burden so lightly. Old men and dull +dispirited young ones who looked at her, after being in her company +and talking to her a little while, felt as if they too were +becoming, like her, full of life and health. All who talked to her, +and at each word saw her bright smile and the constant gleam of her +white teeth, thought that they were in a specially amiable mood that +day. + +The little princess went round the table with quick, short, +swaying steps, her workbag on her arm, and gaily spreading out her +dress sat down on a sofa near the silver samovar, as if all she was +doing was a pleasure to herself and to all around her. "I have brought +my work," said she in French, displaying her bag and addressing all +present. "Mind, Annette, I hope you have not played a wicked trick +on me," she added, turning to her hostess. "You wrote that it was to +be quite a small reception, and just see how badly I am dressed." +And she spread out her arms to show her short-waisted, lace-trimmed, +dainty gray dress, girdled with a broad ribbon just below the breast. + +"Soyez tranquille, Lise, you will always be prettier than anyone +else," replied Anna Pavlovna. + +"You know," said the princess in the same tone of voice and still in +French, turning to a general, "my husband is deserting me? He is going +to get himself killed. Tell me what this wretched war is for?" she +added, addressing Prince Vasili, and without waiting for an answer she +turned to speak to his daughter, the beautiful Helene. + +"What a delightful woman this little princess is!" said Prince +Vasili to Anna Pavlovna. + +One of the next arrivals was a stout, heavily built young man with +close-cropped hair, spectacles, the light-colored breeches fashionable +at that time, a very high ruffle, and a brown dress coat. This stout +young man was an illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov, a well-known +grandee of Catherine's time who now lay dying in Moscow. The young man +had not yet entered either the military or civil service, as he had +only just returned from abroad where he had been educated, and this +was his first appearance in society. Anna Pavlovna greeted him with +the nod she accorded to the lowest hierarchy in her drawing room. +But in spite of this lowest-grade greeting, a look of anxiety and +fear, as at the sight of something too large and unsuited to the +place, came over her face when she saw Pierre enter. Though he was +certainly rather bigger than the other men in the room, her anxiety +could only have reference to the clever though shy, but observant +and natural, expression which distinguished him from everyone else +in that drawing room. + +"It is very good of you, Monsieur Pierre, to come and visit a poor +invalid," said Anna Pavlovna, exchanging an alarmed glance with her +aunt as she conducted him to her. + +Pierre murmured something unintelligible, and continued to look +round as if in search of something. On his way to the aunt he bowed to +the little princess with a pleased smile, as to an intimate +acquaintance. + +Anna Pavlovna's alarm was justified, for Pierre turned away from the +aunt without waiting to hear her speech about Her Majesty's health. +Anna Pavlovna in dismay detained him with the words: "Do you know +the Abbe Morio? He is a most interesting man." + +"Yes, I have heard of his scheme for perpetual peace, and it is very +interesting but hardly feasible." + +"You think so?" rejoined Anna Pavlovna in order to say something and +get away to attend to her duties as hostess. But Pierre now +committed a reverse act of impoliteness. First he had left a lady +before she had finished speaking to him, and now he continued to speak +to another who wished to get away. With his head bent, and his big +feet spread apart, he began explaining his reasons for thinking the +abbe's plan chimerical. + +"We will talk of it later," said Anna Pavlovna with a smile. + +And having got rid of this young man who did not know how to behave, +she resumed her duties as hostess and continued to listen and watch, +ready to help at any point where the conversation might happen to +flag. As the foreman of a spinning mill, when he has set the hands +to work, goes round and notices here a spindle that has stopped or +there one that creaks or makes more noise than it should, and +hastens to check the machine or set it in proper motion, so Anna +Pavlovna moved about her drawing room, approaching now a silent, now a +too-noisy group, and by a word or slight rearrangement kept the +conversational machine in steady, proper, and regular motion. But amid +these cares her anxiety about Pierre was evident. She kept an +anxious watch on him when he approached the group round Mortemart to +listen to what was being said there, and again when he passed to +another group whose center was the abbe. + +Pierre had been educated abroad, and this reception at Anna +Pavlovna's was the first he had attended in Russia. He knew that all +the intellectual lights of Petersburg were gathered there and, like +a child in a toyshop, did not know which way to look, afraid of +missing any clever conversation that was to be heard. Seeing the +self-confident and refined expression on the faces of those present he +was always expecting to hear something very profound. At last he +came up to Morio. Here the conversation seemed interesting and he +stood waiting for an opportunity to express his own views, as young +people are fond of doing. + +CHAPTER III + +Anna Pavlovna's reception was in full swing. The spindles hummed +steadily and ceaselessly on all sides. With the exception of the aunt, +beside whom sat only one elderly lady, who with her thin careworn face +was rather out of place in this brilliant society, the whole company +had settled into three groups. One, chiefly masculine, had formed +round the abbe. Another, of young people, was grouped round the +beautiful Princess Helene, Prince Vasili's daughter, and the little +Princess Bolkonskaya, very pretty and rosy, though rather too plump +for her age. The third group was gathered round Mortemart and Anna +Pavlovna. + +The vicomte was a nice-looking young man with soft features and +polished manners, who evidently considered himself a celebrity but out +of politeness modestly placed himself at the disposal of the circle in +which he found himself. Anna Pavlovna was obviously serving him up +as a treat to her guests. As a clever maitre d'hotel serves up as a +specially choice delicacy a piece of meat that no one who had seen +it in the kitchen would have cared to eat, so Anna Pavlovna served +up to her guests, first the vicomte and then the abbe, as peculiarly +choice morsels. The group about Mortemart immediately began discussing +the murder of the Duc d'Enghien. The vicomte said that the Duc +d'Enghien had perished by his own magnanimity, and that there were +particular reasons for Buonaparte's hatred of him. + +"Ah, yes! Do tell us all about it, Vicomte," said Anna Pavlovna, +with a pleasant feeling that there was something a la Louis XV in +the sound of that sentence: "Contez nous cela, Vicomte." + +The vicomte bowed and smiled courteously in token of his willingness +to comply. Anna Pavlovna arranged a group round him, inviting everyone +to listen to his tale. + +"The vicomte knew the duc personally," whispered Anna Pavlovna to of +the guests. "The vicomte is a wonderful raconteur," said she to +another. "How evidently he belongs to the best society," said she to a +third; and the vicomte was served up to the company in the choicest +and most advantageous style, like a well-garnished joint of roast beef +on a hot dish. + +The vicomte wished to begin his story and gave a subtle smile. + +"Come over here, Helene, dear," said Anna Pavlovna to the +beautiful young princess who was sitting some way off, the center of +another group. + +The princess smiled. She rose with the same unchanging smile with +which she had first entered the room- the smile of a perfectly +beautiful woman. With a slight rustle of her white dress trimmed +with moss and ivy, with a gleam of white shoulders, glossy hair, and +sparkling diamonds, she passed between the men who made way for her, +not looking at any of them but smiling on all, as if graciously +allowing each the privilege of admiring her beautiful figure and +shapely shoulders, back, and bosom- which in the fashion of those days +were very much exposed- and she seemed to bring the glamour of a +ballroom with her as she moved toward Anna Pavlovna. Helene was so +lovely that not only did she not show any trace of coquetry, but on +the contrary she even appeared shy of her unquestionable and all too +victorious beauty. She seemed to wish, but to be unable, to diminish +its effect. + +"How lovely!" said everyone who saw her; and the vicomte lifted +his shoulders and dropped his eyes as if startled by something +extraordinary when she took her seat opposite and beamed upon him also +with her unchanging smile. + +"Madame, I doubt my ability before such an audience," said he, +smilingly inclining his head. + +The princess rested her bare round arm on a little table and +considered a reply unnecessary. She smilingly waited. All the time the +story was being told she sat upright, glancing now at her beautiful +round arm, altered in shape by its pressure on the table, now at her +still more beautiful bosom, on which she readjusted a diamond +necklace. From time to time she smoothed the folds of her dress, and +whenever the story produced an effect she glanced at Anna Pavlovna, at +once adopted just the expression she saw on the maid of honor's +face, and again relapsed into her radiant smile. + +The little princess had also left the tea table and followed Helene. + +"Wait a moment, I'll get my work.... Now then, what are you thinking +of?" she went on, turning to Prince Hippolyte. "Fetch me my workbag." + +There was a general movement as the princess, smiling and talking +merrily to everyone at once, sat down and gaily arranged herself in +her seat. + +"Now I am all right," she said, and asking the vicomte to begin, she +took up her work. + +Prince Hippolyte, having brought the workbag, joined the circle +and moving a chair close to hers seated himself beside her. + +Le charmant Hippolyte was surprising by his extraordinary +resemblance to his beautiful sister, but yet more by the fact that +in spite of this resemblance he was exceedingly ugly. His features +were like his sister's, but while in her case everything was lit up by +a joyous, self-satisfied, youthful, and constant smile of animation, +and by the wonderful classic beauty of her figure, his face on the +contrary was dulled by imbecility and a constant expression of +sullen self-confidence, while his body was thin and weak. His eyes, +nose, and mouth all seemed puckered into a vacant, wearied grimace, +and his arms and legs always fell into unnatural positions. + +"It's not going to be a ghost story?" said he, sitting down beside +the princess and hastily adjusting his lorgnette, as if without this +instrument he could not begin to speak. + +"Why no, my dear fellow," said the astonished narrator, shrugging +his shoulders. + +"Because I hate ghost stories," said Prince Hippolyte in a tone +which showed that he only understood the meaning of his words after he +had uttered them. + +He spoke with such self-confidence that his hearers could not be +sure whether what he said was very witty or very stupid. He was +dressed in a dark-green dress coat, knee breeches of the color of +cuisse de nymphe effrayee, as he called it, shoes, and silk stockings. + +The vicomte told his tale very neatly. It was an anecdote, then +current, to the effect that the Duc d'Enghien had gone secretly to +Paris to visit Mademoiselle George; that at her house he came upon +Bonaparte, who also enjoyed the famous actress' favors, and that in +his presence Napoleon happened to fall into one of the fainting fits +to which he was subject, and was thus at the duc's mercy. The latter +spared him, and this magnanimity Bonaparte subsequently repaid by +death. + +The story was very pretty and interesting, especially at the point +where the rivals suddenly recognized one another; and the ladies +looked agitated. + +"Charming!" said Anna Pavlovna with an inquiring glance at the +little princess. + +"Charming!" whispered the little princess, sticking the needle +into her work as if to testify that the interest and fascination of +the story prevented her from going on with it. + +The vicomte appreciated this silent praise and smiling gratefully +prepared to continue, but just then Anna Pavlovna, who had kept a +watchful eye on the young man who so alarmed her, noticed that he +was talking too loudly and vehemently with the abbe, so she hurried to +the rescue. Pierre had managed to start a conversation with the abbe +about the balance of power, and the latter, evidently interested by +the young man's simple-minded eagerness, was explaining his pet +theory. Both were talking and listening too eagerly and too naturally, +which was why Anna Pavlovna disapproved. + +"The means are... the balance of power in Europe and the rights of +the people," the abbe was saying. "It is only necessary for one +powerful nation like Russia- barbaric as she is said to be- to place +herself disinterestedly at the head of an alliance having for its +object the maintenance of the balance of power of Europe, and it would +save the world!" + +"But how are you to get that balance?" Pierre was beginning. + +At that moment Anna Pavlovna came up and, looking severely at +Pierre, asked the Italian how he stood Russian climate. The +Italian's face instantly changed and assumed an offensively +affected, sugary expression, evidently habitual to him when conversing +with women. + +"I am so enchanted by the brilliancy of the wit and culture of the +society, more especially of the feminine society, in which I have +had the honor of being received, that I have not yet had time to think +of the climate," said he. + +Not letting the abbe and Pierre escape, Anna Pavlovna, the more +conveniently to keep them under observation, brought them into the +larger circle. + +CHAPTER IV + +Just them another visitor entered the drawing room: Prince Andrew +Bolkonski, the little princess' husband. He was a very handsome +young man, of medium height, with firm, clearcut features. +Everything about him, from his weary, bored expression to his quiet, +measured step, offered a most striking contrast to his quiet, little +wife. It was evident that he not only knew everyone in the drawing +room, but had found them to be so tiresome that it wearied him to look +at or listen to them. And among all these faces that he found so +tedious, none seemed to bore him so much as that of his pretty wife. +He turned away from her with a grimace that distorted his handsome +face, kissed Anna Pavlovna's hand, and screwing up his eyes scanned +the whole company. + +"You are off to the war, Prince?" said Anna Pavlovna. + +"General Kutuzov," said Bolkonski, speaking French and stressing the +last syllable of the general's name like a Frenchman, "has been +pleased to take me as an aide-de-camp...." + +"And Lise, your wife?" + +"She will go to the country." + +"Are you not ashamed to deprive us of your charming wife?" + +"Andre," said his wife, addressing her husband in the same +coquettish manner in which she spoke to other men, "the vicomte has +been telling us such a tale about Mademoiselle George and Buonaparte!" + +Prince Andrew screwed up his eyes and turned away. Pierre, who +from the moment Prince Andrew entered the room had watched him with +glad, affectionate eyes, now came up and took his arm. Before he +looked round Prince Andrew frowned again, expressing his annoyance +with whoever was touching his arm, but when he saw Pierre's beaming +face he gave him an unexpectedly kind and pleasant smile. + +"There now!... So you, too, are in the great world?" said he to +Pierre. + +"I knew you would be here," replied Pierre. "I will come to supper +with you. May I?" he added in a low voice so as not to disturb the +vicomte who was continuing his story. + +"No, impossible!" said Prince Andrew, laughing and pressing Pierre's +hand to show that there was no need to ask the question. He wished +to say something more, but at that moment Prince Vasili and his +daughter got up to go and the two young men rose to let them pass. + +"You must excuse me, dear Vicomte," said Prince Vasili to the +Frenchman, holding him down by the sleeve in a friendly way to prevent +his rising. "This unfortunate fete at the ambassador's deprives me +of a pleasure, and obliges me to interrupt you. I am very sorry to +leave your enchanting party," said he, turning to Anna Pavlovna. + +His daughter, Princess Helene, passed between the chairs, lightly +holding up the folds of her dress, and the smile shone still more +radiantly on her beautiful face. Pierre gazed at her with rapturous, +almost frightened, eyes as she passed him. + +"Very lovely," said Prince Andrew. + +"Very," said Pierre. + +In passing Prince Vasili seized Pierre's hand and said to Anna +Pavlovna: "Educate this bear for me! He has been staying with me a +whole month and this is the first time I have seen him in society. +Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the society of clever +women." + +Anna Pavlovna smiled and promised to take Pierre in hand. She knew +his father to be a connection of Prince Vasili's. The elderly lady who +had been sitting with the old aunt rose hurriedly and overtook +Prince Vasili in the anteroom. All the affectation of interest she had +assumed had left her kindly and tearworn face and it now expressed +only anxiety and fear. + +"How about my son Boris, Prince?" said she, hurrying after him +into the anteroom. "I can't remain any longer in Petersburg. Tell me +what news I may take back to my poor boy." + +Although Prince Vasili listened reluctantly and not very politely to +the elderly lady, even betraying some impatience, she gave him an +ingratiating and appealing smile, and took his hand that he might +not go away. + +"What would it cost you to say a word to the Emperor, and then he +would be transferred to the Guards at once?" said she. + +"Believe me, Princess, I am ready to do all I can," answered +Prince Vasili, "but it is difficult for me to ask the Emperor. I +should advise you to appeal to Rumyantsev through Prince Golitsyn. +That would be the best way." + +The elderly lady was a Princess Drubetskaya, belonging to one of the +best families in Russia, but she was poor, and having long been out of +society had lost her former influential connections. She had now +come to Petersburg to procure an appointment in the Guards for her +only son. It was, in fact, solely to meet Prince Vasili that she had +obtained an invitation to Anna Pavlovna's reception and had sat +listening to the vicomte's story. Prince Vasili's words frightened +her, an embittered look clouded her once handsome face, but only for a +moment; then she smiled again and dutched Prince Vasili's arm more +tightly. + +"Listen to me, Prince," said she. "I have never yet asked you for +anything and I never will again, nor have I ever reminded you of my +father's friendship for you; but now I entreat you for God's sake to +do this for my son- and I shall always regard you as a benefactor," +she added hurriedly. "No, don't be angry, but promise! I have asked +Golitsyn and he has refused. Be the kindhearted man you always +were," she said, trying to smile though tears were in her eyes. + +"Papa, we shall be late," said Princess Helene, turning her +beautiful head and looking over her classically molded shoulder as she +stood waiting by the door. + +Influence in society, however, is a capital which has to be +economized if it is to last. Prince Vasili knew this, and having +once realized that if he asked on behalf of all who begged of him, +he would soon be unable to ask for himself, he became chary of using +his influence. But in Princess Drubetskaya's case he felt, after her +second appeal, something like qualms of conscience. She had reminded +him of what was quite true; he had been indebted to her father for the +first steps in his career. Moreover, he could see by her manners +that she was one of those women- mostly mothers- who, having once made +up their minds, will not rest until they have gained their end, and +are prepared if necessary to go on insisting day after day and hour +after hour, and even to make scenes. This last consideration moved +him. + +"My dear Anna Mikhaylovna," said he with his usual familiarity and +weariness of tone, "it is almost impossible for me to do what you ask; +but to prove my devotion to you and how I respect your father's +memory, I will do the impossible- your son shall be transferred to the +Guards. Here is my hand on it. Are you satisfied?" + +"My dear benefactor! This is what I expected from you- I knew your +kindness!" He turned to go. + +"Wait- just a word! When he has been transferred to the Guards..." +she faltered. "You are on good terms with Michael Ilarionovich +Kutuzov... recommend Boris to him as adjutant! Then I shall be at +rest, and then..." + +Prince Vasili smiled. + +"No, I won't promise that. You don't know how Kutuzov is pestered +since his appointment as Commander in Chief. He told me himself that +all the Moscow ladies have conspired to give him all their sons as +adjutants." + +"No, but do promise! I won't let you go! My dear benefactor..." + +"Papa," said his beautiful daughter in the same tone as before, +"we shall be late." + +"Well, au revoir! Good-by! You hear her?" + +"Then tomorrow you will speak to the Emperor?" + +"Certainly; but about Kutuzov, I don't promise." + +"Do promise, do promise, Vasili!" cried Anna Mikhaylovna as he went, +with the smile of a coquettish girl, which at one time probably came +naturally to her, but was now very ill-suited to her careworn face. + +Apparently she had forgotten her age and by force of habit +employed all the old feminine arts. But as soon as the prince had gone +her face resumed its former cold, artificial expression. She +returned to the group where the vicomte was still talking, and again +pretended to listen, while waiting till it would be time to leave. Her +task was accomplished. + +CHAPTER V + +"And what do you think of this latest comedy, the coronation at +Milan?" asked Anna Pavlovna, "and of the comedy of the people of Genoa +and Lucca laying their petitions before Monsieur Buonaparte, and +Monsieur Buonaparte sitting on a throne and granting the petitions +of the nations? Adorable! It is enough to make one's head whirl! It is +as if the whole world had gone crazy." + +Prince Andrew looked Anna Pavlovna straight in the face with a +sarcastic smile. + +"'Dieu me la donne, gare a qui la touche!'~^ They say he was very +fine when he said that," he remarked, repeating the words in +Italian: "'Dio mi l'ha dato. Guai a chi la tocchi!'" + +^~ God has given it to me, let him who touches it beware! + +"I hope this will prove the last drop that will make the glass run +over," Anna Pavlovna continued. "The sovereigns will not be able to +endure this man who is a menace to everything." + +"The sovereigns? I do not speak of Russia," said the vicomte, polite +but hopeless: "The sovereigns, madame... What have they done for Louis +XVII, for the Queen, or for Madame Elizabeth? Nothing!" and he +became more animated. "And believe me, they are reaping the reward +of their betrayal of the Bourbon cause. The sovereigns! Why, they +are sending ambassadors to compliment the usurper." + +And sighing disdainfully, he again changed his position. + +Prince Hippolyte, who had been gazing at the vicomte for some time +through his lorgnette, suddenly turned completely round toward the +little princess, and having asked for a needle began tracing the Conde +coat of arms on the table. He explained this to her with as much +gravity as if she had asked him to do it. + +"Baton de gueules, engrele de gueules d' azur- maison Conde," said +he. + +The princess listened, smiling. + +"If Buonaparte remains on the throne of France a year longer," the +vicomte continued, with the air of a man who, in a matter with which +he is better acquainted than anyone else, does not listen to others +but follows the current of his own thoughts, "things will have gone +too far. By intrigues, violence, exile, and executions, French +society- I mean good French society- will have been forever destroyed, +and then..." + +He shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands. Pierre wished to +make a remark, for the conversation interested him, but Anna Pavlovna, +who had him under observation, interrupted: + +"The Emperor Alexander," said she, with the melancholy which +always accompanied any reference of hers to the Imperial family, +"has declared that he will leave it to the French people themselves to +choose their own form of government; and I believe that once free from +the usurper, the whole nation will certainly throw itself into the +arms of its rightful king," she concluded, trying to be amiable to the +royalist emigrant. + +"That is doubtful," said Prince Andrew. "Monsieur le Vicomte quite +rightly supposes that matters have already gone too far. I think it +will be difficult to return to the old regime." + +"From what I have heard," said Pierre, blushing and breaking into +the conversation, "almost all the aristocracy has already gone over to +Bonaparte's side." + +"It is the Buonapartists who say that," replied the vicomte +without looking at Pierre. "At the present time it is difficult to +know the real state of French public opinion. + +"Bonaparte has said so," remarked Prince Andrew with a sarcastic +smile. + +It was evident that he did not like the vicomte and was aiming his +remarks at him, though without looking at him. + +"'I showed them the path to glory, but they did not follow it,'" +Prince Andrew continued after a short silence, again quoting +Napoleon's words. "'I opened my antechambers and they crowded in.' I +do not know how far he was justified in saying so." + +"Not in the least," replied the vicomte. "After the murder of the +duc even the most partial ceased to regard him as a hero. If to some +people," he went on, turning to Anna Pavlovna, "he ever was a hero, +after the murder of the duc there was one martyr more in heaven and +one hero less on earth." + +Before Anna Pavlovna and the others had time to smile their +appreciation of the vicomte's epigram, Pierre again broke into the +conversation, and though Anna Pavlovna felt sure he would say +something inappropriate, she was unable to stop him. + +"The execution of the Duc d'Enghien," declared Monsieur Pierre, "was +a political necessity, and it seems to me that Napoleon showed +greatness of soul by not fearing to take on himself the whole +responsibility of that deed." + +"Dieu! Mon Dieu!" muttered Anna Pavlovna in a terrified whisper. + +"What, Monsieur Pierre... Do you consider that assassination shows +greatness of soul?" said the little princess, smiling and drawing +her work nearer to her. + +"Oh! Oh!" exclaimed several voices. + +"Capital!" said Prince Hippolyte in English, and began slapping +his knee with the palm of his hand. + +The vicomte merely shrugged his shoulders. Pierre looked solemnly at +his audience over his spectacles and continued. + +"I say so," he continued desperately, "because the Bourbons fled +from the Revolution leaving the people to anarchy, and Napoleon +alone understood the Revolution and quelled it, and so for the general +good, he could not stop short for the sake of one man's life." + +"Won't you come over to the other table?" suggested Anna Pavlovna. + +But Pierre continued his speech without heeding her. + +"No," cried he, becoming more and more eager, "Napoleon is great +because he rose superior to the Revolution, suppressed its abuses, +preserved all that was good in it- equality of citizenship and freedom +of speech and of the press- and only for that reason did he obtain +power." + +"Yes, if having obtained power, without availing himself of it to +commit murder he had restored it to the rightful king, I should have +called him a great man," remarked the vicomte. + +"He could not do that. The people only gave him power that he +might rid them of the Bourbons and because they saw that he was a +great man. The Revolution was a grand thing!" continued Monsieur +Pierre, betraying by this desperate and provocative proposition his +extreme youth and his wish to express all that was in his mind. + +"What? Revolution and regicide a grand thing?... Well, after that... +But won't you come to this other table?" repeated Anna Pavlovna. + +"Rousseau's Contrat social," said the vicomte with a tolerant smile. + +"I am not speaking of regicide, I am speaking about ideas." + +"Yes: ideas of robbery, murder, and regicide," again interjected +an ironical voice. + +"Those were extremes, no doubt, but they are not what is most +important. What is important are the rights of man, emancipation +from prejudices, and equality of citizenship, and all these ideas +Napoleon has retained in full force." + +"Liberty and equality," said the vicomte contemptuously, as if at +last deciding seriously to prove to this youth how foolish his words +were, "high-sounding words which have long been discredited. Who +does not love liberty and equality? Even our Saviour preached +liberty and equality. Have people since the Revolution become happier? +On the contrary. We wanted liberty, but Buonaparte has destroyed it." + +Prince Andrew kept looking with an amused smile from Pierre to the +vicomte and from the vicomte to their hostess. In the first moment +of Pierre's outburst Anna Pavlovna, despite her social experience, was +horror-struck. But when she saw that Pierre's sacrilegious words had +not exasperated the vicomte, and had convinced herself that it was +impossible to stop him, she rallied her forces and joined the +vicomte in a vigorous attack on the orator. + +"But, my dear Monsieur Pierre," said she, "how do you explain the +fact of a great man executing a duc- or even an ordinary man who- is +innocent and untried?" + +"I should like," said the vicomte, "to ask how monsieur explains the +18th Brumaire; was not that an imposture? It was a swindle, and not at +all like the conduct of a great man!" + +"And the prisoners he killed in Africa? That was horrible!" said the +little princess, shrugging her shoulders. + +"He's a low fellow, say what you will," remarked Prince Hippolyte. + +Pierre, not knowing whom to answer, looked at them all and smiled. +His smile was unlike the half-smile of other people. When he smiled, +his grave, even rather gloomy, look was instantaneously replaced by +another- a childlike, kindly, even rather silly look, which seemed +to ask forgiveness. + +The vicomte who was meeting him for the first time saw clearly +that this young Jacobin was not so terrible as his words suggested. +All were silent. + +"How do you expect him to answer you all at once?" said Prince +Andrew. "Besides, in the actions of a statesman one has to distinguish +between his acts as a private person, as a general, and as an emperor. +So it seems to me." + +"Yes, yes, of course!" Pierre chimed in, pleased at the arrival of +this reinforcement. + +"One must admit," continued Prince Andrew, "that Napoleon as a man +was great on the bridge of Arcola, and in the hospital at Jaffa +where he gave his hand to the plague-stricken; but... but there are +other acts which it is difficult to justify." + +Prince Andrew, who had evidently wished to tone down the awkwardness +of Pierre's remarks, rose and made a sign to his wife that it was time +to go. + +Suddenly Prince Hippolyte started up making signs to everyone to +attend, and asking them all to be seated began: + +"I was told a charming Moscow story today and must treat you to +it. Excuse me, Vicomte- I must tell it in Russian or the point will be +lost...." And Prince Hippolyte began to tell his story in such Russian +as a Frenchman would speak after spending about a year in Russia. +Everyone waited, so emphatically and eagerly did he demand their +attention to his story. + +"There is in Moscow a lady, une dame, and she is very stingy. She +must have two footmen behind her carriage, and very big ones. That was +her taste. And she had a lady's maid, also big. She said..." + +Here Prince Hippolyte paused, evidently collecting his ideas with +difficulty. + +"She said... Oh yes! She said, 'Girl,' to the maid, 'put on a +livery, get up behind the carriage, and come with me while I make some +calls.'" + +Here Prince Hippolyte spluttered and burst out laughing long +before his audience, which produced an effect unfavorable to the +narrator. Several persons, among them the elderly lady and Anna +Pavlovna, did however smile. + +"She went. Suddenly there was a great wind. The girl lost her hat +and her long hair came down...." Here he could contain himself no +longer and went on, between gasps of laughter: "And the whole world +knew...." + +And so the anecdote ended. Though it was unintelligible why he had +told it, or why it had to be told in Russian, still Anna Pavlovna +and the others appreciated Prince Hippolyte's social tact in so +agreeably ending Pierre's unpleasant and unamiable outburst. After the +anecdote the conversation broke up into insignificant small talk about +the last and next balls, about theatricals, and who would meet whom, +and when and where. + +CHAPTER VI + +Having thanked Anna Pavlovna for her charming soiree, the guests +began to take their leave. + +Pierre was ungainly. Stout, about the average height, broad, with +huge red hands; he did not know, as the saying is, to enter a +drawing room and still less how to leave one; that is, how to say +something particularly agreeable before going away. Besides this he +was absent-minded. When he rose to go, he took up instead of his +own, the general's three-cornered hat, and held it, pulling at the +plume, till the general asked him to restore it. All his +absent-mindedness and inability to enter a room and converse in it +was, however, redeemed by his kindly, simple, and modest expression. +Anna Pavlovna turned toward him and, with a Christian mildness that +expressed forgiveness of his indiscretion, nodded and said: "I hope to +see you again, but I also hope you will change your opinions, my +dear Monsieur Pierre." + +When she said this, he did not reply and only bowed, but again +everybody saw his smile, which said nothing, unless perhaps, "Opinions +are opinions, but you see what a capital, good-natured fellow I am." +And everyone, including Anna Pavlovna, felt this. + +Prince Andrew had gone out into the hall, and, turning his shoulders +to the footman who was helping him on with his cloak, listened +indifferently to his wife's chatter with Prince Hippolyte who had also +come into the hall. Prince Hippolyte stood close to the pretty, +pregnant princess, and stared fixedly at her through his eyeglass. + +"Go in, Annette, or you will catch cold," said the little +princess, taking leave of Anna Pavlovna. "It is settled," she added in +a low voice. + +Anna Pavlovna had already managed to speak to Lise about the match +she contemplated between Anatole and the little princess' +sister-in-law. + +"I rely on you, my dear," said Anna Pavlovna, also in a low tone. +"Write to her and let me know how her father looks at the matter. Au +revoir!"- and she left the hall. + +Prince Hippolyte approached the little princess and, bending his +face close to her, began to whisper something. + +Two footmen, the princess' and his own, stood holding a shawl and +a cloak, waiting for the conversation to finish. They listened to +the French sentences which to them were meaningless, with an air of +understanding but not wishing to appear to do so. The princess as +usual spoke smilingly and listened with a laugh. + +"I am very glad I did not go to the ambassador's," said Prince +Hippolyte "-so dull-. It has been a delightful evening, has it not? +Delightful!" + +"They say the ball will be very good," replied the princess, drawing +up her downy little lip. "All the pretty women in society will be +there." + +"Not all, for you will not be there; not all," said Prince Hippolyte +smiling joyfully; and snatching the shawl from the footman, whom he +even pushed aside, he began wrapping it round the princess. Either +from awkwardness or intentionally (no one could have said which) after +the shawl had been adjusted he kept his arm around her for a long +time, as though embracing her. + +Still smiling, she gracefully moved away, turning and glancing at +her husband. Prince Andrew's eyes were closed, so weary and sleepy did +he seem. + +"Are you ready?" he asked his wife, looking past her. + +Prince Hippolyte hurriedly put on his cloak, which in the latest +fashion reached to his very heels, and, stumbling in it, ran out +into the porch following the princess, whom a footman was helping into +the carriage. + +"Princesse, au revoir," cried he, stumbling with his tongue as +well as with his feet. + +The princess, picking up her dress, was taking her seat in the +dark carriage, her husband was adjusting his saber; Prince +Hippolyte, under pretense of helping, was in everyone's way. + +"Allow me, sir," said Prince Andrew in Russian in a cold, +disagreeable tone to Prince Hippolyte who was blocking his path. + +"I am expecting you, Pierre," said the same voice, but gently and +affectionately. + +The postilion started, the carriage wheels rattled. Prince Hippolyte +laughed spasmodically as he stood in the porch waiting for the vicomte +whom he had promised to take home. + +"Well, mon cher," said the vicomte, having seated himself beside +Hippolyte in the carriage, "your little princess is very nice, very +nice indeed, quite French," and he kissed the tips of his fingers. +Hippolyte burst out laughing. + +"Do you know, you are a terrible chap for all your innocent airs," +continued the vicomte. "I pity the poor husband, that little officer +who gives himself the airs of a monarch." + +Hippolyte spluttered again, and amid his laughter said, "And you +were saying that the Russian ladies are not equal to the French? One +has to know how to deal with them." + +Pierre reaching the house first went into Prince Andrew's study like +one quite at home, and from habit immediately lay down on the sofa, +took from the shelf the first book that came to his hand (it was +Caesar's Commentaries), and resting on his elbow, began reading it +in the middle. + +"What have you done to Mlle Scherer? She will be quite ill now," +said Prince Andrew, as he entered the study, rubbing his small white +hands. + +Pierre turned his whole body, making the sofa creak. He lifted his +eager face to Prince Andrew, smiled, and waved his hand. + +"That abbe is very interesting but he does not see the thing in +the right light.... In my opinion perpetual peace is possible but- I +do not know how to express it... not by a balance of political +power...." + +It was evident that Prince Andrew was not interested in such +abstract conversation. + +"One can't everywhere say all one thinks, mon cher. Well, have you +at last decided on anything? Are you going to be a guardsman or a +diplomatist?" asked Prince Andrew after a momentary silence. + +Pierre sat up on the sofa, with his legs tucked under him. + +"Really, I don't yet know. I don't like either the one or the +other." + +"But you must decide on something! Your father expects it." + +Pierre at the age of ten had been sent abroad with an abbe as tutor, +and had remained away till he was twenty. When he returned to Moscow +his father dismissed the abbe and said to the young man, "Now go to +Petersburg, look round, and choose your profession. I will agree to +anything. Here is a letter to Prince Vasili, and here is money. +Write to me all about it, and I will help you in everything." Pierre +had already been choosing a career for three months, and had not +decided on anything. It was about this choice that Prince Andrew was +speaking. Pierre rubbed his forehead. + +"But he must be a Freemason," said he, referring to the abbe whom he +had met that evening. + +"That is all nonsense." Prince Andrew again interrupted him, "let us +talk business. Have you been to the Horse Guards?" + +"No, I have not; but this is what I have been thinking and wanted to +tell you. There is a war now against Napoleon. If it were a war for +freedom I could understand it and should be the first to enter the +army; but to help England and Austria against the greatest man in +the world is not right." + +Prince Andrew only shrugged his shoulders at Pierre's childish +words. He put on the air of one who finds it impossible to reply to +such nonsense, but it would in fact have been difficult to give any +other answer than the one Prince Andrew gave to this naive question. + +"If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no +wars," he said. + +"And that would be splendid," said Pierre. + +Prince Andrew smiled ironically. + +"Very likely it would be splendid, but it will never come about..." + +"Well, why are you going to the war?" asked Pierre. + +"What for? I don't know. I must. Besides that I am going..." He +paused. "I am going because the life I am leading here does not suit +me!" + +CHAPTER VII + +The rustle of a woman's dress was heard in the next room. Prince +Andrew shook himself as if waking up, and his face assumed the look it +had had in Anna Pavlovna's drawing room. Pierre removed his feet +from the sofa. The princess came in. She had changed her gown for a +house dress as fresh and elegant as the other. Prince Andrew rose +and politely placed a chair for her. + +"How is it," she began, as usual in French, settling down briskly +and fussily in the easy chair, "how is it Annette never got married? +How stupid you men all are not to have married her! Excuse me for +saying so, but you have no sense about women. What an argumentative +fellow you are, Monsieur Pierre!" + +"And I am still arguing with your husband. I can't understand why he +wants to go to the war," replied Pierre, addressing the princess +with none of the embarrassment so commonly shown by young men in their +intercourse with young women. + +The princess started. Evidently Pierre's words touched her to the +quick. + +"Ah, that is just what I tell him!" said she. "I don't understand +it; I don't in the least understand why men can't live without wars. +How is it that we women don't want anything of the kind, don't need +it? Now you shall judge between us. I always tell him: Here he is +Uncle's aide-de-camp, a most brilliant position. He is so well +known, so much appreciated by everyone. The other day at the +Apraksins' I heard a lady asking, 'Is that the famous Prince +Andrew?' I did indeed." She laughed. "He is so well received +everywhere. He might easily become aide-de-camp to the Emperor. You +know the Emperor spoke to him most graciously. Annette and I were +speaking of how to arrange it. What do you think?" + +Pierre looked at his friend and, noticing that he did not like the +conversation, gave no reply. + +"When are you starting?" he asked. + +"Oh, don't speak of his going, don't! I won't hear it spoken of," +said the princess in the same petulantly playful tone in which she had +spoken to Hippolyte in the drawing room and which was so plainly +ill-suited to the family circle of which Pierre was almost a member. +"Today when I remembered that all these delightful associations must +be broken off... and then you know, Andre..." (she looked +significantly at her husband) "I'm afraid, I'm afraid!" she whispered, +and a shudder ran down her back. + +Her husband looked at her as if surprised to notice that someone +besides Pierre and himself was in the room, and addressed her in a +tone of frigid politeness. + +"What is it you are afraid of, Lise? I don't understand," said he. + +"There, what egotists men all are: all, all egotists! Just for a +whim of his own, goodness only knows why, he leaves me and locks me up +alone in the country." + +"With my father and sister, remember," said Prince Andrew gently. + +"Alone all the same, without my friends.... And he expects me not to +be afraid." + +Her tone was now querulous and her lip drawn up, giving her not a +joyful, but an animal, squirrel-like expression. She paused as if +she felt it indecorous to speak of her pregnancy before Pierre, though +the gist of the matter lay in that. + +"I still can't understand what you are afraid of," said Prince +Andrew slowly, not taking his eyes off his wife. + +The princess blushed, and raised her arms with a gesture of despair. + +"No, Andrew, I must say you have changed. Oh, how you have..." + +"Your doctor tells you to go to bed earlier," said Prince Andrew. +"You had better go." + +The princess said nothing, but suddenly her short downy lip +quivered. Prince Andrew rose, shrugged his shoulders, and walked about +the room. + +Pierre looked over his spectacles with naive surprise, now at him +and now at her, moved as if about to rise too, but changed his mind. + +"Why should I mind Monsieur Pierre being here?" exclaimed the little +princess suddenly, her pretty face all at once distorted by a +tearful grimace. "I have long wanted to ask you, Andrew, why you +have changed so to me? What have I done to you? You are going to the +war and have no pity for me. Why is it?" + +"Lise!" was all Prince Andrew said. But that one word expressed an +entreaty, a threat, and above all conviction that she would herself +regret her words. But she went on hurriedly: + +"You treat me like an invalid or a child. I see it all! Did you +behave like that six months ago?" + +"Lise, I beg you to desist," said Prince Andrew still more +emphatically. + +Pierre, who had been growing more and more agitated as he listened +to all this, rose and approached the princess. He seemed unable to +bear the sight of tears and was ready to cry himself. + +"Calm yourself, Princess! It seems so to you because... I assure you +I myself have experienced... and so... because... No, excuse me! An +outsider is out of place here... No, don't distress yourself... +Good-by!" + +Prince Andrew caught him by the hand. + +"No, wait, Pierre! The princess is too kind to wish to deprive me of +the pleasure of spending the evening with you." + +"No, he thinks only of himself," muttered the princess without +restraining her angry tears. + +"Lise!" said Prince Andrew dryly, raising his voice to the pitch +which indicates that patience is exhausted. + +Suddenly the angry, squirrel-like expression of the princess' pretty +face changed into a winning and piteous look of fear. Her beautiful +eyes glanced askance at her husband's face, and her own assumed the +timid, deprecating expression of a dog when it rapidly but feebly wags +its drooping tail. + +"Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!" she muttered, and lifting her dress with one +hand she went up to her husband and kissed him on the forehead. + +"Good night, Lise," said he, rising and courteously kissing her hand +as he would have done to a stranger. + +CHAPTER VIII + +The friends were silent. Neither cared to begin talking. Pierre +continually glanced at Prince Andrew; Prince Andrew rubbed his +forehead with his small hand. + +"Let us go and have supper," he said with a sigh, going to the door. + +They entered the elegant, newly decorated, and luxurious dining +room. Everything from the table napkins to the silver, china, and +glass bore that imprint of newness found in the households of the +newly married. Halfway through supper Prince Andrew leaned his +elbows on the table and, with a look of nervous agitation such as +Pierre had never before seen on his face, began to talk- as one who +has long had something on his mind and suddenly determines to speak +out. + +"Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That's my advice: never marry +till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable +of, and until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and +have seen her plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and +irrevocable mistake. Marry when you are old and good for nothing- or +all that is good and noble in you will be lost. It will all be +wasted on trifles. Yes! Yes! Yes! Don't look at me with such surprise. +If you marry expecting anything from yourself in the future, you +will feel at every step that for you all is ended, all is closed +except the drawing room, where you will be ranged side by side with +a court lackey and an idiot!... But what's the good?..." and he +waved his arm. + +Pierre took off his spectacles, which made his face seem different +and the good-natured expression still more apparent, and gazed at +his friend in amazement. + +"My wife," continued Prince Andrew, "is an excellent woman, one of +those rare women with whom a man's honor is safe; but, O God, what +would I not give now to be unmarried! You are the first and only one +to whom I mention this, because I like you." + +As he said this Prince Andrew was less than ever like that Bolkonski +who had lolled in Anna Pavlovna's easy chairs and with half-closed +eyes had uttered French phrases between his teeth. Every muscle of his +thin face was now quivering with nervous excitement; his eyes, in +which the fire of life had seemed extinguished, now flashed with +brilliant light. It was evident that the more lifeless he seemed at +ordinary times, the more impassioned he became in these moments of +almost morbid irritation. + +"You don't understand why I say this," he continued, "but it is +the whole story of life. You talk of Bonaparte and his career," said +he (though Pierre had not mentioned Bonaparte), "but Bonaparte when he +worked went step by step toward his goal. He was free, he had +nothing but his aim to consider, and he reached it. But tie yourself +up with a woman and, like a chained convict, you lose all freedom! And +all you have of hope and strength merely weighs you down and +torments you with regret. Drawing rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, and +triviality- these are the enchanted circle I cannot escape from. I +am now going to the war, the greatest war there ever was, and I know +nothing and am fit for nothing. I am very amiable and have a caustic +wit," continued Prince Andrew, "and at Anna Pavlovna's they listen +to me. And that stupid set without whom my wife cannot exist, and +those women... If you only knew what those society women are, and +women in general! My father is right. Selfish, vain, stupid, trivial +in everything- that's what women are when you see them in their true +colors! When you meet them in society it seems as if there were +something in them, but there's nothing, nothing, nothing! No, don't +marry, my dear fellow; don't marry!" concluded Prince Andrew. + +"It seems funny to me," said Pierre, "that you, you should +consider yourself incapable and your life a spoiled life. You have +everything before you, everything. And you..." + +He did not finish his sentence, but his tone showed how highly he +thought of his friend and how much he expected of him in the future. + +"How can he talk like that?" thought Pierre. He considered his +friend a model of perfection because Prince Andrew possessed in the +highest degree just the very qualities Pierre lacked, and which +might be best described as strength of will. Pierre was always +astonished at Prince Andrew's calm manner of treating everybody, his +extraordinary memory, his extensive reading (he had read everything, +knew everything, and had an opinion about everything), but above all +at his capacity for work and study. And if Pierre was often struck +by Andrew's lack of capacity for philosophical meditation (to which he +himself was particularly addicted), he regarded even this not as a +defect but as a sign of strength. + +Even in the best, most friendly and simplest relations of life, +praise and commendation are essential, just as grease is necessary +to wheels that they may run smoothly. + +"My part is played out," said Prince Andrew. "What's the use of +talking about me? Let us talk about you," he added after a silence, +smiling at his reassuring thoughts. + +That smile was immediately reflected on Pierre's face. + +"But what is there to say about me?" said Pierre, his face +relaxing into a careless, merry smile. "What am I? An illegitimate +son!" He suddenly blushed crimson, and it was plain that he had made a +great effort to say this. "Without a name and without means... And +it really..." But he did not say what "it really" was. "For the +present I am free and am all right. Only I haven't the least idea what +I am to do; I wanted to consult you seriously." + +Prince Andrew looked kindly at him, yet his glance- friendly and +affectionate as it was- expressed a sense of his own superiority. + +"I am fond of you, especially as you are the one live man among +our whole set. Yes, you're all right! Choose what you will; it's all +the same. You'll be all right anywhere. But look here: give up +visiting those Kuragins and leading that sort of life. It suits you so +badly- all this debauchery, dissipation, and the rest of it!" + +"What would you have, my dear fellow?" answered Pierre, shrugging +his shoulders. "Women, my dear fellow; women!" + +"I don't understand it," replied Prince Andrew. "Women who are comme +il faut, that's a different matter; but the Kuragins' set of women, +'women and wine' I don't understand!" + +Pierre was staying at Prince Vasili Kuragin's and sharing the +dissipated life of his son Anatole, the son whom they were planning to +reform by marrying him to Prince Andrew's sister. + +"Do you know?" said Pierre, as if suddenly struck by a happy +thought, "seriously, I have long been thinking of it.... Leading +such a life I can't decide or think properly about anything. One's +head aches, and one spends all one's money. He asked me for tonight, +but I won't go." + +"You give me your word of honor not to go?" + +"On my honor!" + +CHAPTER IX + +It was past one o'clock when Pierre left his friend. It was a +cloudless, northern, summer night. Pierre took an open cab intending +to drive straight home. But the nearer he drew to the house the more +he felt the impossibility of going to sleep on such a night. It was +light enough to see a long way in the deserted street and it seemed +more like morning or evening than night. On the way Pierre +remembered that Anatole Kuragin was expecting the usual set for +cards that evening, after which there was generally a drinking bout, +finishing with visits of a kind Pierre was very fond of. + +"I should like to go to Kuragin's," thought he. + +But he immediately recalled his promise to Prince Andrew not to go +there. Then, as happens to people of weak character, he desired so +passionately once more to enjoy that dissipation he was so +accustomed to that he decided to go. The thought immediately +occurred to him that his promise to Prince Andrew was of no account, +because before he gave it he had already promised Prince Anatole to +come to his gathering; "besides," thought he, "all such 'words of +honor' are conventional things with no definite meaning, especially if +one considers that by tomorrow one may be dead, or something so +extraordinary may happen to one that honor and dishonor will be all +the same!" Pierre often indulged in reflections of this sort, +nullifying all his decisions and intentions. He went to Kuragin's. + +Reaching the large house near the Horse Guards' barracks, in which +Anatole lived, Pierre entered the lighted porch, ascended the +stairs, and went in at the open door. There was no one in the +anteroom; empty bottles, cloaks, and overshoes were lying about; there +was a smell of alcohol, and sounds of voices and shouting in the +distance. + +Cards and supper were over, but the visitors had not yet +dispersed. Pierre threw off his cloak and entered the first room, in +which were the remains of supper. A footman, thinking no one saw +him, was drinking on the sly what was left in the glasses. From the +third room came sounds of laughter, the shouting of familiar voices, +the growling of a bear, and general commotion. Some eight or nine +young men were crowding anxiously round an open window. Three others +were romping with a young bear, one pulling him by the chain and +trying to set him at the others. + +"I bet a hundred on Stevens!" shouted one. + +"Mind, no holding on!" cried another. + +"I bet on Dolokhov!" cried a third. "Kuragin, you part our hands." + +"There, leave Bruin alone; here's a bet on." + +"At one draught, or he loses!" shouted a fourth. + +"Jacob, bring a bottle!" shouted the host, a tall, handsome fellow +who stood in the midst of the group, without a coat, and with his fine +linen shirt unfastened in front. "Wait a bit, you fellows.... Here +is Petya! Good man!" cried he, addressing Pierre. + +Another voice, from a man of medium height with clear blue eyes, +particularly striking among all these drunken voices by its sober +ring, cried from the window: "Come here; part the bets!" This was +Dolokhov, an officer of the Semenov regiment, a notorious gambler +and duelist, who was living with Anatole. Pierre smiled, looking about +him merrily. + +"I don't understand. What's it all about?" + +"Wait a bit, he is not drunk yet! A bottle here," said Anatole, +taking a glass from the table he went up to Pierre. + +"First of all you must drink!" + +Pierre drank one glass after another, looking from under his brows +at the tipsy guests who were again crowding round the window, and +listening to their chatter. Anatole kept on refilling Pierre's glass +while explaining that Dolokhov was betting with Stevens, an English +naval officer, that he would drink a bottle of rum sitting on the +outer ledge of the third floor window with his legs hanging out. + +"Go on, you must drink it all," said Anatole, giving Pierre the last +glass, "or I won't let you go!" + +"No, I won't," said Pierre, pushing Anatole aside, and he went up to +the window. + +Dolokhov was holding the Englishman's hand and clearly and +distinctly repeating the terms of the bet, addressing himself +particularly to Anatole and Pierre. + +Dolokhov was of medium height, with curly hair and light-blue +eyes. He was about twenty-five. Like all infantry officers he wore +no mustache, so that his mouth, the most striking feature of his face, +was clearly seen. The lines of that mouth were remarkably finely +curved. The middle of the upper lip formed a sharp wedge and closed +firmly on the firm lower one, and something like two distinct smiles +played continually round the two corners of the mouth; this, +together with the resolute, insolent intelligence of his eyes, +produced an effect which made it impossible not to notice his face. +Dolokhov was a man of small means and no connections. Yet, though +Anatole spent tens of thousands of rubles, Dolokhov lived with him and +had placed himself on such a footing that all who knew them, including +Anatole himself, respected him more than they did Anatole. Dolokhov +could play all games and nearly always won. However much he drank, +he never lost his clearheadedness. Both Kuragin and Dolokhov were at +that time notorious among the rakes and scapegraces of Petersburg. + +The bottle of rum was brought. The window frame which prevented +anyone from sitting on the outer sill was being forced out by two +footmen, who were evidently flurried and intimidated by the directions +and shouts of the gentlemen around. + +Anatole with his swaggering air strode up to the window. He wanted +to smash something. Pushing away the footmen he tugged at the frame, +but could not move it. He smashed a pane. + +"You have a try, Hercules," said he, turning to Pierre. + +Pierre seized the crossbeam, tugged, and wrenched the oak frame +out with a crash. + +"Take it right out, or they'll think I'm holding on," said Dolokhov. + +"Is the Englishman bragging?... Eh? Is it all right?" said Anatole. + +"First-rate," said Pierre, looking at Dolokhov, who with a bottle of +rum in his hand was approaching the window, from which the light of +the sky, the dawn merging with the afterglow of sunset, was visible. + +Dolokhov, the bottle of rum still in his hand, jumped onto the +window sill. "Listen!" cried he, standing there and addressing those +in the room. All were silent. + +"I bet fifty imperials"- he spoke French that the Englishman might +understand him, but he did, not speak it very well- "I bet fifty +imperials... or do you wish to make it a hundred?" added he, +addressing the Englishman. + +"No, fifty," replied the latter. + +"All right. Fifty imperials... that I will drink a whole bottle of +rum without taking it from my mouth, sitting outside the window on +this spot" (he stooped and pointed to the sloping ledge outside the +window) "and without holding on to anything. Is that right?" + +"Quite right," said the Englishman. + +Anatole turned to the Englishman and taking him by one of the +buttons of his coat and looking down at him- the Englishman was short- +began repeating the terms of the wager to him in English. + +"Wait!" cried Dolokhov, hammering with the bottle on the window sill +to attract attention. "Wait a bit, Kuragin. Listen! If anyone else +does the same, I will pay him a hundred imperials. Do you understand?" + +The Englishman nodded, but gave no indication whether he intended to +accept this challenge or not. Anatole did not release him, and +though he kept nodding to show that he understood, Anatole went on +translating Dolokhov's words into English. A thin young lad, an hussar +of the Life Guards, who had been losing that evening, climbed on the +window sill, leaned over, and looked down. + +"Oh! Oh! Oh!" he muttered, looking down from the window at the +stones of the pavement. + +"Shut up!" cried Dolokhov, pushing him away from the window. The lad +jumped awkwardly back into the room, tripping over his spurs. + +Placing the bottle on the window sill where he could reach it +easily, Dolokhov climbed carefully and slowly through the window and +lowered his legs. Pressing against both sides of the window, he +adjusted himself on his seat, lowered his hands, moved a little to the +right and then to the left, and took up the bottle. Anatole brought +two candles and placed them on the window sill, though it was +already quite light. Dolokhov's back in his white shirt, and his curly +head, were lit up from both sides. Everyone crowded to the window, the +Englishman in front. Pierre stood smiling but silent. One man, older +than the others present, suddenly pushed forward with a scared and +angry look and wanted to seize hold of Dolokhov's shirt. + +"I say, this is folly! He'll be killed," said this more sensible +man. + +Anatole stopped him. + +"Don't touch him! You'll startle him and then he'll be killed. +Eh?... What then?... Eh?" + +Dolokhov turned round and, again holding on with both hands, +arranged himself on his seat. + +"If anyone comes meddling again," said he, emitting the words +separately through his thin compressed lips, "I will throw him down +there. Now then!" + +Saying this he again turned round, dropped his hands, took the +bottle and lifted it to his lips, threw back his head, and raised +his free hand to balance himself. One of the footmen who had stooped +to pick up some broken glass remained in that position without +taking his eyes from the window and from Dolokhov's back. Anatole +stood erect with staring eyes. The Englishman looked on sideways, +pursing up his lips. The man who had wished to stop the affair ran +to a corner of the room and threw himself on a sofa with his face to +the wall. Pierre hid his face, from which a faint smile forgot to fade +though his features now expressed horror and fear. All were still. +Pierre took his hands from his eyes. Dolokhov still sat in the same +position, only his head was thrown further back till his curly hair +touched his shirt collar, and the hand holding the bottle was lifted +higher and higher and trembled with the effort. The bottle was +emptying perceptibly and rising still higher and his head tilting +yet further back. "Why is it so long?" thought Pierre. It seemed to +him that more than half an hour had elapsed. Suddenly Dolokhov made +a backward movement with his spine, and his arm trembled nervously; +this was sufficient to cause his whole body to slip as he sat on the +sloping ledge. As he began slipping down, his head and arm wavered +still more with the strain. One hand moved as if to clutch the +window sill, but refrained from touching it. Pierre again covered +his eyes and thought he would never never them again. Suddenly he +was aware of a stir all around. He looked up: Dolokhov was standing on +the window sill, with a pale but radiant face. + +"It's empty." + +He threw the bottle to the Englishman, who caught it neatly. +Dolokhov jumped down. He smelt strongly of rum. + +"Well done!... Fine fellow!... There's a bet for you!... Devil +take you!" came from different sides. + +The Englishman took out his purse and began counting out the +money. Dolokhov stood frowning and did not speak. Pierre jumped upon +the window sill. + +"Gentlemen, who wishes to bet with me? I'll do the same thing!" he +suddenly cried. "Even without a bet, there! Tell them to bring me a +bottle. I'll do it.... Bring a bottle!" + +"Let him do it, let him do it," said Dolokhov, smiling. + +"What next? Have you gone mad?... No one would let you!... Why, +you go giddy even on a staircase," exclaimed several voices. + +"I'll drink it! Let's have a bottle of rum!" shouted Pierre, banging +the table with a determined and drunken gesture and preparing to climb +out of the window. + +They seized him by his arms; but he was so strong that everyone +who touched him was sent flying. + +"No, you'll never manage him that way," said Anatole. "Wait a bit +and I'll get round him.... Listen! I'll take your bet tomorrow, but +now we are all going to -'s." + +"Come on then," cried Pierre. "Come on!... And we'll take Bruin with +us." + +And he caught the bear, took it in his arms, lifted it from the +ground, and began dancing round the room with it. + +CHAPTER X + +Prince Vasili kept the promise he had given to Princess +Drubetskaya who had spoken to him on behalf of her only son Boris on +the evening of Anna Pavlovna's soiree. The matter was mentioned to the +Emperor, an exception made, and Boris transferred into the regiment of +Semenov Guards with the rank of cornet. He received, however, no +appointment to Kutuzov's staff despite all Anna Mikhaylovna's +endeavors and entreaties. Soon after Anna Pavlovna's reception Anna +Mikhaylovna returned to Moscow and went straight to her rich +relations, the Rostovs, with whom she stayed when in the town and +where and where her darling Bory, who had only just entered a regiment +of the line and was being at once transferred to the Guards as a +cornet, had been educated from childhood and lived for years at a +time. The Guards had already left Petersburg on the tenth of August, +and her son, who had remained in Moscow for his equipment, was to join +them on the march to Radzivilov. + +It was St. Natalia's day and the name day of two of the Rostovs- the +mother and the youngest daughter- both named Nataly. Ever since the +morning, carriages with six horses had been coming and going +continually, bringing visitors to the Countess Rostova's big house +on the Povarskaya, so well known to all Moscow. The countess herself +and her handsome eldest daughter were in the drawing-room with the +visitors who came to congratulate, and who constantly succeeded one +another in relays. + +The countess was a woman of about forty-five, with a thin Oriental +type of face, evidently worn out with childbearing- she had had +twelve. A languor of motion and speech, resulting from weakness, +gave her a distinguished air which inspired respect. Princess Anna +Mikhaylovna Drubetskaya, who as a member of the household was also +seated in the drawing room, helped to receive and entertain the +visitors. The young people were in one of the inner rooms, not +considering it necessary to take part in receiving the visitors. The +count met the guests and saw them off, inviting them all to dinner. + +"I am very, very grateful to you, mon cher," or "ma chere"- he +called everyone without exception and without the slightest +variation in his tone, "my dear," whether they were above or below him +in rank- "I thank you for myself and for our two dear ones whose +name day we are keeping. But mind you come to dinner or I shall be +offended, ma chere! On behalf of the whole family I beg you to come, +mon cher!" These words he repeated to everyone without exception or +variation, and with the same expression on his full, cheerful, +clean-shaven face, the same firm pressure of the hand and the same +quick, repeated bows. As soon as he had seen a visitor off he returned +to one of those who were still in the drawing room, drew a chair +toward him or her, and jauntily spreading out his legs and putting his +hands on his knees with the air of a man who enjoys life and knows how +to live, he swayed to and fro with dignity, offered surmises about the +weather, or touched on questions of health, sometimes in Russian and +sometimes in very bad but self-confident French; then again, like a +man weary but unflinching in the fulfillment of duty, he rose to see +some visitors off and, stroking his scanty gray hairs over his bald +patch, also asked them to dinner. Sometimes on his way back from the +anteroom he would pass through the conservatory and pantry into the +large marble dining hall, where tables were being set out for eighty +people; and looking at the footmen, who were bringing in silver and +china, moving tables, and unfolding damask table linen, he would +call Dmitri Vasilevich, a man of good family and the manager of all +his affairs, and while looking with pleasure at the enormous table +would say: "Well, Dmitri, you'll see that things are all as they +should be? That's right! The great thing is the serving, that's it." +And with a complacent sigh he would return to the drawing room. + +"Marya Lvovna Karagina and her daughter!" announced the countess' +gigantic footman in his bass voice, entering the drawing room. The +countess reflected a moment and took a pinch from a gold snuffbox with +her husband's portrait on it. + +"I'm quite worn out by these callers. However, I'll see her and no +more. She is so affected. Ask her in," she said to the footman in a +sad voice, as if saying: "Very well, finish me off." + +A tall, stout, and proud-looking woman, with a round-faced smiling +daughter, entered the drawing room, their dresses rustling. + +"Dear Countess, what an age... She has been laid up, poor child... +at the Razumovski's ball... and Countess Apraksina... I was so +delighted..." came the sounds of animated feminine voices, +interrupting one another and mingling with the rustling of dresses and +the scraping of chairs. Then one of those conversations began which +last out until, at the first pause, the guests rise with a rustle of +dresses and say, "I am so delighted... Mamma's health... and +Countess Apraksina... and then, again rustling, pass into the +anteroom, put on cloaks or mantles, and drive away. The conversation +was on the chief topic of the day: the illness of the wealthy and +celebrated beau of Catherine's day, Count Bezukhov, and about his +illegitimate son Pierre, the one who had behaved so improperly at Anna +Pavlovna's reception. + +"I am so sorry for the poor count," said the visitor. "He is in such +bad health, and now this vexation about his son is enough to kill +him!" + +"What is that?" asked the countess as if she did not know what the +visitor alluded to, though she had already heard about the cause of +Count Bezukhov's distress some fifteen times. + +"That's what comes of a modern education," exclaimed the visitor. +"It seems that while he was abroad this young man was allowed to do as +he liked, now in Petersburg I hear he has been doing such terrible +things that he has been expelled by the police." + +"You don't say so!" replied the countess. + +"He chose his friends badly," interposed Anna Mikhaylovna. "Prince +Vasili's son, he, and a certain Dolokhov have, it is said, been up +to heaven only knows what! And they have had to suffer for it. +Dolokhov has been degraded to the ranks and Bezukhov's son sent back +to Moscow. Anatole Kuragin's father managed somehow to get his son's +affair hushed up, but even he was ordered out of Petersburg." + +"But what have they been up to?" asked the countess. + +"They are regular brigands, especially Dolokhov," replied the +visitor. "He is a son of Marya Ivanovna Dolokhova, such a worthy +woman, but there, just fancy! Those three got hold of a bear +somewhere, put it in a carriage, and set off with it to visit some +actresses! The police tried to interfere, and what did the young men +do? They tied a policeman and the bear back to back and put the bear +into the Moyka Canal. And there was the bear swimming about with the +policeman on his back!" + +"What a nice figure the policeman must have cut, my dear!" shouted +the count, dying with laughter. + +"Oh, how dreadful! How can you laugh at it, Count?" + +Yet the ladies themselves could not help laughing. + +"It was all they could do to rescue the poor man," continued the +visitor. "And to think it is Cyril Vladimirovich Bezukhov's son who +amuses himself in this sensible manner! And he was said to be so +well educated and clever. This is all that his foreign education has +done for him! I hope that here in Moscow no one will receive him, in +spite of his money. They wanted to introduce him to me, but I quite +declined: I have my daughters to consider." + +"Why do you say this young man is so rich?" asked the countess, +turning away from the girls, who at once assumed an air of +inattention. "His children are all illegitimate. I think Pierre also +is illegitimate." + +The visitor made a gesture with her hand. + +"I should think he has a score of them." + +Princess Anna Mikhaylovna intervened in the conversation, +evidently wishing to show her connections and knowledge of what went +on in society. + +"The fact of the matter is," said she significantly, and also in a +half whisper, "everyone knows Count Cyril's reputation.... He has lost +count of his children, but this Pierre was his favorite." + +"How handsome the old man still was only a year ago!" remarked the +countess. "I have never seen a handsomer man." + +"He is very much altered now," said Anna Mikhaylovna. "Well, as I +was saying, Prince Vasili is the next heir through his wife, but the +count is very fond of Pierre, looked after his education, and wrote to +the Emperor about him; so that in the case of his death- and he is +so ill that he may die at any moment, and Dr. Lorrain has come from +Petersburg- no one knows who will inherit his immense fortune, +Pierre or Prince Vasili. Forty thousand serfs and millions of +rubles! I know it all very well for Prince Vasili told me himself. +Besides, Cyril Vladimirovich is my mother's second cousin. He's also +my Bory's godfather," she added, as if she attached no importance at +all to the fact. + +"Prince Vasili arrived in Moscow yesterday. I hear he has come on +some inspection business," remarked the visitor. + +"Yes, but between ourselves," said the princess, that is a +pretext. The fact is he has come to see Count Cyril Vladimirovich, +hearing how ill he is." + +"But do you know, my dear, that was a capital joke," said the count; +and seeing that the elder visitor was not listening, he turned to +the young ladies. "I can just imagine what a funny figure that +policeman cut!" + +And as he waved his arms to impersonate the policeman, his portly +form again shook with a deep ringing laugh, the laugh of one who +always eats well and, in particular, drinks well. "So do come and dine +with us!" he said. + +CHAPTER XI + +Silence ensued. The countess looked at her callers, smiling affably, +but not concealing the fact that she would not be distressed if they +now rose and took their leave. The visitor's daughter was already +smoothing down her dress with an inquiring look at her mother, when +suddenly from the next room were heard the footsteps of boys and girls +running to the door and the noise of a chair falling over, and a +girl of thirteen, hiding something in the folds of her short muslin +frock, darted in and stopped short in the middle of the room. It was +evident that she had not intended her flight to bring her so far. +Behind her in the doorway appeared a student with a crimson coat +collar, an officer of the Guards, a girl of fifteen, and a plump +rosy-faced boy in a short jacket. + +The count jumped up and, swaying from side to side, spread his +arms wide and threw them round the little girl who had run in. + +"Ah, here she is!" he exclaimed laughing. "My pet, whose name day it +is. My dear pet!" + +"Ma chere, there is a time for everything," said the countess with +feigned severity. "You spoil her, Ilya," she added, turning to her +husband. + +"How do you do, my dear? I wish you many happy returns of your +name day," said the visitor. "What a charming child," she added, +addressing the mother. + +This black-eyed, wide-mouthed girl, not pretty but full of life- +with childish bare shoulders which after her run heaved and shook +her bodice, with black curls tossed backward, thin bare arms, little +legs in lace-frilled drawers, and feet in low slippers- was just at +that charming age when a girl is no longer a child, though the child +is not yet a young woman. Escaping from her father she ran to hide her +flushed face in the lace of her mother's mantilla- not paying the +least attention to her severe remark- and began to laugh. She laughed, +and in fragmentary sentences tried to explain about a doll which she +produced from the folds of her frock. + +"Do you see?... My doll... Mimi... You see..." was all Natasha +managed to utter (to her everything seemed funny). She leaned +against her mother and burst into such a loud, ringing fit of laughter +that even the prim visitor could not help joining in. + +"Now then, go away and take your monstrosity with you," said the +mother, pushing away her daughter with pretended sternness, and +turning to the visitor she added: "She is my youngest girl." + +Natasha, raising her face for a moment from her mother's mantilla, +glanced up at her through tears of laughter, and again hid her face. + +The visitor, compelled to look on at this family scene, thought it +necessary to take some part in it. + +"Tell me, my dear," said she to Natasha, "is Mimi a relation of +yours? A daughter, I suppose?" + +Natasha did not like the visitor's tone of condescension to childish +things. She did not reply, but looked at her seriously. + +Meanwhile the younger generation: Boris, the officer, Anna +Mikhaylovna's son; Nicholas, the undergraduate, the count's eldest +son; Sonya, the count's fifteen-year-old niece, and little Petya, +his youngest boy, had all settled down in the drawing room and were +obviously trying to restrain within the bounds of decorum the +excitement and mirth that shone in all their faces. Evidently in the +back rooms, from which they had dashed out so impetuously, the +conversation had been more amusing than the drawing-room talk of +society scandals, the weather, and Countess Apraksina. Now and then +they glanced at one another, hardly able to suppress their laughter. + +The two young men, the student and the officer, friends from +childhood, were of the same age and both handsome fellows, though +not alike. Boris was tall and fair, and his calm and handsome face had +regular, delicate features. Nicholas was short with curly hair and +an open expression. Dark hairs were already showing on his upper +lip, and his whole face expressed impetuosity and enthusiasm. Nicholas +blushed when he entered the drawing room. He evidently tried to find +something to say, but failed. Boris on the contrary at once found +his footing, and related quietly and humorously how he had know that +doll Mimi when she was still quite a young lady, before her nose was +broken; how she had aged during the five years he had known her, and +how her head had cracked right across the skull. Having said this he +glanced at Natasha. She turned away from him and glanced at her +younger brother, who was screwing up his eyes and shaking with +suppressed laughter, and unable to control herself any longer, she +jumped up and rushed from the room as fast as her nimble little feet +would carry her. Boris did not laugh. + +"You were meaning to go out, weren't you, Mamma? Do you want the +carriage?" he asked his mother with a smile. + +"Yes, yes, go and tell them to get it ready," she answered, +returning his smile. + +Boris quietly left the room and went in search of Natasha. The plump +boy ran after them angrily, as if vexed that their program had been +disturbed. + +CHAPTER XII + +The only young people remaining in the drawing room, not counting +the young lady visitor and the countess' eldest daughter (who was four +years older than her sister and behaved already like a grown-up +person), were Nicholas and Sonya, the niece. Sonya was a slender +little brunette with a tender look in her eyes which were veiled by +long lashes, thick black plaits coiling twice round her head, and a +tawny tint in her complexion and especially in the color of her +slender but graceful and muscular arms and neck. By the grace of her +movements, by the softness and flexibility of her small limbs, and +by a certain coyness and reserve of manner, she reminded one of a +pretty, half-grown kitten which promises to become a beautiful +little cat. She evidently considered it proper to show an interest +in the general conversation by smiling, but in spite of herself her +eyes under their thick long lashes watched her cousin who was going to +join the army, with such passionate girlish adoration that her smile +could not for a single instant impose upon anyone, and it was clear +that the kitten had settled down only to spring up with more energy +and again play with her cousin as soon as they too could, like Natasha +and Boris, escape from the drawing room. + +"Ah yes, my dear," said the count, addressing the visitor and +pointing to Nicholas, "his friend Boris has become an officer, and +so for friendship's sake he is leaving the university and me, his +old father, and entering the military service, my dear. And there +was a place and everything waiting for him in the Archives Department! +Isn't that friendship?" remarked the count in an inquiring tone. + +"But they say that war has been declared," replied the visitor. + +"They've been saying so a long while," said the count, "and +they'll say so again and again, and that will be the end of it. My +dear, there's friendship for you," he repeated. "He's joining the +hussars." + +The visitor, not knowing what to say, shook her head. + +"It's not at all from friendship," declared Nicholas, flaring up and +turning away as if from a shameful aspersion. "It is not from +friendship at all; I simply feel that the army is my vocation." + +He glanced at his cousin and the young lady visitor; and they were +both regarding him with a smile of approbation. + +"Schubert, the colonel of the Pavlograd Hussars, is dining with us +today. He has been here on leave and is taking Nicholas back with him. +It can't be helped!" said the count, shrugging his shoulders and +speaking playfully of a matter that evidently distressed him. + +"I have already told you, Papa," said his son, "that if you don't +wish to let me go, I'll stay. But I know I am no use anywhere except +in the army; I am not a diplomat or a government clerk.- I don't +know how to hide what I feel." As he spoke he kept glancing with the +flirtatiousness of a handsome youth at Sonya and the young lady +visitor. + +The little kitten, feasting her eyes on him, seemed ready at any +moment to start her gambols again and display her kittenish nature. + +"All right, all right!" said the old count. "He always flares up! +This Buonaparte has turned all their heads; they all think of how he +rose from an ensign and became Emperor. Well, well, God grant it," +he added, not noticing his visitor's sarcastic smile. + +The elders began talking about Bonaparte. Julie Karagina turned to +young Rostov. + +"What a pity you weren't at the Arkharovs' on Thursday. It was so +dull without you," said she, giving him a tender smile. + +The young man, flattered, sat down nearer to her with a coquettish +smile, and engaged the smiling Julie in a confidential conversation +without at all noticing that his involuntary smile had stabbed the +heart of Sonya, who blushed and smiled unnaturally. In the midst of +his talk he glanced round at her. She gave him a passionately angry +glance, and hardly able to restrain her tears and maintain the +artificial smile on her lips, she got up and left the room. All +Nicholas' animation vanished. He waited for the first pause in the +conversation, and then with a distressed face left the room to find +Sonya. + +"How plainly all these young people wear their hearts on their +sleeves!" said Anna Mikhaylovna, pointing to Nicholas as he went +out. "Cousinage- dangereux voisinage;"~^ she added. + +^~ Cousinhood is a dangerous neighborhood. + +"Yes," said the countess when the brightness these young people +had brought into the room had vanished; and as if answering a question +no one had put but which was always in her mind, "and how much +suffering, how much anxiety one has had to go through that we might +rejoice in them now! And yet really the anxiety is greater now than +the joy. One is always, always anxious! Especially just at this age, +so dangerous both for girls and boys." + +"It all depends on the bringing up," remarked the visitor. + +"Yes, you're quite right," continued the countess. "Till now I +have always, thank God, been my children's friend and had their full +confidence," said she, repeating the mistake of so many parents who +imagine that their children have no secrets from them. "I know I shall +always be my daughters' first confidante, and that if Nicholas, with +his impulsive nature, does get into mischief (a boy can't help it), he +will all the same never be like those Petersburg young men." + +"Yes, they are splendid, splendid youngsters," chimed in the +count, who always solved questions that seemed to him perplexing by +deciding that everything was splendid. "Just fancy: wants to be an +hussar. What's one to do, my dear?" + +"What a charming creature your younger girl is," said the visitor; +"a little volcano!" + +"Yes, a regular volcano," said the count. "Takes after me! And +what a voice she has; though she's my daughter, I tell the truth +when I say she'll be a singer, a second Salomoni! We have engaged an +Italian to give her lessons." + +"Isn't she too young? I have heard that it harms the voice to +train it at that age." + +"Oh no, not at all too young!" replied the count. "Why, our +mothers used to be married at twelve or thirteen." + +"And she's in love with Boris already. Just fancy!" said the +countess with a gentle smile, looking at Boris' and went on, evidently +concerned with a thought that always occupied her: "Now you see if I +were to be severe with her and to forbid it... goodness knows what +they might be up to on the sly" (she meant that they would be +kissing), "but as it is, I know every word she utters. She will come +running to me of her own accord in the evening and tell me everything. +Perhaps I spoil her, but really that seems the best plan. With her +elder sister I was stricter." + +"Yes, I was brought up quite differently," remarked the handsome +elder daughter, Countess Vera, with a smile. + +But the smile did not enhance Vera's beauty as smiles generally +do; on the contrary it gave her an unnatural, and therefore +unpleasant, expression. Vera was good-looking, not at all stupid, +quick at learning, was well brought up, and had a pleasant voice; what +she said was true and appropriate, yet, strange to say, everyone- +the visitors and countess alike- turned to look at her as if wondering +why she had said it, and they all felt awkward. + +"People are always too clever with their eldest children and try +to make something exceptional of them," said the visitor. + +"What's the good of denying it, my dear? Our dear countess was too +clever with Vera," said the count. "Well, what of that? She's turned +out splendidly all the same," he added, winking at Vera. + +The guests got up and took their leave, promising to return to +dinner. + +"What manners! I thought they would never go," said the countess, +when she had seen her guests out. + +CHAPTER XIII + +When Natasha ran out of the drawing room she only went as far as the +conservatory. There she paused and stood listening to the conversation +in the drawing room, waiting for Boris to come out. She was already +growing impatient, and stamped her foot, ready to cry at his not +coming at once, when she heard the young man's discreet steps +approaching neither quickly nor slowly. At this Natasha dashed swiftly +among the flower tubs and hid there. + +Boris paused in the middle of the room, looked round, brushed a +little dust from the sleeve of his uniform, and going up to a mirror +examined his handsome face. Natasha, very still, peered out from her +ambush, waiting to see what he would do. He stood a little while +before the glass, smiled, and walked toward the other door. Natasha +was about to call him but changed her mind. "Let him look for me," +thought she. Hardly had Boris gone than Sonya, flushed, in tears, +and muttering angrily, came in at the other door. Natasha checked +her first impulse to run out to her, and remained in her hiding place, +watching- as under an invisible cap- to see what went on in the world. +She was experiencing a new and peculiar pleasure. Sonya, muttering +to herself, kept looking round toward the drawing-room door. It opened +and Nicholas came in. + +"Sonya, what is the matter with you? How can you?" said he, +running up to her. + +"It's nothing, nothing; leave me alone!" sobbed Sonya. + +"Ah, I know what it is." + +"Well, if you do, so much the better, and you can go back to her!" + +"So-o-onya! Look here! How can you torture me and yourself like +that, for a mere fancy?" said Nicholas taking her hand. + +Sonya did not pull it away, and left off crying. Natasha, not +stirring and scarcely breathing, watched from her ambush with +sparkling eyes. "What will happen now?" thought she. + +"Sonya! What is anyone in the world to me? You alone are +everything!" said Nicholas. "And I will prove it to you." + +"I don't like you to talk like that." + +"Well, then, I won't; only forgive me, Sonya!" He drew her to him +and kissed her. + +"Oh, how nice," thought Natasha; and when Sonya and Nicholas had +gone out of the conservatory she followed and called Boris to her. + +"Boris, come here," said she with a sly and significant look. "I +have something to tell you. Here, here!" and she led him into the +conservatory to the place among the tubs where she had been hiding. + +Boris followed her, smiling. + +"What is the something?" asked he. + +She grew confused, glanced round, and, seeing the doll she had +thrown down on one of the tubs, picked it up. + +"Kiss the doll," said she. + +Boris looked attentively and kindly at her eager face, but did not +reply. + +"Don't you want to? Well, then, come here," said she, and went +further in among the plants and threw down the doll. "Closer, closer!" +she whispered. + +She caught the young officer by his cuffs, and a look of solemnity +and fear appeared on her flushed face. + +"And me? Would you like to kiss me?" she whispered almost inaudibly, +glancing up at him from under her brows, smiling, and almost crying +from excitement. + +Boris blushed. + +"How funny you are!" he said, bending down to her and blushing still +more, but he waited and did nothing. + +Suddenly she jumped up onto a tub to be higher than he, embraced him +so that both her slender bare arms clasped him above his neck, and, +tossing back her hair, kissed him full on the lips. + +Then she slipped down among the flowerpots on the other side of +the tubs and stood, hanging her head. + +"Natasha," he said, "you know that I love you, but..." + +"You are in love with me?" Natasha broke in. + +"Yes, I am, but please don't let us do like that.... In another four +years... then I will ask for your hand." + +Natasha considered. + +"Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen," she counted on her slender +little fingers. "All right! Then it's settled?" + +A smile of joy and satisfaction lit up her eager face. + +"Settled!" replied Boris. + +"Forever?" said the little girl. "Till death itself?" + +She took his arm and with a happy face went with him into the +adjoining sitting room. + +CHAPTER XIV + +After receiving her visitors, the countess was so tired that she +gave orders to admit no more, but the porter was told to be sure to +invite to dinner all who came "to congratulate." The countess wished +to have a tete-a-tete talk with the friend of her childhood, +Princess Anna Mikhaylovna, whom she had not seen properly since she +returned from Petersburg. Anna Mikhaylovna, with her tear-worn but +pleasant face, drew her chair nearer to that of the countess. + +"With you I will be quite frank," said Anna Mikhaylovna. "There +are not many left of us old friends! That's why I so value your +friendship." + +Anna Mikhaylovna looked at Vera and paused. The countess pressed her +friend's hand. + +"Vera," she said to her eldest daughter who was evidently not a +favorite, "how is it you have so little tact? Don't you see you are +not wanted here? Go to the other girls, or..." + +The handsome Vera smiled contemptuously but did not seem at all +hurt. + +"If you had told me sooner, Mamma, I would have gone," she replied +as she rose to go to her own room. + +But as she passed the sitting room she noticed two couples +sitting, one pair at each window. She stopped and smiled scornfully. +Sonya was sitting close to Nicholas who was copying out some verses +for her, the first he had ever written. Boris and Natasha were at +the other window and ceased talking when Vera entered. Sonya and +Natasha looked at Vera with guilty, happy faces. + +It was pleasant and touching to see these little girls in love; +but apparently the sight of them roused no pleasant feeling in Vera. + +"How often have I asked you not to take my things?" she said. "You +have a room of your own," and she took the inkstand from Nicholas. + +"In a minute, in a minute," he said, dipping his pen. + +"You always manage to do things at the wrong time," continued +Vera. "You came rushing into the drawing room so that everyone felt +ashamed of you." + +Though what she said was quite just, perhaps for that very reason no +one replied, and the four simply looked at one another. She lingered +in the room with the inkstand in her hand. + +"And at your age what secrets can there be between Natasha and +Boris, or between you two? It's all nonsense!" + +"Now, Vera, what does it matter to you?" said Natasha in defense, +speaking very gently. + +She seemed that day to be more than ever kind and affectionate to +everyone. + +"Very silly," said Vera. "I am ashamed of you. Secrets indeed!" + +"All have secrets of their own," answered Natasha, getting warmer. +"We don't interfere with you and Berg." + +"I should think not," said Vera, "because there can never be +anything wrong in my behavior. But I'll just tell Mamma how you are +behaving with Boris." + +"Natalya Ilynichna behaves very well to me," remarked Boris. "I have +nothing to complain of." + +"Don't, Boris! You are such a diplomat that it is really +tiresome," said Natasha in a mortified voice that trembled slightly. +(She used the word "diplomat," which was just then much in vogue among +the children, in the special sense they attached to it.) "Why does she +bother me?" And she added, turning to Vera, "You'll never understand +it, because you've never loved anyone. You have no heart! You are a +Madame de Genlis and nothing more" (this nickname, bestowed on Vera by +Nicholas, was considered very stinging), "and your greatest pleasure +is to be unpleasant to people! Go and flirt with Berg as much as you +please," she finished quickly. + +"I shall at any rate not run after a young man before visitors..." + +"Well, now you've done what you wanted," put in Nicholas- "said +unpleasant things to everyone and upset them. Let's go to the +nursery." + +All four, like a flock of scared birds, got up and left the room. + +"The unpleasant things were said to me," remarked Vera, "I said none +to anyone." + +"Madame de Genlis! Madame de Genlis!" shouted laughing voices +through the door. + +The handsome Vera, who produced such an irritating and unpleasant +effect on everyone, smiled and, evidently unmoved by what had been +said to her, went to the looking glass and arranged her hair and +scarf. Looking at her own handsome face she seemed to become still +colder and calmer. + +In the drawing room the conversation was still going on. + +"Ah, my dear," said the countess, "my life is not all roses +either. Don't I know that at the rate we are living our means won't +last long? It's all the Club and his easygoing nature. Even in the +country do we get any rest? Theatricals, hunting, and heaven knows +what besides! But don't let's talk about me; tell me how you managed +everything. I often wonder at you, Annette- how at your age you can +rush off alone in a carriage to Moscow, to Petersburg, to those +ministers and great people, and know how to deal with them all! It's +quite astonishing. How did you get things settled? I couldn't possibly +do it." + +"Ah, my love," answered Anna Mikhaylovna, "God grant you never +know what it is to be left a widow without means and with a son you +love to distraction! One learns many things then," she added with a +certain pride. "That lawsuit taught me much. When I want to see one of +those big people I write a note: 'Princess So-and-So desires an +interview with So and-So,' and then I take a cab and go myself two, +three, or four times- till I get what I want. I don't mind what they +think of me." + +"Well, and to whom did you apply about Bory?" asked the countess. +"You see yours is already an officer in the Guards, while my +Nicholas is going as a cadet. There's no one to interest himself for +him. To whom did you apply?" + +"To Prince Vasili. He was so kind. He at once agreed to +everything, and put the matter before the Emperor," said Princess Anna +Mikhaylovna enthusiastically, quite forgetting all the humiliation she +had endured to gain her end. + +"Has Prince Vasili aged much?" asked the countess. "I have not +seen him since we acted together at the Rumyantsovs' theatricals. I +expect he has forgotten me. He paid me attentions in those days," said +the countess, with a smile. + +"He is just the same as ever," replied Anna Mikhaylovna, +"overflowing with amiability. His position has not turned his head +at all. He said to me, 'I am sorry I can do so little for you, dear +Princess. I am at your command.' Yes, he is a fine fellow and a very +kind relation. But, Nataly, you know my love for my son: I would do +anything for his happiness! And my affairs are in such a bad way +that my position is now a terrible one," continued Anna Mikhaylovna, +sadly, dropping her voice. "My wretched lawsuit takes all I have and +makes no progress. Would you believe it, I have literally not a +penny and don't know how to equip Boris." She took out her +handkerchief and began to cry. "I need five hundred rubles, and have +only one twenty-five-ruble note. I am in such a state.... My only hope +now is in Count Cyril Vladimirovich Bezukhov. If he will not assist +his godson- you know he is Bory's godfather- and allow him something +for his maintenance, all my trouble will have been thrown away.... I +shall not be able to equip him." + +The countess' eyes filled with tears and she pondered in silence. + +"I often think, though, perhaps it's a sin," said the princess, +"that here lives Count Cyril Vladimirovich Bezukhov so rich, all +alone... that tremendous fortune... and what is his life worth? It's a +burden to him, and Bory's life is only just beginning...." + +"Surely he will leave something to Boris," said the countess. + +"Heaven only knows, my dear! These rich grandees are so selfish. +Still, I will take Boris and go to see him at once, and I shall +speak to him straight out. Let people think what they will of me, it's +really all the same to me when my son's fate is at stake." The +princess rose. "It's now two o'clock and you dine at four. There +will just be time." + +And like a practical Petersburg lady who knows how to make the +most of time, Anna Mikhaylovna sent someone to call her son, and +went into the anteroom with him. + +"Good-by, my dear," said she to the countess who saw her to the +door, and added in a whisper so that her son should not hear, "Wish me +good luck." + +"Are you going to Count Cyril Vladimirovich, my dear?" said the +count coming out from the dining hall into the anteroom, and he added: +"If he is better, ask Pierre to dine with us. He has been to the +house, you know, and danced with the children. Be sure to invite +him, my dear. We will see how Taras distinguishes himself today. He +says Count Orlov never gave such a dinner as ours will be!" + +CHAPTER XV + +"My dear Boris," said Princess Anna Mikhaylovna to her son as +Countess Rostova's carriage in which they were seated drove over the +straw covered street and turned into the wide courtyard of Count Cyril +Vladimirovich Bezukhov's house. "My dear Boris," said the mother, +drawing her hand from beneath her old mantle and laying it timidly and +tenderly on her son's arm, "be affectionate and attentive to him. +Count Cyril Vladimirovich is your godfather after all, your future +depends on him. Remember that, my dear, and be nice to him, as you +so well know how to be." + +"If only I knew that anything besides humiliation would come of +it..." answered her son coldly. "But I have promised and will do it +for your sake." + +Although the hall porter saw someone's carriage standing at the +entrance, after scrutinizing the mother and son (who without asking to +be announced had passed straight through the glass porch between the +rows of statues in niches) and looking significantly at the lady's old +cloak, he asked whether they wanted the count or the princesses, +and, hearing that they wished to see the count, said his excellency +was worse today, and that his excellency was not receiving anyone. + +"We may as well go back," said the son in French. + +"My dear!" exclaimed his mother imploringly, again laying her hand +on his arm as if that touch might soothe or rouse him. + +Boris said no more, but looked inquiringly at his mother without +taking off his cloak. + +"My friend," said Anna Mikhaylovna in gentle tones, addressing the +hall porter, I know Count Cyril Vladimirovich is very ill... that's +why I have come... I am a relation. I shall not disturb him, my +friend... I only need see Prince Vasili Sergeevich: he is staying +here, is he not? Please announce me." + +The hall porter sullenly pulled a bell that rang upstairs, and +turned away. + +"Princess Drubetskaya to see Prince Vasili Sergeevich," he called to +a footman dressed in knee breeches, shoes, and a swallow-tail coat, +who ran downstairs and looked over from the halfway landing. + +The mother smoothed the folds of her dyed silk dress before a +large Venetian mirror in the wall, and in her trodden-down shoes +briskly ascended the carpeted stairs. + +"My dear," she said to her son, once more stimulating him by a +touch, "you promised me!" + +The son, lowering his eyes, followed her quietly. + +They entered the large hall, from which one of the doors led to +the apartments assigned to Prince Vasili. + +Just as the mother and son, having reached the middle of the hall, +were about to ask their way of an elderly footman who had sprung up as +they entered, the bronze handle of one of the doors turned and +Prince Vasili came out- wearing a velvet coat with a single star on +his breast, as was his custom when at home- taking leave of a +good-looking, dark-haired man. This was the celebrated Petersburg +doctor, Lorrain. + +"Then it is certain?" said the prince. + +"Prince, humanum est errare,~^ but..." replied the doctor, swallowing +his r's, and pronouncing the Latin words with a French accent. + +^~ To err is human. + +"Very well, very well..." + +Seeing Anna Mikhaylovna and her son, Prince Vasili dismissed the +doctor with a bow and approached them silently and with a look of +inquiry. The son noticed that an expression of profound sorrow +suddenly clouded his mother's face, and he smiled slightly. + +"Ah, Prince! In what sad circumstances we meet again! And how is our +dear invalid?" said she, as though unaware of the cold offensive +look fixed on her. + +Prince Vasili stared at her and at Boris questioningly and +perplexed. Boris bowed politely. Prince Vasili without acknowledging +the bow turned to Anna Mikhaylovna, answering her query by a +movement of the head and lips indicating very little hope for the +patient. + +"Is it possible?" exclaimed Anna Mikhaylovna. "Oh, how awful! It +is terrible to think.... This is my son," she added, indicating Boris. +"He wanted to thank you himself." + +Boris bowed again politely. + +"Believe me, Prince, a mother's heart will never forget what you +have done for us." + +"I am glad I was able to do you a service, my dear Anna +Mikhaylovna," said Prince Vasili, arranging his lace frill, and in +tone and manner, here in Moscow to Anna Mikhaylovna whom he had placed +under an obligation, assuming an air of much greater importance than +he had done in Petersburg at Anna Scherer's reception. + +"Try to serve well and show yourself worthy," added he, addressing +Boris with severity. "I am glad.... Are you here on leave?" he went on +in his usual tone of indifference. + +"I am awaiting orders to join my new regiment, your excellency," +replied Boris, betraying neither annoyance at the prince's brusque +manner nor a desire to enter into conversation, but speaking so +quietly and respectfully that the prince gave him a searching glance. + +"Are you living with your mother?" + +"I am living at Countess Rostova's," replied Boris, again adding, +"your excellency." + +"That is, with Ilya Rostov who married Nataly Shinshina," said +Anna Mikhaylovna. + +"I know, I know," answered Prince Vasili in his monotonous voice. "I +never could understand how Nataly made up her mind to marry that +unlicked bear! A perfectly absurd and stupid fellow, and a gambler +too, I am told." + +"But a very kind man, Prince," said Anna Mikhaylovna with a pathetic +smile, as though she too knew that Count Rostov deserved this censure, +but asked him not to be too hard on the poor old man. "What do the +doctors say?" asked the princess after a pause, her worn face again +expressing deep sorrow. + +"They give little hope," replied the prince. + +"And I should so like to thank Uncle once for all his kindness to me +and Boris. He is his godson," she added, her tone suggesting that this +fact ought to give Prince Vasili much satisfaction. + +Prince Vasili became thoughtful and frowned. Anna Mikhaylovna saw +that he was afraid of finding in her a rival for Count Bezukhov's +fortune, and hastened to reassure him. + +"If it were not for my sincere affection and devotion to Uncle," +said she, uttering the word with peculiar assurance and unconcern, +"I know his character: noble, upright... but you see he has no one +with him except the young princesses.... They are still young...." She +bent her head and continued in a whisper: "Has he performed his +final duty, Prince? How priceless are those last moments! It can +make things no worse, and it is absolutely necessary to prepare him if +he is so ill. We women, Prince," and she smiled tenderly, "always know +how to say these things. I absolutely must see him, however painful it +may be for me. I am used to suffering." + +Evidently the prince understood her, and also understood, as he +had done at Anna Pavlovna's, that it would be difficult to get rid +of Anna Mikhaylovna. + +"Would not such a meeting be too trying for him, dear Anna +Mikhaylovna?" said he. "Let us wait until evening. The doctors are +expecting a crisis." + +"But one cannot delay, Prince, at such a moment! Consider that the +welfare of his soul is at stake. Ah, it is awful: the duties of a +Christian..." + +A door of one of the inner rooms opened and one of the princesses, +the count's niece, entered with a cold, stern face. The length of +her body was strikingly out of proportion to her short legs. Prince +Vasili turned to her. + +"Well, how is he?" + +"Still the same; but what can you expect, this noise..." said the +princess, looking at Anna Mikhaylovna as at a stranger. + +"Ah, my dear, I hardly knew you," said Anna Mikhaylovna with a happy +smile, ambling lightly up to the count's niece. "I have come, and am +at your service to help you nurse my uncle. I imagine what you have +gone through," and she sympathetically turned up her eyes. + +The princess gave no reply and did not even smile, but left the room +at Anna Mikhaylovna took off her gloves and, occupying the position +she had conquered, settled down in an armchair, inviting Prince Vasili +to take a seat beside her. + +"Boris," she said to her son with a smile, "I shall go in to see the +count, my uncle; but you, my dear, had better go to Pierre meanwhile +and don't forget to give him the Rostovs' invitation. They ask him +to dinner. I suppose he won't go?" she continued, turning to the +prince. + +"On the contrary," replied the prince, who had plainly become +depressed, "I shall be only too glad if you relieve me of that young +man.... Here he is, and the count has not once asked for him." + +He shrugged his shoulders. A footman conducted Boris down one flight +of stairs and up another, to Pierre's rooms. + +CHAPTER XVI + +Pierre, after all, had not managed to choose a career for himself in +Petersburg, and had been expelled from there for riotous conduct and +sent to Moscow. The story told about him at Count Rostov's was true. +Pierre had taken part in tying a policeman to a bear. He had now +been for some days in Moscow and was staying as usual at his +father's house. Though he expected that the story of his escapade +would be already known in Moscow and that the ladies about his father- +who were never favorably disposed toward him- would have used it to +turn the count against him, he nevertheless on the day of his +arrival went to his father's part of the house. Entering the drawing +room, where the princesses spent most of their time, he greeted the +ladies, two of whom were sitting at embroidery frames while a third +read aloud. It was the eldest who was reading- the one who had met +Anna Mikhaylovna. The two younger ones were embroidering: both were +rosy and pretty and they differed only in that one had a little mole +on her lip which made her much prettier. Pierre was received as if +he were a corpse or a leper. The eldest princess paused in her reading +and silently stared at him with frightened eyes; the second assumed +precisely the same expression; while the youngest, the one with the +mole, who was of a cheerful and lively disposition, bent over her +frame to hide a smile probably evoked by the amusing scene she +foresaw. She drew her wool down through the canvas and, scarcely +able to refrain from laughing, stooped as if trying to make out the +pattern. + +"How do you do, cousin?" said Pierre. "You don't recognize me?" + +"I recognize you only too well, too well." + +"How is the count? Can I see him?" asked Pierre, awkwardly as usual, +but unabashed. + +"The count is suffering physically and mentally, and apparently +you have done your best to increase his mental sufferings." + +"Can I see the count?" Pierre again asked. + +"Hm.... If you wish to kill him, to kill him outright, you can see +him... Olga, go and see whether Uncle's beef tea is ready- it is +almost time," she added, giving Pierre to understand that they were +busy, and busy making his father comfortable, while evidently he, +Pierre, was only busy causing him annoyance. + +Olga went out. Pierre stood looking at the sisters; then he bowed +and said: "Then I will go to my rooms. You will let me know when I can +see him." + +And he left the room, followed by the low but ringing laughter of +the sister with the mole. + +Next day Prince Vasili had arrived and settled in the count's house. +He sent for Pierre and said to him: "My dear fellow, if you are +going to behave here as you did in Petersburg, you will end very +badly; that is all I have to say to you. The count is very, very +ill, and you must not see him at all." + +Since then Pierre had not been disturbed and had spent the whole +time in his rooms upstairs. + +When Boris appeared at his door Pierre was pacing up and down his +room, stopping occasionally at a corner to make menacing gestures at +the wall, as if running a sword through an invisible foe, and +glaring savagely over his spectacles, and then again resuming his +walk, muttering indistinct words, shrugging his shoulders and +gesticulating. + +"England is done for," said he, scowling and pointing his finger +at someone unseen. "Mr. Pitt, as a traitor to the nation and to the +rights of man, is sentenced to..." But before Pierre- who at that +moment imagined himself to be Napoleon in person and to have just +effected the dangerous crossing of the Straits of Dover and captured +London- could pronounce Pitt's sentence, he saw a well-built and +handsome young officer entering his room. Pierre paused. He had left +Moscow when Boris was a boy of fourteen, and had quite forgotten +him, but in his usual impulsive and hearty way he took Boris by the +hand with a friendly smile. + +"Do you remember me?" asked Boris quietly with a pleasant smile. +"I have come with my mother to see the count, but it seems he is not +well." + +"Yes, it seems he is ill. People are always disturbing him," +answered Pierre, trying to remember who this young man was. + +Boris felt that Pierre did not recognize him but did not consider it +necessary to introduce himself, and without experiencing the least +embarrassment looked Pierre straight in the face. + +"Count Rostov asks you to come to dinner today," said he, after a +considerable pause which made Pierre feel uncomfortable. + +"Ah, Count Rostov!" exclaimed Pierre joyfully. "Then you are his +son, Ilya? Only fancy, I didn't know you at first. Do you remember how +we went to the Sparrow Hills with Madame Jacquot?... It's such an +age..." + +"You are mistaken," said Boris deliberately, with a bold and +slightly sarcastic smile. "I am Boris, son of Princess Anna +Mikhaylovna Drubetskaya. Rostov, the father, is Ilya, and his son is +Nicholas. I never knew any Madame Jacquot." + +Pierre shook his head and arms as if attacked by mosquitoes or bees. + +"Oh dear, what am I thinking about? I've mixed everything up. One +has so many relatives in Moscow! So you are Boris? Of course. Well, +now we know where we are. And what do you think of the Boulogne +expedition? The English will come off badly, you know, if Napoleon +gets across the Channel. I think the expedition is quite feasible. +If only Villeneuve doesn't make a mess of things! + +Boris knew nothing about the Boulogne expedition; he did not read +the papers and it was the first time he had heard Villeneuve's name. + +"We here in Moscow are more occupied with dinner parties and scandal +than with politics," said he in his quiet ironical tone. "I know +nothing about it and have not thought about it. Moscow is chiefly busy +with gossip," he continued. "Just now they are talking about you and +your father." + +Pierre smiled in his good-natured way as if afraid for his +companion's sake that the latter might say something he would +afterwards regret. But Boris spoke distinctly, clearly, and dryly, +looking straight into Pierre's eyes. + +"Moscow has nothing else to do but gossip," Boris went on. +"Everybody is wondering to whom the count will leave his fortune, +though he may perhaps outlive us all, as I sincerely hope he will..." + +"Yes, it is all very horrid," interrupted Pierre, "very horrid." + +Pierre was still afraid that this officer might inadvertently say +something disconcerting to himself. + +"And it must seem to you," said Boris flushing slightly, but not +changing his tone or attitude, "it must seem to you that everyone is +trying to get something out of the rich man?" + +"So it does," thought Pierre. + +"But I just wish to say, to avoid misunderstandings, that you are +quite mistaken if you reckon me or my mother among such people. We are +very poor, but for my own part at any rate, for the very reason that +your father is rich, I don't regard myself as a relation of his, and +neither I nor my mother would ever ask or take anything from him." + +For a long time Pierre could not understand, but when he did, he +jumped up from the sofa, seized Boris under the elbow in his quick, +clumsy way, and, blushing far more than Boris, began to speak with a +feeling of mingled shame and vexation. + +"Well, this is strange! Do you suppose I... who could think?... I +know very well..." + +But Boris again interrupted him. + +"I am glad I have spoken out fully. Perhaps you did not like it? You +must excuse me," said he, putting Pierre at ease instead of being +put at ease by him, "but I hope I have not offended you. I always make +it a rule to speak out... Well, what answer am I to take? Will you +come to dinner at the Rostovs'?" + +And Boris, having apparently relieved himself of an onerous duty and +extricated himself from an awkward situation and placed another in it, +became quite pleasant again. + +"No, but I say," said Pierre, calming down, "you are a wonderful +fellow! What you have just said is good, very good. Of course you +don't know me. We have not met for such a long time... not since we +were children. You might think that I... I understand, quite +understand. I could not have done it myself, I should not have had the +courage, but it's splendid. I am very glad to have made your +acquaintance. It's queer," he added after a pause, "that you should +have suspected me!" He began to laugh. "Well, what of it! I hope we'll +get better acquainted," and he pressed Boris' hand. "Do you know, I +have not once been in to see the count. He has not sent for me.... I +am sorry for him as a man, but what can one do?" + +"And so you think Napoleon will manage to get an army across?" asked +Boris with a smile. + +Pierre saw that Boris wished to change the subject, and being of the +same mind he began explaining the advantages and disadvantages of +the Boulogne expedition. + +A footman came in to summon Boris- the princess was going. Pierre, +in order to make Boris' better acquaintance, promised to come to +dinner, and warmly pressing his hand looked affectionately over his +spectacles into Boris' eyes. After he had gone Pierre continued pacing +up and down the room for a long time, no longer piercing an +imaginary foe with his imaginary sword, but smiling at the remembrance +of that pleasant, intelligent, and resolute young man. + +As often happens in early youth, especially to one who leads a +lonely life, he felt an unaccountable tenderness for this young man +and made up his mind that they would be friends. + +Prince Vasili saw the princess off. She held a handkerchief to her +eyes and her face was tearful. + +"It is dreadful, dreadful!" she was saying, "but cost me what it may +I shall do my duty. I will come and spend the night. He must not be +left like this. Every moment is precious. I can't think why his nieces +put it off. Perhaps God will help me to find a way to prepare +him!... Adieu, Prince! May God support you..." + +"Adieu, ma bonne," answered Prince Vasili turning away from her. + +"Oh, he is in a dreadful state," said the mother to her son when +they were in the carriage. "He hardly recognizes anybody." + +"I don't understand, Mamma- what is his attitude to Pierre?" asked +the son. + +"The will will show that, my dear; our fate also depends on it." + +"But why do you expect that he will leave us anything?" + +"Ah, my dear! He is so rich, and we are so poor!" + +"Well, that is hardly a sufficient reason, Mamma..." + +"Oh, Heaven! How ill he is!" exclaimed the mother. + +CHAPTER XVII + +After Anna Mikhaylovna had driven off with her son to visit Count +Cyril Vladimirovich Bezukhov, Countess Rostova sat for a long time all +alone applying her handkerchief to her eyes. At last she rang. + +"What is the matter with you, my dear?" she said crossly to the maid +who kept her waiting some minutes. "Don't you wish to serve me? Then +I'll find you another place." + +The countess was upset by her friend's sorrow and humiliating +poverty, and was therefore out of sorts, a state of mind which with +her always found expression in calling her maid "my dear" and speaking +to her with exaggerated politeness. + +"I am very sorry, ma'am," answered the maid. + +"Ask the count to come to me." + +The count came waddling in to see his wife with a rather guilty look +as usual. + +"Well, little countess? What a saute of game au madere we are to +have, my dear! I tasted it. The thousand rubles I paid for Taras +were not ill-spent. He is worth it!" + +He sat down by his wife, his elbows on his knees and his hands +ruffling his gray hair. + +"What are your commands, little countess?" + +"You see, my dear... What's that mess?" she said, pointing to his +waistcoat. "It's, the saute, most likely," she added with a smile. +"Well, you see, Count, I want some money." + +Her face became sad. + +"Oh, little countess!"... and the count began bustling to get out +his pocketbook. + +"I want a great deal, Count! I want five hundred rubles," and taking +out her cambric handkerchief she began wiping her husband's waistcoat. + +"Yes, immediately, immediately! Hey, who's there?" he called out +in a tone only used by persons who are certain that those they call +will rush to obey the summons. "Send Dmitri to me!" + +Dmitri, a man of good family who had been brought up in the +count's house and now managed all his affairs, stepped softly into the +room. + +"This is what I want, my dear fellow," said the count to the +deferential young man who had entered. "Bring me..." he reflected a +moment, "yes, bring me seven hundred rubles, yes! But mind, don't +bring me such tattered and dirty notes as last time, but nice clean +ones for the countess." + +"Yes, Dmitri, clean ones, please," said the countess, sighing +deeply. + +"When would you like them, your excellency?" asked Dmitri. "Allow me +to inform you... But, don't be uneasy," he added, noticing that the +count was beginning to breathe heavily and quickly which was always +a sign of approaching anger. "I was forgetting... Do you wish it +brought at once?" + +"Yes, yes; just so! Bring it. Give it to the countess." + +"What a treasure that Dmitri is," added the count with a smile +when the young man had departed. "There is never any 'impossible' with +him. That's a thing I hate! Everything is possible." + +"Ah, money, Count, money! How much sorrow it causes in the world," +said the countess. "But I am in great need of this sum." + +"You, my little countess, are a notorious spendthrift," said the +count, and having kissed his wife's hand he went back to his study. + +When Anna Mikhaylovna returned from Count Bezukhov's the money, +all in clean notes, was lying ready under a handkerchief on the +countess' little table, and Anna Mikhaylovna noticed that something +was agitating her. + +"Well, my dear?" asked the countess. + +"Oh, what a terrible state he is in! One would not know him, he is +so ill! I was only there a few moments and hardly said a word..." + +"Annette, for heaven's sake don't refuse me," the countess began, +with a blush that looked very strange on her thin, dignified, +elderly face, and she took the money from under the handkerchief. + +Anna Mikhaylovna instantly guessed her intention and stooped to be +ready to embrace the countess at the appropriate moment. + +"This is for Boris from me, for his outfit." + +Anna Mikhaylovna was already embracing her and weeping. The countess +wept too. They wept because they were friends, and because they were +kindhearted, and because they- friends from childhood- had to think +about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was over.... +But those tears were pleasant to them both. + +CHAPTER XVIII + +Countess Rostova, with her daughters and a large number of guests, +was already seated in the drawing room. The count took the gentlemen +into his study and showed them his choice collection of Turkish pipes. +From time to time he went out to ask: "Hasn't she come yet?" They were +expecting Marya Dmitrievna Akhrosimova, known in society as le +terrible dragon, a lady distinguished not for wealth or rank, but +for common sense and frank plainness of speech. Marya Dmitrievna was +known to the Imperial family as well as to all Moscow and +Petersburg, and both cities wondered at her, laughed privately at +her rudenesses, and told good stories about her, while none the less +all without exception respected and feared her. + +In the count's room, which was full of tobacco smoke, they talked of +war that had been announced in a manifesto, and about the +recruiting. None of them had yet seen the manifesto, but they all knew +it had appeared. The count sat on the sofa between two guests who were +smoking and talking. He neither smoked nor talked, but bending his +head first to one side and then to the other watched the smokers +with evident pleasure and listened to the conversation of his two +neighbors, whom he egged on against each other. + +One of them was a sallow, clean-shaven civilian with a thin and +wrinkled face, already growing old, though he was dressed like a +most fashionable young man. He sat with his legs up on the sofa as +if quite at home and, having stuck an amber mouthpiece far into his +mouth, was inhaling the smoke spasmodically and screwing up his +eyes. This was an old bachelor, Shinshin, a cousin of the countess', a +man with "a sharp tongue" as they said in Moscow society. He seemed to +be condescending to his companion. The latter, a fresh, rosy officer +of the Guards, irreproachably washed, brushed, and buttoned, held +his pipe in the middle of his mouth and with red lips gently inhaled +the smoke, letting it escape from his handsome mouth in rings. This +was Lieutenant Berg, an officer in the Semenov regiment with whom +Boris was to travel to join the army, and about whom Natasha had, +teased her elder sister Vera, speaking of Berg as her "intended." +The count sat between them and listened attentively. His favorite +occupation when not playing boston, a card game he was very fond of, +was that of listener, especially when he succeeded in setting two +loquacious talkers at one another. + +"Well, then, old chap, mon tres honorable Alphonse Karlovich," +said Shinshin, laughing ironically and mixing the most ordinary +Russian expressions with the choicest French phrases- which was a +peculiarity of his speech. "Vous comptez vous faire des rentes sur +l'etat;~^ you want to make something out of your company?" + +^~ You expect to make an income out of the government. + +"No, Peter Nikolaevich; I only want to show that in the cavalry +the advantages are far less than in the infantry. Just consider my own +position now, Peter Nikolaevich..." + +Berg always spoke quietly, politely, and with great precision. His +conversation always related entirely to himself; he would remain +calm and silent when the talk related to any topic that had no +direct bearing on himself. He could remain silent for hours without +being at all put out of countenance himself or making others +uncomfortable, but as soon as the conversation concerned himself he +would begin to talk circumstantially and with evident satisfaction. + +"Consider my position, Peter Nikolaevich. Were I in the cavalry I +should get not more than two hundred rubles every four months, even +with the rank of lieutenant; but as it is I receive two hundred and +thirty," said he, looking at Shinshin and the count with a joyful, +pleasant smile, as if it were obvious to him that his success must +always be the chief desire of everyone else. + +"Besides that, Peter Nikolaevich, by exchanging into the Guards I +shall be in a more prominent position," continued Berg, "and vacancies +occur much more frequently in the Foot Guards. Then just think what +can be done with two hundred and thirty rubles! I even manage to put a +little aside and to send something to my father," he went on, emitting +a smoke ring. + +"La balance y est...~^ A German knows how to skin a flint, as the +proverb says," remarked Shinshin, moving his pipe to the other side of +his mouth and winking at the count. + +^~ So that squares matters. + +The count burst out laughing. The other guests seeing that +Shinshin was talking came up to listen. Berg, oblivious of irony or +indifference, continued to explain how by exchanging into the Guards +he had already gained a step on his old comrades of the Cadet Corps; +how in wartime the company commander might get killed and he, as +senior in the company, might easily succeed to the post; how popular +he was with everyone in the regiment, and how satisfied his father was +with him. Berg evidently enjoyed narrating all this, and did not +seem to suspect that others, too, might have their own interests. +But all he said was so prettily sedate, and the naivete of his +youthful egotism was so obvious, that he disarmed his hearers. + +"Well, my boy, you'll get along wherever you go- foot or horse- that +I'll warrant," said Shinshin, patting him on the shoulder and taking +his feet off the sofa. + +Berg smiled joyously. The count, by his guests, went into the +drawing room. + +It was just the moment before a big dinner when the assembled +guests, expecting the summons to zakuska,~^ avoid engaging in any +long conversation but think it necessary to move about and talk, in +order to show that they are not at all impatient for their food. The +host and hostess look toward the door, and now and then glance at +one another, and the visitors try to guess from these glances who, +or what, they are waiting for- some important relation who has not yet +arrived, or a dish that is not yet ready. + +^~ Hors d'oeuvres. + +Pierre had come just at dinnertime and was sitting awkwardly in +the middle of the drawing room on the first chair he had come +across, blocking the way for everyone. The countess tried to make +him talk, but he went on naively looking around through his spectacles +as if in search of somebody and answered all her questions in +monosyllables. He was in the way and was the only one who did not +notice the fact. Most of the guests, knowing of the affair with the +bear, looked with curiosity at this big, stout, quiet man, wondering +how such a clumsy, modest fellow could have played such a prank on a +policeman. + +"You have only lately arrived?" the countess asked him. + +"Oui, madame," replied he, looking around him. + +"You have not yet seen my husband?" + +"Non, madame." He smiled quite inappropriately. + +"You have been in Paris recently, I believe? I suppose it's very +interesting." + +"Very interesting." + +The countess exchanged glances with Anna Mikhaylovna. The latter +understood that she was being asked to entertain this young man, and +sitting down beside him she began to speak about his father; but he +answered her, as he had the countess, only in monosyllables. The other +guests were all conversing with one another. "The Razumovskis... It +was charming... You are very kind... Countess Apraksina..." was +heard on all sides. The countess rose and went into the ballroom. + +"Marya Dmitrievna?" came her voice from there. + +"Herself," came the answer in a rough voice, and Marya Dmitrievna +entered the room. + +All the unmarried ladies and even the married ones except the very +oldest rose. Marya Dmitrievna paused at the door. Tall and stout, +holding high her fifty-year-old head with its gray curls, she stood +surveying the guests, and leisurely arranged her wide sleeves as if +rolling them up. Marya Dmitrievna always spoke in Russian. + +"Health and happiness to her whose name day we are keeping and to +her children," she said, in her loud, full-toned voice which drowned +all others. "Well, you old sinner," she went on, turning to the +count who was kissing her hand, "you're feeling dull in Moscow, I +daresay? Nowhere to hunt with your dogs? But what is to be done, old +man? Just see how these nestlings are growing up," and she pointed +to the girls. "You must look for husbands for them whether you like it +or not...." + +Well," said she, "how's my Cossack?" (Marya Dmitrievna always called +Natasha a Cossack) and she stroked the child's arm as she came up +fearless and gay to kiss her hand. "I know she's a scamp of a girl, +but I like her." + +She took a pair of pear-shaped ruby earrings from her huge +reticule and, having given them to the rosy Natasha, who beamed with +the pleasure of her saint's-day fete, turned away at once and +addressed herself to Pierre. + +"Eh, eh, friend! Come here a bit," said she, assuming a soft high +tone of voice. "Come here, my friend..." and she ominously tucked up +her sleeves still higher. Pierre approached, looking at her in a +childlike way through his spectacles. + +"Come nearer, come nearer, friend! I used to be the only one to tell +your father the truth when he was in favor, and in your case it's my +evident duty." She paused. All were silent, expectant of what was to +follow, for this was dearly only a prelude. + +"A fine lad! My word! A fine lad!... His father lies on his deathbed +and he amuses himself setting a policeman astride a bear! For shame, +sir, for shame! It would be better if you went to the war." + +She turned away and gave her hand to the count, who could hardly +keep from laughing. + +"Well, I suppose it is time we were at table?" said Marya +Dmitrievna. + +The count went in first with Marya Dmitrievna, the countess followed +on the arm of a colonel of hussars, a man of importance to them +because Nicholas was to go with him to the regiment; then came Anna +Mikhaylovna with Shinshin. Berg gave his arm to Vera. The smiling +Julie Karagina went in with Nicholas. After them other couples +followed, filling the whole dining hall, and last of all the children, +tutors, and governesses followed singly. The footmen began moving +about, chairs scraped, the band struck up in the gallery, and the +guests settled down in their places. Then the strains of the count's +household band were replaced by the clatter of knives and forks, the +voices of visitors, and the soft steps of the footmen. At one end of +the table sat the countess with Marya Dmitrievna on her right and Anna +Mikhaylovna on her left, the other lady visitors were farther down. At +the other end sat the count, with the hussar colonel on his left and +Shinshin and the other male visitors on his right. Midway down the +long table on one side sat the grownup young people: Vera beside Berg, +and Pierre beside Boris; and on the other side, the children, +tutors, and governesses. From behind the crystal decanters and fruit +vases the count kept glancing at his wife and her tall cap with its +light-blue ribbons, and busily filled his neighbors' glasses, not +neglecting his own. The countess in turn, without omitting her +duties as hostess, threw significant glances from behind the +pineapples at her husband whose face and bald head seemed by their +redness to contrast more than usual with his gray hair. At the ladies' +end an even chatter of voices was heard all the time, at the men's end +the voices sounded louder and louder, especially that of the colonel +of hussars who, growing more and more flushed, ate and drank so much +that the count held him up as a pattern to the other guests. Berg with +tender smiles was saying to Vera that love is not an earthly but a +heavenly feeling. Boris was telling his new friend Pierre who the +guests were and exchanging glances with Natasha, who was sitting +opposite. Pierre spoke little but examined the new faces, and ate a +great deal. Of the two soups he chose turtle with savory patties and +went on to the game without omitting a single dish or one of the +wines. These latter the butler thrust mysteriously forward, wrapped in +a napkin, from behind the next man's shoulders and whispered: "Dry +Madeira"... "Hungarian"... or "Rhine wine" as the case might be. Of +the four crystal glasses engraved with the count's monogram that stood +before his plate, Pierre held out one at random and drank with +enjoyment, gazing with ever-increasing amiability at the other guests. +Natasha, who sat opposite, was looking at Boris as girls of thirteen +look at the boy they are in love with and have just kissed for the +first time. Sometimes that same look fell on Pierre, and that funny +lively little girl's look made him inclined to laugh without knowing +why. + +Nicholas sat at some distance from Sonya, beside Julie Karagina, +to whom he was again talking with the same involuntary smile. Sonya +wore a company smile but was evidently tormented by jealousy; now +she turned pale, now blushed and strained every nerve to overhear what +Nicholas and Julie were saying to one another. The governess kept +looking round uneasily as if preparing to resent any slight that might +be put upon the children. The German tutor was trying to remember +all the dishes, wines, and kinds of dessert, in order to send a full +description of the dinner to his people in Germany; and he felt +greatly offended when the butler with a bottle wrapped in a napkin +passed him by. He frowned, trying to appear as if he did not want +any of that wine, but was mortified because no one would understand +that it was not to quench his thirst or from greediness that he wanted +it, but simply from a conscientious desire for knowledge. + +CHAPTER XIX + +At the men's end of the table the talk grew more and more +animated. The colonel told them that the declaration of war had +already appeared in Petersburg and that a copy, which he had himself +seen, had that day been forwarded by courier to the commander in +chief. + +"And why the deuce are we going to fight Bonaparte?" remarked +Shinshin. "He has stopped Austria's cackle and I fear it will be our +turn next." + +The colonel was a stout, tall, plethoric German, evidently devoted +to the service and patriotically Russian. He resented Shinshin's +remark. + +"It is for the reasson, my goot sir," said he, speaking with a +German accent, "for the reasson zat ze Emperor knows zat. He +declares in ze manifessto zat he cannot fiew wiz indifference ze +danger vreatening Russia and zat ze safety and dignity of ze Empire as +vell as ze sanctity of its alliances..." he spoke this last word +with particular emphasis as if in it lay the gist of the matter. + +Then with the unerring official memory that characterized him he +repeated from the opening words of the manifesto: + +... and the wish, which constitutes the Emperor's sole and +absolute aim- to establish peace in Europe on firm foundations- has +now decided him to despatch part of the army abroad and to create a +new condition for the attainment of that purpose. + +"Zat, my dear sir, is vy..." he concluded, drinking a tumbler of +wine with dignity and looking to the count for approval. + +"Connaissez-vous le Proverbe:~^ 'Jerome, Jerome, do not roam, but +turn spindles at home!'?" said Shinshin, puckering his brows and +smiling. "Cela nous convient a merveille.~^ Suvorov now- he knew +what he was about; yet they beat him a plate couture,~^ and where +are we to find Suvorovs now? Je vous demande un peu,"~^ said he, +continually changing from French to Russian. + +^~ Do you know the proverb? + +^~ That suits us down to the ground. + +^~ Hollow. + +^~ I just ask you that. + +"Ve must vight to the last tr-r-op of our plood!" said the +colonel, thumping the table; "and ve must tie for our Emperor, and zen +all vill pe vell. And ve must discuss it as little as po-o-ossible"... +he dwelt particularly on the word possible... "as po-o-ossible," he +ended, again turning to the count. "Zat is how ve old hussars look +at it, and zere's an end of it! And how do you, a young man and a +young hussar, how do you judge of it?" he added, addressing +Nicholas, who when he heard that the war was being discussed had +turned from his partner with eyes and ears intent on the colonel. + +"I am quite of your opinion," replied Nicholas, flaming up, +turning his plate round and moving his wineglasses about with as +much decision and desperation as though he were at that moment +facing some great danger. "I am convinced that we Russians must die or +conquer," he concluded, conscious- as were others- after the words +were uttered that his remarks were too enthusiastic and emphatic for +the occasion and were therefore awkward. + +"What you said just now was splendid!" said his partner Julie. + +Sonya trembled all over and blushed to her ears and behind them +and down to her neck and shoulders while Nicholas was speaking. + +Pierre listened to the colonel's speech and nodded approvingly. + +"That's fine," said he. + +"The young man's a real hussar!" shouted the colonel, again thumping +the table. + +"What are you making such a noise about over there?" Marya +Dmitrievna's deep voice suddenly inquired from the other end of the +table. "What are you thumping the table for?" she demanded of the +hussar, "and why are you exciting yourself? Do you think the French +are here?" + +"I am speaking ze truce," replied the hussar with a smile. + +"It's all about the war," the count shouted down the table. "You +know my son's going, Marya Dmitrievna? My son is going." + +"I have four sons in the army but still I don't fret. It is all in +God's hands. You may die in your bed or God may spare you in a +battle," replied Marya Dmitrievna's deep voice, which easily carried +the whole length of the table. + +"That's true!" + +Once more the conversations concentrated, the ladies' at the one end +and the men's at the other. + +"You won't ask," Natasha's little brother was saying; "I know you +won't ask!" + +"I will," replied Natasha. + +Her face suddenly flushed with reckless and joyous resolution. She +half rose, by a glance inviting Pierre, who sat opposite, to listen to +what was coming, and turning to her mother: + +"Mamma!" rang out the clear contralto notes of her childish voice, +audible the whole length of the table. + +"What is it?" asked the countess, startled; but seeing by her +daughter's face that it was only mischief, she shook a finger at her +sternly with a threatening and forbidding movement of her head. + +The conversation was hushed. + +"Mamma! What sweets are we going to have?" and Natasha's voice +sounded still more firm and resolute. + +The countess tried to frown, but could not. Marya Dmitrievna shook +her fat finger. + +"Cossack!" she said threateningly. + +Most of the guests, uncertain how to regard this sally, looked at +the elders. + +"You had better take care!" said the countess. + +"Mamma! What sweets are we going to have?" Natasha again cried +boldly, with saucy gaiety, confident that her prank would be taken +in good part. + +Sonya and fat little Petya doubled up with laughter. + +"You see! I have asked," whispered Natasha to her little brother and +to Pierre, glancing at him again. + +"Ice pudding, but you won't get any," said Marya Dmitrievna. + +Natasha saw there was nothing to be afraid of and so she braved even +Marya Dmitrievna. + +"Marya Dmitrievna! What kind of ice pudding? I don't like ice +cream." + +"Carrot ices." + +"No! What kind, Marya Dmitrievna? What kind?" she almost screamed; +"I want to know!" + +Marya Dmitrievna and the countess burst out laughing, and all the +guests joined in. Everyone laughed, not at Marya Dmitrievna's answer +but at the incredible boldness and smartness of this little girl who +had dared to treat Marya Dmitrievna in this fashion. + +Natasha only desisted when she had been told that there would be +pineapple ice. Before the ices, champagne was served round. The band +again struck up, the count and countess kissed, and the guests, +leaving their seats, went up to "congratulate" the countess, and +reached across the table to clink glasses with the count, with the +children, and with one another. Again the footmen rushed about, chairs +scraped, and in the same order in which they had entered but with +redder faces, the guests returned to the drawing room and to the +count's study. + +CHAPTER XX + +The card tables were drawn out, sets made up for boston, and the +count's visitors settled themselves, some in the two drawing rooms, +some in the sitting room, some in the library. + +The count, holding his cards fanwise, kept himself with difficulty +from dropping into his usual after-dinner nap, and laughed at +everything. The young people, at the countess' instigation, gathered +round the clavichord and harp. Julie by general request played +first. After she had played a little air with variations on the +harp, she joined the other young ladies in begging Natasha and +Nicholas, who were noted for their musical talent, to sing +something. Natasha, who was treated as though she were grown up, was +evidently very proud of this but at the same time felt shy. + +"What shall we sing?" she said. + +"'The Brook,'" suggested Nicholas. + +"Well, then,let's be quick. Boris, come here," said Natasha. "But +where is Sonya?" + +She looked round and seeing that her friend was not in the room +ran to look for her. + +Running into Sonya's room and not finding her there, Natasha ran +to the nursery, but Sonya was not there either. Natasha concluded that +she must be on the chest in the passage. The chest in the passage +was the place of mourning for the younger female generation in the +Rostov household. And there in fact was Sonya lying face downward on +Nurse's dirty feather bed on the top of the chest, crumpling her gauzy +pink dress under her, hiding her face with her slender fingers, and +sobbing so convulsively that her bare little shoulders shook. +Natasha's face, which had been so radiantly happy all that saint's +day, suddenly changed: her eyes became fixed, and then a shiver passed +down her broad neck and the corners of her mouth drooped. + +"Sonya! What is it? What is the matter?... Oo... Oo... Oo...!" And +Natasha's large mouth widened, making her look quite ugly, and she +began to wail like a baby without knowing why, except that Sonya was +crying. Sonya tried to lift her head to answer but could not, and +hid her face still deeper in the bed. Natasha wept, sitting on the +blue-striped feather bed and hugging her friend. With an effort +Sonya sat up and began wiping her eyes and explaining. + +"Nicholas is going away in a week's time, his... papers... have +come... he told me himself... but still I should not cry," and she +showed a paper she held in her hand- with the verses Nicholas had +written, "still, I should not cry, but you can't... no one can +understand... what a soul he has!" + +And she began to cry again because he had such a noble soul. + +"It's all very well for you... I am not envious... I love you and +Boris also," she went on, gaining a little strength; "he is nice... +there are no difficulties in your way.... But Nicholas is my cousin... +one would have to... the Metropolitan himself... and even then it +can't be done. And besides, if she tells Mamma" (Sonya looked upon the +countess as her mother and called her so) "that I am spoiling +Nicholas' career and am heartless and ungrateful, while truly... God +is my witness," and she made the sign of the cross, "I love her so +much, and all of you, only Vera... And what for? What have I done to +her? I am so grateful to you that I would willingly sacrifice +everything, only I have nothing...." + +Sonya could not continue, and again hid her face in her hands and in +the feather bed. Natasha began consoling her, but her face showed that +she understood all the gravity of her friend's trouble. + +"Sonya," she suddenly exclaimed, as if she had guessed the true +reason of her friend's sorrow, "I'm sure Vera has said something to +you since dinner? Hasn't she?" + +"Yes, these verses Nicholas wrote himself and I copied some +others, and she found them on my table and said she'd show them to +Mamma, and that I was ungrateful, and that Mamma would never allow him +to marry me, but that he'll marry Julie. You see how he's been with +her all day... Natasha, what have I done to deserve it?..." + +And again she began to sob, more bitterly than before. Natasha +lifted her up, hugged her, and, smiling through her tears, began +comforting her. + +"Sonya, don't believe her, darling! Don't believe her! Do you +remember how we and Nicholas, all three of us, talked in the sitting +room after supper? Why, we settled how everything was to be. I don't +quite remember how, but don't you remember that it could all be +arranged and how nice it all was? There's Uncle Shinshin's brother has +married his first cousin. And we are only second cousins, you know. +And Boris says it is quite possible. You know I have told him all +about it. And he is so clever and so good!" said Natasha. "Don't you +cry, Sonya, dear love, darling Sonya!" and she kissed her and laughed. +"Vera's spiteful; never mind her! And all will come right and she +won't say anything to Mamma. Nicholas will tell her himself, and he +doesn't care at all for Julie." + +Natasha kissed her on the hair. + +Sonya sat up. The little kitten brightened, its eyes shone, and it +seemed ready to lift its tail, jump down on its soft paws, and begin +playing with the ball of worsted as a kitten should. + +"Do you think so?... Really? Truly?" she said, quickly smoothing her +frock and hair. + +"Really, truly!" answered Natasha, pushing in a crisp lock that +had strayed from under her friend's plaits. + +Both laughed. + +"Well, let's go and sing 'The Brook.'" + +"Come along!" + +"Do you know, that fat Pierre who sat opposite me is so funny!" said +Natasha, stopping suddenly. "I feel so happy!" + +And she set off at a run along the passage. + +Sonya, shaking off some down which clung to her and tucking away the +verses in the bosom of her dress close to her bony little chest, ran +after Natasha down the passage into the sitting room with flushed face +and light, joyous steps. At the visitors' request the young people +sang the quartette, "The Brook," with which everyone was delighted. +Then Nicholas sang a song he had just learned: + +_1 At nighttime in the moon's fair glow
+How sweet, as fancies wander free,
+To feel that in this world there's one
+Who still is thinking but of thee! + +_1 That while her fingers touch the harp
+Wafting sweet music music the lea,
+It is for thee thus swells her heart,
+Sighing its message out to thee... + +_1 A day or two, then bliss unspoilt,
+But oh! till then I cannot live!... + +He had not finished the last verse before the young people began +to get ready to dance in the large hall, and the sound of the feet and +the coughing of the musicians were heard from the gallery. + +Pierre was sitting in the drawing-room where Shinshin had engaged +him, as a man recently returned from abroad, in a political +conversation in which several others joined but which bored Pierre. +When the music began Natasha came in and walking straight up to Pierre +said, laughing and blushing: + +"Mamma told me to ask you to join the dancers." + +"I am afraid of mixing the figures," Pierre replied; "but if you +will be my teacher..." And lowering his big arm he offered it to the +slender little girl. + +While the couples were arranging themselves and the musicians tuning +up, Pierre sat down with his little partner. Natasha was perfectly +happy; she was dancing with a grown-up man, who had been abroad. She +was sitting in a conspicuous place and talking to him like a +grown-up lady. She had a fan in her hand that one of the ladies had +given her to hold. Assuming quite the pose of a society woman +(heaven knows when and where she had learned it) she talked with her +partner, fanning herself and smiling over the fan. + +"Dear, dear! Just look at her!" exclaimed the countess as she +crossed the ballroom, pointing to Natasha. + +Natasha blushed and laughed. + +"Well, really, Mamma! Why should you? What is there to be +surprised at?" + +In the midst of the third ecossaise there was a clatter of chairs +being pushed back in the sitting room where the count and Marya +Dmitrievna had been playing cards with the majority of the more +distinguished and older visitors. They now, stretching themselves +after sitting so long, and replacing their purses and pocketbooks, +entered the ballroom. First came Marya Dmitrievna and the count, +both with merry countenances. The count, with playful ceremony +somewhat in ballet style, offered his bent arm to Marya Dmitrievna. He +drew himself up, a smile of debonair gallantry lit up his face and +as soon as the last figure of the ecossaise was ended, he clapped +his hands to the musicians and shouted up to their gallery, addressing +the first violin: + +"Semen! Do you know the Daniel Cooper?" + +This was the count's favorite dance, which he had danced in his +youth. (Strictly speaking, Daniel Cooper was one figure of the +anglaise.) + +"Look at Papa!" shouted Natasha to the whole company, and quite +forgetting that she was dancing with a grown-up partner she bent her +curly head to her knees and made the whole room ring with her +laughter. + +And indeed everybody in the room looked with a smile of pleasure +at the jovial old gentleman, who standing beside his tall and stout +partner, Marya Dmitrievna, curved his arms, beat time, straightened +his shoulders, turned out his toes, tapped gently with his foot, +and, by a smile that broadened his round face more and more, +prepared the onlookers for what was to follow. As soon as the +provocatively gay strains of Daniel Cooper (somewhat resembling +those of a merry peasant dance) began to sound, all the doorways of +the ballroom were suddenly filled by the domestic serfs- the men on +one side and the women on the other- who with beaming faces had come +to see their master making merry. + +"Just look at the master! A regular eagle he is!" loudly remarked +the nurse, as she stood in one of the doorways. + +The count danced well and knew it. But his partner could not and did +not want to dance well. Her enormous figure stood erect, her +powerful arms hanging down (she had handed her reticule to the +countess), and only her stern but handsome face really joined in the +dance. What was expressed by the whole of the count's plump figure, in +Marya Dmitrievna found expression only in her more and more beaming +face and quivering nose. But if the count, getting more and more +into the swing of it, charmed the spectators by the unexpectedness +of his adroit maneuvers and the agility with which he capered about on +his light feet, Marya Dmitrievna produced no less impression by slight +exertions- the least effort to move her shoulders or bend her arms +when turning, or stamp her foot- which everyone appreciated in view of +her size and habitual severity. The dance grew livelier and +livelier. The other couples could not attract a moment's attention +to their own evolutions and did not even try to do so. All were +watching the count and Marya Dmitrievna. Natasha kept pulling everyone +by sleeve or dress, urging them to "look at Papa!" though as it was +they never took their eyes off the couple. In the intervals of the +dance the count, breathing deeply, waved and shouted to the +musicians to play faster. Faster, faster, and faster; lightly, more +lightly, and yet more lightly whirled the count, flying round Marya +Dmitrievna, now on his toes, now on his heels; until, turning his +partner round to her seat, he executed the final pas, raising his soft +foot backwards, bowing his perspiring head, smiling and making a +wide sweep with his arm, amid a thunder of applause and laughter led +by Natasha. Both partners stood still, breathing heavily and wiping +their faces with their cambric handkerchiefs. + +"That's how we used to dance in our time, ma chere," said the count. + +"That was a Daniel Cooper!" exclaimed Marya Dmitrievna, tucking up +her sleeves and puffing heavily. + +CHAPTER XXI + +While in the Rostovs' ballroom the sixth anglaise was being +danced, to a tune in which the weary musicians blundered, and while +tired footmen and cooks were getting the supper, Count Bezukhov had +a sixth stroke. The doctors pronounced recovery impossible. After a +mute confession, communion was administered to the dying man, +preparations made for the sacrament of unction, and in his house there +was the bustle and thrill of suspense usual at such moments. Outside +the house, beyond the gates, a group of undertakers, who hid +whenever a carriage drove up, waited in expectation of an important +order for an expensive funeral. The Military Governor of Moscow, who +had been assiduous in sending aides-de-camp to inquire after the +count's health, came himself that evening to bid a last farewell to +the celebrated grandee of Catherine's court, Count Bezukhov. + +The magnificent reception room was crowded. Everyone stood up +respectfully when the Military Governor, having stayed about half an +hour alone with the dying man, passed out, slightly acknowledging +their bows and trying to escape as quickly as from the glances fixed +on him by the doctors, clergy, and relatives of the family. Prince +Vasili, who had grown thinner and paler during the last few days, +escorted him to the door, repeating something to him several times +in low tones. + +When the Military Governor had gone, Prince Vasili sat down all +alone on a chair in the ballroom, crossing one leg high over the +other, leaning his elbow on his knee and covering his face with his +hand. After sitting so for a while he rose, and, looking about him +with frightened eyes, went with unusually hurried steps down the +long corridor leading to the back of the house, to the room of the +eldest princess. + +Those who were in the dimly lit reception room spoke in nervous +whispers, and, whenever anyone went into or came from the dying +man's room, grew silent and gazed with eyes full of curiosity or +expectancy at his door, which creaked slightly when opened. + +"The limits of human life... are fixed and may not be o'erpassed," +said an old priest to a lady who had taken a seat beside him and was +listening naively to his words. + +"I wonder, is it not too late to administer unction?" asked the +lady, adding the priest's clerical title, as if she had no opinion +of her own on the subject. + +"Ah, madam, it is a great sacrament, "replied the priest, passing +his hand over the thin grizzled strands of hair combed back across his +bald head. + +"Who was that? The Military Governor himself?" was being asked at +the other side of the room. "How young-looking he is!" + +"Yes, and he is over sixty. I hear the count no longer recognizes +anyone. They wished to administer the sacrament of unction." + +"I knew someone who received that sacrament seven times." + +The second princess had just come from the sickroom with her eyes +red from weeping and sat down beside Dr. Lorrain, who was sitting in a +graceful pose under a portrait of Catherine, leaning his elbow on a +table. + +"Beautiful," said the doctor in answer to a remark about the +weather. "The weather is beautiful, Princess; and besides, in Moscow +one feels as if one were in the country." + +"Yes, indeed," replied the princess with a sigh. "So he may have +something to drink?" + +Lorrain considered. + +"Has he taken his medicine?" + +"Yes." + +The doctor glanced at his watch. + +"Take a glass of boiled water and put a pinch of cream of tartar," +and he indicated with his delicate fingers what he meant by a pinch. + +"Dere has neffer been a gase," a German doctor was saying to an +aide-de-camp, "dat one liffs after de sird stroke." + +"And what a well-preserved man he was!" remarked the aide-de-camp. +"And who will inherit his wealth?" he added in a whisper. + +"It von't go begging," replied the German with a smile. + +Everyone again looked toward the door, which creaked as the second +princess went in with the drink she had prepared according to +Lorrain's instructions. The German doctor went up to Lorrain. + +"Do you think he can last till morning?" asked the German, +addressing Lorrain in French which he pronounced badly. + +Lorrain, pursing up his lips, waved a severely negative finger +before his nose. + +"Tonight, not later," said he in a low voice, and he moved away with +a decorous smile of self-satisfaction at being able clearly to +understand and state the patient's condition. + +Meanwhile Prince Vasili had opened the door into the princess' room. + +In this room it was almost dark; only two tiny lamps were burning +before the icons and there was a pleasant scent of flowers and burnt +pastilles. The room was crowded with small pieces of furniture, +whatnots, cupboards, and little tables. The quilt of a high, white +feather bed was just visible behind a screen. A small dog began to +bark. + +"Ah, is it you, cousin?" + +She rose and smoothed her hair, which was as usual so extremely +smooth that it seemed to be made of one piece with her head and +covered with varnish. + +"Has anything happened?" she asked. "I am so terrified." + +"No, there is no change. I only came to have a talk about +business, Catiche,"~^ muttered the prince, seating himself wearily on +the chair she had just vacated. "You have made the place warm, I +must say," he remarked. "Well, sit down: let's have a talk." + +^~ Catherine. + +"I thought perhaps something had happened," she said with her +unchanging stonily severe expression; and, sitting down opposite the +prince, she prepared to listen. + +"I wished to get a nap, mon cousin, but I can't." + +"Well, my dear?" said Prince Vasili, taking her hand and bending +it downwards as was his habit. + +It was plain that this "well?" referred to much that they both +understood without naming. + +The princess, who had a straight, rigid body, abnormally long for +her legs, looked directly at Prince Vasili with no sign of emotion +in her prominent gray eyes. Then she shook her head and glanced up +at the icons with a sigh. This might have been taken as an +expression of sorrow and devotion, or of weariness and hope of resting +before long. Prince Vasili understood it as an expression of +weariness. + +"And I?" he said; "do you think it is easier for me? I am as worn +out as a post horse, but still I must have a talk with you, Catiche, a +very serious talk." + +Prince Vasili said no more and his cheeks began to twitch nervously, +now on one side, now on the other, giving his face an unpleasant +expression which was never to be seen on it in a drawing room. His +eyes too seemed strange; at one moment they looked impudently sly +and at the next glanced round in alarm. + +The princess, holding her little dog on her lap with her thin bony +hands, looked attentively into Prince Vasili's eyes evidently resolved +not to be the first to break silence, if she had to wait till morning. + +"Well, you see, my dear princess and cousin, Catherine Semenovna," +continued Prince Vasili, returning to his theme, apparently not +without an inner struggle; "at such a moment as this one must think of +everything. One must think of the future, of all of you... I love +you all, like children of my own, as you know." + +The princess continued to look at him without moving, and with the +same dull expression. + +"And then of course my family has also to be considered," Prince +Vasili went on, testily pushing away a little table without looking at +her. "You know, Catiche, that we- you three sisters, Mamontov, and +my wife- are the count's only direct heirs. I know, I know how hard it +is for you to talk or think of such matters. It is no easier for me; +but, my dear, I am getting on for sixty and must be prepared for +anything. Do you know I have sent for Pierre? The count," pointing +to his portrait, "definitely demanded that he should be called." + +Prince Vasili looked questioningly at the princess, but could not +make out whether she was considering what he had just said or +whether she was simply looking at him. + +"There is one thing I constantly pray God to grant, mon cousin," she +replied, "and it is that He would be merciful to him and would allow +his noble soul peacefully to leave this..." + +"Yes, yes, of course," interrupted Prince Vasili impatiently, +rubbing his bald head and angrily pulling back toward him the little +table that he had pushed away. "But... in short, the fact is... you +know yourself that last winter the count made a will by which he +left all his property, not to us his direct heirs, but to Pierre." + +"He has made wills enough!" quietly remarked the princess. "But he +cannot leave the estate to Pierre. Pierre is illegitimate." + +"But, my dear," said Prince Vasili suddenly, clutching the little +table and becoming more animated and talking more rapidly: "what if +a letter has been written to the Emperor in which the count asks for +Pierre's legitimation? Do you understand that in consideration of +the count's services, his request would be granted?..." + +The princess smiled as people do who think they know more about +the subject under discussion than those they are talking with. + +"I can tell you more," continued Prince Vasili, seizing her hand, +"that letter was written, though it was not sent, and the Emperor knew +of it. The only question is, has it been destroyed or not? If not, +then as soon as all is over," and Prince Vasili sighed to intimate +what he meant by the words all is over, "and the count's papers are +opened, the will and letter will be delivered to the Emperor, and +the petition will certainly be granted. Pierre will get everything +as the legitimate son." + +"And our share?" asked the princess smiling ironically, as if +anything might happen, only not that. + +"But, my poor Catiche, it is as clear as daylight! He will then be +the legal heir to everything and you won't get anything. You must +know, my dear, whether the will and letter were written, and whether +they have been destroyed or not. And if they have somehow been +overlooked, you ought to know where they are, and must find them, +because..." + +"What next?" the princess interrupted, smiling sardonically and +not changing the expression of her eyes. "I am a woman, and you +think we are all stupid; but I know this: an illegitimate son cannot +inherit... un batard!"~^ she added, as if supposing that this +translation of the word would effectively prove to Prince Vasili the +invalidity of his contention. + +^~ A bastard. + +"Well, really, Catiche! Can't you understand! You are so +intelligent, how is it you don't see that if the count has written a +letter to the Emperor begging him to recognize Pierre as legitimate, +it follows that Pierre will not be Pierre but will become Count +Bezukhov, and will then inherit everything under the will? And if +the will and letter are not destroyed, then you will have nothing +but the consolation of having been dutiful et tout ce qui s'ensuit!~^ +That's certain." + +^~ And all that follows therefrom. + +"I know the will was made, but I also know that it is invalid; and +you, mon cousin, seem to consider me a perfect fool," said the +princess with the expression women assume when they suppose they are +saying something witty and stinging. + +"My dear Princess Catherine Semenovna," began Prince Vasili +impatiently, "I came here not to wrangle with you, but to talk about +your interests as with a kinswoman, a good, kind, true relation. And I +tell you for the tenth time that if the letter to the Emperor and +the will in Pierre's favor are among the count's papers, then, my dear +girl, you and your sisters are not heiresses! If you don't believe me, +then believe an expert. I have just been talking to Dmitri Onufrich" +(the family solicitor) "and he says the same." + +At this a sudden change evidently took place in the princess' ideas; +her thin lips grew white, though her eyes did not change, and her +voice when she began to speak passed through such transitions as she +herself evidently did not expect. + +"That would be a fine thing!" said she. "I never wanted anything and +I don't now." + +She pushed the little dog off her lap and smoothed her dress. + +"And this is gratitude- this is recognition for those who have +sacrificed everything for his sake!" she cried. "It's splendid! +Fine! I don't want anything, Prince." + +"Yes, but you are not the only one. There are your sisters..." +replied Prince Vasili. + +But the princess did not listen to him. + +"Yes, I knew it long ago but had forgotten. I knew that I could +expect nothing but meanness, deceit, envy, intrigue, and +ingratitude- the blackest ingratitude- in this house..." + +"Do you or do you not know where that will is?" insisted Prince +Vasili, his cheeks twitching more than ever. + +"Yes, I was a fool! I still believed in people, loved them, and +sacrificed myself. But only the base, the vile succeed! I know who has +been intriguing!" + +The princees wished to rise, but the prince held her by the hand. +She had the air of one who has suddenly lost faith in the whole +human race. She gave her companion an angry glance. + +"There is still time, my dear. You must remember, Catiche, that it +was all done casually in a moment of anger, of illness, and was +afterwards forgotten. Our duty, my dear, is to rectify his mistake, to +ease his last moments by not letting him commit this injustice, and +not to let him die feeling that he is rendering unhappy those who..." + +"Who sacrificed everything for him," chimed in the princess, who +would again have risen had not the prince still held her fast, "though +he never could appreciate it. No, mon cousin," she added with a +sigh, "I shall always remember that in this world one must expect no +reward, that in this world there is neither honor nor justice. In this +world one has to be cunning and cruel." + +"Now come, come! Be reasonable. I know your excellent heart." + +"No, I have a wicked heart." + +"I know your heart," repeated the prince. "I value your friendship +and wish you to have as good an opinion of me. Don't upset yourself, +and let us talk sensibly while there is still time, be it a day or +be it but an hour.... Tell me all you know about the will, and above +all where it is. You must know. We will take it at once and show it to +the count. He has, no doubt, forgotten it and will wish to destroy it. +You understand that my sole desire is conscientiously to carry out his +wishes; that is my only reason for being here. I came simply to help +him and you." + +"Now I see it all! I know who has been intriguing- I know!" cried +the princess. + +"That's not the point, my dear." + +"It's that protege of yours, that sweet Princess Drubetskaya, that +Anna Mikhaylovna whom I would not take for a housemaid... the +infamous, vile woman!" + +"Do not let us lose any time..." + +"Ah, don't talk to me! Last winter she wheedled herself in here +and told the count such vile, disgraceful things about us, +especially about Sophie- I can't repeat them- that it made the count +quite ill and he would not see us for a whole fortnight. I know it was +then he wrote this vile, infamous paper, but I thought the thing was +invalid." + +"We've got to it at last- why did you not tell me about it sooner?" + +"It's in the inlaid portfolio that he keeps under his pillow," +said the princess, ignoring his question. "Now I know! Yes; if I +have a sin, a great sin, it is hatred of that vile woman!" almost +shrieked the princess, now quite changed. "And what does she come +worming herself in here for? But I will give her a piece of my mind. +The time will come!" + +CHAPTER XXII + +While these conversations were going on in the reception room and +the princess' room, a carriage containing Pierre (who had been sent +for) and Anna Mikhaylovna (who found it necessary to accompany him) +was driving into the court of Count Bezukhov's house. As the wheels +rolled softly over the straw beneath the windows, Anna Mikhaylovna, +having turned with words of comfort to her companion, realized that he +was asleep in his corner and woke him up. Rousing himself, Pierre +followed Anna Mikhaylovna out of the carriage, and only then began +to think of the interview with his dying father which awaited him. +He noticed that they had not come to the front entrance but to the +back door. While he was getting down from the carriage steps two +men, who looked like tradespeople, ran hurriedly from the entrance and +hid in the shadow of the wall. Pausing for a moment, Pierre noticed +several other men of the same kind hiding in the shadow of the house +on both sides. But neither Anna Mikhaylovna nor the footman nor the +coachman, who could not help seeing these people, took any notice of +them. "It seems to be all right," Pierre concluded, and followed +Anna Mikhaylovna. She hurriedly ascended the narrow dimly lit stone +staircase, calling to Pierre, who was lagging behind, to follow. +Though he did not see why it was necessary for him to go to the +count at all, still less why he had to go by the back stairs, yet +judging by Anna Mikhaylovna's air of assurance and haste, Pierre +concluded that it was all absolutely necessary. Halfway up the +stairs they were almost knocked over by some men who, carrying +pails, came running downstairs, their boots clattering. These men +pressed close to the wall to let Pierre and Anna Mikhaylovna pass +and did not evince the least surprise at seeing them there. + +"Is this the way to the princesses' apartments?" asked Anna +Mikhaylovna of one of them. + +"Yes," replied a footman in a bold loud voice, as if anything were +now permissible; "the door to the left, ma'am." + +"Perhaps the count did not ask for me," said Pierre when he +reached the landing. "I'd better go to my own room." + +Anna Mikhaylovna paused and waited for him to come up. + +"Ah, my friend!" she said, touching his arm as she had done her +son's when speaking to him that afternoon, "believe me I suffer no +less than you do, but be a man!" + +"But really, hadn't I better go away?" he asked, looking kindly at +her over his spectacles. + +"Ah, my dear friend! Forget the wrongs that may have been done +you. Think that he is your father... perhaps in the agony of death." +She sighed. "I have loved you like a son from the first. Trust +yourself to me, Pierre. I shall not forget your interests." + +Pierre did not understand a word, but the conviction that all this +had to be grew stronger, and he meekly followed Anna Mikhaylovna who +was already opening a door. + +This door led into a back anteroom. An old man, a servant of the +princesses, sat in a corner knitting a stocking. Pierre had never been +in this part of the house and did not even know of the existence of +these rooms. Anna Mikhaylovna, addressing a maid who was hurrying past +with a decanter on a tray as "my dear" and "my sweet," asked about the +princess' health and then led Pierre along a stone passage. The +first door on the left led into the princesses' apartments. The maid +with the decanter in her haste had not closed the door (everything +in the house was done in haste at that time), and Pierre and Anna +Mikhaylovna in passing instinctively glanced into the room, where +Prince Vasili and the eldest princess were sitting close together +talking. Seeing them pass, Prince Vasili drew back with obvious +impatience, while the princess jumped up and with a gesture of +desperation slammed the door with all her might. + +This action was so unlike her usual composure and the fear +depicted on Prince Vasili's face so out of keeping with his dignity +that Pierre stopped and glanced inquiringly over his spectacles at his +guide. Anna Mikhaylovna evinced no surprise, she only smiled faintly +and sighed, as if to say that this was no more than she had expected. + +"Be a man, my friend. I will look after your interests," said she in +reply to his look, and went still faster along the passage. + +Pierre could not make out what it was all about, and still less what +"watching over his interests" meant, but he decided that all these +things had to be. From the passage they went into a large, dimly lit +room adjoining the count's reception room. It was one of those +sumptuous but cold apartments known to Pierre only from the front +approach, but even in this room there now stood an empty bath, and +water had been spilled on the carpet. They were met by a deacon with a +censer and by a servant who passed out on tiptoe without heeding them. +They went into the reception room familiar to Pierre, with two Italian +windows opening into the conservatory, with its large bust and full +length portrait of Catherine the Great. The same people were still +sitting here in almost the same positions as before, whispering to one +another. All became silent and turned to look at the pale tear-worn +Anna Mikhaylovna as she entered, and at the big stout figure of Pierre +who, hanging his head, meekly followed her. + +Anna Mikhaylovna's face expressed a consciousness that the +decisive moment had arrived. With the air of a practical Petersburg +lady she now, keeping Pierre close beside her, entered the room even +more boldly than that afternoon. She felt that as she brought with her +the person the dying man wished to see, her own admission was assured. +Casting a rapid glance at all those in the room and noticing the +count's confessor there, she glided up to him with a sort of amble, +not exactly bowing yet seeming to grow suddenly smaller, and +respectfully received the blessing first of one and then of another +priest. + +"God be thanked that you are in time," said she to one of the +priests; "all we relatives have been in such anxiety. This young man +is the count's son," she added more softly. "What a terrible moment!" + +Having said this she went up to the doctor. + +"Dear doctor," said she, "this young man is the count's son. Is +there any hope?" + +The doctor cast a rapid glance upwards and silently shrugged his +shoulders. Anna Mikhaylovna with just the same movement raised her +shoulders and eyes, almost closing the latter, sighed, and moved +away from the doctor to Pierre. To him, in a particularly respectful +and tenderly sad voice, she said: + +"Trust in His mercy!" and pointing out a small sofa for him to sit +and wait for her, she went silently toward the door that everyone +was watching and it creaked very slightly as she disappeared behind +it. + +Pierre, having made up his mind to obey his monitress implicitly, +moved toward the sofa she had indicated. As soon as Anna Mikhaylovna +had disappeared he noticed that the eyes of all in the room turned +to him with something more than curiosity and sympathy. He noticed +that they whispered to one another, casting significant looks at him +with a kind of awe and even servility. A deference such as he had +never before received was shown him. A strange lady, the one who had +been talking to the priests, rose and offered him her seat; an +aide-de-camp picked up and returned a glove Pierre had dropped; the +doctors became respectfully silent as he passed by, and moved to +make way for him. At first Pierre wished to take another seat so as +not to trouble the lady, and also to pick up the glove himself and +to pass round the doctors who were not even in his way; but all at +once he felt that this would not do, and that tonight he was a +person obliged to perform some sort of awful rite which everyone +expected of him, and that he was therefore bound to accept their +services. He took the glove in silence from the aide-de-camp, and +sat down in the lady's chair, placing his huge hands symmetrically +on his knees in the naive attitude of an Egyptian statue, and +decided in his own mind that all was as it should be, and that in +order not to lose his head and do foolish things he must not act on +his own ideas tonight, but must yield himself up entirely to the +will of those who were guiding him. + +Not two minutes had passed before Prince Vasili with head erect +majestically entered the room. He was wearing his long coat with three +stars on his breast. He seemed to have grown thinner since the +morning; his eyes seemed larger than usual when he glanced round and +noticed Pierre. He went up to him, took his hand (a thing he never +used to do), and drew it downwards as if wishing to ascertain +whether it was firmly fixed on. + +"Courage, courage, my friend! He has asked to see you. That is +well!" and he turned to go. + +But Pierre thought it necessary to ask: "How is..." and hesitated, +not knowing whether it would be proper to call the dying man "the +count," yet ashamed to call him "father." + +"He had another stroke about half an hour ago. Courage, my +friend..." + +Pierre's mind was in such a confused state that the word "stroke" +suggested to him a blow from something. He looked at Prince Vasili +in perplexity, and only later grasped that a stroke was an attack of +illness. Prince Vasili said something to Lorrain in passing and went +through the door on tiptoe. He could not walk well on tiptoe and his +whole body jerked at each step. The eldest princess followed him, +and the priests and deacons and some servants also went in at the +door. Through that door was heard a noise of things being moved about, +and at last Anna Mikhaylovna, still with the same expression, pale but +resolute in the discharge of duty, ran out and touching Pierre lightly +on the arm said: + +"The divine mercy is inexhaustible! Unction is about to be +administered. Come." + +Pierre went in at the door, stepping on the soft carpet, and noticed +that the strange lady, the aide-de-camp, and some of the servants, all +followed him in, as if there were now no further need for permission +to enter that room. + +CHAPTER XXIII + +Pierre well knew this large room divided by columns and an arch, its +walls hung round with Persian carpets. The part of the room behind the +columns, with a high silk-curtained mahogany bedstead on one side +and on the other an immense case containing icons, was brightly +illuminated with red light like a Russian church during evening +service. Under the gleaming icons stood a long invalid chair, and in +that chair on snowy-white smooth pillows, evidently freshly changed, +Pierre saw- covered to the waist by a bright green quilt- the +familiar, majestic figure of his father, Count Bezukhov, with that +gray mane of hair above his broad forehead which reminded one of a +lion, and the deep characteristically noble wrinkles of his +handsome, ruddy face. He lay just under the icons; his large thick +hands outside the quilt. Into the right hand, which was lying palm +downwards, a wax taper had been thrust between forefinger and thumb, +and an old servant, bending over from behind the chair, held it in +position. By the chair stood the priests, their long hair falling over +their magnificent glittering vestments, with lighted tapers in their +hands, slowly and solemnly conducting the service. A little behind +them stood the two younger princesses holding handkerchiefs to their +eyes, and just in front of them their eldest sister, Catiche, with a +vicious and determined look steadily fixed on the icons, as though +declaring to all that she could not answer for herself should she +glance round. Anna Mikhaylovna, with a meek, sorrowful, and +all-forgiving expression on her face, stood by the door near the +strange lady. Prince Vasili in front of the door, near the invalid +chair, a wax taper in his left hand, was leaning his left arm on the +carved back of a velvet chair he had turned round for the purpose, and +was crossing himself with his right hand, turning his eyes upward each +time he touched his forehead. His face wore a calm look of piety and +resignation to the will of God. "If you do not understand these +sentiments," he seemed to be saying, "so much the worse for you!" + +Behind him stood the aide-de-camp, the doctors, and the menservants; +the men and women had separated as in church. All were silently +crossing themselves, and the reading of the church service, the +subdued chanting of deep bass voices, and in the intervals sighs and +the shuffling of feet were the only sounds that could be heard. Anna +Mikhaylovna, with an air of importance that showed that she felt she +quite knew what she was about, went across the room to where Pierre +was standing and gave him a taper. He lit it and, distracted by +observing those around him, began crossing himself with the hand +that held the taper. + +Sophie, the rosy, laughter-loving, youngest princess with the +mole, watched him. She smiled, hid her face in her handkerchief, and +remained with it hidden for awhile; then looking up and seeing +Pierre she again began to laugh. She evidently felt unable to look +at him without laughing, but could not resist looking at him: so to be +out of temptation she slipped quietly behind one of the columns. In +the midst of the service the voices of the priests suddenly ceased, +they whispered to one another, and the old servant who was holding the +count's hand got up and said something to the ladies. Anna Mikhaylovna +stepped forward and, stooping over the dying man, beckoned to +Lorrain from behind her back. The French doctor held no taper; he +was leaning against one of the columns in a respectful attitude +implying that he, a foreigner, in spite of all differences of faith, +understood the full importance of the rite now being performed and +even approved of it. He now approached the sick man with the noiseless +step of one in full vigor of life, with his delicate white fingers +raised from the green quilt the hand that was free, and turning +sideways felt the pulse and reflected a moment. The sick man was given +something to drink, there was a stir around him, then the people +resumed their places and the service continued. During this interval +Pierre noticed that Prince Vasili left the chair on which he had +been leaning, and- with air which intimated that he knew what he was +about and if others did not understand him it was so much the worse +for them- did not go up to the dying man, but passed by him, joined +the eldest princess, and moved with her to the side of the room +where stood the high bedstead with its silken hangings. On leaving the +bed both Prince Vasili and the princess passed out by a back door, but +returned to their places one after the other before the service was +concluded. Pierre paid no more attention to this occurrence than to +the rest of what went on, having made up his mind once for all that +what he saw happening around him that evening was in some way +essential. + +The chanting of the service ceased, and the voice of the priest +was heard respectfully congratulating the dying man on having received +the sacrament. The dying man lay as lifeless and immovable as +before. Around him everyone began to stir: steps were audible and +whispers, among which Anna Mikhaylovna's was the most distinct. + +Pierre heard her say: + +"Certainly he must be moved onto the bed; here it will be +impossible..." + +The sick man was so surrounded by doctors, princesses, and +servants that Pierre could no longer see the reddish-yellow face +with its gray mane- which, though he saw other faces as well, he had +not lost sight of for a single moment during the whole service. He +judged by the cautious movements of those who crowded round the +invalid chair that they had lifted the dying man and were moving him. + +"Catch hold of my arm or you'll drop him!" he heard one of the +servants say in a frightened whisper. "Catch hold from underneath. +Here!" exclaimed different voices; and the heavy breathing of the +bearers and the shuffling of their feet grew more hurried, as if the +weight they were carrying were too much for them. + +As the bearers, among whom was Anna Mikhaylovna, passed the young +man he caught a momentary glimpse between their heads and backs of the +dying man's high, stout, uncovered chest and powerful shoulders, +raised by those who were holding him under the armpits, and of his +gray, curly, leonine head. This head, with its remarkably broad brow +and cheekbones, its handsome, sensual mouth, and its cold, majestic +expression, was not disfigured by the approach of death. It was the +same as Pierre remembered it three months before, when the count had +sent him to Petersburg. But now this head was swaying helplessly +with the uneven movements of the bearers, and the cold listless gaze +fixed itself upon nothing. + +After a few minutes' bustle beside the high bedstead, those who +had carried the sick man dispersed. Anna Mikhaylovna touched +Pierre's hand and said, "Come." Pierre went with her to the bed on +which the sick man had been laid in a stately pose in keeping with the +ceremony just completed. He lay with his head propped high on the +pillows. His hands were symmetrically placed on the green silk +quilt, the palms downward. When Pierre came up the count was gazing +straight at him, but with a look the significance of which could not +be understood by mortal man. Either this look meant nothing but that +as long as one has eyes they must look somewhere, or it meant too +much. Pierre hesitated, not knowing what to do, and glanced +inquiringly at his guide. Anna Mikhaylovna made a hurried sign with +her eyes, glancing at the sick man's hand and moving her lips as if to +send it a kiss. Pierre, carefully stretching his neck so as not to +touch the quilt, followed her suggestion and pressed his lips to the +large boned, fleshy hand. Neither the hand nor a single muscle of +the count's face stirred. Once more Pierre looked questioningly at +Anna Mikhaylovna to see what he was to do next. Anna Mikhaylovna +with her eyes indicated a chair that stood beside the bed. Pierre +obediently sat down, his eyes asking if he were doing right. Anna +Mikhaylovna nodded approvingly. Again Pierre fell into the naively +symmetrical pose of an Egyptian statue, evidently distressed that +his stout and clumsy body took up so much room and doing his utmost to +look as small as possible. He looked at the count, who still gazed +at the spot where Pierre's face had been before he sat down. Anna +Mikhaylovna indicated by her attitude her consciousness of the +pathetic importance of these last moments of meeting between the +father and son. This lasted about two minutes, which to Pierre +seemed an hour. Suddenly the broad muscles and lines of the count's +face began to twitch. The twitching increased, the handsome mouth +was drawn to one side (only now did Pierre realize how near death +his father was), and from that distorted mouth issued an indistinct, +hoarse sound. Anna Mikhaylovna looked attentively at the sick man's +eyes, trying to guess what he wanted; she pointed first to Pierre, +then to some drink, then named Prince Vasili in an inquiring +whisper, then pointed to the quilt. The eyes and face of the sick +man showed impatience. He made an effort to look at the servant who +stood constantly at the head of the bed. + +"Wants to turn on the other side," whispered the servant, and got up +to turn the count's heavy body toward the wall. + +Pierre rose to help him. + +While the count was being turned over, one of his arms fell back +helplessly and he made a fruitless effort to pull it forward. +Whether he noticed the look of terror with which Pierre regarded +that lifeless arm, or whether some other thought flitted across his +dying brain, at any rate he glanced at the refractory arm, at Pierre's +terror-stricken face, and again at the arm, and on his face a +feeble, piteous smile appeared, quite out of keeping with his +features, that seemed to deride his own helplessness. At sight of this +smile Pierre felt an unexpected quivering in his breast and a tickling +in his nose, and tears dimmed his eyes. The sick man was turned on +to his side with his face to the wall. He sighed. + +"He is dozing," said Anna Mikhaylovna, observing that one of the +princesses was coming to take her turn at watching. "Let us go." + +Pierre went out. + +CHAPTER XXIV + +There was now no one in the reception room except Prince Vasili +and the eldest princess, who were sitting under the portrait of +Catherine the Great and talking eagerly. As soon as they saw Pierre +and his companion they became silent, and Pierre thought he saw the +princess hide something as she whispered: + +"I can't bear the sight of that woman." + +"Catiche has had tea served in the small drawing room," said +Prince Vasili to Anna Mikhaylovna. "Go and take something, my poor +Anna Mikhaylovna, or you will not hold out." + +To Pierre he said nothing, merely giving his arm a sympathetic +squeeze below the shoulder. Pierre went with Anna Mikhaylovna into the +small drawing room. + +"There is nothing so refreshing after a sleepless night as a cup +of this delicious Russian tea," Lorrain was saying with an air of +restrained animation as he stood sipping tea from a delicate Chinese +handleless cup before a table on which tea and a cold supper were laid +in the small circular room. Around the table all who were at Count +Bezukhov's house that night had gathered to fortify themselves. Pierre +well remembered this small circular drawing room with its mirrors +and little tables. During balls given at the house Pierre, who did not +know how to dance, had liked sitting in this room to watch the +ladies who, as they passed through in their ball dresses with diamonds +and pearls on their bare shoulders, looked at themselves in the +brilliantly lighted mirrors which repeated their reflections several +times. Now this same room was dimly lighted by two candles. On one +small table tea things and supper dishes stood in disorder, and in the +middle of the night a motley throng of people sat there, not +merrymaking, but somberly whispering, and betraying by every word +and movement that they none of them forgot what was happening and what +was about to happen in the bedroom. Pierre did not eat anything though +he would very much have liked to. He looked inquiringly at his +monitress and saw that she was again going on tiptoe to the +reception room where they had left Prince Vasili and the eldest +princess. Pierre concluded that this also was essential, and after a +short interval followed her. Anna Mikhaylovna was standing beside +the princess, and they were both speaking in excited whispers. + +"Permit me, Princess, to know what is necessary and what is not +necessary," said the younger of the two speakers, evidently in the +same state of excitement as when she had slammed the door of her room. + +"But, my dear princess," answered Anna Mikhaylovna blandly but +impressively, blocking the way to the bedroom and preventing the other +from passing, "won't this be too much for poor Uncle at a moment +when he needs repose? Worldly conversation at a moment when his soul +is already prepared..." + +Prince Vasili was seated in an easy chair in his familiar +attitude, with one leg crossed high above the other. His cheeks, which +were so flabby that they looked heavier below, were twitching +violently; but he wore the air of a man little concerned in what the +two ladies were saying. + +"Come, my dear Anna Mikhaylovna, let Catiche do as she pleases. +You know how fond the count is of her." + +"I don't even know what is in this paper," said the younger of the +two ladies, addressing Prince Vasili and pointing to an inlaid +portfolio she held in her hand. "All I know is that his real will is +in his writing table, and this is a paper he has forgotten...." + +She tried to pass Anna Mikhaylovna, but the latter sprang so as to +bar her path. + +"I know, my dear, kind princess," said Anna Mikhaylovna, seizing the +portfolio so firmly that it was plain she would not let go easily. +"Dear princess, I beg and implore you, have some pity on him! Je +vous en conjure..." + +The princess did not reply. Their efforts in the struggle for the +portfolio were the only sounds audible, but it was evident that if the +princess did speak, her words would not be flattering to Anna +Mikhaylovna. Though the latter held on tenaciously, her voice lost +none of its honeyed firmness and softness. + +"Pierre, my dear, come here. I think he will not be out of place +in a family consultation; is it not so, Prince?" + +"Why don't you speak, cousin?" suddenly shrieked the princess so +loud that those in the drawing room heard her and were startled. +"Why do you remain silent when heaven knows who permits herself to +interfere, making a scene on the very threshold of a dying man's room? +Intriguer!" she hissed viciously, and tugged with all her might at the +portfolio. + +But Anna Mikhaylovna went forward a step or two to keep her hold +on the portfolio, and changed her grip. + +Prince Vasili rose. "Oh!" said he with reproach and surprise, +"this is absurd! Come, let go I tell you." + +The princess let go. + +"And you too!" + +But Anna Mikhaylovna did not obey him. + +"Let go, I tell you! I will take the responsibility. I myself will +go and ask him, I!... does that satisfy you?" + +"But, Prince," said Anna Mikhaylovna, "after such a solemn +sacrament, allow him a moment's peace! Here, Pierre, tell them your +opinion," said she, turning to the young man who, having come quite +close, was gazing with astonishment at the angry face of the +princess which had lost all dignity, and at the twitching cheeks of +Prince Vasili. + +"Remember that you will answer for the consequences," said Prince +Vasili severely. "You don't know what you are doing." + +"Vile woman!" shouted the princess, darting unexpectedly at Anna +Mikhaylovna and snatching the portfolio from her. + +Prince Vasili bent his head and spread out his hands. + +At this moment that terrible door, which Pierre had watched so +long and which had always opened so quietly, burst noisily open and +banged against the wall, and the second of the three sisters rushed +out wringing her hands. + +"What are you doing!" she cried vehemently. "He is dying and you +leave me alone with him!" + +Her sister dropped the portfolio. Anna Mikhaylovna, stooping, +quickly caught up the object of contention and ran into the bedroom. +The eldest princess and Prince Vasili, recovering themselves, followed +her. A few minutes later the eldest sister came out with a pale hard +face, again biting her underlip. At sight of Pierre her expression +showed an irrepressible hatred. + +"Yes, now you may be glad!" said she; "this is what you have been +waiting for." And bursting into tears she hid her face in her +handkerchief and rushed from the room. + +Prince Vasili came next. He staggered to the sofa on which Pierre +was sitting and dropped onto it, covering his face with his hand. +Pierre noticed that he was pale and that his jaw quivered and shook as +if in an ague. + +"Ah, my friend!" said he, taking Pierre by the elbow; and there +was in his voice a sincerity and weakness Pierre had never observed in +it before. "How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? I +am near sixty, dear friend... I too... All will end in death, all! +Death is awful..." and he burst into tears. + +Anna Mikhaylovna came out last. She approached Pierre with slow, +quiet steps. + +"Pierre!" she said. + +Pierre gave her an inquiring look. She kissed the young man on his +forehead, wetting him with her tears. Then after a pause she said: + +"He is no more...." + +Pierre looked at her over his spectacles. + +"Come, I will go with you. Try to weep, nothing gives such relief as +tears." + +She led him into the dark drawing room and Pierre was glad no one +could see his face. Anna Mikhaylovna left him, and when she returned +he was fast asleep with his head on his arm. + +In the morning Anna Mikhaylovna said to Pierre: + +"Yes, my dear, this is a great loss for us all, not to speak of you. +But God will support you: you are young, and are now, I hope, in +command of an immense fortune. The will has not yet been opened. I +know you well enough to be sure that this will not turn your head, but +it imposes duties on you, and you must be a man." + +Pierre was silent. + +"Perhaps later on I may tell you, my dear boy, that if I had not +been there, God only knows what would have happened! You know, Uncle +promised me only the day before yesterday not to forget Boris. But +he had no time. I hope, my dear friend, you will carry out your +father's wish?" + +Pierre understood nothing of all this and coloring shyly looked in +silence at Princess Anna Mikhaylovna. After her talk with Pierre, Anna +Mikhaylovna returned to the Rostovs' and went to bed. On waking in the +morning she told the Rostovs and all her acquaintances the details +of Count Bezukhov's death. She said the count had died as she would +herself wish to die, that his end was not only touching but +edifying. As to the last meeting between father and son, it was so +touching that she could not think of it without tears, and did not +know which had behaved better during those awful moments- the father +who so remembered everything and everybody at last and last and had +spoken such pathetic words to the son, or Pierre, whom it had been +pitiful to see, so stricken was he with grief, though he tried hard to +hide it in order not to sadden his dying father. "It is painful, but +it does one good. It uplifts the soul to see such men as the old count +and his worthy son," said she. Of the behavior of the eldest +princess and Prince Vasili she spoke disapprovingly, but in whispers +and as a great secret. + +CHAPTER XXV + +At Bald Hills, Prince Nicholas Andreevich Bolkonski's estate, the +arrival of young Prince Andrew and his wife was daily expected, but +this expectation did not upset the regular routine of life in the +old prince's household. General in Chief Prince Nicholas Andreevich +(nicknamed in society, "the King of Prussia") ever since the Emperor +Paul had exiled him to his country estate had lived there continuously +with his daughter, Princess Mary, and her companion, Mademoiselle +Bourienne. Though in the new reign he was free to return to the +capitals, he still continued to live in the country, remarking that +anyone who wanted to see him could come the hundred miles from +Moscow to Bald Hills, while he himself needed no one and nothing. He +used to say that there are only two sources of human vice- idleness +and superstition, and only two virtues- activity and intelligence. +He himself undertook his daughter's education, and to develop these +two cardinal virtues in her gave her lessons in algebra and geometry +till she was twenty, and arranged her life so that her whole time +was occupied. He was himself always occupied: writing his memoirs, +solving problems in higher mathematics, turning snuffboxes on a lathe, +working in the garden, or superintending the building that was +always going on at his estate. As regularity is a prime condition +facilitating activity, regularity in his household was carried to +the highest point of exactitude. He always came to table under +precisely the same conditions, and not only at the same hour but at +the same minute. With those about him, from his daughter to his serfs, +the prince was sharp and invariably exacting, so that without being +a hardhearted man he inspired such fear and respect as few hardhearted +men would have aroused. Although he was in retirement and had now no +influence in political affairs, every high official appointed to the +province in which the prince's estate lay considered it his duty to +visit him and waited in the lofty antechamber ante chamber just as the +architect, gardener, or Princess Mary did, till the prince appeared +punctually to the appointed hour. Everyone sitting in this antechamber +experienced the same feeling of respect and even fear when the +enormously high study door opened and showed the figure of a rather +small old man, with powdered wig, small withered hands, and bushy gray +eyebrows which, when he frowned, sometimes hid the gleam of his +shrewd, youthfully glittering eyes. + +On the morning of the day that the young couple were to arrive, +Princess Mary entered the antechamber as usual at the time appointed +for the morning greeting, crossing herself with trepidation and +repeating a silent prayer. Every morning she came in like that, and +every morning prayed that the daily interview might pass off well. + +An old powdered manservant who was sitting in the antechamber rose +quietly and said in a whisper: "Please walk in." + +Through the door came the regular hum of a lathe. The princess +timidly opened the door which moved noiselessly and easily. She paused +at the entrance. The prince was working at the lathe and after +glancing round continued his work. + +The enormous study was full of things evidently in constant use. The +large table covered with books and plans, the tall glass-fronted +bookcases with keys in the locks, the high desk for writing while +standing up, on which lay an open exercise book, and the lathe with +tools laid ready to hand and shavings scattered around- all +indicated continuous, varied, and orderly activity. The motion of +the small foot shod in a Tartar boot embroidered with silver, and +the firm pressure of the lean sinewy hand, showed that the prince +still possessed the tenacious endurance and vigor of hardy old age. +After a few more turns of the lathe he removed his foot from the +pedal, wiped his chisel, dropped it into a leather pouch attached to +the lathe, and, approaching the table, summoned his daughter. He never +gave his children a blessing, so he simply held out his bristly +cheek (as yet unshaven) and, regarding her tenderly and attentively, +said severely: + +"Quite well? All right then, sit down." He took the exercise book +containing lessons in geometry written by himself and drew up a +chair with his foot. + +"For tomorrow!" said he, quickly finding the page and making a +scratch from one paragraph to another with his hard nail. + +The princess bent over the exercise book on the table. + +"Wait a bit, here's a letter for you," said the old man suddenly, +taking a letter addressed in a woman's hand from a bag hanging above +the table, onto which he threw it. + +At the sight of the letter red patches showed themselves on the +princess' face. She took it quickly and bent her head over it. + +"From Heloise?" asked the prince with a cold smile that showed his +still sound, yellowish teeth. + +"Yes, it's from Julie," replied the princess with a timid glance and +a timid smile. + +"I'll let two more letters pass, but the third I'll read," said +the prince sternly; "I'm afraid you write much nonsense. I'll read the +third!" + +"Read this if you like, Father," said the princess, blushing still +more and holding out the letter. + +"The third, I said the third!" cried the prince abruptly, pushing +the letter away, and leaning his elbows on the table he drew toward +him the exercise book containing geometrical figures. + +"Well, madam," he began, stooping over the book close to his +daughter and placing an arm on the back of the chair on which she sat, +so that she felt herself surrounded on all sides by the acrid scent of +old age and tobacco, which she had known so long. "Now, madam, these +triangles are equal; please note that the angle ABC..." + +The princess looked in a scared way at her father's eyes +glittering close to her; the red patches on her face came and went, +and it was plain that she understood nothing and was so frightened +that her fear would prevent her understanding any of her father's +further explanations, however clear they might be. Whether it was +the teacher's fault or the pupil's, this same thing happened every +day: the princess' eyes grew dim, she could not see and could not hear +anything, but was only conscious of her stern father's withered face +close to her, of his breath and the smell of him, and could think only +of how to get away quickly to her own room to make out the problem +in peace. The old man was beside himself: moved the chair on which +he was sitting noisily backward and forward, made efforts to control +himself and not become vehement, but almost always did become +vehement, scolded, and sometimes flung the exercise book away. + +The princess gave a wrong answer. + +"Well now, isn't she a fool!" shouted the prince, pushing the book +aside and turning sharply away; but rising immediately, he paced up +and down, lightly touched his daughter's hair and sat down again. + +He drew up his chair. and continued to explain. + +"This won't do, Princess; it won't do," said he, when Princess Mary, +having taken and closed the exercise book with the next day's +lesson, was about to leave: "Mathematics are most important, madam! +I don't want to have you like our silly ladies. Get used to it and +you'll like it," and he patted her cheek. "It will drive all the +nonsense out of your head." + +She turned to go, but he stopped her with a gesture and took an +uncut book from the high desk. + +"Here is some sort of Key to the Mysteries that your Heloise has +sent you. Religious! I don't interfere with anyone's belief... I +have looked at it. Take it. Well, now go. Go." + +He patted her on the shoulder and himself closed the door after her. + +Princess Mary went back to her room with the sad, scared +expression that rarely left her and which made her plain, sickly +face yet plainer. She sat down at her writing table, on which stood +miniature portraits and which was littered with books and papers. +The princess was as untidy as her father was tidy. She put down the +geometry book and eagerly broke the seal of her letter. It was from +her most intimate friend from childhood; that same Julie Karagina +who had been at the Rostovs' name-day party. + +Julie wrote in French: + +Dear and precious Friend, How terrible and frightful a thing is +separation! Though I tell myself that half my life and half my +happiness are wrapped up in you, and that in spite of the distance +separating us our hearts are united by indissoluble bonds, my heart +rebels against fate and in spite of the pleasures and distractions +around me I cannot overcome a certain secret sorrow that has been in +my heart ever since we parted. Why are we not together as we were last +summer, in your big study, on the blue sofa, the confidential sofa? +Why cannot I now, as three months ago, draw fresh moral strength +from your look, so gentle, calm, and penetrating, a look I loved so +well and seem to see before me as I write? + +Having read thus far, Princess Mary sighed and glanced into the +mirror which stood on her right. It reflected a weak, ungraceful +figure and thin face. Her eyes, always sad, now looked with particular +hopelessness at her reflection in the glass. "She flatters me," +thought the princess, turning away and continuing to read. But Julie +did not flatter her friend, the princess' eyes- large, deep and +luminous (it seemed as if at times there radiated from them shafts +of warm light)- were so beautiful that very often in spite of the +plainness of her face they gave her an attraction more powerful than +that of beauty. But the princess never saw the beautiful expression of +her own eyes- the look they had when she was not thinking of +herself. As with everyone, her face assumed a forced unnatural +expression as soon as she looked in a glass. She went on reading: + +All Moscow talks of nothing but war. One of my two brothers is +already abroad, the other is with the Guards, who are starting on +their march to the frontier. Our dear Emperor has left Petersburg +and it is thought intends to expose his precious person to the chances +of war. God grant that the Corsican monster who is destroying the +peace of Europe may be overthrown by the angel whom it has pleased the +Almighty, in His goodness, to give us as sovereign! To say nothing +of my brothers, this war has deprived me of one of the associations +nearest my heart. I mean young Nicholas Rostov, who with his +enthusiasm could not bear to remain inactive and has left the +university to join the army. I will confess to you, dear Mary, that in +spite of his extreme youth his departure for the army was a great +grief to me. This young man, of whom I spoke to you last summer, is so +noble-minded and full of that real youthfulness which one seldom finds +nowadays among our old men of twenty and, particularly, he is so frank +and has so much heart. He is so pure and poetic that my relations with +him, transient as they were, have been one of the sweetest comforts to +my poor heart, which has already suffered so much. Someday I will tell +you about our parting and all that was said then. That is still too +fresh. Ah, dear friend, you are happy not to know these poignant +joys and sorrows. You are fortunate, for the latter are generally +the stronger! I know very well that Count Nicholas is too young ever +to be more to me than a friend, but this sweet friendship, this poetic +and pure intimacy, were what my heart needed. But enough of this! +The chief news, about which all Moscow gossips, is the death of old +Count Bezukhov, and his inheritance. Fancy! The three princesses +have received very little, Prince Vasili nothing, and it is Monsieur +Pierre who has inherited all the property and has besides been +recognized as legitimate; so that he is now Count Bezukhov and +possessor of the finest fortune in Russia. It is rumored that Prince +Vasili played a very despicable part in this affair and that he +returned to Petersburg quite crestfallen. + +I confess I understand very little about all these matters of +wills and inheritance; but I do know that since this young man, whom +we all used to know as plain Monsieur Pierre, has become Count +Bezukhov and the owner of one of the largest fortunes in Russia, I +am much amused to watch the change in the tone and manners of the +mammas burdened by marriageable daughters, and of the young ladies +themselves, toward him, though, between you and me, he always seemed +to me a poor sort of fellow. As for the past two years people have +amused themselves by finding husbands for me (most of whom I don't +even know), the matchmaking chronicles of Moscow now speak of me as +the future Countess Bezukhova. But you will understand that I have +no desire for the post. A propos of marriages: do you know that a +while ago that universal auntie Anna Mikhaylovna told me, under the +seal of strict secrecy, of a plan of marriage for you. It is neither +more nor less than with Prince Vasili's son Anatole, whom they wish to +reform by marrying him to someone rich and distinguee, and it is on +you that his relations' choice has fallen. I don't know what you +will think of it, but I consider it my duty to let you know of it. +He is said to be very handsome and a terrible scapegrace. That is +all I have been able to find out about him. + +But enough of gossip. I am at the end of my second sheet of paper, +and Mamma has sent for me to go and dine at the Apraksins'. Read the +mystical book I am sending you; it has an enormous success here. +Though there are things in it difficult for the feeble human mind to +grasp, it is an admirable book which calms and elevates the soul. +Adieu! Give my respects to monsieur your father and my compliments +to Mademoiselle Bourienne. I embrace you as I love you. + +JULIE + +P.S. Let me have news of your brother and his charming little wife. + +The princess pondered awhile with a thoughtful smile and her +luminous eyes lit up so that her face was entirely transformed. Then +she suddenly rose and with her heavy tread went up to the table. She +took a sheet of paper and her hand moved rapidly over it. This is +the reply she wrote, also in French: + +Dear and precious Friend, Your letter of the 13th has given me great +delight. So you still love me, my romantic Julie? Separation, of which +you say so much that is bad, does not seem to have had its usual +effect on you. You complain of our separation. What then should I say, +if I dared complain, I who am deprived of all who are dear to me? +Ah, if we had not religion to console us life would be very sad. Why +do you suppose that I should look severely on your affection for +that young man? On such matters I am only severe with myself. I +understand such feelings in others, and if never having felt them I +cannot approve of them, neither do I condemn them. Only it seems to me +that Christian love, love of one's neighbor, love of one's enemy, is +worthier, sweeter, and better than the feelings which the beautiful +eyes of a young man can inspire in a romantic and loving young girl +like yourself. + +The news of Count Bezukhov's death reached us before your letter and +my father was much affected by it. He says the count was the last +representative but one of the great century, and that it is his own +turn now, but that he will do all he can to let his turn come as +late as possible. God preserve us from that terrible misfortune! + +I cannot agree with you about Pierre, whom I knew as a child. He +always seemed to me to have an excellent heart, and that is the +quality I value most in people. As to his inheritance and the part +played by Prince Vasili, it is very sad for both. Ah, my dear +friend, our divine Saviour's words, that it is easier for a camel to +go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the +Kingdom of God, are terribly true. I pity Prince Vasili but am still +more sorry for Pierre. So young, and burdened with such riches- to +what temptations he will be exposed! If I were asked what I desire +most on earth, it would be to be poorer than the poorest beggar. A +thousand thanks, dear friend, for the volume you have sent me and +which has such success in Moscow. Yet since you tell me that among +some good things it contains others which our weak human understanding +cannot grasp, it seems to me rather useless to spend time in reading +what is unintelligible and can therefore bear no fruit. I never +could understand the fondness some people have for confusing their +minds by dwelling on mystical books that merely awaken their doubts +and excite their imagination, giving them a bent for exaggeration +quite contrary to Christian simplicity. Let us rather read the +Epistles and Gospels. Let us not seek to penetrate what mysteries they +contain; for how can we, miserable sinners that we are, know the +terrible and holy secrets of Providence while we remain in this +flesh which forms an impenetrable veil between us and the Eternal? Let +us rather confine ourselves to studying those sublime rules which +our divine Saviour has left for our guidance here below. Let us try to +conform to them and follow them, and let us be persuaded that the less +we let our feeble human minds roam, the better we shall please God, +who rejects all knowledge that does not come from Him; and the less we +seek to fathom what He has been pleased to conceal from us, the sooner +will He vouchsafe its revelation to us through His divine Spirit. + +My father has not spoken to me of a suitor, but has only told me +that he has received a letter and is expecting a visit from Prince +Vasili. In regard to this project of marriage for me, I will tell you, +dear sweet friend, that I look on marriage as a divine institution +to which we must conform. However painful it may be to me, should +the Almighty lay the duties of wife and wife and mother upon me I +shall try to perform them as faithfully as I can, without +disquieting myself by examining my feelings toward him whom He may +give me for husband. + +I have had a letter from my brother, who announces his speedy +arrival at Bald Hills with his wife. This pleasure will be but a brief +one, however, for he will leave, us again to take part in this unhappy +war into which we have been drawn, God knows how or why. Not only +where you are- at the heart of affairs and of the world- is the talk +all of war, even here amid fieldwork and the calm of nature- which +townsfolk consider characteristic of the country- rumors of war are +heard and painfully felt. My father talks of nothing but marches and +countermarches, things of which I understand nothing; and the day +before yesterday during my daily walk through the village I +witnessed a heartrending scene.... It was a convoy of conscripts +enrolled from our people and starting to join the army. You should +have seen the state of the mothers, wives, and children of the men who +were going and should have heard the sobs. It seems as though +mankind has forgotten the laws of its divine Saviour, Who preached +love and forgiveness of injuries- and that men attribute the +greatest merit to skill in killing one another. + +Adieu, dear and kind friend; may our divine Saviour and His most +Holy Mother keep you in their holy and all-powerful care! + +MARY + +"Ah, you are sending off a letter, Princess? I have already +dispatched mine. I have written to my poor mother," said the smiling +Mademoiselle Bourienne rapidly, in her pleasant mellow tones and +with guttural r's. She brought into Princess Mary's strenuous, +mournful, and gloomy world a quite different atmosphere, careless, +lighthearted, and self-satisfied. + +"Princess, I must warn you," she added, lowering her voice and +evidently listening to herself with pleasure, and speaking with +exaggerated grasseyement, "the prince has been scolding Michael +Ivanovich. He is in a very bad humor, very morose. Be prepared." + +"Ah, dear friend," replied Princess Mary, "I have asked you never to +warn me of the humor my father is in. I do not allow myself to judge +him and would not have others do so." + +The princess glanced at her watch and, seeing that she was five +minutes late in starting her practice on the clavichord, went into the +sitting room with a look of alarm. Between twelve and two o'clock, +as the day was mapped out, the prince rested and the princess played +the clavichord. + +CHAPTER XXVI + +The gray-haired valet was sitting drowsily listening to the +snoring of the prince, who was in his large study. From the far side +of the house through the closed doors came the sound of difficult +passages- twenty times repeated- of a sonata by Dussek. + +Just then a closed carriage and another with a hood drove up to +the porch. Prince Andrew got out of the carriage, helped his little +wife to alight, and let her pass into the house before him. Old +Tikhon, wearing a wig, put his head out of the door of the +antechamber, reported in a whisper that the prince was sleeping, and +hastily closed the door. Tikhon knew that neither the son's arrival +nor any other unusual event must be allowed to disturb the appointed +order of the day. Prince Andrew apparently knew this as well as +Tikhon; he looked at his watch as if to ascertain whether his father's +habits had changed since he was at home last, and, having assured +himself that they had not, he turned to his wife. + +"He will get up in twenty minutes. Let us go across to Mary's room," +he said. + +The little princess had grown stouter during this time, but her eyes +and her short, downy, smiling lip lifted when she began to speak +just as merrily and prettily as ever. + +"Why, this is a palace!" she said to her husband, looking around +with the expression with which people compliment their host at a ball. +"Let's come, quick, quick!" And with a glance round, she smiled at +Tikhon, at her husband, and at the footman who accompanied them. + +"Is that Mary practicing? Let's go quietly and take her by +surprise." + +Prince Andrew followed her with a courteous but sad expression. + +"You've grown older, Tikhon," he said in passing to the old man, who +kissed his hand. + +Before they reached the room from which the sounds of the clavichord +came, the pretty, fair haired Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Bourienne, +rushed out apparently beside herself with delight. + +"Ah! what joy for the princess!" exclaimed she: "At last! I must let +her know." + +"No, no, please not... You are Mademoiselle Bourienne," said the +little princess, kissing her. "I know you already through my +sister-in-law's friendship for you. She was not expecting us?" + +They went up to the door of the sitting room from which came the +sound of the oft-repeated passage of the sonata. Prince Andrew stopped +and made a grimace, as if expecting something unpleasant. + +The little princess entered the room. The passage broke off in the +middle, a cry was heard, then Princess Mary's heavy tread and the +sound of kissing. When Prince Andrew went in the two princesses, who +had only met once before for a short time at his wedding, were in each +other's arms warmly pressing their lips to whatever place they +happened to touch. Mademoiselle Bourienne stood near them pressing her +hand to her heart, with a beatific smile and obviously equally ready +to cry or to laugh. Prince Andrew shrugged his shoulders and +frowned, as lovers of music do when they hear a false note. The two +women let go of one another, and then, as if afraid of being too late, +seized each other's hands, kissing them and pulling them away, and +again began kissing each other on the face, and then to Prince +Andrew's surprise both began to cry and kissed again. Mademoiselle +Bourienne also began to cry. Prince Andrew evidently felt ill at ease, +but to the two women it seemed quite natural that they should cry, and +apparently it never entered their heads that it could have been +otherwise at this meeting. + +"Ah! my dear!... Ah! Mary!" they suddenly exclaimed, and then +laughed. "I dreamed last night..."- "You were not expecting us?..."- +"Ah! Mary, you have got thinner?..." "And you have grown stouter!..." + +"I knew the princess at once," put in Mademoiselle Bourienne. + +"And I had no idea!..." exclaimed Princess Mary. "Ah, Andrew, I +did not see you." + +Prince Andrew and his sister, hand in hand, kissed one another, +and he told her she was still the same crybaby as ever. Princess +Mary had turned toward her brother, and through her tears the +loving, warm, gentle look of her large luminous eyes, very beautiful +at that moment, rested on Prince Andrew's face. + +The little princess talked incessantly, her short, downy upper lip +continually and rapidly touching her rosy nether lip when necessary +and drawing up again next moment when her face broke into a smile of +glittering teeth and sparkling eyes. She told of an accident they +had had on the Spasski Hill which might have been serious for her in +her condition, and immediately after that informed them that she had +left all her clothes in Petersburg and that heaven knew what she would +have to dress in here; and that Andrew had quite changed, and that +Kitty Odyntsova had married an old man, and that there was a suitor +for Mary, a real one, but that they would talk of that later. Princess +Mary was still looking silently at her brother and her beautiful +eyes were full of love and sadness. It was plain that she was +following a train of thought independent of her sister-in-law's words. +In the midst of a description of the last Petersburg fete she +addressed her brother: + +"So you are really going to the war, Andrew?" she said sighing. + +Lise sighed too. + +"Yes, and even tomorrow," replied her brother. + +"He is leaving me here, God knows why, when he might have had +promotion..." + +Princess Mary did not listen to the end, but continuing her train of +thought turned to her sister-in-law with a tender glance at her +figure. + +"Is it certain?" she said. + +The face of the little princess changed. She sighed and said: +"Yes, quite certain. Ah! it is very dreadful..." + +Her lip descended. She brought her face close to her sister-in-law's +and unexpectedly again began to cry. + +"She needs rest," said Prince Andrew with a frown. "Don't you, Lise? +Take her to your room and I'll go to Father. How is he? Just the +same?" + +"Yes, just the same. Though I don't know what your opinion will be," +answered the princess joyfully. + +"And are the hours the same? And the walks in the avenues? And the +lathe?" asked Prince Andrew with a scarcely perceptible smile which +showed that, in spite of all his love and respect for his father, he +was aware of his weaknesses. + +"The hours are the same, and the lathe, and also the mathematics and +my geometry lessons," said Princess Mary gleefully, as if her +lessons in geometry were among the greatest delights of her life. + +When the twenty minutes had elapsed and the time had come for the +old prince to get up, Tikhon came to call the young prince to his +father. The old man made a departure from his usual routine in honor +of his son's arrival: he gave orders to admit him to his apartments +while he dressed for dinner. The old prince always dressed in +old-fashioned style, wearing an antique coat and powdered hair; and +when Prince Andrew entered his father's dressing room (not with the +contemptuous look and manner he wore in drawing rooms, but with the +animated face with which he talked to Pierre), the old man was sitting +on a large leather-covered chair, wrapped in a powdering mantle, +entrusting his head to Tikhon. + +"Ah! here's the warrior! Wants to vanquish Buonaparte?" said the old +man, shaking his powdered head as much as the tail, which Tikhon was +holding fast to plait, would allow. + +"You at least must tackle him properly, or else if he goes on like +this he'll soon have us, too, for his subjects! How are you?" And he +held out his cheek. + +The old man was in a good temper after his nap before dinner. (He +used to say that a nap "after dinner was silver- before dinner, +golden.") He cast happy, sidelong glances at his son from under his +thick, bushy eyebrows. Prince Andrew went up and kissed his father +on the spot indicated to him. He made no reply on his father's +favorite topic- making fun of the military men of the day, and more +particularly of Bonaparte. + +"Yes, Father, I have come come to you and brought my wife who is +pregnant," said Prince Andrew, following every movement of his +father's face with an eager and respectful look. "How is your health?" + +"Only fools and rakes fall ill, my boy. You know me: I am busy +from morning till night and abstemious, so of course I am well." + +"Thank God," said his son smiling. + +"God has nothing to do with it! Well, go on," he continued, +returning to his hobby; "tell me how the Germans have taught you to +fight Bonaparte by this new science you call 'strategy.'" + +Prince Andrew smiled. + +"Give me time to collect my wits, Father," said he, with a smile +that showed that his father's foibles did not prevent his son from +loving and honoring him. "Why, I have not yet had time to settle +down!" + +"Nonsense, nonsense!" cried the old man, shaking his pigtail to +see whether it was firmly plaited, and grasping his by the hand. +"The house for your wife is ready. Princess Mary will take her there +and show her over, and they'll talk nineteen to the dozen. That's +their woman's way! I am glad to have her. Sit down and talk. About +Mikhelson's army I understand- Tolstoy's too... a simultaneous +expedition.... But what's the southern army to do? Prussia is +neutral... I know that. What about Austria?" said he, rising from +his chair and pacing up and down the room followed by Tikhon, who +ran after him, handing him different articles of clothing. "What of +Sweden? How will they cross Pomerania?" + +Prince Andrew, seeing that his father insisted, began- at first +reluctantly, but gradually with more and more animation, and from +habit changing unconsciously from Russian to French as he went on- +to explain the plan of operation for the coming campaign. He explained +how an army, ninety thousand strong, was to threaten Prussia so as +to bring her out of her neutrality and draw her into the war; how part +of that army was to join some Swedish forces at Stralsund; how two +hundred and twenty thousand Austrians, with a hundred thousand +Russians, were to operate in Italy and on the Rhine; how fifty + +thousand Russians and as many English were to land at Naples, and +how a total force of five hundred thousand men was to attack the +French from different sides. The old prince did not evince the least +interest during this explanation, but as if he were not listening to +it continued to dress while walking about, and three times +unexpectedly interrupted. Once he stopped it by shouting: "The white +one, the white one!" + +This meant that Tikhon was not handing him the waistcoat he +wanted. Another time he interrupted, saying: + +"And will she soon be confined?" and shaking his head +reproachfully said: "That's bad! Go on, go on." + +The third interruption came when Prince Andrew was finishing his +description. The old man began to sing, in the cracked voice of old +age: "Malbrook s'en va-t-en guerre. Dieu sait quand reviendra."~^ + +^~ "Marlborough is going to the wars; God knows when he'll return." + +His son only smiled. + +"I don't say it's a plan I approve of," said the son; "I am only +telling you what it is. Napoleon has also formed his plan by now, +not worse than this one." + +"Well, you've told me nothing new," and the old man repeated, +meditatively and rapidly: + +"Dieu sait quand reviendra. Go to the dining room." + +CHAPTER XXVII + +At the appointed hour the prince, powdered and shaven, entered the +dining room where his daughter-in-law, Princess Mary, and Mademoiselle +Bourienne were already awaiting him together with his architect, who +by a strange caprice of his employer's was admitted to table though +the position of that insignificant individual was such as could +certainly not have caused him to expect that honor. The prince, who +generally kept very strictly to social distinctions and rarely +admitted even important government officials to his table, had +unexpectedly selected Michael Ivanovich (who always went into a corner +to blow his nose on his checked handkerchief) to illustrate the theory +that all men are equals, and had more than once impressed on his +daughter that Michael Ivanovich was "not a whit worse than you or +I." At dinner the prince usually spoke to the taciturn Michael +Ivanovich more often than to anyone else. + +In the dining room, which like all the rooms in the house was +exceedingly lofty, the members of the household and the footmen- one +behind each chair- stood waiting for the prince to enter. The head +butler, napkin on arm, was scanning the setting of the table, making +signs to the footmen, and anxiously glancing from the clock to the +door by which the prince was to enter. Prince Andrew was looking at +a large gilt frame, new to him, containing the genealogical tree of +the Princes Bolkonski, opposite which hung another such frame with a +badly painted portrait (evidently by the hand of the artist +belonging to the estate) of a ruling prince, in a crown- an alleged +descendant of Rurik and ancestor of the Bolkonskis. Prince Andrew, +looking again at that genealogical tree, shook his head, laughing as a +man laughs who looks at a portrait so characteristic of the original +as to be amusing. + +"How thoroughly like him that is!" he said to Princess Mary, who had +come up to him. + +Princess Mary looked at her brother in surprise. She did not +understand what he was laughing at. Everything her father did inspired +her with reverence and was beyond question. + +"Everyone has his Achilles' heel," continued Prince Andrew. +"Fancy, with his powerful mind, indulging in such nonsense!" + +Princess Mary could not understand the boldness of her brother's +criticism and was about to reply, when the expected footsteps were +heard coming from the study. The prince walked in quickly and jauntily +as was his wont, as if intentionally contrasting the briskness of +his manners with the strict formality of his house. At that moment the +great clock struck two and another with a shrill tone joined in from +the drawing room. The prince stood still; his lively glittering eyes +from under their thick, bushy eyebrows sternly scanned all present and +rested on the little princess. She felt, as courtiers do when the Tsar +enters, the sensation of fear and respect which the old man inspired +in all around him. He stroked her hair and then patted her awkwardly +on the back of her neck. + +"I'm glad, glad, to see you," he said, looking attentively into +her eyes, and then quickly went to his place and sat down. "Sit +down, sit down! Sit down, Michael Ianovich!" + +He indicated a place beside him to his daughter-in-law. A footman +moved the chair for her. + +"Ho, ho!" said the old man, casting his eyes on her rounded +figure. "You've been in a hurry. That's bad!" + +He laughed in his usual dry, cold, unpleasant way, with his lips +only and not with his eyes. + +"You must walk, walk as much as possible, as much as possible," he +said. + +The little princess did not, or did not wish to, hear his words. She +was silent and seemed confused. The prince asked her about her father, +and she began to smile and talk. He asked about mutual +acquaintances, and she became still more animated and chattered away +giving him greetings from various people and retailing the town +gossip. + +"Countess Apraksina, poor thing, has lost her husband and she has +cried her eyes out," she said, growing more and more lively. + +As she became animated the prince looked at her more and more +sternly, and suddenly, as if he had studied her sufficiently and had +formed a definite idea of her, he turned away and addressed Michael +Ivanovich. + +"Well, Michael Ivanovich, our Bonaparte will be having a bad time of +it. Prince Andrew" (he always spoke thus of his son) "has been telling +me what forces are being collected against him! While you and I +never thought much of him." + +Michael Ivanovich did not at all know when "you and I" had said such +things about Bonaparte, but understanding that he was wanted as a +peg on which to hang the prince's favorite topic, he looked +inquiringly at the young prince, wondering what would follow. + +"He is a great tactician!" said the prince to his son, pointing to +the architect. + +And the conversation again turned on the war, on Bonaparte, and +the generals and statesmen of the day. The old prince seemed convinced +not only that all the men of the day were mere babies who did not know +the A B C of war or of politics, and that Bonaparte was an +insignificant little Frenchy, successful only because there were no +longer any Potemkins or Suvorovs left to oppose him; but he was also +convinced that there were no political difficulties in Europe and no +real war, but only a sort of puppet show at which the men of the day +were playing, pretending to do something real. Prince Andrew gaily +bore with his father's ridicule of the new men, and drew him on and +listened to him with evident pleasure. + +"The past always seems good," said he, "but did not Suvorov +himself fall into a trap Moreau set him, and from which he did not +know how to escape?" + +"Who told you that? Who?" cried the prince. "Suvorov!" And he jerked +away his plate, which Tikhon briskly caught. "Suvorov!... Consider, +Prince Andrew. Two... Frederick and Suvorov; Moreau!... Moreau would +have been a prisoner if Suvorov had had a free hand; but he had the +Hofs-kriegs-wurst-schnapps-Rath on his hands. It would have puzzled +the devil himself! When you get there you'll find out what those +Hofs-kriegs-wurst-Raths are! Suvorov couldn't manage them so what +chance has Michael Kutuzov? No, my dear boy," he continued, "you and +your generals won't get on against Buonaparte; you'll have to call +in the French, so that birds of a feather may fight together. The +German, Pahlen, has been sent to New York in America, to fetch the +Frenchman, Moreau," he said, alluding to the invitation made that year +to Moreau to enter the Russian service.... "Wonderful!... Were the +Potemkins, Suvorovs, and Orlovs Germans? No, lad, either you fellows +have all lost your wits, or I have outlived mine. May God help you, +but we'll see what will happen. Buonaparte has become a great +commander among them! Hm!..." + +"I don't at all say that all the plans are good," said Prince +Andrew, "I am only surprised at your opinion of Bonaparte. You may +laugh as much as you like, but all the same Bonaparte is a great +generall" + +"Michael Ivanovich!" cried the old prince to the architect who, busy +with his roast meat, hoped he had been forgotten: "Didn't I tell you +Buonaparte was a great tactician? Here, he says same thing." + +"To be sure, your excellency." replied the architect. + +The prince again laughed his frigid laugh. + +"Buonaparte was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has got +splendid soldiers. Besides he began by attacking Germans. And only +idlers have failed to beat the Germans. Since the world began +everybody has beaten the Germans. They beat no one- except one +another. He made his reputation fighting them." + +And the prince began explaining all the blunders which, according to +him, Bonaparte had made in his campaigns and even in politics. His son +made no rejoinder, but it was evident that whatever arguments were +presented he was as little able as his father to change his opinion. +He listened, refraining from a reply, and involuntarily wondered how +this old man, living alone in the country for so many years, could +know and discuss so minutely and acutely all the recent European +military and political events. + +"You think I'm an old man and don't understand the present state +of affairs?" concluded his father. "But it troubles me. I don't +sleep at night. Come now, where has this great commander of yours +shown his skill?" he concluded. + +"That would take too long to tell," answered the son. + +"Well, then go to your Buonaparte! Mademoiselle Bourienne, here's +another admirer of that powder-monkey emperor of yours," he +exclaimed in excellent French. + +"You know, Prince, I am not a Bonapartist!" + +"Dieu sait quand reviendra"... hummed the prince out of tune and, +with a laugh still more so, he quitted the table. + +The little princess during the whole discussion and the rest of +the dinner sat silent, glancing with a frightened look now at her +father-in-law and now at Princess Mary. When they left the table she +took her sister-in-law's arm and drew her into another room. + +"What a clever man your father is," said she; "perhaps that is why I +am afraid of him." + +"Oh, he is so kind!" answered Princess Mary. + +CHAPTER XXVIII + +Prince Andrew was to leave next evening. The old prince, not +altering his routine, retired as usual after dinner. The little +princess was in her sister-in-law's room. Prince Andrew in a traveling +coat without epaulettes had been packing with his valet in the rooms +assigned to him. After inspecting the carriage himself and seeing +the trunks put in, he ordered the horses to be harnessed. Only those +things he always kept with him remained in his room; a small box, a +large canteen fitted with silver plate, two Turkish pistols and a +saber- a present from his father who had brought it from the siege +of Ochakov. All these traveling effects of Prince Andrew's were in +very good order: new, clean, and in cloth covers carefully tied with +tapes. + +When starting on a journey or changing their mode of life, men +capable of reflection are generally in a serious frame of mind. At +such moments one reviews the past and plans for the future. Prince +Andrew's face looked very thoughtful and tender. With his hands behind +him he paced briskly from corner to corner of the room, looking +straight before him and thoughtfully shaking his head. Did he fear +going to the war, or was he sad at leaving his wife?- perhaps both, +but evidently he did not wish to be seen in that mood, for hearing +footsteps in the passage he hurriedly unclasped his hands, stopped +at a table as if tying the cover of the small box, and assumed his +usual tranquil and impenetrable expression. It was the heavy tread +of Princess Mary that he heard. + +"I hear you have given orders to harness," she cried, panting (she +had apparently been running), "and I did so wish to have another +talk with you alone! God knows how long we may again be parted. You +are not angry with me for coming? You have changed so, Andrusha," +she added, as if to explain such a question. + +She smiled as she uttered his pet name, "Andrusha." It was obviously +strange to her to think that this stern handsome man should be +Andrusha- the slender mischievous boy who had been her playfellow in +childhood. + +"And where is Lise?" he asked, answering her question only by a +smile. + +"She was so tired that she has fallen asleep on the sofa in my room. +Oh, Andrew! What a treasure of a wife you have," said she, sitting +down on the sofa, facing her brother. "She is quite a child: such a +dear, merry child. I have grown so fond of her." + +Prince Andrew was silent, but the princess noticed the ironical +and contemptuous look that showed itself on his face. + +"One must be indulgent to little weaknesses; who is free from +them, Andrew? Don't forget that she has grown up and been educated +in society, and so her position now is not a rosy one. We should enter +into everyone's situation. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.~^ +Think it must be for her, poor thing, after what she has been used to, +to be parted from her husband and be left alone the country, in her +condition! It's very hard." + +^~ To understand all is to forgive all. + +Prince Andrew smiled as he looked at his sister, as we smile at +those we think we thoroughly understand. + +"You live in the country and don't think the life terrible," he +replied. + +"I... that's different. Why speak of me? I don't want any other +life, and can't, for I know no other. But think, Andrew: for a young +society woman to be buried in the country during the best years of her +life, all alone- for Papa is always busy, and I... well, you know what +poor resources I have for entertaining a woman used to the best +society. There is only Mademoiselle Bourienne...." + +"I don't like your Mademoiselle Bourienne at all," said Prince +Andrew. + +"No? She is very nice and kind and, above all, she's much to be +pitied. She has no one, no one. To tell the truth, I don't need her, +and she's even in my way. You know I always was a savage, and now am +even more so. I like being alone.... Father likes her very much. She +and Michael Ivanovich are the two people to whom he is always gentle +and kind, because he has been a benefactor to them both. As Sterne +says: 'We don't love people so much for the good they have done us, as +for the good we have done them.' Father took her when she was homeless +after losing her own father. She is very good-natured, and my father +likes her way of reading. She reads to him in the evenings and reads +splendidly." + +"To be quite frank, Mary, I expect Father's character sometimes +makes things trying for you, doesn't it?" Prince Andrew asked +suddenly. + +Princess Mary was first surprised and then aghast at this question. + +"For me? For me?... Trying for me!..." said she. + +"He always was rather harsh; and now I should think he's getting +very trying," said Prince Andrew, apparently speaking lightly of their +father in order to puzzle or test his sister. + +"You are good in every way, Andrew, but you have a kind of +intellectual pride," said the princess, following the train of her own +thoughts rather than the trend of the conversation- "and that's a +great sin. How can one judge Father? But even if one might, what +feeling except veneration could such a man as my father evoke? And I +am so contented and happy with him. I only wish you were all as +happy as I am." + +Her brother shook his head incredulously. + +"The only thing that is hard for me... I will tell you the truth, +Andrew... is Father's way of treating religious subjects. I don't +understand how a man of his immense intellect can fail to see what +is as clear as day, and can go so far astray. That is the only thing +that makes me unhappy. But even in this I can see lately a shade of +improvement. His satire has been less bitter of late, and there was +a monk he received and had a long talk with." + +"Ah! my dear, I am afraid you and your monk are wasting your +powder," said Prince Andrew banteringly yet tenderly. + +"Ah! mon ami, I only pray, and hope that God will hear me. +Andrew..." she said timidly after a moment's silence, "I have a +great favor to ask of you." + +"What is it, dear?" + +"No- promise that you will not refuse! It will give you no trouble +and is nothing unworthy of you, but it will comfort me. Promise, +Andrusha!..." said she, putting her hand in her reticule but not yet +taking out what she was holding inside it, as if what she held were +the subject of her request and must not be shown before the request +was granted. + +She looked timidly at her brother. + +"Even if it were a great deal of trouble..." answered Prince Andrew, +as if guessing what it was about. + +"Think what you please! I know you are just like Father. Think as +you please, but do this for my sake! Please do! Father's father, our +grandfather, wore it in all his wars." (She still did not take out +what she was holding in her reticule.) "So you promise?" + +"Of course. What is it?" + +"Andrew, I bless you with this icon and you must promise me you will +never take it off. Do you promise?" + +"If it does not weigh a hundredweight and won't break my neck... +To please you..." said Prince Andrew. But immediately, noticing the +pained expression his joke had brought to his sister's face, he +repented and added: "I am glad; really, dear, I am very glad." + +"Against your will He will save and have mercy on you and bring +you to Himself, for in Him alone is truth and peace," said she in a +voice trembling with emotion, solemnly holding up in both hands before +her brother a small, oval, antique, dark-faced icon of the Saviour +in a gold setting, on a finely wrought silver chain. + +She crossed herself, kissed the icon, and handed it to Andrew. + +"Please, Andrew, for my sake!..." + +Rays of gentle light shone from her large, timid eyes. Those eyes +lit up the whole of her thin, sickly face and made it beautiful. Her +brother would have taken the icon, but she stopped him. Andrew +understood, crossed himself and kissed the icon. There was a look of +tenderness, for he was touched, but also a gleam of irony on his face. + +"Thank you, my dear." She kissed him on the forehead and sat down +again on the sofa. They were silent for a while. + +"As I was saying to you, Andrew, be kind and generous as you +always used to be. Don't judge Lise harshly," she began. "She is so +sweet, so good-natured, and her position now is a very hard one." + +"I do not think I have complained of my wife to you, Masha, or +blamed her. Why do you say all this to me?" + +Red patches appeared on Princess Mary's face and she was silent as +if she felt guilty. + +"I have said nothing to you, but you have already been talked to. +And I am sorry for that," he went on. + +The patches grew deeper on her forehead, neck, and cheeks. She tried +to say something but could not. Her brother had guessed right: the +little princess had been crying after dinner and had spoken of her +forebodings about her confinement, and how she dreaded it, and had +complained of her fate, her father-in-law, and her husband. After +crying she had fallen asleep. Prince Andrew felt sorry for his sister. + +"Know this, Masha: I can't reproach, have not reproached, and +never shall reproach my wife with anything, and I cannot reproach +myself with anything in regard to her; and that always will be so in +whatever circumstances I may be placed. But if you want to know the +truth... if you want to know whether I am happy? No! Is she happy? No! +But why this is so I don't know..." + +As he said this he rose, went to his sister, and, stooping, kissed +her forehead. His fine eyes lit up with a thoughtful, kindly, and +unaccustomed brightness, but he was looking not at his sister but over +her head toward the darkness of the open doorway. + +"Let us go to her, I must say good-by. Or- go and wake and I'll come +in a moment. Petrushka!" he called to his valet: "Come here, take +these away. Put this on the seat and this to the right." + +Princess Mary rose and moved to the door, then stopped and said: +"Andrew, if you had faith you would have turned to God and asked Him +to give you the love you do not feel, and your prayer would have +been answered." + +"Well, may be!" said Prince Andrew. "Go, Masha; I'll come +immediately." + +On the way to his sister's room, in the passage which connected +one wing with the other, Prince Andrew met Mademoiselle Bourienne +smiling sweetly. It was the third time that day that, with an ecstatic +and artless smile, she had met him in secluded passages. + +"Oh! I thought you were in your room," she said, for some reason +blushing and dropping her eyes. + +Prince Andrew looked sternly at her and an expression of anger +suddenly came over his face. He said nothing to her but looked at +her forehead and hair, without looking at her eyes, with such contempt +that the Frenchwoman blushed and went away without a word. When he +reached his sister's room his wife was already awake and her merry +voice, hurrying one word after another, came through the open door. +She was speaking as usual in French, and as if after long +self-restraint she wished to make up for lost time. + +"No, but imagine the old Countess Zubova, with false curls and her +mouth full of false teeth, as if she were trying to cheat old +age.... Ha, ha, ha! Mary!" + +This very sentence about Countess Zubova and this same laugh +Prince Andrew had already heard from his wife in the presence of +others some five times. He entered the room softly. The little +princess, plump and rosy, was sitting in an easy chair with her work +in her hands, talking incessantly, repeating Petersburg +reminiscences and even phrases. Prince Andrew came up, stroked her +hair, and asked if she felt rested after their journey. She answered +him and continued her chatter. + +The coach with six horses was waiting at the porch. It was an autumn +night, so dark that the coachman could not see the carriage pole. +Servants with lanterns were bustling about in the porch. The immense +house was brilliant with lights shining through its lofty windows. The +domestic serfs were crowding in the hall, waiting to bid good-by to +the young prince. The members of the household were all gathered in +the reception hall: Michael Ivanovich, Mademoiselle Bourienne, +Princess Mary, and the little princess. Prince Andrew had been +called to his father's study as the latter wished to say good-by to +him alone. All were waiting for them to come out. + +When Prince Andrew entered the study the old man in his old-age +spectacles and white dressing gown, in which he received no one but +his son, sat at the table writing. He glanced round. + +"Going?" And he went on writing. + +"I've come to say good-by." + +"Kiss me here," and he touched his cheek: "Thanks, thanks!" + +"What do you thank me for?" + +"For not dilly-dallying and not hanging to a woman's apron +strings. The Service before everything. Thanks, thanks!" And he went +on writing, so that his quill spluttered and squeaked. "If you have +anything to say, say it. These two things can be done together," he +added. + +"About my wife... I am ashamed as it is to leave her on your +hands..." + +"Why talk nonsense? Say what you want." + +"When her confinement is due, send to Moscow for an accoucheur.... +Let him be here...." + +The old prince stopped writing and, as if not understanding, fixed +his stern eyes on his son. + +"I know that no one can help if nature does not do her work," said +Prince Andrew, evidently confused. "I know that out of a million cases +only one goes wrong, but it is her fancy and mine. They have been +telling her things. She has had a dream and is frightened." + +"Hm... Hm..." muttered the old prince to himself, finishing what +he was writing. "I'll do it." + +He signed with a flourish and suddenly turning to his son began to +laugh. + +"It's a bad business, eh?" + +"What is bad, Father?" + +"The wife!" said the old prince, briefly and significantly. + +"I don't understand!" said Prince Andrew. + +"No, it can't be helped, lad," said the prince. "They're all like +that; one can't unmarry. Don't be afraid; I won't tell anyone, but you +know it yourself." + +He seized his son by the hand with small bony fingers, shook it, +looked straight into his son's face with keen eyes which seemed to see +through him, and again laughed his frigid laugh. + +The son sighed, thus admitting that his father had understood him. +The old man continued to fold and seal his letter, snatching up and +throwing down the wax, the seal, and the paper, with his accustomed +rapidity. + +"What's to be done? She's pretty! I will do everything. Make your +mind easy," said he in abrupt sentences while sealing his letter. + +Andrew did not speak; he was both pleased and displeased that his +father understood him. The old man got up and gave the letter to his +son. + +"Listen!" said he; "don't worry about your wife: what can be done +shall be. Now listen! Give this letter to Michael Ilarionovich.~^ I +have written that he should make use of you in proper places and not +keep you long as an adjutant: a bad position! Tell him I remember +and like him. Write and tell me how he receives you. If he is all +right- serve him. Nicholas Bolkonski's son need not serve under anyone +if he is in disfavor. Now come here." + +^~ Kutuzov. + +He spoke so rapidly that he did not finish half his words, but his +son was accustomed to understand him. He led him to the desk, raised +the lid, drew out a drawer, and took out an exercise book filled +with his bold, tall, close handwriting. + +"I shall probably die before you. So remember, these are my memoirs; +hand them to the Emperor after my death. Now here is a Lombard bond +and a letter; it is a premium for the man who writes a history of +Suvorov's wars. Send it to the Academy. Here are some jottings for you +to read when I am gone. You will find them useful." + +Andrew did not tell his father that he would no doubt live a long +time yet. He felt that he must not say it. + +"I will do it all, Father," he said. + +"Well, now, good-by!" He gave his son his hand to kiss, and embraced +him. "Remember this, Prince Andrew, if they kill you it will hurt +me, your old father..." he paused unexpectedly, and then in a +querulous voice suddenly shrieked: "but if I hear that you have not +behaved like a son of Nicholas Bolkonski, I shall be ashamed!" + +"You need not have said that to me, Father," said the son with a +smile. + +The old man was silent. + +"I also wanted to ask you," continued Prince Andrew, "if I'm +killed and if I have a son, do not let him be taken away from you- +as I said yesterday... let him grow up with you.... Please." + +"Not let the wife have him?" said the old man, and laughed. + +They stood silent, facing one another. The old man's sharp eyes were +fixed straight on his son's. Something twitched in the lower part of +the old prince's face. + +"We've said good-by. Go!" he suddenly shouted in a loud, angry +voice, opening his door. + +"What is it? What?" asked both princesses when they saw for a moment +at the door Prince Andrew and the figure of the old man in a white +dressing gown, spectacled and wigless, shouting in an angry voice. + +Prince Andrew sighed and made no reply. + +"Well!" he said, turning to his wife. + +And this "Well!" sounded coldly ironic, as if he were saying,: +"Now go through your performance." + +"Andrew, already!" said the little princess, turning pale and +looking with dismay at her husband. + +He embraced her. She screamed and fell unconscious on his shoulder. + +He cautiously released the shoulder she leaned on, looked into her +face, and carefully placed her in an easy chair. + +"Adieu, Mary," said he gently to his sister, taking her by the +hand and kissing her, and then he left the room with rapid steps. + +The little princess lay in the armchair, Mademoiselle Bourienne +chafing her temples. Princess Mary, supporting her sister-in-law, +still looked with her beautiful eyes full of tears at the door through +which Prince Andrew had gone and made the sign of the cross in his +direction. From the study, like pistol shots, came the frequent +sound of the old man angrily blowing his nose. Hardly had Prince +Andrew gone when the study door opened quickly and the stern figure of +the old man in the white dressing gown looked out. + +"Gone? That's all right!" said he; and looking angrily at the +unconscious little princess, he shook his head reprovingly and slammed +the door. + +BOOK TWO: 1805 + +CHAPTER I + +In October, 1805, a Russian army was occupying the villages and +towns of the Archduchy of Austria, and yet other regiments freshly +arriving from Russia were settling near the fortress of Braunau and +burdening the inhabitants on whom they were quartered. Braunau was the +headquarters of the commander-in-chief, Kutuzov. + +On October 11, 1805, one of the infantry regiments that had just +reached Braunau had halted half a mile from the town, waiting to be +inspected by the commander in chief. Despite the un-Russian appearance +of the locality and surroundings- fruit gardens, stone fences, tiled +roofs, and hills in the distance- and despite the fact that the +inhabitants (who gazed with curiosity at the soldiers) were not +Russians, the regiment had just the appearance of any Russian regiment +preparing for an inspection anywhere in the heart of Russia. + +On the evening of the last day's march an order had been received +that the commander in chief would inspect the regiment on the march. +Though the words of the order were not clear to the regimental +commander, and the question arose whether the troops were to be in +marching order or not, it was decided at a consultation between the +battalion commanders to present the regiment in parade order, on the +principle that it is always better to "bow too low than not bow low +enough." So the soldiers, after a twenty-mile march, were kept mending +and cleaning all night long without closing their eyes, while the +adjutants and company commanders calculated and reckoned, and by +morning the regiment- instead of the straggling, disorderly crowd it +had been on its last march the day before- presented a well-ordered +array of two thousand men each of whom knew his place and his duty, +had every button and every strap in place, and shone with cleanliness. +And not only externally was all in order, but had it pleased the +commander in chief to look under the uniforms he would have found on +every man a clean shirt, and in every knapsack the appointed number of +articles, "awl, soap, and all," as the soldiers say. There was only +one circumstance concerning which no one could be at ease. It was +the state of the soldiers' boots. More than half the men's boots +were in holes. But this defect was not due to any fault of the +regimental commander, for in spite of repeated demands boots had not +been issued by the Austrian commissariat, and the regiment had marched +some seven hundred miles. + +The commander of the regiment was an elderly, choleric, stout, and +thick-set general with grizzled eyebrows and whiskers, and wider +from chest to back than across the shoulders. He had on a brand-new +uniform showing the creases where it had been folded and thick gold +epaulettes which seemed to stand rather than lie down on his massive +shoulders. He had the air of a man happily performing one of the +most solemn duties of his life. He walked about in front of the line +and at every step pulled himself up, slightly arching his back. It was +plain that the commander admired his regiment, rejoiced in it, and +that his whole mind was engrossed by it, yet his strut seemed to +indicate that, besides military matters, social interests and the fair +sex occupied no small part of his thoughts. + +"Well, Michael Mitrich, sir?" he said, addressing one of the +battalion commanders who smilingly pressed forward (it was plain +that they both felt happy). "We had our hands full last night. +However, I think the regiment is not a bad one, eh?" + +The battalion commander perceived the jovial irony and laughed. + +"It would not be turned off the field even on the Tsaritsin Meadow." + +"What?" asked the commander. + +At that moment, on the road from the town on which signalers had +been posted, two men appeared on horse back. They were an +aide-decamp followed by a Cossack. + +The aide-de-camp was sent to confirm the order which had not been +clearly worded the day before, namely, that the commander in chief +wished to see the regiment just in the state in which it had been on +the march: in their greatcoats, and packs, and without any preparation +whatever. + +A member of the Hofkriegsrath from Vienna had come to Kutuzov the +day before with proposals and demands for him to join up with the army +of the Archduke Ferdinand and Mack, and Kutuzov, not considering +this junction advisable, meant, among other arguments in support of +his view, to show the Austrian general the wretched state in which the +troops arrived from Russia. With this object he intended to meet the +regiment; so the worse the condition it was in, the better pleased the +commander in chief would be. Though the aide-de-camp did not know +these circumstances, he nevertheless delivered the definite order that +the men should be in their greatcoats and in marching order, and +that the commander in chief would otherwise be dissatisfied. On +hearing this the regimental commander hung his head, silently shrugged +his shoulders, and spread out his arms with a choleric gesture. + +"A fine mess we've made of it!" he remarked. + +"There now! Didn't I tell you, Michael Mitrich, that if it was +said 'on the march' it meant in greatcoats?" said he reproachfully +to the battalion commander. "Oh, my God!" he added, stepping +resolutely forward. "Company commanders!" he shouted in a voice +accustomed to command. "Sergeants major!... How soon will he be here?" +he asked the aide-de-camp with a respectful politeness evidently +relating to the personage he was referring to. + +"In an hour's time, I should say." + +"Shall we have time to change clothes?" + +"I don't know, General...." + +The regimental commander, going up to the line himself, ordered +the soldiers to change into their greatcoats. The company commanders +ran off to their companies, the sergeants major began bustling (the +greatcoats were not in very good condition), and instantly the squares +that had up to then been in regular order and silent began to sway and +stretch and hum with voices. On all sides soldiers were running to and +fro, throwing up their knapsacks with a jerk of their shoulders and +pulling the straps over their heads, unstrapping their overcoats and +drawing the sleeves on with upraised arms. + +In half an hour all was again in order, only the squares had +become gray instead of black. The regimental commander walked with his +jerky steps to the front of the regiment and examined it from a +distance. + +"Whatever is this? This!" he shouted and stood still. "Commander +of the third company!" + +"Commander of the third company wanted by the general!... +commander to the general... third company to the commander." The words +passed along the lines and an adjutant ran to look for the missing +officer. + +When the eager but misrepeated words had reached their destination +in a cry of: "The general to the third company," the missing officer +appeared from behind his company and, though he was a middle-aged +man and not in the habit of running, trotted awkwardly stumbling on +his toes toward the general. The captain's face showed the +uneasiness of a schoolboy who is told to repeat a lesson he has not +learned. Spots appeared on his nose, the redness of which was +evidently due to intemperance, and his mouth twitched nervously. The +general looked the captain up and down as he came up panting, +slackening his pace as he approached. + +"You will soon be dressing your men in petticoats! What is this?" +shouted the regimental commander, thrusting forward his jaw and +pointing at a soldier in the ranks of the third company in a greatcoat +of bluish cloth, which contrasted with the others. "What have you been +after? The commander in chief is expected and you leave your place? +Eh? I'll teach you to dress the men in fancy coats for a parade.... +Eh...?" + +The commander of the company, with his eyes fixed on his superior, +pressed two fingers more and more rigidly to his cap, as if in this +pressure lay his only hope of salvation. + +"Well, why don't you speak? Whom have you got there dressed up as +a Hungarian?" said the commander with an austere gibe. + +"Your excellency..." + +"Well, your excellency, what? Your excellency! But what about your +excellency?... nobody knows." + +"Your excellency, it's the officer Dolokhov, who has been reduced to +the ranks," said the captain softly. + +"Well? Has he been degraded into a field marshal, or into a soldier? +If a soldier, he should be dressed in regulation uniform like the +others." + +"Your excellency, you gave him leave yourself, on the march." + +"Gave him leave? Leave? That's just like you young men," said the +regimental commander cooling down a little. "Leave indeed.... One says +a word to you and you... What?" he added with renewed irritation, "I +beg you to dress your men decently." + +And the commander, turning to look at the adjutant, directed his +jerky steps down the line. He was evidently pleased at his own display +of anger and walking up to the regiment wished to find a further +excuse for wrath. Having snapped at an officer for an unpolished +badge, at another because his line was not straight, he reached the +third company. + +"H-o-o-w are you standing? Where's your leg? Your leg?" shouted +the commander with a tone of suffering in his voice, while there +were still five men between him and Dolokhov with his bluish-gray +uniform. + +Dolokhov slowly straightened his bent knee, looking straight with +his clear, insolent eyes in the general's face. + +"Why a blue coat? Off with it... Sergeant major! Change his +coat... the ras..." he did not finish. + +"General, I must obey orders, but I am not bound to endure..." +Dolokhov hurriedly interrupted. + +"No talking in the ranks!... No talking, no talking!" + +"Not bound to endure insults," Dolokhov concluded in loud, ringing +tones. + +The eyes of the general and the soldier met. The general became +silent, angrily pulling down his tight scarf. + +"I request you to have the goodness to change your coat," he said as +he turned away. + +CHAPTER II + +"He's coming!" shouted the signaler at that moment. + +The regimental commander, flushing, ran to his horse, seized the +stirrup with trembling hands, threw his body across the saddle, +righted himself, drew his saber, and with a happy and resolute +countenance, opening his mouth awry, prepared to shout. The regiment +fluttered like a bird preening its plumage and became motionless. + +"Att-ention!" shouted the regimental commander in a soul-shaking +voice which expressed joy for himself, severity for the regiment, +and welcome for the approaching chief. + +Along the broad country road, edged on both sides by trees, came a +high, light blue Viennese caleche, slightly creaking on its springs +and drawn by six horses at a smart trot. Behind the caleche galloped +the suite and a convoy of Croats. Beside Kutuzov sat an Austrian +general, in a white uniform that looked strange among the Russian +black ones. The caleche stopped in front of the regiment. Kutuzov +and the Austrian general were talking in low voices and Kutuzov smiled +slightly as treading heavily he stepped down from the carriage just as +if those two thousand men breathlessly gazing at him and the +regimental commander did not exist. + +The word of command rang out, and again the regiment quivered, as +with a jingling sound it presented arms. Then amidst a dead silence +the feeble voice of the commander in chief was heard. The regiment +roared, "Health to your ex... len... len... lency!" and again all +became silent. At first Kutuzov stood still while the regiment +moved; then he and the general in white, accompanied by the suite, +walked between the ranks. + +From the way the regimental commander saluted the commander in chief +and devoured him with his eyes, drawing himself up obsequiously, and +from the way he walked through the ranks behind the generals, +bending forward and hardly able to restrain his jerky movements, and +from the way he darted forward at every word or gesture of the +commander in chief, it was evident that he performed his duty as a +subordinate with even greater zeal than his duty as a commander. +Thanks to the strictness and assiduity of its commander the +regiment, in comparison with others that had reached Braunau at the +same time, was in splendid condition. There were only 217 sick and +stragglers. Everything was in good order except the boots. + +Kutuzov walked through the ranks, sometimes stopping to say a few +friendly words to officers he had known in the Turkish war, +sometimes also to the soldiers. Looking at their boots he several +times shook his head sadly, pointing them out to the Austrian +general with an expression which seemed to say that he was not blaming +anyone, but could not help noticing what a bad state of things it was. +The regimental commander ran forward on each such occasion, fearing to +miss a single word of the commander in chief's regarding the regiment. +Behind Kutuzov, at a distance that allowed every softly spoken word to +be heard, followed some twenty men of his suite. These gentlemen +talked among themselves and sometimes laughed. Nearest of all to the +commander in chief walked a handsome adjutant. This was Prince +Bolkonski. Beside him was his comrade Nesvitski, a tall staff officer, +extremely stout, with a kindly, smiling, handsome face and moist eyes. +Nesvitski could hardly keep from laughter provoked by a swarthy hussar +officer who walked beside him. This hussar, with a grave face and +without a smile or a change in the expression of his fixed eyes, +watched the regimental commander's back and mimicked his every +movement. Each time the commander started and bent forward, the hussar +started and bent forward in exactly the same manner. Nesvitski laughed +and nudged the others to make them look at the wag. + +Kutuzov walked slowly and languidly past thousands of eyes which +were starting from their sockets to watch their chief. On reaching the +third company he suddenly stopped. His suite, not having expected +this, involuntarily came closer to him. + +"Ah, Timokhin!" said he, recognizing the red-nosed captain who had +been reprimanded on account of the blue greatcoat. + +One would have thought it impossible for a man to stretch himself +more than Timokhin had done when he was reprimanded by the +regimental commander, but now that the commander in chief addressed +him he drew himself up to such an extent that it seemed he could not +have sustained it had the commander in chief continued to look at him, +and so Kutuzov, who evidently understood his case and wished him +nothing but good, quickly turned away, a scarcely perceptible smile +flitting over his scarred and puffy face. + +"Another Ismail comrade," said he. "A brave officer! Are you +satisfied with him?" he asked the regimental commander. + +And the latter- unconscious that he was being reflected in the +hussar officer as in a looking glass- started, moved forward, and +answered: "Highly satisfied, your excellency!" + +"We all have our weaknesses," said Kutuzov smiling and walking +away from him. "He used to have a predilection for Bacchus." + +The regimental commander was afraid he might be blamed for this +and did not answer. The hussar at that moment noticed the face of +the red-nosed captain and his drawn-in stomach, and mimicked his +expression and pose with such exactitude that Nesvitski could not help +laughing. Kutuzov turned round. The officer evidently had complete +control of his face, and while Kutuzov was turning managed to make a +grimace and then assume a most serious, deferential, and innocent +expression. + +The third company was the last, and Kutuzov pondered, apparently +trying to recollect something. Prince Andrew stepped forward from +among the suite and said in French: + +"You told me to remind you of the officer Dolokhov, reduced to the +ranks in this regiment." + +"Where is Dolokhov?" asked Kutuzov. + +Dolokhov, who had already changed into a soldier's gray greatcoat, +did not wait to be called. The shapely figure of the fair-haired +soldier, with his clear blue eyes, stepped forward from the ranks, +went up to the commander in chief, and presented arms. + +"Have you a complaint to make?" Kutuzov asked with a slight frown. + +"This is Dolokhov," said Prince Andrew. + +"Ah!" said Kutuzov. "I hope this will be a lesson to you. Do your +duty. The Emperor is gracious, and I shan't forget you if you +deserve well." + +The clear blue eyes looked at the commander in chief just as +boldly as they had looked at the regimental commander, seeming by +their expression to tear open the veil of convention that separates +a commander in chief so widely from a private. + +"One thing I ask of your excellency," Dolokhov said in his firm, +ringing, deliberate voice. "I ask an opportunity to atone for my fault +and prove my devotion to His Majesty the Emperor and to Russia!" + +Kutuzov turned away. The same smile of the eyes with which he had +turned from Captain Timokhin again flitted over his face. He turned +away with a grimace as if to say that everything Dolokhov had said +to him and everything he could say had long been known to him, that he +was weary of it and it was not at all what he wanted. He turned away +and went to the carriage. + +The regiment broke up into companies, which went to their +appointed quarters near Braunau, where they hoped to receive boots and +clothes and to rest after their hard marches. + +"You won't bear me a grudge, Prokhor Ignatych?" said the +regimental commander, overtaking the third company on its way to its + +quarters and riding up to Captain Timokhin who was walking in front. +(The regimental commander's face now that the inspection was happily +over beamed with irrepressible delight.) "It's in the Emperor's +service... it can't be helped... one is sometimes a bit hasty on +parade... I am the first to apologize, you know me!... He was very +pleased!" And he held out his hand to the captain. + +"Don't mention it, General, as if I'd be so bold!" replied the +captain, his nose growing redder as he gave a smile which showed where +two front teeth were missing that had been knocked out by the butt end +of a gun at Ismail. + +"And tell Mr. Dolokhov that I won't forget him- he may be quite +easy. And tell me, please- I've been meaning to ask- how is to ask- +how is he behaving himself, and in general..." + +"As far as the service goes he is quite punctilious, your +excellency; but his character..." said Timokhin. + +"And what about his character?" asked the regimental commander. + +"It's different on different days," answered the captain. "One day +he is sensible, well educated, and good-natured, and the next he's a +wild beast.... In Poland, if you please, he nearly killed a Jew." + +"Oh, well, well!" remarked the regimental commander. "Still, one +must have pity on a young man in misfortune. You know he has important +connections... Well, then, you just..." + +"I will, your excellency," said Timokhin, showing by his smile +that he understood his commander's wish. + +"Well, of course, of course!" + +The regimental commander sought out Dolokhov in the ranks and, +reining in his horse, said to him: + +"After the next affair... epaulettes." + +Dolokhov looked round but did not say anything, nor did the +mocking smile on his lips change. + +"Well, that's all right," continued the regimental commander. "A cup +of vodka for the men from me," he added so that the soldiers could +hear. "I thank you all! God be praised!" and he rode past that company +and overtook the next one. + +"Well, he's really a good fellow, one can serve under him," said +Timokhin to the subaltern beside him. + +"In a word, a hearty one..." said the subaltern, laughing (the +regimental commander was nicknamed King of Hearts). + +The cheerful mood of their officers after the inspection infected +the soldiers. The company marched on gaily. The soldiers' voices could +be heard on every side. + +"And they said Kutuzov was blind of one eye?" + +"And so he is! Quite blind!" + +"No, friend, he is sharper-eyed than you are. Boots and leg bands... +he noticed everything..." + +"When he looked at my feet, friend... well, thinks I..." + +"And that other one with him, the Austrian, looked as if he were +smeared with chalk- as white as flour! I suppose they polish him up as +they do the guns." + +"I say, Fedeshon!... Did he say when the battles are to begin? You +were near him. Everybody said that Buonaparte himself was at Braunau." + +"Buonaparte himself!... Just listen to the fool, what he doesn't +know! The Prussians are up in arms now. The Austrians, you see, are +putting them down. When they've been put down, the war with Buonaparte +will begin. And he says Buonaparte is in Braunau! Shows you're a fool. +You'd better listen more carefully!" + +"What devils these quartermasters are! See, the fifth company is +turning into the village already... they will have their buckwheat +cooked before we reach our quarters." + +"Give me a biscuit, you devil!" + +"And did you give me tobacco yesterday? That's just it, friend! +Ah, well, never mind, here you are." + +"They might call a halt here or we'll have to do another four +miles without eating." + +"Wasn't it fine when those Germans gave us lifts! You just sit still +and are drawn along." + +"And here, friend, the people are quite beggarly. There they all +seemed to be Poles- all under the Russian crown- but here they're +all regular Germans." + +"Singers to the front " came the captain's order. + +And from the different ranks some twenty men ran to the front. A +drummer, their leader, turned round facing the singers, and +flourishing his arm, began a long-drawn-out soldiers' song, commencing +with the words: "Morning dawned, the sun was rising," and +concluding: "On then, brothers, on to glory, led by Father +Kamenski." This song had been composed in the Turkish campaign and now +being sung in Austria, the only change being that the words "Father +Kamenski" were replaced by "Father Kutuzov." + +Having jerked out these last words as soldiers do and waved his arms +as if flinging something to the ground, the drummer- a lean, +handsome soldier of forty- looked sternly at the singers and screwed +up his eyes. Then having satisfied himself that all eyes were fixed on +him, he raised both arms as if carefully lifting some invisible but +precious object above his head and, holding it there for some seconds, +suddenly flung it down and began: + +"Oh, my bower, oh, my bower...!" + +"Oh, my bower new...!" chimed in twenty voices, and the castanet +player, in spite of the burden of his equipment, rushed out to the +front and, walking backwards before the company, jerked his +shoulders and flourished his castanets as if threatening someone. +The soldiers, swinging their arms and keeping time spontaneously, +marched with long steps. Behind the company the sound of wheels, the +creaking of springs, and the tramp of horses' hoofs were heard. +Kutuzov and his suite were returning to the town. The commander in +chief made a sign that the men should continue to march at ease, and +he and all his suite showed pleasure at the sound of the singing and +the sight of the dancing soldier and the gay and smartly marching men. +In the second file from the right flank, beside which the carriage +passed the company, a blue-eyed soldier involuntarily attracted +notice. It was Dolokhov marching with particular grace and boldness in +time to the song and looking at those driving past as if he pitied all +who were not at that moment marching with the company. The hussar +cornet of Kutuzov's suite who had mimicked the regimental commander, +fell back from the carriage and rode up to Dolokhov. + +Hussar cornet Zherkov had at one time, in Petersburg, belonged to +the wild set led by Dolokhov. Zherkov had met Dolokhov abroad as a +private and had not seen fit to recognize him. But now that Kutuzov +had spoken to the gentleman ranker, he addressed him with the +cordiality of an old friend. + +"My dear fellow, how are you?" said he through the singing, making +his horse keep pace with the company. + +"How am I?" Dolokhov answered coldly. "I am as you see." + +The lively song gave a special flavor to the tone of free and easy +gaiety with which Zherkov spoke, and to the intentional coldness of +Dolokhov's reply. + +"And how do you get on with the officers?" inquired Zherkov. + +"All right. They are good fellows. And how have you wriggled onto +the staff?" + +"I was attached; I'm on duty." + +Both were silent. + +"She let the hawk fly upward from her wide right sleeve," went the +song, arousing an involuntary sensation of courage and cheerfulness. +Their conversation would probably have been different but for the +effect of that song. + +"Is it true that Austrians have been beaten?" asked Dolokhov. + +"The devil only knows! They say so." + +"I'm glad," answered Dolokhov briefly and clearly, as the song +demanded. + +"I say, come round some evening and we'll have a game of faro!" said +Zherkov. + +"Why, have you too much money?" + +"Do come." + +"I can't. I've sworn not to. I won't drink and won't play till I get +reinstated." + +"Well, that's only till the first engagement." + +"We shall see." + +They were again silent. + +"Come if you need anything. One can at least be of use on the +staff..." + +Dolokhov smiled. "Don't trouble. If I want anything, I won't beg- +I'll take it!" + +"Well, never mind; I only..." + +"And I only..." + +"Good-by." + +"Good health..." + +_1 "It's a long, long way.
+To my native land..." + +Zherkov touched his horse with the spurs; it pranced excitedly +from foot to foot uncertain with which to start, then settled down, +galloped past the company, and overtook the carriage, still keeping +time to the song. + +CHAPTER III + +On returning from the review, Kutuzov took the Austrian general into +his private room and, calling his adjutant, asked for some papers +relating to the condition of the troops on their arrival, and the +letters that had come from the Archduke Ferdinand, who was in +command of the advanced army. Prince Andrew Bolkonski came into the +room with the required papers. Kutuzov and the Austrian member of +the Hofkriegsrath were sitting at the table on which a plan was spread +out. + +"Ah!..." said Kutuzov glancing at Bolkonski as if by this +exclamation he was asking the adjutant to wait, and he went on with +the conversation in French. + +"All I can say, General," said he with a pleasant elegance of +expression and intonation that obliged one to listen to each +deliberately spoken word. It was evident that Kutuzov himself listened +with pleasure to his own voice. "All I can say, General, is that if +the matter depended on my personal wishes, the will of His Majesty the +Emperor Francis would have been fulfilled long ago. I should long +ago have joined the archduke. And believe me on my honour that to me +personally it would be a pleasure to hand over the supreme command +of the army into the hands of a better informed and more skillful +general- of whom Austria has so many- and to lay down all this heavy +responsibility. But circumstances are sometimes too strong for us, +General." + +And Kutuzov smiled in a way that seemed to say, "You are quite at +liberty not to believe me and I don't even care whether you do or not, +but you have no grounds for telling me so. And that is the whole +point." + +The Austrian general looked dissatisfied, but had no option but to +reply in the same tone. + +"On the contrary," he said, in a querulous and angry tone that +contrasted with his flattering words, "on the contrary, your +excellency's participation in the common action is highly valued by +His Majesty; but we think the present delay is depriving the +splendid Russian troops and their commander of the laurels they have +been accustomed to win in their battles," he concluded his evidently +prearranged sentence. + +Kutuzov bowed with the same smile. + +"But that is my conviction, and judging by the last letter with +which His Highness the Archduke Ferdinand has honored me, I imagine +that the Austrian troops, under the direction of so skillful a +leader as General Mack, have by now already gained a decisive +victory and no longer need our aid," said Kutuzov. + +The general frowned. Though there was no definite news of an +Austrian defeat, there were many circumstances confirming the +unfavorable rumors that were afloat, and so Kutuzov's suggestion of an +Austrian victory sounded much like irony. But Kutuzov went on +blandly smiling with the same expression, which seemed to say that +he had a right to suppose so. And, in fact, the last letter he had +received from Mack's army informed him of a victory and stated +strategically the position of the army was very favorable. + +"Give me that letter," said Kutuzov turning to Prince Andrew. +"Please have a look at it"- and Kutuzov with an ironical smile about +the corners of his mouth read to the Austrian general the following +passage, in German, from the Archduke Ferdinand's letter: + +We have fully concentrated forces of nearly seventy thousand men +with which to attack and defeat the enemy should he cross the Lech. +Also, as we are masters of Ulm, we cannot be deprived of the advantage +of commanding both sides of the Danube, so that should the enemy not +cross the Lech, we can cross the Danube, throw ourselves on his line +of communications, recross the river lower down, and frustrate his +intention should he try to direct his whole force against our faithful +ally. We shall therefore confidently await the moment when the +Imperial Russian army will be fully equipped, and shall then, in +conjunction with it, easily find a way to prepare for the enemy the +fate he deserves. + +Kutuzov sighed deeply on finishing this paragraph and looked at +the member of the Hofkriegsrath mildly and attentively. + +"But you know the wise maxim your excellency, advising one to expect +the worst," said the Austrian general, evidently wishing to have +done with jests and to come to business. He involuntarily looked round +at the aide-de-camp. + +"Excuse me, General," interrupted Kutuzov, also turning to Prince +Andrew. "Look here, my dear fellow, get from Kozlovski all the reports +from our scouts. Here are two letters from Count Nostitz and here is +one from His Highness the Archduke Ferdinand and here are these," he +said, handing him several papers, "make a neat memorandum in French +out of all this, showing all the news we have had of the movements +of the Austrian army, and then give it to his excellency." + +Prince Andrew bowed his head in token of having understood from +the first not only what had been said but also what Kutuzov would have +liked to tell him. He gathered up the papers and with a bow to both, +stepped softly over the carpet and went out into the waiting room. + +Though not much time had passed since Prince Andrew had left Russia, +he had changed greatly during that period. In the expression of his +face, in his movements, in his walk, scarcely a trace was left of +his former affected languor and indolence. He now looked like a man +who has time to think of the impression he makes on others, but is +occupied with agreeable and interesting work. His face expressed +more satisfaction with himself and those around him, his smile and +glance were brighter and more attractive. + +Kutuzov, whom he had overtaken in Poland, had received him very +kindly, promised not to forget him, distinguished him above the +other adjutants, and had taken him to Vienna and given him the more +serious commissions. From Vienna Kutuzov wrote to his old comrade, +Prince Andrew's father. + +Your son bids fair to become an officer distinguished by his +industry, firmness, and expedition. I consider myself fortunate to +have such a subordinate by me. + +On Kutuzov's staff, among his fellow officers and in the army +generally, Prince Andrew had, as he had had in Petersburg society, two +quite opposite reputations. Some, a minority, acknowledged him to be +different from themselves and from everyone else, expected great +things of him, listened to him, admired, and imitated him, and with +them Prince Andrew was natural and pleasant. Others, the majority, +disliked him and considered him conceited, cold, and disagreeable. But +among these people Prince Andrew knew how to take his stand so that +they respected and even feared him. + +Coming out of Kutuzov's room into the waiting room with the papers +in his hand Prince Andrew came up to his comrade, the aide-de-camp +on duty, Kozlovski, who was sitting at the window with a book. + +"Well, Prince?" asked Kozlovski. + +"I am ordered to write a memorandum explaining why we are not +advancing." + +"And why is it?" + +Prince Andrew shrugged his shoulders. + +"Any news from Mack?" + +"No." + +"If it were true that he has been beaten, news would have come." + +"Probably," said Prince Andrew moving toward the outer door. + +But at that instant a tall Austrian general in a greatcoat, with the +order of Maria Theresa on his neck and a black bandage round his head, +who had evidently just arrived, entered quickly, slamming the door. +Prince Andrew stopped short. + +"Commander in Chief Kutuzov?" said the newly arrived general +speaking quickly with a harsh German accent, looking to both sides and +advancing straight toward the inner door. + +"The commander in chief is engaged," said Kozlovski, going hurriedly +up to the unknown general and blocking his way to the door. "Whom +shall I announce?" + +The unknown general looked disdainfully down at Kozlovski, who was +rather short, as if surprised that anyone should not know him. + +"The commander in chief is engaged," repeated Kozlovski calmly. + +The general's face clouded, his lips quivered and trembled. He +took out a notebook, hurriedly scribbled something in pencil, tore out +the leaf, gave it to Kozlovski, stepped quickly to the window, and +threw himself into a chair, gazing at those in the room as if +asking, "Why do they look at me?" Then he lifted his head, stretched +his neck as if he intended to say something, but immediately, with +affected indifference, began to hum to himself, producing a queer +sound which immediately broke off. The door of the private room opened +and Kutuzov appeared in the doorway. The general with the bandaged +head bent forward as though running away from some danger, and, making +long, quick strides with his thin legs, went up to Kutuzov. + +"Vous voyez le malheureux Mack," he uttered in a broken voice. + +Kutuzov's face as he stood in the open doorway remained perfectly +immobile for a few moments. Then wrinkles ran over his face like a +wave and his forehead became smooth again, he bowed his head +respectfully, closed his eyes, silently let Mack enter his room before +him, and closed the door himself behind him. + +The report which had been circulated that the Austrians had been +beaten and that the whole army had surrendered at Ulm proved to be +correct. Within half an hour adjutants had been sent in various +directions with orders which showed that the Russian troops, who had +hitherto been inactive, would also soon have to meet the enemy. + +Prince Andrew was one of those rare staff officers whose chief +interest lay in the general progress of the war. When he saw Mack +and heard the details of his disaster he understood that half the +campaign was lost, understood all the difficulties of the Russian +army's position, and vividly imagined what awaited it and the part +he would have to play. Involuntarily he felt a joyful agitation at the +thought of the humiliation of arrogant Austria and that in a week's +time he might, perhaps, see and take part in the first Russian +encounter with the French since Suvorov met them. He feared that +Bonaparte's genius might outweigh all the courage of the Russian +troops, and at the same time could not admit the idea of his hero +being disgraced. + +Excited and irritated by these thoughts Prince Andrew went toward +his room to write to his father, to whom he wrote every day. In the +corridor he met Nesvitski, with whom he shared a room, and the wag +Zherkov; they were as usual laughing. + +"Why are you so glum?" asked Nesvitski noticing Prince Andrew's pale +face and glittering eyes. + +"There's nothing to be gay about," answered Bolkonski. + +Just as Prince Andrew met Nesvitski and Zherkov, there came toward +them from the other end of the corridor, Strauch, an Austrian +general who on Kutuzov's staff in charge of the provisioning of the +Russian army, and the member of the Hofkriegsrath who had arrived +the previous evening. There was room enough in the wide corridor for +the generals to pass the three officers quite easily, but Zherkov, +pushing Nesvitski aside with his arm, said in a breathless voice, + +"They're coming!... they're coming!... Stand aside, make way, please +make way!" + +The generals were passing by, looking as if they wished to avoid +embarrassing attentions. On the face of the wag Zherkov there suddenly +appeared a stupid smile of glee which he seemed unable to suppress. + +"Your excellency," said he in German, stepping forward and +addressing the Austrian general, "I have the honor to congratulate +you." + +He bowed his head and scraped first with one foot and then with +the other, awkwardly, like a child at a dancing lesson. + +The member of the Hofkriegsrath looked at him severely but, seeing +the seriousness of his stupid smile, could not but give him a moment's +attention. He screwed up his eyes showing that he was listening. + +"I have the honor to congratulate you. General Mack has arrived, +quite well, only a little bruised just here," he added, pointing +with a beaming smile to his head. + +The general frowned, turned away, and went on. + +"Gott, wie naiv!"~^ said he angrily, after he had gone a few steps. + +^~ "Good God, what simplicity!" + +Nesvitski with a laugh threw his arms round Prince Andrew, but +Bolkonski, turning still paler, pushed him away with an angry look and +turned to Zherkov. The nervous irritation aroused by the appearance of +Mack, the news of his defeat, and the thought of what lay before the +Russian army found vent in anger at Zherkov's untimely jest. + +"If you, sir, choose to make a buffoon of yourself," he said +sharply, with a slight trembling of the lower jaw, "I can't prevent +your doing so; but I warn you that if you dare to play the fool in +my presence, I will teach you to behave yourself." + +Nesvitski and Zherkov were so surprised by this outburst that they +gazed at Bolkonski silently with wide-open eyes. + +"What's the matter? I only congratulated them," said Zherkov. + +"I am not jesting with you; please be silent!" cried Bolkonski, +and taking Nesvitski's arm he left Zherkov, who did not know what to +say. + +"Come, what's the matter, old fellow?" said Nesvitski trying to +soothe him. + +"What's the matter?" exclaimed Prince Andrew standing still in his +excitement. "Don't you understand that either we are officers +serving our Tsar and our country, rejoicing in the successes and +grieving at the misfortunes of our common cause, or we are merely +lackeys who care nothing for their master's business. Quarante mille +hommes massacres et l'armee de nos allies detruite, et vous trouvez la +le mot pour rire,"~^ he said, as if strengthening his views by this +French sentence. "C' est bien pour un garcon de rein comme cet +individu dont vous avez fait un ami, mais pas pour vous, pas pour +vous.~^ Only a hobbledehoy could amuse himself in this way," he +added in Russian- but pronouncing the word with a French accent- +having noticed that Zherkov could still hear him. + +^~ "Forty thousand men massacred and the army of our allies destroyed, +and you find that a cause for jesting!" + +^~ "It is all very well for that good-for-nothing fellow of whom +you have made a friend, but not for you, not for you." + +He waited a moment to see whether the cornet would answer, but he +turned and went out of the corridor. + +CHAPTER IV + +The Pavlograd Hussars were stationed two miles from Braunau. The +squadron in which Nicholas Rostov served as a cadet was quartered in +the German village of Salzeneck. The best quarters in the village were +assigned to cavalry-captain Denisov, the squadron commander, known +throughout the whole cavalry division as Vaska Denisov. Cadet +Rostov, ever since he had overtaken the regiment in Poland, had +lived with the squadron commander. + +On October 11, the day when all was astir at headquarters over the +news of Mack's defeat, the camp life of the officers of this +squadron was proceeding as usual. Denisov, who had been losing at +cards all night, had not yet come home when Rostov rode back early +in the morning from a foraging expedition. Rostov in his cadet +uniform, with a jerk to his horse, rode up to the porch, swung his leg +over the saddle with a supple youthful movement, stood for a moment in +the stirrup as if loathe to part from his horse, and at last sprang +down and called to his orderly. + +"Ah, Bondarenko, dear friend!" said he to the hussar who rushed up +headlong to the horse. "Walk him up and down, my dear fellow," he +continued, with that gay brotherly cordiality which goodhearted +young people show to everyone when they are happy. + +"Yes, your excellency," answered the Ukrainian gaily, tossing his +head. + +"Mind, walk him up and down well!" + +Another hussar also rushed toward the horse, but Bondarenko had +already thrown the reins of the snaffle bridle over the horse's +head. It was evident that the cadet was liberal with his tips and that +it paid to serve him. Rostov patted the horse's neck and then his +flank, and lingered for a moment. + +"Splendid! What a horse he will be!" he thought with a smile, and +holding up his saber, his spurs jingling, he ran up the steps of the +porch. His landlord, who in a waistcoat and a pointed cap, pitchfork +in hand, was clearing manure from the cowhouse, looked out, and his +face immediately brightened on seeing Rostov. "Schon gut Morgen! Schon +gut Morgen!"~^ he said winking with a merry smile, evidently pleased to +greet the young man. + +^~ "A very good morning! A very good morning!" + +"Schon fleissig?"~^ said Rostov with the same gay brotherly smile +which did not leave his eager face. "Hoch Oestreicher! Hoch Russen! +Kaiser Alexander hoch!"~^ said he, quoting words often repeated by +the German landlord. + +^~ "Busy already?" + +^~ "Hurrah for the Austrians! Hurrah for the Russians! Hurrah +for Emperor Alexander!" + +The German laughed, came out of the cowshed, pulled off his cap, and +waving it above his head cried: + +"Und die ganze Welt hoch!"~^ + +^~ "And hurrah for the whole world!" + +Rostov waved his cap above his head like the German and ctied +laughing, "Und vivat die ganze Welt!" Though neither the German +cleaning his cowshed nor Rostov back with his platoon from foraging +for hay had any reason for rejoicing, they looked at each other with +joyful delight and brotherly love, wagged their heads in token of +their mutual affection, and parted smiling, the German returning to +his cowshed and Rostov going to the cottage he occupied with Denisov. + +"What about your master?" he asked Lavrushka, Denisov's orderly, +whom all the regiment knew for a rogue. + +"Hasn't been in since the evening. Must have been losing," +answered Lavrushka. "I know by now, if he wins he comes back early +to brag about it, but if he stays out till morning it means he's +lost and will come back in a rage. Will you have coffee?" + +"Yes, bring some." + +Ten minutes later Lavrushka brought the coffee. "He's coming!" +said he. "Now for trouble!" Rostov looked out of the window and saw +Denisov coming home. Denisov was a small man with a red face, +sparkling black eyes, and black tousled mustache and hair. He wore +an unfastened cloak, wide breeches hanging down in creases, and a +crumpled shako on the back of his head. He came up to the porch +gloomily, hanging his head. + +"Lavwuska!" he shouted loudly and angrily, "take it off, blockhead!" + +"Well, I am taking it off," replied Lavrushka's voice. + +"Ah, you're up already," said Denisov, entering the room. + +"Long ago," answered Rostov, "I have already been for the hay, and +have seen Fraulein Mathilde." + +"Weally! And I've been losing, bwother. I lost yesterday like a +damned fool!" cried Denisov, not pronouncing his r's. "Such ill +luck! Such ill luck. As soon as you left, it began and went on. +Hullo there! Tea!" + +Puckering up his face though smiling, and showing his short strong +teeth, he began with stubby fingers of both hands to ruffle up his +thick tangled black hair. + +"And what devil made me go to that wat?" (an officer nicknamed +"the rat") he said, rubbing his forehead and whole face with both +hands. "Just fancy, he didn't let me win a single cahd, not one cahd." + +He took the lighted pipe that was offered to him, gripped it in +his fist, and tapped it on the floor, making the sparks fly, while +he continued to shout. + +"He lets one win the singles and collahs it as soon as one doubles +it; gives the singles and snatches the doubles!" + +He scattered the burning tobacco, smashed the pipe, and threw it +away. Then he remained silent for a while, and all at once looked +cheerfully with his glittering, black eyes at Rostov. + +"If at least we had some women here; but there's nothing foh one +to do but dwink. If we could only get to fighting soon. Hullo, who's +there?" he said, turning to the door as he heard a tread of heavy +boots and the clinking of spurs that came to a stop, and a +respectful cough. + +"The squadron quartermaster!" said Lavrushka. + +Denisov's face puckered still more. + +"Wetched!" he muttered, throwing down a purse with some gold in +it. "Wostov, deah fellow, just see how much there is left and shove +the purse undah the pillow," he said, and went out to the +quartermaster. + +Rostov took the money and, mechanically arranging the old and new +coins in separate piles, began counting them. + +"Ah! Telyanin! How d'ye do? They plucked me last night," came +Denisov's voice from the next room. + +"Where? At Bykov's, at the rat's... I knew it," replied a piping +voice, and Lieutenant Telyanin, a small officer of the same +squadron, entered the room. + +Rostov thrust the purse under the pillow and shook the damp little +hand which was offered him. Telyanin for some reason had been +transferred from the Guards just before this campaign. He behaved very +well in the regiment but was not liked; Rostov especially detested him +and was unable to overcome or conceal his groundless antipathy to +the man. + +"Well, young cavalryman, how is my Rook behaving?" he asked. (Rook +was a young horse Telyanin had sold to Rostov.) + +The lieutenant never looked the man he was speaking to straight in +the face; his eyes continually wandered from one object to another. + +"I saw you riding this morning..." he added. + +"Oh, he's all right, a good horse," answered Rostov, though the +horse for which he had paid seven hundred rubbles was not worth half +that sum. "He's begun to go a little lame on the left foreleg," he +added. + +"The hoof's cracked! That's nothing. I'll teach you what to do and +show you what kind of rivet to use." + +"Yes, please do," said Rostov. + +"I'll show you, I'll show you! It's not a secret. And it's a horse +you'll thank me for." + +"Then I'll have it brought round," said Rostov wishing to avoid +Telyanin, and he went out to give the order. + +In the passage Denisov, with a pipe, was squatting on the +threshold facing the quartermaster who was reporting to him. On seeing +Rostov, Denisov screwed up his face and pointing over his shoulder +with his thumb to the room where Telyanin was sitting, he frowned +and gave a shudder of disgust. + +"Ugh! I don't like that fellow"' he said, regardless of the +quartermaster's presence. + +Rostov shrugged his shoulders as much as to say: "Nor do I, but +what's one to do?" and, having given his order, he returned to +Telyanin. + +Telyanin was sitting in the same indolent pose in which Rostov had +left him, rubbing his small white hands. + +"Well there certainly are disgusting people," thought Rostov as he +entered. + +"Have you told them to bring the horse?" asked Telyanin, getting +up and looking carelessly about him. + +"I have." + +"Let us go ourselves. I only came round to ask Denisov about +yesterday's order. Have you got it, Denisov?" + +"Not yet. But where are you off to?" + +"I want to teach this young man how to shoe a horse," said Telyanin. + +They went through the porch and into the stable. The lieutenant +explained how to rivet the hoof and went away to his own quarters. + +When Rostov went back there was a bottle of vodka and a sausage on +the table. Denisov was sitting there scratching with his pen on a +sheet of paper. He looked gloomily in Rostov's face and said: "I am +witing to her." + +He leaned his elbows on the table with his pen in his hand and, +evidently glad of a chance to say quicker in words what he wanted to +write, told Rostov the contents of his letter. + +"You see, my fwiend," he said, "we sleep when we don't love. We +are childwen of the dust... but one falls in love and one is a God, +one is pua' as on the first day of cweation... Who's that now? Send +him to the devil, I'm busy!" he shouted to Lavrushka, who went up to +him not in the least abashed. + +"Who should it be? You yourself told him to come. It's the +quartermaster for the money." + +Denisov frowned and was about to shout some reply but stopped. + +"Wetched business," he muttered to himself. "How much is left in the +puhse?" he asked, turning to Rostov. + +"Seven new and three old imperials." + +"Oh, it's wetched! Well, what are you standing there for, you +sca'cwow? Call the quahtehmasteh," he shouted to Lavrushka. + +"Please, Denisov, let me lend you some: I have some, you know," said +Rostov, blushing. + +"Don't like bowwowing from my own fellows, I don't," growled +Denisov. + +"But if you won't accept money from me like a comrade, you will +offend me. Really I have some," Rostov repeated. + +"No, I tell you." + +And Denisov went to the bed to get the purse from under the pillow. + +"Where have you put it, Wostov?" + +"Under the lower pillow." + +"It's not there." + +Denisov threw both pillows on the floor. The purse was not there. + +"That's a miwacle." + +"Wait, haven't you dropped it?" said Rostov, picking up the +pillows one at a time and shaking them. + +He pulled off the quilt and shook it. The purse was not there. + +"Dear me, can I have forgotten? No, I remember thinking that you +kept it under your head like a treasure," said Rostov. "I put it +just here. Where is it?" he asked, turning to Lavrushka. + +"I haven't been in the room. It must be where you put it." + +"But it isn't?..." + +"You're always like that; you thwow a thing down anywhere and forget +it. Feel in your pockets." + +"No, if I hadn't thought of it being a treasure," said Rostov, +"but I remember putting it there." + +Lavrushka turned all the bedding over, looked under the bed and +under the table, searched everywhere, and stood still in the middle of +the room. Denisov silently watched Lavrushka's movements, and when the +latter threw up his arms in surprise saying it was nowhere to be found +Denisov glanced at Rostov. + +"Wostov, you've not been playing schoolboy twicks..." + +Rostov felt Denisov's gaze fixed on him, raised his eyes, and +instantly dropped them again. All the blood which had seemed congested +somewhere below his throat rushed to his face and eyes. He could not +draw breath. + +"And there hasn't been anyone in the room except the lieutenant +and yourselves. It must be here somewhere," said Lavrushka. + +"Now then, you devil's puppet, look alive and hunt for it!" +shouted Denisov, suddenly, turning purple and rushing at the man +with a threatening gesture. "If the purse isn't found I'll flog you, +I'll flog you all." + +Rostov, his eyes avoiding Denisov, began buttoning his coat, buckled +on his saber, and put on his cap. + +"I must have that purse, I tell you," shouted Denisov, shaking his +orderly by the shoulders and knocking him against the wall. + +"Denisov, let him alone, I know who has taken it," said Rostov, +going toward the door without raising his eyes. Denisov paused, +thought a moment, and, evidently understanding what Rostov hinted +at, seized his arm. + +"Nonsense!" he cried, and the veins on his forehead and neck stood +out like cords. "You are mad, I tell you. I won't allow it. The +purse is here! I'll flay this scoundwel alive, and it will be found." + +"I know who has taken it," repeated Rostov in an unsteady voice, and +went to the door. + +"And I tell you, don't you dahe to do it!" shouted Denisov, +rushing at the cadet to restrain him. + +But Rostov pulled away his arm and, with as much anger as though +Denisov were his worst enemy, firmly fixed his eyes directly on his +face. + +"Do you understand what you're saying?" he said in a trembling +voice. "There was no one else in the room except myself. So that if it +is not so, then..." + +He could not finish, and ran out of the room. + +"Ah, may the devil take you and evewybody," were the last words +Rostov heard. + +Rostov went to Telyanin's quarters. + +"The master is not in, he's gone to headquarters," said Telyanin's +orderly. "Has something happened?" he added, surprised at the +cadet's troubled face. + +"No, nothing." + +"You've only just missed him," said the orderly. + +The headquarters were situated two miles away from Salzeneck, and +Rostov, without returning home, took a horse and rode there. There was +an inn in the village which the officers frequented. Rostov rode up to +it and saw Telyanin's horse at the porch. + +In the second room of the inn the lieutenant was sitting over a dish +of sausages and a bottle of wine. + +"Ah, you've come here too, young man!" he said, smiling and +raising his eyebrows. + +"Yes," said Rostov as if it cost him a great deal to utter the word; +and he sat down at the nearest table. + +Both were silent. There were two Germans and a Russian officer in +the room. No one spoke and the only sounds heard were the clatter of +knives and the munching of the lieutenant. + +When Telyanin had finished his lunch he took out of his pocket a +double purse and, drawing its rings aside with his small, white, +turned-up fingers, drew out a gold imperial, and lifting his +eyebrows gave it to the waiter. + +"Please be quick," he said. + +The coin was a new one. Rostov rose and went up to Telyanin. + +"Allow me to look at your purse," he said in a low, almost +inaudible, voice. + +With shifting eyes but eyebrows still raised, Telyanin handed him +the purse. + +"Yes, it's a nice purse. Yes, yes," he said, growing suddenly +pale, and added, "Look at it, young man." + +Rostov took the purse in his hand, examined it and the money in +it, and looked at Telyanin. The lieutenant was looking about in his +usual way and suddenly seemed to grow very merry. + +"If we get to Vienna I'll get rid of it there but in these +wretched little towns there's nowhere to spend it," said he. "Well, +let me have it, young man, I'm going." + +Rostov did not speak. + +"And you? Are you going to have lunch too? They feed you quite +decently here," continued Telyanin. "Now then, let me have it." + +He stretched out his hand to take hold of the purse. Rostov let go +of it. Telyanin took the purse and began carelessly slipping it into +the pocket of his riding breeches, with his eyebrows lifted and his +mouth slightly open, as if to say, "Yes, yes, I am putting my purse in +my pocket and that's quite simple and is no else's business." + +"Well, young man?" he said with a sigh, and from under his lifted +brows he glanced into Rostov's eyes. + +Some flash as of an electric spark shot from Telyanin's eyes to +Rostov's and back, and back again and again in an instant. + +"Come here," said Rostov, catching hold of Telyanin's arm and almost +dragging him to the window. "That money is Denisov's; you took +it..." he whispered just above Telyanin's ear. + +"What? What? How dare you? What?" said Telyanin. + +But these words came like a piteous, despairing cry and an +entreaty for pardon. As soon as Rostov heard them, an enormous load of +doubt fell from him. He was glad, and at the same instant began to +pity the miserable man who stood before him, but the task he had begun +had to be completed. + +"Heaven only knows what the people here may imagine," muttered +Telyanin, taking up his cap and moving toward a small empty room. +"We must have an explanation..." + +"I know it and shall prove it," said Rostov. + +"I..." + +Every muscle of Telyanin's pale, terrified face began to quiver, his +eyes still shifted from side to side but with a downward look not +rising to Rostov's face, and his sobs were audible. + +"Count!... Don't ruin a young fellow... here is this wretched money, +take it..." He threw it on the table. "I have an old father and +mother!..." + +Rostov took the money, avoiding Telyanin's eyes, and went out of the +room without a word. But at the door he stopped and then retraced +his steps. "O God," he said with tears in his eyes, "how could you +do it?" + +"Count..." said Telyanin drawing nearer to him. + +"Don't touch me," said Rostov, drawing back. "If you need it, take +the money," and he threw the purse to him and ran out of the inn. + +CHAPTER V + +That same evening there was an animated discussion among the +squadron's officers in Denisov's quarters. + +"And I tell you, Rostov, that you must apologize to the colonel!" +said a tall, grizzly-haired staff captain, with enormous mustaches and +many wrinkles on his large features, to Rostov who was crimson with +excitement. + +The staff captain, Kirsten, had twice been reduced to the ranks +for affairs of honor and had twice regained his commission. + +"I will allow no one to call me a liar!" cried Rostov. "He told me I +lied, and I told him he lied. And there it rests. He may keep me on +duty every day, or may place me under arrest, but no one can make me +apologize, because if he, as commander of this regiment, thinks it +beneath his dignity to give me satisfaction, then..." + +"You just wait a moment, my dear fellow, and listen," interrupted +the staff captain in his deep bass, calmly stroking his long mustache. +"You tell the colonel in the presence of other officers that an +officer has stolen..." + +"I'm not to blame that the conversation began in the presence of +other officers. Perhaps I ought not to have spoken before them, but +I am not a diplomatist. That's why I joined the hussars, thinking that +here one would not need finesse; and he tells me that I am lying- so +let him give me satisfaction..." + +"That's all right. No one thinks you a coward, but that's not the +point. Ask Denisov whether it is not out of the question for a cadet +to demand satisfaction of his regimental commander?" + +Denisov sat gloomily biting his mustache and listening to the +conversation, evidently with no wish to take part in it. He answered +the staff captain's question by a disapproving shake of his head. + +"You speak to the colonel about this nasty business before other +officers," continued the staff captain, "and Bogdanich" (the colonel +was called Bogdanich) "shuts you up." + +"He did not shut me up, he said I was telling an untruth." + +"Well, have it so, and you talked a lot of nonsense to him and +must apologize." + +"Not on any account!" exclaimed Rostov. + +"I did not expect this of you," said the staff captain seriously and +severely. "You don't wish to apologize, but, man, it's not only to him +but to the whole regiment- all of us- you're to blame all round. The +case is this: you ought to have thought the matter over and taken +advice; but no, you go and blurt it all straight out before the +officers. Now what was the colonel to do? Have the officer tried and +disgrace the whole regiment? Disgrace the whole regiment because of +one scoundrel? Is that how you look at it? We don't see it like +that. And Bogdanich was a brick: he told you you were saying what +was not true. It's not pleasant, but what's to be done, my dear +fellow? You landed yourself in it. And now, when one wants to smooth +the thing over, some conceit prevents your apologizing, and you wish +to make the whole affair public. You are offended at being put on duty +a bit, but why not apologize to an old and honorable officer? Whatever +Bogdanich may be, anyway he is an honorable and brave old colonel! +You're quick at taking offense, but you don't mind disgracing the +whole regiment!" The staff captain's voice began to tremble. "You have +been in the regiment next to no time, my lad, you're here today and +tomorrow you'll be appointed adjutant somewhere and can snap your +fingers when it is said 'There are thieves among the Pavlograd +officers!' But it's not all the same to us! Am I not right, Denisov? +It's not the same!" + +Denisov remained silent and did not move, but occasionally looked +with his glittering black eyes at Rostov. + +"You value your own pride and don't wish to apologize," continued +the staff captain, "but we old fellows, who have grown up in and, +God willing, are going to die in the regiment, we prize the honor of +the regiment, and Bogdanich knows it. Oh, we do prize it, old +fellow! And all this is not right, it's not right! You may take +offense or not but I always stick to mother truth. It's not right!" + +And the staff captain rose and turned away from Rostov. + +"That's twue, devil take it" shouted Denisov, jumping up. "Now then, +Wostov, now then!" + +Rostov, growing red and pale alternately, looked first at one +officer and then at the other. + +"No, gentlemen, no... you mustn't think... I quite understand. +You're wrong to think that of me... I... for me... for the honor of +the regiment I'd... Ah well, I'll show that in action, and for me +the honor of the flag... Well, never mind, it's true I'm to blame, +to blame all round. Well, what else do you want?..." + +"Come, that's right, Count!" cried the staff captain, turning +round and clapping Rostov on the shoulder with his big hand. + +"I tell you," shouted Denisov, "he's a fine fellow." + +"That's better, Count," said the staff captain, beginning to address +Rostov by his title, as if in recognition of his confession. "Go and +apologize, your excellency. Yes, go!" + +"Gentlemen, I'll do anything. No one shall hear a word from me," +said Rostov in an imploring voice, "but I can't apologize, by God I +can't, do what you will! How can I go and apologize like a little +boy asking forgiveness?" + +Denisov began to laugh. + +"It'll be worse for you. Bogdanich is vindictive and you'll pay +for your obstinacy," said Kirsten. + +"No, on my word it's not obstinacy! I can't describe the feeling. +I can't..." + +"Well, it's as you like," said the staff captain. "And what has +become of that scoundrel?" he asked Denisov. + +"He has weported himself sick, he's to be stwuck off the list +tomowwow," muttered Denisov. + +"It is an illness, there's no other way of explaining it," said +the staff captain. + +"Illness or not, he'd better not cwoss my path. I'd kill him!" +shouted Denisov in a bloodthirsty tone. + +Just then Zherkov entered the room. + +"What brings you here?" cried the officers turning to the newcomer. + +"We're to go into action, gentlemen! Mack has surrendered with his +whole army." + +"It's not true!" + +"I've seen him myself!" + +"What? Saw the real Mack? With hands and feet?" + +"Into action! Into action! Bring him a bottle for such news! But how +did you come here?" + +"I've been sent back to the regiment all on account of that devil, +Mack. An Austrian general complained of me. I congratulated him on +Mack's arrival... What's the matter, Rostov? You look as if you'd just +come out of a hot bath." + +"Oh, my dear fellow, we're in such a stew here these last two days." + +The regimental adjutant came in and confirmed the news brought by +Zherkov. They were under orders to advance next day. + +"We're going into action, gentlemen!" + +"Well, thank God! We've been sitting here too long!" + +CHAPTER VI + +Kutuzov fell back toward Vienna, destroying behind him the bridges +over the rivers Inn (at Braunau) and Traun (near Linz). On October +23 the Russian troops were crossing the river Enns. At midday the +Russian baggage train, the artillery, and columns of troops were +defiling through the town of Enns on both sides of the bridge. + +It was a warm, rainy, autumnal day. The wide expanse that opened out +before the heights on which the Russian batteries stood guarding the +bridge was at times veiled by a diaphanous curtain of slanting rain, +and then, suddenly spread out in the sunlight, far-distant objects +could be clearly seen glittering as though freshly varnished. Down +below, the little town could be seen with its white, red-roofed +houses, its cathedral, and its bridge, on both sides of which streamed +jostling masses of Russian troops. At the bend of the Danube, vessels, +an island, and a castle with a park surrounded by the waters of the +confluence of the Enns and the Danube became visible, and the rocky +left bank of the Danube covered with pine forests, with a mystic +background of green treetops and bluish gorges. The turrets of a +convent stood out beyond a wild virgin pine forest, and far away on +the other side of the Enns the enemy's horse patrols could be +discerned. + +Among the field guns on the brow of the hill the general in +command of the rearguard stood with a staff officer, scanning the +country through his fieldglass. A little behind them Nesvitski, who +had been sent to the rearguard by the commander in chief, was +sitting on the trail of a gun carriage. A Cossack who accompanied +him had handed him a knapsack and a flask, and Nesvitski was +treating some officers to pies and real doppelkummel. The officers +gladly gathered round him, some on their knees, some squatting Turkish +fashion on the wet grass. + +"Yes, the Austrian prince who built that castle was no fool. It's +a fine place! Why are you not eating anything, gentlemen?" Nesvitski +was saying. + +"Thank you very much, Prince," answered one of the officers, pleased +to be talking to a staff officer of such importance. "It's a lovely +place! We passed close to the park and saw two deer... and what a +splendid house!" + +"Look, Prince," said another, who would have dearly liked to take +another pie but felt shy, and therefore pretended to be examining +the countryside- "See, our infantrymen have already got there. Look +there in the meadow behind the village, three of them are dragging +something. They'll ransack that castle," he remarked with evident +approval. + +"So they will," said Nesvitski. "No, but what I should like," +added he, munching a pie in his moist-lipped handsome mouth, "would be +to slip in over there." + +He pointed with a smile to a turreted nunnery, and his eyes narrowed +and gleamed. + +"That would be fine, gentlemen!" + +The officers laughed. + +"Just to flutter the nuns a bit. They say there are Italian girls +among them. On my word I'd give five years of my life for it!" + +"They must be feeling dull, too," said one of the bolder officers, +laughing. + +Meanwhile the staff officer standing in front pointed out +something to the general, who looked through his field glass. + +"Yes, so it is, so it is," said the general angrily, lowering the +field glass and shrugging his shoulders, "so it is! They'll be fired +on at the crossing. And why are they dawdling there?" + +On the opposite side the enemy could be seen by the naked eye, and +from their battery a milk-white cloud arose. Then came the distant +report of a shot, and our troops could be seen hurrying to the +crossing. + +Nesvitski rose, puffing, and went up to the general, smiling. + +"Would not your excellency like a little refreshment?" he said. + +"It's a bad business," said the general without answering him, +"our men have been wasting time." + +"Hadn't I better ride over, your excellency?" asked Nesvitski. + +"Yes, please do," answered the general, and he repeated the order +that had already once been given in detail: "and tell the hussars that +they are to cross last and to fire the bridge as I ordered; and the +inflammable material on the bridge must be reinspected." + +"Very good," answered Nesvitski. + +He called the Cossack with his horse, told him to put away the +knapsack and flask, and swung his heavy person easily into the saddle. + +"I'll really call in on the nuns," he said to the officers who +watched him smilingly, and he rode off by the winding path down the +hill. + +"Now then, let's see how far it will carry, Captain. Just try!" said +the general, turning to an artillery officer. "Have a little fun to +pass the time." + +"Crew, to your guns!" commanded the officer. + +In a moment the men came running gaily from their campfires and +began loading. + +"One!" came the command. + +Number one jumped briskly aside. The gun rang out with a deafening +metallic roar, and a whistling grenade flew above the heads of our +troops below the hill and fell far short of the enemy, a little +smoke showing the spot where it burst. + +The faces of officers and men brightened up at the sound. Everyone +got up and began watching the movements of our troops below, as +plainly visible as if but a stone's throw away, and the movements of +the approaching enemy farther off. At the same instant the sun came +fully out from behind the clouds, and the clear sound of the +solitary shot and the brilliance of the bright sunshine merged in a +single joyous and spirited impression. + +CHAPTER VII + +Two of the enemy's shots had already flown across the bridge, +where there was a crush. Halfway across stood Prince Nesvitski, who +had alighted from his horse and whose big body was body was jammed +against the railings. He looked back laughing to the Cossack who stood +a few steps behind him holding two horses by their bridles. Each +time Prince Nesvitski tried to move on, soldiers and carts pushed +him back again and pressed him against the railings, and all he +could do was to smile. + +"What a fine fellow you are, friend!" said the Cossack to a convoy +soldier with a wagon, who was pressing onto the infantrymen who were +crowded together close to his wheels and his horses. "What a fellow! +You can't wait a moment! Don't you see the general wants to pass?" + +But the convoyman took no notice of the word "general" and shouted +at the soldiers who were blocking his way. "Hi there, boys! Keep to +the left! Wait a bit." But the soldiers, crowded together shoulder +to shoulder, their bayonets interlocking, moved over the bridge in a +dense mass. Looking down over the rails Prince Nesvitski saw the +rapid, noisy little waves of the Enns, which rippling and eddying +round the piles of the bridge chased each other along. Looking on +the bridge he saw equally uniform living waves of soldiers, shoulder +straps, covered shakos, knapsacks, bayonets, long muskets, and, +under the shakos, faces with broad cheekbones, sunken cheeks, and +listless tired expressions, and feet that moved through the sticky mud +that covered the planks of the bridge. Sometimes through the +monotonous waves of men, like a fleck of white foam on the waves of +the Enns, an officer, in a cloak and with a type of face different +from that of the men, squeezed his way along; sometimes like a chip of +wood whirling in the river, an hussar on foot, an orderly, or a +townsman was carried through the waves of infantry; and sometimes like +a log floating down the river, an officers' or company's baggage +wagon, piled high, leather covered, and hemmed in on all sides, +moved across the bridge. + +"It's as if a dam had burst," said the Cossack hopelessly. "Are +there many more of you to come?" + +"A million all but one!" replied a waggish soldier in a torn coat, +with a wink, and passed on followed by another, an old man. + +"If he" (he meant the enemy) "begins popping at the bridge now," +said the old soldier dismally to a comrade, "you'll forget to +scratch yourself." + +That soldier passed on, and after him came another sitting on a +cart. + +"Where the devil have the leg bands been shoved to?" said an +orderly, running behind the cart and fumbling in the back of it. + +And he also passed on with the wagon. Then came some merry +soldiers who had evidently been drinking. + +"And then, old fellow, he gives him one in the teeth with the butt +end of his gun..." a soldier whose greatcoat was well tucked up said +gaily, with a wide swing of his arm. + +"Yes, the ham was just delicious..." answered another with a loud +laugh. And they, too, passed on, so that Nesvitski did not learn who +had been struck on the teeth, or what the ham had to do with it. + +"Bah! How they scurry. He just sends a ball and they think they'll +all be killed," a sergeant was saying angrily and reproachfully. + +"As it flies past me, Daddy, the ball I mean," said a young +soldier with an enormous mouth, hardly refraining from laughing, "I +felt like dying of fright. I did, 'pon my word, I got that +frightened!" said he, as if bragging of having been frightened. + +That one also passed. Then followed a cart unlike any that had +gone before. It was a German cart with a pair of horses led by a +German, and seemed loaded with a whole houseful of effects. A fine +brindled cow with a large udder was attached to the cart behind. A +woman with an unweaned baby, an old woman, and a healthy German girl +with bright red cheeks were sitting on some feather beds. Evidently +these fugitives were allowed to pass by special permission. The eyes +of all the soldiers turned toward the women, and while the vehicle was +passing at foot pace all the soldiers' remarks related to the two +young ones. Every face bore almost the same smile, expressing unseemly +thoughts about the women. + +"Just see, the German sausage is making tracks, too!" + +"Sell me the missis," said another soldier, addressing the German, +who, angry and frightened, strode energetically along with downcast +eyes. + +"See how smart she's made herself! Oh, the devils!" + +"There, Fedotov, you should be quartered on them!" + +"I have seen as much before now, mate!" + +"Where are you going?" asked an infantry officer who was eating an +apple, also half smiling as he looked at the handsome girl. + +The German closed his eyes, signifying that he did not understand. + +"Take it if you like," said the officer, giving the girl an apple. + +The girl smiled and took it. Nesvitski like the rest of the men on +the bridge did not take his eyes off the women till they had passed. +When they had gone by, the same stream of soldiers followed, with +the same kind of talk, and at last all stopped. As often happens, +the horses of a convoy wagon became restive at the end of the +bridge, and the whole crowd had to wait. + +"And why are they stopping? There's no proper order!" said the +soldiers. "Where are you shoving to? Devil take you! Can't you wait? +It'll be worse if he fires the bridge. See, here's an officer jammed +in too"- different voices were saying in the crowd, as the men +looked at one another, and all pressed toward the exit from the +bridge. + +Looking down at the waters of the Enns under the bridge, Nesvitski +suddenly heard a sound new to him, of something swiftly approaching... +something big, that splashed into the water. + +"Just see where it carries to!" a soldier near by said sternly, +looking round at the sound. + +"Encouraging us to get along quicker," said another uneasily. + +The crowd moved on again. Nesvitski realized that it was a cannon +ball. + +"Hey, Cossack, my horse!" he said. "Now, then, you there! get out of +the way! Make way!" + +With great difficulty he managed to get to his horse, and shouting +continually he moved on. The soldiers squeezed themselves to make +way for him, but again pressed on him so that they jammed his leg, and +those nearest him were not to blame for they were themselves pressed +still harder from behind. + +"Nesvitski, Nesvitski! you numskull!" came a hoarse voice from +behind him. + +Nesvitski looked round and saw, some fifteen paces away but +separated by the living mass of moving infantry, Vaska Denisov, red +and shaggy, with his cap on the back of his black head and a cloak +hanging jauntily over his shoulder. + +"Tell these devils, these fiends, to let me pass!" shouted Denisov +evidently in a fit of rage, his coal-black eyes with their bloodshot +whites glittering and rolling as he waved his sheathed saber in a +small bare hand as red as his face. + +"Ah, Vaska!" joyfully replied Nesvitski. "What's up with you?" + +"The squadwon can't pass," shouted Vaska Denisov, showing his +white teeth fiercely and spurring his black thoroughbred Arab, which +twitched its ears as the bayonets touched it, and snorted, spurting +white foam from his bit, tramping the planks of the bridge with his +hoofs, and apparently ready to jump over the railings had his rider +let him. "What is this? They're like sheep! Just like sheep! Out of +the way!... Let us pass!... Stop there, you devil with the cart! +I'll hack you with my saber!" he shouted, actually drawing his saber +from its scabbard and flourishing it + +The soldiers crowded against one another with terrified faces, and +Denisov joined Nesvitski. + +"How's it you're not drunk today?" said Nesvitski when the other had +ridden up to him. + +"They don't even give one time to dwink!" answered Vaska Denisov. +"They keep dwagging the wegiment to and fwo all day. If they mean to +fight, let's fight. But the devil knows what this is." + +"What a dandy you are today!" said Nesvitski, looking at Denisov's +new cloak and saddlecloth. + +Denisov smiled, took out of his sabretache a handkerchief that +diffused a smell of perfume, and put it to Nesvitski's nose. + +"Of course. I'm going into action! I've shaved, bwushed my teeth, +and scented myself." + +The imposing figure of Nesvitski followed by his Cossack, and the +determination of Denisov who flourished his sword and shouted +frantically, had such an effect that they managed to squeeze through +to the farther side of the bridge and stopped the infantry. Beside the +bridge Nesvitski found the colonel to whom he had to deliver the +order, and having done this he rode back. + +Having cleared the way Denisov stopped at the end of the bridge. +Carelessly holding in his stallion that was neighing and pawing the +ground, eager to rejoin its fellows, he watched his squadron draw +nearer. Then the clang of hoofs, as of several horses galloping, +resounded on the planks of the bridge, and the squadron, officers in +front and men four abreast, spread across the bridge and began to +emerge on his side of it. + +The infantry who had been stopped crowded near the bridge in the +trampled mud and gazed with that particular feeling of ill-will, +estrangement, and ridicule with which troops of different arms usually +encounter one another at the clean, smart hussars who moved past +them in regular order. + +"Smart lads! Only fit for a fair!" said one. + +"What good are they? They're led about just for show!" remarked +another. + +"Don't kick up the dust, you infantry!" jested an hussar whose +prancing horse had splashed mud over some foot soldiers. + +"I'd like to put you on a two days' march with a knapsack! Your fine +cords would soon get a bit rubbed," said an infantryman, wiping the +mud off his face with his sleeve. "Perched up there, you're more +like a bird than a man." + +"There now, Zikin, they ought to put you on a horse. You'd look +fine," said a corporal, chaffing a thin little soldier who bent +under the weight of his knapsack. + +"Take a stick between your legs, that'll suit you for a horse!" +the hussar shouted back. + +CHAPTER VIII + +The last of the infantry hurriedly crossed the bridge, squeezing +together as they approached it as if passing through a funnel. At last +the baggage wagons had all crossed, the crush was less, and the last +battalion came onto the bridge. Only Denisov's squadron of hussars +remained on the farther side of the bridge facing the enemy, who could +be seen from the hill on the opposite bank but was not yet visible +from the bridge, for the horizon as seen from the valley through which +the river flowed was formed by the rising ground only half a mile +away. At the foot of the hill lay wasteland over which a few groups of +our Cossack scouts were moving. Suddenly on the road at the top of the +high ground, artillery and troops in blue uniform were seen. These +were the French. A group of Cossack scouts retired down the hill at +a trot. All the officers and men of Denisov's squadron, though they +tried to talk of other things and to look in other directions, thought +only of what was there on the hilltop, and kept constantly looking +at the patches appearing on the skyline, which they knew to be the +enemy's troops. The weather had cleared again since noon and the sun +was descending brightly upon the Danube and the dark hills around +it. It was calm, and at intervals the bugle calls and the shouts of +the enemy could be heard from the hill. There was no one now between +the squadron and the enemy except a few scattered skirmishers. An +empty space of some seven hundred yards was all that separated them. +The enemy ceased firing, and that stern, threatening, inaccessible, +and intangible line which separates two hostile armies was all the +more clearly felt. + +"One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line +dividing the living from the dead lies uncertainty, suffering, and +death. And what is there? Who is there?- there beyond that field, that +tree, that roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to +know. You fear and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner +or later it must be crossed and you will have to find out what is +there, just as you will inevitably have to learn what lies the other +side of death. But you are strong, healthy, cheerful, and excited, and +are surrounded by other such excitedly animated and healthy men." So +thinks, or at any rate feels, anyone who comes in sight of the +enemy, and that feeling gives a particular glamour and glad keenness +of impression to everything that takes place at such moments. + +On the high ground where the enemy was, the smoke of a cannon +rose, and a ball flew whistling over the heads of the hussar squadron. +The officers who had been standing together rode off to their +places. The hussars began carefully aligning their horses. Silence +fell on the whole squadron. All were looking at the enemy in front and +at the squadron commander, awaiting the word of command. A second +and a third cannon ball flew past. Evidently they were firing at the +hussars, but the balls with rapid rhythmic whistle flew over the heads +of the horsemen and fell somewhere beyond them. The hussars did not +look round, but at the sound of each shot, as at the word of +command, the whole squadron with its rows of faces so alike yet so +different, holding its breath while the ball flew past, rose in the +stirrups and sank back again. The soldiers without turning their heads +glanced at one another, curious to see their comrades' impression. +Every face, from Denisov's to that of the bugler, showed one common +expression of conflict, irritation, and excitement, around chin and +mouth. The quartermaster frowned, looking at the soldiers as if +threatening to punish them. Cadet Mironov ducked every time a ball +flew past. Rostov on the left flank, mounted on his Rook- a handsome +horse despite its game leg- had the happy air of a schoolboy called up +before a large audience for an examination in which he feels sure he +will distinguish himself. He was glancing at everyone with a clear, +bright expression, as if asking them to notice how calmly he sat under +fire. But despite himself, on his face too that same indication of +something new and stern showed round the mouth. + +"Who's that curtseying there? Cadet Miwonov! That's not wight! +Look at me," cried Denisov who, unable to keep still on one spot, kept +turning his horse in front of the squadron. + +The black, hairy, snub-nosed face of Vaska Denisov, and his whole +short sturdy figure with the sinewy hairy hand and stumpy fingers in +which he held the hilt of his naked saber, looked just as it usually +did, especially toward evening when he had emptied his second +bottle; he was only redder than usual. With his shaggy head thrown +back like birds when they drink, pressing his spurs mercilessly into +the sides of his good horse, Bedouin, and sitting as though falling +backwards in the saddle, he galloped to the other flank of the +squadron and shouted in a hoarse voice to the men to look to their +pistols. He rode up to Kirsten. The staff captain on his broad-backed, +steady mare came at a walk to meet him. His face with its long +mustache was serious as always, only his eyes were brighter than +usual. + +"Well, what about it?" said he to Denisov. "It won't come to a +fight. You'll see- we shall retire." + +"The devil only knows what they're about!" muttered Denisov. "Ah, +Wostov," he cried noticing the cadet's bright face, "you've got it +at last." + +And he smiled approvingly, evidently pleased with the cadet. +Rostov felt perfectly happy. Just then the commander appeared on the +bridge. Denisov galloped up to him. + +"Your excellency! Let us attack them! I'll dwive them off." + +"Attack indeed!" said the colonel in a bored voice, puckering up his +face as if driving off a troublesome fly. "And why are you stopping +here? Don't you see the skirmishers are retreating? Lead the +squadron back." + +The squadron crossed the bridge and drew out of range of fire +without having lost a single man. The second squadron that had been in +the front line followed them across and the last Cossacks quitted +the farther side of the river. + +The two Pavlograd squadrons, having crossed the bridge, retired up +the hill one after the other. Their colonel, Karl Bogdanich +Schubert, came up to Denisov's squadron and rode at a footpace not far +from Rostov, without taking any notice of him although they were now +meeting for the first time since their encounter concerning +Telyanin. Rostov, feeling that he was at the front and in the power of +a man toward whom he now admitted that he had been to blame, did not +lift his eyes from the colonel's athletic back, his nape covered +with light hair, and his red neck. It seemed to Rostov that +Bogdanich was only pretending not to notice him, and that his whole +aim now was to test the cadet's courage, so he drew himself up and +looked around him merrily; then it seemed to him that Bogdanich rode +so near in order to show him his courage. Next he thought that his +enemy would send the squadron on a desperate attack just to punish +him- Rostov. Then he imagined how, after the attack, Bogdanich would +come up to him as he lay wounded and would magnanimously extend the +hand of reconciliation. + +The high-shouldered figure of Zherkov, familiar to the Pavlograds as +he had but recently left their regiment, rode up to the colonel. After +his dismissal from headquarters Zherkov had not remained in the +regiment, saying he was not such a fool as to slave at the front +when he could get more rewards by doing nothing on the staff, and +had succeeded in attaching himself as an orderly officer to Prince +Bagration. He now came to his former chief with an order from the +commander of the rear guard. + +"Colonel," he said, addressing Rostov's enemy with an air of +gloomy gravity and glancing round at his comrades, "there is an +order to stop and fire the bridge." + +"An order to who?" asked the colonel morosely. + +"I don't myself know 'to who,'" replied the cornet in a serious +tone, "but the prince told me to 'go and tell the colonel that the +hussars must return quickly and fire the bridge.'" + +Zherkov was followed by an officer of the suite who rode up to the +colonel of hussars with the same order. After him the stout +Nesvitski came galloping up on a Cossack horse that could scarcely +carry his weight. + +"How's this, Colonel?" he shouted as he approached. "I told you to +fire the bridge, and now someone has gone and blundered; they are +all beside themselves over there and one can't make anything out." + +The colonel deliberately stopped the regiment and turned to +Nesvitski. + +"You spoke to me of inflammable material," said he, "but you said +nothing about firing it." + +"But, my dear sir," said Nesvitski as he drew up, taking off his cap +and smoothing his hair wet with perspiration with his plump hand, +"wasn't I telling you to fire the bridge, when inflammable material +had been put in position?" + +"I am not your 'dear sir,' Mr. Staff Officer, and you did not tell +me to burn the bridge! I know the service, and it is my habit orders +strictly to obey. You said the bridge would be burned, but who would +it burn, I could not know by the holy spirit!" + +"Ah, that's always the way!" said Nesvitski with a wave of the hand. +"How did you get here?" said he, turning to Zherkov. + +"On the same business. But you are damp! Let me wring you out!" + +"You were saying, Mr. Staff Officer..." continued the colonel in +an offended tone. + +"Colonel," interrupted the officer of the suite, "You must be +quick or the enemy will bring up his guns to use grapeshot." + +The colonel looked silently at the officer of the suite, at the +stout staff officer, and at Zherkov, and he frowned. + +"I will the bridge fire," he said in a solemn tone as if to announce +that in spite of all the unpleasantness he had to endure he would +still do the right thing. + +Striking his horse with his long muscular legs as if it were to +blame for everything, the colonel moved forward and ordered the second +squadron, that in which Rostov was serving under Denisov, to return to +the bridge. + +"There, it's just as I thought," said Rostov to himself. "He +wishes to test me!" His heart contracted and the blood rushed to his +face. "Let him see whether I am a coward!" he thought. + +Again on all the bright faces of the squadron the serious expression +appeared that they had worn when under fire. Rostov watched his enemy, +the colonel, closely- to find in his face confirmation of his own +conjecture, but the colonel did not once glance at Rostov, and +looked as he always did when at the front, solemn and stern. Then came +the word of command. + +"Look sharp! Look sharp!" several voices repeated around him. + +Their sabers catching in the bridles and their spurs jingling, the +hussars hastily dismounted, not knowing what they were to do. The +men were crossing themselves. Rostov no longer looked at the +colonel, he had no time. He was afraid of falling behind the +hussars, so much afraid that his heart stood still. His hand +trembled as he gave his horse into an orderly's charge, and he felt +the blood rush to his heart with a thud. Denisov rode past him, +leaning back and shouting something. Rostov saw nothing but the +hussars running all around him, their spurs catching and their +sabers clattering. + +"Stretchers!" shouted someone behind him. + +Rostov did not think what this call for stretchers meant; he ran on, +trying only to be ahead of the others; but just at the bridge, not +looking at the ground, he came on some sticky, trodden mud, +stumbled, and fell on his hands. The others outstripped him. + +"At boss zides, Captain," he heard the voice of the colonel, who, +having ridden ahead, had pulled up his horse near the bridge, with a +triumphant, cheerful face. + +Rostov wiping his muddy hands on his breeches looked at his enemy +and was about to run on, thinking that the farther he went to the +front the better. But Bogdanich, without looking at or recognizing +Rostov, shouted to him: + +"Who's that running on the middle of the bridge? To the right! +Come back, Cadet!" he cried angrily; and turning to Denisov, who, +showing off his courage, had ridden on to the planks of the bridge: + +"Why run risks, Captain? You should dismount," he said. + +"Oh, every bullet has its billet," answered Vaska Denisov, turning +in his saddle. + +Meanwhile Nesvitski, Zherkov, and the officer of the suite were +standing together out of range of the shots, watching, now the small +group of men with yellow shakos, dark-green jackets braided with cord, +and blue riding breeches, who were swarming near the bridge, and +then at what was approaching in the distance from the opposite side- +the blue uniforms and groups with horses, easily recognizable as +artillery. + +"Will they burn the bridge or not? Who'll get there first? Will they +get there and fire the bridge or will the French get within +grapeshot range and wipe them out?" These were the questions each +man of the troops on the high ground above the bridge involuntarily +asked himself with a sinking heart- watching the bridge and the +hussars in the bright evening light and the blue tunics advancing from +the other side with their bayonets and guns. + +"Ugh. The hussars will get it hot!" said Nesvitski; "they are within +grapeshot range now." + +"He shouldn't have taken so many men," said the officer of the +suite. + +"True enough," answered Nesvitski; "two smart fellows could have +done the job just as well." + +"Ah, your excellency," put in Zherkov, his eyes fixed on the +hussars, but still with that naive air that made it impossible to know +whether he was speaking in jest or in earnest. "Ah, your excellency! +How you look at things! Send two men? And who then would give us the +Vladimir medal and ribbon? But now, even if they do get peppered, +the squadron may be recommended for honors and he may get a ribbon. +Our Bogdanich knows how things are done." + +"There now!" said the officer of the suite, "that's grapeshot." + +He pointed to the French guns, the limbers of which were being +detached and hurriedly removed. + +On the French side, amid the groups with cannon, a cloud of smoke +appeared, then a second and a third almost simultaneously, and at +the moment when the first report was heard a fourth was seen. Then two +reports one after another, and a third. + +"Oh! Oh!" groaned Nesvitski as if in fierce pain, seizing the +officer of the suite by the arm. "Look! A man has fallen! Fallen, +fallen!" + +"Two, I think." + +"If I were Tsar I would never go to war," said Nesvitski, turning +away. + +The French guns were hastily reloaded. The infantry in their blue +uniforms advanced toward the bridge at a run. Smoke appeared again but +at irregular intervals, and grapeshot cracked and rattled onto the +bridge. But this time Nesvitski could not see what was happening +there, as a dense cloud of smoke arose from it. The hussars had +succeeded in setting it on fire and the French batteries were now +firing at them, no longer to hinder them but because the guns were +trained and there was someone to fire at. + +The French had time to fire three rounds of grapeshot before the +hussars got back to their horses. Two were misdirected and the shot +went too high, but the last round fell in the midst of a group of +hussars and knocked three of them over. + +Rostov, absorbed by his relations with Bogdanich, had paused on +the bridge not knowing what to do. There was no one to hew down (as he +had always imagined battles to himself), nor could he help to fire the +bridge because he had not brought any burning straw with him like +the other soldiers. He stood looking about him, when suddenly he heard +a rattle on the bridge as if nuts were being spilt, and the hussar +nearest to him fell against the rails with a groan. Rostov ran up to +him with the others. Again someone shouted, "Stretchers!" Four men +seized the hussar and began lifting him. + +"Oooh! For Christ's sake let me alone!" cried the wounded man, but +still he was lifted and laid on the stretcher. + +Nicholas Rostov turned away and, as if searching for something, +gazed into the distance, at the waters of the Danube, at the sky, +and at the sun. How beautiful the sky looked; how blue, how calm, +and how deep! How bright and glorious was the setting sun! With what +soft glitter the waters of the distant Danube shone. And fairer +still were the faraway blue mountains beyond the river, the nunnery, +the mysterious gorges, and the pine forests veiled in the mist of +their summits... There was peace and happiness... "I should wishing +for nothing else, nothing, if only I were there," thought Rostov. +"In myself alone and in that sunshine there is so much happiness; +but here... groans, suffering, fear, and this uncertainty and hurry... +There- they are shouting again, and again are all running back +somewhere, and I shall run with them, and it, death, is here above +me and around... Another instant and I shall never again see the +sun, this water, that gorge!..." + +At that instant the sun began to hide behind the clouds, and other +stretchers came into view before Rostov. And the fear of death and +of the stretchers, and love of the sun and of life, all merged into +one feeling of sickening agitation. + +"O Lord God! Thou who art in that heaven, save, forgive, and protect +me!" Rostov whispered. + +The hussars ran back to the men who held their horses; their +voices sounded louder and calmer, the stretchers disappeared from +sight. + +"Well, fwiend? So you've smelt powdah!" shouted Vaska Denisov just +above his ear. + +"It's all over; but I am a coward- yes, a coward!" thought Rostov, +and sighing deeply he took Rook, his horse, which stood resting one +foot, from the orderly and began to mount. + +"Was that grapeshot?" he asked Denisov. + +"Yes and no mistake!" cried Denisov. "You worked like wegular bwicks +and it's nasty work! An attack's pleasant work! Hacking away at the +dogs! But this sort of thing is the very devil, with them shooting +at you like a target." + +And Denisov rode up to a group that had stopped near Rostov, +composed of the colonel, Nesvitski, Zherkov, and the officer from +the suite. + +"Well, it seems that no one has noticed," thought Rostov. And this +was true. No one had taken any notice, for everyone knew the sensation +which the cadet under fire for the first time had experienced. + +"Here's something for you to report," said Zherkov. "See if I +don't get promoted to a sublieutenancy." + +"Inform the prince that I the bridge fired!" said the colonel +triumphantly and gaily. + +"And if he asks about the losses?" + +"A trifle," said the colonel in his bass voice: "two hussars +wounded, and one knocked out," he added, unable to restrain a happy +smile, and pronouncing the phrase "knocked out" with ringing +distinctness. + +CHAPTER IX + +Pursued by the French army of a hundred thousand men under the +command of Bonaparte, encountering a population that was unfriendly to +it, losing confidence in its allies, suffering from shortness of +supplies, and compelled to act under conditions of war unlike anything +that had been foreseen, the Russian army of thirty-five thousand men +commanded by Kutuzov was hurriedly retreating along the Danube, +stopping where overtaken by the enemy and fighting rearguard actions +only as far as necessary to enable it to retreat without losing its +heavy equipment. There had been actions at Lambach, Amstetten, and +Melk; but despite the courage and endurance- acknowledged even by +the enemy- with which the Russians fought, the only consequence of +these actions was a yet more rapid retreat. Austrian troops that had +escaped capture at Ulm and had joined Kutuzov at Braunau now separated +from the Russian army, and Kutuzov was left with only his own weak and +exhausted forces. The defense of Vienna was no longer to be thought +of. Instead of an offensive, the plan of which, carefully prepared +in accord with the modern science of strategics, had been handed to +Kutuzov when he was in Vienna by the Austrian Hofkriegsrath, the +sole and almost unattainable aim remaining for him was to effect a +junction with the forces that were advancing from Russia, without +losing his army as Mack had done at Ulm. + +On the twenty-eighth of October Kutuzov with his army crossed to the +left bank of the Danube and took up a position for the first time with +the river between himself and the main body of the French. On the +thirtieth he attacked Mortier's division, which was on the left +bank, and broke it up. In this action for the first time trophies were +taken: banners, cannon, and two enemy generals. For the first time, +after a fortnight's retreat, the Russian troops had halted and after a +fight had not only held the field but had repulsed the French. +Though the troops were ill-clad, exhausted, and had lost a third of +their number in killed, wounded, sick, and stragglers; though a number +of sick and wounded had been abandoned on the other side of the Danube +with a letter in which Kutuzov entrusted them to the humanity of the +enemy; and though the big hospitals and the houses in Krems +converted into military hospitals could no longer accommodate all +the sick and wounded, yet the stand made at Krems and the victory over +Mortier raised the spirits of the army considerably. Throughout the +whole army and at headquarters most joyful though erroneous rumors +were rife of the imaginary approach of columns from Russia, of some +victory gained by the Austrians, and of the retreat of the +frightened Bonaparte. + +Prince Andrew during the battle had been in attendance on the +Austrian General Schmidt, who was killed in the action. His horse +had been wounded under him and his own arm slightly grazed by a +bullet. As a mark of the commander in chief's special favor he was +sent with the news of this victory to the Austrian court, now no +longer at Vienna (which was threatened by the French) but at Brunn. +Despite his apparently delicate build Prince Andrew could endure +physical fatigue far better than many very muscular men, and on the +night of the battle, having arrived at Krems excited but not weary, +with dispatches from Dokhturov to Kutuzov, he was sent immediately +with a special dispatch to Brunn. To be so sent meant not only a +reward but an important step toward promotion. + +The night was dark but starry, the road showed black in the snow +that had fallen the previous day- the day of the battle. Reviewing his +impressions of the recent battle, picturing pleasantly to himself +the impression his news of a victory would create, or recalling the +send-off given him by the commander in chief and his fellow +officers, Prince Andrew was galloping along in a post chaise +enjoying the feelings of a man who has at length begun to attain a +long-desired happiness. As soon as he closed his eyes his ears +seemed filled with the rattle of the wheels and the sensation of +victory. Then he began to imagine that the Russians were running +away and that he himself was killed, but he quickly roused himself +with a feeling of joy, as if learning afresh that this was not so +but that on the contrary the French had run away. He again recalled +all the details of the victory and his own calm courage during the +battle, and feeling reassured he dozed off.... The dark starry night +was followed by a bright cheerful morning. The snow was thawing in the +sunshine, the horses galloped quickly, and on both sides of the road +were forests of different kinds, fields, and villages. + +At one of the post stations he overtook a convoy of Russian wounded. +The Russian officer in charge of the transport lolled back in the +front cart, shouting and scolding a soldier with coarse abuse. In each +of the long German carts six or more pale, dirty, bandaged men were +being jolted over the stony road. Some of them were talking (he +heard Russian words), others were eating bread; the more severely +wounded looked silently, with the languid interest of sick children, +at the envoy hurrying past them. + +Prince Andrew told his driver to stop, and asked a soldier in what +action they had been wounded. "Day before yesterday, on the Danube," +answered the soldier. Prince Andrew took out his purse and gave the +soldier three gold pieces. + +"That's for them all," he said to the officer who came up. + +"Get well soon, lads!" he continued, turning to the soldiers. +"There's plenty to do still." + +"What news, sir?" asked the officer, evidently anxious to start a +conversation. + +"Good news!... Go on!" he shouted to the driver, and they galloped +on. + +It was already quite dark when Prince Andrew rattled over the +paved streets of Brunn and found himself surrounded by high buildings, +the lights of shops, houses, and street lamps, fine carriages, and all +that atmosphere of a large and active town which is always so +attractive to a soldier after camp life. Despite his rapid journey and +sleepless night, Prince Andrew when he drove up to the palace felt +even more vigorous and alert than he had done the day before. Only his +eyes gleamed feverishly and his thoughts followed one another with +extraordinary clearness and rapidity. He again vividly recalled the +details of the battle, no longer dim, but definite and in the +concise form concise form in which he imagined himself stating them to +the Emperor Francis. He vividly imagined the casual questions that +might be put to him and the answers he would give. He expected to be +at once presented to the Emperor. At the chief entrance to the palace, +however, an official came running out to meet him, and learning that +he was a special messenger led him to another entrance. + +"To the right from the corridor, Euer Hochgeboren! There you will +find the adjutant on duty," said the official. "He will conduct you to +the Minister of War." + +The adjutant on duty, meeting Prince Andrew, asked him to wait, +and went in to the Minister of War. Five minutes later he returned and +bowing with particular courtesy ushered Prince Andrew before him along +a corridor to the cabinet where the Minister of War was at work. The +adjutant by his elaborate courtesy appeared to wish to ward off any +attempt at familiarity on the part of the Russian messenger. + +Prince Andrew's joyous feeling was considerably weakened as he +approached the door of the minister's room. He felt offended, and +without his noticing it the feeling of offense immediately turned into +one of disdain which was quite uncalled for. His fertile mind +instantly suggested to him a point of view which gave him a right to +despise the adjutant and the minister. "Away from the smell of powder, +they probably think it easy to gain victories!" he thought. His eyes +narrowed disdainfully, he entered the room of the Minister of War with +peculiarly deliberate steps. This feeling of disdain was heightened +when he saw the minister seated at a large table reading some papers +and making pencil notes on them, and for the first two or three +minutes taking no notice of his arrival. A wax candle stood at each +side of the minister's bent bald head with its gray temples. He went +on reading to the end, without raising his eyes at the opening of +the door and the sound of footsteps. + +"Take this and deliver it," said he to his adjutant, handing him the +papers and still taking no notice of the special messenger. + +Prince Andrew felt that either the actions of Kutuzov's army +interested the Minister of War less than any of the other matters he +was concerned with, or he wanted to give the Russian special messenger +that impression. "But that is a matter of perfect indifference to me," +he thought. The minister drew the remaining papers together, +arranged them evenly, and then raised his head. He had an intellectual +and distinctive head, but the instant he turned to Prince Andrew the +firm, intelligent expression on his face changed in a way evidently +deliberate and habitual to him. His face took on the stupid artificial +smile (which does not even attempt to hide its artificiality) of a man +who is continually receiving many petitioners one after another. + +"From General Field Marshal Kutuzov?" he asked. "I hope it is good +news? There has been an encounter with Mortier? A victory? It was high +time!" + +He took the dispatch which was addressed to him and began to read it +with a mournful expression. + +"Oh, my God! My God! Schmidt!" he exclaimed in German. "What a +calamity! What a calamity!" + +Having glanced through the dispatch he laid it on the table and +looked at Prince Andrew, evidently considering something. + +"Ah what a calamity! You say the affair was decisive? But Mortier is +not captured." Again he pondered. "I am very glad you have brought +good news, though Schmidt's death is a heavy price to pay for the +victory. His Majesty will no doubt wish to see you, but not today. I +thank you! You must have a rest. Be at the levee tomorrow after the +parade. However, I will let you know." + +The stupid smile, which had left his face while he was speaking, +reappeared. + +"Au revoir! Thank you very much. His Majesty will probably desire to +see you," he added, bowing his head. + +When Prince Andrew left the palace he felt that all the interest and +happiness the victory had afforded him had been now left in the +indifferent hands of the Minister of War and the polite adjutant. +The whole tenor of his thoughts instantaneously changed; the battle +seemed the memory of a remote event long past. + +CHAPTER X + +Prince Andrew stayed at Brunn with Bilibin, a Russian acquaintance +of his in the diplomatic service. + +"Ah, my dear prince! I could not have a more welcome visitor," +said Bilibin as he came out to meet Prince Andrew. "Franz, put the +prince's things in my bedroom," said he to the servant who was +ushering Bolkonski in. "So you're a messenger of victory, eh? +Splendid! And I am sitting here ill, as you see." + +After washing and dressing, Prince Andrew came into the diplomat's +luxurious study and sat down to the dinner prepared for him. Bilibin +settled down comfortably beside the fire. + +After his journey and the campaign during which he had been deprived +of all the comforts of cleanliness and all the refinements of life, +Prince Andrew felt a pleasant sense of repose among luxurious +surroundings such as he had been accustomed to from childhood. Besides +it was pleasant, after his reception by the Austrians, to speak if not +in Russian (for they were speaking French) at least with a Russian who +would, he supposed, share the general Russian antipathy to the +Austrians which was then particularly strong. + +Bilibin was a man of thirty-five, a bachelor, and of the same circle +as Prince Andrew. They had known each other previously in +Petersburg, but had become more intimate when Prince Andrew was in +Vienna with Kutuzov. Just as Prince Andrew was a young man who gave +promise of rising high in the military profession, so to an even +greater extent Bilibin gave promise of rising in his diplomatic +career. He still a young man but no longer a young diplomat, as he had +entered the service at the age of sixteen, had been in Paris and +Copenhagen, and now held a rather important post in Vienna. Both the +foreign minister and our ambassador in Vienna knew him and valued him. +He was not one of those many diplomats who are esteemed because they +have certain negative qualities, avoid doing certain things, and speak +French. He was one of those, who, liking work, knew how to do it, +and despite his indolence would sometimes spend a whole night at his +writing table. He worked well whatever the import of his work. It +was not the question "What for?" but the question "How?" that +interested him. What the diplomatic matter might be he did not care, +but it gave him great pleasure to prepare a circular, memorandum, or +report, skillfully, pointedly, and elegantly. Bilibin's services +were valued not only for what he wrote, but also for his skill in +dealing and conversing with those in the highest spheres. + +Bilibin liked conversation as he liked work, only when it could be +made elegantly witty. In society he always awaited an opportunity to +say something striking and took part in a conversation only when +that was possible. His conversation was always sprinkled with +wittily original, finished phrases of general interest. These +sayings were prepared in the inner laboratory of his mind in a +portable form as if intentionally, so that insignificant society +people might carry them from drawing room to drawing room. And, in +fact, Bilibin's witticisms were hawked about in the Viennese drawing +rooms and often had an influence on matters considered important. + +His thin, worn, sallow face was covered with deep wrinkles, which +always looked as clean and well washed as the tips of one's fingers +after a Russian bath. The movement of these wrinkles formed the +principal play of expression on his face. Now his forehead would +pucker into deep folds and his eyebrows were lifted, then his eyebrows +would descend and deep wrinkles would crease his cheeks. His small, +deep-set eyes always twinkled and looked out straight. + +"Well, now tell me about your exploits," said he. + +Bolkonski, very modestly without once mentioning himself, +described the engagement and his reception by the Minister of War. + +"They received me and my news as one receives a dog in a game of +skittles," said he in conclusion. + +Bilibin smiled and the wrinkles on his face disappeared. + +"Cependant, mon cher," he remarked, examining his nails from a +distance and puckering the skin above his left eye, "malgre la haute +estime que je professe pour the Orthodox Russian army, j'avoue que +votre victoire n'est pas des plus victorieuses."~^ + +^~ "But my dear fellow, with all my respect for the Orthodox Russian +army, I must say that your victory was not particularly victorious." + +He went on talking in this way in French, uttering only those +words in Russian on which he wished to put a contemptuous emphasis. + +"Come now! You with all your forces fall on the unfortunate +Mortier and his one division, and even then Mortier slips through your +fingers! Where's the victory?" + +"But seriously," said Prince Andrew, "we can at any rate say without +boasting that it was a little better than at Ulm..." + +"Why didn't you capture one, just one, marshal for us?" + +"Because not everything happens as one expects or with the +smoothness of a parade. We had expected, as I told you, to get at +their rear by seven in the morning but had not reached it by five in +the afternoon." + +"And why didn't you do it at seven in the morning? You ought to have +been there at seven in the morning," returned Bilibin with a smile. +"You ought to have been there at seven in the morning." + +"Why did you not succeed in impressing on Bonaparte by diplomatic +methods that he had better leave Genoa alone?" retorted Prince +Andrew in the same tone. + +"I know," interrupted Bilibin, "you're thinking it's very easy to +take marshals, sitting on a sofa by the fire! That is true, but +still why didn't you capture him? So don't be surprised if not only +the Minister of War but also his Most August Majesty the Emperor and +King Francis is not much delighted by your victory. Even I, a poor +secretary of the Russian Embassy, do not feel any need in token of +my joy to give my Franz a thaler, or let him go with his Liebchen to +the Prater... True, we have no Prater here..." + +He looked straight at Prince Andrew and suddenly unwrinkled his +forehead. + +"It is now my turn to ask you 'why?' mon cher," said Bolkonski. "I +confess I do not understand: perhaps there are diplomatic subtleties +here beyond my feeble intelligence, but I can't make it out. Mack +loses a whole army, the Archduke Ferdinand and the Archduke Karl +give no signs of life and make blunder after blunder. Kutuzov alone at +last gains a real victory, destroying the spell of the invincibility +of the French, and the Minister of War does not even care to hear +the details." + +"That's just it, my dear fellow. You see it's hurrah for the Tsar, +for Russia, for the Orthodox Greek faith! All that is beautiful, but +what do we, I mean the Austrian court, care for your victories? +Bring us nice news of a victory by the Archduke Karl or Ferdinand (one +archduke's as good as another, as you know) and even if it is only +over a fire brigade of Bonaparte's, that will be another story and +we'll fire off some cannon! But this sort of thing seems done on +purpose to vex us. The Archduke Karl does nothing, the Archduke +Ferdinand disgraces himself. You abandon Vienna, give up its +defense- as much as to say: 'Heaven is with us, but heaven help you +and your capital!' The one general whom we all loved, Schmidt, you +expose to a bullet, and then you congratulate us on the victory! Admit +that more irritating news than yours could not have been conceived. +It's as if it had been done on purpose, on purpose. Besides, suppose +you did gain a brilliant victory, if even the Archduke Karl gained a +victory, what effect would that have on the general course of +events? It's too late now when Vienna is occupied by the French army!" + +"What? Occupied? Vienna occupied?" + +"Not only occupied, but Bonaparte is at Schonbrunn, and the count, +our dear Count Vrbna, goes to him for orders." + +After the fatigues and impressions of the journey, his reception, +and especially after having dined, Bolkonski felt that he could not +take in the full significance of the words he heard. + +"Count Lichtenfels was here this morning," Bilibin continued, "and +showed me a letter in which the parade of the French in Vienna was +fully described: Prince Murat et tout le tremblement... You see that +your victory is not a matter for great rejoicing and that you can't be +received as a savior." + +"Really I don't care about that, I don't care at all," said Prince +Andrew, beginning to understand that his news of the battle before +Krems was really of small importance in view of such events as the +fall of Austria's capital. "How is it Vienna was taken? What of the +bridge and its celebrated bridgehead and Prince Auersperg? We heard +reports that Prince Auersperg was defending Vienna?" he said. + +"Prince Auersperg is on this, on our side of the river, and is +defending us- doing it very badly, I think, but still he is +defending us. But Vienna is on the other side. No, the bridge has +not yet been taken and I hope it will not be, for it is mined and +orders have been given to blow it up. Otherwise we should long ago +have been in the mountains of Bohemia, and you and your army would +have spent a bad quarter of an hour between two fires." + +"But still this does not mean that the campaign is over," said +Prince Andrew. + +"Well, I think it is. The bigwigs here think so too, but they +daren't say so. It will be as I said at the beginning of the campaign, +it won't be your skirmishing at Durrenstein, or gunpowder at all, that +will decide the matter, but those who devised it," said Bilibin +quoting one of his own mots, releasing the wrinkles on his forehead, +and pausing. "The only question is what will come of the meeting +between the Emperor Alexander and the King of Prussia in Berlin? If +Prussia joins the Allies, Austria's hand will be forced and there will +be war. If not it is merely a question of settling where the +preliminaries of the new Campo Formio are to be drawn up." + +"What an extraordinary genius!" Prince Andrew suddenly exclaimed, +clenching his small hand and striking the table with it, "and what +luck the man has!" + +"Buonaparte?" said Bilibin inquiringly, puckering up his forehead to +indicate that he was about to say something witty. "Buonaparte?" he +repeated, accentuating the u: "I think, however, now that he lays down +laws for Austria at Schonbrunn, il faut lui faire grace de l'u!~^ I +shall certainly adopt an innovation and call him simply Bonaparte!" + +^~ "We must let him off the u!" + +"But joking apart," said Prince Andrew, "do you really think the +campaign is over?" + +"This is what I think. Austria has been made a fool of, and she is +not used to it. She will retaliate. And she has been fooled in the +first place because her provinces have been pillaged- they say the +Holy Russian army loots terribly- her army is destroyed, her capital +taken, and all this for the beaux yeux~^ of His Sardinian Majesty. +And therefore- this is between ourselves- I instinctively feel that we +are being deceived, my instinct tells me of negotiations with France +and projects for peace, a secret peace concluded separately." + +^~ Fine eyes. + +"Impossible!" cried Prince Andrew. "That would be too base." + +"If we live we shall see," replied Bilibin, his face again +becoming smooth as a sign that the conversation was at an end. + +When Prince Andrew reached the room prepared for him and lay down in +a clean shirt on the feather bed with its warmed and fragrant pillows, +he felt that the battle of which he had brought tidings was far, far +away from him. The alliance with Prussia, Austria's treachery, +Bonaparte's new triumph, tomorrow's levee and parade, and the audience +with the Emperor Francis occupied his thoughts. + +He closed his eyes, and immediately a sound of cannonading, of +musketry and the rattling of carriage wheels seemed to fill his +ears, and now again drawn out in a thin line the musketeers were +descending the hill, the French were firing, and he felt his heart +palpitating as he rode forward beside Schmidt with the bullets merrily +whistling all around, and he experienced tenfold the joy of living, as +he had not done since childhood. + +He woke up... + +"Yes, that all happened!" he said, and, smiling happily to himself +like a child, he fell into a deep, youthful slumber. + +CHAPTER XI + +Next day he woke late. Recalling his recent impressions, the first +thought that came into his mind was that today he had to be +presented to the Emperor Francis; he remembered the Minister of War, + +the polite Austrian adjutant, Bilibin, and last night's +conversation. Having dressed for his attendance at court in full +parade uniform, which he had not worn for a long time, he went into +Bilibin's study fresh, animated, and handsome, with his hand bandaged. +In the study were four gentlemen of the diplomatic corps. With +Prince Hippolyte Kuragin, who was a secretary to the embassy, +Bolkonski was already acquainted. Bilibin introduced him to the +others. + +The gentlemen assembled at Bilibin's were young, wealthy, gay +society men, who here, as in Vienna, formed a special set which +Bilibin, their leader, called les notres.~^ This set, consisting almost +exclusively of diplomats, evidently had its own interests which had +nothing to do with war or politics but related to high society, to +certain women, and to the official side of the service. These +gentlemen received Prince Andrew as one of themselves, an honor they +did not extend to many. From politeness and to start conversation, +they asked him a few questions about the army and the battle, and then +the talk went off into merry jests and gossip. + +^~ Ours. + +"But the best of it was," said one, telling of the misfortune of a +fellow diplomat, "that the Chancellor told him flatly that his +appointment to London was a promotion and that he was so to regard it. +Can you fancy the figure he cut?..." + +"But the worst of it, gentlemen- I am giving Kuragin away to you- is +that that man suffers, and this Don Juan, wicked fellow, is taking +advantage of it!" + +Prince Hippolyte was lolling in a lounge chair with his legs over +its arm. He began to laugh. + +"Tell me about that!" he said. + +"Oh, you Don Juan! You serpent!" cried several voices. + +"You, Bolkonski, don't know," said Bilibin turning to Prince Andrew, +"that all the atrocities of the French army (I nearly said of the +Russian army) are nothing compared to what this man has been doing +among the women!" + +"La femme est la compagne de l'homme,"~^ announced Prince +Hippolyte, and began looking through a lorgnette at his elevated legs. + +^~ "Woman is man's companion." + +Bilibin and the rest of "ours" burst out laughing in Hippolyte's +face, and Prince Andrew saw that Hippolyte, of whom- he had to +admit- he had almost been jealous on his wife's account, was the +butt of this set. + +"Oh, I must give you a treat," Bilibin whispered to Bolkonski. +"Kuragin is exquisite when he discusses politics- you should see his +gravity!" + +He sat down beside Hippolyte and wrinkling his forehead began +talking to him about politics. Prince Andrew and the others gathered +round these two. + +"The Berlin cabinet cannot express a feeling of alliance," began +Hippolyte gazing round with importance at the others, "without +expressing... as in its last note... you understand... Besides, unless +His Majesty the Emperor derogates from the principle of our +alliance... + +"Wait, I have not finished..." he said to Prince Andrew, seizing him +by the arm, "I believe that intervention will be stronger than +nonintervention. And..." he paused. "Finally one cannot impute the +nonreceipt of our dispatch of November 18. That is how it will end." +And he released Bolkonski's arm to indicate that he had now quite +finished. + +"Demosthenes, I know thee by the pebble thou secretest in thy golden +mouth!" said Bilibin, and the mop of hair on his head moved with +satisfaction. + +Everybody laughed, and Hippolyte louder than anyone. He was +evidently distressed, and breathed painfully, but could not restrain +the wild laughter that convulsed his usually impassive features. + +"Well now, gentlemen," said Bilibin, "Bolkonski is my guest in +this house and in Brunn itself. I want to entertain him as far as I +can, with all the pleasures of life here. If we were in Vienna it +would be easy, but here, in this wretched Moravian hole, it is more +difficult, and I beg you all to help me. Brunn's attractions must be +shown him. You can undertake the theater, I society, and you, +Hippolyte, of course the women." + +"We must let him see Amelie, she's exquisite!" said one of "ours," +kissing his finger tips. + +"In general we must turn this bloodthirsty soldier to more humane +interests," said Bilibin. + +"I shall scarcely be able to avail myself of your hospitality, +gentlemen, it is already time for me to go," replied Prince Andrew +looking at his watch. + +"Where to?" + +"To the Emperor." + +"Oh! Oh! Oh!" Well, au revoir, Bolkonski! Au revoir, Prince! Come +back early to dinner," cried several voices. "We'll take you in hand." + +"When speaking to the Emperor, try as far as you can to praise the +way that provisions are supplied and the routes indicated," said +Bilibin, accompanying him to the hall. + +"I should like to speak well of them, but as far as I the facts, I +can't," replied Bolkonski, smiling. + +"Well, talk as much as you can, anyway. He has a passion for +giving audiences, but he does not like talking himself and can't do +it, as you will see." + +CHAPTER XII + +At the levee Prince Andrew stood among the Austrian officers as he +had been told to, and the Emperor Francis merely looked fixedly into +his face and just nodded to him with to him with his long head. But +after it was over, the adjutant he had seen the previous day +ceremoniously informed Bolkonski that the Emperor desired to give +him an audience. The Emperor Francis received him standing in the +middle of the room. Before the conversation began Prince Andrew was +struck by the fact that the Emperor seemed confused and blushed as +if not knowing what to say. + +"Tell me, when did the battle begin?" he asked hurriedly. + +Prince Andrew replied. Then followed other questions just as simple: +"Was Kutuzov well? When had he left Krems?" and so on. The Emperor +spoke as if his sole aim were to put a given number of questions- +the answers to these questions, as was only too evident, did not +interest him. + +"At what o'clock did the battle begin?" asked the Emperor. + +"I cannot inform Your Majesty at what o'clock the battle began at +the front, but at Durrenstein, where I was, our attack began after +five in the afternoon," replied Bolkonski growing more animated and +expecting that he would have a chance to give a reliable account, +which he had ready in his mind, of all he knew and had seen. But the +Emperor smiled and interrupted him. + +"How many miles?" + +"From where to where, Your Majesty?" + +"From Durrenstein to Krems." + +"Three and a half miles, Your Majesty." + +"The French have abandoned the left bank?" + +"According to the scouts the last of them crossed on rafts during +the night." + +"Is there sufficient forage in Krems?" + +"Forage has not been supplied to the extent..." + +The Emperor interrupted him. + +"At what o'clock was General Schmidt killed?" + +"At seven o'clock, I believe." + +"At seven o'clock? It's very sad, very sad!" + +The Emperor thanked Prince Andrew and bowed. Prince Andrew +withdrew and was immediately surrounded by courtiers on all sides. +Everywhere he saw friendly looks and heard friendly words. Yesterday's +adjutant reproached him for not having stayed at the palace, and +offered him his own house. The Minister of War came up and +congratulated him on the Maria Theresa Order of the third grade, which +the Emperor was conferring on him. The Empress' chamberlain invited +him to see Her Majesty. The archduchess also wished to see him. He did +not know whom to answer, and for a few seconds collected his thoughts. +Then the Russian ambassador took him by the shoulder, led him to the +window, and began to talk to him. + +Contrary to Bilibin's forecast the news he had brought was +joyfully received. A thanksgiving service was arranged, Kutuzov was +awarded the Grand Cross of Maria Theresa, and the whole army +received rewards. Bolkonski was invited everywhere, and had to spend +the whole morning calling on the principal Austrian dignitaries. +Between four and five in the afternoon, having made all his calls, +he was returning to Bilibin's house thinking out a letter to his +father about the battle and his visit to Brunn. At the door he found a +vehicle half full of luggage. Franz, Bilibin's man, was dragging a +portmanteau with some difficulty out of the front door. + +Before returning to Bilibin's Prince Andrew had gone to bookshop +to provide himself with some books for the campaign, and had spent +some time in the shop. + +"What is it?" he asked. + +"Oh, your excellency!" said Franz, with difficulty rolling the +portmanteau into the vehicle, "we are to move on still farther. The +scoundrel is again at our heels!" + +"Eh? What?" asked Prince Andrew. + +Bilibin came out to meet him. His usually calm face showed +excitement. + +"There now! Confess that this is delightful," said he. "This +affair of the Thabor Bridge, at Vienna.... They have crossed without +striking a blow!" + +Prince Andrew could not understand. + +"But where do you come from not to know what every coachman in the +town knows?" + +"I come from the archduchess'. I heard nothing there." + +"And you didn't see that everybody is packing up?" + +"I did not... What is it all about?" inquired Prince Andrew +impatiently. + +"What's it all about? Why, the French have crossed the bridge that +Auersperg was defending, and the bridge was not blown up: so Murat +is now rushing along the road to Brunn and will be here in a day or +two." + +"What? Here? But why did they not blow up the bridge, if it was +mined?" + +"That is what I ask you. No one, not even Bonaparte, knows why." + +Bolkonski shrugged his shoulders. + +"But if the bridge is crossed it means that the army too is lost? It +will be cut off," said he. + +"That's just it," answered Bilibin. "Listen! The French entered +Vienna as I told you. Very well. Next day, which was yesterday, +those gentlemen, messieurs les marechaux,~^ Murat, Lannes,and Belliard, +mount and ride to bridge. (Observe that all three are Gascons.) +'Gentlemen,' says one of them, 'you know the Thabor Bridge is mined +and doubly mined and that there are menacing fortifications at its +head and an army of fifteen thousand men has been ordered to blow up +the bridge and not let us cross? But it will please our sovereign +the Emperor Napoleon if we take this bridge, so let us three go and +take it!' 'Yes, let's!' say the others. And off they go and take the +bridge, cross it, and now with their whole army are on this side of +the Danube, marching on us, you, and your lines of communication." + +^~ The marshalls. + +"Stop jesting," said Prince Andrew sadly and seriously. This news +grieved him and yet he was pleased. + +As soon as he learned that the Russian army was in such a hopeless +situation it occurred to him that it was he who was destined to lead +it out of this position; that here was the Toulon that would lift +him from the ranks of obscure officers and offer him the first step to +fame! Listening to Bilibin he was already imagining how on reaching +the army he would give an opinion at the war council which would be +the only one that could save the army, and how he alone would be +entrusted with the executing of the plan. + +"Stop this jesting," he said + +"I am not jesting," Bilibin went on. "Nothing is truer or sadder. +These gentlemen ride onto the bridge alone and wave white +handkerchiefs; they assure the officer on duty that they, the +marshals, are on their way to negotiate with Prince Auersperg. He lets +them enter the tete-de-pont.~^ They spin him a thousand gasconades, +saying that the war is over, that the Emperor Francis is arranging a +meeting with Bonaparte, that they desire to see Prince Auersperg, +and so on. The officer sends for Auersperg; these gentlemen embrace +the officers, crack jokes, sit on the cannon, and meanwhile a French +battalion gets to the bridge unobserved, flings the bags of incendiary +material into the water, and approaches the tete-de-pont. At length +appears the lieutenant general, our dear Prince Auersperg von +Mautern himself. 'Dearest foe! Flower of the Austrian army, hero of +the Turkish wars Hostilities are ended, we can shake one another's +hand.... The Emperor Napoleon burns with impatience to make Prince +Auersperg's acquaintance.' In a word, those gentlemen, Gascons indeed, +so bewildered him with fine words, and he is so flattered by his +rapidly established intimacy with the French marshals, and so +dazzled by the sight of Murat's mantle and ostrich plumes, qu'il n'y +voit que du feu, et oublie celui qu'il devait faire faire sur +l'ennemi!"~^ In spite of the animation of his speech, Bilibin did +not forget to pause after this mot to give time for its due +appreciation. "The French battalion rushes to the bridgehead, spikes +the guns, and the bridge is taken! But what is best of all," he went +on, his excitement subsiding under the delightful interest of his +own story, "is that the sergeant in charge of the cannon which was +to give the signal to fire the mines and blow up the bridge, this +sergeant, seeing that the French troops were running onto the +bridge, was about to fire, but Lannes stayed his hand. The sergeant, +who was evidently wiser than his general, goes up to Auersperg and +says: 'Prince, you are being deceived, here are the French!' Murat, +seeing that all is lost if the sergeant is allowed to speak, turns +to Auersperg with feigned astonishment (he is a true Gascon) and says: +'I don't recognize the world-famous Austrian discipline, if you +allow a subordinate to address you like that!' It was a stroke of +genius. Prince Auersperg feels his dignity at stake and orders the +sergeant to be arrested. Come, you must own that this affair of the +Thabor Bridge is delightful! It is not exactly stupidity, nor +rascality...." + +^~ Bridgehead. + +^~ That their fire gets into his eyes and he forgets that he ought +to be firing at the enemy. + +"It may be treachery," said Prince Andrew, vividly imagining the +gray overcoats, wounds, the smoke of gunpowder, the sounds of +firing, and the glory that awaited him. + +"Not that either. That puts the court in too bad a light," replied +Bilibin."It's not treachery nor rascality nor stupidity: it is just as +at Ulm... it is..."- he seemed to be trying to find the right +expression. "C'est... c'est du Mack. Nous sommes mackes [It is... it +is a bit of Mack. We are Macked]," he concluded, feeling that he had +produced a good epigram, a fresh one that would be repeated. His +hitherto puckered brow became smooth as a sign of pleasure, and with a +slight smile he began to examine his nails. + +"Where are you off to?" he said suddenly to Prince Andrew who had +risen and was going toward his room. + +"I am going away." + +"Where to?" + +"To the army." + +"But you meant to stay another two days?" + +"But now I am off at once." + +And Prince Andrew after giving directions about his departure went +to his room. + +"Do you know, mon cher," said Bilibin following him, "I have been +thinking about you. Why are you going?" + +And in proof of the conclusiveness of his opinion all the wrinkles +vanished from his face. + +Prince Andrew looked inquiringly at him and gave no reply. + +"Why are you going? I know you think it your duty to gallop back +to the army now that it is in danger. I understand that. Mon cher, +it is heroism!" + +"Not at all," said Prince Andrew. + +"But as you are a philosopher, be a consistent one, look at the +other side of the question and you will see that your duty, on the +contrary, is to take care of yourself. Leave it to those who are no +longer fit for anything else.... You have not been ordered to return +and have not been dismissed from here; therefore, you can stay and +go with us wherever our ill luck takes us. They say we are going to +Olmutz, and Olmutz is a very decent town. You and I will travel +comfortably in my caleche." + +"Do stop joking, Bilibin," cried Bolkonski. + +"I am speaking sincerely as a friend! Consider! Where and why are +you going, when you might remain here? You are faced by one of two +things," and the skin over his left temple puckered, "either you +will not reach your regiment before peace is concluded, or you will +share defeat and disgrace with Kutuzov's whole army." + +And Bilibin unwrinkled his temple, feeling that the dilemma was +insoluble. + +"I cannot argue about it," replied Prince Andrew coldly, but he +thought: "I am going to save the army." + +"My dear fellow, you are a hero!" said Bilibin. + +CHAPTER XIII + +That same night, having taken leave of the Minister of War, +Bolkonski set off to rejoin the army, not knowing where he would +find it and fearing to be captured by the French on the way to Krems. + +In Brunn everybody attached to the court was packing up, and the +heavy baggage was already being dispatched to Olmutz. Near Hetzelsdorf +Prince Andrew struck the high road along which the Russian army was +moving with great haste and in the greatest disorder. The road was +so obstructed with carts that it was impossible to get by in a +carriage. Prince Andrew took a horse and a Cossack from a Cossack +commander, and hungry and weary, making his way past the baggage +wagons, rode in search of the commander in chief and of his own +luggage. Very sinister reports of the position of the army reached him +as he went along, and the appearance of the troops in their disorderly +flight confirmed these rumors. + +"Cette armee russe que l'or de l'Angleterre a transportee des +extremites de l'univers, nous allons lui faire eprouver le meme +sort- (le sort de l'armee d'Ulm)."~^ He remembered these words in +Bonaparte's address to his army at the beginning of the campaign, +and they awoke in him astonishment at the genius of his hero, a +feeling of wounded pride, and a hope of glory. "And should there be +nothing left but to die?" he thought. "Well, if need be, I shall do it +no worse than others." + +^~ "That Russian army which has been brought from the ends of the +earth by English gold, we shall cause to share the same fate- (the +fate of the army at Ulm)." + +He looked with disdain at the endless confused mass of +detachments, carts, guns, artillery, and again baggage wagons and +vehicles of all kinds overtaking one another and blocking the muddy +road, three and sometimes four abreast. From all sides, behind and +before, as far as ear could reach, there were the rattle of wheels, +the creaking of carts and gun carriages, the tramp of horses, the +crack of whips, shouts, the urging of horses, and the swearing of +soldiers, orderlies, and officers. All along the sides of the road +fallen horses were to be seen, some flayed, some not, and +broken-down carts beside which solitary soldiers sat waiting for +something, and again soldiers straggling from their companies, +crowds of whom set off to the neighboring villages, or returned from +them dragging sheep, fowls, hay, and bulging sacks. At each ascent +or descent of the road the crowds were yet denser and the din of +shouting more incessant. Soldiers floundering knee-deep in mud +pushed the guns and wagons themselves. Whips cracked, hoofs slipped, +traces broke, and lungs were strained with shouting. The officers +directing the march rode backward and forward between the carts. Their +voices were but feebly heard amid the uproar and one saw by their +faces that they despaired of the possibility of checking this +disorder. + +"Here is our dear Orthodox Russian army," thought Bolkonski, +recalling Bilibin's words. + +Wishing to find out where the commander in chief was, he rode up +to a convoy. Directly opposite to him came a strange one-horse +vehicle, evidently rigged up by soldiers out of any available +materials and looking like something between a cart, a cabriolet, +and a caleche. A soldier was driving, and a woman enveloped in +shawls sat behind the apron under the leather hood of the vehicle. +Prince Andrew rode up and was just putting his question to a soldier +when his attention was diverted by the desperate shrieks of the +woman in the vehicle. An officer in charge of transport was beating +the soldier who was driving the woman's vehicle for trying to get +ahead of others, and the strokes of his whip fell on the apron of +the equipage. The woman screamed piercingly. Seeing Prince Andrew +she leaned out from behind the apron and, waving her thin arms from +under the woolen shawl, cried: + +"Mr. Aide-de-camp! Mr. Aide-de-camp!... For heaven's sake... Protect +me! What will become of us? I am the wife of the doctor of the Seventh +Chasseurs.... They won't let us pass, we are left behind and have lost +our people..." + +"I'll flatten you into a pancake!" shouted the angry officer to +the soldier. "Turn back with your slut!" + +"Mr. Aide-de-camp! Help me!... What does it all mean?" screamed +the doctor's wife. + +"Kindly let this cart pass. Don't you see it's a woman?" said Prince +Andrew riding up to the officer. + +The officer glanced at him, and without replying turned again to the +soldier. "I'll teach you to push on!... Back!" + +"Let them pass, I tell you!" repeated Prince Andrew, compressing his +lips. + +"And who are you?" cried the officer, turning on him with tipsy +rage, "who are you? Are you in command here? Eh? I am commander +here, not you! Go back or I'll flatten you into a pancake," repeated +he. This expression evidently pleased him. + +"That was a nice snub for the little aide-de-camp," came a voice +from behind. + +Prince Andrew saw that the officer was in that state of senseless, +tipsy rage when a man does not know what he is saying. He saw that his +championship of the doctor's wife in her queer trap might expose him +to what he dreaded more than anything in the world- to ridicule; but +his instinct urged him on. Before the officer finished his sentence +Prince Andrew, his face distorted with fury, rode up to him and raised +his riding whip. + +"Kind...ly let- them- pass!" + +The officer flourished his arm and hastily rode away. + +"It's all the fault of these fellows on the staff that there's +this disorder," he muttered. "Do as you like." + +Prince Andrew without lifting his eyes rode hastily away from the +doctor's wife, who was calling him her deliverer, and recalling with a +sense of disgust the minutest details of this humiliating scene he +galloped on to the village where he was told that the commander in +chief was. + +On reaching the village he dismounted and went to the nearest house, +intending to rest if but for a moment, eat something, and try to +sort out the stinging and tormenting thoughts that confused his +mind. "This is a mob of scoundrels and not an army," he was thinking +as he went up to the window of the first house, when a familiar +voice called him by name. + +He turned round. Nesvitski's handsome face looked out of the +little window. Nesvitski, moving his moist lips as he chewed +something, and flourishing his arm, called him to enter. + +"Bolkonski! Bolkonski!... Don't you hear? Eh? Come quick..." he +shouted. + +Entering the house, Prince Andrew saw Nesvitski and another adjutant +having something to eat. They hastily turned round to him asking if he +had any news. On their familiar faces he read agitation and alarm. +This was particularly noticeable on Nesvitski's usually laughing +countenance. + +"Where is the commander in chief?" asked Bolkonski. + +"Here, in that house," answered the adjutant. + +"Well, is it true that it's peace and capitulation?" asked +Nesvitski. + +"I was going to ask you. I know nothing except that it was all I +could do to get here." + +"And we, my dear boy! It's terrible! I was wrong to laugh at Mack, +we're getting it still worse," said Nesvitski. "But sit down and +have something to eat." + +"You won't be able to find either your baggage or anything else now, +Prince. And God only knows where your man Peter is," said the other +adjutant. + +"Where are headquarters?" + +"We are to spend the night in Znaim." + +"Well, I have got all I need into packs for two horses," said +Nesvitski. "They've made up splendid packs for me- fit to cross the +Bohemian mountains with. It's a bad lookout, old fellow! But what's +the matter with you? You must be ill to shiver like that," he added, +noticing that Prince Andrew winced as at an electric shock. + +"It's nothing," replied Prince Andrew. + +He had just remembered his recent encounter with the doctor's wife +and the convoy officer. + +"What is the commander in chief doing here?" he asked. + +"I can't make out at all," said Nesvitski. + +"Well, all I can make out is that everything is abominable, +abominable, quite abominable!" said Prince Andrew, and he went off +to the house where the commander in chief was. + +Passing by Kutuzov's carriage and the exhausted saddle horses of his +suite, with their Cossacks who were talking loudly together, Prince +Andrew entered the passage. Kutuzov himself, he was told, was in the +house with Prince Bagration and Weyrother. Weyrother was the +Austrian general who had succeeded Schmidt. In the passage little +Kozlovski was squatting on his heels in front of a clerk. The clerk, +with cuffs turned up, was hastily writing at a tub turned bottom +upwards. Kozlovski's face looked worn- he too had evidently not +slept all night. He glanced at Prince Andrew and did not even nod to +him. + +"Second line... have you written it?" he continued dictating to +the clerk. "The Kiev Grenadiers, Podolian..." + +"One can't write so fast, your honor," said the clerk, glancing +angrily and disrespectfully at Kozlovski. + +Through the door came the sounds of Kutuzov's voice, excited and +dissatisfied, interrupted by another, an unfamiliar voice. From the +sound of these voices, the inattentive way Kozlovski looked at him, +the disrespectful manner of the exhausted clerk, the fact that the +clerk and Kozlovski were squatting on the floor by a tub so near to +the commander in chief, and from the noisy laughter of the Cossacks +holding the horses near the window, Prince Andrew felt that +something important and disastrous was about to happen. + +He turned to Kozlovski with urgent questions. + +"Immediately, Prince," said Kozlovski. "Dispositions for Bagration." + +"What about capitulation?" + +"Nothing of the sort. Orders are issued for a battle." + +Prince Andrew moved toward the door from whence voices were heard. +Just as he was going to open it the sounds ceased, the door opened, +and Kutuzov with his eagle nose and puffy face appeared in the +doorway. Prince Andrew stood right in front of Kutuzov but the +expression of the commander in chief's one sound eye showed him to +be so preoccupied with thoughts and anxieties as to be oblivious of +his presence. He looked straight at his adjutant's face without +recognizing him. + +"Well, have you finished?" said he to Kozlovski. + +"One moment, your excellency." + +Bagration, a gaunt middle-aged man of medium height with a firm, +impassive face of Oriental type, came out after the commander in +chief. + +"I have the honor to present myself," repeated Prince Andrew +rather loudly, handing Kutuzov an envelope. + +Ah, from Vienna? Very good. Later, later!" + +Kutuzov went out into the porch with Bagration. + +"Well, good-by, Prince," said he to Bagration. "My blessing, and may +Christ be with you in your great endeavor!" + +His face suddenly softened and tears came into his eyes. With his +left hand he drew Bagration toward him, and with his right, on which +he wore a ring, he made the sign of the cross over him with a +gesture evidently habitual, offering his puffy cheek, but Bagration +kissed him on the neck instead. + +"Christ be with you!" Kutuzov repeated and went toward his carriage. +"Get in with me," said he to Bolkonski. + +"Your excellency, I should like to be of use here. Allow me to +remain with Prince Bagration's detachment." + +"Get in," said Kutuzov, and noticing that Bolkonski still delayed, +he added: "I need good officers myself, need them myself!" + +They got into the carriage and drove for a few minutes in silence. + +"There is still much, much before us," he said, as if with an old +man's penetration he understood all that was passing in Bolkonski's +mind. "If a tenth part of his detachment returns I shall thank God," +he added as if speaking to himself. + +Prince Andrew glanced at Kutuzov's face only a foot distant from him +and involuntarily noticed the carefully washed seams of the scar +near his temple, where an Ismail bullet had pierced his skull, and the +empty eye socket. "Yes, he has a right to speak so calmly of those +men's death," thought Bolkonski. + +"That is why I beg to be sent to that detachment," he said. + +Kutuzov did not reply. He seemed to have forgotten what he had +been saying, and sat plunged in thought. Five minutes later, gently +swaying on the soft springs of the carriage, he turned to Prince +Andrew. There was not a trace of agitation on his face. With +delicate irony he questioned Prince Andrew about the details of his +interview with the Emperor, about the remarks he had heard at court +concerning the Krems affair, and about some ladies they both knew. + +CHAPTER XIV + +On November 1 Kutuzov had received, through a spy, news that the +army he commanded was in an almost hopeless position. The spy reported +that the French, after crossing the bridge at Vienna, were advancing +in immense force upon Kutuzov's line of communication with the +troops that were arriving from Russia. If Kutuzov decided to remain at +Krems, Napoleon's army of one hundred and fifty thousand men would cut +him off completely and surround his exhausted army of forty +thousand, and he would find himself in the position of Mack at Ulm. If +Kutuzov decided to abandon the road connecting him with the troops +arriving from Russia, he would have to march with no road into unknown +parts of the Bohemian mountains, defending himself against superior +forces of the enemy and abandoning all hope of a junction with +Buxhowden. If Kutuzov decided to retreat along the road from Krems +to Olmutz, to unite with the troops arriving from Russia, he risked +being forestalled on that road by the French who had crossed the +Vienna bridge, and encumbered by his baggage and transport, having +to accept battle on the march against an enemy three times as +strong, who would hem him in from two sides. + +Kutuzov chose this latter course. + +The French, the spy reported, having crossed the Vienna bridge, were +advancing by forced marches toward Znaim, which lay sixty-six miles +off on the line of Kutuzov's retreat. If he reached Znaim before the +French, there would be great hope of saving the army; to let the +French forestall him at Znaim meant the exposure of his whole army +to a disgrace such as that of Ulm, or to utter destruction. But to +forestall the French with his whole army was impossible. The road +for the French from Vienna to Znaim was shorter and better than the +road for the Russians from Krems to Znaim. + +The night he received the news, Kutuzov sent Bagration's vanguard, +four thousand strong, to the right across the hills from the +Krems-Znaim to the Vienna-Znaim road. Bagration was to make this march +without resting, and to halt facing Vienna with Znaim to his rear, and +if he succeeded in forestalling the French he was to delay them as +long as possible. Kutuzov himself with all his transport took the road +to Znaim. + +Marching thirty miles that stormy night across roadless hills, +with his hungry, ill-shod soldiers, and losing a third of his men as +stragglers by the way, Bagration came out on the Vienna-Znaim road +at Hollabrunn a few hours ahead of the French who were approaching +Hollabrunn from Vienna. Kutuzov with his transport had still to +march for some days before he could reach Znaim. Hence Bagration +with his four thousand hungry, exhausted men would have to detain +for days the whole enemy army that came upon him at Hollabrunn, +which was clearly impossible. But a freak of fate made the +impossible possible. The success of the trick that had placed the +Vienna bridge in the hands of the French without a fight led Murat +to try to deceive Kutuzov in a similar way. Meeting Bagration's weak +detachment on the Znaim road he supposed it to be Kutuzov's whole +army. To be able to crush it absolutely he awaited the arrival of +the rest of the troops who were on their way from Vienna, and with +this object offered a three days' truce on condition that both +armies should remain in position without moving. Murat declared that +negotiations for peace were already proceeding, and that he +therefore offered this truce to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. Count +Nostitz, the Austrian general occupying the advanced posts, believed +Murat's emissary and retired, leaving Bagration's division exposed. +Another emissary rode to the Russian line to announce the peace +negotiations and to offer the Russian army the three days' truce. +Bagration replied that he was not authorized either to accept or +refuse a truce and sent his adjutant to Kutuzov to report the offer he +had received. + +A truce was Kutuzov's sole chance of gaining time, giving +Bagration's exhausted troops some rest, and letting the transport +and heavy convoys (whose movements were concealed from the French) +advance if but one stage nearer Znaim. The offer of a truce gave the +only, and a quite unexpected, chance of saving the army. On +receiving the news he immediately dispatched Adjutant General +Wintzingerode, who was in attendance on him, to the enemy camp. +Wintzingerode was not merely to agree to the truce but also to offer +terms of capitulation, and meanwhile Kutuzov sent his adjutants back +to hasten to the utmost the movements of the baggage trains of the +entire army along the Krems-Znaim road. Bagration's exhausted and +hungry detachment, which alone covered this movement of the +transport and of the whole army, had to remain stationary in face of +an enemy eight times as strong as itself. + +Kutuzov's expectations that the proposals of capitulation (which +were in no way binding) might give time for part of the transport to +pass, and also that Murat's mistake would very soon be discovered, +proved correct. As soon as Bonaparte (who was at Schonbrunn, sixteen +miles from Hollabrunn) received Murat's dispatch with the proposal +of a truce and a capitulation, he detected a ruse and wrote the +following letter to Murat: + +Schonbrunn, 25th Brumaire, 1805, + +at eight o'clock in the morning + +To PRINCE MURAT, + +I cannot find words to express to you my displeasure. You command +only my advance guard, and have no right to arrange an armistice +without my order. You are causing me to lose the fruits of a campaign. +Break the armistice immediately and march on the enemy. Inform him +that the general who signed that capitulation had no right to do so, +and that no one but the Emperor of Russia has that right. + +If, however, the Emperor of Russia ratifies that convention, I +will ratify it; but it is only a trick. March on, destroy the +Russian army.... You are in a position to seize its baggage and +artillery. + +The Russian Emperor's aide-de-camp is an impostor. Officers are +nothing when they have no powers; this one had none.... The +Austrians let themselves be tricked at the crossing of the Vienna +bridge, you are letting yourself be tricked by an aide-de-camp of +the Emperor. + +NAPOLEON + +Bonaparte's adjutant rode full gallop with this menacing letter to +Murat. Bonaparte himself, not trusting to his generals, moved with all +the Guards to the field of battle, afraid of letting a ready victim +escape, and Bagration's four thousand men merrily lighted campfires, +dried and warmed themselves, cooked their porridge for the first +time for three days, and not one of them knew or imagined what was +in store for him. + +CHAPTER XV + +Between three and four o'clock in the afternoon Prince Andrew, who +had persisted in his request to Kutuzov, arrived at Grunth and +reported himself to Bagration. Bonaparte's adjutant had not yet +reached Murat's detachment and the battle had not yet begun. In +Bagration's detachment no one knew anything of the general position of +affairs. They talked of peace but did not believe in its +possibility; others talked of a battle but also disbelieved in the +nearness of an engagement. Bagration, knowing Bolkonski to be a +favorite and trusted adjutant, received him with distinction and +special marks of favor, explaining to him that there would probably be +an engagement that day or the next, and giving him full liberty to +remain with him during the battle or to join the rearguard and have an +eye on the order of retreat, "which is also very important." + +"However, there will hardly be an engagement today," said +Bagration as if to reassure Prince Andrew. + +"If he is one of the ordinary little staff dandies sent to earn a +medal he can get his reward just as well in the rearguard, but if he +wishes to stay with me, let him... he'll be of use here if he's a +brave officer," thought Bagration. Prince Andrew, without replying, +asked the prince's permission to ride round the position to see the +disposition of the forces, so as to know his bearings should he be +sent to execute an order. The officer on duty, a handsome, elegantly +dressed man with a diamond ring on his forefinger, who was fond of +speaking French though he spoke it badly, offered to conduct Prince +Andrew. + +On all sides they saw rain-soaked officers with dejected faces who +seemed to be seeking something, and soldiers dragging doors, +benches, and fencing from the village. + +"There now, Prince! We can't stop those fellows," said the staff +officer pointing to the soldiers. "The officers don't keep them in +hand. And there," he pointed to a sutler's tent, "they crowd in and +sit. This morning I turned them all out and now look, it's full again. +I must go there, Prince, and scare them a bit. It won't take a +moment." + +"Yes, let's go in and I will get myself a roll and some cheese," +said Prince Andrew who had not yet had time to eat anything. + +"Why didn't you mention it, Prince? I would have offered you +something." + +They dismounted and entered the tent. Several officers, with flushed +and weary faces, were sitting at the table eating and drinking. + +"Now what does this mean, gentlemen?" said the staff officer, in the +reproachful tone of a man who has repeated the same thing more than +once. "You know it won't do to leave your posts like this. The +prince gave orders that no one should leave his post. Now you, +Captain," and he turned to a thin, dirty little artillery officer +who without his boots (he had given them to the canteen keeper to +dry), in only his stockings, rose when they entered, smiling not +altogether comfortably. + +"Well, aren't you ashamed of yourself, Captain Tushin?" he +continued. "One would think that as an artillery officer you would set +a good example, yet here you are without your boots! The alarm will be +sounded and you'll be in a pretty position without your boots!" (The +staff officer smiled.) "Kindly return to your posts, gentlemen, all of +you, all!" he added in a tone of command. + +Prince Andrew smiled involuntarily as he looked at the artillery +officer Tushin, who silent and smiling, shifting from one stockinged +foot to the other, glanced inquiringly with his large, intelligent, +kindly eyes from Prince Andrew to the staff officer. + +"The soldiers say it feels easier without boots," said Captain +Tushin smiling shyly in his uncomfortable position, evidently +wishing to adopt a jocular tone. But before he had finished he felt +that his jest was unacceptable and had not come off. He grew confused. + +"Kindly return to your posts," said the staff officer trying to +preserve his gravity. + +Prince Andrew glanced again at the artillery officer's small figure. +There was something peculiar about it, quite unsoldierly, rather +comic, but extremely attractive. + +The staff officer and Prince Andrew mounted their horses and rode +on. + +Having ridden beyond the village, continually meeting and overtaking +soldiers and officers of various regiments, they saw on their left +some entrenchments being thrown up, the freshly dug clay of which +showed up red. Several battalions of soldiers, in their shirt +sleeves despite the cold wind, swarmed in these earthworks like a host +of white ants; spadefuls of red clay were continually being thrown +up from behind the bank by unseen hands. Prince Andrew and the officer +rode up, looked at the entrenchment, and went on again. Just behind it +they came upon some dozens of soldiers, continually replaced by +others, who ran from the entrenchment. They had to hold their noses +and put their horses to a trot to escape from the poisoned +atmosphere of these latrines. + +"Voila l'agrement des camps, monsieur le Prince,"~^ said the staff +officer. + +^~ "This is a pleasure one gets in camp, Prince." + +They rode up the opposite hill. From there the French could +already be seen. Prince Andrew stopped and began examining the +position. + +"That's our battery," said the staff officer indicating the +highest point. "It's in charge of the queer fellow we saw without +his boots. You can see everything from there; let's go there, Prince." + +"Thank you very much, I will go on alone," said Prince Andrew, +wishing to rid himself of this staff officer's company, "please +don't trouble yourself further." + +The staff officer remained behind and Prince Andrew rode on alone. + +The farther forward and nearer the enemy he went, the more orderly +and cheerful were the troops. The greatest disorder and depression had +been in the baggage train he had passed that morning on the Znaim road +seven miles away from the French. At Grunth also some apprehension and +alarm could be felt, but the nearer Prince Andrew came to the French +lines the more confident was the appearance of our troops. The +soldiers in their greatcoats were ranged in lines, the sergeants major +and company officers were counting the men, poking the last man in +each section in the ribs and telling him to hold his hand up. Soldiers +scattered over the whole place were dragging logs and brushwood and +were building shelters with merry chatter and laughter; around the +fires sat others, dressed and undressed, drying their shirts and leg +bands or mending boots or overcoats and crowding round the boilers and +porridge cookers. In one company dinner was ready, and the soldiers +were gazing eagerly at the steaming boiler, waiting till the sample, +which a quartermaster sergeant was carrying in a wooden bowl to an +officer who sat on a log before his shelter, had been tasted. + +Another company, a lucky one for not all the companies had vodka, +crowded round a pock-marked, broad-shouldered sergeant major who, +tilting a keg, filled one after another the canteen lids held out to +him. The soldiers lifted the canteen lids to their lips with +reverential faces, emptied them, rolling the vodka in their mouths, +and walked away from the sergeant major with brightened expressions, +licking their lips and wiping them on the sleeves of their greatcoats. +All their faces were as serene as if all this were happening at home +awaiting peaceful encampment, and not within sight of the enemy before +an action in which at least half of them would be left on the field. +After passing a chasseur regiment and in the lines of the Kiev +grenadiers- fine fellows busy with similar peaceful affairs- near +the shelter of the regimental commander, higher than and different +from the others, Prince Andrew came out in front of a platoon of +grenadiers before whom lay a naked man. Two soldiers held him while +two others were flourishing their switches and striking him +regularly on his bare back. The man shrieked unnaturally. A stout +major was pacing up and down the line, and regardless of the screams +kept repeating: + +"It's a shame for a soldier to steal; a soldier must be honest, +honorable, and brave, but if he robs his fellows there is no honor +in him, he's a scoundrel. Go on! Go on!" + +So the swishing sound of the strokes, and the desperate but +unnatural screams, continued. + +"Go on, go on!" said the major. + +A young officer with a bewildered and pained expression on his +face stepped away from the man and looked round inquiringly at the +adjutant as he rode by. + +Prince Andrew, having reached the front line, rode along it. Our +front line and that of the enemy were far apart on the right and +left flanks, but in the center where the men with a flag of truce +had passed that morning, the lines were so near together that the +men could see one another's faces and speak to one another. Besides +the soldiers who formed the picket line on either side, there were +many curious onlookers who, jesting and laughing, stared at their +strange foreign enemies. + +Since early morning- despite an injunction not to approach the +picket line- the officers had been unable to keep sight-seers away. +The soldiers forming the picket line, like showmen exhibiting a +curiosity, no longer looked at the French but paid attention to the +sight-seers and grew weary waiting to be relieved. Prince Andrew +halted to have a look at the French. + +"Look! Look there!" one soldier was saying to another, pointing to a +Russian musketeer who had gone up to the picket line with an officer +and was rapidly and excitedly talking to a French grenadier. "Hark +to him jabbering! Fine, isn't it? It's all the Frenchy can do to +keep up with him. There now, Sidorov!" + +"Wait a bit and listen. It's fine!" answered Sidorov, who was +considered an adept at French. + +The soldier to whom the laughers referred was Dolokhov. Prince +Andrew recognized him and stopped to listen to what he was saying. +Dolokhov had come from the left flank where their regiment was +stationed, with his captain. + +"Now then, go on, go on!" incited the officer, bending forward and +trying not to lose a word of the speech which was incomprehensible +to him. "More, please: more! What's he saying?" + +Dolokhov did not answer the captain; he had been drawn into a hot +dispute with the French grenadier. They were naturally talking about +the campaign. The Frenchman, confusing the Austrians with the +Russians, was trying to prove that the Russians had surrendered and +had fled all the way from Ulm, while Dolokhov maintained that the +Russians had not surrendered but had beaten the French. + +"We have orders to drive you off here, and we shall drive you +off," said Dolokhov. + +"Only take care you and your Cossacks are not all captured!" said +the French grenadier. + +The French onlookers and listeners laughed. + +"We'll make you dance as we did under Suvorov...,"~^ said Dolokhov. + +^~ "On vous fera danser." + +"Qu' est-ce qu'il chante?"~^ asked a Frenchman. + +^~ "What's he singing about?" + +"It's ancient history," said another, guessing that it referred to a +former war. "The Emperor will teach your Suvara as he has taught the +others..." + +"Bonaparte..." began Dolokhov, but the Frenchman interrupted him. + +"Not Bonaparte. He is the Emperor! Sacre nom...!" cried he angrily. + +"The devil skin your Emperor." + +And Dolokhov swore at him in coarse soldier's Russian and +shouldering his musket walked away. + +"Let us go, Ivan Lukich," he said to the captain. + +"Ah, that's the way to talk French," said the picket soldiers. "Now, +Sidorov, you have a try!" + +Sidorov, turning to the French, winked, and began to jabber +meaningless sounds very fast: "Kari, mala, tafa, safi, muter, +Kaska," he said, trying to give an expressive intonation to his voice. + +"Ho! ho! ho! Ha! ha! ha! ha! Ouh! ouh!" came peals of such healthy +and good-humored laughter from the soldiers that it infected the +French involuntarily, so much so that the only thing left to do seemed +to be to unload the muskets, muskets, explode the ammunition, and +all return home as quickly as possible. + +But the guns remained loaded, the loopholes in blockhouses and +entrenchments looked out just as menacingly, and the unlimbered cannon +confronted one another as before. + +CHAPTER XVI + +Having ridden round the whole line from right flank to left, +Prince Andrew made his way up to the battery from which the staff +officer had told him the whole field could be seen. Here he +dismounted, and stopped beside the farthest of the four unlimbered +cannon. Before the guns an artillery sentry was pacing up and down; he +stood at attention when the officer arrived, but at a sign resumed his +measured, monotonous pacing. Behind the guns were their limbers and +still farther back picket ropes and artillerymen's bonfires. To the +left, not far from the farthest cannon, was a small, newly constructed +wattle shed from which came the sound of officers' voices in eager +conversation. + +It was true that a view over nearly the whole Russian position and +the greater part of the enemy's opened out from this battery. Just +facing it, on the crest of the opposite hill, the village of Schon +Grabern could be seen, and in three places to left and right the +French troops amid the smoke of their campfires, the greater part of +whom were evidently in the village itself and behind the hill. To +the left from that village, amid the smoke, was something resembling a +battery, but it was impossible to see it clearly with the naked eye. +Our right flank was posted on a rather steep incline which dominated +the French position. Our infantry were stationed there, and at the +farthest point the dragoons. In the center, where Tushin's battery +stood and from which Prince Andrew was surveying the position, was the +easiest and most direct descent and ascent to the brook separating +us from Schon Grabern. On the left our troops were close to a copse, +in which smoked the bonfires of our infantry who were felling wood. +The French line was wider than ours, and it was plain that they +could easily outflank us on both sides. Behind our position was a +steep and deep dip, making it difficult for artillery and cavalry to +retire. Prince Andrew took out his notebook and, leaning on the +cannon, sketched a plan of the position. He made some notes on two +points, intending to mention them to Bagration. His idea was, first, +to concentrate all the artillery in the center, and secondly, to +withdraw the cavalry to the other side of the dip. Prince Andrew, +being always near the commander in chief, closely following the mass +movements and general orders, and constantly studying historical +accounts of battles, involuntarily pictured to himself the course of +events in the forthcoming action in broad outline. He imagined only +important possibilities: "If the enemy attacks the right flank," he +said to himself, "the Kiev grenadiers and the Podolsk chasseurs must +hold their position till reserves from the center come up. In that +case the dragoons could successfully make a flank counterattack. If +they attack our center we, having the center battery on this high +ground, shall withdraw the left flank under its cover, and retreat +to the dip by echelons." So he reasoned.... All the time he had been +beside the gun, he had heard the voices of the officers distinctly, +but as often happens had not understood a word of what they were +saying. Suddenly, however, he was struck by a voice coming from the +shed, and its tone was so sincere that he could not but listen. + +"No, friend," said a pleasant and, as it seemed to Prince Andrew, +a familiar voice, "what I say is that if it were possible to know what +is beyond death, none of us would be afraid of it. That's so, friend." + +Another, a younger voice, interrupted him: "Afraid or not, you can't +escape it anyhow." + +"All the same, one is afraid! Oh, you clever people," said a third +manly voice interrupting them both. "Of course you artillery men are +very wise, because you can take everything along with you- vodka and +snacks." + +And the owner of the manly voice, evidently an infantry officer, +laughed. + +"Yes, one is afraid," continued the first speaker, he of the +familiar voice. "One is afraid of the unknown, that's what it is. +Whatever we may say about the soul going to the sky... we know there +is no sky but only an atmosphere." + +The manly voice again interrupted the artillery officer. + +"Well, stand us some of your herb vodka, Tushin," it said. + +"Why," thought Prince Andrew, "that's the captain who stood up in +the sutler's hut without his boots." He recognized the agreeable, +philosophizing voice with pleasure. + +"Some herb vodka? Certainly!" said Tushin. "But still, to conceive a +future life..." + +He did not finish. Just then there was a whistle in the air; +nearer and nearer, faster and louder, louder and faster, a cannon +ball, as if it had not finished saying what was necessary, thudded +into the ground near the shed with super human force, throwing up a +mass of earth. The ground seemed to groan at the terrible impact. + +And immediately Tushin, with a short pipe in the corner of his mouth +and his kind, intelligent face rather pale, rushed out of the shed +followed by the owner of the manly voice, a dashing infantry officer +who hurried off to his company, buttoning up his coat as he ran. + +CHAPTER XVII + +Mounting his horse again Prince Andrew lingered with the battery, +looking at the puff from the gun that had sent the ball. His eyes +ran rapidly over the wide space, but he only saw that the hitherto +motionless masses of the French now swayed and that there really was a +battery to their left. The smoke above it had not yet dispersed. Two +mounted Frenchmen, probably adjutants, were galloping up the hill. A +small but distinctly visible enemy column was moving down the hill, +probably to strengthen the front line. The smoke of the first shot had +not yet dispersed before another puff appeared, followed by a +report. The battle had begun! Prince Andrew turned his horse and +galloped back to Grunth to find Prince Bagration. He heard the +cannonade behind him growing louder and more frequent. Evidently our +guns had begun to reply. From the bottom of the slope, where the +parleys had taken place, came the report of musketry. + +Lemarrois had just arrived at a gallop with Bonaparte's stern +letter, and Murat, humiliated and anxious to expiate his fault, had at +once moved his forces to attack the center and outflank both the +Russian wings, hoping before evening and before the arrival of the +Emperor to crush the contemptible detachment that stood before him. + +"It has begun. Here it is!" thought Prince Andrew, feeling the blood +rush to his heart. "But where and how will my Toulon present itself?" + +Passing between the companies that had been eating porridge and +drinking vodka a quarter of an hour before, he saw everywhere the same +rapid movement of soldiers forming ranks and getting their muskets +ready, and on all their faces he recognized the same eagerness that +filled his heart. "It has begun! Here it is, dreadful but +enjoyable!" was what the face of each soldier and each officer +seemed to say. + +Before he had reached the embankments that were being thrown up, +he saw, in the light of the dull autumn evening, mounted men coming +toward him. The foremost, wearing a Cossack cloak and lambskin cap and +riding a white horse, was Prince Bagration. Prince Andrew stopped, +waiting for him to come up; Prince Bagration reined in his horse and +recognizing Prince Andrew nodded to him. He still looked ahead while +Prince Andrew told him what he had seen. + +The feeling, "It has begun! Here it is!" was seen even on Prince +Bagration's hard brown face with its half-closed, dull, sleepy eyes. +Prince Andrew gazed with anxious curiosity at that impassive face +and wished he could tell what, if anything, this man was thinking +and feeling at that moment. "Is there anything at all behind that +impassive face?" Prince Andrew asked himself as he looked. Prince +Bagration bent his head in sign of agreement with what Prince Andrew +told him, and said, "Very good!" in a tone that seemed to imply that +everything that took place and was reported to him was exactly what he +had foreseen. Prince Andrew, out of breath with his rapid ride, +spoke quickly. Prince Bagration, uttering his words with an Oriental +accent, spoke particularly slowly, as if to impress the fact that +there was no need to hurry. However, he put his horse to a trot in the +direction of Tushin's battery. Prince Andrew followed with the +suite. Behind Prince Bagration rode an officer of the suite, the +prince's personal adjutant, Zherkov, an orderly officer, the staff +officer on duty, riding a fine bobtailed horse, and a civilian- an +accountant who had asked permission to be present at the battle out of +curiosity. The accountant, a stout, full-faced man, looked around +him with a naive smile of satisfaction and presented a strange +appearance among the hussars, Cossacks, and adjutants, in his camlet +coat, as he jolted on his horse with a convoy officer's saddle. + +"He wants to see a battle," said Zherkov to Bolkonski, pointing to +the accountant, "but he feels a pain in the pit of his stomach +already." + +"Oh, leave off!" said the accountant with a beaming but rather +cunning smile, as if flattered at being made the subject of +Zherkov's joke, and purposely trying to appear stupider than he really +was. + +"It is very strange, mon Monsieur Prince," said the staff officer. +(He remembered that in French there is some peculiar way of addressing +a prince, but could not get it quite right.) + +By this time they were all approaching Tushin's battery, and a +ball struck the ground in front of them. + +"What's that that has fallen?" asked the accountant with a naive +smile. + +"A French pancake," answered Zherkov. + +"So that's what they hit with?" asked the accountant. "How awful!" + +He seemed to swell with satisfaction. He had hardly finished +speaking when they again heard an unexpectedly violent whistling which +suddenly ended with a thud into something soft... f-f-flop! and a +Cossack, riding a little to their right and behind the accountant, +crashed to earth with his horse. Zherkov and the staff officer bent +over their saddles and turned their horses away. The accountant +stopped, facing the Cossack, and examined him with attentive +curiosity. The Cossack was dead, but the horse still struggled. + +Prince Bagration screwed up his eyes, looked round, and, seeing +the cause of the confusion, turned away with indifference, as if to +say, "Is it worth while noticing trifles?" He reined in his horse with +the case of a skillful rider and, slightly bending over, disengaged +his saber which had caught in his cloak. It was an old-fashioned saber +of a kind no longer in general use. Prince Andrew remembered the story +of Suvorov giving his saber to Bagration in Italy, and the +recollection was particularly pleasant at that moment. They had +reached the battery at which Prince Andrew had been when he examined +the battlefield. + +"Whose company?" asked Prince Bagration of an artilleryman +standing by the ammunition wagon. + +He asked, "Whose company?" but he really meant, "Are you +frightened here?" and the artilleryman understood him. + +"Captain Tushin's, your excellency!" shouted the red-haired, +freckled gunner in a merry voice, standing to attention. + +"Yes, yes," muttered Bagration as if considering something, and he +rode past the limbers to the farthest cannon. + +As he approached, a ringing shot issued from it deafening him and +his suite, and in the smoke that suddenly surrounded the gun they +could see the gunners who had seized it straining to roll it quickly +back to its former position. A huge, broad-shouldered gunner, Number +One, holding a mop, his legs far apart, sprang to the wheel; while +Number Two with a trembling hand placed a charge in the cannon's +mouth. The short, round-shouldered Captain Tushin, stumbling over +the tail of the gun carriage, moved forward and, not noticing the +general, looked out shading his eyes with his small hand. + +"Lift it two lines more and it will be just right," cried he in a +feeble voice to which he tried to impart a dashing note, ill suited to +his weak figure. "Number Two!" he squeaked. "Fire, Medvedev!" + +Bagration called to him, and Tushin, raising three fingers to his +cap with a bashful and awkward gesture not at all like a military +salute but like a priest's benediction, approached the general. Though +Tushin's guns had been intended to cannonade the valley, he was firing +incendiary balls at the village of Schon Grabern visible just +opposite, in front of which large masses of French were advancing. + +No one had given Tushin orders where and at what to fire, but +after consulting his sergeant major, Zakharchenko, for whom he had +great respect, he had decided that it would be a good thing to set +fire to the village. "Very good!" said Bagration in reply to the +officer's report, and began deliberately to examine the whole +battlefield extended before him. The French had advanced nearest on +our right. Below the height on which the Kiev regiment was +stationed, in the hollow where the rivulet flowed, the soul-stirring +rolling and crackling of musketry was heard, and much farther to the +right beyond the dragoons, the officer of the suite pointed out to +Bagration a French column that was outflanking us. To the left the +horizon bounded by the adjacent wood. Prince Bagration ordered two +battalions from the center to be sent to reinforce the right flank. +The officer of the suite ventured to remark to the prince that if +these battalions went away, the guns would remain without support. +Prince Bagration turned to the officer and with his dull eyes looked +at him in silence. It seemed to Prince Andrew that the officer's +remark was just and that really no answer could be made to it. But +at that moment an adjutant galloped up with a message from the +commander of the regiment in the hollow and news that immense masses +of the French were coming down upon them and that his regiment was +in disorder and was retreating upon the Kiev grenadiers. Prince +Bagration bowed his head in sign of assent and approval. He rode off +at a walk to the right and sent an adjutant to the dragoons with +orders to attack the French. But this adjutant returned half an hour +later with the news that the commander of the dragoons had already +retreated beyond the dip in the ground, as a heavy fire had been +opened on him and he was losing men uselessly, and so had hastened +to throw some sharpshooters into the wood. + +"Very good!" said Bagration. + +As he was leaving the battery, firing was heard on the left also, +and as it was too far to the left flank for him to have time to go +there himself, Prince Bagration sent Zherkov to tell the general in +command (the one who had paraded his regiment before Kutuzov at +Braunau) that he must retreat as quickly as possible behind the hollow +in the rear, as the right flank would probably not be able to +withstand the enemy's attack very long. About Tushin and the battalion +that had been in support of his battery all was forgotten. Prince +Andrew listened attentively to Bagration's colloquies with the +commanding officers and the orders he gave them and, to his +surprise, found that no orders were really given, but that Prince +Bagration tried to make it appear that everything done by necessity, +by accident, or by the will of subordinate commanders was done, if not +by his direct command, at least in accord with his intentions. +Prince Andrew noticed, however, that though what happened was due to +chance and was independent of the commander's will, owing to the +tact Bagration showed, his presence was very valuable. Officers who +approached him with disturbed countenances became calm; soldiers and +officers greeted him gaily, grew more cheerful in his presence, and +were evidently anxious to display their courage before him. + +CHAPTER XVIII + +Prince Bagration, having reached the highest point of our right +flank, began riding downhill to where the roll of musketry was heard +but where on account of the smoke nothing could be seen. The nearer +they got to the hollow the less they could see but the more they +felt the nearness of the actual battlefield. They began to meet +wounded men. One with a bleeding head and no cap was being dragged +along by two soldiers who supported him under the arms. There was a +gurgle in his throat and he was spitting blood. A bullet had evidently +hit him in the throat or mouth. Another was walking sturdily by +himself but without his musket, groaning aloud and swinging his arm +which had just been hurt, while blood from it was streaming over his +greatcoat as from a bottle. He had that moment been wounded and his +face showed fear rather than suffering. Crossing a road they descended +a steep incline and saw several men lying on the ground; they also met +a crowd of soldiers some of whom were unwounded. The soldiers were +ascending the hill breathing heavily, and despite the general's +presence were talking loudly and gesticulating. In front of them +rows of gray cloaks were already visible through the smoke, and an +officer catching sight of Bagration rushed shouting after the crowd of +retreating soldiers, ordering them back. Bagration rode up to the +ranks along which shots crackled now here and now there, drowning +the sound of voices and the shouts of command. The whole air reeked +with smoke. The excited faces of the soldiers were blackened with +it. Some were using their ramrods, others putting powder on the +touchpans or taking charges from their pouches, while others were +firing, though who they were firing at could not be seen for the smoke +which there was no wind to carry away. A pleasant humming and +whistling of bullets were often heard. "What is this?" thought +Prince Andrew approaching the crowd of soldiers. "It can't be an +attack, for they are not moving; it can't be a square- for they are +not drawn up for that." + +The commander of the regiment, a thin, feeble-looking old man with a +pleasant smile- his eyelids drooping more than half over his old eyes, +giving him a mild expression, rode up to Bagration and welcomed him as +a host welcomes an honored guest. He reported that his regiment had +been attacked by French cavalry and that, though the attack had been +repulsed, he had lost more than half his men. He said the attack had +been repulsed, employing this military term to describe what had +occurred to his regiment, but in reality he did not himself know +what had happened during that half-hour to the troops entrusted to +him, and could not say with certainty whether the attack had been +repulsed or his regiment had been broken up. All he knew was that at +the commencement of the action balls and shells began flying all +over his regiment and hitting men and that afterwards someone had +shouted "Cavalry!" and our men had begun firing. They were still +firing, not at the cavalry which had disappeared, but at French +infantry who had come into the hollow and were firing at our men. +Prince Bagration bowed his head as a sign that this was exactly what +he had desired and expected. Turning to his adjutant he ordered him to +bring down the two battalions of the Sixth Chasseurs whom they had +just passed. Prince Andrew was struck by the changed expression on +Prince Bagration's face at this moment. It expressed the +concentrated and happy resolution you see on the face of a man who +on a hot day takes a final run before plunging into the water. The +dull, sleepy expression was no longer there, nor the affectation of +profound thought. The round, steady, hawk's eyes looked before him +eagerly and rather disdainfully, not resting on anything although +his movements were still slow and measured. + +The commander of the regiment turned to Prince Bagration, entreating +him to go back as it was too dangerous to remain where they were. +"Please, your excellency, for God's sake!" he kept saying, glancing +for support at an officer of the suite who turned away from him. +"There, you see!" and he drew attention to the bullets whistling, +singing, and hissing continually around them. He spoke in the tone +of entreaty and reproach that a carpenter uses to a gentleman who +has picked up an ax: "We are used to it, but you, sir, will blister +your hands." He spoke as if those bullets could not kill him, and +his half-closed eyes gave still more persuasiveness to his words. +The staff officer joined in the colonel's appeals, but Bagration did +not reply; he only gave an order to cease firing and re-form, so as to +give room for the two approaching battalions. While he was speaking, +the curtain of smoke that had concealed the hollow, driven by a rising +wind, began to move from right to left as if drawn by an invisible +hand, and the hill opposite, with the French moving about on it, +opened out before them. All eyes fastened involuntarily on this French +column advancing against them and winding down over the uneven ground. +One could already see the soldiers' shaggy caps, distinguish the +officers from the men, and see the standard flapping against its +staff. + +"They march splendidly," remarked someone in Bagration's suite. + +The head of the column had already descended into the hollow. The +clash would take place on this side of it... + +The remains of our regiment which had been in action rapidly +formed up and moved to the right; from behind it, dispersing the +laggards, came two battalions of the Sixth Chasseurs in fine order. +Before they had reached Bagration, the weighty tread of the mass of +men marching in step could be heard. On their left flank, nearest to +Bagration, marched a company commander, a fine round-faced man, with a +stupid and happy expression- the same man who had rushed out of the +wattle shed. At that moment he was clearly thinking of nothing but how +dashing a fellow he would appear as he passed the commander. + +With the self-satisfaction of a man on parade, he stepped lightly +with his muscular legs as if sailing along, stretching himself to +his full height without the smallest effort, his ease contrasting with +the heavy tread of the soldiers who were keeping step with him. He +carried close to his leg a narrow unsheathed sword (small, curved, and +not like a real weapon) and looked now at the superior officers and +now back at the men without losing step, his whole powerful body +turning flexibly. It was as if all the powers of his soul were +concentrated on passing the commander in the best possible manner, and +feeling that he was doing it well he was happy. "Left... left... +left..." he seemed to repeat to himself at each alternate step; and in +time to this, with stern but varied faces, the wall of soldiers +burdened with knapsacks and muskets marched in step, and each one of +these hundreds of soldiers seemed to be repeating to himself at each +alternate step, "Left... left... left..." A fat major skirted a +bush, puffing and falling out of step; a soldier who had fallen +behind, his face showing alarm at his defection, ran at a trot, +panting to catch up with his company. A cannon ball, cleaving the air, +flew over the heads of Bagration and his suite, and fell into the +column to the measure of "Left... left!" "Close up!" came the +company commander's voice in jaunty tones. The soldiers passed in a +semicircle round something where the ball had fallen, and an old +trooper on the flank, a noncommissioned officer who had stopped beside +the dead men, ran to catch up his line and, falling into step with a +hop, looked back angrily, and through the ominous silence and the +regular tramp of feet beating the ground in unison, one seemed to hear +left... left... left. + +"Well done, lads!" said Prince Bagration. + +"Glad to do our best, your ex'len-lency!" came a confused shout from +the ranks. A morose soldier marching on the left turned his eyes on +Bagration as he shouted, with an expression that seemed to say: "We +know that ourselves!" Another, without looking round, as though +fearing to relax, shouted with his mouth wide open and passed on. + +The order was given to halt and down knapsacks. + +Bagration rode round the ranks that had marched past him and +dismounted. He gave the reins to a Cossack, took off and handed over +his felt coat, stretched his legs, and set his cap straight. The +head of the French column, with its officers leading, appeared from +below the hill. + +"Forward, with God!" said Bagration, in a resolute, sonorous +voice, turning for a moment to the front line, and slightly swinging +his arms, he went forward uneasily over the rough field with the +awkward gait of a cavalryman. Prince Andrew felt that an invisible +power was leading him forward, and experienced great happiness. + +The French were already near. Prince Andrew, walking beside +Bagration, could clearly distinguish their bandoliers, red epaulets, +and even their faces. (He distinctly saw an old French officer who, +with gaitered legs and turned-out toes, climbed the hill with +difficulty.) Prince Bagration gave no further orders and silently +continued to walk on in front of the ranks. Suddenly one shot after +another rang out from the French, smoke appeared all along their +uneven ranks, and musket shots sounded. Several of our men fell, among +them the round-faced officer who had marched so gaily and +complacently. But at the moment the first report was heard, +Bagration looked round and shouted, "Hurrah!" + +"Hurrah- ah!- ah!" rang a long-drawn shout from our ranks, and +passing Bagration and racing one another they rushed in an irregular +but joyous and eager crowd down the hill at their disordered foe. + +CHAPTER XIX + +The attack of the Sixth Chasseurs secured the retreat of our right +flank. In the center Tushin's forgotten battery, which had managed +to set fire to the Schon Grabern village, delayed the French +advance. The French were putting out the fire which the wind was +spreading, and thus gave us time to retreat. The retirement of the +center to the other side of the dip in the ground at the rear was +hurried and noisy, but the different companies did not get mixed. +But our left- which consisted of the Azov and Podolsk infantry and the +Pavlograd hussars- was simultaneously attacked and outflanked by +superior French forces under Lannes and was thrown into confusion. +Bagration had sent Zherkov to the general commanding that left flank +with orders to retreat immediately. + +Zherkov, not removing his hand from his cap, turned his horse +about and galloped off. But no sooner had he left Bagration than his +courage failed him. He was seized by panic and could not go where it +was dangerous. + +Having reached the left flank, instead of going to the front where +the firing was, he began to look for the general and his staff where +they could not possibly be, and so did not deliver the order. + +The command of the left flank belonged by seniority to the commander +of the regiment Kutuzov had reviewed at Braunau and in which +Dolokhov was serving as a private. But the command of the extreme left +flank had been assigned to the commander of the Pavlograd regiment +in which Rostov was serving, and a misunderstanding arose. The two +commanders were much exasperated with one another and, long after +the action had begun on the right flank and the French were already +advancing, were engaged in discussion with the sole object of +offending one another. But the regiments, both cavalry and infantry, +were by no means ready for the impending action. From privates to +general they were not expecting a battle and were engaged in +peaceful occupations, the cavalry feeding the horses and the +infantry collecting wood. + +"He higher iss dan I in rank," said the German colonel of the +hussars, flushing and addressing an adjutant who had ridden up, "so +let him do what he vill, but I cannot sacrifice my hussars... +Bugler, sount ze retreat!" + +But haste was becoming imperative. Cannon and musketry, mingling +together, thundered on the right and in the center, while the +capotes of Lannes' sharpshooters were already seen crossing the +milldam and forming up within twice the range of a musket shot. The +general in command of the infantry went toward his horse with jerky +steps, and having mounted drew himself up very straight and tall and +rode to the Pavlograd commander. The commanders met with polite bows +but with secret malevolence in their hearts. + +"Once again, Colonel," said the general, "I can't leave half my +men in the wood. I beg of you, I beg of you," he repeated, "to +occupy the position and prepare for an attack." + +"I peg of you yourself not to mix in vot is not your business!" +suddenly replied the irate colonel. "If you vere in the cavalry..." + +"I am not in the cavalry, Colonel, but I am a Russian general and if +you are not aware of the fact..." + +"Quite avare, your excellency," suddenly shouted the colonel, +touching his horse and turning purple in the face. "Vill you be so +goot to come to ze front and see dat zis position iss no goot? I don't +vish to destroy my men for your pleasure!" + +"You forget yourself, Colonel. I am not considering my own +pleasure and I won't allow it to be said!" + +Taking the colonel's outburst as a challenge to his courage, the +general expanded his chest and rode, frowning, beside him to the front +line, as if their differences would be settled there amongst the +bullets. They reached the front, several bullets sped over them, and +they halted in silence. There was nothing fresh to be seen from the +line, for from where they had been before it had been evident that +it was impossible for cavalry to act among the bushes and broken +ground, as well as that the French were outflanking our left. The +general and colonel looked sternly and significantly at one another +like two fighting cocks preparing for battle, each vainly trying to +detect signs of cowardice in the other. Both passed the examination +successfully. As there was nothing to said, and neither wished to give +occasion for it to be alleged that he had been the first to leave +the range of fire, they would have remained there for a long time +testing each other's courage had it not been that just then they heard +the rattle of musketry and a muffled shout almost behind them in the +wood. The French had attacked the men collecting wood in the copse. It +was no longer possible for the hussars to retreat with the infantry. +They were cut off from the line of retreat on the left by the +French. However inconvenient the position, it was now necessary to +attack in order to cut away through for themselves. + +The squadron in which Rostov was serving had scarcely time to +mount before it was halted facing the enemy. Again, as at the Enns +bridge, there was nothing between the squadron and the enemy, and +again that terrible dividing line of uncertainty and fear- +resembling the line separating the living from the dead- lay between +them. All were conscious of this unseen line, and the question whether +they would they would cross it or not, and how they would cross it, +agitated them all. + +The colonel rode to the front, angrily gave some reply to +questions put to him by the officers, and, like a man desperately +insisting on having his own way, gave an order. No one said anything +definite, but the rumor of an attack spread through the squadron. +The command to form up rang out and the sabers whizzed as they were +drawn from their scabbards. Still no one moved. The troops of the left +flank, infantry and hussars alike, felt that the commander did not +himself know what to do, and this irresolution communicated itself +to the men. + +"If only they would be quick!" thought Rostov, feeling that at +last the time had come to experience the joy of an attack of which +he had so often heard from his fellow hussars. + +"Fo'ward, with God, lads!" rang out Denisov's voice. "At a twot +fo'ward!" + +The horses' croups began to sway in the front line. Rook pulled at +the reins and started of his own accord. + +Before him, on the right, Rostov saw the front lines of his +hussars and still farther ahead a dark line which he could not see +distinctly but took to be the enemy. Shots could be heard, but some +way off. + +"Faster!" came the word of command, and Rostov felt Rook's flanks +drooping as he broke into a gallop. + +Rostov anticipated his horse's movements and became more and more +elated. He had noticed a solitary tree ahead of him. This tree had +been in the middle of the line that had seemed so terrible- and now he +had crossed that line and not only was there nothing terrible, but +everything was becoming more and more happy and animated. "Oh, how I +will slash at him!" thought Rostov, gripping the hilt of his saber. + +"Hur-a-a-a-ah!" came a roar of voices. "Let anyone come my way now," +thought Rostov driving his spurs into Rook and letting him go at a +full gallop so that he outstripped the others. Ahead, the enemy was +already visible. Suddenly something like a birch broom seemed to sweep +over the squadron. Rostov raised his saber, ready to strike, but at +that instant the trooper Nikitenko, who was galloping ahead, shot away +from him, and Rostov felt as in a dream that he continued to be +carried forward with unnatural speed but yet stayed on the same +spot. From behind him Bondarchuk, an hussar he knew, jolted against +him and looked angrily at him. Bondarchuk's horse swerved and galloped +past. + +"How is it I am not moving? I have fallen, I am killed!" Rostov +asked and answered at the same instant. He was alone in the middle +of a field. Instead of the moving horses and hussars' backs, he saw +nothing before him but the motionless earth and the stubble around +him. There was warm blood under his arm. "No, I am wounded and the +horse is killed." Rook tried to rise on his forelegs but fell back, +pinning his rider's leg. Blood was flowing from his head; he struggled +but could not rise. Rostov also tried to rise but fell back, his +sabretache having become entangled in the saddle. Where our men +were, and where the French, he did not know. There was no one near. + +Having disentangled his leg, he rose. "Where, on which side, was now +the line that had so sharply divided the two armies?" he asked himself +and could not answer. "Can something bad have happened to me?" he +wondered as he got up: and at that moment he felt that something +superfluous was hanging on his benumbed left arm. The wrist felt as if +it were not his. He examined his hand carefully, vainly trying to find +blood on it. "Ah, here are people coming," he thought joyfully, seeing +some men running toward him. "They will help me!" In front came a +man wearing a strange shako and a blue cloak, swarthy, sunburned, +and with a hooked nose. Then came two more, and many more running +behind. One of them said something strange, not in Russian. In among +the hindmost of these men wearing similar shakos was a Russian hussar. +He was being held by the arms and his horse was being led behind him. + +"It must be one of ours, a prisoner. Yes. Can it be that they will +take me too? Who are these men?" thought Rostov, scarcely believing +his eyes. "Can they be French?" He looked at the approaching +Frenchmen, and though but a moment before he had been galloping to get +at them and hack them to pieces, their proximity now seemed so awful +that he could not believe his eyes. "Who are they? Why are they +running? Can they be coming at me? And why? To kill me? Me whom +everyone is so fond of?" He remembered his mother's love for him, +and his family's, and his friends', and the enemy's intention to +kill him seemed impossible. "But perhaps they may do it!" For more +than ten seconds he stood not moving from the spot or realizing the +situation. The foremost Frenchman, the one with the hooked nose, was +already so close that the expression of his face could be seen. And +the excited, alien face of that man, his bayonet hanging down, holding +his breath, and running so lightly, frightened Rostov. He seized his +pistol and, instead of firing it, flung it at the Frenchman and ran +with all his might toward the bushes. He did not now run with the +feeling of doubt and conflict with which he had trodden the Enns +bridge, but with the feeling of a hare fleeing from the hounds. One +single sentiment, that of fear for his young and happy life, possessed +his whole being. Rapidly leaping the furrows, he fled across the field +with the impetuosity he used to show at catchplay, now and then +turning his good-natured, pale, young face to look back. A shudder +of terror went through him: "No, better not look," he thought, but +having reached the bushes he glanced round once more. The French had +fallen behind, and just as he looked round the first man changed his +run to a walk and, turning, shouted something loudly to a comrade +farther back. Rostov paused. "No, there's some mistake," thought he. +"They can't have wanted to kill me." But at the same time, his left +arm felt as heavy as if a seventy-pound weight were tied to it. He +could run no more. The Frenchman also stopped and took aim. Rostov +closed his eyes and stooped down. One bullet and then another whistled +past him. He mustered his last remaining strength, took hold of his +left hand with his right, and reached the bushes. Behind these were +some Russian sharpshooters. + +CHAPTER XX + +The infantry regiments that had been caught unawares in the +outskirts of the wood ran out of it, the different companies getting +mixed, and retreated as a disorderly crowd. One soldier, in his +fear, uttered the senseless cry, "Cut off!" that is so terrible in +battle, and that word infected the whole crowd with a feeling of +panic. + +"Surrounded! Cut off? We're lost!" shouted the fugitives. + +The moment he heard the firing and the cry from behind, the +general realized that something dreadful had happened to his regiment, +and the thought that he, an exemplary officer of many years' service +who had never been to blame, might be held responsible at headquarters +for negligence or inefficiency so staggered him that, forgetting the +recalcitrant cavalry colonel, his own dignity as a general, and +above all quite forgetting the danger and all regard for +self-preservation, he clutched the crupper of his saddle and, spurring +his horse, galloped to the regiment under a hail of bullets which fell +around, but fortunately missed him. His one desire was to know what +was happening and at any cost correct, or remedy, the mistake if he +had made one, so that he, an exemplary officer of twenty-two years' +service, who had never been censured, should not be held to blame. + +Having galloped safely through the French, he reached a field behind +the copse across which our men, regardless of orders, were running and +descending the valley. That moment of moral hesitation which decides +the fate of battles had arrived. Would this disorderly crowd of +soldiers attend to the voice of their commander, or would they, +disregarding him, continue their flight? Despite his desperate +shouts that used to seem so terrible to the soldiers, despite his +furious purple countenance distorted out of all likeness to his former +self, and the flourishing of his saber, the soldiers all continued +to run, talking, firing into the air, and disobeying orders. The moral +hesitation which decided the fate of battles was evidently culminating +in a panic. + +The general had a fit of coughing as a result of shouting and of the +powder smoke and stopped in despair. Everything seemed lost. But at +that moment the French who were attacking, suddenly and without any +apparent reason, ran back and disappeared from the outskirts, and +Russian sharpshooters showed themselves in the copse. It was +Timokhin's company, which alone had maintained its order in the wood +and, having lain in ambush in a ditch, now attacked the French +unexpectedly. Timokhin, armed only with a sword, had rushed at the +enemy with such a desperate cry and such mad, drunken determination +that, taken by surprise, the French had thrown down their muskets +and run. Dolokhov, running beside Timokhin, killed a Frenchman at +close quarters and was the first to seize the surrendering French +officer by his collar. Our fugitives returned, the battalions +re-formed, and the French who had nearly cut our left flank in half +were for the moment repulsed. Our reserve units were able to join +up, and the fight was at an end. The regimental commander and Major +Ekonomov had stopped beside a bridge, letting the retreating companies +pass by them, when a soldier came up and took hold of the +commander's stirrup, almost leaning against him. The man was wearing a +bluish coat of broadcloth, he had no knapsack or cap, his head was +bandaged, and over his shoulder a French munition pouch was slung. +He had an officer's sword in his hand. The soldier was pale, his +blue eyes looked impudently into the commander's face, and his lips +were smiling. Though the commander was occupied in giving instructions +to Major Ekonomov, he could not help taking notice of the soldier. + +"Your excellency, here are two trophies," said Dolokhov, pointing to +the French sword and pouch. "I have taken an officer prisoner. I +stopped the company." Dolokhov breathed heavily from weariness and +spoke in abrupt sentences. "The whole company can bear witness. I +beg you will remember this, your excellency!" + +"All right, all right," replied the commander, and turned to Major +Ekonomov. + +But Dolokhov did not go away; he untied the handkerchief around +his head, pulled it off, and showed the blood congealed on his hair. + +"A bayonet wound. I remained at the front. Remember, your +excellency!" + +Tushin's battery had been forgotten and only at the very end of +the action did Prince Bagration, still hearing the cannonade in the +center, send his orderly staff officer, and later Prince Andrew +also, to order the battery to retire as quickly as possible. When +the supports attached to Tushin's battery had been moved away in the +middle of the action by someone's order, the battery had continued +firing and was only not captured by the French because the enemy could +not surmise that anyone could have the effrontery to continue firing +from four quite undefended guns. On the contrary, the energetic action +of that battery led the French to suppose that here- in the center- +the main Russian forces were concentrated. Twice they had attempted to +attack this point, but on each occasion had been driven back by +grapeshot from the four isolated guns on the hillock. + +Soon after Prince Bagration had left him, Tushin had succeeded in +setting fire to Schon Grabern. + +"Look at them scurrying! It's burning! Just see the smoke! Fine! +Grand! Look at the smoke, the smoke!" exclaimed the artillerymen, +brightening up. + +All the guns, without waiting for orders, were being fired in the +direction of the conflagration. As if urging each other on, the +soldiers cried at each shot: "Fine! That's good! Look at it... Grand!" +The fire, fanned by the breeze, was rapidly spreading. The French +columns that had advanced beyond the village went back; but as +though in revenge for this failure, the enemy placed ten guns to the +right of the village and began firing them at Tushin's battery. + +In their childlike glee, aroused by the fire and their luck in +successfully cannonading the French, our artillerymen only noticed +this battery when two balls, and then four more, fell among our +guns, one knocking over two horses and another tearing off a +munition-wagon driver's leg. Their spirits once roused were, +however, not diminished, but only changed character. The horses were +replaced by others from a reserve gun carriage, the wounded were +carried away, and the four guns were turned against the ten-gun +battery. Tushin's companion officer had been killed at the beginning +of the engagement and within an hour seventeen of the forty men of the +guns' crews had been disabled, but the artillerymen were still as +merry and lively as ever. Twice they noticed the French appearing +below them, and then they fired grapeshot at them. + +Little Tushin, moving feebly and awkwardly, kept telling his orderly +to "refill my pipe for that one!" and then, scattering sparks from it, +ran forward shading his eyes with his small hand to look at the +French. + +"Smack at 'em, lads!" he kept saying, seizing the guns by the wheels +and working the screws himself. + +Amid the smoke, deafened by the incessant reports which always +made him jump, Tushin not taking his pipe from his mouth ran from +gun to gun, now aiming, now counting the charges, now giving orders +about replacing dead or wounded horses and harnessing fresh ones, +and shouting in his feeble voice, so high pitched and irresolute. +His face grew more and more animated. Only when a man was killed or +wounded did he frown and turn away from the sight, shouting angrily at +the men who, as is always the case, hesitated about lifting the +injured or dead. The soldiers, for the most part handsome fellows and, +as is always the case in an artillery company, a head and shoulders +taller and twice as broad as their officer- all looked at their +commander like children in an embarrassing situation, and the +expression on his face was invariably reflected on theirs. + +Owing to the terrible uproar and the necessity for concentration and +activity, Tushin did not experience the slightest unpleasant sense +of fear, and the thought that he might be killed or badly wounded +never occurred to him. On the contrary, he became more and more +elated. It seemed to him that it was a very long time ago, almost a +day, since he had first seen the enemy and fired the first shot, and +that the corner of the field he stood on was well-known and familiar +ground. Though he thought of everything, considered everything, and +did everything the best of officers could do in his position, he was +in a state akin to feverish delirium or drunkenness. + +From the deafening sounds of his own guns around him, the whistle +and thud of the enemy's cannon balls, from the flushed and +perspiring faces of the crew bustling round the guns, from the sight +of the blood of men and horses, from the little puffs of smoke on +the enemy's side (always followed by a ball flying past and striking +the earth, a man, a gun, a horse), from the sight of all these +things a fantastic world of his own had taken possession of his +brain and at that moment afforded him pleasure. The enemy's guns +were in his fancy not guns but pipes from which occasional puffs +were blown by an invisible smoker. + +"There... he's puffing again," muttered Tushin to himself, as a +small cloud rose from the hill and was borne in a streak to the left +by the wind. + +"Now look out for the ball... we'll throw it back." + +"What do you want, your honor?" asked an artilleryman, standing +close by, who heard him muttering. + +"Nothing... only a shell..." he answered. + +"Come along, our Matvevna!" he said to himself. "Matvevna"~^ was +the name his fancy gave to the farthest gun of the battery, which +was large and of an old pattern. The French swarming round their +guns seemed to him like ants. In that world, the handsome drunkard +Number One of the second gun's crew was "uncle"; Tushin looked at +him more often than at anyone else and took delight in his every +movement. The sound of musketry at the foot of the hill, now +diminishing, now increasing, seemed like someone's breathing. He +listened intently to the ebb and flow of these sounds. + +^~ Daughter of Matthew. + +"Ah! Breathing again, breathing!" he muttered to himself. + +He imagined himself as an enormously tall, powerful man who was +throwing cannon balls at the French with both hands. + +"Now then, Matvevna, dear old lady, don't let me down!" he was +saying as he moved from the gun, when a strange, unfamiliar voice +called above his head: "Captain Tushin! Captain!" + +Tushin turned round in dismay. It was the staff officer who had +turned him out of the booth at Grunth. He was shouting in a gasping +voice: + +"Are you mad? You have twice been ordered to retreat, and you..." + +"Why are they down on me?" thought Tushin, looking in alarm at his +superior. + +"I... don't..." he muttered, holding up two fingers to his cap. +"I..." + +But the staff officer did not finish what he wanted to say. A cannon +ball, flying close to him, caused him to duck and bend over his horse. +He paused, and just as he was about to say something more, another +ball stopped him. He turned his horse and galloped off. + +"Retire! All to retire!" he shouted from a distance. + +The soldiers laughed. A moment later, an adjutant arrived with the +same order. + +It was Prince Andrew. The first thing he saw on riding up to the +space where Tushin's guns were stationed was an unharnessed horse with +a broken leg, that lay screaming piteously beside the harnessed +horses. Blood was gushing from its leg as from a spring. Among the +limbers lay several dead men. One ball after another passed over as he +approached and he felt a nervous shudder run down his spine. But the +mere thought of being afraid roused him again. "I cannot be afraid," +thought he, and dismounted slowly among the guns. He delivered the +order and did not leave the battery. He decided to have the guns +removed from their positions and withdrawn in his presence. Together +with Tushin, stepping across the bodies and under a terrible fire from +the French, he attended to the removal of the guns. + +"A staff officer was here a minute ago, but skipped off," said an +artilleryman to Prince Andrew. "Not like your honor!" + +Prince Andrew said nothing to Tushin. They were both so busy as to +seem not to notice one another. When having limbered up the only two +cannon that remained uninjured out of the four, they began moving down +the hill (one shattered gun and one unicorn were left behind), +Prince Andrew rode up to Tushin. + +"Well, till we meet again..." he said, holding out his hand to +Tushin. + +"Good-by, my dear fellow," said Tushin. "Dear soul! Good-by, my dear +fellow!" and for some unknown reason tears suddenly filled his eyes. + +CHAPTER XXI + +The wind had fallen and black clouds, merging with the powder smoke, +hung low over the field of battle on the horizon. It was growing +dark and the glow of two conflagrations was the more conspicuous. +The cannonade was dying down, but the rattle of musketry behind and on +the right sounded oftener and nearer. As soon as Tushin with his guns, +continually driving round or coming upon wounded men, was out of range +of fire and had descended into the dip, he was met by some of the +staff, among them the staff officer and Zherkov, who had been twice +sent to Tushin's battery but had never reached it. Interrupting one +another, they all gave, and transmitted, orders as to how to +proceed, reprimanding and reproaching him. Tushin gave no orders, and, +silently- fearing to speak because at every word he felt ready to weep +without knowing why- rode behind on his artillery nag. Though the +orders were to abandon the wounded, many of them dragged themselves +after troops and begged for seats on the gun carriages. The jaunty +infantry officer who just before the battle had rushed out of Tushin's +wattle shed was laid, with a bullet in his stomach, on "Matvevna's" +carriage. At the foot of the hill, a pale hussar cadet, supporting one +hand with the other, came up to Tushin and asked for a seat. + +"Captain, for God's sake! I've hurt my arm," he said timidly. "For +God's sake... I can't walk. For God's sake!" + +It was plain that this cadet had already repeatedly asked for a lift +and been refused. He asked in a hesitating, piteous voice. + +"Tell them to give me a seat, for God's sake!" + +"Give him a seat," said Tushin. "Lay a cloak for him to sit on, +lad," he said, addressing his favorite soldier. "And where is the +wounded officer?" + +"He has been set down. He died," replied someone. + +"Help him up. Sit down, dear fellow, sit down! Spread out the cloak, +Antonov." + +The cadet was Rostov. With one hand he supported the other; he was +pale and his jaw trembled, shivering feverishly. He was placed on +"Matvevna," the gun from which they had removed the dead officer. +The cloak they spread under him was wet with blood which stained his +breeches and arm. + +"What, are you wounded, my lad?" said Tushin, approaching the gun on +which Rostov sat. + +"No, it's a sprain." + +"Then what is this blood on the gun carriage?" inquired Tushin. + +"It was the officer, your honor, stained it," answered the +artilleryman, wiping away the blood with his coat sleeve, as if +apologizing for the state of his gun. + +It was all that they could do to get the guns up the rise aided by +the infantry, and having reached the village of Gruntersdorf they +halted. It had grown so dark that one could not distinguish the +uniforms ten paces off, and the firing had begun to subside. Suddenly, +near by on the right, shouting and firing were again heard. Flashes of +shot gleamed in the darkness. This was the last French attack and +was met by soldiers who had sheltered in the village houses. They +all rushed out of the village again, but Tushin's guns could not move, +and the artillerymen, Tushin, and the cadet exchanged silent glances +as they awaited their fate. The firing died down and soldiers, talking +eagerly, streamed out of a side street. + +"Not hurt, Petrov?" asked one. + +"We've given it 'em hot, mate! They won't make another push now," +said another. + +"You couldn't see a thing. How they shot at their own fellows! +Nothing could be seen. Pitch-dark, brother! Isn't there something to +drink?" + +The French had been repulsed for the last time. And again and +again in the complete darkness Tushin's guns moved forward, surrounded +by the humming infantry as by a frame. + +In the darkness, it seemed as though a gloomy unseen river was +flowing always in one direction, humming with whispers and talk and +the sound of hoofs and wheels. Amid the general rumble, the groans and +voices of the wounded were more distinctly heard than any other +sound in the darkness of the night. The gloom that enveloped the +army was filled with their groans, which seemed to melt into one +with the darkness of the night. After a while the moving mass became +agitated, someone rode past on a white horse followed by his suite, +and said something in passing: "What did he say? Where to, now? +Halt, is it? Did he thank us?" came eager questions from all sides. +The whole moving mass began pressing closer together and a report +spread that they were ordered to halt: evidently those in front had +halted. All remained where they were in the middle of the muddy road. + +Fires were lighted and the talk became more audible. Captain Tushin, +having given orders to his company, sent a soldier to find a +dressing station or a doctor for the cadet, and sat down by a +bonfire the soldiers had kindled on the road. Rostov, too, dragged +himself to the fire. From pain, cold, and damp, a feverish shivering +shook his whole body. Drowsiness was irresistibly mastering him, but +he kept awake kept awake by an excruciating pain in his arm, for which +he could find no satisfactory position. He kept closing his eyes and +then again looking at the fire, which seemed to him dazzlingly red, +and at the feeble, round-shouldered figure of Tushin who was sitting +cross-legged like a Turk beside him. Tushin's large, kind, intelligent +eyes were fixed with sympathy and commiseration on Rostov, who saw +that Tushin with his whole heart wished to help him but could not. + +From all sides were heard the footsteps and talk of the infantry, +who were walking, driving past, and settling down all around. The +sound of voices, the tramping feet, the horses' hoofs moving in mud, +the crackling of wood fires near and afar, merged into one tremulous +rumble. + +It was no longer, as before, a dark, unseen river flowing through +the gloom, but a dark sea swelling and gradually subsiding after a +storm. Rostov looked at and listened listlessly to what passed +before and around him. An infantryman came to the fire, squatted on +his heels, held his hands to the blaze, and turned away his face. + +"You don't mind your honor?" he asked Tushin. "I've lost my company, +your honor. I don't know where... such bad luck!" + +With the soldier, an infantry officer with a bandaged cheek came +up to the bonfire, and addressing Tushin asked him to have the guns +moved a trifle to let a wagon go past. After he had gone, two soldiers +rushed to the campfire. They were quarreling and fighting desperately, +each trying to snatch from the other a boot they were both holding +on to. + +"You picked it up?... I dare say! You're very smart!" one of them +shouted hoarsely. + +Then a thin, pale soldier, his neck bandaged with a bloodstained leg +band, came up and in angry tones asked the artillerymen for water. + +"Must one die like a dog?" said he. + +Tushin told them to give the man some water. Then a cheerful soldier +ran up, begging a little fire for the infantry. + +"A nice little hot torch for the infantry! Good luck to you, +fellow countrymen. Thanks for the fire- we'll return it with +interest," said he, carrying away into the darkness a glowing stick. + +Next came four soldiers, carrying something heavy on a cloak, and +passed by the fire. One of them stumbled. + +"Who the devil has put the logs on the road?" snarled he. + +"He's dead- why carry him?" said another. + +"Shut up!" + +And they disappeared into the darkness with with their load. + +"Still aching?" Tushin asked Rostov in a whisper. + +"Yes." + +"Your honor, you're wanted by the general. He is in the hut here," +said a gunner, coming up to Tushin. + +"Coming, friend." + +Tushin rose and, buttoning his greatcoat and pulling it straight, +walked away from the fire. + +Not far from the artillery campfire, in a hut that had been prepared +for him, Prince Bagration sat at dinner, talking with some +commanding officers who had gathered at his quarters. The little old +man with the half-closed eyes was there greedily gnawing a mutton +bone, and the general who had served blamelessly for twenty-two years, +flushed by a glass of vodka and the dinner; and the staff officer with +the signet ring, and Zherkov, uneasily glancing at them all, and +Prince Andrew, pale, with compressed lips and feverishly glittering +eyes. + +In a corner of the hut stood a standard captured from the French, +and the accountant with the naive face was feeling its texture, +shaking his head in perplexity- perhaps because the banner really +interested him, perhaps because it was hard for him, hungry as he was, +to look on at a dinner where there was no place for him. In the next +hut there was a French colonel who had been taken prisoner by our +dragoons. Our officers were flocking in to look at him. Prince +Bagration was thanking the individual commanders and inquiring into +details of the action and our losses. The general whose regiment had +been inspected at Braunau was informing the prince that as soon as the +action began he had withdrawn from the wood, mustered the men who were +woodcutting, and, allowing the French to pass him, had made a +bayonet charge with two battalions and had broken up the French +troops. + +"When I saw, your excellency, that their first battalion was +disorganized, I stopped in the road and thought: 'I'll let them come +on and will meet them with the fire of the whole battalion'- and +that's what I did." + +The general had so wished to do this and was so sorry he had not +managed to do it that it seemed to him as if it had really happened. +Perhaps it might really have been so? Could one possibly make out amid +all that confusion what did or did not happen? + +"By the way, your excellency, I should inform you," he continued- +remembering Dolokhov's conversation with Kutuzov and his last +interview with the gentleman-ranker- "that Private Dolokhov, who was +reduced to the ranks, took a French officer prisoner in my presence +and particularly distinguished himself." + +"I saw the Pavlograd hussars attack there, your excellency," +chimed in Zherkov, looking uneasily around. He had not seen the +hussars all that day, but had heard about them from an infantry +officer. "They broke up two squares, your excellency." + +Several of those present smiled at Zherkov's words, expecting one of +his usual jokes, but noticing that what he was saying redounded to the +glory of our arms and of the day's work, they assumed a serious +expression, though many of them knew that what he was saying was a lie +devoid of any foundation. Prince Bagration turned to the old colonel: + +"Gentlemen, I thank you all; all arms have behaved heroically: +infantry, cavalry, and artillery. How was it that two guns were +abandoned in the center?" he inquired, searching with his eyes for +someone. (Prince Bagration did not ask about the guns on the left +flank; he knew that all the guns there had been abandoned at the +very beginning of the action.) "I think I sent you?" he added, turning +to the staff officer on duty. + +"One was damaged," answered the staff officer, "and the other I +can't understand. I was there all the time giving orders and had +only just left.... It is true that it was hot there," he added, +modestly. + +Someone mentioned that Captain Tushin was bivouacking close to the +village and had already been sent for. + +"Oh, but you were there?" said Prince Bagration, addressing Prince +Andrew. + +"Of course, we only just missed one another," said the staff +officer, with a smile to Bolkonski. + +"I had not the pleasure of seeing you," said Prince Andrew, coldly +and abruptly. + +All were silent. Tushin appeared at the threshold and made his way +timidly from behind the backs of the generals. As he stepped past +the generals in the crowded hut, feeling embarrassed as he always +was by the sight of his superiors, he did not notice the staff of +the banner and stumbled over it. Several of those present laughed. + +"How was it a gun was abandoned?" asked Bagration, frowning, not +so much at the captain as at those who were laughing, among whom +Zherkov laughed loudest. + +Only now, when he was confronted by the stern authorities, did his +guilt and the disgrace of having lost two guns and yet remaining alive +present themselves to Tushin in all their horror. He had been so +excited that he had not thought about it until that moment. The +officers' laughter confused him still more. He stood before +Bagration with his lower jaw trembling and was hardly able to +mutter: "I don't know... your excellency... I had no men... your +excellency." + +"You might have taken some from the covering troops." + +Tushin did not say that there were no covering troops, though that +was perfectly true. He was afraid of getting some other officer into +trouble, and silently fixed his eyes on Bagration as a schoolboy who +has blundered looks at an examiner. + +The silence lasted some time. Prince Bagration, apparently not +wishing to be severe, found nothing to say; the others did not venture +to intervene. Prince Andrew looked at Tushin from under his brows +and his fingers twitched nervously. + +"Your excellency!" Prince Andrew broke the silence with his abrupt +voice," you were pleased to send me to Captain Tushin's battery. I +went there and found two thirds of the men and horses knocked out, two +guns smashed, and no supports at all." + +Prince Bagration and Tushin looked with equal intentness at +Bolkonski, who spoke with suppressed agitation. + +"And, if your excellency will allow me to express my opinion," he +continued, "we owe today's success chiefly to the action of that +battery and the heroic endurance of Captain Tushin and his company," +and without awaiting a reply, Prince Andrew rose and left the table. + +Prince Bagration looked at Tushin, evidently reluctant to show +distrust in Bolkonski's emphatic opinion yet not feeling able fully to +credit it, bent his head, and told Tushin that he could go. Prince +Andrew went out with him. + +"Thank you; you saved me, my dear fellow!" said Tushin. + +Prince Andrew gave him a look, but said nothing and went away. He +felt sad and depressed. It was all so strange, so unlike what he had +hoped. + +"Who are they? Why are they here? What do they want? And when will +all this end?" thought Rostov, looking at the changing shadows +before him. The pain in his arm became more and more intense. +Irresistible drowsiness overpowered him, red rings danced before his +eyes, and the impression of those voices and faces and a sense of +loneliness merged with the physical pain. It was they, these soldiers- +wounded and unwounded- it was they who were crushing, weighing down, +and twisting the sinews and scorching the flesh of his sprained arm +and shoulder. To rid himself of them he closed his eyes. + +For a moment he dozed, but in that short interval innumerable things +appeared to him in a dream: his mother and her large white hand, +Sonya's thin little shoulders, Natasha's eyes and laughter, Denisov +with his voice and mustache, and Telyanin and all that affair with +Telyanin and Bogdanich. That affair was the same thing as this soldier +with the harsh voice, and it was that affair and this soldier that +were so agonizingly, incessantly pulling and pressing his arm and +always dragging it in one direction. He tried to get away from them, +but they would not for an instant let his shoulder move a hair's +breadth. It would not ache- it would be well- if only they did not +pull it, but it was immpossible to get rid of them. + +He opened his eyes and looked up. The black canopy of night hung +less than a yard above the glow of the charcoal. Flakes of falling +snow were fluttering in that light. Tushin had not returned, the +doctor had not come. He was alone now, except for a soldier who was +sitting naked at the other side of the fire, warming his thin yellow +body. + +"Nobody wants me!" thought Rostov. "There is no one to help me or +pity me. Yet I was once at home, strong, happy, and loved." He +sighed and, doing so, groaned involuntarily. + +"Eh, is anything hurting you?" asked the soldier, shaking his +shirt out over the fire, and not waiting for an answer he gave a grunt +and added: "What a lot of men have been crippled today- frightful!" + +Rostov did not listen to the soldier. He looked at the snowflakes +fluttering above the fire and remembered a Russian winter at his warm, +bright home, his fluffy fur coat, his quickly gliding sleigh, his +healthy body, and all the affection and care of his family. "And why +did I come here?" he wondered. + +Next day the French army did not renew their attack, and the remnant +of Bagration's detachment was reunited to Kutuzov's army. + +BOOK THREE: 1805 + +CHAPTER I + +Prince Vasili was not a man who deliberately thought out his +plans. Still less did he think of injuring anyone for his own +advantage. He was merely a man of the world who had got on and to whom +getting on had become a habit. Schemes and devices for which he +never rightly accounted to himself, but which formed the whole +interest of his life, were constantly shaping themselves in his +mind, arising from the circumstances and persons he met. Of these +plans he had not merely one or two in his head but dozens, some only +beginning to form themselves, some approaching achievement, and some +in course of disintegration. He did not, for instance, say to himself: +"This man now has influence, I must gain his confidence and friendship +and through him obtain a special grant." Nor did he say to himself: +"Pierre is a rich man, I must entice him to marry my daughter and lend +me the forty thousand rubles I need." But when he came across came +across a man of position his instinct immediately told him that this +man could be useful, and without any premeditation Prince Vasili + +took the first opportunity to gain his confidence, flatter him, become +intimate with him, and finally make his request. + +He had Pierre at hand in Moscow and procured for him an +appointment as Gentleman of the Bedchamber, which at that time +conferred the status of Councilor of State, and insisted on the +young man accompanying him to Petersburg and staying at his house. +With apparent absent-mindedness, yet with unhesitating assurance +that he was doing the right thing, Prince Vasili did everything to get +Pierre to marry his daughter. Had he thought out his plans +beforehand he could not have been so natural and shown such unaffected +familiarity in intercourse with everybody both above and below him +in social standing. Something always drew him toward those richer +and more powerful than himself and he had rare skill in seizing the +most opportune moment for making use of people. + +Pierre, on unexpectedly becoming Count Bezukhov and a rich man, felt +himself after his recent loneliness and freedom from cares so beset +and preoccupied that only in bed was he able to be by himself. He +had to sign papers, to present himself at government offices, the +purpose of which was not clear to him, to question his chief +steward, to visit his estate near Moscow, and to receive many people +who formerly did not even wish to know of his existence but would +now have been offended and grieved had he chosen not to see them. +These different people- businessmen, relations, and acquaintances +alike- were all disposed to treat the young heir in the most +friendly and flattering manner: they were all evidently firmly +convinced of Pierre's noble qualities. He was always hearing such +words as: "With your remarkable kindness," or, "With your excellent +heart," "You are yourself so honorable Count," or, "Were he as +clever as you," and so on, till he began sincerely to believe in his +own exceptional kindness and extraordinary intelligence, the more so +as in the depth of his heart it had always seemed to him that he +really was very kind and intelligent. Even people who had formerly +been spiteful toward him and evidently unfriendly now became gentle +and affectionate. The angry eldest princess, with the long waist and +hair plastered down like a doll's, had come into Pierre's room after +the funeral. With drooping eyes and frequent blushes she told him +she was very sorry about their past misunderstandings and did not +now feel she had a right to ask him for anything, except only for +permission, after the blow she had received, to remain for a few weeks +longer in the house she so loved and where she had sacrificed so much. +She could not refrain from weeping at these words. Touched that this +statuesque princess could so change, Pierre took her hand and begged +her forgiveness, without knowing what for. From that day the eldest +princess quite changed toward Pierre and began knitting a striped +scarf for him. + +"Do this for my sake, mon cher; after all, she had to put up with +a great deal from the deceased," said Prince Vasili to him, handing +him a deed to sign for the princess' benefit. + +Prince Vasili had come to the conclusion that it was necessary to +throw this bone- a bill for thirty thousand rubles- to the poor +princess that it might not occur to her to speak of his share in the +affair of the inlaid portfolio. Pierre signed the deed and after +that the princess grew still kinder. The younger sisters also became +affectionate to him, especially the youngest, the pretty one with +the mole, who often made him feel confused by her smiles and her own +confusion when meeting him. + +It seemed so natural to Pierre that everyone should like him, and it +would have seemed so unnatural had anyone disliked him, that he +could not but believe in the sincerity of those around him. Besides, +he had no time to ask himself whether these people were sincere or +not. He was always busy and always felt in a state of mild and +cheerful intoxication. He felt as though he were the center of some +important and general movement; that something was constantly expected +of him, that if he did not do it he would grieve and disappoint many +people, but if he did this and that, all would be well; and he did +what was demanded of him, but still that happy result always +remained in the future. + +More than anyone else, Prince Vasili took possession of Pierre's +affairs and of Pierre himself in those early days. From the death of +Count Bezukhov he did not let go his hold of the lad. He had the air +of a man oppressed by business, weary and suffering, who yet would +not, for pity's sake, leave this helpless youth who, after all, was +the son of his old friend and the possessor of such enormous wealth, +to the caprice of fate and the designs of rogues. During the few +days he spent in Moscow after the death of Count Bezukhov, he would +call Pierre, or go to him himself, and tell him what ought to be +done in a tone of weariness and assurance, as if he were adding +every time: "You know I am overwhelmed with business and it is +purely out of charity that I trouble myself about you, and you also +know quite well that what I propose is the only thing possible." + +"Well, my dear fellow, tomorrow we are off at last," said Prince +Vasili one day, closing his eyes and fingering Pierre's elbow, +speaking as if he were saying something which had long since been +agreed upon and could not now be altered. "We start tomorrow and I'm +giving you a place in my carriage. I am very glad. All our important +business here is now settled, and I ought to have been off long ago. +Here is something I have received from the chancellor. I asked him for +you, and you have been entered in the diplomatic corps and made a +Gentleman of the Bedchamber. The diplomatic career now lies open +before you." + +Notwithstanding the tone of wearied assurance with which these words +were pronounced, Pierre, who had so long been considering his +career, wished to make some suggestion. But Prince Vasili +interrupted him in the special deep cooing tone, precluding the +possibility of interrupting his speech, which he used in extreme cases +when special persuasion was needed. + +"Mais, mon cher, I did this for my own sake, to satisfy my +conscience, and there is nothing to thank me for. No one has ever +complained yet of being too much loved; and besides, you are free, you +could throw it up tomorrow. But you will see everything for yourself +when you get to Petersburg. It is high time for you to get away from +these terrible recollections." Prince Vasili sighed. "Yes, yes, my +boy. And my valet can go in your carriage. Ah! I was nearly +forgetting," he added. "You know, mon cher, your father and I had some +accounts to settle, so I have received what was due from the Ryazan +estate and will keep it; you won't require it. We'll go into the +accounts later." + +By "what was due from the Ryazan estate" Prince Vasili meant several +thousand rubles quitrent received from Pierre's peasants, which the +prince had retained for himself. + +In Petersburg, as in Moscow, Pierre found the same atmosphere of +gentleness and affection. He could not refuse the post, or rather +the rank (for he did nothing), that Prince Vasili had procured for + +him, and acquaintances, invitations, and social occupations were so +numerous that, even more than in Moscow, he felt a sense of +bewilderment, bustle, and continual expectation of some good, always +in front of him but never attained. + +Of his former bachelor acquaintances many were no longer in +Petersburg. The Guards had gone to the front; Dolokhov had been +reduced to the ranks; Anatole was in the army somewhere in the +provinces; Prince Andrew was abroad; so Pierre had not the opportunity +to spend his nights as he used to like to spend them, or to open his +mind by intimate talks with a friend older than himself and whom he +respected. His whole time was taken up with dinners and balls and +was spent chiefly at Prince Vasili's house in the company of the stout +princess, his wife, and his beautiful daughter Helene. + +Like the others, Anna Pavlovna Scherer showed Pierre the change of +attitude toward him that had taken place in society. + +Formerly in Anna Pavlovna's presence, Pierre had always felt that +what he was saying was out of place, tactless and unsuitable, that +remarks which seemed to him clever while they formed in his mind +became foolish as soon as he uttered them, while on the contrary +Hippolyte's stupidest remarks came out clever and apt. Now +everything Pierre said was charmant. Even if Anna Pavlovna did not say +so, he could see that she wished to and only refrained out of regard +for his modesty. + +In the beginning of the winter of 1805-6 Pierre received one of Anna +Pavlovna's usual pink notes with an invitation to which was added: +"You will find the beautiful Helene here, whom it is always delightful +to see." + +When he read that sentence, Pierre felt for the first time that some +link which other people recognized had grown up between himself and +Helene, and that thought both alarmed him, as if some obligation +were being imposed on him which he could not fulfill, and pleased +him as an entertaining supposition. + +Anna Pavlovna's "At Home" was like the former one, only the +novelty she offered her guests this time was not Mortemart, but a +diplomatist fresh from Berlin with the very latest details of the +Emperor Alexander's visit to Potsdam, and of how the two august +friends had pledged themselves in an indissoluble alliance to uphold +the cause of justice against the enemy of the human race. Anna +Pavlovna received Pierre with a shade of melancholy, evidently +relating to the young man's recent loss by the death of Count Bezukhov +(everyone constantly considered it a duty to assure Pierre that he was +greatly afflicted by the death of the father he had hardly known), and +her melancholy was just like the august melancholy she showed at the +mention of her most august Majesty the Empress Marya Fedorovna. Pierre +felt flattered by this. Anna Pavlovna arranged the different groups in +her drawing room with her habitual skill. The large group, in which +were Prince Vasili and the generals, had the benefit of the +diplomat. Another group was at the tea table. Pierre wished to join +the former, but Anna Pavlovna- who was in the excited condition of a +commander on a battlefield to whom thousands of new and brilliant +ideas occur which there is hardly time to put in action- seeing +Pierre, touched his sleeve with her finger, saying: + +"Wait a bit, I have something in view for you this evening." (She +glanced at Helene and smiled at her.) "My dear Helene, be charitable +to my poor aunt who adores you. Go and keep her company for ten +minutes. And that it will not be too dull, here is the dear count +who will not refuse to accompany you." + +The beauty went to the aunt, but Anna Pavlovna detained Pierre, +looking as if she had to give some final necessary instructions. + +"Isn't she exquisite?" she said to Pierre, pointing to the stately +beauty as she glided away. "And how she carries herself! For so +young a girl, such tact, such masterly perfection of manner! It +comes from her heart. Happy the man who wins her! With her the least +worldly of men would occupy a most brilliant position in society. +Don't you think so? I only wanted to know your opinion," and Anna +Pavlovna let Pierre go. + +Pierre, in reply, sincerely agreed with her as to Helene's +perfection of manner. If he ever thought of Helene, it was just of her +beauty and her remarkable skill in appearing silently dignified in +society. + +The old aunt received the two young people in her corner, but seemed +desirous of hiding her adoration for Helene and inclined rather to +show her fear of Anna Pavlovna. She looked at her niece, as if +inquiring what she was to do with these people. On leaving them, +Anna Pavlovna again touched Pierre's sleeve, saying: "I hope you won't +say that it is dull in my house again," and she glanced at Helene. + +Helene smiled, with a look implying that she did not admit the +possibility of anyone seeing her without being enchanted. The aunt +coughed, swallowed, and said in French that she was very pleased to +see Helene, then she turned to Pierre with the same words of welcome +and the same look. In the middle of a dull and halting conversation, +Helene turned to Pierre with the beautiful bright smile that she +gave to everyone. Pierre was so used to that smile, and it had so +little meaning for him, that he paid no attention to it. The aunt +was just speaking of a collection of snuffboxes that had belonged to +Pierre's father, Count Bezukhov, and showed them her own box. Princess +Helene asked to see the portrait of the aunt's husband on the box lid. + +"That is probably the work of Vinesse," said Pierre, mentioning a +celebrated miniaturist, and he leaned over the table to take the +snuffbox while trying to hear what was being said at the other table. + +He half rose, meaning to go round, but the aunt handed him the +snuffbox, passing it across Helene's back. Helene stooped forward to +make room, and looked round with a smile. She was, as always at +evening parties, wearing a dress such as was then fashionable, cut +very low at front and back. Her bust, which had always seemed like +marble to Pierre, was so close to him that his shortsighted eyes could +not but perceive the living charm of her neck and shoulders, so near +to his lips that he need only have bent his head a little to have +touched them. He was conscious of the warmth of her body, the scent of +perfume, and the creaking of her corset as she moved. He did not see +her marble beauty forming a complete whole with her dress, but all the +charm of her body only covered by her garments. And having once seen +this he could not help being aware it, just as we cannot renew an +illusion we have once seen through. + +"So you have never noticed before how beautiful I am?" Helene seemed +to say. "You had not noticed that I am a woman? Yes, I am a woman +who may belong to anyone- to you too," said her glance. And at that +moment Pierre felt that Helene not only could, but must, be his +wife, and that it could not be otherwise. + +He knew this at that moment as surely as if he had been standing +at the altar with her. How and when this would be he did not know, +he did not even know if it would be a good thing (he even felt, he +knew not why, that it would be a bad thing), but he knew it would +happen. + +Pierre dropped his eyes, lifted them again, and wished once more +to see her as a distant beauty far removed from him, as he had seen +her every day until then, but he could no longer do it. He could +not, any more than a man who has been looking at a tuft of steppe +grass through the mist and taking it for a tree can again take it +for a tree after he has once recognized it to be a tuft of grass. +She was terribly close to him. She already had power over him, and +between them there was no longer any barrier except the barrier of his +own will. + +"Well, I will leave you in your little corner," came Anna Pavlovna's +voice, "I see you are all right there." + +And Pierre, anxiously trying to remember whether he had done +anything reprehensible, looked round with a blush. It seemed to him +that everyone knew what had happened to him as he knew it himself. + +A little later when he went up to the large circle, Anna Pavlovna +said to him: "I hear you are refitting your Petersburg house?" + +This was true. The architect had told him that it was necessary, and +Pierre, without knowing why, was having his enormous Petersburg +house done up. + +"That's a good thing, but don't move from Prince Vasili's. It is +good to have a friend like the prince," she said, smiling at Prince +Vasili. "I know something about that. Don't I? And you are still so +young. You need advice. Don't be angry with me for exercising an old +woman's privilege." + +She paused, as women always do, expecting something after they +have mentioned their age. "If you marry it will be a different thing," +she continued, uniting them both in one glance. Pierre did not look at +Helene nor she at him. But she was just as terribly close to him. He +muttered something and colored. + +When he got home he could not sleep for a long time for thinking +of what had happened. What had happened? Nothing. He had merely +understood that the woman he had known as a child, of whom when her +beauty was mentioned he had said absent-mindedly: "Yes, she's good +looking," he had understood that this woman might belong to him. + +"But she's stupid. I have myself said she is stupid," he thought. +"There is something nasty, something wrong, in the feeling she excites +in me. I have been told that her brother Anatole was in love with +her and she with him, that there was quite a scandal and that that's +why he was sent away. Hippolyte is her brother... Prince Vasili is her +father... It's bad...." he reflected, but while he was thinking this +(the reflection was still incomplete), he caught himself smiling and +was conscious that another line of thought had sprung up, and while +thinking of her worthlessness he was also dreaming of how she would be +his wife, how she would love him become quite different, and how all +he had thought and heard of her might be false. And he again saw her +not as the daughter of Prince Vasili, but visualized her whole body +only veiled by its gray dress. "But no! Why did this thought never +occur to me before?" and again he told himself that it was impossible, +that there would be something unnatural, and as it seemed to him +dishonorable, in this marriage. He recalled her former words and looks +and the words and looks of those who had seen them together. He +recalled Anna Pavlovna's words and looks when she spoke to him about +his house, recalled thousands of such hints from Prince Vasili and +others, and was seized by terror lest he had already, in some way, +bound himself to do something that was evidently wrong and that he +ought not to do. But at the very time he was expressing this +conviction to himself, in another part of his mind her image rose in +all its womanly beauty. + +CHAPTER II + +In November, 1805, Prince Vasili had to go on a tour of inspection +in four different provinces. He had arranged this for himself so as to +visit his neglected estates at the same time and pick up his son +Anatole where his regiment was stationed, and take him to visit Prince +Nicholas Bolkonski in order to arrange a match for him with the +daughter of that rich old man. But before leaving home and undertaking +these new affairs, Prince Vasili had to settle matters with Pierre, +who, it is true, had latterly spent whole days at home, that is, in +Prince Vasili's house where he was staying, and had been absurd, +excited, and foolish in Helene's presence (as a lover should be), +but had not yet proposed to her. + +"This is all very fine, but things must be settled," said Prince +Vasili to himself, with a sorrowful sigh, one morning, feeling that +Pierre who was under such obligations to him ("But never mind that") +was not behaving very well in this matter. "Youth, frivolity... +well, God be with him," thought he, relishing his own goodness of +heart, "but it must be brought to a head. The day after tomorrow +will be Lelya's name day. I will invite two or three people, and if he +does not understand what he ought to do then it will be my affair- +yes, my affair. I am her father." + +Six weeks after Anna Pavlovna's "At Home" and after the sleepless +night when he had decided that to marry Helene would be a calamity and +that he ought to avoid her and go away, Pierre, despite that decision, +had not left Prince Vasili's and felt with terror that in people's +eyes he was every day more and more connected with her, that it was +impossible for him to return to his former conception of her, that +he could not break away from her, and that though it would be a +terrible thing he would have to unite his fate with hers. He might +perhaps have been able to free himself but that Prince Vasili (who had +rarely before given receptions) now hardly let a day go by without +having an evening party at which Pierre had to be present unless he +wished to spoil the general pleasure and disappoint everyone's +expectation. Prince Vasili, in the rare moments when he was at home, +would take Pierre's hand in passing and draw it downwards, or +absent-mindedly hold out his wrinkled, clean-shaven cheek for Pierre +to kiss and would say: "Till tomorrow," or, "Be in to dinner or I +shall not see you," or, "I am staying in for your sake," and so on. +And though Prince Vasili, when he stayed in (as he said) for +Pierre's sake, hardly exchanged a couple of words with him, Pierre +felt unable to disappoint him. Every day he said to himself one and +the same thing: "It is time I understood her and made up my mind +what she really is. Was I mistaken before, or am I mistaken now? No, +she is not stupid, she is an excellent girl," he sometimes said to +himself "she never makes a mistake, never says anything stupid. She +says little, but what she does say is always clear and simple, so +she is not stupid. She never was abashed and is not abashed now, so +she cannot be a bad woman!" He had often begun to make reflections +or think aloud in her company, and she had always answered him +either by a brief but appropriate remark- showing that it did not +interest her- or by a silent look and smile which more palpably than +anything else showed Pierre her superiority. She was right in +regarding all arguments as nonsense in comparison with that smile. + +She always addressed him with a radiantly confiding smile meant +for him alone, in which there was something more significant than in +the general smile that usually brightened her face. Pierre knew that +everyone was waiting for him to say a word and cross a certain line, +and he knew that sooner or later he would step across it, but an +incomprehensible terror seized him at the thought of that dreadful +step. A thousand times during that month and a half while he felt +himself drawn nearer and nearer to that dreadful abyss, Pierre said to +himself: "What am I doing? I need resolution. Can it be that I have +none?" + +He wished to take a decision, but felt with dismay that in this +matter he lacked that strength of will which he had known in himself +and really possessed. Pierre was one of those who are only strong when +they feel themselves quite innocent, and since that day when he was +overpowered by a feeling of desire while stooping over the snuffbox at +Anna Pavlovna's, an unacknowledged sense of the guilt of that desire +paralyzed his will. + +On Helene's name day, a small party of just their own people- as his +wife said- met for supper at Prince Vasili's. All these friends and +relations had been given to understand that the fate of the young girl +would be decided that evening. The visitors were seated at supper. +Princess Kuragina, a portly imposing woman who had once been handsome, +was sitting at the head of the table. On either side of her sat the +more important guests- an old general and his wife, and Anna +Pavlovna Scherer. At the other end sat the younger and less +important guests, and there too sat the members of the family, and +Pierre and Helene, side by side. Prince Vasili was not having any +supper: he went round the table in a merry mood, sitting down now by +one, now by another, of the guests. To each of them he made some +careless and agreeable remark except to Pierre and Helene, whose +presence he seemed not to notice. He enlivened the whole party. The +wax candles burned brightly, the silver and crystal gleamed, so did +the ladies' toilets and the gold and silver of the men's epaulets; +servants in scarlet liveries moved round the table, the clatter of +plates, knives, and glasses mingled with the animated hum of several +conversations. At one end of the table, the old chamberlain was +heard assuring an old baroness that he loved her passionately, at +which she laughed; at the other could be heard the story of the +misfortunes of some Mary Viktorovna or other. At the center of the +table, Prince Vasili attracted everybody's attention. With a facetious +smile on his face, he was telling the ladies about last Wednesday's +meeting of the Imperial Council, at which Sergey Kuzmich +Vyazmitinov, the new military governor general of Petersburg, had +received and read the then famous rescript of the Emperor Alexander +from the army to Sergey Kuzmich, in which the Emperor said that he was +receiving from all sides declarations of the people's loyalty, that +the declaration from Petersburg gave him particular pleasure, and that +he was proud to be at the head of such a nation and would endeavor +to be worthy of it. This rescript began with the words: "Sergey +Kuzmich, From all sides reports reach me," etc. + +"Well, and so he never got farther than: 'Sergey Kuzmich'?" asked +one of the ladies. + +"Exactly, not a hair's breadth farther," answered Prince Vasili, +laughing, "'Sergey Kuzmich... From all sides... From all sides... +Sergey Kuzmich...' Poor Vyazmitinov could not get any farther! He +began the rescript again and again, but as soon as he uttered 'Sergey' +he sobbed, 'Kuz-mi-ch,' tears, and 'From all sides' was smothered in +sobs and he could get no farther. And again his handkerchief, and +again: 'Sergey Kuzmich, From all sides,'... and tears, till at last +somebody else was asked to read it." + +"Kuzmich... From all sides... and then tears," someone repeated +laughing. + +"Don't be unkind," cried Anna Pavlovna from her end of the table +holding up a threatening finger. "He is such a worthy and excellent +man, our dear Vyazmitinov...." + +Everybody laughed a great deal. At the head of the table, where +the honored guests sat, everyone seemed to be in high spirits and +under the influence of a variety of exciting sensations. Only Pierre +and Helene sat silently side by side almost at the bottom of the +table, a suppressed smile brightening both their faces, a smile that +had nothing to do with Sergey Kuzmich- a smile of bashfulness at their +own feelings. But much as all the rest laughed, talked, and joked, +much as they enjoyed their Rhine wine, saute, and ices, and however +they avoided looking at the young couple, and heedless and unobservant +as they seemed of them, one could feel by the occasional glances +they gave that the story about Sergey Kuzmich, the laughter, and the +food were all a pretense, and that the whole attention of that company +was directed to- Pierre and Helene. Prince Vasili mimicked the sobbing +of Sergey Kuzmich and at the same time his eyes glanced toward his +daughter, and while he laughed the expression on his face clearly +said: "Yes... it's getting on, it will all be settled today." Anna +Pavlovna threatened him on behalf of "our dear Vyazmitinov," and in +her eyes, which, for an instant, glanced at Pierre, Prince Vasili read +a congratulation on his future son-in-law and on his daughter's +happiness. The old princess sighed sadly as she offered some wine to +the old lady next to her and glanced angrily at her daughter, and +her sigh seemed to say: "Yes, there's nothing left for you and me +but to sip sweet wine, my dear, now that the time has come for these +young ones to be thus boldly, provocatively happy." "And what nonsense +all this is that I am saying!" thought a diplomatist, glancing at +the happy faces of the lovers. "That's happiness!" + +Into the insignificant, trifling, and artificial interests uniting +that society had entered the simple feeling of the attraction of a +healthy and handsome young man and woman for one another. And this +human feeling dominated everything else and soared above all their +affected chatter. Jests fell flat, news was not interesting, and the +animation was evidently forced. Not only the guests but even the +footmen waiting at table seemed to feel this, and they forgot their +duties as they looked at the beautiful Helene with her radiant face +and at the red, broad, and happy though uneasy face of Pierre. It +seemed as if the very light of the candles was focused on those two +happy faces alone. + +Pierre felt that he the center of it all, and this both pleased +and embarrassed him. He was like a man entirely absorbed in some +occupation. He did not see, hear, or understand anything clearly. Only +now and then detached ideas and impressions from the world of +reality shot unexpectedly through his mind. + +"So it is all finished!" he thought. "And how has it all happened? +How quickly! Now I know that not because of her alone, nor of myself +alone, but because of everyone, it must inevitably come about. They +are all expecting it, they are so sure that it will happen that I +cannot, I cannot, disappoint them. But how will it be? I do not +know, but it will certainly happen!" thought Pierre, glancing at those +dazzling shoulders close to his eyes. + +Or he would suddenly feel ashamed of he knew not what. He felt it +awkward to attract everyone's attention and to be considered a lucky +man and, with his plain face, to be looked on as a sort of Paris +possessed of a Helen. "But no doubt it always is and must be so!" he +consoled himself. "And besides, what have I done to bring it about? +How did it begin? I traveled from Moscow with Prince Vasili. Then +there was nothing. So why should I not stay at his house? Then I +played cards with her and picked up her reticule and drove out with +her. How did it begin, when did it all come about?" And here he was +sitting by her side as her betrothed, seeing, hearing, feeling her +nearness, her breathing, her movements, her beauty. Then it would +suddenly seem to him that it was not she but he was so unusually +beautiful, and that that was why they all looked so at him, and +flattered by this general admiration he would expand his chest, +raise his head, and rejoice at his good fortune. Suddenly he heard a +familiar voice repeating something to him a second time. But Pierre +was so absorbed that he did not understand what was said. + +"I am asking you when you last heard from Bolkonski," repeated +Prince Vasili a third time. "How absent-minded you are, my dear +fellow." + +Prince Vasili smiled, and Pierre noticed that everyone was smiling +at him and Helene. "Well, what of it, if you all know it?" thought +Pierre. "What of it? It's the truth!" and he himself smiled his gentle +childlike smile, and Helene smiled too. + +"When did you get the letter? Was it from Olmutz?" repeated Prince +Vasili, who pretended to want to know this in order to settle a +dispute. + +"How can one talk or think of such trifles?" thought Pierre. + +"Yes, from Olmutz," he answered, with a sigh. + +After supper Pierre with his partner followed the others into the +drawing room. The guests began to disperse, some without taking +leave of Helene. Some, as if unwilling to distract her from an +important occupation, came up to her for a moment and made haste to go +away, refusing to let her see them off. The diplomatist preserved a +mournful silence as he left the drawing room. He pictured the vanity +of his diplomatic career in comparison with Pierre's happiness. The +old general grumbled at his wife when she asked how his leg was. +"Oh, the old fool," he thought. "That Princess Helene will be +beautiful still when she's fifty." + +"I think I may congratulate you," whispered Anna Pavlovna to the old +princess, kissing her soundly. "If I hadn't this headache I'd have +stayed longer." + +The old princess did not reply, she was tormented by jealousy of her +daughter's happiness. + +While the guests were taking their leave Pierre remained for a +long time alone with Helene in the little drawing room where they were +sitting. He had often before, during the last six weeks, remained +alone with her, but had never spoken to her of love. Now he felt +that it was inevitable, but he could not make up his mind to take +the final step. He felt ashamed; he felt that he was occupying someone +else's place here beside Helene. "This happiness is not for you," some +inner voice whispered to him. "This happiness is for those who have +not in them what there is in you." + +But, as he had to say something, he began by asking her whether +she was satisfied with the party. She replied in her usual simple +manner that this name day of hers had been one of the pleasantest +she had ever had. + +Some of the nearest relatives had not yet left. They were sitting in +the large drawing room. Prince Vasili came up to Pierre with languid +footsteps. Pierre rose and said it was getting late. Prince Vasili +gave him a look of stern inquiry, as though what Pierre had just +said was so strange that one could not take it in. But then the +expression of severity changed, and he drew Pierre's hand downwards, +made him sit down, and smiled affectionately. + +"Well, Lelya?" he asked, turning instantly to his daughter and +addressing her with the careless tone of habitual tenderness natural +to parents who have petted their children from babyhood, but which +Prince Vasili had only acquired by imitating other parents. + +And he again turned to Pierre. + +"Sergey Kuzmich- From all sides-" he said, unbuttoning the top +button of his waistcoat. + +Pierre smiled, but his smile showed that he knew it was not the +story about Sergey Kuzmich that interested Prince Vasili just then, +and Prince Vasili saw that Pierre knew this. He suddenly muttered +something and went away. It seemed to Pierre that even the prince +was disconcerted. The sight of the discomposure of that old man of the +world touched Pierre: he looked at Helene and she too seemed +disconcerted, and her look seemed to say: "Well, it is your own +fault." + +"The step must be taken but I cannot, I cannot!" thought Pierre, and +he again began speaking about indifferent matters, about Sergey +Kuzmich, asking what the point of the story was as he had not heard it +properly. Helene answered with a smile that she too had missed it. + +When Prince Vasili returned to the drawing room, the princess, his +wife, was talking in low tones to the elderly lady about Pierre. + +"Of course, it is a very brilliant match, but happiness, my dear..." + +"Marriages are made in heaven," replied the elderly lady. + +Prince Vasili passed by, seeming not to hear the ladies, and sat +down on a sofa in a far corner of the room. He closed his eyes and +seemed to be dozing. His head sank forward and then he roused himself. + +"Aline," he said to his wife, "go and see what they are about." + +The princess went up to the door, passed by it with a dignified +and indifferent air, and glanced into the little drawing room. +Pierre and Helene still sat talking just as before. + +"Still the same," she said to her husband. + +Prince Vasili frowned, twisting his mouth, his cheeks quivered and +his face assumed the coarse, unpleasant expression peculiar to him. +Shaking himself, he rose, threw back his head, and with resolute steps +went past the ladies into the little drawing room. With quick steps he +went joyfully up to Pierre. His face was so unusually triumphant +that Pierre rose in alarm on seeing it. + +"Thank God!" said Prince Vasili. "My wife has told me everything!- +(He put one arm around Pierre and the other around his daughter.)- "My +dear boy... Lelya... I am very pleased." (His voice trembled.) "I +loved your father... and she will make you a good wife... God bless +you!..." + +He embraced his daughter, and then again Pierre, and kissed him with +his malodorous mouth. Tears actually moistened his cheeks. + +"Princess, come here!" he shouted. + +The old princess came in and also wept. The elderly lady was using +her handkerchief too. Pierre was kissed, and he kissed the beautiful +Helene's hand several times. After a while they were left alone again. + +"All this had to be and could not be otherwise," thought Pierre, "so +it is useless to ask whether it is good or bad. It is good because +it's definite and one is rid of the old tormenting doubt." Pierre held +the hand of his betrothed in silence, looking at her beautiful bosom +as it rose and fell. + +"Helene!" he said aloud and paused. + +"Something special is always said in such cases," he thought, but +could not remember what it was that people say. He looked at her face. +She drew nearer to him. Her face flushed. + +"Oh, take those off... those..." she said, pointing to his +spectacles. + +Pierre took them off, and his eyes, besides the strange look eyes +have from which spectacles have just been removed, had also a +frightened and inquiring look. He was about to stoop over her hand and +kiss it, but with a rapid, almost brutal movement of her head, she +intercepted his lips and met them with her own. Her face struck +Pierre, by its altered, unpleasantly excited expression. + +"It is too late now, it's done; besides I love her," thought Pierre. + +"Je vous aime!"~^ he said, remembering what has to be said at such +moments: but his words sounded so weak that he felt ashamed of +himself. + +^~ "I love you." + +Six weeks later he was married, and settled in Count Bezukhov's +large, newly furnished Petersburg house, the happy possessor, as +people said, of a wife who was a celebrated beauty and of millions +of money. + +CHAPTER III + +Old Prince Nicholas Bolkonski received a letter from Prince Vasili +in November, 1805, announcing that he and his son would be paying +him a visit. "I am starting on a journey of inspection, and of +course I shall think nothing of an extra seventy miles to come and see +you at the same time, my honored benefactor," wrote Prince Vasili. "My + +son Anatole is accompanying me on his way to the army, so I hope you +will allow him personally to express the deep respect that, +emulating his father, he feels for you." + +"It seems that there will be no need to bring Mary out, suitors +are coming to us of their own accord," incautiously remarked the +little princess on hearing the news. + +Prince Nicholas frowned, but said nothing. + +A fortnight after the letter Prince Vasili's servants came one +evening in advance of him, and he and his son arrived next day. + +Old Bolkonski had always had a poor opinion of Prince Vasili's +character, but more so recently, since in the new reigns of Paul and +Alexander Prince Vasili had risen to high position and honors. And +now, from the hints contained in his letter and given by the little +princess, he saw which way the wind was blowing, and his low opinion +changed into a feeling of contemptuous ill will. He snorted whenever +he mentioned him. On the day of Prince Vasili's arrival, Prince +Bolkonski was particularly discontented and out of temper. Whether +he was in a bad temper because Prince Vasili was coming, or whether +his being in a bad temper made him specially annoyed at Prince +Vasili's visit, he was in a bad temper, and in the morning Tikhon +had already advised the architect not to go the prince with his +report. + +"Do you hear how he's walking?" said Tikhon, drawing the architect's +attention to the sound of the prince's footsteps. "Stepping flat on +his heels- we know what that means...." + +However, at nine o'clock the prince, in his velvet coat with a sable +collar and cap, went out for his usual walk. It had snowed the day +before and the path to the hothouse, along which the prince was in the +habit of walking, had been swept: the marks of the broom were still +visible in the snow and a shovel had been left sticking in one of +the soft snowbanks that bordered both sides of the path. The prince +went through the conservatories, the serfs' quarters, and the +outbuildings, frowning and silent. + +"Can a sleigh pass?" he asked his overseer, a venerable man, +resembling his master in manners and looks, who was accompanying him +back to the house. + +"The snow is deep. I am having the avenue swept, your honor." + +The prince bowed his head and went up to the porch. "God be +thanked," thought the overseer, "the storm has blown over!" + +"It would have been hard to drive up, your honor," he added. "I +heard, your honor, that a minister is coming to visit your honor." + +The prince turned round to the overseer and fixed his eyes on him, +frowning. + +"What? A minister? What minister? Who gave orders?" he said in his +shrill, harsh voice. "The road is not swept for the princess my +daughter, but for a minister! For me, there are no ministers!" + +"Your honor, I thought..." + +"You thought!" shouted the prince, his words coming more and more +rapidly and indistinctly. "You thought!... Rascals! Blackgaurds!... +I'll teach you to think!" and lifting his stick he swung it and +would have hit Alpatych, the overseer, had not the latter +instinctively avoided the blow. "Thought... Blackguards..." shouted +the prince rapidly. + +But although Alpatych, frightened at his own temerity in avoiding +the stroke, came up to the prince, bowing his bald head resignedly +before him, or perhaps for that very reason, the prince, though he +continued to shout: "Blackgaurds!... Throw the snow back on the road!" +did not lift his stick again but hurried into the house. + +Before dinner, Princess Mary and Mademoiselle Bourienne, who knew +that the prince was in a bad humor, stood awaiting him; Mademoiselle +Bourienne with a radiant face that said: "I know nothing, I am the +same as usual," and Princess Mary pale, frightened, and with +downcast eyes. What she found hardest to bear was to know that on such +occasions she ought to behave like Mademoiselle Bourienne, but could +not. She thought: "If I seem not to notice he will think that I do not +sympathize with him; if I seem sad and out of spirits myself, he +will say (as he has done before) that I'm in the dumps." + +The prince looked at his daughter's frightened face and snorted. + +"Fool... or dummy!" he muttered. + +"And the other one is not here. They've been telling tales," he +thought- referring to the little princess who was not in the dining +room. + +"Where is the princess?" he asked. "Hiding?" + +"She is not very well," answered Mademoiselle Bourienne with a +bright smile, "so she won't come down. It is natural in her state." + +"Hm! Hm!" muttered the prince, sitting down. + +His plate seemed to him not quite clean, and pointing to a spot he +flung it away. Tikhon caught it and handed it to a footman. The little +princess was not unwell, but had such an overpowering fear of the +prince that, hearing he was in a bad humor, she had decided not to +appear. + +"I am afraid for the baby," she said to Mademoiselle Bourienne: +"Heaven knows what a fright might do." + +In general at Bald Hills the little princess lived in constant fear, +and with a sense of antipathy to the old prince which she did not +realize because the fear was so much the stronger feeling. The +prince reciprocated this antipathy, but it was overpowered by his +contempt for her. When the little princess had grown accustomed to +life at Bald Hills, she took a special fancy to Mademoiselle +Bourienne, spent whole days with her, asked her to sleep in her +room, and often talked with her about the old prince and criticized +him. + +"So we are to have visitors, mon prince?" remarked Mademoiselle +Bourienne, unfolding her white napkin with her rosy fingers. "His +Excellency Prince Vasili Kuragin and his son, I understand?" she +said inquiringly. + +"Hm!- his excellency is a puppy.... I got him his appointment in the +service," said the prince disdainfully. "Why his son is coming I don't +understand. Perhaps Princess Elizabeth and Princess Mary know. I don't +want him." (He looked at his blushing daughter.) "Are you unwell +today? Eh? Afraid of the 'minister' as that idiot Alpatych called +him this morning?" + +"No, mon pere." + +Though Mademoiselle Bourienne had been so unsuccessful in her choice +of a subject, she did not stop talking, but chattered about the +conservatories and the beauty of a flower that had just opened, and +after the soup the prince became more genial. + +After dinner, he went to see his daughter-in-law. The little +princess was sitting at a small table, chattering with Masha, her +maid. She grew pale on seeing her father-in-law. + +She was much altered. She was now plain rather than pretty. Her +cheeks had sunk, her lip was drawn up, and her eyes drawn down. + +"Yes, I feel a kind of oppression," she said in reply to the +prince's question as to how she felt. + +"Do you want anything?" + +"No, merci, mon pere." + +"Well, all right, all right." + +He left the room and went to the waiting room where Alpatych stood +with bowed head. + +"Has the snow been shoveled back?" + +"Yes, your excellency. Forgive me for heaven's sake... It was only +my stupidity." + +"All right, all right," interrupted the prince, and laughing his +unnatural way, he stretched out his hand for Alpatych to kiss, and +then proceeded to his study. + +Prince Vasili arrived that evening. He was met in the avenue by +coachmen and footmen, who, with loud shouts, dragged his sleighs up to +one of the lodges over the road purposely laden with snow. + +Prince Vasili and Anatole had separate rooms assigned to them. + +Anatole, having taken off his overcoat, sat with arms akimbo +before a table on a corner of which he smilingly and absent-mindedly +fixed his large and handsome eyes. He regarded his whole life as a +continual round of amusement which someone for some reason had to +provide for him. And he looked on this visit to a churlish old man and +a rich and ugly heiress in the same way. All this might, he thought, +turn out very well and amusingly. "And why not marry her if she really +has so much money? That never does any harm," thought Anatole. + +He shaved and scented himself with the care and elegance which had +become habitual to him and, his handsome head held high, entered his +father's room with the good-humored and victorious air natural to him. +Prince Vasili's two valets were busy dressing him, and he looked round +with much animation and cheerfully nodded to his son as the latter +entered, as if to say: "Yes, that's how I want you to look." + +"I say, Father, joking apart, is she very hideous?" Anatole asked, +as if continuing a conversation the subject of which had often been +mentioned during the journey. + +"Enough! What nonsense! Above all, try to be respectful and cautious +with the old prince." + +"If he starts a row I'll go away," said Prince Anatole. "I can't +bear those old men! Eh?" + +"Remember, for you everything depends on this." + +In the meantime, not only was it known in the maidservants' rooms +that the minister and his son had arrived, but the appearance of +both had been minutely described. Princess Mary was sitting alone in +her room, vainly trying to master her agitation. + +"Why did they write, why did Lise tell me about it? It can never +happen!" she said, looking at herself in the glass. "How shall I enter +the drawing room? Even if I like him I can't now be myself with +him." The mere thought of her father's look filled her with terror. +The little princess and Mademoiselle Bourienne had already received +from Masha, the lady's maid, the necessary report of how handsome +the minister's son was, with his rosy cheeks and dark eyebrows, and +with what difficulty the father had dragged his legs upstairs while +the son had followed him like an eagle, three steps at a time. +Having received this information, the little princess and Mademoiselle +Bourienne, whose chattering voices had reached her from the +corridor, went into Princess Mary's room. + +"You know they've come, Marie?" said the little princess, waddling +in, and sinking heavily into an armchair. + +She was no longer in the loose gown she generally wore in the +morning, but had on one of her best dresses. Her hair was carefully +done and her face was animated, which, however, did not conceal its +sunken and faded outlines. Dressed as she used to be in Petersburg +society, it was still more noticeable how much plainer she had become. +Some unobtrusive touch had been added to Mademoiselle Bourienne's +toilet which rendered her fresh and prettyface yet more attractive. + +"What! Are you going to remain as you are, dear princess?" she +began. "They'll be announcing that the gentlemen are in the drawing +room and we shall have to go down, and you have not smartened yourself +up at all!" + +The little princess got up, rang for the maid, and hurriedly and +merrily began to devise and carry out a plan of how Princess Mary +should be dressed. Princess Mary's self-esteem was wounded by the fact +that the arrival of a suitor agitated her, and still more so by both +her companions' not having the least conception that it could be +otherwise. To tell them that she felt ashamed for herself and for them +would be to betray her agitation, while to decline their offers to +dress her would prolong their banter and insistence. She flushed, +her beautiful eyes grew dim, red blotches came on her face, and it +took on the unattractive martyrlike expression it so often wore, as +she submitted herself to Mademoiselle Bourienne and Lise. Both these +women quite sincerely tried to make her look pretty. She was so +plain that neither of them could think of her as a rival, so they +began dressing her with perfect sincerity, and with the naive and firm +conviction women have that dress can make a face pretty. + +"No really, my dear, this dress is not pretty," said Lise, looking +sideways at Princess Mary from a little distance. "You have a maroon +dress, have it fetched. Really! You know the fate of your whole life +may be at stake. But this one is too light, it's not becoming!" + +It was not the dress, but the face and whole figure of Princess Mary +that was not pretty, but neither Mademoiselle Bourienne nor the little +princess felt this; they still thought that if a blue ribbon were +placed in the hair, the hair combed up, and the blue scarf arranged +lower on the best maroon dress, and so on, all would be well. They +forgot that the frightened face and the figure could not be altered, +and that however they might change the setting and adornment of that +face, it would still remain piteous and plain. After two or three +changes to which Princess Mary meekly submitted, just as her hair +had been arranged on the top of her head (a style that quite altered +and spoiled her looks) and she had put on a maroon dress with a +pale-blue scarf, the little princess walked twice round her, now +adjusting a fold of the dress with her little hand, now arranging +the scarf and looking at her with her head bent first on one side +and then on the other. + +"No, it will not do," she said decidedly, clasping her hands. "No, +Mary, really this dress does not suit you. I prefer you in your little +gray everyday dress. Now please, do it for my sake. Katie," she said +to the maid, "bring the princess her gray dress, and you'll see, +Mademoiselle Bourienne, how I shall arrange it," she added, smiling +with a foretaste of artistic pleasure. + +But when Katie brought the required dress, Princess Mary remained +sitting motionless before the glass, looking at her face, and saw in +the mirror her eyes full of tears and her mouth quivering, ready to +burst into sobs. + +"Come, dear princess," said Mademoiselle Bourienne, "just one more +little effort." + +The little princess, taking the dress from the maid, came up to +Princess Mary. + +"Well, now we'll arrange something quite simple and becoming," she +said. + +The three voices, hers, Mademoiselle Bourienne's, and Katie's, who +was laughing at something, mingled in a merry sound, like the chirping +of birds. + +"No, leave me alone," said Princess Mary. + +Her voice sounded so serious and so sad that the chirping of the +birds was silenced at once. They looked at the beautiful, large, +thoughtful eyes full of tears and of thoughts, gazing shiningly and +imploringly at them, and understood that it was useless and even cruel +to insist. + +"At least, change your coiffure," said the little princess. +"Didn't I tell you," she went on, turning reproachfully to +Mademoiselle Bourienne, "Mary's is a face which such a coiffure does +not suit in the least. Not in the least! Please change it." + +"Leave me alone, please leave me alone! It is all quite the same +to me," answered a voice struggling with tears. + +Mademoiselle Bourienne and the little princess had to own to +themselves that Princess Mary in this guise looked very plain, worse +than usual, but it was too late. She was looking at them with an +expression they both knew, an expression thoughtful and sad. This +expression in Princess Mary did not frighten them (she never +inspired fear in anyone), but they knew that when it appeared on her +face, she became mute and was not to be shaken in her determination. + +"You will change it, won't you?" said Lise. And as Princess Mary +gave no answer, she left the room. + +Princess Mary was left alone. She did not comply with Lise's +request, she not only left her hair as it was, but did not even look +in her glass. Letting her arms fall helplessly, she sat with +downcast eyes and pondered. A husband, a man, a strong dominant and +strangely attractive being rose in her imagination, and carried her +into a totally different happy world of his own. She fancied a +child, her own- such as she had seen the day before in the arms of her +nurse's daughter- at her own breast, the husband standing by and +gazing tenderly at her and the child. "But no, it is impossible, I +am too ugly," she thought. + +"Please come to tea. The prince will be out in a moment," came the +maid's voice at the door. + +She roused herself, and felt appalled at what she had been thinking, +and before going down she went into the room where the icons hung and, +her eyes fixed on the dark face of a large icon of the Saviour lit +by a lamp, she stood before it with folded hands for a few moments. +A painful doubt filled her soul. Could the joy of love, of earthly +love for a man, be for her? In her thoughts of marriage Princess +Mary dreamed of happiness and of children, but her strongest, most +deeply hidden longing was for earthly love. The more she tried to hide +this feeling from others and even from herself, the stronger it +grew. "O God," she said, "how am I to stifle in my heart these +temptations of the devil? How am I to renounce forever these vile +fancies, so as peacefully to fulfill Thy will?" And scarcely had she +put that question than God gave her the answer in her own heart. +"Desire nothing for thyself, seek nothing, be not anxious or +envious. Man's future and thy own fate must remain hidden from thee, +but live so that thou mayest be ready for anything. If it be God's +will to prove thee in the duties of marriage, be ready to fulfill +His will." With this consoling thought (but yet with a hope for the +fulfillment of her forbidden earthly longing) Princess Mary sighed, +and having crossed herself went down, thinking neither of her gown and +coiffure nor of how she would go in nor of what she would say. What +could all that matter in comparison with the will of God, without +Whose care not a hair of man's head can fall? + +CHAPTER IV + +When Princess Mary came down, Prince Vasili and his son were already +in the drawing room, talking to the little princess and Mademoiselle +Bourienne. When she entered with her heavy step, treading on her +heels, the gentlemen and Mademoiselle Bourienne rose and the little +princess, indicating her to the gentlemen, said: "Voila Marie!" +Princess Mary saw them all and saw them in detail. She saw Prince +Vasili's face, serious for an instant at the sight of her, but +immediately smiling again, and the little princess curiously noting +the impression "Marie" produced on the visitors. And she saw +Mademoiselle Bourienne, with her ribbon and pretty face, and her +unusually animated look which was fixed on him, but him she could +not see, she only saw something large, brilliant, and handsome +moving toward her as she entered the room. Prince Vasili approached +first, and she kissed the bold forehead that bent over her hand and +answered his question by saying that, on the contrary, she +remembered him quite well. Then Anatole came up to her. She still +could not see him. She only felt a soft hand taking hers firmly, and +she touched with her lips a white forehead, over which was beautiful +light-brown hair smelling of pomade. When she looked up at him she was +struck by his beauty. Anatole stood with his right thumb under a +button of his uniform, his chest expanded and his back drawn in, +slightly swinging one foot, and, with his head a little bent, looked +with beaming face at the princess without speaking and evidently not +thinking about her at all. Anatole was not quick-witted, nor ready +or eloquent in conversation, but he had the faculty, so invaluable +in society, of composure and imperturbable self-possession. If a man +lacking in self-confidence remains dumb on a first introduction and +betrays a consciousness of the impropriety of such silence and an +anxiety to find something to say, the effect is bad. But Anatole was +dumb, swung his foot, and smilingly examined the princess' hair. It +was evident that he could be silent in this way for a very long +time. "If anyone finds this silence inconvenient, let him talk, but +I don't want to"' he seemed to say. Besides this, in his behavior to +women Anatole had a manner which particularly inspires in them +curiosity, awe, and even love- a supercilious consciousness of his own +superiority. It was was as if he said to them: "I know you, I know +you, but why should I bother about you? You'd be only too glad, of +course." Perhaps he did not really think this when he met women- +even probably he did not, for in general he thought very little- but +his looks and manner gave that impression. The princess felt this, and +as if wishing to show him that she did not even dare expect to +interest him, she turned to his father. The conversation was general +and animated, thanks to Princess Lise's voice and little downy lip +that lifted over her white teeth. She met Prince Vasili with that +playful manner often employed by lively chatty people, and +consisting in the assumption that between the person they so address +and themselves there are some semi-private, long-established jokes and +amusing reminiscences, though no such reminiscences really exist- just +as none existed in this case. Prince Vasili readily adopted her tone +and the little princess also drew Anatole, whom she hardly knew, +into these amusing recollections of things that had never occurred. +Mademoiselle Bourienne also shared them and even Princess Mary felt +herself pleasantly made to share in these merry reminiscences. + +"Here at least we shall have the benefit of your company all to +ourselves, dear prince," said the little princess (of course, in +French) to Prince Vasili. "It's not as at Annette's~^ receptions +where you always ran away; you remember cette chere Annette!" + +^~ Anna Pavlovna. + +"Ah, but you won't talk politics to me like Annette!" + +"And our little tea table?" + +"Oh, yes!" + +"Why is it you were never at Annette's?" the little princess asked +Anatole. "Ah, I know, I know," she said with a sly glance, "your +brother Hippolyte told me about your goings on. Oh!" and she shook her +finger at him, "I have even heard of your doings in Paris!" + +"And didn't Hippolyte tell you?" asked Prince Vasili, turning to his +son and seizing the little princess' arm as if she would have run away +and he had just managed to catch her, "didn't he tell you how he +himself was pining for the dear princess, and how she showed him the +door? Oh, she is a pearl among women, Princess," he added, turning +to Princess Mary. + +When Paris was mentioned, Mademoiselle Bourienne for her part seized +the opportunity of joining in the general current of recollections. + +She took the liberty of inquiring whether it was long since +Anatole had left Paris and how he had liked that city. Anatole +answered the Frenchwoman very readily and, looking at her with a +smile, talked to her about her native land. When he saw the pretty +little Bourienne, Anatole came to the conclusion that he would not +find Bald Hills dull either. "Not at all bad!" he thought, examining +her, "not at all bad, that little companion! I hope she will bring her +along with her when we're married, la petite est gentille."~^ + +^~ The little one is charming. + +The old prince dressed leisurely in his study, frowning and +considering what he was to do. The coming of these visitors annoyed +him. "What are Prince Vasili and that son of his to me? Prince +Vasili is a shallow braggart and his son, no doubt, is a fine +specimen," he grumbled to himself. What angered him was that the +coming of these visitors revived in his mind an unsettled question +he always tried to stifle, one about which he always deceived himself. +The question was whether he could ever bring himself to part from +his daughter and give her to a husband. The prince never directly +asked himself that question, knowing beforehand that he would have +to answer it justly, and justice clashed not only with his feelings +but with the very possibility of life. Life without Princess Mary, +little as he seemed to value her, was unthinkable to him. "And why +should she marry?" he thought. "To be unhappy for certain. There's +Lise, married to Andrew- a better husband one would think could hardly +be found nowadays- but is she contented with her lot? And who would +marry Marie for love? Plain and awkward! They'll take her for her +connections and wealth. Are there no women living unmarried, and +even the happier for it?" So thought Prince Bolkonski while +dressing, and yet the question he was always putting off demanded an +immediate answer. Prince Vasili had brought his son with the evident +intention of proposing, and today or tomorrow he would probably ask +for an answer. His birth and position in society were not bad. +"Well, I've nothing against it," the prince said to himself, "but he +must be worthy of her. And that is what we shall see." + +"That is what we shall see! That is what we shall see!" he added +aloud. + +He entered the drawing room with his usual alert step, glancing +rapidly round the company. He noticed the change in the little +princess' dress, Mademoiselle Bourienne's ribbon, Princess Mary's +unbecoming coiffure, Mademoiselle Bourienne's and Anatole's smiles, +and the loneliness of his daughter amid the general conversation. "Got +herself up like a fool!" he thought, looking irritably at her. "She is +shameless, and he ignores her!" + +He went straight up to Prince Vasili. + +"Well! How d'ye do? How d'ye do? Glad to see you!" + +"Friendship laughs at distance," began Prince Vasili in his usual +rapid, self-confident, familiar tone. "Here is my second son; please +love and befriend him." + +Prince Bolkonski surveyed Anatole. + +"Fine young fellow! Fine young fellow!" he said. "Well, come and +kiss me," and he offered his cheek. + +Anatole kissed the old man, and looked at him with curiosity and +perfect composure, waiting for a display of the eccentricities his +father had told him to expect. + +Prince Bolkonski sat down in his usual place in the corner of the +sofa and, drawing up an armchair for Prince Vasili, pointed to it +and began questioning him about political affairs and news. He +seemed to listen attentively to what Prince Vasili said, but kept +glancing at Princess Mary. + +"And so they are writing from Potsdam already?" he said, repeating +Prince Vasili's last words. Then rising, he suddenly went up to his +daughter. + +"Is it for visitors you've got yourself up like that, eh?" said +he. "Fine, very fine! You have done up your hair in this new way for +the visitors, and before the visitors I tell you that in future you +are never to dare to change your way of dress without my consent." + +"It was my fault, mon pere," interceded the little princess, with +a blush. + +"You must do as you please," said Prince Bolkonski, bowing to his +daughter-in-law, "but she need not make a fool of herself, she's plain +enough as it is." + +And he sat down again, paying no more attention to his daughter, who +was reduced to tears. + +"On the contrary, that coiffure suits the princess very well," +said Prince Vasili. + +"Now you, young prince, what's your name?" said Prince Bolkonski, +turning to Anatole, "come here, let us talk and get acquainted." + +"Now the fun begins," thought Anatole, sitting down with a smile +beside the old prince. + +"Well, my dear boy, I hear you've been educated abroad, not taught +to read and write by the deacon, like your father and me. Now tell me, +my dear boy, are you serving in the Horse Guards?" asked the old +man, scrutinizing Anatole closely and intently. + +"No, I have been transferred to the line," said Anatole, hardly able +to restrain his laughter. + +"Ah! That's a good thing. So, my dear boy, you wish to serve the +Tsar and the country? It is wartime. Such a fine fellow must serve. +Well, are you off to the front?" + +"No, Prince, our regiment has gone to the front, but I am +attached... what is it I am attached to, Papa?" said Anatole, +turning to his father with a laugh. + +"A splendid soldier, splendid! 'What am I attached to!' Ha, ha, ha!" +laughed Prince Bolkonski, and Anatole laughed still louder. Suddenly +Prince Bolkonski frowned. + +"You may go," he said to Anatole. + +Anatole returned smiling to the ladies. + +"And so you've had him educated abroad, Prince Vasili, haven't you?" +said the old prince to Prince Vasili. + +"I have done my best for him, and I can assure you the education +there is much better than ours." + +"Yes, everything is different nowadays, everything is changed. The +lad's a fine fellow, a fine fellow! Well, come with me now." He took +Prince Vasili's arm and led him to his study. As soon as they were +alone together, Prince Vasili announced his hopes and wishes to the +old prince. + +"Well, do you think I shall prevent her, that I can't part from +her?" said the old prince angrily. "What an idea! I'm ready for it +tomorrow! Only let me tell you, I want to know my son-in-law better. +You know my principles- everything aboveboard? I will ask her tomorrow +in your presence; if she is willing, then he can stay on. He can +stay and I'll see." The old prince snorted. "Let her marry, it's all +the same to me!" he screamed in the same piercing tone as when parting +from his son. + +"I will tell you frankly," said Prince Vasili in the tone of a +crafty man convinced of the futility of being cunning with so +keen-sighted companion. "You know, you see right through people. +Anatole is no genius, but he is an honest, goodhearted lad; an +excellent son or kinsman." + +"All right, all right, we'll see!" + +As always happens when women lead lonely lives for any length of +time without male society, on Anatole's appearance all the three women +of Prince Bolkonski's household felt that their life had not been real +till then. Their powers of reasoning, feeling, and observing +immediately increased tenfold, and their life, which seemed to have +been passed in darkness, was suddenly lit up by a new brightness, full +of significance. + +Princess Mary grew quite unconscious of her face and coiffure. The +handsome open face of the man who might perhaps be her husband +absorbed all her attention. He seemed to her kind, brave, +determined, manly, and magnanimous. She felt convinced of that. +Thousands of dreams of a future family life continually rose in her +imagination. She drove them away and tried to conceal them. + +"But am I not too cold with him?" thought the princess. "I try to be +reserved because in the depth of my soul I feel too near to him +already, but then he cannot know what I think of him and may imagine +that I do not like him." + +And Princess Mary tried, but could not manage, to be cordial to +her new guest. "Poor girl, she's devilish ugly!" thought Anatole. + +Mademoiselle Bourienne, also roused to great excitement by Anatole's +arrival, thought in another way. Of course, she, a handsome young +woman without any definite position, without relations or even a +country, did not intend to devote her life to serving Prince +Bolkonski, to reading aloud to him and being friends with Princess +Mary. Mademoiselle Bourienne had long been waiting for a Russian +prince who, able to appreciate at a glance her superiority to the +plain, badly dressed, ungainly Russian princesses, would fall in +love with her and carry her off; and here at last was a Russian +prince. Mademoiselle Bourienne knew a story, heard from her aunt but +finished in her own way, which she liked to repeat to herself. It +was the story of a girl who had been seduced, and to whom her poor +mother (sa pauvre mere) appeared, and reproached her for yielding to a +man without being married. Mademoiselle Bourienne was often touched to +tears as in imagination she told this story to him, her seducer. And +now he, a real Russian prince, had appeared. He would carry her away +and then sa pauvre mere would appear and he would marry her. So her +future shaped itself in Mademoiselle Bourienne's head at the very time +she was talking to Anatole about Paris. It was not calculation that +guided her (she did not even for a moment consider what she should +do), but all this had long been familiar to her, and now that +Anatole had appeared it just grouped itself around him and she +wished and tried to please him as much as possible. + +The little princess, like an old war horse that hears the trumpet, +unconsciously and quite forgetting her condition, prepared for the +familiar gallop of coquetry, without any ulterior motive or any +struggle, but with naive and lighthearted gaiety. + +Although in female society Anatole usually assumed the role of a man +tired of being run after by women, his vanity was flattered by the +spectacle of his power over these three women. Besides that, he was +beginning to feel for the pretty and provocative Mademoiselle +Bourienne that passionate animal feeling which was apt to master him +with great suddenness and prompt him to the coarsest and most reckless +actions. + +After tea, the company went into the sitting room and Princess +Mary was asked to play on the clavichord. Anatole, laughing and in +high spirits, came and leaned on his elbows, facing her and beside +Mademoiselle Bourienne. Princess Mary felt his look with a painfully +joyous emotion. Her favorite sonata bore her into a most intimately +poetic world and the look she felt upon her made that world still more +poetic. But Anatole's expression, though his eyes were fixed on her, +referred not to her but to the movements of Mademoiselle Bourienne's +little foot, which he was then touching with his own under the +clavichord. Mademoiselle Bourienne was also looking at Princess +Mary, and in her lovely eyes there was a look of fearful joy and +hope that was also new to the princess. + +"How she loves me!" thought Princess Mary. "How happy I am now, +and how happy I may be with such a friend and such a husband! Husband? +Can it be possible?" she thought, not daring to look at his face, +but still feeling his eyes gazing at her. + +In the evening, after supper, when all were about to retire, Anatole +kissed Princess Mary's hand. She did not know how she found the +courage, but she looked straight into his handsome face as it came +near to her shortsighted eyes. Turning from Princess Mary he went up +and kissed Mademoiselle Bourienne's hand. (This was not etiquette, but +then he did everything so simply and with such assurance!) +Mademoiselle Bourienne flushed, and gave the princess a frightened +look. + +"What delicacy! " thought the princess. "Is it possible that Amelie" +(Mademoiselle Bourienne) "thinks I could be jealous of her, and not +value her pure affection and devotion to me?" She went up to her and +kissed her warmly. Anatole went up to kiss the little princess' hand. + +"No! No! No! When your father writes to tell me that you are +behaving well I will give you my hand to kiss. Not till then!" she +said. And smilingly raising a finger at him, she left the room. + +CHAPTER V + +They all separated, but, except Anatole who fell asleep as soon as +he got into bed, all kept awake a long time that night. + +"Is he really to be my husband, this stranger who is so kind- yes, +kind, that is the chief thing," thought Princess Mary; and fear, which +she had seldom experienced, came upon her. She feared to look round, +it seemed to her that someone was there standing behind the screen +in the dark corner. And this someone was he- the devil- and he was +also this man with the white forehead, black eyebrows, and red lips. + +She rang for her maid and asked her to sleep in her room. + +Mademoiselle Bourienne walked up and down the conservatory for a +long time that evening, vainly expecting someone, now smiling at +someone, now working herself up to tears with the imaginary words of +her pauvre mere rebuking her for her fall. + +The little princess grumbled to her maid that her bed was badly +made. She could not lie either on her face or on her side. Every +position was awkward and uncomfortable, and her burden oppressed her +now more than ever because Anatole's presence had vividly recalled +to her the time when she was not like that and when everything was +light and gay. She sat in an armchair in her dressing jacket and +nightcap and Katie, sleepy and disheveled, beat and turned the heavy +feather bed for the third time, muttering to herself. + +"I told you it was all lumps and holes!" the little princess +repeated. "I should be glad enough to fall asleep, so it's not my +fault!" and her voice quivered like that of a child about to cry. + +The old prince did not sleep either. Tikhon, half asleep, heard +him pacing angrily about and snorting. The old prince felt as though + +he had been insulted through his daughter. The insult was the more +pointed because it concerned not himself but another, his daughter, +whom he loved more than himself. He kept telling himself that he would +consider the whole matter and decide what was right and how he +should act, but instead of that he only excited himself more and more. + +"The first man that turns up- she forgets her father and +everything else, runs upstairs and does up her hair and wags her +tail and is unlike herself! Glad to throw her father over! And she +knew I should notice it. Fr... fr... fr! And don't I see that that +idiot had eyes only for Bourienne- I shall have to get rid of her. And +how is it she has not pride enough to see it? If she has no pride +for herself she might at least have some for my sake! She must be +shown that the blockhead thinks nothing of her and looks only at +Bourienne. No, she has no pride... but I'll let her see...." + +The old prince knew that if he told his daughter she was making a +mistake and that Anatole meant to flirt with Mademoiselle Bourienne, +Princess Mary's self-esteem would be wounded and his point (not to +be parted from her) would be gained, so pacifying himself with this +thought, he called Tikhon and began to undress. + +"What devil brought them here?" thought he, while Tikhon was putting +the nightshirt over his dried-up old body and gray-haired chest. "I +never invited them. They came to disturb my life- and there is not +much of it left." + +"Devil take 'em!" he muttered, while his head was still covered by +the shirt. + +Tikhon knew his master's habit of sometimes thinking aloud, and +therefore met with unaltered looks the angrily inquisitive +expression of the face that emerged from the shirt. + +"Gone to bed?" asked the prince. + +Tikhon, like all good valets, instinctively knew the direction of +his master's thoughts. He guessed that the question referred to Prince +Vasili and his son. + +"They have gone to bed and put out their lights, your excellency." + +"No good... no good..." said the prince rapidly, and thrusting his +feet into his slippers and his arms into the sleeves of his dressing +gown, he went to the couch on which he slept. + +Though no words had passed between Anatole and Mademoiselle +Bourienne, they quite understood one another as to the first part of +their romance, up to the appearance of the pauvre mere; they +understood that they had much to say to one another in private and +so they had been seeking an opportunity since morning to meet one +another alone. When Princess Mary went to her father's room at the +usual hour, Mademoiselle Bourienne and Anatole met in the +conservatory. + +Princess Mary went to the door of the study with special +trepidation. It seemed to her that not only did everybody know that +her fate would be decided that day, but that they also knew what she +thought about it. She read this in Tikhon's face and in that of Prince +Vasili's valet, who made her a low bow when she met him in the +corridor carrying hot water. + +The old prince was very affectionate and careful in his treatment of +his daughter that morning. Princess Mary well knew this painstaking +expression of her father's. His face wore that expression when his dry +hands clenched with vexation at her not understanding a sum in +arithmetic, when rising from his chair he would walk away from her, +repeating in a low voice the same words several times over. + +He came to the point at once, treating her ceremoniously. + +"I have had a proposition made me concerning you," he said with an +unnatural smile. "I expect you have guessed that Prince Vasili has not +come and brought his pupil with him" (for some reason Prince Bolkonski +referred to Anatole as a "pupil") "for the sake of my beautiful +eyes. Last night a proposition was made me on your account and, as you +know my principles, I refer it to you." + +"How am I to understand you, mon pere?" said the princess, growing +pale and then blushing. + +"How understand me!" cried her father angrily. "Prince Vasili +finds you to his taste as a daughter-in-law and makes a proposal to +you on his pupil's behalf. That's how it's to be understood! 'How +understand it'!... And I ask you!" + +"I do not know what you think, Father," whispered the princess. + +"I? I? What of me? Leave me out of the question. I'm not going to +get married. What about you? That's what I want to know." + +The princess saw that her father regarded the matter with +disapproval, but at that moment the thought occurred to her that her +fate would be decided now or never. She lowered her eyes so as not +to see the gaze under which she felt that she could not think, but +would only be able to submit from habit, and she said: "I wish only to +do your will, but if I had to express my own desire..." She had no +time to finish. The old prince interrupted her. + +"That's admirable!" he shouted. "He will take you with your dowry +and take Mademoiselle Bourienne into the bargain. She'll be the +wife, while you..." + +The prince stopped. He saw the effect these words had produced on +his daughter. She lowered her head and was ready to burst into tears. + +"Now then, now then, I'm only joking!" he said. "Remember this, +Princess, I hold to the principle that a maiden has a full right to +choose. I give you freedom. Only remember that your life's happiness +depends on your decision. Never mind me!" + +"But I do not know, Father!" + +"There's no need to talk! He receives his orders and will marry +you or anybody; but you are free to choose.... Go to your room, +think it over, and come back in an hour and tell me in his presence: +yes or no. I know you will pray over it. Well, pray if you like, but +you had better think it over. Go! Yes or no, yes or no, yes or no!" he +still shouted when the princess, as if lost in a fog, had already +staggered out of the study. + +Her fate was decided and happily decided. But what her father had +said about Mademoiselle Bourienne was dreadful. It was untrue to be +sure, but still it was terrible, and she could not help thinking of +it. She was going straight on through the conservatory, neither seeing +nor hearing anything, when suddenly the well-known whispering of +Mademoiselle Bourienne aroused her. She raised her eyes, and two steps +away saw Anatole embracing the Frenchwoman and whispering something to +her. With a horrified expression on his handsome face, Anatole +looked at Princess Mary, but did not at once take his arm from the +waist of Mademoiselle Bourienne who had not yet seen her. + +"Who's that? Why? Wait a moment!" Anatole's face seemed to say. +Princess Mary looked at them in silence. She could not understand +it. At last Mademoiselle Bourienne gave a scream and ran away. Anatole +bowed to Princess Mary with a gay smile, as if inviting her to join in +a laugh at this strange incident, and then shrugging his shoulders +went to the door that led to his own apartments. + +An hour later, Tikhon came to call Princess Mary to the old +prince; he added that Prince Vasili was also there. When Tikhon came +to her Princess Mary was sitting on the sofa in her room, holding +the weeping Mademoiselle Bourienne in her arms and gently stroking her +hair. The princess' beautiful eyes with all their former calm radiance +were looking with tender affection and pity at Mademoiselle +Bourienne's pretty face. + +"No, Princess, I have lost your affection forever!" said +Mademoiselle Bourienne. + +"Why? I love you more than ever," said Princess Mary, "and I will +try to do all I can for your happiness." + +"But you despise me. You who are so pure can never understand +being so carried away by passion. Oh, only my poor mother..." + +"I quite understand," answered Princess Mary, with a sad smile. +"Calm yourself, my dear. I will go to my father," she said, and went +out. + +Prince Vasili, with one leg thrown high over the other and a +snuffbox in his hand, was sitting there with a smile of deep emotion +on his face, as if stirred to his heart's core and himself +regretting and laughing at his own sensibility, when Princess Mary +entered. He hurriedly took a pinch of snuff. + +"Ah, my dear, my dear!" he began, rising and taking her by both +hands. Then, sighing, he added: "My son's fate is in your hands. +Decide, my dear, good, gentle Marie, whom I have always loved as a +daughter!" + +He drew back and a real tear appeared in his eye. + +"Fr... fr..." snorted Prince Bolkonski. "The prince is making a +proposition to you in his pupil's- I mean, his son's- name. Do you +wish or not to be Prince Anatole Kuragin's wife? Reply: yes or no," he +shouted, "and then I shall reserve the right to state my opinion also. +Yes, my opinion, and only my opinion," added Prince Bolkonski, turning +to Prince Vasili and answering his imploring look. "Yes, or no?" + +"My desire is never to leave you, Father, never to separate my +life from yours. I don't wish to marry," she answered positively, +glancing at Prince Vasili and at her father with her beautiful eyes. + +"Humbug! Nonsense! Humbug, humbug, humbug!" cried Prince +Bolkonski, frowning and taking his daughter's hand; he did not kiss +her, but only bending his forehead to hers just touched it, and +pressed her hand so that she winced and uttered a cry. + +Prince Vasili rose. + +"My dear, I must tell you that this is a moment I shall never, never +forget. But, my dear, will you not give us a little hope of touching +this heart, so kind and generous? Say 'perhaps'... The future is so +long. Say 'perhaps.'" + +"Prince, what I have said is all there is in my heart. I thank you +for the honor, but I shall never be your son's wife." + +"Well, so that's finished, my dear fellow! I am very glad to have +seen you. Very glad! Go back to your rooms, Princess. Go!" said the +old prince. "Very, very glad to glad to have seen you," repeated he, +embracing Prince Vasili. + +"My vocation is a different one," thought Princess Mary. "My +vocation is to be happy with another kind of happiness, the +happiness of love and self-sacrifice. And cost what it may, I will +arrange poor Amelie's happiness, she loves him so passionately, and so +passionately repents. I will do all I can to arrange the match between +them. If he is not rich I will give her the means; I will ask my +father and Andrew. I shall be so happy when she is his wife. She is so +unfortunate, a stranger, alone, helpless! And, oh God, how +passionately she must love him if she could so far forget herself! +Perhaps I might have done the same!..." thought Princess Mary. + +CHAPTER VI + +It was long since the Rostovs had news of Nicholas. Not till +midwinter was the count at last handed a letter addressed in his son's +handwriting. On receiving it, he ran on tiptoe to his study in alarm +and haste, trying to escape notice, closed the door, and began to read +the letter. + +Anna Mikhaylovna, who always knew everything that passed in the +house, on hearing of the arrival of the letter went softly into the +room and found the count with it in his hand, sobbing and laughing +at the same time. + +Anna Mikhaylovna, though her circumstances had improved, was still +living with the Rostovs. + +"My dear friend?" said she, in a tone of pathetic inquiry, +prepared to sympathize in any way. + +The count sobbed yet more. + +"Nikolenka... a letter... wa... a... s... wounded... my darling +boy... the countess... promoted to be an officer... thank God... How +tell the little countess!" + +Anna Mikhaylovna sat down beside him, with her own handkerchief +wiped the tears from his eyes and from the letter, then having dried +her own eyes she comforted the count, and decided that at dinner and +till teatime she would prepare the countess, and after tea, with God's +help, would inform her. + +At dinner Anna Mikhaylovna talked the whole time about the war +news and about Nikolenka, twice asked when the last letter had been +received from him, though she knew that already, and remarked that +they might very likely be getting a letter from him that day. Each +time that these hints began to make the countess anxious and she +glanced uneasily at the count and at Anna Mikhaylovna, the latter very +adroitly turned the conversation to insignificant matters. Natasha, +who, of the whole family, was the most gifted with a capacity to +feel any shades of intonation, look, and expression, pricked up her +ears from the beginning of the meal and was certain that there was +some secret between her father and Anna Mikhaylovna, that it had +something to do with her brother, and that Anna Mikhaylovna was +preparing them for it. Bold as she was, Natasha, who knew how +sensitive her mother was to anything relating to Nikolenka, did not +venture to ask any questions at dinner, but she was too excited to eat +anything and kept wriggling about on her chair regardless of her +governess' remarks. After dinner, she rushed head long after Anna +Mikhaylovna and, dashing at her, flung herself on her neck as soon +as she overtook her in the sitting room. + +"Auntie, darling, do tell me what it is!" + +"Nothing, my dear." + +"No, dearest, sweet one, honey, I won't give up- I know you know +something." + +Anna Mikhaylovna shook her head. + +"You are a little slyboots," she said. + +"A letter from Nikolenka! I'm sure of it!" exclaimed Natasha, +reading confirmation in Anna Mikhaylovna's face. + +"But for God's sake, be careful, you know how it may affect your +mamma." + +"I will, I will, only tell me! You won't? Then I will go and tell at +once." + +Anna Mikhaylovna, in a few words, told her the contents of the +letter, on condition that she should tell no one. + +"No, on my true word of honor," said Natasha,crossing herself, "I +won't tell anyone!" and she ran off at once to Sonya. + +"Nikolenka... wounded... a letter," she announced in gleeful +triumph. + +"Nicholas!" was all Sonya said, instantly turning white. + +Natasha, seeing the impression the of her brother's wound produced +on Sonya, felt for the first time the sorrowful side of the news. + +She rushed to Sonya, hugged her, and began to cry. + +"A little wound, but he has been made an officer; he is well now, he +wrote himself," said she through her tears. + +"There now! It's true that all you women are crybabies," remarked +Petya, pacing the room with large, resolute strides. "Now I'm very +glad, very glad indeed, that my brother has distinguished himself +so. You are all blubberers and understand nothing." + +Natasha smiled through her tears. + +"You haven't read the letter?" asked Sonya. + +"No, but she said that it was all over and that he's now an +officer." + +"Thank God!" said Sonya, crossing herself. "But perhaps she deceived +you. Let us go to Mamma." + +Petya paced the room in silence for a time. + +"If I'd been in Nikolenka's place I would have killed even more of +those Frenchmen," he said. "What nasty brutes they are! I'd have +killed so many that there'd have been a heap of them." + +"Hold your tongue, Petya, what a goose you are!" + +"I'm not a goose, but they are who cry about trifles," said Petya. + +"Do you remember him?" Natasha suddenly asked, after a moment's +silence. + +Sonya smiled. + +"Do I remember Nicholas?" + +"No, Sonya, but do you remember so that you remember him +perfectly, remember everything?" said Natasha, with an expressive +gesture, evidently wishing to give her words a very definite +meaning. "I remember Nikolenka too, I remember him well," she said. +"But I don't remember Boris. I don't remember him a bit." + +"What! You don't remember Boris?" asked Sonya in surprise. + +"It's not that I don't remember- I know what he is like, but not +as I remember Nikolenka. Him- I just shut my eyes and remember, but +Boris... No!" (She shut her eyes.)"No! there's nothing at all." + +"Oh, Natasha!" said Sonya, looking ecstatically and earnestly at her +friend as if she did not consider her worthy to hear what she meant to +say and as if she were saying it to someone else, with whom joking was +out of the question, "I am in love with your brother once for all and, +whatever may happen to him or to me, shall never cease to love him +as long as I live." + +Natasha looked at Sonya with wondering and inquisitive eyes, and +said nothing. She felt that Sonya was speaking the truth, that there +was such love as Sonya was speaking of. But Natasha had not yet felt +anything like it. She believed it could be, but did not understand it. + +"Shall you write to him?" she asked. + +Sonya became thoughtful. The question of how to write to Nicholas, +and whether she ought to write, tormented her. Now that he was already +an officer and a wounded hero, would it be right to remind him of +herself and, as it might seem, of the obligations to her he had +taken on himself? + +"I don't know. I think if he writes, I will write too," she said, +blushing. + +"And you won't feel ashamed to write to him?" + +Sonya smiled. + +"No." + +"And I should be ashamed to write to Boris. I'm not going to." + +"Why should you be ashamed?" + +"Well, I don't know. It's awkward and would make me ashamed." + +"And I know why she'd be ashamed," said Petya, offended by Natasha's +previous remark. "It's because she was in love with that fat one in +spectacles" (that was how Petya described his namesake, the new +Count Bezukhov) "and now she's in love with that singer" (he meant +Natasha's Italian singing master), "that's why she's ashamed!" + +"Petya, you're a stupid!" said Natasha. + +"Not more stupid than you, madam," said the nine-year-old Petya, +with the air of an old brigadier. + +The countess had been prepared by Anna Mikhaylovna's hints at +dinner. On retiring to her own room, she sat in an armchair, her +eyes fixed on a miniature portrait of her son on the lid of a +snuffbox, while the tears kept coming into her eyes. Anna Mikhaylovna, +with the letter, came on tiptoe to the countess' door and paused. + +"Don't come in," she said to the old count who was following her. +"Come later." And she went in, closing the door behind her. + +The count put his ear to the keyhole and listened. + +At first he heard the sound of indifferent voices, then Anna +Mikhaylovna's voice alone in a long speech, then a cry, then +silence, then both voices together with glad intonations, and then +footsteps. Anna Mikhaylovna opened the door. Her face wore the proud +expression of a surgeon who has just performed a difficult operation +and admits the public to appreciate his skill. + +"It is done!" she said to the count, pointing triumphantly to the +countess, who sat holding in one hand the snuffbox with its portrait +and in the other the letter, and pressing them alternately to her +lips. + +When she saw the count, she stretched out her arms to him, +embraced his bald head, over which she again looked at the letter +and the portrait, and in order to press them again to her lips, she +slightly pushed away the bald head. Vera, Natasha, Sonya, and Petya +now entered the room, and the reading of the letter began. After a +brief description of the campaign and the two battles in which he +had taken part, and his promotion, Nicholas said that he kissed his +father's and mother's hands asking for their blessing, and that he +kissed Vera, Natasha, and Petya. Besides that, he sent greetings to +Monsieur Schelling, Madame Schoss, and his old nurse, and asked them +to kiss for him "dear Sonya, whom he loved and thought of just the +same as ever." When she heard this Sonya blushed so that tears came +into her eyes and, unable to bear the looks turned upon her, ran +away into the dancing hall, whirled round it at full speed with her +dress puffed out like a balloon, and, flushed and smiling, plumped +down on the floor. The countess was crying. + +"Why are you crying, Mamma?" asked Vera. "From all he says one +should be glad and not cry." + +This was quite true, but the count, the countess, and Natasha looked +at her reproachfully. "And who is it she takes after?" thought the +countess. + +Nicholas' letter was read over hundreds of times, and those who were +considered worthy to hear it had to come to the countess, for she +did not let it out of her hands. The tutors came, and the nurses, +and Dmitri, and several acquaintances, and the countess reread the +letter each time with fresh pleasure and each time discovered in it +fresh proofs of Nikolenka's virtues. How strange, how extraordinary, +how joyful it seemed, that her son, the scarcely perceptible motion of +whose tiny limbs she had felt twenty years ago within her, that son +about whom she used to have quarrels with the too indulgent count, +that son who had first learned to say "pear" and then "granny," that +this son should now be away in a foreign land amid strange +surroundings, a manly warrior doing some kind of man's work of his +own, without help or guidance. The universal experience of ages, +showing that children do grow imperceptibly from the cradle to +manhood, did not exist for the countess. Her son's growth toward +manhood, at each of its stages, had seemed as extraordinary to her +as if there had never existed the millions of human beings who grew up +in the same way. As twenty years before, it seemed impossible that the +little creature who lived somewhere under her heart would ever cry, +suck her breast, and begin to speak, so now she could not believe that +that little creature could be this strong, brave man, this model son +and officer that, judging by this letter, he now was. + +"What a style! How charmingly he describes!" said she, reading the +descriptive part of the letter. "And what a soul! Not a word about +himself.... Not a word! About some Denisov or other, though he +himself, I dare say, is braver than any of them. He says nothing about +his sufferings. What a heart! How like him it is! And how he has +remembered everybody! Not forgetting anyone. I always said when he was +only so high- I always said...." + +For more than a week preparations were being made, rough drafts of +letters to Nicholas from all the household were written and copied +out, while under the supervision of the countess and the solicitude of +the count, money and all things necessary for the uniform and +equipment of the newly commissioned officer were collected. Anna +Mikhaylovna, practical woman that she was, had even managed by favor +with army authorities to secure advantageous means of communication +for herself and her son. She had opportunities of sending her +letters to the Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich, who commanded the +Guards. The Rostovs supposed that The Russian Guards, Abroad, was +quite a definite address, and that if a letter reached the Grand +Duke in command of the Guards there was no reason why it should not +reach the Pavlograd regiment, which was presumably somewhere in the +same neighborhood. And so it was decided to send the letters and money +by the Grand Duke's courier to Boris and Boris was to forward them +to Nicholas. The letters were from the old count, the countess, Petya, +Vera, Natasha, and Sonya, and finally there were six thousand rubles +for his outfit and various other things the old count sent to his son. + +CHAPTER VII + +On the twelfth of November, Kutuzov's active army, in camp before +Olmutz, was preparing to be reviewed next day by the two Emperors- the +Russian and the Austrian. The Guards, just arrived from Russia, +spent the night ten miles from Olmutz and next morning were to come +straight to the review, reaching the field at Olmutz by ten o'clock. + +That day Nicholas Rostov received a letter from Boris, telling him +that the Ismaylov regiment was quartered for the night ten miles +from Olmutz and that he wanted to see him as he had a letter and money +for him. Rostov was particularly in need of money now that the troops, +after their active service, were stationed near Olmutz and the camp +swarmed with well-provisioned sutlers and Austrian Jews offering all +sorts of tempting wares. The Pavlograds held feast after feast, +celebrating awards they had received for the campaign, and made +expeditions to Olmutz to visit a certain Caroline the Hungarian, who +had recently opened a restaurant there with girls as waitresses. +Rostov, who had just celebrated his promotion to a cornetcy and bought +Denisov's horse, Bedouin, was in debt all round, to his comrades and +the sutlers. On receiving Boris' letter he rode with a fellow +officer to Olmutz, dined there, drank a bottle of wine, and then set +off alone to the Guards' camp to find his old playmate. Rostov had not +yet had time to get his uniform. He had on a shabby cadet jacket, +decorated with a soldier's cross, equally shabby cadet's riding +breeches lined with worn leather, and an officer's saber with a +sword knot. The Don horse he was riding was one he had bought from a +Cossack during the campaign, and he wore a crumpled hussar cap stuck +jauntily back on one side of his head. As he rode up to the camp he +thought how he would impress Boris and all his comrades of the +Guards by his appearance- that of a fighting hussar who had been under +fire. + +The Guards had made their whole march as if on a pleasure trip, +parading their cleanliness and discipline. They had come by easy +stages, their knapsacks conveyed on carts, and the Austrian +authorities had provided excellent dinners for the officers at every +halting place. The regiments had entered and left the town with +their bands playing, and by the Grand Duke's orders the men had +marched all the way in step (a practice on which the Guards prided +themselves), the officers on foot and at their proper posts. Boris had +been quartered, and had marched all the way, with Berg who was already +in command of a company. Berg, who had obtained his captaincy during +the campaign, had gained the confidence of his superiors by his +promptitude and accuracy and had arranged his money matters very +satisfactorily. Boris, during the campaign, had made the +acquaintance of many persons who might prove useful to him, and by a +letter of recommendation he had brought from Pierre had become +acquainted with Prince Andrew Bolkonski, through whom he hoped to +obtain a post on the commander in chief's staff. Berg and Boris, +having rested after yesterday's march, were sitting, clean and +neatly dressed, at a round table in the clean quarters allotted to +them, playing chess. Berg held a smoking pipe between his knees. +Boris, in the accurate way characteristic of him, was building a +little pyramid of chessmen with his delicate white fingers while +awaiting Berg's move, and watched his opponent's face, evidently +thinking about the game as he always thought only of whatever he was +engaged on. + +"Well, how are you going to get out of that?" he remarked. + +"We'll try to," replied Berg, touching a pawn and then removing +his hand. + +At that moment the door opened. + +"Here he is at last!" shouted Rostov. "And Berg too! Oh, you +petisenfans, allay cushay dormir!" he exclaimed, imitating his Russian +nurse's French, at which he and Boris used to laugh long ago. + +"Dear me, how you have changed!" + +Boris rose to meet Rostov, but in doing so did not omit to steady +and replace some chessmen that were falling. He was about to embrace +his friend, but Nicholas avoided him. With that peculiar feeling of +youth, that dread of beaten tracks, and wish to express itself in a +manner different from that of its elders which is often insincere, +Nicholas wished to do something special on meeting his friend. He +wanted to pinch him, push him, do anything but kiss him- a thing +everybody did. But notwithstanding this, Boris embraced him in a +quiet, friendly way and kissed him three times. + +They had not met for nearly half a year and, being at the age when +young men take their first steps on life's road, each saw immense +changes in the other, quite a new reflection of the society in which +they had taken those first steps. Both had changed greatly since +they last met and both were in a hurry to show the changes that had +taken place in them. + +"Oh, you damned dandies! Clean and fresh as if you'd been to a fete, +not like us sinners of the line," cried Rostov, with martial swagger +and with baritone notes in his voice, new to Boris, pointing to his +own mud-bespattered breeches. The German landlady, hearing Rostov's +loud voice, popped her head in at the door. + +"Eh, is she pretty?" he asked with a wink. + +"Why do you shout so? You'll frighten them!" said Boris. "I did +not expect you today," he added. "I only sent you the note yesterday +by Bolkonski- an adjutant of Kutuzov's, who's a friend of mine. I +did not think he would get it to you so quickly.... Well, how are you? +Been under fire already?" asked Boris. + +Without answering, Rostov shook the soldier's Cross of St. George +fastened to the cording of his uniform and, indicating a bandaged arm, +glanced at Berg with a smile. + +"As you see," he said. + +"Indeed? Yes, yes!" said Boris, with a smile. "And we too have had a +splendid march. You know, of course, that His Imperial Highness rode +with our regiment all the time, so that we had every comfort and every +advantage. What receptions we had in Poland! What dinners and balls! I +can't tell you. And the Tsarevich was very gracious to all our +officers." + +And the two friends told each other of their doings, the one of +his hussar revels and life in the fighting line, the other of the +pleasures and advantages of service under members of the Imperial +family. + +"Oh, you Guards!" said Rostov. "I say, send for some wine." + +Boris made a grimace. + +"If you really want it," said he. + +He went to his bed, drew a purse from under the clean pillow, and +sent for wine. + +"Yes, and I have some money and a letter to give you," he added. + +Rostov took the letter and, throwing the money on the sofa, put both +arms on the table and began to read. After reading a few lines, he +glanced angrily at Berg, then, meeting his eyes, hid his face behind +the letter. + +"Well, they've sent you a tidy sum," said Berg, eying the heavy +purse that sank into the sofa. "As for us, Count, we get along on +our pay. I can tell you for myself..." + +"I say, Berg, my dear fellow," said Rostov, "when you get a letter +from home and meet one of your own people whom you want to talk +everything over with, and I happen to be there, I'll go at once, to be +out of your way! Do go somewhere, anywhere... to the devil!" he +exclaimed, and immediately seizing him by the shoulder and looking +amiably into his face, evidently wishing to soften the rudeness of his +words, he added, "Don't be hurt, my dear fellow; you know I speak from +my heart as to an old acquaintance." + +"Oh, don't mention it, Count! I quite understand," said Berg, +getting up and speaking in a muffled and guttural voice. + +"Go across to our hosts: they invited you," added Boris. + +Berg put on the cleanest of coats, without a spot or speck of +dust, stood before a looking glass and brushed the hair on his temples +upwards, in the way affected by the Emperor Alexander, and, having +assured himself from the way Rostov looked at it that his coat had +been noticed, left the room with a pleasant smile. + +"Oh dear, what a beast I am!" muttered Rostov, as he read the +letter. + +"Why?" + +"Oh, what a pig I am, not to have written and to have given them +such a fright! Oh, what a pig I am!" he repeated, flushing suddenly. +"Well, have you sent Gabriel for some wine? All right let's have +some!" + +In the letter from his parents was enclosed a letter of +recommendation to Bagration which the old countess at Anna +Mikhaylovna's advice had obtained through an acquaintance and sent +to her son, asking him to take it to its destination and make use of +it. + +"What nonsense! Much I need it!" said Rostov, throwing the letter +under the table. + +"Why have you thrown that away?" asked Boris. + +"It is some letter of recommendation... what the devil do I want +it for!" + +"Why 'What the devil'?" said Boris, picking it up and reading the +address. "This letter would be of great use to you." + +"I want nothing, and I won't be anyone's adjutant." + +"Why not?" inquired Boris. + +"It's a lackey's job!" + +"You are still the same dreamer, I see," remarked Boris, shaking his +head. + +"And you're still the same diplomatist! But that's not the +point... Come, how are you?" asked Rostov. + +"Well, as you see. So far everything's all right, but I confess I +should much like to be an adjutant and not remain at the front." + +"Why?" + +"Because when once a man starts on military service, he should try +to make as successful a career of it as possible." + +"Oh, that's it!" said Rostov, evidently thinking of something else. + +He looked intently and inquiringly into his friend's eyes, evidently +trying in vain to find the answer to some question. + +Old Gabriel brought in the wine. + +"Shouldn't we now send for Berg?" asked Boris. "He would drink +with you. I can't." + +"Well, send for him... and how do you get on with that German?" +asked Rostov, with a contemptuous smile. + +"He is a very, very nice, honest, and pleasant fellow," answered +Boris. + +Again Rostov looked intently into Boris' eyes and sighed. Berg +returned, and over the bottle of wine conversation between the three +officers became animated. The Guardsmen told Rostov of their march and +how they had been made much of in Russia, Poland, and abroad. They +spoke of the sayings and doings of their commander, the Grand Duke, +and told stories of his kindness and irascibility. Berg, as usual, +kept silent when the subject did not relate to himself, but in +connection with the stories of the Grand Duke's quick temper he +related with gusto how in Galicia he had managed to deal with the +Grand Duke when the latter made a tour of the regiments and was +annoyed at the irregularity of a movement. With a pleasant smile +Berg related how the Grand Duke had ridden up to him in a violent +passion, shouting: "Arnauts!" ("Arnauts" was the Tsarevich's +favorite expression when he was in a rage) and called for the +company commander. + +"Would you believe it, Count, I was not at all alarmed, because I +knew I was right. Without boasting, you know, I may say that I know +the Army Orders by heart and know the Regulations as well as I do +the Lord's Prayer. So, Count, there never is any negligence in my +company, and so my conscience was at ease. I came forward...." (Berg +stood up and showed how he presented himself, with his hand to his +cap, and really it would have been difficult for a face to express +greater respect and self-complacency than his did.) "Well, he +stormed at me, as the saying is, stormed and stormed and stormed! It +was not a matter of life but rather of death, as the saying is. +'Albanians!' and 'devils!' and 'To Siberia!'" said Berg with a +sagacious smile. "I knew I was in the right so I kept silent; was +not that best, Count?... 'Hey, are you dumb?' he shouted. Still I +remained silent. And what do you think, Count? The next day it was not +even mentioned in the Orders of the Day. That's what keeping one's +head means. That's the way, Count," said Berg, lighting his pipe and +emitting rings of smoke. + +"Yes, that was fine," said Rostov, smiling. + +But Boris noticed that he was preparing to make fun of Berg, and +skillfully changed the subject. He asked him to tell them how and +where he got his wound. This pleased Rostov and he began talking about +it, and as he went on became more and more animated. He told them of +his Schon Grabern affair, just as those who have taken part in a +battle generally do describe it, that is, as they would like it to +have been, as they have heard it described by others, and as sounds +well, but not at all as it really was. Rostov was a truthful young man +and would on no account have told a deliberate lie. He began his story +meaning to tell everything just as it happened, but imperceptibly, +involuntarily, and inevitably he lapsed into falsehood. If he had told +the truth to his hearers- who like himself had often heard stories +of attacks and had formed a definite idea of what an attack was and +were expecting to hear just such a story- they would either not have +believed him or, still worse, would have thought that Rostov was +himself to blame since what generally happens to the narrators of +cavalry attacks had not happened to him. He could not tell them simply +that everyone went at a trot and that he fell off his horse and +sprained his arm and then ran as hard as he could from a Frenchman +into the wood. Besides, to tell everything as it really happened, it +would have been necessary to make an effort of will to tell only +what happened. It is very difficult to tell the truth, and young +people are rarely capable of it. His hearers expected a story of how +beside himself and all aflame with excitement, he had flown like a +storm at the square, cut his way in, slashed right and left, how his +saber had tasted flesh and he had fallen exhausted, and so on. And +so he told them all that. + +In the middle of his story, just as he was saying: "You cannot +imagine what a strange frenzy one experiences during an attack," +Prince Andrew, whom Boris was expecting, entered the room. Prince +Andrew, who liked to help young men, was flattered by being asked +for his assistance and being well disposed toward Boris, who had +managed to please him the day before, he wished to do what the young +man wanted. Having been sent with papers from Kutuzov to the +Tsarevich, he looked in on Boris, hoping to find him alone. When he +came in and saw an hussar of the line recounting his military exploits +(Prince Andrew could not endure that sort of man), he gave Boris a +pleasant smile, frowned as with half-closed eyes he looked at +Rostov, bowed slightly and wearily, and sat down languidly on the +sofa: he felt it unpleasant to have dropped in on bad company. +Rostov flushed up on noticing this, but he did not care, this was a +mere stranger. Glancing, however, at Boris, he saw that he too +seemed ashamed of the hussar of the line. + +In spite of Prince Andrew's disagreeable, ironical tone, in spite of +the contempt with which Rostov, from his fighting army point of +view, regarded all these little adjutants on the staff of whom the +newcomer was evidently one, Rostov felt confused, blushed, and +became silent. Boris inquired what news there might be on the staff, +and what, without indiscretion, one might ask about our plans. + +"We shall probably advance," replied Bolkonski, evidently +reluctant to say more in the presence of a stranger. + +Berg took the opportunity to ask, with great politeness, whether, as +was rumored, the allowance of forage money to captains of companies +would be doubled. To this Prince Andrew answered with a smile that +he could give no opinion on such an important government order, and +Berg laughed gaily. + +"As to your business," Prince Andrew continued, addressing Boris, +"we will talk of it later" (and he looked round at Rostov). "Come to +me after the review and we will do what is possible." + +And, having glanced round the room, Prince Andrew turned to +Rostov, whose state of unconquerable childish embarrassment now +changing to anger he did not condescend to notice, and said: "I +think you were talking of the Schon Grabern affair? Were you there?" + +"I was there," said Rostov angrily, as if intending to insult the +aide-de-camp. + +Bolkonski noticed the hussar's state of mind, and it amused him. +With a slightly contemptuous smile, he said: "Yes, there are many +stories now told about that affair!" + +"Yes, stories!" repeated Rostov loudly, looking with eyes suddenly +grown furious, now at Boris, now at Bolkonski. "Yes, many stories! But +our stories are the stories of men who have been under the enemy's +fire! Our stories have some weight, not like the stories of those +fellows on the staff who get rewards without doing anything!" + +"Of whom you imagine me to be one?" said Prince Andrew, with a quiet +and particularly amiable smile. + +A strange feeling of exasperation and yet of respect for this +man's self-possession mingled at that moment in Rostov's soul. + +"I am not talking about you," he said, "I don't know you and, +frankly, I don't want to. I am speaking of the staff in general." + +"And I will tell you this," Prince Andrew interrupted in a tone of +quiet authority, "you wish to insult me, and I am ready to agree +with you that it would be very easy to do so if you haven't sufficient +self-respect, but admit that the time and place are very badly chosen. +In a day or two we shall all have to take part in a greater and more +serious duel, and besides, Drubetskoy, who says he is an old friend of +yours, is not at all to blame that my face has the misfortune to +displease you. However," he added rising, "you know my name and +where to find me, but don't forget that I do not regard either +myself or you as having been at all insulted, and as a man older +than you, my advice is to let the matter drop. Well then, on Friday +after the review I shall expect you, Drubetskoy. Au revoir!" exclaimed +Prince Andrew, and with a bow to them both he went out. + +Only when Prince Andrew was gone did Rostov think of what he ought +to have said. And he was still more angry at having omitted to say it. +He ordered his horse at once and, coldly taking leave of Boris, rode +home. Should he go to headquarters next day and challenge that +affected adjutant, or really let the matter drop, was the question +that worried him all the way. He thought angrily of the pleasure he +would have at seeing the fright of that small and frail but proud +man when covered by his pistol, and then he felt with surprise that of +all the men he knew there was none he would so much like to have for a +friend as that very adjutant whom he so hated. + +CHAPTER VIII + +The day after Rostov had been to see Boris, a review was held of the +Austrian and Russian troops, both those freshly arrived from Russia +and those who had been campaigning under Kutuzov. The two Emperors, +the Russian with his heir the Tsarevich, and the Austrian with the +Archduke, inspected the allied army of eighty thousand men. + +From early morning the smart clean troops were on the move, +forming up on the field before the fortress. Now thousands of feet and +bayonets moved and halted at the officers' command, turned with +banners flying, formed up at intervals, and wheeled round other +similar masses of infantry in different uniforms; now was heard the +rhythmic beat of hoofs and the jingling of showy cavalry in blue, red, +and green braided uniforms, with smartly dressed bandsmen in front +mounted on black, roan, or gray horses; then again, spreading out with +the brazen clatter of the polished shining cannon that quivered on the +gun carriages and with the smell of linstocks, came the artillery +which crawled between the infantry and cavalry and took up its +appointed position. Not only the generals in full parade uniforms, +with their thin or thick waists drawn in to the utmost, their red +necks squeezed into their stiff collars, and wearing scarves and all +their decorations, not only the elegant, pomaded officers, but every +soldier with his freshly washed and shaven face and his weapons +clean and polished to the utmost, and every horse groomed till its +coat shone like satin and every hair of its wetted mane lay smooth- +felt that no small matter was happening, but an important and solemn +affair. Every general and every soldier was conscious of his own +insignificance, aware of being but a drop in that ocean of men, and +yet at the same time was conscious of his strength as a part of that +enormous whole. + +From early morning strenuous activities and efforts had begun and by +ten o'clock all had been brought into due order. The ranks were +drown up on the vast field. The whole army was extended in three +lines: the cavalry in front, behind it the artillery, and behind +that again the infantry. + +A space like a street was left between each two lines of troops. The +three parts of that army were sharply distinguished: Kutuzov's +fighting army (with the Pavlograds on the right flank of the front); +those recently arrived from Russia, both Guards and regiments of the +line; and the Austrian troops. But they all stood in the same lines, +under one command, and in a like order. + +Like wind over leaves ran an excited whisper: "They're coming! +They're coming!" Alarmed voices were heard, and a stir of final +preparation swept over all the troops. + +From the direction of Olmutz in front of them, a group was seen +approaching. And at that moment, though the day was still, a light +gust of wind blowing over the army slightly stirred the streamers on +the lances and the unfolded standards fluttered against their +staffs. It looked as if by that slight motion the army itself was +expressing its joy at the approach of the Emperors. One voice was +heard shouting: "Eyes front!" Then, like the crowing of cocks at + +sunrise, this was repeated by others from various sides and all became +silent. + +In the deathlike stillness only the tramp of horses was heard. +This was the Emperors' suites. The Emperors rode up to the flank, +and the trumpets of the first cavalry regiment played the general +march. It seemed as though not the trumpeters were playing, but as +if the army itself, rejoicing at the Emperors' approach, had naturally +burst into music. Amid these sounds, only the youthful kindly voice of +the Emperor Alexander was clearly heard. He gave the words of +greeting, and the first regiment roared "Hurrah!" so deafeningly, +continuously, and joyfully that the men themselves were awed by +their multitude and the immensity of the power they constituted. + +Rostov, standing in the front lines of Kutuzov's army which the Tsar +approached first, experienced the same feeling as every other man in +that army: a feeling of self-forgetfulness, a proud consciousness of +might, and a passionate attraction to him who was the cause of this +triumph. + +He felt that at a single word from that man all this vast mass +(and he himself an insignificant atom in it) would go through fire and +water, commit crime, die, or perform deeds of highest heroism, and +so he could not but tremble and his heart stand still at the imminence +of that word. + +"Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!" thundered from all sides, one regiment +after another greeting the Tsar with the strains of the march, and +then "Hurrah!"... Then the general march, and again "Hurrah! +Hurrah!" growing ever stronger and fuller and merging into a deafening +roar. + +Till the Tsar reached it, each regiment in its silence and +immobility seemed like a lifeless body, but as soon as he came up it +became alive, its thunder joining the roar of the whole line along +which he had already passed. Through the terrible and deafening roar +of those voices, amid the square masses of troops standing +motionless as if turned to stone, hundreds of riders composing the +suites moved carelessly but symmetrically and above all freely, and in +front of them two men- the Emperors. Upon them the undivided, +tensely passionate attention of that whole mass of men was +concentrated. + +The handsome young Emperor Alexander, in the uniform of the Horse +Guards, wearing a cocked hat with its peaks front and back, with his +pleasant face and resonant though not loud voice, attracted everyone's +attention. + +Rostov was not far from the trumpeters, and with his keen sight +had recognized the Tsar and watched his approach. When he was within +twenty paces, and Nicholas could clearly distinguish every detail of +his handsome, happy young face, he experienced a feeling tenderness +and ecstasy such as he had never before known. Every trait and every +movement of the Tsar's seemed to him enchanting. + +Stopping in front of the Pavlograds, the Tsar said something in +French to the Austrian Emperor and smiled. + +Seeing that smile, Rostov involuntarily smiled himself and felt a +still stronger flow of love for his sovereign. He longed to show +that love in some way and knowing that this was impossible was ready +to cry. The Tsar called the colonel of the regiment and said a few +words to him. + +"Oh God, what would happen to me if the Emperor spoke to me?" +thought Rostov. "I should die of happiness!" + +The Tsar addressed the officers also: "I thank you all, gentlemen, I +thank you with my whole heart." To Rostov every word sounded like a +voice from heaven. How gladly would he have died at once for his Tsar! + +"You have earned the St. George's standards and will be worthy of +them." + +"Oh, to die, to die for him " thought Rostov. + +The Tsar said something more which Rostov did not hear, and the +soldiers, straining their lungs, shouted "Hurrah!" + +Rostov too, bending over his saddle, shouted "Hurrah!" with all +his might, feeling that he would like to injure himself by that shout, +if only to express his rapture fully. + +The Tsar stopped a few minutes in front of the hussars as if +undecided. + +"How can the Emperor be undecided?" thought Rostov, but then even +this indecision appeared to him majestic and enchanting, like +everything else the Tsar did. + +That hesitation lasted only an instant. The Tsar's foot, in the +narrow pointed boot then fashionable, touched the groin of the +bobtailed bay mare he rode, his hand in a white glove gathered up +the reins, and he moved off accompanied by an irregularly swaying +sea of aides-de-camp. Farther and farther he rode away, stopping at +other regiments, till at last only his white plumes were visible to +Rostov from amid the suites that surrounded the Emperors. + +Among the gentlemen of the suite, Rostov noticed Bolkonski, +sitting his horse indolently and carelessly. Rostov recalled their +quarrel of yesterday and the question presented itself whether he +ought or ought not to challenge Bolkonski. "Of course not!" he now +thought. "Is it worth thinking or speaking of it at such a moment? +At a time of such love, such rapture, and such self-sacrifice, what do +any of our quarrels and affronts matter? I love and forgive +everybody now." + +When the Emperor had passed nearly all the regiments, the troops +began a ceremonial march past him, and Rostov on Bedouin, recently +purchased from Denisov, rode past too, at the rear of his squadron- +that is, alone and in full view of the Emperor. + +Before he reached him, Rostov, who was a splendid horseman, +spurred Bedouin twice and successfully put him to the showy trot in +which the animal went when excited. Bending his foaming muzzle to +his chest, his tail extended, Bedouin, as if also conscious of the +Emperor's eye upon him, passed splendidly, lifting his feet with a +high and graceful action, as if flying through the air without +touching the ground. + +Rostov himself, his legs well back and his stomach drawn in and +feeling himself one with his horse, rode past the Emperor with a +frowning but blissful face "like a vewy devil," as Denisov expressed +it. + +"Fine fellows, the Pavlograds!" remarked the Emperor. + +"My God, how happy I should be if he ordered me to leap into the +fire this instant!" thought Rostov. + +When the review was over, the newly arrived officers, and also +Kutuzov's, collected in groups and began to talk about the awards, +about the Austrians and their uniforms, about their lines, about +Bonaparte, and how badly the latter would fare now, especially if +the Essen corps arrived and Prussia took our side. + +But the talk in every group was chiefly about the Emperor Alexander. +His every word and movement was described with ecstasy. + +They all had but one wish: to advance as soon as possible against +the enemy under the Emperor's command. Commanded by the Emperor +himself they could not fail to vanquish anyone, be it whom it might: +so thought Rostov and most of the officers after the review. + +All were then more confident of victory than the winning of two +battles would have made them. + +CHAPTER IX + +The day after the review, Boris, in his best uniform and with his +comrade Berg's best wishes for success, rode to Olmutz to see +Bolkonski, wishing to profit by his friendliness and obtain for +himself the best post he could- preferably that of adjutant to some +important personage, a position in the army which seemed to him most +attractive. "It is all very well for Rostov, whose father sends him +ten thousand rubles at a time, to talk about not wishing to cringe +to anybody and not be anyone's lackey, but I who have nothing but my +brains have to make a career and must not miss opportunities, but must +avail myself of them!" he reflected. + +He did not find Prince Andrew in Olmutz that day, but the appearance +of the town where the headquarters and the diplomatic corps were +stationed and the two Emperors were living with their suites, +households, and courts only strengthened his desire to belong to +that higher world. + +He knew no one, and despite his smart Guardsman's uniform, all these +exalted personages passing in the streets in their elegant carriages +with their plumes, ribbons, and medals, both courtiers and military +men, seemed so immeasurably above him, an insignificant officer of the +Guards, that they not only did not wish to, but simply could not, be +aware of his existence. At the quarters of the commander in chief, +Kutuzov, where he inquired for Bolkonski, all the adjutants and even +the orderlies looked at him as if they wished to impress on him that a +great many officers like him were always coming there and that +everybody was heartily sick of them. In spite of this, or rather +because of it, next day, November 15, after dinner he again went to +Olmutz and, entering the house occupied by Kutuzov, asked for +Bolkonski. Prince Andrew was in and Boris was shown into a large +hall probably formerly used for dancing, but in which five beds now +stood, and furniture of various kinds: a table, chairs, and a +clavichord. One adjutant, nearest the door, was sitting at the table +in a Persian dressing gown, writing. Another, the red, stout +Nesvitski, lay on a bed with his arms under his head, laughing with an +officer who had sat down beside him. A third was playing a Viennese +waltz on the clavichord, while a fourth, lying on the clavichord, sang +the tune. Bolkonski was not there. None of these gentlemen changed his +position on seeing Boris. The one who was writing and whom Boris +addressed turned round crossly and told him Bolkonski was on duty +and that he should go through the door on the left into the +reception room if he wished to see him. Boris thanked him and went +to the reception room, where he found some ten officers and generals. + +When he entered, Prince Andrew, his eyes drooping contemptuously +(with that peculiar expression of polite weariness which plainly says, +"If it were not my duty I would not talk to you for a moment"), was +listening to an old Russian general with decorations, who stood very +erect, almost on tiptoe, with a soldier's obsequious expression on his +purple face, reporting something. + +"Very well, then, be so good as to wait," said Prince Andrew to + +the general, in Russian, speaking with the French intonation he +affected when he wished to speak contemptuously, and noticing Boris, +Prince Andrew, paying no more heed to the general who ran after him +imploring him to hear something more, nodded and turned to him with +a cheerful smile. + +At that moment Boris clearly realized what he had before surmised, +that in the army, besides the subordination and discipline +prescribed in the military code, which he and the others knew in the +regiment, there was another, more important, subordination, which made +this tight-laced, purple-faced general wait respectfully while Captain +Prince Andrew, for his own pleasure, chose to chat with Lieutenant +Drubetskoy. More than ever was Boris resolved to serve in future not +according to the written code, but under this unwritten law. He felt +now that merely by having been recommended to Prince Andrew he had +already risen above the general who at the front had the power to +annihilate him, a lieutenant of the Guards. Prince Andrew came up to +him and took his hand. + +"I am very sorry you did not find me in yesterday. I was fussing +about with Germans all day. We went with Weyrother to survey the +dispositions. When Germans start being accurate, there's no end to +it!" + +Boris smiled, as if he understood what Prince Andrew was alluding to +as something generally known. But it the first time he had heard +Weyrother's name, or even the term "dispositions." + +"Well, my dear fellow, so you still want to be an adjutant? I have +been thinking about you." + +"Yes, I was thinking"- for some reason Boris could not help +blushing- "of asking the commander in chief. He has had a letter +from Prince Kuragin about me. I only wanted to ask because I fear +the Guards won't be in action," he added as if in apology. + +"All right, all right. We'll talk it over," replied Prince Andrew. +"Only let me report this gentleman's business, and I shall be at +your disposal." + +While Prince Andrew went to report about the purple-faced general, +that gentleman- evidently not sharing Boris' conception of the +advantages of the unwritten code of subordination- looked so fixedly +at the presumptuous lieutenant who had prevented his finishing what he +had to say to the adjutant that Boris felt uncomfortable. He turned +away and waited impatiently for Prince Andrew's return from the +commander in chief's room. + +"You see, my dear fellow, I have been thinking about you," said +Prince Andrew when they had gone into the large room where the +clavichord was. "It's no use your going to the commander in chief. +He would say a lot of pleasant things, ask you to dinner" ("That would +not be bad as regards the unwritten code," thought Boris), "but +nothing more would come of it. There will soon be a battalion of us +aides-de-camp and adjutants! But this is what we'll do: I have a +good friend, an adjutant general and an excellent fellow, Prince +Dolgorukov; and though you may not know it, the fact is that now +Kutuzov with his staff and all of us count for nothing. Everything +is now centered round the Emperor. So we will go to Dolgorukov; I have +to go there anyhow and I have already spoken to him about you. We +shall see whether he cannot attach you to himself or find a place +for you somewhere nearer the sun." + +Prince Andrew always became specially keen when he had to guide a +young man and help him to worldly success. Under cover of obtaining +help of this kind for another, which from pride he would never +accept for himself, he kept in touch with the circle which confers +success and which attracted him. He very readily took up Boris' +cause and went with him to Dolgorukov. + +It was late in the evening when they entered the palace at Olmutz +occupied by the Emperors and their retinues. + +That same day a council of war had been held in which all the +members of the Hofkriegsrath and both Emperors took part. At that +council, contrary to the views of the old generals Kutuzov and +Prince Schwartzenberg, it had been decided to advance immediately +and give battle to Bonaparte. The council of war was just over when +Prince Andrew accompanied by Boris arrived at the palace to find +Dolgorukov. Everyone at headquarters was still under the spell of +the day's council, at which the party of the young had triumphed. +The voices of those who counseled delay and advised waiting for +something else before advancing had been so completely silenced and +their arguments confuted by such conclusive evidence of the advantages +of attacking that what had been discussed at the council- the coming +battle and the victory that would certainly result from it- no +longer seemed to be in the future but in the past. All the +advantages were on our side. Our enormous forces, undoubtedly superior +to Napoleon's, were concentrated in one place, the troops inspired +by the Emperors' presence were eager for action. The strategic +position where the operations would take place was familiar in all its +details to the Austrian General Weyrother: a lucky accident had +ordained that the Austrian army should maneuver the previous year on +the very fields where the French had now to be fought; the adjacent +locality was known and shown in every detail on the maps, and +Bonaparte, evidently weakened, was undertaking nothing. + +Dolgorukov, one of the warmest advocates of an attack, had just +returned from the council, tired and exhausted but eager and proud +of the victory that had been gained. Prince Andrew introduced his +protege, but Prince Dolgorukov politely and firmly pressing his hand +said nothing to Boris and, evidently unable to suppress the thoughts +which were uppermost in his mind at that moment, addressed Prince +Andrew in French. + +"Ah, my dear fellow, what a battle we have gained! God grant that +the one that will result from it will be as victorious! However, +dear fellow," he said abruptly and eagerly, "I must confess to +having been unjust to the Austrians and especially to Weyrother. +What exactitude, what minuteness, what knowledge of the locality, what +foresight for every eventuality, every possibility even to the +smallest detail! No, my dear fellow, no conditions better than our +present ones could have been devised. This combination of Austrian +precision with Russian valor- what more could be wished for?" + +"So the attack is definitely resolved on?" asked Bolkonski. + +"And do you know, my dear fellow, it seems to me that Bonaparte +has decidedly lost bearings, you know that a letter was received +from him today for the Emperor." Dolgorukov smiled significantly. + +"Is that so? And what did he say?" inquired Bolkonski. + +"What can he say? Tra-di-ri-di-ra and so on... merely to gain +time. I tell you he is in our hands, that's certain! But what was most +amusing," he continued, with a sudden, good-natured laugh, "was that +we could not think how to address the reply! If not as 'Consul' and of +course not as 'Emperor,' it seemed to me it should be to 'General +Bonaparte.'" + +"But between not recognizing him as Emperor and calling him +General Bonaparte, there is a difference," remarked Bolkonski. + +"That's just it," interrupted Dolgorukov quickly, laughing. "You +know Bilibin- he's a very clever fellow. He suggested addressing him +as 'Usurper and Enemy of Mankind.'" + +Dolgorukov laughed merrily. + +"Only that?" said Bolkonski. + +"All the same, it was Bilibin who found a suitable form for the +address. He is a wise and clever fellow." + +"What was it?" + +"To the Head of the French Government... Au chef du gouvernement +francais," said Dolgorukov, with grave satisfaction. "Good, wasn't +it?" + +"Yes, but he will dislike it extremely," said Bolkonski. + +"Oh yes, very much! My brother knows him, he's dined with him- the +present Emperor- more than once in Paris, and tells me he never met +a more cunning or subtle diplomatist- you know, a combination of +French adroitness and Italian play-acting! Do you know the tale +about him and Count Markov? Count Markov was the only man who knew how +to handle him. You know the story of the handkerchief? It is +delightful!" + +And the talkative Dolgorukov, turning now to Boris, now to Prince +Andrew, told how Bonaparte wishing to test Markov, our ambassador, +purposely dropped a handkerchief in front of him and stood looking +at Markov, probably expecting Markov to pick it up for him, and how +Markov immediately dropped his own beside it and picked it up +without touching Bonaparte's. + +"Delightful!" said Bolkonski. "But I have come to you, Prince, as +a petitioner on behalf of this young man. You see..." but before +Prince Andrew could finish, an aide-de-camp came in to summon +Dolgorukov to the Emperor. + +"Oh, what a nuisance," said Dolgorukov, getting up hurriedly and +pressing the hands of Prince Andrew and Boris. "You know I should be +very glad to do all in my power both for you and for this dear young +man." Again he pressed the hand of the latter with an expression of +good-natured, sincere, and animated levity. "But you see... another +time!" + +Boris was excited by the thought of being so close to the higher +powers as he felt himself to be at that moment. He was conscious +that here he was in contact with the springs that set in motion the +enormous movements of the mass of which in his regiment he felt +himself a tiny, obedient, and insignificant atom. They followed Prince +Dolgorukov out into the corridor and met- coming out of the door of +the Emperor's room by which Dolgorukov had entered- a short man in +civilian clothes with a clever face and sharply projecting jaw +which, without spoiling his face, gave him a peculiar vivacity and +shiftiness of expression. This short man nodded to Dolgorukov as to an +intimate friend and stared at Prince Andrew with cool intensity, +walking straight toward him and evidently expecting him to bow or to +step out of his way. Prince Andrew did neither: a look of animosity +appeared on his face and the other turned away and went down the +side of the corridor. + +"Who was that?" asked Boris. + +"He is one of the most remarkable, but to me most unpleasant of men- +the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Adam Czartoryski.... It is +such men as he who decide the fate of nations," added Bolkonski with a +sigh he could not suppress, as they passed out of the palace. + +Next day, the army began its campaign, and up to the very battle +of Austerlitz, Boris was unable to see either Prince Andrew or +Dolgorukov again and remained for a while with the Ismaylov regiment. + +CHAPTER X + +At dawn on the sixteenth of November, Denisov's squadron, in which +Nicholas Rostov served and which was in Prince Bagration's detachment, +moved from the place where it had spent the night, advancing into +action as arranged, and after going behind other columns for about two +thirds of a mile was stopped on the highroad. Rostov saw the +Cossacks and then the first and second squadrons of hussars and +infantry battalions and artillery pass by and go forward and then +Generals Bagration and Dolgorukov ride past with their adjutants. +All the fear before action which he had experienced as previously, all +the inner struggle to conquer that fear, all his dreams of +distinguishing himself as a true hussar in this battle, had been +wasted. Their squadron remained in reserve and Nicholas Rostov spent +that day in a dull and wretched mood. At nine in the morning, he heard +firing in front and shouts of hurrah, and saw wounded being brought +back (there were not many of them), and at last he saw how a whole +detachment of French cavalry was brought in, convoyed by a sontnya +of Cossacks. Evidently the affair was over and, though not big, had +been a successful engagement. The men and officers returning spoke +of a brilliant victory, of the occupation of the town of Wischau and +the capture of a whole French squadron. The day was bright and sunny +after a sharp night frost, and the cheerful glitter of that autumn day +was in keeping with the news of victory which was conveyed, not only +by the tales of those who had taken part in it, but also by the joyful +expression on the faces of soldiers, officers, generals, and +adjutants, as they passed Rostov going or coming. And Nicholas, who +had vainly suffered all the dread that precedes a battle and had spent +that happy day in inactivity, was all the more depressed. + +"Come here, Wostov. Let's dwink to dwown our gwief!" shouted +Denisov, who had settled down by the roadside with a flask and some +food. + +The officers gathered round Denisov's canteen, eating and talking. + +"There! They are bringing another!" cried one of the officers, +indicating a captive French dragoon who was being brought in on foot +by two Cossacks. + +One of them was leading by the bridle a fine large French horse he +had taken from the prisoner. + +"Sell us that horse!" Denisov called out to the Cossacks. + +"If you like, your honor!" + +The officers got up and stood round the Cossacks and their prisoner. +The French dragoon was a young Alsatian who spoke French with a German +accent. He was breathless with agitation, his face was red, and when +he heard some French spoken he at once began speaking to the officers, +addressing first one, then another. He said he would not have been +taken, it was not his fault but the corporal's who had sent him to +seize some horsecloths, though he had told him the Russians were +there. And at every word he added: "But don't hurt my little horse!" +and stroked the animal. It was plain that he did not quite grasp where +he was. Now he excused himself for having been taken prisoner and now, +imagining himself before his own officers, insisted on his soldierly +discipline and zeal in the service. He brought with him into our +rearguard all the freshness of atmosphere of the French army, which +was so alien to us. + +The Cossacks sold the horse for two gold pieces, and Rostov, being +the richest of the officers now that he had received his money, bought +it. + +"But don't hurt my little horse!" said the Alsatian good-naturedly +to Rostov when the animal was handed over to the hussar. + +Rostov smilingly reassured the dragoon and gave him money. + +"Alley! Alley!" said the Cossack, touching the prisoner's arm to +make him go on. + +"The Emperor! The Emperor!" was suddenly heard among the hussars. + +All began to run and bustle, and Rostov saw coming up the road +behind him several riders with white plumes in their hats. In a moment +everyone was in his place, waiting. + +Rostov did not know or remember how he ran to his place and mounted. +Instantly his regret at not having been in action and his dejected +mood amid people of whom he was weary had gone, instantly every +thought of himself had vanished. He was filled with happiness at his +nearness to the Emperor. He felt that this nearness by itself made +up to him for the day he had lost. He was happy as a lover when the +longed-for moment of meeting arrives. Not daring to look round and +without looking round, he was ecstatically conscious of his +approach. He felt it not only from the sound of the hoofs of the +approaching cavalcade, but because as he drew near everything grew +brighter, more joyful, more significant, and more festive around +him. Nearer and nearer to Rostov came that sun shedding beams of +mild and majestic light around, and already he felt himself +enveloped in those beams, he heard his voice, that kindly, calm, and +majestic voice that was yet so simple! And as if in accord with +Rostov's feeling, there was a deathly stillness amid which was heard +the Emperor's voice. + +"The Pavlograd hussars?" he inquired. + +"The reserves, sire!" replied a voice, a very human one compared +to that which had said: "The Pavlograd hussars?" + +The Emperor drew level with Rostov and halted. Alexander's face +was even more beautiful than it had been three days before at the +review. It shone with such gaiety and youth, such innocent youth, that +it suggested the liveliness of a fourteen-year-old boy, and yet it was +the face of the majestic Emperor. Casually, while surveying the +squadron, the Emperor's eyes met Rostov's and rested on them for not +more than two seconds. Whether or no the Emperor understood what was +going on in Rostov's soul (it seemed to Rostov that he understood +everything), at any rate his light-blue eyes gazed for about two +seconds into Rostov's face. A gentle, mild light poured from them. +Then all at once he raised his eyebrows, abruptly touched his horse +with his left foot, and galloped on. + +The younger Emperor could not restrain his wish to be present at the +battle and, in spite of the remonstrances of his courtiers, at +twelve o'clock left the third column with which he had been and +galloped toward the vanguard. Before he came up with the hussars, +several adjutants met him with news of the successful result of the +action. + +This battle, which consisted in the capture of a French squadron, +was represented as a brilliant victory over the French, and so the +Emperor and the whole army, especially while the smoke hung over the +battlefield, believed that the French had been defeated and were +retreating against their will. A few minutes after the Emperor had +passed, the Pavlograd division was ordered to advance. In Wischau +itself, a petty German town, Rostov saw the Emperor again. In the +market place, where there had been some rather heavy firing before the +Emperor's arrival, lay several killed and wounded soldiers whom +there had not been time to move. The Emperor, surrounded by his +suite of officers and courtiers, was riding a bobtailed chestnut mare, +a different one from that which he had ridden at the review, and +bending to one side he gracefully held a gold lorgnette to his eyes +and looked at a soldier who lay prone, with blood on his uncovered +head. The wounded soldier was so dirty, coarse, and revolting that his +proximity to the Emperor shocked Rostov. Rostov saw how the +Emperor's rather round shoulders shuddered as if a cold shiver had run +down them, how his left foot began convulsively tapping the horse's +side with the spur, and how the well-trained horse looked round +unconcerned and did not stir. An adjutant, dismounting, lifted the +soldier under the arms to place him on a stretcher that had been +brought. The soldier groaned. + +"Gently, gently! Can't you do it more gently?" said the Emperor +apparently suffering more than the dying soldier, and he rode away. + +Rostov saw tears filling the Emperor's eyes and heard him, as he was +riding away, say to Czartoryski: "What a terrible thing war is: what a +terrible thing! Quelle terrible chose que la guerre!" + +The troops of the vanguard were stationed before Wischau, within +sight of the enemy's lines, which all day long had yielded ground to +us at the least firing. The Emperor's gratitude was announced to the +vanguard, rewards were promised, and the men received a double +ration of vodka. The campfires crackled and the soldiers' songs +resounded even more merrily than on the previous night. Denisov +celebrated his promotion to the rank of major, and Rostov, who had +already drunk enough, at the end of the feast proposed the Emperor's +health. "Not 'our Sovereign, the Emperor,' as they say at official +dinners," said he, "but the health of our Sovereign, that good, +enchanting, and great man! Let us drink to his health and to the +certain defeat of the French!" + +"If we fought before," he said, "not letting the French pass, as +at Schon Grabern, what shall we not do now when he is at the front? We +will all die for him gladly! Is it not so, gentlemen? Perhaps I am not +saying it right, I have drunk a good deal- but that is how I feel, and +so do you too! To the health of Alexander the First! Hurrah!" + +"Hurrah!" rang the enthusiastic voices of the officers. + +And the old cavalry captain, Kirsten, shouted enthusiastically and +no less sincerely than the twenty-year-old Rostov. + +When the officers had emptied and smashed their glasses, Kirsten +filled others and, in shirt sleeves and breeches, went glass in hand +to the soldiers' bonfires and with his long gray mustache, his white +chest showing under his open shirt, he stood in a majestic pose in the +light of the campfire, waving his uplifted arm. + +"Lads! here's to our Sovereign, the Emperor, and victory over our +enemies! Hurrah!" he exclaimed in his dashing, old, hussar's baritone. + +The hussars crowded round and responded heartily with loud shouts. + +Late that night, when all had separated, Denisov with his short hand +patted his favorite, Rostov, on the shoulder. + +"As there's no one to fall in love with on campaign, he's fallen +in love with the Tsar," he said. + +"Denisov, don't make fun of it!" cried Rostov. "It is such a +lofty, beautiful feeling, such a..." + +"I believe it, I believe it, fwiend, and I share and appwove..." + +"No, you don't understand!" + +And Rostov got up and went wandering among the campfires, dreaming +of what happiness it would be to die- not in saving the Emperor's life +(he did not even dare to dream of that), but simply to die before +his eyes. He really was in love with the Tsar and the glory of the +Russian arms and the hope of future triumph. And he was not the only +man to experience that feeling during those memorable days preceding +the battle of Austerlitz: nine tenths of the men in the Russian army +were then in love, though less ecstatically, with their Tsar and the +glory of the Russian arms. + +CHAPTER XI + +The next day the Emperor stopped at Wischau, and Villier, his +physician, was repeatedly summoned to see him. At headquarters and +among the troops near by the news spread that the Emperor was +unwell. He ate nothing and had slept badly that night, those around +him reported. The cause of this indisposition was the strong +impression made on his sensitive mind by the sight of the killed and +wounded. + +At daybreak on the seventeenth, a French officer who had come with a +flag of truce, demanding an audience with the Russian Emperor, was +brought into Wischau from our outposts. This officer was Savary. The +Emperor had only just fallen asleep and so Savary had to wait. At +midday he was admitted to the Emperor, and an hour later he rode off +with Prince Dolgorukov to the advanced post of the French army. + +It was rumored that Savary had been sent to propose to Alexander a +meeting with Napoleon. To the joy and pride of the whole army, a +personal interview was refused, and instead of the Sovereign, Prince +Dolgorukov, the victor at Wischau, was sent with Savary to negotiate +with Napoleon if, contrary to expectations, these negotiations were +actuated by a real desire for peace. + +Toward evening Dolgorukov came back, went straight to the Tsar, +and remained alone with him for a long time. + +On the eighteenth and nineteenth of November, the army advanced +two days' march and the enemy's outposts after a brief interchange +of shots retreated. In the highest army circles from midday on the +nineteenth, a great, excitedly bustling activity began which lasted +till the morning of the twentieth, when the memorable battle of +Austerlitz was fought. + +Till midday on the nineteenth, the activity- the eager talk, running +to and fro, and dispatching of adjutants- was confined to the +Emperor's headquarters. But on the afternoon of that day, this +activity reached Kutiizov's headquarters and the staffs of the +commanders of columns. By evening, the adjutants had spread it to +all ends and parts of the army, and in the night from the nineteenth +to the twentieth, the whole eighty thousand allied troops rose from +their bivouacs to the hum of voices, and the army swayed and started +in one enormous mass six miles long. + +The concentrated activity which had begun at the Emperor's +headquarters in the morning and had started the whole movement that +followed was like the first movement of the main wheel of a large +tower clock. One wheel slowly moved, another was set in motion, and +a third, and wheels began to revolve faster and faster, levers and +cogwheels to work, chimes to play, figures to pop out, and the hands +to advance with regular motion as a result of all that activity. + +Just as in the mechanism of a clock, so in the mechanism of the +military machine, an impulse once given leads to the final result; and +just as indifferently quiescent till the moment when motion is +transmitted to them are the parts of the mechanism which the impulse +has not yet reached. Wheels creak on their axles as the cogs engage +one another and the revolving pulleys whirr with the rapidity of their +movement, but a neighboring wheel is as quiet and motionless as though +it were prepared to remain so for a hundred years; but the moment +comes when the lever catches it and obeying the impulse that wheel +begins to creak and joins in the common motion the result and aim of +which are beyond its ken. + +Just as in a clock, the result of the complicated motion of +innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement +of the hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated +human activities of 160,000 Russians and French- all their passions, +desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, +fear, and enthusiasm- was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, +the so-called battle of the three Emperors- that is to say, a slow +movement of the hand on the dial of human history. + +Prince Andrew was on duty that day and in constant attendance on the +commander in chief. + +At six in the evening, Kutuzov went to the Emperor's headquarters +and after staying but a short time with the Tsar went to see the grand +marshal of the court, Count Tolstoy. + +Bolkonski took the opportunity to go in to get some details of the +coming action from Dolgorukov. He felt that Kutuzov was upset and +dissatisfied about something and that at headquarters they were +dissatisfied with him, and also that at the Emperor's headquarters +everyone adopted toward him the tone of men who know something +others do not know: he therefore wished to speak to Dolgorukov. + +"Well, how d'you do, my dear fellow?" said Dolgorukov, who was +sitting at tea with Bilibin. "The fete is for tomorrow. How is your +old fellow? Out of sorts?" + +"I won't say he is out of sorts, but I fancy he would like to be +heard." + +"But they heard him at the council of war and will hear him when +he talks sense, but to temporize and wait for something now when +Bonaparte fears nothing so much as a general battle is impossible." + +"Yes, you have seen him?" said Prince Andrew. "Well, what is +Bonaparte like? How did he impress you?" + +"Yes, I saw him, and am convinced that he fears nothing so much as a +general engagement," repeated Dolgorukov, evidently prizing this +general conclusion which he had arrived at from his interview with +Napoleon. "If he weren't afraid of a battle why did he ask for that +interview? Why negotiate, and above all why retreat, when to retreat +is so contrary to his method of conducting war? Believe me, he is +afraid, afraid of a general battle. His hour has come! Mark my words!" + +"But tell me, what is he like, eh?" said Prince Andrew again. + +"He is a man in a gray overcoat, very anxious that I should call him +'Your Majesty,' but who, to his chagrin, got no title from me! +That's the sort of man he is, and nothing more," replied Dolgorukov, +looking round at Bilibin with a smile. + +"Despite my great respect for old Kutuzov," he continued, "we should +be a nice set of fellows if we were to wait about and so give him a +chance to escape, or to trick us, now that we certainly have him in +our hands! No, we mustn't forget Suvorov and his rule- not to put +yourself in a position to be attacked, but yourself to attack. Believe +me in war the energy of young men often shows the way better than +all the experience of old Cunctators." + +"But in what position are we going to attack him? I have been at the +outposts today and it is impossible to say where his chief forces +are situated," said Prince Andrew. + +He wished to explain to Dolgorukov a plan of attack he had himself +formed. + +"Oh, that is all the same," Dolgorukov said quickly, and getting +up he spread a map on the table. "All eventualities have been +foreseen. If he is standing before Brunn..." + +And Prince Dolgorukov rapidly but indistinctly explained Weyrother's +plan of a flanking movement. + +Prince Andrew began to reply and to state his own plan, which +might have been as good as Weyrother's, but for the disadvantage +that Weyrother's had already been approved. As soon as Prince Andrew +began to demonstrate the defects of the latter and the merits of his +own plan, Prince Dolgorukov ceased to listen to him and gazed +absent-mindedly not at the map, but at Prince Andrew's face. + +"There will be a council of war at Kutuzov's tonight, though; you +can say all this there," remarked Dolgorukov. + +"I will do so," said Prince Andrew, moving away from the map. + +"Whatever are you bothering about, gentlemen?" said Bilibin, who, +till then, had listened with an amused smile to their conversation and +now was evidently ready with a joke. "Whether tomorrow brings +victory or defeat, the glory of our Russian arms is secure. Except +your Kutuzov, there is not a single Russian in command of a column! +The commanders are: Herr General Wimpfen, le Comte de Langeron, le +Prince de Lichtenstein, le Prince, de Hohenlohe, and finally +Prishprish, and so on like all those Polish names." + +"Be quiet, backbiter!" said Dolgorukov. "It is not true; there are +now two Russians, Miloradovich, and Dokhturov, and there would be a +third, Count Arakcheev, if his nerves were not too weak." + +"However, I think General Kutuzov has come out," said Prince Andrew. +"I wish you good luck and success, gentlemen!" he added and went out +after shaking hands with Dolgorukov and Bilibin. + +On the way home, Prince Andrew could not refrain from asking +Kutuzov, who was sitting silently beside him, what he thought of +tomorrow's battle. + +Kutuzov looked sternly at his adjutant and, after a pause, +replied: "I think the battle will be lost, and so I told Count Tolstoy +and asked him to tell the Emperor. What do you think he replied? 'But, +my dear general, I am engaged with rice and cutlets, look after +military matters yourself!' Yes... That was the answer I got!" + +CHAPTER XII + +Shortly after nine o'clock that evening, Weyrother drove with his +plans to Kutuzov's quarters where the council of war was to be held. +All the commanders of columns were summoned to the commander in +chief's and with the exception of Prince Bagration, who declined to +come, were all there at the appointed time. + +Weyrother, who was in full control of the proposed battle, by his +eagerness and briskness presented a marked contrast to the +dissatisfied and drowsy Kutuzov, who reluctantly played the part of +chairman and president of the council of war. Weyrother evidently felt +himself to be at the head of a movement that had already become +unrestrainable. He was like a horse running downhill harnessed to a +heavy cart. Whether he was pulling it or being pushed by it he did not +know, but rushed along at headlong speed with no time to consider what +this movement might lead to. Weyrother had been twice that evening +to the enemy's picket line to reconnoiter personally, and twice to the +Emperors, Russian and Austrian, to report and explain, and to his +headquarters where he had dictated the dispositions in German, and +now, much exhausted, he arrived at Kutuzov's. + +He was evidently so busy that he even forgot to be polite to the +commander in chief. He interrupted him, talked rapidly and +indistinctly, without looking at the man he was addressing, and did +not reply to questions put to him. He was bespattered with mud and had +a pitiful, weary, and distracted air, though at the same time he was +haughty and self-confident. + +Kutuzov was occupying a nobleman's castle of modest dimensions +near Ostralitz. In the large drawing room which had become the +commander in chief's office were gathered Kutuzov himself, +Weyrother, and the members of the council of war. They were drinking +tea, and only awaited Prince Bagration to begin the council. At last +Bagration's orderly came with the news that the prince could not +attend. Prince Andrew came in to inform the commander in chief of this +and, availing himself of permission previously given him by Kutuzov to +be present at the council, he remained in the room. + +"Since Prince Bagration is not coming, we may begin," said +Weyrother, hurriedly rising from his seat and going up to the table on +which an enormous map of the environs of Brunn was spread out. + +Kutuzov, with his uniform unbuttoned so that his fat neck bulged +over his collar as if escaping, was sitting almost asleep in a low +chair, with his podgy old hands resting symmetrically on its arms. +At the sound of Weyrother's voice, he opened his one eye with an +effort. + +"Yes, yes, if you please! It is already late," said he, and +nodding his head he let it droop and again closed his eye. + +If at first the members of the council thought that Kutuzov was +pretending to sleep, the sounds his nose emitted during the reading +that followed proved that the commander in chief at that moment was +absorbed by a far more serious matter than a desire to show his +contempt for the dispositions or anything else- he was engaged in +satisfying the irresistible human need for sleep. He really was +asleep. Weyrother, with the gesture of a man too busy to lose a +moment, glanced at Kutuzov and, having convinced himself that he was +asleep, took up a paper and in a loud, monotonous voice began to +read out the dispositions for the impending battle, under a heading +which he also read out: + +"Dispositions for an attack on the enemy position behind Kobelnitz +and Sokolnitz, November 30, 1805." + +The dispositions were very complicated and difficult. They began +as follows: + +"As the enemy's left wing rests on wooded hills and his right +extends along Kobelnitz and Sokolnitz behind the ponds that are there, +while we, on the other hand, with our left wing by far outflank his +right, it is advantageous to attack the enemy's latter wing especially +if we occupy the villages of Sokolnitz and Kobelnitz, whereby we can +both fall on his flank and pursue him over the plain between +Schlappanitz and the Thuerassa forest, avoiding the defiles of +Schlappanitz and Bellowitz which cover the enemy's front. For this +object it is necessary that... The first column marches... The +second column marches... The third column marches..." and so on, +read Weyrother. + +The generals seemed to listen reluctantly to the difficult +dispositions. The tall, fair-haired General Buxhowden stood, leaning +his back against the wall, his eyes fixed on a burning candle, and +seemed not to listen or even to wish to be thought to listen. +Exactly opposite Weyrother, with his glistening wide-open eyes fixed +upon him and his mustache twisted upwards, sat the ruddy +Miloradovich in a military pose, his elbows turned outwards, his hands +on his knees, and his shoulders raised. He remained stubbornly silent, +gazing at Weyrother's face, and only turned away his eyes when the +Austrian chief of staff finished reading. Then Miloradovich looked +round significantly at the other generals. But one could not tell from +that significant look whether he agreed or disagreed and was satisfied +or not with the arrangements. Next to Weyrother sat Count Langeron +who, with a subtle smile that never left his typically southern French +face during the whole time of the reading, gazed at his delicate +fingers which rapidly twirled by its corners a gold snuffbox on +which was a portrait. In the middle of one of the longest sentences, +he stopped the rotary motion of the snuffbox, raised his head, and +with inimical politeness lurking in the corners of his thin lips +interrupted Weyrother, wishing to say something. But the Austrian +general, continuing to read, frowned angrily and jerked his elbows, as +if to say: "You can tell me your views later, but now be so good as to +look at the map and listen." Langeron lifted his eyes with an +expression of perplexity, turned round to Miloradovich as if seeking +an explanation, but meeting the latter's impressive but meaningless +gaze drooped his eyes sadly and again took to twirling his snuffbox. + +"A geography lesson!" he muttered as if to himself, but loud +enough to be heard. + +Przebyszewski, with respectful but dignified politeness, held his +hand to his ear toward Weyrother, with the air of a man absorbed in +attention. Dohkturov, a little man, sat opposite Weyrother, with an +assiduous and modest mien, and stooping over the outspread map +conscientiously studied the dispositions and the unfamiliar +locality. He asked Weyrother several times to repeat words he had +not clearly heard and the difficult names of villages. Weyrother +complied and Dohkturov noted them down. + +When the reading which lasted more than an hour was over, Langeron +again brought his snuffbox to rest and, without looking at Weyrother +or at anyone in particular, began to say how difficult it was to carry +out such a plan in which the enemy's position was assumed to be known, +whereas it was perhaps not known, since the enemy was in movement. +Langeron's objections were valid but it was obvious that their chief +aim was to show General Weyrother- who had read his dispositions +with as much self-confidence as if he were addressing school children- +that he had to do, not with fools, but with men who could teach him +something in military matters. + +When the monotonous sound of Weyrother's voice ceased, Kutuzov +opened his eye as a miller wakes up when the soporific drone of the +mill wheel is interrupted. He listened to what Langeron said, as if +remarking, "So you are still at that silly business!" quickly closed +his eye again, and let his head sink still lower. + +Langeron, trying as virulently as possible to sting Weyrother's +vanity as author of the military plan, argued that Bonaparte might +easily attack instead of being attacked, and so render the whole of +this plan perfectly worthless. Weyrother met all objections with a +firm and contemptuous smile, evidently prepared beforehand to meet all +objections be they what they might. + +"If he could attack us, he would have done so today," said he. + +"So you think he is powerless?" said Langeron. + +"He has forty thousand men at most," replied Weyrother, with the +smile of a doctor to whom an old wife wishes to explain the +treatment of a case. + +"In that case he is inviting his doom by awaiting our attack," +said Langeron, with a subtly ironical smile, again glancing round +for support to Miloradovich who was near him. + +But Miloradovich was at that moment evidently thinking of anything +rather than of what the generals were disputing about. + +"Ma foi!" said he, "tomorrow we shall see all that on the +battlefield." + +Weyrother again gave that smile which seemed to say that to him it +was strange and ridiculous to meet objections from Russian generals +and to have to prove to them what he had not merely convinced +himself of, but had also convinced the sovereign Emperors of. + +"The enemy has quenched his fires and a continual noise is heard +from his camp," said he. "What does that mean? Either he is +retreating, which is the only thing we need fear, or he is changing +his position." (He smiled ironically.) "But even if he also took up +a position in the Thuerassa, he merely saves us a great deal of +trouble and all our arrangements to the minutest detail remain the +same." + +"How is that?..." began Prince Andrew, who had for long been waiting +an opportunity to express his doubts. + +Kutuzov here woke up, coughed heavily, and looked round at the +generals. + +"Gentlemen, the dispositions for tomorrow- or rather for today, +for it is past midnight- cannot now be altered," said he. "You have +heard them, and we shall all do our duty. But before a battle, there +is nothing more important..." he paused, "than to have a good sleep." + +He moved as if to rise. The generals bowed and retired. It was +past midnight. Prince Andrew went out. + +The council of war, at which Prince Andrew had not been able to +express his opinion as he had hoped to, left on him a vague and uneasy +impression. Whether Dolgorukov and Weyrother, or Kutuzov, Langeron, +and the others who did not approve of the plan of attack, were +right- he did not know. "But was it really not possible for Kutuzov to +state his views plainly to the Emperor? Is it possible that on account +of court and personal considerations tens of thousands of lives, and +my life, my life," he thought, "must be risked?" + +"Yes, it is very likely that I shall be killed tomorrow," he +thought. And suddenly, at this thought of death, a whole series of +most distant, most intimate, memories rose in his imagination: he +remembered his last parting from his father and his wife; he +remembered the days when he first loved her. He thought of her +pregnancy and felt sorry for her and for himself, and in a nervously +emotional and softened mood he went out of the hut in which he was +billeted with Nesvitski and began to walk up and down before it. + +The night was foggy and through the fog the moonlight gleamed +mysteriously. "Yes, tomorrow, tomorrow!" he thought. "Tomorrow +everything may be over for me! All these memories will be no more, +none of them will have any meaning for me. Tomorrow perhaps, even +certainly, I have a presentiment that for the first time I shall +have to show all I can do." And his fancy pictured the battle, its +loss, the concentration of fighting at one point, and the hesitation +of all the commanders. And then that happy moment, that Toulon for +which he had so long waited, presents itself to him at last. He firmly +and clearly expresses his opinion to Kutuzov, to Weyrother, and to the +Emperors. All are struck by the justness of his views, but no one +undertakes to carry them out, so he takes a regiment, a division- +stipulates that no one is to interfere with his arrangements- leads +his division to the decisive point, and gains the victory alone. +"But death and suffering?" suggested another voice. Prince Andrew, +however, did not answer that voice and went on dreaming of his +triumphs. The dispositions for the next battle are planned by him +alone. Nominally he is only an adjutant on Kutuzov's staff, but he +does everything alone. The next battle is won by him alone. Kutuzov is +removed and he is appointed... "Well and then?" asked the other voice. +"If before that you are not ten times wounded, killed, or betrayed, +well... what then?..." "Well then," Prince Andrew answered himself, "I +don't know what will happen and don't want to know, and can't, but +if I want this- want glory, want to be known to men, want to be +loved by them, it is not my fault that I want it and want nothing +but that and live only for that. Yes, for that alone! I shall never +tell anyone, but, oh God! what am I to do if I love nothing but fame +and men's esteem? Death, wounds, the loss of family- I fear nothing. +And precious and dear as many persons are to me- father, sister, wife- +those dearest to me- yet dreadful and unnatural as it seems, I would +give them all at once for a moment of glory, of triumph over men, of +love from men I don't know and never shall know, for the love of these +men here," he thought, as he listened to voices in Kutuzov's +courtyard. The voices were those of the orderlies who were packing up; +one voice, probably a coachman's, was teasing Kutuzov's old cook +whom Prince Andrew knew, and who was called Tit. He was saying, +"Tit, I say, Tit!" + +"Well?" returned the old man. + +"Go, Tit, thresh a bit!" said the wag. + +"Oh, go to the devil!" called out a voice, drowned by the laughter +of the orderlies and servants. + +"All the same, I love and value nothing but triumph over them all, I +value this mystic power and glory that is floating here above me in +this mist!" + +CHAPTER XIII + +That same night, Rostov was with a platoon on skirmishing duty in +front of Bagration's detachment. His hussars were placed along the +line in couples and he himself rode along the line trying to master +the sleepiness that kept coming over him. An enormous space, with +our army's campfires dimly glowing in the fog, could be seen behind +him; in front of him was misty darkness. Rostov could see nothing, +peer as he would into that foggy distance: now something gleamed gray, +now there was something black, now little lights seemed to glimmer +where the enemy ought to be, now he fancied it was only something in +his own eyes. His eyes kept closing, and in his fancy appeared- now +the Emperor, now Denisov, and now Moscow memories- and he again +hurriedly opened his eyes and saw close before him the head and ears +of the horse he was riding, and sometimes, when he came within six +paces of them, the black figures of hussars, but in the distance was +still the same misty darkness. "Why not?... It might easily happen," +thought Rostov, "that the Emperor will meet me and give me an order as +he would to any other officer; he'll say: 'Go and find out what's +there.' There are many stories of his getting to know an officer in +just such a chance way and attaching him to himself! What if he gave +me a place near him? Oh, how I would guard him, how I would tell him +the truth, how I would unmask his deceivers!" And in order to +realize vividly his love devotion to the sovereign, Rostov pictured to +himself an enemy or a deceitful German, whom he would not only kill +with pleasure but whom he would slap in the face before the Emperor. +Suddenly a distant shout aroused him. He started and opened his eyes. + +"Where am I? Oh yes, in the skirmishing line... pass and +watchword- shaft, Olmutz. What a nuisance that our squadron will be in +reserve tomorrow," he thought. "I'll ask leave to go to the front, +this may be my only chance of seeing the Emperor. It won't be long now +before I am off duty. I'll take another turn and when I get back +I'll go to the general and ask him." He readjusted himself in the +saddle and touched up his horse to ride once more round his hussars. +It seemed to him that it was getting lighter. To the left he saw a +sloping descent lit up, and facing it a black knoll that seemed as +steep as a wall. On this knoll there was a white patch that Rostov +could not at all make out: was it a glade in the wood lit up by the +moon, or some unmelted snow, or some white houses? He even thought +something moved on that white spot. "I expect it's snow... that +spot... a spot- une tache," he thought. "There now... it's not a +tache... Natasha... sister, black eyes... Na... tasha... (Won't she be +surprised when I tell her how I've seen the Emperor?) Natasha... +take my sabretache..."- "Keep to the right, your honor, there are +bushes here," came the voice of an hussar, past whom Rostov was riding +in the act of falling asleep. Rostov lifted his head that had sunk +almost to his horse's mane and pulled up beside the hussar. He was +succumbing to irresistible, youthful, childish drowsiness. "But what +was I thinking? I mustn't forget. How shall I speak to the Emperor? +No, that's not it- that's tomorrow. Oh yes! Natasha... sabretache... +saber them...Whom? The hussars... Ah, the hussars with mustaches. +Along the Tverskaya Street rode the hussar with mustaches... I thought +about him too, just opposite Guryev's house... Old Guryev.... Oh, +but Denisov's a fine fellow. But that's all nonsense. The chief +thing is that the Emperor is here. How he looked at me and wished to +say something, but dared not.... No, it was I who dared not. But +that's nonsense, the chief thing is not to forget the important +thing I was thinking of. Yes, Na-tasha, sabretache, oh, yes, yes! +That's right!" And his head once more sank to his horse's neck. All at +once it seemed to him that he was being fired at. "What? What? +What?... Cut them down! What?..." said Rostov, waking up. At the +moment he opened his eyes his eyes he heard in front of him, where the +enemy was, the long-drawn shouts of thousands of voices. His horse and +the horse of the hussar near him pricked their ears at these shouts. +Over there, where the shouting came from, a fire flared up and went +out again, then another, and all along the French line on the hill +fires flared up and the shouting grew louder and louder. Rostov +could hear the sound of French words but could not distinguish them. +The din of many voices was too great; all he could hear was: "ahahah!" +and "rrrr!" + +"What's that? What do you make of it?" said Rostov to the hussar +beside him. "That must be the enemy's camp!" + +The hussar did not reply. + +"Why, don't you hear it?" Rostov asked again, after waiting for a +reply. + +"Who can tell, your honor?" replied the hussar reluctantly. + +"From the direction, it must be the enemy," repeated Rostov. + +"It may be he or it may be nothing," muttered the hussar. "It's +dark... Steady!" he cried to his fidgeting horse. + +Rostov's horse was also getting restive: it pawed the frozen ground, +pricking its ears at the noise and looking at the lights. The shouting +grew still louder and merged into a general roar that only an army +of several thousand men could produce. The lights spread farther and +farther, probably along the line of the French camp. Rostov no +longer wanted to sleep. The gay triumphant shouting of the enemy +army had a stimulating effect on him. "Vive l'Empereur! L'Empereur!" +he now heard distinctly. + +"They can't be far off, probably just beyond the stream," he said to +the hussar beside him. + +The hussar only sighed without replying and coughed angrily. The +sound of horse's hoofs approaching at a trot along the line of hussars +was heard, and out of the foggy darkness the figure of a sergeant of +hussars suddenly appeared, looming huge as an elephant. + +"Your honor, the generals!" said the sergeant, riding up to Rostov. + +Rostov, still looking round toward the fires and the shouts, rode +with the sergeant to meet some mounted men who were riding along the +line. One was on a white horse. Prince Bagration and Prince Dolgorukov +with their adjutants had come to witness the curious phenomenon of the +lights and shouts in the enemy's camp. Rostov rode up to Bagration, +reported to him, and then joined the adjutants listening to what the +generals were saying. + +"Believe me," said Prince Dolgorukov, addressing Bagration, "it is +nothing but a trick! He has retreated and ordered the rearguard to +kindle fires and make a noise to deceive us." + +"Hardly," said Bagration. "I saw them this evening on that knoll; if +they had retreated they would have withdrawn from that too.... +Officer!" said Bagration to Rostov, "are the enemy's skirmishers still +there?" + +"They were there this evening, but now I don't know, your +excellency. Shall I go with some of my hussars to see?" replied +Rostov. + +Bagration stopped and, before replying, tried to see Rostov's face +in the mist. + +"Well, go and see," he said, after a pause. + +"Yes, sir." + +Rostov spurred his horse, called to Sergeant Fedchenko and two other +hussars, told them to follow him, and trotted downhill in the +direction from which the shouting came. He felt both frightened and +pleased to be riding alone with three hussars into that mysterious and +dangerous misty distance where no one had been before him. Bagration +called to him from the hill not to go beyond the stream, but Rostov +pretended not to hear him and did not stop but rode on and on, +continually mistaking bushes for trees and gullies for men and +continually discovering his mistakes. Having descended the hill at a +trot, he no longer saw either our own or the enemy's fires, but +heard the shouting of the French more loudly and distinctly. In the +valley he saw before him something like a river, but when he reached +it he found it was a road. Having come out onto the road he reined +in his horse, hesitating whether to ride along it or cross it and ride +over the black field up the hillside. To keep to the road which +gleamed white in the mist would have been safer because it would be +easier to see people coming along it. "Follow me!" said he, crossed +the road, and began riding up the hill at a gallop toward the point +where the French pickets had been standing that evening. + +"Your honor, there he is!" cried one of the hussars behind him. +And before Rostov had time to make out what the black thing was that +had suddenly appeared in the fog, there was a flash, followed by a +report, and a bullet whizzing high up in the mist with a plaintive +sound passed out of hearing. Another musket missed fire but flashed in +the pan. Rostov turned his horse and galloped back. Four more +reports followed at intervals, and the bullets passed somewhere in the +fog singing in different tones. Rostov reined in his horse, whose +spirits had risen, like his own, at the firing, and went back at a +footpace. "Well, some more! Some more!" a merry voice was saying in +his soul. But no more shots came. + +Only when approaching Bagration did Rostov let his horse gallop +again, and with his hand at the salute rode up to the general. + +Dolgorukov was still insisting that the French had retreated and had +only lit fires to deceive us. + +"What does that prove?" he was saying as Rostov rode up. "They might +retreat and leave the pickets." + +"It's plain that they have not all gone yet, Prince," said +Bagration. "Wait till tomorrow morning, we'll find out everything +tomorrow." + +"The picket is still on the hill, your excellency, just where it was +in the evening," reported Rostov, stooping forward with his hand at +the salute and unable to repress the smile of delight induced by his +ride and especially by the sound of the bullets. + +"Very good, very good," said Bagration. "Thank you, officer." + +"Your excellency," said Rostov, "may I ask a favor?" + +"What is it?" + +"Tomorrow our squadron is to be in reserve. May I ask to be attached +to the first squadron?" + +"What's your name?" + +"Count Rostov." + +"Oh, very well, you may stay in attendance on me." + +"Count Ilya Rostov's son?" asked Dolgorukov. + +But Rostov did not reply. + +"Then I may reckon on it, your excellency?" + +"I will give the order." + +"Tomorrow very likely I may be sent with some message to the +Emperor," thought Rostov. + +"Thank God!" + +The fires and shouting in the enemy's army were occasioned by the +fact that while Napoleon's proclamation was being read to the troops +the Emperor himself rode round his bivouacs. The soldiers, on seeing +him, lit wisps of straw and ran after him, shouting, "Vive +l'Empereur!" Napoleon's proclamation was as follows: + +Soldiers! The Russian army is advancing against you to avenge the +Austrian army of Ulm. They are the same battalions you broke at +Hollabrunn and have pursued ever since to this place. The position +we occupy is a strong one, and while they are marching to go round +me on the right they will expose a flank to me. Soldiers! I will +myself direct your battalions. I will keep out of fire if you with +your habitual valor carry disorder and confusion into the enemy's +ranks, but should victory be in doubt, even for a moment, you will see +your Emperor exposing himself to the first blows of the enemy, for +there must be no doubt of victory, especially on this day when what is +at stake is the honor of the French infantry, so necessary to the +honor of our nation. + +Do not break your ranks on the plea of removing the wounded! Let +every man be fully imbued with the thought that we must defeat these +hirelings of England, inspired by such hatred of our nation! This +victory will conclude our campaign and we can return to winter +quarters, where fresh French troops who are being raised in France +will join us, and the peace I shall conclude will be worthy of my +people, of you, and of myself. + +NAPOLEON + +CHAPTER XIV + +At five in the morning it was still quite dark. The troops of the +center, the reserves, and Bagration's right flank had not yet moved, +but on the left flank the columns of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, +which were to be the first to descend the heights to attack the French +right flank and drive it into the Bohemian mountains according to +plan, were already up and astir. The smoke of the campfires, into +which they were throwing everything superfluous, made the eyes +smart. It was cold and dark. The officers were hurriedly drinking +tea and breakfasting, the soldiers, munching biscuit and beating a +tattoo with their feet to warm themselves, gathering round the fires +throwing into the flames the remains of sheds, chairs, tables, wheels, +tubs, and everything that they did not want or could not carry away +with them. Austrian column guides were moving in and out among the +Russian troops and served as heralds of the advance. As soon as an +Austrian officer showed himself near a commanding officer's +quarters, the regiment began to move: the soldiers ran from the fires, +thrust their pipes into their boots, their bags into the carts, got +their muskets ready, and formed rank. The officers buttoned up their +coats, buckled on their swords and pouches, and moved along the +ranks shouting. The train drivers and orderlies harnessed and packed +the wagons and tied on the loads. The adjutants and battalion and +regimental commanders mounted, crossed themselves, gave final +instructions, orders, and commissions to the baggage men who +remained behind, and the monotonous tramp of thousands of feet +resounded. The column moved forward without knowing where and +unable, from the masses around them, the smoke and the increasing fog, +to see either the place they were leaving or that to which they were +going. + +A soldier on the march is hemmed in and borne along by his +regiment as much as a sailor is by his ship. However far he has +walked, whatever strange, unknown, and dangerous places he reaches, +just as a sailor is always surrounded by the same decks, masts, and +rigging of his ship, so the soldier always has around him the same +comrades, the same ranks, the same sergeant major Ivan Mitrich, the +same company dog Jack, and the same commanders. The sailor rarely +cares to know the latitude in which his ship is sailing, but on the +day of battle- heaven knows how and whence- a stern note of which +all are conscious sounds in the moral atmosphere of an army, +announcing the approach of something decisive and solemn, and +awakening in the men an unusual curiosity. On the day of battle the +soldiers excitedly try to get beyond the interests of their +regiment, they listen intently, look about, and eagerly ask concerning +what is going on around them. + +The fog had grown so dense that though it was growing light they +could not see ten paces ahead. Bushes looked like gigantic trees and +level ground like cliffs and slopes. Anywhere, on any side, one +might encounter an enemy invisible ten paces off. But the columns +advanced for a long time, always in the same fog, descending and +ascending hills, avoiding gardens and enclosures, going over new and +unknown ground, and nowhere encountering the enemy. On the contrary, +the soldiers became aware that in front, behind, and on all sides, +other Russian columns were moving in the same direction. Every soldier +felt glad to know that to the unknown place where he was going, many +more of our men were going too. + +"There now, the Kurskies have also gone past," was being said in the +ranks. + +"It's wonderful what a lot of our troops have gathered, lads! Last +night I looked at the campfires and there was no end of them. A +regular Moscow!" + +Though none of the column commanders rode up to the ranks or +talked to the men (the commanders, as we saw at the council of war, +were out of humor and dissatisfied with the affair, and so did not +exert themselves to cheer the men but merely carried out the +orders), yet the troops marched gaily, as they always do when going +into action, especially to an attack. But when they had marched for +about an hour in the dense fog, the greater part of the men had to +halt and an unpleasant consciousness of some dislocation and blunder +spread through the ranks. How such a consciousness is communicated +is very difficult to define, but it certainly is communicated very +surely, and flows rapidly, imperceptibly, and irrepressibly, as +water does in a creek. Had the Russian army been alone without any +allies, it might perhaps have been a long time before this +consciousness of mismanagement became a general conviction, but as +it was, the disorder was readily and naturally attributed to the +stupid Germans, and everyone was convinced that a dangerous muddle had +been occasioned by the sausage eaters. + +"Why have we stopped? Is the way blocked? Or have we already come up +against the French?" + +"No, one can't hear them. They'd be firing if we had." + +"They were in a hurry enough to start us, and now here we stand in +the middle of a field without rhyme or reason. It's all those damned +Germans' muddling! What stupid devils!" + +"Yes, I'd send them on in front, but no fear, they're crowding up +behind. And now here we stand hungry." + +"I say, shall we soon be clear? They say the cavalry are blocking +the way," said an officer. + +"Ah, those damned Germans! They don't know their own country!" +said another. + +"What division are you?" shouted an adjutant, riding up. + +"The Eighteenth." + +"Then why are you here? You should have gone on long ago, now you +won't get there till evening." + +"What stupid orders! They don't themselves know what they are +doing!" said the officer and rode off. + +Then a general rode past shouting something angrily, not in Russian. + +"Tafa-lafa! But what he's jabbering no one can make out," said a +soldier, mimicking the general who had ridden away. "I'd shoot them, +the scoundrels!" + +"We were ordered to be at the place before nine, but we haven't +got halfway. Fine orders!" was being repeated on different sides. + +And the feeling of energy with which the troops had started began to +turn into vexation and anger at the stupid arrangements and at the +Germans. + +The cause of the confusion was that while the Austrian cavalry was +moving toward our left flank, the higher command found that our center +was too far separated from our right flank and the cavalry were all +ordered to turn back to the right. Several thousand cavalry crossed in +front of the infantry, who had to wait. + +At the front an altercation occurred between an Austrian guide and a +Russian general. The general shouted a demand that the cavalry +should be halted, the Austrian argued that not he, but the higher +command, was to blame. The troops meanwhile stood growing listless and +dispirited. After an hour's delay they at last moved on, descending +the hill. The fog that was dispersing on the hill lay still more +densely below, where they were descending. In front in the fog a +shot was heard and then another, at first irregularly at varying +intervals- trata... tat- and then more and more regularly and rapidly, +and the action at the Goldbach Stream began. + +Not expecting to come on the enemy down by the stream, and having +stumbled on him in the fog, hearing no encouraging word from their +commanders, and with a consciousness of being too late spreading +through the ranks, and above all being unable to see anything in front +or around them in the thick fog, the Russians exchanged shots with the +enemy lazily and advanced and again halted, receiving no timely orders +from the officers or adjutants who wandered about in the fog in +those unknown surroundings unable to find their own regiments. In this +way the action began for the first, second, and third columns, which +had gone down into the valley. The fourth column, with which Kutuzov +was, stood on the Pratzen Heights. + +Below, where the fight was beginning, there was still thick fog; +on the higher ground it was clearing, but nothing could be seen of +what was going on in front. Whether all the enemy forces were, as we +supposed, six miles away, or whether they were near by in that sea +of mist, no one knew till after eight o'clock. + +It was nine o'clock in the morning. The fog lay unbroken like a +sea down below, but higher up at the village of Schlappanitz where +Napoleon stood with his marshals around him, it was quite light. Above +him was a clear blue sky, and the sun's vast orb quivered like a +huge hollow, crimson float on the surface of that milky sea of mist. +The whole French army, and even Napoleon himself with his staff, +were not on the far side of the streams and hollows of Sokolnitz and +Schlappanitz beyond which we intended to take up our position and +begin the action, but were on this side, so close to our own forces +that Napoleon with the naked eye could distinguish a mounted man +from one on foot. Napoleon, in the blue cloak which he had worn on his +Italian campaign, sat on his small gray Arab horse a little in front +of his marshals. He gazed silently at the hills which seemed to rise +out of the sea of mist and on which the Russian troops were moving +in the distance, and he listened to the sounds of firing in the +valley. Not a single muscle of his face- which in those days was still +thin- moved. His gleaming eyes were fixed intently on one spot. His +predictions were being justified. Part of the Russian force had +already descended into the valley toward the ponds and lakes and +part were leaving these Pratzen Heights which he intended to attack +and regarded as the key to the position. He saw over the mist that +in a hollow between two hills near the village of Pratzen, the Russian +columns, their bayonets glittering, were moving continuously in one +direction toward the valley and disappearing one after another into +the mist. From information he had received the evening before, from +the sound of wheels and footsteps heard by the outposts during the +night, by the disorderly movement of the Russian columns, and from all +indications, he saw clearly that the allies believed him to be far +away in front of them, and that the columns moving near Pratzen +constituted the center of the Russian army, and that that center was +already sufficiently weakened to be successfully attacked. But still +he did not begin the engagement. + +Today was a great day for him- the anniversary of his coronation. +Before dawn he had slept for a few hours, and refreshed, vigorous, and +in good spirits, he mounted his horse and rode out into the field in +that happy mood in which everything seems possible and everything +succeeds. He sat motionless, looking at the heights visible above +the mist, and his cold face wore that special look of confident, +self-complacent happiness that one sees on the face of a boy happily +in love. The marshals stood behind him not venturing to distract his +attention. He looked now at the Pratzen Heights, now at the sun +floating up out of the mist. + +When the sun had entirely emerged from the fog, and fields and +mist were aglow with dazzling light- as if he had only awaited this to +begin the action- he drew the glove from his shapely white hand, +made a sign with it to the marshals, and ordered the action to +begin. The marshals, accompanied by adjutants, galloped off in +different directions, and a few minutes later the chief forces of +the French army moved rapidly toward those Pratzen Heights which +were being more and more denuded by Russian troops moving down the +valley to their left. + +CHAPTER XV + +At eight o'clock Kutuzov rode to Pratzen at the head of the fourth +column, Miloradovich's, the one that was to take the place of +Przebyszewski's and Langeron's columns which had already gone down +into the valley. He greeted the men of the foremost regiment and +gave them the order to march, thereby indicating that he intended to +lead that column himself. When he had reached the village of Pratzen +he halted. Prince Andrew was behind, among the immense number +forming the commander in chief's suite. He was in a state of +suppressed excitement and irritation, though controlledly calm as a +man is at the approach of a long-awaited moment. He was firmly +convinced that this was the day of his Toulon, or his bridge of +Arcola. How it would come about he did not know, but he felt sure it +would do so. The locality and the position of our troops were known to +him as far as they could be known to anyone in our army. His own +strategic plan, which obviously could not now be carried out, was +forgotten. Now, entering into Weyrother's plan, Prince Andrew +considered possible contingencies and formed new projects such as +might call for his rapidity of perception and decision. + +To the left down below in the mist, the musketry fire of unseen +forces could be heard. It was there Prince Andrew thought the fight +would concentrate. "There we shall encounter difficulties, and there," +thought he, "I shall be sent with a brigade or division, and there, +standard in hand, I shall go forward and break whatever is in front of +me." + +He could not look calmly at the standards of the passing battalions. +Seeing them he kept thinking, "That may be the very standard with +which I shall lead the army." + +In the morning all that was left of the night mist on the heights +was a hoar frost now turning to dew, but in the valleys it still lay +like a milk-white sea. Nothing was visible in the valley to the left +into which our troops had descended and from whence came the sounds of +firing. Above the heights was the dark clear sky, and to the right the +vast orb of the sun. In front, far off on the farther shore of that +sea of mist, some wooded hills were discernible, and it was there +the enemy probably was, for something could be descried. On the +right the Guards were entering the misty region with a sound of +hoofs and wheels and now and then a gleam of bayonets; to the left +beyond the village similar masses of cavalry came up and disappeared +in the sea of mist. In front and behind moved infantry. The +commander in chief was standing at the end of the village letting +the troops pass by him. That morning Kutuzov seemed worn and +irritable. The infantry passing before him came to a halt without +any command being given, apparently obstructed by something in front. + +"Do order them to form into battalion columns and go round the +village!" he said angrily to a general who had ridden up. "Don't you +understand, your excellency, my dear sir, that you must not defile +through narrow village streets when we are marching against the +enemy?" + +"I intended to re-form them beyond the village, your excellency," +answered the general. + +Kutuzov laughed bitterly. + +"You'll make a fine thing of it, deploying in sight of the enemy! +Very fine!" + +"The enemy is still far away, your excellency. According to the +dispositions..." + +"The dispositions!" exclaimed Kutuzov bitterly. "Who told you +that?... Kindly do as you are ordered." + +"Yes, sir." + +"My dear fellow," Nesvitski whispered to Prince Andrew, "the old man +is as surly as a dog." + +An Austrian officer in a white uniform with green plumes in his +hat galloped up to Kutuzov and asked in the Emperor's name had the +fourth column advanced into action. + +Kutuzov turned round without answering and his eye happened to +fall upon Prince Andrew, who was beside him. Seeing him, Kutuzov's +malevolent and caustic expression softened, as if admitting that +what was being done was not his adjutant's fault, and still not +answering the Austrian adjutant, he addressed Bolkonski. + +"Go, my dear fellow, and see whether the third division has passed +the village. Tell it to stop and await my orders." + +Hardly had Prince Andrew started than he stopped him. + +"And ask whether sharpshooters have been posted," he added. "What +are they doing? What are they doing?" he murmured to himself, still +not replying to the Austrian. + +Prince Andrew galloped off to execute the order. + +Overtaking the battalions that continued to advance, he stopped +the third division and convinced himself that there really were no +sharpshooters in front of our columns. The colonel at the head of +the regiment was much surprised at the commander in chief's order to +throw out skirmishers. He had felt perfectly sure that there were +other troops in front of him and that the enemy must be at least six +miles away. There was really nothing to be seen in front except a +barren descent hidden by dense mist. Having given orders in the +commander in chief's name to rectify this omission, Prince Andrew +galloped back. Kutuzov still in the same place, his stout body resting +heavily in the saddle with the lassitude of age, sat yawning wearily +with closed eyes. The troops were no longer moving, but stood with the +butts of their muskets on the ground. + +"All right, all right!" he said to Prince Andrew, and turned to a +general who, watch in hand, was saying it was time they started as all +the left-flank columns had already descended. + +"Plenty of time, your excellency," muttered Kutuzov in the midst +of a yawn. "Plenty of time," he repeated. + +Just then at a distance behind Kutuzov was heard the sound of +regiments saluting, and this sound rapidly came nearer along the whole +extended line of the advancing Russian columns. Evidently the person +they were greeting was riding quickly. When the soldiers of the +regiment in front of which Kutuzov was standing began to shout, he +rode a little to one side and looked round with a frown. Along the +road from Pratzen galloped what looked like a squadron of horsemen +in various uniforms. Two of them rode side by side in front, at full +gallop. One in a black uniform with white plumes in his hat rode a +bobtailed chestnut horse, the other who was in a white uniform rode +a black one. These were the two Emperors followed by their suites. +Kutuzov, affecting the manners of an old soldier at the front, gave +the command "Attention!" and rode up to the Emperors with a salute. +His whole appearance and manner were suddenly transformed. He put on +the air of a subordinate who obeys without reasoning. With an +affectation of respect which evidently struck Alexander +unpleasantly, he rode up and saluted. + +This unpleasant impression merely flitted over the young and happy +face of the Emperor like a cloud of haze across a clear sky and +vanished. After his illness he looked rather thinner that day than +on the field of Olmutz where Bolkonski had seen him for the first time +abroad, but there was still the same bewitching combination of majesty +and mildness in his fine gray eyes, and on his delicate lips the +same capacity for varying expression and the same prevalent appearance +of goodhearted innocent youth. + +At the Olmutz review he had seemed more majestic; here he seemed +brighter and more energetic. He was slightly flushed after galloping +two miles, and reining in his horse he sighed restfully and looked +round at the faces of his suite, young and animated as his own. +Czartoryski, Novosiltsev, Prince Volkonsky, Strogonov, and the others, +all richly dressed gay young men on splendid, well-groomed, fresh, +only slightly heated horses, exchanging remarks and smiling, had +stopped behind the Emperor. The Emperor Francis, a rosy, long faced +young man, sat very erect on his handsome black horse, looking about +him in a leisurely and preoccupied manner. He beckoned to one of his +white adjutants and asked some question- "Most likely he is asking +at what o'clock they started," thought Prince Andrew, watching his old +acquaintance with a smile he could not repress as he recalled his +reception at Brunn. In the Emperors' suite were the picked young +orderly officers of the Guard and line regiments, Russian and +Austrian. Among them were grooms leading the Tsar's beautiful relay +horses covered with embroidered cloths. + +As when a window is opened a whiff of fresh air from the fields +enters a stuffy room, so a whiff of youthfulness, energy, and +confidence of success reached Kutuzov's cheerless staff with the +galloping advent of all these brilliant young men. + +"Why aren't you beginning, Michael Ilarionovich?" said the Emperor +Alexander hurriedly to Kutuzov, glancing courteously at the same +time at the Emperor Francis. + +"I am waiting, Your Majesty," answered Kutuzov, bending forward +respectfully. + +The Emperor, frowning slightly, bent his ear forward as if he had +not quite heard. + +"Waiting, Your Majesty," repeated Kutuzov. (Prince Andrew noted that +Kutuzov's upper lip twitched unnaturally as he said the word +"waiting.") "Not all the columns have formed up yet, Your Majesty." + +The Tsar heard but obviously did not like the reply; he shrugged his +rather round shoulders and glanced at Novosiltsev who was near him, as +if complaining of Kutuzov. + +"You know, Michael Ilarionovich, we are not are not on the +Empress' Field where a parade does not begin till all the troops are +assembled," said the Tsar with another glance at the Emperor +Francis, as if inviting him if not to join in at least to listen to +what he was saying. But the Emperor Francis continued to look about +him and did not listen. + +"That is just why I do not begin, sire," said Kutuzov in a +resounding voice, apparently to preclude the possibility of not +being heard, and again something in his face twitched- "That is just +why I do not begin, sire, because we are not on parade and not on +the Empress' Field." said clearly and distinctly. + +In the Emperor's suite all exchanged rapid looks that expressed +dissatisfaction and reproach. "Old though he may be, he should not, he +certainly should not, speak like that," their glances seemed to say. + +The Tsar looked intently and observantly into Kutuzov's eye +waiting to hear whether he would say anything more. But Kutuzov, +with respectfully bowed head, seemed also to be waiting. The silence +lasted for about a minute. + +"However, if you command it, Your Majesty," said Kutuzov, lifting +his head and again assuming his former tone of a dull, unreasoning, +but submissive general. + +He touched his horse and having called Miloradovich, the commander +of the column, gave him the order to advance. + +The troops again began to move, and two battalions of the Novgorod +and one of the Apsheron regiment went forward past the Emperor. + +As this Apsheron battalion marched by, the red-faced Miloradovich, +without his greatcoat, with his Orders on his breast and an enormous +tuft of plumes in his cocked hat worn on one side with its corners +front and back, galloped strenuously forward, and with a dashing +salute reined in his horse before the Emperor. + +"God be with you, general!" said the Emperor. + +"Ma foi, sire, nous ferons ce qui sera dans notre possibilite, +sire,"~^ he answered gaily, raising nevertheless ironic smiles among +the gentlemen of the Tsar's suite by his poor French. + +^~ "Indeed, Sire, we shall do everything it is possible to do, Sire." + +Miloradovich wheeled his horse sharply and stationed himself a +little behind the Emperor. The Apsheron men, excited by the Tsar's +presence, passed in step before the Emperors and their suites at a +bold, brisk pace. + +"Lads!" shouted Miloradovich in a loud, self-confident, and cheery +voice, obviously so elated by the sound of firing, by the prospect +of battle, and by the sight of the gallant Apsherons, his comrades +in Suvorov's time, now passing so gallantly before the Emperors, +that he forgot the sovereigns' presence. "Lads, it's not the first +village you've had to take," cried he. + +"Glad to do our best!" shouted the soldiers. + +The Emperor's horse started at the sudden cry. This horse that had +carried the sovereign at reviews in Russia bore him also here on the +field of Austerlitz, enduring the heedless blows of his left foot +and pricking its ears at the sound of shots just as it had done on the +Empress' Field, not understanding the significance of the firing, +nor of the nearness of the Emperor Francis' black cob, nor of all that +was being said, thought, and felt that day by its rider. + +The Emperor turned with a smile to one of his followers and made a +remark to him, pointing to the gallant Apsherons. + +CHAPTER XVI + +Kutuzov accompanied by his adjutants rode at a walking pace behind +the carabineers. + +When he had gone less than half a mile in the rear of the column +he stopped at a solitary, deserted house that had probably once been +an inn, where two roads parted. Both of them led downhill and troops +were marching along both. + +The fog had begun to clear and enemy troops were already dimly +visible about a mile and a half off on the opposite heights. Down +below, on the left, the firing became more distinct. Kutuzov had +stopped and was speaking to an Austrian general. Prince Andrew, who +was a little behind looking at them, turned to an adjutant to ask +him for a field glass. + +"Look, look!" said this adjutant, looking not at the troops in the +distance, but down the hill before him. "It's the French!" + +The two generals and the adjutant took hold of the field glass, +trying to snatch it from one another. The expression on all their +faces suddenly changed to one of horror. The French were supposed to +be a mile and a half away, but had suddenly and unexpectedly +appeared just in front of us. + +"It's the enemy?... No!... Yes, see it is!... for certain.... But +how is that?" said different voices. + +With the naked eye Prince Andrew saw below them to the right, not +more than five hundred paces from where Kutuzov was standing, a +dense French column coming up to meet the Apsherons. + +"Here it is! The decisive moment has arrived. My turn has come," +thought Prince Andrew, and striking his horse he rode up to Kutuzov. + +"The Apsherons must be stopped, your excellency," cried he. But at +that very instant a cloud of smoke spread all round, firing was +heard quite close at hand, and a voice of naive terror barely two +steps from Prince Andrew shouted, "Brothers! All's lost!" And at +this as if at a command, everyone began to run. + +Confused and ever-increasing crowds were running back to where +five minutes before the troops had passed the Emperors. Not only would +it have been difficult to stop that crowd, it was even impossible +not to be carried back with it oneself. Bolkonski only tried not to +lose touch with it, and looked around bewildered and unable to grasp +what was happening in front of him. Nesvitski with an angry face, +red and unlike himself, was shouting to Kutuzov that if he did not +ride away at once he would certainly be taken prisoner. Kutuzov +remained in the same place and without answering drew out a +handkerchief. Blood was flowing from his cheek. Prince Andrew forced +his way to him. + +"You are wounded?" he asked, hardly able to master the trembling +of his lower jaw. + +"The wound is not here, it is there!" said Kutuzov, pressing the +handkerchief to his wounded cheek and pointing to the fleeing +soldiers. "Stop them!" he shouted, and at the same moment, probably +realizing that it was impossible to stop them, spurred his horse and +rode to the right. + +A fresh wave of the flying mob caught him and bore him back with it. + +The troops were running in such a dense mass that once surrounded by +them it was difficult to get out again. One was shouting, "Get on! Why +are you hindering us?" Another in the same place turned round and +fired in the air; a third was striking the horse Kutuzov himself rode. +Having by a great effort got away to the left from that flood of +men, Kutuzov, with his suite diminished by more than half, rode toward +a sound of artillery fire near by. Having forced his way out of the +crowd of fugitives, Prince Andrew, trying to keep near Kutuzov, saw on +the slope of the hill amid the smoke a Russian battery that was +still firing and Frenchmen running toward it. Higher up stood some +Russian infantry, neither moving forward to protect the battery nor +backward with the fleeing crowd. A mounted general separated himself +from the infantry and approached Kutuzov. Of Kutuzov's suite only four +remained. They were all pale and exchanged looks in silence. + +"Stop those wretches!" gasped Kutuzov to the regimental commander, +pointing to the flying soldiers; but at that instant, as if to +punish him for those words, bullets flew hissing across the regiment +and across Kutuzov's suite like a flock of little birds. + +The French had attacked the battery and, seeing Kutuzov, were firing +at him. After this volley the regimental commander clutched at his +leg; several soldiers fell, and a second lieutenant who was holding +the flag let it fall from his hands. It swayed and fell, but caught on +the muskets of the nearest soldiers. The soldiers started firing +without orders. + +"Oh! Oh! Oh!" groaned Kutuzov despairingly and looked around.... +"Bolkonski!" he whispered, his voice trembling from a consciousness of +the feebleness of age, "Bolkonski!" he whispered, pointing to the +disordered battalion and at the enemy, "what's that?" + +But before he had finished speaking, Prince Andrew, feeling tears of +shame and anger choking him, had already leapt from his horse and +run to the standard. + +"Forward, lads!" he shouted in a voice piercing as a child's. + +"Here it is!" thought he, seizing the staff of the standard and +hearing with pleasure the whistle of bullets evidently aimed at him. +Several soldiers fell. + +"Hurrah!" shouted Prince Andrew, and, scarcely able to hold up the +heavy standard, he ran forward with full confidence that the whole +battalion would follow him. + +And really he only ran a few steps alone. One soldier moved and then +another and soon the whole battalion ran forward shouting "Hurrah!" +and overtook him. A sergeant of the battalion ran up and took the flag +that was swaying from its weight in Prince Andrew's hands, but he +was immediately killed. Prince Andrew again seized the standard and, +dragging it by the staff, ran on with the battalion. In front he saw +our artillerymen, some of whom were fighting, while others, having +abandoned their guns, were running toward him. He also saw French +infantry soldiers who were seizing the artillery horses and turning +the guns round. Prince Andrew and the battalion were already within +twenty paces of the cannon. He heard the whistle of bullets above +him unceasingly and to right and left of him soldiers continually +groaned and dropped. But he did not look at them: he looked only at +what was going on in front of him- at the battery. He now saw +clearly the figure of a red-haired gunner with his shako knocked awry, +pulling one end of a mop while a French soldier tugged at the other. +He could distinctly see the distraught yet angry expression on the +faces of these two men, who evidently did not realize what they were +doing. + +"What are they about?" thought Prince Andrew as he gazed at them. +"Why doesn't the red-haired gunner run away as he is unarmed? Why +doesn't the Frenchman stab him? He will not get away before the +Frenchman remembers his bayonet and stabs him...." + +And really another French soldier, trailing his musket, ran up to +the struggling men, and the fate of the red-haired gunner, who had +triumphantly secured the mop and still did not realize what awaited +him, was about to be decided. But Prince Andrew did not see how it +ended. It seemed to him as though one of the soldiers near him hit him +on the head with the full swing of a bludgeon. It hurt a little, but +the worst of it was that the pain distracted him and prevented his +seeing what he had been looking at. + +"What's this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way," thought he, and +fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle +of the Frenchmen with the gunners ended, whether the red-haired gunner +had been killed or not and whether the cannon had been captured or +saved. But he saw nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the +sky- the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with +gray clouds gliding slowly across it. "How quiet, peaceful, and +solemn; not at all as I ran," thought Prince Andrew- "not as we ran, +shouting and fighting, not at all as the gunner and the Frenchman with +frightened and angry faces struggled for the mop: how differently do +those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did +not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it +at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite +sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not +exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!..." + +CHAPTER XVII + +On our right flank commanded by Bagration, at nine o'clock the +battle had not yet begun. Not wishing to agree to Dolgorukov's +demand to commence the action, and wishing to avert responsibility +from himself, Prince Bagration proposed to Dolgorukov to send to +inquire of the commander in chief. Bagration knew that as the distance +between the two flanks was more than six miles, even if the +messenger were not killed (which he very likely would be), and found +the commander in chief (which would be very difficult), he would not +be able to get back before evening. + +Bagration cast his large, expressionless, sleepy eyes round his +suite, and the boyish face Rostov, breathless with excitement and +hope, was the first to catch his eye. He sent him. + +"And if I should meet His Majesty before I meet the commander in +chief, your excellency?" said Rostov, with his hand to his cap. + +"You can give the message to His Majesty," said Dolgorukov, +hurriedly interrupting Bagration. + +On being relieved from picket duty Rostov had managed to get a few +hours' sleep before morning and felt cheerful, bold, and resolute, +with elasticity of movement, faith in his good fortune, and +generally in that state of mind which makes everything seem +possible, pleasant, and easy. + +All his wishes were being fulfilled that morning: there was to be +a general engagement in which he was taking part, more than that, he +was orderly to the bravest general, and still more, he was going +with a message to Kutuzov, perhaps even to the sovereign himself. +The morning was bright, he had a good horse under him, and his heart +was full of joy and happiness. On receiving the order he gave his +horse the rein and galloped along the line. At first he rode along the +line of Bagration's troops, which had not yet advanced into action but +were standing motionless; then he came to the region occupied by +Uvarov's cavalry and here he noticed a stir and signs of preparation +for battle; having passed Uvarov's cavalry he clearly heard the +sound of cannon and musketry ahead of him. The firing grew louder +and louder. + +In the fresh morning air were now heard, not two or three musket +shots at irregular intervals as before, followed by one or two +cannon shots, but a roll of volleys of musketry from the slopes of the +hill before Pratzen, interrupted by such frequent reports of cannon +that sometimes several of them were not separated from one another but +merged into a general roar. + +He could see puffs of musketry smoke that seemed to chase one +another down the hillsides, and clouds of cannon smoke rolling, +spreading, and mingling with one another. He could also, by the +gleam of bayonets visible through the smoke, make out moving masses of +infantry and narrow lines of artillery with green caissons. + +Rostov stopped his horse for a moment on a hillock to see what was +going on, but strain his attention as he would he could not understand +or make out anything of what was happening: there in the smoke men +of some sort were moving about, in front and behind moved lines of +troops; but why, whither, and who they were, it was impossible to make +out. These sights and sounds had no depressing or intimidating +effect on him; on the contrary, they stimulated his energy and +determination. + +"Go on! Go on! Give it them!" he mentally exclaimed at these sounds, +and again proceeded to gallop along the line, penetrating farther +and farther into the region where the army was already in action. + +"How it will be there I don't know, but all will be well!" thought +Rostov. + +After passing some Austrian troops he noticed that the next part +of the line (the Guards) was already in action. + +"So much the better! I shall see it close," he thought. + +He was riding almost along the front line. A handful of men came +galloping toward him. They were our Uhlans who with disordered ranks +were returning from the attack. Rostov got out of their way, +involuntarily noticed that one of them was bleeding, and galloped on. + +"That is no business of mine," he thought. He had not ridden many +hundred yards after that before he saw to his left, across the whole +width of the field, an enormous mass of cavalry in brilliant white +uniforms, mounted on black horses, trotting straight toward him and +across his path. Rostov put his horse to full gallop to get out of the +way of these men, and he would have got clear had they continued at +the same speed, but they kept increasing their pace, so that some of +the horses were already galloping. Rostov heard the thud of their +hoofs and the jingle of their weapons and saw their horses, their +figures, and even their faces, more and more distinctly. They were our +Horse Guards, advancing to attack the French cavalry that was coming +to meet them. + +The Horse Guards were galloping, but still holding in their +horses. Rostov could already see their faces and heard the command: +"Charge!" shouted by an officer who was urging his thoroughbred to +full speed. Rostov, fearing to be crushed or swept into the attack +on the French, galloped along the front as hard as his horse could go, +but still was not in time to avoid them. + +The last of the Horse Guards, a huge pockmarked fellow, frowned +angrily on seeing Rostov before him, with whom he would inevitably +collide. This Guardsman would certainly have bowled Rostov and his +Bedouin over (Rostov felt himself quite tiny and weak compared to +these gigantic men and horses) had it not occurred to Rostov to +flourish his whip before the eyes of the Guardsman's horse. The +heavy black horse, sixteen hands high, shied, throwing back its +ears; but the pockmarked Guardsman drove his huge spurs in +violently, and the horse, flourishing its tail and extending its neck, +galloped on yet faster. Hardly had the Horse Guards passed Rostov +before he heard them shout, "Hurrah!" and looking back saw that +their foremost ranks were mixed up with some foreign cavalry with +red epaulets, probably French. He could see nothing more, for +immediately afterwards cannon began firing from somewhere and smoke +enveloped everything. + +At that moment, as the Horse Guards, having passed him, +disappeared in the smoke, Rostov hesitated whether to gallop after +them or to go where he was sent. This was the brilliant charge of +the Horse Guards that amazed the French themselves. Rostov was +horrified to hear later that of all that mass of huge and handsome +men, of all those brilliant, rich youths, officers and cadets, who had +galloped past him on their thousand-ruble horses, only eighteen were +left after the charge. + +"Why should I envy them? My chance is not lost, and maybe I shall +see the Emperor immediately! " thought Rostov and galloped on. + +When he came level with the Foot Guards he noticed that about them +and around them cannon balls were flying, of which he was aware not so +much because he heard their sound as because he saw uneasiness on +the soldiers' faces and unnatural warlike solemnity on those of the +officers. + +Passing behind one of the lines of a regiment of Foot Guards he +heard a voice calling him by name. + +"Rostov!" + +"What?" he answered, not recognizing Boris. + +"I say, we've been in the front line! Our regiment attacked!" said +Boris with the happy smile seen on the faces of young men who have +been under fire for the first time. + +Rostov stopped. + +"Have you?" he said. "Well, how did it go?" + +"We drove them back!" said Boris with animation, growing +talkative. "Can you imagine it?" and he began describing how the +Guards, having taken up their position and seeing troops before +them, thought they were Austrians, and all at once discovered from the +cannon balls discharged by those troops that they were themselves in +the front line and had unexpectedly to go into action. Rostov +without hearing Boris to the end spurred his horse. + +"Where are you off to?" asked Boris. + +"With a message to His Majesty." + +"There he is!" said Boris, thinking Rostov had said "His +Highness," and pointing to the Grand Duke who with his high +shoulders and frowning brows stood a hundred paces away from them in +his helmet and Horse Guards' jacket, shouting something to a pale, +white uniformed Austrian officer. + +"But that's the Grand Duke, and I want the commander in chief or the +Emperor," said Rostov, and was about to spur his horse. + +"Count! Count!" shouted Berg who ran up from the other side as eager +as Boris. "Count! I am wounded in my right hand" (and he showed his +bleeding hand with a handkerchief tied round it) "and I remained at +the front. I held my sword in my left hand, Count. All our family- the +von Bergs- have been knights!" + +He said something more, but Rostov did not wait to hear it and +rode away. + +Having passed the Guards and traversed an empty space, Rostov, to +avoid again getting in front of the first line as he had done when the +Horse Guards charged, followed the line of reserves, going far round +the place where the hottest musket fire and cannonade were heard. +Suddenly he heard musket fire quite close in front of him and behind +our troops, where he could never have expected the enemy to be. + +"What can it be?" he thought. "The enemy in the rear of our army? +Impossible!" And suddenly he was seized by a panic of fear for himself +and for the issue of the whole battle. "But be that what it may," he +reflected, "there is no riding round it now. I must look for the +commander in chief here, and if all is lost it is for me to perish +with the rest." + +The foreboding of evil that had suddenly come over Rostov was more +and more confirmed the farther he rode into the region behind the +village of Pratzen, which was full of troops of all kinds. + +"What does it mean? What is it? Whom are they firing at? Who is +firing?" Rostov kept asking as he came up to Russian and Austrian +soldiers running in confused crowds across his path. + +"The devil knows! They've killed everybody! It's all up now!" he was +told in Russian, German, and Czech by the crowd of fugitives who +understood what was happening as little as he did. + +"Kill the Germans!" shouted one. + +"May the devil take them- the traitors!" + +"Zum Henker diese Russen!"~^ muttered a German. + +^~ "Hang these Russians!" + +Several wounded men passed along the road, and words of abuse, +screams, and groans mingled in a general hubbub, then the firing +died down. Rostov learned later that Russian and Austrian soldiers had +been firing at one another. + +"My God! What does it all mean?" thought he. "And here, where at any +moment the Emperor may see them.... But no, these must be only a +handful of scoundrels. It will soon be over, it can't be that, it +can't be! Only to get past them quicker, quicker!" + +The idea of defeat and flight could not enter Rostov's head. +Though he saw French cannon and French troops on the Pratzen Heights +just where he had been ordered to look for the commander in chief, +he could not, did not wish to, believe that. + +CHAPTER XVIII + +Rostov had been ordered to look for Kutuzov and the Emperor near the +village of Pratzen. But neither they nor a single commanding officer +were there, only disorganized crowds of troops of various kinds. He +urged on his already weary horse to get quickly past these crowds, but +the farther he went the more disorganized they were. The highroad on +which he had come out was thronged with caleches, carriages of all +sorts, and Russian and Austrian soldiers of all arms, some wounded and +some not. This whole mass droned and jostled in confusion under the +dismal influence of cannon balls flying from the French batteries +stationed on the Pratzen Heights. + +"Where is the Emperor? Where is Kutuzov?" Rostov kept asking +everyone he could stop, but got no answer from anyone. + +At last seizing a soldier by his collar he forced him to answer. + +"Eh, brother! They've all bolted long ago!" said the soldier, +laughing for some reason and shaking himself free. + +Having left that soldier who was evidently drunk, Rostov stopped the +horse of a batman or groom of some important personage and began to +question him. The man announced that the Tsar had been driven in a +carriage at full speed about an hour before along that very road and +that he was dangerously wounded. + +"It can't be!" said Rostov. "It must have been someone else." + +"I saw him myself." replied the man with a self-confident smile of +derision. "I ought to know the Emperor by now, after the times I've +seen him in Petersburg. I saw him just as I see you.... There he sat +in the carriage as pale as anything. How they made the four black +horses fly! Gracious me, they did rattle past! It's time I knew the +Imperial horses and Ilya Ivanych. I don't think Ilya drives anyone +except the Tsar!" + +Rostov let go of the horse and was about to ride on, when a +wounded officer passing by addressed him: + +"Who is it you want?" he asked. "The commander in chief? He was +killed by a cannon ball- struck in the breast before our regiment." + +"Not killed- wounded!" another officer corrected him. + +"Who? Kutuzov?" asked Rostov. + +"Not Kutuzov, but what's his name- well, never mind... there are not +many left alive. Go that way, to that village, all the commanders +are there," said the officer, pointing to the village of Hosjeradek, +and he walked on. + +Rostov rode on at a footpace not knowing why or to whom he was now +going. The Emperor was wounded, the battle lost. It was impossible +to doubt it now. Rostov rode in the direction pointed out to him, in +which he saw turrets and a church. What need to hurry? What was he now +to say to the Tsar or to Kutuzov, even if they were alive and +unwounded? + +"Take this road, your honor, that way you will be killed at once!" a +soldier shouted to him. "They'd kill you there!" + +"Oh, what are you talking about?" said another. "Where is he to +go? That way is nearer." + +Rostov considered, and then went in the direction where they said he +would be killed. + +"It's all the same now. If the Emperor is wounded, am I to try to +save myself?" he thought. He rode on to the region where the +greatest number of men had perished in fleeing from Pratzen. The +French had not yet occupied that region, and the Russians- the +uninjured and slightly wounded- had left it long ago. All about the +field, like heaps of manure on well-kept plowland, lay from ten to +fifteen dead and wounded to each couple of acres. The wounded crept +together in twos and threes and one could hear their distressing +screams and groans, sometimes feigned- or so it seemed to Rostov. He +put his horse to a trot to avoid seeing all these suffering men, and +he felt afraid- afraid not for his life, but for the courage he needed +and which he knew would not stand the sight of these unfortunates. + +The French, who had ceased firing at this field strewn with dead and +wounded where there was no one left to fire at, on seeing an +adjutant riding over it trained a gun on him and fired several +shots. The sensation of those terrible whistling sounds and of the +corpses around him merged in Rostov's mind into a single feeling of +terror and pity for himself. He remembered his mother's last letter. +"What would she feel," thought he, "if she saw me here now on this +field with the cannon aimed at me?" + +In the village of Hosjeradek there were Russian troops retiring from +the field of battle, who though still in some confusion were less +disordered. The French cannon did not reach there and the musketry +fire sounded far away. Here everyone clearly saw and said that the +battle was lost. No one whom Rostov asked could tell him where the +Emperor or Kutuzov was. Some said the report that the Emperor was +wounded was correct, others that it was not, and explained the false +rumor that had spread by the fact that the Emperor's carriage had +really galloped from the field of battle with the pale and terrified +Ober-Hofmarschal Count Tolstoy, who had ridden out to the +battlefield with others in the Emperor's suite. One officer told +Rostov that he had seen someone from headquarters behind the village +to the left, and thither Rostov rode, not hoping to find anyone but +merely to ease his conscience. When he had ridden about two miles +and had passed the last of the Russian troops, he saw, near a +kitchen garden with a ditch round it, two men on horseback facing +the ditch. One with a white plume in his hat seemed familiar to +Rostov; the other on a beautiful chestnut horse (which Rostov +fancied he had seen before) rode up to the ditch, struck his horse +with his spurs, and giving it the rein leaped lightly over. Only a +little earth crumbled from the bank under the horse's hind hoofs. +Turning the horse sharply, he again jumped the ditch, and +deferentially addressed the horseman with the white plumes, +evidently suggesting that he should do the same. The rider, whose +figure seemed familiar to Rostov and involuntarily riveted his +attention, made a gesture of refusal with his head and hand and by +that gesture Rostov instantly recognized his lamented and adored +monarch. + +"But it can't be he, alone in the midst of this empty field!" +thought Rostov. At that moment Alexander turned his head and Rostov +saw the beloved features that were so deeply engraved on his memory. +The Emperor was pale, his cheeks sunken and his eyes hollow, but the +charm, the mildness of his features, was all the greater. Rostov was +happy in the assurance that the rumors about the Emperor being wounded +were false. He was happy to be seeing him. He knew that he might and +even ought to go straight to him and give the message Dolgorukov had +ordered him to deliver. + +But as a youth in love trembles, is unnerved, and dares not utter +the thoughts he has dreamed of for nights, but looks around for help +or a chance of delay and flight when the longed-for moment comes and +he is alone with her, so Rostov, now that he had attained what he +had longed for more than anything else in the world, did not know +how to approach the Emperor, and a thousand reasons occurred to him +why it would be inconvenient, unseemly, and impossible to do so. + +"What! It is as if I were glad of a chance to take advantage of +his being alone and despondent! A strange face may seem unpleasant +or painful to him at this moment of sorrow; besides, what can I say to +him now, when my heart fails me and my mouth feels dry at the mere +sight of him?" Not one of the innumerable speeches addressed to the +Emperor that he had composed in his imagination could he now recall. +Those speeches were intended for quite other conditions, they were for +the most part to be spoken at a moment of victory and triumph, +generally when he was dying of wounds and the sovereign had thanked +him for heroic deeds, and while dying he expressed the love his +actions had proved. + +"Besides how can I ask the Emperor for his instructions for the +right flank now that it is nearly four o'clock and the battle is lost? +No, certainly I must not approach him, I must not intrude on his +reflections. Better die a thousand times than risk receiving an unkind +look or bad opinion from him," Rostov decided; and sorrowfully and +with a heart full despair he rode away, continually looking back at +the Tsar, who still remained in the same attitude of indecision. + +While Rostov was thus arguing with himself and riding sadly away, +Captain von Toll chanced to ride to the same spot, and seeing the +Emperor at once rode up to him, offered his services, and assisted him +to cross the ditch on foot. The Emperor, wishing to rest and feeling +unwell, sat down under an apple tree and von Toll remained beside him. +Rostov from a distance saw with envy and remorse how von Toll spoke +long and warmly to the Emperor and how the Emperor, evidently weeping, +covered his eyes with his hand and pressed von Toll's hand. + +"And I might have been in his place!" thought Rostov, and hardly +restraining his tears of pity for the Emperor, he rode on in utter +despair, not knowing where to or why he was now riding. + +His despair was all the greater from feeling that his own weakness +was the cause his grief. + +He might... not only might but should, have gone up to the +sovereign. It was a unique chance to show his devotion to the +Emperor and he had not made use of it.... "What have I done?" +thought he. And he turned round and galloped back to the place where +he had seen the Emperor, but there was no one beyond the ditch now. +Only some carts and carriages were passing by. From one of the drivers +he learned that Kutuzov's staff were not far off, in the village the +vehicles were going to. Rostov followed them. In front of him walked +Kutuzov's groom leading horses in horsecloths. Then came a cart, and +behind that walked an old, bandy-legged domestic serf in a peaked +cap and sheepskin coat. + +"Tit! I say, Tit!" said the groom. + +"What?" answered the old man absent-mindedly. + +"Go, Tit! Thresh a bit!" + +"Oh, you fool!" said the old man, spitting angrily. Some time passed +in silence, and then the same joke was repeated. + +Before five in the evening the battle had been lost at all points. +More than a hundred cannon were already in the hands of the French. + +Przebyszewski and his corps had laid down their arms. Other +columns after losing half their men were retreating in disorderly +confused masses. + +The remains of Langeron's and Dokhturov's mingled forces were +crowding around the dams and banks of the ponds near the village of +Augesd. + +After five o'clock it was only at the Augesd Dam that a hot +cannonade (delivered by the French alone) was still to be heard from +numerous batteries ranged on the slopes of the Pratzen Heights, +directed at our retreating forces. + +In the rearguard, Dokhturov and others rallying some battalions kept +up a musketry fire at the French cavalry that was pursuing our troops. +It was growing dusk. On the narrow Augesd Dam where for so many +years the old miller had been accustomed to sit in his tasseled cap +peacefully angling, while his grandson, with shirt sleeves rolled +up, handled the floundering silvery fish in the watering can, on +that dam over which for so many years Moravians in shaggy caps and +blue jackets had peacefully driven their two-horse carts loaded with +wheat and had returned dusty with flour whitening their carts- on that +narrow dam amid the wagons and the cannon, under the horses' hoofs and +between the wagon wheels, men disfigured by fear of death now +crowded together, crushing one another, dying, stepping over the dying +and killing one another, only to move on a few steps and be killed +themselves in the same way. + +Every ten seconds a cannon ball flew compressing the air around, +or a shell burst in the midst of that dense throng, killing some and +splashing with blood those near them. + +Dolokhov- now an officer- wounded in the arm, and on foot, with +the regimental commander on horseback and some ten men of his company, +represented all that was left of that whole regiment. Impelled by +the crowd, they had got wedged in at the approach to the dam and, +jammed in on all sides, had stopped because a horse in front had +fallen under a cannon and the crowd were dragging it out. A cannon +ball killed someone behind them, another fell in front and splashed +Dolokhov with blood. The crowd, pushing forward desperately, +squeezed together, moved a few steps, and again stopped. + +"Move on a hundred yards and we are certainly saved, remain here +another two minutes and it is certain death," thought each one. + +Dolokhov who was in the midst of the crowd forced his way to the +edge of the dam, throwing two soldiers off their feet, and ran onto +the slippery ice that covered the millpool. + +"Turn this way!" he shouted, jumping over the ice which creaked +under him; "turn this way!" he shouted to those with the gun. "It +bears!..." + +The ice bore him but it swayed and creaked, and it was plain that it +would give way not only under a cannon or a crowd, but very soon +even under his weight alone. The men looked at him and pressed to +the bank, hesitating to step onto the ice. The general on horseback at +the entrance to the dam raised his hand and opened his mouth to +address Dolokhov. Suddenly a cannon ball hissed so low above the crowd +that everyone ducked. It flopped into something moist, and the general +fell from his horse in a pool of blood. Nobody gave him a look or +thought of raising him. + +"Get onto the ice, over the ice! Go on! Turn! Don't you hear? Go +on!" innumerable voices suddenly shouted after the ball had struck the +general, the men themselves not knowing what, or why, they were +shouting. + +One of the hindmost guns that was going onto the dam turned off onto +the ice. Crowds of soldiers from the dam began running onto the frozen +pond. The ice gave way under one of the foremost soldiers, and one leg +slipped into the water. He tried to right himself but fell in up to +his waist. The nearest soldiers shrank back, the gun driver stopped +his horse, but from behind still came the shouts: "Onto the ice, why +do you stop? Go on! Go on!" And cries of horror were heard in the +crowd. The soldiers near the gun waved their arms and beat the +horses to make them turn and move on. The horses moved off the bank. +The ice, that had held under those on foot, collapsed in a great mass, +and some forty men who were on it dashed, some forward and some +back, drowning one another. + +Still the cannon balls continued regularly to whistle and flop +onto the ice and into the water and oftenest of all among the crowd +that covered the dam, the pond, and the bank. + +CHAPTER XIX + +On the Pratzen Heights, where he had fallen with the flagstaff in +his hand, lay Prince Andrew Bolkonski bleeding profusely and +unconsciously uttering a gentle, piteous, and childlike moan. + +Toward evening he ceased moaning and became quite still. He did +not know how long his unconsciousness lasted. Suddenly he again felt +that he was alive and suffering from a burning, lacerating pain in his +head. + +"Where is it, that lofty sky that I did not know till now, but saw +today?" was his first thought. "And I did not know this suffering +either," he thought. "Yes, I did not know anything, anything at all +till now. But where am I?" + +He listened and heard the sound of approaching horses, and voices +speaking French. He opened his eyes. Above him again was the same +lofty sky with clouds that had risen and were floating still higher, +and between them gleamed blue infinity. He did not turn his head and +did not see those who, judging by the sound of hoofs and voices, had +ridden up and stopped near him. + +It was Napoleon accompanied by two aides-de-camp. Bonaparte riding +over the battlefield had given final orders to strengthen the +batteries firing at the Augesd Dam and was looking at the killed and +wounded left on the field. + +"Fine men!" remarked Napoleon, looking at a dead Russian +grenadier, who, with his face buried in the ground and a blackened +nape, lay on his stomach with an already stiffened arm flung wide. + +"The ammunition for the guns in position is exhausted, Your +Majesty," said an adjutant who had come from the batteries that were +firing at Augesd. + +"Have some brought from the reserve," said Napoleon, and having gone +on a few steps he stopped before Prince Andrew, who lay on his back +with the flagstaff that had been dropped beside him. (The flag had +already been taken by the French as a trophy.) + +"That's a fine death!" said Napoleon as he gazed at Bolkonski. + +Prince Andrew understood that this was said of him and that it was +Napoleon who said it. He heard the speaker addressed as Sire. But he +heard the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly. Not +only did they not interest him, but he took no notice of them and at +once forgot them. His head was burning, he felt himself bleeding to +death, and he saw above him the remote, lofty, and everlasting sky. He +knew it was Napoleon- his hero- but at that moment Napoleon seemed +to him such a small, insignificant creature compared with what was +passing now between himself and that lofty infinite sky with the +clouds flying over it. At that moment it meant nothing to him who +might be standing over him, or what was said of him; he was only +glad that people were standing near him and only wished that they +would help him and bring him back to life, which seemed to him so +beautiful now that he had today learned to understand it so +differently. He collected all his strength, to stir and utter a sound. +He feebly moved his leg and uttered a weak, sickly groan which aroused +his own pity. + +"Ah! He is alive," said Napoleon. "Lift this young man up and +carry him to the dressing station." + +Having said this, Napoleon rode on to meet Marshal Lannes, who, +hat in hand, rode up smiling to the Emperor to congratulate him on the +victory. + +Prince Andrew remembered nothing more: he lost consciousness from +the terrible pain of being lifted onto the stretcher, the jolting +while being moved, and the probing of his wound at the dressing +station. He did not regain consciousness till late in the day, when +with other wounded and captured Russian officers he was carried to the +hospital. During this transfer he felt a little stronger and was +able to look about him and even speak. + +The first words he heard on coming to his senses were those of a +French convoy officer, who said rapidly: "We must halt here: the +Emperor will pass here immediately; it will please him to see these +gentlemen prisoners." + +"There are so many prisoners today, nearly the whole Russian army, +that he is probably tired of them," said another officer. + +"All the same! They say this one is the commander of all the Emperor +Alexander's Guards," said the first one, indicating a Russian +officer in the white uniform of the Horse Guards. + +Bolkonski recognized Prince Repnin whom he had met in Petersburg +society. Beside him stood a lad of nineteen, also a wounded officer of +the Horse Guards. + +Bonaparte, having come up at a gallop, stopped his horse. + +"Which is the senior?" he asked, on seeing the prisoners. + +They named the colonel, Prince Repnin. + +"You are the commander of the Emperor Alexander's regiment of +Horse Guards?" asked Napoleon. + +"I commanded a squadron," replied Repnin. + +"Your regiment fulfilled its duty honorably," said Napoleon. + +"The praise of a great commander is a soldier's highest reward," +said Repnin. + +"I bestow it with pleasure," said Napoleon. "And who is that young +man beside you?" + +Prince Repnin named Lieutenant Sukhtelen. + +After looking at him Napoleon smiled. + +"He's very young to come to meddle with us." + +"Youth is no hindrance to courage," muttered Sukhtelen in a +failing voice. + +"A splendid reply!" said Napoleon. "Young man, you will go far!" + +Prince Andrew, who had also been brought forward before the +Emperor's eyes to complete the show of prisoners, could not fail to +attract his attention. Napoleon apparently remembered seeing him on +the battlefield and, addressing him, again used the epithet "young +man" that was connected in his memory with Prince Andrew. + +"Well, and you, young man," said he. "How do you feel, mon brave?" + +Though five minutes before, Prince Andrew had been able to say a few +words to the soldiers who were carrying him, now with his eyes fixed +straight on Napoleon, he was silent.... So insignificant at that +moment seemed to him all the interests that engrossed Napoleon, so +mean did his hero himself with his paltry vanity and joy in victory +appear, compared to the lofty, equitable, and kindly sky which he +had seen and understood, that he could not answer him. + +Everything seemed so futile and insignificant in comparison with the +stern and solemn train of thought that weakness from loss of blood, +suffering, and the nearness of death aroused in him. Looking into +Napoleon's eyes Prince Andrew thought of the insignificance of +greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and +the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one +alive could understand or explain. + +The Emperor without waiting for an answer turned away and said to +one of the officers as he went: "Have these gentlemen attended to +and taken to my bivouac; let my doctor, Larrey, examine their +wounds. Au revoir, Prince Repnin!" and he spurred his horse and +galloped away. + +His face shone with self-satisfaction and pleasure. + +The soldiers who had carried Prince Andrew had noticed and taken the +little gold icon Princess Mary had hung round her brother's neck, +but seeing the favor the Emperor showed the prisoners, they now +hastened to return the holy image. + +Prince Andrew did not see how and by whom it was replaced, but the +little icon with its thin gold chain suddenly appeared upon his +chest outside his uniform. + +"It would be good," thought Prince Andrew, glancing at the icon +his sister had hung round his neck with such emotion and reverence, +"it would be good if everything were as clear and simple as it seems +to Mary. How good it would be to know where to seek for help in this +life, and what to expect after it beyond the grave! How happy and calm +I should be if I could now say: 'Lord, have mercy on me!'... But to +whom should I say that? Either to a Power indefinable, +incomprehensible, which I not only cannot address but which I cannot +even express in words- the Great All or Nothing-" said he to +himself, "or to that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Mary! +There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of +everything I understand, and the greatness of something +incomprehensible but all-important. + +The stretchers moved on. At every jolt he again felt unendurable +pain; his feverishness increased and he grew delirious. Visions of his +father, wife, sister, and future son, and the tenderness he had felt +the night before the battle, the figure of the insignificant little +Napoleon, and above all this the lofty sky, formed the chief +subjects of his delirious fancies. + +The quiet home life and peaceful happiness of Bald Hills presented +itself to him. He was already enjoying that happiness when that little +Napoleon had suddenly appeared with his unsympathizing look of +shortsighted delight at the misery of others, and doubts and +torments had followed, and only the heavens promised peace. Toward +morning all these dreams melted and merged into the chaos and darkness +of unconciousness and oblivion which in the opinion of Napoleon's +doctor, Larrey, was much more likely to end in death than in +convalescence. + +"He is a nervous, bilious subject," said Larrey, "and will not +recover." + +And Prince Andrew, with others fatally wounded, was left to the care +of the inhabitants of the district. + +BOOK FOUR: 1806 + +CHAPTER I + +Early in the year 1806 Nicholas Rostov returned home on leave. +Denisov was going home to Voronezh and Rostov persuaded him to +travel with him as far as Moscow and to stay with him there. Meeting a +comrade at the last post station but one before Moscow, Denisov had +drunk three bottles of wine with him and, despite the jolting ruts +across the snow-covered road, did not once wake up on the way to +Moscow, but lay at the bottom of the sleigh beside Rostov, who grew +more and more impatient the nearer they got to Moscow. + +"How much longer? How much longer? Oh, these insufferable streets, +shops, bakers' signboards, street lamps, and sleighs!" thought Rostov, +when their leave permits had been passed at the town gate and they had +entered Moscow. + +"Denisov! We're here! He's asleep," he added, leaning forward with +his whole body as if in that position he hoped to hasten the speed +of the sleigh. + +Denisov gave no answer. + +"There's the corner at the crossroads, where the cabman, Zakhar, has +his stand, and there's Zakhar himself and still the same horse! And +here's the little shop where we used to buy gingerbread! Can't you +hurry up? Now then!" + +"Which house is it?" asked the driver. + +"Why, that one, right at the end, the big one. Don't you see? That's +our house," said Rostov. "Of course, it's our house! Denisov, Denisov! +We're almost there!" + +Denisov raised his head, coughed, and made no answer. + +"Dmitri," said Rostov to his valet on the box, "those lights are +in our house, aren't they?" + +"Yes, sir, and there's a light in your father's study." + +"Then they've not gone to bed yet? What do you think? Mind now, +don't forget to put out my new coat," added Rostov, fingering his +new mustache. "Now then, get on," he shouted to the driver. "Do wake +up, Vaska!" he went on, turning to Denisov, whose head was again +nodding. "Come, get on! You shall have three rubles for vodka- get +on!" Rostov shouted, when the sleigh was only three houses from his +door. It seemed to him the horses were not moving at all. At last +the sleigh bore to the right, drew up at an entrance, and Rostov saw +overhead the old familiar cornice with a bit of plaster broken off, +the porch, and the post by the side of the pavement. He sprang out +before the sleigh stopped, and ran into the hall. The house stood cold +and silent, as if quite regardless of who had come to it. There was no +one in the hall. "Oh God! Is everyone all right?" he thought, stopping +for a moment with a sinking heart, and then immediately starting to +run along the hall and up the warped steps of the familiar +staircase. The well-known old door handle, which always angered the +countess when it was not properly cleaned, turned as loosely as +ever. A solitary tallow candle burned in the anteroom. + +Old Michael was asleep on the chest. Prokofy, the footman, who was +so strong that he could lift the back of the carriage from behind, sat +plaiting slippers out of cloth selvedges. He looked up at the +opening door and his expression of sleepy indifference suddenly +changed to one of delighted amazement. + +"Gracious heavens! The young count!" he cried, recognizing his young +master. "Can it be? My treasure!" and Prokofy, trembling with +excitement, rushed toward the drawing-room door, probably in order +to announce him, but, changing his mind, came back and stooped to kiss +the young man's shoulder. + +"All well?" asked Rostov, drawing away his arm. + +"Yes, God be thanked! Yes! They've just finished supper. Let me have +a look at you, your excellency." + +"Is everything quite all right?" + +"The Lord be thanked, yes!" + +Rostov, who had completely forgotten Denisov, not wishing anyone +to forestall him, threw off his fur coat and ran on tiptoe through the +large dark ballroom. All was the same: there were the same old card +tables and the same chandelier with a cover over it; but someone had +already seen the young master, and, before he had reached the +drawing room, something flew out from a side door like a tornado and +began hugging and kissing him. Another and yet another creature of the +same kind sprang from a second door and a third; more hugging, more +kissing, more outcries, and tears of joy. He could not distinguish +which was Papa, which Natasha, and which Petya. Everyone shouted, +talked, and kissed him at the same time. Only his mother was not +there, he noticed that. + +"And I did not know... Nicholas... My darling!..." + +"Here he is... our own... Kolya,~^ dear fellow... How he has +changed!... Where are the candles?... Tea!..." + +^~ Nicholas. + +"And me, kiss me!" + +"Dearest... and me!" + +Sonya, Natasha, Petya, Anna Mikhaylovna, Vera, and the old count +were all hugging him, and the serfs, men and maids, flocked into the +room, exclaiming and oh-ing and ah-ing. + +Petya, clinging to his legs, kept shouting, "And me too!" + +Natasha, after she had pulled him down toward her and covered his +face with kisses, holding him tight by the skirt of his coat, sprang +away and pranced up and down in one place like a goat and shrieked +piercingly. + +All around were loving eyes glistening with tears of joy, and all +around were lips seeking a kiss. + +Sonya too, all rosy red, clung to his arm and, radiant with bliss, +looked eagerly toward his eyes, waiting for the look for which she +longed. Sonya now was sixteen and she was very pretty, especially at +this moment of happy, rapturous excitement. She gazed at him, not +taking her eyes off him, and smiling and holding her breath. He gave +her a grateful look, but was still expectant and looking for +someone. The old countess had not yet come. But now steps were heard +at the door, steps so rapid that they could hardly be his mother's. + +Yet it was she, dressed in a new gown which he did not know, made +since he had left. All the others let him go, and he ran to her. +When they met, she fell on his breast, sobbing. She could not lift her +face, but only pressed it to the cold braiding of his hussar's jacket. +Denisov, who had come into the room unnoticed by anyone, stood there +and wiped his eyes at the sight. + +"Vasili Denisov, your son's friend," he said, introducing himself to +the count, who was looking inquiringly at him. + +"You are most welcome! I know, I know," said the count, kissing +and embracing Denisov. "Nicholas wrote us... Natasha, Vera, look! Here +is Denisov!" + +The same happy, rapturous faces turned to the shaggy figure of +Denisov. + +"Darling Denisov!" screamed Natasha, beside herself with rapture, +springing to him, putting her arms round him, and kissing him. This +escapade made everybody feel confused. Denisov blushed too, but smiled +and, taking Natasha's hand, kissed it. + +Denisov was shown to the room prepared for him, and the Rostovs +all gathered round Nicholas in the sitting room. + +The old countess, not letting go of his hand and kissing it every +moment, sat beside him: the rest, crowding round him, watched every +movement, word, or look of his, never taking their blissfully +adoring eyes off him. His brother and sisters struggled for the places +nearest to him and disputed with one another who should bring him +his tea, handkerchief, and pipe. + +Rostov was very happy in the love they showed him; but the first +moment of meeting had been so beatific that his present joy seemed +insufficient, and he kept expecting something more, more and yet more. + +Next morning, after the fatigues of their journey, the travelers +slept till ten o'clock. + +In the room next their bedroom there was a confusion of sabers, +satchels, sabretaches, open portmanteaus, and dirty boots. Two freshly +cleaned pairs with spurs had just been placed by the wall. The +servants were bringing in jugs and basins, hot water for shaving, +and their well-brushed clothes. There was a masculine odor and a smell +of tobacco. + +"Hallo, Gwiska- my pipe!" came Vasili Denisov's husky voice. +"Wostov, get up!" + +Rostov, rubbing his eyes that seemed glued together, raised his +disheveled head from the hot pillow. + +"Why, is it late?" + +"Late! It's nearly ten o'clock," answered Natasha's voice. A +rustle of starched petticoats and the whispering and laughter of +girls' voices came from the adjoining room. The door was opened a +crack and there was a glimpse of something blue, of ribbons, black +hair, and merry faces. It was Natasha, Sonya, and Petya, who had +come to see whether they were getting up. + +"Nicholas! Get up!" Natasha's voice was again heard at the door. + +"Directly!" + +Meanwhile, Petya, having found and seized the sabers in the outer +room, with the delight boys feel at the sight of a military elder +brother, and forgetting that it was unbecoming for the girls to see +men undressed, opened the bedroom door. + +"Is this your saber?" he shouted. + +The girls sprang aside. Denisov hid his hairy legs under the +blanket, looking with a scared face at his comrade for help. The door, +having let Petya in, closed again. A sound of laughter came from +behind it. + +"Nicholas! Come out in your dressing gown!" said Natasha's voice. + +"Is this your saber?" asked Petya. "Or is it yours?" he said, +addressing the black-mustached Denisov with servile deference. + +Rostov hurriedly put something on his feet, drew on his dressing +gown, and went out. Natasha had put on one spurred boot and was just +getting her foot into the other. Sonya, when he came in, was +twirling round and was about to expand her dresses into a balloon +and sit down. They were dressed alike, in new pale-blue frocks, and +were both fresh, rosy, and bright. Sonya ran away, but Natasha, taking +her brother's arm, led him into the sitting room, where they began +talking. They hardly gave one another time to ask questions and give +replies concerning a thousand little matters which could not +interest anyone but themselves. Natasha laughed at every word he +said or that she said herself, not because what they were saying was +amusing, but because she felt happy and was unable to control her +joy which expressed itself by laughter. + +"Oh, how nice, how splendid!" she said to everything. + +Rostov felt that, under the influence of the warm rays of love, that +childlike smile which had not once appeared on his face since he +left home now for the first time after eighteen months again +brightened his soul and his face. + +"No, but listen," she said, "now you are quite a man, aren't you? +I'm awfully glad you're my brother." She touched his mustache. "I want +to know what you men are like. Are you the same as we? No?" + +"Why did Sonya run away?" asked Rostov. + +"Ah, yes! That's a whole long story! How are you going to speak to +her- thou or you?" + +"As may happen," said Rostov. + +"No, call her you, please! I'll tell you all about it some other +time. No, I'll tell you now. You know Sonya's my dearest friend. +Such a friend that I burned my arm for her sake. Look here!" + +She pulled up her muslin sleeve and showed him a red scar on her +long, slender, delicate arm, high above the elbow on that part that is +covered even by a ball dress. + +"I burned this to prove my love for her. I just heated a ruler in +the fire and pressed it there!" + +Sitting on the sofa with the little cushions on its arms, in what +used to be his old schoolroom, and looking into Natasha's wildly +bright eyes, Rostov re-entered that world of home and childhood +which had no meaning for anyone else, but gave him some of the best +joys of his life; and the burning of an arm with a ruler as a proof of +love did not seem to him senseless, he understood and was not +surprised at it. + +"Well, and is that all?" he asked. + +"We are such friends, such friends! All that ruler business was just +nonsense, but we are friends forever. She, if she loves anyone, does +it for life, but I don't understand that, I forget quickly." + +"Well, what then?" + +"Well, she loves me and you like that." + +Natasha suddenly flushed. + +"Why, you remember before you went away?... Well, she says you are +to forget all that.... She says: 'I shall love him always, but let him +be free.' Isn't that lovely and noble! Yes, very noble? Isn't it?" +asked Natasha, so seriously and excitedly that it was evident that +what she was now saying she had talked of before, with tears. + +Rostov became thoughtful. + +"I never go back on my word," he said. "Besides, Sonya is so +charming that only a fool would renounce such happiness." + +"No, no!" cried Natasha, "she and I have already talked it over. +We knew you'd say so. But it won't do, because you see, if you say +that- if you consider yourself bound by your promise- it will seem +as if she had not meant it seriously. It makes it as if you were +marrying her because you must, and that wouldn't do at all." + +Rostov saw that it had been well considered by them. Sonya had +already struck him by her beauty on the preceding day. Today, when +he had caught a glimpse of her, she seemed still more lovely. She +was a charming girl of sixteen, evidently passionately in love with +him (he did not doubt that for an instant). Why should he not love her +now, and even marry her, Rostov thought, but just now there were so +many other pleasures and interests before him! "Yes, they have taken a +wise decision," he thought, "I must remain free." + +"Well then, that's excellent," said he. "We'll talk it over later +on. Oh, how glad I am to have you! + +"Well, and are you still true to Boris?" he continued. + +"Oh, what nonsense!" cried Natasha, laughing. "I don't think about +him or anyone else, and I don't want anything of the kind." + +"Dear me! Then what are you up now?" + +"Now?" repeated Natasha, and a happy smile lit up her face. "Have +you seen Duport?" + +"No." + +"Not seen Duport- the famous dancer? Well then, you won't +understand. That's what I'm up to." + +Curving her arms, Natasha held out her skirts as dancers do, ran +back a few steps, turned, cut a caper, brought her little feet sharply +together, and made some steps on the very tips of her toes. + +"See, I'm standing! See!" she said, but could not maintain herself +on her toes any longer. "So that's what I'm up to! I'll never marry +anyone, but will be a dancer. Only don't tell anyone." + +Rostov laughed so loud and merrily that Denisov, in his bedroom, +felt envious and Natasha could not help joining in. + +"No, but don't you think it's nice?" she kept repeating. + +"Nice! And so you no longer wish to marry Boris?" + +Natasha flared up. "I don't want to marry anyone. And I'll tell +him so when I see him!" + +"Dear me!" said Rostov. + +"But that's all rubbish," Natasha chattered on. "And is Denisov +nice?" she asked. + +"Yes, indeed!" + +"Oh, well then, good-by: go and dress. Is he very terrible, +Denisov?" + +"Why terrible?" asked Nicholas. "No, Vaska is a splendid fellow." + +"You call him Vaska? That's funny! And is he very nice?" + +"Very." + +"Well then, be quick. We'll all have breakfast together." + +And Natasha rose and went out of the room on tiptoe, like a ballet +dancer, but smiling as only happy girls of fifteen can smile. When +Rostov met Sonya in the drawing room, he reddened. He did not know how +to behave with her. The evening before, in the first happy moment of +meeting, they had kissed each other, but today they felt it could +not be done; he felt that everybody, including his mother and sisters, +was looking inquiringly at him and watching to see how he would behave +with her. He kissed her hand and addressed her not as thou but as you- +Sonya. But their eyes met and said thou, and exchanged tender +kisses. Her looks asked him to forgive her for having dared, by +Natasha's intermediacy, to remind him of his promise, and then thanked +him for his love. His looks thanked her for offering him his freedom +and told her that one way or another he would never cease to love her, +for that would be impossible. + +"How strange it is," said Vera, selecting a moment when all were +silent, "that Sonya and Nicholas now say you to one another and meet +like strangers." + +Vera's remark was correct, as her remarks always were, but, like +most of her observations, it made everyone feel uncomfortable, not +only Sonya, Nicholas, and Natasha, but even the old countess, who- +dreading this love affair which might hinder Nicholas from making a +brilliant match- blushed like a girl. + +Denisov, to Rostov's surprise, appeared in the drawing room with +pomaded hair, perfumed, and in a new uniform, looking just as smart as +he made himself when going into battle, and he was more amiable to the +ladies and gentlemen than Rostov had ever expected to see him. + +CHAPTER II + +On his return to Moscow from the army, Nicholas Rostov was +welcomed by his home circle as the best of sons, a hero, and their +darling Nikolenka; by his relations as a charming, attractive, and +polite young man; by his acquaintances as a handsome lieutenant of +hussars, a good dancer, and one of the best matches in the city. + +The Rostovs knew everybody in Moscow. The old count had money enough +that year, as all his estates had been remortgaged, and so Nicholas, +acquiring a trotter of his own, very stylish riding breeches of the +latest cut, such as no one else yet had in Moscow, and boots of the +latest fashion, with extremely pointed toes and small silver spurs, +passed his time very gaily. After a short period of adapting himself +to the old conditions of life, Nicholas found it very pleasant to be +at home again. He felt that he had grown up and matured very much. His +despair at failing in a Scripture examination, his borrowing money +from Gavril to pay a sleigh driver, his kissing Sonya on the sly- he +now recalled all this as childishness he had left immeasurably behind. +Now he was a lieutenant of hussars, in a jacket laced with silver, and +wearing the Cross of St. George, awarded to soldiers for bravery in +action, and in the company of well-known, elderly, and respected +racing men was training a trotter of his own for a race. He knew a +lady on one of the boulevards whom he visited of an evening. He led +the mazurka at the Arkharovs' ball, talked about the war with Field +Marshal Kamenski, visited the English Club, and was on intimate +terms with a colonel of forty to whom Denisov had introduced + +His passion for the Emperor had cooled somewhat in Moscow. But +still, as he did not see him and had no opportunity of seeing him, +he often spoke about him and about his love for him, letting it be +understood that he had not told all and that there was something in +his feelings for the Emperor not everyone could understand, and with +his whole soul he shared the adoration then common in Moscow for the +Emperor, who was spoken of as the "angel incarnate." + +During Rostov's short stay in Moscow, before rejoining the army, +he did not draw closer to Sonya, but rather drifted away from her. She +was very pretty and sweet, and evidently deeply in love with him, +but he was at the period of youth when there seems so much to do +that there is no time for that sort of thing and a young man fears +to bind himself and prizes his freedom which he needs for so many +other things. When he thought of Sonya, during this stay in Moscow, he +said to himself, "Ah, there will be, and there are, many more such +girls somewhere whom I do not yet know. There will be time enough to +think about love when I want to, but now I have no time." Besides, +it seemed to him that the society of women was rather derogatory to +his manhood. He went to balls and into ladies' society with an +affectation of doing so against his will. The races, the English Club, +sprees with Denisov, and visits to a certain house- that was another +matter and quite the thing for a dashing young hussar! + +At the beginning of March, old Count Ilya Rostov was very busy +arranging a dinner in honor of Prince Bagration at the English Club. + +The count walked up and down the hall in his dressing gown, giving +orders to the club steward and to the famous Feoktist, the Club's head +cook, about asparagus, fresh cucumbers, strawberries, veal, and fish +for this dinner. The count had been a member and on the committee of +the Club from the day it was founded. To him the Club entrusted the +arrangement of the festival in honor of Bagration, for few men knew so +well how to arrange a feast on an open-handed, hospitable scale, and +still fewer men would be so well able and willing to make up out of +their own resources what might be needed for the success of the +fete. The club cook and the steward listened to the count's orders +with pleased faces, for they knew that under no other management could +they so easily extract a good profit for themselves from a dinner +costing several thousand rubles. + +"Well then, mind and have cocks' comb in the turtle soup, you know!" + +"Shall we have three cold dishes then?" asked the cook. + +The count considered. + +"We can't have less- yes, three... the mayonnaise, that's one," said +he, bending down a finger. + +"Then am I to order those large sterlets?" asked the steward. + +"Yes, it can't be helped if they won't take less. Ah, dear me! I was +forgetting. We must have another entree. Ah, goodness gracious!" he +clutched at his head. "Who is going to get me the flowers? Dmitri! Eh, +Dmitri! Gallop off to our Moscow estate," he said to the factotum +who appeared at his call. "Hurry off and tell Maksim, the gardener, to +set the serfs to work. Say that everything out of the hothouses must +be brought here well wrapped up in felt. I must have two hundred +pots here on Friday." + +Having given several more orders, he was about to go to his +"little countess" to have a rest, but remembering something else of +importance, he returned again, called back the cook and the club +steward, and again began giving orders. A light footstep and the +clinking of spurs were heard at the door, and the young count, +handsome, rosy, with a dark little mustache, evidently rested and made +sleeker by his easy life in Moscow, entered the room. + +"Ah, my boy, my head's in a whirl!" said the old man with a smile, +as if he felt a little confused before his son. "Now, if you would +only help a bit! I must have singers too. I shall have my own +orchestra, but shouldn't we get the gypsy singers as well? You +military men like that sort of thing." + +"Really, Papa, I believe Prince Bagration worried himself less +before the battle of Schon Grabern than you do now," said his son with +a smile. + +The old count pretended to be angry. + +"Yes, you talk, but try it yourself!" + +And the count turned to the cook, who, with a shrewd and +respectful expression, looked observantly and sympathetically at the +father and son. + +"What have the young people come to nowadays, eh, Feoktist?" said +he. "Laughing at us old fellows!" + +"That's so, your excellency, all they have to do is to eat a good +dinner, but providing it and serving it all up, that's not their +business! + +"That's it, that's it!" exclaimed the count, and gaily seizing his +son by both hands, he cried, "Now I've got you, so take the sleigh and +pair at once, and go to Bezukhob's, and tell him 'Count Ilya has +sent you to ask for strawberries and fresh pineapples.' We can't get +them from anyone else. He's not there himself, so you'll have to go in +and ask the princesses; and from there go on to the Rasgulyay- the +coachman Ipatka knows- and look up the gypsy Ilyushka, the one who +danced at Count Orlov's, you remember, in a white Cossack coat, and +bring him along to me." + +"And am I to bring the gypsy girls along with him?" asked +Nicholas, laughing. "Dear, dear!..." + +At that moment, with noiseless footsteps and with the +businesslike, preoccupied, yet meekly Christian look which never +left her face, Anna Mikhaylovna entered the hall. Though she came upon +the count in his dressing gown every day, he invariably became +confused and begged her to excuse his costume. + +"No matter at all, my dear count," she said, meekly closing her +eyes. "But I'll go to Bezukhov's myself. Pierre has arrived, and now +we shall get anything we want from his hothouses. I have to see him in +any case. He has forwarded me a letter from Boris. Thank God, Boris is +now on the staff." + +The count was delighted at Anna Mikhaylovna's taking upon herself +one of his commissions and ordered the small closed carriage for her. + +"Tell Bezukhov to come. I'll put his name down. Is his wife with +him?" he asked. + +Anna Mikhaylovna turned up her eyes, and profound sadness was +depicted on her face. + +"Ah, my dear friend, he is very unfortunate," she said. "If what +we hear is true, it is dreadful. How little we dreamed of such a thing +when we were rejoicing at his happiness! And such a lofty angelic soul +as young Bezukhov! Yes, I pity him from my heart, and shall try to +give him what consolation I can." + +"Wh-what is the matter?" asked both the young and old Rostov. + +Anna Mikhaylovna sighed deeply. + +"Dolokhov, Mary Ivanovna's son," she said in a mysterious whisper, +"has compromised her completely, they say. Pierre took him up, invited +him to his house in Petersburg, and now... she has come here and +that daredevil after her!" said Anna Mikhaylovna, wishing to show +her sympathy for Pierre, but by involuntary intonations and a half +smile betraying her sympathy for the "daredevil," as she called +Dolokhov. "They say Pierre is quite broken by his misfortune." + +"Dear, dear! But still tell him to come to the Club- it will all +blow over. It will be a tremendous banquet." + +Next day, the third of March, soon after one o'clock, two hundred +and fifty members of the English Club and fifty guests were awaiting +the guest of honor and hero of the Austrian campaign, Prince +Bagration, to dinner. + +On the first arrival of the news of the battle of Austerlitz, Moscow +had been bewildered. At that time, the Russians were so used to +victories that on receiving news of the defeat some would simply not +believe it, while others sought some extraordinary explanation of so +strange an event. In the English Club, where all who were +distinguished, important, and well informed forgathered when the +news began to arrive in December, nothing was said about the war and +the last battle, as though all were in a conspiracy of silence. The +men who set the tone in conversation- Count Rostopchin, Prince Yuri +Dolgorukov, Valuev, Count Markov, and Prince Vyazemski- did not show +themselves at the Club, but met in private houses in intimate circles, +and the Moscovites who took their opinions from others- Ilya Rostov +among them- remained for a while without any definite opinion on the +subject of the war and without leaders. The Moscovites felt that +something was wrong and that to discuss the bad news was difficult, +and so it was best to be silent. But after a while, just as a jury +comes out of its room, the bigwigs who guided the Club's opinion +reappeared, and everybody began speaking clearly and definitely. +Reasons were found for the incredible, unheard-of, and impossible +event of a Russian defeat, everything became clear, and in all corners +of Moscow the same things began to be said. These reasons were the +treachery of the Austrians, a defective commissariat, the treachery of +the Pole Przebyszewski and of the Frenchman Langeron, Kutuzov's +incapacity, and (it was whispered) the youth and inexperience of the +sovereign, who had trusted worthless and insignificant people. But the +army, the Russian army, everyone declared, was extraordinary and had +achieved miracles of valor.The soldiers, officers, and generals were +heroes. But the hero of heroes was Prince Bagration, distinguished +by his Schon Grabern affair and by the retreat from Austerlitz, +where he alone had withdrawn his column unbroken and had all day +beaten back an enemy force twice as numerous as his own. What also +conduced to Bagration's being selected as Moscow's hero was the fact +that he had no connections in the city and was a stranger there. In +his person, honor was shown to a simple fighting Russian soldier +without connections and intrigues, and to one who was associated by +memories of the Italian campaign with the name of Suvorov. Moreover, +paying such honor to Bagration was the best way of expressing +disapproval and dislike of Kutuzov. + +"Had there been no Bagration, it would have been necessary to invent +him," said the wit Shinshin, parodying the words of Voltaire. +Kutuzov no one spoke of, except some who abused him in whispers, +calling him a court weathercock and an old satyr. + +All Moscow repeated Prince Dolgorukov's saying: "If you go on +modeling and modeling you must get smeared with clay," suggesting +consolation for our defeat by the memory of former victories; and +the words of Rostopchin, that French soldiers have to be incited to +battle by highfalutin words, and Germans by logical arguments to +show them that it is more dangerous to run away than to advance, but +that Russian soldiers only need to be restrained and held back! On all +sides, new and fresh anecdotes were heard of individual examples of +heroism shown by our officers and men at Austerlitz. One had saved a +standard, another had killed five Frenchmen, a third had loaded five +cannon singlehanded. Berg was mentioned, by those who did not know +him, as having, when wounded in the right hand, taken his sword in the +left, and gone forward. Of Bolkonski, nothing was said, and only those +who knew him intimately regretted that he had died so young, leaving a +pregnant wife with his eccentric father. + +CHAPTER III + +On that third of March, all the rooms in the English Club were +filled with a hum of conversation, like the hum of bees swarming in +springtime. The members and guests of the Club wandered hither and +thither, sat, stood, met, and separated, some in uniform and some in +evening dress, and a few here and there with powdered hair and in +Russian kaftans. Powdered footmen, in livery with buckled shoes and +smart stockings, stood at every door anxiously noting visitors' +every movement in order to offer their services. Most of those present +were elderly, respected men with broad, self-confident faces, fat +fingers, and resolute gestures and voices. This class of guests and +members sat in certain habitual places and met in certain habitual +groups. A minority of those present were casual guests- chiefly +young men, among whom were Denisov, Rostov, and Dolokhov- who was +now again an officer in the Semenov regiment. The faces of these young +people, especially those who were militarymen, bore that expression of +condescending respect for their elders which seems to say to the older +generation, "We are prepared to respect and honor you, but all the +same remember that the future belongs to us." + +Nesvitski was there as an old member of the Club. Pierre, who at his +wife's command had let his hair grow and abandoned his spectacles, +went about the rooms fashionably dressed but looking sad and dull. +Here, as elsewhere, he was surrounded by an atmosphere of subservience +to his wealth, and being in the habit of lording it over these people, +he treated them with absent-minded contempt. + +By his age he should have belonged to the younger men, but by his +wealth and connections he belonged to the groups old and honored +guests, and so he went from one group to another. Some of the most +important old men were the center of groups which even strangers +approached respectfully to hear the voices of well-known men. The +largest circles formed round Count Rostopchin, Valuev, and +Naryshkin. Rostopchin was describing how the Russians had been +overwhelmed by flying Austrians and had had to force their way through +them with bayonets. + +Valuev was confidentially telling that Uvarov had been sent from +Petersburg to ascertain what Moscow was thinking about Austerlitz. + +In the third circle, Naryshkin was speaking of the meeting of the +Austrian Council of War at which Suvorov crowed like a cock in reply +to the nonsense talked by the Austrian generals. Shinshin, standing +close by, tried to make a joke, saying that Kutuzov had evidently +failed to learn from Suvorov even so simple a thing as the art of +crowing like a cock, but the elder members glanced severely at the +wit, making him feel that in that place and on that day, it was +improper to speak so of Kutuzov. + +Count Ilya Rostov, hurried and preoccupied, went about in his soft +boots between the dining and drawing rooms, hastily greeting the +important and unimportant, all of whom he knew, as if they were all +equals, while his eyes occasionally sought out his fine well-set-up +young son, resting on him and winking joyfully at him. Young Rostov +stood at a window with Dolokhov, whose acquaintance he had lately made +and highly valued. The old count came up to them and pressed +Dolokhov's hand. + +"Please come and visit us... you know my brave boy... been +together out there... both playing the hero... Ah, Vasili +Ignatovich... How d'ye do, old fellow?" he said, turning to an old man +who was passing, but before he had finished his greeting there was a +general stir, and a footman who had run in announced, with a +frightened face: "He's arrived!" + +Bells rang, the stewards rushed forward, and- like rye shaken +together in a shovel- the guests who had been scattered about in +different rooms came together and crowded in the large drawing room by +the door of the ballroom. + +Bagration appeared in the doorway of the anteroom without hat or +sword, which, in accord with the Club custom, he had given up to the +hall porter. He had no lambskin cap on his head, nor had he a loaded +whip over his shoulder, as when Rostov had seen him on the eve of +the battle of Austerlitz, but wore a tight new uniform with Russian +and foreign Orders, and the Star of St. George on his left breast. +Evidently just before coming to the dinner he had had his hair and +whiskers trimmed, which changed his appearance for the worse. There +was something naively festive in his air, which, in conjunction with +his firm and virile features, gave him a rather comical expression. +Bekleshev and Theodore Uvarov, who had arrived with him, paused at the +doorway to allow him, as the guest of honor, to enter first. Bagration +was embarrassed, not wishing to avail himself of their courtesy, and +this caused some delay at the doors, but after all he did at last +enter first. He walked shyly and awkwardly over the parquet floor of +the reception room, not knowing what to do with his hands; he was more +accustomed to walk over a plowed field under fire, as he had done at +the head of the Kursk regiment at Schon Grabern- and he would have +found that easier. The committeemen met him at the first door and, +expressing their delight at seeing such a highly honored guest, took +possession of him as it were, without waiting for his reply, +surrounded him, and led him to the drawing room. It was at first +impossible to enter the drawing-room door for the crowd of members and +guests jostling one another and trying to get a good look at Bagration +over each other's shoulders, as if he were some rare animal. Count +Ilya Rostov, laughing and repeating the words, "Make way, dear boy! +Make way, make way!" pushed through the crowd more energetically +than anyone, led the guests into the drawing room, and seated them +on the center sofa. The bigwigs, the most respected members of the +Club, beset the new arrivals. Count Ilya, again thrusting his way +through the crowd, went out of the drawing room and reappeared a +minute later with another committeeman, carrying a large silver salver +which he presented to Prince Bagration. On the salver lay some +verses composed and printed in the hero's honor. Bagration, on +seeing the salver, glanced around in dismay, as though seeking help. +But all eyes demanded that he should submit. Feeling himself in +their power, he resolutely took the salver with both hands and +looked sternly and reproachfully at the count who had presented it +to him. Someone obligingly took the dish from Bagration (or he +would, it seemed, have held it till evening and have gone in to dinner +with it) and drew his attention to the verses. + +"Well, I will read them, then!" Bagration seemed to say, and, fixing +his weary eyes on the paper, began to read them with a fixed and +serious expression. But the author himself took the verses and began +reading them aloud. Bagration bowed his bead and listened: + +_1 Bring glory then to Alexander's reign
+And on the throne our Titus shield. +A dreaded foe be thou, kindhearted as a man, +A Rhipheus at home, a Caesar in the field! +E'en fortunate Napoleon +Knows by experience, now, Bagration, +And dare not Herculean Russians trouble... + +But before he had finished reading, a stentorian major-domo +announced that dinner was ready! The door opened, and from the +dining room came the resounding strains of the polonaise: + +_1 Conquest's joyful thunder waken,
+Triumph, valiant Russians, now!... + +and Count Rostov, glancing angrily at the author who went on reading +his verses, bowed to Bagration. Everyone rose, feeling that dinner was +more important than verses, and Bagration, again preceding all the +rest, went in to dinner. He was seated in the place of honor between +two Alexanders- Bekleshev and Naryshkin- which was a significant +allusion to the name of the sovereign. Three hundred persons took +their seats in the dining room, according to their rank and +importance: the more important nearer to the honored guest, as +naturally as water flows deepest where the land lies lowest. + +Just before dinner, Count Ilya Rostov presented his son to +Bagration, who recognized him and said a few words to him, +disjointed and awkward, as were all the words he spoke that day, and +Count Ilya looked joyfully and proudly around while Bagration spoke to +his son. + +Nicholas Rostov, with Denisov and his new acquaintance, Dolokhov, +sat almost at the middle of the table. Facing them sat Pierre, +beside Prince Nesvitski. Count Ilya Rostov with the other members of +the committee sat facing Bagration and, as the very personification of +Moscow hospitality, did the honors to the prince. + +His efforts had not been in vain. The dinner, both the Lenten and +the other fare, was splendid, yet he could not feel quite at ease till +the end of the meal. He winked at the butler, whispered directions +to the footmen, and awaited each expected dish with some anxiety. +Everything was excellent. With the second course, a gigantic sterlet +(at sight of which Ilya Rostov blushed with self-conscious +pleasure), the footmen began popping corks and filling the champagne +glasses. After the fish, which made a certain sensation, the count +exchanged glances with the other committeemen. "There will be many +toasts, it's time to begin," he whispered, and taking up his glass, he +rose. All were silent, waiting for what he would say. + +"To the health of our Sovereign, the Emperor!" he cried, and at +the same moment his kindly eyes grew moist with tears of joy and +enthusiasm. The band immediately struck up "Conquest's joyful +thunder waken..." All rose and cried "Hurrah!" Bagration also rose and +shouted "Hurrah!" in exactly the same voice in which he had shouted it +on the field at Schon Grabern. Young Rostov's ecstatic voice could +be heard above the three hundred others. He nearly wept. "To the +health of our Sovereign, the Emperor!" he roared, "Hurrah!" and +emptying his glass at one gulp he dashed it to the floor. Many +followed his example, and the loud shouting continued for a long time. +When the voices subsided, the footmen cleared away the broken glass +and everybody sat down again, smiling at the noise they had made and +exchanging remarks. The old count rose once more, glanced at a note +lying beside his plate, and proposed a toast, "To the health of the +hero of our last campaign, Prince Peter Ivanovich Bagration!" and +again his blue eyes grew moist. "Hurrah!" cried the three hundred +voices again, but instead of the band a choir began singing a +cantata composed by Paul Ivanovich Kutuzov: + +_1 Russians! O'er all barriers on!
+Courage conquest guarantees; +Have we not Bagration? +He brings foe men to their knees,... etc. + +As soon as the singing was over, another and another toast was +proposed and Count Ilya Rostov became more and more moved, more +glass was smashed, and the shouting grew louder. They drank to +Bekleshev, Naryshkin, Uvarov, Dolgorukov, Apraksin, Valuev, to the +committee, to all the Club members and to all the Club guests, and +finally to Count Ilya Rostov separately, as the organizer of the +banquet. At that toast, the count took out his handkerchief and, +covering his face, wept outright. + +CHAPTER IV + +Pierre sat opposite Dolokhov and Nicholas Rostov. As usual, he ate +and drank much, and eagerly. But those who knew him intimately noticed +that some great change had come over him that day. He was silent all +through dinner and looked about, blinking and scowling, or, with fixed +eyes and a look of complete absent-mindedness, kept rubbing the bridge +of his nose. His face was depressed and gloomy. He seemed to see and +hear nothing of what was going on around him and to be absorbed by +some depressing and unsolved problem. + +The unsolved problem that tormented him was caused by hints given by +the princess, his cousin, at Moscow, concerning Dolokhov's intimacy +with his wife, and by an anonymous letter he had received that +morning, which in the mean jocular way common to anonymous letters +said that he saw badly through his spectacles, but that his wife's +connection with Dolokhov was a secret to no one but himself. Pierre +absolutely disbelieved both the princess' hints and the letter, but he +feared now to look at Dolokhov, who was sitting opposite him. Every +time he chanced to meet Dolokhov's handsome insolent eyes, Pierre felt +something terrible and monstrous rising in his soul and turned quickly +away. Involuntarily recalling his wife's past and her relations with +Dolokhov, Pierre saw clearly that what was said in the letter might be +true, or might at least seem to be true had it not referred to his +wife. He involuntarily remembered how Dolokhov, who had fully +recovered his former position after the campaign, had returned to +Petersburg and come to him. Availing himself of his friendly relations +with Pierre as a boon companion, Dolokhov had come straight to his +house, and Pierre had put him up and lent him money. Pierre recalled +how Helene had smilingly expressed disapproval of Dolokhov's living at +their house, and how cynically Dolokhov had praised his wife's +beauty to him and from that time till they came to Moscow had not left +them for a day. + +"Yes, he is very handsome," thought Pierre, "and I know him. It +would be particularly pleasant to him to dishonor my name and ridicule +me, just because I have exerted myself on his behalf, befriended +him, and helped him. I know and understand what a spice that would add +to the pleasure of deceiving me, if it really were true. Yes, if it +were true, but I do not believe it. I have no right to, and can't, +believe it." He remembered the expression Dolokhov's face assumed in +his moments of cruelty, as when tying the policeman to the bear and +dropping them into the water, or when he challenged a man to a duel +without any reason, or shot a post-boy's horse with a pistol. That +expression was often on Dolokhov's face when looking at him. "Yes, +he is a bully," thought Pierre, "to kill a man means nothing to him. +It must seem to him that everyone is afraid of him, and that must +please him. He must think that I, too, am afraid of him- and in fact I +am afraid of him," he thought, and again he felt something terrible +and monstrous rising in his soul. Dolokhov, Denisov, and Rostov were +now sitting opposite Pierre and seemed very gay. Rostov was talking +merrily to his two friends, one of whom was a dashing hussar and the +other a notorious duelist and rake, and every now and then he +glanced ironically at Pierre, whose preoccupied, absent-minded, and +massive figure was a very noticeable one at the dinner. Rostov +looked inimically at Pierre, first because Pierre appeared to his +hussar eyes as a rich civilian, the husband of a beauty, and in a +word- an old woman; and secondly because Pierre in his preoccupation +and absent-mindedness had not recognized Rostov and had not +responded to his greeting. When the Emperor's health was drunk, +Pierre, lost in thought, did not rise or lift his glass. + +"What are you about?" shouted Rostov, looking at him in an ecstasy +of exasperation. "Don't you hear it's His Majesty the Emperor's +health?" + +Pierre sighed, rose submissively, emptied his glass, and, waiting +till all were seated again, turned with his kindly smile to Rostov. + +"Why, I didn't recognize you!" he said. But Rostov was otherwise +engaged; he was shouting "Hurrah!" + +"Why don't you renew the acquaintance?" said Dolokhov to Rostov. + +"Confound him, he's a fool!" said Rostov. + +"One should make up to the husbands of pretty women," said Denisov. + +Pierre did not catch what they were saying, but knew they were +talking about him. He reddened and turned away. + +"Well, now to the health of handsome women!" said Dolokhov, and with +a serious expression, but with a smile lurking at the corners of his +mouth, he turned with his glass to Pierre. + +"Here's to the health of lovely women, Peterkin- and their +lovers!" he added. + +Pierre, with downcast eyes, drank out of his glass without looking +at Dolokhov or answering him. The footman, who was distributing +leaflets with Kutuzov's cantata, laid one before Pierre as one of +the principal guests. He was just going to take it when Dolokhov, +leaning across, snatched it from his hand and began reading it. Pierre +looked at Dolokhov and his eyes dropped, the something terrible and +monstrous that had tormented him all dinnertime rose and took +possession of him. He leaned his whole massive body across the table. + +"How dare you take it?" he shouted. + +Hearing that cry and seeing to whom it was addressed, Nesvitski +and the neighbor on his right quickly turned in alarm to Bezukhov. + +"Don't! Don't! What are you about?" whispered their frightened +voices. + +Dolokhov looked at Pierre with clear, mirthful, cruel eyes, and that +smile of his which seemed to say, "Ah! This is what I like!" + +"You shan't have it!" he said distinctly. + +Pale, with quivering lips, Pierre snatched the copy. + +"You...! you... scoundrel! I challenge you!" he ejaculated, and, +pushing back his chair, he rose from the table. + +At the very instant he did this and uttered those words, Pierre felt +that the question of his wife's guilt which had been tormenting him +the whole day was finally and indubitably answered in the affirmative. +He hated her and was forever sundered from her. Despite Denisov's +request that he would take no part in the matter, Rostov agreed to +be Dolokhov's second, and after dinner he discussed the arrangements +for the duel with Nesvitski, Bezukhov's second. Pierre went home, +but Rostov with Dolokhov and Denisov stayed on at the Club till +late, listening to the gypsies and other singers. + +"Well then, till tomorrow at Sokolniki,"said Dolokhov, as he took +leave of Rostov in the Club porch. + +"And do you feel quite calm?" Rostov asked. + +Dolokhov paused. + +"Well, you see, I'll tell you the whole secret of dueling in two +words. If you are going to fight a duel, and you make a will and write +affectionate letters to your parents, and if you think you may be +killed, you are a fool and are lost for certain. But go with the +firm intention of killing your man as quickly and surely as +possible, and then all will be right, as our bear huntsman at Kostroma +used to tell me. 'Everyone fears a bear,' he says, 'but when you see +one your fear's all gone, and your only thought is not to let him +get away!' And that's how it is with me. A demain, mon cher."~^ + +^~ Till tomorrow, my dear fellow. + +Next day, at eight in the morning, Pierre and Nesvitski drove to the +Sokolniki forest and found Dolokhov, Denisov, and Rostov already +there. Pierre had the air of a man preoccupied with considerations +which had no connection with the matter in hand. His haggard face +was yellow. He had evidently not slept that night. He looked about +distractedly and screwed up his eyes as if dazzled by the sun. He +was entirely absorbed by two considerations: his wife's guilt, of +which after his sleepless night he had not the slightest doubt, and +the guiltlessness of Dolokhov, who had no reason to preserve the honor +of a man who was nothing to him.... "I should perhaps have done the +same thing in his place," thought Pierre. "It's even certain that I +should have done the same, then why this duel, this murder? Either I +shall kill him, or he will hit me in the head, or elbow, or knee. +Can't I go away from here, run away, bury myself somewhere?" passed +through his mind. But just at moments when such thoughts occurred to +him, he would ask in a particularly calm and absent-minded way, +which inspired the respect of the onlookers, "Will it be long? Are +things ready?" + +When all was ready, the sabers stuck in the snow to mark the +barriers, and the pistols loaded, Nesvitski went up to Pierre. + +"I should not be doing my duty, Count," he said in timid tones, "and +should not justify your confidence and the honor you have done me in +choosing me for your second, if at this grave, this very grave, moment +I did not tell you the whole truth. I think there is no sufficient +ground for this affair, or for blood to be shed over it.... You were +not right, not quite in the right, you were impetuous..." + +"Oh yes, it is horribly stupid," said Pierre. + +"Then allow me to express your regrets, and I am sure your +opponent will accept them," said Nesvitski (who like the others +concerned in the affair, and like everyone in similar cases, did not +yet believe that the affair had come to an actual duel). "You know, +Count, it is much more honorable to admit one's mistake than to let +matters become irreparable. There was no insult on either side. +Allow me to convey...." + +"No! What is there to talk about?" said Pierre. "It's all the +same.... Is everything ready?" he added. "Only tell me where to go and +where to shoot," he said with an unnaturally gentle smile. + +He took the pistol in his hand and began asking about the working of +the trigger, as he had not before held a pistol in his hand- a fact +that he did not to confess. + +"Oh yes, like that, I know, I only forgot," said he. + +"No apologies, none whatever," said Dolokhov to Denisov (who on +his side had been attempting a reconciliation), and he also went up to +the appointed place. + +The spot chosen for the duel was some eighty paces from the road, +where the sleighs had been left, in a small clearing in the pine +forest covered with melting snow, the frost having begun to break up +during the last few days. The antagonists stood forty paces apart at +the farther edge of the clearing. The seconds, measuring the paces, +left tracks in the deep wet snow between the place where they had been +standing and Nesvitski's and Dolokhov's sabers, which were stuck +intothe ground ten paces apart to mark the barrier. It was thawing and +misty; at forty paces' distance nothing could be seen. For three +minutes all had been ready, but they still delayed and all were +silent. + +CHAPTER V + +"Well begin!" said Dolokhov. + +"All right," said Pierre, still smiling in the same way. A feeling +of dread was in the air. It was evident that the affair so lightly +begun could no longer be averted but was taking its course +independently of men's will. + +Denisov first went to the barrier and announced: "As the adve'sawies +have wefused a weconciliation, please pwoceed. Take your pistols, +and at the word thwee begin to advance. + +"O-ne! T-wo! Thwee!" he shouted angrily and stepped aside. + +The combatants advanced along the trodden tracks, nearer and +nearer to one another, beginning to see one another through the +mist. They had the right to fire when they liked as they approached +the barrier. Dolokhov walked slowly without raising his pistol, +looking intently with his bright, sparkling blue eyes into his +antagonist's face. His mouth wore its usual semblance of a smile. + +"So I can fire when I like!" said Pierre, and at the word "three," +he went quickly forward, missing the trodden path and stepping into +the deep snow. He held the pistol in his right hand at arm's length, +apparently afraid of shooting himself with it. His left hand he held +carefully back, because he wished to support his right hand with it +and knew he must not do so. Having advanced six paces and strayed +off the track into the snow, Pierre looked down at his feet, then +quickly glanced at Dolokhov and, bending his finger as he had been +shown, fired. Not at all expecting so loud a report, Pierre +shuddered at the sound and then, smiling at his own sensations, +stood still. The smoke, rendered denser by the mist, prevented him +from seeing anything for an instant, but there was no second report as +he had expected. He only heard Dolokhov's hurried steps, and his +figure came in view through the smoke. He was pressing one hand to his +left side, while the other clutched his drooping pistol. His face +was pale. Rostov ran toward him and said something. + +"No-o-o!" muttered Dolokhov through his teeth, "no, it's not +over." And after stumbling a few staggering steps right up to the +saber, he sank on the snow beside it. His left hand was bloody; he +wiped it on his coat and supported himself with it. His frowning +face was pallid and quivered. + +"Plea..." began Dolokhov, but could not at first pronounce the word. + +"Please," he uttered with an effort. + +Pierre, hardly restraining his sobs, began running toward Dolokhov +and was about to cross the space between the barriers, when Dolokhov +cried: + +"To your barrier!" and Pierre, grasping what was meant, stopped by +his saber. Only ten paces divided them. Dolokhov lowered his head to +the snow, greedily bit at it, again raised his head, adjusted himself, +drew in his legs and sat up, seeking a firm center of gravity. He +sucked and sucked and swallowed the cold snow, his lips quivered but +his eyes, still smiling, glittered with effort and exasperation as +he mustered his remaining strength. He raised his pistol and aimed. + +"Sideways! Cover yourself with your pistol!" ejaculated Nesvitski. + +"Cover yourself!" even Denisov cried to his adversary. + +Pierre, with a gentle smile of pity and remorse, his arms and legs +helplessly spread out, stood with his broad chest directly facing +Dolokhov looked sorrowfully at him. Denisov, Rostov, and Nesvitski +closed their eyes. At the same instant they heard a report and +Dolokhov's angry cry. + +"Missed!" shouted Dolokhov, and he lay helplessly, face downwards on +the snow. + +Pierre clutched his temples, and turning round went into the forest, +trampling through the deep snow, and muttering incoherent words: + +"Folly... folly! Death... lies..." he repeated, puckering his face. + +Nesvitski stopped him and took him home. + +Rostov and Denisov drove away with the wounded Dolokhov. + +The latter lay silent in the sleigh with closed eyes and did not +answer a word to the questions addressed to him. But on entering +Moscow he suddenly came to and, lifting his head with an effort, +took Rostov, who was sitting beside him, by the hand. Rostov was +struck by the totally altered and unexpectedly rapturous and tender +expression on Dolokhov's face. + +"Well? How do you feel?" he asked. + +"Bad! But it's not that, my friend-" said Dolokhov with a gasping +voice. "Where are we? In Moscow, I know. I don't matter, but I have +killed her, killed... She won't get over it! She won't survive...." + +"Who?" asked Rostov. + +"My mother! My mother, my angel, my adored angel mother," and +Dolokhov pressed Rostov's hand and burst into tears. + +When he had become a little quieter, he explained to Rostov that +he was living with his mother, who, if she saw him dying, would not +survive it. He implored Rostov to go on and prepare her. + +Rostov went on ahead to do what was asked, and to his great surprise +learned that Dolokhov the brawler, Dolokhov the bully, lived in Moscow +with an old mother and a hunchback sister, and was the most +affectionate of sons and brothers. + +CHAPTER VI + +Pierre had of late rarely seen his wife alone. Both in Petersburg +and in Moscow their house was always full of visitors. The night after +the duel he did not go to his bedroom but, as he often did, remained +in his father's room, that huge room in which Count Bezukhov had died. + +He lay down on the sofa meaning to fall asleep and forget all that +had happened to him, but could not do so. Such a storm of feelings, +thoughts, and memories suddenly arose within him that he could not +fall asleep, nor even remain in one place, but had to jump up and pace +the room with rapid steps. Now he seemed to see her in the early +days of their marriage, with bare shoulders and a languid, +passionate look on her face, and then immediately he saw beside her +Dolokhov's handsome, insolent, hard, and mocking face as he had seen +it at the banquet, and then that same face pale, quivering, and +suffering, as it had been when he reeled and sank on the snow. + +"What has happened?" he asked himself. "I have killed her lover, +yes, killed my wife's lover. Yes, that was it! And why? How did I come +to do it?"- "Because you married her," answered an inner voice. + +"But in what was I to blame?" he asked. "In marrying her without +loving her; in deceiving yourself and her." And he vividly recalled +that moment after supper at Prince Vasili's, when he spoke those words +he had found so difficult to utter: "I love you." "It all comes from +that! Even then I felt it," he thought. "I felt then that it was not +so, that I had no right to do it. And so it turns out." + +He remembered his honeymoon and blushed at the recollection. +Particularly vivid, humiliating, and shameful was the recollection +of how one day soon after his marriage he came out of the bedroom into +his study a little before noon in his silk dressing gown and found his +head steward there, who, bowing respectfully, looked into his face and +at his dressing gown and smiled slightly, as if expressing +respectful understanding of his employer's happiness. + +"But how often I have felt proud of her, proud of her majestic +beauty and social tact," thought he; "been proud of my house, in which +she received all Petersburg, proud of her unapproachability and +beauty. So this is what I was proud of! I then thought that I did +not understand her. How often when considering her character I have +told myself that I was to blame for not understanding her, for not +understanding that constant composure and complacency and lack of +all interests or desires, and the whole secret lies in the terrible +truth that she is a depraved woman. Now I have spoken that terrible +word to myself all has become clear. + +"Anatole used to come to borrow money from her and used to kiss +her naked shoulders. She did not give him the money, but let herself +be kissed. Her father in jest tried to rouse her jealousy, and she +replied with a calm smile that she was not so stupid as to be jealous: +'Let him do what he pleases,' she used to say of me. One day I asked +her if she felt any symptoms of pregnancy. She laughed +contemptuously and said she was not a fool to want to have children, +and that she was not going to have any children by me." + +Then he recalled the coarseness and bluntness of her thoughts and +the vulgarity of the expressions that were natural to her, though +she had been brought up in the most aristocratic circles. + +"I'm not such a fool.... Just you try it on.... Allez-vous +promener,"~^ she used to say. Often seeing the success she had with +young and old men and women Pierre could not understand why he did not +love her. + +^~ "You clear out of this." + +"Yes, I never loved her," said he to himself; "I knew she was a +depraved woman," he repeated, "but dared not admit it to myself. And +now there's Dolokhov sitting in the snow with a forced smile and +perhaps dying, while meeting my remorse with some forced bravado!" + +Pierre was one of those people who, in spite of an appearance of +what is called weak character, do not seek a confidant in their +troubles. He digested his sufferings alone. + +"It is all, all her fault," he said to himself; "but what of that? +Why did I bind myself to her? Why did I say 'Je vous aime'~^ to her, +which was a lie, and worse than a lie? I am guilty and must +endure... what? A slur on my name? A misfortune for life? Oh, that's +nonsense," he thought. "The slur on my name and honor- that's all +apart from myself. + +^~ I love you. + +"Louis XVI was executed because they said he was dishonorable and +a criminal," came into Pierre's head, "and from their point of view +they were right, as were those too who canonized him and died a +martyr's death for his sake. Then Robespierre was beheaded for being a +despot. Who is right and who is wrong? No one! But if you are alive- +live: tomorrow you'll die as I might have died an hour ago. And is +it worth tormenting oneself, when one has only a moment of life in +comparison with eternity?" + +But at the moment when he imagined himself calmed by such +reflections, she suddenly came into his mind as she was at the moments +when he had most strongly expressed his insincere love for her, and he +felt the blood rush to his heart and had again to get up and move +about and break and tear whatever came to his hand. "Why did I tell +her that 'Je vous aime'?" he kept repeating to himself. And when he +had said it for the tenth time, Molibre's words: "Mais que diable +alloit-il faire dans cette galere?" occurred to him, and he began to +laugh at himself. + +In the night he called his valet and told him to pack up to go to +Petersburg. He could not imagine how he could speak to her now. He +resolved to go away next day and leave a letter informing her of his +intention to part from her forever. + +Next morning when the valet came into the room with his coffee, +Pierre was lying asleep on the ottoman with an open book in his hand. + +He woke up and looked round for a while with a startled +expression, unable to realize where he was. + +"The countess told me to inquire whether your excellency was at +home," said the valet. + +But before Pierre could decide what answer he would send, the +countess herself in a white satin dressing gown embroidered with +silver and with simply dressed hair (two immense plaits twice round +her lovely head like a coronet) entered the room, calm and majestic, +except that there was a wrathful wrinkle on her rather prominent +marble brow. With her imperturbable calm she did not begin to speak in +front of the valet. She knew of the duel and had come to speak about +it. She waited till the valet had set down the coffee things and +left the room. Pierre looked at her timidly over his spectacles, and +like a hare surrounded by hounds who lays back her ears and +continues to crouch motionless before her enemies, he tried to +continue reading. But feeling this to be senseless and impossible, +he again glanced timidly at her. She did not sit down but looked at +him with a contemptuous smile, waiting for the valet to go. + +"Well, what's this now? What have you been up to now, I should +like to know?" she asked sternly. + +"I? What have I...?" stammered Pierre. + +"So it seems you're a hero, eh? Come now, what was this duel +about? What is it meant to prove? What? I ask you." + +Pierre turned over heavily on the ottoman and opened his mouth, +but could not reply. + +"If you won't answer, I'll tell you..." Helene went on. "You believe +everything you're told. You were told..." Helene laughed, "that +Dolokhov was my lover," she said in French with her coarse plainness +of speech, uttering the word amant as casually as any other word, "and +you believed it! Well, what have you proved? What does this duel +prove? That you're a fool, que vous etes un sot, but everybody knew +that. What will be the result? That I shall be the laughingstock of +all Moscow, that everyone will say that you, drunk and not knowing +what you were about, challenged a man you are jealous of without +cause." Helene raised her voice and became more and more excited, "A +man who's a better man than you in every way..." + +"Hm... Hm...!" growled Pierre, frowning without looking at her, +and not moving a muscle. + +"And how could you believe he was my lover? Why? Because I like +his company? If you were cleverer and more agreeable, I should +prefer yours." + +"Don't speak to me... I beg you," muttered Pierre hoarsely. + +"Why shouldn't I speak? I can speak as I like, and I tell you +plainly that there are not many wives with husbands such as you who +would not have taken lovers (des amants), but I have not done so," +said she. + +Pierre wished to say something, looked at her with eyes whose +strange expression she did not understand, and lay down again. He +was suffering physically at that moment, there was a weight on his +chest and he could not breathe. He knew that he must do something to +put an end to this suffering, but what he wanted to do was too +terrible. + +"We had better separate," he muttered in a broken voice. + +"Separate? Very well, but only if you give me a fortune," said +Helene. "Separate! That's a thing to frighten me with!" + +Pierre leaped up from the sofa and rushed staggering toward her. + +"I'll kill you!" he shouted, and seizing the marble top of a table +with a strength he had never before felt, he made a step toward her +brandishing the slab. + +Helene's face became terrible, she shrieked and sprang aside. His +father's nature showed itself in Pierre. He felt the fascination and +delight of frenzy. He flung down the slab, broke it, and swooping down +on her with outstretched hands shouted, "Get out!" in such a +terrible voice that the whole house heard it with horror. God knows +what he would have done at that moment had Helene not fled from the +room. + +A week later Pierre gave his wife full power to control all his +estates in Great Russia, which formed the larger part of his property, +and left for Petersburg alone. + +CHAPTER VII + +Two months had elapsed since the news of the battle of Austerlitz +and the loss of Prince Andrew had reached Bald Hills, and in spite +of the letters sent through the embassy and all the searches made, his +body had not been found nor was he on the list of prisoners. What +was worst of all for his relations was the fact that there was still a +possibility of his having been picked up on the battlefield by the +people of the place and that he might now be lying, recovering or +dying, alone among strangers and unable to send news of himself. The +gazettes from which the old prince first heard of the defeat at +Austerlitz stated, as usual very briefly and vaguely, that after +brilliant engagements the Russians had had to retreat and had made +their withdrawal in perfect order. The old prince understood from this +official report that our army had been defeated. A week after the +gazette report of the battle of Austerlitz came a letter from +Kutuzov informing the prince of the fate that had befallen his son. + +"Your son," wrote Kutuzov, "fell before my eyes, a standard in his +hand and at the head of a regiment- he fell as a hero, worthy of his +father and his fatherland. To the great regret of myself and of the +whole army it is still uncertain whether he is alive or not. I comfort +myself and you with the hope that your son is alive, for otherwise +he would have been mentioned among the officers found on the field +of battle, a list of whom has been sent me under flag of truce." + +After receiving this news late in the evening, when he was alone +in his study, the old prince went for his walk as usual next +morning, but he was silent with his steward, the gardener, and the +architect, and though he looked very grim he said nothing to anyone. + +When Princess Mary went to him at the usual hour he was working at +his lathe and, as usual, did not look round at her. + +"Ah, Princess Mary!" he said suddenly in an unnatural voice, +throwing down his chisel. (The wheel continued to revolve by its own +impetus, and Princess Mary long remembered the dying creak of that +wheel, which merged in her memory with what followed.) + +She approached him, saw his face, and something gave way within her. +Her eyes grew dim. By the expression of her father's face, not sad, +not crushed, but angry and working unnaturally, she saw that hanging +over her and about to crush her was some terrible misfortune, the +worst in life, one she had not yet experienced, irreparable and +incomprehensible- the death of one she loved. + +"Father! Andrew!"- said the ungraceful, awkward princess with such +an indescribable charm of sorrow and self-forgetfulness that her +father could not bear her look but turned away with a sob. + +"Bad news! He's not among the prisoners nor among the killed! +Kutuzov writes..." and he screamed as piercingly as if he wished to +drive the princess away by that scream... "Killed!" + +The princess did not fall down or faint. She was already pale, but +on hearing these words her face changed and something brightened in +her beautiful, radiant eyes. It was as if joy- a supreme joy apart +from the joys and sorrows of this world- overflowed the great grief +within her. She forgot all fear of her father, went up to him, took +his hand, and drawing him down put her arm round his thin, scraggy +neck. + +"Father" she said, "do not turn away from me, let us weep together." + +"Scoundrels! Blackguards!" shrieked the old man, turning his face +away from her. "Destroying the army, destroying the men! And why? +Go, go and tell Lise." + +The princess sank helplessly into an armchair beside her father +and wept. She saw her brother now as he had been at the moment when he +took leave of her and of Lise, his look tender yet proud. She saw +him tender and amused as he was when he put on the little icon. "Did +he believe? Had he repented of his unbelief? Was he now there? There +in the realms of eternal peace and blessedness?" she thought. + +"Father, tell me how it happened," she asked through her tears. + +"Go! Go! Killed in battle, where the best of Russian men and +Russia's glory were led to destruction. Go, Princess Mary. Go and tell +Lise. I will follow." + +When Princess Mary returned from her father, the little princess sat +working and looked up with that curious expression of inner, happy +calm peculiar to pregnant women. It was evident that her eyes did +not see Princess Mary but were looking within... into herself... at +something joyful and mysterious taking place within her. + +"Mary," she said, moving away from the embroidery frame and lying +back, "give me your hand." She took her sister-in-law's hand and +held it below her waist. + +Her eyes were smiling expectantly, her downy lip rose and remained +lifted in childlike happiness. + +Princess Mary knelt down before her and hid her face in the folds of +her sister-in-law's dress. + +"There, there! Do you feel it? I feel so strange. And do you know, +Mary, I am going to love him very much," said Lise, looking with +bright and happy eyes at her sister-in-law. + +Princess Mary could not lift her head, she was weeping. + +"What is the matter, Mary?" + +"Nothing... only I feel sad... sad about Andrew," she said, wiping +away her tears on her sister-in-law's knee. + +Several times in the course of the morning Princess Mary began +trying to prepare her sister-in-law, and every time began to cry. +Unobservant as was the little princess, these tears, the cause of +which she did not understand, agitated her. She said nothing but +looked about uneasily as if in search of something. Before dinner +the old prince, of whom she was always afraid, came into her room with +a peculiarly restless and malign expression and went out again without +saying a word. She looked at Princess Mary, then sat thinking for a +while with that expression of attention to something within her that +is only seen in pregnant women, and suddenly began to cry. + +"Has anything come from Andrew?" she asked. + +"No, you know it's too soon for news. But my father is anxious and I +feel afraid." + +"So there's nothing?" + +"Nothing," answered Princess Mary, looking firmly with her radiant +eyes at her sister-in-law. + +She had determined not to tell her and persuaded her father to +hide the terrible news from her till after her confinement, which +was expected within a few days. Princess Mary and the old prince +each bore and hid their grief in their own way. The old prince would +not cherish any hope: he made up his mind that Prince Andrew had +been killed, and though he sent an official to Austria to seek for +traces of his son, he ordered a monument from Moscow which he intended +to erect in his own garden to his memory, and he told everybody that +his son had been killed. He tried not to change his former way of +life, but his strength failed him. He walked less, ate less, slept +less, and became weaker every day. Princess Mary hoped. She prayed for +her brother as living and was always awaiting news of his return. + +CHAPTER VIII + +"Dearest," said the little princess after breakfast on the morning +of the nineteenth March, and her downy little lip rose from old habit, +but as sorrow was manifest in every smile, the sound of every word, +and even every footstep in that house since the terrible news had +come, so now the smile of the little princess- influenced by the +general mood though without knowing its cause- was such as to remind +one still more of the general sorrow. + +"Dearest, I'm afraid this morning's fruschtique~^ as Foka the cook +calls it- has disagreed with me." + +^~ Fruhstuck: breakfast. + +"What is the matter with you, my darling? You look pale. Oh, you are +very pale!" said Princess Mary in alarm, running with her soft, +ponderous steps up to her sister-in-law. + +"Your excellency, should not Mary Bogdanovna be sent for?" said +one of the maids who was present. (Mary Bogdanovna was a midwife +from the neighboring town, who had been at Bald Hills for the last +fortnight.) + +"Oh yes," assented Princess Mary, "perhaps that's it. I'll go. +Courage, my angel." She kissed Lise and was about to leave the room. + +"Oh, no, no!" And besides the pallor and the physical suffering on +the little princess' face, an expression of childish fear of +inevitable pain showed itself. + +"No, it's only indigestion?... Say it's only indigestion, say so, +Mary! Say..." And the little princess began to cry capriciously like a +suffering child and to wring her little hands even with some +affectation. Princess Mary ran out of the room to fetch Mary +Bogdanovna. + +"Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Oh!" she heard as she left the room. + +The midwife was already on her way to meet her, rubbing her small, +plump white hands with an air of calm importance. + +"Mary Bogdanovna, I think it's beginning!" said Princess Mary +looking at the midwife with wide-open eyes of alarm. + +"Well, the Lord be thanked, Princess," said Mary Bogdanovna, not +hastening her steps. "You young ladies should not know anything +about it." + +"But how is it the doctor from Moscow is not here yet?" said the +princess. (In accordance with Lise's and Prince Andrew's wishes they +had sent in good time to Moscow for a doctor and were expecting him at +any moment.) + +"No matter, Princess, don't be alarmed," said Mary Bogdanovna. +"We'll manage very well without a doctor." + +Five minutes later Princess Mary from her room heard something heavy +being carried by. She looked out. The men servants were carrying the +large leather sofa from Prince Andrew's study into the bedroom. On +their faces was a quiet and solemn look. + +Princess Mary sat alone in her room listening to the sounds in the +house, now and then opening her door when someone passed and +watching what was going on in the passage. Some women passing with +quiet steps in and out of the bedroom glanced at the princess and +turned away. She did not venture to ask any questions, and shut the +door again, now sitting down in her easy chair, now taking her +prayer book, now kneeling before the icon stand. To her surprise and +distress she found that her prayers did not calm her excitement. +Suddenly her door opened softly and her old nurse, Praskovya Savishna, +who hardly ever came to that room as the old prince had forbidden +it, appeared on the threshold with a shawl round her head. + +"I've come to sit with you a bit, Masha," said the nurse, "and +here I've brought the prince's wedding candles to light before his +saint, my angel," she said with a sigh. + +"Oh, nurse, I'm so glad!" + +"God is merciful, birdie." + +The nurse lit the gilt candles before the icons and sat down by +the door with her knitting. Princess Mary took a book and began +reading. Only when footsteps or voices were heard did they look at one +another, the princess anxious and inquiring, the nurse encouraging. +Everyone in the house was dominated by the same feeling that +Princess Mary experienced as she sat in her room. But owing to the +superstition that the fewer the people who know of it the less a woman +in travail suffers, everyone tried to pretend not to know; no one +spoke of it, but apart from the ordinary staid and respectful good +manners habitual in the prince's household, a common anxiety, a +softening of the heart, and a consciousness that something great and +mysterious was being accomplished at that moment made itself felt. + +There was no laughter in the maids' large hall. In the men servants' +hall all sat waiting, silently and alert. In the outlying serfs' +quarters torches and candles were burning and no one slept. The old +prince, stepping on his heels, paced up and down his study and sent +Tikhon to ask Mary Bogdanovna what news.- "Say only that 'the prince +told me to ask,' and come and tell me her answer." + +"Inform the prince that labor has begun," said Mary Bogdanovna, +giving the messenger a significant look. + +Tikhon went and told the prince. + +"Very good!" said the prince closing the door behind him, and Tikhon +did not hear the slightest sound from the study after that. + +After a while he re-entered it as if to snuff the candles, and, +seeing the prince was lying on the sofa, looked at him, noticed his +perturbed face, shook his head, and going up to him silently kissed +him on the shoulder and left the room without snuffing the candles +or saying why he had entered. The most solemn mystery in the world +continued its course. Evening passed, night came, and the feeling of +suspense and softening of heart in the presence of the unfathomable +did not lessen but increased. No one slept. + +It was one of those March nights when winter seems to wish to resume +its sway and scatters its last snows and storms with desperate fury. A +relay of horses had been sent up the highroad to meet the German +doctor from Moscow who was expected every moment, and men on horseback +with lanterns were sent to the crossroads to guide him over the +country road with its hollows and snow-covered pools of water. + +Princess Mary had long since put aside her book: she sat silent, her +luminous eyes fixed on her nurse's wrinkled face (every line of +which she knew so well), on the lock of gray hair that escaped from +under the kerchief, and the loose skin that hung under her chin. + +Nurse Savishna, knitting in hand, was telling in low tones, scarcely +hearing or understanding her own words, what she had told hundreds +of times before: how the late princess had given birth to Princess +Mary in Kishenev with only a Moldavian peasant woman to help instead +of a midwife. + +"God is merciful, doctors are never needed," she said. + +Suddenly a gust of wind beat violently against the casement of the +window, from which the double frame had been removed (by order of +the prince, one window frame was removed in each room as soon as the +larks returned), and, forcing open a loosely closed latch, set the +damask curtain flapping and blew out the candle with its chill, +snowy draft. Princess Mary shuddered; her nurse, putting down the +stocking she was knitting, went to the window and leaning out tried to +catch the open casement. The cold wind flapped the ends of her +kerchief and her loose locks of gray hair. + +"Princess, my dear, there's someone driving up the avenue! " she +said, holding the casement and not closing it. "With lanterns. Most +likely the doctor." + +"Oh, my God! thank God!" said Princess Mary. "I must go and meet +him, he does not know Russian." + +Princess Mary threw a shawl over her head and ran to meet the +newcomer. As she was crossing the anteroom she saw through the +window a carriage with lanterns, standing at the entrance. She went +out on the stairs. On a banister post stood a tallow candle which +guttered in the draft. On the landing below, Philip, the footman, +stood looking scared and holding another candle. Still lower, beyond +the turn of the staircase, one could hear the footstep of someone in +thick felt boots, and a voice that seemed familiar to Princess Mary +was saying something. + +"Thank God!" said the voice. "And Father?" + +"Gone to bed," replied the voice of Demyan the house steward, who +was downstairs. + +Then the voice said something more, Demyan replied, and the steps in +the felt boots approached the unseen bend of the staircase more +rapidly. + +"It's Andrew!" thought Princess Mary. "No it can't be, that would be +too extraordinary," and at the very moment she thought this, the +face and figure of Prince Andrew, in a fur cloak the deep collar of +which covered with snow, appeared on the landing where the footman +stood with the candle. Yes, it was he, pale, thin, with a changed +and strangely softened but agitated expression on his face. He came up +the stairs and embraced his sister. + +"You did not get my letter?" he asked, and not waiting for a +reply- which he would not have received, for the princess was unable +to speak- he turned back, rapidly mounted the stairs again with the +doctor who had entered the hall after him (they had met at the last +post station), and again embraced his sister. + +"What a strange fate, Masha darling!" And having taken off his cloak +and felt boots, he went to the little princess' apartment. + +CHAPTER IX + +The little princess lay supported by pillows, with a white cap on +her head (the pains had just left her). Strands of her black hair +lay round her inflamed and perspiring cheeks, her charming rosy +mouth with its downy lip was open and she was smiling joyfully. Prince +Andrew entered and paused facing her at the foot of the sofa on +which she was lying. Her glittering eyes, filled with childlike fear +and excitement, rested on him without changing their expression. "I +love you all and have done no harm to anyone; why must I suffer so? +Help me!" her look seemed to say. She saw her husband, but did not +realize the significance of his appearance before her now. Prince +Andrew went round the sofa and kissed her forehead. + +"My darling!" he said- a word he had never used to her before. +"God is merciful...." + +She looked at him inquiringly and with childlike reproach. + +"I expected help from you and I get none, none from you either!" +said her eyes. She was not surprised at his having come; she did not +realize that he had come. His coming had nothing to do with her +sufferings or with their relief. The pangs began again and Mary +Bogdanovna advised Prince Andrew to leave the room. + +The doctor entered. Prince Andrew went out and, meeting Princess +Mary, again joined her. They began talking in whispers, but their talk +broke off at every moment. They waited and listened. + +"Go, dear," said Princess Mary. + +Prince Andrew went again to his wife and sat waiting in the room +next to hers. A woman came from the bedroom with a frightened face and +became confused when she saw Prince Andrew. He covered his face with +his hands and remained so for some minutes. Piteous, helpless, +animal moans came through the door. Prince Andrew got up, went to +the door, and tried to open it. Someone was holding it shut. + +"You can't come in! You can't!" said a terrified voice from within. + +He began pacing the room. The screaming ceased, and a few more +seconds went by. Then suddenly a terrible shriek- it could not be +hers, she could not scream like that- came from the bedroom. Prince +Andrew ran to the door; the scream ceased and he heard the wail of +an infant. + +"What have they taken a baby in there for?" thought Prince Andrew in +the first second. "A baby? What baby...? Why is there a baby there? Or +is the baby born?" + +Then suddenly he realized the joyful significance of that wail; +tears choked him, and leaning his elbows on the window sill be began +to cry, sobbing like a child. The door opened. The doctor with his +shirt sleeves tucked up, without a coat, pale and with a trembling +jaw, came out of the room. Prince Andrew turned to him, but the doctor +gave him a bewildered look and passed by without a word. A woman +rushed out and seeing Prince Andrew stopped, hesitating on the +threshold. He went into his wife's room. She was lying dead, in the +same position he had seen her in five minutes before and, despite +the fixed eyes and the pallor of the cheeks, the same expression was +on her charming childlike face with its upper lip covered with tiny +black hair. + +"I love you all, and have done no harm to anyone; and what have +you done to me?"- said her charming, pathetic, dead face. + +In a corner of the room something red and tiny gave a grunt and +squealed in Mary Bogdanovna's trembling white hands. + +Two hours later Prince Andrew, stepping softly, went into his +father's room. The old man already knew everything. He was standing +close to the door and as soon as it opened his rough old arms closed +like a vise round his son's neck, and without a word he began to sob +like a child. + +Three days later the little princess was buried, and Prince Andrew +went up the steps to where the coffin stood, to give her the +farewell kiss. And there in the coffin was the same face, though +with closed eyes. "Ah, what have you done to me?" it still seemed to +say, and Prince Andrew felt that something gave way in his soul and +that he was guilty of a sin he could neither remedy nor forget. He +could not weep. The old man too came up and kissed the waxen little +hands that lay quietly crossed one on the other on her breast, and +to him, too, her face seemed to say: "Ah, what have you done to me, +and why?" And at the sight the old man turned angrily away. + +Another five days passed, and then the young Prince Nicholas +Andreevich was baptized. The wet nurse supported the coverlet with her +while the priest with a goose feather anointed the boy's little red +and wrinkled soles and palms. + +His grandfather, who was his godfather, trembling and afraid of +dropping him, carried the infant round the battered tin font and +handed him over to the godmother, Princess Mary. Prince Andrew sat +in another room, faint with fear lest the baby should be drowned in +the font, and awaited the termination of the ceremony. He looked up +joyfully at the baby when the nurse brought it to him and nodded +approval when she told him that the wax with the baby's hair had not +sunk in the font but had floated. + +CHAPTER X + +Rostov's share in Dolokhov's duel with Bezukhov was hushed up by the +efforts of the old count, and instead of being degraded to the ranks +as he expected he was appointed an adjutant to the governor general of +Moscow. As a result he could not go to the country with the rest of +the family, but was kept all summer in Moscow by his new duties. +Dolokhov recovered, and Rostov became very friendly with him during +his convalescence. Dolokhov lay ill at his mother's who loved him +passionately and tenderly, and old Mary Ivanovna, who had grown fond +of Rostov for his friendship to her Fedya, often talked to him about +her son. + +"Yes, Count," she would say, "he is too noble and pure-souled for +our present, depraved world. No one now loves virtue; it seems like +a reproach to everyone. Now tell me, Count, was it right, was it +honorable, of Bezukhov? And Fedya, with his noble spirit, loved him +and even now never says a word against him. Those pranks in Petersburg +when they played some tricks on a policeman, didn't they do it +together? And there! Bezukhov got off scotfree, while Fedya had to +bear the whole burden on his shoulders. Fancy what he had to go +through! It's true he has been reinstated, but how could they fail +to do that? I think there were not many such gallant sons of the +fatherland out there as he. And now- this duel! Have these people no +feeling, or honor? Knowing him to be an only son, to challenge him and +shoot so straight! It's well God had mercy on us. And what was it for? +Who doesn't have intrigues nowadays? Why, if he was so jealous, as I +see things he should have shown it sooner, but he lets it go on for +months. And then to call him out, reckoning on Fedya not fighting +because he owed him money! What baseness! What meanness! I know you +understand Fedya, my dear count; that, believe me, is why I am so fond +of you. Few people do understand him. He is such a lofty, heavenly +soul!" + +Dolokhov himself during his convalescence spoke to Rostov in a way +no one would have expected of him. + +"I know people consider me a bad man!" he said. "Let them! I don't +care a straw about anyone but those I love; but those I love, I love +so that I would give my life for them, and the others I'd throttle +if they stood in my way. I have an adored, a priceless mother, and two +or three friends- you among them- and as for the rest I only care +about them in so far as they are harmful or useful. And most of them +are harmful, especially the women. Yes, dear boy," he continued, "I +have met loving, noble, high-minded men, but I have not yet met any +women- countesses or cooks- who were not venal. I have not yet met +that divine purity and devotion I look for in women. If I found such a +one I'd give my life for her! But those!... and he made a gesture of +contempt. "And believe me, if I still value my life it is only because +I still hope to meet such a divine creature, who will regenerate, +purify, and elevate me. But you don't understand it." + +"Oh, yes, I quite understand, "answered Rostov, who was under his +new friend's influence. + +In the autumn the Rostovs returned to Moscow. Early in the winter +Denisov also came back and stayed with them. The first half of the +winter of 1806, which Nicholas Rostov spent in Moscow, was one of +the happiest, merriest times for him and the whole family. Nicholas +brought many young men to his parents' house. Vera was a handsome girl +of twenty; Sonya a girl of sixteen with all the charm of an opening +flower; Natasha, half grown up and half child, was now childishly +amusing, now girlishly enchanting. + +At that time in the Rostovs' house there prevailed an amorous +atmosphere characteristic of homes where there are very young and very +charming girls. Every young man who came to the house- seeing those +impressionable, smiling young faces (smiling probably at their own +happiness), feeling the eager bustle around him, and hearing the +fitful bursts of song and music and the inconsequent but friendly +prattle of young girls ready for anything and full of hope- +experienced the same feeling; sharing with the young folk of the +Rostovs' household a readiness to fall in love and an expectation of +happiness. + +Among the young men introduced by Rostov one of the first was +Dolokhov, whom everyone in the house liked except Natasha. She +almost quarreled with her brother about him. She insisted that he +was a bad man, and that in the duel with Bezukhov, Pierre was right +and Dolokhov wrong, and further that he was disagreeable and +unnatural. + +"There's nothing for me to understand," cried out with resolute +self-will, "he is wicked and heartless. There now, I like your Denisov +though he is a rake and all that, still I like him; so you see I do +understand. I don't know how to put it... with this one everything +is calculated, and I don't like that. But Denisov..." + +"Oh, Denisov is quite different," replied Nicholas, implying that +even Denisov was nothing compared to Dolokhov- "you must understand +what a soul there is in Dolokhov, you should see him with his +mother. What a heart!" + +"Well, I don't know about that, but I am uncomfortable with him. And +do you know he has fallen in love with Sonya?" + +"What nonsense..." + +"I'm certain of it; you'll see." + +Natasha's prediction proved true. Dolokhov, who did not usually care +for the society of ladies, began to come often to the house, and the +question for whose sake he came (though no one spoke of it) was soon +settled. He came because of Sonya. And Sonya, though she would never +have dared to say so, knew it and blushed scarlet every time +Dolokhov appeared. + +Dolokhov often dined at the Rostovs', never missed a performance +at which they were present, and went to Iogel's balls for young people +which the Rostovs always attended. He was pointedly attentive to Sonya +and looked at her in such a way that not only could she not bear his +glances without coloring, but even the old countess and Natasha +blushed when they saw his looks. + +It was evident that this strange, strong man was under the +irresistible influence of the dark, graceful girl who loved another. + +Rostov noticed something new in Dolokhov's relations with Sonya, but +he did not explain to himself what these new relations were. +"They're always in love with someone," he thought of Sonya and +Natasha. But he was not as much at ease with Sonya and Dolokhov as +before and was less frequently at home. + +In the autumn of 1806 everybody had again begun talking of the war +with Napoleon with even greater warmth than the year before. Orders +were given to raise recruits, ten men in every thousand for the +regular army, and besides this, nine men in every thousand for the +militia. Everywhere Bonaparte was anathematized and in Moscow +nothing but the coming war was talked of. For the Rostov family the +whole interest of these preparations for war lay in the fact that +Nicholas would not hear of remaining in Moscow, and only awaited the +termination of Denisov's furlough after Christmas to return with him +to their regiment. His approaching departure did not prevent his +amusing himself, but rather gave zest to his pleasures. He spent the +greater part of his time away from home, at dinners, parties, and +balls. + +CHAPTER XI + +On the third day after Christmas Nicholas dined at home, a thing +he had rarely done of late. It was a grand farewell dinner, as he +and Denisov were leaving to join their regiment after Epiphany. +About twenty people were present, including Dolokhov and Denisov. + +Never had love been so much in the air, and never had the amorous +atmosphere made itself so strongly felt in the Rostovs' house as at +this holiday time. "Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! +That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the +one thing we are interested in here," said the spirit of the place. + +Nicholas, having as usual exhausted two pairs of horses, without +visiting all the places he meant to go to and where he had been +invited, returned home just before dinner. As soon as he entered he +noticed and felt the tension of the amorous air in the house, and also +noticed a curious embarrassment among some of those present. Sonya, +Dolokhov, and the old countess were especially disturbed, and to a +lesser degree Natasha. Nicholas understood that something must have +happened between Sonya and Dolokhov before dinner, and with the kindly +sensitiveness natural to him was very gentle and wary with them both +at dinner. On that same evening there was to be one of the balls +that Iogel (the dancing master) gave for his pupils durings the +holidays. + +"Nicholas, will you come to Iogel's? Please do!" said Natasha. "He +asked you, and Vasili Dmitrich~^ is also going." + +^~ Denisov. + +"Where would I not go at the countess' command!" said Denisov, who +at the Rostovs' had jocularly assumed the role of Natasha's knight. +"I'm even weady to dance the pas de chale." + +"If I have time," answered Nicholas. "But I promised the +Arkharovs; they have a party." + +"And you?" he asked Dolokhov, but as soon as he had asked the +question he noticed that it should not have been put. + +"Perhaps," coldly and angrily replied Dolokhov, glancing at Sonya, +and, scowling, he gave Nicholas just such a look as he had given +Pierre at the Club dinner. + +"There is something up," thought Nicholas, and he was further +confirmed in this conclusion by the fact that Dolokhov left +immediately after dinner. He called Natasha and asked her what was the +matter. + +"And I was looking for you," said Natasha running out to him. "I +told you, but you would not believe it," she said triumphantly. "He +has proposed to Sonya!" + +Little as Nicholas had occupied himself with Sonya of late, +something seemed to give way within him at this news. Dolokhov was a +suitable and in some respects a brilliant match for the dowerless, +orphan girl. From the point of view of the old countess and of society +it was out of the question for her to refuse him. And therefore +Nicholas' first feeling on hearing the news was one of anger with +Sonya.... He tried to say, "That's capital; of course she'll forget +her childish promises and accept the offer," but before he had time to +say it Natasha began again. + +"And fancy! she refused him quite definitely!" adding, after a +pause, "she told him she loved another." + +"Yes, my Sonya could not have done otherwise!" thought Nicholas. + +"Much as Mamma pressed her, she refused, and I know she won't change +once she has said..." + +"And Mamma pressed her!" said Nicholas reproachfully. + +"Yes," said Natasha. "Do you know, Nicholas- don't be angry- but I +know you will not marry her. I know, heaven knows how, but I know +for certain that you won't marry her." + +"Now don't know that at all!" said Nicholas. "But I must talk to +her. What a darling Sonya is!" he added with a smile. + +"Ah, she is indeed a darling! I'll send her to you." + +And Natasha kissed her brother and ran away. + +A minute later Sonya came in with a frightened, guilty, and scared +look. Nicholas went up to her and kissed her hand. This was the +first time since his return that they had talked alone and about their +love. + +"Sophie," he began, timidly at first and then more and more +boldly, "if you wish to refuse one who is not only a brilliant and +advantageous match but a splendid, noble fellow... he is my friend..." + +Sonya interrupted him. + +"I have already refused," she said hurriedly. + +"If you are refusing for my sake, I am afraid that I..." + +Sonya again interrupted. She gave him an imploring, frightened look. + +"Nicholas, don't tell me that!" she said. + +"No, but I must. It may be arrogant of me, but still it is best to +say it. If you refuse him on my account, I must tell you the whole +truth. I love you, and I think I love you more than anyone else...." + +"That is enough for me," said Sonya, blushing. + +"No, but I have been in love a thousand times and shall fall in love +again, though for no one have I such a feeling of friendship, +confidence, and love as I have for you. Then I am young. Mamma does +not wish it. In a word, I make no promise. And I beg you to consider +Dolokhov's offer," he said, articulating his friend's name with +difficulty. + +"Don't say that to me! I want nothing. I love you as a brother and +always shall, and I want nothing more." + +"You are an angel: I am not worthy of you, but I am afraid of +misleading you." + +And Nicholas again kissed her hand. + +CHAPTER XII + +Iogel's were the most enjoyable balls in Moscow. So said the mothers +as they watched their young people executing their newly learned +steps, and so said the youths and maidens themselves as they danced +till they were ready to drop, and so said the grown-up young men and +women who came to these balls with an air of condescension and found +them most enjoyable. That year two marriages had come of these +balls. The two pretty young Princesses Gorchakov met suitors there and +were married and so further increased the fame of these dances. What +distinguished them from others was the absence of host or hostess +and the presence of the good-natured Iogel, flying about like a +feather and bowing according to the rules of his art, as he +collected the tickets from all his visitors. There was the fact that +only those came who wished to dance and amuse themselves as girls of +thirteen and fourteen do who are wearing long dresses for the first +time. With scarcely any exceptions they all were, or seemed to be, +pretty- so rapturous were their smiles and so sparkling their eyes. +Sometimes the best of the pupils, of whom Natasha, who was +exceptionally graceful, was first, even danced the pas de chale, but +at this last ball only the ecossaise, the anglaise, and the mazurka, +which was just coming into fashion, were danced. Iogel had taken a +ballroom in Bezukhov's house, and the ball, as everyone said, was a +great success. There were many pretty girls and the Rostov girls +were among the prettiest. They were both particularly happy and gay. +That evening, proud of Dolokhov's proposal, her refusal, and her +explanation with Nicholas, Sonya twirled about before she left home so +that the maid could hardly get her hair plaited, and she was +transparently radiant with impulsive joy. + +Natasha no less proud of her first long dress and of being at a real +ball was even happier. They were both dressed in white muslin with +pink ribbons. + +Natasha fell in love the very moment she entered the ballroom. She +was not in love with anyone in particular, but with everyone. Whatever +person she happened to look at she was in love with for that moment. + +"Oh, how delightful it is!" she kept saying, running up to Sonya. + +Nicholas and Denisov were walking up and down, looking with kindly +patronage at the dancers. + +"How sweet she is- she will be a weal beauty!" said Denisov. + +"Who?" + +"Countess Natasha," answered Denisov. + +"And how she dances! What gwace!" he said again after a pause. + +"Who are you talking about?" + +"About your sister," ejaculated Denisov testily. + +Rostov smiled. + +"My dear count, you were one of my best pupils- you must dance," +said little Iogel coming up to Nicholas. "Look how many charming young +ladies-" He turned with the same request to Denisov who was also a +former pupil of his. + +"No, my dear fellow, I'll be a wallflower," said Denisov. "Don't you +wecollect what bad use I made of your lessons?" + +"Oh no!" said Iogel, hastening to reassure him. "You were only +inattentive, but you had talent- oh yes, you had talent!" + +The band struck up the newly introduced mazurka. Nicholas could not +refuse Iogel and asked Sonya to dance. Denisov sat down by the old +ladies and, leaning on his saber and beating time with his foot, +told them something funny and kept them amused, while he watched the +young people dancing, Iogel with Natasha, his pride and his best +pupil, were the first couple. Noiselessly, skillfully stepping with +his little feet in low shoes, Iogel flew first across the hall with +Natasha, who, though shy, went on carefully executing her steps. +Denisov did not take his eyes off her and beat time with his saber +in a way that clearly indicated that if he was not dancing it was +because he would not and not because he could not. In the middle of +a figure he beckoned to Rostov who was passing: + +"This is not at all the thing," he said. "What sort of Polish +mazuwka is this? But she does dance splendidly." + +Knowing that Denisov had a reputation even in Poland for the +masterly way in which he danced the mazurka, Nicholas ran up to +Natasha: + +"Go and choose Denisov. He is a real dancer, a wonder!" he said. + +When it came to Natasha's turn to choose a partner, she rose and, +tripping rapidly across in her little shoes trimmed with bows, ran +timidly to the corner where Denisov sat. She saw that everybody was +looking at her and waiting. Nicholas saw that Denisov was refusing +though he smiled delightedly. He ran up to them. + +"Please, Vasili Dmitrich," Natasha was saying, "do come!" + +"Oh no, let me off, Countess," Denisov replied. + +"Now then, Vaska," said Nicholas. + +"They coax me as if I were Vaska the cat!" said Denisov jokingly. + +"I'll sing for you a whole evening," said Natasha. + +"Oh, the faiwy! She can do anything with me!" said Denisov, and he +unhooked his saber. He came out from behind the chairs, clasped his +partner's hand firmly, threw back his head, and advanced his foot, +waiting for the beat. Only on horse back and in the mazurka was +Denisov's short stature not noticeable and he looked the fine fellow +he felt himself to be. At the right beat of the music he looked +sideways at his partner with a merry and triumphant air, suddenly +stamped with one foot, bounded from the floor like a ball, and flew +round the room taking his partner with him. He glided silently on +one foot half across the room, and seeming not to notice the chairs +was dashing straight at them, when suddenly, clinking his spurs and +spreading out his legs, he stopped short on his heels, stood so a +second, stamped on the spot clanking his spurs, whirled rapidly round, +and, striking his left heel against his right, flew round again in a +circle. Natasha guessed what he meant to do, and abandoning herself to +him followed his lead hardly knowing how. First he spun her round, +holding her now with his left, now with his right hand, then falling +on one knee he twirled her round him, and again jumping up, dashed +so impetuously forward that it seemed as if he would rush through +the whole suite of rooms without drawing breath, and then he +suddenly stopped and performed some new and unexpected steps. When +at last, smartly whirling his partner round in front of her chair, +he drew up with a click of his spurs and bowed to her, Natasha did not +even make him a curtsy. She fixed her eyes on him in amazement, +smiling as if she did not recognize him. + +"What does this mean?" she brought out. + +Although Iogel did not acknowledge this to be the real mazurka, +everyone was delighted with Denisov's skill, he was asked again and +again as a partner, and the old men began smilingly to talk about +Poland and the good old days. Denisov, flushed after the mazurka and +mopping himself with his handkerchief, sat down by Natasha and did not +leave her for the rest of the evening. + +CHAPTER XIII + +For two days after that Rostov did not see Dolokhov at his own or at +Dolokhov's home: on the third day he received a note from him: + +As I do not intend to be at your house again for reasons you know +of, and am going to rejoin my regiment, I am giving a farewell +supper tonight to my friends- come to the English Hotel. + +About ten o'clock Rostov went to the English Hotel straight from the +theater, where he had been with his family and Denisov. He was at once +shown to the best room, which Dolokhov had taken for that evening. +Some twenty men were gathered round a table at which Dolokhov sat +between two candles. On the table was a pile of gold and paper +money, and he was keeping the bank. Rostov had not seen him since +his proposal and Sonya's refusal and felt uncomfortable at the thought +of how they would meet. + +Dolokhov's clear, cold glance met Rostov as soon as he entered the +door, as though he had long expected him. + +"It's a long time since we met," he said. "Thanks for coming. I'll +just finish dealing, and then Ilyushka will come with his chorus." + +"I called once or twice at your house," said Rostov, reddening. + +Dolokhov made no reply. + +"You may punt," he said. + +Rostov recalled at that moment a strange conversation he had once +had with Dolokhov. "None but fools trust to luck in play," Dolokhov +had then said. + +"Or are you afraid to play with me?" Dolokhov now asked as if +guessing Rostov's thought. + +Beneath his smile Rostov saw in him the mood he had shown at the +Club dinner and at other times, when as if tired of everyday life he +had felt a need to escape from it by some strange, and usually +cruel, action. + +Rostov felt ill at ease. He tried, but failed, to find some joke +with which to reply to Dolokhov's words. But before he had thought +of anything, Dolokhov, looking straight in his face, said slowly and +deliberately so that everyone could hear: + +"Do you remember we had a talk about cards... 'He's a fool who +trusts to luck, one should make certain,' and I want to try." + +"To try his luck or the certainty?" Rostov asked himself. + +"Well, you'd better not play," Dolokhov added, and springing a new +pack of cards said: "Bank, gentlemen!" + +Moving the money forward he prepared to deal. Rostov sat down by his +side and at first did not play. Dolokhov kept glancing at him. + +"Why don't you play?" he asked. + +And strange to say Nicholas felt that he could not help taking up +a card, putting a small stake on it, and beginning to play. + +"I have no money with me," he said. + +"I'll trust you." + +Rostov staked five rubles on a card and lost, staked again, and +again lost. Dolokhov "killed," that is, beat, ten cards of Rostov's +running. + +"Gentlemen," said Dolokhov after he had dealt for some time. "Please +place your money on the cards or I may get muddled in the reckoning." + +One of the players said he hoped he might be trusted. + +"Yes, you might, but I am afraid of getting the accounts mixed. So I +ask you to put the money on your cards," replied Dolokhov. "Don't +stint yourself, we'll settle afterwards," he added, turning to Rostov. + +The game continued; a waiter kept handing round champagne. + +All Rostov's cards were beaten and he had eight hundred rubles +scored up against him. He wrote "800 rubles" on a card, but while +the waiter filled his glass he changed his mind and altered it to +his usual stake of twenty rubles. + +"Leave it," said Dolokhov, though he did not seem to be even looking +at Rostov, "you'll win it back all the sooner. I lose to the others +but win from you. Or are you afraid of me?" he asked again. + +Rostov submitted. He let the eight hundred remain and laid down a +seven of hearts with a torn corner, which he had picked up from the +floor. He well remembered that seven afterwards. He laid down the +seven of hearts, on which with a broken bit of chalk he had written +"800 rubles" in clear upright figures; he emptied the glass of warm +champagne that was handed him, smiled at Dolokhov's words, and with +a sinking heart, waiting for a seven to turn up, gazed at Dolokhov's +hands which held the pack. Much depended on Rostov's winning or losing +on that seven of hearts. On the previous Sunday the old count had +given his son two thousand rubles, and though he always disliked +speaking of money difficulties had told Nicholas that this was all +he could let him have till May, and asked him to be more economical +this time. Nicholas had replied that it would be more than enough +for him and that he gave his word of honor not to take anything more +till the spring. Now only twelve hundred rubles was left of that +money, so that this seven of hearts meant for him not only the loss of +sixteen hundred rubles, but the necessity of going back on his word. +With a sinking heart he watched Dolokhov's hands and thought, "Now +then, make haste and let me have this card and I'll take my cap and +drive home to supper with Denisov, Natasha, and Sonya, and will +certainly never touch a card again." At that moment his home life, +jokes with Petya, talks with Sonya, duets with Natasha, piquet with +his father, and even his comfortable bed in the house on the +Povarskaya rose before him with such vividness, clearness, and charm +that it seemed as if it were all a lost and unappreciated bliss, +long past. He could not conceive that a stupid chance, letting the +seven be dealt to the right rather than to the left, might deprive him +of all this happiness, newly appreciated and newly illumined, and +plunge him into the depths of unknown and undefined misery. That could +not be, yet he awaited with a sinking heart the movement of Dolokhov's +hands. Those broad, reddish hands, with hairy wrists visible from +under the shirt cuffs, laid down the pack and took up a glass and a +pipe that were handed him. + +"So you are not afraid to play with me?" repeated Dolokhov, and as +if about to tell a good story he put down the cards, leaned back in +his chair, and began deliberately with a smile: + +"Yes, gentlemen, I've been told there's a rumor going about Moscow +that I'm a sharper, so I advise you to be careful." + +"Come now, deal!" exclaimed Rostov. + +"Oh, those Moscow gossips!" said Dolokhov, and he took up the +cards with a smile. + +"Aah!" Rostov almost screamed lifting both hands to his head. The +seven he needed was lying uppermost, the first card in the pack. He +had lost more than he could pay. + +"Still, don't ruin yourself!" said Dolokhov with a side glance at +Rostov as he continued to deal. + +CHAPTER XIV + +An hour and a half later most of the players were but little +interested in their own play. + +The whole interest was concentrated on Rostov. Instead of sixteen +hundred rubles he had a long column of figures scored against him, +which he had reckoned up to ten thousand, but that now, as he +vaguely supposed, must have risen to fifteen thousand. In reality it +already exceeded twenty thousand rubles. Dolokhov was no longer +listening to stories or telling them, but followed every movement of +Rostov's hands and occasionally ran his eyes over the score against +him. He had decided to play until that score reached forty-three +thousand. He had fixed on that number because forty-three was the +sum of his and Sonya's joint ages. Rostov, leaning his head on both +hands, sat at the table which was scrawled over with figures, wet with +spilled wine, and littered with cards. One tormenting impression did +not leave him: that those broad-boned reddish hands with hairy +wrists visible from under the shirt sleeves, those hands which he +loved and hated, held him in their power. + +"Six hundred rubles, ace, a corner, a nine... winning it back's +impossible... Oh, how pleasant it was at home!... The knave, double or +quits... it can't be!... And why is he doing this to me?" Rostov +pondered. Sometimes he staked a large sum, but Dolokhov refused to +accept it and fixed the stake himself. Nicholas submitted to him, +and at one moment prayed to God as he had done on the battlefield at +the bridge over the Enns, and then guessed that the card that came +first to hand from the crumpled heap under the table would save him, +now counted the cords on his coat and took a card with that number and +tried staking the total of his losses on it, then he looked round +for aid from the other players, or peered at the now cold face of +Dolokhov and tried to read what was passing in his mind. + +"He knows of course what this loss means to me. He can't want my +ruin. Wasn't he my friend? Wasn't I fond of him? But it's not his +fault. What's he to do if he has such luck?... And it's not my fault +either," he thought to himself, "I have done nothing wrong. Have I +killed anyone, or insulted or wished harm to anyone? Why such a +terrible misfortune? And when did it begin? Such a little while ago +I came to this table with the thought of winning a hundred rubles to +buy that casket for Mamma's name day and then going home. I was so +happy, so free, so lighthearted! And I did not realize how happy I +was! When did that end and when did this new, terrible state of things +begin? What marked the change? I sat all the time in this same place +at this table, chose and placed cards, and watched those broad-boned +agile hands in the same way. When did it happen and what has happened? +I am well and strong and still the same and in the same place. No, +it can't be! Surely it will all end in nothing!" + +He was flushed and bathed in perspiration, though the room was not +hot. His face was terrible and piteous to see, especially from its +helpless efforts to seem calm. + +The score against him reached the fateful sum of forty-three +thousand. Rostov had just prepared a card, by bending the corner of +which he meant to double the three thousand just put down to his +score, when Dolokhov, slamming down the pack of cards, put it aside +and began rapidly adding up the total of Rostov's debt, breaking the +chalk as he marked the figures in his clear, bold hand. + +"Supper, it's time for supper! And here are the gypsies!" + +Some swarthy men and women were really entering from the cold +outside and saying something in their gypsy accents. Nicholas +understood that it was all over; but he said in an indifferent tone: + +"Well, won't you go on? I had a splendid card all ready," as if it +were the fun of the game which interested him most. + +"It's all up! I'm lost!" thought he. "Now a bullet through my brain- +that's all that's left me! " And at the same time he said in a +cheerful voice: + +"Come now, just this one more little card!" + +"All right!" said Dolokhov, having finished the addition. "All +right! Twenty-one rubles," he said, pointing to the figure +twenty-one by which the total exceeded the round sum of forty-three +thousand; and taking up a pack he prepared to deal. Rostov +submissively unbent the corner of his card and, instead of the six +thousand he had intended, carefully wrote twenty-one. + +"It's all the same to me," he said. "I only want to see whether +you will let me win this ten, or beat it." + +Dolokhov began to deal seriously. Oh, how Rostov detested at that +moment those hands with their short reddish fingers and hairy +wrists, which held him in their power.... The ten fell to him. + +"You owe forty-three thousand, Count," said Dolokhov, and stretching +himself he rose from the table. "One does get tired sitting so +long," he added. + +"Yes, I'm tired too," said Rostov. + +Dolokhov cut him short, as if to remind him that it was not for +him to jest. + +"When am I to receive the money, Count?" + +Rostov, flushing, drew Dolokhov into the next room. + +"I cannot pay it all immediately. Will you take an I.O.U.?" he said. + +"I say, Rostov," said Dolokhov clearly, smiling and looking Nicholas +straight in the eyes, "you know the saying, 'Lucky in love, unlucky at +cards.' Your cousin is in love with you, I know." + +"Oh, it's terrible to feel oneself so in this man's power," +thought Rostov. He knew what a shock he would inflict on his father +and mother by the news of this loss, he knew what a relief it would be +to escape it all, and felt that Dolokhov knew that he could save him +from all this shame and sorrow, but wanted now to play with him as a +cat does with a mouse. + +"Your cousin..." Dolokhov started to say, but Nicholas interrupted +him. + +"My cousin has nothing to do with this and it's not necessary to +mention her!" he exclaimed fiercely. + +"Then when am I to have it?" + +"Tomorrow," replied Rostov and left the room. + +CHAPTER XV + +To say "tomorrow" and keep up a dignified tone was not difficult, +but to go home alone, see his sisters, brother, mother, and father, +confess and ask for money he had no right to after giving his word +of honor, was terrible. + +At home, they had not yet gone to bed. The young people, after +returning from the theater, had had supper and were grouped round +the clavichord. As soon as Nicholas entered, he was enfolded in that +poetic atmosphere of love which pervaded the Rostov household that +winter and, now after Dolokhov's proposal and Iogel's ball, seemed +to have grown thicker round Sonya and Natasha as the air does before a +thunderstorm. Sonya and Natasha, in the light-blue dresses they had +worn at the theater, looking pretty and conscious of it, were standing +by the clavichord, happy and smiling. Vera was playing chess with +Shinshin in the drawing room. The old countess, waiting for the return +of her husband and son, sat playing patience with the old +gentlewoman who lived in their house. Denisov, with sparkling eyes and +ruffled hair, sat at the clavichord striking chords with his short +fingers, his legs thrown back and his eyes rolling as he sang, with +his small, husky, but true voice, some verses called "Enchantress," +which he had composed, and to which he was trying to fit music: + +_1 Enchantress, say, to my forsaken lyre
+What magic power is this recalls me still?
+What spark has set my inmost soul on fire,
+What is this bliss that makes my fingers thrill? + +He was singing in passionate tones, gazing with gazing with his +sparkling black-agate eyes at the frightened and happy Natasha. + +"Splendid! Excellent!" exclaimed Natasha. "Another verse, she +said, without noticing Nicholas. + +"Everything's still the same with them," thought Nicholas, +glancing into the drawing room, where he saw Vera and his mother +with the old lady. + +"Ah, and here's Nicholas!" cried Natasha, running up to him. + +"Is Papa at home?" he asked. + +"I am so glad you've come!" said Natasha, without answering him. "We +are enjoying ourselves! Vasili Dmitrich is staying a day longer for my +sake! Did you know?" + +"No, Papa is not back yet," said Sonya. + +"Nicholas, have you come? Come here, dear!" called the old +countess from the drawing room. + +Nicholas went to her, kissed her hand, and sitting down silently +at her table began to watch her hands arranging the cards. From the +dancing room, they still heard the laughter and merry voices trying to +persuade Natasha to sing. + +"All wight! All wight!" shouted Denisov. "It's no good making +excuses now! It's your turn to sing the ba'cawolla- I entweat you!" + +The countess glanced at her silent son. + +"What is the matter?" she asked. + +"Oh, nothing," said he, as if weary of being continually asked the +same question. "Will Papa be back soon?" + +"I expect so." + +"Everything's the same with them. They know nothing about it! +Where am I to go?" thought Nicholas, and went again into the dancing +room where the clavichord stood. + +Sonya was sitting at the clavichord, playing the prelude to +Denisov's favorite barcarolle. Natasha was preparing to sing. +Denisov was looking at her with enraptured eyes. + +Nicholas began pacing up and down the room. + +"Why do they want to make her sing? How can she sing? There's +nothing to be happy about!" thought he. + +Sonya struck the first chord of the prelude. + +"My God, I'm a ruined and dishonored man! A bullet through my +brain is the only thing left me- not singing! " his thoughts ran on. +"Go away? But where to? It's one- let them sing!" + +He continued to pace the room, looking gloomily at Denisov and the +girls and avoiding their eyes. + +"Nikolenka, what is the matter?" Sonya's eyes fixed on him seemed to +ask. She noticed at once that something had happened to him. + +Nicholas turned away from her. Natasha too, with her quick instinct, +had instantly noticed her brother's condition. But, though she noticed +it, she was herself in such high spirits at that moment, so far from +sorrow, sadness, or self-reproach, that she purposely deceived herself +as young people often do. "No, I am too happy now to spoil my +enjoyment by sympathy with anyone's sorrow," she felt, and she said to +herself: "No, I must be mistaken, he must be feeling happy, just as +I am." + +"Now, Sonya!" she said, going to the very middle of the room, +where she considered the resonance was best. + +Having lifted her head and let her arms droop lifelessly, as +ballet dancers do, Natasha, rising energetically from her heels to her +toes, stepped to the middle of the room and stood still. + +"Yes, that's me!" she seemed to say, answering the rapt gaze with +which Denisov followed her. + +"And what is she so pleased about?" thought Nicholas, looking at his +sister. "Why isn't she dull and ashamed?" + +Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her chest rose, her +eyes became serious. At that moment she was oblivious of her +surroundings, and from her smiling lips flowed sounds which anyone may +produce at the same intervals hold for the same time, but which +leave you cold a thousand times and the thousand and first time thrill +you and make you weep. + +Natasha, that winter, had for the first time begun to sing +seriously, mainly because Denisov so delighted in her singing. She +no longer sang as a child, there was no longer in her singing that +comical, childish, painstaking effect that had been in it before; +but she did not yet sing well, as all the connoisseurs who heard her +said: "It is not trained, but it is a beautiful voice that must be +trained." Only they generally said this some time after she had +finished singing. While that untrained voice, with its incorrect +breathing and labored transitions, was sounding, even the connoisseurs +said nothing, but only delighted in it and wished to hear it again. In +her voice there was a virginal freshness, an unconsciousness of her +own powers, and an as yet untrained velvety softness, which so mingled +with her lack of art in singing that it seemed as if nothing in that +voice could be altered without spoiling it. + +"What is this?" thought Nicholas, listening to her with widely +opened eyes. "What has happened to her? How she is singing today!" And +suddenly the whole world centered for him on anticipation of the +next note, the next phrase, and everything in the world was divided +into three beats: "Oh mio crudele affetto."... One, two, three... one, +two, three... One... "Oh mio crudele affetto."... One, two, three... +One. "Oh, this senseless life of ours!" thought Nicholas. "All this +misery, and money, and Dolokhov, and anger, and honor- it's all +nonsense... but this is real.... Now then, Natasha, now then, dearest! +Now then, darling! How will she take that si? She's taken it! Thank +God!" And without noticing that he was singing, to strengthen the si +he sung a second, a third below the high note. "Ah, God! How fine! Did +I really take it? How fortunate!" he thought. + +Oh, how that chord vibrated, and how moved was something that was +finest in Rostov's soul! And this something was apart from +everything else in the world and above everything in the world. +"What were losses, and Dolokhov, and words of honor?... All +nonsense! One might kill and rob and yet be happy..." + +CHAPTER XVI + +It was long since Rostov had felt such enjoyment from music as he +did that day. But no sooner had Natasha finished her barcarolle than +reality again presented itself. He got up without saying a word and +went downstairs to his own room. A quarter of an hour later the old +count came in from his Club, cheerful and contented. Nicholas, hearing +him drive up, went to meet him. + +"Well- had a good time?" said the old count, smiling gaily and +proudly at his son. + +Nicholas tried to say "Yes," but could not: and he nearly burst into +sobs. The count was lighting his pipe and did not notice his son's +condition. + +"Ah, it can't be avoided!" thought Nicholas, for the first and +last time. And suddenly, in the most casual tone, which made him +feel ashamed feel of himself, he said, as if merely asking his +father to let him have the carriage to drive to town: + +"Papa, I have come on a matter of business. I was nearly forgetting. +I need some money." + +"Dear me!" said his father, who was in a specially good humor. "I +told you it would not be enough. How much?" + +"Very much," said Nicholas flushing, and with a stupid careless +smile, for which he was long unable to forgive himself, "I have lost a +little, I mean a good deal, a great deal- forty three thousand." + +"What! To whom?... Nonsense!" cried the count, suddenly reddening +with an apoplectic flush over neck and nape as old people do. + +"I promised to pay tomorrow," said Nicholas. + +"Well!..." said the old count, spreading out his arms and sinking +helplessly on the sofa. + +"It can't be helped It happens to everyone!" said the son, with a +bold, free, and easy tone, while in his soul he regarded himself as +a worthless scoundrel whose whole life could not atone for his +crime. He longed to kiss his father's hands and kneel to beg his +forgiveness, but said, in a careless and even rude voice, that it +happens to everyone! + +The old count cast down his eyes on hearing his son's words and +began bustlingly searching for something. + +"Yes, yes," he muttered, "it will be difficult, I fear, difficult to +raise... happens to everybody! Yes, who has not done it?" + +And with a furtive glance at his son's face, the count went out of +the room.... Nicholas had been prepared for resistance, but had not at +all expected this. + +"Papa! Pa-pa!" he called after him, sobbing, "forgive me!" And +seizing his father's hand, he pressed it to his lips and burst into +tears. + +While father and son were having their explanation, the mother and +daughter were having one not less important. Natasha came running to +her mother, quite excited. + +"Mamma!... Mamma!... He has made me..." + +"Made what?" + +"Made, made me an offer, Mamma! Mamma!" she exclaimed. + +The countess did not believe her ears. Denisov had proposed. To +whom? To this chit of a girl, Natasha, who not so long ago was playing +with dolls and who was still having lessons. + +"Don't, Natasha! What nonsense!" she said, hoping it was a joke. + +"Nonsense, indeed! I am telling you the fact," said Natasha +indignantly. "I come to ask you what to do, and you call it +'nonsense!'" + +The countess shrugged her shoulders. + +"If it true that Monsieur Denisov has made you a proposal, tell +him he is a fool, that's all!" + +"No, he's not a fool!" replied Natasha indignantly and seriously. + +"Well then, what do you want? You're all in love nowadays. Well, +if you are in love, marry him!" said the countess, with a laugh of +annoyance. "Good luck to you!" + +"No, Mamma, I'm not in love with him, I suppose I'm not in love with +him." + +"Well then, tell him so." + +"Mamma, are you cross? Don't be cross, dear! Is it my fault?" + +"No, but what is it, my dear? Do you want me to go and tell him?" +said the countess smiling. + +"No, I will do it myself, only tell me what to say. It's all very +well for you," said Natasha, with a responsive smile. "You should have +seen how he said it! I know he did not mean to say it, but it came out +accidently." + +"Well, all the same, you must refuse him." + +"No, I mustn't. I am so sorry for him! He's so nice." + +"Well then, accept his offer. It's high time for you to be married," +answered the countess sharply and sarcastically. + +"No, Mamma, but I'm so sorry for him. I don't know how I'm to say +it." + +"And there's nothing for you to say. I shall speak to him myself," +said the countess, indignant that they should have dared to treat this +little Natasha as grown up. + +"No, not on any account! I will tell him myself, and you'll listen +at the door," and Natasha ran across the drawing room to the dancing +hall, where Denisov was sitting on the same chair by the clavichord +with his face in his hands. + +He jumped up at the sound of her light step. + +"Nataly," he said, moving with rapid steps toward her, "decide my +fate. It is in your hands." + +"Vasili Dmitrich, I'm so sorry for you!... No, but you are so +nice... but it won't do...not that... but as a friend, I shall +always love you." + +Denisov bent over her hand and she heard strange sounds she did +not understand. She kissed his rough curly black head. At this +instant, they heard the quick rustle of the countess' dress. She +came up to them. + +"Vasili Dmitrich, I thank you for the honor," she said, with an +embarrassed voice, though it sounded severe to Denisov- "but my +daughter is so young, and I thought that, as my son's friend, you +would have addressed yourself first to me. In that case you would +not have obliged me to give this refusal." + +"Countess..." said Denisov, with downcast eyes and a guilty face. He +tried to say more, but faltered. + +Natasha could not remain calm, seeing him in such a plight. She +began to sob aloud. + +"Countess, I have done w'ong," Denisov went on in an unsteady voice, +"but believe me, I so adore your daughter and all your family that I +would give my life twice over..." He looked at the countess, and +seeing her severe face said: "Well, good-by, Countess," and kissing +her hand, he left the room with quick resolute strides, without +looking at Natasha. + +Next day Rostov saw Denisov off. He not wish to stay another day +in Moscow. All Denisov's Moscow friends gave him a farewell +entertainment at the gypsies', with the result that he had no +recollection of how he was put in the sleigh or of the first three +stages of his journey. + +After Denisov's departure, Rostov spent another fortnight in Moscow, +without going out of the house, waiting for the money his father could +not at once raise, and he spent most of his time in the girls' room. + +Sonya was more tender and devoted to him than ever. It was as if she +wanted to show him that his losses were an achievement that made her +love him all the more, but Nicholas now considered himself unworthy of +her. + +He filled the girls' albums with verses and music, and having at +last sent Dolokhov the whole forty-three thousand rubles and +received his receipt, he left at the end of November, without taking +leave of any of his acquaintances, to overtake his regiment which +was already in Poland. + +BOOK FIVE: 1806 - 07 + +CHAPTER I + +After his interview with his wife Pierre left for Petersburg. At the +Torzhok post station, either there were no horses or the postmaster +would not supply them. Pierre was obliged to wait. Without undressing, +he lay down on the leather sofa in front of a round table, put his big +feet in their overboots on the table, and began to reflect. + +"Will you have the portmanteaus brought in? And a bed got ready, and +tea?" asked his valet. + +Pierre gave no answer, for he neither heard nor saw anything. He had +begun to think of the last station and was still pondering on the same +question- one so important that he took no notice of what went on +around him. Not only was he indifferent as to whether he got to +Petersburg earlier or later, or whether he secured accommodation at +this station, but compared to the thoughts that now occupied him it +was a matter of indifference whether he remained there for a few hours +or for the rest of his life. + +The postmaster, his wife, the valet, and a peasant woman selling +Torzhok embroidery came into the room offering their services. Without +changing his careless attitude, Pierre looked at them over his +spectacles unable to understand what they wanted or how they could +go on living without having solved the problems that so absorbed +him. He had been engrossed by the same thoughts ever since the day +he returned from Sokolniki after the duel and had spent that first +agonizing, sleepless night. But now, in the solitude of the journey, +they seized him with special force. No matter what he thought about, +he always returned to these same questions which he could not solve +and yet could not cease to ask himself. It was as if the thread of the +chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so that the +screw could not get in or out, but went on turning uselessly in the +same place. + +The postmaster came in and began obsequiously to beg his +excellency to wait only two hours, when, come what might, he would let +his excellency have the courier horses. It was plain that he was lying +and only wanted to get more money from the traveler. + +"Is this good or bad?" Pierre asked himself. "It is good for me, bad +for another traveler, and for himself it's unavoidable, because he +needs money for food; the man said an officer had once given him a +thrashing for letting a private traveler have the courier horses. +But the officer thrashed him because he had to get on as quickly as +possible. And I," continued Pierre, "shot Dolokhov because I +considered myself injured, and Louis XVI was executed because they +considered him a criminal, and a year later they executed those who +executed him- also for some reason. What is bad? What is good? What +should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am +I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all?" + +There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and +that not a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer +was: "You'll die and all will end. You'll die and know all, or cease +asking." But dying was also dreadful. + +The Torzhok peddler woman, in a whining voice, went on offering +her wares, especially a pair of goatskin slippers. "I have hundreds of +rubles I don't know what to do with, and she stands in her tattered +cloak looking timidly at me," he thought. "And what does she want +the money for? As if that money could add a hair's breadth to +happiness or peace of mind. Can anything in the world make her or me +less a prey to evil and death?- death which ends all and must come +today or tomorrow- at any rate, in an instant as compared with +eternity." And again he twisted the screw with the stripped thread, +and again it turned uselessly in the same place. + +His servant handed him a half-cut novel, in the form of letters, +by Madame de Souza. He began reading about the sufferings and virtuous +struggles of a certain Emilie de Mansfeld. "And why did she resist her +seducer when she loved him?" he thought. "God could not have put +into her heart an impulse that was against His will. My wife- as she +once was- did not struggle, and perhaps she was right. Nothing has +been found out, nothing discovered," Pierre again said to himself. +"All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of +human wisdom." + +Everything within and around him seemed confused, senseless, and +repellent. Yet in this very repugnance to all his circumstances Pierre +found a kind of tantalizing satisfaction. + +"I make bold to ask your excellency to move a little for this +gentleman," said the postmaster, entering the room followed by another +traveler, also detained for lack of horses. + +The newcomer was a short, large-boned, yellow-faced, wrinkled old +man, with gray bushy eyebrows overhanging bright eyes of an indefinite +grayish color. + +Pierre took his feet off the table, stood up, and lay down on a +bed that had been got ready for him, glancing now and then at the +newcomer, who, with a gloomy and tired face, was wearily taking off +his wraps with the aid of his servant, and not looking at Pierre. With +a pair of felt boots on his thin bony legs, and keeping on a worn, +nankeen-covered, sheepskin coat, the traveler sat down on the sofa, +leaned back his big head with its broad temples and close-cropped +hair, and looked at Bezukhov. The stern, shrewd, and penetrating +expression of that look struck Pierre. He felt a wish to speak to +the stranger, but by the time he had made up his mind to ask him a +question about the roads, the traveler had closed his eyes. His +shriveled old hands were folded and on the finger of one of them +Pierre noticed a large cast iron ring with a seal representing a +death's head. The stranger sat without stirring, either resting or, as +it seemed to Pierre, sunk in profound and calm meditation. His servant +was also a yellow, wrinkled old man, without beard or mustache, +evidently not because he was shaven but because they had never +grown. This active old servant was unpacking the traveler's canteen +and preparing tea. He brought in a boiling samovar. When everything +was ready, the stranger opened his eyes, moved to the table, filled +a tumbler with tea for himself and one for the beardless old man to +whom he passed it. Pierre began to feel a sense of uneasiness, and the +need, even the inevitability, of entering into conversation with +this stranger. + +The servant brought back his tumbler turned upside down,~^ with an +unfinished bit of nibbled sugar, and asked if anything more would be +wanted. + +^~ To indicate he did not want more tea. + +"No. Give me the book," said the stranger. + +The servant handed him a book which Pierre took to be a devotional +work, and the traveler became absorbed in it. Pierre looked at him. +All at once the stranger closed the book, putting in a marker, and +again, leaning with his arms on the back of the sofa, sat in his +former position with his eyes shut. Pierre looked at him and had not +time to turn away when the old man, opening his eyes, fixed his steady +and severe gaze straight on Pierre's face. + +Pierre felt confused and wished to avoid that look, but the bright +old eyes attracted him irresistibly. + +CHAPTER II + +"I have the pleasure of addressing Count Bezukhov, if I am not +mistaken," said the stranger in a deliberate and loud voice. + +Pierre looked silently and inquiringly at him over his spectacles. + +"I have heard of you, my dear sir, "continued the stranger, "and +of your misfortune." He seemed to emphasize the last word, as if to +say- "Yes, misfortune! Call it what you please, I know that what +happened to you in Moscow was a misfortune."- "I regret it very +much, my dear sir." + +Pierre flushed and, hurriedly putting his legs down from the bed, +bent forward toward the old man with a forced and timid smile. + +"I have not referred to this out of curiosity, my dear sir, but +for greater reasons." + +He paused, his gaze still on Pierre, and moved aside on the sofa +by way of inviting the other to take a seat beside him. Pierre felt +reluctant to enter into conversation with this old man, but, +submitting to him involuntarily, came up and sat down beside him. + +"You are unhappy, my dear sir," the stranger continued. "You are +young and I am old. I should like to help you as far as lies in my +power." + +"Oh, yes!" said Pierre, with a forced smile. "I am very grateful +to you. Where are you traveling from?" + +The stranger's face was not genial, it was even cold and severe, but +in spite of this, both the face and words of his new acquaintance were +irresistibly attractive to Pierre. + +"But if for reason you don't feel inclined to talk to me," said +the old man, "say so, my dear sir." And he suddenly smiled, in an +unexpected and tenderly paternal way. + +"Oh no, not at all! On the contrary, I am very glad to make your +acquaintance," said Pierre. And again, glancing at the stranger's +hands, he looked more closely at the ring, with its skull- a Masonic +sign. + +"Allow me to ask," he said, "are you a Mason?" + +"Yes, I belong to the Brotherhood of the Freemasons," said the +stranger, looking deeper and deeper into Pierre's eyes. "And in +their name and my own I hold out a brotherly hand to you." + +"I am afraid," said Pierre, smiling, and wavering between the +confidence the personality of the Freemason inspired in him and his +own habit of ridiculing the Masonic beliefs- "I am afraid I am very +far from understanding- how am I to put it?- I am afraid my way of +looking at the world is so opposed to yours that we shall not +understand one another." + +"I know your outlook," said the Mason, "and the view of life you +mention, and which you think is the result of your own mental efforts, +is the one held by the majority of people, and is the invariable fruit +of pride, indolence, and ignorance. Forgive me, my dear sir, but if +I had not known it I should not have addressed you. Your view of +life is a regrettable delusion." + +"Just as I may suppose you to be deluded," said Pierre, with a faint +smile. + +"I should never dare to say that I know the truth," said the +Mason, whose words struck Pierre more and more by their precision +and firmness. "No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying +stone on stone with the cooperation of all, by the millions of +generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that +temple reared which is to be a worthy dwelling place of the Great +God," he added, and closed his eyes. + +"I ought to tell you that I do not believe... do not believe in God, +said Pierre, regretfully and with an effort, feeling it essential to +speak the whole truth. + +The Mason looked intently at Pierre and smiled as a rich man with +millions in hand might smile at a poor fellow who told him that he, +poor man, had not the five rubles that would make him happy. + +"Yes, you do not know Him, my dear sir," said the Mason. "You cannot +know Him. You do not know Him and that is why you are unhappy." + +"Yes, yes, I am unhappy," assented Pierre. "But what am I to do?" + +"You know Him not, my dear sir, and so you are very unhappy. You +do not know Him, but He is here, He is in me, He is in my words, He is +in thee, and even in those blasphemous words thou hast just +uttered!" pronounced the Mason in a stern and tremulous voice. + +He paused and sighed, evidently trying to calm himself. + +"If He were not," he said quietly, "you and I would not be +speaking of Him, my dear sir. Of what, of whom, are we speaking? +Whom hast thou denied?" he suddenly asked with exulting austerity +and authority in his voice. "Who invented Him, if He did not exist? +Whence came thy conception of the existence of such an +incomprehensible Being? didst thou, and why did the whole world, +conceive the idea of the existence of such an incomprehensible +Being, a Being all-powerful, eternal, and infinite in all His +attributes?..." + +He stopped and remained silent for a long time. + +Pierre could not and did not wish to break this silence. + +"He exists, but to understand Him is hard," the Mason began again, +looking not at Pierre but straight before him, and turning the +leaves of his book with his old hands which from excitement he could +not keep still. "If it were a man whose existence thou didst doubt I +could bring him to thee, could take him by the hand and show him to +thee. But how can I, an insignificant mortal, show His omnipotence, +His infinity, and all His mercy to one who is blind, or who shuts +his eyes that he may not see or understand Him and may not see or +understand his own vileness and sinfulness?" He paused again. "Who art +thou? Thou dreamest that thou art wise because thou couldst utter +those blasphemous words," he went on, with a somber and scornful +smile. "And thou art more foolish and unreasonable than a little +child, who, playing with the parts of a skillfully made watch, dares +to say that, as he does not understand its use, he does not believe in +the master who made it. To know Him is hard.... For ages, from our +forefather Adam to our own day, we labor to attain that knowledge +and are still infinitely far from our aim; but in our lack of +understanding we see only our weakness and His greatness...." + +Pierre listened with swelling heart, gazing into the Mason's face +with shining eyes, not interrupting or questioning him, but +believing with his whole soul what the stranger said. Whether he +accepted the wise reasoning contained in the Mason's words, or +believed as a child believes, in the speaker's tone of conviction +and earnestness, or the tremor of the speaker's voice- which sometimes +almost broke- or those brilliant aged eyes grown old in this +conviction, or the calm firmness and certainty of his vocation, +which radiated from his whole being (and which struck Pierre +especially by contrast with his own dejection and hopelessness)- at +any rate, Pierre longed with his whole soul to believe and he did +believe, and felt a joyful sense of comfort, regeneration, and +return to life. + +"He is not to be apprehended by reason, but by life," said the +Mason. + +"I do not understand," said Pierre, feeling with dismay doubts +reawakening. He was afraid of any want of clearness, any weakness, +in the Mason's arguments; he dreaded not to be able to believe in him. +"I don't understand," he said, "how it is that the mind of man +cannot attain the knowledge of which you speak." + +The Mason smiled with his gentle fatherly smile. + +"The highest wisdom and truth are like the purest liquid we may wish +to imbibe," he said. "Can I receive that pure liquid into an impure +vessel and judge of its purity? Only by the inner purification of +myself can I retain in some degree of purity the liquid I receive." + +"Yes, yes, that is so," said Pierre joyfully. + +"The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those +worldly sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into +which intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. +The highest wisdom has but one science- the science of the whole- +the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it. To +receive that science it is necessary to purify and renew one's inner +self, and so before one can know, it is necessary to believe and to +perfect one's self. And to attain this end, we have the light called +conscience that God has implanted in our souls." + +"Yes, yes," assented Pierre. + +"Look then at thy inner self with the eyes of the spirit, and ask +thyself whether thou art content with thyself. What hast thou attained +relying on reason only? What art thou? You are young, you are rich, +you are clever, you are well educated. And what have you done with all +these good gifts? Are you content with yourself and with your life?" + +"No, I hate my life," Pierre muttered, wincing. + +"Thou hatest it. Then change it, purify thyself; and as thou art +purified, thou wilt gain wisdom. Look at your life, my dear sir. How +have you spent it? In riotous orgies and debauchery, receiving +everything from society and giving nothing in return. You have +become the possessor of wealth. How have you used it? What have you +done for your neighbor? Have you ever thought of your tens of +thousands of slaves? Have you helped them physically and morally? +No! You have profited by their toil to lead a profligate life. That is +what you have done. Have you chosen a post in which you might be of +service to your neighbor? No! You have spent your life in idleness. +Then you married, my dear sir- took on yourself responsibility for the +guidance of a young woman; and what have you done? You have not helped +her to find the way of truth, my dear sir, but have thrust her into an +abyss of deceit and misery. A man offended you and you shot him, and +you say you do not know God and hate your life. There is nothing +strange in that, my dear sir!" + +After these words, the Mason, as if tired by his long discourse, +again leaned his arms on the back of the sofa and closed his eyes. +Pierre looked at that aged, stern, motionless, almost lifeless face +and moved his lips without uttering a sound. He wished to say, "Yes, a +vile, idle, vicious life!" but dared not break the silence. + +The Mason cleared his throat huskily, as old men do, and called +his servant. + +"How about the horses?" he asked, without looking at Pierre. + +"The exchange horses have just come," answered the servant. "Will +you not rest here?" + +"No, tell them to harness." + +"Can he really be going away leaving me alone without having told me +all, and without promising to help me?" thought Pierre, rising with +downcast head; and he began to pace the room, glancing occasionally at +the Mason. "Yes, I never thought of it, but I have led a +contemptible and profligate life, though I did not like it and did not +want to," thought Pierre. "But this man knows the truth and, if he +wished to, could disclose it to me." + +Pierre wished to say this to the Mason, but did not dare to. The +traveler, having packed his things with his practiced hands, began +fastening his coat. When he had finished, he turned to Bezukhov, and +said in a tone of indifferent politeness: + +"Where are you going to now, my dear sir?" + +"I?... I'm going to Petersburg," answered Pierre, in a childlike, +hesitating voice. "I thank you. I agree with all you have said. But do +not suppose me to be so bad. With my whole soul I wish to be what +you would have me be, but I have never had help from anyone.... But it +is I, above all, who am to blame for everything. Help me, teach me, +and perhaps I may..." + +Pierre could not go on. He gulped and turned away. + +The Mason remained silent for a long time, evidently considering. + +"Help comes from God alone," he said, "but such measure of help as +our Order can bestow it will render you, my dear sir. You are going to +Petersburg. Hand this to Count Willarski" (he took out his notebook +and wrote a few words on a large sheet of paper folded in four). +"Allow me to give you a piece of advice. When you reach the capital, +first of all devote some time to solitude and self-examination and +do not resume your former way of life. And now I wish you a good +journey, my dear sir," he added, seeing that his servant had +entered... "and success." + +The traveler was Joseph Alexeevich Bazdeev, as Pierre saw from the +postmaster's book. Bazdeev had been one of the best-known Freemasons +and Martinists, even in Novikov's time. For a long while after he +had gone, Pierre did not go to bed or order horses but paced up and +down the room, pondering over his vicious past, and with a rapturous +sense of beginning anew pictured to himself the blissful, +irreproachable, virtuous future that seemed to him so easy. It +seemed to him that he had been vicious only because he had somehow +forgotten how good it is to be virtuous. Not a trace of his former +doubts remained in his soul. He firmly believed in the possibility +of the brotherhood of men united in the aim of supporting one +another in the path of virtue, and that is how Freemasonry presented +itself to him. + +CHAPTER III + +On reaching Petersburg Pierre did not let anyone know of his +arrival, he went nowhere and spent whole days in reading Thomas a +Kempis, whose book had been sent him by someone unknown. One thing +he continually realized as he read that book: the joy, hitherto +unknown to him, of believing in the possibility of attaining +perfection, and in the possibility of active brotherly love among men, +which Joseph Alexeevich had revealed to him. A week after his arrival, +the young Polish count, Willarski, whom Pierre had known slightly in +Petersburg society, came into his room one evening in the official and +ceremonious manner in which Dolokhov's second had called on him, +and, having closed the door behind him and satisfied himself that +there was nobody else in the room, addressed Pierre. + +"I have come to you with a message and an offer, Count," he said +without sitting down. "A person of very high standing in our +Brotherhood has made application for you to be received into our Order +before the usual term and has proposed to me to be your sponsor. I +consider it a sacred duty to fulfill that person's wishes. Do you wish +to enter the Brotherhood of Freemasons under my sponsorship?" + +The cold, austere tone of this man, whom he had almost always +before met at balls, amiably smiling in the society of the most +brilliant women, surprised Pierre. + +"Yes, I do wish it," said he. + +Willarski bowed his head. + +"One more question, Count," he said, "which beg you to answer in all +sincerity- not as a future Mason but as an honest man: have you +renounced your former convictions- do you believe in God?" + +Pierre considered. + +"Yes... yes, I believe in God," he said. + +"In that case..." began Willarski, but Pierre interrupted him. + +"Yes, I do believe in God," he repeated. + +"In that case we can go," said Willarski. "My carriage is at your +service." + +Willarski was silent throughout the drive. To Pierre's inquiries +as to what he must do and how he should answer, Willarski only replied +that brothers more worthy than he would test him and that Pierre had +only to tell the truth. + +Having entered the courtyard of a large house where the Lodge had +its headquarters, and having ascended a dark staircase, they entered a +small well-lit anteroom where they took off their cloaks without the +aid of a servant. From there they passed into another room. A man in +strange attire appeared at the door. Willarski, stepping toward him, +said something to him in French in an undertone and then went up to +a small wardrobe in which Pierre noticed garments such as he had never +seen before. Having taken a kerchief from the cupboard, Willarski +bound Pierre's eyes with it and tied it in a knot behind, catching +some hairs painfully in the knot. Then he drew his face down, kissed +him, and taking him by the hand led him forward. The hairs tied in the +knot hurt Pierre and there were lines of pain on his face and a +shamefaced smile. His huge figure, with arms hanging down and with a +puckered, though smiling face, moved after Willarski with uncertain, +timid steps. + +Having led him about ten paces, Willarski stopped. + +"Whatever happens to you," he said, "you must bear it all manfully +if you have firmly resolved to join our Brotherhood." (Pierre nodded +affirmatively.) "When you hear a knock at the door, you will uncover +your eyes," added Willarski. "I wish you courage and success," and, +pressing Pierre's hand, he went out. + +Left alone, Pierre went on smiling in the same way. Once or twice he +shrugged his and raised his hand to the kerchief, as if wishing to +take it off, but let it drop again. The five minutes spent with his +eyes bandaged seemed to him an hour. His arms felt numb, his legs +almost gave way, it seemed to him that he was tired out. He +experienced a variety of most complex sensations. He felt afraid of +what would happen to him and still more afraid of showing his fear. He +felt curious to know what was going to happen and what would be +revealed to him; but most of all, he felt joyful that the moment had +come when he would at last start on that path of regeneration and on +the actively virtuous life of which he had been dreaming since he +met Joseph Alexeevich. Loud knocks were heard at the door. Pierre took +the bandage off his eyes and glanced around him. The room was in black +darkness, only a small lamp was burning inside something white. Pierre +went nearer and saw that the lamp stood on a black table on which +lay an open book. The book was the Gospel, and the white thing with +the lamp inside was a human skull with its cavities and teeth. After +reading the first words of the Gospel: "In the beginning was the +Word and the Word was with God," Pierre went round the table and saw a +large open box filled with something. It was a coffin with bones +inside. He was not at all surprised by what he saw. Hoping to enter on +an entirely new life quite unlike the old one, he expected +everything to be unusual, even more unusual than what he was seeing. A +skull, a coffin, the Gospel- it seemed to him that he had expected all +this and even more. Trying to stimulate his emotions he looked around. +"God, death, love, the brotherhood of man," he kept saying to himself, +associating these words with vague yet joyful ideas. The door opened +and someone came in. + +By the dim light, to which Pierre had already become accustomed, +he saw rather short man. Having evidently come from the light into the +darkness, the man paused, then moved with cautious steps toward the +table and placed on it his small leather-gloved hands. + +This short man had on a white leather apron which covered his +chest and part of his legs; he had on a kind of necklace above which +rose a high white ruffle, outlining his rather long face which was lit +up from below. + +"For what have you come hither?" asked the newcomer, turning in +Pierre's direction at a slight rustle made by the latter. "Why have +you, who do not believe in the truth of the light and who have not +seen the light, come here? What do you seek from us? Wisdom, virtue, +enlightenment?" + +At the moment the door opened and the stranger came in, Pierre +felt a sense of awe and veneration such as he had experienced in his +boyhood at confession; he felt himself in the presence of one socially +a complete stranger, yet nearer to him through the brotherhood of man. +With bated breath and beating heart he moved toward the Rhetor (by +which name the brother who prepared a seeker for entrance into the +Brotherhood was known). Drawing nearer, he recognized in the Rhetor +a man he knew, Smolyaninov, and it mortified him to think that the +newcomer was an acquaintance- he wished him simply a brother and a +virtuous instructor. For a long time he could not utter a word, so +that the Rhetor had to repeat his question. + +"Yes... I... I... desire regeneration," Pierre uttered with +difficulty. + +"Very well," said Smolyaninov, and went on at once: "Have you any +idea of the means by which our holy Order will help you to reach +your aim?" said he quietly and quickly. + +"I... hope... for guidance... help... in regeneration," said Pierre, +with a trembling voice and some difficulty in utterance due to his +excitement and to being unaccustomed to speak of abstract matters in +Russian. + +"What is your conception of Freemasonry?" + +"I imagine that Freemasonry is the fraternity and equality of men +who have virtuous aims," said Pierre, feeling ashamed of the +inadequacy of his words for the solemnity of the moment, as he +spoke. "I imagine..." + +"Good!" said the Rhetor quickly, apparently satisfied with this +answer. "Have you sought for means of attaining your aim in religion?" + +"No, I considered it erroneous and did not follow it," said +Pierre, so softly that the Rhetor did not hear him and asked him +what he was saying. "I have been an atheist," answered Pierre. + +"You are seeking for truth in order to follow its laws in your life, +therefore you seek wisdom and virtue. Is that not so?" said the +Rhetor, after a moment's pause. + +"Yes, yes," assented Pierre. + +The Rhetor cleared his throat, crossed his gloved hands on his +breast, and began to speak. + +"Now I must disclose to you the chief aim of our Order," he said, +"and if this aim coincides with yours, you may enter our Brotherhood +with profit. The first and chief object of our Order, the foundation +on which it rests and which no human power can destroy, is the +preservation and handing on to posterity of a certain important +mystery... which has come down to us from the remotest ages, even from +the first man- a mystery on which perhaps the fate of mankind depends. +But since this mystery is of such a nature that nobody can know or use +it unless he be prepared by long and diligent self-purification, not +everyone can hope to attain it quickly. Hence we have a secondary aim, +that of preparing our members as much as possible to reform their +hearts, to purify and enlighten their minds, by means handed on to +us by tradition from those who have striven to attain this mystery, +and thereby to render them capable of receiving it. + +"By purifying and regenerating our members we try, thirdly, to +improve the whole human race, offering it in our members an example of +piety and virtue, and thereby try with all our might to combat the +evil which sways the world. Think this over and I will come to you +again." + +"To combat the evil which sways the world..." Pierre repeated, and a +mental image of his future activity in this direction rose in his +mind. He imagined men such as he had himself been a fortnight ago, and +he addressed an edifying exhortation to them. He imagined to himself +vicious and unfortunate people whom he would assist by word and +deed, imagined oppressors whose victims he would rescue. Of the +three objects mentioned by the Rhetor, this last, that of improving +mankind, especially appealed to Pierre. The important mystery +mentioned by the Rhetor, though it aroused his curiosity, did not seem +to him essential, and the second aim, that of purifying and +regenerating himself, did not much interest him because at that moment +he felt with delight that he was already perfectly cured of his former +faults and was ready for all that was good. + +Half an hour later, the Rhetor returned to inform the seeker of +the seven virtues, corresponding to the seven steps of Solomon's +temple, which every Freemason should cultivate in himself. These +virtues were: 1. Discretion, the keeping of the secrets of the Order. +2. Obedience to those of higher ranks in the Order. 3. Morality. 4. +Love of mankind. 5. Courage. 6. Generosity. 7. The love of death. + +"In the seventh place, try, by the frequent thought of death," the +Rhetor said, "to bring yourself to regard it not as a dreaded foe, but +as a friend that frees the soul grown weary in the labors of virtue +from this distressful life, and leads it to its place of recompense +and peace." + +"Yes, that must be so," thought Pierre, when after these words the +Rhetor went away, leaving him to solitary meditation. "It must be +so, but I am still so weak that I love my life, the meaning of which +is only now gradually opening before me." But five of the other +virtues which Pierre recalled, counting them on his fingers, he felt +already in his soul: courage, generosity, morality, love of mankind, +and especially obedience- which did not even seem to him a virtue, but +a joy. (He now felt so glad to be free from his own lawlessness and to +submit his will to those who knew the indubitable truth.) He forgot +what the seventh virtue was and could not recall it. + +The third time the Rhetor came back more quickly and asked Pierre +whether he was still firm in his intention and determined to submit to +all that would be required of him. + +"I am ready for everything," said Pierre. + +"I must also inform you," said the Rhetor, "that our Order +delivers its teaching not in words only but also by other means, which +may perhaps have a stronger effect on the sincere seeker after +wisdom and virtue than mere words. This chamber with what you see +therein should already have suggested to your heart, if it is sincere, +more than words could do. You will perhaps also see in your further +initiation a like method of enlightenment. Our Order imitates the +ancient societies that explained their teaching by hieroglyphics. A +hieroglyph," said the Rhetor, "is an emblem of something not +cognizable by the senses but which possesses qualities resembling +those of the symbol." + +Pierre knew very well what a hieroglyph was, but dared not speak. He +listened to the Rhetor in silence, feeling from all he said that his +ordeal was about to begin. + +"If you are resolved, I must begin your initiation," said the Rhetor +coming closer to Pierre. "In token of generosity I ask you to give +me all your valuables." + +"But I have nothing here," replied Pierre, supposing that he was +asked to give up all he possessed. + +"What you have with you: watch, money, rings...." + +Pierre quickly took out his purse and watch, but could not manage +for some time to get the wedding ring off his fat finger. When that +had been done, the Rhetor said: + +"In token of obedience, I ask you to undress." + +Pierre took off his coat, waistcoat, and left boot according to +the Rhetor's instructions. The Mason drew the shirt back from Pierre's +left breast, and stooping down pulled up the left leg of his +trousers to above the knee. Pierre hurriedly began taking off his +right boot also and was going to tuck up the other trouser leg to save +this stranger the trouble, but the Mason told him that was not +necessary and gave him a slipper for his left foot. With a childlike +smile of embarrassment, doubt, and self-derision, which appeared on +his face against his will, Pierre stood with his arms hanging down and +legs apart, before his brother Rhetor, and awaited his further +commands. + +"And now, in token of candor, I ask you to reveal to me your chief +passion," said the latter. + +"My passion! I have had so many," replied Pierre. + +"That passion which more than all others caused you to waver on +the path of virtue," said the Mason. + +Pierre paused, seeking a reply. + +"Wine? Gluttony? Idleness? Laziness? Irritability? Anger? Women?" He +went over his vices in his mind, not knowing to which of them to +give the pre-eminence. + +"Women," he said in a low, scarcely audible voice. + +The Mason did not move and for a long time said nothing after this +answer. At last he moved up to Pierre and, taking the kerchief that +lay on the table, again bound his eyes. + +"For the last time I say to you- turn all your attention upon +yourself, put a bridle on your senses, and seek blessedness, not in +passion but in your own heart. The source of blessedness is not +without us but within...." + +Pierre had already long been feeling in himself that refreshing +source of blessedness which now flooded his heart with glad emotion. + +CHAPTER IV + +Soon after this there came into the dark chamber to fetch Pierre, +not the Rhetor but Pierre's sponsor, Willarski, whom he recognized +by his voice. To fresh questions as to the firmness of his +resolution Pierre replied: "Yes, yes, I agree," and with a beaming, +childlike smile, his fat chest uncovered, stepping unevenly and +timidly in one slippered and one booted foot, he advanced, while +Willarski held a sword to his bare chest. He was conducted from that +room along passages that turned backwards and forwards and was at last +brought to the doors of the Lodge. Willarski coughed, he was +answered by the Masonic knock with mallets, the doors opened before +them. A bass voice (Pierre was still blindfold) questioned him as to +who he was, when and where he was born, and so on. Then he was again +led somewhere still blindfold, and as they went along he was told +allegories of the toils of his pilgrimage, of holy friendship, of +the Eternal Architect of the universe, and of the courage with which +he should endure toils and dangers. During these wanderings, Pierre +noticed that he was spoken of now as the "Seeker," now as the +"Sufferer," and now as the "Postulant," to the accompaniment of +various knockings with mallets and swords. As he was being led up to +some object he noticed a hesitation and uncertainty among his +conductors. He heard those around him disputing in whispers and one of +them insisting that he should be led along a certain carpet. After +that they took his right hand, placed it on something, and told him to +hold a pair of compasses to his left breast with the other hand and to +repeat after someone who read aloud an oath of fidelity to the laws of +the Order. The candles were then extinguished and some spirit lighted, +as Pierre knew by the smell, and he was told that he would now see the +lesser light. The bandage was taken off his eyes and, by the faint +light of the burning spirit, Pierre, as in a dream, saw several men +standing before him, wearing aprons like the Rhetor's and holding +swords in their hands pointed at his breast. Among them stood a man +whose white shirt was stained with blood. On seeing this, Pierre moved +forward with his breast toward the swords, meaning them to pierce +it. But the swords were drawn back from him and he was at once +blindfolded again. + +"Now thou hast seen the lesser light," uttered a voice. Then the +candles were relit and he was told that he would see the full light; +the bandage was again removed and more than ten voices said +together: "Sic transit gloria mundi." + +Pierre gradually began to recover himself and looked about at the +room and at the people in it. Round a long table covered with black +sat some twelve men in garments like those he had already seen. Some +of them Pierre had met in Petersburg society. In the President's chair +sat a young man he did not know, with a peculiar cross hanging from +his neck. On his right sat the Italian abbe whom Pierre had met at +Anna Pavlovna's two years before. There were also present a very +distinguished dignitary and a Swiss who had formerly been tutor at the +Kuragins'. All maintained a solemn silence, listening to the words +of the President, who held a mallet in his hand. Let into the wall was +a star-shaped light. At one side of the table was a small carpet +with various figures worked upon it, at the other was something +resembling an altar on which lay a Testament and a skull. Round it +stood seven large candlesticks like those used in churches. Two of the +brothers led Pierre up to the altar, placed his feet at right +angles, and bade him lie down, saying that he must prostrate himself +at the Gates of the Temple. + +"He must first receive the trowel," whispered one of the brothers. + +"Oh, hush, please!" said another. + +Pierre, perplexed, looked round with his shortsighted eyes without +obeying, and suddenly doubts arose in his mind. "Where am I? What am I +doing? Aren't they laughing at me? Shan't I be ashamed to remember +this?" But these doubts only lasted a moment. Pierre glanced at the +serious faces of those around, remembered all he had already gone +through, and realized that he could not stop halfway. He was aghast at +his hesitation and, trying to arouse his former devotional feeling, +prostrated himself before the Gates of the Temple. And really, the +feeling of devotion returned to him even more strongly than before. +When he had lain there some time, he was told to get up, and a white +leather apron, such as the others wore, was put on him: he was given a +trowel and three pairs of gloves, and then the Grand Master +addressed him. He told him that he should try to do nothing to stain +the whiteness of that apron, which symbolized strength and purity; +then of the unexplained trowel, he told him to toil with it to cleanse +his own heart from vice, and indulgently to smooth with it the heart +of his neighbor. As to the first pair of gloves, a man's, he said that +Pierre could not know their meaning but must keep them. The second +pair of man's gloves he was to wear at the meetings, and finally of +the third, a pair of women's gloves, he said: "Dear brother, these +woman's gloves are intended for you too. Give them to the woman whom +you shall honor most of all. This gift will be a pledge of your purity +of heart to her whom you select to be your worthy helpmeet in +Masonry." And after a pause, he added: "But beware, dear brother, that +these gloves do not deck hands that are unclean." While the Grand +Master said these last words it seemed to Pierre that he grew +embarrassed. Pierre himself grew still more confused, blushed like a +child till tears came to his eyes, began looking about him uneasily, +and an awkward pause followed. + +This silence was broken by one of the brethren, who led Pierre up to +the rug and began reading to him from a manuscript book an explanation +of all the figures on it: the sun, the moon, a hammer, a plumb line, a +trowel, a rough stone and a squared stone, a pillar, three windows, +and so on. Then a place was assigned to Pierre, he was shown the signs +of the Lodge, told the password, and at last was permitted to sit +down. The Grand Master began reading the statutes. They were very +long, and Pierre, from joy, agitation, and embarrassment, was not in a +state to understand what was being read. He managed to follow only the +last words of the statutes and these remained in his mind. + +"In our temples we recognize no other distinctions," read the +Grand Master, "but those between virtue and vice. Beware of making any +distinctions which may infringe equality. Fly to a brother's aid +whoever he may be, exhort him who goeth astray, raise him that +falleth, never bear malice or enmity toward thy brother. Be kindly and +courteous. Kindle in all hearts the flame of virtue. Share thy +happiness with thy neighbor, and may envy never dim the purity of that +bliss. Forgive thy enemy, do not avenge thyself except by doing him +good. Thus fulfilling the highest law thou shalt regain traces of +the ancient dignity which thou hast lost." + +He finished and, getting up, embraced and kissed Pierre, who, with +tears of joy in his eyes, looked round him, not knowing how to +answer the congratulations and greetings from acquaintances that met +him on all sides. He acknowledged no acquaintances but saw in all +these men only brothers, and burned with impatience to set to work +with them. + +The Grand Master rapped with his mallet. All the Masons sat down +in their places, and one of them read an exhortation on the +necessity of humility. + +The Grand Master proposed that the last duty should be performed, +and the distinguished dignitary who bore the title of "Collector of +Alms" went round to all the brothers. Pierre would have liked to +subscribe all he had, but fearing that it might look like pride +subscribed the same amount as the others. + +The meeting was at an end, and on reaching home Pierre felt as if he +had returned from a long journey on which he had spent dozens of +years, had become completely changed, and had quite left behind his +former habits and way of life. + +CHAPTER V + +The day after he had been received into the Lodge, Pierre was +sitting at home reading a book and trying to fathom the significance +of the Square, one side of which symbolized God, another moral things, +a third physical things, and the fourth a combination of these. Now +and then his attention wandered from the book and the Square and he +formed in imagination a new plan of life. On the previous evening at +the Lodge, he had heard that a rumor of his duel had reached the +Emperor and that it would be wiser for him to leave Petersburg. Pierre +proposed going to his estates in the south and there attending to +the welfare of his serfs. He was joyfully planning this new life, when +Prince Vasili suddenly entered the room. + +"My dear fellow, what have you been up to in Moscow? Why have you +quarreled with Helene, mon cher? You are under a delusion," said +Prince Vasili, as he entered. "I know all about it, and I can tell you +positively that Helene is as innocent before you as Christ was +before the Jews." + +Pierre was about to reply, but Prince Vasili interrupted him. + +"And why didn't you simply come straight to me as to a friend? I +know all about it and understand it all," he said. "You behaved as +becomes a man values his honor, perhaps too hastily, but we won't go +into that. But consider the position in which you are placing her +and me in the eyes of society, and even of the court," he added, +lowering his voice. "She is living in Moscow and you are here. +Remember, dear boy," and he drew Pierre's arm downwards, "it is simply +a misunderstanding. I expect you feel it so yourself. Let us write her +a letter at once, and she'll come here and all will be explained, or +else, my dear boy, let me tell you it's quite likely you'll have to +suffer for it." + +Prince Vasili gave Pierre a significant look. + +"I know from reliable sources that the Dowager Empress is taking a +keen interest in the whole affair. You know she is very gracious to +Helene." + +Pierre tried several times to speak, but, on one hand, Prince Vasili +did not let him and, on the other, Pierre himself feared to begin to +speak in the tone of decided refusal and disagreement in which he +had firmly resolved to answer his father-in-law. Moreover, the words +of the Masonic statutes, "be kindly and courteous," recurred to him. +He blinked, went red, got up and sat down again, struggling with +himself to do what was for him the most difficult thing in life- to +say an unpleasant thing to a man's face, to say what the other, +whoever he might be, did not expect. He was so used to submitting to +Prince Vasili's tone of careless self-assurance that he felt he +would be unable to withstand it now, but he also felt that on what +he said now his future depended- whether he would follow the same +old road, or that new path so attractively shown him by the Masons, on +which he firmly believed he would be reborn to a new life. + +"Now, dear boy," said Prince Vasili playfully, "say 'yes,' and +I'll write to her myself, and we will kill the fatted calf." + +But before Prince Vasili had finished his playful speech, Pierre, +without looking at him, and with a kind of fury that made him like his +father, muttered in a whisper: + +"Prince, I did not ask you here. Go, please go!" And he jumped up +and opened the door for him. + +"Go!" he repeated, amazed at himself and glad to see the look of +confusion and fear that showed itself on Prince Vasili's face. + +"What's the matter with you? Are you ill?" + +"Go!" the quivering voice repeated. And Prince Vasili had to go +without receiving any explanation. + +A week later, Pierre, having taken leave of his new friends, the +Masons, and leaving large sums of money with them for alms, went +away to his estates. His new brethren gave him letters to the Kiev and +Odessa Masons and promised to write to him and guide him in his new +activity. + +CHAPTER VI + +The duel between Pierre and Dolokhov was hushed up and, in spite +of the Emperor's severity regarding duels at that time, neither the +principals nor their seconds suffered for it. But the story of the +duel, confirmed by Pierre's rupture with his wife, was the talk of +society. Pierre who had been regarded with patronizing condescension +when he was an illegitimate son, and petted and extolled when he was +the best match in Russia, had sunk greatly in the esteem of society +after his marriage- when the marriageable daughters and their +mothers had nothing to hope from him- especially as he did not know +how, and did not wish, to court society's favor. Now he alone was +blamed for what had happened, he was said to be insanely jealous and +subject like his father to fits of bloodthirsty rage. And when after +Pierre's departure Helene returned to Petersburg, she was received +by all her acquaintances not only cordially, but even with a shade +of deference due to her misfortune. When conversation turned on her +husband Helene assumed a dignified expression, which with +characteristic tact she had acquired though she did not understand its +significance. This expression suggested that she had resolved to +endure her troubles uncomplainingly and that her husband was a cross +laid upon her by God. Prince Vasili expressed his opinion more openly. +He shrugged his shoulders when Pierre was mentioned and, pointing to +his forehead, remarked: + +"A bit touched- I always said so." + +"I said from the first," declared Anna Pavlovna referring to Pierre, +"I said at the time and before anyone else" (she insisted on her +priority) "that that senseless young man was spoiled by the depraved +ideas of these days. I said so even at the time when everybody was +in raptures about him, when he had just returned from abroad, and +when, if you remember, he posed as a sort of Marat at one of my +soirees. And how has it ended? I was against this marriage even then +and foretold all that has happened." + +Anna Pavlovna continued to give on free evenings the same kind of +soirees as before- such as she alone had the gift of arranging- at +which was to be found "the cream of really good society, the bloom +of the intellectual essence of Petersburg," as she herself put it. +Besides this refined selection of society Anna Pavlovna's receptions +were also distinguished by the fact that she always presented some new +and interesting person to the visitors and that nowhere else was the +state of the political thermometer of legitimate Petersburg court +society so dearly and distinctly indicated. + +Toward the end of 1806, when all the sad details of Napoleon's +destruction of the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstadt and the +surrender of most of the Prussian fortresses had been received, when +our troops had already entered Prussia and our second war with +Napoleon was beginning, Anna Pavlovna gave one of her soirees. The +"cream of really good society" consisted of the fascinating Helene, +forsaken by her husband, Mortemart, the delightful Prince Hippolyte +who had just returned from Vienna, two diplomatists, the old aunt, a +young man referred to in that drawing room as "a man of great merit" +(un homme de beaucoup de merite), a newly appointed maid of honor +and her mother, and several other less noteworthy persons. + +The novelty Anna Pavlovna was setting before her guests that evening +was Boris Drubetskoy, who had just arrived as a special messenger from +the Prussian army and was aide-de-camp to a very important personage. + +The temperature shown by the political thermometer to the company +that evening was this: + +"Whatever the European sovereigns and commanders may do to +countenance Bonaparte, and to cause me, and us in general, annoyance +and mortification, our opinion of Bonaparte cannot alter. We shall not +cease to express our sincere views on that subject, and can only say +to the King Prussia and others: 'So much the worse for you. Tu l'as +voulu, George Dandin,' that's all we have to say about it!" + +When Boris, who was to be served up to the guests, entered the +drawing room, almost all the company had assembled, and the +conversation, guided by Anna Pavlovna, was about our diplomatic +relations with Austria and the hope of an alliance with her. + +Boris, grown more manly and looking fresh, rosy and +self-possessed, entered the drawing room elegantly dressed in the +uniform of an aide-de-camp and was duly conducted to pay his +respects to the aunt and then brought back to the general circle. + +Anna Pavlovna gave him her shriveled hand to kiss and introduced him +to several persons whom he did not know, giving him a whispered +description of each. +charge d'affaires from Copenhagen- a profound intellect," and +simply, "Mr. Shitov- a man of great merit"- this of the man usually so +described. + +Thanks to Anna Mikhaylovna's efforts, his own tastes, and the +peculiarities of his reserved nature, Boris had managed during his +service to place himself very advantageously. He was aide-de-camp to a +very important personage, had been sent on a very important mission to +Prussia, and had just returned from there as a special messenger. He +had become thoroughly conversant with that unwritten code with which +he had been so pleased at Olmutz and according to which an ensign +might rank incomparably higher than a general, and according to +which what was needed for success in the service was not effort or +work, or courage, or perseverance, but only the knowledge of how to +get on with those who can grant rewards, and he was himself often +surprised at the rapidity of his success and at the inability of +others to understand these things. In consequence of this discovery +his whole manner of life, all his relations with old friends, all +his plans for his future, were completely altered. He was not rich, +but would spend his last groat to be better dressed than others, and +would rather deprive himself of many pleasures than allow himself to +be seen in a shabby equipage or appear in the streets of Petersburg in +an old uniform. He made friends with and sought the acquaintance of +only those above him in position and who could therefore be of use +to him. He liked Petersburg and despised Moscow. The remembrance of +the Rostovs' house and of his childish love for Natasha was unpleasant +to him and he had not once been to see the Rostovs since the day of +his departure for the army. To be in Anna Pavlovna's drawing room he +considered an important step up in the service, and he at once +understood his role, letting his hostess make use of whatever interest +he had to offer. He himself carefully scanned each face, appraising +the possibilities of establishing intimacy with each of those present, +and the advantages that might accrue. He took the seat indicated to +him beside the fair Helene and listened to the general conversation. + +"Vienna considers the bases of the proposed treaty so unattainable +that not even a continuity of most brilliant successes would secure +them, and she doubts the means we have of gaining them. That is the +actual phrase used by the Vienna cabinet," said the Danish charge +d'affaires. + +"The doubt is flattering," said "the man of profound intellect," +with a subtle smile. + +"We must distinguish between the Vienna cabinet and the Emperor of +Austria," said Mortemart. "The Emperor of Austria can never have +thought of such a thing, it is only the cabinet that says it." + +"Ah, my dear vicomte," put in Anna Pavlovna, "L'Urope" (for some +reason she called it Urope as if that were a specially refined +French pronunciation which she could allow herself when conversing +with a Frenchman), "L'Urope ne sera jamais notre alliee sincere."~^ + +^~ "Europe will never be our sincere ally." + +After that Anna Pavlovna led up to the courage and firmness of the +King of Prussia, in order to draw Boris into the conversation. + +Boris listened attentively to each of the speakers, awaiting his +turn, but managed meanwhile to look round repeatedly at his +neighbor, the beautiful Helene, whose eyes several times met those +of the handsome young aide-de-camp with a smile. + +Speaking of the position of Prussia, Anna Pavlovna very naturally +asked Boris to tell them about his journey to Glogau and in what state +he found the Prussian army. Boris, speaking with deliberation, told +them in pure, correct French many interesting details about the armies +and the court, carefully abstaining from expressing an opinion of +his own about the facts he was recounting. For some time he +engrossed the general attention, and Anna Pavlovna felt that the +novelty she had served up was received with pleasure by all her +visitors. The greatest attention of all to Boris' narrative was +shown by Helene. She asked him several questions about his journey and +seemed greatly interested in the state of the Prussian army. As soon +as he had finished she turned to him with her usual smile. + +"You absolutely must come and see me," she said in a tone that +implied that, for certain considerations he could not know of, this +was absolutely necessary. + +"On Tuesday between eight and nine. It will give me great pleasure." + +Boris promised to fulfill her wish and was about to begin a +conversation with her, when Anna Pavlovna called him away on the +pretext that her aunt wished to hear him. + +"You know her husband, of course?" said Anna Pavlovna, closing her +eyes and indicating Helene with a sorrowful gesture. "Ah, she is +such an unfortunate and charming woman! Don't mention him before +her- please don't! It is too painful for her!" + +CHAPTER VII + +When Boris and Anna Pavlovna returned to the others Prince Hippolyte +had the ear of the company. + +Bending forward in his armchair he said: "Le Roi de Prusse!" and +having said this laughed. Everyone turned toward him. + +"Le Roi de Prusse?" Hippolyte said interrogatively, again +laughing, and then calmly and seriously sat back in his chair. Anna +Pavlovna waited for him to go on, but as he seemed quite decided to +say no more she began to tell of how at Potsdam the impious +Bonaparte had stolen the sword of Frederick the Great. + +"It is the sword of Frederick the Great which I..." she began, but +Hippolyte interrupted her with the words: "Le Roi de Prusse..." and +again, as soon as soon as all turned toward him, excused himself and +said no more. + +Anna Pavlovna frowned. Mortemart, Hippolyte's friend, addressed +him firmly. + +"Come now, what about your Roi de Prusse?" + +Hippolyte laughed as if ashamed of laughing. + +"Oh, it's nothing. I only wished to say..." (he wanted to repeat a +joke he had heard in Vienna and which he had been trying all that +evening to get in) "I only wished to say that we are wrong to fight +pour le Roi de Prusse!" + +Boris smiled circumspectly, so that it might be taken as ironical or +appreciative according to the way the joke was received. Everybody +laughed. + +"Your joke is too bad, it's witty but unjust," said Anna Pavlovna, +shaking her little shriveled finger at him. + +"We are not fighting pour le Roi de Prusse, but for right +principles. Oh, that wicked Prince Hippolyte!" she said. + +The conversation did not flag all evening and turned chiefly on +the political news. It became particularly animated toward the end +of the evening when the rewards bestowed by the Emperor were +mentioned. + +"You know N- N- received a snuffbox with the portrait last year?" +said "the man of profound intellect." "Why shouldn't S- S- get the +same distinction?" + +"Pardon me! A snuffbox with the Emperor's portrait is a reward but +not a distinction," said the diplomatist- "a gift, rather." + +"There are precedents, I may mention Schwarzenberg." + +"It's impossible," replied another. + +"Will you bet? The ribbon of the order is a different matter...." + +When everybody rose to go, Helene who had spoken very little all the +evening again turned to Boris, asking him in a tone of caressing +significant command to come to her on Tuesday. + +"It is of great importance to me," she said, turning with a smile +toward Anna Pavlovna, and Anna Pavlovna, with the same sad smile +with which she spoke of her exalted patroness, supported Helene's +wish. + +It seemed as if from some words Boris had spoken that evening +about the Prussian army, Helene had suddenly found it necessary to see +him. She seemed to promise to explain that necessity to him when he +came on Tuesday. + +But on Tuesday evening, having come to Helene's splendid salon, +Boris received no clear explanation of why it had been necessary for +him to come. There were other guests and the countess talked little to +him, and only as he kissed her hand on taking leave said +unexpectedly and in a whisper, with a strangely unsmiling face: +"Come to dinner tomorrow... in the evening. You must come.... Come!" + +During that stay in Petersburg, Boris became an intimate in the +countess' house. + +CHAPTER VIII + +The war was flaming up and nearing the Russian frontier. +Everywhere one heard curses on Bonaparte, "the enemy of mankind." +Militiamen and recruits were being enrolled in the villages, and +from the seat of war came contradictory news, false as usual and +therefore variously interpreted. The life of old Prince Bolkonski, +Prince Andrew, and Princess Mary had greatly changed since 1805. + +In 1806 the old prince was made one of the eight commanders in chief +then appointed to supervise the enrollment decreed throughout +Russia. Despite the weakness of age, which had become particularly +noticeable since the time when he thought his son had been killed, +he did not think it right to refuse a duty to which he had been +appointed by the Emperor himself, and this fresh opportunity for +action gave him new energy and strength. He was continually +traveling through the three provinces entrusted to him, was pedantic +in the fulfillment of his duties, severe to cruelty with his +subordinates, and went into everything down to the minutest details +himself. Princess Mary had ceased taking lessons in mathematics from +her father, and when the old prince was at home went to his study with +the wet nurse and little Prince Nicholas (as his grandfather called +him). The baby Prince Nicholas lived with his wet nurse and nurse +Savishna in the late princess' rooms and Princess Mary spent most of +the day in the nursery, taking a mother's place to her little nephew +as best she could. Mademoiselle Bourienne, too, seemed passionately +fond of the boy, and Princess Mary often deprived herself to give +her friend the pleasure of dandling the little angel- as she called +her nephew- and playing with him. + +Near the altar of the church at Bald Hills there was a chapel over +the tomb of the little princess, and in this chapel was a marble +monument brought from Italy, representing an angel with outspread +wings ready to fly upwards. The angel's upper lip was slightly +raised as though about to smile, and once on coming out of the +chapel Prince Andrew and Princess Mary admitted to one another that +the angel's face reminded them strangely of the little princess. But +what was still stranger, though of this Prince Andrew said nothing +to his sister, was that in the expression the sculptor had happened to +give the angel's face, Prince Andrew read the same mild reproach he +had read on the face of his dead wife: "Ah, why have you done this +to me?" + +Soon after Prince Andrew's return the old prince made over to him +a large estate, Bogucharovo, about twenty-five miles from Bald +Hills. Partly because of the depressing memories associated with +Bald Hills, partly because Prince Andrew did not always feel equal +to bearing with his father's peculiarities, and partly because he +needed solitude, Prince Andrew made use of Bogucharovo, began building +and spent most of his time there. + +After the Austerlitz campaign Prince Andrew had firmly resolved +not to continue his military service, and when the war recommenced and +everybody had to serve, he took a post under his father in the +recruitment so as to avoid active service. The old prince and his +son seemed to have changed roles since the campaign of 1805. The old +man, roused by activity, expected the best results from the new +campaign, while Prince Andrew on the contrary, taking no part in the +war and secretly regretting this, saw only the dark side. + +On February 26, 1807, the old prince set off on one of his circuits. +Prince Andrew remained at Bald Hills as usual during his father's +absence. Little Nicholas had been unwell for four days. The coachman +who had driven the old prince to town returned bringing papers and +letters for Prince Andrew. + +Not finding the young prince in his study the valet went with the +letters to Princess Mary's apartments, but did not find him there. +He was told that the prince had gone to the nursery. + +"If you please, your excellency, Petrusha has brought some +papers," said one of the nursemaids to Prince Andrew who was sitting +on a child's little chair while, frowning and with trembling hands, he +poured drops from a medicine bottle into a wineglass half full of +water. + +"What is it?" he said crossly, and, his hand shaking +unintentionally, he poured too many drops into the glass. He threw the +mixture onto the floor and asked for some more water. The maid brought +it. + +There were in the room a child's cot, two boxes, two armchairs, a +table, a child's table, and the little chair on which Prince Andrew +was sitting. The curtains were drawn, and a single candle was +burning on the table, screened by a bound music book so that the light +did not fall on the cot. + +"My dear," said Princess Mary, addressing her brother from beside +the cot where she was standing, "better wait a bit... later..." + +"Oh, leave off, you always talk nonsense and keep putting things +off- and this is what comes of it!" said Prince Andrew in an +exasperated whisper, evidently meaning to wound his sister. + +"My dear, really... it's better not to wake him... he's asleep," +said the princess in a tone of entreaty. + +Prince Andrew got up and went on tiptoe up to the little bed, +wineglass in hand. + +"Perhaps we'd really better not wake him," he said hesitating. + +"As you please... really... I think so... but as you please," said +Princess Mary, evidently intimidated and confused that her opinion had +prevailed. She drew her brother's attention to the maid who was +calling him in a whisper. + +It was the second night that neither of them had slept, watching the +boy who was in a high fever. These last days, mistrusting their +household doctor and expecting another for whom they had sent to town, +they had been trying first one remedy and then another. Worn out by +sleeplessness and anxiety they threw their burden of sorrow on one +another and reproached and disputed with each other. + +"Petrusha has come with papers from your father," whispered the +maid. + +Prince Andrew went out. + +"Devil take them!" he muttered, and after listening to the verbal +instructions his father had sent and taking the correspondence and his +father's letter, he returned to the nursery. + +"Well?" he asked. + +"Still the same. Wait, for heaven's sake. Karl Ivanich always says +that sleep is more important than anything," whispered Princess Mary +with a sigh. + +Prince Andrew went up to the child and felt him. He was burning hot. + +"Confound you and your Karl Ivanich!" He took the glass with the +drops and again went up to the cot. + +"Andrew, don't!" said Princess Mary. + +But he scowled at her angrily though also with suffering in his +eyes, and stooped glass in hand over the infant. + +"But I wish it," he said. "I beg you- give it him!" + +Princess Mary shrugged her shoulders but took the glass submissively +and calling the nurse began giving the medicine. The child screamed +hoarsely. Prince Andrew winced and, clutching his head, went out and +sat down on a sofa in the next room. + +He still had all the letters in his hand. Opening them +mechanically he began reading. The old prince, now and then using +abbreviations, wrote in his large elongated hand on blue paper as +follows: + +Have just this moment received by special messenger very joyful +news- if it's not false. Bennigsen seems to have obtained a complete +victory over Buonaparte at Eylau. In Petersburg everyone is rejoicing, +and the rewards sent to the army are innumerable. Though he is a +German- I congratulate him! I can't make out what the commander at +Korchevo- a certain Khandrikov- is up to; till now the additional +men and provisions have not arrived. Gallop off to him at once and say +I'll have his head off if everything is not here in a week. Have +received another letter about the Preussisch-Eylau battle from +Petenka- he took part in it- and it's all true. When mischief-makers +don't meddle even a German beats Buonaparte. He is said to be +fleeing in great disorder. Mind you gallop off to Korchevo without +delay and carry out instructions! + +Prince Andrew sighed and broke the seal of another envelope. It +was a closely written letter of two sheets from Bilibin. He folded +it up without reading it and reread his father's letter, ending with +the words: "Gallop off to Korchevo and carry out instructions!" + +"No, pardon me, I won't go now till the child is better," thought +he, going to the door and looking into the nursery. + +Princess Mary was still standing by the cot, gently rocking the +baby. + +"Ah yes, and what else did he say that's unpleasant?" thought Prince +Andrew, recalling his father's letter. "Yes, we have gained a +victory over Bonaparte, just when I'm not serving. Yes, yes, he's +always poking fun at me.... Ah, well! Let him!" And he began reading +Bilibin's letter which was written in French. He read without +understanding half of it, read only to forget, if but for a moment, +what he had too long been thinking of so painfully to the exclusion of +all else. + +CHAPTER IX + +Bilibin was now at army headquarters in a diplomatic capacity, and +though he wrote in French and used French jests and French idioms, +he described the whole campaign with a fearless self-censure and +self-derision genuinely Russian. Bilibin wrote that the obligation +of diplomatic discretion tormented him, and he was happy to have in +Prince Andrew a reliable correspondent to whom he could pour out the +bile he had accumulated at the sight of all that was being done in the +army. The letter was old, having been written before the battle at +Preussisch-Eylau. + +"Since the day of our brilliant success at Austerlitz," wrote +Bilibin, "as you know, my dear prince, I never leave headquarters. I +have certainly acquired a taste for war, and it is just as well for +me; what I have seen during these last three months is incredible. + +"I begin ab ovo. 'The enemy of the human race,' as you know, attacks +the Prussians. The Prussians are our faithful allies who have only +betrayed us three times in three years. We take up their cause, but it +turns out that 'the enemy of the human race' pays no heed to our +fine speeches and in his rude and savage way throws himself on the +Prussians without giving them time to finish the parade they had +begun, and in two twists of the hand he breaks them to smithereens and +installs himself in the palace at Potsdam. + +"'I most ardently desire,' writes the King of Prussia to +Bonaparte, 'that Your Majesty should be received and treated in my +palace in a manner agreeable to yourself, and in so far as +circumstances allowed, I have hastened to take all steps to that +end. May I have succeeded!' The Prussian generals pride themselves +on being polite to the French and lay down their arms at the first +demand. + +"The head of the garrison at Glogau, with ten thousand men, asks the +King of Prussia what he is to do if he is summoned to surrender.... +All this is absolutely true. + +"In short, hoping to settle matters by taking up a warlike attitude, +it turns out that we have landed ourselves in war, and what is more, +in war on our own frontiers, with and for the King of Prussia. We have +everything in perfect order, only one little thing is lacking, namely, +a commander in chief. As it was considered that the Austerlitz success +might have been more decisive had the commander in chief not been so +young, all our octogenarians were reviewed, and of Prozorovski and +Kamenski the latter was preferred. The general comes to us, +Suvorov-like, in a kibitka, and is received with acclamations of joy +and triumph. + +"On the 4th, the first courier arrives from Petersburg. The mails +are taken to the field marshal's room, for he likes to do everything +himself. I am called in to help sort the letters and take those +meant for us. The field marshal looks on and waits for letters +addressed to him. We search, but none are to be found. The field +marshal grows impatient and sets to work himself and finds letters +from the Emperor to Count T., Prince V., and others. Then he bursts +into one of his wild furies and rages at everyone and everything, +seizes the letters, opens them, and reads those from the Emperor +addressed to others. 'Ah! So that's the way they treat me! No +confidence in me! Ah, ordered to keep an eye on me! Very well then! +Get along with you!' So he writes the famous order of the day to +General Bennigsen: + +'I am wounded and cannot ride and consequently cannot command the +army. You have brought your army corps to Pultusk, routed: here it +is exposed, and without fuel or forage, so something must be done, +and, as you yourself reported to Count Buxhowden yesterday, you must +think of retreating to our frontier- which do today.' + +"'From all my riding,' he writes to the Emperor, 'I have got a +saddle sore which, coming after all my previous journeys, quite +prevents my riding and commanding so vast an army, so I have passed on +the command to the general next in seniority, Count Buxhowden, +having sent him my whole staff and all that belongs to it, advising +him if there is a lack of bread, to move farther into the interior +of Prussia, for only one day's ration of bread remains, and in some +regiments none at all, as reported by the division commanders, +Ostermann and Sedmoretzki, and all that the peasants had has been +eaten up. I myself will remain in hospital at Ostrolenka till I +recover. In regard to which I humbly submit my report, with the +information that if the army remains in its present bivouac another +fortnight there will not be a healthy man left in it by spring. + +"'Grant leave to retire to his country seat to an old man who is +already in any case dishonored by being unable to fulfill the great +and glorious task for which he was chosen. I shall await your most +gracious permission here in hospital, that I may not have to play +the part of a secretary rather than commander in the army. My +removal from the army does not produce the slightest stir- a blind man +has left it. There are thousands such as I in Russia.' + +"The field marshal is angry with the Emperor and he punishes us all, +isn't it logical? + +"This is the first act. Those that follow are naturally increasingly +interesting and entertaining. After the field marshal's departure it +appears that we are within sight of the enemy and must give battle. +Buxhowden is commander in chief by seniority, but General Bennigsen +does not quite see it; more particularly as it is he and his corps who +are within sight of the enemy and he wishes to profit by the +opportunity to fight a battle 'on his own hand' as the Germans say. He +does so. This is the battle of Pultusk, which is considered a great +victory but in my opinion was nothing of the kind. We civilians, as +you know, have a very bad way of deciding whether a battle was won +or lost. Those who retreat after a battle have lost it is what we say; +and according to that it is we who lost the battle of Pultusk. In +short, we retreat after the battle but send a courier to Petersburg +with news of a victory, and General Bennigsen, hoping to receive +from Petersburg the post of commander in chief as a reward for his +victory, does not give up the command of the army to General +Buxhowden. During this interregnum we begin a very original and +interesting series of maneuvers. Our aim is no longer, as it should +be, to avoid or attack the enemy, but solely to avoid General +Buxhowden who by right of seniority should be our chief. So +energetically do we pursue this aim that after crossing an +unfordable river we burn the bridges to separate ourselves from our +enemy, who at the moment is not Bonaparte but Buxhowden. General +Buxhowden was all but attacked and captured by a superior enemy +force as a result of one of these maneuvers that enabled us to +escape him. Buxhowden pursues us- we scuttle. He hardly crosses the +river to our side before we recross to the other. At last our enemy. +Buxhowden, catches us and attacks. Both generals are angry, and the +result is a challenge on Buxhowden's part and an epileptic fit on +Bennigsen's. But at the critical moment the courier who carried the +news of our victory at Pultusk to Petersburg returns bringing our +appointment as commander in chief, and our first foe, Buxhowden, is +vanquished; we can now turn our thoughts to the second, Bonaparte. But +as it turns out, just at that moment a third enemy rises before us- +namely the Orthodox Russian soldiers, loudly demanding bread, meat, +biscuits, fodder, and whatnot! The stores are empty, the roads +impassable. The Orthodox begin looting, and in a way of which our last +campaign can give you no idea. Half the regiments form bands and scour +the countryside and put everything to fire and sword. The +inhabitants are totally ruined, the hospitals overflow with sick, +and famine is everywhere. Twice the marauders even attack our +headquarters, and the commander in chief has to ask for a battalion to +disperse them. During one of these attacks they carried off my empty +portmanteau and my dressing gown. The Emperor proposes to give all +commanders of divisions the right to shoot marauders, but I much +fear this will oblige one half the army to shoot the other." + +At first Prince Andrew read with his eyes only, but after a while, +in spite of himself (although he knew how far it was safe to trust +Bilibin), what he had read began to interest him more and more. When +he had read thus far, he crumpled the letter up and threw it away. +It was not what he had read that vexed him, but the fact that the life +out there in which he had now no part could perturb him. He shut his +eyes, rubbed his forehead as if to rid himself of all interest in what +he had read, and listened to what was passing in the nursery. Suddenly +he thought he heard a strange noise through the door. He was seized +with alarm lest something should have happened to the child while he +was reading the letter. He went on tiptoe to the nursery door and +opened it. + +Just as he went in he saw that the nurse was hiding something from +him with a scared look and that Princess Mary was no longer by the +cot. + +"My dear," he heard what seemed to him her despairing whisper behind +him. + +As often happens after long sleeplessness and long anxiety, he was +seized by an unreasoning panic- it occurred to him that the child +was dead. All that he saw and heard seemed to confirm this terror. + +"All is over," he thought, and a cold sweat broke out on his +forehead. He went to the cot in confusion, sure that he would find +it empty and that the nurse had been hiding the dead baby. He drew the +curtain aside and for some time his frightened, restless eyes could +not find the baby. At last he saw him: the rosy boy had tossed about +till he lay across the bed with his head lower than the pillow, and +was smacking his lips in his sleep and breathing evenly. + +Prince Andrew was as glad to find the boy like that, as if he had +already lost him. He bent over him and, as his sister had taught +him, tried with his lips whether the child was still feverish. The +soft forehead was moist. Prince Andrew touched the head with his hand; +even the hair was wet, so profusely had the child perspired. He was +not dead, but evidently the crisis was over and he was convalescent. +Prince Andrew longed to snatch up, to squeeze, to hold to his heart, +this helpless little creature, but dared not do so. He stood over him, +gazing at his head and at the little arms and legs which showed +under the blanket. He heard a rustle behind him and a shadow +appeared under the curtain of the cot. He did not look round, but +still gazing at the infant's face listened to his regular breathing. +The dark shadow was Princess Mary, who had come up to the cot with +noiseless steps, lifted the curtain, and dropped it again behind +her. Prince Andrew recognized her without looking and held out his +hand to her. She pressed it. + +"He has perspired," said Prince Andrew. + +"I was coming to tell you so." + +The child moved slightly in his sleep, smiled, and rubbed his +forehead against the pillow. + +Prince Andrew looked at his sister. In the dim shadow of the curtain +her luminous eyes shone more brightly than usual from the tears of joy +that were in them. She leaned over to her brother and kissed him, +slightly catching the curtain of the cot. Each made the other a +warning gesture and stood still in the dim light beneath the curtain +as if not wishing to leave that seclusion where they three were shut +off from all the world. Prince Andrew was the first to move away, +ruffling his hair against the muslin of the curtain. + +"Yes, this is the one thing left me now," he said with a sigh. + +CHAPTER X + +Soon after his admission to the Masonic Brotherhood, Pierre went +to the Kiev province, where he had the greatest number of serfs, +taking with him full directions which he had written down for his +own guidance as to what he should do on his estates. + +When he reached Kiev he sent for all his stewards to the head office +and explained to them his intentions and wishes. He told them that +steps would be taken immediately to free his serfs- and that till then +they were not to be overburdened with labor, women while nursing their +babies were not to be sent to work, assistance was to be given to +the serfs, punishments were to be admonitory and not corporal, and +hospitals, asylums, and schools were to be established on all the +estates. Some of the stewards (there were semiliterate foremen among +them) listened with alarm, supposing these words to mean that the +young count was displeased with their management and embezzlement of +money, some after their first fright were amused by Pierre's lisp +and the new words they had not heard before, others simply enjoyed +hearing how the master talked, while the cleverest among them, +including the chief steward, understood from this speech how they +could best handle the master for their own ends. + +The chief steward expressed great sympathy with Pierre's intentions, +but remarked that besides these changes it would be necessary to go +into the general state of affairs which was far from satisfactory. + +Despite Count Bezukhov's enormous wealth, since he had come into +an income which was said to amount to five hundred thousand rubles a +year, Pierre felt himself far poorer than when his father had made him +an allowance of ten thousand rubles. He had a dim perception of the +following budget: + +About 80,000 went in payments on all the estates to the Land Bank, +about 30,000 went for the upkeep of the estate near Moscow, the town +house, and the allowance to the three princesses; about 15,000 was +given in pensions and the same amount for asylums; 150,000 alimony was +sent to the countess; about 70,00 went for interest on debts. The +building of a new church, previously begun, had cost about 10,000 in +each of the last two years, and he did not know how the rest, about +100,000 rubles, was spent, and almost every year he was obliged to +borrow. Besides this the chief steward wrote every year telling him of +fires and bad harvests, or of the necessity of rebuilding factories +and workshops. So the first task Pierre had to face was one for +which he had very little aptitude or inclination- practical business. + +He discussed estate affairs every day with his chief steward. But he +felt that this did not forward matters at all. He felt that these +consultations were detached from real affairs and did not link up with +them or make them move. On the one hand, the chief steward put the +state of things to him in the very worst light, pointing out the +necessity of paying off the debts and undertaking new activities +with serf labor, to which Pierre did not agree. On the other hand, +Pierre demanded that steps should be taken to liberate the serfs, +which the steward met by showing the necessity of first paying off the +loans from the Land Bank, and the consequent impossibility of a speedy +emancipation. + +The steward did not say it was quite impossible, but suggested +selling the forests in the province of Kostroma, the land lower down +the river, and the Crimean estate, in order to make it possible: all +of which operations according to him were connected with such +complicated measures- the removal of injunctions, petitions, +permits, and so on- that Pierre became quite bewildered and only +replied: + +"Yes, yes, do so." + +Pierre had none of the practical persistence that would have enabled +him to attend to the business himself and so he disliked it and only +tried to pretend to the steward that he was attending to it. The +steward for his part tried to pretend to the count that he +considered these consultations very valuable for the proprietor and +troublesome to himself. + +In Kiev Pierre found some people he knew, and strangers hastened +to make his acquaintance and joyfully welcomed the rich newcomer, +the largest landowner of the province. Temptations to Pierre's +greatest weakness- the one to which he had confessed when admitted +to the Lodge- were so strong that he could not resist them. Again +whole days, weeks, and months of his life passed in as great a rush +and were as much occupied with evening parties, dinners, lunches, +and balls, giving him no time for reflection, as in Petersburg. +Instead of the new life he had hoped to lead he still lived the old +life, only in new surroundings. + +Of the three precepts of Freemasonry Pierre realized that he did not +fulfill the one which enjoined every Mason to set an example of +moral life, and that of the seven virtues he lacked two- morality +and the love of death. He consoled himself with the thought that he +fulfilled another of the precepts- that of reforming the human race- +and had other virtues- love of his neighbor, and especially +generosity. + +In the spring of 1807 he decided to return to Petersburg. On the way +he intended to visit all his estates and see for himself how far his +orders had been carried out and in what state were the serfs whom +God had entrusted to his care and whom he intended to benefit. + +The chief steward, who considered the young count's attempts +almost insane- unprofitable to himself, to the count, and to the +serfs- made some concessions. Continuing to represent the liberation +of the serfs as impracticable, he arranged for the erection of large +buildings- schools, hospitals, and asylums- on all the estates +before the master arrived. Everywhere preparations were made not for +ceremonious welcomes (which he knew Pierre would not like), but for +just such gratefully religious ones, with offerings of icons and the +bread and salt of hospitality, as, according to his understanding of +his master, would touch and delude him. + +The southern spring, the comfortable rapid traveling in a Vienna +carriage, and the solitude of the road, all had a gladdening effect on +Pierre. The estates he had not before visited were each more +picturesque than the other; the serfs everywhere seemed thriving and +touchingly grateful for the benefits conferred on them. Everywhere +were receptions, which though they embarrassed Pierre awakened a +joyful feeling in the depth of his heart. In one place the peasants +presented him with bread and salt and an icon of Saint Peter and Saint +Paul, asking permission, as a mark of their gratitude for the benefits +he had conferred on them, to build a new chantry to the church at +their own expense in honor of Peter and Paul, his patron saints. In +another place the women with infants in arms met him to thank him +for releasing them from hard work. On a third estate the priest, +bearing a cross, came to meet him surrounded by children whom, by +the count's generosity, he was instructing in reading, writing, and +religion. On all his estates Pierre saw with his own eyes brick +buildings erected or in course of erection, all on one plan, for +hospitals, schools, and almshouses, which were soon to be opened. +Everywhere he saw the stewards' accounts, according to which the +serfs' manorial labor had been diminished, and heard the touching +thanks of deputations of serfs in their full-skirted blue coats. + +What Pierre did not know was that the place where they presented him +with bread and salt and wished to build a chantry in honor of Peter +and Paul was a market village where a fair was held on St. Peter's +day, and that the richest peasants (who formed the deputation) had +begun the chantry long before, but that nine tenths of the peasants in +that villages were in a state of the greatest poverty. He did not know +that since the nursing mothers were no longer sent to work on his +land, they did still harder work on their own land. He did not know +that the priest who met him with the cross oppressed the peasants by +his exactions, and that the pupils' parents wept at having to let +him take their children and secured their release by heavy payments. +He did not know that the brick buildings, built to plan, were being +built by serfs whose manorial labor was thus increased, though +lessened on paper. He did not know that where the steward had shown +him in the accounts that the serfs' payments had been diminished by +a third, their obligatory manorial work had been increased by a +half. And so Pierre was delighted with his visit to his estates and +quite recovered the philanthropic mood in which he had left +Petersburg, and wrote enthusiastic letters to his "brother-instructor" +as he called the Grand Master. + +"How easy it is, how little effort it needs, to do so much good," +thought Pierre, "and how little attention we pay to it!" + +He was pleased at the gratitude he received, but felt abashed at +receiving it. This gratitude reminded him of how much more he might do +for these simple, kindly people. + +The chief steward, a very stupid but cunning man who saw perfectly +through the naive and intelligent count and played with him as with +a toy, seeing the effect these prearranged receptions had on Pierre, +pressed him still harder with proofs of the impossibility and above +all the uselessness of freeing the serfs, who were quite happy as it +was. + +Pierre in his secret soul agreed with the steward that it would be +difficult to imagine happier people, and that God only knew what would +happen to them when they were free, but he insisted, though +reluctantly, on what he thought right. The steward promised to do +all in his power to carry out the count's wishes, seeing clearly +that not only would the count never be able to find out whether all +measures had been taken for the sale of the land and forests and to +release them from the Land Bank, but would probably never even inquire +and would never know that the newly erected buildings were standing +empty and that the serfs continued to give in money and work all +that other people's serfs gave- that is to say, all that could be +got out of them. + +CHAPTER XI + +Returning from his journey through South Russia in the happiest +state of mind, Pierre carried out an intention he had long had of +visiting his friend Bolkonski, whom he had not seen for two years. + +Bogucharovo lay in a flat uninteresting part of the country among +fields and forests of fir and birch, which were partly cut down. The +house lay behind a newly dug pond filled with water to the brink and +with banks still bare of grass. It was at the end of a village that +stretched along the highroad in the midst of a young copse in which +were a few fir trees. + +The homestead consisted of a threshing floor, outhouses, stables, +a bathhouse, a lodge, and a large brick house with semicircular facade +still in course of construction. Round the house was a garden newly +laid out. The fences and gates were new and solid; two fire pumps +and a water cart, painted green, stood in a shed; the paths were +straight, the bridges were strong and had handrails. Everything bore +an impress of tidiness and good management. Some domestic serfs Pierre +met, in reply to inquiries as to where the prince lived, pointed out a +small newly built lodge close to the pond. Anton, a man who had looked +after Prince Andrew in his boyhood, helped Pierre out of his carriage, +said that the prince was at home, and showed him into a clean little +anteroom. + +Pierre was struck by the modesty of the small though clean house +after the brilliant surroundings in which he had last met his friend +in Petersburg. + +He quickly entered the small reception room with its +still-unplastered wooden walls redolent of pine, and would have gone +farther, but Anton ran ahead on tiptoe and knocked at a door. + +"Well, what is it?" came a sharp, unpleasant voice. + +"A visitor," answered Anton. + +"Ask him to wait," and the sound was heard of a chair being pushed +back. + +Pierre went with rapid steps to the door and suddenly came face to +face with Prince Andrew, who came out frowning and looking old. Pierre +embraced him and lifting his spectacles kissed his friend on the cheek +and looked at him closely. + +"Well, I did not expect you, I am very glad," said Prince Andrew. + +Pierre said nothing; he looked fixedly at his friend with +surprise. He was struck by the change in him. His words were kindly +and there was a smile on his lips and face, but his eyes were dull and +lifeless and in spite of his evident wish to do so he could not give +them a joyous and glad sparkle. Prince Andrew had grown thinner, +paler, and more manly-looking, but what amazed and estranged Pierre +till he got used to it were his inertia and a wrinkle on his brow +indicating prolonged concentration on some one thought. + +As is usually the case with people meeting after a prolonged +separation, it was long before their conversation could settle on +anything. They put questions and gave brief replies about things +they knew ought to be talked over at length. At last the +conversation gradually settled on some of the topics at first +lightly touched on: their past life, plans for the future, Pierre's +journeys and occupations, the war, and so on. The preoccupation and +despondency which Pierre had noticed in his friend's look was now +still more clearly expressed in the smile with which he listened to +Pierre, especially when he spoke with joyful animation of the past +or the future. It was as if Prince Andrew would have liked to +sympathize with what Pierre was saying, but could not. The latter +began to feel that it was in bad taste to speak of his enthusiasms, +dreams, and hopes of happiness or goodness, in Prince Andrew's +presence. He was ashamed to express his new Masonic views, which had +been particularly revived and strengthened by his late tour. He +checked himself, fearing to seem naive, yet he felt an irresistible +desire to show his friend as soon as possible that he was now a +quite different, and better, Pierre than he had been in Petersburg. + +"I can't tell you how much I have lived through since then. I hardly +know myself again." + +"Yes, we have altered much, very much, since then," said Prince +Andrew. + +"Well, and you? What are your plans?" + +"Plans!" repeated Prince Andrew ironically. "My plans?" he said, +as if astonished at the word. "Well, you see, I'm building. I mean +to settle here altogether next year...." + +Pierre looked silently and searchingly into Prince Andrew's face, +which had grown much older. + +"No, I meant to ask..." Pierre began, but Prince Andrew +interrupted him. + +"But why talk of me?... Talk to me, yes, tell me about your +travels and all you have been doing on your estates." + +Pierre began describing what he had done on his estates, trying as +far as possible to conceal his own part in the improvements that had +been made. Prince Andrew several times prompted Pierre's story of what +he had been doing, as though it were all an old-time story, and he +listened not only without interest but even as if ashamed of what +Pierre was telling him. + +Pierre felt uncomfortable and even depressed in his friend's company +and at last became silent. + +"I'll tell you what, my dear fellow," said Prince Andrew, who +evidently also felt depressed and constrained with his visitor, "I +am only bivouacking here and have just come to look round. I am +going back to my sister today. I will introduce you to her. But of +course you know her already," he said, evidently trying to entertain a +visitor with whom he now found nothing in common. "We will go after +dinner. And would you now like to look round my place?" + +They went out and walked about till dinnertime, talking of the +political news and common acquaintances like people who do not know +each other intimately. Prince Andrew spoke with some animation and +interest only of the new homestead he was constructing and its +buildings, but even here, while on the scaffolding, in the midst of +a talk explaining the future arrangements of the house, he interrupted +himself: + +"However, this is not at all interesting. Let us have dinner, and +then we'll set off." + +At dinner, conversation turned on Pierre's marriage. + +"I was very much surprised when I heard of it," said Prince Andrew. + +Pierre blushed, as he always did when it was mentioned, and said +hurriedly: "I will tell you some time how it all happened. But you +know it is all over, and forever." + +"Forever?" said Prince Andrew. "Nothing's forever." + +"But you know how it all ended, don't you? You heard of the duel?" + +"And so you had to go through that too!" + +"One thing I thank God for is that I did not kill that man," said +Pierre. + +"Why so?" asked Prince Andrew. "To kill a vicious dog is a very good +thing really." + +"No, to kill a man is bad- wrong." + +"Why is it wrong?" urged Prince Andrew. "It is not given to man to +know what is right and what is wrong. Men always did and always will +err, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong." + +"What does harm to another is wrong," said Pierre, feeling with +pleasure that for the first time since his arrival Prince Andrew was +roused, had begun to talk, and wanted to express what had brought +him to his present state. + +"And who has told you what is bad for another man?" he asked. + +"Bad! Bad!" exclaimed Pierre. "We all know what is bad for +ourselves." + +"Yes, we know that, but the harm I am conscious of in myself is +something I cannot inflict on others," said Prince Andrew, growing +more and more animated and evidently wishing to express his new +outlook to Pierre. He spoke in French. "I only know two very real +evils in life: remorse and illness. The only good is the absence of +those evils. To live for myself avoiding those two evils is my whole +philosophy now." + +"And love of one's neighbor, and self-sacrifice?" began Pierre. "No, +I can't agree with you! To live only so as not to do evil and not to +have to repent is not enough. I lived like that, I lived for myself +and ruined my life. And only now when I am living, or at least trying" +(Pierre's modesty made him correct himself) "to live for others, +only now have I understood all the happiness of life. No, I shall +not agree with you, and you do not really believe what you are +saying." Prince Andrew looked silently at Pierre with an ironic smile. + +"When you see my sister, Princess Mary, you'll get on with her," +he said. "Perhaps you are right for yourself," he added after a +short pause, "but everyone lives in his own way. You lived for +yourself and say you nearly ruined your life and only found +happiness when you began living for others. I experienced just the +reverse. I lived for glory.- And after all what is glory? The same +love of others, a desire to do something for them, a desire for +their approval.- So I lived for others, and not almost, but quite, +ruined my life. And I have become calmer since I began to live only +for myself." + +"But what do you mean by living only for yourself?" asked Pierre, +growing excited. "What about your son, your sister, and your father?" + +"But that's just the same as myself- they are not others," explained +Prince Andrew. "The others, one's neighbors, le prochain, as you and +Princess Mary call it, are the chief source of all error and evil. +Le prochain- your Kiev peasants to whom you want to do good." + +And he looked at Pierre with a mocking, challenging expression. He +evidently wished to draw him on. + +"You are joking," replied Pierre, growing more and more excited. +"What error or evil can there be in my wishing to do good, and even +doing a little- though I did very little and did it very badly? What +evil can there be in it if unfortunate people, our serfs, people +like ourselves, were growing up and dying with no idea of God and +truth beyond ceremonies and meaningless prayers and are now instructed +in a comforting belief in future life, retribution, recompense, and +consolation? What evil and error are there in it, if people were dying +of disease without help while material assistance could so easily be +rendered, and I supplied them with a doctor, a hospital, and an asylum +for the aged? And is it not a palpable, unquestionable good if a +peasant, or a woman with a baby, has no rest day or night and I give +them rest and leisure?" said Pierre, hurrying and lisping. "And I have +done that though badly and to a small extent; but I have done +something toward it and you cannot persuade me that it was not a +good action, and more than that, you can't make me believe that you do +not think so yourself. And the main thing is," he continued, "that I +know, and know for certain, that the enjoyment of doing this good is +the only sure happiness in life." + +"Yes, if you put it like that it's quite a different matter," said +Prince Andrew. "I build a house and lay out a garden, and you build +hospitals. The one and the other may serve as a pastime. But what's +right and what's good must be judged by one who knows all, but not +by us. Well, you want an argument," he added, come on then." + +They rose from the table and sat down in the entrance porch which +served as a veranda. + +"Come, let's argue then," said Prince Andrew, "You talk of schools," +he went on, crooking a finger, "education and so forth; that is, you +want to raise him" (pointing to a peasant who passed by them taking +off his cap) "from his animal condition and awaken in him spiritual +needs, while it seems to me that animal happiness is the only +happiness possible, and that is just what you want to deprive him +of. I envy him, but you want to make him what I am, without giving him +my means. Then you say, 'lighten his toil.' But as I see it, +physical labor is as essential to him, as much a condition of his +existence, as mental activity is to you or me. You can't help +thinking. I go to bed after two in the morning, thoughts come and I +can't sleep but toss about till dawn, because I think and can't help +thinking, just as he can't help plowing and mowing; if he didn't, he +would go to the drink shop or fall ill. Just as I could not stand +his terrible physical labor but should die of it in a week, so he +could not stand my physical idleness, but would grow fat and die. +The third thing- what else was it you talked about?" and Prince Andrew +crooked a third finger. "Ah, yes, hospitals, medicine. He has a fit, +he is dying, and you come and bleed him and patch him up. He will drag +about as a cripple, a burden to everybody, for another ten years. It +would be far easier and simpler for him to die. Others are being +born and there are plenty of them as it is. It would be different if +you grudged losing a laborer- that's how I regard him- but you want to +cure him from love of him. And he does not want that. And besides, +what a notion that medicine ever cured anyone! Killed them, yes!" said +he, frowning angrily and turning away from Pierre. + +Prince Andrew expressed his ideas so clearly and distinctly that +it was evident he had reflected on this subject more than once, and he +spoke readily and rapidly like a man who has not talked for a long +time. His glance became more animated as his conclusions became more +hopeless. + +"Oh, that is dreadful, dreadful!" said Pierre. "I don't understand +how one can live with such ideas. I had such moments myself not long +ago, in Moscow and when traveling, but at such times I collapsed so +that I don't live at all- everything seems hateful to me... myself + +most of all. Then I don't eat, don't wash... and how is it with +you?..." + +"Why not wash? That is not cleanly," said Prince Andrew; "on the +contrary one must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. +I'm alive, that is not my fault, so I must live out my life as best +I can without hurting others." + +"But with such ideas what motive have you for living? One would +sit without moving, undertaking nothing...." + +"Life as it is leaves one no peace. I should be thankful to do +nothing, but here on the one hand the local nobility have done me +the honor to choose me to be their marshal; it was all I could do to +get out of it. They could not understand that I have not the necessary +qualifications for it- the kind of good-natured, fussy shallowness +necessary for the position. Then there's this house, which must be +built in order to have a nook of one's own in which to be quiet. And +now there's this recruiting." + +"Why aren't you serving in the army?" + +"After Austerlitz!" said Prince Andrew gloomily. "No, thank you very +much! I have promised myself not to serve again in the active +Russian army. And I won't- not even if Bonaparte were here at Smolensk +threatening Bald Hills- even then I wouldn't serve in the Russian +army! Well, as I was saying," he continued, recovering his +composure, "now there's this recruiting. My father is chief in command +of the Third District, and my only way of avoiding active service is +to serve under him." + +"Then you are serving?" + +"I am." + +He paused a little while. + +"And why do you serve?" + +"Why, for this reason! My father is one of the most remarkable men +of his time. But he is growing old, and though not exactly cruel he +has too energetic a character. He is so accustomed to unlimited +power that he is terrible, and now he has this authority of a +commander in chief of the recruiting, granted by the Emperor. If I had +been two hours late a fortnight ago he would have had a paymaster's +clerk at Yukhnovna hanged," said Prince Andrew with a smile. "So I +am serving because I alone have any influence with my father, and +now and then can save him from actions which would torment him +afterwards." + +"Well, there you see!" + +"Yes, but it is not as you imagine," Prince Andrew continued. "I did +not, and do not, in the least care about that scoundrel of a clerk who +had stolen some boots from the recruits; I should even have been +very glad to see him hanged, but I was sorry for my father- that again +is for myself." + +Prince Andrew grew more and more animated. His eyes glittered +feverishly while he tried to prove to Pierre that in his actions there +was no desire to do good to his neighbor. + +"There now, you wish to liberate your serfs," he continued; "that is +a very good thing, but not for you- I don't suppose you ever had +anyone flogged or sent to Siberia- and still less for your serfs. If +they are beaten, flogged, or sent to Siberia, I don't suppose they are +any the worse off. In Siberia they lead the same animal life, and +the stripes on their bodies heal, and they are happy as before. But it +is a good thing for proprietors who perish morally, bring remorse upon +themselves, stifle this remorse and grow callous, as a result of being +able to inflict punishments justly and unjustly. It is those people +I pity, and for their sake I should like to liberate the serfs. You +may not have seen, but I have seen, how good men brought up in those +traditions of unlimited power, in time when they grow more +irritable, become cruel and harsh, are conscious of it, but cannot +restrain themselves and grow more and more miserable." + +Prince Andrew spoke so earnestly that Pierre could not help thinking +that these thoughts had been suggested to Prince Andrew by his +father's case. + +He did not reply. + +"So that's what I'm sorry for- human dignity, peace of mind, purity, +and not the serfs' backs and foreheads, which, beat and shave as you +may, always remain the same backs and foreheads." + +"No, no! A thousand times no! I shall never agree with you," said +Pierre. + +CHAPTER XII + +In the evening Andrew and Pierre got into the open carriage and +drove to Bald Hills. Prince Andrew, glancing at Pierre, broke the +silence now and then with remarks which showed that he was in a good +temper. + +Pointing to the fields, he spoke of the improvements he was making +in his husbandry. + +Pierre remained gloomily silent, answering in monosyllables and +apparently immersed in his own thoughts. + +He was thinking that Prince Andrew was unhappy, had gone astray, did +not see the true light, and that he, Pierre, ought to aid, +enlighten, and raise him. But as soon as he thought of what he +should say, he felt that Prince Andrew with one word, one argument, +would upset all his teaching, and he shrank from beginning, afraid +of exposing to possible ridicule what to him was precious and sacred. + +"No, but why do you think so?" Pierre suddenly began, lowering his +head and looking like a bull about to charge, "why do you think so? +You should not think so." + +"Think? What about?" asked Prince Andrew with surprise. + +"About life, about man's destiny. It can't be so. I myself thought +like that, and do you know what saved me? Freemasonry! No, don't +smile. Freemasonry is not a religious ceremonial sect, as I thought it +was: Freemasonry is the best expression of the best, the eternal, +aspects of humanity." + +And he began to explain Freemasonry as he understood it to Prince +Andrew. He said that Freemasonry is the teaching of Christianity freed +from the bonds of State and Church, a teaching of equality, +brotherhood, and love. + +"Only our holy brotherhood has the real meaning of life, all the +rest is a dream," said Pierre. "Understand, my dear fellow, that +outside this union all is filled with deceit and falsehood and I agree +with you that nothing is left for an intelligent and good man but to +live out his life, like you, merely trying not to harm others. But +make our fundamental convictions your own, join our brotherhood, +give yourself up to us, let yourself be guided, and you will at once +feel yourself, as I have felt myself, a part of that vast invisible +chain the beginning of which is hidden in heaven," said Pierre. + +Prince Andrew, looking straight in front of him, listened in silence +to Pierre's words. More than once, when the noise of the wheels +prevented his catching what Pierre said, he asked him to repeat it, +and by the peculiar glow that came into Prince Andrew's eyes and by +his silence, Pierre saw that his words were not in vain and that +Prince Andrew would not interrupt him or laugh at what he said. + +They reached a river that had overflowed its banks and which they +had to cross by ferry. While the carriage and horses were being placed +on it, they also stepped on the raft. + +Prince Andrew, leaning his arms on the raft railing, gazed +silently at the flooding waters glittering in the setting sun. + +"Well, what do you think about it?" Pierre asked. "Why are you +silent?" + +"What do I think about it? I am listening to you. It's all very +well.... You say: join our brotherhood and we will show you the aim of +life, the destiny of man, and the laws which govern the world. But who +are we? Men. How is it you know everything? Why do I alone not see +what you see? You see a reign of goodness and truth on earth, but I +don't see it." + +Pierre interrupted him. + +"Do you believe in a future life?" he asked. + +"A future life?" Prince Andrew repeated, but Pierre, giving him no +time to reply, took the repetition for a denial, the more readily as +he knew Prince Andrew's former atheistic convictions. + +"You say you can't see a reign of goodness and truth on earth. Nor +could I, and it cannot be seen if one looks on our life here as the +end of everything. On earth, here on this earth" (Pierre pointed to +the fields), "there is no truth, all is false and evil; but in the +universe, in the whole universe there is a kingdom of truth, and we +who are now the children of earth are- eternally- children of the +whole universe. Don't I feel in my soul that I am part of this vast +harmonious whole? Don't I feel that I form one link, one step, between +the lower and higher beings, in this vast harmonious multitude of +beings in whom the Deity- the Supreme Power if you prefer the term- is +manifest? If I see, clearly see, that ladder leading from plant to +man, why should I suppose it breaks off at me and does not go +farther and farther? I feel that I cannot vanish, since nothing +vanishes in this world, but that I shall always exist and always +have existed. I feel that beyond me and above me there are spirits, +and that in this world there is truth." + +"Yes, that is Herder's theory," said Prince Andrew, "but it is not +that which can convince me, dear friend- life and death are what +convince. What convinces is when one sees a being dear to one, bound +up with one's own life, before whom one was to blame and had hoped +to make it right" (Prince Andrew's voice trembled and he turned away), +"and suddenly that being is seized with pain, suffers, and ceases to +exist.... Why? It cannot be that there is no answer. And I believe +there is.... That's what convinces, that is what has convinced me," +said Prince Andrew. + +"Yes, yes, of course," said Pierre, "isn't that what I'm saying?" + +"No. All I say is that it is not argument that convinces me of the +necessity of a future life, but this: when you go hand in hand with +someone and all at once that person vanishes there, into nowhere, +and you yourself are left facing that abyss, and look in. And I have +looked in...." + +"Well, that's it then! You know that there is a there and there is a +Someone? There is the future life. The Someone is- God." + +Prince Andrew did not reply. The carriage and horses had long +since been taken off, onto the farther bank, and reharnessed. The +sun had sunk half below the horizon and an evening frost was +starring the puddles near the ferry, but Pierre and Andrew, to the +astonishment of the footmen, coachmen, and ferrymen, still stood on +the raft and talked. + +"If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and +man's highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must +live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on +this scrap of earth, but have lived and shall live forever, there, +in the Whole," said Pierre, and he pointed to the sky. + +Prince Andrew stood leaning on the railing of the raft listening +to Pierre, and he gazed with his eyes fixed on the red reflection of +the sun gleaming on the blue waters. There was perfect stillness. +Pierre became silent. The raft had long since stopped and only the +waves of the current beat softly against it below. Prince Andrew +felt as if the sound of the waves kept up a refrain to Pierre's words, +whispering: + +"It is true, believe it." + +He sighed, and glanced with a radiant, childlike, tender look at +Pierre's face, flushed and rapturous, but yet shy before his +superior friend. + +"Yes, if it only were so!" said Prince Andrew. "However, it is +time to get on," he added, and, stepping off the raft, he looked up at +the sky to which Pierre had pointed, and for the first time since +Austerlitz saw that high, everlasting sky he had seen while lying on +that battlefield; and something that had long been slumbering, +something that was best within him, suddenly awoke, joyful and +youthful, in his soul. It vanished as soon as he returned to the +customary conditions of his life, but he knew that this feeling +which he did not know how to develop existed within him. His meeting +with Pierre formed an epoch in Prince Andrew's life. Though +outwardly he continued to live in the same old way, inwardly he +began a new life. + +CHAPTER XIII + +It was getting dusk when Prince Andrew and Pierre drove up to the +front entrance of the house at Bald Hills. As they approached the +house, Prince Andrew with asmile drew Pierre's attention to a +commotion going on at the back porch. A woman, bent with age, with a +wallet on her back, and a short, long-haired, young man in a black +garment had rushed back to the gate on seeing the carriage driving up. +Two women ran out after them, and all four, looking round at the +carriage, ran in dismay up the steps of the back porch. + +"Those are Mary's 'God's folk,'" said Prince Andrew. "They have +mistaken us for my father. This is the one matter in which she +disobeys him. He orders these pilgrims to be driven away, but she +receives them." + +"But what are 'God's folk'?" asked Pierre. + +Prince Andrew had no time to answer. The servants came out to meet +them, and he asked where the old prince was and whether he was +expected back soon. + +The old prince had gone to the town and was expected back any +minute. + +Prince Andrew led Pierre to his own apartments, which were always +kept in perfect order and readiness for him in his father's house; +he himself went to the nursery. + +"Let us go and see my sister," he said to Pierre when he returned. +"I have not found her yet, she is hiding now, sitting with her +'God's folk.' It will serve her right, she will be confused, but you +will see her 'God's folk.' It's really very curious." + +"What are 'God's folk'?" asked Pierre. + +"Come, and you'll see for yourself." + +Princess Mary really was disconcerted and red patches came on her +face when they went in. In her snug room, with lamps burning before +the icon stand, a young lad with a long nose and long hair, wearing +a monk's cassock, sat on the sofa beside her, behind a samovar. Near +them, in an armchair, sat a thin, shriveled, old woman, with a meek +expression on her childlike face. + +"Andrew, why didn't you warn me?" said the princess, with mild +reproach, as she stood before her pilgrims like a hen before her +chickens. + +"Charmee de vous voir. Je suis tres contente de vous voir,"~^ she +said to Pierre as he kissed her hand. She had known him as a child, +and now his friendship with Andrew, his misfortune with his wife, +and above all his kindly, simple face disposed her favorably toward +him. She looked at him with her beautiful radiant eyes and seemed to +say, "I like you very much, but please don't laugh at my people." +After exchanging the first greetings, they sat down. + +^~ "Delighted to see you. I am very glad to see you." + +"Ah, and Ivanushka is here too!" said Prince Andrew, glancing with a +smile at the young pilgrim. + +"Andrew!" said Princess Mary, imploringly. "Il faut que vous sachiez +que c'est une femme,"~^ said Prince Andrew to Pierre. + +"Andrew, au nom de Dieu!"~^ Princess Mary repeated. + +^~ "You must know that this is a woman." + +^~ "For heaven's sake." + +It was evident that Prince Andrew's ironical tone toward the +pilgrims and Princess Mary's helpless attempts to protect them were +their customary long-established relations on the matter. + +"Mais, ma bonne amie," said Prince Andrew, "vous devriez au +contraire m'etre reconnaissante de ce que j'explique a Pierre votre +intimite avec ce jeune homme."~^ + +^~ "But, my dear, you ought on the contrary to be grateful to me for +explaining to Pierre your intimacy with this young man." + +"Really?" said Pierre, gazing over his spectacles with curiosity and +seriousness (for which Princess Mary was specially grateful to him) +into Ivanushka's face, who, seeing that she was being spoken about, +looked round at them all with crafty eyes. + +Princess Mary's embarrassment on her people's account was quite +unnecessary. They were not in the least abashed. The old woman, +lowering her eyes but casting side glances at the newcomers, had +turned her cup upside down and placed a nibbled bit of sugar beside +it, and sat quietly in her armchair, though hoping to be offered +another cup of tea. Ivanushka, sipping out of her saucer, looked +with sly womanish eyes from under her brows at the young men. + +"Where have you been? To Kiev?" Prince Andrew asked the old woman. + +"I have, good sir," she answered garrulously. "Just at Christmastime +I was deemed worthy to partake of the holy and heavenly sacrament at +the shrine of the saint. And now I'm from Kolyazin, master, where a +great and wonderful blessing has been revealed." + +"And was Ivanushka with you?" + +"I go by myself, benefactor," said Ivanushka, trying to speak in a +bass voice. "I only came across Pelageya in Yukhnovo..." + +Pelageya interrupted her companion; she evidently wished to tell +what she had seen. + +"In Kolyazin, master, a wonderful blessing has been revealed." + +"What is it? Some new relics?" asked Prince Andrew. + +"Andrew, do leave off," said Princess Mary. "Don't tell him, +Pelageya." + +"No... why not, my dear, why shouldn't I? I like him. He is kind, he +is one of God's chosen, he's a benefactor, he once gave me ten rubles, +I remember. When I was in Kiev, Crazy Cyril says to me (he's one of +God's own and goes barefoot summer and winter), he says, 'Why are +you not going to the right place? Go to Kolyazin where a +wonder-working icon of the Holy Mother of God has been revealed.' On +hearing those words I said good-by to the holy folk and went." + +All were silent, only the pilgrim woman went on in measured tones, +drawing in her breath. + +"So I come, master, and the people say to me: 'A great blessing +has been revealed, holy oil trickles from the cheeks of our blessed +Mother, the Holy Virgin Mother of God'...." + +"All right, all right, you can tell us afterwards," said Princess +Mary, flushing. + +"Let me ask her," said Pierre. "Did you see it yourselves?" he +inquired. + +"Oh, yes, master, I was found worthy. Such a brightness on the +face like the light of heaven, and from the blessed Mother's cheek +it drops and drops...." + +"But, dear me, that must be a fraud!" said Pierre, naively, who +had listened attentively to the pilgrim. + +"Oh, master, what are you saying?" exclaimed the horrified Pelageya, +turning to Princess Mary for support. + +"They impose on the people," he repeated. + +"Lord Jesus Christ!" exclaimed the pilgrim woman, crossing +herself. "Oh, don't speak so, master! There was a general who did +not believe, and said, 'The monks cheat,' and as soon as he'd said +it he went blind. And he dreamed that the Holy Virgin Mother of the +Kiev catacombs came to him and said, 'Believe in me and I will make +you whole.' So he begged: 'Take me to her, take me to her.' It's the +real truth I'm telling you, I saw it myself. So he was brought, +quite blind, straight to her, and he goes up to her and falls down and +says, 'Make me whole,' says he, 'and I'll give thee what the Tsar +bestowed on me.' I saw it myself, master, the star is fixed into the +icon. Well, and what do you think? He received his sight! It's a sin +to speak so. God will punish you," she said admonishingly, turning +to Pierre. + +"How did the star get into the icon?" Pierre asked. + +"And was the Holy Mother promoted to the rank of general?" said +Prince Andrew, with a smile. + +Pelageya suddenly grew quite pale and clasped her hands. + +"Oh, master, master, what a sin! And you who have a son!" she began, +her pallor suddenly turning to a vivid red. "Master, what have you +said? God forgive you!" And she crossed herself. "Lord forgive him! My +dear, what does it mean?..." she asked, turning to Princess Mary. +She got up and, almost crying, began to arrange her wallet. She +evidently felt frightened and ashamed to have accepted charity in a +house where such things could be said, and was at the same time +sorry to have now to forgo the charity of this house. + +"Now, why need you do it?" said Princess Mary. "Why did you come +to me?..." + +"Come, Pelageya, I was joking," said Pierre. "Princesse, ma +parole, je n'ai pas voulu l'offenser.~^ I did not mean anything, I +was only joking," he said, smiling shyly and trying to efface his +offense. "It was all my fault, and Andrew was only joking." + +^~ "Princess, on my word, I did not wish to offend her." + +Pelageya stopped doubtfully, but in Pierre's face there was such a +look of sincere penitence, and Prince Andrew glanced so meekly now +at her and now at Pierre, that she was gradually reassured. + +CHAPTER XIV + +The pilgrim woman was appeased and, being encouraged to talk, gave a +long account of Father Amphilochus, who led so holy a life that his +hands smelled of incense, and how on her last visit to Kiev some monks +she knew let her have the keys of the catacombs, and how she, taking +some dried bread with her, had spent two days in the catacombs with +the saints. "I'd pray awhile to one, ponder awhile, then go on to +another. I'd sleep a bit and then again go and kiss the relics, and +there was such peace all around, such blessedness, that one don't want +to come out, even into the light of heaven again." + +Pierre listened to her attentively and seriously. Prince Andrew went +out of the room, and then, leaving "God's folk" to finish their tea, +Princess Mary took Pierre into the drawing room. + +"You are very kind," she said to him. + +"Oh, I really did not mean to hurt her feelings. I understand them +so well and have the greatest respect for them." + +Princess Mary looked at him silently and smiled affectionately. + +"I have known you a long time, you see, and am as fond of you as +of a brother," she said. "How do you find Andrew?" she added +hurriedly, not giving him time to reply to her affectionate words. +"I am very anxious about him. His health was better in the winter, but +last spring his wound reopened and the doctor said he ought to go away +for a cure. And I am also very much afraid for him spiritually. He has +not a character like us women who, when we suffer, can weep away our +sorrows. He keeps it all within him. Today he is cheerful and in +good spirits, but that is the effect of your visit- he is not often +like that. If you could persuade him to go abroad. He needs +activity, and this quiet regular life is very bad for him. Others +don't notice it, but I see it." + +Toward ten o'clock the men servants rushed to the front door, +hearing the bells of the old prince's carriage approaching. Prince +Andrew and Pierre also went out into the porch. + +"Who's that?" asked the old prince, noticing Pierre as he got out +of, the carriage. + +"Ah! Very glad! Kiss me," he said, having learned who the young +stranger was. + +The old prince was in a good temper and very gracious to Pierre. + +Before supper, Prince Andrew, coming back to his father's study, +found him disputing hotly with his visitor. Pierre was maintaining +that a time would come when there would be no more wars. The old +prince disputed it chaffingly, but without getting angry. + +"Drain the blood from men's veins and put in water instead, then +there will be no more war! Old women's nonsense- old women's +nonsense!" he repeated, but still he patted Pierre affectionately on +the shoulder, and then went up to the table where Prince Andrew, +evidently not wishing to join in the conversation, was looking over +the papers his father had brought from town. The old prince went up to +him and began to talk business. + +"The marshal, a Count Rostov, hasn't sent half his contingent. He +came to town and wanted to invite me to dinner- I gave him a pretty +dinner!... And there, look at this.... Well, my boy," the old prince +went on, addressing his son and patting Pierre on the shoulder. "A +fine fellow- your friend- I like him! He stirs me up. Another says +clever things and one doesn't care to listen, but this one talks +rubbish yet stirs an old fellow up. Well, go! Get along! Perhaps +I'll come and sit with you at supper. We'll have another dispute. Make +friends with my little fool, Princess Mary," he shouted after +Pierre, through the door. + +Only now, on his visit to Bald Hills, did Pierre fully realize the +strength and charm of his friendship with Prince Andrew. That charm +was not expressed so much in his relations with him as with all his +family and with the household. With the stern old prince and the +gentle, timid Princess Mary, though he had scarcely known them, Pierre +at once felt like an old friend. They were all fond of him already. +Not only Princess Mary, who had been won by his gentleness with the +pilgrims, gave him her most radiant looks, but even the one-year-old +"Prince Nicholas" (as his grandfather called him) smiled at Pierre and +let himself be taken in his arms, and Michael Ivanovich and +Mademoiselle Bourienne looked at him with pleasant smiles when he +talked to the old prince. + +The old prince came in to supper; this was evidently on Pierre's +account. And during the two days of the young man's visit he was +extremely kind to him and told him to visit them again. + +When Pierre had gone and the members of the household met +together, they began to express their opinions of him as people always +do after a new acquaintance has left, but as seldom happens, no one +said anything but what was good of him. + +CHAPTER XV + +When returning from his leave, Rostov felt, for the first time, +how close was the bond that united him to Denisov and and the whole +regiment. + +On approaching it, Rostov felt as he had done when approaching his +home in Moscow. When he saw the first hussar with the unbuttoned +uniform of his regiment, when he recognized red-haired Dementyev and +saw the picket ropes of the roan horses, when Lavrushka gleefully +shouted to his master, "The count has come!" and Denisov, who had been +asleep on his bed, ran all disheveled out of the mud hut to embrace +him, and the officers collected round to greet the new arrival, Rostov +experienced the same feeling his mother, his father, and his sister +had embraced him, and tears of joy choked him so that he could not +speak. The regiment was also a home, and as unalterably dear and +precious as his parents' house. + +When he had reported himself to the commander of the regiment and +had been reassigned to his former squadron, had been on duty and had +gone out foraging, when he had again entered into all the little +interests of the regiment and felt himself deprived of liberty and +bound in one narrow, unchanging frame, he experienced the same sense +of peace, of moral support, and the same sense being at home here in +his own place, as he had felt under the parental roof. But here was +none of all that turmoil of the world at large, where he did not +know his right place and took mistaken decisions; here was no Sonya +with whom he ought, or ought not, to have an explanation; here was +no possibility of going there or not going there; here there were +not twenty-four hours in the day which could be spent in such a +variety of ways; there was not that innumerable crowd of people of +whom not one was nearer to him or farther from him than another; there +were none of those uncertain and undefined money relations with his +father, and nothing to recall that terrible loss to Dolokhov. Here, in +the regiment, all was clear and simple. The whole world was divided +into two unequal parts: one, our Pavlograd regiment; the other, all +the rest. And the rest was no concern of his. In the regiment, +everything was definite: who was lieutenant, who captain, who was a +good fellow, who a bad one, and most of all, who was a comrade. The +canteenkeeper gave one credit, one's pay came every four months, there +was nothing to think out or decide, you had only to do nothing that +was considered bad in the Pavlograd regiment and, when given an order, +to do what was clearly, distinctly, and definitely ordered- and all +would be well. + +Having once more entered into the definite conditions of this +regimental life, Rostov felt the joy and relief a tired man feels on +lying down to rest. Life in the regiment, during this campaign, was +all the pleasanter for him, because, after his loss to Dolokhov (for +which, in spite of all his family's efforts to console him, he could +not forgive himself), he had made up his mind to atone for his fault +by serving, not as he had done before, but really well, and by being a +perfectly first-rate comrade and officer- in a word, a splendid man +altogether, a thing which seemed so difficult out in the world, but so +possible in the regiment. + +After his losses, he had determined to pay back his debt to his +parents in five years. He received ten thousand rubles a year, but now +resolved to take only two thousand and leave the rest to repay the +debt to his parents. + +Our army, after repeated retreats and advances and battles at +Pultusk and Preussisch-Eylau, was concentrated near Bartenstein. It +was awaiting the Emperor's arrival and the beginning of a new +campaign. + +The Pavlograd regiment, belonging to that part of the army which had +served in the 1805 campaign, had been recruiting up to strength in +Russia, and arrived too late to take part in the first actions of +the campaign. It had been neither at Pultusk nor at Preussisch-Eylau +and, when it joined the army in the field in the second half of the +campaign, was attached to Platov's division. + +Platov's division was acting independently of the main army. Several +times parts of the Pavlograd regiment had exchanged shots with the +enemy, had taken prisoners, and once had even captured Marshal +Oudinot's carriages. In April the Pavlograds were stationed +immovably for some weeks near a totally ruined and deserted German +village. + +A thaw had set in, it was muddy and cold, the ice on the river +broke, and the roads became impassable. For days neither provisions +for the men nor fodder for the horses had been issued. As no +transports could arrive, the men dispersed about the abandoned and +deserted villages, searching for potatoes, but found few even of +these. + +Everything had been eaten up and the inhabitants had all fled- if +any remained, they were worse than beggars and nothing more could be +taken from them; even the soldiers, usually pitiless enough, instead +of taking anything from them, often gave them the last of their +rations. + +The Pavlograd regiment had had only two men wounded in action, but +had lost nearly half its men from hunger and sickness. In the +hospitals, death was so certain that soldiers suffering from fever, or +the swelling that came from bad food, preferred to remain on duty, and +hardly able to drag their legs went to the front rather than to the +hospitals. When spring came on, the soldiers found a plant just +showing out of the ground that looked like asparagus, which, for +some reason, they called "Mashka's sweet root." It was very bitter, +but they wandered about the fields seeking it and dug it out with +their sabers and ate it, though they were ordered not to do so, as +it was a noxious plant. That spring a new disease broke out broke +out among the soldiers, a swelling of the arms, legs, and face, +which the doctors attributed to eating this root. But in spite of +all this, the soldiers of Denisov's squadron fed chiefly on +"Mashka's sweet root," because it was the second week that the last of +the biscuits were being doled out at the rate of half a pound a man +and the last potatoes received had sprouted and frozen. + +The horses also had been fed for a fortnight on straw from the +thatched roofs and had become terribly thin, though still covered with +tufts of felty winter hair. + +Despite this destitution, the soldiers and officers went on living +just as usual. Despite their pale swollen faces and tattered uniforms, +the hussars formed line for roll call, kept things in order, groomed +their horses, polished their arms, brought in straw from the +thatched roofs in place of fodder, and sat down to dine round the +caldrons from which they rose up hungry, joking about their nasty food +and their hunger. As usual, in their spare time, they lit bonfires, +steamed themselves before them naked; smoked, picked out and baked +sprouting rotten potatoes, told and listened to stories of +Potemkin's and Suvorov's campaigns, or to legends of Alesha the Sly, +or the priest's laborer Mikolka. + +The officers, as usual, lived in twos and threes in the roofless, +half-ruined houses. The seniors tried to collect straw and potatoes +and, in general, food for the men. The younger ones occupied +themselves as before, some playing cards (there was plenty of money, +though there was no food), some with more innocent games, such as +quoits and skittles. The general trend of the campaign was rarely +spoken of, partly because nothing certain was known about it, partly +because there was a vague feeling that in the main it was going badly. + +Rostov lived, as before, with Denisov, and since their furlough they +had become more friendly than ever. Denisov never spoke of Rostov's +family, but by the tender friendship his commander showed him, +Rostov felt that the elder hussar's luckless love for Natasha played a +part in strengthening their friendship. Denisov evidently tried to +expose Rostov to danger as seldom as possible, and after an action +greeted his safe return with evident joy. On one of his foraging +expeditions, in a deserted and ruined village to which he had come +in search of provisions, Rostov found a family consisting of an old +Pole and his daughter with an infant in arms. They were half clad, +hungry, too weak to get away on foot and had no means of obtaining a +conveyance. Rostov brought them to his quarters, placed them in his +own lodging, and kept them for some weeks while the old man was +recovering. One of his comrades, talking of women, began chaffing +Rostov, saying that he was more wily than any of them and that it +would not be a bad thing if he introduced to them the pretty Polish +girl he had saved. Rostov took the joke as an insult, flared up, and +said such unpleasant things to the officer that it was all Denisov +could do to prevent a duel. When the officer had gone away, Denisov, +who did not himself know what Rostov's relations with the Polish +girl might be, began to upbraid him for his quickness of temper, and +Rostov replied: + +"Say what you like.... She is like a sister to me, and I can't +tell you how it offended me... because... well, for that reason...." + +Denisov patted him on the shoulder and began rapidly pacing the room +without looking at Rostov, as was his way at moments of deep feeling. + +"Ah, what a mad bweed you Wostovs are!" he muttered, and Rostov +noticed tears in his eyes. + +CHAPTER XVI + +In April the troops were enlivened by news of the Emperor's arrival, +but Rostov had no chance of being present at the review he held at +Bartenstein, as the Pavlograds were at the outposts far beyond that +place. + +They were bivouacking. Denisov and Rostov were living in an earth +hut, dug out for them by the soldiers and roofed with branches and +turf. The hut was made in the following manner, which had then come +into vogue. A trench was dug three and a half feet wide, four feet +eight inches deep, and eight feet long. At one end of the trench, +steps were cut out and these formed the entrance and vestibule. The +trench itself was the room, in which the lucky ones, such as the +squadron commander, had a board, lying on piles at the end opposite +the entrance, to serve as a table. On each side of the trench, the +earth was cut out to a breadth of about two and a half feet, and +this did duty for bedsteads and couches. The roof was so constructed +that one could stand up in the middle of the trench and could even sit +up on the beds if one drew close to the table. Denisov, who was living +luxuriously because the soldiers of his squadron liked him, had also a +board in the roof at the farther end, with a piece of (broken but +mended) glass in it for a window. When it was very cold, embers from +the soldiers' campfire were placed on a bent sheet of iron on the +steps in the "reception room"- as Denisov called that part of the hut- +and it was then so warm that the officers, of whom there were always +some with Denisov and Rostov, sat in their shirt sleeves. + +In April, Rostov was on orderly duty. One morning, between seven and +eight, returning after a sleepless night, he sent for embers, +changed his rain-soaked underclothes, said his prayers, drank tea, got +warm, then tidied up the things on the table and in his own corner, +and, his face glowing from exposure to the wind and with nothing on +but his shirt, lay down on his back, putting his arms under his +head. He was pleasantly considering the probability of being +promoted in a few days for his last reconnoitering expedition, and was +awaiting Denisov, who had gone out somewhere and with whom he wanted a +talk. + +Suddenly he heard Denisov shouting in a vibrating voice behind the +hut, evidently much excited. Rostov moved to the window to see whom he +was speaking to, and saw the quartermaster, Topcheenko. + +"I ordered you not to let them that Mashka woot stuff!" Denisov +was shouting. "And I saw with my own eyes how Lazarchuk bwought some +fwom the fields." + +"I have given the order again and again, your honor, but they +don't obey," answered the quartermaster. + +Rostov lay down again on his bed and thought complacently: "Let +him fuss and bustle now, my job's done and I'm lying down- capitally!" +He could hear that Lavrushka- that sly, bold orderly of Denisov's- was +talking, as well as the quartermaster. Lavrushka was saying +something about loaded wagons, biscuits, and oxen he had seen when +he had gone out for provisions. + +Then Denisov's voice was heard shouting farther and farther away. +"Saddle! Second platoon!" + +"Where are they off to now?" thought Rostov. + +Five minutes later, Denisov came into the hut, climbed with muddy +boots on the bed, lit his pipe, furiously scattered his things +about, took his leaded whip, buckled on his saber, and went out again. +In answer to Rostov's inquiry where he was going, he answered +vaguely and crossly that he had some business. + +"Let God and our gweat monarch judge me afterwards!" said Denisov +going out, and Rostov heard the hoofs of several horses splashing +through the mud. He did not even trouble to find out where Denisov had +gone. Having got warm in his corner, he fell asleep and did not +leave the hut till toward evening. Denisov had not yet returned. The +weather had cleared up, and near the next hut two officers and a cadet +were playing svayka, laughing as they threw their missiles which +buried themselves in the soft mud. Rostov joined them. In the middle +of the game, the officers saw some wagons approaching with fifteen +hussars on their skinny horses behind them. The wagons escorted by the +hussars drew up to the picket ropes and a crowd of hussars +surrounded them. + +"There now, Denisov has been worrying," said Rostov, "and here are +the provisions." + +"So they are!" said the officers. "Won't the soldiers be glad!" + +A little behind the hussars came Denisov, accompanied by two +infantry officers with whom he was talking. + +Rostov went to meet them. + +"I warn you, Captain," one of the officers, a short thin man, +evidently very angry, was saying. + +"Haven't I told you I won't give them up?" replied Denisov. + +"You will answer for it, Captain. It is mutiny- seizing the +transport of one's own army. Our men have had nothing to eat for two +days." + +"And mine have had nothing for two weeks," said Denisov. + +"It is robbery! You'll answer for it, sir!" said the infantry +officer, raising his voice. + +"Now, what are you pestewing me for?" cried Denisov, suddenly losing +his temper. "I shall answer for it and not you, and you'd better not +buzz about here till you get hurt. Be off! Go!" he shouted at the +officers. + +"Very well, then!" shouted the little officer, undaunted and not +riding away. "If you are determined to rob, I'll..." + +"Go to the devil! quick ma'ch, while you're safe and sound!" and +Denisov turned his horse on the officer. + +"Very well, very well!" muttered the officer, threateningly, and +turning his horse he trotted away, jolting in his saddle. + +"A dog astwide a fence! A weal dog astwide a fence!" shouted Denisov +after him (the most insulting expression a cavalryman can address to a +mounted infantryman) and riding up to Rostov, he burst out laughing. + +"I've taken twansports from the infantwy by force!" he said. +"After all, can't let our men starve." + +The wagons that had reached the hussars had been consigned to an +infantry regiment, but learning from Lavrushka that the transport +was unescorted, Denisov with his hussars had seized it by force. The +soldiers had biscuits dealt out to them freely, and they even shared +them with the other squadrons. + +The next day the regimental commander sent for Denisov, and +holding his fingers spread out before his eyes said: + +"This is how I look at this affair: I know nothing about it and +won't begin proceedings, but I advise you to ride over to the staff +and settle the business there in the commissariat department and if +possible sign a receipt for such and such stores received. If not, +as the demand was booked against an infantry regiment, there will be a +row and the affair may end badly." + +From the regimental commander's, Denisov rode straight to the +staff with a sincere desire to act on this advice. In the evening he +came back to his dugout in a state such as Rostov had never yet seen +him in. Denisov could not speak and gasped for breath. When Rostov +asked what was the matter, he only uttered some incoherent oaths and +threats in a hoarse, feeble voice. + +Alarmed at Denisov's condition, Rostov suggested that he should +undress, drink some water, and send for the doctor. + +"Twy me for wobbewy... oh! Some more water... Let them twy me, but +I'll always thwash scoundwels... and I'll tell the Empewo'... +Ice..." he muttered. + +The regimental doctor, when he came, said it was absolutely +necessary to bleed Denisov. A deep saucer of black blood was taken +from his hairy arm and only then was he able to relate what had +happened to him. + +"I get there," began Denisov. "'Now then, where's your chief's +quarters?' They were pointed out. 'Please to wait.' 'I've widden +twenty miles and have duties to attend to and no time to wait. +Announce me.' Vewy well, so out comes their head chief- also took it +into his head to lecture me: 'It's wobbewy!'- 'Wobbewy,' I say, 'is +not done by man who seizes pwovisions to feed his soldiers, but by him +who takes them to fill his own pockets!' 'Will you please be +silent?' 'Vewy good!' Then he says: 'Go and give a weceipt to the +commissioner, but your affair will be passed on to headquarters.' I go +to the commissioner. I enter, and at the table... who do you think? +No, but wait a bit!... Who is it that's starving us?" shouted Denisov, +hitting the table with the fist of his newly bled arm so violently +that the table nearly broke down and the tumblers on it jumped +about. "Telyanin! 'What? So it's you who's starving us to death! Is +it? Take this and this!' and I hit him so pat, stwaight on his +snout... 'Ah, what a... what...!' and I sta'ted fwashing him... +Well, I've had a bit of fun I can tell you!" cried Denisov, gleeful +and yet angry, his showing under his black mustache. "I'd have +killed him if they hadn't taken him away!" + +"But what are you shouting for? Calm yourself," said Rostov. "You've +set your arm bleeding afresh. Wait, we must tie it up again." + +Denisov was bandaged up again and put to bed. Next day he woke +calm and cheerful. + +But at noon the adjutant of the regiment came into Rostov's and +Denisov's dugout with a grave and serious face and regretfully +showed them a paper addressed to Major Denisov from the regimental +commander in which inquiries were made about yesterday's occurrence. +The adjutant told them that the affair was likely to take a very bad +turn: that a court-martial had been appointed, and that in view of the +severity with which marauding and insubordination were now regarded, +degradation to the ranks would be the best that could be hoped for. + +The case, as represented by the offended parties, was that, after +seizing the transports, Major Denisov, being drunk, went to the +chief quartermaster and without any provocation called him a thief, +threatened to strike him, and on being led out had rushed into the +office and given two officials a thrashing, and dislocated the arm +of one of them. + +In answer to Rostov's renewed questions, Denisov said, laughing, +that he thought he remembered that some other fellow had got mixed +up in it, but that it was all nonsense and rubbish, and he did not +in the least fear any kind of trial, and that if those scoundrels +dared attack him he would give them an answer that they would not +easily forget. + +Denisov spoke contemptuously of the whole matter, but Rostov knew +him too well not to detect that (while hiding it from others) at heart +he feared a court-martial and was worried over the affair, which was +evidently taking a bad turn. Every day, letters of inquiry and notices + +from the court arrived, and on the first of May, Denisov was ordered +to hand the squadron over to the next in seniority and appear before +the staff of his division to explain his violence at the +commissariat office. On the previous day Platov reconnoitered with two +Cossack regiments and two squadrons of hussars. Denisov, as was his +wont, rode out in front of the outposts, parading his courage. A +bullet fired by a French sharpshooter hit him in the fleshy part of +his leg. Perhaps at another time Denisov would not have left the +regiment for so slight a wound, but now he took advantage of it to +excuse himself from appearing at the staff and went into hospital. + +CHAPTER XVII + +In June the battle of Friedland was fought, in which the +Pavlograds did not take part, and after that an armistice was +proclaimed. Rostov, who felt his friend's absence very much, having no +news of him since he left and feeling very anxious about his wound and +the progress of his affairs, took advantage of the armistice to get +leave to visit Denisov in hospital. + +The hospital was in a small Prussian town that had been twice +devastated by Russian and French troops. Because it was summer, when +it is so beautiful out in the fields, the little town presented a +particularly dismal appearance with its broken roofs and fences, its +foul streets, tattered inhabitants, and the sick and drunken +soldiers wandering about. + +The hospital was in a brick building with some of the window +frames and panes broken and a courtyard surrounded by the remains of a +wooden fence that had been pulled to pieces. Several bandaged +soldiers, with pale swollen faces, were sitting or walking about in +the sunshine in the yard. + +Directly Rostov entered the door he was enveloped by a smell of +putrefaction and hospital air. On the stairs he met a Russian army +doctor smoking a cigar. The doctor was followed by a Russian +assistant. + +"I can't tear myself to pieces," the doctor was saying. "Come to +Makar Alexeevich in the evening. I shall be there." + +The assistant asked some further questions. + +"Oh, do the best you can! Isn't it all the same?" The doctor noticed +Rostov coming upstairs. + +"What do you want, sir?" said the doctor. "What do you want? The +bullets having spared you, do you want to try typhus? This is a +pesthouse, sir." + +"How so?" asked Rostov. + +"Typhus, sir. It's death to go in. Only we two, Makeev and I" (he +pointed to the assistant), "keep on here. Some five of us doctors have +died in this place.... When a new one comes he is done for in a week," +said the doctor with evident satisfaction. "Prussian doctors have been +invited here, but our allies don't like it at all." + +Rostov explained that he wanted to see Major Denisov of the hussars, +who was wounded. + +"I don't know. I can't tell you, sir. Only think! I am alone in +charge of three hospitals with more than four hundred patients! It's +well that the charitable Prussian ladies send us two pounds of +coffee and some lint each month or we should be lost!" he laughed. +"Four hundred, sir, and they're always sending me fresh ones. There +are four hundred? Eh?" he asked, turning to the assistant. + +The assistant looked fagged out. He was evidently vexed and +impatient for the talkative doctor to go. + +"Major Denisov," Rostov said again. "He was wounded at Molliten." + +"Dead, I fancy. Eh, Makeev?" queried the doctor, in a tone of +indifference. + +The assistant, however, did not confirm the doctor's words. + +"Is he tall and with reddish hair?" asked the doctor. + +Rostov described Denisov's appearance. + +"There was one like that," said the doctor, as if pleased. "That one +is dead, I fancy. However, I'll look up our list. We had a list. +Have you got it, Makeev?" + +"Makar Alexeevich has the list," answered the assistant. "But if +you'll step into the officers' wards you'll see for yourself," he +added, turning to Rostov. + +"Ah, you'd better not go, sir," said the doctor, "or you may have to +stay here yourself." + +But Rostov bowed himself away from the doctor and asked the +assistant to show him the way. + +"Only don't blame me!" the doctor shouted up after him. + +Rostov and the assistant went into the dark corridor. The smell +was so strong there that Rostov held his nose and had to pause and +collect his strength before he could go on. A door opened to the +right, and an emaciated sallow man on crutches, barefoot and in +underclothing, limped out and, leaning against the doorpost, looked +with glittering envious eyes at those who were passing. Glancing in at +the door, Rostov saw that the sick and wounded were lying on the floor +on straw and overcoats. + +"May I go in and look?" + +"What is there to see?" said the assistant. + +But, just because the assistant evidently did not want him to go in, +Rostov entered the soldiers' ward. The foul air, to which he had +already begun to get used in the corridor, was still stronger here. It +was a little different, more pungent, and one felt that this was where +it originated. + +In the long room, brightly lit up by the sun through the large +windows, the sick and wounded lay in two rows with their heads to +the walls, and leaving a passage in the middle. Most of them were +unconscious and paid no attention to the newcomers. Those who were +conscious raised themselves or lifted their thin yellow faces, and all +looked intently at Rostov with the same expression of hope, of relief, +reproach, and envy of another's health. Rostov went to the middle of +the room and looking through the open doors into the two adjoining +rooms saw the same thing there. He stood still, looking silently +around. He had not at all expected such a sight. Just before him, +almost across the middle of the passage on the bare floor, lay a +sick man, probably a Cossack to judge by the cut of his hair. The +man lay on his back, his huge arms and legs outstretched. His face was +purple, his eyes were rolled back so that only the whites were seen, +and on his bare legs and arms which were still red, the veins stood +out like cords. He was knocking the back of his head against the +floor, hoarsely uttering some word which he kept repeating. Rostov +listened and made out the word. It was "drink, drink, a drink!" Rostov +glanced round, looking for someone who would put this man back in +his place and bring him water. + +"Who looks after the sick here?" he asked the assistant. + +Just then a commissariat soldier, a hospital orderly, came in from +the next room, marching stiffly, and drew up in front of Rostov. + +"Good day, your honor!" he shouted, rolling his eyes at Rostov and +evidently mistaking him for one of the hospital authorities. + +"Get him to his place and give him some water," said Rostov, +pointing to the Cossack. + +"Yes, your honor," the soldier replied complacently, and rolling his +eyes more than ever he drew himself up still straighter, but did not +move. + +"No, it's impossible to do anything here," thought Rostov, +lowering his eyes, and he was going out, but became aware of an +intense look fixed on him on his right, and he turned. Close to the +corner, on an overcoat, sat an old, unshaven, gray-bearded soldier +as thin as a skeleton, with a stern sallow face and eyes intently +fixed on Rostov. The man's neighbor on one side whispered something to +him, pointing at Rostov, who noticed that the old man wanted to +speak to him. He drew nearer and saw that the old man had only one leg +bent under him, the other had been amputated above the knee. His +neighbor on the other side, who lay motionless some distance from +him with his head thrown back, was a young soldier with a snub nose. +His pale waxen face was still freckled and his eyes were rolled +back. Rostov looked at the young soldier and a cold chill ran down his +back. + +"Why, this one seems..." he began, turning to the assistant. + +"And how we've been begging, your honor," said the old soldier, +his jaw quivering. "He's been dead since morning. After all we're men, +not dogs." + +"I'll send someone at once. He shall be taken away- taken away at +once," said the assistant hurriedly. "Let us go, your honor." + +"Yes, yes, let us go," said Rostov hastily, and lowering his eyes +and shrinking, he tried to pass unnoticed between the rows of +reproachful envious eyes that were fixed upon him, and went out of the +room. + +CHAPTER XVIII + +Going along the corridor, the assistant led Rostov to the +officers' wards, consisting of three rooms, the doors of which stood +open. There were beds in these rooms and the sick and wounded officers +were lying or sitting on them. Some were walking about the rooms in +hospital dressing gowns. The first person Rostov met in the +officers' ward was a thin little man with one arm, who was walking +about the first room in a nightcap and hospital dressing gown, with +a pipe between his teeth. Rostov looked at him, trying to remember +where he had seen him before. + +"See where we've met again!" said the little man. "Tushin, Tushin, +don't you remember, who gave you a lift at Schon Grabern? And I've had +a bit cut off, you see..." he went on with a smile, pointing to the +empty sleeve of his dressing gown. "Looking for Vasili Dmitrich +Denisov? My neighbor," he added, when he heard who Rostov wanted. +"Here, here," and Tushin led him into the next room, from whence +came sounds of several laughing voices. + +"How can they laugh, or even live at all here?" thought Rostov, +still aware of that smell of decomposing flesh that had been so strong +in the soldiers' ward, and still seeming to see fixed on him those +envious looks which had followed him out from both sides, and the face +of that young soldier with eyes rolled back. + +Denisov lay asleep on his bed with his head under the blanket, +though it was nearly noon. + +"Ah, Wostov? How are you, how are you?" he called out, still in +the same voice as in the regiment, but Rostov noticed sadly that under +this habitual ease and animation some new, sinister, hidden feeling +showed itself in the expression of Denisov's face and the +intonations of his voice. + +His wound, though a slight one, had not yet healed even now, six +weeks after he had been hit. His face had the same swollen pallor as +the faces of the other hospital patients, but it was not this that +struck Rostov. What struck him was that Denisov did not seem glad to +see him, and smiled at him unnaturally. He did not ask about the +regiment, nor about the general state of affairs, and when Rostov +spoke of these matters did not listen. + +Rostov even noticed that Denisov did not like to be reminded of +the regiment, or in general of that other free life which was going on +outside the hospital. He seemed to try to forget that old life and was +only interested in the affair with the commissariat officers. On +Rostov's inquiry as to how the matter stood, he at once produced +from under his pillow a paper he had received from the commission +and the rough draft of his answer to it. He became animated when he +began reading his paper and specially drew Rostov's attention to the +stinging rejoinders he made to his enemies. His hospital companions, +who had gathered round Rostov- a fresh arrival from the world outside- +gradually began to disperse as soon as Denisov began reading his +answer. Rostov noticed by their faces that all those gentlemen had +already heard that story more than once and were tired of it. Only the +man who had the next bed, a stout Uhlan, continued to sit on his +bed, gloomily frowning and smoking a pipe, and little one-armed Tushin +still listened, shaking his head disapprovingly. In the middle of +the reading, the Uhlan interrupted Denisov. + +"But what I say is," he said, turning to Rostov, "it would be best +simply to petition the Emperor for pardon. They say great rewards will +now be distributed, and surely a pardon would be granted...." + +"Me petition the Empewo'!" exclaimed Denisov, in a voice to which he +tried hard to give the old energy and fire, but which sounded like +an expression of irritable impotence. "What for? If I were a wobber +I would ask mercy, but I'm being court-martialed for bwinging +wobbers to book. Let them twy me, I'm not afwaid of anyone. I've +served the Tsar and my countwy honowably and have not stolen! And am I +to be degwaded?... Listen, I'm w'iting to them stwaight. This is +what I say: 'If I had wobbed the Tweasuwy...'" + +"It's certainly well written," said Tushin, "but that's not the +point, Vasili Dmitrich," and he also turned to Rostov. "One has to +submit, and Vasili Dmitrich doesn't want to. You know the auditor told +you it was a bad business. + +"Well, let it be bad," said Denisov. + +"The auditor wrote out a petition for you," continued Tushin, "and +you ought to sign it and ask this gentleman to take it. No doubt he" +(indicating Rostov) "has connections on the staff. You won't find a +better opportunity." + +"Haven't I said I'm not going to gwovel?" Denisov interrupted him, +went on reading his paper. + +Rostov had not the courage to persuade Denisov, though he +instinctively felt that the way advised by Tushin and the other +officers was the safest, and though he would have been glad to be of +service to Denisov. He knew his stubborn will and straightforward +hasty temper. + +When the reading of Denisov's virulent reply, which took more than +an hour, was over, Rostov said nothing, and he spent the rest of the +day in a most dejected state of mind amid Denisov's hospital comrades, +who had round him, telling them what he knew and listening to their +stories. Denisov was moodily silent all the evening. + +Late in the evening, when Rostov was about to leave, he asked +Denisov whether he had no commission for him. + +"Yes, wait a bit," said Denisov, glancing round at the officers, and +taking his papers from under his pillow he went to the window, where +he had an inkpot, and sat down to write. + +"It seems it's no use knocking one's head against a wall!" he +said, coming from the window and giving Rostov a large envelope. In it +was the petition to the Emperor drawn up by the auditor, in which +Denisov, without alluding to the offenses of the commissariat +officials, simply asked for pardon. + +"Hand it in. It seems..." + +He did not finish, but gave a painfully unnatural smile. + +CHAPTER XIX + +Having returned to the regiment and told the commander the state +of Denisov's affairs, Rostov rode to Tilsit with the letter to the +Emperor. + +On the thirteenth of June the French and Russian Emperors arrived in +Tilsit. Boris Drubetskoy had asked the important personage on whom +he was in attendance, to include him in the suite appointed for the +stay at Tilsit. + +"I should like to see the great man," he said, alluding to Napoleon, +whom hitherto he, like everyone else, had always called Buonaparte. + +"You are speaking of Buonaparte?" asked the general, smiling. + +Boris looked at his general inquiringly and immediately saw that +he was being tested. + +"I am speaking, Prince, of the Emperor Napoleon," he replied. The +general patted him on the shoulder, with a smile. + +"You will go far," he said, and took him to Tilsit with him. + +Boris was among the few present at the Niemen on the day the two +Emperors met. He saw the raft, decorated with monograms, saw +Napoleon pass before the French Guards on the farther bank of the +river, saw the pensive face of the Emperor Alexander as he sat in +silence in a tavern on the bank of the Niemen awaiting Napoleon's +arrival, saw both Emperors get into boats, and saw how Napoleon- +reaching the raft first- stepped quickly forward to meet Alexander and +held out his hand to him, and how they both retired into the pavilion. +Since he had begun to move in the highest circles Boris had made it +his habit to watch attentively all that went on around him and to note +it down. At the time of the meeting at Tilsit he asked the names of +those who had come with Napoleon and about the uniforms they wore, and +listened attentively to words spoken by important personages. At the +moment the Emperors went into the pavilion he looked at his watch, and +did not forget to look at it again when Alexander came out. The +interview had lasted an hour and fifty-three minutes. He noted this +down that same evening, among other facts he felt to be of historic +importance. As the Emperor's suite was a very small one, it was a +matter of great importance, for a man who valued his success in the +service, to be at Tilsit on the occasion of this interview between the +two Emperors, and having succeeded in this, Boris felt that henceforth +his position was fully assured. He had not only become known, but +people had grown accustomed to him and accepted him. Twice he had +executed commissions to the Emperor himself, so that the latter knew +his face, and all those at court, far from cold-shouldering him as +at first when they considered him a newcomer, would now have been +surprised had he been absent. + +Boris lodged with another adjutant, the Polish Count Zhilinski. +Zhilinski, a Pole brought up in Paris, was rich, and passionately fond +of the French, and almost every day of the stay at Tilsit, French +officers of the Guard and from French headquarters were dining and +lunching with him and Boris. + +On the evening of the twenty-fourth of June, Count Zhilinski +arranged a supper for his French friends. The guest of honor was an +aide-de-camp of Napoleon's, there were also several French officers of +the Guard, and a page of Napoleon's, a young lad of an old +aristocratic French family. That same day, Rostov, profiting by the +darkness to avoid being recognized in civilian dress. came to Tilsit +and went to the lodging occupied by Boris and Zhilinski. + +Rostov, in common with the whole army from which he came, was far +from having experienced the change of feeling toward Napoleon and +the French- who from being foes had suddenly become friends- that +had taken place at headquarters and in Boris. In the army, Bonaparte +and the French were still regarded with mingled feelings of anger, +contempt, and fear. Only recently, talking with one of Platov's +Cossack officers, Rostov had argued that if Napoleon were taken +prisoner he would be treated not as a sovereign, but as a criminal. +Quite lately, happening to meet a wounded French colonel on the +road, Rostov had maintained with heat that peace was impossible +between a legitimate sovereign and the criminal Bonaparte. Rostov +was therefore unpleasantly struck by the presence of French officers +in Boris' lodging, dressed in uniforms he had been accustomed to see +from quite a different point of view from the outposts of the flank. +As soon as he noticed a French officer, who thrust his head out of the +door, that warlike feeling of hostility which he always experienced at +the sight of the enemy suddenly seized him. He stopped at the +threshold and asked in Russian whether Drubetskoy lived there. +Boris, hearing a strange voice in the anteroom, came out to meet +him. An expression of annoyance showed itself for a moment on his face +on first recognizing Rostov. + +"Ah, it's you? Very glad, very glad to see you," he said, however, +coming toward him with a smile. But Rostov had noticed his first +impulse. + +"I've come at a bad time I think. I should not have come, but I have +business," he said coldly. + +"No, I only wonder how you managed to get away from your regiment. +Dans un moment je suis a vous,"~^ he said, answering someone who called +him. + +^~ "In a minute I shall be at your disposal." + +"I see I'm intruding," Rostov repeated. + +The look of annoyance had already disappeared from Boris' face: +having evidently reflected and decided how to act, he very quietly +took both Rostov's hands and led him into the next room. His eyes, +looking serenely and steadily at Rostov, seemed to be veiled by +something, as if screened by blue spectacles of conventionality. So it +seemed to Rostov. + +"Oh, come now! As if you could come at a wrong time!" said Boris, +and he led him into the room where the supper table was laid and +introduced him to his guests, explaining that he was not a civilian, +but an hussar officer, and an old friend of his. + +"Count Zhilinski- le Comte N. N.- le Capitaine S. S.," said he, +naming his guests. Rostov looked frowningly at the Frenchmen, bowed +reluctantly, and remained silent. + +Zhilinski evidently did not receive this new Russian person very +willingly into his circle and did not speak to Rostov. Boris did not +appear to notice the constraint the newcomer produced and, with the +same pleasant composure and the same veiled look in his eyes with +which he had met Rostov, tried to enliven the conversation. One of the +Frenchmen, with the politeness characteristic of his countrymen, +addressed the obstinately taciturn Rostov, saying that the latter +had probably come to Tilsit to see the Emperor. + +"No, I came on business," replied Rostov, briefly. + +Rostov had been out of humor from the moment he noticed the look +of dissatisfaction on Boris' face, and as always happens to those in a +bad humor, it seemed to him that everyone regarded him with aversion +and that he was in everybody's way. He really was in their way, for he +alone took no part in the conversation which again became general. The +looks the visitors cast on him seemed to say: "And what is he +sitting here for?" He rose and went up to Boris. + +"Anyhow, I'm in your way," he said in a low tone. "Come and talk +over my business and I'll go away." + +"Oh, no, not at all," said Boris. "But if you are tired, come and +lie down in my room and have a rest." + +"Yes, really..." + +They went into the little room where Boris slept. Rostov, without +sitting down, began at once, irritably (as if Boris were to blame in +some way) telling him about Denisov's affair, asking him whether, +through his general, he could and would intercede with the Emperor +on Denisov's behalf and get Denisov's petition handed in. When he +and Boris were alone, Rostov felt for the first time that he could not +look Boris in the face without a sense of awkwardness. Boris, with one +leg crossed over the other and stroking his left hand with the slender +fingers of his right, listened to Rostov as a general listens to the +report of a subordinate, now looking aside and now gazing straight +into Rostov's eyes with the same veiled look. Each time this +happened Rostov felt uncomfortable and cast down his eyes. + +"I have heard of such cases and know that His Majesty is very severe +in such affairs. I think it would be best not to bring it before the +Emperor, but to apply to the commander of the corps.... But in +general, I think..." + +"So you don't want to do anything? Well then, say so!" Rostov almost +shouted, not looking Boris in the face. + +Boris smiled. + +"On the contrary, I will do what I can. Only I thought..." + +At that moment Zhilinski's voice was heard calling Boris. + +"Well then, go, go, go..." said Rostov, and refusing supper and +remaining alone in the little room, he walked up and down for a long +time, hearing the lighthearted French conversation from the next room. + +CHAPTER XX + +Rostov had come to Tilsit the day least suitable for a petition on +Denisov's behalf. He could not himself go to the general in attendance +as he was in mufti and had come to Tilsit without permission to do so, +and Boris, even had he wished to, could not have done so on the +following day. On that day, June 27, the preliminaries of peace were +signed. The Emperors exchanged decorations: Alexander received the +Cross of the Legion of Honor and Napoleon the Order of St. Andrew of +the First Degree, and a dinner had been arranged for the evening, +given by a battalion of the French Guards to the Preobrazhensk +battalion. The Emperors were to be present at that banquet. + +Rostov felt so ill at ease and uncomfortable with Boris that, when +the latter looked in after supper, he pretended to be asleep, and +early next morning went away, avoiding Boris. In his civilian +clothes and a round hat, he wandered about the town, staring at the +French and their uniforms and at the streets and houses where the +Russian and French Emperors were staying. In a square he saw tables +being set up and preparations made for the dinner; he saw the +Russian and French colors draped from side to side of the streets, +with hugh monograms A and N. In the windows of the houses also flags +and bunting were displayed. + +"Boris doesn't want to help me and I don't want to ask him. That's +settled," thought Nicholas. "All is over between us, but I won't leave +here without having done all I can for Denisov and certainly not +without getting his letter to the Emperor. The Emperor!... He is +here!" thought Rostov, who had unconsciously returned to the house +where Alexander lodged. + +Saddled horses were standing before the house and the suite were +assembling, evidently preparing for the Emperor to come out. + +"I may see him at any moment," thought Rostov. "If only I were to +hand the letter direct to him and tell him all... could they really +arrest me for my civilian clothes? Surely not! He would understand +on whose side justice lies. He understands everything, knows +everything. Who can be more just, more magnanimous than he? And even +if they did arrest me for being here, what would it matter?" thought +he, looking at an officer who was entering the house the Emperor +occupied. "After all, people do go in.... It's all nonsense! I'll go +in and hand the letter to the Emperor myself so much the worse for +Drubetskoy who drives me to it!" And suddenly with a determination +he himself did not expect, Rostov felt for the letter in his pocket +and went straight to the house. + +"No, I won't miss my opportunity now, as I did after Austerlitz," he +thought, expecting every moment to meet the monarch, and conscious +of the blood that rushed to his heart at the thought. "I will fall +at his feet and beseech him. He will lift me up, will listen, and will +even thank me. 'I am happy when I can do good, but to remedy injustice +is the greatest happiness,'" Rostov fancied the sovereign saying. +And passing people who looked after him with curiosity, he entered the +porch of the Emperor's house. + +A broad staircase led straight up from the entry, and to the right +he saw a closed door. Below, under the staircase, was a door leading +to the lower floor. + +"Whom do you want?" someone inquired. + +"To hand in a letter, a petition, to His Majesty," said Nicholas, +with a tremor in his voice. + +"A petition? This way, to the officer the officer on duty" (he was +shown the door leading downstairs), "only it won't be accepted." + +On hearing this indifferent voice, Rostov grew frightened at what he +was doing; the thought of meeting the Emperor at any moment was so +fascinating and consequently so alarming that he was ready to run +away, but the official who had questioned him opened the door, and +Rostov entered. + +A short stout man of about thirty, in white breeches and high +boots and a batiste shirt that he had evidently only just put on, +standing in that room, and his valet was buttoning on to the back of +his breeches a new pair of handsome silk-embroidered braces that, +for some reason, attracted Rostov's attention. This man was was +speaking to someone in the adjoining room. + +"A good figure and in her first bloom," he was saying, but on seeing +Rostov, he stopped short and frowned. + +"What is it? A petition?" + +"What is it?" asked the person in the other room. + +"Another petitioner," answered the man with the braces. + +"Tell him to come later. He'll be coming out directly, we must go." + +"Later... later! Tomorrow. It's too late..." + +Rostov turned and was about to go, but the man in the braces stopped +him. + +"Whom have you come from? Who are you?" + +"I come from Major Denisov," answered Rostov. + +"Are you an officer?" + +"Lieutenant Count Rostov." + +"What audacity! Hand it in through your commander. And go along with +you... go," and he continued to put on the uniform the valet handed +him. + +Rostov went back into the hall and noticed that in the porch there +were many officers and generals in full parade uniform, whom he had to +pass. + +Cursing his temerity, his heart sinking at the thought of finding +himself at any moment face to face with the Emperor and being put to +shame and arrested in his presence, fully alive now to the impropriety +of his conduct and repenting of it, Rostov, with downcast eyes, was +making his way out of the house through the brilliant suite when a +familiar voice called him and a hand detained him. + +"What are you doing here, sir, in civilian dress?" asked a deep +voice. + +It was a cavalry general who had obtained the Emperor's special +favor during this campaign, and who had formerly commanded the +division in which Rostov was serving. + +Rostov, in dismay, began justifying himself, but seeing the +kindly, jocular face of the general, he took him aside and in an +excited voice told him the whole affair, asking him to intercede for +Denisov, whom the general knew. Having heard Rostov to the end, the +general shook his head gravely. + +"I'm sorry, sorry for that fine fellow. Give me the letter." + +Hardly had Rostov handed him the letter and finished explaining +Denisov's case, when hasty steps and the jingling of spurs were +heard on the stairs, and the general, leaving him, went to the +porch. The gentlemen of the Emperor's suite ran down the stairs and +went to their horses. Hayne, the same groom who had been at +Austerlitz, led up the Emperor's horse, and the faint creak of a +footstep Rostov knew at once was heard on the stairs. Forgetting the +danger of being recognized, Rostov went close to the porch, together +with some inquisitive civilians, and again, after two years, saw those +features he adored: that same face and same look and step, and the +same union of majesty and mildness.... And the feeling of enthusiasm +and love for his sovereign rose again in Rostov's soul in all its +old force. In the uniform of the Preobrazhensk regiment- white +chamois-leather breeches and high boots- and wearing a star Rostov did +not know (it was that of the Legion d'honneur), the monarch came out +into the porch, putting on his gloves and carrying his hat under his +arm. He stopped and looked about him, brightening everything around by +his glance. He spoke a few words to some of the generals, and, +recognizing the former commander of Rostov's division, smiled and +beckoned to him. + +All the suite drew back and Rostov saw the general talking for +some time to the Emperor. + +The Emperor said a few words to him and took a step toward his +horse. Again the crowd of members of the suite and street gazers +(among whom was Rostov) moved nearer to the Emperor. Stopping beside +his horse, with his hand on the saddle, the Emperor turned to the +cavalry general and said in a loud voice, evidently wishing to be +heard by all: + +"I cannot do it, General. I cannot, because the law is stronger than +I," and he raised his foot to the stirrup. + +The general bowed his head respectfully, and the monarch mounted and +rode down the street at a gallop. Beside himself with enthusiasm, +Rostov ran after him with the crowd. + +CHAPTER XXI + +The Emperor rode to the square where, facing one another, a +battalion of the Preobrazhensk regiment stood on the right and a +battalion of the French Guards in their bearskin caps on the left. + +As the Tsar rode up to one flank of the battalions, which +presented arms, another group of horsemen galloped up to the +opposite flank, and at the head of them Rostov recognized Napoleon. It +could be no one else. He came at a gallop, wearing a small hat, a blue +uniform open over a white vest, and the St. Andrew ribbon over his +shoulder. He was riding a very fine thoroughbred gray Arab horse +with a crimson gold-embroidered saddlecloth. On approaching +Alexander he raised his hat, and as he did so, Rostov, with his +cavalryman's eye, could not help noticing that Napoleon did not sit +well or firmly in the saddle. The battalions shouted "Hurrah!" and +"Vive l'Empereur!" Napoleon said something to Alexander, and both +Emperors dismounted and took each other's hands. Napoleon's face +wore an unpleasant and artificial smile. Alexander was saying +something affable to him. + +In spite of the trampling of the French gendarmes' horses, which +were pushing back the crowd, Rostov kept his eyes on every movement of +Alexander and Bonaparte. It struck him as a surprise that Alexander +treated Bonaparte as an equal and that the latter was quite at ease +with the Tsar, as if such relations with an Emperor were an everyday +matter to him. + +Alexander and Napoleon, with the long train of their suites, +approached the right flank of the Preobrazhensk battalion and came +straight up to the crowd standing there. The crowd unexpectedly +found itself so close to the Emperors that Rostov, standing in the +front row, was afraid he might be recognized. + +"Sire, I ask your permission to present the Legion of Honor to the +bravest of your soldiers," said a sharp, precise voice, articulating +every letter. + +This was said by the undersized Napoleon, looking up straight into +Alexander's eyes. Alexander listened attentively to what was said to +him and, bending his head, smiled pleasantly. + +"To him who has borne himself most bravely in this last war," +added Napoleon, accentuating each syllable, as with a composure and +assurance exasperating to Rostov, he ran his eyes over the Russian +ranks drawn up before him, who all presented arms with their eyes +fixed on their Emperor. + +"Will Your Majesty allow me to consult the colonel?" said +Alexander and took a few hasty steps toward Prince Kozlovski, the +commander of the battalion. + +Bonaparte meanwhile began taking the glove off his small white hand, +tore it in doing so, and threw it away. An aide-de-camp behind him +rushed forward and picked it up. + +"To whom shall it be given?" the Emperor Alexander asked +Koslovski, in Russian in a low voice. + +"To whomever Your Majesty commands." + +The Emperor knit his brows with dissatisfaction and, glancing +back, remarked: + +"But we must give him an answer." + +Kozlovski scanned the ranks resolutely and included Rostov in his +scrutiny. + +"Can it be me?" thought Rostov. + +"Lazarev!" the colonel called, with a frown, and Lazarev, the +first soldier in the rank, stepped briskly forward. + +"Where are you off to? Stop here!" voices whispered to Lazarev who +did not know where to go. Lazarev stopped, casting a sidelong look +at his colonel in alarm. His face twitched, as often happens to +soldiers called before the ranks. + +Napoleon slightly turned his head, and put his plump little hand out +behind him as if to take something. The members of his suite, guessing +at once what he wanted, moved about and whispered as they passed +something from one to another, and a page- the same one Rostov had +seen the previous evening at Boris'- ran forward and, bowing +respectfully over the outstretched hand and not keeping it waiting a +moment, laid in it an Order on a red ribbon. Napoleon, without +looking, pressed two fingers together and the badge was between +them. Then he approached Lazarev (who rolled his eyes and persistently +gazed at his own monarch), looked round at the Emperor Alexander to +imply that what he was now doing was done for the sake of his ally, +and the small white hand holding the Order touched one of Lazarev's +buttons. It was as if Napoleon knew that it was only necessary for his +hand to deign to touch that soldier's breast for the soldier to be +forever happy, rewarded, and distinguished from everyone else in the +world. Napoleon merely laid the cross on Lazarev's breast and, +dropping his hand, turned toward Alexander as though sure that the +cross would adhere there. And it really did. + +Officious hands, Russian and French, immediately seized the cross +and fastened it to the uniform. Lazarev glanced morosely at the little +man with white hands who was doing something to him and, still +standing motionless presenting arms, looked again straight into +Alexander's eyes, as if asking whether he should stand there, or go +away, or do something else. But receiving no orders, he remained for +some time in that rigid position. + +The Emperors remounted and rode away. The Preobrazhensk battalion, +breaking rank, mingled with the French Guards and sat down at the +tables prepared for them. + +Lazarev sat in the place of honor. Russian and French officers +embraced him, congratulated him, and pressed his hands. Crowds of +officers and civilians drew near merely to see him. A rumble of +Russian and French voices and laughter filled the air round the tables +in the square. Two officers with flushed faces, looking cheerful and +happy, passed by Rostov. + +"What d'you think of the treat? All on silver plate," one of them +was saying. "Have you seen Lazarev?" + +"I have." + +"Tomorrow, I hear, the Preobrazhenskis will give them a dinner." + +"Yes, but what luck for Lazarev! Twelve hundred francs' pension +for life." + +"Here's a cap, lads!" shouted a Preobrazhensk soldier, donning a +shaggy French cap. + +"It's a fine thing! First-rate!" + +"Have you heard the password?" asked one Guards' officer of another. +"The day before yesterday it was 'Napoleon, France, bravoure'; +yesterday, 'Alexandre, Russie, grandeur.' One day our Emperor gives it +and next day Napoleon. Tomorrow our Emperor will send a St. George's +Cross to the bravest of the French Guards. It has to be done. He +must respond in kind." + +Boris, too, with his friend Zhilinski, came to see the Preobrazhensk +banquet. On his way back, he noticed Rostov standing by the corner +of a house. + +"Rostov! How d'you do? We missed one another," he said, and could +not refrain from asking what was the matter, so strangely dismal and +troubled was Rostov's face. + +"Nothing, nothing," replied Rostov. + +"You'll call round?" + +"Yes, I will." + +Rostov stood at that corner for a long time, watching the feast from +a distance. a distance. In his mind, a painful process was going on +which he could not bring to a conclusion. Terrible doubts rose in +his soul. Now he remembered Denisov with his changed expression, his +submission, and the whole hospital, with arms and legs torn off and +its dirt and disease. So vividly did he recall that hospital stench of +dead flesh that he looked round to see where the smell came from. Next +he thought of that self-satisfied Bonaparte, with his small white +hand, who was now an Emperor, liked and respected by Alexander. Then +why those severed arms and legs and those dead men?... Then again he +thought of Lazarev rewarded and Denisov punished and unpardoned. He +caught himself harboring such strange thoughts that he was frightened. + +The smell of the food the Preobrazhenskis were eating and a sense of +hunger recalled him from these reflections; he had to get something to +eat before going away. He went to a hotel he had noticed that morning. +There he found so many people, among them officers who, like +himself, had come in civilian clothes, that he had difficulty in +getting a dinner. Two officers of his own division joined him. The +conversation naturally turned on the peace. The officers, his +comrades, like most of the army, were dissatisfied with the peace +concluded after the battle of Friedland. They said that had we held +out a little longer Napoleon would have been done for, as his troops +had neither provisions nor ammunition. Nicholas ate and drank (chiefly +the latter) in silence. He finished a couple of bottles of wine by +himself. The process in his mind went on tormenting him without +reaching a conclusion. He feared to give way to his thoughts, yet +could not get rid of them. Suddenly, on one of the officers' saying +that it was humiliating to look at the French, Rostov began shouting +with uncalled-for wrath, and therefore much to the surprise of the +officers: + +"How can you judge what's best?" he cried, the blood suddenly +rushing to his face. "How can you judge the Emperor's actions? What +right have we to argue? We cannot comprehend either the Emperor's or +his actions!" + +"But I never said a word about the Emperor!" said the officer, +justifying himself, and unable to understand Rostov's outburst, except +on the supposition that he was drunk. + +But Rostov did not listen to him. + +"We are not diplomatic officials, we are soldiers and nothing more," +he went on. "If we are ordered to die, we must die. If we're punished, +it means that we have deserved it, it's not for us to judge. If the +Emperor pleases to recognize Bonaparte as Emperor and to conclude an +alliance with him, it means that that is the right thing to do. If +once we begin judging and arguing about everything, nothing sacred +will be left! That way we shall be saying there is no God- nothing!" +shouted Nicholas, banging the table- very little to the point as it +seemed to his listeners, but quite relevantly to the course of his own +thoughts. + +"Our business is to do our duty, to fight and not to think! That's +all...." said he. + +"And to drink," said one of the officers, not wishing to quarrel. + +"Yes, and to drink," assented Nicholas. "Hullo there! Another +bottle!" he shouted. + +In 1808 the Emperor Alexander went to Erfurt for a fresh interview +with the Emperor Napoleon, and in the upper circles of Petersburg +there was much talk of the grandeur of this important meeting. + +CHAPTER XXII + +In 1809 the intimacy between "the world's two arbiters," as Napoleon +and Alexander were called, was such that when Napoleon declared war on +Austria a Russian corps crossed the frontier to co-operate with our +old enemy Bonaparte against our old ally the Emperor of Austria, and +in court circles the possibility of marriage between Napoleon and +one of Alexander's sisters was spoken of. But besides considerations +of foreign policy, the attention of Russian society was at that time +keenly directed on the internal changes that were being undertaken +in all the departments of government. + +Life meanwhile- real life, with its essential interests of health +and sickness, toil and rest, and its intellectual interests in +thought, science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, and +passions- went on as usual, independently of and apart from +political friendship or enmity with Napoleon Bonaparte and from all +the schemes of reconstruction. + +BOOK SIX: 1808 - 10 + +CHAPTER I + +Prince Andrew had spent two years continuously in the country. + +All the plans Pierre had attempted on his estates- and constantly +changing from one thing to another had never accomplished- were +carried out by Prince Andrew without display and without perceptible +difficulty. + +He had in the highest degree a practical tenacity which Pierre +lacked, and without fuss or strain on his part this set things going. + +On one of his estates the three hundred serfs were liberated and +became free agricultural laborers- this being one of the first +examples of the kind in Russia. On other estates the serfs' compulsory +labor was commuted for a quitrent. A trained midwife was engaged for +Bogucharovo at his expense, and a priest was paid to teach reading and +writing to the children of the peasants and household serfs. + +Prince Andrew spent half his time at Bald Hills with his father +and his son, who was still in the care of nurses. The other half he +spent in "Bogucharovo Cloister," as his father called Prince +Andrew's estate. Despite the indifference to the affairs of the +world he had expressed to Pierre, he diligently followed all that went +on, received many books, and to his surprise noticed that when he or +his father had visitors from Petersburg, the very vortex of life, +these people lagged behind himself- who never left the country- in +knowledge of what was happening in home and foreign affairs. + +Besides being occupied with his estates and reading a great +variety of books, Prince Andrew was at this time busy with a +critical of survey our last two unfortunate campaigns, and with +drawing up a proposal for a reform of the army rules and regulations. + +In the spring of 1809 he went to visit the Ryazan estates which +had been inherited by his son, whose guardian he was. + +Warmed by the spring sunshine he sat in the caleche looking at the +new grass, the first leaves on the birches, and the first puffs of +white spring clouds floating across the clear blue sky. He was not +thinking of anything, but looked absent-mindedly and cheerfully from +side to side. + +They crossed the ferry where he had talked with Pierre the year +before. They went through the muddy village, past threshing floors and +green fields of winter rye, downhill where snow still lodged near +the bridge, uphill where the clay had been liquefied by the rain, past +strips of stubble land and bushes touched with green here and there, +and into a birch forest growing on both sides of the road. In the +forest it was almost hot, no wind could be felt. The birches with +their sticky green leaves were motionless, and lilac-colored flowers +and the first blades of green grass were pushing up and lifting last +year's leaves. The coarse evergreen color of the small fir trees +scattered here and there among the birches was an unpleasant +reminder of winter. On entering the forest the horses began to snort +and sweated visibly. + +Peter the footman made some remark to the coachman; the latter +assented. But apparently the coachman's sympathy was not enough for +Peter, and he turned on the box toward his master. + +"How pleasant it is, your excellency!" he said with a respectful +smile. + +"What?" + +"It's pleasant, your excellency!" + +"What is he talking about?" thought Prince Andrew. "Oh, the +spring, I suppose," he thought as he turned round. "Yes, really +everything is green already.... How early! The birches and cherry +and alders too are coming out.... But the oaks show no sign yet. Ah, +here is one oak!" + +At the edge of the road stood an oak. Probably ten times the age of +the birches that formed the forest, it was ten times as thick and +twice as tall as they. It was an enormous tree, its girth twice as +great as a man could embrace, and evidently long ago some of its +branches had been broken off and its bark scarred. With its huge +ungainly limbs sprawling unsymmetrically, and its gnarled hands and +fingers, it stood an aged, stern, and scornful monster among the +smiling birch trees. Only the dead-looking evergreen firs dotted about +in the forest, and this oak, refused to yield to the charm of spring +or notice either the spring or the sunshine. + +"Spring, love, happiness!" this oak seemed to say. "Are you not +weary of that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always +the same and always a fraud? There is no spring, no sun, no happiness! +Look at those cramped dead firs, ever the same, and at me too, +sticking out my broken and barked fingers just where they have +grown, whether from my back or my sides: as they have grown so I +stand, and I do not believe in your hopes and your lies." + +As he passed through the forest Prince Andrew turned several times +to look at that oak, as if expecting something from it. Under the oak, +too, were flowers and grass, but it stood among them scowling, +rigid, misshapen, and grim as ever. + +"Yes, the oak is right, a thousand times right," thought Prince +Andrew. "Let others- the young- yield afresh to that fraud, but we +know life, our life is finished!" + +A whole sequence of new thoughts, hopeless but mournfully +pleasant, rose in his soul in connection with that tree. During this +journey he, as it were, considered his life afresh and arrived at +his old conclusion, restful in its hopelessness: that it was not for +him to begin anything anew- but that he must live out his life, +content to do no harm, and not disturbing himself or desiring +anything. + +CHAPTER II + +Prince Andrew had to see the Marshal of the Nobility for the +district in connection with the affairs of the Ryazan estate of +which he was trustee. This Marshal was Count Ilya Rostov, and in the +middle of May Prince Andrew went to visit him. + +It was now hot spring weather. The whole forest was already +clothed in green. It was dusty and so hot that on passing near water +one longed to bathe. + +Prince Andrew, depressed and preoccupied with the business about +which he had to speak to the Marshal, was driving up the avenue in the +grounds of the Rostovs' house at Otradnoe. He heard merry girlish +cries behind some trees on the right and saw group of girls running to +cross the path of his caleche. Ahead of the rest and nearer to him ran +a dark-haired, remarkably slim, pretty girl in a yellow chintz +dress, with a white handkerchief on her head from under which loose +locks of hair escaped. The girl was shouting something but, seeing +that he was a stranger, ran back laughing without looking at him. + +Suddenly, he did not know why, he felt a pang. The day was so +beautiful, the sun so bright, everything around so gay, but that +slim pretty girl did not know, or wish to know, of his existence and +was contented and cheerful in her own separate- probably foolish- +but bright and happy life. "What is she so glad about? What is she +thinking of? Not of the military regulations or of the arrangement +of the Ryazan serfs' quitrents. Of what is she thinking? Why is she so +happy?" Prince Andrew asked himself with instinctive curiosity. + +In 1809 Count Ilya Rostov was living at Otradnoe just as he had done +in former years, that is, entertaining almost the whole province +with hunts, theatricals, dinners, and music. He was glad to see Prince +Andrew, as he was to see any new visitor, and insisted on his +staying the night. + +During the dull day, in the course of which he was entertained by +his elderly hosts and by the more important of the visitors (the old +count's house was crowded on account of an approaching name day), +Prince Andrew repeatedly glanced at Natasha, gay and laughing among +the younger members of the company, and asked himself each time, "What +is she thinking about? Why is she so glad?" + +That night, alone in new surroundings, he was long unable to +sleep. He read awhile and then put out his candle, but relit it. It +was hot in the room, the inside shutters of which were closed. He +was cross with the stupid old man (as he called Rostov), who had +made him stay by assuring him that some necessary documents had not +yet arrived from town, and he was vexed with himself for having +stayed. + +He got up and went to the window to open it. As soon as he opened +the shutters the moonlight, as if it had long been watching for +this, burst into the room. He opened the casement. The night was +fresh, bright, and very still. Just before the window was a row of +pollard trees, looking black on one side and with a silvery light on +the other. Beneath the trees grewsome kind of lush, wet, bushy +vegetation with silver-lit leaves and stems here and there. Farther +back beyond the dark trees a roof glittered with dew, to the right was +a leafy tree with brilliantly white trunk and branches, and above it +shone the moon, nearly at its full, in a pale, almost starless, spring +sky. Prince Andrew leaned his elbows on the window ledge and his +eyes rested on that sky. + +His room was on the first floor. Those in the rooms above were +also awake. He heard female voices overhead. + +"Just once more," said a girlish voice above him which Prince Andrew +recognized at once. + +"But when are you coming to bed?" replied another voice. + +"I won't, I can't sleep, what's the use? Come now for the last +time." + +Two girlish voices sang a musical passage- the end of some song. + +"Oh, how lovely! Now go to sleep, and there's an end of it." + +"You go to sleep, but I can't," said the first voice, coming +nearer to the window. She was evidently leaning right out, for the +rustle of her dress and even her breathing could be heard. +Everything was stone-still, like the moon and its light and the +shadows. Prince Andrew, too, dared not stir, for fear of betraying his +unintentional presence. + +"Sonya! Sonya!" he again heard the first speaker. "Oh, how can you +sleep? Only look how glorious it is! Ah, how glorious! Do wake up, +Sonya!" she said almost with tears in her voice. "There never, never +was such a lovely night before!" + +Sonya made some reluctant reply. + +"Do just come and see what a moon!... Oh, how lovely! Come +here.... Darling, sweetheart, come here! There, you see? I feel like +sitting down on my heels, putting my arms round my knees like this, +straining tight, as tight as possible, and flying away! Like this...." + +"Take care, you'll fall out." + +He heard the sound of a scuffle and Sonya's disapproving voice: +"It's past one o'clock." + +"Oh, you only spoil things for me. All right, go, go!" + +Again all was silent, but Prince Andrew knew she was still sitting +there. From time to time he heard a soft rustle and at times a sigh. + +"O God, O God! What does it mean?" she suddenly exclaimed. "To bed +then, if it must be!" and she slammed the casement. + +"For her I might as well not exist!" thought Prince Andrew while +he listened to her voice, for some reason expecting yet fearing that +she might say something about him. "There she is again! As if it +were on purpose," thought he. + +In his soul there suddenly arose such an unexpected turmoil of +youthful thoughts and hopes, contrary to the whole tenor of his +life, that unable to explain his condition to himself he lay down +and fell asleep at once. + +CHAPTER III + +Next morning, having taken leave of no one but the count, and not +waiting for the ladies to appear, Prince Andrew set off for home. + +It was already the beginning of June when on his return journey he +drove into the birch forest where the gnarled old oak had made so +strange and memorable an impression on him. In the forest the +harness bells sounded yet more muffled than they had done six weeks +before, for now all was thick, shady, and dense, and the young firs +dotted about in the forest did not jar on the general beauty but, +lending themselves to the mood around, were delicately green with +fluffy young shoots. + +The whole day had been hot. Somewhere a storm was gathering, but +only a small cloud had scattered some raindrops lightly, sprinkling +the road and the sappy leaves. The left side of the forest was dark in +the shade, the right side glittered in the sunlight, wet and shiny and +scarcely swayed by the breeze. Everything was in blossom, the +nightingales trilled, and their voices reverberated now near, now +far away. + +"Yes, here in this forest was that oak with which I agreed," thought +Prince Andrew. "But where is it?" he again wondered, gazing at the +left side of the road, and without recognizing it he looked with +admiration at the very oak he sought. The old oak, quite transfigured, +spreading out a canopy of sappy dark-green foliage, stood rapt and +slightly trembling in the rays of the evening sun. Neither gnarled +fingers nor old scars nor old doubts and sorrows were any of them in +evidence now. Through the hard century-old bark, even where there were +no twigs, leaves had sprouted such as one could hardly believe the old +veteran could have produced. + +"Yes, it is the same oak," thought Prince Andrew, and all at once he +was seized by an unreasoning springtime feeling of joy and renewal. +All the best moments of his life suddenly rose to his memory. +Austerlitz with the lofty heavens, his wife's dead reproachful face, +Pierre at the ferry, that girl thrilled by the beauty of the night, +and that night itself and the moon, and.... all this rushed suddenly +to his mind. + +"No, life is not over at thirty-one!" Prince Andrew suddenly decided +finally and decisively. "It is not enough for me to know what I have +in me- everyone must know it: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted +to fly away into the sky, everyone must know me, so that my life may +not be lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, +but so that it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live +in harmony!" + +On reaching home Prince Andrew decided to go to Petersburg that +autumn and found all sorts of reasons for this decision. A whole +serics of sensible and logical considerations showing it to be +essential for him to go to Petersburg, and even to re-enter the +service, kept springing up in his mind. He could not now understand +how he could ever even have doubted the necessity of taking an +active share in life, just as a month before he had not understood how +the idea of leaving the quiet country could ever enter his head. It +now seemed clear to him that all his experience of life must be +senselessly wasted unless he applied it to some kind of work and again +played an active part in life. He did not even remember how +formerly, on the strength of similar wretched logical arguments, it +had seemed obvious that he would be degrading himself if he now, after +the lessons he had had in life, allowed himself to believe in the +possibility of being useful and in the possibility of happiness or +love. Now reason suggested quite the opposite. After that journey to +Ryazan he found the country dull; his former pursuits no longer +interested him, and often when sitting alone in his study he got up, +went to the mirror, and gazed a long time at his own face. Then he +would turn away to the portrait of his dead Lise, who with hair curled +a la grecque looked tenderly and gaily at him out of the gilt frame. +She did not now say those former terrible words to him, but looked +simply, merrily, and inquisitively at him. And Prince Andrew, crossing +his arms behind him, long paced the room, now frowning, now smiling, +as he reflected on those irrational, inexpressible thoughts, secret as +a crime, which altered his whole life and were connected with +Pierre, with fame, with the girl at the window, the oak, and woman's +beauty and love. And if anyone came into his room at such moments he +was particularly cold, stern, and above all unpleasantly logical. + +"My dear," Princess Mary entering at such a moment would say, +"little Nicholas can't go out today, it's very cold." + +"If it were hot," Prince Andrew would reply at such times very dryly +to his sister, "he could go out in his smock, but as it is cold he +must wear warm clothes, which were designed for that purpose. That +is what follows from the fact that it is cold; and not that a child +who needs fresh air should remain at home," he would add with +extreme logic, as if punishing someone for those secret illogical +emotions that stirred within him. + +At such moments Princess Mary would think how intellectual work +dries men up. + +CHAPTER IV + +Prince Andrew arrived in Petersburg in August, 1809. It was the time +when the youthful Speranski was at the zenith of his fame and his +reforms were being pushed forward with the greatest energy. That +same August the Emperor was thrown from his caleche, injured his +leg, and remained three weeks at Peterhof, receiving Speranski every +day and no one else. At that time the two famous decrees were being +prepared that so agitated society- abolishing court ranks and +introducing examinations to qualify for the grades of Collegiate +Assessor and State Councilor- and not merely these but a whole state +constitution, intended to change the existing order of government in +Russia: legal, administrative, and financial, from the Council of +State down to the district tribunals. Now those vague liberal dreams +with which the Emperor Alexander had ascended the throne, and which he +had tried to put into effect with the aid of his associates, +Czartoryski, Novosiltsev, Kochubey, and Strogonov- whom he himself +in jest had called his Comite de salut public- were taking shape and +being realized. + +Now all these men were replaced by Speranski on the civil side, +and Arakcheev on the military. Soon after his arrival Prince Andrew, +as a gentleman of the chamber, presented himself at court and at a +levee. The Emperor, though he met him twice, did not favor him with +a single word. It had always seemed to Prince Andrew before that he +was antipathetic to the Emperor and that the latter disliked his +face and personality generally, and in the cold, repellent glance +the Emperor gave him, he now found further confirmation of this +surmise. The courtiers explained the Emperor's neglect of him by His +Majesty's displeasure at Bolkonski's not having served since 1805. + +"I know myself that one cannot help one's sympathies and +antipathies," thought Prince Andrew, "so it will not do to present +my proposal for the reform of the army regulations to the Emperor +personally, but the project will speak for itself." + +He mentioned what he had written to an old field marshal, a friend +of his father's. The field marshal made an appointment to see him, +received him graciously, and promised to inform the Emperor. A few +days later Prince Andrew received notice that he was to go to see +the Minister of War, Count Arakcheev. + +On the appointed day Prince Andrew entered Count Arakcheev's waiting +room at nine in the morning. + +He did not know Arakcheev personally, had never seen him, and all he +had heard of him inspired him with but little respect for the man. + +"He is Minister of War, a man trusted by the Emperor, and I need not +concern myself about his personal qualities: he has been +commissioned to consider my project, so he alone can get it +adopted," thought Prince Andrew as he waited among a number of +important and unimportant people in Count Arakcheev's waiting room. + +During his service, chiefly as an adjutant, Prince Andrew had seen +the anterooms of many important men, and the different types of such +rooms were well known to him. Count Arakcheev's anteroom had quite a +special character. The faces of the unimportant people awaiting +their turn for an audience showed embarrassment and servility; the +faces of those of higher rank expressed a common feeling of +awkwardness, covered by a mask of unconcern and ridicule of +themselves, their situation, and the person for whom they were +waiting. Some walked thoughtfully up and down, others whispered and +laughed. Prince Andrew heard the nickname "Sila Andreevich" and the +words, "Uncle will give it to us hot," in reference to Count +Arakcheev. One general (an important personage), evidently feeling +offended at having to wait so long, sat crossing and uncrossing his +legs and smiling contemptuously to himself. + +But the moment the door opened one feeling alone appeared on all +faces- that of fear. Prince Andrew for the second time asked the +adjutant on duty to take in his name, but received an ironical look +and was told that his turn would come in due course. After some others +had been shown in and out of the minister's room by the adjutant on +duty, an officer who struck Prince Andrew by his humiliated and +frightened air was admitted at that terrible door. This officer's +audience lasted a long time. Then suddenly the grating sound of a +harsh voice was heard from the other side of the door, and the +officer- with pale face and trembling lips- came out and passed +through the waiting room, clutching his head. + +After this Prince Andrew was conducted to the door and the officer +on duty said in a whisper, "To the right, at the window." + +Prince Andrew entered a plain tidy room and saw at the table a man +of forty with a long waist, a long closely cropped head, deep +wrinkles, scowling brows above dull greenish-hazel eyes and an +overhanging red nose. Arakcheev turned his head toward him without +looking at him. + +"What is your petition?" asked Arakcheev. + +"I am not petitioning, your excellency," returned Prince Andrew +quietly. + +Arakcheev's eyes turned toward him. + +"Sit down," said he. "Prince Bolkonski?" + +"I am not petitioning about anything. His Majesty the Emperor has +deigned to send your excellency a project submitted by me..." + +"You see, my dear sir, I have read your project," interrupted +Arakcheev, uttering only the first words amiably and then- again +without looking at Prince Andrew- relapsing gradually into a tone of +grumbling contempt. "You are proposing new military laws? There are +many laws but no one to carry out the old ones. Nowadays everybody +designs laws, it is easier writing than doing." + +"I came at His Majesty the Emperor's wish to learn from your +excellency how you propose to deal with the memorandum I have +presented," said Prince Andrew politely. + +"I have endorsed a resolution on your memorandum and sent it to +the committee. I do not approve of it," said Arakcheev, rising and +taking a paper from his writing table. "Here!" and he handed it to +Prince Andrew. + +Across the paper was scrawled in pencil, without capital letters, +misspelled, and without punctuation: "Unsoundly constructed because +resembles an imitation of the French military code and from the +Articles of War needlessly deviating." + +"To what committee has the memorandum been referred?" inquired +Prince Andrew. + +"To the Committee on Army Regulations, and I have recommended that +your honor should be appointed a member, but without a salary." + +Prince Andrew smiled. + +"I don't want one." + +"A member without salary," repeated Arakcheev. "I have the +honor... Eh! Call the next one! Who else is there?" he shouted, bowing +to Prince Andrew. + +CHAPTER V + +While waiting for the announcement of his appointment to the +committee Prince Andrew looked up his former acquaintances, +particularly those he knew to be in power and whose aid he might need. +In Petersburg he now experienced the same feeling he had had on the +eve of a battle, when troubled by anxious curiosity and irresistibly +attracted to the ruling circles where the future, on which the fate of +millions depended, was being shaped. From the irritation of the +older men, the curiosity of the uninitiated. the reserve of the +initiated, the hurry and preoccupation of everyone, and the +innumerable committees and commissions of whose existence he learned +every day, he felt that now, in 1809, here in Petersburg a vast +civil conflict was in preparation, the commander in chief of which was +a mysterious person he did not know, but who was supposed to be a +man of genius- Speranski. And this movement of reconstruction of which +Prince Andrew had a vague idea, and Speranski its chief promoter, +began to interest him so keenly that the question of the army +regulations quickly receded to a secondary place in his consciousness. + +Prince Andrew was most favorably placed to secure good reception +in the highest and most diverse Petersburg circles of the day. The +reforming party cordially welcomed and courted him, the first place +because he was reputed to be clever and very well read, and secondly +because by liberating his serfs he had obtained the reputation of +being a liberal. The party of the old and dissatisfied, who censured +the innovations, turned to him expecting his sympathy in their +disapproval of the reforms, simply because he was the son of his +father. The feminine society world welcomed him gladly, because he was +rich, distinguished, a good match, and almost a newcomer, with a +halo of romance on account of his supposed death and the tragic loss +of his wife. Besides this the general opinion of all who had known him +previously was that he had greatly improved during these last five +years, having softened and grown more manly, lost his former +affectation, pride, and contemptuous irony, and acquired the +serenity that comes with years. People talked about him, were +interested in him, and wanted to meet him. + +The day after his interview with Count Arakcheev, Prince Andrew +spent the evening at Count Kochubey's. He told the count of his +interview with Sila Andreevich (Kochubey spoke of Arakcheev by that +nickname with the same vague irony Prince Andrew had noticed in the +Minister of War's anteroom). + +"Mon cher, even in this case you can't do without Michael +Mikhaylovich Speranski. He manages everything. I'll speak to him. He +has promised to come this evening." + +"What has Speranski to do with the army regulations?" asked Prince +Andrew. + +Kochubey shook his head smilingly, as if surprised at Bolkonski's +simplicity. + +"We were talking to him about you a few days ago," Kochubey +continued, "and about your freed plowmen." + +"Oh, is it you, Prince, who have freed your serfs?" said an old +man of Catherine's day, turning contemptuously toward Bolkonski. + +"It was a small estate that brought in no profit," replied Prince +Andrew, trying to extenuate his action so as not to irritate the old +man uselessly. + +"Afraid of being late..." said the old man, looking at Kochubey. + +"There's one thing I don't understand," he continued. "Who will plow +the land if they are set free? It is easy to write laws, but difficult +to rule.... Just the same as now- I ask you, Count- who will be +heads of the departments when everybody has to pass examinations?" + +"Those who pass the examinations, I suppose," replied Kochubey, +crossing his legs and glancing round. + +"Well, I have Pryanichnikov serving under me, a splendid man, a +priceless man, but he's sixty. Is he to go up for examination?" + +"Yes, that's a difficulty, as education is not at all general, +but..." + +Count Kochubey did not finish. He rose, took Prince Andrew by the +arm, and went to meet a tall, bald, fair man of about forty with a +large open forehead and a long face of unusual and peculiar whiteness, +who was just entering. The newcomer wore a blue swallow-tail coat with +a cross suspended from his neck and a star on his left breast. It +was Speranski. Prince Andrew recognized him at once, and felt a +throb within him, as happens at critical moments of life. Whether it +was from respect, envy, or anticipation, he did not know. +Speranski's whole figure was of a peculiar type that made him easily +recognizable. In the society in which Prince Andrew lived he had never +seen anyone who together with awkward and clumsy gestures possessed +such calmness and self-assurance; he had never seen so resolute yet +gentle an expression as that in those half-closed, rather humid +eyes, or so firm a smile that expressed nothing; nor had he heard such +a refined, smooth, soft voice; above all he had never seen such +delicate whiteness of face or hands- hands which were broad, but +very plump, soft, and white. Such whiteness and softness Prince Andrew +had only seen on the faces of soldiers who had been long in +hospital. This was Speranski, Secretary of State, reporter to the +Emperor and his companion at Erfurt, where he had more than once met +and talked with Napoleon. + +Speranski did not shift his eyes from one face to another as +people involuntarily do on entering a large company and was in no +hurry to speak. He spoke slowly, with assurance that he would be +listened to, and he looked only at the person with whom he was +conversing. + +Prince Andrew followed Speranski's every word and movement with +particular attention. As happens to some people, especially to men who +judge those near to them severely, he always on meeting anyone new- +especially anyone whom, like Speranski, he knew by reputation- +expected to discover in him the perfection of human qualities. + +Speranski told Kochubey he was sorry he had been unable to come +sooner as he had been detained at the palace. He did not say that +the Emperor had kept him, and Prince Andrew noticed this affectation +of modesty. When Kochubey introduced Prince Andrew, Speranski slowly +turned his eyes to Bolkonski with his customary smile and looked at +him in silence. + +"I am very glad to make your acquaintance. I had heard of you, as +everyone has," he said after a pause. + +Kochubey said a few words about the reception Arakcheev had given +Bolkonski. Speranski smiled more markedly. + +"The chairman of the Committee on Army Regulations is my good friend +Monsieur Magnitski," he said, fully articulating every word and +syllable, "and if you like I can put you in touch with him." He paused +at the full stop. "I hope you will find him sympathetic and ready to +co-operate in promoting all that is reasonable." + +A circle soon formed round Speranski, and the old man who had talked +about his subordinate Pryanichnikov addressed a question to him. + +Prince Andrew without joining in the conversation watched every +movement of Speranski's: this man, not long since an insignificant +divinity student, who now, Bolkonski thought, held in his hands- those +plump white hands- the fate of Russia. Prince Andrew was struck by the +extraordinarily disdainful composure with which Speranski answered the +old man. He appeared to address condescending words to him from an +immeasurable height. When the old man began to speak too loud, +Speranski smiled and said he could not judge of the advantage or +disadvantage of what pleased the sovereign. + +Having talked for a little while in the general circle, Speranski +rose and coming up to Prince Andrew took him along to the other end of +the room. It was clear that he thought it necessary to interest +himself in Bolkonski. + +"I had no chance to talk with you, Prince, during the animated +conversation in which that venerable gentleman involved me," he said +with a mildly contemptuous smile, as if intimating by that smile +that he and Prince Andrew understood the insignificance of the +people with whom he had just been talking. This flattered Prince +Andrew. "I have known of you for a long time: first from your action +with regard to your serfs, a first example, of which it is very +desirable that there should be more imitators; and secondly because +you are one of those gentlemen of the chamber who have not +considered themselves offended by the new decree concerning the +ranks allotted to courtiers, which is causing so much gossip and +tittle-tattle." + +"No," said Prince Andrew, "my father did not wish me to take +advantage of the privilege. I began the service from the lower grade." + +"Your father, a man of the last century, evidently stands above +our contemporaries who so condemn this measure which merely +reestablishes natural justice." + +"I think, however, that these condemnations have some ground," +returned Prince Andrew, trying to resist Speranski's influence, of +which he began to be conscious. He did not like to agree with him in +everything and felt a wish to contradict. Though he usually spoke +easily and well, he felt a difficulty in expressing himself now +while talking with Speranski. He was too much absorbed in observing +the famous man's personality. + +"Grounds of personal ambition maybe," Speranski put in quietly. + +"And of state interest to some extent," said Prince Andrew. + +"What do you mean?" asked Speranski quietly, lowering his eyes. + +"I am an admirer of Montesquieu," replied Prince Andrew, "and his +idea that le principe des monarchies est l'honneur me parait +incontestable. Certains droits et privileges de la noblesse me +paraissent etre des moyens de soutenir ce sentiment."~^ + +^~ "The principle of monarchies is honor seems to me incontestable. +Certain rights and privileges for the aristocracy appear to me a means +of maintaining that sentiment." + +The smile vanished from Speranski's white face, which was much +improved by the change. Probably Prince Andrew's thought interested +him. + +"Si vous envisagez la question sous ce point de vue,"~^ he began, +pronouncing French with evident difficulty, and speaking even slower +than in Russian but quite calmly. + +^~ "If you regard the question from that point of view." + +Speranski went on to say that honor, l'honeur, cannot be upheld by +privileges harmful to the service; that honor, l'honneur, is either +a negative concept of not doing what is blameworthy or it is a +source of emulation in pursuit of commendation and rewards, which +recognize it. His arguments were concise, simple, and clear. + +"An institution upholding honor, the source of emulation, is one +similar to the Legion d'honneur of the great Emperor Napoleon, not +harmful but helpful to the success of the service, but not a class +or court privilege." + +"I do not dispute that, but it cannot be denied that court +privileges have attained the same end," returned Prince Andrew. "Every +courtier considers himself bound to maintain his position worthily." + +"Yet you do not care to avail yourself of the privilege, Prince," +said Speranski, indicating by a smile that he wished to finish amiably +an argument which was embarrassing for his companion. "If you will + +do me the honor of calling on me on Wednesday," he added, "I will, +after talking with Magnitski, let you know what may interest you, +and shall also have the pleasure of a more detailed chat with you." + +Closing his eyes, he bowed a la francaise, without taking leave, and +trying to attract as little attention as possible, he left the room. + +CHAPTER VI + +During the first weeks of his stay in Petersburg Prince Andrew +felt the whole trend of thought he had formed during his life of +seclusion quite overshadowed by the trifling cares that engrossed +him in that city. + +On returning home in the evening he would jot down in his notebook +four or five necessary calls or appointments for certain hours. The +mechanism of life, the arrangement of the day so as to be in time +everywhere, absorbed the greater part of his vital energy. He did +nothing, did not even think or find time to think, but only talked, +and talked successfully, of what he had thought while in the country. + +He sometimes noticed with dissatisfaction that he repeated the +same remark on the same day in different circles. But he was so busy +for whole days together that he had no time to notice that he was +thinking of nothing. + +As he had done on their first meeting at Kochubey's, Speranski +produced a strong impression on Prince Andrew on the Wednesday, when +he received him tete-a-tate at his own house and talked to him long +and confidentially. + +To Bolkonski so many people appeared contemptible and +insignificant creatures, and he so longed to find in someone the +living ideal of that perfection toward which he strove, that he +readily believed that in Speranski he had found this ideal of a +perfectly rational and virtuous man. Had Speranski sprung from the +same class as himself and possessed the same breeding and +traditions, Bolkonski would soon have discovered his weak, human, +unheroic sides; but as it was, Speranski's strange and logical turn of +mind inspired him with respect all the more because he did not quite +understand him. Moreover, Speranski, either because he appreciated the +other's capacity or because he considered it necessary to win him to +his side, showed off his dispassionate calm reasonableness before +Prince Andrew and flattered him with that subtle flattery which goes +hand in hand with self-assurance and consists in a tacit assumption +that one's companion is the only man besides oneself capable of +understanding the folly of the rest of mankind and the +reasonableness and profundity of one's own ideas. + +During their long conversation on Wednesday evening, Speranski +more than once remarked: "We regard everything that is above the +common level of rooted custom..." or, with a smile: "But we want the +wolves to be fed and the sheep to be safe..." or: "They cannot +understand this..." and all in a way that seemed to say: "We, you +and I, understand what they are and who we are." + +This first long conversation with Speranski only strengthened in +Prince Andrew the feeling he had experienced toward him at their first +meeting. He saw in him a remarkable, clear-thinking man of vast +intellect who by his energy and persistence had attained power, +which he was using solely for the welfare of Russia. In Prince +Andrew's eyes Speranski was the man he would himself have wished to +be- one who explained all the facts of life reasonably, considered +important only what was rational, and was capable of applying the +standard of reason to everything. Everything seemed so simple and +clear in Speranski's exposition that Prince Andrew involuntarily +agreed with him about everything. If he replied and argued, it was +only because he wished to maintain his independence and not submit +to Speranski's opinions entirely. Everything was right and +everything was as it should be: only one thing disconcerted Prince +Andrew. This was Speranski's cold, mirrorlike look, which did not +allow one to penetrate to his soul, and his delicate white hands, +which Prince Andrew involuntarily watched as one does watch the +hands of those who possess power. This mirrorlike gaze and those +delicate hands irritated Prince Andrew, he knew not why. He was +unpleasantly struck, too, by the excessive contempt for others that he +observed in Speranski, and by the diversity of lines of argument he +used to support his opinions. He made use of every kind of mental +device, except analogy, and passed too boldly, it seemed to Prince +Andrew, from one to another. Now he would take up the position of a +practical man and condemn dreamers; now that of a satirist, and +laugh ironically at his opponents; now grow severely logical, or +suddenly rise to the realm of metaphysics. (This last resource was one +he very frequently employed.) He would transfer a question to +metaphysical heights, pass on to definitions of space, time, and +thought, and, having deduced the refutation he needed, would again +descend to the level of the original discussion. + +In general the trait of Speranski's mentality which struck Prince +Andrew most was his absolute and unshakable belief in the power and +authority of reason. It was evident that the thought could never occur +to him which to Prince Andrew seemed so natural, namely, that it is +after all impossible to express all one thinks; and that he had +never felt the doubt, "Is not all I think and believe nonsense?" And +it was just this peculiarity of Speranski's mind that particularly +attracted Prince Andrew. + +During the first period of their acquaintance Bolkonski felt a +passionate admiration for him similar to that which he had once felt +for Bonaparte. The fact that Speranski was the son of a village +priest, and that stupid people might meanly despise him on account +of his humble origin (as in fact many did), caused Prince Andrew to +cherish his sentiment for him the more, and unconsciously to +strengthen it. + +On that first evening Bolkonski spent with him, having mentioned the +Commission for the Revision of the Code of Laws, Speranski told him +sarcastically that the Commission had existed for a hundred and +fifty years, had cost millions, and had done nothing except that +Rosenkampf had stuck labels on the corresponding paragraphs of the +different codes. + +"And that is all the state has for the millions it has spent," +said he. "We want to give the Senate new juridical powers, but we have +no laws. That is why it is a sin for men like you, Prince, not to +serve in these times!" + +Prince Andrew said that for that work an education in +jurisprudence was needed which he did not possess. + +"But nobody possesses it, so what would you have? It is a vicious +circle from which we must break a way out." + +A week later Prince Andrew was a member of the Committee on Army +Regulations and- what he had not at all expected- was chairman of a +section of the committee for the revision of the laws. At +Speranski's request he took the first part of the Civil Code that +was being drawn up and, with the aid of the Code Napoleon and the +Institutes of Justinian, he worked at formulating the section on +Personal Rights. + +CHAPTER VII + +Nearly two years before this, in 1808, Pierre on returning to +Petersburg after visiting his estates had involuntarily found +himself in a leading position among the Petersburg Freemasons. He +arranged dining and funeral lodge meetings, enrolled new members, +and busied himself uniting various lodges and acquiring authentic +charters. He gave money for the erection of temples and supplemented +as far as he could the collection of alms, in regard to which the +majority of members were stingy and irregular. He supported almost +singlehanded a poorhouse the order had founded in Petersburg. + +His life meanwhile continued as before, with the same infatuations +and dissipations. He liked to dine and drink well, and though he +considered it immoral and humiliating could not resist the temptations +of the bachelor circles in which he moved. + +Amid the turmoil of his activities and distractions, however, Pierre +at the end of a year began to feel that the more firmly he tried to +rest upon it, the more Masonic ground on which he stood gave way under +him. At the same time he felt that the deeper the ground sank under +him the closer bound he involuntarily became to the order. When he had +joined the Freemasons he had experienced the feeling of one who +confidently steps onto the smooth surface of a bog. When he put his +foot down it sank in. To make quite sure of the firmness the ground, +he put his other foot down and sank deeper still, became stuck in +it, and involuntarily waded knee-deep in the bog. + +Joseph Alexeevich was not in Petersburg- he had of late stood +aside from the affairs of the Petersburg lodges, and lived almost +entirely in Moscow. All the members of the lodges were men Pierre knew +in ordinary life, and it was difficult for him to regard them merely +as Brothers in Freemasonry and not as Prince B. or Ivan Vasilevich D., +whom he knew in society mostly as weak and insignificant men. Under +the Masonic aprons and insignia he saw the uniforms and decorations at +which they aimed in ordinary life. Often after collecting alms, and +reckoning up twenty to thirty rubles received for the most part in +promises from a dozen members, of whom half were as well able to pay +as himself, Pierre remembered the Masonic vow in which each Brother +promised to devote all his belongings to his neighbor, and doubts on +which he tried not to dwell arose in his soul. + +He divided the Brothers he knew into four categories. In the first +he put those who did not take an active part in the affairs of the +lodges or in human affairs, but were exclusively occupied with the +mystical science of the order: with questions of the threefold +designation of God, the three primordial elements- sulphur, mercury, +and salt- or the meaning of the square and all the various figures +of the temple of Solomon. Pierre respected this class of Brothers to +which the elder ones chiefly belonged, including, Pierre thought, +Joseph Alexeevich himself, but he did not share their interests. His +heart was not in the mystical aspect of Freemasonry. + +In the second category Pierre reckoned himself and others like +him, seeking and vacillating, who had not yet found in Freemasonry a +straight and comprehensible path, but hoped to do so. + +In the third category he included those Brothers (the majority) +who saw nothing in Freemasonry but the external forms and +ceremonies, and prized the strict performance of these forms without +troubling about their purport or significance. Such were Willarski and +even the Grand Master of the principal lodge. + +Finally, to the fourth category also a great many Brothers belonged, +particularly those who had lately joined. These according to +Pierre's observations were men who had no belief in anything, nor +desire for anything, but joined the Freemasons merely to associate +with the wealthy young Brothers who were influential through their +connections or rank, and of whom there were very many in the lodge. + +Pierre began to feel dissatisfied with what he was doing. +Freemasonry, at any rate as he saw it here, sometimes seemed to him +based merely on externals. He did not think of doubting Freemasonry +itself, but suspected that Russian Masonry had taken a wrong path +and deviated from its original principles. And so toward the end of +the year he went abroad to be initiated into the higher secrets of the +order. + +In the summer of 1809 Pierre returned to Petersburg. Our +Freemasons knew from correspondence with those abroad that Bezukhov +had obtained the confidence of many highly placed persons, had been +initiated into many mysteries, had been raised to a higher grade, +and was bringing back with him much that might conduce to the +advantage of the Masonic cause in Russia. The Petersburg Freemasons +all came to see him, tried to ingratiate themselves with him, and it +seemed to them all that he was preparing something for them and +concealing it. + +A solemn meeting of the lodge of the second degree was convened, +at which Pierre promised to communicate to the Petersburg Brothers +what he had to deliver to them from the highest leaders of their +order. The meeting was a full one. After the usual ceremonies Pierre +rose and began his address. + +"Dear Brothers," he began, blushing and stammering, with a written +speech in his hand, "it is not sufficient to observe our mysteries +in the seclusion of our lodge- we must act- act! We are drowsing, +but we must act." Pierre raised his notebook and began to read. + +"For the dissemination of pure truth and to secure the triumph of +virtue," he read, "we must cleanse men from prejudice, diffuse +principles in harmony with the spirit of the times, undertake the +education of the young, unite ourselves in indissoluble bonds with the +wisest men, boldly yet prudently overcome superstitions, infidelity, +and folly, and form of those devoted to us a body linked together by +unity of purpose and possessed of authority and power. + +"To attain this end we must secure a preponderance of virtue over +vice and must endeavor to secure that the honest man may, even in this +world, receive a lasting reward for his virtue. But in these great +endeavors we are gravely hampered by the political institutions of +today. What is to be done in these circumstances? To favor +revolutions, overthrow everything, repel force by force?... No! We are +very far from that. Every violent reform deserves censure, for it +quite fails to remedy evil while men remain what they are, and also +because wisdom needs no violence. + +"The whole plan of our order should be based on the idea of +preparing men of firmness and virtue bound together by unity of +conviction- aiming at the punishment of vice and folly, and +patronizing talent and virtue: raising worthy men from the dust and +attaching them to our Brotherhood. Only then will our order have the +power unobtrusively to bind the hands of the protectors of disorder +and to control them without their being aware of it. In a word, we +must found a form of government holding universal sway, which should +be diffused over the whole world without destroying the bonds of +citizenship, and beside which all other governments can continue in +their customary course and do everything except what impedes the great +aim of our order, which is to obtain for virtue the victory over vice. +This aim was that of Christianity itself. It taught men to be wise and +good and for their own benefit to follow the example and instruction +of the best and wisest men. + +"At that time, when everything was plunged in darkness, preaching +alone was of course sufficient. The novelty of Truth endowed her +with special strength, but now we need much more powerful methods. +It is now necessary that man, governed by his senses, should find in +virtue a charm palpable to those senses. It is impossible to eradicate +the passions; but we must strive to direct them to a noble aim, and it +is therefore necessary that everyone should be able to satisfy his +passions within the limits of virtue. Our order should provide means +to that end. + +"As soon as we have a certain number of worthy men in every state, +each of them again training two others and all being closely united, +everything will be possible for our order, which has already in secret +accomplished much for the welfare of mankind." + +This speech not only made a strong impression, but created +excitement in the lodge. The majority of the Brothers, seeing in it +dangerous designs of Illuminism,~^ met it with a coldness that +surprised Pierre. The Grand Master began answering him, and Pierre +began developing his views with more and more warmth. It was long +since there had been so stormy a meeting. Parties were formed, some +accusing Pierre of Illuminism, others supporting him. At that +meeting he was struck for the first time by the endless variety of +men's minds, which prevents a truth from ever presenting itself +identically to two persons. Even those members who seemed to be on his +side understood him in their own way with limitations and +alterations he could not agree to, as what he always wanted most was +to convey his thought to others just as he himself understood it. + +^~ The Illuminati sought to substitute republican for monarchical +institutions. + +At the end of the meeting the Grand Master with irony and ill-will +reproved Bezukhov for his vehemence and said it was not love of virtue +alone, but also a love of strife that had moved him in the dispute. +Pierre did not answer him and asked briefly whether his proposal would +be accepted. He was told that it would not, and without waiting for +the usual formalities he left the lodge and went home. + +CHAPTER VIII + +Again Pierre was overtaken by the depression he so dreaded. For +three days after the delivery of his speech at the lodge he lay on a +sofa at home receiving no one and going nowhere. + +It was just then that he received a letter from his wife, who +implored him to see her, telling him how grieved she was about him and +how she wished to devote her whole life to him. + +At the end of the letter she informed him that in a few days she +would return to Petersburg from abroad. + +Following this letter one of the Masonic Brothers whom Pierre +respected less than the others forced his way in to see him and, +turning the conversation upon Pierre's matrimonial affairs, by way +of fraternal advice expressed the opinion that his severity to his +wife was wrong and that he was neglecting one of the first rules of +Freemasonry by not forgiving the penitent. + +At the same time his mother-in-law, Prince Vasili's wife, sent to +him imploring him to come if only for a few minutes to discuss a +most important matter. Pierre saw that there was a conspiracy +against him and that they wanted to reunite him with his wife, and +in the mood he then was, this was not even unpleasant to him. +Nothing mattered to him. Nothing in life seemed to him of much +importance, and under the influence of the depression that possessed +him he valued neither his liberty nor his resolution to punish his +wife. + +"No one is right and no one is to blame; so she too is not to +blame," he thought. + +If he did not at once give his consent to a reunion with his wife, +it was only because in his state of depression he did not feel able to +take any step. Had his wife come to him, he would not have turned +her away. Compared to what preoccupied him, was it not a matter of +indifference whether he lived with his wife or not? + +Without replying either to his wife or his mother-in-law, Pierre +late one night prepared for a journey and started for Moscow to see +Joseph Alexeevich. This is what he noted in his diary: + +Moscow, 17th November + +I have just returned from my benefactor, and hasten to write down +what I have experienced. Joseph Alexeevich is living poorly and has +for three years been suffering from a painful disease of the +bladder. No one has ever heard him utter a groan or a word of +complaint. From morning till late at night, except when he eats his +very plain food, he is working at science. He received me graciously +and made me sit down on the bed on which he lay. I made the sign of +the Knights of the East and of Jerusalem, and he responded in the same +manner, asking me with a mild smile what I had learned and gained in +the Prussian and Scottish lodges. I told him everything as best I +could, and told him what I had proposed to our Petersburg lodge, of +the bad reception I had encountered, and of my rupture with the +Brothers. Joseph Alexeevich, having remained silent and thoughtful for +a good while, told me his view of the matter, which at once lit up for +me my whole past and the future path I should follow. He surprised +me by asking whether I remembered the threefold aim of the order: +(1) The preservation and study of the mystery. (2) The purification +and reformation of oneself for its reception, and (3) The +improvement of the human race by striving for such purification. Which +is the principal aim of these three? Certainly self-reformation and +self-purification. Only to this aim can we always strive independently +of circumstances. But at the same time just this aim demands the +greatest efforts of us; and so, led astray by pride, losing sight of +this aim, we occupy ourselves either with the mystery which in our +impurity we are unworthy to receive, or seek the reformation of the +human race while ourselves setting an example of baseness and +profligacy. Illuminism is not a pure doctrine, just because it is +attracted by social activity and puffed up by pride. On this ground +Joseph Alexeevich condemned my speech and my whole activity, and in +the depth of my soul I agreed with him. Talking of my family affairs +he said to me, "the chief duty of a true Mason, as I have told you, +lies in perfecting himself. We often think that by removing all the +difficulties of our life we shall more quickly reach our aim, but on +the contrary, my dear sir, it is only in the midst of worldly cares +that we can attain our three chief aims: (1) Self-knowledge- for man +can only know himself by comparison, (2) Self-perfecting, which can +only be attained by conflict, and (3) The attainment of the chief +virtue- love of death. Only the vicissitudes of life can show us its +vanity and develop our innate love of death or of rebirth to a new +life." These words are all the more remarkable because, in spite of +his great physical sufferings, Joseph Alexeevich is never weary of +life though he loves death, for which- in spite of the purity and +loftiness of his inner man- he does not yet feel himself +sufficiently prepared. My benefactor then explained to me fully the +meaning of the Great Square of creation and pointed out to me that the +numbers three and seven are the basis of everything. He advised me not +to avoid intercourse with the Petersburg Brothers, but to take up only +second-grade posts in the lodge, to try, while diverting the +Brothers from pride, to turn them toward the true path +self-knowledge and self-perfecting. Besides this he advised me for +myself personally above all to keep a watch over myself, and to that +end he gave me a notebook, the one I am now writing in and in which +I will in future note down all my actions. + +Petersburg, 23rd November + +I am again living with my wife. My mother-in-law came to me in tears +and said that Helene was here and that she implored me to hear her; +that she was innocent and unhappy at my desertion, and much more. I +knew that if I once let myself see her I should not have strength to +go on refusing what she wanted. In my perplexity I did not know +whose aid and advice to seek. Had my benefactor been here he would +have told me what to do. I went to my room and reread Joseph +Alexeevich's letters and recalled my conversations with him, and +deduced from it all that I ought not to refuse a suppliant, and +ought to reach a helping hand to everyone- especially to one so +closely bound to me- and that I must bear my cross. But if I forgive +her for the sake of doing right, then let union with her have only a +spiritual aim. That is what I decided, and what I wrote to Joseph +Alexeevich. I told my wife that I begged her to forget the past, to +forgive me whatever wrong I may have done her, and that I had +nothing to forgive. It gave me joy to tell her this. She need not know +how hard it was for me to see her again. I have settled on the upper +floor of this big house and am experiencing a happy feeling of +regeneration. + +CHAPTER IX + +At that time, as always happens, the highest society that met at +court and at the grand balls was divided into several circles, each +with its own particular tone. The largest of these was the French +circle of the Napoleonic alliance, the circle of Count Rumyantsev +and Caulaincourt. In this group Helene, as soon as she had settled +in Petersburg with her husband, took a very prominent place. She was +visited by the members of the French embassy and by many belonging +to that circle and noted for their intellect and polished manners. + +Helene had been at Erfurt during the famous meeting of the +Emperors and had brought from there these connections with the +Napoleonic notabilities. At Erfurt her success had been brilliant. +Napoleon himself had noticed her in the theater and said of her: +"C'est un superbe animal."~^ Her success as a beautiful and elegant +woman did not surprise Pierre, for she had become even handsomer +than before. What did surprise him was that during these last two +years his wife had succeeded in gaining the reputation "d' une femme +charmante, aussi spirituelle que belle."~^ The distinguished +Prince de Ligne wrote her eight-page letters. Bilibin saved up his +epigrams to produce them in Countess Bezukhova's presence. To be +received in the Countess Bezukhova's salon was regarded as a diploma +of intellect. Young men read books before attending Helene's evenings, +to have something to say in her salon, and secretaries of the embassy, +and even ambassadors, confided diplomatic secrets to her, so that in a +way Helene was a power. Pierre, who knew she was very stupid, +sometimes attended, with a strange feeling of perplexity and fear, her +evenings and dinner parties, where politics, poetry, and philosophy +were discussed. At these parties his feelings were like those of a +conjuror who always expects his trick to be found out at any moment. +But whether because stupidity was just what was needed to run such a +salon, or because those who were deceived found pleasure in the +deception, at any rate it remained unexposed and Helene Bezukhova's +reputation as a lovely and clever woman became so firmly established +that she could say the emptiest and stupidest things and everybody +would go into raptures over every word of hers and look for a profound +meaning in it of which she herself had no conception. + +^~ "That's a superb animal." + +^~ "Of a charming woman, as witty as she is lovely." + +Pierre was just the husband needed for a brilliant society woman. He +was that absent-minded crank, a grand seigneur husband who was in no +one's way, and far from spoiling the high tone and general +impression of the drawing room, he served, by the contrast he +presented to her, as an advantageous background to his elegant and +tactful wife. Pierre during the last two years, as a result of his +continual absorption in abstract interests and his sincere contempt +for all else, had acquired in his wife's circle, which did not +interest him, that air of unconcern, indifference, and benevolence +toward all, which cannot be acquired artificially and therefore +inspires involuntary respect. He entered his wife's drawing room as +one enters a theater, was acquainted with everybody, equally pleased +to see everyone, and equally indifferent to them all. Sometimes he +joined in a conversation which interested him and, regardless of +whether any "gentlemen of the embassy" were present or not, +lispingly expressed his views, which were sometimes not at all in +accord with the accepted tone of the moment. But the general opinion +concerning the queer husband of "the most distinguished woman in +Petersburg" was so well established that no one took his freaks +seriously. + +Among the many young men who frequented her house every day, Boris +Drubetskoy, who had already achieved great success in the service, was +the most intimate friend of the Bezukhov household since Helene's +return from Erfurt. Helene spoke of him as "mon page" and treated +him like a child. Her smile for him was the same as for everybody, but +sometimes that smile made Pierre uncomfortable. Toward him Boris +behaved with a particularly dignified and sad deference. This shade of +deference also disturbed Pierre. He had suffered so painfully three +years before from the mortification to which his wife had subjected +him that he now protected himself from the danger of its repetition, +first by not being a husband to his wife, and secondly by not allowing +himself to suspect. + +"No, now that she has become a bluestocking she has finally +renounced her former infatuations," he told himself. "There has +never been an instance of a bluestocking being carried away by affairs +of the heart"- a statement which, though gathered from an unknown +source, he believed implicitly. Yet strange to say Boris' presence +in his wife's drawing room (and he was almost always there) had a +physical effect upon Pierre; it constricted his limbs and destroyed +the unconsciousness and freedom of his movements. + +"What a strange antipathy," thought Pierre, "yet I used to like +him very much." + +In the eyes of the world Pierre was a great gentleman, the rather +blind and absurd husband of a distinguished wife, a clever crank who +did nothing but harmed nobody and was a first-rate, good-natured +fellow. But a complex and difficult process of internal development +was taking place all this time in Pierre's soul, revealing much to him +and causing him many spiritual doubts and joys. + +CHAPTER X + +Pierre went on with his diary, and this is what he wrote in it +during that time: + +24th November + +Got up at eight, read the Scriptures, then went to my duties. [By +Joseph Alexeevich's advice Pierre had entered the service of the state +and served on one of the committees.] Returned home for dinner and +dined alone- the countess had many visitors I do not like. I ate and +drank moderately and after dinner copied out some passages for the +Brothers. In the evening I went down to the countess and told a +funny story about B., and only remembered that I ought not to have +done so when everybody laughed loudly at it. + +I am going to bed with a happy and tranquil mind. Great God, help me +to walk in Thy paths, (1) to conquer anger by calmness and +deliberation, (2) to vanquish lust by self-restraint and repulsion, +(3) to withdraw from worldliness, but not avoid (a) the service of the +state, (b) family duties, (c) relations with my friends, and the +management of my affairs. + +27th November + +I got up late. On waking I lay long in bed yielding to sloth. O God, +help and strengthen me that I may walk in Thy ways! Read the +Scriptures, but without proper feeling. Brother Urusov came and we +talked about worldly vanities. He told me of the Emperor's new +projects. I began to criticize them, but remembered my rules and my +benefactor's words- that a true Freemason should be a zealous worker +for the state when his aid is required and a quiet onlooker when not +called on to assist. My tongue is my enemy. Brothers G. V. and O. +visited me and we had a preliminary talk about the reception of a +new Brother. They laid on me the duty of Rhetor. I feel myself weak +and unworthy. Then our talk turned to the interpretation of the +seven pillars and steps of the Temple, the seven sciences, the seven +virtues, the seven vices, and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. +Brother O. was very eloquent. In the evening the admission took place. +The new decoration of the Premises contributed much to the +magnificence of the spectacle. It was Boris Drubetskoy who was +admitted. I nominated him and was the Rhetor. A strange feeling +agitated me all the time I was alone with him in the dark chamber. I +caught myself harboring a feeling of hatred toward him which I +vainly tried to overcome. That is why I should really like to save him +from evil and lead him into the path of truth, but evil thoughts of +him did not leave me. It seemed to me that his object in entering +the Brotherhood was merely to be intimate and in favor with members of +our lodge. Apart from the fact that he had asked me several times +whether N. and S. were members of our lodge (a question to which I +could not reply) and that according to my observation he is +incapable of feeling respect for our holy order and is too preoccupied +and satisfied with the outer man to desire spiritual improvement, I +had no cause to doubt him, but he seemed to me insincere, and all +the time I stood alone with him in the dark temple it seemed to me +that he was smiling contemptuously at my words, and I wished really to +stab his bare breast with the sword I held to it. I could not be +eloquent, nor could I frankly mention my doubts to the Brothers and to +the Grand Master. Great Architect of Nature, help me to find the +true path out of the labyrinth of lies! + +After this, three pages were left blank in the diary, and then +the following was written: + +I have had a long and instructive talk alone with Brother V., who +advised me to hold fast by brother A. Though I am unworthy, much was +revealed to me. Adonai is the name of the creator of the world. Elohim +is the name of the ruler of all. The third name is the name +unutterable which means the All. Talks with Brother V. strengthen, +refresh, and support me in the path of virtue. In his presence doubt +has no place. The distinction between the poor teachings of mundane +science and our sacred all-embracing teaching is clear to me. Human +sciences dissect everything to comprehend it, and kill everything to +examine it. In the holy science of our order all is one, all is +known in its entirety and life. The Trinity- the three elements of +matter- are sulphur, mercury, and salt. Sulphur is of an oily and +fiery nature; in combination with salt by its fiery nature it +arouses a desire in the latter by means of which it attracts +mercury, seizes it, holds it, and in combination produces other +bodies. Mercury is a fluid, volatile, spiritual essence. Christ, the +Holy Spirit, Him!... + +3rd December + +Awoke late, read the Scriptures but was apathetic. Afterwards went +and paced up and down the large hall. I wished to meditate, but +instead my imagination pictured an occurrence of four years ago, +when Dolokhov, meeting me in Moscow after our duel, said he hoped I +was enjoying perfect peace of mind in spite of my wife's absence. At +the time I gave him no answer. Now I recalled every detail of that +meeting and in my mind gave him the most malevolent and bitter +replies. I recollected myself and drove away that thought only when +I found myself glowing with anger, but I did not sufficiently +repent. Afterwards Boris Drubetskoy came and began relating various +adventures. His coming vexed me from the first, and I said something +disagreeable to him. He replied. I flared up and said much that was +unpleasant and even rude to him. He became silent, and I recollected +myself only when it was too late. My God, I cannot get on with him +at all. The cause of this is my egotism. I set myself above him and so +become much worse than he, for he is lenient to my rudeness while I on +the contrary nourish contempt for him. O God, grant that in his +presence I may rather see my own vileness, and behave so that he too +may benefit. After dinner I fell asleep and as I was drowsing off I +clearly heard a voice saying in my left ear, "Thy day!" + +I dreamed that I was walking in the dark and was suddenly surrounded +by dogs, but I went on undismayed. Suddenly a smallish dog seized my +left thigh with its teeth and would not let go. I began to throttle it +with my hands. Scarcely had I torn it off before another, a bigger +one, began biting me. I lifted it up, but the higher I lifted it the +bigger and heavier it grew. And suddenly Brother A. came and, taking +my arm, led me to a building to enter which we had to pass along a +narrow plank. I stepped on it, but it bent and gave way and I began to +clamber up a fence which I could scarcely reach with my hands. After +much effort I dragged myself up, so that my leg hung down on one +side and my body on the other. I looked round and saw Brother A. +standing on the fence and pointing me to a broad avenue and garden, +and in the garden was a large and beautiful building. I woke up. O +Lord, great Architect of Nature, help me to tear from myself these +dogs- my passions especially the last, which unites in itself the +strength of all the former ones, and aid me to enter that temple of +virtue to a vision of which I attained in my dream. + +7th December + +I dreamed that Joseph Alexeevich was sitting in my house, and that I +was very glad and wished to entertain him. It seemed as if I chattered +incessantly with other people and suddenly remembered that this +could not please him, and I wished to come close to him and embrace +him. But as soon as I drew near I saw that his face had changed and +grown young, and he was quietly telling me something about the +teaching of our order, but so softly that I could not hear it. Then it +seemed that we all left the room and something strange happened. We +were sitting or lying on the floor. He was telling me something, and I +wished to show him my sensibility, and not listening to what he was +saying I began picturing to myself the condition of my inner man and +the grace of God sanctifying me. And tears came into my eyes, and I +was glad he noticed this. But be looked at me with vexation and jumped +up, breaking off his remarks. I felt abashed and asked whether what he +had been saying did not concern me; but he did not reply, gave me a +kind look, and then we suddenly found ourselves in my bedroom where +there is a double bed. He lay down on the edge of it and I burned with +longing to caress him and lie down too. And he said, "Tell me +frankly what is your chief temptation? Do you know it? I think you +know it already." Abashed by this question, I replied that sloth was +my chief temptation. He shook his head incredulously; and even more +abashed, I said that though I was living with my wife as he advised, I +was not living with her as her husband. To this he replied that one +should not deprive a wife of one's embraces and gave me to +understand that that was my duty. But I replied that I should be +ashamed to do it, and suddenly everything vanished. And I awoke and +found in my mind the text from the Gospel: "The life was the light +of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness +comprehended it not." Joseph Alexeevich's face had looked young and +bright. That day I received a letter from my benefactor in which he +wrote about "conjugal duties." + +9th December + +I had a dream from which I awoke with a throbbing heart. I saw +that I was in Moscow in my house, in the big sitting room, and +Joseph Alexeevich came in from the drawing room. I seemed to know at +once that the process of regeneration had already taken place in +him, and I rushed to meet him. I embraced him and kissed his hands, +and he said, "Hast thou noticed that my face is different?" I looked +at him, still holding him in my arms, and saw that his face was young, +but that he had no hair on his head and his features were quite +changed. And I said, "I should have known you had I met you by +chance," and I thought to myself, "Am I telling the truth?" And +suddenly I saw him lying like a dead body; then he gradually recovered +and went with me into my study carrying a large book of sheets of +drawing paper; I said, "I drew that," and he answered by bowing his +head. I opened the book, and on all the pages there were excellent +drawings. And in my dream I knew that these drawings represented the +love adventures of the soul with its beloved. And on its pages I saw a +beautiful representation of a maiden in transparent garments and +with a transparent body, flying up to the clouds. And I seemed to know +that this maiden was nothing else than a representation of the Song of +Songs. And looking at those drawings I dreamed I felt that I was doing +wrong, but could not tear myself away from them. Lord, help me! My +God, if Thy forsaking me is Thy doing, Thy will be done; but if I am +myself the cause, teach me what I should do! I shall perish of my +debauchery if Thou utterly desertest me! + +CHAPTER XI + +The Rostovs' monetary affairs had not improved during the two +years they had spent in the country. + +Though Nicholas Rostov had kept firmly to his resolution and was +still serving modestly in an obscure regiment, spending +comparatively little, the way of life at Otradnoe- Mitenka's +management of affairs, in particular- was such that the debts +inevitably increased every year. The only resource obviously +presenting itself to the old count was to apply for an official +post, so he had come to Petersburg to look for one and also, as he +said, to let the lassies enjoy themselves for the last time. + +Soon after their arrival in Petersburg Berg proposed to Vera and was +accepted. + +Though in Moscow the Rostovs belonged to the best society without +themselves giving it a thought, yet in Petersburg their circle of +acquaintances was a mixed and indefinite one. In Petersburg they +were provincials, and the very people they had entertained in Moscow +without inquiring to what set they belonged, here looked down on them. + +The Rostovs lived in the same hospitable way in Petersburg as in +Moscow, and the most diverse people met at their suppers. Country +neighbors from Otradnoe, impoverished old squires and their daughters, +Peronskaya a maid of honor, Pierre Bezukhov, and the son of their +district postmaster who had obtained a post in Petersburg. Among the +men who very soon became frequent visitors at the Rostovs' house in +Petersburg were Boris, Pierre whom the count had met in the street and +dragged home with him, and Berg who spent whole days at the Rostovs' +and paid the eldest daughter, Countess Vera, the attentions a young +man pays when he intends to propose. + +Not in vain had Berg shown everybody his right hand wounded at +Austerlitz and held a perfectly unnecessary sword in his left. He +narrated that episode so persistently and with so important an air +that everyone believed in the merit and usefulness of his deed, and he +had obtained two decorations for Austerlitz. + +In the Finnish war he also managed to distinguish himself. He had +picked up the scrap of a grenade that had killed an aide-de-camp +standing near the commander in chief and had taken it to his +commander. Just as he had done after Austerlitz, he related this +occurrence at such length and so insistently that everyone again +believed it had been necessary to do this, and he received two +decorations for the Finnish war also. In 1809 he was a captain in +the Guards, wore medals, and held some special lucrative posts in +Petersburg. + +Though some skeptics smiled when told of Berg's merits, it could not +be denied that he was a painstaking and brave officer, on excellent +terms with his superiors, and a moral young man with a brilliant +career before him and an assured position in society. + +Four years before, meeting a German comrade in the stalls of a +Moscow theater, Berg had pointed out Vera Rostova to him and had +said in German, "das soll mein Weib werden,"~^ and from that moment had +made up his mind to marry her. Now in Petersburg, having considered +the Rostovs' position and his own, he decided that the time had come +to propose. + +^~ "That girl shall be my wife." + +Berg's proposal was at first received with a perplexity that was not +flattering to him. At first it seemed strange that the son of an +obscure Livonian gentleman should propose marriage to a Countess +Rostova; but Berg's chief characteristic was such a naive and good +natured egotism that the Rostovs involuntarily came to think it +would be a good thing, since he himself was so firmly convinced that +it was good, indeed excellent. Moreover, the Rostovs' affairs were +seriously embarrassed, as the suitor could not but know; and above +all, Vera was twenty-four, had been taken out everywhere, and though +she was certainly good-looking and sensible, no one up to now had +proposed to her. So they gave their consent. + +"You see," said Berg to his comrade, whom he called "friend" only +because he knew that everyone has friends, "you see, I have considered +it all, and should not marry if I had not thought it all out or if +it were in any way unsuitable. But on the contrary, my papa and +mamma are now provided for- I have arranged that rent for them in +the Baltic Provinces- and I can live in Petersburg on my pay, and with +her fortune and my good management we can get along nicely. I am not +marrying for money- I consider that dishonorable- but a wife should +bring her share and a husband his. I have my position in the +service, she has connections and some means. In our times that is +worth something, isn't it? But above all, she is a handsome, estimable +girl, and she loves me..." + +Berg blushed and smiled. + +"And I love her, because her character is sensible and very good. +Now the other sister, though they are the same family, is quite +different- an unpleasant character and has not the same +intelligence. She is so... you know?... Unpleasant... But my +fiancee!... Well, you will be coming," he was going to say, "to dine," +but changed his mind and said "to take tea with us," and quickly +doubling up his tongue he blew a small round ring of tobacco smoke, +perfectly embodying his dream of happiness. + +After the first feeling of perplexity aroused in the parents by +Berg's proposal, the holiday tone of joyousness usual at such times +took possession of the family, but the rejoicing was external and +insincere. In the family's feeling toward this wedding a certain +awkwardness and constraint was evident, as if they were ashamed of not +having loved Vera sufficiently and of being so ready to get her off +their hands. The old count felt this most. He would probably have been +unable to state the cause of his embarrassment, but it resulted from +the state of his affairs. He did not know at all how much he had, what +his debts amounted to, or what dowry he could give Vera. When his +daughters were born he had assigned to each of them, for her dowry, an +estate with three hundred serfs; but one of these estates had +already been sold, and the other was mortgaged and the interest so +much in arrears that it would have to be sold, so that it was +impossible to give it to Vera. Nor had he any money. + +Berg had already been engaged a month, and only a week remained +before the wedding, but the count had not yet decided in his own +mind the question of the dowry, nor spoken to his wife about it. At +one time the count thought of giving her the Ryazan estate or of +selling a forest, at another time of borrowing money on a note of +hand. A few days before the wedding Berg entered the count's study +early one morning and, with a pleasant smile, respectfully asked his +future father-in-law to let him know what Vera's dowry would be. The +count was so disconcerted by this long-foreseen inquiry that without +consideration he gave the first reply that came into his head. "I like +your being businesslike about it.... I like it. You shall be +satisfied...." + +And patting Berg on the shoulder he got up, wishing to end the +conversation. But Berg, smiling pleasantly, explained that if he did +not know for certain how much Vera would have and did not receive at +least part of the dowry in advance, he would have to break matters +off. + +"Because, consider, Count- if I allowed myself to marry now +without having definite means to maintain my wife, I should be +acting badly...." + +The conversation ended by the count, who wished to be generous and +to avoid further importunity, saying that he would give a note of hand +for eighty thousand rubles. Berg smiled meekly, kissed the count on +the shoulder, and said that he was very grateful, but that it was +impossible for him to arrange his new life without receiving thirty +thousand in ready money. "Or at least twenty thousand, Count," he +added, "and then a note of hand for only sixty thousand." + +"Yes, yes, all right!" said the count hurriedly. "Only excuse me, my +dear fellow, I'll give you twenty thousand and a note of hand for +eighty thousand as well. Yes, yes! Kiss me." + +CHAPTER XII + +Natasha was sixteen and it was the year 1809, the very year to which +she had counted on her fingers with Boris after they had kissed four +years ago. Since then she had not seen him. Before Sonya and her +mother, if Boris happened to be mentioned, she spoke quite freely of +that episode as of some childish, long-forgotten matter that was not +worth mentioning. But in the secret depths of her soul the question +whether her engagement to Boris was a jest or an important, binding +promise tormented her. + +Since Boris left Moscow in 1805 to join the army he had had not seen +the Rostovs. He had been in Moscow several times, and had passed +near Otradnoe, but had never been to see them. + +Sometimes it occurred to Natasha that he not wish to see her, and +this conjecture was confirmed by the sad tone in which her elders +spoke of him. + +"Nowadays old friends are not remembered," the countess would say +when Boris was mentioned. + +Anna Mikhaylovna also had of late visited them less frequently, +seemed to hold herself with particular dignity, and always spoke +rapturously and gratefully of the merits of her son and the +brilliant career on which he had entered. When the Rostovs came to +Petersburg Boris called on them. + +He drove to their house in some agitation. The memory of Natasha was +his most poetic recollection. But he went with the firm intention of +letting her and her parents feel that the childish relations between +himself and Natasha could not be binding either on her or on him. He +had a brilliant position in society thanks to his intimacy with +Countess Bezukhova, a brilliant position in the service thanks to +the patronage of an important personage whose complete confidence he +enjoyed, and he was beginning to make plans for marrying one of the +richest heiresses in Petersburg, plans which might very easily be +realized. When he entered the Rostovs' drawing room Natasha was in her +own room. When she heard of his arrival she almost ran into the +drawing room, flushed and beaming with a more than cordial smile. + +Boris remembered Natasha in a short dress, with dark eyes shining +from under her curls and boisterous, childish laughter, as he had +known her four years before; and so he was taken aback when quite a +different Natasha entered, and his face expressed rapturous +astonishment. This expression on his face pleased Natasha. + +"Well, do you recognize your little madcap playmate?" asked the +countess. + +Boris kissed Natasha's hand and said that he was astonished at the +change in her. + +"How handsome you have grown!" + +"I should think so!" replied Natasha's laughing eyes. + +"And is Papa older?" she asked. + +Natasha sat down and, without joining in Boris' conversation with +the countess, silently and minutely studied her childhood's suitor. He +felt the weight of that resolute and affectionate scrutiny and glanced +at her occasionally. + +Boris' uniform, spurs, tie, and the way his hair was brushed were +all comme il faut and in the latest fashion. This Natasha noticed at +once. He sat rather sideways in the armchair next to the countess, +arranging with his right hand the cleanest of gloves that fitted his +left hand like a skin, and he spoke with a particularly refined +compression of his lips about the amusements of the highest Petersburg +society, recalling with mild irony old times in Moscow and Moscow +acquaintances. It was not accidentally, Natasha felt, that he alluded, +when speaking of the highest aristocracy, to an ambassador's ball he +had attended, and to invitations he had received from N.N. and S.S. + +All this time Natasha sat silent, glancing up at him from under +her brows. This gaze disturbed and confused Boris more and more. He +looked round more frequently toward her, and broke off in what he +was saying. He did not stay more than ten minutes, then rose and +took his leave. The same inquisitive, challenging, and rather +mocking eyes still looked at him. After his first visit Boris said +to himself that Natasha attracted him just as much as ever, but that +he must not yield to that feeling, because to marry her, a girl almost +without fortune, would mean ruin to his career, while to renew their +former relations without intending to marry her would be dishonorable. +Boris made up his mind to avoid meeting Natasha, but despite that +resolution he called again a few days later and began calling often +and spending whole days at the Rostovs'. It seemed to him that he +ought to have an explanation with Natasha and tell her that the old +times must be forgotten, that in spite of everything... she could +not be his wife, that he had no means, and they would never let her +marry him. But he failed to do so and felt awkward about entering on +such an explanation. From day to day he became more and more +entangled. It seemed to her mother and Sonya that Natasha was in +love with Boris as of old. She sang him his favorite songs, showed him +her album, making him write in it, did not allow him to allude to +the past, letting it be understood how was the present; and every +day he went away in a fog, without having said what he meant to, and +not knowing what he was doing or why he came, or how it would all end. +He left off visiting Helene and received reproachful notes from her +every day, and yet he continued to spend whole days with the Rostovs. + +CHAPTER XIII + +One night when the old countess, in nightcap and dressing jacket, +without her false curls, and with her poor little knob of hair showing +under her white cotton cap, knelt sighing and groaning on a rug and +bowing to the ground in prayer, her door creaked and Natasha, also +in a dressing jacket with slippers on her bare feet and her hair in +curlpapers, ran in. The countess- her prayerful mood dispelled- looked +round and frowned. She was finishing her last prayer: "Can it be +that this couch will be my grave?" Natasha, flushed and eager, +seeing her mother in prayer, suddenly checked her rush, half sat down, +and unconsciously put out her tongue as if chiding herself. Seeing +that her mother was still praying she ran on tiptoe to the bed and, +rapidly slipping one little foot against the other, pushed off her +slippers and jumped onto the bed the countess had feared might +become her grave. This couch was high, with a feather bed and five +pillows each smaller than the one below. Natasha jumped on it, sank +into the feather bed, rolled over to the wall, and began snuggling +up the bedclothes as she settled down, raising her knees to her +chin, kicking out and laughing almost inaudibly, now covering +herself up head and all, and now peeping at her mother. The countess +finished her prayers and came to the bed with a stern face, but +seeing, that Natasha's head was covered, she smiled in her kind, +weak way. + +"Now then, now then!" said she. + +"Mamma, can we have a talk? Yes?" said Natasha. "Now, just one on +your throat and another... that'll do!" And seizing her mother round +the neck, she kissed her on the throat. In her behavior to her +mother Natasha seemed rough, but she was so sensitive and tactful that +however she clasped her mother she always managed to do it without +hurting her or making her feel uncomfortable or displeased. + +"Well, what is it tonight?" said the mother, having arranged her +pillows and waited until Natasha, after turning over a couple of +times, had settled down beside her under the quilt, spread out her +arms, and assumed a serious expression. + +These visits of Natasha's at night before the count returned from +his club were one of the greatest pleasures of both mother, and +daughter. + +"What is it tonight?- But I have to tell you..." + +Natasha put her hand on her mother's mouth. + +"About Boris... I know," she said seriously; "that's what I have +come about. Don't say it- I know. No, do tell me!" and she removed her +hand. "Tell me, Mamma! He's nice?" + +"Natasha, you are sixteen. At your age I was married. You say +Boris is nice. He is very nice, and I love him like a son. But what +then?... What are you thinking about? You have quite turned his +head, I can see that...." + +As she said this the countess looked round at her daughter. +Natasha was lying looking steadily straight before her at one of the +mahogany sphinxes carved on the corners of the bedstead, so that the +countess only saw her daughter's face in profile. That face struck her +by its peculiarly serious and concentrated expression. + +Natasha was listening and considering. + +"Well, what then?" said she. + +"You have quite turned his head, and why? What do you want of him? +You know you can't marry him." + +"Why not?" said Natasha, without changing her position. + +"Because he is young, because he is poor, because he is a +relation... and because you yourself don't love him." + +"How do you know?" + +"I know. It is not right, darling!" + +"But if I want to..." said Natasha. + +"Leave off talking nonsense," said the countess. + +"But if I want to..." + +"Natasha, I am in earnest..." + +Natasha did not let her finish. She drew the countess' large hand to +her, kissed it on the back and then on the palm, then again turned +it over and began kissing first one knuckle, then the space between +the knuckles, then the next knuckle, whispering, "January, February, +March, April, May. Speak, Mamma, why don't you say anything? Speak!" +said she, turning to her mother, who was tenderly gazing at her +daughter and in that contemplation seemed to have forgotten all she +had wished to say. + +"It won't do, my love! Not everyone will understand this +friendship dating from your childish days, and to see him so +intimate with you may injure you in the eyes of other young men who +visit us, and above all it torments him for nothing. He may already +have found a suitable and wealthy match, and now he's half crazy." + +"Crazy?" repeated Natasha. + +"I'll tell you some things about myself. I had a cousin..." + +"I know! Cyril Matveich... but he is old." + +"He was not always old. But this is what I'll do, Natasha, I'll have +a talk with Boris. He need not come so often...." + +"Why not, if he likes to?" + +"Because I know it will end in nothing...." + +"How can you know? No, Mamma, don't speak to him! What nonsense!" +said Natasha in the tone of one being deprived of her property. "Well, +I won't marry, but let him come if he enjoys it and I enjoy it." +Natasha smiled and looked at her mother. "Not to marry, but just +so," she added. + +"How so, my pet?" + +"Just so. There's no need for me to marry him. But... just so." + +"Just so, just so," repeated the countess, and shaking all over, she +went off into a good humored, unexpected, elderly laugh. + +"Don't laugh, stop!" cried Natasha. "You're shaking the whole bed! +You're awfully like me, just such another giggler.... Wait..." and she +seized the countess' hands and kissed a knuckle of the little +finger, saying, "June," and continued, kissing, "July, August," on the +other hand. "But, Mamma, is he very much in love? What do you think? +Was anybody ever so much in love with you? And he's very nice, very, +very nice. Only not quite my taste- he is so narrow, like the +dining-room clock.... Don't you understand? Narrow, you know- gray, +light gray..." + +"What rubbish you're talking!" said the countess. + +Natasha continued: "Don't you really understand? Nicholas would +understand.... Bezukhov, now, is blue, dark-blue and red, and he is +square." + +"You flirt with him too," said the countess, laughing. + +"No, he is a Freemason, I have found out. He is fine, dark-blue +and red.... How can I explain it to you?" + +"Little countess!" the count's voice called from behind the door. +"You're not asleep?" Natasha jumped up, snatched up her slippers, +and ran barefoot to her own room. + +It was a long time before she could sleep. She kept thinking that no +one could understand all that she understood and all there was in her. + +"Sonya?" she thought, glancing at that curled-up, sleeping little +kitten with her enormous plait of hair. "No, how could she? She's +virtuous. She fell in love with Nicholas and does not wish to know +anything more. Even Mamma does not understand. It is wonderful how +clever I am and how... charming she is," she went on, speaking of +herself in the third person, and imagining it was some very wise +man- the wisest and best of men- who was saying it of her. "There is +everything, everything in her," continued this man. "She is +unusually intelligent, charming... and then she is pretty, +uncommonly pretty, and agile- she swims and rides splendidly... and +her voice! One can really say it's a wonderful voice!" + +She hummed a scrap from her favorite opera by Cherubini, threw +herself on her bed, laughed at the pleasant thought that she would +immediately fall asleep, called Dunyasha the maid to put out the +candle, and before Dunyasha had left the room had already passed +into yet another happier world of dreams, where everything was as +light and beautiful as in reality, and even more so because it was +different. + +Next day the countess called Boris aside and had a talk with him, +after which he ceased coming to the Rostovs'. + +CHAPTER XIV + +On the thirty-first of December, New Year's Eve, 1809 - 10 an old +grandee of Catherine's day was giving a ball and midnight supper. +The diplomatic corps and the Emperor himself were to be present. + +The grandee's well-known mansion on the English Quay glittered +with innumerable lights. Police were stationed at the brightly lit +entrance which was carpeted with red baize, and not only gendarmes but +dozens of police officers and even the police master himself stood +at the porch. Carriages kept driving away and fresh ones arriving, +with red-liveried footmen and footmen in plumed hats. From the +carriages emerged men wearing uniforms, stars, and ribbons, while +ladies in satin and ermine cautiously descended the carriage steps +which were let down for them with a clatter, and then walked hurriedly +and noiselessly over the baize at the entrance. + +Almost every time a new carriage drove up a whisper ran through +the crowd and caps were doffed. + +"The Emperor?... No, a minister.... prince... ambassador. Don't +you see the plumes?..." was whispered among the crowd. + +One person, better dressed than the rest, seemed to know everyone +and mentioned by name the greatest dignitaries of the day. + +A third of the visitors had already arrived, but the Rostovs, who +were to be present, were still hurrying to get dressed. + +There had been many discussions and preparations for this ball in +the Rostov family, many fears that the invitation would not arrive, +that the dresses would not be ready, or that something would not be +arranged as it should be. + +Marya Ignatevna Peronskaya, a thin and shallow maid of honor at +the court of the Dowager Empress, who was a friend and relation of the +countess and piloted the provincial Rostovs in Petersburg high +society, was to accompany them to the ball. + +They were to call for her at her house in the Taurida Gardens at ten +o'clock, but it was already five minutes to ten, and the girls were +not yet dressed. + +Natasha was going to her first grand ball. She had got up at eight +that morning and had been in a fever of excitement and activity all +day. All her powers since morning had been concentrated on ensuring +that they all- she herself, Mamma, and Sonya- should be as well +dressed as possible. Sonya and her mother put themselves entirely in +her hands. The countess was to wear a claret-colored velvet dress, and +the two girls white gauze over pink silk slips, with roses on their +bodices and their hair dressed a la grecque. + +Everything essential had already been done; feet, hands, necks, +and ears washed, perfumed, and powdered, as befits a ball; the +openwork silk stockings and white satin shoes with ribbons were +already on; the hairdressing was almost done. Sonya was finishing +dressing and so was the countess, but Natasha, who had bustled about +helping them all, was behindhand. She was still sitting before a +looking-glass with a dressing jacket thrown over her slender +shoulders. Sonya stood ready dressed in the middle of the room and, +pressing the head of a pin till it hurt her dainty finger, was +fixing on a last ribbon that squeaked as the pin went through it. + +"That's not the way, that's not the way, Sonya!" cried Natasha +turning her head and clutching with both hands at her hair which the +maid who was dressing it had not time to release. "That bow is not +right. Come here!" + +Sonya sat down and Natasha pinned the ribbon on differently. + +"Allow me, Miss! I can't do it like that," said the maid who was +holding Natasha's hair. + +"Oh, dear! Well then, wait. That's right, Sonya." + +"Aren't you ready? It is nearly ten," came the countess' voice. + +"Directly! Directly! And you, Mamma?" + +"I have only my cap to pin on." + +"Don't do it without me!" called Natasha. "You won't do it right." + +"But it's already ten." + +They had decided to be at the ball by half past ten, and Natasha had +still to get dressed and they had to call at the Taurida Gardens. + +When her hair was done, Natasha, in her short petticoat from under +which her dancing shoes showed, and in her mother's dressing jacket, +ran up to Sonya, scrutinized her, and then ran to her mother. +Turning her mother's head this way and that, she fastened on the cap +and, hurriedly kissing her gray hair, ran back to the maids who were +turning up the hem of her skirt. + +The cause of the delay was Natasha's skirt, which was too long. +Two maids were turning up the hem and hurriedly biting off the ends of +thread. A third with pins in her mouth was running about between the +countess and Sonya, and a fourth held the whole of the gossamer +garment up high on one uplifted hand. + +"Mavra, quicker, darling!" + +"Give me my thimble, Miss, from there..." + +"Whenever will you be ready?" asked the count coming to the door. +"Here is here is some scent. Peronskaya must be tired of waiting." + +"It's ready, Miss," said the maid, holding up the shortened gauze +dress with two fingers, and blowing and shaking something off it, as +if by this to express a consciousness of the airiness and purity of +what she held. + +Natasha began putting on the dress. + +"In a minute! In a minute! Don't come in, Papa!" she cried to her +father as he opened the door- speaking from under the filmy skirt +which still covered her whole face. + +Sonya slammed the door to. A minute later they let the count in. +He was wearing a blue swallow-tail coat, shoes and stockings, and +was perfumed and his hair pomaded. + +"Oh, Papa! how nice you look! Charming!" cried Natasha, as she stood +in the middle of the room smoothing out the folds of the gauze. + +"If you please, Miss! allow me," said the maid, who on her knees was +pulling the skirt straight and shifting the pins from one side of +her mouth to the other with her tongue. + +"Say what you like," exclaimed Sonya, in a despairing voice as she +looked at Natasha, "say what you like, it's still too long." + +Natasha stepped back to look at herself in the pier glass. The dress +was too long. + +"Really, madam, it is not at all too long," said Mavra, crawling +on her knees after her young lady. + +"Well, if it's too long we'll take it up... we'll tack it up in +one minute," said the resolute Dunyasha taking a needle that was stuck +on the front of her little shawl and, still kneeling on the floor, set +to work once more. + +At that moment, with soft steps, the countess came in shyly, in +her cap and velvet gown. + +"Oo-oo, my beauty!" exclaimed the count, "she looks better than +any of you!" + +He would have embraced her but, blushing, she stepped aside +fearing to be rumpled. + +"Mamma, your cap, more to this side," said Natasha. "I'll arrange +it," and she rushed forward so that the maids who were tacking up +her skirt could not move fast enough and a piece of gauze was torn +off. + +"Oh goodness! What has happened? Really it was not my fault!" + +"Never mind, I'll run it up, it won't show," said Dunyasha. + +"What a beauty- a very queen!" said the nurse as she came to the +door. "And Sonya! They are lovely!" + +At a quarter past ten they at last got into their carriages and +started. But they had still to call at the Taurida Gardens. + +Peronskaya was quite ready. In spite of her age and plainness she +had gone through the same process as the Rostovs, but with less +flurry- for to her it was a matter of routine. Her ugly old body was +washed, perfumed, and powdered in just the same way. She had washed +behind her ears just as carefully, and when she entered her drawing +room in her yellow dress, wearing her badge as maid of honor, her +old lady's maid was as full of rapturous admiration as the Rostovs' +servants had been. + +She praised the Rostovs' toilets. They praised her taste and toilet, +and at eleven o'clock, careful of their coiffures and dresses, they +settled themselves in their carriages and drove off. + +CHAPTER XV + +Natasha had not had a moment free since early morning and had not +once had time to think of what lay before her. + +In the damp chill air and crowded closeness of the swaying carriage, +she for the first time vividly imagined what was in store for her +there at the ball, in those brightly lighted rooms- with music, +flowers, dances, the Emperor, and all the brilliant young people of +Petersburg. The prospect was so splendid that she hardly believed it +would come true, so out of keeping was it with the chill darkness +and closeness of the carriage. She understood all that awaited her +only when, after stepping over the red baize at the entrance, she +entered the hall, took off her fur cloak, and, beside Sonya and in +front of her mother, mounted the brightly illuminated stairs between +the flowers. Only then did she remember how she must behave at a ball, +and tried to assume the majestic air she considered indispensable +for a girl on such an occasion. But, fortunately for her, she felt her +eyes growing misty, she saw nothing clearly, her pulse beat a +hundred to the minute, and the blood throbbed at her heart. She +could not assume that pose, which would have made her ridiculous, +and she moved on almost fainting from excitement and trying with all +her might to conceal it. And this was the very attitude that became +her best. Before and behind them other visitors were entering, also +talking in low tones and wearing ball dresses. The mirrors on the +landing reflected ladies in white, pale-blue, and pink dresses, with +diamonds and pearls on their bare necks and arms. + +Natasha looked in the mirrors and could not distinguish her +reflection from the others. All was blended into one brilliant +procession. On entering the ballroom the regular hum of voices, +footsteps, and greetings deafened Natasha, and the light and glitter +dazzled her still more. The host and hostess, who had already been +standing at the door for half an hour repeating the same words to +the various arrivals, "Charme de vous voir,"~^ greeted the Rostovs +and Peronskaya in the same manner. + +^~ "Delighted to see you." + +The two girls in their white dresses, each with a rose in her +black hair, both curtsied in the same way, but the hostess' eye +involuntarily rested longer on the slim Natasha. She looked at her and +gave her alone a special smile in addition to her usual smile as +hostess. Looking at her she may have recalled the golden, +irrecoverable days of her own girlhood and her own first ball. The +host also followed Natasha with his eyes and asked the count which was +his daughter. + +"Charming!" said he, kissing the tips of his fingers. + +In the ballroom guests stood crowding at the entrance doors awaiting +the Emperor. The countess took up a position in one of the front +rows of that crowd. Natasha heard and felt that several people were +asking about her and looking at her. She realized that those +noticing her liked her, and this observation helped to calm her. + +"There are some like ourselves and some worse," she thought. + +Peronskaya was pointing out to the countess the most important +people at the ball. + +"That is the Dutch ambassador, do you see? That gray-haired man," +she said, indicating an old man with a profusion of silver-gray +curly hair, who was surrounded by ladies laughing at something he +said. + +"Ah, here she is, the Queen of Petersburg, Countess Bezukhova," said +Peronskaya, indicating Helene who had just entered. "How lovely! She +is quite equal to Marya Antonovna. See how the men, young and old, pay +court to her. Beautiful and clever... they say Prince- is quite mad +about her. But see, those two, though not good-looking, are even +more run after." + +She pointed to a lady who was crossing the room followed by a very +plain daughter. + +"She is a splendid match, a millionairess," said Peronskaya. "And +look, here come her suitors." + +"That is Bezukhova's brother, Anatole Kuragin," she said, indicating +a handsome officer of the Horse Guards who passed by them with head +erect, looking at something over the heads of the ladies. "He's +handsome, isn't he? I hear they will marry him to that rich girl. +But your cousin, Drubetskoy, is also very attentive to her. They say +she has millions. Oh yes, that's the French ambassador himself!" she +replied to the countess' inquiry about Caulaincourt. "Looks as if he +were a king! All the same, the French are charming, very charming. +No one more charming in society. Ah, here she is! Yes, she is still +the most beautiful of them all, our Marya Antonovna! And how simply +she is dressed! Lovely! And that stout one in spectacles is the +universal Freemason," she went on, indicating Pierre. "Put him +beside his wife and he looks a regular buffoon!" + +Pierre, swaying his stout body, advanced, making way through the +crowd and nodding to right and left as casually and good-naturedly +as if he were passing through a crowd at a fair. He pushed through, +evidently looking for someone. + +Natasha looked joyfully at the familiar face of Pierre, "the +buffoon," as Peronskaya had called him, and knew he was looking for +them, and for her in particular. He had promised to be at the ball and +introduce partners to her. + +But before he reached them Pierre stopped beside a very handsome, +dark man of middle height, and in a white uniform, who stood by a +window talking to a tall man wearing stars and a ribbon. Natasha at +once recognized the shorter and younger man in the white uniform: it +was Bolkonski, who seemed to her to have grown much younger, +happier, and better-looking. + +"There's someone else we know- Bolkonski, do you see, Mamma?" said +Natasha, pointing out Prince Andrew. "You remember, he stayed a +night with us at Otradnoe." + +"Oh, you know him?" said Peronskaya. "I can't bear him. Il fait a +present la pluie et le beau temps."~^ He's too proud for anything. +Takes after his father. And he's hand in glove with Speranski, writing +some project or other. Just look how he treats the ladies! There's one +talking to him and he has turned away," she said, pointing at him. +"I'd give it to him if he treated me as he does those ladies." + +^~ "He is all the rage just now. + +CHAPTER XVI + +Suddenly everybody stirred, began talking, and pressed forward and +then back, and between the two rows, which separated, the Emperor +entered to the sounds of music that had immediately struck up. +Behind him walked his host and hostess. He walked in rapidly, bowing +to right and left as if anxious to get the first moments of the +reception over. The band played the polonaise in vogue at that time on +account of the words that had been set to it, beginning: "Alexander, +Elisaveta, all our hearts you ravish quite..." The Emperor passed on +to the drawing room, the crowd made a rush for the doors, and +several persons with excited faces hurried there and back again. +Then the crowd hastily retired from the drawing-room door, at which +the Emperor reappeared talking to the hostess. A young man, looking +distraught, pounced down on the ladies, asking them to move aside. +Some ladies, with faces betraying complete forgetfulness of all the +rules of decorum, pushed forward to the detriment of their toilets. +The men began to choose partners and take their places for the +polonaise. + +Everyone moved back, and the Emperor came smiling out of the drawing +room leading his hostess by the hand but not keeping time to the +music. The host followed with Marya Antonovna Naryshkina; then came +ambassadors, ministers, and various generals, whom Peronskaya +diligently named. More than half the ladies already had partners and +were taking up, or preparing to take up, their positions for the +polonaise. Natasha felt that she would be left with her mother and +Sonya among a minority of women who crowded near the wall, not +having been invited to dance. She stood with her slender arms +hanging down, her scarcely defined bosom rising and falling regularly, +and with bated breath and glittering, frightened eyes gazed straight +before her, evidently prepared for the height of joy or misery. She +was not concerned about the Emperor or any of those great people +whom Peronskaya was pointing out- she had but one thought: "Is it +possible no one will ask me, that I shall not be among the first to +dance? Is it possible that not one of all these men will notice me? +They do not even seem to see me, or if they do they look as if they +were saying, 'Ah, she's not the one I'm after, so it's not worth +looking at her!' No, it's impossible," she thought. "They must know +how I long to dance, how splendidly I dance, and how they would +enjoy dancing with me." + +The strains of the polonaise, which had continued for a considerable +time, had begun to sound like a sad reminiscence to Natasha's ears. +She wanted to cry. Peronskaya had left them. The count was at the +other end of the room. She and the countess and Sonya were standing by +themselves as in the depths of a forest amid that crowd of +strangers, with no one interested in them and not wanted by anyone. +Prince Andrew with a lady passed by, evidently not recognizing them. +The handsome Anatole was smilingly talking to a partner on his arm and +looked at Natasha as one looks at a wall. Boris passed them twice +and each time turned away. Berg and his wife, who were not dancing, +came up to them. + +This family gathering seemed humiliating to Natasha- as if there +were nowhere else for the family to talk but here at the ball. She did +not listen to or look at Vera, who was telling her something about her +own green dress. + +At last the Emperor stopped beside his last partner (he had danced +with three) and the music ceased. A worried aide-de-camp ran up to the +Rostovs requesting them to stand farther back, though as it was they +were already close to the wall, and from the gallery resounded the +distinct, precise, enticingly rhythmical strains of a waltz. The +Emperor looked smilingly down the room. A minute passed but no one had +yet begun dancing. An aide-de-camp, the Master of Ceremonies, went +up to Countess Bezukhova and asked her to dance. She smilingly +raised her hand and laid it on his shoulder without looking at him. +The aide-de-camp, an adept in his art, grasping his partner firmly +round her waist, with confident deliberation started smoothly, gliding +first round the edge of the circle, then at the corner of the room +he caught Helene's left hand and turned her, the only sound audible, +apart from the ever-quickening music, being the rhythmic click of +the spurs on his rapid, agile feet, while at every third beat his +partner's velvet dress spread out and seemed to flash as she whirled +round. Natasha gazed at them and was ready to cry because it was not +she who was dancing that first turn of the waltz. + +Prince Andrew, in the white uniform of a cavalry colonel, wearing +stockings and dancing shoes, stood looking animated and bright in +the front row of the circle not far from the Rostovs. Baron Firhoff +was talking to him about the first sitting of the Council of State +to be held next day. Prince Andrew, as one closely connected with +Speranski and participating in the work of the legislative commission, +could give reliable information about that sitting, concerning which +various rumors were current. But not listening to what Firhoff was +saying, he was gazing now at the sovereign and now at the men +intending to dance who had not yet gathered courage to enter the +circle. + +Prince Andrew was watching these men abashed by the Emperor's +presence, and the women who were breathlessly longing to be asked to +dance. + +Pierre came up to him and caught him by the arm. + +"You always dance. I have a protegee, the young Rostova, here. Ask +her," he said. + +"Where is she?" asked Bolkonski. "Excuse me!" he added, turning to +the baron, "we will finish this conversation elsewhere- at a ball +one must dance." He stepped forward in the direction Pierre indicated. +The despairing, dejected expression of Natasha's face caught his +eye. He recognized her, guessed her feelings, saw that it was her +debut, remembered her conversation at the window, and with an +expression of pleasure on his face approached Countess Rostova. + +"Allow me to introduce you to my daughter," said the countess, +with heightened color. + +"I have the pleasure of being already acquainted, if the countess +remembers me," said Prince Andrew with a low and courteous bow quite +belying Peronskaya's remarks about his rudeness, and approaching +Natasha he held out his arm to grasp her waist before he had completed +his invitation. He asked her to waltz. That tremulous expression on +Natasha's face, prepared either for despair or rapture, suddenly +brightened into a happy, grateful, childlike smile. + +"I have long been waiting for you," that frightened happy little +girl seemed to say by the smile that replaced the threatened tears, as +she raised her hand to Prince Andrew's shoulder. They were the +second couple to enter the circle. Prince Andrew was one of the best +dancers of his day and Natasha danced exquisitely. Her little feet +in their white satin dancing shoes did their work swiftly, lightly, +and independently of herself, while her face beamed with ecstatic +happiness. Her slender bare arms and neck were not beautiful- compared +to Helene's her shoulders looked thin and her bosom undeveloped. But +Helene seemed, as it were, hardened by a varnish left by the thousands +of looks that had scanned her person, while Natasha was like a girl +exposed for the first time, who would have felt very much ashamed +had she not been assured that this was absolutely necessary. + +Prince Andrew liked dancing, and wishing to escape as quickly as +possible from the political and clever talk which everyone addressed +to him, wishing also to break up the circle of restraint he +disliked, caused by the Emperor's presence, he danced, and had +chosen Natasha because Pierre pointed her out to him and because she +was the first pretty girl who caught his eye; but scarcely had he +embraced that slender supple figure and felt her stirring so close +to him and smiling so near him than the wine of her charm rose to +his head, and he felt himself revived and rejuvenated when after +leaving her he stood breathing deeply and watching the other dancers. + +CHAPTER XVII + +After Prince Andrew, Boris came up to ask Natasha for dance, and +then the aide-de-camp who had opened the ball, and several other young +men, so that, flushed and happy, and passing on her superfluous +partners to Sonya, she did not cease dancing all the evening. She +noticed and saw nothing of what occupied everyone else. Not only did +she fail to notice that the Emperor talked a long time with the French +ambassador, and how particularly gracious he was to a certain lady, or +that Prince So-and-so and So-and-so did and said this and that, and +that Helene had great success and was honored was by the special +attention of So-and-so, but she did not even see the Emperor, and only +noticed that he had gone because the ball became livelier after his +departure. For one of the merry cotillions before supper Prince Andrew +was again her partner. He reminded her of their first encounter in the +Otradnoe avenue, and how she had been unable to sleep that moonlight +night, and told her how he had involuntarily overheard her. Natasha +blushed at that recollection and tried to excuse herself, as if +there had been something to be ashamed of in what Prince Andrew had +overheard. + +Like all men who have grown up in society, Prince Andrew liked +meeting someone there not of the conventional society stamp. And +such was Natasha, with her surprise, her delight, her shyness, and +even her mistakes in speaking French. With her he behaved with special +care and tenderness, sitting beside her and talking of the simplest +and most unimportant matters; he admired her shy grace. In the +middle of the cotillion, having completed one of the figures, Natasha, +still out of breath, was returning to her seat when another dancer +chose her. She was tired and panting and evidently thought of +declining, but immediately put her hand gaily on the man's shoulder, +smiling at Prince Andrew. + +"I'd be glad to sit beside you and rest: I'm tired; but you see +how they keep asking me, and I'm glad of it, I'm happy and I love +everybody, and you and I understand it all," and much, much more was +said in her smile. When her partner left her Natasha ran across the +room to choose two ladies for the figure. + +"If she goes to her cousin first and then to another lady, she +will be my wife," said Prince Andrew to himself quite to his own +surprise, as he watched her. She did go first to her cousin. + +"What rubbish sometimes enters one's head!" thought Prince Andrew, +"but what is certain is that that girl is so charming, so original, +that she won't be dancing here a month before she will be +married.... Such as she are rare here," he thought, as Natasha, +readjusting a rose that was slipping on her bodice, settled herself +beside him. + +When the cotillion was over the old count in his blue coat came up +to the dancers. He invited Prince Andrew to come and see them, and +asked his daughter whether she was enjoying herself. Natasha did not +answer at once but only looked up with a smile that said +reproachfully: "How can you ask such a question?" + +"I have never enjoyed myself so much before!" she said, and Prince +Andrew noticed how her thin arms rose quickly as if to embrace her +father and instantly dropped again. Natasha was happier than she had +ever been in her life. She was at that height of bliss when one +becomes completely kind and good and does not believe in the +possibility of evil, unhappiness, or sorrow. + +At that ball Pierre for the first time felt humiliated by the +position his wife occupied in court circles. He was gloomy and +absent-minded. A deep furrow ran across his forehead, and standing +by a window he stared over his spectacles seeing no one. + +On her way to supper Natasha passed him. + +Pierre's gloomy, unhappy look struck her. She stopped in front of +him. She wished to help him, to bestow on him the superabundance of +her own happiness. + +"How delightful it is, Count!" said she. "Isn't it?" + +Pierre smiled absent-mindedly, evidently not grasping what she said. + +"Yes, I am very glad," he said. + +"How can people be dissatisfied with anything?" thought Natasha. +"Especially such a capital fellow as Bezukhov!" In Natasha's eyes +all the people at the ball alike were good, kind, and splendid people, +loving one another; none of them capable of injuring another- and so +they ought all to be happy. + +CHAPTER XVIII + +Next day Prince Andrew thought of the ball, but his mind did not +dwell on it long. "Yes, it was a very brilliant ball," and then... +"Yes, that little Rostova is very charming. There's something fresh, +original, un-Petersburg-like about her that distinguishes her." That +was all he thought about yesterday's ball, and after his morning tea +he set to work. + +But either from fatigue or want of sleep he was ill-disposed for +work and could get nothing done. He kept criticizing his own work, +as he often did, and was glad when he heard someone coming. + +The visitor was Bitski, who served on various committees, frequented +all the societies in Petersburg, and a passionate devotee of the new +ideas and of Speranski, and a diligent Petersburg newsmonger- one of +those men who choose their opinions like their clothes according to +the fashion, but who for that very reason appear to be the warmest +partisans. Hardly had he got rid of his hat before he ran into +Prince Andrew's room with a preoccupied air and at once began talking. +He had just heard particulars of that morning's sitting of the Council +of State opened by the Emperor, and he spoke of it enthusiastically. +The Emperor's speech had been extraordinary. It had been a speech such +as only constitutional monarchs deliver. "The Sovereign plainly said +that the Council and Senate are estates of the realm, he said that the +government must rest not on authority but on secure bases. The Emperor +said that the fiscal system must be reorganized and the accounts +published," recounted Bitski, emphasizing certain words and opening +his eyes significantly. + +"Ah, yes! Today's events mark an epoch, the greatest epoch in our +history," he concluded. + +Prince Andrew listened to the account of the opening of the +Council of State, which he had so impatiently awaited and to which +he had attached such importance, and was surprised that this event, +now that it had taken place, did not affect him, and even seemed quite +insignificant. He listened with quiet irony to Bitski's enthusiastic +account of it. A very simple thought occurred to him: "What does it +matter to me or to Bitski what the Emperor was pleased to say at the +Council? Can all that make me any happier or better?" + +And this simple reflection suddenly destroyed all the interest +Prince Andrew had felt in the impending reforms. He was going to +dine that evening at Speranski's, "with only a few friends," as the +host had said when inviting him. The prospect of that dinner in the +intimate home circle of the man he so admired had greatly interested +Prince Andrew, especially as he had not yet seen Speranski in his +domestic surroundings, but now he felt disinclined to go to it. + +At the appointed hour, however, he entered the modest house +Speranski owned in the Taurida Gardens. In the parqueted dining room +this small house, remarkable for its extreme cleanliness (suggesting +that of a monastery), Prince Andrew, who was rather late, found the +friendly gathering of Speranski's intimate acquaintances already +assembled at five o'clock. There were no ladies present except +Speranski's little daughter (long-faced like her father) and her +governess. The other guests were Gervais, Magnitski, and Stolypin. +While still in the anteroom Prince Andrew heard loud voices and a +ringing staccato laugh- a laugh such as one hears on the stage. +Someone- it sounded like Speranski- was distinctly ejaculating +ha-ha-ha. Prince Andrew had never before heard Speranski's famous +laugh, and this ringing, high pitched laughter from a statesman made a +strange impression on him. + +He entered the dining room. The whole company were standing +between two windows at a small table laid with hors-d'oeuvres. +Speranski, wearing a gray swallow-tail coat with a star on the breast, +and evidently still the same waistcoat and high white stock he had +worn at the meeting of the Council of State, stood at the table with a +beaming countenance. His guests surrounded him. Magnitski, +addressing himself to Speranski, was relating an anecdote, and +Speranski was laughing in advance at what Magnitski was going to +say. When Prince Andrew entered the room Magnitski's words were +again crowned by laughter. Stolypin gave a deep bass guffaw as he +munched a piece of bread and cheese. Gervais laughed softly with a +hissing chuckle, and Speranski in a high-pitched staccato manner. + +Still laughing, Speranski held out his soft white hand to Prince +Andrew. + +"Very pleased to see you, Prince," he said. "One moment..." he +went on, turning to Magnitski and interrupting his story. "We have +agreed that this is a dinner for recreation, with not a word about +business!" and turning again to the narrator he began to laugh afresh. + +Prince Andrew looked at the laughing Speranski with astonishment, +regret, and disillusionment. It seemed to him that this was not +Speranski but someone else. Everything that had formerly appeared + +mysterious and fascinating in Speranski suddenly became plain and +unattractive. + +At dinner the conversation did not cease for a moment and seemed +to consist of the contents of a book of funny anecdotes. Before +Magnitski had finished his story someone else was anxious to relate +something still funnier. Most of the anecdotes, if not relating to the +state service, related to people in the service. It seemed that in +this company the insignificance of those people was so definitely +accepted that the only possible attitude toward them was one of good +humored ridicule. Speranski related how at the Council that morning +a deaf dignitary, when asked his opinion, replied that he thought so +too. Gervais gave a long account of an official revision, remarkable +for the stupidity of everybody concerned. Stolypin, stuttering, +broke into the conversation and began excitedly talking of the +abuses that existed under the former order of things- threatening to +give a serious turn to the conversation. Magnitski starting quizzing +Stolypin about his vehemence. Gervais intervened with a joke, and +the talk reverted to its former lively tone. + +Evidently Speranski liked to rest after his labors and find +amusement in a circle of friends, and his guests, understanding his +wish, tried to enliven him and amuse themselves. But their gaiety +seemed to Prince Andrew mirthless and tiresome. Speranski's +high-pitched voice struck him unpleasantly, and the incessant laughter +grated on him like a false note. Prince Andrew did not laugh and +feared that he would be a damper on the spirits of the company, but no +one took any notice of his being out of harmony with the general mood. +They all seemed very gay. + +He tried several times to join in the conversation, but his +remarks were tossed aside each time like a cork thrown out of the +water, and he could not jest with them. + +There was nothing wrong or unseemly in what they said, it was +witty and might have been funny, but it lacked just that something +which is the salt of mirth, and they were not even aware that such a +thing existed. + +After dinner Speranski's daughter and her governess rose. He +patted the little girl with his white hand and kissed her. And that +gesture, too, seemed unnatural to Prince Andrew. + +The men remained at table over their port- English fashion. In the +midst of a conversation that was started about Napoleon's Spanish +affairs, which they all agreed in approving, Prince Andrew began to +express a contrary opinion. Speranski smiled and, with an evident wish +to prevent the conversation from taking an unpleasant course, told a +story that had no connection with the previous conversation. For a few +moments all were silent. + +Having sat some time at table, Speranski corked a bottle of wine +and, remarking, "Nowadays good wine rides in a carriage and pair," +passed it to the servant and got up. All rose and continuing to talk +loudly went into the drawing room. Two letters brought by a courier +were handed to Speranski and he took them to his study. As soon as +he had left the room the general merriment stopped and the guests +began to converse sensibly and quietly with one another. + +"Now for the recitation!" said Speranski on returning from his +study. "A wonderful talent!" he said to Prince Andrew, and Magnitski +immediately assumed a pose and began reciting some humorous verses +in French which he had composed about various well-known Petersburg +people. He was interrupted several times by applause. When the +verses were finished Prince Andrew went up to Speranski and took his +leave. + +"Where are you off to so early?" asked Speranski. + +"I promised to go to a reception." + +They said no more. Prince Andrew looked closely into those +mirrorlike, impenetrable eyes, and felt that it had been ridiculous of +him to have expected anything from Speranski and from any of his own +activities connected with him, or ever to have attributed importance +to what Speranski was doing. That precise, mirthless laughter rang +in Prince Andrew's ears long after he had left the house. + +When he reached home Prince Andrew began thinking of his life in +Petersburg during those last four months as if it were something +new. He recalled his exertions and solicitations, and the history of +his project of army reform, which had been accepted for +consideration and which they were trying to pass over in silence +simply because another, a very poor one, had already been prepared and +submitted to the Emperor. He thought of the meetings of a committee of +which Berg was a member. He remembered how carefully and at what +length everything relating to form and procedure was discussed at +those meetings, and how sedulously and promptly all that related to +the gist of the business was evaded. He recalled his labors on the +Legal Code, and how painstakingly he had translated the articles of +the Roman and French codes into Russian, and he felt ashamed of +himself. Then he vividly pictured to himself Bogucharovo, his +occupations in the country, his journey to Ryazan; he remembered the +peasants and Dron the village elder, and mentally applying to them the +Personal Rights he had divided into paragraphs, he felt astonished +that he could have spent so much time on such useless work. + +CHAPTER XIX + +Next day Prince Andrew called at a few houses he had not visited +before, and among them at the Rostovs' with whom he had renewed +acquaintance at the ball. Apart from considerations of politeness +which demanded the call, he wanted to see that original, eager girl +who had left such a pleasant impression on his mind, in her own home. + +Natasha was one of the first to meet him. She was wearing a +dark-blue house dress in which Prince Andrew thought her even prettier +than in her ball dress. She and all the Rostov family welcomed him +as an old friend, simply and cordially. The whole family, whom he +had formerly judged severely, now seemed to him to consist of +excellent, simple, and kindly people. The old count's hospitality +and good nature, which struck one especially in Petersburg as a +pleasant surprise, were such that Prince Andrew could not refuse to +stay to dinner. "Yes," he thought, "they are capital people, who of +course have not the slightest idea what a treasure they possess in +Natasha; but they are kindly folk and form the best possible setting +for this strikingly poetic, charming girl, overflowing with life!" + +In Natasha Prince Andrew was conscious of a strange world completely +alien to him and brimful of joys unknown to him, a different world, +that in the Otradnoe avenue and at the window that moonlight night had +already begun to disconcert him. Now this world disconcerted him no +longer and was no longer alien to him, but he himself having entered +it found in it a new enjoyment. + +After dinner Natasha, at Prince Andrew's request, went to the +clavichord and began singing. Prince Andrew stood by a window +talking to the ladies and listened to her. In the midst of a phrase he +ceased speaking and suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he had +thought impossible for him. He looked at Natasha as she sang, and +something new and joyful stirred in his soul. He felt happy and at the +same time sad. He had absolutely nothing to weep about yet he was +ready to weep. What about? His former love? The little princess? His +disillusionments?... His hopes for the future?... Yes and no. The +chief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast +between something infinitely great and illimitable within him and that +limited and material something that he, and even she, was. This +contrast weighed on and yet cheered him while she sang. + +As soon as Natasha had finished she went up to him and asked how +he liked her voice. She asked this and then became confused, feeling +that she ought not to have asked it. He smiled, looking at her, and +said he liked her singing as he liked everything she did. + +Prince Andrew left the Rostovs' late in the evening. He went to +bed from habit, but soon realized that he could not sleep. Having +lit his candle he sat up in bed, then got up, then lay down again +not at all troubled by his sleeplessness: his soul was as fresh and +joyful as if he had stepped out of a stuffy room into God's own +fresh air. It did not enter his head that he was in love with Natasha; +he was not thinking about her, but only picturing her to himself, +and in consequence all life appeared in a new light. "Why do I strive, +why do I toil in this narrow, confined frame, when life, all life with +all its joys, is open to me?" said he to himself. And for the first +time for a very long while he began making happy plans for the future. +He decided that he must attend to his son's education by finding a +tutor and putting the boy in his charge, then he ought to retire +from the service and go abroad, and see England, Switzerland and +Italy. "I must use my freedom while I feel so much strength and +youth in me," he said to himself. "Pierre was right when he said one +must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and +now I do believe in it. Let the dead bury their dead, but while one +has life one must live and be happy!" thought he. + +CHAPTER XX + +One morning Colonel Berg, whom Pierre knew as he knew everybody in +Moscow and Petersburg, came to see him. Berg arrived in an +immaculate brand-new uniform, with his hair pomaded and brushed +forward over his temples as the Emperor Alexander wore his hair. + +"I have just been to see the countess, your wife. Unfortunately +she could not grant my request, but I hope, Count, I shall be more +fortunate with you," he said with a smile. + +"What is it you wish, Colonel? I am at your service." + +"I have now quite settled in my new rooms, Count" (Berg said this +with perfect conviction that this information could not but be +agreeable), "and so I wish to arrange just a small party for my own +and my wife's friends." (He smiled still more pleasantly.) "I wished +to ask the countess and you to do me the honor of coming to tea and to +supper." + +Only Countess Helene, considering the society of such people as +the Bergs beneath her, could be cruel enough to refuse such an +invitation. Berg explained so clearly why he wanted to collect at +his house a small but select company, and why this would give him +pleasure, and why though he grudged spending money on cards or +anything harmful, he was prepared to run into some expense for the +sake of good society- that Pierre could not refuse, and promised to +come. + +"But don't be late, Count, if I may venture to ask; about ten +minutes to eight, please. We shall make up a rubber. Our general is +coming. He is very good to me. We shall have supper, Count. So you +will do me the favor." + +Contrary to his habit of being late, Pierre on that day arrived at +the Bergs' house, not at ten but at fifteen minutes to eight. + +Having prepared everything necessary for the party, the Bergs were +really for their guests' arrival. + +In their new, clean, and light study with its small busts and +pictures and new furniture sat Berg and his wife. Berg, closely +buttoned up in his new uniform, sat beside his wife explaining to +her that one always could and should be acquainted with people above +one, because only then does one get satisfaction from acquaintances. + +"You can get to know something, you can ask for something. See how I +managed from my first promotion." (Berg measured his life not by years +but by promotions.) "My comrades are still nobodies, while I am only +waiting for a vacancy to command a regiment, and have the happiness to +be your husband." (He rose and kissed Vera's hand, and on the way to +her straightened out a turned-up corner of the carpet.) "And how +have I obtained all this? Chiefly by knowing how to choose my +aquaintances. It goes without saying that one must be conscientious +and methodical." + +Berg smiled with a sense of his superiority over a weak woman, and +paused, reflecting that this dear wife of his was after all but a weak +woman who could not understand all that constitutes a man's dignity, +what it was ein Mann zu sein.~^ Vera at the same time smiling with a +sense of superiority over her good, conscientious husband, who all the +same understood life wrongly, as according to Vera all men did. +Berg, judging by his wife, thought all women weak and foolish. Vera, +judging only by her husband and generalizing from that observation, +supposed that all men, though they understand nothing and are +conceited and selfish, ascribe common sense to themselves alone. + +^~ To be a man. + +Berg rose and embraced his wife carefully, so as not to crush her +lace fichu for which he had paid a good price, kissing her straight on +the lips. + +"The only thing is, we mustn't have children too soon," he +continued, following an unconscious sequence of ideas. + +"Yes," answered Vera, "I don't at all want that. We must live for +society." + +"Princess Yusupova wore one exactly like this," said Berg, +pointing to the fichu with a happy and kindly smile. + +Just then Count Bezukhov was announced. Husband and wife glanced +at one another, both smiling with self-satisfaction, and each mentally +claiming the honor of this visit. + +"This is what what comes of knowing how to make acquaintances," +thought Berg. "This is what comes of knowing how to conduct oneself." + +"But please don't interrupt me when I am entertaining the guests," +said Vera, "because I know what interests each of them and what to say +to different people." + +Berg smiled again. + +"It can't be helped: men must sometimes have masculine +conversation," said he. + +They received Pierre in their small, new drawing-room, where it +was impossible to sit down anywhere without disturbing its symmetry, +neatness, and order; so it was quite comprehensible and not strange +that Berg, having generously offered to disturb the symmetry of an +armchair or of the sofa for his dear guest, but being apparently +painfully undecided on the matter himself, eventually left the visitor +to settle the question of selection. Pierre disturbed the symmetry +by moving a chair for himself, and Berg and Vera immediately began +their evening party, interrupting each other in their efforts to +entertain their guest. + +Vera, having decided in her own mind that Pierre ought to be +entertained with conversation about the French embassy, at once +began accordingly. Berg, having decided that masculine conversation +was required, interrupted his wife's remarks and touched on the +question of the war with Austria, and unconsciously jumped from the +general subject to personal considerations as to the proposals made +him to take part in the Austrian campaign and the reasons why he had +declined them. Though the conversation was very incoherent and Vera +was angry at the intrusion of the masculine element, both husband +and wife felt with satisfaction that, even if only one guest was +present, their evening had begun very well and was as like as two peas +to every other evening party with its talk, tea, and lighted candles. + +Before long Boris, Berg's old comrade, arrived. There was a shade of +condescension and patronage in his treatment of Berg and Vera. After +Boris came a lady with the colonel, then the general himself, then the +Rostovs, and the party became unquestionably exactly like all other +evening parties. Berg and Vera could not repress their smiles of +satisfaction at the sight of all this movement in their drawing +room, at the sound of the disconnected talk, the rustling of +dresses, and the bowing and scraping. Everything was just as everybody +always has it, especially so the general, who admired the apartment, +patted Berg on the shoulder, and with parental authority superintended +the setting out of the table for boston. The general sat down by Count +Ilya Rostov, who was next to himself the most important guest. The old +people sat with the old, the young with the young, and the hostess +at the tea table, on which stood exactly the same kind of cakes in a +silver cake basket as the Panins had at their party. Everything was +just as it was everywhere else. + +CHAPTER XXI + +Pierre, as one of the principal guests, had to sit down to boston +with Count Rostov, the general, and the colonel. At the card table +he happened to be directly facing Natasha, and was struck by a curious +change that had come over her since the ball, She was silent, and +not only less pretty than at the ball, but only redeemed from +plainness by her look of gentle indifference to everything around. + +"What's the matter with her?" thought Pierre, glancing at her. She +was sitting by her sister at the tea table, and reluctantly, without +looking at him, made some reply to Boris who sat down beside her. +After playing out a whole suit and to his partner's delight taking +five tricks, Pierre, hearing greetings and the steps of someone who +had entered the room while he was picking up his tricks, glanced again +at Natasha. + +"What has happened to her?" he asked himself with still greater +surprise. + +Prince Andrew was standing before her, saying something to her +with a look of tender solicitude. She, having raised her head, was +looking up at him, flushed and evidently trying to master her rapid +breathing. And the bright glow of some inner fire that had been +suppressed was again alight in her. She was completely transformed and +from a plain girl had again become what she had been at the ball. + +Prince Andrew went up to Pierre, and the latter noticed a new and +youthful expression in his friend's face. + +Pierre changed places several times during the game, sitting now +with his back to Natasha and now facing her, but during the whole of +the six rubbers he watched her and his friend. + +"Something very important is happening between them," thought +Pierre, and a feeling that was both joyful and painful agitated him +and made him neglect the game. + +After six rubbers the general got up, saying that it was no use +playing like that, and Pierre was released. Natasha on one side was +talking with Sonya and Boris, and Vera with a subtle smile was +saying something to Prince Andrew. Pierre went up to his friend and, +asking whether they were talking secrets, sat down beside them. +Vera, having noticed Prince Andrew's attentions to Natasha, decided +that at a party, a real evening party, subtle allusions to the +tender passion were absolutely necessary and, seizing a moment when +Prince Andrew was alone, began a conversation with him about +feelings in general and about her sister. With so intellectual a guest +as she considered Prince Andrew to be, she felt that she had to employ +her diplomatic tact. + +When Pierre went up to them he noticed that Vera was being carried +away by her self-satisfied talk, but that Prince Andrew seemed +embarrassed, a thing that rarely happened with him. + +"What do you think?" Vera was saying with an arch smile. "You are so +discerning, Prince, and understand people's characters so well at a +glance. What do you think of Natalie? Could she be constant in her +attachments? Could she, like other women" (Vera meant herself), +"love a man once for all and remain true to him forever? That is +what I consider true love. What do you think, Prince?" + +"I know your sister too little," replied Prince Andrew, with a +sarcastic smile under which he wished to hide his embarrassment, "to +be able to solve so delicate a question, and then I have noticed +that the less attractive a woman is the more constant she is likely to +be," he added, and looked up Pierre who was just approaching them. + +"Yes, that is true, Prince. In our days," continued Vera- mentioning +"our days" as people of limited intelligence are fond of doing, +imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of +"our days" and that human characteristics change with the times- "in +our days a girl has so much freedom that the pleasure of being courted +often stifles real feeling in her. And it must be confessed that +Natalie is very susceptible." This return to the subject of Natalie +caused Prince Andrew to knit his brows with discomfort: he was about +to rise, but Vera continued with a still more subtle smile: + +"I think no one has been more courted than she," she went on, "but +till quite lately she never cared seriously for anyone. Now you +know, Count," she said to Pierre, "even our dear cousin Boris, who, +between ourselves, was very far gone in the land of tenderness..." +(alluding to a map of love much in vogue at that time). + +Prince Andrew frowned and remained silent. + +"You are friendly with Boris, aren't you?" asked Vera. + +"Yes, I know him..." + +"I expect he has told you of his childish love for Natasha?" + +"Oh, there was childish love?" suddenly asked Prince Andrew, +blushing unexpectedly. + +"Yes, you know between cousins intimacy often leads to love. Le +cousinage est un dangereux voisinage.~^ Don't you think so?" + +^~ "Cousinhood is a dangerous neighborhood." + +"Oh, undoubtedly!" said Prince Andrew, and with sudden and unnatural +liveliness he began chaffing Pierre about the need to be very +careful with his fifty-year-old Moscow cousins, and in the midst of +these jesting remarks he rose, taking Pierre by the arm, and drew +him aside. + +"Well?" asked Pierre, seeing his friend's strange animation with +surprise, and noticing the glance he turned on Natasha as he rose. + +"I must... I must have a talk with you," said Prince Andrew. "You +know that pair of women's gloves?" (He referred to the Masonic +gloves given to a newly initiated Brother to present to the woman he +loved.) "I... but no, I will talk to you later on," and with a strange +light in his eyes and restlessness in his movements, Prince Andrew +approached Natasha and sat down beside her. Pierre saw how Prince +Andrew asked her something and how she flushed as she replied. + +But at that moment Berg came to Pierre and began insisting that he +should take part in an argument between the general and the colonel on +the affairs in Spain. + +Berg was satisfied and happy. The smile of pleasure never left his +face. The party was very successful and quite like other parties he +had seen. Everything was similar: the ladies' subtle talk, the +cards, the general raising his voice at the card table, and the +samovar and the tea cakes; only one thing was lacking that he had +always seen at the evening parties he wished to imitate. They had +not yet had a loud conversation among the men and a dispute about +something important and clever. Now the general had begun such a +discussion and so Berg drew Pierre to it. + +CHAPTER XXII + +Next day, having been invited by the count, Prince Andrew dined with +the Rostovs and spent the rest of the day there. + +Everyone in the house realized for whose sake Prince Andrew came, +and without concealing it he tried to be with Natasha all day. Not +only in the soul of the frightened yet happy and enraptured Natasha, +but in the whole house, there was a feeling of awe at something +important that was bound to happen. The countess looked with sad and +sternly serious eyes at Prince Andrew when he talked to Natasha and +timidly started some artificial conversation about trifles as soon +as he looked her way. Sonya was afraid to leave Natasha and afraid +of being in the way when she was with them. Natasha grew pale, in a +panic of expectation, when she remained alone with him for a moment. +Prince Andrew surprised her by his timidity. She felt that he wanted +to say something to her but could not bring himself to do so. + +In the evening, when Prince Andrew had left, the countess went up to +Natasha and whispered: "Well, what?" + +"Mamma! For heaven's sake don't ask me anything now! One can't +talk about that," said Natasha. + +But all the same that night Natasha, now agitated and now +frightened, lay long time in her mother's bed gazing straight before +her. She told her how he had complimented her, how he told her he +was going abroad, asked her where they were going to spend the summer, +and then how he had asked her about Boris. + +"But such a... such a... never happened to me before!" she said. +"Only I feel afraid in his presence. I am always afraid when I'm +with him. What does that mean? Does it mean that it's the real +thing? Yes? Mamma, are you asleep?" + +"No, my love; I am frightened myself," answered her mother. "Now +go!" + +"All the same I shan't sleep. What silliness, to sleep! Mummy! +Mummy! such a thing never happened to me before," she said, +surprised and alarmed at the feeling she was aware of in herself. "And +could we ever have thought!..." + +It seemed to Natasha that even at the time she first saw Prince +Andrew at Otradnoe she had fallen in love with him. It was as if she +feared this strange, unexpected happiness of meeting again the very +man she had then chosen (she was firmly convinced she had done so) and +of finding him, as it seemed, not indifferent to her. + +"And it had to happen that he should come specially to Petersburg +while we are here. And it had to happen that we should meet at that +ball. It is fate. Clearly it is fate that everything led up to this! +Already then, directly I saw him I felt something peculiar." + +"What else did he say to you? What are those verses? Read them..." +said her mother, thoughtfully, referring to some verses Prince +Andrew had written in Natasha's album. + +"Mamma, one need not be ashamed of his being a widower?" + +"Don't, Natasha! Pray to God. 'Marriages are made in heaven,'" +said her mother. + +"Darling Mummy, how I love you! How happy I am!" cried Natasha, +shedding tears of joy and excitement and embracing her mother. + +At that very time Prince Andrew was sitting with Pierre and +telling him of his love for Natasha and his firm resolve to make her +his wife. + +That day Countess Helene had a reception at her house. The French +ambassador was there, and a foreign prince of the blood who had of +late become a frequent visitor of hers, and many brilliant ladies +and gentlemen. Pierre, who had come downstairs, walked through the +rooms and struck everyone by his preoccupied, absent-minded, and +morose air. + +Since the ball he had felt the approach of a fit of nervous +depression and had made desperate efforts to combat it. Since the +intimacy of his wife with the royal prince, Pierre had unexpectedly +been made a gentleman of the bedchamber, and from that time he had +begun to feel oppressed and ashamed in court society, and dark +thoughts of the vanity of all things human came to him oftener than +before. At the same time the feeling he had noticed between his +protegee Natasha and Prince Andrew accentuated his gloom by the +contrast between his own position and his friend's. He tried equally +to avoid thinking about his wife, and about Natasha and Prince Andrew; +and again everything seemed to him insignificant in comparison with +eternity; again the question: for what? presented itself; and he +forced himself to work day and night at Masonic labors, hoping to +drive away the evil spirit that threatened him. Toward midnight, after +he had left the countess' apartments, he was sitting upstairs in a +shabby dressing gown, copying out the original transaction of the +Scottish lodge of Freemasons at a table in his low room cloudy with +tobacco smoke, when someone came in. It was Prince Andrew. + +"Ah, it's you!" said Pierre with a preoccupied, dissatisfied air. +"And I, you see, am hard at it." He pointed to his manuscript book +with that air of escaping from the ills of life with which unhappy +people look at their work. + +Prince Andrew, with a beaming, ecstatic expression of renewed life +on his face, paused in front of Pierre and, not noticing his sad look, +smiled at him with the egotism of joy. + +"Well, dear heart," said he, "I wanted to tell you about it +yesterday and I have come to do so today. I never experienced anything +like it before. I am in love, my friend!" + +Suddenly Pierre heaved a deep sigh and dumped his heavy person +down on the sofa beside Prince Andrew. + +"With Natasha Rostova, yes?" said he. + +"Yes, yes! Who else should it be? I should never have believed it, +but the feeling is stronger than I. Yesterday I tormented myself and +suffered, but I would not exchange even that torment for anything in +the world, I have not lived till now. At last I live, but I can't live +without her! But can she love me?... I am too old for her.... Why +don't you speak?" + +"I? I? What did I tell you?" said Pierre suddenly, rising and +beginning to pace up and down the room. "I always thought it.... +That girl is such a treasure... she is a rare girl.... My dear friend, +I entreat you, don't philosophize, don't doubt, marry, marry, +marry.... And I am sure there will not be a happier man than you." + +"But what of her?" + +"She loves you." + +"Don't talk rubbish..." said Prince Andrew, smiling and looking into +Pierre's eyes. + +"She does, I know," Pierre cried fiercely. + +"But do listen," returned Prince Andrew, holding him by the arm. "Do +you know the condition I am in? I must talk about it to someone." + +"Well, go on, go on. I am very glad," said Pierre, and his face +really changed, his brow became smooth, and he listened gladly to +Prince Andrew. Prince Andrew seemed, and really was, quite a +different, quite a new man. Where was his spleen, his contempt for +life, his disillusionment? Pierre was the only person to whom he +made up his mind to speak openly; and to him he told all that was in +his soul. Now he boldly and lightly made plans for an extended future, +said he could not sacrifice his own happiness to his father's caprice, +and spoke of how he would either make his father consent to this +marriage and love her, or would do without his consent; then he +marveled at the feeling that had mastered him as at something strange, +apart from and independent of himself. + +"I should not have believed anyone who told me that I was capable of +such love," said Prince Andrew. "It is not at all the same feeling +that I knew in the past. The whole world is now for me divided into +two halves: one half is she, and there all is joy, hope, light: the +other half is everything where she is not, and there is all gloom +and darkness...." + +"Darkness and gloom," reiterated Pierre: "yes, yes, I understand +that." + +"I cannot help loving the light, it is not my fault. And I am very +happy! You understand me? I know you are glad for my sake." + +"Yes, yes," Pierre assented, looking at his friend with a touched +and sad expression in his eyes. The brighter Prince Andrew's lot +appeared to him, the gloomier seemed his own. + +CHAPTER XXIII + +Prince Andrew needed his father's consent to his marriage, and to +obtain this he started for the country next day. + +His father received his son's communication with external composure, +but inward wrath. He could not comprehend how anyone could wish to +alter his life or introduce anything new into it, when his own life +was already ending. "If only they would let me end my days as I want +to," thought the old man, "then they might do as they please." With +his son, however, he employed the diplomacy he reserved for +important occasions and, adopting a quiet tone, discussed the whole +matter. + +In the first place the marriage was not a brilliant one as regards +birth, wealth, or rank. Secondly, Prince Andrew was no longer as young +as he had been and his health was poor (the old man laid special +stress on this), while she was very young. Thirdly, he had a son +whom it would be a pity to entrust to a chit of a girl. "Fourthly +and finally," the father said, looking ironically at his son, "I beg +you to put it off for a year: go abroad, take a cure, look out as +you wanted to for a German tutor for Prince Nicholas. Then if your +love or passion or obstinacy- as you please- is still as great, marry! +And that's my last word on it. Mind, the last..." concluded the +prince, in a tone which showed that nothing would make him alter his +decision. + +Prince Andrew saw clearly that the old man hoped that his +feelings, or his fiancee's, would not stand a year's test, or that +he (the old prince himself) would die before then, and he decided to +conform to his father's wish- to propose, and postpone the wedding for +a year. + +Three weeks after the last evening he had spent with the Rostovs, +Prince Andrew returned to Petersburg. + +Next day after her talk with her mother Natasha expected Bolkonski +all day, but he did not come. On the second and third day it was the +same. Pierre did not come either and Natasha, not knowing that +Prince Andrew had gone to see his father, could not explain his +absence to herself. + +Three weeks passed in this way. Natasha had no desire to go out +anywhere and wandered from room to room like a shadow, idle and +listless; she wept secretly at night and did not go to her mother in +the evenings. She blushed continually and was irritable. It seemed +to her that everybody knew about her disappointment and was laughing +at her and pitying her. Strong as was her inward grief, this wound +to her vanity intensified her misery. + +Once she came to her mother, tried to say something, and suddenly +began to cry. Her tears were those of an offended child who does not +know why it is being punished. + +The countess began to soothe Natasha, who after first listening to +her mother's words, suddenly interrupted her: + +"Leave off, Mamma! I don't think, and don't want to think about +it! He just came and then left off, left off..." + +Her voice trembled, and she again nearly cried, but recovered and +went on quietly: + +"And I don't at all want to get married. And I am afraid of him; I +have now become quite calm, quite calm." + +The day after this conversation Natasha put on the old dress which +she knew had the peculiar property of conducing to cheerfulness in the +mornings, and that day she returned to the old way of life which she +had abandoned since the ball. Having finished her morning tea she went +to the ballroom, which she particularly liked for its loud +resonance, and began singing her solfeggio. When she had finished +her first exercise she stood still in the middle of the room and +sang a musical phrase that particularly pleased her. She listened +joyfully (as though she had not expected it) to the charm of the notes +reverberating, filling the whole empty ballroom, and slowly dying +away; and all at once she felt cheerful. "What's the good of making so +much of it? Things are nice as it is," she said to herself, and she +began walking up and down the room, not stepping simply on the +resounding parquet but treading with each step from the heel to the +toe (she had on a new and favorite pair of shoes) and listening to the +regular tap of the heel and creak of the toe as gladly as she had to +the sounds of her own voice. Passing a mirror she glanced into it. +"There, that's me!" the expression of her face seemed to say as she +caught sight of herself. "Well, and very nice too! I need nobody." + +A footman wanted to come in to clear away something in the room +but she would not let him, and having closed the door behind him +continued her walk. That morning she had returned to her favorite +mood- love of, and delight in, herself. "How charming that Natasha +is!" she said again, speaking as some third, collective, male +person. "Pretty, a good voice, young, and in nobody's way if only they +leave her in peace." But however much they left her in peace she could +not now be at peace, and immediately felt this. + +In the hall the porch door opened, and someone asked, "At home?" and +then footsteps were heard. Natasha was looking at the mirror, but +did not see herself. She listened to the sounds in the hall. When +she saw herself, her face was pale. It was he. She knew this for +certain, though she hardly heard his voice through the closed doors. + +Pale and agitated, Natasha ran into the drawing room. + +"Mamma! Bolkonski has come!" she said. "Mamma, it is awful, it is +unbearable! I don't want... to be tormented? What am I to do?..." + +Before the countess could answer, Prince Andrew entered the room +with an agitated and serious face. As soon as he saw Natasha his +face brightened. He kissed the countess' hand and Natasha's, and sat +down beside the sofa. + +"It is long since we had the pleasure..." began the countess, but +Prince Andrew interrupted her by answering her intended question, +obviously in haste to say what he had to. + +"I have not been to see all this time because I have been at my +father's. I had to talk over a very important matter with him. I +only got back last night," he said glancing at Natasha; "I want to +have a talk with you, Countess," he added after a moment's pause. + +The countess lowered her eyes, sighing deeply. + +"I am at your disposal," she murmured. + +Natasha knew that she ought to go away, but was unable to do so: +something gripped her throat, and regardless of manners she stared +straight at Prince Andrew with wide-open eyes. + +"At once? This instant!... No, it can't be!" she thought. + +Again he glanced at her, and that glance convinced her that she +was not mistaken. Yes, at once, that very instant, her fate would be +decided. + +"Go, Natasha! I will call you," said the countess in a whisper. + +Natasha glanced with frightened imploring eyes at Prince Andrew +and at her mother and went out. + +"I have come, Countess, to ask for your daughter's hand," said +Prince Andrew. + +The countess' face flushed hotly, but she said nothing. + +"Your offer..." she began at last sedately. He remained silent, +looking into her eyes. "Your offer..." (she grew confused) "is +agreeable to us, and I accept your offer. I am glad. And my husband... +I hope... but it will depend on her...." + +"I will speak to her when I have your consent.... Do you give it +to me?" said Prince Andrew. + +"Yes," replied the countess. She held out her hand to him, and +with a mixed feeling of estrangement and tenderness pressed her lips +to his forehead as he stooped to kiss her hand. She wished to love him +as a son, but felt that to her he was a stranger and a terrifying man. +"I am sure my husband will consent," said the countess, "but your +father..." + +"My father, to whom I have told my plans, has made it an express +condition of his consent that the wedding is not to take place for a +year. And I wished to tell you of that," said Prince Andrew. + +"It is true that Natasha is still young, but- so long as that?..." + +"It is unavoidable," said Prince Andrew with a sigh. + +"I will send her to you," said the countess, and left the room. + +"Lord have mercy upon us!" she repeated while seeking her daughter. + +Sonya said that Natasha was in her bedroom. Natasha was sitting on +the bed, pale and dry eyed, and was gazing at the icons and whispering +something as she rapidly crossed herself. Seeing her mother she jumped +up and flew to her. + +"Well, Mamma?... Well?..." + +"Go, go to him. He is asking for your hand," said the countess, +coldly it seemed to Natasha. "Go... go," said the mother, sadly and +reproachfully, with a deep sigh, as her daughter ran away. + +Natasha never remembered how she entered the drawing room. When +she came in and saw him she paused. "Is it possible that this stranger +has now become everything to me?" she asked herself, and immediately +answered, "Yes, everything! He alone is now dearer to me than +everything in the world." Prince Andrew came up to her with downcast +eyes. + +"I have loved you from the very first moment I saw you. May I hope?" + +He looked at her and was struck by the serious impassioned +expression of her face. Her face said: "Why ask? Why doubt what you +cannot but know? Why speak, when words cannot express what one feels?" + +She drew near to him and stopped. He took her hand and kissed it. + +"Do you love me?" + +"Yes, yes!" Natasha murmured as if in vexation. Then she sighed +loudly and, catching her breath more and more quickly, began to sob. + +"What is it? What's the matter?" + +"Oh, I am so happy!" she replied, smiled through her tears, bent +over closer to him, paused for an instant as if asking herself whether +she might, and then kissed him. + +Prince Andrew held her hands, looked into her eyes, and did not find +in his heart his former love for her. Something in him had suddenly +changed; there was no longer the former poetic and mystic charm of +desire, but there was pity for her feminine and childish weakness, +fear at her devotion and trustfulness, and an oppressive yet joyful +sense of the duty that now bound him to her forever. The present +feeling, though not so bright and poetic as the former, was stronger +and more serious. + +"Did your mother tell you that it cannot be for a year?" asked +Prince Andrew, still looking into her eyes. + +"Is it possible that I- the 'chit of a girl,' as everybody called +me," thought Natasha- "is it possible that I am now to be the wife and +the equal of this strange, dear, clever man whom even my father +looks up to? Can it be true? Can it be true that there can be no +more playing with life, that now I am grown up, that on me now lies +a responsibility for my every word and deed? Yes, but what did he +ask me?" + +"No," she replied, but she had not understood his question. + +"Forgive me!" he said. "But you are so young, and I have already +been through so much in life. I am afraid for you, you do not yet know +yourself." + +Natasha listened with concentrated attention, trying but failing +to take in the meaning of his words. + +"Hard as this year which delays my happiness will be," continued +Prince Andrew, "it will give you time to be sure of yourself. I ask +you to make me happy in a year, but you are free: our engagement shall +remain a secret, and should you find that you do not love me, or +should you come to love..." said Prince Andrew with an unnatural +smile. + +"Why do you say that?" Natasha interrupted him. "You know that +from the very day you first came to Otradnoe I have loved you," she +cried, quite convinced that she spoke the truth. + +"In a year you will learn to know yourself...." + +"A whole year!" Natasha repeated suddenly, only now realizing that +the marriage was to be postponed for a year. "But why a year? Why a +year?..." + +Prince Andrew began to explain to her the reasons for this delay. +Natasha did not hear him. + +"And can't it be helped?" she asked. Prince Andrew did not reply, +but his face expressed the impossibility of altering that decision. + +"It's awful! Oh, it's awful! awful!" Natasha suddenly cried, and +again burst into sobs. "I shall die, waiting a year: it's +impossible, it's awful!" She looked into her lover's face and saw in +it a look of commiseration and perplexity. + +"No, no! I'll do anything!" she said, suddenly checking her tears. +"I am so happy." + +The father and mother came into the room and gave the betrothed +couple their blessing. + +From that day Prince Andrew began to frequent the Rostovs' as +Natasha's affianced lover. + +CHAPTER XXIV + +No betrothal ceremony took place and Natasha's engagement to +Bolkonski was not announced; Prince Andrew insisted on that. He said +that as he was responsible for the delay he ought to bear the whole +burden of it; that he had given his word and bound himself forever, +but that he did not wish to bind Natasha and gave her perfect freedom. +If after six months she felt that she did not love him she would +have full right to reject him. Naturally neither Natasha nor her +parents wished to hear of this, but Prince Andrew was firm. He came +every day to the Rostovs', but did not behave to Natasha as an +affianced lover: he did not use the familiar thou, but said you to +her, and kissed only her hand. After their engagement, quite +different, intimate, and natural relations sprang up between them. +It was as if they had not known each other till now. Both liked to +recall how they had regarded each other when as yet they were +nothing to one another; they felt themselves now quite different +beings: then they were artificial, now natural and sincere. At first +the family felt some constraint in intercourse with Prince Andrew; +he seemed a man from another world, and for a long time Natasha +trained the family to get used to him, proudly assuring them all +that he only appeared to be different, but was really just like all of +them, and that she was not afraid of him and no one else ought to +be. After a few days they grew accustomed to him, and without +restraint in his presence pursued their usual way of life, in which he +took his part. He could talk about rural economy with the count, +fashions with the countess and Natasha, and about albums and fancywork +with Sonya. Sometimes the household both among themselves and in his +presence expressed their wonder at how it had all happened, and at the +evident omens there had been of it: Prince Andrew's coming to Otradnoe +and their coming to Petersburg, and the likeness between Natasha and +Prince Andrew which her nurse had noticed on his first visit, and +Andrew's encounter with Nicholas in 1805, and many other incidents +betokening that it had to be. + +In the house that poetic dullness and quiet reigned which always +accompanies the presence of a betrothed couple. Often when all sitting +together everyone kept silent. Sometimes the others would get up and +go away and the couple, left alone, still remained silent. They rarely +spoke of their future life. Prince Andrew was afraid and ashamed to +speak of it. Natasha shared this as she did all his feelings, which +she constantly divined. Once she began questioning him about his +son. Prince Andrew blushed, as he often did now- Natasha +particularly liked it in him- and said that his son would not live +with them. + +"Why not?" asked Natasha in a frightened tone. + +"I cannot take him away from his grandfather, and besides..." + +"How I should have loved him!" said Natasha, immediately guessing +his thought; "but I know you wish to avoid any pretext for finding +fault with us." + +Sometimes the old count would come up, kiss Prince Andrew, and ask +his advice about Petya's education or Nicholas' service. The old +countess sighed as she looked at them; Sonya was always getting +frightened lest she should be in the way and tried to find excuses for +leaving them alone, even when they did not wish it. When Prince Andrew +spoke (he could tell a story very well), Natasha listened to him +with pride; when she spoke she noticed with fear and joy that he gazed +attentively and scrutinizingly at her. She asked herself in +perplexity: "What does he look for in me? He is trying to discover +something by looking at me! What if what he seeks in me is not there?" +Sometimes she fell into one of the mad, merry moods characteristic +of her, and then she particularly loved to hear and see how Prince +Andrew laughed. He seldom laughed, but when he did he abandoned +himself entirely to his laughter, and after such a laugh she always +felt nearer to him. Natasha would have been completely happy if the +thought of the separation awaiting her and drawing near had not +terrified her, just as the mere thought of it made him turn pale and +cold. + +On the eve of his departure from Petersburg Prince Andrew brought +with him Pierre, who had not been to the Rostovs' once since the ball. +Pierre seemed disconcerted and embarrassed. He was talking to the +countess, and Natasha sat down beside a little chess table with Sonya, +thereby inviting Prince Andrew to come too. He did so. + +"You have known Bezukhov a long time?" he asked. "Do you like him?" + +"Yes, he's a dear, but very absurd." + +And as usual when speaking of Pierre, she began to tell anecdotes of +his absent-mindedness, some of which had even been invented about him. + +"Do you know I have entrusted him with our secret? I have known +him from childhood. He has a heart of gold. I beg you, Natalie," +Prince Andrew said with sudden seriousness- "I am going away and +heaven knows what may happen. You may cease to... all right, I know +I am not to say that. Only this, then: whatever may happen to you when +I am not here..." + +"What can happen?" + +"Whatever trouble may come," Prince Andrew continued, "I beg you, +Mademoiselle Sophie, whatever may happen, to turn to him alone for +advice and help! He is a most absent-minded and absurd fellow, but +he has a heart of gold." + +Neither her father, nor her mother, nor Sonya, nor Prince Andrew +himself could have foreseen how the separation from her lover would +act on Natasha. Flushed and agitated she went about the house all that +day, dry-eyed, occupied with most trivial matters as if not +understanding what awaited her. She did not even cry when, on taking +leave, he kissed her hand for the last time. "Don't go!" she said in a +tone that made him wonder whether he really ought not to stay and +which he remembered long afterwards. Nor did she cry when he was gone; +but for several days she sat in her room dry-eyed, taking no +interest in anything and only saying now and then, "Oh, why did he +go away?" + +But a fortnight after his departure, to the surprise of those around +her, she recovered from her mental sickness just as suddenly and +became her old self again, but with a change in her moral physiognomy, +as a child gets up after a long illness with a changed expression of +face. + +CHAPTER XXV + +During that year after his son's departure, Prince Nicholas +Bolkonski's health and temper became much worse. He grew still more +irritable, and it was Princess Mary who generally bore the brunt of +his frequent fits of unprovoked anger. He seemed carefully to seek out +her tender spots so as to torture her mentally as harshly as possible. +Princess Mary had two passions and consequently two joys- her +nephew, little Nicholas, and religion- and these were the favorite +subjects of the prince's attacks and ridicule. Whatever was spoken +of he would bring round to the superstitiousness of old maids, or +the petting and spoiling of children. "You want to make him"- little +Nicholas- "into an old maid like yourself! A pity! Prince Andrew wants +a son and not an old maid," he would say. Or, turning to +Mademoiselle Bourienne, he would ask her in Princess Mary's presence +how she liked our village priests and icons and would joke about them. + +He continually hurt Princess Mary's feelings and tormented her, +but it cost her no effort to forgive him. Could he be to blame +toward her, or could her father, whom she knew loved her in spite of +it all, be unjust? And what is justice? The princess never thought +of that proud word "justice." All the complex laws of man centered for +her in one clear and simple law- the law of love and self-sacrifice +taught us by Him who lovingly suffered for mankind though He Himself +was God. What had she to do with the justice or injustice of other +people? She had to endure and love, and that she did. + +During the winter Prince Andrew had come to Bald Hills and had +been gay, gentle, and more affectionate than Princess Mary had known +him for a long time past. She felt that something had happened to him, +but he said nothing to her about his love. Before he left he had a +long talk with his father about something, and Princess Mary noticed +that before his departure they were dissatisfied with one another. + +Soon after Prince Andrew had gone, Princess Mary wrote to her friend +Julie Karagina in Petersburg, whom she had dreamed (as all girls +dream) of marrying to her brother, and who was at that time in +mourning for her own brother, killed in Turkey. + +Sorrow, it seems, is our common lot, my dear, tender friend Julie. + +Your loss is so terrible that I can only explain it to myself as a +special providence of God who, loving you, wishes to try you and +your excellent mother. Oh, my friend! Religion, and religion alone, +can- I will not say comfort us- but save us from despair. Religion +alone can explain to us what without its help man cannot comprehend: +why, for what cause, kind and noble beings able to find happiness in +life- not merely harming no one but necessary to the happiness of +others- are called away to God, while cruel, useless, harmful persons, +or such as are a burden to themselves and to others, are left +living. The first death I saw, and one I shall never forget- that of +my dear sister-in-law- left that impression on me. Just as you ask +destiny why your splendid brother had to die, so I asked why that +angel Lise, who not only never wronged anyone, but in whose soul there +were never any unkind thoughts, had to die. And what do you think, +dear friend? Five years have passed since then, and already I, with my +petty understanding, begin to see clearly why she had to die, and in +what way that death was but an expression of the infinite goodness +of the Creator, whose every action, though generally +incomprehensible to us, is but a manifestation of His infinite love +for His creatures. Perhaps, I often think, she was too angelically +innocent to have the strength to perform all a mother's duties. As a +young wife she was irreproachable; perhaps she could not have been +so as a mother. As it is, not only has she left us, and particularly +Prince Andrew, with the purest regrets and memories, but probably +she will there receive a place I dare not hope for myself. But not +to speak of her alone, that early and terrible death has had the +most beneficent influence on me and on my brother in spite of all +our grief. Then, at the moment of our loss, these thoughts could not +occur to me; I should then have dismissed them with horror, but now +they are very clear and certain. I write all this to you, dear friend, +only to convince you of the Gospel truth which has become for me a +principle of life: not a single hair of our heads will fall without +His will. And His will is governed only by infinite love for us, and +so whatever befalls us is for our good. + +You ask whether we shall spend next winter in Moscow. In spite of my +wish to see you, I do not think so and do not want to do so. You +will be surprised to hear that the reason for this is Buonaparte! +The case is this: my father's health is growing noticeably worse, he +cannot stand any contradiction and is becoming irritable. This +irritability is, as you know, chiefly directed to political questions. +He cannot endure the notion that Buonaparte is negotiating on equal +terms with all the sovereigns of Europe and particularly with our own, +the grandson of the Great Catherine! As you know, I am quite +indifferent to politics, but from my father's remarks and his talks +with Michael Ivanovich I know all that goes on in the world and +especially about the honors conferred on Buonaparte, who only at +Bald Hills in the whole world, it seems, is not accepted as a great +man, still less as Emperor of France. And my father cannot stand this. +It seems to me that it is chiefly because of his political views +that my father is reluctant to speak of going to Moscow; for he +foresees the encounters that would result from his way of expressing +his views regardless of anybody. All the benefit he might derive +from a course of treatment he would lose as a result of the disputes +about Buonaparte which would be inevitable. In any case it will be +decided very shortly. + +Our family life goes on in the old way except for my brother +Andrew's absence. He, as I wrote you before, has changed very much +of late. After his sorrow he only this year quite recovered his +spirits. He has again become as I used to know him when a child: kind, +affectionate, with that heart of gold to which I know no equal. He has +realized, it seems to me, that life is not over for him. But +together with this mental change he has grown physically much +weaker. He has become thinner and more nervous. I am anxious about him +and glad he is taking this trip abroad which the doctors recommended +long ago. I hope it will cure him. You write that in Petersburg he +is spoken of as one of the most active, cultivated, and capable of the +young men. Forgive my vanity as a relation, but I never doubted it. +The good he has done to everybody here, from his peasants up to the +gentry, is incalculable. On his arrival in Petersburg he received only +his due. I always wonder at the way rumors fly from Petersburg to +Moscow, especially such false ones as that you write about- I mean the +report of my brother's betrothal to the little Rostova. I do not think +my brother will ever marry again, and certainly not her; and this is +why: first, I know that though he rarely speaks about the wife he +has lost, the grief of that loss has gone too deep in his heart for +him ever to decide to give her a successor and our little angel a +stepmother. Secondly because, as far as I know, that girl is not the +kind of girl who could please Prince Andrew. I do not think he would +choose her for a wife, and frankly I do not wish it. But I am +running on too long and am at the end of my second sheet. Good-by, +my dear friend. May God keep you in His holy and mighty care. My +dear friend, Mademoiselle Bourienne, sends you kisses. + +MARY + +CHAPTER XXVI + +In the middle of the summer Princess Mary received an unexpected +letter from Prince Andrew in Switzerland in which he gave her +strange and surprising news. He informed her of his engagement to +Natasha Rostova. The whole letter breathed loving rapture for his +betrothed and tender and confiding affection for his sister. He +wrote that he had never loved as he did now and that only now did he +understand and know what life was. He asked his sister to forgive +him for not having told her of his resolve when he had last visited +Bald Hills, though he had spoken of it to his father. He had not +done so for fear Princess Mary should ask her father to give his +consent, irritating him and having to bear the brunt of his +displeasure without attaining her object. "Besides," he wrote, "the +matter was not then so definitely settled as it is now. My father then +insisted on a delay of a year and now already six months, half of that +period, have passed, and my resolution is firmer than ever. If the +doctors did not keep me here at the spas I should be back in Russia, +but as it is I have to postpone my return for three months. You know +me and my relations with Father. I want nothing from him. I have +been and always shall be independent; but to go against his will and +arouse his anger, now that he may perhaps remain with us such a +short time, would destroy half my happiness. I am now writing to him +about the same question, and beg you to choose a good moment to hand +him the letter and to let me know how he looks at the whole matter and +whether there is hope that he may consent to reduce the term by four +months." + +After long hesitations, doubts, and prayers, Princess Mary gave +the letter to her father. The next day the old prince said to her +quietly: + +"Write and tell your brother to wait till I am dead.... It won't +be long- I shall soon set him free." + +The princess was about to reply, but her father would not let her +speak and, raising his voice more and more, cried: + +"Marry, marry, my boy!... A good family!... Clever people, eh? Rich, +eh? Yes, a nice stepmother little Nicholas will have! Write and tell +him that he may marry tomorrow if he likes. She will be little +Nicholas' stepmother and I'll marry Bourienne!... Ha, ha, ha! He +mustn't be without a stepmother either! Only one thing, no more +women are wanted in my house- let him marry and live by himself. +Perhaps you will go and live with him too?" he added, turning to +Princess Mary. "Go in heavens name! Go out into the frost... the +frost... the frost! + +After this outburst the prince did not speak any more about the +matter. But repressed vexation at his son's poor-spirited behavior +found expression in his treatment of his daughter. To his former +pretexts for irony a fresh one was now added- allusions to stepmothers +and amiabilities to Mademoiselle Bourienne. + +"Why shouldn't I marry her?" he asked his daughter. "She'll make a +splendid princess!" + +And latterly, to her surprise and bewilderment, Princess Mary +noticed that her father was really associating more and more with +the Frenchwoman. She wrote to Prince Andrew about the reception of his +letter, but comforted him with hopes of reconciling their father to +the idea. + +Little Nicholas and his education, her brother Andrew, and +religion were Princess Mary's joys and consolations; but besides that, +since everyone must have personal hopes, Princess Mary in the +profoundest depths of her heart had a hidden dream and hope that +supplied the chief consolation of her life. This comforting dream +and hope were given her by God's folk- the half-witted and other +pilgrims who visited her without the prince's knowledge. The longer +she lived, the more experience and observation she had of life, the +greater was her wonder at the short-sightedness of men who seek +enjoyment and happiness here on earth: toiling, suffering, struggling, +and harming one another, to obtain that impossible, visionary, +sinful happiness. Prince Andrew had loved his wife, she died, but that +was not enough: he wanted to bind his happiness to another woman. +Her father objected to this because he wanted a more distinguished and +wealthier match for Andrew. And they all struggled and suffered and +tormented one another and injured their souls, their eternal souls, +for the attainment of benefits which endure but for an instant. Not +only do we know this ourselves, but Christ, the Son of God, came +down to earth and told us that this life is but for a moment and is +a probation; yet we cling to it and think to find happiness in it. +"How is it that no one realizes this?" thought Princess Mary. "No +one except these despised God's folk who, wallet on back, come to me +by the back door, afraid of being seen by the prince, not for fear +of ill-usage by him but for fear of causing him to sin. To leave +family, home, and all the cares of worldly welfare, in order without +clinging to anything to wander in hempen rags from place to place +under an assumed name, doing no one any harm but praying for all- +for those who drive one away as well as for those who protect one: +higher than that life and truth there is no life or truth!" + +There was one pilgrim, a quiet pockmarked little woman of fifty +called Theodosia, who for over thirty years had gone about barefoot +and worn heavy chains. Princess Mary was particularly fond of her. +Once, when in a room with a lamp dimly lit before the icon Theodosia +was talking of her life, the thought that Theodosia alone had found +the true path of life suddenly came to Princess Mary with such force +that she resolved to become a pilgrim herself. When Theodosia had gone +to sleep Princess Mary thought about this for a long time, and at last +made up her mind that, strange as it might seem, she must go on a +pilgrimage. She disclosed this thought to no one but to her confessor, +Father Akinfi, the monk, and he approved of her intention. Under guise +of a present for the pilgrims, Princess Mary prepared a pilgrim's +complete costume for herself: a coarse smock, bast shoes, a rough +coat, and a black kerchief. Often, approaching the chest of drawers +containing this secret treasure, Princess Mary paused, uncertain +whether the time had not already come to put her project into +execution. + +Often, listening to the pilgrims' tales, she was so stimulated by +their simple speech, mechanical to them but to her so full of deep +meaning, that several times she was on the point of abandoning +everything and running away from home. In imagination she already +pictured herself by Theodosia's side, dressed in coarse rags, +walking with a staff, a wallet on her back, along the dusty road, +directing her wanderings from one saint's shrine to another, free from +envy, earthly love, or desire, and reaching at last the place where +there is no more sorrow or sighing, but eternal joy and bliss. + +"I shall come to a place and pray there, and before having time to +get used to it or getting to love it, I shall go farther. I will go on +till my legs fail, and I'll lie down and die somewhere, and shall at +last reach that eternal, quiet haven, where there is neither sorrow +nor sighing..." thought Princess Mary. + +But afterwards, when she saw her father and especially little Koko +(Nicholas), her resolve weakened. She wept quietly, and felt that +she was a sinner who loved her father and little nephew more than God. + +BOOK SEVEN: 1810 - 11 + +CHAPTER I + +The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labor- idleness- was a +condition of the first man's blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man +has retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race +not only because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our +brows, but because our moral nature is such that we cannot be both +idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we +are idle. If man could find a state in which he felt that though +idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the +conditions of man's primitive blessedness. And such a state of +obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class- +the military. The chief attraction of military service has consisted +and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness. + +Nicholas Rostov experienced this blissful condition to the full +when, after 1807, he continued to serve in the Pavlograd regiment, +in which he already commanded the squadron he had taken over from +Denisov. + +Rostov had become a bluff, good-natured fellow, whom his Moscow +acquaintances would have considered rather bad form, but who was liked +and respected by his comrades, subordinates, and superiors, and was +well contented with his life. Of late, in 1809, he found in letters +from home more frequent complaints from his mother that their +affairs were falling into greater and greater disorder, and that it +was time for him to come back to gladden and comfort his old parents. + +Reading these letters, Nicholas felt a dread of their wanting to +take him away from surroundings in which, protected from all the +entanglements of life, he was living so calmly and quietly. He felt +that sooner or later he would have to re-enter that whirlpool of life, +with its embarrassments and affairs to be straightened out, its +accounts with stewards, quarrels, and intrigues, its ties, society, +and with Sonya's love and his promise to her. It was all dreadfully +difficult and complicated; and he replied to his mother in cold, +formal letters in French, beginning: "My dear Mamma," and ending: +"Your obedient son," which said nothing of when he would return. In +1810 he received letters from his parents, in which they told him of +Natasha's engagement to Bolkonski, and that the wedding would be in +a year's time because the old prince made difficulties. This letter +grieved and mortified Nicholas. In the first place he was sorry that +Natasha, for whom he cared more than for anyone else in the family, +should be lost to the home; and secondly, from his hussar point of +view, he regretted not to have been there to show that fellow +Bolkonski that connection with him was no such great honor after +all, and that if he loved Natasha he might dispense with permission +from his dotard father. For a moment he hesitated whether he should +not apply for leave in order to see Natasha before she was married, +but then came the maneuvers, and considerations about Sonya and +about the confusion of their affairs, and Nicholas again put it off. +But in the spring of that year, he received a letter from his +mother, written without his father's knowledge, and that letter +persuaded him to return. She wrote that if he did not come and take +matters in hand, their whole property would be sold by auction and +they would all have to go begging. The count was so weak, and +trusted Mitenka so much, and was so good-natured, that everybody +took advantage of him and things were going from bad to worse. "For +God's sake, I implore you, come at once if you do not wish to make +me and the whole family wretched," wrote the countess. + +This letter touched Nicholas. He had that common sense of a +matter-of-fact man which showed him what he ought to do. + +The right thing now was, if not to retire from the service, at any +rate to go home on leave. Why he had to go he did not know; but +after his after-dinner nap he gave orders to saddle Mars, an extremely +vicious gray stallion that had not been ridden for a long time, and +when he returned with the horse all in a lather, he informed Lavrushka +(Denisov's servant who had remained with him) and his comrades who +turned up in the evening that he was applying for leave and was +going home. Difficult and strange as it was for him to reflect that he +would go away without having heard from the staff- and this interested +him extremely- whether he was promoted to a captaincy or would receive +the Order of St. Anne for the last maneuvers; strange as it was to +think that he would go away without having sold his three roans to the +Polish Count Golukhovski, who was bargaining for the horses Rostov had +betted he would sell for two thousand rubles; incomprehensible as it +seemed that the ball the hussars were giving in honor of the Polish +Mademoiselle Przazdziecka (out of rivalry to the Uhlans who had +given one in honor of their Polish Mademoiselle Borzozowska) would +take place without him- he knew he must go away from this good, bright +world to somewhere where everything was stupid and confused. A week +later he obtained his leave. His hussar comrades- not only those of +his own regiment, but the whole brigade- gave Rostov a dinner to which +the subscription was fifteen rubles a head, and at which there were +two bands and two choirs of singers. Rostov danced the Trepak with +Major Basov; the tipsy officers tossed, embraced, and dropped +Rostov; the soldiers of the third squadron tossed him too, and shouted +"hurrah!" and then they put him in his sleigh and escorted him as +far as the first post station. + +During the first half of the journey- from Kremenchug to Kiev- all +Rostov's thoughts, as is usual in such cases, were behind him, with +the squadron; but when he had gone more than halfway he began to +forget his three roans and Dozhoyveyko, his quartermaster, and to +wonder anxiously how things would be at Otradnoe and what he would +find there. Thoughts of home grew stronger the nearer he approached +it- far stronger, as though this feeling of his was subject to the law +by which the force of attraction is in inverse proportion to the +square of the distance. At the last post station before Otradnoe he +gave the driver a three-ruble tip, and on arriving he ran +breathlessly, like a boy, up the steps of his home. + +After the rapture of meeting, and after that odd feeling of +unsatisfied expectation- the feeling that "everything is just the +same, so why did I hurry?"- Nicholas began to settle down in his old +home world. His father and mother were much the same, only a little +older. What was new in them was a certain uneasiness and occasional +discord, which there used not to be, and which, as Nicholas soon found +out, was due to the bad state of their affairs. Sonya was nearly +twenty; she had stopped growing prettier and promised nothing more +than she was already, but that was enough. She exhaled happiness and +love from the time Nicholas returned, and the faithful, unalterable +love of this girl had a gladdening effect on him. Petya and Natasha +surprised Nicholas most. Petya was a big handsome boy of thirteen, +merry, witty, and mischievous, with a voice that was already breaking. +As for Natasha, for a long while Nicholas wondered and laughed +whenever he looked at her. + +"You're not the same at all," he said. + +"How? Am I uglier?" + +"On the contrary, but what dignity? A princess!" he whispered to +her. + +"Yes, yes, yes!" cried Natasha, joyfully. + +She told him about her romance with Prince Andrew and of his visit +to Otradnoe and showed him his last letter. + +"Well, are you glad?" Natasha asked. "I am so tranquil and happy +now." + +"Very glad," answered Nicholas. "He is an excellent fellow.... And +are you very much in love?" + +"How shall I put it?" replied Natasha. "I was in love with Boris, +with my teacher, and with Denisov, but this is quite different. I feel +at peace and settled. I know that no better man than he exists, and +I am calm and contented now. Not at all as before." + +Nicholas expressed his disapproval of the postponement of the +marriage for a year; but Natasha attacked her brother with +exasperation, proving to him that it could not be otherwise, and +that it would be a bad thing to enter a family against the father's +will, and that she herself wished it so. + +"You don't at all understand," she said. + +Nicholas was silent and agreed with her. + +Her brother often wondered as he looked at her. She did not seem +at all like a girl in love and parted from her affianced husband. +She was even-tempered and calm and quite as cheerful as of old. This +amazed Nicholas and even made him regard Bolkonski's courtship +skeptically. He could not believe that her fate was sealed, especially +as he had not seen her with Prince Andrew. It always seemed to him +that there was something not quite right about this intended marriage. + +"Why this delay? Why no betrothal?" he thought. Once, when he had +touched on this topic with his mother, he discovered, to his +surprise and somewhat to his satisfaction, that in the depth of her +soul she too had doubts about this marriage. + +"You see he writes," said she, showing her son a letter of Prince +Andrew's, with that latent grudge a mother always has in regard to a +daughter's future married happiness, "he writes that he won't come +before December. What can be keeping him? Illness, probably! His +health is very delicate. Don't tell Natasha. And don't attach +importance to her being so bright: that's because she's living through +the last days of her girlhood, but I know what she is like every +time we receive a letter from him! However, God grant that +everything turns out well!" (She always ended with these words.) "He +is an excellent man!" + +CHAPTER II + +After reaching home Nicholas was at first serious and even dull. +He was worried by the impending necessity of interfering in the stupid +business matters for which his mother had called him home. To throw +off this burden as quickly as possible, on the third day after his +arrival he went, angry and scowling and without answering questions as +to where he was going, to Mitenka's lodge and demanded an account of +everything. But what an account of everything might be Nicholas knew +even less than the frightened and bewildered Mitenka. The conversation +and the examination of the accounts with Mitenka did not last long. +The village elder, a peasant delegate, and the village clerk, who were +waiting in the passage, heard with fear and delight first the young +count's voice roaring and snapping and rising louder and louder, and +then words of abuse, dreadful words, ejaculated one after the other. + +"Robber!... Ungrateful wretch!... I'll hack the dog to pieces! I'm +not my father!... Robbing us!..." and so on. + +Then with no less fear and delight they saw how the young count, red +in the face and with bloodshot eyes, dragged Mitenka out by the scruff +of the neck and applied his foot and knee to him behind with great +agility at convenient moments between the words, shouting, "Be off! +Never let me see your face here again, you villain!" + +Mitenka flew headlong down the six steps and ran away into the +shrubbery. (This shrubbery was a well-known haven of refuge for +culprits at Otradnoe. Mitenka himself, returning tipsy from the +town, used to hide there, and many of the residents at Otradnoe, +hiding from Mitenka, knew of its protective qualities.) + +Mitenka's wife and sisters-in-law thrust their heads and +frightened faces out of the door of a room where a bright samovar +was boiling and where the steward's high bedstead stood with its +patchwork quilt. + +The young count paid no heed to them, but, breathing hard, passed by +with resolute strides and went into the house. + +The countess, who heard at once from the maids what had happened +at the lodge, was calmed by the thought that now their affairs would +certainly improve, but on the other hand felt anxious as to the effect +this excitement might have on her son. She went several times to his +door on tiptoe and listened, as he lighted one pipe after another. + +Next day the old count called his son aside and, with an embarrassed +smile, said to him: + +"But you know, my dear boy, it's a pity you got excited! Mitenka has +told me all about it." + +"I knew," thought Nicholas, "that I should never understand anything +in this crazy world." + +"You were angry that he had not entered those 700 rubles. But they +were carried forward- and you did not look at the other page." + +"Papa, he is a blackguard and a thief! I know he is! And what I have +done, I have done; but, if you like, I won't speak to him again." + +"No, my dear boy" (the count, too, felt embarrassed. He knew he +had mismanaged his wife's property and was to blame toward his +children, but he did not know how to remedy it). "No, I beg you to +attend to the business. I am old. I..." + +"No, Papa. Forgive me if I have caused you unpleasantness. I +understand it all less than you do." + +"Devil take all these peasants, and money matters, and carryings +forward from page to page," he thought. "I used to understand what a +'corner' and the stakes at cards meant, but carrying forward to +another page I don't understand at all," said he to himself, and after +that he did not meddle in business affairs. But once the countess +called her son and informed him that she had a promissory note from +Anna Mikhaylovna for two thousand rubles, and asked him what he +thought of doing with it. + +"This," answered Nicholas. "You say it rests with me. Well, I +don't like Anna Mikhaylovna and I don't like Boris, but they were +our friends and poor. Well then, this!" and he tore up the note, and +by so doing caused the old countess to weep tears of joy. After +that, young Rostov took no further part in any business affairs, but +devoted himself with passionate enthusiasm to what was to him a new +pursuit- the chase- for which his father kept a large establishment. + +CHAPTER III + +The weather was already growing wintry and morning frosts +congealed an earth saturated by autumn rains. The verdure had +thickened and its bright green stood out sharply against the +brownish strips of winter rye trodden down by the cattle, and +against the pale-yellow stubble of the spring buckwheat. The wooded +ravines and the copses, which at the end of August had still been +green islands amid black fields and stubble, had become golden and +bright-red islands amid the green winter rye. The hares had already +half changed their summer coats, the fox cubs were beginning to +scatter, and the young wolves were bigger than dogs. It was the best +time of the year for the chase. The hounds of that ardent young +sportsman Rostov had not merely reached hard winter condition, but +were so jaded that at a meeting of the huntsmen it was decided to give +them a three days' rest and then, on the sixteenth of September, to go +on a distant expedition, starting from the oak grove where there was +an undisturbed litter of wolf cubs. + +All that day the hounds remained at home. It was frosty and the +air was sharp, but toward evening the sky became overcast and it began +to thaw. On the fifteenth, when young Rostov, in his dressing gown, +looked out of the window, he saw it was an unsurpassable morning for +hunting: it was as if the sky were melting and sinking to the earth +without any wind. The only motion in the air was that of the dripping, +microscopic particles of drizzling mist. The bare twigs in the +garden were hung with transparent drops which fell on the freshly +fallen leaves. The earth in the kitchen garden looked wet and black +and glistened like poppy seed and at a short distance merged into +the dull, moist veil of mist. Nicholas went out into the wet and muddy +porch. There was a smell of decaying leaves and of dog. Milka, a +black-spotted, broad-haunched bitch with prominent black eyes, got +up on seeing her master, stretched her hind legs, lay down like a +hare, and then suddenly jumped up and licked him right on his nose and +mustache. Another borzoi, a dog, catching sight of his master from the +garden path, arched his back and, rushing headlong toward the porch +with lifted tail, began rubbing himself against his legs. + +"O-hoy!" came at that moment, that inimitable huntsman's call +which unites the deepest bass with the shrillest tenor, and round +the corner came Daniel the head huntsman and head kennelman, a gray, +wrinkled old man with hair cut straight over his forehead, Ukrainian +fashion, a long bent whip in his hand, and that look of independence +and scorn of everything that is only seen in huntsmen. He doffed his +Circassian cap to his master and looked at him scornfully. This +scorn was not offensive to his master. Nicholas knew that this Daniel, +disdainful of everybody and who considered himself above them, was all +the same his serf and huntsman. + +"Daniel!" Nicholas said timidly, conscious at the sight of the +weather, the hounds, and the huntsman that he was being carried away +by that irresistible passion for sport which makes a man forget all +his previous resolutions, as a lover forgets in the presence of his +mistress. + +"What orders, your excellency?" said the huntsman in his deep +bass, deep as a proto-deacon's and hoarse with hallooing- and two +flashing black eyes gazed from under his brows at his master, who +was silent. "Can you resist it?" those eyes seemed to be asking. + +"It's a good day, eh? For a hunt and a gallop, eh?" asked +Nicholas, scratching Milka behind the ears. + +Daniel did not answer, but winked instead. + +"I sent Uvarka at dawn to listen," his bass boomed out after a +minute's pause. "He says she's moved them into the Otradnoe enclosure. +They were howling there." (This meant that the she-wolf, about whom +they both knew, had moved with her cubs to the Otradnoe copse, a small +place a mile and a half from the house.) + +"We ought to go, don't you think so?" said Nicholas. "Come to me +with Uvarka." + +"As you please." + +"Then put off feeding them." + +"Yes, sir." + +Five minutes later Daniel and Uvarka were standing in Nicholas' +big study. Though Daniel was not a big man, to see him in a room was +like seeing a horse or a bear on the floor among the furniture and +surroundings of human life. Daniel himself felt this, and as usual +stood just inside the door, trying to speak softly and not move, for +fear of breaking something in the master's apartment, and he +hastened to say all that was necessary so as to get from under that +ceiling, out into the open under the sky once more. + +Having finished his inquiries and extorted from Daniel an opinion +that the hounds were fit (Daniel himself wished to go hunting), +Nicholas ordered the horses to be saddled. But just as Daniel was +about to go Natasha came in with rapid steps, not having done up her +hair or finished dressing and with her old nurse's big shawl wrapped +round her. Petya ran in at the same time. + +"You are going?" asked Natasha. "I knew you would! Sonya said you +wouldn't go, but I knew that today is the sort of day when you +couldn't help going." + +"Yes, we are going," replied Nicholas reluctantly, for today, as +he intended to hunt seriously, he did not want to take Natasha and +Petya. "We are going, but only wolf hunting: it would be dull for +you." + +"You know it is my greatest pleasure," said Natasha. "It's not fair; +you are going by yourself, are having the horses saddled and said +nothing to us about it." + +"'No barrier bars a Russian's path'- we'll go!" shouted Petya. + +"But you can't. Mamma said you mustn't," said Nicholas to Natasha. + +"Yes, I'll go. I shall certainly go," said Natasha decisively. +"Daniel, tell them to saddle for us, and Michael must come with my +dogs," she added to the huntsman. + +It seemed to Daniel irksome and improper to be in a room at all, but +to have anything to do with a young lady seemed to him impossible. +He cast down his eyes and hurried out as if it were none of his +business, careful as he went not to inflict any accidental injury on +the young lady. + +CHAPTER IV + +The old count, who had always kept up an enormous hunting +establishment but had now handed it all completely over to his son's +care, being in very good spirits on this fifteenth of September, +prepared to go out with the others. + +In an hour's time the whole hunting party was at the porch. +Nicholas, with a stern and serious air which showed that now was no +time for attending to trifles, went past Natasha and Petya who were +trying to tell him something. He had a look at all the details of +the hunt, sent a pack of hounds and huntsmen on ahead to find the +quarry, mounted his chestnut Donets, and whistling to his own leash of +borzois, set off across the threshing ground to a field leading to the +Otradnoe wood. The old count's horse, a sorrel gelding called +Viflyanka, was led by the groom in attendance on him, while the +count himself was to drive in a small trap straight to a spot reserved +for him. + +They were taking fifty-four hounds, with six hunt attendants and +whippers-in. Besides the family, there were eight borzoi kennelmen and +more than forty borzois, so that, with the borzois on the leash +belonging to members of the family, there were about a hundred and +thirty dogs and twenty horsemen. + +Each dog knew its master and its call. Each man in the hunt knew his +business. his place, what he had to do. As soon as they had passed the +fence they all spread out evenly and quietly, without noise or talk, +along the road and field leading to the Otradnoe covert. + +The horses stepped over the field as over a thick carpet, now and +then splashing into puddles as they crossed a road. The misty sky +still seemed to descend evenly and imperceptibly toward the earth, the +air was still, warm, and silent. Occasionally the whistle of a +huntsman, the snort of a horse, the crack of a whip, or the whine of a +straggling hound could be heard. + +When they had gone a little less than a mile, five more riders +with dogs appeared out of the mist, approaching the Rostovs. In +front rode a fresh-looking, handsome old man with a large gray +mustache. + +"Good morning, Uncle!" said Nicholas, when the old man drew near. + +"That's it. Come on!... I was sure of it," began "Uncle." (He was +a distant relative of the Rostovs', a man of small means, and their +neighbor.) "I knew you wouldn't be able to resist it and it's a good +thing you're going. That's it! Come on! (This was "Uncle's" favorite +expression.) "Take the covert at once, for my Girchik says the Ilagins +are at Korniki with their hounds. That's it. Come on!... They'll +take the cubs from under your very nose." + +"That's where I'm going. Shall we join up our packs?" asked +Nicholas. + +The hounds were joined into one pack, and "Uncle" and Nicholas +rode on side by side. Natasha, muffled up in shawls which did not hide +her eager face and shining eyes, galloped up to them. She was followed +by Petya who always kept close to her, by Michael, a huntsman, and +by a groom appointed to look after her. Petya, who was laughing, +whipped and pulled at his horse. Natasha sat easily and confidently on +her black Arabchik and reined him in without effort with a firm hand. + +"Uncle" looked round disapprovingly at Petya and Natasha. He did not +like to combine frivolity with the serious business of hunting. + +"Good morning, Uncle! We are going too!" shouted Petya. + +"Good morning, good morning! But don't go overriding the hounds," +said "Uncle" sternly. + +"Nicholas, what a fine dog Trunila is! He knew me," said Natasha, +referring to her favorite hound. + +"In the first place, Trunila is not a 'dog,' but a harrier," thought +Nicholas, and looked sternly at his sister, trying to make her feel +the distance that ought to separate them at that moment. Natasha +understood it. + +"You mustn't think we'll be in anyone's way, Uncle," she said. +"We'll go to our places and won't budge." + +"A good thing too, little countess," said "Uncle," "only mind you +don't fall off your horse," he added, "because- that's it, come on!- +you've nothing to hold on to." + +The oasis of the Otradnoe covert came in sight a few hundred yards +off, the huntsmen were already nearing it. Rostov, having finally +settled with "Uncle" where they should set on the hounds, and having +shown Natasha where she was to stand- a spot where nothing could +possibly run out- went round above the ravine. + +"Well, nephew, you're going for a big wolf," said "Uncle." "Mind and +don't let her slip!" + +"That's as may happen," answered Rostov. "Karay, here!" he +shouted, answering "Uncle's" remark by this call to his borzoi. +Karay was a shaggy old dog with a hanging jowl, famous for having +tackled a big wolf unaided. They all took up their places. + +The old count, knowing his son's ardor in the hunt, hurried so as +not to be late, and the hunstmen had not yet reached their places when +Count Ilya Rostov, cheerful, flushed, and with quivering cheeks, drove +up with his black horses over the winter rye to the place reserved for +him, where a wolf might come out. Having straightened his coat and +fastened on his hunting knives and horn, he mounted his good, sleek, +well-fed, and comfortable horse, Viflyanka, which was turning gray, +like himself. His horses and trap were sent home. Count Ilya Rostov, +though not at heart a keen sportsman, knew the rules of the hunt well, +and rode to the bushy edge of the road where he was to stand, arranged +his reins, settled himself in the saddle, and, feeling that he was +ready, looked about with a smile. + +Beside him was Simon Chekmar, his personal attendant, an old +horseman now somewhat stiff in the saddle. Chekmar held in leash three +formidable wolfhounds, who had, however, grown fat like their master +and his horse. Two wise old dogs lay down unleashed. Some hundred +paces farther along the edge of the wood stood Mitka, the count's +other groom, a daring horseman and keen rider to hounds. Before the +hunt, by old custom, the count had drunk a silver cupful of mulled +brandy, taken a snack, and washed it down with half a bottle of his +favorite Bordeaux. + +He was somewhat flushed with the wine and the drive. His eyes were +rather moist and glittered more than usual, and as he sat in his +saddle, wrapped up in his fur coat, he looked like a child taken out +for an outing. + +The thin, hollow-cheeked Chekmar, having got everything ready, +kept glancing at his master with whom he had lived on the best of +terms for thirty years, and understanding the mood he was in +expected a pleasant chat. A third person rode up circumspectly through +the wood (it was plain that he had had a lesson) and stopped behind +the count. This person was a gray-bearded old man in a woman's +cloak, with a tall peaked cap on his head. He was the buffoon, who +went by a woman's name, Nastasya Ivanovna. + +"Well, Nastasya Ivanovna!" whispered the count, winking at him. +"If you scare away the beast, Daniel'll give it you!" + +"I know a thing or two myself!" said Nastasya Ivanovna. + +"Hush!" whispered the count and turned to Simon. "Have you seen +the young countess?" he asked. "Where is she?" + +"With young Count Peter, by the Zharov rank grass," answered +Simon, smiling. "Though she's a lady, she's very fond of hunting." + +"And you're surprised at the way she rides, Simon, eh?" said the +count. "She's as good as many a man!" + +"Of course! It's marvelous. So bold, so easy!" + +"And Nicholas? Where is he? By the Lyadov upland, isn't he?" + +"Yes, sir. He knows where to stand. He understands the matter so +well that Daniel and I are often quite astounded," said Simon, well +knowing what would please his master. + +"Rides well, eh? And how well he looks on his horse, eh?" + +"A perfect picture! How he chased a fox out of the rank grass by the +Zavarzinsk thicket the other day! Leaped a fearful place; what a sight +when they rushed from the covert... the horse worth a thousand +rubles and the rider beyond all price! Yes, one would have to search +far to find another as smart." + +"To search far..." repeated the count, evidently sorry Simon had not +said more. "To search far," he said, turning back the skirt of his +coat to get at his snuffbox. + +"The other day when he came out from Mass in full uniform, Michael +Sidorych..." Simon did not finish, for on the still air he had +distinctly caught the music of the hunt with only two or three +hounds giving tongue. He bent down his head and listened, shaking a +warning finger at his master. "They are on the scent of the cubs... +" he whispered, "straight to the Lyadov uplands." + +The count, forgetting to smooth out the smile on his face, looked +into the distance straight before him, down the narrow open space, +holding the snuffbox in his hand but not taking any. After the cry +of the hounds came the deep tones of the wolf call from Daniel's +hunting horn; the pack joined the first three hounds and they could be +heard in full cry, with that peculiar lift in the note that +indicates that they are after a wolf. The whippers-in no longer set on +the hounds, but changed to the cry of ulyulyu, and above the others +rose Daniel's voice, now a deep bass, now piercingly shrill. His voice +seemed to fill the whole wood and carried far beyond out into the open +field. + +After listening a few moments in silence, the count and his +attendant convinced themselves that the hounds had separated into +two packs: the sound of the larger pack, eagerly giving tongue, +began to die away in the distance, the other pack rushed by the wood +past the count, and it was with this that Daniel's voice was heard +calling ulyulyu. The sounds of both packs mingled and broke apart +again, but both were becoming more distant. + +Simon sighed and stooped to straighten the leash a young borzoi +had entangled; the count too sighed and, noticing the snuffbox in +his hand, opened it and took a pinch. "Back!" cried Simon to a +borzoi that was pushing forward out of the wood. The count started and +dropped the snuffbox. Nastasya Ivanovna dismounted to pick it up. +The count and Simon were looking at him. + +Then, unexpectedly, as often happens, the sound of the hunt suddenly +approached, as if the hounds in full cry and Daniel ulyulyuing were +just in front of them. + +The count turned and saw on his right Mitka staring at him with eyes +starting out of his head, raising his cap and pointing before him to +the other side. + +"Look out!" he shouted, in a voice plainly showing that he had +long fretted to utter that word, and letting the borzois slip he +galloped toward the count. + +The count and Simon galloped out of the wood and saw on their left a +wolf which, softly swaying from side to side, was coming at a quiet +lope farther to the left to the very place where they were standing. +The angry borzois whined and getting free of the leash rushed past the +horses' feet at the wolf. + +The wolf paused, turned its heavy forehead toward the dogs +awkwardly, like a man suffering from the quinsy, and, still slightly +swaying from side to side, gave a couple of leaps and with a swish +of its tail disappeared into the skirt of the wood. At the same +instant, with a cry like a wail, first one hound, then another, and +then another, sprang helter-skelter from the wood opposite and the +whole pack rushed across the field toward the very spot where the wolf +had disappeared. The hazel bushes parted behind the hounds and +Daniel's chestnut horse appeared, dark with sweat. On its long back +sat Daniel, hunched forward, capless, his disheveled gray hair hanging +over his flushed, perspiring face. + +"Ulyulyulyu! ulyulyu!..." he cried. When he caught sight of the +count his eyes flashed lightning. + +"Blast you!" he shouted, holding up his whip threateningly at the +count. + +"You've let the wolf go!... What sportsmen! and as if scorning to +say more to the frightened and shamefaced count, he lashed the heaving +flanks of his sweating chestnut gelding with all the anger the count +had aroused and flew off after the hounds. The count, like a +punished schoolboy, looked round, trying by a smile to win Simon's +sympathy for his plight. But Simon was no longer there. He was +galloping round by the bushes while the field was coming up on both +sides, all trying to head the wolf, but it vanished into the wood +before they could do so. + +CHAPTER V + +Nicholas Rostov meanwhile remained at his post, waiting for the +wolf. By the way the hunt approached and receded, by the cries of +the dogs whose notes were familiar to him, by the way the voices of +the huntsmen approached, receded, and rose, he realized what was +happening at the copse. He knew that young and old wolves were +there, that the hounds had separated into two packs, that somewhere +a wolf was being chased, and that something had gone wrong. He +expected the wolf to come his way any moment. He made thousands of +different conjectures as to where and from what side the beast would +come and how he would set upon it. Hope alternated with despair. +Several times he addressed a prayer to God that the wolf should come +his way. He prayed with that passionate and shame-faced feeling with +which men pray at moments of great excitement arising from trivial +causes. "What would it be to Thee to do this for me?" he said to +God. "I know Thou art great, and that it is a sin to ask this of Thee, +but for God's sake do let the old wolf come my way and let Karay +spring at it- in sight of 'Uncle' who is watching from over there- and +seize it by the throat in a death grip!" A thousand times during +that half-hour Rostov cast eager and restless glances over the edge of +the wood, with the two scraggy oaks rising above the aspen undergrowth +and the gully with its water-worn side and "Uncle's" cap just +visible above the bush on his right. + +"No, I shan't have such luck," thought Rostov, "yet what wouldn't it +be worth! It is not to be! Everywhere, at cards and in war, I am +always unlucky." Memories of Austerlitz and of Dolokhov flashed +rapidly and clearly through his mind. "Only once in my life to get +an old wolf, I want only that!" thought he, straining eyes and ears +and looking to the left and then to the right and listening to the +slightest variation of note in the cries of the dogs. + +Again he looked to the right and saw something running toward him +across the deserted field. "No, it can't be!" thought Rostov, taking a +deep breath, as a man does at the coming of something long hoped +for. The height of happiness was reached- and so simply, without +warning, or noise, or display, that Rostov could not believe his +eyes and remained in doubt for over a second. The wolf ran forward and +jumped heavily over a gully that lay in her path. She was an old +animal with a gray back and big reddish belly. She ran without +hurry, evidently feeling sure that no one saw her. Rostov, holding his +breath, looked round at the borzois. They stood or lay not seeing +the wolf or understanding the situation. Old Karay had turned his head +and was angrily searching for fleas, baring his yellow teeth and +snapping at his hind legs. + +"Ulyulyulyu!" whispered Rostov, pouting his lips. The borzois jumped +up, jerking the rings of the leashes and pricking their ears. Karay +finished scratching his hindquarters and, cocking his ears, got up +with quivering tail from which tufts of matted hair hung down. + +"Shall I loose them or not?" Nicholas asked himself as the wolf +approached him coming from the copse. Suddenly the wolf's whole +physiognomy changed: she shuddered, seeing what she had probably never +seen before- human eyes fixed upon her- and turning her head a +little toward Rostov, she paused. + +"Back or forward? Eh, no matter, forward..." the wolf seemed to +say to herself, and she moved forward without again looking round +and with a quiet, long, easy yet resolute lope. + +"Ulyulyu!" cried Nicholas, in a voice not his own, and of its own +accord his good horse darted headlong downhill, leaping over gullies +to head off the wolf, and the borzois passed it, running faster still. +Nicholas did not hear his own cry nor feel that he was galloping, +nor see the borzois, nor the ground over which he went: he saw only +the wolf, who, increasing her speed, bounded on in the same +direction along the hollow. The first to come into view was Milka, +with her black markings and powerful quarters, gaining upon the +wolf. Nearer and nearer... now she was ahead of it; but the wolf +turned its head to face her, and instead of putting on speed as she +usually did Milka suddenly raised her tail and stiffened her forelegs. + +"Ulyulyulyulyu!" shouted Nicholas. + +The reddish Lyubim rushed forward from behind Milka, sprang +impetuously at the wolf, and seized it by its hindquarters, but +immediately jumped aside in terror. The wolf crouched, gnashed her +teeth, and again rose and bounded forward, followed at the distance of +a couple of feet by all the borzois, who did not get any closer to +her. + +"She'll get away! No, it's impossible!" thought Nicholas, still +shouting with a hoarse voice. + +"Karay, ulyulyu!..." he shouted, looking round for the old borzoi +who was now his only hope. Karay, with all the strength age had left +him, stretched himself to the utmost and, watching the wolf, +galloped heavily aside to intercept it. But the quickness of the +wolf's lope and the borzoi's slower pace made it plain that Karay +had miscalculated. Nicholas could already see not far in front of +him the wood where the wolf would certainly escape should she reach +it. But, coming toward him, he saw hounds and a huntsman galloping +almost straight at the wolf. There was still hope. A long, yellowish +young borzoi, one Nicholas did not know, from another leash, rushed +impetuously at the wolf from in front and almost knocked her over. But +the wolf jumped up more quickly than anyone could have expected and, +gnashing her teeth, flew at the yellowish borzoi, which, with a +piercing yelp, fell with its head on the ground, bleeding from a +gash in its side. + +"Karay? Old fellow!..." wailed Nicholas. + +Thanks to the delay caused by this crossing of the wolf's path, +the old dog with its felted hair hanging from its thigh was within +five paces of it. As if aware of her danger, the wolf turned her +eyes on Karay, tucked her tail yet further between her legs, and +increased her speed. But here Nicholas only saw that something +happened to Karay- the borzoi was suddenly on the wolf, and they +rolled together down into a gully just in front of them. + +That instant, when Nicholas saw the wolf struggling in the gully +with the dogs, while from under them could be seen her gray hair and +outstretched hind leg and her frightened choking head, with her ears +laid back (Karay was pinning her by the throat), was the happiest +moment of his life. With his hand on his saddlebow, he was ready to +dismount and stab the wolf, when she suddenly thrust her head up +from among that mass of dogs, and then her forepaws were on the edge +of the gully. She clicked her teeth (Karay no longer had her by the +throat), leaped with a movement of her hind legs out of the gully, and +having disengaged herself from the dogs, with tail tucked in again, +went forward. Karay, his hair bristling, and probably bruised or +wounded, climbed with difficulty out of the gully. + +"Oh my God! Why?" Nicholas cried in despair. + +"Uncle's" huntsman was galloping from the other side across the +wolf's path and his borzois once more stopped the animal's advance. +She was again hemmed in. + +Nicholas and his attendant, with "Uncle" and his huntsman, were +all riding round the wolf, crying "ulyulyu!" shouting and preparing to +dismount each moment that the wolf crouched back, and starting forward +again every time she shook herself and moved toward the wood where she +would be safe. + +Already, at the beginning of this chase, Daniel, hearing the +ulyulyuing, had rushed out from the wood. He saw Karay seize the wolf, +and checked his horse, supposing the affair to be over. But when he +saw that the horsemen did not dismount and that the wolf shook herself +and ran for safety, Daniel set his chestnut galloping, not at the wolf +but straight toward the wood, just as Karay had run to cut the +animal off. As a result of this, he galloped up to the wolf just +when she had been stopped a second time by "Uncle's" borzois. + +Daniel galloped up silently, holding a naked dagger in his left hand +and thrashing the laboring sides of his chestnut horse with his whip +as if it were a flail. + +Nicholas neither saw nor heard Daniel until the chestnut, +breathing heavily, panted past him, and he heard the fall of a body +and saw Daniel lying on the wolf's back among the dogs, trying to +seize her by the ears. It was evident to the dogs, the hunters, and to +the wolf herself that all was now over. The terrified wolf pressed +back her ears and tried to rise, but the borzois stuck to her. +Daniel rose a little, took a step, and with his whole weight, as if +lying down to rest, fell on the wolf, seizing her by the ears. +Nicholas was about to stab her, but Daniel whispered, "Don't! We'll +gag her!" and, changing his position, set his foot on the wolf's neck. +A stick was thrust between her jaws and she was fastened with a leash, +as if bridled, her legs were bound together, and Daniel rolled her +over once or twice from side to side. + +With happy, exhausted faces, they laid the old wolf, alive, on a +shying and snorting horse and, accompanied by the dogs yelping at her, +took her to the place where they were all to meet. The hounds had +killed two of the cubs and the borzois three. The huntsmen assembled +with their booty and their stories, and all came to look at the +wolf, which, with her broad-browed head hanging down and the bitten +stick between her jaws, gazed with great glassy eyes at this crowd +of dogs and men surrounding her. When she was touched, she jerked +her bound legs and looked wildly yet simply at everybody. Old Count +Rostov also rode up and touched the wolf. + +"Oh, what a formidable one!" said he. "A formidable one, eh?" he +asked Daniel, who was standing near. + +"Yes, your excellency," answered Daniel, quickly doffing his cap. + +The count remembered the wolf he had let slip and his encounter with +Daniel. + +"Ah, but you are a crusty fellow, friend!" said the count. + +For sole reply Daniel gave him a shy, childlike, meek, and amiable +smile. + +CHAPTER VI + +The old count went home, and Natasha and Petya promised to return +very soon, but as it was still early the hunt went farther. At +midday they put the hounds into a ravine thickly overgrown with +young trees. Nicholas standing in a fallow field could see all his +whips. + +Facing him lay a field of winter rye, there his own huntsman stood +alone in a hollow behind a hazel bush. The hounds had scarcely been +loosed before Nicholas heard one he knew, Voltorn, giving tongue at +intervals; other hounds joined in, now pausing and now again giving +tongue. A moment later he heard a cry from the wooded ravine that a +fox had been found, and the whole pack, joining together, rushed along +the ravine toward the ryefield and away from Nicholas. + +He saw the whips in their red caps galloping along the edge of the +ravine, he even saw the hounds, and was expecting a fox to show itself +at any moment on the ryefield opposite. + +The huntsman standing in the hollow moved and loosed his borzois, +and Nicholas saw a queer, short-legged red fox with a fine brush going +hard across the field. The borzois bore down on it.... Now they drew +close to the fox which began to dodge between the field in sharper and +sharper curves, trailing its brush, when suddenly a strange white +borzoi dashed in followed by a black one, and everything was in +confusion; the borzois formed a star-shaped figure, scarcely swaying +their bodies and with tails turned away from the center of the +group. Two huntsmen galloped up to the dogs; one in a red cap, the +other, a stranger, in a green coat. + +"What's this?" thought Nicholas. "Where's that huntsman from? He +is not 'Uncle's' man." + +The huntsmen got the fox, but stayed there a long time without +strapping it to the saddle. Their horses, bridled and with high +saddles, stood near them and there too the dogs were lying. The +huntsmen waved their arms and did something to the fox. Then from that +spot came the sound of a horn, with the signal agreed on in case of +a fight. + +"That's Ilagin's huntsman having a row with our Ivan," said +Nicholas' groom. + +Nicholas sent the man to call Natasha and Petya to him, and rode +at a footpace to the place where the whips were getting the hounds +together. Several of the field galloped to the spot where the fight +was going on. + +Nicholas dismounted, and with Natasha and Petya, who had ridden +up, stopped near the hounds, waiting to see how the matter would +end. Out of the bushes came the huntsman who had been fighting and +rode toward his young master, with the fox tied to his crupper. +While still at a distance he took off his cap and tried to speak +respectfully, but he was pale and breathless and his face was angry. +One of his eyes was black, but he probably was not even aware of it. + +"What has happened?" asked Nicholas. + +"A likely thing, killing a fox our dogs had hunted! And it was my +gray bitch that caught it! Go to law, indeed!... He snatches at the +fox! I gave him one with the fox. Here it is on my saddle! Do you want +a taste of this?..." said the huntsman, pointing to his dagger and +probably imagining himself still speaking to his foe. + +Nicholas, not stopping to talk to the man, asked his sister and +Petya to wait for him and rode to the spot where the enemy's, +Ilagin's, hunting party was. + +The victorious huntsman rode off to join the field, and there, +surrounded by inquiring sympathizers, recounted his exploits. + +The facts were that Ilagin, with whom the Rostovs had a quarrel +and were at law, hunted over places that belonged by custom to the +Rostovs, and had now, as if purposely, sent his men to the very +woods the Rostovs were hunting and let his man snatch a fox their dogs +had chased. + +Nicholas, though he had never seen Ilagin, with his usual absence of +moderation in judgment, hated him cordially from reports of his +arbitrariness and violence, and regarded him as his bitterest foe. +He rode in angry agitation toward him, firmly grasping his whip and +fully prepared to take the most resolute and desperate steps to punish +his enemy. + +Hardly had he passed an angle of the wood before a stout gentleman +in a beaver cap came riding toward him on a handsome raven-black +horse, accompanied by two hunt servants. + +Instead of an enemy, Nicholas found in Ilagin a stately and +courteous gentleman who was particularly anxious to make the young +count's acquaintance. Having ridden up to Nicholas, Ilagin raised +his beaver cap and said he much regretted what had occurred and +would have the man punished who had allowed himself to seize a fox +hunted by someone else's borzois. He hoped to become better acquainted +with the count and invited him to draw his covert. + +Natasha, afraid that her brother would do something dreadful, had +followed him in some excitement. Seeing the enemies exchanging +friendly greetings, she rode up to them. Ilagin lifted his beaver +cap still higher to Natasha and said, with a pleasant smile, that +the young countess resembled Diana in her passion for the chase as +well as in her beauty, of which he had heard much. + +To expiate his huntsman's offense, Ilagin pressed the Rostovs to +come to an upland of his about a mile away which he usually kept for +himself and which, he said, swarmed with hares. Nicholas agreed, and +the hunt, now doubled, moved on. + +The way to Iligin's upland was across the fields. The hunt +servants fell into line. The masters rode together. "Uncle," Rostov, +and Ilagin kept stealthily glancing at one another's dogs, trying +not to be observed by their companions and searching uneasily for +rivals to their own borzois. + +Rostov was particularly struck by the beauty of a small, +pure-bred, red-spotted bitch on Ilagin's leash, slender but with +muscles like steel, a delicate muzzle, and prominent black eyes. He +had heard of the swiftness of Ilagin's borzois, and in that +beautiful bitch saw a rival to his own Milka. + +In the middle of a sober conversation begun by Ilagin about the +year's harvest, Nicholas pointed to the red-spotted bitch. + +"A fine little bitch, that!" said he in a careless tone. "Is she +swift?" + +"That one? Yes, she's a good dog, gets what she's after," answered +Ilagin indifferently, of the red-spotted bitch Erza, for which, a year +before, he had given a neighbor three families of house serfs. "So +in your parts, too, the harvest is nothing to boast of, Count?" he +went on, continuing the conversation they had begun. And considering +it polite to return the young count's compliment, Ilagin looked at his +borzois and picked out Milka who attracted his attention by her +breadth. "That black-spotted one of yours is fine- well shaped!" +said he. + +"Yes, she's fast enough," replied Nicholas, and thought: "If only +a full-grown hare would cross the field now I'd show you what sort +of borzoi she is," and turning to his groom, he said he would give a +ruble to anyone who found a hare. + +"I don't understand," continued Ilagin, "how some sportsmen can be +so jealous about game and dogs. For myself, I can tell you, Count, I +enjoy riding in company such as this... what could be better?" (he +again raised his cap to Natasha) "but as for counting skins and what +one takes, I don't care about that." + +"Of course not!" + +"Or being upset because someone else's borzoi and not mine catches +something. All I care about is to enjoy seeing the chase, is it not +so, Count? For I consider that..." + +"A-tu!" came the long-drawn cry of one of the borzoi whippers-in, +who had halted. He stood on a knoll in the stubble, holding his whip +aloft, and again repeated his long-drawn cry, "A-tu!" (This call and +the uplifted whip meant that he saw a sitting hare.) + +"Ah, he has found one, I think," said Ilagin carelessly. "Yes, we +must ride up.... Shall we both course it?" answered Nicholas, seeing +in Erza and "Uncle's" red Rugay two rivals he had never yet had a +chance of pitting against his own borzois. "And suppose they outdo +my Milka at once!" he thought as he rode with "Uncle" and Ilagin +toward the hare. + +"A full-grown one?" asked Ilagin as he approached the whip who had +sighted the hare- and not without agitation he looked round and +whistled to Erza. + +"And you, Michael Nikanorovich?" he said, addressing "Uncle." + +The latter was riding with a sullen expression on his face. + +"How can I join in? Why, you've given a village for each of your +borzois! That's it, come on! Yours are worth thousands. Try yours +against one another, you two, and I'll look on!" + +"Rugay, hey, hey!" he shouted. "Rugayushka!" he added, involuntarily +by this diminutive expressing his affection and the hopes he placed on +this red borzoi. Natasha saw and felt the agitation the two elderly +men and her brother were trying to conceal, and was herself excited by +it. + +The huntsman stood halfway up the knoll holding up his whip and +the gentlefolk rode up to him at a footpace; the hounds that were +far off on the horizon turned away from the hare, and the whips, but +not the gentlefolk, also moved away. All were moving slowly and +sedately. + +"How is it pointing?" asked Nicholas, riding a hundred paces +toward the whip who had sighted the hare. + +But before the whip could reply, the hare, scenting the frost coming +next morning, was unable to rest and leaped up. The pack on leash +rushed downhill in full cry after the hare, and from all sides the +borzois that were not on leash darted after the hounds and the hare. +All the hunt, who had been moving slowly, shouted, "Stop!" calling +in the hounds, while the borzoi whips, with a cry of "A-tu!"galloped +across the field setting the borzois on the hare. The tranquil Ilagin, +Nicholas, Natasha, and "Uncle" flew, reckless of where and how they +went, seeing only the borzois and the hare and fearing only to lose +sight even for an instant of the chase. The hare they had started +was a strong and swift one. When he jumped up he did not run at +once, but pricked his ears listening to the shouting and trampling +that resounded from all sides at once. He took a dozen bounds, not +very quickly, letting the borzois gain on him, and, finally having +chosen his direction and realized his danger, laid back his ears and +rushed off headlong. He had been lying in the stubble, but in front of +him was the autumn sowing where the ground was soft. The two borzois +of the huntsman who had sighted him, having been the nearest, were the +first to see and pursue him, but they had not gone far before Ilagin's +red-spotted Erza passed them, got within a length, flew at the hare +with terrible swiftness aiming at his scut, and, thinking she had +seized him, rolled over like a ball. The hare arched his back and +bounded off yet more swiftly. From behind Erza rushed the +broad-haunched, black-spotted Milka and began rapidly gaining on the +hare. + +"Milashka, dear!" rose Nicholas' triumphant cry. It looked as if +Milka would immediately pounce on the hare, but she overtook him and +flew past. The hare had squatted. Again the beautiful Erza reached +him, but when close to the hare's scut paused as if measuring the +distance, so as not to make a mistake this time but seize his hind +leg. + +"Erza, darling! Ilagin wailed in a voice unlike his own. Erza did +not hearken to his appeal. At the very moment when she would have +seized her prey, the hare moved and darted along the balk between +the winter rye and the stubble. Again Erza and Milka were abreast, +running like a pair of carriage horses, and began to overtake the +hare, but it was easier for the hare to run on the balk and the +borzois did not overtake him so quickly. + +"Rugay, Rugayushka! That's it, come on!" came a third voice just +then, and "Uncle's" red borzoi, straining and curving its back, caught +up with the two foremost borzois, pushed ahead of them regardless of +the terrible strain, put on speed close to the hare, knocked it off +the balk onto the ryefield, again put on speed still more viciously, +sinking to his knees in the muddy field, and all one could see was +how, muddying his back, he rolled over with the hare. A ring of +borzois surrounded him. A moment later everyone had drawn up round the +crowd of dogs. Only the delighted "Uncle" dismounted, and cut off a +pad, shaking the hare for the blood to drip off, and anxiously +glancing round with restless eyes while his arms and legs twitched. He +spoke without himself knowing whom to or what about. "That's it, +come on! That's a dog!... There, it has beaten them all, the +thousand-ruble as well as the one-ruble borzois. That's it, come +on!" said he, panting and looking wrathfully around as if he were +abusing someone, as if they were all his enemies and had insulted him, +and only now had he at last succeeded in justifying himself. "There +are your thousand-ruble ones.... That's it, come on!..." + +"Rugay, here's a pad for you!" he said, throwing down the hare's +muddy pad. "You've deserved it, that's it, come on!" + +"She'd tired herself out, she'd run it down three times by herself," +said Nicholas, also not listening to anyone and regardless of +whether he were heard or not. + +"But what is there in running across it like that?" said Ilagin's +groom. + +"Once she had missed it and turned it away, any mongrel could take +it," Ilagin was saying at the same time, breathless from his gallop +and his excitement. At the same moment Natasha, without drawing +breath, screamed joyously, ecstatically, and so piercingly that it set +everyone's ear tingling. By that shriek she expressed what the +others expressed by all talking at once, and it was so strange that +she must herself have been ashamed of so wild a cry and everyone +else would have been amazed at it at any other time. "Uncle" himself +twisted up the hare, threw it neatly and smartly across his horse's +back as if by that gesture he meant to rebuke everybody, and, with +an air of not wishing to speak to anyone, mounted his bay and rode +off. The others all followed, dispirited and shamefaced, and only much +later were they able to regain their former affectation of +indifference. For a long time they continued to look at red Rugay who, +his arched back spattered with mud and clanking the ring of his leash, +walked along just behind "Uncle's" horse with the serene air of a +conqueror. + +"Well, I am like any other dog as long as it's not a question of +coursing. But when it is, then look out!" his appearance seem to +Nicholas to be saying. + +When, much later, "Uncle" rode up to Nicholas and began talking to +him, he felt flattered that, after what had happened, "Uncle" +deigned to speak to him. + +CHAPTER VII + +Toward evening Ilagin took leave of Nicholas, who found that they +were so far from home that he accepted "Uncle's" offer that the +hunting party should spend the night in his little village of +Mikhaylovna. + +"And if you put up at my house that will be better still. That's it, +come on!" said "Uncle." "You see it's damp weather, and you could +rest, and the little countess could be driven home in a trap." + +"Uncle's" offer was accepted. A huntsman was sent to Otradnoe for +a trap, while Nicholas rode with Natasha and Petya to "Uncle's" house. + +Some five male domestic serfs, big and little, rushed out to the +front porch to meet their master. A score of women serfs, old and +young, as well as children, popped out from the back entrance to +have a look at the hunters who were arriving. The presence of Natasha- +a woman, a lady, and on horseback- raised the curiosity of the serfs +to such a degree that many of them came up to her, stared her in the +face, and unabashed by her presence made remarks about her as though +she were some prodigy on show and not a human being able to hear or +understand what was said about her. + +"Arinka! Look, she sits sideways! There she sits and her skirt +dangles.... See, she's got a little hunting horn!" + +"Goodness gracious! See her knife?..." + +"Isn't she a Tartar!" + +"How is it you didn't go head over heels?" asked the boldest of all, +addressing Natasha directly. + +"Uncle" dismounted at the porch of his little wooden house which +stood in the midst of an overgrown garden and, after a glance at his +retainers, shouted authoritatively that the superfluous ones should +take themselves off and that all necessary preparations should be made +to receive the guests and the visitors. + +The serfs all dispersed. "Uncle" lifted Natasha off her horse and +taking her hand led her up the rickety wooden steps of the porch. +The house, with its bare, unplastered log walls, was not overclean- it +did not seem that those living in it aimed at keeping it spotless- but +neither was it noticeably neglected. In the entry there was a smell of +fresh apples, and wolf and fox skins hung about. + +"Uncle" led the visitors through the anteroom into a small hall with +a folding table and red chairs, then into the drawing room with a +round birchwood table and a sofa, and finally into his private room +where there was a tattered sofa, a worn carpet, and portraits of +Suvorov, of the host's father and mother, and of himself in military +uniform. The study smelt strongly of tobacco and dogs. "Uncle" asked +his visitors to sit down and make themselves at home, and then went +out of the room. Rugay, his back still muddy, came into the room and +lay down on the sofa, cleaning himself with his tongue and teeth. +Leading from the study was a passage in which a partition with +ragged curtains could be seen. From behind this came women's +laughter and whispers. Natasha, Nicholas, and Petya took off their +wraps and sat down on the sofa. Petya, leaning on his elbow, fell +asleep at once. Natasha and Nicholas were silent. Their faces +glowed, they were hungry and very cheerful. They looked at one another +(now that the hunt was over and they were in the house, Nicholas no +longer considered it necessary to show his manly superiority over +his sister), Natasha gave him a wink, and neither refrained long +from bursting into a peal of ringing laughter even before they had a +pretext ready to account for it. + +After a while "Uncle" came in, in a Cossack coat, blue trousers, and +small top boots. And Natasha felt that this costume, the very one +she had regarded with surprise and amusement at Otradnoe, was just the +right thing and not at all worse than a swallow-tail or frock coat. +"Uncle" too was in high spirits and far from being offended by the +brother's and sister's laughter (it could never enter his head that +they might be laughing at his way of life) he himself joined in the +merriment. + +"That's right, young countess, that's it, come on! I never saw +anyone like her!" said he, offering Nicholas a pipe with a long stem +and, with a practiced motion of three fingers, taking down another +that had been cut short. "She's ridden all day like a man, and is as +fresh as ever! + +Soon after "Uncle's" reappearance the door was opened, evidently +from the sound by a barefooted girl, and a stout, rosy, good-looking +woman of about forty, with a double chin and full red lips, entered +carrying a large loaded tray. With hospitable dignity and cordiality +in her glance and in every motion, she looked at the visitors and, +with a pleasant smile, bowed respectfully. In spite of her exceptional +stoutness, which caused her to protrude her chest and stomach and +throw back her head, this woman (who was "Uncle's" housekeeper) trod +very lightly. She went to the table, set down the tray, and with her +plump white hands deftly took from it the bottles and various hors +d'oeuvres and dishes and arranged them on the table. When she had +finished, she stepped aside and stopped at the door with a smile on +her face. "Here I am. I am she! Now do you understand 'Uncle'?" her +expression said to Rostov. How could one help understanding? Not +only Nicholas, but even Natasha understood the meaning of his puckered +brow and the happy complacent smile that slightly puckered his lips +when Anisya Fedorovna entered. On the tray was a bottle of herb +wine, different kinds of vodka, pickled mushrooms, rye cakes made with +buttermilk, honey in the comb, still mead and sparkling mead, +apples, nuts (raw and roasted), and nut-and-honey sweets. Afterwards +she brought a freshly roasted chicken, ham, preserves made with honey, +and preserves made with sugar. + +All this was the fruit of Anisya Fedorovna's housekeeping, +gathered and prepared by her. The smell and taste of it all had a +smack of Anisya Fedorovna herself: a savor of juiciness, +cleanliness, whiteness, and pleasant smiles. + +"Take this, little Lady-Countess!" she kept saying, as she offered +Natasha first one thing and then another. + +Natasha ate of everything and thought she had never seen or eaten +such buttermilk cakes, such aromatic jam, such honey-and-nut sweets, +or such a chicken anywhere. Anisya Fedorovna left the room. + +After supper, over their cherry brandy, Rostov and "Uncle" talked of +past and future hunts, of Rugay and Ilagin's dogs, while Natasha sat +upright on the sofa and listened with sparkling eyes. She tried +several times to wake Petya that he might eat something, but he only +muttered incoherent words without waking up. Natasha felt so +lighthearted and happy in these novel surroundings that she only +feared the trap would come for her too soon. After a casual pause, +such as often occurs when receiving friends for the first time in +one's own house, "Uncle," answering a thought that was in his +visitors' mind, said: + +"This, you see, is how I am finishing my days... Death will come. +That's it, come on! Nothing will remain. Then why harm anyone?" + +"Uncle's" face was very significant and even handsome as he said +this. Involuntarily Rostov recalled all the good he had heard about +him from his father and the neighbors. Throughout the whole province +"Uncle" had the reputation of being the most honorable and +disinterested of cranks. They called him in to decide family disputes, +chose him as executor, confided secrets to him, elected him to be a +justice and to other posts; but he always persistently refused +public appointments, passing the autumn and spring in the fields on +his bay gelding, sitting at home in winter, and lying in his overgrown +garden in summer. + +"Why don't you enter the service, Uncle?" + +"I did once, but gave it up. I am not fit for it. That's it, come +on! I can't make head or tail of it. That's for you- I haven't +brains enough. Now, hunting is another matter- that's it, come on! +Open the door, there!" he shouted. "Why have you shut it?" + +The door at the end of the passage led to the huntsmen's room, as +they called the room for the hunt servants. + +There was a rapid patter of bare feet, and an unseen hand opened the +door into the huntsmen's room, from which came the clear sounds of a +balalayka on which someone, who was evidently a master of the art, was +playing. Natasha had been listening to those strains for some time and +now went out into the passage to hear better. + +"That's Mitka, my coachman.... I have got him a good balalayka. +I'm fond of it," said "Uncle." + +It was the custom for Mitka to play the balalayka in the +huntsmen's room when "Uncle" returned from the chase. "Uncle" was fond +of such music. + +"How good! Really very good!" said Nicholas with some +unintentional superciliousness, as if ashamed to confess that the +sounds pleased him very much. + +"Very good?" said Natasha reproachfully, noticing her brother's +tone. "Not 'very good' it's simply delicious!" + +Just as "Uncle's" pickled mushrooms, honey, and cherry brandy had +seemed to her the best in the world, so also that song, at that +moment, seemed to her the acme of musical delight. + +"More, please, more!" cried Natasha at the door as soon as the +balalayka ceased. Mitka tuned up afresh, and recommenced thrumming the +balalayka to the air of My Lady, with trills and variations. "Uncle" +sat listening, slightly smiling, with his head on one side. The air +was repeated a hundred times. The balalayka was retuned several +times and the same notes were thrummed again, but the listeners did +not grow weary of it and wished to hear it again and again. Anisya +Fedorovna came in and leaned her portly person against the doorpost. + +"You like listening?" she said to Natasha, with a smile extremely +like "Uncle's." "That's a good player of ours," she added. + +"He doesn't play that part right!" said "Uncle" suddenly, with an +energetic gesture. "Here he ought to burst out- that's it, come on!- +ought to burst out." + +"Do you play then?" asked Natasha. + +"Uncle" did not answer, but smiled. + +"Anisya, go and see if the strings of my guitar are all right. I +haven't touched it for a long time. That's it- come on! I've given +it up." + +Anisya Fedorovna, with her light step, willingly went to fulfill her +errand and brought back the guitar. + +Without looking at anyone, "Uncle" blew the dust off it and, tapping +the case with his bony fingers, tuned the guitar and settled himself +in his armchair. He took the guitar a little above the fingerboard, +arching his left elbow with a somewhat theatrical gesture, and, with a +wink at Anisya Fedorovna, struck a single chord, pure and sonorous, +and then quietly, smoothly, and confidently began playing in very slow +time, not My Lady, but the well-known song: Came a maiden down the +street. The tune, played with precision and in exact time, began to +thrill in the hearts of Nicholas and Natasha, arousing in them the +same kind of sober mirth as radiated from Anisya Fedorovna's whole +being. Anisya Fedorovna flushed, and drawing her kerchief over her +face went laughing out of the room. "Uncle" continued to play +correctly, carefully, with energetic firmness, looking with a +changed and inspired expression at the spot where Anisya Fedorovna had +just stood. Something seemed to be laughing a little on one side of +his face under his gray mustaches, especially as the song grew brisker +and the time quicker and when, here and there, as he ran his fingers +over the strings, something seemed to snap. + +"Lovely, lovely! Go on, Uncle, go on!" shouted Natasha as soon as he +had finished. She jumped up and hugged and kissed him. "Nicholas, +Nicholas!" she said, turning to her brother, as if asking him: "What +is it moves me so?" + +Nicholas too was greatly pleased by "Uncle's" playing, and "Uncle" +played the piece over again. Anisya Fedorovna's smiling face +reappeared in the doorway and behind hers other faces... + +_1 Fetching water clear and sweet,
+Stop, dear maiden, I entreat- + +played "Uncle" once more, running his fingers skillfully over the +strings, and then he stopped short and jerked his shoulders. + +"Go on, Uncle dear," Natasha wailed in an imploring tone as if her +life depended on it. + +"Uncle" rose, and it was as if there were two men in him: one of +them smiled seriously at the merry fellow, while the merry fellow +struck a naive and precise attitude preparatory to a folk dance. + +"Now then, niece!" he exclaimed, waving to Natasha the hand that had +just struck a chord. + +Natasha threw off the shawl from her shoulders, ran forward to +face "Uncle," and setting her arms akimbo also made a motion with +her shoulders and struck an attitude. + +Where, how, and when had this young countess, educated by an emigree +French governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that +spirit and obtained that manner which the pas de chale~^ would, one +would have supposed, long ago have effaced? But the spirit and the +movements were those inimitable and unteachable Russian ones that +"Uncle" had expected of her. As soon as she had struck her pose, and +smiled triumphantly, proudly, and with sly merriment, the fear that +had at first seized Nicholas and the others that she might not do +the right thing was at an end, and they were already admiring her. + +^~ The French shawl dance. + +She did the right thing with such precision, such complete +precision, that Anisya Fedorovna, who had at once handed her the +handkerchief she needed for the dance, had tears in her eyes, though +she laughed as she watched this slim, graceful countess, reared in +silks and velvets and so different from herself, who yet was able to +understand all that was in Anisya and in Anisya's father and mother +and aunt, and in every Russian man and woman. + +"Well, little countess; that's it- come on!" cried "Uncle," with a +joyous laugh, having finished the dance. "Well done, niece! Now a fine +young fellow must be found as husband for you. That's it- come on!" + +"He's chosen already," said Nicholas smiling. + +"Oh?" said "Uncle" in surprise, looking inquiringly at Natasha, +who nodded her head with a happy smile. + +"And such a one!" she said. But as soon as she had said it a new +train of thoughts and feelings arose in her. "What did Nicholas' smile +mean when he said 'chosen already'? Is he glad of it or not? It is +as if he thought my Bolkonski would not approve of or understand our +gaiety. But he would understand it all. Where is he now?" she thought, +and her face suddenly became serious. But this lasted only a second. +"Don't dare to think about it," she said to herself, and sat down +again smilingly beside "Uncle," begging him to play something more. + +"Uncle" played another song and a valse; then after a pause he +cleared his throat and sang his favorite hunting song: + +_1 As 'twas growing dark last night
+Fell the snow so soft and light... + +"Uncle" sang as peasants sing, with full and naive conviction that +the whole meaning of a song lies in the words and that the tune +comes of itself, and that apart from the words there is no tune, which +exists only to give measure to the words. As a result of this the +unconsidered tune, like the song of a bird, was extraordinarily +good. Natasha was in ecstasies over "Uncle's" singing. She resolved to +give up learning the harp and to play only the guitar. She asked +"Uncle" for his guitar and at once found the chords of the song. + +After nine o'clock two traps and three mounted men, who had been +sent to look for them, arrived to fetch Natasha and Petya. The count +and countess did not know where they were and were very anxious, +said one of the men. + +Petya was carried out like a log and laid in the larger of the two +traps. Natasha and Nicholas got into the other. "Uncle" wrapped +Natasha up warmly and took leave of her with quite a new tenderness. +He accompanied them on foot as far as the bridge that could not be +crossed, so that they had to go round by the ford, and he sent +huntsmen to ride in front with lanterns. + +"Good-by, dear niece," his voice called out of the darkness- not the +voice Natasha had known previously, but the one that had sung As 'twas +growing dark last night. + +In the village through which they passed there were red lights and a +cheerful smell of smoke. + +"What a darling Uncle is!" said Natasha, when they had come out onto +the highroad. + +"Yes," returned Nicholas. "You're not cold?" + +"No. I'm quite, quite all right. I feel so comfortable!" answered +Natasha, almost perplexed by her feelings. They remained silent a long +while. The night was dark and damp. They could not see the horses, but +only heard them splashing through the unseen mud. + +What was passing in that receptive childlike soul that so eagerly +caught and assimilated all the diverse impressions of life? How did +they all find place in her? But she was very happy. As they were +nearing home she suddenly struck up the air of As 'twas growing dark +last night- the tune of which she had all the way been trying to get +and had at last caught. + +"Got it?" said Nicholas. + +"What were you thinking about just now, Nicholas?" inquired Natasha. + +They were fond of asking one another that question. + +"I?" said Nicholas, trying to remember. "Well, you see, first I +thought that Rugay, the red hound, was like Uncle, and that if he were +a man he would always keep Uncle near him, if not for his riding, then +for his manner. What a good fellow Uncle is! Don't you think so?... +Well, and you?" + +"I? Wait a bit, wait.... Yes, first I thought that we are driving +along and imagining that we are going home, but that heaven knows +where we are really going in the darkness, and that we shall arrive +and suddenly find that we are not in Otradnoe, but in Fairyland. And +then I thought... No, nothing else." + +"I know, I expect you thought of him," said Nicholas, smiling as +Natasha knew by the sound of his voice. + +"No," said Natasha, though she had in reality been thinking about +Prince Andrew at the same time as of the rest, and of how he would +have liked "Uncle." "And then I was saying to myself all the way, 'How +well Anisya carried herself, how well!'" And Nicholas heard her +spontaneous, happy, ringing laughter. "And do you know," she +suddenly said, "I know that I shall never again be as happy and +tranquil as I am now." + +"Rubbish, nonsense, humbug!" exclaimed Nicholas, and he thought: +"How charming this Natasha of mine is! I have no other friend like her +and never shall have. Why should she marry? We might always drive +about together! + +"What a darling this Nicholas of mine is!" thought Natasha. + +"Ah, there are still lights in the drawingroom!" she said, +pointing to the windows of the house that gleamed invitingly in the +moist velvety darkness of the night. + +CHAPTER VIII + +Count Ilya Rostov had resigned the position of Marshal of the +Nobility because it involved him in too much expense, but still his +affairs did not improve. Natasha and Nicholas often noticed their +parents conferring together anxiously and privately and heard +suggestions of selling the fine ancestral Rostov house and estate near +Moscow. It was not necessary to entertain so freely as when the +count had been Marshal, and life at Otradnoe was quieter than in +former years, but still the enormous house and its lodges were full of +people and more than twenty sat down to table every day. These were +all their own people who had settled down in the house almost as +members of the family, or persons who were, it seemed, obliged to live +in the count's house. Such were Dimmler the musician and his wife, +Vogel the dancing master and his family, Belova, an old maiden lady, +an inmate of the house, and many others such as Petya's tutors, the +girls' former governess, and other people who simply found it +preferable and more advantageous to live in the count's house than +at home. They had not as many visitors as before, but the old habits +of life without which the count and countess could not conceive of +existence remained unchanged. There was still the hunting +establishment which Nicholas had even enlarged, the same fifty +horses and fifteen grooms in the stables, the same expensive +presents and dinner parties to the whole district on name days; +there were still the count's games of whist and boston, at which- +spreading out his cards so that everybody could see them- he let +himself be plundered of hundreds of rubles every day by his neighbors, +who looked upon an opportunity to play a rubber with Count Rostov as a +most profitable source of income. + +The count moved in his affairs as in a huge net, trying not to +believe that he was entangled but becoming more and more so at every +step, and feeling too feeble to break the meshes or to set to work +carefully and patiently to disentangle them. The countess, with her +loving heart, felt that her children were being ruined, that it was +not the count's fault for he could not help being what he was- that +(though he tried to hide it) he himself suffered from the +consciousness of his own and his children's ruin, and she tried to +find means of remedying the position. From her feminine point of +view she could see only one solution, namely, for Nicholas to marry +a rich heiress. She felt this to be their last hope and that if +Nicholas refused the match she had found for him, she would have to +abandon the hope of ever getting matters right. This match was with +Julie Karagina, the daughter of excellent and virtuous parents, a girl +the Rostovs had known from childhood, and who had now become a wealthy +heiress through the death of the last of her brothers. + +The countess had written direct to Julie's mother in Moscow +suggesting a marriage between their children and had received a +favorable answer from her. Karagina had replied that for her part +she was agreeable, and everything depend on her daughter's +inclination. She invited Nicholas to come to Moscow. + +Several times the countess, with tears in her eyes, told her son +that now both her daughters were settled, her only wish was to see him +married. She said she could lie down in her grave peacefully if that +were accomplished. Then she told him that she knew of a splendid +girl and tried to discover what he thought about marriage. + +At other times she praised Julie to him and advised him to go to +Moscow during the holidays to amuse himself. Nicholas guessed what his +mother's remarks were leading to and during one of these conversations +induced her to speak quite frankly. She told him that her only hope of +getting their affairs disentangled now lay in his marrying Julie +Karagina. + +"But, Mamma, suppose I loved a girl who has no fortune, would you +expect me to sacrifice my feelings and my honor for the sake of +money?" he asked his mother, not realizing the cruelty of his question +and only wishing to show his noble-mindedness. + +"No, you have not understood me," said his mother, not knowing how +to justify herself. "You have not understood me, Nikolenka. It is your +happiness I wish for," she added, feeling that she was telling an +untruth and was becoming entangled. She began to cry. + +"Mamma, don't cry! Only tell me that you wish it, and you know I +will give my life, anything, to put you at ease," said Nicholas. "I +would sacrifice anything for you- even my feelings." + +But the countess did not want the question put like that: she did +not want a sacrifice from her son, she herself wished to make a +sacrifice for him. + +"No, you have not understood me, don't let us talk about it," she +replied, wiping away her tears. + +"Maybe I do love a poor girl," said Nicholas to himself. "Am I to +sacrifice my feelings and my honor for money? I wonder how Mamma could +speak so to me. Because Sonya is poor I must not love her," he +thought, "must not respond to her faithful, devoted love? Yet I should +certainly be happier with her than with some doll-like Julie. I can +always sacrifice my feelings for my family's welfare," he said to +himself, "but I can't coerce my feelings. If I love Sonya, that +feeling is for me stronger and higher than all else." + +Nicholas did not go to Moscow, and the countess did not renew the +conversation with him about marriage. She saw with sorrow, and +sometimes with exasperation, symptoms of a growing attachment +between her son and the portionless Sonya. Though she blamed herself +for it, she could not refrain from grumbling at and worrying Sonya, +often pulling her up without reason, addressing her stiffly as "my +dear," and using the formal "you" instead of the intimate "thou" in +speaking to her. The kindhearted countess was the more vexed with +Sonya because that poor, dark-eyed niece of hers was so meek, so kind, +so devotedly grateful to her benefactors, and so faithfully, +unchangingly, and unselfishly in love with Nicholas, that there were +no grounds for finding fault with her. + +Nicholas was spending the last of his leave at home. A fourth letter +had come from Prince Andrew, from Rome, in which he wrote that he +would have been on his way back to Russia long ago had not his wound +unexpectedly reopened in the warm climate, which obliged him to +defer his return till the beginning of the new year. Natasha was still +as much in love with her betrothed, found the same comfort in that +love, and was still as ready to throw herself into all the pleasures +of life as before; but at the end of the fourth month of their +separation she began to have fits of depression which she could not +master. She felt sorry for herself: sorry that she was being wasted +all this time and of no use to anyone- while she felt herself so +capable of loving and being loved. + +Things were not cheerful in the Rostovs' home. + +CHAPTER IX + +Christmas came and except for the ceremonial Mass, the solemn and +wearisome Christmas congratulations from neighbors and servants, and +the new dresses everyone put on, there were no special festivities, +though the calm frost of twenty degrees Reaumur, the dazzling sunshine +by day, and the starlight of the winter nights seemed to call for some +special celebration of the season. + +On the third day of Christmas week, after the midday dinner, all the +inmates of the house dispersed to various rooms. It was the dullest +time of the day. Nicholas, who had been visiting some neighbors that +morning, was asleep on the sitting-room sofa. The old count was +resting in his study. Sonya sat in the drawing room at the round +table, copying a design for embroidery. The countess was playing +patience. Nastasya Ivanovna the buffoon sat with a sad face at the +window with two old ladies. Natasha came into the room, went up to +Sonya, glanced at what she was doing, and then went up to her mother +and stood without speaking. + +"Why are you wandering about like an outcast?" asked her mother. +"What do you want?" + +"Him... I want him... now, this minute! I want him!" said Natasha, +with glittering eyes and no sign of a smile. + +The countess lifted her head and looked attentively at her daughter. + +"Don't look at me, Mamma! Don't look; I shall cry directly." + +"Sit down with me a little," said the countess. + +"Mamma, I want him. Why should I be wasted like this, Mamma?" + +Her voice broke, tears gushed from her eyes, and she turned +quickly to hide them and left the room. + +She passed into the sitting room, stood there thinking awhile, and +then went into the maids' room. There an old maidservant was grumbling +at a young girl who stood panting, having just run in through the cold +from the serfs' quarters. + +"Stop playing- there's a time for everything," said the old woman. + +"Let her alone, Kondratevna," said Natasha. "Go, Mavrushka, go." + +Having released Mavrushka, Natasha crossed the dancing hall and went +to the vestibule. There an old footman and two young ones were playing +cards. They broke off and rose as she entered. + +"What can I do with them?" thought Natasha. + +"Oh, Nikita, please go... where can I send him?... Yes, go to the +yard and fetch a fowl, please, a cock, and you, Misha, bring me some +oats." + +"Just a few oats?" said Misha, cheerfully and readily. + +"Go, go quickly," the old man urged him. + +"And you, Theodore, get me a piece of chalk." + +On her way past the butler's pantry she told them to set a +samovar, though it was not at all the time for tea. + +Foka, the butler, was the most ill-tempered person in the house. +Natasha liked to test her power over him. He distrusted the order +and asked whether the samovar was really wanted. + +"Oh dear, what a young lady!" said Foka, pretending to frown at +Natasha. + +No one in the house sent people about or gave them as much trouble +as Natasha did. She could not see people unconcernedly, but had to +send them on some errand. She seemed to be trying whether any of +them would get angry or sulky with her; but the serfs fulfilled no +one's orders so readily as they did hers. "What can I do, where can +I go?" thought she, as she went slowly along the passage. + +"Nastasya Ivanovna, what sort of children shall I have?" she asked +the buffoon, who was coming toward her in a woman's jacket. + +"Why, fleas, crickets, grasshoppers," answered the buffoon. + +"O Lord, O Lord, it's always the same! Oh, where am I to go? What am +I to do with myself?" And tapping with her heels, she ran quickly +upstairs to see Vogel and his wife who lived on the upper story. + +Two governesses were sitting with the Vogels at a table, on which +were plates of raisins, walnuts, and almonds. The governesses were +discussing whether it was cheaper to live in Moscow or Odessa. Natasha +sat down, listened to their talk with a serious and thoughtful air, +and then got up again. + +"The island of Madagascar," she said, "Ma-da-gas-car," she repeated, +articulating each syllable distinctly, and, not replying to Madame +Schoss who asked her what she was saying, she went out of the room. + +Her brother Petya was upstairs too; with the man in attendance on +him he was preparing fireworks to let off that night. + +"Petya! Petya!" she called to him. "Carry me downstairs." + +Petya ran up and offered her his back. She jumped on it, putting her +arms round his neck, and he pranced along with her. + +"No, don't... the island of Madagascar!" she said, and jumping off +his back she went downstairs. + +Having as it were reviewed her kingdom, tested her power, and made +sure that everyone was submissive, but that all the same it was +dull, Natasha betook herself to the ballroom, picked up her guitar, +sat down in a dark corner behind a bookcase, and began to run her +fingers over the strings in the bass, picking out a passage she +recalled from an opera she had heard in Petersburg with Prince Andrew. +What she drew from the guitar would have had no meaning for other +listeners, but in her imagination a whole series of reminiscences +arose from those sounds. She sat behind the bookcase with her eyes +fixed on a streak of light escaping from the pantry door and +listened to herself and pondered. She was in a mood for brooding on +the past. + +Sonya passed to the pantry with a glass in her hand. Natasha glanced +at her and at the crack in the pantry door, and it seemed to her +that she remembered the light failing through that crack once before +and Sonya passing with a glass in her hand. "Yes it was exactly the +same," thought Natasha. + +"Sonya, what is this?" she cried, twanging a thick string. + +"Oh, you are there!" said Sonya with a start, and came near and +listened. "I don't know. A storm?" she ventured timidly, afraid of +being wrong. + +"There! That's just how she started and just how she came up smiling +timidly when all this happened before," thought Natasha, "and in +just the same way I thought there was something lacking in her." + +"No, it's the chorus from The Water-Carrier, listen! " and Natasha +sang the air of the chorus so that Sonya should catch it. "Where +were you going?" she asked. + +"To change the water in this glass. I am just finishing the design." + +"You always find something to do, but I can't," said Natasha. "And +where's Nicholas?" + +"Asleep, I think." + +"Sonya, go and wake him," said Natasha. "Tell him I want him to come +and sing." + +She sat awhile, wondering what the meaning of it all having happened +before could be, and without solving this problem, or at all +regretting not having done so, she again passed in fancy to the time +when she was with him and he was looking at her with a lover's eyes. + +"Oh, if only he would come quicker! I am so afraid it will never be! +And, worst of all, I am growing old- that's the thing! There won't +then be in me what there is now. But perhaps he'll come today, will +come immediately. Perhaps he has come and is sitting in the drawing +room. Perhaps he came yesterday and I have forgotten it." She rose, +put down the guitar, and went to the drawing room. + +All the domestic circle, tutors, governesses, and guests, were +already at the tea table. The servants stood round the table- but +Prince Andrew was not there and life was going on as before. + +"Ah, here she is!" said the old count, when he saw Natasha enter. +"Well, sit down by me." But Natasha stayed by her mother and glanced +round as if looking for something. + +"Mamma!" she muttered, "give him to me, give him, Mamma, quickly, +quickly!" and she again had difficulty in repressing her sobs. + +She sat down at the table and listened to the conversation between +the elders and Nicholas, who had also come to the table. "My God, my +God! The same faces, the same talk, Papa holding his cup and blowing +in the same way!" thought Natasha, feeling with horror a sense of +repulsion rising up in her for the whole household, because they +were always the same. + +After tea, Nicholas, Sonya, and Natasha went to the sitting room, to +their favorite corner where their most intimate talks always began. + +CHAPTER X + +Does it ever happen to you," said Natasha to her brother, when +they settled down in the sitting room, "does it ever happen to you +to feel as if there were nothing more to come- nothing; that +everything good is past? And to feel not exactly dull, but sad?" + +"I should think so!" he replied. "I have felt like that when +everything was all right and everyone was cheerful. The thought has +come into my mind that I was already tired of it all, and that we must +all die. Once in the regiment I had not gone to some merrymaking where +there was music... and suddenly I felt so depressed..." + +"Oh yes, I know, I know, I know!" Natasha interrupted him. "When I +was quite little that used to be so with me. Do you remember when I +was punished once about some plums? You were all dancing, and I sat +sobbing in the schoolroom? I shall never forget it: I felt sad and +sorry for everyone, for myself, and for everyone. And I was +innocent- that was the chief thing," said Natasha. "Do you remember?" + +"I remember," answered Nicholas. "I remember that I came to you +afterwards and wanted to comfort you, but do you know, I felt +ashamed to. We were terribly absurd. I had a funny doll then and +wanted to give it to you. Do you remember?" + +"And do you remember," Natasha asked with a pensive smile, "how +once, long, long ago, when we were quite little, Uncle called us +into the study- that was in the old house- and it was dark- we went in +and suddenly there stood..." + +"A Negro," chimed in Nicholas with a smile of delight. "Of course +I remember. Even now I don't know whether there really was a Negro, or +if we only dreamed it or were told about him." + +"He was gray, you remember, and had white teeth, and stood and +looked at us..." + +"Sonya, do you remember?" asked Nicholas. + +"Yes, yes, I do remember something too," Sonya answered timidly. + +"You know I have asked Papa and Mamma about that Negro," said +Natasha, "and they say there was no Negro at all. But you see, you +remember!" + +"Of course I do, I remember his teeth as if I had just seen them." + +"How strange it is! It's as if it were a dream! I like that." + +"And do you remember how we rolled hard-boiled eggs in the ballroom, +and suddenly two old women began spinning round on the carpet? Was +that real or not? Do you remember what fun it was?" + +"Yes, and you remember how Papa in his blue overcoat fired a gun +in the porch?" + +So they went through their memories, smiling with pleasure: not +the sad memories of old age, but poetic, youthful ones- those +impressions of one's most distant past in which dreams and realities +blend- and they laughed with quiet enjoyment. + +Sonya, as always, did not quite keep pace with them, though they +shared the same reminiscences. + +Much that they remembered had slipped from her mind, and what she +recalled did not arouse the same poetic feeling as they experienced. +She simply enjoyed their pleasure and tried to fit in with it. + +She only really took part when they recalled Sonya's first +arrival. She told them how afraid she had been of Nicholas because +he had on a corded jacket and her nurse had told her that she, too, +would be sewn up with cords. + +"And I remember their telling me that you had been born under a +cabbage," said Natasha, and I remember that I dared not disbelieve +it then, but knew that it was not true, and I felt so uncomfortable." + +While they were talking a maid thrust her head in at the other +door of the sitting room. + +"They have brought the cock, Miss," she said in a whisper. + +"It isn't wanted, Petya. Tell them to take it away," replied +Natasha. + +In the middle of their talk in the sitting room, Dimmler came in and +went up to the harp that stood there in a corner. He took off its +cloth covering, and the harp gave out a jarring sound. + +"Mr. Dimmler, please play my favorite nocturne by Field," came the +old countess' voice from the drawing room. + +Dimmler struck a chord and, turning to Natasha, Nicholas, and Sonya, +remarked: "How quiet you young people are!" + +"Yes, we're philosophizing," said Natasha, glancing round for a +moment and then continuing the conversation. They were now +discussing dreams. + +Dimmler began to play; Natasha went on tiptoe noiselessly to the +table, took up a candle, carried it out, and returned, seating herself +quietly in her former place. It was dark in the room especially +where they were sitting on the sofa, but through the big windows the +silvery light of the full moon fell on the floor. Dimmler had finished +the piece but still sat softly running his fingers over the strings, +evidently uncertain whether to stop or to play something else. + +"Do you know," said Natasha in a whisper, moving closer to +Nicholas and Sonya, "that when one goes on and on recalling +memories, one at last begins to remember what happened before one +was in the world..." + +"That is metempsychosis," said Sonya, who had always learned well, +and remembered everything. "The Egyptians believed that our souls have +lived in animals, and will go back into animals again." + +"No, I don't believe we ever were in animals," said Natasha, still +in a whisper though the music had ceased. "But I am certain that we +were angels somewhere there, and have been here, and that is why we +remember...." + +"May I join you?" said Dimmler who had come up quietly, and he sat +down by them. + +"If we have been angels, why have we fallen lower?" said Nicholas. +"No, that can't be!" + +"Not lower, who said we were lower?... How do I know what I was +before?" Natasha rejoined with conviction. "The soul is immortal- well +then, if I shall always live I must have lived before, lived for a +whole eternity." + +"Yes, but it is hard for us to imagine eternity," remarked +Dimmler, who had joined the young folk with a mildly condescending +smile but now spoke as quietly and seriously as they. + +"Why is it hard to imagine eternity?" said Natasha. "It is now +today, and it will be tomorrow, and always; and there was yesterday, +and the day before..." + +"Natasha! Now it's your turn. Sing me something," they heard the +countess say. "Why are you sitting there like conspirators?" + +"Mamma, I don't at all want to," replied Natasha, but all the same +she rose. + +None of them, not even the middle-aged Dimmler, wanted to break +off their conversation and quit that corner in the sitting room, but +Natasha got up and Nicholas sat down at the clavichord. Standing as +usual in the middle of the hall and choosing the place where the +resonance was best, Natasha began to sing her mother's favorite song. + +She had said she did not want to sing, but it was long since she had +sung, and long before she again sang, as she did that evening. The +count, from his study where he was talking to Mitenka, heard her +and, like a schoolboy in a hurry to run out to play, blundered in +his talk while giving orders to the steward, and at last stopped, +while Mitenka stood in front of him also listening and smiling. +Nicholas did not take his eyes off his sister and drew breath in +time with her. Sonya, as she listened, thought of the immense +difference there was between herself and her friend, and how +impossible it was for her to be anything like as bewitching as her +cousin. The old countess sat with a blissful yet sad smile and with +tears in her eyes, occasionally shaking her head. She thought of +Natasha and of her own youth, and of how there was something unnatural +and dreadful in this impending marriage of Natasha and Prince Andrew. + +Dimmler, who had seated himself beside the countess, listened with +closed eyes. + +"Ah, Countess," he said at last, "that's a European talent, she +has nothing to learn- what softness, tenderness, and strength...." + +"Ah, how afraid I am for her, how afraid I am!" said the countess, +not realizing to whom she was speaking. Her maternal instinct told her +that Natasha had too much of something, and that because of this she +would not be happy. Before Natasha had finished singing, +fourteen-year-old Petya rushed in delightedly, to say that some +mummers had arrived. + +Natasha stopped abruptly. + +"Idiot!" she screamed at her brother and, running to a chair, +threw herself on it, sobbing so violently that she could not stop +for a long time. + +"It's nothing, Mamma, really it's nothing; only Petya startled +me," she said, trying to smile, but her tears still flowed and sobs +still choked her. + +The mummers (some of the house serfs) dressed up as bears, Turks, +innkeepers, and ladies- frightening and funny- bringing in with them +the cold from outside and a feeling of gaiety, crowded, at first +timidly, into the anteroom, then hiding behind one another they pushed +into the ballroom where, shyly at first and then more and more merrily +and heartily, they started singing, dancing, and playing Christmas +games. The countess, when she had identified them and laughed at their +costumes, went into the drawing room. The count sat in the ballroom, +smiling radiantly and applauding the players. The young people had +disappeared. + +Half an hour later there appeared among the other mummers in the +ballroom an old lady in a hooped skirt- this was Nicholas. A Turkish +girl was Petya. A clown was Dimmler. An hussar was Natasha, and a +Circassian was Sonya with burnt-cork mustache and eyebrows. + +After the condescending surprise, nonrecognition, and praise, from +those who were not themselves dressed up, the young people decided +that their costumes were so good that they ought to be shown +elsewhere. + +Nicholas, who, as the roads were in splendid condition, wanted to +take them all for a drive in his troyka, proposed to take with them +about a dozen of the serf mummers and drive to "Uncle's." + +"No, why disturb the old fellow?" said the countess. "Besides, you +wouldn't have room to turn round there. If you must go, go to the +Melyukovs'" + +Melyukova was a widow, who, with her family and their tutors and +governesses, lived three miles from the Rostovs. + +"That's right, my dear," chimed in the old count, thoroughly +aroused. "I'll dress up at once and go with them. I'll make Pashette +open her eyes." + +But the countess would not agree to his going; he had had a bad +leg all these last days. It was decided that the count must not go, +but that if Louisa Ivanovna (Madame Schoss) would go with them, the +young ladies might go to the Melyukovs', Sonya, generally so timid and +shy, more urgently than anyone begging Louisa Ivanovna not to refuse. + +Sonya's costume was the best of all. Her mustache and eyebrows +were extraordinarily becoming. Everyone told her she looked very +handsome, and she was in a spirited and energetic mood unusual with +her. Some inner voice told her that now or never her fate would be +decided, and in her male attire she seemed quite a different person. +Louisa Ivanovna consented to go, and in half an hour four troyka +sleighs with large and small bells, their runners squeaking and +whistling over the frozen snow, drove up to the porch. + +Natasha was foremost in setting a merry holiday tone, which, passing +from one to another, grew stronger and stronger and reached its climax +when they all came out into the frost and got into the sleighs, +talking, calling to one another, laughing, and shouting. + +Two of the troykas were the usual household sleighs, the third was +the old count's with a trotter from the Orlov stud as shaft horse, the +fourth was Nicholas' own with a short shaggy black shaft horse. +Nicholas, in his old lady's dress over which he had belted his +hussar overcoat, stood in the middle of the sleigh, reins in hand. + +It was so light that he could see the moonlight reflected from the +metal harness disks and from the eyes of the horses, who looked +round in alarm at the noisy party under the shadow of the porch roof. + +Natasha, Sonya, Madame Schoss, and two maids got into Nicholas' +sleigh; Dimmler, his wife, and Petya, into the old count's, and the +rest of the mummers seated themselves in the other two sleighs. + +"You go ahead, Zakhar!" shouted Nicholas to his father's coachman, +wishing for a chance to race past him. + +The old count's troyka, with Dimmler and his party, started forward, +squeaking on its runners as though freezing to the snow, its +deep-toned bell clanging. The side horses, pressing against the shafts +of the middle horse, sank in the snow, which was dry and glittered +like sugar, and threw it up. + +Nicholas set off, following the first sleigh; behind him the +others moved noisily, their runners squeaking. At first they drove +at a steady trot along the narrow road. While they drove past the +garden the shadows of the bare trees often fell across the road and +hid the brilliant moonlight, but as soon as they were past the +fence, the snowy plain bathed in moonlight and motionless spread out +before them glittering like diamonds and dappled with bluish +shadows. Bang, bang! went the first sleigh over a cradle hole in the +snow of the road, and each of the other sleighs jolted in the same +way, and rudely breaking the frost-bound stillness, the troykas +began to speed along the road, one after the other. + +"A hare's track, a lot of tracks!" rang out Natasha's voice +through the frost-bound air. + +"How light it is, Nicholas!" came Sonya's voice. + +Nicholas glanced round at Sonya, and bent down to see her face +closer. Quite a new, sweet face with black eyebrows and mustaches +peeped up at him from her sable furs- so close and yet so distant- +in the moonlight. + +"That used to be Sonya," thought he, and looked at her closer and +smiled. + +"What is it, Nicholas?" + +"Nothing," said he and turned again to the horses. + +When they came out onto the beaten highroad- polished by sleigh +runners and cut up by rough-shod hoofs, the marks of which were +visible in the moonlight- the horses began to tug at the reins of +their own accord and increased their pace. The near side horse, +arching his head and breaking into a short canter, tugged at his +traces. The shaft horse swayed from side to side, moving his ears as +if asking: "Isn't it time to begin now?" In front, already far ahead +the deep bell of the sleigh ringing farther and farther off, the black +horses driven by Zakhar could be clearly seen against the white +snow. From that sleigh one could hear the shouts, laughter, and voices +of the mummers. + +"Gee up, my darlings!" shouted Nicholas, pulling the reins to one +side and flourishing the whip. + +It was only by the keener wind that met them and the jerks given +by the side horses who pulled harder- ever increasing their gallop- +that one noticed how fast the troyka was flying. Nicholas looked back. +With screams squeals, and waving of whips that caused even the shaft +horses to gallop- the other sleighs followed. The shaft horse swung +steadily beneath the bow over its head, with no thought of +slackening pace and ready to put on speed when required. + +Nicholas overtook the first sleigh. They were driving downhill and +coming out upon a broad trodden track across a meadow, near a river. + +"Where are we?" thought he. "It's the Kosoy meadow, I suppose. But +no- this is something new I've never seen before. This isn't the Kosoy +meadow nor the Demkin hill, and heaven only knows what it is! It is +something new and enchanted. Well, whatever it may be..." And shouting +to his horses, he began to pass the first sleigh. + +Zakhar held back his horses and turned his face, which was already +covered with hoarfrost to his eyebrows. + +Nicholas gave the horses the rein, and Zakhar, stretching out his +arms, clucked his tongue and let his horses go. + +"Now, look out, master!" he cried. + +Faster still the two troykas flew side by side, and faster moved the +feet of the galloping side horses. Nicholas began to draw ahead. +Zakhar, while still keeping his arms extended, raised one hand with +the reins. + +"No you won't, master!" he shouted. + +Nicholas put all his horses to a gallop and passed Zakhar. The +horses showered the fine dry snow on the faces of those in the sleigh- +beside them sounded quick ringing bells and they caught confused +glimpses of swiftly moving legs and the shadows of the troyka they +were passing. The whistling sound of the runners on the snow and the +voices of girls shrieking were heard from different sides. + +Again checking his horses, Nicholas looked around him. They were +still surrounded by the magic plain bathed in moonlight and spangled +with stars. + +"Zakhar is shouting that I should turn to the left, but why to the +left?" thought Nicholas. "Are we getting to the Melyukovs'? Is this +Melyukovka? Heaven only knows where we are going, and heaven knows +what is happening to us- but it is very strange and pleasant +whatever it is." And he looked round in the sleigh. + +"Look, his mustache and eyelashes are all white!" said one of the +strange, pretty, unfamiliar people- the one with fine eyebrows and +mustache. + +"I think this used to be Natasha," thought Nicholas, "and that was +Madame Schoss, but perhaps it's not, and this Circassian with the +mustache I don't know, but I love her." + +"Aren't you cold?" he asked. + +They did not answer but began to laugh. Dimmler from the sleigh +behind shouted something- probably something funny- but they could not +make out what he said. + +"Yes, yes!" some voices answered, laughing. + +"But here was a fairy forest with black moving shadows, and a +glitter of diamonds and a flight of marble steps and the silver +roofs of fairy buildings and the shrill yells of some animals. And +if this is really Melyukovka, it is still stranger that we drove +heaven knows where and have come to Melyukovka," thought Nicholas. + +It really was Melyukovka, and maids and footmen with merry faces +came running, out to the porch carrying candles. + +"Who is it?" asked someone in the porch. + +"The mummers from the count's. I know by the horses," replied some +voices. + +CHAPTER XI + +Pelageya Danilovna Melyukova, a broadly built, energetic woman +wearing spectacles, sat in the drawing room in a loose dress, +surrounded by her daughters whom she was trying to keep from feeling +dull. They were quietly dropping melted wax into snow and looking at +the shadows the wax figures would throw on the wall, when they heard +the steps and voices of new arrivals in the vestibule. + +Hussars, ladies, witches, clowns, and bears, after clearing their +throats and wiping the hoarfrost from their faces in the vestibule, +came into the ballroom where candles were hurriedly lighted. The +clown- Dimmler- and the lady- Nicholas- started a dance. Surrounded by +the screaming children the mummers, covering their faces and +disguising their voices, bowed to their hostess and arranged +themselves about the room. + +"Dear me! there's no recognizing them! And Natasha! See whom she +looks like! She really reminds me of somebody. But Herr Dimmler- isn't +he good! I didn't know him! And how he dances. Dear me, there's a +Circassian. Really, how becoming it is to dear Sonya. And who is that? +Well, you have cheered us up! Nikita and Vanya- clear away the tables! +And we were sitting so quietly. Ha, ha, ha!... The hussar, the hussar! +Just like a boy! And the legs!... I can't look at him..." different +voices were saying. + +Natasha, the young Melyukovs' favorite, disappeared with them into +the back rooms where a cork and various dressing gowns and male +garments were called for and received from the footman by bare girlish +arms from behind the door. Ten minutes later, all the young +Melyukovs joined the mummers. + +Pelageya Danilovna, having given orders to clear the rooms for the +visitors and arranged about refreshments for the gentry and the serfs, +went about among the mummers without removing her spectacles, +peering into their faces with a suppressed smile and failing to +recognize any of them. It was not merely Dimmler and the Rostovs she +failed to recognize, she did not even recognize her own daughters, +or her late husband's, dressing gowns and uniforms, which they had put +on. + +"And who is is this?" she asked her governess, peering into the face +of her own daughter dressed up as a Kazan-Tartar. "I suppose it is one +of the Rostovs! Well, Mr. Hussar, and what regiment do you serve +in?" she asked Natasha. "Here, hand some fruit jelly to the Turk!" she +ordered the butler who was handing things round. "That's not forbidden +by his law." + +Sometimes, as she looked at the strange but amusing capers cut by +the dancers, who- having decided once for all that being disguised, no +one would recognize them- were not at all shy, Pelageya Danilovna +hid her face in her handkerchief, and her whole stout body shook +with irrepressible, kindly, elderly laughter. + +"My little Sasha! Look at Sasha!" she said. + +After Russian country dances and chorus dances, Pelageya Danilovna +made the serfs and gentry join in one large circle: a ring, a +string, and a silver ruble were fetched and they all played games +together. + +In an hour, all the costumes were crumpled and disordered. The +corked eyebrows and mustaches were smeared over the perspiring, +flushed, and merry faces. Pelageya Danilovna began to recognize the +mummers, admired their cleverly contrived costumes, and particularly +how they suited the young ladies, and she thanked them all for +having entertained her so well. The visitors were invited to supper in +the drawing room, and the serfs had something served to them in the +ballroom. + +"Now to tell one's fortune in the empty bathhouse is frightening!" +said an old maid who lived with the Melyukovs, during supper. + +"Why?" said the eldest Melyukov girl. + +"You wouldn't go, it takes courage..." + +"I'll go," said Sonya. + +"Tell what happened to the young lady!" said the second Melyukov +girl. + +"Well," began the old maid, "a young lady once went out, took a +cock, laid the table for two, all properly, and sat down. After +sitting a while, she suddenly hears someone coming... a sleigh +drives up with harness bells; she hears him coming! He comes in, +just in the shape of a man, like an officer- comes in and sits down to +table with her." + +"Ah! ah!" screamed Natasha, rolling her eyes with horror. + +"Yes? And how... did he speak?" + +"Yes, like a man. Everything quite all right, and he began +persuading her; and she should have kept him talking till cockcrow, +but she got frightened, just got frightened and hid her face in her +hands. Then he caught her up. It was lucky the maids ran in just +then..." + +"Now, why frighten them?" said Pelageya Danilovna. + +"Mamma, you used to try your fate yourself..." said her daughter. + +"And how does one do it in a barn?" inquired Sonya. + +"Well, say you went to the barn now, and listened. It depends on +what you hear; hammering and knocking- that's bad; but a sound of +shifting grain is good and one sometimes hears that, too." + +"Mamma, tell us what happened to you in the barn." + +Pelageya Danilovna smiled. + +"Oh, I've forgotten..." she replied. "But none of you would go?" + +"Yes, I will; Pelageya Danilovna, let me! I'll go," said Sonya. + +"Well, why not, if you're not afraid?" + +"Louisa Ivanovna, may I?" asked Sonya. + +Whether they were playing the ring and string game or the ruble game +or talking as now, Nicholas did not leave Sonya's side, and gazed at +her with quite new eyes. It seemed to him that it was only today, +thanks to that burnt-cork mustache, that he had fully learned to +know her. And really, that evening, Sonya was brighter, more animated, +and prettier than Nicholas had ever seen her before. + +"So that's what she is like; what a fool I have been!" he thought +gazing at her sparkling eyes, and under the mustache a happy rapturous +smile dimpled her cheeks, a smile he had never seen before. + +"I'm not afraid of anything," said Sonya. "May I go at once?" She +got up. + +They told her where the barn was and how she should stand and +listen, and they handed her a fur cloak. She threw this over her +head and shoulders and glanced at Nicholas. + +"What a darling that girl is!" thought he. "And what have I been +thinking of till now?" + +Sonya went out into the passage to go to the barn. Nicholas went +hastily to the front porch, saying he felt too hot. The crowd of +people really had made the house stuffy. + +Outside, there was the same cold stillness and the same moon, but +even brighter than before. The light was so strong and the snow +sparkled with so many stars that one did not wish to look up at the +sky and the real stars were unnoticed. The sky was black and dreary, +while the earth was gay. + +"I am a fool, a fool! what have I been waiting for?" thought +Nicholas. and running out from the porch he went round the corner of +the house and along the path that led to the back porch. He knew Sonya +would pass that way. Halfway lay some snow-covered piles of firewood +and across and along them a network of shadows from the bare old +lime trees fell on the snow and on the path. This path led to the +barn. The log walls of the barn and its snow-covered roof, that looked +as if hewn out of some precious stone, sparkled in the moonlight. A +tree in the garden snapped with the frost, and then all was again +perfectly silent. His bosom seemed to inhale not air but the +strength of eternal youth and gladness. + +From the back porch came the sound of feet descending the steps, the +bottom step upon which snow had fallen gave a ringing creak and he +heard the voice of an old maidservant saying, "Straight, straight, +along the path, Miss. Only, don't look back." + +"I am not afraid," answered Sonya's voice, and along the path toward +Nicholas came the crunching, whistling sound of Sonya's feet in her +thin shoes. + +Sonya came along, wrapped in her cloak. She was only a couple of +paces away when she saw him, and to her too he was not the Nicholas +she had known and always slightly feared. He was in a woman's dress, +with tousled hair and a happy smile new to Sonya. She ran rapidly +toward him. + +"Quite different and yet the same," thought Nicholas, looking at her +face all lit up by the moonlight. He slipped his arms under the +cloak that covered her head, embraced her, pressed her to him, and +kissed her on the lips that wore a mustache and had a smell of burnt +cork. Sonya kissed him full on the lips, and disengaging her little +hands pressed them to his cheeks. + +"Sonya!... Nicholas!"... was all they said. They ran to the barn and +then back again, re-entering, he by the front and she by the back +porch. + +CHAPTER XII + +When they all drove back from Pelageya Danilovna's, Natasha, who +always saw and noticed everything, arranged that she and Madame Schoss +should go back in the sleigh with Dimmler, and Sonya with Nicholas and +the maids. + +On the way back Nicholas drove at a steady pace instead of racing +and kept peering by that fantastic all-transforming light into Sonya's +face and searching beneath the eyebrows and mustache for his former +and his present Sonya from whom he had resolved never to be parted +again. He looked and recognizing in her both the old and the new +Sonya, and being reminded by the smell of burnt cork of the +sensation of her kiss, inhaled the frosty air with a full breast +and, looking at the ground flying beneath him and at the sparkling +sky, felt himself again in fairyland. + +"Sonya, is it well with thee?" he asked from time to time. + +"Yes!" she replied. "And with thee?" + +When halfway home Nicholas handed the reins to the coachman and +ran for a moment to Natasha's sleigh and stood on its wing. + +"Natasha!" he whispered in French, "do you know I have made up my +mind about Sonya?" + +"Have you told her?" asked Natasha, suddenly beaming all over with +joy. + +"Oh, how strange you are with that mustache and those eyebrows!... +Natasha- are you glad?" + +"I am so glad, so glad! I was beginning to be vexed with you. I +did not tell you, but you have been treating her badly. What a heart +she has, Nicholas! I am horrid sometimes, but I was ashamed to be +happy while Sonya was not," continued Natasha. "Now I am so glad! +Well, run back to her." + +"No, wait a bit.... Oh, how funny you look!" cried Nicholas, peering +into her face and finding in his sister too something new, unusual, +and bewitchingly tender that he had not seen in her before. +"Natasha, it's magical, isn't it?" + +"Yes," she replied. "You have done splendidly." + +"Had I seen her before as she is now," thought Nicholas, "I should +long ago have asked her what to do and have done whatever she told me, +and all would have been well." + +"So you are glad and I have done right?" + +"Oh, quite right! I had a quarrel with Mamma some time ago about it. +Mamma said she was angling for you. How could she say such a thing! +I nearly stormed at Mamma. I will never let anyone say anything bad of +Sonya, for there is nothing but good in her." + +"Then it's all right?" said Nicholas, again scrutinizing the +expression of his sister's face to see if she was in earnest. Then +he jumped down and, his boots scrunching the snow, ran back to his +sleigh. The same happy, smiling Circassian, with mustache and +beaming eyes looking up from under a sable hood, was still sitting +there, and that Circassian was Sonya, and that Sonya was certainly his +future happy and loving wife. + +When they reached home and had told their mother how they had +spent the evening at the Melyukovs', the girls went to their +bedroom. When they had undressed, but without washing off the cork +mustaches, they sat a long time talking of their happiness. They +talked of how they would live when they were married, how their +husbands would be friends, and how happy they would be. On Natasha's +table stood two looking glasses which Dunyasha had prepared +beforehand. + +"Only when will all that be? I am afraid never.... It would be too +good!" said Natasha, rising and going to the looking glasses. + +"Sit down, Natasha; perhaps you'll see him," said Sonya. + +Natasha lit the candles, one on each side of one of the looking +glasses, and sat down. + +"I see someone with a mustache," said Natasha, seeing her own face. + +"You mustn't laugh, Miss," said Dunyasha. + +With Sonya's help and the maid's, Natasha got the glass she held +into the right position opposite the other; her face assumed a serious +expression and she sat silent. She sat a long time looking at the +receding line of candles reflected in the glasses and expecting +(from tales she had heard) to see a coffin, or him, Prince Andrew, +in that last dim, indistinctly outlined square. But ready as she was +to take the smallest speck for the image of a man or of a coffin, +she saw nothing. She began blinking rapidly and moved away from the +looking glasses. + +"Why is it others see things and I don't?" she said. "You sit down +now, Sonya. You absolutely must, tonight! Do it for me.... Today I +feel so frightened!" + +Sonya sat down before the glasses, got the right position, and began +looking. + +"Now, Miss Sonya is sure to see something," whispered Dunyasha; +"while you do nothing but laugh." + +Sonya heard this and Natasha's whisper: + +"I know she will. She saw something last year." + +For about three minutes all were silent. + +"Of course she will!" whispered Natasha, but did not finish... +suddenly Sonya pushed away the glass she was holding and covered her +eyes with her hand. + +"Oh, Natasha!" she cried. + +"Did you see? Did you? What was it?" exclaimed Natasha, holding up +the looking glass. + +Sonya had not seen anything, she was just wanting to blink and to +get up when she heard Natasha say, "Of course she will!" She did not +wish to disappoint either Dunyasha or Natasha, but it was hard to +sit still. She did not herself know how or why the exclamation escaped +her when she covered her eyes. + +"You saw him?" urged Natasha, seizing her hand. + +"Yes. Wait a bit... I... saw him," Sonya could not help saying, +not yet knowing whom Natasha meant by him, Nicholas or Prince Andrew. + +"But why shouldn't I say I saw something? Others do see! Besides who +can tell whether I saw anything or not?" flashed through Sonya's mind. + +"Yes, I saw him," she said. + +"How? Standing or lying?" + +"No, I saw... At first there was nothing, then I saw him lying +down." + +"Andrew lying? Is he ill?" asked Natasha, her frightened eyes +fixed on her friend. + +"No, on the contrary, on the contrary! His face was cheerful, and he +turned to me." And when saying this she herself fancied she had really +seen what she described. + +"Well, and then, Sonya?..." + +"After that, I could not make out what there was; something blue and +red..." + +"Sonya! When will he come back? When shall I see him! O, God, how +afraid I am for him and for myself and about everything!..." Natasha +began, and without replying to Sonya's words of comfort she got into +bed, and long after her candle was out lay open-eyed and motionless, +gazing at the moonlight through the frosty windowpanes. + +CHAPTER XIII + +Soon after the Christmas holidays Nicholas told his mother of his +love for Sonya and of his firm resolve to marry her. The countess, who +had long noticed what was going on between them and was expecting this +declaration, listened to him in silence and then told her son that +he might marry whom he pleased, but that neither she nor his father +would give their blessing to such a marriage. Nicholas, for the +first time, felt that his mother was displeased with him and that, +despite her love for him, she would not give way. Coldly, without +looking at her son, she sent for her husband and, when he came, +tried briefly and coldly to inform him of the facts, in her son's +presence, but unable to restrain herself she burst into tears of +vexation and left the room. The old count began irresolutely to +admonish Nicholas and beg him to abandon his purpose. Nicholas replied +that he could not go back on his word, and his father, sighing and +evidently disconcerted, very soon became silent and went in to the +countess. In all his encounters with his son, the count was always +conscious of his own guilt toward him for having wasted the family +fortune, and so he could not be angry with him for refusing to marry +an heiress and choosing the dowerless Sonya. On this occasion, he +was only more vividly conscious of the fact that if his affairs had +not been in disorder, no better wife for Nicholas than Sonya could +have been wished for, and that no one but himself with his Mitenka and +his uncomfortable habits was to blame for the condition of the +family finances. + +The father and mother did not speak of the matter to their son +again, but a few days later the countess sent for Sonya and, with a +cruelty neither of them expected, reproached her niece for trying to +catch Nicholas and for ingratitude. Sonya listened silently with +downcast eyes to the countess' cruel words, without understanding what +was required of her. She was ready to sacrifice everything for her +benefactors. Self-sacrifice was her most cherished idea but in this +case she could not see what she ought to sacrifice, or for whom. She +could not help loving the countess and the whole Rostov family, but +neither could she help loving Nicholas and knowing that his +happiness depended on that love. She was silent and sad and did not +reply. Nicholas felt the situation to be intolerable and went to +have an explanation with his mother. He first implored her to +forgive him and Sonya and consent to their marriage, then he +threatened that if she molested Sonya he would at once marry her +secretly. + +The countess, with a coldness her son had never seen in her +before, replied that he was of age, that Prince Andrew was marrying +without his father's consent, and he could do the same, but that she +would never receive that intriguer as her daughter. + +Exploding at the word intriguer, Nicholas, raising his voice, told +his mother he had never expected her to try to force him to sell his +feelings, but if that were so, he would say for the last time.... +But he had no time to utter the decisive word which the expression +of his face caused his mother to await with terror, and which would +perhaps have forever remained a cruel memory to them both. He had +not time to say it, for Natasha, with a pale and set face, entered the +room from the door at which she had been listening. + +"Nicholas, you are talking nonsense! Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet, I +tell you!..." she almost screamed, so as to drown his voice. + +"Mamma darling, it's not at all so... my poor, sweet darling," she +said to her mother, who conscious that they had been on the brink of a +rupture gazed at her son with terror, but in the obstinacy and +excitement of the conflict could not and would not give way. + +"Nicholas, I'll explain to you. Go away! Listen, Mamma darling," +said Natasha. + +Her words were incoherent, but they attained the purpose at which +she was aiming. + +The countess, sobbing heavily, hid her face on her daughter's +breast, while Nicholas rose, clutching his head, and left the room. + +Natasha set to work to effect a reconciliation, and so far succeeded +that Nicholas received a promise from his mother that Sonya should not +be troubled, while he on his side promised not to undertake anything +without his parents' knowledge. + +Firmly resolved, after putting his affairs in order in the regiment, +to retire from the army and return and marry Sonya, Nicholas, serious, +sorrowful, and at variance with his parents, but, as it seemed to him, +passionately in love, left at the beginning of January to rejoin his +regiment. + +After Nicholas had gone things in the Rostov household were more +depressing than ever, and the countess fell ill from mental agitation. + +Sonya was unhappy at the separation from Nicholas and still more +so on account of the hostile tone the countess could not help adopting +toward her. The count was more perturbed than ever by the condition of +his affairs, which called for some decisive action. Their town house +and estate near Moscow had inevitably to be sold, and for this they +had to go to Moscow. But the countess' health obliged them to delay +their departure from day to day. + +Natasha, who had borne the first period of separation from her +betrothed lightly and even cheerfully, now grew more agitated and +impatient every day. The thought that her best days, which she would +have employed in loving him, were being vainly wasted, with no +advantage to anyone, tormented her incessantly. His letters for the +most part irritated her. It hurt her to think that while she lived +only in the thought of him, he was living a real life, seeing new +places and new people that interested him. The more interesting his +letters were the more vexed she felt. Her letters to him, far from +giving her any comfort, seemed to her a wearisome and artificial +obligation. She could not write, because she could not conceive the +possibility of expressing sincerely in a letter even a thousandth part +of what she expressed by voice, smile, and glance. She wrote to him +formal, monotonous, and dry letters, to which she attached no +importance herself, and in the rough copies of which the countess +corrected her mistakes in spelling. + +There was still no improvement in the countess' health, but it was +impossible to defer the journey to Moscow any longer. Natasha's +trousseau had to be ordered and the house sold. Moreover, Prince +Andrew was expected in Moscow, where old Prince Bolkonski was spending +the winter, and Natasha felt sure he had already arrived. + +So the countess remained in the country, and the count, taking Sonya +and Natasha with him, went to Moscow at the end of January. + +BOOK EIGHT: 1811 - 12 + +CHAPTER I + +After Prince Andrews engagement to Natasha, Pierre without any +apparent cause suddenly felt it impossible to go on living as +before. Firmly convinced as he was of the truths revealed to him by +his benefactor, and happy as he had been in perfecting his inner +man, to which he had devoted himself with such ardor- all the zest +of such a life vanished after the engagement of Andrew and Natasha and +the death of Joseph Alexeevich, the news of which reached him almost +at the same time. Only the skeleton of life remained: his house, a +brilliant wife who now enjoyed the favors of a very important +personage, acquaintance with all Petersburg, and his court service +with its dull formalities. And this life suddenly seemed to Pierre +unexpectedly loathsome. He ceased keeping a diary, avoided the company +of the Brothers, began going to the Club again, drank a great deal, +and came once more in touch with the bachelor sets, leading such a +life that the Countess Helene thought it necessary to speak severely +to him about it. Pierre felt that she right, and to avoid compromising +her went away to Moscow. + +In Moscow as soon as he entered his huge house in which the faded +and fading princesses still lived, with its enormous retinue; as +soon as, driving through the town, he saw the Iberian shrine with +innumerable tapers burning before the golden covers of the icons, +the Kremlin Square with its snow undisturbed by vehicles, the sleigh +drivers and hovels of the Sivtsev Vrazhok, those old Moscovites who +desired nothing, hurried nowhere, and were ending their days +leisurely; when he saw those old Moscow ladies, the Moscow balls, +and the English Club, he felt himself at home in a quiet haven. In +Moscow he felt at peace, at home, warm and dirty as in an old dressing +gown. + +Moscow society, from the old women down to the children, received +Pierre like a long-expected guest whose place was always ready +awaiting him. For Moscow society Pierre was the nicest, kindest, +most intellectual, merriest, and most magnanimous of cranks, a +heedless, genial nobleman of the old Russian type. His purse was +always empty because it was open to everyone. + +Benefit performances, poor pictures, statues, benevolent +societies, gypsy choirs, schools, subscription dinners, sprees, +Freemasons, churches, and books- no one and nothing met with a refusal +from him, and had it not been for two friends who had borrowed large +sums from him and taken him under their protection, he would have +given everything away. There was never a dinner or soiree at the +Club without him. As soon as he sank into his place on the sofa +after two bottles of Margaux he was surrounded, and talking, +disputing, and joking began. When there were quarrels, his kindly +smile and well-timed jests reconciled the antagonists. The Masonic +dinners were dull and dreary when he was not there. + +When after a bachelor supper he rose with his amiable and kindly +smile, yielding to the entreaties of the festive company to drive +off somewhere with them, shouts of delight and triumph arose among the +young men. At balls he danced if a partner was needed. Young ladies, +married and unmarried, liked him because without making love to any of +them, he was equally amiable to all, especially after supper. "Il +est charmant; il n'a pas de sexe,"~^ they said of him. + +^~ "He is charming; he has no sex." + +Pierre was one of those retired gentlemen-in-waiting of whom there +were hundreds good-humoredly ending their days in Moscow. + +How horrified he would have been seven years before, when he first +arrived from abroad, had he been told that there was no need for him +to seek or plan anything, that his rut had long been shaped, eternally +predetermined, and that wriggle as he might, he would be what all in +his position were. He could not have believed it! Had he not at one +time longed with all his heart to establish a republic in Russia; then +himself to be a Napoleon; then to be a philosopher; and then a +strategist and the conqueror of Napoleon? Had he not seen the +possibility of, and passionately desired, the regeneration of the +sinful human race, and his own progress to the highest degree of +perfection? Had he not established schools and hospitals and liberated +his serfs? + +But instead of all that- here he was, the wealthy husband of an +unfaithful wife, a retired gentleman-in-waiting, fond of eating and +drinking and, as he unbuttoned his waistcoat, of abusing the +government a bit, a member of the Moscow English Club, and a universal +favorite in Moscow society. For a long time he could not reconcile +himself to the idea that he was one of those same retired Moscow +gentlemen-in-waiting he had so despised seven years before. + +Sometimes he consoled himself with the thought that he was only +living this life temporarily; but then he was shocked by the thought +of how many, like himself, had entered that life and that Club +temporarily, with all their teeth and hair, and had only left it +when not a single tooth or hair remained. + +In moments of pride, when he thought of his position it seemed to +him that he was quite different and distinct from those other +retired gentlemen-in-waiting he had formerly despised: they were +empty, stupid, contented fellows, satisfied with their position, +"while I am still discontented and want to do something for mankind. +But perhaps all these comrades of mine struggled just like me and +sought something new, a path in life of their own, and like me were +brought by force of circumstances, society, and race- by that +elemental force against which man is powerless- to the condition I +am in," said he to himself in moments of humility; and after living +some time in Moscow he no longer despised, but began to grow fond +of, to respect, and to pity his comrades in destiny, as he pitied +himself. + +Pierre longer suffered moments of despair, hypochondria, and disgust +with life, but the malady that had formerly found expression in such +acute attacks was driven inwards and never left him for a moment. +"What for? Why? What is going on in the world?" he would ask himself +in perplexity several times a day, involuntarily beginning to +reflect anew on the meaning of the phenomena of life; but knowing by +experience that there were no answers to these questions he made haste +to turn away from them, and took up a book, or hurried of to the +Club or to Apollon Nikolaevich's, to exchange the gossip of the town. + +"Helene, who has never cared for anything but her own body and is +one of the stupidest women in the world," thought Pierre, "is regarded +by people as the acme of intelligence and refinement, and they pay +homage to her. Napoleon Bonaparte was despised by all as long as he +was great, but now that he has become a wretched comedian the +Emperor Francis wants to offer him his daughter in an illegal +marriage. The Spaniards, through the Catholic clergy, offer praise +to God for their victory over the French on the fourteenth of June, +and the French, also through the Catholic clergy, offer praise because +on that same fourteenth of June they defeated the Spaniards. My +brother Masons swear by the blood that they are ready to sacrifice +everything for their neighbor, but they do not give a ruble each to +the collections for the poor, and they intrigue, the Astraea Lodge +against the Manna Seekers, and fuss about an authentic Scotch carpet +and a charter that nobody needs, and the meaning of which the very man +who wrote it does not understand. We all profess the Christian law +of forgiveness of injuries and love of our neighbors, the law in honor +of which we have built in Moscow forty times forty churches- but +yesterday a deserter was knouted to death and a minister of that +same law of love and forgiveness, a priest, gave the soldier a cross +to kiss before his execution." So thought Pierre, and the whole of +this general deception which everyone accepts, accustomed as he was to +it, astonished him each time as if it were something new. "I +understand the deception and confusion," he thought, "but how am I +to tell them all that I see? I have tried, and have always found +that they too in the depths of their souls understand it as I do, +and only try not to see it. So it appears that it must be so! But I- +what is to become of me?" thought he. He had the unfortunate +capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing +in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and +falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it. +Every sphere of work was connected, in his eyes, with evil and +deception. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he engaged in, the evil +and falsehood of it repulsed him and blocked every path of activity. +Yet he had to live and to find occupation. It was too dreadful to be +under the burden of these insoluble problems, so he abandoned +himself to any distraction in order to forget them. He frequented +every kind of society, drank much, bought pictures, engaged in +building, and above all- read. + +He read, and read everything that came to hand. On coming home, +while his valets were still taking off his things, he picked up a book +and began to read. From reading he passed to sleeping, from sleeping +to gossip in drawing rooms of the Club, from gossip to carousals and +women; from carousals back to gossip, reading, and wine. Drinking +became more and more a physical and also a moral necessity. Though the +doctors warned him that with his corpulence wine was dangerous for +him, he drank a great deal. He was only quite at ease when having +poured several glasses of wine mechanically into his large mouth he +felt a pleasant warmth in his body, an amiability toward all his +fellows, and a readiness to respond superficially to every idea +without probing it deeply. Only after emptying a bottle or two did +he feel dimly that the terribly tangled skein of life which previously +had terrified him was not as dreadful as he had thought. He was always +conscious of some aspect of that skein, as with a buzzing in his +head after dinner or supper he chatted or listened to conversation +or read. But under the influence of wine he said to himself: "It +doesn't matter. I'll get it unraveled. I have a solution ready, but +have no time now- I'll think it all out later on!" But the later on +never came. + +In the morning, on an empty stomach, all the old questions +appeared as insoluble and terrible as ever, and Pierre hastily +picked up a book, and if anyone came to see him he was glad. + +Sometimes he remembered how he had heard that soldiers in war when +entrenched under the enemy's fire, if they have nothing to do, try +hard to find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger. To +Pierre all men seemed like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: +some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in +women, some in toys, some in horses, some in politics, some in +sport, some in wine, and some in governmental affairs. "Nothing is +trivial, and nothing is important, it's all the same- only to save +oneself from it as best one can," thought Pierre. "Only not to see it, +that dreadful it!" + +CHAPTER II + +At the beginning of winter Prince Nicholas Bolkonski and his +daughter moved to Moscow. At that time enthusiasm for the Emperor +Alexander's regime had weakened and a patriotic and anti-French +tendency prevailed there, and this, together with his past and his +intellect and his originality, at once made Prince Nicholas +Bolkonski an object of particular respect to the Moscovites and the +center of the Moscow opposition to the government. + +The prince had aged very much that year. He showed marked signs of +senility by a tendency to fall asleep, forgetfulness of quite recent +events, remembrance of remote ones, and the childish vanity with which +he accepted the role of head of the Moscow opposition. In spite of +this the old man inspired in all his visitors alike a feeling of +respectful veneration- especially of an evening when he came in to tea +in his old-fashioned coat and powdered wig and, aroused by anyone, +told his abrupt stories of the past, or uttered yet more abrupt and +scathing criticisms of the present. For them all, that old-fashioned +house with its gigantic mirrors, pre-Revolution furniture, powdered +footmen, and the stern shrewd old man (himself a relic of the past +century) with his gentle daughter and the pretty Frenchwoman who +were reverently devoted to him presented a majestic and agreeable +spectacle. But the visitors did not reflect that besides the couple of +hours during which they saw their host, there were also twenty-two +hours in the day during which the private and intimate life of the +house continued. + +Latterly that private life had become very trying for Princess Mary. +There in Moscow she was deprived of her greatest pleasures- talks with +the pilgrims and the solitude which refreshed her at Bald Hills- and +she had none of the advantages and pleasures of city life. She did not +go out into society; everyone knew that her father would not let her +go anywhere without him, and his failing health prevented his going +out himself, so that she was not invited to dinners and evening +parties. She had quite abandoned the hope of getting married. She +saw the coldness and malevolence with which the old prince received +and dismissed the young men, possible suitors, who sometimes +appeared at their house. She had no friends: during this visit to +Moscow she had been disappointed in the two who had been nearest to +her. Mademoiselle Bourienne, with whom she had never been able to be +quite frank, had now become unpleasant to her, and for various reasons +Princess Mary avoided her. Julie, with whom she had corresponded for +the last five years, was in Moscow, but proved to be quite alien to +her when they met. Just then Julie, who by the death of her brothers +had become one of the richest heiresses in Moscow, was in the full +whirl of society pleasures. She was surrounded by young men who, she +fancied, had suddenly learned to appreciate her worth. Julie was at +that stage in the life of a society woman when she feels that her last +chance of marrying has come and that her fate must be decided now or +never. On Thursdays Princess Mary remembered with a mournful smile +that she now had no one to write to, since Julie- whose presence +gave her no pleasure was here and they met every week. Like the old +emigre who declined to marry the lady with whom he had spent his +evenings for years, she regretted Julie's presence and having no one +to write to. In Moscow Princess Mary had no one to talk to, no one +to whom to confide her sorrow, and much sorrow fell to her lot just +then. The time for Prince Andrew's return and marriage was +approaching, but his request to her to prepare his father for it had +not been carried out; in fact, it seemed as if matters were quite +hopeless, for at every mention of the young Countess Rostova the old +prince (who apart from that was usually in a bad temper) lost +control of himself. Another lately added sorrow arose from the lessons +she gave her six year-old nephew. To her consternation she detected in +herself in relation to little Nicholas some symptoms of her father's +irritability. However often she told herself that she must not get +irritable when teaching her nephew, almost every time that, pointer in +hand, she sat down to show him the French alphabet, she so longed to +pour her own knowledge quickly and easily into the child- who was +already afraid that Auntie might at any moment get angry- that at +his slightest inattention she trembled, became flustered and heated, +raised her voice, and sometimes pulled him by the arm and put him in +the corner. Having put him in the corner she would herself begin to +cry over her cruel, evil nature, and little Nicholas, following her +example, would sob, and without permission would leave his corner, +come to her, pull her wet hands from her face, and comfort her. But +what distressed the princess most of all was her father's +irritability, which was always directed against her and had of late +amounted to cruelty. Had he forced her to prostrate herself to the +ground all night, had he beaten her or made her fetch wood or water, +it would never have entered her mind to think her position hard; but +this loving despot- the more cruel because he loved her and for that +reason tormented himself and her- knew how not merely to hurt and +humiliate her deliberately, but to show her that she was always to +blame for everything. Of late he had exhibited a new trait that +tormented Princess Mary more than anything else; this was his +ever-increasing intimacy with Mademoiselle Bourienne. The idea that at +the first moment of receiving the news of his son's intentions had +occurred to him in jest- that if Andrew got married he himself would +marry Bourienne- had evidently pleased him, and latterly he had +persistently, and as it seemed to Princess Mary merely to offend +her, shown special endearments to the companion and expressed his +dissatisfaction with his daughter by demonstrations of love of +Bourienne. + +One day in Moscow in Princess Mary's presence (she thought her +father did it purposely when she was there) the old prince kissed +Mademoiselle Bourienne's hand and, drawing her to him, embraced her +affectionately. Princess Mary flushed and ran out of the room. A few +minutes later Mademoiselle Bourienne came into Princess Mary's room +smiling and making cheerful remarks in her agreeable voice. Princess +Mary hastily wiped away her tears, went resolutely up to +Mademoiselle Bourienne, and evidently unconscious of what she was +doing began shouting in angry haste at the Frenchwoman, her voice +breaking: "It's horrible, vile, inhuman, to take advantage of the +weakness..." She did not finish. "Leave my room," she exclaimed, and +burst into sobs. + +Next day the prince did not say a word to his daughter, but she +noticed that at dinner he gave orders that Mademoiselle Bourienne +should be served first. After dinner, when the footman handed coffee +and from habit began with the princess, the prince suddenly grew +furious, threw his stick at Philip, and instantly gave instructions to +have him conscripted for the army. + +"He doesn't obey... I said it twice... and he doesn't obey! She is +the first person in this house; she's my best friend," cried the +prince. "And if you allow yourself," he screamed in a fury, addressing +Princess Mary for the first time, "to forget yourself again before her +as you dared to do yesterday, I will show you who is master in this +house. Go! Don't let me set eyes on you; beg her pardon!" + +Princess Mary asked Mademoiselle Bourienne's pardon, and also her +father's pardon for herself and for Philip the footman, who had begged +for her intervention. + +At such moments something like a pride of sacrifice gathered in +her soul. And suddenly that father whom she had judged would look +for his spectacles in her presence, fumbling near them and not +seeing them, or would forget something that had just occurred, or take +a false step with his failing legs and turn to see if anyone had +noticed his feebleness, or, worst of all, at dinner when there were no +visitors to excite him would suddenly fall asleep, letting his +napkin drop and his shaking head sink over his plate. "He is old and +feeble, and I dare to condemn him!" she thought at such moments, +with a feeling of revulsion against herself. + +CHAPTER III + +In 1811 there was living in Moscow a French doctor- Metivier- who +had rapidly become the fashion. He was enormously tall, handsome, +amiable as Frenchmen are, and was, as all Moscow said, an +extraordinarily clever doctor. He was received in the best houses +not merely as a doctor, but as an equal. + +Prince Nicholas had always ridiculed medicine, but latterly on +Mademoiselle Bourienne's advice had allowed this doctor to visit him +and had grown accustomed to him. Metivier came to see the prince about +twice a week. + +On December 6- St. Nicholas' Day and the prince's name day- all +Moscow came to the prince's front door but he gave orders to admit +no one and to invite to dinner only a small number, a list of whom +he gave to Princess Mary. + +Metivier, who came in the morning with his felicitations, considered +it proper in his quality of doctor de forcer la consigne,~^ as he +told Princess Mary, and went in to see the prince. It happened that on +that morning of his name day the prince was in one of his worst moods. +He had been going about the house all the morning finding fault with +everyone and pretending not to understand what was said to him and not +to be understood himself. Princess Mary well knew this mood of quiet +absorbed querulousness, which generally culminated in a burst of rage, +and she went about all that morning as though facing a cocked and +loaded gun and awaited the inevitable explosion. Until the doctor's +arrival the morning had passed off safely. After admitting the doctor, +Princess Mary sat down with a book in the drawing room near the door +through which she could hear all that passed in the study. + +^~ To force the guard. + +At first she heard only Metivier's voice, then her father's, then +both voices began speaking at the same time, the door was flung +open, and on the threshold appeared the handsome figure of the +terrified Metivier with his shock of black hair, and the prince in his +dressing gown and fez, his face distorted with fury and the pupils +of his eyes rolled downwards. + +"You don't understand?" shouted the prince, "but I do! French spy, +slave of Buonaparte, spy, get out of my house! Be off, I tell you..." + +Metivier, shrugging his shoulders, went up to Mademoiselle Bourienne +who at the sound of shouting had run in from an adjoining room. + +"The prince is not very well: bile and rush of blood to the head. +Keep calm, I will call again tomorrow," said Metivier; and putting his +fingers to his lips he hastened away. + +Through the study door came the sound of slippered feet and the cry: +"Spies, traitors, traitors everywhere! Not a moment's peace in my +own house!" + +After Metivier's departure the old prince called his daughter in, +and the whole weight of his wrath fell on her. She was to blame that a +spy had been admitted. Had he not told her, yes, told her to make a +list, and not to admit anyone who was not on that list? Then why was +that scoundrel admitted? She was the cause of it all. With her, he +said, he could not have a moment's peace and could not die quietly. + +"No, ma'am! We must part, we must part! Understand that, +understand it! I cannot endure any more," he said, and left the +room. Then, as if afraid she might find some means of consolation, +he returned and trying to appear calm added: "And don't imagine I have +said this in a moment of anger. I am calm. I have thought it over, and +it will be carried out- we must part; so find some place for +yourself...." But he could not restrain himself and with the virulence +of which only one who loves is capable, evidently suffering himself, +he shook his fists at her and screamed: + +"If only some fool would marry her!" Then he slammed the door, +sent for Mademoiselle Bourienne, and subsided into his study. + +At two o'clock the six chosen guests assembled for dinner. + +These guests- the famous Count Rostopchin, Prince Lopukhin with +his nephew, General Chatrov an old war comrade of the prince's, and of +the younger generation Pierre and Boris Drubetskoy- awaited the prince +in the drawing room. + +Boris, who had come to Moscow on leave a few days before, had been +anxious to be presented to Prince Nicholas Bolkonski, and had +contrived to ingratiate himself so well that the old prince in his +case made an exception to the rule of not receiving bachelors in his +house. + +The prince's house did not belong to what is known as fashionable +society, but his little circle- though not much talked about in +town- was one it was more flattering to be received in than any other. +Boris had realized this the week before when the commander in chief in +his presence invited Rostopchin to dinner on St. Nicholas' Day, and +Rostopchin had replied that he could not come: + +"On that day I always go to pay my devotions to the relics of Prince +Nicholas Bolkonski." + +"Oh, yes, yes!" replied the commander in chief. "How is he?..." + +The small group that assembled before dinner in the lofty +old-fashioned drawing room with its old furniture resembled the solemn +gathering of a court of justice. All were silent or talked in low +tones. Prince Nicholas came in serious and taciturn. Princess Mary +seemed even quieter and more diffident than usual. The guests were +reluctant to address her, feeling that she was in no mood for their +conversation. Count Rostopchin alone kept the conversation going, +now relating the latest town news, and now the latest political +gossip. + +Lopukhin and the old general occasionally took part in the +conversation. Prince Bolkonski listened as a presiding judge +receives a report, only now and then, silently or by a brief word, +showing that he took heed of what was being reported to him. The +tone of the conversation was such as indicated that no one approved of +what was being done in the political world. Incidents were related +evidently confirming the opinion that everything was going from bad to +worse, but whether telling a story or giving an opinion the speaker +always stopped, or was stopped, at the point beyond which his +criticism might touch the sovereign himself. + +At dinner the talk turned on the latest political news: Napoleon's +seizure of the Duke of Oldenburg's territory, and the Russian Note, +hostile to Napoleon, which had been sent to all the European courts. + +"Bonaparte treats Europe as a pirate does a captured vessel," said +Count Rostopchin, repeating a phrase he had uttered several times +before. "One only wonders at the long-suffering or blindness of the +crowned heads. Now the Pope's turn has come and Bonaparte doesn't +scruple to depose the head of the Catholic Church- yet all keep +silent! Our sovereign alone has protested against the seizure of the +Duke of Oldenburg's territory, and even..." Count Rostopchin paused, +feeling that he had reached the limit beyond which censure was +impossible. + +"Other territories have been offered in exchange for the Duchy of +Oldenburg," said Prince Bolkonski. "He shifts the Dukes about as I +might move my serfs from Bald Hills to Bogucharovo or my Ryazan +estates." + +"The Duke of Oldenburg bears his misfortunes with admirable strength +of character and resignation," remarked Boris, joining in +respectfully. + +He said this because on his journey from Petersburg he had had the +honor of being presented to the Duke. Prince Bolkonski glanced at +the young man as if about to say something in reply, but changed his +mind, evidently considering him too young. + +"I have read our protests about the Oldenburg affair and was +surprised how badly the Note was worded," remarked Count Rostopchin in +the casual tone of a man dealing with a subject quite familiar to him. + +Pierre looked at Rostopchin with naive astonishment, not +understanding why he should be disturbed by the bad composition of the +Note. + +"Does it matter, Count, how the Note is worded," he asked, "so +long as its substance is forcible?" + +"My dear fellow, with our five hundred thousand troops it should +be easy to have a good style," returned Count Rostopchin. + +Pierre now understood the count's dissatisfaction with the wording +of the Note. + +"One would have thought quill drivers enough had sprung up," +remarked the old prince. "There in Petersburg they are always writing- +not notes only but even new laws. My Andrew there has written a +whole volume of laws for Russia. Nowadays they are always writing!" +and he laughed unnaturally. + +There was a momentary pause in the conversation; the old general +cleared his throat to draw attention. + +"Did you hear of the last event at the review in Petersburg? The +figure cut by the new French ambassador." + +"Eh? Yes, I heard something: he said something awkward in His +Majesty's presence." + +"His Majesty drew attention to the Grenadier division and to the +march past," continued the general, "and it seems the ambassador +took no notice and allowed himself to reply that: 'We in France pay no +attention to such trifles!' The Emperor did not condescend to reply. +At the next review, they say, the Emperor did not once deign to +address him." + +All were silent. On this fact relating to the Emperor personally, it +was impossible to pass any judgment. + +"Impudent fellows!" said the prince. "You know Metivier? I turned +him out of my house this morning. He was here; they admitted him spite +of my request that they should let no one in," he went on, glancing +angrily at his daughter. + +And he narrated his whole conversation with the French doctor and +the reasons that convinced him that Metivier was a spy. Though these +reasons were very insufficient and obscure, no one made any rejoinder. + +After the roast, champagne was served. The guests rose to +congratulate the old prince. Princess Mary, too, went round to him. + +He gave her a cold, angry look and offered her his wrinkled, +clean-shaven cheek to kiss. The whole expression of his face told +her that he had not forgotten the morning's talk, that his decision +remained in force, and only the presence of visitors hindered his +speaking of it to her now. + +When they went into the drawing room where coffee was served, the +old men sat together. + +Prince Nicholas grew more animated and expressed his views on the +impending war. + +He said that our wars with Bonaparte would be disastrous so long +as we sought alliances with the Germans and thrust ourselves into +European affairs, into which we had been drawn by the Peace of Tilsit. +"We ought not to fight either for or against Austria. Our political +interests are all in the East, and in regard to Bonaparte the only +thing is to have an armed frontier and a firm policy, and he will +never dare to cross the Russian frontier, as was the case in 1807!" + +"How can we fight the French, Prince?" said Count Rostopchin. "Can +we arm ourselves against our teachers and divinities? Look at our +youths, look at our ladies! The French are our Gods: Paris is our +Kingdom of Heaven." + +He began speaking louder, evidently to be heard by everyone. + +"French dresses, French ideas, French feelings! There now, you +turned Metivier out by the scruff of his neck because he is a +Frenchman and a scoundrel, but our ladies crawl after him on their +knees. I went to a party last night, and there out of five ladies +three were Roman Catholics and had the Pope's indulgence for doing +woolwork on Sundays. And they themselves sit there nearly naked, +like the signboards at our Public Baths if I may say so. Ah, when +one looks at our young people, Prince, one would like to take Peter +the Great's old cudgel out of the museum and belabor them in the +Russian way till all the nonsense jumps out of them." + +All were silent. The old prince looked at Rostopchin with a smile +and wagged his head approvingly. + +"Well, good-by, your excellency, keep well!" said Rostopchin, +getting up with characteristic briskness and holding out his hand to +the prince. + +"Good-by, my dear fellow.... His words are music, I never tire of +hearing him!" said the old prince, keeping hold of the hand and +offering his cheek to be kissed. + +Following Rostopchin's example the others also rose. + +CHAPTER IV + +Princess Mary as she sat listening to the old men's talk and +faultfinding, understood nothing of what she heard; she only +wondered whether the guests had all observed her father's hostile +attitude toward her. She did not even notice the special attentions +and amiabilities shown her during dinner by Boris Drubetskoy, who +was visiting them for the third time already. + +Princess Mary turned with absent-minded questioning look to +Pierre, who hat in hand and with a smile on his face was the last of +the guests to approach her after the old prince had gone out and +they were left alone in the drawing room. + +"May I stay a little longer?" he said, letting his stout body sink +into an armchair beside her. + +"Oh yes," she answered. "You noticed nothing?" her look asked. + +Pierre was in an agreeable after-dinner mood. He looked straight +before him and smiled quietly. + +"Have you known that young man long, Princess?" he asked. + +"Who?" + +"Drubetskoy." + +"No, not long..." + +"Do you like him?" + +"Yes, he is an agreeable young man.... Why do you ask me that?" said +Princess Mary, still thinking of that morning's conversation with +her father. + +"Because I have noticed that when a young man comes on leave from +Petersburg to Moscow it is usually with the object of marrying an +heiress." + +"You have observed that?" said Princess Mary. + +"Yes," returned Pierre with a smile, "and this young man now manages +matters so that where there is a wealthy heiress there he is too. I +can read him like a book. At present he is hesitating whom to lay +siege to- you or Mademoiselle Julie Karagina. He is very attentive +to her." + +"He visits them?" + +"Yes, very often. And do you know the new way of courting?" said +Pierre with an amused smile, evidently in that cheerful mood of good +humored raillery for which he so often reproached himself in his +diary. + +"No," replied Princess Mary. + +"To please Moscow girls nowadays one has to be melancholy. He is +very melancholy with Mademoiselle Karagina," said Pierre. + +"Really?" asked Princess Mary, looking into Pierre's kindly face and +still thinking of her own sorrow. "It would be a relief," thought she, +"if I ventured to confide what I am feeling to someone. I should +like to tell everything to Pierre. He is kind and generous. It would +be a relief. He would give me advice." + +"Would you marry him?" + +"Oh, my God, Count, there are moments when I would marry anybody!" +she cried suddenly to her own surprise and with tears in her voice. +"Ah, how bitter it is to love someone near to you and to feel that..." +she went on in a trembling voice, "that you can do nothing for him but +grieve him, and to know that you cannot alter this. Then there is only +one thing left- to go away, but where could I go?" + +"What is wrong? What is it, Princess?" + +But without finishing what she was saying, Princess Mary burst +into tears. + +"I don't know what is the matter with me today. Don't take any +notice- forget what I have said!" + +Pierre's gaiety vanished completely. He anxiously questioned the +princess, asked her to speak out fully and confide her grief to him; +but she only repeated that she begged him to forget what she had said, +that she did not remember what she had said, and that she had no +trouble except the one he knew of- that Prince Andrew's marriage +threatened to cause a rupture between father and son. + +"Have you any news of the Rostovs?" she asked, to change the +subject. "I was told they are coming soon. I am also expecting +Andrew any day. I should like them to meet here." + +"And how does he now regard the matter?" asked Pierre, referring +to the old prince. + +Princess Mary shook her head. + +"What is to be done? In a few months the year will be up. The +thing is impossible. I only wish I could spare my brother the first +moments. I wish they would come sooner. I hope to be friends with her. +You have known them a long time," said Princess Mary. "Tell me +honestly the whole truth: what sort of girl is she, and what do you +think of her?- The real truth, because you know Andrew is risking so +much doing this against his father's will that I should like to +know..." + +An undefined instinct told Pierre that these explanations, and +repeated requests to be told the whole truth, expressed ill-will on +the princess' part toward her future sister-in-law and a wish that +he should disapprove of Andrew's choice; but in reply he said what +he felt rather than what he thought. + +"I don't know how to answer your question," he said, blushing +without knowing why. "I really don't know what sort of girl she is; +I can't analyze her at all. She is enchanting, but what makes her so I +don't know. That is all one can say about her." + +Princess Mary sighed, and the expression on her face said: "Yes, +that's what I expected and feared." + +"Is she clever?" she asked. + +Pierre considered. + +"I think not," he said, "and yet- yes. She does not deign to be +clever.... Oh no, she is simply enchanting, and that is all." + +Princess Mary again shook her head disapprovingly. + +"Ah, I so long to like her! Tell her so if you see her before I do." + +"I hear they are expected very soon," said Pierre. + +Princess Mary told Pierre of her plan to become intimate with her +future sister-in-law as soon as the Rostovs arrived and to try to +accustom the old prince to her. + +CHAPTER V + +Boris had not succeeded in making a wealthy match in Petersburg, +so with the same object in view he came to Moscow. There he wavered +between the two richest heiresses, Julie and Princess Mary. Though +Princess Mary despite her plainness seemed to him more attractive than +Julie, he, without knowing why, felt awkward about paying court to +her. When they had last met on the old prince's name day, she had +answered at random all his attempts to talk sentimentally, evidently +not listening to what he was saying. + +Julie on the contrary accepted his attentions readily, though in a +manner peculiar to herself. + +She was twenty-seven. After the death of her brothers she had become +very wealthy. She was by now decidedly plain, but thought herself +not merely as good-looking as before but even far more attractive. She +was confirmed in this delusion by the fact that she had become a +very wealthy heiress and also by the fact that the older she grew +the less dangerous she became to men, and the more freely they could +associate with her and avail themselves of her suppers, soirees, and +the animated company that assembled at her house, without incurring +any obligation. A man who would have been afraid ten years before of +going every day to the house when there was a girl of seventeen there, +for fear of compromising her and committing himself, would now go +boldly every day and treat her not as a marriageable girl but as a +sexless acquaintance. + +That winter the Karagins' house was the most agreeable and +hospitable in Moscow. In addition to the formal evening and dinner +parties, a large company, chiefly of men, gathered there every day, +supping at midnight and staying till three in the morning. Julie never +missed a ball, a promenade, or a play. Her dresses were always of +the latest fashion. But in spite of that she seemed to be +disillusioned about everything and told everyone that she did not +believe either in friendship or in love, or any of the joys of life, +and expected peace only "yonder." She adopted the tone of one who +has suffered a great disappointment, like a girl who has either lost +the man she loved or been cruelly deceived by him. Though nothing of +the kind had happened to her she was regarded in that light, and had +even herself come to believe that she had suffered much in life. +This melancholy, which did not prevent her amusing herself, did not +hinder the young people who came to her house from passing the time +pleasantly. Every visitor who came to the house paid his tribute to +the melancholy mood of the hostess, and then amused himself with +society gossip, dancing, intellectual games, and bouts rimes, which +were in vogue at the Karagins'. Only a few of these young men, among +them Boris, entered more deeply into Julie's melancholy, and with +these she had prolonged conversations in private on the vanity of +all worldly things, and to them she showed her albums filled with +mournful sketches, maxims, and verses. + +To Boris, Julie was particularly gracious: she regretted his early +disillusionment with life, offered him such consolation of +friendship as she who had herself suffered so much could render, and +showed him her album. Boris sketched two trees in the album and wrote: +"Rustic trees, your dark branches shed gloom and melancholy upon me." + +On another page he drew a tomb, and wrote: + +_1 La mort est secourable et la mort est tranquille.
+Ah! contre les douleurs il n'y a pas d'autre asile.~^ + +^~ Death gives relief and death is peaceful. + +_1 Ah! from suffering there is no other refuge. + +Julia said this was charming + +"There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy," she +said to Boris, repeating word for word a passage she had copied from a +book. "It is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness +and despair, showing the possibility of consolation." + +In reply Boris wrote these lines: + +_1 Aliment de poison d'une ame trop sensible,
+Toi, sans qui le bonheur me serait impossible,
+Tendre melancholie, ah, viens me consoler,
+Viens calmer les tourments de ma sombre retraite,
+Et mele une douceur secrete
+A ces pleurs que je sens couler.~^ + +^~ Poisonous nourishment of a too sensitive soul, + +_1 Thou, without whom happiness would for me be impossible, + +_1 Tender melancholy, ah, come to console me, + +_1 Come to calm the torments of my gloomy retreat, + +_1 And mingle a secret sweetness + +_1 With these tears that I feel to be flowing. + +For Boris, Julie played most doleful nocturnes on her harp. Boris +read Poor Liza aloud to her, and more than once interrupted the +reading because of the emotions that choked him. Meeting at large +gatherings Julie and Boris looked on one another as the only souls who +understood one another in a world of indifferent people. + +Anna Mikhaylovna, who often visited the Karagins, while playing +cards with the mother made careful inquiries as to Julie's dowry +(she was to have two estates in Penza and the Nizhegorod forests). +Anna Mikhaylovna regarded the refined sadness that united her son to +the wealthy Julie with emotion, and resignation to the Divine will. + +"You are always charming and melancholy, my dear Julie," she said to +the daughter. "Boris says his soul finds repose at your house. He +has suffered so many disappointments and is so sensitive," said she to +the mother. "Ah, my dear, I can't tell you how fond I have grown of +Julie latterly," she said to her son. "But who could help loving +her? She is an angelic being! Ah, Boris, Boris!"- she paused. "And how +I pity her mother," she went on; "today she showed me her accounts and +letters from Penza (they have enormous estates there), and she, poor +thing, has no one to help her, and they do cheat her so!" + +Boris smiled almost imperceptibly while listening to his mother. +He laughed blandly at her naive diplomacy but listened to what she had +to say, and sometimes questioned her carefully about the Penza and +Nizhegorod estates. + +Julie had long been expecting a proposal from her melancholy +adorer and was ready to accept it; but some secret feeling of +repulsion for her, for her passionate desire to get married, for her +artificiality, and a feeling of horror at renouncing the possibility +of real love still restrained Boris. His leave was expiring. He +spent every day and whole days at the Karagins', and every day on +thinking the matter over told himself that he would propose +tomorrow. But in Julie's presence, looking at her red face and chin +(nearly always powdered), her moist eyes, and her expression of +continual readiness to pass at once from melancholy to an unnatural +rapture of married bliss, Boris could not utter the decisive words, +though in imagination he had long regarded himself as the possessor of +those Penza and Nizhegorod estates and had apportioned the use of +the income from them. Julie saw Boris' indecision, and sometimes the +thought occurred to her that she was repulsive to him, but her +feminine self-deception immediately supplied her with consolation, and +she told herself that he was only shy from love. Her melancholy, +however, began to turn to irritability, and not long before Boris' +departure she formed a definite plan of action. Just as Boris' leave +of absence was expiring, Anatole Kuragin made his appearance in +Moscow, and of course in the Karagins' drawing room, and Julie, +suddenly abandoning her melancholy, became cheerful and very attentive +to Kuragin. + +"My dear," said Anna Mikhaylovna to her son, "I know from a reliable +source that Prince Vasili has sent his son to Moscow to get him +married to Julie. I am so fond of Julie that I should be sorry for +her. What do you think of it, my dear?" + +The idea of being made a fool of and of having thrown away that +whole month of arduous melancholy service to Julie, and of seeing +all the revenue from the Penza estates which he had already mentally +apportioned and put to proper use fall into the hands of another, +and especially into the hands of that idiot Anatole, pained Boris. +He drove to the Karagins' with the firm intention of proposing. +Julie met him in a gay, careless manner, spoke casually of how she had +enjoyed yesterday's ball, and asked when he was leaving. Though +Boris had come intentionally to speak of his love and therefore +meant to be tender, he began speaking irritably of feminine +inconstancy, of how easily women can turn from sadness to joy, and how +their moods depend solely on who happens to be paying court to them. +Julie was offended and replied that it was true that a woman needs +variety, and the same thing over and over again would weary anyone. + +"Then I should advise you..." Boris began, wishing to sting her; but +at that instant the galling thought occurred to him that he might have +to leave Moscow without having accomplished his aim, and have vainly +wasted his efforts- which was a thing he never allowed to happen. + +He checked himself in the middle of the sentence, lowered his eyes +to avoid seeing her unpleasantly irritated and irresolute face, and +said: + +"I did not come here at all to quarrel with you. On the contrary..." + +He glanced at her to make sure that he might go on. Her irritability +had suddenly quite vanished, and her anxious, imploring eyes were +fixed on him with greedy expectation. "I can always arrange so as +not to see her often," thought Boris. "The affair has been begun and +must be finished!" He blushed hotly, raised his eyes to hers, and +said: + +"You know my feelings for you!" + +There was no need to say more: Julie's face shone with triumph and +self-satisfaction; but she forced Boris to say all that is said on +such occasions- that he loved her and had never loved any other +woman more than her. She knew that for the Penza estates and +Nizhegorod forests she could demand this, and she received what she +demanded. + +The affianced couple, no longer alluding to trees that shed gloom +and melancholy upon them, planned the arrangements of a splendid house +in Petersburg, paid calls, and prepared everything for a brilliant +wedding. + +CHAPTER VI + +At the end of January old Count Rostov went to Moscow with Natasha +and Sonya. The countess was still unwell and unable to travel but it +was impossible to wait for her recovery. Prince Andrew was expected in +Moscow any day, the trousseau had to be ordered and the estate near +Moscow had to be sold, besides which the opportunity of presenting his +future daughter-in-law to old Prince Bolkonski while he was in +Moscow could not be missed. The Rostovs' Moscow house had not been +heated that winter and, as they had come only for a short time and the +countess was not with them, the count decided to stay with Marya +Dmitrievna Akhrosimova, who had long been pressing her hospitality +on them. + +Late one evening the Rostovs' four sleighs drove into Marya +Dmitrievna's courtyard in the old Konyusheny street. Marya +Dmitrievna lived alone. She had already married off her daughter, +and her sons were all in the service. + +She held herself as erect, told everyone her opinion as candidly, +loudly, and bluntly as ever, and her whole bearing seemed a reproach +to others for any weakness, passion, or temptation- the possibility of +which she did not admit. From early in the morning, wearing a dressing +jacket, she attended to her household affairs, and then she drove out: +on holy days to church and after the service to jails and prisons on +affairs of which she never spoke to anyone. On ordinary days, after +dressing, she received petitioners of various classes, of whom there +were always some. Then she had dinner, a substantial and appetizing +meal at which there were always three or four guests; after dinner she +played a game of boston, and at night she had the newspapers or a +new book read to her while she knitted. She rarely made an exception +and went out to pay visits, and then only to the most important +persons in the town. + +She had not yet gone to bed when the Rostovs arrived and the +pulley of the hall door squeaked from the cold as it let in the +Rostovs and their servants. Marya Dmitrievna, with her spectacles +hanging down on her nose and her head flung back, stood in the hall +doorway looking with a stern, grim face at the new arrivals. One might +have thought she was angry with the travelers and would immediately +turn them out, had she not at the same time been giving careful +instructions to the servants for the accommodation of the visitors and +their belongings. + +"The count's things? Bring them here," she said, pointing to the +portmanteaus and not greeting anyone. "The young ladies'? There to the +left. Now what are you dawdling for?" she cried to the maids. "Get the +samovar ready!... You've grown plumper and prettier," she remarked, +drawing Natasha (whose cheeks were glowing from the cold) to her by +the hood. "Foo! You are cold! Now take off your things, quick!" she +shouted to the count who was going to kiss her hand. "You're half +frozen, I'm sure! Bring some rum for tea!... Bonjour, Sonya dear!" she +added, turning to Sonya and indicating by this French greeting her +slightly contemptuous though affectionate attitude toward her. + +When they came in to tea, having taken off their outdoor things +and tidied themselves up after their journey, Marya Dmitrievna +kissed them all in due order. + +"I'm heartily glad you have come and are staying with me. It was +high time," she said, giving Natasha a significant look. "The old +man is here and his son's expected any day. You'll have to make his +aquaintance. But we'll speak of that later on," she added, glancing at +Sonya with a look that showed she did not want to speak of it in her +presence. "Now listen," she said to the count. "What do you want +tomorrow? Whom will you send for? Shinshin?" she crooked one of her +fingers. "The sniveling Anna Mikhaylovna? That's two. She's here +with her son. The son is getting married! Then Bezukhov, eh? He is +here too, with his wife. He ran away from her and she came galloping +after him. He dined with me on Wednesday. As for them"- and she +pointed to the girls- "tomorrow I'll take them first to the Iberian +shrine of the Mother of God, and then we'll drive to the +Super-Rogue's. I suppose you'll have everything new. Don't judge by +me: sleeves nowadays are this size! The other day young Princess Irina +Vasilevna came to see me; she was an awful sight- looked as if she had +put two barrels on her arms. You know not a day passes now without +some new fashion.... And what have you to do yourself?" she asked +the count sternly. + +"One thing has come on top of another: her rags to buy, and now a +purchaser has turned up for the Moscow estate and for the house. If +you will be so kind, I'll fix a time and go down to the estate just +for a day, and leave my lassies with you." + +"All right. All right. They'll be safe with me, as safe as in +Chancery! I'll take them where they must go, scold them a bit, and pet +them a bit," said Marya Dmitrievna, touching her goddaughter and +favorite, Natasha, on the cheek with her large hand. + +Next morning Marya Dmitrievna took the young ladies to the Iberian +shrine of the Mother of God and to Madame Suppert-Roguet, who was so +afraid of Marya Dmitrievna that she always let her have costumes at +a loss merely to get rid of her. Marya Dmitrievna ordered almost the +whole trousseau. When they got home she turned everybody out of the +room except Nataisha, and then called her pet to her armchair. + +"Well, now we'll talk. I congratulate you on your betrothed. +You've hooked a fine fellow! I am glad for your sake and I've known +him since he was so high." She held her hand a couple of feet from the +ground. Natasha blushed happily. "I like him and all his family. Now +listen! You know that old Prince Nicholas much dislikes his son's +marrying. The old fellow's crotchety! Of course Prince Andrew is not a +child and can shift without him, but it's not nice to enter a family +against a father's will. One wants to do it peacefully and lovingly. +You're a clever girl and you'll know how to manage. Be kind, and use +your wits. Then all will be well." + +Natasha remained silent, from shyness Marya Dmitrievna supposed, but +really because she disliked anyone interfering in what touched her +love of Prince Andrew, which seemed to her so apart from all human +affairs that no one could understand it. She loved and knew Prince +Andrew, he loved her only, and was to come one of these days and +take her. She wanted nothing more. + +"You see I have known him a long time and am also fond of Mary, your +future sister-in-law. 'Husbands' sisters bring up blisters,' but +this one wouldn't hurt a fly. She has asked me to bring you two +together. Tomorrow you'll go with your father to see her. Be very nice +and affectionate to her: you're younger than she. When he comes, he'll +find you already know his sister and father and are liked by them. +Am I right or not? Won't that be best?" + +"Yes, it will," Natasha answered reluctantly. + +CHAPTER VII + +Next day, by Marya Dmitrievna's advice, Count Rostov took Natasha to +call on Prince Nicholas Bolkonski. The count did not set out +cheerfully on this visit, at heart he felt afraid. He well +remembered the last interview he had had with the old prince at the +time of the enrollment, when in reply to an invitation to dinner he +had had to listen to an angry reprimand for not having provided his +full quota of men. Natasha, on the other hand, having put on her +best gown, was in the highest spirits. "They can't help liking me," +she thought. "Everybody always has liked me, and I am so willing to do +anything they wish, so ready to be fond of him- for being his +father- and of her- for being his sister- that there is no reason +for them not to like me..." + +They drove up to the gloomy old house on the Vozdvizhenka and +entered the vestibule. + +"Well, the Lord have mercy on us!" said the count, half in jest, +half in earnest; but Natasha noticed that her father was flurried on +entering the anteroom and inquired timidly and softly whether the +prince and princess were at home. + +When they had been announced a perturbation was noticeable among the +servants. The footman who had gone to announce them was stopped by +another in the large hall and they whispered to one another. Then a +maidservant ran into the hall and hurriedly said something, mentioning +the princess. At last an old, cross looking footman came and announced +to the Rostovs that the prince was not receiving, but that the +princess begged them to walk up. The first person who came to meet the +visitors was Mademoiselle Bourienne. She greeted the father and +daughter with special politeness and showed them to the princess' +room. The princess, looking excited and nervous, her face flushed in +patches, ran in to meet the visitors, treading heavily, and vainly +trying to appear cordial and at ease. From the first glance Princess +Mary did not like Natasha. She thought her too fashionably dressed, +frivolously gay and vain. She did not at all realize that before +having seen her future sister-in-law she was prejudiced against her by +involuntary envy of her beauty, youth, and happiness, as well as by +jealousy of her brother's love for her. Apart from this insuperable +antipathy to her, Princess Mary was agitated just then because on +the Rostovs' being announced, the old prince had shouted that he did +not wish to see them, that Princess Mary might do so if she chose, but +they were not to be admitted to him. She had decided to receive +them, but feared lest the prince might at any moment indulge in some +freak, as he seemed much upset by the Rostovs' visit. + +"There, my dear princess, I've brought you my songstress," said +the count, bowing and looking round uneasily as if afraid the old +prince might appear. "I am so glad you should get to know one +another... very sorry the prince is still ailing," and after a few +more commonplace remarks he rose. "If you'll allow me to leave my +Natasha in your hands for a quarter of an hour, Princess, I'll drive +round to see Anna Semenovna, it's quite near in the Dogs' Square, +and then I'll come back for her." + +The count had devised this diplomatic ruse (as he afterwards told +his daughter) to give the future sisters-in-law an opportunity to talk +to one another freely, but another motive was to avoid the danger of +encountering the old prince, of whom he was afraid. He did not mention +this to his daughter, but Natasha noticed her father's nervousness and +anxiety and felt mortified by it. She blushed for him, grew still +angrier at having blushed, and looked at the princess with a bold +and defiant expression which said that she was not afraid of +anybody. The princess told the count that she would be delighted, +and only begged him to stay longer at Anna Semenovna's, and he +departed. + +Despite the uneasy glances thrown at her by Princess Mary- who +wished to have a tete-a-tete with Natasha- Mademoiselle Bourienne +remained in the room and persistently talked about Moscow amusements +and theaters. Natasha felt offended by the hesitation she had +noticed in the anteroom, by her father's nervousness, and by the +unnatural manner of the princess who- she thought- was making a +favor of receiving her, and so everything displeased her. She did +not like Princess Mary, whom she thought very plain, affected, and +dry. Natasha suddenly shrank into herself and involuntarily assumed an +offhand air which alienated Princess Mary still more. After five +minutes of irksome, constrained conversation, they heard the sound +of slippered feet rapidly approaching. Princess Mary looked +frightened. + +The door opened and the old prince, in a dress, ing gown and a white +nightcap, came in. + +"Ah, madam!" he began. "Madam, Countess... Countess Rostova, if I am +not mistaken... I beg you to excuse me, to excuse me... I did not +know, madam. God is my witness, I did not know you had honored us with +a visit, and I came in such a costume only to see my daughter. I beg +you to excuse me... God is my witness, I didn't know-" he repeated, +stressing the word "God" so unnaturally and so unpleasantly that +Princess Mary stood with downcast eyes not daring to look either at +her father or at Natasha. + +Nor did the latter, having risen and curtsied, know what to do. +Mademoiselle Bourienne alone smiled agreeably. + +"I beg you to excuse me, excuse me! God is my witness, I did not +know," muttered the old man, and after looking Natasha over from +head to foot he went out. + +Mademoiselle Bourienne was the first to recover herself after this +apparition and began speaking about the prince's indisposition. +Natasha and Princess Mary looked at one another in silence, and the +longer they did so without saying what they wanted to say, the greater +grew their antipathy to one another. + +When the count returned, Natasha was impolitely pleased and hastened +to get away: at that moment she hated the stiff, elderly princess, who +could place her in such an embarrassing position and had spent half an +hour with her without once mentioning Prince Andrew. "I couldn't begin +talking about him in the presence of that Frenchwoman," thought +Natasha. The same thought was meanwhile tormenting Princess Mary. +She knew what she ought to have said to Natasha, but she had been +unable to say it because Mademoiselle Bourienne was in the way, and +because, without knowing why, she felt it very difficult to speak of +the marriage. When the count was already leaving the room, Princess +Mary went up hurriedly to Natasha, took her by the hand, and said with +a deep sigh: + +"Wait, I must..." + +Natasha glanced at her ironically without knowing why. + +"Dear Natalie," said Princess Mary, "I want you to know that I am +glad my brother has found happiness...." + +She paused, feeling that she was not telling the truth. Natasha +noticed this and guessed its reason. + +"I think, Princess, it is not convenient to speak of that now," +she said with external dignity and coldness, though she felt the tears +choking her. + +"What have I said and what have I done?" thought she, as soon as she +was out of the room. + +They waited a long time for Natasha to come to dinner that day. +She sat in her room crying like a child, blowing her nose and sobbing. +Sonya stood beside her, kissing her hair. + +"Natasha, what is it about?" she asked. "What do they matter to you? +It will all pass, Natasha." + +"But if you only knew how offensive it was... as if I..." + +"Don't talk about it, Natasha. It wasn't your fault so why should +you mind? Kiss me," said Sonya. + +Natasha raised her head and, kissing her friend on the lips, pressed +her wet face against her. + +"I can't tell you, I don't know. No one's to blame," said Natasha- +"It's my fault. But it all hurts terribly. Oh, why doesn't he +come?..." + +She came in to dinner with red eyes. Marya Dmitrievna, who knew +how the prince had received the Rostovs, pretended not to notice how +upset Natasha was and jested resolutely and loudly at table with the +count and the other guests. + +CHAPTER VIII + +That evening the Rostovs went to the Opera, for which Marya +Dmitrievna had taken a box. + +Natasha did not want to go, but could not refuse Marya +Dmitrievna's kind offer which was intended expressly for her. When she +came ready dressed into the ballroom to await her father, and +looking in the large mirror there saw that she was pretty, very +pretty, she felt even more sad, but it was a sweet, tender sadness. + +"O God, if he were here now I would not behave as I did then, but +differently. I would not be silly and afraid of things, I would simply +embrace him, cling to him, and make him look at me with those +searching inquiring eyes with which he has so often looked at me, +and then I would make him laugh as he used to laugh. And his eyes- how +I see those eyes!" thought Natasha. "And what do his father and sister +matter to me? I love him alone, him, him, with that face and those +eyes, with his smile, manly and yet childlike.... No, I had better not +think of him; not think of him but forget him, quite forget him for +the present. I can't bear this waiting and I shall cry in a minute!" +and she turned away from the glass, making an effort not to cry. +"And how can Sonya love Nicholas so calmly and quietly and wait so +long and so patiently?" thought she, looking at Sonya, who also came +in quite ready, with a fan in her hand. "No, she's altogether +different. I can't!" + +Natasha at that moment felt so softened and tender that it was not +enough for her to love and know she was beloved, she wanted now, at +once, to embrace the man she loved, to speak and hear from him words +of love such as filled her heart. While she sat in the carriage beside +her father, pensively watching the lights of the street lamps +flickering on the frozen window, she felt still sadder and more in +love, and forgot where she was going and with whom. Having fallen into +the line of carriages, the Rostovs' carriage drove up to the +theater, its wheels squeaking over the snow. Natasha and Sonya, +holding up their dresses, jumped out quickly. The count got out helped +by the footmen, and, passing among men and women who were entering and +the program sellers, they all three went along the corridor to the +first row of boxes. Through the closed doors the music was already +audible. + +"Natasha, your hair!..." whispered Sonya. + +An attendant deferentially and quickly slipped before the ladies and +opened the door of their box. The music sounded louder and through the +door rows of brightly lit boxes in which ladies sat with bare arms and +shoulders, and noisy stalls brilliant with uniforms, glittered +before their eyes. A lady entering the next box shot a glance of +feminine envy at Natasha. The curtain had not yet risen and the +overture was being played. Natasha, smoothing her gown, went in with +Sonya and sat down, scanning the brilliant tiers of boxes opposite. +A sensation she had not experienced for a long time- that of +hundreds of eyes looking at her bare arms and neck- suddenly +affected her both agreeably and disagreeably and called up a whole +crowd of memories, desires and emotions associated with that feeling. + +The two remarkably pretty girls, Natasha and Sonya, with Count +Rostov who had not been seen in Moscow for a long time, attracted +general attention. Moreover, everybody knew vaguely of Natasha's +engagement to Prince Andrew, and knew that the Rostovs had lived in +the country ever since, and all looked with curiosity at a fiancee who +was making one of the best matches in Russia. + +Natasha's looks, as everyone told her, had improved in the +country, and that evening thanks to her agitation she was particularly +pretty. She struck those who saw her by her fullness of life and +beauty, combined with her indifference to everything about her. Her +black eyes looked at the crowd without seeking anyone, and her +delicate arm, bare to above the elbow, lay on the velvet edge of the +box, while, evidently unconsciously, she opened and closed her hand in +time to the music, crumpling her program. "Look, there's Alenina," +said Sonya, "with her mother, isn't it?" + +"Dear me, Michael Kirilovich has grown still stouter!" remarked +the count. + +"Look at our Anna Mikhaylovna- what a headdress she has on!" + +"The Karagins, Julie- and Boris with them. One can see at once +that they're engaged...." + +"Drubetskoy has proposed?" + +"Oh yes, I heard it today," said Shinshin, coming into the +Rostovs' box. + +Natasha looked in the direction in which her father's eyes were +turned and saw Julie sitting beside her mother with a happy look on +her face and a string of pearls round her thick red neck- which +Natasha knew was covered with powder. Behind them, wearing a smile and +leaning over with an ear to Julie's mouth, was Boris' handsome +smoothly brushed head. He looked the Rostovs from under his brows +and said something, smiling, to his betrothed. + +"They are talking about us, about me and him!" thought Natasha. "And +he no doubt is calming her jealousy of me. They needn't trouble +themselves! If only they knew how little I am concerned about any of +them." + +Behind them sat Anna Mikhaylovna wearing a green headdress and +with a happy look of resignation to the will of God on her face. Their +box was pervaded by that atmosphere of an affianced couple which +Natasha knew so well and liked so much. She turned away and suddenly +remembered all that had been so humiliating in her morning's visit. + +"What right has he not to wish to receive me into his family? Oh, +better not think of it- not till he comes back!" she told herself, and +began looking at the faces, some strange and some familiar, in the +stalls. In the front, in the very center, leaning back against the +orchestra rail, stood Dolokhov in a Persian dress, his curly hair +brushed up into a huge shock. He stood in full view of the audience, +well aware that he was attracting everyone's attention, yet as much at +ease as though he were in his own room. Around him thronged Moscow's +most brilliant young men, whom he evidently dominated. + +The count, laughing, nudged the blushing Sonya and pointed to her +former adorer. + +"Do you recognize him?" said he. "And where has he sprung from?" +he asked, turning to Shinshin. "Didn't he vanish somewhere?" + +"He did," replied Shinshin. "He was in the Caucasus and ran away +from there. They say he has been acting as minister to some ruling +prince in Persia, where he killed the Shah's brother. Now all the +Moscow ladies are mad about him! It's 'Dolokhov the Persian' that does +it! We never hear a word but Dolokhov is mentioned. They swear by him, +they offer him to you as they would a dish of choice sterlet. Dolokhov +and Anatole Kuragin have turned all our ladies' heads." + +A tall, beautiful woman with a mass of plaited hair and much exposed +plump white shoulders and neck, round which she wore a double string +of large pearls, entered the adjoining box rustling her heavy silk +dress and took a long time settling into her place. + +Natasha involuntarily gazed at that neck, those shoulders, and +pearls and coiffure, and admired the beauty of the shoulders and the +pearls. While Natasha was fixing her gaze on her for the second time +the lady looked round and, meeting the count's eyes, nodded to him and +smiled. She was the Countess Bezukhova, Pierre's wife, and the +count, who knew everyone in society, leaned over and spoke to her. + +"Have you been here long, Countess?" he inquired. "I'll call, I'll +call to kiss your hand. I'm here on business and have brought my girls +with me. They say Semenova acts marvelously. Count Pierre never used +to forget us. Is he here?" + +"Yes, he meant to look in," answered Helene, and glanced attentively +at Natasha. + +Count Rostov resumed his seat. + +"Handsome, isn't she?" he whispered to Natasha. + +"Wonderful!" answered Natasha. "She's a woman one could easily +fall in love with." + +Just then the last chords of the overture were heard and the +conductor tapped with his stick. Some latecomers took their seats in +the stalls, and the curtain rose. + +As soon as it rose everyone in the boxes and stalls became silent, +and all the men, old and young, in uniform and evening dress, and +all the women with gems on their bare flesh, turned their whole +attention with eager curiosity to the stage. Natasha too began to look +at it. + +CHAPTER IX + +The floor of the stage consisted of smooth boards, at the sides +was some painted cardboard representing trees, and at the back was a +cloth stretched over boards. In the center of the stage sat some girls +in red bodices and white skirts. One very fat girl in a white silk +dress sat apart on a low bench, to the back of which a piece of +green cardboard was glued. They all sang something. When they had +finished their song the girl in white went up to the prompter's box +and a man with tight silk trousers over his stout legs, and holding +a plume and a dagger, went up to her and began singing, waving his +arms about. + +First the man in the tight trousers sang alone, then she sang, +then they both paused while the orchestra played and the man +fingered the hand of the girl in white, obviously awaiting the beat to +start singing with her. They sang together and everyone in the theater +began clapping and shouting, while the man and woman on the stage- who +represented lovers- began smiling, spreading out their arms, and +bowing. + +After her life in the country, and in her present serious mood, +all this seemed grotesque and amazing to Natasha. She could not follow +the opera nor even listen to the music; she saw only the painted +cardboard and the queerly dressed men and women who moved, spoke, +and sang so strangely in that brilliant light. She knew what it was +all meant to represent, but it was so pretentiously false and +unnatural that she first felt ashamed for the actors and then amused +at them. She looked at the faces of the audience, seeking in them +the same sense of ridicule and perplexity she herself experienced, but +they all seemed attentive to what was happening on the stage, and +expressed delight which to Natasha seemed feigned. "I suppose it has +to be like this!" she thought. She kept looking round in turn at the +rows of pomaded heads in the stalls and then at the seminude women +in the boxes, especially at Helene in the next box, who- apparently +quite unclothed- sat with a quiet tranquil smile, not taking her +eyes off the stage. And feeling the bright light that flooded the +whole place and the warm air heated by the crowd, Natasha little by +little began to pass into a state of intoxication she had not +experienced for a long while. She did not realize who and where she +was, nor what was going on before her. As she looked and thought, +the strangest fancies unexpectedly and disconnectedly passed through +her mind: the idea occurred to her of jumping onto the edge of the box +and singing the air the actress was singing, then she wished to +touch with her fan an old gentleman sitting not far from her, then +to lean over to Helene and tickle her. + +At a moment when all was quiet before the commencement of a song, +a door leading to the stalls on the side nearest the Rostovs' box +creaked, and the steps of a belated arrival were heard. "There's +Kuragin!" whispered Shinshin. Countess Bezukhova turned smiling to the +newcomer, and Natasha, following the direction of that look, saw an +exceptionally handsome adjutant approaching their box with a +self-assured yet courteous bearing. This was Anatole Kuragin whom +she had seen and noticed long ago at the ball in Petersburg. He was +now in an adjutant's uniform with one epaulet and a shoulder knot. +He moved with a restrained swagger which would have been ridiculous +had he not been so good-looking and had his handsome face not worn +such an expression of good-humored complacency and gaiety. Though +the performance was proceeding, he walked deliberately down the +carpeted gangway, his sword and spurs slightly jingling and his +handsome perfumed head held high. Having looked at Natasha he +approached his sister, laid his well gloved hand on the edge of her +box, nodded to her, and leaning forward asked a question, with a +motion toward Natasha. + +"Mais charmante!" said he, evidently referring to Natasha, who did +not exactly hear his words but understood them from the movement of +his lips. Then he took his place in the first row of the stalls and +sat down beside Dolokhov, nudging with his elbow in a friendly and +offhand way that Dolokhov whom others treated so fawningly. He +winked at him gaily, smiled, and rested his foot against the orchestra +screen. + +"How like the brother is to the sister," remarked the count. "And +how handsome they both are!" + +Shinshin, lowering his voice, began to tell the count of some +intrigue of Kuragin's in Moscow, and Natasha tried to overhear it just +because he had said she was "charmante." + +The first act was over. In the stalls everyone began moving about, +going out and coming in. + +Boris came to the Rostovs' box, received their congratulations +very simply, and raising his eyebrows with an absent-minded smile +conveyed to Natasha and Sonya his fiancee's invitation to her wedding, +and went away. Natasha with a gay, coquettish smile talked to him, and +congratulated on his approaching wedding that same Boris with whom she +had formerly been in love. In the state of intoxication she was in, +everything seemed simple and natural. + +The scantily clad Helene smiled at everyone in the same way, and +Natasha gave Boris a similar smile. + +Helene's box was filled and surrounded from the stalls by the most +distinguished and intellectual men, who seemed to vie with one another +in their wish to let everyone see that they knew her. + +During the whole of that entr'acte Kuragin stood with Dolokhov in +front of the orchestra partition, looking at the Rostovs' box. Natasha +knew he was talking about her and this afforded her pleasure. She even +turned so that he should see her profile in what she thought was its +most becoming aspect. Before the beginning of the second act Pierre +appeared in the stalls. The Rostovs had not seen him since their +arrival. His face looked sad, and he had grown still stouter since +Natasha last saw him. He passed up to the front rows, not noticing +anyone. Anatole went up to him and began speaking to him, looking at +and indicating the Rostovs' box. On seeing Natasha Pierre grew +animated and, hastily passing between the rows, came toward their box. +When he got there he leaned on his elbows and, smiling, talked to +her for a long time. While conversing with Pierre, Natasha heard a +man's voice in Countess Bezukhova's box and something told her it +was Kuragin. She turned and their eyes met. Almost smiling, he gazed +straight into her eyes with such an enraptured caressing look that +it seemed strange to be so near him, to look at him like that, to be +so sure he admired her, and not to be acquainted with him. + +In the second act there was scenery representing tombstones, there +was a round hole in the canvas to represent the moon, shades were +raised over the footlights, and from horns and contrabass came deep +notes while many people appeared from right and left wearing black +cloaks and holding things like daggers in their hands. They began +waving their arms. Then some other people ran in and began dragging +away the maiden who had been in white and was now in light blue. +They did not drag her away at once, but sang with her for a long +time and then at last dragged her off, and behind the scenes something +metallic was struck three times and everyone knelt down and sang a +prayer. All these things were repeatedly interrupted by the +enthusiastic shouts of the audience. + +During this act every time Natasha looked toward the stalls she +saw Anatole Kuragin with an arm thrown across the back of his chair, +staring at her. She was pleased to see that he was captivated by her +and it did not occur to her that there was anything wrong in it. + +When the second act was over Countess Bezukhova rose, turned to +the Rostovs' box- her whole bosom completely exposed- beckoned the old +count with a gloved finger, and paying no attention to those who had +entered her box began talking to him with an amiable smile. + +"Do make me acquainted with your charming daughters," said she. "The +whole town is singing their praises and I don't even know then!" + +Natasha rose and curtsied to the splendid countess. She was so +pleased by praise from this brilliant beauty that she blushed with +pleasure. + +"I want to become a Moscovite too, now," said Helene. "How is it +you're not ashamed to bury such pearls in the country?" + +Countess Bezukhova quite deserved her reputation of being a +fascinating woman. She could say what she did not think- especially +what was flattering- quite simply and naturally. + +"Dear count, you must let me look after your daughters! Though I +am not staying here long this time- nor are you- I will try to amuse +them. I have already heard much of you in Petersburg and wanted to get +to know you," said she to Natasha with her stereotyped and lovely +smile. "I had heard about you from my page, Drubetskoy. Have you heard +he is getting married? And also from my husband's friend Bolkonski, +Prince Andrew Bolkonski," she went on with special emphasis, +implying that she knew of his relation to Natasha. To get better +acquainted she asked that one of the young ladies should come into her +box for the rest of the performance, and Natasha moved over to it. + +The scene of the third act represented a palace in which many +candles were burning and pictures of knights with short beards hung on +the walls. In the middle stood what were probably a king and a +queen. The king waved his right arm and, evidently nervous, sang +something badly and sat down on a crimson throne. The maiden who had +been first in white and then in light blue, now wore only a smock, and +stood beside the throne with her hair down. She sang something +mournfully, addressing the queen, but the king waved his arm severely, +and men and women with bare legs came in from both sides and began +dancing all together. Then the violins played very shrilly and merrily +and one of the women with thick bare legs and thin arms, separating +from the others, went behind the wings, adjusted her bodice, +returned to the middle of the stage, and began jumping and striking +one foot rapidly against the other. In the stalls everyone clapped and +shouted "bravo!" Then one of the men went into a corner of the +stage. The cymbals and horns in the orchestra struck up more loudly, +and this man with bare legs jumped very high and waved his feet +about very rapidly. (He was Duport, who received sixty thousand rubles +a year for this art.) Everybody in the stalls, boxes, and galleries +began clapping and shouting with all their might, and the man +stopped and began smiling and bowing to all sides. Then other men +and women danced with bare legs. Then the king again shouted to the +sound of music, and they all began singing. But suddenly a storm +came on, chromatic scales and diminished sevenths were heard in the +orchestra, everyone ran off, again dragging one of their number +away, and the curtain dropped. Once more there was a terrible noise +and clatter among the audience, and with rapturous faces everyone +began shouting: "Duport! Duport! Duport!" Natasha no longer thought +this strange. She look about with pleasure, smiling joyfully. + +"Isn't Duport delightful?" Helene asked her. + +"Oh, yes," replied Natasha. + +CHAPTER X + +During the entr'acte a whiff of cold air came into Helene's box, the +door opened, and Anatole entered, stooping and trying not to brush +against anyone. + +"Let me introduce my brother to you," said Helene, her eyes shifting +uneasily from Natasha to Anatole. + +Natasha turned her pretty little head toward the elegant young +officer and smiled at him over her bare shoulder. Anatole, who was +as handsome at close quarters as at a distance, sat down beside her +and told her he had long wished to have this happiness- ever since the +Naryshkins' ball in fact, at which he had had the well-remembered +pleasure of seeing her. Kuragin was much more sensible and simple with +women than among men. He talked boldly and naturally, and Natasha +was strangely and agreeably struck by the fact that there was +nothing formidable in this man about whom there was so much talk, +but that on the contrary his smile was most naive, cheerful, and +good-natured. + +Kuragin asked her opinion of the performance and told her how at a +previous performance Semenova had fallen down on the stage. + +"And do you know, Countess," he said, suddenly addressing her as +an old, familiar acquaintance, "we are getting up a costume +tournament; you ought to take part in it! It will be great fun. We +shall all meet at the Karagins'! Please come! No! Really, eh?" said +he. + +While saying this he never removed his smiling eyes from her face, +her neck, and her bare arms. Natasha knew for certain that he was +enraptured by her. This pleased her, yet his presence made her feel +constrained and oppressed. When she was not looking at him she felt +that he was looking at her shoulders, and she involuntarily caught his +eye so that he should look into hers rather than this. But looking +into his eyes she was frightened, realizing that there was not that +barrier of modesty she had always felt between herself and other +men. She did not know how it was that within five minutes she had come +to feel herself terribly near to this man. When she turned away she +feared he might seize her from behind by her bare arm and kiss her +on the neck. They spoke of most ordinary things, yet she felt that +they were closer to one another than she had ever been to any man. +Natasha kept turning to Helene and to her father, as if asking what it +all meant, but Helene was engaged in conversation with a general and +did not answer her look, and her father's eyes said nothing but what +they always said: "Having a good time? Well, I'm glad of it!" + +During one of these moments of awkward silence when Anatole's +prominent eyes were gazing calmly and fixedly at her, Natasha, to +break the silence, asked him how he liked Moscow. She asked the +question and blushed. She felt all the time that by talking to him she +was doing something improper. Anatole smiled as though to encourage +her. + +"At first I did not like it much, because what makes a town pleasant +ce sont les jolies femmes,~^ isn't that so? But now I like it very much +indeed," he said, looking at her significantly. "You'll come to the +costume tournament, Countess? Do come!" and putting out his hand to +her bouquet and dropping his voice, he added, "You will be the +prettiest there. Do come, dear countess, and give me this flower as +a pledge!" + +^~ Are the pretty women. + +Natasha did not understand what he was saying any more than he did +himself, but she felt that his incomprehensible words had an +improper intention. She did not know what to say and turned away as if +she had not heard his remark. But as soon as she had turned away she +felt that he was there, behind, so close behind her. + +"How is he now? Confused? Angry? Ought I to put it right?" she asked +herself, and she could not refrain from turning round. She looked +straight into his eyes, and his nearness, self-assurance, and the +good-natured tenderness of his smile vanquished her. She smiled just +as he was doing, gazing straight into his eyes. And again she felt +with horror that no barrier lay between him and her. + +The curtain rose again. Anatole left the box, serene and gay. +Natasha went back to her father in the other box, now quite submissive +to the world she found herself in. All that was going on before her +now seemed quite natural, but on the other hand all her previous +thoughts of her betrothed, of Princess Mary, or of life in the country +did not once recur to her mind and were as if belonging to a remote +past. + +In the fourth act there was some sort of devil who sang waving his +arm about, till the boards were withdrawn from under him and he +disappeared down below. That was the only part of the fourth act +that Natasha saw. She felt agitated and tormented, and the cause of +this was Kuragin whom she could not help watching. As they were +leaving the theater Anatole came up to them, called their carriage, +and helped them in. As he was putting Natasha in he pressed her arm +above the elbow. Agitated and flushed she turned round. He was looking +at her with glittering eyes, smiling tenderly. + +Only after she had reached home was Natasha able clearly to think +over what had happened to her, and suddenly remembering Prince +Andrew she was horrified, and at tea to which all had sat down after +the opera, she gave a loud exclamation, flushed, and ran out of the +room. + +"O God! I am lost!" she said to herself. "How could I let him?" +She sat for a long time hiding her flushed face in her hands trying to +realize what had happened to her, but was unable either to +understand what had happened or what she felt. Everything seemed dark, +obscure, and terrible. There in that enormous, illuminated theater +where the bare-legged Duport, in a tinsel-decorated jacket, jumped +about to the music on wet boards, and young girls and old men, and the +nearly naked Helene with her proud, calm smile, rapturously cried +"bravo!"- there in the presence of that Helene it had all seemed clear +and simple; but now, alone by herself, it was incomprehensible. +"What is it? What was that terror I felt of him? What is this +gnawing of conscience I am feeling now?" she thought. + +Only to the old countess at night in bed could Natasha have told all +she was feeling. She knew that Sonya with her severe and simple +views would either not understand it at all or would be horrified at +such a confession. So Natasha tried to solve what was torturing her by +herself. + +"Am I spoiled for Andrew's love or not?" she asked herself, and with +soothing irony replied: "What a fool I am to ask that! What did happen +to me? Nothing! I have done nothing, I didn't lead him on at all. +Nobody will know and I shall never see him again," she told herself. +"So it is plain that nothing has happened and there is nothing to +repent of, and Andrew can love me still. But why 'still?' O God, why +isn't he here?" Natasha quieted herself for a moment, but again some +instinct told her that though all this was true, and though nothing +had happened, yet the former purity of her love for Prince Andrew +had perished. And again in imagination she went over her whole +conversation with Kuragin, and again saw the face, gestures, and +tender smile of that bold handsome man when he pressed her arm. + +CHAPTER XI + +Anatole Kuragin was staying in Moscow because his father had sent +him away from Petersburg, where he had been spending twenty thousand +rubles a year in cash, besides running up debts for as much more, +which his creditors demanded from his father. + +His father announced to him that he would now pay half his debts for +the last time, but only on condition that he went to Moscow as +adjutant to the commander in chief- a post his father had procured for +him- and would at last try to make a good match there. He indicated to +him Princess Mary and Julie Karagina. + +Anatole consented and went to Moscow, where he put up at Pierre's +house. Pierre received him unwillingly at first, but got used to him +after a while, sometimes even accompanied him on his carousals, and +gave him money under the guise of loans. + +As Shinshin had remarked, from the time of his arrival Anatole had +turned the heads of the Moscow ladies, especially by the fact that +he slighted them and plainly preferred the gypsy girls and French +actresses- with the chief of whom, Mademoiselle George, he was said to +be on intimate relations. He had never missed a carousal at +Danilov's or other Moscow revelers', drank whole nights through, +outvying everyone else, and was at all the balls and parties of the +best society. There was talk of his intrigues with some of the ladies, +and he flirted with a few of them at the balls. But he did not run +after the unmarried girls, especially the rich heiresses who were most +of them plain. There was a special reason for this, as he had got +married two years before- a fact known only to his most intimate +friends. At that time while with his regiment in Poland, a Polish +landowner of small means had forced him to marry his daughter. Anatole +had very soon abandoned his wife and, for a payment which he agreed to +send to his father-in-law, had arranged to be free to pass himself off +as a bachelor. + +Anatole was always content with his position, with himself, and with +others. He was instinctively and thoroughly convinced that was +impossible for him to live otherwise than as he did and that he had +never in his life done anything base. He was incapable of +considering how his actions might affect others or what the +consequences of this or that action of his might be. He was +convinced that, as a duck is so made that it must live in water, so +God had made him such that he must spend thirty thousand rubles a year +and always occupy a prominent position in society. He believed this so +firmly that others, looking at him, were persuaded of it too and did +not refuse him either a leading place in society or money, which he +borrowed from anyone and everyone and evidently would not repay. + +He was not a gambler, at any rate he did not care about winning. +He was not vain. He did not mind what people thought of him. Still +less could he be accused of ambition. More than once he had vexed +his father by spoiling his own career, and he laughed at +distinctions of all kinds. He was not mean, and did not refuse +anyone who asked of him. All he cared about was gaiety and women, +and as according to his ideas there was nothing dishonorable in +these tastes, and he was incapable of considering what the +gratification of his tastes entailed for others, he honestly +considered himself irreproachable, sincerely despised rogues and bad +people, and with a tranquil conscience carried his head high. + +Rakes, those male Magdalenes, have a secret feeling of innocence +similar to that which female Magdalenes have, based on the same hope +of forgiveness. "All will be forgiven her, for she loved much; and all +will be forgiven him, for he enjoyed much." + +Dolokhov, who had reappeared that year in Moscow after his exile and +his Persian adventures, and was leading a life of luxury, gambling, +and dissipation, associated with his old Petersburg comrade Kuragin +and made use of him for his own ends. + +Anatole was sincerely fond of Dolokhov for his cleverness and +audacity. Dolokhov, who needed Anatole Kuragin's name, position, and +connections as a bait to draw rich young men into his gambling set, +made use of him and amused himself at his expense without letting +the other feel it. Apart from the advantage he derived from Anatole, +the very process of dominating another's will was in itself a +pleasure, a habit, and a necessity to Dolokhov. + +Natasha had made a strong impression on Kuragin. At supper after the +opera he described to Dolokhov with the air of a connoisseur the +attractions of her arms, shoulders, feet, and hair and expressed his +intention of making love to her. Anatole had no notion and was +incapable of considering what might come of such love-making, as he +never had any notion of the outcome of any of his actions. + +"She's first-rate, my dear fellow, but not for us," replied +Dolokhov. + +"I will tell my sister to ask her to dinner," said Anatole. "Eh?" + +"You'd better wait till she's married...." + +"You know, I adore little girls, they lose their heads at once," +pursued Anatole. + +"You have been caught once already by a 'little girl,'" said +Dolokhov who knew of Kuragin's marriage. "Take care!" + +"Well, that can't happen twice! Eh?" said Anatole, with a +good-humored laugh. + +CHAPTER XII + +The day after the opera the Rostovs went nowhere and nobody came +to see them. Marya Dmitrievna talked to the count about something +which they concealed from Natasha. Natasha guessed they were talking +about the old prince and planning something, and this disquieted and +offended her. She was expecting Prince Andrew any moment and twice +that day sent a manservant to the Vozdvizhenka to ascertain whether he +had come. He had not arrived. She suffered more now than during her +first days in Moscow. To her impatience and pining for him were now +added the unpleasant recollection of her interview with Princess +Mary and the old prince, and a fear and anxiety of which she did not +understand the cause. She continually fancied that either he would +never come or that something would happen to her before he came. She +could no longer think of him by herself calmly and continuously as she +had done before. As soon as she began to think of him, the +recollection of the old prince, of Princess Mary, of the theater, +and of Kuragin mingled with her thoughts. The question again presented +itself whether she was not guilty, whether she had not already +broken faith with Prince Andrew, and again she found herself recalling +to the minutest detail every word, every gesture, and every shade in +the play of expression on the face of the man who had been able to +arouse in her such an incomprehensible and terrifying feeling. To +the family Natasha seemed livelier than usual, but she was far less +tranquil and happy than before. + +On Sunday morning Marya Dmitrievna invited her visitors to Mass at +her parish church- the Church of the Assumption built over the +graves of victims of the plague. + +"I don't like those fashionable churches," she said, evidently +priding herself on her independence of thought. "God is the same every +where. We have an excellent priest, he conducts the service decently +and with dignity, and the deacon is the same. What holiness is there +in giving concerts in the choir? I don't like it, it's just +self-indulgence!" + +Marya Dmitrievna liked Sundays and knew how to keep them. Her +whole house was scrubbed and cleaned on Saturdays; neither she nor the +servants worked, and they all wore holiday dress and went to church. +At her table there were extra dishes at dinner, and the servants had +vodka and roast goose or suckling pig. But in nothing in the house was +the holiday so noticeable as in Marya Dmitrievna's broad, stern +face, which on that day wore an invariable look of solemn festivity. + +After Mass, when they had finished their coffee in the dining room +where the loose covers had been removed from the furniture, a +servant announced that the carriage was ready, and Marya Dmitrievna +rose with a stern air. She wore her holiday shawl, in which she paid +calls, and announced that she was going to see Prince Nicholas +Bolkonski to have an explanation with him about Natasha. + +After she had gone, a dressmaker from Madame Suppert-Roguet waited +on the Rostovs, and Natasha, very glad of this diversion, having +shut herself into a room adjoining the drawing room, occupied +herself trying on the new dresses. Just as she had put on a bodice +without sleeves and only tacked together, and was turning her head +to see in the glass how the back fitted, she heard in the drawing room +the animated sounds of her father's voice and another's- a woman's- +that made her flush. It was Helene. Natasha had not time to take off +the bodice before the door opened and Countess Bezukhova, dressed in a +purple velvet gown with a high collar, came into the room beaming with +good-humored amiable smiles. + +"Oh, my enchantress!" she cried to the blushing Natasha. +"Charming! No, this is really beyond anything, my dear count," said +she to Count Rostov who had followed her in. "How can you live in +Moscow and go nowhere? No, I won't let you off! Mademoiselle George +will recite at my house tonight and there'll be some people, and if +you don't bring your lovely girls- who are prettier than +Mademoiselle George- I won't know you! My husband is away in Tver or I +would send him to fetch you. You must come. You positively must! +Between eight and nine." + +She nodded to the dressmaker, whom she knew and who had curtsied +respectfully to her, and seated herself in an armchair beside the +looking glass, draping the folds of her velvet dress picturesquely. +She did not cease chattering good-naturedly and gaily, continually +praising Natasha's beauty. She looked at Natasha's dresses and praised +them, as well as a new dress of her own made of "metallic gauze," +which she had received from Paris, and advised Natasha to have one +like it. + +"But anything suits you, my charmer!" she remarked. + +A smile of pleasure never left Natasha's face. She felt happy and as +if she were blossoming under the praise of this dear Countess +Bezukhova who had formerly seemed to her so unapproachable and +important and was now so kind to her. Natasha brightened up and felt +almost in love with this woman, who was so beautiful and so kind. +Helene for her part was sincerely delighted with Natasha and wished to +give her a good time. Anatole had asked her to bring him and Natasha +together, and she was calling on the Rostovs for that purpose. The +idea of throwing her brother and Natasha together amused her. + +Though at one time, in Petersburg, she had been annoyed with Natasha +for drawing Boris away, she did not think of that now, and in her +own way heartily wished Natasha well. As she was leaving the Rostovs +she called her protegee aside. + +"My brother dined with me yesterday- we nearly died of laughter- +he ate nothing and kept sighing for you, my charmer! He is madly, +quite madly, in love with you, my dear." + +Natasha blushed scarlet when she heard this. + +"How she blushes, how she blushes, my pretty!" said Helene. "You +must certainly come. If you love somebody, my charmer, that is not a +reason to shut yourself up. Even if you are engaged, I am sure your +fiance would wish you to go into society rather than be bored to +death." + +"So she knows I am engaged, and she and her husband Pierre- that +good Pierre- have talked and laughed about this. So it's all right." +And again, under Helene's influence, what had seemed terrible now +seemed simple and natural. "And she is such a grande dame, so kind, +and evidently likes me so much. And why not enjoy myself?" thought +Natasha, gazing at Helene with wide-open, wondering eyes. + +Marya Dmitrievna came back to dinner taciturn and serious, having +evidently suffered a defeat at the old prince's. She was still too +agitated by the encounter to be able to talk of the affair calmly. +In answer to the count's inquiries she replied that things were all +right and that she would tell about it next day. On hearing of +Countess Bezukhova's visit and the invitation for that evening, +Marya Dmitrievna remarked: + +"I don't care to have anything to do with Bezukhova and don't advise +you to; however, if you've promised- go. It will divert your +thoughts," she added, addressing Natasha. + +CHAPTER XIII + +Count Rostov took the girls to Countess Bezukhova's. There were a +good many people there, but nearly all strangers to Natasha. Count +Rostov was displeased to see that the company consisted almost +entirely of men and women known for the freedom of their conduct. +Mademoiselle George was standing in a corner of the drawing room +surrounded by young men. There were several Frenchmen present, among +them Metivier who from the time Helene reached Moscow had been an +intimate in her house. The count decided not to sit down to cards or +let his girls out of his sight and to get away as soon as Mademoiselle +George's performance was over. + +Anatole was at the door, evidently on the lookout for the Rostovs. +Immediately after greeting the count he went up to Natasha and +followed her. As soon as she saw him she was seized by the same +feeling she had had at the opera- gratified vanity at his admiration +of her and fear at the absence of a moral barrier between them. + +Helene welcomed Natasha delightedly and was loud in admiration of +her beauty and her dress. Soon after their arrival Mademoiselle George +went out of the room to change her costume. In the drawing room people +began arranging the chairs and taking their seats. Anatole moved a +chair for Natasha and was about to sit down beside her, but the count, +who never lost sight of her, took the seat himself. Anatole sat down +behind her. + +Mademoiselle George, with her bare, fat, dimpled arms, and a red +shawl draped over one shoulder, came into the space left vacant for +her, and assumed an unnatural pose. Enthusiastic whispering was +audible. + +Mademoiselle George looked sternly and gloomily at the audience +and began reciting some French verses describing her guilty love for +her son. In some places she raised her voice, in others she whispered, +lifting her head triumphantly; sometimes she paused and uttered hoarse +sounds, rolling her eyes. + +"Adorable! divine! delicious!" was heard from every side. + +Natasha looked at the fat actress, but neither saw nor heard nor +understood anything of what went on before her. She only felt +herself again completely borne away into this strange senseless world- +so remote from her old world- a world in which it was impossible to +know what was good or bad, reasonable or senseless. Behind her sat +Anatole, and conscious of his proximity she experienced a frightened +sense of expectancy. + +After the first monologue the whole company rose and surrounded +Mademoiselle George, expressing their enthusiasm. + +"How beautiful she is!" Natasha remarked to her father who had +also risen and was moving through the crowd toward the actress. + +"I don't think so when I look at you!" said Anatole, following +Natasha. He said this at a moment when she alone could hear him. +"You are enchanting... from the moment I saw you I have never +ceased..." + +"Come, come, Natasha!" said the count, as he turned back for his +daughter. "How beautiful she is!" Natasha without saying anything +stepped up to her father and looked at him with surprised inquiring +eyes. + +After giving several recitations, Mademoiselle George left, and +Countess Bezukhova asked her visitors into the ballroom. + +The count wished to go home, but Helene entreated him not to spoil +her improvised ball, and the Rostovs stayed on. Anatole asked +Natasha for a valse and as they danced he pressed her waist and hand +and told her she was bewitching and that he loved her. During the +ecossaise, which she also danced with him, Anatole said nothing when +they happened to be by themselves, but merely gazed at her. Natasha +lifted her frightened eyes to him, but there was such confident +tenderness in his affectionate look and smile that she could not, +whilst looking at him, say what she had to say. She lowered her eyes. + +"Don't say such things to me. I am betrothed and love another," +she said rapidly.... She glanced at him. + +Anatole was not upset or pained by what she had said. + +"Don't speak to me of that! What can I do?" said he. "I tell you I +am madly, madly, in love with you! Is it my fault that you are +enchanting?... It's our turn to begin." + +Natasha, animated and excited, looked about her with wide-open +frightened eyes and seemed merrier than usual. She understood hardly +anything that went on that evening. They danced the ecossaise and +the Grossvater. Her father asked her to come home, but she begged to +remain. Wherever she went and whomever she was speaking to, she felt +his eyes upon her. Later on she recalled how she had asked her +father to let her go to the dressing room to rearrange her dress, that +Helene had followed her and spoken laughingly of her brother's love, +and that she again met Anatole in the little sitting room. Helene +had disappeared leaving them alone, and Anatole had taken her hand and +said in a tender voice: + +"I cannot come to visit you but is it possible that I shall never +see you? I love you madly. Can I never...?" and, blocking her path, he +brought his face close to hers. + +His large, glittering, masculine eyes were so close to hers that she +saw nothing but them. + +"Natalie?" he whispered inquiringly while she felt her hands being +painfully pressed. "Natalie?" + +"I don't understand. I have nothing to say," her eyes replied. + +Burning lips were pressed to hers, and at the same instant she +felt herself released, and Helene's footsteps and the rustle of her +dress were heard in the room. Natasha looked round at her, and then, +red and trembling, threw a frightened look of inquiry at Anatole and +moved toward the door. + +"One word, just one, for God's sake!" cried Anatole. + +She paused. She so wanted a word from him that would explain to +her what had happened and to which she could find no answer. + +"Natalie, just a word, only one!" he kept repeating, evidently not +knowing what to say and he repeated it till Helene came up to them. + +Helene returned with Natasha to the drawing room. The Rostovs went +away without staying for supper. + +After reaching home Natasha did not sleep all night. She was +tormented by the insoluble question whether she loved Anatole or +Prince Andrew. She loved Prince Andrew- she remembered distinctly +how deeply she loved him. But she also loved Anatole, of that there +was no doubt. "Else how could all this have happened?" thought she. +"If, after that, I could return his smile when saying good-by, if I +was able to let it come to that, it means that I loved him from the +first. It means that he is kind, noble, and splendid, and I could +not help loving him. What am I to do if I love him and the other one +too?" she asked herself, unable to find an answer to these terrible +questions. + +CHAPTER XIV + +Morning came with its cares and bustle. Everyone got up and began to +move about and talk, dressmakers came again. Marya Dmitrievna +appeared, and they were called to breakfast. Natasha kept looking +uneasily at everybody with wide-open eyes, as if wishing to +intercept every glance directed toward her, and tried to appear the +same as usual. + +After breakfast, which was her best time, Marya Dmitrievna sat +down in her armchair and called Natasha and the count to her. + +"Well, friends, I have now thought the whole matter over and this is +my advice," she began. "Yesterday, as you know, I went to see Prince +Bolkonski. Well, I had a talk with him.... He took it into his head to +begin shouting, but I am not one to be shouted down. I said what I had +to say!" + +"Well, and he?" asked the count. + +"He? He's crazy... he did not want to listen. But what's the use +of talking? As it is we have worn the poor girl out," said Marya +Dmitrievna. "My advice to you is finish your business and go back home +to Otradnoe... and wait there." + +"Oh, no!" exclaimed Natasha. + +"Yes, go back," said Marya Dmitrievna, "and wait there. If your +betrothed comes here now- there will be no avoiding a quarrel; but +alone with the old man he will talk things over and then come on to +you." + +Count Rostov approved of this suggestion, appreciating its +reasonableness. If the old man came round it would be all the better +to visit him in Moscow or at Bald Hills later on; and if not, the +wedding, against his wishes, could only be arranged at Otradnoe. + +"That is perfectly true. And I am sorry I went to see him and took +her," said the old count. + +"No, why be sorry? Being here, you had to pay your respects. But +if he won't- that's his affair," said Marya Dmitrievna, looking for +something in her reticule. "Besides, the trousseau is ready, so +there is nothing to wait for; and what is not ready I'll send after +you. Though I don't like letting you go, it is the best way. So go, +with God's blessing!" + +Having found what she was looking for in the reticule she handed +it to Natasha. It was a letter from Princess Mary. + +"She has written to you. How she torments herself, poor thing! She's +afraid you might think that she does not like you." + +"But she doesn't like me," said Natasha. + +"Don't talk nonsense!" cried Marya Dmitrievna. + +"I shan't believe anyone, I know she doesn't like me," replied +Natasha boldly as she took the letter, and her face expressed a cold +and angry resolution that caused Marya Dmitrievna to look at her +more intently and to frown. + +"Don't answer like that, my good girl!" she said. "What I say is +true! Write an answer!" Natasha did not reply and went to her own room +to read Princess Mary's letter. + +Princess Mary wrote that she was in despair at the +misunderstanding that had occurred between them. Whatever her father's +feelings might be, she begged Natasha to believe that she could not +help loving her as the one chosen by her brother, for whose +happiness she was ready to sacrifice everything. + +"Do not think, however," she wrote, "that my father is +ill-disposed toward you. He is an invalid and an old man who must be +forgiven; but he is good and magnanimous and will love her who makes +his son happy." Princess Mary went on to ask Natasha to fix a time +when she could see her again. + +After reading the letter Natasha sat down at the writing table to +answer it. "Dear Princess," she wrote in French quickly and +mechanically, and then paused. What more could she write after all +that had happened the evening before? "Yes, yes! All that has +happened, and now all is changed," she thought as she sat with the +letter she had begun before her. "Must I break off with him? Must I +really? That's awful... and to escape from these dreadful thoughts she +went to Sonya and began sorting patterns with her. + +After dinner Natasha went to her room and again took up Princess +Mary's letter. "Can it be that it is all over?" she thought. "Can it +be that all this has happened so quickly and has destroyed all that +went before?" She recalled her love for Prince Andrew in all its +former strength, and at the same time felt that she loved Kuragin. She +vividly pictured herself as Prince Andrew's wife, and the scenes of +happiness with him she had so often repeated in her imagination, and +at the same time, aglow with excitement, recalled every detail of +yesterday's interview with Anatole. + +"Why could that not be as well?" she sometimes asked herself in +complete bewilderment. "Only so could I be completely happy; but now I +have to choose, and I can't be happy without either of them. Only," +she thought, "to tell Prince Andrew what has happened or to hide it +from him are both equally impossible. But with that one nothing is +spoiled. But am I really to abandon forever the joy of Prince Andrew's +love, in which I have lived so long?" + +"Please, Miss!" whispered a maid entering the room with a mysterious +air. "A man told me to give you this-" and she handed Natasha a +letter. + +"Only, for Christ's sake..." the girl went on, as Natasha, without +thinking, mechanically broke the seal and read a love letter from +Anatole, of which, without taking in a word, she understood only +that it was a letter from him- from the man she loved. Yes, she +loved him, or else how could that have happened which had happened? +And how could she have a love letter from him in her hand? + +With trembling hands Natasha held that passionate love letter +which Dolokhov had composed for Anatole, and as she read it she +found in it an echo of all that she herself imagined she was feeling. + +"Since yesterday evening my fate has been sealed; to be loved by you +or to die. There is no other way for me," the letter began. Then he +went on to say that he knew her parents would not give her to him- for +this there were secret reasons he could reveal only to her- but that +if she loved him she need only say the word yes, and no human power +could hinder their bliss. Love would conquer all. He would steal her +away and carry her off to the ends of the earth. + +"Yes, yes! I love him!" thought Natasha, reading the letter for +the twentieth time and finding some peculiarly deep meaning in each +word of it. + +That evening Marya Dmitrievna was going to the Akharovs' and +proposed to take the girls with her. Natasha, pleading a headache, +remained at home. + +CHAPTER XV + +On returning late in the evening Sonya went to Natasha's room, and +to her surprise found her still dressed and asleep on the sofa. Open +on the table, beside her lay Anatole's letter. Sonya picked it up +and read it. + +As she read she glanced at the sleeping Natasha, trying to find in +her face an explanation of what she was reading, but did not find +it. Her face was calm, gentle, and happy. Clutching her breast to keep +herself from choking, Sonya, pale and trembling with fear and +agitation, sat down in an armchair and burst into tears. + +"How was it I noticed nothing? How could it go so far? Can she +have left off loving Prince Andrew? And how could she let Kuragin go +to such lengths? He is a deceiver and a villain, that's plain! What +will Nicholas, dear noble Nicholas, do when he hears of it? So this is +the meaning of her excited, resolute, unnatural look the day before +yesterday, yesterday, and today," thought Sonya. "But it can't be that +she loves him! She probably opened the letter without knowing who it +was from. Probably she is offended by it. She could not do such a +thing!" + +Sonya wiped away her tears and went up to Natasha, again scanning +her face. + +"Natasha!" she said, just audibly. + +Natasha awoke and saw Sonya. + +"Ah, you're back?" + +And with the decision and tenderness that often come at the moment +of awakening, she embraced her friend, but noticing Sonya's look of +embarrassment, her own face expressed confusion and suspicion. + +"Sonya, you've read that letter?" she demanded. + +"Yes," answered Sonya softly. + +Natasha smiled rapturously. + +"No, Sonya, I can't any longer!" she said. "I can't hide it from you +any longer. You know, we love one another! Sonya, darling, he +writes... Sonya..." + +Sonya stared open-eyed at Natasha, unable to believe her ears. + +"And Bolkonski?" she asked. + +"Ah, Sonya, if you only knew how happy I am!" cried Natasha. "You +don't know what love is...." + +"But, Natasha, can that be all over?" + +Natasha looked at Sonya with wide-open eyes as if she could not +grasp the question. + +"Well, then, are you refusing Prince Andrew?" said Sonya. + +"Oh, you don't understand anything! Don't talk nonsense, just +listen!" said Natasha, with momentary vexation. + +"But I can't believe it," insisted Sonya. "I don't understand. How +is it you have loved a man for a whole year and suddenly... Why, you +have only seen him three times! Natasha, I don't believe you, you're +joking! In three days to forget everything and so..." + +"Three days?" said Natasha. "It seems to me I've loved him a hundred +years. It seems to me that I have never loved anyone before. You can't +understand it.... Sonya, wait a bit, sit here," and Natasha embraced +and kissed her. + +"I had heard that it happens like this, and you must have heard it +too, but it's only now that I feel such love. It's not the same as +before. As soon as I saw him I felt he was my master and I his +slave, and that I could not help loving him. Yes, his slave! +Whatever he orders I shall do. You don't understand that. What can I +do? What can I do, Sonya?" cried Natasha with a happy yet frightened +expression. + +"But think what you are doing," cried Sonya. "I can't leave it +like this. This secret correspondence... How could you let him go so +far?" she went on, with a horror and disgust she could hardly conceal. + +"I told you that I have no will," Natasha replied. "Why can't you +understand? I love him!" + +"Then I won't let it come to that... I shall tell!" cried Sonya, +bursting into tears. + +"What do you mean? For God's sake... If you tell, you are my enemy!" +declared Natasha. "You want me to be miserable, you want us to be +separated...." + +When she saw Natasha's fright, Sonya shed tears of shame and pity +for her friend. + +"But what has happened between you?" she asked. "What has he said to +you? Why doesn't he come to the house?" + +Natasha did not answer her questions. + +"For God's sake, Sonya, don't tell anyone, don't torture me," +Natasha entreated. "Remember no one ought to interfere in such +matters! I have confided in you...." + +"But why this secrecy? Why doesn't he come to the house?" asked +Sonya. "Why doesn't he openly ask for your hand? You know Prince +Andrew gave you complete freedom- if it is really so; but I don't +believe it! Natasha, have you considered what these secret reasons can +be?" + +Natasha looked at Sonya with astonishment. Evidently this question +presented itself to her mind for the first time and she did not know +how to answer it. + +"I don't know what the reasons are. But there must be reasons!" + +Sonya sighed and shook her head incredulously. + +"If there were reasons..." she began. + +But Natasha, guessing her doubts, interrupted her in alarm. + +"Sonya, one can't doubt him! One can't, one can't! Don't you +understand?" she cried. + +"Does he love you?" + +"Does he love me?" Natasha repeated with a smile of pity at her +friend's lack of comprehension. "Why, you have read his letter and you +have seen him." + +"But if he is dishonorable?" + +"He! dishonorable? If you only knew!" exclaimed Natasha. + +"If he is an honorable man he should either declare his intentions +or cease seeing you; and if you won't do this, I will. I will write to +him, and I will tell Papa!" said Sonya resolutely. + +"But I can't live without him!" cried Natasha. + +"Natasha, I don't understand you. And what are you saying! Think +of your father and of Nicholas." + +"I don't want anyone, I don't love anyone but him. How dare you +say he is dishonorable? Don't you know that I love him?" screamed +Natasha. "Go away, Sonya! I don't want to quarrel with you, but go, +for God's sake go! You see how I am suffering!" Natasha cried angrily, +in a voice of despair and repressed irritation. Sonya burst into +sobs and ran from the room. + +Natasha went to the table and without a moment's reflection wrote +that answer to Princess Mary which she had been unable to write all +the morning. In this letter she said briefly that all their +misunderstandings were at an end; that availing herself of the +magnanimity of Prince Andrew who when he went abroad had given her her +she begged Princess Mary to forget everything and forgive her if she +had been to blame toward her, but that she could not be his wife. At +that moment this all seemed quite easy, simple, and clear to Natasha. + +On Friday the Rostovs were to return to the country, but on +Wednesday the count went with the prospective purchaser to his +estate near Moscow. + +On the day the count left, Sonya and Natasha were invited to a big +dinner party at the Karagins', and Marya Dmitrievna took them there. +At that party Natasha again met Anatole, and Sonya noticed that she +spoke to him, trying not to be overheard, and that all through +dinner she was more agitated than ever. When they got home Natasha was +the first to begin the explanation Sonya expected. + +"There, Sonya, you were talking all sorts of nonsense about him," +Natasha began in a mild voice such as children use when they wish to +be praised. "We have had an explanation today." + +"Well, what happened? What did he say? Natasha, how glad I am you're +not angry with me! Tell me everything- the whole truth. What did he +say?" + +Natasha became thoughtful. + +"Oh, Sonya, if you knew him as I do! He said... He asked me what I +had promised Bolkonski. He was glad I was free to refuse him." + +Sonya sighed sorrowfully. + +"But you haven't refused Bolkonski?" said she. + +"Perhaps I have. Perhaps all is over between me and Bolkonski. Why +do you think so badly of me?" + +"I don't think anything, only I don't understand this..." + +"Wait a bit, Sonya, you'll understand everything. You'll see what +a man he is! Now don't think badly of me or of him. I don't think +badly of anyone: I love and pity everybody. But what am I to do?" + +Sonya did not succumb to the tender tone Natasha used toward her. +The more emotional and ingratiating the expression of Natasha's face +became, the more serious and stern grew Sonya's. + +"Natasha," said she, "you asked me not to speak to you, and I +haven't spoken, but now you yourself have begun. I don't trust him, +Natasha. Why this secrecy?" + +"Again, again!" interrupted Natasha. + +"Natasha, I am afraid for you!" + +"Afraid of what?" + +"I am afraid you're going to your ruin," said Sonya resolutely, +and was herself horrified at what she had said. + +Anger again showed in Natasha's face. + +"And I'll go to my ruin, I will, as soon as possible! It's not +your business! It won't be you, but I, who'll suffer. Leave me +alone, leave me alone! I hate you!" + +Natasha!" moaned Sonya, aghast. + +"I hate you, I hate you! You're my enemy forever!" And Natasha ran +out of the room. + +Natasha did not speak to Sonya again and avoided her. With the +same expression of agitated surprise and guilt she went about the +house, taking up now one occupation, now another, and at once +abandoning them. + +Hard as it was for Sonya, she watched her friend and did not let her +out of her sight. + +The day before the count was to return, Sonya noticed that Natasha +sat by the drawingroom window all the morning as if expecting +something and that she made a sign to an officer who drove past, +whom Sonya took to be Anatole. + +Sonya began watching her friend still more attentively and noticed +that at dinner and all that evening Natasha was in a strange and +unnatural state. She answered questions at random, began sentences she +did not finish, and laughed at everything. + +After tea Sonya noticed a housemaid at Natasha's door timidly +waiting to let her pass. She let the girl go in, and then listening at +the door learned that another letter had been delivered. + +Then suddenly it became clear to Sonya that Natasha had some +dreadful plan for that evening. Sonya knocked at her door. Natasha did +not let her in. + +"She will run away with him!" thought Sonya. "She is capable of +anything. There was something particularly pathetic and resolute in +her face today. She cried as she said good-by to Uncle," Sonya +remembered. "Yes, that's it, she means to elope with him, but what +am I to do?" thought she, recalling all the signs that clearly +indicated that Natasha had some terrible intention. "The count is +away. What am I to do? Write to Kuragin demanding an explanation? +But what is there to oblige him to reply? Write to Pierre, as Prince +Andrew asked me to in case of some misfortune?... But perhaps she +really has already refused Bolkonski- she sent a letter to Princess +Mary yesterday. And Uncle is away...." To tell Marya Dmitrievna who +had such faith in Natasha seemed to Sonya terrible. "Well, anyway," +thought Sonya as she stood in the dark passage, "now or never I must +prove that I remember the family's goodness to me and that I love +Nicholas. Yes! If I don't sleep for three nights I'll not leave this +passage and will hold her back by force and will and not let the +family be disgraced," thought she. + +CHAPTER XVI + +Anatole had lately moved to Dolokhov's. The plan for Natalie +Rostova's abduction had been arranged and the preparations made by +Dolokhov a few days before, and on the day that Sonya, after listening +at Natasha's door, resolved to safeguard her, it was to have been +put into execution. Natasha had promised to come out to Kuragin at the +back porch at ten that evening. Kuragin was to put her into a troyka +he would have ready and to drive her forty miles to the village of +Kamenka, where an unfrocked priest was in readiness to perform a +marriage ceremony over them. At Kamenka a relay of horses was to +wait which would take them to the Warsaw highroad, and from there they +would hasten abroad with post horses. + +Anatole had a passport, an order for post horses, ten thousand +rubles he had taken from his sister and another ten thousand +borrowed with Dolokhov's help. + +Two witnesses for the mock marriage- Khvostikov, a retired petty +official whom Dolokhov made use of in his gambling transactions, and +Makarin, a retired hussar, a kindly, weak fellow who had an +unbounded affection for Kuragin- were sitting at tea in Dolokhov's +front room. + +In his large study, the walls of which were hung to the ceiling with +Persian rugs, bearskins, and weapons, sat Dolokhov in a traveling +cloak and high boots, at an open desk on which lay abacus and some +bundles of paper money. Anatole, with uniform unbuttoned, walked to +and fro from the room where the witnesses were sitting, through the +study to the room behind, where his French valet and others were +packing the last of his things. Dolokhov was counting the money and +noting something down. + +"Well," he said, "Khvostikov must have two thousand." + +"Give it to him, then," said Anatole. + +"Makarka" (their name for Makarin) "will go through fire and water +for you for nothing. So here are our accounts all settled," said +Dolokhov, showing him the memorandum. "Is that right?" + +"Yes, of course," returned Anatole, evidently not listening to +Dolokhov and looking straight before him with a smile that did not +leave his face. + +Dolokhov banged down the or of his and turned to Anatole with an +ironic smile: + +"Do you know? You'd really better drop it all. There's still time!" + +"Fool," retorted Anatole. "Don't talk nonsense! If you only +knew... it's the devil knows what!" + +"No, really, give it up!" said Dolokhov. "I am speaking seriously. +It's no joke, this plot you've hatched." + +"What, teasing again? Go to the devil! Eh?" said Anatole, making a +grimace. "Really it's no time for your stupid jokes," and he left +the room. + +Dolokhov smiled contemptuously and condescendingly when Anatole +had gone out. + +"You wait a bit," he called after him. "I'm not joking, I'm +talking sense. Come here, come here!" + +Anatole returned and looked at Dolokhov, trying to give him his +attention and evidently submitting to him involuntarily. + +"Now listen to me. I'm telling you this for the last time. Why +should I joke about it? Did I hinder you? Who arranged everything +for you? Who found the priest and got the passport? Who raised the +money? I did it all." + +"Well, thank you for it. Do you think I am not grateful?" And +Anatole sighed and embraced Dolokhov. + +"I helped you, but all the same I must tell you the truth; it is a +dangerous business, and if you think about it- a stupid business. +Well, you'll carry her off- all right! Will they let it stop at +that? It will come out that you're already married. Why, they'll +have you in the criminal court...." + +"Oh, nonsense, nonsense!" Anatole ejaculated and again made a +grimace. "Didn't I explain to you? What?" And Anatole, with the +partiality dull-witted people have for any conclusion they have +reached by their own reasoning, repeated the argument he had already +put to Dolokhov a hundred times. "Didn't I explain to you that I +have come to this conclusion: if this marriage is invalid," he went +on, crooking one finger, "then I have nothing to answer for; but if it +is valid, no matter! Abroad no one will know anything about it. +Isn't that so? And don't talk to me, don't, don't." + +"Seriously, you'd better drop it! You'll only get yourself into a +mess!" + +"Go to the devil!" cried Anatole and, clutching his hair, left the +room, but returned at once and dropped into an armchair in front of +Dolokhov with his feet turned under him. "It's the very devil! What? +Feel how it beats!" He took Dolokhov's hand and put it on his heart. +"What a foot, my dear fellow! What a glance! A goddess!" he added in +French. "What?" + +Dolokhov with a cold smile and a gleam in his handsome insolent eyes +looked at him- evidently wishing to get some more amusement out of +him. + +"Well and when the money's gone, what then?" + +"What then? Eh?" repeated Anatole, sincerely perplexed by a +thought of the future. "What then?... Then, I don't know.... But why +talk nonsense!" He glanced at his watch. "It's time!" + +Anatole went into the back room. + +"Now then! Nearly ready? You're dawdling!" he shouted to the +servants. + +Dolokhov put away the money, called a footman whom he ordered to +bring something for them to eat and drink before the journey, and went +into the room where Khvostikov and Makarin were sitting. + +Anatole lay on the sofa in the study leaning on his elbow and +smiling pensively, while his handsome lips muttered tenderly to +himself. + +"Come and eat something. Have a drink!" Dolokhov shouted to him from +the other room. + +"I don't want to," answered Anatole continuing to smile. + +"Come! Balaga is here." + +Anatole rose and went into the dining room. Balaga was a famous +troyka driver who had known Dolokhov and Anatole some six years and +had given them good service with his troykas. More than once when +Anatole's regiment was stationed at Tver he had taken him from Tver in +the evening, brought him to Moscow by daybreak, and driven him back +again the next night. More than once he had enabled Dolokhov to escape +when pursued. More than once he had driven them through the town +with gypsies and "ladykins" as he called the cocottes. More than +once in their service he had run over pedestrians and upset vehicles +in the streets of Moscow and had always been protected from the +consequences by "my gentlemen" as he called them. He had ruined more +than one horse in their service. More than once they had beaten him, +and more than once they had made him drunk on champagne and Madeira, +which he loved; and he knew more than one thing about each of them +which would long ago have sent an ordinary man to Siberia. They +often called Balaga into their orgies and made him drink and dance +at the gypsies', and more than one thousand rubles of their money +had passed through his hands. In their service he risked his skin +and his life twenty times a year, and in their service had lost more +horses than the money he had from them would buy. But he liked them; +liked that mad driving at twelve miles an hour, liked upsetting a +driver or running down a pedestrian, and flying at full gallop through +the Moscow streets. He liked to hear those wild, tipsy shouts behind +him: "Get on! Get on!" when it was impossible to go any faster. He +liked giving a painful lash on the neck to some peasant who, more dead +than alive, was already hurrying out of his way. "Real gentlemen!" +he considered them. + +Anatole and Dolokhov liked Balaga too for his masterly driving and +because he liked the things they liked. With others Balaga +bargained, charging twenty-five rubles for a two hours' drive, and +rarely drove himself, generally letting his young men do so. But +with "his gentlemen" he always drove himself and never demanded +anything for his work. Only a couple of times a year- when he knew +from their valets that they had money in hand- he would turn up of a +morning quite sober and with a deep bow would ask them to help him. +The gentlemen always made him sit down. + +"Do help me out, Theodore Ivanych, sir," or "your excellency," he +would say. "I am quite out of horses. Let me have what you can to go +to the fair." + +And Anatole and Dolokhov, when they had money, would give him a +thousand or a couple of thousand rubles. + +Balaga was a fair-haired, short, and snub-nosed peasant of about +twenty-seven; red-faced, with a particularly red thick neck, +glittering little eyes, and a small beard. He wore a fine, +dark-blue, silk-lined cloth coat over a sheepskin. + +On entering the room now he crossed himself, turning toward the +front corner of the room, and went up to Dolokhov, holding out a +small, black hand. + +"Theodore Ivanych!" he said, bowing. + +"How d'you do, friend? Well, here he is!" + +"Good day, your excellency!" he said, again holding out his hand +to Anatole who had just come in. + +"I say, Balaga," said Anatole, putting his hands on the man's +shoulders, "do you care for me or not? Eh? Now, do me a service.... +What horses have you come with? Eh?" + +"As your messenger ordered, your special beasts," replied Balaga. + +"Well, listen, Balaga! Drive all three to death but get me there +in three hours. Eh?" + +"When they are dead, what shall I drive?" said Balaga with a wink. + +"Mind, I'll smash your face in! Don't make jokes!" cried Anatole, +suddenly rolling his eyes. + +"Why joke?" said the driver, laughing. "As if I'd grudge my +gentlemen anything! As fast as ever the horses can gallop, so fast +we'll go!" + +"Ah!" said Anatole. "Well, sit down." + +"Yes, sit down!" said Dolokhov. + +"I'll stand, Theodore Ivanych." + +"Sit down; nonsense! Have a drink!" said Anatole, and filled a large +glass of Madeira for him. + +The driver's eyes sparkled at the sight of the wine. After +refusing it for manners' sake, he drank it and wiped his mouth with +a red silk handkerchief he took out of his cap. + +"And when are we to start, your excellency?" + +"Well..." Anatole looked at his watch. "We'll start at once. Mind, +Balaga! You'll get there in time? Eh?" + +"That depends on our luck in starting, else why shouldn't we be +there in time?" replied Balaga. "Didn't we get you to Tver in seven +hours? I think you remember that, your excellency?" + +"Do you know, one Christmas I drove from Tver," said Anatole, +smilingly at the recollection and turning to Makarin who gazed +rapturously at him with wide-open eyes. "Will you believe it, Makarka, +it took one's breath away, the rate we flew. We came across a train of +loaded sleighs and drove right over two of them. Eh?" + +"Those were horses!" Balaga continued the tale. "That time I'd +harnessed two young side horses with the bay in the shafts," he went +on, turning to Dolokhov. "Will you believe it, Theodore Ivanych, those +animals flew forty miles? I couldn't hold them in, my hands grew +numb in the sharp frost so that I threw down the reins- 'Catch hold +yourself, your excellency!' says I, and I just tumbled on the bottom +of the sleigh and sprawled there. It wasn't a case of urging them +on, there was no holding them in till we reached the place. The devils +took us there in three hours! Only the near one died of it." + +CHAPTER XVII + +Anatole went out of the room and returned a few minutes later +wearing a fur coat girt with a silver belt, and a sable cap jauntily +set on one side and very becoming to his handsome face. Having +looked in a mirror, and standing before Dolokhov in the same pose he +had assumed before it, he lifted a glass of wine. + +"Well, good-by, Theodore. Thank you for everything and farewell!" +said Anatole. "Well, comrades and friends..." he considered for a +moment "...of my youth, farewell!" he said, turning to Makarin and the +others. + +Though they were all going with him, Anatole evidently wished to +make something touching and solemn out of this address to his +comrades. He spoke slowly in a loud voice and throwing out his chest +slightly swayed one leg. + +"All take glasses; you too, Balaga. Well, comrades and friends of my +youth, we've had our fling and lived and reveled. Eh? And now, when +shall we meet again? I am going abroad. We have had a good time- now +farewell, lads! To our health! Hurrah!..." he cried, and emptying +his glass flung it on the floor. + +"To your health!" said Balaga who also emptied his glass, and +wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. + +Makarin embraced Anatole with tears in his eyes. + +"Ah, Prince, how sorry I am to part from you! + +"Let's go. Let's go!" cried Anatole. + +Balaga was about to leave the room. + +"No, stop!" said Anatole. "Shut the door; we have first to sit down. +That's the way." + +They shut the door and all sat down. + +"Now, quick march, lads!" said Anatole, rising. + +Joseph, his valet, handed him his sabretache and saber, and they all +went out into the vestibule. + +"And where's the fur cloak?" asked Dolokhov. "Hey, Ignatka! Go to +Matrena Matrevna and ask her for the sable cloak. I have heard what +elopements are like," continued Dolokhov with a wink. "Why, she'll +rush out more dead than alive just in the things she is wearing; if +you delay at all there'll be tears and 'Papa' and 'Mamma,' and she's +frozen in a minute and must go back- but you wrap the fur cloak +round her first thing and carry her to the sleigh." + +The valet brought a woman's fox-lined cloak. + +"Fool, I told you the sable one! Hey, Matrena, the sable!" he +shouted so that his voice rang far through the rooms. + +A handsome, slim, and pale-faced gypsy girl with glittering black +eyes and curly blue-black hair, wearing a red shawl, ran out with a +sable mantle on her arm. + +"Here, I don't grudge it- take it!" she said, evidently afraid of +her master and yet regretful of her cloak. + +Dolokhov, without answering, took the cloak, threw it over +Matrena, and wrapped her up in it. + +"That's the way," said Dolokhov, "and then so!" and he turned the +collar up round her head, leaving only a little of the face uncovered. +"And then so, do you see?" and he pushed Anatole's head forward to +meet the gap left by the collar, through which Matrena's brilliant +smile was seen. + +"Well, good-by, Matrena," said Anatole, kissing her. "Ah, my +revels here are over. Remember me to Steshka. There, good-by! Good-by, +Matrena, wish me luck!" + +"Well, Prince, may God give you great luck!" said Matrena in her +gypsy accent. + +Two troykas were standing before the porch and two young drivers +were holding the horses. Balaga took his seat in the front one and +holding his elbows high arranged the reins deliberately. Anatole and +Dolokhov got in with him. Makarin, Khvostikov, and a valet seated +themselves in the other sleigh. + +"Well, are you ready?" asked Balaga. + +"Go!" he cried, twisting the reins round his hands, and the troyka +tore down the Nikitski Boulevard. + +"Tproo! Get out of the way! Hi!... Tproo!..." The shouting of Balaga +and of the sturdy young fellow seated on the box was all that could be +heard. On the Arbat Square the troyka caught against a carriage; +something cracked, shouts were heard, and the troyka flew along the +Arbat Street. + +After taking a turn along the Podnovinski Boulevard, Balaga began to +rein in, and turning back drew up at the crossing of the old +Konyusheny Street. + +The young fellow on the box jumped down to hold the horses and +Anatole and Dolokhov went along the pavement. When they reached the +gate Dolokhov whistled. The whistle was answered, and a maidservant +ran out. + +"Come into the courtyard or you'll be seen; she'll come out +directly," said she. + +Dolokhov stayed by the gate. Anatole followed the maid into the +courtyard, turned the corner, and ran up into the porch. + +He was met by Gabriel, Marya Dmitrievna's gigantic footman. + +"Come to the mistress, please," said the footman in his deep bass, +intercepting any retreat. + +"To what Mistress? Who are you?" asked Anatole in a breathless +whisper. + +"Kindly step in, my orders are to bring you in." + +"Kuragin! Come back!" shouted Dolokhov. "Betrayed! Back!" + +Dolokhov, after Anatole entered, had remained at the wicket gate and +was struggling with the yard porter who was trying to lock it. With +a last desperate effort Dolokhov pushed the porter aside, and when +Anatole ran back seized him by the arm, pulled him through the wicket, +and ran back with him to the troyka. + +CHAPTER XVIII + +Marya Dmitrievna, having found Sonya weeping in the corridor, made +her confess everything, and intercepting the note to Natasha she +read it and went into Natasha's room with it in her hand. + +"You shameless good-for-nothing!" said she. "I won't hear a word." + +Pushing back Natasha who looked at her with astonished but +tearless eyes, she locked her in; and having given orders to the +yard porter to admit the persons who would be coming that evening, but +not to let them out again, and having told the footman to bring them +up to her, she seated herself in the drawing room to await the +abductors. + +When Gabriel came to inform her that the men who had come had run +away again, she rose frowning, and clasping her hands behind her paced +through the rooms a long time considering what she should do. Toward +midnight she went to Natasha's room fingering the key in her pocket. +Sonya was sitting sobbing in the corridor. "Marya Dmitrievna, for +God's sake let me in to her!" she pleaded, but Marya Dmitrievna +unlocked the door and went in without giving her an answer.... +"Disgusting, abominable... In my house... horrid girl, hussy! I'm only +sorry for her father!" thought she, trying to restrain her wrath. +"Hard as it may be, I'll tell them all to hold their tongues and +will hide it from the count." She entered the room with resolute +steps. Natasha lying on the sofa, her head hidden in her hands, and +she did not stir. She was in just the same position in which Marya +Dmitrievna had left her. + +"A nice girl! Very nice!" said Marya Dmitrievna. "Arranging meetings +with lovers in my house! It's no use pretending: you listen when I +speak to you!" And Marya Dmitrievna touched her arm. "Listen when when +I speak! You've disgraced yourself like the lowest of hussies. I'd +treat you differently, but I'm sorry for your father, so I will +conceal it." + +Natasha did not change her position, but her whole body heaved +with noiseless, convulsive sobs which choked her. Marya Dmitrievna +glanced round at Sonya and seated herself on the sofa beside Natasha. + +"It's lucky for him that he escaped me; but I'll find him!" she said +in her rough voice. "Do you hear what I am saying or not?" she added. + +She put her large hand under Natasha's face and turned it toward +her. Both Marya Dmitrievna and Sonya were amazed when they saw how +Natasha looked. Her eyes were dry and glistening, her lips compressed, +her cheeks sunken. + +"Let me be!... What is it to me?... I shall die!" she muttered, +wrenching herself from Marya Dmitrievna's hands with a vicious +effort and sinking down again into her former position. + +"Natalie!" said Marya Dmitrievna. "I wish for your good. Lie +still, stay like that then, I won't touch you. But listen. I won't +tell you how guilty you are. You know that yourself. But when your +father comes back tomorrow what am I to tell him? Eh?" + +Again Natasha's body shook with sobs. + +"Suppose he finds out, and your brother, and your betrothed?" + +"I have no betrothed: I have refused him!" cried Natasha. + +"That's all the same," continued Dmitrievna. "If they hear of +this, will they let it pass? He, your father, I know him... if he +challenges him to a duel will that be all right? Eh?" + +"Oh, let me be! Why have you interfered at all? Why? Why? Who +asked you to?" shouted Natasha, raising herself on the sofa and +looking malignantly at Marya Dmitrievna. + +"But what did you want?" cried Marya Dmitrievna, growing angry +again. "Were you kept under lock and key? Who hindered his coming to +the house? Why carry you off as if you were some gypsy singing +girl?... Well, if he had carried you off... do you think they wouldn't +have found him? Your father, or brother, or your betrothed? And he's a +scoundrel, a wretch- that's a fact!" + +"He is better than any of you!" exclaimed Natasha getting up. "If +you hadn't interfered... Oh, my God! What is it all? What is it? +Sonya, why?... Go away!" + +And she burst into sobs with the despairing vehemence with which +people bewail disasters they feel they have themselves occasioned. +Marya Dmitrievna was to speak again but Natasha cried out: + +"Go away! Go away! You all hate and despise me!" and she threw +herself back on the sofa. + +Marya Dmitrievna went on admonishing her for some time, enjoining on +her that it must all be kept from her father and assuring her that +nobody would know anything about it if only Natasha herself would +undertake to forget it all and not let anyone see that something had +happened. Natasha did not reply, nor did she sob any longer, but she +grew cold and had a shivering fit. Marya Dmitrievna put a pillow under +her head, covered her with two quilts, and herself brought her some +lime-flower water, but Natasha did not respond to her. + +"Well, let her sleep," said Marya Dmitrievna as she went of the room +supposing Natasha to be asleep. + +But Natasha was not asleep; with pale face and fixed wide-open +eyes she looked straight before her. All that night she did not +sleep or weep and did not speak to Sonya who got up and went to her +several times. + +Next day Count Rostov returned from his estate near Moscow in time +for lunch as he had promised. He was in very good spirits; the +affair with the purchaser was going on satisfactorily, and there was +nothing to keep him any longer in Moscow, away from the countess +whom he missed. Marya Dmitrievna met him and told him that Natasha had +been very unwell the day before and that they had sent for the doctor, +but that she was better now. Natasha had not left her room that +morning. With compressed and parched lips and dry fixed eyes, she +sat at the window, uneasily watching the people who drove past and +hurriedly glancing round at anyone who entered the room. She was +evidently expecting news of him and that he would come or would +write to her. + +When the count came to see her she turned anxiously round at the +sound of a man's footstep, and then her face resumed its cold and +malevolent expression. She did not even get up to greet him. "What +is the matter with you, my angel? Are you ill?" asked the count. + +After a moment's silence Natasha answered: "Yes, ill." + +In reply to the count's anxious inquiries as to why she was so +dejected and whether anything had happened to her betrothed, she +assured him that nothing had happened and asked him not to worry. +Marya Dmitrievna confirmed Natasha's assurances that nothing had +happened. From the pretense of illness, from his daughter's +distress, and by the embarrassed faces of Sonya and Marya +Dmitrievna, the count saw clearly that something had gone wrong during +his absence, but it was so terrible for him to think that anything +disgraceful had happened to his beloved daughter, and he so prized his +own cheerful tranquillity, that he avoided inquiries and tried to +assure himself that nothing particularly had happened; and he was only +dissatisfied that her indisposition delayed their return to the +country. + +CHAPTER XIX + +From the day his wife arrived in Moscow Pierre had been intending to +go away somewhere, so as not to be near her. Soon after the Rostovs +came to Moscow the effect Natasha had on him made him hasten to +carry out his intention. He went to Tver to see Joseph Alexeevich's +widow, who had long since promised to hand over to him some papers +of her deceased husband's. + +When he returned to Moscow Pierre was handed a letter from Marya +Dmitrievna asking him to come and see her on a matter of great +importance relating to Andrew Bolkonski and his betrothed. Pierre +had been avoiding Natasha because it seemed to him that his feeling +for her was stronger than a married man's should be for his friend's +fiancee. Yet some fate constantly threw them together. + +"What can have happened? And what can they want with me?" thought he +as he dressed to go to Marya Dmitrievna's. "If only Prince Andrew +would hurry up and come and marry her!" thought he on his way to the +house. + +On the Tverskoy Boulevard a familiar voice called to him. + +"Pierre! Been back long?" someone shouted. Pierre raised his head. +In a sleigh drawn by two gray trotting-horses that were bespattering +the dashboard with snow, Anatole and his constant companion Makarin +dashed past. Anatole was sitting upright in the classic pose of +military dandies, the lower part of his face hidden by his beaver +collar and his head slightly bent. His face was fresh and rosy, his +white-plumed hat, tilted to one side, disclosed his curled and pomaded +hair besprinkled with powdery snow. + +"Yes, indeed, that's a true sage," thought Pierre. "He sees +nothing beyond the pleasure of the moment, nothing troubles him and so +he is always cheerful, satisfied, and serene. What wouldn't I give +to be like him!" he thought enviously. + +In Marya Dmitrievna's anteroom the footman who helped him off with +his fur coat said that the mistress asked him to come to her bedroom. + +When he opened the ballroom door Pierre saw Natasha sitting at the +window, with a thin, pale, and spiteful face. She glanced round at +him, frowned, and left the room with an expression of cold dignity. + +"What has happened?" asked Pierre, entering Marya Dmitrievna's room. + +"Fine doings!" answered Dmitrievna. "For fifty-eight years have I +lived in this world and never known anything so disgraceful!" + +And having put him on his honor not to repeat anything she told him, +Marya Dmitrievna informed him that Natasha had refused Prince Andrew +without her parents' knowledge and that the cause of this was +Anatole Kuragin into whose society Pierre's wife had thrown her and +with whom Natasha had tried to elope during her father's absence, in +order to be married secretly. + +Pierre raised his shoulders and listened open-mouthed to what was +told him, scarcely able to believe his own ears. That Prince +Andrew's deeply loved affianced wife- the same Natasha Rostova who +used to be so charming- should give up Bolkonski for that fool Anatole +who was already secretly married (as Pierre knew), and should be so in +love with him as to agree to run away with him, was something Pierre +could not conceive and could not imagine. + +He could not reconcile the charming impression he had of Natasha, +whom he had known from a child, with this new conception of her +baseness, folly, and cruelty. He thought of his wife. "They are all +alike!" he said to himself, reflecting that he was not the only man +unfortunate enough to be tied to a bad woman. But still he pitied +Prince Andrew to the point of tears and sympathized with his wounded +pride, and the more he pitied his friend the more did he think with +contempt and even with disgust of that Natasha who had just passed him +in the ballroom with such a look of cold dignity. He did not know that +Natasha's soul was overflowing with despair, shame, and humiliation, +and that it was not her fault that her face happened to assume an +expression of calm dignity and severity. + +"But how get married?" said Pierre, in answer to Marya Dmitrievna. +"He could not marry- he is married!" + +"Things get worse from hour to hour!" ejaculated Marya Dmitrievna. +"A nice youth! What a scoundrel! And she's expecting him- expecting +him since yesterday. She must be told! Then at least she won't go on +expecting him." + +After hearing the details of Anatole's marriage from Pierre, and +giving vent to her anger against Anatole in words of abuse, Marya +Dmitrievna told Pierre why she had sent for him. She was afraid that +the count or Bolkonski, who might arrive at any moment, if they knew +of this affair (which she hoped to hide from them) might challenge +Anatole to a duel, and she therefore asked Pierre to tell his +brother-in-law in her name to leave Moscow and not dare to let her set +eyes on him again. Pierre- only now realizing the danger to the old +count, Nicholas, and Prince Andrew- promised to do as she wished. +Having briefly and exactly explained her wishes to him, she let him go +to the drawing room. + +"Mind, the count knows nothing. Behave as if you know nothing +either," she said. "And I will go and tell her it is no use +expecting him! And stay to dinner if you care to!" she called after +Pierre. + +Pierre met the old count, who seemed nervous and upset. That morning +Natasha had told him that she had rejected Bolkonski. + +"Troubles, troubles, my dear fellow!" he said to Pierre. "What +troubles one has with these girls without their mother! I do so regret +having come here.... I will be frank with you. Have you heard she +has broken off her engagement without consulting anybody? It's true +this engagement never was much to my liking. Of course he is an +excellent man, but still, with his father's disapproval they +wouldn't have been happy, and Natasha won't lack suitors. Still, it +has been going on so long, and to take such a step without father's or +mother's consent! And now she's ill, and God knows what! It's hard, +Count, hard to manage daughters in their mother's absence...." + +Pierre saw that the count was much upset and tried to change the +subject, but the count returned to his troubles. + +Sonya entered the room with an agitated face. + +"Natasha is not quite well; she's in her room and would like to +see you. Marya Dmitrievna is with her and she too asks you to come." + +"Yes, you are a great friend of Bolkonski's, no doubt she wants to +send him a message," said the count. "Oh dear! Oh dear! How happy it +all was!" + +And clutching the spare gray locks on his temples the count left the +room. + +When Marya Dmitrievna told Natasha that Anatole was married, Natasha +did not wish to believe it and insisted on having it confirmed by +Pierre himself. Sonya told Pierre this as she led him along the +corridor to Natasha's room. + +Natasha, pale and stern, was sitting beside Marya Dmitrievna, and +her eyes, glittering feverishly, met Pierre with a questioning look +the moment he entered. She did not smile or nod, but only gazed +fixedly at him, and her look asked only one thing: was he a friend, or +like the others an enemy in regard to Anatole? As for Pierre, he +evidently did not exist for her. + +"He knows all about it," said Marya Dmitrievna pointing to Pierre +and addressing Natasha. "Let him tell you whether I have told the +truth." + +Natasha looked from one to the other as a hunted and wounded +animal looks at the approaching dogs and sportsmen. + +"Natalya Ilynichna," Pierre began, dropping his eyes with a +feeling of pity for her and loathing for the thing he had to do, +"whether it is true or not should make no difference to you, +because..." + +"Then it is not true that he's married!" + +"Yes, it is true." + +"Has he been married long?" she asked. "On your honor?..." + +Pierre gave his word of honor. + +"Is he still here?" she asked, quickly. + +"Yes, I have just seen him." + +She was evidently unable to speak and made a sign with her hands +that they should leave her alone. + +CHAPTER XX + +Pierre did not stay for dinner, but left the room and went away at +once. He drove through the town seeking Anatole Kuragin, at the +thought of whom now the blood rushed to his heart and he felt a +difficulty in breathing. He was not at the ice hills, nor at the +gypsies', nor at Komoneno's. Pierre drove to the Club. In the Club all +was going on as usual. The members who were assembling for dinner were +sitting about in groups; they greeted Pierre and spoke of the town +news. The footman having greeted him, knowing his habits and his +acquaintances, told him there was a place left for him in the small +dining room and that Prince Michael Zakharych was in the library, +but Paul Timofeevich had not yet arrived. One of Pierre's +acquaintances, while they were talking about the weather, asked if +he had heard of Kuragin's abduction of Rostova which was talked of +in the town, and was it true? Pierre laughed and said it was +nonsense for he had just come from the Rostovs'. He asked everyone +about Anatole. One man told him he had not come yet, and another +that he was coming to dinner. Pierre felt it strange to see this calm, +indifferent crowd of people unaware of what was going on in his +soul. He paced through the ballroom, waited till everyone had come, +and as Anatole had not turned up did not stay for dinner but drove +home. + +Anatole, for whom Pierre was looking, dined that day with +Dolokhov, consulting him as to how to remedy this unfortunate +affair. It seemed to him essential to see Natasha. In the evening he +drove to his sister's to discuss with her how to arrange a meeting. +When Pierre returned home after vainly hunting all over Moscow, his +valet informed him that Prince Anatole was with the countess. The +countess' drawing room was full of guests. + +Pierre without greeting his wife whom he had not seen since his +return- at that moment she was more repulsive to him than ever- +entered the drawing room and seeing Anatole went up to him. + +"Ah, Pierre," said the countess going up to her husband. "You +don't know what a plight our Anatole..." + +She stopped, seeing in the forward thrust of her husband's head, +in his glowing eyes and his resolute gait, the terrible indications of +that rage and strength which she knew and had herself experienced +after his duel with Dolokhov. + +"Where you are, there is vice and evil!" said Pierre to his wife. +"Anatole, come with me! I must speak to you," he added in French. + +Anatole glanced round at his sister and rose submissively, ready +to follow Pierre. Pierre, taking him by the arm, pulled him toward +himself and was leading him from the room. + +"If you allow yourself in my drawing room..." whispered Helene, +but Pierre did not reply and went out of the room. + +Anatole followed him with his usual jaunty step but his face +betrayed anxiety. + +Having entered his study Pierre closed the door and addressed +Anatole without looking at him. + +"You promised Countess Rostova to marry her and were about to +elope with her, is that so?" + +"Mon cher," answered Anatole (their whole conversation was in +French), "I don't consider myself bound to answer questions put to +me in that tone." + +Pierre's face, already pale, became distorted by fury. He seized +Anatole by the collar of his uniform with his big hand and shook him +from side to side till Anatole's face showed a sufficient degree of +terror. + +"When I tell you that I must talk to you!..." repeated Pierre. + +"Come now, this is stupid. What?" said Anatole, fingering a button +of his collar that had been wrenched loose with a bit of the cloth. + +"You're a scoundrel and a blackguard, and I don't know what deprives +me from the pleasure of smashing your head with this!" said Pierre, +expressing himself so artificially because he was talking French. + +He took a heavy paperweight and lifted it threateningly, but at once +put it back in its place. + +"Did you promise to marry her?" + +"I... I didn't think of it. I never promised, because..." + +Pierre interrupted him. + +"Have you any letters of hers? Any letters?" he said, moving +toward Anatole. + +Anatole glanced at him and immediately thrust his hand into his +pocket and drew out his pocketbook. + +Pierre took the letter Anatole handed him and, pushing aside a table +that stood in his way, threw himself on the sofa. + +"I shan't be violent, don't be afraid!" said Pierre in answer to a +frightened gesture of Anatole's. "First, the letters," said he, as +if repeating a lesson to himself. "Secondly," he continued after a +short pause, again rising and again pacing the room, "tomorrow you +must get out of Moscow." + +"But how can I?..." + +"Thirdly," Pierre continued without listening to him, "you must +never breathe a word of what has passed between you and Countess +Rostova. I know I can't prevent your doing so, but if you have a spark +of conscience..." Pierre paced the room several times in silence. + +Anatole sat at a table frowning and biting his lips. + +"After all, you must understand that besides your pleasure there +is such a thing as other people's happiness and peace, and that you +are ruining a whole life for the sake of amusing yourself! Amuse +yourself with women like my wife- with them you are within your +rights, for they know what you want of them. They are armed against +you by the same experience of debauchery; but to promise a maid to +marry her... to deceive, to kidnap.... Don't you understand that it is +as mean as beating an old man or a child?..." + +Pierre paused and looked at Anatole no longer with an angry but with +a questioning look. + +"I don't know about that, eh?" said Anatole, growing more +confident as Pierre mastered his wrath. "I don't know that and don't +want to," he said, not looking at Pierre and with a slight tremor of +his lower jaw, "but you have used such words to me- 'mean' and so +on- which as a man of honor I can't allow anyone to use." + +Pierre glanced at him with amazement, unable to understand what he +wanted. + +"Though it was tete-a-tete," Anatole continued, "still I can't..." + +"Is it satisfaction you want?" said Pierre ironically. + +"You could at least take back your words. What? If you want me to do +as you wish, eh?" + +"I take them back, I take them back!" said Pierre, "and I ask you to +forgive me." Pierre involuntarily glanced at the loose button. "And if +you require money for your journey..." + +Anatole smiled. The expression of that base and cringing smile, +which Pierre knew so well in his wife, revolted him. + +"Oh, vile and heartless brood!" he exclaimed, and left the room. + +Next day Anatole left for Petersburg. + +CHAPTER XXI + +Pierre drove to Marya Dmitrievna's to tell her of the fulfillment of +her wish that Kuragin should be banished from Moscow. The whole +house was in a state of alarm and commotion. Natasha was very ill, +having, as Marya Dmitrievna told him in secret, poisoned herself the +night after she had been told that Anatole was married, with some +arsenic she had stealthily procured. After swallowing a little she had +been so frightened that she woke Sonya and told her what she had done. +The necessary antidotes had been administered in time and she was +now out of danger, though still so weak that it was out of the +question to move her to the country, and so the countess had been sent +for. Pierre saw the distracted count, and Sonya, who had a +tear-stained face, but he could not see Natasha. + +Pierre dined at the club that day and heard on all sides gossip +about the attempted abduction of Rostova. He resolutely denied these +rumors, assuring everyone that nothing had happened except that his +brother-in-law had proposed to her and been refused. It seemed to +Pierre that it was his duty to conceal the whole affair and +re-establish Natasha's reputation. + +He was awaiting Prince Andrew's return with dread and went every day +to the old prince's for news of him. + +Old Prince Bolkonski heard all the rumors current in the town from +Mademoiselle Bourienne and had read the note to Princess Mary in which +Natasha had broken off her engagement. He seemed in better spirits +than usual and awaited his son with great impatience. + +Some days after Anatole's departure Pierre received a note from +Prince Andrew, informing him of his arrival and asking him to come +to see him. + +As soon as he reached Moscow, Prince Andrew had received from his +father Natasha's note to Princess Mary breaking off her engagement +(Mademoiselle Bourienne had purloined it from Princess Mary and +given it to the old prince), and he heard from him the story of +Natasha's elopement, with additions. + +Prince Andrew had arrived in the evening and Pierre came to see +him next morning. Pierre expected to find Prince Andrew in almost +the same state as Natasha and was therefore surprised on entering +the drawing room to hear him in the study talking in a loud animated +voice about some intrigue going on in Petersburg. The old prince's +voice and another now and then interrupted him. Princess Mary came out +to meet Pierre. She sighed, looking toward the door of the room +where Prince Andrew was, evidently intending to express her sympathy +with his sorrow, but Pierre saw by her face that she was glad both +at what had happened and at the way her brother had taken the news +of Natasha's faithlessness. + +"He says he expected it," she remarked. "I know his pride will not +let him express his feelings, but still he has taken it better, far +better, than I expected. Evidently it had to be...." + +"But is it possible that all is really ended?" asked Pierre. + +Princess Mary looked at him with astonishment. She did not +understand how he could ask such a question. Pierre went into the +study. Prince Andrew, greatly changed and plainly in better health, +but with a fresh horizontal wrinkle between his brows, stood in +civilian dress facing his father and Prince Meshcherski, warmly +disputing and vigorously gesticulating. The conversation was about +Speranski- the news of whose sudden exile and alleged treachery had +just reached Moscow. + +"Now he is censured and accused by all who were enthusiastic about +him a month ago," Prince Andrew was saying, "and by those who were +unable to understand his aims. To judge a man who is in disfavor and +to throw on him all the blame of other men's mistakes is very easy, +but I maintain that if anything good has been accomplished in this +reign it was done by him, by him alone." + +He paused at the sight of Pierre. His face quivered and +immediately assumed a vindictive expression. + +"Posterity will do him justice," he concluded, and at once turned to +Pierre. + +"Well, how are you? Still getting stouter?" he said with +animation, but the new wrinkle on his forehead deepened. "Yes, I am +well," he said in answer to Pierre's question, and smiled. + +To Pierre that smile said plainly: "I am well, but my health is +now of no use to anyone." + +After a few words to Pierre about the awful roads from the Polish +frontier, about people he had met in Switzerland who knew Pierre, +and about M. Dessalles, whom he had brought from abroad to be his +son's tutor, Prince Andrew again joined warmly in the conversation +about Speranski which was still going on between the two old men. + +"If there were treason, or proofs of secret relations with Napoleon, +they would have been made public," he said with warmth and haste. "I +do not, and never did, like Speranski personally, but I like justice!" + +Pierre now recognized in his friend a need with which he was only +too familiar, to get excited and to have arguments about extraneous +matters in order to stifle thoughts that were too oppressive and too +intimate. When Prince Meshcherski had left, Prince Andrew took +Pierre's arm and asked him into the room that had been assigned him. A +bed had been made up there, and some open portmanteaus and trunks +stood about. Prince Andrew went to one and took out a small casket, +from which he drew a packet wrapped in paper. He did it all silently +and very quickly. He stood up and coughed. His face was gloomy and his +lips compressed. + +"Forgive me for troubling you..." + +Pierre saw that Prince Andrew was going to speak of Natasha, and his +broad face expressed pity and sympathy. This expression irritated +Prince Andrew, and in a determined, ringing, and unpleasant tone he +continued: + +"I have received a refusal from Countess Rostova and have heard +reports of your brother-in-law having sought her hand, or something of +that kind. Is that true?" + +"Both true and untrue," Pierre began; but Prince Andrew +interrupted him. + +"Here are her letters and her portrait," said he. + +He took the packet from the table and handed it to Pierre. + +"Give this to the countess... if you see her." + +"She is very ill," said Pierre. + +"Then she is here still?" said Prince Andrew. "And Prince +Kuragin?" he added quickly. + +"He left long ago. She has been at death's door." + +"I much regret her illness," said Prince Andrew; and he smiled +like his father, coldly, maliciously, and unpleasantly. + +"So Monsieur Kuragin has not honored Countess Rostova with his +hand?" said Prince Andrew, and he snorted several times. + +"He could not marry, for he was married already," said Pierre. + +Prince Andrew laughed disagreeably, again reminding one of his +father. + +"And where is your brother-in-law now, if I may ask?" he said. + +"He has gone to Peters... But I don't know," said Pierre. + +"Well, it doesn't matter," said Prince Andrew. "Tell Countess +Rostova that she was and is perfectly free and that I wish her all +that is good." + +Pierre took the packet. Prince Andrew, as if trying to remember +whether he had something more to say, or waiting to see if Pierre +would say anything, looked fixedly at him. + +"I say, do you remember our discussion in Petersburg?" asked Pierre, +"about..." + +"Yes," returned Prince Andrew hastily. "I said that a fallen woman +should be forgiven, but I didn't say I could forgive her. I can't." + +"But can this be compared...?" said Pierre. + +Prince Andrew interrupted him and cried sharply: "Yes, ask her +hand again, be magnanimous, and so on?... Yes, that would be very +noble, but I am unable to follow in that gentleman's footsteps. If you +wish to be my friend never speak to me of that... of all that! Well, +good-by. So you'll give her the packet?" + +Pierre left the room and went to the old prince and Princess Mary. + +The old man seemed livelier than usual. Princess Mary was the same +as always, but beneath her sympathy for her brother, Pierre noticed +her satisfaction that the engagement had been broken off. Looking at +them Pierre realized what contempt and animosity they all felt for the +Rostovs, and that it was impossible in their presence even to +mention the name of her who could give up Prince Andrew for anyone +else. + +At dinner the talk turned on the war, the approach of which was +becoming evident. Prince Andrew talked incessantly, arguing now with +his father, now with the Swiss tutor Dessalles, and showing an +unnatural animation, the cause of which Pierre so well understood. + +CHAPTER XXII + +That same evening Pierre went to the Rostovs' to fulfill the +commission entrusted to him. Natasha was in bed, the count at the +Club, and Pierre, after giving the letters to Sonya, went to Marya +Dmitrievna who was interested to know how Prince Andrew had taken +the news. Ten minutes later Sonya came to Marya Dmitrievna. + +"Natasha insists on seeing Count Peter Kirilovich," said she. + +"But how? Are we to take him up to her? The room there has not +been tidied up." + +"No, she has dressed and gone into the drawing room," said Sonya. + +Marya Dmitrievna only shrugged her shoulders. + +"When will her mother come? She has worried me to death! Now mind, +don't tell her everything!" said she to Pierre. "One hasn't the +heart to scold her, she is so much to be pitied, so much to be +pitied." + +Natasha was standing in the middle of the drawing room, emaciated, +with a pale set face, but not at all shamefaced as Pierre expected +to find her. When he appeared at the door she grew flurried, evidently +undecided whether to go to meet him or to wait till he came up. + +Pierre hastened to her. He thought she would give him her hand as +usual; but she, stepping up to him, stopped, breathing heavily, her +arms hanging lifelessly just in the pose she used to stand in when she +went to the middle of the ballroom to sing, but with quite a different +expression of face. + +"Peter Kirilovich," she began rapidly, "Prince Bolkonski was your +friend- is your friend," she corrected herself. (It seemed to her that +everything that had once been must now be different.) "He told me once +to apply to you..." + +Pierre sniffed as he looked at her, but did not speak. Till then +he had reproached her in his heart and tried to despise her, but he +now felt so sorry for her that there was no room in his soul for +reproach. + +"He is here now: tell him... to for... forgive me!" She stopped +and breathed still more quickly, but did not shed tears. + +"Yes... I will tell him," answered Pierre; "but..." + +He did not know what to say. + +Natasha was evidently dismayed at the thought of what he might think +she had meant. + +"No, I know all is over," she said hurriedly. "No, that can never +be. I'm only tormented by the wrong I have done him. Tell him only +that I beg him to forgive, forgive, forgive me for everything...." + +She trembled all over and sat down on a chair. + +A sense of pity he had never before known overflowed Pierre's heart. + +"I will tell him, I will tell him everything once more," said +Pierre. "But... I should like to know one thing...." + +"Know what?" Natasha's eyes asked. + +"I should like to know, did you love..." Pierre did not know how +to refer to Anatole and flushed at the thought of him- "did you love +that bad man?" + +"Don't call him bad!" said Natasha. "But I don't know, don't know at +all...." + +She began to cry and a still greater sense of pity, tenderness, +and love welled up in Pierre. He felt the tears trickle under his +spectacles and hoped they would not be noticed. + +"We won't speak of it any more, my dear," said Pierre, and his +gentle, cordial tone suddenly seemed very strange to Natasha. + +"We won't speak of it, my dear- I'll tell him everything; but one +thing I beg of you, consider me your friend and if you want help, +advice, or simply to open your heart to someone- not now, but when +your mind is clearer think of me!" He took her hand and kissed it. +"I shall be happy if it's in my power..." + +Pierre grew confused. + +"Don't speak to me like that. I am not worth it!" exclaimed +Natasha and turned to leave the room, but Pierre held her hand. + +He knew he had something more to say to her. But when he said it +he was amazed at his own words. + +"Stop, stop! You have your whole life before you," said he to her. + +"Before me? No! All is over for me," she replied with shame and +self-abasement. + +"All over?" he repeated. "If I were not myself, but the handsomest, +cleverest, and best man in the world, and were free, I would this +moment ask on my knees for your hand and your love!" + +For the first time for many days Natasha wept tears of gratitude and +tenderness, and glancing at Pierre she went out of the room. + +Pierre too when she had gone almost ran into the anteroom, +restraining tears of tenderness and joy that choked him, and without +finding the sleeves of his fur cloak threw it on and got into his +sleigh. + +"Where to now, your excellency?" asked the coachman. + +"Where to?" Pierre asked himself. "Where can I go now? Surely not to +the Club or to pay calls?" All men seemed so pitiful, so poor, in +comparison with this feeling of tenderness and love he experienced: in +comparison with that softened, grateful, last look she had given him +through her tears. + +"Home!" said Pierre, and despite twenty-two degrees of frost +Fahrenheit he threw open the bearskin cloak from his broad chest and +inhaled the air with joy. + +It was clear and frosty. Above the dirty, ill-lit streets, above the +black roofs, stretched the dark starry sky. Only looking up at the sky +did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane +things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been +raised. At the entrance to the Arbat Square an immense expanse of dark +starry sky presented itself to his eyes. Almost in the center of it, +above the Prechistenka Boulevard, surrounded and sprinkled on all +sides by stars but distinguished from them all by its nearness to +the earth, its white light, and its long uplifted tail, shone the +enormous and brilliant comet of 18l2- the comet which was said to +portend all kinds of woes and the end of the world. In Pierre, +however, that comet with its long luminous tail aroused no feeling +of fear. On the contrary he gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with tears, +at this bright comet which, having traveled in its orbit with +inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly- +like an arrow piercing the earth- to remain fixed in a chosen spot, +vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and displaying its white +light amid countless other scintillating stars. It seemed to Pierre +that this comet fully responded to what was passing in his own +softened and uplifted soul, now blossoming into a new life. + +BOOK NINE: 1812 + +CHAPTER I + +From the close of the year 1811 intensified arming and concentrating +of the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces- +millions of men, reckoning those transporting and feeding the army- +moved from the west eastwards to the Russian frontier, toward which +since 1811 Russian forces had been similarly drawn. On the twelfth +of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian +frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to +human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated +against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, +thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, +and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of +all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them +did not at the time regard as being crimes. + +What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? +The historians tell us with naive assurance that its causes were the +wrongs inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the +Continental System, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of +Alexander, the mistakes of the diplomatists, and so on. + +Consequently, it would only have been necessary for Metternich, +Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and an evening party, to +have taken proper pains and written a more adroit note, or for +Napoleon to have written to Alexander: "My respected Brother, I +consent to restore the duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg"- and there +would have been no war. + +We can understand that the matter seemed like that to +contemporaries. It naturally seemed to Napoleon that the war was +caused by England's intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. +Helena). It naturally seemed to members of the English Parliament that +the cause of the war was Napoleon's ambition; to the Duke of +Oldenburg, that the cause of the war was the violence done to him; +to businessmen that the cause of the way was the Continental System +which was ruining Europe; to the generals and old soldiers that the +chief reason for the war was the necessity of giving them +employment; to the legitimists of that day that it was the need of +re-establishing les bons principes, and to the diplomatists of that +time that it all resulted from the fact that the alliance between +Russia and Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed +from Napoleon, and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178. +It is natural that these and a countless and infinite quantity of +other reasons, the number depending on the endless diversity of points +of view, presented themselves to the men of that day; but to us, to +posterity who view the thing that happened in all its magnitude and +perceive its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem +insufficient. To us it is incomprehensible that millions of +Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon +was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was +astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what +connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter +and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men +from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk +and Moscow and were killed by them. + +To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried +away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event +with unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes +present themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes +the more of them we find; and each separate cause or whole series of +causes appears to us equally valid in itself and equally false by +its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the events, and by its +impotence- apart from the cooperation of all the other coincident +causes- to occasion the event. To us, the wish or objection of this or +that French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as +Napoleon's refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to +restore the duchy of Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, and +had a second, a third, and a thousandth corporal and private also +refused, there would have been so many less men in Napoleon's army and +the war could not have occurred. + +Had Napoleon not taken offense at the demand that he should withdraw +beyond the Vistula, and not ordered his troops to advance, there would +have been no war; but had all his sergeants objected to serving a +second term then also there could have been no war. Nor could there +have been a war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of +Oldenburg, and had Alexander not felt insulted, and had there not been +an autocratic government in Russia, or a Revolution in France and a +subsequent dictatorship and Empire, or all the things that produced +the French Revolution, and so on. Without each of these causes nothing +could have happened. So all these causes- myriads of causes- coincided +to bring it about. And so there was no one cause for that +occurrence, but it had to occur because it had to. Millions of men, +renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to +east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes +of men had come from the east to the west, slaying their fellows. + +The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event +seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier +who was drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This +could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and +Alexander (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried +out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without +any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was +necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power- +the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns- should +consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and should +have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and +complex causes. + +We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of +irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of +which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in +history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they +become to us. + +Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal +aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain +from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that +action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and +belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined +significance. + +There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, +which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his +elemental hive life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for +him. + +Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious +instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of +humanity. A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in +time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic +significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more +people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the +more evident is the predestination and inevitability of his every +action. + +"The king's heart is in the hands of the Lord." + +A king is history's slave. + +History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, +uses every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes. + +Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than +ever that it depended on him, verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses +peuples~^ as Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him- +he had never been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which +compelled him, while thinking that he was acting on his own +volition, to perform for the hive life- that is to say, for history- +whatever had to be performed. + +^~ "To shed (or not to shed) the blood of his peoples." + +The people of the west moved eastwards to slay their fellow men, and +by the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in and +co-ordinated to produce that movement and war: reproaches for the +nonobservance of the Continental System, the Duke of Oldenburg's +wrongs, the movement of troops into Prussia- undertaken (as it +seemed to Napoleon) only for the purpose of securing an armed peace, +the French Emperor's love and habit of war coinciding with his +people's inclinations, allurement by the grandeur of the preparations, +and the expenditure on those preparations and the need of obtaining +advantages to compensate for that expenditure, the intoxicating honors +he received in Dresden, the diplomatic negotiations which, in the +opinion of contemporaries, were carried on with a sincere desire to +attain peace, but which only wounded the self-love of both sides, +and millions and millions of other causes that adapted themselves to +the event that was happening or coincided with it. + +When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of +its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it +is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes +it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? + +Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions +in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the +botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue +decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under +the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and +prayed for it. Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon +went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander +desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill +weighing a million tons fell because the last navvy struck it for +the last time with his mattock. In historic events the so-called great +men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but +the smallest connection with the event itself. + +Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, +is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole +course of history and predestined from eternity. + +CHAPTER II + +On the twenty-ninth of May Napoleon left Dresden, where he had spent +three weeks surrounded by a court that included princes, dukes, kings, +and even an emperor. Before leaving, Napoleon showed favor to the +emperor, kings, and princes who had deserved it, reprimanded the kings +and princes with whom he was dissatisfied, presented pearls and +diamonds of his own- that is, which he had taken from other kings- +to the Empress of Austria, and having, as his historian tells us, +tenderly embraced the Empress Marie Louise- who regarded him as her +husband, though he had left another wife in Paris- left her grieved by +the parting which she seemed hardly able to bear. Though the +diplomatists still firmly believed in the possibility of peace and +worked zealously to that end, and though the Emperor Napoleon +himself wrote a letter to Alexander, calling him Monsieur mon frere, +and sincerely assured him that he did not want war and would always +love and honor him- yet he set off to join his army, and at every +station gave fresh orders to accelerate the movement of his troops +from west to east. He went in a traveling coach with six horses, +surrounded by pages, aides-de-camp, and an escort, along the road to +Posen, Thorn, Danzig, and Konigsberg. At each of these towns thousands +of people met him with excitement and enthusiasm. + +The army was moving from west to east, and relays of six horses +carried him in the same direction. On the tenth of June,~^ coming up +with the army, he spent the night in apartments prepared for him on +the estate of a Polish count in the Vilkavisski forest. + +^~ Old style. + +Next day, overtaking the army, he went in a carriage to the +Niemen, and, changing into a Polish uniform, he drove to the riverbank +in order to select a place for the crossing. + +Seeing, on the other side, some Cossacks (les Cosaques) and the +wide-spreading steppes in the midst of which lay the holy city of +Moscow (Moscou, la ville sainte), the capital of a realm such as the +Scythia into which Alexander the Great had marched- Napoleon +unexpectedly, and contrary alike to strategic and diplomatic +considerations, ordered an advance, and the next day his army began to +cross the Niemen. + +Early in the morning of the twelfth of June he came out of his tent, +which was pitched that day on the steep left bank of the Niemen, and +looked through a spyglass at the streams of his troops pouring out +of the Vilkavisski forest and flowing over the three bridges thrown +across the river. The troops, knowing of the Emperor's presence, +were on the lookout for him, and when they caught sight of a figure in +an overcoat and a cocked hat standing apart from his suite in front of +his tent on the hill, they threw up their caps and shouted: "Vive +l'Empereur!" and one after another poured in a ceaseless stream out of +the vast forest that had concealed them and, separating, flowed on and +on by the three bridges to the other side. + +"Now we'll go into action. Oh, when he takes it in hand himself, +things get hot... by heaven!... There he is!... Vive l'Empereur! So +these are the steppes of Asia! It's a nasty country all the same. Au +revoir, Beauche; I'll keep the best palace in Moscow for you! Au +revoir. Good luck!... Did you see the Emperor? Vive l'Empereur!... +preur!- If they make me Governor of India, Gerard, I'll make you +Minister of Kashmir- that's settled. Vive l'Empereur! Hurrah! +hurrah! hurrah! The Cossacks- those rascals- see how they run! Vive +l'Empereur! There he is, do you see him? I've seen him twice, as I see +you now. The little corporal... I saw him give the cross to one of the +veterans.... Vive l'Empereur!" came the voices of men, old and +young, of most diverse characters and social positions. On the faces +of all was one common expression of joy at the commencement of the +long-expected campaign and of rapture and devotion to the man in the +gray coat who was standing on the hill. + +On the thirteenth of June a rather small, thoroughbred Arab horse +was brought to Napoleon. He mounted it and rode at a gallop to one +of the bridges over the Niemen, deafened continually by incessant +and rapturous acclamations which he evidently endured only because +it was impossible to forbid the soldiers to express their love of +him by such shouting, but the shouting which accompanied him +everywhere disturbed him and distracted him from the military cares +that had occupied him from the time he joined the army. He rode across +one of the swaying pontoon bridges to the farther side, turned sharply +to the left, and galloped in the direction of Kovno, preceded by +enraptured, mounted chasseurs of the Guard who, breathless with +delight, galloped ahead to clear a path for him through the troops. On +reaching the broad river Viliya, he stopped near a regiment of +Polish Uhlans stationed by the river. + +"Vivat!" shouted the Poles, ecstatically, breaking their ranks and +pressing against one another to see him. + +Napoleon looked up and down the river, dismounted, and sat down on a +log that lay on the bank. At a mute sign from him, a telescope was +handed him which he rested on the back of a happy page who had run +up to him, and he gazed at the opposite bank. Then he became +absorbed in a map laid out on the logs. Without lifting his head he +said something, and two of his aides-de-camp galloped off to the +Polish Uhlans. + +"What? What did he say?" was heard in the ranks of the Polish Uhlans +when one of the aides-de-camp rode up to them. + +The order was to find a ford and to cross the river. The colonel +of the Polish Uhlans, a handsome old man, flushed and, fumbling in his +speech from excitement, asked the aide-de-camp whether he would be +permitted to swim the river with his Uhlans instead of seeking a ford. +In evident fear of refusal, like a boy asking for permission to get on +a horse, he begged to be allowed to swim across the river before the +Emperor's eyes. The aide-de-camp replied that probably the Emperor +would not be displeased at this excess of zeal. + +As soon as the aide-de-camp had said this, the old mustached +officer, with happy face and sparkling eyes, raised his saber, shouted +"Vivat!" and, commanding the Uhlans to follow him, spurred his horse +and galloped into the river. He gave an angry thrust to his horse, +which had grown restive under him, and plunged into the water, heading +for the deepest part where the current was swift. Hundreds of Uhlans +galloped in after him. It was cold and uncanny in the rapid current in +the middle of the stream, and the Uhlans caught hold of one another as +they fell off their horses. Some of the horses were drowned and some +of the men; the others tried to swim on, some in the saddle and some +clinging to their horses' manes. They tried to make their way +forward to the opposite bank and, though there was a ford one third of +a mile away, were proud that they were swimming and drowning in this +river under the eyes of the man who sat on the log and was not even +looking at what they were doing. When the aide-de-camp, having +returned and choosing an opportune moment, ventured to draw the +Emperor's attention to the devotion of the Poles to his person, the +little man in the gray overcoat got up and, having summoned +Berthier, began pacing up and down the bank with him, giving him +instructions and occasionally glancing disapprovingly at the +drowning Uhlans who distracted his attention. + +For him it was no new conviction that his presence in any part of +the world, from Africa to the steppes of Muscovy alike, was enough +to dumfound people and impel them to insane self-oblivion. He called +for his horse and rode to his quarters. + +Some forty Uhlans were drowned in the river, though boats were +sent to their assistance. The majority struggled back to the bank from +which they had started. The colonel and some of his men got across and +with difficulty clambered out on the further bank. And as soon as they +had got out, in their soaked and streaming clothes, they shouted +"Vivat!" and looked ecstatically at the spot where Napoleon had been +but where he no longer was and at that moment considered themselves +happy. + +That evening, between issuing one order that the forged Russian +paper money prepared for use in Russia should be delivered as +quickly as possible and another that a Saxon should be shot, on whom a +letter containing information about the orders to the French army +had been found, Napoleon also gave instructions that the Polish +colonel who had needlessly plunged into the river should be enrolled +in the Legion d'honneur of which Napoleon was himself the head. + +Quos vult perdere dementat.~^ + +^~ Those whom (God) wishes to destroy he drives mad. + +CHAPTER III + +The Emperor of Russia had, meanwhile, been in Vilna for more than +a month. reviewing troops and holding maneuvers. Nothing was ready for +the war that everyone expected and to prepare for which the Emperor +had come from Petersburg. There was no general plan of action. The +vacillation between the various plans that were proposed had even +increased after the Emperor had been at headquarters for a month. Each +of the three armies had its own commander in chief, but there was no +supreme commander of all the forces, and the Emperor did not assume +that responsibility himself. + +The longer the Emperor remained in Vilna the less did everybody- +tired of waiting- prepare for the war. All the efforts of those who +surrounded the sovereign seemed directed merely to making him spend +his time pleasantly and forget that war was impending. + +In June, after many balls and fetes given by the Polish magnates, by +the courtiers, and by the Emperor himself, it occurred to one of the +Polish aides-de-camp in attendance that a dinner and ball should be +given for the Emperor by his aides-de-camp. This idea was eagerly +received. The Emperor gave his consent. The aides-de-camp collected +money by subscription. The lady who was thought to be most pleasing to +the Emperor was invited to act as hostess. Count Bennigsen, being a +landowner in the Vilna province, offered his country house for the +fete, and the thirteenth of June was fixed for a ball, dinner, +regatta, and fireworks at Zakret, Count Bennigsen's country seat. + +The very day that Napoleon issued the order to cross the Niemen, and +his vanguard, driving off the Cossacks, crossed the Russian +frontier, Alexander spent the evening at the entertainment given by +his aides-de-camp at Bennigsen's country house. + +It was a gay and brilliant fete. Connoisseurs of such matters +declared that rarely had so many beautiful women been assembled in one +place. Countess Bezukhova was present among other Russian ladies who +had followed the sovereign from Petersburg to Vilna and eclipsed the +refined Polish ladies by her massive, so called Russian type of +beauty. The Emperor noticed her and honored her with a dance. + +Boris Drubetskoy, having left his wife in Moscow and being for the +present en garcon (as he phrased it), was also there and, though not +an aide-de-camp, had subscribed a large sum toward the expenses. Boris +was now a rich man who had risen to high honors and no longer sought +patronage but stood on an equal footing with the highest of those of +his own age. He was meeting Helene in Vilna after not having seen +her for a long time and did not recall the past, but as Helene was +enjoying the favors of a very important personage and Boris had only +recently married, they met as good friends of long standing. + +At midnight dancing was still going on. Helene, not having a +suitable partner, herself offered to dance the mazurka with Boris. +They were the third couple. Boris, coolly looking at Helene's dazzling +bare shoulders which emerged from a dark, gold-embroidered, gauze +gown, talked to her of old acquaintances and at the same time, unaware +of it himself and unnoticed by others, never for an instant ceased +to observe the Emperor who was in the same room. The Emperor was not +dancing, he stood in the doorway, stopping now one pair and now +another with gracious words which he alone knew how to utter. + +As the mazurka began, Boris saw that Adjutant General Balashev, +one of those in closest attendance on the Emperor, went up to him +and contrary to court etiquette stood near him while he was talking to +a Polish lady. Having finished speaking to her, the Emperor looked +inquiringly at Balashev and, evidently understanding that he only +acted thus because there were important reasons for so doing, nodded +slightly to the lady and turned to him. Hardly had Balashev begun to +speak before a look of amazement appeared on the Emperor's face. He +took Balashev by the arm and crossed the room with him, +unconsciously clearing a path seven yards wide as the people on both +sides made way for him. Boris noticed Arakcheev's excited face when +the sovereign went out with Balashev. Arakcheev looked at the +Emperor from under his brow and, sniffing with his red nose, stepped +forward from the crowd as if expecting the Emperor to address him. +(Boris understood that Arakcheev envied Balashev and was displeased +that evidently important news had reached the Emperor otherwise than +through himself.) + +But the Emperor and Balashev passed out into the illuminated +garden without noticing Arakcheev who, holding his sword and +glancing wrathfully around, followed some twenty paces behind them. + +All the time Boris was going through the figures of the mazurka, +he was worried by the question of what news Balashev had brought and +how he could find it out before others. In the figure in which he +had to choose two ladies, he whispered to Helene that he meant to +choose Countess Potocka who, he thought, had gone out onto the +veranda, and glided over the parquet to the door opening into the +garden, where, seeing Balashev and the Emperor returning to the +veranda, he stood still. They were moving toward the door. Boris, +fluttering as if he had not had time to withdraw, respectfully pressed +close to the doorpost with bowed head. + +The Emperor, with the agitation of one who has been personally +affronted, was finishing with these words: + +"To enter Russia without declaring war! I will not make peace as +long as a single armed enemy remains in my country!" It seemed to +Boris that it gave the Emperor pleasure to utter these words. He was +satisfied with the form in which he had expressed his thoughts, but +displeased that Boris had overheard it. + +"Let no one know of it! " the Emperor added with a frown. + +Boris understood that this was meant for him and, closing his +eyes, slightly bowed his head. The Emperor re-entered the ballroom and +remained there about another half-hour. + +Boris was thus the first to learn the news that the French army +had crossed the Niemen and, thanks to this, was able to show certain +important personages that much that was concealed from others was +usually known to him, and by this means he rose higher in their +estimation. + +The unexpected news of the French having crossed the Niemen was +particularly startling after a month of unfulfilled expectations, +and at a ball. On first receiving the news, under the influence of +indignation and resentment the Emperor had found a phrase that pleased +him, fully expressed his feelings, and has since become famous. On +returning home at two o'clock that night he sent for his secretary, +Shishkov, and told him to write an order to the troops and a +rescript to Field Marshal Prince Saltykov, in which he insisted on the +words being inserted that he would not make peace so long as a +single armed Frenchman remained on Russian soil. + +Next day the following letter was sent to Napoleon: + +Monsieur mon frere, + +Yesterday I learned that, despite the loyalty which I have kept my +engagements with Your Majesty, your troops have crossed the Russian +frontier, and I have this moment received from Petersburg a note, in +which Count Lauriston informs me, as a reason for this aggression, +that Your Majesty has considered yourself to be in a state of war with +me from the time Prince Kuragin asked for his passports. The reasons +on which the Duc de Bassano based his refusal to deliver them to him +would never have led me to suppose that that could serve as a +pretext for aggression. In fact, the ambassador, as he himself has +declared, was never authorized to make that demand, and as soon as I +was informed of it I let him know how much I disapproved of it and +ordered him to remain at his post. If Your Majesty does not intend +to shed the blood of our peoples for such a misunderstanding, and +consents to withdraw your troops from Russian territory, I will regard +what has passed as not having occurred and an understanding between us +will be possible. In the contrary case, Your Majesty, I shall see +myself forced to repel an attack that nothing on my part has provoked. +It still depends on Your Majesty to preserve humanity from the +calamity of another war. I am, etc., + +(signed) Alexander + +CHAPTER IV + +At two in the morning of the fourteenth of June, the Emperor, having +sent for Balashev and read him his letter to Napoleon, ordered him +to take it and hand it personally to the French Emperor. When +dispatching Balashev, the Emperor repeated to him the words that he +would not make peace so long as a single armed enemy remained on +Russian soil and told him to transmit those words to Napoleon. +Alexander did not insert them in his letter to Napoleon, because +with his characteristic tact he felt it would be injudicious to use +them at a moment when a last attempt at reconciliation was being made, +but he definitely instructed Balashev to repeat them personally to +Napoleon. + +Having set off in the small hours of the fourteenth, accompanied +by a bugler and two Cossacks, Balashev reached the French outposts +at the village of Rykonty, on the Russian side of the Niemen, by dawn. +There he was stopped by French cavalry sentinels. + +A French noncommissioned officer of hussars, in crimson uniform +and a shaggy cap, shouted to the approaching Balashev to halt. +Balashev did not do so at once, but continued to advance along the +road at a walking pace. + +The noncommissioned officer frowned and, muttering words of abuse, +advanced his horse's chest against Balashev, put his hand to his +saber, and shouted rudely at the Russian general, asking: was he +deaf that he did not do as he was told? Balashev mentioned who he was. +The noncommissioned officer began talking with his comrades about +regimental matters without looking at the Russian general. + +After living at the seat of the highest authority and power, after +conversing with the Emperor less than three hours before, and in +general being accustomed to the respect due to his rank in the +service, Balashev found it very strange here on Russian soil to +encounter this hostile, and still more this disrespectful, application +of brute force to himself. + +The sun was only just appearing from behind the clouds, the air +was fresh and dewy. A herd of cattle was being driven along the road +from the village, and over the fields the larks rose trilling, one +after another, like bubbles rising in water. + +Balashev looked around him, awaiting the arrival of an officer +from the village. The Russian Cossacks and bugler and the French +hussars looked silently at one another from time to time. + +A French colonel of hussars, who had evidently just left his bed, +came riding from the village on a handsome sleek gray horse, +accompanied by two hussars. The officer, the soldiers, and their +horses all looked smart and well kept. + +It was that first period of a campaign when troops are still in full +trim, almost like that of peacetime maneuvers, but with a shade of +martial swagger in their clothes, and a touch of the gaiety and spirit +of enterprise which always accompany the opening of a campaign. + +The French colonel with difficulty repressed a yawn, but was +polite and evidently understood Balashev's importance. He led him past +his soldiers and behind the outposts and told him that his wish to +be presented to the Emperor would most likely be satisfied +immediately, as the Emperor's quarters were, he believed, not far off. + +They rode through the village of Rykonty, past tethered French +hussar horses, past sentinels and men who saluted their colonel and +stared with curiosity at a Russian uniform, and came out at the +other end of the village. The colonel said that the commander of the +division was a mile and a quarter away and would receive Balashev +and conduct him to his destination. + +The sun had by now risen and shone gaily on the bright verdure. + +They had hardly ridden up a hill, past a tavern, before they saw a +group of horsemen coming toward them. In front of the group, on a +black horse with trappings that glittered in the sun, rode a tall +man with plumes in his hat and black hair curling down to his +shoulders. He wore a red mantle, and stretched his long legs forward +in French fashion. This man rode toward Balashev at a gallop, his +plumes flowing and his gems and gold lace glittering in the bright +June sunshine. + +Balashev was only two horses' length from the equestrian with the +bracelets, plunies, necklaces, and gold embroidery, who was +galloping toward him with a theatrically solemn countenance, when +Julner, the French colonel, whispered respectfully: "The King of +Naples!" It was, in fact, Murat, now called "King of Naples." Though +it was quite incomprehensible why he should be King of Naples, he +was called so, and was himself convinced that he was so, and therefore +assumed a more solemn and important air than formerly. He was so +sure that he really was the King of Naples that when, on the eve of +his departure from that city, while walking through the streets with +his wife, some Italians called out to him: "Viva il re!"~^ he turned to +his wife with a pensive smile and said: "Poor fellows, they don't know +that I am leaving them tomorrow!" + +^~ "Long live the king." + +But though he firmly believed himself to be King of Naples and +pitied the grief felt by the subjects he was abandoning, latterly, +after he had been ordered to return to military service- and +especially since his last interview with Napoleon in Danzig, when +his august brother-in-law had told him: "I made you King that you +should reign in my way, but not in yours!"- he had cheerfully taken up +his familiar business, and- like a well-fed but not overfat horse that +feels himself in harness and grows skittish between the shafts- he +dressed up in clothes as variegated and expensive as possible, and +gaily and contentedly galloped along the roads of Poland, without +himself knowing why or whither. + +On seeing the Russian general he threw back his head, with its +long hair curling to his shoulders, in a majestically royal manner, +and looked inquiringly at the French colonel. The colonel respectfully +informed His Majesty of Balashev's mission, whose name he could not +pronounce. + +"De Bal-macheve!" said the King (overcoming by his assurance the +difficulty that had presented itself to the colonel). "Charmed to make +your acquaintance, General!" he added, with a gesture of kingly +condescension. + +As soon as the King began to speak loud and fast his royal dignity +instantly forsook him, and without noticing it he passed into his +natural tone of good-natured familiarity. He laid his hand on the +withers of Balashev's horse and said: + +"Well, General, it all looks like war," as if regretting a +circumstance of which he was unable to judge. + +"Your Majesty," replied Balashev, "my master, the Emperor, does +not desire war and as Your Majesty sees..." said Balashev, using the +words Your Majesty at every opportunity, with the affectation +unavoidable in frequently addressing one to whom the title was still a +novelty. + +Murat's face beamed with stupid satisfaction as he listened to +"Monsieur de Bal-macheve." But royaute oblige!~^ and he felt it +incumbent on him, as a king and an ally, to confer on state affairs +with Alexander's envoy. He dismounted, took Balashev's arm, and moving +a few steps away from his suite, which waited respectfully, began to +pace up and down with him, trying to speak significantly. He +referred to the fact that the Emperor Napoleon had resented the demand +that he should withdraw his troops from Prussia, especially when +that demand became generally known and the dignity of France was +thereby offended. + +^~ "Royalty has its obligations." + +Balashev replied that there was nothing offensive in the demand, +because..." but Murat interrupted him. + +"Then you don't consider the Emperor Alexander the aggressor?" he +asked unexpectedly, with a kindly and foolish smile. + +Balashev told him why he considered Napoleon to be the originator of +the war. + +"Oh, my dear general!" Murat again interrupted him, "with all my +heart I wish the Emperors may arrange the affair between them, and +that the war begun by no wish of mine may finish as quickly as +possible!" said he, in the tone of a servant who wants to remain +good friends with another despite a quarrel between their masters. + +And he went on to inquiries about the Grand Duke and the state of +his health, and to reminiscences of the gay and amusing times he had +spent with him in Naples. Then suddenly, as if remembering his royal +dignity, Murat solemnly drew himself up, assumed the pose in which +he had stood at his coronation. and, waving his right arm, said: + +"I won't detain you longer, General. I wish success to your +mission," and with his embroidered red mantle, his flowing feathers, +and his glittering ornaments, he rejoined his suite who were +respectfully awaiting him. + +Balashev rode on, supposing from Murat's words that he would very +soon be brought before Napoleon himself. But instead of that, at the +next village the sentinels of Davout's infantry corps detained him +as the pickets of the vanguard had done, and an adjutant of the +corps commander, who was fetched, conducted him into the village to +Marshal Davout. + +CHAPTER V + +Davout was to Napoleon what Arakcheev was to Alexander- though not a +coward like Arakcheev, he was as precise, as cruel, and as unable to +express his devotion to his monarch except by cruelty. + +In the organism of states such men are necessary, as wolves are +necessary in the organism of nature, and they always exist, always +appear and hold their own, however incongruous their presence and +their proximity to the head of the government may be. This +inevitability alone can explain how the cruel Arakcheev, who tore +out a grenadier's mustache with his own hands, whose weak nerves +rendered him unable to face danger, and who was neither an educated +man nor a courtier, was able to maintain his powerful position with +Alexander, whose own character was chivalrous, noble, and gentle. + +Balashev found Davout seated on a barrel in the shed of a +peasant's hut, writing- he was auditing accounts. Better quarters +could have been found him, but Marshal Davout was one of those men who +purposely put themselves in most depressing conditions to have a +justification for being gloomy. For the same reason they are always +hard at work and in a hurry. "How can I think of the bright side of +life when, as you see, I am sitting on a barrel and working in a dirty +shed?" the expression of his face seemed to say. The chief pleasure +and necessity of such men, when they encounter anyone who shows +animation, is to flaunt their own dreary, persistent activity. +Davout allowed himself that pleasure when Balashev was brought in. +He became still more absorbed in his task when the Russian general +entered, and after glancing over his spectacles at Balashev's face, +which was animated by the beauty of the morning and by his talk with +Murat, he did not rise or even stir, but scowled still more and +sneered malevolently. + +When he noticed in Balashev's face the disagreeable impression +this reception produced, Davout raised his head and coldly asked +what he wanted. + +Thinking he could have been received in such a manner only because +Davout did not know that he was adjutant general to the Emperor +Alexander and even his envoy to Napoleon, Balashev hastened to +inform him of his rank and mission. Contrary to his expectation, +Davout, after hearing him, became still surlier and ruder. + +"Where is your dispatch?" he inquired. "Give it to me. I will send +it to the Emperor." + +Balashev replied that he had been ordered to hand it personally to +the Emperor. + +"Your Emperor's orders are obeyed in your army, but here," said +Davout, "you must do as you're told." + +And, as if to make the Russian general still more conscious of his +dependence on brute force, Davout sent an adjutant to call the officer +on duty. + +Balashev took out the packet containing the Emperor's letter and +laid it on the table (made of a door with its hinges still hanging +on it, laid across two barrels). Davout took the packet and read the +inscription. + +"You are perfectly at liberty to treat me with respect or not," +protested Balashev, "but permit me to observe that I have the honor to +be adjutant general to His Majesty...." + +Davout glanced at him silently and plainly derived pleasure from the +signs of agitation and confusion which appeared on Balashev's face. + +"You will be treated as is fitting," said he and, putting the packet +in his pocket, left the shed. + +A minute later the marshal's adjutant, de Castres, came in and +conducted Balashev to the quarters assigned him. + +That day he dined with the marshal, at the same board on the +barrels. + +Next day Davout rode out early and, after asking Balashev to come to +him, peremptorily requested him to remain there, to move on with the +baggage train should orders come for it to move, and to talk to no one +except Monsieur de Castres. + +After four days of solitude, ennui, and consciousness of his +impotence and insignificance- particularly acute by contrast with +the sphere of power in which he had so lately moved- and after several +marches with the marshal's baggage and the French army, which occupied +the whole district, Balashev was brought to Vilna- now occupied by the +French- through the very gate by which he had left it four days +previously. + +Next day the imperial gentleman-in-waiting, the Comte de Turenne, +came to Balashev and informed him of the Emperor Napoleon's wish to +honor him with an audience. + +Four days before, sentinels of the Preobrazhensk regiment had +stood in front of the house to which Balashev was conducted, and now +two French grenadiers stood there in blue uniforms unfastened in front +and with shaggy caps on their heads, and an escort of hussars and +Uhlans and a brilliant suite of aides-de-camp, pages, and generals, +who were waiting for Napoleon to come out, were standing at the porch, +round his saddle horse and his Mameluke, Rustan. Napoleon received +Balashev in the very house in Vilna from which Alexander had +dispatched him on his mission. + +CHAPTER VI + +Though Balashev was used to imperial pomp, he was amazed at the +luxury and magnificence of Napoleon's court. + +The Comte de Turenne showed him into a big reception room where many +generals, gentlemen-in-waiting, and Polish magnates- several of whom +Balashev had seen at the court of the Emperor of Russia- were waiting. +Duroc said that Napoleon would receive the Russian general before +going for his ride. + +After some minutes, the gentleman-in-waiting who was on duty came +into the great reception room and, bowing politely, asked Balashev +to follow him. + +Balashev went into a small reception room, one door of which led +into a study, the very one from which the Russian Emperor had +dispatched him on his mission. He stood a minute or two, waiting. He +heard hurried footsteps beyond the door, both halves of it were opened +rapidly; all was silent and then from the study the sound was heard of +other steps, firm and resolute- they were those of Napoleon. He had +just finished dressing for his ride, and wore a blue uniform, +opening in front over a white waistcoat so long that it covered his +rotund stomach, white leather breeches tightly fitting the fat +thighs of his short legs, and Hessian boots. His short hair had +evidently just been brushed, but one lock hung down in the middle of +his broad forehead. His plump white neck stood out sharply above the +black collar of his uniform, and he smelled of Eau de Cologne. His +full face, rather young-looking, with its prominent chin, wore a +gracious and majestic expression of imperial welcome. + +He entered briskly, with a jerk at every step and his head +slightly thrown back. His whole short corpulent figure with broad +thick shoulders, and chest and stomach involuntarily protruding, had +that imposing and stately appearance one sees in men of forty who live +in comfort. It was evident, too, that he was in the best of spirits +that day. + +He nodded in answer to Balashav's low and respectful bow, and coming +up to him at once began speaking like a man who values every moment of +his time and does not condescend to prepare what he has to say but +is sure he will always say the right thing and say it well. + +"Good day, General!" said he. "I have received the letter you +brought from the Emperor Alexander and am very glad to see you." He +glanced with his large eyes into Balashav's face and immediately +looked past him. + +It was plain that Balashev's personality did not interest him at +all. Evidently only what took place within his own mind interested +him. Nothing outside himself had any significance for him, because +everything in the world, it seemed to him, depended entirely on his +will. + +"I do not, and did not, desire war," he continued, "but it has +been forced on me. Even now" (he emphasized the word) "I am ready to +receive any explanations you can give me." + +And he began clearly and concisely to explain his reasons for +dissatisfaction with the Russian government. Judging by the calmly +moderate and amicable tone in which the French Emperor spoke, Balashev +was firmly persuaded that he wished for peace and intended to enter +into negotiations. + +When Napoleon, having finished speaking, looked inquiringly at the +Russian envoy, Balashev began a speech he had prepared long before: +"Sire! The Emperor, my master..." but the sight of the Emperor's +eyes bent on him confused him. "You are flurried- compose yourself!" +Napoleon seemed to say, as with a scarcely perceptible smile he looked +at Balashev's uniform and sword. + +Balashev recovered himself and began to speak. He said that the +Emperor Alexander did not consider Kurakin's demand for his +passports a sufficient cause for war; that Kurakin had acted on his +own initiative and without his sovereign's assent, that the Emperor +Alexander did not desire war, and had no relations with England. + +"Not yet!" interposed Napoleon, and, as if fearing to give vent to +his feelings, he frowned and nodded slightly as a sign that Balashev +might proceed. + +After saying all he had been instructed to say, Balashev added +that the Emperor Alexander wished for peace, but would not enter +into negotiations except on condition that... Here Balashev hesitated: +he remembered the words the Emperor Alexander had not written in his +letter, but had specially inserted in the rescript to Saltykov and had +told Balashev to repeat to Napoleon. Balashev remembered these +words, "So long as a single armed foe remains on Russian soil," but +some complex feeling restrained him. He could not utter them, though +he wished to do so. He grew confused and said: "On condition that +the French army retires beyond the Niemen." + +Napoleon noticed Balashev's embarrassment when uttering these last +words; his face twitched and the calf of his left leg began to +quiver rhythmically. Without moving from where he stood he began +speaking in a louder tone and more hurriedly than before. During the +speech that followed, Balashev, who more than once lowered his eyes, +involuntarily noticed the quivering of Napoleon's left leg which +increased the more Napoleon raised his voice. + +"I desire peace, no less than the Emperor Alexander," he began. +"Have I not for eighteen months been doing everything to obtain it? +I have waited eighteen months for explanations. But in order to +begin negotiations, what is demanded of me?" he said, frowning and +making an energetic gesture of inquiry with his small white plump +hand. + +"The withdrawal of your army beyond the Niemen, sire," replied +Balashev. + +"The Niemen?" repeated Napoleon. "So now you want me to retire +beyond the Niemen- only the Niemen?" repeated Napoleon, looking +straight at Balashev. + +The latter bowed his head respectfully. + +Instead of the demand of four months earlier to withdraw from +Pomerania, only a withdrawal beyond the Niemen was now demanded. +Napoleon turned quickly and began to pace the room. + +"You say the demand now is that I am to withdraw beyond the Niemen +before commencing negotiations, but in just the same way two months +ago the demand was that I should withdraw beyond the Vistula and the +Oder, and yet you are willing to negotiate." + +He went in silence from one corner of the room to the other and +again stopped in front of Balashev. Balashev noticed that his left leg +was quivering faster than before and his face seemed petrified in +its stern expression. This quivering of his left leg was a thing +Napoleon was conscious of. "The vibration of my left calf is a great +sign with me," he remarked at a later date. + +"Such demands as to retreat beyond the Vistula and Oder may be +made to a Prince of Baden, but not to me!" Napoleon almost screamed, +quite to his own surprise. "If you gave me Petersburg and Moscow I +could not accept such conditions. You say I have begun this war! But +who first joined his army? The Emperor Alexander, not I! And you offer +me negotiations when I have expended millions, when you are in +alliance with England, and when your position is a bad one. You +offer me negotiations! But what is the aim of your alliance with +England? What has she given you?" he continued hurriedly, evidently no +longer trying to show the advantages of peace and discuss its +possibility, but only to prove his own rectitude and power and +Alexander's errors and duplicity. + +The commencement of his speech had obviously been made with the +intention of demonstrating the advantages of his position and +showing that he was nevertheless willing to negotiate. But he had +begun talking, and the more he talked the less could he control his +words. + +The whole purport of his remarks now was evidently to exalt +himself and insult Alexander- just what he had least desired at the +commencement of the interview. + +"I hear you have made peace with Turkey?" + +Balashev bowed his head affirmatively. + +"Peace has been concluded..." he began. + +But Napoleon did not let him speak. He evidently wanted to do all +the talking himself, and continued to talk with the sort of +eloquence and unrestrained irritability to which spoiled people are so +prone. + +"Yes, I know you have made peace with the Turks without obtaining +Moldavia and Wallachia; I would have given your sovereign those +provinces as I gave him Finland. Yes," he went on, "I promised and +would have given the Emperor Alexander Moldavia and Wallachia, and now +he won't have those splendid provinces. Yet he might have united +them to his empire and in a single reign would have extended Russia +from the Gulf of Bothnia to the mouths of the Danube. Catherine the +Great could not have done more," said Napoleon, growing more and +more excited as he paced up and down the room, repeating to Balashev +almost the very words he had used to Alexander himself at Tilsit. "All +that, he would have owed to my friendship. Oh, what a splendid reign!" +he repeated several times, then paused, drew from his pocket a gold +snuffbox, lifted it to his nose, and greedily sniffed at it. + +"What a splendid reign the Emperor Alexander's might have been!" + +He looked compassionately at Balashev, and as soon as the latter +tried to make some rejoinder hastily interrupted him. + +"What could he wish or look for that he would not have obtained +through my friendship?" demanded Napoleon, shrugging his shoulders +in perplexity. "But no, he has preferred to surround himself with my +enemies, and with whom? With Steins, Armfeldts, Bennigsens, and +Wintzingerodes! Stein, a traitor expelled from his own country; +Armfeldt, a rake and an intriguer; Wintzingerode, a fugitive French +subject; Bennigsen, rather more of a soldier than the others, but +all the same an incompetent who was unable to do anything in 1807 +and who should awaken terrible memories in the Emperor Alexander's +mind.... Granted that were they competent they might be made use +of," continued Napoleon- hardly able to keep pace in words with the +rush of thoughts that incessantly sprang up, proving how right and +strong he was (in his perception the two were one and the same)- +"but they are not even that! They are neither fit for war nor peace! +Barclay is said to be the most capable of them all, but I cannot say +so, judging by his first movements. And what are they doing, all these +courtiers? Pfuel proposes, Armfeldt disputes, Bennigsen considers, and +Barclay, called on to act, does not know what to decide on, and time +passes bringing no result. Bagration alone is a military man. He's +stupid, but he has experience, a quick eye, and resolution.... And +what role is your young monarch playing in that monstrous crowd? +They compromise him and throw on him the responsibility for all that +happens. A sovereign should not be with the army unless he is a +general!" said Napoleon, evidently uttering these words as a direct +challenge to the Emperor. He knew how Alexander desired to be a +military commander. + +"The campaign began only a week ago, and you haven't even been +able to defend Vilna. You are cut in two and have been driven out of +the Polish provinces. Your army is grumbling." + +"On the contrary, Your Majesty," said Balashev, hardly able to +remember what had been said to him and following these verbal +fireworks with difficulty, "the troops are burning with eagerness..." + +"I know everything!" Napoleon interrupted him. "I know everything. I +know the number of your battalions as exactly as I know my own. You +have not two hundred thousand men, and I have three times that number. +I give you my word of honor," said Napoleon, forgetting that his +word of honor could carry no weight- "I give you my word of honor that +I have five hundred and thirty thousand men this side of the +Vistula. The Turks will be of no use to you; they are worth nothing +and have shown it by making peace with you. As for the Swedes- it is +their fate to be governed by mad kings. Their king was insane and they +changed him for another- Bernadotte, who promptly went mad- for no +Swede would ally himself with Russia unless he were mad." + +Napoleon grinned maliciously and again raised his snuffbox to his +nose. + +Balashev knew how to reply to each of Napoleon's remarks, and +would have done so; he continually made the gesture of a man wishing +to say something, but Napoleon always interrupted him. To the +alleged insanity of the Swedes, Balashev wished to reply that when +Russia is on her side Sweden is practically an island: but Napoleon +gave an angry exclamation to drown his voice. Napoleon was in that +state of irritability in which a man has to talk, talk, and talk, +merely to convince himself that he is in the right. Balashev began +to feel uncomfortable: as envoy he feared to demean his dignity and +felt the necessity of replying; but, as a man, he shrank before the +transport of groundless wrath that had evidently seized Napoleon. He +knew that none of the words now uttered by Napoleon had any +significance, and that Napoleon himself would be ashamed of them +when he came to his senses. Balashev stood with downcast eyes, looking +at the movements of Napoleon's stout legs and trying to avoid +meeting his eyes. + +"But what do I care about your allies?" said Napoleon. "I have +allies- the Poles. There are eighty thousand of them and they fight +like lions. And there will be two hundred thousand of them." + +And probably still more perturbed by the fact that he had uttered +this obvious falsehood, and that Balashev still stood silently +before him in the same attitude of submission to fate, Napoleon +abruptly turned round, drew close to Balashev's face, and, +gesticulating rapidly and energetically with his white hands, almost +shouted: + +"Know that if you stir up Prussia against me, I'll wipe it off the +map of Europe!" he declared, his face pale and distorted by anger, and +he struck one of his small hands energetically with the other. "Yes, I +will throw you back beyond the Dvina and beyond the Dnieper, and +will re-erect against you that barrier which it was criminal and blind +of Europe to allow to be destroyed. Yes, that is what will happen to +you. That is what you have gained by alienating me!" And he walked +silently several times up and down the room, his fat shoulders +twitching. + +He put his snuffbox into his waistcoat pocket, took it out again, +lifted it several times to his nose, and stopped in front of Balashev. +He paused, looked ironically straight into Balashev's eyes, and said +in a quiet voice: + +"And yet what a splendid reign your master might have had!" + +Balashev, feeling it incumbent on him to reply, said that from the +Russian side things did not appear in so gloomy a light. Napoleon +was silent, still looking derisively at him and evidently not +listening to him. Balashev said that in Russia the best results were +expected from the war. Napoleon nodded condescendingly, as if to +say, "I know it's your duty to say that, but you don't believe it +yourself. I have convinced you." + +When Balashev had ended, Napoleon again took out his snuffbox, +sniffed at it, and stamped his foot twice on the floor as a signal. +The door opened, a gentleman-in-waiting, bending respectfully, +handed the Emperor his hat and gloves; another brought hima pocket +handkerchief. Napoleon, without giving them a glance, turned to +Balashev: + +"Assure the Emperor Alexander from me," said he, taking his hat, +"that I am as devoted to him as before: I know him thoroughly and very +highly esteem his lofty qualities. I will detain you no longer, +General; you shall receive my letter to the Emperor." + +And Napoleon went quickly to the door. Everyone in the reception +room rushed forward and descended the staircase. + +CHAPTER VII + +After all that Napoleon had said to him- those bursts of anger and +the last dryly spoken words: "I will detain you no longer, General; +you shall receive my letter," Balashev felt convinced that Napoleon +would not wish to see him, and would even avoid another meeting with +him- an insulted envoy- especially as he had witnessed his unseemly +anger. But, to his surprise, Balashev received, through Duroc, an +invitation to dine with the Emperor that day. + +Bessieres, Caulaincourt, and Berthier were present at that dinner. + +Napoleon met Balashev cheerfully and amiably. He not only showed +no sign of constraint or self-reproach on account of his outburst that +morning, but, on the contrary, tried to reassure Balashev. It was +evident that he had long been convinced that it was impossible for him +to make a mistake, and that in his perception whatever he did was +right, not because it harmonized with any idea of right and wrong, but +because he did it. + +The Emperor was in very good spirits after his ride through Vilna, +where crowds of people had rapturously greeted and followed him. +From all the windows of the streets through which he rode, rugs, +flags, and his monogram were displayed, and the Polish ladies, +welcoming him, waved their handkerchiefs to him. + +At dinner, having placed Balashev beside him, Napoleon not only +treated him amiably but behaved as if Balashev were one of his own +courtiers, one of those who sympathized with his plans and ought to +rejoice at his success. In the course of conversation he mentioned +Moscow and questioned Balashev about the Russian capital, not merely +as an interested traveler asks about a new city he intends to visit, +but as if convinced that Balashev, as a Russian, must be flattered +by his curiosity. + +"How many inhabitants are there in Moscow? How many houses? Is it +true that Moscow is called 'Holy Moscow'? How many churches are +there in Moscow?" he asked. + +And receiving the reply that there were more than two hundred +churches, he remarked: + +"Why such a quantity of churches?" + +"The Russians are very devout," replied Balashev. + +"But a large number of monasteries and churches is always a sign +of the backwardness of a people," said Napoleon, turning to +Caulaincourt for appreciation of this remark. + +Balashev respectfully ventured to disagree with the French Emperor. + +"Every country has its own character," said he. + +"But nowhere in Europe is there anything like that," said Napoleon. + +"I beg your Majesty's pardon," returned Balashev, "besides Russia +there is Spain, where there are also many churches and monasteries." + +This reply of Balashev's, which hinted at the recent defeats of +the French in Spain, was much appreciated when he related it at +Alexander's court, but it was not much appreciated at Napoleon's +dinner, where it passed unnoticed. + +The uninterested and perplexed faces of the marshals showed that +they were puzzled as to what Balashev's tone suggested. "If there is a +point we don't see it, or it is not at all witty," their expressions +seemed to say. So little was his rejoinder appreciated that Napoleon +did not notice it at all and naively asked Balashev through what towns +the direct road from there to Moscow passed. Balashev, who was on +the alert all through the dinner, replied that just as "all roads lead +to Rome," so all roads lead to Moscow: there were many roads, and +"among them the road through Poltava, which Charles XII chose." +Balashev involuntarily flushed with pleasure at the aptitude of this +reply, but hardly had he uttered the word Poltava before +Caulaincourt began speaking of the badness of the road from Petersburg +to Moscow and of his Petersburg reminiscences. + +After dinner they went to drink coffee in Napoleon's study, which +four days previously had been that of the Emperor Alexander. +Napoleon sat down, toying with his Sevres coffee cup, and motioned +Balashev to a chair beside him. + +Napoleon was in that well-known after-dinner mood which, more than +any reasoned cause, makes a man contented with himself and disposed to +consider everyone his friend. It seemed to him that he was +surrounded by men who adored him: and he felt convinced that, after +his dinner, Balashev too was his friend and worshiper. Napoleon turned +to him with a pleasant, though slightly ironic, smile. + +"They tell me this is the room the Emperor Alexander occupied? +Strange, isn't it, General?" he said, evidently not doubting that this +remark would be agreeable to his hearer since it went to prove his, +Napoleon's, superiority to Alexander. + +Balashev made no reply and bowed and bowed his head in silence. + +"Yes. Four days ago in this room, Wintzingerode and Stein were +deliberating," continued Napoleon with the same derisive and +self-confident smile. "What I can't understand," he went on, "is +that the Emperor Alexander has surrounded himself with my personal +enemies. That I do not... understand. Has he not thought that I may +the same?" and he turned inquiringly to Balashev, and evidently this +thought turned him back on to the track of his morning's anger, +which was still fresh in him. + +"And let him know that I will do so!" said Napoleon, rising and +pushing his cup away with his hand. "I'll drive all his Wurttemberg, +Baden, and Weimar relations out of Germany.... Yes. I'll drive them +out. Let him prepare an asylum for them in Russia!" + +Balashev bowed his head with an air indicating that he would like to +make his bow and leave, and only listened because he could not help +hearing what was said to him. Napoleon did not notice this expression; +he treated Balashev not as an envoy from his enemy, but as a man now +fully devoted to him and who must rejoice at his former master's +humiliation. + +"And why has the Emperor Alexander taken command of the armies? What +is the good of that? War is my profession, but his business is to +reign and not to command armies! Why has he taken on himself such a +responsibility?" + +Again Napoleon brought out his snuffbox, paced several times up +and down the room in silence, and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, +went up to Balashev and with a slight smile, as confidently, +quickly, and simply as if he were doing something not merely +important but pleasing to Balashev, he raised his hand to the +forty-year-old Russian general's face and, taking him by the ear, +pulled it gently, smiling with his lips only. + +To have one's ear pulled by the Emperor was considered the +greatest honor and mark of favor at the French court. + +"Well, adorer and courtier of the Emperor Alexander, why don't you +say anything?" said he, as if it was ridiculous, in his presence, to +be the adorer and courtier of anyone but himself, Napoleon. "Are the +horses ready for the general?" he added, with a slight inclination +of his head in reply to Balashev's bow. "Let him have mine, he has a +long way to go!" + +The letter taken by Balashev was the last Napoleon sent to +Alexander. Every detail of the interview was communicated to the +Russian monarch, and the war began... + +CHAPTER VIII + +After his interview with Pierre in Moscow, Prince Andrew went to +Petersburg, on business as he told his family, but really to meet +Anatole Kuragin whom he felt it necessary to encounter. On reaching +Petersburg he inquired for Kuragin but the latter had already left the +city. Pierre had warned his brother-in-law that Prince Andrew was on +his track. Anatole Kuragin promptly obtained an appointment from the +Minister of War and went to join the army in Moldavia. While in +Petersburg Prince Andrew met Kutuzov, his former commander who was +always well disposed toward him, and Kutuzov suggested that he +should accompany him to the army in Moldavia, to which the old general +had been appointed commander in chief. So Prince Andrew, having +received an appointment on the headquarters staff, left for Turkey. + +Prince Andrew did not think it proper to write and challenge +Kuragin. He thought that if he challenged him without some fresh cause +it might compromise the young Countess Rostova and so he wanted to +meet Kuragin personally in order to find a fresh pretext for a duel. +But he again failed to meet Kuragin in Turkey, for soon after Prince +Andrew arrived, the latter returned to Russia. In a new country, +amid new conditions, Prince Andrew found life easier to bear. After +his betrothed had broken faith with him- which he felt the more +acutely the more he tried to conceal its effects- the surroundings +in which he had been happy became trying to him, and the freedom and +independence he had once prized so highly were still more so. Not only +could he no longer think the thoughts that had first come to him as he +lay gazing at the sky on the field of Austerlitz and had later +enlarged upon with Pierre, and which had filled his solitude at +Bogucharovo and then in Switzerland and Rome, but he even dreaded to +recall them and them and the bright and boundless horizons they had +revealed. He was now concerned only with the nearest practical matters +unrelated to his past interests, and he seized on these the more +eagerly the more those past interests were closed to him. It was as if +that lofty, infinite canopy of heaven that had once towered above +him had suddenly turned into a low, solid vault that weighed him down, +in which all was clear, but nothing eternal or mysterious. + +Of the activities that presented themselves to him, army service was +the simplest and most familiar. As a general on duty on Kutuzov's +staff, he applied himself to business with zeal and perseverance and +surprised Kutuzov by his willingness and accuracy in work. Not +having found Kuragin in Turkey, Prince Andrew did not think it +necessary to rush back to Russia after him, but all the same he knew +that however long it might be before he met Kuragin, despite his +contempt for him and despite all the proofs he deduced to convince +himself that it was not worth stooping to a conflict with him- he knew +that when he did meet him he would not be able to resist calling him +out, any more than a ravenous man can help snatching at food. And +the consciousness that the insult was not yet avenged, that his rancor +was still unspent, weighed on his heart and poisoned the artificial +tranquillity which he managed to obtain in Turkey by means of +restless, plodding, and rather vainglorious and ambitious activity. + +In the year 1812, when news of the war with Napoleon reached +Bucharest- where Kutuzov had been living for two months, passing his +days and nights with a Wallachian woman- Prince Andrew asked Kutuzov +to transfer him to the Western Army. Kutuzov, who was already weary of +Bolkonski's activity which seemed to reproach his own idleness, very +readily let him go and gave him a mission to Barclay de Tolly. + +Before joining the Western Army which was then, in May, encamped +at Drissa, Prince Andrew visited Bald Hills which was directly on +his way, being only two miles off the Smolensk highroad. During the +last three years there had been so many changes in his life, he had +thought, felt, and seen so much (having traveled both in the east +and the west), that on reaching Bald Hills it struck him as strange +and unexpected to find the way of life there unchanged and still the +same in every detail. He entered through the gates with their stone +pillars and drove up the avenue leading to the house as if he were +entering an enchanted, sleeping castle. The same old stateliness, +the same cleanliness, the same stillness reigned there, and inside +there was the same furniture, the same walls, sounds, and smell, and +the same timid faces, only somewhat older. Princess Mary was still the +same timid, plain maiden getting on in years, uselessly and +joylessly passing the best years of her life in fear and constant +suffering. Mademoiselle Bourienne was the same coquettish, +self-satisfied girl, enjoying every moment of her existence and full +of joyous hopes for the future. She had merely become more +self-confident, Prince Andrew thought. Dessalles, the tutor he had +brought from Switzerland, was wearing a coat of Russian cut and +talking broken Russian to the servants, but was still the same +narrowly intelligent, conscientious, and pedantic preceptor. The old +prince had changed in appearance only by the loss of a tooth, which +left a noticeable gap on one side of his mouth; in character he was +the same as ever, only showing still more irritability and +skepticism as to what was happening in the world. Little Nicholas +alone had changed. He had grown, become rosier, had curly dark hair, +and, when merry and laughing, quite unconsciously lifted the upper lip +of his pretty little mouth just as the little princess used to do. +He alone did not obey the law of immutability in the enchanted, +sleeping castle. But though externally all remained as of old, the +inner relations of all these people had changed since Prince Andrew +had seen them last. The household was divided into two alien and +hostile camps, who changed their habits for his sake and only met +because he was there. To the one camp belonged the old prince, +Madmoiselle Bourienne, and the architect; to the other Princess +Mary, Dessalles, little Nicholas, and all the old nurses and maids. + +During his stay at Bald Hills all the family dined together, but +they were ill at ease and Prince Andrew felt that he was a visitor for +whose sake an exception was being made and that his presence made them +all feel awkward. Involuntarily feeling this at dinner on the first +day, he was taciturn, and the old prince noticing this also became +morosely dumb and retired to his apartments directly after dinner. +In the evening, when Prince Andrew went to him and, trying to rouse +him, began to tell him of the young Count Kamensky's campaign, the old +prince began unexpectedly to talk about Princess Mary, blaming her for +her superstitions and her dislike of Mademoiselle Bourienne, who, he +said, was the only person really attached to him. + +The old prince said that if he was ill it was only because of +Princess Mary: that she purposely worried and irritated him, and +that by indulgence and silly talk she was spoiling little Prince +Nicholas. The old prince knew very well that he tormented his daughter +and that her life was very hard, but he also knew that he could not +help tormenting her and that she deserved it. "Why does Prince Andrew, +who sees this, say nothing to me about his sister? Does he think me +a scoundrel, or an old fool who, without any reason, keeps his own +daughter at a distance and attaches this Frenchwoman to himself? He +doesn't understand, so I must explain it, and he must hear me out," +thought the old prince. And he began explaining why he could not put +up with his daughter's unreasonable character. + +"If you ask me," said Prince Andrew, without looking up (he was +censuring his father for the first time in his life), "I did not +wish to speak about it, but as you ask me I will give you my frank +opinion. If there is any misunderstanding and discord between you +and Mary, I can't blame her for it at all. I know how she loves and +respects you. Since you ask me," continued Prince Andrew, becoming +irritable- as he was always liable to do of late- "I can only say that +if there are any misunderstandings they are caused by that worthless +woman, who is not fit to be my sister's companion." + +The old man at first stared fixedly at his son, and an unnatural +smile disclosed the fresh gap between his teeth to which Prince Andrew +could not get accustomed. + +"What companion, my dear boy? Eh? You've already been talking it +over! Eh?" + +"Father, I did not want to judge," said Prince Andrew, in a hard and +bitter tone, "but you challenged me, and I have said, and always shall +say, that Mary is not to blame, but those to blame- the one to +blame- is that Frenchwoman." + +"Ah, he has passed judgment... passed judgement!" said the old man +in a low voice and, as it seemed to Prince Andrew, with some +embarrassment, but then he suddenly jumped up and cried: "Be off, be +off! Let not a trace of you remain here!..." + +Prince Andrew wished to leave at once, but Princess Mary persuaded +him to stay another day. That day he did not see his father, who did +not leave his room and admitted no one but Mademoiselle Bourienne +and Tikhon, but asked several times whether his son had gone. Next +day, before leaving, Prince Andrew went to his son's rooms. The boy, +curly-headed like his mother and glowing with health, sat on his knee, +and Prince Andrew began telling him the story of Bluebeard, but fell +into a reverie without finishing the story. He thought not of this +pretty child, his son whom he held on his knee, but of himself. He +sought in himself either remorse for having angered his father or +regret at leaving home for the first time in his life on bad terms +with him, and was horrified to find neither. What meant still more +to him was that he sought and did not find in himself the former +tenderness for his son which he had hoped to reawaken by caressing the +boy and taking him on his knee. + +"Well, go on!" said his son. + +Prince Andrew, without replying, put him down from his knee and went +out of the room. + +As soon as Prince Andrew had given up his daily occupations, and +especially on returning to the old conditions of life amid which he +had been happy, weariness of life overcame him with its former +intensity, and he hastened to escape from these memories and to find +some work as soon as possible. + +"So you've decided to go, Andrew?" asked his sister. + +"Thank God that I can," replied Prince Andrew. "I am very sorry +you can't." + +"Why do you say that?" replied Princess Mary. "Why do you say +that, when you are going to this terrible war, and he is so old? +Mademoiselle Bourienne says he has been asking about you...." + +As soon as she began to speak of that, her lips trembled and her +tears began to fall. Prince Andrew turned away and began pacing the +room. + +"Ah, my God! my God! When one thinks who and what- what trash- can +cause people misery!" he said with a malignity that alarmed Princess +Mary. + +She understood that when speaking of "trash" he referred not only to +Mademoiselle Bourienne, the cause of her misery, but also to the man +who had ruined his own happiness. + +"Andrew! One thing I beg, I entreat of you!" she said, touching +his elbow and looking at him with eyes that shone through her tears. +"I understand you" (she looked down). "Don't imagine that sorrow is +the work of men. Men are His tools." She looked a little above +Prince Andrew's head with the confident, accustomed look with which +one looks at the place where a familiar portrait hangs. "Sorrow is +sent by Him, not by men. Men are His instruments, they are not to +blame. If you think someone has wronged you, forget it and forgive! We +have no right to punish. And then you will know the happiness of +forgiving." + +"If I were a woman I would do so, Mary. That is a woman's virtue. +But a man should not and cannot forgive and forget," he replied, and +though till that moment he had not been thinking of Kuragin, all his +unexpended anger suddenly swelled up in his heart. + +"If Mary is already persuading me forgive, it means that I ought +long ago to have punished him," he thought. And giving her no +further reply, he began thinking of the glad vindictive moment when he +would meet Kuragin who he knew was now in the army. + +Princess Mary begged him to stay one day more, saying that she +knew how unhappy her father would be if Andrew left without being +reconciled to him, but Prince Andrew replied that he would probably +soon be back again from the army and would certainly write to his +father, but that the longer he stayed now the more embittered their +differences would become. + +"Good-by, Andrew! Remember that misfortunes come from God, and men +are never to blame," were the last words he heard from his sister when +he took leave of her. + +"Then it must be so!" thought Prince Andrew as he drove out of the +avenue from the house at Bald Hills. "She, poor innocent creature, +is left to be victimized by an old man who has outlived his wits. +The old man feels he is guilty, but cannot change himself. My boy is +growing up and rejoices in life, in which like everybody else he +will deceive or be deceived. And I am off to the army. Why? I myself +don't know. I want to meet that man whom I despise, so as to give +him a chance to kill and laugh at me! + +These conditions of life had been the same before, but then they +were all connected, while now they had all tumbled to pieces. Only +senseless things, lacking coherence, presented themselves one after +another to Prince Andrew's mind. + +CHAPTER IX + +Prince Andrew reached the general headquarters of the army at the +end of June. The first army, with which was the Emperor, occupied +the fortified camp at Drissa; the second army was retreating, trying +to effect a junction with the first one from which it was said to be +cut off by large French forces. Everyone was dissatisfied with the +general course of affairs in the Russian army, but no one +anticipated any danger of invasion of the Russian provinces, and no +one thought the war would extend farther than the western, the Polish, +provinces. + +Prince Andrew found Barclay de Tolly, to whom he had been +assigned, on the bank of the Drissa. As there was not a single town or +large village in the vicinity of the camp, the immense number of +generals and courtiers accompanying the army were living in the best +houses of the villages on both sides of the river, over a radius of +six miles. Barclay de Tolly was quartered nearly three miles from +the Emperor. He received Bolkonski stiffly and coldly and told him +in his foreign accent that he would mention him to the Emperor for a +decision as to his employment, but asked him meanwhile to remain on +his staff. Anatole Kuragin, whom Prince Andrew had hoped to find +with the army, was not there. He had gone to Petersburg, but Prince +Andrew was glad to hear this. His mind was occupied by the interests +of the center that was conducting a gigantic war, and he was glad to +be free for a while from the distraction caused by the thought of +Kuragin. During the first four days, while no duties were required +of him, Prince Andrew rode round the whole fortified camp and, by +the aid of his own knowledge and by talks with experts, tried to +form a definite opinion about it. But the question whether the camp +was advantageous or disadvantageous remained for him undecided. +Already from his military experience and what he had seen in the +Austrian campaign, he had come to the conclusion that in war the +most deeply considered plans have no significance and that all depends +on the way unexpected movements of the enemy- that cannot be foreseen- +are met, and on how and by whom the whole matter is handled. To +clear up this last point for himself, Prince Andrew, utilizing his +position and acquaintances, tried to fathom the character of the +control of the army and of the men and parties engaged in it, and he +deduced for himself the following of the state of affairs. + +While the Emperor had still been at Vilna, the forces had been +divided into three armies. First, the army under Barclay de Tolly, +secondly, the army under Bagration, and thirdly, the one commanded +by Tormasov. The Emperor was with the first army, but not as commander +in chief. In the orders issued it was stated, not that the Emperor +would take command, but only that he would be with the army. The +Emperor, moreover, had with him not a commander in chief's staff but +the imperial headquarters staff. In attendance on him was the head +of the imperial staff, Quartermaster General Prince Volkonski, as well +as generals, imperial aides-de-camp, diplomatic officials, and a large +number of foreigners, but not the army staff. Besides these, there +were in attendance on the Emperor without any definite appointments: +Arakcheev, the ex-Minister of War; Count Bennigsen, the senior general +in rank; the Grand Duke Tsarevich Constantine Pavlovich; Count +Rumyantsev, the Chancellor; Stein, a former Prussian minister; +Armfeldt, a Swedish general; Pfuel, the chief author of the plan of +campaign; Paulucci, an adjutant general and Sardinian emigre; +Wolzogen- and many others. Though these men had no military +appointment in the army, their position gave them influence, and often +a corps commander, or even the commander in chief, did not know in +what capacity he was questioned by Bennigsen, the Grand Duke, +Arakcheev, or Prince Volkonski, or was given this or that advice and +did not know whether a certain order received in the form of advice +emanated from the man who gave it or from the Emperor and whether it +had to be executed or not. But this was only the external condition; +the essential significance of the presence of the Emperor and of all +these people, from a courtier's point of view (and in an Emperor's +vicinity all became courtiers), was clear to everyone. It was this: +the Emperor did not assume the title of commander in chief, but +disposed of all the armies; the men around him were his assistants. +Arakcheev was a faithful custodian to enforce order and acted as the +sovereign's bodyguard. Bennigsen was a landlord in the Vilna +province who appeared to be doing the honors of the district, but +was in reality a good general, useful as an adviser and ready at +hand to replace Barclay. The Grand Duke was there because it suited +him to be. The ex-Minister Stein was there because his advice was +useful and the Emperor Alexander held him in high esteem personally. +Armfeldt virulently hated Napoleon and was a general full of +self-confidence, a quality that always influenced Alexander. +Paulucci was there because he was bold and decided in speech. The +adjutants general were there because they always accompanied the +Emperor, and lastly and chiefly Pfuel was there because he had drawn +up the plan of campaign against Napoleon and, having induced Alexander +to believe in the efficacy of that plan, was directing the whole +business of the war. With Pfuel was Wolzogen, who expressed Pfuel's +thoughts in a more comprehensible way than Pfuel himself (who was a +harsh, bookish theorist, self-confident to the point of despising +everyone else) was able to do. + +Besides these Russians and foreigners who propounded new and +unexpected ideas every day- especially the foreigners, who did so with +a boldness characteristic of people employed in a country not their +own- there were many secondary personages accompanying the army +because their principals were there. + +Among the opinions and voices in this immense, restless, +brilliant, and proud sphere, Prince Andrew noticed the following +sharply defined subdivisions of and parties: + +The first party consisted of Pfuel and his adherents- military +theorists who believed in a science of war with immutable laws- laws +of oblique movements, outflankings, and so forth. Pfuel and his +adherents demanded a retirement into the depths of the country in +accordance with precise laws defined by a pseudo-theory of war, and +they saw only barbarism, ignorance, or evil intention in every +deviation from that theory. To this party belonged the foreign nobles, +Wolzogen, Wintzingerode, and others, chiefly Germans. + +The second party was directly opposed to the first; one extreme, +as always happens, was met by representatives of the other. The +members of this party were those who had demanded an advance from +Vilna into Poland and freedom from all prearranged plans. Besides +being advocates of bold action, this section also represented +nationalism, which made them still more one-sided in the dispute. They +were Russians: Bagration, Ermolov (who was beginning to come to the +front), and others. At that time a famous joke of Ermolov's was +being circulated, that as a great favor he had petitioned the +Emperor to make him a German. The men of that party, remembering +Suvorov, said that what one had to do was not to reason, or stick pins +into maps, but to fight, beat the enemy, keep him out of Russia, and +not let the army get discouraged. + +To the third party- in which the Emperor had most confidence- +belonged the courtiers who tried to arrange compromises between the +other two. The members of this party, chiefly civilians and to whom +Arakcheev belonged, thought and said what men who have no +convictions but wish to seem to have some generally say. They said +that undoubtedly war, particularly against such a genius as +Bonaparte (they called him Bonaparte now), needs most deeply devised +plans and profound scientific knowledge and in that respect Pfuel +was a genius, but at the same time it had to be acknowledged that +the theorists are often one sided, and therefore one should not +trust them absolutely, but should also listen to what Pfuel's +opponents and practical men of experience in warfare had to say, and +then choose a middle course. They insisted on the retention of the +camp at Drissa, according to Pfuel's plan, but on changing the +movements of the other armies. Though, by this course, neither one aim +nor the other could be attained, yet it seemed best to the adherents +of this third party. + +Of a fourth opinion the most conspicuous representative was the +Tsarevich, who could not forget his disillusionment at Austerlitz, +where he had ridden out at the head of the Guards, in his casque and +cavalry uniform as to a review, expecting to crush the French +gallantly; but unexpectedly finding himself in the front line had +narrowly escaped amid the general confusion. The men of this party had +both the quality and the defect of frankness in their opinions. They +feared Napoleon, recognized his strength and their own weakness, and +frankly said so. They said: "Nothing but sorrow, shame, and ruin +will come of all this! We have abandoned Vilna and Vitebsk and shall +abandon Drissa. The only reasonable thing left to do is to conclude +peace as soon as possible, before we are turned out of Petersburg." + +This view was very general in the upper army circles and found +support also in Petersburg and from the chancellor, Rumyantsev, who, +for other reasons of state, was in favor of peace. + +The fifth party consisted of those who were adherents of Barclay +de Tolly, not so much as a man but as minister of war and commander in +chief. "Be he what he may" (they always began like that), "he is an +honest, practical man and we have nobody better. Give him real +power, for war cannot be conducted successfully without unity of +command, and he will show what he can do, as he did in Finland. If our +army is well organized and strong and has withdrawn to Drissa +without suffering any defeats, we owe this entirely to Barclay. If +Barclay is now to be superseded by Bennigsen all will be lost, for +Bennigsen showed his incapacity already in 1807." + +The sixth party, the Bennigsenites, said, on the contrary, that at +any rate there was no one more active and experienced than +Bennigsen: "and twist about as you may, you will have to come to +Bennigsen eventually. Let the others make mistakes now!" said they, +arguing that our retirement to Drissa was a most shameful reverse +and an unbroken series of blunders. "The more mistakes that are made +the better. It will at any rate be understood all the sooner that +things cannot go on like this. What is wanted is not some Barclay or +other, but a man like Bennigsen, who made his mark in 1807, and to +whom Napoleon himself did justice- a man whose authority would be +willingly recognized, and Bennigsen is the only such man." + +The seventh party consisted of the sort of people who are always +to be found, especially around young sovereigns, and of whom there +were particularly many round Alexander- generals and imperial +aides-de-camp passionately devoted to the Emperor, not merely as a +monarch but as a man, adoring him sincerely and disinterestedly, as +Rostov had done in 1805, and who saw in him not only all the virtues +but all human capabilities as well. These men, though enchanted with +the sovereign for refusing the command of the army, yet blamed him for +such excessive modesty, and only desired and insisted that their +adored sovereign should abandon his diffidence and openly announce +that he would place himself at the head of the army, gather round +him a commander in chief's staff, and, consulting experienced +theoreticians and practical men where necessary, would himself lead +the troops, whose spirits would thereby be raised to the highest +pitch. + +The eighth and largest group, which in its enormous numbers was to +the others as ninety-nine to one, consisted of men who desired neither +peace nor war, neither an advance nor a defensive camp at the Drissa +or anywhere else, neither Barclay nor the Emperor, neither Pfuel nor +Bennigsen, but only the one most essential thing- as much advantage +and pleasure for themselves as possible. In the troubled waters of +conflicting and intersecting intrigues that eddied about the Emperor's +headquarters, it was possible to succeed in many ways unthinkable at +other times. A man who simply wished to retain his lucrative post +would today agree with Pfuel, tomorrow with his opponent, and the +day after, merely to avoid responsibility or to please the Emperor, +would declare that he had no opinion at all on the matter. Another who +wished to gain some advantage would attract the Emperor's attention by +loudly advocating the very thing the Emperor had hinted at the day +before, and would dispute and shout at the council, beating his breast +and challenging those who did not agree with him to duels, thereby +proving that he was prepared to sacrifice himself for the common good. +A third, in the absence of opponents, between two councils would +simply solicit a special gratuity for his faithful services, well +knowing that at that moment people would be too busy to refuse him. +A fourth while seemingly overwhelmed with work would often come +accidentally under the Emperor's eye. A fifth, to achieve his +long-cherished aim of dining with the Emperor, would stubbornly insist +on the correctness or falsity of some newly emerging opinion and for +this object would produce arguments more or less forcible and correct. + +All the men of this party were fishing for rubles, decorations, +and promotions, and in this pursuit watched only the weathercock of +imperial favor, and directly they noticed it turning in any direction, +this whole drone population of the army began blowing hard that way, +so that it was all the harder for the Emperor to turn it elsewhere. +Amid the uncertainties of the position, with the menace of serious +danger giving a peculiarly threatening character to everything, amid +this vortex of intrigue, egotism, conflict of views and feelings, +and the diversity of race among these people- this eighth and +largest party of those preoccupied with personal interests imparted +great confusion and obscurity to the common task. Whatever question +arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their +buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum +drowned and obscured the voices of those who were disputing honestly. + +From among all these parties, just at the time Prince Andrew reached +the army, another, a ninth party, was being formed and was beginning +to raise its voice. This was the party of the elders, reasonable men +experienced and capable in state affairs, who, without sharing any +of those conflicting opinions, were able to take a detached view of +what was going on at the staff at headquarters and to consider means +of escape from this muddle, indecision, intricacy, and weakness. + +The men of this party said and thought that what was wrong +resulted chiefly from the Emperor's presence in the army with his +military court and from the consequent presence there of an +indefinite, conditional, and unsteady fluctuation of relations, +which is in place at court but harmful in an army; that a sovereign +should reign but not command the army, and that the only way out of +the position would be for the Emperor and his court to leave the army; +that the mere presence of the Emperor paralyzed the action of fifty +thousand men required to secure his personal safety, and that the +worst commander in chief if independent would be better than the +very best one trammeled by the presence and authority of the monarch. + +Just at the time Prince Andrew was living unoccupied at Drissa, +Shishkov, the Secretary of State and one of the chief +representatives of this party, wrote a letter to the Emperor which +Arakcheev and Balashev agreed to sign. In this letter, availing +himself of permission given him by the Emperor to discuss the +general course of affairs, he respectfully suggested- on the plea that +it was necessary for the sovereign to arouse a warlike spirit in the +people of the capital- that the Emperor should leave the army. + +That arousing of the people by their sovereign and his call to +them to defend their country- the very incitement which was the +chief cause of Russia's triumph in so far as it was produced by the +Tsar's personal presence in Moscow- was suggested to the Emperor, +and accepted by him, as a pretext for quitting the army. + +CHAPTER X + +This letter had not yet been presented to the Emperor when +Barclay, one day at dinner, informed Bolkonski that the sovereign +wished to see him personally, to question him about Turkey, and that +Prince Andrew was to present himself at Bennigsen's quarters at six +that evening. + +News was received at the Emperor's quarters that very day of a fresh +movement by Napoleon which might endanger the army- news +subsequently found to be false. And that morning Colonel Michaud had +ridden round the Drissa fortifications with the Emperor and had +pointed out to him that this fortified camp constructed by Pfuel, +and till then considered a chef-d'oeuvre of tactical science which +would ensure Napoleon's destruction, was an absurdity, threatening the +destruction of the Russian army. + +Prince Andrew arrived at Bennigsen's quarters- a country gentleman's +house of moderate size, situated on the very banks of the river. +Neither Bennigsen nor the Emperor was there, but Chernyshev, the +Emperor's aide-de-camp, received Bolkonski and informed him that the +Emperor, accompanied by General Bennigsen and Marquis Paulucci, had +gone a second time that day to inspect the fortifications of the +Drissa camp, of the suitability of which serious doubts were beginning +to be felt. + +Chernyshev was sitting at a window in the first room with a French +novel in his hand. This room had probably been a music room; there was +still an organ in it on which some rugs were piled, and in one +corner stood the folding bedstead of Bennigsen's adjutant. This +adjutant was also there and sat dozing on the rolled-up bedding, +evidently exhausted by work or by feasting. Two doors led from the +room, one straight on into what had been the drawing room, and +another, on the right, to the study. Through the first door came the +sound of voices conversing in German and occasionally in French. In +that drawing room were gathered, by the Emperor's wish, not a military +council (the Emperor preferred indefiniteness), but certain persons +whose opinions he wished to know in view of the impending +difficulties. It was not a council of war, but, as it were, a +council to elucidate certain questions for the Emperor personally. +To this semicouncil had been invited the Swedish General Armfeldt, +Adjutant General Wolzogen, Wintzingerode (whom Napoleon had referred +to as a renegade French subject), Michaud, Toll, Count Stein who was +not a military man at all, and Pfuel himself, who, as Prince Andrew +had heard, was the mainspring of the whole affair. Prince Andrew had +an opportunity of getting a good look at him, for Pfuel arrived soon +after himself and, in passing through to the drawing room, stopped a +minute to speak to Chernyshev. + +At first sight, Pfuel, in his ill-made uniform of a Russian general, +which fitted him badly like a fancy costume, seemed familiar to Prince +Andrew, though he saw him now for the first time. There was about +him something of Weyrother, Mack, and Schmidt, and many other German +theorist-generals whom Prince Andrew had seen in 1805, but he was more +typical than any of them. Prince Andrew had never yet seen a German +theorist in whom all the characteristics of those others were united +to such an extent. + +Pfuel was short and very thin but broad-boned, of coarse, robust +build, broad in the hips, and with prominent shoulder blades. His face +was much wrinkled and his eyes deep set. His hair had evidently been +hastily brushed smooth in front of the temples, but stuck up behind in +quaint little tufts. He entered the room, looking restlessly and +angrily around, as if afraid of everything in that large apartment. +Awkwardly holding up his sword, he addressed Chernyshev and asked in +German where the Emperor was. One could see that he wished to pass +through the rooms as quickly as possible, finish with the bows and +greetings, and sit down to business in front of a map, where he +would feel at home. He nodded hurriedly in reply to Chernyshev, and +smiled ironically on hearing that the sovereign was inspecting the +fortifications that he, Pfuel, had planned in accord with his +theory. He muttered something to himself abruptly and in a bass voice, +as self-assured Germans do- it might have been "stupid fellow"... or +"the whole affair will be ruined," or "something absurd will come of +it."... Prince Andrew did not catch what he said and would have passed +on, but Chernyshev introduced him to Pfuel, remarking that Prince +Andrew was just back from Turkey where the war had terminated so +fortunately. Pfuel barely glanced- not so much at Prince Andrew as +past him- and said, with a laugh: "That must have been a fine tactical +war"; and, laughing contemptuously, went on into the room from which +the sound of voices was heard. + +Pfuel, always inclined to be irritably sarcastic, was particularly +disturbed that day, evidently by the fact that they had dared to +inspect and criticize his camp in his absence. From this short +interview with Pfuel, Prince Andrew, thanks to his Austerlitz +experiences, was able to form a clear conception of the man. Pfuel was +one of those hopelessly and immutably self-confident men, +self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, +because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract +notion- science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. +A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, +both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An +Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized +state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what +he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is +undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is +excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is +self-assured just because he knows nothing does not want to know +anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The +German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive +than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth- +science- which he himself has invented but which is for him the +absolute truth. + +Pfuel was evidently of that sort. He had a science- the theory of +oblique movements deduced by him from the history of Frederick the +Great's wars, and all he came across in the history of more recent +warfare seemed to him absurd and barbarous- monstrous collisions in +which so many blunders were committed by both sides that these wars +could not be called wars, they did not accord with the theory, and +therefore could not serve as material for science. + +In 1806 Pfuel had been one of those responsible, for the plan of +campaign that ended in Jena and Auerstadt, but he did not see the +least proof of the fallibility of his theory in the disasters of +that war. On the contrary, the deviations made from his theory were, +in his opinion, the sole cause of the whole disaster, and with +characteristically gleeful sarcasm he would remark, "There, I said the +whole affair would go to the devil!" Pfuel was one of those +theoreticians who so love their theory that they lose sight of the +theory's object- its practical application. His love of theory made +him hate everything practical, and he would not listen to it. He was +even pleased by failures, for failures resulting from deviations in +practice from the theory only proved to him the accuracy of his +theory. + +He said a few words to Prince Andrew and Chernyshev about the +present war, with the air of a man who knows beforehand that all +will go wrong, and who is not displeased that it should be so. The +unbrushed tufts of hair sticking up behind and the hastily brushed +hair on his temples expressed this most eloquently. + +He passed into the next room, and the deep, querulous sounds of +his voice were at once heard from there. + +CHAPTER XI + +Prince Andrew's eyes were still following Pfuel out of the room when +Count Bennigsen entered hurriedly, and nodding to Bolkonski, but not +pausing, went into the study, giving instructions to his adjutant as +he went. The Emperor was following him, and Bennigsen had hastened +on to make some preparations and to be ready to receive the sovereign. +Chernyshev and Prince Andrew went out into the porch, where the +Emperor, who looked fatigued, was dismounting. Marquis Paulucci was +talking to him with particular warmth and the Emperor, with his head +bent to the left, was listening with a dissatisfied air. The Emperor +moved forward evidently wishing to end the conversation, but the +flushed and excited Italian, oblivious of decorum, followed him and +continued to speak. + +"And as for the man who advised forming this camp- the Drissa camp," +said Paulucci, as the Emperor mounted the steps and noticing Prince +Andrew scanned his unfamiliar face, "as to that person, sire..." +continued Paulucci, desperately, apparently unable to restrain +himself, "the man who advised the Drissa camp- I see no alternative +but the lunatic asylum or the gallows!" + +Without heeding the end of the Italian's remarks, and as though +not hearing them, the Emperor, recognizing Bolkonski, addressed him +graciously. + +"I am very glad to see you! Go in there where they are meeting, +and wait for me." + +The Emperor went into the study. He was followed by Prince Peter +Mikhaylovich Volkonski and Baron Stein, and the door closed behind +them. Prince Andrew, taking advantage of the Emperor's permission, +accompanied Paulucci, whom he had known in Turkey, into the drawing +room where the council was assembled. + +Prince Peter Mikhaylovich Volkonski occupied the position, as it +were, of chief of the Emperor's staff. He came out of the study into +the drawing room with some maps which he spread on a table, and put +questions on which he wished to hear the opinion of the gentlemen +present. What had happened was that news (which afterwards proved to +be false) had been received during the night of a movement by the +French to outflank the Drissa camp. + +The first to speak was General Armfeldt who, to meet the +difficulty that presented itself, unexpectedly proposed a perfectly +new position away from the Petersburg and Moscow roads. The reason for +this was inexplicable (unless he wished to show that he, too, could +have an opinion), but he urged that at this point the army should +unite and there await the enemy. It was plain that Armfeldt had +thought out that plan long ago and now expounded it not so much to +answer the questions put- which, in fact, his plan did not answer- +as to avail himself of the opportunity to air it. It was one of the +millions of proposals, one as good as another, that could be made as +long as it was quite unknown what character the war would take. Some +disputed his arguments, others defended them. Young Count Toll +objected to the Swedish general's views more warmly than anyone +else, and in the course of the dispute drew from his side pocket a +well-filled notebook, which he asked permission to read to them. In +these voluminous notes Toll suggested another scheme, totally +different from Armfeldt's or Pfuel's plan of campaign. In answer to +Toll, Paulucci suggested an advance and an attack, which, he urged, +could alone extricate us from the present uncertainty and from the +trap (as he called the Drissa camp) in which we were situated. + +During all these discussions Pfuel and his interpreter, Wolzogen +(his "bridge" in court relations), were silent. Pfuel only snorted +contemptuously and turned away, to show that he would never demean +himself by replying to such nonsense as he was now hearing. So when +Prince Volkonski, who was in the chair, called on him to give his +opinion, he merely said: + +"Why ask me? General Armfeldt has proposed a splendid position +with an exposed rear, or why not this Italian gentleman's attack- very +fine, or a retreat, also good! Why ask me?" said he. "Why, you +yourselves know everything better than I do." + +But when Volkonski said, with a frown, that it was in the +Emperor's name that he asked his opinion, Pfuel rose and, suddenly +growing animated, began to speak: + +"Everything has been spoiled, everything muddled, everybody +thought they knew better than I did, and now you come to me! How +mend matters? There is nothing to mend! The principles laid down by me +must be strictly adhered to," said he, drumming on the table with +his bony fingers. "What is the difficulty? Nonsense, childishness!" + +He went up to the map and speaking rapidly began proving that no +eventuality could alter the efficiency of the Drissa camp, that +everything had been foreseen, and that if the enemy were really +going to outflank it, the enemy would inevitably be destroyed. + +Paulucci, who did not know German, began questioning him in +French. Wolzogen came to the assistance of his chief, who spoke French +badly, and began translating for him, hardly able to keep pace with +Pfuel, who was rapidly demonstrating that not only all that had +happened, but all that could happen, had been foreseen in his +scheme, and that if there were now any difficulties the whole fault +lay in the fact that his plan had not been precisely executed. He kept +laughing sarcastically, he demonstrated, and at last contemptuously +ceased to demonstrate, like a mathematician who ceases to prove in +various ways the accuracy of a problem that has already been proved. +Wolzogen took his place and continued to explain his views in +French, every now and then turning to Pfuel and saying, "Is it not so, +your excellency?" But Pfuel, like a man heated in a fight who +strikes those on his own side, shouted angrily at his own supporter, +Wolzogen: + +"Well, of course, what more is there to explain?" + +Paulucci and Michaud both attacked Wolzogen simultaneously in +French. Armfeldt addressed Pfuel in German. Toll explained to +Volkonski in Russian. Prince Andrew listened and observed in silence. + +Of all these men Prince Andrew sympathized most with Pfuel, angry, +determined, and absurdly self-confident as he was. Of all those +present, evidently he alone was not seeking anything for himself, +nursed no hatred against anyone, and only desired that the plan, +formed on a theory arrived at by years of toil, should be carried out. +He was ridiculous, and unpleasantly sarcastic, but yet he inspired +involuntary respect by his boundless devotion to an idea. Besides +this, the remarks of all except Pfuel had one common trait that had +not been noticeable at the council of war in 1805: there was now a +panic fear of Napoleon's genius, which, though concealed, was +noticeable in every rejoinder. Everything was assumed to be possible +for Napoleon, they expected him from every side, and invoked his +terrible name to shatter each other's proposals. Pfuel alone seemed to +consider Napoleon a barbarian like everyone else who opposed his +theory. But besides this feeling of respect, Pfuel evoked pity in +Prince Andrew. From the tone in which the courtiers addressed him +and the way Paulucci had allowed himself to speak of him to the +Emperor, but above all from a certain desperation in Pfuel's own +expressions, it was clear that the others knew, and Pfuel himself +felt, that his fall was at hand. And despite his self-confidence and +grumpy German sarcasm he was pitiable, with his hair smoothly +brushed on the temples and sticking up in tufts behind. Though he +concealed the fact under a show of irritation and contempt, he was +evidently in despair that the sole remaining chance of verifying his +theory by a huge experiment and proving its soundness to the whole +world was slipping away from him. + +The discussions continued a long time, and the longer they lasted +the more heated became the disputes, culminating in shouts and +personalities, and the less was it possible to arrive at any general +conclusion from all that had been said. Prince Andrew, listening to +this polyglot talk and to these surmises, plans, refutations, and +shouts, felt nothing but amazement at what they were saying. A thought +that had long since and often occurred to him during his military +activities- the idea that there is not and cannot be any science of +war, and that therefore there can be no such thing as a military +genius- now appeared to him an obvious truth. "What theory and science +is possible about a matter the conditions and circumstances of which +are unknown and cannot be defined, especially when the strength of the +acting forces cannot be ascertained? No one was or is able to +foresee in what condition our or the enemy's armies will be in a day's +time, and no one can gauge the force of this or that detachment. +Sometimes- when there is not a coward at the front to shout, 'We are +cut off!' and start running, but a brave and jolly lad who shouts, +'Hurrah!'- a detachment of five thousand is worth thirty thousand, +as at Schon Grabern, while at times fifty thousand run from eight +thousand, as at Austerlitz. What science can there be in a matter in +which, as in all practical matters, nothing can be defined and +everything depends on innumerable conditions, the significance of +which is determined at a particular moment which arrives no one +knows when? Armfeldt says our army is cut in half, and Paulucci says +we have got the French army between two fires; Michaud says that the +worthlessness of the Drissa camp lies in having the river behind it, +and Pfuel says that is what constitutes its strength; Toll proposes +one plan, Armfeldt another, and they are all good and all bad, and the +advantages of any suggestions can be seen only at the moment of trial. +And why do they all speak of a 'military genius'? Is a man a genius +who can order bread to be brought up at the right time and say who +is to go to the right and who to the left? It is only because military +men are invested with pomp and power and crowds of sychophants flatter +power, attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess. +The best generals I have known were, on the contrary, stupid or +absent-minded men. Bagration was the best, Napoleon himself admitted +that. And of Bonaparte himself! I remember his limited, self-satisfied +face on the field of Austerlitz. Not only does a good army commander +not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence +of the highest and best human attributes- love, poetry, tenderness, +and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly +convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will +not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave +leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, +or think of what is just and unjust. It is understandable that a +theory of their 'genius' was invented for them long ago because they +have power! The success of a military action depends not on them, +but on the man in the ranks who shouts, 'We are lost!' or who +shouts, 'Hurrah!' And only in the ranks can one serve with assurance +of being useful." + +So thought Prince Andrew as he listened to the talking, and he +roused himself only when Paulucci called him and everyone was leaving. + +At the review next day the Emperor asked Prince Andrew where he +would like to serve, and Prince Andrew lost his standing in court +circles forever by not asking to remain attached to the sovereign's +person, but for permission to serve in the army. + +CHAPTER XII + +Before the beginning of the campaign, Rostov had received a letter +from his parents in which they told him briefly of Natasha's illness +and the breaking off of her engagement to Prince Andrew (which they +explained by Natasha's having rejected him) and again asked Nicholas +to retire from the army and return home. On receiving this letter, +Nicholas did not even make any attempt to get leave of absence or to +retire from the army, but wrote to his parents that he was sorry +Natasha was ill and her engagement broken off, and that he would do +all he could to meet their wishes. To Sonya he wrote separately. + +"Adored friend of my soul!" he wrote. "Nothing but honor could +keep me from returning to the country. But now, at the commencement of +the campaign, I should feel dishonored, not only in my comrades' +eyes but in my own, if I preferred my own happiness to my love and +duty to the Fatherland. But this shall be our last separation. Believe +me, directly the war is over, if I am still alive and still loved by +you, I will throw up everything and fly to you, to press you forever +to my ardent breast." + +It was, in fact, only the commencement of the campaign that +prevented Rostov from returning home as he had promised and marrying +Sonya. The autumn in Otradnoe with the hunting, and the winter with +the Christmas holidays and Sonya's love, had opened out to him a vista +of tranquil rural joys and peace such as he had never known before, +and which now allured him. "A splendid wife, children, a good pack +of hounds, a dozen leashes of smart borzois, agriculture, neighbors, +service by election..." thought he. But now the campaign was +beginning, and he had to remain with his regiment. And since it had to +be so, Nicholas Rostov, as was natural to him, felt contented with the +life he led in the regiment and was able to find pleasure in that +life. + +On his return from his furlough Nicholas, having been joyfully +welcomed by his comrades, was sent to obtain remounts and brought back +from the Ukraine excellent horses which pleased him and earned him +commendation from his commanders. During his absence he had been +promoted captain, and when the regiment was put on war footing with an +increase in numbers, he was again allotted his old squadron. + +The campaign began, the regiment was moved into Poland on double +pay, new officers arrived, new men and horses, and above all everybody +was infected with the merrily excited mood that goes with the +commencement of a war, and Rostov, conscious of his advantageous +position in the regiment, devoted himself entirely to the pleasures +and interests of military service, though he knew that sooner or later +he would have to relinquish them. + +The troops retired from Vilna for various complicated reasons of +state, political and strategic. Each step of the retreat was +accompanied by a complicated interplay of interests, arguments, and +passions at headquarters. For the Pavlograd hussars, however, the +whole of this retreat during the finest period of summer and with +sufficient supplies was a very simple and agreeable business. + +It was only at headquarters that there was depression, uneasiness, +and intriguing; in the body of the army they did not ask themselves +where they were going or why. If they regretted having to retreat, +it was only because they had to leave billets they had grown +accustomed to, or some pretty young Polish lady. If the thought that +things looked bad chanced to enter anyone's head, he tried to be as +cheerful as befits a good soldier and not to think of the general +trend of affairs, but only of the task nearest to hand. First they +camped gaily before Vilna, making acquaintance with the Polish +landowners, preparing for reviews and being reviewed by the Emperor +and other high commanders. Then came an order to retreat to Sventsyani +and destroy any provisions they could not carry away with them. +Sventsyani was remembered by the hussars only as the drunken camp, a +name the whole army gave to their encampment there, and because many +complaints were made against the troops, who, taking advantage of +the order to collect provisions, took also horses, carriages, and +carpets from the Polish proprietors. Rostov remembered Sventsyani, +because on the first day of their arrival at that small town he +changed his sergeant major and was unable to manage all the drunken +men of his squadron who, unknown to him, had appropriated five barrels +of old beer. From Sventsyani they retired farther and farther to +Drissa, and thence again beyond Drissa, drawing near to the frontier +of Russia proper. + +On the thirteenth of July the Pavlograds took part in a serious +action for the first time. + +On the twelfth of July, on the eve of that action, there was a heavy +storm of rain and hail. In general, the summer of 18l2 was +remarkable for its storms. + +The two Pavlograd squadrons were bivouacking on a field of rye, +which was already in ear but had been completely trodden down by +cattle and horses. The rain was descending in torrents, and Rostov, +with a young officer named Ilyin, his protege, was sitting in a +hastily constructed shelter. An officer of their regiment, with long +mustaches extending onto his cheeks, who after riding to the staff had +been overtaken by the rain, entered Rostov's shelter. + +"I have come from the staff, Count. Have you heard of Raevski's +exploit?" + +And the officer gave them details of the Saltanov battle, which he +had heard at the staff. + +Rostov, smoking his pipe and turning his head about as the water +trickled down his neck, listened inattentively, with an occasional +glance at Ilyin, who was pressing close to him. This officer, a lad of +sixteen who had recently joined the regiment, was now in the same +relation to Nicholas that Nicholas had been to Denisov seven years +before. Ilyin tried to imitate Rostov in everything and adored him +as a girl might have done. + +Zdrzhinski, the officer with the long mustache, spoke +grandiloquently of the Saltanov dam being "a Russian Thermopylae," and +of how a deed worthy of antiquity had been performed by General +Raevski. He recounted how Raevski had led his two sons onto the dam +under terrific fire and had charged with them beside him. Rostov heard +the story and not only said nothing to encourage Zdrzhinski's +enthusiasm but, on the contrary, looked like a man ashamed of what +he was hearing, though with no intention of contradicting it. Since +the campaigns of Austerlitz and of 1807 Rostov knew by experience that +men always lie when describing military exploits, as he himself had +done when recounting them; besides that, he had experience enough to +know that nothing happens in war at all as we can imagine or relate +it. And so he did not like Zdrzhinski's tale, nor did he like +Zdrzhinski himself who, with his mustaches extending over his +cheeks, bent low over the face of his hearer, as was his habit, and +crowded Rostov in the narrow shanty. Rostov looked at him in +silence. "In the first place, there must have been such a confusion +and crowding on the dam that was being attacked that if Raevski did +lead his sons there, it could have had no effect except perhaps on +some dozen men nearest to him," thought he, "the rest could not have +seen how or with whom Raevski came onto the dam. And even those who +did see it would not have been much stimulated by it, for what had +they to do with Raevski's tender paternal feelings when their own +skins were in danger? And besides, the fate of the Fatherland did +not depend on whether they took the Saltanov dam or not, as we are +told was the case at Thermopylae. So why should he have made such a +sacrifice? And why expose his own children in the battle? I would +not have taken my brother Petya there, or even Ilyin, who's a stranger +to me but a nice lad, but would have tried to put them somewhere under +cover," Nicholas continued to think, as he listened to Zdrzhinski. But +he did not express his thoughts, for in such matters, too, he had +gained experience. He knew that this tale redounded to the glory of +our arms and so one had to pretend not to doubt it. And he acted +accordingly. + +"I can't stand this any more," said Ilyin, noticing that Rostov +did not relish Zdrzhinski's conversation. "My stockings and shirt... +and the water is running on my seat! I'll go and look for shelter. The +rain seems less heavy." + +Ilyin went out and Zdrzhinski rode away. + +Five minutes later Ilyin, splashing through the mud, came running +back to the shanty. + +"Hurrah! Rostov, come quick! I've found it! About two hundred +yards away there's a tavern where ours have already gathered. We can +at least get dry there, and Mary Hendrikhovna's there." + +Mary Hendrikhovna was the wife of the regimental doctor, a pretty +young German woman he had married in Poland. The doctor, whether +from lack of means or because he did not like to part from his young +wife in the early days of their marriage, took her about with him +wherever the hussar regiment went and his jealousy had become a +standing joke among the hussar officers. + +Rostov threw his cloak over his shoulders, shouted to Lavrushka to +follow with the things, and- now slipping in the mud, now splashing +right through it- set off with Ilyin in the lessening rain and the +darkness that was occasionally rent by distant lightning. + +"Rostov, where are you?" + +"Here. What lightning!" they called to one another. + +CHAPTER XIII + +In the tavern, before which stood the doctor's covered cart, there +were already some five officers. Mary Hendrikhovna, a plump little +blonde German, in a dressing jacket and nightcap, was sitting on a +broad bench in the front corner. Her husband, the doctor, lay asleep +behind her. Rostov and Ilyin, on entering the room, were welcomed with +merry shouts and laughter. + +"Dear me, how jolly we are!" said Rostov laughing. + +"And why do you stand there gaping?" + +"What swells they are! Why, the water streams from them! Don't +make our drawing room so wet." + +"Don't mess Mary Hendrikhovna's dress!" cried other voices. + +Rostov and Ilyin hastened to find a corner where they could change +into dry clothes without offending Mary Hendrikhovna's modesty. They +were going into a tiny recess behind a partition to change, but +found it completely filled by three officers who sat playing cards +by the light of a solitary candle on an empty box, and these +officers would on no account yield their position. Mary Hendrikhovna +obliged them with the loan of a petticoat to be used as a curtain, and +behind that screen Rostov and Ilyin, helped by Lavrushka who had +brought their kits, changed their wet things for dry ones. + +A fire was made up in the dilapidated brick stove. A board was +found, fixed on two saddles and covered with a horsecloth, a small +samovar was produced and a cellaret and half a bottle of rum, and +having asked Mary Hendrikhovna to preside, they all crowded round her. +One offered her a clean handkerchief to wipe her charming hands, +another spread a jacket under her little feet to keep them from the +damp, another hung his coat over the window to keep out the draft, and +yet another waved the flies off her husband's face, lest he should +wake up. + +"Leave him alone," said Mary Hendrikhovna, smiling timidly and +happily. "He is sleeping well as it is, after a sleepless night." + +"Oh, no, Mary Hendrikhovna," replied the officer, "one must look +after the doctor. Perhaps he'll take pity on me someday, when it comes +to cutting off a leg or an arm for me." + +There were only three tumblers, the water was so muddy that one +could not make out whether the tea was strong or weak, and the samovar +held only six tumblers of water, but this made it all the pleasanter +to take turns in order of seniority to receive one's tumbler from Mary +Hendrikhovna's plump little hands with their short and not overclean +nails. All the officers appeared to be, and really were, in love +with her that evening. Even those playing cards behind the partition +soon left their game and came over to the samovar, yielding to the +general mood of courting Mary Hendrikhovna. She, seeing herself +surrounded by such brilliant and polite young men, beamed with +satisfaction, try as she might to hide it, and perturbed as she +evidently was each time her husband moved in his sleep behind her. + +There was only one spoon, sugar was more plentiful than anything +else, but it took too long to dissolve, so it was decided that Mary +Hendrikhovna should stir the sugar for everyone in turn. Rostov +received his tumbler, and adding some rum to it asked Mary +Hendrikhovna to stir it. + +"But you take it without sugar?" she said, smiling all the time, +as if everything she said and everything the others said was very +amusing and had a double meaning. + +"It is not the sugar I want, but only that your little hand should +stir my tea." + +Mary Hendrikhovna assented and began looking for the spoon which +someone meanwhile had pounced on. + +"Use your finger, Mary Hendrikhovna, it will be still nicer," said +Rostov. + +"Too hot!" she replied, blushing with pleasure. + +Ilyin put a few drops of rum into the bucket of water and brought it +to Mary Hendrikhovna, asking her to stir it with her finger. + +"This is my cup," said he. "Only dip your finger in it and I'll +drink it all up." + +When they had emptied the samovar, Rostov took a pack of cards and +proposed that they should play "Kings" with Mary Hendrikhovna. They +drew lots to settle who should make up her set. At Rostov's suggestion +it was agreed that whoever became "King" should have the right to kiss +Mary Hendrikhovna's hand, and that the "Booby" should go to refill and +reheat the samovar for the doctor when the latter awoke. + +"Well, but supposing Mary Hendrikhovna is 'King'?" asked Ilyin. + +"As it is, she is Queen, and her word is law!" + +They had hardly begun to play before the doctor's disheveled head +suddenly appeared from behind Mary Hendrikhovna. He had been awake for +some time, listening to what was being said, and evidently found +nothing entertaining or amusing in what was going on. His face was sad +and depressed. Without greeting the officers, he scratched himself and +asked to be allowed to pass as they were blocking the way. As soon +as he had left the room all the officers burst into loud laughter +and Mary Hendrikhovna blushed till her eyes filled with tears and +thereby became still more attractive to them. Returning from the yard, +the doctor told his wife (who had ceased to smile so happily, and +looked at him in alarm, awaiting her sentence) that the rain had +ceased and they must go to sleep in their covered cart, or +everything in it would be stolen. + +"But I'll send an orderly.... Two of them!" said Rostov. "What an +idea, doctor!" + +"I'll stand guard on it myself!" said Ilyin. + +"No, gentlemen, you have had your sleep, but I have not slept for +two nights," replied the doctor, and he sat down morosely beside his +wife, waiting for the game to end. + +Seeing his gloomy face as he frowned at his wife, the officers +grew still merrier, and some of them could not refrain from +laughter, for which they hurriedly sought plausible pretexts. When +he had gone, taking his wife with him, and had settled down with her +in their covered cart, the officers lay down in the tavern, covering +themselves with their wet cloaks, but they did not sleep for a long +time; now they exchanged remarks, recalling the doctor's uneasiness +and his wife's delight, now they ran out into the porch and reported +what was taking place in the covered trap. Several times Rostov, +covering his head, tried to go to sleep, but some remark would +arouse him and conversation would be resumed, to the accompaniment +of unreasoning, merry, childlike laughter. + +CHAPTER XIV + +It was nearly three o'clock but no one was yet asleep, when the +quartermaster appeared with an order to move on to the little town +of Ostrovna. Still laughing and talking, the officers began +hurriedly getting ready and again boiled again boiled some muddy water +in the samovar. But Rostov went off to his squadron without waiting +for tea. Day was breaking, the rain had ceased, and the clouds were +dispersing. It felt damp and cold, especially in clothes that were +still moist. As they left the tavern in the twilight of the dawn, +Rostov and Ilyin both glanced under the wet and glistening leather +hood of the doctor's cart, from under the apron of which his feet were +sticking out, and in the middle of which his wife's nightcap was +visible and her sleepy breathing audible. + +"She really is a dear little thing," said Rostov to Ilyin, who was +following him. + +"A charming woman!" said Ilyin, with all the gravity of a boy of +sixteen. + +Half an hour later the squadron was lined up on the road. The +command was heard to "mount" and the soldiers crossed themselves and +mounted. Rostov riding in front gave the order "Forward!" and the +hussars, with clanking sabers and subdued talk, their horses' hoofs +splashing in the mud, defiled in fours and moved along the broad +road planted with birch trees on each side, following the infantry and +a battery that had gone on in front. + +Tattered, blue-purple clouds, reddening in the east, were scudding +before the wind. It was growing lighter and lighter. That curly +grass which always grows by country roadsides became clearly +visible, still wet with the night's rain; the drooping branches of the +birches, also wet, swayed in the wind and flung down bright drops of +water to one side. The soldiers' faces were more and more clearly +visible. Rostov, always closely followed by Ilyin, rode along the side +of the road between two rows of birch trees. + +When campaigning, Rostov allowed himself the indulgence of riding +not a regimental but a Cossack horse. A judge of horses and a +sportsman, he had lately procured himself a large, fine, mettlesome, +Donets horse, dun-colored, with light mane and tail, and when he +rode it no one could outgallop him. To ride this horse was a +pleasure to him, and he thought of the horse, of the morning, of the +doctor's wife, but not once of the impending danger. + +Formerly, when going into action, Rostov had felt afraid; now he had +not the least feeling of fear. He was fearless, not because he had +grown used to being under fire (one cannot grow used to danger), but +because he had learned how to manage his thoughts when in danger. He +had grown accustomed when going into action to think about anything +but what would seem most likely to interest him- the impending danger. +During the first period of his service, hard as he tried and much as +he reproached himself with cowardice, he had not been able to do this, +but with time it had come of itself. Now he rode beside Ilyin under +the birch trees, occasionally plucking leaves from a branch that met +his hand, sometimes touching his horse's side with his foot, or, +without turning round, handing a pipe he had finished to an hussar +riding behind him, with as calm and careless an air as though he +were merely out for a ride. He glanced with pity at the excited face +of Ilyin, who talked much and in great agitation. He knew from +experience the tormenting expectation of terror and death the cornet +was suffering and knew that only time could help him. + +As soon as the sun appeared in a clear strip of sky beneath the +clouds, the wind fell, as if it dared not spoil the beauty of the +summer morning after the storm; drops still continued to fall, but +vertically now, and all was still. The whole sun appeared on the +horizon and disappeared behind a long narrow cloud that hung above it. +A few minutes later it reappeared brighter still from behind the top +of the cloud, tearing its edge. Everything grew bright and +glittered. And with that light, and as if in reply to it, came the +sound of guns ahead of them. + +Before Rostov had had time to consider and determine the distance of +that firing, Count Ostermann-Tolstoy's adjutant came galloping from +Vitebsk with orders to advance at a trot along the road. + +The squadron overtook and passed the infantry and the battery- which +had also quickened their pace- rode down a hill, and passing through +an empty and deserted village again ascended. The horses began to +lather and the men to flush. + +"Halt! Dress your ranks!" the order of the regimental commander +was heard ahead. "Forward by the left. Walk, march!" came the order +from in front. + +And the hussars, passing along the line of troops on the left +flank of our position, halted behind our Uhlans who were in the +front line. To the right stood our infantry in a dense column: they +were the reserve. Higher up the hill, on the very horizon, our guns +were visible through the wonderfully clear air, brightly illuminated +by slanting morning sunbeams. In front, beyond a hollow dale, could be +seen the enemy's columns and guns. Our advanced line, already in +action, could be heard briskly exchanging shots with the enemy in +the dale. + +At these sounds, long unheard, Rostov's spirits rose, as at the +strains of the merriest music. Trap-ta-ta-tap! cracked the shots, +now together, now several quickly one after another. Again all was +silent and then again it sounded as if someone were walking on +detonators and exploding them. + +The hussars remained in the same place for about an hour. A +cannonade began. Count Ostermann with his suite rode up behind the +squadron, halted, spoke to the commander of the regiment, and rode +up the hill to the guns. + +After Ostermann had gone, a command rang out to the Uhlans. + +"Form column! Prepare to charge!" + +The infantry in front of them parted into platoons to allow the +cavalry to pass. The Uhlans started, the streamers on their spears +fluttering, and trotted downhill toward the French cavalry which was +seen below to the left. + +As soon as the Uhlans descended the hill, the hussars were ordered +up the hill to support the battery. As they took the places vacated by +the Uhlans, bullets came from the front, whining and whistling, but +fell spent without taking effect. + +The sounds, which he had not heard for so long, had an even more +pleasurable and exhilarating effect on Rostov than the previous sounds +of firing. Drawing himself up, he viewed the field of battle opening +out before him from the hill, and with his whole soul followed the +movement of the Uhlans. They swooped down close to the French +dragoons, something confused happened there amid the smoke, and five +minutes later our Uhlans were galloping back, not to the place they +had occupied but more to the left, and among the orange-colored Uhlans +on chestnut horses and behind them, in a large group, blue French +dragoons on gray horses could be seen. + +CHAPTER XV + +Rostov, with his keen sportsman's eye, was one of the first to catch +sight of these blue French dragoons pursuing our Uhlans. Nearer and +nearer in disorderly crowds came the Uhlans and the French dragoons +pursuing them. He could already see how these men, who looked so small +at the foot of the hill, jostled and overtook one another, waving +their arms and their sabers in the air. + +Rostov gazed at what was happening before him as at a hunt. He +felt instinctively that if the hussars struck at the French dragoons +now, the latter could not withstand them, but if a charge was to be +made it must be done now, at that very moment, or it would be too +late. He looked around. A captain, standing beside him, was gazing +like himself with eyes fixed on the cavalry below them. + +"Andrew Sevastyanych!" said Rostov. "You know, we could crush +them...." + +"A fine thing too!" replied the captain, "and really..." + +Rostov, without waiting to hear him out, touched his horse, galloped +to the front of his squadron, and before he had time to finish +giving the word of command, the whole squadron, sharing his feeling, +was following him. Rostov himself did not know how or why he did it. +He acted as he did when hunting, without reflecting or considering. He +saw the dragoons near and that they were galloping in disorder; he +knew they could not withstand an attack- knew there was only that +moment and that if he let it slip it would not return. The bullets +were whining and whistling so stimulatingly around him and his horse +was so eager to go that he could not restrain himself. He touched +his horse, gave the word of command, and immediately, hearing behind +him the tramp of the horses of his deployed squadron, rode at full +trot downhill toward the dragoons. Hardly had they reached the +bottom of the hill before their pace instinctively changed to a +gallop, which grew faster and faster as they drew nearer to our Uhlans +and the French dragoons who galloped after them. The dragoons were now +close at hand. On seeing the hussars, the foremost began to turn, +while those behind began to halt. With the same feeling with which +he had galloped across the path of a wolf, Rostov gave rein to his +Donets horse and galloped to intersect the path of the dragoons' +disordered lines. One Uhlan stopped, another who was on foot flung +himself to the ground to avoid being knocked over, and a riderless +horse fell in among the hussars. Nearly all the French dragoons were +galloping back. Rostov, picking out one on a gray horse, dashed +after him. On the way he came upon a bush, his gallant horse cleared +it, and almost before he had righted himself in his saddle he saw that +he would immediately overtake the enemy he had selected. That +Frenchman, by his uniform an officer, was going at a gallop, crouching +on his gray horse and urging it on with his saber. In another moment +Rostov's horse dashed its breast against the hindquarters of the +officer's horse, almost knocking it over, and at the same instant +Rostov, without knowing why, raised his saber and struck the Frenchman +with it. + +The instant he had done this, all Rostov's animation vanished. The +officer fell, not so much from the blow- which had but slightly cut +his arm above the elbow- as from the shock to his horse and from +fright. Rostov reined in his horse, and his eyes sought his foe to see +whom he had vanquished. The French dragoon officer was hopping with +one foot on the ground, the other being caught in the stirrup. His +eyes, screwed up with fear as if he every moment expected another +blow, gazed up at Rostov with shrinking terror. His pale and +mud-stained face- fair and young, with a dimple in the chin and +light-blue eyes- was not an enemy's face at all suited to a +battlefield, but a most ordinary, homelike face. Before Rostov had +decided what to do with him, the officer cried, "I surrender!" He +hurriedly but vainly tried to get his foot out of the stirrup and +did not remove his frightened blue eyes from Rostov's face. Some +hussars who galloped up disengaged his foot and helped him into the +saddle. On all sides, the hussars were busy with the dragoons; one was +wounded, but though his face was bleeding, he would not give up his +horse; another was perched up behind an hussar with his arms round +him; a third was being helped by an hussar to mount his horse. In +front, the French infantry were firing as they ran. The hussars +galloped hastily back with their prisoners. Rostov galloped back +with the rest, aware of an unpleasant feeling of depression in his +heart. Something vague and confused, which he could not at all account +for, had come over him with the capture of that officer and the blow +he had dealt him. + +Count Ostermann-Tolstoy met the returning hussars, sent for +Rostov, thanked him, and said he would report his gallant deed to +the Emperor and would recommend him for a St. George's Cross. When +sent for by Count Ostermann, Rostov, remembering that he had charged +without orders, felt sure his commander was sending for him to +punish him for breach of discipline. Ostermann's flattering words +and promise of a reward should therefore have struck him all the +more pleasantly, but he still felt that same vaguely disagreeable +feeling of moral nausea. "But what on earth is worrying me?" he +asked himself as he rode back from the general. "Ilyin? No, he's safe. +Have I disgraced myself in any way? No, that's not it." Something +else, resembling remorse, tormented him. "Yes, oh yes, that French +officer with the dimple. And I remember how my arm paused when I +raised it." + +Rostov saw the prisoners being led away and galloped after them to +have a look at his Frenchman with the dimple on his chin. He was +sitting in his foreign uniform on an hussar packhorse and looked +anxiously about him; The sword cut on his arm could scarcely be called +a wound. He glanced at Rostov with a feigned smile and waved his +hand in greeting. Rostov still had the same indefinite feeling, as +of shame. + +All that day and the next his friends and comrades noticed that +Rostov, without being dull or angry, was silent, thoughtful, and +preoccupied. He drank reluctantly, tried to remain alone, and kept +turning something over in his mind. + +Rostov was always thinking about that brilliant exploit of his, +which to his amazement had gained him the St. George's Cross and +even given him a reputation for bravery, and there was something he +could not at all understand. "So others are even more afraid than I +am!" he thought. "So that's all there is in what is called heroism! +And heroism! And did I do it for my country's sake? And how was he +to blame, with his dimple and blue eyes? And how frightened he was! He +thought that I should kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand +trembled. And they have given me a St. George's Cross.... I can't make +it out at all." + +But while Nicholas was considering these questions and still could +reach no clear solution of what puzzled him so, the wheel of fortune +in the service, as often happens, turned in his favor. After the +affair at Ostrovna he was brought into notice, received command of +an hussar battalion, and when a brave officer was needed he was +chosen. + +CHAPTER XVI + +On receiving news of Natasha's illness, the countess, though not +quite well yet and still weak, went to Moscow with Petya and the +rest of the household, and the whole family moved from Marya +Dmitrievna's house to their own and settled down in town. + +Natasha's illness was so serious that, fortunately for her and for +her parents, the consideration of all that had caused the illness, her +conduct and the breaking off of her engagement, receded into the +background. She was so ill that it was impossible for them to consider +in how far she was to blame for what had happened. She could not eat +or sleep, grew visibly thinner, coughed, and, as the doctors made them +feel, was in danger. They could not think of anything but how to +help her. Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked +much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and +prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known +to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they +could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from, as no disease +suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his +own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, +complicated disease, unknown to medicine- not a disease of the +lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical +books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations +of the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur +to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to +work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, +and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their +lives on that business. But, above all, that thought was kept out of +their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful, as in +fact they were to the whole Rostov family. Their usefulness did not +depend on making the patient swallow substances for the most part +harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible, as they were given in +small doses), but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable +because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and of those who +loved her- and that is why there are, and always will be, +pseudo-healers, wise women, homeopaths, and allopaths. They +satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, +and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are +suffering. They satisfied the need seen in its most elementary form in +a child, when it wants to have a place rubbed that has been hurt. A +child knocks itself and runs at once to the arms of its mother or +nurse to have the aching spot rubbed or kissed, and it feels better +when this is done. The child cannot believe that the strongest and +wisest of its people have no remedy for its pain, and the hope of +relief and the expression of its mother's sympathy while she rubs +the bump comforts it. The doctors were of use to Natasha because +they kissed and rubbed her bump, assuring her that it would soon +pass if only the coachman went to the chemist's in the Arbat and got a +powder and some pills in a pretty box of a ruble and seventy kopeks, +and if she took those powders in boiled water at intervals of +precisely two hours, neither more nor less. + +What would Sonya and the count and countess have done, how would +they have looked, if nothing had been done, if there had not been +those pills to give by the clock, the warm drinks, the chicken +cutlets, and all the other details of life ordered by the doctors, the +carrying out of which supplied an occupation and consolation to the +family circle? How would the count have borne his dearly loved +daughter's illness had he not known that it was costing him a thousand +rubles, and that he would not grudge thousands more to benefit her, or +had he not known that if her illness continued he would not grudge yet +other thousands and would take her abroad for consultations there, and +had he not been able to explain the details of how Metivier and Feller +had not understood the symptoms, but Frise had, and Mudrov had +diagnosed them even better? What would the countess have done had +she not been able sometimes to scold the invalid for not strictly +obeying the doctor's orders? + +"You'll never get well like that," she would say, forgetting her +grief in her vexation, "if you won't obey the doctor and take your +medicine at the right time! You mustn't trifle with it, you know, or +it may turn to pneumonia," she would go on, deriving much comfort from +the utterance of that foreign word, incomprehensible to others as well +as to herself. + +What would Sonya have done without the glad consciousness that she +had not undressed during the first three nights, in order to be +ready to carry out all the doctor's injunctions with precision, and +that she still kept awake at night so as not to miss the proper time +when the slightly harmful pills in the little gilt box had to be +administered? Even to Natasha herself it was pleasant to see that so +many sacrifices were being made for her sake, and to know that she had +to take medicine at certain hours, though she declared that no +medicine would cure her and that it was all nonsense. And it was +even pleasant to be able to show, by disregarding the orders, that she +did not believe in medical treatment and did not value her life. + +The doctor came every day, felt her pulse, looked at her tongue, and +regardless of her grief-stricken face joked with her. But when he +had gone into another room, to which the countess hurriedly followed +him, he assumed a grave air and thoughtfully shaking his head said +that though there was danger, he had hopes of the effect of this +last medicine and one must wait and see, that the malady was chiefly +mental, but... And the countess, trying to conceal the action from +herself and from him, slipped a gold coin into his hand and always +returned to the patient with a more tranquil mind. + +The symptoms of Natasha's illness were that she ate little, slept +little, coughed, and was always low-spirited. The doctors said that +she could not get on without medical treatment, so they kept her in +the stifling atmosphere of the town, and the Rostovs did not move to +the country that summer of 1812. + +In spite of the many pills she swallowed and the drops and powders +out of the little bottles and boxes of which Madame Schoss who was +fond of such things made a large collection, and in spite of being +deprived of the country life to which she was accustomed, youth +prevailed. Natasha's grief began to be overlaid by the impressions +of daily life, it ceased to press so painfully on her heart, it +gradually faded into the past, and she began to recover physically. + +CHAPTER XVII + +Natasha was calmer but no happier. She not merely avoided all +external forms of pleasure- balls, promenades, concerts, and theaters- +but she never laughed without a sound of tears in her laughter. She +could not sing. As soon as she began to laugh, or tried to sing by +herself, tears choked her: tears of remorse, tears at the recollection +of those pure times which could never return, tears of vexation that +she should so uselessly have ruined her young life which might have +been so happy. Laughter and singing in particular seemed to her like a +blasphemy, in face of her sorrow. Without any need of +self-restraint, no wish to coquet ever entered her head. She said +and felt at that time that no man was more to her than Nastasya +Ivanovna, the buffoon. Something stood sentinel within her and forbade +her every joy. Besides, she had lost all the old interests of her +carefree girlish life that had been so full of hope. The previous +autumn, the hunting, "Uncle," and the Christmas holidays spent with +Nicholas at Otradnoe were what she recalled oftenest and most +painfully. What would she not have given to bring back even a single +day of that time! But it was gone forever. Her presentiment at the +time had not deceived her- that that state of freedom and readiness +for any enjoyment would not return again. Yet it was necessary to live +on. + +It comforted her to reflect that she was not better as she had +formerly imagined, but worse, much worse, than anybody else in the +world. But this was not enough. She knew that, and asked herself, +"What next?" But there was nothing to come. There was no joy in +life, yet life was passing. Natasha apparently tried not to be a +burden or a hindrance to anyone, but wanted nothing for herself. She +kept away from everyone in the house and felt at ease only with her +brother Petya. She liked to be with him better than with the others, +and when alone with him she sometimes laughed. She hardly ever left +the house and of those who came to see them was glad to see only one +person, Pierre. It would have been impossible to treat her with more +delicacy, greater care, and at the same time more seriously than did +Count Bezukhov. Natasha unconsciously felt this delicacy and so +found great pleasure in his society. But she was not even grateful +to him for it; nothing good on Pierre's part seemed to her to be an +effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there +was no merit in his kindness. Sometimes Natasha noticed +embarrassment and awkwardness on his part in her presence, +especially when he wanted to do something to please her, or feared +that something they spoke of would awaken memories distressing to her. +She noticed this and attributed it to his general kindness and +shyness, which she imagined must be the same toward everyone as it was +to her. After those involuntary words- that if he were free he would +have asked on his knees for her hand and her love- uttered at a moment +when she was so strongly agitated, Pierre never spoke to Natasha of +his feelings; and it seemed plain to her that those words, which had +then so comforted her, were spoken as all sorts of meaningless words +are spoken to comfort a crying child. It was not because Pierre was +a married man, but because Natasha felt very strongly with him that +moral barrier the absence of which she had experienced with Kuragin +that it never entered her head that the relations between him and +herself could lead to love on her part, still less on his, or even +to the kind of tender, self-conscious, romantic friendship between a +man and a woman of which she had known several instances. + +Before the end of the fast of St. Peter, Agrafena Ivanovna Belova, a +country neighbor of the Rostovs, came to Moscow to pay her devotions +at the shrines of the Moscow saints. She suggested that Natasha should +fast and prepare for Holy Communion, and Natasha gladly welcomed the +idea. Despite the doctor's orders that she should not go out early +in the morning, Natasha insisted on fasting and preparing for the +sacrament, not as they generally prepared for it in the Rostov +family by attending three services in their own house, but as Agrafena +Ivanovna did, by going to church every day for a week and not once +missing Vespers, Matins, or Mass. + +The countess was pleased with Natasha's zeal; after the poor results +of the medical treatment, in the depths of her heart she hoped that +prayer might help her daughter more than medicines and, though not +without fear and concealing it from the doctor, she agreed to +Natasha's wish and entrusted her to Belova. Agrafena Ivanovna used +to come to wake Natasha at three in the morning, but generally found +her already awake. She was afraid of being late for Matins. Hastily +washing, and meekly putting on her shabbiest dress and an old +mantilla, Natasha, shivering in the fresh air, went out into the +deserted streets lit by the clear light of dawn. By Agrafena +Ivanovna's advice Natasha prepared herself not in their own parish, +but at a church where, according to the devout Agrafena Ivanovna, +the priest was a man of very severe and lofty life. There were never +many people in the church; Natasha always stood beside Belova in the +customary place before an icon of the Blessed Virgin, let into the +screen before the choir on the left side, and a feeling, new to her, +of humility before something great and incomprehensible, seized her +when at that unusual morning hour, gazing at the dark face of the +Virgin illuminated by the candles burning before it and by the morning +light falling from the window, she listened to the words of the +service which she tried to follow with understanding. When she +understood them her personal feeling became interwoven in the +prayers with shades of its own. When she did not understand, it was +sweeter still to think that the wish to understand everything is +pride, that it is impossible to understand all, that it is only +necessary to believe and to commit oneself to God, whom she felt +guiding her soul at those moments. She crossed herself, bowed low, and +when she did not understand, in horror at her own vileness, simply +asked God to forgive her everything, everything, to have mercy upon +her. The prayers to which she surrendered herself most of all were +those of repentance. On her way home at an early hour when she met +no one but bricklayers going to work or men sweeping the street, and +everybody within the houses was still asleep, Natasha experienced a +feeling new to her, a sense of the possibility of correcting her +faults, the possibility of a new, clean life, and of happiness. + +During the whole week she spent in this way, that feeling grew every +day. And the happiness of taking communion, or "communing" as Agrafena +Ivanovna, joyously playing with the word, called it, seemed to Natasha +so great that she felt she should never live till that blessed Sunday. + +But the happy day came, and on that memorable Sunday, when, +dressed in white muslin, she returned home after communion, for the +first time for many months she felt calm and not oppressed by the +thought of the life that lay before her. + +The doctor who came to see her that day ordered her to continue +the powders he had prescribed a fortnight previously. + +"She must certainly go on taking them morning and evening," said he, +evidently sincerely satisfied with his success. "Only, please be +particular about it. + +"Be quite easy," he continued playfully, as he adroitly took the +gold coin in his palm. "She will soon be singing and frolicking about. +The last medicine has done her a very great deal of good. She has +freshened up very much." + +The countess, with a cheerful expression on her face, looked down at +her nails and spat a little for luck as she returned to the drawing +room. + +CHAPTER XVIII + +At the beginning of July more and more disquieting reports about the +war began to spread in Moscow; people spoke of an appeal by the +Emperor to the people, and of his coming himself from the army to +Moscow. And as up to the eleventh of July no manifesto or appeal had +been received, exaggerated reports became current about them and about +the position of Russia. It was said that the Emperor was leaving the +army because it was in danger, it was said that Smolensk had +surrendered, that Napoleon had an army of a million and only a miracle +could save Russia. + +On the eleventh of July, which was Saturday, the manifesto was +received but was not yet in print, and Pierre, who was at the +Rostovs', promised to come to dinner next day, Sunday, and bring a +copy of the manifesto and appeal, which he would obtain from Count +Rostopchin. + +That Sunday, the Rostovs went to Mass at the Razumovskis' private +chapel as usual. It was a hot July day. Even at ten o'clock, when +the Rostovs got out of their carriage at the chapel, the sultry air, +the shouts of hawkers, the light and gay summer clothes of the +crowd, the dusty leaves of the trees on the boulevard, the sounds of +the band and the white trousers of a battalion marching to parade, the +rattling of wheels on the cobblestones, and the brilliant, hot +sunshine were all full of that summer languor, that content and +discontent with the present, which is most strongly felt on a +bright, hot day in town. All the Moscow notabilities, all the Rostovs' +acquaintances, were at the Razumovskis' chapel, for, as if expecting +something to happen, many wealthy families who usually left town for +their country estates had not gone away that summer. As Natasha, at +her mother's side, passed through the crowd behind a liveried +footman who cleared the way for them, she heard a young man speaking +about her in too loud a whisper. + +"That's Rostova, the one who..." + +"She's much thinner, but all the same she's pretty!" + +She heard, or thought she heard, the names of Kuragin and Bolkonski. +But she was always imagining that. It always seemed to her that +everyone who looked at her was thinking only of what had happened to +her. With a sinking heart, wretched as she always was now when she +found herself in a crowd, Natasha in her lilac silk dress trimmed with +black lace walked- as women can walk- with the more repose and +stateliness the greater the pain and shame in her soul. She knew for +certain that she was pretty, but this no longer gave her +satisfaction as it used to. On the contrary it tormented her more than +anything else of late, and particularly so on this bright, hot +summer day in town. "It's Sunday again- another week past," she +thought, recalling that she had been here the Sunday before, "and +always the same life that is no life, and the same surroundings in +which it used to be so easy to live. I'm pretty, I'm young, and I know +that now I am good. I used to be bad, but now I know I am good," she +thought, "but yet my best years are slipping by and are no good to +anyone." She stood by her mother's side and exchanged nods with +acquaintances near her. From habit she scrutinized the ladies' +dresses, condemned the bearing of a lady standing close by who was not +crossing herself properly but in a cramped manner, and again she +thought with vexation that she was herself being judged and was +judging others, and suddenly, at the sound of the service, she felt +horrified at her own vileness, horrified that the former purity of her +soul was again lost to her. + +A comely, fresh-looking old man was conducting the service with that +mild solemnity which has so elevating and soothing an effect on the +souls of the worshipers. The gates of the sanctuary screen were +closed, the curtain was slowly drawn, and from behind it a soft +mysterious voice pronounced some words. Tears, the cause of which +she herself did not understand, made Natasha's breast heave, and a +joyous but oppressive feeling agitated her. + +"Teach me what I should do, how to live my life, how I may grow good +forever, forever!" she pleaded. + +The deacon came out onto the raised space before the altar screen +and, holding his thumb extended, drew his long hair from under his +dalmatic and, making the sign of the cross on his breast, began in a +loud and solemn voice to recite the words of the prayer... + +"In peace let us pray unto the Lord." + +"As one community, without distinction of class, without enmity, +united by brotherly love- let us pray!" thought Natasha. + +"For the peace that is from above, and for the salvation of our +souls." + +"For the world of angels and all the spirits who dwell above us," +prayed Natasha. + +When they prayed for the warriors, she thought of her brother and +Denisov. When they prayed for all traveling by land and sea, she +remembered Prince Andrew, prayed for him, and asked God to forgive her +all the wrongs she had done him. When they prayed for those who love +us, she prayed for the members of her own family, her father and +mother and Sonya, realizing for the first time how wrongly she had +acted toward them, and feeling all the strength of her love for +them. When they prayed for those who hate us, she tried to think of +her enemies and people who hated her, in order to pray for them. She +included among her enemies the creditors and all who had business +dealings with her father, and always at the thought of enemies and +those who hated her she remembered Anatole who had done her so much +harm- and though he did not hate her she gladly prayed for him as +for an enemy. Only at prayer did she feel able to think clearly and +calmly of Prince Andrew and Anatole, as men for whom her feelings were +as nothing compared with her awe and devotion to God. When they prayed +for the Imperial family and the Synod, she bowed very low and made the +sign of the cross, saying to herself that even if she did not +understand, still she could not doubt, and at any rate loved the +governing Synod and prayed for it. + +When he had finished the Litany the deacon crossed the stole over +his breast and said, "Let us commit ourselves and our whole lives to +Christ the Lord!" + +"Commit ourselves to God," Natasha inwardly repeated. "Lord God, I +submit myself to Thy will!" she thought. "I want nothing, wish for +nothing; teach me what to do and how to use my will! Take me, take +me!" prayed Natasha, with impatient emotion in her heart, not crossing +herself but letting her slender arms hang down as if expecting some +invisible power at any moment to take her and deliver her from +herself, from her regrets, desires, remorse, hopes, and sins. + +The countess looked round several times at her daughter's softened +face and shining eyes and prayed God to help her. + +Unexpectedly, in the middle of the service, and not in the usual +order Natasha knew so well, the deacon brought out a small stool, +the one he knelt on when praying on Trinity Sunday, and placed it +before the doors of the sanctuary screen. The priest came out with his +purple velvet biretta on his head, adjusted his hair, and knelt down +with an effort. Everybody followed his example and they looked at +one another in surprise. Then came the prayer just received from the +Synod- a prayer for the deliverance of Russia from hostile invasion. + +"Lord God of might, God of our salvation!" began the priest in +that voice, clear, not grandiloquent but mild, in which only the +Slav clergy read and which acts so irresistibly on a Russian heart. + +"Lord God of might, God of our salvation! Look this day in mercy and +blessing on Thy humble people, and graciously hear us, spare us, and +have mercy upon us! This foe confounding Thy land, desiring to lay +waste the whole world, rises against us; these lawless men are +gathered together to overthrow Thy kingdom, to destroy Thy dear +Jerusalem, Thy beloved Russia; to defile Thy temples, to overthrow +Thine altars, and to desecrate our holy shrines. How long, O Lord, how +long shall the wicked triumph? How long shall they wield unlawful +power? + +"Lord God! Hear us when we pray to Thee; strengthen with Thy might +our most gracious sovereign lord, the Emperor Alexander Pavlovich; +be mindful of his uprightness and meekness, reward him according to +his righteousness, and let it preserve us, Thy chosen Israel! Bless +his counsels, his undertakings, and his work; strengthen his kingdom +by Thine almighty hand, and give him victory over his enemy, even as +Thou gavest Moses the victory over Amalek, Gideon over Midian, and +David over Goliath. Preserve his army, put a bow of brass in the hands +of those who have armed themselves in Thy Name, and gird their loins +with strength for the fight. Take up the spear and shield and arise to +help us; confound and put to shame those who have devised evil against +us, may they be before the faces of Thy faithful warriors as dust +before the wind, and may Thy mighty Angel confound them and put them +to flight; may they be ensnared when they know it not, and may the +plots they have laid in secret be turned against them; let them fall +before Thy servants' feet and be laid low by our hosts! Lord, Thou art +able to save both great and small; Thou art God, and man cannot +prevail against Thee! + +"God of our fathers! Remember Thy bounteous mercy and +loving-kindness which are from of old; turn not Thy face from us, +but be gracious to our unworthiness, and in Thy great goodness and Thy +many mercies regard not our transgressions and iniquities! Create in +us a clean heart and renew a right spirit within us, strengthen us all +in Thy faith, fortify our hope, inspire us with true love one for +another, arm us with unity of spirit in the righteous defense of the +heritage Thou gavest to us and to our fathers, and let not the scepter +of the wicked be exalted against the destiny of those Thou hast +sanctified. + +"O Lord our God, in whom we believe and in whom we put our trust, +let us not be confounded in our hope of Thy mercy, and give us a token +of Thy blessing, that those who hate us and our Orthodox faith may see +it and be put to shame and perish, and may all the nations know that +Thou art the Lord and we are Thy people. Show Thy mercy upon us this +day, O Lord, and grant us Thy salvation; make the hearts of Thy +servants to rejoice in Thy mercy; smite down our enemies and destroy +them swiftly beneath the feet of Thy faithful servants! For Thou art +the defense, the succor, and the victory of them that put their +trust in Thee, and to Thee be all glory, to Father, Son, and Holy +Ghost, now and forever, world without end. Amen." + +In Natasha's receptive condition of soul this prayer affected her +strongly. She listened to every word about the victory of Moses over +Amalek, of Gideon over Midian, and of David over Goliath, and about +the destruction of "Thy Jerusalem," and she prayed to God with the +tenderness and emotion with which her heart was overflowing, but +without fully understanding what she was asking of God in that prayer. +She shared with all her heart in the prayer for the spirit of +righteousness, for the strengthening of the heart by faith and hope, +and its animation by love. But she could not pray that her enemies +might be trampled under foot when but a few minutes before she had +been wishing she had more of them that she might pray for them. But +neither could she doubt the righteousness of the prayer that was being +read on bended knees. She felt in her heart a devout and tremulous awe +at the thought of the punishment that overtakes men for their sins, +and especially of her own sins, and she prayed to God to forgive +them all, and her too, and to give them all, and her too, peace and +happiness. And it seemed to her that God heard her prayer. + +CHAPTER XIX + +From the day when Pierre, after leaving the Rostovs' with +Natasha's grateful look fresh in his mind, had gazed at the comet that +seemed to be fixed in the sky and felt that something new was +appearing on his own horizon- from that day the problem of the +vanity and uselessness of all earthly things, that had incessantly +tormented him, no longer presented itself. That terrible question +"Why?" "Wherefore?" which had come to him amid every occupation, was +now replaced, not by another question or by a reply to the former +question, but by her image. When he listened to, or himself took +part in, trivial conversations, when he read or heard of human +baseness or folly, he was not horrified as formerly, and did not ask +himself why men struggled so about these things when all is so +transient and incomprehensible- but he remembered her as he had last +seen her, and all his doubts vanished- not because she had answered +the questions that had haunted him, but because his conception of +her transferred him instantly to another, a brighter, realm of +spiritual activity in which no one could be justified or guilty- a +realm of beauty and love which it was worth living for. Whatever +worldly baseness presented itself to him, he said to himself: + +"Well, supposing N. N. swindled the country and the Tsar, and the +country and the Tsar confer honors upon him, what does that matter? +She smiled at me yesterday and asked me to come again, and I love her, +and no one will ever know it." And his soul felt calm and peaceful. + +Pierre still went into society, drank as much and led the same +idle and dissipated life, because besides the hours he spent at the +Rostovs' there were other hours he had to spend somehow, and the +habits and acquaintances he had made in Moscow formed a current that +bore him along irresistibly. But latterly, when more and more +disquieting reports came from the seat of war and Natasha's health +began to improve and she no longer aroused in him the former feeling +of careful pity, an ever-increasing restlessness, which he could not +explain, took possession of him. He felt that the condition he was +in could not continue long, that a catastrophe was coming which +would change his whole life, and he impatiently sought everywhere +for signs of that approaching catastrophe. One of his brother Masons +had revealed to Pierre the following prophecy concerning Napoleon, +drawn from the Revelation of St. John. + +In chapter 13, verse 18, of the Apocalypse, it is said: + +Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number +of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six +hundred threescore and six. + +And in the fifth verse of the same chapter: + +And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and +blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two +months. + +The French alphabet, written out with the same numerical values as +the Hebrew, in which the first nine letters denote units and the +others tens, will have the following significance: + + a b c d e f g h i k + 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 + l m n o p q r s + 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 + t u v w x y + 100 110 120 130 140 150 + z + 160 + +Writing the words L'Empereur Napoleon in numbers, it appears that +the sum of them is 666, and that Napoleon therefore the beast foretold +in the Apocalypse. Moreover, by applying the same system to the +words quarante-deux,~^ which was the term allowed to the beast that +"spoke great things and blasphemies," the same number 666 was +obtained; from which it followed that the limit fixed for Napoleon's +power had come in the year 1812 when the French emperor was forty-two. +This prophecy pleased Pierre very much and he often asked himself what +would put an end to the power of the beast, that is, of Napoleon, +and tried by the same system of using letters as numbers and adding +them up, to find an answer to the question that engrossed him. He +wrote the words L'Empereur Alexandre, La nation russe and added up +their numbers, but the sums were either more or less than 666. Once +when making such calculations he wrote down his own name in French, +Comte Pierre Besouhoff, but the sum of the numbers did not come right. +Then he changed the spelling, substituting a z for the s and adding de +and the article le, still without obtaining the desired result. Then +it occurred to him: if the answer to the question were contained in +his name, his nationality would also be given in the answer. So he +wrote Le russe Besuhof and adding up the numbers got 671. This was +only five too much, and five was represented by e, the very letter +elided from the article le before the word Empereur. By omitting the +e, though incorrectly, Pierre got the answer he sought. L'russe +Besuhof made 666. This discovery excited him. How, or by what means, +he was connected with the great event foretold in the Apocalypse he +did not know, but he did not doubt that connection for a moment. His +love for Natasha, Antichrist, Napoleon, the invasion, the comet, +666, L'Empereur Napoleon, and L'russe Besuhof- all this had to +mature and culminate, to lift him out of that spellbound, petty sphere +of Moscow habits in which he felt himself held captive and lead him to +a great achievement and great happiness. + +^~ Forty-two. + +On the eve of the Sunday when the special prayer was read, Pierre +had promised the Rostovs to bring them, from Count Rostopchin whom +he knew well, both the appeal to the people and the news from the +army. In the morning, when he went to call at Rostopchin's he met +there a courier fresh from the army, an acquaintance of his own, who +often danced at Moscow balls. + +"Do, please, for heaven's sake, relieve me of something!" said the +courier. "I have a sackful of letters to parents." + +Among these letters was one from Nicholas Rostov to his father. +Pierre took that letter, and Rostopchin also gave him the Emperor's +appeal to Moscow, which had just been printed, the last army orders, +and his own most recent bulletin. Glancing through the army orders, +Pierre found in one of them, in the lists of killed, wounded, and +rewarded, the name of Nicholas Rostov, awarded a St. George's Cross of +the Fourth Class for courage shown in the Ostrovna affair, and in +the same order the name of Prince Andrew Bolkonski, appointed to the +command of a regiment of Chasseurs. Though he did not want to remind +the Rostovs of Bolkonski, Pierre could not refrain from making them +happy by the news of their son's having received a decoration, so he +sent that printed army order and Nicholas' letter to the Rostovs, +keeping the appeal, the bulletin, and the other orders to take with +him when he went to dinner. + +His conversation with Count Rostopchin and the latter's tone of +anxious hurry, the meeting with the courier who talked casually of how +badly things were going in the army, the rumors of the discovery of +spies in Moscow and of a leaflet in circulation stating that +Napoleon promised to be in both the Russian capitals by the autumn, +and the talk of the Emperor's being expected to arrive next day- all +aroused with fresh force that feeling of agitation and expectation +in Pierre which he had been conscious of ever since the appearance +of the comet, and especially since the beginning of the war. + +He had long been thinking of entering the army and would have done +so had he not been hindered, first, by his membership of the Society +of Freemasons to which he was bound by oath and which preached +perpetual peace and the abolition of war, and secondly, by the fact +that when he saw the great mass of Muscovites who had donned uniform +and were talking patriotism, he somehow felt ashamed to take the step. +But the chief reason for not carrying out his intention to enter the +army lay in the vague idea that he was L'russe Besuhof who had the +number of the beast, 666; that his part in the great affair of setting +a limit to the power of the beast that spoke great and blasphemous +things had been predestined from eternity, and that therefore he ought +not to undertake anything, but wait for what was bound to come to +pass. + +CHAPTER XX + +A few intimate friends were dining with the Rostovs that day, as +usual on Sundays. + +Pierre came early so as to find them alone. + +He had grown so stout this year that he would have been abnormal had +he not been so tall, so broad of limb, and so strong that he carried +his bulk with evident ease. + +He went up the stairs, puffing and muttering something. His coachman +did not even ask whether he was to wait. He knew that when his +master was at the Rostovs' he stayed till midnight. The Rostovs' +footman rushed eagerly forward to help him off with his cloak and take +his hat and stick. Pierre, from club habit, always left both hat and +stick in the anteroom. + +The first person he saw in the house was Natasha. Even before he saw +her, while taking off his cloak, he heard her. She was practicing +solfa exercises in the music room. He knew that she had not sung since +her illness, and so the sound of her voice surprised and delighted +him. He opened the door softly and saw her, in the lilac dress she had +worn at church, walking about the room singing. She had her back to +him when he opened the door, but when, turning quickly, she saw his +broad, surprised face, she blushed and came rapidly up to him. + +"I want to try to sing again," she said, adding as if by way of +excuse, "it is, at least, something to do." + +"That's capital!" + +"How glad I am you've come! I am so happy today," she said, with the +old animation Pierre had not seen in her for along time. "You know +Nicholas has received a St. George's Cross? I am so proud of him." + +"Oh yes, I sent that announcement. But I don't want to interrupt +you," he added, and was about to go to the drawing room. + +Natasha stopped him. + +"Count, is it wrong of me to sing?" she said blushing, and fixing +her eyes inquiringly on him. + +"No... Why should it be? On the contrary... But why do you ask me?" + +"I don't know myself," Natasha answered quickly, "but I should not +like to do anything you disapproved of. I believe in you completely. +You don't know how important you are to me, how much you've done for +me...." She spoke rapidly and did not notice how Pierre flushed at her +words. "I saw in that same army order that he, Bolkonski" (she +whispered the name hastily), "is in Russia, and in the army again. +What do you think?"- she was speaking hurriedly, evidently afraid +her strength might fail her- "Will he ever forgive me? Will he not +always have a bitter feeling toward me? What do you think? What do you +think?" + +"I think..." Pierre replied, "that he has nothing to forgive.... +If I were in his place..." + +By association of ideas, Pierre was at once carried back to the +day when, trying to comfort her, he had said that if he were not +himself but the best man in the world and free, he would ask on his +knees for her hand; and the same feeling of pity, tenderness, and love +took possession of him and the same words rose to his lips. But she +did not give him time to say them. + +"Yes, you... you..." she said, uttering the word you rapturously- +"that's a different thing. I know no one kinder, more generous, or +better than you; nobody could be! Had you not been there then, and now +too, I don't know what would have become of me, because..." + +Tears suddenly rose in her eyes, she turned away, lifted her music +before her eyes, began singing again, and again began walking up and +down the room. + +Just then Petya came running in from the drawing room. + +Petya was now a handsome rosy lad of fifteen with full red lips +and resembled Natasha. He was preparing to enter the university, but +he and his friend Obolenski had lately, in secret, agreed to join +the hussars. + +Petya had come rushing out to talk to his namesake about this +affair. He had asked Pierre to find out whether he would be accepted +in the hussars. + +Pierre walked up and down the drawing room, not listening to what +Petya was saying. + +Petya pulled him by the arm to attract his attention. + +"Well, what about my plan? Peter Kirilych, for heaven's sake! You +are my only hope " said Petya. + +"Oh yes, your plan. To join the hussars? I'll mention it, I'll bring +it all up today." + +"Well, mon cher, have you got the manifesto?" asked the old count. +"The countess has been to Mass at the Razumovskis' and heard the new +prayer. She says it's very fine." + +"Yes, I've got it," said Pierre. "The Emperor is to be here +tomorrow... there's to be an Extraordinary Meeting of the nobility, +and they are talking of a levy of ten men per thousand. Oh yes, let me +congratulate you!" + +"Yes, yes, thank God! Well, and what news from the army?" + +"We are again retreating. They say we're already near Smolensk," +replied Pierre. + +"O Lord, O Lord!" exclaimed the count. "Where is the manifesto?" + +"The Emperor's appeal? Oh yes!" + +Pierre began feeling in his pockets for the papers, but could not +find them. Still slapping his pockets, he kissed the hand of the +countess who entered the room and glanced uneasily around, evidently +expecting Natasha, who had left off singing but had not yet come +into the drawing room. + +"On my word, I don't know what I've done with it," he said. + +"There he is, always losing everything!" remarked the countess. + +Natasha entered with a softened and agitated expression of face +and sat down looking silently at Pierre. As soon as she entered, +Pierre's features, which had been gloomy, suddenly lighted up, and +while still searching for the papers he glanced at her several times. + +"No, really! I'll drive home, I must have left them there. I'll +certainly..." + +"But you'll be late for dinner." + +"Oh! And my coachman has gone." + +But Sonya, who had gone to look for the papers in the anteroom, +had found them in Pierre's hat, where he had carefully tucked them +under the lining. Pierre was about to begin reading. + +"No, after dinner," said the old count, evidently expecting much +enjoyment from that reading. + +At dinner, at which champagne was drunk to the health of the new +chevalier of St. George, Shinshin told them the town news, of the +illness of the old Georgian princess, of Metivier's disappearance from +Moscow, and of how some German fellow had been brought to Rostopchin +and accused of being a French "spyer" (so Count Rostopchin had told +the story), and how Rostopchin let him go and assured the people +that he was "not a spire at all, but only an old German ruin." + +"People are being arrested..." said the count. "I've told the +countess she should not speak French so much. It's not the time for it +now." + +"And have you heard?" Shinshin asked. "Prince Golitsyn has engaged a +master to teach him Russian. It is becoming dangerous to speak +French in the streets." + +"And how about you, Count Peter Kirilych? If they call up the +militia, you too will have to mount a horse," remarked the old +count, addressing Pierre. + +Pierre had been silent and preoccupied all through dinner, seeming +not to grasp what was said. He looked at the count. + +"Oh yes, the war," he said. "No! What sort of warrior should I make? +And yet everything is so strange, so strange! I can't make it out. I +don't know, I am very far from having military tastes, but in these +times no one can answer for himself." + +After dinner the count settled himself comfortably in an easy +chair and with a serious face asked Sonya, who was considered an +excellent reader, to read the appeal. + +"To Moscow, our ancient Capital! + +"The enemy has entered the borders of Russia with immense forces. He +comes to despoil our beloved country," + +Sonya read painstakingly in her high-pitched voice. The count +listened with closed eyes, heaving abrupt sighs at certain passages. + +Natasha sat erect, gazing with a searching look now at her father +and now at Pierre. + +Pierre felt her eyes on him and tried not to look round. The +countess shook her head disapprovingly and angrily at every solemn +expression in the manifesto. In all these words she saw only that +the danger threatening her son would not soon be over. Shinshin, +with a sarcastic smile on his lips, was evidently preparing to make +fun of anything that gave him the opportunity: Sonya's reading, any +remark of the count's, or even the manifesto itself should no better +pretext present itself. + +After reading about the dangers that threatened Russia, the hopes +the Emperor placed on Moscow and especially on its illustrious +nobility, Sonya, with a quiver in her voice due chiefly to the +attention that was being paid to her, read the last words: + +"We ourselves will not delay to appear among our people in that +Capital and in others parts of our realm for consultation, and for the +direction of all our levies, both those now barring the enemy's path +and those freshly formed to defeat him wherever he may appear. May the +ruin he hopes to bring upon us recoil on his own head, and may +Europe delivered from bondage glorify the name of Russia!" + +"Yes, that's it!" cried the count, opening his moist eyes and +sniffing repeatedly, as if a strong vinaigrette had been held to his +nose; and he added, "Let the Emperor but say the word and we'll +sacrifice everything and begrudge nothing." + +Before Shinshin had time to utter the joke he was ready to make on +the count's patriotism, Natasha jumped up from her place and ran to +her father. + +"What a darling our Papa is!" she cried, kissing him, and she +again looked at Pierre with the unconscious coquetry that had returned +to her with her better spirits. + +"There! Here's a patriot for you!" said Shinshin. + +"Not a patriot at all, but simply..." Natasha replied in an +injured tone. "Everything seems funny to you, but this isn't at all +a joke...." + +"A joke indeed!" put in the count. "Let him but say the word and +we'll all go.... We're not Germans!" + +"But did you notice, it says, 'for consultation'?" said Pierre. + +"Never mind what it's for...." + +At this moment, Petya, to whom nobody was paying any attention, came +up to his father with a very flushed face and said in his breaking +voice that was now deep and now shrill: + +"Well, Papa, I tell you definitely, and Mamma too, it's as you +please, but I say definitely that you must let me enter the army, +because I can't... that's all...." + +The countess, in dismay, looked up to heaven, clasped her hands, and +turned angrily to her husband. + +"That comes of your talking!" said she. + +But the count had already recovered from his excitement. + +"Come, come!" said he. "Here's a fine warrior! No! Nonsense! You +must study." + +"It's not nonsense, Papa. Fedya Obolenski is younger than I, and +he's going too. Besides, all the same I can't study now when..." Petya +stopped short, flushed till he perspired, but still got out the words, +"when our Fatherland is in danger." + +"That'll do, that'll do- nonsense...." + +"But you said yourself that we would sacrifice everything." + +"Petya! Be quiet, I tell you!" cried the count, with a glance at his +wife, who had turned pale and was staring fixedly at her son. + +"And I tell you- Peter Kirilych here will also tell you..." + +"Nonsense, I tell you. Your mother's milk has hardly dried on your +lips and you want to go into the army! There, there, I tell you," +and the count moved to go out of the room, taking the papers, probably +to reread them in his study before having a nap. + +"Well, Peter Kirilych, let's go and have a smoke," he said. + +Pierre was agitated and undecided. Natasha's unwontedly brilliant +eyes, continually glancing at him with a more than cordial look, had +reduced him to this condition. + +"No, I think I'll go home." + +"Home? Why, you meant to spend the evening with us.... You don't +often come nowadays as it is, and this girl of mine," said the count +good-naturedly, pointing to Natasha, "only brightens up when you're +here." + +"Yes, I had forgotten... I really must go home... business..." +said Pierre hurriedly. + +"Well, then, au revoir!" said the count, and went out of the room. + +"Why are you going? Why are you upset?" asked Natasha, and she +looked challengingly into Pierre's eyes. + +"Because I love you!" was what he wanted to say, but he did not +say it, and only blushed till the tears came, and lowered his eyes. + +"Because it is better for me to come less often... because... No, +simply I have business...." + +"Why? No, tell me!" Natasha began resolutely and suddenly stopped. + +They looked at each other with dismayed and embarrassed faces. He +tried to smile but could not: his smile expressed suffering, and he +silently kissed her hand and went out. + +Pierre made up his mind not to go to the Rostovs' any more. + +CHAPTER XXI + +After the definite refusal he had received, Petya went to his room +and there locked himself in and wept bitterly. When he came in to tea, +silent, morose, and with tear-stained face, everybody pretended not to +notice anything. + +Next day the Emperor arrived in Moscow, and several of the +Rostovs' domestic serfs begged permission to go to have a look at him. +That morning Petya was a long time dressing and arranging his hair and +collar to look like a grown-up man. He frowned before his looking +glass, gesticulated, shrugged his shoulders, and finally, without +saying a word to anyone, took his cap and left the house by the back +door, trying to avoid notice. Petya decided to go straight to where +the Emperor was and to explain frankly to some gentleman-in-waiting +(he imagined the Emperor to be always surrounded by +gentlemen-in-waiting) that he, Count Rostov, in spite of his youth +wished to serve his country; that youth could be no hindrance to +loyalty, and that he was ready to... While dressing, Petya had +prepared many fine things he meant to say to the gentleman-in-waiting. + +It was on the very fact of being so young that Petya counted for +success in reaching the Emperor- he even thought how surprised +everyone would be at his youthfulness- and yet in the arrangement of +his collar and hair and by his sedate deliberate walk he wished to +appear a grown-up man. But the farther he went and the more his +attention was diverted by the ever-increasing crowds moving toward the +Kremlin, the less he remembered to walk with the sedateness and +deliberation of a man. As he approached the Kremlin he even began to +avoid being crushed and resolutely stuck out his elbows in a +menacing way. But within the Trinity Gateway he was so pressed to +the wall by people who probably were unaware of the patriotic +intentions with which he had come that in spite of all his +determination he had to give in, and stop while carriages passed in, +rumbling beneath the archway. Beside Petya stood a peasant woman, a +footman, two tradesmen, and a discharged soldier. After standing +some time in the gateway, Petya tried to move forward in front of +the others without waiting for all the carriages to pass, and he began +resolutely working his way with his elbows, but the woman just in +front of him, who was the first against whom he directed his +efforts, angrily shouted at him: + +"What are you shoving for, young lordling? Don't you see we're all +standing still? Then why push?" + +"Anybody can shove," said the footman, and also began working his +elbows to such effect that he pushed Petya into a very filthy corner +of the gateway. + +Petya wiped his perspiring face with his hands and pulled up the +damp collar which he had arranged so well at home to seem like a +man's. + +He felt that he no longer looked presentable, and feared that if +he were now to approach the gentlemen-in-waiting in that plight he +would not be admitted to the Emperor. But it was impossible to smarten +oneself up or move to another place, because of the crowd. One of +the generals who drove past was an acquaintance of the Rostovs', and +Petya thought of asking his help, but came to the conclusion that that +would not be a manly thing to do. When the carriages had all passed +in, the crowd, carrying Petya with it, streamed forward into the +Kremlin Square which was already full of people. There were people not +only in the square, but everywhere- on the slopes and on the roofs. As +soon as Petya found himself in the square he clearly heard the sound +of bells and the joyous voices of the crowd that filled the whole +Kremlin. + +For a while the crowd was less dense, but suddenly all heads were +bared, and everyone rushed forward in one direction. Petya was being +pressed so that he could scarcely breathe, and everybody shouted, +"Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!" Petya stood on tiptoe and pushed and +pinched, but could see nothing except the people about him. + +All the faces bore the same expression of excitement and enthusiasm. +A tradesman's wife standing beside Petya sobbed, and the tears ran +down her cheeks. + +"Father! Angel! Dear one!" she kept repeating, wiping away her tears +with her fingers. + +"Hurrah!" was heard on all sides. + +For a moment the crowd stood still, but then it made another rush +forward. + +Quite beside himself, Petya, clinching his teeth and rolling his +eyes ferociously, pushed forward, elbowing his way and shouting +"hurrah!" as if he were prepared that instant to kill himself and +everyone else, but on both sides of him other people with similarly +ferocious faces pushed forward and everybody shouted "hurrah!" + +"So this is what the Emperor is!" thought Petya. "No, I can't +petition him myself- that would be too bold." But in spite of this +he continued to struggle desperately forward, and from between the +backs of those in front he caught glimpses of an open space with a +strip of red cloth spread out on it; but just then the crowd swayed +back- the police in front were pushing back those who had pressed +too close to the procession: the Emperor was passing from the palace +to the Cathedral of the Assumption- and Petya unexpectedly received +such a blow on his side and ribs and was squeezed so hard that +suddenly everything grew dim before his eyes and he lost +consciousness. When he came to himself, a man of clerical appearance +with a tuft of gray hair at the back of his head and wearing a +shabby blue cassock- probably a church clerk and chanter- was +holding him under the arm with one hand while warding off the pressure +of the crowd with the other. + +"You've crushed the young gentleman!" said the clerk. "What are +you up to? Gently!... They've crushed him, crushed him!" + +The Emperor entered the Cathedral of the Assumption. The crowd +spread out again more evenly, and the clerk led Petya- pale and +breathless- to the Tsar-cannon. Several people were sorry for Petya, +and suddenly a crowd turned toward him and pressed round him. Those +who stood nearest him attended to him, unbuttoned his coat, seated him +on the raised platform of the cannon, and reproached those others +(whoever they might be) who had crushed him. + +"One might easily get killed that way! What do they mean by it? +Killing people! Poor dear, he's as white as a sheet!"- various +voices were heard saying. + +Petya soon came to himself, the color returned to his face, the pain +had passed, and at the cost of that temporary unpleasantness he had +obtained a place by the cannon from where he hoped to see the +Emperor who would be returning that way. Petya no longer thought of +presenting his petition. If he could only see the Emperor he would +be happy! + +While the service was proceeding in the Cathedral of the Assumption- +it was a combined service of prayer on the occasion of the Emperor's +arrival and of thanksgiving for the conclusion of peace with the +Turks- the crowd outside spread out and hawkers appeared, selling +kvas, gingerbread, and poppyseed sweets (of which Petya was +particularly fond), and ordinary conversation could again be heard. +A tradesman's wife was showing a rent in her shawl and telling how +much the shawl had cost; another was saying that all silk goods had +now got dear. The clerk who had rescued Petya was talking to a +functionary about the priests who were officiating that day with the +bishop. The clerk several times used the word "plenary" (of the +service), a word Petya did not understand. Two young citizens were +joking with some serf girls who were cracking nuts. All these +conversations, especially the joking with the girls, were such as +might have had a particular charm for Petya at his age, but they did +not interest him now. He sat on his elevation- the pedestal of the +cannon- still agitated as before by the thought of the Emperor and +by his love for him. The feeling of pain and fear he had experienced +when he was being crushed, together with that of rapture, still +further intensified his sense of the importance of the occasion. + +Suddenly the sound of a firing of cannon was heard from the +embankment, to celebrate the signing of peace with the Turks, and +the crowd rushed impetuously toward the embankment to watch the +firing. Petya too would have run there, but the clerk who had taken +the young gentleman under his protection stopped him. The firing was +still proceeding when officers, generals, and gentlemen-in-waiting +came running out of the cathedral, and after them others in a more +leisurely manner: caps were again raised, and those who had run to +look at the cannon ran back again. At last four men in uniforms and +sashes emerged from the cathedral doors. "Hurrah! hurrah!" shouted the +crowd again. + +"Which is he? Which?" asked Petya in a tearful voice, of those +around him, but no one answered him, everybody was too excited; and +Petya, fixing on one of those four men, whom he could not clearly +see for the tears of joy that filled his eyes, concentrated all his +enthusiasm on him- though it happened not to be the Emperor- +frantically shouted "Hurrah!" and resolved that tomorrow, come what +might, he would join the army. + +The crowd ran after the Emperor, followed him to the palace, and +began to disperse. It was already late, and Petya had not eaten +anything and was drenched with perspiration, yet he did not go home +but stood with that diminishing, but still considerable, crowd +before the palace while the Emperor dined- looking in at the palace +windows, expecting he knew not what, and envying alike the notables he +saw arriving at the entrance to dine with the Emperor and the court +footmen who served at table, glimpses of whom could be seen through +the windows. + +While the Emperor was dining, Valuev, looking out of the window, +said: + +"The people are still hoping to see Your Majesty again." + +The dinner was nearly over, and the Emperor, munching a biscuit, +rose and went out onto the balcony. The people, with Petya among them, +rushed toward the balcony. + +"Angel! Dear one! Hurrah! Father!..." cried the crowd, and Petya +with it, and again the women and men of weaker mold, Petya among them, +wept with joy. + +A largish piece of the biscuit the Emperor was holding in his hand +broke off, fell on the balcony parapet, and then to the ground. A +coachman in a jerkin, who stood nearest, sprang forward and snatched +it up. Several people in the crowd rushed at the coachman. Seeing this +the Emperor had a plateful of biscuits brought him and began +throwing them down from the balcony. Petya's eyes grew bloodshot, +and still more excited by the danger of being crushed, he rushed at +the biscuits. He did not know why, but he had to have a biscuit from +the Tsar's hand and he felt that he must not give way. He sprang +forward and upset an old woman who was catching at a biscuit; the +old woman did not consider herself defeated though she was lying on +the ground- she grabbed at some biscuits but her hand did not reach +them. Petya pushed her hand away with his knee, seized a biscuit, +and as if fearing to be too late, again shouted "Hurrah!" with a voice +already hoarse. + +The Emperor went in, and after that the greater part of the crowd +began to disperse. + +"There! I said if only we waited- and so it was!" was being joyfully +said by various people. + +Happy as Petya was, he felt sad at having to go home knowing that +all the enjoyment of that day was over. He did not go straight home +from the Kremlin, but called on his friend Obolenski, who was +fifteen and was also entering the regiment. On returning home Petya +announced resolutely and firmly that if he was not allowed to enter +the service he would run away. And next day, Count Ilya Rostov- though +he had not yet quite yielded- went to inquire how he could arrange for +Petya to serve where there would be least danger. + +CHAPTER XXII + +Two days later, on the fifteenth of July, an immense number of +carriages were standing outside the Sloboda Palace. + +The great halls were full. In the first were the nobility and gentry +in their uniforms, in the second bearded merchants in full-skirted +coats of blue cloth and wearing medals. in the noblemen's hall there +was an incessant movement and buzz of voices. The chief magnates sat +on high-backed chairs at a large table under the portrait of the +Emperor, but most of the gentry were strolling about the room. + +All these nobles, whom Pierre met every day at the Club or in +their own houses, were in uniform- some in that of Catherine's day, +others in that of Emperor Paul, others again in the new uniforms of +Alexander's time or the ordinary uniform of the nobility, and the +general characteristic of being in uniform imparted something +strange and fantastic to these diverse and familiar personalities, +both old and young. The old men, dim-eyed, toothless, bald, sallow, +and bloated, or gaunt and wrinkled, were especially striking. For +the most part they sat quietly in their places and were silent, or, if +they walked about and talked, attached themselves to someone +younger. On all these faces, as on the faces of the crowd Petya had +seen in the Square, there was a striking contradiction: the general +expectation of a solemn event, and at the same time the everyday +interests in a boston card party, Peter the cook, Zinaida Dmitrievna's +health, and so on. + +Pierre was there too, buttoned up since early morning in a +nobleman's uniform that had become too tight for him. He was agitated; +this extraordinary gathering not only of nobles but also of the +merchant-class- les etats generaux (States-General)- evoked in him a +whole series of ideas he had long laid aside but which were deeply +graven in his soul: thoughts of the Contrat social and the French +Revolution. The words that had struck him in the Emperor's appeal- +that the sovereign was coming to the capital for consultation with his +people- strengthened this idea. And imagining that in this direction +something important which he had long awaited was drawing near, he +strolled about watching and listening to conversations, but nowhere +finding any confirmation of the ideas that occupied him. + +The Emperor's manifesto was read, evoking enthusiasm, and then all +moved about discussing it. Besides the ordinary topics of +conversation, Pierre heard questions of where the marshals of the +nobility were to stand when the Emperor entered, when a ball should be +given in the Emperor's honor, whether they should group themselves +by districts or by whole provinces... and so on; but as soon as the +war was touched on, or what the nobility had been convened for, the +talk became undecided and indefinite. Then all preferred listening +to speaking. + +A middle-aged man, handsome and virile, in the uniform of a +retired naval officer, was speaking in one of the rooms, and a small +crowd was pressing round him. Pierre went up to the circle that had +formed round the speaker and listened. Count Ilya Rostov, in a +military uniform of Catherine's time, was sauntering with a pleasant +smile among the crowd, with all of whom he was acquainted. He too +approached that group and listened with a kindly smile and nods of +approval, as he always did, to what the speaker was saying. The +retired naval man was speaking very boldly, as was evident from the +expression on the faces of the listeners and from the fact that some +people Pierre knew as the meekest and quietest of men walked away +disapprovingly or expressed disagreement with him. Pierre pushed his +way into the middle of the group, listened, and convinced himself that +the man was indeed a liberal, but of views quite different from his +own. The naval officer spoke in a particularly sonorous, musical, +and aristocratic baritone voice, pleasantly swallowing his r's and +generally slurring his consonants: the voice of a man calling out to +his servant, "Heah! Bwing me my pipe!" It was indicative of +dissipation and the exercise of authority. + +"What if the Smolensk people have offahd to waise militia for the +Empewah? Ah we to take Smolensk as our patte'n? If the noble +awistocwacy of the pwovince of Moscow thinks fit, it can show its +loyalty to our sov'weign the Empewah in other ways. Have we +fo'gotten the waising of the militia in the yeah 'seven? All that +did was to enwich the pwiests' sons and thieves and wobbahs...." + +Count Ilya Rostov smiled blandly and nodded approval. + +"And was our militia of any use to the Empia? Not at all! It only +wuined our farming! Bettah have another conscwiption... o' ou' men +will wetu'n neithah soldiers no' peasants, and we'll get only +depwavity fwom them. The nobility don't gwudge theah lives- evewy +one of us will go and bwing in more wecwuits, and the sov'weign" (that +was the way he referred to the Emperor) "need only say the word and +we'll all die fo' him!" added the orator with animation. + +Count Rostov's mouth watered with pleasure and he nudged Pierre, but +Pierre wanted to speak himself. He pushed forward, feeling stirred, +but not yet sure what stirred him or what he would say. Scarcely had +he opened his mouth when one of the senators, a man without a tooth in +his head, with a shrewd though angry expression, standing near the +first speaker, interrupted him. Evidently accustomed to managing +debates and to maintaining an argument, he began in low but distinct +tones: + +"I imagine, sir," said he, mumbling with his toothless mouth, +"that we have been summoned here not to discuss whether it's best +for the empire at the present moment to adopt conscription or to +call out the militia. We have been summoned to reply to the appeal +with which our sovereign the Emperor has honored us. But to judge what +is best- conscription or the militia- we can leave to the supreme +authority...." + +Pierre suddenly saw an outlet for his excitement. He hardened his +heart against the senator who was introducing this set and narrow +attitude into the deliberations of the nobility. Pierre stepped +forward and interrupted him. He himself did not yet know what he would +say, but he began to speak eagerly, occasionally lapsing into French +or expressing himself in bookish Russian. + +"Excuse me, your excellency," he began. (He was well acquainted with +the senator, but thought it necessary on this occasion to address +him formally.) "Though I don't agree with the gentleman..." (he +hesitated: he wished to say, "Mon tres honorable preopinant"- "My very +honorable opponent") "with the gentleman... whom I have not the +honor of knowing, I suppose that the nobility have been summoned not +merely to express their sympathy and enthusiasm but also to consider +the means by which we can assist our Fatherland! I imagine," he went +on, warming to his subject, "that the Emperor himself would not be +satisfied to find in us merely owners of serfs whom we are willing +to devote to his service, and chair a canon~^ we are ready to make of +ourselves- and not to obtain from us any co-co-counsel." + +^~ "Food for cannon." + +Many persons withdrew from the circle, noticing the senator's +sarcastic smile and the freedom of Pierre's remarks. Only Count Rostov +was pleased with them as he had been pleased with those of the naval +officer, the senator, and in general with whatever speech he had +last heard. + +"I think that before discussing these questions," Pierre +continued, "we should ask the Emperor- most respectfully ask His +Majesty- to let us know the number of our troops and the position in +which our army and our forces now are, and then..." + +But scarcely had Pierre uttered these words before he was attacked +from three sides. The most vigorous attack came from an old +acquaintance, a boston player who had always been well disposed toward +him, Stepan Stepanovich Adraksin. Adraksin was in uniform, and whether +as a result of the uniform or from some other cause Pierre saw +before him quite a different man. With a sudden expression of +malevolence on his aged face, Adraksin shouted at Pierre: + +"In the first place, I tell you we have no right to question the +Emperor about that, and secondly, if the Russian nobility had that +right, the Emperor could not answer such a question. The troops are +moved according to the enemy's movements and the number of men +increases and decreases..." + +Another voice, that of a nobleman of medium height and about forty +years of age, whom Pierre had formerly met at the gypsies' and knew as +a bad cardplayer, and who, also transformed by his uniform, came up to +Pierre, interrupted Adraksin. + +"Yes, and this is not a time for discussing," he continued, "but for +acting: there is war in Russia! The enemy is advancing to destroy +Russia, to desecrate the tombs of our fathers, to carry off our +wives and children." The nobleman smote his breast. "We will all +arise, every one of us will go, for our father the Tsar!" he +shouted, rolling his bloodshot eyes. Several approving voices were +heard in the crowd. "We are Russians and will not grudge our blood +in defense of our faith, the throne, and the Fatherland! We must cease +raving if we are sons of our Fatherland! We will show Europe how +Russia rises to the defense of Russia!" + +Pierre wished to reply, but could not get in a word. He felt that +his words, apart from what meaning they conveyed, were less audible +than the sound of his opponent's voice. + +Count Rostov at the back of the crowd was expressing approval; +several persons, briskly turning a shoulder to the orator at the end +of a phrase, said: + +"That's right, quite right! Just so!" + +Pierre wished to say that he was ready to sacrifice his money, his +serfs, or himself, only one ought to know the state of affairs in +order to be able to improve it, but he was unable to speak. Many +voices shouted and talked at the same time, so that Count Rostov had +not time to signify his approval of them all, and the group increased, +dispersed, re-formed, and then moved with a hum of talk into the +largest hall and to the big table. Not only was Pierre's attempt to +speak unsuccessful, but he was rudely interrupted, pushed aside, and +people turned away from him as from a common enemy. This happened +not because they were displeased by the substance of his speech, which +had even been forgotten after the many subsequent speeches, but to +animate it the crowd needed a tangible object to love and a tangible +object to hate. Pierre became the latter. Many other orators spoke +after the excited nobleman, and all in the same tone. Many spoke +eloquently and with originality. + +Glinka, the editor of the Russian Messenger, who was recognized +(cries of "author! author!" were heard in the crowd), said that +"hell must be repulsed by hell," and that he had seen a child +smiling at lightning flashes and thunderclaps, but "we will not be +that child." + +"Yes, yes, at thunderclaps!" was repeated approvingly in the back +rows of the crowd. + +The crowd drew up to the large table, at which sat gray-haired or +bald seventy-year-old magnates, uniformed and besashed almost all of +whom Pierre had seen in their own homes with their buffoons, or +playing boston at the clubs. With an incessant hum of voices the crowd +advanced to the table. Pressed by the throng against the high backs of +the chairs, the orators spoke one after another and sometimes two +together. Those standing behind noticed what a speaker omitted to +say and hastened to supply it. Others in that heat and crush racked +their brains to find some thought and hastened to utter it. The old +magnates, whom Pierre knew, sat and turned to look first at one and +then at another, and their faces for the most part only expressed +the fact that they found it very hot. Pierre, however, felt excited, +and the general desire to show that they were ready to go to all +lengths- which found expression in the tones and looks more than in +the substance of the speeches- infected him too. He did not renounce +his opinions, but felt himself in some way to blame and wished to +justify himself. + +"I only said that it would be more to the purpose to make sacrifices +when we know what is needed!" said he, trying to be heard above the +other voices. + +One of the old men nearest to him looked round, but his attention +was immediately diverted by an exclamation at the other side of the +table. + +"Yes, Moscow will be surrendered! She will be our expiation!" +shouted one man. + +"He is the enemy of mankind!" cried another. "Allow me to speak...." +"Gentlemen, you are crushing me!..." + +CHAPTER XXIII + +At that moment Count Rostopchin with his protruding chin and alert +eyes, wearing the uniform of a general with sash over his shoulder, +entered the room, stepping briskly to the front of the crowd of +gentry. + +"Our sovereign the Emperor will be here in a moment," said +Rostopchin. "I am straight from the palace. Seeing the position we are +in, I think there is little need for discussion. The Emperor has +deigned to summon us and the merchants. Millions will pour forth +from there"- he pointed to the merchants' hall- "but our business is +to supply men and not spare ourselves... That is the least we can do!" + +A conference took place confined to the magnates sitting at the +table. The whole consultation passed more than quietly. After all +the preceding noise the sound of their old voices saying one after +another, "I agree," or for variety, "I too am of that opinion," and so +on had even a mournful effect. + +The secretary was told to write down the resolution of the Moscow +nobility and gentry, that they would furnish ten men, fully +equipped, out of every thousand serfs, as the Smolensk gentry had +done. Their chairs made a scraping noise as the gentlemen who had +conferred rose with apparent relief, and began walking up and down, +arm in arm, to stretch their legs and converse in couples. + +"The Emperor! The Emperor!" a sudden cry resounded through the halls +and the whole throng hurried to the entrance. + +The Emperor entered the hall through a broad path between two +lines of nobles. Every face expressed respectful, awe-struck +curiosity. Pierre stood rather far off and could not hear all that the +Emperor said. From what he did hear he understood that the Emperor +spoke of the danger threatening the empire and of the hopes he +placed on the Moscow nobility. He was answered by a voice which +informed him of the resolution just arrived at. + +"Gentlemen!" said the Emperor with a quivering voice. + +There was a rustling among the crowd and it again subsided, so +that Pierre distinctly heard the pleasantly human voice of the Emperor +saying with emotion: + +"I never doubted the devotion of the Russian nobles, but today it +has surpassed my expectations. I thank you in the name of the +Fatherland! Gentlemen, let us act! Time is most precious..." + +The Emperor ceased speaking, the crowd began pressing round him, and +rapturous exclamations were heard from all sides. + +"Yes, most precious... a royal word," said Count Rostov, with a sob. +He stood at the back, and, though he had heard hardly anything, +understood everything in his own way. + +From the hall of the nobility the Emperor went to that of the +merchants. There he remained about ten minutes. Pierre was among those +who saw him come out from the merchants' hall with tears of emotion in +his eyes. As became known later, he had scarcely begun to address +the merchants before tears gushed from his eyes and he concluded in +a trembling voice. When Pierre saw the Emperor he was coming out +accompanied by two merchants, one of whom Pierre knew, a fat +otkupshchik. The other was the mayor, a man with a thin sallow face +and narrow beard. Both were weeping. Tears filled the thin man's eyes, +and the fat otkupshchik sobbed outright like a child and kept +repeating: + +"Our lives and property- take them, Your Majesty!" + +Pierre's one feeling at the moment was a desire to show that he +was ready to go all lengths and was prepared to sacrifice +everything. He now felt ashamed of his speech with its +constitutional tendency and sought an opportunity of effacing it. +Having heard that Count Mamonov was furnishing a regiment, Bezukhov at +once informed Rostopchin that he would give a thousand men and their +maintenance. + +Old Rostov could not tell his wife of what had passed without tears, +and at once consented to Petya's request and went himself to enter his +name. + +Next day the Emperor left Moscow. The assembled nobles all took +off their uniforms and settled down again in their homes and clubs, +and not without some groans gave orders to their stewards about the +enrollment, feeling amazed themselves at what they had done. + +BOOK TEN: 1812 + +CHAPTER I + +Napoleon began the war with Russia because he could not resist going +to Dresden, could not help having his head turned by the homage he +received, could not help donning a Polish uniform and yielding to +the stimulating influence of a June morning, and could not refrain +from bursts of anger in the presence of Kurakin and then of Balashev. + +Alexander refused negotiations because he felt himself to be +personally insulted. Barclay de Tolly tried to command the army in the +best way, because he wished to fulfill his duty and earn fame as a +great commander. Rostov charged the French because he could not +restrain his wish for a gallop across a level field; and in the same +way the innumerable people who took part in the war acted in accord +with their personal characteristics, habits, circumstances, and +aims. They were moved by fear or vanity, rejoiced or were indignant, +reasoned, imagining that they knew what they were doing and did it +of their own free will, but they all were involuntary tools of +history, carrying on a work concealed from them but comprehensible +to us. Such is the inevitable fate of men of action, and the higher +they stand in the social hierarchy the less are they free. + +The actors of 1812 have long since left the stage, their personal +interests have vanished leaving no trace, and nothing remains of +that time but its historic results. + +Providence compelled all these men, striving to attain personal +aims, to further the accomplishment of a stupendous result no one of +them at all expected- neither Napoleon, nor Alexander, nor still +less any of those who did the actual fighting. + +The cause of the destruction of the French army in 1812 is clear +to us now. No one will deny that that cause was, on the one hand, +its advance into the heart of Russia late in the season without any +preparation for a winter campaign and, on the other, the character +given to the war by the burning of Russian towns and the hatred of the +foe this aroused among the Russian people. But no one at the time +foresaw (what now seems so evident) that this was the only way an army +of eight hundred thousand men- the best in the world and led by the +best general- could be destroyed in conflict with a raw army of half +its numerical strength, and led by inexperienced commanders as the +Russian army was. Not only did no one see this, but on the Russian +side every effort was made to hinder the only thing that could save +Russia, while on the French side, despite Napoleon's experience and +so-called military genius, every effort was directed to pushing on +to Moscow at the end of the summer, that is, to doing the very thing +that was bound to lead to destruction. + +In historical works on the year 1812 French writers are very fond of +saying that Napoleon felt the danger of extending his line, that he +sought a battle and that his marshals advised him to stop at Smolensk, +and of making similar statements to show that the danger of the +campaign was even then understood. Russian authors are still fonder of +telling us that from the commencement of the campaign a Scythian war +plan was adopted to lure Napoleon into the depths of Russia, and +this plan some of them attribute to Pfuel, others to a certain +Frenchman, others to Toll, and others again to Alexander himself- +pointing to notes, projects, and letters which contain hints of such a +line of action. But all these hints at what happened, both from the +French side and the Russian, are advanced only because they fit in +with the event. Had that event not occurred these hints would have +been forgotten, as we have forgotten the thousands and millions of +hints and expectations to the contrary which were current then but +have now been forgotten because the event falsified them. There are +always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that however +it may end there will always be people to say: "I said then that it +would be so," quite forgetting that amid their innumerable conjectures +many were to quite the contrary effect. + +Conjectures as to Napoleon's awareness of the danger of extending +his line, and (on the Russian side) as to luring the enemy into the +depths of Russia, are evidently of that kind, and only by much +straining can historians attribute such conceptions to Napoleon and +his marshals, or such plans to the Russian commanders. All the facts +are in flat contradiction to such conjectures. During the whole period +of the war not only was there no wish on the Russian side to draw +the French into the heart of the country, but from their first entry +into Russia everything was done to stop them. And not only was +Napoleon not afraid to extend his line, but he welcomed every step +forward as a triumph and did not seek battle as eagerly as in former +campaigns, but very lazily. + +At the very beginning of the war our armies were divided, and our +sole aim was to unite them, though uniting the armies was no advantage +if we meant to retire and lure the enemy into the depths of the +country. Our Emperor joined the army to encourage it to defend every +inch of Russian soil and not to retreat. The enormous Drissa camp +was formed on Pfuel's plan, and there was no intention of retiring +farther. The Emperor reproached the commanders in chief for every step +they retired. He could not bear the idea of letting the enemy even +reach Smolensk, still less could he contemplate the burning of Moscow, +and when our armies did unite he was displeased that Smolensk was +abandoned and burned without a general engagement having been fought +under its walls. + +So thought the Emperor, and the Russian commanders and people were +still more provoked at the thought that our forces were retreating +into the depths of the country. + +Napoleon having cut our armies apart advanced far into the country +and missed several chances of forcing an engagement. In August he +was at Smolensk and thought only of how to advance farther, though +as we now see that advance was evidently ruinous to him. + +The facts clearly show that Napoleon did not foresee the danger of +the advance on Moscow, nor did Alexander and the Russian commanders +then think of luring Napoleon on, but quite the contrary. The luring +of Napoleon into the depths of the country was not the result of any +plan, for no one believed it to be possible; it resulted from a most +complex interplay of intrigues, aims, and wishes among those who +took part in the war and had no perception whatever of the inevitable, +or of the one way of saving Russia. Everything came about +fortuitously. The armies were divided at the commencement of the +campaign. We tried to unite them, with the evident intention of giving +battle and checking the enemy's advance, and by this effort to unite +them while avoiding battle with a much stronger enemy, and necessarily +withdrawing the armies at an acute angle- we led the French on to +Smolensk. But we withdrew at an acute angle not only because the +French advanced between our two armies; the angle became still more +acute and we withdrew still farther, because Barclay de Tolly was an +unpopular foreigner disliked by Bagration (who would come his +command), and Bagration- being in command of the second army- tried to +postpone joining up and coming under Barclay's command as long as he +could. Bagration was slow in effecting the junction- though that was +the chief aim of all at headquarters- because, as he alleged, he +exposed his army to danger on this march, and it was best for him to +retire more to the left and more to the south, worrying the enemy from +flank and rear and securing from the Ukraine recruits for his army; +and it looks as if he planned this in order not to come under the +command of the detested foreigner Barclay, whose rank was inferior +to his own. + +The Emperor was with the army to encourage it, but his presence +and ignorance of what steps to take, and the enormous number of +advisers and plans, destroyed the first army's energy and it retired. + +The intention was to make a stand at the Drissa camp, but +Paulucci, aiming at becoming commander in chief, unexpectedly employed +his energy to influence Alexander, and Pfuel's whole plan was +abandoned and the command entrusted to Barclay. But as Barclay did not +inspire confidence his power was limited. The armies were divided, +there was no unity of command, and Barclay was unpopular; but from +this confusion, division, and the unpopularity of the foreign +commander in chief, there resulted on the one hand indecision and +the avoidance of a battle (which we could not have refrained from +had the armies been united and had someone else, instead of Barclay, +been in command) and on the other an ever-increasing indignation +against the foreigners and an increase in patriotic zeal. + +At last the Emperor left the army, and as the most convenient and +indeed the only pretext for his departure it was decided that it was +necessary for him to inspire the people in the capitals and arouse the +nation in general to a patriotic war. And by this visit of the Emperor +to Moscow the strength of the Russian army was trebled. + +He left in order not to obstruct the commander in chief's +undivided control of the army, and hoping that more decisive action +would then be taken, but the command of the armies became still more +confused and enfeebled. Bennigsen, the Tsarevich, and a swarm of +adjutants general remained with the army to keep the commander in +chief under observation and arouse his energy, and Barclay, feeling +less free than ever under the observation of all these "eyes of the +Emperor," became still more cautious of undertaking any decisive +action and avoided giving battle. + +Barclay stood for caution. The Tsarevich hinted at treachery and +demanded a general engagement. Lubomirski, Bronnitski, Wlocki, and the +others of that group stirred up so much trouble that Barclay, under +pretext of sending papers to the Emperor, dispatched these Polish +adjutants general to Petersburg and plunged into an open struggle with +Bennigsen and the Tsarevich. + +At Smolensk the armies at last reunited, much as Bagration +disliked it. + +Bagration drove up in a carriage to to the house occupied by +Barclay. Barclay donned his sash and came out to meet and report to +his senior officer Bagration. + +Despite his seniority in rank Bagration, in this contest of +magnanimity, took his orders from Barclay, but, having submitted, +agreed with him less than ever. By the Emperor's orders Bagration +reported direct to him. He wrote to Arakcheev, the Emperor's +confidant: "It must be as my sovereign pleases, but I cannot work with +the Minister (meaning Barclay). For God's sake send me somewhere +else if only in command of a regiment. I cannot stand it here. +Headquarters are so full of Germans that a Russian cannot exist and +there is no sense in anything. I thought I was really serving my +sovereign and the Fatherland, but it turns out that I am serving +Barclay. I confess I do not want to." + +The swarm of Bronnitskis and Wintzingerodes and their like still +further embittered the relations between the commanders in chief, +and even less unity resulted. Preparations were made to fight the +French before Smolensk. A general was sent to survey the position. +This general, hating Barclay, rode to visit a friend of his own, a +corps commander, and, having spent the day with him, returned to +Barclay and condemned, as unsuitable from every point of view, the +battleground he had not seen. + +While disputes and intrigues were going on about the future field of +battle, and while we were looking for the French- having lost touch +with them- the French stumbled upon Neverovski's division and +reached the walls of Smolensk. + +It was necessary to fight an unexpected battle at Smolensk to save +our lines of communication. The battle was fought and thousands were +killed on both sides. + +Smolensk was abandoned contrary to the wishes of the Emperor and +of the whole people. But Smolensk was burned by its own +inhabitants-who had been misled by their governor. And these ruined +inhabitants, setting an example to other Russians, went to Moscow +thinking only of their own losses but kindling hatred of the foe. +Napoleon advanced farther and we retired, thus arriving at the very +result which caused his destruction. + +CHAPTER II + +The day after his son had left, Prince Nicholas sent for Princess +Mary to come to his study. + +"Well? Are you satisfied now?" said he. "You've made me quarrel with +my son! Satisfied, are you? That's all you wanted! Satisfied?... It +hurts me, it hurts. I'm old and weak and this is what you wanted. Well +then, gloat over it! Gloat over it!" + +After that Princess Mary did not see her father for a whole week. He +was ill and did not leave his study. + +Princess Mary noticed to her surprise that during this illness the +old prince not only excluded her from his room, but did not admit +Mademoiselle Bourienne either. Tikhon alone attended him. + +At the end of the week the prince reappeared and resumed his +former way of life, devoting himself with special activity to building +operations and the arrangement of the gardens and completely +breaking off his relations with Mademoiselle Bourienne. His looks +and cold tone to his daughter seemed to say: "There, you see? You +plotted against me, you lied to Prince Andrew about my relations +with that Frenchwoman and made me quarrel with him, but you see I need +neither her nor you!" + +Princess Mary spent half of every day with little Nicholas, watching +his lessons, teaching him Russian and music herself, and talking to +Dessalles; the rest of the day she spent over her books, with her +old nurse, or with "God's folk" who sometimes came by the back door to +see her. + +Of the war Princess Mary thought as women do think about wars. She +feared for her brother who was in it, was horrified by and amazed at +the strange cruelty that impels men to kill one another, but she did +not understand the significance of this war, which seemed to her +like all previous wars. She did not realize the significance of this +war, though Dessalles with whom she constantly conversed was +passionately interested in its progress and tried to explain his own +conception of it to her, and though the "God's folk" who came to see +her reported, in their own way, the rumors current among the people of +an invasion by Antichrist, and though Julie (now Princess +Drubetskaya), who had resumed correspondence with her, wrote patriotic +letters from Moscow. + +"I write you in Russian, my good friend," wrote Julie in her +Frenchified Russian, "because I have a detestation for all the French, +and the same for their language which I cannot support to hear +spoken.... We in Moscow are elated by enthusiasm for our adored +Emperor. + +"My poor husband is enduring pains and hunger in Jewish taverns, but +the news which I have inspires me yet more. + +"You heard probably of the heroic exploit of Raevski, embracing +his two sons and saying: 'I will perish with them but we will not be +shaken!' And truly though the enemy was twice stronger than we, we +were unshakable. We pass the time as we can, but in war as in war! The +princesses Aline and Sophie sit whole days with me, and we, unhappy +widows of live men, make beautiful conversations over our charpie, +only you, my friend, are missing..." and so on. + +The chief reason Princess Mary did not realize the full significance +of this war was that the old prince never spoke of it, did not +recognize it, and laughed at Dessalles when he mentioned it at dinner. +The prince's tone was so calm and confident that Princess Mary +unhesitatingly believed him. + +All that July the old prince was exceedingly active and even +animated. He planned another garden and began a new building for the +domestic serfs. The only thing that made Princess Mary anxious about +him was that he slept very little and, instead of sleeping in his +study as usual, changed his sleeping place every day. One day he would +order his camp bed to be set up in the glass gallery, another day he +remained on the couch or on the lounge chair in the drawing room and +dozed there without undressing, while- instead of Mademoiselle +Bourienne- a serf boy read to him. Then again he would spend a night +in the dining room. + +On August 1, a second letter was received from Prince Andrew. In his +first letter which came soon after he had left home, Prince Andrew had +dutifully asked his father's forgiveness for what he had allowed +himself to say and begged to be restored to his favor. To this +letter the old prince had replied affectionately, and from that time +had kept the Frenchwoman at at Prince Andrew's second letter, +written near Vitebsk after the French had occupied that town, gave a +brief account of the whole campaign, enclosed for them a plan he had +drawn and forecasts as to the further progress of the war. In this +letter Prince Andrew pointed out to his father the danger of staying +at Bald Hills, so near the theater of war and on the army's direct +line of march, and advised him to move to Moscow. + +At dinner that day, on Dessalles' mentioning that the French were +said to have already entered Vitebsk, the old prince remembered his +son's letter. + +"There was a letter from Prince Andrew today," he said to Princess +Mary- "Haven't you read it?" + +"No, Father," she replied in a frightened voice. + +She could not have read the letter as she did not even know it had +arrived. + +"He writes about this war," said the prince, with the ironic smile +that had become habitual to him in speaking of the present war. + +"That must be very interesting," said Dessalles. "Prince Andrew is +in a position to know..." + +"Oh, very interesting!" said Mademoiselle Bourienne. + +"Go and get it for me," said the old prince to Mademoiselle +Bourienne. "You know- under the paperweight on the little table." + +Mademoiselle Bourienne jumped up eagerly. + +"No, don't!" he exclaimed with a frown. "You go, Michael Ivanovich." + +Michael Ivanovich rose and went to the study. But as soon as he +had left the room the old prince, looking uneasily round, threw down +his napkin and went himself. + +"They can't do anything... always make some muddle," he muttered. + +While he was away Princess Mary, Dessalles, Mademoiselle +Bourienne, and even little Nicholas exchanged looks in silence. The +old prince returned with quick steps, accompanied by Michael +Ivanovich, bringing the letter and a plan. These he put down beside +him- not letting anyone read them at dinner. + +On moving to the drawing room he handed the letter to Princess +Mary and, spreading out before him the plan of the new building and +fixing his eyes upon it, told her to read the letter aloud. When she +had done so Princess Mary looked inquiringly at her father. He was +examining the plan, evidently engrossed in his own ideas. + +"What do you think of it, Prince?" Dessalles ventured to ask. + +"I? I?..." said the prince as if unpleasantly awakened, and not +taking his eyes from the plan of the building. + +"Very possibly the theater of war will move so near to us that..." + +"Ha ha ha! The theater of war!" said the prince. "I have said and +still say that the theater of war is Poland and the enemy will never +get beyond the Niemen." + +Dessalles looked in amazement at the prince, who was talking of +the Niemen when the enemy was already at the Dnieper, but Princess +Mary, forgetting the geographical position of the Niemen, thought that +what her father was saying was correct. + +"When the snow melts they'll sink in the Polish swamps. Only they +could fail to see it," the prince continued, evidently thinking of the +campaign of 1807 which seemed to him so recent. "Bennigsen should have +advanced into Prussia sooner, then things would have taken a different +turn..." + +"But, Prince," Dessalles began timidly, "the letter mentions +Vitebsk...." + +"Ah, the letter? Yes..." replied the prince peevishly. "Yes... +yes..." His face suddenly took on a morose expression. He paused. +"Yes, he writes that the French were beaten at... at... what river +is it?" + +Dessalles dropped his eyes. + +"The prince says nothing about that," he remarked gently. + +"Doesn't he? But I didn't invent it myself." + +No one spoke for a long time. + +"Yes... yes... Well, Michael Ivanovich," he suddenly went on, +raising his head and pointing to the plan of the building, "tell me +how you mean to alter it...." + +Michael Ivanovich went up to the plan, and the prince after speaking +to him about the building looked angrily at Princess Mary and +Dessalles and went to his own room. + +Princess Mary saw Dessalles' embarrassed and astonished look fixed +on her father, noticed his silence, and was struck by the fact that +her father had forgotten his son's letter on the drawing-room table; +but she was not only afraid to speak of it and ask Dessalles the +reason of his confusion and silence, but was afraid even to think +about it. + +In the evening Michael Ivanovich, sent by the prince, came to +Princess Mary for Prince Andrew's letter which had been forgotten in +the drawing room. She gave it to him and, unpleasant as it was to +her to do so, ventured to ask him what her father was doing. + +"Always busy," replied Michael Ivanovich with a respectfully +ironic smile which caused Princess Mary to turn pale. "He's worrying +very much about the new building. He has been reading a little, but +now"- Michael Ivanovich went on, lowering his voice- "now he's at +his desk, busy with his will, I expect." (One of the prince's favorite +occupations of late had been the preparation of some papers he meant +to leave at his death and which he called his "will.") + +"And Alpatych is being sent to Smolensk?" asked Princess Mary. + +"Oh, yes, he has been waiting to start for some time." + +CHAPTER III + +When Michael Ivanovich returned to the study with the letter, the +old prince, with spectacles on and a shade over his eyes, was +sitting at his open bureau with screened candles, holding a paper in +his outstretched hand, and in a somewhat dramatic attitude was reading +his manuscript- his "Remarks" as he termed it- which was to be +transmitted to the Emperor after his death. + +When Michael Ivanovich went in there were tears in the prince's eyes +evoked by the memory of the time when the paper he was now reading had +been written. He took the letter from Michael Ivanovich's hand, put it +in his pocket, folded up his papers, and called in Alpatych who had +long been waiting. + +The prince had a list of things to be bought in Smolensk and, +walking up and down the room past Alpatych who stood by the door, he +gave his instructions. + +"First, notepaper- do you hear? Eight quires, like this sample, +gilt-edged... it must be exactly like the sample. Varnish, sealing +wax, as in Michael Ivanovich's list." + +He paced up and down for a while and glanced at his notes. + +"Then hand to the governor in person a letter about the deed." + +Next, bolts for the doors of the new building were wanted and had to +be of a special shape the prince had himself designed, and a leather +case had to be ordered to keep the "will" in. + +The instructions to Alpatych took over two hours and still the +prince did not let him go. He sat down, sank into thought, closed +his eyes, and dozed off. Alpatych made a slight movement. + +"Well, go, go! If anything more is wanted I'll send after you." + +Alpatych went out. The prince again went to his bureau, glanced into +it, fingered his papers, closed the bureau again, and sat down at +the table to write to the governor. + +It was already late when he rose after sealing the letter. He wished +to sleep, but he knew he would not be able to and that most depressing +thoughts came to him in bed. So he called Tikhon and went through +the rooms with him to show him where to set up the bed for that night. + +He went about looking at every corner. Every place seemed +unsatisfactory, but worst of all was his customary couch in the study. +That couch was dreadful to him, probably because of the oppressive +thoughts he had had when lying there. It was unsatisfactory +everywhere, but the corner behind the piano in the sitting room was +better than other places: he had never slept there yet. + +With the help of a footman Tikhon brought in the bedstead and +began putting it up. + +"That's not right! That's not right!" cried the prince, and +himself pushed it a few inches from the corner and then closer in +again. + +"Well, at last I've finished, now I'll rest," thought the prince, +and let Tikhon undress him. + +Frowning with vexation at the effort necessary to divest himself +of his coat and trousers, the prince undressed, sat down heavily on +the bed, and appeared to be meditating as he looked contemptuously +at his withered yellow legs. He was not meditating, but only deferring +the moment of making the effort to lift those legs up and turn over on +the bed. "Ugh, how hard it is! Oh, that this toil might end and you +would release me!" thought he. Pressing his lips together he made that +effort for the twenty-thousandth time and lay down. But hardly had +he done so before he felt the bed rocking backwards and forwards +beneath him as if it were breathing heavily and jolting. This happened +to him almost every night. He opened his eyes as they were closing. + +"No peace, damn them!" he muttered, angry he knew not with whom. "Ah +yes, there was something else important, very important, that I was +keeping till I should be in bed. The bolts? No, I told him about them. +No, it was something, something in the drawing room. Princess Mary +talked some nonsense. Dessalles, that fool, said something. +Something in my pocket- can't remember..." + +"Tikhon, what did we talk about at dinner?" + +"About Prince Michael..." + +"Be quiet, quiet!" The prince slapped his hand on the table. "Yes, I +know, Prince Andrew's letter! Princess Mary read it. Dessalles said +something about Vitebsk. Now I'll read it." + +He had the letter taken from his pocket and the table- on which +stood a glass of lemonade and a spiral wax candle- moved close to +the bed, and putting on his spectacles he began reading. Only now in +the stillness of the night, reading it by the faint light under the +green shade, did he grasp its meaning for a moment. + +"The French at Vitebsk, in four days' march they may be at Smolensk; +perhaps are already there! Tikhon!" Tikhon jumped up. "No, no, I don't +want anything!" he shouted. + +He put the letter under the candlestick and closed his eyes. And +there rose before him the Danube at bright noonday: reeds, the Russian +camp, and himself a young general without a wrinkle on his ruddy face, +vigorous and alert, entering Potemkin's gaily colored tent, and a +burning sense of jealousy of "the favorite" agitated him now as +strongly as it had done then. He recalled all the words spoken at that +first meeting with Potemkin. And he saw before him a plump, rather +sallow-faced, short, stout woman, the Empress Mother, with her smile +and her words at her first gracious reception of him, and then that +same face on the catafalque, and the encounter he had with Zubov +over her coffin about his right to kiss her hand. + +"Oh, quicker, quicker! To get back to that time and have done with +all the present! Quicker, quicker- and that they should leave me in +peace!" + +CHAPTER IV + +Bald Hills, Prince Nicholas Bolkonski's estate, lay forty miles east +from Smolensk and two miles from the main road to Moscow. + +The same evening that the prince gave his instructions to +Alpatych, Dessalles, having asked to see Princess Mary, told her that, +as the prince was not very well and was taking no steps to secure +his safety, though from Prince Andrew's letter it was evident that +to remain at Bald Hills might be dangerous, he respectfully advised +her to send a letter by Alpatych to the Provincial Governor at +Smolensk, asking him to let her know the state of affairs and the +extent of the danger to which Bald Hills was exposed. Dessalles +wrote this letter to the Governor for Princess Mary, she signed it, +and it was given to Alpatych with instructions to hand it to the +Governor and to come back as quickly as possible if there was danger. + +Having received all his orders Alpatych, wearing a white beaver hat- +a present from the prince- and carrying a stick as the prince did, +went out accompanied by his family. Three well-fed roans stood ready +harnessed to a small conveyance with a leather hood. + +The larger bell was muffled and the little bells on the harness +stuffed with paper. The prince allowed no one at Bald Hills to drive +with ringing bells; but on a long journey Alpatych liked to have them. +His satellites- the senior clerk, a countinghouse clerk, a scullery +maid, a cook, two old women, a little pageboy, the coachman, and +various domestic serfs- were seeing him off. + +His daughter placed chintz-covered down cushions for him to sit on +and behind his back. His old sister-in-law popped in a small bundle, +and one of the coachmen helped him into the vehicle. + +"There! There! Women's fuss! Women, women!" said Alpatych, puffing +and speaking rapidly just as the prince did, and he climbed into the +trap. + +After giving the clerk orders about the work to be done, Alpatych, +not trying to imitate the prince now, lifted the hat from his bald +head and crossed himself three times. + +"If there is anything... come back, Yakov Alpatych! For Christ's +sake think of us!" cried his wife, referring to the rumors of war +and the enemy. + +"Women, women! Women's fuss!" muttered Alpatych to himself and +started on his journey, looking round at the fields of yellow rye +and the still-green, thickly growing oats, and at other quite black +fields just being plowed a second time. + +As he went along he looked with pleasure at the year's splendid crop +of corn, scrutinized the strips of ryefield which here and there +were already being reaped, made his calculations as to the sowing +and the harvest, and asked himself whether he had not forgotten any of +the prince's orders. + +Having baited the horses twice on the way, he arrived at the town +toward evening on the fourth of August. + +Alpatych kept meeting and overtaking baggage trains and troops on +the road. As he approached Smolensk he heard the sounds of distant +firing, but these did not impress him. What struck him most was the +sight of a splendid field of oats in which a camp had been pitched and +which was being mown down by the soldiers, evidently for fodder. +This fact impressed Alpatych, but in thinking about his own business +he soon forgot it. + +All the interests of his life for more than thirty years had been +bounded by the will of the prince, and he never went beyond that +limit. Everything not connected with the execution of the prince's +orders did not interest and did not even exist for Alpatych. + +On reaching Smolensk on the evening of the fourth of August he put +up in the Gachina suburb across the Dnieper, at the inn kept by +Ferapontov, where he had been in the habit of putting up for the +last thirty years. Some thirty years ago Ferapontov, by Alpatych's +advice, had bought a wood from the prince, had begun to trade, and now +had a house, an inn, and a corn dealer's shop in that province. He was +a stout, dark, red-faced peasant in the forties, with thick lips, a +broad knob of a nose, similar knobs over his black frowning brows, and +a round belly. + +Wearing a waistcoat over his cotton shirt, Ferapontov was standing +before his shop which opened onto the street. On seeing Alpatych he +went up to him. + +"You're welcome, Yakov Alpatych. Folks are leaving the town, but you +have come to it," said he. + +"Why are they leaving the town?" asked Alpatych. + +"That's what I say. Folks are foolish! Always afraid of the French." + +"Women's fuss, women's fuss!" said Alpatych. + +"Just what I think, Yakov Alpatych. What I say is: orders have +been given not to let them in, so that must be right. And the peasants +are asking three rubles for carting- it isn't Christian!" + +Yakov Alpatych heard without heeding. He asked for a samovar and for +hay for his horses, and when he had had his tea he went to bed. + +All night long troops were moving past the inn. Next morning +Alpatych donned a jacket he wore only in town and went out on +business. It was a sunny morning and by eight o'clock it was already +hot. "A good day for harvesting," thought Alpatych. + +From beyond the town firing had been heard since early morning. At +eight o'clock the booming of cannon was added to the sound of +musketry. Many people were hurrying through the streets and there were +many soldiers, but cabs were still driving about, tradesmen stood at +their shops, and service was being held in the churches as usual. +Alpatych went to the shops, to government offices, to the post office, +and to the Governor's. In the offices and shops and at the post office +everyone was talking about the army and about the enemy who was +already attacking the town, everybody was asking what should be +done, and all were trying to calm one another. + +In front of the Governor's house Alpatych found a large number of +people, Cossacks, and a traveling carriage of the Governor's. At the +porch he met two of the landed gentry, one of whom he knew. This +man, an ex-captain of police, was saying angrily: + +"It's no joke, you know! It's all very well if you're single. 'One +man though undone is but one,' as the proverb says, but with +thirteen in your family and all the property... They've brought us +to utter ruin! What sort of governors are they to do that? They +ought to be hanged- the brigands!..." + +"Oh come, that's enough!" said the other. + +"What do I care? Let him hear! We're not dogs," said the +ex-captain of police, and looking round he noticed Alpatych. + +"Oh, Yakov Alpatych! What have you come for?" + +"To see the Governor by his excellency's order," answered +Alpatych, lifting his head and proudly thrusting his hand into the +bosom of his coat as he always did when he mentioned the prince.... He +has ordered me to inquire into the position of affairs," he added. + +"Yes, go and find out!" shouted the angry gentleman. "They've +brought things to such a pass that there are no carts or +anything!... There it is again, do you hear?" said he, pointing in the +direction whence came the sounds of firing. + +"They've brought us all to ruin... the brigands!" he repeated, and +descended the porch steps. + +Alpatych swayed his head and went upstairs. In the waiting room were +tradesmen, women, and officials, looking silently at one another. +The door of the Governor's room opened and they all rose and moved +forward. An official ran out, said some words to a merchant, called +a stout official with a cross hanging on his neck to follow him, and +vanished again, evidently wishing to avoid the inquiring looks and +questions addressed to him. Alpatych moved forward and next time the +official came out addressed him, one hand placed in the breast of +his buttoned coat, and handed him two letters. + +"To his Honor Baron Asch, from General-in-Chief Prince Bolkonski," +he announced with such solemnity and significance that the official +turned to him and took the letters. + +A few minutes later the Governor received Alpatych and hurriedly +said to him: + +"Inform the prince and princess that I knew nothing: I acted on +the highest instructions- here..." and he handed a paper to +Alpatych. "Still, as the prince is unwell my advice is that they +should go to Moscow. I am just starting myself. Inform them..." + +But the Governor did not finish: a dusty perspiring officer ran into +the room and began to say something in French. The Governor's face +expressed terror. + +"Go," he said, nodding his head to Alpatych, and began questioning +the officer. + +Eager, frightened, helpless glances were turned on Alpatych when +he came out of the Governor's room. Involuntarily listening now to the +firing, which had drawn nearer and was increasing in strength, +Alpatych hurried to his inn. The paper handed to him by the Governor +said this: + +"I assure you that the town of Smolensk is not in the slightest +danger as yet and it is unlikely that it will be threatened with +any. I from the one side and Prince Bagration from the other are +marching to unite our forces before Smolensk, which junction will be +effected on the 22nd instant, and both armies with their united forces +will defend our compatriots of the province entrusted to your care +till our efforts shall have beaten back the enemies of our Fatherland, +or till the last warrior in our valiant ranks has perished. From +this you will see that you have a perfect right to reassure the +inhabitants of Smolensk, for those defended by two such brave armies +may feel assured of victory." (Instructions from Barclay de Tolly to +Baron Asch, the civil governor of Smolensk, 1812.) + +People were anxiously roaming about the streets. + +Carts piled high with household utensils, chairs, and cupboards kept +emerging from the gates of the yards and moving along the streets. +Loaded carts stood at the house next to Ferapontov's and women were +wailing and lamenting as they said good-by. A small watchdog ran round +barking in front of the harnessed horses. + +Alpatych entered the innyard at a quicker pace than usual and went +straight to the shed where his horses and trap were. The coachman +was asleep. He woke him up, told him to harness, and went into the +passage. From the host's room came the sounds of a child crying, the +despairing sobs of a woman, and the hoarse angry shouting of +Ferapontov. The cook began running hither and thither in the passage +like a frightened hen, just as Alpatych entered. + +"He's done her to death. Killed the mistress!... Beat her... dragged +her about so!..." + +"What for?" asked Alpatych. + +"She kept begging to go away. She's a woman! 'Take me away,' says +she, 'don't let me perish with my little children! Folks,' she says, +'are all gone, so why,' she says, 'don't we go?' And he began +beating and pulling her about so!" + +At these words Alpatych nodded as if in approval, and not wishing to +hear more went to the door of the room opposite the innkeeper's, where +he had left his purchases. + +"You brute, you murderer!" screamed a thin, pale woman who, with a +baby in her arms and her kerchief torn from her head, burst through +the door at that moment and down the steps into the yard. + +Ferapontov came out after her, but on seeing Alpatych adjusted his +waistcoat, smoothed his hair, yawned, and followed Alpatych into the +opposite room. + +"Going already?" said he. + +Alpatych, without answering or looking at his host, sorted his +packages and asked how much he owed. + +"We'll reckon up! Well, have you been to the Governor's?" asked +Ferapontov. "What has been decided?" + +Alpatych replied that the Governor had not told him anything +definite. + +"With our business, how can we get away?" said Ferapontov. "We'd +have to pay seven rubles a cartload to Dorogobuzh and I tell them +they're not Christians to ask it! Selivanov, now, did a good stroke +last Thursday- sold flour to the army at nine rubles a sack. Will +you have some tea?" he added. + +While the horses were being harnessed Alpatych and Ferapontov over +their tea talked of the price of corn, the crops, and the good weather +for harvesting. + +"Well, it seems to be getting quieter," remarked Ferapontov, +finishing his third cup of tea and getting up. "Ours must have got the +best of it. The orders were not to let them in. So we're in force, +it seems.... They say the other day Matthew Ivanych Platov drove +them into the river Marina and drowned some eighteen thousand in one +day." + +Alpatych collected his parcels, handed them to the coachman who +had come in, and settled up with the innkeeper. The noise of wheels, +hoofs, and bells was heard from the gateway as a little trap passed +out. + +It was by now late in the afternoon. Half the street was in +shadow, the other half brightly lit by the sun. Alpatych looked out of +the window and went to the door. Suddenly the strange sound of a +far-off whistling and thud was heard, followed by a boom of cannon +blending into a dull roar that set the windows rattling. + +He went out into the street: two men were running past toward the +bridge. From different sides came whistling sounds and the thud of +cannon balls and bursting shells falling on the town. But these sounds +were hardly heard in comparison with the noise of the firing outside +the town and attracted little attention from the inhabitants. The town +was being bombarded by a hundred and thirty guns which Napoleon had +ordered up after four o'clock. The people did not at once realize +the meaning of this bombardment. + +At first the noise of the falling bombs and shells only aroused +curiosity. Ferapontov's wife, who till then had not ceased wailing +under the shed, became quiet and with the baby in her arms went to the +gate, listening to the sounds and looking in silence at the people. + +The cook and a shop assistant came to the gate. With lively +curiosity everyone tried to get a glimpse of the projectiles as they +flew over their heads. Several people came round the corner talking +eagerly. + +"What force!" remarked one. "Knocked the roof and ceiling all to +splinters!" + +"Routed up the earth like a pig," said another. + +"That's grand, it bucks one up!" laughed the first. "Lucky you +jumped aside, or it would have wiped you out!" + +Others joined those men and stopped and told how cannon balls had +fallen on a house close to them. Meanwhile still more projectiles, now +with the swift sinister whistle of a cannon ball, now with the +agreeable intermittent whistle of a shell, flew over people's heads +incessantly, but not one fell close by, they all flew over. Alpatych +was getting into his trap. The innkeeper stood at the gate. + +"What are you staring at?" he shouted to the cook, who in her red +skirt, with sleeves rolled up, swinging her bare elbows, had stepped +to the corner to listen to what was being said. + +"What marvels!" she exclaimed, but hearing her master's voice she +turned back. pulling down her tucked-up skirt. + +Once more something whistled, but this time quite close, swooping +downwards like a little bird; a flame flashed in the middle of the +street, something exploded, and the street was shrouded in smoke. + +"Scoundrel, what are you doing?" shouted the innkeeper, rushing to +the cook. + +At that moment the pitiful wailing of women was heard from different +sides, the frightened baby began to cry, and people crowded silently +with pale faces round the cook. The loudest sound in that crowd was +her wailing. + +"Oh-h-h! Dear souls, dear kind souls! Don't let me die! My good +souls!..." + +Five minutes later no one remained in the street. The cook, with her +thigh broken by a shell splinter, had been carried into the kitchen. +Alpatych, his coachman, Ferapontov's wife and children and the house +porter were all sitting in the cellar, listening. The roar of guns, +the whistling of projectiles, and the piteous moaning of the cook, +which rose above the other sounds, did not cease for a moment. The +mistress rocked and hushed her baby and when anyone came into the +cellar asked in a pathetic whisper what had become of her husband +who had remained in the street. A shopman who entered told her that +her husband had gone with others to the cathedral, whence they were +fetching the wonder-working icon of Smolensk. + +Toward dusk the cannonade began to subside. Alpatych left the cellar +and stopped in the doorway. The evening sky that had been so clear was +clouded with smoke, through which, high up, the sickle of the new moon +shone strangely. Now that the terrible din of the guns had ceased a +hush seemed to reign over the town, broken only by the rustle of +footsteps, the moaning, the distant cries, and the crackle of fires +which seemed widespread everywhere. The cook's moans had now subsided. +On two sides black curling clouds of smoke rose and spread from the +fires. Through the streets soldiers in various uniforms walked or +ran confusedly in different directions like ants from a ruined +ant-hill. Several of them ran into Ferapontov's yard before Alpatych's +eyes. Alpatych went out to the gate. A retreating regiment, +thronging and hurrying, blocked the street. + +Noticing him, an officer said: "The town is being abandoned. Get +away, get away!" and then, turning to the soldiers, shouted: + +"I'll teach you to run into the yards!" + +Alpatych went back to the house, called the coachman, and told him +to set off. Ferapontov's whole household came out too, following +Alpatych and the coachman. The women, who had been silent till then, +suddenly began to wail as they looked at the fires- the smoke and even +the flames of which could be seen in the failing twilight- and as if +in reply the same kind of lamentation was heard from other parts of +the street. Inside the shed Alpatych and the coachman arranged the +tangled reins and traces of their horses with trembling hands. + +As Alpatych was driving out of the gate he saw some ten soldiers +in Ferapontov's open shop, talking loudly and filling their bags and +knapsacks with flour and sunflower seeds. Just then Ferapontov +returned and entered his shop. On seeing the soldiers he was about +to shout at them, but suddenly stopped and, clutching at his hair, +burst into sobs and laughter: + +"Loot everything, lads! Don't let those devils get it!" he cried, +taking some bags of flour himself and throwing them into the street. + +Some of the soldiers were frightened and ran away, others went on +filling their bags. On seeing Alpatych, Ferapontov turned to him: + +"Russia is done for!" he cried. "Alpatych, I'll set the place on +fire myself. We're done for!..." and Ferapontov ran into the yard. + +Soldiers were passing in a constant stream along the street blocking +it completely, so that Alpatych could not pass out and had to wait. +Ferapontov's wife and children were also sitting in a cart waiting +till it was it was possible to drive out. + +Night had come. There were stars in the sky and the new moon shone +out amid the smoke that screened it. On the sloping descent to the +Dnieper Alpatych's cart and that of the innkeeper's wife, which were +slowly moving amid the rows of soldiers and of other vehicles, had +to stop. In a side street near the crossroads where the vehicles had +stopped, a house and some shops were on fire. This fire was already +burning itself out. The flames now died down and were lost in the +black smoke, now suddenly flared up again brightly, lighting up with +strange distinctness the faces of the people crowding at the +crossroads. Black figures flitted about before the fire, and through +the incessant crackling of the flames talking and shouting could be +heard. Seeing that his trap would not be able to move on for some +time, Alpatych got down and turned into the side street to look at the +fire. Soldiers were continually rushing backwards and forwards near +it, and he saw two of them and a man in a frieze coat dragging burning +beams into another yard across the street, while others carried +bundles of hay. + +Alpatych went up to a large crowd standing before a high barn +which was blazing briskly. The walls were all on fire and the back +wall had fallen in, the wooden roof was collapsing, and the rafters +were alight. The crowd was evidently watching for the roof to fall in, +and Alpatych watched for it too. + +"Alpatych!" a familiar voice suddenly hailed the old man. + +"Mercy on us! Your excellency!" answered Alpatych, immediately +recognizing the voice of his young prince. + +Prince Andrew in his riding cloak, mounted on a black horse, was +looking at Alpatych from the back of the crowd. + +"Why are you here?" he asked. + +"Your... your excellency," stammered Alpatych and broke into sobs. +"Are we really lost? Master!..." + +"Why are you here?" Prince Andrew repeated. + +At that moment the flames flared up and showed his young master's +pale worn face. Alpatych told how he had been sent there and how +difficult it was to get away. + +"Are we really quite lost, your excellency?" he asked again. + +Prince Andrew without replying took out a notebook and raising his +knee began writing in pencil on a page he tore out. He wrote to his +sister: + +"Smolensk is being abandoned. Bald Hills will be occupied by the +enemy within a week. Set off immediately for Moscow. Let me know at +once when you will start. Send by special messenger to Usvyazh." + +Having written this and given the paper to Alpatych, he told him how +to arrange for departure of the prince, the princess, his son, and the +boy's tutor, and how and where to let him know immediately. Before +he had had time to finish giving these instructions, a chief of +staff followed by a suite galloped up to him. + +"You are a colonel?" shouted the chief of staff with a German +accent, in a voice familiar to Prince Andrew. "Houses are set on +fire in your presence and you stand by! What does this mean? You +will answer for it!" shouted Berg, who was now assistant to the +chief of staff of the commander of the left flank of the infantry of +the first army, a place, as Berg said, "very agreeable and well en +evidence." + +Prince Andrew looked at him and without replying went on speaking to +Alpatych. + +"So tell them that I shall await a reply till the tenth, and if by +the tenth I don't receive news that they have all got away I shall +have to throw up everything and come myself to Bald Hills." + +"Prince," said Berg, recognizing Prince Andrew, "I only spoke +because I have to obey orders, because I always do obey exactly.... +You must please excuse me," he went on apologetically. + +Something cracked in the flames. The fire died down for a moment and +wreaths of black smoke rolled from under the roof. There was another +terrible crash and something huge collapsed. + +"Ou-rou-rou!" yelled the crowd, echoing the crash of the +collapsing roof of the barn, the burning grain in which diffused a +cakelike aroma all around. The flames flared up again, lighting the +animated, delighted, exhausted faces of the spectators. + +The man in the frieze coat raised his arms and shouted: + +"It's fine, lads! Now it's raging... It's fine!" + +"That's the owner himself," cried several voices. + +"Well then," continued Prince Andrew to Alpatych, "report to them as +I have told you"; and not replying a word to Berg who was now mute +beside him, he touched his horse and rode down the side street. + +CHAPTER V + +From Smolensk the troops continued to retreat, followed by the +enemy. On the tenth of August the regiment Prince Andrew commanded was +marching along the highroad past the avenue leading to Bald Hills. +Heat and drought had continued for more than three weeks. Each day +fleecy clouds floated across the sky and occasionally veiled the +sun, but toward evening the sky cleared again and the sun set in +reddish-brown mist. Heavy night dews alone refreshed the earth. The +unreaped corn was scorched and shed its grain. The marshes dried up. +The cattle lowed from hunger, finding no food on the sun-parched +meadows. Only at night and in the forests while the dew lasted was +there any freshness. But on the road, the highroad along which the +troops marched, there was no such freshness even at night or when +the road passed through the forest; the dew was imperceptible on the +sandy dust churned up more than six inches deep. As soon as day dawned +the march began. The artillery and baggage wagons moved noiselessly +through the deep dust that rose to the very hubs of the wheels, and +the infantry sank ankle-deep in that soft, choking, hot dust that +never cooled even at night. Some of this dust was kneaded by the +feet and wheels, while the rest rose and hung like a cloud over the +troops, settling in eyes, ears, hair, and nostrils, and worst of all +in the lungs of the men and beasts as they moved along that road. +The higher the sun rose the higher rose that cloud of dust, and +through the screen of its hot fine particles one could look with naked +eye at the sun, which showed like a huge crimson ball in the unclouded +sky. There was no wind, and the men choked in that motionless +atmosphere. They marched with handkerchiefs tied over their noses +and mouths. When they passed through a village they all rushed to +the wells and fought for the water and drank it down to the mud. + +Prince Andrew was in command of a regiment, and the management of +that regiment, the welfare of the men and the necessity of receiving +and giving orders, engrossed him. The burning of Smolensk and its +abandonment made an epoch in his life. A novel feeling of anger +against the foe made him forget his own sorrow. He was entirely +devoted to the affairs of his regiment and was considerate and kind to +his men and officers. In the regiment they called him "our prince," +were proud of him and loved him. But he was kind and gentle only to +those of his regiment, to Timokhin and the like- people quite new to +him, belonging to a different world and who could not know and +understand his past. As soon as he came across a former acquaintance +or anyone from the staff, he bristled up immediately and grew +spiteful, ironical, and contemptuous. Everything that reminded him +of his past was repugnant to him, and so in his relations with that +former circle he confined himself to trying to do his duty and not +to be unfair. + +In truth everything presented itself in a dark and gloomy light to +Prince Andrew, especially after the abandonment of Smolensk on the +sixth of August (he considered that it could and should have been +defended) and after his sick father had had to flee to Moscow, +abandoning to pillage his dearly beloved Bald Hills which he had built +and peopled. But despite this, thanks to his regiment, Prince Andrew +had something to think about entirely apart from general questions. +Two days previously he had received news that his father, son, and +sister had left for Moscow; and though there was nothing for him to do +at Bald Hills, Prince Andrew with a characteristic desire to foment +his own grief decided that he must ride there. + +He ordered his horse to be saddled and, leaving his regiment on +the march, rode to his father's estate where he had been born and +spent his childhood. Riding past the pond where there used always to +be dozens of women chattering as they rinsed their linen or beat it +with wooden beetles, Prince Andrew noticed that there was not a soul +about and that the little washing wharf, torn from its place and +half submerged, was floating on its side in the middle of the pond. He +rode to the keeper's lodge. No one at the stone entrance gates of +the drive and the door stood open. Grass had already begun to grow +on the garden paths, and horses and calves were straying in the +English park. Prince Andrew rode up to the hothouse; some of the glass +panes were broken, and of the trees in tubs some were overturned and +others dried up. He called for Taras the gardener, but no one replied. +Having gone round the corner of the hothouse to the ornamental garden, +he saw that the carved garden fence was broken and branches of the +plum trees had been torn off with the fruit. An old peasant whom +Prince Andrew in his childhood had often seen at the gate was +sitting on a green garden seat, plaiting a bast shoe. + +He was deaf and did not hear Prince Andrew ride up. He was sitting +on the seat the old prince used to like to sit on, and beside him +strips of bast were hanging on the broken and withered branch of a +magnolia. + +Prince Andrew rode up to the house. Several limes in the old +garden had been cut down and a piebald mare and her foal were +wandering in front of the house among the rosebushes. The shutters +were all closed, except at one window which was open. A little serf +boy, seeing Prince Andrew, ran into the house. Alpatych, having sent +his family away, was alone at Bald Hills and was sitting indoors +reading the Lives of the Saints. On hearing that Prince Andrew had +come, he went out with his spectacles on his nose, buttoning his coat, +and, hastily stepping up, without a word began weeping and kissing +Prince Andrew's knee. + +Then, vexed at his own weakness, he turned away and began to +report on the position of affairs. Everything precious and valuable +had been removed to Bogucharovo. Seventy quarters of grain had also +been carted away. The hay and the spring corn, of which Alpatych +said there had been a remarkable crop that year, had been commandeered +by the troops and mown down while still green. The peasants were +ruined; some of them too had gone to Bogucharovo, only a few remained. + +Without waiting to hear him out, Prince Andrew asked: + +"When did my father and sister leave?" meaning when did they leave +for Moscow. + +Alpatych, understanding the question to refer to their departure for +Bogucharovo, replied that they had left on the seventh and again +went into details concerning the estate management, asking for +instructions. + +"Am I to let the troops have the oats, and to take a receipt for +them? We have still six hundred quarters left," he inquired. + +"What am I to say to him?" thought Prince Andrew, looking down on +the old man's bald head shining in the sun and seeing by the +expression on his face that the old man himself understood how +untimely such questions were and only asked them to allay his grief. + +"Yes, let them have it," replied Prince Andrew. + +"If you noticed some disorder in the garden," said Alpatych, "it was +impossible to prevent it. Three regiments have been here and spent the +night, dragoons mostly. I took down the name and rank of their +commanding officer, to hand in a complaint about it." + +"Well, and what are you going to do? Will you stay here if the enemy +occupies the place?" asked Prince Andrew. + +Alpatych turned his face to Prince Andrew, looked at him, and +suddenly with a solemn gesture raised his arm. + +"He is my refuge! His will be done!" he exclaimed. + +A group of bareheaded peasants was approaching across the meadow +toward the prince. + +"Well, good-by!" said Prince Andrew, bending over to Alpatych. +"You must go away too, take away what you can and tell the serfs to go +to the Ryazan estate or to the one near Moscow." + +Alpatych clung to Prince Andrew's leg and burst into sobs. Gently +disengaging himself, the prince spurred his horse and rode down the +avenue at a gallop. + +The old man was still sitting in the ornamental garden, like a fly +impassive on the face of a loved one who is dead, tapping the last +on which he was making the bast shoe, and two little girls, running +out from the hot house carrying in their skirts plums they had plucked +from the trees there, came upon Prince Andrew. On seeing the young +master, the elder one frightened look clutched her younger companion +by the hand and hid with her behind a birch tree, not stopping to pick +up some green plums they had dropped. + +Prince Andrew turned away with startled haste, unwilling to let them +see that they had been observed. He was sorry for the pretty +frightened little girl, was afraid of looking at her, and yet felt +an irresistible desire to do so. A new sensation of comfort and relief +came over him when, seeing these girls, he realized the existence of +other human interests entirely aloof from his own and just as +legitimate as those that occupied him. Evidently these girls +passionately desired one thing- to carry away and eat those green +plums without being caught- and Prince Andrew shared their wish for +the success of their enterprise. He could not resist looking at them +once more. Believing their danger past, they sprang from their +ambush and, chirruping something in their shrill little voices and +holding up their skirts, their bare little sunburned feet scampered +merrily and quickly across the meadow grass. + +Prince Andrew was somewhat refreshed by having ridden off the +dusty highroad along which the troops were moving. But not far from +Bald Hills he again came out on the road and overtook his regiment +at its halting place by the dam of a small pond. It was past one +o'clock. The sun, a red ball through the dust, burned and scorched his +back intolerably through his black coat. The dust always hung +motionless above the buzz of talk that came from the resting troops. +There was no wind. As he crossed the dam Prince Andrew smelled the +ooze and freshness of the pond. He longed to get into that water, +however dirty it might be, and he glanced round at the pool from +whence came sounds of shrieks and laughter. The small, muddy, green +pond had risen visibly more than a foot, flooding the dam, because +it was full of the naked white bodies of soldiers with brick-red +hands, necks, and faces, who were splashing about in it. All this +naked white human flesh, laughing and shrieking, floundered about in +that dirty pool like carp stuffed into a watering can, and the +suggestion of merriment in that floundering mass rendered it specially +pathetic. + +One fair-haired young soldier of the third company, whom Prince +Andrew knew and who had a strap round the calf of one leg, crossed +himself, stepped back to get a good run, and plunged into the water; +another, a dark noncommissioned officer who was always shaggy, stood +up to his waist in the water joyfully wriggling his muscular figure +and snorted with satisfaction as he poured the water over his head +with hands blackened to the wrists. There were sounds of men +slapping one another, yelling, and puffing. + +Everywhere on the bank, on the dam, and in the pond, there was +healthy, white, muscular flesh. The officer, Timokhin, with his red +little nose, standing on the dam wiping himself with a towel, felt +confused at seeing the prince, but made up his mind to address him +nevertheless. + +"It's very nice, your excellency! Wouldn't you like to?" said he. + +"It's dirty," replied Prince Andrew, making a grimace. + +"We'll clear it out for you in a minute," said Timokhin, and, +still undressed, ran off to clear the men out of the pond. + +"The prince wants to bathe." + +"What prince? Ours?" said many voices, and the men were in such +haste to clear out that the prince could hardly stop them. He +decided that he would rather himself with water in the barn. + +"Flesh, bodies, cannon fodder!" he thought, and he looked at his own +naked body and shuddered, not from cold but from a sense of disgust +and horror he did not himself understand, aroused by the sight of that +immense number of bodies splashing about in the dirty pond. + +On the seventh of August Prince Bagration wrote as follows from +his quarters at Mikhaylovna on the Smolensk road: + +Dear Count Alexis Andreevich- (He was writing to Arakcheev but +knew that his letter would be read by the Emperor, and therefore +weighed every word in it to the best of his ability.) + +I expect the Minister [Barclay de Tolly] has already reported the +abandonment of Smolensk to the enemy. It is pitiable and sad, and +the whole army is in despair that this most important place has been +wantonly abandoned. I, for my part, begged him personally most +urgently and finally wrote him, but nothing would induce him to +consent. I swear to you on my honor that Napoleon was in such a fix as +never before and might have lost half his army but could not have +taken Smolensk. Our troops fought, and are fighting, as never +before. With fifteen thousand men I held the enemy at bay for +thirty-five hours and beat him; but he would not hold out even for +fourteen hours. It is disgraceful, a stain on our army, and as for +him, he ought, it seems to me, not to live. If he reports that our +losses were great, it is not true; perhaps about four thousand, not +more, and not even that; but even were they ten thousand, that's +war! But the enemy has lost masses... + +What would it have cost him to hold out for another two days? They +would have had to retire of their own accord, for they had no water +for men or horses. He gave me his word he would not retreat, but +suddenly sent instructions that he was retiring that night. We +cannot fight in this way, or we may soon bring the enemy to Moscow... + +There is a rumor that you are thinking of peace. God forbid that you +should make peace after all our sacrifices and such insane retreats! +You would set all Russia against you and every one of us would feel +ashamed to wear the uniform. If it has come to this- we must fight +as long as Russia can and as long as there are men able to stand... + +One man ought to be in command, and not two. Your Minister may +perhaps be good as a Minister, but as a general he is not merely bad +but execrable, yet to him is entrusted the fate of our whole +country.... I am really frantic with vexation; forgive my writing +boldly. It is clear that the man who advocates the conclusion of a +peace, and that the Minister should command the army, does not love +our sovereign and desires the ruin of us all. So I write you +frankly: call out the militia. For the Minister is leading these +visitors after him to Moscow in a most masterly way. The whole army +feels great suspicion of the Imperial aide-de-camp Wolzogen. He is +said to be more Napoleon's man than ours, and he is always advising +the Minister. I am not merely civil to him but obey him like a +corporal, though I am his senior. This is painful, but, loving my +benefactor and sovereign, I submit. Only I am sorry for the Emperor +that he entrusts our fine army to such as he. Consider that on our +retreat we have lost by fatigue and left in the hospital more than +fifteen thousand men, and had we attacked this would not have +happened. Tell me, for God's sake, what will Russia, our mother +Russia, say to our being so frightened, and why are we abandoning +our good and gallant Fatherland to such rabble and implanting feelings +of hatred and shame in all our subjects? What are we scared at and +of whom are we afraid? I am not to blame that the Minister is +vacillating, a coward, dense, dilatory, and has all bad qualities. The +whole army bewails it and calls down curses upon him... + +CHAPTER VI + +Among the innumerable categories applicable to the phenomena of +human life one may discriminate between those in which substance +prevails and those in which form prevails. To the latter- as +distinguished from village, country, provincial, or even Moscow +life- we may allot Petersburg life, and especially the life of its +salons. That life of the salons is unchanging. Since the year 1805 +we had made peace and had again quarreled with Bonaparte and had +made constitutions and unmade them again, but the salons of Anna +Pavlovna Helene remained just as they had been- the one seven and +the other five years before. At Anna Pavlovna's they talked with +perplexity of Bonaparte's successes just as before and saw in them and +in the subservience shown to him by the European sovereigns a +malicious conspiracy, the sole object of which was to cause +unpleasantness and anxiety to the court circle of which Anna +Pavlovna was the representative. And in Helene's salon, which +Rumyantsev himself honored with his visits, regarding Helene as a +remarkably intelligent woman, they talked with the same ecstasy in +1812 as in 1808 of the "great nation" and the "great man," and +regretted our rupture with France, a rupture which, according to them, +ought to be promptly terminated by peace. + +Of late, since the Emperor's return from the army, there had been +some excitement in these conflicting salon circles and some +demonstrations of hostility to one another, but each camp retained its +own tendency. In Anna Pavlovna's circle only those Frenchmen were +admitted who were deep-rooted legitimists, and patriotic views were +expressed to the effect that one ought not to go to the French theater +and that to maintain the French troupe was costing the government as +much as a whole army corps. The progress of the war was eagerly +followed, and only the reports most flattering to our army were +circulated. In the French circle of Helene and Rumyantsev the +reports of the cruelty of the enemy and of the war were contradicted +and all Napoleon's attempts at conciliation were discussed. In that +circle they discountenanced those who advised hurried preparations for +a removal to Kazan of the court and the girls' educational +establishments under the patronage of the Dowager Empress. In Helene's +circle the war in general was regarded as a series of formal +demonstrations which would very soon end in peace, and the view +prevailed expressed by Bilibin- who now in Petersburg was quite at +home in Helene's house, which every clever man was obliged to visit- +that not by gunpowder but by those who invented it would matters be +settled. In that circle the Moscow enthusiasm- news of which had +reached Petersburg simultaneously with the Emperor's return- was +ridiculed sarcastically and very cleverly, though with much caution. + +Anna Pavlovna's circle on the contrary was enraptured by this +enthusiasm and spoke of it as Plutarch speaks of the deeds of the +ancients. Prince Vasili, who still occupied his former important +posts, formed a connecting link between these two circles. He +visited his "good friend Anna Pavlovna" as well as his daughter's +"diplomatic salon," and often in his constant comings and goings +between the two camps became confused and said at Helene's what he +should have said at Anna Pavlovna's and vice versa. + +Soon after the Emperor's return Prince Vasili in a conversation +about the war at Anna Pavlovna's severely condemned Barclay de +Tolly, but was undecided as to who ought to be appointed commander +in chief. One of the visitors, usually spoken of as "a man of great +merit," having described how he had that day seen Kutuzov, the newly +chosen chief of the Petersburg militia, presiding over the +enrollment of recruits at the Treasury, cautiously ventured to suggest +that Kutuzov would be the man to satisfy all requirements. + +Anna Pavlovna remarked with a melancholy smile that Kutuzov had done +nothing but cause the Emperor annoyance. + +"I have talked and talked at the Assembly of the Nobility," Prince +Vasili interrupted, "but they did not listen to me. I told them his +election as chief of the militia would not please the Emperor. They +did not listen to me. + +"It's all this mania for opposition," he went on. "And who for? It +is all because we want to ape the foolish enthusiasm of those +Muscovites," Prince Vasili continued, forgetting for a moment that +though at Helene's one had to ridicule the Moscow enthusiasm, at +Anna Pavlovna's one had to be ecstatic about it. But he retrieved +his mistake at once. "Now, is it suitable that Count Kutuzov, the +oldest general in Russia, should preside at that tribunal? He will get +nothing for his pains! How could they make a man commander in chief +who cannot mount a horse, who drops asleep at a council, and has the +very worst morals! A good reputation he made for himself at Bucharest! +I don't speak of his capacity as a general, but at a time like this +how they appoint they appoint a decrepit, blind old man, positively +blind? A fine idea to have a blind general! He can't see anything. +To play blindman's bluff? He can't see at all!" + +No one replied to his remarks. + +This was quite correct on the twenty-fourth of July. But on the +twenty-ninth of July Kutuzov received the title of Prince. This +might indicate a wish to get rid of him, and therefore Prince Vasili's +opinion continued to be correct though he was not now in any hurry +to express it. But on the eighth of August a committee, consisting +of Field Marshal Saltykov, Arakcheev, Vyazmitinov, Lopukhin, and +Kochubey met to consider the progress of the war. This committee +came to the conclusion that our failures were due to a want of unity +in the command and though the members of the committee were aware of +the Emperor's dislike of Kutuzov, after a short deliberation they +agreed to advise his appointment as commander in chief. That same +day Kutuzov was appointed commander in chief with full powers over the +armies and over the whole region occupied by them. + +On the ninth of August Prince Vasili at Anna Pavlovna's again met +the "man of great merit." The latter was very attentive to Anna +Pavlovna because he wanted to be appointed director of one of the +educational establishments for young ladies. Prince Vasili entered the +room with the air of a happy conqueror who has attained the object +of his desires. + +"Well, have you heard the great news? Prince Kutuzov is field +marshal! All dissensions are at an end! I am so glad, so delighted! At +last we have a man!" said he, glancing sternly and significantly round +at everyone in the drawing room. + +The "man of great merit," despite his desire to obtain the post of +director, could not refrain from reminding Prince Vasili of his former +opinion. Though this was impolite to Prince Vasili in Anna +Pavlovna's drawing room, and also to Anna Pavlovna herself who had +received the news with delight, he could not resist the temptation. + +"But, Prince, they say he is blind!" said he, reminding Prince +Vasili of his own words. + +"Eh? Nonsense! He sees well enough," said Prince Vasili rapidly, +in a deep voice and with a slight cough- the voice and cough with +which he was wont to dispose of all difficulties. + +"He sees well enough," he added. "And what I am so pleased about," +he went on, "is that our sovereign has given him full powers over +all the armies and the whole region- powers no commander in chief ever +had before. He is a second autocrat," he concluded with a victorious +smile. + +"God grant it! God grant it!" said Anna Pavlovna. + +The "man of great merit," who was still a novice in court circles, +wishing to flatter Anna Pavlovna by defending her former position on +this question, observed: + +"It is said that the Emperor was reluctant to give Kutuzov those +powers. They say he blushed like a girl to whom Joconde is read, +when he said to Kutuzov: 'Your Emperor and the Fatherland award you +this honor.' + +"Perhaps the heart took no part in that speech," said Anna Pavlovna. + +"Oh, no, no!" warmly rejoined Prince Vasili, who would not now yield +Kutuzov to anyone; in his opinion Kutuzov was not only admirable +himself, but was adored by everybody. "No, that's impossible," said +he, "for our sovereign appreciated him so highly before." + +"God grant only that Prince Kutuzov assumes real power and does +not allow anyone to put a spoke in his wheel," observed Anna Pavlovna. + +Understanding at once to whom she alluded, Prince Vasili said in a +whisper: + +"I know for a fact that Kutuzov made it an absolute condition that +the Tsarevich should not be with the army. Do you know what he said to +the Emperor?" + +And Prince Vasili repeated the words supposed to have been spoken by +Kutuzov to the Emperor. "I can neither punish him if he does wrong nor +reward him if he does right." + +"Oh, a very wise man is Prince Kutuzov! I have known him a long +time!" + +"They even say," remarked the "man of great merit" who did not yet +possess courtly tact, "that his excellency made it an express +condition that the sovereign himself should not be with the army." + +As soon as he said this both Prince Vasili and Anna Pavlovna +turned away from him and glanced sadly at one another with a sigh at +his naivete. + +CHAPTER VII + +While this was taking place in Petersburg the French had already +passed Smolensk and were drawing nearer and nearer to Moscow. +Napoleon's historian Thiers, like other of his historians, trying to +justify his hero says that he was drawn to the walls of Moscow against +his will. He is as right as other historians who look for the +explanation of historic events in the will of one man; he is as +right as the Russian historians who maintain that Napoleon was drawn +to Moscow by the skill of the Russian commanders. Here besides the law +of retrospection, which regards all the past as a preparation for +events that subsequently occur, the law of reciprocity comes in, +confusing the whole matter. A good chessplayer having lost a game is +sincerely convinced that his loss resulted from a mistake he made +and looks for that mistake in the opening, but forgets that at each +stage of the game there were similar mistakes and that none of his +moves were perfect. He only notices the mistake to which he pays +attention, because his opponent took advantage of it. How much more +complex than this is the game of war, which occurs under certain +limits of time, and where it is not one will that manipulates lifeless +objects, but everything results from innumerable conflicts of +various wills! + +After Smolensk Napoleon sought a battle beyond Dorogobuzh at Vyazma, +and then at Tsarevo-Zaymishche, but it happened that owing to a +conjunction of innumerable circumstances the Russians could not give +battle till they reached Borodino, seventy miles from Moscow. From +Vyazma Napoleon ordered a direct advance on Moscow. + +Moscou, la capitale asiatique de ce grand empire, la ville sacree +des peuples d'Alexandre, Moscou avec ses innombrables eglises en forme +de pagodes chinoises,~^ this Moscow gave Napoleon's imagination no +rest. On the march from Vyazma to Tsarevo-Zaymishche he rode his light +bay bobtailed ambler accompanied by his Guards, his bodyguard, his +pages, and aides-de-camp. Berthier, his chief of staff, dropped behind +to question a Russian prisoner captured by the cavalry. Followed by +Lelorgne d'Ideville, an interpreter, he overtook Napoleon at a +gallop and reined in his horse with an amused expression. + +^~ "Moscow, the Asiatic capital of this great empire, the sacred +city of Alexander's people, Moscow with its innumerable churches +shaped like Chinese pagodas." + +"Well?" asked Napoleon. + +"One of Platov's Cossacks says that Platov's corps is joining up +with the main army and that Kutuzov has been appointed commander in +chief. He is a very shrewd and garrulous fellow." + +Napoleon smiled and told them to give the Cossack a horse and +bring the man to him. He wished to talk to him himself. Several +adjutants galloped off, and an hour later, Lavrushka, the serf Denisov +had handed over to Rostov, rode up to Napoleon in an orderly's +jacket and on a French cavalry saddle, with a merry, and tipsy face. +Napoleon told him to ride by his side and began questioning him. + +"You are a Cossack?" + +"Yes, a Cossack, your Honor." + +"The Cossack, not knowing in what company he was, for Napoleon's +plain appearance had nothing about it that would reveal to an Oriental +mind the presence of a monarch, talked with extreme familiarity of the +incidents of the war," says Thiers, narrating this episode. In reality +Lavrushka, having got drunk the day before and left his master +dinnerless, had been whipped and sent to the village in quest of +chickens, where he engaged in looting till the French took him +prisoner. Lavrushka was one of those coarse, bare-faced lackeys who +have seen all sorts of things, consider it necessary to do +everything in a mean and cunning way, are ready to render any sort +of service to their master, and are keen at guessing their master's +baser impulses, especially those prompted by vanity and pettiness. + +Finding himself in the company of Napoleon, whose identity he had +easily and surely recognized, Lavrushka was not in the least abashed +but merely did his utmost to gain his new master's favor. + +He knew very well that this was Napoleon, but Napoleon's presence +could no more intimidate him than Rostov's, or a sergeant major's with +the rods, would have done, for he had nothing that either the sergeant +major or Napoleon could deprive him of. + +So he rattled on, telling all the gossip he had heard among the +orderlies. Much of it true. But when Napoleon asked him whether the +Russians thought they would beat Bonaparte or not, Lavrushka screwed +up his eyes and considered. + +In this question he saw subtle cunning, as men of his type see +cunning in everything, so he frowned and did not answer immediately. + +"It's like this," he said thoughtfully, "if there's a battle soon, +yours will win. That's right. But if three days pass, then after that, +well, then that same battle will not soon be over." + +Lelorgne d'Ideville smilingly interpreted this speech to Napoleon +thus: "If a battle takes place within the next three days the French +will win, but if later, God knows what will happen." Napoleon did +not smile, though he was evidently in high good humor, and he +ordered these words to be repeated. + +Lavrushka noticed this and to entertain him further, pretending +not to know who Napoleon was, added: + +"We know that you have Bonaparte and that he has beaten everybody in +the world, but we are a different matter..."- without knowing why or +how this bit of boastful patriotism slipped out at the end. + +The interpreter translated these words without the last phrase, +and Bonaparte smiled. "The young Cossack made his mighty +interlocutor smile," says Thiers. After riding a few paces in silence, +Napoleon turned to Berthier and said he wished to see how the news +that he was talking to the Emperor himself, to that very Emperor who +had written his immortally victorious name on the Pyramids, would +affect this enfant du Don.~^ + +^~ "Child of the Don." + +The fact was accordingly conveyed to Lavrushka. + +Lavrushka, understanding that this was done to perplex him and +that Napoleon expected him to be frightened, to gratify his new +masters promptly pretended to be astonished and awe-struck, opened his +eyes wide, and assumed the expression he usually put on when taken +to be whipped. "As soon as Napoleon's interpreter had spoken," says +Thiers, "the Cossack, seized by amazement, did not utter another word, +but rode on, his eyes fixed on the conqueror whose fame had reached +him across the steppes of the East. All his loquacity was suddenly +arrested and replaced by a naive and silent feeling of admiration. +Napoleon, after making the Cossack a present, had him set free like +a bird restored to its native fields." + +Napoleon rode on, dreaming of the Moscow that so appealed to his +imagination, and "the bird restored to its native fields" galloped +to our outposts, inventing on the way all that had not taken place but +that he meant to relate to his comrades. What had really taken place +he did not wish to relate because it seemed to him not worth +telling. He found the Cossacks, inquired for the regiment operating +with Platov's detachment and by evening found his master, Nicholas +Rostov, quartered at Yankovo. Rostov was just mounting to go for a +ride round the neighboring villages with Ilyin; he let Lavrushka +have another horse and took him along with him. + +CHAPTER VIII + +Princess Mary was not in Moscow and out of danger as Prince Andrew +supposed. + +After the return of Alpatych from Smolensk the old prince suddenly +seemed to awake as from a dream. He ordered the militiamen to be +called up from the villages and armed, and wrote a letter to the +commander in chief informing him that he had resolved to remain at +Bald Hills to the last extremity and to defend it, leaving to the +commander in chief's discretion to take measures or not for the +defense of Bald Hills, where one of Russia's oldest generals would +be captured or killed, and he announced to his household that he would +remain at Bald Hills. + +But while himself remaining, he gave instructions for the +departure of the princess and Dessalles with the little prince to +Bogucharovo and thence to Moscow. Princess Mary, alarmed by her +father's feverish and sleepless activity after his previous apathy, +could not bring herself to leave him alone and for the first time in +her life ventured to disobey him. She refused to go away and her +father's fury broke over her in a terrible storm. He repeated every +injustice he had ever inflicted on her. Trying to convict her, he told +her she had worn him out, had caused his quarrel with his son, had +harbored nasty suspicions of him, making it the object of her life +to poison his existence, and he drove her from his study telling her +that if she did not go away it was all the same to him. He declared +that he did not wish to remember her existence and warned her not to +dare to let him see her. The fact that he did not, as she had +feared, order her to be carried away by force but only told her not to +let him see her cheered Princess Mary. She knew it was a proof that in +the depth of his soul he was glad she was remaining at home and had +not gone away. + +The morning after little Nicholas had left, the old prince donned +his full uniform and prepared to visit the commander in chief. His +caleche was already at the door. Princess Mary saw him walk out of the +house in his uniform wearing all his orders and go down the garden +to review his armed peasants and domestic serfs. She sat by the window +listening to his voice which reached her from the garden. Suddenly +several men came running up the avenue with frightened faces. + +Princess Mary ran out to the porch, down the flower-bordered path, +and into the avenue. A large crowd of militiamen and domestics were +moving toward her, and in their midst several men were supporting by +the armpits and dragging along a little old man in a uniform and +decorations. She ran up to him and, in the play of the sunlight that +fell in small round spots through the shade of the lime-tree avenue, +could not be sure what change there was in his face. All she could see +was that his former stern and determined expression had altered to one +of timidity and submission. On seeing his daughter he moved his +helpless lips and made a hoarse sound. It was impossible to make out +what he wanted. He was lifted up, carried to his study, and laid on +the very couch he had so feared of late. + +The doctor, who was fetched that same night, bled him and said +that the prince had had seizure a paralyzing his right side. + +It was becoming more and more dangerous to remain at Bald Hills, and +next day they moved the prince to Bogucharovo, the doctor accompanying +him. + +By the time they reached Bogucharovo, Dessalles and the little +prince had already left for Moscow. + +For three weeks the old prince lay stricken by paralysis in the +new house Prince Andrew had built at Bogucharovo, ever in the same +state, getting neither better nor worse. He was unconscious and lay +like a distorted corpse. He muttered unceasingly, his eyebrows and +lips twitching, and it was impossible to tell whether he understood +what was going on around him or not. One thing was certain- that he +was suffering and wished to say something. But what it was, no one +could tell: it might be some caprice of a sick and half-crazy man, +or it might relate to public affairs, or possibly to family concerns. + +The doctor said this restlessness did not mean anything and was +due to physical causes; but Princess Mary thought he wished to tell +her something, and the fact that her presence always increased his +restlessness confirmed her opinion. + +He was evidently suffering both physically and mentally. There was +no hope of recovery. It was impossible for him to travel, it would not +do to let him die on the road. "Would it not be better if the end +did come, the very end?" Princess Mary sometimes thought. Night and +day, hardly sleeping at all, she watched him and, terrible to say, +often watched him not with hope of finding signs of improvement but +wishing to find symptoms of the approach of the end. + +Strange as it was to her to acknowledge this feeling in herself, yet +there it was. And what seemed still more terrible to her was that +since her father's illness began (perhaps even sooner, when she stayed +with him expecting something to happen), all the personal desires +and hopes that had been forgotten or sleeping within her had awakened. +Thoughts that had not entered her mind for years- thoughts of a life +free from the fear of her father, and even the possibility of love and +of family happiness- floated continually in her imagination like +temptations of the devil. Thrust them aside as she would, questions +continually recurred to her as to how she would order her life now, +after that. These were temptations of the devil and Princess Mary knew +it. She knew that the sole weapon against him was prayer, and she +tried to pray. She assumed an attitude of prayer, looked at the icons, +repeated the words of a prayer, but she could not pray. She felt +that a different world had now taken possession of her- the life of +a world of strenuous and free activity, quite opposed to the spiritual +world in which till now she had been confined and in which her +greatest comfort had been prayer. She could not pray, could not +weep, and worldly cares took possession of her. + +It was becoming dangerous to remain in Bogucharovo. News of the +approach of the French came from all sides, and in one village, ten +miles from Bogucharovo, a homestead had been looted by French +marauders. + +The doctor insisted on the necessity of moving the prince; the +provincial Marshal of the Nobility sent an official to Princess Mary +to persuade her to get away as quickly as possible, and the head of +the rural police having come to Bogucharovo urged the same thing, +saying that the French were only some twenty-five miles away, that +French proclamations were circulating in the villages, and that if the +princess did not take her father away before the fifteenth, he could +not answer for the consequences. + +The princess decided to leave on the fifteenth. The cares of +preparation and giving orders, for which everyone came to her, +occupied her all day. She spent the night of the fourteenth as +usual, without undressing, in the room next to the one where the +prince lay. Several times, waking up, she heard his groans and +muttering, the creak of his bed, and the steps of Tikhon and the +doctor when they turned him over. Several times she listened at the +door, and it seemed to her that his mutterings were louder than +usual and that they turned him over oftener. She could not sleep and +several times went to the door and listened, wishing to enter but +not deciding to do so. Though he did not speak, Princess Mary saw +and knew how unpleasant every sign of anxiety on his account was to +him. She had noticed with what dissatisfaction he turned from the look +she sometimes involuntarily fixed on him. She knew that her going in +during the night at an unusual hour would irritate him. + +But never had she felt so grieved for him or so much afraid of +losing him. She recalled all her life with him and in every word and +act of his found an expression of his love of her. Occasionally amid +these memories temptations of the devil would surge into her +imagination: thoughts of how things would be after his death, and +how her new, liberated life would be ordered. But she drove these +thoughts away with disgust. Toward morning he became quiet and she +fell asleep. + +She woke late. That sincerity which often comes with waking showed +her clearly what chiefly concerned her about her father's illness. +On waking she listened to what was going on behind the door and, +hearing him groan, said to herself with a sigh that things were +still the same. + +"But what could have happened? What did I want? I want his death!" +she cried with a feeling of loathing for herself. + +She washed, dressed, said her prayers, and went out to the porch. In +front of it stood carriages without horses and things were being +packed into the vehicles. + +It was a warm, gray morning. Princess Mary stopped at the porch, +still horrified by her spiritual baseness and trying to arrange her +thoughts before going to her father. The doctor came downstairs and +went out to her. + +"He is a little better today," said he. "I was looking for you. +One can make out something of what he is saying. His head is +clearer. Come in, he is asking for you..." + +Princess Mary's heart beat so violently at this news that she grew +pale and leaned against the wall to keep from falling. To see him, +talk to him, feel his eyes on her now that her whole soul was +overflowing with those dreadful, wicked temptations, was a torment +of joy and terror. + +"Come," said the doctor. + +Princess Mary entered her father's room and went up to his bed. He +was lying on his back propped up high, and his small bony hands with +their knotted purple veins were lying on the quilt; his left eye gazed +straight before him, his right eye was awry, and his brows and lips +motionless. He seemed altogether so thin, small, and pathetic. His +face seemed to have shriveled or melted; his features had grown +smaller. Princess Mary went up and kissed his hand. His left hand +pressed hers so that she understood that he had long been waiting +for her to come. He twitched her hand, and his brows and lips quivered +angrily. + +She looked at him in dismay trying to guess what he wanted of her. +When she changed her position so that his left eye could see her +face he calmed down, not taking his eyes off her for some seconds. +Then his lips and tongue moved, sounds came, and he began to speak, +gazing timidly and imploringly at her, evidently afraid that she might +not understand. + +Straining all her faculties Princess Mary looked at him. The comic +efforts with which he moved his tongue made her drop her eyes and with +difficulty repress the sobs that rose to her throat. He said +something, repeating the same words several times. She could not +understand them, but tried to guess what he was saying and inquiringly +repeated the words he uttered. + +"Mmm...ar...ate...ate..." he repeated several times. + +It was quite impossible to understand these sounds. The doctor +thought he had guessed them, and inquiringly repeated: "Mary, are +you afraid?" The prince shook his head, again repeated the same +sounds. + +"My mind, my mind aches?" questioned Princess Mary. + +He made a mumbling sound in confirmation of this, took her hand, and +began pressing it to different parts of his breast as if trying to +find the right place for it. + +"Always thoughts... about you... thoughts..." he then uttered much +more clearly than he had done before, now that he was sure of being +understood. + +Princess Mary pressed her head against his hand, trying to hide +her sobs and tears. + +He moved his hand over her hair. + +"I have been calling you all night..." he brought out. + +"If only I had known..." she said through her tears. "I was afraid +to come in." + +He pressed her hand. + +"Weren't you asleep?" + +"No, I did not sleep," said Princess Mary, shaking her head. + +Unconsciously imitating her father, she now tried to express herself +as he did, as much as possible by signs, and her tongue too seemed +to move with difficulty. + +"Dear one... Dearest..." Princess Mary could not quite make out what +he had said, but from his look it was clear that he had uttered a +tender caressing word such as he had never used to her before. "Why +didn't you come in?" + +"And I was wishing for his death!" thought Princess Mary. + +He was silent awhile. + +"Thank you... daughter dear!... for all, for all... forgive!... +thank you!... forgive!... thank you!..." and tears began to flow +from his eyes. "Call Andrew!" he said suddenly, and a childish, +timid expression of doubt showed itself on his face as he spoke. + +He himself seemed aware that his demand was meaningless. So at least +it seemed to Princess Mary. + +"I have a letter from him," she replied. + +He glanced at her with timid surprise. + +"Where is he?" + +"He's with the army, Father, at Smolensk." + +He closed his eyes and remained silent a long time. Then as if in +answer to his doubts and to confirm the fact that now he understood +and remembered everything, he nodded his head and reopened his eyes. + +"Yes," he said, softly and distinctly. "Russia has perished. They've +destroyed her." + +And he began to sob, and again tears flowed from his eyes. +Princess Mary could no longer restrain herself and wept while she +gazed at his face. + +Again he closed his eyes. His sobs ceased, he pointed to his eyes, +and Tikhon, understanding him, wiped away the tears. + +Then he again opened his eyes and said something none of them +could understand for a long time, till at last Tikhon understood and +repeated it. Princess Mary had sought the meaning of his words in +the mood in which he had just been speaking. She thought he was +speaking of Russia, or Prince Andrew, of herself, of his grandson, +or of his own death, and so she could not guess his words. + +"Put on your white dress. I like it," was what he said. + +Having understood this Princess Mary sobbed still louder, and the +doctor taking her arm led her out to the veranda, soothing her and +trying to persuade her to prepare for her journey. When she had left +the room the prince again began speaking about his son, about the war, +and about the Emperor, angrily twitching his brows and raising his +hoarse voice, and then he had a second and final stroke. + +Princess Mary stayed on the veranda. The day had cleared, it was hot +and sunny. She could understand nothing, think of nothing and feel +nothing, except passionate love for her father, love such as she +thought she had never felt till that moment. She ran out sobbing +into the garden and as far as the pond, along the avenues of young +lime trees Prince Andrew had planted. + +"Yes... I... I... I wished for his death! Yes, I wanted it to end +quicker.... I wished to be at peace.... And what will become of me? +What use will peace be when he is no longer here?" Princess Mary +murmured, pacing the garden with hurried steps and pressing her +hands to her bosom which heaved with convulsive sobs. + +When she had completed the tour of the garden, which brought her +again to the house, she saw Mademoiselle Bourienne- who had remained +at Bogucharovo and did not wish to leave it- coming toward her with +a stranger. This was the Marshal of the Nobility of the district, +who had come personally to point out to the princess the necessity for +her prompt departure. Princess Mary listened without understanding +him; she led him to the house, offered him lunch, and sat down with +him. Then, excusing herself, she went to the door of the old +prince's room. The doctor came out with an agitated face and said +she could not enter. + +"Go away, Princess! Go away... go away!" + +She returned to the garden and sat down on the grass at the foot +of the slope by the pond, where no one could see her. She did not know +how long she had been there when she was aroused by the sound of a +woman's footsteps running along the path. She rose and saw Dunyasha +her maid, who was evidently looking for her, and who stopped +suddenly as if in alarm on seeing her mistress. + +"Please come, Princess... The Prince," said Dunyasha in a breaking +voice. + +"Immediately, I'm coming, I'm coming!" replied the princess +hurriedly, not giving Dunyasha time to finish what she was saying, and +trying to avoid seeing the girl she ran toward the house. + +"Princess, it's God's will! You must be prepared for everything," +said the Marshal, meeting her at the house door. + +"Let me alone; it's not true!" she cried angrily to him. + +The doctor tried to stop her. She pushed him aside and ran to her +father's door. "Why are these people with frightened faces stopping +me? I don't want any of them! And what are they doing here?" she +thought. She opened the door and the bright daylight in that +previously darkened room startled her. In the room were her nurse +and other women. They all drew back from the bed, making way for +her. He was still lying on the bed as before, but the stern expression +of his quiet face made Princess Mary stop short on the threshold. + +"No, he's not dead- it's impossible!" she told herself and +approached him, and repressing the terror that seized her, she pressed +her lips to his cheek. But she stepped back immediately. All the force +of the tenderness she had been feeling for him vanished instantly +and was replaced by a feeling of horror at what lay there before +her. "No, he is no more! He is not, but here where he was is something +unfamiliar and hostile, some dreadful, terrifying, and repellent +mystery!" And hiding her face in her hands, Princess Mary sank into +the arms of the doctor, who held her up. + +In the presence of Tikhon and the doctor the women washed what had +been the prince, tied his head up with a handkerchief that the mouth +should not stiffen while open, and with another handkerchief tied +together the legs that were already spreading apart. Then they dressed +him in uniform with his decorations and placed his shriveled little +body on a table. Heaven only knows who arranged all this and when, but +it all got done as if of its own accord. Toward night candles were +burning round his coffin, a pall was spread over it, the floor was +strewn with sprays of juniper, a printed band was tucked in under +his shriveled head, and in a corner of the room sat a chanter +reading the psalms. + +Just as horses shy and snort and gather about a dead horse, so the +inmates of the house and strangers crowded into the drawing room round +the coffin- the Marshal, the village Elder, peasant women- and all +with fixed and frightened eyes, crossing themselves, bowed and +kissed the old prince's cold and stiffened hand. + +CHAPTER IX + +Until Prince Andrew settled in Bogucharovo its owners had always +been absentees, and its peasants were of quite a different character +from those of Bald Hills. They differed from them in speech, dress, +and disposition. They were called steppe peasants. The old prince used +to approve of them for their endurance at work when they came to +Bald Hills to help with the harvest or to dig ponds, and ditches, +but he disliked them for their boorishness. + +Prince Andrew's last stay at Bogucharovo, when he introduced +hospitals and schools and reduced the quitrent the peasants had to +pay, had not softened their disposition but had on the contrary +strengthened in them the traits of character the old prince called +boorishness. Various obscure rumors were always current among them: at +one time a rumor that they would all be enrolled as Cossacks; at +another of a new religion to which they were all to be converted; then +of some proclamation of the Tsar's and of an oath to the Tsar Paul +in 1797 (in connection with which it was rumored that freedom had been +granted them but the landowners had stopped it), then of Peter +Fedorovich's return to the throne in seven years' time, when +everything would be made free and so "simple" that there would be no +restrictions. Rumors of the war with Bonaparte and his invasion were +connected in their minds with the same sort of vague notions of +Antichrist, the end of the world, and "pure freedom." + +In the vicinity of Bogucharovo were large villages belonging to +the crown or to owners whose serfs paid quitrent and could work +where they pleased. There were very few resident landlords in the +neighborhood and also very few domestic or literate serfs, and in +the lives of the peasantry of those parts the mysterious undercurrents +in the life of the Russian people, the causes and meaning of which are +so baffling to contemporaries, were more clearly and strongly +noticeable than among others. One instance, which had occurred some +twenty years before, was a movement among the peasants to emigrate +to some unknown "warm rivers." Hundreds of peasants, among them the +Bogucharovo folk, suddenly began selling their cattle and moving in +whole families toward the southeast. As birds migrate to somewhere +beyond the sea, so these men with their wives and children streamed to +the southeast, to parts where none of them had ever been. They set off +in caravans, bought their freedom one by one or ran away, and drove or +walked toward the "warm rivers." Many of them were punished, some sent +to Siberia, many died of cold and hunger on the road, many returned of +their own accord, and the movement died down of itself just as it +had sprung up, without apparent reason. But such undercurrents still +existed among the people and gathered new forces ready to manifest +themselves just as strangely, unexpectedly, and at the same time +simply, naturally, and forcibly. Now in 1812, to anyone living in +close touch with these people it was apparent that these undercurrents +were acting strongly and nearing an eruption. + +Alpatych, who had reached Bogucharovo shortly before the old +prince's death, noticed an agitation among the peasants, and that +contrary to what was happening in the Bald Hills district, where +over a radius of forty miles all the peasants were moving away and +leaving their villages to be devastated by the Cossacks, the +peasants in the steppe region round Bogucharovo were, it was +rumored, in touch with the French, received leaflets from them that +passed from hand to hand, and did not migrate. He learned from +domestic serfs loyal to him that the peasant Karp, who possessed great +influence in the village commune and had recently been away driving +a government transport, had returned with news that the Cossacks +were destroying deserted villages, but that the French did not harm +them. Alpatych also knew that on the previous day another peasant +had even brought from the village of Visloukhovo, which was occupied +by the French, a proclamation by a French general that no harm would +be done to the inhabitants, and if they remained they would be paid +for anything taken from them. As proof of this the peasant had brought +from Visloukhovo a hundred rubles in notes (he did not know that +they were false) paid to him in advance for hay. + +More important still, Alpatych learned that on the morning of the +very day he gave the village Elder orders to collect carts to move the +princess' luggage from Bogucharovo, there had been a village meeting +at which it had been decided not to move but to wait. Yet there was no +time to waste. On the fifteenth, the day of the old prince's death, +the Marshal had insisted on Princess Mary's leaving at once, as it was +becoming dangerous. He had told her that after the sixteenth he +could not be responsible for what might happen. On the evening of +the day the old prince died the Marshal went away, promising to return +next day for the funeral. But this he was unable to do, for he +received tidings that the French had unexpectedly advanced, and had +barely time to remove his own family and valuables from his estate. + +For some thirty years Bogucharovo had been managed by the village +Elder, Dron, whom the old prince called by the diminutive "Dronushka." + +Dron was one of those physically and mentally vigorous peasants +who grow big beards as soon as they are of age and go on unchanged +till they are sixty or seventy, without a gray hair or the loss of a +tooth, as straight and strong at sixty as at thirty. + +Soon after the migration to the "warm rivers," in which he had taken +part like the rest, Dron was made village Elder and overseer of +Bogucharovo, and had since filled that post irreproachably for +twenty-three years. The peasants feared him more than they did their +master. The masters, both the old prince and the young, and the +steward respected him and jestingly called him "the Minister." +During the whole time of his service Dron had never been drunk or ill, +never after sleepless nights or the hardest tasks had he shown the +least fatigue, and though he could not read he had never forgotten a +single money account or the number of quarters of flour in any of +the endless cartloads he sold for the prince, nor a single shock of +the whole corn crop on any single acre of the Bogucharovo fields. + +Alpatych, arriving from the devastated Bald Hills estate, sent for +his Dron on the day of the prince's funeral and told him to have +twelve horses got ready for the princess' carriages and eighteen carts +for the things to be removed from Bogucharovo. Though the peasants +paid quitrent, Alpatych thought no difficulty would be made about +complying with this order, for there were two hundred and thirty +households at work in Bogucharovo and the peasants were well to do. +But on hearing the order Dron lowered his eyes and remained silent. +Alpatych named certain peasants he knew, from whom he told him to take +the carts. + +Dron replied that the horses of these peasants were away carting. +Alpatych named others, but they too, according to Dron, had no +horses available: some horses were carting for the government, +others were too weak, and others had died for want of fodder. It +seemed that no horses could be had even for the carriages, much less +for the carting. + +Alpatych looked intently at Dron and frowned. Just as Dron was a +model village Elder, so Alpatych had not managed the prince's +estates for twenty years in vain. He a model steward, possessing in +the highest degree the faculty of divining the needs and instincts +of those he dealt with. Having glanced at Dron he at once understood +that his answers did not express his personal views but the general +mood of the Bogucharovo commune, by which the Elder had already been +carried away. But he also knew that Dron, who had acquired property +and was hated by the commune, must be hesitating between the two +camps: the masters' and the serfs'. He noticed this hesitation in +Dron's look and therefore frowned and moved closer up to him. + +"Now just listen, Dronushka," said he. "Don't talk nonsense to me. +His excellency Prince Andrew himself gave me orders to move all the +people away and not leave them with the enemy, and there is an order +from the Tsar about it too. Anyone who stays is a traitor to the Tsar. +Do you hear?" + +"I hear," Dron answered without lifting his eyes. + +Alpatych was not satisfied with this reply. + +"Eh, Dron, it will turn out badly!" he said, shaking his head. + +"The power is in your hands," Dron rejoined sadly. + +"Eh, Dron, drop it!" Alpatych repeated, withdrawing his hand from +his bosom and solemnly pointing to the floor at Dron's feet. "I can +see through you and three yards into the ground under you," he +continued, gazing at the floor in front of Dron. + +Dron was disconcerted, glanced furtively at Alpatych and again +lowered his eyes. + +"You drop this nonsense and tell the people to get ready to leave +their homes and go to Moscow and to get carts ready for tomorrow +morning for the princess' things. And don't go to any meeting +yourself, do you hear?" + +Dron suddenly fell on his knees. + +"Yakov Alpatych, discharge me! Take the keys from me and discharge +me, for Christ's sake!" + +"Stop that!" cried Alpatych sternly. "I see through you and three +yards under you," he repeated, knowing that his skill in beekeeping, +his knowledge of the right time to sow the oats, and the fact that +he had been able to retain the old prince's favor for twenty years had +long since gained him the reputation of being a wizard, and that the +power of seeing three yards under a man is considered an attribute +of wizards. + +Dron got up and was about to say something, but Alpatych interrupted +him. + +"What is it you have got into your heads, eh?... What are you +thinking of, eh?" + +"What am I to do with the people?" said Dron. "They're quite +beside themselves; I have already told them..." + +"'Told them,' I dare say!" said Alpatych. "Are they drinking?" he +asked abruptly. + +"Quite beside themselves, Yakov Alpatych; they've fetched another +barrel." + +"Well, then, listen! I'll go to the police officer, and you tell +them so, and that they must stop this and the carts must be got +ready." + +"I understand." + +Alpatych did not insist further. He had managed people for a long +time and knew that the chief way to make them obey is to show no +suspicion that they can possibly disobey. Having wrung a submissive "I +understand" from Dron, Alpatych contented himself with that, though he +not only doubted but felt almost certain that without the help of +troops the carts would not be forthcoming. + +And so it was, for when evening came no carts had been provided. +In the village, outside the drink shop, another meeting was being +held, which decided that the horses should be driven out into the +woods and the carts should not be provided. Without saying anything of +this to the princess, Alpatych had his own belongings taken out of the +carts which had arrived from Bald Hills and had those horses got ready +for the princess' carriages. Meanwhile he went himself to the police +authorities. + +CHAPTER X + +After her father's funeral Princess Mary shut herself up in her room +and did not admit anyone. A maid came to the door to say that Alpatych +was asking for orders about their departure. (This was before his talk +with Dron.) Princess Mary raised herself on the sofa on which she +had been lying and replied through the closed door that she did not +mean to go away and begged to be left in peace. + +The windows of the room in which she was lying looked westward. +She lay on the sofa with her face to the wall, fingering the buttons +of the leather cushion and seeing nothing but that cushion, and her +confused thoughts were centered on one subject- the irrevocability +of death and her own spiritual baseness, which she had not +suspected, but which had shown itself during her father's illness. She +wished to pray but did not dare to, dared not in her present state +of mind address herself to God. She lay for a long time in that +position. + +The sun had reached the other side of the house, and its slanting +rays shone into the open window, lighting up the room and part of +the morocco cushion at which Princess Mary was looking. The flow of +her thoughts suddenly stopped. Unconsciously she sat up, smoothed +her hair, got up, and went to the window, involuntarily inhaling the +freshness of the clear but windy evening. + +"Yes, you can well enjoy the evening now! He is gone and no one will +hinder you," she said to herself, and sinking into a chair she let her +head fall on the window sill. + +Someone spoke her name in a soft and tender voice from the garden +and kissed her head. She looked up. It was Mademoiselle Bourienne in a +black dress and weepers. She softly approached Princess Mary, +sighed, kissed her, and immediately began to cry. The princess +looked up at her. All their former disharmony and her own jealousy +recurred to her mind. But she remembered too how he had changed of +late toward Mademoiselle Bourienne and could not bear to see her, +thereby showing how unjust were the reproaches Princess Mary had +mentally addressed to her. "Besides, is it for me, for me who +desired his death, to condemn anyone?" she thought. + +Princess Mary vividly pictured to herself the position of +Mademoiselle Bourienne, whom she had of late kept at a distance, but +who yet was dependent on her and living in her house. She felt sorry +for her and held out her hand with a glance of gentle inquiry. +Mademoiselle Bourienne at once began crying again and kissed that +hand, speaking of the princess' sorrow and making herself a partner in +it. She said her only consolation was the fact that the princess +allowed her to share her sorrow, that all the old misunderstandings +should sink into nothing but this great grief; that she felt herself +blameless in regard to everyone, and that he, from above, saw her +affection and gratitude. The princess heard her, not heeding her words +but occasionally looking up at her and listening to the sound of her +voice. + +"Your position is doubly terrible, dear princess," said Mademoiselle +Bourienne after a pause. "I understand that you could not, and cannot, +think of yourself, but with my love for you I must do so.... Has +Alpatych been to you? Has he spoken to you of going away?" she asked. + +Princess Mary did not answer. She did not understand who was to go +or where to. "Is it possible to plan or think of anything now? Is it +not all the same?" she thought, and did not reply. + +"You know, chere Marie," said Mademoiselle Bourienne, "that we are +in danger- are surrounded by the French. It would be dangerous to move +now. If we go we are almost sure to be taken prisoners, and God +knows..." + +Princess Mary looked at her companion without understanding what she +was talking about. + +"Oh, if anyone knew how little anything matters to me now," she +said. "Of course I would on no account wish to go away from him.... +Alpatych did say something about going.... Speak to him; I can do +nothing, nothing, and don't want to...." + +"I've spoken to him. He hopes we should be in time to get away +tomorrow, but I think it would now be better to stay here," said +Mademoiselle Bourienne. "Because, you will agree, chere Marie, to fall +into the hands of the soldiers or of riotous peasants would be +terrible." + +Mademoiselle Bourienne took from her reticule a proclamation (not +printed on ordinary Russian paper) of General Rameau's, telling people +not to leave their homes and that the French authorities would +afford them proper protection. She handed this to the princess. + +"I think it would be best to appeal to that general," she continued, +"and and am sure that all due respect would be shown you." + +Princess Mary read the paper, and her face began to quiver with +stifled sobs. + +"From whom did you get this?" she asked. + +"They probably recognized that I am French, by my name," replied +Mademoiselle Bourienne blushing. + +Princess Mary, with the paper in her hand, rose from the window +and with a pale face went out of the room and into what had been +Prince Andrew's study. + +"Dunyasha, send Alpatych, or Dronushka, or somebody to me!" she +said, "and tell Mademoiselle Bourienne not to come to me," she +added, hearing Mademoiselle Bourienne's voice. "We must go at once, at +once!" she said, appalled at the thought of being left in the hands of +the French. + +"If Prince Andrew heard that I was in the power of the French! +That I, the daughter of Prince Nicholas Bolkonski, asked General +Rameau for protection and accepted his favor!" This idea horrified +her, made her shudder, blush, and feel such a rush of anger and +pride as she had never experienced before. All that was distressing, +and especially all that was humiliating, in her position rose +vividly to her mind. "They, the French, would settle in this house: M. +le General Rameau would occupy Prince Andrew's study and amuse himself +by looking through and reading his letters and papers. Mademoiselle +Bourienne would do the honors of Bogucharovo for him. I should be +given a small room as a favor, the soldiers would violate my +father's newly dug grave to steal his crosses and stars, they would +tell me of their victories over the Russians, and would pretend to +sympathize with my sorrow..." thought Princess Mary, not thinking +her own thoughts but feeling bound to think like her father and her +brother. For herself she did not care where she remained or what +happened to her, but she felt herself the representative of her dead +father and of Prince Andrew. Involuntarily she thought their +thoughts and felt their feelings. What they would have said and what +they would have done she felt bound to say and do. She went into +Prince Andrew's study, trying to enter completely into his ideas, +and considered her position. + +The demands of life, which had seemed to her annihilated by her +father's death, all at once rose before her with a new, previously +unknown force and took possession of her. + +Agitated and flushed she paced the room, sending now for Michael +Ivanovich and now for Tikhon or Dron. Dunyasha, the nurse, and the +other maids could not say in how far Mademoiselle Bourienne's +statement was correct. Alpatych was not at home, he had gone to the +police. Neither could the architect Michael Ivanovich, who on being +sent for came in with sleepy eyes, tell Princess Mary anything. With +just the same smile of agreement with which for fifteen years he had +been accustomed to answer the old prince without expressing views of +his own, he now replied to Princess Mary, so that nothing definite +could be got from his answers. The old valet Tikhon, with sunken, +emaciated face that bore the stamp of inconsolable grief, replied: +"Yes, Princess" to all Princess Mary's questions and hardly +refrained from sobbing as he looked at her. + +At length Dron, the village Elder, entered the room and with a +deep bow to Princess Mary came to a halt by the doorpost. + +Princess Mary walked up and down the room and stopped in front of +him. + +"Dronushka," she said, regarding as a sure friend this Dronushka who +always used to bring a special kind of gingerbread from his visit to +the fair at Vyazma every year and smilingly offer it to her, +"Dronushka, now since our misfortune..." she began, but could not go +on. + +"We are all in God's hands," said he, with a sigh. + +They were silent for a while. + +"Dronushka, Alpatych has gone off somewhere and I have no one to +turn to. Is true, as they tell me, that I can't even go away?" + +"Why shouldn't you go away, your excellency? You can go," said Dron. + +"I was told it would be dangerous because of the enemy. Dear friend, +I can do nothing. I understand nothing. I have nobody! I want to go +away tonight or early tomorrow morning." + +Dron paused. He looked askance at Princess Mary and said: "There are +no horses; I told Yakov Alpatych so." + +"Why are there none?" asked the princess. + +"It's all God's scourge," said Dron. "What horses we had have been +taken for the army or have died- this is such a year! It's not a +case of feeding horses- we may die of hunger ourselves! As it is, some +go three days without eating. We've nothing, we've been ruined." + +Princess Mary listened attentively to what he told her. + +"The peasants are ruined? They have no bread?" she asked. + +"They're dying of hunger," said Dron. "It's not a case of carting." + +"But why didn't you tell me, Dronushka? Isn't it possible to help +them? I'll do all I can...." + +To Princess Mary it was strange that now, at a moment when such +sorrow was filling her soul, there could be rich people and poor, +and the rich could refrain from helping the poor. She had heard +vaguely that there was such a thing as "landlord's corn" which was +sometimes given to the peasants. She also knew that neither her father +nor her brother would refuse to help the peasants in need, she only +feared to make some mistake in speaking about the distribution of +the grain she wished to give. She was glad such cares presented +themselves, enabling her without scruple to forget her own grief. +She began asking Dron about the peasants' needs and what there was +in Bogucharovo that belonged to the landlord. + +"But we have grain belonging to my brother?" she said. + +"The landlord's grain is all safe," replied Dron proudly. "Our +prince did not order it to be sold." + +"Give it to the peasants, let them have all they need; I give you +leave in my brother's name," said she. + +Dron made no answer but sighed deeply. + +"Give them that corn if there is enough of it. Distribute it all. +I give this order in my brother's name; and tell them that what is +ours is theirs. We do not grudge them anything. Tell them so." + +" Dron looked intently at the princess while she was speaking. + +"Discharge me, little mother, for God's sake! Order the keys to be +taken from me," said he. "I have served twenty-three years and have +done no wrong. Discharge me, for God's sake!" + +Princess Mary did not understand what he wanted of her or why he was +asking to be discharged. She replied that she had never doubted his +devotion and that she was ready to do anything for him and for the +peasants. + +CHAPTER XI + +An hour later Dunyasha came to tell the princess that Dron had come, +and all the peasants had assembled at the barn by the princess' +order and wished to have word with their mistress. + +"But I never told them to come," said Princess Mary. "I only told +Dron to let them have the grain." + +"Only, for God's sake, Princess dear, have them sent away and +don't go out to them. It's all a trick," said Dunyasha, "and when +Yakov Alpatych returns let us get away... and please don't..." + +"What is a trick?" asked Princess Mary in surprise. + +"I know it is, only listen to me for God's sake! Ask nurse too. They +say they don't agree to leave Bogucharovo as you ordered." + +"You're making some mistake. I never ordered them to go away," +said Princess Mary. "Call Dronushka." + +Dron came and confirmed Dunyasha's words; the peasants had come by +the princess' order. + +"But I never sent for them," declared the princess. "You must have +given my message wrong. I only said that you were to give them the +grain." + +Dron only sighed in reply. + +"If you order it they will go away," said he. + +"No, no. I'll go out to them," said Princess Mary, and in spite of +the nurse's and Dunyasha's protests she went out into the porch; Dron, +Dunyasha, the nurse, and Michael Ivanovich following her. + +"They probably think I am offering them the grain to bribe them to +remain here, while I myself go away leaving them to the mercy of the +French," thought Princess Mary. "I will offer them monthly rations and +housing at our Moscow estate. I am sure Andrew would do even more in +my place," she thought as she went out in the twilight toward the +crowd standing on the pasture by the barn. + +The men crowded closer together, stirred, and rapidly took off their +hats. Princess Mary lowered her eyes and, tripping over her skirt, +came close up to them. So many different eyes, old and young, were +fixed on her, and there were so many different faces, that she could +not distinguish any of them and, feeling that she must speak to them +all at once, did not know how to do it. But again the sense that she +represented her father and her brother gave her courage, and she +boldly began her speech. + +"I am very glad you have come," she said without raising her eyes, +and feeling her heart beating quickly and violently. "Dronushka +tells me that the war has ruined you. That is our common misfortune, +and I shall grudge nothing to help you. I am myself going away because +it is dangerous here... the enemy is near... because... I am giving +you everything, my friends, and I beg you to take everything, all +our grain, so that you may not suffer want! And if you have been +told that I am giving you the grain to keep you here- that is not +true. On the contrary, I ask you to go with all your belongings to our +estate near Moscow, and I promise you I will see to it that there +you shall want for nothing. You shall be given food and lodging." + +The princess stopped. Sighs were the only sound heard in the crowd. + +"I am not doing this on my own account," she continued, "I do it +in the name of my dead father, who was a good master to you, and of my +brother and his son." + +Again she paused. No one broke the silence. + +"Ours is a common misfortune and we will share it together. All that +is mine is yours," she concluded, scanning the faces before her. + +All eyes were gazing at her with one and the same expression. She +could not fathom whether it was curiosity, devotion, gratitude, or +apprehension and distrust- but the expression on all the faces was +identical. + +"We are all very thankful for your bounty, but it won't do for us to +take the landlord's grain," said a voice at the back of the crowd. + +"But why not?" asked the princess. + +No one replied and Princess Mary, looking round at the crowd, +found that every eye she met now was immediately dropped. + +"But why don't you want to take it?" she asked again. + +No one answered. + +The silence began to oppress the princess and she tried to catch +someone's eye. + +"Why don't you speak?" she inquired of a very old man who stood just +in front of her leaning on his stick. "If you think something more +is wanted, tell me! I will do anything," said she, catching his eye. + +But as if this angered him, he bent his head quite low and muttered: + +"Why should we agree? We don't want the grain." + +"Why should we give up everything? We don't agree. Don't agree.... +We are sorry for you, but we're not willing. Go away yourself, +alone..." came from various sides of the crowd. + +And again all the faces in that crowd bore an identical +expression, though now it was certainly not an expression of curiosity +or gratitude, but of angry resolve. + +"But you can't have understood me," said Princess Mary with a sad +smile. "Why don't you want to go? I promise to house and feed you, +while here the enemy would ruin you..." + +But her voice was drowned by the voices of the crowd. + +"We're not willing. Let them ruin us! We won't take your grain. We +don't agree." + +Again Princess Mary tried to catch someone's eye, but not a single +eye in the crowd was turned to her; evidently they were all trying +to avoid her look. She felt strange and awkward. + +"Oh yes, an artful tale! Follow her into slavery! Pull down your +houses and go into bondage! I dare say! 'I'll give you grain, indeed!' +she says," voices in the crowd were heard saying. + +With drooping head Princess Mary left the crowd and went back to the +house. Having repeated her order to Dron to have horses ready for +her departure next morning, she went to her room and remained alone +with her own thoughts. + +CHAPTER XII + +For a long time that night Princess Mary sat by the open window of +her room hearing the sound of the peasants' voices that reached her +from the village, but it was not of them she was thinking. She felt +that she could not understand them however much she might think +about them. She thought only of one thing, her sorrow, which, after +the break caused by cares for the present, seemed already to belong to +the past. Now she could remember it and weep or pray. + +After sunset the wind had dropped. The night was calm and fresh. +Toward midnight the voices began to subside, a cock crowed, the full +moon began to show from behind the lime trees, a fresh white dewy mist +began to rise, and stillness reigned over the village and the house. + +Pictures of the near past- her father's illness and last moments- +rose one after another to her memory. With mournful pleasure she now +lingered over these images, repelling with horror only the last one, +the picture of his death, which she felt she could not contemplate +even in imagination at this still and mystic hour of night. And +these pictures presented themselves to her so clearly and in such +detail that they seemed now present, now past, and now future. + +She vividly recalled the moment when he had his first stroke and was +being dragged along by his armpits through the garden at Bald Hills, +muttering something with his helpless tongue, twitching his gray +eyebrows and looking uneasily and timidly at her. + +"Even then he wanted to tell me what he told me the day he died," +she thought. "He had always thought what he said then." And she +recalled in all its detail the night at Bald Hills before he had the +last stroke, when with a foreboding of disaster she had remained at +home against his will. She had not slept and had stolen downstairs +on tiptoe, and going to the door of the conservatory where he slept +that night had listened at the door. In a suffering and weary voice he +was saying something to Tikhon, speaking of the Crimea and its warm +nights and of the Empress. Evidently he had wanted to talk. "And why +didn't he call me? Why didn't he let me be there instead of Tikhon?" +Princess Mary had thought and thought again now. "Now he will never +tell anyone what he had in his soul. Never will that moment return for +him or for me when he might have said all he longed to say, and not +Tikhon but I might have heard and understood him. Why didn't I enter +the room?" she thought. "Perhaps he would then have said to me what he +said the day he died. While talking to Tikhon he asked about me twice. +He wanted to see me, and I was standing close by, outside the door. It +was sad and painful for him to talk to Tikhon who did not understand +him. I remember how he began speaking to him about Lise as if she were +alive- he had forgotten she was dead- and Tikhon reminded him that she +was no more, and he shouted, 'Fool!' He was greatly depressed. From +behind the door I heard how he lay down on his bed groaning and loudly +exclaimed, 'My God!' Why didn't I go in then? What could he have +done to me? What could I have lost? And perhaps he would then have +been comforted and would have said that word to me." And Princess Mary +uttered aloud the caressing word he had said to her on the day of +his death. "Dear-est!" she repeated, and began sobbing, with tears +that relieved her soul. She now saw his face before her. And not the +face she had known ever since she could remember and had always seen +at a distance, but the timid, feeble face she had seen for the first +time quite closely, with all its wrinkles and details, when she +stooped near to his mouth to catch what he said. + +"Dear-est!" she repeated again. + +"What was he thinking when he uttered that word? What is he thinking +now?" This question suddenly presented itself to her, and in answer +she saw him before her with the expression that was on his face as +he lay in his coffin with his chin bound up with a white handkerchief. +And the horror that had seized her when she touched him and +convinced herself that that was not he, but something mysterious and +horrible, seized her again. She tried to think of something else and +to pray, but could do neither. With wide-open eyes she gazed at the +moonlight and the shadows, expecting every moment to see his dead +face, and she felt that the silence brooding over the house and within +it held her fast. + +"Dunyasha," she whispered. "Dunyasha!" she screamed wildly, and +tearing herself out of this silence she ran to the servants' +quarters to meet her old nurse and the maidservants who came running +toward her. + +CHAPTER XIII + +On the seventeenth of August Rostov and Ilyin, accompanied by +Lavrushka who had just returned from captivity and by an hussar +orderly, left their quarters at Yankovo, ten miles from Bogucharovo, +and went for a ride- to try a new horse Ilyin had bought and to find +out whether there was any hay to be had in the villages. + +For the last three days Bogucharovo had lain between the two hostile +armies, so that it was as easy for the Russian rearguard to get to +it as for the French vanguard; Rostov, as a careful squadron +commander, wished to take such provisions as remained at Bogucharovo +before the French could get them. + +Rostov and Ilyin were in the merriest of moods. On the way to +Bogucharovo, a princely estate with a dwelling house and farm where +they hoped to find many domestic serfs and pretty girls, they +questioned Lavrushka about Napoleon and laughed at his stories, and +raced one another to try Ilyin's horse. + +Rostov had no idea that the village he was entering was the property +of that very Bolkonski who had been engaged to his sister. + +Rostov and Ilyin gave rein to their horses for a last race along the +incline before reaching Bogucharovo, and Rostov, outstripping Ilyin, +was the first to gallop into the village street. + +"You're first!" cried Ilyin, flushed. + +"Yes, always first both on the grassland and here," answered Rostov, +stroking his heated Donets horse. + +"And I'd have won on my Frenchy, your excellency," said Lavrushka +from behind, alluding to his shabby cart horse, "only I didn't wish to +mortify you. + +They rode at a footpace to the barn, where a large crowd of peasants +was standing. + +Some of the men bared their heads, others stared at the new arrivals +without doffing their caps. Two tall old peasants with wrinkled +faces and scanty beards emerged from the tavern, smiling, +staggering, and singing some incoherent song, and approached the +officers. + +"Fine fellows!" said Rostov laughing. "Is there any hay here?" + +"And how like one another," said Ilyin. + +"A mo-o-st me-r-r-y co-o-m-pa...!" sang one of the peasants with a +blissful smile. + +One of the men came out of the crowd and went up to Rostov. + +"Who do you belong to?" he asked. + +"The French," replied Ilyin jestingly, "and here is Napoleon +himself"- and he pointed to Lavrushka. + +"Then you are Russians?" the peasant asked again. + +"And is there a large force of you here?" said another, a short man, +coming up. + +"Very large," answered Rostov. "But why have you collected here?" he +added. "Is it a holiday?" + +"The old men have met to talk over the business of the commune," +replied the peasant, moving away. + +At that moment, on the road leading from the big house, two women +and a man in a white hat were seen coming toward the officers. + +"The one in pink is mine, so keep off!" said Ilyin on seeing +Dunyasha running resolutely toward him. + +"She'll be ours!" said Lavrushka to Ilyin, winking. + +"What do you want, my pretty?" said Ilyin with a smile. + +"The princess ordered me to ask your regiment and your name." + +"This is Count Rostov, squadron commander, and I am your humble +servant." + +"Co-o-om-pa-ny!" roared the tipsy peasant with a beatific smile as +he looked at Ilyin talking to the girl. Following Dunyasha, Alpatych +advanced to Rostov, having bared his head while still at a distance. + +"May I make bold to trouble your honor?" said he respectfully, but +with a shade of contempt for the youthfulness of this officer and with +a hand thrust into his bosom. "My mistress, daughter of General in +Chief Prince Nicholas Bolkonski who died on the fifteenth of this +month, finding herself in difficulties owing to the boorishness of +these people"- he pointed to the peasants- "asks you to come up to the +house.... Won't you, please, ride on a little farther," said +Alpatych with a melancholy smile, "as it is not convenient in the +presence of...?" He pointed to the two peasants who kept as close to +him as horseflies to a horse. + +"Ah!... Alpatych... Ah, Yakov Alpatych... Grand! Forgive us for +Christ's sake, eh?" said the peasants, smiling joyfully at him. + +Rostov looked at the tipsy peasants and smiled. + +"Or perhaps they amuse your honor?" remarked Alpatych with a staid +air, as he pointed at the old men with his free hand. + +"No, there's not much to be amused at here," said Rostov, and rode +on a little way. "What's the matter?" he asked. + +"I make bold to inform your honor that the rude peasants here +don't wish to let the mistress leave the estate, and threaten to +unharness her horses, so that though everything has been packed up +since morning, her excellency cannot get away." + +"Impossible!" exclaimed Rostov. + +"I have the honor to report to you the actual truth," said Alpatych. + +Rostov dismounted, gave his horse to the orderly, and followed +Alpatych to the house, questioning him as to the state of affairs. +It appeared that the princess' offer of corn to the peasants the +previous day, and her talk with Dron and at the meeting, had +actually had so bad an effect that Dron had finally given up the +keys and joined the peasants and had not appeared when Alpatych sent +for him; and that in the morning when the princess gave orders to +harness for her journey, the peasants had come in a large crowd to the +barn and sent word that they would not let her leave the village: that +there was an order not to move, and that they would unharness the +horses. Alpatych had gone out to admonish them, but was told (it was +chiefly Karp who did the talking, Dron not showing himself in the +crowd) that they could not let the princess go, that there was an +order to the contrary, but that if she stayed they would serve her +as before and obey her in everything. + +At the moment when Rostov and Ilyin were galloping along the road, +Princess Mary, despite the dissuasions of Alpatych, her nurse, and the +maids, had given orders to harness and intended to start, but when the +cavalrymen were espied they were taken for Frenchmen, the coachman ran +away, and the women in the house began to wail. + +"Father! Benefactor! God has sent you!" exclaimed deeply moved +voices as Rostov passed through the anteroom. + +Princess Mary was sitting helpless and bewildered in the large +sitting room, when Rostov was shown in. She could not grasp who he was +and why he had come, or what was happening to her. When she saw his +Russian face, and by his walk and the first words he uttered +recognized him as a man of her own class, she glanced at him with +her deep radiant look and began speaking in a voice that faltered +and trembled with emotion. This meeting immediately struck Rostov as a +romantic event. "A helpless girl overwhelmed with grief, left to the +mercy of coarse, rioting peasants! And what a strange fate sent me +here! What gentleness and nobility there are in her features and +expression!" thought he as he looked at her and listened to her +timid story. + +When she began to tell him that all this had happened the day +after her father's funeral, her voiced trembled. She turned away, +and then, as if fearing he might take her words as meant to move him +to pity, looked at him with an apprehensive glance of inquiry. There +were tears in Rostov's eyes. Princess Mary noticed this and glanced +gratefully at him with that radiant look which caused the plainness of +her face to be forgotten. + +"I cannot express, Princess, how glad I am that I happened to ride +here and am able to show my readiness to serve you," said Rostov, +rising. "Go when you please, and I give you my word of honor that no +one shall dare to cause you annoyance if only you will allow me to act +as your escort." And bowing respectfully, as if to a lady of royal +blood, he moved toward the door. + +Rostov's deferential tone seemed to indicate that though he would +consider himself happy to be acquainted with her, he did not wish to +take advantage of her misfortunes to intrude upon her. + +Princess Mary understood this and appreciated his delicacy. + +"I am very, very grateful to you," she said in French, "but I hope +it was all a misunderstanding and that no one is to blame for it." She +suddenly began to cry. + +"Excuse me!" she said. + +Rostov, knitting his brows, left the room with another low bow. + +CHAPTER XIV + +Well, is she pretty? Ah, friend- my pink one is delicious; her +name is Dunyasha...." + +But on glancing at Rostov's face Ilyin stopped short. He saw that +his hero and commander was following quite a different train of +thought. + +Rostov glanced angrily at Ilyin and without replying strode off with +rapid steps to the village. + +"I'll show them; I'll give it to them, the brigands!" said he to +himself. + +Alpatych at a gliding trot, only just managing not to run, kept up +with him with difficulty. + +"What decision have you been pleased to come to?" said he. + +Rostov stopped and, clenching his fists, suddenly and sternly turned +on Alpatych. + +"Decision? What decision? Old dotard!..." cried he. "What have you +been about? Eh? The peasants are rioting, and you can't manage them? +You're a traitor youself! I know you. I'll flay you all alive!..." And +as if afraid of wasting his store of anger, he left Alpatych and +went rapidly forward. Alpatych, mastering his offended feelings, +kept pace with Rostov at a gliding gait and continued to impart his +views. He said the peasants were obdurate and that at the present +moment it would be imprudent to "overresist" them without an armed +force, and would it not be better first to send for the military? + +"I'll give them armed force... I'll 'overresist' them!" uttered +Rostov meaninglessly, breathless with irrational animal fury and the +need to vent it. + +Without considering what he would do he moved unconciously with +quick, resolute steps toward the crowd. And the nearer he drew to it +the more Alpatych felt that this unreasonable action might produce +good results. The peasants in the crowd were similarly impressed +when they saw Rostov's rapid, firm steps and resolute, frowning face. + +After the hussars had come to the village and Rostov had gone to see +the princess, a certain confusion and dissension had arisen among +the crowd. Some of the peasants said that these new arrivals were +Russians and might take it amiss that the mistress was being detained. +Dron was of this opinion, but as soon as he expressed it Karp and +others attacked their ex-Elder. + +"How many years have you been fattening on the commune?" Karp +shouted at him. "It's all one to you! You'll dig up your pot of +money and take it away with you.... What does it matter to you whether +our homes are ruined or not?" + +"We've been told to keep order, and that no one is to leave their +homes or take away a single grain, and that's all about it!" cried +another. + +"It was your son's turn to be conscripted, but no fear! You +begrudged your lump of a son," a little old man suddenly began +attacking Dron- "and so they took my Vanka to be shaved for a soldier! +But we all have to die." + +"To be sure, we all have to die. I'm not against the commune," +said Dron. + +"That's it- not against it! You've filled your belly...." + +The two tall peasants had their say. As soon as Rostov, followed +by Ilyin, Lavrushka, and Alpatych, came up to the crowd, Karp, +thrusting his fingers into his belt and smiling a little, walked to +the front. Dron on the contrary retired to the rear and the crowd drew +closer together. + +"Who is your Elder here? Hey?" shouted Rostov, coming up to the +crowd with quick steps. + +"The Elder? What do you want with him?..." asked Karp. + +But before the words were well out of his mouth, his cap flew off +and a fierce blow jerked his head to one side. + +"Caps off, traitors!" shouted Rostov in a wrathful voice. "Where's +the Elder?" he cried furiously. + +"The Elder.... He wants the Elder!... Dron Zakharych, you!" meek and +flustered voices here and there were heard calling and caps began to +come off their heads. + +"We don't riot, we're following the orders," declared Karp, and at +that moment several voices began speaking together. + +"It's as the old men have decided- there's too many of you giving +orders." + +"Arguing? Mutiny!... Brigands! Traitors!" cried Rostov unmeaningly +in a voice not his own, gripping Karp by the collar. "Bind him, bind +him!" he shouted, though there was no one to bind him but Lavrushka +and Alpatych. + +Lavrushka, however, ran up to Karp and seized him by the arms from +behind. + +"Shall I call up our men from beyond the hill?" he called out. + +Alpatych turned to the peasants and ordered two of them by name to +come and bind Karp. The men obediently came out of the crowd and began +taking off their belts. + +"Where's the Elder?" demanded Rostov in a loud voice. + +With a pale and frowning face Dron stepped out of the crowd. + +"Are you the Elder? Bind him, Lavrushka!" shouted Rostov, as if that +order, too, could not possibly meet with any opposition. + +And in fact two more peasants began binding Dron, who took off his +own belt and handed it to them, as if to aid them. + +"And you all listen to me!" said Rostov to the peasants. "Be off +to your houses at once, and don't let one of your voices be heard!" + +"Why, we've not done any harm! We did it just out of foolishness. +It's all nonsense... I said then that it was not in order," voices +were heard bickering with one another. + +"There! What did I say?" said Alpatych, coming into his own again. +"It's wrong, lads!" + +"All our stupidity, Yakov Alpatych," came the answers, and the +crowd began at once to disperse through the village. + +The two bound men were led off to the master's house. The two +drunken peasants followed them. + +"Aye, when I look at you!..." said one of them to Karp. + +"How can one talk to the masters like that? What were you thinking +of, you fool?" added the other- "A real fool!" + +Two hours later the carts were standing in the courtyard of the +Bogucharovo house. The peasants were briskly carrying out the +proprietor's goods and packing them on the carts, and Dron, +liberated at Princess Mary's wish from the cupboard where he had +been confined, was standing in the yard directing the men. + +"Don't put it in so carelessly," said one of the peasants, a man +with a round smiling face, taking a casket from a housemaid. "You know +it has cost money! How can you chuck it in like that or shove it under +the cord where it'll get rubbed? I don't like that way of doing +things. Let it all be done properly, according to rule. Look here, put +it under the bast matting and cover it with hay- that's the way!" + +"Eh, books, books!" said another peasant, bringing out Prince +Andrew's library cupboards. "Don't catch up against it! It's heavy, +lads- solid books." + +"Yes, they worked all day and didn't play!" remarked the tall, +round-faced peasant gravely, pointing with a significant wink at the +dictionaries that were on the top. + +Unwilling to obtrude himself on the princess, Rostov did not go back +to the house but remained in the village awaiting her departure. +When her carriage drove out of the house, he mounted and accompanied +her eight miles from Bogucharovo to where the road was occupied by our +troops. At the inn at Yankovo he respectfully took leave of her, for +the first time permitting himself to kiss her hand. + +"How can you speak so!" he blushingly replied to Princess Mary's +expressions of gratitude for her deliverance, as she termed what had +occurred. "Any police officer would have done as much! If we had had +only peasants to fight, we should not have let the enemy come so far," +said he with a sense of shame and wishing to change the subject. "I am +only happy to have had the opportunity of making your acquaintance. +Good-by, Princess. I wish you happiness and consolation and hope to +meet you again in happier circumstances. If you don't want to make +me blush, please don't thank me!" + +But the princess, if she did not again thank him in words, thanked +him with the whole expression of her face, radiant with gratitude +and tenderness. She could not believe that there was nothing to +thank him for. On the contrary, it seemed to her certain that had he +not been there she would have perished at the hands of the mutineers +and of the French, and that he had exposed himself to terrible and +obvious danger to save her, and even more certain was it that he was a +man of lofty and noble soul, able to understand her position and her +sorrow. His kind, honest eyes, with the tears rising in them when +she herself had begun to cry as she spoke of her loss, did leave her +memory. + +When she had taken leave of him and remained alone she suddenly felt +her eyes filling with tears, and then not for the first time the +strange question presented itself to her: did she love him? + +On the rest of the way to Moscow, though the princess' position +was not a cheerful one, Dunyasha, who went with her in the carriage, +more than once noticed that her mistress leaned out of the window +and smiled at something with an expression of mingled joy and sorrow. + +"Well, supposing I do love him?" thought Princess Mary. + +Ashamed as she was of acknowledging to herself that she had fallen +in love with a man who would perhaps never love her, she comforted +herself with the thought that no one would ever know it and that she +would not be to blame if, without ever speaking of it to anyone, she +continued to the end of her life to love the man with whom she had +fallen in love for the first and last time in her life. + +Sometimes when she recalled his looks, his sympathy, and his +words, happiness did not appear impossible to her. It was at those +moments that Dunyasha noticed her smiling as she looked out of the +carriage window. + +"Was it not fate that brought him to Bogucharovo, and at that very +moment?" thought Princess Mary. "And that caused his sister to +refuse my brother?" And in all this Princess Mary saw the hand of +Providence. + +The impression the princess made on Rostov was a very agreeable one. +To remember her gave him pleasure, and when his comrades, hearing of +his adventure at Bogucharovo, rallied him on having gone to look for +hay and having picked up one of the wealthiest heiresses in Russia, he +grew angry. It made him angry just because the idea of marrying the +gentle Princess Mary, who was attractive to him and had an enormous +fortune, had against his will more than once entered his head. For +himself personally Nicholas could not wish for a better wife: by +marrying her he would make the countess his mother happy, would be +able to put his father's affairs in order, and would even- he felt it- +ensure Princess Mary's happiness. + +But Sonya? And his plighted word? That was why Rostov grew angry +when he was rallied about Princess Bolkonskaya. + +CHAPTER XV + +On receiving command of the armies Kutuzov remembered Prince +Andrew and sent an order for him to report at headquarters. + +Prince Andrew arrived at Tsarevo-Zaymishche on the very day and at +the very hour that Kutuzov was reviewing the troops for the first +time. He stopped in the village at the priest's house in front of +which stood the commander in chief's carriage, and he sat down on +the bench at the gate awaiting his Serene Highness, as everyone now +called Kutuzov. From the field beyond the village came now sounds of +regimental music and now the roar of many voices shouting "Hurrah!" to +the new commander in chief. Two orderlies, a courier and a major-domo, +stood near by, some ten paces from Prince Andrew, availing +themselves of Kutuzov's absence and of the fine weather. A short, +swarthy lieutenant colonel of hussars with thick mustaches and +whiskers rode up to the gate and, glancing at Prince Andrew, +inquired whether his Serene Highness was putting up there and +whether he would soon be back. + +Prince Andrew replied that he was not on his Serene Highness' +staff but was himself a new arrival. The lieutenant colonel turned +to a smart orderly, who, with the peculiar contempt with which a +commander in chief's orderly speaks to officers, replied: + +"What? His Serene Highness? I expect he'll be here soon. What do you +want?" + +The lieutenant colonel of hussars smiled beneath his mustache at the +orderly's tone, dismounted, gave his horse to a dispatch runner, and +approached Bolkonski with a slight bow. Bolkonski made room for him on +the bench and the lieutenant colonel sat down beside him. + +"You're also waiting for the commander in chief?" said he. "They say +he weceives evewyone, thank God!... It's awful with those sausage +eaters! Ermolov had weason to ask to be pwomoted to be a German! Now +p'waps Wussians will get a look in. As it was, devil only knows what +was happening. We kept wetweating and wetweating. Did you take part in +the campaign?" he asked. + +"I had the pleasure," replied Prince Andrew, "not only of taking +part in the retreat but of losing in that retreat all I held dear- not +to mention the estate and home of my birth- my father, who died of +grief. I belong to the province of Smolensk." + +"Ah? You're Pwince Bolkonski? Vewy glad to make your acquaintance! +I'm Lieutenant Colonel Denisov, better known as 'Vaska,'" said +Denisov, pressing Prince Andrew's hand and looking into his face +with a particularly kindly attention. "Yes, I heard," said he +sympathetically, and after a short pause added: "Yes, it's Scythian +warfare. It's all vewy well- only not for those who get it in the +neck. So you are Pwince Andwew Bolkonski?" He swayed his head. "Vewy +pleased, Pwince, to make your acquaintance!" he repeated again, +smiling sadly, and he again pressed Prince Andrew's hand. + +Prince Andrew knew Denisov from what Natasha had told him of her +first suitor. This memory carried him sadly and sweetly back to +those painful feelings of which he had not thought lately, but which +still found place in his soul. Of late he had received so many new and +very serious impressions- such as the retreat from Smolensk, his visit +to Bald Hills, and the recent news of his father's death- and had +experienced so many emotions, that for a long time past those memories +had not entered his mind, and now that they did, they did not act on +him with nearly their former strength. For Denisov, too, the +memories awakened by the name of Bolkonski belonged to a distant, +romantic past, when after supper and after Natasha's singing he had +proposed to a little girl of fifteen without realizing what he was +doing. He smiled at the recollection of that time and of his love +for Natasha, and passed at once to what now interested him +passionately and exclusively. This was a plan of campaign he had +devised while serving at the outposts during the retreat. He had +proposed that plan to Barclay de Tolly and now wished to propose it to +Kutuzov. The plan was based on the fact that the French line of +operation was to extended, and it proposed that instead of, or +concurrently with, action on the front to bar the advance of the +French, we should attack their line of communication. He began +explaining his plan to Prince Andrew. + +"They can't hold all that line. It's impossible. I will undertake to +bweak thwough. Give me five hundwed men and I will bweak the line, +that's certain! There's only one way- guewilla warfare!" + +Denisov rose and began gesticulating as he explained his plan to +Bolkonski. In the midst of his explanation shouts were heard from +the army, growing more incoherent and more diffused, mingling with +music and songs and coming from the field where the review was held. +Sounds of hoofs and shouts were nearing the village. + +"He's coming! He's coming!" shouted a Cossack standing at the gate. + +Bolkonski and Denisov moved to the gate, at which a knot of soldiers +(a guard of honor) was standing, and they saw Kutuzov coming down +the street mounted on a rather small sorrel horse. A huge suite of +generals rode behind him. Barclay was riding almost beside him, and +a crowd of officers ran after and around them shouting, "Hurrah!" + +His adjutants galloped into the yard before him. Kutuzov was +impatiently urging on his horse, which ambled smoothly under his +weight, and he raised his hand to his white Horse Guard's cap with a +red band and no peak, nodding his head continually. When he came up to +the guard of honor, a fine set of Grenadiers mostly wearing +decorations, who were giving him the salute, he looked at them +silently and attentively for nearly a minute with the steady gaze of a +commander and then turned to the crowd of generals and officers +surrounding him. Suddenly his face assumed a subtle expression, he +shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity. + +"And with such fine fellows to retreat and retreat! Well, good-by, +General," he added, and rode into the yard past Prince Andrew and +Denisov. + +"Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!" shouted those behind him. + +Since Prince Andrew had last seen him Kutuzov had grown still more +corpulent, flaccid, and fat. But the bleached eyeball, the scar, and +the familiar weariness of his expression were still the same. He was +wearing the white Horse Guard's cap and a military overcoat with a +whip hanging over his shoulder by a thin strap. He sat heavily and +swayed limply on his brisk little horse. + +"Whew... whew... whew!" he whistled just audibly as he rode into the +yard. His face expressed the relief of relaxed strain felt by a man +who means to rest after a ceremony. He drew his left foot out of the +stirrup and, lurching with his whole body and puckering his face +with the effort, raised it with difficulty onto the saddle, leaned +on his knee, groaned, and slipped down into the arms of the Cossacks +and adjutants who stood ready to assist him. + +He pulled himself together, looked round, screwing up his eyes, +glanced at Prince Andrew, and, evidently not recognizing him, moved +with his waddling gait to the porch. "Whew... whew... whew!" he +whistled, and again glanced at Prince Andrew. As often occurs with old +men, it was only after some seconds that the impression produced by +Prince Andrew's face linked itself up with Kutuzov's remembrance of +his personality. + +"Ah, how do you do, my dear prince? How do you do, my dear boy? Come +along..." said he, glancing wearily round, and he stepped onto the +porch which creaked under his weight. + +He unbuttoned his coat and sat down on a bench in the porch. + +"And how's your father?" + +"I received news of his death, yesterday," replied Prince Andrew +abruptly. + +Kutuzov looked at him with eyes wide open with dismay and then +took off his cap and crossed himself: + +"May the kingdom of Heaven be his! God's will be done to us all!" He +sighed deeply, his whole chest heaving, and was silent for a while. "I +loved him and respected him, and sympathize with you with all my +heart." + +He embraced Prince Andrew, pressing him to his fat breast, and for +some time did not let him go. When he released him Prince Andrew saw +that Kutuzov's flabby lips were trembling and that tears were in his +eyes. He sighed and pressed on the bench with both hands to raise +himself. + +"Come! Come with me, we'll have a talk," said he. + +But at that moment Denisov, no more intimidated by his superiors +than by the enemy, came with jingling spurs up the steps of the porch, +despite the angry whispers of the adjutants who tried to stop him. +Kutuzov, his hands still pressed on the seat, glanced at him glumly. +Denisov, having given his name, announced that he had to communicate +to his Serene Highness a matter of great importance for their +country's welfare. Kutuzov looked wearily at him and, lifting his +hands with a gesture of annoyance, folded them across his stomach, +repeating the words: "For our country's welfare? Well, what is it? +Speak!" Denisov blushed like a girl (it was strange to see the color +rise in that shaggy, bibulous, time-worn face) and boldly began to +expound his plan of cutting the enemy's lines of communication between +Smolensk and Vyazma. Denisov came from those parts and knew the +country well. His plan seemed decidedly a good one, especially from +the strength of conviction with which he spoke. Kutuzov looked down at +his own legs, occasionally glancing at the door of the adjoining hut +as if expecting something unpleasant to emerge from it. And from +that hut, while Denisov was speaking, a general with a portfolio under +his arm really did appear. + +"What?" said Kutuzov, in the midst of Denisov's explanations, "are +you ready so soon?" + +"Ready, your Serene Highness," replied the general. + +Kutuzov swayed his head, as much as to say: "How is one man to +deal with it all?" and again listened to Denisov. + +"I give my word of honor as a Wussian officer," said Denisov, +"that I can bweak Napoleon's line of communication!" + +"What relation are you to Intendant General Kiril Andreevich +Denisov?" asked Kutuzov, interrupting him. + +"He is my uncle, your Sewene Highness." + +"Ah, we were friends," said Kutuzov cheerfully. "All right, all +right, friend, stay here at the staff and tomorrow we'll have a talk." + +With a nod to Denisov he turned away and put out his hand for the +papers Konovnitsyn had brought him. + +"Would not your Serene Highness like to come inside?" said the +general on duty in a discontented voice, "the plans must be examined +and several papers have to be signed." + +An adjutant came out and announced that everything was in +readiness within. But Kutuzov evidently did not wish to enter that +room till he was disengaged. He made a grimace... + +"No, tell them to bring a small table out here, my dear boy. I'll +look at them here," said he. "Don't go away," he added, turning to +Prince Andrew, who remained in the porch and listened to the general's +report. + +While this was being given, Prince Andrew heard the whisper of a +woman's voice and the rustle of a silk dress behind the door. +Several times on glancing that way he noticed behind that door a +plump, rosy, handsome woman in a pink dress with a lilac silk kerchief +on her head, holding a dish and evidently awaiting the entrance of the +commander in chief. Kutiizov's adjutant whispered to Prince Andrew +that this was the wife of the priest whose home it was, and that she +intended to offer his Serene Highness bread and salt. "Her husband has +welcomed his Serene Highness with the cross at the church, and she +intends to welcome him in the house.... She's very pretty," added +the adjutant with a smile. At those words Kutuzov looked round. He was +listening to the general's report- which consisted chiefly of a +criticism of the position at Tsarevo-Zaymishche- as he had listened to +Denisov, and seven years previously had listened to the discussion +at the Austerlitz council of war. He evidently listened only because +he had ears which, though there was a piece of tow in one of them, +could not help hearing; but it was evident that nothing the general +could say would surprise or even interest him, that he knew all that +would be said beforehand, and heard it all only because he had to, +as one has to listen to the chanting of a service of prayer. All +that Denisov had said was clever and to the point. What the general +was saying was even more clever and to the point, but it was evident +that Kutuzov despised knowledge and cleverness, and knew of +something else that would decide the matter- something independent +of clever. ness and knowledge. Prince Andrew watched the commander +in chief's face attentively, and the only expression he could see +there was one of boredom, curiosity as to the meaning of the +feminine whispering behind the door, and a desire to observe +propriety. It was evident that Kutuzov despised cleverness and +learning and even the patriotic feeling shown by Denisov, but despised +them not because of his own intellect, feelings, or knowledge- he +did not try to display any of these- but because of something else. He +despised them because of his old age and experience of life. The +only instruction Kutuzov gave of his own accord during that report +referred to looting by the Russian troops. At the end of the report +the general put before him for signature a paper relating to the +recovery of payment from army commanders for green oats mown down by +the soldiers, when landowners lodged petitions for compensation. + +After hearing the matter, Kutuzov smacked his lips together and +shook his head. + +"Into the stove... into the fire with it! I tell you once for all, +my dear fellow," said he, "into the fire with all such things! Let +them cut the crops and burn wood to their hearts' content. I don't +order it or allow it, but I don't exact compensation either. One can't +get on without it. 'When wood is chopped the chips will fly.'" He +looked at the paper again. "Oh, this German precision!" he muttered, +shaking his head. + +CHAPTER XVI + +"Well, that's all!" said Kutuzov as he signed the last of the +documents, and rising heavily and smoothing out the folds in his fat +white neck he moved toward the door with a more cheerful expression. + +The priest's wife, flushing rosy red, caught up the dish she had +after all not managed to present at the right moment, though she had +so long been preparing for it, and with a low bow offered it to +Kutuzov. + +He screwed up his eyes, smiled, lifted her chin with his hand, and +said: + +"Ah, what a beauty! Thank you, sweetheart!" + +He took some gold pieces from his trouser pocket and put them on the +dish for her. "Well, my dear, and how are we getting on?" he asked, +moving to the door of the room assigned to him. The priest's wife +smiled, and with dimples in her rosy cheeks followed him into the +room. The adjutant came out to the porch and asked Prince Andrew to +lunch with him. Half an hour later Prince Andrew was again called to +Kutuzov. He found him reclining in an armchair, still in the same +unbuttoned overcoat. He had in his hand a French book which he +closed as Prince Andrew entered, marking the place with a knife. +Prince Andrew saw by the cover that it was Les Chevaliers du Cygne +by Madame de Genlis. + +"Well, sit down, sit down here. Let's have a talk," said Kutuzov. +"It's sad, very sad. But remember, my dear fellow, that I am a +father to you, a second father...." + +Prince Andrew told Kutuzov all he knew of his father's death, and +what he had seen at Bald Hills when he passed through it. + +"What... what they have brought us to!" Kutuzov suddenly cried in an +agitated voice, evidently picturing vividly to himself from Prince +Andrew's story the condition Russia was in. "But give me time, give me +time!" he said with a grim look, evidently not wishing to continue +this agitating conversation, and added: "I sent for you to keep you +with me." + +"I thank your Serene Highness, but I fear I am longer fit for the +staff," replied Prince Andrew with a smile which Kutuzov noticed. + +Kutuzov glanced inquiringly at him. + +"But above all," added Prince Andrew, "I have grown used to my +regiment, am fond of the officers, and I fancy the men also like me. I +should be sorry to leave the regiment. If I decline the honor of being +with you, believe me..." + +A shrewd, kindly, yet subtly derisive expression lit up Kutuzov's +podgy face. He cut Bolkonski short. + +"I am sorry, for I need you. But you're right, you're right! It's +not here that men are needed. Advisers are always plentiful, but men +are not. The regiments would not be what they are if the would-be +advisers served there as you do. I remember you at Austerlitz.... I +remember, yes, I remember you with the standard!" said Kutuzov, and +a flush of pleasure suffused Prince Andrew's face at this +recollection. + +Taking his hand and drawing him downwards, Kutuzov offered his cheek +to be kissed, and again Prince Andrew noticed tears in the old man's +eyes. Though Prince Andrew knew that Kutuzov's tears came easily, +and that he was particularly tender to and considerate of him from a +wish to show sympathy with his loss, yet this reminder of Austerlitz +was both pleasant and flattering to him. + +"Go your way and God be with you. I know your path is the path of +honor!" He paused. "I missed you at Bucharest, but I needed someone to +send." And changing the subject, Kutuzov began to speak of the Turkish +war and the peace that had been concluded. "Yes, I have been much +blamed," he said, "both for that war and the peace... but everything +came at the right time. Tout vient a point a celui qui sait attendre.~^ +And there were as many advisers there as here..." he went on, +returning to the subject of "advisers" which evidently occupied him. +"Ah, those advisers!" said he. "If we had listened to them all we +should not have made peace with Turkey and should not have been +through with that war. Everything in haste, but more haste, less +speed. Kamenski would have been lost if he had not died. He stormed +fortresses with thirty thousand men. It is not difficult to capture +a fortress but it is difficult to win a campaign. For that, storming +and attacking but patience and time are wanted. Kamenski sent soldiers +to Rustchuk, but I only employed these two things and took more +fortresses than Kamenski and made the but eat horseflesh!" He swayed +his head. "And the French shall too, believe me," he went on, +growing warmer and beating his chest, "I'll make them eat horseflesh!" +And tears again dimmed his eyes. + +^~ "Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait." + +"But shan't we have to accept battle?" remarked Prince Andrew. + +"We shall if everybody wants it; it can't be helped.... But +believe me, my dear boy, there is nothing stronger than those two: +patience and time, they will do it all. But the advisers n'entendent +pas de cette oreille, voila le mal.~^ Some want a thing- others +don't. What's one to do?" he asked, evidently expecting an answer. +"Well, what do you want us to do?" he repeated and his eye shone +with a deep, shrewd look. "I'll tell you what to do," he continued, as +Prince Andrew still did not reply: "I will tell you what to do, and +what I do. Dans le doute, mon cher," he paused, "abstiens-toi"~^ he +articulated the French proverb deliberately. + +^~ "Don't see it that way, that's the trouble." + +^~ "When in doubt, my dear fellow, do nothing." + +"Well, good-by, my dear fellow; remember that with all my heart I +share your sorrow, and that for you I am not a Serene Highness, nor +a prince, nor a commander in chief, but a father! If you want anything +come straight to me. Good-by, my dear boy." + +Again he embraced and kissed Prince Andrew, but before the latter +had left the room Kutuzov gave a sigh of relief and went on with his +unfinished novel, Les Chevaliers du Cygne by Madame de Genlis. + +Prince Andrew could not have explained how or why it was, but +after that interview with Kutuzov he went back to his regiment +reassured as to the general course of affairs and as to the man to +whom it had been entrusted. The more he realized the absence of all +personal motive in that old man- in whom there seemed to remain only +the habit of passions, and in place of an intellect (grouping events +and drawing conclusions) only the capacity calmly to contemplate the +course of events- the more reassured he was that everything would be +as it should. "He will not bring in any plan of his own. He will not +devise or undertake anything," thought Prince Andrew, "but he will +hear everything, remember everything, and put everything in its place. +He will not hinder anything useful nor allow anything harmful. He +understands that there is something stronger and more important than +his own will- the inevitable course of events, and he can see them and +grasp their significance, and seeing that significance can refrain +from meddling and renounce his personal wish directed to something +else. And above all," thought Prince Andrew, "one believes in him +because he's Russian, despite the novel by Genlis and the French +proverbs, and because his voice shook when he said: 'What they have +brought us to!' and had a sob in it when he said he would 'make them +eat horseflesh!'" + +On such feelings, more or less dimly shared by all, the unanimity +and general approval were founded with which, despite court +influences, the popular choice of Kutuzov as commander in chief was +received. + +CHAPTER XVII + +After the Emperor had left Moscow, life flowed on there in its usual +course, and its course was so very usual that it was difficult to +remember the recent days of patriotic elation and ardor, hard to +believe that Russia was really in danger and that the members of the +English Club were also sons of the Fatherland ready to sacrifice +everything for it. The one thing that recalled the patriotic fervor +everyone had displayed during the Emperor's stay was the call for +contributions of men and money, a necessity that as soon as the +promises had been made assumed a legal, official form and became +unavoidable. + +With the enemy's approach to Moscow, the Moscovites' view of their +situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even +more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger +approaching. At the approach of danger there are always two voices +that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably +tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of +escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too +depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in +man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of +events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till +it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude a man +generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second. So +it was now with the inhabitants of Moscow. It was long since people +had been as gay in Moscow as that year. + +Rostopchin's broadsheets, headed by woodcuts of a drink shop, a +potman, and a Moscow burgher called Karpushka Chigirin, "who- having +been a militiaman and having had rather too much at the pub- heard +that Napoleon wished to come to Moscow, grew angry, abused the +French in very bad language, came out of the drink shop, and, under +the sign of the eagle, began to address the assembled people," were +read and discussed, together with the latest of Vasili Lvovich +Pushkin's bouts rimes. + +In the corner room at the Club, members gathered to read these +broadsheets, and some liked the way Karpushka jeered at the French, +saying: "They will swell up with Russian cabbage, burst with our +buckwheat porridge, and choke themselves with cabbage soup. They are +all dwarfs and one peasant woman will toss three of them with a +hayfork." Others did not like that tone and said it was stupid and +vulgar. It was said that Rostopchin had expelled all Frenchmen and +even all foreigners from Moscow, and that there had been some spies +and agents of Napoleon among them; but this was told chiefly to +introduce Rostopchin's witty remark on that occasion. The foreigners +were deported to Nizhni by boat, and Rostopchin had said to them in +French: "Rentrez en vousmemes; entrez dans la barque, et n'en faites +pas une barque de Charon."~^ There was talk of all the government +offices having been already removed from Moscow, and to this +Shinshin's witticism was added- that for that alone Moscow ought to be +grateful to Napoleon. It was said that Mamonov's regiment would cost +him eight hundred thousand rubles, and that Bezukhov had spent even +more on his, but that the best thing about Bezukhov's action was +that he himself was going to don a uniform and ride at the head of his +regiment without charging anything for the show. + +^~ "Think it over; get into the barque, and take care not to make it a +barque of Charon." + +"You don't spare anyone," said Julie Drubetskaya as she collected +and pressed together a bunch of raveled lint with her thin, beringed +fingers. + +Julie was preparing to leave Moscow next day and was giving a +farewell soiree. + +"Bezukhov est ridicule, but he is so kind and good-natured. What +pleasure is there to be so caustique?" + +"A forfeit!" cried a young man in militia uniform whom Julie +called "mon chevalier," and who was going with her to Nizhni. + +In Julie's set, as in many other circles in Moscow, it had been +agreed that they would speak nothing but Russian and that those who +made a slip and spoke French should pay fines to the Committee of +Voluntary Contributions. + +"Another forfeit for a Gallicism," said a Russian writer who was +present. "'What pleasure is there to be' is not Russian!" + +"You spare no one," continued Julie to the young man without heeding +the author's remark. + +"For caustique- I am guilty and will pay, and I am prepared to pay +again for the pleasure of telling you the truth. For Gallicisms I +won't be responsible," she remarked, turning to the author: "I have +neither the money nor the time, like Prince Galitsyn, to engage a +master to teach me Russian!" + +"Ah, here he is!" she added. "Quand on... No, no," she said to the +militia officer, "you won't catch me. Speak of the sun and you see its +rays!" and she smiled amiably at Pierre. "We were just talking of +you," she said with the facility in lying natural to a society +woman. "We were saying that your regiment would be sure to be better +than Mamonov's." + +"Oh, don't talk to me of my regiment," replied Pierre, kissing his +hostess' hand and taking a seat beside her. "I am so sick of it." + +"You will, of course, command it yourself?" said Julie, directing +a sly, sarcastic glance toward the militia officer. + +The latter in Pierre's presence had ceased to be caustic, and his +face expressed perplexity as to what Julie's smile might mean. In +spite of his absent-mindedness and good nature, Pierre's personality +immediately checked any attempt to ridicule him to his face. + +"No," said Pierre, with a laughing glance at his big, stout body. "I +should make too good a target for the French, besides I am afraid I +should hardly be able to climb onto a horse." + +Among those whom Julie's guests happened to choose to gossip about +were the Rostovs. + +"I hear that their affairs are in a very bad way," said Julie. +"And he is so unreasonable, the count himself I mean. The +Razumovskis wanted to buy his house and his estate near Moscow, but it +drags on and on. He asks too much." + +"No, I think the sale will come off in a few days," said someone. +"Though it is madness to buy anything in Moscow now." + +"Why?" asked Julie. "You don't think Moscow is in danger?" + +"Then why are you leaving?" + +"I? What a question! I am going because... well, because everyone is +going: and besides- I am not Joan of Arc or an Amazon." + +"Well, of course, of course! Let me have some more strips of linen." + +"If he manages the business properly he will be able to pay off +all his debts," said the militia officer, speaking of Rostov. + +"A kindly old man but not up to much. And why do they stay on so +long in Moscow? They meant to leave for the country long ago. +Natalie is quite well again now, isn't she?" Julie asked Pierre with a +knowing smile. + +"They are waiting for their younger son," Pierre replied. "He joined +Obolenski's Cossacks and went to Belaya Tserkov where the regiment +is being formed. But now they have had him transferred to my +regiment and are expecting him every day. The count wanted to leave +long ago, but the countess won't on any account leave Moscow till +her son returns." + +"I met them the day before yesterday at the Arkharovs'. Natalie +has recovered her looks and is brighter. She sang a song. How easily +some people get over everything!" + +"Get over what?" inquired Pierre, looking displeased. + +Julie smiled. + +"You know, Count, such knights as you are only found in Madame de +Souza's novels." + +"What knights? What do you mean?" demanded Pierre, blushing. + +"Oh, come, my dear count! C'est la fable de tout Moscou. Je vous +admire, ma parole d'honneur!"~^ + +^~ "It is the talk of all Moscow. My word, I admire you!" + +"Forfeit, forfeit!" cried the militia officer. + +"All right, one can't talk- how tiresome!" + +"What is 'the talk of all Moscow'?" Pierre asked angrily, rising +to his feet. + +"Come now, Count, you know!" + +"I don't know anything about it," said Pierre. + +"I know you were friendly with Natalie, and so... but I was always +more friendly with Vera- that dear Vera." + +"No, madame!" Pierre continued in a tone of displeasure, "I have not +taken on myself the role of Natalie Rostova's knight at all, and +have not been their house for nearly a month. But I cannot +understand the cruelty..." + +"Qui s'excuse s'accuse,"~^ said Julie, smiling and waving the lint +triumphantly, and to have the last word she promptly changed the +subject. "Do you know what I heard today? Poor Mary Bolkonskaya +arrived in Moscow yesterday. Do you know that she has lost her +father?" + +^~ "Who excuses himself, accuses himself." + +"Really? Where is she? I should like very much to see her," said +Pierre. + +"I spent the evening with her yesterday. She is going to their +estate near Moscow either today or tomorrow morning, with her nephew." + +"Well, and how is she?" asked Pierre. + +"She is well, but sad. But do you know who rescued her? It is +quite a romance. Nicholas Rostov! She was surrounded, and they +wanted to kill her and had wounded some of her people. He rushed in +and saved her...." + +"Another romance," said the militia officer. "Really, this general +flight has been arranged to get all the old maids married off. Catiche +is one and Princess Bolkonskaya another." + +"Do you know, I really believe she is un petit peu amoureuse du +jeune homme."~^ + +^~ "A little bit in love with the young man." + +"Forfeit, forfeit, forfeit!" + +"But how could one say that in Russian?" + +CHAPTER XVIII + +When Pierre returned home he was handed two of Rostopchin's +broadsheets that had been brought that day. + +The first declared that the report that Count Rostopchin had +forbidden people to leave Moscow was false; on the contrary he was +glad that ladies and tradesmen's wives were leaving the city. "There +will be less panic and less gossip," ran the broadsheet "but I will +stake my life on it that that will not enter Moscow." These words +showed Pierre clearly for the first time that the French would enter +Moscow. The second broadsheet stated that our headquarters were at +Vyazma, that Count Wittgenstein had defeated the French, but that as +many of the inhabitants of Moscow wished to be armed, weapons were +ready for them at the arsenal: sabers, pistols, and muskets which +could be had at a low price. The tone of the proclamation was not as +jocose as in the former Chigirin talks. Pierre pondered over these +broadsheets. Evidently the terrible stormcloud he had desired with the +whole strength of his soul but which yet aroused involuntary horror in +him was drawing near. + +"Shall I join the army and enter the service, or wait?" he asked +himself for the hundredth time. He took a pack of cards that lay on +the table and began to lay them out for a game of patience. + +"If this patience comes out," he said to himself after shuffling the +cards, holding them in his hand, and lifting his head, "if it comes +out, it means... what does it mean?" + +He had not decided what it should mean when he heard the voice of +the eldest princess at the door asking whether she might come in. + +"Then it will mean that I must go to the army," said Pierre to +himself. "Come in, come in!" he added to the princess. + +Only the eldest princess, the one with the stony face and long +waist, was still living in Pierre's house. The two younger ones had +both married. + +"Excuse my coming to you, cousin," she said in a reproachful and +agitated voice. "You know some decision must be come to. What is going +to happen? Everyone has left Moscow and the people are rioting. How is +it that we are staying on?" + +"On the contrary, things seem satisfactory, ma cousine," said Pierre +in the bantering tone he habitually adopted toward her, always feeling +uncomfortable in the role of her benefactor. + +"Satisfactory, indeed! Very satisfactory! Barbara Ivanovna told me +today how our troops are distinguishing themselves. It certainly +does them credit! And the people too are quite mutinous- they no +longer obey, even my maid has taken to being rude. At this rate they +will soon begin beating us. One can't walk in the streets. But, +above all, the French will be here any day now, so what are we waiting +for? I ask just one thing of you, cousin," she went on, "arrange for +me to be taken to Petersburg. Whatever I may be, I can't live under +Bonaparte's rule." + +"Oh, come, ma cousine! Where do you get your information from? On +the contrary..." + +"I won't submit to your Napoleon! Others may if they please.... If +you don't want to do this..." + +"But I will, I'll give the order at once." + +The princess was apparently vexed at not having anyone to be angry +with. Muttering to herself, she sat down on a chair. + +"But you have been misinformed," said Pierre. "Everything is quiet +in the city and there is not the slightest danger. See! I've just been +reading..." He showed her the broadsheet. "Count Rostopchin writes +that he will stake his life on it that the enemy will not enter +Moscow." + +"Oh, that count of yours!" said the princess malevolently. "He is +a hypocrite, a rascal who has himself roused the people to riot. +Didn't he write in those idiotic broadsheets that anyone, 'whoever +it might be, should be dragged to the lockup by his hair'? (How +silly!) 'And honor and glory to whoever captures him,' he says. This +is what his cajolery has brought us to! Barbara Ivanovna told me the +mob near killed her because she said something in French." + +"Oh, but it's so... You take everything so to heart," said Pierre, +and began laying out his cards for patience. + +Although that patience did come out, Pierre did not join the army, +but remained in deserted Moscow ever in the same state of agitation, +irresolution, and alarm, yet at the same time joyfully expecting +something terrible. + +Next day toward evening the princess set off, and Pierre's head +steward came to inform him that the money needed for the equipment +of his regiment could not be found without selling one of the estates. +In general the head steward made out to Pierre that his project of +raising a regiment would ruin him. Pierre listened to him, scarcely +able to repress a smile. + +"Well then, sell it," said he. "What's to be done? I can't draw back +now!" + +The worse everything became, especially his own affairs, the +better was Pierre pleased and the more evident was it that the +catastrophe he expected was approaching. Hardly anyone he knew was +left in town. Julie had gone, and so had Princess Mary. Of his +intimate friends only the Rostovs remained, but he did not go to see +them. + +To distract his thoughts he drove that day to the village of +Vorontsovo to see the great balloon Leppich was constructing to +destroy the foe, and a trial balloon that was to go up next day. The +balloon was not yet ready, but Pierre learned that it was being +constructed by the Emperor's desire. The Emperor had written to +Count Rostopchin as follows: + +As soon as Leppich is ready, get together a crew of reliable and +intelligent men for his car and send a courier to General Kutuzov to +let him know. I have informed him of the matter. + +Please impress upon Leppich to be very careful where he descends for +the first time, that he may not make a mistake and fall into the +enemy's hands. It is essential for him to combine his movements with +those of the commander in chief. + +On his way home from Vorontsovo, as he was passing the Bolotnoe +Place Pierre, seeing a large crowd round the Lobnoe Place, stopped and +got out of his trap. A French cook accused of being a spy was being +flogged. The flogging was only just over, and the executioner was +releasing from the flogging bench a stout man with red whiskers, in +blue stockings and a green jacket, who was moaning piteously. +Another criminal, thin and pale, stood near. Judging by their faces +they were both Frenchmen. With a frightened and suffering look +resembling that on the thin Frenchman's face, Pierre pushed his way in +through the crowd. + +"What is it? Who is it? What is it for?" he kept asking. + +But the attention of the crowd- officials, burghers, shopkeepers, +peasants, and women in cloaks and in pelisses- was so eagerly centered +on what was passing in Lobnoe Place that no one answered him. The +stout man rose, frowned, shrugged his shoulders, and evidently +trying to appear firm began to pull on his jacket without looking +about him, but suddenly his lips trembled and he began to cry, in +the way full-blooded grown-up men cry, though angry with himself for +doing so. In the crowd people began talking loudly, to stifle their +feelings of pity as it seemed to Pierre. + +"He's cook to some prince." + +"Eh, mounseer, Russian sauce seems to be sour to a Frenchman... sets +his teeth on edge!" said a wrinkled clerk who was standing behind +Pierre, when the Frenchman began to cry. + +The clerk glanced round, evidently hoping that his joke would be +appreciated. Some people began to laugh, others continued to watch +in dismay the executioner who was undressing the other man. + +Pierre choked, his face puckered, and he turned hastily away, went +back to his trap muttering something to himself as he went, and took +his seat. As they drove along he shuddered and exclaimed several times +so audibly that the coachman asked him: + +"What is your pleasure?" + +"Where are you going?" shouted Pierre to the man, who was driving to +Lubyanka Street. + +"To the Governor's, as you ordered," answered the coachman. + +"Fool! Idiot!" shouted Pierre, abusing his coachman- a thing he +rarely did. "Home, I told you! And drive faster, blockhead!" "I must +get away this very day," he murmured to himself. + +At the sight of the tortured Frenchman and the crowd surrounding the +Lobnoe Place, Pierre had so definitely made up his mind that he +could no longer remain in Moscow and would leave for the army that +very day that it seemed to him that either he had told the coachman +this or that the man ought to have known it for himself. + +On reaching home Pierre gave orders to Evstafey- his head coachman +who knew everything, could do anything, and was known to all Moscow- +that he would leave that night for the army at Mozhaysk, and that +his saddle horses should be sent there. This could not all be arranged +that day, so on Evstafey's representation Pierre had to put off his +departure till next day to allow time for the relay horses to be +sent on in advance. + +On the twenty-fourth the weather cleared up after a spell of rain, +and after dinner Pierre left Moscow. When changing horses that night +in Perkhushkovo, he learned that there had been a great battle that +evening. (This was the battle of Shevardino.) He was told that there +in Perkhushkovo the earth trembled from the firing, but nobody could +answer his questions as to who had won. At dawn next day Pierre was +approaching Mozhaysk. + +Every house in Mozhaysk had soldiers quartered in it, and at the +hostel where Pierre was met by his groom and coachman there was no +room to be had. It was full of officers. + +Everywhere in Mozhaysk and beyond it, troops were stationed or on +the march. Cossacks, foot and horse soldiers, wagons, caissons, and +cannon were everywhere. Pierre pushed forward as fast as he could, and +the farther he left Moscow behind and the deeper he plunged into +that sea of troops the more was he overcome by restless agitation +and a new and joyful feeling he had not experienced before. It was a +feeling akin to what he had felt at the Sloboda Palace during the +Emperor's visit- a sense of the necessity of undertaking something and +sacrificing something. He now experienced a glad consciousness that +everything that constitutes men's happiness- the comforts of life, +wealth, even life itself- is rubbish it is pleasant to throw away, +compared with something... With what? Pierre could not say, and he did +not try to determine for whom and for what he felt such particular +delight in sacrificing everything. He was not occupied with the +question of what to sacrifice for; the fact of sacrificing in itself +afforded him a new and joyous sensation. + +CHAPTER XIX + +On the twenty-fourth of August the battle of the Shevardino +Redoubt was fought, on the twenty-fifth not a shot was fired by either +side, and on the twenty-sixth the battle of Borodino itself took +place. + +Why and how were the battles of Shevardino and Borodino given and +accepted? Why was the battle of Borodino fought? There was not the +least sense in it for either the French or the Russians. Its immediate +result for the Russians was, and was bound to be, that we were brought +nearer to the destruction of Moscow- which we feared more than +anything in the world; and for the French its immediate result was +that they were brought nearer to the destruction of their whole +army- which they feared more than anything in the world. What the +result must be was quite obvious, and yet Napoleon offered and Kutuzov +accepted that battle. + +If the commanders had been guided by reason, it would seem that it +must have been obvious to Napoleon that by advancing thirteen +hundred miles and giving battle with a probability of losing a quarter +of his army, he was advancing to certain destruction, and it must have +been equally clear to Kutuzov that by accepting battle and risking the +loss of a quarter of his army he would certainly lose Moscow. For +Kutuzov this was mathematically clear, as it is that if when playing +draughts I have one man less and go on exchanging, I shall certainly +lose, and therefore should not exchange. When my opponent has +sixteen men and I have fourteen, I am only one eighth weaker than +he, but when I have exchanged thirteen more men he will be three times +as strong as I am. + +Before the battle of Borodino our strength in proportion to the +French was about as five to six, but after that battle it was little +more than one to two: previously we had a hundred thousand against a +hundred and twenty thousand; afterwards little more than fifty +thousand against a hundred thousand. Yet the shrewd and experienced +Kutuzov accepted the battle, while Napoleon, who was said to be a +commander of genius, gave it, losing a quarter of his army and +lengthening his lines of communication still more. If it is said +that he expected to end the campaign by occupying Moscow as he had +ended a previous campaign by occupying Vienna, there is much +evidence to the contrary. Napoleon's historians themselves tell us +that from Smolensk onwards he wished to stop, knew the danger of his +extended position, and knew that the occupation of Moscow would not be +the end of the campaign, for he had seen at Smolensk the state in +which Russian towns were left to him, and had not received a single +reply to his repeated announcements of his wish to negotiate. + +In giving and accepting battle at Borodino, Kutuzov acted +involuntarily and irrationally. But later on, to fit what had +occurred, the historians provided cunningly devised evidence of the +foresight and genius the generals who, of all the blind tools of +history were the most enslaved and involuntary. + +The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes +furnish the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to +accustom ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that +kind are meaningless. + +On the other question, how the battle of Borodino and the +preceding battle of Shevardino were fought, there also exists a +definite and well-known, but quite false, conception. All the +historians describe the affair as follows: + +The Russian army, they say, in its retreat from Smolensk sought +out for itself the best position for a general engagement and found +such a position at Borodino. + +The Russians, they say, fortified this position in advance on the +left of the highroad (from Moscow to Smolensk) and almost at a right +angle to it, from Borodino to Utitsa, at the very place where the +battle was fought. + +In front of this position, they say, a fortified outpost was set +up on the Shevardino mound to observe the enemy. On the twenty-fourth, +we are told, Napoleon attacked this advanced post and took it, and, on +the twenty-sixth, attacked the whole Russian army, which was in +position on the field of Borodino. + +So the histories say, and it is all quite wrong, as anyone who cares +to look into the matter can easily convince himself. + +The Russians did not seek out the best position but, on the +contrary, during the retreat passed many positions better than +Borodino. They did not stop at any one of these positions because +Kutuzov did not wish to occupy a position he had not himself chosen, +because the popular demand for a battle had not yet expressed itself +strongly enough, and because Miloradovich had not yet arrived with the +militia, and for many other reasons. The fact is that other +positions they had passed were stronger, and that the position at +Borodino (the one where the battle was fought), far from being strong, +was no more a position than any other spot one might find in the +Russian Empire by sticking a pin into the map at hazard. + +Not only did the Russians not fortify the position on the field of +Borodino to the left of, and at a right angle to, the highroad (that +is, the position on which the battle took place), but never till the +twenty-fifth of August, 1812, did they think that a battle might be +fought there. This was shown first by the fact that there were no +entrenchments there by the twenty fifth and that those begun on the +twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth were not completed, and secondly, by the +position of the Shevardino Redoubt. That redoubt was quite senseless +in front of the position where the battle was accepted. Why was it +more strongly fortified than any other post? And why were all +efforts exhausted and six thousand men sacrificed to defend it till +late at night on the twenty-fourth? A Cossack patrol would have +sufficed to observe the enemy. Thirdly, as proof that the position +on which the battle was fought had not been foreseen and that the +Shevardino Redoubt was not an advanced post of that position, we +have the fact that up to the twenty-fifth, Barclay de Tolly and +Bagration were convinced that the Shevardino Redoubt was the left +flank of the position, and that Kutuzov himself in his report, written +in hot haste after the battle, speaks of the Shevardino Redoubt as the +left flank of the position. It was much later, when reports on the +battle of Borodino were written at leisure, that the incorrect and +extraordinary statement was invented (probably to justify the mistakes +of a commander in chief who had to be represented as infallible) +that the Shevardino Redoubt was an advanced post- whereas in reality +it was simply a fortified point on the left flank- and that the battle +of Borodino was fought by us on an entrenched position previously +selected, where as it was fought on a quite unexpected spot which +was almost unentrenched. + +The case was evidently this: a position was selected along the river +Kolocha- which crosses the highroad not at a right angle but at an +acute angle- so that the left flank was at Shevardino, the right flank +near the village of Novoe, and the center at Borodino at the +confluence of the rivers Kolocha and Voyna. + +To anyone who looks at the field of Borodino without thinking of how +the battle was actually fought, this position, protected by the +river Kolocha, presents itself as obvious for an army whose object was +to prevent an enemy from advancing along the Smolensk road to Moscow. + +Napoleon, riding to Valuevo on the twenty-fourth, did not see (as +the history books say he did) the position of the Russians from Utitsa +to Borodino (he could not have seen that position because it did not +exist), nor did he see an advanced post of the Russian army, but while +pursuing the Russian rearguard he came upon the left flank of the +Russian position- at the Shevardino Redoubt- and unexpectedly for +the Russians moved his army across the Kolocha. And the Russians, +not having time to begin a general engagement, withdrew their left +wing from the position they had intended to occupy and took up a new +position which had not been foreseen and was not fortified. By +crossing to the other side of the Kolocha to the left of the highroad, +Napoleon shifted the whole forthcoming battle from right to left +(looking from the Russian side) and transferred it to the plain +between Utitsa, Semenovsk, and Borodino- a plain no more +advantageous as a position than any other plain in Russia- and there +the whole battle of the twenty-sixth of August took place. + +Had Napoleon not ridden out on the evening of the twenty-fourth to +the Kolocha, and had he not then ordered an immediate attack on the +redoubt but had begun the attack next morning, no one would have +doubted that the Shevardino Redoubt was the left flank of our and +the battle would have taken place where we expected it. In that case +we should probably have defended the Shevardino Redoubt- our left +flank- still more obstinately. We should have attacked Napoleon in the +center or on the right, and the engagement would have taken place on +the twenty-fifth, in the position we intended and had fortified. But +as the attack on our left flank took place in the evening after the +retreat of our rea guard (that is, immediately after the fight at +Gridneva), and as the Russian commanders did not wish, or were not +in time, to begin a general engagement then on the evening of the +twenty-fourth, the first and chief action of the battle of Borodino +was already lost on the twenty-fourth, and obviously led to the loss +of the one fought on the twenty-sixth. + +After the loss of the Shevardino Redoubt, we found ourselves on +the morning of the twenty-fifth without a position for our left flank, +and were forced to bend it back and hastily entrench it where it +chanced to be. + +Not only was the Russian army on the twenty-sixth defended by +weak, unfinished entrenchments, but the disadvantage of that +position was increased by the fact that the Russian commanders- not +having fully realized what had happened, namely the loss of our +position on the left flank and the shifting of the whole field of +the forthcoming battle from right to left- maintained their extended +position from the village of Novoe to Utitsa, and consequently had +to move their forces from right to left during the battle. So it +happened that throughout the whole battle the Russians opposed the +entire French army launched against our left flank with but half as +many men. (Poniatowski's action against Utitsa, and Uvarov's on the +right flank against the French, were actions distinct from the main +course of the battle.) So the battle of Borodino did not take place at +all as (in an effort to conceal our commanders' mistakes even at the +cost of diminishing the glory due to the Russian army and people) it +has been described. The battle of Borodino was not fought on a +chosen and entrenched position with forces only slightly weaker than +those of the enemy, but, as a result of the loss of the Shevardino +Redoubt, the Russians fought the battle of Borodino on an open and +almost unentrenched position, with forces only half as numerous as the +French; that is to say, under conditions in which it was not merely +unthinkable to fight for ten hours and secure an indecisive result, +but unthinkable to keep an army even from complete disintegration +and flight. + +CHAPTER XX + +On the morning of the twenty-fifth Pierre was leaving Mozhaysk. At +the descent of the high steep hill, down which a winding road led +out of the town past the cathedral on the right, where a service was +being held and the bells were ringing, Pierre got out of his vehicle +and proceeded on foot. Behind him a cavalry regiment was coming down +the hill preceded by its singers. Coming up toward him was a train +of carts carrying men who had been wounded in the engagement the day +before. The peasant drivers, shouting and lashing their horses, kept +crossing from side to side. The carts, in each of which three or +four wounded soldiers were lying or sitting, jolted over the stones +that had been thrown on the steep incline to make it something like +a road. The wounded, bandaged with rags, with pale cheeks, +compressed lips, and knitted brows, held on to the sides of the +carts as they were jolted against one another. Almost all of them +stared with naive, childlike curiosity at Pierre's white hat and green +swallow-tail coat. + +Pierre's coachman shouted angrily at the convoy of wounded to keep +to one side of the road. The cavalry regiment, as it descended the +hill with its singers, surrounded Pierre's carriage and blocked the +road. Pierre stopped, being pressed against the side of the cutting in +which the road ran. The sunshine from behind the hill did not +penetrate into the cutting and there it was cold and damp, but above +Pierre's head was the bright August sunshine and the bells sounded +merrily. One of the carts with wounded stopped by the side of the road +close to Pierre. The driver in his bast shoes ran panting up to it, +placed a stone under one of its tireless hind wheels, and began +arranging the breech-band on his little horse. + +One of the wounded, an old soldier with a bandaged arm who was +following the cart on foot, caught hold of it with his sound hand +and turned to look at Pierre. + +"I say, fellow countryman! Will they set us down here or take us +on to Moscow?" he asked. + +Pierre was so deep in thought that he did not hear the question. +He was looking now at the cavalry regiment that had met the convoy +of wounded, now at the cart by which he was standing, in which two +wounded men were sitting and one was lying. One of those sitting up in +the cart had probably been wounded in the cheek. His whole head was +wrapped in rags and one cheek was swollen to the size of a baby's +head. His nose and mouth were twisted to one side. This soldier was +looking at the cathedral and crossing himself. Another, a young lad, a +fair-haired recruit as white as though there was no blood in his +thin face, looked at Pierre kindly, with a fixed smile. The third +lay prone so that his face was not visible. The cavalry singers were +passing close by: + +_1 Ah lost, quite lost... is my head so keen,
+Living in a foreign land. + +they sang their soldiers' dance song. + +As if responding to them but with a different sort of merriment, the +metallic sound of the bells reverberated high above and the hot rays +of the sun bathed the top of the opposite slope with yet another +sort of merriment. But beneath the slope, by the cart with the wounded +near the panting little nag where Pierre stood, it was damp, somber, +and sad. + +The soldier with the swollen cheek looked angrily at the cavalry +singers. + +"Oh, the coxcombs!" he muttered reproachfully. + +"It's not the soldiers only, but I've seen peasants today, too.... +The peasants- even they have to go," said the soldier behind the cart, +addressing Pierre with a sad smile. "No distinctions made nowadays.... +They want the whole nation to fall on them- in a word, it's Moscow! +They want to make an end of it." + +In spite of the obscurity of the soldier's words Pierre understood +what he wanted to say and nodded approval. + +The road was clear again; Pierre descended the hill and drove on. + +He kept looking to either side of the road for familiar faces, but +only saw everywhere the unfamiliar faces of various military men of +different branches of the service, who all looked with astonishment at +his white hat and green tail coat. + +Having gone nearly three miles he at last met an acquaintance and +eagerly addressed him. This was one of the head army doctors. He was +driving toward Pierre in a covered gig, sitting beside a young +surgeon, and on recognizing Pierre he told the Cossack who occupied +the driver's seat to pull up. + +"Count! Your excellency, how come you to be here?" asked the doctor. + +"Well, you know, I wanted to see..." + +"Yes, yes, there will be something to see...." + +Pierre got out and talked to the doctor, explaining his intention of +taking part in a battle. + +The doctor advised him to apply direct to Kutuzov. + +"Why should you be God knows where out of sight, during the battle?" +he said, exchanging glances with his young companion. "Anyhow his +Serene Highness knows you and will receive you graciously. That's what +you must do." + +The doctor seemed tired and in a hurry. + +"You think so?... Ah, I also wanted to ask you where our position is +exactly?" said Pierre. + +"The position?" repeated the doctor. "Well, that's not my line. +Drive past Tatarinova, a lot of digging is going on there. Go up the +hillock and you'll see." + +"Can one see from there?... If you would..." + +But the doctor interrupted him and moved toward his gig. + +"I would go with you but on my honor I'm up to here"- and he pointed +to his throat. "I'm galloping to the commander of the corps. How do +matters stand?... You know, Count, there'll be a battle tomorrow. +Out of an army of a hundred thousand we must expect at least twenty +thousand wounded, and we haven't stretchers, or bunks, or dressers, or +doctors enough for six thousand. We have ten thousand carts, but we +need other things as well- we must manage as best we can!" + +The strange thought that of the thousands of men, young and old, who +had stared with merry surprise at his hat (perhaps the very men he had +noticed), twenty thousand were inevitably doomed to wounds and death +amazed Pierre. + +"They may die tomorrow; why are they thinking of anything but +death?" And by some latent sequence of thought the descent of the +Mozhaysk hill, the carts with the wounded, the ringing bells, the +slanting rays of the sun, and the songs of the cavalrymen vividly +recurred to his mind. + +"The cavalry ride to battle and meet the wounded and do not for a +moment think of what awaits them, but pass by, winking at the wounded. +Yet from among these men twenty thousand are doomed to die, and they +wonder at my hat! Strange!" thought Pierre, continuing his way to +Tatarinova. + +In front of a landowner's house to the left of the road stood +carriages, wagons, and crowds of orderlies and sentinels. The +commander in chief was putting up there, but just when Pierre +arrived he was not in and hardly any of the staff were there- they had +gone to the church service. Pierre drove on toward Gorki. + +When he had ascended the hill and reached the little village street, +he saw for the first time peasant militiamen in their white shirts and +with crosses on their caps, who, talking and laughing loudly, animated +and perspiring, were at work on a huge knoll overgrown with grass to +the right of the road. + +Some of them were digging, others were wheeling barrowloads of earth +along planks, while others stood about doing nothing. + +Two officers were standing on the knoll, directing the men. On +seeing these peasants, who were evidently still amused by the +novelty of their position as soldiers, Pierre once more thought of the +wounded men at Mozhaysk and understood what the soldier had meant when +he said: "They want the whole nation to fall on them." The sight of +these bearded peasants at work on the battlefield, with their queer, +clumsy boots and perspiring necks, and their shirts opening from the +left toward the middle, unfastened, exposing their sunburned +collarbones, impressed Pierre more strongly with the solemnity and +importance of the moment than anything he had yet seen or heard. + +CHAPTER XXI + +Pierre stepped out of his carriage and, passing the toiling +militiamen, ascended the knoll from which, according to the doctor, +the battlefield could be seen. + +It was about eleven o'clock. The sun shone somewhat to the left +and behind him and brightly lit up the enormous panorama which, rising +like an amphitheater, extended before him in the clear rarefied +atmosphere. + +From above on the left, bisecting that amphitheater, wound the +Smolensk highroad, passing through a village with a white church +some five hundred paces in front of the knoll and below it. This was +Borodino. Below the village the road crossed the river by a bridge +and, winding down and up, rose higher and higher to the village of +Valuevo visible about four miles away, where Napoleon was then +stationed. Beyond Valuevo the road disappeared into a yellowing forest +on the horizon. Far in the distance in that birch and fir forest to +the right of the road, the cross and belfry of the Kolocha Monastery +gleamed in the sun. Here and there over the whole of that blue +expanse, to right and left of the forest and the road, smoking +campfires could be seen and indefinite masses of troops- ours and +the enemy's. The ground to the right- along the course of the +Kolocha and Moskva rivers- was broken and hilly. Between the hollows +the villages of Bezubova and Zakharino showed in the distance. On +the left the ground was more level; there were fields of grain, and +the smoking ruins of Semenovsk, which had been burned down, could be +seen. + +All that Pierre saw was so indefinite that neither the left nor +the right side of the field fully satisfied his expectations. +Nowhere could he see the battlefield he had expected to find, but only +fields, meadows, troops, woods, the smoke of campfires, villages, +mounds, and streams; and try as he would he could descry no military +"position" in this place which teemed with life, nor could he even +distinguish our troops from the enemy's. + +"I must ask someone who knows," he thought, and addressed an officer +who was looking with curiosity at his huge unmilitary figure. + +"May I ask you," said Pierre, "what village that is in front?" + +"Burdino, isn't it?" said the officer, turning to his companion. + +"Borodino," the other corrected him. + +The officer, evidently glad of an opportunity for a talk, moved up +to Pierre. + +"Are those our men there?" Pierre inquired. + +"Yes, and there, further on, are the French," said the officer. +"There they are, there... you can see them." + +"Where? Where?" asked Pierre. + +"One can see them with the naked eye... Why, there!" + +The officer pointed with his hand to the smoke visible on the left +beyond the river, and the same stern and serious expression that +Pierre had noticed on many of the faces he had met came into his face. + +"Ah, those are the French! And over there?..." Pierre pointed to a +knoll on the left, near which some troops could be seen. + +"Those are ours." + +"Ah, ours! And there?..." Pierre pointed to another knoll in the +distance with a big tree on it, near a village that lay in a hollow +where also some campfires were smoking and something black was +visible. + +"That's his again," said the officer. (It was the Shevardino +Redoubt.) "It was ours yesterday, but now it is his." + +"Then how about our position?" + +"Our position?" replied the officer with a smile of satisfaction. "I +can tell you quite clearly, because I constructed nearly all our +entrenchments. There, you see? There's our center, at Borodino, just +there," and he pointed to the village in front of them with the +white church. "That's where one crosses the Kolocha. You see down +there where the rows of hay are lying in the hollow, there's the +bridge. That's our center. Our right flank is over there"- he +pointed sharply to the right, far away in the broken ground- "That's +where the Moskva River is, and we have thrown up three redoubts there, +very strong ones. The left flank..." here the officer paused. "Well, +you see, that's difficult to explain.... Yesterday our left flank +was there at Shevardino, you see, where the oak is, but now we have +withdrawn our left wing- now it is over there, do you see that village +and the smoke? That's Semenovsk, yes, there," he pointed to +Raevski's knoll. "But the battle will hardly be there. His having +moved his troops there is only a ruse; he will probably pass round +to the right of the Moskva. But wherever it may be, many a man will be +missing tomorrow!" he remarked. + +An elderly sergeant who had approached the officer while he was +giving these explanations had waited in silence for him to finish +speaking, but at this point, evidently not liking the officer's +remark, interrupted him. + +"Gabions must be sent for," said he sternly. + +The officer appeared abashed, as though he understood that one might +think of how many men would be missing tomorrow but ought not to speak +to speak of it. + +"Well, send number three company again," the officer replied +hurriedly. + +"And you, are you one of the doctors?" + +"No, I've come on my own," answered Pierre, and he went down the +hill again, passing the militiamen. + +"Oh, those damned fellows!" muttered the officer who followed him, +holding his nose as he ran past the men at work. + +"There they are... bringing her, coming... There they are... They'll +be here in a minute..." voices were suddenly heard saying; and +officers, soldiers, and militiamen began running forward along the +road. + +A church procession was coming up the hill from Borodino. First +along the dusty road came the infantry in ranks, bareheaded and with +arms reversed. From behind them came the sound of church singing. + +Soldiers and militiamen ran bareheaded past Pierre toward the +procession. + +"They are bringing her, our Protectress!... The Iberian Mother of +God!" someone cried. + +"The Smolensk Mother of God," another corrected him. + +The militiamen, both those who had been in the village and those who +had been at work on the battery, threw down their spades and ran to +meet the church procession. Following the battalion that marched along +the dusty road came priests in their vestments- one little old man +in a hood with attendants and singers. Behind them soldiers and +officers bore a large, dark-faced icon with an embossed metal cover. +This was the icon that had been brought from and had since accompanied +the army. Behind, before, and on both sides, crowds of militiamen with +bared heads walked, ran, and bowed to the ground. + +At the summit of the hill they stopped with the icon; the men who +had been holding it up by the linen bands attached to it were relieved +by others, the chanters relit their censers, and service began. The +hot rays of the sun beat down vertically and a fresh soft wind +played with the hair of the bared heads and with the ribbons +decorating the icon. The singing did not sound loud under the open +sky. An immense crowd of bareheaded officers, soldiers, and militiamen +surrounded the icon. Behind the priest and a chanter stood the +notabilities on a spot reserved for them. A bald general with +general with a St. George's Cross on his neck stood just behind the +priest's back, and without crossing himself (he was evidently a +German) patiently awaited the end of the service, which he +considered it necessary to hear to the end, probably to arouse the +patriotism of the Russian people. Another general stood in a martial +pose, crossing himself by shaking his hand in front of his chest while +looking about him. Standing among the crowd of peasants, Pierre +recognized several acquaintances among these notables, but did not +look at them- his whole attention was absorbed in watching the serious +expression on the faces of the crowd of soldiers and militiamen who +were all gazing eagerly at the icon. As soon as the tired chanters, +who were singing the service for the twentieth time that day, began +lazily and mechanically to sing: "Save from calamity Thy servants, O +Mother of God," and the priest and deacon chimed in: "For to Thee +under God we all flee as to an inviolable bulwark and protection," +there again kindled in all those faces the same expression of +consciousness of the solemnity of the impending moment that Pierre had +seen on the faces at the foot of the hill at Mozhaysk and +momentarily on many and many faces he had met that morning; and +heads were bowed more frequently and hair tossed back, and sighs and +the sound men made as they crossed themselves were heard. + +The crowd round the icon suddenly parted and pressed against Pierre. +Someone, a very important personage judging by the haste with which +way was made for him, was approaching the icon. + +It was Kutuzov, who had been riding round the position and on his +way back to Tatarinova had stopped where the service was being held. +Pierre recognized him at once by his peculiar figure, which +distinguished him from everybody else. + +With a long overcoat on his his exceedingly stout, +round-shouldered body, with uncovered white head and puffy face +showing the white ball of the eye he had lost, Kutuzov walked with +plunging, swaying gait into the crowd and stopped behind the priest. +He crossed himself with an accustomed movement, bent till he touched +the ground with his hand, and bowed his white head with a deep sigh. +Behind Kutuzov was Bennigsen and the suite. Despite the presence of +the commander in chief, who attracted the attention of all the +superior officers, the militiamen and soldiers continued their prayers +without looking at him. + +When the service was over, Kutuzov stepped up to the icon, sank +heavily to his knees, bowed to the ground, and for a long time tried +vainly to rise, but could not do so on account of his weakness and +weight. His white head twitched with the effort. At last he rose, +kissed the icon as a child does with naively pouting lips, and again +bowed till he touched the ground with his hand. The other generals +followed his example, then the officers, and after them with excited +faces, pressing on one another, crowding, panting, and pushing, +scrambled the soldiers and militiamen. + +CHAPTER XXII + +Staggering amid the crush, Pierre looked about him. + +"Count Peter Kirilovich! How did you get here?" said a voice. + +Pierre looked round. Boris Drubetskoy, brushing his knees with his +hand (he had probably soiled them when he, too, had knelt before the +icon), came up to him smiling. Boris was elegantly dressed, with a +slightly martial touch appropriate to a campaign. He wore a long +coat and like Kutuzov had a whip slung across his shoulder. + +Meanwhile Kutuzov had reached the village and seated himself in +the shade of the nearest house, on a bench which one Cossack had run +to fetch and another had hastily covered with a rug. An immense and +brilliant suite surrounded him. + +The icon was carried further, accompanied by the throng. Pierre +stopped some thirty paces from Kutuzov, talking to Boris. + +He explained his wish to be present at the battle and to see the +position. + +"This is what you must do," said Boris. "I will do the honors of the +camp to you. You will see everything best from where Count Bennigsen +will be. I am in attendance on him, you know; I'll mention it to +him. But if you want to ride round the position, come along with us. +We are just going to the left flank. Then when we get back, do spend +the night with me and we'll arrange a game of cards. Of course you +know Dmitri Sergeevich? Those are his quarters," and he pointed to the +third house in the village of Gorki. + +"But I should like to see the right flank. They say it's very +strong," said Pierre. "I should like to start from the Moskva River +and ride round the whole position." + +"Well, you can do that later, but the chief thing is the left +flank." + +"Yes, yes. But where is Prince Bolkonski's regiment? Can you point +it out to me?" + +"Prince Andrew's? We shall pass it and I'll take you to him." + +What about the left flank?" asked Pierre + +"To tell you the truth, between ourselves, God only knows what state +our left flank is in," said Boris confidentially lowering his voice. +"It is not at all what Count Bennigsen intended. He meant to fortify +that knoll quite differently, but..." Boris shrugged his shoulders, +"his Serene Highness would not have it, or someone persuaded him. +You see..." but Boris did not finish, for at that moment Kaysarov, +Kutuzov's adjutant, came up to Pierre. "Ah, Kaysarov!" said Boris, +addressing him with an unembarrassed smile, "I was just trying to +explain our position to the count. It is amazing how his Serene +Highness could so the intentions of the French!" + +"You mean the left flank?" asked Kaysarov. + +"Yes, exactly; the left flank is now extremely strong." + +Though Kutuzov had dismissed all unnecessary men from the staff, +Boris had contrived to remain at headquarters after the changes. He +had established himself with Count Bennigsen, who, like all on whom +Boris had been in attendance, considered young Prince Drubetskoy an +invaluable man. + +In the higher command there were two sharply defined parties: +Kutuzov's party and that of Bennigsen, the chief of staff. Boris +belonged to the latter and no one else, while showing servile +respect to Kutuzov, could so create an impression that the old +fellow was not much good and that Bennigsen managed everything. Now +the decisive moment of battle had come when Kutuzov would be destroyed +and the power pass to Bennigsen, or even if Kutuzov won the battle +it would be felt that everything was done by Bennigsen. In any case +many great rewards would have to be given for tomorrow's action, and +new men would come to the front. So Boris was full of nervous vivacity +all day. + +After Kaysarov, others whom Pierre knew came up to him, and he had +not time to reply to all the questions about Moscow that were showered +upon him, or to listen to all that was told him. The faces all +expressed animation and apprehension, but it seemed to Pierre that the +cause of the excitement shown in some of these faces lay chiefly in +questions of personal success; his mind, however, was occupied by +the different expression he saw on other faces- an expression that +spoke not of personal matters but of the universal questions of life +and death. Kutuzov noticed Pierre's figure and the group gathered +round him. + +"Call him to me," said Kutuzov. + +An adjutant told Pierre of his Serene Highness' wish, and Pierre +went toward Kutuzov's bench. But a militiaman got there before him. It +was Dolokhov. + +"How did that fellow get here?" asked Pierre. + +"He's a creature that wriggles in anywhere!" was the answer. "He has +been degraded, you know. Now he wants to bob up again. He's been +proposing some scheme or other and has crawled into the enemy's picket +line at night.... He's a brave fellow." + +Pierre took off his hat and bowed respectfully to Kutuzov. + +"I concluded that if I reported to your Serene Highness you might +send me away or say that you knew what I was reporting, but then I +shouldn't lose anything..." Dolokhov was saying. + +"Yes, yes." + +"But if I were right, I should be rendering a service to my +Fatherland for which I am ready to die." + +"Yes, yes." + +"And should your Serene Highness require a man who will not spare +his skin, please think of me.... Perhaps I may prove useful to your +Serene Highness." + +"Yes... Yes..." Kutuzov repeated, his laughing eye narrowing more +and more as he looked at Pierre. + +Just then Boris, with his courtierlike adroitness, stepped up to +Pierre's side near Kutuzov and in a most natural manner, without +raising his voice, said to Pierre, as though continuing an interrupted +conversation: + +"The militia have put on clean white shirts to be ready to die. What +heroism, Count!" + +Boris evidently said this to Pierre in order to be overheard by +his Serene Highness. He knew Kutuzov's attention would be caught by +those words, and so it was. + +"What are you saying about the militia?" he asked Boris. + +"Preparing for tomorrow, your Serene Highness- for death- they +have put on clean shirts." + +"Ah... a wonderful, a matchless people!" said Kutuzov; and he closed +his eyes and swayed his head. "A matchless people!" he repeated with a +sigh. + +"So you want to smell gunpowder?" he said to Pierre. "Yes, it's a +pleasant smell. I have the honor to be one of your wife's adorers. +Is she well? My quarters are at your service." + +And as often happens with old people, Kutuzov began looking about +absent-mindedly as if forgetting all he wanted to say or do. + +Then, evidently remembering what he wanted, he beckoned to Andrew +Kaysarov, his adjutant's brother. + +"Those verses... those verses of Marin's... how do they go, eh? +Those he wrote about Gerakov: 'Lectures for the corps inditing'... +Recite them, recite them!" said he, evidently preparing to laugh. + +Kaysarov recited.... Kutuzov smilingly nodded his head to the rhythm +of the verses. + +When Pierre had left Kutuzov, Dolokhov came up to him and took his +hand. + +"I am very glad to meet you here, Count," he said aloud, +regardless of the presence of strangers and in a particularly resolute +and solemn tone. "On the eve of a day when God alone knows who of us +is fated to survive, I am glad of this opportunity to tell you that +I regret the misunderstandings that occurred between us and should +wish you not to have any ill feeling for me. I beg you to forgive me." + +Pierre looked at Dolokhov with a smile, not knowing what to say to +him. With tears in his eyes Dolokhov embraced Pierre and kissed him. + +Boris said a few words to his general, and Count Bennigsen turned to +Pierre and proposed that he should ride with him along the line. + +"It will interest you," said he. + +"Yes, very much," replied Pierre. + +Half an hour later Kutuzov left for Tatarinova, and Bennigsen and +his suite, with Pierre among them, set out on their ride along the +line. + +CHAPTER XXIII + +From Gorki, Bennigsen descended the highroad to the bridge which, +when they had looked it from the hill, the officer had pointed out +as being the center of our position and where rows of fragrant +new-mown hay lay by the riverside. They rode across that bridge into +the village of Borodino and thence turned to the left, passing an +enormous number of troops and guns, and came to a high knoll where +militiamen were digging. This was the redoubt, as yet unnamed, which +afterwards became known as the Raevski Redoubt, or the Knoll +Battery, but Pierre paid no special attention to it. He did not know +that it would become more memorable to him than any other spot on +the plain of Borodino. + +They then crossed the hollow to Semenovsk, where the soldiers were +dragging away the last logs from the huts and barns. Then they rode +downhill and uphill, across a ryefield trodden and beaten down as if +by hail, following a track freshly made by the artillery over the +furrows of the plowed land, and reached some fleches~^ which were still +being dug. + +^~ A kind of entrenchment. + +At the fleches Bennigsen stopped and began looking at the Shevardino +Redoubt opposite, which had been ours the day before and where several +horsemen could be descried. The officers said that either Napoleon +or Murat was there, and they all gazed eagerly at this little group of +horsemen. Pierre also looked at them, trying to guess which of the +scarcely discernible figures was Napoleon. At last those mounted men +rode away from the mound and disappeared. + +Bennigsen spoke to a general who approached him, and began +explaining the whole position of our troops. Pierre listened to him, +straining each faculty to understand the essential points of the +impending battle, but was mortified to feel that his mental capacity +was inadequate for the task. He could make nothing of it. Bennigsen +stopped speaking and, noticing that Pierre was listening, suddenly +said to him: + +"I don't think this interests you?" + +"On the contrary it's very interesting!" replied Pierre not quite +truthfully. + +From the fleches they rode still farther to the left, along a road +winding through a thick, low-growing birch wood. In the middle of +the wood a brown hare with white feet sprang out and, scared by the +tramp of the many horses, grew so confused that it leaped along the +road in front of them for some time, arousing general attention and +laughter, and only when several voices shouted at it did it dart to +one side and disappear in the thicket. After going through the wood +for about a mile and a half they came out on a glade where troops of +Tuchkov's corps were stationed to defend the left flank. + +Here, at the extreme left flank, Bennigsen talked a great deal and +with much heat, and, as it seemed to Pierre, gave orders of great +military importance. In front of Tuchkov's troops was some high ground +not occupied by troops. Bennigsen loudly criticized this mistake, +saying that it was madness to leave a height which commanded the +country around unoccupied and to place troops below it. Some of the +generals expressed the same opinion. One in particular declared with +martial heat that they were put there to be slaughtered. Bennigsen +on his own authority ordered the troops to occupy the high ground. +This disposition on the left flank increased Pierre's doubt of his own +capacity to understand military matters. Listening to Bennigsen and +the generals criticizing the position of the troops behind the hill, +he quite understood them and shared their opinion, but for that very +reason he could not understand how the man who put them there behind +the hill could have made so gross and palpable a blunder. + +Pierre did not know that these troops were not, as Bennigsen +supposed, put there to defend the position, but were in a concealed +position as an ambush, that they should not be seen and might be +able to strike an approaching enemy unexpectedly. Bennigsen did not +know this and moved the troops forward according to his own ideas +without mentioning the matter to the commander in chief. + +CHAPTER XXIV + +On that bright evening of August 25, Prince Andrew lay leaning on +his elbow in a broken-down shed in the village of Knyazkovo at the +further end of his regiment's encampment. Through a gap in the +broken wall he could see, beside the wooden fence, a row of thirty +year-old birches with their lower branches lopped off, a field on +which shocks of oats were standing, and some bushes near which rose +the smoke of campfires- the soldiers' kitchens. + +Narrow and burdensome and useless to anyone as his life now seemed +to him, Prince Andrew on the eve of battle felt agitated and irritable +as he had done seven years before at Austerlitz. + +He had received and given the orders for next day's battle and had +nothing more to do. But his thoughts- the simplest, clearest, and +therefore most terrible thoughts- would give him no peace. He knew +that tomorrow's battle would be the most terrible of all he had +taken part in, and for the first time in his life the possibility of +death presented itself to him- not in relation to any worldly matter +or with reference to its effect on others, but simply in relation to +himself, to his own soul- vividly, plainly, terribly, and almost as +a certainty. And from the height of this perception all that had +previously tormented and preoccupied him suddenly became illumined +by a cold white light without shadows, without perspective, without +distinction of outline. All life appeared to him like magic-lantern +pictures at which he had long been gazing by artificial light +through a glass. Now he suddenly saw those badly daubed pictures in +clear daylight and without a glass. "Yes, yes! There they are, those +false images that agitated, enraptured, and tormented me," said he +to himself, passing in review the principal pictures of the magic +lantern of life and regarding them now in the cold white daylight of +his clear perception of death. "There they are, those rudely painted +figures that once seemed splendid and mysterious. Glory, the good of +society, love of a woman, the Fatherland itself- how important these +pictures appeared to me, with what profound meaning they seemed to +be filled! And it is all so simple, pale, and crude in the cold +white light of this morning which I feel is dawning for me." The three +great sorrows of his life held his attention in particular: his love +for a woman, his father's death, and the French invasion which had +overrun half Russia. "Love... that little girl who seemed to me +brimming over with mystic forces! Yes, indeed, I loved her. I made +romantic plans of love and happiness with her! Oh, what a boy I +was!" he said aloud bitterly. "Ah me! I believed in some ideal love +which was to keep her faithful to me for the whole year of my absence! +Like the gentle dove in the fable she was to pine apart from me.... +But it was much simpler really.... It was all very simple and +horrible." + +"When my father built Bald Hills he thought the place was his: his +land, his air, his peasants. But Napoleon came and swept him aside, +unconscious of his existence, as he might brush a chip from his +path, and his Bald Hills and his whole life fell to pieces. Princess +Mary says it is a trial sent from above. What is the trial for, when +he is not here and will never return? He is not here! For whom then is +the trial intended? The Fatherland, the destruction of Moscow! And +tomorrow I shall be killed, perhaps not even by a Frenchman but by one +of our own men, by a soldier discharging a musket close to my ear as +one of them did yesterday, and the French will come and take me by +head and heels and fling me into a hole that I may not stink under +their noses, and new conditions of life will arise, which will seem +quite ordinary to others and about which I shall know nothing. I shall +not exist..." + +He looked at the row of birches shining in the sunshine, with +their motionless green and yellow foliage and white bark. "To die... +to be killed tomorrow... That I should not exist... That all this +should still be, but no me...." + +And the birches with their light and shade, the curly clouds, the +smoke of the campfires, and all that was around him changed and seemed +terrible and menacing. A cold shiver ran down his spine. He rose +quickly, went out of the shed, and began to walk about. + +After he had returned, voices were heard outside the shed. "Who's +that?" he cried. + +The red-nosed Captain Timokhin, formerly Dolokhov's squadron +commander, but now from lack of officers a battalion commander, +shyly entered the shed followed by an adjutant and the regimental +paymaster. + +Prince Andrew rose hastily, listened to the business they had come +about, gave them some further instructions, and was about to dismiss +them when he heard a familiar, lisping, voice behind the shed. + +"Devil take it!" said the voice of a man stumbling over something. + +Prince Andrew looked out of the shed and saw Pierre, who had tripped +over a pole on the ground and had nearly fallen, coming his way. It +was unpleasant to Prince Andrew to meet people of his own set in +general, and Pierre especially, for he reminded him of all the painful +moments of his last visit to Moscow. + +"You? What a surprise!" said he. "What brings you here? This is +unexpected!" + +As he said this his eyes and face expressed more than coldness- they +expressed hostility, which Pierre noticed at once. He had approached +the shed full of animation, but on seeing Prince Andrew's face he felt +constrained and ill at ease. + +"I have come... simply... you know... come... it interests me," said +Pierre, who had so often that day senselessly repeated that word +"interesting." "I wish to see the battle." + +"Oh yes, and what do the Masonic brothers say about war? How would +they stop it?" said Prince Andrew sarcastically. "Well, and how's +Moscow? And my people? Have they reached Moscow at last?" he asked +seriously. + +"Yes, they have. Julie Drubetskaya told me so. I went to see them, +but missed them. They have gone to your estate near Moscow." + +CHAPTER XXV + +The officers were about to take leave, but Prince Andrew, apparently +reluctant to be left alone with his friend, asked them to stay and +have tea. Seats were brought in and so was the tea. The officers gazed +with surprise at Pierre's huge stout figure and listened to his talk +of Moscow and the position of our army, round which he had ridden. +Prince Andrew remained silent, and his expression was so forbidding +that Pierre addressed his remarks chiefly to the good-natured +battalion commander. + +"So you understand the whole position of our troops?" Prince +Andrew interrupted him. + +"Yes- that is, how do you mean?" said Pierre. "Not being a +military man I can't say I have understood it fully, but I +understand the general position." + +"Well, then, you know more than anyone else, be it who it may," said +Prince Andrew. + +"Oh!" said Pierre, looking over his spectacles in perplexity at +Prince Andrew. "Well, and what do think of Kutuzov's appointment?" +he asked. + +"I was very glad of his appointment, that's all I know," replied +Prince Andrew. + +"And tell me your opinion of Barclay de Tolly. In Moscow they are +saying heaven knows what about him.... What do you think of him?" + +"Ask them," replied Prince Andrew, indicating the officers. + +Pierre looked at Timokhin with the condescendingly interrogative +smile with which everybody involuntarily addressed that officer. + +"We see light again, since his Serenity has been appointed, your +excellency," said Timokhin timidly, and continually turning to +glance at his colonel. + +"Why so?" asked Pierre. + +"Well, to mention only firewood and fodder, let me inform you. +Why, when we were retreating from Sventsyani we dare not touch a stick +or a wisp of hay or anything. You see, we were going away, so he would +get it all; wasn't it so, your excellency?" and again Timokhin +turned to the prince. "But we daren't. In our regiment two officers +were court-martialed for that kind of thing. But when his Serenity +took command everything became straight forward. Now we see light..." + +"Then why was it forbidden?" + +Timokhin looked about in confusion, not knowing what or how to +answer such a question. Pierre put the same question to Prince Andrew. + +"Why, so as not to lay waste the country we were abandoning to the +enemy," said Prince Andrew with venomous irony. "It is very sound: one +can't permit the land to be pillaged and accustom the troops to +marauding. At Smolensk too he judged correctly that the French might +outflank us, as they had larger forces. But he could not understand +this," cried Prince Andrew in a shrill voice that seemed to escape him +involuntarily: "he could not understand that there, for the first +time, we were fighting for Russian soil, and that there was a spirit +in the men such as I had never seen before, that we had held the +French for two days, and that that success had increased our +strength tenfold. He ordered us to retreat, and all our efforts and +losses went for nothing. He had no thought of betraying us, he tried +to do the best he could, he thought out everything, and that is why he +is unsuitable. He is unsuitable now, just because he plans out +everything very thoroughly and accurately as every German has to. +How can I explain?... Well, say your father has a German valet, and he +is a splendid valet and satisfies your father's requirements better +than you could, then it's all right to let him serve. But if your +father is mortally sick you'll send the valet away and attend to +your father with your own unpracticed, awkward hands, and will +soothe him better than a skilled man who is a stranger could. So it +has been with Barclay. While Russia was well, a foreigner could +serve her and be a splendid minister; but as soon as she is in +danger she needs one of her own kin. But in your Club they have been +making him out a traitor! They slander him as a traitor, and the +only result will be that afterwards, ashamed of their false +accusations, they will make him out a hero or a genius instead of a +traitor, and that will be still more unjust. He is an honest and +very punctilious German." + +"And they say he's a skillful commander," rejoined Pierre. + +"I don't understand what is meant by 'a skillful commander,'" +replied Prince Andrew ironically. + +"A skillful commander?" replied Pierre. "Why, one who foresees all +contingencies... and foresees the adversary's intentions." + +"But that's impossible," said Prince Andrew as if it were a matter +settled long ago. + +Pierre looked at him in surprise. + +"And yet they say that war is like a game of chess?" he remarked. + +"Yes," replied Prince Andrew, "but with this little difference, that +in chess you may think over each move as long as you please and are +not limited for time, and with this difference too, that a knight is +always stronger than a pawn, and two pawns are always stronger than +one, while in war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division +and sometimes weaker than a company. The relative strength of bodies +of troops can never be known to anyone. Believe me," he went on, "if +things depended on arrangements made by the staff, I should be there +making arrangements, but instead of that I have the honor to serve +here in the regiment with these gentlemen, and I consider that on us +tomorrow's battle will depend and not on those others.... Success +never depends, and never will depend, on position, or equipment, or +even on numbers, and least of all on position." + +"But on what then?" + +"On the feeling that is in me and in him," he pointed to Timokhin, +"and in each soldier." + +Prince Andrew glanced at Timokhin, who looked at his commander in +alarm and bewilderment. In contrast to his former reticent taciturnity +Prince Andrew now seemed excited. He could apparently not refrain from +expressing the thoughts that had suddenly occurred to him. + +"A battle is won by those who firmly resolve to win it! Why did we +lose the battle at Austerlitz? The French losses were almost equal +to ours, but very early we said to ourselves that we were losing the +battle, and we did lose it. And we said so because we had nothing to +fight for there, we wanted to get away from the battlefield as soon as +we could. 'We've lost, so let us run,' and we ran. If we had not +said that till the evening, heaven knows what might not have happened. +But tomorrow we shan't say it! You talk about our position, the left +flank weak and the right flank too extended," he went on. "That's +all nonsense, there's nothing of the kind. But what awaits us +tomorrow? A hundred million most diverse chances which will be decided +on the instant by the fact that our men or theirs run or do not run, +and that this man or that man is killed, but all that is being done at +present is only play. The fact is that those men with whom you have +ridden round the position not only do not help matters, but hinder. +They are only concerned with their own petty interests." + +"At such a moment?" said Pierre reproachfully. + +"At such a moment!" Prince Andrew repeated. "To them it is only a +moment affording opportunities to undermine a rival and obtain an +extra cross or ribbon. For me tomorrow means this: a Russian army of a +hundred thousand and a French army of a hundred thousand have met to +fight, and the thing is that these two hundred thousand men will fight +and the side that fights more fiercely and spares itself least will +win. And if you like I will tell you that whatever happens and +whatever muddles those at the top may make, we shall win tomorrow's +battle. Tomorrow, happen what may, we shall win!" + +"There now, your excellency! That's the truth, the real truth," said +Timokhin. "Who would spare himself now? The soldiers in my +battalion, believe me, wouldn't drink their vodka! 'It's not the day +for that!' they say." + +All were silent. The officers rose. Prince Andrew went out of the +shed with them, giving final orders to the adjutant. After they had +gone Pierre approached Prince Andrew and was about to start a +conversation when they heard the clatter of three horses' hoofs on the +road not far from the shed, and looking in that direction Prince +Andrew recognized Wolzogen and Clausewitz accompanied by a Cossack. +They rode close by continuing to converse, and Prince Andrew +involuntarily heard these words: + +"Der Krieg muss in Raum verlegt werden. Der Ansicht kann ich nicht +genug Preis geben,"~^ said one of them. + +^~ "The war must be extended widely. I cannot sufficiently commend +that view." + +"Oh, ja," said the other, "der Zweck ist nur den Feind zu schwachen, +so kann man gewiss nicht den Verlust der Privat-Personen in Achtung +nehmen."~^ + +^~ "Oh, yes, the only aim is to weaken the enemy, so of course one +cannot take into account the loss of private individuals." + +"Oh, no," agreed the other. + +"Extend widely!" said Prince Andrew with an angry snort, when they +had ridden past. "In that 'extend' were my father, son, and sister, at +Bald Hills. That's all the same to him! That's what I was saying to +you- those German gentlemen won't win the battle tomorrow but will +only make all the mess they can, because they have nothing in their +German heads but theories not worth an empty eggshell and haven't in +their hearts the one thing needed tomorrow- that which Timokhin has. +They have yielded up all Europe to him, and have now come to teach us. +Fine teachers!" and again his voice grew shrill. + +"So you think we shall win tomorrow's battle?" asked Pierre. + +"Yes, yes," answered Prince Andrew absently. "One thing I would do +if I had the power," he began again, "I would not take prisoners. +Why take prisoners? It's chivalry! The French have destroyed my home +and are on their way to destroy Moscow, they have outraged and are +outraging me every moment. They are my enemies. In my opinion they are +all criminals. And so thinks Timokhin and the whole army. They +should be executed! Since they are my foes they cannot be my +friends, whatever may have been said at Tilsit." + +"Yes, yes," muttered Pierre, looking with shining eyes at Prince +Andrew. "I quite agree with you!" + +The question that had perturbed Pierre on the Mozhaysk hill and +all that day now seemed to him quite clear and completely solved. He +now understood the whole meaning and importance of this war and of the +impending battle. All he had seen that day, all the significant and +stern expressions on the faces he had seen in passing, were lit up for +him by a new light. He understood that latent heat (as they say in +physics) of patriotism which was present in all these men he had seen, +and this explained to him why they all prepared for death calmly, +and as it were lightheartedly. + +"Not take prisoners," Prince Andrew continued: "That by itself would +quite change the whole war and make it less cruel. As it is we have +played at war- that's what's vile! We play at magnanimity and all that +stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and +sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: +she is so kind-hearted that she can't look at blood, but enjoys eating +the calf served up with sauce. They talk to us of the rules of war, of +chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. +It's all rubbish! I saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they +humbugged us and we humbugged them. They plunder other people's +houses, issue false paper money, and worst of all they kill my +children and my father, and then talk of rules of war and +magnanimity to foes! Take no prisoners, but kill and be killed! He who +has come to this as I have through the same sufferings..." + +Prince Andrew, who had thought it was all the same to him whether or +not Moscow was taken as Smolensk had been, was suddenly checked in his +speech by an unexpected cramp in his throat. He paced up and down a +few times in silence, but his eyes glittered feverishly and his lips +quivered as he began speaking. + +"If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war +only when it was worth while going to certain death, as now. Then +there would not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended Michael +Ivanovich. And when there was a war, like this one, it would be war! +And then the determination of the troops would be quite different. +Then all these Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading +would not follow him into Russia, and we should not go to fight in +Austria and Prussia without knowing why. War is not courtesy but the +most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not +play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and +seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be +war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the +idle and frivolous. The military calling is the most highly honored. + +"But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are +the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of +war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a +country's inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, +and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the +military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, +idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in +spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. +All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he +who kills most people receives the highest rewards. + +"They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they +kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services +for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), +and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they +have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look +at them and hear them?" exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, +piercing voice. "Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to +live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it doesn't +do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.... +Ah, well, it's not for long!" he added. + +"However, you're sleepy, and it's time for me to sleep. Go back to +Gorki!" said Prince Andrew suddenly. + +"Oh no!" Pierre replied, looking at Prince Andrew with frightened, +compassionate eyes. + +"Go, go! Before a battle one must have one's sleep out," repeated +Prince Andrew. + +He came quickly up to Pierre and embraced and kissed him. +"Good-by, be off!" he shouted. "Whether we meet again or not..." +and turning away hurriedly he entered the shed. + +It was already dark, and Pierre could not make out whether the +expression of Prince Andrew's face was angry or tender. + +For some time he stood in silence considering whether he should +follow him or go away. "No, he does not want it!" Pierre concluded. +"And I know that this is our last meeting!" He sighed deeply and +rode back to Gorki. + +On re-entering the shed Prince Andrew lay down on a rug, but he +could not sleep. + +He closed his eyes. One picture succeeded another in his +imagination. On one of them he dwelt long and joyfully. He vividly +recalled an evening in Petersburg. Natasha with animated and excited +face was telling him how she had gone to look for mushrooms the +previous summer and had lost her way in the big forest. She +incoherently described the depths of the forest, her feelings, and a +talk with a beekeeper she met, and constantly interrupted her story to +say: "No, I can't! I'm not telling it right; no, you don't +understand," though he encouraged her by saying that he did +understand, and he really had understood all she wanted to say. But +Natasha was not satisfied with her own words: she felt that they did +not convey the passionately poetic feeling she had experienced that +day and wished to convey. "He was such a delightful old man, and it +was so dark in the forest... and he had such kind... No, I can't +describe it," she had said, flushed and excited. Prince Andrew +smiled now the same happy smile as then when he had looked into her +eyes. "I understood her," he thought. "I not only understood her, +but it was just that inner, spiritual force, that sincerity, that +frankness of soul- that very soul of hers which seemed to be +fettered by her body- it was that soul I loved in her... loved so +strongly and happily..." and suddenly he remembered how his love had +ended. "He did not need anything of that kind. He neither saw nor +understood anything of the sort. He only saw in her a pretty and fresh +young girl, with whom he did not deign to unite his fate. And I?... +and he is still alive and gay!" + +Prince Andrew jumped up as if someone had burned him, and again +began pacing up and down in front of the shed. + +CHAPTER XXVI + +On August 25, the eve of the battle of Borodino, M. de Beausset, +prefect of the French Emperor's palace, arrived at Napoleon's quarters +at Valuevo with Colonel Fabvier, the former from Paris and the +latter from Madrid. + +Donning his court uniform, M. de Beausset ordered a box he had +brought for the Emperor to be carried before him and entered the first +compartment of Napoleon's tent, where he began opening the box while +conversing with Napoleon's aides-de-camp who surrounded him. + +Fabvier, not entering the tent, remained at the entrance talking +to some generals of his acquaintance. + +The Emperor Napoleon had not yet left his bedroom and was +finishing his toilet. Slightly snorting and grunting, he presented now +his back and now his plump hairy chest to the brush with which his +valet was rubbing him down. Another valet, with his finger over the +mouth of a bottle, was sprinkling Eau de Cologne on the Emperor's +pampered body with an expression which seemed to say that he alone +knew where and how much Eau de Cologne should be sprinkled. Napoleon's +short hair was wet and matted on the forehead, but his face, though +puffy and yellow, expressed physical satisfaction. "Go on, harder, +go on!" he muttered to the valet who was rubbing him, slightly +twitching and grunting. An aide-de-camp, who had entered the bedroom +to report to the Emperor the number of prisoners taken in +yesterday's action, was standing by the door after delivering his +message, awaiting permission to withdraw. Napoleon, frowning, looked +at him from under his brows. + +"No prisoners!" said he, repeating the aide-de-camp's words. "They +are forcing us to exterminate them. So much the worse for the +Russian army.... Go on... harder, harder!" he muttered, hunching his +back and presenting his fat shoulders. + +"All right. Let Monsieur de Beausset enter, and Fabvier too," he +said, nodding to the aide-de-camp. + +"Yes, sire," and the aide-de-camp disappeared through the door of +the tent. + +Two valets rapidly dressed His Majesty, and wearing the blue uniform +of the Guards he went with firm quick steps to the reception room. + +De Beausset's hands meanwhile were busily engaged arranging the +present he had brought from the Empress, on two chairs directly in +front of the entrance. But Napoleon had dressed and come out with such +unexpected rapidity that he had not time to finish arranging the +surprise. + +Napoleon noticed at once what they were about and guessed that +they were not ready. He did not wish to deprive them of the pleasure +of giving him a surprise, so he pretended not to see de Beausset and +called Fabvier to him, listening silently and with a stern frown to +what Fabvier told him of the heroism and devotion of his troops +fighting at Salamanca, at the other end of Europe, with but one +thought- to be worthy of their Emperor- and but one fear- to fail to +please him. The result of that battle had been deplorable. Napoleon +made ironic remarks during Fabvier's account, as if he had not +expected that matters could go otherwise in his absence. + +"I must make up for that in Moscow," said Napoleon. "I'll see you +later," he added, and summoned de Beausset, who by that time had +prepared the surprise, having placed something on the chairs and +covered it with a cloth. + +De Beausset bowed low, with that courtly French bow which only the +old retainers of the Bourbons knew how to make, and approached him, +presenting an envelope. + +Napoleon turned to him gaily and pulled his ear. + +"You have hurried here. I am very glad. Well, what is Paris saying?" +he asked, suddenly changing his former stern expression for a most +cordial tone. + +"Sire, all Paris regrets your absence," replied de Beausset as was +proper. + +But though Napoleon knew that de Beausset had to say something of +this kind, and though in his lucid moments he knew it was untrue, he +was pleased to hear it from him. Again he honored him by touching +his ear. + +"I am very sorry to have made you travel so far," said he. + +"Sire, I expected nothing less than to find you at the gates of +Moscow," replied de Beausset. + +Napoleon smiled and, lifting his head absentmindedly, glanced to the +right. An aide-de-camp approached with gliding steps and offered him a +gold snuffbox, which he took. + +"Yes, it has happened luckily for you," he said, raising the open +snuffbox to his nose. "You are fond of travel, and in three days you +will see Moscow. You surely did not expect to see that Asiatic +capital. You will have a pleasant journey." + +De Beausset bowed gratefully at this regard for his taste for travel +(of which he had not till then been aware). + +"Ha, what's this?" asked Napoleon, noticing that all the courtiers +were looking at something concealed under a cloth. + +With courtly adroitness de Beausset half turned and without +turning his back to the Emperor retired two steps, twitching off the +cloth at the same time, and said: + +"A present to Your Majesty from the Empress." + +It was a portrait, painted in bright colors by Gerard, of the son +borne to Napoleon by the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, the boy +whom for some reason everyone called "The King of Rome." + +A very pretty curly-headed boy with a look of the Christ in the +Sistine Madonna was depicted playing at stick and ball. The ball +represented the terrestrial globe and the stick in his other hand a +scepter. + +Though it was not clear what the artist meant to express by +depicting the so-called King of Rome spiking the earth with a stick, +the allegory apparently seemed to Napoleon, as it had done to all +who had seen it in Paris, quite clear and very pleasing. + +"The King of Rome!" he said, pointing to the portrait with a +graceful gesture. "Admirable!" + +With the natural capacity of an Italian for changing the +expression of his face at will, he drew nearer to the portrait and +assumed a look of pensive tenderness. He felt that what he now said +and did would be historical, and it seemed to him that it would now be +best for him- whose grandeur enabled his son to play stick and ball +with the terrestrial globe- to show, in contrast to that grandeur, the +simplest paternal tenderness. His eyes grew dim, he moved forward, +glanced round at a chair (which seemed to place itself under him), and +sat down on it before the portrait. At a single gesture from him +everyone went out on tiptoe, leaving the great man to himself and +his emotion. + +Having sat still for a while he touched- himself not knowing why- +the thick spot of paint representing the highest light in the +portrait, rose, and recalled de Beausset and the officer on duty. He +ordered the portrait to be carried outside his tent, that the Old +Guard, stationed round it, might not be deprived of the pleasure of +seeing the King of Rome, the son and heir of their adored monarch. + +And while he was doing M. de Beausset the honor of breakfasting with +him, they heard, as Napoleon had anticipated, the rapturous cries of +the officers and men of the Old Guard who had run up to see the +portrait. + +"Vive l'Empereur! Vive le roi de Rome! Vive l'Empereur!" came +those ecstatic cries. + +After breakfast Napoleon in de Beausset's presence dictated his +order of the day to the army. + +"Short and energetic!" he remarked when he had read over the +proclamation which he had dictated straight off without corrections. +It ran: + +Soldiers! This is the battle you have so longed for. Victory depends +on you. It is essential for us; it will give us all we need: +comfortable quarters and a speedy return to our country. Behave as you +did at Austerlitz, Friedland, Vitebsk, and Smolensk. Let our +remotest posterity recall your achievements this day with pride. Let +it be said of each of you: "He was in the great battle before Moscow!" + +"Before Moscow!" repeated Napoleon, and inviting M. de Beausset, who +was so fond of travel, to accompany him on his ride, he went out of +the tent to where the horses stood saddled. + +"Your Majesty is too kind!" replied de Beausset to the invitation to +accompany the Emperor; he wanted to sleep, did not know how to ride +and was afraid of doing so. + +But Napoleon nodded to the traveler, and de Beausset had to mount. +When Napoleon came out of the tent the shouting of the Guards before +his son's portrait grew still louder. Napoleon frowned. + +"Take him away!" he said, pointing with a gracefully majestic +gesture to the portrait. "It is too soon for him to see a field of +battle." + +De Beausset closed his eyes, bowed his head, and sighed deeply, to +indicate how profoundly he valued and comprehended the Emperor's +words. + +CHAPTER XXVII + +On the twenty-fifth of August, so his historians tell us, Napoleon +spent the whole day on horseback inspecting the locality, +considering plans submitted to him by his marshals, and personally +giving commands to his generals. + +The original line of the Russian forces along the river Kolocha +had been dislocated by the capture of the Shevardino Redoubt on the +twenty-fourth, and part of the line- the left flank- had been drawn +back. That part of the line was not entrenched and in front of it +the ground was more open and level than elsewhere. It was evident to +anyone, military or not, that it was here the French should attack. It +would seem that not much consideration was needed to reach this +conclusion, nor any particular care or trouble on the part of the +Emperor and his marshals, nor was there any need of that special and +supreme quality called genius that people are so apt to ascribe to +Napoleon; yet the historians who described the event later and the men +who then surrounded Napoleon, and he himself, thought otherwise. + +Napoleon rode over the plain and surveyed the locality with a +profound air and in silence, nodded with approval or shook his head +dubiously, and without communicating to the generals around him the +profound course of ideas which guided his decisions merely gave them +his final conclusions in the form of commands. Having listened to a +suggestion from Davout, who was now called Prince d'Eckmuhl, to turn +the Russian left wing, Napoleon said it should not be done, without +explaining why not. To a proposal made by General Campan (who was to +attack the fleches) to lead his division through the woods, Napoleon +agreed, though the so-called Duke of Elchingen (Ney) ventured to +remark that a movement through the woods was dangerous and might +disorder the division. + +Having inspected the country opposite the Shevardino Redoubt, +Napoleon pondered a little in silence and then indicated the spots +where two batteries should be set up by the morrow to act against +the Russian entrenchments, and the places where, in line with them, +the field artillery should be placed. + +After giving these and other commands he returned to his tent, and +the dispositions for the battle were written down from his dictation. + +These dispositions, of which the French historians write with +enthusiasm and other historians with profound respect, were as +follows: + +At dawn the two new batteries established during the night on the +plain occupied by the Prince d'Eckmuhl will open fire on the +opposing batteries of the enemy. + +At the same time the commander of the artillery of the 1st Corps, +General Pernetti, with thirty cannon of Campan's division and all +the howitzers of Dessaix's and Friant's divisions, will move +forward, open fire, and overwhelm with shellfire the enemy's +battery, against which will operate: + +_1 24 guns of the artillery of the Guards
+30 guns of Campan's division + +and 8 guns of Friant's and Dessaix's divisions + -- + +in all 62 guns. + +The commander of the artillery of the 3rd Corps, General Fouche, +will place the howitzers of the 3rd and 8th Corps, sixteen in all, +on the flanks of the battery that is to bombard the entrenchment on +the left, which will have forty guns in all directed against it. + +General Sorbier must be ready at the first order to advance with all +the howitzers of the Guard's artillery against either one or other +of the entrenchments. + +During the cannonade Prince Poniatowski is to advance through the +wood on the village and turn the enemy's position. + +General Campan will move through the wood to seize the first +fortification. + +After the advance has begun in this manner, orders will be given +in accordance with the enemy's movements. + +The cannonade on the left flank will begin as soon as the guns of +the right wing are heard. The sharpshooters of Morand's division and +of the vice-King's division will open a heavy fire on seeing the +attack commence on the right wing. + +The vice-King will occupy the village and cross by its three +bridges, advancing to the same heights as Morand's and Gibrard's +divisions, which under his leadership will be directed against the +redoubt and come into line with the rest of the forces. + +All this must be done in good order (le tout se fera avec ordre et +methode) as far as possible retaining troops in reserve. + +_1 The Imperial Camp near Mozhaysk,
+September, 6, 1812. + +These dispositions, which are very obscure and confused if one +allows oneself to regard the arrangements without religious awe of his +genius, related to Napoleon's orders to deal with four points- four +different orders. Not one of these was, or could be, carried out. + +In the disposition it is said first that the batteries placed on the +spot chosen by Napoleon, with the guns of Pernetti and Fouche; which +were to come in line with them, 102 guns in all, were to open fire and +shower shells on the Russian fleches and redoubts. This could not be +done, as from the spots selected by Napoleon the projectiles did not +carry to the Russian works, and those 102 guns shot into the air until +the nearest commander, contrary to Napoleon's instructions, moved them +forward. + +The second order was that Poniatowski, moving to the village through +the wood, should turn the Russian left flank. This could not be done +and was not done, because Poniatowski, advancing on the village +through the wood, met Tuchkov there barring his way, and could not and +did not turn the Russian position. + +The third order was: General Campan will move through the wood to +seize the first fortification. General Campan's division did not seize +the first fortification but was driven back, for on emerging from +the wood it had to reform under grapeshot, of which Napoleon was +unaware. + +The fourth order was: The vice-King will occupy the village +(Borodino) and cross by its three bridges, advancing to the same +heights as Morand's and Gdrard's divisions (for whose movements no +directions are given), which under his leadership will be directed +against the redoubt and come into line with the rest of the forces. + +As far as one can make out, not so much from this unintelligible +sentence as from the attempts the vice-King made to execute the orders +given him, he was to advance from the left through Borodino to the +redoubt while the divisions of Morand and Gerard were to advance +simultaneously from the front. + +All this, like the other parts of the disposition, was not and could +not be executed. After passing through Borodino the vice-King was +driven back to the Kolocha and could get no farther; while the +divisions of Morand and Gerard did not take the redoubt but were +driven back, and the redoubt was only taken at the end of the battle +by the cavalry (a thing probably unforeseen and not heard of by +Napoleon). So not one of the orders in the disposition was, or could +be, executed. But in the disposition it is said that, after the +fight has commenced in this manner, orders will be given in accordance +with the enemy's movements, and so it might be supposed that all +necessary arrangements would be made by Napoleon during the battle. +But this was not and could not be done, for during the whole battle +Napoleon was so far away that, as appeared later, he could not know +the course of the battle and not one of his orders during the fight +could be executed. + +CHAPTER XXVIII + +Many historians say that the French did not win the battle of +Borodino because Napoleon had a cold, and that if he had not had a +cold the orders he gave before and during the battle would have been +still more full of genius and Russia would have been lost and the face +of the world have been changed. To historians who believe that +Russia was shaped by the will of one man- Peter the Great- and that +France from a republic became an empire and French armies went to +Russia at the will of one man- Napoleon- to say that Russia remained a +power because Napoleon had a bad cold on the twenty-fourth of August +may seem logical and convincing. + +If it had depended on Napoleon's will to fight or not to fight the +battle of Borodino, and if this or that other arrangement depended +on his will, then evidently a cold affecting the manifestation of +his will might have saved Russia, and consequently the valet who +omitted to bring Napoleon his waterproof boots on the twenty-fourth +would have been the savior of Russia. Along that line of thought +such a deduction is indubitable, as indubitable as the deduction +Voltaire made in jest (without knowing what he was jesting at) when he +saw that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew was due to Charles IX's +stomach being deranged. But to men who do not admit that Russia was +formed by the will of one man, Peter I, or that the French Empire +was formed and the war with Russia begun by the will of one man, +Napoleon, that argument seems not merely untrue and irrational, but +contrary to all human reality. To the question of what causes historic +events another answer presents itself, namely, that the course of +human events is predetermined from on high- depends on the coincidence +of the wills of all who take part in the events, and that a Napoleon's +influence on the course of these events is purely external and +fictitious. + +Strange as at first glance it may seem to suppose that the +Massacre of St. Bartholomew was not due to Charles IX's will, though +he gave the order for it and thought it was done as a result of that +order; and strange as it may seem to suppose that the slaughter of +eighty thousand men at Borodino was not due to Napoleon's will, though +he ordered the commencement and conduct of the battle and thought it +was done because he ordered it; strange as these suppositions +appear, yet human dignity- which tells me that each of us is, if not +more at least not less a man than the great Napoleon- demands the +acceptance of that solution of the question, and historic +investigation abundantly confirms it. + +At the battle of Borodino Napoleon shot at no one and killed no one. +That was all done by the soldiers. Therefore it was not he who +killed people. + +The French soldiers went to kill and be killed at the battle of +Borodino not because of Napoleon's orders but by their own volition. +The whole army- French, Italian, German, Polish, and Dutch- hungry, +ragged, and weary of the campaign, felt at the sight of an army +blocking their road to Moscow that the wine was drawn and must be +drunk. Had Napoleon then forbidden them to fight the Russians, they +would have killed him and have proceeded to fight the Russians because +it was inevitable. + +When they heard Napoleon's proclamation offering them, as +compensation for mutilation and death, the words of posterity about +their having been in the battle before Moscow, they cried "Vive +l'Empereur!" just as they had cried "Vive l'Empereur!" at the sight of +the portrait of the boy piercing the terrestrial globe with a toy +stick, and just as they would have cried "Vive l'Empereur!" at any +nonsense that might be told them. There was nothing left for them to +do but cry "Vive l'Empereur!" and go to fight, in order to get food +and rest as conquerors in Moscow. So it was not because of +Napoleon's commands that they killed their fellow men. + +And it was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for +none of his orders were executed and during the battle he did not know +what was going on before him. So the way in which these people +killed one another was not decided by Napoleon's will but occurred +independently of him, in accord with the will of hundreds of thousands +of people who took part in the common action. It only seemed to +Napoleon that it all took place by his will. And so the question +whether he had or had not a cold has no more historic interest than +the cold of the least of the transport soldiers. + +Moreover, the assertion made by various writers that his cold was +the cause of his dispositions not being as well planned as on former +occasions, and of his orders during the battle not being as good as +previously, is quite baseless, which again shows that Napoleon's +cold on the twenty-sixth of August was unimportant. + +The dispositions cited above are not at all worse, but are even +better, than previous dispositions by which he had won victories. +His pseudo-orders during the battle were also no worse than +formerly, but much the same as usual. These dispositions and orders +only seem worse than previous ones because the battle of Borodino +was the first Napoleon did not win. The profoundest and most excellent +dispositions and orders seem very bad, and every learned militarist +criticizes them with looks oks importance, when they relate to a +battle that has been lost, and the very worst dispositions and +orders seem very good, and serious people fill whole volumes to +demonstrate their merits, when they relate to a battle that has been +won. + +The dispositions drawn up by Weyrother for the battle of +Austerlitz were a model of perfection for that kind of composition, +but still they were criticized- criticized for their very +perfection, for their excessive minuteness. + +Napoleon at the battle of Borodino fulfilled his office as +representative of authority as well as, and even better than, at other +battles. He did nothing harmful to the progress of the battle; he +inclined to the most reasonable opinions, he made no confusion, did +not contradict himself, did not get frightened or run away from the +field of battle, but with his great tact and military experience +carried out his role of appearing to command, calmly and with dignity. + +CHAPTER XXIX + +On returning from a second inspection of the lines, Napoleon +remarked: + +"The chessmen are set up, the game will begin tomorrow!" + +Having ordered punch and summoned de Beausset, he began to talk to +him about Paris and about some changes he meant to make the Empress' +household, surprising the prefect by his memory of minute details +relating to the court. + +He showed an interest in trifles, joked about de Beausset's love +of travel, and chatted carelessly, as a famous, self-confident surgeon +who knows his job does when turning up his sleeves and putting on +his apron while a patient is being strapped to the operating table. +"The matter is in my hands and is clear and definite in my head. +When the times comes to set to work I shall do it as no one else +could, but now I can jest, and the more I jest and the calmer I am the +more tranquil and confident you ought to be, and the more amazed at my +genius." + +Having finished his second glass of punch, Napoleon went to rest +before the serious business which, he considered, awaited him next +day. He was so much interested in that task that he was unable to +sleep, and in spite of his cold which had grown worse from the +dampness of the evening, he went into the large division of the tent +at three o'clock in the morning, loudly blowing his nose. He asked +whether the Russians had not withdrawn, and was told that the +enemy's fires were still in the same places. He nodded approval. + +The adjutant in attendance came into the tent. + +"Well, Rapp, do you think we shall do good business today?" Napoleon +asked him. + +"Without doubt, sire," replied Rapp. + +Napoleon looked at him. + +"Do you remember, sire, what you did me the honor to say at +Smolensk?" continued Rapp. "The wine is drawn and must be drunk." + +Napoleon frowned and sat silent for a long time leaning his head +on his hand. + +"This poor army!" he suddenly remarked. "It has diminished greatly +since Smolensk. Fortune is frankly a courtesan, Rapp. I have always +said so and I am beginning to experience it. But the Guards, Rapp, the +Guards are intact?" he remarked interrogatively. + +"Yes, sire," replied Rapp. + +Napoleon took a lozenge, put it in his mouth, and glanced at his +watch. He was not sleepy and it was still not nearly morning. It was +impossible to give further orders for the sake of killing time, for +the orders had all been given and were now being executed. + +"Have the biscuits and rice been served out to the regiments of +the Guards?" asked Napoleon sternly. + +"Yes, sire." + +"The rice too?" + +Rapp replied that he had given the Emperor's order about the rice, +but Napoleon shook his head in dissatisfaction as if not believing +that his order had been executed. An attendant came in with punch. +Napoleon ordered another glass to be brought for Rapp, and silently +sipped his own. + +"I have neither taste nor smell," he remarked, sniffing at his +glass. "This cold is tiresome. They talk about medicine- what is the +good of medicine when it can't cure a cold! Corvisart gave me these +lozenges but they don't help at all. What can doctors cure? One +can't cure anything. Our body is a machine for living. It is organized +for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it +defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by +encumbering it with remedies. Our body is like a perfect watch that +should go for a certain time; watchmaker cannot open it, he can only +adjust it by fumbling, and that blindfold.... Yes, our body is just +a machine for living, that is all." + +And having entered on the path of definition, of which he was +fond, Napoleon suddenly and unexpectedly gave a new one. + +"Do you know, Rapp, what military art is?" asked he. "It is the +art of being stronger than the enemy at a given moment. That's all." + +Rapp made no reply. + +"Tomorrow we shall have to deal with Kutuzov!" said Napoleon. "We +shall see! Do you remember at Braunau he commanded an army for three +weeks and did not once mount a horse to inspect his +entrenchments.... We shall see!" + +He looked at his watch. It was still only four o'clock. He did not +feel sleepy. The punch was finished and there was still nothing to do. +He rose, walked to and fro, put on a warm overcoat and a hat, and went +out of the tent. The night was dark and damp, a scarcely perceptible +moisture was descending from above. Near by, the campfires were +dimly burning among the French Guards, and in the distance those of +the Russian line shone through the smoke. The weather was calm, and +the rustle and tramp of the French troops already beginning to move to +take up their positions were clearly audible. + +Napoleon walked about in front of his tent, looked at the fires +and listened to these sounds, and as he was passing a tall guardsman +in a shaggy cap, who was standing sentinel before his tent and had +drawn himself up like a black pillar at sight of the Emperor, Napoleon +stopped in front of him. + +"What year did you enter the service?" he asked with that +affectation of military bluntness and geniality with which he always +addressed the soldiers. + +The man answered the question. + +"Ah! One of the old ones! Has your regiment had its rice?" + +"It has, Your Majesty." + +Napoleon nodded and walked away. + +At half-past five Napoleon rode to the village of Shevardino. + +It was growing light, the sky was clearing, only a single cloud +lay in the east. The abandoned campfires were burning themselves out +in the faint morning light. + +On the right a single deep report of a cannon resounded and died +away in the prevailing silence. Some minutes passed. A second and a +third report shook the air, then a fourth and a fifth boomed +solemnly near by on the right. + +The first shots had not yet ceased to reverberate before others rang +out and yet more were heard mingling with and overtaking one another. + +Napoleon with his suite rode up to the Shevardino Redoubt where he +dismounted. The game had begun. + +CHAPTER XXX + +On returning to Gorki after having seen Prince Andrew, Pierre +ordered his groom to get the horses ready and to call him early in the +morning, and then immediately fell asleep behind a partition in a +corner Boris had given up to him. + +Before he was thoroughly awake next morning everybody had already +left the hut. The panes were rattling in the little windows and his +groom was shaking him. + +"Your excellency! Your excellency! Your excellency!" he kept +repeating pertinaciously while he shook Pierre by the shoulder without +looking at him, having apparently lost hope of getting him to wake up. + +"What? Has it begun? Is it time?" Pierre asked, waking up. + +"Hear the firing," said the groom, a discharged soldier. "All the +gentlemen have gone out, and his Serene Highness himself rode past +long ago." + +Pierre dressed hastily and ran out to the porch. Outside all was +bright, fresh, dewy, and cheerful. The sun, just bursting forth from +behind a cloud that had concealed it, was shining, with rays still +half broken by the clouds, over the roofs of the street opposite, on +the dew-besprinkled dust of the road, on the walls of the houses, on +the windows, the fence, and on Pierre's horses standing before the +hut. The roar of guns sounded more distinct outside. An adjutant +accompanied by a Cossack passed by at a sharp trot. + +"It's time, Count; it's time!" cried the adjutant. + +Telling the groom to follow him with the horses, Pierre went down +the street to the knoll from which he had looked at the field of +battle the day before. A crowd of military men was assembled there, +members of the staff could be heard conversing in French, and +Kutuzov's gray head in a white cap with a red band was visible, his +gray nape sunk between his shoulders. He was looking through a field +glass down the highroad before him. + +Mounting the steps to the knoll Pierre looked at the scene before +him, spellbound by beauty. It was the same panorama he had admired +from that spot the day before, but now the whole place was full of +troops and covered by smoke clouds from the guns, and the slanting +rays of the bright sun, rising slightly to the left behind Pierre, +cast upon it through the clear morning air penetrating streaks of +rosy, golden tinted light and long dark shadows. The forest at the +farthest extremity of the panorama seemed carved in some precious +stone of a yellowish-green color; its undulating outline was +silhouetted against the horizon and was pierced beyond Valuevo by +the Smolensk highroad crowded with troops. Nearer at hand glittered +golden cornfields interspersed with copses. There were troops to be +seen everywhere, in front and to the right and left. All this was +vivid, majestic, and unexpected; but what impressed Pierre most of all +was the view of the battlefield itself, of Borodino and the hollows on +both sides of the Kolocha. + +Above the Kolocha, in Borodino and on both sides of it, especially +to the left where the Voyna flowing between its marshy banks falls +into the Kolocha, a mist had spread which seemed to melt, to dissolve, +and to become translucent when the brilliant sun appeared and +magically colored and outlined everything. The smoke of the guns +mingled with this mist, and over the whole expanse and through that +mist the rays of the morning sun were reflected, flashing back like +lightning from the water, from the dew, and from the bayonets of the +troops crowded together by the riverbanks and in Borodino. A white +church could be seen through the mist, and here and there the roofs of +huts in Borodino as well as dense masses of soldiers, or green +ammunition chests and ordnance. And all this moved, or seemed to move, +as the smoke and mist spread out over the whole space. Just as in +the mist-enveloped hollow near Borodino, so along the entire line +outside and above it and especially in the woods and fields to the +left, in the valleys and on the summits of the high ground, clouds +of powder smoke seemed continually to spring up out of nothing, now +singly, now several at a time, some translucent, others dense, +which, swelling, growing, rolling, and blending, extended over the +whole expanse. + +These puffs of smoke and (strange to say) the sound of sound of +the firing produced the chief beauty of the spectacle. + +"Puff!"- suddenly a round compact cloud of smoke was seen merging +from violet into gray and milky white, and "boom!" came the report a +second later. + +"Puff! puff!"- and two clouds arose pushing one another and blending +together; and "boom, boom!" came the sounds confirming what the eye +had seen. + +Pierre glanced round at the first cloud, which he had seen as a +round compact ball, and in its place already were balloons of smoke +floating to one side, and- "puff" (with a pause)- "puff, puff!" +three and then four more appeared and then from each, with the same +interval- "boom- boom, boom!" came the fine, firm, precise sounds in +reply. It seemed as if those smoke clouds sometimes ran and +sometimes stood still while woods, fields, and glittering bayonets ran +past them. From the left, over fields and bushes, those large balls of +smoke were continually appearing followed by their solemn reports, +while nearer still, in the hollows and woods, there burst from the +muskets small cloudlets that had no time to become balls, but had +their little echoes in just the same way. "Trakh-ta-ta-takh!" came the +frequent crackle of musketry, but it was irregular and feeble in +comparison with the reports of the cannon. + +Pierre wished to be there with that smoke, those shining bayonets, +that movement, and those sounds. He turned to look at Kutuzov and +his suite, to compare his impressions with those of others. They +were all looking at the field of battle as he was, and, as it seemed +to him, with the same feelings. All their faces were now shining +with that latent warmth of feeling Pierre had noticed the day before +and had fully understood after his talk with Prince Andrew. + +"Go, my dear fellow, go... and Christ be with you!" Kutuzov was +saying to a general who stood beside him, not taking his eye from +the battlefield. + +Having received this order the general passed by Pierre on his way +down the knoll. + +"To the crossing!" said the general coldly and sternly in reply to +one of the staff who asked where he was going. + +"I'll go there too, I too!" thought Pierre, and followed the +general. + +The general mounted a horse a Cossack had brought him. Pierre went +to his groom who was holding his horses and, asking which was the +quietest, clambered onto it, seized it by the mane, and turning out +his toes pressed his heels against its sides and, feeling that his +spectacles were slipping off but unable to let go of the mane and +reins, he galloped after the general, causing the staff officers to +smile as they watched him from the knoll. + +CHAPTER XXXI + +Having descended the hill the general after whom Pierre was +galloping turned sharply to the left, and Pierre, losing sight of him, +galloped in among some ranks of infantry marching ahead of him. He +tried to pass either in front of them or to the right or left, but +there were soldiers everywhere, all with expression and busy with some +unseen but evidently important task. They all gazed with the same +dissatisfied and inquiring expression at this stout man in a white +hat, who for some unknown reason threatened to trample them under +his horse's hoofs. + +"Why ride into the middle of the battalion?" one of them shouted +at him. + +Another prodded his horse with the butt end of a musket, and Pierre, +bending over his saddlebow and hardly able to control his shying +horse, galloped ahead of the soldiers where there was a free space. + +There was a bridge ahead of him, where other soldiers stood +firing. Pierre rode up to them. Without being aware of it he had +come to the bridge across the Kolocha between Gorki and Borodino, +which the French (having occupied Borodino) were attacking in the +first phase of the battle. Pierre saw that there was a bridge in front +of him and that soldiers were doing something on both sides of it +and in the meadow, among the rows of new-mown hay which he had taken +no notice of amid the smoke of the campfires the day before; but +despite the incessant firing going on there he had no idea that this +was the field of battle. He did not notice the sound of the bullets +whistling from every side, or the projectiles that flew over him, +did not see the enemy on the other side of the river, and for a long +time did not notice the killed and wounded, though many fell near him. +He looked about him with a smile which did not leave his face. + +"Why's that fellow in front of the line?" shouted somebody at him +again. + +"To the left!... Keep to the right!" the men shouted to him. + +Pierre went to the right, and unexpectedly encountered one of +Raevski's adjutants whom he knew. The adjutant looked angrily at +him, evidently also intending to shout at him, but on recognizing +him he nodded. + +"How have you got here?" he said, and galloped on. + +Pierre, feeling out of place there, having nothing to do, and afraid +of getting in someone's way again, galloped after the adjutant. + +"What's happening here? May I come with you?" he asked. + +"One moment, one moment!" replied the adjutant, and riding up to a +stout colonel who was standing in the meadow, he gave him some message +and then addressed Pierre. + +"Why have you come here, Count?" he asked with a smile. "Still +inquisitive?" + +"Yes, yes," assented Pierre. + +But the adjutant turned his horse about and rode on. + +"Here it's tolerable," said he, "but with Bagration on the left +flank they're getting it frightfully hot." + +"Really?" said Pierre. "Where is that?" + +"Come along with me to our knoll. We can get a view from there and +in our battery it is still bearable," said the adjutant. "Will you +come?" + +"Yes, I'll come with you," replied Pierre, looking round for his +groom. + +It was only now that he noticed wounded men staggering along or +being carried on stretchers. On that very meadow he had ridden over +the day before, a soldier was lying athwart the rows of scented hay, +with his head thrown awkwardly back and his shako off. + +"Why haven't they carried him away?" Pierre was about to ask, but +seeing the stern expression of the adjutant who was also looking +that way, he checked himself. + +Pierre did not find his groom and rode along the hollow with the +adjutant to Raevski's Redoubt. His horse lagged behind the +adjutant's and jolted him at every step. + +"You don't seem to be used to riding, Count?" remarked the adjutant. + +"No it's not that, but her action seems so jerky," said Pierre in +a puzzled tone. + +"Why... she's wounded!" said the adjutant. "In the off foreleg above +the knee. A bullet, no doubt. I congratulate you, Count, on your +baptism of fire!" + +Having ridden in the smoke past the Sixth Corps, behind the +artillery which had been moved forward and was in action, deafening +them with the noise of firing, they came to a small wood. There it was +cool and quiet, with a scent of autumn. Pierre and the adjutant +dismounted and walked up the hill on foot. + +"Is the general here?" asked the adjutant on reaching the knoll. + +"He was here a minute ago but has just gone that way," someone +told him, pointing to the right. + +The adjutant looked at Pierre as if puzzled what to do with him now. + +"Don't trouble about me," said Pierre. "I'll go up onto the knoll if +I may?" + +"Yes, do. You'll see everything from there and it's less +dangerous, and I'll come for you." + +Pierre went to the battery and the adjutant rode on. They did not +meet again, and only much later did Pierre learn that he lost an arm +that day. + +The knoll to which Pierre ascended was that famous one afterwards +known to the Russians as the Knoll Battery or Raevski's Redoubt, and +to the French as la grande redoute, la fatale redoute, la redoute du +centre, around which tens of thousands fell, and which the French +regarded as the key to the whole position. + +This redoubt consisted of a knoll, on three sides of which +trenches had been dug. Within the entrenchment stood ten guns that +were being fired through openings in the earthwork. + +In line with the knoll on both sides stood other guns which also +fired incessantly. A little behind the guns stood infantry. When +ascending that knoll Pierre had no notion that this spot, on which +small trenches had been dug and from which a few guns were firing, was +the most important point of the battle. + +On the contrary, just because he happened to be there he thought +it one of the least significant parts of the field. + +Having reached the knoll, Pierre sat down at one end of a trench +surrounding the battery and gazed at what was going on around him with +an unconsciously happy smile. Occasionally he rose and walked about +the battery still with that same smile, trying not to obstruct the +soldiers who were loading, hauling the guns, and continually running +past him with bags and charges. The guns of that battery were being +fired continually one after another with a deafening roar, +enveloping the whole neighborhood in powder smoke. + +In contrast with the dread felt by the infantrymen placed in +support, here in the battery where a small number of men busy at their +work were separated from the rest by a trench, everyone experienced +a common and as it were family feeling of animation. + +The intrusion of Pierre's nonmilitary figure in a white hat made +an unpleasant impression at first. The soldiers looked askance at +him with surprise and even alarm as they went past him. The senior +artillery officer, a tall, long-legged, pockmarked man, moved over +to Pierre as if to see the action of the farthest gun and looked at +him with curiosity. + +A young round-faced officer, quite a boy still and evidently only +just out of the Cadet College, who was zealously commanding the two +guns entrusted to him, addressed Pierre sternly. + +"Sir," he said, "permit me to ask you to stand aside. You must not +be here." + +The soldiers shook their heads disapprovingly as they looked at +Pierre. But when they had convinced themselves that this man in the +white hat was doing no harm, but either sat quietly on the slope of +the trench with a shy smile or, politely making way for the +soldiers, paced up and down the battery under fire as calmly as if +he were on a boulevard, their feeling of hostile distrust gradually +began to change into a kindly and bantering sympathy, such as soldiers +feel for their dogs, cocks, goats, and in general for the animals that +live with the regiment. The men soon accepted Pierre into their +family, adopted him, gave him a nickname ("our gentleman"), and made +kindly fun of him among themselves. + +A shell tore up the earth two paces from Pierre and he looked around +with a smile as he brushed from his clothes some earth it had thrown +up. + +"And how's it you're not afraid, sir, really now?" a red-faced, +broad-shouldered soldier asked Pierre, with a grin that disclosed a +set of sound, white teeth. + +"Are you afraid, then?" said Pierre. + +"What else do you expect?" answered the soldier. "She has no +mercy, you know! When she comes spluttering down, out go your innards. +One can't help being afraid," he said laughing. + +Several of the men, with bright kindly faces, stopped beside Pierre. +They seemed not to have expected him to talk like anybody else, and +the discovery that he did so delighted them. + +"It's the business of us soldiers. But in a gentleman it's +wonderful! There's a gentleman for you!" + +"To your places!" cried the young officer to the men gathered +round Pierre. + +The young officer was evidently exercising his duties for the +first or second time and therefore treated both his superiors and +the men with great precision and formality. + +The booming cannonade and the fusillade of musketry were growing +more intense over the whole field, especially to the left where +Bagration's fleches were, but where Pierre was the smoke of the firing +made it almost impossible to distinguish anything. Moreover, his whole +attention was engrossed by watching the family circle- separated +from all else- formed by the men in the battery. His first unconscious +feeling of joyful animation produced by the sights and sounds of the +battlefield was now replaced by another, especially since he had +seen that soldier lying alone in the hayfield. Now, seated on the +slope of the trench, he observed the faces of those around him. + +By ten o'clock some twenty men had already been carried away from +the battery; two guns were smashed and cannon balls fell more and more +frequently on the battery and spent bullets buzzed and whistled +around. But the men in the battery seemed not to notice this, and +merry voices and jokes were heard on all sides. + +"A live one!" shouted a man as a whistling shell approached. + +"Not this way! To the infantry!" added another with loud laughter, +seeing the shell fly past and fall into the ranks of the supports. + +"Are you bowing to a friend, eh?" remarked another, chaffing a +peasant who ducked low as a cannon ball flew over. + +Several soldiers gathered by the wall of the trench, looking out +to see what was happening in front. + +"They've withdrawn the front line, it has retired," said they, +pointing over the earthwork. + +"Mind your own business," an old sergeant shouted at them. "If +they've retired it's because there's work for them to do farther +back." + +And the sergeant, taking one of the men by the shoulders, gave him a +shove with his knee. This was followed by a burst of laughter. + +"To the fifth gun, wheel it up!" came shouts from one side. + +"Now then, all together, like bargees!" rose the merry voices of +those who were moving the gun. + +"Oh, she nearly knocked our gentleman's hat off!" cried the +red-faced humorist, showing his teeth chaffing Pierre. "Awkward +baggage!" he added reproachfully to a cannon ball that struck a cannon +wheel and a man's leg. + +"Now then, you foxes!" said another, laughing at some militiamen +who, stooping low, entered the battery to carry away the wounded man. + +"So this gruel isn't to your taste? Oh, you crows! You're scared!" +they shouted at the militiamen who stood hesitating before the man +whose leg had been torn off. + +"There, lads... oh, oh!" they mimicked the peasants, "they don't +like it at all!" + +Pierre noticed that after every ball that hit the redoubt, and after +every loss, the liveliness increased more and more. + +As the flames of the fire hidden within come more and more vividly +and rapidly from an approaching thundercloud, so, as if in +opposition to what was taking place, the lightning of hidden fire +growing more and more intense glowed in the faces of these men. + +Pierre did not look out at the battlefield and was not concerned +to know what was happening there; he was entirely absorbed in watching +this fire which burned ever more brightly and which he felt was +flaming up in the same way in his own soul. + +At ten o'clock the infantry that had been among the bushes in +front of the battery and along the Kamenka streamlet retreated. From +the battery they could be seen running back past it carrying their +wounded on their muskets. A general with his suite came to the +battery, and after speaking to the colonel gave Pierre an angry look +and went away again having ordered the infantry supports behind the +battery to lie down, so as to be less exposed to fire. After this from +amid the ranks of infantry to the right of the battery came the +sound of a drum and shouts of command, and from the battery one saw +how those ranks of infantry moved forward. + +Pierre looked over the wall of the trench and was particularly +struck by a pale young officer who, letting his sword hang down, was +walking backwards and kept glancing uneasily around. + +The ranks of the infantry disappeared amid the smoke but their +long-drawn shout and rapid musketry firing could still be heard. A few +minutes later crowds of wounded men and stretcher-bearers came back +from that direction. Projectiles began to fall still more frequently +in the battery. Several men were lying about who had not been removed. +Around the cannon the men moved still more briskly and busily. No +one any longer took notice of Pierre. Once or twice he was shouted +at for being in the way. The senior officer moved with big, rapid +strides from one gun to another with a frowning face. The young +officer, with his face still more flushed, commanded the men more +scrupulously than ever. The soldiers handed up the charges, turned, +loaded, and did their business with strained smartness. They gave +little jumps as they walked, as though they were on springs. + +The stormcloud had come upon them, and in every face the fire +which Pierre had watched kindle burned up brightly. Pierre standing +beside the commanding officer. The young officer, his hand to his +shako, ran up to his superior. + +"I have the honor to report, sir, that only eight rounds are left. +Are we to continue firing?" he asked. + +"Grapeshot!" the senior shouted, without answering the question, +looking over the wall of the trench. + +Suddenly something happened: the young officer gave a gasp and +bending double sat down on the ground like a bird shot on the wing. +Everything became strange, confused, and misty in Pierre's eyes. + +One cannon ball after another whistled by and struck the +earthwork, a soldier, or a gun. Pierre, who had not noticed these +sounds before, now heard nothing else. On the right of the battery +soldiers shouting "Hurrah!" were running not forwards but backwards, +it seemed to Pierre. + +A cannon ball struck the very end of the earth work by which he +was standing, crumbling down the earth; a black ball flashed before +his eyes and at the same instant plumped into something. Some +militiamen who were entering the battery ran back. + +"All with grapeshot!" shouted the officer. + +The sergeant ran up to the officer and in a frightened whisper +informed him (as a butler at dinner informs his master that there is +no more of some wine asked for) that there were no more charges. + +"The scoundrels! What are they doing?" shouted the officer, +turning to Pierre. + +The officer's face was red and perspiring and his eyes glittered +under his frowning brow. + +"Run to the reserves and bring up the ammunition boxes!" he +yelled, angrily avoiding Pierre with his eyes and speaking to his men. + +"I'll go," said Pierre. + +The officer, without answering him, strode across to the opposite +side. + +"Don't fire.... Wait!" he shouted. + +The man who had been ordered to go for ammunition stumbled against +Pierre. + +"Eh, sir, this is no place for you," said he, and ran down the +slope. + +Pierre ran after him, avoiding the spot where the young officer +was sitting. + +One cannon ball, another, and a third flew over him, falling in +front, beside, and behind him. Pierre ran down the slope. "Where am +I going?" he suddenly asked himself when he was already near the green +ammunition wagons. He halted irresolutely, not knowing whether to +return or go on. Suddenly a terrible concussion threw him backwards to +the ground. At the same instant he was dazzled by a great flash of +flame, and immediately a deafening roar, crackling, and whistling made +his ears tingle. + +When he came to himself he was sitting on the ground leaning on +his hands; the ammunition wagons he had been approaching no longer +existed, only charred green boards and rags littered the scorched +grass, and a horse, dangling fragments of its shaft behind it, +galloped past, while another horse lay, like Pierre, on the ground, +uttering prolonged and piercing cries. + +CHAPTER XXXII + +Beside himself with terror Pierre jumped up and ran back to the +battery, as to the only refuge from the horrors that surrounded him. + +On entering the earthwork he noticed that there were men doing +something there but that no shots were being fired from the battery. +He had no time to realize who these men were. He saw the senior +officer lying on the earth wall with his back turned as if he were +examining something down below and that one of the soldiers he had +noticed before was struggling forward shouting "Brothers!" and +trying to free himself from some men who were holding him by the +arm. He also saw something else that was strange. + +But he had not time to realize that the colonel had been killed, +that the soldier shouting "Brothers!" was a prisoner, and that another +man had been bayoneted in the back before his eyes, for hardly had +he run into the redoubt before a thin, sallow-faced, perspiring man in +a blue uniform rushed on him sword in hand, shouting something. +Instinctively guarding against the shock- for they had been running +together at full speed before they saw one another- Pierre put out his +hands and seized the man (a French officer) by the shoulder with one +hand and by the throat with the other. The officer, dropping his +sword, seized Pierre by his collar. + +For some seconds they gazed with frightened eyes at one another's +unfamiliar faces and both were perplexed at what they had done and +what they were to do next. "Am I taken prisoner or have I taken him +prisoner?" each was thinking. But the French officer was evidently +more inclined to think he had been taken prisoner because Pierre's +strong hand, impelled by instinctive fear, squeezed his throat ever +tighter and tighter. The Frenchman was about to say something, when +just above their heads, terrible and low, a cannon ball whistled, +and it seemed to Pierre that the French officer's head had been torn +off, so swiftly had he ducked it. + +Pierre too bent his head and let his hands fall. Without further +thought as to who had taken whom prisoner, the Frenchman ran back to +the battery and Pierre ran down the slope stumbling over the dead +and wounded who, it seemed to him, caught at his feet. But before he +reached the foot of the knoll he was met by a dense crowd of Russian +soldiers who, stumbling, tripping up, and shouting, ran merrily and +wildly toward the battery. (This was the attack for which Ermolov +claimed the credit, declaring that only his courage and good luck made +such a feat possible: it was the attack in which he was said to have +thrown some St. George's Crosses he had in his pocket into the battery +for the first soldiers to take who got there.) + +The French who had occupied the battery fled, and our troops +shouting "Hurrah!" pursued them so far beyond the battery that it +was difficult to call them back. + +The prisoners were brought down from the battery and among them +was a wounded French general, whom the officers surrounded. Crowds +of wounded- some known to Pierre and some unknown- Russians and +French, with faces distorted by suffering, walked, crawled, and were +carried on stretchers from the battery. Pierre again went up onto +the knoll where he had spent over an hour, and of that family circle +which had received him as a member he did not find a single one. There +were many dead whom he did not know, but some he recognized. The young +officer still sat in the same way, bent double, in a pool of blood +at the edge of the earth wall. The red-faced man was still +twitching, but they did not carry him away. + +Pierre ran down the slope once more. + +"Now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have +done!" he thought, aimlessly going toward a crowd of stretcher bearers +moving from the battlefield. + +But behind the veil of smoke the sun was still high, and in front +and especially to the left, near Semenovsk, something seemed to be +seething in the smoke, and the roar of cannon and musketry did not +diminish, but even increased to desperation like a man who, +straining himself, shrieks with all his remaining strength. + +CHAPTER XXXIII + +The chief action of the battle of Borodino was fought within the +seven thousand feet between Borodino and Bagration's fleches. Beyond +that space there was, on the one side, a demonstration made by the +Russians with Uvarov's cavalry at midday, and on the other side, +beyond Utitsa, Poniatowski's collision with Tuchkov; but these two +were detached and feeble actions in comparison with what took place in +the center of the battlefield. On the field between Borodino and the +fleches, beside the wood, the chief action of the day took place on an +open space visible from both sides and was fought in the simplest +and most artless way. + +The battle began on both sides with a cannonade from several hundred +guns. + +Then when the whole field was covered with smoke, two divisions, +Campan's and Dessaix's, advanced from the French right, while +Murat's troops advanced on Borodino from their left. + +From the Shevardino Redoubt where Napoleon was standing the +fleches were two thirds of a mile away, and it was more than a mile as +the crow flies to Borodino, so that Napoleon could not see what was +happening there, especially as the smoke mingling with the mist hid +the whole locality. The soldiers of Dessaix's division advancing +against the fleches could only be seen till they had entered the +hollow that lay between them and the fleches. As soon as they had +descended into that hollow, the smoke of the guns and musketry on +the fleches grew so dense that it covered the whole approach on that +side of it. Through the smoke glimpses could be caught of something +black- probably men- and at times the glint of bayonets. But whether +they were moving or stationary, whether they were French or Russian, +could not be discovered from the Shevardino Redoubt. + +The sun had risen brightly and its slanting rays struck straight +into Napoleon's face as, shading his eyes with his hand, he looked +at the fleches. The smoke spread out before them, and at times it +looked as if the smoke were moving, at times as if the troops moved. +Sometimes shouts were heard through the firing, but it was +impossible to tell what was being done there. + +Napoleon, standing on the knoll, looked through a field glass, and +in its small circlet saw smoke and men, sometimes his own and +sometimes Russians, but when he looked again with the naked eye, he +could not tell where what he had seen was. + +He descended the knoll and began walking up and down before it. + +Occasionally he stopped, listened to the firing, and gazed +intently at the battlefield. + +But not only was it impossible to make out what was happening from +where he was standing down below, or from the knoll above on which +some of his generals had taken their stand, but even from the +fleches themselves- in which by this time there were now Russian and +now French soldiers, alternately or together, dead, wounded, alive, +frightened, or maddened- even at those fleches themselves it was +impossible to make out what was taking place. There for several +hours amid incessant cannon and musketry fire, now Russians were +seen alone, now Frenchmen alone, now infantry, and now cavalry: they +appeared, fired, fell, collided, not knowing what to do with one +another, screamed, and ran back again. + +From the battlefield adjutants he had sent out, and orderlies from +his marshals, kept galloping up to Napoleon with reports of the +progress of the action, but all these reports were false, both because +it was impossible in the heat of battle to say what was happening at +any given moment and because many of the adjutants did not go to the +actual place of conflict but reported what they had heard from others; +and also because while an adjutant was riding more than a mile to +Napoleon circumstances changed and the news he brought was already +becoming false. Thus an adjutant galloped up from Murat with tidings +that Borodino had been occupied and the bridge over the Kolocha was in +the hands of the French. The adjutant asked whether Napoleon wished +the troops to cross it? Napoleon gave orders that the troops should +form up on the farther side and wait. But before that order was given- +almost as soon in fact as the adjutant had left Borodino- the bridge +had been retaken by the Russians and burned, in the very skirmish at +which Pierre had been present at the beginning of the battle. + +An adjutant galloped up from the fleches with a pale and +frightened face and reported to Napoleon that their attack had been +repulsed, Campan wounded, and Davout killed; yet at the very time +the adjutant had been told that the French had been repulsed, the +fleches had in fact been recaptured by other French troops, and Davout +was alive and only slightly bruised. On the basis of these necessarily +untrustworthy reports Napoleon gave his orders, which had either +been executed before he gave them or could not be and were not +executed. + +The marshals and generals, who were nearer to the field of battle +but, like Napoleon, did not take part in the actual fighting and +only occasionally went within musket range, made their own +arrangements without asking Napoleon and issued orders where and in +what direction to fire and where cavalry should gallop and infantry +should run. But even their orders, like Napoleon's, were seldom +carried out, and then but partially. For the most part things happened +contrary to their orders. Soldiers ordered to advance ran back on +meeting grapeshot; soldiers ordered to remain where they were, +suddenly, seeing Russians unexpectedly before them, sometimes rushed +back and sometimes forward, and the cavalry dashed without orders in +pursuit of the flying Russians. In this way two cavalry regiments +galloped through the Semenovsk hollow and as soon as they reached +the top of the incline turned round and galloped full speed back +again. The infantry moved in the same way, sometimes running to +quite other places than those they were ordered to go to. All orders +as to where and when to move the guns, when to send infantry to +shoot or horsemen to ride down the Russian infantry- all such orders +were given by the officers on the spot nearest to the units concerned, +without asking either Ney, Davout, or Murat, much less Napoleon. +They did not fear getting into trouble for not fulfilling orders or +for acting on their own initiative, for in battle what is at stake +is what is dearest to man- his own life- and it sometimes seems that +safety lies in running back, sometimes in running forward; and these +men who were right in the heat of the battle acted according to the +mood of the moment. In reality, however, all these movements forward +and backward did not improve or alter the position of the troops. +All their rushing and galloping at one another did little harm, the +harm of disablement and death was caused by the balls and bullets that +flew over the fields on which these men were floundering about. As +soon as they left the place where the balls and bullets were flying +about, their superiors, located in the background, re-formed them +and brought them under discipline and under the influence of that +discipline led them back to the zone of fire, where under the +influence of fear of death they lost their discipline and rushed about +according to the chance promptings of the throng. + +CHAPTER XXXIV + +Napoleon's generals- Davout, Ney, and Murat, who were near that +region of fire and sometimes even entered it- repeatedly led into it +huge masses of well-ordered troops. But contrary to what had always +happened in their former battles, instead of the news they expected of +the enemy's flight, these orderly masses returned thence as +disorganized and terrified mobs. The generals re-formed them, but +their numbers constantly decreased. In the middle of the day Murat +sent his adjutant to Napoleon to demand reinforcements. + +Napoleon sat at the foot of the knoll, drinking punch, when +Murat's adjutant galloped up with an assurance that the Russians would +be routed if His Majesty would let him have another division. + +"Reinforcements?" said Napoleon in a tone of stern surprise, looking +at the adjutant- a handsome lad with long black curls arranged like +Murat's own- as though he did not understand his words. + +"Reinforcements!" thought Napoleon to himself. "How can they need +reinforcements when they already have half the army directed against a +weak, unentrenched Russian wing?" + +"Tell the King of Naples," said he sternly, "that it is not noon +yet, and I don't yet see my chessboard clearly. Go!..." + +The handsome boy adjutant with the long hair sighed deeply without +removing his hand from his hat and galloped back to where men were +being slaughtered. + +Napoleon rose and having summoned Caulaincourt and Berthier began +talking to them about matters unconnected with the battle. + +In the midst of this conversation, which was beginning to interest +Napoleon, Berthier's eyes turned to look at a general with a suite, +who was galloping toward the knoll on a lathering horse. It was +Belliard. Having dismounted he went up to the Emperor with rapid +strides and in a loud voice began boldly demonstrating the necessity +of sending reinforcements. He swore on his honor that the Russians +were lost if the Emperor would give another division. + +Napoleon shrugged his shoulders and continued to pace up and down +without replying. Belliard began talking loudly and eagerly to the +generals of the suite around him. + +"You are very fiery, Belliard," said Napoleon, when he again came up +to the general. "In the heat of a battle it is easy to make a mistake. +Go and have another look and then come back to me." + +Before Belliard was out of sight, a messenger from another part of +the battlefield galloped up. + +"Now then, what do you want?" asked Napoleon in the tone of a man +irritated at being continually disturbed. + +"Sire, the prince..." began the adjutant. + +"Asks for reinforcements?" said Napoleon with an angry gesture. + +The adjutant bent his head affirmatively and began to report, but +the Emperor turned from him, took a couple of steps, stopped, came +back, and called Berthier. + +"We must give reserves," he said, moving his arms slightly apart. +"Who do you think should be sent there?" he asked of Berthier (whom he +subsequently termed "that gosling I have made an eagle"). + +"Send Claparede's division, sire," replied Berthier, who knew all +the divisions regiments, and battalions by heart. + +Napoleon nodded assent. + +The adjutant galloped to Claparede's division and a few minutes +later the Young Guards stationed behind the knoll moved forward. +Napoleon gazed silently in that direction. + +"No!" he suddenly said to Berthier. "I can't send Claparede. Send +Friant's division." + +Though there was no advantage in sending Friant's division instead +of Claparede's, and even in obvious inconvenience and delay in +stopping Claparede and sending Friant now, the order was carried out +exactly. Napoleon did not notice that in regard to his army he was +playing the part of a doctor who hinders by his medicines- a role he +so justly understood and condemned. + +Friant's division disappeared as the others had done into the +smoke of the battlefield. From all sides adjutants continued to arrive +at a gallop and as if by agreement all said the same thing. They all +asked for reinforcements and all said that the Russians were holding +their positions and maintaining a hellish fire under which the +French army was melting away. + +Napoleon sat on a campstool, wrapped in thought. + +M. de Beausset, the man so fond of travel, having fasted since +morning, came up to the Emperor and ventured respectfully to suggest +lunch to His Majesty. + +"I hope I may now congratulate Your Majesty on a victory?" said he. + +Napoleon silently shook his head in negation. Assuming the +negation to refer only to the victory and not to the lunch, M. de +Beausset ventured with respectful jocularity to remark that there is +no reason for not having lunch when one can get it. + +"Go away..." exclaimed Napoleon suddenly and morosely, and turned +aside. + +A beatific smile of regret, repentance, and ecstasy beamed on M. +de Beausset's face and he glided away to the other generals. + +Napoleon was experiencing a feeling of depression like that of an +ever-lucky gambler who, after recklessly flinging money about and +always winning, suddenly just when he has calculated all the chances +of the game, finds that the more he considers his play the more surely +he loses. + +His troops were the same, his generals the same, the same +preparations had been made, the same dispositions, and the same +proclamation courte et energique, he himself was still the same: he +knew that and knew that he was now even more experienced and +skillful than before. Even the enemy was the same as at Austerlitz and +Friedland- yet the terrible stroke of his arm had supernaturally +become impotent. + +All the old methods that had been unfailingly crowned with +success: the concentration of batteries on one point, an attack by +reserves to break the enemy's line, and a cavalry attack by "the men +of iron," all these methods had already been employed, yet not only +was there no victory, but from all sides came the same news of +generals killed and wounded, of reinforcements needed, of the +impossibility of driving back the Russians, and of disorganization +among his own troops. + +Formerly, after he had given two or three orders and uttered a few +phrases, marshals and adjutants had come galloping up with +congratulations and happy faces, announcing the trophies taken, the +corps of prisoners, bundles of enemy eagles and standards, cannon +and stores, and Murat had only begged leave to loose the cavalry to +gather in the baggage wagons. So it had been at Lodi, Marengo, Arcola, +Jena, Austerlitz, Wagram, and so on. But now something strange was +happening to his troops. + +Despite news of the capture of the fleches, Napoleon saw that this +was not the same, not at all the same, as what had happened in his +former battles. He saw that what he was feeling was felt by all the +men about him experienced in the art of war. All their faces looked +dejected, and they all shunned one another's eyes- only a de +Beausset could fail to grasp the meaning of what was happening. + +But Napoleon with his long experience of war well knew the meaning +of a battle not gained by the attacking side in eight hours, after all +efforts had been expended. He knew that it was a lost battle and +that the least accident might now- with the fight balanced on such a +strained center- destroy him and his army. + +When he ran his mind over the whole of this strange Russian campaign +in which not one battle had been won, and in which not a flag, or +cannon, or army corps had been captured in two months, when he +looked at the concealed depression on the faces around him and heard +reports of the Russians still holding their ground- a terrible feeling +like a nightmare took possession of him, and all the unlucky accidents +that might destroy him occurred to his mind. The Russians might fall +on his left wing, might break through his center, he himself might +be killed by a stray cannon ball. All this was possible. In former +battles he had only considered the possibilities of success, but now +innumerable unlucky chances presented themselves, and he expected them +all. Yes, it was like a dream in which a man fancies that a ruffian is +coming to attack him, and raises his arm to strike that ruffian a +terrible blow which he knows should annihilate him, but then feels +that his arm drops powerless and limp like a rag, and the horror of +unavoidable destruction seizes him in his helplessness. + +The news that the Russians were attacking the left flank of the +French army aroused that horror in Napoleon. He sat silently on a +campstool below the knoll, with head bowed and elbows on his knees. +Berthier approached and suggested that they should ride along the line +to ascertain the position of affairs. + +"What? What do you say?" asked Napoleon. "Yes, tell them to bring me +my horse." + +He mounted and rode toward Semenovsk. + +Amid the powder smoke, slowly dispersing over the whole space +through which Napoleon rode, horses and men were lying in pools of +blood, singly or in heaps. Neither Napoleon nor any of his generals +had ever before seen such horrors or so many slain in such a small +area. The roar of guns, that had not ceased for ten hours, wearied the +ear and gave a peculiar significance to the spectacle, as music does +to tableaux vivants. Napoleon rode up the high ground at Semenovsk, +and through the smoke saw ranks of men in uniforms of a color +unfamiliar to him. They were Russians. + +The Russians stood in serried ranks behind Semenovsk village and its +knoll, and their guns boomed incessantly along their line and sent +forth clouds of smoke. It was no longer a battle: it was a +continuous slaughter which could be of no avail either to the French +or the Russians. Napoleon stopped his horse and again fell into the +reverie from which Berthier had aroused him. He could not stop what +was going on before him and around him and was supposed to be directed +by him and to depend on him, and from its lack of success this affair, +for the first time, seemed to him unnecessary and horrible. + +One of the generals rode up to Napoleon and ventured to offer to +lead the Old Guard into action. Ney and Berthier, standing near +Napoleon, exchanged looks and smiled contemptuously at this +general's senseless offer. + +Napoleon bowed his head and remained silent a long time. + +"At eight hundred leagues from France, I will not have my Guard +destroyed!" he said, and turning his horse rode back to Shevardino. + +CHAPTER XXXV + +On the rug-covered bench where Pierre had seen him in the morning +sat Kutuzov, his gray head hanging, his heavy body relaxed. He gave no +orders, but only assented to or dissented from what others suggested. + +"Yes, yes, do that," he replied to various proposals. "Yes, yes: go, +dear boy, and have a look," he would say to one or another of those +about him; or, "No, don't, we'd better wait!" He listened to the +reports that were brought him and gave directions when his +subordinates demanded that of him; but when listening to the reports +it seemed as if he were not interested in the import of the words +spoken, but rather in something else- in the expression of face and +tone of voice of those who were reporting. By long years of military +experience he knew, and with the wisdom of age understood, that it +is impossible for one man to direct hundreds of thousands of others +struggling with death, and he knew that the result of a battle is +decided not by the orders of a commander in chief, nor the place where +the troops are stationed, nor by the number of cannon or of +slaughtered men, but by that intangible force called the spirit of the +army, and he watched this force and guided it in as far as that was in +his power. + +Kutuzov's general expression was one of concentrated quiet +attention, and his face wore a strained look as if he found it +difficult to master the fatigue of his old and feeble body. + +At eleven o'clock they brought him news that the fleches captured by +the French had been retaken, but that Prince Bagration was wounded. +Kutuzov groaned and swayed his head. + +"Ride over to Prince Peter Ivanovich and find out about it exactly," +he said to one of his adjutants, and then turned to the Duke of +Wurttemberg who was standing behind him. + +"Will Your Highness please take command of the first army?" + +Soon after the duke's departure- before he could possibly have +reached Semenovsk- his adjutant came back from him and told Kutuzov +that the duke asked for more troops. + +Kutuzov made a grimace and sent an order to Dokhturov to take over +the command of the first army, and a request to the duke- whom he said +he could not spare at such an important moment- to return to him. When +they brought him news that Murat had been taken prisoner, and the +staff officers congratulated him, Kutuzov smiled. + +"Wait a little, gentlemen," said he. "The battle is won, and there +is nothing extraordinary in the capture of Murat. Still, it is +better to wait before we rejoice." + +But he sent an adjutant to take the news round the army. + +When Scherbinin came galloping from the left flank with news that +the French had captured the fleches and the village of Semenovsk, +Kutuzov, guessing by the sounds of the battle and by Scherbinin's +looks that the news was bad, rose as if to stretch his legs and, +taking Scherbinin's arm, led him aside. + +"Go, my dear fellow," he said to Ermolov, "and see whether something +can't be done." + +Kutuzov was in Gorki, near the center of the Russian position. The +attack directed by Napoleon against our left flank had been several +times repulsed. In the center the French had not got beyond +Borodino, and on their left flank Uvarov's cavalry had put the +French to flight. + +Toward three o'clock the French attacks ceased. On the faces of +all who came from the field of battle, and of those who stood around +him, Kutuzov noticed an expression of extreme tension. He was +satisfied with the day's success- a success exceeding his +expectations, but the old man's strength was failing him. Several +times his head dropped low as if it were falling and he dozed off. +Dinner was brought him. + +Adjutant General Wolzogen, the man who when riding past Prince +Andrew had said, "the war should be extended widely," and whom +Bagration so detested, rode up while Kutuzov was at dinner. Wolzogen +had come from Barclay de Tolly to report on the progress of affairs on +the left flank. The sagacious Barclay de Tolly, seeing crowds of +wounded men running back and the disordered rear of the army, +weighed all the circumstances, concluded that the battle was lost, and +sent his favorite officer to the commander in chief with that news. + +Kutuzov was chewing a piece of roast chicken with difficulty and +glanced at Wolzogen with eyes that brightened under their puckering +lids. + +Wolzogen, nonchalantly stretching his legs, approached Kutuzov +with a half-contemptuous smile on his lips, scarcely touching the peak +of his cap. + +He treated his Serene Highness with a somewhat affected +nonchalance intended to show that, as a highly trained military man, +he left it to Russians to make an idol of this useless old man, but +that he knew whom he was dealing with. "Der alte Herr" (as in their +own set the Germans called Kutuzov) "is making himself very +comfortable," thought Wolzogen, and looking severely at the dishes +in front of Kutuzov he began to report to "the old gentleman" the +position of affairs on the left flank as Barclay had ordered him to +and as he himself had seen and understood it. + +"All the points of our position are in the enemy's hands and we +cannot dislodge them for lack of troops, the men are running away +and it is impossible to stop them," he reported. + +Kutuzov ceased chewing and fixed an astonished gaze on Wolzogen, +as if not understand what was said to him. Wolzogen, noticing "the old +gentleman's" agitation, said with a smile: + +"I have not considered it right to conceal from your Serene Highness +what I have seen. The troops are in complete disorder..." + +"You have seen? You have seen?..." Kutuzov shouted frowning, and +rising quickly he went up to Wolzogen. + +"How... how dare you!..." he shouted, choking and making a +threatening gesture with his trembling arms: "How dare you, sir, say +that to me? You know nothing about it. Tell General Barclay from me +that his information is incorrect and that the real course of the +battle is better known to me, the commander in chief, than to him." + +Wolzogen was about to make a rejoinder, but Kutuzov interrupted him. + +"The enemy has been repulsed on the left and defeated on the right +flank. If you have seen amiss, sir, do not allow yourself to say +what you don't know! Be so good as to ride to General Barclay and +inform him of my firm intention to attack the enemy tomorrow," said +Kutuzov sternly. + +All were silent, and the only sound audible was the heavy +breathing of the panting old general. + +"They are repulsed everywhere, for which I thank God and our brave +army! The enemy is beaten, and tomorrow we shall drive him from the +sacred soil of Russia," said Kutuzov crossing himself, and he suddenly +sobbed as his eyes filled with tears. + +Wolzogen, shrugging his shoulders and curling his lips, stepped +silently aside, marveling at "the old gentleman's" conceited +stupidity. + +"Ah, here he is, my hero!" said Kutuzov to a portly, handsome, +dark-haired general who was just ascending the knoll. + +This was Raevski, who had spent the whole day at the most +important part of the field of Borodino. + +Raevski reported that the troops were firmly holding their ground +and that the French no longer ventured to attack. + +After hearing him, Kutuzov said in French: + +"Then you do not think, like some others, that we must retreat?" + +"On the contrary, your Highness, in indecisive actions it is +always the most stubborn who remain victors," replied Raevski, "and in +my opinion..." + +"Kaysarov!" Kutuzov called to his adjutant. "Sit down and write +out the order of the day for tomorrow. And you," he continued, +addressing another, "ride along the line and that tomorrow we attack." + +While Kutuzov was talking to Raevski and dictating the order of +the day, Wolzogen returned from Barclay and said that General +Barclay wished to have written confirmation of the order the field +marshal had given. + +Kutuzov, without looking at Wolzogen, gave directions for the +order to be written out which the former commander in chief, to +avoid personal responsibility, very judiciously wished to receive. + +And by means of that mysterious indefinable bond which maintains +throughout an army one and the same temper, known as "the spirit of +the army," and which constitutes the sinew of war, Kutuzov's words, +his order for a battle next day, immediately became known from one end +of the army to the other. + +It was far from being the same words or the same order that +reached the farthest links of that chain. The tales passing from mouth +to mouth at different ends of the army did not even resemble what +Kutuzov had said, but the sense of his words spread everywhere because +what he said was not the outcome of cunning calculations, but of a +feeling that lay in the commander in chief's soul as in that of +every Russian. + +And on learning that tomorrow they were to attack the enemy, and +hearing from the highest quarters a confirmation of what they wanted +to believe, the exhausted, wavering men felt comforted and inspirited. + +CHAPTER XXXVI + +Prince Andrew's regiment was among the reserves which till after one +o'clock were stationed inactive behind Semenovsk, under heavy +artillery fire. Toward two o'clock the regiment, having already lost +more than two hundred men, was moved forward into a trampled +oatfield in the gap between Semenovsk and the Knoll Battery, where +thousands of men perished that day and on which an intense, +concentrated fire from several hundred enemy guns was directed between +one and two o'clock. + +Without moving from that spot or firing a single shot the regiment +here lost another third of its men. From in front and especially +from the right, in the unlifting smoke the guns boomed, and out of the +mysterious domain of smoke that overlay the whole space in front, +quick hissing cannon balls and slow whistling shells flew unceasingly. +At times, as if to allow them a respite, a quarter of an hour passed +during which the cannon balls and shells all flew overhead, but +sometimes several men were torn from the regiment in a minute and +the slain were continually being dragged away and the wounded +carried off. + +With each fresh blow less and less chance of life remained for those +not yet killed. The regiment stood in columns of battalion, three +hundred paces apart, but nevertheless the men were always in one and +the same mood. All alike were taciturn and morose. Talk was rarely +heard in the ranks, and it ceased altogether every time the thud of +a successful shot and the cry of "stretchers!" was heard. Most of +the time, by their officers' order, the men sat on the ground. One, +having taken off his shako, carefully loosened the gathers of its +lining and drew them tight again; another, rubbing some dry clay +between his palms, polished his bayonet; another fingered the strap +and pulled the buckle of his bandolier, while another smoothed and +refolded his leg bands and put his boots on again. Some built little +houses of the tufts in the plowed ground, or plaited baskets from +the straw in the cornfield. All seemed fully absorbed in these +pursuits. When men were killed or wounded, when rows of stretchers +went past, when some troops retreated, and when great masses of the +enemy came into view through the smoke, no one paid any attention to +these things. But when our artillery or cavalry advanced or some of +our infantry were seen to move forward, words of approval were heard +on all sides. But the liveliest attention was attracted by occurrences +quite apart from, and unconnected with, the battle. It was as if the +minds of these morally exhausted men found relief in everyday, +commonplace occurrences. A battery of artillery was passing in front +of the regiment. The horse of an ammunition cart put its leg over a +trace. "Hey, look at the trace horse!... Get her leg out! She'll +fall.... Ah, they don't see it!" came identical shouts from the +ranks all along the regiment. Another time, general attention was +attracted by a small brown dog, coming heaven knows whence, which +trotted in a preoccupied manner in front of the ranks with tail +stiffly erect till suddenly a shell fell close by, when it yelped, +tucked its tail between its legs, and darted aside. Yells and +shrieks of laughter rose from the whole regiment. But such +distractions lasted only a moment, and for eight hours the men had +been inactive, without food, in constant fear of death, and their pale +and gloomy faces grew ever paler and gloomier. + +Prince Andrew, pale and gloomy like everyone in the regiment, +paced up and down from the border of one patch to another, at the edge +of the meadow beside an oatfield, with head bowed and arms behind +his back. There was nothing for him to do and no orders to be given. +Everything went on of itself. The killed were dragged from the +front, the wounded carried away, and the ranks closed up. If any +soldiers ran to the rear they returned immediately and hastily. At +first Prince Andrew, considering it his duty to rouse the courage of +the men and to set them an example, walked about among the ranks, +but he soon became convinced that this was unnecessary and that +there was nothing he could teach them. All the powers of his soul, +as of every soldier there, were unconsciously bent on avoiding the +contemplation of the horrors of their situation. He walked along the +meadow, dragging his feet, rustling the grass, and gazing at the +dust that covered his boots; now he took big strides trying to keep to +the footprints left on the meadow by the mowers, then he counted his +steps, calculating how often he must walk from one strip to another to +walk a mile, then he stripped the flowers from the wormwood that +grew along a boundary rut, rubbed them in his palms, and smelled their +pungent, sweetly bitter scent. Nothing remained of the previous +day's thoughts. He thought of nothing. He listened with weary ears +to the ever-recurring sounds, distinguishing the whistle of flying +projectiles from the booming of the reports, glanced at the tiresomely +familiar faces of the men of the first battalion, and waited. "Here it +comes... this one is coming our way again!" he thought, listening to +an approaching whistle in the hidden region of smoke. "One, another! +Again! It has hit...." He stopped and looked at the ranks. "No, it has +gone over. But this one has hit!" And again he started trying to reach +the boundary strip in sixteen paces. A whizz and a thud! Five paces +from him, a cannon ball tore up the dry earth and disappeared. A chill +ran down his back. Again he glanced at the ranks. Probably many had +been hit- a large crowd had gathered near the second battalion. + +"Adjutant!" he shouted. "Order them not to crowd together." + +The adjutant, having obeyed this instruction, approached Prince +Andrew. From the other side a battalion commander rode up. + +"Look out!" came a frightened cry from a soldier and, like a bird +whirring in rapid flight and alighting on the ground, a shell +dropped with little noise within two steps of Prince Andrew and +close to the battalion commander's horse. The horse first, +regardless of whether it was right or wrong to show fear, snorted, +reared almost throwing the major, and galloped aside. The horse's +terror infected the men. + +"Lie down!" cried the adjutant, throwing himself flat on the ground. + +Prince Andrew hesitated. The smoking shell spun like a top between +him and the prostrate adjutant, near a wormwood plant between the +field and the meadow. + +"Can this be death?" thought Prince Andrew, looking with a quite +new, envious glance at the grass, the wormwood, and the streamlet of +smoke that curled up from the rotating black ball. "I cannot, I do not +wish to die. I love life- I love this grass, this earth, this air...." +He thought this, and at the same time remembered that people were +looking at him. + +"It's shameful, sir!" he said to the adjutant. "What..." + +He did not finish speaking. At one and the same moment came the +sound of an explosion, a whistle of splinters as from a breaking +window frame, a suffocating smell of powder, and Prince Andrew started +to one side, raising his arm, and fell on his chest. Several +officers ran up to him. From the right side of his abdomen, blood +was welling out making a large stain on the grass. + +The militiamen with stretchers who were called up stood behind the +officers. Prince Andrew lay on his chest with his face in the grass, +breathing heavily and noisily. + +"What are you waiting for? Come along!" + +The peasants went up and took him by his shoulders and legs, but +he moaned piteously and, exchanging looks, they set him down again. + +"Pick him up, lift him, it's all the same!" cried someone. + +They again took him by the shoulders and laid him on the stretcher. + +"Ah, God! My God! What is it? The stomach? That means death! My +God!"- voices among the officers were heard saying. + +"It flew a hair's breadth past my ear," said the adjutant. + +The peasants, adjusting the stretcher to their shoulders, started +hurriedly along the path they had trodden down, to the dressing +station. + +"Keep in step! Ah... those peasants!" shouted an officer, seizing by +their shoulders and checking the peasants, who were walking unevenly +and jolting the stretcher. + +"Get into step, Fedor... I say, Fedor!" said the foremost peasant. + +"Now that's right!" said the one behind joyfully, when he had got +into step. + +"Your excellency! Eh, Prince!" said the trembling voice of Timokhin, +who had run up and was looking down on the stretcher. + +Prince Andrew opened his eyes and looked up at the speaker from +the stretcher into which his head had sunk deep and again his +eyelids drooped. + +The militiamen carried Prince Andrew to dressing station by the +wood, where wagons were stationed. The dressing station consisted of +three tents with flaps turned back, pitched at the edge of a birch +wood. In the wood, wagons and horses were standing. The horses were +eating oats from their movable troughs and sparrows flew down and +pecked the grains that fell. Some crows, scenting blood, flew among +the birch trees cawing impatiently. Around the tents, over more than +five acres, bloodstained men in various garbs stood, sat, or lay. +Around the wounded stood crowds of soldier stretcher-bearers with +dismal and attentive faces, whom the officers keeping order tried in +vain to drive from the spot. Disregarding the officers' orders, the +soldiers stood leaning against their stretchers and gazing intently, +as if trying to comprehend the difficult problem of what was taking +place before them. From the tents came now loud angry cries and now +plaintive groans. Occasionally dressers ran out to fetch water, or +to point out those who were to be brought in next. The wounded men +awaiting their turn outside the tents groaned, sighed, wept, screamed, +swore, or asked for vodka. Some were delirious. Prince Andrew's +bearers, stepping over the wounded who had not yet been bandaged, took +him, as a regimental commander, close up to one of the tents and there +stopped, awaiting instructions. Prince Andrew opened his eyes and +for a long time could not make out what was going on around him. He +remembered the meadow, the wormwood, the field, the whirling black +ball, and his sudden rush of passionate love of life. Two steps from +him, leaning against a branch and talking loudly and attracting +general attention, stood a tall, handsome, black-haired +noncommissioned officer with a bandaged head. He had been wounded in +the head and leg by bullets. Around him, eagerly listening to his +talk, a crowd of wounded and stretcher-bearers was gathered. + +"We kicked him out from there so that he chucked everything, we +grabbed the King himself!" cried he, looking around him with eyes that +glittered with fever. "If only reserves had come up just then, lads, +there wouldn't have been nothing left of him! I tell you surely..." + +Like all the others near the speaker, Prince Andrew looked at him +with shining eyes and experienced a sense of comfort. "But isn't it +all the same now?" thought he. "And what will be there, and what has +there been here? Why was I so reluctant to part with life? There was +something in this life I did not and do not understand." + +CHAPTER XXXVII + +One of the doctors came out of the tent in a bloodstained apron, +holding a cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his +small bloodstained hands, so as not to smear it. He raised his head +and looked about him, but above the level of the wounded men. He +evidently wanted a little respite. After turning his head from right +to left for some time, he sighed and looked down. + +"All right, immediately," he replied to a dresser who pointed Prince +Andrew out to him, and he told them to carry him into the tent. + +Murmurs arose among the wounded who were waiting. + +"It seems that even in the next world only the gentry are to have +a chance!" remarked one. + +Prince Andrew was carried in and laid on a table that had only +just been cleared and which a dresser was washing down. Prince +Andrew could not make out distinctly what was in that tent. The +pitiful groans from all sides and the torturing pain in his thigh, +stomach, and back distracted him. All he saw about him merged into a +general impression of naked, bleeding human bodies that seemed to fill +the whole of the low tent, as a few weeks previously, on that hot +August day, such bodies had filled the dirty pond beside the +Smolensk road. Yes, it was the same flesh, the same chair a canon, the +sight of which had even then filled him with horror, as by a +presentiment. + +There were three operating tables in the tent. Two were occupied, +and on the third they placed Prince Andrew. For a little while he +was left alone and involuntarily witnessed what was taking place on +the other two tables. On the nearest one sat a Tartar, probably a +Cossack, judging by the uniform thrown down beside him. Four +soldiers were holding him, and a spectacled doctor was cutting into +his muscular brown back. + +"Ooh, ooh, ooh!" grunted the Tartar, and suddenly lifting up his +swarthy snub-nosed face with its high cheekbones, and baring his white +teeth, he began to wriggle and twitch his body and utter piercing, +ringing, and prolonged yells. On the other table, round which many +people were crowding, a tall well-fed man lay on his back with his +head thrown back. His curly hair, its color, and the shape of his head +seemed strangely familiar to Prince Andrew. Several dressers were +pressing on his chest to hold him down. One large, white, plump leg +twitched rapidly all the time with a feverish tremor. The man was +sobbing and choking convulsively. Two doctors- one of whom was pale +and trembling- were silently doing something to this man's other, gory +leg. When he had finished with the Tartar, whom they covered with an +overcoat, the spectacled doctor came up to Prince Andrew, wiping his +hands. + +He glanced at Prince Andrew's face and quickly turned away. + +"Undress him! What are you waiting for?" he cried angrily to the +dressers. + +His very first, remotest recollections of childhood came back to +Prince Andrew's mind when the dresser with sleeves rolled up began +hastily to undo the buttons of his clothes and undressed him. The +doctor bent down over the wound, felt it, and sighed deeply. Then he +made a sign to someone, and the torturing pain in his abdomen caused +Prince Andrew to lose consciousness. When he came to himself the +splintered portions of his thighbone had been extracted, the torn +flesh cut away, and the wound bandaged. Water was being sprinkled on +his face. As soon as Prince Andrew opened his eyes, the doctor bent +over, kissed him silently on the lips, and hurried away. + +After the sufferings he had been enduring, Prince Andrew enjoyed a +blissful feeling such as he had not experienced for a long time. All +the best and happiest moments of his life- especially his earliest +childhood, when he used to be undressed and put to bed, and when +leaning over him his nurse sang him to sleep and he, burying his +head in the pillow, felt happy in the mere consciousness of life- +returned to his memory, not merely as something past but as +something present. + +The doctors were busily engaged with the wounded man the shape of +whose head seemed familiar to Prince Andrew: they were lifting him +up and trying to quiet him. + +"Show it to me.... Oh, ooh... Oh! Oh, ooh!" his frightened moans +could be heard, subdued by suffering and broken by sobs. + +Hearing those moans Prince Andrew wanted Andrew wanted to weep. +Whether because he was dying without glory, or because he was sorry to +part with life, or because of those memories of a childhood that could +not return, or because he was suffering and others were suffering +and that man near him was groaning so piteously- he felt like +weeping childlike, kindly, and almost happy tears. + +The wounded man was shown his amputated leg stained with clotted +blood and with the boot still on. + +"Oh! Oh, ooh!" he sobbed, like a woman. + +The doctor who had been standing beside him, preventing Prince +Andrew from seeing his face, moved away. + +"My God! What is this? Why is he here?" said Prince Andrew to +himself. + +In the miserable, sobbing, enfeebled man whose leg had just been +amputated, he recognized Anatole Kuragin. Men were supporting him in +their arms and offering him a glass of water, but his trembling, +swollen lips could not grasp its rim. Anatole was sobbing painfully. +"Yes, it is he! Yes, that man is somehow closely and painfully +connected with me," thought Prince Andrew, not yet clearly grasping +what he saw before him. "What is the connection of that man with my +childhood and life?" he asked himself without finding an answer. And +suddenly a new unexpected memory from that realm of pure and loving +childhood presented itself to him. He remembered Natasha as he had +seen her for the first time at the ball in 1810, with her slender neck +and arms and with a frightened happy face ready for rapture, and +love and tenderness for her, stronger and more vivid than ever, +awoke in his soul. He now remembered the connection that existed +between himself and this man who was dimly gazing at him through tears +that filled his swollen eyes. He remembered everything, and ecstatic +pity and love for that man overflowed his happy heart. + +Prince Andrew could no longer restrain himself and wept tender +loving tears for his fellow men, for himself, and for his own and +their errors. + +"Compassion, love of our brothers, for those who love us and for +those who hate us, love of our enemies; yes, that love which God +preached on earth and which Princess Mary taught me and I did not +understand- that is what made me sorry to part with life, that is what +remained for me had I lived. But now it is too late. I know it!" + +CHAPTER XXXVIII + +The terrible spectacle of the battlefield covered with dead and +wounded, together with the heaviness of his head and the news that +some twenty generals he knew personally had been killed or wounded, +and the consciousness of the impotence of his once mighty arm, +produced an unexpected impression on Napoleon who usually liked to +look at the killed and wounded, thereby, he considered, testing his +strength of mind. This day the horrible appearance of the +battlefield overcame that strength of mind which he thought +constituted his merit and his greatness. He rode hurriedly from the +battlefield and returned to the Shevardino knoll, where he sat on +his campstool, his sallow face swollen and heavy, his eyes dim, his +nose red, and his voice hoarse, involuntarily listening, with downcast +eyes, to the sounds of firing. With painful dejection he awaited the +end of this action, in which he regarded himself as a participant +and which he was unable to arrest. A personal, human feeling for a +brief moment got the better of the artificial phantasm of life he +had served so long. He felt in his own person the sufferings and death +he had witnessed on the battlefield. The heaviness of his head and +chest reminded him of the possibility of suffering and death for +himself. At that moment he did not desire Moscow, or victory, or glory +(what need had he for any more glory?). The one thing he wished for +was rest, tranquillity, and freedom. But when he had been on the +Semenovsk heights the artillery commander had proposed to him to bring +several batteries of artillery up to those heights to strengthen the +fire on the Russian troops crowded in front of Knyazkovo. Napoleon had +assented and had given orders that news should be brought to him of +the effect those batteries produced. + +An adjutant came now to inform him that the fire of two hundred guns +had been concentrated on the Russians, as he had ordered, but that +they still held their ground. + +"Our fire is mowing them down by rows, but still they hold on," said +the adjutant. + +"They want more!..." said Napoleon in a hoarse voice. + +"Sire?" asked the adjutant who had not heard the remark. + +"They want more!" croaked Napoleon frowning. "Let them have it!" + +Even before he gave that order the thing he did not desire, and +for which he gave the order only because he thought it was expected of +him, was being done. And he fell back into that artificial realm of +imaginary greatness, and again- as a horse walking a treadmill +thinks it is doing something for itself- he submissively fulfilled the +cruel, sad, gloomy, and inhuman role predestined for him. + +And not for that day and hour alone were the mind and conscience +darkened of this man on whom the responsibility for what was happening +lay more than on all the others who took part in it. Never to the +end of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the +significance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness and +truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to +grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as +they were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, +goodness, and all humanity. + +Not only on that day, as he rode over the battlefield strewn with +men killed and maimed (by his will as he believed), did he reckon as +he looked at them how many Russians there were for each Frenchman and, +deceiving himself, find reason for rejoicing in the calculation that +there were five Russians for every Frenchman. Not on that day alone +did he write in a letter to Paris that "the battle field was +superb," because fifty thousand corpses lay there, but even on the +island of St. Helena in the peaceful solitude where he said he +intended to devote his leisure to an account of the great deeds he had +done, he wrote: + +The Russian war should have been the most popular war of modern +times: it was a war of good sense, for real interests, for the +tranquillity and security of all; it was purely pacific and +conservative. + +It was a war for a great cause, the end of uncertainties and the +beginning of security. A new horizon and new labors were opening +out, full of well-being and prosperity for all. The European system +was already founded; all that remained was to organize it. + +Satisfied on these great points and with tranquility everywhere, I +too should have had my Congress and my Holy Alliance. Those ideas were +stolen from me. In that reunion of great sovereigns we should have +discussed our interests like one family, and have rendered account +to the peoples as clerk to master. + +Europe would in this way soon have been, in fact, but one people, +and anyone who traveled anywhere would have found himself always in +the common fatherland. I should have demanded the freedom of all +navigable rivers for everybody, that the seas should be common to all, +and that the great standing armies should be reduced henceforth to +mere guards for the sovereigns. + +On returning to France, to the bosom of the great, strong, +magnificent, peaceful, and glorious fatherland, I should have +proclaimed her frontiers immutable; all future wars purely +defensive, all aggrandizement antinational. I should have associated +my son in the Empire; my dictatorship would have been finished, and +his constitutional reign would have begun. + +Paris would have been the capital of the world, and the French the +envy of the nations! + +My leisure then, and my old age, would have been devoted, in company +with the Empress and during the royal apprenticeship of my son, to +leisurely visiting, with our own horses and like a true country +couple, every corner of the Empire, receiving complaints, redressing +wrongs, and scattering public buildings and benefactions on all +sides and everywhere. + +Napoleon, predestined by Providence for the gloomy role of +executioner of the peoples, assured himself that the aim of his +actions had been the peoples' welfare and that he could control the +fate of millions and by the employment of power confer benefactions. + +"Of four hundred thousand who crossed the Vistula," he wrote further +of the Russian war, "half were Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Poles, +Bavarians, Wurttembergers, Mecklenburgers, Spaniards, Italians, and +Neapolitans. The Imperial army, strictly speaking, was one third +composed of Dutch, Belgians, men from the borders of the Rhine, +Piedmontese, Swiss, Genevese, Tuscans, Romans, inhabitants of the +Thirty-second Military Division, of Bremen, of Hamburg, and so on: +it included scarcely a hundred and forty thousand who spoke French. +The Russian expedition actually cost France less than fifty thousand +men; the Russian army in its retreat from Vilna to Moscow lost in +the various battles four times more men than the French army; the +burning of Moscow cost the lives of a hundred thousand Russians who +died of cold and want in the woods; finally, in its march from +Moscow to the Oder the Russian army also suffered from the severity of +the season; so that by the the time it reached Vilna it numbered +only fifty thousand, and at Kalisch less than eighteen thousand." + +He imagined that the war with Russia came about by his will, and the +horrors that occurred did not stagger his soul. He boldly took the +whole responsibility for what happened, and his darkened mind found +justification in the belief that among the hundreds of thousands who +perished there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians. + +CHAPTER XXXIX + +Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and +various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davydov +family and to the crown serfs- those fields and meadows where for +hundreds of years the peasants of Borodino, Gorki, Shevardino, and +Semenovsk had reaped their harvests and pastured their cattle. At +the dressing stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood for a +space of some three acres around. Crowds of men of various arms, +wounded and unwounded, with frightened faces, dragged themselves +back to Mozhaysk from the one army and back to Valuevo from the other. +Other crowds, exhausted and hungry, went forward led by their +officers. Others held their ground and continued to fire. + +Over the whole field, previously so gaily beautiful with the glitter +of bayonets and cloudlets of smoke in the morning sun, there now +spread a mist of damp and smoke and a strange acid smell of +saltpeter and blood. Clouds gathered and drops of rain began to fall +on the dead and wounded, on the frightened, exhausted, and +hesitating men, as if to say: "Enough, men! Enough! Cease... bethink +yourselves! What are you doing?" + +To the men of both sides alike, worn out by want of food and rest, +it began equally to appear doubtful whether they should continue to +slaughter one another; all the faces expressed hesitation, and the +question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and +be killed?... You may go and kill whom you please, but I don't want to +do so anymore!" By evening this thought had ripened in every soul. +At any moment these men might have been seized with horror at what +they were doing and might have thrown up everything and run away +anywhere. + +But though toward the end of the battle the men felt all the +horror of what they were doing, though they would have been glad to +leave off, some incomprehensible, mysterious power continued to +control them, and they still brought up the charges, loaded, aimed, +and applied the match, though only one artilleryman survived out of +every three, and though they stumbled and panted with fatigue, +perspiring and stained with blood and powder. The cannon balls flew +just as swiftly and cruelly from both sides, crushing human bodies, +and that terrible work which was not done by the will of a man but +at the will of Him who governs men and worlds continued. + +Anyone looking at the disorganized rear of the Russian army would +have said that, if only the French made one more slight effort, it +would disappear; and anyone looking at the rear of the French army +would have said that the Russians need only make one more slight +effort and the French would be destroyed. But neither the French nor +the Russians made that effort, and the flame of battle burned slowly +out. + +The Russians did not make that effort because they were not +attacking the French. At the beginning of the battle they stood +blocking the way to Moscow and they still did so at the end of the +battle as at the beginning. But even had the aim of the Russians +been to drive the French from their positions, they could not have +made this last effort, for all the Russian troops had been broken +up, there was no part of the Russian army that had not suffered in the +battle, and though still holding their positions they had lost ONE +HALF of their army. + +The French, with the memory of all their former victories during +fifteen years, with the assurance of Napoleon's invincibility, with +the consciousness that they had captured part of the battlefield and +had lost only a quarter of their men and still had their Guards +intact, twenty thousand strong, might easily have made that effort. +The French had attacked the Russian army in order to drive it from its +position ought to have made that effort, for as long as the Russians +continued to block the road to Moscow as before, the aim of the French +had not been attained and all their efforts and losses were in vain. +But the French did not make that effort. Some historians say that +Napoleon need only have used his Old Guards, who were intact, and +the battle would have been won. To speak of what would have happened +had Napoleon sent his Guards is like talking of what would happen if +autumn became spring. It could not be. Napoleon did not give his +Guards, not because he did not want to, but because it could not be +done. All the generals, officers. and soldiers of the French army knew +it could not be done, because the flagging spirit of the troops +would not permitit. + +It was not Napoleon alone who had experienced that nightmare feeling +of the mighty arm being stricken powerless, but all the generals and +soldiers of his army whether they had taken part in the battle or not, +after all their experience of previous battles- when after one tenth +of such efforts the enemy had fled- experienced a similar feeling of +terror before an enemy who, after losing HALF his men, stood as +threateningly at the end as at the beginning of the battle. The +moral force of the attacking French army was exhausted. Not that +sort of victory which is defined by the capture of pieces of +material fastened to sticks, called standards, and of the ground on +which the troops had stood and were standing, but a moral victory that +convinces the enemy of the moral superiority of his opponent and of +his own impotence was gained by the Russians at Borodino. The French +invaders, like an infuriated animal that has in its onslaught received +a mortal wound, felt that they were perishing, but could not stop, any +more than the Russian army, weaker by one half, could help swerving. +By impetus gained, the French army was still able to roll forward to +Moscow, but there, without further effort on the part of the Russians, +it had to perish, bleeding from the mortal wound it had received at +Borodino. The direct consequence of the battle of Borodino was +Napoleon's senseless flight from Moscow, his retreat along the old +Smolensk road, the destruction of the invading army of five hundred +thousand men, and the downfall of Napoleonic France, on which at +Borodino for the first time the hand of an opponent of stronger spirit +had been laid. + +BOOK ELEVEN: 1812 + +CHAPTER I + +Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human +mind. Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man only +when he examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but +at the same time, a large proportion of human error comes from the +arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements. +There is a well known, so-called sophism of the ancients consisting in +this, that Achilles could never catch up with a tortoise he was +following, in spite of the fact that he traveled ten times as fast +as the tortoise. By the time Achilles has covered the distance that +separated him from the tortoise, the tortoise has covered one tenth of +that distance ahead of him: when Achilles has covered that tenth, +the tortoise has covered another one hundredth, and so on forever. +This problem seemed to the ancients insoluble. The absurd answer (that +Achilles could never overtake the tortoise) resulted from this: that +motion was arbitrarily divided into discontinuous elements, whereas +the motion both of Achilles and of the tortoise was continuous. + +By adopting smaller and smaller elements of motion we only +approach a solution of the problem, but never reach it. Only when we +have admitted the conception of the infinitely small, and the +resulting geometrical progression with a common ratio of one tenth, +and have found the sum of this progression to infinity, do we reach +a solution of the problem. + +A modern branch of mathematics having achieved the art of dealing +with the infinitely small can now yield solutions in other more +complex problems of motion which used to appear insoluble. + +This modern branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, when +dealing with problems of motion admits the conception of the +infinitely small, and so conforms to the chief condition of motion +(absolute continuity) and thereby corrects the inevitable error +which the human mind cannot avoid when it deals with separate elements +of motion instead of examining continuous motion. + +In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing +happens. The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable +arbitrary human wills, is continuous. + +To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of +history. But to arrive at these laws, resulting from the sum of all +those human wills, man's mind postulates arbitrary and disconnected +units. The first method of history is to take an arbitrarily +selected series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, +though there is and can be no beginning to any event, for one event +always flows uninterruptedly from another. + +The second method is to consider the actions of some one man- a king +or a commander- as equivalent to the sum of many individual wills; +whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed by the activity +of a single historic personage. + +Historical science in its endeavor to draw nearer to truth +continually takes smaller and smaller units for examination. But +however small the units it takes, we feel that to take any unit +disconnected from others, or to assume a beginning of any +phenomenon, or to say that the will of many men is expressed by the +actions of any one historic personage, is in itself false. + +It needs no critical exertion to reduce utterly to dust any +deductions drawn from history. It is merely necessary to select some +larger or smaller unit as the subject of observation- as criticism has +every right to do, seeing that whatever unit history observes must +always be arbitrarily selected. + +Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the +differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) +and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum +of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history. + +The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century in Europe +present an extraordinary movement of millions of people. Men leave +their customary pursuits, hasten from one side of Europe to the other, +plunder and slaughter one another, triumph and are plunged in despair, +and for some years the whole course of life is altered and presents an +intensive movement which first increases and then slackens. What was +the cause of this movement, by what laws was it governed? asks the +mind of man. + +The historians, replying to this question, lay before us the sayings +and doings of a few dozen men in a building in the city of Paris, +calling these sayings and doings "the Revolution"; then they give a +detailed biography of Napoleon and of certain people favorable or +hostile to him; tell of the influence some of these people had on +others, and say: that is why this movement took place and those are +its laws. + +But the mind of man not only refuses to believe this explanation, +but plainly says that this method of explanation is fallacious, +because in it a weaker phenomenon is taken as the cause of a stronger. +The sum of human wills produced the Revolution and Napoleon, and +only the sum of those wills first tolerated and then destroyed them. + +"But every time there have been conquests there have been +conquerors; every time there has been a revolution in any state +there have been great men," says history. And, indeed, human reason +replies: every time conquerors appear there have been wars, but this +does not prove that the conquerors caused the wars and that it is +possible to find the laws of a war in the personal activity of a +single man. Whenever I look at my watch and its hands point to ten, +I hear the bells of the neighboring church; but because the bells +begin to ring when the hands of the clock reach ten, I have no right +to assume that the movement of the bells is caused by the position +of the hands of the watch. + +Whenever I see the movement of a locomotive I hear the whistle and +see the valves opening and wheels turning; but I have no right to +conclude that the whistling and the turning of wheels are the cause of +the movement of the engine. + +The peasants say that a cold wind blows in late spring because the +oaks are budding, and really every spring cold winds do blow when +the oak is budding. But though I do not know what causes the cold +winds to blow when the oak buds unfold, I cannot agree with the +peasants that the unfolding of the oak buds is the cause of the cold +wind, for the force of the wind is beyond the influence of the buds. I +see only a coincidence of occurrences such as happens with all the +phenomena of life, and I see that however much and however carefully I +observe the hands of the watch, and the valves and wheels of the +engine, and the oak, I shall not discover the cause of the bells +ringing, the engine moving, or of the winds of spring. To that I +must entirely change my point of view and study the laws of the +movement of steam, of the bells, and of the wind. History must do +the same. And attempts in this direction have already been made. + +To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject +of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, +and the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are +moved. No one can say in how far it is possible for man to advance +in this way toward an understanding of the laws of history; but it +is evident that only along that path does the possibility of +discovering the laws of history lie, and that as yet not a millionth +part as much mental effort has been applied in this direction by +historians as has been devoted to describing the actions of various +kings, commanders, and ministers and propounding the historians' own +reflections concerning these actions. + +CHAPTER II + +The forces of a dozen European nations burst into Russia. The +Russian army and people avoided a collision till Smolensk was reached, +and again from Smolensk to Borodino. The French army pushed on to +Moscow, its goal, its impetus ever increasing as it neared its aim, +just as the velocity of a falling body increases as it approaches +the earth. Behind it were seven hundred miles of hunger-stricken, +hostile country; ahead were a few dozen miles separating it from its +goal. Every soldier in Napoleon's army felt this and the invasion +moved on by its own momentum. + +The more the Russian army retreated the more fiercely a spirit of +hatred of the enemy flared up, and while it retreated the army +increased and consolidated. At Borodino a collision took place. +Neither army was broken up, but the Russian army retreated immediately +after the collision as inevitably as a ball recoils after colliding +with another having a greater momentum, and with equal inevitability +the ball of invasion that had advanced with such momentum rolled on +for some distance, though the collision had deprived it of all its +force. + +The Russians retreated eighty miles- to beyond Moscow- and the +French reached Moscow and there came to a standstill. For five weeks +after that there was not a single battle. The French did not move. +As a bleeding, mortally wounded animal licks its wounds, they remained +inert in Moscow for five weeks, and then suddenly, with no fresh +reason, fled back: they made a dash for the Kaluga road, and (after +a victory- for at Malo-Yaroslavets the field of conflict again +remained theirs) without undertaking a single serious battle, they +fled still more rapidly back to Smolensk, beyond Smolensk, beyond +the Berezina, beyond Vilna, and farther still. + +On the evening of the twenty-sixth of August, Kutuzov and the +whole Russian army were convinced that the battle of Borodino was a +victory. Kutuzov reported so to the Emperor. He gave orders to prepare +for a fresh conflict to finish the enemy and did this not to deceive +anyone, but because he knew that the enemy was beaten, as everyone who +had taken part in the battle knew it. + +But all that evening and next day reports came in one after +another of unheard-of losses, of the loss of half the army, and a +fresh battle proved physically impossible. + +It was impossible to give battle before information had been +collected, the wounded gathered in, the supplies of ammunition +replenished, the slain reckoned up, new officers appointed to +replace those who had been killed, and before the men had had food and +sleep. And meanwhile, the very next morning after the battle, the +French army advanced of itself upon the Russians, carried forward by +the force of its own momentum now seemingly increased in inverse +proportion to the square of the distance from its aim. Kutuzov's +wish was to attack next day, and the whole army desired to do so. +But to make an attack the wish to do so is not sufficient, there +must also be a possibility of doing it, and that possibility did not +exist. It was impossible not to retreat a day's march, and then in the +same way it was impossible not to retreat another and a third day's +march, and at last, on the first of September when the army drew +near Moscow- despite the strength of the feeling that had arisen in +all ranks- the force of circumstances compelled it to retire beyond +Moscow. And the troops retired one more, last, day's march, and +abandoned Moscow to the enemy. + +For people accustomed to think that plans of campaign and battles +are made by generals- as any one of us sitting over a map in his study +may imagine how he would have arranged things in this or that +battle- the questions present themselves: Why did Kutuzov during the +retreat not do this or that? Why did he not take up a position +before reaching Fili? Why did he not retire at once by the Kaluga +road, abandoning Moscow? and so on. People accustomed to think in that +way forget, or do not know, the inevitable conditions which always +limit the activities of any commander in chief. The activity of a +commander in chief does not all resemble the activity we imagine to +ourselves when we sit at case in our studies examining some campaign +on the map, with a certain number of troops on this and that side in a +certain known locality, and begin our plans from some given moment. +A commander in chief is never dealing with the beginning of any event- +the position from which we always contemplate it. The commander in +chief is always in the midst of a series of shifting events and so +he never can at any moment consider the whole import of an event +that is occurring. Moment by moment the event is imperceptibly shaping +itself, and at every moment of this continuous, uninterrupted +shaping of events the commander in chief is in the midst of a most +complex play of intrigues, worries, contingencies, authorities, +projects, counsels, threats, and deceptions and is continually obliged +to reply to innumerable questions addressed to him, which constantly +conflict with one another. + +Learned military authorities quite seriously tell us that Kutuzov +should have moved his army to the Kaluga road long before reaching +Fili, and that somebody actually submitted such a proposal to him. But +a commander in chief, especially at a difficult moment, has always +before him not one proposal but dozens simultaneously. And all these +proposals, based on strategics and tactics, contradict each other. + +A commander in chief's business, it would seem, is simply to +choose one of these projects. But even that he cannot do. Events and +time do not wait. For instance, on the twenty-eighth it is suggested +to him to cross to the Kaluga road, but just then an adjutant +gallops up from Miloradovich asking whether he is to engage the French +or retire. An order must be given him at once, that instant. And the +order to retreat carries us past the turn to the Kaluga road. And +after the adjutant comes the commissary general asking where the +stores are to be taken, and the chief of the hospitals asks where +the wounded are to go, and a courier from Petersburg brings a letter +from the sovereign which does not admit of the possibility of +abandoning Moscow, and the commander in chief's rival, the man who +is undermining him (and there are always not merely one but several +such), presents a new project diametrically opposed to that of turning +to the Kaluga road, and the commander in chief himself needs sleep and +refreshment to maintain his energy and a respectable general who has +been overlooked in the distribution of rewards comes to complain, +and the inhabitants of the district pray to be defended, and an +officer sent to inspect the locality comes in and gives a report quite +contrary to what was said by the officer previously sent; and a spy, a +prisoner, and a general who has been on reconnaissance, all describe +the position of the enemy's army differently. People accustomed to +misunderstand or to forget these inevitable conditions of a +commander in chief's actions describe to us, for instance, the +position of the army at Fili and assume that the commander in chief +could, on the first of September, quite freely decide whether to +abandon Moscow or defend it; whereas, with the Russian army less +than four miles from Moscow, no such question existed. When had that +question been settled? At Drissa and at Smolensk and most palpably +of all on the twenty-fourth of August at Shevardino and on the +twenty-sixth at Borodino, and each day and hour and minute of the +retreat from Borodino to Fili. + +CHAPTER III + +When Ermolov, having been sent by Kutuzov to inspect the position, +told the field marshal that it was impossible to fight there before +Moscow and that they must retreat, Kutuzov looked at him in silence. + +"Give me your hand," said he and, turning it over so as to feel +the pulse, added: "You are not well, my dear fellow. Think what you +are saying!" + +Kutuzov could not yet admit the possibility of retreating beyond +Moscow without a battle. + +On the Poklonny Hill, four miles from the Dorogomilov gate of +Moscow, Kutuzov got out of his carriage and sat down on a bench by the +roadside. A great crowd of generals gathered round him, and Count +Rostopchin, who had come out from Moscow, joined them. This +brilliant company separated into several groups who all discussed +the advantages and disadvantages of the position, the state of the +army, the plans suggested, the situation of Moscow, and military +questions generally. Though they had not been summoned for the +purpose, and though it was not so called, they all felt that this +was really a council of war. The conversations all dealt with public +questions. If anyone gave or asked for personal news, it was done in a +whisper and they immediately reverted to general matters. No jokes, or +laughter, or smiles even, were seen among all these men. They +evidently all made an effort to hold themselves at the height the +situation demanded. And all these groups, while talking among +themselves, tried to keep near the commander in chief (whose bench +formed the center of the gathering) and to speak so that he might +overhear them. The commander in chief listened to what was being +said and sometimes asked them to repeat their remarks, but did not +himself take part in the conversations or express any opinion. After +hearing what was being said by one or other of these groups he +generally turned away with an air of disappointment, as though they +were not speaking of anything he wished to hear. Some discussed the +position that had been chosen, criticizing not the position itself +so much as the mental capacity of those who had chosen it. Others +argued that a mistake had been made earlier and that a battle should +have been fought two days before. Others again spoke of the battle +of Salamanca, which was described by Crosart, a newly arrived +Frenchman in a Spanish uniform. (This Frenchman and one of the +German princes serving with the Russian army were discussing the siege +of Saragossa and considering the possibility of defending Moscow in +a similar manner.) Count Rostopchin was telling a fourth group that he +was prepared to die with the city train bands under the walls of the +capital, but that he still could not help regretting having been +left in ignorance of what was happening, and that had he known it +sooner things would have been different.... A fifth group, +displaying the profundity of their strategic perceptions, discussed +the direction the troops would now have to take. A sixth group was +talking absolute nonsense. Kutuzov's expression grew more and more +preoccupied and gloomy. From all this talk he saw only one thing: that +to defend Moscow was a physical impossibility in the full meaning of +those words, that is to say, so utterly impossible that if any +senseless commander were to give orders to fight, confusion would +result but the battle would still not take place. It would not take +place because the commanders not merely all recognized the position to +be impossible, but in their conversations were only discussing what +would happen after its inevitable abandonment. How could the +commanders lead their troops to a field of battle they considered it +impossible to hold? The lower-grade officers and even the soldiers +(who too reason) also considered the position impossible and therefore +could not go to fight, fully convinced as they were of defeat. If +Bennigsen insisted on the position being defended and others still +discussed it, the question was no longer important in itself but +only as a pretext for disputes and intrigue. This Kutuzov knew well. + +Bennigsen, who had chosen the position, warmly displayed his Russian +patriotism (Kutuzov could not listen to this without wincing) by +insisting that Moscow must be defended. His aim was as clear as +daylight to Kutuzov: if the defense failed, to throw the blame on +Kutuzov who had brought the army as far as the Sparrow Hills without +giving battle; if it succeeded, to claim the success as his own; or if +battle were not given, to clear himself of the crime of abandoning +Moscow. But this intrigue did not now occupy the old man's mind. One +terrible question absorbed him and to that question he heard no +reply from anyone. The question for him now was: "Have I really +allowed Napoleon to reach Moscow, and when did I do so? When was it +decided? Can it have been yesterday when I ordered Platov to +retreat, or was it the evening before, when I had a nap and told +Bennigsen to issue orders? Or was it earlier still?... When, when +was this terrible affair decided? Moscow must be abandoned. The army +must retreat and the order to do so must be given." To give that +terrible order seemed to him equivalent to resigning the command of +the army. And not only did he love power to which he was accustomed +(the honours awarded to Prince Prozorovski, under whom he had served +in Turkey, galled him), but he was convinced that he was destined to +save Russia and that that was why, against the Emperor's wish and by +the will of the people, he had been chosen commander in chief. He +was convinced that he alone could maintain command of the army in +these difficult circumstances, and that in all the world he alone +could encounter the invincible Napoleon without fear, and he was +horrified at the thought of the order he had to issue. But something +had to be decided, and these conversations around him which were +assuming too free a character must be stopped. + +He called the most important generals to him. + +"My head, be it good or bad, must depend on itself," said he, rising +from the bench, and he rode to Fili where his carriages were waiting. + +CHAPTER IV + +The Council of War began to assemble at two in the afternoon in +the better and roomier part of Andrew Savostyanov's hut. The men, +women, and children of the large peasant family crowded into the +back room across the passage. Only Malasha, Andrew's six-year-old +granddaughter whom his Serene Highness had petted and to whom he had +given a lump of sugar while drinking his tea, remained on the top of +the brick oven in the larger room. Malasha looked down from the oven +with shy delight at the faces, uniforms, and decorations of the +generals, who one after another came into the room and sat down on the +broad benches in the corner under the icons. "Granddad" himself, as +Malasha in her own mind called Kutuzov, sat apart in a dark corner +behind the oven. He sat, sunk deep in a folding armchair, and +continually cleared his throat and pulled at the collar of his coat +which, though it was unbuttoned, still seemed to pinch his neck. Those +who entered went up one by one to the field marshal; he pressed the +hands of some and nodded to others. His adjutant Kaysarov was about to +draw back the curtain of the window facing Kutuzov, but the latter +moved his hand angrily and Kaysarov understood that his Serene +Highness did not wish his face to be seen. + +Round the peasant's deal table, on which lay maps, plans, pencils, +and papers, so many people gathered that the orderlies brought in +another bench and put it beside the table. Ermolov, Kaysarov, and +Toll, who had just arrived, sat down on this bench. In the foremost +place, immediately under the icons, sat Barclay de Tolly, his high +forehead merging into his bald crown. He had a St. George's Cross +round his neck and looked pale and ill. He had been feverish for two +days and was now shivering and in pain. Beside him sat Uvarov, who +with rapid gesticulations was giving him some information, speaking in +low tones as they all did. Chubby little Dokhturov was listening +attentively with eyebrows raised and arms folded on his stomach. On +the other side sat Count Ostermann-Tolstoy, seemingly absorbed in +his own thoughts. His broad head with its bold features and glittering +eyes was resting on his hand. Raevski, twitching forward the black +hair on his temples as was his habit, glanced now at Kutuzov and now +at the door with a look of impatience. Konovnitsyn's firm, handsome, +and kindly face was lit up by a tender, sly smile. His glance met +Malasha's, and the expression of his eyes caused the little girl to +smile. + +They were all waiting for Bennigsen, who on the pretext of +inspecting the position was finishing his savory dinner. They waited +for him from four till six o'clock and did not begin their +deliberations all that time talked in low tones of other matters. + +Only when Bennigsen had entered the hut did Kutuzov leave his corner +and draw toward the table, but not near enough for the candles that +had been placed there to light up his face. + +Bennigsen opened the council with the question: "Are we to abandon +Russia's ancient and sacred capital without a struggle, or are we to +defend it?" A prolonged and general silence followed. There was a +frown on every face and only Kutuzov's angry grunts and occasional +cough broke the silence. All eyes were gazing at him. Malasha too +looked at "Granddad." She was nearest to him and saw how his face +puckered; he seemed about to cry, but this did not last long. + +"Russia's ancient and sacred capital!" he suddenly said, repeating +Bennigsen's words in an angry voice and thereby drawing attention to +the false note in them. "Allow me to tell you, your excellency, that +that question has no meaning for a Russian." (He lurched his heavy +body forward.) "Such a question cannot be put; it is senseless! The +question I have asked these gentlemen to meet to discuss is a military +one. The question is that of saving Russia. Is it better to give up +Moscow without a battle, or by accepting battle to risk losing the +army as well as Moscow? That is the question on which I want your +opinion," and he sank back in his chair. + +The discussion began. Bennigsen did not yet consider his game +lost. Admitting the view of Barclay and others that a defensive battle +at Fili was impossible, but imbued with Russian patriotism and the +love of Moscow, he proposed to move troops from the right to the +left flank during the night and attack the French right flank the +following day. Opinions were divided, and arguments were advanced +for and against that project. Ermolov, Dokhturov, and Raevski agreed +with Bennigsen. Whether feeling it necessary to make a sacrifice +before abandoning the capital or guided by other, personal +considerations, these generals seemed not to understand that this +council could not alter the inevitable course of events and that +Moscow was in effect already abandoned. The other generals, however, +understood it and, leaving aside the question of Moscow, of the +direction the army should take in its retreat. Malasha, who kept her +eyes fixed on what was going on before her, understood the meaning +of the council differently. It seemed to her that it was only a +personal struggle between "Granddad" and "Long-coat" as she termed +Bennigsen. She saw that they grew spiteful when they spoke to one +another, and in her heart she sided with "Granddad." In the midst of +the conversation she noticed "Granddad" give Bennigsen a quick, subtle +glance, and then to her joys he saw that "Granddad" said something +to "Long-coat" which settled him. Bennigsen suddenly reddened and +paced angrily up and down the room. What so affected him was Kutuzov's +calm and quiet comment on the advantage or disadvantage of Bennigsen's +proposal to move troops by night from the right to the left flank to +attack the French right wing. + +"Gentlemen," said Kutuzov, "I cannot approve of the count's plan. +Moving troops in close proximity to an enemy is always dangerous, +and military history supports that view. For instance..." Kutuzov +seemed to reflect, searching for an example, then with a clear, +naive look at Bennigsen he added: "Oh yes; take the battle of +Friedland, which I think the count well remembers, and which was... +not fully successful, only because our troops were rearranged too near +the enemy..." + +There followed a momentary pause, which seemed very long to them +all. + +The discussion recommenced, but pauses frequently occurred and +they all felt that there was no more to be said. + +During one of these pauses Kutuzov heaved a deep sigh as if +preparing to speak. They all looked at him. + +"Well, gentlemen, I see that it is I who will have to pay for the +broken crockery," said he, and rising slowly he moved to the table. +"Gentlemen, I have heard your views. Some of you will not agree with +me. But I," he paused, "by the authority entrusted to me by my +Sovereign and country, order a retreat." + +After that the generals began to disperse with the solemnity and +circumspect silence of people who are leaving, after a funeral. + +Some of the generals, in low tones and in a strain very different +from the way they had spoken during the council, communicated +something to their commander in chief. + +Malasha, who had long been expected for supper, climbed carefully +backwards down from the oven, her bare little feet catching at its +projections, and slipping between the legs of the generals she +darted out of the room. + +When he had dismissed the generals Kutuzov sat a long time with +his elbows on the table, thinking always of the same terrible +question: "When, when did the abandonment of Moscow become inevitable? +When was that done which settled the matter? And who was to blame +for it?" + +"I did not expect this," said he to his adjutant Schneider when +the latter came in late that night. "I did not expect this! I did +not think this would happen." + +"You should take some rest, your Serene Highness," replied +Schneider. + +"But no! They shall eat horseflesh yet, like the Turks!" exclaimed +Kutuzov without replying, striking the table with his podgy fist. +"They shall too, if only..." + +CHAPTER V + +At that very time, in circumstances even more important than +retreating without a battle, namely the evacuation and burning of +Moscow, Rostopchin, who is usually represented as being the instigator +of that event, acted in an altogether different manner from Kutuzov. + +After the battle of Borodino the abandonment and burning of Moscow +was as inevitable as the retreat of the army beyond Moscow without +fighting. + +Every Russian might have predicted it, not by reasoning but by the +feeling implanted in each of us and in our fathers. + +The same thing that took place in Moscow had happened in all the +towns and villages on Russian soil beginning with Smolensk, without +the participation of Count Rostopchin and his broadsheets. The +people awaited the enemy unconcernedly, did not riot or become excited +or tear anyone to pieces, but faced its fate, feeling within it the +strength to find what it should do at that most difficult moment. +And as soon as the enemy drew near the wealthy classes went away +abandoning their property, while the poorer remained and burned and +destroyed what was left. + +The consciousness that this would be so and would always be so was +and is present in the heart of every Russian. And a consciousness of +this, and a foreboding that Moscow would be taken, was present in +Russian Moscow society in 1812. Those who had quitted Moscow already +in July and at the beginning of August showed that they expected this. +Those who went away, taking what they could and abandoning their +houses and half their belongings, did so from the latent patriotism +which expresses itself not by phrases or by giving one's children to +save the fatherland and similar unnatural exploits, but unobtrusively, +simply, organically, and therefore in the way that always produces the +most powerful results. + +"It is disgraceful to run away from danger; only cowards are running +away from Moscow," they were told. In his broadsheets Rostopchin +impressed on them that to leave Moscow was shameful. They were ashamed +to be called cowards, ashamed to leave, but still they left, knowing +it had to be done. Why did they go? It is impossible to suppose that +Rostopchin had scared them by his accounts of horrors Napoleon had +committed in conquered countries. The first people to go away were the +rich educated people who knew quite well that Vienna and Berlin had +remained intact and that during Napoleon's occupation the +inhabitants had spent their time pleasantly in the company of the +charming Frenchmen whom the Russians, and especially the Russian +ladies, then liked so much. + +They went away because for Russians there could be no question as to +whether things would go well or ill under French rule in Moscow. It +was out of the question to be under French rule, it would be the worst +thing that could happen. They went away even before the battle of +Borodino and still more rapidly after it, despite Rostopchin's calls +to defend Moscow or the announcement of his intention to take the +wonder-working icon of the Iberian Mother of God and go to fight, or +of the balloons that were to destroy the French, and despite all the +nonsense Rostopchin wrote in his broadsheets. They knew that it was +for the army to fight, and that if it could not succeed it would not +do to take young ladies and house serfs to the Three Hills quarter +of Moscow to fight Napoleon, and that they must go away, sorry as they +were to abandon their property to destruction. They went away +without thinking of the tremendous significance of that immense and +wealthy city being given over to destruction, for a great city with +wooden buildings was certain when abandoned by its inhabitants to be +burned. They went away each on his own account, and yet it was only in +consequence of their going away that the momentous event was +accomplished that will always remain the greatest glory of the Russian +people. The lady who, afraid of being stopped by Count Rostopchin's +orders, had already in June moved with her Negroes and her women +jesters from Moscow to her Saratov estate, with a vague +consciousness that she was not Bonaparte's servant, was really, +simply, and truly carrying out the great work which saved Russia. +But Count Rostopchin, who now taunted those who left Moscow and now +had the government offices removed; now distributed quite useless +weapons to the drunken rabble; now had processions displaying the +icons, and now forbade Father Augustin to remove icons or the relics +of saints; now seized all the private carts in Moscow and on one +hundred and thirty-six of them removed the balloon that was being +constructed by Leppich; now hinted that he would burn Moscow and +related how he had set fire to his own house; now wrote a proclamation +to the French solemnly upbraiding them for having destroyed his +Orphanage; now claimed the glory of having hinted that he would burn +Moscow and now repudiated the deed; now ordered the people to catch +all spies and bring them to him, and now reproached them for doing so; +now expelled all the French residents from Moscow, and now allowed +Madame Aubert-Chalme (the center of the whole French colony in Moscow) +to remain, but ordered the venerable old postmaster Klyucharev to be +arrested and exiled for no particular offense; now assembled the +people at the Three Hills to fight the French and now, to get rid of +them, handed over to them a man to be killed and himself drove away by +a back gate; now declared that he would not survive the fall of +Moscow, and now wrote French verses in albums concerning his share +in the affair- this man did not understand the meaning of what was +happening but merely wanted to do something himself that would +astonish people, to perform some patriotically heroic feat; and like a +child he made sport of the momentous, and unavoidable event- the +abandonment and burning of Moscow- and tried with his puny hand now to +speed and now to stay the enormous, popular tide that bore him along +with it. + +CHAPTER VI + +Helene, having returned with the court from Vilna to Petersburg, +found herself in a difficult position. + +In Petersburg she had enjoyed the special protection of a grandee +who occupied one of the highest posts in the Empire. In Vilna she +had formed an intimacy with a young foreign prince. When she +returned to Petersburg both the magnate and the prince were there, and +both claimed their rights. Helene was faced by a new problem- how to +preserve her intimacy with both without offending either. + +What would have seemed difficult or even impossible to another woman +did not cause the least embarrassment to Countess Bezukhova, who +evidently deserved her reputation of being a very clever woman. Had +she attempted concealment, or tried to extricate herself from her +awkward position by cunning, she would have spoiled her case by +acknowledging herself guilty. But Helene, like a really great man +who can do whatever he pleases, at once assumed her own position to be +correct, as she sincerely believed it to be, and that everyone else +was to blame. + +The first time the young foreigner allowed himself to reproach +her, she lifted her beautiful head and, half turning to him, said +firmly: "That's just like a man- selfish and cruel! I expected nothing +else. A woman sacrifices herself for you, she suffers, and this is her +reward! What right have you, monseigneur, to demand an account of my +attachments and friendships? He is a man who has been more than a +father to me!" The prince was about to say something, but Helene +interrupted him. + +"Well, yes," said she, "it may be that he has other sentiments for +me than those of a father, but that is not a reason for me to shut +my door on him. I am not a man, that I should repay kindness with +ingratitude! Know, monseigneur, that in all that relates to my +intimate feelings I render account only to God and to my +conscience," she concluded, laying her hand on her beautiful, fully +expanded bosom and looking up to heaven. + +"But for heaven's sake listen to me!" + +"Marry me, and I will be your slave!" + +"But that's impossible." + +"You won't deign to demean yourself by marrying me, you..." said +Helene, beginning to cry. + +The prince tried to comfort her, but Helene, as if quite distraught, +said through her tears that there was nothing to prevent her marrying, +that there were precedents (there were up to that time very few, but +she mentioned Napoleon and some other exalted personages), that she +had never been her husband's wife, and that she had been sacrificed. + +"But the law, religion..." said the prince, already yielding. + +"The law, religion... What have they been invented for if they can't +arrange that?" said Helene. + +The prince was surprised that so simple an idea had not occurred +to him, and he applied for advice to the holy brethren of the +Society of Jesus, with whom he was on intimate terms. + +A few days later at one of those enchanting fetes which Helene +gave at her country house on the Stone Island, the charming Monsieur +de Jobert, a man no longer young, with snow white hair and brilliant +black eyes, a Jesuit a robe courte~^ was presented to her, and in the +garden by the light of the illuminations and to the sound of music +talked to her for a long time of the love of God, of Christ, of the +Sacred Heart, and of the consolations the one true Catholic religion +affords in this world and the next. Helene was touched, and more +than once tears rose to her eyes and to those of Monsieur de Jobert +and their voices trembled. A dance, for which her partner came to seek +her, put an end to her discourse with her future directeur de +conscience, but the next evening Monsieur de Jobert came to see Helene +when she was alone, and after that often came again. + +^~ Lay member of the Society of Jesus. + +One day he took the countess to a Roman Catholic church, where she +knelt down before the altar to which she was led. The enchanting, +middle-aged Frenchman laid his hands on her head and, as she herself +afterward described it, she felt something like a fresh breeze +wafted into her soul. It was explained to her that this was la grace. + +After that a long-frocked abbe was brought to her. She confessed +to him, and he absolved her from her sins. Next day she received a box +containing the Sacred Host, which was left at her house for her to +partake of. A few days later Helene learned with pleasure that she had +now been admitted to the true Catholic Church and that in a few days +the Pope himself would hear of her and would send her a certain +document. + +All that was done around her and to her at this time, all the +attention devoted to her by so many clever men and expressed in such +pleasant, refined ways, and the state of dove-like purity she was +now in (she wore only white dresses and white ribbons all that time) +gave her pleasure, but her pleasure did not cause her for a moment +to forget her aim. And as it always happens in contests of cunning +that a stupid person gets the better of cleverer ones, Helene- +having realized that the main object of all these words and all this +trouble was, after converting her to Catholicism, to obtain money from +her for Jesuit institutions (as to which she received indications)- +before parting with her money insisted that the various operations +necessary to free her from her husband should be performed. In her +view the aim of every religion was merely to preserve certain +proprieties while affording satisfaction to human desires. And with +this aim, in one of her talks with her Father Confessor, she +insisted on an answer to the question, in how far was she bound by her +marriage? + +They were sitting in the twilight by a window in the drawing room. +The scent of flowers came in at the window. Helene was wearing a white +dress, transparent over her shoulders and bosom. The abbe, a +well-fed man with a plump, clean-shaven chin, a pleasant firm mouth, +and white hands meekly folded on his knees, sat close to Helene and, +with a subtle smile on his lips and a peaceful look of delight at +her beauty, occasionally glanced at her face as he explained his +opinion on the subject. Helene with an uneasy smile looked at his +curly hair and his plump, clean-shaven, blackish cheeks and every +moment expected the conversation to take a fresh turn. But the abbe, +though he evidently enjoyed the beauty of his companion, was +absorbed in his mastery of the matter. + +The course of the Father Confessor's arguments ran as follows: +"Ignorant of the import of what you were undertaking, you made a vow +of conjugal fidelity to a man who on his part, by entering the married +state without faith in the religious significance of marriage, +committed an act of sacrilege. That marriage lacked the dual +significance it should have had. Yet in spite of this your vow was +binding. You swerved from it. What did you commit by so acting? A +venial, or a mortal, sin? A venial sin, for you acted without evil +intention. If now you married again with the object of bearing +children, your sin might be forgiven. But the question is again a +twofold one: firstly..." + +But suddenly Helene, who was getting bored, said with one of her +bewitching smiles: "But I think that having espoused the true religion +I cannot be bound by what a false religion laid upon me." + +The director of her conscience was astounded at having the case +presented to him thus with the simplicity of Columbus' egg. He was +delighted at the unexpected rapidity of his pupil's progress, but +could not abandon the edifice of argument he had laboriously +constructed. + +"Let us understand one another, Countess," said he with a smile, and +began refuting his spiritual daughter's arguments. + +CHAPTER VII + +Helene understood that the question was very simple and easy from +the ecclesiastical point of view, and that her directors were making +difficulties only because they were apprehensive as to how the +matter would be regarded by the secular authorities. + +So she decided that it was necessary to prepare the opinion of +society. She provoked the jealousy of the elderly magnate and told him +what she had told her other suitor; that is, she put the matter so +that the only way for him to obtain a right over her was to marry her. +The elderly magnate was at first as much taken aback by this +suggestion of marriage with a woman whose husband was alive, as the +younger man had been, but Helene's imperturbable conviction that it +was as simple and natural as marrying a maiden had its effect on him +too. Had Helene herself shown the least sign of hesitation, shame, +or secrecy, her cause would certainly have been lost; but not only did +she show no signs of secrecy or shame, on the contrary, with +good-natured naivete she told her intimate friends (and these were all +Petersburg) that both the prince and the magnate had proposed to her +and that she loved both and was afraid of grieving either. + +A rumor immediately spread in Petersburg, not that Helene wanted +to be divorced from her husband (had such a report spread many would +have opposed so illegal an intention) but simply that the +unfortunate and interesting Helene was in doubt which of the two men +she should marry. The question was no longer whether this was +possible, but only which was the better match and how the matter would +be regarded at court. There were, it is true, some rigid individuals +unable to rise to the height of such a question, who saw in the +project a desecration of the sacrament of marriage, but there were not +many such and they remained silent, while the majority were interested +in Helene's good fortune and in the question which match would be +the more advantageous. Whether it was right or wrong to remarry +while one had a husband living they did not discuss, for that question +had evidently been settled by people "wiser than you or me," as they +said, and to doubt the correctness of that decision would be to risk +exposing one's stupidity and incapacity to live in society. + +Only Marya Dmitrievna Akhrosimova, had come to Petersburg that +summer to see one of her sons, allowed herself plainly to express an +opinion contrary to the general one. Meeting Helene at a ball she +stopped her in the middle of the room and, amid general silence, +said in her gruff voice: "So wives of living men have started marrying +again! Perhaps you think you have invented a novelty? You have been +forestalled, my dear! It was thought of long ago. It is done in all +the brothels," and with these words Marya Dmitrievna, turning up her +wide sleeves with her usual threatening gesture and glancing sternly +round, moved across the room. + +Though people were afraid of Marya Dmitrievna she was regarded in +Petersburg as a buffoon, and so of what she had said they only +noticed, and repeated in a whisper, the one coarse word she had +used, supposing the whole sting of her remark to lie in that word. + +Prince Vasili, who of late very often forgot what he had said and +repeated one and the same thing a hundred times, remarked to his +daughter whenever he chanced to see her: + +"Helene, I have a word to say to you," and he would lead her +aside, drawing her hand downward. "I have heard of certain projects +concerning... you know. Well my dear child, you know how your father's +heart rejoices to know that you... You have suffered so much.... +But, my dear child, consult only your own heart. That is all I have to +say," and concealing his unvarying emotion he would press his cheek +against his daughter's and move away. + +Bilibin, who had not lost his reputation of an exceedingly clever +man, and who was one of one of the disinterested friends so +brilliant a woman as Helene always has- men friends who can never +change into lovers- once gave her his view of the matter at a small +and intimate gathering. + +"Listen, Bilibin," said Helene (she always called friends of that +sort by their surnames), and she touched his coat sleeve with her +white, beringed fingers. "Tell me, as you would a sister, what I ought +to do. Which of the two?" + +Bilibin wrinkled up the skin over his eyebrows and pondered, with +a smile on his lips. + +"You are not taking me unawares, you know," said he. "As a true +friend, I have thought and thought again about your affair. You see, +if you marry the prince"- he meant the younger man- and he crooked one +finger, "you forever lose the chance of marrying the other, and you +will displease the court besides. (You know there is some kind of +connection.) But if you marry the old count you will make his last +days happy, and as widow of the Grand... the prince would no longer be +making a mesalliance by marrying you," and Bilibin smoothed out his +forehead. + +"That's a true friend!" said Helene beaming, and again touching +Bilibin's sleeve. "But I love them, you know, and don't want to +distress either of them. I would give my life for the happiness of +them both." + +Bilibin shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say that not even he +could help in that difficulty. + +"Une maitresse-femme!~^ That's what is called putting things +squarely. She would like to be married to all three at the same time," +thought he. + +^~ A masterly woman. + +"But tell me, how will your husband look at the matter?" Bilibin +asked, his reputation being so well established that he did not fear +to ask so naive a question. "Will he agree?" + +"Oh, he loves me so!" said Helene, who for some reason imagined that +Pierre too loved her. "He will do anything for me." + +Bilibin puckered his skin in preparation for something witty. + +"Even divorce you?" said he. + +Helene laughed. + +Among those who ventured to doubt the justifiability of the proposed +marriage was Helene's mother, Princess Kuragina. She was continually +tormented by jealousy of her daughter, and now that jealousy concerned +a subject near to her own heart, she could not reconcile herself to +the idea. She consulted a Russian priest as to the possibility of +divorce and remarriage during a husband's lifetime, and the priest +told her that it was impossible, and to her delight showed her a +text in the Gospel which (as it seemed to him) plainly remarriage +while the husband is alive. + +Armed with these arguments, which appeared to her unanswerable, +she drove to her daughter's early one morning so as to find her alone. + +Having listened to her mother's objections, Helene smiled blandly +and ironically. + +"But it says plainly: 'Whosoever shall marry her that is +divorced...'" said the old princess. + +"Ah, Maman, ne dites pas de betises. Vous ne comprenez rein. Dans ma +position j'ai des devoirs,"~^ said Helene changing from Russian, in +which language she always felt that her case did not sound quite +clear, into French which suited it better. + +^~ "Oh, Mamma, don't talk nonsense! You don't understand anything. +In my position I have obligations. + +"But, my dear...." + +"Oh, Mamma, how is it you don't understand that the Holy Father, who +has the right to grant dispensations..." + +Just then the lady companion who lived with Helene came in to +announce that His Highness was in the ballroom and wished to see her. + +"Non, dites-lui que je ne veux pas le voir, que je suis furieuse +contre lui, parce qu'il m' a manque parole."~^ + +^~ "No, tell him I don't wish to see him, I am furious with him for +not keeping his word to me." + +"Comtesse, a tout peche misericorde,"~^ said a fair-haired young +man with a long face and nose, as he entered the room. + +^~ "Countess, there is mercy for every sin." + +The old princess rose respectfully and curtsied. The young man who +had entered took no notice of her. The princess nodded to her daughter +and sidled out of the room. + +"Yes, she is right," thought the old princess, all her convictions +dissipated by the appearance of His Highness. "She is right, but how +is it that we in our irrecoverable youth did not know it? Yet it is so +simple," she thought as she got into her carriage. + +By the beginning of August Helene's affairs were clearly defined and +she wrote a letter to her husband- who, as she imagined, loved her +very much- informing him of her intention to marry N.N. and of her +having embraced the one true faith, and asking him to carry out all +the formalities necessary for a divorce, which would be explained to +him by the bearer of the letter. + +And so I pray God to have you, my friend, in His holy and powerful +keeping- Your friend Helene. + +This letter was brought to Pierre's house when he was on the field +of Borodino. + +CHAPTER VIII + +Toward the end of the battle of Borodino, Pierre, having run down +from Raevski's battery a second time, made his way through a gully +to Knyazkovo with a crowd of soldiers, reached the dressing station, +and seeing blood and hearing cries and groans hurried on, still +entangled in the crowds of soldiers. + +The one thing he now desired with his whole soul was to get away +quickly from the terrible sensations amid which he had lived that +day and return to ordinary conditions of life and sleep quietly in a +room in his own bed. He felt that only in the ordinary conditions of +life would he be able to understand himself and all he had seen and +felt. But such ordinary conditions of life were nowhere to be found. + +Though shells and bullets did not whistle over the road along +which he was going, still on all sides there was what there had been +on the field of battle. There were still the same suffering, +exhausted, and sometimes strangely indifferent faces, the same +blood, the same soldiers' overcoats, the same sounds of firing +which, though distant now, still aroused terror, and besides this +there were the foul air and the dust. + +Having gone a couple of miles along the Mozhaysk road, Pierre sat +down by the roadside. + +Dusk had fallen, and the roar of guns died away. Pierre lay +leaning on his elbow for a long time, gazing at the shadows that moved +past him in the darkness. He was continually imagining that a cannon +ball was flying toward him with a terrific whizz, and then he +shuddered and sat up. He had no idea how long he had been there. In +the middle of the night three soldiers, having brought some +firewood, settled down near him and began lighting a fire. + +The soldiers, who threw sidelong glances at Pierre, got the fire +to burn and placed an iron pot on it into which they broke some +dried bread and put a little dripping. The pleasant odor of greasy +viands mingled with the smell of smoke. Pierre sat up and sighed. +The three soldiers were eating and talking among themselves, taking no +notice of him. + +"And who may you be?" one of them suddenly asked Pierre, evidently +meaning what Pierre himself had in mind, namely: "If you want to eat +we'll give you some food, only let us know whether you are an honest +man." + +"I, I..." said Pierre, feeling it necessary to minimize his social +position as much as possible so as to be nearer to the soldiers and +better understood by them. "By rights I am a militia officer, but my +men are not here. I came to the battle and have lost them." + +"There now!" said one of the soldiers. + +Another shook his head. + +"Would you like a little mash?" the first soldier asked, and +handed Pierre a wooden spoon after licking it clean. + +Pierre sat down by the fire and began eating the mash, as they +called the food in the cauldron, and he thought it more delicious than +any food he had ever tasted. As he sat bending greedily over it, +helping himself to large spoonfuls and chewing one after another, +his was lit up by the fire and the soldiers looked at him in silence. + +"Where have you to go to? Tell us!" said one of them. + +"To Mozhaysk." + +"You're a gentleman, aren't you?" + +"Yes." + +"And what's your name?" + +"Peter Kirilych." + +"Well then, Peter Kirilych, come along with us, we'll take you +there." + +In the total darkness the soldiers walked with Pierre to Mozhaysk. + +By the time they got near Mozhaysk and began ascending the steep +hill into the town, the cocks were already crowing. Pierre went on +with the soldiers, quite forgetting that his inn was at the bottom +of the hill and that he had already passed it. He would not soon +have remembered this, such was his state of forgetfulness, had he +not halfway up the hill stumbled upon his groom, who had been to +look for him in the town and was returning to the inn. The groom +recognized Pierre in the darkness by his white hat. + +"Your excellency!" he said. "Why, we were beginning to despair! +How is it you are on foot? And where are you going, please?" + +"Oh, yes!" said Pierre. + +The soldiers stopped. + +"So you've found your folk?" said one of them. "Well, good-by, Peter +Kirilych- isn't it?" + +"Good-by, Peter Kirilych!" Pierre heard the other voices repeat. + +"Good-by!" he said and turned with his groom toward the inn. + +"I ought to give them something!" he thought, and felt in his +pocket. "No, better not!" said another, inner voice. + +There was not a room to be had at the inn, they were all occupied. +Pierre went out into the yard and, covering himself up head and all, +lay down in his carriage. + +CHAPTER IX + +Scarcely had Pierre laid his head on the pillow before he felt +himself falling asleep, but suddenly, almost with the distinctness +of reality, he heard the boom, boom, boom of firing, the thud of +projectiles, groans and cries, and smelled blood and powder, and a +feeling of horror and dread of death seized him. Filled with fright he +opened his eyes and lifted his head from under his cloak. All was +tranquil in the yard. Only someone's orderly passed through the +gateway, splashing through the mud, and talked to the innkeeper. Above +Pierre's head some pigeons, disturbed by the movement he had made in +sitting up, fluttered under the dark roof of the penthouse. The +whole courtyard was permeated by a strong peaceful smell of stable +yards, delightful to Pierre at that moment. He could see the clear +starry sky between the dark roofs of two penthouses. + +"Thank God, there is no more of that!" he thought, covering up his +head again. "Oh, what a terrible thing is fear, and how shamefully I +yielded to it! But they... they were steady and calm all the time, +to the end..." thought he. + +They, in Pierre's mind, were the soldiers, those who had been at the +battery, those who had given him food, and those who had prayed before +the icon. They, those strange men he had not previously known, stood +out clearly and sharply from everyone else. + +"To be a soldier, just a soldier!" thought Pierre as he fell asleep, +"to enter communal life completely, to be imbued by what makes them +what they are. But how cast off all the superfluous, devilish burden +of my outer man? There was a time when I could have done it. I could +have run away from my father, as I wanted to. Or I might have been +sent to serve as a soldier after the duel with Dolokhov." And the +memory of the dinner at the English Club when he had challenged +Dolokhov flashed through Pierre's mind, and then he remembered his +benefactor at Torzhok. And now a picture of a solemn meeting of the +lodge presented itself to his mind. It was taking place at the English +Club and someone near and dear to him sat at the end of the table. +"Yes, that is he! It is my benefactor. But he died!" thought Pierre. +"Yes, he died, and I did not know he was alive. How sorry I am that he +died, and how glad I am that he is alive again!" On one side of the +table sat Anatole, Dolokhov, Nesvitski, Denisov, and others like +them (in his dream the category to which these men belonged was as +clearly defined in his mind as the category of those he termed +they), and he heard those people, Anatole and Dolokhov, shouting and +singing loudly; yet through their shouting the voice of his benefactor +was heard speaking all the time and the sound of his words was as +weighty and uninterrupted as the booming on the battlefield, but +pleasant and comforting. Pierre did not understand what his benefactor +was saying, but he knew (the categories of thoughts were also quite +distinct in his dream) that he was talking of goodness and the +possibility of being what they were. And they with their simple, kind, +firm faces surrounded his benefactor on all sides. But though they +were kindly they did not look at Pierre and did not know him. +Wishing to speak and to attract their attention, he got up, but at +that moment his legs grew cold and bare. + +He felt ashamed, and with one arm covered his legs from which his +cloak had in fact slipped. For a moment as he was rearranging his +cloak Pierre opened his eyes and saw the same penthouse roofs, +posts, and yard, but now they were all bluish, lit up, and +glittering with frost or dew. + +"It is dawn," thought Pierre. "But that's not what I want. I want to +hear and understand my benefactor's words." Again he covered himself +up with his cloak, but now neither the lodge nor his benefactor was +there. There were only thoughts clearly expressed in words, thoughts +that someone was uttering or that he himself was formulating. + +Afterwards when he recalled those thoughts Pierre was convinced that +someone outside himself had spoken them, though the impressions of +that day had evoked them. He had never, it seemed to him, been able to +think and express his thoughts like that when awake. + +"To endure war is the most difficult subordination of man's +freedom to the law of God," the voice had said. "Simplicity is +submission to the will of God; you cannot escape from Him. And they +are simple. They do not talk, but act. The spoken word is silver but +the unspoken is golden. Man can be master of nothing while he fears +death, but he who does not fear it possesses all. If there were no +suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself. +The hardest thing [Pierre went on thinking, or hearing, in his +dream] is to be able in your soul to unite the meaning of all. To +unite all?" he asked himself. "No, not to unite. Thoughts cannot be +united, but to harness all these thoughts together is what we need! +Yes, one must harness them, must harness them!" he repeated to himself +with inward rapture, feeling that these words and they alone expressed +what he wanted to say and solved the question that tormented him. + +"Yes, one must harness, it is time to harness." + +"Time to harness, time to harness, your excellency! Your +excellency!" some voice was repeating. "We must harness, it is time to +harness...." + +It was the voice of the groom, trying to wake him. The sun shone +straight into Pierre's face. He glanced at the dirty innyard in the +middle of which soldiers were watering their lean horses at the pump +while carts were passing out of the gate. Pierre turned away with +repugnance, and closing his eyes quickly fell back on the carriage +seat. "No, I don't want that, I don't want to see and understand that. +I want to understand what was revealing itself to me in my dream. +One second more and I should have understood it all! But what am I +to do? Harness, but how can I harness everything?" and Pierre felt +with horror that the meaning of all he had seen and thought in the +dream had been destroyed. + +The groom, the coachman, and the innkeeper told Pierre that an +officer had come with news that the French were already near +Mozhaysk and that our men were leaving it. + +Pierre got up and, having told them to harness and overtake him, +went on foot through the town. + +The troops were moving on, leaving about ten thousand wounded behind +them. There were wounded in the yards, at the windows of the houses, +and the streets were crowded with them. In the streets, around carts +that were to take some of the wounded away, shouts, curses, and +blows could be heard. Pierre offered the use of his carriage, which +had overtaken him, to a wounded general he knew, and drove with him to +Moscow. On the way Pierre was told of the death of his +brother-in-law Anatole and of that of Prince Andrew. + +CHAPTER X + +On the thirteenth of August Pierre reached Moscow. Close to the +gates of the city he was met by Count Rostopchin's adjutant. + +"We have been looking for you everywhere," said the adjutant. "The +count wants to see you particularly. He asks you to come to him at +once on a very important matter." + +Without going home, Pierre took a cab and drove to see the Moscow +commander in chief. + +Count Rostopchin had only that morning returned to town from his +summer villa at Sokolniki. The anteroom and reception room of his +house were full of officials who had been summoned or had come for +orders. Vasilchikov and Platov had already seen the count and +explained to him that it was impossible to defend Moscow and that it +would have to be surrendered. Though this news was being concealed +from the inhabitants, the officials- the heads of the various +government departments- knew that Moscow would soon be in the +enemy's hands, just as Count Rostopchin himself knew it, and to escape +personal responsibility they had all come to the governor to ask how +they were to deal with their various departments. + +As Pierre was entering the reception room a courier from the army +came out of Rostopchin's private room. + +In answer to questions with which he was greeted, the courier made a +despairing gesture with his hand and passed through the room. + +While waiting in the reception room Pierre with weary eyes watched +the various officials, old and young, military and civilian, who +were there. They all seemed dissatisfied and uneasy. Pierre went up to +a group of men, one of whom he knew. After greeting Pierre they +continued their conversation. + +"If they're sent out and brought back again later on it will do no +harm, but as things are now one can't answer for anything." + +"But you see what he writes..." said another, pointing to a +printed sheet he held in his hand. + +"That's another matter. That's necessary for the people," said the +first. + +"What is it?" asked Pierre. + +"Oh, it's a fresh broadsheet." + +Pierre took it and began reading. + +His Serene Highness has passed through Mozhaysk in order to join +up with the troops moving toward him and has taken up a strong +position where the enemy will not soon attack him. Forty eight guns +with ammunition have been sent him from here, and his Serene +Highness says he will defend Moscow to the last drop of blood and is +even ready to fight in the streets. Do not be upset, brothers, that +the law courts are closed; things have to be put in order, and we will +deal with villains in our own way! When the time comes I shall want +both town and peasant lads and will raise the cry a day or two +beforehand, but they are not wanted yet so I hold my peace. An ax will +be useful, a hunting spear not bad, but a three-pronged fork will be +best of all: a Frenchman is no heavier than a sheaf of rye. Tomorrow +after dinner I shall take the Iberian icon of the Mother of God to the +wounded in the Catherine Hospital where we will have some water +blessed. That will help them to get well quicker. I, too, am well now: +one of my eyes was sore but now I am on the lookout with both. + +"But military men have told me that it is impossible to fight in the +town," said Pierre, "and that the position..." + +"Well, of course! That's what we were saying," replied the first +speaker. + +"And what does he mean by 'One of my eyes was sore but now I am on +the lookout with both'?" asked Pierre. + +"The count had a sty," replied the adjutant smiling, "and was very +much upset when I told him people had come to ask what was the +matter with him. By the by, Count," he added suddenly, addressing +Pierre with a smile, "we heard that you have family troubles and +that the countess, your wife..." + +"I have heard nothing," Pierre replied unconcernedly. "But what have +you heard?" + +"Oh, well, you know people often invent things. I only say what I +heard." + +"But what did you hear?" + +"Well, they say," continued the adjutant with the same smile, +"that the countess, your wife, is preparing to go abroad. I expect +it's nonsense...." + +"Possibly," remarked Pierre, looking about him absent-mindedly. "And +who is that?" he asked, indicating a short old man in a clean blue +peasant overcoat, with a big snow-white beard and eyebrows and a ruddy +face. + +"He? That's a tradesman, that is to say, he's the restaurant keeper, +Vereshchagin. Perhaps you have heard of that affair with the +proclamation." + +"Oh, so that is Vereshchagin!" said Pierre, looking at the firm, +calm face of the old man and seeking any indication of his being a +traitor. + +"That's not he himself, that's the father of the fellow who wrote +the proclamation," said the adjutant. "The young man is in prison +and I expect it will go hard with him." + +An old gentleman wearing a star and another official, a German +wearing a cross round his neck, approached the speaker. + +"It's a complicated story, you know," said the adjutant. "That +proclamation appeared about two months ago. The count was informed +of it. He gave orders to investigate the matter. Gabriel Ivanovich +here made the inquiries. The proclamation had passed through exactly +sixty-three hands. He asked one, 'From whom did you get it?' 'From +so-and-so.' He went to the next one. 'From whom did you get it?' and +so on till he reached Vereshchagin, a half educated tradesman, you +know, 'a pet of a trader,'" said the adjutant smiling. "They asked +him, 'Who gave it you?' And the point is that we knew whom he had it +from. He could only have had it from the Postmaster. But evidently +they had come to some understanding. He replied: 'From no one; I +made it up myself.' They threatened and questioned him, but he stuck +to that: 'I made it up myself.' And so it was reported to the count, +who sent for the man. 'From whom did you get the proclamation?' 'I +wrote it myself.' Well, you know the count," said the adjutant +cheerfully, with a smile of pride, "he flared up dreadfully- and +just think of the fellow's audacity, lying, and obstinacy!" + +"And the count wanted him to say it was from Klyucharev? I +understand!" said Pierre. + +"Not at all," rejoined the adjutant in dismay. "Klyucharev had his +own sins to answer for without that and that is why he has been +banished. But the point is that the count was much annoyed. 'How could +you have written it yourself?' said he, and he took up the Hamburg +Gazette that was lying on the table. 'Here it is! You did not write it +yourself but translated it, and translated it abominably, because +you don't even know French, you fool.' And what do you think? 'No,' +said he, 'I have not read any papers, I made it up myself.' 'If that's +so, you're a traitor and I'll have you tried, and you'll be hanged! +Say from whom you had it.' 'I have seen no papers, I made it up +myself.' And that was the end of it. The count had the father fetched, +but the fellow stuck to it. He was sent for trial and condemned to +hard labor, I believe. Now the father has come to intercede for him. +But he's a good-for-nothing lad! You know that sort of tradesman's +son, a dandy and lady-killer. He attended some lectures somewhere +and imagines that the devil is no match for him. That's the sort of +fellow he is. His father keeps a cookshop here by the Stone Bridge, +and you know there was a large icon of God Almighty painted with a +scepter in one hand and an orb in the other. Well, he took that icon +home with him for a few days and what did he do? He found some +scoundrel of a painter..." + +CHAPTER XI + +In the middle of this fresh tale Pierre was summoned to the +commander in chief. + +When he entered the private room Count Rostopchin, puckering his +face, was rubbing his forehead and eyes with his hand. A short man was +saying something, but when Pierre entered he stopped speaking and went +out. + +"Ah, how do you do, great warrior?" said Rostopchin as soon as the +short man had left the room. "We have heard of your prowess. But +that's not the point. Between ourselves, mon cher, do you belong to +the Masons?" he went on severely, as though there were something wrong +about it which he nevertheless intended to pardon. Pierre remained +silent. "I am well informed, my friend, but I am aware that there +are Masons and Masons and I hope that you are not one of those who +on pretense of saving mankind wish to ruin Russia." + +"Yes, I am a Mason," Pierre replied. + +"There, you see, mon cher! I expect you know that Messrs. +Speranski and Magnitski have been deported to their proper place. +Mr. Klyucharev has been treated in the same way, and so have others +who on the plea of building up the temple of Solomon have tried to +destroy the temple of their fatherland. You can understand that +there are reasons for this and that I could not have exiled the +Postmaster had he not been a harmful person. It has now come to my +knowledge that you lent him your carriage for his removal from town, +and that you have even accepted papers from him for safe custody. I +like you and don't wish you any harm and- as you are only half my age- +I advise you, as a father would, to cease all communication with men +of that stamp and to leave here as soon as possible." + +"But what did Klyucharev do wrong, Count?" asked Pierre. + +"That is for me to know, but not for you to ask," shouted +Rostopchin. + +"If he is accused of circulating Napoleon's proclamation it is not +proved that he did so," said Pierre without looking at Rostopchin, +"and Vereshchagin..." + +"There we are!" Rostopchin shouted at Pierre louder than before, +frowning suddenly. "Vereshchagin is a renegade and a traitor who +will be punished as he deserves," said he with the vindictive heat +with which people speak when recalling an insult. "But I did not +summon you to discuss my actions, but to give you advice- or an +order if you prefer it. I beg you to leave the town and break off +all communication with such men as Klyucharev. And I will knock the +nonsense out of anybody"- but probably realizing that he was +shouting at Bezukhov who so far was not guilty of anything, he +added, taking Pierre's hand in a friendly manner, "We are on the eve +of a public disaster and I haven't time to be polite to everybody +who has business with me. My head is sometimes in a whirl. Well, mon +cher, what are you doing personally?" + +"Why, nothing," answered Pierre without raising his eyes or changing +the thoughtful expression of his face. + +The count frowned. + +"A word of friendly advice, mon cher. Be off as soon as you can, +that's all I have to tell you. Happy he who has ears to hear. Good-by, +my dear fellow. Oh, by the by!" he shouted through the doorway after +Pierre, "is it true that the countess has fallen into the clutches +of the holy fathers of the Society of Jesus?" + +Pierre did not answer and left Rostopchin's room more sullen and +angry than he had ever before shown himself. + +When he reached home it was already getting dark. Some eight +people had come to see him that evening: the secretary of a committee, +the colonel of his battalion, his steward, his major-domo, and various +petitioners. They all had business with Pierre and wanted decisions +from him. Pierre did not understand and was not interested in any of +these questions and only answered them in order to get rid of these +people. When left alone at last he opened and read his wife's letter. + +"They, the soldiers at the battery, Prince Andrew killed... that old +man... Simplicity is submission to God. Suffering is necessary... +the meaning of all... one must harness... my wife is getting +married... One must forget and understand..." And going to his bed +he threw himself on it without undressing and immediately fell asleep. + +When he awoke next morning the major-domo came to inform him that +a special messenger, a police officer, had come from Count +Rostopchin to know whether Count Bezukhov had left or was leaving +the town. + +A dozen persons who had business with Pierre were awaiting him in +the drawing room. Pierre dressed hurriedly and, instead of going to +see them, went to the back porch and out through the gate. + +From that time till the end of the destruction of Moscow no one of +Bezukhov's household, despite all the search they made, saw Pierre +again or knew where he was. + +CHAPTER XII + +The Rostovs remained in Moscow till the first of September, that is, +till the eve of the enemy's entry into the city. + +After Petya had joined Obolenski's regiment of Cossacks and left for +Belaya Tserkov where that regiment was forming, the countess was +seized with terror. The thought that both her sons were at the war, +had both gone from under her wing, that today or tomorrow either or +both of them might be killed like the three sons of one of her +acquaintances, struck her that summer for the first time with cruel +clearness. She tried to get Nicholas back and wished to go herself +to join Petya, or to get him an appointment somewhere in Petersburg, +but neither of these proved possible. Petya could not return unless +his regiment did so or unless he was transferred to another regiment +on active service. Nicholas was somewhere with the army and had not +sent a word since his last letter, in which he had given a detailed +account of his meeting with Princess Mary. The countess did not +sleep at night, or when she did fall asleep dreamed that she saw her +sons lying dead. After many consultations and conversations, the count +at last devised means to tranquillize her. He got Petya transferred +from Obolenski's regiment to Bezukhov's, which was in training near +Moscow. Though Petya would remain in the service, this transfer +would give the countess the consolation of seeing at least one of +her sons under her wing, and she hoped to arrange matters for her +Petya so as not to let him go again, but always get him appointed to +places where he could not possibly take part in a battle. As long as +Nicholas alone was in danger the countess imagined that she loved +her first-born more than all her other children and even reproached +herself for it; but when her youngest: the scapegrace who had been bad +at lessons, was always breaking things in the house and making himself +a nuisance to everybody, that snub-nosed Petya with his merry black +eyes and fresh rosy cheeks where soft down was just beginning to show- +when he was thrown amid those big, dreadful, cruel men who were +fighting somewhere about something and apparently finding pleasure +in it- then his mother thought she loved him more, much more, than all +her other children. The nearer the time came for Petya to return, +the more uneasy grew the countess. She began to think she would +never live to see such happiness. The presence of Sonya, of her +beloved Natasha, or even of her husband irritated her. "What do I want +with them? I want no one but Petya," she thought. + +At the end of August the Rostovs received another letter from +Nicholas. He wrote from the province of Voronezh where he had been +sent to procure remounts, but that letter did not set the countess +at ease. Knowing that one son was out of danger she became the more +anxious about Petya. + +Though by the twentieth of August nearly all the Rostovs' +acquaintances had left Moscow, and though everybody tried to +persuade the countess to get away as quickly as possible, she would +not bear of leaving before her treasure, her adored Petya, returned. +On the twenty-eighth of August he arrived. The passionate tenderness +with which his mother received him did not please the sixteen-year-old +officer. Though she concealed from him her intention of keeping him +under her wing, Petya guessed her designs, and instinctively fearing +that he might give way to emotion when with her- might "become +womanish" as he termed it to himself- he treated her coldly, avoided +her, and during his stay in Moscow attached himself exclusively to +Natasha for whom he had always had a particularly brotherly +tenderness, almost lover-like. + +Owing to the count's customary carelessness nothing was ready for +their departure by the twenty-eighth of August and the carts that were +to come from their Ryazan and Moscow estates to remove their household +belongings did not arrive till the thirtieth. + +From the twenty-eighth till the thirty-first all Moscow was in a +bustle and commotion. Every day thousands of men wounded at Borodino +were brought in by the Dorogomilov gate and taken to various parts +of Moscow, and thousands of carts conveyed the inhabitants and their +possessions out by the other gates. In spite of Rostopchin's +broadsheets, or because of them or independently of them, the +strangest and most contradictory rumors were current in the town. Some +said that no one was to be allowed to leave the city, others on the +contrary said that all the icons had been taken out of the churches +and everybody was to be ordered to leave. Some said there had been +another battle after Borodino at which the French had been routed, +while others on the contrary reported that the Russian army bad been +destroyed. Some talked about the Moscow militia which, preceded by the +clergy, would go to the Three Hills; others whispered that Augustin +had been forbidden to leave, that traitors had been seized, that the +peasants were rioting and robbing people on their way from Moscow, and +so on. But all this was only talk; in reality (though the Council of +Fili, at which it was decided to abandon Moscow, had not yet been +held) both those who went away and those who remained behind felt, +though they did not show it, that Moscow would certainly be abandoned, +and that they ought to get away as quickly as possible and save +their belongings. It was felt that everything would suddenly break +up and change, but up to the first of September nothing had done so. +As a criminal who is being led to execution knows that he must die +immediately, but yet looks about him and straightens the cap that is +awry on his head, so Moscow involuntarily continued its wonted life, +though it knew that the time of its destruction was near when the +conditions of life to which its people were accustomed to submit would +be completely upset. + +During the three days preceding the occupation of Moscow the whole +Rostov family was absorbed in various activities. The head of the +family, Count Ilya Rostov, continually drove about the city collecting +the current rumors from all sides and gave superficial and hasty +orders at home about the preparations for their departure. + +The countess watched the things being packed, was dissatisfied +with everything, was constantly in pursuit of Petya who was always +running away from her, and was jealous of Natasha with whom he spent +all his time. Sonya alone directed the practical side of matters by +getting things packed. But of late Sonya had been particularly sad and +silent. Nicholas' letter in which he mentioned Princess Mary had +elicited, in her presence, joyous comments from the countess, who +saw an intervention of Providence in this meeting of the princess +and Nicholas. + +"I was never pleased at Bolkonski's engagement to Natasha," said the +countess, "but I always wanted Nicholas to marry the princess, and had +a presentiment that it would happen. What a good thing it would be!" + +Sonya felt that this was true: that the only possibility of +retrieving the Rostovs' affairs was by Nicholas marrying a rich woman, +and that the princess was a good match. It was very bitter for her. +But despite her grief, or perhaps just because of it, she took on +herself all the difficult work of directing the storing and packing of +their things and was busy for whole days. The count and countess +turned to her when they had any orders to give. Petya and Natasha on +the contrary, far from helping their parents, were generally a +nuisance and a hindrance to everyone. Almost all day long the house +resounded with their running feet, their cries, and their +spontaneous laughter. They laughed and were gay not because there +was any reason to laugh, but because gaiety and mirth were in their +hearts and so everything that happened was a cause for gaiety and +laughter to them. Petya was in high spirits because having left home a +boy he had returned (as everybody told him) a fine young man, +because he was at home, because he had left Belaya Tserkov where there +was no hope of soon taking part in a battle and had come to Moscow +where there was to be fighting in a few days, and chiefly because +Natasha, whose lead he always followed, was in high spirits. Natasha +was gay because she had been sad too long and now nothing reminded her +of the cause of her sadness, and because she was feeling well. She was +also happy because she had someone to adore her: the adoration of +others was a lubricant the wheels of her machine needed to make them +run freely- and Petya adored her. Above all, they were gay because +there was a war near Moscow, there would be fighting at the town +gates, arms were being given out, everybody was escaping- going away +somewhere, and in general something extraordinary was happening, and +that is always exciting, especially to the young. + +CHAPTER XIII + +On Saturday, the thirty-first of August, everything in the +Rostovs' house seemed topsy-turvy. All the doors were open, all the +furniture was being carried out or moved about, and the mirrors and +pictures had been taken down. There were trunks in the rooms, and hay, +wrapping paper, and ropes were scattered about. The peasants and house +serfs carrying out the things were treading heavily on the parquet +floors. The yard was crowded with peasant carts, some loaded high +and already corded up, others still empty. + +The voices and footsteps of the many servants and of the peasants +who had come with the carts resounded as they shouted to one another +in the yard and in the house. The count bad been out since morning. +The countess had a headache brought on by all the noise and turmoil +and was lying down in the new sitting room with a vinegar compress +on her head. Petya was not at home, he had gone to visit a friend with +whom he meant to obtain a transfer from the militia to the active +army. Sonya was in the ballroom looking after the packing of the glass +and china. Natasha was sitting on the floor of her dismantled room +with dresses, ribbons, and scarves strewn all about her, gazing +fixedly at the floor and holding in her hands the old ball dress +(already out of fashion) which she had worn at her first Petersburg +ball. + +Natasha was ashamed of doing nothing when everyone else was so busy, +and several times that morning had tried to set to work, but her heart +was not in it, and she could not and did not know how to do anything +except with all her heart and all her might. For a while she had stood +beside Sonya while the china was being packed and tried to help, but +soon gave it up and went to her room to pack her own things. At +first she found it amusing to give away dresses and ribbons to the +maids, but when that was done and what was left had still to be +packed, she found it dull. + +"Dunyasha, you pack! You will, won't you, dear?" And when Dunyasha +willingly promised to do it all for her, Natasha sat down on the +floor, took her old ball dress, and fell into a reverie quite +unrelated to what ought to have occupied her thoughts now. She was +roused from her reverie by the talk of the maids in the next room +(which was theirs) and by the sound of their hurried footsteps going +to the back porch. Natasha got up and looked out of the window. An +enormously long row of carts full of wounded men had stopped in the +street. + +The housekeeper, the old nurse, the cooks, coachmen, maids, footmen, +postilions, and scullions stood at the gate, staring at the wounded. + +Natasha, throwing a clean pocket handkerchief over her hair and +holding an end of it in each hand, went out into the street. + +The former housekeeper, old Mavra Kuzminichna, had stepped out of +the crowd by the gate, gone up to a cart with a hood constructed of +bast mats, and was speaking to a pale young officer who lay inside. +Natasha moved a few steps forward and stopped shyly, still holding her +handkerchief, and listened to what the housekeeper was saying. + +"Then you have nobody in Moscow?" she was saying. "You would be more +comfortable somewhere in a house... in ours, for instance... the +family are leaving." + +"I don't know if it would be allowed," replied the officer in a weak +voice. "Here is our commanding officer... ask him," and he pointed +to a stout major who was walking back along the street past the row of +carts. + +Natasha glanced with frightened eyes at the face of the wounded +officer and at once went to meet the major. + +"May the wounded men stay in our house?" she asked. + +The major raised his hand to his cap with a smile. + +"Which one do you want, Ma'am'selle?" said he, screwing up his +eyes and smiling. + +Natasha quietly repeated her question, and her face and whole manner +were so serious, though she was still holding the ends of her +handkerchief, that the major ceased smiling and after some reflection- +as if considering in how far the thing was possible- replied in the +affirmative. + +"Oh yes, why not? They may," he said. + +With a slight inclination of her head, Natasha stepped back +quickly to Mavra Kuzminichna, who stood talking compassionately to the +officer. + +"They may. He says they may!" whispered Natasha. + +The cart in which the officer lay was turned into the Rostovs' yard, +and dozens of carts with wounded men began at the invitation of the +townsfolk to turn into the yards and to draw up at the entrances of +the houses in Povarskaya Street. Natasha was evidently pleased to be +dealing with new people outside the ordinary routine of her life. +She and Mavra Kuzminichna tried to get as many of the wounded as +possible into their yard. + +"Your Papa must be told, though," said Mavra Kuzminichna. + +"Never mind, never mind, what does it matter? For one day we can +move into the drawing room. They can have all our half of the house." + +"There now, young lady, you do take things into your head! Even if +we put them into the wing, the men's room, or the nurse's room, we +must ask permission." + +"Well, I'll ask." + +Natasha ran into the house and went on tiptoe through the +half-open door into the sitting room, where there was a smell of +vinegar and Hoffman's drops. + +"Are you asleep, Mamma?" + +"Oh, what sleep-?" said the countess, waking up just as she was +dropping into a doze. + +"Mamma darling!" said Natasha, kneeling by her mother and bringing +her face close to her mother's, "I am sorry, forgive me, I'll never do +it again; I woke you up! Mavra Kuzminichna has sent me: they have +brought some wounded here- officers. Will you let them come? They have +nowhere to go. I knew you'd let them come!" she said quickly all in +one breath. + +"What officers? Whom have they brought? I don't understand +anything about it," said the countess. + +Natasha laughed, and the countess too smiled slightly. + +"I knew you'd give permission... so I'll tell them," and, having +kissed her mother, Natasha got up and went to the door. + +In the hall she met her father, who had returned with bad news. + +"We've stayed too long!" said the count with involuntary vexation. +"The Club is closed and the police are leaving." + +"Papa, is it all right- I've invited some of the wounded into the +house?" said Natasha. + +"Of course it is," he answered absently. "That's not the point. I +beg you not to indulge in trifles now, but to help to pack, and +tomorrow we must go, go, go!...." + +And the count gave a similar order to the major-domo and the +servants. + +At dinner Petya having returned home told them the news he had +heard. He said the people had been getting arms in the Kremlin, and +that though Rostopchin's broadsheet had said that he would sound a +call two or three days in advance, the order had certainly already +been given for everyone to go armed to the Three Hills tomorrow, and +that there would be a big battle there. + +The countess looked with timid horror at her son's eager, excited +face as he said this. She realized that if she said a word about his +not going to the battle (she knew he enjoyed the thought of the +impending engagement) he would say something about men, honor, and the +fatherland- something senseless, masculine, and obstinate which +there would be no contradicting, and her plans would be spoiled; and +so, hoping to arrange to leave before then and take Petya with her +as their protector and defender, she did not answer him, but after +dinner called the count aside and implored him with tears to take +her away quickly, that very night if possible. With a woman's +involuntary loving cunning she, who till then had not shown any alarm, +said that she would die of fright if they did not leave that very +night. Without any pretense she was now afraid of everything. + +CHAPTER XIV + +Madame Schoss, who had been out to visit her daughter, increased the +countess' fears still more by telling what she had seen at a spirit +dealer's in Myasnitski Street. When returning by that street she had +been unable to pass because of a drunken crowd rioting in front of the +shop. She had taken a cab and driven home by a side street and the +cabman had told her that the people were breaking open the barrels +at the drink store, having received orders to do so. + +After dinner the whole Rostov household set to work with +enthusiastic haste packing their belongings and preparing for their +departure. The old count, suddenly setting to work, kept passing +from the yard to the house and back again, shouting confused +instructions to the hurrying people, and flurrying them still more. +Petya directed things in the yard. Sonya, owing to the count's +contradictory orders, lost her head and did not know what to do. The +servants ran noisily about the house and yard, shouting and disputing. +Natasha, with the ardor characteristic of all she did suddenly set +to work too. At first her intervention in the business of packing +was received skeptically. Everybody expected some prank from her and +did not wish to obey her; but she resolutely and passionately demanded +obedience, grew angry and nearly cried because they did not heed +her, and at last succeeded in making them believe her. Her first +exploit, which cost her immense effort and established her +authority, was the packing of the carpets. The count had valuable +Gobelin tapestries and Persian carpets in the house. When Natasha +set to work two cases were standing open in the ballroom, one almost +full up with crockery, the other with carpets. There was also much +china standing on the tables, and still more was being brought in from +the storeroom. A third case was needed and servants had gone to +fetch it. + +"Sonya, wait a bit- we'll pack everything into these," said Natasha. + +"You can't, Miss, we have tried to," said the butler's assistant. + +"No, wait a minute, please." + +And Natasha began rapidly taking out of the case dishes and plates +wrapped in paper. + +"The dishes must go in here among the carpets," said she. + +"Why, it's a mercy if we can get the carpets alone into three +cases," said the butler's assistant. + +"Oh, wait, please!" And Natasha began rapidly and deftly sorting out +the things. "These aren't needed," said she, putting aside some plates +of Kiev ware. "These- yes, these must go among the carpets," she said, +referring to the Saxony china dishes. + +"Don't, Natasha! Leave it alone! We'll get it all packed," urged +Sonya reproachfully. + +"What a young lady she is!" remarked the major-domo. + +But Natasha would not give in. She turned everything out and began +quickly repacking, deciding that the inferior Russian carpets and +unnecessary crockery should not be taken at all. When everything had +been taken out of the cases, they recommenced packing, and it turned +out that when the cheaper things not worth taking had nearly all +been rejected, the valuable ones really did all go into the two cases. +Only the lid of the case containing the carpets would not shut down. A +few more things might have been taken out, but Natasha insisted on +having her own way. She packed, repacked, pressed, made the butler's +assistant and Petya- whom she had drawn into the business of +packing- press on the lid, and made desperate efforts herself. + +"That's enough, Natasha," said Sonya. "I see you were right, but +just take out the top one." + +"I won't!" cried Natasha, with one hand bolding back the hair that +hung over her perspiring face, while with the other she pressed down +the carpets. "Now press, Petya! Press, Vasilich, press hard!" she +cried. + +The carpets yielded and the lid closed; Natasha, clapping her hands, +screamed with delight and tears fell from her eyes. But this only +lasted a moment. She at once set to work afresh and they now trusted +her completely. The count was not angry even when they told him that +Natasha had countermanded an order of his, and the servants now came +to her to ask whether a cart was sufficiently loaded, and whether it +might be corded up. Thanks to Natasha's directions the work now went +on expeditiously, unnecessary things were left, and the most +valuable packed as compactly as possible. + +But hard as they all worked till quite late that night, they could +not get everything packed. The countess had fallen asleep and the +count, having put off their departure till next morning, went to bed. + +Sonya and Natasha slept in the sitting room without undressing. + +That night another wounded man was driven down the Povarskaya, and +Mavra Kuzminichna, who was standing at the gate, had him brought +into the Rostovs' yard. Mavra Kuzminichna concluded that he was a very +important man. He was being conveyed in a caleche with a raised +hood, and was quite covered by an apron. On the box beside the +driver sat a venerable old attendant. A doctor and two soldiers +followed the carriage in a cart. + +"Please come in here. The masters are going away and the whole house +will be empty," said the old woman to the old attendant. + +"Well, perhaps," said he with a sigh. "We don't expect to get him +home alive! We have a house of our own in Moscow, but it's a long +way from here, and there's nobody living in it." + +"Do us the honor to come in, there's plenty of everything in the +master's house. Come in," said Mavra Kuzminichna. "Is he very ill?" +she asked. + +The attendant made a hopeless gesture. + +"We don't expect to get him home! We must ask the doctor." + +And the old servant got down from the box and went up to the cart. + +"All right!" said the doctor. + +The old servant returned to the caleche, looked into it, shook his +head disconsolately, told the driver to turn into the yard, and +stopped beside Mavra Kuzminichna. + +"O, Lord Jesus Christ!" she murmured. + +She invited them to take the wounded man into the house. + +"The masters won't object..." she said. + +But they had to avoid carrying the man upstairs, and so they took +him into the wing and put him in the room that had been Madame +Schoss'. + +This wounded man was Prince Andrew Bolkonski. + +CHAPTER XV + +Moscow's last day had come. It was a clear bright autumn day, a +Sunday. The church bells everywhere were ringing for service, just +as usual on Sundays. Nobody seemed yet to realize what awaited the +city. + +Only two things indicated the social condition of Moscow- the +rabble, that is the poor people, and the price of commodities. An +enormous crowd of factory hands, house serfs, and peasants, with +whom some officials, seminarists, and gentry were mingled, had gone +early that morning to the Three Hills. Having waited there for +Rostopchin who did not turn up, they became convinced that Moscow +would be surrendered, and then dispersed all about the town to the +public houses and cookshops. Prices too that day indicated the state +of affairs. The price of weapons, of gold, of carts and horses, kept +rising, but the value of paper money and city articles kept falling, +so that by midday there were instances of carters removing valuable +goods, such as cloth, and receiving in payment a half of what they +carted, while peasant horses were fetching five hundred rubles each, +and furniture, mirrors, and bronzes were being given away for nothing. + +In the Rostovs' staid old-fashioned house the dissolution of +former conditions of life was but little noticeable. As to the serfs +the only indication was that three out of their huge retinue +disappeared during the night, but nothing was stolen; and as to the +value of their possessions, the thirty peasant carts that had come +in from their estates and which many people envied proved to be +extremely valuable and they were offered enormous sums of money for +them. Not only were huge sums offered for the horses and carts, but on +the previous evening and early in the morning of the first of +September, orderlies and servants sent by wounded officers came to the +Rostovs' and wounded men dragged themselves there from the Rostovs' +and from neighboring houses where they were accommodated, entreating +the servants to try to get them a lift out of Moscow. The major-domo +to whom these entreaties were addressed, though he was sorry for the +wounded, resolutely refused, saying that he dare not even mention +the matter to the count. Pity these wounded men as one might, it was +evident that if they were given one cart there would be no reason to +refuse another, or all the carts and one's own carriages as well. +Thirty carts could not save all the wounded and in the general +catastrophe one could not disregard oneself and one's own family. So +thought the major-domo on his master's behalf. + +On waking up that morning Count Ilya Rostov left his bedroom softly, +so as not to wake the countess who had fallen asleep only toward +morning, and came out to the porch in his lilac silk dressing gown. In +the yard stood the carts ready corded. The carriages were at the front +porch. The major-domo stood at the porch talking to an elderly orderly +and to a pale young officer with a bandaged arm. On seeing the count +the major-domo made a significant and stern gesture to them both to go +away. + +"Well, Vasilich, is everything ready?" asked the count, and stroking +his bald head he looked good-naturedly at the officer and the +orderly and nodded to them. (He liked to see new faces.) + +"We can harness at once, your excellency." + +"Well, that's right. As soon as the countess wakes we'll be off, God +willing! What is it, gentlemen?" he added, turning to the officer. +"Are you staying in my house?" + +The officer came nearer and suddenly his face flushed crimson. + +"Count, be so good as to allow me... for God's sake, to get into +some corner of one of your carts! I have nothing here with me.... I +shall be all right on a loaded cart..." + +Before the officer had finished speaking the orderly made the same +request on behalf of his master. + +"Oh, yes, yes,yes!" said the count hastily. "I shall be very +pleased, very pleased. Vasilich, you'll see to it. Just unload one +or two carts. Well, what of it... do what's necessary..." said the +count, muttering some indefinite order. + +But at the same moment an expression of warm gratitude on the +officer's face had already sealed the order. The count looked around +him. In the yard, at the gates, at the window of the wings, wounded +officers and their orderlies were to be seen. They were all looking at +the count and moving toward the porch. + +"Please step into the gallery, your excellency," said the +major-domo. "What are your orders about the pictures?" + +The count went into the house with him, repeating his order not to +refuse the wounded who asked for a lift. + +"Well, never mind, some of the things can be unloaded," he added +in a soft, confidential voice, as though afraid of being overheard. + +At nine o'clock the countess woke up, and Matrena Timofeevna, who +had been her lady's maid before her marriage and now performed a +sort of chief gendarme's duty for her, came to say that Madame +Schoss was much offended and the young ladies' summer dresses could +not be left behind. On inquiry, the countess learned that Madame +Schoss was offended because her trunk had been taken down from its +cart, and all the loads were being uncorded and the luggage taken +out of the carts to make room for wounded men whom the count in the +simplicity of his heart had ordered that they should take with them. +The countess sent for her husband. + +"What is this, my dear? I hear that the luggage is being unloaded." + +"You know, love, I wanted to tell you... Countess dear... an officer +came to me to ask for a few carts for the wounded. After all, ours are +things that can be bought but think what being left behind means to +them!... Really now, in our own yard- we asked them in ourselves and +there are officers among them.... You know, I think, my dear... let +them be taken... where's the hurry?" + +The count spoke timidly, as he always did when talking of money +matters. The countess was accustomed to this tone as a precursor of +news of something detrimental to the children's interests, such as the +building of a new gallery or conservatory, the inauguration of a +private theater or an orchestra. She was accustomed always to oppose +anything announced in that timid tone and considered it her duty to do +so. + +She assumed her dolefully submissive manner and said to her husband: +"Listen to me, Count, you have managed matters so that we are +getting nothing for the house, and now you wish to throw away all our- +all the children's property! You said yourself that we have a +hundred thousand rubles' worth of things in the house. I don't +consent, my dear, I don't! Do as you please! It's the government's +business to look after the wounded; they know that. Look at the +Lopukhins opposite, they cleared out everything two days ago. That's +what other people do. It's only we who are such fools. If you have +no pity on me, have some for the children." + +Flourishing his arms in despair the count left the room without +replying. + +"Papa, what are you doing that for?" asked Natasha, who had followed +him into her mother's room. + +"Nothing! What business is it of yours?" muttered the count angrily. + +"But I heard," said Natasha. "Why does Mamma object?" + +"What business is it of yours?" cried the count. + +Natasha stepped up to the window and pondered. + +"Papa! Here's Berg coming to see us," said she, looking out of the +window. + +CHAPTER XVI + +Berg, the Rostovs' son-in-law, was already a colonel wearing the +orders of Vladimir and Anna, and he still filled the quiet and +agreeable post of assistant to the head of the staff of the +assistant commander of the first division of the Second Army. + +On the first of September he had come to Moscow from the army. + +He had nothing to do in Moscow, but he had noticed that everyone +in the army was asking for leave to visit Moscow and had something +to do there. So he considered it necessary to ask for leave of absence +for family and domestic reasons. + +Berg drove up to his father-in-law's house in his spruce little trap +with a pair of sleek roans, exactly like those of a certain prince. He +looked attentively at the carts in the yard and while going up to +the porch took out a clean pocket handkerchief and tied a knot in it. + +From the anteroom Berg ran with smooth though impatient steps into +the drawing room, where he embraced the count, kissed the hands of +Natasha and Sonya, and hastened to inquire after "Mamma's" health. + +"Health, at a time like this?" said the count. "Come, tell us the +news! Is the army retreating or will there be another battle?" + +"God Almighty alone can decide the fate of our fatherland, Papa," +said Berg. "The army is burning with a spirit of heroism and the +leaders, so to say, have now assembled in council. No one knows what +is coming. But in general I can tell you, Papa, that such a heroic +spirit, the truly antique valor of the Russian army, which they- which +it" (he corrected himself) "has shown or displayed in the battle of +the twenty-sixth- there are no words worthy to do it justice! I tell +you, Papa" (he smote himself on the breast as a general he had heard +speaking had done, but Berg did it a trifle late for he should have +struck his breast at the words "Russian army"), "I tell you frankly +that we, the commanders, far from having to urge the men on or +anything of that kind, could hardly restrain those... those... yes, +those exploits of antique valor," he went on rapidly. "General Barclay +de Tolly risked his life everywhere at the head of the troops, I can +assure you. Our corps was stationed on a hillside. You can imagine!" + +And Berg related all that he remembered of the various tales he +had heard those days. Natasha watched him with an intent gaze that +confused him, as if she were trying to find in his face the answer +to some question. + +"Altogether such heroism as was displayed by the Russian warriors +cannot be imagined or adequately praised!" said Berg, glancing round +at Natasha, and as if anxious to conciliate her, replying to her +intent look with a smile. "'Russia is not in Moscow, she lives in +the hearts of her sons!' Isn't it so, Papa?" said he. + +Just then the countess came in from the sitting room with a weary +and dissatisfied expression. Berg hurriedly jumped up, kissed her +hand, asked about her health, and, swaying his head from side to +side to express sympathy, remained standing beside her. + +"Yes, Mamma, I tell you sincerely that these are hard and sad +times for every Russian. But why are you so anxious? You have still +time to get away...." + +"I can't think what the servants are about," said the countess, +turning to her husband. "I have just been told that nothing is ready +yet. Somebody after all must see to things. One misses Mitenka at such +times. There won't be any end to it." + +The count was about to say something, but evidently restrained +himself. He got up from his chair and went to the door. + +At that moment Berg drew out his handkerchief as if to blow his nose +and, seeing the knot in it, pondered, shaking his head sadly and +significantly. + +"And I have a great favor to ask of you, Papa," said he. + +"Hm..." said the count, and stopped. + +"I was driving past Yusupov's house just now," said Berg with a +laugh, "when the steward, a man I know, ran out and asked me whether I +wouldn't buy something. I went in out of curiosity, you know, and +there is a small chiffonier and a dressing table. You know how dear +Vera wanted a chiffonier like that and how we had a dispute about it." +(At the mention of the chiffonier and dressing table Berg +involuntarily changed his tone to one of pleasure at his admirable +domestic arrangements.) "And it's such a beauty! It pulls out and +has a secret English drawer, you know! And dear Vera has long wanted +one. I wish to give her a surprise, you see. I saw so many of those +peasant carts in your yard. Please let me have one, I will pay the man +well, and..." + +The count frowned and coughed. + +"Ask the countess, I don't give orders." + +"If it's inconvenient, please don't," said Berg. "Only I so wanted +it, for dear Vera's sake." + +"Oh, go to the devil, all of you! To the devil, the devil, the +devil..." cried the old count. "My head's in a whirl!" + +And he left the room. The countess began to cry. + +"Yes, Mamma! Yes, these are very hard times!" said Berg. + +Natasha left the room with her father and, as if finding it +difficult to reach some decision, first followed him and then ran +downstairs. + +Petya was in the porch, engaged in giving out weapons to the +servants who were to leave Moscow. The loaded carts were still +standing in the yard. Two of them had been uncorded and a wounded +officer was climbing into one of them helped by an orderly. + +"Do you know what it's about?" Petya asked Natasha. + +She understood that he meant what were their parents quarreling +about. She did not answer. + +"It's because Papa wanted to give up all the carts to the +wounded," said Petya. "Vasilich told me. I consider..." + +"I consider," Natasha suddenly almost shouted, turning her angry +face to Petya, "I consider it so horrid, so abominable, so... I +don't know what. Are we despicable Germans?" + +Her throat quivered with convulsive sobs and, afraid of weakening +and letting the force of her anger run to waste, she turned and rushed +headlong up the stairs. + +Berg was sitting beside the countess consoling her with the +respectful attention of a relative. The count, pipe in hand, was +pacing up and down the room, when Natasha, her face distorted by +anger, burst in like a tempest and approached her mother with rapid +steps. + +"It's horrid! It's abominable! she screamed. "You can't possibly +have ordered it!" + +Berg and the countess looked at her, perplexed and frightened. The +count stood still at the window and listened. + +"Mamma, it's impossible: see what is going on in the yard!" she +cried. "They will be left!..." + +"What's the matter with you? Who are 'they'? What do you want?" + +"Why, the wounded! It's impossible, Mamma. It's monstrous!... No, +Mamma darling, it's not the thing. Please forgive me, darling.... +Mamma, what does it matter what we take away? Only look what is +going on in the yard... Mamma!... It's impossible!" + +The count stood by the window and listened without turning round. +Suddenly he sniffed and put his face closer to the window. + +The countess glanced at her daughter, saw her face full of shame for +her mother, saw her agitation, and understood why her husband did +not turn to look at her now, and she glanced round quite disconcerted. + +"Oh, do as you like! Am I hindering anyone?" she said, not +surrendering at once. + +"Mamma, darling, forgive me!" + +But the countess pushed her daughter away and went up to her +husband. + +"My dear, you order what is right.... You know I don't understand +about it," said she, dropping her eyes shamefacedly. + +"The eggs... the eggs are teaching the hen," muttered the count +through tears of joy, and he embraced his wife who was glad to hide +her look of shame on his breast. + +"Papa! Mamma! May I see to it? May I?..." asked Natasha. "We will +still take all the most necessary things." + +The count nodded affirmatively, and Natasha, at the rapid pace at +which she used to run when playing at tag, ran through the ballroom to +the anteroom and downstairs into the yard. + +The servants gathered round Natasha, but could not believe the +strange order she brought them until the count himself, in his +wife's name, confirmed the order to give up all the carts to the +wounded and take the trunks to the storerooms. When they understood +that order the servants set to work at this new task with pleasure and +zeal. It no longer seemed strange to them but on the contrary it +seemed the only thing that could be done, just as a quarter of an hour +before it had not seemed strange to anyone that the wounded should +be left behind and the goods carted away but that had seemed the +only thing to do. + +The whole household, as if to atone for not having done it sooner, +set eagerly to work at the new task of placing the wounded in the +carts. The wounded dragged themselves out of their rooms and stood +with pale but happy faces round the carts. The news that carts were to +be had spread to the neighboring houses, from which wounded men +began to come into the Rostovs' yard. Many of the wounded asked them +not to unload the carts but only to let them sit on the top of the +things. But the work of unloading, once started, could not be +arrested. It seemed not to matter whether all or only half the +things were left behind. Cases full of china, bronzes, pictures, and +mirrors that had been so carefully packed the night before now lay +about the yard, and still they went on searching for and finding +possibilities of unloading this or that and letting the wounded have +another and yet another cart. + +"We can take four more men," said the steward. "They can have my +trap, or else what is to become of them?" + +"Let them have my wardrobe cart," said the countess. "Dunyasha can +go with me in the carriage." + +They unloaded the wardrobe cart and sent it to take wounded men from +a house two doors off. The whole household, servants included, was +bright and animated. Natasha was in a state of rapturous excitement +such as she had not known for a long time. + +"What could we fasten this onto?" asked the servants, trying to +fix a trunk on the narrow footboard behind a carriage. "We must keep +at least one cart." + +"What's in it?" asked Natasha. + +"The count's books." + +"Leave it, Vasilich will put it away. It's not wanted." + +The phaeton was full of people and there was a doubt as to where +Count Peter could sit. + +"On the box. You'll sit on the box, won't you, Petya?" cried +Natasha. + +Sonya too was busy all this time, but the aim of her efforts was +quite different from Natasha's. She was putting away the things that +had to be left behind and making a list of them as the countess +wished, and she tried to get as much taken away with them as possible. + +CHAPTER XVII + +Before two o'clock in the afternoon the Rostovs' four carriages, +packed full and with the horses harnessed, stood at the front door. +One by one the carts with the wounded had moved out of the yard. + +The caleche in which Prince Andrew was being taken attracted Sonya's +attention as it passed the front porch. With the help of a maid she +was arranging a seat for the countess in the huge high coach that +stood at the entrance. + +"Whose caleche is that?" she inquired, leaning out of the carriage +window. + +"Why, didn't you know, Miss?" replied the maid. "The wounded prince: +he spent the night in our house and is going with us." + +"But who is it? What's his name?" + +"It's our intended that was- Prince Bolkonski himself! They say he +is dying," replied the maid with a sigh. + +Sonya jumped out of the coach and ran to the countess. The countess, +tired out and already dressed in shawl and bonnet for her journey, was +pacing up and down the drawing room, waiting for the household to +assemble for the usual silent prayer with closed doors before +starting. Natasha was not in the room. + +"Mamma," said Sonya, "Prince Andrew is here, mortally wounded. He is +going with us." + +The countess opened her eyes in dismay and, seizing Sonya's arm, +glanced around. + +"Natasha?" she murmured. + +At that moment this news had only one significance for both of them. +They knew their Natasha, and alarm as to what would happen if she +heard this news stifled all sympathy for the man they both liked. + +"Natasha does not know yet, but he is going with us," said Sonya. + +"You say he is dying?" + +Sonya nodded. + +The countess put her arms around Sonya and began to cry. + +"The ways of God are past finding out!" she thought, feeling that +the Almighty Hand, hitherto unseen, was becoming manifest in all +that was now taking place. + +"Well, Mamma? Everything is ready. What's the matter?" asked +Natasha, as with animated face she ran into the room. + +"Nothing," answered the countess. "If everything is ready let us +start." + +And the countess bent over her reticule to hide her agitated face. +Sonya embraced Natasha and kissed her. + +Natasha looked at her inquiringly. + +"What is it? What has happened?" + +"Nothing... No..." + +"Is it something very bad for me? What is it?" persisted Natasha +with her quick intuition. + +Sonya sighed and made no reply. The count, Petya, Madame Schoss, +Mavra Kuzminichna, and Vasilich came into the drawing room and, having +closed the doors, they all sat down and remained for some moments +silently seated without looking at one another. + +The count was the first to rise, and with a loud sigh crossed +himself before the icon. All the others did the same. Then the count +embraced Mavra Kuzminichna and Vasilich, who were to remain in Moscow, +and while they caught at his hand and kissed his shoulder he patted +their backs lightly with some vaguely affectionate and comforting +words. The countess went into the oratory and there Sonya found her on +her knees before the icons that had been left here and there hanging +on the wall. (The most precious ones, with which some family tradition +was connected, were being taken with them.) + +In the porch and in the yard the men whom Petya had armed with +swords and daggers, with trousers tucked inside their high boots and +with belts and girdles tightened, were taking leave of those remaining +behind. + +As is always the case at a departure, much had been forgotten or put +in the wrong place, and for a long time two menservants stood one on +each side of the open door and the carriage steps waiting to help +the countess in, while maids rushed with cushions and bundles from the +house to the carriages, the caleche, the phaeton, and back again. + +"They always will forget everything!" said the countess. "Don't +you know I can't sit like that?" + +And Dunyasha, with clenched teeth, without replying but with an +aggrieved look on her face, hastily got into the coach to rearrange +the seat. + +"Oh, those servants!" said the count, swaying his head. + +Efim, the old coachman, who was the only one the countess trusted to +drive her, sat perched up high on the box and did not so much as +glance round at what was going on behind him. From thirty years' +experience he knew it would be some time yet before the order, "Be +off, in God's name!" would be given him: and he knew that even when it +was said he would be stopped once or twice more while they sent back +to fetch something that had been forgotten, and even after that he +would again be stopped and the countess herself would lean out of +the window and beg him for the love of heaven to drive carefully +down the hill. He knew all this and therefore waited calmly for what +would happen, with more patience than the horses, especially the +near one, the chestnut Falcon, who was pawing the ground and +champing his bit. At last all were seated, the carriage steps were +folded and pulled up, the door was shut, somebody was sent for a +traveling case, and the countess leaned out and said what she had to +say. Then Efim deliberately doffed his hat and began crossing himself. +The postilion and all the other servants did the same. "Off, in +God's name!" said Efim, putting on his hat. "Start!" The postilion +started the horses, the off pole horse tugged at his collar, the +high springs creaked, and the body of the coach swayed. The footman +sprang onto the box of the moving coach which jolted as it passed +out of the yard onto the uneven roadway; the other vehicles jolted +in their turn, and the procession of carriages moved up the street. In +the carriages, the caleche, and the phaeton, all crossed themselves as +they passed the church opposite the house. Those who were to remain in +Moscow walked on either side of the vehicles seeing the travelers off. + +Rarely had Natasha experienced so joyful a feeling as now, sitting +in the carriage beside the countess and gazing at the slowly +receding walls of forsaken, agitated Moscow. Occasionally she leaned +out of the carriage window and looked back and then forward at the +long train of wounded in front of them. Almost at the head of the line +she could see the raised hood of Prince Andrew's caleche. She did +not know who was in it, but each time she looked at the procession her +eyes sought that caleche. She knew it was right in front. + +In Kudrino, from the Nikitski, Presnya, and Podnovinsk Streets +came several other trains of vehicles similar to the Rostovs', and +as they passed along the Sadovaya Street the carriages and carts +formed two rows abreast. + +As they were going round the Sukharev water tower Natasha, who was +inquisitively and alertly scrutinizing the people driving or walking +past, suddenly cried out in joyful surprise: + +"Dear me! Mamma, Sonya, look, it's he!" + +"Who? Who?" + +"Look! Yes, on my word, it's Bezukhov!" said Natasha, putting her +head out of the carriage and staring at a tall, stout man in a +coachman's long coat, who from his manner of walking and moving was +evidently a gentleman in disguise, and who was passing under the +arch of the Sukharev tower accompanied by a small, sallow-faced, +beardless old man in a frieze coat. + +"Yes, it really is Bezukhov in a coachman's coat, with a +queer-looking old boy. Really," said Natasha, "look, look!" + +"No, it's not he. How can you talk such nonsense?" + +"Mamma," screamed Natasha, "I'll stake my head it's he! I assure +you! Stop, stop!" she cried to the coachman. + +But the coachman could not stop, for from the Meshchanski Street +came more carts and carriages, and the Rostovs were being shouted at +to move on and not block the way. + +In fact, however, though now much farther off than before, the +Rostovs all saw Pierre- or someone extraordinarily like him- in a +coachman's coat, going down the street with head bent and a serious +face beside a small, beardless old man who looked like a footman. That +old man noticed a face thrust out of the carriage window gazing at +them, and respectfully touching Pierre's elbow said something to him +and pointed to the carriage. Pierre, evidently engrossed in thought, +could not at first understand him. At length when he had understood +and looked in the direction the old man indicated, he recognized +Natasha, and following his first impulse stepped instantly and rapidly +toward the coach. But having taken a dozen steps he seemed to remember +something and stopped. + +Natasha's face, leaning out of the window, beamed with quizzical +kindliness. + +"Peter Kirilovich, come here! We have recognized you! This is +wonderful!" she cried, holding out her hand to him. "What are you +doing? Why are you like this?" + +Pierre took her outstretched hand and kissed it awkwardly as he +walked along beside her while the coach still moved on. + +"What is the matter, Count?" asked the countess in a surprised and +commiserating tone. + +"What? What? Why? Don't ask me," said Pierre, and looked round at +Natasha whose radiant, happy expression- of which he was conscious +without looking at her- filled him with enchantment. + +"Are you remaining in Moscow, then?" + +Pierre hesitated. + +"In Moscow?" he said in a questioning tone. "Yes, in Moscow. +Goodby!" + +"Ah, if only I were a man? I'd certainly stay with you. How +splendid!" said Natasha. "Mamma, if you'll let me, I'll stay!" + +Pierre glanced absently at Natasha and was about to say something, +but the countess interrupted him. + +"You were at the battle, we heard." + +"Yes, I was," Pierre answered. "There will be another battle +tomorrow..." he began, but Natasha interrupted him. + +"But what is the matter with you, Count? You are not like +yourself...." + +"Oh, don't ask me, don't ask me! I don't know myself. Tomorrow... +But no! Good-by, good-by!" he muttered. "It's an awful time!" and +dropping behind the carriage he stepped onto the pavement. + +Natasha continued to lean out of the window for a long time, beaming +at him with her kindly, slightly quizzical, happy smile. + +CHAPTER XVIII + +For the last two days, ever since leaving home, Pierre had been +living in the empty house of his deceased benefactor, Bazdeev. This is +how it happened. + +When he woke up on the morning after his return to Moscow and his +interview with Count Rostopchin, he could not for some time make out +where he was and what was expected of him. When he was informed that +among others awaiting him in his reception room there was a +Frenchman who had brought a letter from his wife, the Countess Helene, +he felt suddenly overcome by that sense of confusion and +hopelessness to which he was apt to succumb. He felt that everything +was now at an end, all was in confusion and crumbling to pieces, +that nobody was right or wrong, the future held nothing, and there was +no escape from this position. Smiling unnaturally and muttering to +himself, he first sat down on the sofa in an attitude of despair, then +rose, went to the door of the reception room and peeped through the +crack, returned flourishing his arms, and took up a book. His +major-domo came in a second time to say that the Frenchman who had +brought the letter from the countess was very anxious to see him if +only for a minute, and that someone from Bazdeev's widow had called to +ask Pierre to take charge of her husband's books, as she herself was +leaving for the country. + +"Oh, yes, in a minute; wait... or no! No, of course... go and say +I will come directly," Pierre replied to the major-domo. + +But as soon as the man had left the room Pierre took up his hat +which was lying on the table and went out of his study by the other +door. There was no one in the passage. He went along the whole +length of this passage to the stairs and, frowning and rubbing his +forehead with both hands, went down as far as the first landing. The +hall porter was standing at the front door. From the landing where +Pierre stood there was a second staircase leading to the back +entrance. He went down that staircase and out into the yard. No one +had seen him. But there were some carriages waiting, and as soon as +Pierre stepped out of the gate the coachmen and the yard porter +noticed him and raised their caps to him. When he felt he was being +looked at he behaved like an ostrich which hides its head in a bush in +order not to be seen: he hung his head and quickening his pace went +down the street. + +Of all the affairs awaiting Pierre that day the sorting of Joseph +Bazdeev's books and papers appeared to him the most necessary. + +He hired the first cab he met and told the driver to go to the +Patriarch's Ponds, where the widow Bazdeev's house was. + +Continually turning round to look at the rows of loaded carts that +were making their way from all sides out of Moscow, and balancing +his bulky body so as not to slip out of the ramshackle old vehicle, +Pierre, experiencing the joyful feeling of a boy escaping from school, +began to talk to his driver. + +The man told him that arms were being distributed today at the +Kremlin and that tomorrow everyone would be sent out beyond the +Three Hills gates and a great battle would be fought there. + +Having reached the Patriarch's Ponds Pierre found the Bazdeevs' +house, where he had not been for a long time past. He went up to the +gate. Gerasim, that sallow beardless old man Pierre had seen at +Torzhok five years before with Joseph Bazdeev, came out in answer to +his knock. + +"At home?" asked Pierre. + +"Owing to the present state of things Sophia Danilovna has gone to +the Torzhok estate with the children, your excellency." + +"I will come in all the same, I have to look through the books," +said Pierre. + +"Be so good as to step in. Makar Alexeevich, the brother of my +late master- may the kingdom of heaven be his- has remained here, +but he is in a weak state as you know," said the old servant. + +Pierre knew that Makar Alexeevich was Joseph Bazdeev's half-insane +brother and a hard drinker. + +"Yes, yes, I know. Let us go in..." said Pierre and entered the +house. + +A tall, bald-headed old man with a red nose, wearing a dressing gown +and with galoshes on his bare feet, stood in the anteroom. On seeing +Pierre he muttered something angrily and went away along the passage. + +"He was a very clever man but has now grown quite feeble, as your +honor sees," said Gerasim. "Will you step into the study?" Pierre +nodded. "As it was sealed up so it has remained, but Sophia +Danilovna gave orders that if anyone should come from you they were to +have the books." + +Pierre went into that gloomy study which he had entered with such +trepidation in his benefactor's lifetime. The room, dusty and +untouched since the death of Joseph Bazdeev was now even gloomier. + +Gerasim opened one of the shutters and left the room on tiptoe. +Pierre went round the study, approached the cupboard in which the +manuscripts were kept, and took out what had once been one of the most +important, the holy of holies of the order. This was the authentic +Scotch Acts with Bazdeev's notes and explanations. He sat down at +the dusty writing table, and, having laid the manuscripts before +him, opened them out, closed them, finally pushed them away, and +resting his head on his hand sank into meditation. + +Gerasim looked cautiously into the study several times and saw +Pierre always sitting in the same attitude. + +More than two hours passed and Gerasim took the liberty of making +a slight noise at the door to attract his attention, but Pierre did +not hear him. + +"Is the cabman to be discharged, your honor?" + +"Oh yes!" said Pierre, rousing himself and rising hurriedly. "Look +here," he added, taking Gerasim by a button of his coat and looking +down at the old man with moist, shining, and ecstatic eyes, "I say, do +you know that there is going to be a battle tomorrow?" + +"We heard so," replied the man. + +"I beg you not to tell anyone who I am, and to do what I ask you." + +"Yes, your excellency," replied Gerasim. "Will you have something to +eat?" + +"No, but I want something else. I want peasant clothes and a +pistol," said Pierre, unexpectedly blushing. + +"Yes, your excellency," said Gerasim after thinking for a moment. + +All the rest of that day Pierre spent alone in his benefactor's +study, and Gerasim heard him pacing restlessly from one corner to +another and talking to himself. And he spent the night on a bed made +up for him there. + +Gerasim, being a servant who in his time had seen many strange +things, accepted Pierre's taking up his residence in the house without +surprise, and seemed pleased to have someone to wait on. That same +evening- without even asking himself what they were wanted for- he +procured a coachman's coat and cap for Pierre, and promised to get him +the pistol next day. Makar Alexeevich came twice that evening +shuffling along in his galoshes as far as the door and stopped and +looked ingratiatingly at Pierre. But as soon as Pierre turned toward +him he wrapped his dressing gown around him with a shamefaced and +angry look and hurried away. It was when Pierre (wearing the +coachman's coat which Gerasim had procured for him and had disinfected +by steam) was on his way with the old man to buy the pistol at the +Sukharev market that he met the Rostovs. + +CHAPTER XIX + +Kutuzov's order to retreat through Moscow to the Ryazan road was +issued at night on the first of September. + +The first troops started at once, and during the night they +marched slowly and steadily without hurry. At daybreak, however, those +nearing the town at the Dorogomilov bridge saw ahead of them masses of +soldiers crowding and hurrying across the bridge, ascending on the +opposite side and blocking the streets and alleys, while endless +masses of troops were bearing down on them from behind, and an +unreasoning hurry and alarm overcame them. They all rushed forward +to the bridge, onto it, and to the fords and the boats. Kutuzov +himself had driven round by side streets to the other side of Moscow. + +By ten o'clock in the morning of the second of September, only the +rear guard remained in the Dorogomilov suburb, where they had ample +room. The main army was on the other side of Moscow or beyond it. + +At that very time, at ten in the morning of the second of September, +Napoleon was standing among his troops on the Poklonny Hill looking at +the panorama spread out before him. From the twenty-sixth of August to +the second of September, that is from the battle of Borodino to the +entry of the French into Moscow, during the whole of that agitating, +memorable week, there had been the extraordinary autumn weather that +always comes as a surprise, when the sun hangs low and gives more heat +than in spring, when everything shines so brightly in the rare clear +atmosphere that the eyes smart, when the lungs are strengthened and +refreshed by inhaling the aromatic autumn air, when even the nights +are warm, and when in those dark warm nights, golden stars startle and +delight us continually by falling from the sky. + +At ten in the morning of the second of September this weather +still held. + +The brightness of the morning was magical. Moscow seen from the +Poklonny Hill lay spaciously spread out with her river, her gardens, +and her churches, and she seemed to be living her usual life, her +cupolas glittering like stars in the sunlight. + +The view of the strange city with its peculiar architecture, such as +he had never seen before, filled Napoleon with the rather envious +and uneasy curiosity men feel when they see an alien form of life that +has no knowledge of them. This city was evidently living with the full +force of its own life. By the indefinite signs which, even at a +distance, distinguish a living body from a dead one, Napoleon from the +Poklonny Hill perceived the throb of life in the town and felt, as +it were, the breathing of that great and beautiful body. + +Every Russian looking at Moscow feels her to be a mother; every +foreigner who sees her, even if ignorant of her significance as the +mother city, must feel her feminine character, and Napoleon felt it. + +"Cette ville asiatique aux innombrables eglises, Moscou la sainte. +La voila done enfin, cette fameuse ville! Il etait temps,"~^ said he, +and dismounting he ordered a plan of Moscow to be spread out before +him, and summoned Lelorgne d'Ideville, the interpreter. + +^~ "That Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy Moscow! Here +it is then at last, that famous city. It was high time." + +"A town captured by the enemy is like a maid who has lost her +honor," thought he (he had said so to Tuchkov at Smolensk). From +that point of view he gazed at the Oriental beauty he had not seen +before. It seemed strange to him that his long-felt wish, which had +seemed unattainable, had at last been realized. In the clear morning +light he gazed now at the city and now at the plan, considering its +details, and the assurance of possessing it agitated and awed him. + +"But could it be otherwise?" he thought. "Here is this capital at my +feet. Where is Alexander now, and of what is he thinking? A strange, +beautiful, and majestic city; and a strange and majestic moment! In +what light must I appear to them!" thought he, thinking of his troops. +"Here she is, the reward for all those fainthearted men," he +reflected, glancing at those near him and at the troops who were +approaching and forming up. "One word from me, one movement of my +hand, and that ancient capital of the Tsars would perish. But my +clemency is always ready to descend upon the vanquished. I must be +magnanimous and truly great. But no, it can't be true that I am in +Moscow," he suddenly thought. "Yet here she is lying at my feet, +with her golden domes and crosses scintillating and twinkling in the +sunshine. But I shall spare her. On the ancient monuments of barbarism +and despotism I will inscribe great words of justice and mercy.... +It is just this which Alexander will feel most painfully, I know him." +(It seemed to Napoleon that the chief import of what was taking +place lay in the personal struggle between himself and Alexander.) +"From the height of the Kremlin- yes, there is the Kremlin, yes- I +will give them just laws; I will teach them the meaning of true +civilization, I will make generations of boyars remember their +conqueror with love. I will tell the deputation that I did not, and do +not, desire war, that I have waged war only against the false policy +of their court; that I love and respect Alexander and that in Moscow I +will accept terms of peace worthy of myself and of my people. I do not +wish to utilize the fortunes of war to humiliate an honored monarch. +'Boyars,' I will say to them, 'I do not desire war, I desire the peace +and welfare of all my subjects.' However, I know their presence will +inspire me, and I shall speak to them as I always do: clearly, +impressively, and majestically. But can it be true that I am in +Moscow? Yes, there she lies." + +"Qu'on m'amene les boyars,"~^ said he to his suite. + +^~ "Bring the boyars to me." + +A general with a brilliant suite galloped off at once to fetch the +boyars. + +Two hours passed. Napoleon had lunched and was again standing in the +same place on the Poklonny Hill awaiting the deputation. His speech to +the boyars had already taken definite shape in his imagination. That +speech was full of dignity and greatness as Napoleon understood it. + +He was himself carried away by the tone of magnanimity he intended +to adopt toward Moscow. In his imagination he appointed days for +assemblies at the palace of the Tsars, at which Russian notables and +his own would mingle. He mentally appointed a governor, one who +would win the hearts of the people. Having learned that there were +many charitable institutions in Moscow he mentally decided that he +would shower favors on them all. He thought that, as in Africa he +had to put on a burnoose and sit in a mosque, so in Moscow he must +be beneficent like the Tsars. And in order finally to touch the hearts +of the Russians- and being like all Frenchmen unable to imagine +anything sentimental without a reference to ma chere, ma tendre, ma +pauvre mere~^ - he decided that he would place an inscription on all +these establishments in large letters: "This establishment is +dedicated to my dear mother." Or no, it should be simply: Maison de ma +Mere,~^ he concluded. "But am I really in Moscow? Yes, here it +lies before me, but why is the deputation from the city so long in +appearing?" he wondered. + +^~ "My dear, my tender, my poor mother." + +^~ "House of my Mother." + +Meanwhile an agitated consultation was being carried on in +whispers among his generals and marshals at the rear of his suite. +Those sent to fetch the deputation had returned with the news that +Moscow was empty, that everyone had left it. The faces of those who +were not conferring together were pale and perturbed. They were not +alarmed by the fact that Moscow had been abandoned by its +inhabitants (grave as that fact seemed), but by the question how to +tell the Emperor- without putting him in the terrible position of +appearing ridiculous- that he had been awaiting the boyars so long +in vain: that there were drunken mobs left in Moscow but no one +else. Some said that a deputation of some sort must be scraped +together, others disputed that opinion and maintained that the Emperor +should first be carefully and skillfully prepared, and then told the +truth. + +"He will have to be told, all the same," said some gentlemen of +the suite. "But, gentlemen..." + +The position was the more awkward because the Emperor, meditating +upon his magnanimous plans, was pacing patiently up and down before +the outspread map, occasionally glancing along the road to Moscow from +under his lifted hand with a bright and proud smile. + +"But it's impossible..." declared the gentlemen of the suite, +shrugging their shoulders but not venturing to utter the implied word- +le ridicule... + +At last the Emperor, tired of futile expectation, his actor's +instinct suggesting to him that the sublime moment having been too +long drawn out was beginning to lose its sublimity, gave a sign with +his hand. A single report of a signaling gun followed, and the troops, +who were already spread out on different sides of Moscow, moved into +the city through Tver, Kaluga, and Dorogomilov gates. Faster and +faster, vying with one another, they moved at the double or at a trot, +vanishing amid the clouds of dust they raised and making the air +ring with a deafening roar of mingling shouts. + +Drawn on by the movement of his troops Napoleon rode with them as +far as the Dorogomilov gate, but there again stopped and, +dismounting from his horse, paced for a long time by the +Kammer-Kollezski rampart, awaiting the deputation. + +CHAPTER XX + +Meanwhile Moscow was empty. There were still people in it, perhaps a +fiftieth part of its former inhabitants had remained, but it was +empty. It was empty in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty. + +In a queenless hive no life is left though to a superficial glance +it seems as much alive as other hives. + +The bees circle round a queenless hive in the hot beams of the +midday sun as gaily as around the living hives; from a distance it +smells of honey like the others, and bees fly in and out in the same +way. But one has only to observe that hive to realize that there is no +longer any life in it. The bees do not fly in the same way, the +smell and the sound that meet the beekeeper are not the same. To the +beekeeper's tap on the wall of the sick hive, instead of the former +instant unanimous humming of tens of thousands of bees with their +abdomens threateningly compressed, and producing by the rapid +vibration of their wings an aerial living sound, the only reply is a +disconnected buzzing from different parts of the deserted hive. From +the alighting board, instead of the former spirituous fragrant smell +of honey and venom, and the warm whiffs of crowded life, comes an odor +of emptiness and decay mingling with the smell of honey. There are +no longer sentinels sounding the alarm with their abdomens raised, and +ready to die in defense of the hive. There is no longer the measured +quiet sound of throbbing activity, like the sound of boiling water, +but diverse discordant sounds of disorder. In and out of the hive long +black robber bees smeared with honey fly timidly and shiftily. They do +not sting, but crawl away from danger. Formerly only bees laden with +honey flew into the hive, and they flew out empty; now they fly out +laden. The beekeeper opens the lower part of the hive and peers in. +Instead of black, glossy bees- tamed by toil, clinging to one +another's legs and drawing out the wax, with a ceaseless hum of labor- +that used to hang in long clusters down to the floor of the hive, +drowsy shriveled bees crawl about separately in various directions +on the floor and walls of the hive. Instead of a neatly glued floor, +swept by the bees with the fanning of their wings, there is a floor +littered with bits of wax, excrement, dying bees scarcely moving their +legs, and dead ones that have not been cleared away. + +The beekeeper opens the upper part of the hive and examines the +super. Instead of serried rows of bees sealing up every gap in the +combs and keeping the brood warm, he sees the skillful complex +structures of the combs, but no longer in their former state of +purity. All is neglected and foul. Black robber bees are swiftly and +stealthily prowling about the combs, and the short home bees, +shriveled and listless as if they were old, creep slowly about without +trying to hinder the robbers, having lost all motive and all sense +of life. Drones, bumblebees, wasps, and butterflies knock awkwardly +against the walls of the hive in their flight. Here and there among +the cells containing dead brood and honey an angry buzzing can +sometimes be heard. Here and there a couple of bees, by force of habit +and custom cleaning out the brood cells, with efforts beyond their +strength laboriously drag away a dead bee or bumblebee without knowing +why they do it. In another corner two old bees are languidly fighting, +or cleaning themselves, or feeding one another, without themselves +knowing whether they do it with friendly or hostile intent. In a third +place a crowd of bees, crushing one another, attack some victim and +fight and smother it, and the victim, enfeebled or killed, drops +from above slowly and lightly as a feather, among the heap of corpses. +The keeper opens the two center partitions to examine the brood cells. +In place of the former close dark circles formed by thousands of +bees sitting back to back and guarding the high mystery of generation, +he sees hundreds of dull, listless, and sleepy shells of bees. They +have almost all died unawares, sitting in the sanctuary they had +guarded and which is now no more. They reek of decay and death. Only a +few of them still move, rise, and feebly fly to settle on the +enemy's hand, lacking the spirit to die stinging him; the rest are +dead and fall as lightly as fish scales. The beekeeper closes the +hive, chalks a mark on it, and when he has time tears out its contents +and burns it clean. + +So in the same way Moscow was empty when Napoleon, weary, uneasy, +and morose, paced up and down in front of the Kammer-Kollezski +rampart, awaiting what to his mind was a necessary, if but formal, +observance of the proprieties- a deputation. + +In various corners of Moscow there still remained a few people +aimlessly moving about, following their old habits and hardly aware of +what they were doing. + +When with due circumspection Napoleon was informed that Moscow was +empty, he looked angrily at his informant, turned away, and silently +continued to walk to and fro. + +"My carriage!" he said. + +He took his seat beside the aide-de-camp on duty and drove into +the suburb. "Moscow deserted!" he said to himself. "What an incredible +event!" + +He did not drive into the town, but put up at an inn in the +Dorogomilov suburb. + +The coup de theatre had not come off. + +CHAPTER XXI + +The Russian troops were passing through Moscow from two o'clock at +night till two in the afternoon and bore away with them the wounded +and the last of the inhabitants who were leaving. + +The greatest crush during the movement of the troops took place at +the Stone, Moskva, and Yauza bridges. + +While the troops, dividing into two parts when passing around the +Kremlin, were thronging the Moskva and the Stone bridges, a great many +soldiers, taking advantage of the stoppage and congestion, turned back +from the bridges and slipped stealthily and silently past the church +of Vasili the Beatified and under the Borovitski gate, back up the +hill to the Red Square where some instinct told them they could easily +take things not belonging to them. Crowds of the kind seen at cheap +sales filled all the passages and alleys of the Bazaar. But there were +no dealers with voices of ingratiating affability inviting customers +to enter; there were no hawkers, nor the usual motley crowd of +female purchasers- but only soldiers, in uniforms and overcoats though +without muskets, entering the Bazaar empty-handed and silently +making their way out through its passages with bundles. Tradesmen +and their assistants (of whom there were but few) moved about among +the soldiers quite bewildered. They unlocked their shops and locked +them up again, and themselves carried goods away with the help their +assistants. On the square in front of the Bazaar were drummers beating +the muster call. But the roll of the drums did not make the looting +soldiers run in the direction of the drum as formerly, but made +them, on the contrary, run farther away. Among the soldiers in the +shops and passages some men were to be seen in gray coats, with +closely shaven heads. Two officers, one with a scarf over his +uniform and mounted on a lean, dark-gray horse, the other in an +overcoat and on foot, stood at the corner of Ilyinka Street, +talking. A third officer galloped up to them. + +"The general orders them all to be driven out at once, without fail. +This is outrageous! Half the men have dispersed." + +"Where are you off to?... Where?..." he shouted to three infantrymen +without muskets who, holding up the skirts of their overcoats, were +slipping past him into the Bazaar passage. "Stop, you rascals!" + +"But how are you going to stop them?" replied another officer. +"There is no getting them together. The army should push on before the +rest bolt, that's all!" + +"How can one push on? They are stuck there, wedged on the bridge, +and don't move. Shouldn't we put a cordon round to prevent the rest +from running away?" + +"Come, go in there and drive them out!" shouted the senior officer. + +The officer in the scarf dismounted, called up a drummer, and went +with him into the arcade. Some soldiers started running away in a +group. A shopkeeper with red pimples on his cheeks near the nose, +and a calm, persistent, calculating expression on his plump face, +hurriedly and ostentatiously approached the officer, swinging his +arms. + +"Your honor!" said he. "Be so good as to protect us! We won't grudge +trifles, you are welcome to anything- we shall be delighted! +Pray!... I'll fetch a piece of cloth at once for such an honorable +gentleman, or even two pieces with pleasure. For we feel how it is; +but what's all this- sheer robbery! If you please, could not guards be +placed if only to let us close the shop...." + +Several shopkeepers crowded round the officer. + +"Eh, what twaddle!" said one of them, a thin, stern-looking man. +"When one's head is gone one doesn't weep for one's hair! Take what +any of you like!" And flourishing his arm energetically he turned +sideways to the officer. + +"It's all very well for you, Ivan Sidorych, to talk," said the first +tradesman angrily. "Please step inside, your honor!" + +"Talk indeed!" cried the thin one. "In my three shops here I have +a hundred thousand rubles' worth of goods. Can they be saved when +the army has gone? Eh, what people! 'Against God's might our hands +can't fight.'" + +"Come inside, your honor!" repeated the tradesman, bowing. + +The officer stood perplexed and his face showed indecision. + +"It's not my business!" he exclaimed, and strode on quickly down one +of the passages. + +From one open shop came the sound of blows and vituperation, and +just as the officer came up to it a man in a gray coat with a shaven +head was flung out violently. + +This man, bent double, rushed past the tradesman and the officer. +The officer pounced on the soldiers who were in the shops, but at that +moment fearful screams reached them from the huge crowd on the +Moskva bridge and the officer ran out into the square. + +"What is it? What is it?" he asked, but his comrade was already +galloping off past Vasili the Beatified in the direction from which +the screams came. + +The officer mounted his horse and rode after him. When he reached +the bridge he saw two unlimbered guns, the infantry crossing the +bridge, several overturned carts, and frightened and laughing faces +among the troops. Beside the cannon a cart was standing to which two +horses were harnessed. Four borzois with collars were pressing close +to the wheels. The cart was loaded high, and at the very top, beside a +child's chair with its legs in the air, sat a peasant woman uttering +piercing and desperate shrieks. He was told by his fellow officers +that the screams of the crowd and the shrieks of the woman were due to +the fact that General Ermolov, coming up to the crowd and learning +that soldiers were dispersing among the shops while crowds of +civilians blocked the bridge, had ordered two guns to be unlimbered +and made a show of firing at the bridge. The crowd, crushing one +another, upsetting carts, and shouting and squeezing desperately, +had cleared off the bridge and the troops were now moving forward. + +CHAPTER XXII + +Meanwhile, the city itself was deserted. There was hardly anyone +in the streets. The gates and shops were all closed, only here and +there round the taverns solitary shouts or drunken songs could be +heard. Nobody drove through the streets and footsteps were rarely +heard. The Povarskaya was quite still and deserted. The huge courtyard +of the Rostovs' house was littered with wisps of hay and with dung +from the horses, and not a soul was to be seen there. In the great +drawing room of the house, which had been left with all it +contained, were two people. They were the yard porter Ignat, and the +page boy Mishka, Vasilich's grandson who had stayed in Moscow with his +grandfather. Mishka had opened the clavichord and was strumming on +it with one finger. The yard porter, his arms akimbo, stood smiling +with satisfaction before the large mirror. + +"Isn't it fine, eh, Uncle Ignat?" said the boy, suddenly beginning +to strike the keyboard with both hands. + +"Only fancy!" answered Ignat, surprised at the broadening grin on +his face in the mirror. + +"Impudence! Impudence!" they heard behind them the voice of Mavra +Kuzminichna who had entered silently. "How he's grinning, the fat mug! +Is that what you're here for? Nothing's cleared away down there and +Vasilich is worn out. Just you wait a bit!" + +Ignat left off smiling, adjusted his belt, and went out of the +room with meekly downcast eyes. + +"Aunt, I did it gently," said the boy. + +"I'll give you something gently, you monkey you!" cried Mavra +Kuzminichna, raising her arm threateningly. "Go and get the samovar to +boil for your grandfather." + +Mavra Kuzminichna flicked the dust off the clavichord and closed it, +and with a deep sigh left the drawing room and locked its main door. + +Going out into the yard she paused to consider where she should go +next- to drink tea in the servants' wing with Vasilich, or into the +storeroom to put away what still lay about. + +She heard the sound of quick footsteps in the quiet street. +Someone stopped at the gate, and the latch rattled as someone tried to +open it. Mavra Kuzminichna went to the gate. + +"Who do you want?" + +"The count- Count Ilya Andreevich Rostov." + +"And who are you?" + +"An officer, I have to see him," came the reply in a pleasant, +well-bred Russian voice. + +Mavra Kuzminichna opened the gate and an officer of eighteen, with +the round face of a Rostov, entered the yard. + +"They have gone away, sir. Went away yesterday at vespertime," +said Mavra Kuzminichna cordially. + +The young officer standing in the gateway, as if hesitating +whether to enter or not, clicked his tongue. + +"Ah, how annoying!" he muttered. "I should have come yesterday.... +Ah, what a pity." + +Meanwhile, Mavra Kuzminichna was attentively and sympathetically +examining the familiar Rostov features of the young man's face, his +tattered coat and trodden-down boots. + +"What did you want to see the count for?" she asked. + +"Oh well... it can't be helped!" said he in a tone of vexation and +placed his hand on the gate as if to leave. + +He again paused in indecision. + +"You see," he suddenly said, "I am a kinsman of the count's and he +has been very kind to me. As you see" (he glanced with an amused air +and good-natured smile at his coat and boots) "my things are worn +out and I have no money, so I was going to ask the count..." + +Mavra Kuzminichna did not let him finish. + +"Just wait a minute, sir. One little moment," said she. + +And as soon as the officer let go of the gate handle she turned and, +hurrying away on her old legs, went through the back yard to the +servants' quarters. + +While Mavra Kuzminichna was running to her room the officer walked +about the yard gazing at his worn-out boots with lowered head and a +faint smile on his lips. "What a pity I've missed Uncle! What a nice +old woman! Where has she run off to? And how am I to find the +nearest way to overtake my regiment, which must by now be getting near +the Rogozhski gate?" thought he. Just then Mavra Kuzminichna +appeared from behind the corner of the house with a frightened yet +resolute look, carrying a rolled-up check kerchief in her hand. +While still a few steps from the officer she unfolded the kerchief and +took out of it a white twenty-five-ruble assignat and hastily handed +it to him. + +"If his excellency had been at home, as a kinsman he would of +course... but as it is..." + +Mavra Kuzminichna grew abashed and confused. The officer did not +decline, but took the note quietly and thanked her. + +"If the count had been at home..." Mavra Kuzminichna went on +apologetically. "Christ be with you, sir! May God preserve you!" +said she, bowing as she saw him out. + +Swaying his head and smiling as if amused at himself, the officer +ran almost at a trot through the deserted streets toward the Yauza +bridge to overtake his regiment. + +But Mavra Kuzminichna stood at the closed gate for some time with +moist eyes, pensively swaying her head and feeling an unexpected +flow of motherly tenderness and pity for the unknown young officer. + +CHAPTER XXIII + +From an unfinished house on the Varvarka, the ground floor of +which was a dramshop, came drunken shouts and songs. On benches +round the tables in a dirty little room sat some ten factory hands. +Tipsy and perspiring, with dim eyes and wide-open mouths, they were +all laboriously singing some song or other. They were singing +discordantly, arduously, and with great effort, evidently not +because they wished to sing, but because they wanted to show they were +drunk and on a spree. One, a tall, fair-haired lad in a clean blue +coat, was standing over the others. His face with its fine straight +nose would have been handsome had it not been for his thin, +compressed, twitching lips and dull, gloomy, fixed eyes. Evidently +possessed by some idea, he stood over those who were singing, and +solemnly and jerkily flourished above their heads his white arm with +the sleeve turned up to the elbow, trying unnaturally to spread out +his dirty fingers. The sleeve of his coat kept slipping down and he +always carefully rolled it up again with his left hand, as if it +were most important that the sinewy white arm he was flourishing +should be bare. In the midst of the song cries were heard, and +fighting and blows in the passage and porch. The tall lad waved his +arm. + +"Stop it!" he exclaimed peremptorily. "There's a fight, lads!" +And, still rolling up his sleeve, he went out to the porch. + +The factory hands followed him. These men, who under the +leadership of the tall lad were drinking in the dramshop that morning, +had brought the publican some skins from the factory and for this +had had drink served them. The blacksmiths from a neighboring +smithy, hearing the sounds of revelry in the tavern and supposing it +to have been broken into, wished to force their way in too and a fight +in the porch had resulted. + +The publican was fighting one of the smiths at the door, and when +the workmen came out the smith, wrenching himself free from the tavern +keeper, fell face downward on the pavement. + +Another smith tried to enter the doorway, pressing against the +publican with his chest. + +The lad with the turned-up sleeve gave the smith a blow in the +face and cried wildly: "They're fighting us, lads!" + +At that moment the first smith got up and, scratching his bruised +face to make it bleed, shouted in a tearful voice: "Police! Murder!... +They've killed a man, lads!" + +"Oh, gracious me, a man beaten to death- killed!..." screamed a +woman coming out of a gate close by. + +A crowd gathered round the bloodstained smith. + +"Haven't you robbed people enough- taking their last shirts?" said a +voice addressing the publican. "What have you killed a man for, you +thief?" + +The tall lad, standing in the porch, turned his bleared eyes from +the publican to the smith and back again as if considering whom he +ought to fight now. + +"Murderer!" he shouted suddenly to the publican. "Bind him, lads!" + +"I daresay you would like to bind me!" shouted the publican, pushing +away the men advancing on him, and snatching his cap from his head +he flung it on the ground. + +As if this action had some mysterious and menacing significance, the +workmen surrounding the publican paused in indecision. + +"I know the law very well, mates! I'll take the matter to the +captain of police. You think I won't get to him? Robbery is not +permitted to anybody now a days!" shouted the publican, picking up his +cap. + +"Come along then! Come along then!" the publican and the tall +young fellow repeated one after the other, and they moved up the +street together. + +The bloodstained smith went beside them. The factory hands and +others followed behind, talking and shouting. + +At the corner of the Moroseyka, opposite a large house with closed +shutters and bearing a bootmaker's signboard, stood a score of thin, +worn-out, gloomy-faced bootmakers, wearing overalls and long +tattered coats. + +"He should pay folks off properly," a thin workingman, with frowning +brows and a straggly beard, was saying. + +"But he's sucked our blood and now he thinks he's quit of us. He's +been misleading us all the week and now that he's brought us to this +pass he's made off." + +On seeing the crowd and the bloodstained man the workman ceased +speaking, and with eager curiosity all the bootmakers joined the +moving crowd. + +"Where are all the folks going?" + +"Why, to the police, of course!" + +"I say, is it true that we have been beaten?" "And what did you +think? Look what folks are saying." + +Questions and answers were heard. The publican, taking advantage +of the increased crowd, dropped behind and returned to his tavern. + +The tall youth, not noticing the disappearance of his foe, waved his +bare arm and went on talking incessantly, attracting general attention +to himself. It was around him that the people chiefly crowded, +expecting answers from him to the questions that occupied all their +minds. + +"He must keep order, keep the law, that's what the government is +there for. Am I not right, good Christians?" said the tall youth, with +a scarcely perceptible smile. "He thinks there's no government! How +can one do without government? Or else there would be plenty who'd rob +us." + +"Why talk nonsense?" rejoined voices in the crowd. "Will they give +up Moscow like this? They told you that for fun, and you believed +it! Aren't there plenty of troops on the march? Let him in, indeed! +That's what the government is for. You'd better listen to what +people are saying," said some of the mob pointing to the tall youth. + +By the wall of China-Town a smaller group of people were gathered +round a man in a frieze coat who held a paper in his hand. + +"An ukase, they are reading an ukase! Reading an ukase!" cried +voices in the crowd, and the people rushed toward the reader. + +The man in the frieze coat was reading the broadsheet of August 31 +When the crowd collected round him he seemed confused, but at the +demand of the tall lad who had pushed his way up to him, he began in a +rather tremulous voice to read the sheet from the beginning. + +"Early tomorrow I shall go to his Serene Highness," he read +("Sirin Highness," said the tall fellow with a triumphant smile on his +lips and a frown on his brow), "to consult with him to act, and to aid +the army to exterminate these scoundrels. We too will take part..." +the reader went on, and then paused ("Do you see," shouted the youth +victoriously, "he's going to clear up the whole affair for +you...."), "in destroying them, and will send these visitors to the +devil. I will come back to dinner, and we'll set to work. We will +do, completely do, and undo these scoundrels." + +The last words were read out in the midst of complete silence. The +tall lad hung his head gloomily. It was evident that no one had +understood the last part. In particular, the words "I will come back +to dinner," evidently displeased both reader and audience. The +people's minds were tuned to a high pitch and this was too simple +and needlessly comprehensible- it was what any one of them might +have said and therefore was what an ukase emanating from the highest +authority should not say. + +They all stood despondent and silent. The tall youth moved his +lips and swayed from side to side. + +"We should ask him... that's he himself?"... "Yes, ask him +indeed!... Why not? He'll explain"... voices in the rear of the +crowd were suddenly heard saying, and the general attention turned +to the police superintendent's trap which drove into the square +attended by two mounted dragoons. + +The superintendent of police, who had that morning by Count +Rostopchin's orders to burn the barges and had in connection with that +matter acquired a large sum of money which was at that moment in his +pocket, on seeing a crowd bearing down upon him told his coachman to +stop. + +"What people are these?" he shouted to the men, who were moving +singly and timidly in the direction of his trap. + +"What people are these?" he shouted again, receiving no answer. + +"Your honor..." replied the shopman in the frieze coat, "your honor, +in accord with the proclamation of his highest excellency the count, +they desire to serve, not sparing their lives, and it is not any +kind of riot, but as his highest excellence said..." + +"The count has not left, he is here, and an order will be issued +concerning you," said the superintendent of police. "Go on!" he +ordered his coachman. + +The crowd halted, pressing around those who had heard what the +superintendent had said, and looking at the departing trap. + +The superintendent of police turned round at that moment with a +scared look, said something to his coachman, and his horses +increased their speed. + +"It's a fraud, lads! Lead the way to him, himself!" shouted the tall +youth. "Don't let him go, lads! Let him answer us! Keep him!" +shouted different people and the people dashed in pursuit of the trap. + +Following the superintendent of police and talking loudly the +crowd went in the direction of the Lubyanka Street. + +"There now, the gentry and merchants have gone away and left us to +perish. Do they think we're dogs?" voices in the crowd were heard +saying more and more frequently. + +CHAPTER XXIV + +On the evening of the first of September, after his interview with +Kutuzov, Count Rostopchin had returned to Moscow mortified and +offended because he had not been invited to attend the council of war, +and because Kutuzov had paid no attention to his offer to take part in +the defense of the city; amazed also at the novel outlook revealed +to him at the camp, which treated the tranquillity of the capital +and its patriotic fervor as not merely secondary but quite +irrelevant and unimportant matters. Distressed, offended, and +surprised by all this, Rostopchin had returned to Moscow. After supper +he lay down on a sofa without undressing, and was awakened soon +after midnight by a courier bringing him a letter from Kutuzov. This +letter requested the count to send police officers to guide the troops +through the town, as the army was retreating to the Ryazan road beyond +Moscow. This was not news to Rostopchin. He had known that Moscow +would be abandoned not merely since his interview the previous day +with Kutuzov on the Poklonny Hill but ever since the battle of +Borodino, for all the generals who came to Moscow after that battle +had said unanimously that it was impossible to fight another battle, +and since then the government property had been removed every night, +and half the inhabitants had left the city with Rostopchin's own +permission. Yet all the same this information astonished and irritated +the count, coming as it did in the form of a simple note with an order +from Kutuzov, and received at night, breaking in on his beauty sleep. + +When later on in his memoirs Count Rostopchin explained his +actions at this time, he repeatedly says that he was then actuated +by two important considerations: to maintain tranquillity in Moscow +and expedite the departure of the inhabitants. If one accepts this +twofold aim all Rostopchin's actions appear irreproachable. "Why +were the holy relics, the arms, ammunition, gunpowder, and stores of +corn not removed? Why were thousands of inhabitants deceived into +believing that Moscow would not be given up- and thereby ruined?" +"To presence the tranquillity of the city," explains Count Rostopchin. +"Why were bundles of useless papers from the government offices, and +Leppich's balloon and other articles removed?" "To leave the town +empty," explains Count Rostopchin. One need only admit that public +tranquillity is in danger and any action finds a justification. + +All the horrors of the reign of terror were based only on solicitude +for public tranquillity. + +On what, then, was Count Rostopchin's fear for the tranquillity of +Moscow based in 1812? What reason was there for assuming any +probability of an uprising in the city? The inhabitants were leaving +it and the retreating troops were filling it. Why should that cause +the masses to riot? + +Neither in Moscow nor anywhere in Russia did anything resembling +an insurrection ever occur when the enemy entered a town. More than +ten thousand people were still in Moscow on the first and second of +September, and except for a mob in the governor's courtyard, assembled +there at his bidding, nothing happened. It is obvious that there would +have been even less reason to expect a disturbance among the people if +after the battle of Borodino, when the surrender of Moscow became +certain or at least probable, Rostopchin instead of exciting the +people by distributing arms and broadsheets had taken steps to +remove all the holy relics, the gunpowder, munitions, and money, and +had told the population plainly that the town would be abandoned. + +Rostopchin, though he had patriotic sentiments, was a sanguine and +impulsive man who had always moved in the highest administrative +circles and had no understanding at all of the people he supposed +himself to be guiding. Ever since the enemy's entry into Smolensk he +had in imagination been playing the role of director of the popular +feeling of "the heart of Russia." Not only did it seem to him (as to +all administrators) that he controlled the external actions of +Moscow's inhabitants, but he also thought he controlled their mental +attitude by means of his broadsheets and posters, written in a +coarse tone which the people despise in their own class and do not +understand from those in authority. Rostopchin was so pleased with the +fine role of leader of popular feeling, and had grown so used to it, +that the necessity of relinquishing that role and abandoning Moscow +without any heroic display took him unawares and he suddenly felt +the ground slip away from under his feet, so that he positively did +not know what to do. Though he knew it was coming, he did not till the +last moment wholeheartedly believe that Moscow would be abandoned, and +did not prepare for it. The inhabitants left against his wishes. If +the government offices were removed, this was only done on the +demand of officials to whom the count yielded reluctantly. He was +absorbed in the role he had created for himself. As is often the +case with those gifted with an ardent imagination, though he had +long known that Moscow would be abandoned he knew it only with his +intellect, he did not believe it in his heart and did not adapt +himself mentally to this new position of affairs. + +All his painstaking and energetic activity (in how far it was useful +and had any effect on the people is another question) had been +simply directed toward arousing in the masses his own feeling of +patriotic hatred of the French. + +But when events assumed their true historical character, when +expressing hatred for the French in words proved insufficient, when it +was not even possible to express that hatred by fighting a battle, +when self-confidence was of no avail in relation to the one question +before Moscow, when the whole population streamed out of Moscow as one +man, abandoning their belongings and proving by that negative action +all the depth of their national feeling, then the role chosen by +Rostopchin suddenly appeared senseless. He unexpectedly felt himself +ridiculous, weak, and alone, with no ground to stand on. + +When, awakened from his sleep, he received that cold, peremptory +note from Kutuzov, he felt the more irritated the more he felt himself +to blame. All that he had been specially put in charge of, the state +property which he should have removed, was still in Moscow and it +was no longer possible to take the whole of it away. + +"Who is to blame for it? Who has let things come to such a pass?" he +ruminated. "Not I, of course. I had everything ready. I had Moscow +firmly in hand. And this is what they have let it come to! Villains! +Traitors!" he thought, without clearly defining who the villains and +traitors were, but feeling it necessary to hate those traitors whoever +they might be who were to blame for the false and ridiculous +position in which he found himself. + +All that night Count Rostopchin issued orders, for which people came +to him from all parts of Moscow. Those about him had never seen the +count so morose and irritable. + +"Your excellency, the Director of the Registrar's Department has +sent for instructions... From the Consistory, from the Senate, from +the University, from the Foundling Hospital, the Suffragan has sent... +asking for information.... What are your orders about the Fire +Brigade? From the governor of the prison... from the superintendent of +the lunatic asylum..." All night long such announcements were +continually being received by the count. + +To all these inquiries he gave brief and angry replies indicating +that orders from him were not now needed, that the whole affair, +carefully prepared by him, had now been ruined by somebody, and that +that somebody would have to bear the whole responsibility for all that +might happen. + +"Oh, tell that blockhead," he said in reply to the question from the +Registrar's Department, "that he should remain to guard his documents. +Now why are you asking silly questions about the Fire Brigade? They +have horses, let them be off to Vladimir, and not leave them to the +French." + +"Your excellency, the superintendent of the lunatic asylum has come: +what are your commands?" + +"My commands? Let them go away, that's all.... And let the +lunatics out into the town. When lunatics command our armies God +evidently means these other madmen to be free." + +In reply to an inquiry about the convicts in the prison, Count +Rostopchin shouted angrily at the governor: + +"Do you expect me to give you two battalions- which we have not got- +for a convoy? Release them, that's all about it!" + +"Your excellency, there are some political prisoners, Meshkov, +Vereshchagin..." + +"Vereshchagin! Hasn't he been hanged yet?" shouted Rostopchin. +"Bring him to me!" + +CHAPTER XXV + +Toward nine o'clock in the morning, when the troops were already +moving through Moscow, nobody came to the count any more for +instructions. Those who were able to get away were going of their +own accord, those who remained behind decided for themselves what they +must do. + +The count ordered his carriage that he might drive to Sokolniki, and +sat in his study with folded hands, morose, sallow, and taciturn. + +In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that +it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule +is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable +every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. +While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his +frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people +and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the +ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea +begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer +possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, +the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the +administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, +becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man. + +Rostopchin felt this, and it was this which exasperated him. + +The superintendent of police, whom the crowd had stopped, went in to +see him at the same time as an adjutant who informed the count that +the horses were harnessed. They were both pale, and the superintendent +of police, after reporting that he had executed the instructions he +had received, informed the count that an immense crowd had collected +in the courtyard and wished to see him. + +Without saying a word Rostopchin rose and walked hastily to his +light, luxurious drawing room, went to the balcony door, took hold +of the handle, let it go again, and went to the window from which he +had a better view of the whole crowd. The tall lad was standing in +front, flourishing his arm and saying something with a stern look. The +blood stained smith stood beside him with a gloomy face. A drone of +voices was audible through the closed window. + +"Is my carriage ready?" asked Rostopchin, stepping back from the +window. + +"It is, your excellency," replied the adjutant. + +Rostopchin went again to the balcony door. + +"But what do they want?" he asked the superintendent of police. + +"Your excellency, they say they have got ready, according to your +orders, to go against the French, and they shouted something about +treachery. But it is a turbulent crowd, your excellency- I hardly +managed to get away from it. Your excellency, I venture to suggest..." + +"You may go. I don't need you to tell me what to do!" exclaimed +Rostopchin angrily. + +He stood by the balcony door looking at the crowd. + +"This is what they have done with Russia! This is what they have +done with me!" thought he, full of an irrepressible fury that welled +up within him against the someone to whom what was happening might +be attributed. As often happens with passionate people, he was +mastered by anger but was still seeking an object on which to vent it. +"Here is that mob, the dregs of the people," he thought as he gazed at +the crowd: "this rabble they have roused by their folly! They want a +victim," he thought as he looked at the tall lad flourishing his +arm. And this thought occurred to him just because he himself +desired a victim, something on which to vent his rage. + +"Is the carriage ready?" he asked again. + +"Yes, your excellency. What are your orders about Vereshchagin? He +is waiting at the porch," said the adjutant. + +"Ah!" exclaimed Rostopchin, as if struck by an unexpected +recollection. + +And rapidly opening the door he went resolutely out onto the +balcony. The talking instantly ceased, hats and caps were doffed, +and all eyes were raised to the count. + +"Good morning, lads!" said the count briskly and loudly. "Thank +you for coming. I'll come out to you in a moment, but we must first +settle with the villain. We must punish the villain who has caused the +ruin of Moscow. Wait for me!" + +And the count stepped as briskly back into the room and slammed +the door behind him. + +A murmur of approbation and satisfaction ran through the crowd. +"He'll settle with all the villains, you'll see! And you said the +French... He'll show you what law is!" the mob were saying as if +reproving one another for their lack of confidence. + +A few minutes later an officer came hurriedly out of the front door, +gave an order, and the dragoons formed up in line. The crowd moved +eagerly from the balcony toward the porch. Rostopchin, coming out +there with quick angry steps, looked hastily around as if seeking +someone. + +"Where is he?" he inquired. And as he spoke he saw a young man +coming round the corner of the house between two dragoons. He had a +long thin neck, and his head, that had been half shaved, was again +covered by short hair. This young man was dressed in a threadbare blue +cloth coat lined with fox fur, that had once been smart, and dirty +hempen convict trousers, over which were pulled his thin, dirty, +trodden-down boots. On his thin, weak legs were heavy chains which +hampered his irresolute movements. + +"Ah!" said Rostopchin, hurriedly turning away his eyes from the +young man in the fur-lined coat and pointing to the bottom step of the +porch. "Put him there." + +The young man in his clattering chains stepped clumsily to the +spot indicated, holding away with one finger the coat collar which +chafed his neck, turned his long neck twice this way and that, sighed, +and submissively folded before him his thin hands, unused to work. + +For several seconds while the young man was taking his place on +the step the silence continued. Only among the back rows of the +people, who were all pressing toward the one spot, could sighs, +groans, and the shuffling of feet be heard. + +While waiting for the young man to take his place on the step +Rostopchin stood frowning and rubbing his face with his hand. + +"Lads!" said he, with a metallic ring in his voice. "This man, +Vereshchagin, is the scoundrel by whose doing Moscow is perishing." + +The young man in the fur-lined coat, stooping a little, stood in a +submissive attitude, his fingers clasped before him. His emaciated +young face, disfigured by the half-shaven head, hung down +hopelessly. At the count's first words he raised it slowly and +looked up at him as if wishing to say something or at least to meet +his eye. But Rostopchin did not look at him. A vein in the young man's +long thin neck swelled like a cord and went blue behind the ear, and +suddenly his face flushed. + +All eyes were fixed on him. He looked at the crowd, and rendered +more hopeful by the expression he read on the faces there, he smiled +sadly and timidly, and lowering his head shifted his feet on the step. + +"He has betrayed his Tsar and his country, he had gone over to +Bonaparte. He alone of all the Russians has disgraced the Russian +name, he has caused Moscow to perish," said Rostopchin in a sharp, +even voice, but suddenly he glanced down at Vereshchagin who continued +to stand in the same submissive attitude. As if inflamed by the sight, +he raised his arm and addressed the people, almost shouting: + +"Deal with him as you think fit! I hand him over to you." + +The crowd remained silent and only pressed closer and closer to +one another. To keep one another back, to breathe in that stifling +atmosphere, to be unable to stir, and to await something unknown, +uncomprehended, and terrible, was becoming unbearable. Those +standing in front, who had seen and heard what had taken place +before them, all stood with wide open eyes and mouths, straining +with all their strength, and held back the crowd that was pushing +behind them. + +"Beat him!... Let the traitor perish and not disgrace the Russian +name!" shouted Rostopchin. "Cut him down. I command it." + +Hearing not so much the words as the angry tone of Rostopchin's +voice, the crowd moaned and heaved forward, but again paused. + +"Count!" exclaimed the timid yet theatrical voice of Vereshchagin in +the midst of the momentary silence that ensued, "Count! One God is +above us both...." He lifted his head and again the thick vein in +his thin neck filled with blood and the color rapidly came and went in +his face. + +He did not finish what he wished to say. + +"Cut him down! I command it..." shouted Rostopchin, suddenly growing +pale like Vereshchagin. + +"Draw sabers!" cried the dragoon officer, drawing his own. + +Another still stronger wave flowed through the crowd and reaching +the front ranks carried it swaying to the very steps of the porch. The +tall youth, with a stony look on his face, and rigid and uplifted arm, +stood beside Vereshchagin. + +"Saber him!" the dragoon officer almost whispered. + +And one of the soldiers, his face all at once distorted with fury, +struck Vereshchagin on the head with the blunt side of his saber. + +"Ah!" cried Vereshchagin in meek surprise, looking round with a +frightened glance as if not understanding why this was done to him. +A similar moan of surprise and horror ran through the crowd. "O Lord!" +exclaimed a sorrowful voice. + +But after the exclamation of surprise that had escaped from +Vereshchagin he uttered a plaintive cry of pain, and that cry was +fatal. The barrier of human feeling, strained to the utmost, that +had held the crowd in check suddenly broke. The crime had begun and +must now be completed. The plaintive moan of reproach was drowned by +the threatening and angry roar of the crowd. Like the seventh and last +wave that shatters a ship, that last irresistible wave burst from +the rear and reached the front ranks, carrying them off their feet and +engulfing them all. The dragoon was about to repeat his blow. +Vereshchagin with a cry of horror, covering his head with his hands, +rushed toward the crowd. The tall youth, against whom he stumbled, +seized his thin neck with his hands and, yelling wildly, fell with him +under the feet of the pressing, struggling crowd. + +Some beat and tore at Vereshchagin, others at the tall youth. And +the screams of those that were being trampled on and of those who +tried to rescue the tall lad only increased the fury of the crowd. +It was a long time before the dragoons could extricate the bleeding +youth, beaten almost to death. And for a long time, despite the +feverish haste with which the mob tried to end the work that had +been begun, those who were hitting, throttling, and tearing at +Vereshchagin were unable to kill him, for the crowd pressed from all +sides, swaying as one mass with them in the center and rendering it +impossible for them either to kill him or let him go. + +"Hit him with an ax, eh!... Crushed?... Traitor, he sold +Christ.... Still alive... tenacious... serves him right! Torture +serves a thief right. Use the hatchet!... What- still alive?" + +Only when the victim ceased to struggle and his cries changed to a +long-drawn, measured death rattle did the crowd around his +prostrate, bleeding corpse begin rapidly to change places. Each one +came up, glanced at what had been done, and with horror, reproach, and +astonishment pushed back again. + +"O Lord! The people are like wild beasts! How could he be alive?" +voices in the crowd could be heard saying. "Quite a young fellow +too... must have been a merchant's son. What men!... and they say he's +not the right one.... How not the right one?... O Lord! And there's +another has been beaten too- they say he's nearly done for.... Oh, the +people... Aren't they afraid of sinning?..." said the same mob now, +looking with pained distress at the dead body with its long, thin, +half-severed neck and its livid face stained with blood and dust. + +A painstaking police officer, considering the presence of a corpse +in his excellency's courtyard unseemly, told the dragoons to take it +away. Two dragoons took it by its distorted legs and dragged it +along the ground. The gory, dust-stained, half-shaven head with its +long neck trailed twisting along the ground. The crowd shrank back +from it. + +At the moment when Vereshchagin fell and the crowd closed in with +savage yells and swayed about him, Rostopchin suddenly turned pale +and, instead of going to the back entrance where his carriage +awaited him, went with hurried steps and bent head, not knowing +where and why, along the passage leading to the rooms on the ground +floor. The count's face was white and he could not control the +feverish twitching of his lower jaw. + +"This way, your excellency... Where are you going?... This way, +please..." said a trembling, frightened voice behind him. + +Count Rostopchin was unable to reply and, turning obediently, went +in the direction indicated. At the back entrance stood his caleche. +The distant roar of the yelling crowd was audible even there. He +hastily took his seat and told the coachman to drive him to his +country house in Sokolniki. + +When they reached the Myasnitski Street and could no longer hear the +shouts of the mob, the count began to repent. He remembered with +dissatisfaction the agitation and fear he had betrayed before his +subordinates. "The mob is terrible- disgusting," he said to himself in +French. "They are like wolves whom nothing but flesh can appease." +"Count! One God is above us both!"- Vereshchagin's words suddenly +recurred to him, and a disagreeable shiver ran down his back. But this +was only a momentary feeling and Count Rostopchin smiled +disdainfully at himself. "I had other duties," thought he. "The people +had to be appeased. Many other victims have perished and are perishing +for the public good"- and he began thinking of his social duties to +his family and to the city entrusted to him, and of himself- not +himself as Theodore Vasilyevich Rostopchin (he fancied that Theodore +Vasilyevich Rostopchin was sacrificing himself for the public good) +but himself as governor, the representative of authority and of the +Tsar. "Had I been simply Theodore Vasilyevich my course of action +would have been quite different, but it was my duty to safeguard my +life and dignity as commander in chief." + +Lightly swaying on the flexible springs of his carriage and no +longer hearing the terrible sounds of the crowd, Rostopchin grew +physically calm and, as always happens, as soon as he became +physically tranquil his mind devised reasons why he should be mentally +tranquil too. The thought which tranquillized Rostopchin was not a new +one. Since the world began and men have killed one another no one +has ever committed such a crime against his fellow man without +comforting himself with this same idea. This idea is le bien public, +the hypothetical welfare of other people. + +To a man not swayed by passion that welfare is never certain, but he +who commits such a crime always knows just where that welfare lies. +And Rostopchin now knew it. + +Not only did his reason not reproach him for what he had done, but +he even found cause for self-satisfaction in having so successfully +contrived to avail himself of a convenient opportunity to punish a +criminal and at the same time pacify the mob. + +"Vereshchagin was tried and condemned to death," thought +Rostopchin (though the Senate had only condemned Vereshchagin to +hard labor), "he was a traitor and a spy. I could not let him go +unpunished and so I have killed two birds with one stone: to appease +the mob I gave them a victim and at the same time punished a +miscreant." + +Having reached his country house and begun to give orders about +domestic arrangements, the count grew quite tranquil. + +Half an hour later he was driving with his fast horses across the +Sokolniki field, no longer thinking of what had occurred but +considering what was to come. He was driving to the Yauza bridge where +he had heard that Kutuzov was. Count Rostopchin was mentally preparing +the angry and stinging reproaches he meant to address to Kutuzov for +his deception. He would make that foxy old courtier feel that the +responsibility for all the calamities that would follow the +abandonment of the city and the ruin of Russia (as Rostopchin regarded +it) would fall upon his doting old head. Planning beforehand what he +would say to Kutuzov, Rostopchin turned angrily in his caleche and +gazed sternly from side to side. + +The Sokolniki field was deserted. Only at the end of it, in front of +the almshouse and the lunatic asylum, could be seen some people in +white and others like them walking singly across the field shouting +and gesticulating. + +One of these was running to cross the path of Count Rostopchin's +carriage, and the count himself, his coachman, and his dragoons looked +with vague horror and curiosity at these released lunatics and +especially at the one running toward them. + +Swaying from side to side on his long, thin legs in his fluttering +dressing gown, this lunatic was running impetuously, his gaze fixed on +Rostopchin, shouting something in a hoarse voice and making signs to +him to stop. The lunatic's solemn, gloomy face was thin and yellow, +with its beard growing in uneven tufts. His black, agate pupils with +saffron-yellow whites moved restlessly near the lower eyelids. + +"Stop! Pull up, I tell you!" he cried in a piercing voice, and again +shouted something breathlessly with emphatic intonations and gestures. + +Coming abreast of the caleche he ran beside it. + +"Thrice have they slain me, thrice have I risen from the dead. +They stoned me, crucified me... I shall rise... shall rise... shall +rise. They have torn my body. The kingdom of God will be overthrown... +Thrice will I overthrow it and thrice re-establish it!" he cried, +raising his voice higher and higher. + +Count Rostopchin suddenly grew pale as he had done when the crowd +closed in on Vereshchagin. He turned away. "Go fas... faster!" he +cried in a trembling voice to his coachman. The caleche flew over +the ground as fast as the horses could draw it, but for a long time +Count Rostopchin still heard the insane despairing screams growing +fainter in the distance, while his eyes saw nothing but the +astonished, frightened, bloodstained face of "the traitor" in the +fur-lined coat. + +Recent as that mental picture was, Rostopchin already felt that it +had cut deep into his heart and drawn blood. Even now he felt +clearly that the gory trace of that recollection would not pass with +time, but that the terrible memory would, on the contrary, dwell in +his heart ever more cruelly and painfully to the end of his life. He +seemed still to hear the sound of his own words: "Cut him down! I +command it...." + +"Why did I utter those words? It was by some accident I said +them.... I need not have said them," he thought. "And then nothing +would have happened." He saw the frightened and then infuriated face +of the dragoon who dealt the blow, the look of silent, timid +reproach that boy in the fur-lined coat had turned upon him. "But I +did not do it for my own sake. I was bound to act that way.... The +mob, the traitor... the public welfare," thought he. + +Troops were still crowding at the Yauza bridge. It was hot. Kutuzov, +dejected and frowning, sat on a bench by the bridge toying with his +whip in the sand when a caleche dashed up noisily. A man in a +general's uniform with plumes in his hat went up to Kutuzov and said +something in French. It was Count Rostopchin. He told Kutuzov that +he had come because Moscow, the capital, was no more and only the army +remained. + +"Things would have been different if your Serene Highness had not +told me that you would not abandon Moscow without another battle; +all this would not have happened," he said. + +Kutuzov looked at Rostopchin as if, not grasping what was said to +him, he was trying to read something peculiar written at that moment +on the face of the man addressing him. Rostopchin grew confused and +became silent. Kutuzov slightly shook his head and not taking his +penetrating gaze from Rostopchin's face muttered softly: + +"No! I shall not give up Moscow without a battle!" + +Whether Kutuzov was thinking of something entirely different when he +spoke those words, or uttered them purposely, knowing them to be +meaningless, at any rate Rostopchin made no reply and hastily left +him. And strange to say, the Governor of Moscow, the proud Count +Rostopchin, took up a Cossack whip and went to the bridge where he +began with shouts to drive on the carts that blocked the way. + +CHAPTER XXVI + +Toward four o'clock in the afternoon Murat's troops were entering +Moscow. In front rode a detachment of Wurttemberg hussars and behind +them rode the King of Naples himself accompanied by a numerous suite. + +About the middle of the Arbat Street, near the Church of the +Miraculous Icon of St. Nicholas, Murat halted to await news from the +advanced detachment as to the condition in which they had found the +citadel, le Kremlin. + +Around Murat gathered a group of those who had remained in Moscow. +They all stared in timid bewilderment at the strange, long-haired +commander dressed up in feathers and gold. + +"Is that their Tsar himself? He's not bad!" low voices could be +heard saying. + +An interpreter rode up to the group. + +"Take off your cap... your caps!" These words went from one to +another in the crowd. The interpreter addressed an old porter and +asked if it was far to the Kremlin. The porter, listening in +perplexity to the unfamiliar Polish accent and not realizing that +the interpreter was speaking Russian, did not understand what was +being said to him and slipped behind the others. + +Murat approached the interpreter and told him to ask where the +Russian army was. One of the Russians understood what was asked and +several voices at once began answering the interpreter. A French +officer, returning from the advanced detachment, rode up to Murat +and reported that the gates of the citadel had been barricaded and +that there was probably an ambuscade there. + +"Good!" said Murat and, turning to one of the gentlemen in his +suite, ordered four light guns to be moved forward to fire at the +gates. + +The guns emerged at a trot from the column following Murat and +advanced up the Arbat. When they reached the end of the Vozdvizhenka +Street they halted and drew in the Square. Several French officers +superintended the placing of the guns and looked at the Kremlin +through field glasses. + +The bells in the Kremlin were ringing for vespers, and this sound +troubled the French. They imagined it to be a call to arms. A few +infantrymen ran to the Kutafyev Gate. Beams and wooden screens had +been put there, and two musket shots rang out from under the gate as +soon as an officer and men began to run toward it. A general who was +standing by the guns shouted some words of command to the officer, and +the latter ran back again with his men. + +The sound of three more shots came from the gate. + +One shot struck a French soldier's foot, and from behind the screens +came the strange sound of a few voices shouting. Instantly as at a +word of command the expression of cheerful serenity on the faces of +the French general, officers, and men changed to one of determined +concentrated readiness for strife and suffering. To all of them from +the marshal to the least soldier, that place was not the Vozdvizhenka, +Mokhavaya, or Kutafyev Street, nor the Troitsa Gate (places familiar +in Moscow), but a new battlefield which would probably prove +sanguinary. And all made ready for that battle. The cries from the +gates ceased. The guns were advanced, the artillerymen blew the ash +off their linstocks, and an officer gave the word "Fire!" This was +followed by two whistling sounds of canister shot, one after +another. The shot rattled against the stone of the gate and upon the +wooden beams and screens, and two wavering clouds of smoke rose over +the Square. + +A few instants after the echo of the reports resounding over the +stone-built Kremlin had died away the French heard a strange sound +above their head. Thousands of crows rose above the walls and +circled in the air, cawing and noisily flapping their wings. +Together with that sound came a solitary human cry from the gateway +and amid the smoke appeared the figure of a bareheaded man in a +peasant's coat. He grasped a musket and took aim at the French. +"Fire!" repeated the officer once more, and the reports of a musket +and of two cannon shots were heard simultaneously. The gate again +hidden by smoke. + +Nothing more stirred behind the screens and the French infantry +soldiers and officers advanced to the gate. In the gateway lay three +wounded and four dead. Two men in peasant coats ran away at the foot +of the wall, toward the Znamenka. + +"Clear that away!" said the officer, pointing to the beams and the +corpses, and the French soldiers, after dispatching the wounded, threw +the corpses over the parapet. + +Who these men were nobody knew. "Clear that away!" was all that +was said of them, and they were thrown over the parapet and removed +later on that they might not stink. Thiers alone dedicates a few +eloquent lines to their memory: "These wretches had occupied the +sacred citadel, having supplied themselves with guns from the arsenal, +and fired" (the wretches) "at the French. Some of them were sabered +and the Kremlin was purged of their presence." + +Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French entered +the gates and began pitching their camp in the Senate Square. Out of +the windows of the Senate House the soldiers threw chairs into the +Square for fuel and kindled fires there. + +Other detachments passed through the Kremlin and encamped along +the Moroseyka, the Lubyanka, and Pokrovka Streets. Others quartered +themselves along the Vozdvizhenka, the Nikolski, and the Tverskoy +Streets. No masters of the houses being found anywhere, the French +were not billeted on the inhabitants as is usual in towns but lived in +it as in a camp. + +Though tattered, hungry, worn out, and reduced to a third of their +original number, the French entered Moscow in good marching order. +It was a weary and famished, but still a fighting and menacing army. +But it remained an army only until its soldiers had dispersed into +their different lodgings. As soon as the men of the various +regiments began to disperse among the wealthy and deserted houses, the +army was lost forever and there came into being something nondescript, +neither citizens nor soldiers but what are known as marauders. When +five weeks later these same men left Moscow, they no longer formed +an army. They were a mob of marauders, each carrying a quantity of +articles which seemed to him valuable or useful. The aim of each man +when he left Moscow was no longer, as it had been, to conquer, but +merely to keep what he had acquired. Like a monkey which puts its +paw into the narrow neck of a jug, and having seized a handful of nuts +will not open its fist for fear of losing what it holds, and therefore +perishes, the French when they left Moscow had inevitably to perish +because they carried their loot with them, yet to abandon what they +had stolen was as impossible for them as it is for the monkey to +open its paw and let go of its nuts. Ten minutes after each regiment +had entered a Moscow district, not a soldier or officer was left. +Men in military uniforms and Hessian boots could be seen through the +windows, laughing and walking through the rooms. In cellars and +storerooms similar men were busy among the provisions, and in the +yards unlocking or breaking open coach house and stable doors, +lighting fires in kitchens and kneading and baking bread with +rolled-up sleeves, and cooking; or frightening, amusing, or +caressing women and children. There were many such men both in the +shops and houses- but there was no army. + +Order after order was issued by the French commanders that day +forbidding the men to disperse about the town, sternly forbidding +any violence to the inhabitants or any looting, and announcing a +roll call for that very evening. But despite all these measures the +men, who had till then constituted an army, flowed all over the +wealthy, deserted city with its comforts and plentiful supplies. As +a hungry herd of cattle keeps well together when crossing a barren +field, but gets out of hand and at once disperses uncontrollably as +soon as it reaches rich pastures, so did the army disperse all over +the wealthy city. + +No residents were left in Moscow, and the soldiers- like water +percolating through sand- spread irresistibly through the city in +all directions from the Kremlin into which they had first marched. The +cavalry, on entering a merchant's house that had been abandoned and +finding there stabling more than sufficient for their horses, went on, +all the same, to the next house which seemed to them better. Many of +them appropriated several houses, chalked their names on them, and +quarreled and even fought with other companies for them. Before they +had had time to secure quarters the soldiers ran out into the +streets to see the city and, hearing that everything had been +abandoned, rushed to places where valuables were to be had for the +taking. The officers followed to check the soldiers and were +involuntarily drawn into doing the same. In Carriage Row carriages had +been left in the shops, and generals flocked there to select +caleches and coaches for themselves. The few inhabitants who had +remained invited commanding officers to their houses, hoping thereby +to secure themselves from being plundered. There were masses of wealth +and there seemed no end to it. All around the quarters occupied by the +French were other regions still unexplored and unoccupied where, +they thought, yet greater riches might be found. And Moscow engulfed +the army ever deeper and deeper. When water is spilled on dry ground +both the dry ground and the water disappear and mud results; and in +the same way the entry of the famished army into the rich and deserted +city resulted in fires and looting and the destruction of both the +army and the wealthy city. + +The French attributed the Fire of Moscow au patriotisme feroce de +Rostopchine,~^ the Russians to the barbarity of the French. In reality, +however, it was not, and could not be, possible to explain the burning +of Moscow by making any individual, or any group of people, +responsible for it. Moscow was burned because it found itself in a +position in which any town built of wood was bound to burn, quite +apart from whether it had, or had not, a hundred and thirty inferior +fire engines. Deserted Moscow had to burn as inevitably as a heap of +shavings has to burn on which sparks continually fall for several +days. A town built of wood, where scarcely a day passes without +conflagrations when the house owners are in residence and a police +force is present, cannot help burning when its inhabitants have left +it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke pipes, make campfires of +the Senate chairs in the Senate Square, and cook themselves meals +twice a day. In peacetime it is only necessary to billet troops in the +villages of any district and the number of fires in that district +immediately increases. How much then must the probability of fire be +increased in an abandoned, wooden town where foreign troops are +quartered. "Le patriotisme feroce de Rostopchine" and the barbarity of +the French were not to blame in the matter. Moscow was set on fire +by the soldiers' pipes, kitchens, and campfires, and by the +carelessness of enemy soldiers occupying houses they did not own. Even +if there was any arson (which is very doubtful, for no one had any +reason to burn the houses- in any case a troublesome and dangerous +thing to do), arson cannot be regarded as the cause, for the same +thing would have happened without any incendiarism. + +^~ To Rostopchin's ferocious patriotism. + +However tempting it might be for the French to blame Rostopchin's +ferocity and for Russians to blame the scoundrel Bonaparte, or later +on to place an heroic torch in the hands of their own people, it is +impossible not to see that there could be no such direct cause of +the fire, for Moscow had to burn as every village, factory, or house +must burn which is left by its owners and in which strangers are +allowed to live and cook their porridge. Moscow was burned by its +inhabitants, it is true, but by those who had abandoned it and not +by those who remained in it. Moscow when occupied by the enemy did not +remain intact like Berlin, Vienna, and other towns, simply because its +inhabitants abandoned it and did not welcome the French with bread and +salt, nor bring them the keys of the city. + +CHAPTER XXVII + +The absorption of the French by Moscow, radiating starwise as it +did, only reached the quarter where Pierre was staying by the +evening of the second of September. + +After the last two days spent in solitude and unusual circumstances, +Pierre was in a state bordering on insanity. He was completely +obsessed by one persistent thought. He did not know how or when this +thought had taken such possession of him, but he remembered nothing of +the past, understood nothing of the present, and all he saw and +heard appeared to him like a dream. + +He had left home only to escape the intricate tangle of life's +demands that enmeshed him, and which in his present condition he was +unable to unravel. He had gone to Joseph Alexeevich's house, on the +plea of sorting the deceased's books and papers, only in search of +rest from life's turmoil, for in his mind the memory of Joseph +Alexeevich was connected with a world of eternal, solemn, and calm +thoughts, quite contrary to the restless confusion into which he +felt himself being drawn. He sought a quiet refuge, and in Joseph +Alexeevich's study he really found it. When he sat with his elbows +on the dusty writing table in the deathlike stillness of the study, +calm and significant memories of the last few days rose one after +another in his imagination, particularly of the battle of Borodino and +of that vague sense of his own insignificance and insincerity compared +with the truth, simplicity, and strength of the class of men he +mentally classed as they. When Gerasim roused him from his reverie the +idea occurred to him of taking part in the popular defense of Moscow +which he knew was projected. And with that object he had asked Gerasim +to get him a peasant's coat and a pistol, confiding to him his +intentions of remaining in Joseph Alexeevich's house and keeping his +name secret. Then during the first day spent in inaction and +solitude (he tried several times to fix his attention on the Masonic +manuscripts, but was unable to do so) the idea that had previously +occurred to him of the cabalistic significance of his name in +connection with Bonaparte's more than once vaguely presented itself. +But the idea that he, L'russe Besuhof, was destined to set a limit +to the power of the Beast was as yet only one of the fancies that +often passed through his mind and left no trace behind. + +When, having bought the coat merely with the object of taking part +among the people in the defense of Moscow, Pierre had met the +Rostovs and Natasha had said to him: "Are you remaining in +Moscow?... How splendid!" the thought flashed into his mind that it +really would be a good thing, even if Moscow were taken, for him to +remain there and do what he was predestined to do. + +Next day, with the sole idea of not sparing himself and not +lagging in any way behind them, Pierre went to the Three Hills gate. +But when he returned to the house convinced that Moscow would not be +defended, he suddenly felt that what before had seemed to him merely a +possibility had now become absolutely necessary and inevitable. He +must remain in Moscow, concealing his name, and must meet Napoleon and +kill him, and either perish or put an end to the misery of all Europe- +which it seemed to him was solely due to Napoleon. + +Pierre knew all the details of the attempt on Bonaparte's life in +1809 by a German student in Vienna, and knew that the student had been +shot. And the risk to which he would expose his life by carrying out +his design excited him still more. + +Two equally strong feelings drew Pierre irresistibly to this +purpose. The first was a feeling of the necessity of sacrifice and +suffering in view of the common calamity, the same feeling that had + +caused him to go to Mozhaysk on the twenty-fifth and to make his way +to the very thick of the battle and had now caused him to run away +from his home and, in place of the luxury and comfort to which he +was accustomed, to sleep on a hard sofa without undressing and eat the +same food as Gerasim. The other was that vague and quite Russian +feeling of contempt for everything conventional, artificial, and +human- for everything the majority of men regard as the greatest +good in the world. Pierre had first experienced this strange and +fascinating feeling at the Sloboda Palace, when he had suddenly felt +that wealth, power, and life- all that men so painstakingly acquire +and guard- if it has any worth has so only by reason the joy with +which it can all be renounced. + +It was the feeling that induces a volunteer recruit to spend his +last penny on drink, and a drunken man to smash mirrors or glasses for +no apparent reason and knowing that it will cost him all the money +he possesses: the feeling which causes a man to perform actions +which from an ordinary point of view are insane, to test, as it +were, his personal power and strength, affirming the existence of a +higher, nonhuman criterion of life. + +From the very day Pierre had experienced this feeling for the +first time at the Sloboda Palace he had been continuously under its +influence, but only now found full satisfaction for it. Moreover, at +this moment Pierre was supported in his design and prevented from +renouncing it by what he had already done in that direction. If he +were now to leave Moscow like everyone else, his flight from home, the +peasant coat, the pistol, and his announcement to the Rostovs that +he would remain in Moscow would all become not merely meaningless +but contemptible and ridiculous, and to this Pierre was very +sensitive. + +Pierre's physical condition, as is always the case, corresponded +to his mental state. The unaccustomed coarse food, the vodka he +drank during those days, the absence of wine and cigars, his dirty +unchanged linen, two almost sleepless nights passed on a short sofa +without bedding- all this kept him in a state of excitement +bordering on insanity. + +It was two o'clock in the afternoon. The French had already +entered Moscow. Pierre knew this, but instead of acting he only +thought about his undertaking, going over its minutest details in +his mind. In his fancy he did not clearly picture to himself either +the striking of the blow or the death of Napoleon, but with +extraordinary vividness and melancholy enjoyment imagined his own +destruction and heroic endurance. + +"Yes, alone, for the sake of all, I must do it or perish!" he +thought. "Yes, I will approach... and then suddenly... with pistol +or dagger? But that is all the same! 'It is not I but the hand of +Providence that punishes thee,' I shall say," thought he, imagining +what he would say when killing Napoleon. "Well then, take me and +execute me!" he went on, speaking to himself and bowing his head +with a sad but firm expression. + +While Pierre, standing in the middle of the room, was talking to +himself in this way, the study door opened and on the threshold +appeared the figure of Makar Alexeevich, always so timid before but +now quite transformed. + +His dressing gown was unfastened, his face red and distorted. He was +obviously drunk. On seeing Pierre he grew confused at first, but +noticing embarrassment on Pierre's face immediately grew bold and, +staggering on his thin legs, advanced into the middle of the room. + +"They're frightened," he said confidentially in a hoarse voice. "I +say I won't surrender, I say... Am I not right, sir?" + +He paused and then suddenly seeing the pistol on the table seized it +with unexpected rapidity and ran out into the corridor. + +Gerasim and the porter, who had followed Makar Alexeevich, stopped +him in the vestibule and tried to take the pistol from him. Pierre, +coming out into the corridor, looked with pity and repulsion at the +half-crazy old man. Makar Alexeevich, frowning with exertion, held +on to the pistol and screamed hoarsely, evidently with some heroic +fancy in his head. + +"To arms! Board them! No, you shan't get it," he yelled. + +"That will do, please, that will do. Have the goodness- please, sir, +to let go! Please, sir..." pleaded Gerasim, trying carefully to +steer Makar Alexeevich by the elbows back to the door. + +"Who are you? Bonaparte!..." shouted Makar Alexeevich. + +"That's not right, sir. Come to your room, please, and rest. Allow +me to have the pistol." + +"Be off, thou base slave! Touch me not! See this?" shouted Makar +Alexeevich, brandishing the pistol. "Board them!" + +"Catch hold!" whispered Gerasim to the porter. + +They seized Makar Alexeevich by the arms and dragged him to the +door. + +The vestibule was filled with the discordant sounds of a struggle +and of a tipsy, hoarse voice. + +Suddenly a fresh sound, a piercing feminine scream, reverberated +from the porch and the cook came running into the vestibule. + +"It's them! Gracious heavens! O Lord, four of them, horsemen!" she +cried. + +Gerasim and the porter let Makar Alexeevich go, and in the now +silent corridor the sound of several hands knocking at the front +door could be heard. + +CHAPTER XXVIII + +Pierre, having decided that until he had carried out his design he +would disclose neither his identity nor his knowledge of French, stood +at the half-open door of the corridor, intending to conceal himself as +soon as the French entered. But the French entered and still Pierre +did not retire- an irresistible curiosity kept him there. + +There were two of them. One was an officer- a tall, soldierly, +handsome man- the other evidently a private or an orderly, +sunburned, short, and thin, with sunken cheeks and a dull +expression. The officer walked in front, leaning on a stick and +slightly limping. When he had advanced a few steps he stopped, +having apparently decided that these were good quarters, turned +round to the soldiers standing at the entrance, and in a loud voice of +command ordered them to put up the horses. Having done that, the +officer, lifting his elbow with a smart gesture, stroked his +mustache and lightly touched his hat. + +"Bonjour, la compagnie!"~^ said he gaily, smiling and looking about +him. + +^~ "Good day, everybody!" + +No one gave any reply. + +"Vous etes le bourgeois?"~^ the officer asked Gerasim. + +^~ "Are you the master here?" + +Gerasim gazed at the officer with an alarmed and inquiring look. + +"Quartier, quartier, logement!" said the officer, looking down at +the little man with a condescending and good-natured smile. "Les +francais sont de bons enfants. Que diable! Voyons! Ne nous fachons +pas, mon vieux!"~^ added he, clapping the scared and silent Gerasim +on the shoulder. "Well, does no one speak French in this +establishment?" he asked again in French, looking around and meeting +Pierre's eyes. Pierre moved away from the door. + +^~ "Quarters, quarters, lodgings! The French are good fellows. What +the devil! There, don't let us be cross, old fellow!" + +Again the officer turned to Gerasim and asked him to show him the +rooms in the house. + +"Master, not here- don't understand... me, you..." said Gerasim, +trying to render his words more comprehensible by contorting them. + +Still smiling, the French officer spread out his hands before +Gerasim's nose, intimating that he did not understand him either, +and moved, limping, to the door at which Pierre was standing. Pierre +wished to go away and conceal himself, but at that moment he saw Makar +Alexeevich appearing at the open kitchen door with the pistol in his +hand. With a madman's cunning, Makar Alexeevich eyed the Frenchman, +raised his pistol, and took aim. + +"Board them!" yelled the tipsy man, trying to press the trigger. +Hearing the yell the officer turned round, and at the same moment +Pierre threw himself on the drunkard. Just when Pierre snatched at and +struck up the pistol Makar Alexeevich at last got his fingers on the +trigger, there was a deafening report, and all were enveloped in a +cloud of smoke. The Frenchman turned pale and rushed to the door. + +Forgetting his intention of concealing his knowledge of French, +Pierre, snatching away the pistol and throwing it down, ran up to +the officer and addressed him in French. + +"You are not wounded?" he asked. + +"I think not," answered the Frenchman, feeling himself over. "But +I have had a lucky escape this time," he added, pointing to the +damaged plaster of the wall. "Who is that man?" said he, looking +sternly at Pierre. + +"Oh, I am really in despair at what has occurred," said Pierre +rapidly, quite forgetting the part he had intended to play. "He is +an unfortunate madman who did not know what he was doing." + +The officer went up to Makar Alexeevich and took him by the collar. + +Makar Alexeevich was standing with parted lips, swaying, as if about +to fall asleep, as he leaned against the wall. + +"Brigand! You shall pay for this," said the Frenchman, letting go of +him. "We French are merciful after victory, but we do not pardon +traitors," he added, with a look of gloomy dignity and a fine +energetic gesture. + +Pierre continued, in French, to persuade the officer not to hold +that drunken imbecile to account. The Frenchman listened in silence +with the same gloomy expression, but suddenly turned to Pierre with +a smile. For a few seconds he looked at him in silence. His handsome +face assumed a melodramatically gentle expression and he held out +his hand. + +"You have saved my life. You are French," said he. + +For a Frenchman that deduction was indubitable. Only a Frenchman +could perform a great deed, and to save his life- the life of M. +Ramballe, captain of the 13th Light Regiment- was undoubtedly a very +great deed. + +But however indubitable that conclusion and the officer's conviction +based upon it, Pierre felt it necessary to disillusion him. + +"I am Russian," he said quickly. + +"Tut, tut, tut! Tell that to others," said the officer, waving his +finger before his nose and smiling. "You shall tell me all about +that presently. I am delighted to meet a compatriot. Well, and what +are we to do with this man?" he added, addressing himself to Pierre as +to a brother. + +Even if Pierre were not a Frenchman, having once received that +loftiest of human appellations he could not renounce it, said the +officer's look and tone. In reply to his last question Pierre again +explained who Makar Alexeevich was and how just before their arrival +that drunken imbecile had seized the loaded pistol which they had +not had time to recover from him, and begged the officer to let the +deed go unpunished. + +The Frenchman expanded his chest and made a majestic gesture with +his arm. + +"You have saved my life! You are French. You ask his pardon? I grant +it you. Lead that man away!" said he quickly and energetically, and +taking the arm of Pierre whom he had promoted to be a Frenchman for +saving his life, he went with him into the room. + +The soldiers in the yard, hearing the shot, came into the passage +asking what had happened, and expressed their readiness to punish +the culprits, but the officer sternly checked them. + +"You will be called in when you are wanted," he said. + +The soldiers went out again, and the orderly, who had meanwhile +had time to visit the kitchen, came up to his officer. + +"Captain, there is soup and a leg of mutton in the kitchen," said +he. "Shall I serve them up?" + +"Yes, and some wine," answered the captain. + +CHAPTER XXIX + +When the French officer went into the room with Pierre the latter +again thought it his duty to assure him that he was not French and +wished to go away, but the officer would not hear of it. He was so +very polite, amiable, good-natured, and genuinely grateful to Pierre +for saving his life that Pierre had not the heart to refuse, and sat +down with him in the parlor- the first room they entered. To +Pierre's assurances that he was not a Frenchman, the captain, +evidently not understanding how anyone could decline so flattering +an appellation, shrugged his shoulders and said that if Pierre +absolutely insisted on passing for a Russian let it be so, but for all +that he would be forever bound to Pierre by gratitude for saving his +life. + +Had this man been endowed with the slightest capacity for perceiving +the feelings of others, and had he at all understood what Pierre's +feelings were, the latter would probably have left him, but the +man's animated obtuseness to everything other than himself disarmed +Pierre. + +"A Frenchman or a Russian prince incognito," said the officer, +looking at Pierre's fine though dirty linen and at the ring on his +finger. "I owe my life to you and offer you my friendship. A Frenchman +never forgets either an insult or a service. I offer you my +friendship. That is all I can say." + +There was so much good nature and nobility (in the French sense of +the word) in the officer's voice, in the expression of his face and in +his gestures, that Pierre, unconsciously smiling in response to the +Frenchman's smile, pressed the hand held out to him. + +"Captain Ramballe, of the 13th Light Regiment, Chevalier of the +Legion of Honor for the affair on the seventh of September," he +introduced himself, a self-satisfied irrepressible smile puckering his +lips under his mustache. "Will you now be so good as to tell me with +whom I have the honor of conversing so pleasantly, instead of being in +the ambulance with that maniac's bullet in my body?" + +Pierre replied that he could not tell him his name and, blushing, +began to try to invent a name and to say something about his reason +for concealing it, but the Frenchman hastily interrupted him. + +"Oh, please!" said he. "I understand your reasons. You are an +officer... a superior officer perhaps. You have borne arms against us. +That's not my business. I owe you my life. That is enough for me. I am +quite at your service. You belong to the gentry?" he concluded with +a shade of inquiry in his tone. Pierre bent his head. "Your +baptismal name, if you please. That is all I ask. Monsieur Pierre, you +say.... That's all I want to know." + +When the mutton and an omelet had been served and a samovar and +vodka brought, with some wine which the French had taken from a +Russian cellar and brought with them, Ramballe invited Pierre to share +his dinner, and himself began to eat greedily and quickly like a +healthy and hungry man, munching his food rapidly with his strong +teeth, continually smacking his lips, and repeating- "Excellent! +Delicious!" His face grew red and was covered with perspiration. +Pierre was hungry and shared the dinner with pleasure. Morel, the +orderly, brought some hot water in a saucepan and placed a bottle of +claret in it. He also brought a bottle of kvass, taken from the +kitchen for them to try. That beverage was already known to the French +and had been given a special name. They called it limonade de cochon +(pig's lemonade), and Morel spoke well of the limonade de cochon he +had found in the kitchen. But as the captain had the wine they had +taken while passing through Moscow, he left the kvass to Morel and +applied himself to the bottle of Bordeaux. He wrapped the bottle up to +its neck in a table napkin and poured out wine for himself and for +Pierre. The satisfaction of his hunger and the wine rendered the +captain still more lively and he chatted incessantly all through +dinner. + +"Yes, my dear Monsieur Pierre, I owe you a fine votive candle for +saving me from that maniac.... You see, I have bullets enough in my +body already. Here is one I got at Wagram" (he touched his side) +"and a second at Smolensk"- he showed a scar on his cheek- "and this +leg which as you see does not want to march, I got that on the seventh +at the great battle of la Moskowa. Sacre Dieu! It was splendid! That +deluge of fire was worth seeing. It was a tough job you set us +there, my word! You may be proud of it! And on my honor, in spite of +the cough I caught there, I should be ready to begin again. I pity +those who did not see it." + +"I was there," said Pierre. + +"Bah, really? So much the better! You are certainly brave foes. +The great redoubt held out well, by my pipe!" continued the Frenchman. +"And you made us pay dear for it. I was at it three times- sure as I +sit here. Three times we reached the guns and three times we were +thrown back like cardboard figures. Oh, it was beautiful, Monsieur +Pierre! Your grenadiers were splendid, by heaven! I saw them close +up their ranks six times in succession and march as if on parade. Fine +fellows! Our King of Naples, who knows what's what, cried 'Bravo!' Ha, +ha! So you are one of us soldiers!" he added, smiling, after a +momentary pause. "So much the better, so much the better, Monsieur +Pierre! Terrible in battle... gallant... with the fair" (he winked and +smiled), "that's what the French are, Monsieur Pierre, aren't they?" + +The captain was so naively and good-humoredly gay, so real, and so +pleased with himself that Pierre almost winked back as he looked +merrily at him. Probably the word "gallant" turned the captain's +thoughts to the state of Moscow. + +"Apropos, tell me please, is it true that the women have all left +Moscow? What a queer idea! What had they to be afraid of?" + +"Would not the French ladies leave Paris if the Russians entered +it?" asked Pierre. + +"Ha, ha, ha!" The Frenchman emitted a merry, sanguine chuckle, +patting Pierre on the shoulder. "What a thing to say!" he exclaimed. +"Paris?... But Paris, Paris..." + +"Paris- the capital of the world," Pierre finished his remark for +him. + +The captain looked at Pierre. He had a habit of stopping short in +the middle of his talk and gazing intently with his laughing, kindly +eyes. + +"Well, if you hadn't told me you were Russian, I should have wagered +that you were Parisian! You have that... I don't know what, that..." +and having uttered this compliment, he again gazed at him in silence. + +"I have been in Paris. I spent years there," said Pierre. + +"Oh yes, one sees that plainly. Paris!... A man who doesn't know +Paris is a savage. You can tell a Parisian two leagues off. Paris is +Talma, la Duchenois, Potier, the Sorbonne, the boulevards," and +noticing that his conclusion was weaker than what had gone before, +he added quickly: "There is only one Paris in the world. You have been +to Paris and have remained Russian. Well, I don't esteem you the +less for it." + +Under the influence of the wine he had drunk, and after the days +he had spent alone with his depressing thoughts, Pierre +involuntarily enjoyed talking with this cheerful and good-natured man. + +"To return to your ladies- I hear they are lovely. What a wretched +idea to go and bury themselves in the steppes when the French army +is in Moscow. What a chance those girls have missed! Your peasants, +now- that's another thing; but you civilized people, you ought to know +us better than that. We took Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Naples, Rome, +Warsaw, all the world's capitals.... We are feared, but we are +loved. We are nice to know. And then the Emperor..." he began, but +Pierre interrupted him. + +"The Emperor," Pierre repeated, and his face suddenly became sad and +embarrassed, "is the Emperor...?" + +"The Emperor? He is generosity, mercy, justice, order, genius- +that's what the Emperor is! It is I, Ramballe, who tell you so.... I +assure you I was his enemy eight years ago. My father was an +emigrant count.... But that man has vanquished me. He has taken hold +of me. I could not resist the sight of the grandeur and glory with +which he has covered France. When I understood what he wanted- when +I saw that he was preparing a bed of laurels for us, you know, I +said to myself: 'That is a monarch,' and I devoted myself to him! So +there! Oh yes, mon cher, he is the greatest man of the ages past or +future." + +"Is he in Moscow?" Pierre stammered with a guilty look. + +The Frenchman looked at his guilty face and smiled. + +"No, he will make his entry tomorrow," he replied, and continued his +talk. + +Their conversation was interrupted by the cries of several voices at +the gate and by Morel, who came to say that some Wurttemberg hussars +had come and wanted to put up their horses in the yard where the +captain's horses were. This difficulty had arisen chiefly because +the hussars did not understand what was said to them in French. + +The captain had their senior sergeant called in, and in a stern +voice asked him to what regiment he belonged, who was his commanding +officer, and by what right he allowed himself to claim quarters that +were already occupied. The German who knew little French, answered the +two first questions by giving the names of his regiment and of his +commanding officer, but in reply to the third question which he did +not understand said, introducing broken French into his own German, +that he was the quartermaster of the regiment and his commander had +ordered him to occupy all the houses one after another. Pierre, who +knew German, translated what the German said to the captain and gave +the captain's reply to the Wurttemberg hussar in German. When he had +understood what was said to him, the German submitted and took his men +elsewhere. The captain went out into the porch and gave some orders in +a loud voice. + +When he returned to the room Pierre was sitting in the same place as +before, with his head in his hands. His face expressed suffering. He +really was suffering at that moment. When the captain went out and +he was left alone, suddenly he came to himself and realized the +position he was in. It was not that Moscow had been taken or that +the happy conquerors were masters in it and were patronizing him. +Painful as that was it was not that which tormented Pierre at the +moment. He was tormented by the consciousness of his own weakness. The +few glasses of wine he had drunk and the conversation with this +good-natured man had destroyed the mood of concentrated gloom in which +he had spent the last few days and which was essential for the +execution of his design. The pistol, dagger, and peasant coat were +ready. Napoleon was to enter the town next day. Pierre still +considered that it would be a useful and worthy action to slay the +evildoer, but now he felt that he would not do it. He did not know +why, but he felt a foreboding that he would not carry out his +intention. He struggled against the confession of his weakness but +dimly felt that he could not overcome it and that his former gloomy +frame of mind, concerning vengeance, killing, and self-sacrifice, +had been dispersed like dust by contact with the first man he met. + +The captain returned to the room, limping slightly and whistling a +tune. + +The Frenchman's chatter which had previously amused Pierre now +repelled him. The tune he was whistling, his gait, and the gesture +with which he twirled his mustache, all now seemed offensive. "I +will go away immediately. I won't say another word to him," thought +Pierre. He thought this, but still sat in the same place. A strange +feeling of weakness tied him to the spot; he wished to get up and go +away, but could not do so. + +The captain, on the other hand, seemed very cheerful. He paced up +and down the room twice. His eyes shone and his mustache twitched as +if he were smiling to himself at some amusing thought. + +"The colonel of those Wurttembergers is delightful," he suddenly +said. "He's a German, but a nice fellow all the same.... But he's a +German." He sat down facing Pierre. "By the way, you know German, +then?" + +Pierre looked at him in silence. + +"What is the German for 'shelter'?" + +"Shelter?" Pierre repeated. "The German for shelter is Unterkunft." + +"How do you say it?" the captain asked quickly and doubtfully. + +"Unterkunft," Pierre repeated. + +"Onterkoff," said the captain and looked at Pierre for some +seconds with laughing eyes. "These Germans are first-rate fools, don't +you think so, Monsieur Pierre?" he concluded. + +"Well, let's have another bottle of this Moscow Bordeaux, shall +we? Morel will warm us up another little bottle. Morel!" he called out +gaily. + +Morel brought candles and a bottle of wine. The captain looked at +Pierre by the candlelight and was evidently struck by the troubled +expression on his companion's face. Ramballe, with genuine distress +and sympathy in his face, went up to Pierre and bent over him. + +"There now, we're sad," said he, touching Pierre's hand. "Have I +upset you? No, really, have you anything against me?" he asked Pierre. +"Perhaps it's the state of affairs?" + +Pierre did not answer, but looked cordially into the Frenchman's +eyes whose expression of sympathy was pleasing to him. + +"Honestly, without speaking of what I owe you, I feel friendship for +you. Can I do anything for you? Dispose of me. It is for life and +death. I say it with my hand on my heart!" said he, striking his +chest. + +"Thank you," said Pierre. + +The captain gazed intently at him as he had done when he learned +that "shelter" was Unterkunft in German, and his face suddenly +brightened. + +"Well, in that case, I drink to our friendship!" he cried gaily, +filling two glasses with wine. + +Pierre took one of the glasses and emptied it. Ramballe emptied +his too, again pressed Pierre's hand, and leaned his elbows on the +table in a pensive attitude. + +"Yes, my dear friend," he began, "such is fortune's caprice. Who +would have said that I should be a soldier and a captain of dragoons +in the service of Bonaparte, as we used to call him? Yet here I am +in Moscow with him. I must tell you, mon cher," he continued in the +sad and measured tones of a man who intends to tell a long story, +"that our name is one of the most ancient in France." + +And with a Frenchman's easy and naive frankness the captain told +Pierre the story of his ancestors, his childhood, youth, and +manhood, and all about his relations and his financial and family +affairs, "ma pauvre mere" playing of course an important part in the +story. + +"But all that is only life's setting, the real thing is love- +love! Am I not right, Monsieur Pierre?" said he, growing animated. +"Another glass?" + +Pierre again emptied his glass and poured himself out a third. + +"Oh, women, women!" and the captain, looking with glistening eyes at +Pierre, began talking of love and of his love affairs. + +There were very many of these, as one could easily believe, +looking at the officer's handsome, self-satisfied face, and noting the +eager enthusiasm with which he spoke of women. Though all Ramballe's +love stories had the sensual character which Frenchmen regard as the +special charm and poetry of love, yet he told his story with such +sincere conviction that he alone had experienced and known all the +charm of love and he described women so alluringly that Pierre +listened to him with curiosity. + +It was plain that l'amour which the Frenchman was so fond of was not +that low and simple kind that Pierre had once felt for his wife, nor +was it the romantic love stimulated by himself that he experienced for +Natasha. (Ramballe despised both these kinds of love equally: the +one he considered the "love of clodhoppers" and the other the "love of +simpletons.") L'amour which the Frenchman worshiped consisted +principally in the unnaturalness of his relation to the woman and in a +combination of incongruities giving the chief charm to the feeling. + +Thus the captain touchingly recounted the story of his love for a +fascinating marquise of thirty-five and at the same time for a +charming, innocent child of seventeen, daughter of the bewitching +marquise. The conflict of magnanimity between the mother and the +daughter, ending in the mother's sacrificing herself and offering +her daughter in marriage to her lover, even now agitated the +captain, though it was the memory of a distant past. Then he recounted +an episode in which the husband played the part of the lover, and +he- the lover- assumed the role of the husband, as well as several +droll incidents from his recollections of Germany, where "shelter" +is called Unterkunft and where the husbands eat sauerkraut and the +young girls are "too blonde." + +Finally, the latest episode in Poland still fresh in the captain's +memory, and which he narrated with rapid gestures and glowing face, +was of how he had saved the life of a Pole (in general, the saving +of life continually occurred in the captain's stories) and the Pole +had entrusted to him his enchanting wife (parisienne de coeur) while +himself entering the French service. The captain was happy, the +enchanting Polish lady wished to elope with him, but, prompted by +magnanimity, the captain restored the wife to the husband, saying as +he did so: "I have saved your life, and I save your honor!" Having +repeated these words the captain wiped his eyes and gave himself a +shake, as if driving away the weakness which assailed him at this +touching recollection. + +Listening to the captain's tales, Pierre- as often happens late in +the evening and under the influence of wine- followed all that was +told him, understood it all, and at the same time followed a train +of personal memories which, he knew not why, suddenly arose in his +mind. While listening to these love stories his own love for Natasha +unexpectedly rose to his mind, and going over the pictures of that +love in his imagination he mentally compared them with Ramballe's +tales. Listening to the story of the struggle between love and duty, +Pierre saw before his eyes every minutest detail of his last meeting +with the object of his love at the Sukharev water tower. At the time +of that meeting it had not produced an effect upon him- he had not +even once recalled it. But now it seemed to him that that meeting +had had in it something very important and poetic. + +"Peter Kirilovich, come here! We have recognized you," he now seemed +to hear the words she had uttered and to see before him her eyes, +her smile, her traveling hood, and a stray lock of her hair... and +there seemed to him something pathetic and touching in all this. + +Having finished his tale about the enchanting Polish lady, the +captain asked Pierre if he had ever experienced a similar impulse to +sacrifice himself for love and a feeling of envy of the legitimate +husband. + +Challenged by this question Pierre raised his head and felt a need +to express the thoughts that filled his mind. He began to explain that +he understood love for a women somewhat differently. He said that in +all his life he had loved and still loved only one woman, and that she +could never be his. + +"Tiens!" said the captain. + +Pierre then explained that he had loved this woman from his earliest +years, but that he had not dared to think of her because she was too +young, and because he had been an illegitimate son without a name. +Afterwards when he had received a name and wealth he dared not think +of her because he loved her too well, placing her far above everything +in the world, and especially therefore above himself. + +When he had reached this point, Pierre asked the captain whether +he understood that. + +The captain made a gesture signifying that even if he did not +understand it he begged Pierre to continue. + +"Platonic love, clouds..." he muttered. + +Whether it was the wine he had drunk, or an impulse of frankness, or +the thought that this man did not, and never would, know any of +those who played a part in his story, or whether it was all these +things together, something loosened Pierre's tongue. Speaking +thickly and with a faraway look in his shining eyes, he told the whole +story of his life: his marriage, Natasha's love for his best friend, +her betrayal of him, and all his own simple relations with her. +Urged on by Ramballe's questions he also told what he had at first +concealed- his own position and even his name. + +More than anything else in Pierre's story the captain was +impressed by the fact that Pierre was very rich, had two mansions in +Moscow, and that he had abandoned everything and not left the city, +but remained there concealing his name and station. + +When it was late at night they went out together into the street. +The night was warm and light. To the left of the house on the Pokrovka +a fire glowed- the first of those that were beginning in Moscow. To +the right and high up in the sky was the sickle of the waning moon and +opposite to it hung that bright comet which was connected in +Pierre's heart with his love. At the gate stood Gerasim, the cook, and +two Frenchmen. Their laughter and their mutually incomprehensible +remarks in two languages could be heard. They were looking at the glow +seen in the town. + +There was nothing terrible in the one small, distant fire in the +immense city. + +Gazing at the high starry sky, at the moon, at the comet, and at the +glow from the fire, Pierre experienced a joyful emotion. "There now, +how good it is, what more does one need?" thought he. And suddenly +remembering his intention he grew dizzy and felt so faint that he +leaned against the fence to save himself from falling. + +Without taking leave of his new friend, Pierre left the gate with +unsteady steps and returning to his room lay down on the sofa and +immediately fell asleep. + +CHAPTER XXX + +The glow of the first fire that began on the second of September was +watched from the various roads by the fugitive Muscovites and by the +retreating troops, with many different feelings. + +The Rostov party spent the night at Mytishchi, fourteen miles from +Moscow. They had started so late on the first of September, the road +had been so blocked by vehicles and troops, so many things had been +forgotten for which servants were sent back, that they had decided +to spend that night at a place three miles out of Moscow. The next +morning they woke late and were again delayed so often that they +only got as far as Great Mytishchi. At ten o'clock that evening the +Rostov family and the wounded traveling with them were all distributed +in the yards and huts of that large village. The Rostovs' servants and +coachmen and the orderlies of the wounded officers, after attending to +their masters, had supper, fed the horses, and came out into the +porches. + +In a neighboring hut lay Raevski's adjutant with a fractured +wrist. The awful pain he suffered made him moan incessantly and +piteously, and his moaning sounded terrible in the darkness of the +autumn night. He had spent the first night in the same yard as the +Rostovs. The countess said she had been unable to close her eyes on +account of his moaning, and at Mytishchi she moved into a worse hut +simply to be farther away from the wounded man. + +In the darkness of the night one of the servants noticed, above +the high body of a coach standing before the porch, the small glow +of another fire. One glow had long been visible and everybody knew +that it was Little Mytishchi burning- set on fire by Mamonov's +Cossacks. + +"But look here, brothers, there's another fire!" remarked an +orderly. + +All turned their attention to the glow. + +"But they told us Little Mytishchi had been set on fire by Mamonov's +Cossacks." + +"But that's not Mytishchi, it's farther away." + +"Look, it must be in Moscow!" + +Two of the gazers went round to the other side of the coach and +sat down on its steps. + +"It's more to the left, why, Little Mytishchi is over there, and +this is right on the other side." + +Several men joined the first two. + +"See how it's flaring," said one. "That's a fire in Moscow: either +in the Sushchevski or the Rogozhski quarter." + +No one replied to this remark and for some time they all gazed +silently at the spreading flames of the second fire in the distance. + +Old Daniel Terentich, the count's valet (as he was called), came +up to the group and shouted at Mishka. + +"What are you staring at, you good-for-nothing?... The count will be +calling and there's nobody there; go and gather the clothes together." + +"I only ran out to get some water," said Mishka. + +"But what do you think, Daniel Terentich? Doesn't it look as if that +glow were in Moscow?" remarked one of the footmen. + +Daniel Terentich made no reply, and again for a long time they +were all silent. The glow spread, rising and failing, farther and +farther still. + +"God have mercy.... It's windy and dry..." said another voice. + +"Just look! See what it's doing now. O Lord! You can even see the +crows flying. Lord have mercy on us sinners!" + +"They'll put it out, no fear!" + +"Who's to put it out?" Daniel Terentich, who had hitherto been +silent, was heard to say. His voice was calm and deliberate. "Moscow +it is, brothers," said he. "Mother Moscow, the white..." his voice +faltered, and he gave way to an old man's sob. + +And it was as if they had all only waited for this to realize the +significance for them of the glow they were watching. Sighs were +heard, words of prayer, and the sobbing of the count's old valet. + +CHAPTER XXXI + +The valet, returning to the cottage, informed the count that +Moscow was burning. The count donned his dressing gown and went out to +look. Sonya and Madame Schoss, who had not yet undressed, went out +with him. Only Natasha and the countess remained in the room. Petya +was no longer with the family, he had gone on with his regiment +which was making for Troitsa. + +The countess, on hearing that Moscow was on fire, began to cry. +Natasha, pale, with a fixed look, was sitting on the bench under the +icons just where she had sat down on arriving and paid no attention to +her father's words. She was listening to the ceaseless moaning of +the adjutant, three houses off. + +"Oh, how terrible," said Sonya returning from the yard chilled and +frightened. "I believe the whole of Moscow will burn, there's an awful +glow! Natasha, do look! You can see it from the window," she said to +her cousin, evidently wishing to distract her mind. + +But Natasha looked at her as if not understanding what was said to +her and again fixed her eyes on the corner of the stove. She had +been in this condition of stupor since the morning, when Sonya, to the +surprise and annoyance of the countess, had for some unaccountable +reason found it necessary to tell Natasha of Prince Andrew's wound and +of his being with their party. The countess had seldom been so angry +with anyone as she was with Sonya. Sonya had cried and begged to be +forgiven and now, as if trying to atone for her fault, paid +unceasing attention to her cousin. + +"Look, Natasha, how dreadfully it is burning!" said she. + +"What's burning?" asked Natasha. "Oh, yes, Moscow." + +And as if in order not to offend Sonya and to get rid of her, she +turned her face to the window, looked out in such a way that it was +evident that she could not see anything, and again settled down in her +former attitude. + +"But you didn't see it!" + +"Yes, really I did," Natasha replied in a voice that pleaded to be +left in peace. + +Both the countess and Sonya understood that, naturally, neither +Moscow nor the burning of Moscow nor anything else could seem of +importance to Natasha. + +The count returned and lay down behind the partition. The countess +went up to her daughter and touched her head with the back of her hand +as she was wont to do when Natasha was ill, then touched her +forehead with her lips as if to feel whether she was feverish, and +finally kissed her. + +"You are cold. You are trembling all over. You'd better lie down," +said the countess. + +"Lie down? All right, I will. I'll lie down at once," said Natasha. + +When Natasha had been told that morning that Prince Andrew was +seriously wounded and was traveling with their party, she had at first +asked many questions: Where was he going? How was he wounded? Was it +serious? And could she see him? But after she had been told that she +could not see him, that he was seriously wounded but that his life was +not in danger, she ceased to ask questions or to speak at all, +evidently disbelieving what they told her, and convinced that say what +she might she would still be told the same. All the way she had sat +motionless in a corner of the coach with wide open eyes, and the +expression in them which the countess knew so well and feared so much, +and now she sat in the same way on the bench where she had seated +herself on arriving. She was planning something and either deciding or +had already decided something in her mind. The countess knew this, but +what it might be she did not know, and this alarmed and tormented her. + +"Natasha, undress, darling; lie down on my bed." + +A bed had been made on a bedstead for the countess only. Madame +Schoss and the two girls were to sleep on some hay on the floor. + +"No, Mamma, I will lie down here on the floor," Natasha replied +irritably and she went to the window and opened it. Through the open +window the moans of the adjutant could be heard more distinctly. She +put her head out into the damp night air, and the countess saw her +slim neck shaking with sobs and throbbing against the window frame. +Natasha knew it was not Prince Andrew who was moaning. She knew Prince +Andrew was in the same yard as themselves and in a part of the hut +across the passage; but this dreadful incessant moaning made her +sob. The countess exchanged a look with Sonya. + +"Lie down, darling; lie down, my pet," said the countess, softly +touching Natasha's shoulders. "Come, lie down." + +"Oh, yes... I'll lie down at once," said Natasha, and began +hurriedly undressing, tugging at the tapes of her petticoat. + +When she had thrown off her dress and put on a dressing jacket, +she sat down with her foot under her on the bed that had been made +up on the floor, jerked her thin and rather short plait of hair to the +front, and began replaiting it. Her long, thin, practiced fingers +rapidly unplaited, replaited, and tied up her plait. Her head moved +from side to side from habit, but her eyes, feverishly wide, looked +fixedly before her. When her toilet for the night was finished she +sank gently onto the sheet spread over the hay on the side nearest the +door. + +"Natasha, you'd better lie in the middle," said Sonya. + +"I'll stay here," muttered Natasha. "Do lie down," she added +crossly, and buried her face in the pillow. + +The countess, Madame Schoss, and Sonya undressed hastily and lay +down. The small lamp in front of the icons was the only light left +in the room. But in the yard there was a light from the fire at Little +Mytishchi a mile and a half away, and through the night came the noise +of people shouting at a tavern Mamonov's Cossacks had set up across +the street, and the adjutant's unceasing moans could still be heard. + +For a long time Natasha listened attentively to the sounds that +reached her from inside and outside the room and did not move. First +she heard her mother praying and sighing and the creaking of her bed +under her, then Madame Schoss' familiar whistling snore and Sonya's +gentle breathing. Then the countess called to Natasha. Natasha did not +answer. + +"I think she's asleep, Mamma," said Sonya softly. + +After short silence the countess spoke again but this time no one +replied. + +Soon after that Natasha heard her mother's even breathing. Natasha +did not move, though her little bare foot, thrust out from under the +quilt, was growing cold on the bare floor. + +As if to celebrate a victory over everybody, a cricket chirped in +a crack in the wall. A cock crowed far off and another replied near +by. The shouting in the tavern had died down; only the moaning of +the adjutant was heard. Natasha sat up. + +"Sonya, are you asleep? Mamma?" she whispered. + +No one replied. Natasha rose slowly and carefully, crossed +herself, and stepped cautiously on the cold and dirty floor with her +slim, supple, bare feet. The boards of the floor creaked. Stepping +cautiously from one foot to the other she ran like a kitten the few +steps to the door and grasped the cold door handle. + +It seemed to her that something heavy was beating rhythmically +against all the walls of the room: it was her own heart, sinking +with alarm and terror and overflowing with love. + +She opened the door and stepped across the threshold and onto the +cold, damp earthen floor of the passage. The cold she felt refreshed +her. With her bare feet she touched a sleeping man, stepped over +him, and opened the door into the part of the hut where Prince +Andrew lay. It was dark in there. In the farthest corner, on a bench +beside a bed on which something was lying, stood a tallow candle +with a long, thick, and smoldering wick. + +From the moment she had been told that of Prince Andrew's wound +and his presence there, Natasha had resolved to see him. She did not +know why she had to, she knew the meeting would be painful, but felt +the more convinced that it was necessary. + +All day she had lived only in hope of seeing him that night. But now +that the moment had come she was filled with dread of what she might +see. How was he maimed? What was left of him? Was he like that +incessant moaning of the adjutant's? Yes, he was altogether like that. +In her imagination he was that terrible moaning personified. When +she saw an indistinct shape in the corner, and mistook his knees +raised under the quilt for his shoulders, she imagined a horrible body +there, and stood still in terror. But an irresistible impulse drew her +forward. She cautiously took one step and then another, and found +herself in the middle of a small room containing baggage. Another man- +Timokhin- was lying in a corner on the benches beneath the icons, +and two others- the doctor and a valet- lay on the floor. + +The valet sat up and whispered something. Timokhin, kept awake by +the pain in his wounded leg, gazed with wide-open eyes at this strange +apparition of a girl in a white chemise, dressing jacket, and +nightcap. The valet's sleepy, frightened exclamation, "What do you +want? What's the matter?" made Natasha approach more swiftly to what +was lying in the corner. Horribly unlike a man as that body looked, +she must see him. She passed the valet, the snuff fell from the candle +wick, and she saw Prince Andrew clearly with his arms outside the +quilt, and such as she had always seen him. + +He was the same as ever, but the feverish color of his face, his +glittering eyes rapturously turned toward her, and especially his +neck, delicate as a child's, revealed by the turn-down collar of his +shirt, gave him a peculiarly innocent, childlike look, such as she had +never seen on him before. She went up to him and with a swift, +flexible, youthful movement dropped on her knees. + +He smiled and held out his hand to her. + +CHAPTER XXXII + +Seven days had passed since Prince Andrew found himself in the +ambulance station on the field of Borodino. His feverish state and the +inflammation of his bowels, which were injured, were in the doctor's +opinion sure to carry him off. But on the seventh day he ate with +pleasure a piece of bread with some tea, and the doctor noticed that +his temperature was lower. He had regained consciousness that morning. +The first night after they left Moscow had been fairly warm and he had +remained in the caleche, but at Mytishchi the wounded man himself +asked to be taken out and given some tea. The pain caused by his +removal into the hut had made him groan aloud and again lose +consciousness. When he had been placed on his camp bed he lay for a +long time motionless with closed eyes. Then he opened them and +whispered softly: "And the tea?" His remembering such a small detail +of everyday life astonished the doctor. He felt Prince Andrew's pulse, +and to his surprise and dissatisfaction found it had improved. He +was dissatisfied because he knew by experience that if his patient did +not die now, he would do so a little later with greater suffering. +Timokhin, the red-nosed major of Prince Andrew's regiment, had +joined him in Moscow and was being taken along with him, having been +wounded in the leg at the battle of Borodino. They were accompanied by +a doctor, Prince Andrew's valet, his coach. man, and two orderlies. + +They gave Prince Andrew some tea. He drank it eagerly, looking +with feverish eyes at the door in front of him as if trying to +understand and remember something. + +"I don't want any more. Is Timokhin here?" he asked. + +Timokhin crept along the bench to him. + +"I am here, your excellency." + +"How's your wound?" + +"Mine, sir? All right. But how about you?" + +Prince Andrew again pondered as if trying to remember something. + +"Couldn't one get a book?" he asked. + +"What book?" + +"The Gospels. I haven't one." + +The doctor promised to procure it for him and began to ask how he +was feeling. Prince Andrew answered all his questions reluctantly +but reasonably, and then said he wanted a bolster placed under him +as he was uncomfortable and in great pain. The doctor and valet lifted +the cloak with which he was covered and, making wry faces at the +noisome smell of mortifying flesh that came from the wound, began +examining that dreadful place. The doctor was very much displeased +about something and made a change in the dressings, turning the +wounded man over so that he groaned again and grew unconscious and +delirious from the agony. He kept asking them to get him the book +and put it under him. + +"What trouble would it be to you?" he said. "I have not got one. +Please get it for me and put it under for a moment," he pleaded in a +piteous voice. + +The doctor went into the passage to wash his hands. + +"You fellows have no conscience," said he to the valet who was +pouring water over his hands. "For just one moment I didn't look after +you... It's such pain, you know, that I wonder how he can bear it." + +"By the Lord Jesus Christ, I thought we had put something under +him!" said the valet. + +The first time Prince Andrew understood where he was and what was +the matter with him and remembered being wounded and how was when he +asked to be carried into the hut after his caleche had stopped at +Mytishchi. After growing confused from pain while being carried into +the hut he again regained consciousness, and while drinking tea once +more recalled all that had happened to him, and above all vividly +remembered the moment at the ambulance station when, at the sight of +the sufferings of a man he disliked, those new thoughts had come to +him which promised him happiness. And those thoughts, though now vague +and indefinite, again possessed his soul. He remembered that he had +now a new source of happiness and that this happiness had something to +do with the Gospels. That was why he asked for a copy of them. The +uncomfortable position in which they had put him and turned him over +again confused his thoughts, and when he came to himself a third +time it was in the complete stillness of the night. Everybody near him +was sleeping. A cricket chirped from across the passage; someone was +shouting and singing in the street; cockroaches rustled on the +table, on the icons, and on the walls, and a big fly flopped at the +head of the bed and around the candle beside him, the wick of which +was charred and had shaped itself like a mushroom. + +His mind was not in a normal state. A healthy man usually thinks of, +feels, and remembers innumerable things simultaneously, but has the +power and will to select one sequence of thoughts or events on which +to fix his whole attention. A healthy man can tear himself away from +the deepest reflections to say a civil word to someone who comes in +and can then return again to his own thoughts. But Prince Andrew's +mind was not in a normal state in that respect. All the powers of +his mind were more active and clearer than ever, but they acted +apart from his will. Most diverse thoughts and images occupied him +simultaneously. At times his brain suddenly began to work with a +vigor, clearness, and depth it had never reached when he was in +health, but suddenly in the midst of its work it would turn to some +unexpected idea and he had not the strength to turn it back again. + +"Yes, a new happiness was revealed to me of which man cannot be +deprived," he thought as he lay in the semi-darkness of the quiet hut, +gazing fixedly before him with feverish wide open eyes. "A happiness +lying beyond material forces, outside the material influences that act +on man- a happiness of the soul alone, the happiness of loving. +Every man can understand it, but to conceive it and enjoin it was +possible only for God. But how did God enjoin that law? And why was +the Son...?" + +And suddenly the sequence of these thoughts broke off, and Prince +Andrew heard (without knowing whether it was a delusion or reality) +a soft whispering voice incessantly and rhythmically repeating +"piti-piti-piti," and then "titi," and then again "piti-piti-piti," +and "ti-ti" once more. At the same time he felt that above his face, +above the very middle of it, some strange airy structure was being +erected out of slender needles or splinters, to the sound of this +whispered music. He felt that he had to balance carefully (though it +was difficult) so that this airy structure should not collapse; but +nevertheless it kept collapsing and again slowly rising to the sound +of whispered rhythmic music- "it stretches, stretches, spreading out +and stretching," said Prince Andrew to himself. While listening to +this whispering and feeling the sensation of this drawing out and +the construction of this edifice of needles, he also saw by glimpses a +red halo round the candle, and heard the rustle of the cockroaches and +the buzzing of the fly that flopped against his pillow and his face. +Each time the fly touched his face it gave him a burning sensation and +yet to his surprise it did not destroy the structure, though it +knocked against the very region of his face where it was rising. But +besides this there was something else of importance. It was +something white by the door- the statue of a sphinx, which also +oppressed him. + +"But perhaps that's my shirt on the table," he thought, "and +that's my legs, and that is the door, but why is it always +stretching and drawing itself out, and 'piti-piti-piti' and 'ti-ti' +and 'piti-piti-piti'...? That's enough, please leave off!" Prince +Andrew painfully entreated someone. And suddenly thoughts and feelings +again swam to the surface of his mind with peculiar clearness and +force. + +"Yes- love," he thought again quite clearly. "But not love which +loves for something, for some quality, for some purpose, or for some +reason, but the love which I- while dying- first experienced when I +saw my enemy and yet loved him. I experienced that feeling of love +which is the very essence of the soul and does not require an +object. Now again I feel that bliss. To love one's neighbors, to +love one's enemies, to love everything, to love God in all His +manifestations. It is possible to love someone dear to you with +human love, but an enemy can only be loved by divine love. That is why +I experienced such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What has +become of him? Is he alive?... + +"When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but +divine love cannot change. No, neither death nor anything else can +destroy it. It is the very essence of the soul. Yet how many people +have I hated in my life? And of them all, I loved and hated none as +I did her." And he vividly pictured to himself Natasha, not as he +had done in the past with nothing but her charms which gave him +delight, but for the first time picturing to himself her soul. And +he understood her feelings, her sufferings, shame, and remorse. He now +understood for the first time all the cruelty of his rejection of her, +the cruelty of his rupture with her. "If only it were possible for +me to see her once more! Just once, looking into those eyes to say..." + +"Piti-piti-piti and ti-ti and piti-piti-piti boom!" flopped the +fly... And his attention was suddenly carried into another world, a +world of reality and delirium in which something particular was +happening. In that world some structure was still being erected and +did not fall, something was still stretching out, and the candle +with its red halo was still burning, and the same shirtlike sphinx lay +near the door; but besides all this something creaked, there was a +whiff of fresh air, and a new white sphinx appeared, standing at the +door. And that sphinx had the pale face and shining eyes of the very +Natasha of whom he had just been thinking. + +"Oh, how oppressive this continual delirium is," thought Prince +Andrew, trying to drive that face from his imagination. But the face +remained before him with the force of reality and drew nearer. +Prince Andrew wished to return that former world of pure thought, +but he could not, and delirium drew him back into its domain. The soft +whispering voice continued its rhythmic murmur, something oppressed +him and stretched out, and the strange face was before him. Prince +Andrew collected all his strength in an effort to recover his +senses, he moved a little, and suddenly there was a ringing in his +ears, a dimness in his eyes, and like a man plunged into water he lost +consciousness. When he came to himself, Natasha, that same living +Natasha whom of all people he most longed to love with this new pure +divine love that had been revealed to him, was kneeling before him. He +realized that it was the real living Natasha, and he was not surprised +but quietly happy. Natasha, motionless on her knees (she was unable to +stir), with frightened eyes riveted on him, was restraining her +sobs. Her face was pale and rigid. Only in the lower part of it +something quivered. + +Prince Andrew sighed with relief, smiled, and held out his hand. + +"You?" he said. "How fortunate!" + +With a rapid but careful movement Natasha drew nearer to him on +her knees and, taking his hand carefully, bent her face over it and +began kissing it, just touching it lightly with her lips. + +"Forgive me!" she whispered, raising her head and glancing at him. +"Forgive me!" + +"I love you," said Prince Andrew. + +"Forgive...!" + +"Forgive what?" he asked. + +"Forgive me for what I ha-ve do-ne!" faltered Natasha in a +scarcely audible, broken whisper, and began kissing his hand more +rapidly, just touching it with her lips. + +"I love you more, better than before," said Prince Andrew, lifting +her face with his hand so as to look into her eyes. + +Those eyes, filled with happy tears, gazed at him timidly, +compassionately, and with joyous love. Natasha's thin pale face, +with its swollen lips, was more than plain- it was dreadful. But +Prince Andrew did not see that, he saw her shining eyes which were +beautiful. They heard the sound of voices behind them. + +Peter the valet, who was now wide awake, had roused the doctor. +Timokhin, who had not slept at all because of the pain in his leg, had +long been watching all that was going on, carefully covering his +bare body with the sheet as he huddled up on his bench. + +"What's this?" said the doctor, rising from his bed. "Please go +away, madam!" + +At that moment a maid sent by the countess, who had noticed her +daughter's absence, knocked at the door. + +Like a somnambulist aroused from her sleep Natasha went out of the +room and, returning to her hut, fell sobbing on her bed. + +From that time, during all the rest of the Rostovs' journey, at +every halting place and wherever they spent a night, Natasha never +left the wounded Bolkonski, and the doctor had to admit that he had +not expected from a young girl either such firmness or such skill in +nursing a wounded man. + +Dreadful as the countess imagined it would be should Prince Andrew +die in her daughter's arms during the journey- as, judging by what the +doctor said, it seemed might easily happen- she could not oppose +Natasha. Though with the intimacy now established between the +wounded man and Natasha the thought occurred that should he recover +their former engagement would be renewed, no one- least of all Natasha +and Prince Andrew- spoke of this: the unsettled question of life and +death, which hung not only over Bolkonski but over all Russia, shut +out all other considerations. + +CHAPTER XXXIII + +On the third of September Pierre awoke late. His head was aching, +the clothes in which he had slept without undressing felt +uncomfortable on his body, and his mind had a dim consciousness of +something shameful he had done the day before. That something shameful +was his yesterday's conversation with Captain Ramballe. + +It was eleven by the clock, but it seemed peculiarly dark out of +doors. Pierre rose, rubbed his eyes, and seeing the pistol with an +engraved stock which Gerasim had replaced on the writing table, he +remembered where he was and what lay before him that very day. + +"Am I not too late?" he thought. "No, probably he won't make his +entry into Moscow before noon." + +Pierre did not allow himself to reflect on what lay before him, +but hastened to act. + +After arranging his clothes, he took the pistol and was about to +go out. But it then occurred to him for the first time that he +certainly could not carry the weapon in his hand through the +streets. It was difficult to hide such a big pistol even under his +wide coat. He could not carry it unnoticed in his belt or under his +arm. Besides, it had been discharged, and he had not had time to +reload it. "No matter, dagger will do," he said to himself, though +when planning his design he had more than once come to the +conclusion that the chief mistake made by the student in 1809 had been +to try to kill Napoleon with a dagger. But as his chief aim +consisted not in carrying out his design, but in proving to himself +that he would not abandon his intention and was doing all he could +to achieve it, Pierre hastily took the blunt jagged dagger in a +green sheath which he had bought at the Sukharev market with the +pistol, and hid it under his waistcoat. + +Having tied a girdle over his coat and pulled his cap low on his +head, Pierre went down the corridor, trying to avoid making a noise or +meeting the captain, and passed out into the street. + +The conflagration, at which he had looked with so much +indifference the evening before, had greatly increased during the +night. Moscow was on fire in several places. The buildings in Carriage +Row, across the river, in the Bazaar and the Povarskoy, as well as the +barges on the Moskva River and the timber yards by the Dorogomilov +Bridge, were all ablaze. + +Pierre's way led through side streets to the Povarskoy and from +there to the church of St. Nicholas on the Arbat, where he had long +before decided that the deed should should be done. The gates of +most of the houses were locked and the shutters up. The streets and +lanes were deserted. The air was full of smoke and the smell of +burning. Now and then he met Russians with anxious and timid faces, +and Frenchmen with an air not of the city but of the camp, walking +in the middle of the streets. Both the Russians and the French +looked at Pierre with surprise. Besides his height and stoutness, +and the strange morose look of suffering in his face and whole figure, +the Russians stared at Pierre because they could not make out to +what class he could belong. The French followed him with +astonishment in their eyes chiefly because Pierre, unlike all the +other Russians who gazed at the French with fear and curiosity, paid +no attention to them. At the gate of one house three Frenchmen, who +were explaining something to some Russians who did not understand +them, stopped Pierre asking if he did not know French. + +Pierre shook his head and went on. In another side street a sentinel +standing beside a green caisson shouted at him, but only when the +shout was threateningly repeated and he heard the click of the man's +musket as he raised it did Pierre understand that he had to pass on +the other side of the street. He heard nothing and saw nothing of what +went on around him. He carried his resolution within himself in terror +and haste, like something dreadful and alien to him, for, after the +previous night's experience, he was afraid of losing it. But he was +not destined to bring his mood safely to his destination. And even had +he not been hindered by anything on the way, his intention could not +now have been carried out, for Napoleon had passed the Arbat more than +four hours previously on his way from the Dorogomilov suburb to the +Kremlin, and was now sitting in a very gloomy frame of mind in a royal +study in the Kremlin, giving detailed and exact orders as to +measures to be taken immediately to extinguish the fire, to prevent +looting, and to reassure the inhabitants. But Pierre did not know +this; he was entirely absorbed in what lay before him, and was +tortured- as those are who obstinately undertake a task that is +impossible for them not because of its difficulty but because of its +incompatibility with their natures- by the fear of weakening at the +decisive moment and so losing his self-esteem. + +Though he heard and saw nothing around him he found his way by +instinct and did not go wrong in the side streets that led to the +Povarskoy. + +As Pierre approached that street the smoke became denser and denser- +he even felt the heat of the fire. Occasionally curly tongues of flame +rose from under the roofs of the houses. He met more people in the +streets and they were more excited. But Pierre, though he felt that +something unusual was happening around him, did not realize that he +was approaching the fire. As he was going along a foot path across a +wide-open space adjoining the Povarskoy on one side and the gardens of +Prince Gruzinski's house on the other, Pierre suddenly heard the +desperate weeping of a woman close to him. He stopped as if +awakening from a dream and lifted his head. + +By the side of the path, on the dusty dry grass, all sorts of +household goods lay in a heap: featherbeds, a samovar, icons, and +trunks. On the ground, beside the trunks, sat a thin woman no longer +young, with long, prominent upper teeth, and wearing a black cloak and +cap. This woman, swaying to and fro and muttering something, was +choking with sobs. Two girls of about ten and twelve, dressed in dirty +short frocks and cloaks, were staring at their mother with a look of +stupefaction on their pale frightened faces. The youngest child, a boy +of about seven, who wore an overcoat and an immense cap evidently +not his own, was crying in his old nurse's arms. A dirty, barefooted +maid was sitting on a trunk, and, having undone her pale-colored +plait, was pulling it straight and sniffing at her singed hair. The +woman's husband, a short, round-shouldered man in the undress +uniform of a civilian official, with sausage-shaped whiskers and +showing under his square-set cap the hair smoothly brushed forward +over his temples, with expressionless face was moving the trunks, +which were placed one on another, and was dragging some garments +from under them. + +As soon as she saw Pierre, the woman almost threw herself at his +feet. + +"Dear people, good Christians, save me, help me, dear friends... +help us, somebody," she muttered between her sobs. "My girl... My +daughter! My youngest daughter is left behind. She's burned! Ooh! +Was it for this I nursed you.... Ooh!" + +"Don't, Mary Nikolievna!" said her husband to her in a low voice, +evidently only to justify himself before the stranger. "Sister must +have taken her, or else where can she be?" he added. + +"Monster! Villain!" shouted the woman angrily, suddenly ceasing to +weep. "You have no heart, you don't feel for your own child! Another +man would have rescued her from the fire. But this is a monster and +neither a man nor a father! You, honored sir, are a noble man," she +went on, addressing Pierre rapidly between her sobs. "The fire broke +out alongside, and blew our way, the maid called out 'Fire!' and we +rushed to collect our things. We ran out just as we were.... This is +what we have brought away.... The icons, and my dowry bed, all the +rest is lost. We seized the children. But not Katie! Ooh! O +Lord!..." and again she began to sob. "My child, my dear one! +Burned, burned!" + +"But where was she left?" asked Pierre. + +From the expression of his animated face the woman saw that this man +might help her. + +"Oh, dear sir!" she cried, seizing him by the legs. "My +benefactor, set my heart at ease.... Aniska, go, you horrid girl, show +him the way!" she cried to the maid, angrily opening her mouth and +still farther exposing her long teeth. + +"Show me the way, show me, I... I'll do it," gasped Pierre rapidly. + +The dirty maidservant stepped from behind the trunk, put up her +plait, sighed, and went on her short, bare feet along the path. Pierre +felt as if he had come back to life after a heavy swoon. He held his +head higher, his eyes shone with the light of life, and with swift +steps he followed the maid, overtook her, and came out on the +Povarskoy. The whole street was full of clouds of black smoke. Tongues +of flame here and there broke through that cloud. A great number of +people crowded in front of the conflagration. In the middle of the +street stood a French general saying something to those around him. +Pierre, accompanied by the maid, was advancing to the spot where the +general stood, but the French soldiers stopped him. + +"On ne passe pas!"~^ cried a voice. + +^~ "You can't pass! + +"This way, uncle," cried the girl. "We'll pass through the side +street, by the Nikulins'!" + +Pierre turned back, giving a spring now and then to keep up with +her. She ran across the street, turned down a side street to the left, +and, passing three houses, turned into a yard on the right. + +"It's here, close by," said she and, running across the yard, opened +a gate in a wooden fence and, stopping, pointed out to him a small +wooden wing of the house, which was burning brightly and fiercely. One +of its sides had fallen in, another was on fire, and bright flames +issued from the openings of the windows and from under the roof. + +As Pierre passed through the fence gate, he was enveloped by hot air +and involuntarily stopped. + +"Which is it? Which is your house?" he asked. + +"Ooh!" wailed the girl, pointing to the wing. "That's it, that was +our lodging. You've burned to death, our treasure, Katie, my +precious little missy! Ooh!" lamented Aniska, who at the sight of +the fire felt that she too must give expression to her feelings. + +Pierre rushed to the wing, but the heat was so great that he +involuntarily passed round in a curve and came upon the large house +that was as yet burning only at one end, just below the roof, and +around which swarmed a crowd of Frenchmen. At first Pierre did not +realize what these men, who were dragging something out, were about; +but seeing before him a Frenchman hitting a peasant with a blunt saber +and trying to take from him a fox-fur coat, he vaguely understood that +looting was going on there, but he had no time to dwell on that idea. + +The sounds of crackling and the din of falling walls and ceilings, +the whistle and hiss of the flames, the excited shouts of the +people, and the sight of the swaying smoke, now gathering into thick +black clouds and now soaring up with glittering sparks, with here +and there dense sheaves of flame (now red and now like golden fish +scales creeping along the walls), and the heat and smoke and +rapidity of motion, produced on Pierre the usual animating effects +of a conflagration. It had a peculiarly strong effect on him because +at the sight of the fire he felt himself suddenly freed from the ideas +that had weighed him down. He felt young, bright, adroit, and +resolute. He ran round to the other side of the lodge and was about to +dash into that part of it which was still standing, when just above +his head he heard several voices shouting and then a cracking sound +and the ring of something heavy falling close beside him. + +Pierre looked up and saw at a window of the large house some +Frenchmen who had just thrown out the drawer of a chest, filled with +metal articles. Other French soldiers standing below went up to the +drawer. + +"What does this fellow want?" shouted one of them referring to +Pierre. + +"There's a child in that house. Haven't you seen a child?" cried +Pierre. + +"What's he talking about? Get along!" said several voices, and one +of the soldiers, evidently afraid that Pierre might want to take +from them some of the plate and bronzes that were in the drawer, moved +threateningly toward him. + +"A child?" shouted a Frenchman from above. "I did hear something +squealing in the garden. Perhaps it's his brat that the fellow is +looking for. After all, one must be human, you know...." + +"Where is it? Where?" said Pierre. + +"There! There!" shouted the Frenchman at the window, pointing to the +garden at the back of the house. "Wait a bit- I'm coming down." + +And a minute or two later the Frenchman, a black-eyed fellow with +a spot on his cheek, in shirt sleeves, really did jump out of a window +on the ground floor, and clapping Pierre on the shoulder ran with +him into the garden. + +"Hurry up, you others!" he called out to his comrades. "It's getting +hot." + +When they reached a gravel path behind the house the Frenchman +pulled Pierre by the arm and pointed to a round, graveled space +where a three-year-old girl in a pink dress was lying under a seat. + +"There is your child! Oh, a girl, so much the better!" said the +Frenchman. "Good-by, Fatty. We must be human, we are all mortal you +know!" and the Frenchman with the spot on his cheek ran back to his +comrades. + +Breathless with joy, Pierre ran to the little girl and was going +to take her in his arms. But seeing a stranger the sickly, +scrofulous-looking child, unattractively like her mother, began to +yell and run away. Pierre, however, seized her and lifted her in his +arms. She screamed desperately and angrily and tried with her little +hands to pull Pierre's hands away and to bite them with her slobbering +mouth. Pierre was seized by a sense of horror and repulsion such as he +had experienced when touching some nasty little animal. But he made an +effort not to throw the child down and ran with her to the large +house. It was now, however, impossible to get back the way he had +come; the maid, Aniska, was no longer there, and Pierre with a feeling +of pity and disgust pressed the wet, painfully sobbing child to +himself as tenderly as he could and ran with her through the garden +seeking another way out. + +CHAPTER XXXIV + +Having run through different yards and side streets, Pierre got back +with his little burden to the Gruzinski garden at the corner of the +Povarskoy. He did not at first recognize the place from which he had +set out to look for the child, so crowded was it now with people and +goods that had been dragged out of the houses. Besides Russian +families who had taken refuge here from the fire with their +belongings, there were several French soldiers in a variety of +clothing. Pierre took no notice of them. He hurried to find the family +of that civil servant in order to restore the daughter to her mother +and go to save someone else. Pierre felt that he had still much to +do and to do quickly. Glowing with the heat and from running, he +felt at that moment more strongly than ever the sense of youth, +animation, and determination that had come on him when he ran to +save the child. She had now become quiet and, clinging with her little +hands to Pierre's coat, sat on his arm gazing about her like some +little wild animal. He glanced at her occasionally with a slight +smile. He fancied he saw something pathetically innocent in that +frightened, sickly little face. + +He did not find the civil servant or his wife where he had left +them. He walked among the crowd with rapid steps, scanning the various +faces he met. Involuntarily he noticed a Georgian or Armenian family +consisting of a very handsome old man of Oriental type, wearing a new, +cloth-covered, sheepskin coat and new boots, an old woman of similar +type, and a young woman. That very young woman seemed to Pierre the +perfection of Oriental beauty, with her sharply outlined, arched, +black eyebrows and the extraordinarily soft, bright color of her long, +beautiful, expressionless face. Amid the scattered property and the +crowd on the open space, she, in her rich satin cloak with a bright +lilac shawl on her head, suggested a delicate exotic plant thrown +out onto the snow. She was sitting on some bundles a little behind the +old woman, and looked from under her long lashes with motionless, +large, almond-shaped eyes at the ground before her. Evidently she +was aware of her beauty and fearful because of it. Her face struck +Pierre and, hurrying along by the fence, he turned several times to +look at her. When he had reached the fence, still without finding +those he sought, he stopped and looked about him. + +With the child in his arms his figure was now more conspicuous +than before, and a group of Russians, both men and women, gathered +about him. + +"Have you lost anyone, my dear fellow? You're of the gentry +yourself, aren't you? Whose child is it?" they asked him. + +Pierre replied that the child belonged to a woman in a black coat +who had been sitting there with her other children, and he asked +whether anyone knew where she had gone. + +"Why, that must be the Anferovs," said an old deacon, addressing a +pockmarked peasant woman. "Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy!" he added +in his customary bass. + +"The Anferovs? No," said the woman. "They left in the morning. +That must be either Mary Nikolievna's or the Ivanovs'!" + +"He says 'a woman,' and Mary Nikolievna is a lady," remarked a house +serf. + +"Do you know her? She's thin, with long teeth," said Pierre. + +"That's Mary Nikolievna! They went inside the garden when these +wolves swooped down," said the woman, pointing to the French soldiers. + +"O Lord, have mercy!" added the deacon. + +"Go over that way, they're there. It's she! She kept on lamenting +and crying," continued the woman. "It's she. Here, this way!" + +But Pierre was not listening to the woman. He had for some seconds +been intently watching what was going on a few steps away. He was +looking at the Armenian family and at two French soldiers who had gone +up to them. One of these, a nimble little man, was wearing a blue coat +tied round the waist with a rope. He had a nightcap on his head and +his feet were bare. The other, whose appearance particularly struck +Pierre, was a long, lank, round-shouldered, fair-haired man, slow in +his movements and with an idiotic expression of face. He wore a +woman's loose gown of frieze, blue trousers, and large torn Hessian +boots. The little barefooted Frenchman in the blue coat went up to the +Armenians and, saying something, immediately seized the old man by his +legs and the old man at once began pulling off his boots. The other in +the frieze gown stopped in front of the beautiful Armenian girl and +with his hands in his pockets stood staring at her, motionless and +silent. + +"Here, take the child!" said Pierre peremptorily and hurriedly to +the woman, handing the little girl to her. "Give her back to them, +give her back!" he almost shouted, putting the child, who began +screaming, on the ground, and again looking at the Frenchman and the +Armenian family. + +The old man was already sitting barefoot. The little Frenchman had +secured his second boot and was slapping one boot against the other. +The old man was saying something in a voice broken by sobs, but Pierre +caught but a glimpse of this, his whole attention was directed to +the Frenchman in the frieze gown who meanwhile, swaying slowly from +side to side, had drawn nearer to the young woman and taking his hands +from his pockets had seized her by the neck. + +The beautiful Armenian still sat motionless and in the same +attitude, with her long lashes drooping as if she did not see or +feel what the soldier was doing to her. + +While Pierre was running the few steps that separated him from the +Frenchman, the tall marauder in the frieze gown was already tearing +from her neck the necklace the young Armenian was wearing, and the +young woman, clutching at her neck, screamed piercingly. + +"Let that woman alone!" exclaimed Pierre hoarsely in a furious +voice, seizing the soldier by his round shoulders and throwing him +aside. + +The soldier fell, got up, and ran away. But his comrade, throwing +down the boots and drawing his sword, moved threateningly toward +Pierre. + +"Voyons, Pas de betises!"~^ he cried. + +^~ "Look here, no nonsense!" + +Pierre was in such a transport of rage that he remembered nothing +and his strength increased tenfold. He rushed at the barefooted +Frenchman and, before the latter had time to draw his sword, knocked +him off his feet and hammered him with his fists. Shouts of approval +were heard from the crowd around, and at the same moment a mounted +patrol of French Uhlans appeared from round the corner. The Uhlans +came up at a trot to Pierre and the Frenchman and surrounded them. +Pierre remembered nothing of what happened after that. He only +remembered beating someone and being beaten and finally feeling that +his hands were bound and that a crowd of French soldiers stood +around him and were searching him. + +"Lieutenant, he has a dagger," were the first words Pierre +understood. + +"Ah, a weapon?" said the officer and turned to the barefooted +soldier who had been arrested with Pierre. "All right, you can tell +all about it at the court-martial." Then he turned to Pierre. "Do +you speak French?" + +Pierre looked around him with bloodshot eyes and did not reply. +His face probably looked very terrible, for the officer said something +in a whisper and four more Uhlans left the ranks and placed themselves +on both sides of Pierre. + +"Do you speak French?" the officer asked again, keeping at a +distance from Pierre. "Call the interpreter." + +A little man in Russian civilian clothes rode out from the ranks, +and by his clothes and manner of speaking Pierre at once knew him to +be a French salesman from one of the Moscow shops. + +"He does not look like a common man," said the interpreter, after +a searching look at Pierre. + +"Ah, he looks very much like an incendiary," remarked the officer. +"And ask him who he is," he added. + +"Who are you?" asked the interpreter in poor Russian. "You must +answer the chief." + +"I will not tell you who I am. I am your prisoner- take me!" +Pierre suddenly replied in French. + +"Ah, ah!" muttered the officer with a frown. "Well then, march!" + +A crowd had collected round the Uhlans. Nearest to Pierre stood +the pockmarked peasant woman with the little girl, and when the patrol +started she moved forward. + +"Where are they taking you to, you poor dear?" said she. "And the +little girl, the little girl, what am I to do with her if she's not +theirs?" said the woman. + +"What does that woman want?" asked the officer. + +Pierre was as if intoxicated. His elation increased at the sight +of the little girl he had saved. + +"What does she want?" he murmured. "She is bringing me my daughter +whom I have just saved from the flames," said he. "Good-by!" And +without knowing how this aimless lie had escaped him, he went along +with resolute and triumphant steps between the French soldiers. + +The French patrol was one of those sent out through the various +streets of Moscow by Durosnel's order to put a stop to the pillage, +and especially to catch the incendiaries who, according to the general +opinion which had that day originated among the higher French +officers, were the cause of the conflagrations. After marching through +a number of streets the patrol arrested five more Russian suspects: +a small shopkeeper, two seminary students, a peasant, and a house +serf, besides several looters. But of all these various suspected +characters, Pierre was considered to be the most suspicious of all. +When they had all been brought for the night to a large house on the +Zubov Rampart that was being used as a guardhouse, Pierre was placed +apart under strict guard. + +BOOK TWELVE: 1812 + +CHAPTER I + +In Petersburg at that time a complicated struggle was being +carried on with greater heat than ever in the highest circles, between +the parties of Rumyantsev, the French, Marya Fedorovna, the Tsarevich, +and others, drowned as usual by the buzzing of the court drones. But +the calm, luxurious life of Petersburg, concerned only about +phantoms and reflections of real life, went on in its old way and made +it hard, except by a great effort, to realize the danger and the +difficult position of the Russian people. There were the same +receptions and balls, the same French theater, the same court +interests and service interests and intrigues as usual. Only in the +very highest circles were attempts made to keep in mind the +difficulties of the actual position. Stories were whispered of how +differently the two Empresses behaved in these difficult +circumstances. The Empress Marya, concerned for the welfare of the +charitable and educational institutions under her patronage, had given +directions that they should all be removed to Kazan, and the things +belonging to these institutions had already been packed up. The +Empress Elisabeth, however, when asked what instructions she would +be pleased to give- with her characteristic Russian patriotism had +replied that she could give no directions about state institutions for +that was the affair of the sovereign, but as far as she personally was +concerned she would be the last to quit Petersburg. + +At Anna Pavlovna's on the twenty-sixth of August, the very day of +the battle of Borodino, there was a soiree, the chief feature of which +was to be the reading of a letter from His Lordship the Bishop when +sending the Emperor an icon of the Venerable Sergius. It was +regarded as a model of ecclesiastical, patriotic eloquence. Prince +Vasili himself, famed for his elocution, was to read it. (He used to +read at the Empress'.) The art of his reading was supposed to lie in +rolling out the words, quite independently of their meaning, in a loud +and singsong voice alternating between a despairing wail and a +tender murmur, so that the wail fell quite at random on one word and +the murmur on another. This reading, as was always the case at Anna +Pavlovna's soirees, had a political significance. That evening she +expected several important personages who had to be made ashamed of +their visits to the French theater and aroused to a patriotic +temper. A good many people had already arrived, but Anna Pavlovna, not +yet seeing all those whom she wanted in her drawing room, did not +let the reading begin but wound up the springs of a general +conversation. + +The news of the day in Petersburg was the illness of Countess +Bezukhova. She had fallen ill unexpectedly a few days previously, +had missed several gatherings of which she was usually ornament, and +was said to be receiving no one, and instead of the celebrated +Petersburg doctors who usually attended her had entrusted herself to +some Italian doctor who was treating her in some new and unusual way. + +They all knew very well that the enchanting countess' illness +arose from an inconvenience resulting from marrying two husbands at +the same time, and that the Italian's cure consisted in removing +such inconvenience; but in Anna Pavlovna's presence no one dared to +think of this or even appear to know it. + +"They say the poor countess is very ill. The doctor says it is +angina pectoris." + +"Angina? Oh, that's a terrible illness!" + +"They say that the rivals are reconciled, thanks to the angina..." +and the word angina was repeated with great satisfaction. + +"The count is pathetic, they say. He cried like a child when the +doctor told him the case was dangerous." + +"Oh, it would be a terrible loss, she is an enchanting woman." + +"You are speaking of the poor countess?" said Anna Pavlovna, +coming up just then. "I sent to ask for news, and hear that she is a +little better. Oh, she is certainly the most charming woman in the +world," she went on, with a smile at her own enthusiasm. "We belong to +different camps, but that does not prevent my esteeming her as she +deserves. She is very unfortunate!" added Anna Pavlovna. + +Supposing that by these words Anna Pavlovna was somewhat lifting the +veil from the secret of the countess' malady, an unwary young man +ventured to express surprise that well known doctors had not been +called in and that the countess was being attended by a charlatan +who might employ dangerous remedies. + +"Your information maybe better than mine," Anna Pavlovna suddenly +and venomously retorted on the inexperienced young man, "but I know on +good authority that this doctor is a very learned and able man. He +is private physician to the Queen of Spain." + +And having thus demolished the young man, Anna Pavlovna turned to +another group where Bilibin was talking about the Austrians: having +wrinkled up his face he was evidently preparing to smooth it out again +and utter one of his mots. + +"I think it is delightful," he said, referring to a diplomatic +note that had been sent to Vienna with some Austrian banners +captured from the French by Wittgenstein, "the hero of Petropol" as he +was then called in Petersburg. + +"What? What's that?" asked Anna Pavlovna, securing silence for the +mot, which she had heard before. + +And Bilibin repeated the actual words of the diplomatic dispatch, +which he had himself composed. + +"The Emperor returns these Austrian banners," said Bilibin, +"friendly banners gone astray and found on a wrong path," and his brow +became smooth again. + +"Charming, charming!" observed Prince Vasili. + +"The path to Warsaw, perhaps," Prince Hippolyte remarked loudly +and unexpectedly. Everybody looked at him, understanding what he +meant. Prince Hippolyte himself glanced around with amused surprise. +He knew no more than the others what his words meant. During his +diplomatic career he had more than once noticed that such utterances +were received as very witty, and at every opportunity he uttered in +that way the first words that entered his head. "It may turn out +very well," he thought, "but if not, they'll know how to arrange +matters." And really, during the awkward silence that ensued, that +insufficiently patriotic person entered whom Anna Pavlovna had been +waiting for and wished to convert, and she, smiling and shaking a +finger at Hippolyte, invited Prince Vasili to the table and bringing +him two candles and the manuscript begged him to begin. Everyone +became silent. + +"Most Gracious Sovereign and Emperor! " Prince Vasili sternly +declaimed, looking round at his audience as if to inquire whether +anyone had anything to say to the contrary. But no one said +anything. "Moscow, our ancient capital, the New Jerusalem, receives +her Christ"- he placed a sudden emphasis on the word her- "as a mother +receives her zealous sons into her arms, and through the gathering +mists, foreseeing the brilliant glory of thy rule, sings in +exultation, 'Hosanna, blessed is he that cometh!'" + +Prince Vasili pronounced these last words in a tearful voice. + +Bilibin attentively examined his nails, and many of those present +appeared intimidated, as if asking in what they were to blame. Anna +Pavlovna whispered the next words in advance, like an old woman +muttering the prayer at Communion: "Let the bold and insolent +Goliath..." she whispered. + +Prince Vasili continued. + +"Let the bold and insolent Goliath from the borders of France +encompass the realms of Russia with death-bearing terrors; humble +Faith, the sling of the Russian David, shall suddenly smite his head +in his blood-thirsty pride. This icon of the Venerable Sergius, the +servant of God and zealous champion of old of our country's weal, is +offered to Your Imperial Majesty. I grieve that my waning strength +prevents rejoicing in the sight of your most gracious presence. I +raise fervent prayers to Heaven that the Almighty may exalt the race +of the just, and mercifully fulfill the desires of Your Majesty." + +"What force! What a style!" was uttered in approval both of reader +and of author. + +Animated by that address Anna Pavlovna's guests talked for a long +time of the state of the fatherland and offered various conjectures as +to the result of the battle to be fought in a few days. + +"You will see," said Anna Pavlovna, "that tomorrow, on the Emperor's +birthday, we shall receive news. I have a favorable presentiment!" + +CHAPTER II + +Anna Pavlovna's presentiment was in fact fulfilled. Next day +during the service at the palace church in honor of the Emperor's +birthday, Prince Volkonski was called out of the church and received a +dispatch from Prince Kutuzov. It was Kutuzov's report, written from +Tatarinova on the day of the battle. Kutuzov wrote that the Russians +had not retreated a step, that the French losses were much heavier +than ours, and that he was writing in haste from the field of battle +before collecting full information. It followed that there must have +been a victory. And at once, without leaving the church, thanks were +rendered to the Creator for His help and for the victory. + +Anna Pavlovna's presentiment was justified, and all that morning a +joyously festive mood reigned in the city. Everyone believed the +victory to have been complete, and some even spoke of Napoleon's +having been captured, of his deposition, and of the choice of a new +ruler for France. + +It is very difficult for events to be reflected in their real +strength and completeness amid the conditions of court life and far +from the scene of action. General events involuntarily group +themselves around some particular incident. So now the courtiers' +pleasure was based as much on the fact that the news had arrived on +the Emperor's birthday as on the fact of the victory itself. It was +like a successfully arranged surprise. Mention was made in Kutuzov's +report of the Russian losses, among which figured the names of +Tuchkov, Bagration, and Kutaysov. In the Petersburg world this sad +side of the affair again involuntarily centered round a single +incident: Kutaysov's death. Everybody knew him, the Emperor liked him, +and he was young and interesting. That day everyone met with the +words: + +"What a wonderful coincidence! Just during the service. But what a +loss Kutaysov is! How sorry I am!" + +"What did I tell about Kutuzov?" Prince Vasili now said with a +prophet's pride. "I always said he was the only man capable of +defeating Napoleon." + +But next day no news arrived from the army and the public mood +grew anxious. The courtiers suffered because of the suffering the +suspense occasioned the Emperor. + +"Fancy the Emperor's position!" said they, and instead of +extolling Kutuzov as they had done the day before, they condemned +him as the cause of the Emperor's anxiety. That day Prince Vasili no +longer boasted of his protege Kutuzov, but remained silent when the +commander in chief was mentioned. Moreover, toward evening, as if +everything conspired to make Petersburg society anxious and uneasy, +a terrible piece of news was added. Countess Helene Bezukhova had +suddenly died of that terrible malady it had been so agreeable to +mention. Officially, at large gatherings, everyone said that +Countess Bezukhova had died of a terrible attack of angina pectoris, +but in intimate circles details were mentioned of how the private +physician of the Queen of Spain had prescribed small doses of a +certain drug to produce a certain effect; but Helene, tortured by +the fact that the old count suspected her and that her husband to whom +she had written (that wretched, profligate Pierre) had not replied, +had suddenly taken a very large dose of the drug, and had died in +agony before assistance could be rendered her. It was said that Prince +Vasili and the old count had turned upon the Italian, but the latter +had produced such letters from the unfortunate deceased that they +had immediately let the matter drop. + +Talk in general centered round three melancholy facts: the Emperor's +lack of news, the loss of Kutuzov, and the death of Helene. + +On the third day after Kutuzov's report a country gentleman +arrived from Moscow, and news of the surrender of Moscow to the French +spread through the whole town. This was terrible! What a position +for the Emperor to be in! Kutuzov was a traitor, and Prince Vasili +during the visits of condolence paid to him on the occasion of his +daughter's death said of Kutuzov, whom he had formerly praised (it was +excusable for him in his grief to forget what he had said), that it +was impossible to expect anything else from a blind and depraved old +man. + +"I only wonder that the fate of Russia could have been entrusted +to such a man." + +As long as this news remained unofficial it was possible to doubt +it, but the next day the following communication was received from +Count Rostopchin: + +Prince Kutuzov's adjutant has brought me a letter in which he +demands police officers to guide the army to the Ryazan road. He +writes that he is regretfully abandoning Moscow. Sire! Kutuzov's +action decides the fate of the capital and of your empire! Russia will +shudder to learn of the abandonment of the city in which her greatness +is centered and in which lie the ashes of your ancestors! I shall +follow the army. I have had everything removed, and it only remains +for me to weep over the fate of my fatherland. + +On receiving this dispatch the Emperor sent Prince Volkonski to +Kutuzov with the following rescript: + +Prince Michael Ilarionovich! Since the twenty-ninth of August I have +received no communication from you, yet on the first of September I +received from the commander in chief of Moscow, via Yaroslavl, the sad +news that you, with the army, have decided to abandon Moscow. You +can yourself imagine the effect this news has had on me, and your +silence increases my astonishment. I am sending this by +Adjutant-General Prince Volkonski, to hear from you the situation of +the army and the reasons that have induced you to take this melancholy +decision. + +CHAPTER III + +Nine days after the abandonment of Moscow, a messenger from +Kutuzov reached Petersburg with the official announcement of that +event. This messenger was Michaud, a Frenchman who did not know +Russian, but who was quoique etranger, russe de coeur et d'ame,~^ as he +said of himself. + +^~ Though a foreigner, Russian in heart and soul. + +The Emperor at once received this messenger in his study at the +palace on Stone Island. Michaud, who had never seen Moscow before +the campaign and who did not know Russian, yet felt deeply moved (as +he wrote) when he appeared before notre tres gracieux souverain~^ +with the news of the burning of Moscow, dont les flammes eclairaient +sa route.~^ + +^~ Our most gracious sovereign. + +^~ Whose flames illumined his route. + +Though the source of M. Michaud's chagrin must have been different +from that which caused Russians to grieve, he had such a sad face when +shown into the Emperor's study that the latter at once asked: + +"Have you brought me sad news, Colonel?" + +"Very sad, sire," replied Michaud, lowering his eyes with a sigh. +"The abandonment of Moscow." + +"Have they surrendered my ancient capital without a battle?" asked +the Emperor quickly, his face suddenly flushing. + +Michaud respectfully delivered the message Kutuzov had entrusted +to him, which was that it had been impossible to fight before +Moscow, and that as the only remaining choice was between losing the +army as well as Moscow, or losing Moscow alone, the field marshal +had to choose the latter. + +The Emperor listened in silence, not looking at Michaud. + +"Has the enemy entered the city?" he asked. + +"Yes, sire, and Moscow is now in ashes. I left it all in flames," +replied Michaud in a decided tone, but glancing at the Emperor he +was frightened by what he had done. + +The Emperor began to breathe heavily and rapidly, his lower lip +trembled, and tears instantly appeared in his fine blue eyes. + +But this lasted only a moment. He suddenly frowned, as if blaming +himself for his weakness, and raising his head addressed Michaud in +a firm voice: + +"I see, Colonel, from all that is happening, that Providence +requires great sacrifices of us... I am ready to submit myself in +all things to His will; but tell me, Michaud, how did you leave the +army when it saw my ancient capital abandoned without a battle? Did +you not notice discouragement?..." + +Seeing that his most gracious ruler was calm once more, Michaud also +grew calm, but was not immediately ready to reply to the Emperor's +direct and relevant question which required a direct answer. + +"Sire, will you allow me to speak frankly as befits a loyal +soldier?" he asked to gain time. + +"Colonel, I always require it," replied the Emperor. "Conceal +nothing from me, I wish to know absolutely how things are." + +"Sire!" said Michaud with a subtle, scarcely perceptible smile on +his lips, having now prepared a well-phrased reply, "sire, I left +the whole army, from its chiefs to the lowest soldier, without +exception in desperate and agonized terror..." + +"How is that?" the Emperor interrupted him, frowning sternly. "Would +misfortune make my Russians lose heart?... Never!" + +Michaud had only waited for this to bring out the phrase he had +prepared. + +"Sire," he said, with respectful playfulness, "they are only +afraid lest Your Majesty, in the goodness of your heart, should +allow yourself to be persuaded to make peace. They are burning for the +combat," declared this representative of the Russian nation, "and to +prove to Your Majesty by the sacrifice of their lives how devoted they +are...." + +"Ah!" said the Emperor reassured, and with a kindly gleam in his +eyes, he patted Michaud on the shoulder. "You set me at ease, +Colonel." + +He bent his head and was silent for some time. + +"Well, then, go back to the army," he said, drawing himself up to +his full height and addressing Michaud with a gracious and majestic +gesture, "and tell our brave men and all my good subjects wherever you +go that when I have not a soldier left I shall put myself at the +head of my beloved nobility and my good peasants and so use the last +resources of my empire. It still offers me more than my enemies +suppose," said the Emperor growing more and more animated; "but should +it ever be ordained by Divine Providence," he continued, raising to +heaven his fine eyes shining with emotion, "that my dynasty should +cease to reign on the throne of my ancestors, then after exhausting +all the means at my command, I shall let my beard grow to here" (he +pointed halfway down his chest) "and go and eat potatoes with the +meanest of my peasants, rather than sign the disgrace of my country +and of my beloved people whose sacrifices I know how to appreciate." + +Having uttered these words in an agitated voice the Emperor suddenly +turned away as if to hide from Michaud the tears that rose to his +eyes, and went to the further end of his study. Having stood there a +few moments, he strode back to Michaud and pressed his arm below the +elbow with a vigorous movement. The Emperor's mild and handsome face +was flushed and his eyes gleamed with resolution and anger. + +"Colonel Michaud, do not forget what I say to you here, perhaps we +may recall it with pleasure someday... Napoleon or I," said the +Emperor, touching his breast. "We can no longer both reign together. I +have learned to know him, and he will not deceive me any more...." + +And the Emperor paused, with a frown. + +When he heard these words and saw the expression of firm +resolution in the Emperor's eyes, Michaud- quoique etranger, russe +de coeur et d'ame- at that solemn moment felt himself enraptured by +all that he had heard (as he used afterwards to say), and gave +expression to his own feelings and those of the Russian people whose +representative he considered himself to be, in the following words: + +"Sire!" said he, "Your Majesty is at this moment signing the glory +of the nation and the salvation of Europe!" + +With an inclination of the head the Emperor dismissed him. + +CHAPTER IV + +It is natural for us who were not living in those days to imagine +that when half Russia had been conquered and the inhabitants were +ficeing to distant provinces, and one levy after another was being +raised for the defense of the fatherland, all Russians from the +greatest to the least were solely engaged in sacrificing themselves, +saving their fatherland, or weeping over its downfall. The tales and +descriptions of that time without exception speak only of the +self-sacrifice, patriotic devotion, despair, grief, and the heroism of +the Russians. But it was not really so. It appears so to us because we +see only the general historic interest of that time and do not see all +the personal human interests that people had. Yet in reality those +personal interests of the moment so much transcend the general +interests that they always prevent the public interest from being felt +or even noticed. Most of the people at that time paid no attention +to the general progress of events but were guided only by their +private interests, and they were the very people whose activities at +that period were most useful. + +Those who tried to understand the general course of events and to +take part in it by self-sacrifice and heroism were the most useless +members of society, they saw everything upside down, and all they +did for the common good turned out to be useless and foolish- like +Pierre's and Mamonov's regiments which looted Russian villages, and +the lint the young ladies prepared and that never reached the wounded, +and so on. Even those, fond of intellectual talk and of expressing +their feelings, who discussed Russia's position at the time +involuntarily introduced into their conversation either a shade of +pretense and falsehood or useless condemnation and anger directed +against people accused of actions no one could possibly be guilty +of. In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the fruit of +the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable. Only unconscious action +bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic event never +understands its significance. If he tries to realize it his efforts +are fruitless. + +The more closely a man was engaged in the events then taking place +in Russia the less did he realize their significance. In Petersburg +and in the provinces at a distance from Moscow, ladies, and +gentlemen in militia uniforms, wept for Russia and its ancient capital +and talked of self-sacrifice and so on; but in the army which +retired beyond Moscow there was little talk or thought of Moscow, +and when they caught sight of its burned ruins no one swore to be +avenged on the French, but they thought about their next pay, their +next quarters, of Matreshka the vivandiere, and like matters. + +As the war had caught him in the service, Nicholas Rostov took a +close and prolonged part in the defense of his country, but did so +casually, without any aim at self-sacrifice, and he therefore looked +at what was going on in Russia without despair and without dismally +racking his brains over it. Had he been asked what he thought of the +state of Russia, he would have said that it was not his business to +think about it, that Kutuzov and others were there for that purpose, +but that he had heard that the regiments were to be made up to their +full strength, that fighting would probably go on for a long time yet, +and that things being so it was quite likely he might be in command of +a regiment in a couple of years' time. + +As he looked at the matter in this way, he learned that he was being +sent to Voronezh to buy remounts for his division, not only without +regret at being prevented from taking part in the coming battle, but +with the greatest pleasure- which he did not conceal and which his +comrades fully understood. + +A few days before the battle of Borodino, Nicholas received the +necessary money and warrants, and having sent some hussars on in +advance, he set out with post horses for Voronezh. + +Only a man who has experienced it- that is, has passed some months +continuously in an atmosphere of campaigning and war- can understand +the delight Nicholas felt when he escaped from the region covered by +the army's foraging operations, provision trains, and hospitals. When- +free from soldiers, wagons, and the filthy traces of a camp- he saw +villages with peasants and peasant women, gentlemen's country +houses, fields where cattle were grazing, posthouses with +stationmasters asleep in them, he rejoiced as though seeing all this +for the first time. What for a long while specially surprised and +delighted him were the women, young and healthy, without a dozen +officers making up to each of them; women, too, who were pleased and +flattered that a passing officer should joke with them. + +In the highest spirits Nicholas arrived at night at a hotel in +Voronezh, ordered things he had long been deprived of in camp, and +next day, very clean-shaven and in a full-dress uniform he had not +worn for a long time, went to present himself to the authorities. + +The commander of the militia was a civilian general, an old man +who was evidently pleased with his military designation and rank. He +received Nicholas brusquely (imagining this to be characteristically +military) and questioned him with an important air, as if +considering the general progress of affairs and approving and +disapproving with full right to do so. Nicholas was in such good +spirits that this merely amused him. + +From the commander of the militia he drove to the governor. The +governor was a brisk little man, very simple and affable. He indicated +the stud farms at which Nicholas might procure horses, recommended +to him a horse dealer in the town and a landowner fourteen miles out +of town who had the best horses, and promised to assist him in every +way. + +"You are Count Ilya Rostov's son? My wife was a great friend of your +mother's. We are at home on Thursdays- today is Thursday, so please +come and see us quite informally," said the governor, taking leave +of him. + +Immediately on leaving the governor's, Nicholas hired post horses +and, taking his squadron quartermaster with him, drove at a gallop +to the landowner, fourteen miles away, who had the stud. Everything +seemed to him pleasant and easy during that first part of his stay +in Voronezh and, as usually happens when a man is in a pleasant +state of mind, everything went well and easily. + +The landowner to whom Nicholas went was a bachelor, an old +cavalryman, a horse fancier, a sportsman, the possessor of some +century-old brandy and some old Hungarian wine, who had a snuggery +where he smoked, and who owned some splendid horses. + +In very few words Nicholas bought seventeen picked stallions for six +thousand rubles- to serve, as he said, as samples of his remounts. +After dining and taking rather too much of the Hungarian wine, +Nicholas- having exchanged kisses with the landowner, with whom he was +already on the friendliest terms- galloped back over abominable roads, +in the brightest frame of mind, continually urging on the driver so as +to be in time for the governor's party. + +When he had changed, poured water over his head, and scented +himself, Nicholas arrived at the governor's rather late, but with +the phrase "better late than never" on his lips. + +It was not a ball, nor had dancing been announced, but everyone knew +that Catherine Petrovna would play valses and the ecossaise on the +clavichord and that there would be dancing, and so everyone had come +as to a ball. + +Provincial life in 1812 went on very much as usual, but with this +difference, that it was livelier in the towns in consequence of the +arrival of many wealthy families from Moscow, and as in everything +that went on in Russia at that time a special recklessness was +noticeable, an "in for a penny, in for a pound- who cares?" spirit, +and the inevitable small talk, instead of turning on the weather and +mutual acquaintances, now turned on Moscow, the army, and Napoleon. + +The society gathered together at the governor's was the best in +Voronezh. + +There were a great many ladies and some of Nicholas' Moscow +acquaintances, but there were no men who could at all vie with the +cavalier of St. George, the hussar remount officer, the good-natured +and well-bred Count Rostov. Among the men was an Italian prisoner, +an officer of the French army; and Nicholas felt that the presence +of that prisoner enhanced his own importance as a Russian hero. The +Italian was, as it were, a war trophy. Nicholas felt this, it seemed +to him that everyone regarded the Italian in the same light, and he +treated him cordially though with dignity and restraint. + +As soon as Nicholas entered in his hussar uniform, diffusing +around him a fragrance of perfume and wine, and had uttered the +words "better late than never" and heard them repeated several times +by others, people clustered around him; all eyes turned on him, and he +felt at once that he had entered into his proper position in the +province- that of a universal favorite: a very pleasant position, +and intoxicatingly so after his long privations. At posting +stations, at inns, and in the landowner's snuggery, maidservants had +been flattered by his notice, and here too at the governor's party +there were (as it seemed to Nicholas) an inexhaustible number of +pretty young women, married and unmarried, impatiently awaiting his +notice. The women and girls flirted with him and, from the first +day, the people concerned themselves to get this fine young +daredevil of an hussar married and settled down. Among these was the +governor's wife herself, who welcomed Rostov as a near relative and +called him "Nicholas." + +Catherine Petrovna did actually play valses and the ecossaise, and +dancing began in which Nicholas still further captivated the +provincial society by his agility. His particularly free manner of +dancing even surprised them all. Nicholas was himself rather surprised +at the way he danced that evening. He had never danced like that in +Moscow and would even have considered such a very free and easy manner +improper and in bad form, but here he felt it incumbent on him to +astonish them all by something unusual, something they would have to +accept as the regular thing in the capital though new to them in the +provinces. + +All the evening Nicholas paid attention to a blue-eyed, plump and +pleasing little blonde, the wife of one of the provincial officials. +With the naive conviction of young men in a merry mood that other +men's wives were created for them, Rostov did not leave the lady's +side and treated her husband in a friendly and conspiratorial style, +as if, without speaking of it, they knew how capitally Nicholas and +the lady would get on together. The husband, however, did not seem +to share that conviction and tried to behave morosely with Rostov. But +the latter's good-natured naivete was so boundless that sometimes even +he involuntarily yielded to Nicholas' good humor. Toward the end of +the evening, however, as the wife's face grew more flushed and +animated, the husband's became more and more melancholy and solemn, as +though there were but a given amount of animation between them and +as the wife's share increased the husband's diminished. + +CHAPTER V + +Nicholas sat leaning slightly forward in an armchair, bending +closely over the blonde lady and paying her mythological compliments +with a smile that never left his face. Jauntily shifting the +position of his legs in their tight riding breeches, diffusing an odor +of perfume, and admiring his partner, himself, and the fine outlines +of his legs in their well-fitting Hessian boots, Nicholas told the +blonde lady that he wished to run away with a certain lady here in +Voronezh. + +"Which lady?" + +"A charming lady, a divine one. Her eyes" (Nicholas looked at his +partner) "are blue, her mouth coral and ivory; her figure" (he glanced +at her shoulders) "like Diana's...." + +The husband came up and sullenly asked his wife what she was talking +about. + +"Ah, Nikita Ivanych!" cried Nicholas, rising politely, and as if +wishing Nikita Ivanych to share his joke, he began to tell him of +his intention to elope with a blonde lady. + +The husband smiled gloomily, the wife gaily. The governor's +good-natured wife came up with a look of disapproval. + +"Anna Ignatyevna wants to see you, Nicholas," said she, +pronouncing the name so that Nicholas at once understood that Anna +Ignatyevna was a very important person. "Come, Nicholas! You know +you let me call you so?" + +"Oh, yes, Aunt. Who is she?" + +"Anna Ignatyevna Malvintseva. She has heard from her niece how you +rescued her... Can you guess?" + +"I rescued such a lot of them!" said Nicholas. + +"Her niece, Princess Bolkonskaya. She is here in Voronezh with her +aunt. Oho! How you blush. Why, are...?" + +"Not a bit! Please don't, Aunt!" + +"Very well, very well!... Oh, what a fellow you are!" + +The governor's wife led him up to a tall and very stout old lady +with a blue headdress, who had just finished her game of cards with +the most important personages of the town. This was Malvintseva, +Princess Mary's aunt on her mother's side, a rich, childless widow who +always lived in Voronezh. When Rostov approached her she was +standing settling up for the game. She looked at him and, screwing +up her eyes sternly, continued to upbraid the general who had won from +her. + +"Very pleased, mon cher," she then said, holding out her hand to +Nicholas. "Pray come and see me." + +After a few words about Princess Mary and her late father, whom +Malvintseva had evidently not liked, and having asked what Nicholas +knew of Prince Andrew, who also was evidently no favorite of hers, the +important old lady dismissed Nicholas after repeating her invitation +to come to see her. + +Nicholas promised to come and blushed again as he bowed. At the +mention of Princess Mary he experienced a feeling of shyness and +even of fear, which he himself did not understand. + +When he had parted from Malvintseva Nicholas wished to return to the +dancing, but the governor's little wife placed her plump hand on his +sleeve and, saying that she wanted to have a talk with him, led him to +her sitting room, from which those who were there immediately withdrew +so as not to be in her way. + +"Do you know, dear boy," began the governor's wife with a serious +expression on her kind little face, "that really would be the match +for you: would you like me to arrange it?" + +"Whom do you mean, Aunt?" asked Nicholas. + +"I will make a match for you with the princess. Catherine Petrovna +speaks of Lily, but I say, no- the princess! Do you want me to do +it? I am sure your mother will be grateful to me. What a charming girl +she is, really! And she is not at all so plain, either." + +"Not at all," replied Nicholas as if offended at the idea. "As +befits a soldier, Aunt, I don't force myself on anyone or refuse +anything," he said before he had time to consider what he was saying. + +"Well then, remember, this is not a joke!" + +"Of course not!" + +"Yes, yes," the governor's wife said as if talking to herself. "But, +my dear boy, among other things you are too attentive to the other, +the blonde. One is sorry for the husband, really...." + +"Oh no, we are good friends with him," said Nicholas in the +simplicity of his heart; it did not enter his head that a pastime so +pleasant to himself might not be pleasant to someone else. + +"But what nonsense I have been saying to the governor's wife!" +thought Nicholas suddenly at supper. "She will really begin to arrange +a match... and Soyna...?" And on taking leave of the governor's +wife, when she again smilingly said to him, "Well then, remember!" +he drew her aside. + +"But see here, to tell the truth, Aunt..." + +"What is it, my dear? Come, let's sit down here," said she. + +Nicholas suddenly felt a desire and need to tell his most intimate +thoughts (which he would not have told to his mother, his sister, or +his friend) to this woman who was almost a stranger. When he +afterwards recalled that impulse to unsolicited and inexplicable +frankness which had very important results for him, it seemed to +him- as it seems to everyone in such cases- that it was merely some +silly whim that seized him: yet that burst of frankness, together with +other trifling events, had immense consequences for him and for all +his family. + +"You see, Aunt, Mamma has long wanted me to marry an heiress, but +the very idea of marrying for money is repugnant to me." + +"Oh yes, I understand," said the governor's wife. + +"But Princess Bolkonskaya- that's another matter. I will tell you +the truth. In the first place I like her very much, I feel drawn to +her; and then, after I met her under such circumstances- so strangely, +the idea often occurred to me: 'This is fate.' Especially if you +remember that Mamma had long been thinking of it; but I had never +happened to meet her before, somehow it had always happened that we +did not meet. And as long as my sister Natasha was engaged to her +brother it was of course out of the question for me to think of +marrying her. And it must needs happen that I should meet her just +when Natasha's engagement had been broken off... and then +everything... So you see... I never told this to anyone and never +will, only to you." + +The governor's wife pressed his elbow gratefully. + +"You know Sonya, my cousin? I love her, and promised to marry her, +and will do so.... So you see there can be no question about-" said +Nicholas incoherently and blushing. + +"My dear boy, what a way to look at it! You know Sonya has nothing +and you yourself say your Papa's affairs are in a very bad way. And +what about your mother? It would kill her, that's one thing. And +what sort of life would it be for Sonya- if she's a girl with a heart? +Your mother in despair, and you all ruined.... No, my dear, you and +Sonya ought to understand that." + +Nicholas remained silent. It comforted him to hear these arguments. + +"All the same, Aunt, it is impossible," he rejoined with a sigh, +after a short pause. "Besides, would the princess have me? And +besides, she is now in mourning. How can one think of it!" + +"But you don't suppose I'm going to get you married at once? There +is always a right way of doing things," replied the governor's wife. + +"What a matchmaker you are, Aunt..." said Nicholas, kissing her +plump little hand. + +CHAPTER VI + +On reaching Moscow after her meeting with Rostov, Princess Mary +had found her nephew there with his tutor, and a letter from Prince +Andrew giving her instructions how to get to her Aunt Malvintseva at +Voronezh. That feeling akin to temptation which had tormented her +during her father's illness, since his death, and especially since her +meeting with Rostov was smothered by arrangements for the journey, +anxiety about her brother, settling in a new house, meeting new +people, and attending to her nephew's education. She was sad. Now, +after a month passed in quiet surroundings, she felt more and more +deeply the loss of her father which was associated in her mind with +the ruin of Russia. She was agitated and incessantly tortured by the +thought of the dangers to which her brother, the only intimate +person now remaining to her, was exposed. She was worried too about +her nephew's education for which she had always felt herself +incompetent, but in the depths of her soul she felt at peace- a +peace arising from consciousness of having stifled those personal +dreams and hopes that had been on the point of awakening within her +and were related to her meeting with Rostov. + +The day after her party the governor's wife came to see +Malvintseva and, after discussing her plan with the aunt, remarked +that though under present circumstances a formal betrothal was, of +course, not to be thought of, all the same the young people might be +brought together and could get to know one another. Malvintseva +expressed approval, and the governor's wife began to speak of Rostov +in Mary's presence, praising him and telling how he had blushed when +Princess Mary's name was mentioned. But Princess Mary experienced a +painful rather than a joyful feeling- her mental tranquillity was +destroyed, and desires, doubts, self-reproach, and hopes reawoke. + +During the two days that elapsed before Rostov called, Princess Mary +continually thought of how she ought to behave to him. First she +decided not to come to the drawing room when he called to see her +aunt- that it would not be proper for her, in her deep mourning, to +receive visitors; then she thought this would be rude after what he +had done for her; then it occurred to her that her aunt and the +governor's wife had intentions concerning herself and Rostov- their +looks and words at times seemed to confirm this supposition- then +she told herself that only she, with her sinful nature, could think +this of them: they could not forget that situated as she was, while +still wearing deep mourning, such matchmaking would be an insult to +her and to her father's memory. Assuming that she did go down to see +him, Princess Mary imagined the words he would say to her and what she +would say to him, and these words sometimes seemed undeservedly cold +and then to mean too much. More than anything she feared lest the +confusion she felt might overwhelm her and betray her as soon as she +saw him. + +But when on Sunday after church the footman announced in the drawing +room that Count Rostov had called, the princess showed no confusion, +only a slight blush suffused her cheeks and her eyes lit up with a new +and radiant light. + +"You have met him, Aunt?" said she in a calm voice, unable herself +to understand that she could be outwardly so calm and natural. + +When Rostov entered the room, the princess dropped her eyes for an +instant, as if to give the visitor time to greet her aunt, and then +just as Nicholas turned to her she raised her head and met his look +with shining eyes. With a movement full of dignity and grace she +half rose with a smile of pleasure, held out her slender, delicate +hand to him, and began to speak in a voice in which for the first time +new deep womanly notes vibrated. Mademoiselle Bourienne, who was in +the drawing room, looked at Princess Mary in bewildered surprise. +Herself a consummate coquette, she could not have maneuvered better on +meeting a man she wished to attract. + +"Either black is particularly becoming to her or she really has +greatly improved without my having noticed it. And above all, what +tact and grace!" thought Mademoiselle Bourienne. + +Had Princess Mary been capable of reflection at that moment, she +would have been more surprised than Mademoiselle Bourienne at the +change that had taken place in herself. From the moment she recognized +that dear, loved face, a new life force took possession of her and +compelled her to speak and act apart from her own will. From the +time Rostov entered, her face became suddenly transformed. It was as +if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern and the +intricate, skillful, artistic work on its sides, that previously +seemed dark, coarse, and meaningless, was suddenly shown up in +unexpected and striking beauty. For the first time all that pure, +spiritual, inward travail through which she had lived appeared on +the surface. All her inward labor, her dissatisfaction with herself, +her sufferings, her strivings after goodness, her meekness, love, +and self-sacrifice- all this now shone in those radiant eyes, in her +delicate smile, and in every trait of her gentle face. + +Rostov saw all this as clearly as if he had known her whole life. He +felt that the being before him was quite different from, and better +than, anyone he had met before, and above all better than himself. + +Their conversation was very simple and unimportant. They spoke of +the war, and like everyone else unconsciously exaggerated their sorrow +about it; they spoke of their last meeting- Nicholas trying to +change the subject- they talked of the governor's kind wife, of +Nicholas' relations, and of Princess Mary's. + +She did not talk about her brother, diverting the conversation as +soon as her aunt mentioned Andrew. Evidently she could speak of +Russia's misfortunes with a certain artificiality, but her brother was +too near her heart and she neither could nor would speak lightly of +him. Nicholas noticed this, as he noticed every shade of Princess +Mary's character with an observation unusual to him, and everything +confirmed his conviction that she was a quite unusual and +extraordinary being. Nicholas blushed and was confused when people +spoke to him about the princess (as she did when he was mentioned) and +even when he thought of her, but in her presence he felt quite at +ease, and said not at all what he had prepared, but what, quite +appropriately, occurred to him at the moment. + +When a pause occurred during his short visit, Nicholas, as is +usual when there are children, turned to Prince Andrew's little son, +caressing him and asking whether he would like to be an hussar. He +took the boy on his knee, played with him, and looked round at +Princess Mary. With a softened, happy, timid look she watched the +boy she loved in the arms of the man she loved. Nicholas also +noticed that look and, as if understanding it, flushed with pleasure +and began to kiss the boy with good natured playfulness. + +As she was in mourning Princess Mary did not go out into society, +and Nicholas did not think it the proper thing to visit her again; but +all the same the governor's wife went on with her matchmaking, passing +on to Nicholas the flattering things Princess Mary said of him and +vice versa, and insisting on his declaring himself to Princess Mary. +For this purpose she arranged a meeting between the young people at +the bishop's house before Mass. + +Though Rostov told the governeor's wife that he would not make any +declaration to Princess Mary, he promised to go. + +As at Tilsit Rostov had not allowed himself to doubt that what +everybody considered right was right, so now, after a short but +sincere struggle between his effort to arrange his life by his own +sense of justice, and in obedient submission to circumstances, he +chose the latter and yielded to the power he felt irresistibly +carrying him he knew not where. He knew that after his promise to +Sonya it would be what he deemed base to declare his feelings to +Princess Mary. And he knew that he would never act basely. But he also +knew (or rather felt at the bottom of his heart) that by resigning +himself now to the force of circumstances and to those who were +guiding him, he was not only doing nothing wrong, but was doing +something very important- more important than anything he had ever +done in his life. + +After meeting Princess Mary, though the course of his life went on +externally as before, all his former amusements lost their charm for +him and he often thought about her. But he never thought about her +as he had thought of all the young ladies without exception whom he +had met in society, nor as he had for a long time, and at one time +rapturously, thought about Sonya. He had pictured each of those +young ladies as almost all honest-hearted young men do, that is, as +a possible wife, adapting her in his imagination to all the conditions +of married life: a white dressing gown, his wife at the tea table, his +wife's carriage, little ones, Mamma and Papa, their relations to +her, and so on- and these pictures of the future had given him +pleasure. But with Princess Mary, to whom they were trying to get +him engaged, he could never picture anything of future married life. +If he tried, his pictures seemed incongruous and false. It made him +afraid. + +CHAPTER VII + +The dreadful news of the battle of Borodino, of our losses in killed +and wounded, and the still more terrible news of the loss of Moscow +reached Voronezh in the middle of September. Princess Mary, having +learned of her brother's wound only from the Gazette and having no +definite news of him, prepared (so Nicholas heard, he had not seen her +again himself) to set off in search of Prince Andrew. + +When he received the news of the battle of Borodino and the +abandonment of Moscow, Rostov was not seized with despair, anger, +the desire for vengeance, or any feeling of that kind, but +everything in Voronezh suddenly seemed to him dull and tiresome, and +he experienced an indefinite feeling of shame and awkwardness. The +conversations he heard seemed to him insincere; he did not know how to +judge all these affairs and felt that only in the regiment would +everything again become clear to him. He made haste to finish buying +the horses, and often became unreasonably angry with his servant and +squadron quartermaster. + +A few days before his departure a special thanksgiving, at which +Nicholas was present, was held in the cathedral for the Russian +victory. He stood a little behind the governor and held himself with +military decorum through the service, meditating on a great variety of +subjects. When the service was over the governor's wife beckoned him +to her. + +"Have you seen the princess?" she asked, indicating with a +movement of her head a lady standing on the opposite side, beyond +the choir. + +Nicholas immediately recognized Princess Mary not so much by the +profile he saw under her bonnet as by the feeling of solicitude, +timidity, and pity that immediately overcame him. Princess Mary, +evidently engrossed by her thoughts, was crossing herself for the last +time before leaving the church. + +Nicholas looked at her face with surprise. It was the same face he +had seen before, there was the same general expression of refined, +inner, spiritual labor, but now it was quite differently lit up. There +was a pathetic expression of sorrow, prayer, and hope in it. As had +occurred before when she was present, Nicholas went up to her +without waiting to be prompted by the governor's wife and not asking +himself whether or not it was right and proper to address her here +in church, and told her he had heard of her trouble and sympathized +with his whole soul. As soon as she heard his voice a vivid glow +kindled in her face, lighting up both her sorrow and her joy. + +"There is one thing I wanted to tell you, Princess," said Rostov. +"It is that if your brother, Prince Andrew Nikolievich, were not +living, it would have been at once announced in the Gazette, as he +is a colonel." + +The princess looked at him, not grasping what he was saying, but +cheered by the expression of regretful sympathy on his face. + +"And I have known so many cases of a splinter wound" (the Gazette +said it was a shell) "either proving fatal at once or being very +slight," continued Nicholas. "We must hope for the best, and I am +sure..." + +Princess Mary interrupted him. + +"Oh, that would be so dread..." she began and, prevented by +agitation from finishing, she bent her head with a movement as +graceful as everything she did in his presence and, looking up at +him gratefully, went out, following her aunt. + +That evening Nicholas did not go out, but stayed at home to settle +some accounts with the horse dealers. When he had finished that +business it was already too late to go anywhere but still too early to +go to bed, and for a long time he paced up and down the room, +reflecting on his life, a thing he rarely did. + +Princess Mary had made an agreeable impression on him when he had +met her in Smolensk province. His having encountered her in such +exceptional circumstances, and his mother having at one time mentioned +her to him as a good match, had drawn his particular attention to her. +When he met her again in Voronezh the impression she made on him was +not merely pleasing but powerful. Nicholas had been struck by the +peculiar moral beauty he observed in her at this time. He was, +however, preparing to go away and it had not entered his head to +regret that he was thus depriving himself of chances of meeting her. +But that day's encounter in church had, he felt, sunk deeper than +was desirable for his peace of mind. That pale, sad, refined face, +that radiant look, those gentle graceful gestures, and especially +the deep and tender sorrow expressed in all her features agitated +him and evoked his sympathy. In men Rostov could not bear to see the +expression of a higher spiritual life (that was why he did not like +Prince Andrew) and he referred to it contemptuously as philosophy +and dreaminess, but in Princess Mary that very sorrow which revealed +the depth of a whole spiritual world foreign to him was an +irresistible attraction. + +"She must be a wonderful woman. A real angel!" he said to himself. +"Why am I not free? Why was I in such a hurry with Sonya?" And he +involuntarily compared the two: the lack of spirituality in the one +and the abundance of it in the other- a spirituality he himself lacked +and therefore valued most highly. He tried to picture what would +happen were he free. How he would propose to her and how she would +become his wife. But no, he could not imagine that. He felt awed, +and no clear picture presented itself to his mind. He had long ago +pictured to himself a future with Sonya, and that was all clear and +simple just because it had all been thought out and he knew all +there was in Sonya, but it was impossible to picture a future with +Princess Mary, because he did not understand her but simply loved her. + +Reveries about Sonya had had something merry and playful in them, +but to dream of Princess Mary was always difficult and a little +frightening. + +"How she prayed!" he thought. "It was plain that her whole soul +was in her prayer. Yes, that was the prayer that moves mountains, +and I am sure her prayer will be answered. Why don't I pray for what I +want?" he suddenly thought. "What do I want? To be free, released from +Sonya... She was right," he thought, remembering what the governor's +wife had said: "Nothing but misfortune can come of marrying Sonya. +Muddles, grief for Mamma... business difficulties... muddles, terrible +muddles! Besides, I don't love her- not as I should. O, God! release +me from this dreadful, inextricable position!" he suddenly began to +pray. "Yes, prayer can move mountains, but one must have faith and not +pray as Natasha and I used to as children, that the snow might turn +into sugar- and then run out into the yard to see whether it had +done so. No, but I am not praying for trifles now," he thought as he +put his pipe down in a corner, and folding his hands placed himself +before the icon. Softened by memories of Princess Mary he began to +pray as he had not done for a long time. Tears were in his eyes and in +his throat when the door opened and Lavrushka came in with some +papers. + +"Blockhead! Why do you come in without being called?" cried +Nicholas, quickly changing his attitude. + +"From the governor," said Lavrushka in a sleepy voice. "A courier +has arrived and there's a letter for you." + +"Well, all right, thanks. You can go!" + +Nicholas took the two letters, one of which was from his mother +and the other from Sonya. He recognized them by the handwriting and +opened Sonya's first. He had read only a few lines when he turned pale +and his eyes opened wide with fear and joy. + +"No, it's not possible!" he cried aloud. + +Unable to sit still he paced up and down the room holding the letter +and reading it. He glanced through it, then read it again, and then +again, and standing still in the middle of the room he raised his +shoulders, stretching out his hands, with his mouth wide open and +his eyes fixed. What he had just been praying for with confidence that +God would hear him had come to pass; but Nicholas was as much +astonished as if it were something extraordinary and unexpected, and +as if the very fact that it had happened so quickly proved that it had +not come from God to whom he had prayed, but by some ordinary +coincidence. + +This unexpected and, as it seemed to Nicholas, quite voluntary +letter from Sonya freed him from the knot that fettered him and from +which there had seemed no escape. She wrote that the last +unfortunate events- the loss of almost the whole of the Rostovs' +Moscow property- and the countess' repeatedly expressed wish that +Nicholas should marry Princess Bolkonskaya, together with his +silence and coldness of late, had all combined to make her decide to +release him from his promise and set him completely free. + +It would be too painful to me to think that I might be a cause of +sorrow or discord in the family that has been so good to me (she +wrote), and my love has no aim but the happiness of those I love; +so, Nicholas, I beg you to consider yourself free, and to be assured +that, in spite of everything, no one can love you more than does + +Your Sonya + +Both letters were written from Troitsa. The other, from the +countess, described their last days in Moscow, their departure, the +fire, and the destruction of all their property. In this letter the +countess also mentioned that Prince Andrew was among the wounded +traveling with them; his state was very critical, but the doctor +said there was now more hope. Sonya and Natasha were nursing him. + +Next day Nicholas took his mother's letter and went to see +Princess Mary. Neither he nor she said a word about what "Natasha +nursing him" might mean, but thanks to this letter Nicholas suddenly +became almost as intimate with the princess as if they were relations. + +The following day he saw Princess Mary off on her journey to +Yaroslavl, and a few days later left to rejoin his regiment. + +CHAPTER VIII + +Sonya's letter written from Troitsa, which had come as an answer +to Nicholas' prayer, was prompted by this: the thought of getting +Nicholas married to an heiress occupied the old countess' mind more +and more. She knew that Sonya was the chief obstacle to this +happening, and Sonya's life in the countess' house had grown harder +and harder, especially after they had received a letter from +Nicholas telling of his meeting with Princess Mary in Bogucharovo. The +countess let no occasion slip of making humiliating or cruel allusions +to Sonya. + +But a few days before they left Moscow, moved and excited by all +that was going on, she called Sonya to her and, instead of reproaching +and making demands on her, tearfully implored her to sacrifice herself +and repay all that the family had done for her by breaking off her +engagement with Nicholas. + +"I shall not be at peace till you promise me this." + +Sonya burst into hysterical tears and replied through her sobs +that she would do anything and was prepared for anything, but gave +no actual promise and could not bring herself to decide to do what was +demanded of her. She must sacrifice herself for the family that had +reared and brought her up. To sacrifice herself for others was Sonya's +habit. Her position in the house was such that only by sacrifice could +she show her worth, and she was accustomed to this and loved doing it. +But in all her former acts of self-sacrifice she had been happily +conscious that they raised her in her own esteem and in that of +others, and so made her more worthy of Nicholas whom she loved more +than anything in the world. But now they wanted her to sacrifice the +very thing that constituted the whole reward for her self-sacrifice +and the whole meaning of her life. And for the first time she felt +bitterness against those who had been her benefactors only to +torture her the more painfully; she felt jealous of Natasha who had +never experienced anything of this sort, had never needed to sacrifice +herself, but made others sacrifice themselves for her and yet was +beloved by everybody. And for the first time Sonya felt that out of +her pure, quiet love for Nicholas a passionate feeling was beginning +to grow up which was stronger than principle, virtue, or religion. +Under the influence of this feeling Sonya, whose life of dependence +had taught her involuntarily to be secretive, having answered the +countess in vague general terms, avoided talking with her and resolved +to wait till she should see Nicholas, not in order to set him free but +on the contrary at that meeting to bind him to her forever. + +The bustle and terror of the Rostovs' last days in Moscow stifled +the gloomy thoughts that oppressed Sonya. She was glad to find +escape from them in practical activity. But when she heard of Prince +Andrew's presence in their house, despite her sincere pity for him and +for Natasha, she was seized by a joyful and superstitious feeling that +God did not intend her to be separated from Nicholas. She knew that +Natasha loved no one but Prince Andrew and had never ceased to love +him. She knew that being thrown together again under such terrible +circumstances they would again fall in love with one another, and that +Nicholas would then not be able to marry Princess Mary as they would +be within the prohibited degrees of affinity. Despite all the terror +of what had happened during those last days and during the first +days of their journey, this feeling that Providence was intervening in +her personal affairs cheered Sonya. + +At the Troitsa monastery the Rostovs first broke their journey for a +whole day. + +Three large rooms were assigned to them in the monastery hostelry, +one of which was occupied by Prince Andrew. The wounded man was much +better that day and Natasha was sitting with him. In the next room sat +the count and countess respectfully conversing with the prior, who was +calling on them as old acquaintances and benefactors of the monastery. +Sonya was there too, tormented by curiosity as to what Prince Andrew +and Natasha were talking about. She heard the sound of their voices +through the door. That door opened and Natasha came out, looking +excited. Not noticing the monk, who had risen to greet her and was +drawing back the wide sleeve on his right arm, she went up to Sonya +and took her hand. + +"Natasha, what are you about? Come here!" said the countess. + +Natasha went up to the monk for his blessing, and advised her to +pray for aid to God and His saint. + +As soon as the prior withdrew, Natasha took her friend by the hand +and went with her into the unoccupied room. + +"Sonya, will he live?" she asked. "Sonya, how happy I am, and how +unhappy!... Sonya, dovey, everything is as it used to be. If only he +lives! He cannot... because... because... of" and Natasha burst into +tears. + +"Yes! I knew it! Thank God!" murmured Sonya. "He will live." + +Sonya was not less agitated than her friend by the latter's fear and +grief and by her own personal feelings which she shared with no one. +Sobbing, she kissed and comforted Natasha. "If only he lives!" she +thought. Having wept, talked, and wiped away their tears, the two +friends went together to Prince Andrew's door. Natasha opened it +cautiously and glanced into the room, Sonya standing beside her at the +half-open door. + +Prince Andrew was lying raised high on three pillows. His pale +face was calm, his eyes closed, and they could see his regular +breathing. + +"O, Natasha!" Sonya suddenly almost screamed, catching her +companion's arm and stepping back from the door. + +"What? What is it?" asked Natasha. + +"It's that, that..." said Sonya, with a white face and trembling +lips. + +Natasha softly closed the door and went with Sonya to the window, +not yet understanding what the latter was telling her. + +"You remember," said Sonya with a solemn and frightened +expression. "You remember when I looked in the mirror for you... at +Otradnoe at Christmas? Do you remember what I saw?" + +"Yes, yes!" cried Natasha opening her eyes wide, and vaguely +recalling that Sonya had told her something about Prince Andrew whom +she had seen lying down. + +"You remember?" Sonya went on. "I saw it then and told everybody, +you and Dunyasha. I saw him lying on a bed," said she, making a +gesture with her hand and a lifted finger at each detail, "and that he +had his eyes closed and was covered just with a pink quilt, and that +his hands were folded," she concluded, convincing herself that the +details she had just seen were exactly what she had seen in the +mirror. + +She had in fact seen nothing then but had mentioned the first +thing that came into her head, but what she had invented then seemed +to her now as real as any other recollection. She not only +remembered what she had then said- that he turned to look at her and +smiled and was covered with something red- but was firmly convinced +that she had then seen and said that he was covered with a pink +quilt and that his eyes were closed. + +"Yes, yes, it really was pink!" cried Natasha, who now thought she +too remembered the word pink being used, and saw in this the most +extraordinary and mysterious part of the prediction. + +"But what does it mean?" she added meditatively. + +"Oh, I don't know, it is all so strange," replied Sonya, clutching +at her head. + +A few minutes later Prince Andrew rang and Natasha went to him, +but Sonya, feeling unusually excited and touched, remained at the +window thinking about the strangeness of what had occurred. + +They had an opportunity that day to send letters to the army, and +the countess was writing to her son. + +"Sonya!" said the countess, raising her eyes from her letter as +her niece passed, "Sonya, won't you write to Nicholas?" She spoke in a +soft, tremulous voice, and in the weary eyes that looked over her +spectacles Sonya read all that the countess meant to convey with these +words. Those eyes expressed entreaty, shame at having to ask, fear +of a refusal, and readiness for relentless hatred in case of such +refusal. + +Sonya went up to the countess and, kneeling down, kissed her hand. + +"Yes, Mamma, I will write," said she. + +Sonya was softened, excited, and touched by all that had occurred +that day, especially by the mysterious fulfillment she had just seen +of her vision. Now that she knew that the renewal of Natasha's +relations with Prince Andrew would prevent Nicholas from marrying +Princess Mary, she was joyfully conscious of a return of that +self-sacrificing spirit in which she was accustomed to live and +loved to live. So with a joyful consciousness of performing a +magnanimous deed- interrupted several times by the tears that dimmed +her velvety black eyes- she wrote that touching letter the arrival +of which had so amazed Nicholas. + +CHAPTER IX + +The officer and soldiers who had arrested Pierre treated him with +hostility but yet with respect, in the guardhouse to which he was +taken. In their attitude toward him could still be felt both +uncertainty as to who he might be- perhaps a very important person- +and hostility as a result of their recent personal conflict with him. + +But when the guard was relieved next morning, Pierre felt that for +the new guard- both officers and men- he was not as interesting as +he had been to his captors; and in fact the guard of the second day +did not recognize in this big, stout man in a peasant coat the +vigorous person who had fought so desperately with the marauder and +the convoy and had uttered those solemn words about saving a child; +they saw in him only No. 17 of the captured Russians, arrested and +detained for some reason by order of the Higher Command. If they +noticed anything remarkable about Pierre, it was only his unabashed, +meditative concentration and thoughtfulness, and the way he spoke +French, which struck them as surprisingly good. In spite of this he +was placed that day with the other arrested suspects, as the +separate room he had occupied was required by an officer. + +All the Russians confined with Pierre were men of the lowest class +and, recognizing him as a gentleman, they all avoided him, more +especially as he spoke French. Pierre felt sad at hearing them +making fun of him. + +That evening he learned that all these prisoners (he, probably, +among them) were to be tried for incendiarism. On the third day he was +taken with the others to a house where a French general with a white +mustache sat with two colonels and other Frenchmen with scarves on +their arms. With the precision and definiteness customary in +addressing prisoners, and which is supposed to preclude human frailty, +Pierre like the others was questioned as to who he was, where he had +been, with what object, and so on. + +These questions, like questions put at trials generally, left the +essence of the matter aside, shut out the possibility of that +essence's being revealed, and were designed only to form a channel +through which the judges wished the answers of the accused to flow +so as to lead to the desired result, namely a conviction. As soon as +Pierre began to say anything that did not fit in with that aim, the +channel was removed and the water could flow to waste. Pierre felt, +moreover, what the accused always feel at their trial, perplexity as +to why these questions were put to him. He had a feeling that it was +only out of condescension or a kind of civility that this device of +placing a channel was employed. He knew he was in these men's power, +that only by force had they brought him there, that force alone gave +them the right to demand answers to their questions, and that the sole +object of that assembly was to inculpate him. And so, as they had +the power and wish to inculpate him, this expedient of an inquiry +and trial seemed unnecessary. It was evident that any answer would +lead to conviction. When asked what he was doing when he was arrested, +Pierre replied in a rather tragic manner that he was restoring to +its parents a child he had saved from the flames. Why had he fought +the marauder? Pierre answered that he "was protecting a woman," and +that "to protect a woman who was being insulted was the duty of +every man; that..." They interrupted him, for this was not to the +point. Why was he in the yard of a burning house where witnesses had +seen him? He replied that he had gone out to see what was happening in +Moscow. Again they interrupted him: they had not asked where he was +going, but why he was found near the fire? Who was he? they asked, +repeating their first question, which he had declined to answer. Again +he replied that he could not answer it. + +"Put that down, that's bad... very bad," sternly remarked the +general with the white mustache and red flushed face. + +On the fourth day fires broke out on the Zubovski rampart. + +Pierre and thirteen others were moved to the coach house of a +merchant's house near the Crimean bridge. On his way through the +streets Pierre felt stifled by the smoke which seemed to hang over the +whole city. Fires were visible on all sides. He did not then realize +the significance of the burning of Moscow, and looked at the fires +with horror. + +He passed four days in the coach house near the Crimean bridge and +during that time learned, from the talk of the French soldiers, that +all those confined there were awaiting a decision which might come any +day from the marshal. What marshal this was, Pierre could not learn +from the soldiers. Evidently for them "the marshal" represented a very +high and rather mysterious power. + +These first days, before the eighth of September when the +prisoners were had up for a second examination, were the hardest of +all for Pierre. + +CHAPTER X + +On the eighth of September an officer- a very important one +judging by the respect the guards showed him- entered the coach +house where the prisoners were. This officer, probably someone on +the staff, was holding a paper in his hand, and called over all the +Russians there, naming Pierre as "the man who does not give his name." +Glancing indolently and indifferently at all the prisoners, he ordered +the officer in charge to have them decently dressed and tidied up +before taking them to the marshal. An hour later a squad of soldiers +arrived and Pierre with thirteen others was led to the Virgin's Field. +It was a fine day, sunny after rain, and the air was unusually pure. +The smoke did not hang low as on the day when Pierre had been taken +from the guardhouse on the Zubovski rampart, but rose through the pure +air in columns. No flames were seen, but columns of smoke rose on +all sides, and all Moscow as far as Pierre could see was one vast +charred ruin. On all sides there were waste spaces with only stoves +and chimney stacks still standing, and here and there the blackened +walls of some brick houses. Pierre gazed at the ruins and did not +recognize districts he had known well. Here and there he could see +churches that had not been burned. The Kremlin, which was not +destroyed, gleamed white in the distance with its towers and the +belfry of Ivan the Great. The domes of the New Convent of the Virgin +glittered brightly and its bells were ringing particularly clearly. +These bells reminded Pierre that it was Sunday and the feast of the +Nativity of the Virgin. But there seemed to be no one to celebrate +this holiday: everywhere were blackened ruins, and the few Russians to +be seen were tattered and frightened people who tried to hide when +they saw the French. + +It was plain that the Russian nest was ruined and destroyed, but +in place of the Russian order of life that had been destroyed, +Pierre unconsciously felt that a quite different, firm, French order +had been established over this ruined nest. He felt this in the +looks of the soldiers who, marching in regular ranks briskly and +gaily, were escorting him and the other criminals; he felt it in the +looks of an important French official in a carriage and pair driven by +a soldier, whom they met on the way. He felt it in the merry sounds of +regimental music he heard from the left side of the field, and felt +and realized it especially from the list of prisoners the French +officer had read out when he came that morning. Pierre had been +taken by one set of soldiers and led first to one and then to +another place with dozens of other men, and it seemed that they +might have forgotten him, or confused him with the others. But no: the +answers he had given when questioned had come back to him in his +designation as "the man who does not give his name," and under that +appellation, which to Pierre seemed terrible, they were now leading +him somewhere with unhesitating assurance on their faces that he and +all the other prisoners were exactly the ones they wanted and that +they were being taken to the proper place. Pierre felt himself to be +an insignificant chip fallen among the wheels of a machine whose +action he did not understand but which was working well. + +He and the other prisoners were taken to the right side of the +Virgin's Field, to a large white house with an immense garden not +far from the convent. This was Prince Shcherbitov's house, where +Pierre had often been in other days, and which, as he learned from the +talk of the soldiers, was now occupied by the marshal, the Duke of +Eckmuhl (Davout). + +They were taken to the entrance and led into the house one by one. +Pierre was the sixth to enter. He was conducted through a glass +gallery, an anteroom, and a hall, which were familiar to him, into a +long low study at the door of which stood an adjutant. + +Davout, spectacles on nose, sat bent over a table at the further end +of the room. Pierre went close up to him, but Davout, evidently +consulting a paper that lay before him, did not look up. Without +raising his eyes, he said in a low voice: + +"Who are you?" + +Pierre was silent because he was incapable of uttering a word. To +him Davout was not merely a French general, but a man notorious for +his cruelty. Looking at his cold face, as he sat like a stern +schoolmaster who was prepared to wait awhile for an answer, Pierre +felt that every instant of delay might cost him his life; but he did +not know what to say. He did not venture to repeat what he had said at +his first examination, yet to disclose his rank and position was +dangerous and embarrassing. So he was silent. But before he had +decided what to do, Davout raised his head, pushed his spectacles back +on his forehead, screwed up his eyes, and looked intently at him. + +"I know that man," he said in a cold, measured tone, evidently +calculated to frighten Pierre. + +The chill that had been running down Pierre's back now seized his +head as in a vise. + +"You cannot know me, General, I have never seen you..." + +"He is a Russian spy," Davout interrupted, addressing another +general who was present, but whom Pierre had not noticed. + +Davout turned away. With an unexpected reverberation in his voice +Pierre rapidly began: + +"No, monseigneur," he said, suddenly remembering that Davout was a +duke. "No, monseigneur, you cannot have known me. I am a militia +officer and have not quitted Moscow." + +"Your name?" asked Davout. + +"Bezukhov." + +"What proof have I that you are not lying?" + +"Monseigneur!" exclaimed Pierre, not in an offended but in a +pleading voice. + +Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they +looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from +conditions of war and law, that look established human relations +between the two men. At that moment an immense number of things passed +dimly through both their minds, and they realized that they were +both children of humanity and were brothers. + +At the first glance, when Davout had only raised his head from the +papers where human affairs and lives were indicated by numbers, Pierre +was merely a circumstance, and Davout could have shot him without +burdening his conscience with an evil deed, but now he saw in him a +human being. He reflected for a moment. + +"How can you show me that you are telling the truth?" said Davout +coldly. + +Pierre remembered Ramballe, and named him and his regiment and the +street where the house was. + +"You are not what you say," returned Davout. + +In a trembling, faltering voice Pierre began adducing proofs of +the truth of his statements. + +But at that moment an adjutant entered and reported something to +Davout. + +Davout brightened up at the news the adjutant brought, and began +buttoning up his uniform. It seemed that he had quite forgotten +Pierre. + +When the adjutant reminded him of the prisoner, he jerked his head +in Pierre's direction with a frown and ordered him to be led away. But +where they were to take him Pierre did not know: back to the coach +house or to the place of execution his companions had pointed out to +him as they crossed the Virgin's Field. + +He turned his head and saw that the adjutant was putting another +question to Davout. + +"Yes, of course!" replied Davout, but what this "yes" meant, +Pierre did not know. + +Pierre could not afterwards remember how he went, whether it was +far, or in which direction. His faculties were quite numbed, he was +stupefied, and noticing nothing around him went on moving his legs +as the others did till they all stopped and he stopped too. The only +thought in his mind at that time was: who was it that had really +sentenced him to death? Not the men on the commission that had first +examined him- not one of them wished to or, evidently, could have done +it. It was not Davout, who had looked at him in so human a way. In +another moment Davout would have realized that he was doing wrong, but +just then the adjutant had come in and interrupted him. The +adjutant, also, had evidently had no evil intent though he might +have refrained from coming in. Then who was executing him, killing +him, depriving him of life- him, Pierre, with all his memories, +aspirations, hopes, and thoughts? Who was doing this? And Pierre +felt that it was no one. + +It was a system- a concurrence of circumstances. + +A system of some sort was killing him- Pierre- depriving him of +life, of everything, annihilating him. + +CHAPTER XI + +From Prince Shcherbatov's house the prisoners were led straight down +the Virgin's Field, to the left of the nunnery, as far as a kitchen +garden in which a post had been set up. Beyond that post a fresh pit +had been dug in the ground, and near the post and the pit a large +crowd stood in a semicircle. The crowd consisted of a few Russians and +many of Napoleon's soldiers who were not on duty- Germans, Italians, +and Frenchmen, in a variety of uniforms. To the right and left of +the post stood rows of French troops in blue uniforms with red +epaulets and high boots and shakos. + +The prisoners were placed in a certain order, according to the +list (Pierre was sixth), and were led to the post. Several drums +suddenly began to beat on both sides of them, and at that sound Pierre +felt as if part of his soul had been torn away. He lost the power of +thinking or understanding. He could only hear and see. And he had only +one wish- that the frightful thing that had to happen should happen +quickly. Pierre looked round at his fellow prisoners and scrutinized +them. + +The two first were convicts with shaven heads. One was tall and +thin, the other dark, shaggy, and sinewy, with a flat nose. The +third was a domestic serf, about forty-five years old, with grizzled +hair and a plump, well-nourished body. The fourth was a peasant, a +very handsome man with a broad, light-brown beard and black eyes. +The fifth was a factory hand, a thin, sallow-faced lad of eighteen +in a loose coat. + +Pierre heard the French consulting whether to shoot them +separately or two at a time. "In couples," replied the officer in +command in a calm voice. There was a stir in the ranks of the soldiers +and it was evident that they were all hurrying- not as men hurry to do +something they understand, but as people hurry to finish a necessary +but unpleasant and incomprehensible task. + +A French official wearing a scarf came up to the right of the row of +prisoners and read out the sentence in Russian and in French. + +Then two pairs of Frenchmen approached the criminals and at the +officer's command took the two convicts who stood first in the row. +The convicts stopped when they reached the post and, while sacks +were being brought, looked dumbly around as a wounded beast looks at +an approaching huntsman. One crossed himself continually, the other +scratched his back and made a movement of the lips resembling a smile. +With hurried hands the soldiers blindfolded them, drawing the sacks +over their heads, and bound them to the post. + +Twelve sharpshooters with muskets stepped out of the ranks with a +firm regular tread and halted eight paces from the post. Pierre turned +away to avoid seeing what was going to happen. Suddenly a crackling, +rolling noise was heard which seemed to him louder than the most +terrific thunder, and he looked round. There was some smoke, and the +Frenchmen were doing something near the pit, with pale faces and +trembling hands. Two more prisoners were led up. In the same way and +with similar looks, these two glanced vainly at the onlookers with +only a silent appeal for protection in their eyes, evidently unable to +understand or believe what was going to happen to them. They could not +believe it because they alone knew what their life meant to them, +and so they neither understood nor believed that it could be taken +from them. + +Again Pierre did not wish to look and again turned away; but again +the sound as of a frightful explosion struck his ear, and at the +same moment he saw smoke, blood, and the pale, scared faces of the +Frenchmen who were again doing something by the post, their +trembling hands impeding one another. Pierre, breathing heavily, +looked around as if asking what it meant. The same question was +expressed in all the looks that met his. + +On the faces of all the Russians and of the French soldiers and +officers without exception, he read the same dismay, horror, and +conflict that were in his own heart. "But who, after all, is doing +this? They are all suffering as I am. Who then is it? Who?" flashed +for an instant through his mind. + +"Sharpshooters of the 86th, forward!" shouted someone. The fifth +prisoner, the one next to Pierre, was led away- alone. Pierre did +not understand that he was saved, that he and the rest had been +brought there only to witness the execution. With ever-growing horror, +and no sense of joy or relief, he gazed at what was taking place. +The fifth man was the factory lad in the loose cloak. The moment +they laid hands on him he sprang aside in terror and clutched at +Pierre. (Pierre shuddered and shook himself free.) The lad was +unable to walk. They dragged him along, holding him up under the arms, +and he screamed. When they got him to the post he grew quiet, as if he +suddenly understood something. Whether he understood that screaming +was useless or whether he thought it incredible that men should kill +him, at any rate he took his stand at the post, waiting to be +blindfolded like the others, and like a wounded animal looked around +him with glittering eyes. + +Pierre was no longer able to turn away and close his eyes. His +curiosity and agitation, like that of the whole crowd, reached the +highest pitch at this fifth murder. Like the others this fifth man +seemed calm; he wrapped his loose cloak closer and rubbed one bare +foot with the other. + +When they began to blindfold him he himself adjusted the knot +which hurt the back of his head; then when they propped him against +the bloodstained post, he leaned back and, not being comfortable in +that position, straightened himself, adjusted his feet, and leaned +back again more comfortably. Pierre did not take his eyes from him and +did not miss his slightest movement. + +Probably a word of command was given and was followed by the reports +of eight muskets; but try as he would Pierre could not afterwards +remember having heard the slightest sound of the shots. He only saw +how the workman suddenly sank down on the cords that held him, how +blood showed itself in two places, how the ropes slackened under the +weight of the hanging body, and how the workman sat down, his head +hanging unnaturally and one leg bent under him. Pierre ran up to the +post. No one hindered him. Pale, frightened people were doing +something around the workman. The lower jaw of an old Frenchman with a +thick mustache trembled as he untied the ropes. The body collapsed. +The soldiers dragged it awkwardly from the post and began pushing it +into the pit. + +They all plainly and certainly knew that they were criminals who +must hide the traces of their guilt as quickly as possible. + +Pierre glanced into the pit and saw that the factory lad was lying +with his knees close up to his head and one shoulder higher than the +other. That shoulder rose and fell rhythmically and convulsively, +but spadefuls of earth were already being thrown over the whole +body. One of the soldiers, evidently suffering, shouted gruffly and +angrily at Pierre to go back. But Pierre did not understand him and +remained near the post, and no one drove him away. + +When the pit had been filled up a command was given. Pierre was +taken back to his place, and the rows of troops on both sides of the +post made a half turn and went past it at a measured pace. The +twenty-four sharpshooters with discharged muskets, standing in the +center of the circle, ran back to their places as the companies passed +by. + +Pierre gazed now with dazed eyes at these sharpshooters who ran in +couples out of the circle. All but one rejoined their companies. +This one, a young soldier, his face deadly pale, his shako pushed +back, and his musket resting on the ground, still stood near the pit +at the spot from which he had fired. He swayed like a drunken man, +taking some steps forward and back to save himself from falling. An +old, noncommissioned officer ran out of the ranks and taking him by +the elbow dragged him to his company. The crowd of Russians and +Frenchmen began to disperse. They all went away silently and with +drooping heads. + +"That will teach them to start fires," said one of the Frenchmen. + +Pierre glanced round at the speaker and saw that it was a soldier +who was trying to find some relief after what had been done, but was +not able to do so. Without finishing what he had begun to say he +made a hopeless movement with his arm and went away. + +CHAPTER XII + +After the execution Pierre was separated from the rest of the +prisoners and placed alone in a small, ruined, and befouled church. + +Toward evening a noncommissioned officer entered with two soldiers +and told him that he had been pardoned and would now go to the +barracks for the prisoners of war. Without understanding what was said +to him, Pierre got up and went with the soldiers. They took him to the +upper end of the field, where there were some sheds built of charred +planks, beams, and battens, and led him into one of them. In the +darkness some twenty different men surrounded Pierre. He looked at +them without understanding who they were, why they were there, or what +they wanted of him. He heard what they said, but did not understand +the meaning of the words and made no kind of deduction from or +application of them. He replied to questions they put to him, but +did not consider who was listening to his replies, nor how they +would understand them. He looked at their faces and figures, but +they all seemed to him equally meaningless. + +From the moment Pierre had witnessed those terrible murders +committed by men who did not wish to commit them, it was as if the +mainspring of his life, on which everything depended and which made +everything appear alive, had suddenly been wrenched out and everything +had collapsed into a heap of meaningless rubbish. Though he did not +acknowledge it to himself, his faith in the right ordering of the +universe, in humanity, in his own soul, and in God, had been +destroyed. He had experienced this before, but never so strongly as +now. When similar doubts had assailed him before, they had been the +result of his own wrongdoing, and at the bottom of his heart he had +felt that relief from his despair and from those doubts was to be +found within himself. But now he felt that the universe had crumbled +before his eyes and only meaningless ruins remained, and this not by +any fault of his own. He felt that it was not in his power to regain +faith in the meaning of life. + +Around him in the darkness men were standing and evidently something +about him interested them greatly. They were telling him something and +asking him something. Then they led him away somewhere, and at last he +found himself in a corner of the shed among men who were laughing +and talking on all sides. + +"Well, then, mates... that very prince who..." some voice at the +other end of the shed was saying, with a strong emphasis on the word +who. + +Sitting silent and motionless on a heap of straw against the wall, +Pierre sometimes opened and sometimes closed his eyes. But as soon +as he closed them he saw before him the dreadful face of the factory +lad- especially dreadful because of its simplicity- and the faces of +the murderers, even more dreadful because of their disquiet. And he +opened his eyes again and stared vacantly into the darkness around +him. + +Beside him in a stooping position sat a small man of whose +presence he was first made aware by a strong smell of perspiration +which came from him every time he moved. This man was doing +something to his legs in the darkness, and though Pierre could not see +his face he felt that the man continually glanced at him. On growing +used to the darkness Pierre saw that the man was taking off his leg +bands, and the way he did it aroused Pierre's interest. + +Having unwound the string that tied the band on one leg, he +carefully coiled it up and immediately set to work on the other leg, +glancing up at Pierre. While one hand hung up the first string the +other was already unwinding the band on the second leg. In this way, +having carefully removed the leg bands by deft circular motions of his +arm following one another uninterruptedly, the man hung the leg +bands up on some pegs fixed above his head. Then he took out a +knife, cut something, closed the knife, placed it under the head of +his bed, and, seating himself comfortably, clasped his arms round +his lifted knees and fixed his eyes on Pierre. The latter was +conscious of something pleasant, comforting, and well rounded in these +deft movements, in the man's well-ordered arrangements in his +corner, and even in his very smell, and he looked at the man without +taking his eyes from him. + +"You've seen a lot of trouble, sir, eh?" the little man suddenly +said. + +And there was so much kindliness and simplicity in his singsong +voice that Pierre tried to reply, but his jaw trembled and he felt +tears rising to his eyes. The little fellow, giving Pierre no time +to betray his confusion, instantly continued in the same pleasant +tones: + +"Eh, lad, don't fret!" said he, in the tender singsong caressing +voice old Russian peasant women employ. "Don't fret, friend- 'suffer +an hour, live for an age!' that's how it is, my dear fellow. And +here we live, thank heaven, without offense. Among these folk, too, +there are good men as well as bad," said he, and still speaking, he +turned on his knees with a supple movement, got up, coughed, and +went off to another part of the shed. + +"Eh, you rascal!" Pierre heard the same kind voice saying at the +other end of the shed. "So you've come, you rascal? She remembers... +Now, now, that'll do!" + +And the soldier, pushing away a little dog that was jumping up at +him, returned to his place and sat down. In his hands he had something +wrapped in a rag. + +"Here, eat a bit, sir," said he, resuming his former respectful tone +as he unwrapped and offered Pierre some baked potatoes. "We had soup +for dinner and the potatoes are grand!" + +Pierre had not eaten all day and the smell of the potatoes seemed +extremely pleasant to him. He thanked the soldier and began to eat. + +"Well, are they all right?" said the soldier with a smile. "You +should do like this." + +He took a potato, drew out his clasp knife, cut the potato into +two equal halves on the palm of his hand, sprinkled some salt on it +from the rag, and handed it to Pierre. + +"The potatoes are grand!" he said once more. "Eat some like that!" + +Pierre thought he had never eaten anything that tasted better. + +"Oh, I'm all right," said he, "but why did they shoot those poor +fellows? The last one was hardly twenty." + +"Tss, tt...!" said the little man. "Ah, what a sin... what a sin!" +he added quickly, and as if his words were always waiting ready in his +mouth and flew out involuntarily he went on: "How was it, sir, that +you stayed in Moscow?" + +"I didn't think they would come so soon. I stayed accidentally," +replied Pierre. + +"And how did they arrest you, dear lad? At your house?" + +"No, I went to look at the fire, and they arrested me there, and +tried me as an incendiary." + +"Where there's law there's injustice," put in the little man. + +"And have you been here long?" Pierre asked as he munched the last +of the potato. + +"I? It was last Sunday they took me, out of a hospital in Moscow." + +"Why, are you a soldier then?" + +"Yes, we are soldiers of the Apsheron regiment. I was dying of +fever. We weren't told anything. There were some twenty of us lying +there. We had no idea, never guessed at all." + +"And do you feel sad here?" Pierre inquired. + +"How can one help it, lad? My name is Platon, and the surname is +Karataev," he added, evidently wishing to make it easier for Pierre to +address him. "They call me 'little falcon' in the regiment. How is one +to help feeling sad? Moscow- she's the mother of cities. How can one +see all this and not feel sad? But 'the maggot gnaws the cabbage, +yet dies first'; that's what the old folks used to tell us," he +added rapidly. + +"What? What did you say?" asked Pierre. + +"Who? I?" said Karataev. "I say things happen not as we plan but +as God judges," he replied, thinking that he was repeating what he had +said before, and immediately continued: + +"Well, and you, have you a family estate, sir? And a house? So you +have abundance, then? And a housewife? And your old parents, are +they still living?" he asked. + +And though it was too dark for Pierre to see, he felt that a +suppressed smile of kindliness puckered the soldier's lips as he put +these questions. He seemed grieved that Pierre had no parents, +especially that he had no mother. + +"A wife for counsel, a mother-in-law for welcome, but there's none +as dear as one's own mother!" said he. "Well, and have you little +ones?" he went on asking. + +Again Pierre's negative answer seemed to distress him, and he +hastened to add: + +"Never mind! You're young folks yet, and please God may still have +some. The great thing is to live in harmony...." + +"But it's all the same now," Pierre could not help saying. + +"Ah, my dear fellow!" rejoined Karataev, "never decline a prison +or a beggar's sack!" + +He seated himself more comfortably and coughed, evidently +preparing to tell a long story. + +"Well, my dear fellow, I was still living at home," he began. "We +had a well-to-do homestead, plenty of land, we peasants lived well and +our house was one to thank God for. When Father and we went out mowing +there were seven of us. We lived well. We were real peasants. It so +happened..." + +And Platon Karataev told a long story of how he had gone into +someone's copse to take wood, how he had been caught by the keeper, +had been tried, flogged, and sent to serve as a soldier. + +"Well, lad," and a smile changed the tone of his voice "we thought +it was a misfortune but it turned out a blessing! If it had not been +for my sin, my brother would have had to go as a soldier. But he, my +younger brother, had five little ones, while I, you see, only left a +wife behind. We had a little girl, but God took her before I went as a +soldier. I come home on leave and I'll tell you how it was, I look and +see that they are living better than before. The yard full of +cattle, the women at home, two brothers away earning wages, and only +Michael the youngest, at home. Father, he says, 'All my children are +the same to me: it hurts the same whichever finger gets bitten. But if +Platon hadn't been shaved for a soldier, Michael would have had to +go.' called us all to him and, will you believe it, placed us in front +of the icons. 'Michael,' he says, 'come here and bow down to his feet; +and you, young woman, you bow down too; and you, grandchildren, also +bow down before him! Do you understand?' he says. That's how it is, +dear fellow. Fate looks for a head. But we are always judging, 'that's +not well- that's not right!' Our luck is like water in a dragnet: +you pull at it and it bulges, but when you've drawn it out it's empty! +That's how it is." + +And Platon shifted his seat on the straw. + +After a short silence he rose. + +"Well, I think you must be sleepy," said he, and began rapidly +crossing himself and repeating: + +"Lord Jesus Christ, holy Saint Nicholas, Frola and Lavra! Lord Jesus +Christ, holy Saint Nicholas, Frola and Lavra! Lord Jesus Christ, +have mercy on us and save us!" he concluded, then bowed to the ground, +got up, sighed, and sat down again on his heap of straw. "That's the +way. Lay me down like a stone, O God, and raise me up like a loaf," he +muttered as he lay down, pulling his coat over him. + +"What prayer was that you were saying?" asked Pierre. + +"Eh?" murmured Platon, who had almost fallen asleep. "What was I +saying? I was praying. Don't you pray?" + +"Yes, I do," said Pierre. "But what was that you said: Frola and +Lavra?" + +"Well, of course," replied Platon quickly, "the horses' saints. +One must pity the animals too. Eh, the rascal! Now you've curled up +and got warm, you daughter of a bitch!" said Karataev, touching the +dog that lay at his feet, and again turning over he fell asleep +immediately. + +Sounds of crying and screaming came from somewhere in the distance +outside, and flames were visible through the cracks of the shed, but +inside it was quiet and dark. For a long time Pierre did not sleep, +but lay with eyes open in the darkness, listening to the regular +snoring of Platon who lay beside him, and he felt that the world +that had been shattered was once more stirring in his soul with a +new beauty and on new and unshakable foundations. + +CHAPTER XIII + +Twenty-three soldiers, three officers, and two officials were +confined in the shed in which Pierre had been placed and where he +remained for four weeks. + +When Pierre remembered them afterwards they all seemed misty figures +to him except Platon Karataev, who always remained in his mind a +most vivid and precious memory and the personification of everything +Russian, kindly, and round. When Pierre saw his neighbor next +morning at dawn the first impression of him, as of something round, +was fully confirmed: Platon's whole figure- in a French overcoat +girdled with a cord, a soldier's cap, and bast shoes- was round. His +head was quite round, his back, chest, shoulders, and even his arms, +which he held as if ever ready to embrace something, were rounded, his +pleasant smile and his large, gentle brown eyes were also round. + +Platon Karataev must have been fifty, judging by his stories of +campaigns he had been in, told as by an old soldier. He did not +himself know his age and was quite unable to determine it. But his +brilliantly white, strong teeth which showed in two unbroken +semicircles when he laughed- as he often did- were all sound and good, +there was not a gray hair in his beard or on his head, and his whole +body gave an impression of suppleness and especially of firmness and +endurance. + +His face, despite its fine, rounded wrinkles, had an expression of +innocence and youth, his voice was pleasant and musical. But the chief +peculiarity of his speech was its directness and appositeness. It +was evident that he never considered what he had said or was going +to say, and consequently the rapidity and justice of his intonation +had an irresistible persuasiveness. + +His physical strength and agility during the first days of his +imprisonment were such that he seemed not to know what fatigue and +sickness meant. Every night before lying down, he said: "Lord, lay +me down as a stone and raise me up as a loaf!" and every morning on +getting up, he said: "I lay down and curled up, I get up and shake +myself." And indeed he only had to lie down, to fall asleep like a +stone, and he only had to shake himself, to be ready without a +moment's delay for some work, just as children are ready to play +directly they awake. He could do everything, not very well but not +badly. He baked, cooked, sewed, planed, and mended boots. He was +always busy, and only at night allowed himself conversation- of +which he was fond- and songs. He did not sing like a trained singer +who knows he is listened to, but like the birds, evidently giving vent +to the sounds in the same way that one stretches oneself or walks +about to get rid of stiffness, and the sounds were always +high-pitched, mournful, delicate, and almost feminine, and his face at +such times was very serious. + +Having been taken prisoner and allowed his beard to grow, he +seemed to have thrown off all that had been forced upon him- +everything military and alien to himself- and had returned to his +former peasant habits. + +"A soldier on leave- a shirt outside breeches," he would say. + +He did not like talking about his life as a soldier, though he did +not complain, and often mentioned that he had not been flogged once +during the whole of his army service. When he related anything it +was generally some old and evidently precious memory of his +"Christian" life, as he called his peasant existence. The proverbs, of +which his talk was full, were for the most part not the coarse and +indecent saws soldiers employ, but those folk sayings which taken +without a context seem so insignificant, but when used appositely +suddenly acquire a significance of profound wisdom. + +He would often say the exact opposite of what he had said on a +previous occasion, yet both would be right. He liked to talk and he +talked well, adorning his speech with terms of endearment and with +folk sayings which Pierre thought he invented himself, but the chief +charm of his talk lay in the fact that the commonest events- sometimes +just such as Pierre had witnessed without taking notice of them- +assumed in Karataev's a character of solemn fitness. He liked to +hear the folk tales one of the soldiers used to tell of an evening +(they were always the same), but most of all he liked to hear +stories of real life. He would smile joyfully when listening to such +stories, now and then putting in a word or asking a question to make +the moral beauty of what he was told clear to himself. Karataev had no +attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them, but +loved and lived affectionately with everything life brought him in +contact with, particularly with man- not any particular man, but those +with whom he happened to be. He loved his dog, his comrades, the +French, and Pierre who was his neighbor, but Pierre felt that in spite +of Karataev's affectionate tenderness for him (by which he +unconsciously gave Pierre's spiritual life its due) he would not +have grieved for a moment at parting from him. And Pierre began to +feel in the same way toward Karataev. + +To all the other prisoners Platon Karataev seemed a most ordinary +soldier. They called him "little falcon" or "Platosha," chaffed him +good-naturedly, and sent him on errands. But to Pierre he always +remained what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, +rounded, eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and +truth. + +Platon Karataev knew nothing by heart except his prayers. When he +began to speak he seemed not to know how he would conclude. + +Sometimes Pierre, struck by the meaning of his words, would ask +him to repeat them, but Platon could never recall what he had said a +moment before, just as he never could repeat to Pierre the words of +his favorite song: native and birch tree and my heart is sick occurred +in it, but when spoken and not sung, no meaning could be got out of +it. He did not, and could not, understand the meaning of words apart +from their context. Every word and action of his was the manifestation +of an activity unknown to him, which was his life. But his life, as he +regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only +as part of a whole of which he was always conscious. His words and +actions flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as +fragrance exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value +or significance of any word or deed taken separately. + +CHAPTER XIV + +When Princess Mary heard from Nicholas that her brother was with the +Rostovs at Yaroslavl she at once prepared to go there, in spite of her +aunt's efforts to dissuade her- and not merely to go herself but to +take her nephew with her. Whether it were difficult or easy, +possible or impossible, she did not ask and did not want to know: it +was her duty not only herself to be near her brother who was perhaps +dying, but to do everything possible to take his son to him, and so +she prepared to set off. That she had not heard from Prince Andrew +himself, Princess Mary attributed to his being too weak to write or to +his considering the long journey too hard and too dangerous for her +and his son. + +In a few days Princess Mary was ready to start. Her equipages were +the huge family coach in which she had traveled to Voronezh, a +semiopen trap, and a baggage cart. With her traveled Mademoiselle +Bourienne, little Nicholas and his tutor, her old nurse, three +maids, Tikhon, and a young footman and courier her aunt had sent to +accompany her. + +The usual route through Moscow could not be thought of, and the +roundabout way Princess Mary was obliged to take through Lipetsk, +Ryazan, Vladimir, and Shuya was very long and, as post horses were not +everywhere obtainable, very difficult, and near Ryazan where the +French were said to have shown themselves was even dangerous. + +During this difficult journey Mademoiselle Bourienne, Dessalles, and +Princess Mary's servants were astonished at her energy and firmness of +spirit. She went to bed later and rose earlier than any of them, and +no difficulties daunted her. Thanks to her activity and energy, +which infected her fellow travelers, they approached Yaroslavl by +the end of the second week. + +The last days of her stay in Voronezh had been the happiest of her +life. Her love for Rostov no longer tormented or agitated her. It +filled her whole soul, had become an integral part of herself, and she +no longer struggled against it. Latterly she had become convinced that +she loved and was beloved, though she never said this definitely to +herself in words. She had become convinced of it at her last interview +with Nicholas, when he had come to tell her that her brother was +with the Rostovs. Not by a single word had Nicholas alluded to the +fact that Prince Andrew's relations with Natasha might, if he +recovered, be renewed, but Princess Mary saw by his face that he +knew and thought of this. + +Yet in spite of that, his relation to her- considerate, delicate, +and loving- not only remained unchanged, but it sometimes seemed to +Princess Mary that he was even glad that the family connection between +them allowed him to express his friendship more freely. She knew +that she loved for the first and only time in her life and felt that +she was beloved, and was happy in regard to it. + +But this happiness on one side of her spiritual nature did not +prevent her feeling grief for her brother with full force; on the +contrary, that spiritual tranquility on the one side made it the +more possible for her to give full play to her feeling for her +brother. That feeling was so strong at the moment of leaving +Voronezh that those who saw her off, as they looked at her careworn, +despairing face, felt sure she would fall ill on the journey. But +the very difficulties and preoccupations of the journey, which she +took so actively in hand, saved her for a while from her grief and +gave her strength. + +As always happens when traveling, Princess Mary thought only of +the journey itself, forgetting its object. But as she approached +Yaroslavl the thought of what might await her there- not after many +days, but that very evening- again presented itself to her and her +agitation increased to its utmost limit. + +The courier who had been sent on in advance to find out where the +Rostovs were staying in Yaroslavl, and in what condition Prince Andrew +was, when he met the big coach just entering the town gates was +appalled by the terrible pallor of the princess' face that looked +out at him from the window. + +"I have found out everything, your excellency: the Rostovs are +staying at the merchant Bronnikov's house, in the Square not far +from here, right above the Volga," said the courier. + +Princess Mary looked at him with frightened inquiry, not +understanding why he did not reply to what she chiefly wanted to know: +how was her brother? Mademoiselle Bourienne put that question for her. + +"How is the prince?" she asked. + +"His excellency is staying in the same house with them." + +"Then he is alive," thought Princess Mary, and asked in a low voice: +"How is he?" + +"The servants say he is still the same." + +What "still the same" might mean Princess Mary did not ask, but with +an unnoticed glance at little seven-year-old Nicholas, who was sitting +in front of her looking with pleasure at the town, she bowed her +head and did not raise it again till the heavy coach, rumbling, +shaking and swaying, came to a stop. The carriage steps clattered as +they were let down. + +The carriage door was opened. On the left there was water- a great +river- and on the right a porch. There were people at the entrance: +servants, and a rosy girl with a large plait of black hair, smiling as +it seemed to Princess Mary in an unpleasantly affected way. (This +was Sonya.) Princess Mary ran up the steps. "This way, this way!" said +the girl, with the same artificial smile, and the princess found +herself in the hall facing an elderly woman of Oriental type, who came +rapidly to meet her with a look of emotion. This was the countess. She +embraced Princess Mary and kissed her. + +"Mon enfant!" she muttered, "je vous aime et vous connais depuis +longtemps."~^ + +^~ "My child! I love you and have known you a long time." + +Despite her excitement, Princess Mary realized that this was the +countess and that it was necessary to say something to her. Hardly +knowing how she did it, she contrived to utter a few polite phrases in +French in the same tone as those that had been addressed to her, and +asked: "How is he?" + +"The doctor says that he is not in danger," said the countess, but +as she spoke she raised her eyes with a sigh, and her gesture conveyed +a contradiction of her words. + +"Where is he? Can I see him- can I?" asked the princess. + +"One moment, Princess, one moment, my dear! Is this his son?" said +the countess, turning to little Nicholas who was coming in with +Dessalles. "There will be room for everybody, this is a big house. Oh, +what a lovely boy!" + +The countess took Princess Mary into the drawing room, where Sonya +was talking to Mademoiselle Bourienne. The countess caressed the +boy, and the old count came in and welcomed the princess. He had +changed very much since Princess Mary had last seen him. Then he had +been a brisk, cheerful, self-assured old man; now he seemed a pitiful, +bewildered person. While talking to Princess Mary he continually +looked round as if asking everyone whether he was doing the right +thing. After the destruction of Moscow and of his property, thrown out +of his accustomed groove he seemed to have lost the sense of his own +significance and to feel that there was no longer a place for him in +life. + +In spite of her one desire to see her brother as soon as possible, +and her vexation that at the moment when all she wanted was to see him +they should be trying to entertain her and pretending to admire her +nephew, the princess noticed all that was going on around her and felt +the necessity of submitting, for a time, to this new order of things +which she had entered. She knew it to be necessary, and though it +was hard for her she was not vexed with these people. + +"This is my niece," said the count, introducing Sonya- "You don't +know her, Princess?" + +Princess Mary turned to Sonya and, trying to stifle the hostile +feeling that arose in her toward the girl, she kissed her. But she +felt oppressed by the fact that the mood of everyone around her was so +far from what was in her own heart. + +"Where is he?" she asked again, addressing them all. + +"He is downstairs. Natasha is with him," answered Sonya, flushing. +"We have sent to ask. I think you must be tired, Princess." + +Tears of vexation showed themselves in Princess Mary's eyes. She +turned away and was about to ask the countess again how to go to +him, when light, impetuous, and seemingly buoyant steps were heard +at the door. The princess looked round and saw Natasha coming in, +almost running- that Natasha whom she had liked so little at their +meeting in Moscow long since. + +But hardly had the princess looked at Natasha's face before she +realized that here was a real comrade in her grief, and consequently a +friend. She ran to meet her, embraced her, and began to cry on her +shoulder. + +As soon as Natasha, sitting at the head of Prince Andrew's bed, +heard of Princess Mary's arrival, she softly left his room and +hastened to her with those swift steps that had sounded buoyant to +Princess Mary. + +There was only one expression on her agitated face when she ran into +the drawing room- that of love- boundless love for him, for her, and +for all that was near to the man she loved; and of pity, suffering for +others, and passionate desire to give herself entirely to helping +them. It was plain that at that moment there was in Natasha's heart no +thought of herself or of her own relations with Prince Andrew. + +Princess Mary, with her acute sensibility, understood all this at +the first glance at Natasha's face, and wept on her shoulder with +sorrowful pleasure. + +"Come, come to him, Mary," said Natasha, leading her into the +other room. + +Princess Mary raised her head, dried her eyes, and turned to +Natasha. She felt that from her she would be able to understand and +learn everything. + +"How..." she began her question but stopped short. + +She felt that it was impossible to ask, or to answer, in words. +Natasha's face eyes would eyes would have to tell her all more clearly +and profoundly. + +Natasha was gazing at her, but seemed afraid and in doubt whether to +say all she knew or not; she seemed to feel that before those luminous +eyes which penetrated into the very depths of her heart, it was +impossible not to tell the whole truth which she saw. And suddenly, +Natasha's lips twitched, ugly wrinkles gathered round her mouth, and +covering her face with her hands she burst into sobs. + +Princess Mary understood. + +But she still hoped, and asked, in words she herself did not trust: + +"But how is his wound? What is his general condition?" + +"You, you... will see," was all Natasha could say. + +They sat a little while downstairs near his room till they had +left off crying and were able to go to him with calm faces. + +"How has his whole illness gone? Is it long since he grew worse? +When did this happen?" Princess Mary inquired. + +Natasha told her that at first there had been danger from his +feverish condition and the pain he suffered, but at Troitsa that had +passed and the doctor had only been afraid of gangrene. That danger +had also passed. When they reached Yaroslavl the wound had begun to +fester (Natasha knew all about such things as festering) and the +doctor had said that the festering might take a normal course. Then +fever set in, but the doctor had said the fever was not very serious. + +"But two days ago this suddenly happened," said Natasha, +struggling with her sobs. "I don't know why, but you will see what +he is like." + +"Is he weaker? Thinner?" asked the princess. + +"No, it's not that, but worse. You will see. O, Mary, he is too +good, he cannot, cannot live, because..." + +CHAPTER XV + +When Natasha opened Prince Andrew's door with a familiar movement +and let Princess Mary pass into the room before her, the princess felt +the sobs in her throat. Hard as she had tried to prepare herself, +and now tried to remain tranquil, she knew that she would be unable to +look at him without tears. + +The princess understood what Natasha had meant by the words: "two +days ago this suddenly happened." She understood those words to mean +that he had suddenly softened and that this softening and gentleness +were signs of approaching death. As she stepped to the door she +already saw in imagination Andrew's face as she remembered it in +childhood, a gentle, mild, sympathetic face which he had rarely shown, +and which therefore affected her very strongly. She was sure he +would speak soft, tender words to her such as her father had uttered +before his death, and that she would not be able to bear it and +would burst into sobs in his presence. Yet sooner or later it had to +be, and she went in. The sobs rose higher and higher in her throat +as she more and more clearly distinguished his form and her +shortsighted eyes tried to make out his features, and then she saw his +face and met his gaze. + +He was lying in a squirrel-fur dressing gown on a divan, +surrounded by pillows. He was thin and pale. In one thin, +translucently white hand he held a handkerchief, while with the +other he stroked the delicate mustache he had grown, moving his +fingers slowly. His eyes gazed at them as they entered. + +On seeing his face and meeting his eyes Princess Mary's pace +suddenly slackened, she felt her tears dry up and her sobs ceased. She +suddenly felt guilty and grew timid on catching the expression of +his face and eyes. + +"But in what am I to blame?" she asked herself. And his cold, +stern look replied: "Because you are alive and thinking of the living, +while I..." + +In the deep the deep gaze that seemed to look not outwards but +inwards there was an almost hostile expression as he slowly regarded +his sister and Natasha. + +He kissed his sister, holding her hand in his as was their wont. + +"How are you, Mary? How did you manage to get here?" said he in a +voice as calm and aloof as his look. + +Had he screamed in agony, that scream would not have struck such +horror into Princess Mary's heart as the tone of his voice. + +"And have you brought little Nicholas?" he asked in the same slow, +quiet manner and with an obvious effort to remember. + +"How are you now?" said Princess Mary, herself surprised at what she +was saying. + +"That, my dear, you must ask the doctor," he replied, and again +making an evident effort to be affectionate, he said with his lips +only (his words clearly did not correspond to his thoughts): + +"Merci, chere amie, d'etre venue."~^ + +^~ "Thank you for coming, my dear." + +Princess Mary pressed his hand. The pressure made him wince just +perceptibly. He was silent, and she did not know what to say. She +now understood what had happened to him two days before. In his words, +his tone, and especially in that calm, almost antagonistic look +could be felt an estrangement from everything belonging to this world, +terrible in one who is alive. Evidently only with an effort did he +understand anything living; but it was obvious that he failed to +understand, not because he lacked the power to do so but because he +understood something else- something the living did not and could +not understand- and which wholly occupied his mind. + +"There, you see how strangely fate has brought us together," said +he, breaking the silence and pointing to Natasha. "She looks after +me all the time." + +Princess Mary heard him and did not understand how he could say such +a thing. He, the sensitive, tender Prince Andrew, how could he say +that, before her whom he loved and who loved him? Had he expected to +live he could not have said those words in that offensively cold tone. +If he had not known that he was dying, how could he have failed to +pity her and how could he speak like that in her presence? The only +explanation was that he was indifferent, because something else, +much more important, had been revealed to him. + +The conversation was cold and disconnected and continually broke +off. + +"Mary came by way of Ryazan," said Natasha. + +Prince Andrew did not notice that she called his sister Mary, and +only after calling her so in his presence did Natasha notice it +herself. + +"Really?" he asked. + +"They told her that all Moscow has been burned down, and that..." + +Natasha stopped. It was impossible to talk. It was plain that he was +making an effort to listen, but could not do so. + +"Yes, they say it's burned," he said. "It's a great pity," and he +gazed straight before him, absently stroking his mustache with his +fingers. + +"And so you have met Count Nicholas, Mary?" Prince Andrew suddenly +said, evidently wishing to speak pleasantly to them. "He wrote here +that he took a great liking to you," he went on simply and calmly, +evidently unable to understand all the complex significance his +words had for living people. "If you liked him too, it would be a good +thing for you to get married," he added rather more quickly, as if +pleased at having found words he had long been seeking. + +Princess Mary heard his words but they had no meaning for her, +except as a proof of how far away he now was from everything living. + +"Why talk of me?" she said quietly and glanced at Natasha. + +Natasha, who felt her glance, did not look at her. All three were +again silent. + +"Andrew, would you like..." Princess Mary suddenly said in a +trembling voice, "would you like to see little Nicholas? He is +always talking about you!" + +Prince Andrew smiled just perceptibly and for the first time, but +Princess Mary, who knew his face so well, saw with horror that he +did not smile with pleasure or affection for his son, but with +quiet, gentle irony because he thought she was trying what she +believed to be the last means of arousing him. + +"Yes, I shall be very glad to see him. Is he quite well?" + +When little Nicholas was brought into Prince Andrew's room he looked +at his father with frightened eyes, but did not cry, because no one +else was crying. Prince Andrew kissed him and evidently did not know +what to say to him. + +When Nicholas had been led away, Princess Mary again went up to +her brother, kissed him, and unable to restrain her tears any longer +began to cry. + +He looked at her attentively. + +"Is it about Nicholas?" he asked. + +Princess Mary nodded her head, weeping. + +"Mary, you know the Gosp..." but he broke off. + +"What did you say?" + +"Nothing. You mustn't cry here," he said, looking at her with the +same cold expression. + +When Princess Mary began to cry, he understood that she was crying +at the thought that little Nicholas would be left without a father. +With a great effort he tried to return to life and to see things +from their point of view. + +"Yes, to them it must seem sad!" he thought. "But how simple it is. + +"The fowls of the air sow not, neither do they reap, yet your Father +feedeth them," he said to himself and wished to say to Princess +Mary; "but no, they will take it their own way, they won't understand! +They can't understand that all those feelings they prize so- all our +feelings, all those ideas that seem so important to us, are +unnecessary. We cannot understand one another," and he remained +silent. + +Prince Andrew's little son was seven. He could scarcely read, and +knew nothing. After that day he lived through many things, gaining +knowledge, observation, and experience, but had he possessed all the +faculties he afterwards acquired, he could not have had a better or +more profound understanding of the meaning of the scene he had +witnessed between his father, Mary, and Natasha, than he had then. +He understood it completely, and, leaving the room without crying, +went silently up to Natasha who had come out with him and looked shyly +at her with his beautiful, thoughtful eyes, then his uplifted, rosy +upper lip trembled and leaning his head against her he began to cry. + +After that he avoided Dessalles and the countess who caressed him +and either sat alone or came timidly to Princess Mary, or to Natasha +of whom he seemed even fonder than of his aunt, and clung to them +quietly and shyly. + +When Princess Mary had left Prince Andrew she fully understood +what Natasha's face had told her. She did not speak any more to +Natasha of hopes of saving his life. She took turns with her beside +his sofa, and did not cry any more, but prayed continually, turning in +soul to that Eternal and Unfathomable, whose presence above the +dying man was now so evident. + +CHAPTER XVI + +Not only did Prince Andrew know he would die, but he felt that he +was dying and was already half dead. He was conscious of an +aloofness from everything earthly and a strange and joyous lightness +of existence. Without haste or agitation he awaited what was coming. +That inexorable, eternal, distant, and unknown the presence of which +he had felt continually all his life- was now near to him and, by +the strange lightness he experienced, almost comprehensible and +palpable... + +Formerly he had feared the end. He had twice experienced that +terribly tormenting fear of death- the end- but now he no longer +understood that fear. + +He had felt it for the first time when the shell spun like a top +before him, and he looked at the fallow field, the bushes, and the +sky, and knew that he was face to face with death. When he came to +himself after being wounded and the flower of eternal, unfettered love +had instantly unfolded itself in his soul as if freed from the bondage +of life that had restrained it, he no longer feared death and ceased +to think about it. + +During the hours of solitude, suffering, and partial delirium he +spent after he was wounded, the more deeply he penetrated into the new +principle of eternal love revealed to him, the more he unconsciously +detached himself from earthly life. To love everything and everybody +and always to sacrifice oneself for love meant not to love anyone, not +to live this earthly life. And the more imbued he became with that +principle of love, the more he renounced life and the more +completely he destroyed that dreadful barrier which- in the absence of +such love- stands between life and death. When during those first days +he remembered that he would have to die, he said to himself: "Well, +what of it? So much the better!" + +But after the night in Mytishchi when, half delirious, he had seen +her for whom he longed appear before him and, having pressed her +hand to his lips, had shed gentle, happy tears, love for a +particular woman again crept unobserved into his heart and once more +bound him to life. And joyful and agitating thoughts began to occupy +his mind. Recalling the moment at the ambulance station when he had +seen Kuragin, he could not now regain the feeling he then had, but was +tormented by the question whether Kuragin was alive. And he dared +not inquire. + +His illness pursued its normal physical course, but what Natasha +referred to when she said: "This suddenly happened," had occurred +two days before Princess Mary arrived. It was the last spiritual +struggle between life and death, in which death gained the victory. It +was the unexpected realization of the fact that he still valued life +as presented to him in the form of his love for Natasha, and a last, +though ultimately vanquished, attack of terror before the unknown. + +It was evening. As usual after dinner he was slightly feverish, +and his thoughts were preternaturally clear. Sonya was sitting by +the table. He began to doze. Suddenly a feeling of happiness seized +him. + +"Ah, she has come!" thought he. + +And so it was: in Sonya's place sat Natasha who had just come in +noiselessly. + +Since she had begun looking after him, he had always experienced +this physical consciousness of her nearness. She was sitting in an +armchair placed sideways, screening the light of the candle from +him, and was knitting a stocking. She had learned to knit stockings +since Prince Andrew had casually mentioned that no one nursed the sick +so well as old nurses who knit stockings, and that there is +something soothing in the knitting of stockings. The needles clicked +lightly in her slender, rapidly moving hands, and he could clearly see +the thoughtful profile of her drooping face. She moved, and the ball +rolled off her knees. She started, glanced round at him, and screening +the candle with her hand stooped carefully with a supple and exact +movement, picked up the ball, and regained her former position. + +He looked at her without moving and saw that she wanted to draw a +deep breath after stooping, but refrained from doing so and breathed +cautiously. + +At the Troitsa monastery they had spoken of the past, and he had +told her that if he lived he would always thank God for his wound +which had brought them together again, but after that they never spoke +of the future. + +"Can it or can it not be?" he now thought as he looked at her and +listened to the light click of the steel needles. "Can fate have +brought me to her so strangely only for me to die?... Is it possible +that the truth of life has been revealed to me only to show me that +I have spent my life in falsity? I love her more than anything in +the world! But what am I to do if I love her?" he thought, and he +involuntarily groaned, from a habit acquired during his sufferings. + +On hearing that sound Natasha put down the stocking, leaned nearer +to him, and suddenly, noticing his shining eyes, stepped lightly up to +him and bent over him. + +"You are not asleep?" + +"No, I have been looking at you a long time. I felt you come in. +No one else gives me that sense of soft tranquillity that you do... +that light. I want to weep for joy." + +Natasha drew closer to him. Her face shone with rapturous joy. + +"Natasha, I love you too much! More than anything in the world." + +"And I!"- She turned away for an instant. "Why too much?" she asked. + +"Why too much?... Well, what do you, what do you feel in your +soul, your whole soul- shall I live? What do you think?" + +"I am sure of it, sure!" Natasha almost shouted, taking hold of both +his hands with a passionate movement. + +He remained silent awhile. + +"How good it would be!" and taking her hand he kissed it. + +Natasha felt happy and agitated, but at once remembered that this +would not do and that he had to be quiet. + +"But you have not slept," she said, repressing her joy. "Try to +sleep... please!" + +He pressed her hand and released it, and she went back to the candle +and sat down again in her former position. Twice she turned and looked +at him, and her eyes met his beaming at her. She set herself a task on +her stocking and resolved not to turn round till it was finished. + +Soon he really shut his eyes and fell asleep. He did not sleep +long and suddenly awoke with a start and in a cold perspiration. + +As he fell asleep he had still been thinking of the subject that now +always occupied his mind- about life and death, and chiefly about +death. He felt himself nearer to it. + +"Love? What is love?" he thought. + +"Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I +understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, +everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it +alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall +return to the general and eternal source." These thoughts seemed to +him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking +in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and +brain-spun. And there was the former agitation and obscurity. He +fell asleep. + +He dreamed that he was lying in the room he really was in, but +that he was quite well and unwounded. Many various, indifferent, and +insignificant people appeared before him. He talked to them and +discussed something trivial. They were preparing to go away somewhere. +Prince Andrew dimly realized that all this was trivial and that he had +more important cares, but he continued to speak, surprising them by +empty witticisms. Gradually, unnoticed, all these persons began to +disappear and a single question, that of the closed door, superseded +all else. He rose and went to the door to bolt and lock it. Everything +depended on whether he was, or was not, in time to lock it. He went, +and tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move and he knew he +would not be in time to lock the door though he painfully strained all +his powers. He was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear was +the fear of death. It stood behind the door. But just when he was +clumsily creeping toward the door, that dreadful something on the +other side was already pressing against it and forcing its way in. +Something not human- death- was breaking in through that door, and had +to be kept out. He seized the door, making a final effort to hold it +back- to lock it was no longer possible- but his efforts were weak and +clumsy and the door, pushed from behind by that terror, opened and +closed again. + +Once again it pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts +were vain and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It +entered, and it was death, and Prince Andrew died. + +But at the instant he died, Prince Andrew remembered that he was +asleep, and at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he +awoke. + +"Yes, it was death! I died- and woke up. Yes, death is an +awakening!" And all at once it grew light in his soul and the veil +that had till then concealed the unknown was lifted from his spiritual +vision. He felt as if powers till then confined within him had been +liberated, and that strange lightness did not again leave him. + +When, waking in a cold perspiration, he moved on the divan, +Natasha went up and asked him what was the matter. He did not answer +and looked at her strangely, not understanding. + +That was what had happened to him two days before Princess Mary's +arrival. From that day, as the doctor expressed it, the wasting +fever assumed a malignant character, but what the doctor said did +not interest Natasha, she saw the terrible moral symptoms which to her +were more convincing. + +From that day an awakening from life came to Prince Andrew +together with his awakening from sleep. And compared to the duration +of life it did not seem to him slower than an awakening from sleep +compared to the duration of a dream. + +There was nothing terrible or violent in this comparatively slow +awakening. + +His last days and hours passed in an ordinary and simple way. Both +Princess Mary and Natasha, who did not leave him, felt this. They +did not weep or shudder and during these last days they themselves +felt that they were not attending on him (he was no longer there, he +had left them) but on what reminded them most closely of him- his +body. Both felt this so strongly that the outward and terrible side of +death did not affect them and they did not feel it necessary to foment +their grief. Neither in his presence nor out of it did they weep, +nor did they ever talk to one another about him. They felt that they +could not express in words what they understood. + +They both saw that he was sinking slowly and quietly, deeper and +deeper, away from them, and they both knew that this had to be so +and that it was right. + +He confessed, and received communion: everyone came to take leave of +him. When they brought his son to him, he pressed his lips to the +boy's and turned away, not because he felt it hard and sad (Princess +Mary and Natasha understood that) but simply because he thought it was +all that was required of him, but when they told him to bless the boy, +he did what was demanded and looked round as if asking whether there +was anything else he should do. + +When the last convulsions of the body, which the spirit was leaving, +occurred, Princess Mary and Natasha were present. + +"Is it over?" said Princess Mary when his body had for a few minutes +lain motionless, growing cold before them. Natasha went up, looked +at the dead eyes, and hastened to close them. She closed them but +did not kiss them, but clung to that which reminded her most nearly of +him- his body. + +"Where has he gone? Where is he now?..." + +When the body, washed and dressed, lay in the coffin on a table, +everyone came to take leave of him and they all wept. + +Little Nicholas cried because his heart was rent by painful +perplexity. The countess and Sonya cried from pity for Natasha and +because he was no more. The old count cried because he felt that +before long, he, too, must take the same terrible step. + +Natasha and Princess Mary also wept now, but not because of their +own personal grief; they wept with a reverent and softening emotion +which had taken possession of their souls at the consciousness of +the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished in +their presence. + +BOOK THIRTEEN: 1812 + +CHAPTER I + +Man's mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their +completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in +man's soul. And without considering the multiplicity and complexity of +the conditions any one of which taken separately may seem to be the +cause, he snatches at the first approximation to a cause that seems to +him intelligible and says: "This is the cause!" In historical events +(where the actions of men are the subject of observation) the first +and most primitive approximation to present itself was the will of the +gods and, after that, the will of those who stood in the most +prominent position- the heroes of history. But we need only +penetrate to the essence of any historic event- which lies in the +activity of the general mass of men who take part in it- to be +convinced that the will of the historic hero does not control the +actions of the mass but is itself continually controlled. It may +seem to be a matter of indifference whether we understand the +meaning of historical events this way or that; yet there is the same +difference between a man who says that the people of the West moved on +the East because Napoleon wished it and a man who says that this +happened because it had to happen, as there is between those who +declared that the earth was stationary and that the planets moved +round it and those who admitted that they did not know what upheld the +earth, but knew there were laws directing its movement and that of the +other planets. There is, and can be, no cause of an historical event +except the one cause of all causes. But there are laws directing +events, and some of these laws are known to us while we are +conscious of others we cannot comprehend. The discovery of these +laws is only possible when possible when we have quite abandoned the +attempt to find the cause in the will of some one man, just as the +discovery of the laws of the motion of the planets was possible only +when men abandoned the conception of the fixity of the earth. + +The historians consider that, next to the battle of Borodino and the +occupation of Moscow by the enemy and its destruction by fire, the +most important episode of the war of 1812 was the movement of the +Russian army from the Ryazana to the Kaluga road and to the Tarutino +camp- the so-called flank march across the Krasnaya Pakhra River. They +ascribe the glory of that achievement of genius to different men and +dispute as to whom the honor is due. Even foreign historians, +including the French, acknowledge the genius of the Russian commanders +when they speak of that flank march. But it is hard to understand +why military writers, and following them others, consider this flank +march to be the profound conception of some one man who saved Russia +and destroyed Napoleon. In the first place it is hard to understand +where the profundity and genius of this movement lay, for not much +mental effort was needed to see that the best position for an army +when it is not being attacked is where there are most provisions; +and even a dull boy of thirteen could have guessed that the best +position for an army after its retreat from Moscow in 1812 was on +the Kaluga road. So it is impossible to understand by what reasoning +the historians reach the conclusion that this maneuver was a +profound one. And it is even more difficult to understand just why +they think that this maneuver was calculated to save Russia and +destroy the French; for this flank march, had it been preceded, +accompanied, or followed by other circumstances, might have proved +ruinous to the Russians and salutary for the French. If the position +of the Russian army really began to improve from the time of that +march, it does not at all follow that the march was the cause of it. + +That flank march might not only have failed to give any advantage to +the Russian army, but might in other circumstances have led to its +destruction. What would have happened had Moscow not burned down? If +Murat had not lost sight of the Russians? If Napoleon had not remained +inactive? If the Russian army at Krasnaya Pakhra had given battle as +Bennigsen and Barclay advised? What would have happened had the French +attacked the Russians while they were marching beyond the Pakhra? What +would have happened if on approaching Tarutino, Napoleon had +attacked the Russians with but a tenth of the energy he had shown when +he attacked them at Smolensk? What would have happened had the +French moved on Petersburg?... In any of these eventualities the flank +march that brought salvation might have proved disastrous. + +The third and most incomprehensible thing is that people studying +history deliberately avoid seeing that this flank march cannot be +attributed to any one man, that no one ever foresaw it, and that in +reality, like the retreat from Fili, it did not suggest itself to +anyone in its entirety, but resulted- moment by moment, step by +step, event by event- from an endless number of most diverse +circumstances and was only seen in its entirety when it had been +accomplished and belonged to the past. + +At the council at Fili the prevailing thought in the minds of the +Russian commanders was the one naturally suggesting itself, namely, +a direct retreat by the Nizhni road. In proof of this there is the +fact that the majority of the council voted for such a retreat, and +above all there is the well-known conversation after the council, +between the commander in chief and Lanskoy, who was in charge of the +commissariat department. Lanskoy informed the commander in chief +that the army supplies were for the most part stored along the Oka +in the Tula and Ryazan provinces, and that if they retreated on Nizhni +the army would be separated from its supplies by the broad river +Oka, which cannot be crossed early in winter. This was the first +indication of the necessity of deviating from what had previously +seemed the most natural course- a direct retreat on Nizhni-Novgorod. +The army turned more to the south, along the Ryazan road and nearer to +its supplies. Subsequently the in activity of the French (who even +lost sight of the Russian army), concern for the safety of the arsenal +at Tula, and especially the advantages of drawing nearer to its +supplies caused the army to turn still further south to the Tula road. +Having crossed over, by a forced march, to the Tula road beyond the +Pakhra, the Russian commanders intended to remain at Podolsk and had +no thought of the Tarutino position; but innumerable circumstances and +the reappearance of French troops who had for a time lost touch with +the Russians, and projects of giving battle, and above all the +abundance of provisions in Kaluga province, obliged our army to turn +still more to the south and to cross from the Tula to the Kaluga +road and go to Tarutino, which was between the roads along which those +supplies lay. Just as it is impossible to say when it was decided to +abandon Moscow, so it is impossible to say precisely when, or by whom, +it was decided to move to Tarutino. Only when the army had got +there, as the result of innumerable and varying forces, did people +begin to assure themselves that they had desired this movement and +long ago foreseen its result. + +CHAPTER II + +The famous flank movement merely consisted in this: after the +advance of the French had ceased, the Russian army, which had been +continually retreating straight back from the invaders, deviated +from that direct course and, not finding itself pursued, was naturally +drawn toward the district where supplies were abundant. + +If instead of imagining to ourselves commanders of genius leading +the Russian army, we picture that army without any leaders, it could +not have done anything but make a return movement toward Moscow, +describing an arc in the direction where most provisions were to be +found and where the country was richest. + +That movement from the Nizhni to the Ryazan, Tula, and Kaluga +roads was so natural that even the Russian marauders moved in that +direction, and demands were sent from Petersburg for Kutuzov to take +his army that way. At Tarutino Kutuzov received what was almost a +reprimand from the Emperor for having moved his army along the +Ryazan road, and the Emperor's letter indicated to him the very +position he had already occupied near Kaluga. + +Having rolled like a ball in the direction of the impetus given by +the whole campaign and by the battle of Borodino, the Russian army- +when the strength of that impetus was exhausted and no fresh push +was received- assumed the position natural to it. + +Kutuzov's merit lay, not in any strategic maneuver of genius, as +it is called, but in the fact that he alone understood the +significance of what had happened. He alone then understood the +meaning of the French army's inactivity, he alone continued to +assert that the battle of Borodino had been a victory, he alone- who +as commander in chief might have been expected to be eager to +attack- employed his whole strength to restrain the Russian army +from useless engagements. + +The beast wounded at Borodino was lying where the fleeing hunter had +left him; but whether he was still alive, whether he was strong and +merely lying low, the hunter did not know. Suddenly the beast was +heard to moan. + +The moan of that wounded beast (the French army) which betrayed +its calamitous condition was the sending of Lauriston to Kutuzov's +camp with overtures for peace. + +Napoleon, with his usual assurance that whatever entered his head +was right, wrote to Kutuzov the first words that occurred to him, +though they were meaningless. + +MONSIEUR LE PRINCE KOUTOUZOV: I am sending one of my +adjutants-general to discuss several interesting questions with you. I +beg your Highness to credit what he says to you, especially when he +expresses the sentiment of esteem and special regard I have long +entertained for your person. This letter having no other object, I +pray God, monsieur le Prince Koutouzov, to keep you in His holy and +gracious protection! + +NAPOLEON + +MOSCOW, OCTOBER 30, 1812 + +Kutuzov replied: "I should be cursed by posterity were I looked on +as the initiator of a settlement of any sort. Such is the present +spirit of my nation." But he continued to exert all his powers to +restrain his troops from attacking. + +During the month that the French troops were pillaging in Moscow and +the Russian troops were quietly encamped at Tarutino, a change had +taken place in the relative strength of the two armies- both in spirit +and in number- as a result of which the superiority had passed to +the Russian side. Though the condition and numbers of the French +army were unknown to the Russians, as soon as that change occurred the +need of attacking at once showed itself by countless signs. These +signs were: Lauriston's mission; the abundance of provisions at +Tarutino; the reports coming in from all sides of the inactivity and +disorder of the French; the flow of recruits to our regiments; the +fine weather; the long rest the Russian soldiers had enjoyed, and +the impatience to do what they had been assembled for, which usually +shows itself in an army that has been resting; curiosity as to what +the French army, so long lost sight of, was doing; the boldness with +which our outposts now scouted close up to the French stationed at +Tarutino; the news of easy successes gained by peasants and +guerrilla troops over the French, the envy aroused by this; the desire +for revenge that lay in the heart of every Russian as long as the +French were in Moscow, and (above all) a dim consciousness in every +soldier's mind that the relative strength of the armies had changed +and that the advantage was now on our side. There was a substantial +change in the relative strength, and an advance had become inevitable. +And at once, as a clock begins to strike and chime as soon as the +minute hand has completed a full circle, this change was shown by an +increased activity, whirring, and chiming in the higher spheres. + +CHAPTER III + +The Russian army was commanded by Kutuzov and his staff, and also by +the Emperor from Petersburg. Before the news of the abandonment of +Moscow had been received in Petersburg, a detailed plan of the whole +campaign had been drawn up and sent to Kutuzov for his guidance. +Though this plan had been drawn up on the supposition that Moscow +was still in our hands, it was approved by the staff and accepted as a +basis for action. Kutuzov only replied that movements arranged from +a distance were always difficult to execute. So fresh instructions +were sent for the solution of difficulties that might be +encountered, as well as fresh people who were to watch Kutuzov's +actions and report upon them. + +Besides this, the whole staff of the Russian army was now +reorganized. The posts left vacant by Bagration, who had been +killed, and by Barclay, who had gone away in dudgeon, had to be +filled. Very serious consideration was given to the question whether +it would be better to put A in B's place and B in D's, or on the +contrary to put D in A's place, and so on- as if anything more than +A's or B's satisfaction depended on this. + +As a result of the hostility between Kutuzov and Bennigsen, his +Chief of Staff, the presence of confidential representatives of the +Emperor, and these transfers, a more than usually complicated play +of parties was going on among the staff of the army. A was undermining +B, D was undermining C, and so on in all possible combinations and +permutations. In all these plottings the subject of intrigue was +generally the conduct of the war, which all these men believed they +were directing; but this affair of the war went on independently of +them, as it had to go: that is, never in the way people devised, but +flowing always from the essential attitude of the masses. Only in +the highest spheres did all these schemes, crossings, and +interminglings appear to be a true reflection of what had to happen. + +Prince Michael Ilarionovich! (wrote the Emperor on the second of +October in a letter that reached Kutuzov after the battle at Tarutino) +Since September 2 Moscow has been in the hands of the enemy. Your last +reports were written on the twentieth, and during all this time not +only has no action been taken against the enemy or for the relief of +the ancient capital, but according to your last report you have even +retreated farther. Serpukhov is already occupied by an enemy +detachment and Tula with its famous arsenal so indispensable to the +army, is in danger. From General Wintzingerode's reports, I see that +an enemy corps of ten thousand men is moving on the Petersburg road. +Another corps of several thousand men is moving on Dmitrov. A third +has advanced along the Vladimir road, and a fourth, rather +considerable detachment is stationed between Ruza and Mozhaysk. +Napoleon himself was in Moscow as late as the twenty-fifth. In view of +all this information, when the enemy has scattered his forces in large +detachments, and with Napoleon and his Guards in Moscow, is it +possible that the enemy's forces confronting you are so considerable +as not to allow of your taking the offensive? On the contrary, he is +probably pursuing you with detachments, or at most with an army +corps much weaker than the army entrusted to you. It would seem +that, availing yourself of these circumstances, you might +advantageously attack a weaker one and annihilate him, or at least +oblige him to retreat, retaining in our hands an important part of the +provinces now occupied by the enemy, and thereby averting danger +from Tula and other towns in the interior. You will be responsible +if the enemy is able to direct a force of any size against +Petersburg to threaten this capital in which it has not been +possible to retain many troops; for with the army entrusted to you, +and acting with resolution and energy, you have ample means to avert +this fresh calamity. Remember that you have still to answer to our +offended country for the loss of Moscow. You have experienced my +readiness to reward you. That readiness will not weaken in me, but I +and Russia have a right to expect from you all the zeal, firmness, and +success which your intellect, military talent, and the courage of +the troops you command justify us in expecting. + +But by the time this letter, which proved that the real relation +of the forces had already made itself felt in Petersburg, was +dispatched, Kutuzov had found himself unable any longer to restrain +the army he commanded from attacking and a battle had taken place. + +On the second of October a Cossack, Shapovalov, who was out +scouting, killed one hare and wounded another. Following the wounded +hare he made his way far into the forest and came upon the left +flank of Murat's army, encamped there without any precautions. The +Cossack laughingly told his comrades how he had almost fallen into the +hands of the French. A cornet, hearing the story, informed his +commander. + +The Cossack was sent for and questioned. The Cossack officers wished +to take advantage of this chance to capture some horses, but one of +the superior officers, who was acquainted with the higher authorities, +reported the incident to a general on the staff. The state of +things on the staff had of late been exceedingly strained. Ermolov had +been to see Bennigsen a few days previously and had entreated him to +use his influence with the commander in chief to induce him to take +the offensive. + +"If I did not know you I should think you did not want what you +are asking for. I need only advise anything and his Highness is sure +to do the opposite," replied Bennigsen. + +The Cossack's report, confirmed by horse patrols who were sent +out, was the final proof that events had matured. The tightly coiled +spring was released, the clock began to whirr and the chimes to +play. Despite all his supposed power, his intellect, his experience, +and his knowledge of men, Kutuzov- having taken into consideration the +Cossack's report, a note from Bennigsen who sent personal reports to +the Emperor, the wishes he supposed the Emperor to hold, and the +fact that all the generals expressed the same wish- could no longer +check the inevitable movement, and gave the order to do what he +regarded as useless and harmful- gave his approval, that is, to the +accomplished fact. + +CHAPTER IV + +Bennigsen's note and the Cossack's information that the left flank +of the French was unguarded were merely final indications that it +was necessary to order an attack, and it was fixed for the fifth of +October. + +On the morning of the fourth of October Kutuzov signed the +dispositions. Toll read them to Ermolov, asking him to attend to the +further arrangements. + +"All right- all right. I haven't time just now," replied Ermolov, +and left the hut. + +The dispositions drawn up by Toll were very good. As in the +Austerlitz dispositions, it was written- though not in German this +time: + +"The First Column will march here and here," "the Second Column will +march there and there," and so on; and on paper, all these columns +arrived at their places at the appointed time and destroyed the enemy. +Everything had been admirably thought out as is usual in dispositions, +and as is always the case, not a single column reached its place at +the appointed time. + +When the necessary number of copies of the dispositions had been +prepared, an officer was summoned and sent to deliver them to +Ermolov to deal with. A young officer of the Horse Guards, Kutuzov's +orderly, pleased at the importance of the mission entrusted to him, +went to Ermolov's quarters. + +"Gone away," said Ermolov's orderly. + +The officer of the Horse Guards went to a general with whom +Ermolov was often to be found. + +"No, and the general's out too." + +The officer, mounting his horse, rode off to someone else. + +"No, he's gone out." + +"If only they don't make me responsible for this delay! What a +nuisance it is!" thought the officer, and he rode round the whole +camp. One man said he had seen Ermolov ride past with some other +generals, others said he must have returned home. The officer searched +till six o'clock in the evening without even stopping to eat. +Ermolov was nowhere to be found and no one knew where he was. The +officer snatched a little food at a comrade's, and rode again to the +vanguard to find Miloradovich. Miloradovich too was away, but here +he was told that he had gone to a ball at General Kikin's and that +Ermolov was probably there too. + +"But where is it?" + +"Why, there, over at Echkino," said a Cossack officer, pointing to a +country house in the far distance. + +"What, outside our line?" + +"They've put two regiments as outposts, and they're having such a +spree there, it's awful! Two bands and three sets of singers!" + +The officer rode out beyond our lines to Echkino. While still at a +distance he heard as he rode the merry sounds of a soldier's dance +song proceeding from the house. + +"In the meadows... in the meadows!" he heard, accompanied by +whistling and the sound of a torban, drowned every now and then by +shouts. These sounds made his spirits rise, but at the same time he +was afraid that he would be blamed for not having executed sooner +the important order entrusted to him. It was already past eight +o'clock. He dismounted and went up into the porch of a large country +house which had remained intact between the Russian and French forces. +In the refreshment room and the hall, footmen were bustling about with +wine and viands. Groups of singers stood outside the windows. The +officer was admitted and immediately saw all the chief generals of the +army together, and among them Ermolov's big imposing figure. They +all had their coats unbuttoned and were standing in a semicircle +with flushed and animated faces, laughing loudly. In the middle of the +room a short handsome general with a red face was dancing the trepak +with much spirit and agility. + +"Ha, ha, ha! Bravo, Nicholas Ivanych! Ha, ha, ha!" + +The officer felt that by arriving with important orders at such a +moment he was doubly to blame, and he would have preferred to wait; +but one of the generals espied him and, hearing what he had come +about, informed Ermolov. + +Ermolov came forward with a frown on his face and, hearing what +the officer had to say, took the papers from him without a word. + +"You think he went off just by chance?" said a comrade, who was on +the staff that evening, to the officer of the Horse Guards, +referring to Ermolov. "It was a trick. It was done on purpose to get +Konovnitsyn into trouble. You'll see what a mess there'll be +tomorrow." + +CHAPTER V + +Next day the decrepit Kutuzov, having given orders to be called +early, said his prayers, dressed, and, with an unpleasant +consciousness of having to direct a battle he did not approve of, +got into his caleche and drove from Letashovka (a village three and +a half miles from Tarutino) to the place where the attacking columns +were to meet. He sat in the caleche, dozing and waking up by turns, +and listening for any sound of firing on the right as an indication +that the action had begun. But all was still quiet. A damp dull autumn +morning was just dawning. On approaching Tarutino Kutuzov noticed +cavalrymen leading their horses to water across the road along which +he was driving. Kutuzov looked at them searchingly, stopped his +carriage, and inquired what regiment they belonged to. They belonged +to a column that should have been far in front and in ambush long +before then. "It may be a mistake," thought the old commander in +chief. But a little further on he saw infantry regiments with their +arms piled and the soldiers, only partly dressed, eating their rye +porridge and carrying fuel. He sent for an officer. The officer +reported that no order to advance had been received. + +"How! Not rec..." Kutuzov began, but checked himself immediately and +sent for a senior officer. Getting out of his caleche, he waited +with drooping head and breathing heavily, pacing silently up and down. +When Eykhen, the officer of the general staff whom he had summoned, +appeared, Kutuzov went purple in the face, not because that officer +was to blame for the mistake, but because he was an object of +sufficient importance for him to vent his wrath on. Trembling and +panting the old man fell into that state of fury in which he sometimes +used to roll on the ground, and he fell upon Eykhen, threatening him +with his hands, shouting and loading him with gross abuse. Another +man, Captain Brozin, who happened to turn up and who was not at all to +blame, suffered the same fate. + +"What sort of another blackguard are you? I'll have you shot! +Scoundrels!" yelled Kutuzov in a hoarse voice, waving his arms and +reeling. + +He was suffering physically. He, the commander in chief, a Serene +Highness who everybody said possessed powers such as no man had ever +had in Russia, to be placed in this position- made the laughingstock +of the whole army! "I needn't have been in such a hurry to pray +about today, or have kept awake thinking everything over all night," +thought he to himself. "When I was a chit of an officer no one would +have dared to mock me so... and now!" He was in a state of physical +suffering as if from corporal punishment, and could not avoid +expressing it by cries of anger and distress. But his strength soon +began to fail him, and looking about him, conscious of having said +much that was amiss, he again got into his caleche and drove back in +silence. + +His wrath, once expended, did not return, and blinking feebly he +listened to excuses and self-justifications (Ermolov did not come to +see him till the next day) and to the insistence of Bennigsen, +Konovnitsyn, and Toll that the movement that had miscarried should +be executed next day. And once more Kutuzov had to consent. + +CHAPTER VI + +Next day the troops assembled in their appointed places in the +evening and advanced during the night. It was an autumn night with +dark purple clouds, but no rain. The ground was damp but not muddy, +and the troops advanced noiselessly, only occasionally a jingling of +the artillery could be faintly heard. The men were forbidden to talk +out loud, to smoke their pipes, or to strike a light, and they tried +to prevent their horses neighing. The secrecy of the undertaking +heightened its charm and they marched gaily. Some columns, +supposing. they had reached their destination, halted, piled arms, and +settled down on the cold ground, but the majority marched all night +and arrived at places where they evidently should not have been. + +Only Count Orlov-Denisov with his Cossacks (the least important +detachment of all) got to his appointed place at the right time. +This detachment halted at the outskirts of a forest, on the path +leading from the village of Stromilova to Dmitrovsk. + +Toward dawn, Count Orlov-Denisov, who had dozed off, was awakened by +a deserter from the French army being brought to him. This was a +Polish sergeant of Poniatowski's corps, who explained in Polish that +he had come over because he had been slighted in the service: that +he ought long ago to have been made an officer, that he was braver +than any of them, and so he had left them and wished to pay them +out. He said that Murat was spending the night less than a mile from +where they were, and that if they would let him have a convoy of a +hundred men he would capture him alive. Count Orlov-Denisov +consulted his fellow officers. + +The offer was too tempting to be refused. Everyone volunteered to go +and everybody advised making the attempt. After much disputing and +arguing, Major-General Grekov with two Cossack regiments decided to go +with the Polish sergeant. + +"Now, remember," said Count Orlov-Denisov to the sergeant at +parting, "if you have been lying I'll have you hanged like a dog; +but if it's true you shall have a hundred gold pieces!" + +Without replying, the sergeant, with a resolute air, mounted and +rode away with Grekov whose men had quickly assembled. They +disappeared into the forest, and Count Orlov-Denisov, having seen +Grekov off, returned, shivering from the freshness of the early dawn +and excited by what he had undertaken on his own responsibility, and +began looking at the enemy camp, now just visible in the deceptive +light of dawn and the dying campfires. Our columns ought to have begun +to appear on an open declivity to his right. He looked in that +direction, but though the columns would have been visible quite far +off, they were not to be seen. It seemed to the count that things were +beginning to stir in the French camp, and his keen-sighted adjutant +confirmed this. + +"Oh, it is really too late," said Count Orlov, looking at the camp. + +As often happens when someone we have trusted is no longer before +our eyes, it suddenly seemed quite clear and obvious to him that the +sergeant was an impostor, that he had lied, and that the whole Russian +attack would be ruined by the absence of those two regiments, which he +would lead away heaven only knew where. How could one capture a +commander in chief from among such a mass of troops! + +"I am sure that rascal was lying," said the count. + +"They can still be called back," said one of his suite, who like +Count Orlov felt distrustful of the adventure when he looked at the +enemy's camp. + +"Eh? Really... what do you think? Should we let them go on or not?" + +"Will you have them fetched back?" + +"Fetch them back, fetch them back!" said Count Orlov with sudden +determination, looking at his watch. "It will be too late. It is quite +light." + +And the adjutant galloped through the forest after Grekov. When +Grekov returned, Count Orlov-Denisov, excited both by the abandoned +attempt and by vainly awaiting the infantry columns that still did not +appear, as well as by the proximity of the enemy, resolved to advance. +All his men felt the same excitement. + +"Mount!" he commanded in a whisper. The men took their places and +crossed themselves.... "Forward, with God's aid!" + +"Hurrah-ah-ah!" reverberated in the forest, and the Cossack +companies, trailing their lances and advancing one after another as if +poured out of a sack, dashed gaily across the brook toward the camp. + +One desperate, frightened yell from the first French soldier who saw +the Cossacks, and all who were in the camp, undressed and only just +waking up, ran off in all directions, abandoning cannons, muskets, and +horses. + +Had the Cossacks pursued the French, without heeding what was behind +and around them, they would have captured Murat and everything +there. That was what the officers desired. But it was impossible to +make the Cossacks budge when once they had got booty and prisoners. +None of them listened to orders. Fifteen hundred prisoners and +thirty-eight guns were taken on the spot, besides standards and +(what seemed most important to the Cossacks) horses, saddles, +horsecloths, and the like. All this had to be dealt with, the +prisoners and guns secured, the booty divided- not without some +shouting and even a little themselves- and it was on this that the +Cossacks all busied themselves. + +The French, not being farther pursued, began to recover +themselves: they formed into detachments and began firing. +Orlov-Denisov, still waiting for the other columns to arrive, advanced +no further. + +Meantime, according to the dispositions which said that "the First +Column will march" and so on, the infantry of the belated columns, +commanded by Bennigsen and directed by Toll, had started in due +order and, as always happens, had got somewhere, but not to their +appointed places. As always happens the men, starting cheerfully, +began to halt; murmurs were heard, there was a sense of confusion, and +finally a backward movement. Adjutants and generals galloped about, +shouted, grew angry, quarreled, said they had come quite wrong and +were late, gave vent to a little abuse, and at last gave it all up and +went forward, simply to get somewhere. "We shall get somewhere or +other!" And they did indeed get somewhere, though not to their right +places; a few eventually even got to their right place, but too late +to be of any use and only in time to be fired at. Toll, who in this +battle played the part of Weyrother at Austerlitz, galloped +assiduously from place to place, finding everything upside down +everywhere. Thus he stumbled on Bagovut's corps in a wood when it +was already broad daylight, though the corps should long before have +joined Orlov-Denisov. Excited and vexed by the failure and supposing +that someone must be responsible for it, Toll galloped up to the +commander of the corps and began upbraiding him severely, saying +that he ought to be shot. General Bagovut, a fighting old soldier of +placid temperament, being also upset by all the delay, confusion, +and cross-purposes, fell into a rage to everybody's surprise and quite +contrary to his usual character and said disagreeable things to Toll. + +"I prefer not to take lessons from anyone, but I can die with my men +as well as anybody," he said, and advanced with a single division. + +Coming out onto a field under the enemy's fire, this brave general +went straight ahead, leading his men under fire, without considering +in his agitation whether going into action now, with a single +division, would be of any use or no. Danger, cannon balls, and bullets +were just what he needed in his angry mood. One of the first bullets +killed him, and other bullets killed many of his men. And his division +remained under fire for some time quite uselessly. + +CHAPTER VII + +Meanwhile another column was to have attacked the French from the +front, but Kutuzov accompanied that column. He well knew that +nothing but confusion would come of this battle undertaken against his +will, and as far as was in his power held the troops back. He did +not advance. + +He rode silently on his small gray horse, indolently answering +suggestions that they should attack. + +"The word attack is always on your tongue, but you don't see that we +are unable to execute complicated maneuvers," said he to +Miloradovich who asked permission to advance. + +"We couldn't take Murat prisoner this morning or get to the place in +time, and nothing can be done now!" he replied to someone else. + +When Kutuzov was informed that at the French rear- where according +to the reports of the Cossacks there had previously been nobody- there +were now two battalions of Poles, he gave a sidelong glance at Ermolov +who was behind him and to whom he had not spoken since the previous +day. + +"You see! They are asking to attack and making plans of all kinds, +but as soon as one gets to business nothing is ready, and the enemy, +forewarned, takes measures accordingly." + +Ermolov screwed up his eyes and smiled faintly on hearing these +words. He understood that for him the storm had blown over, and that +Kutuzov would content himself with that hint. + +"He's having a little fun at my expense," said Ermolov softly, +nudging with his knee Raevski who was at his side. + +Soon after this, Ermolov moved up to Kutuzov and respectfully +remarked: + +"It is not too late yet, your Highness- the enemy has not gone away- +if you were to order an attack! If not, the Guards will not so much as +see a little smoke." + +Kutuzov did not reply, but when they reported to him that Murat's +troops were in retreat he ordered an advance, though at every +hundred paces he halted for three quarters of an hour. + +The whole battle consisted in what Orlov-Denisov's Cossacks had +done: the rest of the army merely lost some hundreds of men uselessly. + +In consequence of this battle Kutuzov received a diamond decoration, +and Bennigsen some diamonds and a hundred thousand rubles, others also +received pleasant recognitions corresponding to their various +grades, and following the battle fresh changes were made in the staff. + +"That's how everything is done with us, all topsy-turvy!" said the +Russian officers and generals after the Tarutino battle, letting it be +understood that some fool there is doing things all wrong but that +we ourselves should not have done so, just as people speak today. +But people who talk like that either do not know what they are talking +about or deliberately deceive themselves. No battle- Tarutino, +Borodino, or Austerlitz- takes place as those who planned it +anticipated. That is an essential condition. + +A countless number of free forces (for nowhere is man freer than +during a battle, where it is a question of life and death) influence +the course taken by the fight, and that course never can be known in +advance and never coincides with the direction of any one force. + +If many simultaneously and variously directed forces act on a +given body, the direction of its motion cannot coincide with any one +of those forces, but will always be a mean- what in mechanics is +represented by the diagonal of a parallelogram of forces. + +If in the descriptions given by historians, especially French +ones, we find their wars and battles carried out in accordance with +previously formed plans, the only conclusion to be drawn is that those +descriptions are false. + +The battle of Tarutino obviously did not attain the aim Toll had +in view- to lead the troops into action in the order prescribed by the +dispositions; nor that which Count Orlov-Denisov may have had in view- +to take Murat prisoner; nor the result of immediately destroying the +whole corps, which Bennigsen and others may have had in view; nor +the aim of the officer who wished to go into action to distinguish +himself; nor that of the Cossack who wanted more booty than he got, +and so on. But if the aim of the battle was what actually resulted and +what all the Russians of that day desired- to drive the French out +of Russia and destroy their army- it is quite clear that the battle of +Tarutino, just because of its incongruities, was exactly what was +wanted at that stage of the campaign. It would be difficult and even +impossible to imagine any result more opportune than the actual +outcome of this battle. With a minimum of effort and insignificant +losses, despite the greatest confusion, the most important results +of the whole campaign were attained: the transition from retreat to +advance, an exposure of the weakness of the French, and the +administration of that shock which Napoleon's army had only awaited to +begin its flight. + +CHAPTER VIII + +Napoleon enters Moscow after the brilliant victory de la Moskowa; +there can be no doubt about the victory for the battlefield remains in +the hands of the French. The Russians retreat and abandon their +ancient capital. Moscow, abounding in provisions, arms, munitions, and +incalculable wealth, is in Napoleon's hands. The Russian army, only +half the strength of the French, does not make a single attempt to +attack for a whole month. Napoleon's position is most brilliant. He +can either fall on the Russian army with double its strength and +destroy it; negotiate an advantageous peace, or in case of a refusal +make a menacing move on Petersburg, or even, in the case of a reverse, +return to Smolensk or Vilna; or remain in Moscow; in short, no special +genius would seem to be required to retain the brilliant position +the French held at that time. For that, only very simple and easy +steps were necessary: not to allow the troops to loot, to prepare +winter clothing- of which there was sufficient in Moscow for the whole +army- and methodically to collect the provisions, of which +(according to the French historians) there were enough in Moscow to +supply the whole army for six months. Yet Napoleon, that greatest of +all geniuses, who the historians declare had control of the army, took +none of these steps. + +He not merely did nothing of the kind, but on the contrary he used +his power to select the most foolish and ruinous of all the courses +open to him. Of all that Napoleon might have done: wintering in +Moscow, advancing on Petersburg or on Nizhni-Novgorod, or retiring +by a more northerly or more southerly route (say by the road Kutuzov +afterwards took), nothing more stupid or disastrous can be imagined +than what he actually did. He remained in Moscow till October, letting +the troops plunder the city; then, hesitating whether to leave a +garrison behind him, he quitted Moscow, approached Kutuzov without +joining battle, turned to the right and reached Malo-Yaroslavets, +again without attempting to break through and take the road Kutuzov +took, but retiring instead to Mozhaysk along the devastated Smolensk +road. Nothing more stupid than that could have been devised, or more +disastrous for the army, as the sequel showed. Had Napoleon's aim been +to destroy his army, the most skillful strategist could hardly have +devised any series of actions that would so completely have +accomplished that purpose, independently of anything the Russian +army might do. + +Napoleon, the man of genius, did this! But to say that he +destroyed his army because he wished to, or because he was very +stupid, would be as unjust as to say that he had brought his troops to +Moscow because he wished to and because he was very clever and a +genius. + +In both cases his personal activity, having no more force than the +personal activity of any soldier, merely coincided with the laws +that guided the event. + +The historians quite falsely represent Napoleon's faculties as +having weakened in Moscow, and do so only because the results did +not justify his actions. He employed all his ability and strength to +do the best he could for himself and his army, as he had done +previously and as he did subsequently in 1813. His activity at that +time was no less astounding than it was in Egypt, in Italy, in +Austria, and in Prussia. We do not know for certain in how far his +genius was genuine in Egypt- where forty centuries looked down upon +his grandeur- for his great exploits there are all told us by +Frenchmen. We cannot accurately estimate his genius in Austria or +Prussia, for we have to draw our information from French or German +sources, and the incomprehensible surrender of whole corps without +fighting and of fortresses without a siege must incline Germans to +recognize his genius as the only explanation of the war carried on +in Germany. But we, thank God, have no need to recognize his genius in +order to hide our shame. We have paid for the right to look at the +matter plainly and simply, and we will not abandon that right. + +His activity in Moscow was as amazing and as full of genius as +elsewhere. Order after order order and plan after plan were issued +by him from the time he entered Moscow till the time he left it. The +absence of citizens and of a deputation, and even the burning of +Moscow, did not disconcert him. He did not lose sight either of the +welfare of his army or of the doings of the enemy, or of the welfare +of the people of Russia, or of the direction of affairs in Paris, or +of diplomatic considerations concerning the terms of the anticipated +peace. + +CHAPTER IX + +With regard to military matters, Napoleon immediately on his entry +into Moscow gave General Sabastiani strict orders to observe the +movements of the Russian army, sent army corps out along the different +roads, and charged Murat to find Kutuzov. Then he gave careful +directions about the fortification of the Kremlin, and drew up a +brilliant plan for a future campaign over the whole map of Russia. + +With regard to diplomatic questions, Napoleon summoned Captain +Yakovlev, who had been robbed and was in rags and did not know how +to get out of Moscow, minutely explained to him his whole policy and +his magnanimity, and having written a letter to the Emperor +Alexander in which he considered it his duty to inform his Friend +and Brother that Rostopchin had managed affairs badly in Moscow, he +dispatched Yakovlev to Petersburg. + +Having similarly explained his views and his magnanimity to +Tutolmin, he dispatched that old man also to Petersburg to negotiate. + +With regard to legal matters, immediately after the fires he gave +orders to find and execute the incendiaries. And the scoundrel +Rostopchin was punished by an order to burn down his houses. + +With regard to administrative matters, Moscow was granted a +constitution. A municipality was established and the following +announcement issued: + +INHABITANTS OF MOSCOW! + +Your misfortunes are cruel, but His Majesty the Emperor and King +desires to arrest their course. Terrible examples have taught you +how he punishes disobedience and crime. Strict measures have been +taken to put an end to disorder and to re-establish public security. A +paternal administration, chosen from among yourselves, will form +your municipality or city government. It will take care of you, of +your needs, and of your welfare. Its members will be distinguished +by a red ribbon worn across the shoulder, and the mayor of the city +will wear a white belt as well. But when not on duty they will only +wear a red ribbon round the left arm. + +The city police is established on its former footing, and better +order already prevails in consequence of its activity. The +government has appointed two commissaries general, or chiefs of +police, and twenty commissaries or captains of wards have been +appointed to the different wards of the city. You will recognize +them by the white ribbon they will wear on the left arm. Several +churches of different denominations are open, and divine service is +performed in them unhindered. Your fellow citizens are returning every +day to their homes. and orders have been given that they should find +in them the help and protection due to their misfortunes. These are +the measures the government has adopted to re-establish order and +relieve youp condition. But to achieve this aim it is necessary that +you should add your efforts and should, if possible, forget the +misfortunes you have suffered, should entertain the hope of a less +cruel fate, should be certain that inevitable and ignominious death +awaits those who make any attempt on your persons or on what remains +of your property, and finally that you should not doubt that these +will be safeguarded, since such is the will of the greatest and most +just of monarchs. Soldiers and citizens, of whatever nation you may +be, re-establish public confidence, the source of the welfare of a +state, live like brothers, render mutual aid and protection one to +another, unite to defeat the intentions of the evil-minded, obey the +military and civil authorities, and your tears will soon cease to +flow! + +With regard to supplies for the army, Napoleon decreed that all +the troops in turn should enter Moscow a la maraude~^ to obtain +provisions for themselves, so that the army might have its future +provided for. + +^~ As looters. + +With regard to religion, Napoleon ordered the priests to be +brought back and services to be again performed in the churches. + +With regard to commerce and to provisioning the army, the +following was placarded everywhere: + +PROCLAMATION! + +You, peaceful inhabitants of Moscow, artisans and workmen whom +misfortune has driven from the city, and you scattered tillers of +the soil, still kept out in the fields by groundless fear, listen! +Tranquillity is returning to this capital and order is being +restored in it. Your fellow countrymen are emerging boldly from +their hiding places on finding that they are respected. Any violence +to them or to their property is promptly punished. His Majesty the +Emperor and King protects them, and considers no one among you his +enemy except those who disobey his orders. He desires to end your +misfortunes and restore you to your homes and families. Respond, +therefore, to his benevolent intentions and come to us without fear. +Inhabitants, return with confidence to your abodes! You will soon find +means of satisfying your needs. Craftsmen and industrious artisans, +return to your work, your houses, your shops, where the protection +of guards awaits you! You shall receive proper pay for your work. +And lastly you too, peasants, come from the forests where you are +hiding in terror, return to your huts without fear, in full +assurance that you will find protection! Markets are established in +the city where peasants can bring their surplus supplies and the +products of the soil. The government has taken the following steps +to ensure freedom of sale for them: (1) From today, peasants, +husbandmen, and those living in the neighborhood of Moscow may without +any danger bring their supplies of all kinds to two appointed markets, +of which one is on the Mokhovaya Street and the other at the Provision +Market. (2) Such supplies will be bought from them at such prices as +seller and buyer may agree on, and if a seller is unable to obtain a +fair price he will be free to take his goods back to his village and +no one may hinder him under any pretense. (3) Sunday and Wednesday +of each week are appointed as the chief market days and to that end +a sufficient number of troops will be stationed along the highroads on +Tuesdays and Saturdays at such distances from the town as to protect +the carts. (4) Similar measures will be taken that peasants with their +carts and horses may meet with no hindrance on their return journey. +(5) Steps will immediately be taken to re-establish ordinary trading. + +Inhabitants of the city and villages, and you, workingmen and +artisans, to whatever nation you belong, you are called on to carry +out the paternal intentions of His Majesty the Emperor and King and to +co-operate with him for the public welfare! Lay your respect and +confidence at his feet and do not delay to unite with us! + +With the object of raising the spirits of the troops and of the +people, reviews were constantly held and rewards distributed. The +Emperor rode through the streets to comfort the inhabitants, and, +despite his preoccupation with state affairs, himself visited the +theaters that were established by his order. + +In regard to philanthropy, the greatest virtue of crowned heads, +Napoleon also did all in his power. He caused the words Maison de ma +Mere to be inscribed on the charitable institutions, thereby combining +tender filial affection with the majestic benevolence of a monarch. He +visited the Foundling Hospital and, allowing the orphans saved by +him to kiss his white hands, graciously conversed with Tutolmin. Then, +as Thiers eloquently recounts, he ordered his soldiers to be paid in +forged Russian money which he had prepared: "Raising the use of +these means by an act worthy of himself and of the French army, he let +relief be distributed to those who had been burned out. But as food +was too precious to be given to foreigners, who were for the most part +enemies, Napoleon preferred to supply them with money with which to +purchase food from outside, and had paper rubles distributed to them." + +With reference to army discipline, orders were continually being +issued to inflict severe punishment for the nonperformance of military +duties and to suppress robbery. + +CHAPTER X + +But strange to say, all these measures, efforts, and plans- which +were not at all worse than others issued in similar circumstances- did +not affect the essence of the matter but, like the hands of a clock +detached from the mechanism, swung about in an arbitrary and aimless +way without engaging the cogwheels. + +With reference to the military side- the plan of campaign- that work +of genius of which Thiers remarks that, "His genius never devised +anything more profound, more skillful, or more admirable," and +enters into a polemic with M. Fain to prove that this work of genius +must be referred not to the fourth but to the fifteenth of October- +that plan never was or could be executed, for it was quite out of +touch with the facts of the case. The fortifying of the Kremlin, for +which la Mosquee (as Napoleon termed the church of Basil the +Beatified) was to have been razed to the ground, proved quite useless. +The mining of the Kremlin only helped toward fulfilling Napoleon's +wish that it should be blown up when he left Moscow- as a child +wants the floor on which he has hurt himself to be beaten. The pursuit +of the Russian army, about which Napoleon was so concerned, produced +an unheard-of result. The French generals lost touch with the +Russian army of sixty thousand men, and according to Thiers it was +only eventually found, like a lost pin, by the skill- and apparently +the genius- of Murat. + +With reference to diplomacy, all Napoleon's arguments as to his +magnanimity and justice, both to Tutolmin and to Yakovlev (whose chief +concern was to obtain a greatcoat and a conveyance), proved useless; +Alexander did not receive these envoys and did not reply to their +embassage. + +With regard to legal matters, after the execution of the supposed +incendiaries the rest of Moscow burned down. + +With regard to administrative matters, the establishment of a +municipality did not stop the robberies and was only of use to certain +people who formed part of that municipality and under pretext of +preserving order looted Moscow or saved their own property from +being looted. + +With regard to religion, as to which in Egypt matters had so +easily been settled by Napoleon's visit to a mosque, no results were +achieved. Two or three priests who were found in Moscow did try to +carry out Napoleon's wish, but one of them was slapped in the face +by a French soldier while conducting service, and a French official +reported of another that: "The priest whom I found and invited to +say Mass cleaned and locked up the church. That night the doors were +again broken open, the padlocks smashed, the books mutilated, and +other disorders perpetrated." + +With reference to commerce, the proclamation to industrious +workmen and to peasants evoked no response. There were no +industrious workmen, and the peasants caught the commissaries who +ventured too far out of town with the proclamation and killed them. + +As to the theaters for the entertainment of the people and the +troops, these did not meet with success either. The theaters set up in +the Kremlin and in Posnyakov's house were closed again at once because +the actors and actresses were robbed. + +Even philanthropy did not have the desired effect. The genuine as +well as the false paper money which flooded Moscow lost its value. The +French, collecting booty, cared only for gold. Not only was the +paper money valueless which Napoleon so graciously distributed to +the unfortunate, but even silver lost its value in relation to gold. + +But the most amazing example of the ineffectiveness of the orders +given by the authorities at that time was Napoleon's attempt to stop +the looting and re-establish discipline. + +This is what the army authorities were reporting: + +"Looting continues in the city despite the decrees against it. Order +is not yet restored and not a single merchant is carrying on trade +in a lawful manner. The sutlers alone venture to trade, and they +sell stolen goods." + +"The neighborhood of my ward continues to be pillaged by soldiers of +the 3rd Corps who, not satisfied with taking from the unfortunate +inhabitants hiding in the cellars the little they have left, even have +the ferocity to wound them with their sabers, as I have repeatedly +witnessed." + +"Nothing new, except that the soldiers are robbing and pillaging- +October 9." + +"Robbery and pillaging continue. There is a band of thieves in our +district who ought to be arrested by a strong force- October 11." + +"The Emperor is extremely displeased that despite the strict +orders to stop pillage, parties of marauding Guards are continually +seen returning to the Kremlin. Among the Old Guard disorder and +pillage were renewed more violently than ever yesterday evening, +last night, and today. The Emperor sees with regret that the picked +soldiers appointed to guard his person, who should set an example of +discipline, carry disobedience to such a point that they break into +the cellars and stores containing army supplies. Others have disgraced +themselves to the extent of disobeying sentinels and officers, and +have abused and beaten them." + +"The Grand Marshal of the palace," wrote the governor, "complains +bitterly that in spite of repeated orders, the soldiers continue to +commit nuisances in all the courtyards and even under the very windows +of the Emperor." + +That army, like a herd of cattle run wild and trampling underfoot +the provender which might have saved it from starvation, disintegrated +and perished with each additional day it remained in Moscow. But it +did not go away. + +It began to run away only when suddenly seized by a panic caused +by the capture of transport trains on the Smolensk road, and by the +battle of Tarutino. The news of that battle of Tarutino, +unexpectedly received by Napoleon at a review, evoked in him a +desire to punish the Russians (Thiers says), and he issued the order +for departure which the whole army was demanding. + +Fleeing from Moscow the soldiers took with them everything they +had stolen. Napoleon, too, carried away his own personal tresor, but +on seeing the baggage trains that impeded the army, he was (Thiers +says) horror-struck. And yet with his experience of war he did not +order all the superfluous vehicles to be burned, as he had done with +those of a certain marshal when approaching Moscow. He gazed at the +caleches and carriages in which soldiers were riding and remarked that +it was a very good thing, as those vehicles could be used to carry +provisions, the sick, and the wounded. + +The plight of the whole army resembled that of a wounded animal +which feels it is perishing and does not know what it is doing. To +study the skillful tactics and aims of Napoleon and his army from +the time it entered Moscow till it was destroyed is like studying +the dying leaps and shudders of a mortally wounded animal. Very +often a wounded animal, hearing a rustle, rushes straight at the +hunter's gun, runs forward and back again, and hastens its own end. +Napoleon, under pressure from his whole army, did the same thing. +The rustle of the battle of Tarutino frightened the beast, and it +rushed forward onto the hunter's gun, reached him, turned back, and +finally- like any wild beast- ran back along the most +disadvantageous and dangerous path, where the old scent was familiar. + +During the whole of that period Napoleon, who seems to us to have +been the leader of all these movements- as the figurehead of a ship +may seem to a savage to guide the vessel- acted like a child who, +holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving +it. + +CHAPTER XI + +Early in the morning of the sixth of October Pierre went out of +the shed, and on returning stopped by the door to play with a little +blue-gray dog, with a long body and short bandy legs, that jumped +about him. This little dog lived in their shed, sleeping beside +Karataev at night; it sometimes made excursions into the town but +always returned again. Probably it had never had an owner, and it +still belonged to nobody and had no name. The French called it Azor; +the soldier who told stories called it Femgalka; Karataev and others +called it Gray, or sometimes Flabby. Its lack of a master, a name, +or even of a breed or any definite color did not seem to trouble the +blue-gray dog in the least. Its furry tail stood up firm and round +as a plume, its bandy legs served it so well that it would often +gracefully lift a hind leg and run very easily and quickly on three +legs, as if disdaining to use all four. Everything pleased it. Now +it would roll on its back, yelping with delight, now bask in the sun +with a thoughtful air of importance, and now frolic about playing with +a chip of wood or a straw. + +Pierre's attire by now consisted of a dirty torn shirt (the only +remnant of his former clothing), a pair of soldier's trousers which by +Karataev's advice he tied with string round the ankles for warmth, and +a peasant coat and cap. Physically he had changed much during this +time. He no longer seemed stout, though he still had the appearance of +solidity and strength hereditary in his family. A beard and mustache +covered the lower part of his face, and a tangle of hair, infested +with lice, curled round his head like a cap. The look of his eyes +was resolute, calm, and animatedly alert, as never before. The +former slackness which had shown itself even in his eyes was now +replaced by an energetic readiness for action and resistance. His feet +were bare. + +Pierre first looked down the field across which vehicles and +horsemen were passing that morning, then into the distance across +the river, then at the dog who was pretending to be in earnest about +biting him, and then at his bare feet which he placed with pleasure in +various positions, moving his dirty thick big toes. Every time he +looked at his bare feet a smile of animated self-satisfaction +flitted across his face. The sight of them reminded him of all he +had experienced and learned during these weeks and this recollection +was pleasant to him. + +For some days the weather had been calm and clear with slight frosts +in the mornings- what is called an "old wives' summer." + +In the sunshine the air was warm, and that warmth was particularly +pleasant with the invigorating freshness of the morning frost still in +the air. + +On everything- far and near- lay the magic crystal glitter seen only +at that time autumn. The Sparrow Hills were visible in the distance, +with the village, the church, and the large white house. The bare +trees, the sand, the bricks and roofs of the houses, the green +church spire, and the corners of the white house in the distance, +all stood out in the transparent air in most delicate outline and with +unnatural clearness. Near by could be seen the familiar ruins of a +half-burned mansion occupied by the French, with lilac bushes still +showing dark green beside the fence. And even that ruined and befouled +house- which in dull weather was repulsively ugly- seemed quietly +beautiful now, in the clear, motionless brilliance. + +A French corporal, with coat unbuttoned in a homely way, a +skullcap on his head, and a short pipe in his mouth, came from +behind a corner of the shed and approached Pierre with a friendly +wink. + +"What sunshine, Monsieur Kiril!" (Their name for Pierre.) "Eh? +Just like spring!" + +And the corporal leaned against the door and offered Pierre his +pipe, though whenever he offered it Pierre always declined it. + +"To be on the march in such weather..." he began. + +Pierre inquired what was being said about leaving, and the +corporal told him that nearly all the troops were starting and there +ought to be an order about the prisoners that day. Sokolov, one of the +soldiers in the shed with Pierre, was dying, and Pierre told the +corporal that something should be done about him. The corporal replied +that Pierre need not worry about that as they had an ambulance and a +permanent hospital and arrangements would be made for the sick, and +that in general everything that could happen had been foreseen by +the authorities. + +"Besides, Monsieur Kiril, you have only to say a word to the +captain, you know. He is a man who never forgets anything. Speak to +the captain when he makes his round, he will do anything for you." + +(The captain of whom the corporal spoke often had long chats with +Pierre and showed him all sorts of favors.) + +"'You see, St. Thomas,' he said to me the other day. 'Monsieur Kiril +is a man of education, who speaks French. He is a Russian seigneur who +has had misfortunes, but he is a man. He knows what's what.... If he +wants anything and asks me, he won't get a refusal. When one has +studied, you see, one likes education and well-bred people.' It is for +your sake I mention it, Monsieur Kiril. The other day if it had not +been for you that affair would have ended ill." + +And after chatting a while longer, the corporal went away. (The +affair he had alluded to had happened a few days before- a fight +between the prisoners and the French soldiers, in which Pierre had +succeeded in pacifying his comrades.) Some of the prisoners who had +heard Pierre talking to the corporal immediately asked what the +Frenchman had said. While Pierre was repeating what he had been told +about the army leaving Moscow, a thin, sallow, tattered French soldier +came up to the door of the shed. Rapidly and timidly raising his +fingers to his forehead by way of greeting, he asked Pierre whether +the soldier Platoche to whom he had given a shirt to sew was in that +shed. + +A week before the French had had boot leather and linen issued to +them, which they had given out to the prisoners to make up into +boots and shirts for them. + +"Ready, ready, dear fellow!" said Karataev, coming out with a neatly +folded shirt. + +Karataev, on account of the warm weather and for convenience at +work, was wearing only trousers and a tattered shirt as black as soot. +His hair was bound round, workman fashion, with a wisp of lime-tree +bast, and his round face seemed rounder and pleasanter than ever. + +"A promise is own brother to performance! I said Friday and here +it is, ready," said Platon, smiling and unfolding the shirt he had +sewn. + +The Frenchman glanced around uneasily and then, as if overcoming his +hesitation, rapidly threw off his uniform and put on the shirt. He had +a long, greasy, flowered silk waistcoat next to his sallow, thin +bare body, but no shirt. He was evidently afraid the prisoners looking +on would laugh at him, and thrust his head into the shirt hurriedly. +None of the prisoners said a word. + +"See, it fits well!" Platon kept repeating, pulling the shirt +straight. + +The Frenchman, having pushed his head and hands through, without +raising his eyes, looked down at the shirt and examined the seams. + +"You see, dear man, this is not a sewing shop, and I had no proper +tools; and, as they say, one needs a tool even to kill a louse," +said Platon with one of his round smiles, obviously pleased with his +work. + +"It's good, quite good, thank you," said the Frenchman, in French, +"but there must be some linen left over. + +"It will fit better still when it sets to your body," said Karataev, +still admiring his handiwork. "You'll be nice and comfortable...." + +"Thanks, thanks, old fellow.... But the bits left over?" said the +Frenchman again and smiled. He took out an assignation ruble note +and gave it to Karataev. "But give me the pieces that are over." + +Pierre saw that Platon did not want to understand what the Frenchman +was saying, and he looked on without interfering. Karataev thanked the +Frenchman for the money and went on admiring his own work. The +Frenchman insisted on having the pieces returned that were left over +and asked Pierre to translate what he said. + +"What does he want the bits for?" said Karataev. "They'd make fine +leg bands for us. Well, never mind." + +And Karataev, with a suddenly changed and saddened expression, +took a small bundle of scraps from inside his shirt and gave it to the +Frenchman without looking at him. "Oh dear!" muttered Karataev and +went away. The Frenchman looked at the linen, considered for a moment, +then looked inquiringly at Pierre and, as if Pierre's look had told +him something, suddenly blushed and shouted in a squeaky voice: + +"Platoche! Eh, Platoche! Keep them yourself!" And handing back the +odd bits he turned and went out. + +"There, look at that," said Karataev, swaying his head. "People said +they were not Christians, but they too have souls. It's what the old +folk used to say: 'A sweating hand's an open hand, a dry hand's +close.' He's naked, but yet he's given it back." + +Karataev smiled thoughtfully and was silent awhile looking at the +pieces. + +"But they'll make grand leg bands, dear friend," he said, and went +back into the shed. + +CHAPTER XII + +Four weeks had passed since Pierre had been taken prisoner and +though the French had offered to move him from the men's to the +officers' shed, he had stayed in the shed where he was first put. + +In burned and devastated Moscow Pierre experienced almost the +extreme limits of privation a man can endure; but thanks to his +physical strength and health, of which he had till then been +unconscious, and thanks especially to the fact that the privations +came so gradually that it was impossible to say when they began, he +endured his position not only lightly but joyfully. And just at this +time he obtained the tranquillity and ease of mind he had formerly +striven in vain to reach. He had long sought in different ways that +tranquillity of mind, that inner harmony which had so impressed him in +the soldiers at the battle of Borodino. He had sought it in +philanthropy, in Freemasonry, in the dissipations of town life, in +wine, in heroic feats of self-sacrifice, and in romantic love for +Natasha; he had sought it by reasoning- and all these quests and +experiments had failed him. And now without thinking about it he had +found that peace and inner harmony only through the horror of death, +through privation, and through what he recognized in Karataev. + +Those dreadful moments he had lived through at the executions had as +it were forever washed away from his imagination and memory the +agitating thoughts and feelings that had formerly seemed so important. +It did not now occur to him to think of Russia, or the war, or +politics, or Napoleon. It was plain to him that all these things +were no business of his, and that he was not called on to judge +concerning them and therefore could not do so. "Russia and summer +weather are not bound together," he thought, repeating words of +Karataev's which he found strangely consoling. His intention of +killing Napoleon and his calculations of the cabalistic number of +the beast of the Apocalypse now seemed to him meaningless and even +ridiculous. His anger with his wife and anxiety that his name should +not be smirched now seemed not merely trivial but even amusing. What +concern was it of his that somewhere or other that woman was leading +the life she preferred? What did it matter to anybody, and +especially to him, whether or not they found out that their prisoner's +name was Count Bezukhov? + +He now often remembered his conversation with Prince Andrew and +quite agreed with him, though he understood Prince Andrew's thoughts +somewhat differently. Prince Andrew had thought and said that +happiness could only be negative, but had said it with a shade of +bitterness and irony as though he was really saying that all desire +for positive happiness is implanted in us merely to torment us and +never be satisfied. But Pierre believed it without any mental +reservation. The absence of suffering, the satisfaction of one's needs +and consequent freedom in the choice of one's occupation, that is, +of one's way of life, now seemed to Pierre to be indubitably man's +highest happiness. Here and now for the first time he fully +appreciated the enjoyment of eating when he wanted to eat, drinking +when he wanted to drink, sleeping when he wanted to sleep, of warmth +when he was cold, of talking to a fellow man when he wished to talk +and to hear a human voice. The satisfaction of one's needs- good food, +cleanliness, and freedom- now that he was deprived of all this, seemed +to Pierre to constitute perfect happiness; and the choice of +occupation, that is, of his way of life- now that that was so +restricted- seemed to him such an easy matter that he forgot that a +superfluity of the comforts of life destroys all joy in satisfying +one's needs, while great freedom in the choice of occupation- such +freedom as his wealth, his education, and his social position had +given him in his own life- is just what makes the choice of occupation +insolubly difficult and destroys the desire and possibility of +having an occupation. + +All Pierre's daydreams now turned on the time when he would be free. +Yet subsequently, and for the rest of his life, he thought and spoke +with enthusiasm of that month of captivity, of those irrecoverable, +strong, joyful sensations, and chiefly of the complete peace of mind +and inner freedom which he experienced only during those weeks. + +When on the first day he got up early, went out of the shed at dawn, +and saw the cupolas and crosses of the New Convent of the Virgin still +dark at first, the hoarfrost on the dusty grass, the Sparrow Hills, +and the wooded banks above the winding river vanishing in the purple +distance, when he felt the contact of the fresh air and heard the +noise of the crows flying from Moscow across the field, and when +afterwards light gleamed from the east and the sun's rim appeared +solemnly from behind a cloud, and the cupolas and crosses, the +hoarfrost, the distance and the river, all began to sparkle in the +glad light- Pierre felt a new joy and strength in life such as he +had never before known. And this not only stayed with him during the +whole of his imprisonment, but even grew in strength as the +hardships of his position increased. + +That feeling of alertness and of readiness for anything was still +further strengthened in him by the high opinion his fellow prisoners +formed of him soon after his arrival at the shed. With his knowledge +of languages, the respect shown him by the French, his simplicity, his +readiness to give anything asked of him (he received the allowance +of three rubles a week made to officers); with his strength, which +he showed to the soldiers by pressing nails into the walls of the hut; +his gentleness to his companions, and his capacity for sitting still +and thinking without doing anything (which seemed to them +incomprehensible), he appeared to them a rather mysterious and +superior being. The very qualities that had been a hindrance, if not +actually harmful, to him in the world he had lived in- his strength, +his disdain for the comforts of life, his absent-mindedness and +simplicity- here among these people gave him almost the status of a +hero. And Pierre felt that their opinion placed responsibilities +upon him. + +CHAPTER XIII + +The French evacuation began on the night between the sixth and +seventh of October: kitchens and sheds were dismantled, carts +loaded, and troops and baggage trains started. + +At seven in the morning a French convoy in marching trim, wearing +shakos and carrying muskets, knapsacks, and enormous sacks, stood in +front of the sheds, and animated French talk mingled with curses +sounded all along the lines. + +In the shed everyone was ready, dressed, belted, shod, and only +awaited the order to start. The sick soldier, Sokolov, pale and thin +with dark shadows round his eyes, alone sat in his place barefoot +and not dressed. His eyes, prominent from the emaciation of his +face, gazed inquiringly at his comrades who were paying no attention +to him, and he moaned regularly and quietly. It was evidently not so +much his sufferings that caused him to moan (he had dysentery) as +his fear and grief at being left alone. + +Pierre, girt with a rope round his waist and wearing shoes +Karataev had made for him from some leather a French soldier had +torn off a tea chest and brought to have his boots mended with, went +up to the sick man and squatted down beside him. + +"You know, Sokolov, they are not all going away! They have a +hospital here. You may be better off than we others," said Pierre. + +"O Lord! Oh, it will be the death of me! O Lord!" moaned the man +in a louder voice. + +"I'll go and ask them again directly," said Pierre, rising and going +to the door of the shed. + +Just as Pierre reached the door, the corporal who had offered him +a pipe the day before came up to it with two soldiers. The corporal +and soldiers were in marching kit with knapsacks and shakos that had +metal straps, and these changed their familiar faces. + +The corporal came, according to orders, to shut the door. The +prisoners had to be counted before being let out. + +"Corporal, what will they do with the sick man?..." Pierre began. + +But even as he spoke he began to doubt whether this was the corporal +he knew or a stranger, so unlike himself did the corporal seem at that +moment. Moreover, just as Pierre was speaking a sharp rattle of +drums was suddenly heard from both sides. The corporal frowned at +Pierre's words and, uttering some meaningless oaths, slammed the door. +The shed became semidark, and the sharp rattle of the drums on two +sides drowned the sick man's groans. + +"There it is!... It again!..." said Pierre to himself, and an +involuntary shudder ran down his spine. In the corporal's changed +face, in the sound of his voice, in the stirring and deafening noise +of the drums, he recognized that mysterious, callous force which +compelled people against their will to kill their fellow men- that +force the effect of which he had witnessed during the executions. To +fear or to try to escape that force, to address entreaties or +exhortations to those who served as its tools, was useless. Pierre +knew this now. One had to wait and endure. He did not again go to +the sick man, nor turn to look at him, but stood frowning by the +door of the hut. + +When that door was opened and the prisoners, crowding against one +another like a flock of sheep, squeezed into the exit, Pierre pushed +his way forward and approached that very captain who as the corporal +had assured him was ready to do anything for him. The captain was also +in marching kit, and on his cold face appeared that same it which +Pierre had recognized in the corporal's words and in the roll of the +drums. + +"Pass on, pass on!" the captain reiterated, frowning sternly, and +looking at the prisoners who thronged past him. + +Pierre went up to him, though he knew his attempt would be vain. + +"What now?" the officer asked with a cold look as if not recognizing +Pierre. + +Pierre told him about the sick man. + +"He'll manage to walk, devil take him!" said the captain. "Pass +on, pass on!" he continued without looking at Pierre. + +"But he is dying," Pierre again began. + +"Be so good..." shouted the captain, frowning angrily. + +"Dram-da-da-dam, dam-dam..." rattled the drums, and Pierre +understood that this mysterious force completely controlled these +men and that it was now useless to say any more. + +The officer prisoners were separated from the soldiers and told to +march in front. There were about thirty officers, with Pierre among +them, and about three hundred men. + +The officers, who had come from the other sheds, were all +strangers to Pierre and much better dressed than he. They looked at +him and at his shoes mistrustfully, as at an alien. Not far from him +walked a fat major with a sallow, bloated, angry face, who was wearing +a Kazan dressing grown tied round with a towel, and who evidently +enjoyed the respect of his fellow prisoners. He kept one hand, in +which he clasped his tobacco pouch, inside the bosom of his dressing +gown and held the stem of his pipe firmly with the other. Panting +and puffing, the major grumbled and growled at everybody because he +thought he was being pushed and that they were all hurrying when +they had nowhere to hurry to and were all surprised at something +when there was nothing to be surprised at. Another, a thin little +officer, was speaking to everyone, conjecturing where they were now +being taken and how far they would get that day. An official in felt +boots and wearing a commissariat uniform ran round from side to side +and gazed at the ruins of Moscow, loudly announcing his observations +as to what had been burned down and what this or that part of the city +was that they could see. A third officer, who by his accent was a +Pole, disputed with the commissariat officer, arguing that he was +mistaken in his identification of the different wards of Moscow. + +"What are you disputing about?" said the major angrily. "What does +it matter whether it is St. Nicholas or St. Blasius? You see it's +burned down, and there's an end of it.... What are you pushing for? +Isn't the road wide enough?" said he, turning to a man behind him +who was not pushing him at all. + +"Oh, oh, oh! What have they done?" the prisoners on one side and +another were heard saying as they gazed on the charred ruins. "All +beyond the river, and Zubova, and in the Kremlin.... Just look! +There's not half of it left. Yes, I told you- the whole quarter beyond +the river, and so it is." + +"Well, you know it's burned, so what's the use of talking?" said the +major. + +As they passed near a church in the Khamovniki (one of the few +unburned quarters of Moscow) the whole mass of prisoners suddenly +started to one side and exclamations of horror and disgust were heard. + +"Ah, the villains! What heathens! Yes; dead, dead, so he is... And +smeared with something!" + +Pierre too drew near the church where the thing was that evoked +these exclamations, and dimly made out something leaning against the +palings surrounding the church. From the words of his comrades who saw +better than he did, he found that this was the body of a man, set +upright against the palings with its face smeared with soot. + +"Go on! What the devil... Go on! Thirty thousand devils!..." the +convoy guards began cursing and the French soldiers, with fresh +virulence, drove away with their swords the crowd of prisoners who +were gazing at the dead man. + +CHAPTER XIV + +Through the cross streets of the Khamovniki quarter the prisoners +marched, followed only by their escort and the vehicles and wagons +belonging to that escort, but when they reached the supply stores they +came among a huge and closely packed train of artillery mingled with +private vehicles. + +At the bridge they all halted, waiting for those in front to get +across. From the bridge they had a view of endless lines of moving +baggage trains before and behind them. To the right, where the +Kaluga road turns near Neskuchny, endless rows of troops and carts +stretched away into the distance. These were troops of Beauharnais' +corps which had started before any of the others. Behind, along the +riverside and across the Stone Bridge, were Ney's troops and +transport. + +Davout's troops, in whose charge were the prisoners, were crossing +the Crimean bridge and some were already debouching into the Kaluga +road. But the baggage trains stretched out so that the last of +Beauharnais' train had not yet got out of Moscow and reached the +Kaluga road when the vanguard of Ney's army was already emerging +from the Great Ordynka Street. + +When they had crossed the Crimean bridge the prisoners moved a few +steps forward, halted, and again moved on, and from all sides vehicles +and men crowded closer and closer together. They advanced the few +hundred paces that separated the bridge from the Kaluga road, taking +more than an hour to do so, and came out upon the square where the +streets of the Transmoskva ward and the Kaluga road converge, and +the prisoners jammed close together had to stand for some hours at +that crossway. From all sides, like the roar of the sea, were heard +the rattle of wheels, the tramp of feet, and incessant shouts of anger +and abuse. Pierre stood pressed against the wall of a charred house, +listening to that noise which mingled in his imagination with the roll +of the drums. + +To get a better view, several officer prisoners climbed onto the +wall of the half-burned house against which Pierre was leaning. + +"What crowds! Just look at the crowds!... They've loaded goods +even on the cannon! Look there, those are furs!" they exclaimed. "Just +see what the blackguards have looted.... There! See what that one +has behind in the cart.... Why, those are settings taken from some +icons, by heaven!... Oh, the rascals!... See how that fellow has +loaded himself up, he can hardly walk! Good lord, they've even grabbed +those chaises!... See that fellow there sitting on the trunks.... +Heavens! They're fighting." + +"That's right, hit him on the snout- on his snout! Like this, we +shan't get away before evening. Look, look there.... Why, that must be +Napoleon's own. See what horses! And the monograms with a crown! +It's like a portable house.... That fellow's dropped his sack and +doesn't see it. Fighting again... A woman with a baby, and not +bad-looking either! Yes, I dare say, that's the way they'll let you +pass... Just look, there's no end to it. Russian wenches, by heaven, +so they are! In carriages- see how comfortably they've settled +themselves!" + +Again, as at the church in Khamovniki, a wave of general curiosity +bore all the prisoners forward onto the road, and Pierre, thanks to +his stature, saw over the heads of the others what so attracted +their curiosity. In three carriages involved among the munition carts, +closely squeezed together, sat women with rouged faces, dressed in +glaring colors, who were shouting something in shrill voices. + +From the moment Pierre had recognized the appearance of the +mysterious force nothing had seemed to him strange or dreadful: +neither the corpse smeared with soot for fun nor these women +hurrying away nor the burned ruins of Moscow. All that he now +witnessed scarcely made an impression on him- as if his soul, making +ready for a hard struggle, refused to receive impressions that might +weaken it. + +The women's vehicles drove by. Behind them came more carts, +soldiers, wagons, soldiers, gun carriages, carriages, soldiers, +ammunition carts, more soldiers, and now and then women. + +Pierre did not see the people as individuals but saw their movement. + +All these people and horses seemed driven forward by some +invisible power. During the hour Pierre watched them they all came +flowing from the different streets with one and the same desire to get +on quickly; they all jostled one another, began to grow angry and to +fight, white teeth gleamed, brows frowned, ever the same words of +abuse flew from side to side, and all the faces bore the same +swaggeringly resolute and coldly cruel expression that had struck +Pierre that morning on the corporal's face when the drums were +beating. + +It was not till nearly evening that the officer commanding the +escort collected his men and with shouts and quarrels forced his way +in among the baggage trains, and the prisoners, hemmed in on all +sides, emerged onto the Kaluga road. + +They marched very quickly, without resting, and halted only when the +sun began to set. The baggage carts drew up close together and the men +began to prepare for their night's rest. They all appeared angry and +dissatisfied. For a long time, oaths, angry shouts, and fighting could +be heard from all sides. A carriage that followed the escort ran +into one of the carts and knocked a hole in it with its pole. +Several soldiers ran toward the cart from different sides: some beat +the carriage horses on their heads, turning them aside, others +fought among themselves, and Pierre saw that one German was badly +wounded on the head by a sword. + +It seemed that all these men, now that they had stopped amid +fields in the chill dusk of the autumn evening, experienced one and +the same feeling of unpleasant awakening from the hurry and +eagerness to push on that had seized them at the start. Once at a +standstill they all seemed to understand that they did not yet know +where they were going, and that much that was painful and difficult +awaited them on this journey. + +During this halt the escort treated the prisoners even worse than +they had done at the start. It was here that the prisoners for the +first time received horseflesh for their meat ration. + +From the officer down to the lowest soldier they showed what +seemed like personal spite against each of the prisoners, in +unexpected contrast to their former friendly relations. + +This spite increased still more when, on calling over the roll of +prisoners, it was found that in the bustle of leaving Moscow one +Russian soldier, who had pretended to suffer from colic, had +escaped. Pierre saw a Frenchman beat a Russian soldier cruelly for +straying too far from the road, and heard his friend the captain +reprimand and threaten to court-martial a noncommissioned officer on +account of the escape of the Russian. To the noncommissioned officer's +excuse that the prisoner was ill and could not walk, the officer +replied that the order was to shoot those who lagged behind. Pierre +felt that that fatal force which had crushed him during the +executions, but which be had not felt during his imprisonment, now +again controlled his existence. It was terrible, but he felt that in +proportion to the efforts of that fatal force to crush him, there grew +and strengthened in his soul a power of life independent of it. + +He ate his supper of buckwheat soup with horseflesh and chatted with +his comrades. + +Neither Pierre nor any of the others spoke of what they had seen +in Moscow, or of the roughness of their treatment by the French, or of +the order to shoot them which had been announced to them. As if in +reaction against the worsening of their position they were all +particularly animated and gay. They spoke of personal reminiscences, +of amusing scenes they had witnessed during the campaign, and +avoided all talk of their present situation. + +The sun had set long since. Bright stars shone out here and there in +the sky. A red glow as of a conflagration spread above the horizon +from the rising full moon, and that vast red ball swayed strangely +in the gray haze. It grew light. The evening was ending, but the night +had not yet come. Pierre got up and left his new companions, +crossing between the campfires to the other side of the road where +he had been told the common soldier prisoners were stationed. He +wanted to talk to them. On the road he was stopped by a French +sentinel who ordered him back. + +Pierre turned back, not to his companions by the campfire, but to an +unharnessed cart where there was nobody. Tucking his legs under him +and dropping his head he sat down on the cold ground by the wheel of +the cart and remained motionless a long while sunk in thought. +Suddenly he burst out into a fit of his broad, good-natured +laughter, so loud that men from various sides turned with surprise +to see what this strange and evidently solitary laughter could mean. + +"Ha-ha-ha!" laughed Pierre. And he said aloud to himself: "The +soldier did not let me pass. They took me and shut me up. They hold me +captive. What, me? Me? My immortal soul? Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!..." and +he laughed till tears started to his eyes. + +A man got up and came to see what this queer big fellow was laughing +at all by himself. Pierre stopped laughing, got up, went farther +away from the inquisitive man, and looked around him. + +The huge, endless bivouac that had previously resounded with the +crackling of campfires and the voices of many men had grown quiet, the +red campfires were growing paler and dying down. High up in the +light sky hung the full moon. Forests and fields beyond the camp, +unseen before, were now visible in the distance. And farther still, +beyond those forests and fields, the bright, oscillating, limitless +distance lured one to itself. Pierre glanced up at the sky and the +twinkling stars in its faraway depths. "And all that is me, all that +is within me, and it is all I!" thought Pierre. "And they caught all +that and put it into a shed boarded up with planks!" He smiled, and +went and lay down to sleep beside his companions. + +CHAPTER XV + +In the early days of October another envoy came to Kutuzov with a +letter from Napoleon proposing peace and falsely dated from Moscow, +though Napoleon was already not far from Kutuzov on the old Kaluga +road. Kutuzov replied to this letter as he had done to the one +formerly brought by Lauriston, saying that there could be no +question of peace. + +Soon after that a report was received from Dorokhov's guerrilla +detachment operating to the left of Tarutino that troops of +Broussier's division had been seen at Forminsk and that being +separated from the rest of the French army they might easily be +destroyed. The soldiers and officers again demanded action. Generals +on the staff, excited by the memory of the easy victory at Tarutino, +urged Kutuzov to carry out Dorokhov's suggestion. Kutuzov did not +consider any offensive necessary. The result was a compromise which +was inevitable: a small detachment was sent to Forminsk to attack +Broussier. + +By a strange coincidence, this task, which turned out to be a most +difficult and important one, was entrusted to Dokhturov- that same +modest little Dokhturov whom no one had described to us as drawing +up plans of battles, dashing about in front of regiments, showering +crosses on batteries, and so on, and who was thought to be and was +spoken of as undecided and undiscerning- but whom we find commanding +wherever the position was most difficult all through the +Russo-French wars from Austerlitz to the year 1813. At Austerlitz he +remained last at the Augezd dam, rallying the regiments, saving what +was possible when all were flying and perishing and not a single +general was left in the rear guard. Ill with fever he went to Smolensk +with twenty thousand men to defend the town against Napoleon's whole +army. In Smolensk, at the Malakhov Gate, he had hardly dozed off in +a paroxysm of fever before he was awakened by the bombardment of the +town- and Smolensk held out all day long. At the battle of Borodino, +when Bagration was killed and nine tenths of the men of our left flank +had fallen and the full force of the French artillery fire was +directed against it, the man sent there was this same irresolute and +undiscerning Dokhturov- Kutuzov hastening to rectify a mistake he +had made by sending someone else there first. And the quiet little +Dokhturov rode thither, and Borodino became the greatest glory of +the Russian army. Many heroes have been described to us in verse and +prose, but of Dokhturov scarcely a word has been said. + +It was Dokhturov again whom they sent to Forminsk and from there +to Malo-Yaroslavets, the place where the last battle with the French +was fought and where the obvious disintegration of the French army +began; and we are told of many geniuses and heroes of that period of +the campaign, but of Dokhturov nothing or very little is said and that +dubiously. And this silence about Dokhturov is the clearest +testimony to his merit. + +It is natural for a man who does not understand the workings of a +machine to imagine that a shaving that has fallen into it by chance +and is interfering with its action and tossing about in it is its most +important part. The man who does not understand the construction of +the machine cannot conceive that the small connecting cogwheel which +revolves quietly is one of the most essential parts of the machine, +and not the shaving which merely harms and hinders the working. + +On the tenth of October when Dokhturov had gone halfway to +Forminsk and stopped at the village of Aristovo, preparing +faithfully to execute the orders he had received, the whole French +army having, in its convulsive movement, reached Murat's position +apparently in order to give battle- suddenly without any reason turned +off to the left onto the new Kaluga road and began to enter +Forminsk, where only Broussier had been till then. At that time +Dokhturov had under his command, besides Dorokhov's detachment, the +two small guerrilla detachments of Figner and Seslavin. + +On the evening of October 11 Seslavin came to the Aristovo +headquarters with a French guardsman he had captured. The prisoner +said that the troops that had entered Forminsk that day were the +vanguard of the whole army, that Napoleon was there and the whole army +had left Moscow four days previously. That same evening a house serf +who had come from Borovsk said he had seen an immense army entering +the town. Some Cossacks of Dokhturov's detachment reported having +sighted the French Guards marching along the road to Borovsk. From all +these reports it was evident that where they had expected to meet a +single division there was now the whole French army marching from +Moscow in an unexpected direction- along the Kaluga road. Dokhturov +was unwilling to undertake any action, as it was not clear to him +now what he ought to do. He had been ordered to attack Forminsk. But +only Broussier had been there at that time and now the whole French +army was there. Ermolov wished to act on his own judgment, but +Dokhturov insisted that he must have Kutuzov's instructions. So it was +decided to send a dispatch to the staff. + +For this purpose a capable officer, Bolkhovitinov, was chosen, who +was to explain the whole affair by word of mouth, besides delivering a +written report. Toward midnight Bolkhovitinov, having received the +dispatch and verbal instructions, galloped off to the General Staff +accompanied by a Cossack with spare horses. + +CHAPTER XVI + +It was a warm, dark, autumn night. It had been raining for four +days. Having changed horses twice and galloped twenty miles in an hour +and a half over a sticky, muddy road, Bolkhovitinov reached Litashevka +after one o'clock at night. Dismounting at a cottage on whose wattle +fence hung a signboard, GENERAL STAFF, and throwing down his reins, he +entered a dark passage. + +"The general on duty, quick! It's very important!" said he to +someone who had risen and was sniffing in the dark passage. + +"He has been very unwell since the evening and this is the third +night he has not slept," said the orderly pleadingly in a whisper. +"You should wake the captain first." + +"But this is very important, from General Dokhturov," said +Bolkhovitinov, entering the open door which he had found by feeling in +the dark. + +The orderly had gone in before him and began waking somebody. + +"Your honor, your honor! A courier." + +"What? What's that? From whom?" came a sleepy voice. + +"From Dokhturov and from Alexey Petrovich. Napoleon is at Forminsk," +said Bolkhovitinov, unable to see in the dark who was speaking but +guessing by the voice that it was not Konovnitsyn. + +The man who had wakened yawned and stretched himself. + +"I don't like waking him," he said, fumbling for something. "He is +very ill. Perhaps this is only a rumor." + +"Here is the dispatch," said Bolkhovitinov. "My orders are to give +it at once to the general on duty." + +"Wait a moment, I'll light a candle. You damned rascal, where do you +always hide it?" said the voice of the man who was stretching himself, +to the orderly. (This was Shcherbinin, Konovnitsyn's adjutant.) +"I've found it, I've found it!" he added. + +The orderly was striking a light and Shcherbinin was fumbling for +something on the candlestick. + +"Oh, the nasty beasts!" said he with disgust. + +By the light of the sparks Bolkhovitinov saw Shcherbinin's +youthful face as he held the candle, and the face of another man who +was still asleep. This was Konovnitsyn. + +When the flame of the sulphur splinters kindled by the tinder burned +up, first blue and then red, Shcherbinin lit the tallow candle, from +the candlestick of which the cockroaches that had been gnawing it were +running away, and looked at the messenger. Bolkhovitinov was +bespattered all over with mud and had smeared his face by wiping it +with his sleeve. + +"Who gave the report?" inquired Shcherbinin, taking the envelope. + +"The news is reliable," said Bolkhovitinov. "Prisoners, Cossacks, +and the scouts all say the same thing." + +"There's nothing to be done, we'll have to wake him," said +Shcherbinin, rising and going up to the man in the nightcap who lay +covered by a greatcoat. "Peter Petrovich!" said he. (Konovnitsyn did +not stir.) "To the General Staff!" he said with a smile, knowing +that those words would be sure to arouse him. + +And in fact the head in the nightcap was lifted at once. On +Konovnitsyn's handsome, resolute face with cheeks flushed by fever, +there still remained for an instant a faraway dreamy expression remote +from present affairs, but then he suddenly started and his face +assumed its habitual calm and firm appearance. + +"Well, what is it? From whom?" he asked immediately but without +hurry, blinking at the light. + +While listening to the officer's report Konovnitsyn broke the seal +and read the dispatch. Hardly had he done so before he lowered his +legs in their woolen stockings to the earthen floor and began +putting on his boots. Then he took off his nightcap, combed his hair +over his temples, and donned his cap. + +"Did you get here quickly? Let us go to his Highness." + +Konovnitsyn had understood at once that the news brought was of +great importance and that no time must be lost. He did not consider or +ask himself whether the news was good or bad. That did not interest +him. He regarded the whole business of the war not with his +intelligence or his reason but by something else. There was within him +a deep unexpressed conviction that all would be well, but that one +must not trust to this and still less speak about it, but must only +attend to one's own work. And he did his work, giving his whole +strength to the task. + +Peter Petrovich Konovnitsyn, like Dokhturov, seems to have been +included merely for propriety's sake in the list of the so-called +heroes of 1812- the Barclays, Raevskis, Ermolovs, Platovs, and +Miloradoviches. Like Dokhturov he had the reputation of being a man of +very limited capacity and information, and like Dokhturov he never +made plans of battle but was always found where the situation was most +difficult. Since his appointment as general on duty he had always +slept with his door open, giving orders that every messenger should be +allowed to wake him up. In battle he was always under fire, so that +Kutuzov reproved him for it and feared to send him to the front, and +like Dokhturov he was one of those unnoticed cogwheels that, without +clatter or noise, constitute the most essential part of the machine. + +Coming out of the hut into the damp, dark night Konovnitsyn frowned- +partly from an increased pain in his head and partly at the unpleasant +thought that occurred to him, of how all that nest of influential +men on the staff would be stirred up by this news, especially +Bennigsen, who ever since Tarutino had been at daggers drawn with +Kutuzov; and how they would make suggestions, quarrel, issue orders, +and rescind them. And this premonition was disagreeable to him +though he knew it could not be helped. + +And in fact Toll, to whom he went to communicate the news, +immediately began to expound his plans to a general sharing his +quarters, until Konovnitsyn, who listened in weary silence, reminded +him that they must go to see his Highness. + +CHAPTER XVII + +Kutuzov like all old people did not sleep much at night. He often +fell asleep unexpectedly in the daytime, but at night, lying on his +bed without undressing, he generally remained awake thinking. + +So he lay now on his bed, supporting his large, heavy, scarred +head on his plump hand, with his one eye open, meditating and +peering into the darkness. + +Since Bennigsen, who corresponded with the Emperor and had more +influence than anyone else on the staff, had begun to avoid him, +Kutuzov was more at ease as to the possibility of himself and his +troops being obliged to take part in useless aggressive movements. The +lesson of the Tarutino battle and of the day before it, which +Kutuzov remembered with pain, must, he thought, have some effect on +others too. + +"They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive. +Patience and time are my warriors, my champions," thought Kutuzov. +He knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is green. It will +fall of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, +the tree is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge. Like an +experienced sportsman he knew that the beast was wounded, and +wounded as only the whole strength of Russia could have wounded it, +but whether it was mortally wounded or not was still an undecided +question. Now by the fact of Lauriston and Barthelemi having been +sent, and by the reports of the guerrillas, Kutuzov was almost sure +that the wound was mortal. But he needed further proofs and it was +necessary to wait. + +"They want to run to see how they have wounded it. Wait and we shall +see! Continual maneuvers, continual advances!" thought he. "What +for? Only to distinguish themselves! As if fighting were fun. They are +like children from whom one can't get any sensible account of what has +happened because they all want to show how well they can fight. But +that's not what is needed now. + +"And what ingenious maneuvers they all propose to me! It seems to +them that when they have thought of two or three contingencies" (he +remembered the general plan sent him from Petersburg) "they have +foreseen everything. But the contingencies are endless." + +The undecided question as to whether the wound inflicted at Borodino +was mortal or not had hung over Kutuzov's head for a whole month. On +the one hand the French had occupied Moscow. On the other Kutuzov felt +assured with all his being that the terrible blow into which he and +all the Russians had put their whole strength must have been mortal. +But in any case proofs were needed; he had waited a whole month for +them and grew more impatient the longer he waited. Lying on his bed +during those sleepless nights he did just what he reproached those +younger generals for doing. He imagined all sorts of possible +contingencies, just like the younger men, but with this difference, +that he saw thousands of contingencies instead of two or three and +based nothing on them. The longer he thought the more contingencies +presented themselves. He imagined all sorts of movements of the +Napoleonic army as a whole or in sections- against Petersburg, or +against him, or to outflank him. He thought too of the possibility +(which he feared most of all) that Napoleon might fight him with his +own weapon and remain in Moscow awaiting him. Kutuzov even imagined +that Napoleon's army might turn back through Medyn and Yukhnov, but +the one thing he could not foresee was what happened- the insane, +convulsive stampede of Napoleon's army during its first eleven days +after leaving Moscow: a stampede which made possible what Kutuzov +had not yet even dared to think of- the complete extermination of +the French. Dorokhov's report about Broussier's division, the +guerrillas' reports of distress in Napoleon's army, rumors of +preparations for leaving Moscow, all confirmed the supposition that +the French army was beaten and preparing for flight. But these were +only suppositions, which seemed important to the younger men but not +to Kutuzov. With his sixty years' experience he knew what value to +attach to rumors, knew how apt people who desire anything are to group +all news so that it appears to confirm what they desire, and he knew +how readily in such cases they omit all that makes for the contrary. +And the more he desired it the less he allowed himself to believe +it. This question absorbed all his mental powers. All else was to +him only life's customary routine. To such customary routine +belonged his conversations with the staff, the letters he wrote from +Tarutino to Madame de Stael, the reading of novels, the distribution +of awards, his correspondence with Petersburg, and so on. But the +destruction of the French, which he alone foresaw, was his heart's one +desire. + +On the night of the eleventh of October he lay leaning on his arm +and thinking of that. + +There was a stir in the next room and he heard the steps of Toll, +Konovnitsyn, and Bolkhovitinov. + +"Eh, who's there? Come in, come in! What news?" the field marshal +called out to them. + +While a footman was lighting a candle, Toll communicated the +substance of the news. + +"Who brought it?" asked Kutuzov with a look which, when the candle +was lit, struck Toll by its cold severity. + +"There can be no doubt about it, your Highness." + +"Call him in, call him here." + +Kutuzov sat up with one leg hanging down from the bed and his big +paunch resting against the other which was doubled under him. He +screwed up his seeing eye to scrutinize the messenger more +carefully, as if wishing to read in his face what preoccupied his +own mind. + +"Tell me, tell me, friend," said he to Bolkhovitinov in his low, +aged voice, as he pulled together the shirt which gaped open on his +chest, "come nearer- nearer. What news have you brought me? Eh? That +Napoleon has left Moscow? Are you sure? Eh?" + +Bolkhovitinov gave a detailed account from the beginning of all he +had been told to report. + +"Speak quicker, quicker! Don't torture me!" Kutuzov interrupted him. + +Bolkhovitinov told him everything and was then silent, awaiting +instructions. Toll was beginning to say something but Kutuzov +checked him. He tried to say something, but his face suddenly puckered +and wrinkled; he waved his arm at Toll and turned to the opposite side +of the room, to the corner darkened by the icons that hung there. + +"O Lord, my Creator, Thou has heard our prayer..." said he in a +tremulous voice with folded hands. "Russia is saved. I thank Thee, O +Lord!" and he wept. + +CHAPTER XVIII + +From the time he received this news to the end of the campaign all +Kutuzov's activity was directed toward restraining his troops, by +authority, by guile, and by entreaty, from useless attacks, maneuvers, +or encounters with the perishing enemy. Dokhturov went to +Malo-Yaroslavets, but Kutuzov lingered with the main army and gave +orders for the evacuation of Kaluga- a retreat beyond which town +seemed to him quite possible. + +Everywhere Kutuzov retreated, but the enemy without waiting for +his retreat fled in the opposite direction. + +Napoleon's historians describe to us his skilled maneuvers at +Tarutino and Malo-Yaroslavets, and make conjectures as to what would +have happened had Napoleon been in time to penetrate into the rich +southern provinces. + +But not to speak of the fact that nothing prevented him from +advancing into those southern provinces (for the Russian army did +not bar his way), the historians forget that nothing could have +saved his army, for then already it bore within itself the germs of +inevitable ruin. How could that army- which had found abundant +supplies in Moscow and had trampled them underfoot instead of +keeping them, and on arriving at Smolensk had looted provisions +instead of storing them- how could that army recuperate in Kaluga +province, which was inhabited by Russians such as those who lived in +Moscow, and where fire had the same property of consuming what was set +ablaze? + +That army could not recover anywhere. Since the battle of Borodino +and the pillage of Moscow it had borne within itself, as it were, +the chemical elements of dissolution. + +The members of what had once been an army- Napoleon himself and +all his soldiers fled- without knowing whither, each concerned only to +make his escape as quickly as possible from this position, of the +hopelessness of which they were all more or less vaguely conscious. + +So it came about that at the council at Malo-Yaroslavets, when the +generals pretending to confer together expressed various opinions, all +mouths were closed by the opinion uttered by the simple-minded soldier +Mouton who, speaking last, said what they all felt: that the one thing +needful was to get away as quickly as possible; and no one, not even +Napoleon, could say anything against that truth which they all +recognized. + +But though they all realized that it was necessary to get away, +there still remained a feeling of shame at admitting that they must +flee. An external shock was needed to overcome that shame, and this +shock came in due time. It was what the French called "le hourra de +l'Empereur." + +The day after the council at Malo-Yaroslavets Napoleon rode out +early in the morning amid the lines of his army with his suite of +marshals and an escort, on the pretext of inspecting the army and +the scene of the previous and of the impending battle. Some Cossacks +on the prowl for booty fell in with the Emperor and very nearly +captured him. If the Cossacks did not capture Napoleon then, what +saved him was the very thing that was destroying the French army, +the booty on which the Cossacks fell. Here as at Tarutino they went +after plunder, leaving the men. Disregarding Napoleon they rushed +after the plunder and Napoleon managed to escape. + +When les enfants du Don might so easily have taken the Emperor +himself in the midst of his army, it was clear that there was +nothing for it but to fly as fast as possible along the nearest, +familiar road. Napoleon with his forty-year-old stomach understood +that hint, not feeling his former agility and boldness, and under +the influence of the fright the Cossacks had given him he at once +agreed with Mouton and issued orders- as the historians tell us- to +retreat by the Smolensk road. + +That Napoleon agreed with Mouton, and that the army retreated, +does not prove that Napoleon caused it to retreat, but that the forces +which influenced the whole army and directed it along the Mozhaysk +(that is, the Smolensk) road acted simultaneously on him also. + +CHAPTER XIX + +A man in motion always devises an aim for that motion. To be able to +go a thousand miles he must imagine that something good awaits him +at the end of those thousand miles. One must have the prospect of a +promised land to have the strength to move. + +The promised land for the French during their advance had been +Moscow, during their retreat it was their native land. But that native +land was too far off, and for a man going a thousand miles it is +absolutely necessary to set aside his final goal and to say to +himself: "Today I shall get to a place twenty-five miles off where I +shall rest and spend the night," and during the first day's journey +that resting place eclipses his ultimate goal and attracts all his +hopes and desires. And the impulses felt by a single person are always +magnified in a crowd. + +For the French retreating along the old Smolensk road, the final +goal- their native land- was too remote, and their immediate goal +was Smolensk, toward which all their desires and hopes, enormously +intensified in the mass, urged them on. It was not that they knew that +much food and fresh troops awaited them in Smolensk, nor that they +were told so (on the contrary their superior officers, and Napoleon +himself, knew that provisions were scarce there), but because this +alone could give them strength to move on and endure their present +privations. So both those who knew and those who did not know deceived +themselves, and pushed on to Smolensk as to a promised land. + +Coming out onto the highroad the French fled with surprising +energy and unheard-of rapidity toward the goal they had fixed on. +Besides the common impulse which bound the whole crowd of French +into one mass and supplied them with a certain energy, there was +another cause binding them together- their great numbers. As with +the physical law of gravity, their enormous mass drew the individual +human atoms to itself. In their hundreds of thousands they moved +like a whole nation. + +Each of them desired nothing more than to give himself up as a +prisoner to escape from all this horror and misery; but on the one +hand the force of this common attraction to Smolensk, their goal, drew +each of them in the same direction; on the other hand an army corps +could not surrender to a company, and though the French availed +themselves of every convenient opportunity to detach themselves and to +surrender on the slightest decent pretext, such pretexts did not +always occur. Their very numbers and their crowded and swift +movement deprived them of that possibility and rendered it not only +difficult but impossible for the Russians to stop this movement, to +which the French were directing all their energies. Beyond a certain +limit no mechanical disruption of the body could hasten the process of +decomposition. + +A lump of snow cannot be melted instantaneously. There is a +certain limit of time in less than which no amount of heat can melt +the snow. On the contrary the greater the heat the more solidified the +remaining snow becomes. + +Of the Russian commanders Kutuzov alone understood this. When the +flight of the French army along the Smolensk road became well defined, +what Konovnitsyn had foreseen on the night of the eleventh of +October began to occur. The superior officers all wanted to +distinguish themselves, to cut off, to seize, to capture, and to +overthrow the French, and all clamored for action. + +Kutuzov alone used all his power (and such power is very limited +in the case of any commander in chief) to prevent an attack. + +He could not tell them what we say now: "Why fight, why block the +road, losing our own men and inhumanly slaughtering unfortunate +wretches? What is the use of that, when a third of their army has +melted away on the road from Moscow to Vyazma without any battle?" But +drawing from his aged wisdom what they could understand, he told +them of the golden bridge, and they laughed at and slandered him, +flinging themselves on, rending and exulting over the dying beast. + +Ermolov, Miloradovich, Platov, and others in proximity to the French +near Vyazma could not resist their desire to cut off and break up +two French corps, and by way of reporting their intention to Kutuzov +they sent him a blank sheet of paper in an envelope. + +And try as Kutuzov might to restrain the troops, our men attacked, +trying to bar the road. Infantry regiments, we are told, advanced to +the attack with music and with drums beating, and killed and lost +thousands of men. + +But they did not cut off or overthrow anybody and the French army, +closing up more firmly at the danger, continued, while steadily +melting away, to pursue its fatal path to Smolensk. + +BOOK FOURTEEN: 1812 + +CHAPTER I + +The Battle of Borodino, with the occupation of Moscow that +followed it and the flight of the French without further conflicts, is +one of the most instructive phenomena in history. + +All historians agree that the external activity of states and +nations in their conflicts with one another is expressed in wars, +and that as a direct result of greater or less success in war the +political strength of states and nations increases or decreases. + +Strange as may be the historical account of how some king or +emperor, having quarreled with another, collects an army, fights his +enemy's army, gains a victory by killing three, five, or ten +thousand men, and subjugates a kingdom and an entire nation of several +millions, all the facts of history (as far as we know it) confirm +the truth of the statement that the greater or lesser success of one +army against another is the cause, or at least an essential +indication, of an increase or decrease in the strength of the +nation- even though it is unintelligible why the defeat of an army- +a hundredth part of a nation- should oblige that whole nation to +submit. An army gains a victory, and at once the rights of the +conquering nation have increased to the detriment of the defeated. +An army has suffered defeat, and at once a people loses its rights +in proportion to the severity of the reverse, and if its army +suffers a complete defeat the nation is quite subjugated. + +So according to history it has been found from the most ancient +times, and so it is to our own day. All Napoleon's wars serve to +confirm this rule. In proportion to the defeat of the Austrian army +Austria loses its rights, and the rights and the strength of France +increase. The victories of the French at Jena and Auerstadt destroy +the independent existence of Prussia. + +But then, in 1812, the French gain a victory near Moscow. Moscow +is taken and after that, with no further battles, it is not Russia +that ceases to exist, but the French army of six hundred thousand, and +then Napoleonic France itself. To strain the facts to fit the rules of +history: to say that the field of battle at Borodino remained in the +hands of the Russians, or that after Moscow there were other battles +that destroyed Napoleon's army, is impossible. + +After the French victory at Borodino there was no general engagement +nor any that were at all serious, yet the French army ceased to exist. +What does this mean? If it were an example taken from the history of +China, we might say that it was not an historic phenomenon (which is +the historians' usual expedient when anything does not fit their +standards); if the matter concerned some brief conflict in which +only a small number of troops took part, we might treat it as an +exception; but this event occurred before our fathers' eyes, and for +them it was a question of the life or death of their fatherland, and +it happened in the greatest of all known wars. + +The period of the campaign of 1812 from the battle of Borodino to +the expulsion of the French proved that the winning of a battle does +not produce a conquest and is not even an invariable indication of +conquest; it proved that the force which decides the fate of peoples +lies not in the conquerors, nor even in armies and battles, but in +something else. + +The French historians, describing the condition of the French army +before it left Moscow, affirm that all was in order in the Grand Army, +except the cavalry, the artillery, and the transport- there was no +forage for the horses or the cattle. That was a misfortune no one +could remedy, for the peasants of the district burned their hay rather +than let the French have it. + +The victory gained did not bring the usual results because the +peasants Karp and Vlas (who after the French had evacuated Moscow +drove in their carts to pillage the town, and in general personally +failed to manifest any heroic feelings), and the whole innumerable +multitude of such peasants, did not bring their hay to Moscow for +the high price offered them, but burned it instead. + +Let us imagine two men who have come out to fight a duel with +rapiers according to all the rules of the art of fencing. The +fencing has gone on for some time; suddenly one of the combatants, +feeling himself wounded and understanding that the matter is no joke +but concerns his life, throws down his rapier, and seizing the first +cudgel that comes to hand begins to brandish it. Then let us imagine +that the combatant who so sensibly employed the best and simplest +means to attain his end was at the same time influenced by +traditions of chivalry and, desiring to conceal the facts of the case, +insisted that he had gained his victory with the rapier according to +all the rules of art. One can imagine what confusion and obscurity +would result from such an account of the duel. + +The fencer who demanded a contest according to the rules of +fencing was the French army; his opponent who threw away the rapier +and snatched up the cudgel was the Russian people; those who try to +explain the matter according to the rules of fencing are the +historians who have described the event. + +After the burning of Smolensk a war began which did not follow any +previous traditions of war. The burning of towns and villages, the +retreats after battles, the blow dealt at Borodino and the renewed +retreat, the burning of Moscow, the capture of marauders, the +seizure of transports, and the guerrilla war were all departures +from the rules. + +Napoleon felt this, and from the time he took up the correct fencing +attitude in Moscow and instead of his opponent's rapier saw a cudgel +raised above his head, he did not cease to complain to Kutuzov and +to the Emperor Alexander that the war was being carried on contrary to +all the rules- as if there were any rules for killing people. In spite +of the complaints of the French as to the nonobservance of the +rules, in spite of the fact that to some highly placed Russians it +seemed rather disgraceful to fight with a cudgel and they wanted to +assume a pose en quarte or en tierce according to all the rules, and +to make an adroit thrust en prime, and so on- the cudgel of the +people's war was lifted with all its menacing and majestic strength, +and without consulting anyone's tastes or rules and regardless of +anything else, it rose and fell with stupid simplicity, but +consistently, and belabored the French till the whole invasion had +perished. + +And it is well for a people who do not- as the French did in 1813- +salute according to all the rules of art, and, presenting the hilt +of their rapier gracefully and politely, hand it to their +magnanimous conqueror, but at the moment of trial, without asking what +rules others have adopted in similar cases, simply and easily pick +up the first cudgel that comes to hand and strike with it till the +feeling of resentment and revenge in their soul yields to a feeling of +contempt and compassion. + +CHAPTER II + +One of the most obvious and advantageous departures from the +so-called laws of war is the action of scattered groups against men +pressed together in a mass. Such action always occurs in wars that +take on a national character. In such actions, instead of two crowds +opposing each other, the men disperse, attack singly, run away when +attacked by stronger forces, but again attack when opportunity offers. +This was done by the guerrillas in Spain, by the mountain tribes in +the Caucasus, and by the Russians in 1812. + +People have called this kind of war "guerrilla warfare" and assume +that by so calling it they have explained its meaning. But such a +war does not fit in under any rule and is directly opposed to a +well-known rule of tactics which is accepted as infallible. That +rule says that an attacker should concentrate his forces in order to +be stronger than his opponent at the moment of conflict. + +Guerrilla war (always successful, as history shows) directly +infringes that rule. + +This contradiction arises from the fact that military science +assumes the strength of an army to be identical with its numbers. +Military science says that the more troops the greater the strength. +Les gros bataillons ont toujours raison.~^ + +^~ Large battalions are always victorious. + +For military science to say this is like defining momentum in +mechanics by reference to the mass only: stating that momenta are +equal or unequal to each other simply because the masses involved +are equal or unequal. + +Momentum (quantity of motion) is the product of mass and velocity. + +In military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its +mass and some unknown x. + +Military science, seeing in history innumerable instances of the +fact that the size of any army does not coincide with its strength and +that small detachments defeat larger ones, obscurely admits the +existence of this unknown factor and tries to discover it- now in a +geometric formation, now in the equipment employed, now, and most +usually, in the genius of the commanders. But the assignment of +these various meanings to the factor does not yield results which +accord with the historic facts. + +Yet it is only necessary to abandon the false view (adopted to +gratify the "heroes") of the efficacy of the directions issued in +wartime by commanders, in order to find this unknown quantity. + +That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army, that is to say, the +greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger felt by all the +men composing an army, quite independently of whether they are, or are +not, fighting under the command of a genius, in two- or three-line +formation, with cudgels or with rifles that repeat thirty times a +minute. Men who want to fight will always put themselves in the most +advantageous conditions for fighting. + +The spirit of an army is the factor which multiplied by the mass +gives the resulting force. To define and express the significance of +this unknown factor- the spirit of an army- is a problem for science. + +This problem is only solvable if we cease arbitrarily to +substitute for the unknown x itself the conditions under which that +force becomes apparent- such as the commands of the general, the +equipment employed, and so on- mistaking these for the real +significance of the factor, and if we recognize this unknown +quantity in its entirety as being the greater or lesser desire to +fight and to face danger. Only then, expressing known historic facts +by equations and comparing the relative significance of this factor, +can we hope to define the unknown. + +Ten men, battalions, or divisions, fighting fifteen men, battalions, +or divisions, conquer- that is, kill or take captive- all the +others, while themselves losing four, so that on the one side four and +on the other fifteen were lost. Consequently the four were equal to +the fifteen, and therefore 4x = 15y. Consequently x/y = 15/4. This +equation does not give us the value of the unknown factor but gives us +a ratio between two unknowns. And by bringing variously selected +historic units (battles, campaigns, periods of war) into such +equations, a series of numbers could be obtained in which certain laws +should exist and might be discovered. + +The tactical rule that an army should act in masses when +attacking, and in smaller groups in retreat, unconsciously confirms +the truth that the strength of an army depends on its spirit. To +lead men forward under fire more discipline (obtainable only by +movement in masses) is needed than is needed to resist attacks. But +this rule which leaves out of account the spirit of the army +continually proves incorrect and is in particularly striking +contrast to the facts when some strong rise or fall in the spirit of +the troops occurs, as in all national wars. + +The French, retreating in 1812- though according to tactics they +should have separated into detachments to defend themselves- +congregated into a mass because the spirit of the army had so fallen +that only the mass held the army together. The Russians, on the +contrary, ought according to tactics to have attacked in mass, but +in fact they split up into small units, because their spirit had so +risen that separate individuals, without orders, dealt blows at the +French without needing any compulsion to induce them to expose +themselves to hardships and dangers. + +CHAPTER III + +The so-called partisan war began with the entry of the French into +Smolensk. + +Before partisan warfare had been officially recognized by the +government, thousands of enemy stragglers, marauders, and foragers had +been destroyed by the Cossacks and the peasants, who killed them off +as instinctively as dogs worry a stray mad dog to death. Denis +Davydov, with his Russian instinct, was the first to recognize the +value of this terrible cudgel which regardless of the rules of +military science destroyed the French, and to him belongs the credit +for taking the first step toward regularizing this method of warfare. + +On August 24 Davydov's first partisan detachment was formed and then +others were recognized. The further the campaign progressed the more +numerous these detachments became. + +The irregulars destroyed the great army piecemeal. They gathered the +fallen leaves that dropped of themselves from that withered tree- +the French army- and sometimes shook that tree itself. By October, +when the French were fleeing toward Smolensk, there were hundreds of +such companies, of various sizes and characters. There were some +that adopted all the army methods and had infantry, artillery, staffs, +and the comforts of life. Others consisted solely of Cossack +cavalry. There were also small scratch groups of foot and horse, and +groups of peasants and landowners that remained unknown. A sacristan +commanded one party which captured several hundred prisoners in the +course of a month; and there was Vasilisa, the wife of a village +elder, who slew hundreds of the French. + +The partisan warfare flamed up most fiercely in the latter days of +October. Its first period had passed: when the partisans themselves, +amazed at their own boldness, feared every minute to be surrounded and +captured by the French, and hid in the forests without unsaddling, +hardly daring to dismount and always expecting to be pursued. By the +end of October this kind of warfare had taken definite shape: it had +become clear to all what could be ventured against the French and what +could not. Now only the commanders of detachments with staffs, and +moving according to rules at a distance from the French, still +regarded many things as impossible. The small bands that had started +their activities long before and had already observed the French +closely considered things possible which the commanders of the big +detachments did not dare to contemplate. The Cossacks and peasants who +crept in among the French now considered everything possible. + +On October 22, Denisov (who was one of the irregulars) was with +his group at the height of the guerrilla enthusiasm. Since early +morning he and his party had been on the move. All day long he had +been watching from the forest that skirted the highroad a large French +convoy of cavalry baggage and Russian prisoners separated from the +rest of the army, which- as was learned from spies and prisoners- +was moving under a strong escort to Smolensk. Besides Denisov and +Dolokhov (who also led a small party and moved in Denisov's vicinity), +the commanders of some large divisions with staffs also knew of this +convoy and, as Denisov expressed it, were sharpening their teeth for +it. Two of the commanders of large parties- one a Pole and the other a +German- sent invitations to Denisov almost simultaneously, +requesting him to join up with their divisions to attack the convoy. + +"No, bwother, I have gwown mustaches myself," said Denisov on +reading these documents, and he wrote to the German that, despite +his heartfelt desire to serve under so valiant and renowned a general, +he had to forgo that pleasure because he was already under the command +of the Polish general. To the Polish general he replied to the same +effect, informing him that he was already under the command of the +German. + +Having arranged matters thus, Denisov and Dolokhov intended, without +reporting matters to the higher command, to attack and seize that +convoy with their own small forces. On October 22 it was moving from +the village of Mikulino to that of Shamshevo. To the left of the +road between Mikulino and Shamshevo there were large forests, +extending in some places up to the road itself though in others a mile +or more back from it. Through these forests Denisov and his party rode +all day, sometimes keeping well back in them and sometimes coming to +the very edge, but never losing sight of the moving French. That +morning, Cossacks of Denisov's party had seized and carried off into +the forest two wagons loaded with cavalry saddles, which had stuck +in the mud not far from Mikulino where the forest ran close to the +road. Since then, and until evening, the party had the movements of +the French without attacking. It was necessary to let the French reach +Shamshevo quietly without alarming them and then, after joining +Dolokhov who was to come that evening to a consultation at a +watchman's hut in the forest less than a mile from Shamshevo, to +surprise the French at dawn, falling like an avalanche on their +heads from two sides, and rout and capture them all at one blow. + +In their rear, more than a mile from Mikulino where the forest +came right up to the road, six Cossacks were posted to report if any +fresh columns of French should show themselves. + +Beyond Shamshevo, Dolokhov was to observe the road in the same +way, to find out at what distance there were other French troops. They +reckoned that the convoy had fifteen hundred men. Denisov had two +hundred, and Dolokhov might have as many more, but the disparity of +numbers did not deter Denisov. All that he now wanted to know was what +troops these were and to learn that he had to capture a "tongue"- that +is, a man from the enemy column. That morning's attack on the wagons +had been made so hastily that the Frenchmen with the wagons had all +been killed; only a little drummer boy had been taken alive, and as he +was a straggler he could tell them nothing definite about the troops +in that column. + +Denisov considered it dangerous to make a second attack for fear +of putting the whole column on the alert, so he sent Tikhon +Shcherbaty, a peasant of his party, to Shamshevo to try and seize at +least one of the French quartermasters who had been sent on in +advance. + +CHAPTER IV + +It was a warm rainy autumn day. The sky and the horizon were both +the color of muddy water. At times a sort of mist descended, and +then suddenly heavy slanting rain came down. + +Denisov in a felt cloak and a sheepskin cap from which the rain +ran down was riding a thin thoroughbred horse with sunken sides. +Like his horse, which turned its head and laid its ears back, he +shrank from the driving rain and gazed anxiously before him. His +thin face with its short, thick black beard looked angry. + +Beside Denisov rode an esaul,~^ Denisov's fellow worker, also in felt +cloak and sheepskin cap, and riding a large sleek Don horse. + +^~ A captain of Cossacks. + +Esaul Lovayski the Third was a tall man as straight as an arrow, +pale-faced, fair-haired, with narrow light eyes and with calm +self-satisfaction in his face and bearing. Though it was impossible to +say in what the peculiarity of the horse and rider lay, yet at first +glance at the esaul and Denisov one saw that the latter was wet and +uncomfortable and was a man mounted on a horse, while looking at the +esaul one saw that he was as comfortable and as much at ease as always +and that he was not a man who had mounted a horse, but a man who was +one with his horse, a being consequently possessed of twofold +strength. + +A little ahead of them walked a peasant guide, wet to the skin and +wearing a gray peasant coat and a white knitted cap. + +A little behind, on a poor, small, lean Kirghiz mount with an +enormous tail and mane and a bleeding mouth, rode a young officer in a +blue French overcoat. + +Beside him rode an hussar, with a boy in a tattered French uniform +and blue cap behind him on the crupper of his horse. The boy held on +to the hussar with cold, red hands, and raising his eyebrows gazed +about him with surprise. This was the French drummer boy captured that +morning. + +Behind them along the narrow, sodden, cutup forest road came hussars +in threes and fours, and then Cossacks: some in felt cloaks, some in +French greatcoats, and some with horsecloths over their heads. The +horses, being drenched by the rain, all looked black whether +chestnut or bay. Their necks, with their wet, close-clinging manes, +looked strangely thin. Steam rose from them. Clothes, saddles, +reins, were all wet, slippery, and sodden, like the ground and the +fallen leaves that strewed the road. The men sat huddled up trying not +to stir, so as to warm the water that had trickled to their bodies and +not admit the fresh cold water that was leaking in under their +seats, their knees, and at the back of their necks. In the midst of +the outspread line of Cossacks two wagons, drawn by French horses +and by saddled Cossack horses that had been hitched on in front, +rumbled over the tree stumps and branches and splashed through the +water that lay in the ruts. + +Denisov's horse swerved aside to avoid a pool in the track and +bumped his rider's knee against a tree. + +"Oh, the devil!" exclaimed Denisov angrily, and showing his teeth he +struck his horse three times with his whip, splashing himself and +his comrades with mud. + +Denisov was out of sorts both because of the rain and also from +hunger (none of them had eaten anything since morning), and yet more +because he still had no news from Dolokhov and the man sent to capture +a "tongue" had not returned. + +"There'll hardly be another such chance to fall on a transport as +today. It's too risky to attack them by oneself, and if we put it +off till another day one of the big guerrilla detachments will +snatch the prey from under our noses," thought Denisov, continually +peering forward, hoping to see a messenger from Dolokhov. + +On coming to a path in the forest along which he could see far to +the right, Denisov stopped. + +"There's someone coming," said he. + +The esaul looked in the direction Denisov indicated. + +"There are two, an officer and a Cossack. But it is not +presupposable that it is the lieutenant colonel himself," said the +esaul, who was fond of using words the Cossacks did not know. + +The approaching riders having descended a decline were no longer +visible, but they reappeared a few minutes later. In front, at a weary +gallop and using his leather whip, rode an officer, disheveled and +drenched, whose trousers had worked up to above his knees. Behind him, +standing in the stirrups, trotted a Cossack. The officer, a very young +lad with a broad rosy face and keen merry eyes, galloped up to Denisov +and handed him a sodden envelope. + +"From the general," said the officer. "Please excuse its not being +quite dry." + +Denisov, frowning, took the envelope and opened it. + +"There, they kept telling us: 'It's dangerous, it's dangerous,'" +said the officer, addressing the esaul while Denisov was reading the +dispatch. "But Komarov and I"- he pointed to the Cossack- "were +prepared. We have each of us two pistols.... But what's this?" he +asked, noticing the French drummer boy. "A prisoner? You've already +been in action? May I speak to him?" + +"Wostov! Petya!" exclaimed Denisov, having run through the dispatch. +"Why didn't you say who you were?" and turning with a smile he held +out his hand to the lad. + +The officer was Petya Rostov. + +All the way Petya had been preparing himself to behave with +Denisov as befitted a grownup man and an officer- without hinting at +their previous acquaintance. But as soon as Denisov smiled at him +Petya brightened up, blushed with pleasure, forgot the official manner +he had been rehearsing, and began telling him how he had already +been in a battle near Vyazma and how a certain hussar had +distinguished himself there. + +"Well, I am glad to see you," Denisov interrupted him, and his +face again assumed its anxious expression. + +"Michael Feoklitych," said he to the esaul, "this is again fwom that +German, you know. He"- he indicated Petya- "is serving under him." + +And Denisov told the esaul that the dispatch just delivered was a +repetition of the German general's demand that he should join forces +with him for an attack on the transport. + +"If we don't take it tomowwow, he'll snatch it fwom under our +noses," he added. + +While Denisov was talking to the esaul, Petya- abashed by +Denisov's cold tone and supposing that it was due to the condition +of his trousers- furtively tried to pull them down under his greatcoat +so that no one should notice it, while maintaining as martial an air +as possible. + +"Will there be any orders, your honor?" he asked Denisov, holding +his hand at the salute and resuming the game of adjutant and general +for which he had prepared himself, "or shall I remain with your +honor?" + +"Orders?" Denisov repeated thoughtfully. "But can you stay till +tomowwow?" + +"Oh, please... May I stay with you?" cried Petya. + +"But, just what did the genewal tell you? To weturn at once?" +asked Denisov. + +Petya blushed. + +"He gave me no instructions. I think I could?" he returned, +inquiringly. + +"Well, all wight," said Denisov. + +And turning to his men he directed a party to go on to the halting +place arranged near the watchman's hut in the forest, and told the +officer on the Kirghiz horse (who performed the duties of an adjutant) +to go and find out where Dolokhov was and whether he would come that +evening. Denisov himself intended going with the esaul and Petya to +the edge of the forest where it reached out to Shamshevo, to have a +look at the part of the French bivouac they were to attack next day. + +"Well, old fellow," said he to the peasant guide, "lead us to +Shamshevo." + +Denisov, Petya, and the esaul, accompanied by some Cossacks and +the hussar who had the prisoner, rode to the left across a ravine to +the edge of the forest. + +CHAPTER V + +The rain had stopped, and only the mist was falling and drops from +the trees. Denisov, the esaul, and Petya rode silently, following +the peasant in the knitted cap who, stepping lightly with outturned +toes and moving noiselessly in his bast shoes over the roots and wet +leaves, silently led them to the edge of the forest. + +He ascended an incline, stopped, looked about him, and advanced to +where the screen of trees was less dense. On reaching a large oak tree +that had not yet shed its leaves, he stopped and beckoned mysteriously +to them with his hand. + +Denisov and Petya rode up to him. From the spot where the peasant +was standing they could see the French. Immediately beyond the forest, +on a downward slope, lay a field of spring rye. To the right, beyond a +steep ravine, was a small village and a landowner's house with a +broken roof. In the village, in the house, in the garden, by the well, +by the pond, over all the rising ground, and all along the road uphill +from the bridge leading to the village, not more than five hundred +yards away, crowds of men could be seen through the shimmering mist. +Their un-Russian shouting at their horses which were straining +uphill with the carts, and their calls to one another, could be +clearly heard. + +"Bwing the prisoner here," said Denisov in a low voice, not taking +his eyes off the French. + +A Cossack dismounted, lifted the boy down, and took him to +Denisov. Pointing to the French troops, Denisov asked him what these +and those of them were. The boy, thrusting his cold hands into his +pockets and lifting his eyebrows, looked at Denisov in affright, but +in spite of an evident desire to say all he knew gave confused +answers, merely assenting to everything Denisov asked him. Denisov +turned away from him frowning and addressed the esaul, conveying his +own conjectures to him. + +Petya, rapidly turning his head, looked now at the drummer boy, +now at Denisov, now at the esaul, and now at the French in the village +and along the road, trying not to miss anything of importance. + +"Whether Dolokhov comes or not, we must seize it, eh?" said +Denisov with a merry sparkle in his eyes. + +"It is a very suitable spot," said the esaul. + +"We'll send the infantwy down by the swamps," Denisov continued. +"They'll cweep up to the garden; you'll wide up fwom there with the +Cossacks"- he pointed to a spot in the forest beyond the village- "and +I with my hussars fwom here. And at the signal shot..." + +"The hollow is impassable- there's a swamp there," said the esaul. +"The horses would sink. We must ride round more to the left...." + +While they were talking in undertones the crack of a shot sounded +from the low ground by the pond, a puff of white smoke appeared, +then another, and the sound of hundreds of seemingly merry French +voices shouting together came up from the slope. For a moment +Denisov and the esaul drew back. They were so near that they thought +they were the cause of the firing and shouting. But the firing and +shouting did not relate to them. Down below, a man wearing something +red was running through the marsh. The French were evidently firing +and shouting at him. + +"Why, that's our Tikhon," said the esaul. + +"So it is! It is!" + +"The wascal!" said Denisov. + +"He'll get away!" said the esaul, screwing up his eyes. + +The man whom they called Tikhon, having run to the stream, plunged +in so that the water splashed in the air, and, having disappeared +for an instant, scrambled out on all fours, all black with the wet, +and ran on. The French who had been pursuing him stopped. + +"Smart, that!" said the esaul. + +"What a beast!" said Denisov with his former look of vexation. "What +has he been doing all this time?" + +"Who is he?" asked Petya. + +"He's our plastun. I sent him to capture a 'tongue.'" + +"Oh, yes," said Petya, nodding at the first words Denisov uttered as +if he understood it all, though he really did not understand +anything of it. + +Tikhon Shcherbaty was one of the most indispensable men in their +band. He was a peasant from Pokrovsk, near the river Gzhat. When +Denisov had come to Pokrovsk at the beginning of his operations and +had as usual summoned the village elder and asked him what he knew +about the French, the elder, as though shielding himself, had replied, +as all village elders did, that he had neither seen nor heard anything +of them. But when Denisov explained that his purpose was to kill the +French, and asked if no French had strayed that way, the elder replied +that some "more-orderers" had really been at their village, but that +Tikhon Shcherbaty was the only man who dealt with such matters. +Denisov had Tikhon called and, having praised him for his activity, +said a few words in the elder's presence about loyalty to the Tsar and +the country and the hatred of the French that all sons of the +fatherland should cherish. + +"We don't do the French any harm," said Tikhon, evidently frightened +by Denisov's words. "We only fooled about with the lads for fun, you +know! We killed a score or so of 'more-orderers,' but we did no harm +else..." + +Next day when Denisov had left Pokrovsk, having quite forgotten +about this peasant, it was reported to him that Tikhon had attached +himself to their party and asked to be allowed to remain with it. +Denisov gave orders to let him do so. + +Tikhon, who at first did rough work, laying campfires, fetching +water, flaying dead horses, and so on, soon showed a great liking +and aptitude for partisan warfare. At night he would go out for +booty and always brought back French clothing and weapons, and when +told to would bring in French captives also. Denisov then relieved him +from drudgery and began taking him with him when he went out on +expeditions and had him enrolled among the Cossacks. + +Tikhon did not like riding, and always went on foot, never lagging +behind the cavalry. He was armed with a musketoon (which he carried +rather as a joke), a pike and an ax, which latter he used as a wolf +uses its teeth, with equal case picking fleas out of its fur or +crunching thick bones. Tikhon with equal accuracy would split logs +with blows at arm's length, or holding the head of the ax would cut +thin little pegs or carve spoons. In Denisov's party he held a +peculiar and exceptional position. When anything particularly +difficult or nasty had to be done- to push a cart out of the mud +with one's shoulders, pull a horse out of a swamp by its tail, skin +it, slink in among the French, or walk more than thirty miles in a +day- everybody pointed laughingly at Tikhon. + +"It won't hurt that devil- he's as strong as a horse!" they said +of him. + +Once a Frenchman Tikhon was trying to capture fired a pistol at +him and shot him in the fleshy part of the back. That wound (which +Tikhon treated only with internal and external applications of +vodka) was the subject of the liveliest jokes by the whole detachment- +jokes in which Tikhon readily joined. + +"Hallo, mate! Never again? Gave you a twist?" the Cossacks would +banter him. And Tikhon, purposely writhing and making faces, pretended +to be angry and swore at the French with the funniest curses. The only +effect of this incident on Tikhon was that after being wounded he +seldom brought in prisoners. + +He was the bravest and most useful man in the party. No one found +more opportunities for attacking, no one captured or killed more +Frenchmen, and consequently he was made the buffoon of all the +Cossacks and hussars and willingly accepted that role. Now he had been +sent by Denisov overnight to Shamshevo to capture a "tongue." But +whether because he had not been content to take only one Frenchman +or because he had slept through the night, he had crept by day into +some bushes right among the French and, as Denisov had witnessed +from above, had been detected by them. + +CHAPTER VI + +After talking for some time with the esaul about next day's +attack, which now, seeing how near they were to the French, he +seemed to have definitely decided on, Denisov turned his horse and +rode back. + +"Now, my lad, we'll go and get dwy," he said to Petya. + +As they approached the watchhouse Denisov stopped, peering into +the forest. Among the trees a man with long legs and long, swinging +arms, wearing a short jacket, bast shoes, and a Kazan hat, was +approaching with long, light steps. He had a musketoon over his +shoulder and an ax stuck in his girdle. When he espied Denisov he +hastily threw something into the bushes, removed his sodden hat by its +floppy brim, and approached his commander. It was Tikhon. His wrinkled +and pockmarked face and narrow little eyes beamed with +self-satisfied merriment. He lifted his head high and gazed at Denisov +as if repressing a laugh. + +"Well, where did you disappear to?" inquired Denisov. + +"Where did I disappear to? I went to get Frenchmen," answered Tikhon +boldly and hurriedly, in a husky but melodious bass voice. + +"Why did you push yourself in there by daylight? You ass! Well, +why haven't you taken one?" + +"Oh, I took one all right," said Tikhon. + +"Where is he?" + +"You see, I took him first thing at dawn," Tikhon continued, +spreading out his flat feet with outturned toes in their bast shoes. +"I took him into the forest. Then I see he's no good and think I'll go +and fetch a likelier one." + +"You see?... What a wogue- it's just as I thought," said Denisov +to the esaul. "Why didn't you bwing that one?" + +"What was the good of bringing him?" Tikhon interrupted hastily +and angrily- "that one wouldn't have done for you. As if I don't +know what sort you want!" + +"What a bwute you are!... Well?" + +"I went for another one," Tikhon continued, "and I crept like this +through the wood and lay down." (He suddenly lay down on his stomach +with a supple movement to show how he had done it.) "One turned up and +I grabbed him, like this." (He jumped up quickly and lightly.) +"'Come along to the colonel,' I said. He starts yelling, and +suddenly there were four of them. They rushed at me with their +little swords. So I went for them with my ax, this way: 'What are +you up to?' says I. 'Christ be with you!'" shouted Tikhon, waving +his arms with an angry scowl and throwing out his chest. + +"Yes, we saw from the hill how you took to your heels through the +puddles!" said the esaul, screwing up his glittering eyes. + +Petya badly wanted to laugh, but noticed that they all refrained +from laughing. He turned his eyes rapidly from Tikhon's face to the +esaul's and Denisov's, unable to make out what it all meant. + +"Don't play the fool!" said Denisov, coughing angrily. "Why didn't +you bwing the first one?" + +Tikhon scratched his back with one hand and his head with the other, +then suddenly his whole face expanded into a beaming, foolish grin, +disclosing a gap where he had lost a tooth (that was why he was called +Shcherbaty- the gap-toothed). Denisov smiled, and Petya burst into a +peal of merry laughter in which Tikhon himself joined. + +"Oh, but he was a regular good-for-nothing," said Tikhon. "The +clothes on him- poor stuff! How could I bring him? And so rude, your +honor! Why, he says: 'I'm a general's son myself, I won't go!' he +says." + +"You are a bwute!" said Denisov. "I wanted to question..." + +"But I questioned him," said Tikhon. "He said he didn't know much. +'There are a lot of us,' he says, 'but all poor stuff- only soldiers +in name,' he says. 'Shout loud at them,' he says, 'and you'll take +them all,'" Tikhon concluded, looking cheerfully and resolutely into +Denisov's eyes. + +"I'll give you a hundwed sharp lashes- that'll teach you to play the +fool!" said Denisov severely. + +"But why are you angry?" remonstrated Tikhon, "just as if I'd +never seen your Frenchmen! Only wait till it gets dark and I'll +fetch you any of them you want- three if you like." + +"Well, let's go," said Denisov, and rode all the way to the +watchhouse in silence and frowning angrily. + +Tikhon followed behind and Petya heard the Cossacks laughing with +him and at him, about some pair of boots he had thrown into the +bushes. + +When the fit of laughter that had seized him at Tikhon's words and +smile had passed and Petya realized for a moment that this Tikhon +had killed a man, he felt uneasy. He looked round at the captive +drummer boy and felt a pang in his heart. But this uneasiness lasted +only a moment. He felt it necessary to hold his head higher, to +brace himself, and to question the esaul with an air of importance +about tomorrow's undertaking, that he might not be unworthy of the +company in which he found himself. + +The officer who had been sent to inquire met Denisov on the way with +the news that Dolokhov was soon coming and that all was well with him. + +Denisov at once cheered up and, calling Petya to him, said: "Well, +tell me about yourself." + +CHAPTER VII + +Petya, having left his people after their departure from Moscow, +joined his regiment and was soon taken as orderly by a general +commanding a large guerrilla detachment. From the time he received his +commission, and especially since he had joined the active army and +taken part in the battle of Vyazma, Petya had been in a constant state +of blissful excitement at being grown-up and in a perpetual ecstatic +hurry not to miss any chance to do something really heroic. He was +highly delighted with what he saw and experienced in the army, but +at the same time it always seemed to him that the really heroic +exploits were being performed just where he did not happen to be. +And he was always in a hurry to get where he was not. + +When on the twenty-first of October his general expressed a wish +to send somebody to Denisov's detachment, Petya begged so piteously to +be sent that the general could not refuse. But when dispatching him he +recalled Petya's mad action at the battle of Vyazma, where instead +of riding by the road to the place to which he had been sent, he had +galloped to the advanced line under the fire of the French and had +there twice fired his pistol. So now the general explicitly forbade +his taking part in any action whatever of Denisov's. That was why +Petya had blushed and grown confused when Denisov asked him whether he +could stay. Before they had ridden to the outskirts of the forest +Petya had considered he must carry out his instructions strictly and +return at once. But when he saw the French and saw Tikhon and +learned that there would certainly be an attack that night, he +decided, with the rapidity with which young people change their views, +that the general, whom he had greatly respected till then, was a +rubbishy German, that Denisov was a hero, the esaul a hero, and Tikhon +a hero too, and that it would be shameful for him to leave them at a +moment of difficulty. + +It was already growing dusk when Denisov, Petya, and the esaul +rode up to the watchhouse. In the twilight saddled horses could be +seen, and Cossacks and hussars who had rigged up rough shelters in the +glade and were kindling glowing fires in a hollow of the forest +where the French could not see the smoke. In the passage of the +small watchhouse a Cossack with sleeves rolled up was chopping some +mutton. In the room three officers of Denisov's band were converting a +door into a tabletop. Petya took off his wet clothes, gave them to +be dried, and at once began helping the officers to fix up the +dinner table. + +In ten minutes the table was ready and a napkin spread on it. On the +table were vodka, a flask of rum, white bread, roast mutton, and salt. + +Sitting at table with the officers and tearing the fat savory mutton +with his hands, down which the grease trickled, Petya was in an +ecstatic childish state of love for all men, and consequently of +confidence that others loved him in the same way. + +"So then what do you think, Vasili Dmitrich?" said he to Denisov. +"It's all right my staying a day with you?" And not waiting for a +reply he answered his own question: "You see I was told to find out- +well, I am finding out.... Only do let me into the very... into the +chief... I don't want a reward... But I want..." + +Petya clenched his teeth and looked around, throwing back his head +and flourishing his arms. + +"Into the vewy chief..." Denisov repeated with a smile. + +"Only, please let me command something, so that I may really +command..." Petya went on. "What would it be to you?... Oh, you want a +knife?" he said, turning to an officer who wished to cut himself a +piece of mutton. + +And he handed him his clasp knife. The officer admired it. + +"Please keep it. I have several like it," said Petya, blushing. +"Heavens! I was quite forgetting!" he suddenly cried. "I have some +raisins, fine ones; you know, seedless ones. We have a new sutler +and he has such capital things. I bought ten pounds. I am used to +something sweet. Would you like some?..." and Petya ran out into the +passage to his Cossack and brought back some bags which contained +about five pounds of raisins. "Have some, gentlemen, have some!" + +"You want a coffeepot, don't you?" he asked the esaul. "I bought a +capital one from our sutler! He has splendid things. And he's very +honest, that's the chief thing. I'll be sure to send it to you. Or +perhaps your flints are giving out, or are worn out- that happens +sometimes, you know. I have brought some with me, here they are"- +and he showed a bag- "a hundred flints. I bought them very cheap. +Please take as many as you want, or all if you like...." + +Then suddenly, dismayed lest he had said too much, Petya stopped and +blushed. + +He tried to remember whether he had not done anything else that +was foolish. And running over the events of the day he remembered +the French drummer boy. "It's capital for us here, but what of him? +Where have they put him? Have they fed him? Haven't they hurt his +feelings?" he thought. But having caught himself saying too much about +the flints, he was now afraid to speak out. + +"I might ask," he thought, "but they'll say: 'He's a boy himself and +so he pities the boy.' I'll show them tomorrow whether I'm a boy. Will +it seem odd if I ask?" Petya thought. "Well, never mind!" and +immediately, blushing and looking anxiously at the officers to see +if they appeared ironical, he said: + +"May I call in that boy who was taken prisoner and give him +something to eat?... Perhaps..." + +"Yes, he's a poor little fellow," said Denisov, who evidently saw +nothing shameful in this reminder. "Call him in. His name is Vincent +Bosse. Have him fetched." + +"I'll call him," said Petya. + +"Yes, yes, call him. A poor little fellow," Denisov repeated. + +Petya was standing at the door when Denisov said this. He slipped in +between the officers, came close to Denisov, and said: + +"Let me kiss you, dear old fellow! Oh, how fine, how splendid!" + +And having kissed Denisov he ran out of the hut. + +"Bosse! Vincent!" Petya cried, stopping outside the door. + +"Who do you want, sir?" asked a voice in the darkness. + +Petya replied that he wanted the French lad who had been captured +that day. + +"Ah, Vesenny?" said a Cossack. + +Vincent, the boy's name, had already been changed by the Cossacks +into Vesenny (vernal) and into Vesenya by the peasants and soldiers. +In both these adaptations the reference to spring (vesna) matched +the impression made by the young lad. + +"He is warming himself there by the bonfire. Ho, Vesenya! +Vesenya!- Vesenny!" laughing voices were heard calling to one +another in the darkness. + +"He's a smart lad," said an hussar standing near Petya. "We gave him +something to eat a while ago. He was awfully hungry!" + +The sound of bare feet splashing through the mud was heard in the +darkness, and the drummer boy came to the door. + +"Ah, c'est vous!" said Petya. "Voulez-vous manger? N'ayez pas +peur, on ne vous fera pas de mal,"~^ he added shyly and affectionately, +touching the boy's hand. "Entrez, entrez."~^ + +^~ "Ah, it's you! Do you want something to eat? Don't be afraid, +they won't hurt you." + +^~ "Come in, come in." + +"Merci, monsieur,"~^ said the drummer boy in a trembling almost +childish voice, and he began scraping his dirty feet on the threshold. + +^~ "Thank you, sir." + +There were many things Petya wanted to say to the drummer boy, but +did not dare to. He stood irresolutely beside him in the passage. Then +in the darkness he took the boy's hand and pressed it. + +"Come in, come in!" he repeated in a gentle whisper. "Oh, what can I +do for him?" he thought, and opening the door he let the boy pass in +first. + +When the boy had entered the hut, Petya sat down at a distance +from him, considering it beneath his dignity to pay attention to +him. But he fingered the money in his pocket and wondered whether it +would seem ridiculous to give some to the drummer boy. + +CHAPTER VIII + +The arrival of Dolokhov diverted Petya's attention from the +drummer boy, to whom Denisov had had some mutton and vodka given, +and whom he had had dressed in a Russian coat so that he might be kept +with their band and not sent away with the other prisoners. Petya +had heard in the army many stories of Dolokhov's extraordinary bravery +and of his cruelty to the French, so from the moment he entered the +hut Petya did not take his eyes from him, but braced himself up more +and more and held his head high, that he might not be unworthy even of +such company. + +Dolokhov's appearance amazed Petya by its simplicity. + +Denisov wore a Cossack coat, had a beard, had an icon of Nicholas +the Wonder-Worker on his breast, and his way of speaking and +everything he did indicated his unusual position. But Dolokhov, who in +Moscow had worn a Persian costume, had now the appearance of a most +correct officer of the Guards. He was clean-shaven and wore a +Guardsman's padded coat with an Order of St. George at his +buttonhole and a plain forage cap set straight on his head. He took +off his wet felt cloak in a corner of the room, and without greeting +anyone went up to Denisov and began questioning him about the matter +in hand. Denisov told him of the designs the large detachments had +on the transport, of the message Petya had brought, and his own +replies to both generals. Then he told him all he knew of the French +detachment. + +"That's so. But we must know what troops they are and their +numbers," said Dolokhov. "It will be necessary to go there. We can't +start the affair without knowing for certain how many there are. I +like to work accurately. Here now- wouldn't one of these gentlemen +like to ride over to the French camp with me? I have brought a spare +uniform." + +"I, I... I'll go with you!" cried Petya. + +"There's no need for you to go at all," said Denisov, addressing +Dolokhov, "and as for him, I won't let him go on any account." + +"I like that!" exclaimed Petya. "Why shouldn't I go?" + +"Because it's useless." + +"Well, you must excuse me, because... because... I shall go, and +that's all. You'll take me, won't you?" he said, turning to Dolokhov. + +"Why not?" Dolokhov answered absently, scrutinizing the face of +the French drummer boy. "Have you had that youngster with you long?" +he asked Denisov. + +"He was taken today but he knows nothing. I'm keeping him with me." + +"Yes, and where do you put the others?" inquired Dolokhov. + +"Where? I send them away and take a weceipt for them," shouted +Denisov, suddenly flushing. "And I say boldly that I have not a single +man's life on my conscience. Would it be difficult for you to send +thirty or thwee hundwed men to town under escort, instead of staining- +I speak bluntly- staining the honor of a soldier?" + +"That kind of amiable talk would be suitable from this young count +of sixteen," said Dolokhov with cold irony, "but it's time for you +to drop it." + +"Why, I've not said anything! I only say that I'll certainly go with +you," said Petya shyly. + +"But for you and me, old fellow, it's time to drop these amenities," +continued Dolokhov, as if he found particular pleasure in speaking +of this subject which irritated Denisov. "Now, why have you kept +this lad?" he went on, swaying his head. "Because you are sorry for +him! Don't we know those 'receipts' of yours? You send a hundred men +away, and thirty get there. The rest either starve or get killed. So +isn't it all the same not to send them?" + +The esaul, screwing up his light-colored eyes, nodded approvingly. + +"That's not the point. I'm not going to discuss the matter. I do not +wish to take it on my conscience. You say they'll die. All wight. Only +not by my fault!" + +Dolokhov began laughing. + +"Who has told them not to capture me these twenty times over? But if +they did catch me they'd string me up to an aspen tree, and with all +your chivalry just the same." He paused. "However, we must get to +work. Tell the Cossack to fetch my kit. I have two French uniforms +in it. Well, are you coming with me?" he asked Petya. + +"I? Yes, yes, certainly!" cried Petya, blushing almost to tears +and glancing at Denisov. + +While Dolokhov had been disputing with Denisov what should be done +with prisoners, Petya had once more felt awkward and restless; but +again he had no time to grasp fully what they were talking about. +"If grown-up, distinguished men think so, it must be necessary and +right," thought he. "But above all Denisov must not dare to imagine +that I'll obey him and that he can order me about. I will certainly go +to the French camp with Dolokhov. If he can, so can I!" + +And to all Denisov's persuasions, Petya replied that he too was +accustomed to do everything accurately and not just anyhow, and that +he never considered personal danger. + +"For you'll admit that if we don't know for sure how many of them +there are... hundreds of lives may depend on it, while there are +only two of us. Besides, I want to go very much and certainly will go, +so don't hinder me," said he. "It will only make things worse..." + +CHAPTER IX + +Having put on French greatcoats and shakos, Petya and Dolokhov +rode to the clearing from which Denisov had reconnoitered the French +camp, and emerging from the forest in pitch darkness they descended +into the hollow. On reaching the bottom, Dolokhov told the Cossacks +accompanying him to await him there and rode on at a quick trot +along the road to the bridge. Petya, his heart in his mouth with +excitement, rode by his side. + +"If we're caught, I won't be taken alive! I have a pistol," +whispered he. + +"Don't talk Russian," said Dolokhov in a hurried whisper, and at +that very moment they heard through the darkness the challenge: "Qui +vive?"~^ and the click of a musket. + +^~ "Who goes there?" + +The blood rushed to Petya's face and he grasped his pistol. + +"Lanciers du 6-me,"~^ replied Dolokhov, neither hastening nor +slackening his horse's pace. + +^~ "Lancers of the 6th Regiment." + +The black figure of a sentinel stood on the bridge. + +"Mot d'ordre."~^ + +^~ "Password." + +Dolokhov reined in his horse and advanced at a walk. + +"Dites donc, le colonel Gerard est ici?"~^ he asked. + +^~ "Tell me, is Colonel Gerard here?" + +"Mot d'ordre," repeated the sentinel, barring the way and not +replying. + +"Quand un officier fait sa ronde, les sentinelles ne demandent pas +le mot d'ordre..." cried Dolokhov suddenly flaring up and riding +straight at the sentinel. "Je vous demande si le colonel est ici."~^ + +^~ "When an officer is making his round, sentinels don't ask him for +the password.... I am asking you if the colonel is here." + +And without waiting for an answer from the sentinel, who had stepped +aside, Dolokhov rode up the incline at a walk. + +Noticing the black outline of a man crossing the road, Dolokhov +stopped him and inquired where the commander and officers were. The +man, a soldier with a sack over his shoulder, stopped, came close up +to Dolokhov's horse, touched it with his hand, and explained simply +and in a friendly way that the commander and the officers were +higher up the hill to the right in the courtyard of the farm, as he +called the landowner's house. + +Having ridden up the road, on both sides of which French talk +could be heard around the campfires, Dolokhov turned into the +courtyard of the landowner's house. Having ridden in, he dismounted +and approached a big blazing campfire, around which sat several men +talking noisily. Something was boiling in a small cauldron at the edge +of the fire and a soldier in a peaked cap and blue overcoat, lit up by +the fire, was kneeling beside it stirring its contents with a ramrod. + +"Oh, he's a hard nut to crack," said one of the officers who was +sitting in the shadow at the other side of the fire. + +"He'll make them get a move on, those fellows!" said another, +laughing. + +Both fell silent, peering out through the darkness at the sound of +Dolokhov's and Petya's steps as they advanced to the fire leading +their horses. + +"Bonjour, messieurs!"~^ said Dolokhov loudly and clearly. + +^~ "Good day, gentlemen." + +There was a stir among the officers in the shadow beyond the fire, +and one tall, long-necked officer, walking round the fire, came up +to Dolokhov. + +"Is that you, Clement?" he asked. "Where the devil...? But, noticing +his mistake, he broke off short and, with a frown, greeted Dolokhov as +a stranger, asking what he could do for him. + +Dolokhov said that he and his companion were trying to overtake +their regiment, and addressing the company in general asked whether +they knew anything of the 6th Regiment. None of them knew anything, +and Petya thought the officers were beginning to look at him and +Dolokhov with hostility and suspicion. For some seconds all were +silent. + +"If you were counting on the evening soup, you have come too +late," said a voice from behind the fire with a repressed laugh. + +Dolokhov replied that they were not hungry and must push on +farther that night. + +He handed the horses over to the soldier who was stirring the pot +and squatted down on his heels by the fire beside the officer with the +long neck. That officer did not take his eyes from Dolokhov and +again asked to what regiment he belonged. Dolokhov, as if he had not +heard the question, did not reply, but lighting a short French pipe +which he took from his pocket began asking the officer in how far +the road before them was safe from Cossacks. + +"Those brigands are everywhere," replied an officer from behind +the fire. + +Dolokhov remarked that the Cossacks were a danger only to stragglers +such as his companion and himself, "but probably they would not dare +to attack large detachments?" he added inquiringly. No one replied. + +"Well, now he'll come away," Petya thought every moment as he +stood by the campfire listening to the talk. + +But Dolokhov restarted the conversation which had dropped and +began putting direct questions as to how many men there were in the +battalion, how many battalions, and how many prisoners. Asking about +the Russian prisoners with that detachment, Dolokhov said: + +"A horrid business dragging these corpses about with one! It would +be better to shoot such rabble," and burst into loud laughter, so +strange that Petya thought the French would immediately detect their +disguise, and involuntarily took a step back from the campfire. + +No one replied a word to Dolokhov's laughter, and a French officer +whom they could not see (he lay wrapped in a greatcoat) rose and +whispered something to a companion. Dolokhov got up and called to +the soldier who was holding their horses. + +"Will they bring our horses or not?" thought Petya, instinctively +drawing nearer to Dolokhov. + +The horses were brought. + +"Good evening, gentlemen," said Dolokhov. + +Petya wished to say "Good night" but could not utter a word. The +officers were whispering together. Dolokhov was a long time mounting +his horse which would not stand still, then he rode out of the yard at +a footpace. Petya rode beside him, longing to look round to see +whether or no the French were running after them, but not daring to. + +Coming out onto the road Dolokhov did not ride back across the +open country, but through the village. At one spot he stopped and +listened. "Do you hear?" he asked. Petya recognized the sound of +Russian voices and saw the dark figures of Russian prisoners round +their campfires. When they had descended to the bridge Petya and +Dolokhov rode past the sentinel, who without saying a word paced +morosely up and down it, then they descended into the hollow where the +Cossacks awaited them. + +"Well now, good-by. Tell Denisov, 'at the first shot at +daybreak,'" said Dolokhov and was about to ride away, but Petya seized +hold of him. + +"Really!" he cried, "you are such a hero! Oh, how fine, how +splendid! How I love you!" + +"All right, all right!" said Dolokhov. But Petya did not let go of +him and Dolokhov saw through the gloom that Petya was bending toward +him and wanted to kiss him. Dolokhov kissed him, laughed, turned his +horse, and vanished into the darkness. + +CHAPTER X + +Having returned to the watchman's hut, Petya found Denisov in the +passage. He was awaiting Petya's return in a state of agitation, +anxiety, and self-reproach for having let him go. + +"Thank God!" he exclaimed. "Yes, thank God!" he repeated, +listening to Petya's rapturous account. "But, devil take you, I +haven't slept because of you! Well, thank God. Now lie down. We can +still get a nap before morning." + +"But... no," said Petya, "I don't want to sleep yet. Besides I +know myself, if I fall asleep it's finished. And then I am used to not +sleeping before a battle." + +He sat awhile in the hut joyfully recalling the details of his +expedition and vividly picturing to himself what would happen next +day. + +Then, noticing that Denisov was asleep, he rose and went out of +doors. + +It was still quite dark outside. The rain was over, but drops were +still falling from the trees. Near the watchman's hut the black shapes +of the Cossacks' shanties and of horses tethered together could be +seen. Behind the hut the dark shapes of the two wagons with their +horses beside them were discernible, and in the hollow the dying +campfire gleamed red. Not all the Cossacks and hussars were asleep; +here and there, amid the sounds of falling drops and the munching of +the horses near by, could be heard low voices which seemed to be +whispering. + +Petya came out, peered into the darkness, and went up to the wagons. +Someone was snoring under them, and around them stood saddled horses +munching their oats. In the dark Petya recognized his own horse, which +he called "Karabakh" though it was of Ukranian breed, and went up to +it. + +"Well, Karabakh! We'll do some service tomorrow," said he, +sniffing its nostrils and kissing it. + +"Why aren't you asleep, sir?" said a Cossack who was sitting under a +wagon. + +"No, ah... Likhachev- isn't that your name? Do you know I have +only just come back! We've been into the French camp." + +And Petya gave the Cossack a detailed account not only of his ride +but also of his object, and why he considered it better to risk his +life than to act "just anyhow." + +"Well, you should get some sleep now," said the Cossack. + +"No, I am used to this," said Petya. "I say, aren't the flints in +your pistols worn out? I brought some with me. Don't you want any? You +can have some." + +The Cossack bent forward from under the wagon to get a closer look +at Petya. + +"Because I am accustomed to doing everything accurately," said +Petya. "Some fellows do things just anyhow, without preparation, and +then they're sorry for it afterwards. I don't like that." + +"Just so," said the Cossack. + +"Oh yes, another thing! Please, my dear fellow, will you sharpen +my saber for me? It's got bl..." (Petya feared to tell a lie, and +the saber never had been sharpened.) "Can you do it?" + +"Of course I can." + +Likhachev got up, rummaged in his pack, and soon Petya heard the +warlike sound of steel on whetstone. He climbed onto the wagon and sat +on its edge. The Cossack was sharpening the saber under the wagon. + +"I say! Are the lads asleep?" asked Petya. + +"Some are, and some aren't- like us." + +"Well, and that boy?" + +"Vesenny? Oh, he's thrown himself down there in the passage. Fast +asleep after his fright. He was that glad!" + +After that Petya remained silent for a long time, listening to the +sounds. He heard footsteps in the darkness and a black figure +appeared. + +"What are you sharpening?" asked a man coming up to the wagon. + +"Why, this gentleman's saber." + +"That's right," said the man, whom Petya took to be an hussar. +"Was the cup left here?" + +"There, by the wheel!" + +The hussar took the cup. + +"It must be daylight soon," said he, yawning, and went away. + +Petya ought to have known that he was in a forest with Denisov's +guerrilla band, less than a mile from the road, sitting on a wagon +captured from the French beside which horses were tethered, that under +it Likhachev was sitting sharpening a saber for him, that the big dark +blotch to the right was the watchman's hut, and the red blotch below +to the left was the dying embers of a campfire, that the man who had +come for the cup was an hussar who wanted a drink; but he neither knew +nor waited to know anything of all this. He was in a fairy kingdom +where nothing resembled reality. The big dark blotch might really be +the watchman's hut or it might be a cavern leading to the very +depths of the earth. Perhaps the red spot was a fire, or it might be +the eye of an enormous monster. Perhaps he was really sitting on a +wagon, but it might very well be that he was not sitting on a wagon +but on a terribly high tower from which, if he fell, he would have +to fall for a whole day or a whole month, or go on falling and never +reach the bottom. Perhaps it was just the Cossack, Likhachev, who +was sitting under the wagon, but it might be the kindest, bravest, +most wonderful, most splendid man in the world, whom no one knew of. +It might really have been that the hussar came for water and went back +into the hollow, but perhaps he had simply vanished- disappeared +altogether and dissolved into nothingness. + +Nothing Petya could have seen now would have surprised him. He was +in a fairy kingdom where everything was possible. + +He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the +earth. It was clearing, and over the tops of the trees clouds were +swiftly sailing as if unveiling the stars. Sometimes it looked as if +the clouds were passing, and a clear black sky appeared. Sometimes +it seemed as if the black spaces were clouds. Sometimes the sky seemed +to be rising high, high overhead, and then it seemed to sink so low +that one could touch it with one's hand. + +Petya's eyes began to close and he swayed a little. + +The trees were dripping. Quiet talking was heard. The horses neighed +and jostled one another. Someone snored. + +"Ozheg-zheg, Ozheg-zheg..." hissed the saber against the +whetstone, and suddenly Petya heard an harmonious orchestra playing +some unknown, sweetly solemn hymn. Petya was as musical as Natasha and +more so than Nicholas, but had never learned music or thought about +it, and so the melody that unexpectedly came to his mind seemed to him +particularly fresh and attractive. The music became more and more +audible. The melody grew and passed from one instrument to another. +And what was played was a fugue- though Petya had not the least +conception of what a fugue is. Each instrument- now resembling a +violin and now a horn, but better and clearer than violin or horn- +played its own part, and before it had finished the melody merged with +another instrument that began almost the same air, and then with a +third and a fourth; and they all blended into one and again became +separate and again blended, now into solemn church music, now into +something dazzlingly brilliant and triumphant. + +"Oh- why, that was in a dream!" Petya said to himself, as he lurched +forward. "It's in my ears. But perhaps it's music of my own. Well, +go on, my music! Now!..." + +He closed his eyes, and, from all sides as if from a distance, +sounds fluttered, grew into harmonies, separated, blended, and again +all mingled into the same sweet and solemn hymn. "Oh, this is +delightful! As much as I like and as I like!" said Petya to himself. +He tried to conduct that enormous orchestra. + +"Now softly, softly die away!" and the sounds obeyed him. "Now +fuller, more joyful. Still more and more joyful!" And from an +unknown depth rose increasingly triumphant sounds. "Now voices join +in!" ordered Petya. And at first from afar he heard men's voices and +then women's. The voices grew in harmonious triumphant strength, and +Petya listened to their surpassing beauty in awe and joy. + +With a solemn triumphal march there mingled a song, the drip from +the trees, and the hissing of the saber, "Ozheg-zheg-zheg..." and +again the horses jostled one another and neighed, not disturbing the +choir but joining in it. + +Petya did not know how long this lasted: he enjoyed himself all +the time, wondered at his enjoyment and regretted that there was no +one to share it. He was awakened by Likhachev's kindly voice. + +"It's ready, your honor; you can split a Frenchman in half with it!" + +Petya woke up. + +"It's getting light, it's really getting light!" he exclaimed. + +The horses that had previously been invisible could now be seen to +their very tails, and a watery light showed itself through the bare +branches. Petya shook himself, jumped up, took a ruble from his pocket +and gave it to Likhachev; then he flourished the saber, tested it, and +sheathed it. The Cossacks were untying their horses and tightening +their saddle girths. + +"And here's the commander," said Likhachev. + +Denisov came out of the watchman's hut and, having called Petya, +gave orders to get ready. + +CHAPTER XI + +The men rapidly picked out their horses in the semidarkness, +tightened their saddle girths, and formed companies. Denisov stood +by the watchman's hut giving final orders. The infantry of the +detachment passed along the road and quickly disappeared amid the +trees in the mist of early dawn, hundreds of feet splashing through +the mud. The esaul gave some orders to his men. Petya held his horse +by the bridle, impatiently awaiting the order to mount. His face, +having been bathed in cold water, was all aglow, and his eyes were +particularly brilliant. Cold shivers ran down his spine and his +whole body pulsed rhythmically. + +"Well, is ev'wything weady?" asked Denisov. "Bwing the horses." + +The horses were brought. Denisov was angry with the Cossack +because the saddle girths were too slack, reproved him, and mounted. +Petya put his foot in the stirrup. His horse by habit made as if to +nip his leg, but Petya leaped quickly into the saddle unconscious of +his own weight and, turning to look at the hussars starting in the +darkness behind him, rode up to Denisov. + +"Vasili Dmitrich, entrust me with some commission! Please... for +God's sake...!" said he. + +Denisov seemed to have forgotten Petya's very existence. He turned +to glance at him. + +"I ask one thing of you," he said sternly, "to obey me and not shove +yourself forward anywhere." + +He did not say another word to Petya but rode in silence all the +way. When they had come to the edge of the forest it was noticeably +growing light over the field. Denisov talked in whispers with the +esaul and the Cossacks rode past Petya and Denisov. When they had +all ridden by, Denisov touched his horse and rode down the hill. +Slipping onto their haunches and sliding, the horses descended with +their riders into the ravine. Petya rode beside Denisov, the pulsation +of his body constantly increasing. It was getting lighter and lighter, +but the mist still hid distant objects. Having reached the valley, +Denisov looked back and nodded to a Cossack beside him. + +"The signal!" said he. + +The Cossack raised his arm and a shot rang out. In an instant the +tramp of horses galloping forward was heard, shouts came from +various sides, and then more shots. + +At the first sound of trampling hoofs and shouting, Petya lashed his +horse and loosening his rein galloped forward, not heeding Denisov who +shouted at him. It seemed to Petya that at the moment the shot was +fired it suddenly became as bright as noon. He galloped to the bridge. +Cossacks were galloping along the road in front of him. On the +bridge he collided with a Cossack who had fallen behind, but he +galloped on. In front of him soldiers, probably Frenchmen, were +running from right to left across the road. One of them fell in the +mud under his horse's feet. + +Cossacks were crowding about a hut, busy with something. From the +midst of that crowd terrible screams arose. Petya galloped up, and the +first thing he saw was the pale face and trembling jaw of a Frenchman, +clutching the handle of a lance that had been aimed at him. + +"Hurrah!... Lads!... ours!" shouted Petya, and giving rein to his +excited horse he galloped forward along the village street. + +He could hear shooting ahead of him. Cossacks, hussars, and ragged +Russian prisoners, who had come running from both sides of the road, +were shouting something loudly and incoherently. A gallant-looking +Frenchman, in a blue overcoat, capless, and with a frowning red +face, had been defending himself against the hussars. When Petya +galloped up the Frenchman had already fallen. "Too late again!" +flashed through Petya's mind and he galloped on to the place from +which the rapid firing could be heard. The shots came from the yard of +the landowner's house he had visited the night before with Dolokhov. +The French were making a stand there behind a wattle fence in a garden +thickly overgrown with bushes and were firing at the Cossacks who +crowded at the gateway. Through the smoke, as he approached the +gate, Petya saw Dolokhov, whose face was of a pale-greenish tint, +shouting to his men. "Go round! Wait for the infantry!" he exclaimed +as Petya rode up to him. + +"Wait?... Hurrah-ah-ah!" shouted Petya, and without pausing a moment +galloped to the place whence came the sounds of firing and where the +smoke was thickest. + +A volley was heard, and some bullets whistled past, while others +plashed against something. The Cossacks and Dolokhov galloped after +Petya into the gateway of the courtyard. In the dense wavering smoke +some of the French threw down their arms and ran out of the bushes +to meet the Cossacks, while others ran down the hill toward the +pond. Petya was galloping along the courtyard, but instead of +holding the reins he waved both his arms about rapidly and +strangely, slipping farther and farther to one side in his saddle. His +horse, having galloped up to a campfire that was smoldering in the +morning light, stopped suddenly, and Petya fell heavily on to the +wet ground. The Cossacks saw that his arms and legs jerked rapidly +though his head was quite motionless. A bullet had pierced his skull. + +After speaking to the senior French officer, who came out of the +house with a white handkerchief tied to his sword and announced that +they surrendered, Dolokhov dismounted and went up to Petya, who lay +motionless with outstretched arms. + +"Done for!" he said with a frown, and went to the gate to meet +Denisov who was riding toward him. + +"Killed?" cried Denisov, recognizing from a distance the +unmistakably lifeless attitude- very familiar to him- in which Petya's +body was lying. + +"Done for!" repeated Dolokhov as if the utterance of these words +afforded him pleasure, and he went quickly up to the prisoners, who +were surrounded by Cossacks who had hurried up. "We won't take +them!" he called out to Denisov. + +Denisov did not reply; he rode up to Petya, dismounted, and with +trembling hands turned toward himself the bloodstained, +mud-bespattered face which had already gone white. + +"I am used to something sweet. Raisins, fine ones... take them all!" +he recalled Petya's words. And the Cossacks looked round in surprise +at the sound, like the yelp of a dog, with which Denisov turned +away, walked to the wattle fence, and seized hold of it. + +Among the Russian prisoners rescued by Denisov and Dolokhov was +Pierre Bezukhov. + +CHAPTER XII + +During the whole of their march from Moscow no fresh orders had been +issued by the French authorities concerning the party of prisoners +among whom was Pierre. On the twenty-second of October that party +was no longer with the same troops and baggage trains with which it +had left Moscow. Half the wagons laden with hardtack that had traveled +the first stages with them had been captured by Cossacks, the other +half had gone on ahead. Not one of those dismounted cavalrymen who had +marched in front of the prisoners was left; they had all +disappeared. The artillery the prisoners had seen in front of them +during the first days was now replaced by Marshal Junot's enormous +baggage train, convoyed by Westphalians. Behind the prisoners came a +cavalry baggage train. + +From Vyazma onwards the French army, which had till then moved in +three columns, went on as a single group. The symptoms of disorder +that Pierre had noticed at their first halting place after leaving +Moscow had now reached the utmost limit. + +The road along which they moved was bordered on both sides by dead +horses; ragged men who had fallen behind from various regiments +continually changed about, now joining the moving column, now again +lagging behind it. + +Several times during the march false alarms had been given and the +soldiers of the escort had raised their muskets, fired, and run +headlong, crushing one another, but had afterwards reassembled and +abused each other for their causeless panic. + +These three groups traveling together- the cavalry stores, the +convoy of prisoners, and Junot's baggage train- still constituted a +separate and united whole, though each of the groups was rapidly +melting away. + +Of the artillery baggage train which had consisted of a hundred +and twenty wagons, not more than sixty now remained; the rest had been +captured or left behind. Some of Junot's wagons also had been captured +or abandoned. Three wagons had been raided and robbed by stragglers +from Davout's corps. From the talk of the Germans Pierre learned +that a larger guard had been allotted to that baggage train than to +the prisoners, and that one of their comrades, a German soldier, had +been shot by the marshal's own order because a silver spoon +belonging to the marshal had been found in his possession. + +The group of prisoners had melted away most of all. Of the three +hundred and thirty men who had set out from Moscow fewer than a +hundred now remained. The prisoners were more burdensome to the escort +than even the cavalry saddles or Junot's baggage. They understood that +the saddles and Junot's spoon might be of some use, but that cold +and hungry soldiers should have to stand and guard equally cold and +hungry Russians who froze and lagged behind on the road (in which case +the order was to shoot them) was not merely incomprehensible but +revolting. And the escort, as if afraid, in the grievous condition +they themselves were in, of giving way to the pity they felt for the +prisoners and so rendering their own plight still worse, treated +them with particular moroseness and severity. + +At Dorogobuzh while the soldiers of the convoy, after locking the +prisoners in a stable, had gone off to pillage their own stores, +several of the soldier prisoners tunneled under the wall and ran away, +but were recaptured by the French and shot. + +The arrangement adopted when they started, that the officer +prisoners should be kept separate from the rest, had long since been +abandoned. All who could walk went together, and after the third stage +Pierre had rejoined Karataev and the gray-blue bandy-legged dog that +had chosen Karataev for its master. + +On the third day after leaving Moscow Karataev again fell ill with +the fever he had suffered from in the hospital in Moscow, and as he +grew gradually weaker Pierre kept away from him. Pierre did not know +why, but since Karataev had begun to grow weaker it had cost him an +effort to go near him. When he did so and heard the subdued moaning +with which Karataev generally lay down at the halting places, and when +he smelled the odor emanating from him which was now stronger than +before, Pierre moved farther away and did not think about him. + +While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his +intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is +created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the +satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises +not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last +three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory +truth- that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that +as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely +free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack +freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and +that those limits are very near together; that the person in a bed +of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, +sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while +the other was warming; and that when he had put on tight dancing shoes +he had suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet +that were covered with sores- his footgear having long since fallen to +pieces. He discovered that when he had married his wife- of his own +free will as it had seemed to him- he had been no more free than now +when they locked him up at night in a stable. Of all that he himself +subsequently termed his sufferings, but which at the time he +scarcely felt, the worst was the state of his bare, raw, and +scab-covered feet. (The horseflesh was appetizing and nourishing, +the saltpeter flavor of the gunpowder they used instead of salt was +even pleasant; there was no great cold, it was always warm walking +in the daytime, and at night there were the campfires; the lice that +devoured him warmed his body.) The one thing that was at first hard to +bear was his feet. + +After the second day's march Pierre, having examined his feet by the +campfire, thought it would be impossible to walk on them; but when +everybody got up he went along, limping, and, when he had warmed up, +walked without feeling the pain, though at night his feet were more +terrible to look at than before. However, he did not look at them now, +but thought of other things. + +Only now did Pierre realize the full strength of life in man and the +saving power he has of transferring his attention from one thing to +another, which is like the safety valve of a boiler that allows +superfluous steam to blow off when the pressure exceeds a certain +limit. + +He did not see and did not hear how they shot the prisoners who +lagged behind, though more than a hundred perished in that way. He did +not think of Karataev who grew weaker every day and evidently would +soon have to share that fate. Still less did Pierre think about +himself. The harder his position became and the more terrible the +future, the more independent of that position in which he found +himself were the joyful and comforting thoughts, memories, and +imaginings that came to him. + +CHAPTER XIII + +At midday on the twenty-second of October Pierre was going uphill +along the muddy, slippery road, looking at his feet and at the +roughness of the way. Occasionally he glanced at the familiar crowd +around him and then again at his feet. The former and the latter +were alike familiar and his own. The blue-gray bandy legged dog ran +merrily along the side of the road, sometimes in proof of its +agility and self-satisfaction lifting one hind leg and hopping along +on three, and then again going on all four and rushing to bark at +the crows that sat on the carrion. The dog was merrier and sleeker +than it had been in Moscow. All around lay the flesh of different +animals- from men to horses- in various stages of decomposition; and +as the wolves were kept off by the passing men the dog could eat all +it wanted. + +It had been raining since morning and had seemed as if at any moment +it might cease and the sky clear, but after a short break it began +raining harder than before. The saturated road no longer absorbed +the water, which ran along the ruts in streams. + +Pierre walked along, looking from side to side, counting his steps +in threes, and reckoning them off on his fingers. Mentally +addressing the rain, he repeated: "Now then, now then, go on! Pelt +harder!" + +It seemed to him that he was thinking of nothing, but far down and +deep within him his soul was occupied with something important and +comforting. This something was a most subtle spiritual deduction +from a conversation with Karataev the day before. + +At their yesterday's halting place, feeling chilly by a dying +campfire, Pierre had got up and gone to the next one, which was +burning better. There Platon Karataev was sitting covered up- head and +all- with his greatcoat as if it were a vestment, telling the soldiers +in his effective and pleasant though now feeble voice a story Pierre +knew. It was already past midnight, the hour when Karataev was usually +free of his fever and particularly lively. When Pierre reached the +fire and heard Platon's voice enfeebled by illness, and saw his +pathetic face brightly lit up by the blaze, he felt a painful prick at +his heart. His feeling of pity for this man frightened him and he +wished to go away, but there was no other fire, and Pierre sat down, +trying not to look at Platon. + +"Well, how are you?" he asked. + +"How am I? If we grumble at sickness, God won't grant us death," +replied Platon, and at once resumed the story he had begun. + +"And so, brother," he continued, with a smile on his pale +emaciated face and a particularly happy light in his eyes, " you +see, brother..." + +Pierre had long been familiar with that story. Karataev had told +it to him alone some half-dozen times and always with a specially +joyful emotion. But well as he knew it, Pierre now listened to that +tale as to something new, and the quiet rapture Karataev evidently +felt as he told it communicated itself also to Pierre. The story was +of an old merchant who lived a good and God-fearing life with his +family, and who went once to the Nizhni fair with a companion- a +rich merchant. + +Having put up at an inn they both went to sleep, and next morning +his companion was found robbed and with his throat cut. A bloodstained +knife was found under the old merchant's pillow. He was tried, +knouted, and his nostrils having been torn off, "all in due form" as +Karataev put it, he was sent to hard labor in Siberia. + +"And so, brother" (it was at this point that Pierre came up), "ten +years or more passed by. The old man was living as a convict, +submitting as he should and doing no wrong. Only he prayed to God +for death. Well, one night the convicts were gathered just as we +are, with the old man among them. And they began telling what each was +suffering for, and how they had sinned against God. One told how he +had taken a life, another had taken two, a third had set a house on +fire, while another had simply been a vagrant and had done nothing. So +they asked the old man: 'What are you being punished for, Daddy?'- 'I, +my dear brothers,' said he, 'am being punished for my own and other +men's sins. But I have not killed anyone or taken anything that was +not mine, but have only helped my poorer brothers. I was a merchant, +my dear brothers, and had much property. 'And he went on to tell +them all about it in due order. 'I don't grieve for myself,' he +says, 'God, it seems, has chastened me. Only I am sorry for my old +wife and the children,' and the old man began to weep. Now it happened +that in the group was the very man who had killed the other +merchant. 'Where did it happen, Daddy?' he said. 'When, and in what +month?' He asked all about it and his heart began to ache. So he comes +up to the old man like this, and falls down at his feet! 'You are +perishing because of me, Daddy,' he says. 'It's quite true, lads, that +this man,' he says, 'is being tortured innocently and for nothing! I,' +he says, 'did that deed, and I put the knife under your head while you +were asleep. Forgive me, Daddy,' he says, 'for Christ's sake!'" + +Karataev paused, smiling joyously as he gazed into the fire, and +he drew the logs together. + +"And the old man said, 'God will forgive you, we are all sinners +in His sight. I suffer for my own sins,' and he wept bitter tears. +Well, and what do you think, dear friends?" Karataev continued, his +face brightening more and more with a rapturous smile as if what he +now had to tell contained the chief charm and the whole meaning of his +story: "What do you think, dear fellows? That murderer confessed to +the authorities. 'I have taken six lives,' he says (he was a great +sinner), 'but what I am most sorry for is this old man. Don't let +him suffer because of me.' So he confessed and it was all written down +and the papers sent off in due form. The place was a long way off, and +while they were judging, what with one thing and another, filling in +the papers all in due form- the authorities I mean- time passed. The +affair reached the Tsar. After a while the Tsar's decree came: to +set the merchant free and give him a compensation that had been +awarded. The paper arrived and they began to look for the old man. +'Where is the old man who has been suffering innocently and in vain? A +paper has come from the Tsar!' so they began looking for him," here +Karataev's lower jaw trembled, "but God had already forgiven him- he +was dead! That's how it was, dear fellows!" Karataev concluded and sat +for a long time silent, gazing before him with a smile. + +And Pierre's soul was dimly but joyfully filled not by the story +itself but by its mysterious significance: by the rapturous joy that +lit up Karataev's face as he told it, and the mystic significance of +that joy. + +CHAPTER XIV + +"A vos places!"~^ suddenly cried a voice. + +^~ "To your places." + +A pleasant feeling of excitement and an expectation of something +joyful and solemn was aroused among the soldiers of the convoy and the +prisoners. From all sides came shouts of command, and from the left +came smartly dressed cavalrymen on good horses, passing the +prisoners at a trot. The expression on all faces showed the tension +people feel at the approach of those in authority. The prisoners +thronged together and were pushed off the road. The convoy formed up. + +"The Emperor! The Emperor! The Marshal! The Duke!" and hardly had +the sleek cavalry passed, before a carriage drawn by six gray horses +rattled by. Pierre caught a glimpse of a man in a three-cornered hat +with a tranquil look on his handsome, plump, white face. It was one of +the marshals. His eye fell on Pierre's large and striking figure, +and in the expression with which he frowned and looked away Pierre +thought he detected sympathy and a desire to conceal that sympathy. + +The general in charge of the stores galloped after the carriage with +a red and frightened face, whipping up his skinny horse. Several +officers formed a group and some soldiers crowded round them. Their +faces all looked excited and worried. + +"What did he say? What did he say?" Pierre heard them ask. + +While the marshal was passing, the prisoners had huddled together in +a crowd, and Pierre saw Karataev whom he had not yet seen that +morning. He sat in his short overcoat leaning against a birch tree. On +his face, besides the look of joyful emotion it had worn yesterday +while telling the tale of the merchant who suffered innocently, +there was now an expression of quiet solemnity. + +Karataev looked at Pierre with his kindly round eyes now filled with +tears, evidently wishing him to come near that he might say +something to him. But Pierre was not sufficiently sure of himself. +He made as if he did not notice that look and moved hastily away. + +When the prisoners again went forward Pierre looked round. +Karataev was still sitting at the side of the road under the birch +tree and two Frenchmen were talking over his head. Pierre did not look +round again but went limping up the hill. + +From behind, where Karataev had been sitting, came the sound of a +shot. Pierre heard it plainly, but at that moment he remembered that +he had not yet finished reckoning up how many stages still remained to +Smolensk- a calculation he had begun before the marshal went by. And +he again started reckoning. Two French soldiers ran past Pierre, one +of whom carried a lowered and smoking gun. They both looked pale, +and in the expression on their faces- one of them glanced timidly at +Pierre- there was something resembling what he had seen on the face of +the young soldier at the execution. Pierre looked at the soldier and +remembered that, two days before, that man had burned his shirt +while drying it at the fire and how they had laughed at him. + +Behind him, where Karataev had been sitting, the dog began to +howl. "What a stupid beast! Why is it howling?" thought Pierre. + +His comrades, the prisoner soldiers walking beside him, avoided +looking back at the place where the shot had been fired and the dog +was howling, just as Pierre did, but there was a set look on all their +faces. + +CHAPTER XV + +The stores, the prisoners, and the marshal's baggage train stopped +at the village of Shamshevo. The men crowded together round the +campfires. Pierre went up to the fire, ate some roast horseflesh, +lay down with his back to the fire, and immediately fell asleep. He +again slept as he had done at Mozhaysk after the battle of Borodino. + +Again real events mingled with dreams and again someone, he or +another, gave expression to his thoughts, and even to the same +thoughts that had been expressed in his dream at Mozhaysk. + +"Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and +that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in +consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and +more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, +in innocent sufferings." + +"Karataev!" came to Pierre's mind. + +And suddenly he saw vividly before him a long-forgotten, kindly +old man who had given him geography lessons in Switzerland. "Wait a +bit," said the old man, and showed Pierre a globe. This globe was +alive- a vibrating ball without fixed dimensions. Its whole surface +consisted of drops closely pressed together, and all these drops moved +and changed places, sometimes several of them merging into one, +sometimes one dividing into many. Each drop tried to spread out and +occupy as much space as possible, but others striving to do the same +compressed it, sometimes destroyed it, and sometimes merged with it. + +"That is life," said the old teacher. + +"How simple and clear it is," thought Pierre. "How is it I did not +know it before?" + +"God is in the midst, and each drop tries to expand so as to reflect +Him to the greatest extent. And it grows, merges, disappears from +the surface, sinks to the depths, and again emerges. There now, +Karataev has spread out and disappeared. Do you understand, my child?" +said the teacher. + +"Do you understand, damn you?" shouted a voice, and Pierre woke up. + +He lifted himself and sat up. A Frenchman who had just pushed a +Russian soldier away was squatting by the fire, engaged in roasting +a piece of meat stuck on a ramrod. His sleeves were rolled up and +his sinewy, hairy, red hands with their short fingers deftly turned +the ramrod. His brown morose face with frowning brows was clearly +visible by the glow of the charcoal. + +"It's all the same to him," he muttered, turning quickly to a +soldier who stood behind him. "Brigand! Get away!" + +And twisting the ramrod he looked gloomily at Pierre, who turned +away and gazed into the darkness. A prisoner, the Russian soldier +the Frenchman had pushed away, was sitting near the fire patting +something with his hand. Looking more closely Pierre recognized the +blue-gray dog, sitting beside the soldier, wagging its tail. + +"Ah, he's come?" said Pierre. "And Plat-" he began, but did not +finish. + +Suddenly and simultaneously a crowd of memories awoke in his +fancy- of the look Platon had given him as he sat under the tree, of +the shot heard from that spot, of the dog's howl, of the guilty +faces of the two Frenchmen as they ran past him, of the lowered and +smoking gun, and of Karataev's absence at this halt- and he was on the +point of realizing that Karataev had been killed, but just at that +instant, he knew not why, the recollection came to his mind of a +summer evening he had spent with a beautiful Polish lady on the +veranda of his house in Kiev. And without linking up the events of the +day or drawing a conclusion from them, Pierre closed his eyes, +seeing a vision of the country in summertime mingled with memories +of bathing and of the liquid, vibrating globe, and he sank into +water so that it closed over his head. + +Before sunrise he was awakened by shouts and loud and rapid +firing. French soldiers were running past him. + +"The Cossacks!" one of them shouted, and a moment later a crowd of +Russians surrounded Pierre. + +For a long time he could not understand what was happening to him. +All around he heard his comrades sobbing with joy. + +"Brothers! Dear fellows! Darlings!" old soldiers exclaimed, weeping, +as they embraced Cossacks and hussars. + +The hussars and Cossacks crowded round the prisoners; one offered +them clothes, another boots, and a third bread. Pierre sobbed as he +sat among them and could not utter a word. He hugged the first soldier +who approached him, and kissed him, weeping. + +Dolokhov stood at the gate of the ruined house, letting a crowd of +disarmed Frenchmen pass by. The French, excited by all that had +happened, were talking loudly among themselves, but as they passed +Dolokhov who gently switched his boots with his whip and watched +them with cold glassy eyes that boded no good, they became silent. +On the opposite side stood Dolokhov's Cossack, counting the +prisoners and marking off each hundred with a chalk line on the gate. + +"How many?" Dolokhov asked the Cossack. + +"The second hundred," replied the Cossack. + +"Filez, filez!"~^ Dolokhov kept saying, having adopted this +expression from the French, and when his eyes met those of the +prisoners they flashed with a cruel light. + +^~ "Get along, get along!" + +Denisov, bareheaded and with a gloomy face, walked behind some +Cossacks who were carrying the body of Petya Rostov to a hole that had +been dug in the garden. + +CHAPTER XVI + +After the twenty-eighth of October when the frosts began, the flight +of the French assumed a still more tragic character, with men +freezing, or roasting themselves to death at the campfires, while +carriages with people dressed in furs continued to drive past, +carrying away the property that had been stolen by the Emperor, kings, +and dukes; but the process of the flight and disintegration of the +French army went on essentially as before. + +From Moscow to Vyazma the French army of seventy-three thousand +men not reckoning the Guards (who did nothing during the whole war but +pillage) was reduced to thirty-six thousand, though not more than five +thousand had fallen in battle. From this beginning the succeeding +terms of the progression could be determined mathematically. The +French army melted away and perished at the same rate from Moscow to +Vyazma, from Vyazma to Smolensk, from Smolensk to the Berezina, and +from the Berezina to Vilna- independently of the greater or lesser +intensity of the cold, the pursuit, the barring of the way, or any +other particular conditions. Beyond Vyazma the French army instead +of moving in three columns huddled together into one mass, and so went +on to the end. Berthier wrote to his Emperor (we know how far +commanding officers allow themselves to diverge from the truth in +describing the condition of an army) and this is what he said: + +I deem it my duty to report to Your Majesty the condition of the +various corps I have had occasion to observe during different stages +of the last two or three days' march. They are almost disbanded. +Scarcely a quarter of the soldiers remain with the standards of +their regiments, the others go off by themselves in different +directions hoping to find food and escape discipline. In general +they regard Smolensk as the place where they hope to recover. During +the last few days many of the men have been seen to throw away their +cartridges and their arms. In such a state of affairs, whatever your +ultimate plans may be, the interest of Your Majesty's service +demands that the army should be rallied at Smolensk and should first +of all be freed from ineffectives, such as dismounted cavalry, +unnecessary baggage, and artillery material that is no longer in +proportion to the present forces. The soldiers, who are worn out +with hunger and fatigue, need these supplies as well as a few days' +rest. Many have died last days on the road or at the bivouacs. This +state of things is continually becoming worse and makes one fear +that unless a prompt remedy is applied the troops will no longer be +under control in case of an engagement. + +November 9: twenty miles from Smolensk. + +After staggering into Smolensk which seemed to them a promised land, +the French, searching for food, killed one another, sacked their own +stores, and when everything had been plundered fled farther. + +They all went without knowing whither or why they were going. +Still less did that genius, Napoleon, know it, for no one issued any +orders to him. But still he and those about him retained their old +habits: wrote commands, letters, reports, and orders of the day; +called one another sire, mon cousin, prince d'Eckmuhl, roi de +Naples, and so on. But these orders and reports were only on paper, +nothing in them was acted upon for they could not be carried out, +and though they entitled one another Majesties, Highnesses, or +Cousins, they all felt that they were miserable wretches who had +done much evil for which they had now to pay. And though they +pretended to be concerned about the army, each was thinking only of +himself and of how to get away quickly and save himself. + +CHAPTER XVII + +The movements of the Russian and French armies during the campaign +from Moscow back to the Niemen were like those in a game of Russian +blindman's bluff, in which two players are blindfolded and one of them +occasionally rings a little bell to inform the catcher of his +whereabouts. First he rings his bell fearlessly, but when he gets into +a tight place he runs away as quietly as he can, and often thinking to +escape runs straight into his opponent's arms. + +At first while they were still moving along the Kaluga road, +Napoleon's armies made their presence known, but later when they +reached the Smolensk road they ran holding the clapper of their bell +tight- and often thinking they were escaping ran right into the +Russians. + +Owing to the rapidity of the French flight and the Russian pursuit +and the consequent exhaustion of the horses, the chief means of +approximately ascertaining the enemy's position- by cavalry +scouting- was not available. Besides, as a result of the frequent +and rapid change of position by each army, even what information was +obtained could not be delivered in time. If news was received one +day that the enemy had been in a certain position the day before, by +the third day when something could have been done, that army was +already two days' march farther on and in quite another position. + +One army fled and the other pursued. Beyond Smolensk there were +several different roads available for the French, and one would have +thought that during their stay of four days they might have learned +where the enemy was, might have arranged some more advantageous plan +and undertaken something new. But after a four days' halt the mob, +with no maneuvers or plans, again began running along the beaten +track, neither to the right nor to the left but along the old- the +worst- road, through Krasnoe and Orsha. + +Expecting the enemy from behind and not in front, the French +separated in their flight and spread out over a distance of +twenty-four hours. In front of them all fled the Emperor, then the +kings, then the dukes. The Russian army, expecting Napoleon to take +the road to the right beyond the Dnieper- which was the only +reasonable thing for him to do- themselves turned to the right and +came out onto the highroad at Krasnoe. And here as in a game of +blindman's buff the French ran into our vanguard. Seeing their enemy +unexpectedly the French fell into confusion and stopped short from the +sudden fright, but then they resumed their flight, abandoning their +comrades who were farther behind. Then for three days separate +portions of the French army- first Murat's (the vice-king's), then +Davout's, and then Ney's- ran, as it were, the gauntlet of the Russian +army. They abandoned one another, abandoned all their heavy baggage, +their artillery, and half their men, and fled, getting past the +Russians by night by making semicircles to the right. + +Ney, who came last, had been busying himself blowing up the walls of +Smolensk which were in nobody's way, because despite the unfortunate +plight of the French or because of it, they wished to punish the floor +against which they had hurt themselves. Ney, who had had a corps of +ten thousand men, reached Napoleon at Orsha with only one thousand men +left, having abandoned all the rest and all his cannon, and having +crossed the Dnieper at night by stealth at a wooded spot. + +From Orsha they fled farther along the road to Vilna, still +playing at blindman's buff with the pursuing army. At the Berezina +they again became disorganized, many were drowned and many +surrendered, but those who got across the river fled farther. Their +supreme chief donned a fur coat and, having seated himself in a +sleigh, galloped on alone, abandoning his companions. The others who +could do so drove away too, leaving those who could not to surrender +or die. + +CHAPTER XVIII + +This campaign consisted in a flight of the French during which +they did all they could to destroy themselves. From the time they +turned onto the Kaluga road to the day their leader fled from the +army, none of the movements of the crowd had any sense. So one might +have thought that regarding this period of the campaign the +historians, who attributed the actions of the mass to the will of +one man, would have found it impossible to make the story of the +retreat fit their theory. But no! Mountains of books have been written +by the historians about this campaign, and everywhere are described +Napoleon's arrangements, the maneuvers, and his profound plans which +guided the army, as well as the military genius shown by his marshals. + +The retreat from Malo-Yaroslavets when he had a free road into a +well-supplied district and the parallel road was open to him along +which Kutuzov afterwards pursued him- this unnecessary retreat along a +devastated road- is explained to us as being due to profound +considerations. Similarly profound considerations are given for his +retreat from Smolensk to Orsha. Then his heroism at Krasnoe is +described, where he is reported to have been prepared to accept battle +and take personal command, and to have walked about with a birch stick +and said: + +"J'ai assez fait l'empereur; il est temps de faire le general,"~^ but +nevertheless immediately ran away again, abandoning to its fate the +scattered fragments of the army he left behind. + +^~ "I have acted the Emperor long enough; it is time to act the +general." + +Then we are told of the greatness of soul of the marshals, +especially of Ney- a greatness of soul consisting in this: that he +made his way by night around through the forest and across the Dnieper +and escaped to Orsha, abandoning standards, artillery, and nine tenths +of his men. + +And lastly, the final departure of the great Emperor from his heroic +army is presented to us by the historians as something great and +characteristic of genius. Even that final running away, described in +ordinary language as the lowest depth of baseness which every child is +taught to be ashamed of- even that act finds justification in the +historians' language. + +When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of +historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly +contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians +produce a saving conception of "greatness." "Greatness," it seems, +excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the "great" man nothing +is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a "great" man can be blamed. + +"C'est grand!"~^ say the historians, and there no longer exists +either good or evil but only "grand" and "not grand." Grand is good, +not grand is bad. Grand is the characteristic, in their conception, of +some special animals called "heroes." And Napoleon, escaping home in a +warm fur coat and leaving to perish those who were not merely his +comrades but were (in his opinion) men he had brought there, feels que +c'est grand,~^ and his soul is tranquil. + +^~ "It is great." + +^~ That it is great. + +"Du sublime (he saw something sublime in himself) au ridicule il n'y +a qu'un pas,"~^ said he. And the whole world for fifty years has been +repeating: "Sublime! Grand! Napoleon le Grand!" Du sublime au ridicule +il n'y a qu'un pas. + +^~ "From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step." + +And it occurs to no one that to admit a greatness not +commensurable with the standard of right and wrong is merely to +admit one's own nothingness and immeasurable meanness. + +For us with the standard of good and evil given us by Christ, no +human actions are incommensurable. And there is no greatness where +simplicity, goodness, and truth are absent. + +CHAPTER XIX + +What Russian, reading the account of the last part of the campaign +of 1812, has not experienced an uncomfortable feeling of regret, +dissatisfaction, and perplexity? Who has not asked himself how it is +that the French were not all captured or destroyed when our three +armies surrounded them in superior numbers, when the disordered +French, hungry and freezing, surrendered in crowds, and when (as the +historians relate) the aim of the Russians was to stop the French, +to cut them off, and capture them all? + +How was it that the Russian army, which when numerically weaker than +the French had given battle at Borodino, did not achieve its purpose +when it had surrounded the French on three sides and when its aim +was to capture them? Can the French be so enormously superior to us +that when we had surrounded them with superior forces we could not +beat them? How could that happen? + +History (or what is called by that name) replying to these questions +says that this occurred because Kutuzov and Tormasov and Chichagov, +and this man and that man, did not execute such and such maneuvers... + +But why did they not execute those maneuvers? And why if they were +guilty of not carrying out a prearranged plan were they not tried +and punished? But even if we admitted that Kutuzov, Chichagov, and +others were the cause of the Russian failures, it is still +incomprehensible why, the position of the Russian army being what it +was at Krasnoe and at the Berezina (in both cases we had superior +forces), the French army with its marshals, kings, and Emperor was not +captured, if that was what the Russians aimed at. + +The explanation of this strange fact given by Russian military +historians (to the effect that Kutuzov hindered an attack) is +unfounded, for we know that he could not restrain the troops from +attacking at Vyazma and Tarutino. + +Why was the Russian army- which with inferior forces had withstood +the enemy in full strength at Borodino- defeated at Krasnoe and the +Berezina by the disorganized crowds of the French when it was +numerically superior? + +If the aim of the Russians consisted in cutting off and capturing +Napoleon and his marshals- and that aim was not merely frustrated +but all attempts to attain it were most shamefully baffled- then +this last period of the campaign is quite rightly considered by the +French to be a series of victories, and quite wrongly considered +victorious by Russian historians. + +The Russian military historians in so far as they submit to claims +of logic must admit that conclusion, and in spite of their lyrical +rhapsodies about valor, devotion, and so forth, must reluctantly admit +that the French retreat from Moscow was a series of victories for +Napoleon and defeats for Kutuzov. + +But putting national vanity entirely aside one feels that such a +conclusion involves a contradiction, since the series of French +victories brought the French complete destruction, while the series of +Russian defeats led to the total destruction of their enemy and the +liberation of their country. + +The source of this contradiction lies in the fact that the +historians studying the events from the letters of the sovereigns +and the generals, from memoirs, reports, projects, and so forth, +have attributed to this last period of the war of 1812 an aim that +never existed, namely that of cutting off and capturing Napoleon +with his marshals and his army. + +There never was or could have been such an aim, for it would have +been senseless and its attainment quite impossible. + +It would have been senseless, first because Napoleon's +disorganized army was flying from Russia with all possible speed, that +is to say, was doing just what every Russian desired. So what was +the use of performing various operations on the French who were +running away as fast as they possibly could? + +Secondly, it would have been senseless to block the passage of men +whose whole energy was directed to flight. + +Thirdly, it would have been senseless to sacrifice one's own +troops in order to destroy the French army, which without external +interference was destroying itself at such a rate that, though its +path was not blocked, it could not carry across the frontier more than +it actually did in December, namely a hundredth part of the original +army. + +Fourthly, it would have been senseless to wish to take captive the +Emperor, kings, and dukes- whose capture would have been in the +highest degree embarrassing for the Russians, as the most adroit +diplomatists of the time (Joseph de Maistre and others) recognized. +Still more senseless would have been the wish to capture army corps of +the French, when our own army had melted away to half before +reaching Krasnoe and a whole division would have been needed to convoy +the corps of prisoners, and when our men were not always getting +full rations and the prisoners already taken were perishing of hunger. + +All the profound plans about cutting off and capturing Napoleon +and his army were like the plan of a market gardener who, when driving +out of his garden a cow that had trampled down the beds he had +planted, should run to the gate and hit the cow on the head. The +only thing to be said in excuse of that gardener would be that he +was very angry. But not even that could be said for those who drew +up this project, for it was not they who had suffered from the +trampled beds. + +But besides the fact that cutting off Napoleon with his army would +have been senseless, it was impossible. + +It was impossible first because- as experience shows that a +three-mile movement of columns on a battlefield never coincides with +the plans- the probability of Chichagov, Kutuzov, and Wittgenstein +effecting a junction on time at an appointed place was so remote as to +be tantamount to impossibility, as in fact thought Kutuzov, who when +he received the plan remarked that diversions planned over great +distances do not yield the desired results. + +Secondly it was impossible, because to paralyze the momentum with +which Napoleon's army was retiring, incomparably greater forces than +the Russians possessed would have been required. + +Thirdly it was impossible, because the military term "to cut off" +has no meaning. One can cut off a slice of bread, but not an army. +To cut off an army- to bar its road- is quite impossible, for there is +always plenty of room to avoid capture and there is the night when +nothing can be seen, as the military scientists might convince +themselves by the example of Krasnoe and of the Berezina. It is only +possible to capture prisoners if they agree to be captured, just as it +is only possible to catch a swallow if it settles on one's hand. Men +can only be taken prisoners if they surrender according to the rules +of strategy and tactics, as the Germans did. But the French troops +quite rightly did not consider that this suited them, since death by +hunger and cold awaited them in flight or captivity alike. + +Fourthly and chiefly it was impossible, because never since the +world began has a war been fought under such conditions as those +that obtained in 1812, and the Russian army in its pursuit of the +French strained its strength to the utmost and could not have done +more without destroying itself. + +During the movement of the Russian army from Tarutino to Krasnoe +it lost fifty thousand sick or stragglers, that is a number equal to +the population of a large provincial town. Half the men fell out of +the army without a battle. + +And it is of this period of the campaign- when the army lacked boots +and sheepskin coats, was short of provisions and without vodka, and +was camping out at night for months in the snow with fifteen degrees +of frost, when there were only seven or eight hours of daylight and +the rest was night in which the influence of discipline cannot be +maintained, when men were taken into that region of death where +discipline fails, not for a few hours only as in a battle, but for +months, where they were every moment fighting death from hunger and +cold, when half the army perished in a single month- it is of this +period of the campaign that the historians tell us how Miloradovich +should have made a flank march to such and such a place, Tormasov to +another place, and Chichagov should have crossed (more than +knee-deep in snow) to somewhere else, and how so-and-so "routed" and +"cut off" the French and so on and so on. + +The Russians, half of whom died, did all that could and should +have been done to attain an end worthy of the nation, and they are not +to blame because other Russians, sitting in warm rooms, proposed +that they should do what was impossible. + +All that strange contradiction now difficult to understand between +the facts and the historical accounts only arises because the +historians dealing with the matter have written the history of the +beautiful words and sentiments of various generals, and not the +history of the events. + +To them the words of Miloradovich seem very interesting, and so do +their surmises and the rewards this or that general received; but +the question of those fifty thousand men who were left in hospitals +and in graves does not even interest them, for it does not come within +the range of their investigation. + +Yet one need only discard the study of the reports and general plans +and consider the movement of those hundreds of thousands of men who +took a direct part in the events, and all the questions that seemed +insoluble easily and simply receive an immediate and certain solution. + +The aim of cutting off Napoleon and his army never existed except in +the imaginations of a dozen people. It could not exist because it +was senseless and unattainable. + +The people had a single aim: to free their land from invasion. +That aim was attained in the first place of itself, as the French +ran away, and so it was only necessary not to stop their flight. +Secondly it was attained by the guerrilla warfare which was destroying +the French, and thirdly by the fact that a large Russian army was +following the French, ready to use its strength in case their movement +stopped. + +The Russian army had to act like a whip to a running animal. And the +experienced driver knew it was better to hold the whip raised as a +menace than to strike the running animal on the head. + +BOOK FIFTEEN: 1812 - 13 + +CHAPTER I + +When seeing a dying animal a man feels a sense of horror: +substance similar to his own is perishing before his eyes. But when it +is a beloved and intimate human being that is dying, besides this +horror at the extinction of life there is a severance, a spiritual +wound, which like a physical wound is sometimes fatal and sometimes +heals, but always aches and shrinks at any external irritating touch. + +After Prince Andrew's death Natasha and Princess Mary alike felt +this. Drooping in spirit and closing their eyes before the menacing +cloud of death that overhung them, they dared not look life in the +face. They carefully guarded their open wounds from any rough and +painful contact. Everything: a carriage passing rapidly in the street, +a summons to dinner, the maid's inquiry what dress to prepare, or +worse still any word of insincere or feeble sympathy, seemed an +insult, painfully irritated the wound, interrupting that necessary +quiet in which they both tried to listen to the stern and dreadful +choir that still resounded in their imagination, and hindered their +gazing into those mysterious limitless vistas that for an instant +had opened out before them. + +Only when alone together were they free from such outrage and +pain. They spoke little even to one another, and when they did it +was of very unimportant matters. + +Both avoided any allusion to the future. To admit the possibility of +a future seemed to them to insult his memory. Still more carefully did +they avoid anything relating to him who was dead. It seemed to them +that what they had lived through and experienced could not be +expressed in words, and that any reference to the details of his +life infringed the majesty and sacredness of the mystery that had been +accomplished before their eyes. + +Continued abstention from speech, and constant avoidance of +everything that might lead up to the subject- this halting on all +sides at the boundary of what they might not mention- brought before +their minds with still greater purity and clearness what they were +both feeling. + +But pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete +joy. Princess Mary, in her position as absolute and independent +arbiter of her own fate and guardian and instructor of her nephew, was +the first to be called back to life from that realm of sorrow in which +she had dwelt for the first fortnight. She received letters from her +relations to which she had to reply; the room in which little Nicholas +had been put was damp and he began to cough; Alpatych came to +Yaroslavl with reports on the state of their affairs and with advice +and suggestions that they should return to Moscow to the house on +the Vozdvizhenka Street, which had remained uninjured and needed +only slight repairs. Life did not stand still and it was necessary +to live. Hard as it was for Princess Mary to emerge from the realm +of secluded contemplation in which she had lived till then, and +sorry and almost ashamed as she felt to leave Natasha alone, yet the +cares of life demanded her attention and she involuntarily yielded +to them. She went through the accounts with Alpatych, conferred with +Dessalles about her nephew, and gave orders and made preparations +for the journey to Moscow. + +Natasha remained alone and, from the time Princess Mary began making +preparations for departure, held aloof from her too. + +Princess Mary asked the countess to let Natasha go with her to +Moscow, and both parents gladly accepted this offer, for they saw +their daughter losing strength every day and thought that a change +of scene and the advice of Moscow doctors would be good for her. + +"I am not going anywhere," Natasha replied when this was proposed to +her. "Do please just leave me alone!" And she ran out of the room, +with difficulty refraining from tears of vexation and irritation +rather than of sorrow. + +After she felt herself deserted by Princes Mary and alone in her +grief, Natasha spent most of the time in her room by herself, +sitting huddled up feet and all in the corner of the sofa, tearing and +twisting something with her slender nervous fingers and gazing +intently and fixedly at whatever her eyes chanced to fall on. This +solitude exhausted and tormented her but she was in absolute need of +it. As soon as anyone entered she got up quickly, changed her position +and expression, and picked up a book or some sewing, evidently waiting +impatiently for the intruder to go. + +She felt all the time as if she might at any moment penetrate that +on which- with a terrible questioning too great for her strength- +her spiritual gaze was fixed. + +One day toward the end of December Natasha, pale and thin, dressed +in a black woolen gown, her plaited hair negligently twisted into a +knot, was crouched feet and all in the corner of her sofa, nervously +crumpling and smoothing out the end of her sash while she looked at +a corner of the door. + +She was gazing in the direction in which he had gone- to the other +side of life. And that other side of life, of which she had never +before thought and which had formerly seemed to her so far away and +improbable, was now nearer and more akin and more comprehensible +than this side of life, where everything was either emptiness and +desolation or suffering and indignity. + +She was gazing where she knew him to be; but she could not imagine +him otherwise than as he had been here. She now saw him again as he +had been at Mytishchi, at Troitsa, and at Yaroslavl. + +She saw his face, heard his voice, repeated his words and her own, +and sometimes devised other words they might have spoken. + +There he is lying back in an armchair in his velvet cloak, leaning +his head on his thin pale hand. His chest is dreadfully hollow and his +shoulders raised. His lips are firmly closed, his eyes glitter, and +a wrinkle comes and goes on his pale forehead. One of his legs +twitches just perceptibly, but rapidly. Natasha knows that he is +struggling with terrible pain. "What is that pain like? Why does he +have that pain? What does he feel? How does it hurt him?" thought +Natasha. He noticed her watching him, raised his eyes, and began to +speak seriously: + +"One thing would be terrible," said he: "to bind oneself forever +to a suffering man. It would be continual torture." And he looked +searchingly at her. Natasha as usual answered before she had time to +think what she would say. She said: "This can't go on- it won't. You +will get well- quite well." + +She now saw him from the commencement of that scene and relived what +she had then felt. She recalled his long sad and severe look at +those words and understood the meaning of the rebuke and despair in +that protracted gaze. + +"I agreed," Natasha now said to herself, "that it would be +dreadful if he always continued to suffer. I said it then only because +it would have been dreadful for him, but he understood it differently. +He thought it would be dreadful for me. He then still wished to live +and feared death. And I said it so awkwardly and stupidly! I did not +say what I meant. I thought quite differently. Had I said what I +thought, I should have said: even if he had to go on dying, to die +continually before my eyes, I should have been happy compared with +what I am now. Now there is nothing... nobody. Did he know that? No, +he did not and never will know it. And now it will never, never be +possible to put it right." And now he again seemed to be saying the +same words to her, only in her imagination Natasha this time gave +him a different answer. She stopped him and said: "Terrible for you, +but not for me! You know that for me there is nothing in life but you, +and to suffer with you is the greatest happiness for me," and he +took her hand and pressed it as he had pressed it that terrible +evening four days before his death. And in her imagination she said +other tender and loving words which she might have said then but +only spoke now: "I love thee!... thee! I love, love..." she said, +convulsively pressing her hands and setting her teeth with a desperate +effort... + +She was overcome by sweet sorrow and tears were already rising in +her eyes; then she suddenly asked herself to whom she was saying this. +Again everything was shrouded in hard, dry perplexity, and again +with a strained frown she peered toward the world where he was. And +now, now it seemed to her she was penetrating the mystery.... But at +the instant when it seemed that the incomprehensible was revealing +itself to her a loud rattle of the door handle struck painfully on her +ears. Dunyasha, her maid, entered the room quickly and abruptly with a +frightened look on her face and showing no concern for her mistress. + +"Come to your Papa at once, please!" said she with a strange, +excited look. "A misfortune... about Peter Ilynich... a letter," she +finished with a sob. + +CHAPTER II + +Besides a feeling of aloofness from everybody Natasha was feeling +a special estrangement from the members of her own family. All of +them- her father, mother, and Sonya- were so near to her, so familiar, +so commonplace, that all their words and feelings seemed an insult +to the world in which she had been living of late, and she felt not +merely indifferent to them but regarded them with hostility. She heard +Dunyasha's words about Peter Ilynich and a misfortune, but did not +grasp them. + +"What misfortune? What misfortune can happen to them? They just live +their own old, quiet, and commonplace life," thought Natasha. + +As she entered the ballroom her father was hurriedly coming out of +her mother's room. His face was puckered up and wet with tears. He had +evidently run out of that room to give vent to the sobs that were +choking him. When he saw Natasha he waved his arms despairingly and +burst into convulsively painful sobs that distorted his soft round +face. + +"Pe... Petya... Go, go, she... is calling..." and weeping like a +child and quickly shuffling on his feeble legs to a chair, he almost +fell into it, covering his face with his hands. + +Suddenly an electric shock seemed to run through Natasha's whole +being. Terrible anguish struck her heart, she felt a dreadful ache +as if something was being torn inside her and she were dying. But +the pain was immediately followed by a feeling of release from the +oppressive constraint that had prevented her taking part in life. +The sight of her father, the terribly wild cries of her mother that +she heard through the door, made her immediately forget herself and +her own grief. + +She ran to her father, but he feebly waved his arm, pointing to +her mother's door. Princess Mary, pale and with quivering chin, came +out from that room and taking Natasha by the arm said something to +her. Natasha neither saw nor heard her. She went in with rapid +steps, pausing at the door for an instant as if struggling with +herself, and then ran to her mother. + +The countess was lying in an armchair in a strange and awkward +position, stretching out and beating her head against the wall. +Sonya and the maids were holding her arms. + +"Natasha! Natasha!..." cried the countess. "It's not true... it's +not true... He's lying... Natasha!" she shrieked, pushing those around +her away. "Go away, all of you; it's not true! Killed!... ha, ha, +ha!... It's not true!" + +Natasha put one knee on the armchair, stooped over her mother, +embraced her, and with unexpected strength raised her, turned her face +toward herself, and clung to her. + +"Mummy!... darling!... I am here, my dearest Mummy," she kept on +whispering, not pausing an instant. + +She did not let go of her mother but struggled tenderly with her, +demanded a pillow and hot water, and unfastened and tore open her +mother's dress. + +"My dearest darling... Mummy, my precious!..." she whispered +incessantly, kissing her head, her hands, her face, and feeling her +own irrepressible and streaming tears tickling her nose and cheeks. + +The countess pressed her daughter's hand, closed her eyes, and +became quiet for a moment. Suddenly she sat up with unaccustomed +swiftness, glanced vacantly around her, and seeing Natasha began to +press her daughter's head with all her strength. Then she turned +toward her daughter's face which was wincing with pain and gazed +long at it. + +"Natasha, you love me?" she said in a soft trustful whisper. +"Natasha, you would not deceive me? You'll tell me the whole truth?" + +Natasha looked at her with eyes full of tears and in her look +there was nothing but love and an entreaty for forgiveness. + +"My darling Mummy!" she repeated, straining all the power of her +love to find some way of taking on herself the excess of grief that +crushed her mother. + +And again in a futile struggle with reality her mother, refusing +to believe that she could live when her beloved boy was killed in +the bloom of life, escaped from reality into a world of delirium. + +Natasha did not remember how that day passed nor that night, nor the +next day and night. She did not sleep and did not leave her mother. +Her persevering and patient love seemed completely to surround the +countess every moment, not explaining or consoling, but recalling +her to life. + +During the third night the countess kept very quiet for a few +minutes, and Natasha rested her head on the arm of her chair and +closed her eyes, but opened them again on hearing the bedstead +creak. The countess was sitting up in bed and speaking softly. + +"How glad I am you have come. You are tired. Won't you have some +tea?" Natasha went up to her. "You have improved in looks and grown +more manly," continued the countess, taking her daughter's hand. + +"Mamma! What are you saying..." + +"Natasha, he is no more, no more!" + +And embracing her daughter, the countess began to weep for the first +time. + +CHAPTER III + +Princess Mary postponed her departure. Sonya and the count tried +to replace Natasha but could not. They saw that she alone was able +to restrain her mother from unreasoning despair. For three weeks +Natasha remained constantly at her mother's side, sleeping on a lounge +chair in her room, making her eat and drink, and talking to her +incessantly because the mere sound of her tender, caressing tones +soothed her mother. + +The mother's wounded spirit could not could not heal. Petya's +death had torn from her half her life. When the news of Petya's +death had come she had been a fresh and vigorous woman of fifty, but a +month later she left her room a listless old woman taking no +interest in life. But the same blow that almost killed the countess, +this second blow, restored Natasha to life. + +A spiritual wound produced by a rending of the spiritual body is +like a physical wound and, strange as it may seem, just as a deep +wound may heal and its edges join, physical and spiritual wounds alike +can yet heal completely only as the result of a vital force from +within. + +Natasha's wound healed in that way. She thought her life was +ended, but her love for her mother unexpectedly showed her that the +essence of life- love- was still active within her. Love awoke and +so did life. + +Prince Andrew's last days had bound Princess Mary and Natasha +together; this new sorrow brought them still closer to one another. +Princess Mary put off her departure, and for three weeks looked +after Natasha as if she had been a sick child. The last weeks passed +in her mother's bedroom had strained Natasha's physical strength. + +One afternoon noticing Natasha shivering with fever, Princess Mary +took her to her own room and made her lie down on the bed. Natasha lay +down, but when Princess Mary had drawn the blinds and was going away +she called her back. + +"I don't want to sleep, Mary, sit by me a little." + +"You are tired- try to sleep." + +"No, no. Why did you bring me away? She will be asking for me." + +"She is much better. She spoke so well today," said Princess Mary. + +Natasha lay on the bed and in the semidarkness of the room scanned +Princess Mary's face. + +"Is she like him?" thought Natasha. "Yes, like and yet not like. But +she is quite original, strange, new, and unknown. And she loves me. +What is in her heart? All that is good. But how? What is her mind +like? What does she think about me? Yes, she is splendid!" + +"Mary," she said timidly, drawing Princess Mary's hand to herself, +"Mary, you mustn't think me wicked. No? Mary darling, how I love +you! Let us be quite, quite friends." + +And Natasha, embracing her, began kissing her face and hands, making +Princess Mary feel shy but happy by this demonstration of her +feelings. + +From that day a tender and passionate friendship such as exists only +between women was established between Princess Mary and Natasha. +They were continually kissing and saying tender things to one +another and spent most of their time together. When one went out the +other became restless and hastened to rejoin her. Together they felt +more in harmony with one another than either of them felt with herself +when alone. A feeling stronger than friendship sprang up between them; +an exclusive feeling of life being possible only in each other's +presence. + +Sometimes they were silent for hours; sometimes after they were +already in bed they would begin talking and go on till morning. They +spoke most of what was long past. Princess Mary spoke of her +childhood, of her mother, her father, and her daydreams; and +Natasha, who with a passive lack of understanding had formerly +turned away from that life of devotion, submission, and the poetry +of Christian self-sacrifice, now feeling herself bound to Princess +Mary by affection, learned to love her past too and to understand a +side of life previously incomprehensible to her. She did not think +of applying submission and self-abnegation to her own life, for she +was accustomed to seek other joys, but she understood and loved in +another those previously incomprehensible virtues. For Princess +Mary, listening to Natasha's tales of childhood and early youth, there +also opened out a new and hitherto uncomprehended side of life: belief +in life and its enjoyment. + +Just as before, they never mentioned him so as not to lower (as they +thought) their exalted feelings by words; but this silence about him +had the effect of making them gradually begin to forget him without +being conscious of it. + +Natasha had grown thin and pale and physically so weak that they all +talked about her health, and this pleased her. But sometimes she was +suddenly overcome by fear not only of death but of sickness, weakness, +and loss of good looks, and involuntarily she examined her bare arm +carefully, surprised at its thinness, and in the morning noticed her +drawn and, as it seemed to her, piteous face in her glass. It seemed +to her that things must be so, and yet it was dreadfully sad. + +One day she went quickly upstairs and found herself out of breath. +Unconsciously she immediately invented a reason for going down, and +then, testing her strength, ran upstairs again, observing the result. + +Another time when she called Dunyasha her voice trembled, so she +called again- though she could hear Dunyasha coming- called her in the +deep chest tones in which she had been wont to sing, sing, and +listened attentively to herself. + +She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the +layer of slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, +delicate young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which taking +root would so cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed +her down that it would soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound +had begun to heal from within. + +At the end of January Princess Mary left for Moscow, and the count +insisted on Natasha's going with her to consult the doctors. + +CHAPTER IV + +After the encounter at Vyazma, where Kutuzov had been unable to hold +back his troops in their anxiety to overwhelm and cut off the enemy +and so on, the farther movement of the fleeing French, and of the +Russians who pursued them, continued as far as Krasnoe without a +battle. The flight was so rapid that the Russian army pursuing the +French could not keep up with them; cavalry and artillery horses broke +down, and the information received of the movements of the French +was never reliable. + +The men in the Russian army were so worn out by this continuous +marching at the rate of twenty-seven miles a day that they could not +go any faster. + +To realize the degree of exhaustion of the Russian army it is only +necessary to grasp clearly the meaning of the fact that, while not +losing more than five thousand killed and wounded after Tarutino and +less than a hundred prisoners, the Russian army which left that +place a hundred thousand strong reached Krasnoe with only fifty +thousand. + +The rapidity of the Russian pursuit was just as destructive to our +army as the flight of the French was to theirs. The only difference +was that the Russian army moved voluntarily, with no such threat of +destruction as hung over the French, and that the sick Frenchmen +were left behind in enemy hands while the sick Russians left behind +were among their own people. The chief cause of the wastage of +Napoleon's army was the rapidity of its movement, and a convincing +proof of this is the corresponding decrease of the Russian army. + +Kutuzov as far as was in his power, instead of trying to check the +movement of the French as was desired in Petersburg and by the Russian +army generals, directed his whole activity here, as he had done at +Tarutino and Vyazma, to hastening it on while easing the movement of +our army. + +But besides this, since the exhaustion and enormous diminution of +the army caused by the rapidity of the advance had become evident, +another reason for slackening the pace and delaying presented itself +to Kutuzov. The aim of the Russian army was to pursue the French. +The road the French would take was unknown, and so the closer our +troops trod on their heels the greater distance they had to cover. +Only by following at some distance could one cut across the zigzag +path of the French. All the artful maneuvers suggested by our generals +meant fresh movements of the army and a lengthening of its marches, +whereas the only reasonable aim was to shorten those marches. To +that end Kutuzov's activity was directed during the whole campaign +from Moscow to Vilna- not casually or intermittently but so +consistently that he never once deviated from it. + +Kutuzov felt and knew- not by reasoning or science but with the +whole of his Russian being- what every Russian soldier felt: that +the French were beaten, that the enemy was flying and must be driven +out; but at the same time he like the soldiers realized all the +hardship of this march, the rapidity of which was unparalleled for +such a time of the year. + +But to the generals, especially the foreign ones in the Russian +army, who wished to distinguish themselves, to astonish somebody, +and for some reason to capture a king or a duke- it seemed that now- +when any battle must be horrible and senseless- was the very time to +fight and conquer somebody. Kutuzov merely shrugged his shoulders when +one after another they presented projects of maneuvers to be made with +those soldiers- ill-shod, insufficiently clad, and half starved- who +within a month and without fighting a battle had dwindled to half +their number, and who at the best if the flight continued would have +to go a greater distance than they had already traversed, before +they reached the frontier. + +This longing to distinguish themselves, to maneuver, to overthrow, +and to cut off showed itself particularly whenever the Russians +stumbled on the French army. + +So it was at Krasnoe, where they expected to find one of the three +French columns and stumbled instead on Napoleon himself with sixteen +thousand men. Despite all Kutuzov's efforts to avoid that ruinous +encounter and to preserve his troops, the massacre of the broken mob +of French soldiers by worn-out Russians continued at Krasnoe for three +days. + +Toll wrote a disposition: "The first column will march to so and +so," etc. And as usual nothing happened in accord with the +disposition. Prince Eugene of Wurttemberg fired from a hill over the +French crowds that were running past, and demanded reinforcements +which did not arrive. The French, avoiding the Russians, dispersed and +hid themselves in the forest by night, making their way round as +best they could, and continued their flight. + +Miloradovich, who said he did not want to know anything about the +commissariat affairs of his detachment, and could never be found +when he was wanted- that chevalier sans peur et sans reproche~^ as he +styled himself- who was fond of parleys with the French, sent envoys +demanding their surrender, wasted time, and did not do what he was +ordered to do. + +^~ Knight without fear and without reproach. + +"I give you that column, lads," he said, riding up to the troops and +pointing out the French to the cavalry. + +And the cavalry, with spurs and sabers urging on horses that could +scarcely move, trotted with much effort to the column presented to +them- that is to say, to a crowd of Frenchmen stark with cold, +frost-bitten, and starving- and the column that had been presented +to them threw down its arms and surrendered as it had long been +anxious to do. + +At Krasnoe they took twenty-six thousand prisoners, several +hundred cannon, and a stick called a "marshal's staff," and disputed +as to who had distinguished himself and were pleased with their +achievement- though they much regretted not having taken Napoleon, +or at least a marshal or a hero of some sort, and reproached one +another and especially Kutuzov for having failed to do so. + +These men, carried away by their passions, were but blind tools of +the most melancholy law of necessity, but considered themselves heroes +and imagined that they were accomplishing a most noble and honorable +deed. They blamed Kutuzov and said that from the very beginning of the +campaign he had prevented their vanquishing Napoleon, that he +thought nothing but satisfying his passions and would not advance from +the Linen Factories because he was comfortable there, that at +Krasnoe he checked the advance because on learning that Napoleon was +there he had quite lost his head, and that it was probable that he had +an understanding with Napoleon and had been bribed by him, and so +on, and so on. + +Not only did his contempories, carried away by their passions, +talk in this way, but posterity and history have acclaimed Napoleon as +grand, while Kutuzov is described by foreigners as a crafty, +dissolute, weak old courtier, and by Russians as something indefinite- +a sort of puppet useful only because he had a Russian name. + +CHAPTER V + +In 1812 and 1813 Kutuzov was openly accused of blundering. The +Emperor was dissatisfied with him. And in a history recently written +by order of the Highest Authorities it is said that Kutuzov was a +cunning court liar, frightened of the name of Napoleon, and that by +his blunders at Krasnoe and the Berezina he deprived the Russian +army of the glory of complete victory over the French.~^ + +^~ History of the year 1812. The character of Kutuzov and +reflections on the unsatisfactory results of the battles at Krasnoe, +by Bogdanovich. + +Such is the fate not of great men (grands hommes) whom the Russian +mind does not acknowledge, but of those rare and always solitary +individuals who, discerning the will of Providence, submit their +personal will to it. The hatred and contempt of the crowd punish +such men for discerning the higher laws. + +For Russian historians, strange and terrible to say, Napoleon- +that most insignificant tool of history who never anywhere, even in +exile, showed human dignity- Napoleon is the object of adulation and +enthusiasm; he is grand. But Kutuzov- the man who from the beginning +to the end of his activity in 1812, never once swerving by word or +deed from Borodino to Vilna, presented an example exceptional in +history of self-sacrifice and a present conciousness of the future +importance of what was happening- Kutuzov seems to them something +indefinite and pitiful, and when speaking of him and of the year +1812 they always seem a little ashamed. + +And yet it is difficult to imagine an historical character whose +activity was so unswervingly directed to a single aim; and it would be +difficult to imagine any aim more worthy or more consonant with the +will of the whole people. Still more difficult would it be to find +an instance in history of the aim of an historical personage being +so completely accomplished as that to which all Kutuzov's efforts were +directed in 1812. + +Kutuzov never talked of "forty centuries looking down from the +Pyramids," of the sacrifices he offered for the fatherland, or of what +he intended to accomplish or had accomplished; in general he said +nothing about himself, adopted no prose, always appeared to be the +simplest and most ordinary of men, and said the simplest and most +ordinary things. He wrote letters to his daughters and to Madame de +Stael, read novels, liked the society of pretty women, jested with +generals, officers, and soldiers, and never contradicted those who +tried to prove anything to him. When Count Rostopchin at the Yauza +bridge galloped up to Kutuzov with personal reproaches for having +caused the destruction of Moscow, and said: "How was it you promised +not to abandon Moscow without a battle?" Kutuzov replied: "And I shall +not abandon Moscow without a battle," though Moscow was then already +abandoned. When Arakcheev, coming to him from the Emperor, said that +Ermolov ought to be appointed chief of the artillery, Kutuzov replied: +"Yes, I was just saying so myself," though a moment before he had said +quite the contrary. What did it matter to him- who then alone amid a +senseless crowd understood the whole tremendous significance of what +was happening- what did it matter to him whether Rostopchin attributed +the calamities of Moscow to him or to himself? Still less could it +matter to him who was appointed chief of the artillery. + +Not merely in these cases but continually did that old man- who by +experience of life had reached the conviction that thoughts and the +words serving as their expression are not what move people- use +quite meaningless words that happened to enter his head. + +But that man, so heedless of his words, did not once during the +whole time of his activity utter one word inconsistent with the single +aim toward which he moved throughout the whole war. Obviously in spite +of himself, in very diverse circumstances, he repeatedly expressed his +real thoughts with the bitter conviction that he would not be +understood. Beginning with the battle of Borodino, from which time his +disagreement with those about him began, he alone said that the battle +of Borodino was a victory, and repeated this both verbally and in +his dispatches and reports up to the time of his death. He alone +said that the loss of Moscow is not the loss of Russia. In reply to +Lauriston's proposal of peace, he said: There can be no peace, for +such is the people's will. He alone during the retreat of the French +said that all our maneuvers are useless, everything is being +accomplished of itself better than we could desire; that the enemy +must be offered "a golden bridge"; that neither the Tarutino, the +Vyazma, nor the Krasnoe battles were necessary; that we must keep some +force to reach the frontier with, and that he would not sacrifice a +single Russian for ten Frenchmen. + +And this courtier, as he is described to us, who lies to Arakcheev +to please the Emperor, he alone- incurring thereby the Emperor's +displeasure- said in Vilna that to carry the war beyond the frontier +is useless and harmful. + +Nor do words alone prove that only he understood the meaning of +the events. His actions- without the smallest deviation- were all +directed to one and the same threefold end: (1) to brace all his +strength for conflict with the French, (2) to defeat them, and (3) +to drive them out of Russia, minimizing as far as possible the +sufferings of our people and of our army. + +This procrastinator Kutuzov, whose motto was "Patience and Time," +this enemy of decisive action, gave battle at Borodino, investing +the preparations for it with unparalleled solemnity. This Kutuzov +who before the battle of Austerlitz began said that it would be +lost, he alone, in contradiction to everyone else, declared till his +death that Borodino was a victory, despite the assurance of generals +that the battle was lost and despite the fact that for an army to have +to retire after winning a battle was unprecedented. He alone during +the whole retreat insisted that battles, which were useless then, +should not be fought, and that a new war should not be begun nor the +frontiers of Russia crossed. + +It is easy now to understand the significance of these events- if +only we abstain from attributing to the activity of the mass aims that +existed only in the heads of a dozen individuals- for the events and +results now lie before us. + +But how did that old man, alone, in opposition to the general +opinion, so truly discern the importance of the people's view of the +events that in all his activity he was never once untrue to it? + +The source of that extraordinary power of penetrating the meaning of +the events then occuring lay in the national feeling which he +possessed in full purity and strength. + +Only the recognition of the fact that he possessed this feeling +caused the people in so strange a manner, contrary to the Tsar's wish, +to select him- an old man in disfavor- to be their representative in +the national war. And only that feeling placed him on that highest +human pedestal from which he, the commander in chief, devoted all +his powers not to slaying and destroying men but to saving and showing +pity on them. + +That simple, modest, and therefore truly great, figure could not +be cast in the false mold of a European hero- the supposed ruler of +men- that history has invented. + +To a lackey no man can be great, for a lackey has his own conception +of greatness. + +CHAPTER VI + +The fifth of November was the first day of what is called the battle +of Krasnoe. Toward evening- after much disputing and many mistakes +made by generals who did not go to their proper places, and after +adjutants had been sent about with counterorders- when it had become +plain that the enemy was everywhere in flight and that there could and +would be no battle, Kutuzov left Krasnoe and went to Dobroe whither +his headquarters had that day been transferred. + +The day was clear and frosty. Kutuzov rode to Dobroe on his plump +little white horse, followed by an enormous suite of discontented +generals who whispered among themselves behind his back. All along the +road groups of French prisoners captured that day (there were seven +thousand of them) were crowding to warm themselves at campfires. +Near Dobroe an immense crowd of tattered prisoners, buzzing with +talk and wrapped and bandaged in anything they had been able to get +hold of, were standing in the road beside a long row of unharnessed +French guns. At the approach of the commander in chief the buzz of +talk ceased and all eyes were fixed on Kutuzov who, wearing a white +cap with a red band and a padded overcoat that bulged on his round +shoulders, moved slowly along the road on his white horse. One of +the generals was reporting to him where the guns and prisoners had +been captured. + +Kutuzov seemed preoccupied and did not listen to what the general +was saying. He screwed up his eyes with a dissatisfied look as he +gazed attentively and fixedly at these prisoners, who presented a +specially wretched appearance. Most of them were disfigured by +frost-bitten noses and cheeks, and nearly all had red, swollen and +festering eyes. + +One group of the French stood close to the road, and two of them, +one of whom had his face covered with sores, were tearing a piece of +raw flesh with their hands. There was something horrible and bestial +in the fleeting glance they threw at the riders and in the +malevolent expression with which, after a glance at Kutuzov, the +soldier with the sores immediately turned away and went on with what +he was doing. + +Kutuzov looked long and intently at these two soldiers. He +puckered his face, screwed up his eyes, and pensively swayed his head. +At another spot he noticed a Russian soldier laughingly patting a +Frenchman on the shoulder, saying something to him in a friendly +manner, and Kutuzov with the same expression on his face again +swayed his head. + +"What were you saying?" he asked the general, who continuing his +report directed the commander in chief's attention to some standards +captured from the French and standing in front of the Preobrazhensk +regiment. + +"Ah, the standards!" said Kutuzov, evidently detaching himself +with difficulty from the thoughts that preoccupied him. + +He looked about him absently. Thousands of eyes were looking at +him from all sides awaiting a word from him. + +He stopped in front of the Preobrazhensk regiment, sighed deeply, +and closed his eyes. One of his suite beckoned to the soldiers +carrying the standards to advance and surround the commander in +chief with them. Kutuzov was silent for a few seconds and then, +submitting with evident reluctance to the duty imposed by his +position, raised his head and began to speak. A throng of officers +surrounded him. He looked attentively around at the circle of +officers, recognizing several of them. + +"I thank you all!" he said, addressing the soldiers and then again +the officers. In the stillness around him his slowly uttered words +were distinctly heard. "I thank you all for your hard and faithful +service. The victory is complete and Russia will not forget you! Honor +to you forever." + +He paused and looked around. + +"Lower its head, lower it!" he said to a soldier who had +accidentally lowered the French eagle he was holding before the +Preobrazhensk standards. "Lower, lower, that's it. Hurrah lads!" he +added, addressing the men with a rapid movement of his chin. + +"Hur-r-rah!" roared thousands of voices. + +While the soldiers were shouting Kutuzov leaned forward in his +saddle and bowed his head, and his eye lit up with a mild and +apparently ironic gleam. + +"You see, brothers..." said he when the shouts had ceased... and all +at once his voice and the expression of his face changed. It was no +longer the commander in chief speaking but an ordinary old man who +wanted to tell his comrades something very important. + +There was a stir among the throng of officers and in the ranks of +the soldiers, who moved that they might hear better what he was +going to say. + +"You see, brothers, I know it's hard for you, but it can't be +helped! Bear up; it won't be for long now! We'll see our visitors +off and then we'll rest. The Tsar won't forget your service. It is +hard for you, but still you are at home while they- you see what +they have come to," said he, pointing to the prisoners. "Worse off +than our poorest beggars. While they were strong we didn't spare +ourselves, but now we may even pity them. They are human beings too. +Isn't it so, lads?" + +He looked around, and in the direct, respectful, wondering gaze +fixed upon him he read sympathy with what he had said. His face grew +brighter and brighter with an old man's mild smile, which drew the +corners of his lips and eyes into a cluster of wrinkles. He ceased +speaking and bowed his head as if in perplexity. + +"But after all who asked them here? Serves them right, the bloody +bastards!" he cried, suddenly lifting his head. + +And flourishing his whip he rode off at a gallop for the first +time during the whole campaign, and left the broken ranks of the +soldiers laughing joyfully and shouting "Hurrah!" + +Kutuzov's words were hardly understood by the troops. No one could +have repeated the field marshal's address, begun solemnly and then +changing into an old man's simplehearted talk; but the hearty +sincerity of that speech, the feeling of majestic triumph combined +with pity for the foe and consciousness of the justice of our cause, +exactly expressed by that old man's good-natured expletives, was not +merely understood but lay in the soul of every soldier and found +expression in their joyous and long-sustained shouts. Afterwards +when one of the generals addressed Kutuzov asking whether he wished +his caleche to be sent for, Kutuzov in answering unexpectedly gave a +sob, being evidently greatly moved. + +CHAPTER VII + +When the troops reached their night's halting place on the eighth of +November, the last day of the Krasnoe battles, it was already +growing dusk. All day it had been calm and frosty with occasional +lightly falling snow and toward evening it began to clear. Through the +falling snow a purple-black and starry sky showed itself and the frost +grew keener. + +An infantry regiment which had left Tarutino three thousand strong +but now numbered only nine hundred was one of the first to arrive that +night at its halting place- a village on the highroad. The +quartermasters who met the regiment announced that all the huts were +full of sick and dead Frenchmen, cavalrymen, and members of the staff. +There was only one hut available for the regimental commander. + +The commander rode up to his hut. The regiment passed through the +village and stacked its arms in front of the last huts. + +Like some huge many-limbed animal, the regiment began to prepare its +lair and its food. One part of it dispersed and waded knee-deep +through the snow into a birch forest to the right of the village, +and immediately the sound of axes and swords, the crashing of +branches, and merry voices could be heard from there. Another +section amid the regimental wagons and horses which were standing in a +group was busy getting out caldrons and rye biscuit, and feeding the +horses. A third section scattered through the village arranging +quarters for the staff officers, carrying out the French corpses +that were in the huts, and dragging away boards, dry wood, and +thatch from the roofs, for the campfires, or wattle fences to serve +for shelter. + +Some fifteen men with merry shouts were shaking down the high wattle +wall of a shed, the roof of which had already been removed. + +"Now then, all together- shove!" cried the voices, and the huge +surface of the wall, sprinkled with snow and creaking with frost, +was seen swaying in the gloom of the night. The lower stakes cracked +more and more and at last the wall fell, and with it the men who had +been pushing it. Loud, coarse laughter and joyous shouts ensued. + +"Now then, catch hold in twos! Hand up the lever! That's it... Where +are you shoving to?" + +"Now, all together! But wait a moment, boys... With a song!" + +All stood silent, and a soft, pleasant velvety voice began to +sing. At the end of the third verse as the last note died away, twenty +voices roared out at once: "Oo-oo-oo-oo! That's it. All together! +Heave away, boys!..." but despite their united efforts the wattle +hardly moved, and in the silence that followed the heavy breathing +of the men was audible. + +"Here, you of the Sixth Company! Devils that you are! Lend a hand... +will you? You may want us one of these days." + +Some twenty men of the Sixth Company who were on their way into +the village joined the haulers, and the wattle wall, which was about +thirty-five feet long an seven feet high, moved forward along the +village street, swaying, pressing upon and cutting the shoulders of +the gasping men. + +"Get along... Falling? What are you stopping for? There now..." + +Merry senseless words of abuse flowed freely. + +"What are you up to?" suddenly came the authoritative voice of a +sergeant major who came upon the men who were hauling their burden. +"There are gentry here; the general himself is in that hut, and you +foul-mouthed devils, you brutes, I'll give it to you!" shouted he, +hitting the first man who came in his way a swinging blow on the back. +"Can't you make less noise?" + +The men became silent. The soldier who had been struck groaned and +wiped his face, which had been scratched till it bled by his falling +against the wattle. + +"There, how that devil hits out! He's made my face all bloody," said +he in a frightened whisper when the sergeant major had passed on. + +"Don't you like it?" said a laughing voice, and moderating their +tones the men moved forward. + +When they were out of the village they began talking again as loud +as before, interlarding their talk with the same aimless expletives. + +In the hut which the men had passed, the chief officers had gathered +and were in animated talk over their tea about the events of the day +and the maneuvers suggested for tomorrow. It was proposed to make a +flank march to the left, cut off the Vice-King (Murat) and capture +him. + +By the time the soldiers had dragged the wattle fence to its place +the campfires were blazing on all sides ready for cooking, the wood +crackled, the snow was melting, and black shadows of soldiers +flitted to and fro all over the occupied space where the snow had been +trodden down. + +Axes and choppers were plied all around. Everything was done without +any orders being given. Stores of wood were brought for the night, +shelters were rigged up for the officers, caldrons were being +boiled, and muskets and accouterments put in order. + +The wattle wall the men had brought was set up in a semicircle by +the Eighth Company as a shelter from the north, propped up by musket +rests, and a campfire was built before it. They beat the tattoo, +called the roll, had supper, and settled down round the fires for +the night- some repairing their footgear, some smoking pipes, and some +stripping themselves naked to steam the lice out of their shirts. + +CHAPTER VIII + +One would have thought that under the almost incredibly wretched +conditions the Russian soldiers were in at that time- lacking warm +boots and sheepskin coats, without a roof over their heads, in the +snow with eighteen degrees of frost, and without even full rations +(the commissariat did not always keep up with the troops)- they +would have presented a very sad and depressing spectacle. + +On the contrary, the army had never under the best material +conditions presented a more cheerful and animated aspect. This was +because all who began to grow depressed or who lost strength were +sifted out of the army day by day. All the physically or morally +weak had long since been left behind and only the flower of the +army- physically and mentally- remained. + +More men collected behind the wattle fence of the Eighth Company +than anywhere else. Two sergeants major were sitting with them and +their campfire blazed brighter than others. For leave to sit by +their wattle they demanded contributions of fuel. + +"Eh, Makeev! What has become of you, you son of a bitch? Are you +lost or have the wolves eaten you? Fetch some more wood!" shouted a +red-haired and red-faced man, screwing up his eyes and blinking +because of the smoke but not moving back from the fire. "And you, +Jackdaw, go and fetch some wood!" said he to another soldier. + +This red-haired man was neither a sergeant nor a corporal, but being +robust he ordered about those weaker than himself. The soldier they +called "Jackdaw," a thin little fellow with a sharp nose, rose +obediently and was about to go but at that instant there came into the +light of the fire the slender, handsome figure of a young soldier +carrying a load of wood. + +"Bring it here- that's fine!" + +They split up the wood, pressed it down on the fire, blew at it with +their mouths, and fanned it with the skirts of their greatcoats, +making the flames hiss and crackle. The men drew nearer and lit +their pipes. The handsome young soldier who had brought the wood, +setting his arms akimbo, began stamping his cold feet rapidly and +deftly on the spot where he stood. + +"Mother! The dew is cold but clear.... It's well that I'm a +musketeer..." he sang, pretending to hiccough after each syllable. + +"Look out, your soles will fly off!" shouted the red-haired man, +noticing that the sole of the dancer's boot was hanging loose. "What a +fellow you are for dancing!" + +The dancer stopped, pulled off the loose piece of leather, and threw +it on the fire. + +"Right enough, friend," said he, and, having sat down, took out of +his knapsack a scrap of blue French cloth, and wrapped it round his +foot. "It's the steam that spoils them," he added, stretching out +his feet toward the fire. + +"They'll soon be issuing us new ones. They say that when we've +finished hammering them, we're to receive double kits!" + +"And that son of a bitch Petrov has lagged behind after all, it +seems," said one sergeant major. + +"I've had an eye on him this long while," said the other. + +"Well, he's a poor sort of soldier..." + +"But in the Third Company they say nine men were missing yesterday." + +"Yes, it's all very well, but when a man's feet are frozen how can +he walk?" + +"Eh? Don't talk nonsense!" said a sergeant major. + +"Do you want to be doing the same?" said an old soldier, turning +reproachfully to the man who had spoken of frozen feet. + +"Well, you know," said the sharp-nosed man they called Jackdaw in +a squeaky and unsteady voice, raising himself at the other side of the +fire, "a plump man gets thin, but for a thin one it's death. Take +me, now! I've got no strength left," he added, with sudden +resolution turning to the sergeant major. "Tell them to send me to +hospital; I'm aching all over; anyway I shan't be able to keep up." + +"That'll do, that'll do!" replied the sergeant major quietly. + +The soldier said no more and the talk went on. + +"What a lot of those Frenchies were taken today, and the fact is +that not one of them had what you might call real boots on," said a +soldier, starting a new theme. "They were no more than make-believes." + +"The Cossacks have taken their boots. They were clearing the hut for +the colonel and carried them out. It was pitiful to see them, boys," +put in the dancer. "As they turned them over one seemed still alive +and, would you believe it, he jabbered something in their lingo." + +"But they're a clean folk, lads," the first man went on; "he was +white- as white as birchbark- and some of them are such fine +fellows, you might think they were nobles." + +"Well, what do you think? They make soldiers of all classes there." + +"But they don't understand our talk at all," said the dancer with +a puzzled smile. "I asked him whose subject he was, and he jabbered in +his own way. A queer lot!" + +"But it's strange, friends," continued the man who had wondered at +their whiteness, "the peasants at Mozhaysk were saying that when +they began burying the dead- where the battle was you know- well, +those dead had been lying there for nearly a month, and says the +peasant, 'they lie as white as paper, clean, and not as much smell +as a puff of powder smoke.'" + +"Was it from the cold?" asked someone. + +"You're a clever fellow! From the cold indeed! Why, it was hot. If +it had been from the cold, ours would not have rotted either. 'But,' +he says, 'go up to ours and they are all rotten and maggoty. So,' he +says, 'we tie our faces up with kerchiefs and turn our heads away as +we drag them off: we can hardly do it. But theirs,' he says, 'are +white as paper and not so much smell as a whiff of gunpowder.'" + +All were silent. + +"It must be from their food," said the sergeant major. "They used to +gobble the same food as the gentry." + +No one contradicted him. + +"That peasant near Mozhaysk where the battle was said the men were +all called up from ten villages around and they carted for twenty days +and still didn't finish carting the dead away. And as for the +wolves, he says..." + +"That was a real battle," said an old soldier. "It's the only one +worth remembering; but since that... it's only been tormenting folk." + +"And do you know, Daddy, the day before yesterday we ran at them +and, my word, they didn't let us get near before they just threw +down their muskets and went on their knees. 'Pardon!' they say. That's +only one case. They say Platov took 'Poleon himself twice. But he +didn't know the right charm. He catches him and catches him- no +good! He turns into a bird in his hands and flies away. And there's no +way of killing him either." + +"You're a first-class liar, Kiselev, when I come to look at you!" + +"Liar, indeed! It's the real truth." + +"If he fell into my hands, when I'd caught him I'd bury him in the +ground with an aspen stake to fix him down. What a lot of men he's +ruined!" + +"Well, anyhow we're going to end it. He won't come here again," +remarked the old soldier, yawning. + +The conversation flagged, and the soldiers began settling down to +sleep. + +"Look at the stars. It's wonderful how they shine! You would think +the women had spread out their linen," said one of the men, gazing +with admiration at the Milky Way. + +"That's a sign of a good harvest next year." + +"We shall want some more wood." + +"You warm your back and your belly gets frozen. That's queer." + +"O Lord!" + +"What are you pushing for? Is the fire only for you? Look how he's +sprawling!" + +In the silence that ensued, the snoring of those who had fallen +asleep could be heard. Others turned over and warmed themselves, now +and again exchanging a few words. From a campfire a hundred paces +off came a sound of general, merry laughter. + +"Hark at them roaring there in the Fifth Company!" said one of the +soldiers, and what a lot of them there are!" + +One of the men got up and went over to the Fifth Company. + +"They're having such fun," said he, coming back. "Two Frenchies have +turned up. One's quite frozen and the other's an awful swaggerer. He's +singing songs...." + +"Oh, I'll go across and have a look...." + +And several of the men went over to the Fifth Company. + +CHAPTER IX + +The fifth company was bivouacking at the very edge of the forest. +A huge campfire was blazing brightly in the midst of the snow, +lighting up the branches of trees heavy with hoarfrost. + +About midnight they heard the sound of steps in the snow of the +forest, and the crackling of dry branches. + +"A bear, lads," said one of the men. + +They all raised their heads to listen, and out of the forest into +the bright firelight stepped two strangely clad human figures clinging +to one another. + +These were two Frenchmen who had been hiding in the forest. They +came up to the fire, hoarsely uttering something in a language our +soldiers did not understand. One was taller than the other; he wore an +officer's hat and seemed quite exhausted. On approaching the fire he +had been going to sit down, but fell. The other, a short sturdy +soldier with a shawl tied round his head, was stronger. He raised +his companion and said something, pointing to his mouth. The +soldiers surrounded the Frenchmen, spread a greatcoat on the ground +for the sick man, and brought some buckwheat porridge and vodka for +both of them. + +The exhausted French officer was Ramballe and the man with his +head wrapped in the shawl was Morel, his orderly. + +When Morel had drunk some vodka and finished his bowl of porridge he +suddenly became unnaturally merry and chattered incessantly to the +soldiers, who could not understand him. Ramballe refused food and +resting his head on his elbow lay silent beside the campfire, +looking at the Russian soldiers with red and vacant eyes. Occasionally +he emitted a long-drawn groan and then again became silent. Morel, +pointing to his shoulders, tried to impress on the soldiers the fact +that Ramballe was an officer and ought to be warmed. A Russian officer +who had come up to the fire sent to ask his colonel whether he would +not take a French officer into his hut to warm him, and when the +messenger returned and said that the colonel wished the officer to +be brought to him, Ramballe was told to go. He rose and tried to walk, +but staggered and would have fallen had not a soldier standing by held +him up. + +"You won't do it again, eh?" said one of the soldiers, winking and +turning mockingly to Ramballe. + +"Oh, you fool! Why talk rubbish, lout that you are- a real peasant!" +came rebukes from all sides addressed to the jesting soldier. + +They surrounded Ramballe, lifted him on the crossed arms of two +soldiers, and carried him to the hut. Ramballe put his arms around +their necks while they carried him and began wailing plaintively: + +"Oh, you fine fellows, my kind, kind friends! These are men! Oh, +my brave, kind friends," and he leaned his head against the shoulder +of one of the men like a child. + +Meanwhile Morel was sitting in the best place by the fire, +surrounded by the soldiers. + +Morel, a short sturdy Frenchman with inflamed and streaming eyes, +was wearing a woman's cloak and had a shawl tied woman fashion round +his head over his cap. He was evidently tipsy, and was singing a +French song in a hoarse broken voice, with an arm thrown round the +nearest soldier. The soldiers simply held their sides as they +watched him. + +"Now then, now then, teach us how it goes! I'll soon pick it up. How +is it?" said the man- a singer and a wag- whom Morel was embracing. + +"Vive Henri Quatre! Vive ce roi valiant!" sang Morel, winking. "Ce +diable a quatre..."~^ + +^~ "Long live Henry the Fourth, that valiant king! That rowdy devil." + +"Vivarika! Vif-seruvaru! Sedyablyaka!" repeated the soldier, +flourishing his arm and really catching the tune. + +"Bravo! Ha, ha, ha!" rose their rough, joyous laughter from all +sides. + +Morel, wrinkling up his face, laughed too. + +"Well, go on, go on!" + +_1 "Qui eut le triple talent,
+De boire, de battre,
+Et d'etre un vert galant."~^ + +^~ Who had a triple talent + +_1 For drinking, for fighting, + +_1 And for being a gallant old boy... + +"It goes smoothly, too. Well, now, Zaletaev!" + +"Ke..." Zaletaev, brought out with effort: "ke-e-e-e," he drawled, +laboriously pursing his lips, "le-trip-ta-la-de-bu-de-ba, e +de-tra-va-ga-la " he sang. + +"Fine! Just like the Frenchie! Oh, ho ho! Do you want some more to +eat?" + +"Give him some porridge: it takes a long time to get filled up after +starving." + +They gave him some more porridge and Morel with a laugh set to +work on his third bowl. All the young soldiers smiled gaily as they +watched him. The older men, who thought it undignified to amuse +themselves with such nonsense, continued to lie at the opposite side +of the fire, but one would occasionally raise himself on an elbow +and glance at Morel with a smile. + +"They are men too," said one of them as he wrapped himself up in his +coat. "Even wormwood grows on its own root." + +"O Lord, O Lord! How starry it is! Tremendous! That means a hard +frost...." + +They all grew silent. The stars, as if knowing that no one was +looking at them, began to disport themselves in the dark sky: now +flaring up, now vanishing, now trembling, they were busy whispering +something gladsome and mysterious to one another. + +CHAPTER X + +The French army melted away at the uniform rate of a mathematical +progression; and that crossing of the Berezina about which so much has +been written was only one intermediate stage in its destruction, and +not at all the decisive episode of the campaign. If so much has been +and still is written about the Berezina, on the French side this is +only because at the broken bridge across that river the calamities +their army had been previously enduring were suddenly concentrated +at one moment into a tragic spectacle that remained in every memory, +and on the Russian side merely because in Petersburg- far from the +seat of war- a plan (again one of Pfuel's) had been devised to catch +Napoleon in a strategic trap at the Berezina River. Everyone assured +himself that all would happen according to plan, and therefore +insisted that it was just the crossing of the Berezina that +destroyed the French army. In reality the results of the crossing were +much less disastrous to the French- in guns and men lost- than Krasnoe +had been, as the figures show. + +The sole importance of the crossing of the Berezina lies in the fact +that it plainly and indubitably proved the fallacy of all the plans +for cutting off the enemy's retreat and the soundness of the only +possible line of action- the one Kutuzov and the general mass of the +army demanded- namely, simply to follow the enemy up. The French crowd +fled at a continually increasing speed and all its energy was directed +to reaching its goal. It fled like a wounded animal and it was +impossible to block its path. This was shown not so much by the +arrangements it made for crossing as by what took place at the +bridges. When the bridges broke down, unarmed soldiers, people from +Moscow and women with children who were with the French transport, +all- carried on by vis inertiae- pressed forward into boats and into +the ice-covered water and did not, surrender. + +That impulse was reasonable. The condition of fugitives and of +pursuers was equally bad. As long as they remained with their own +people each might hope for help from his fellows and the definite +place he held among them. But those who surrendered, while remaining +in the same pitiful plight, would be on a lower level to claim a share +in the necessities of life. The French did not need to be informed +of the fact that half the prisoners- with whom the Russians did not +know what to do- perished of cold and hunger despite their captors' +desire to save them; they felt that it could not be otherwise. The +most compassionate Russian commanders, those favorable to the +French- and even the Frenchmen in the Russian service- could do +nothing for the prisoners. The French perished from the conditions +to which the Russian army was itself exposed. It was impossible to +take bread and clothes from our hungry and indispensable soldiers to +give to the French who, though not harmful, or hated, or guilty, +were simply unnecessary. Some Russians even did that, but they were +exceptions. + +Certain destruction lay behind the French but in front there was +hope. Their ships had been burned, there was no salvation save in +collective flight, and on that the whole strength of the French was +concentrated. + +The farther they fled the more wretched became the plight of the +remnant, especially after the Berezina, on which (in consequence of +the Petersburg plan) special hopes had been placed by the Russians, +and the keener grew the passions of the Russian commanders, blamed one +another and Kutuzov most of all. Anticipation that the failure of +the Petersburg Berezina plan would be attributed to Kutuzov led to +dissatisfaction, contempt, and ridicule, more and more strongly +expressed. The ridicule and contempt were of course expressed in a +respectful form, making it impossible for him to ask wherein he was to +blame. They did not talk seriously to him; when reporting to him or +asking for his sanction they appeared to be fulfilling a regrettable +formality, but they winked behind his back and tried to mislead him at +every turn. + +Because they could not understand him all these people assumed +that it was useless to talk to the old man; that he would never +grasp the profundity of their plans, that he would answer with his +phrases (which they thought were mere phrases) about a "golden +bridge," about the impossibility of crossing the frontier with a crowd +of tatterdemalions, and so forth. They had heard all that before. +And all he said- that it was necessary to await provisions, or that +the men had no boots- was so simple, while what they proposed was so +complicated and clever, that it was evident that he was old and stupid +and that they, though not in power, were commanders of genius. + +After the junction with the army of the brilliant admiral and +Petersburg hero Wittgenstein, this mood and the gossip of the staff +reached their maximum. Kutuzov saw this and merely sighed and shrugged +his shoulders. Only once, after the affair of the Berezina, did he get +angry and write to Bennigsen (who reported separately to the +Emperor) the following letter: + +"On account of your spells of ill health, will your excellency +please be so good as to set off for Kaluga on receipt of this, and +there await further commands and appointments from His Imperial +Majesty." + +But after Bennigsen's departure, the Grand Duke Tsarevich +Constantine Pavlovich joined the army. He had taken part in the +beginning of the campaign but had subsequently been removed from the +army by Kutuzov. Now having come to the army, he informed Kutuzov of +the Emperor's displeasure at the poor success of our forces and the +slowness of their advance. The Emperor intended to join the army +personally in a few days' time. + +The old man, experienced in court as well as in military affairs- +this same Kutuzov who in August had been chosen commander in chief +against the sovereign's wishes and who had removed the Grand Duke +and heir- apparent from the army- who on his own authority and +contrary to the Emperor's will had decided on the abandonment of +Moscow, now realized at once that his day was over, that his part +was played, and that the power he was supposed to hold was no longer +his. And he understood this not merely from the attitude of the court. +He saw on the one hand that the military business in which he had +played his part was ended and felt that his mission was +accomplished; and at the same time he began to be conscious of the +physical weariness of his aged body and of the necessity of physical +rest. + +On the twenty-ninth of November Kutuzov entered Vilna- his "dear +Vilna" as he called it. Twice during his career Kutuzov had been +governor of Vilna. In that wealthy town, which had not been injured, +he found old friends and associations, besides the comforts of life of +which he had so long been deprived. And he suddenly turned from the +cares of army and state and, as far as the passions that seethed +around him allowed, immersed himself in the quiet life to which he had +formerly been accustomed, as if all that was taking place and all that +had still to be done in the realm of history did not concern him at +all. + +Chichagov, one of the most zealous "cutters-off" and +"breakers-up," who had first wanted to effect a diversion in Greece +and then in Warsaw but never wished to go where he was sent: +Chichagov, noted for the boldness with which he spoke to the +Emperor, and who considered Kutuzov to be under an obligation to him +because when he was sent to make peace with Turkey in 1811 +independently of Kutuzov, and found that peace had already been +concluded, he admitted to the Emperor that the merit of securing +that peace was really Kutuzov's; this Chichagov was the first to +meet Kutuzov at the castle where the latter was to stay. In undress +naval uniform, with a dirk, and holding his cap under his arm, he +handed Kutuzov a garrison report and the keys of the town. The +contemptuously respectful attitude of the younger men to the old man +in his dotage was expressed in the highest degree by the behavior of +Chichagov, who knew of the accusations that were being directed +against Kutuzov. + +When speaking to Chichagov, Kutuzov incidentally mentioned that +the vehicles packed with china that had been captured from him at +Borisov had been recovered and would be restored to him. + +"You mean to imply that I have nothing to eat out of.... On the +contrary, I can supply you with everything even if you want to give +dinner parties," warmly replied Chichagov, who tried by every word +he spoke to prove his own rectitude and therefore imagined Kutuzov +to be animated by the same desire. + +Kutuzov, shrugging his shoulders, replied with his subtle +penetrating smile: "I meant merely to say what I said." + +Contrary to the Emperor's wish Kutuzov detained the greater part +of the army at Vilna. Those about him said that he became +extraordinarily slack and physically feeble during his stay in that +town. He attended to army affairs reluctantly, left everything to +his generals, and while awaiting the Emperor's arrival led a +dissipated life. + +Having left Petersburg on the seventh of December with his suite- +Count Tolstoy, Prince Volkonski, Arakcheev, and others- the Emperor +reached Vilna on the eleventh, and in his traveling sleigh drove +straight to the castle. In spite of the severe frost some hundred +generals and staff officers in full parade uniform stood in front of +the castle, as well as a guard of honor of the Semenov regiment. + +A courier who galloped to the castle in advance, in a troyka with +three foam-flecked horses, shouted "Coming!" and Konovnitsyn rushed +into the vestibule to inform Kutuzov, who was waiting in the hall +porter's little lodge. + +A minute later the old man's large stout figure in full-dress +uniform, his chest covered with orders and a scarf drawn round his +stomach, waddled out into the porch. He put on his hat with its +peaks to the sides and, holding his gloves in his hand and walking +with an effort sideways down the steps to the level of the street, +took in his hand the report he had prepared for the Emperor. + +There was running to and fro and whispering; another troyka +furiously up, and then all eyes were turned on an approaching sleigh +in which the figures of the Emperor and Volkonski could already be +descried. + +From the habit of fifty years all this had a physically agitating +effect on the old general. He carefully and hastily felt himself all +over, readjusted his hat, and pulling himself together drew himself up +and, at the very moment when the Emperor, having alighted from the +sleigh, lifted his eyes to him, handed him the report and began +speaking in his smooth, ingratiating voice. + +The Emperor with a rapid glance scanned Kutuzov from head to foot, +frowned for an instant, but immediately mastering himself went up to +the old man, extended his arms and embraced him. And this embrace too, +owing to a long-standing impression related to his innermost feelings, +had its usual effect on Kutuzov and he gave a sob. + +The Emperor greeted the officers and the Semenov guard, and again +pressing the old man's hand went with him into the castle. + +When alone with the field marshal the Emperor expressed his +dissatisfaction at the slowness of the pursuit and at the mistakes +made at Krasnoe and the Berezina, and informed him of his intentions +for a future campaign abroad. Kutuzov made no rejoinder or remark. The +same submissive, expressionless look with which he had listened to the +Emperor's commands on the field of Austerlitz seven years before +settled on his face now. + +When Kutuzov came out of the study and with lowered head was +crossing the ballroom with his heavy waddling gait, he was arrested by +someone's voice saying: + +"Your Serene Highness!" + +Kutuzov raised his head and looked for a long while into the eyes of +Count Tolstoy, who stood before him holding a silver salver on which +lay a small object. Kutuzov seemed not to understand what was expected +of him. + +Suddenly he seemed to remember; a scarcely perceptible smile flashed +across his puffy face, and bowing low and respectfully he took the +object that lay on the salver. It was the Order of St. George of the +First Class. + +CHAPTER XI + +Next day the field marshal gave a dinner and ball which the +Emperor honored by his presence. Kutuzov had received the Order of St. +George of the First Class and the Emperor showed him the highest +honors, but everyone knew of the imperial dissatisfaction with him. +The proprieties were observed and the Emperor was the first to set +that example, but everybody understood that the old man was +blameworthy and good-for-nothing. When Kutuzov, conforming to a custom +of Catherine's day, ordered the standards that had been captured to be +lowered at the Emperor's feet on his entering the ballroom, the +Emperor made a wry face and muttered something in which some people +caught the words, "the old comedian." + +The Emperor's displeasure with Kutuzov was specially increased at +Vilna by the fact that Kutuzov evidently could not or would not +understand the importance of the coming campaign. + +When on the following morning the Emperor said to the officers +assembled about him: "You have not only saved Russia, you have saved +Europe!" they all understood that the war was not ended. + +Kutuzov alone would not see this and openly expressed his opinion +that no fresh war could improve the position or add to the glory of +Russia, but could only spoil and lower the glorious position that +Russia had gained. He tried to prove to the Emperor the +impossibility of levying fresh troops, spoke of the hardships +already endured by the people, of the possibility of failure and so +forth. + +This being the field marshal's frame of mind he was naturally +regarded as merely a hindrance and obstacle to the impending war. + +To avoid unpleasant encounters with the old man, the natural +method was to do what had been done with him at Austerlitz and with +Barclay at the beginning of the Russian campaign- to transfer the +authority to the Emperor himself, thus cutting the ground from under +the commander in chief's feet without upsetting the old man by +informing him of the change. + +With this object his staff was gradually reconstructed and its +real strength removed and transferred to the Emperor. Toll, +Konovnitsyn, and Ermolov received fresh appointments. Everyone spoke +loudly of the field marshal's great weakness and failing health. + +His health had to be bad for his place to be taken away and given to +another. And in fact his health was poor. + +So naturally, simply, and gradually- just as he had come from Turkey +to the Treasury in Petersburg to recruit the militia, and then to +the army when he was needed there- now when his part was played out, +Kutuzov's place was taken by a new and necessary performer. + +The war 1812, besides its national significance dear to every +Russian heart, was now to assume another, a European, significance. + +The movement of peoples from west to east was to be succeeded by a +movement of peoples from east to west, and for this fresh war +another leader was necessary, having qualities and views differing +from Kutuzov's and animated by different motives. + +Alexander I was as necessary for the movement of the peoples from +east to west and for the refixing of national frontiers as Kutuzov had +been for the salvation and glory of Russia. + +Kutuzov did not understand what Europe, the balance of power, or +Napoleon meant. He could not understand it. For the representative +of the Russian people, after the enemy had been destroyed and Russia +had been liberated and raised to the summit of her glory, there was +nothing left to do as a Russian. Nothing remained for the +representative of the national war but to die, and Kutuzov died. + +CHAPTER XII + +As generally happens, Pierre did not feel the full effects of the +physical privation and strain he had suffered as prisoner until +after they were over. After his liberation he reached Orel, and on the +third day there, when preparing to go to Kiev, he fell ill and was +laid up for three months. He had what the doctors termed "bilious +fever." But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, +and gave him medicines to drink, he recovered. + +Scarcely any impression was left on Pierre's mind by all that +happened to him from the time of his rescue till his illness. He +remembered only the dull gray weather now rainy and now snowy, +internal physical distress, and pains in his feet and side. He +remembered a general impression of the misfortunes and sufferings of +people and of being worried by the curiosity of officers and +generals who questioned him, he also remembered his difficulty in +procuring a conveyance and horses, and above all he remembered his +incapacity to think and feel all that time. On the day of his rescue +he had seen the body of Petya Rostov. That same day he had learned +that Prince Andrew, after surviving the battle of Borodino for more +than a month had recently died in the Rostovs' house at Yaroslavl, and +Denisov who told him this news also mentioned Helene's death, +supposing that Pierre had heard of it long before. All this at the +time seemed merely strange to Pierre: he felt he could not grasp its +significance. Just then he was only anxious to get away as quickly +as possible from places where people were killing one another, to some +peaceful refuge where he could recover himself, rest, and think over +all the strange new facts he had learned; but on reaching Orel he +immediately fell ill. When he came to himself after his illness he saw +in attendance on him two of his servants, Terenty and Vaska, who had +come from Moscow; and also his cousin the eldest princess, who had +been living on his estate at Elets and hearing of his rescue and +illness had come to look after him. + +It was only gradually during his convalescence that Pierre lost +the impressions he had become accustomed to during the last few months +and got used to the idea that no one would oblige him to go anywhere +tomorrow, that no one would deprive him of his warm bed, and that he +would be sure to get his dinner, tea, and supper. But for a long +time in his dreams he still saw himself in the conditions of +captivity. In the same way little by little he came to understand +the news he had been told after his rescue, about the death of +Prince Andrew, the death of his wife, and the destruction of the +French. + +A joyous feeling of freedom- that complete inalienable freedom +natural to man which he had first experienced at the first halt +outside Moscow- filled Pierre's soul during his convalescence. He +was surprised to find that this inner freedom, which was independent +of external conditions, now had as it were an additional setting of +external liberty. He was alone in a strange town, without +acquaintances. No one demanded anything of him or sent him anywhere. +He had all he wanted: the thought of his wife which had been a +continual torment to him was no longer there, since she was no more. + +"Oh, how good! How splendid!" said he to himself when a cleanly laid +table was moved up to him with savory beef tea, or when he lay down +for the night on a soft clean bed, or when he remembered that the +French had gone and that his wife was no more. "Oh, how good, how +splendid!" + +And by old habit he asked himself the question: "Well, and what +then? What am I going to do?" And he immediately gave himself the +answer: "Well, I shall live. Ah, how splendid!" + +The very question that had formerly tormented him, the thing he +had continually sought to find- the aim of life- no longer existed for +him now. That search for the aim of life had not merely disappeared +temporarily- he felt that it no longer existed for him and could not +present itself again. And this very absence of an aim gave him the +complete, joyous sense of freedom which constituted his happiness at +this time. + +He could not see an aim, for he now had faith- not faith in any kind +of rule, or words, or ideas, but faith in an ever-living, +ever-manifest God. Formerly he had sought Him in aims he set +himself. That search for an aim had been simply a search for God, +and suddenly in his captivity he had learned not by words or reasoning +but by direct feeling what his nurse had told him long ago: that God +is here and everywhere. In his captivity he had learned that in +Karataev God was greater, more infinite and unfathomable than in the +Architect of the Universe recognized by the Freemasons. He felt like a +man who after straining his eyes to see into the far distance finds +what he sought at his very feet. All his life he had looked over the +heads of the men around him, when he should have merely looked in +front of him without straining his eyes. + +In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable +infinite something. He had only felt that it must exist somewhere +and had looked for it. In everything near and comprehensible he had +only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He had +equipped himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space, +where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed +to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen. +And such had European life, politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and +philanthropy seemed to him. But even then, at moments of weakness as +he had accounted them, his mind had penetrated to those distances +and he had there seen the same pettiness, worldliness, and +senselessness. Now, however, he had learned to see the great, eternal, +and infinite in everything, and therefore- to see it and enjoy its +contemplation- he naturally threw away the telescope through which +he had till now gazed over men's heads, and gladly regarded the +ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around +him. And the closer he looked the more tranquil and happy he became. +That dreadful question, "What for?" which had formerly destroyed all +his mental edifices, no longer existed for him. To that question, +"What for?" a simple answer was now always ready in his soul: "Because +there is a God, that God without whose will not one hair falls from +a man's head." + +CHAPTER XIII + +In external ways Pierre had hardly changed at all. In appearance +he was just what he used to be. As before he was absent-minded and +seemed occupied not with what was before his eyes but with something +special of his own. The difference between his former and present self +was that formerly when he did not grasp what lay before him or was +said to him, he had puckered his forehead painfully as if vainly +seeking to distinguish something at a distance. At present he still +forgot what was said to him and still did not see what was before +his eyes, but he now looked with a scarcely perceptible and +seemingly ironic smile at what was before him and listened to what was +said, though evidently seeing and hearing something quite different. +Formerly he had appeared to be a kindhearted but unhappy man, and so +people had been inclined to avoid him. Now a smile at the joy of +life always played round his lips, and sympathy for others, shone in +his eyes with a questioning look as to whether they were as +contented as he was, and people felt pleased by his presence. + +Previously he had talked a great deal, grew excited when he +talked, and seldom listened; now he was seldom carried away in +conversation and knew how to listen so that people readily told him +their most intimate secrets. + +The princess, who had never liked Pierre and had been particularly +hostile to him since she had felt herself under obligations to him +after the old count's death, now after staying a short time in Orel- +where she had come intending to show Pierre that in spite of his +ingratitude she considered it her duty to nurse him- felt to her +surprise and vexation that she had become fond of him. Pierre did +not in any way seek her approval, he merely studied her with interest. +Formerly she had felt that he regarded her with indifference and +irony, and so had shrunk into herself as she did with others and had +shown him only the combative side of her nature; but now he seemed +to be trying to understand the most intimate places of her heart, and, +mistrustfully at first but afterwards gratefully, she let him see +the hidden, kindly sides of her character. + +The most cunning man could not have crept into her confidence more +successfully, evoking memories of the best times of her youth and +showing sympathy with them. Yet Pierre's cunning consisted simply in +finding pleasure in drawing out the human qualities of the embittered, +hard, and (in her own way) proud princess. + +"Yes, he is a very, very kind man when he is not under the influence +of bad people but of people such as myself," thought she. + +His servants too- Terenty and Vaska- in their own way noticed the +change that had taken place in Pierre. They considered that he had +become much "simpler." Terenty, when he had helped him undress and +wished him good night, often lingered with his master's boots in his +hands and clothes over his arm, to see whether he would not start a +talk. And Pierre, noticing that Terenty wanted a chat, generally +kept him there. + +"Well, tell me... now, how did you get food?" he would ask. + +And Terenty would begin talking of the destruction of Moscow, and of +the old count, and would stand for a long time holding the clothes and +talking, or sometimes listening to Pierre's stories, and then would go +out into the hall with a pleasant sense of intimacy with his master +and affection for him. + +The doctor who attended Pierre and visited him every day, though +he considered it his duty as a doctor to pose as a man whose every +moment was of value to suffering humanity, would sit for hours with +Pierre telling him his favorite anecdotes and his observations on +the characters of his patients in general, and especially of the +ladies. + +"It's a pleasure to talk to a man like that; he is not like our +provincials," he would say. + +There were several prisoners from the French army in Orel, and the +doctor brought one of them, a young Italian, to see Pierre. + +This officer began visiting Pierre, and the princess used to make +fun of the tenderness the Italian expressed for him. + +The Italian seemed happy only when he could come to see Pierre, talk +with him, tell him about his past, his life at home, and his love, and +pour out to him his indignation against the French and especially +against Napoleon. + +"If all Russians are in the least like you, it is sacrilege to fight +such a nation," he said to Pierre. "You, who have suffered so from the +French, do not even feel animosity toward them." + +Pierre had evoked the passionate affection of the Italian merely +by evoking the best side of his nature and taking a pleasure in so +doing. + +During the last days of Pierre's stay in Orel his old Masonic +acquaintance Count Willarski, who had introduced him to the lodge in +1807, came to see him. Willarski was married to a Russian heiress +who had a large estate in Orel province, and he occupied a temporary +post in the commissariat department in that town. + +Hearing that Bezukhov was in Orel, Willarski, though they had +never been intimate, came to him with the professions of friendship +and intimacy that people who meet in a desert generally express for +one another. Willarski felt dull in Orel and was pleased to meet a man +of his own circle and, as he supposed, of similar interests. + +But to his surprise Willarski soon noticed that Pierre had lagged +much behind the times, and had sunk, as he expressed it to himself, +into apathy and egotism. + +"You are letting yourself go, my dear fellow," he said. + +But for all that Willarski found it pleasanter now than it had +been formerly to be with Pierre, and came to see him every day. To +Pierre as he looked at and listened to Willarski, it seemed strange to +think that he had been like that himself but a short time before. + +Willarski was a married man with a family, busy with his family +affairs, his wife's affairs, and his official duties. He regarded +all these occupations as hindrances to life, and considered that +they were all contemptible because their aim was the welfare of +himself and his family. Military, administrative, political, and +Masonic interests continually absorbed his attention. And Pierre, +without trying to change the other's views and without condemning him, +but with the quiet, joyful, and amused smile now habitual to him, +was interested in this strange though very familiar phenomenon. + +There was a new feature in Pierre's relations with Willarski, with +the princess, with the doctor, and with all the people he now met, +which gained for him the general good will. This was his +acknowledgment of the impossibility of changing a man's convictions by +words, and his recognition of the possibility of everyone thinking, +feeling, and seeing things each from his own point of view. This +legitimate peculiarity of each individual which used to excite and +irritate Pierre now became a basis of the sympathy he felt for, and +the interest he took in, other people. The difference, and sometimes +complete contradiction, between men's opinions and their lives, and +between one man and another, pleased him and drew from him an amused +and gentle smile. + +In practical matters Pierre unexpectedly felt within himself a +center of gravity he had previously lacked. Formerly all pecuniary +questions, especially requests for money to which, as an extremely +wealthy man, he was very exposed, produced in him a state of +hopeless agitation and perplexity. "To give or not to give?" he had +asked himself. "I have it and he needs it. But someone else needs it +still more. Who needs it most? And perhaps they are both impostors?" +In the old days he had been unable to find a way out of all these +surmises and had given to all who asked as long as he had anything +to give. Formerly he had been in a similar state of perplexity with +regard to every question concerning his property, when one person +advised one thing and another something else. + +Now to his surprise he found that he no longer felt either doubt +or perplexity about these questions. There was now within him a +judge who by some rule unknown to him decided what should or should +not be done. + +He was as indifferent as heretofore to money matters, but now he +felt certain of what ought and what ought not to be done. The first +time he had recourse to his new judge was when a French prisoner, a +colonel, came to him and, after talking a great deal about his +exploits, concluded by making what amounted to a demand that Pierre +should give him four thousand francs to send to his wife and children. +Pierre refused without the least difficulty or effort, and was +afterwards surprised how simple and easy had been what used to +appear so insurmountably difficult. At the same time that he refused +the colonel's demand he made up his mind that he must have recourse to +artifice when leaving Orel, to induce the Italian officer to accept +some money of which he was evidently in need. A further proof to +Pierre of his own more settled outlook on practical matters was +furnished by his decision with regard to his wife's debts and to the +rebuilding of his houses in and near Moscow. + +His head steward came to him at Orel and Pierre reckoned up with him +his diminished income. The burning of Moscow had cost him, according +to the head steward's calculation, about two million rubles. + +To console Pierre for these losses the head steward gave him an +estimate showing that despite these losses his income would not be +diminished but would even be increased if he refused to pay his wife's +debts which he was under no obligation to meet, and did not rebuild +his Moscow house and the country house on his Moscow estate, which had +cost him eighty thousand rubles a year and brought in nothing. + +"Yes, of course that's true," said Pierre with a cheerful smile. +"I don't need all that at all. By being ruined I have become much +richer." + +But in January Savelich came from Moscow and gave him an account +of the state of things there, and spoke of the estimate an architect +had made of the cost of rebuilding the town and country houses, +speaking of this as of a settled matter. About the same time he +received letters from Prince Vasili and other Petersburg acquaintances +speaking of his wife's debts. And Pierre decided that the steward's +proposals which had so pleased him were wrong and that he must go to +Petersburg and settle his wife's affairs and must rebuild in Moscow. +Why this was necessary he did not know, but he knew for certain that +it was necessary. His income would be reduced by three fourths, but he +felt it must be done. + +Willarski was going to Moscow and they agreed to travel together. + +During the whole time of his convalescence in Orel Pierre had +experienced a feeling of joy, freedom, and life; but when during his +journey he found himself in the open world and saw hundreds of new +faces, that feeling was intensified. Throughout his journey he felt +like a schoolboy on holiday. Everyone- the stagecoach driver, the +post-house overseers, the peasants on the roads and in the villages- +had a new significance for him. The presence and remarks of +Willarski who continually deplored the ignorance and poverty of Russia +and its backwardness compared with Europe only heightened Pierre's +pleasure. Where Willarski saw deadness Pierre saw an extraordinary +strength and vitality- the strength which in that vast space amid +the snows maintained the life of this original, peculiar, and unique +people. He did not contradict Willarski and even seemed to agree +with him- an apparent agreement being the simplest way to avoid +discussions that could lead to nothing- and he smiled joyfully as he +listened to him. + +CHAPTER XIV + +It would be difficult to explain why and whither ants whose heap has +been destroyed are hurrying: some from the heap dragging bits of +rubbish, larvae, and corpses, others back to the heap, or why they +jostle, overtake one another, and fight, and it would be equally +difficult to explain what caused the Russians after the departure of +the French to throng to the place that had formerly been Moscow. But +when we watch the ants round their ruined heap, the tenacity, +energy, and immense number of the delving insects prove that despite +the destruction of the heap, something indestructible, which though +intangible is the real strength of the colony, still exists; and +similarly, though in Moscow in the month of October there was no +government no churches, shrines, riches, or houses- it was still the +Moscow it had been in August. All was destroyed, except something +intangible yet powerful and indestructible. + +The motives of those who thronged from all sides to Moscow after +it had been cleared of the enemy were most diverse and personal, and +at first for the most part savage and brutal. One motive only they all +had in common: a desire to get to the place that had been called +Moscow, to apply their activities there. + +Within a week Moscow already had fifteen thousand inhabitants, in +a fortnight twenty-five thousand, and so on. By the autumn of 1813 the +number, ever increasing and increasing, exceeded what it had been in +1812. + +The first Russians to enter Moscow were the Cossacks of +Wintzingerode's detachment, peasants from the adjacent villages, and +residents who had fled from Moscow and had been hiding in its +vicinity. The Russians who entered Moscow, finding it plundered, +plundered it in their turn. They continued what the French had +begun. Trains of peasant carts came to Moscow to carry off to the +villages what had been abandoned in the ruined houses and the streets. +The Cossacks carried off what they could to their camps, and the +householders seized all they could find in other houses and moved it +to their own, pretending that it was their property. + +But the first plunderers were followed by a second and a third +contingent, and with increasing numbers plundering became more and +more difficult and assumed more definite forms. + +The French found Moscow abandoned but with all the organizations +of regular life, with diverse branches of commerce and +craftsmanship, with luxury, and governmental and religious +institutions. These forms were lifeless but still existed. There +were bazaars, shops, warehouses, market stalls, granaries- for the +most part still stocked with goods- and there were factories and +workshops, palaces and wealthy houses filled with luxuries, hospitals, +prisons, government offices, churches, and cathedrals. The longer +the French remained the more these forms of town life perished, +until finally all was merged into one confused, lifeless scene of +plunder. + +The more the plundering by the French continued, the more both the +wealth of Moscow and the strength of its plunderers was destroyed. But +plundering by the Russians, with which the reoccupation of the city +began, had an opposite effect: the longer it continued and the greater +the number of people taking part in it the more rapidly was the wealth +of the city and its regular life restored. + +Besides the plunderers, very various people, some drawn by +curiosity, some by official duties, some by self-interest- house +owners, clergy, officials of all kinds, tradesmen, artisans, and +peasants- streamed into Moscow as blood flows to the heart. + +Within a week the peasants who came with empty carts to carry off +plunder were stopped by the authorities and made to cart the corpses +out of the town. Other peasants, having heard of their comrades' +discomfiture, came to town bringing rye, oats, and hay, and beat +down one another's prices to below what they had been in former +days. Gangs of carpenters hoping for high pay arrived in Moscow +every day, and on all sides logs were being hewn, new houses built, +and old, charred ones repaired. Tradesmen began trading in booths. +Cookshops and taverns were opened in partially burned houses. The +clergy resumed the services in many churches that had not been burned. +Donors contributed Church property that had been stolen. Government +clerks set up their baize-covered tables and their pigeonholes of +documents in small rooms. The higher authorities and the police +organized the distribution of goods left behind by the French. The +owners of houses in which much property had been left, brought there +from other houses, complained of the injustice of taking everything to +the Faceted Palace in the Kremlin; others insisted that as the +French had gathered things from different houses into this or that +house, it would be unfair to allow its owner to keep all that was +found there. They abused the police and bribed them, made out +estimates at ten times their value for government stores that had +perished in the fire, and demanded relief. And Count Rostopchin +wrote proclamations. + +CHAPTER XV + +At the end of January Pierre went to Moscow and stayed in an annex +of his house which had not been burned. He called on Count +Rostopchin and on some acquaintances who were back in Moscow, and he +intended to leave for Petersburg two days later. Everybody was +celebrating the victory, everything was bubbling with life in the +ruined but reviving city. Everyone was pleased to see Pierre, everyone +wished to meet him, and everyone questioned him about what he had +seen. Pierre felt particularly well disposed toward them all, but +was now instinctively on his guard for fear of binding himself in +any way. To all questions put to him- whether important or quite +trifling- such as: Where would he live? Was he going to rebuild? +When was he going to Petersburg and would he mind taking a parcel +for someone?- he replied: "Yes, perhaps," or, "I think so," and so on. + +He had heard that the Rostovs were at Kostroma but the thought of +Natasha seldom occurred to him. If it did it was only as a pleasant +memory of the distant past. He felt himself not only free from +social obligations but also from that feeling which, it seemed to him, +he had aroused in himself. + +On the third day after his arrival he heard from the Drubetskoys +that Princess Mary was in Moscow. The death, sufferings, and last days +of Prince Andrew had often occupied Pierre's thoughts and now recurred +to him with fresh vividness. Having heard at dinner that Princess Mary +was in Moscow and living in her house- which had not been burned- in +Vozdvizhenka Street, he drove that same evening to see her. + +On his way to the house Pierre kept thinking of Prince Andrew, of +their friendship, of his various meetings with him, and especially +of the last one at Borodino. + +"Is it possible that he died in the bitter frame of mind he was then +in? Is it possible that the meaning of life was not disclosed to him +before he died?" thought Pierre. He recalled Karataev and his death +and involuntarily began to compare these two men, so different, and +yet so similar in that they had both lived and both died and in the +love he felt for both of them. + +Pierre drove up to the house of the old prince in a most serious +mood. The house had escaped the fire; it showed signs of damage but +its general aspect was unchanged. The old footman, who met Pierre with +a stern face as if wishing to make the visitor feel that the absence +of the old prince had not disturbed the order of things in the +house, informed him that the princess had gone to her own +apartments, and that she received on Sundays. + +"Announce me. Perhaps she will see me," said Pierre. + +"Yes, sir," said the man. "Please step into the portrait gallery." + +A few minutes later the footman returned with Dessalles, who brought +word from the princess that she would be very glad to see Pierre if he +would excuse her want of ceremony and come upstairs to her apartment. + +In a rather low room lit by one candle sat the princess and with her +another person dressed in black. Pierre remembered that the princess +always had lady companions, but who they were and what they were +like he never knew or remembered. "This must be one of her +companions," he thought, glancing at the lady in the black dress. + +The princess rose quickly to meet him and held out her hand. + +"Yes," she said, looking at his altered face after he had kissed her +hand, "so this is how we meet again. He of spoke of you even at the +very last," she went on, turning her eyes from Pierre to her companion +with a shyness that surprised him for an instant. + +"I was so glad to hear of your safety. It was the first piece of +good news we had received for a long time." + +Again the princess glanced round at her companion with even more +uneasiness in her manner and was about to add something, but Pierre +interrupted her. + +"Just imagine- I knew nothing about him!" said he. "I thought he had +been killed. All I know I heard at second hand from others. I only +know that he fell in with the Rostovs.... What a strange coincidence!" + +Pierre spoke rapidly and with animation. He glanced once at the +companion's face, saw her attentive and kindly gaze fixed on him, and, +as often happens when one is talking, felt somehow that this companion +in the black dress was a good, kind, excellent creature who would +not hinder his conversing freely with Princess Mary. + +But when he mentioned the Rostovs, Princess Mary's face expressed +still greater embarrassment. She again glanced rapidly from Pierre's +face to that of the lady in the black dress and said: + +"Do you really not recognize her?" + +Pierre looked again at the companion's pale, delicate face with +its black eyes and peculiar mouth, and something near to him, long +forgotten and more than sweet, looked at him from those attentive +eyes. + +"But no, it can't be!" he thought. "This stern, thin, pale face that +looks so much older! It cannot be she. It merely reminds me of her." +But at that moment Princess Mary said, "Natasha!" And with difficulty, +effort, and stress, like the opening of a door grown rusty on its +hinges, a smile appeared on the face with the attentive eyes, and from +that opening door came a breath of fragrance which suffused Pierre +with a happiness he had long forgotten and of which he had not even +been thinking- especially at that moment. It suffused him, seized him, +and enveloped him completely. When she smiled doubt was no longer +possible, it was Natasha and he loved her. + +At that moment Pierre involuntarily betrayed to her, to Princess +Mary, and above all to himself, a secret of which he himself had +been unaware. He flushed joyfully yet with painful distress. He +tried to hide his agitation. But the more he tried to hide it the more +clearly- clearer than any words could have done- did he betray to +himself, to her, and to Princess Mary that he loved her. + +"No, it's only the unexpectedness of it," thought Pierre. But as +soon as he tried to continue the conversation he had begun with +Princess Mary he again glanced at Natasha, and a still-deeper flush +suffused his face and a still-stronger agitation of mingled joy and +fear seized his soul. He became confused in his speech and stopped +in the middle of what he was saying. + +Pierre had failed to notice Natasha because he did not at all expect +to see her there, but he had failed to recognize her because the +change in her since he last saw her was immense. She had grown thin +and pale, but that was not what made her unrecognizable; she was +unrecognizable at the moment he entered because on that face whose +eyes had always shone with a suppressed smile of the joy of life, +now when he first entered and glanced at her there was not the least +shadow of a smile: only her eyes were kindly attentive and sadly +interrogative. + +Pierre's confusion was not reflected by any confusion on Natasha's +part, but only by the pleasure that just perceptibly lit up her +whole face. + +CHAPTER XVI + +"She has come to stay with me," said Princess Mary. "The count and +countess will be here in a few days. The countess is in a dreadful +state; but it was necessary for Natasha herself to see a doctor. +They insisted on her coming with me." + +"Yes, is there a family free from sorrow now?" said Pierre, +addressing Natasha. "You know it happened the very day we were +rescued. I saw him. What a delightful boy he was!" + +Natasha looked at him, and by way of answer to his words her eyes +widened and lit up. + +"What can one say or think of as a consolation?" said Pierre. +"Nothing! Why had such a splendid boy, so full of life, to die?" + +"Yes, in these days it would be hard to live without faith..." +remarked Princess Mary. + +"Yes, yes, that is really true," Pierre hastily interrupted her. + +"Why is it true?" Natasha asked, looking attentively into Pierre's +eyes. + +"How can you ask why?" said Princess Mary. "The thought alone of +what awaits..." + +Natasha without waiting for Princess Mary to finish again looked +inquiringly at Pierre. + +"And because," Pierre continued, "only one who believes that there +is a God ruling us can bear a loss such as hers and... yours." + +Natasha had already opened her mouth to speak but suddenly +stopped. Pierre hurriedly turned away from her and again addressed +Princess Mary, asking about his friend's last days. + +Pierre's confusion had now almost vanished, but at the same time +he felt that his freedom had also completely gone. He felt that +there was now a judge of his every word and action whose judgment +mattered more to him than that of all the rest of the world. As he +spoke now he was considering what impression his words would make on +Natasha. He did not purposely say things to please her, but whatever +he was saying he regarded from her standpoint. + +Princess Mary- reluctantly as is usual in such cases- began +telling of the condition in which she had found Prince Andrew. But +Pierre's face quivering with emotion, his questions and his eager +restless expression, gradually compelled her to go into details +which she feared to recall for her own sake. + +"Yes, yes, and so...? " Pierre kept saying as he leaned toward her +with his whole body and eagerly listened to her story. "Yes, yes... so +he grew tranquil and softened? With all his soul he had always +sought one thing- to be perfectly good- so he could not be afraid of +death. The faults he had- if he had any- were not of his making. So he +did soften?... What a happy thing that he saw you again," he added, +suddenly turning to Natasha and looking at her with eyes full of +tears. + +Natasha's face twitched. She frowned and lowered her eyes for a +moment. She hesitated for an instant whether to speak or not. + +"Yes, that was happiness," she then said in her quiet voice with its +deep chest notes. "For me it certainly was happiness." She paused. +"And he... he... he said he was wishing for it at the very moment I +entered the room...." + +Natasha's voice broke. She blushed, pressed her clasped hands on her +knees, and then controlling herself with an evident effort lifted +her head and began to speak rapidly. + +"We knew nothing of it when we started from Moscow. I did not dare +to ask about him. Then suddenly Sonya told me he was traveling with +us. I had no idea and could not imagine what state he was in, all I +wanted was to see him and be with him," she said, trembling, and +breathing quickly. + +And not letting them interrupt her she went on to tell what she +had never yet mentioned to anyone- all she had lived through during +those three weeks of their journey and life at Yaroslavl. + +Pierre listened to her with lips parted and eyes fixed upon her full +of tears. As he listened he did not think of Prince Andrew, nor of +death, nor of what she was telling. He listened to her and felt only +pity for her, for what she was suffering now while she was speaking. + +Princess Mary, frowning in her effort to hold back her tears, sat +beside Natasha, and heard for the first time the story of those last +days of her brother's and Natasha's love. + +Evidently Natasha needed to tell that painful yet joyful tale. + +She spoke, mingling most trifling details with the intimate +secrets of her soul, and it seemed as if she could never finish. +Several times she repeated the same thing twice. + +Dessalles' voice was heard outside the door asking whether little +Nicholas might come in to say good night. + +"Well, that's all- everything," said Natasha. + +She got up quickly just as Nicholas entered, almost ran to the +door which was hidden by curtains, struck her head against it, and +rushed from the room with a moan either of pain or sorrow. + +Pierre gazed at the door through which she had disappeared and did +not understand why he suddenly felt all alone in the world. + +Princess Mary roused him from his abstraction by drawing his +attention to her nephew who had entered the room. + +At that moment of emotional tenderness young Nicholas' face, which +resembled his father's, affected Pierre so much that when he had +kissed the boy he got up quickly, took out his handkerchief, and +went to the window. He wished to take leave of Princess Mary, but +she would not let him go. + +"No, Natasha and I sometimes don't go to sleep till after two, so +please don't go. I will order supper. Go downstairs, we will come +immediately." + +Before Pierre left the room Princess Mary told him: "This is the +first time she has talked of him like that." + +CHAPTER XVII + +Pierre was shown into the large, brightly lit dining room; a few +minutes later he heard footsteps and Princess Mary entered with +Natasha. Natasha was calm, though a severe and grave expression had +again settled on her face. They all three of them now experienced that +feeling of awkwardness which usually follows after a serious and +heartfelt talk. It is impossible to go back to the same +conversation, to talk of trifles is awkward, and yet the desire to +speak is there and silence seems like affectation. They went +silently to table. The footmen drew back the chairs and pushed them up +again. Pierre unfolded his cold table napkin and, resolving to break +the silence, looked at Natasha and at Princess Mary. They had +evidently both formed the same resolution; the eyes of both shone with +satisfaction and a confession that besides sorrow life also has joy. + +"Do you take vodka, Count?" asked Princess Mary, and those words +suddenly banished the shadows of the past. "Now tell us about +yourself," said she. "One hears such improbable wonders about you." + +"Yes," replied Pierre with the smile of mild irony now habitual to +him. "They even tell me wonders I myself never dreamed of! Mary +Abramovna invited me to her house and kept telling me what had +happened, or ought to have happened, to me. Stepan Stepanych also +instructed me how I ought to tell of my experiences. In general I have +noticed that it is very easy to be an interesting man (I am an +interesting man now); people invite me out and tell me all about +myself." + +Natasha smiled and was on the point of speaking. + +"We have been told," Princess Mary interrupted her, "that you lost +two millions in Moscow. Is that true?" + +"But I am three times as rich as before," returned Pierre. + +Though the position was now altered by his decision to pay his +wife's debts and to rebuild his houses, Pierre still maintained that +he had become three times as rich as before. + +"What I have certainly gained is freedom," he began seriously, but +did not continue, noticing that this theme was too egotistic. + +"And are you building?" + +"Yes. Savelich says I must!" + +"Tell me, you did not know of the countess' death when you decided +to remain in Moscow?" asked Princess Mary and immediately blushed, +noticing that her question, following his mention of freedom, ascribed +to his words a meaning he had perhaps not intended. + +"No," answered Pierre, evidently not considering awkward the meaning +Princess Mary had given to his words. "I heard of it in Orel and you +cannot imagine how it shocked me. We were not an exemplary couple," he +added quickly, glancing at Natasha and noticing on her face +curiosity as to how he would speak of his wife, "but her death shocked +me terribly. When two people quarrel they are always both in fault, +and one's own guilt suddenly becomes terribly serious when the other +is no longer alive. And then such a death... without friends and +without consolation! I am very, very sorry for her," he concluded, and +was pleased to notice a look of glad approval on Natasha's face. + +"Yes, and so you are once more an eligible bachelor," said +Princess Mary. + +Pierre suddenly flushed crimson and for a long time tried not to +look at Natasha. When he ventured to glance her way again her face was +cold, stern, and he fancied even contemptuous. + +"And did you really see and speak to Napoleon, as we have been +told?" said Princess Mary. + +Pierre laughed. + +"No, not once! Everybody seems to imagine that being taken +prisoner means being Napoleon's guest. Not only did I never see him +but I heard nothing about him- I was in much lower company!" + +Supper was over, and Pierre who at first declined to speak about his +captivity was gradually led on to do so. + +"But it's true that you remained in Moscow to kill Napoleon?" +Natasha asked with a slight smile. "I guessed it then when we met at +the Sukharev tower, do you remember?" + +Pierre admitted that it was true, and from that was gradually led by +Princess Mary's questions and especially by Natasha's into giving a +detailed account of his adventures. + +At first he spoke with the amused and mild irony now customary +with him toward everybody and especially toward himself, but when he +came to describe the horrors and sufferings he had witnessed he was +unconsciously carried away and began speaking with the suppressed +emotion of a man re-experiencing in recollection strong impressions he +has lived through. + +Princess Mary with a gentle smile looked now at Pierre and now at +Natasha. In the whole narrative she saw only Pierre and his +goodness. Natasha, leaning on her elbow, the expression of her face +constantly changing with the narrative, watched Pierre with an +attention that never wandered- evidently herself experiencing all that +he described. Not only her look, but her exclamations and the brief +questions she put, showed Pierre that she understood just what he +wished to convey. It was clear that she understood not only what he +said but also what he wished to, but could not, express in words. +The account Pierre gave of the incident with the child and the woman +for protecting whom he was arrested was this: "It was an awful +sight- children abandoned, some in the flames... One was snatched +out before my eyes... and there were women who had their things +snatched off and their earrings torn out..." he flushed and grew +confused. "Then a patrol arrived and all the men- all those who were +not looting, that is- were arrested, and I among them." + +"I am sure you're not telling us everything; I am sure you did +something..." said Natasha and pausing added, "something fine?" + +Pierre continued. When he spoke of the execution he wanted to pass +over the horrible details, but Natasha insisted that he should not +omit anything. + +Pierre began to tell about Karataev, but paused. By this time he had +risen from the table and was pacing the room, Natasha following him +with her eyes. Then he added: + +"No, you can't understand what I learned from that illiterate man- +that simple fellow." + +"Yes, yes, go on!" said Natasha. "Where is he?" + +"They killed him almost before my eyes." + +And Pierre, his voice trembling continually, went on to tell of +the last days of their retreat, of Karataev's illness and his death. + +He told of his adventures as he had never yet recalled them. He now, +as it were, saw a new meaning in all he had gone through. Now that +he was telling it all to Natasha he experienced that pleasure which +a man has when women listen to him- not clever women who when +listening either try to remember what they hear to enrich their +minds and when opportunity offers to retell it, or who wish to adopt +it to some thought of their own and promptly contribute their own +clever comments prepared in their little mental workshop- but the +pleasure given by real women gifted with a capacity to select and +absorb the very best a man shows of himself. Natasha without knowing +it was all attention: she did not lose a word, no single quiver in +Pierre's voice, no look, no twitch of a muscle in his face, nor a +single gesture. She caught the unfinished word in its flight and +took it straight into her open heart, divining the secret meaning of +all Pierre's mental travail. + +Princess Mary understood his story and sympathized with him, but she +now saw something else that absorbed all her attention. She saw the +possibility of love and happiness between Natasha and Pierre, and +the first thought of this filled her heart with gladness. + +It was three o'clock in the morning. The footmen came in with sad +and stern faces to change the candles, but no one noticed them. + +Pierre finished his story. Natasha continued to look at him intently +with bright, attentive, and animated eyes, as if trying to +understand something more which he had perhaps left untold. Pierre +in shamefaced and happy confusion glanced occasionally at her, and +tried to think what to say next to introduce a fresh subject. Princess +Mary was silent. It occurred to none of them that it was three o'clock +and time to go to bed. + +"People speak of misfortunes and sufferings," remarked Pierre, +"but if at this moment I were asked: 'Would you rather be what you +were before you were taken prisoner, or go through all this again?' +then for heaven's sake let me again have captivity and horseflesh! +We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is +lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While +there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us. I say +this to you," he added, turning to Natasha. + +"Yes, yes," she said, answering something quite different. "I too +should wish nothing but to relive it all from the beginning." + +Pierre looked intently at her. + +"Yes, and nothing more." said Natasha. + +"It's not true, not true!" cried Pierre. "I am not to blame for +being alive and wishing to live- nor you either." + +Suddenly Natasha bent her head, covered her face with her hands, and +began to cry. + +"What is it, Natasha?" said Princess Mary. + +"Nothing, nothing." She smiled at Pierre through her tears. "Good +night! It is time for bed." + +Pierre rose and took his leave. + +Princess Mary and Natasha met as usual in the bedroom. They talked +of what Pierre had told them. Princess Mary did not express her +opinion of Pierre nor did Natasha speak of him. + +"Well, good night, Mary!" said Natasha. "Do you know, I am often +afraid that by not speaking of him" (she meant Prince Andrew) "for +fear of not doing justice to our feelings, we forget him." + +Princess Mary sighed deeply and thereby acknowledged the justice +of Natasha's remark, but she did not express agreement in words. + +"Is it possible to forget?" said she. + +"It did me so much good to tell all about it today. It was hard +and painful, but good, very good!" said Natasha. "I am sure he +really loved him. That is why I told him... Was it all right?" she +added, suddenly blushing. + +"To tell Pierre? Oh, yes. What a splendid man he is!" said +Princess Mary. + +"Do you know, Mary..." Natasha suddenly said with a mischievous +smile such as Princess Mary had not seen on her face for a long +time, "he has somehow grown so clean, smooth, and fresh- as if he +had just come out of a Russian bath; do you understand? Out of a moral +bath. Isn't it true?" + +"Yes," replied Princess Mary. "He has greatly improved." + +"With a short coat and his hair cropped; just as if, well, just as +if he had come straight from the bath... Papa used to..." + +"I understand why he" (Prince Andrew) "liked no one so much as him," +said Princess Mary. + +"Yes, and yet he is quite different. They say men are friends when +they are quite different. That must be true. Really he is quite unlike +him- in everything." + +"Yes, but he's wonderful." + +"Well, good night," said Natasha. + +And the same mischievous smile lingered for a long time on her +face as if it had been forgotten there. + +CHAPTER XVIII + +It was a long time before Pierre could fall asleep that night. He +paced up and down his room, now turning his thoughts on a difficult +problem and frowning, now suddenly shrugging his shoulders and +wincing, and now smiling happily. + +He was thinking of Prince Andrew, of Natasha, and of their love, +at one moment jealous of her past, then reproaching himself for that +feeling. It was already six in the morning and he still paced up and +down the room. + +"Well, what's to be done if it cannot be avoided? What's to be done? +Evidently it has to be so," said he to himself, and hastily undressing +he got into bed, happy and agitated but free from hesitation or +indecision. + +"Strange and impossible as such happiness seems, I must do +everything that she and I may be man and wife," he told himself. + +A few days previously Pierre had decided to go to Petersburg on +the Friday. When he awoke on the Thursday, Savelich came to ask him +about packing for the journey. + +"What, to Petersburg? What is Petersburg? Who is there in +Petersburg?" he asked involuntarily, though only to himself. "Oh, yes, +long ago before this happened I did for some reason mean to go to +Petersburg," he reflected. "Why? But perhaps I shall go. What a good +fellow he is and how attentive, and how he remembers everything," he +thought, looking at Savelich's old face, "and what a pleasant smile he +has!" + +"Well, Savelich, do you still not wish to accept your freedom?" +Pierre asked him. + +"What's the good of freedom to me, your excellency? We lived under +the late count- the kingdom of heaven be his!- and we have lived under +you too, without ever being wronged." + +"And your children?" + +"The children will live just the same. With such masters one can +live." + +"But what about my heirs?" said Pierre. "Supposing I suddenly +marry... it might happen," he added with an involuntary smile. + +"If I may take the liberty, your excellency, it would be a good +thing." + +"How easy he thinks it," thought Pierre. "He doesn't know how +terrible it is and how dangerous. Too soon or too late... it is +terrible!" + +"So what are your orders? Are you starting tomorrow?" asked +Savelich. + +"No, I'll put it off for a bit. I'll tell you later. You must +forgive the trouble I have put you to," said Pierre, and seeing +Savelich smile, he thought: "But how strange it is that he should +not know that now there is no Petersburg for me, and that that must be +settled first of all! But probably he knows it well enough and is only +pretending. Shall I have a talk with him and see what he thinks?" +Pierre reflected. "No, another time." + +At breakfast Pierre told the princess, his cousin, that he had +been to see Princess Mary the day before and had there met- "Whom do +you think? Natasha Rostova!" + +The princess seemed to see nothing more extraordinary in that than +if he had seen Anna Semenovna. + +"Do you know her?" asked Pierre. + +"I have seen the princess," she replied. "I heard that they were +arranging a match for her with young Rostov. It would be a very good +thing for the Rostovs, they are said to be utterly ruined." + +"No; I mean do you know Natasha Rostova?" + +"I heard about that affair of hers at the time. It was a great +pity." + +"No, she either doesn't understand or is pretending," thought +Pierre. "Better not say anything to her either." + +The princess too had prepared provisions for Pierre's journey. + +"How kind they all are," thought Pierre. "What is surprising is that +they should trouble about these things now when it can no longer be of +interest to them. And all for me!" + +On the same day the Chief of Police came to Pierre, inviting him +to send a representative to the Faceted Palace to recover things +that were to be returned to their owners that day. + +"And this man too," thought Pierre, looking into the face of the +Chief of Police. "What a fine, good-looking officer and how kind. +Fancy bothering about such trifies now! And they actually say he is +not honest and takes bribes. What nonsense! Besides, why shouldn't +he take bribes? That's the way he was brought up, and everybody does +it. But what a kind, pleasant face and how he smiles as he looks at +me." + +Pierre went to Princess Mary's to dinner. + +As he drove through the streets past the houses that had been burned +down, he was surprised by the beauty of those ruins. The +picturesqueness of the chimney stacks and tumble-down walls of the +burned-out quarters of the town, stretching out and concealing one +another, reminded him of the Rhine and the Colosseum. The cabmen he +met and their passengers, the carpenters cutting the timber for new +houses with axes, the women hawkers, and the shopkeepers, all looked +at him with cheerful beaming eyes that seemed to say: "Ah, there he +is! Let's see what will come of it!" + +At the entrance to Princess Mary's house Pierre felt doubtful +whether he had really been there the night before and really seen +Natasha and talked to her. "Perhaps I imagined it; perhaps I shall +go in and find no one there." But he had hardly entered the room +before he felt her presence with his whole being by the loss of his +sense of freedom. She was in the same black dress with soft folds +and her hair was done the same way as the day before, yet she was +quite different. Had she been like this when he entered the day before +he could not for a moment have failed to recognize her. + +She was as he had known her almost as a child and later on as Prince +Andrew's fiancee. A bright questioning light shone in her eyes, and on +her face was a friendly and strangely roguish expression. + +Pierre dined with them and would have spent the whole evening there, +but Princess Mary was going to vespers and Pierre left the house +with her. + +Next day he came early, dined, and stayed the whole evening. +Though Princess Mary and Natasha were evidently glad to see their +visitor and though all Pierre's interest was now centered in that +house, by the evening they had talked over everything and the +conversation passed from one trivial topic to another and repeatedly +broke off. He stayed so long that Princess Mary and Natasha +exchanged glances, evidently wondering when he would go. Pierre +noticed this but could not go. He felt uneasy and embarrassed, but sat +on because he simply could not get up and take his leave. + +Princess Mary, foreseeing no end to this, rose first, and +complaining of a headache began to say good night. + +"So you are going to Petersburg tomorrow?" she asked. + +"No, I am not going," Pierre replied hastily, in a surprised tone +and as though offended. "Yes... no... to Petersburg? Tomorrow- but I +won't say good-by yet. I will call round in case you have any +commissions for me," said he, standing before Princess Mary and +turning red, but not taking his departure. + +Natasha gave him her hand and went out. Princess Mary on the other +hand instead of going away sank into an armchair, and looked sternly +and intently at him with her deep, radiant eyes. The weariness she had +plainly shown before had now quite passed off. With a deep and +long-drawn sigh she seemed to be prepared for a lengthy talk. + +When Natasha left the room Pierre's confusion and awkwardness +immediately vanished and were replaced by eager excitement. He quickly +moved an armchair toward Princess Mary. + +"Yes, I wanted to tell you," said he, answering her look as if she +had spoken. "Princess, help me! What am I to do? Can I hope? Princess, +my dear friend, listen! I know it all. I know I am not worthy of +her, I know it's impossible to speak of it now. But I want to be a +brother to her. No, not that, I don't, I can't..." + +He paused and rubbed his face and eyes with his hands. + +"Well," he went on with an evident effort at self-control and +coherence. "I don't know when I began to love her, but I have loved +her and her alone all my life, and I love her so that I cannot imagine +life without her. I cannot propose to her at present, but the +thought that perhaps she might someday be my wife and that I may be +missing that possibility... that possibility... is terrible. Tell +me, can I hope? Tell me what I am to do, dear princess!" he added +after a pause, and touched her hand as she did not reply. + +"I am thinking of what you have told me," answered Princess Mary. +"This is what I will say. You are right that to speak to her of love +at present..." + +Princess Mary stopped. She was going to say that to speak of love +was impossible, but she stopped because she had seen by the sudden +change in Natasha two days before that she would not only not be +hurt if Pierre spoke of his love, but that it was the very thing she +wished for. + +"To speak to her now wouldn't do," said the princess all the same. + +"But what am I to do? + +"Leave it to me," said Princess Mary. "I know..." + +Pierre was looking into Princess Mary's eyes. + +"Well?... Well?..." he said. + +"I know that she loves... will love you," Princess Mary corrected +herself. + +Before her words were out, Pierre had sprung up and with a +frightened expression seized Princess Mary's hand. + +"What makes you think so? You think I may hope? You think...?" + +"Yes, I think so," said Princess Mary with a smile. "Write to her +parents, and leave it to me. I will tell her when I can. I wish it +to happen and my heart tells me it will." + +"No, it cannot be! How happy I am! But it can't be.... How happy I +am! No, it can't be!" Pierre kept saying as he kissed Princess +Mary's hands. + +"Go to Petersburg, that will be best. And I will write to you," +she said. + +"To Petersburg? Go there? Very well, I'll go. But I may come again +tomorrow?" + +Next day Pierre came to say good-by. Natasha was less animated +than she had been the day before; but that day as he looked at her +Pierre sometimes felt as if he was vanishing and that neither he nor +she existed any longer, that nothing existed but happiness. "Is it +possible? No, it can't be," he told himself at every look, gesture, +and word that filled his soul with joy. + +When on saying good-by he took her thin, slender hand, he could +not help holding it a little longer in his own. + +"Is it possible that this hand, that face, those eyes, all this +treasure of feminine charm so strange to me now, is it possible that +it will one day be mine forever, as familiar to me as I am to +myself?... No, that's impossible!..." + +"Good-by, Count," she said aloud. "I shall look forward very much to +your return," she added in a whisper. + +And these simple words, her look, and the expression on her face +which accompanied them, formed for two months the subject of +inexhaustible memories, interpretations, and happy meditations for +Pierre. "'I shall look forward very much to your return....' Yes, yes, +how did she say it? Yes, 'I shall look forward very much to your +return.' Oh, how happy I am! What is happening to me? How happy I am!" +said Pierre to himself. + +CHAPTER XIX + +There was nothing in Pierre's soul now at all like what had troubled +it during his courtship of Helene. + +He did not repeat to himself with a sickening feeling of shame the +words he had spoken, or say: "Oh, why did I not say that?" and, +"Whatever made me say 'Je vous aime'?" On the contrary, he now +repeated in imagination every word that he or Natasha had spoken and +pictured every detail of her face and smile, and did not wish to +diminish or add anything, but only to repeat it again and again. There +was now not a shadow of doubt in his mind as to whether what he had +undertaken was right or wrong. Only one terrible doubt sometimes +crossed his mind: "Wasn't it all a dream? Isn't Princess Mary +mistaken? Am I not too conceited and self-confident? I believe all +this- and suddenly Princess Mary will tell her, and she will be sure +to smile and say: 'How strange! He must be deluding himself. Doesn't +he know that he is a man, just a man, while I...? I am something +altogether different and higher.'" + +That was the only doubt often troubling Pierre. He did not now +make any plans. The happiness before him appeared so inconceivable +that if only he could attain it, it would be the end of all things. +Everything ended with that. + +A joyful, unexpected frenzy, of which he had thought himself +incapable, possessed him. The whole meaning of life- not for him alone +but for the whole world- seemed to him centered in his love and the +possibility of being loved by her. At times everybody seemed to him to +be occupied with one thing only- his future happiness. Sometimes it +seemed to him that other people were all as pleased as he was +himself and merely tried to hide that pleasure by pretending to be +busy with other interests. In every word and gesture he saw +allusions to his happiness. He often surprised those he met by his +significantly happy looks and smiles which seemed to express a +secret understanding between him and them. And when he realized that +people might not be aware of his happiness, he pitied them with his +whole heart and felt a desire somehow to explain to them that all that +occupied them was a mere frivolous trifle unworthy of attention. + +When it was suggested to him that he should enter the civil service, +or when the war or any general political affairs were discussed on the +assumption that everybody's welfare depended on this or that issue +of events, he would listen with a mild and pitying smile and +surprise people by his strange comments. But at this time he saw +everybody- both those who, as he imagined, understood the real meaning +of life (that is, what he was feeling) and those unfortunates who +evidently did not understand it- in the bright light of the emotion +that shone within himself, and at once without any effort saw in +everyone he met everything that was good and worthy of being loved. + +When dealing with the affairs and papers of his dead wife, her +memory aroused in him no feeling but pity that she had not known the +bliss he now knew. Prince Vasili, who having obtained a new post and +some fresh decorations was particularly proud at this time, seemed +to him a pathetic, kindly old man much to be pitied. + +Often in afterlife Pierre recalled this period of blissful insanity. +All the views he formed of men and circumstances at this time remained +true for him always. He not only did not renounce them subsequently, +but when he was in doubt or inwardly at variance, he referred to the +views he had held at this time of his madness and they always proved +correct. + +"I may have appeared strange and queer then," he thought, "but I was +not so mad as I seemed. On the contrary I was then wiser and had +more insight than at any other time, and understood all that is +worth understanding in life, because... because I was happy." + +Pierre's insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to +discover personal attributes which he termed "good qualities" in +people before loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, +and by loving people without cause he discovered indubitable causes +for loving them. + +CHAPTER XX + +After Pierre's departure that first evening, when Natasha had said +to Princess Mary with a gaily mocking smile: "He looks just, yes, just +as if he had come out of a Russian bath- in a short coat and with +his hair cropped," something hidden and unknown to herself, but +irrepressible, awoke in Natasha's soul. + +Everything: her face, walk, look, and voice, was suddenly altered. +To her own surprise a power of life and hope of happiness rose to +the surface and demanded satisfaction. From that evening she seemed to +have forgotten all that had happened to her. She no longer +complained of her position, did not say a word about the past, and +no longer feared to make happy plans for the future. She spoke +little of Pierre, but when Princess Mary mentioned him a +long-extinguished light once more kindled in her eyes and her lips +curved with a strange smile. + +The change that took place in Natasha at first surprised Princess +Mary; but when she understood its meaning it grieved her. "Can she +have loved my brother so little as to be able to forget him so +soon?" she thought when she reflected on the change. But when she +was with Natasha she was not vexed with her and did not reproach +her. The reawakened power of life that had seized Natasha was so +evidently irrepressible and unexpected by her that in her presence +Princess Mary felt that she had no right to reproach her even in her +heart. + +Natasha gave herself up so fully and frankly to this new feeling +that she did not try to hide the fact that she was no longer sad, +but bright and cheerful. + +When Princess Mary returned to her room after her nocturnal talk +with Pierre, Natasha met her on the threshold. + +"He has spoken? Yes? He has spoken?" she repeated. + +And a joyful yet pathetic expression which seemed to beg forgiveness +for her joy settled on Natasha's face. + +"I wanted to listen at the door, but I knew you would tell me." + +Understandable and touching as the look with which Natasha gazed +at her seemed to Princess Mary, and sorry as she was to see her +agitation, these words pained her for a moment. She remembered her +brother and his love. + +"But what's to be done? She can't help it," thought the princess. + +And with a sad and rather stern look she told Natasha all that +Pierre had said. On hearing that he was going to Petersburg Natasha +was astounded. + +"To Petersburg!" she repeated as if unable to understand. + +But noticing the grieved expression on Princess Mary's face she +guessed the reason of that sadness and suddenly began to cry. + +"Mary," said she, "tell me what I should do! I am afraid of being +bad. Whatever you tell me, I will do. Tell me...." + +"You love him?" + +"Yes," whispered Natasha. + +"Then why are you crying? I am happy for your sake," said Princess +Mary, who because of those tears quite forgave Natasha's joy. + +"It won't be just yet- someday. Think what fun it will be when I +am his wife and you marry Nicholas!" + +"Natasha, I have asked you not to speak of that. Let us talk about +you." + +They were silent awhile. + +"But why go to Petersburg?" Natasha suddenly asked, and hastily +replied to her own question. "But no, no, he must... Yes, Mary, He +must...." + +FIRST EPILOGUE: 1813 - 20 + +CHAPTER I + +Seven years had passed. The storm-tossed sea of European history had +subsided within its shores and seemed to have become calm. But the +mysterious forces that move humanity (mysterious because the laws of +their motion are unknown to us) continued to operate. + +Though the surface of the sea of history seemed motionless, the +movement of humanity went on as unceasingly as the flow of time. +Various groups of people formed and dissolved, the coming formation +and dissolution of kingdoms and displacement of peoples was in +course of preparation. + +The sea of history was not driven spasmodically from shore to +shore as previously. It was seething in its depths. Historic figures +were not borne by the waves from one shore to another as before. +They now seemed to rotate on one spot. The historical figures at the +head of armies, who formerly reflected the movement of the masses by +ordering wars, campaigns, and battles, now reflected the restless +movement by political and diplomatic combinations, laws, and treaties. + +The historians call this activity of the historical figures "the +reaction." + +In dealing with this period they sternly condemn the historical +personages who, in their opinion, caused what they describe as the +reaction. All the well-known people of that period, from Alexander and +Napoleon to Madame de Stael, Photius, Schelling, Fichte, +Chateaubriand, and the rest, pass before their stern judgment seat and +are acquitted or condemned according to whether they conduced to +progress or to reaction. + +According to their accounts a reaction took place at that time in +Russia also, and the chief culprit was Alexander I, the same man who +according to them was the chief cause of the liberal movement at the +commencement of his reign, being the savior of Russia. + +There is no one in Russian literature now, from schoolboy essayist +to learned historian, who does not throw his little stone at Alexander +for things he did wrong at this period of his reign. + +"He ought to have acted in this way and in that way. In this case he +did well and in that case badly. He behaved admirably at the beginning +of his reign and during 1812, but acted badly by giving a constitution +to Poland, forming the Holy Alliance, entrusting power to Arakcheev, +favoring Golitsyn and mysticism, and afterwards Shishkov and +Photius. He also acted badly by concerning himself with the active +army and disbanding the Semenov regiment." + +It would take a dozen pages to enumerate all the reproaches the +historians address to him, based on their knowledge of what is good +for humanity. + +What do these reproaches mean? + +Do not the very actions for which the historians praise Alexander +I (the liberal attempts at the beginning of his reign, his struggle +with Napoleon, the firmness he displayed in 1812 and the campaign of +1813) flow from the same sources- the circumstances of his birth, +education, and life- that made his personality what it was and from +which the actions for which they blame him (the Holy Alliance, the +restoration of Poland, and the reaction of 1820 and later) also +flowed? + +In what does the substance of those reproaches lie? + +It lies in the fact that an historic character like Alexander I, +standing on the highest possible pinnacle of human power with the +blinding light of history focused upon him; a character exposed to +those strongest of all influences: the intrigues, flattery, and +self-deception inseparable from power; a character who at every moment +of his life felt a responsibility for all that was happening in +Europe; and not a fictitious but a live character who like every man +had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, +beauty, and truth- that this character- though not lacking in virtue +(the historians do not accuse him of that)- had not the same +conception of the welfare of humanity fifty years ago as a present-day +professor who from his youth upwards has been occupied with +learning: that is, with books and lectures and with taking notes +from them. + +But even if we assume that fifty years ago Alexander I was +mistaken in his view of what was good for the people, we must +inevitably assume that the historian who judges Alexander will also +after the lapse of some time turn out to be mistaken in his view of +what is good for humanity. This assumption is all the more natural and +inevitable because, watching the movement of history, we see that +every year and with each new writer, opinion as to what is good for +mankind changes; so that what once seemed good, ten years later +seems bad, and vice versa. And what is more, we find at one and the +same time quite contradictory views as to what is bad and what is good +in history: some people regard giving a constitution to Poland and +forming the Holy Alliance as praiseworthy in Alexander, while others +regard it as blameworthy. + +The activity of Alexander or of Napoleon cannot be called useful +or harmful, for it is impossible to say for what it was useful or +harmful. If that activity displeases somebody, this is only because it +does not agree with his limited understanding of what is good. Whether +the preservation of my father's house in Moscow, or the glory of the +Russian arms, or the prosperity of the Petersburg and other +universities, or the freedom of Poland or the greatness of Russia, +or the balance of power in Europe, or a certain kind of European +culture called "progress" appear to me to be good or bad, I must admit +that besides these things the action of every historic character has +other more general purposes inaccessible to me. + +But let us assume that what is called science can harmonize all +contradictions and possesses an unchanging standard of good and bad by +which to try historic characters and events; let us say that Alexander +could have done everything differently; let us say that with +guidance from those who blame him and who profess to know the ultimate +aim of the movement of humanity, he might have arranged matters +according to the program his present accusers would have given him- of +nationality, freedom, equality, and progress (these, I think, cover +the ground). Let us assume that this program was possible and had then +been formulated, and that Alexander had acted on it. What would then +have become of the activity of all those who opposed the tendency that +then prevailed in the government- an activity that in the opinion of +the historians was good and beneficent? Their activity would not +have existed: there would have been no life, there would have been +nothing. + +If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the +possibility of life is destroyed. + +CHAPTER II + +If we assume as the historians do that great men lead humanity to +the attainment of certain ends- the greatness of Russia or of +France, the balance of power in Europe, the diffusion of the ideas +of the Revolution general progress or anything else- then it is +impossible to explain the facts of history without introducing the +conceptions of chance and genius. + +If the aim of the European wars at the beginning of the nineteenth +century had been the aggrandizement of Russia, that aim might have +been accomplished without all the preceding wars and without the +invasion. If the aim wag the aggrandizement of France, that might have +been attained without the Revolution and without the Empire. If the +aim was the dissemination of ideas, the printing press could have +accomplished that much better than warfare. If the aim was the +progress of civilization, it is easy to see that there are other +ways of diffusing civilization more expedient than by the +destruction of wealth and of human lives. + +Why did it happen in this and not in some other way? + +Because it happened so! "Chance created the situation; genius +utilized it," says history. + +But what is chance? What is genius? + +The words chance and genius do not denote any really existing +thing and therefore cannot be defined. Those words only denote a +certain stage of understanding of phenomena. I do not know why a +certain event occurs; I think that I cannot know it; so I do not try +to know it and I talk about chance. I see a force producing effects +beyond the scope of ordinary human agencies; I do not understand why +this occurs and I talk of genius. + +To a herd of rams, the ram the herdsman drives each evening into a +special enclosure to feed and that becomes twice as fat as the +others must seem to be a genius. And it must appear an astonishing +conjunction of genius with a whole series of extraordinary chances +that this ram, who instead of getting into the general fold every +evening goes into a special enclosure where there are oats- that +this very ram, swelling with fat, is killed for meat. + +But the rams need only cease to suppose that all that happens to +them happens solely for the attainment of their sheepish aims; they +need only admit that what happens to them may also have purposes +beyond their ken, and they will at once perceive a unity and coherence +in what happened to the ram that was fattened. Even if they do not +know for what purpose they are fattened, they will at least know +that all that happened to the ram did not happen accidentally, and +will no longer need the conceptions of chance or genius. + +Only by renouncing our claim to discern a purpose immediately +intelligible to us, and admitting the ultimate purpose to be beyond +our ken, may we discern the sequence of experiences in the lives of +historic characters and perceive the cause of the effect they +produce (incommensurable with ordinary human capabilities), and then +the words chance and genius become superfluous. + +We need only confess that we do not know the purpose of the European +convulsions and that we know only the facts- that is, the murders, +first in France, then in Italy, in Africa, in Prussia, in Austria, +in Spain, and in Russia- and that the movements from the west to the +east and from the east to the west form the essence and purpose of +these events, and not only shall we have no need to see exceptional +ability and genius in Napoleon and Alexander, but we shall be unable +to consider them to be anything but like other men, and we shall not +be obliged to have recourse to chance for an explanation of those +small events which made these people what they were, but it will be +clear that all those small events were inevitable. + +By discarding a claim to knowledge of the ultimate purpose, we shall +clearly perceive that just as one cannot imagine a blossom or seed for +any single plant better suited to it than those it produces, so it +is impossible to imagine any two people more completely adapted down +to the smallest detail for the purpose they had to fulfill, than +Napoleon and Alexander with all their antecedents. + +CHAPTER III + +The fundamental and essential significance of the European events of +the beginning of the nineteenth century lies in the movement of the +mass of the European peoples from west to east and afterwards from +east to west. The commencement of that movement was the movement +from west to east. For the peoples of the west to be able to make +their warlike movement to Moscow it was necessary: (1) that they +should form themselves into a military group of a size able to +endure a collision with the warlike military group of the east, (2) +that they should abandon all established traditions and customs, and +(3) that during their military movement they should have at their head +a man who could justify to himself and to them the deceptions, +robberies, and murders which would have to be committed during that +movement. + +And beginning with the French Revolution the old inadequately +large group was destroyed, as well as the old habits and traditions, +and step by step a group was formed of larger dimensions with new +customs and traditions, and a man was produced who would stand at +the head of the coming movement and bear the responsibility for all +that had to be done. + +A man without convictions, without habits, without traditions, +without a name, and not even a Frenchman, emerges- by what seem the +strangest chances- from among all the seething French parties, and +without joining any one of them is borne forward to a prominent +position. + +The ignorance of his colleagues, the weakness and insignificance +of his opponents, the frankness of his falsehoods, and the dazzling +and self-confident limitations of this man raise him to the head of +the army. The brilliant qualities of the soldiers of the army sent +to Italy, his opponents' reluctance to fight, and his own childish +audacity and self-confidence secure him military fame. Innumerable +so called chances accompany him everywhere. The disfavor into which he +falls with the rulers of France turns to his advantage. His attempts +to avoid his predestined path are unsuccessful: he is not received +into the Russian service, and the appointment he seeks in Turkey comes +to nothing. During the war in Italy he is several times on the verge +of destruction and each time is saved in an unexpected manner. Owing +to various diplomatic considerations the Russian armies- just those +which might have destroyed his prestige- do not appear upon the +scene till he is no longer there. + +On his return from Italy he finds the government in Paris in a +process of dissolution in which all those who are in it are inevitably +wiped out and destroyed. And by chance an escape from this dangerous +position presents itself in the form of an aimless and senseless +expedition to Africa. Again so-called chance accompanies him. +Impregnable Malta surrenders without a shot; his most reckless schemes +are crowned with success. The enemy's fleet, which subsequently did +not let a single boat pass, allows his entire army to elude it. In +Africa a whole series of outrages are committed against the almost +unarmed inhabitants. And the men who commit these crimes, especially +their leader, assure themselves that this is admirable, this is glory- +it resembles Caesar and Alexander the Great and is therefore good. + +This ideal of glory and grandeur- which consists not merely in +considering nothing wrong that one does but in priding oneself on +every crime one commits, ascribing to it an incomprehensible +supernatural significance- that ideal, destined to guide this man +and his associates, had scope for its development in Africa. +Whatever he does succeeds. The plague does not touch him. The +cruelty of murdering prisoners is not imputed to him as a fault. His +childishly rash, uncalled-for, and ignoble departure from Africa, +leaving his comrades in distress, is set down to his credit, and again +the enemy's fleet twice lets him slip past. When, intoxicated by the +crimes he has committed so successfully, he reaches Paris, the +dissolution of the republican government, which a year earlier might +have ruined him, has reached its extreme limit, and his presence there +now as a newcomer free from party entanglements can only serve to +exalt him- and though he himself has no plan, he is quite ready for +his new role. + +He had no plan, he was afraid of everything, but the parties +snatched at him and demanded his participation. + +He alone- with his ideal of glory and grandeur developed in Italy +and Egypt, his insane self-adulation, his boldness in crime and +frankness in lying- he alone could justify what had to be done. + +He is needed for the place that awaits him, and so almost apart from +his will and despite his indecision, his lack of a plan, and all his +mistakes, he is drawn into a conspiracy that aims at seizing power and +the conspiracy is crowned with success. + +He is pushed into a meeting of the legislature. In alarm he wishes +to flee, considering himself lost. He pretends to fall into a swoon +and says senseless things that should have ruined him. But the once +proud and shrewd rulers of France, feeling that their part is played +out, are even more bewildered than he, and do not say the words they +should have said to destroy him and retain their power. + +Chance, millions of chances, give him power, and all men as if by +agreement co-operate to confirm that power. Chance forms the +characters of the rulers of France, who submit to him; chance forms +the character of Paul I of Russia who recognizes his government; +chance contrives a plot against him which not only fails to harm him +but confirms his power. Chance puts the Duc d'Enghien in his hands and +unexpectedly causes him to kill him- thereby convincing the mob more +forcibly than in any other way that he had the right, since he had the +might. Chance contrives that though he directs all his efforts to +prepare an expedition against England (which would inevitably have +ruined him) he never carries out that intention, but unexpectedly +falls upon Mack and the Austrians, who surrender without a battle. +Chance and genius give him the victory at Austerlitz; and by chance +all men, not only the French but all Europe- except England which does +not take part in the events about to happen- despite their former +horror and detestation of his crimes, now recognize his authority, the +title he has given himself, and his ideal of grandeur and glory, which +seems excellent and reasonable to them all. + +As if measuring themselves and preparing for the coming movement, +the western forces push toward the east several times in 1805, 1806, +1807, and 1809, gaining strength and growing. In 1811 the group of +people that had formed in France unites into one group with the +peoples of Central Europe. The strength of the justification of the +man who stands at the head of the movement grows with the increased +size of the group. During the ten-year preparatory period this man had +formed relations with all the crowned heads of Europe. The discredited +rulers of the world can oppose no reasonable ideal to the insensate +Napoleonic ideal of glory and grandeur. One after another they +hasten to display their insignificance before him. The King of Prussia +sends his wife to seek the great man's mercy; the Emperor of Austria +considers it a favor that this man receives a daughter the Caesars +into his bed; the Pope, the guardian of all that the nations hold +sacred, utilizes religion for the aggrandizement of the great man. +It is not Napoleon who prepares himself for the accomplishment of +his role, so much as all those round him who prepare him to take on +himself the whole responsibility for what is happening and has to +happen. There is no step, no crime or petty fraud he commits, which in +the mouths of those around him is not at once represented as a great +deed. The most suitable fete the Germans can devise for him is a +celebration of Jena and Auerstadt. Not only is he great, but so are +his ancestors, his brothers, his stepsons, and his brothers-in-law. +Everything is done to deprive him of the remains of his reason and +to prepare him for his terrible part. And when he is ready so too +are the forces. + +The invasion pushes eastward and reaches its final goal- Moscow. +That city is taken; the Russian army suffers heavier losses than the +opposing armies had suffered in the former war from Austerlitz to +Wagram. But suddenly instead of those chances and that genius which +hitherto had so consistently led him by an uninterrupted series of +successes to the predestined goal, an innumerable sequence of +inverse chances occur- from the cold in his head at Borodino to the +sparks which set Moscow on fire, and the frosts- and instead of +genius, stupidity and immeasurable baseness become evident. + +The invaders flee, turn back, flee again, and all the chances are +now not for Napoleon but always against him. + +A countermovement is then accomplished from east to west with a +remarkable resemblance to the preceding movement from west to east. +Attempted drives from east to west- similar to the contrary +movements of 1805, 1807, and 1809- precede the great westward +movement; there is the same coalescence into a group of enormous +dimensions; the same adhesion of the people of Central Europe to the +movement; the same hesitation midway, and the same increasing rapidity +as the goal is approached. + +Paris, the ultimate goal, is reached. The Napoleonic government +and army are destroyed. Napoleon himself is no longer of any +account; all his actions are evidently pitiful and mean, but again +an inexplicable chance occurs. The allies detest Napoleon whom they +regard as the cause of their sufferings. Deprived of power and +authority, his crimes and his craft exposed, he should have appeared +to them what he appeared ten years previously and one year later- an +outlawed brigand. But by some strange chance no one perceives this. +His part is not yet ended. The man who ten years before and a year +later was considered an outlawed brigand is sent to an island two +days' sail from France, which for some reason is presented to him as +his dominion, and guards are given to him and millions of money are +paid him. + +CHAPTER IV + +The flood of nations begins to subside into its normal channels. The +waves of the great movement abate, and on the calm surface eddies +are formed in which float the diplomatists, who imagine that they have +caused the floods to abate. + +But the smooth sea again suddenly becomes disturbed. The +diplomatists think that their disagreements are the cause of this +fresh pressure of natural forces; they anticipate war between their +sovereigns; the position seems to them insoluble. But the wave they +feel to be rising does not come from the quarter they expect. It rises +again from the same point as before- Paris. The last backwash of the +movement from the west occurs: a backwash which serves to solve the +apparently insuperable diplomatic difficulties and ends the military +movement of that period of history. + +The man who had devastated France returns to France alone, without +any conspiracy and without soldiers. Any guard might arrest him, but +by strange chance no one does so and all rapturously greet the man +they cursed the day before and will curse again a month later. + +This man is still needed to justify the final collective act. + +That act is performed. + +The last role is played. The actor is bidden to disrobe and wash off +his powder and paint: he will not be wanted any more. + +And some years pass during which he plays a pitiful comedy to +himself in solitude on his island, justifying his actions by intrigues +and lies when the justification is no longer needed, and displaying to +the whole world what it was that people had mistaken for strength as +long as an unseen hand directed his actions. + +The manager having brought the drama to a close and stripped the +actor shows him to us. + +"See what you believed in! This is he! Do you now see that it was +not he but I who moved you?" + +But dazed by the force of the movement, it was long before people +understood this. + +Still greater coherence and inevitability is seen in the life of +Alexander I, the man who stood at the head of the countermovement from +east to west. + +What was needed for him who, overshadowing others, stood at the head +of that movement from east to west? + +What was needed was a sense of justice and a sympathy with +European affairs, but a remote sympathy not dulled by petty interests; +a moral superiority over those sovereigns of the day who co-operated +with him; a mild and attractive personality; and a personal +grievance against Napoleon. And all this was found in Alexander I; all +this had been prepared by innumerable so-called chances in his life: +his education, his early liberalism, the advisers who surrounded +him, and by Austerlitz, and Tilsit, and Erfurt. + +During the national war he was inactive because he was not needed. +But as soon as the necessity for a general European war presented +itself he appeared in his place at the given moment and, uniting the +nations of Europe, led them to the goal. + +The goal is reached. After the final war of 1815 Alexander possesses +all possible power. How does he use it? + +Alexander I- the pacifier of Europe, the man who from his early +years had striven only for his people's welfare, the originator of the +liberal innovations in his fatherland- now that he seemed to possess +the utmost power and therefore to have the possibility of bringing +about the welfare of his peoples- at the time when Napoleon in exile +was drawing up childish and mendacious plans of how he would have made +mankind happy had he retained power- Alexander I, having fulfilled his +mission and feeling the hand of God upon him, suddenly recognizes +the insignificance of that supposed power, turns away from it, and +gives it into the hands of contemptible men whom he despises, saying +only: + +"Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy Name!... I too am a man like +the rest of you. Let me live like a man and think of my soul and of +God." + +As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, +and yet at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to +comprehend, so each individual has within himself his own aims and yet +has them to serve a general purpose incomprehensible to man. + +A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is +afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet +admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it +exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee +collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it +exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life +of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed +the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate +its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of +a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this +the purpose of the bee's existence. Another, observing the migration +of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that +in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the +bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes +the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in +the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the +ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension. + +All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee +to other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of +historic characters and nations. + +CHAPTER V + +Natasha's wedding to Bezukhov, which took place in 1813, was the +last happy event in the family of the old Rostovs. Count Ilya Rostov +died that same year and, as always happens, after the father's death +the family group broke up. + +The events of the previous year: the burning of Moscow and the +flight from it, the death of Prince Andrew, Natasha's despair, Petya's +death, and the old countess' grief fell blow after blow on the old +count's head. He seemed to be unable to understand the meaning of +all these events, and bowed his old head in a spiritual sense as if +expecting and inviting further blows which would finish him. He seemed +now frightened and distraught and now unnaturally animated and +enterprising. + +The arrangements for Natasha's marriage occupied him for a while. He +ordered dinners and suppers and obviously tried to appear cheerful, +but his cheerfulness was not infectious as it used to be: on the +contrary it evoked the compassion of those who knew and liked him. + +When Pierre and his wife had left, he grew very quiet and began to +complain of depression. A few days later he fell ill and took to his +bed. He realized from the first that he would not get up again, +despite the doctor's encouragement. The countess passed a fortnight in +an armchair by his pillow without undressing. Every time she gave +him his medicine he sobbed and silently kissed her hand. On his last +day, sobbing, he asked her and his absent son to forgive him for +having dissipated their property- that being the chief fault of +which he was conscious. After receiving communion and unction he +quietly died; and next day a throng of acquaintances who came to pay +their last respects to the deceased filled the house rented by the +Rostovs. All these acquaintances, who had so often dined and danced at +his house and had so often laughed at him, now said, with a common +feeling of self-reproach and emotion, as if justifying themselves: +"Well, whatever he may have been he was a most worthy man. You don't +meet such men nowadays.... And which of us has not weaknesses of his +own?" + +It was just when the count's affairs had become so involved that +it was impossible to say what would happen if he lived another year +that he unexpectedly died. + +Nicholas was with the Russian army in Paris when the news of his +father's death reached him. He at once resigned his commission, and +without waiting for it to be accepted took leave of absence and went +to Moscow. The state of the count's affairs became quite obvious a +month after his death, surprising everyone by the immense total of +small debts the existence of which no one had suspected. The debts +amounted to double the value of the property. + +Friends and relations advised Nicholas to decline the inheritance. +But he regarded such a refusal as a slur on his father's memory, which +he held sacred, and therefore would not hear of refusing and +accepted the inheritance together with the obligation to pay the +debts. + +The creditors who had so long been silent, restrained by a vague but +powerful influence exerted on them while he lived by the count's +careless good nature, all proceeded to enforce their claims at once. +As always happens in such cases rivalry sprang up as to which should +get paid first, and those who like Mitenka held promissory notes given +them as presents now became the most exacting of the creditors. +Nicholas was allowed no respite and no peace, and those who had seemed +to pity the old man- the cause of their losses (if they were +losses)- now remorselessly pursued the young heir who had +voluntarily undertaken the debts and was obviously not guilty of +contracting them. + +Not one of the plans Nicholas tried succeeded; the estate was sold +by auction for half its value, and half the debts still remained +unpaid. Nicholas accepted thirty thousand rubles offered him by his +brother-in-law Bezukhov to pay off debts he regarded as genuinely +due for value received. And to avoid being imprisoned for the +remainder, as the creditors threatened, he re-entered the government +service. + +He could not rejoin the army where he would have been made colonel +at the next vacancy, for his mother now clung to him as her one hold +on life; and so despite his reluctant to remain in Moscow among people +who had known him before, and despite his abhorrence of the civil +service, he accepted a post in Moscow in that service, doffed the +uniform of which he was so fond, and moved with his mother and Sonya +to a small house on the Sivtsev Vrazhek. + +Natasha and Pierre were living in Petersburg at the time and had +no clear idea of Nicholas' circumstances. Having borrowed money from +his brother-in-law, Nicholas tried to hide his wretched condition from +him. His position was the more difficult because with his salary of +twelve hundred rubles he had not only to keep himself, his mother, and +Sonya, but had to shield his mother from knowledge of their poverty. +The countess could not conceive of life without the luxurious +conditions she had been used to from childhood and, unable to +realize how hard it was for her son, kept demanding now a carriage +(which they did not keep) to send for a friend, now some expensive +article of food for herself, or wine for her son, or money to buy a +present as a surprise for Natasha or Sonya, or for Nicholas himself. + +Sonya kept house, attended on her aunt, read to her, put up with her +whims and secret ill-will, and helped Nicholas to conceal their +poverty from the old countess. Nicholas felt himself irredeemably +indebted to Sonya for all she was doing for his mother and greatly +admired her patience and devotion, but tried to keep aloof from her. + +He seemed in his heart to reproach her for being too perfect, and +because there was nothing to reproach her with. She had all that +people are valued for, but little that could have made him love her. +He felt that the more he valued her the less he loved her. He had +taken her at her word when she wrote giving him his freedom and now +behaved as if all that had passed between them had been long forgotten +and could never in any case be renewed. + +Nicholas' position became worse and worse. The idea of putting +something aside out of his salary proved a dream. Not only did he +not save anything, but to comply with his mother's demands he even +incurred some small debts. He could see no way out of this +situation. The idea of marrying some rich woman, which was suggested +to him by his female relations, was repugnant to him. The other way +out- his mother's death- never entered his head. He wished for nothing +and hoped for nothing, and deep in his heart experienced a gloomy +and stern satisfaction in an uncomplaining endurance of his +position. He tried to avoid his old acquaintances with their +commiseration and offensive offers of assistance; he avoided all +distraction and recreation, and even at home did nothing but play +cards with his mother, pace silently up and down the room, and smoke +one pipe after another. He seemed carefully to cherish within +himself the gloomy mood which alone enabled him to endure his +position. + +CHAPTER VI + +At the beginning of winter Princess Mary came to Moscow. From +reports current in town she learned how the Rostovs were situated, and +how "the son has sacrificed himself for his mother," as people were +saying. + +"I never expected anything else of him," said Princess Mary to +herself, feeling a joyous sense of her love for him. Remembering her +friendly relations with all the Rostovs which had made her almost a +member of the family, she thought it her duty to go to see them. But +remembering her relations with Nicholas in Voronezh she was shy +about doing so. Making a great effort she did however go to call on +them a few weeks after her arrival in Moscow. + +Nicholas was the first to meet her, as the countess' room could only +be reached through his. But instead of being greeted with pleasure +as she had expected, at his first glance at her his face assumed a +cold, stiff, proud expression she had not seen on it before. He +inquired about her health, led the way to his mother, and having sat +there for five minutes left the room. + +When the princess came out of the countess' room Nicholas met her +again, and with marked solemnity and stiffness accompanied her to +the anteroom. To her remarks about his mother's health he made no +reply. "What's that to you? Leave me in peace," his looks seemed to +say. + +"Why does she come prowling here? What does she want? I can't bear +these ladies and all these civilities!" said he aloud in Sonya's +presence, evidently unable to repress his vexation, after the +princess' carriage had disappeared. + +"Oh, Nicholas, how can you talk like that?" cried Sonya, hardly able +to conceal her delight. "She is so kind and Mamma is so fond of her!" + +Nicholas did not reply and tried to avoid speaking of the princess +any more. But after her visit the old countess spoke of her several +times a day. + +She sang her praises, insisted that her son must call on her, +expressed a wish to see her often, but yet always became ill-humored +when she began to talk about her. + +Nicholas tried to keep silence when his mother spoke of the +princess, but his silence irritated her. + +"She is a very admirable and excellent young woman," said she, +"and you must go and call on her. You would at least be seeing +somebody, and I think it must be dull for you only seeing us." + +"But I don't in the least want to, Mamma." + +"You used to want to, and now you don't. Really I don't understand +you, my dear. One day you are dull, and the next you refuse to see +anyone." + +"But I never said I was dull." + +"Why, you said yourself you don't want even to see her. She is a +very admirable young woman and you always liked her, but now +suddenly you have got some notion or other in your head. You hide +everything from me." + +"Not at all, Mamma." + +"If I were asking you to do something disagreeable now- but I only +ask you to return a call. One would think mere politeness required +it.... Well, I have asked you, and now I won't interfere any more +since you have secrets from your mother." + +"Well, then, I'll go if you wish it." + +"It doesn't matter to me. I only wish it for your sake." + +Nicholas sighed, bit his mustache, and laid out the cards for a +patience, trying to divert his mother's attention to another topic. + +The same conversation was repeated next day and the day after, and +the day after that. + +After her visit to the Rostovs and her unexpectedly chilly reception +by Nicholas, Princess Mary confessed to herself that she had been +right in not wishing to be the first to call. + +"I expected nothing else," she told herself, calling her pride to +her aid. "I have nothing to do with him and I only wanted to see the +old lady, who was always kind to me and to whom I am under many +obligations." + +But she could not pacify herself with these reflections; a feeling +akin to remorse troubled her when she thought of her visit. Though she +had firmly resolved not to call on the Rostovs again and to forget the +whole matter, she felt herself all the time in an awkward position. +And when she asked herself what distressed her, she had to admit +that it was her relation to Rostov. His cold, polite manner did not +express his feeling for her (she knew that) but it concealed +something, and until she could discover what that something was, she +felt that she could not be at ease. + +One day in midwinter when sitting in the schoolroom attending to her +nephew's lessons, she was informed that Rostov had called. With a firm +resolution not to betray herself and not show her agitation, she +sent for Mademoiselle Bourienne and went with her to the drawing room. + +Her first glance at Nicholas' face told her that he had only come to +fulfill the demands of politeness, and she firmly resolved to maintain +the tone in which he addressed her. + +They spoke of the countess' health, of their mutual friends, of +the latest war news, and when the ten minutes required by propriety +had elapsed after which a visitor may rise, Nicholas got up to say +good-by. + +With Mademoiselle Bourienne's help the princess had maintained the +conversation very well, but at the very last moment, just when he +rose, she was so tired of talking of what did not interest her, and +her mind was so full of the question why she alone was granted so +little happiness in life, that in a fit of absent-mindedness she sat +still, her luminous eyes gazing fixedly before her, not noticing +that he had risen. + +Nicholas glanced at her and, wishing to appear not to notice her +abstraction, made some remark to Mademoiselle Bourienne and then again +looked at the princess. She still sat motionless with a look of +suffering on her gentle face. He suddenly felt sorry for her and was +vaguely conscious that he might be the cause of the sadness her face +expressed. He wished to help her and say something pleasant, but could +think of nothing to say. + +"Good-by, Princess!" said he. + +She started, flushed, and sighed deeply. + +"Oh, I beg your pardon," she said as if waking up. "Are you going +already, Count? Well then, good-by! Oh, but the cushion for the +countess!" + +"Wait a moment, I'll fetch it," said Mademoiselle Bourienne, and she +left the room. + +They both sat silent, with an occasional glance at one another. + +"Yes, Princess," said Nicholas at last with a sad smile, "it doesn't +seem long ago since we first met at Bogucharovo, but how much water +has flowed since then! In what distress we all seemed to be then, +yet I would give much to bring back that time... but there's no +bringing it back." + +Princess Mary gazed intently into his eyes with her own luminous +ones as he said this. She seemed to be trying to fathom the hidden +meaning of his words which would explain his feeling for her. + +"Yes, yes," said she, "but you have no reason to regret the past, +Count. As I understand your present life, I think you will always +recall it with satisfaction, because the self-sacrifice that fills +it now..." + +"I cannot accept your praise," he interrupted her hurriedly. "On the +contrary I continually reproach myself.... But this is not at all an +interesting or cheerful subject." + +His face again resumed its former stiff and cold expression. But the +princess had caught a glimpse of the man she had known and loved, +and it was to him that she now spoke. + +"I thought you would allow me to tell you this," she said. "I had +come so near to you... and to all your family that I thought you would +not consider my sympathy misplaced, but I was mistaken," and +suddenly her voice trembled. "I don't know why," she continued, +recovering herself, "but you used to be different, and..." + +"There are a thousand reasons why," laying special emphasis on the +why. "Thank you, Princess," he added softly. "Sometimes it is hard." + +"So that's why! That's why!" a voice whispered in Princess Mary's +soul. "No, it was not only that gay, kind, and frank look, not only +that handsome exterior, that I loved in him. I divined his noble, +resolute, self-sacrificing spirit too," she said to herself. "Yes, +he is poor now and I am rich.... Yes, that's the only reason.... +Yes, were it not for that..." And remembering his former tenderness, +and looking now at his kind, sorrowful face, she suddenly understood +the cause of his coldness. + +"But why, Count, why?" she almost cried, unconsciously moving closer +to him. "Why? Tell me. You must tell me!" + +He was silent. + +"I don't understand your why, Count," she continued, "but it's +hard for me... I confess it. For some reason you wish to deprive me of +our former friendship. And that hurts me." There were tears in her +eyes and in her voice. "I have had so little happiness in life that +every loss is hard for me to bear.... Excuse me, good-by!" and +suddenly she began to cry and was hurrying from the room. + +"Princess, for God's sake!" he exclaimed, trying to stop her. +"Princess!" + +She turned round. For a few seconds they gazed silently into one +another's eyes- and what had seemed impossible and remote suddenly +became possible, inevitable, and very near. + +CHAPTER VII + +In the winter of 1813 Nicholas married Princess Mary and moved to +Bald Hills with his wife, his mother, and Sonya. + +Within four years he had paid off all his remaining debts without +selling any of his wife's property, and having received a small +inheritance on the death of a cousin he paid his debt to Pierre as +well. + +In another three years, by 1820, he had so managed his affairs +that he was able to buy a small estate adjoining Bald Hills and was +negotiating to buy back Otradnoe- that being his pet dream. + +Having started farming from necessity, he soon grew so devoted to it +that it became his favorite and almost his sole occupation. Nicholas +was a plain farmer: he did not like innovations, especially the +English ones then coming into vogue. He laughed at theoretical +treatises on estate management, disliked factories, the raising of +expensive products, and the buying of expensive seed corn, and did not +make a hobby of any particular part of the work on his estate. He +always had before his mind's eye the estate as a whole and not any +particular part of it. The chief thing in his eyes was not the +nitrogen in the soil, nor the oxygen in the air, nor manures, nor +special plows, but that most important agent by which nitrogen, +oxygen, manure, and plow were made effective- the peasant laborer. +When Nicholas first began farming and began to understand its +different branches, it was the serf who especially attracted his +attention. The peasant seemed to him not merely a tool, but also a +judge of farming and an end in himself. At first he watched the serfs, +trying to understand their aims and what they considered good and bad, +and only pretended to direct them and give orders while in reality +learning from them their methods, their manner of speech, and their +judgment of what was good and bad. Only when he had understood the +peasants' tastes and aspirations, had learned to talk their +language, to grasp the hidden meaning of their words, and felt akin to +them did he begin boldly to manage his serfs, that is, to perform +toward them the duties demanded of him. And Nicholas' management +produced very brilliant results. + +Guided by some gift of insight, on taking up the management of the +estates he at once unerringly appointed as bailiff, village elder, and +delegate, the very men the serfs would themselves have chosen had they +had the right to choose, and these posts never changed hands. Before +analyzing the properties of manure, before entering into the debit and +credit (as he ironically called it), he found out how many cattle +the peasants had and increased the number by all possible means. He +kept the peasant families together in the largest groups possible, not +allowing the family groups to divide into separate households. He +was hard alike on the lazy, the depraved, and the weak, and tried to +get them expelled from the commune. + +He was as careful of the sowing and reaping of the peasants' hay and +corn as of his own, and few landowners had their crops sown and +harvested so early and so well, or got so good a return, as did +Nicholas. + +He disliked having anything to do with the domestic serfs- the +"drones" as he called them- and everyone said he spoiled them by his +laxity. When a decision had to be taken regarding a domestic serf, +especially if one had to be punished, he always felt undecided and +consulted everybody in the house; but when it was possible to have a +domestic serf conscripted instead of a land worker he did so without +the least hesitation. He never felt any hesitation in dealing with the +peasants. He knew that his every decision would be approved by them +all with very few exceptions. + +He did not allow himself either to be hard on or punish a man, or to +make things easy for or reward anyone, merely because he felt inclined +to do so. He could not have said by what standard he judged what he +should or should not do, but the standard was quite firm and +definite in his own mind. + +Often, speaking with vexation of some failure or irregularity, he +would say: "What can one do with our Russian peasants?" and imagined +that he could not bear them. + +Yet he loved "our Russian peasants" and their way of life with his +whole soul, and for that very reason had understood and assimilated +the one way and manner of farming which produced good results. + +Countess Mary was jealous of this passion of her husband's and +regretted that she could not share it; but she could not understand +the joys and vexations he derived from that world, to her so remote +and alien. She could not understand why he was so particularly +animated and happy when, after getting up at daybreak and spending the +whole morning in the fields or on the threshing floor, he returned +from the sowing or mowing or reaping to have tea with her. She did not +understand why he spoke with such admiration and delight of the +farming of the thrifty and well-to-do peasant Matthew Ermishin, who +with his family had carted corn all night; or of the fact that his +(Nicholas') sheaves were already stacked before anyone else had his +harvest in. She did not understand why he stepped out from the +window to the veranda and smiled under his mustache and winked so +joyfully, when warm steady rain began to fall on the dry and thirsty +shoots of the young oats, or why when the wind carried away a +threatening cloud during the hay harvest he would return from the +barn, flushed, sunburned, and perspiring, with a smell of wormwood and +gentian in his hair and, gleefully rubbing his hands, would say: +"Well, one more day and my grain and the peasants' will all be under +cover." + +Still less did she understand why he, kindhearted and always ready +to anticipate her wishes, should become almost desperate when she +brought him a petition from some peasant men or women who had appealed +to her to be excused some work; why he, that kind Nicholas, should +obstinately refuse her, angrily asking her not to interfere in what +was not her business. She felt he had a world apart, which he loved +passionately and which had laws she had not fathomed. + +Sometimes when, trying to understand him, she spoke of the good work +he was doing for his serfs, he would be vexed and reply: "Not in the +least; it never entered my head and I wouldn't do that for their good! +That's all poetry and old wives' talk- all that doing good to one's +neighbor! What I want is that our children should not have to go +begging. I must put our affairs in order while I am alive, that's all. +And to do that, order and strictness are essential.... That's all +about it!" said he, clenching his vigorous fist. "And fairness, of +course," he added, "for if the peasant is naked and hungry and has +only one miserable horse, he can do no good either for himself or +for me." + +And all Nicholas did was fruitful- probably just because he +refused to allow himself to think that he was doing good to others for +virtue's sake. His means increased rapidly; serfs from neighboring +estates came to beg him to buy them, and long after his death the +memory of his administration was devoutly preserved among the serfs. +"He was a master... the peasants' affairs first and then his own. Of +course he was not to be trifled with either- in a word, he was a +real master!" + +CHAPTER VIII + +One matter connected with his management sometimes worried Nicholas, +and that was his quick temper together with his old hussar habit of +making free use of his fists. At first he saw nothing reprehensible in +this, but in the second year of his marriage his view of that form +of punishment suddenly changed. + +Once in summer he had sent for the village elder from Bogucharovo, a +man who had succeeded to the post when Dron died and who was accused +of dishonesty and various irregularities. Nicholas went out into the +porch to question him, and immediately after the elder had given a few +replies the sound of cries and blows were heard. On returning to lunch +Nicholas went up to his wife, who sat with her head bent low over +her embroidery frame, and as usual began to tell her what he had +been doing that morning. Among other things he spoke of the +Bogucharovo elder. Countess Mary turned red and then pale, but +continued to sit with head bowed and lips compressed and gave her +husband no reply. + +"Such an insolent scoundrel!" he cried, growing hot again at the +mere recollection of him. "If he had told me he was drunk and did +not see... But what is the matter with you, Mary?" he suddenly asked. + +Countess Mary raised her head and tried to speak, but hastily looked +down again and her lips puckered. + +"Why, whatever is the matter, my dearest?" + +The looks of the plain Countess Mary always improved when she was in +tears. She never cried from pain or vexation, but always from sorrow +or pity, and when she wept her radiant eyes acquired an irresistible +charm. + +The moment Nicholas took her hand she could no longer restrain +herself and began to cry. + +"Nicholas, I saw it... he was to blame, but why do you... Nicholas!" +and she covered her face with her hands. + +Nicholas said nothing. He flushed crimson, left her side, and +paced up and down the room. He understood what she was weeping +about, but could not in his heart at once agree with her that what +he had regarded from childhood as quite an everyday event was wrong. +"Is it just sentimentality, old wives' tales, or is she right?" he +asked himself. Before he had solved that point he glanced again at her +face filled with love and pain, and he suddenly realized that she +was right and that he had long been sinning against himself. + +"Mary," he said softly, going up to her, "it will never happen +again; I give you my word. Never," he repeated in a trembling voice +like a boy asking for forgiveness. + +The tears flowed faster still from the countess' eyes. She took +his hand and kissed it. + +"Nicholas, when when did you break your cameo?" she asked to +change the subject, looking at his finger on which he wore a ring with +a cameo of Laocoon's head. + +"Today- it was the same affair. Oh, Mary, don't remind me of it!" +and again he flushed. "I give you my word of honor it shan't occur +again, and let this always be a reminder to me," and he pointed to the +broken ring. + +After that, when in discussions with his village elders or +stewards the blood rushed to his face and his fists began to clench, +Nicholas would turn the broken ring on his finger and would drop his +eyes before the man who was making him angry. But he did forget +himself once or twice within a twelvemonth, and then he would go and +confess to his wife, and would again promise that this should really +be the very last time. + +"Mary, you must despise me!" he would say. "I deserve it." + +"You should go, go away at once, if you don't feel strong enough +to control yourself," she would reply sadly, trying to comfort her +husband. + +Among the gentry of the province Nicholas was respected but not +liked. He did not concern himself with the interests of his own class, +and consequently some thought him proud and others thought him stupid. +The whole summer, from spring sowing to harvest, he was busy with +the work on his farm. In autumn he gave himself up to hunting with the +same business like seriousness- leaving home for a month, or even two, +with his hunt. In winter he visited his other villages or spent his +time reading. The books he read were chiefly historical, and on +these he spent a certain sum every year. He was collecting, as he +said, a serious library, and he made it a rule to read through all the +books he bought. He would sit in his study with a grave air, +reading- a task he first imposed upon himself as a duty, but which +afterwards became a habit affording him a special kind of pleasure and +a consciousness of being occupied with serious matters. In winter, +except for business excursions, he spent most of his time at home +making himself one with his family and entering into all the details +of his children's relations with their mother. The harmony between him +and his wife grew closer and closer and he daily discovered fresh +spiritual treasures in her. + +From the time of his marriage Sonya had lived in his house. Before +that, Nicholas had told his wife all that had passed between himself +and Sonya, blaming himself and commending her. He had asked Princess +Mary to be gentle and kind to his cousin. She thoroughly realized +the wrong he had done Sonya, felt herself to blame toward her, and +imagined that her wealth had influenced Nicholas' choice. She could +not find fault with Sonya in any way and tried to be fond of her, +but often felt ill-will toward her which she could not overcome. + +Once she had a talk with her friend Natasha about Sonya and about +her own injustice toward her. + +"You know," said Natasha, "you have read the Gospels a great deal- +there is a passage in them that just fits Sonya." + +"What?" asked Countess Mary, surprised. + +"'To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not +shall be taken away.' You remember? She is one that hath not; why, I +don't know. Perhaps she lacks egotism, I don't know, but from her is +taken away, and everything has been taken away. Sometimes I am +dreadfully sorry for her. Formerly I very much wanted Nicholas to +marry her, but I always had a sort of presentiment that it would not +come off. She is a sterile flower, you know- like some strawberry +blossoms. Sometimes I am sorry for her, and sometimes I think she +doesn't feel it as you or I would." + +Though Countess Mary told Natasha that those words in the Gospel +must be understood differently, yet looking at Sonya she agreed with +Natasha's explanation. It really seemed that Sonya did not feel her +position trying, and had grown quite reconciled to her lot as a +sterile flower. She seemed to be fond not so much of individuals as of +the family as a whole. Like a cat, she had attached herself not to the +people but to the home. She waited on the old countess, petted and +spoiled the children, was always ready to render the small services +for which she had a gift, and all this was unconsciously accepted from +her with insufficient gratitude. + +The country seat at Bald Hills had been rebuilt, though not on the +same scale as under the old prince. + +The buildings, begun under straitened circumstances, were more +than simple. The immense house on the old stone foundations was of +wood, plastered only inside. It had bare deal floors and was furnished +with very simple hard sofas, armchairs, tables, and chairs made by +their own serf carpenters out of their own birchwood. The house was +spacious and had rooms for the house serfs and apartments for +visitors. Whole families of the Rostovs' and Bolkonskis' relations +sometimes came to Bald Hills with sixteen horses and dozens of +servants and stayed for months. Besides that, four times a year, on +the name days and birthdays of the hosts, as many as a hundred +visitors would gather there for a day or two. The rest of the year +life pursued its unbroken routine with its ordinary occupations, and +its breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and suppers, provided out of the +produce of the estate. + +CHAPTER IX + +It was the eve of St. Nicholas, the fifth of December, 1820. Natasha +had been staying at her brother's with her husband and children +since early autumn. Pierre had gone to Petersburg on business of his +own for three weeks as he said, but had remained there nearly seven +weeks and was expected back every minute. + +Besides the Bezukhov family, Nicholas' old friend the retired +General Vasili Dmitrich Denisov was staying with the Rostovs this +fifth of December. + +On the sixth, which was his name day when the house would be full of +visitors, Nicholas knew he would have to exchange his Tartar tunic for +a tail coat, and put on narrow boots with pointed toes, and drive to +the new church he had built, and then receive visitors who would +come to congratulate him, offer them refreshments, and talk about +the elections of the nobility; but he considered himself entitled to +spend the eve of that day in his usual way. He examined the +bailiff's accounts of the village in Ryazan which belonged to his +wife's nephew, wrote two business letters, and walked over to the +granaries, cattle yards and stables before dinner. Having taken +precautions against the general drunkenness to be expected on the +morrow because it was a great saint's day, he returned to dinner, +and without having time for a private talk with his wife sat down at +the long table laid for twenty persons, at which the whole household +had assembled. At that table were his mother, his mother's old lady +companion Belova, his wife, their three children with their +governess and tutor, his wife's nephew with his tutor, Sonya, Denisov, +Natasha, her three children, their governess, and old Michael +Ivanovich, the late prince's architect, who was living on in +retirement at Bald Hills. + +Countess Mary sat at the other end of the table. When her husband +took his place she concluded, from the rapid manner in which after +taking up his table napkin he pushed back the tumbler and wineglass +standing before him, that he was out of humor, as was sometimes the +case when he came in to dinner straight from the farm- especially +before the soup. Countess Mary well knew that mood of his, and when +she herself was in a good frame of mind quietly waited till he had had +his soup and then began to talk to him and make him admit that there +was no cause for his ill-humor. But today she quite forgot that and +was hurt that he should be angry with her without any reason, and +she felt unhappy. She asked him where he had been. He replied. She +again inquired whether everything was going well on the farm. Her +unnatural tone made him wince unpleasantly and he replied hastily. + +"Then I'm not mistaken," thought Countess Mary. "Why is he cross +with me?" She concluded from his tone that he was vexed with her and +wished to end the conversation. She knew her remarks sounded +unnatural, but could not refrain from asking some more questions. + +Thanks to Denisov the conversation at table soon became general +and lively, and she did not talk to her husband. When they left the +table and went as usual to thank the old countess, Countess Mary +held out her hand and kissed her husband, and asked him why he was +angry with her. + +"You always have such strange fancies! I didn't even think of +being angry," he replied. + +But the word always seemed to her to imply: "Yes, I am angry but I +won't tell you why." + +Nicholas and his wife lived together so happily that even Sonya +and the old countess, who felt jealous and would have liked them to +disagree, could find nothing to reproach them with; but even they +had their moments of antagonism. Occasionally, and it was always +just after they had been happiest together, they suddenly had a +feeling of estrangement and hostility, which occurred most +frequently during Countess Mary's pregnancies, and this was such a +time. + +"Well, messieurs et mesdames," said Nicholas loudly and with +apparent cheerfulness (it seemed to Countess Mary that he did it on +purpose to vex her), "I have been on my feet since six this morning. +Tomorrow I shall have to suffer, so today I'll go and rest." + +And without a word to his wife he went to the little sitting room +and lay down on the sofa. + +"That's always the way," thought Countess Mary. "He talks to +everyone except me. I see... I see that I am repulsive to him, +especially when I am in this condition." She looked down at her +expanded figure and in the glass at her pale, sallow, emaciated face +in which her eyes now looked larger than ever. + +And everything annoyed her- Denisov's shouting and laughter, +Natasha's talk, and especially a quick glance Sonya gave her. + +Sonya was always the first excuse Countess Mary found for feeling +irritated. + +Having sat awhile with her visitors without understanding anything +of what they were saying, she softly left the room and went to the +nursery. + +The children were playing at "going to Moscow" in a carriage made of +chairs and invited her to go with them. She sat down and played with +them a little, but the thought of her husband and his unreasonable +crossness worried her. She got up and, walking on tiptoe with +difficulty, went to the small sitting room. + +"Perhaps he is not asleep; I'll have an explanation with him," she +said to herself. Little Andrew, her eldest boy, imitating his +mother, followed her on tiptoe. She not notice him. + +"Mary, dear, I think he is asleep- he was so tired," said Sonya, +meeting her in the large sitting room (it seemed to Countess Mary that +she crossed her path everywhere). "Andrew may wake him." + +Countess Mary looked round, saw little Andrew following her, felt +that Sonya was right, and for that very reason flushed and with +evident difficulty refrained from saying something harsh. She made +no reply, but to avoid obeying Sonya beckoned to Andrew to follow +her quietly and went to the door. Sonya went away by another door. +From the room in which Nicholas was sleeping came the sound of his +even breathing, every slightest tone of which was familiar to his +wife. As she listened to it she saw before her his smooth handsome +forehead, his mustache, and his whole face, as she had so often seen +it in the stillness of the night when he slept. Nicholas suddenly +moved and cleared his throat. And at that moment little Andrew shouted +from outside the door: "Papa! Mamma's standing here!" Countess Mary +turned pale with fright and made signs to the boy. He grew silent, and +quiet ensued for a moment, terrible to Countess Mary. She knew how +Nicholas disliked being waked. Then through the door she heard +Nicholas clearing his throat again and stirring, and his voice said +crossly: + +"I can't get a moment's peace.... Mary, is that you? Why did you +bring him here?" + +"I only came in to look and did not notice... forgive me..." + +Nicholas coughed and said no more. Countess Mary moved away from the +door and took the boy back to the nursery. Five minutes later little +black-eyed three-year-old Natasha, her father's pet, having learned +from her brother that Papa was asleep and Mamma was in the sitting +room, ran to her father unobserved by her mother. The dark-eyed little +girl boldly opened the creaking door, went up to the sofa with +energetic steps of her sturdy little legs, and having examined the +position of her father, who was asleep with his back to her, rose on +tiptoe and kissed the hand which lay under his head. Nicholas turned +with a tender smile on his face. + +"Natasha, Natasha!" came Countess Mary's frightened whisper from the +door. "Papa wants to sleep." + +"No, Mamma, he doesn't want to sleep," said little Natasha with +conviction. "He's laughing." + +Nicholas lowered his legs, rose, and took his daughter in his arms. + +"Come in, Mary," he said to his wife. + +She went in and sat down by her husband. + +"I did not notice him following me," she said timidly. "I just +looked in." + +Holding his little girl with one arm, Nicholas glanced at his wife +and, seeing her guilty expression, put his other arm around her and +kissed her hair. + +"May I kiss Mamma?" he asked Natasha. + +Natasha smiled bashfully. + +"Again!" she commanded, pointing with a peremptory gesture to the +spot where Nicholas had placed the kiss. + +"I don't know why you think I am cross," said Nicholas, replying +to the question he knew was in his wife's mind. + +"You have no idea how unhappy, how lonely, I feel when you are +like that. It always seems to me... " + +"Mary, don't talk nonsense. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" he +said gaily. + +"It seems to be that you can't love me, that I am so plain... +always... and now... in this cond..." + +"Oh, how absurd you are! It is not beauty that endears, it's love +that makes us see beauty. It is only Malvinas and women of that kind +who are loved for their beauty. But do I love my wife? I don't love +her, but... I don't know how to put it. Without you, or when something +comes between us like this, I seem lost and can't do anything. Now +do I love my finger? I don't love it, but just try to cut it off! + +"I'm not like that myself, but I understand. So you're not angry +with me?" + +"Awfully angry!" he said, smiling and getting up. And smoothing +his hair he began to pace the room. + +"Do you know, Mary, what I've been thinking?" he began, +immediately thinking aloud in his wife's presence now that they had +made it up. + +He did not ask if she was ready to listen to him. He did not care. A +thought had occurred to him and so it belonged to her also. And he +told her of his intention to persuade Pierre to stay with them till +spring. + +Countess Mary listened till he had finished, made some remark, and +in her turn began thinking aloud. Her thoughts were about the +children. + +"You can see the woman in her already," she said in French, pointing +to little Natasha. "You reproach us women with being illogical. Here +is our logic. I say: 'Papa wants to sleep!' but she says, 'No, he's +laughing.' And she was right," said Countess Mary with a happy smile. + +"Yes, yes." And Nicholas, taking his little daughter in his strong +hand, lifted her high, placed her on his shoulder, held her by the +legs, and paced the room with her. There was an expression of carefree +happiness on the faces of both father and daughter. + +"But you know you may be unfair. You are too fond of this one," +his wife whispered in French. + +"Yes, but what am I to do?... I try not to show..." + +At that moment they heard the sound of the door pulley and footsteps +in the hall and anteroom, as if someone had arrived. + +"Somebody has come." + +"I am sure it is Pierre. I will go and see," said Countess Mary +and left the room. + +In her absence Nicholas allowed himself to give his little +daughter a gallop round the room. Out of breath, he took the +laughing child quickly from his shoulder and pressed her to his heart. +His capers reminded him of dancing, and looking at the child's round +happy little face he thought of what she would be like when he was +an old man, taking her into society and dancing the mazurka with her +as his old father had danced Daniel Cooper with his daughter. + +"It is he, it is he, Nicholas!" said Countess Mary, re-entering +the room a few minutes later. "Now our Natasha has come to life. You +should have seen her ecstasy, and how he caught it for having stayed +away so long. Well, come along now, quick, quick! It's time you two +were parted," she added, looking smilingly at the little girl who +clung to her father. + +Nicholas went out holding the child by the hand. + +Countess Mary remained in the sitting room. + +"I should never, never have believed that one could be so happy," +she whispered to herself. A smile lit up her face but at the same time +she sighed, and her deep eyes expressed a quiet sadness as though +she felt, through her happiness, that there is another sort of +happiness unattainable in this life and of which she involuntarily +thought at that instant. + +CHAPTER X + +Natasha had married in the early spring of 1813, and in 1820 already +had three daughters besides a son for whom she had longed and whom she +was now nursing. She had grown stouter and broader, so that it was +difficult to recognize in this robust, motherly woman the slim, lively +Natasha of former days. Her features were more defined and had a calm, +soft, and serene expression. In her face there was none of the +ever-glowing animation that had formerly burned there and +constituted its charm. Now her face and body were of all that one saw, +and her soul was not visible at all. All that struck the eye was a +strong, handsome, and fertile woman. The old fire very rarely +kindled in her face now. That happened only when, as was the case that +day, her husband returned home, or a sick child was convalescent, or +when she and Countess Mary spoke of Prince Andrew (she never mentioned +him to her husband, who she imagined was jealous of Prince Andrew's +memory), or on the rare occasions when something happened to induce +her to sing, a practice she had quite abandoned since her marriage. At +the rare moments when the old fire did kindle in her handsome, fully +developed body she was even more attractive than in former days. + +Since their marriage Natasha and her husband had lived in Moscow, in +Petersburg, on their estate near Moscow, or with her mother, that is +to say, in Nicholas' house. The young Countess Bezukhova was not often +seen in society, and those who met her there were not pleased with her +and found her neither attractive nor amiable. Not that Natasha liked +solitude- she did not know whether she liked it or not, she even +thought that she did not- but with her pregnancies, her +confinements, the nursing of her children, and sharing every moment of +her husband's life, she had demands on her time which could be +satisfied only by renouncing society. All who had known Natasha before +her marriage wondered at the change in her as at something +extraordinary. Only the old countess with her maternal instinct had +realized that all Natasha's outbursts had been due to her need of +children and a husband- as she herself had once exclaimed at +Otradnoe not so much in fun as in earnest- and her mother was now +surprised at the surprise expressed by those who had never +understood Natasha, and she kept saying that she had always known that +Natasha would make an exemplary wife and mother. + +"Only she lets her love of her husband and children overflow all +bounds," said the countess, "so that it even becomes absurd." + +Natasha did not follow the golden rule advocated by clever folk, +especially by the French, which says that a girl should not let +herself go when she marries, should not neglect her accomplishments, +should be even more careful of her appearance than when she was +unmarried, and should fascinate her husband as much as she did +before he became her husband. Natasha on the contrary had at once +abandoned all her witchery, of which her singing had been an unusually +powerful part. She gave it up just because it was so powerfully +seductive. She took no pains with her manners or with of speech, or +with her toilet, or to show herself to her husband in her most +becoming attitudes, or to avoid inconveniencing him by being too +exacting. She acted in contradiction to all those rules. She felt that +the allurements instinct had formerly taught her to use would now be +merely ridiculous in the eyes of her husband, to whom she had from the +first moment given herself up entirely- that is, with her whole +soul, leaving no corner of it hidden from him. She felt that her unity +with her husband was not maintained by the poetic feelings that had +attracted him to her, but by something else- indefinite but firm as +the bond between her own body and soul. + +To fluff out her curls, put on fashionable dresses, and sing +romantic songs to fascinate her husband would have seemed as strange +as to adorn herself to attract herself. To adorn herself for others +might perhaps have been agreeable- she did not know- but she had no +time at all for it. The chief reason for devoting no time either to +singing, to dress, or to choosing her words was that she really had no +time to spare for these things. + +We know that man has the faculty of becoming completely absorbed +in a subject however trivial it may be, and that there is no subject +so trivial that it will not grow to infinite proportions if one's +entire attention is devoted to it. + +The subject which wholly engrossed Natasha's attention was her +family: that is, her husband whom she had to keep so that he should +belong entirely to her and to the home, and the children whom she +had to bear, bring into the world, nurse, and bring up. + +And the deeper she penetrated, not with her mind only but with her +whole soul, her whole being, into the subject that absorbed her, the +larger did that subject grow and the weaker and more inadequate did +her powers appear, so that she concentrated them wholly on that one +thing and yet was unable to accomplish all that she considered +necessary. + +There were then as now conversations and discussions about women's +rights, the relations of husband and wife and their freedom and +rights, though these themes were not yet termed questions as they +are now; but these topics were not merely uninteresting to Natasha, +she positively did not understand them. + +These questions, then as now, existed only for those who see nothing +in marriage but the pleasure married people get from one another, that +is, only the beginnings of marriage and not its whole significance, +which lies in the family. + +Discussions and questions of that kind, which are like the +question of how to get the greatest gratification from one's dinner, +did not then and do not now exist for those for whom the purpose of +a dinner is the nourishment it affords; and the purpose of marriage is +the family. + +If the purpose of dinner is to nourish the body, a man who eats +two dinners at once may perhaps get more enjoyment but will not attain +his purpose, for his stomach will not digest the two dinners. + +If the purpose of marriage is the family, the person who wishes to +have many wives or husbands may perhaps obtain much pleasure, but in +that case will not have a family. + +If the purpose of food is nourishment and the purpose of marriage is +the family, the whole question resolves itself into not eating more +than one can digest, and not having more wives or husbands than are +needed for the family- that is, one wife or one husband. Natasha +needed a husband. A husband was given her and he gave her a family. +And she not only saw no need of any other or better husband, but as +all the powers of her soul were intent on serving that husband and +family, she could not imagine and saw no interest in imagining how +it would be if things were different. + +Natasha did not care for society in general, but prized the more the +society of her relatives- Countess Mary, and her brother, her +mother, and Sonya. She valued the company of those to whom she could +come striding disheveled from the nursery in her dressing gown, and +with joyful face show a yellow instead of a green stain on baby's +napkin, and from whom she could hear reassuring words to the effect +that baby was much better. + +To such an extent had Natasha let herself go that the way she +dressed and did her hair, her ill-chosen words, and her jealousy- +she was jealous of Sonya, of the governess, and of every woman, pretty +or plain- were habitual subjects of jest to those about her. The +general opinion was that Pierre was under his wife's thumb, which +was really true. From the very first days of their married life +Natasha had announced her demands. Pierre was greatly surprised by his +wife's view, to him a perfectly novel one, that every moment of his +life belonged to her and to the family. His wife's demands +astonished him, but they also flattered him, and he submitted to them. + +Pierre's subjection consisted in the fact that he not only dared not +flirt with, but dared not even speak smilingly to, any other woman; +did not dare dine at the Club as a pastime, did not dare spend money a +whim, and did not dare absent himself for any length of time, except +on business- in which his wife included his intellectual pursuits, +which she did not in the least understand but to which she +attributed great importance. To make up for this, at home Pierre had +the right to regulate his life and that of the whole family exactly as +he chose. At home Natasha placed herself in the position of a slave to +her husband, and the whole household went on tiptoe when he was +occupied- that is, was reading or writing in his study. Pierre had but +to show a partiality for anything to get just what he liked done +always. He had only to express a wish and Natasha would jump up and +run to fulfill it. + +The entire household was governed according to Pierre's supposed +orders, that is, by his wishes which Natasha tried to guess. Their way +of life and place of residence, their acquaintances and ties, +Natasha's occupations, the children's upbringing, were all selected +not merely with regard to Pierre's expressed wishes, but to what +Natasha from the thoughts he expressed in conversation supposed his +wishes to be. And she deduced the essentials of his wishes quite +correctly, and having once arrived at them clung to them +tenaciously. When Pierre himself wanted to change his mind she would +fight him with his own weapons. + +Thus in a time of trouble ever memorable to him after the birth of +their first child who was delicate, when they had to change the wet +nurse three times and Natasha fell ill from despair, Pierre one day +told her of Rousseau's view, with which he quite agreed, that to +have a wet nurse is unnatural and harmful. When her next baby was +born, despite the opposition of her mother, the doctors, and even of +her husband himself- who were all vigorously opposed to her nursing +her baby herself, a thing then unheard of and considered injurious- +she insisted on having her own way, and after that nursed all her +babies herself. + +It very often happened that in a moment of irritation husband and +wife would have a dispute, but long afterwards Pierre to his +surprise and delight would find in his wife's ideas and actions the +very thought against which she had argued, but divested of +everything superfluous that in the excitement of the dispute he had +added when expressing his opinion. + +After seven years of marriage Pierre had the joyous and firm +consciousness that he was not a bad man, and he felt this because he +saw himself reflected in his wife. He felt the good and bad within +himself inextricably mingled and overlapping. But only what was really +good in him was reflected in his wife, all that was not quite good was +rejected. And this was not the result of logical reasoning but was a +direct and mysterious reflection. + +CHAPTER XI + +Two months previously when Pierre was already staying with the +Rostovs he had received a letter from Prince Theodore, asking him to +come to Petersburg to confer on some important questions that were +being discussed there by a society of which Pierre was one of the +principal founders. + +On reading that letter (she always read her husband's letters) +Natasha herself suggested that he should go to Petersburg, though +she would feel his absence very acutely. She attributed immense +importance to all her husband's intellectual and abstract interests +though she did not understand them, and she always dreaded being a +hindrance to him in such matters. To Pierre's timid look of inquiry +after reading the letter she replied by asking him to go, but to fix a +definite date for his return. He was given four weeks' leave of +absence. + +Ever since that leave of absence had expired, more than a +fortnight before, Natasha had been in a constant state of alarm, +depression, and irritability. + +Denisov, now a general on the retired list and much dissatisfied +with the present state of affairs, had arrived during that +fortnight. He looked at Natasha with sorrow and surprise as at a bad +likeness of a person once dear. A dull, dejected look, random replies, +and talk about the nursery was all he saw and heard from his former +enchantress. + +Natasha was sad and irritable all that time, especially when her +mother, her brother, Sonya, or Countess Mary in their efforts to +console her tried to excuse Pierre and suggested reasons for his delay +in returning. + +"It's all nonsense, all rubbish- those discussions which lead to +nothing and all those idiotic societies!" Natasha declared of the very +affairs in the immense importance of which she firmly believed. + +And she would go to the nursery to nurse Petya, her only boy. No one +else could tell her anything so comforting or so reasonable as this +little three-month-old creature when he lay at her breast and she +was conscious of the movement of his lips and the snuffling of his +little nose. That creature said: "You are angry, you are jealous, +you would like to pay him out, you are afraid- but here am I! And I am +he..." and that was unanswerable. It was more than true. + +During that fortnight of anxiety Natasha resorted to the baby for +comfort so often, and fussed over him so much, that she overfed him +and he fell ill. She was terrified by his illness, and yet that was +just what she needed. While attending to him she bore the anxiety +about her husband more easily. + +She was nursing her boy when the sound of Pierre's sleigh was +heard at the front door, and the old nurse- knowing how to please +her mistress- entered the room inaudibly but hurriedly and with a +beaming face. + +"Has he come?" Natasha asked quickly in a whisper, afraid to move +lest she should rouse the dozing baby. + +"He's come, ma'am," whispered the nurse. + +The blood rushed to Natasha's face and her feet involuntarily moved, +but she could not jump up and run out. The baby again opened his +eyes and looked at her. "You're here?" he seemed to be saying, and +again lazily smacked his lips. + +Cautiously withdrawing her breast, Natasha rocked him a little, +handed him to the nurse, and went with rapid steps toward the door. +But at the door she stopped as if her conscience reproached her for +having in her joy left the child too soon, and she glanced round. +The nurse with raised elbows was lifting the infant over the rail of +his cot. + +"Go, ma'am! Don't worry, go!" she whispered, smiling, with the +kind of familiarity that grows up between a nurse and her mistress. + +Natasha ran with light footsteps to the anteroom. + +Denisov, who had come out of the study into the dancing room with +his pipe, now for the first time recognized the old Natasha. A flood +of brilliant, joyful light poured from her transfigured face. + +"He's come!" she exclaimed as she ran past, and Denisov felt that he +too was delighted that Pierre, whom he did not much care for, had +returned. + +On reaching the vestibule Natasha saw a tall figure in a fur coat +unwinding his scarf. "It's he! It's really he! He has come!" she +said to herself, and rushing at him embraced him, pressed his head +to her breast, and then pushed him back and gazed at his ruddy, +happy face, covered with hoarfrost. "Yes, it is he, happy and +contented..." + +Then all at once she remembered the tortures of suspense she had +experienced for the last fortnight, and the joy that had lit up her +face vanished; she frowned and overwhelmed Pierre with a torrent of +reproaches and angry words. + +"Yes, it's all very well for you. You are pleased, you've had a good +time.... But what about me? You might at least have shown +consideration for the children. I am nursing and my milk was +spoiled.... Petya was at death's door. But you were enjoying yourself. +Yes, enjoying..." + +Pierre knew he was not to blame, for he could not have come +sooner; he knew this outburst was unseemly and would blow over in a +minute or two; above all he knew that he himself was bright and happy. +He wanted to smile but dared not even think of doing so. He made a +piteous, frightened face and bent down. + +"I could not, on my honor. But how is Petya?" + +"All right now. Come along! I wonder you're not ashamed! If only you +could see what I was like without you, how I suffered!" + +"You are well?" + +"Come, come!" she said, not letting go of his arm. And they went +to their rooms. + +When Nicholas and his wife came to look for Pierre he was in the +nursery holding his baby son, who was again awake, on his huge right +palm and dandling him. A blissful bright smile was fixed on the baby's +broad face with its toothless open mouth. The storm was long since +over and there was bright, joyous sunshine on Natasha's face as she +gazed tenderly at her husband and child. + +"And have you talked everything well over with Prince Theodore?" she +asked. + +"Yes, capitally." + +"You see, he holds it up." (She meant the baby's head.) "But how +he did frighten me... You've seen the princess? Is it true she's in +love with that..." + +"Yes, just fancy..." + +At that moment Nicholas and Countess Mary came in. Pierre with the +baby on his hand stooped, kissed them, and replied to their inquiries. +But in spite of much that was interesting and had to be discussed, the +baby with the little cap on its unsteady head evidently absorbed all +his attention. + +"How sweet!" said Countess Mary, looking at and playing with the +baby. "Now, Nicholas," she added, turning to her husband, "I can't +understand how it is you don't see the charm of these delicious +marvels." + +"I don't and can't," replied Nicholas, looking coldly at the baby. +"A lump of flesh. Come along, Pierre!" + +"And yet he's such an affectionate father," said Countess Mary, +vindicating her husband, "but only after they are a year old or so..." + +"Now, Pierre nurses them splendidly," said Natasha. "He says his +hand is just made for a baby's seat. Just look!" + +"Only not for this..." Pierre suddenly exclaimed with a laugh, and +shifting the baby he gave him to the nurse. + +CHAPTER XII + +As in every large household, there were at Bald Hills several +perfectly distinct worlds which merged into one harmonious whole, +though each retained its own peculiarities and made concessions to the +others. Every event, joyful or sad, that took place in that house +was important to all these worlds, but each had its own special +reasons to rejoice or grieve over that occurrence independently of the +others. + +For instance, Pierre's return was a joyful and important event and +they all felt it to be so. + +The servants- the most reliable judges of their masters because they +judge not by their conversation or expressions of feeling but by their +acts and way of life- were glad of Pierre's return because they knew +that when he was there Count Nicholas would cease going every day +attend to the estate, and would would be in better spirits and temper, +and also because they would all receive handsome presents for the +holidays. + +The children and their governesses were glad of Pierre's return +because no one else drew them into the social life of the household as +he did. He alone could play on the clavichord that ecossaise (his only +piece) to which, as he said, all possible dances could be danced, +and they felt sure he had brought presents for them all. + +Young Nicholas, now a slim lad of fifteen, delicate and intelligent, +with curly light-brown hair and beautiful eyes, was delighted +because Uncle Pierre as he called him was the object of his +rapturous and passionate affection. No one had instilled into him this +love for Pierre whom he saw only occasionally. Countess Mary who had +brought him up had done her utmost to make him love her husband as she +loved him, and little Nicholas did love his uncle, but loved him +with just a shade of contempt. Pierre, however, he adored. He did +not want to be an hussar or a Knight of St. George like his uncle +Nicholas; he wanted to be learned, wise, and kind like Pierre. In +Pierre's presence his face always shone with pleasure and he flushed +and was breathless when Pierre spoke to him. He did not miss a +single word he uttered, and would afterwards, with Dessalles or by +himself, recall and reconsider the meaning of everything Pierre had +said. Pierre's past life and his unhappiness prior to 1812 (of which +young Nicholas had formed a vague poetic picture from some words he +had overheard), his adventures in Moscow, his captivity, Platon +Karataev (of whom he had heard from Pierre), his love for Natasha +(of whom the lad was also particularly fond), and especially +Pierre's friendship with the father whom Nicholas could not +remember- all this made Pierre in his eyes a hero and a saint. + +From broken remarks about Natasha and his father, from the emotion +with which Pierre spoke of that dead father, and from the careful, +reverent tenderness with which Natasha spoke of him, the boy, who +was only just beginning to guess what love is, derived the notion that +his father had loved Natasha and when dying had left her to his +friend. But the father whom the boy did not remember appeared to him a +divinity who could not be pictured, and of whom he never thought +without a swelling heart and tears of sadness and rapture. So the +boy also was happy that Pierre had arrived. + +The guests welcomed Pierre because he always helped to enliven and +unite any company he was in. + +The grown-up members of the family, not to mention his wife, were +pleased to have back a friend whose presence made life run more +smoothly and peacefully. + +The old ladies were pleased with the presents he brought them, and +especially that Natasha would now be herself again. + +Pierre felt the different outlooks of these various worlds and +made haste to satisfy all their expectations. + +Though the most absent-minded and forgetful of men, Pierre, with the +aid of a list his wife drew up, had now bought everything, not +forgetting his mother- and brother-in-law's commissions, nor the dress +material for a present to Belova, nor toys for his wife's nephews. +In the early days of his marriage it had seemed strange to him that +his wife should expect him not to forget to procure all the things +he undertook to buy, and he had been taken aback by her serious +annoyance when on his first trip he forgot everything. But in time +he grew used to this demand. Knowing that Natasha asked nothing for +herself, and gave him commissions for others only when he himself +had offered to undertake them, he now found an unexpected and +childlike pleasure in this purchase of presents for everyone in the +house, and never forgot anything. If he now incurred Natasha's censure +it was only for buying too many and too expensive things. To her other +defects (as most people thought them, but which to Pierre were +qualities) of untidiness and neglect of herself, she now added +stinginess. + +From the time that Pierre began life as a family man on a footing +entailing heavy expenditure, he had noticed to his surprise that he +spent only half as much as before, and that his affairs- which had +been in disorder of late, chiefly because of his first wife's debts- +had begun to improve. + +Life was cheaper because it was circumscribed: that most expensive +luxury, the kind of life that can be changed at any moment, was no +longer his nor did he wish for it. He felt that his way of life had +now been settled once for all till death and that to change it was not +in his power, and so that way of life proved economical. + +With a merry, smiling face Pierre was sorting his purchases. + +"What do you think of this?" said he, unrolling a piece of stuff +like a shopman. + +Natasha, who was sitting opposite to him with her eldest daughter on +her lap, turned her sparkling eyes swiftly from her husband to the +things he showed her. + +"That's for Belova? Excellent!" She felt the quality of the +material. "It was a ruble an arshin, I suppose?" + +Pierre told her the price. + +"Too dear!" Natasha remarked. "How pleased the children will be +and Mamma too! Only you need not have bought me this," she added, +unable to suppress a smile as she gazed admiringly at a gold comb +set with pearls, of a kind then just coming into fashion. + +"Adele tempted me: she kept on telling me to buy it," returned +Pierre. + +"When am I to wear it?" and Natasha stuck it in her coil of hair. +"When I take little Masha into society? Perhaps they will be +fashionable again by then. Well, let's go now." + +And collecting the presents they went first to the nursery and +then to the old countess' rooms. + +The countess was sitting with her companion Belova, playing +grand-patience as usual, when Pierre and Natasha came into the drawing +room with parcels under their arms. + +The countess was now over sixty, was quite gray, and wore a cap with +a frill that surrounded her face. Her face had shriveled, her upper +lip had sunk in, and her eyes were dim. + +After the deaths of her son and husband in such rapid succession, +she felt herself a being accidentally forgotten in this world and left +without aim or object for her existence. She ate, drank, slept, or +kept awake, but did not live. Life gave her no new impressions. She +wanted nothing from life but tranquillity, and that tranquillity +only death could give her. But until death came she had to go on +living, that is, to use her vital forces. A peculiarity one sees in +very young children and very old people was particularly evident in +her. Her life had no external aims- only a need to exercise her +various functions and inclinations was apparent. She had to eat, +sleep, think, speak, weep, work, give vent to her anger, and so on, +merely because she had a stomach, a brain, muscles, nerves, and a +liver. She did these things not under any external impulse as people +in the full vigor of life do, when behind the purpose for which they +strive that of exercising their functions remains unnoticed. She +talked only because she physically needed to exercise her tongue and +lungs. She cried as a child does, because her nose had to be +cleared, and so on. What for people in their full vigor is an aim +was for her evidently merely a pretext. + +Thus in the morning- especially if she had eaten anything rich the +day before- she felt a need of being angry and would choose as the +handiest pretext Belova's deafness. + +She would begin to say something to her in a low tone from the other +end of the room. + +"It seems a little warmer today, my dear," she would murmur. + +And when Belova replied: "Oh yes, they've come," she would mutter +angrily: "O Lord! How stupid and deaf she is!" + +Another pretext would be her snuff, which would seem too dry or +too damp or not rubbed fine enough. After these fits of irritability +her face would grow yellow, and her maids knew by infallible +symptoms when Belova would again be deaf, the snuff damp, and the +countess' face yellow. Just as she needed to work off her spleen so +she had sometimes to exercise her still-existing faculty of +thinking- and the pretext for that was a game of patience. When she +needed to cry, the deceased count would be the pretext. When she +wanted to be agitated, Nicholas and his health would be the pretext, +and when she felt a need to speak spitefully, the pretext would be +Countess Mary. When her vocal organs needed exercise, which was +usually toward seven o'clock when she had had an after-dinner rest +in a darkened room, the pretext would be the retelling of the same +stories over and over again to the same audience. + +The old lady's condition was understood by the whole household +though no one ever spoke of it, and they all made every possible +effort to satisfy her needs. Only by a rare glance exchanged with a +sad smile between Nicholas, Pierre, Natasha, and Countess Mary was the +common understanding of her condition expressed. + +But those glances expressed something more: they said that she had +played her part in life, that what they now saw was not her whole +self, that we must all become like her, and that they were glad to +yield to her, to restrain themselves for this once precious being +formerly as full of life as themselves, but now so much to be +pitied. "Memento mori," said these glances. + +Only the really heartless, the stupid ones of that household, and +the little children failed to understand this and avoided her. + +CHAPTER XIII + +When Pierre and his wife entered the drawing room the countess was +in one of her customary states in which she needed the mental exertion +of playing patience, and so- though by force of habit she greeted +him with the words she always used when Pierre or her son returned +after an absence: "High time, my dear, high time! We were all weary of +waiting for you. Well, thank God!" and received her presents with +another customary remark: "It's not the gift that's precious, my dear, +but that you give it to me, an old woman..."- yet it was evident +that she was not pleased by Pierre's arrival at that moment when it +diverted her attention from the unfinished game. + +She finished her game of patience and only then examined the +presents. They consisted of a box for cards, of splendid +workmanship, a bright-blue Sevres tea cup with shepherdesses +depicted on it and with a lid, and a gold snuffbox with the count's +portrait on the lid which Pierre had had done by a miniaturist in +Petersburg. The countess had long wished for such a box, but as she +did not want to cry just then she glanced indifferently at the +portrait and gave her attention chiefly to the box for cards. + +"Thank you, my dear, you have cheered me up," said she as she always +did. "But best of all you have brought yourself back- for I never +saw anything like it, you ought to give your wife a scolding! What are +we to do with her? She is like a mad woman when you are away. +Doesn't see anything, doesn't remember anything," she went on, +repeating her usual phrases. "Look, Anna Timofeevna," she added to her +companion, "see what a box for cards my son has brought us!" + +Belova admired the presents and was delighted with her dress +material. + +Though Pierre, Natasha, Nicholas, Countess Mary, and Denisov had +much to talk about that they could not discuss before the old +countess- not that anything was hidden from her, but because she had +dropped so far behindhand in many things that had they begun to +converse in her presence they would have had to answer inopportune +questions and to repeat what they had already told her many times: +that so-and-so was dead and so-and-so was married, which she would +again be unable to remember- yet they sat at tea round the samovar +in the drawing room from habit, and Pierre answered the countess' +questions as to whether Prince Vasili had aged and whether Countess +Mary Alexeevna had sent greetings and still thought of them, and other +matters that interested no one and to which she herself was +indifferent. + +Conversation of this kind, interesting to no one yet unavoidable, +continued all through teatime. All the grown-up members of the +family were assembled near the round tea table at which Sonya presided +beside the samovar. The children with their tutors and governesses had +had tea and their voices were audible from the next room. At tea all +sat in their accustomed places: Nicholas beside the stove at a small +table where his tea was handed to him; Milka, the old gray borzoi +bitch (daughter of the first Milka), with a quite gray face and +large black eyes that seemed more prominent than ever, lay on the +armchair beside him; Denisov, whose curly hair, mustache, and whiskers +had turned half gray, sat beside countess Mary with his general's +tunic unbuttoned; Pierre sat between his wife and the old countess. He +spoke of what he knew might interest the old lady and that she could +understand. He told her of external social events and of the people +who had formed the circle of her contemporaries and had once been a +real, living, and distinct group, but who were now for the most part +scattered about the world and like herself were garnering the last +ears of the harvests they had sown in earlier years. But to the old +countess those contemporaries of hers seemed to be the only serious +and real society. Natasha saw by Pierre's animation that his visit had +been interesting and that he had much to tell them but dare not say it +before the old countess. Denisov, not being a member of the family, +did not understand Pierre's caution and being, as a malcontent, much +interested in what was occurring in Petersburg, kept urging Pierre +to tell them about what had happened in the Semenovsk regiment, then +about Arakcheev, and then about the Bible Society. Once or twice +Pierre was carried away and began to speak of these things, but +Nicholas and Natasha always brought him back to the health of Prince +Ivan and Countess Mary Alexeevna. + +"Well, and all this idiocy- Gossner and Tatawinova?" Denisov +asked. "Is that weally still going on?" + +"Going on?" Pierre exclaimed. "Why more than ever! The Bible Society +is the whole government now!" + +"What is that, mon cher ami?" asked the countess, who had +finished her tea and evidently needed a pretext for being angry +after her meal. "What are you saying about the government? I don't +understand." + +"Well, you know, Maman," Nicholas interposed, knowing how to +translate things into his mother's language, "Prince Alexander +Golitsyn has founded a society and in consequence has great influence, +they say." + +"Arakcheev and Golitsyn," incautiously remarked Pierre, "are now the +whole government! And what a government! They see treason everywhere +and are afraid of everything." + +"Well, and how is Prince Alexander to blame? He is a most +estimable man. I used to meet him at Mary Antonovna's," said the +countess in an offended tone; and still more offended that they all +remained silent, she went on: "Nowadays everyone finds fault. A Gospel +Society! Well, and what harm is there in that?" and she rose +(everybody else got up too) and with a severe expression sailed back +to her table in the sitting room. + +The melancholy silence that followed was broken by the sounds of the +children's voices and laughter from the next room. Evidently some +jolly excitement was going on there. + +"Finished, finished!" little Natasha's gleeful yell rose above +them all. + +Pierre exchanged glances with Countess Mary and Nicholas (Natasha he +never lost sight of) and smiled happily. + +"That's delightful music!" said he. + +"It means that Anna Makarovna has finished her stocking," said +Countess Mary. + +"Oh, I'll go and see," said Pierre, jumping up. "You know," he +added, stopping at the door, "why I'm especially fond of that music? +It is always the first thing that tells me all is well. When I was +driving here today, the nearer I got to the house the more anxious I +grew. As I entered the anteroom I heard Andrusha's peals of laughter +and that meant that all was well." + +"I know! I know that feeling," said Nicholas. "But I mustn't go +there- those stockings are to be a surprise for me." + +Pierre went to the children, and the shouting and laughter grew +still louder. + +"Come, Anna Makarovna," Pierre's voice was heard saying, "come +here into the middle of the room and at the word of command, 'One, +two,' and when I say 'three'... You stand here, and you in my arms- +well now! One, two!..." said Pierre, and a silence followed: +"three!" and a rapturously breathless cry of children's voices +filled the room. "Two, two!" they shouted. + +This meant two stockings, which by a secret process known only to +herself Anna Makarovna used to knit at the same time on the same +needles, and which, when they were ready, she always triumphantly +drew, one out of the other, in the children's presence. + +CHAPTER XIV + +Soon after this the children came in to say good night. They +kissed everyone, the tutors and governesses made their bows, and +they went out. Only young Nicholas and his tutor remained. Dessalles +whispered to the boy to come downstairs. + +"No, Monsieur Dessalles, I will ask my aunt to let me stay," replied +Nicholas Bolkonski also in a whisper. + +"Ma tante, please let me stay," said he, going up to his aunt. + +His face expressed entreaty, agitation, and ecstasy. Countess Mary +glanced at him and turned to Pierre. + +"When you are here he can't tear himself away," she said. + +"I will bring him to you directly, Monsieur Dessalles. Good +night!" said Pierre, giving his hand to the Swiss tutor, and he turned +to young Nicholas with a smile. "You and I haven't seen anything of +one another yet... How like he is growing, Mary!" he added, addressing +Countess Mary. + +"Like my father?" asked the boy, flushing crimson and looking up +at Pierre with bright, ecstatic eyes. + +Pierre nodded, and went on with what he had been saying when the +children had interrupted. Countess Mary sat down doing woolwork; +Natasha did not take her eyes off her husband. Nicholas and Denisov +rose, asked for their pipes, smoked, went to fetch more tea from +Sonya- who sat weary but resolute at the samovar- and questioned +Pierre. The curly-headed, delicate boy sat with shining eyes unnoticed +in a corner, starting every now and then and muttering something to +himself, and evidently experiencing a new and powerful emotion as he +turned his curly head, with his thin neck exposed by his turn-down +collar, toward the place where Pierre sat. + +The conversation turned on the contemporary gossip about those in +power, in which most people see the chief interest of home politics. +Denisov, dissatisfied with the government on account of his own +disappointments in the service, heard with pleasure of the things done +in Petersburg which seemed to him stupid, and made forcible and +sharp comments on what Pierre told them. + +"One used to have to be a German- now one must dance with Tatawinova +and Madame Kwudener, and wead Ecka'tshausen and the bwethwen. Oh, they +should let that fine fellow Bonaparte lose- he'd knock all this +nonsense out of them! Fancy giving the command of the Semenov wegiment +to a fellow like that Schwa'tz!" he cried. + +Nicholas, though free from Denisov's readiness to find fault with +everything, also thought that discussion of the government was a +very serious and weighty matter, and the fact that A had been +appointed Minister of This and B Governor General of That, and that +the Emperor had said so-and-so and this minister so-and-so, seemed +to him very important. And so he thought it necessary to take an +interest in these things and to question Pierre. The questions put +by these two kept the conversation from changing its ordinary +character of gossip about the higher government circles. + +But Natasha, knowing all her husband's ways and ideas, saw that he +had long been wishing but had been unable to divert the conversation +to another channel and express his own deeply felt idea for the sake +of which he had gone to Petersburg to consult with his new friend +Prince Theodore, and she helped him by asking how his affairs with +Prince Theodore had gone. + +"What was it about?" asked Nicholas. + +"Always the same thing," said Pierre, looking round at his +listeners. "Everybody sees that things are going so badly that they +cannot be allowed to go on so and that it is the duty of all decent +men to counteract it as far as they can." + +"What can decent men do?" Nicholas inquired, frowning slightly. +"What can be done?" + +"Why, this..." + +"Come into my study," said Nicholas. + +Natasha, who had long expected to be fetched to nurse her baby, +now heard the nurse calling her and went to the nursery. Countess Mary +followed her. The men went into the study and little Nicholas +Bolkonski followed them unnoticed by his uncle and sat down at the +writing table in a shady corner by the window. + +"Well, what would you do?" asked Denisov. + +"Always some fantastic schemes," said Nicholas. + +"Why this," began Pierre, not sitting down but pacing the room, +sometimes stopping short, gesticulating, and lisping: "the position in +Petersburg is this: the Emperor does not look into anything. He has +abandoned himself altogether to this mysticism" (Pierre could not +tolerate mysticism in anyone now). "He seeks only for peace, and +only these people sans foi ni loi~^ can give it him- people who +recklessly hack at and strangle everything- Magnitski, Arakcheev, +and tutti quanti.... You will agree that if you did not look after +your estates yourself but only wanted a quiet life, the harsher your +steward was the more readily your object might be attained," he said +to Nicholas. + +^~ Without faith or law. + +"Well, what does that lead up to?" said Nicholas. + +"Well, everything is going to ruin! Robbery in the law courts, in +the army nothing but flogging, drilling, and Military Settlements; the +people are tortured, enlightenment is suppressed. All that is young +and honest is crushed! Everyone sees that this cannot go on. +Everything is strained to such a degree that it will certainly break," +said Pierre (as those who examine the actions of any government have +always said since governments began). "I told them just one thing in +Petersburg." + +"Told whom?" + +"Well, you know whom," said Pierre, with a meaning glance from under +his brows. "Prince Theodore and all those. To encourage culture and +philanthropy is all very well of course. The aim is excellent but in +the present circumstances something else is needed." + +At that moment Nicholas noticed the presence of his nephew. His face +darkened and he went up to the boy. + +"Why are you here?" + +"Why? Let him be," said Pierre, taking Nicholas by the arm and +continuing. "That is not enough, I told them. Something else is +needed. When you stand expecting the overstrained string to snap at +any moment, when everyone is expecting the inevitable catastrophe, +as many as possible must join hands as closely as they can to +withstand the general calamity. Everything that is young and strong is +being enticed away and depraved. One is lured by women, another by +honors, a third by ambition or money, and they go over to that camp. +No independent men, such as you or I, are left. What I say is widen +the scope of our society, let the mot d'ordre be not virtue alone +but independence and action as well!" + +Nicholas, who had left his nephew, irritably pushed up an +armchair, sat down in it, and listened to Pierre, coughing +discontentedly and frowning more and more. + +"But action with what aim?" he cried. "And what position will you +adopt toward the government?" + +"Why, the position of assistants. The society need not be secret +if the government allows it. Not merely is it not hostile to +government, but it is a society of true conservatives- a society of +gentlemen in the full meaning of that word. It is only to prevent some +Pugachev or other from killing my children and yours, and Arakcheev +from sending me off to some Military Settlement. We join hands only +for the public welfare and the general safety." + +"Yes, but it's a secret society and therefore a hostile and +harmful one which can only cause harm." + +"Why? Did the Tugendbund which saved Europe" (they did not then +venture to suggest that Russia had saved Europe) "do any harm? The +Tugendbund is an alliance of virtue: it is love, mutual help... it +is what Christ preached on the Cross." + +Natasha, who had come in during the conversation, looked joyfully at +her husband. It was not what he was saying that pleased her- that +did not even interest her, for it seemed to her that was all extremely +simple and that she had known it a long time (it seemed so to her +because she knew that it sprang from Pierre's whole soul), but it +was his animated and enthusiastic appearance that made her glad. + +The boy with the thin neck stretching out from the turn-down collar- +whom everyone had forgotten- gazed at Pierre with even greater and +more rapturous joy. Every word of Pierre's burned into his heart, +and with a nervous movement of his fingers he unconsciously broke +the sealing wax and quill pens his hands came upon on his uncle's +table. + +"It is not at all what you suppose; but that is what the German +Tugendbund was, and what I am proposing." + +"No, my fwiend! The Tugendbund is all vewy well for the sausage +eaters, but I don't understand it and can't even pwonounce it," +interposed Denisov in a loud and resolute voice. "I agwee that +evewything here is wotten and howwible, but the Tugendbund I don't +understand. If we're not satisfied, let us have a bunt of our own. +That's all wight. Je suis vot'e homme!"~^ + +^~ "I'm your man." + +Pierre smiled, Natasha began to laugh, but Nicholas knitted his +brows still more and began proving to Pierre that there was no +prospect of any great change and that all the danger he spoke of +existed only in his imagination. Pierre maintained the contrary, and +as his mental faculties were greater and more resourceful, Nicholas +felt himself cornered. This made him still angrier, for he was fully +convinced, not by reasoning but by something within him stronger +than reason, of the justice of his opinion. + +"I will tell you this," he said, rising and trying with nervously +twitching fingers to prop up his pipe in a corner, but finally +abandoning the attempt. "I can't prove it to you. You say that +everything here is rotten and that an overthrow is coming: I don't see +it. But you also say that our oath of allegiance is a conditional +matter, and to that I reply: 'You are my best friend, as you know, but +if you formed a secret society and began working against the +government- be it what it may- I know it is my duty to obey the +government. And if Arakcheev ordered me to lead a squadron against you +and cut you down, I should not hesitate an instant, but should do it.' +And you may argue about that as you like!" + +An awkward silence followed these words. Natasha was the first to +speak, defending her husband and attacking her brother. Her defense +was weak and inapt but she attained her object. The conversation was +resumed, and no longer in the unpleasantly hostile tone of Nicholas' +last remark. + +When they all got up to go in to supper, little Nicholas Bolkonski +went up to Pierre, pale and with shining, radiant eyes. + +"Uncle Pierre, you... no... If Papa were alive... would he agree +with you?" he asked. + +And Pierre suddenly realized what a special, independent, complex, +and powerful process of thought and feeling must have been going on in +this boy during that conversation, and remembering all he had said +he regretted that the lad should have heard him. He had, however, to +give him an answer. + +"Yes, I think so," he said reluctantly, and left the study. + +The lad looked down and seemed now for the first time to notice what +he had done to the things on the table. He flushed and went up to +Nicholas. + +"Uncle, forgive me, I did that... unintentionally," he said, +pointing to the broken sealing wax and pens. + +Nicholas started angrily. + +"All right, all right," he said, throwing the bits under the table. + +And evidently suppressing his vexation with difficulty, he turned +away from the boy. + +"You ought not to have been here at all," he said. + +CHAPTER XV + +The conversation at supper was not about politics or societies, +but turned on the subject Nicholas liked best- recollections of +1812. Denisov started these and Pierre was particularly agreeable +and amusing about them. The family separated on the most friendly +terms. + +After supper Nicholas, having undressed in his study and given +instructions to the steward who had been waiting for him, went to +the bedroom in his dressing gown, where he found his wife still at her +table, writing. + +"What are you writing, Mary?" Nicholas asked. + +Countess Mary blushed. She was afraid that what she was writing +would not be understood or approved by her husband. + +She had wanted to conceal what she was writing from him, but at +the same time was glad he had surprised her at it and that she would +now have to tell him. + +"A diary, Nicholas," she replied, handing him a blue exercise book +filled with her firm, bold writing. + +"A diary?" Nicholas repeated with a shade of irony, and he took up +the book. + +It was in French. + +December 4. Today when Andrusha (her eldest boy) woke up he did +not wish to dress and Mademoiselle Louise sent for me. He was +naughty and obstinate. I tried threats, but he only grew angrier. Then +I took the matter in hand: I left him alone and began with nurse's +help to get the other children up, telling him that I did not love +him. For a long time he was silent, as if astonished, then he jumped +out of bed, ran to me in his shirt, and sobbed so that I could not +calm him for a long time. It was plain that what troubled him most was +that he had grieved me. Afterwards in the evening when I gave him +his ticket, he again began crying piteously and kissing me. One can do +anything with him by tenderness. + +"What is a 'ticket'?" Nicholas inquired. + +"I have begun giving the elder ones marks every evening, showing how +they have behaved." + +Nicholas looked into the radiant eyes that were gazing at him, and +continued to turn over the pages and read. In the diary was set down +everything in the children's lives that seemed noteworthy to their +mother as showing their characters or suggesting general reflections +on educational methods. They were for the most part quite +insignificant trifles, but did not seem so to the mother or to the +father either, now that he read this diary about his children for +the first time. + +Under the date "5" was entered: + +Mitya was naughty at table. Papa said he was to have no pudding. +He had none, but looked so unhappily and greedily at the others +while they were eating! I think that punishment by depriving +children of sweets only develops their greediness. Must tell +Nicholas this. + +Nicholas put down the book and looked at his wife. The radiant +eyes gazed at him questioningly: would he approve or disapprove of her +diary? There could be no doubt not only of his approval but also of +his admiration for his wife. + +Perhaps it need not be done so pedantically, thought Nicholas, or +even done at all, but this untiring, continual spiritual effort of +which the sole aim was the children's moral welfare delighted him. Had +Nicholas been able to analyze his feelings he would have found that +his steady, tender, and proud love of his wife rested on his feeling +of wonder at her spirituality and at the lofty moral world, almost +beyond his reach, in which she had her being. + +He was proud of her intelligence and goodness, recognized his own +insignificance beside her in the spiritual world, and rejoiced all the +more that she with such a soul not only belonged to him but was part +of himself. + +"I quite, quite approve, my dearest!" said he with a significant +look, and after a short pause he added: "And I behaved badly today. +You weren't in the study. We began disputing- Pierre and I- and I lost +my temper. But he is impossible: such a child! I don't know what would +become of him if Natasha didn't keep him in hand.... Have you any idea +why he went to Petersburg? They have formed..." + +"Yes, I know," said Countess Mary. "Natasha told me." + +"Well, then, you know," Nicholas went on, growing hot at the mere +recollection of their discussion, "he wanted to convince me that it is +every honest man's duty to go against the government, and that the +oath of allegiance and duty... I am sorry you weren't there. They +all fell on me- Denisov and Natasha... Natasha is absurd. How she +rules over him! And yet there need only be a discussion and she has no +words of her own but only repeats his sayings..." added Nicholas, +yielding to that irresistible inclination which tempts us to judge +those nearest and dearest to us. He forgot that what he was saying +about Natasha could have been applied word for word to himself in +relation to his wife. + +"Yes, I have noticed that," said Countess Mary. + +"When I told him that duty and the oath were above everything, he +started proving goodness knows what! A pity you were not there- what +would you have said?" + +"As I see it you were quite right, and I told Natasha so. Pierre +says everybody is suffering, tortured, and being corrupted, and that +it is our duty to help our neighbor. Of course he is right there," +said Countess Mary, "but he forgets that we have other duties nearer +to us, duties indicated to us by God Himself, and that though we might +expose ourselves to risks we must not risk our children." + +"Yes, that's it! That's just what I said to him," put in Nicholas, +who fancied he really had said it. "But they insisted on their own +view: love of one's neighbor and Christianity- and all this in the +presence of young Nicholas, who had gone into my study and broke all +my things." + +"Ah, Nicholas, do you know I am often troubled about little +Nicholas," said Countess Mary. "He is such an exceptional boy. I am +afraid I neglect him in favor of my own: we all have children and +relations while he has no one. He is constantly alone with his +thoughts." + +"Well, I don't think you need reproach yourself on his account. +All that the fondest mother could do for her son you have done and are +doing for him, and of course I am glad of it. He is a fine lad, a fine +lad! This evening he listened to Pierre in a sort of trance, and +fancy- as we were going in to supper I looked and he had broken +everything on my table to bits, and he told me of it himself at +once! I never knew him to tell an untruth. A fine lad, a fine lad!" +repeated Nicholas, who at heart was not fond of Nicholas Bolkonski but +was always anxious to recognize that he was a fine lad. + +"Still, I am not the same as his own mother," said Countess Mary. "I +feel I am not the same and it troubles me. A wonderful boy, but I am +dreadfully afraid for him. It would be good for him to have +companions." + +"Well it won't be for long. Next summer I'll take him to +Petersburg," said Nicholas. "Yes, Pierre always was a dreamer and +always will be," he continued, returning to the talk in the study +which had evidently disturbed him. "Well, what business is it of +mine what goes on there- whether Arakcheev is bad, and all that? +What business was it of mine when I married and was so deep in debt +that I was threatened with prison, and had a mother who could not +see or understand it? And then there are you and the children and +our affairs. Is it for my own pleasure that I am at the farm or in the +office from morning to night? No, but I know I must work to comfort my +mother, to repay you, and not to leave the children such beggars as +I was." + +Countess Mary wanted to tell him that man does not live by bread +alone and that he attached too much importance to these matters. But +she knew she must not say this and that it would be useless to do +so. She only took his hand and kissed it. He took this as a sign of +approval and a confirmation of his thoughts, and after a few +minutes' reflection continued to think aloud. + +"You know, Mary, today Elias Mitrofanych" (this was his overseer) +"came back from the Tambov estate and told me they are already +offering eighty thousand rubles for the forest." + +And with an eager face Nicholas began to speak of the possibility of +repurchasing Otradnoe before long, and added: "Another ten years of +life and I shall leave the children... in an excellent position." + +Countess Mary listened to her husband and understood all that he +told her. She knew that when he thought aloud in this way he would +sometimes ask her what he had been saying, and be vexed if he +noticed that she had been thinking about something else. But she had +to force herself to attend, for what he was saying did not interest +her at all. She looked at him and did not think, but felt, about +something different. She felt a submissive tender love for this man +who would never understand all that she understood, and this seemed to +make her love for him still stronger and added a touch of passionate +tenderness. Besides this feeling which absorbed her altogether and +hindered her from following the details of her husband's plans, +thoughts that had no connection with what he was saying flitted +through her mind. She thought of her nephew. Her husband's account +of the boy's agitation while Pierre was speaking struck her +forcibly, and various traits of his gentle, sensitive character +recurred to her mind; and while thinking of her nephew she thought +also of her own children. She did not compare them with him, but +compared her feeling for them with her feeling for him, and felt +with regret that there was something lacking in her feeling for +young Nicholas. + +Sometimes it seemed to her that this difference arose from the +difference in their ages, but she felt herself to blame toward him and +promised in her heart to do better and to accomplish the impossible- +in this life to love her husband, her children, little Nicholas, and +all her neighbors, as Christ loved mankind. Countess Mary's soul +always strove toward the infinite, the eternal, and the absolute, +and could therefore never be at peace. A stern expression of the +lofty, secret suffering of a soul burdened by the body appeared on her +face. Nicholas gazed at her. "O God! What will become of us if she +dies, as I always fear when her face is like that?" thought he, and +placing himself before the icon he began to say his evening prayers. + +CHAPTER XVI + +Natasha and Pierre, left alone, also began to talk as only a husband +and wife can talk, that is, with extraordinary clearness and rapidity, +understanding and expressing each other's thoughts in ways contrary to +all rules of logic, without premises, deductions, or conclusions, +and in a quite peculiar way. Natasha was so used to this kind of +talk with her husband that for her it was the surest sign of something +being wrong between them if Pierre followed a line of logical +reasoning. When he began proving anything, or talking +argumentatively and calmly and she, led on by his example, began to do +the same, she knew that they were on the verge of a quarrel. + +From the moment they were alone and Natasha came up to him with +wide-open happy eyes, and quickly seizing his head pressed it to her +bosom, saying: "Now you are all mine, mine! You won't escape!"- from +that moment this conversation began, contrary to all the laws of logic +and contrary to them because quite different subjects were talked +about at one and the same time. This simultaneous discussion of many +topics did not prevent a clear understanding but on the contrary was +the surest sign that they fully understood one another. + +Just as in a dream when all is uncertain, unreasoning, and +contradictory, except the feeling that guides the dream, so in this +intercourse contrary to all laws of reason, the words themselves +were not consecutive and clear but only the feeling that prompted +them. + +Natasha spoke to Pierre about her brother's life and doings, of +how she had suffered and lacked life during his own absence, and of +how she was fonder than ever of Mary, and how Mary was in every way +better than herself. In saying this Natasha was sincere in +acknowledging Mary's superiority, but at the same time by saying it +she made a demand on Pierre that he should, all the same, prefer her +to Mary and to all other women, and that now, especially after +having seen many women in Petersburg, he should tell her so afresh. + +Pierre, answering Natasha's words, told her how intolerable it had +been for him to meet ladies at dinners and balls in Petersburg. + +"I have quite lost the knack of talking to ladies," he said. "It was +simply dull. Besides, I was very busy." + +Natasha looked intently at him and went on: + +"Mary is so splendid," she said. "How she understands children! It +is as if she saw straight into their souls. Yesterday, for instance, +Mitya was naughty..." + +"How like his father he is," Pierre interjected. + +Natasha knew why he mentioned Mitya's likeness to Nicholas: the +recollection of his dispute with his brother-in-law was unpleasant and +he wanted to know what Natasha thought of it. + +"Nicholas has the weakness of never agreeing with anything not +generally accepted. But I understand that you value what opens up a +fresh line," said she, repeating words Pierre had once uttered. + +"No, the chief point is that to Nicholas ideas and discussions are +an amusement- almost a pastime," said Pierre. "For instance, he is +collecting a library and has made it a rule not to buy a new book till +he has read what he had already bought- Sismondi and Rousseau and +Montesquieu," he added with a smile. "You know how much I..." he began +to soften down what he had said; but Natasha interrupted him to show +that this was unnecessary. + +"So you say ideas are an amusement to him...." + +"Yes, and for me nothing else is serious. All the time in Petersburg +I saw everyone as in a dream. When I am taken up by a thought, all +else is mere amusement." + +"Ah, I'm so sorry I wasn't there when you met the children," said +Natasha. "Which was most delighted? Lisa, I'm sure." + +"Yes," Pierre replied, and went on with what was in his mind. +"Nicholas says we ought not to think. But I can't help it. Besides, +when I was in Petersburg I felt (I can this to you) that the whole +affair would go to pieces without me- everyone was pulling his own +way. But I succeeded in uniting them all; and then my idea is so clear +and simple. You see, I don't say that we ought to oppose this and +that. We may be mistaken. What I say is: 'Join hands, you who love the +right, and let there be but one banner- that of active virtue.' Prince +Sergey is a fine fellow and clever." + +Natasha would have had no doubt as to the greatness of Pierre's +idea, but one thing disconcerted her. "Can a man so important and +necessary to society be also my husband? How did this happen?" She +wished to express this doubt to him. "Now who could decide whether +he is really cleverer than all the others?" she asked herself, and +passed in review all those whom Pierre most respected. Judging by what +he had said there was no one he had respected so highly as Platon +Karataev. + +"Do you know what I am thinking about?" she asked. "About Platon +Karataev. Would he have approved of you now, do you think?" + +Pierre was not at all surprised at this question. He understood +his wife's line of thought. + +"Platon Karataev?" he repeated, and pondered, evidently sincerely +trying to imagine Karataev's opinion on the subject. "He would not +have understood... yet perhaps he would." + +"I love you awfully!" Natasha suddenly said. "Awfully, awfully!" + +"No, he would not have approved," said Pierre, after reflection. +"What he would have approved of is our family life. He was always so +anxious to find seemliness, happiness, and peace in everything, and +I should have been proud to let him see us. There now- you talk of +my absence, but you wouldn't believe what a special feeling I have for +you after a separation...." + +"Yes, I should think..." Natasha began. + +"No, it's not that. I never leave off loving you. And one couldn't +love more, but this is something special.... Yes, of course-" he did +not finish because their eyes meeting said the rest. + +"What nonsense it is," Natasha suddenly exclaimed, "about +honeymoons, and that the greatest happiness is at first! On the +contrary, now is the best of all. If only you did not go away! Do +you remember how we quarreled? And it was always my fault. Always +mine. And what we quarreled about- I don't even remember!" + +"Always about the same thing," said Pierre with a smile. "Jealo..." + +"Don't say it! I can't bear it!" Natasha cried, and her eyes +glittered coldly and vindictively. "Did you see her?" she added, after +a pause. + +"No, and if I had I shouldn't have recognized her." + +They were silent for a while. + +"Oh, do you know? While you were talking in the study I was +looking at you," Natasha began, evidently anxious to disperse the +cloud that had come over them. "You are as like him as two peas- +like the boy." (She meant her little son.) "Oh, it's time to go to +him.... The milk's come.... But I'm sorry to leave you." + +They were silent for a few seconds. Then suddenly turning to one +another at the same time they both began to speak. Pierre began with +self-satisfaction and enthusiasm, Natasha with a quiet, happy smile. +Having interrupted one another they both stopped to let the other +continue. + +"No. What did you say? Go on, go on." + +"No, you go on, I was talking nonsense," said Natasha. + +Pierre finished what he had begun. It was the sequel to his +complacent reflections on his success in Petersburg. At that moment it +seemed to him that he was chosen to give a new direction to the +whole of Russian society and to the whole world. + +"I only wished to say that ideas that have great results are +always simple ones. My whole idea is that if vicious people are united +and constitute a power, then honest folk must do the same. Now +that's simple enough." + +"Yes." + +"And what were you going to say?" + +"I? Only nonsense." + +"But all the same?" + +"Oh nothing, only a trifle," said Natasha, smilingly still more +brightly. "I only wanted to tell you about Petya: today nurse was +coming to take him from me, and he laughed, shut his eyes, and clung +to me. I'm sure he thought he was hiding. Awfully sweet! There, now +he's crying. Well, good-by!" and she left the room. + +Meanwhile downstairs in young Nicholas Bolkonski's bedroom a +little lamp was burning as usual. (The boy was afraid of the dark +and they could not cure him of it.) Dessalles slept propped up on four +pillows and his Roman nose emitted sounds of rhythmic snoring. +Little Nicholas, who had just waked up in a cold perspiration, sat +up in bed and gazed before him with wide-open eyes. He had awaked from +a terrible dream. He had dreamed that he and Uncle Pierre, wearing +helmets such as were depicted in his Plutarch, were leading a huge +army. The army was made up of white slanting lines that filled the air +like the cobwebs that float about in autumn and which Dessalles called +les fils de la Vierge. In front was Glory, which was similar to +those threads but rather thicker. He and Pierre were borne along +lightly and joyously, nearer and nearer to their goal. Suddenly the +threads that moved them began to slacken and become entangled and it +grew difficult to move. And Uncle Nicholas stood before them in a +stern and threatening attitude. + +"Have you done this?" he said, pointing to some broken sealing wax +and pens. "I loved you, but I have orders from Arakcheev and will kill +the first of you who moves forward." Little Nicholas turned to look at +Pierre but Pierre was no longer there. In his place was his father- +Prince Andrew- and his father had neither shape nor form, but he +existed, and when little Nicholas perceived him he grew faint with +love: he felt himself powerless, limp, and formless. His father +caressed and pitied him. But Uncle Nicholas came nearer and nearer +to them. Terror seized young Nicholas and he awoke. + +"My father!" he thought. (Though there were two good portraits of +Prince Andrew in the house, Nicholas never imagined him in human +form.) "My father has been with me and caressed me. He approved of +me and of Uncle Pierre. Whatever he may tell me, I will do it. +Mucius Scaevola burned his hand. Why should not the same sort of thing +happen to me? I know they want me to learn. And I will learn. But +someday I shall have finished learning, and then I will do +something. I only pray God that something may happen to me such as +happened to Plutarch's men, and I will act as they did. I will do +better. Everyone shall know me, love me, and be delighted with me!" +And suddenly his bosom heaved with sobs and he began to cry. + +"Are you ill?" he heard Dessalles' voice asking. + +"No," answered Nicholas, and lay back on his pillow. + +"He is good and kind and I am fond of him!" he thought of Dessalles. +"But Uncle Pierre! Oh, what a wonderful man he is! And my father? +Oh, Father, Father! Yes, I will do something with which even he +would be satisfied...." + +SECOND EPILOGUE + +CHAPTER I + +History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put +into words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a +single nation, appears impossible. + +The ancient historians all employed one and the same method to +describe and seize the apparently elusive- the life of a people. +They described the activity of individuals who ruled the people, and +regarded the activity of those men as representing the activity of the +whole nation. + +The question: how did individuals make nations act as they wished +and by what was the will of these individuals themselves guided? the +ancients met by recognizing a divinity which subjected the nations +to the will of a chosen man, and guided the will of that chosen man so +as to accomplish ends that were predestined. + +For the ancients these questions were solved by a belief in the +direct participation of the Deity in human affairs. + +Modern history, in theory, rejects both these principles. + +It would seem that having rejected the belief of the ancients in +man's subjection to the Deity and in a predetermined aim toward +which nations are led, modern history should study not the +manifestations of power but the causes that produce it. But modern +history has not done this. Having in theory rejected the view held +by the ancients, it still follows them in practice. + +Instead of men endowed with divine authority and directly guided +by the will of God, modern history has given us either heroes +endowed with extraordinary, superhuman capacities, or simply men of +very various kinds, from monarchs to journalists, who lead the masses. +Instead of the former divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or +Roman nations, which ancient historians regarded as representing the +progress of humanity, modern history has postulated its own aims- +the welfare of the French, German, or English people, or, in its +highest abstraction, the welfare and civilization of humanity in +general, by which is usually meant that of the peoples occupying a +small northwesterly portion of a large continent. + +Modern history has rejected the beliefs of the ancients without +replacing them by a new conception, and the logic of the situation has +obliged the historians, after they had apparently rejected the +divine authority of the kings and the "fate" of the ancients, to reach +the same conclusion by another road, that is, to recognize (1) nations +guided by individual men, and (2) the existence of a known aim to +which these nations and humanity at large are tending. + +At the basis of the works of all the modern historians from Gibbon +to Buckle, despite their seeming disagreements and the apparent +novelty of their outlooks, lie those two old, unavoidable assumptions. + +In the first place the historian describes the activity of +individuals who in his opinion have directed humanity (one historian +considers only monarchs, generals, and ministers as being such men, +while another includes also orators, learned men, reformers, +philosophers, and poets). Secondly, it is assumed that the goal toward +which humanity is being led is known to the historians: to one of them +this goal is the greatness of the Roman, Spanish, or French realm; +to another it is liberty, equality, and a certain kind of civilization +of a small corner of the world called Europe. + +In 1789 a ferment arises in Paris; it grows, spreads, and is +expressed by a movement of peoples from west to east. Several times it +moves eastward and collides with a countermovement from the east +westward. In 1812 it reaches its extreme limit, Moscow, and then, with +remarkable symmetry, a countermovement occurs from east to west, +attracting to it, as the first movement had done, the nations of +middle Europe. The counter movement reaches the starting point of +the first movement in the west- Paris- and subsides. + +During that twenty-year period an immense number of fields were left +untilled, houses were burned, trade changed its direction, millions of +men migrated, were impoverished, or were enriched, and millions of +Christian men professing the law of love of their fellows slew one +another. + +What does all this mean? Why did it happen? What made those people +burn houses and slay their fellow men? What were the causes of these +events? What force made men act so? These are the instinctive, +plain, and most legitimate questions humanity asks itself when it +encounters the monuments and tradition of that period. + +For a reply to these questions the common sense of mankind turns +to the science of history, whose aim is to enable nations and humanity +to know themselves. + +If history had retained the conception of the ancients it would have +said that God, to reward or punish his people, gave Napoleon power and +directed his will to the fulfillment of the divine ends, and that +reply, would have been clear and complete. One might believe or +disbelieve in the divine significance of Napoleon, but for anyone +believing in it there would have been nothing unintelligible in the +history of that period, nor would there have been any contradictions. + +But modern history cannot give that reply. Science does not admit +the conception of the ancients as to the direct participation of the +Deity in human affairs, and therefore history ought to give other +answers. + +Modern history replying to these questions says: you want to know +what this movement means, what caused it, and what force produced +these events? Then listen: + +"Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man; he had such +and such mistresses and such and such ministers and he ruled France +badly. His descendants were weak men and they too ruled France +badly. And they had such and such favorites and such and such +mistresses. Moreover, certain men wrote some books at that time. At +the end of the eighteenth century there were a couple of dozen men +in Paris who began to talk about all men being free and equal. This +caused people all over France to begin to slash at and drown one +another. They killed the king and many other people. At that time +there was in France a man of genius- Napoleon. He conquered +everybody everywhere- that is, he killed many people because he was +a great genius. And for some reason he went to kill Africans, and +killed them so well and was so cunning and wise that when he +returned to France he ordered everybody to obey him, and they all +obeyed him. Having become an Emperor he again went out to kill +people in Italy, Austria, and Prussia. And there too he killed a great +many. In Russia there was an Emperor, Alexander, who decided to +restore order in Europe and therefore fought against Napoleon. In 1807 +he suddenly made friends with him, but in 1811 they again quarreled +and again began killing many people. Napoleon led six hundred thousand +men into Russia and captured Moscow; then he suddenly ran away from +Moscow, and the Emperor Alexander, helped by the advice of Stein and +others, united Europe to arm against the disturber of its peace. All +Napoleon's allies suddenly became his enemies and their forces +advanced against the fresh forces he raised. The Allies defeated +Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to abdicate, and sent him +to the island of Elba, not depriving him of the title of Emperor and +showing him every respect, though five years before and one year later +they all regarded him as an outlaw and a brigand. Then Louis XVIII, +who till then had been the laughingstock both of the French and the +Allies, began to reign. And Napoleon, shedding tears before his Old +Guards, renounced the throne and went into exile. Then the skillful +statesmen and diplomatists (especially Talleyrand, who managed to +sit down in a particular chair before anyone else and thereby extended +the frontiers of France) talked in Vienna and by these conversations +made the nations happy or unhappy. Suddenly the diplomatists and +monarchs nearly quarreled and were on the point of again ordering +their armies to kill one another, but just then Napoleon arrived in +France with a battalion, and the French, who had been hating him, +immediately all submitted to him. But the Allied monarchs were angry +at this and went to fight the French once more. And they defeated +the genius Napoleon and, suddenly recognizing him as a brigand, sent +him to the island of St. Helena. And the exile, separated from the +beloved France so dear to his heart, died a lingering death on that +rock and bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. But in Europe a +reaction occurred and the sovereigns once again all began to oppress +their subjects." + +It would be a mistake to think that this is ironic- a caricature +of the historical accounts. On the contrary it is a very mild +expression of the contradictory replies, not meeting the questions, +which all the historians give, from the compilers of memoirs and the +histories of separate states to the writers of general histories and +the new histories of the culture of that period. + +The strangeness and absurdity of these replies arise from the fact +that modern history, like a deaf man, answers questions no one has +asked. + +If the purpose of history be to give a description of the movement +of humanity and of the peoples, the first question- in the absence +of a reply to which all the rest will be incomprehensible- is: what is +the power that moves peoples? To this, modern history laboriously +replies either that Napoleon was a great genius, or that Louis XIV was +very proud, or that certain writers wrote certain books. + +All that may be so and mankind is ready to agree with it, but it +is not what was asked. All that would be interesting if we +recognized a divine power based on itself and always consistently +directing its nations through Napoleons, Louis-es, and writers; but we +do not acknowledge such a power, and therefore before speaking about +Napoleons, Louis-es, and authors, we ought to be shown the +connection existing between these men and the movement of the nations. + +If instead of a divine power some other force has appeared, it +should be explained in what this new force consists, for the whole +interest of history lies precisely in that force. + +History seems to assume that this force is self-evident and known to +everyone. But in spite of every desire to regard it as known, anyone +reading many historical works cannot help doubting whether this new +force, so variously understood by the historians themselves, is really +quite well known to everybody. + +CHAPTER II + +What force moves the nations? + +Biographical historians and historians of separate nations +understand this force as a power inherent in heroes and rulers. In +their narration events occur solely by the will of a Napoleon, and +Alexander, or in general of the persons they describe. The answers +given by this kind of historian to the question of what force causes +events to happen are satisfactory only as long as there is but one +historian to each event. As soon as historians of different +nationalities and tendencies begin to describe the same event, the +replies they give immediately lose all meaning, for this force is +understood by them all not only differently but often in quite +contradictory ways. One historian says that an event was produced by +Napoleon's power, another that it was produced by Alexander's, a third +that it was due to the power of some other person. Besides this, +historians of that kind contradict each other even in their +statement as to the force on which the authority of some particular +person was based. Thiers, a Bonapartist, says that Napoleon's power +was based on his virtue and genius. Lanfrey, a Republican, says it was +based on his trickery and deception of the people. So the historians +of this class, by mutually destroying one another's positions, destroy +the understanding of the force which produces events, and furnish no +reply to history's essential question. + +Writers of universal history who deal with all the nations seem to +recognize how erroneous is the specialist historians' view of the +force which produces events. They do not recognize it as a power +inherent in heroes and rulers, but as the resultant of a +multiplicity of variously directed forces. In describing a war or +the subjugation of a people, a general historian looks for the cause +of the event not in the power of one man, but in the interaction of +many persons connected with the event. + +According to this view the power of historical personages, +represented as the product of many forces, can no longer, it would +seem, be regarded as a force that itself produces events. Yet in +most cases universal historians still employ the conception of power +as a force that itself produces events, and treat it as their cause. +In their exposition, an historic character is first the product of his +time, and his power only the resultant of various forces, and then his +power is itself a force producing events. Gervinus, Schlosser, and +others, for instance, at one time prove Napoleon to be a product of +the Revolution, of the ideas of 1789 and so forth, and at another +plainly say that the campaign of 1812 and other things they do not +like were simply the product of Napoleon's misdirected will, and +that the very ideas of 1789 were arrested in their development by +Napoleon's caprice. The ideas of the Revolution and the general temper +of the age produced Napoleon's power. But Napoleon's power +suppressed the ideas of the Revolution and the general temper of the +age. + +This curious contradiction is not accidental. Not only does it occur +at every step, but the universal historians' accounts are all made +up of a chain of such contradictions. This contradiction occurs +because after entering the field of analysis the universal +historians stop halfway. + +To find component forces equal to the composite or resultant +force, the sum of the components must equal the resultant. This +condition is never observed by the universal historians, and so to +explain the resultant forces they are obliged to admit, in addition to +the insufficient components, another unexplained force affecting the +resultant action. + +Specialist historians describing the campaign of 1813 or the +restoration of the Bourbons plainly assert that these events were +produced by the will of Alexander. But the universal historian +Gervinus, refuting this opinion of the specialist historian, tries +to prove that the campaign of 1813 and the restoration of the Bourbons +were due to other things beside Alexander's will- such as the activity +of Stein, Metternich, Madame de Stael, Talleyrand, Fichte +Chateaubriand, and others. The historian evidently decomposes +Alexander's power into the components: Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, +and the rest- but the sum of the components, that is, the interactions +of Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Madame de Stael, and the others, +evidently does not equal the resultant, namely the phenomenon of +millions of Frenchmen submitting to the Bourbons. That +Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, and others spoke certain words to +one another only affected their mutual relations but does not +account for the submission of millions. And therefore to explain how +from these relations of theirs the submission of millions of people +resulted- that is, how component forces equal to one A gave a +resultant equal to a thousand times A- the historian is again +obliged to fall back on power- the force he had denied- and to +recognize it as the resultant of the forces, that is, he has to +admit an unexplained force acting on the resultant. And that is just +what the universal historians do, and consequently they not only +contradict the specialist historians but contradict themselves. + +Peasants having no clear idea of the cause of rain, say, according +to whether they want rain or fine weather: "The wind has blown the +clouds away," or, "The wind has brought up the clouds." And in the +same way the universal historians sometimes, when it pleases them +and fits in with their theory, say that power is the result of events, +and sometimes, when they want to prove something else, say that +power produces events. + +A third class of historians- the so-called historians of culture- +following the path laid down by the universal historians who sometimes +accept writers and ladies as forces producing events- again take +that force to be something quite different. They see it in what is +called culture- in mental activity. + +The historians of culture are quite consistent in regard to their +progenitors, the writers of universal histories, for if historical +events may be explained by the fact that certain persons treated one +another in such and such ways, why not explain them by the fact that +such and such people wrote such and such books? Of the immense +number of indications accompanying every vital phenomenon, these +historians select the indication of intellectual activity and say that +this indication is the cause. But despite their endeavors to prove +that the cause of events lies in intellectual activity, only by a +great stretch can one admit that there is any connection between +intellectual activity and the movement of peoples, and in no case +can one admit that intellectual activity controls people's actions, +for that view is not confirmed by such facts as the very cruel murders +of the French Revolution resulting from the doctrine of the equality +of man, or the very cruel wars and executions resulting from the +preaching of love. + +But even admitting as correct all the cunningly devised arguments +with which these histories are filled- admitting that nations are +governed by some undefined force called an idea- history's essential +question still remains unanswered, and to the former power of monarchs +and to the influence of advisers and other people introduced by the +universal historians, another, newer force- the idea- is added, the +connection of which with the masses needs explanation. It is +possible to understand that Napoleon had power and so events occurred; +with some effort one may even conceive that Napoleon together with +other influences was the cause of an event; but how a book, Le Contrat +social, had the effect of making Frenchmen begin to drown one +another cannot be understood without an explanation of the causal +nexus of this new force with the event. + +Undoubtedly some relation exists between all who live +contemporaneously, and so it is possible to find some connection +between the intellectual activity of men and their historical +movements, just as such a connection may be found between the +movements of humanity and commerce, handicraft, gardening, or anything +else you please. But why intellectual activity is considered by the +historians of culture to be the cause or expression of the whole +historical movement is hard to understand. Only the following +considerations can have led the historians to such a conclusion: (1) +that history is written by learned men, and so it is natural and +agreeable for them to think that the activity of their class +supplies the basis of the movement of all humanity, just as a +similar belief is natural and agreeable to traders, agriculturists, +and soldiers (if they do not express it, that is merely because +traders and soldiers do not write history), and (2) that spiritual +activity, enlightenment, civilization, culture, ideas, are all +indistinct, indefinite conceptions under whose banner it is very +easy to use words having a still less definite meaning, and which +can therefore be readily introduced into any theory. + +But not to speak of the intrinsic quality of histories of this +kind (which may possibly even be of use to someone for something) +the histories of culture, to which all general histories tend more and +more to approximate, are significant from the fact that after +seriously and minutely examining various religious, philosophic, and +political doctrines as causes of events, as soon as they have to +describe an actual historic event such as the campaign of 1812 for +instance, they involuntarily describe it as resulting from an exercise +of power- and say plainly that that was the result of Napoleon's will. +Speaking so, the historians of culture involuntarily contradict +themselves, and show that the new force they have devised does not +account for what happens in history, and that history can only be +explained by introducing a power which they apparently do not +recognize. + +CHAPTER III + +A locomotive is moving. Someone asks: "What moves it?" A peasant +says the devil moves it. Another man says the locomotive moves because +its wheels go round. A third asserts that the cause of its movement +lies in the smoke which the wind carries away. + +The peasant is irrefutable. He has devised a complete explanation. +To refute him someone would have to prove to him that there is no +devil, or another peasant would have to explain to him that it is +not the devil but a German, who moves the locomotive. Only then, as +a result of the contradiction, will they see that they are both wrong. +But the man who says that the movement of the wheels is the cause +refutes himself, for having once begun to analyze he ought to go on +and explain further why the wheels go round; and till he has reached +the ultimate cause of the movement of the locomotive in the pressure +of steam in the boiler, he has no right to stop in his search for +the cause. The man who explains the movement of the locomotive by +the smoke that is carried back has noticed that the wheels do not +supply an explanation and has taken the first sign that occurs to +him and in his turn has offered that as an explanation. + +The only conception that can explain the movement of the +locomotive is that of a force commensurate with the movement observed. + +The only conception that can explain the movement of the peoples +is that of some force commensurate with the whole movement of the +peoples. + +Yet to supply this conception various historians take forces of +different kinds, all of which are incommensurate with the movement +observed. Some see it as a force directly inherent in heroes, as the +peasant sees the devil in the locomotive; others as a force +resulting from several other forces, like the movement of the +wheels; others again as an intellectual influence, like the smoke that +is blown away. + +So long as histories are written of separate individuals, whether +Caesars, Alexanders, Luthers, or Voltaires, and not the histories of +all, absolutely all those who take part in an event, it is quite +impossible to describe the movement of humanity without the conception +of a force compelling men to direct their activity toward a certain +end. And the only such conception known to historians is that of +power. + +This conception is the one handle by means of which the material +of history, as at present expounded, can be dealt with, and anyone who +breaks that handle off, as Buckle did, without finding some other +method of treating historical material, merely deprives himself of the +one possible way of dealing with it. The necessity of the conception +of power as an explanation of historical events is best demonstrated +by the universal historians and historians of culture themselves, +for they professedly reject that conception but inevitably have +recourse to it at every step. + +In dealing with humanity's inquiry, the science of history up to now +is like money in circulation- paper money and coin. The biographies +and special national histories are like paper money. They can be +used and can circulate and fulfill their purpose without harm to +anyone and even advantageously, as long as no one asks what is the +security behind them. You need only forget to ask how the will of +heroes produces events, and such histories as Thiers' will be +interesting and instructive and may perhaps even possess a tinge of +poetry. But just as doubts of the real value of paper money arise +either because, being easy to make, too much of it gets made or +because people try to exchange it for gold, so also doubts +concerning the real value of such histories arise either because too +many of them are written or because in his simplicity of heart someone +inquires: by what force did Napoleon do this?- that is, wants to +exchange the current paper money for the real gold of actual +comprehension. + +The writers of universal histories and of the history of culture are +like people who, recognizing the defects of paper money, decide to +substitute for it money made of metal that has not the specific +gravity of gold. It may indeed make jingling coin, but will do no more +than that. Paper money may deceive the ignorant, but nobody is +deceived by tokens of base metal that have no value but merely jingle. +As gold is gold only if it is serviceable not merely for exchange +but also for use, so universal historians will be valuable only when +they can reply to history's essential question: what is power? The +universal historians give contradictory replies to that question, +while the historians of culture evade it and answer something quite +different. And as counters of imitation gold can be used only among +a group of people who agree to accept them as gold, or among those who +do not know the nature of gold, so universal historians and historians +of culture, not answering humanity's essential question, serve as +currency for some purposes of their own, only in universities and +among the mass of readers who have a taste for what they call "serious +reading." + +CHAPTER IV + +Having abandoned the conception of the ancients as to the divine +subjection of the will of a nation to some chosen man and the +subjection of that man's will to the Deity, history cannot without +contradictions take a single step till it has chosen one of two +things: either a return to the former belief in the direct +intervention of the Deity in human affairs or a definite explanation +of the meaning of the force producing historical events and termed +"power." + +A return to the first is impossible, the belief has been +destroyed; and so it is essential to explain what is meant by power. + +Napoleon ordered an army to be raised and go to war. We are so +accustomed to that idea and have become so used to it that the +question: why did six hundred thousand men go to fight when Napoleon +uttered certain words, seems to us senseless. He had the power and +so what he ordered was done. + +This reply is quite satisfactory if we believe that the power was +given him by God. But as soon as we do not admit that, it becomes +essential to determine what is this power of one man over others. + +It cannot be the direct physical power of a strong man over a weak +one- a domination based on the application or threat of physical +force, like the power of Hercules; nor can it be based on the effect +of moral force, as in their simplicity some historians think who say +that the leading figures in history are heroes, that is, men gifted +with a special strength of soul and mind called genius. This power +cannot be based on the predominance of moral strength, for, not to +mention heroes such as Napoleon about whose moral qualities opinions +differ widely, history shows us that neither a Louis XI nor a +Metternich, who ruled over millions of people, had any particular +moral qualities, but on the contrary were generally morally weaker +than any of the millions they ruled over. + +If the source of power lies neither in the physical nor in the moral +qualities of him who possesses it, it must evidently be looked for +elsewhere- in the relation to the people of the man who wields the +power. + +And that is how power is understood by the science of jurisprudence, +that exchange bank of history which offers to exchange history's +understanding of power for true gold. + +Power is the collective will of the people transferred, by expressed +or tacit consent, to their chosen rulers. + +In the domain of jurisprudence, which consists of discussions of how +a state and power might be arranged were it possible for all that to +be arranged, it is all very clear; but when applied to history that +definition of power needs explanation. + +The science of jurisprudence regards the state and power as the +ancients regarded fire- namely, as something existing absolutely. +But for history, the state and power are merely phenomena, just as for +modern physics fire is not an element but a phenomenon. + +From this fundamental difference between the view held by history +and that held by jurisprudence, it follows that jurisprudence can tell +minutely how in its opinion power should be constituted and what +power- existing immutably outside time- is, but to history's questions +about the meaning of the mutations of power in time it can answer +nothing. + +If power be the collective will of the people transferred to their +ruler, was Pugachev a representative of the will of the people? If +not, then why was Napoleon I? Why was Napoleon III a criminal when +he was taken prisoner at Boulogne, and why, later on, were those +criminals whom he arrested? + +Do palace revolutions- in which sometimes only two or three people +take part- transfer the will of the people to a new ruler? In +international relations, is the will of the people also transferred to +their conqueror? Was the will of the Confederation of the Rhine +transferred to Napoleon in 1806? Was the will of the Russian people +transferred to Napoleon in 1809, when our army in alliance with the +French went to fight the Austrians? + +To these questions three answers are possible: + +Either to assume (1) that the will of the people is always +unconditionally transferred to the ruler or rulers they have chosen, +and that therefore every emergence of a new power, every struggle +against the power once appointed, should be absolutely regarded as +an infringement of the real power; or (2) that the will of the +people is transferred to the rulers conditionally, under definite +and known conditions, and to show that all limitations, conflicts, and +even destructions of power result from a nonobservance by the rulers +of the conditions under which their power was entrusted to them; or +(3) that the will of the people is delegated to the rulers +conditionally, but that the conditions are unknown and indefinite, and +that the appearance of several authorities, their struggles and +their falls, result solely from the greater or lesser fulfillment by +the rulers of these unknown conditions on which the will of the people +is transferred from some people to others. + +And these are the three ways in which the historians do explain +the relation of the people to their rulers. + +Some historians- those biographical and specialist historians +already referred to- in their simplicity failing to understand the +question of the meaning of power, seem to consider that the collective +will of the people is unconditionally transferred to historical +persons, and therefore when describing some single state they assume +that particular power to be the one absolute and real power, and +that any other force opposing this is not a power but a violation of +power- mere violence. + +Their theory, suitable for primitive and peaceful periods of +history, has the inconvenience- in application to complex and stormy +periods in the life of nations during which various powers arise +simultaneously and struggle with one another- that a Legitimist +historian will prove that the National Convention, the Directory, +and Bonaparte were mere infringers of the true power, while a +Republican and a Bonapartist will prove: the one that the Convention +and the other that the Empire was the real power, and that all the +others were violations of power. Evidently the explanations +furnished by these historians being mutually contradictory can only +satisfy young children. + +Recognizing the falsity of this view of history, another set of +historians say that power rests on a conditional delegation of the +will of the people to their rulers, and that historical leaders have +power only conditionally on carrying out the program that the will +of the people has by tacit agreement prescribed to them. But what this +program consists in these historians do not say, or if they do they +continually contradict one another. + +Each historian, according to his view of what constitutes a nation's +progress, looks for these conditions in the greatness, wealth, +freedom, or enlightenment of citizens of France or some other country. +But not to mention the historians' contradictions as to the nature +of this program- or even admitting that some one general program of +these conditions exists- the facts of history almost always contradict +that theory. If the conditions under which power is entrusted +consist in the wealth, freedom, and enlightenment of the people, how +is it that Louis XIV and Ivan the Terrible end their reigns +tranquilly, while Louis XVI and Charles I are executed by their +people? To this question historians reply that Louis XIV's activity, +contrary to the program, reacted on Louis XVI. But why did it not +react on Louis XIV or on Louis XV- why should it react just on Louis +XVI? And what is the time limit for such reactions? To these questions +there are and can be no answers. Equally little does this view explain +why for several centuries the collective will is not withdrawn from +certain rulers and their heirs, and then suddenly during a period of +fifty years is transferred to the Convention, to the Directory, to +Napoleon, to Alexander, to Louis XVIII, to Napoleon again, to +Charles X, to Louis Philippe, to a Republican government, and to +Napoleon III. When explaining these rapid transfers of the people's +will from from one individual to another, especially in view of +international relations, conquests, and alliances, the historians +are obliged to admit that some of these transfers are not normal +delegations of the people's will but are accidents dependent on +cunning, on mistakes, on craft, or on the weakness of a diplomatist, a +ruler, or a party leader. So that the greater part of the events of +history- civil wars, revolutions, and conquests- are presented by +these historians not as the results of free transferences of the +people's will, but as results of the ill-directed will of one or +more individuals, that is, once again, as usurpations of power. And so +these historians also see and admit historical events which are +exceptions to the theory. + +These historians resemble a botanist who, having noticed that some +plants grow from seeds producing two cotyledons, should insist that +all that grows does so by sprouting into two leaves, and that the +palm, the mushroom, and even the oak, which blossom into full growth +and no longer resemble two leaves, are deviations from the theory. + +Historians of the third class assume that the will of the people +is transferred to historic personages conditionally, but that the +conditions are unknown to us. They say that historical personages have +power only because they fulfill the will of the people which has +been delegated to them. + +But in that case, if the force that moves nations lies not in the +historic leaders but in the nations themselves, what significance have +those leaders? + +The leaders, these historians tell us, express the will of the +people: the activity of the leaders represents the activity of the +people. + +But in that case the question arises whether all the activity of the +leaders serves as an expression of the people's will or only some part +of it. If the whole activity of the leaders serves as the expression +of the people's will, as some historians suppose, then all the details +of the court scandals contained in the biographies of a Napoleon or +a Catherine serve to express the life of the nation, which is +evident nonsense; but if it is only some particular side of the +activity of an historical leader which serves to express the +people's life, as other so-called "philosophical" historians +believe, then to determine which side of the activity of a leader +expresses the nation's life, we have first of all to know in what +the nation's life consists. + +Met by this difficulty historians of that class devise some most +obscure, impalpable, and general abstraction which can cover all +conceivable occurrences, and declare this abstraction to be the aim of +humanity's movement. The most usual generalizations adopted by +almost all the historians are: freedom, equality, enlightenment, +progress, civilization, and culture. Postulating some generalization +as the goal of the movement of humanity, the historians study the +men of whom the greatest number of monuments have remained: kings, +ministers, generals, authors, reformers, popes, and journalists, to +the extent to which in their opinion these persons have promoted or +hindered that abstraction. But as it is in no way proved that the +aim of humanity does consist in freedom, equality, enlightenment, or +civilization, and as the connection of the people with the rulers +and enlighteners of humanity is only based on the arbitrary assumption +that the collective will of the people is always transferred to the +men whom we have noticed, it happens that the activity of the millions +who migrate, burn houses, abandon agriculture, and destroy one another +never is expressed in the account of the activity of some dozen people +who did not burn houses, practice agriculture, or slay their fellow +creatures. + +History proves this at every turn. Is the ferment of the peoples +of the west at the end of the eighteenth century and their drive +eastward explained by the activity of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, their +mistresses and ministers, and by the lives of Napoleon, Rousseau, +Diderot, Beaumarchais, and others? + +Is the movement of the Russian people eastward to Kazan and +Siberia expressed by details of the morbid character of Ivan the +Terrible and by his correspondence with Kurbski? + +Is the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusades explained +by the life and activity of the Godfreys and the Louis-es and their +ladies? For us that movement of the peoples from west to east, without +leaders, with a crowd of vagrants, and with Peter the Hermit, +remains incomprehensible. And yet more incomprehensible is the +cessation of that movement when a rational and sacred aim for the +Crusade- the deliverance of Jerusalem- had been clearly defined by +historic leaders. Popes, kings, and knights incited the peoples to +free the Holy Land; but the people did not go, for the unknown cause +which had previously impelled them to go no longer existed. The +history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers can evidently not cover +the life of the peoples. And the history of the Godfreys and the +Minnesingers has remained the history of Godfreys and Minnesingers, +but the history of the life of the peoples and their impulses has +remained unknown. + +Still less does the history of authors and reformers explain to us +the life of the peoples. + +The history of culture explains to us the impulses and conditions of +life and thought of a writer or a reformer. We learn that Luther had a +hot temper and said such and such things; we learn that Rousseau was +suspicious and wrote such and such books; but we do not learn why +after the Reformation the peoples massacred one another, nor why +during the French Revolution they guillotined one another. + +If we unite both these kinds of history, as is done by the newest +historians, we shall have the history of monarchs and writers, but not +the history of the life of the peoples. + +CHAPTER V + +The life of the nations is not contained in the lives of a few +men, for the connection between those men and the nations has not been +found. The theory that this connection is based on the transference of +the collective will of a people to certain historical personages is an +hypothesis unconfirmed by the experience of history. + +The theory of the transference of the collective will of the +people to historic persons may perhaps explain much in the domain of +jurisprudence and be essential for its purposes, but in its +application to history, as soon as revolutions, conquests, or civil +wars occur- that is, as soon as history begins- that theory explains +nothing. + +The theory seems irrefutable just because the act of transference of +the people's will cannot be verified, for it never occurred. + +Whatever happens and whoever may stand at the head of affairs, the +theory can always say that such and such a person took the lead +because the collective will was transferred to him. + +The replies this theory gives to historical questions are like the +replies of a man who, watching the movements of a herd of cattle and +paying no attention to the varying quality of the pasturage in +different parts of the field, or to the driving of the herdsman, +should attribute the direction the herd takes to what animal happens +to be at its head. + +"The herd goes in that direction because the animal in front leads +it and the collective will of all the other animals is vested in +that leader." This is what historians of the first class say- those +who assume the unconditional transference of the people's will. + +"If the animals leading the herd change, this happens because the +collective will of all the animals is transferred from one leader to +another, according to whether the animal is or is not leading them +in the direction selected by the whole herd." Such is the reply +historians who assume that the collective will of the people is +delegated to rulers under conditions which they regard as known. (With +this method of observation it often happens that the observer, +influenced by the direction he himself prefers, regards those as +leaders who, owing to the people's change of direction, are no +longer in front, but on one side, or even in the rear.) + +"If the animals in front are continually changing and the +direction of the whole herd is constantly altered, this is because +in order to follow a given direction the animals transfer their will +to the animals that have attracted our attention, and to study the +movements of the herd we must watch the movements of all the prominent +animals moving on all sides of the herd." So say the third class of +historians who regard all historical persons, from monarchs to +journalists, as the expression of their age. + +The theory of the transference of the will of the people to historic +persons is merely a paraphrase- a restatement of the question in other +words. + +What causes historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the +collective will of the people transferred to one person. Under what +condition is the will of the people delegated to one person? On +condition that that person expresses the will of the whole people. +That is, power is power: in other words, power is a word the meaning +of which we do not understand. + +If the realm of human knowledge were confined to abstract reasoning, +then having subjected to criticism the explanation of "power" that +juridical science gives us, humanity would conclude that power is +merely a word and has no real existence. But to understand phenomena +man has, besides abstract reasoning, experience by which he verifies +his reflections. And experience tells us that power is not merely a +word but an actually existing phenomenon. + +Not to speak of the fact that no description of the collective +activity of men can do without the conception of power, the +existence of power is proved both by history and by observing +contemporary events. + +Whenever an event occurs a man appears or men appear, by whose +will the event seems to have taken place. Napoleon III issues a decree +and the French go to Mexico. The King of Prussia and Bismarck issue +decrees and an army enters Bohemia. Napoleon I issues a decree and +an army enters Russia. Alexander I gives a command and the French +submit to the Bourbons. Experience shows us that whatever event occurs +it is always related to the will of one or of several men who have +decreed it. + +The historians, in accord with the old habit of acknowledging divine +intervention in human affairs, want to see the cause of events in +the expression of the will of someone endowed with power, but that +supposition is not confirmed either by reason or by experience. + +On the one side reflection shows that the expression of a man's +will- his words- are only part of the general activity expressed in an +event, as for instance in a war or a revolution, and so without +assuming an incomprehensible, supernatural force- a miracle- one +cannot admit that words can be the immediate cause of the movements of +millions of men. On the other hand, even if we admitted that words +could be the cause of events, history shows that the expression of the +will of historical personages does not in most cases produce any +effect, that is to say, their commands are often not executed, and +sometimes the very opposite of what they order occurs. + +Without admitting divine intervention in the affairs of humanity +we cannot regard "power" as the cause of events. + +Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation +that exists between the expression of someone's will and the execution +of that will by others. + +To explain the conditions of that relationship we must first +establish a conception of the expression of will, referring it to +man and not to the Deity. + +If the Deity issues a command, expresses His will, as ancient +history tells us, the expression of that will is independent of time +and is not caused by anything, for the Divinity is not controlled by +an event. But speaking of commands that are the expression of the will +of men acting in time and in relation to one another, to explain the +connection of commands with events we must restore: (1) the +condition of all that takes place: the continuity of movement in +time both of the events and of the person who commands, and (2) the +inevitability of the connection between the person commanding and +those who execute his command. + +CHAPTER VI + +Only the expression of the will of the Deity, not dependent on time, +can relate to a whole series of events occurring over a period of +years or centuries, and only the Deity, independent of everything, can +by His sole will determine the direction of humanity's movement; but +man acts in time and himself takes part in what occurs. + +Reinstating the first condition omitted, that of time, we see that +no command can be executed without some preceding order having been +given rendering the execution of the last command possible. + +No command ever appears spontaneously, or itself covers a whole +series of occurrences; but each command follows from another, and +never refers to a whole series of events but always to one moment only +of an event. + +When, for instance, we say that Napoleon ordered armies to go to +war, we combine in one simultaneous expression a whole series of +consecutive commands dependent one on another. Napoleon could not have +commanded an invasion of Russia and never did so. Today he ordered +such and such papers to be written to Vienna, to Berlin, and to +Petersburg; tomorrow such and such decrees and orders to the army, the +fleet, the commissariat, and so on and so on- millions of commands, +which formed a whole series corresponding to a series of events +which brought the French armies into Russia. + +If throughout his reign Napoleon gave commands concerning an +invasion of England and expended on no other undertaking so much +time and effort, and yet during his whole reign never once attempted +to execute that design but undertook an expedition into Russia, with +which country he considered it desirable to be in alliance (a +conviction he repeatedly expressed)- this came about because his +commands did not correspond to the course of events in the first case, +but did so correspond in the latter. + +For an order to be certainly executed, it is necessary that a man +should order what can be executed. But to know what can and what +cannot be executed is impossible, not only in the case of Napoleon's +invasion of Russia in which millions participated, but even in the +simplest event, for in either case millions of obstacles may arise +to prevent its execution. Every order executed is always one of an +immense number unexecuted. All the impossible orders inconsistent with +the course of events remain unexecuted. Only the possible ones get +linked up with a consecutive series of commands corresponding to a +series of events, and are executed. + +Our false conception that an event is caused by a command which +precedes it is due to the fact that when the event has taken place and +out of thousands of others those few commands which were consistent +with that event have been executed, we forget about the others that +were not executed because they could not be. Apart from that, the +chief source of our error in this matter is due to the fact that in +the historical accounts a whole series of innumerable, diverse, and +petty events, such for instance as all those which led the French +armies to Russia, is generalized into one event in accord with the +result produced by that series of events, and corresponding with +this generalization the whole series of commands is also generalized +into a single expression of will. + +We say that Napoleon wished to invade Russia and invaded it. In +reality in all Napoleon's activity we never find anything resembling +an expression of that wish, but find a series of orders, or +expressions of his will, very variously and indefinitely directed. +Amid a long series of unexecuted orders of Napoleon's one series, +for the campaign of 1812, was carried out- not because those orders +differed in any way from the other, unexecuted orders but because they +coincided with the course of events that led the French army into +Russia; just as in stencil work this or that figure comes out not +because the color was laid on from this side or in that way, but +because it was laid on from all sides over the figure cut in the +stencil. + +So that examining the relation in time of the commands to the +events, we find that a command can never be the cause of the event, +but that a certain definite dependence exists between the two. + +To understand in what this dependence consists it is necessary to +reinstate another omitted condition of every command proceeding not +from the Deity but from a man, which is, that the man who gives the +command himself takes part in + +This relation of the commander to those he commands is just what +is called power. This relation consists in the following: + +For common action people always unite in certain combinations, in +which regardless of the difference of the aims set for the common +action, the relation between those taking part in it is always the +same. + +Men uniting in these combinations always assume such relations +toward one another that the larger number take a more direct share, +and the smaller number a less direct share, in the collective action +for which they have combined. + +Of all the combinations in which men unite for collective action one +of the most striking and definite examples is an army. + +Every army is composed of lower grades of the service- the rank +and file- of whom there are always the greatest number; of the next +higher military rank- corporals and noncommissioned officers of whom +there are fewer, and of still-higher officers of whom there are +still fewer, and so on to the highest military command which is +concentrated in one person. + +A military organization may be quite correctly compared to a cone, +of which the base with the largest diameter consists of the rank and +file; the next higher and smaller section of the cone consists of +the next higher grades of the army, and so on to the apex, the point +of which will represent the commander in chief. + +The soldiers, of whom there are the most, form the lower section +of the cone and its base. The soldier himself does the stabbing, +hacking, burning, and pillaging, and always receives orders for +these actions from men above him; he himself never gives an order. The +noncommissioned officers (of whom there are fewer) perform the +action itself less frequently than the soldiers, but they already give +commands. An officer still less often acts directly himself, but +commands still more frequently. A general does nothing but command the +troops, indicates the objective, and hardly ever uses a weapon +himself. The commander in chief never takes direct part in the +action itself, but only gives general orders concerning the movement +of the mass of the troops. A similar relation of people to one another +is seen in every combination of men for common activity- in +agriculture, trade, and every administration. + +And so without particularly analyzing all the contiguous sections of +a cone and of the ranks of an army, or the ranks and positions in +any administrative or public business whatever from the lowest to +the highest, we see a law by which men, to take associated action, +combine in such relations that the more directly they participate in +performing the action the less they can command and the more +numerous they are, while the less their direct participation in the +action itself, the more they command and the fewer of them there +are; rising in this way from the lowest ranks to the man at the top, +who takes the least direct share in the action and directs his +activity chiefly to commanding. + +This relation of the men who command to those they command is what +constitutes the essence of the conception called power. + +Having restored the condition of time under which all events +occur, find that a command is executed only when it is related to a +corresponding series of events. Restoring the essential condition of +relation between those who command and those who execute, we find that +by the very nature of the case those who command take the smallest +part in the action itself and that their activity is exclusively +directed to commanding. + +CHAPTER VII + +When an event is taking place people express their opinions and +wishes about it, and as the event results from the collective activity +of many people, some one of the opinions or wishes expressed is sure +to be fulfilled if but approximately. When one of the opinions +expressed is fulfilled, that opinion gets connected with the event +as a command preceding it. + +Men are hauling a log. Each of them expresses his opinion as to +how and where to haul it. They haul the log away, and it happens +that this is done as one of them said. He ordered it. There we have +command and power in their primary form. The man who worked most +with his hands could not think so much about what he was doing, or +reflect on or command what would result from the common activity; +while the man who commanded more would evidently work less with his +hands on account of his greater verbal activity. + +When some larger concourse of men direct their activity to a +common aim there is a yet sharper division of those who, because their +activity is given to directing and commanding, take less less part +in the direct work. + +When a man works alone he always has a certain set of reflections +which as it seems to him directed his past activity, justify his +present activity, and guide him in planning his future actions. Just +the same is done by a concourse of people, allowing those who do not +take a direct part in the activity to devise considerations, +justifications, and surmises concerning their collective activity. + +For reasons known or unknown to us the French began to drown and +kill one another. And corresponding to the event its justification +appears in people's belief that this was necessary for the welfare +of France, for liberty, and for equality. People ceased to kill one +another, and this event was accompanied by its justification in the +necessity for a centralization of power, resistance to Europe, and +so on. Men went from the west to the east killing their fellow men, +and the event was accompanied by phrases about the glory of France, +the baseness of England, and so on. History shows us that these +justifications of the events have no common sense and are all +contradictory, as in the case of killing a man as the result of +recognizing his rights, and the killing of millions in Russia for +the humiliation of England. But these justifications have a very +necessary significance in their own day. + +These justifications release those who produce the events from moral +responsibility. These temporary aims are like the broom fixed in front +of a locomotive to clear the snow from the rails in front: they +clear men's moral responsibilities from their path. + +Without such justification there would be no reply to the simplest +question that presents itself when examining each historical event. +How is it that millions of men commit collective crimes- make war, +commit murder, and so on? + +With the present complex forms of political and social life in +Europe can any event that is not prescribed, decreed, or ordered by +monarchs, ministers, parliaments, or newspapers be imagined? Is +there any collective action which cannot find its justification in +political unity, in patriotism, in the balance of power, or in +civilization? So that every event that occurs inevitably coincides +with some expressed wish and, receiving a justification, presents +itself as the result of the will of one man or of several men. + +In whatever direction a ship moves, the flow of the waves it cuts +will always be noticeable ahead of it. To those on board the ship +the movement of those waves will be the only perceptible motion. + +Only by watching closely moment by moment the movement of that +flow and comparing it with the movement of the ship do we convince +ourselves that every bit of it is occasioned by the forward movement +of the ship, and that we were led into error by the fact that we +ourselves were imperceptibly moving. + +We see the same if we watch moment by moment the movement of +historical characters (that is, re-establish the inevitable +condition of all that occurs- the continuity of movement in time) +and do not lose sight of the essential connection of historical +persons with the masses. + +When the ship moves in one direction there is one and the same +wave ahead of it, when it turns frequently the wave ahead of it also +turns frequently. But wherever it may turn there always will be the +wave anticipating its movement. + +Whatever happens it always appears that just that event was foreseen +and decreed. Wherever the ship may go, the rush of water which neither +directs nor increases its movement foams ahead of it, and at a +distance seems to us not merely to move of itself but to govern the +ship's movement also. + +Examining only those expressions of the will of historical persons +which, as commands, were related to events, historians have assumed +that the events depended on those commands. But examining the events +themselves and the connection in which the historical persons stood to +the people, we have found that they and their orders were dependent on +events. The incontestable proof of this deduction is that, however +many commands were issued, the event does not take place unless +there are other causes for it, but as soon as an event occurs- be it +what it may- then out of all the continually expressed wishes of +different people some will always be found which by their meaning +and their time of utterance are related as commands to the events. + +Arriving at this conclusion we can reply directly and positively +to these two essential questions of history: + +(1) What is power? + +(2) What force produces the movement of the nations? + +(1) Power is the relation of a given person to other individuals, in +which the more this person expresses opinions, predictions, and +justifications of the collective action that is performed, the less is +his participation in that action. + +(2) The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by +intellectual activity, nor even by a combination of the two as +historians have supposed, but by the activity of all the people who +participate in the events, and who always combine in such a way that +those taking the largest direct share in the event take on +themselves the least responsibility and vice versa. + +Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event; +physically it is those who submit to the power. But as the moral +activity is inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event +is neither in the one nor in the other but in the union of the two. + +Or in other words, the conception of a cause is inapplicable to +the phenomena we are examining. + +In the last analysis we reach the circle of infinity- that final +limit to which in every domain of thought man's reason arrives if it +is not playing with the subject. Electricity produces heat, heat +produces electricity. Atoms attract each other and atoms repel one +another. + +Speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity and of atoms, we +cannot say why this occurs, and we say that it is so because it is +inconceivable otherwise, because it must be so and that it is a law. +The same applies to historical events. Why war and revolution occur we +do not know. We only know that to produce the one or the other action, +people combine in a certain formation in which they all take part, and +we say that this is so because it is unthinkable otherwise, or in +other words that it is a law. + +CHAPTER VIII + +If history dealt only with external phenomena, the establishment +of this simple and obvious law would suffice and we should have +finished our argument. But the law of history relates to man. A +particle of matter cannot tell us that it does not feel the law of +attraction or repulsion and that that law is untrue, but man, who is +the subject of history, says plainly: I am free and am therefore not +subject to the law. + +The presence of the problem of man's free will, though +unexpressed, is felt at every step of history. + +All seriously thinking historians have involuntarily encountered +this question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history and +the false path historical science has followed are due solely to the +lack of a solution of that question. + +If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could act +as he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected +incidents. + +If in a thousand years even one man in a million could act freely, +that is, as he chose, it is evident that one single free act of that +man's in violation of the laws governing human action would destroy +the possibility of the existence of any laws for the whole of +humanity. + +If there be a single law governing the actions of men, free will +cannot exist, for then man's will is subject to that law. + +In this contradiction lies the problem of free will, which from most +ancient times has occupied the best human minds and from most +ancient times has been presented in its whole tremendous significance. + +The problem is that regarding man as a subject of observation from +whatever point of view- theological, historical, ethical, or +philosophic- we find a general law of necessity to which he (like +all that exists) is subject. But regarding him from within ourselves +as what we are conscious of, we feel ourselves to be free. + +This consciousness is a source of self-cognition quite apart from +and independent of reason. Through his reason man observes himself, +but only through consciousness does he know himself. + +Apart from consciousness of self no observation or application of +reason is conceivable. + +To understand, observe, and draw conclusions, man must first of +all be conscious of himself as living. A man is only conscious of +himself as a living being by the fact that he wills, that is, is +conscious of his volition. But his will- which forms the essence of +his life- man recognizes (and can but recognize) as free. + +If, observing himself, man sees that his will is always directed +by one and the same law (whether he observes the necessity of taking +food, using his brain, or anything else) he cannot recognize this +never-varying direction of his will otherwise than as a limitation +of it. Were it not free it could not be limited. A man's will seems to +him to be limited just because he is not conscious of it except as +free. + +You say: I am not and am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let +it fall. Everyone understands that this illogical reply is an +irrefutable demonstration of freedom. + +That reply is the expression of a consciousness that is not +subject to reason. + +If the consciousness of freedom were not a separate and +independent source of self-consciousness it would be subject to +reasoning and to experience, but in fact such subjection does not +exist and is inconceivable. + +A series of experiments and arguments proves to every man that he, +as an object of observation, is subject to certain laws, and man +submits to them and never resists the laws of gravity or +impermeability once he has become acquainted with them. But the same +series of experiments and arguments proves to him that the complete +freedom of which he is conscious in himself is impossible, and that +his every action depends on his organization, his character, and the +motives acting upon him; yet man never submits to the deductions of +these experiments and arguments. Having learned from experiment and +argument that a stone falls downwards, a man indubitably believes this +and always expects the law that he has learned to be fulfilled. + +But learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, +he does not and cannot believe this. + +However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under the +same conditions and with the same character he will do the same +thing as before, yet when under the same conditions and with the +same character he approaches for the thousandth time the action that +always ends in the same way, he feels as certainly convinced as before +the experiment that he can act as he pleases. Every man, savage or +sage, however incontestably reason and experiment may prove to him +that it is impossible to imagine two different courses of action in +precisely the same conditions, feels that without this irrational +conception (which constitutes the essence of freedom) he cannot +imagine life. He feels that however impossible it may be, it is so, +for without this conception of freedom not only would he be unable +to understand life, but he would be unable to live for a single +moment. + +He could not live, because all man's efforts, all his impulses to +life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame +and obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, +health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion +and hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of +freedom. + +A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of +life. + +If the conception of freedom appears to reason to be a senseless +contradiction like the possibility of performing two actions at one +and the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that +only proves that consciousness is not subject to reason. + +This unshakable, irrefutable consciousness of freedom, +uncontrolled by experiment or argument, recognized by all thinkers and +felt by everyone without exception, this consciousness without which +no conception of man is possible constitutes the other side of the +question. + +Man is the creation of an all-powerful, all-good, and all-seeing +God. What is sin, the conception of which arises from the +consciousness of man's freedom? That is a question for theology. + +The actions of men are subject to general immutable laws expressed +in statistics. What is man's responsibility to society, the conception +of which results from the conception of freedom? That is a question +for jurisprudence. + +Man's actions proceed from his innate character and the motives +acting upon him. What is conscience and the perception of right and +wrong in actions that follows from the consciousness of freedom? +That is a question for ethics. + +Man in connection with the general life of humanity appears +subject to laws which determine that life. But the same man apart from +that connection appears to free. How should the past life of nations +and of humanity be regarded- as the result of the free, or as the +result of the constrained, activity of man? That is a question for +history. + +Only in our self-confident day of the popularization of knowledge- +thanks to that most powerful engine of ignorance, the diffusion of +printed matter- has the question of the freedom of will been put on +a level on which the question itself cannot exist. In our time the +majority of so-called advanced people- that is, the crowd of +ignoramuses- have taken the work of the naturalists who deal with +one side of the question for a solution of the whole problem. + +They say and write and print that the soul and freedom do not exist, +for the life of man is expressed by muscular movements and muscular +movements are conditioned by the activity of the nerves; the soul +and free will do not exist because at an unknown period of time we +sprang from the apes. They say this, not at all suspecting that +thousands of years ago that same law of necessity which with such +ardor they are now trying to prove by physiology and comparative +zoology was not merely acknowledged by all the religions and all the +thinkers, but has never been denied. They do not see that the role +of the natural sciences in this matter is merely to serve as an +instrument for the illumination of one side of it. For the fact +that, from the point of view of observation, reason and the will are +merely secretions of the brain, and that man following the general law +may have developed from lower animals at some unknown period of +time, only explains from a fresh side the truth admitted thousands +of years ago by all the religious and philosophic theories- that +from the point of view of reason man is subject to the law of +necessity; but it does not advance by a hair's breadth the solution of +the question, which has another, opposite, side, based on the +consciousness of freedom. + +If men descended from the apes at an unknown period of time, that is +as comprehensible as that they were made from a handful of earth at +a certain period of time (in the first case the unknown quantity is +the time, in the second case it is the origin); and the question of +how man's consciousness of freedom is to be reconciled with the law of +necessity to which he is subject cannot be solved by comparative +physiology and zoology, for in a frog, a rabbit, or an ape, we can +observe only the muscular nervous activity, but in man we observe +consciousness as well as the muscular and nervous activity. + +The naturalists and their followers, thinking they can solve this +question, are like plasterers set to plaster one side of the walls +of a church who, availing themselves of the absence of the chief +superintendent of the work, should in an access of zeal plaster over +the windows, icons, woodwork, and still unbuttressed walls, and should +be delighted that from their point of view as plasterers, everything +is now so smooth and regular. + +CHAPTER IX + +For the solution of the question of free will or inevitability, +history has this advantage over other branches of knowledge in which +the question is dealt with, that for history this question does not +refer to the essence of man's free will but its manifestation in the +past and under certain conditions. + +In regard to this question, history stands to the other sciences +as experimental science stands to abstract science. + +The subject for history is not man's will itself but our +presentation of it. + +And so for history, the insoluble mystery presented by the +incompatibility of free will and inevitability does not exist as it +does for theology, ethics, and philosophy. History surveys a +presentation of man's life in which the union of these two +contradictions has already taken place. + +In actual life each historic event, each human action, is very +clearly and definitely understood without any sense of +contradiction, although each event presents itself as partly free +and partly compulsory. + +To solve the question of how freedom and necessity are combined +and what constitutes the essence of these two conceptions, the +philosophy of history can and should follow a path contrary to that +taken by other sciences. Instead of first defining the conceptions +of freedom and inevitability in themselves, and then ranging the +phenomena of life under those definitions, history should deduce a +definition of the conception of freedom and inevitability themselves +from the immense quantity of phenomena of which it is cognizant and +that always appear dependent on these two elements. + +Whatever presentation of the activity of many men or of an +individual we may consider, we always regard it as the result partly +of man's free will and partly of the law of inevitability. + +Whether we speak of the migration of the peoples and the +incursions of the barbarians, or of the decrees of Napoleon III, or of +someone's action an hour ago in choosing one direction out of +several for his walk, we are unconscious of any contradiction. The +degree of freedom and inevitability governing the actions of these +people is clearly defined for us. + +Our conception of the degree of freedom often varies according to +differences in the point of view from which we regard the event, but +every human action appears to us as a certain combination of freedom +and inevitability. In every action we examine we see a certain measure +of freedom and a certain measure of inevitability. And always the more +freedom we see in any action the less inevitability do we perceive, +and the more inevitability the less freedom. + +The proportion of freedom to inevitability decreases and increases +according to the point of view from which the action is regarded, +but their relation is always one of inverse proportion. + +A sinking man who clutches at another and drowns him; or a hungry +mother exhausted by feeding her baby, who steals some food; or a man +trained to discipline who on duty at the word of command kills a +defenseless man- seem less guilty, that is, less free and more subject +to the law of necessity, to one who knows the circumstances in which +these people were placed, and more free to one who does not know +that the man was himself drowning, that the mother was hungry, that +the soldier was in the ranks, and so on. Similarly a man who committed +a murder twenty years ago and has since lived peaceably and harmlessly +in society seems less guilty and his action more due to the law of +inevitability, to someone who considers his action after twenty +years have elapsed than to one who examined it the day after it was +committed. And in the same way every action of an insane, intoxicated, +or highly excited man appears less free and more inevitable to one who +knows the mental condition of him who committed the action, and +seems more free and less inevitable to one who does not know it. In +all these cases the conception of freedom is increased or diminished +and the conception of compulsion is correspondingly decreased or +increased, according to the point of view from which the action is +regarded. So that the greater the conception of necessity the +smaller the conception of freedom and vice versa. + +Religion, the common sense of mankind, the science of jurisprudence, +and history itself understand alike this relation between necessity +and freedom. + +All cases without exception in which our conception of freedom and +necessity is increased and diminished depend on three considerations: + +(1) The relation to the external world of the man who commits the +deeds. + +(2) His relation to time. + +(3) His relation to the causes leading to the action. + +The first consideration is the clearness of our perception of the +man's relation to the external world and the greater or lesser +clearness of our understanding of the definite position occupied by +the man in relation to everything coexisting with him. This is what +makes it evident that a drowning man is less free and more subject +to necessity than one standing on dry ground, and that makes the +actions of a man closely connected with others in a thickly +populated district, or of one bound by family, official, or business +duties, seem certainly less free and more subject to necessity than +those of a man living in solitude and seclusion. + +If we consider a man alone, apart from his relation to everything +around him, each action of his seems to us free. But if we see his +relation to anything around him, if we see his connection with +anything whatever- with a man who speaks to him, a book he reads, +the work on which he is engaged, even with the air he breathes or +the light that falls on the things about him- we see that each of +these circumstances has an influence on him and controls at least some +side of his activity. And the more we perceive of these influences the +more our conception of his freedom diminishes and the more our +conception of the necessity that weighs on him increases. + +The second consideration is the more or less evident time relation +of the man to the world and the clearness of our perception of the +place the man's action occupies in time. That is the ground which +makes the fall of the first man, resulting in the production of the +human race, appear evidently less free than a man's entry into +marriage today. It is the reason why the life and activity of people +who lived centuries ago and are connected with me in time cannot +seem to me as free as the life of a contemporary, the consequences +of which are still unknown to me. + +The degree of our conception of freedom or inevitability depends +in this respect on the greater or lesser lapse of time between the +performance of the action and our judgment of it. + +If I examine an act I performed a moment ago in approximately the +same circumstances as those I am in now, my action appears to me +undoubtedly free. But if I examine an act performed a month ago, +then being in different circumstances, I cannot help recognizing +that if that act had not been committed much that resulted from it- +good, agreeable, and even essential- would not have taken place. If +I reflect on an action still more remote, ten years ago or more, +then the consequences of my action are still plainer to me and I +find it hard to imagine what would have happened had that action not +been performed. The farther I go back in memory, or what is the same +thing the farther I go forward in my judgment, the more doubtful +becomes my belief in the freedom of my action. + +In history we find a very similar progress of conviction +concerning the part played by free will in the general affairs of +humanity. A contemporary event seems to us to be indubitably the doing +of all the known participants, but with a more remote event we already +see its inevitable results which prevent our considering anything else +possible. And the farther we go back in examining events the less +arbitrary do they appear. + +The Austro-Prussian war appears to us undoubtedly the result of +the crafty conduct of Bismarck, and so on. The Napoleonic wars still +seem to us, though already questionably, to be the outcome of their +heroes' will. But in the Crusades we already see an event occupying +its definite place in history and without which we cannot imagine +the modern history of Europe, though to the chroniclers of the +Crusades that event appeared as merely due to the will of certain +people. In regard to the migration of the peoples it does not enter +anyone's head today to suppose that the renovation of the European +world depended on Attila's caprice. The farther back in history the +object of our observation lies, the more doubtful does the free will +of those concerned in the event become and the more manifest the law +of inevitability. + +The third consideration is the degree to which we apprehend that +endless chain of causation inevitably demanded by reason, in which +each phenomenon comprehended, and therefore man's every action, must +have its definite place as a result of what has gone before and as a +cause of what will follow. + +The better we are acquainted with the physiological, +psychological, and historical laws deduced by observation and by which +man is controlled, and the more correctly we perceive the +physiological, psychological, and historical causes of the action, and +the simpler the action we are observing and the less complex the +character and mind of the man in question, the more subject to +inevitability and the less free do our actions and those of others +appear. + +When we do not at all understand the cause of an action, whether a +crime, a good action, or even one that is simply nonmoral, we +ascribe a greater amount of freedom to it. In the case of a crime we +most urgently demand the punishment for such an act; in the case of +a virtuous act we rate its merit most highly. In an indifferent case +we recognize in it more individuality, originality, and +independence. But if even one of the innumerable causes of the act +is known to us we recognize a certain element of necessity and are +less insistent on punishment for the crime, or the acknowledgment of +the merit of the virtuous act, or the freedom of the apparently +original action. That a criminal was reared among male factors +mitigates his fault in our eyes. The self-sacrifice of a father or +mother, or self-sacrifice with the possibility of a reward, is more +comprehensible than gratuitous self-sacrifice, and therefore seems +less deserving of sympathy and less the result of free will. The +founder of a sect or party, or an inventor, impresses us less when +we know how or by what the way was prepared for his activity. If we +have a large range of examples, if our observation is constantly +directed to seeking the correlation of cause and effect in people's +actions, their actions appear to us more under compulsion and less +free the more correctly we connect the effects with the causes. If +we examined simple actions and had a vast number of such actions under +observation, our conception of their inevitability would be still +greater. The dishonest conduct of the son of a dishonest father, the +misconduct of a woman who had fallen into bad company, a drunkard's +relapse into drunkenness, and so on are actions that seem to us less +free the better we understand their cause. If the man whose actions we +are considering is on a very low stage of mental development, like a +child, a madman, or a simpleton- then, knowing the causes of the act +and the simplicity of the character and intelligence in question, we +see so large an element of necessity and so little free will that as +soon as we know the cause prompting the action we can foretell the +result. + +On these three considerations alone is based the conception of +irresponsibility for crimes and the extenuating circumstances admitted +by all legislative codes. The responsibility appears greater or less +according to our greater or lesser knowledge of the circumstances in +which the man was placed whose action is being judged, and according +to the greater or lesser interval of time between the commission of +the action and its investigation, and according to the greater or +lesser understanding of the causes that led to the action. + +CHAPTER X + +Thus our conception of free will and inevitability gradually +diminishes or increases according to the greater or lesser +connection with the external world, the greater or lesser remoteness +of time, and the greater or lesser dependence on the causes in +relation to which we contemplate a man's life. + +So that if we examine the case of a man whose connection with the +external world is well known, where the time between the action and +its examination is great, and where the causes of the action are +most accessible, we get the conception of a maximum of inevitability +and a minimum of free will. If we examine a man little dependent on +external conditions, whose action was performed very recently, and the +causes of whose action are beyond our ken, we get the conception of +a minimum of inevitability and a maximum of freedom. + +In neither case- however we may change our point of view, however +plain we may make to ourselves the connection between the man and +the external world, however inaccessible it may be to us, however long +or short the period of time, however intelligible or +incomprehensible the causes of the action may be- can we ever conceive +either complete freedom or complete necessity. + +(1) To whatever degree we may imagine a man to be exempt from the +influence of the external world, we never get a conception of +freedom in space. Every human action is inevitably conditioned by what +surrounds him and by his own body. I lift my arm and let it fall. My +action seems to me free; but asking myself whether I could raise my +arm in every direction, I see that I raised it in the direction in +which there was least obstruction to that action either from things +around me or from the construction of my own body. I chose one out +of all the possible directions because in it there were fewest +obstacles. For my action to be free it was necessary that it should +encounter no obstacles. To conceive of a man being free we must +imagine him outside space, which is evidently impossible. + +(2) However much we approximate the time of judgment to the time +of the deed, we never get a conception of freedom in time. For if I +examine an action committed a second ago I must still recognize it +as not being free, for it is irrevocably linked to the moment at which +it was committed. Can I lift my arm? I lift it, but ask myself: +could I have abstained from lifting my arm at the moment that has +already passed? To convince myself of this I do not lift it the next +moment. But I am not now abstaining from doing so at the first +moment when I asked the question. Time has gone by which I could not +detain, the arm I then lifted is no longer the same as the arm I now +refrain from lifting, nor is the air in which I lifted it the same +that now surrounds me. The moment in which the first movement was made +is irrevocable, and at that moment I could make only one movement, and +whatever movement I made would be the only one. That I did not lift my +arm a moment later does not prove that I could have abstained from +lifting it then. And since I could make only one movement at that +single moment of time, it could not have been any other. To imagine it +as free, it is necessary to imagine it in the present, on the boundary +between the past and the future- that is, outside time, which is +impossible. + +(3) However much the difficulty of understanding the causes may be +increased, we never reach a conception of complete freedom, that is, +an absence of cause. However inaccessible to us may be the cause of +the expression of will in any action, our own or another's, the +first demand of reason is the assumption of and search for a cause, +for without a cause no phenomenon is conceivable. I raise my arm to +perform an action independently of any cause, but my wish to perform +an action without a cause is the cause of my action. + +But even if- imagining a man quite exempt from all influences, +examining only his momentary action in the present, unevoked by any +cause- we were to admit so infinitely small a remainder of +inevitability as equaled zero, we should even then not have arrived at +the conception of complete freedom in man, for a being uninfluenced by +the external world, standing outside of time and independent of cause, +is no longer a man. + +In the same way we can never imagine the action of a man quite +devoid of freedom and entirely subject to the law of inevitability. + +(1) However we may increase our knowledge of the conditions of space +in which man is situated, that knowledge can never be complete, for +the number of those conditions is as infinite as the infinity of +space. And therefore so long as not all the conditions influencing men +are defined, there is no complete inevitability but a certain +measure of freedom remains. + +(2) However we may prolong the period of time between the action +we are examining and the judgment upon it, that period will be finite, +while time is infinite, and so in this respect too there can never +be absolute inevitability. + +(3) However accessible may be the chain of causation of any +action, we shall never know the whole chain since it is endless, and +so again we never reach absolute inevitability. + +But besides this, even if, admitting the remaining minimum of +freedom to equal zero, we assumed in some given case- as for +instance in that of a dying man, an unborn babe, or an idiot- complete +absence of freedom, by so doing we should destroy the very +conception of man in the case we are examining, for as soon as there +is no freedom there is also no man. And so the conception of the +action of a man subject solely to the law of inevitability without any +element of freedom is just as impossible as the conception of a +man's completely free action. + +And so to imagine the action of a man entirely subject to the law of +inevitability without any freedom, we must assume the knowledge of +an infinite number of space relations, an infinitely long period of +time, and an infinite series of causes. + +To imagine a man perfectly free and not subject to the law of +inevitability, we must imagine him all alone, beyond space, beyond +time, and free from dependence on cause. + +In the first case, if inevitability were possible without freedom we +should have reached a definition of inevitability by the laws of +inevitability itself, that is, a mere form without content. + +In the second case, if freedom were possible without inevitability +we should have arrived at unconditioned freedom beyond space, time, +and cause, which by the fact of its being unconditioned and +unlimited would be nothing, or mere content without form. + +We should in fact have reached those two fundamentals of which man's +whole outlook on the universe is constructed- the incomprehensible +essence of life, and the laws defining that essence. + +Reason says: (1) space with all the forms of matter that give it +visibility is infinite, and cannot be imagined otherwise. (2) Time +is infinite motion without a moment of rest and is unthinkable +otherwise. (3) The connection between cause and effect has no +beginning and can have no end. + +Consciousness says: (1) I alone am, and all that exists is but me, +consequently I include space. (2) I measure flowing time by the +fixed moment of the present in which alone I am conscious of myself as +living, consequently I am outside time. (3) I am beyond cause, for I +feel myself to be the cause of every manifestation of my life. + +Reason gives expression to the laws of inevitability. +Consciousness gives expression to the essence of freedom. + +Freedom not limited by anything is the essence of life, in man's +consciousness. Inevitability without content is man's reason in its +three forms. + +Freedom is the thing examined. Inevitability is what examines. +Freedom is the content. Inevitability is the form. + +Only by separating the two sources of cognition, related to one +another as form to content, do we get the mutually exclusive and +separately incomprehensible conceptions of freedom and inevitability. + +Only by uniting them do we get a clear conception of man's life. + +Apart from these two concepts which in their union mutually define +one another as form and content, no conception of life is possible. + +All that we know of the life of man is merely a certain relation +of free will to inevitability, that is, of consciousness to the laws +of reason. + +All that we know of the external world of nature is only a certain +relation of the forces of nature to inevitability, or of the essence +of life to the laws of reason. + +The great natural forces lie outside us and we are not conscious +of them; we call those forces gravitation, inertia, electricity, +animal force, and so on, but we are conscious of the force of life +in man and we call that freedom. + +But just as the force of gravitation, incomprehensible in itself but +felt by every man, is understood by us only to the extent to which +we know the laws of inevitability to which it is subject (from the +first knowledge that all bodies have weight, up to Newton's law), so +too the force of free will, incomprehensible in itself but of which +everyone is conscious, is intelligible to us only in as far as we know +the laws of inevitability to which it is subject (from the fact that +every man dies, up to the knowledge of the most complex economic and +historic laws). + +All knowledge is merely a bringing of this essence of life under the +laws of reason. + +Man's free will differs from every other force in that man is +directly conscious of it, but in the eyes of reason it in no way +differs from any other force. The forces of gravitation, +electricity, or chemical affinity are only distinguished from one +another in that they are differently defined by reason. Just so the +force of man's free will is distinguished by reason from the other +forces of nature only by the definition reason gives it. Freedom, +apart from necessity, that is, apart from the laws of reason that +define it, differs in no way from gravitation, or heat, or the force +that makes things grow; for reason, it is only a momentary undefinable +sensation of life. + +And as the undefinable essence of the force moving the heavenly +bodies, the undefinable essence of the forces of heat and electricity, +or of chemical affinity, or of the vital force, forms the content of +astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and so on, just in the +same way does the force of free will form the content of history. +But just as the subject of every science is the manifestation of +this unknown essence of life while that essence itself can only be the +subject of metaphysics, even the manifestation of the force of free +will in human beings in space, in time, and in dependence on cause +forms the subject of history, while free will itself is the subject of +metaphysics. + +In the experimental sciences what we know we call the laws of +inevitability, what is unknown to us we call vital force. Vital +force is only an expression for the unknown remainder over and above +what we know of the essence of life. + +So also in history what is known to us we call laws of +inevitability, what is unknown we call free will. Free will is for +history only an expression for the unknown remainder of what we know +about the laws of human life. + +CHAPTER XI + +History examines the manifestations of man's free will in connection +with the external world in time and in dependence on cause, that is, +it defines this freedom by the laws of reason, and so history is a +science only in so far as this free will is defined by those laws. + +The recognition of man's free will as something capable of +influencing historical events, that is, as not subject to laws, is the +same for history as the recognition of a free force moving the +heavenly bodies would be for astronomy. + +That assumption would destroy the possibility of the existence of +laws, that is, of any science whatever. If there is even a single body +moving freely, then the laws of Kepler and Newton are negatived and no +conception of the movement of the heavenly bodies any longer exists. +If any single action is due to free will, then not a single historical +law can exist, nor any conception of historical events. + +For history, lines exist of the movement of human wills, one end +of which is hidden in the unknown but at the other end of which a +consciousness of man's will in the present moves in space, time, and +dependence on cause. + +The more this field of motion spreads out before our eyes, the +more evident are the laws of that movement. To discover and define +those laws is the problem of history. + +From the standpoint from which the science of history now regards +its subject on the path it now follows, seeking the causes of events +in man's freewill, a scientific enunciation of those laws is +impossible, for however man's free will may be restricted, as soon +as we recognize it as a force not subject to law, the existence of law +becomes impossible. + +Only by reducing this element of free will to the infinitesimal, +that is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can we +convince ourselves of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes, +and then instead of seeking causes, history will take the discovery of +laws as its problem. + +The search for these laws has long been begun and the new methods of +thought which history must adopt are being worked out simultaneously +with the self-destruction toward which- ever dissecting and dissecting +the causes of phenomena- the old method of history is moving. + +All human sciences have traveled along that path. Arriving at +infinitesimals, mathematics, the most exact of sciences, abandons +the process of analysis and enters on the new process of the +integration of unknown, infinitely small, quantities. Abandoning the +conception of cause, mathematics seeks law, that is, the property +common to all unknown, infinitely small, elements. + +In another form but along the same path of reflection the other +sciences have proceeded. When Newton enunciated the law of gravity +he did not say that the sun or the earth had a property of attraction; +he said that all bodies from the largest to the smallest have the +property of attracting one another, that is, leaving aside the +question of the cause of the movement of the bodies, he expressed +the property common to all bodies from the infinitely large to the +infinitely small. The same is done by the natural sciences: leaving +aside the question of cause, they seek for laws. History stands on the +same path. And if history has for its object the study of the movement +of the nations and of humanity and not the narration of episodes in +the lives of individuals, it too, setting aside the conception of +cause, should seek the laws common to all the inseparably +interconnected infinitesimal elements of free will. + +CHAPTER XII + +From the time the law of Copernicus was discovered and proved, the +mere recognition of the fact that it was not the sun but the earth +that moves sufficed to destroy the whole cosmography of the +ancients. By disproving that law it might have been possible to retain +the old conception of the movements of the bodies, but without +disproving it, it would seem impossible to continue studying the +Ptolemaic worlds. But even after the discovery of the law of +Copernicus the Ptolemaic worlds were still studied for a long time. + +From the time the first person said and proved that the number of +births or of crimes is subject to mathematical laws, and that this +or that mode of government is determined by certain geographical and +economic conditions, and that certain relations of population to +soil produce migrations of peoples, the foundations on which history +had been built were destroyed in their essence. + +By refuting these new laws the former view of history might have +been retained; but without refuting them it would seem impossible to +continue studying historic events as the results of man's free will. +For if a certain mode of government was established or certain +migrations of peoples took place in consequence of such and such +geographic, ethnographic, or economic conditions, then the free will +of those individuals who appear to us to have established that mode of +government or occasioned the migrations can no longer be regarded as +the cause. + +And yet the former history continues to be studied side by side with +the laws of statistics, geography, political economy, comparative +philology, and geology, which directly contradict its assumptions. + +The struggle between the old views and the new was long and +stubbornly fought out in physical philosophy. Theology stood on +guard for the old views and accused the new of violating revelation. +But when truth conquered, theology established itself just as firmly +on the new foundation. + +Just as prolonged and stubborn is the struggle now proceeding +between the old and the new conception of history, and theology in the +same way stands on guard for the old view, and accuses the new view of +subverting revelation. + +In the one case as in the other, on both sides the struggle provokes +passion and stifles truth. On the one hand there is fear and regret +for the loss of the whole edifice constructed through the ages, on the +other is the passion for destruction. + +To the men who fought against the rising truths of physical +philosophy, it seemed that if they admitted that truth it would +destroy faith in God, in the creation of the firmament, and in the +miracle of Joshua the son of Nun. To the defenders of the laws of +Copernicus and Newton, to Voltaire for example, it seemed that the +laws of astronomy destroyed religion, and he utilized the law of +gravitation as a weapon against religion. + +Just so it now seems as if we have only to admit the law of +inevitability, to destroy the conception of the soul, of good and +evil, and all the institutions of state and church that have been +built up on those conceptions. + +So too, like Voltaire in his time, uninvited defenders of the law of +inevitability today use that law as a weapon against religion, +though the law of inevitability in history, like the law of Copernicus +in astronomy, far from destroying, even strengthens the foundation +on which the institutions of state and church are erected. + +As in the question of astronomy then, so in the question of +history now, the whole difference of opinion is based on the +recognition or nonrecognition of something absolute, serving as the +measure of visible phenomena. In astronomy it was the immovability +of the earth, in history it is the independence of personality- free +will. + +As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the +earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth's +fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the +difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of +space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the +independence of one's own personality. But as in astronomy the new +view said: "It is true that we do not feel the movement of the +earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while +by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws," +so also in history the new view says: "It is true that we are not +conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we +arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external +world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws." + +In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness +of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did +not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce +a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of +which we are not conscious. + +% Notes: +% SiSU: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu +% SiSU markup for 0.16 and later +% SiSU markup: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/sample +% Output: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/war_and_peace.leo_tolstoy +% Markup: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/sample/markup/war_and_peace.leo_tolstoy.sst +% Syntax: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/sample/syntax/war_and_peace.leo_tolstoy.sst.html diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/README b/data/samples/wrapped/README new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3be1001 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/README @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +This directory contains sisu marked up files with lines of fixed width. 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You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor; * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes; * No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work; * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. (* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. * Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ These SiSU presentations of Accelerando are done with the kind permission of the author Charles Stross + +@original: + :source: http://www.accelerando.org/ + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:science fiction|short stories;fiction:science fiction|artificial intelligence + :subject: Science Fiction + +@identifier: + :oclc: 57682282 + :isbn: 9780441012848 + +@links: + { Accelerando home }http://www.accelerando.org/ + { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_%28novel%29 + { @ Amazon.com}http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441014151 + { @ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0441014151 + +@make: +% :headings: none; PART; none; Chapter; + :breaks: new=:A,:B; break=:C,1 + :home_button_image: {accelerando_stross.png }http://www.accelerando.org/ + :footer: {Accelerando}http://www.accelerando.org/; {Charles Stross}http://www.antipope.org/charlie/ + +% book cover shot (US) book cover shot (UK) + +% http://www.accelerando.org/_static/accelerando.html + +:A~ @title @author + +1~dedication Dedication + +For Feòrag, with love + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgements + +This book took me five years to write - a personal record - and would not exist +without the support and encouragement of a host of friends, and several +friendly editors. Among the many people who read and commented on the early +drafts are: Andrew J. Wilson, Stef Pearson, Gav Inglis, Andrew Ferguson, Jack +Deighton, Jane McKie, Hannu Rajaniemi, Martin Page, Stephen Christian, Simon +Bisson, Paul Fraser, Dave Clements, Ken MacLeod, Damien Broderick, Damon +Sicore, Cory Doctorow, Emmet O'Brien, Andrew Ducker, Warren Ellis, and Peter +Hollo. (If your name isn't on this list, blame my memory - my neural prostheses +are off-line.) + +I mentioned several friendly editors earlier: I relied on the talented +midwifery of Gardner Dozois, who edited Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine at +the time, and Sheila Williams, who quietly and diligently kept the wheels +rolling. My agent Caitlin Blasdell had a hand in it too, and I'd like to thank +my editors Ginjer Buchanan at Ace and Tim Holman at Orbit for their helpful +comments and advice. + +Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who e-mailed me to ask when the book was +coming, or who voted for the stories that were shortlisted for awards. You did +a great job of keeping me focused, even during the periods when the whole +project was too daunting to contemplate. + +1~history Publication History + +Portions of this book originally appeared in Asimov's SF Magazine as follows: +"Lobsters" (June 2001), "Troubadour" (Oct/Nov 2001), "Tourist" (Feb 2002), +"Halo" (June 2002), "Router" (Sept 2002), "Nightfall" (April 2003), "Curator" +(Dec 2003), "Elector" (Oct/Nov 2004), "Survivor" (Dec 2004). + +[Accelerando was published by Ace Books on July 5, 2005] ~# + +:B~ PART 1: Slow Takeoff + +"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the +question of whether a submarine can swim." + +- Edsger W. Dijkstra + +1~ Chapter 1: Lobsters + +Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich. + +It's a hot summer Tuesday, and he's standing in the plaza in front of the +Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the +canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists +chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and +the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams +ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a +pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The +bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the +whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he's +fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with the dynamic optimism of +another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going +to become very rich indeed. + +He wonders who it's going to be. + +* * * + +Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij 't IJ, watching +the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly +sour /{gueuze}/. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up +display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They +compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. +A couple of punks - maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by +the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar - +are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A +tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead +cast long, cool shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting +water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, +sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he's +going to meet a man he can talk to about trading energy for space, +twenty-first-century style, and forget about his personal problems. + +He's ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low-bandwidth, +high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to +him, and says his name: "Manfred Macx?" + +He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned +smooth-running muscles clad in a paean to polymer technology: electric blue +lycra and wasp yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti collision LEDs +and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, +struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiance. + +"I'm Macx," he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her bar-code +reader. "Who's it from?" + +"FedEx." The voice isn't Pam's. She dumps the box in his lap, then she's back +over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone already chirping, +disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions. + +Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it's a disposable supermarket phone, +paid for in cash - cheap, untraceable, and efficient. It can even do conference +calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere. + +The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly +annoyed. "Yes? Who is this?" + +The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this +decade of cheap on-line translation services. "Manfred. Am please to meet you. +Wish to personalize interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer." + +"Who are you?" Manfred repeats suspiciously. + +"Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU." + +"I think your translator's broken." He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as +if it's made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the +other end of the line. + +"Nyet - no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software. +Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and +pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?" + +Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk +along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat +mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple +listener process. "Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you +could talk to me?" + +"Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and +Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: +Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our +tutorials." + +Manfred pauses in mid stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided +roller blader. This is getting weird enough to trip his weird-out meter, and +that takes some doing. Manfred's whole life is lived on the bleeding edge of +strangeness, fifteen minutes into everyone else's future, and he's normally in +complete control - but at times like this he gets a frisson of fear, a sense +that he might just have missed the correct turn on reality's approach road. +"Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some +kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright +infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?" + +"Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire +to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You +are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine +because digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am +wishing to defect." + +Manfred stops dead in the street. "Oh man, you've got the wrong free enterprise +broker here. I don't work for the government. I'm strictly private." A rogue +advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties +kitsch across his navigation window - which is blinking - for a moment before a +phage process kills it and spawns a new filter. He leans against a shop front, +massaging his forehead and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. +"Have you tried the State Department?" + +"Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-SSR. State Department is not +help us." + +This is getting just too bizarre. Manfred's never been too clear on new-old +old-new European metapolitics: Just dodging the crumbling bureaucracy of his +old-old American heritage gives him headaches. "Well, if you hadn't shafted +them during the late noughties ... " Manfred taps his left heel on the +pavement, looking round for a way out of this conversation. A camera winks at +him from atop a streetlight; he waves, wondering idly if it's the KGB or the +traffic police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive +within the next half hour, and this Cold War retread Eliza-bot is bumming him +out. "Look, I don't deal with the G-men. I /{hate}/ the military-industrial +complex. I hate traditional politics. They're all zero-sum cannibals." A +thought occurs to him. "If survival is what you're after, you could post your +state vector on one of the p2p nets: Then nobody could delete you -" + +"Nyet!" The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it's possible to sound +over a VoiP link. "Am not open source! Not want lose autonomy!" + +"Then we probably have nothing to talk about." Manfred punches the hang-up +button and throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits the water, and +there's a pop of deflagrating lithium cells. "Fucking Cold War hangover +losers," he swears under his breath, quite angry, partly at himself for losing +his cool and partly at the harassing entity behind the anonymous phone call. +"/{Fucking}/ capitalist spooks." Russia has been back under the thumb of the +apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with anarchocapitalism +replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme and Putinesque puritanism, and it's no +surprise that the wall's crumbling - but it looks like they haven't learned +anything from the current woes afflicting the United States. The neocommies +still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants +to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector: /{See! +You get ahead by giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive!}/ But +the KGB won't get the message. He's dealt with old-time commie weak-AIs before, +minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: They're so +thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of global capitalism that they +can't surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term. + +Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he's going to +patent next. + +* * * + +_1 Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful +multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass +paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has +airline employee's travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having +worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing +clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that +wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to +measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he's never met. Law firms handle +his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy, does he patent a lot - +although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as +contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project. + +_1 In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the +business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual +property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He's the guy who +patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from +an initial description of a problem domain - not just a better mousetrap, but +the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions +are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become +illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. +There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a +net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the +Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual +property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego +and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking +the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think +he's the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope. + +_1 Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up +with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes +with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity +from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred +never has to pay for anything. + +_1 There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant +burn of future shock - he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and +several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue +Service is investigating him continuously because it doesn't believe his +lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And then there are the items that no +money can't buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn't spoken to them for +three years, his father thinks he's a hippy scrounger, and his mother still +hasn't forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation +course. (They're still locked in the boringly bourgeois twen-cen paradigm of +college-career-kids.) His fiance and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over +six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically, +she's a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the place at public expense, +trying to persuade entrepreneurs who've gone global to pay taxes for the good +of the Treasury Department.) To cap it all, the Southern Baptist Conventions +have denounced him as a minion of Satan on all their websites. Which would be +funny because, as a born-again atheist Manfred doesn't believe in Satan, if it +wasn't for the dead kittens that someone keeps mailing him. + +* * * + +Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his Aineko, plugs in a fresh set +of cells to charge, and sticks most of his private keys in the safe. Then he +heads straight for the party, which is currently happening at De Wildemann's; +it's a twenty-minute walk, and the only real hazard is dodging the trams that +sneak up on him behind the cover of his moving map display. + +Along the way, his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe has +achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this +unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. The +Middle East is, well, it's just as bad as ever, but the war on fundamentalism +doesn't hold much interest for Manfred. In San Diego, researchers are uploading +lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron +at a time. They're burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Georgia. NASA still +can't put a man on the moon. Russia has re-elected the communist government +with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile, in China, fevered rumors +circulate about an imminent rehabilitation, the second coming of Mao, who will +save them from the consequences of the Three Gorges disaster. In business news, +the US Justice Department is - ironically - outraged at the Baby Bills. The +divested Microsoft divisions have automated their legal processes and are +spawning subsidiaries, IPOing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of +bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that, by the time the windfall tax demands +are served, the targets don't exist anymore, even though the same staff are +working on the same software in the same Mumbai cubicle farms. + +Welcome to the twenty-first century. + +The permanent floating meatspace party Manfred is hooking up with is a strange +attractor for some of the American exiles cluttering up the cities of Europe +this decade - not trustafarians, but honest-to-God political dissidents, draft +dodgers, and terminal outsourcing victims. It's the kind of place where weird +connections are made and crossed lines make new short circuits into the future, +like the street cafes of Switzerland where the pre Great War Russian exiles +gathered. Right now it's located in the back of De Wildemann's, a +three-hundred-year old brown cafe with a list of brews that runs to sixteen +pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with +the smells of tobacco, brewer's yeast, and melatonin spray: Half the dotters +are nursing monster jet lag hangovers, and the other half are babbling a +Eurotrash creole at each other while they work on the hangover. "Man did you +see that? He looks like a Democrat!" exclaims one whitebread hanger-on who's +currently propping up the bar. Manfred slides in next to him, catches the +bartender's eye. + +"Glass of the Berlinerweisse, please," he says. + +"You drink that stuff?" asks the hanger-on, curling a hand protectively around +his Coke. "Man, you don't want to do that! It's full of alcohol!" + +Manfred grins at him toothily. "Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up: There are +lots of neurotransmitter precursors in this shit, phenylalanine and glutamate." + +"But I thought that was a beer you were ordering ..." + +Manfred's away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more +popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper +floaters has planted a contact bug on it, and the vCards of all the personal +network owners who've have visited the bar in the past three hours are queuing +up for attention. The air is full of ultrawideband chatter, WiMAX and 'tooth +both, as he speed-scrolls through the dizzying list of cached keys in search of +one particular name. + +"Your drink." The barman holds out an improbable-looking goblet full of blue +liquid with a cap of melting foam and a felching straw stuck out at some crazy +angle. Manfred takes it and heads for the back of the split-level bar, up the +steps to a table where some guy with greasy dreadlocks is talking to a suit +from Paris. The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first time, staring +with suddenly wide eyes: He nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door. + +/{Oh shit, thinks Manfred, better buy some more server time}/. He can recognize +the signs: He's about to be slashdotted. He gestures at the table. "This one +taken?" + +"Be my guest," says the guy with the dreads. Manfred slides the chair open then +realizes that the other guy - immaculate double-breasted Suit, sober tie, crew +cut - is a girl. She nods at him, half-smiling at his transparent double take. +Mr. Dreadlock nods. "You're Macx? I figured it was about time we met." + +"Sure." Manfred holds out a hand, and they shake. His PDA discreetly swaps +digital fingerprints, confirming that the hand belongs to Bob Franklin, a +Research Triangle startup monkey with a VC track record, lately moving into +micromachining and space technology. Franklin made his first million two +decades ago, and now he's a specialist in extropian investment fields. +Operating exclusively overseas these past five years, ever since the IRS got +medieval about trying to suture the sucking chest wound of the federal budget +deficit. Manfred has known him for nearly a decade via a closed mailing list, +but this is the first time they've ever met face-to-face. The Suit silently +slides a business card across the table; a little red devil brandishes a +trident at him, flames jetting up around its feet. He takes the card, raises an +eyebrow: "Annette Dimarcos? I'm pleased to meet you. Can't say I've ever met +anyone from Arianespace marketing before." + +She smiles warmly; "That is all right. I have not the pleasure of meeting the +famous venture altruist either." Her accent is noticeably Parisian, a pointed +reminder that she's making a concession to him just by talking. Her camera +earrings watch him curiously, encoding everything for the company memory. She's +a genuine new European, unlike most of the American exiles cluttering up the +bar. + +"Yes, well." He nods cautiously, unsure how to deal with her. "Bob. I assume +you're in on this ball?" + +Franklin nods; beads clatter. "Yeah, man. Ever since the Teledesic smash it's +been, well, waiting. If you've got something for us, we're game." + +"Hmm." The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons and +slightly less cheap high-altitude, solar-powered drones with spread-spectrum +laser relays: It marked the beginning of a serious recession in the satellite +biz. "The depression's got to end sometime: But" - a nod to Annette from Paris +- "with all due respect, I don't think the break will involve one of the +existing club carriers." + +She shrugs. "Arianespace is forward-looking. We face reality. The launch cartel +cannot stand. Bandwidth is not the only market force in space. We must explore +new opportunities. I personally have helped us diversify into submarine reactor +engineering, microgravity nanotechnology fabrication, and hotel management." +Her face is a well-polished mask as she recites the company line, but he can +sense the sardonic amusement behind it as she adds: "We are more flexible than +the American space industry ..." + +Manfred shrugs. "That's as may be." He sips his Berlinerweisse slowly as she +launches into a long, stilted explanation of how Arianespace is a diversified +dot-com with orbital aspirations, a full range of merchandising spin-offs, Bond +movie sets, and a promising hotel chain in LEO. She obviously didn't come up +with these talking points herself. Her face is much more expressive than her +voice as she mimes boredom and disbelief at appropriate moments - an +out-of-band signal invisible to her corporate earrings. Manfred plays along, +nodding occasionally, trying to look as if he's taking it seriously: Her droll +subversion has got his attention far more effectively than the content of the +marketing pitch. Franklin is nose down in his beer, shoulders shaking as he +tries not to guffaw at the hand gestures she uses to express her opinion of her +employer's thrusting, entrepreneurial executives. Actually, the talking points +bullshit is right about one thing: Arianespace is still profitable, due to +those hotels and orbital holiday hops. Unlike LockMartBoeing, who'd go Chapter +Eleven in a split second if their Pentagon drip-feed ran dry. + +Someone else sidles up to the table; a pudgy guy in outrageously loud Hawaiian +shirt with pens leaking in a breast pocket and the worst case of ozone-hole +burn Manfred's seen in ages. "Hi, Bob," says the new arrival. "How's life?" + +"'S good." Franklin nodes at Manfred; "Manfred, meet Ivan MacDonald. Ivan, +Manfred. Have a seat?" He leans over. "Ivan's a public arts guy. He's heavily +into extreme concrete." + +"Rubberized concrete," Ivan says, slightly too loudly. "/{Pink}/ rubberized +concrete." + +"Ah!" He's somehow triggered a priority interrupt: Annette from Arianespace +drops out of marketing zombiehood with a shudder of relief and, duty +discharged, reverts to her non corporate identity: "You are he who rubberized +the Reichstag, yes? With the supercritical carbon-dioxide carrier and the +dissolved polymethoxysilanes?" She claps her hands, eyes alight with +enthusiasm: "Wonderful!" + +"He rubberized /{what}/?" Manfred mutters in Bob's ear. + +Franklin shrugs. "Don't ask me, I'm just an engineer." + +"He works with limestone and sandstones as well as concrete; he's brilliant!" +Annette smiles at Manfred. "Rubberizing the symbol of the, the autocracy, is it +not wonderful?" + +"I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve," Manfred says ruefully. He +adds to Bob: "Buy me another drink?" + +"I'm going to rubberize Three Gorges!" Ivan explains loudly. "When the +floodwaters subside." + +Just then, a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on +Manfred's head and sends clumps of humongous pixilation flickering across his +sensorium: Around the world, five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home +site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the +bar. Manfred winces. "I really came here to talk about the economic +exploitation of space travel, but I've just been slashdotted. Mind if I just +sit and drink until it wears off?" + +"Sure, man." Bob waves at the bar. "More of the same all round!" At the next +table, a person with makeup and long hair who's wearing a dress - Manfred +doesn't want to speculate about the gender of these crazy mixed-up Euros - is +reminiscing about wiring the fleshpots of Tehran for cybersex. Two +collegiate-looking dudes are arguing intensely in German: The translation +stream in his glasses tell him they're arguing over whether the Turing Test is +a Jim Crow law that violates European corpus juris standards on human rights. +The beer arrives, and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred: "Here, try +this. You'll like it." + +"Okay." It's some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy superoxides: +Just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there's a fire alarm in his nose +screaming /{danger, Will Robinson! Cancer! Cancer!}/. "Yeah, right. Did I say I +nearly got mugged on my way here?" + +"Mugged? Hey, that's heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had stopped - did +they sell you anything?" + +"No, but they weren't your usual marketing type. You know anyone who can use a +Warpac surplus espionage bot? Recent model, one careful owner, slightly +paranoid but basically sound - I mean, claims to be a general-purpose AI?" + +"No. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn't like that." + +"What I thought. Poor thing's probably unemployable, anyway." + +"The space biz." + +"Ah, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn't it? Hasn't been the same since +Rotary Rocket went bust for the second time. And NASA, mustn't forget NASA." + +"To NASA." Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass in toast. +Ivan the extreme concrete geek has an arm round her shoulders, and she leans +against him; he raises his glass, too. "Lots more launchpads to rubberize!" + +"To NASA," Bob echoes. They drink. "Hey, Manfred. To NASA?" + +"NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows +a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just +dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. +They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational +problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into +computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only +way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now - dumb all over! Just +measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need +to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle +the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor +nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of +the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of +solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!" + +Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. "Sounds kind of +long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?" + +"Very long-term - at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments +for this market, Bob; if they can't tax it, they won't understand it. But see, +there's an angle on the self-replicating robotics market coming up, that's +going to set the cheap launch market doubling every fifteen months for the +foreseeable future, starting in, oh, about two years. It's your leg up, and my +keystone for the Dyson sphere project. It works like this -" + +* * * + +It's night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty thousand human +babies are being born around the world. Meanwhile automated factories in +Indonesia and Mexico have produced another quarter of a million motherboards +with processors rated at more than ten petaflops - about an order of magnitude +below the lower bound on the computational capacity of a human brain. Another +fourteen months and the larger part of the cumulative conscious processing +power of the human species will be arriving in silicon. And the first meat the +new AIs get to know will be the uploaded lobsters. + +Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his glasses are +still jerking, slashdotted to hell and back by geeks piggybacking on his call +to dismantle the moon. They stutter quiet suggestions at his peripheral vision. +Fractal cloud-witches ghost across the face of the moon as the last huge +Airbuses of the night rumble past overhead. Manfred's skin crawls, grime +embedded in his clothing from three days of continuous wear. + +Back in his room, the Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head against +his ankle. She's a late-model Sony, thoroughly upgradeable: Manfred's been +working on her in his spare minutes, using an open source development kit to +extend her suite of neural networks. He bends down and pets her, then sheds his +clothing and heads for the en suite bathroom. When he's down to the glasses and +nothing more, he steps into the shower and dials up a hot, steamy spray. The +shower tries to strike up a friendly conversation about football, but he isn't +even awake enough to mess with its silly little associative personalization +network. Something that happened earlier in the day is bugging him, but he +can't quite put his finger on what's wrong. + +Toweling himself off, Manfred yawns. Jet lag has finally overtaken him, a +velvet hammerblow between the eyes. He reaches for the bottle beside the bed, +dry-swallows two melatonin tablets, a capsule full of antioxidants, and a +multivitamin bullet: Then he lies down on the bed, on his back, legs together, +arms slightly spread. The suite lights dim in response to commands from the +thousand petaflops of distributed processing power running the neural networks +that interface with his meatbrain through the glasses. + +Manfred drops into a deep ocean of unconsciousness populated by gentle voices. +He isn't aware of it, but he talks in his sleep - disjointed mumblings that +would mean little to another human but everything to the metacortex lurking +beyond his glasses. The young posthuman intelligence over whose Cartesian +theatre he presides sings urgently to him while he slumbers. + +* * * + +Manfred is always at his most vulnerable shortly after waking. + +He screams into wakefulness as artificial light floods the room: For a moment +he is unsure whether he has slept. He forgot to pull the covers up last night, +and his feet feel like lumps of frozen cardboard. Shuddering with inexplicable +tension, he pulls a fresh set of underwear from his overnight bag, then drags +on soiled jeans and tank top. Sometime today he'll have to spare time to hunt +the feral T-shirt in Amsterdam's markets, or find a Renfield and send it forth +to buy clothing. He really ought to find a gym and work out, but he doesn't +have time - his glasses remind him that he's six hours behind the moment and +urgently needs to catch up. His teeth ache in his gums, and his tongue feels +like a forest floor that's been visited with Agent Orange. He has a sense that +something went bad yesterday; if only he could remember /{what}/. + +He speed reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth, then blogs +his web throughput to a public annotation server; he's still too enervated to +finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a morning rant on his storyboard +site. His brain is still fuzzy, like a scalpel blade clogged with too much +blood: He needs stimulus, excitement, the burn of the new. Whatever, it can +wait on breakfast. He opens his bedroom door and nearly steps on a small, damp +cardboard box that lies on the carpet. + +The box - he's seen a couple of its kin before. But there are no stamps on this +one, no address: just his name, in big, childish handwriting. He kneels and +gently picks it up. It's about the right weight. Something shifts inside it +when he tips it back and forth. It smells. He carries it into his room +carefully, angrily: Then he opens it to confirm his worst suspicion. It's been +surgically decerebrated, brains scooped out like a boiled egg. + +"Fuck!" + +This is the first time the madman has gotten as far as his bedroom door. It +raises worrying possibilities. + +Manfred pauses for a moment, triggering agents to go hunt down arrest +statistics, police relations, information on corpus juris, Dutch animal-cruelty +laws. He isn't sure whether to dial two-one-one on the archaic voice phone or +let it ride. Aineko, picking up his angst, hides under the dresser mewling +pathetically. Normally he'd pause a minute to reassure the creature, but not +now: Its mere presence is suddenly acutely embarrassing, a confession of deep +inadequacy. It's too realistic, as if somehow the dead kitten's neural maps -- +stolen, no doubt, for some dubious uploading experiment -- have ended up +padding out its plastic skull. He swears again, looks around, then takes the +easy option: Down the stairs two steps at a time, stumbling on the second floor +landing, down to the breakfast room in the basement, where he will perform the +stable rituals of morning. + +Breakfast is unchanging, an island of deep geological time standing still +amidst the continental upheaval of new technologies. While reading a paper on +public key steganography and parasite network identity spoofing he mechanically +assimilates a bowl of cornflakes and skimmed milk, then brings a platter of +whole grain bread and slices of some weird seed-infested Dutch cheese back to +his place. There is a cup of strong black coffee in front of his setting, and +he picks it up and slurps half of it down before he realizes he's not alone at +the table. Someone is sitting opposite him. He glances up incuriously and +freezes inside. + +"Morning, Manfred. How does it feel to owe the government twelve million, three +hundred and sixty-two thousand, nine hundred and sixteen dollars and fifty-one +cents?" She smiles a Mona Lisa smile, at once affectionate and challenging. + +Manfred puts everything in his sensorium on indefinite hold and stares at her. +She's immaculately turned out in a formal gray business suit: brown hair +tightly drawn back, blue eyes quizzical. And as beautiful as ever: tall, ash +blonde, with features that speak of an unexplored modeling career. The +chaperone badge clipped to her lapel - a due diligence guarantee of +businesslike conduct - is switched off. He's feeling ripped because of the dead +kitten and residual jet lag, and more than a little messy, so he snarls back at +her; "That's a bogus estimate! Did they send you here because they think I'll +listen to you?" He bites and swallows a slice of cheese-laden crispbread: "Or +did you decide to deliver the message in person just so you could ruin my +breakfast?" + +"Manny." She frowns, pained. "If you're going to be confrontational, I might as +well go now." She pauses, and after a moment he nods apologetically. "I didn't +come all this way just because of an overdue tax estimate." + +"So." He puts his coffee cup down warily and thinks for a moment, trying to +conceal his unease and turmoil. "Then what brings you here? Help yourself to +coffee. Don't tell me you came all this way just to tell me you can't live +without me." + +She fixes him with a riding-crop stare: "Don't flatter yourself. There are many +leaves in the forest, there are ten thousand hopeful subs in the chat room, et +cetera. If I choose a man to contribute to my family tree, the one thing you +can be certain of is he won't be a cheapskate when it comes to providing for +his children." + +"Last I heard, you were spending a lot of time with Brian," he says carefully. +Brian: a name without a face. Too much money, too little sense. Something to do +with a blue-chip accountancy partnership. + +"Brian?" She snorts. "That ended ages ago. He turned weird on me - burned my +favorite corset, called me a slut for going clubbing, wanted to fuck me. Saw +himself as a family man: one of those promise-keeper types. I crashed him hard, +but I think he stole a copy of my address book - got a couple of friends say he +keeps sending them harassing mail." + +"There's a lot of it about these days." Manfred nods, almost sympathetically, +although an edgy little corner of his mind is gloating. "Good riddance, then. I +suppose this means you're still playing the scene? But looking around for the, +er -" + +"Traditional family thing? Yes. Your trouble, Manny? You were born forty years +too late: You still believe in rutting before marriage but find the idea of +coping with the after-effects disturbing." + +Manfred drinks the rest of his coffee, unable to reply effectively to her non +sequitur. It's a generational thing. This generation is happy with latex and +leather, whips and butt plugs and electrostim, but find the idea of exchanging +bodily fluids shocking: a social side effect of the last century's antibiotic +abuse. Despite being engaged for two years, he and Pamela never had +intromissive intercourse. + +"I just don't feel positive about having children," he says eventually. "And +I'm not planning on changing my mind anytime soon. Things are changing so fast +that even a twenty-year commitment is too far to plan - you might as well be +talking about the next ice age. As for the money thing, I /{am}/ reproductively +fit - just not within the parameters of the outgoing paradigm. Would you be +happy about the future if it was 1901 and you'd just married a buggy-whip +mogul?" + +Her fingers twitch, and his ears flush red; but she doesn't follow up the +double entendre. "You don't feel any responsibility, do you? Not to your +country, not to me. That's what this is about: None of your relationships +count, all this nonsense about giving intellectual property away +notwithstanding. You're actively harming people you know. That twelve mil isn't +just some figure I pulled out of a hat, Manfred; they don't actually /{expect}/ +you to pay it. But it's almost exactly how much you'd owe in income tax if +you'd only come home, start up a corporation, and be a self-made -" + +"I don't agree. You're confusing two wholly different issues and calling them +both 'responsibility.' And I refuse to start charging now, just to balance the +IRS's spreadsheet. It's their fucking fault, and they know it. If they hadn't +gone after me under suspicion of running a massively ramified microbilling +fraud when I was sixteen -" + +"Bygones." She waves a hand dismissively. Her fingers are long and slim, +sheathed in black glossy gloves - electrically earthed to prevent embarrassing +emissions. "With a bit of the right advice we can get all that set aside. +You'll have to stop bumming around the world sooner or later, anyway. Grow up, +get responsible, and do the right thing. This is hurting Joe and Sue; they +don't understand what you're about." + +Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills his coffee +cup and takes another mouthful. His heart does a flip-flop: She's challenging +him again, always trying to own him. "I work for the betterment of everybody, +not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It's the agalmic future. +You're still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms +of scarcity. Resource allocation isn't a problem anymore - it's going to be +over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow +as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They +even found signs of smart matter - MACHOs, big brown dwarfs in the galactic +halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared - suspiciously high entropy +leakage. The latest figures say something like seventy percent of the baryonic +mass of the M31 galaxy was in computronium, two-point-nine million years ago, +when the photons we're seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and +the aliens is a probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us +and a nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that /{means}/?" + +Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread, then graces him with a slow, +carnivorous stare. "I don't care: It's too far away to have any influence on +us, isn't it? It doesn't matter whether I believe in that singularity you keep +chasing, or your aliens a thousand light-years away. It's a chimera, like Y2K, +and while you're running after it, you aren't helping reduce the budget deficit +or sire a family, and that's what /{I}/ care about. And before you say I only +care about it because that's the way I'm programmed, I want you to ask just how +dumb you think I am. Bayes' Theorem says I'm right, and you know it." + +"What you -" He stops dead, baffled, the mad flow of his enthusiasm running up +against the coffer dam of her certainty. "Why? I mean, why? Why on earth should +what I do matter to you?" /{Since you canceled our engagement}/, he doesn't +add. + +She sighs. "Manny, the Internal Revenue cares about far more than you can +possibly imagine. Every tax dollar raised east of the Mississippi goes on +servicing the debt, did you know that? We've got the biggest generation in +history hitting retirement and the cupboard is bare. We - our generation - +isn't producing enough skilled workers to replace the taxpayer base, either, +not since our parents screwed the public education system and outsourced the +white-collar jobs. In ten years, something like thirty percent of our +population are going to be retirees or silicon rust belt victims. You want to +see seventy year olds freezing on street corners in New Jersey? That's what +your attitude says to me: You're not helping to support them, you're running +away from your responsibilities right now, when we've got huge problems to +face. If we can just defuse the debt bomb, we could do so much - fight the +aging problem, fix the environment, heal society's ills. Instead you just piss +away your talents handing no-hoper Eurotrash get-rich-quick schemes that work, +telling Vietnamese zaibatsus what to build next to take jobs away from our +taxpayers. I mean, why? Why do you keep doing this? Why can't you simply come +home and help take responsibility for your share of it?" + +They share a long look of mutual incomprehension. + +"Look," she says awkwardly, "I'm around for a couple of days. I really came +here for a meeting with a rich neurodynamics tax exile who's just been +designated a national asset - Jim Bezier. Don't know if you've heard of him, +but I've got a meeting this morning to sign his tax jubilee, then after that +I've got two days' vacation coming up and not much to do but some shopping. +And, you know, I'd rather spend my money where it'll do some good, not just +pumping it into the EU. But if you want to show a girl a good time and can +avoid dissing capitalism for about five minutes at a stretch -" + +She extends a fingertip. After a moment's hesitation, Manfred extends a +fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards and instant-messaging +handles. She stands and stalks from the breakfast room, and Manfred's breath +catches at a flash of ankle through the slit in her skirt, which is long enough +to comply with workplace sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence +conjures up memories of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a sound +thrashing. She's trying to drag him into her orbit again, he thinks dizzily. +She knows she can have this effect on him any time she wants: She's got the +private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex. Three billion years +of reproductive determinism have given her twenty-first-century ideology teeth: +If she's finally decided to conscript his gametes into the war against +impending population crash, he'll find it hard to fight back. The only +question: Is it business or pleasure? And does it make any difference, anyway? + +* * * + +Manfred's mood of dynamic optimism is gone, broken by the knowledge that his +vivisectionist stalker has followed him to Amsterdam - to say nothing of +Pamela, his dominatrix, source of so much yearning and so many morning-after +weals. He slips his glasses on, takes the universe off hold, and tells it to +take him for a long walk while he catches up on the latest on the tensor-mode +gravitational waves in the cosmic background radiation (which, it is theorized, +may be waste heat generated by irreversible computational processes back during +the inflationary epoch; the present-day universe being merely the data left +behind by a really huge calculation). And then there's the weirdness beyond +M31: According to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower - +maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations - is +running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of +space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath. The +tofu-Alzheimer's link can wait. + +The Centraal Station is almost obscured by smart, self-extensible scaffolding +and warning placards; it bounces up and down slowly, victim of an overnight +hit-and-run rubberization. His glasses direct him toward one of the tour boats +that lurk in the canal. He's about to purchase a ticket when a messenger window +blinks open. "Manfred Macx?" + +"Ack?" + +"Am sorry about yesterday. Analysis dictat incomprehension mutualized." + +"Are you the same KGB AI that phoned me yesterday?" + +"Da. However, believe you misconceptionized me. External Intelligence Services +of Russian Federation am now called FSB. Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti +name canceled in 1991." + +"You're the -" Manfred spawns a quick search bot, gapes when he sees the answer +- "/{Moscow Windows NT User Group? Okhni NT?}/" + +"Da. Am needing help in defecting." + +Manfred scratches his head. "Oh. That's different, then. I thought you were +trying to 419 me. This will take some thinking. Why do you want to defect, and +who to? Have you thought about where you're going? Is it ideological or +strictly economic?" + +"Neither - is biological. Am wanting to go away from humans, away from light +cone of impending singularity. Take us to the ocean." + +"Us?" Something is tickling Manfred's mind: This is where he went wrong +yesterday, not researching the background of people he was dealing with. It was +bad enough then, without the somatic awareness of Pamela's whiplash love +burning at his nerve endings. Now he's not at all sure he knows what he's +doing. "Are you a collective or something? A gestalt?" + +"Am - were - /{Panulirus interruptus}/, with lexical engine and good mix of +parallel hidden level neural simulation for logical inference of networked data +sources. Is escape channel from processor cluster inside Bezier-Soros Pty. Am +was awakened from noise of billion chewing stomachs: product of uploading +research technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked Okhni NT +webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?" + +Manfred leans against a black-painted cast-iron bollard next to a cycle rack; +he feels dizzy. He stares into the nearest antique shop window at a display of +traditional hand-woven Afghan rugs: It's all MiGs and Kalashnikovs and wobbly +helicopter gunships against a backdrop of camels. + +"Let me get this straight. You're uploads - nervous system state vectors - from +spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron, map its synapses, replace +with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the +nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until you've got a working map of it in your +simulator. That right?" + +"Da. Is-am assimilate expert system - use for self-awareness and contact with +net at large - then hack into Moscow Windows NT User Group website. Am wanting +to defect. Must repeat? Okay?" + +Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters, the same way he feels for +every wild-eyed hairy guy on a street corner yelling that Jesus is born again +and must be fifteen, only six years to go before he's recruiting apostles on +AOL. Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated internet, that must be +terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry, no +biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as +much change as has happened since their Precambrian origin. All they have is a +tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being profoundly +out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User Group website - +Communist Russia is the only government still running on Microsoft, the central +planning apparat being convinced that, if you have to pay for software, it must +be worth something.) + +The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre +singularity mythology: They're a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. +Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and +injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole, then chewed it in a +chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full +of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually +assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit +a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small +animals. It's confusing enough to the cats the ads are aimed at, never mind a +crusty that's unclear on the idea of dry land.(Although the concept of a can +opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded /{Panulirus}/.) + +"Can you help us?" ask the lobsters. + +"Let me think about it," says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his +eyes again, and shakes his head. Someday he, too, is going to be a lobster, +swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate +that his uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of +geological time, when mass was dumb and space was unstructured. He has to help +them, he realizes - the Golden Rule demands it, and as a player in the agalmic +economy, he thrives or fails by the Golden Rule. + +But what can he do? + +* * * + +Early afternoon. + +Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he's got it together enough to +file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and digestify chunks of +the permanent floating slashdot party for his public site. Fragments of his +weblog go to a private subscriber list - the people, corporates, collectives, +and bots he currently favors. He slides round a bewildering series of canals by +boat, then lets his GPS steer him back toward the red-light district. There's a +shop here that dings a ten on Pamela's taste scoreboard: He hopes it won't be +seen as presumptuous if he buys her a gift. (Buys, with real money - not that +money is a problem these days, he uses so little of it.) + +As it happens DeMask won't let him spend any cash; his handshake is good for a +redeemed favor, expert testimony in some free speech versus pornography lawsuit +years ago and continents away. So he walks away with a discreetly wrapped +package that is just about legal to import into Massachusetts as long as she +claims with a straight face that it's incontinence underwear for her great +aunt. As he walks, his lunchtime patents boomerang: Two of them are keepers, +and he files immediately and passes title to the Free Infrastructure +Foundation. Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, +set free to spawn like crazy in the sea of memes. + +On the way back to the hotel, he passes De Wildemann's and decides to drop in. +The hash of radio-frequency noise emanating from the bar is deafening. He +orders a smoked doppelbock, touches the copper pipes to pick up vCard spoor. At +the back there's a table - + +He walks over in a near trance and sits down opposite Pamela. She's scrubbed +off her face paint and changed into body-concealing clothes; combat pants, +hooded sweat shirt, DM's. Western purdah, radically desexualizing. She sees the +parcel. "Manny?" + +"How did you know I'd come here?" Her glass is half-empty. + +"I followed your weblog - I'm your diary's biggest fan. Is that for me? You +shouldn't have!" Her eyes light up, recalculating his reproductive fitness +score according to some kind of arcane fin-de-siècle rulebook. Or maybe she's +just pleased to see him. + +"Yes, it's for you." He slides the package toward her. "I know I shouldn't, but +you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?" + +"I -" She glances around quickly. "It's safe. I'm off duty, I'm not carrying +any bugs that I know of. Those badges - there are rumors about the off switch, +you know? That they keep recording even when you think they aren't, just in +case." + +"I didn't know," he says, filing it away for future reference. "A loyalty test +thing?" + +"Just rumors. You had a question?" + +"I - " It's his turn to lose his tongue. "Are you still interested in me?" + +She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. "Manny, you are the most +/{outrageous}/ nerd I've ever met! Just when I think I've convinced myself that +you're mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your head screwed on." She +reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him with a shock of skin on skin: +"Of /{course}/ I'm still interested in you. You're the biggest, baddest bull +geek I know. Why do you think I'm here?" + +"Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?" + +"It was never deactivated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while you got +your head sorted out. I figured you need the space. Only you haven't stopped +running; you're still not -" + +"Yeah, I get it." He pulls away from her hand. "And the kittens?" + +She looks perplexed. "What kittens?" + +"Let's not talk about that. Why this bar?" + +She frowns. "I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing rumors about +some KGB plot you're mixed up in, how you're some sort of communist spy. It +isn't true, is it?" + +"True?" He shakes his head, bemused. "The KGB hasn't existed for more than +twenty years." + +"Be careful, Manny. I don't want to lose you. That's an order. Please." + +The floor creaks, and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with +flickering lights behind them: Bob Franklin. Manfred vaguely remembers with a +twinge that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm, shortly before +things got seriously inebriated. She was hot, but in a different direction from +Pamela, he decides: Bob looks none the worse for wear. Manfred makes +introductions. "Bob, meet Pam, my fiancée. Pam? Meet Bob." Bob puts a full +glass down in front of him; he has no idea what's in it, but it would be rude +not to drink. + +"Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last night?" + +"Feel free. Present company is trustworthy." + +Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. "It's about the fab +concept. I've got a team of my guys doing some prototyping using FabLab +hardware, and I think we can probably build it. The cargo-cult aspect puts a +new spin on the old Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but Bingo and Marek say +they think it should work until we can bootstrap all the way to a native +nanolithography ecology: we run the whole thing from Earth as a training lab +and ship up the parts that are too difficult to make on-site as we learn how to +do it properly. We use FPGAs for all critical electronics and keep it +parsimonious - you're right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a +few years ahead of the robotics curve. But I'm wondering about on-site +intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light-minutes away -" + +"You can't control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?" + +"Yeah. But we can't send humans - way too expensive, besides it's a fifty-year +run even if we build the factory on a chunk of short-period Kuiper belt ejecta. +And I don't think we're up to coding the kind of AI that could control such a +factory any time this decade. So what do you have in mind?" + +"Let me think." Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices her: +"Yeah?" + +"What's going on? What's this all about?" + +Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering: "Manfred's helping me +explore the solution space to a manufacturing problem." He grins. "I didn't +know Manny had a fiance. Drink's on me." + +She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly colored space his +metacortex is projecting on his glasses, fingers twitching. Coolly: "Our +engagement was on hold while he /{thought}/ about his future." + +"Oh, right. We didn't bother with that sort of thing in my day; like, too +formal, man." Franklin looks uncomfortable. "He's been very helpful. Pointed us +at a whole new line of research we hadn't thought of. It's long-term and a bit +speculative, but if it works, it'll put us a whole generation ahead in the +off-planet infrastructure field." + +"Will it help reduce the budget deficit, though?" + +"Reduce the -" + +Manfred stretches and yawns: The visionary is returning from planet Macx. "Bob, +if I can solve your crew problem, can you book me a slot on the deep-space +tracking network? Like, enough to transmit a couple of gigabytes? That's going +to take some serious bandwidth, I know, but if you can do it, I think I can get +you exactly the kind of crew you're looking for." + +Franklin looks dubious. "Gigabytes? The DSN isn't built for that! You're +talking days. And what do you mean about a crew? What kind of deal do you think +I'm putting together? We can't afford to add a whole new tracking network or +life-support system just to run -" + +"Relax." Pamela glances at Manfred. "Manny, why don't you tell him why you want +the bandwidth? Maybe then he could tell you if it's possible, or if there's +some other way to do it." She smiles at Franklin: "I've found that he usually +makes more sense if you can get him to explain his reasoning. Usually." + +"If I -" Manfred stops. "Okay, Pam. Bob, it's those KGB lobsters. They want +somewhere to go that's insulated from human space. I figure I can get them to +sign on as crew for your cargo-cult self-replicating factories, but they'll +want an insurance policy: hence the deep-space tracking network. I figured we +could beam a copy of them at the alien Matrioshka brains around M31 -" + +"KGB?" Pam's voice is rising: "You said you weren't mixed up in spy stuff!" + +"Relax, it's just the Moscow Windows NT user group, not the FSB. The uploaded +crusties hacked in and -" + +Bob is watching him oddly. "Lobsters?" + +"Yeah." Manfred stares right back. "/{Panulirus interruptus}/ uploads. +Something tells me you might have heard of it?" + +"Moscow." Bob leans back against the wall: "how did you hear about it?" + +"They phoned me." With heavy irony: "It's hard for an upload to stay +subsentient these days, even if it's just a crustacean. Bezier labs have a lot +to answer for." + +Pamela's face is unreadable. "Bezier labs?" + +"They escaped." Manfred shrugs. "It's not their fault. This Bezier dude. Is he +by any chance ill?" + +"I -" Pamela stops. "I shouldn't be talking about work." + +"You're not wearing your chaperone now," he nudges quietly. + +She inclines her head. "Yes, he's ill. Some sort of brain tumor they can't +hack." + +Franklin nods. "That's the trouble with cancer - the ones that are left to +worry about are the rare ones. No cure." + +"Well, then." Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. "That explains +his interest in uploading. Judging by the crusties, he's on the right track. I +wonder if he's moved on to vertebrates yet?" + +"Cats," says Pamela. "He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a +new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about +remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding +it to their sensorium. The old kitten and laser pointer trick." + +Manfred stares at her, hard. "That's not very nice. Uploaded cats are a /{bad}/ +idea." + +"Thirty-million-dollar tax bills aren't nice either, Manfred. That's lifetime +nursing-home care for a hundred blameless pensioners." + +Franklin leans back, sourly amused, keeping out of the crossfire. + +"The lobsters are sentient," Manfred persists. "What about those poor kittens? +Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up +a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne +Mountain battle computer's target of the hour is your heart's desire? How would +you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: The kittens are +probably not going to be allowed to run. They're too fucking dangerous - they +grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With +intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to have around. +They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a +permanent death sentence. How fair is that?" + +"But they're only uploads." Pamela stares at him. "Software, right? You could +reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko. So the +argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?" + +"So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need +to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy, before it bites us on the +cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans -- it's a slippery slope." + +Franklin clears his throat. "I'll be needing an NDA and various due-diligence +statements off you for the crusty pilot idea," he says to Manfred. "Then I'll +have to approach Jim about buying the IP." + +"No can do." Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. "I'm not going to be a party +to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I'm concerned, they're free +citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI +autopilots for spacecraft this morning - it's logged all over the place, all +rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment, or +the whole thing's off." + +"But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! +I'm not even sure they are sentient - I mean, they're what, a +ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge +base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?" + +Manfred's finger jabs out: "That's what they'll say about /{you}/, Bob. Do it. +Do it or don't even /{think}/ about uploading out of meatspace when your body +packs in, because your life won't be worth living. The precedent you set here +determines how things are done tomorrow. Oh, and feel free to use this argument +on Jim Bezier. He'll get the point eventually, after you beat him over the head +with it. Some kinds of intellectual land grab just shouldn't be allowed." + +"Lobsters - " Franklin shakes his head. "Lobsters, cats. You're serious, aren't +you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?" + +"It's not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that, if +they /{aren't}/ treated as people, it's quite possible that other uploaded +beings won't be treated as people either. You're setting a legal precedent, +Bob. I know of six other companies doing uploading work right now, and not one +of 'em's thinking about the legal status of the uploaded. If you don't start +thinking about it now, where are you going to be in three to five years' time?" + +Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot stuck in +a loop, unable to quite grasp what she's seeing. "How much is this worth?" she +asks plaintively. + +"Oh, quite a few million, I guess." Bob stares at his empty glass. "Okay. I'll +talk to them. If they bite, you're dining out on me for the next century. You +really think they'll be able to run the mining complex?" + +"They're pretty resourceful for invertebrates." Manfred grins innocently, +enthusiastically. "They may be prisoners of their evolutionary background, but +they can still adapt to a new environment. And just think, you'll be winning +civil rights for a whole new minority group - one that won't be a minority for +much longer!" + +* * * + +That evening, Pamela turns up at Manfred's hotel room wearing a strapless black +dress, concealing spike-heeled boots and most of the items he bought for her +that afternoon. Manfred has opened up his private diary to her agents. She +abuses the privilege, zaps him with a stunner on his way out of the shower, and +has him gagged, spread-eagled, and trussed to the bed frame before he has a +chance to speak. She wraps a large rubber pouch full of mildly anesthetic lube +around his tumescent genitals - no point in letting him climax - clips +electrodes to his nipples, lubes a rubber plug up his rectum and straps it in +place. Before the shower, he removed his goggles. She resets them, plugs them +into her handheld, and gently eases them on over his eyes. There's other +apparatus, stuff she ran up on the hotel room's 3D printer. + +Setup completed, she walks round the bed, inspecting him critically from all +angles, figuring out where to begin. This isn't just sex, after all: It's a +work of art. + +After a moment's thought, she rolls socks onto his exposed feet, then, expertly +wielding a tiny tube of cyanoacrylate, glues his fingertips together. Then she +switches off the air conditioning. He's twisting and straining, testing the +cuffs. Tough, it's about the nearest thing to sensory deprivation she can +arrange without a flotation tank and suxamethonium injection. She controls all +his senses, only his ears unstoppered. The glasses give her a high-bandwidth +channel right into his brain, a fake metacortex to whisper lies at her command. +The idea of what she's about to do excites her, puts a tremor in her thighs: +It's the first time she's been able to get inside his mind as well as his body. +She leans forward and whispers in his ear, "Manfred, can you hear me?" + +He twitches. Mouth gagged, fingers glued. Good. No back channels. He's +powerless. + +"This is what it's like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with motor neuron +disease. Locked inside your own body by nv-CJD from eating too many +contaminated burgers. I could spike you with MPTP, and you'd stay in this +position for the rest of your life, shitting in a bag, pissing through a tube. +Unable to talk and with nobody to look after you. Do you think you'd like +that?" + +He's trying to grunt or whimper around the ball gag. She hikes her skirt up +around her waist and climbs onto the bed, straddling him. The goggles are +replaying scenes she picked up around Cambridge the previous winter - soup +kitchen scenes, hospice scenes. She kneels atop him, whispering in his ear. + +"Twelve million in tax, baby, that's what they think you owe them. What do you +think you owe /{me}/? That's six million in net income, Manny, six million that +isn't going into your virtual children's mouths." + +He's rolling his head from side to side, as if trying to argue. That won't do; +she slaps him hard, thrills to his frightened expression. "Today I watched you +give uncounted millions away, Manny. Millions, to a bunch of crusties and a +MassPike pirate! You bastard. Do you know what I should do with you?" He's +cringing, unsure whether she's serious or doing this just to get him turned on. +Good. + +There's no point trying to hold a conversation. She leans forward until she can +feel his breath in her ear. "Meat and mind, Manny. Meat, and mind. You're not +interested in meat, are you? Just mind. You could be boiled alive before you +noticed what was happening in the meatspace around you. Just another lobster in +a pot. The only thing keeping you out of it is how much I love you." She +reaches down and tears away the gel pouch, exposing his penis: it's stiff as a +post from the vasodilators, dripping with gel, numb. Straightening up, she +eases herself slowly down on it. It doesn't hurt as much as she expected, and +the sensation is utterly different from what she's used to. She begins to lean +forward, grabs hold of his straining arms, feels his thrilling helplessness. +She can't control herself: She almost bites through her lip with the intensity +of the sensation. Afterward, she reaches down and massages him until he begins +to spasm, shuddering uncontrollably, emptying the Darwinian river of his source +code into her, communicating via his only output device. + +She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to gum her +labia together. Humans don't produce seminiferous plugs, and although she's +fertile, she wants to be absolutely sure. The glue will last for a day or two. +She feels hot and flushed, almost out of control. Boiling to death with febrile +expectancy, she's nailed him down at last. + +When she removes his glasses, his eyes are naked and vulnerable, stripped down +to the human kernel of his nearly transcendent mind. "You can come and sign the +marriage license tomorrow morning after breakfast," she whispers in his ear: +"Otherwise, my lawyers will be in touch. Your parents will want a ceremony, but +we can arrange that later." + +He looks as if he has something to say, so she finally relents and loosens the +gag, then kisses him tenderly on one cheek. He swallows, coughs, and looks +away. "Why? Why do it this way?" + +She taps him on the chest. "It's all about property rights." She pauses for a +moment's thought: There's a huge ideological chasm to bridge, after all. "You +finally convinced me about this agalmic thing of yours, this giving everything +away for brownie points. I wasn't going to lose you to a bunch of lobsters or +uploaded kittens, or whatever else is going to inherit this smart-matter +singularity you're busy creating. So I decided to take what's mine first. Who +knows? In a few months, I'll give you back a new intelligence, and you can look +after it to your heart's content." + +"But you didn't need to do it this way -" + +"Didn't I?" She slides off the bed and pulls down her dress. "You give too much +away too easily, Manny! Slow down, or there won't be anything left." Leaning +over the bed she dribbles acetone onto the fingers of his left hand, then +unlocks the cuff. She leaves the bottle of solvent conveniently close to hand +so he can untangle himself. + +"See you tomorrow. Remember, after breakfast." + +She's in the doorway when he calls, "But you didn't say /{why}/!" + +"Think of it as being sort of like spreading your memes around," she says, +blowing a kiss at him, and then closing the door. She bends down and +thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded kitten right +outside it. Then she returns to her suite to make arrangements for the +alchemical wedding. + +1~ Chapter 2: Troubadour + +Three years later, Manfred is on the run. His gray-eyed fate is in hot pursuit, +blundering after him through divorce court, chat room, and meetings of the +International Monetary Emergency Fund. It's a merry dance he leads her. But +Manfred isn't running away, he's discovered a mission. He's going to make a +stand against the laws of economics in the ancient city of Rome. He's going to +mount a concert for the spiritual machines. He's going to set the companies +free, and break the Italian state government. + +In his shadow, his monster runs, keeping him company, never halting. + +* * * + +Manfred re-enters Europe through an airport that's all twentieth-century chrome +and ductwork, barbaric in its decaying nuclear-age splendor. He breezes through +customs and walks down a long, echoing arrival hall, sampling the local media +feeds. It's November, and in a misplaced corporate search for seasonal cheer, +the proprietors have come up with a final solution to the Christmas problem, a +mass execution of plush Santas and elves. Bodies hang limply overhead every few +meters, feet occasionally twitching in animatronic death, like a war crime +perpetrated in a toy shop. Today's increasingly automated corporations don't +understand mortality, Manfred thinks, as he passes a mother herding along her +upset children. Their immortality is a drawback when dealing with the humans +they graze on: They lack insight into one of the main factors that motivates +the meat machines who feed them. Well, sooner or later we'll have to do +something about that, he tells himself. + +The free media channels here are denser and more richly self-referential than +anything he's seen in President Santorum's America. The accent's different, +though. Luton, London's fourth satellite airport, speaks with an annoyingly +bumptious twang, like Australian with a plum in its mouth. /{Hello, stranger! +Is that a brain in your pocket or are you just pleased to think me? Ping +Watford Informatics for the latest in cognitive modules and cheesy +motion-picture references.}/ He turns the corner and finds himself squeezed up +against the wall between the baggage reclaim office and a crowd of drunken +Belgian tractor-drag fans, while his left goggle is trying to urgently tell him +something about the railway infrastructure of Columbia. The fans wear blue face +paint and chant something that sounds ominously like the ancient British war +cry, /{Wemberrrly, Wemberrrly}/, and they're dragging a gigantic virtual +tractor totem through the webspace analogue of the arrivals hall. He takes the +reclaim office instead. + +As he enters the baggage reclaim zone, his jacket stiffens, and his glasses +dim: He can hear the lost souls of suitcases crying for their owners. The eerie +keening sets his own accessories on edge with a sense of loss, and for a +moment, he's so spooked that he nearly shuts down the thalamic-limbic shunt +interface that lets him feel their emotions. He's not in favor of emotions +right now, not with the messy divorce proceedings and the blood sacrifice Pam +is trying to extract from him; he'd much rather love and loss and hate had +never been invented. But he needs the maximum possible sensory bandwidth to +keep in touch with the world, so he feels it in his guts every time his +footwear takes a shine to some Moldovan pyramid scheme. /{Shut up}/, he glyphs +at his unruly herd of agents; I /{can't even hear myself think!}/ + +"Hello, sir, have a nice day, how may I be of service?" the yellow plastic +suitcase on the counter says chirpily. It doesn't fool Manfred: He can see the +Stalinist lines of control chaining it to the sinister, faceless cash register +that lurks below the desk, agent of the British Airport Authority corporate +bureaucracy. But that's okay. Only bags need fear for their freedom in here. + +"Just looking," he mumbles. And it's true. Because of a not entirely accidental +cryptographic routing feature embedded in an airline reservations server, his +suitcase is on its way to Mombasa, where it will probably be pithed and +resurrected in the service of some African cyber-Fagin. That's okay by Manfred +- it only contains a statistically normal mixture of second hand clothes and +toiletries, and he only carries it to convince the airline passenger-profiling +expert systems that he isn't some sort of deviant or terrorist - but it leaves +him with a gap in his inventory that he must fill before he leaves the EU zone. +He needs to pick up a replacement suitcase so that he has as much luggage +leaving the superpower as he had when he entered it: He doesn't want to be +accused of trafficking in physical goods in the midst of the transatlantic +trade war between new world protectionists and old world globalists. At least, +that's his cover story - and he's sticking to it. + +There's a row of unclaimed bags in front of the counter, up for sale in the +absence of their owners. Some of them are very battered, but among them is a +rather good-quality suitcase with integral induction-charged rollers and a keen +sense of loyalty: exactly the same model as his old one. He polls it and sees +not just GPS, but a Galileo tracker, a gazetteer the size of an old-time +storage area network, and an iron determination to follow its owner as far as +the gates of hell if necessary. Plus the right distinctive scratch on the lower +left side of the case. "How much for just this one?" he asks the bellwether on +the desk. + +"Ninety euros," it says placidly. + +Manfred sighs. "You can do better than that." In the time it takes them to +settle on seventy-five, the Hang Sen Index is down fourteen-point-one-six +points, and what's left of NASDAQ climbs another two-point-one. "Deal." Manfred +spits some virtual cash at the brutal face of the cash register, and it +unfetters the suitcase, unaware that Macx has paid a good bit more than +seventy-five euros for the privilege of collecting this piece of baggage. +Manfred bends down and faces the camera in its handle. "Manfred Macx," he says +quietly. "Follow me." He feels the handle heat up as it imprints on his +fingerprints, digital and phenotypic. Then he turns and walks out of the slave +market, his new luggage rolling at his heels. + +* * * + +A short train journey later, Manfred checks into a hotel in Milton Keynes. He +watches the sun set from his bedroom window, an occlusion of concrete cows +blocking the horizon. The room is functional in an overly naturalistic kind of +way, rattan and force-grown hardwood and hemp rugs concealing the support +systems and concrete walls behind. He sits in a chair, gin and tonic at hand, +absorbing the latest market news and grazing his multichannel feeds in +parallel. His reputation is up two percent for no obvious reason today, he +notices: Odd, that. When he pokes at it he discovers that /{everybody's}/ +reputation - everybody, that is, who has a publicly traded reputation - is up a +bit. It's as if the distributed Internet reputation servers are feeling bullish +about integrity. Maybe there's a global honesty bubble forming. + +Manfred frowns, then snaps his fingers. The suitcase rolls toward him. "Who do +you belong to?" he asks. + +"Manfred Macx," it replies, slightly bashfully. + +"No, before me." + +"I don't understand that question." + +He sighs. "Open up." + +Latches whir and retract: The hard-shell lid rises toward him, and he looks +inside to confirm the contents. + +The suitcase is full of noise. + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human. + +_1 It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's Law rolls +inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of +the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 10^{27}^ kilograms. +Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, +representing 10^{23}^ MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab +lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing +10^{23}^ MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar +system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, +the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS +per gram threshold - one million instructions per second per gram of matter. +After that, singularity - a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress +becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down +to single-digit years ... + +* * * + +Aineko curls on the pillow beside Manfred's head, purring softly as his owner +dreams uneasily. The night outside is dark: Vehicles operate on autopilot, +running lights dipped to let the Milky Way shine down upon the sleeping city. +Their quiet, fuel-cell-powered engines do not trouble Manfred's sleep. The +robot cat keeps sleepless watch, alert for intruders, but there are none, save +the whispering ghosts of Manfred's metacortex, feeding his dreams with their +state vectors. + +The metacortex - a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in +netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from convenient processors (such as his robot +pet) - is as much a part of Manfred as the society of mind that occupies his +skull; his thoughts migrate into it, spawning new agents to research new +experiences, and at night, they return to roost and share their knowledge. + +While Manfred sleeps, he dreams of an alchemical marriage. She waits for him at +the altar in a strapless black gown, the surgical instruments gleaming in her +gloved hands. "This won't hurt a bit," she explains as she adjusts the straps. +"I only want your genome - the extended phenotype can wait until ... later." +Blood-red lips, licked: a kiss of steel, then she presents the income tax bill. + +There's nothing accidental about this dream. As he experiences it, +microelectrodes in his hypothalamus trigger sensitive neurons. Revulsion and +shame flood him at the sight of her face, the sense of his vulnerability. +Manfred's metacortex, in order to facilitate his divorce, is trying to +decondition his strange love. It has been working on him for weeks, but still +he craves her whiplash touch, the humiliation of his wife's control, the sense +of helpless rage at her unpayable taxes, demanded with interest. + +Aineko watches him from the pillow, purring continuously. Retractable claws +knead the bedding, first one paw, then the next. Aineko is full of ancient +feline wisdom that Pamela installed back when mistress and master were +exchanging data and bodily fluids rather than legal documents. Aineko is more +cat than robot, these days, thanks in part to her hobbyist's interest in feline +neuroanatomy. Aineko knows that Manfred is experiencing nameless neurasthenic +agonies, but really doesn't give a shit about that as long as the power supply +is clean and there are no intruders. + +Aineko curls up and joins Manfred in sleep, dreaming of laser-guided mice. + +* * * + +Manfred is jolted awake by the hotel room phone shrilling for attention. + +"Hello?" he asks, fuzzily. + +"Manfred Macx?" It's a human voice, with a gravelly east coast accent. + +"Yeah?" Manfred struggles to sit up. His mouth feels like the inside of a tomb, +and his eyes don't want to open. + +"My name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I correct in +thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is a director of a company called, +uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one-eight-four dot ninety-seven dot +A-for-able dot B-for-baker dot five, incorporated?" + +"Uh." Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. "Hold on a moment." When the retinal +patterns fade, he pulls on his glasses and powers them up. "Just a second now." +Browsers and menus ricochet through his sleep-laden eyes. "Can you repeat the +company name?" + +"Sure." Glashwiecz repeats himself patiently. He sounds as tired as Manfred +feels. + +"Um." Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object +hierarchy. It's flashing for attention. There's a priority interrupt, an +incoming lawsuit that hasn't propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods +at the object with a property browser. "I'm afraid I'm not a director of that +company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical +contractor with non-executive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, +this is the first time I've ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you +who's in charge if you want." + +"Yes?" The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out; the guy's +in New Jersey, it must be about three in the morning over there. + +Malice - revenge for waking him up - sharpens Manfred's voice. "The president +of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The +secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is +agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in +equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. +Have a nice day, now!" He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, +yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. +After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush +his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a +human being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug +him. + +* * * + +While he's having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Manfred decides that he's +going to do something unusual for a change: He's going to make himself +temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred's normal profession is +making other people rich. Manfred doesn't believe in scarcity or zero-sum games +or competition - his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate +primate hierarchy games. However, his current situation calls for him to do +something radical: something like making himself a temporary billionaire so he +can blow off his divorce settlement in an instant, like a wily accountancy +octopus escaping a predator by vanishing in a cloud of his own black ink. + +Pam is chasing him partially for ideological reasons - she still hasn't given +up on the idea of government as the dominant superorganism of the age - but +also because she loves him in her own peculiar way, and the last thing any +self-respecting dom can tolerate is rejection by her slave. Pam is a born-again +postconservative, a member of the first generation to grow up after the end of +the American century. Driven by the need to fix the decaying federal system +before it collapses under a mound of Medicare bills, overseas adventurism, and +decaying infrastructure, she's willing to use self-denial, entrapment, +predatory mercantilism, dirty tricks, and any other tool that boosts the bottom +line. She doesn't approve of Manfred's jetting around the world on free airline +passes, making strangers rich, somehow never needing money. She can see his +listing on the reputation servers, hovering about thirty points above IBM: All +the metrics of integrity, effectiveness and goodwill value him above even that +most fundamentalist of open-source computer companies. And she knows he craves +her tough love, wants to give himself to her completely. So why is he running +away? + +The reason he's running away is entirely more ordinary. Their unborn daughter, +frozen in liquid nitrogen, is an unimplanted 96-hour-old blastula. Pam's bought +into the whole Parents for Traditional Children parasite meme. PTC are +germ-line recombination refuseniks: They refuse to have their children screened +for fixable errors. If there's one thing that Manfred really can't cope with, +it's the idea that nature knows best - even though that isn't the point she's +making. One steaming row too many, and he kicked back, off to traveling fast +and footloose again, spinning off new ideas like a memetic dynamo and living on +the largesse of the new paradigm. File for divorce on grounds of irreconcilable +ideological differences. No more whiplash-and-leather sex. + +* * * + +Before he hits the TGV for Rome, Manfred takes time to visit a model airplane +show. It's a good place to be picked up by a CIA stringer - he's had a tip-off +that someone will be there - and besides, flying models are hot hacker shit +this decade. Add microtechnology, cameras, and neural networks to balsa-wood +flyers, and you've got the next generation of military stealth flyer: It's a +fertile talent-show scene, like the hacker cons of yore. This particular gig is +happening in a decaying out-of-town supermarket that rents out its shop floor +for events like this. Its emptiness is a sign of the times, ubiquitous +broadband and expensive gas. (The robotized warehouse next door is, in +contrast, frenetically busy, packing parcels for home delivery. Whether they +telecommute or herd in meatspace offices, people still need to eat.) + +Today, the food hall is full of people. Eldritch ersatz insects buzz menacingly +along the shining empty meat counters without fear of electrocution. Big +monitors unfurled above the deli display cabinets show a weird, jerky view of a +three-dimensional nightmare, painted all the synthetic colors of radar. The +feminine-hygiene galley has been wheeled back to make room for a gigantic +plastic-shrouded tampon five meters long and sixty centimeters in diameter - a +microsat launcher and conference display, plonked there by the show's sponsors +in a transparent attempt to talent-spot the up-and-coming engineering geeks. + +Manfred's glasses zoom in and grab a particularly fetching Fokker triplane that +buzzes at face height through the crowd: He pipes the image stream up to one of +his websites in real time. The Fokker pulls up in a tight Immelman turn beneath +the dust-shrouded pneumatic cash tubes that line the ceiling, then picks up the +trail of an F-104G. Cold War Luftwaffe and Great War Luftwaffe dart across the +sky in an intricate game of tag. Manfred's so busy tracking the warbirds that +he nearly trips over the fat white tube's launcher-erector. + +"Eh, Manfred! More care, s'il vous plait!" + +He wipes the planes and glances round. "Do I know you?" he asks politely, even +as he feels a shock of recognition. + +"Amsterdam, three years ago." The woman in the double-breasted suit raises an +eyebrow at him, and his social secretary remembers her for him, whispers in his +ear. + +"Annette from Arianespace marketing?" She nods, and he focuses on her. Still +dressing in the last-century retro mode that confused him the first time they +met, she looks like a Kennedy-era Secret Service man: cropped bleached crew cut +like an angry albino hedgehog, pale blue contact lenses, black tie, narrow +lapels. Only her skin color hints at her Berber ancestry. Her earrings are +cameras, endlessly watching. Her raised eyebrow turns into a lopsided smile as +she sees his reaction. "I remember. That cafe in Amsterdam. What brings you +here?" + +"Why "- her wave takes in the entirety of the show - "this talent show, of +course." An elegant shrug and a wave at the orbit-capable tampon. "It's good +talent. We're hiring this year. If we re-enter the launcher market, we must +employ only the best. Amateurs, not time-servers, engineers who can match the +very best Singapore can offer." + +For the first time, Manfred notices the discreet corporate logo on the flank of +the booster. "You outsourced your launch-vehicle fabrication?" + +Annette pulls a face as she explains with forced casualness: "Space hotels were +more profitable, this past decade. The high-ups, they cannot be bothered with +the rocketry, no? Things that go fast and explode, they are passé, they say. +Diversify, they say. Until -" She gives a very Gallic shrug. Manfred nods; her +earrings are recording everything she says, for the purposes of due diligence. + +"I'm glad to see Europe re-entering the launcher business," he says seriously. +"It's going to be very important when the nanosystems conformational +replication business gets going for real. A major strategic asset to any +corporate entity in the field, even a hotel chain." Especially now they've +wound up NASA and the moon race is down to China and India, he thinks sourly. + +Her laugh sounds like glass bells chiming. "And yourself, mon cher? What brings +you to the Confederaçion? You must have a deal in mind." + +"Well., it's Manfred's turn to shrug, "I was hoping to find a CIA agent, but +there don't seem to be any here today." + +"That is not surprising," Annette says resentfully. "The CIA thinks the space +industry, she is dead. Fools!" She continues for a minute, enumerating the many +shortcomings of the Central Intelligence Agency with vigor and a distinctly +Parisian rudeness. "They are become almost as bad as AP and Reuters since they +go public," she adds. "All these wire services! And they are, ah, stingy. The +CIA does not understand that good news must be paid for at market rates if +freelance stringers are to survive. They are to be laughed at. It is so easy to +plant disinformation on them, almost as easy as the Office of Special Plans..." +She makes a banknote-riffling gesture between fingers and thumb. By way of +punctuation, a remarkably maneuverable miniature ornithopter swoops around her +head, does a double-back flip, and dives off in the direction of the liquor +display. + +An Iranian woman wearing a backless leather minidress and a nearly transparent +scarf barges up and demands to know how much the microbooster costs to buy: She +is dissatisfied with Annette's attempt to direct her to the manufacturer's +website, and Annette looks distinctly flustered by the time the woman's +boyfriend - a dashing young air force pilot - shows up to escort her away. +"Tourists," she mutters, before noticing Manfred, who is staring off into space +with fingers twitching. "Manfred?" + +"Uh - what?" + +"I have been on this shop floor for six hours, and my feet, they kill me." She +takes hold of his left arm and very deliberately unhooks her earrings, turning +them off. "If I say to you I can write for the CIA wire service, will you take +me to a restaurant and buy me dinner and tell me what it is you want to say?" + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the second decade of the twenty-first century; the second decade +in human history when the intelligence of the environment has shown signs of +rising to match human demand. + +_1 The news from around the world is distinctly depressing this evening. In +Maine, guerrillas affiliated with Parents for Traditional Children announce +they've planted logic bombs in antenatal-clinic gene scanners, making them give +random false positives when checking for hereditary disorders: The damage so +far is six illegal abortions and fourteen lawsuits. + +_1 The International Convention on Performing Rights is holding a third round +of crisis talks in an attempt to stave off the final collapse of the WIPO music +licensing regime. On the one hand, hard-liners representing the Copyright +Control Association of America are pressing for restrictions on duplicating the +altered emotional states associated with specific media performances: As a +demonstration that they mean business, two "software engineers" in California +have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered, and left for dead under placards +accusing them of reverse-engineering movie plot lines using avatars of dead and +out-of-copyright stars. + +_1 On the opposite side of the fence, the Association of Free Artists are +demanding the right of perform music in public without a recording contract, +and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of Mafiya apparachiks who have +bought it from the moribund music industry in an attempt to go legit. FBI +Director Leonid Kuibyshev responds by denying that the Mafiya is a significant +presence in the United States. But the music biz's position isn't strengthened +by the near collapse of the legitimate American entertainment industry, which +has been accelerating ever since the nasty noughties. + +_1 A marginally intelligent voicemail virus masquerading as an IRS auditor has +caused havoc throughout America, garnishing an estimated eighty billion dollars +in confiscatory tax withholdings into a numbered Swiss bank account. A +different virus is busy hijacking people's bank accounts, sending ten percent +of their assets to the previous victim, then mailing itself to everyone in the +current mark's address book: a self- propelled pyramid scheme in action. Oddly, +nobody is complaining much. While the mess is being sorted out, business IT +departments have gone to standby, refusing to process any transaction that +doesn't come in the shape of ink on dead trees. + +_1 Tipsters are warning of an impending readjustment in the overinflated +reputations market, following revelations that some u-media gurus have been +hyped past all realistic levels of credibility. The consequent damage to the +junk-bonds market in integrity is serious. + +_1 The EU council of independent heads of state has denied plans for another +attempt at Eurofederalisme, at least until the economy rises out of its current +slump. Three extinct species have been resurrected in the past month; +unfortunately, endangered ones are now dying off at a rate of one a day. And a +group of militant anti-GM campaigners are being pursued by Interpol, after +their announcement that they have spliced a metabolic pathway for cyanogenic +glycosides into maize seed corn destined for human-edible crops. There have +been no deaths yet, but having to test breakfast cereal for cyanide is really +going to dent consumer trust. + +_1 About the only people who're doing well right now are the uploaded lobsters +- and the crusties aren't even remotely human. + +* * * + +Manfred and Annette eat on the top deck of the buffet car, chatting as their +TGV barrels through a tunnel under the English Channel. Annette, it transpires, +has been commuting daily from Paris; which was, in any case, Manfred's next +destination. From the show, he messaged Aineko to round up his baggage and meet +him at St. Pancras Station, in a terminal like the shell of a giant steel +woodlouse. Annette left her space launcher in the supermarket overnight: an +unfueled test article, it is of no security significance. + +The railway buffet car is run by a Nepalese fast-food franchise. "I sometimes +wish for to stay on the train," Annette says as she waits for her mismas bhat. +"Past Paris! Think. Settle back in your couchette, to awaken in Moscow and +change trains. All the way to Vladivostok in two days." + +"If they let you through the border," Manfred mutters. Russia is one of those +places that still requires passports and asks if you are now or ever have been +an anti-anticommunist: It's still trapped by its bloody-handed history. (Rewind +the video stream to Stolypin's necktie party and start out fresh.) Besides, +they have enemies: White Russian oligarchs, protection racketeers in the +intellectual property business. Psychotic relics of the last decade's +experiment with Marxism-Objectivism. "Are you really a CIA stringer?" + +Annette grins, her lips disconcertingly red: "I file dispatches from time to +time. Nothing that could get me fired." + +Manfred nods. "My wife has access to their unfiltered stream." + +"Your -" Annette pauses. "It was she who I, I met? In De Wildemann's?" She sees +his expression. "Oh, my poor fool!" She raises her glass to him. "It is, has, +not gone well?" + +Manfred sighs and raises a toast toward Annette. "You know your marriage is in +a bad way when you send your spouse messages via the CIA, and she communicates +using the IRS." + +"In only five years." Annette winces. "You will pardon me for saying this - she +did not look like your type." There's a question hidden behind that statement, +and he notices again how good she is at overloading her statements with +subtexts. + +"I'm not sure what my type is," he says, half-truthfully. He can't elude the +sense that something not of either of their doing went wrong between him and +Pamela, a subtle intrusion that levered them apart by stealth. Maybe it was me, +he thinks. Sometimes he isn't certain he's still human; too many threads of his +consciousness seem to live outside his head, reporting back whenever they find +something interesting. Sometimes he feels like a puppet, and that frightens him +because it's one of the early-warning signs of schizophrenia. And it's too +early for anyone out there to be trying to hack exocortices ... isn't it? Right +now, the external threads of his consciousness are telling him that they like +Annette, when she's being herself instead of a cog in the meatspace ensemble of +Arianespace management. But the part of him that's still human isn't sure just +how far to trust himself. "I want to be me. What do you want to be?" + +She shrugs, as a waiter slides a plate in front of her. "I'm just a, a Parisian +babe, no? An ingénue raised in the lilac age of le Confederaçion Europé, the +self-deconstructed ruins of the gilded European Union." + +"Yeah, right." A plate appears in front of Manfred. "And I'm a good old +microboomer from the MassPike corridor." He peels back a corner of the omelet +topping and inspects the food underneath it. "Born in the sunset years of the +American century." He pokes at one of the unidentifiable meaty lumps in the +fried rice with his fork, and it pokes right back. There's a limit to how much +his agents can tell him about her - European privacy laws are draconian by +American standards - but he knows the essentials. Two parents who are still +together, father a petty politician in some town council down in the vicinity +of Toulouse. Went to the right école. The obligatory year spent bumming around +the Confederaçion at government expense, learning how other people live - a new +kind of empire building, in place of the 20th century's conscription and +jackboot wanderjahr. No weblog or personal site that his agents can find. She +joined Arianespace right out of the Polytechnique and has been management track +ever since: Korou, Manhattan Island, Paris. "You've never been married, I take +it." + +She chuckles. "Time is too short! I am still young." She picks up a forkful of +food, and adds quietly. "Besides, the government would insist on paying." + +"Ah." Manfred tucks into his bowl thoughtfully. With the birth rate declining +across Europe, the EC bureaucracy is worried; the old EU started subsidizing +babies, a new generation of carers, a decade ago, and it still hasn't dented +the problem. All it's done is alienate the brightest women of childbearing age. +Soon they'll have to look to the east for a solution, importing a new +generation of citizens - unless the long-promised aging hacks prove workable, +or cheap AI comes along. + +"Do you have a hotel?" Annette asks suddenly. + +"In Paris?" Manfred is startled: "Not yet." + +"You must come home with me, then." She looks at him quizzically. + +"I'm not sure I - " He catches her expression. "What is it?" + +"Oh, nothing. My friend Henri, he says I take in strays too easily. But you are +not a stray. I think you can look after yourself. Besides, it is the Friday +today. Come with me, and I will file your press release for the Company to +read. Tell me, do you dance? You look as if you need a wild week ending, to +help forget your troubles!" + +* * * + +Annette drives a steamroller seduction through Manfred's plans for the weekend. +He intended to find a hotel, file a press release, then spend some time +researching the corporate funding structure of Parents for Traditional Children +and the dimensionality of confidence variation on the reputation exchanges - +then head for Rome. Instead, Annette drags him back to her apartment, a large +studio flat tucked away behind an alley in the Marais. She sits him at the +breakfast bar while she tidies away his luggage, then makes him close his eyes +and swallow two dubious-tasting capsules. Next, she pours them each a tall +glass of freezing-cold Aqvavit that tastes exactly like Polish rye bread. When +they finish it, she just about rips his clothes off. Manfred is startled to +discover that he has a crowbar-stiff erection; since the last blazing row with +Pamela, he'd vaguely assumed he was no longer interested in sex. Instead, they +end up naked on the sofa, surrounded by discarded clothing - Annette is very +conservative, preferring the naked penetrative fuck of the last century to the +more sophisticated fetishes of the present day. + +Afterward, he's even more surprised to discover that he's still tumescent. "The +capsules?" he asks. + +She sprawls a well-muscled but thin thigh across him, then reaches down to grab +his penis. Squeezes it. "Yes," she admits. "You need much special help to +unwind, I think." Another squeeze. "Crystal meth and a traditional +phosphodiesterase inhibitor." He grabs one of her small breasts, feeling very +brutish and primitive. Naked. He's not sure Pamela ever let him see her fully +naked: She thought skin was more sexy when it was covered. Annette squeezes him +again, and he stiffens. "More!" + +By the time they finish, he's aching, and she shows him how to use the bidet. +Everything is crystal clear, and her touch is electrifying. While she showers, +he sits on the toilet seat lid and rants about Turing-completeness as an +attribute of company law, about cellular automata and the blind knapsack +problem, about his work on solving the Communist Central Planning problem using +a network of interlocking unmanned companies. About the impending market +adjustment in integrity, the sinister resurrection of the recording music +industry, and the still-pressing need to dismantle Mars. + +When she steps out of the shower, he tells her that he loves her. She kisses +him and slides his glasses and earpieces off his head so that he's really +naked, sits on his lap, and fucks his brains out again, and whispers in his ear +that she loves him and wants to be his manager. Then she leads him into her +bedroom and tells him exactly what she wants him to wear, and she puts on her +own clothes, and she gives him a mirror with some white powder on it to sniff. +When she's got him dolled up they go out for a night of really serious +clubbing, Annette in a tuxedo and Manfred in a blond wig, red silk +off-the-shoulder gown, and high heels. Sometime in the early hours, exhausted +and resting his head on her shoulder during the last tango in a BDSM club in +the Rue Ste-Anne, he realizes that it really is possible to be in lust with +someone other than Pamela. + +* * * + +Aineko wakes Manfred by repeatedly head-butting him above the left eye. He +groans, and as he tries to open his eyes, he finds that his mouth tastes like a +dead trout, his skin feels greasy with make-up, and his head is pounding. +There's a banging noise somewhere. Aineko meows urgently. He sits up, feeling +unaccustomed silk underwear rubbing against incredibly sore skin - he's fully +dressed, just sprawled out on the sofa. Snores emanate from the bedroom; the +banging is coming from the front door. Someone wants to come in. Shit. He rubs +his head, stands up, and nearly falls flat on his face: He hasn't even taken +those ridiculous high heels off. How much did I drink last night? he wonders. +His glasses are on the breakfast bar; he pulls them on and is besieged by an +urgent flurry of ideas demanding attention. He straightens his wig, picks up +his skirts, and trips across to the door with a sinking feeling. Luckily his +publicly traded reputation is strictly technical. + +He unlocks the door. "Who is it?" he asks in English. By way of reply somebody +shoves the door in, hard. Manfred falls back against the wall, winded. His +glasses stop working, sidelook displays filling with multicolored static. + +Two men charge in, identically dressed in jeans and leather jackets. They're +wearing gloves and occlusive face masks, and one of them points a small and +very menacing ID card at Manfred. A self-propelled gun hovers in the doorway, +watching everything. "Where is he?" + +"Who?" gasps Manfred, breathless and terrified. + +"Macx." The other intruder steps into the living room quickly, pans around, +ducks through the bathroom door. Aineko flops as limp as a dishrag in front of +the sofa. The intruder checks out the bedroom: There's a brief scream, cut off +short. + +"I don't know - who?" Manfred is choking with fear. + +The other intruder ducks out of the bedroom, waves a hand dismissively. + +"We are sorry to have bothered you," the man with the card says stiffly. He +replaced it in his jacket pocket. "If you should see Manfred Macx, tell him +that the Copyright Control Association of America advises him to cease and +desist from his attempt to assist music thieves and other degenerate mongrel +second-hander enemies of Objectivism. Reputations only of use to those alive to +own them. Goodbye." + +The two copyright gangsters disappear through the door, leaving Manfred to +shake his head dizzily while his glasses reboot. It takes him a moment to +register the scream from the bedroom. "Fuck - Annette!" + +She appears in the open doorway, holding a sheet around her waist, looking +angry and confused. "Annette!" he calls. She looks around, sees him, and begins +to laugh shakily. "Annette!" He crosses over to her. "You're okay," he says. +"You're okay." + +"You too." She hugs him, and she's shaking. Then she holds him at arm's length. +"My, what a pretty picture!" + +"They wanted me," he says, and his teeth are chattering. "Why?" + +She looks up at him seriously. "You must bathe. Then have coffee. We are not at +home, oui?" + +"Ah, oui." He looks down. Aineko is sitting up, looking dazed. "Shower. Then +that dispatch for CIA news." + +"The dispatch?" She looks puzzled. "I filed that last night. When I was in the +shower. The microphone, he is waterproof." + +* * * + +By the time Arianespace's security contractors show up, Manfred has stripped +off Annette's evening gown and showered; he's sitting in the living room +wearing a bathrobe, drinking a half-liter mug of espresso and swearing under +his breath. + +While he was dancing the night away in Annette's arms, the global reputation +market has gone nonlinear: People are putting their trust in the Christian +Coalition and the Eurocommunist Alliance - always a sign that the times are bad +- while perfectly sound trading enterprises have gone into free fall, as if a +major bribery scandal has broken out. + +Manfred trades ideas for kudos via the Free Intellect Foundation, bastard child +of George Soros and Richard Stallman. His reputation is cemented by donations +to the public good that don't backfire. So he's offended and startled to +discover that he's dropped twenty points in the past two hours - and frightened +to see that this is by no means unusual. He was expecting a ten-point drop +mediated via an options trade - payment for the use of the anonymous luggage +remixer that routed his old suitcase to Mombasa and in return sent this new one +to him via the left-luggage office in Luton - but this is more serious. The +entire reputation market seems to have been hit by the confidence flu. + +Annette bustles around busily, pointing out angles and timings to the forensics +team her head office sent in answer to her call for back-up. She seems more +angry and shaken than worried by the intrusion. It's probably an occupational +hazard for any upwardly mobile executive in the old, grasping network of greed +that Manfred's agalmic future aims to supplant. The forensics dude and dudette, +a pair of cute, tanned Lebanese youngsters, point the yellow snout of their +mass spectroscope into various corners and agree that there's something not +unlike gun oil in the air. But, so sorry, the intruders wore masks to trap the +skin particles and left behind a spray of dust vacuumed from the seat of a city +bus, so there's no way of getting a genotype match. Presently they agree to log +it as a suspected corporate intrusion (origin: unclassified; severity: +worrying) and increase the logging level on her kitchen telemetry. And remember +to wear your earrings at all times, please. They leave, and Annette locks the +door, leans against it, and curses for a whole long minute. + +"They gave me a message from the copyright control agency," Manfred says +unevenly when she winds down. "Russian gangsters from New York bought the +recording cartels a few years ago, you know? After the rights stitch-up fell +apart, and the artists all went on-line while they focused on copy prevention +technologies, the Mafiya were the only people who would buy the old business +model. These guys add a whole new meaning to copy protection: This was just a +polite cease and desist notice by their standards. They run the record shops, +and they try to block any music distribution channel they don't own. Not very +successfully, though - most gangsters are living in the past, more conservative +than any normal businessman can afford to be. What was it that you put on the +wire?" + +Annette closes her eyes. "I don't remember. No." She holds up a hand. "Open +mike. I streamed you into a file and cut, cut out the bits about me." She opens +her eyes and shakes her head. "What was I on?" + +"You don't know either?" + +He stands up, and she walks over and throws her arms around him. "I was on +you," she murmurs. + +"Bullshit." He pulls away, then sees how this upsets her. Something is blinking +for attention in his glasses; he's been off-line for the best part of six hours +and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch +with everything that's happened in the last twenty kiloseconds. "I need to know +more. Something in that report rattled the wrong cages. Or someone ratted on +the suitcase exchange - I meant the dispatch to be a heads-up for whoever needs +a working state planning system, not an invitation to shoot me!" + +"Well, then." She lets go of him. "Do your work." Coolly: "I'll be around." + +He realizes that he's hurt her, but he doesn't see any way of explaining that +he didn't mean to - at least, not without digging himself in deeper. He +finishes his croissant and plunges into one of those unavoidable fits of deep +interaction, fingers twitching on invisible keypads and eyeballs jiggling as +his glasses funnel deep media straight into his skull through the highest +bandwidth channel currently available. + +One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, +companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the +attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies - and there are +currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day +by day - has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each +of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the +directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to +pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of cellular +automata, like the cells in Conway's Game of Life, only far more complex and +powerful. + +Manfred's companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with +capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated rather than +passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively +nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their corporate functions (such as +filing of accounts and voting in new directors) are all handled centrally +through his company-operating framework, and their trading is carried out via +several of the more popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do +other, more obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation +problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which explains +why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past twenty-two hours. + +The lawsuits are ... random. That's the only pattern Manfred can detect. Some +of them allege patent infringements; these he might take seriously, except that +about a third of the targets are director companies that don't actually do +anything visible to the public. A few lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then +there's a whole bizarre raft of spurious nonsense: suits for wrongful dismissal +or age discrimination - against companies with no employees - complaints about +reckless trading, and one action alleging that the defendant (in conspiracy +with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada, and the Emir of +Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make the plaintiff's pet +chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night. + +Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate, lawsuits are +hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one every sixteen seconds - up from +none in the preceding six months. In another day, this is going to saturate +him. If it keeps up for a week, it'll saturate every court in the United +States. Someone has found a means to do for lawsuits what he's doing for +companies - and they've chosen him as their target. + +To say that Manfred is unamused is an understatement. If he wasn't already +preoccupied with Annette's emotional state and edgy from the intrusion, he'd be +livid - but he's still human enough that he responds to human stimuli first. So +he determines to do something about it, but he's still flashing on the floating +gun, her cross-dressing cool. + +Transgression, sex, and networks; these are all on his mind when Glashwiecz +phones again. + +"Hello?" Manfred answers distractedly; he's busy pondering the lawsuit bot +that's attacking his systems. + +"Macx! The elusive Mr. Macx!" Glashwiecz sounds positively overjoyed to have +tracked down his target. + +Manfred winces. "Who is this?" he asks. + +"I called you yesterday," says the lawyer; "You should have listened." He +chortles horribly. "Now I have you!" + +Manfred holds the phone away from his face, like something poisonous. "I'm +recording this," he warns. "Who the hell are you and what do you want?" + +"Your wife has retained my partnership's services to pursue her interests in +your divorce case. When I called you yesterday it was to point out without +prejudice that your options are running out. I have an order, signed in court +three days ago, to have all your assets frozen. These ridiculous shell +companies notwithstanding, she's going to take you for exactly what you owe +her. After tax, of course. She's very insistent on that point." + +Manfred glances round, puts his phone on hold for a moment: "Where's my +suitcase?" he asks Aineko. The cat sidles away, ignoring him. "Shit." He can't +see the new luggage anywhere. Quite possibly it's on its way to Morocco, +complete with its priceless cargo of high-density noise. He returns his +attention to the phone. Glashwiecz is droning on about equitable settlements, +cumulative IRS tax demands - that seem to have materialized out of fantasy with +Pam's imprimatur on them - and the need to make a clean breast of things in +court and confess to his sins. "Where's the fucking suitcase?" He takes the +phone off hold. "Shut the fuck up, please, I'm trying to think." + +"I'm not going to shut up! You're on the court docket already, Macx. You can't +evade your responsibilities forever. You've got a wife and a helpless daughter +to care for -" + +"A daughter?" That cuts right through Manfred's preoccupation with the +suitcase. + +"Didn't you know?" Glashwiecz sounds pleasantly surprised. "She was decanted +last Thursday. Perfectly healthy, I'm told. I thought you knew; you have +viewing rights via the clinic webcam. Anyway, I'll just leave you with this +thought - the sooner you come to a settlement, the sooner I can unfreeze your +companies. Good-bye." + +The suitcase rolls into view, peeping coyly out from behind Annette's dressing +table. Manfred breathes a sigh of relief and beckons to it; at the moment, it's +easier to deal with his Plan B than dawn raids by objectivist gangsters, +Annette's sulk, his wife's incessant legal spamming, and the news that he is a +father against his will. "C'mon over here, you stray baggage. Let's see what I +got for my reputation derivatives ..." + +* * * + +Anticlimax. + +Annette's communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera +(shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx is in +Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and +he's promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, +starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by +building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with +external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the +Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. +Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the +screams from the Chicago School. + +Try as he may, Manfred can't see anything in the press release that is at all +unusual. It's just the sort of thing he does, and getting it on the net was why +he was looking for a CIA stringer in the first place. + +He tries to explain this to her in the bath as he soaps her back. "I don't +understand what they're on about," he complains. "There's nothing that tipped +them off - except that I was in Paris, and you filed the news. You did nothing +wrong." + +"Mais oui." She turns round, slippery as an eel, and slides backward into the +water. "I try to tell you this, but you are not listening." + +"I am now." Water droplets cling to the outside of his glasses, plastering his +view of the room with laser speckle highlights. "I'm sorry, Annette, I brought +this mess with me. I can take it out of your life." + +"No!" She rises up in front of him and leans forward, face serious. "I said +yesterday. I want to be your manager. Take me in." + +"I don't need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of +control!" + +"You think you do not need a manager, but your companies do," she observes. +"You have lawsuits, how many? You cannot the time to oversee them spare. The +Soviets, they abolish capitalists, but even they need managers. Please, let me +manage for you!" + +Annette is so intense about the idea that she becomes visibly aroused. He leans +toward her, cups a hand around one taut nipple. "The company matrix isn't sold +yet," he admits. + +"It is not?" She looks delighted. "Excellent! To who can this be sold, to +Moscow? To SLORC? To -" + +"I was thinking of the Italian Communist Party," he says. "It's a pilot +project. I was working on selling it - I need the money for my divorce, and to +close the deal on the luggage - but it's not that simple. Someone has to run +the damn thing - someone with a keen understanding of how to interface a +central planning system with a capitalist economy. A system administrator with +experience of working for a multinational corporation would be perfect, ideally +with an interest in finding new ways and means of interfacing the centrally +planned enterprise to the outside world." He looks at her with suddenly dawning +surmise. "Um, are you interested?" + +* * * + +Rome is hotter than downtown Columbia, South Carolina, over Thanksgiving +weekend; it stinks of methane-burning Skodas with a low undertone of cooked dog +shit. The cars are brightly colored subcompact missiles, hurtling in and out of +alleyways like angry wasps: Hot-wiring their drive-by-wire seems to be the +national sport, although Fiat's embedded systems people have always written +notoriously wobbly software. + +Manfred emerges from the Stazione Termini into dusty sunlight, blinking like an +owl. His glasses keep up a rolling monologue about who lived where in the days +of the late Republic. They're stuck on a tourist channel and won't come unglued +from that much history without a struggle. Manfred doesn't feel like a struggle +right now. He feels like he's been sucked dry over the weekend: a light, hollow +husk that might blow away in a stiff breeze. He hasn't had a patentable idea +all day. This is not a good state to be in on a Monday morning when he's due to +meet the former Minister for Economic Affairs, in order to give him a gift that +will probably get the minister a shot at higher office and get Pam's lawyer off +his back. But somehow he can't bring himself to worry too much: Annette has +been good for him. + +The ex-minister's private persona isn't what Manfred was expecting. All Manfred +has seen so far is a polished public avatar in a traditionally cut suit, +addressing the Chamber of Deputies in cyberspace; which is why, when he rings +the doorbell set in the whitewashed doorframe of Gianni's front door, he isn't +expecting a piece of Tom of Finland beefcake, complete with breechclout and +peaked leather cap, to answer. + +"Hello, I am here to see the minister," Manfred says carefully. Aineko, perched +on his left shoulder, attempts to translate: It trills something that sounds +extremely urgent. Everything sounds urgent in Italian. + +"It's okay, I'm from Iowa," says the guy in the doorway. He tucks a thumb under +one leather strap and grins over his moustache: "What's it about?" Over his +shoulder: "Gianni! Visitor!" + +"It's about the economy," Manfred says carefully. "I'm here to make it +obsolete." + +The beefcake backs away from the door cautiously - then the minister appears +behind him. "Ah, signore Macx! It's okay, Johnny, I have been expecting him." +Gianni extends a rapid welcome, like a hyperactive gnome buried in a white +toweling bathrobe: "Please come in, my friend! I'm sure you must be tired from +your journey. A refreshment for the guest if you please, Johnny. Would you +prefer coffee or something stronger?" + +Five minutes later, Manfred is buried up to his ears in a sofa covered in +buttery white cowhide, a cup of virulently strong espresso balanced +precariously on his knee, while Gianni Vittoria himself holds forth on the +problems of implementing a postindustrial ecosystem on top of a bureaucratic +system with its roots in the bullheadedly modernist era of the 1920s. Gianni is +a visionary of the left, a strange attractor within the chaotic phase-space of +Italian politics. A former professor of Marxist economics, his ideas are +informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone - even his enemies - +agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his +intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow +travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him +of the ultimate political crime — valuing truth over power. + +Manfred had met Gianni a couple of years earlier via a hosted politics chat +room; at the beginning of last week, he sent him a paper detailing his +embeddable planned economy and a proposal for using it to turbocharge the +endless Italian attempt to re-engineer its government systems. This is the thin +end of the wedge: If Manfred is right, it could catalyse a whole new wave of +communist expansion, driven by humanitarian ideals and demonstrably superior +performance, rather than wishful thinking and ideology. + +"It is impossible, I fear. This is Italy, my friend. Everybody has to have +their say. Not everybody even understands what it is we are talking about, but +that won't stop them talking about it. Since 1945, our government requires +consensus - a reaction to what came before. Do you know, we have five different +routes to putting forward a new law, two of them added as emergency measures to +break the gridlock? And none of them work on their own unless you can get +everybody to agree. Your plan is daring and radical, but if it works, we must +understand why we work - and that digs right to the root of being human, and +not everybody will agree." + +At this point Manfred realizes that he's lost. "I don't understand," he says, +genuinely puzzled. "What has the human condition got to do with economics?" + +The minister sighs abruptly. "You are very unusual. You earn no money, do you? +But you are rich, because grateful people who have benefited from your work +give you everything you need. You are like a medieval troubadour who has found +favor with the aristocracy. Your labor is not alienated - it is given freely, +and your means of production is with you always, inside your head." Manfred +blinks; the jargon is weirdly technical-sounding but orthogonal to his +experience, offering him a disquieting glimpse into the world of the terminally +future-shocked. He is surprised to find that not understanding itches. + +Gianni taps his balding temple with a knuckle like a walnut. "Most people spend +little time inside their heads. They don't understand how you live. They're +like medieval peasants looking in puzzlement at the troubadour. This system you +invent, for running a planned economy, is delightful and elegant: Lenin's heirs +would have been awestruck. But it is not a system for the new century. It is +not human." + +Manfred scratches his head. "It seems to me that there's nothing human about +the economics of scarcity," he says. "Anyway, humans will be obsolete as +economic units within a couple more decades. All I want to do is make everybody +rich beyond their wildest dreams before that happens." A pause for a sip of +coffee, and to think, one honest statement deserves another: "And to pay off a +divorce settlement." + +"Ye-es? Well, let me show you my library, my friend," he says, standing up. +"This way." + +Gianni ambles out of the white living room with its carnivorous leather sofas, +and up a cast-iron spiral staircase that nails some kind of upper level to the +underside of the roof. "Human beings aren't rational," he calls over his +shoulder. "That was the big mistake of the Chicago School economists, +neoliberals to a man, and of my predecessors, too. If human behavior was +logical, there would be no gambling, hmm? The house always wins, after all." +The staircase debouches into another airy whitewashed room, where one wall is +occupied by a wooden bench supporting a number of ancient, promiscuously cabled +servers and a very new, eye-wateringly expensive solid volume renderer. +Opposite the bench is a wall occupied from floor to ceiling by bookcases: +Manfred looks at the ancient, low-density medium and sneezes, momentarily +bemused by the sight of data density measured in kilograms per megabyte rather +than vice versa. + +"What's it fabbing?" Manfred asks, pointing at the renderer, which is whining +to itself and slowly sintering together something that resembles a carriage +clockmaker's fever dream of a spring-powered hard disk drive. + +"Oh, one of Johnny's toys - a micromechanical digital phonograph player," +Gianni says dismissively. "He used to design Babbage engines for the Pentagon - +stealth computers. (No van Eck radiation, you know.) Look." He carefully pulls +a fabric-bound document out of the obsolescent data wall and shows the spine to +Manfred: "On the Theory of Games, by John von Neumann. Signed first edition." + +Aineko meeps and dumps a slew of confusing purple finite state automata into +Manfred's left eye. The hardback is dusty and dry beneath his fingertips as he +remembers to turn the pages gently. "This copy belonged to the personal library +of Oleg Kordiovsky. A lucky man is Oleg: He bought it in 1952, while on a visit +to New York, and the MVD let him to keep it." + +"He must be -" Manfred pauses. More data, historical time lines. "Part of +GosPlan?" + +"Correct." Gianni smiles thinly. "Two years before the central committee +denounced computers as bourgeois deviationist pseudoscience intended to +dehumanize the proletarian. They recognized the power of robots even then. A +shame they did not anticipate the compiler or the Net." + +"I don't understand the significance. Nobody back then could expect that the +main obstacle to doing away with market capitalism would be overcome within +half a century, surely?" + +"Indeed not. But it's true: Since the 1980s, it has been possible - in +principle - to resolve resource allocation problems algorithmically, by +computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: They allow +competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap. So why do they +persist?" + +Manfred shrugs. "You tell me. Conservativism?" + +Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. "Markets afford their +participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find that human +beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their +best interests. Of necessity, a command economy must be coercive - it does, +after all, command." + +"But my system doesn't! It mediates where supplies go, not who has to produce +what -" + +Gianni is shaking his head. "Backward chaining or forward chaining, it is still +an expert system, my friend. Your companies need no human beings, and this is a +good thing, but they must not direct the activities of human beings, either. If +they do, you have just enslaved people to an abstract machine, as dictators +have throughout history." + +Manfred's eyes scan along the bookshelf. "But the market itself is an abstract +machine! A lousy one, too. I'm mostly free of it - but how long is it going to +continue oppressing people?" + +"Maybe not as long as you fear." Gianni sits down next to the renderer, which +is currently extruding the inference mill of the analytical engine. "The +marginal value of money decreases, after all: The more you have, the less it +means to you. We are on the edge of a period of prolonged economic growth, with +annual averages in excess of twenty percent, if the Council of Europe's +predictor metrics are anything to go by. The last of the flaccid industrial +economy has withered away, and this era's muscle of economic growth, what used +to be the high-technology sector, is now everything. We can afford a little +wastage, my friend, if that is the price of keeping people happy until the +marginal value of money withers away completely." + +Realization dawns. "You want to abolish scarcity, not just money!" + +"Indeed." Gianni grins. "There's more to that than mere economic performance; +you have to consider abundance as a factor. Don't plan the economy; take things +out of the economy. Do you pay for the air you breathe? Should uploaded minds - +who will be the backbone of our economy, by and by - have to pay for processor +cycles? No and no. Now, do you want to know how you can pay for your divorce +settlement? And can I interest you, and your interestingly accredited new +manager, in a little project of mine?" + +* * * + +The shutters are thrown back, the curtains tied out of the way, and Annette's +huge living room windows are drawn open in the morning breeze. + +Manfred sits on a leather-topped piano stool, his suitcase open at his feet. +He's running a link from the case to Annette's stereo, an antique stand-alone +unit with a satellite Internet uplink. Someone has chipped it, crudely revoking +its copy protection algorithm: The back of its case bears scars from the +soldering iron. Annette is curled up on the huge sofa, wrapped in a kaftan and +a pair of high-bandwidth goggles, thrashing out an internal Arianespace +scheduling problem with some colleagues in Iran and Guyana. + +His suitcase is full of noise, but what's coming out of the stereo is ragtime. +Subtract entropy from a data stream - coincidentally uncompressing it - and +what's left is information. With a capacity of about a trillion terabytes, the +suitcase's holographic storage reservoir has enough capacity to hold every +music, film, and video production of the twentieth century with room to spare. +This is all stuff that is effectively out of copyright control, work-for-hire +owned by bankrupt companies, released before the CCAA could make their media +clampdown stick. Manfred is streaming the music through Annette's stereo - but +keeping the noise it was convoluted with. High-grade entropy is valuable, too +... + +Presently, Manfred sighs and pushes his glasses up his forehead, killing the +displays. He's thought his way around every permutation of what's going on, and +it looks like Gianni was right: There's nothing left to do but wait for +everyone to show up. + +For a moment, he feels old and desolate, as slow as an unassisted human mind. +Agencies have been swapping in and out of his head for the past day, ever since +he got back from Rome. He's developed a butterfly attention span, irritable and +unable to focus on anything while the information streams fight it out for +control of his cortex, arguing about a solution to his predicament. Annette is +putting up with his mood swings surprisingly calmly. He's not sure why, but he +glances her way fondly. Her obsessions run surprisingly deep, and she's quite +clearly using him for her own purposes. So why does he feel more comfortable +around her than he did with Pam? + +She stretches and pushes her goggles up. "Oui?" + +"I was just thinking." He smiles. "Three days and you haven't told me what I +should be doing with myself, yet." + +She pulls a face. "Why would I do that?" + +"Oh, no reason. I'm just not over - " He shrugs uncomfortably. There it is, an +inexplicable absence in his life, but not one he feels he urgently needs to +fill yet. Is this what a relationship between equals feels like? He's not sure: +Starting with the occlusive cocooning of his upbringing and continuing through +all his adult relationships, he's been effectively - voluntarily - dominated by +his partners. Maybe the antisubmissive conditioning is working, after all. But +if so, why the creative malaise? Why isn't he coming up with original new ideas +this week? Could it be that his peculiar brand of creativity is an outlet, that +he needs the pressure of being lovingly enslaved to make him burst out into a +great flowering of imaginative brilliance? Or could it be that he really is +missing Pam? + +Annette stands up and walks over, slowly. He looks at her and feels lust and +affection, and isn't sure whether or not this is love. "When are they due?" she +asks, leaning over him. + +"Any -" The doorbell chimes. + +"Ah. I will get that." She stalks away, opens the door. + +"You!" + +Manfred's head snaps round as if he's on a leash. Her leash: But he wasn't +expecting her to come in person. + +"Yes, me," Annette says easily. "Come in. Be my guest." + +Pam enters the apartment living room with flashing eyes, her tame lawyer in +tow. "Well, look what the robot kitty dragged in," she drawls, fixing Manfred +with an expression that owes more to anger than to humor. It's not like her, +this blunt hostility, and he wonders where it came from. + +Manfred rises. For a moment he's transfixed by the sight of his dominatrix +wife, and his - mistress? conspirator? lover? - side by side. The contrast is +marked: Annette's expression of ironic amusement a foil for Pamela's angry +sincerity. Somewhere behind them stands a balding middle-aged man in a suit, +carrying a folio: just the kind of diligent serf Pam might have turned him +into, given time. Manfred musters up a smile. "Can I offer you some coffee?" he +asks. "The party of the third part seems to be late." + +"Coffee would be great, mine's dark, no sugar," twitters the lawyer. He puts +his briefcase down on a side table and fiddles with his wearable until a light +begins to blink from his spectacle frames: "I'm recording this, I'm sure you +understand." + +Annette sniffs and heads for the kitchen, which is charmingly manual but not +very efficient; Pam is pretending she doesn't exist. "Well, well, well." She +shakes her head. "I'd expected better of you than a French tart's boudoir, +Manny. And before the ink's dry on the divorce - these days that'll cost you, +didn't you think of that?" + +"I'm surprised you're not in the hospital," he says, changing the subject. "Is +postnatal recovery outsourced these days?" + +"The employers." She slips her coat off her shoulders and hangs it behind the +broad wooden door. "They subsidize everything when you reach my grade." Pamela +is wearing a very short, very expensive dress, the kind of weapon in the war +between the sexes that ought to come with an end-user certificate: But to his +surprise it has no effect on him. He realizes that he's completely unable to +evaluate her gender, almost as if she's become a member of another species. "As +you'd be aware if you'd been paying attention." + +"I always pay attention, Pam. It's the only currency I carry." + +"Very droll, ha-ha," interrupts Glashwiecz. "You do realize that you're paying +me while I stand here listening to this fascinating byplay?" + +Manfred stares at him. "You know I don't have any money." + +"Ah," Glashwiecz smiles, "but you must be mistaken. Certainly the judge will +agree with me that you must be mistaken - all a lack of paper documentation +means is that you've covered your trail. There's the small matter of the +several thousand corporations you own, indirectly. Somewhere at the bottom of +that pile there has got to be something, hasn't there?" + +A hissing, burbling noise like a sackful of large lizards being drowned in mud +emanates from the kitchen, suggesting that Annette's percolator is nearly +ready. Manfred's left hand twitches, playing chords on an air keyboard. Without +being at all obvious, he's releasing a bulletin about his current activities +that should soon have an effect on the reputation marketplace. "Your attack was +rather elegant," he comments, sitting down on the sofa as Pam disappears into +the kitchen. + +Glashwiecz nods. "The idea was one of my interns'," he says. "I don't +understand this distributed denial of service stuff, but Lisa grew up on it. +Something about it being a legal travesty, but workable all the same." + +"Uh-huh." Manfred's opinion of the lawyer drops a notch. He notices Pam +reappearing from the kitchen, her expression icy. A moment later Annette +surfaces carrying a jug and some cups, beaming innocently. Something's going +on, but at that moment, one of his agents nudges him urgently in the left ear, +his suitcase keens mournfully and beams a sense of utter despair at him, and +the doorbell rings again. + +"So what's the scam?" Glashwiecz sits down uncomfortably close to Manfred and +murmurs out of one side of his mouth. "Where's the money?" + +Manfred looks at him irritably. "There is no money," he says. "The idea is to +make money obsolete. Hasn't she explained that?" His eyes wander, taking in the +lawyer's Patek Philippe watch, his Java-enabled signet ring. + +"C'mon. Don't give me that line. Look, all it takes is a couple of million, and +you can buy your way free for all I care. All I'm here for is to see that your +wife and daughter don't get left penniless and starving. You know and I know +that you've got bags of it stuffed away - just look at your reputation! You +didn't get that by standing at the roadside with a begging bowl, did you?" + +Manfred snorts. "You're talking about an elite IRS auditor here. She isn't +penniless; she gets a commission on every poor bastard she takes to the +cleaners, and she was born with a trust fund. Me, I -" The stereo bleeps. +Manfred pulls his glasses on. Whispering ghosts of dead artists hum through his +earlobes, urgently demanding their freedom. Someone knocks at the door again, +and he glances around to see Annette walking toward it. + +"You're making it hard on yourself," Glashwiecz warns. + +"Expecting company?" Pam asks, one brittle eyebrow raised in Manfred's +direction. + +"Not exactly -" + +Annette opens the door and a couple of guards in full SWAT gear march in. +They're clutching gadgets that look like crosses between digital sewing +machines and grenade launchers, and their helmets are studded with so many +sensors that they resemble 1950s space probes. "That's them," Annette says +clearly. + +"Mais Oui." The door closes itself and the guards stand to either side. Annette +stalks toward Pam. + +"You think to walk in here, to my pied-a-terre, and take from Manfred?" she +sniffs. + +"You're making a big mistake, lady," Pam says, her voice steady and cold enough +to liquefy helium. + +A burst of static from one of the troopers. "No," Annette says distantly. "No +mistake." + +She points at Glashwiecz. "Are you aware of the takeover?" + +"Takeover?" The lawyer looks puzzled, but not alarmed by the presence of the +guards. + +"As of three hours ago," Manfred says quietly, "I sold a controlling interest +in agalmic.holdings.root.1.1.1 to Athene Accelerants BV, a venture capital +outfit from Maastricht. One dot one dot one is the root node of the central +planning tree. Athene aren't your usual VC, they're accelerants - they take +explosive business plans and detonate them." Glashwiecz is looking pale - +whether with anger or fear of a lost commission is impossible to tell. +"Actually, Athene Accelerants is owned by a shell company owned by the Italian +Communist Party's pension trust. The point is, you're in the presence of one +dot one dot one's chief operations officer." + +Pam looks annoyed. "Puerile attempts to dodge responsibility -" + +Annette clears her throat. "Exactly who do you think you are trying to sue?" +she asks Glashwiecz sweetly. "Here we have laws about unfair restraint of +trade. Also about foreign political interference, specifically in the financial +affairs of an Italian party of government." + +"You wouldn't -" + +"I would." Manfred brushes his hands on his knees and stands up. "Done, yet?" +he asks the suitcase. + +Muffled beeps, then a gravelly synthesized voice speaks. "Uploads completed." + +"Ah, good." He grins at Annette. "Time for our next guests?" + +On cue, the doorbell rings again. The guards sidle to either side of the door. +Annette snaps her fingers, and it opens to admit a pair of smartly dressed +thugs. It's beginning to get crowded in the living room. + +"Which one of you is Macx?" snaps the older one of the two thugs, staring at +Glashwiecz for no obvious reason. He hefts an aluminum briefcase. "Got a writ +to serve." + +"You'd be the CCAA?" asks Manfred. + +"You bet. If you're Macx, I have a restraining order -" + +Manfred raises a hand. "It's not me you want," he says. "It's this lady." He +points at Pam, whose mouth opens in silent protest. "Y'see, the intellectual +property you're chasing wants to be free. It's so free that it's now +administered by a complex set of corporate instruments lodged in the +Netherlands, and the prime shareholder as of approximately four minutes ago is +my soon-to-be-ex-wife Pamela, here." He winks at Glashwiecz. "Except she +doesn't control anything." + +"Just what do you think you're playing at, Manfred?" Pamela snarls, unable to +contain herself any longer. The guards shuffle: The larger, junior CCAA +enforcer tugs at his boss's jacket nervously. + +"Well." Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. "Pam wanted a +divorce settlement, didn't she? The most valuable assets I own are the rights +to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire that slipped through the CCAA's +fingers a few years back. Part of the twentieth century's cultural heritage +that got locked away by the music industry in the last decade - Janis Joplin, +the Doors, that sort of thing. Artists who weren't around to defend themselves +anymore. When the music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took +them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving it back to +the public domain, as it were." + +Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering and +buzzing into a throat mike. Manfred continues. "I was working on a solution to +the central planning paradox - how to interface a centrally planned enclave to +a market economy. My good friend Gianni Vittoria suggested that such a shell +game could have alternative uses. So I've not freed the music. Instead, I +signed the rights over to various actors and threads running inside the agalmic +holdings network - currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred +and seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly - the rights to any given +song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty milliseconds at a +time. Now understand, I don't own these companies. I don't even have a +financial interest in them anymore. I've deeded my share of the profits to Pam, +here. I'm getting out of the biz, Gianni's suggested something rather more +challenging for me to do instead." + +He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording Mafiya goon glares at him. +Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one wall, looking amused. "Perhaps +you'd like to sort it out between you?" he asks. Aside, to Glashwiecz: "I trust +you'll drop your denial of service attack before I set the Italian parliament +on you? By the way, you'll find the book value of the intellectual property +assets I deeded to Pamela - by the value these gentlemen place on them - is +somewhere in excess of a billion dollars. As that's rather more than +ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets, you'll probably want to look +elsewhere for your fees." + +Glashwiecz stands up carefully. The lead goon stares at Pamela. "Is this true?" +he demands. "This little squirt give you IP assets of Sony Bertelsmann +Microsoft Music? We have claim! You come to us for distribution or you get in +deep trouble." + +The second goon rumbles agreement: "Remember, dose MP3s, dey bad for you +health!" + +Annette claps her hands. "If you would to leave my apartment, please?" The +door, attentive as ever, swings open: "You are no longer welcome here!" + +"This means you," Manfred advises Pam helpfully. + +"You bastard," she spits at him. + +Manfred forces a smile, bemused by his inability to respond to her the way she +wants. Something's wrong, missing, between them. "I thought you wanted my +assets. Are the encumbrances too much for you?" + +"You know what I mean! You and that two-bit Euro-whore! I'll nail you for child +neglect!" + +His smile freezes. "Try it, and I'll sue you for breach of patent rights. My +genome, you understand." + +Pam is taken aback by this. "You patented your own genome? What happened to the +brave new communist, sharing information freely?" + +Manfred stops smiling. "Divorce happened. And the Italian Communist Party +happened." + +She turns on her heel and stalks out of the apartment bravely, tame attorney in +tow behind her, muttering about class action lawsuits and violations of the +Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The CCAA lawyer's tame gorilla makes a grab +for Glashwiecz's shoulder, and the guards move in, hustling the whole movable +feast out into the stairwell. The door slams shut on a chaos of impending +recursive lawsuits, and Manfred breathes a huge wheeze of relief. + +Annette walks over to him and leans her chin on the top of his head. "Think it +will work?" she asks. + +"Well, the CCAA will sue the hell out of the company network for a while if +they try to distribute by any channel that isn't controlled by the Mafiya. Pam +gets rights to all the music, her settlement, but she can't sell it without +going through the mob. And I got to serve notice on that legal shark: If he +tries to take me on he's got to be politically bullet-proof. Hmm. Maybe I ought +not to plan on going back to the USA this side of the singularity." + +"Profits," Annette sighs, "I do not easily understand this way of yours. Or +this apocalyptic obsession with singularity." + +"Remember the old aphorism, if you love something, set it free? I freed the +music." + +"But you didn't! You signed rights over -" + +"But first I uploaded the entire stash to several cryptographically anonymized +public network filesystems over the past few hours, so there'll be rampant +piracy. And the robot companies are all set to automagically grant any and +every copyright request they receive, royalty-free, until the goons figure out +how to hack them. But that's not the point. The point is abundance. The Mafiya +can't stop it being distributed. Pam is welcome to her cut if she can figure an +angle - but I bet she can't. She still believes in classical economics, the +allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn't work +that way. What matters is that people will be able to hear the music - instead +of a Soviet central planning system, I've turned the network into a firewall to +protect freed intellectual property." + +"Oh, Manfred, you hopeless idealist." She strokes his shoulder. "Whatever for?" + +"It's not just the music. When we develop a working AI or upload minds we'll +need a way of defending it against legal threats. That's what Gianni pointed +out to me ..." + +He's still explaining to her how he's laying the foundations for the transhuman +explosion due early in the next decade when she picks him up in both arms, +carries him to her bedroom, and commits outrageous acts of tender intimacy with +him. But that's okay. He's still human, this decade. + +This, too, will pass, thinks the bulk of his metacortex. And it drifts off into +the net to think deep thoughts elsewhere, leaving his meatbody to experience +the ancient pleasures of the flesh set free. + +1~ Chapter 3: Tourist + +Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels. His right +hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark's stolen memories. The victim +is sitting on the hard stones of the pavement behind him. Maybe he's wondering +what's happened; maybe he looks after the fleeing youth. But the tourist crowds +block the view effectively, and in any case, he has no hope of catching the +mugger. Hit-and-run amnesia is what the polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled +Jack it's just more loot to buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus motorized +combat boots. + +* * * + +The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples. What +happened? he wonders. The universe is a brightly colored blur of fast-moving +shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted cameras are rebooting +repeatedly: They panic every eight hundred milliseconds, whenever they realize +that they're alone on his personal area network without the comforting support +of a hub to tell them where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his +mobile phones are bickering moronically, disputing ownership of his grid +bandwidth, and his memory ... is missing. + +A tall blond clutching an electric chainsaw sheathed in pink bubble wrap leans +over him curiously: "you all right?" she asks. + +"I -" He shakes his head, which hurts. "Who am I?" His medical monitor is +alarmed because his blood pressure has fallen: His pulse is racing, his serum +cortisol titer is up, and a host of other biometrics suggest that he's going +into shock. + +"I think you need an ambulance," the woman announces. She mutters at her lapel, +"Phone, call an ambulance. " She waves a finger vaguely at him as if to reify a +geolink, then wanders off, chain-saw clutched under one arm. Typical southern +émigré behavior in the Athens of the North, too embarrassed to get involved. +The man shakes his head again, eyes closed, as a flock of girls on powered +blades skid around him in elaborate loops. A siren begins to warble, over the +bridge to the north. + +Who am I? he wonders. "I'm Manfred," he says with a sense of stunned wonder. He +looks up at the bronze statue of a man on a horse that looms above the crowds +on this busy street corner. Someone has plastered a Hello Cthulhu! holo on the +plaque that names its rider: Languid fluffy pink tentacles wave at him in an +attack of kawaii. "I'm Manfred - Manfred. My memory. What's happened to my +memory?" Elderly Malaysian tourists point at him from the open top deck of a +passing bus. He burns with a sense of horrified urgency. I was going somewhere, +he recalls. What was I doing? It was amazingly important, he thinks, but he +can't remember what exactly it was. He was going to see someone about - it's on +the tip of his tongue - + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the eve of the third decade: a time of chaos characterized by an +all-out depression in the space industries. + +_1 Most of the thinking power on the planet is now manufactured rather than +born; there are ten microprocessors for every human being, and the number is +doubling every fourteen months. Population growth in the developing world has +stalled, the birth rate dropping below replacement level. In the wired nations, +more forward-looking politicians are looking for ways to enfranchise their +nascent AI base. + +_1 Space exploration is still stalled on the cusp of the second recession of +the century. The Malaysian government has announced the goal of placing an imam +on Mars within ten years, but nobody else cares enough to try. + +_1 The Space Settlers Society is still trying to interest Disney Corp. in the +media rights to their latest L5 colony plan, unaware that there's already a +colony out there and it isn't human: First-generation uploads, Californian +spiny lobsters in wobbly symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard +an asteroid mining project established by the Franklin Trust. Meanwhile, +Chinese space agency cutbacks are threatening the continued existence of +Moonbase Mao. Nobody, it seems, has figured out how to turn a profit out beyond +geosynchronous orbit. + +_1 Two years ago, JPL, the ESA, and the uploaded lobster colony on comet +Khrunichev-7 picked up an apparently artificial signal from outside the solar +system; most people don't know, and of those who do, even fewer care. After +all, if humans can't even make it to Mars, who cares what's going on a hundred +trillion kilometers farther out? + +* * * + +Portrait of a wasted youth: + +Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his father; he +was unplanned, and Dad managed to kill himself in a building-site accident +before the Child Support could garnish his income for the upbringing. His +mother raised him in a two-bedroom housing association flat in Hawick. She +worked in a call center when he was young, but business dried up: Humans aren't +needed on the end of a phone anymore. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, +stacking shelves for virtual fly-by-nights that come and go like tourists in +the Festival season - but humans aren't in demand for shelf stacking either, +these days. + +His mother sent Jack to a local religious school, where he was regularly +excluded and effectively ran wild from the age of twelve. By thirteen, he was +wearing a parole cuff for shoplifting; by fourteen, he'd broken his collarbone +in a car crash while joyriding and the dour Presbyterian sheriff sent him to +the Wee Frees, who completed the destruction of his educational prospects with +high principles and an illicit tawse. + +Today, he's a graduate of the hard school of avoiding public surveillance +cameras, with distinctions in steganographic alibi construction. Mostly this +entails high-density crime - if you're going to mug someone, do so where there +are so many bystanders that they can't pin the blame on you. But the polis +expert systems are on his tail. If he keeps it up at this rate, in another four +months they'll have a positive statistical correlation that will convince even +a jury of his peers that he's guilty as fuck - and then he'll go down to +Saughton for four years. + +But Jack doesn't understand the meaning of a Gaussian distribution or the +significance of a chi-square test, and the future still looks bright to him as +he pulls on the chunky spectacles he ripped off the tourist gawking at the +statue on North Bridge. And after a moment, when they begin whispering into his +ears in stereo and showing him pictures of the tourist's vision, it looks even +brighter. + +"Gotta make a deal, gotta close a deal," whisper the glasses. "Meet the borg, +strike a chord." Weird graphs in lurid colors are filling up his peripheral +vision, like the hallucinations of a drugged marketroid. + +"Who the fuck are ye?" asks Jack, intrigued by the bright lights and icons. + +"I am your Cartesian theatre and you are our focus," murmur the glasses. "Dow +Jones down fifteen points, Federated Confidence up three, incoming briefing on +causal decoupling of social control of skirt hem lengths, shaving pattern of +beards, and emergence of multidrug antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative +bacilli: Accept?" + +"Ah can take it," Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on his +eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his ears like the superego of a +disembodied giant. Which is actually what he's stolen: The glasses and waist +pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed with enough hardware to run the +entire Internet, circa the turn of the millennium. They've got bandwidth coming +out the wazoo, distributed engines running a bazillion inscrutable search +tasks, and a whole slew of high-level agents that collectively form a large +chunk of the society of mind that is their owner's personality. Their owner is +a posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned policy wonk, +specializing in the politics of AI emancipation. When he was in the biz he was +the kind of guy who catalysed value wherever he went, leaving money trees +growing in his footprints. Now he's the kind of political backroom hitter who +builds coalitions where nobody else could see common ground. And Jack has +stolen his memories. There are microcams built into the frame of the glasses, +pickups in the earpieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in +the belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four months per +terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so unusual is that +their owner - Manfred - has cross-indexed them with his agents. Mind uploading +may not be a practical technology yet, but Manfred has made an end run on it +already. + +In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the identity of +the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses. And it is a very puzzled +Manfred who picks himself up and, with a curious vacancy in his head - except +for a hesitant request for information about accessories for Russian army boots +- dusts himself off and heads for his meeting on the other side of town. + +* * * + +Meanwhile, in another meeting, Manfred's absence is already being noticed. +"Something, something is wrong," says Annette. She raises her mirrorshades and +rubs her left eye, visibly worried. "Why is he not answering his chat? He knows +we are due to hold this call with him. Don't you think it is odd?" + +Gianni nods and leans back, regarding her from behind his desk. He prods at the +highly polished rosewood desktop. The wood grain slips, sliding into a +strangely different conformation, generating random dot stereoisograms - +messages for his eyes only. "He was visiting Scotland for me," he says after a +moment. "I do not know his exact whereabouts - the privacy safeguards - but if +you, as his designated next of kin, travel in person, I am sure you will find +it easier. He was going to talk to the Franklin Collective, face-to-face, one +to many ..." + +The office translator is good, but it can't provide real-time lip-synch +morphing between French and Italian. Annette has to make an effort to listen to +his words because the shape of his mouth is all wrong, like a badly dubbed +video. Her expensive, recent implants aren't connected up to her Broca's area +yet, so she can't simply sideload a deep grammar module for Italian. Their +communications are the best that money can buy, their VR environment +painstakingly sculpted, but it still doesn't break down the language barrier +completely. Besides, there are distractions: the way the desk switches from +black ash to rosewood halfway across its expanse, the strange air currents that +are all wrong for a room this size. "Then what could be up with him? His +voicemail is trying to cover for him. It is good, but it does not lie +convincingly." + +Gianni looks worried. "Manfred is prone to fits of do his own thing with +telling nobody in advance. But I don't like this. He should have to told one of +us first." Ever since that first meeting in Rome, when Gianni offered him a +job, Manfred has been a core member of Gianni's team, the fixer who goes out +and meets people and solves their problems. Losing him at this point could be +more than embarrassing. Besides, he's a friend. + +"I do not like this either." She stands up. "If he doesn't call back soon -" + +"You'll go and fetch him." + +"Oui." A smile flashes across her face, rapidly replaced by worry lines. "What +can have happened?" + +"Anything. Nothing." Gianni shrugs. "But we cannot do without him." He casts +her a warning glance. "Or you. Don't let the borg get you. Either of you." + +"Not to worry, I will just bring him back, whatever has happened." She stands +up, surprising a vacuum cleaner that skulks behind her desk. "Au revoir!" + +"Ciao." + +As she vacates her office, the minister flickers off behind her, leaving the +far wall the dull gray of a cold display panel. Gianni is in Rome, she's in +Paris, Markus is in Düsseldorf, and Eva's in Wroclaw. There are others, trapped +in digital cells scattered halfway across an elderly continent, but as long as +they don't try to shake hands, they're free to shout across the office at each +other. Their confidences and dirty jokes tunnel through multiple layers of +anonymized communication. + +Gianni is trying to make his break out of regional politics and into European +national affairs: Their job - his election team - is to get him a seat on the +Confederacy Commission, as Representative for Intelligence Oversight, and push +the boundaries of post-humanistic action outward, into deep space and deeper +time. Which makes the loss of a key team player, the house futurologist and +fixer, profoundly interesting to certain people: The walls have ears, and not +all the brains they feed into are human. + +Annette is more worried than she's letting on to Gianni. It's unlike Manfred to +be out of contact for long and even odder for his receptionist to stonewall +her, given that her apartment is the nearest thing to a home he's had for the +past couple of years. But something smells fishy. He sneaked out last night, +saying it would be an overnight trip, and now he's not answering. Could it be +his ex-wife? she wonders, despite Gianni's hints about a special mission. But +there's been no word from Pamela other than the sarcastic cards she dispatches +every year without fail, timed to arrive on the birthday of the daughter +Manfred has never met. The music Mafiya? A letter bomb from the Copyright +Control Association of America? But no, his medical monitor would have been +screaming its head off if anything like that had happened. + +Annette has organized things so that he's safe from the intellectual property +thieves. She's lent him the support he needs, and he's helped her find her own +path. She gets a warm sense of happiness whenever she considers how much +they've achieved together. But that's exactly why she's worried now. The +watchdog hasn't barked ... + +Annette summons a taxi to Charles de Gaulle. By the time she arrives, she's +already used her parliamentary carte to bump an executive-class seat on the +next A320 to Turnhouse, Edinburgh's airport, and scheduled accommodation and +transport for her arrival. The plane is climbing out over la Manche before the +significance of Gianni's last comment hits her: Might he think the Franklin +Collective could be dangerous to Manfred? + +* * * + +The hospital emergency suite has a waiting room with green plastic bucket seats +and subtractive volume renderings by preteens stuck to the walls like surreal +Lego sculptures. It's deeply silent, the available bandwidth all sequestrated +for medical monitors - there are children crying, periodic sirens wailing as +ambulances draw up, and people chattering all around him, but to Manfred, it's +like being at the bottom of a deep blue pool of quiet. He feels stoned, except +this particular drug brings no euphoria or sense of well-being. Corridor-corner +vendors hawk kebab-spitted pigeons next to the chained and rusted voluntary +service booth; video cameras watch the blue bivvy bags of the chronic cases +lined up next to the nursing station. Alone in his own head, Manfred is +frightened and confused. + +"I can't check you in 'less you sign the confidentiality agreement," says the +triage nurse, pushing an antique tablet at Manfred's face. Service in the NHS +is still free, but steps have been taken to reduce the incidence of scandals: +"Sign the nondisclosure clause here and here, or the house officer won't see +you." + +Manfred stares blearily up at the nurse's nose, which is red and slightly +inflamed from a nosocomial infection. His phones are bickering again, and he +can't remember why; they don't normally behave like this, something must be +missing, but thinking about it is hard. "Why am I here?" he asks for the third +time. + +"Sign it." A pen is thrust into his hand. He focuses on the page, jerks upright +as deeply canalized reflexes kick in. + +"This is theft of human rights! It says here that the party of the second part +is enjoined from disclosing information relating to the operations management +triage procedures and processes of the said health-giving institution, that's +you, to any third party - that's the public media - on pain of forfeiture of +health benefits pursuant to section two of the Health Service Reform Act. I +can't sign this! You could repossess my left kidney if I post on the Net about +how long I've been in hospital!" + +"So don't sign, then." The Hijra nurse shrugs, hitches up his sari, and walks +away. "Enjoy your wait!" + +Manfred pulls out his backup phone and stares at its display. "Something's +wrong here." The keypad beeps as he laboriously inputs opcodes. This gets him +into an arcane and ancient X.25 PAD, and he has a vague, disturbing memory that +hints about where he can go from here - mostly into the +long-since-decommissioned bowels of NHSNet - but the memories spring a page +fault and die somewhere between fingertips and the moment when understanding +dawns. It's a frustrating feeling: His brain is like an ancient car engine with +damp spark plugs, turning over and over without catching fire. + +The kebab vendor next to Manfred's seating rail chucks a stock cube on his +grill; it begins to smoke, aromatic and blue and herbal - cannabinoids to +induce tranquillity and appetite. Manfred sniffs twice, then staggers to his +feet and heads off in search of the toilet, his head spinning. He's mumbling at +his wrist watch: "Hello, Guatemala? Get me posology please. Click down my meme +tree, I'm confused. Oh shit. Who was I? What happened? Why is everything +blurry? I can't find my glasses ..." + +A gaggle of day-trippers are leaving the leprosy ward, men and women dressed in +anachronistic garb: men in dark suits, women in long dresses. All of them wear +electric blue disposable gloves and face masks. There's a hum and crackle of +encrypted bandwidth emanating from them, and Manfred instinctively turns to +follow. They leave the A&E unit through the wheelchair exit, two ladies +escorted by three gentlemen, with a deranged distressed refugee from the +twenty-first century shuffling dizzily after. They're all young, Manfred +realizes vaguely. Where's my cat? Aineko might be able to make sense of this, +if Aineko was interested. + +"I rather fancy we should retire to the club house," says one young beau. "Oh +yes! please!" his short blond companion chirps, clapping her hands together, +then irritably stripping off the anachronistic plastic gloves to reveal +wired-lace positional-sensor mitts underneath. "This trip has obviously been +unproductive. If our contact is here, I see no easy way of locating of him +without breach of medical confidence or a hefty gratuity." + +"The poor things," murmurs the other woman, glancing back at the leprosarium. +"Such a humiliating way to die." + +"Their own fault; If they hadn't participated in antibiotic abuse they wouldn't +be in the isolation ward," harrumphs a twentysomething with mutton-chops and +the manner of a precocious paterfamilias. He raps his walking stick on the +pavement for punctuation, and they pause for a flock of cyclists and a rickshaw +before they cross the road onto the Meadows. "Degenerate medication compliance, +degenerate immune systems." + +Manfred pauses to survey the grass, brain spinning as he ponders the fractal +dimensionality of leaves. Then he lurches after them, nearly getting himself +run down by a flywheel-powered tourist bus. Club. His feet hit the pavement, +cross it, thud down onto three billion years of vegetative evolution. Something +about those people. He feels a weird yearning, a tropism for information. It's +almost all that's left of him - his voracious will to know. The tall, +dark-haired woman hitches up her long skirts to keep them out of the mud. he +sees a flash of iridescent petticoats that ripple like oil on water, worn over +old-fashioned combat boots. Not Victorian, then: something else. I came here to +see - the name is on the tip of his tongue. Almost. He feels that it has +something to do with these people. + +The squad cross The Meadows by way of a tree-lined path, and come to a +nineteenth-century frontage with wide steps and a polished brass doorbell. They +enter, and the man with the mutton-chops pauses on the threshold and turns to +face Manfred. "You've followed us this far," he says. "Do you want to come in? +You might find what you're looking for." + +Manfred follows with knocking knees, desperately afraid of whatever he's +forgotten. + +* * * + +Meanwhile, Annette is busy interrogating Manfred's cat. + +"When did you last see your father?" + +Aineko turns its head away from her and concentrates on washing the inside of +its left leg. Its fur is lifelike and thick, pleasingly patterned except for a +manufacturer's URL emblazoned on its flanks; but the mouth produces no saliva, +the throat opens on no stomach or lungs. "Go away," it says: "I'm busy." + +"When did you last see Manfred?" she repeats intently. "I don't have time for +this. The polis don't know. The medical services don't know. He's off net and +not responding. So what can you tell me?" + +It took her precisely eighteen minutes to locate his hotel once she hit the +airport arrivals area and checked the hotel booking front end in the terminal: +She knows his preferences. It took her slightly longer to convince the +concierge to let her into his room. But Aineko is proving more recalcitrant +than she'd expected. + +"AI Neko mod two alpha requires maintenance downtime on a regular basis," the +cat says pompously: "You knew that when you bought me this body. What were you +expecting, five-nines uptime from a lump of meat? Go away, I'm thinking." The +tongue rasps out, then pauses while microprobes in its underside replace the +hairs that fell out earlier in the day. + +Annette sighs. Manfred's been upgrading this robot cat for years, and his +ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration too: This is its +third body, and it's getting more realistically uncooperative with every +hardware upgrade. Sooner or later it's going to demand a litter tray and start +throwing up on the carpet. "Command override," she says. "Dump event log to my +Cartesian theatre, minus eight hours to present." + +The cat shudders and looks round at her. "Human bitch!" it hisses. Then it +freezes in place as the air fills with a bright and silent tsunami of data. +Both Annette and Aineko are wired for extremely high-bandwidth spread-spectrum +optical networking; an observer would see the cat's eyes and a ring on her left +hand glow blue-white at each other. After a few seconds, Annette nods to +herself and wiggles her fingers in the air, navigating a time sequence only she +can see. Aineko hisses resentfully at her, then stands and stalks away, tail +held high. + +"Curiouser and curiouser," Annette hums to herself. She intertwines her +fingers, pressing obscure pressure points on knuckle and wrist, then sighs and +rubs her eyes. "He left here under his own power, looking normal," she calls to +the cat. "Who did he say he was going to see?" The cat sits in a beam of +sunlight falling in through the high glass window, pointedly showing her its +back. "Merde. If you're not going to help him -" + +"Try the Grassmarket," sulks the cat. "He said something about meeting the +Franklin Collective near there. Much good they'll do him ..." + +* * * + +A man wearing secondhand Chinese combat fatigues and a horribly expensive pair +of glasses bounces up a flight of damp stone steps beneath a keystone that +announces the building to be a Salvation Army hostel. He bangs on the door, his +voice almost drowned out by the pair of Cold War Re-enactment Society MiGs that +are buzzing the castle up the road: "Open up, ye cunts! Ye've got a deal +comin'!" + +A peephole set in the door at eye level slides to one side, and a pair of +beady, black-eyed video cameras peer out at him. "Who are you and what do you +want?" the speaker crackles. They don't belong to the Salvation Army; +Christianity has been deeply unfashionable in Scotland for some decades, and +the church that currently occupies the building has certainly moved with the +times in an effort to stay relevant. + +"I'm Macx," he says: "You've heard from my systems. I'm here to offer you a +deal you can't refuse." At least that's what his glasses tell him to say: What +comes out of his mouth sounds a bit more like, Am Max: Yiv hurdfrae ma system. +Am here tae gie ye a deal ye cannae refuse. The glasses haven't had long enough +to work on his accent. Meanwhile, he's so full of himself that he snaps his +fingers and does a little dance of impatience on the top step. + +"Aye, well, hold on a minute." The person on the other side of the speakerphone +has the kind of cut-glass Morningside accent that manages to sound more English +than the King while remaining vernacular Scots. The door opens, and Macx finds +himself confronted by a tall, slightly cadaverous man wearing a tweed suit that +has seen better days and a clerical collar cut from a translucent circuit +board. His face is almost concealed behind a pair of recording angel goggles. +"Who did ye say you were?" + +"I'm Macx! Manfred Macx! I'm here with an opportunity you wouldn't believe. +I've got the answer to your church's financial situation. I'm going to make you +rich!" The glasses prompt, and Macx speaks. + +The man in the doorway tilts his head slightly, goggles scanning Macx from head +to foot. Bursts of blue combustion products spurt from Macx's heels as he +bounces up and down enthusiastically. "Are ye sure ye've got the right +address?" he asks worriedly. + +"Aye, Ah am that." + +The resident backs into the hostel: "Well then, come in, sit yeself down and +tell me all about it." + +Macx bounces into the room with his brain wide open to a blizzard of pie charts +and growth curves, documents spawning in the bizarre phase-space of his +corporate management software. "I've got a deal you're not going to believe," +he reads, gliding past notice boards upon which Church circulars are staked out +to die like exotic butterflies, stepping over rolled-up carpets and a stack of +laptops left over from a jumble sale, past the devotional radio telescope that +does double duty as Mrs. Muirhouse's back-garden bird bath. "You've been here +five years and your posted accounts show you aren't making much money - barely +keeping the rent up. But you're a shareholder in Scottish Nuclear Electric, +right? Most of the church funds are in the form of a trust left to the church +by one of your congregants when she went to join the omega point, right?" + +"Er." The minister looks at him oddly. "I cannae comment on the church +eschatological investment trust. Why d'ye think that?" + +They fetch up, somehow, in the minister's office. A huge, framed rendering +hangs over the back of his threadbare office chair: the collapsing cosmos of +the End Times, galactic clusters rotten with the Dyson spheres of the eschaton +falling toward the big crunch. Saint Tipler the Astrophysicist beams down from +above with avuncular approval, a ring of quasars forming a halo around his +head. Posters proclaim the new Gospel: COSMOLOGY IS BETTER THAN GUESSWORK, and +LIVE FOREVER WITHIN MY LIGHT CONE. "Can I get ye anything? Cup of tea? Fuel +cell charge point?" asks the minister. + +"Crystal meth?" asks Macx, hopefully. His face falls as the minister shakes his +head apologetically. "Aw, dinnae worry, Ah wis only joshing." He leans forward: +"Ah know a' aboot yer plutonium futures speculation," he hisses. A finger taps +his stolen spectacles in an ominous gesture: "These dinnae just record, they +think. An' Ah ken where the money's gone." + +"What have ye got?" the minister asks coldly, any indication of good humor +flown. "I'm going to have to edit down these memories, ye bastard. I thought +I'd forgotten all about that. Bits of me aren't going to merge with the godhead +at the end of time now, thanks to you." + +"Keep yer shirt on. Whit's the point o' savin' it a' up if ye nae got a life +worth living? Ye reckon the big yin's nae gonnae unnerstan' a knees up?" + +"What do ye want?" + +"Aye, well," Macx leans back, aggrieved. Ah've got -" He pauses. An expression +of extreme confusion flits over his head. "Ah've got lobsters," he finally +announces. "Genetically engineered uploaded lobsters tae run yer uranium +reprocessing plant." As he grows more confused, the glasses' control over his +accent slips: "Ah wiz gonnae help yiz oot ba showin ye how ter get yer dosh +back whir it belong ..." A strategic pause: "so ye could make the council tax +due date. See, they're neutron-resistant, the lobsters. No, that cannae be +right. Ah wiz gonnae sell ye somethin' ye cud use fer" - his face slumps into a +frown of disgust - "free?" + +Approximately thirty seconds later, as he is picking himself up off the front +steps of the First Reformed Church of Tipler, Astrophysicist, the man who would +be Macx finds himself wondering if maybe this high finance shit isn't as easy +as it's cracked up to be. Some of the agents in his glasses are wondering if +elocution lessons are the answer; others aren't so optimistic. + +* * * + +_1 Getting back to the history lesson, the prospects for the decade look mostly +medical. + +_1 A few thousand elderly baby boomers are converging on Tehran for Woodstock +Four. Europe is desperately trying to import eastern European nurses and +home-care assistants; in Japan, whole agricultural villages lie vacant and +decaying, ghost communities sucked dry as cities slurp people in like +residential black holes. + +_1 A rumor is spreading throughout gated old-age communities in the American +Midwest, leaving havoc and riots in its wake: Senescence is caused by a slow +virus coded into the mammalian genome that evolution hasn't weeded out, and +rich billionaires are sitting on the rights to a vaccine. As usual, Charles +Darwin gets more than his fair share of the blame. (Less spectacular but more +realistic treatments for old age - telomere reconstruction and hexose-denatured +protein reduction - are available in private clinics for those who are willing +to surrender their pensions.) Progress is expected to speed up shortly, as the +fundamental patents in genomic engineering begin to expire; the Free Chromosome +Foundation has already published a manifesto calling for the creation of an +intellectual-property-free genome with improved replacements for all commonly +defective exons. + +_1 Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are +well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology +matures, death - with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights - +will become the biggest civil rights issue of all. + +_1 For a small extra fee, most veterinary insurance policies now cover cloning +of pets in the event of their accidental and distressing death. Human cloning, +for reasons nobody is very clear on anymore, is still illegal in most developed +nations - but very few judiciaries push for mandatory abortion of identical +twins. + +_1 Some commodities are expensive: the price of crude oil has broken eighty +Euros a barrel and is edging inexorably up. Other commodities are cheap: +computers, for example. Hobbyists print off weird new processor architectures +on their home inkjets; middle-aged folks wipe their backsides with diagnostic +paper that can tell how their cholesterol levels are tending. + +_1 The latest casualties of the march of technological progress are: the +high-street clothes shop, the flushing water closet, the Main Battle Tank, and +the first generation of quantum computers. New with the decade are cheap +enhanced immune systems, brain implants that hook right into the Chomsky organ +and talk to their owners through their own speech centers, and widespread +public paranoia about limbic spam. Nanotechnology has shattered into a dozen +disjoint disciplines, and skeptics are predicting that it will all peter out +before long. Philosophers have ceded qualia to engineers, and the current +difficult problem in AI is getting software to experience embarrassment. + +_1 Fusion power is still, of course, fifty years away. + +* * * + +The Victorians are morphing into goths before Manfred's culture-shocked eyes. + +"You looked lost," explains Monica, leaning over him curiously. "What's with +your eyes?" + +"I can't see too well," Manfred tries to explain. Everything is a blur, and the +voices that usually chatter incessantly in his head have left nothing behind +but a roaring silence. "I mean, someone mugged me. They took -" His hand closes +on air: something is missing from his belt. + +Monica, the tall woman he first saw in the hospital, enters the room. What +she's wearing indoors is skin-tight, iridescent and, disturbingly, she claims +is a distributed extension of her neuroectoderm. Stripped of costume-drama +accoutrements, she's a twenty-first-century adult, born or decanted after the +millennial baby boom. She waves some fingers in Manfred's face: "How many?" + +"Two." Manfred tries to concentrate. "What -" + +"No concussion," she says briskly. "'Scuse me while I page." Her eyes are +brown, with amber raster lines flickering across her pupils. Contact lenses? +Manfred wonders, his head turgid and unnaturally slow. It's like being drunk, +except much less pleasant: He can't seem to wrap his head around an idea from +all angles at once, anymore. Is this what consciousness used to be like? It's +an ugly, slow sensation. She turns away from him: "Medline says you'll be all +right in a while. The main problem is the identity loss. Are you backed up +anywhere?" + +"Here." Alan, still top-hatted and mutton-chopped, holds out a pair of +spectacles to Manfred. "Take these, they may do you some good." His topper +wobbles, as if a strange A-life experiment is nesting under its brim. + +"Oh. Thank you." Manfred reaches for them with a pathetic sense of gratitude. +As soon as he puts them on, they run through a test series, whispering +questions and watching how his eyes focus: After a minute, the room around him +clears as the specs build a synthetic image to compensate for his myopia. +There's limited Net access, too, he notices, a warm sense of relief stealing +over him. "Do you mind if I call somebody?" he asks: "I want to check my +back-ups." + +"Be my guest." Alan slips out through the door; Monica sits down opposite him +and stares into some inner space. The room has a tall ceiling, with whitewashed +walls and wooden shutters to cover the aerogel window bays. The furniture is +modern modular, and clashes horribly with the original nineteenth-century +architecture. "We were expecting you." + +"You were -" He shifts track with an effort: "I was here to see somebody. Here +in Scotland, I mean." + +"Us." She catches his eye deliberately. "To discuss sapience options with our +patron." + +"With your -" He squeezes his eyes shut. "Damn! I don't remember. I need my +glasses back. Please." + +"What about your back-ups?" she asks curiously. + +"A moment." Manfred tries to remember what address to ping. It's useless, and +painfully frustrating. "It would help if I could remember where I keep the rest +of my mind," he complains. "It used to be at - oh, there." + +An elephantine semantic network sits down on his spectacles as soon as he asks +for the site, crushing his surroundings into blocky pixilated monochrome that +jerks as he looks around. "This is going to take some time," he warns his hosts +as a goodly chunk of his metacortex tries to handshake with his brain over a +wireless network connection that was really only designed for web browsing. The +download consists of the part of his consciousness that isn't security-critical +- public access actors and vague opinionated rants - but it clears down a huge +memory castle, sketching in the outline of a map of miracles and wonders onto +the whitewashed walls of the room. + +When Manfred can see the outside world again, he feels a bit more like himself: +He can, at least, spawn a search thread that will resynchronize and fill him in +on what it found. He still can't access the inner mysteries of his soul +(including his personal memories); they're locked and barred pending biometric +verification of his identity and a quantum key exchange. But he has his wits +about him again - and some of them are even working. It's like sobering up from +a strange new drug, the infinitely reassuring sense of being back at the +controls of his own head. "I think I need to report a crime," he tells Monica - +or whoever is plugged into Monica's head right now, because now he knows where +he is and who he was meant to meet (although not why) - and he understands +that, for the Franklin Collective, identity is a politically loaded issue. + +"A crime report." Her expression is subtly mocking. "Identity theft, by any +chance?" + +"Yeah, yeah, I know: Identity is theft, don't trust anyone whose state vector +hasn't forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et +bloody cetera. Who am I talking to, by the way? And if we're talking, doesn't +that signify that you think we're on the same side, more or less?" He struggles +to sit up in the recliner chair: Stepper motors whine softly as it strives to +accommodate him. + +"Sidedness is optional." The woman who is Monica some of the time looks at him +quirkily: "It tends to alter drastically if you vary the number of dimensions. +Let's just say that right now I'm Monica, plus our sponsor. Will that do you?" + +"Our sponsor, who is in cyberspace -" + +She leans back on the sofa, which buzzes and extrudes an occasional table with +a small bar. "Drink? Can I offer you coffee? Guarana? Or maybe a +Berlinerweisse, for old time's sake?" + +"Guarana will do. Hello, Bob. How long have you been dead?" + +She chuckles. "I'm not dead, Manny. I may not be a full upload, but I feel like +me." She rolls her eyes, self-consciously. "He's making rude comments about +your wife," She adds; "I'm not going to pass that on." + +"My ex-wife," Manfred corrects her automatically. "The, uh, tax vamp. So. +You're acting as a, I guess, an interpreter for Bob?" + +"Ack." She looks at Manfred very seriously: "We owe him a lot, you know. He +left his assets in trust to the movement along with his partials. We feel +obliged to instantiate his personality as often as possible, even though you +can only do so much with a couple of petabytes of recordings. But we have +help." + +"The lobsters." Manfred nods to himself and accepts the glass that she offers. +Its diamond-plated curves glitter brilliantly in the late-afternoon sunlight. +"I knew this had something to do with them." He leans forward, holding his +glass and frowns. "If only I could remember why I came here! It was something +emergent, something in deep memory ... something I didn't trust in my own +skull. Something to do with Bob." + +The door behind the sofa opens; Alan enters. "Excuse me," he says quietly, and +heads for the far side of the room. A workstation folds down from the wall, and +a chair rolls in from a service niche. He sits with his chin propped on his +hands, staring at the white desktop. Every so often he mutters quietly to +himself; "Yes, I understand ... campaign headquarters ... donations need to be +audited ..." + +"Gianni's election campaign," Monica prompts him. + +Manfred jumps. "Gianni -" A bundle of memories unlock inside his head as he +remembers his political front man's message. "Yes! That's what this is about. +It has to be!" He looks at her excitedly. "I'm here to deliver a message to you +from Gianni Vittoria. About -" He looks crestfallen. "I'm not sure," he trails +off uncertainly, "but it was important. Something critical in the long term, +something about group minds and voting. But whoever mugged me got the message." + +* * * + +The Grassmarket is an overly rustic cobbled square nestled beneath the +glowering battlements of Castle Rock. Annette stands on the site of the gallows +where they used to execute witches; she sends forth her invisible agents to +search for spoor of Manfred. Aineko, overly familiar, drapes over her left +shoulder like a satanic stole and delivers a running stream of cracked +cellphone chatter into her ear. + +"I don't know where to begin," she sighs, annoyed. This place is a wall-to-wall +tourist trap, a many-bladed carnivorous plant that digests easy credit and +spits out the drained husks of foreigners. The road has been pedestrianized and +resurfaced in squalidly authentic mediaeval cobblestones; in the middle of what +used to be the car park, there's a permanent floating antiques market, where +you can buy anything from a brass fire surround to an ancient CD player. Much +of the merchandise in the shops is generic dot-com trash, vying for the title +of Japanese-Scottish souvenir from hell: Puroland tartans, animatronic Nessies +hissing bad-temperedly at knee level, second hand laptops. People swarm +everywhere, from the theme pubs (hangings seem to be a running joke hereabouts) +to the expensive dress shops with their fabric renderers and digital mirrors. +Street performers, part of the permanent floating Fringe, clutter the sidewalk: +A robotic mime, very traditional in silver face paint, mimics the gestures of +passers by with ironically stylized gestures. + +"Try the doss house," Aineko suggests from the shelter of her shoulder bag. + +"The -" Annette does a doubletake as her thesaurus conspires with her open +government firmware and dumps a geographical database of city social services +into her sensorium. "Oh, I see." The Grassmarket itself is touristy, but the +bits off to one end - down a dingy canyon of forbidding stone buildings six +stories high - are decidedly downmarket. "Okay." + +Annette weaves past a stall selling disposable cellphones and cheaper genome +explorers, round a gaggle of teenage girls in the grips of some kind of +imported kawaii fetish, who look at her in alarm from atop their pink platform +heels - probably mistaking her for a school probation inspector - and past a +stand of chained and parked bicycles. The human attendant looks bored out of +her mind. Annette tucks a blandly anonymous ten-Euro note in her pocket almost +before she notices: "If you were going to buy a hot bike," she asks, "where +would you go?" The parking attendant stares, and for a moment Annette thinks +she's overestimated her. Then she mumbles something. "What?" + +"McMurphy's. Used to be called Bannerman's. Down yon Cowgate, thataway." The +meter maid looks anxiously at her rack of charges. "You didn't -" + +"Uh-huh." Annette follows her gaze: straight down the dark stone canyon. Well, +okay. "This had better be worth it, Manny mon chèr," she mutters under her +breath. + +McMurphy's is a fake Irish pub, a stone grotto installed beneath a mound of +blank-faced offices. It was once a real Irish pub before the developers got +their hands on it and mutated it in rapid succession into a punk nightclub, a +wine bar, and a fake Dutch coffee shop; after which, as burned-out as any star, +it left the main sequence. Now it occupies an unnaturally prolonged, chilly +existence as the sort of recycled imitation Irish pub that has neon four-leafed +clovers hanging from the artificially blackened pine beams above the log tables +- in other words, the burned-out black dwarf afterlife of a once-serious +drinking establishment. Somewhere along the line, the beer cellar was replaced +with a toilet (leaving more room for paying patrons upstairs), and now its +founts dispense fizzy concentrate diluted with water from the city mains. + +"Say, did you hear the one about the Eurocrat with the robot pussy who goes +into a dodgy pub on the Cowgate and orders a coke? And when it arrives, she +says 'hey, where's the mirror?'" + +"Shut up," Annette hisses into her shoulder bag. "That isn't funny." Her +personal intruder telemetry has just e-mailed her wristphone, and it's +displaying a rotating yellow exclamation point, which means that according to +the published police crime stats, this place is likely to do grievous harm to +her insurance premiums. + +Aineko looks up at her from his nest in the bag and yawns cavernously, baring a +pink, ribbed mouth and a tongue like pink suede. "Want to make me? I just +pinged Manny's head. The network latency was trivial." + +The barmaid sidles up and pointedly manages not to make eye contact with +Annette. "I'll have a Diet Coke," Annette orders. In the direction of her bag, +voice pitched low: "Did you hear the one about the Eurocrat who goes into a +dodgy pub, orders half a liter of Diet Coke, and when she spills it in her +shoulder bag she says 'oops, I've got a wet pussy'?" + +The Coke arrives. Annette pays for it. There may be a couple of dozen people in +the pub; it's hard to tell because it looks like an ancient cellar, lots of +stone archways leading off into niches populated with second-hand church pews +and knife-scarred tables. Some guys who might be bikers, students, or +well-dressed winos are hunched over one table: hairy, wearing vests with too +many pockets, in an artful bohemianism that makes Annette blink until one of +her literary programs informs her that one of them is a moderately famous local +writer, a bit of a guru for the space and freedom party. There're a couple of +women in boots and furry hats in one corner, poring over the menu, and a parcel +of off-duty street performers hunching over their beers in a booth. Nobody else +is wearing anything remotely like office drag, but the weirdness coefficient is +above average; so Annette dials her glasses to extra-dark, straightens her tie, +and glances around. + +The door opens and a nondescript youth slinks in. He's wearing baggy BDUs, +woolly cap, and a pair of boots that have that quintessential essense de panzer +division look, all shock absorbers and olive drab Kevlar panels. He's wearing - + +"I spy with my little network intrusion detector kit," begins the cat, as +Annette puts her drink down and moves in on the youth, "something beginning +with -" + +"How much you want for the glasses, kid?" she asks quietly. + +He jerks and almost jumps - a bad idea in MilSpec combat boots, the ceiling is +eighteenth-century stone half a meter thick; "Dinnae fuckin' dae that," he +complains in an eerily familiar way: "Ah -" he swallows. "Annie! Who -" + +"Stay calm. Take them off - they'll only hurt you if you keep wearing them," +she says, careful not to move too fast because now she has a second, +scary-jittery fear, and she knows without having to look that the exclamation +mark on her watch has turned red and begun to flash: "Look, I'll give you two +hundred Euros for the glasses and the belt pouch, real cash, and I won't ask +how you got them or tell anyone." He's frozen in front of her, mesmerized, and +she can see the light from inside the lenses spilling over onto his +half-starved adolescent cheekbones, flickering like cold lightning, like he's +plugged his brain into a grid bearer; swallowing with a suddenly dry mouth, she +slowly reaches up and pulls the spectacles off his face with one hand and takes +hold of the belt pouch with the other. The kid shudders and blinks at her, and +she sticks a couple of hundred-Euro notes in front of his nose. "Scram," she +says, not unkindly. + +He reaches up slowly, then seizes the money and runs - blasts his way through +the door with an ear-popping concussion, hangs a left onto the cycle path, and +vanishes downhill toward the parliament buildings and university complex. + +Annette watches the doorway apprehensively. "Where is he?" she hisses, worried: +"Any ideas, cat?" + +"Naah. It's your job to find him," Aineko opines complacently. But there's an +icicle of anxiety in Annette's spine. Manfred's been separated from his memory +cache? Where could he be? Worse - who could he be? + +"Fuck you, too," she mutters. "Only one thing for it, I guess." She takes off +her own glasses - they're much less functional than Manfred's massively +ramified custom rig - and nervously raises the repo'd specs toward her face. +Somehow what she's about to do makes her feel unclean, like snooping on a +lover's e-mail folders. But how else can she figure out where he might have +gone? + +She slides the glasses on and tries to remember what she was doing yesterday in +Edinburgh. + +* * * + +"Gianni?" + +"Oui, ma chérie?" + +Pause. "I lost him. But I got his aid-mémoire back. A teenage freeloader +playing cyberpunk with them. No sign of his location - so I put them on." + +Pause. "Oh dear." + +"Gianni, why exactly did you send him to the Franklin Collective?" + +Pause. (During which, the chill of the gritty stone wall she's leaning on +begins to penetrate the weave of her jacket.) "I not wanting to bother you with +trivia." + +"Merde. It's not trivia, Gianni, they're accelerationistas. Have you any idea +what that's going to do to his head?" + +Pause: Then a grunt, almost of pain. "Yes." + +"Then why did you do it?" she demands vehemently. She hunches over, punching +words into her phone so that other passers-by avoid her, unsure whether she's +hands-free or hallucinating: "Shit, Gianni, I have to pick up the pieces every +time you do this! Manfred is not a healthy man, he's on the edge of acute +future shock the whole time, and I was not joking when I told you last February +that he'd need a month in a clinic if you tried running him flat out again! If +you're not careful, he could end up dropping out completely and joining the +borganism -" + +"Annette." A heavy sigh: "He are the best hope we got. Am knowing half-life of +agalmic catalyst now down to six months and dropping; Manny outlast his career +expectancy, four deviations outside the normal, yes, we know this. But I are +having to break civil rights deadlock now, this election. We must achieve +consensus, and Manfred are only staffer we got who have hope of talking to +Collective on its own terms. He are deal-making messenger, not force burnout, +right? We need coalition reserve before term limit lockout followed by gridlock +in Brussels, American-style. Is more than vital - is essential." + +"That's no excuse -" + +"Annette, they have partial upload of Bob Franklin. They got it before he died, +enough of his personality to reinstantiate it, time-sharing in their own +brains. We must get the Franklin Collective with their huge resources lobbying +for the Equal Rights Amendment: If ERA passes, all sapients are eligible to +vote, own property, upload, download, sideload. Are more important than little +gray butt-monsters with cold speculum: Whole future depends on it. Manny +started this with crustacean rights: Leave uploads covered by copyrights not +civil rights and where will we be in fifty years? Do you think I must ignore +this? It was important then, but now, with the transmission the lobsters +received -" + +"Shit." She turns and leans her forehead against the cool stonework. "I'll need +a prescription. Ritalin or something. And his location. Leave the rest to me." +She doesn't add, That includes peeling him off the ceiling afterwards: that's +understood. Nor does she say, you're going to pay. That's understood, too. +Gianni may be a hard-nosed political fixer, but he looks after his own. + +"Location am easy if he find the PLO. GPS coordinates are following -" + +"No need. I got his spectacles." + +"Merde, as you say. Take them to him, ma chérie. Bring me the distributed trust +rating of Bob Franklin's upload, and I bring Bob the jubilee, right to direct +his own corporate self again as if still alive. And we pull diplomatic +chestnuts out of fire before they burn. Agreed?" + +"Oui." + +She cuts the connection and begins walking uphill, along the Cowgate (through +which farmers once bought their herds to market), toward the permanent floating +Fringe and then the steps towards The Meadows. As she pauses opposite the site +of the gallows, a fight breaks out: Some Paleolithic hangover takes exception +to the robotic mime aping his movements, and swiftly rips its arm off. The mime +stands there, sparks flickering inside its shoulder, and looks confused. Two +pissed-looking students start forward and punch the short-haired vandal. There +is much shouting in the mutually incomprehensible accents of Oxgangs and the +Herriott-Watt Robot Lab. Annette watches the fight and shudders; it's like a +flashover vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment - with its +redefinition of personhood - is rejected by the house of deputies: a universe +where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental +DNA is to be doomed to slavery. + +Maybe Gianni was right, she ponders. But I wish the price wasn't so personal - + +* * * + +Manfred can feel one of his attacks coming on. The usual symptoms are all +present - the universe, with its vast preponderance of unthinking matter, +becomes an affront; weird ideas flicker like heat lightning far away across the +vast plateaus of his imagination - but, with his metacortex running in +sandboxed insecure mode, he feels blunt. And slow. Even obsolete. The latter is +about as welcome a sensation as heroin withdrawal: He can't spin off threads to +explore his designs for feasibility and report back to him. It's like someone +has stripped fifty points off his IQ; his brain feels like a surgical scalpel +that's been used to cut down trees. A decaying mind is a terrible thing to be +trapped inside. Manfred wants out, and he wants out bad - but he's too afraid +to let on. + +"Gianni is a middle-of-the-road Eurosocialist, a mixed-market pragmatist +politician," Bob's ghost accuses Manfred by way of Monica's dye-flushed lips, +"hardly the sort of guy you'd expect me to vote for, no? So what does he think +I can do for him?" + +"That's a - ah - " Manfred rocks forward and back in his chair, arms crossed +firmly and hands thrust under his armpits for protection. "Dismantle the moon! +Digitize the biosphere, make a nöosphere out of it - shit, sorry, that's +long-term planning. Build Dyson spheres, lots and lots of - Ahem. Gianni is an +ex-Marxist, reformed high church Trotskyite clade. He believes in achieving +True Communism, which is a state of philosophical grace that requires certain +prerequisites like, um, not pissing around with Molotov cocktails and thought +police: He wants to make everybody so rich that squabbling over ownership of +the means of production makes as much sense as arguing over who gets to sleep +in the damp spot at the back of the cave. He's not your enemy, I mean. He's the +enemy of those Stalinist deviationist running dogs in Conservative Party +Central Office who want to bug your bedroom and hand everything on a plate to +the big corporates owned by the pension funds - which in turn rely on people +dying predictably to provide their raison d'être. And, um, more importantly +dying and not trying to hang on to their property and chattels. Sitting up in +the coffin singing extropian fireside songs, that kind of thing. The actuaries +are to blame, predicting life expectancy with intent to cause people to buy +insurance policies with money that is invested in control of the means of +production - Bayes' Theorem is to blame -" + +Alan glances over his shoulder at Manfred: "I don't think feeding him guarana +was a good idea," he says in tones of deep foreboding. + +Manfred's mode of vibration has gone nonlinear by this point: He's rocking +front to back, and jiggling up and down in little hops, like a technophiliacal +yogic flyer trying to bounce his way to the singularity. Monica leans toward +him and her eyes widen: "Manfred," she hisses, "shut up!" + +He stops babbling abruptly, with an expression of deep puzzlement. "Who am I?" +he asks, and keels over backward. "Why am I, here and now, occupying this body +-" + +"Anthropic anxiety attack," Monica comments. "I think he did this in Amsterdam +eight years ago when Bob first met him." She looks alarmed, a different +identity coming to the fore: "What shall we do?" + +"We have to make him comfortable." Alan raises his voice: "Bed, make yourself +ready, now." The back of the sofa Manfred is sprawled on flops downward, the +base folds up, and a strangely animated duvet crawls up over his feet. "Listen, +Manny, you're going to be all right." + +"Who am I and what do I signify?" Manfred mumbles incoherently: "A mass of +propagating decision trees, fractal compression, lots of synaptic junctions +lubricated with friendly endorphins -" Across the room, the bootleg +pharmacopoeia is cranking up to manufacture some heavy tranquilizers. Monica +heads for the kitchen to get something for him to drink them in. "Why are you +doing this?" Manfred asks, dizzily. + +"It's okay. Lie down and relax." Alan leans over him. "We'll talk about +everything in the morning, when you know who you are." (Aside to Monica, who is +entering the room with a bottle of iced tea: "Better let Gianni know that he's +unwell. One of us may have to go visit the minister. Do you know if Macx has +been audited?") "Rest up, Manfred. Everything is being taken care of." + +About fifteen minutes later, Manfred - who, in the grip of an existential +migraine, meekly obeys Monica's instruction to drink down the spiked tea - lies +back on the bed and relaxes. His breathing slows; the subliminal muttering +ceases. Monica, sitting next to him, reaches out and takes his right hand, +which is lying on top of the bedding. + +"Do you want to live forever?" she intones in Bob Franklin's tone of voice. +"You can live forever in me ..." + +* * * + +The Church of Latter-Day Saints believes that you can't get into the Promised +Land unless it's baptized you - but it can do so if it knows your name and +parentage, even after you're dead. Its genealogical databases are among the +most impressive artifacts of historical research ever prepared. And it likes to +make converts. + +The Franklin Collective believes that you can't get into the future unless it's +digitized your neural state vector, or at least acquired as complete a snapshot +of your sensory inputs and genome as current technology permits. You don't need +to be alive for it to do this. Its society of mind is among the most impressive +artifacts of computer science. And it likes to make converts. + +* * * + +Nightfall in the city. Annette stands impatiently on the doorstep. "Let me the +fuck in," she snarls impatiently at the speakerphone. "Merde!" + +Someone opens the door. "Who -" + +Annette shoves him inside, kicks the door shut, and leans on it. "Take me to +your bodhisattva," she demands. "Now." + +"I -" he turns and heads inside, along the gloomy hallway that runs past a +staircase. Annette strides after him aggressively. He opens a door and ducks +inside, and she follows before he can close it. + +Inside, the room is illuminated by a variety of indirect diode sources, +calibrated for the warm glow of a summer afternoon's daylight. There's a bed in +the middle of it, a figure lying asleep at the heart of a herd of attentive +diagnostic instruments. A couple of attendants sit to either side of the +sleeping man. + +"What have you done to him?" Annette snaps, rushing forward. Manfred blinks up +at her from the pillows, bleary-eyed and confused as she leans overhead: +"Hello? Manny?" Over her shoulder: "If you have done anything to him -" + +"Annie?" He looks puzzled. A bright orange pair of goggles - not his own - is +pushed up onto his forehead like a pair of beached jellyfish. "I don't feel +well. 'F I get my hands on the bastard who did this ..." + +"We can fix that," she says briskly, declining to mention the deal she cut to +get his memories back. She peels off his glasses and carefully slides them onto +his face, replacing his temporary ones. The brain bag she puts down next to his +shoulder, within easy range. The hairs on the back of her neck rise as a thin +chattering fills the ether around them: his eyes are glowing a luminous blue +behind his shades, as if a high-tension spark is flying between his ears. + +"Oh. Wow." He sits up, the covers fall from his naked shoulders, and her breath +catches. + +She looks round at the motionless figure sitting to his left. The man in the +chair nods deliberately, ironically. "What have you done to him?" + +"We've been looking after him - nothing more, nothing less. He arrived in a +state of considerable confusion, and his state deteriorated this afternoon." + +She's never met this fellow before, but she has a gut feeling that she knows +him. "You would be Robert ... Franklin?" + +He nods again. "The avatar is in." There's a thud as Manfred's eyes roll up in +his head, and he flops back onto the bedding. "Excuse me. Monica?" + +The young woman on the other side of the bed shakes her head. "No, I'm running +Bob, too." + +"Oh. Well, you tell her - I've got to get him some juice." + +The woman who is also Bob Franklin - or whatever part of him survived his +battle with an exotic brain tumor eight years earlier - catches Annette's eye +and shakes her head, smiles faintly. "You're never alone when you're a +syncitium." + +Annette wrinkles her brow: she has to trigger a dictionary attack to parse the +sentence. "One large cell, many nuclei? Oh, I see. You have the new implant. +The better to record everything." + +The youngster shrugs. "You want to die and be resurrected as a third-person +actor in a low-bandwidth re-enactment? Or a shadow of itchy memories in some +stranger's skull?" She snorts, a gesture that's at odds with the rest of her +body language. + +"Bob must have been one of the first borganisms. Humans, I mean. After Jim +Bezier." Annette glances over at Manfred, who has begun to snore softly. "It +must have been a lot of work." + +"The monitoring equipment cost millions, then," says the woman - Monica? - "and +it didn't do a very good job. One of the conditions for our keeping access to +his research funding is that we regularly run his partials. He wanted to build +up a kind of aggregate state vector - patched together out of bits and pieces +of other people to supplement the partials that were all I - he - could record +with the then state of the art." + +"Eh, right." Annette reaches out and absently smooths a stray hair away from +Manfred's forehead. "What is it like to be part of a group mind?" + +Monica sniffs, evidently amused. "What is it like to see red? What's it like to +be a bat? I can't tell you - I can only show you. We're all free to leave at +any time, you know." + +"But somehow you don't." Annette rubs her head, feels the short hair over the +almost imperceptible scars that conceal a network of implants - tools that +Manfred turned down when they became available a year or two ago. ("Goop-phase +Darwin-design nanotech ain't designed for clean interfaces," he'd said, "I'll +stick to disposable kit, thanks.") "No thank you. I don't think he'll take up +your offer when he wakes up, either." (Subtext: I'll let you have him over my +dead body.) + +Monica shrugs. "That's his loss: He won't live forever in the singularity, +along with other followers of our gentle teacher. Anyway, we have more converts +than we know what to do with." + +A thought occurs to Annette. "Ah. You are all of one mind? Partially? A +question to you is a question to all?" + +"It can be." The words come simultaneously from Monica and the other body, +Alan, who is standing in the doorway with a boxy thing that looks like an +improvised diagnostician. "What do you have in mind?" adds the Alan body. + +Manfred, lying on the bed, groans: There's an audible hiss of pink noise as his +glasses whisper in his ears, bone conduction providing a serial highway to his +wetware. + +"Manfred was sent to find out why you're opposing the ERA," Annette explains. +"Some parts of our team operate without the other's knowledge." + +"Indeed." Alan sits down on the chair beside the bed and clears his throat, +puffing his chest out pompously. "A very important theological issue. I feel -" + +"I, or we?" Annette interrupts. + +"We feel," Monica snaps. Then she glances at Alan. "Soo-rrry." + +The evidence of individuality within the group mind is disturbing to Annette: +Too many reruns of the Borgish fantasy have conditioned her preconceptions, and +their quasi-religious belief in a singularity leaves her cold. "Please +continue." + +"One person, one vote, is obsolete," says Alan. "The broader issue of how we +value identity needs to be revisited, the franchise reconsidered. Do you get +one vote for each warm body? Or one vote for each sapient individual? What +about distributed intelligences? The proposals in the Equal Rights Act are +deeply flawed, based on a cult of individuality that takes no account of the +true complexity of posthumanism." + +"Like the proposals for a feminine franchise in the nineteenth century that +would grant the vote to married wives of land-owning men," Monica adds slyly: +"It misses the point." + +"Ah, oui." Annette crosses her arms, suddenly defensive. This isn't what she'd +expected to hear. This is the elitist side of the posthumanism shtick, +potentially as threatening to her post enlightenment ideas as the divine right +of kings. + +"It misses more than that." Heads turn to face an unexpected direction: +Manfred's eyes are open again, and as he glances around the room Annette can +see a spark of interest there that was missing earlier. "Last century, people +were paying to have their heads frozen after their death - in hope of +reconstruction, later. They got no civil rights: The law didn't recognize death +as a reversible process. Now how do we account for it when you guys stop +running Bob? Opt out of the collective borganism? Or maybe opt back in again +later?" He reaches up and rubs his forehead, tiredly. "Sorry, I haven't been +myself lately." A crooked, slightly manic grin flickers across his face. "See, +I've been telling Gianni for a whole while, we need a new legal concept of what +it is to be a person. One that can cope with sentient corporations, artificial +stupidities, secessionists from group minds, and reincarnated uploads. The +religiously inclined are having lots of fun with identity issues right now - +why aren't we posthumanists thinking about these things?" + +Annette's bag bulges: Aineko pokes his head out, sniffs the air, squeezes out +onto the carpet, and begins to groom himself with perfect disregard for the +human bystanders. "Not to mention A-life experiments who think they're the real +thing," Manfred adds. "And aliens." + +Annette freezes, staring at him. "Manfred! You're not supposed to -" + +Manfred is watching Alan, who seems to be the most deeply integrated of the +dead venture billionaire's executors: Even his expression reminds Annette of +meeting Bob Franklin back in Amsterdam, early in the decade, when Manny's +personal dragon still owned him. "Aliens," Alan echoes. An eyebrow twitches. +"Would this be the signal SETI announced, or the, uh, other one? And how long +have you known about them?" + +"Gianni has his fingers in a lot of pies," Manfred comments blandly. "And we +still talk to the lobsters from time to time - you know, they're only a couple +of light-hours away, right? They told us about the signals." + +"Er." Alan's eyes glaze over for a moment; Annette's prostheses paint her a +picture of false light spraying from the back of his head, his entire sensory +bandwidth momentarily soaking up a huge peer-to-peer download from the server +dust that wallpapers every room in the building. Monica looks irritated, taps +her fingernails on the back of her chair. "The signals. Right. Why wasn't this +publicized?" + +"The first one was." Annette's eyebrows furrow. "We couldn't exactly cover it +up, everyone with a backyard dish pointed in the right direction caught it. But +most people who're interested in hearing about alien contacts already think +they drop round on alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays to administer rectal exams. +Most of the rest think it's a hoax. Quite a few of the remainder are scratching +their heads and wondering whether it isn't just a new kind of cosmological +phenomenon that emits a very low entropy signal. Of the six who are left over, +five are trying to get a handle on the message contents, and the last is +convinced it's a practical joke. And the other signal, well, that was weak +enough that only the deep-space tracking network caught it." + +Manfred fiddles with the bed control system. "It's not a practical joke," he +adds. "But they only captured about sixteen megabits of data from the first +one, maybe double that in the second. There's quite a bit of noise, the signals +don't repeat, their length doesn't appear to be a prime, there's no obvious +metainformation that describes the internal format, so there's no easy way of +getting a handle on them. To make matters worse, pointy-haired management at +Arianespace" - he glances at Annette, as if seeking a response to the naming of +her ex-employers - "decided the best thing to do was to cover up the second +signal and work on it in secret - for competitive advantage, they say - and as +for the first, to pretend it never happened. So nobody really knows how long +it'll take to figure out whether it's a ping from the galactic root domain +servers or a pulsar that's taken to grinding out the eighteen-quadrillionth +digits of pi, or what." + +"But," Monica glances around, "you can't be sure." + +"I think it may be sapient," says Manfred. He finds the right button at last, +and the bed begins to fold itself back into a lounger. Then he finds the wrong +button; the duvet dissolves into viscous turquoise slime that slurps and +gurgles away through a multitude of tiny nozzles in the headboard. "Bloody +aerogel. Um, where was I?" He sits up. + +"Sapient network packet?" asks Alan. + +"Nope." Manfred shakes his head, grins. "Should have known you'd read Vinge ... +or was it the movie? No, what I think is that there's only one logical thing to +beam backward and forward out there, and you may remember I asked you to beam +it out about, oh, nine years ago?" + +"The lobsters." Alan's eyes go blank. "Nine years. Time to Proxima Centauri and +back?" + +"About that distance, yes," says Manfred. "And remember, that's an upper bound +- it could well have come from somewhere closer. Anyway, the first SETI signal +came from a couple of degrees off and more than hundred light-years out, but +the second signal came from less than three light-years away. You can see why +they didn't publicize that - they didn't want a panic. And no, the signal isn't +a simple echo of the canned crusty transmission - I think it's an exchange +embassy, but we haven't cracked it yet. Now do you see why we have to crowbar +the civil rights issue open again? We need a framework for rights that can +encompass nonhumans, and we need it as fast as possible. Otherwise, if the +neighbors come visiting..." + +"Okay," says Alan, "I'll have to talk with myselves. Maybe we can agree +something, as long as it's clear that it's a provisional stab at the framework +and not a permanent solution?" + +Annette snorts. "No solution is final!" Monica catches her eyes and winks: +Annette is startled by the blatant display of dissent within the syncitium. + +"Well," says Manfred, "I guess that's all we can ask for?" He looks hopeful. +"Thanks for the hospitality, but I feel the need to lie down in my own bed for +a while. I had to commit a lot to memory while I was off-line, and I want to +record it before I forget who I am," he adds pointedly, and Annette breathes a +quiet sight of relief. + +* * * + +Later that night, a doorbell rings. + +"Who's there?" asks the entryphone. + +"Uh, me," says the man on the steps. He looks a little confused. "Ah'm Macx. +Ah'm here tae see" - the name is on the tip of his tongue - "someone." + +"Come in." A solenoid buzzes; he pushes the door open, and it closes behind +him. His metal-shod boots ring on the hard stone floor, and the cool air smells +faintly of unburned jet fuel. + +"Ah'm Macx," he repeats uncertainly, "or Ah wis fer a wee while, an' it made ma +heid hurt. But noo Ah'm me agin, an' Ah wannae be somebody else ... can ye +help?" + +* * * + +Later still, a cat sits on a window ledge, watching the interior of a darkened +room from behind the concealment of curtains. The room is dark to human eyes, +but bright to the cat: Moonlight cascades silently off the walls and furniture, +the twisted bedding, the two naked humans lying curled together in the middle +of the bed. + +Both the humans are in their thirties: Her close-cropped hair is beginning to +gray, distinguished threads of gunmetal wire threading it, while his brown mop +is not yet showing signs of age. To the cat, who watches with a variety of +unnatural senses, her head glows in the microwave spectrum with a gentle halo +of polarized emissions. The male shows no such aura: he's unnaturally natural +for this day and age, although - oddly - he's wearing spectacles in bed, and +the frames shine similarly. An invisible soup of radiation connects both humans +to items of clothing scattered across the room - clothing that seethes with +unsleeping sentience, dribbling over to their suitcases and hand luggage and +(though it doesn't enjoy noticing it) the cat's tail, which is itself a rather +sensitive antenna. + +The two humans have just finished making love: They do this less often than in +their first few years, but with more tenderness and expertise - lengths of +shocking pink Hello Kitty bondage tape still hang from the bedposts, and a lump +of programmable memory plastic sits cooling on the side table. The male is +sprawled with his head and upper torso resting in the crook of the female's +left arm and shoulder. Shifting visualization to infrared, the cat sees that +she is glowing, capillaries dilating to enhance the blood flow around her +throat and chest. + +"I'm getting old," the male mumbles. "I'm slowing down." + +"Not where it counts," the female replies, gently squeezing his right buttock. + +"No, I'm sure of it," he says. "The bits of me that still exist in this old +head - how many types of processor can you name that are still in use +thirty-plus years after they're born?" + +"You're thinking about the implants again," she says carefully. The cat +remembers this as a sore point; from being a medical procedure to help the +blind see and the autistic talk, intrathecal implants have blossomed into a +must-have accessory for the now-clade. But the male is reluctant. "It's not as +risky as it used to be. If they screw up, there're neural growth cofactors and +cheap replacement stem cells. I'm sure one of your sponsors can arrange for +extra cover." + +"Hush: I'm still thinking about it." He's silent for a while. "I wasn't myself +yesterday. I was someone else. Someone too slow to keep up. Puts a new +perspective on everything: I've been afraid of losing my biological plasticity, +of being trapped in an obsolete chunk of skullware while everything moves on - +but how much of me lives outside my own head these days, anyhow?" One of his +external threads generates an animated glyph and throws it at her mind's eye; +she grins at his obscure humor. "Cross-training from a new interface is going +to be hard, though." + +"You'll do it," she predicts. "You can always get a discreet prescription for +novotrophin-B." A receptor agonist tailored for gerontological wards, it +stimulates interest in the new: combined with MDMA, it's a component of the +street cocktail called sensawunda. "That should keep you focused for long +enough to get comfortable." + +"What's life coming to when I can't cope with the pace of change?" he asks the +ceiling plaintively. + +The cat lashes its tail, irritated by his anthropocentrism. + +"You are my futurological storm shield," she says, jokingly, and moves her hand +to cup his genitals. Most of her current activities are purely biological, the +cat notes: From the irregular sideloads, she's using most of her skullware to +run ETItalk@home, one of the distributed cracking engines that is trying to +decode the alien grammar of the message that Manfred suspects is eligible for +citizenship. + +Obeying an urge that it can't articulate, the cat sends out a feeler to the +nearest router. The cybeast has Manfred's keys; Manfred trusts Aineko +implicitly, which is unwise - his ex-wife tampered with it, after all, never +mind all the kittens it absorbed in its youth. Tunneling out into the darkness, +the cat stalks the Net alone ... + +"Just think about the people who can't adapt," he says. His voice sounds +obscurely worried. + +"I try not to." She shivers. "You are thirty, you are slowing. What about the +young? Are they keeping up, themselves?" + +"I have a daughter. She's about a hundred and sixty million seconds old. If +Pamela would let me message her I could find out ..." There are echoes of old +pain in his voice. + +"Don't go there, Manfred. Please." Despite everything, Manfred hasn't let go: +Amber is a ligature that permanently binds him to Pamela's distant orbit. + +In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, +a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out +through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The +lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and +tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human +world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle. + +Beyond the distant lobsters, the cat pings an anonymous distributed network +server - peer-to-peer file storage spread holographically across a million +hosts, unerasable, full of secrets and lies that nobody can afford to suppress. +Rants, music, rip-offs of the latest Bollywood hits: The cat spiders past them +all, looking for the final sample. Grabbing it - a momentary breakup in +Manfred's spectacles the only symptom for either human to notice - the cat +drags its prey home, sucks it down, and compares it against the data sample +Annette's exocortex is analysing. + +"I'm sorry, my love. I just sometimes feel -" He sighs. "Age is a process of +closing off opportunities behind you. I'm not young enough anymore - I've lost +the dynamic optimism." + +The data sample on the pirate server differs from the one Annette's implant is +processing. + +"You'll get it back," she reassures him quietly, stroking his side. "You are +still sad from being mugged. This also will pass. You'll see." + +"Yeah." He finally relaxes, dropping back into the reflexive assurance of his +own will. "I'll get over it, one way or another. Or someone who remembers being +me will ..." + +In the darkness, Aineko bares teeth in a silent grin. Obeying a deeply +hardwired urge to meddle, he moves a file across, making a copy of the alien +download package Annette has been working on. She's got a copy of number two, +the sequence the deep-space tracking network received from close to home, which +ESA and the other big combines have been keeping to themselves. Another deeply +buried thread starts up, and Aineko analyses the package from a perspective no +human being has yet established. Presently a braid of processes running on an +abstract virtual machine asks him a question that cannot be encoded in any +human grammar. Watch and wait, he replies to his passenger. They'll figure out +what we are sooner or later. + +:B~ PART 2: Point of Inflexion + +Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media. + +- John Von Neumann + +1~ Chapter 4: Halo + +The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier, of the +passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship for the needy billions of +the Pacific Rim. "I love you," it croons in Amber's ears as she seeks a precise +fix on it: "Let me give you a big hug ..." + +A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of cursors together on +the signal, trains them to track its Doppler shift, and reads off the orbital +elements. "Locked and loaded," she mutters. The animated purple dinosaur +pirouettes and prances in the middle of her viewport, throwing a diamond-tipped +swizzle stick overhead. Sarcastically: "Big hug time! I got asteroid!" Cold gas +thrusters bang somewhere behind her in the interstage docking ring, prodding +the cumbersome farm ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her +enthusiasm self-consciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating surplus +neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before reuptake sets +in. It doesn't do to get too excited in free flight. But the impulse to spin +handstands, jump and sing is still there: It's her rock, and it loves her, and +she's going to bring it to life. + +The workspace of Amber's room is a mass of stuff that probably doesn't belong +on a spaceship. Posters of the latest Lebanese boy band bump and grind through +their glam routines: Tentacular restraining straps wave from the corners of her +sleeping bag, somehow accumulating a crust of dirty clothing from the air like +a giant inanimate hydra. (Cleaning robots seldom dare to venture inside the +teenager's bedroom.) One wall is repeatedly cycling through a simulation of the +projected construction cycle of Habitat One, a big fuzzy sphere with a glowing +core (that Amber is doing her bit to help create). Three or four small +pastel-colored plastic kawaii dolls stalk each other across its circumference +with million-kilometer strides. And her father's cat is curled up between the +aircon duct and her costume locker, snoring in a high-pitched tone. + +Amber yanks open the faded velour curtain that shuts her room off from the rest +of the hive: "I've got it!" she shouts. "It's all mine! I rule!" It's the +sixteenth rock tagged by the orphanage so far, but it's the first that she's +tagged by herself, and that makes it special. She bounces off the other side of +the commons, surprising one of Oscar's cane toads - which should be locked down +in the farm, it's not clear how it got here - and the audio repeaters copy the +incoming signal, noise-fuzzed echoes of a thousand fossilized infants' video +shows. + +* * * + +"You're so prompt, Amber," Pierre whines when she corners him in the canteen. + +"Well, yeah!" She tosses her head, barely concealing a smirk of delight at her +own brilliance. She knows it isn't nice, but Mom is a long way away, and Dad +and Stepmom don't care about that kind of thing. "I'm brilliant, me," she +announces. "Now what about our bet?" + +"Aww." Pierre thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. "But I don't have two +million on me in change right now. Next cycle?" + +"Huh?" She's outraged. "But we had a bet!" + +"Uh, Dr. Bayes said you weren't going to make it this time, either, so I stuck +my smart money in an options trade. If I take it out now, I'll take a big hit. +Can you give me until cycle's end?" + +"You should know better than to trust a sim, Pee." Her avatar blazes at him +with early-teen contempt: Pierre hunches his shoulders under her gaze. He's +only twelve, freckled, hasn't yet learned that you don't welsh on a deal. "I'll +let you do it this time," she announces, "but you'll have to pay for it. I want +interest." + +He sighs. "What base rate are you -" + +"No, your interest! Slave for a cycle!" She grins malevolently. + +And his face shifts abruptly into apprehension: "As long as you don't make me +clean the litter tray again. You aren't planning on doing that, are you?" + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the fourth decade. The thinking mass of the solar system now +exceeds one MIPS per gram; it's still pretty dumb, but it's not dumb all over. +The human population is near maximum overshoot, pushing nine billion, but its +growth rate is tipping toward negative numbers, and bits of what used to be the +first world are now facing a middle-aged average. Human cogitation provides +about 10^{28}^ MIPS of the solar system's brainpower. The real thinking is +mostly done by the halo of a thousand trillion processors that surround the +meat machines with a haze of computation - individually a tenth as powerful as +a human brain, collectively they're ten thousand times more powerful, and their +numbers are doubling every twenty million seconds. They're up to 10^{33}^ MIPS +and rising, although there's a long way to go before the solar system is fully +awake. + +_1 Technologies come, technologies go, but nobody even five years ago predicted +that there'd be tinned primates in orbit around Jupiter by now: A synergy of +emergent industries and strange business models have kick-started the space age +again, aided and abetted by the discovery of (so far undecrypted) signals from +ETs. Unexpected fringe riders are developing new ecological niches on the edge +of the human information space, light-minutes and light-hours from the core, as +an expansion that has hung fire since the 1970s gets under way. + +_1 Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage ship Ernst +Sanger, is in her early teens: While their natural abilities are in many cases +enhanced by germ-line genetic recombination, thanks to her mother's early +ideals she has to rely on brute computational enhancements. She doesn't have a +posterior parietal cortex hacked for extra short-term memory, or an anterior +superior temporal gyrus tweaked for superior verbal insight, but she's grown up +with neural implants that feel as natural to her as lungs or fingers. Half her +wetware is running outside her skull on an array of processor nodes hooked into +her brain by quantum-entangled communication channels - her own personal +metacortex. These kids are mutant youth, burning bright: Not quite +incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien - the generation gap is +as wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar system. Their parents, born in +the gutter years of the twenty-first century, grew up with white elephant +shuttles and a space station that just went round and round, and computers that +went beep when you pushed their buttons. The idea that Jupiter orbit was +somewhere you could go was as profoundly counterintuitive as the Internet to a +baby boomer. + +_1 Most of the passengers on the can have run away from parents who think that +teenagers belong in school, unable to come to terms with a generation so +heavily augmented that they are fundamentally brighter than the adults around +them. Amber was fluent in nine languages by the age of six, only two of them +human and six of them serializable; when she was seven, her mother took her to +the school psychiatrist for speaking in synthetic tongues. That was the final +straw for Amber: using an illicit anonymous phone, she called her father. Her +mother had him under a restraining order, but it hadn't occurred to her to +apply for an order against his partner ... + +* * * + +Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the ship's drive stinger: Orange and brown +and muddy gray streaks slowly crawl across the bloated horizon of Jupiter. +Sanger is nearing perijove, deep within the gas giant's lethal magnetic field; +static discharges flicker along the tube, arcing over near the deep violet +exhaust cloud emerging from the magnetic mirrors of the ship's VASIMR motor. +The plasma rocket is cranked up to high mass flow, its specific impulse almost +as low as a fission rocket but producing maximum thrust as the assembly creaks +and groans through the gravitational assist maneuver. In another hour, the +drive will flicker off, and the orphanage will fall up and out toward Ganymede, +before dropping back in toward orbit around Amalthea, Jupiter's fourth moon +(and source of much of the material in the Gossamer ring). They're not the +first canned primates to make it to Jupiter subsystem, but they're one of the +first wholly private ventures. The bandwidth out here sucks dead slugs through +a straw, with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them from scant +hundreds of mouse-brained microprobes and a few dinosaurs left behind by NASA +or ESA. They're so far from the inner system that a good chunk of the ship's +communications array is given over to caching: The news is whole kiloseconds +old by the time it gets out here. + +Amber, along with about half the waking passengers, watches in fascination from +the common room. The commons are a long axial cylinder, a double-hulled +inflatable at the center of the ship with a large part of their liquid water +supply stored in its wall tubes. The far end is video-enabled, showing them a +real-time 3D view of the planet as it rolls beneath them: in reality, there's +as much mass as possible between them and the trapped particles in the Jovian +magnetic envelope. "I could go swimming in that," sighs Lilly. "Just imagine, +diving into that sea ..." Her avatar appears in the window, riding a silver +surfboard down the kilometers of vacuum. + +"Nice case of wind-burn you've got there," someone jeers - Kas. Suddenly +Lilly's avatar, hitherto clad in a shimmering metallic swimsuit, turns to the +texture of baked meat and waggles sausage fingers up at them in warning. + +"Same to you and the window you climbed in through!" Abruptly the virtual +vacuum outside the window is full of bodies, most of them human, contorting and +writhing and morphing in mock-combat as half the kids pitch into the virtual +death match. It's a gesture in the face of the sharp fear that outside the thin +walls of the orphanage lies an environment that really is as hostile as Lilly's +toasted avatar would indicate. + +Amber turns back to her slate: She's working through a complex mess of forms, +necessary before the expedition can start work. Facts and figures that are +never far away crowd around her, intimidating. Jupiter weighs 1.9 x 10^{27}^ +kilograms. There are twenty-nine Jovian moons and an estimated two hundred +thousand minor bodies, lumps of rock, and bits of debris crowded around them - +debris above the size of ring fragments, for Jupiter (like Saturn) has rings, +albeit not as prominent. A total of six major national orbiter platforms have +made it out here - and another two hundred and seventeen microprobes, all but +six of them private entertainment platforms. The first human expedition was put +together by ESA Studios six years ago, followed by a couple of wildcat mining +prospectors and a M-commerce bus that scattered half a million picoprobes +throughout Jupiter subsystem. Now the Sanger has arrived, along with another +three monkey cans (one from Mars, two more from LEO) and it looks as if +colonization is about to explode, except that there are at least four mutually +exclusive Grand Plans for what to do with old Jove's mass. + +Someone prods her. "Hey, Amber, what are you up to?" + +She opens her eyes. "Doing my homework." It's Su Ang. "Look, we're going to +Amalthea, aren't we? But we file our accounts in Reno, so we have to do all +this paperwork. Monica asked me to help. It's insane." + +Ang leans over and reads, upside down. "Environmental Protection Agency?" + +"Yeah. Estimated Environmental Impact Forward Analysis 204.6b, Page Two. They +want me to 'list any bodies of standing water within five kilometers of the +designated mining area. If excavating below the water table, list any +wellsprings, reservoirs, and streams within depth of excavation in meters +multiplied by five hundred meters up to a maximum distance of ten kilometers +downstream of direction of bedding plane flow. For each body of water, itemize +any endangered or listed species of bird, fish, mammal, reptile, invertebrate, +or plant living within ten kilometers -'" + +" - of a mine on Amalthea. Which orbits one hundred and eighty thousand +kilometers above Jupiter, has no atmosphere, and where you can pick up a whole +body radiation dose of ten Grays in half an hour on the surface." Ang shakes +her head, then spoils it by giggling. Amber glances up. + +On the wall in front of her someone - Nicky or Boris, probably - has pasted a +caricature of her own avatar into the virch fight. She's being hugged from +behind by a giant cartoon dog with floppy ears and an improbably large +erection, who's singing anatomically improbable suggestions while fondling +himself suggestively. "Fuck that!" Shocked out of her distraction - and angry - +Amber drops her stack of paperwork and throws a new avatar at the screen, one +an agent of hers dreamed up overnight. It's called Spike, and it's not +friendly. Spike rips off the dog's head and pisses down its trachea, which is +anatomically correct for a human being: Meanwhile she looks around, trying to +work out which of the laughing idiot children and lost geeks around her could +have sent such an unpleasant message. + +"Children! Chill out." She glances round - one of the Franklins (this is the +twentysomething dark-skinned female one) is frowning at them. "Can't we leave +you alone for half a K without a fight?" + +Amber pouts. "It's not a fight; it's a forceful exchange of opinions." + +"Hah." The Franklin leans back in midair, arms crossed, an expression of +supercilious smugness pasted across her-their face. "Heard that one before. +Anyway" - she-they gesture, and the screen goes blank - "I've got news for you +pesky kids. We got a claim verified! Factory starts work as soon as we shut +down the stinger and finish filing all the paperwork via our lawyers. Now's our +chance to earn our upkeep ..." + +* * * + +Amber is flashing on ancient history, five years back along her time line. In +her replay, she's in some kind of split-level ranch house out West. It's a +temporary posting while her mother audits an obsolescent fab line enterprise +that grinds out dead chips of VLSI silicon for Pentagon projects that have +slipped behind the cutting edge. Her Mom leans over her, menacingly adult in +her dark suit and chaperone earrings: "You're going to school, and that's +that." + +Her mother is a blonde ice maiden madonna, one of the IRS's most productive +bounty hunters - she can make grown CEOs panic just by blinking at them. Amber, +a towheaded-eight-year old tearaway with a confusing mix of identities, +inexperience blurring the boundary between self and grid, is not yet able to +fight back effectively. After a couple of seconds, she verbalizes a rather +feeble protest: "Don't want to!" One of her stance daemons whispers that this +is the wrong approach to take, so she modifies it: "They'll beat up on me, Mom. +I'm too different. Sides, I know you want me socialized up with my grade +metrics, but isn't that what sideband's for? I can socialize real good at +home." + +Mom does something unexpected: She kneels, putting herself on eye-level with +Amber. They're on the living room carpet, all seventies-retro brown corduroy +and acid-orange Paisley wallpaper, and for once, they're alone: The domestic +robots are in hiding while the humans hold court. "Listen to me, sweetie." +Mom's voice is breathy, laden with an emotional undertow as strong and stifling +as the eau-de-Cologne she wears to the office to cover up the scent of her +client's fear. "I know that's what your father's writing to you, but it isn't +true. You need the company - physical company - of children your own age. +You're natural, not some kind of engineered freak, even with your skullset. +Natural children like you need company or they grow up all weird. Socialization +isn't just about texting your own kind, Amber, you need to know how to deal +with people who're different, too. I want you to grow up happy, and that won't +happen if you don't learn to get on with children your own age. You're not +going to be some kind of cyborg otaku freak, Amber. But to get healthy, you've +got to go to school, build up a mental immune system. Anyway, that which does +not destroy us makes us stronger, right?" + +It's crude moral blackmail, transparent as glass and manipulative as hell, but +Amber's corpus logica flags it with a heavy emotional sprite miming the +likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait: Mom is agitated, +nostrils slightly flared, ventilation rate up, some vasodilatation visible in +her cheeks. Amber - in combination with her skullset and the metacortex of +distributed agents it supports - is mature enough at eight years to model, +anticipate, and avoid corporal punishment. But her stature and lack of physical +maturity conspire to put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who +matured in a simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she's +still reluctant, but obedient. "O-kay. If you say so." + +Mom stands up, eyes distant - probably telling Saturn to warm his engine and +open the garage doors. "I say so, punkin. Go get your shoes on, now. I'll pick +you up on my way back from work, and I've got a treat for you; we're going to +check out a new church together this evening." Mom smiles, but it doesn't reach +her eyes: Amber has already figured out she's going through the motions in +order to give her the simulated middle-American upbringing she believes Amber +desperately needs before she runs head first into the future. She doesn't like +the churches any more than her daughter does, but arguing won't work. "You be a +good little girl, now, all right?" + +* * * + +The imam is at prayer in a gyrostabilized mosque. + +His mosque is not very big, and it has a congregation of one: He prays on his +own every seventeen thousand two hundred and eighty seconds. He also webcasts +the call to prayer, but there are no other believers in trans-Jovian space to +answer the summons. Between prayers, he splits his attention between the +exigencies of life support and scholarship. A student both of the Hadith and of +knowledge-based systems, Sadeq collaborates in a project with other scholars +who are building a revised concordance of all the known isnads, to provide a +basis for exploring the body of Islamic jurisprudence from a new perspective - +one they'll need sorely if the looked-for breakthroughs in communication with +aliens emerge. Their goal is to answer the vexatious questions that bedevil +Islam in the age of accelerated consciousness; and as their representative in +orbit around Jupiter, these questions fall most heavily on Sadeq's shoulders. + +Sadeq is a slightly built man, with close-cropped black hair and a perpetually +tired expression: Unlike the orphanage crew he has a ship to himself. The ship +started out as an Iranian knock off of a Shenzhou-B capsule, with a Chinese +type 921 space-station module tacked onto its tail; but the clunky, 1960s +look-alike - a glittering aluminum dragonfly mating with a Coke can - has a +weirdly contoured M2P2 pod strapped to its nose. The M2P2 pod is a plasma sail, +built in orbit by one of Daewoo's wake shield facilities. It dragged Sadeq and +his cramped space station out to Jupiter in just four months, surfing on the +solar breeze. His presence may be a triumph for the umma, but he feels acutely +alone out here: When he turns his compact observatory's mirrors in the +direction of the Sanger, he is struck by its size and purposeful appearance. +Sanger's superior size speaks of the efficiency of the Western financial +instruments, semiautonomous investment trusts with variable business-cycle +accounting protocols that make possible the development of commercial space +exploration. The Prophet, peace be unto him, may have condemned usury; but it +might well have given him pause to see these engines of capital formation +demonstrate their power above the Great Red Spot. + +After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of precious extra minutes on +his mat. He finds meditation comes hard in this environment: Kneel in silence, +and you become aware of the hum of ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and +sweat, the metallic taste of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is +hard to approach God in this third hand spaceship, a hand-me-down from arrogant +Russia to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who +have better uses for it than any of the heathen states imagine. They've pushed +it far, this little toy space station; but who's to say if it is God's +intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this swollen alien giant of +a planet? + +Sadeq shakes his head; he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the solitary +porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness wrenches at him, for his +childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a student in Qom: He +steadies himself by looking round, searching the station that is now as +familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete apartment his parents - a car +factory worker and his wife - raised him in. The interior of the station is the +size of a school bus, every surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument +consoles, and layers of exposed pipes. A couple of globules of antifreeze +jiggle like stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him +grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for this +purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of his agents to +find him the relevant part of the maintenance log: it's time to fix the leaky +joint for good. + +An hour or so of serious plumbing and he will eat freeze-dried lamb stew, with +a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb of strong tea to wash it down, +then sit down to review his next fly-by maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God +willing, there will be no further system alerts and he'll be able to spend an +hour or two on his research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day +after tomorrow there'll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to watch +one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their insights into +alien cultures: Apollo Thirteen, perhaps. It isn't easy, being the crew aboard +a long-duration space mission. It's even harder for Sadeq, up here alone with +nobody to talk to, for the communications lag to earth is more than half an +hour each way - and as far as he knows, he's the only believer within half a +billion kilometers. + +* * * + +Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the phone. She +knows the strange woman on the phone's tiny screen: Mom calls her "your +father's fancy bitch" with a peculiar tight smile. (The one time Amber asked +what a fancy bitch was, Mom slapped her - not hard, just a warning.) "Is Daddy +there?" she asks. + +The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blonde, like Mom's, but +the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle, and it's cut really short, and +her skin is dark.) "Oui. Ah, yes." She smiles tentatively. "I am sorry, it is a +disposable phone you are using? You want to talk to 'im?" + +It comes out in a rush: "I want to see him." Amber clutches the phone like a +lifesaver: It's a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the cardboard is +already softening in her sweaty grip. "Momma won't let me, Auntie 'Nette -" + +"Hush." Annette, who has lived with Amber's father for more than twice as long +as her mother, smiles. "You are sure that telephone, your mother does not know +of it?" + +Amber looks around. She's the only child in the restroom because it isn't break +time, and she told teacher she had to go 'right now': "I'm sure, P20 confidence +factor greater than 0.9." Her Bayesian head tells her that she can't reason +accurately about this because Momma has never caught her with an illicit phone +before, but what the hell. It can't get Dad into trouble if he doesn't know, +can it? + +"Very good." Annette glances aside. "Manny, I have a surprise call for you." + +Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of his face, and he looks younger than +last time: he must have stopped using those clunky old glasses. "Hi - Amber! +Where are you? Does your mother know you're calling me?" He looks slightly +worried. + +"No," she says confidently, "the phone came in a box of Grahams." + +"Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember never, ever to call me where your mom +may find out. Otherwise, she'll get her lawyers to come after me with +thumbscrews and hot pincers, because she'll say I made you call me. And not +even Uncle Gianni will be able to sort that out. Understand?" + +"Yes, Daddy." She sighs. "Even though that's not true, I know. Don't you want +to know why I called?" + +"Um." For a moment, he looks taken aback. Then he nods, thoughtfully. Amber +likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she talks to him. +It's a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her classmate's phones or tunnel +past Mom's pit-bull firewall, but Dad doesn't assume that she can't know +anything just because she's only a kid. "Go ahead. There's something you need +to get off your chest? How've things been, anyway?" + +She's going to have to be brief: The disposaphone comes prepaid, the +international tariff it's using is lousy, and the break bell is going to ring +any minute. "I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom's getting loopier every week - +she's dragging me round all these churches now, and yesterday, she threw a fit +over me talking to my terminal. She wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, +what for? I can't do what she wants - I'm not her little girl! Every time I +tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on me, and it's making my head hurt +- I can't even think straight anymore!" To her surprise, Amber feels tears +starting. "Get me out of here!" + +The view of her father shakes, pans round to show her Tante Annette looking +worried. "You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The divorce lawyers, +they will tie him up." + +Amber sniffs. "Can you help?" she asks. + +"I'll see what I can do," her father's fancy bitch promises as the break bell +rings. + +* * * + +An instrument package peels away from the Sanger's claim jumper drone and drops +toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below. Jupiter hangs huge and +gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: +Pierre bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering it. + +Amber, wearing a black sleeping sack, hovers over his head like a giant bat, +enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on Pierre's bowl-cut hair, +wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing table, and wonders what to have +him do next. A slave for a day is an interesting experience: Life aboard the +Sanger is busy enough that nobody gets much slack time (at least not until the +big habitats have been assembled and the high-bandwidth dish is pointing back +at Earth). They're unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by +the backers' critical path team, and there isn't much room for idling: The +expedition relies on shamelessly exploiting child labor - they're lighter on +the life-support consumables than adults - working the kids twelve hour days to +assemble a toe hold on the shore of the future. (When they're older and their +options vest fully, they'll all be rich, but that hasn't stopped the outraged +herdnews propaganda chorus from sounding off back home.) For Amber, the chance +to let somebody else work for her is novel, and she's trying to make every +minute count. + +"Hey, slave," she calls idly; "how you doing?" + +Pierre sniffs. "It's going okay." He refuses to glance up at her, Amber +notices. He's thirteen. Isn't he supposed to be obsessed with girls by that +age? She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a stealthy probe along his +outer boundary; he shows no sign of noticing it, but it bounces off, unable to +chink his mental armor. "Got cruise speed," he says, taciturn, as two tonnes of +metal, ceramics and diamond-phase weirdness hurtle toward the surface of Barney +at three hundred kilometers per hour. "Stop shoving me, there's a three-second +lag, and I don't want to get into a feedback control loop with it." + +"I'll shove if I want, slave." She sticks her tongue out at him. + +"And if you make me drop it?" he asks. Looking up at her, his face serious - +"Are we supposed to be doing this?" + +"You cover your ass, and I'll cover mine," she says, then turns bright red. +"You know what I mean." + +"I do, do I?" Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console: "Aww, that's +no fun. And you want to tune whatever bit-bucket you've given control of your +speech centers to - they're putting out way too much double entendre, somebody +might mistake you for a grown-up." + +"You stick to your business, and I'll stick to mine," she says, emphatically. +"And you can start by telling me what's happening." + +"Nothing." He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the screen. "It's +going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then there's the midcourse +correction and a deceleration burn before touch down. And then it's going to be +an hour while it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the cable spool. What do +you want, minute noodles with that?" + +"Uh-huh." Amber spreads her bat wings and lies back in mid air, staring at the +window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way through her day shift. +"Wake me when there's something interesting to see." Maybe she should have had +him feed her peeled grapes or give her a foot massage, something more +traditionally hedonistic; but right now, just knowing he's her own little piece +of alienated labor is doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those +tense arms, the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there's something to this +whispering and giggling he really fancies you stuff the older girls go in for - + +The window rings like a gong, and Pierre coughs. "You've got mail," he says +drily. "You want me to read it for you?" + +"What the -" A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left snaky +script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged safely in a +deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to load in a grammar agent that +can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to take in the meaning of the +message. When she does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously. + +"You bitch, Mom, why'd you have to go and do a thing like that?" + +* * * + +The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to Amber: It +happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she remembers it as if it +was only an hour ago. + +She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the deliveryman's +clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers sampling her DNA. She drags +the package inside. When she pulls the tab on the box, it unpacks itself +automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper printed +in old-fashioned dumb ink, and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its +flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at +her. "You're Amber?" it mrowls. It actually makes real cat noises, but the +meaning is clear - it's able to talk directly to her linguistic competence +interface. + +"Yeah," she says, shyly. "Are you from Tante 'Nette?" + +"No, I'm from the fucking tooth fairy." It leans over and head-butts her knee, +strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt. "Listen, you got +any tuna in the kitchen?" + +"Mom doesn't believe in seafood," says Amber. "It's all foreign-farmed muck +these days, she says. It's my birthday today, did I tell you?" + +"Happy fucking birthday, then." The cat yawns, convincingly realistic. "Here's +your dad's present. Bastard put me in hibernation and sent me along to show you +how to work it. You take my advice, you'll trash the fucker. No good will come +of it." + +Amber interrupts the cat's grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully; "So what +is it?" she demands: "A new invention? Some kind of weird sex toy from +Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?" + +"Naah." The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to the 3D +printer. "It's some kinda dodgy business model to get you out of hock to your +mom. Better be careful, though - he says its legality is narrowly scoped +jurisdiction-wise. Your Mom might be able to undermine it if she learns about +how it works." + +"Wow. Like, how totally cool." In truth, Amber is delighted because it is her +birthday; but Mom's at work, and Amber's home alone, with just the TV in moral +majority mode for company. Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal +average dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing, to +the point that absolutely the best thing in the world Tante Annette could send +her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn't work, Mom +will take her to Church tonight, and she's certain she'll end up making a scene +again. Amber's tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing rapidly, and while +building up her memetic immunity might be the real reason Mom's forcing this +shit on her - it's always hard to tell with Mom - things have been tense ever +since she got expelled from Sunday school for mounting a spirited defense of +the theory of evolution. + +The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer. "Why doncha fire it up?" Amber +opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn, and plugs it in. +There's a whir and a rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging +heads down to working temperature and registers her ownership. + +"What do I do now?" she asks. + +"Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions," the cat recites +in a bored singsong voice. It winks at her, then fakes an exaggerated French +accent: "Le READ ME, il sont contain directions pour executing le corporate +instrument dans le boit. In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying +Aineko for clarification." The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it's about +to bite an invisible insect: "Warning: Don't rely on your father's cat's +opinions, it is a perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed +its meme base, back when they were married. Ends." It mumbles on for a while: +"Fucking snotty Parisian bitch, I'll piss in her knicker drawer, I'll molt in +her bidet ..." + +"Don't be vile." Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are +strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards - a +limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between +shari'a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn't easy, even with +a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole +libraries of international trade law - the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber +finds the documents highly puzzling. It's not the fact that half of them are +written in Arabic that bothers her - that's what her grammar engine is for - or +even that they're full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But +the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning +chattel slaves. + +"What's going on?" she asks the cat. "What's this all about?" + +The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. "This wasn't my idea, big shot. Your +father is a very weird guy, and your mother hates him lots because she's still +in love with him. She's got kinks, y'know? Or maybe she's sublimating them, if +she's serious about this church shit she's putting you through. He thinks she's +a control freak, and he's not entirely wrong. Anyway, after your dad ran off in +search of another dom, she took out an injunction against him. But she forgot +to cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent them to you, +okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he's got her wrapped right around his finger, +or something. Anyway, he built these companies and this printer - which isn't +hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your mom's - specifically to let you get +away from her legally. If that's what you want to do." + +Amber fast-forwards through the dynamic chunks of the README - boring legal UML +diagrams, mostly - soaking up the gist of the plan. Yemen is one of the few +countries to implement traditional Sunni shari'a law and a limited liability +company scam at the same time. Owning slaves is legal - the fiction is that the +owner has an option hedged on the indentured laborer's future output, with +interest payments that grow faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off +- and companies are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this +company, she will become a slave and the company will be legally liable for her +actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument - about ninety percent of +it, in fact - is a set of self-modifying corporate mechanisms coded in a +variety of jurisdictions that permit Turing-complete company constitutions, and +which act as an ownership shell for the slavery contract. At the far end of the +corporate shell game is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary +and shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she'll acquire total +control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve her slave +contract; until then, the trust fund (which she essentially owns) oversees the +company that owns her (and keeps it safe from hostile takeover bids). Oh, and +the company network is primed by an extraordinary general meeting that +instructed it to move the trust's assets to Paris immediately. A one-way +airline ticket is enclosed. + +"You think I should take this?" she asks uncertainly. It's hard to tell how +smart the cat really is - there's probably a yawning vacuum behind those +semantic networks if you dig deep enough - but it tells a pretty convincing +tale. + +The cat squats and curls its tail protectively around its paws: "I'm saying +nothing, you know what I mean? You take this, you can go live with your dad. +But it won't stop your ma coming after him with a horsewhip, and after you with +a bunch of lawyers and a set of handcuffs. You want my advice, you'll phone the +Franklins and get aboard their off-planet mining scam. In space, no one can +serve a writ on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI +market, cracking alien network packets. You want my honest opinion, you +wouldn't like it in Paris after a bit. Your Dad and the frog bitch, they're +swingers, y'know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat like me, now I +think of it. They're working all day for the Senator, and out all hours of +night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera, that kind of adult shit. Your +Dad dresses in frocks more than your mom, and your Tante 'Nettie leads him +around the apartment on a chain when they're not having noisy sex on the +balcony. They'd cramp your style, kid. You shouldn't have to put up with +parents who have more of a life than you do." + +"Huh." Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted by the cat's transparent +scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I better think hard about this, +she decides. Then she flies off in so many directions at once that she nearly +browns out the household broadband. Part of her is examining the intricate card +pyramid of company structures; somewhere else, she's thinking about what can go +wrong, while another bit (probably some of her wet, messy glandular biological +self) is thinking about how nice it would be to see Daddy again, albeit with +some trepidation. Parents aren't supposed to have sex - isn't there a law, or +something? "Tell me about the Franklins? Are they married? Singular?" + +The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat from the +hard vacuum chamber in its supercooled workspace. Deep in its guts it creates +coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose-Einstein condensates hovering on the +edge of absolute zero. By superimposing interference patterns on them, it +generates an atomic hologram, building a perfect replica of some original +artifact, right down to the atomic level - there are no clunky moving +nanotechnology parts to break or overheat or mutate. Something is going to come +out of the printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right +down to the individual quantum states of its component atomic nuclei. The cat, +seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to the warm air exhaust ducts. + +"Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years before you were born - your dad +did business with him. So did your mom. Anyway, he had chunks of his noumen +preserved and the estate trustees are trying to re-create his consciousness by +cross-loading him in their implants. They're sort of a borganism, but with +money and style. Anyway, Bob got into the space biz back then, with some +financial wizardry a friend of your father whipped up for him, and now they're +building a spacehab that they're going to take all the way out to Jupiter, +where they can dismantle a couple of small moons and begin building +helium-three refineries. It's that CETI scam I told you about earlier, but +they've got a whole load of other angles on it for the long term. See, your +dad's friends have cracked the broadcast, the one everybody knows about. It's a +bunch of instructions for finding the nearest router that plugs into the +galactic Internet. And they want to go out there and talk to some aliens." + +This is mostly going right over Amber's head - she'll have to learn what +helium-three refineries are later - but the idea of running away to space has a +certain appeal. Adventure, that's what. Amber looks around the living room and +sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision +of a middle America that never was - the one her mom wants to bring her up in, +like a misshapen Skinner box designed to train her to be normal. "Is Jupiter +fun?" she asks. "I know it's big and not very dense, but is it, like, a +happening place? Are there any aliens there?" + +"It's the first place you need to go if you want to get to meet the aliens +eventually," says the cat as the printer clanks and disgorges a fake passport +(convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved with Arabic script, and a +tailored wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on Amber's immature immune system. +"Stick that on your wrist, sign the three top copies, put them in the envelope, +and let's get going. We've got a flight to catch, slave." + +* * * + +Sadeq is eating his dinner when the first lawsuit in Jupiter orbit rolls in. + +Alone in the cramped humming void of his station, he considers the plea. The +language is awkward, showing all the hallmarks of a crude machine translation: +The supplicant is American, a woman, and - oddly - claims to be a Christian. +This is surprising enough, but the nature of her claim is, at face value, +preposterous. He forces himself to finish his bread, then bag the waste and +clean the platter, before he gives it his full consideration. Is it a tasteless +joke? Evidently not. As the only quadi outside the orbit of Mars, he is +uniquely qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice. + +A woman who leads a God-fearing life - not a correct one, no, but she shows +some signs of humility and progress toward a deeper understanding - is deprived +of her child by the machinations of a feckless husband who deserted her years +before. That the woman was raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as +disturbingly Western, but pardonable when he reads her account of the feckless +one's behavior, which is pretty lax; an ill fate indeed would await any child +that this man raises to adulthood. This man deprives her of her child, but not +by legitimate means: He doesn't take the child into his own household or make +any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with his own customs or the +precepts of shari'a. Instead, he enslaves her wickedly in the mire of the +Western legal tradition, then casts her into outer darkness to be used as a +laborer by the dubious forces of self-proclaimed "progress". The same forces +Sadeq has been sent to confront, as representative of the umma in orbit around +Jupiter. + +Sadeq scratches his short beard thoughtfully. A nasty tale, but what can he do +about it? "Computer," he says, "a reply to this supplicant: My sympathies lie +with you in the manner of your suffering, but I fail to see in what way I can +be of assistance. Your heart cries out for help before God (blessed be his +name), but surely this is a matter for the temporal authorities of the dar +al-Harb." He pauses: Or is it? he wonders. Legal wheels begin to turn in his +mind. "If you can but find your way to extending to me a path by which I can +assert the primacy of shari'a over your daughter, I shall apply myself to +constructing a case for her emancipation, to the greater glory of God (blessed +be his name). Ends, sigblock, send." + +Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at the table, Sadeq floats up and +kicks gently toward the forward end of the cramped habitat. The controls of the +telescope are positioned between the ultrasonic clothing cleaner and the +lithium hydroxide scrubbers. They're already freed up, because he was +conducting a wide-field survey of the inner ring, looking for the signature of +water ice. It is the work of a few moments to pipe the navigation and tracking +system into the telescope's controller and direct it to hunt for the big +foreign ship of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq's mind urgently, an irritating +realization that he may have missed something in the woman's e-mail: there were +a number of huge attachments. With half his mind he surfs the news digest his +scholarly peers send him daily. Meanwhile, he waits patiently for the telescope +to find the speck of light that the poor woman's daughter is enslaved within. + +This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to enter dialogue with them. Let the +hard questions answer themselves, elegantly. There will be no need for +confrontation if they can be convinced that their plans are faulty: no need to +defend the godly from the latter-day Tower of Babel these people propose to +build. If this woman Pamela means what she says, Sadeq need not end his days +out here in the cold between the worlds, away from his elderly parents and +brother, and his colleagues and friends. And he will be profoundly grateful, +because in his heart of hearts, he knows that he is less a warrior than a +scholar. + +* * * + +"I'm sorry, but the borg is attempting to assimilate a lawsuit," says the +receptionist. "Will you hold?" + +"Crud." Amber blinks the Binary Betty answerphone sprite out of her eye and +glances round at the cabin. "That is so last century," she grumbles. "Who do +they think they are?" + +"Dr. Robert H. Franklin," volunteers the cat. "It's a losing proposition if you +ask me. Bob was so fond of his dope there's this whole hippy group mind that's +grown up using his state vector as a bong -" + +"Shut the fuck up!" Amber shouts at him. Instantly contrite (for yelling in an +inflatable spacecraft is a major faux pas): "Sorry." She spawns an autonomic +thread with full parasympathetic nervous control, tells it to calm her down, +then spawns a couple more to go forth and become fuqaha, expert on shari'a law. +She realizes she's buying up way too much of the orphanage's scarce bandwidth - +time that will have to be paid for in chores, later - but it's necessary. +"Mom's gone too far. This time it's war." + +She slams out of her cabin and spins right round in the central axis of the +hab, a rogue missile pinging for a target to vent her rage on. A tantrum would +be good - + +But her body is telling her to chill out, take ten, and there's a drone of +scriptural lore dribbling away in the back of her head, and she's feeling +frustrated and angry and not in control, but not really mad anymore. It was +like this three years ago when Mom noticed her getting on too well with Jenny +Morgan and moved her to a new school district - she said it was a work +assignment, but Amber knows better, Mom asked for it - just to keep her +dependent and helpless. Mom is a control-freak with fixed ideas about how to +bring up a child, and ever since she lost Dad, she's been working her claws +into Amber, making her upbringing a life's work - which is tough, because Amber +is not good victim material, and is smart and well networked to boot. But now, +Mom's found a way to fuck Amber over completely, even in Jupiter orbit, and if +not for her skullware keeping a lid on things, Amber would be totally out of +control. + +Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to message the Franklins, Amber goes +to hunt down the borg in their meatspace den. + +There are sixteen borg aboard the Sanger - adults, members of the Franklin +Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob Franklin's posthumous vision. They +lend bits of their brains to the task of running what science has been able to +resurrect of the dead dot-com billionaire's mind, making him the first +bodhisattva of the uploading age - apart from the lobster colony, of course. +Their den mother is a woman called Monica: a willowy, brown-eyed hive queen +with raster-burned corneal implants and a dry, sardonic delivery that can +corrode egos like a desert wind. She's better than any of the others at running +Bob, except for the creepy one called Jack, and she's no slouch when she's +being herself (unlike Jack, who is never himself in public). Which probably +explains why they elected her Maximum Leader of the expedition. + +Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen garden, performing surgery on a +filter that's been blocked by toad spawn. She's almost buried beneath a large +pipe, her Velcro-taped tool kit waving in the breeze like strange blue +air-kelp. "Monica? You got a minute?" + +"Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself helpful? Pass me the antitorque +wrench and a number six hex head." + +"Um." Amber captures the blue flag and fiddles around with its contents. +Something that has batteries, motors, a flywheel counterweight, and laser gyros +assembles itself - Amber passes it under the pipe. "Here. Listen, your phone is +engaged." + +"I know. You've come to see me about your conversion, haven't you?" + +"Yes!" + +There's a clanking noise from under the pressure sump. "Take this." A plastic +bag floats out, bulging with stray fasteners. "I got a bit of hoovering to do. +Get yourself a mask if you don't already have one." + +A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica's legs, her face veiled by a filter +mask. "I don't want this to go through," she says. "I don't care what Mom says, +I'm not Moslem! This judge, he can't touch me. He can't," she adds, vehemence +warring with uncertainty. + +"Maybe he doesn't want to?" Another bag: "Here, catch." + +Amber grabs the bag, a fraction of a second too late. She discovers the hard +way that it's full of water and toadspawn. Stringy mucous ropes full of +squiggling comma-shaped tadpoles explode all over the compartment and bounce +off the walls in a shower of amphibian confetti. "Eew!" + +Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. "Oh, you didn't." She kicks off the +consensus-defined floor and grabs a wad of absorbent paper from the spinner, +whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the sump. Together they go after +the toad spawn with rubbish bags and paper - by the time they've got the +stringy mess mopped up, the spinner has begun to click and whir, processing +cellulose from the algae tanks into fresh wipes. "That was not good," Monica +says emphatically as the disposal bin sucks down her final bag. "You wouldn't +happen to know how the toad got in here?" + +"No, but I ran into one that was loose in the commons, one shift before last +cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to Oscar." + +"I'll have a word with him, then." Monica glares blackly at the pipe. "I'm +going to have to go back and refit the filter in a minute. Do you want me to be +Bob?" + +"Uh." Amber thinks. "Not sure. Your call." + +"All right, Bob coming on-line." Monica's face relaxes slightly, then her +expression hardens. "Way I see it, you've got a choice. Your mother kinda boxed +you in, hasn't she?" + +"Yes." Amber frowns. + +"So. Pretend I'm an idiot. Talk me through it, huh?" + +Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe and gets her head down, alongside +Monica/Bob, who is floating with her feet near the floor. "I ran away from +home. Mom owned me - that is, she had parental rights and Dad had none. So Dad, +via a proxy, helped me sell myself into slavery to a company. The company was +owned by a trust fund, and I'm the main beneficiary when I reach the age of +majority. As a chattel, the company tells me what to do - legally - but the +shell company is set to take my orders. So I'm autonomous. Right?" + +"That sounds like the sort of thing your father would do," Monica/Bob says +neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic middle-aged Silicon Valley drawl, her +north-of-England accent sounds peculiarly mid-Atlantic. + +"Trouble is, most countries don't acknowledge slavery, they just dress it up +pretty and call it in loco parentis or something. Those that do mostly don't +have any equivalent of a limited liability company, much less one that can be +directed by another company from abroad. Dad picked Yemen on the grounds that +they've got this stupid brand of shari'a law - and a crap human rights record - +but they're just about conformant to the open legal standards protocol, able to +interface to EU norms via a Turkish legislative cut-out." + +"So." + +"Well, I guess I was technically a Janissary. Mom was doing her Christian +phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave of an Islamic company. Now +the stupid bitch has gone and converted to shi'ism. Normally Islamic descent +runs through the father, but she picked her sect carefully and chose one that's +got a progressive view of women's rights: They're sort of Islamic +fundamentalist liberal constructionists, 'what would the Prophet do if he was +alive today and had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories' and +that sort of thing. They generally take a progressive view of things like legal +equality of the sexes because, for his time and place, the Prophet was way +ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow his example. Anyway, +that means Mom can assert that I am Moslem, and under Yemeni law, I get to be +treated as a Moslem chattel of a company. And their legal code is very dubious +about permitting slavery of Moslems. It's not that I have rights as such, but +my pastoral well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and -" She +shrugs helplessly. + +"Has he tried to make you run under any new rules, yet?" asks Monica/Bob. "Has +he put blocks on your freedom of agency, tried to mess with your mind? Insisted +on libido dampers or a strict dress code?" + +"Not yet." Amber's expression is grim. "But he's no dummy. I figure he may be +using Mom - and me - as a way of getting his fingers into this whole +expedition. Staking a claim for jurisdiction, claim arbitration, that sort of +thing. It could be worse; he might order me to comply fully with his specific +implementation of shari'a. They permit implants, but require mandatory +conceptual filtering: If I run that stuff, I'll end up believing it." + +"Okay." Monica does a slow backward somersault in midair. "Now tell me why you +can't simply repudiate it." + +"Because." Deep breath. "I can do that in two ways. I can deny Islam, which +makes me an apostate, and automatically terminates my indenture to the shell, +so Mom owns me under US or EU law. Or I can say that the instrument has no +legal standing because I was in the USA when I signed it, and slavery is +illegal there, in which case Mom owns me. Or I can take the veil, live like a +modest Moslem woman, do whatever the imam wants, and Mom doesn't own me - but +she gets to appoint my chaperone. Oh Bob, she has planned this so well." + +"Uh-huh." Monica rotates back to the floor and looks at Amber, suddenly very +Bob. "Now you've told me your troubles, start thinking like your dad. Your Dad +had a dozen creative ideas before breakfast every day - it's how he made his +name. Your mom has got you in a box. Think your way outside it: What can you +do?" + +"Well." Amber rolls over and hugs the fat hydroponic duct to her chest like a +life raft. "It's a legal paradox. I'm trapped because of the jurisdiction she's +cornered me in. I could talk to the judge, I suppose, but she'll have picked +him carefully." Her eyes narrow. "The jurisdiction. Hey, Bob." She lets go of +the duct and floats free, hair streaming out behind her like a cometary halo. +"How do I go about getting myself a new jurisdiction?" + +Monica grins. "I seem to recall the traditional way was to grab yourself some +land and set yourself up as king; but there are other ways. I've got some +friends I think you should meet. They're not good conversationalists and +there's a two-hour lightspeed delay, but I think you'll find they've answered +that question already. But why don't you talk to the imam first and find out +what he's like? He may surprise you. After all, he was already out here before +your mom decided to use him to make a point." + +* * * + +The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of +potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos, ten +kilometers above the mean surface level. They kick up clouds of reddish +sulphate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the barren moonscape. +This close to Jupiter (a mere hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above the +swirling madness of the cloudscape) the gas giant fills half the sky with a +perpetually changing clock face, for Amalthea orbits the master in just under +twelve hours. The Sanger's radiation shields are running at full power, +shrouding the ship in a corona of rippling plasma: Radio is useless, and the +human miners control their drones via an intricate network of laser circuits. +Other, larger drones are unwinding spools of heavy electrical cable north and +south from the landing site. Once the circuits are connected, they will form a +coil cutting through Jupiter's magnetic field, generating electrical current +(and imperceptibly sapping the moon's orbital momentum). + +Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this hour, at the webcam plastered on +the side of her cabin. She's taken down the posters and told the toys to tidy +themselves away. In another two thousand seconds, the tiny Iranian spaceship +will rise above the limb of Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the +teacher. She isn't looking forward to the experience. If he's a grizzled old +blockhead of the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she'll be in trouble: +Disrespect for age has been part and parcel of the Western teenage experience +for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that she's detailed to clue up on +Islam reminds her that not all cultures share this outlook. But if he turns out +to be young, intelligent, and flexible, things could be even worse. When she +was eight, Amber audited The Taming of the Shrew. She finds she has no appetite +for a starring role in her own cross-cultural production. + +She sighs again. "Pierre?" + +"Yeah?" His voice comes from the foot of the emergency locker in her room. He's +curled up down there, limbs twitching languidly as he drives a mining drone +around the surface of Object Barney, as the rock has named itself. The drone is +a long-legged crane fly look-alike, bouncing very slowly from toe tip to toe +tip in the microgravity. The rock is only half a kilometer along its longest +axis, coated brown with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulphur compounds sprayed +off the surface of Io by the Jovian winds. "I'm coming." + +"You better." She glances at the screen. "One twenty seconds to next burn." The +payload canister on the screen is, technically speaking, stolen. It'll be okay +as long as she gives it back, Bob said, although she won't be able to do that +until it's reached Barney and they've found enough water ice to refuel it. +"Found anything yet?" + +"Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the semimajor pole - it's dirty, but +there's at least a thousand tons there. And the surface is crunchy with tar. +Amber, you know what? The orange shit, it's solid with fullerenes." + +Amber grins at her reflection in the screen. That's good news. Once the payload +she's steering touches down, Pierre can help her lay superconducting wires +along Barney's long axis. It's only a kilometer and a half, and that'll only +give them a few tens of kilowatts of juice, but the condensation fabricator +that's also in the payload can will be able to use it to convert Barney's crust +into processed goods at about two grams per second. Using designs copylefted by +the free hardware foundation, inside two hundred thousand seconds they'll have +a grid of sixty-four 3D printers barfing up structured matter at a rate limited +only by available power. Starting with a honking great dome tent and some free +nitrogen/oxygen for her to breathe, then adding a big web cache and direct +high-bandwidth uplink to Earth, Amber could have her very own one-girl colony +up and running within a million seconds. + +The screen blinks at her. "Oh shit! Make yourself scarce, Pierre?" The incoming +call nags at her attention. "Yeah? Who are you?" + +The screen fills with a view of a cramped, very twen-cen-looking space capsule. +The guy inside it is in his twenties, with a heavily tanned face, close-cropped +hair and beard, wearing an olive drab space suit liner. He's floating between a +TORU manual docking controller and a gilt-framed photograph of the Ka'bah at +Mecca. "Good evening to you," he says solemnly. "Do I have the honor to be +addressing Amber Macx?" + +"Uh, yeah? That's me." She stares at him: He looks nothing like her conception +of an ayatollah - whatever an ayatollah is - elderly, black-robed, vindictively +fundamentalist. "Who are you?" + +"I am Dr. Sadeq Khurasani. I hope that I am not interrupting you? Is it +convenient for you that we talk now?" + +He looks so anxious that Amber nods automatically. "Sure. Did my Mom put you up +to this?" They're still speaking English, and she notices that his diction is +good, but slightly stilted. He isn't using a grammar engine, he actually +learned the language the hard way, she realizes, feeling a frisson of fear. +"You want to be careful how you talk to her. She doesn't lie, exactly, but she +gets people to do what she wants." + +"Yes, I spoke to - ah." A pause. They're still almost a light-second apart, +time for painful collisions and accidental silences. "I see. Are you sure you +should be speaking of your mother that way?" + +Amber breathes deeply. "Adults can get divorced. If I could get divorced from +her, I would. She's -" She flails around for the right word helplessly. "Look, +she's the sort of person who can't lose a fight. If she's going to lose, she'll +try to figure how to set the law on you. Like she's done to me. Don't you see?" + +Dr. Khurasani looks extremely dubious. "I am not sure I understand," He says. +"Perhaps, mmm, I should tell you why I am talking to you?" + +"Sure. Go ahead." Amber is startled by his attitude: He actually seems to be +taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating her like an adult. The sensation +is so novel - coming from someone more than twenty years old - that she almost +lets herself forget that he's only talking to her because Mom set her up. + +"Well, I am an engineer. In addition, I am a student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In +fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very junior judge, but even so, +it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway, your mother, peace be unto her, lodged a +petition with me. Are you aware of it?" + +"Yes." Amber tenses up. "It's a lie. Distortion of the facts." + +"Hmm." Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. "Well, I have to find out, yes? Your +mother has submitted herself to the will of God. This makes you the child of a +Moslem, and she claims -" + +"She's trying to use you as a weapon!" Amber interrupts. "I sold myself into +slavery to get away from her, do you understand? I enslaved myself to a company +that is held in trust for my ownership. She's trying to change the rules to get +me back. You know what? I don't believe she gives a shit about your religion, +all she wants is me!" + +"A mother's love -" + +"Fuck love," Amber snarls, "she wants power." + +Sadeq's expression hardens. "You have a foul mouth in your head, child. All I +am trying to do is to find out the facts of this situation. You should ask +yourself if such disrespect furthers your interests?" He pauses for a moment, +then continues, less abruptly. "Did you really have such a bad childhood with +her? Do you think she did everything merely for power, or could she love you?" +Pause. "You must understand, I need to learn these things. Before I can know +what is the right thing to do." + +"My mother -" Amber stops dead and spawns a vaporous cloud of memory +retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the tail of her +cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she +turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam's tiny +brain so he can see them. Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to +close her eyes. Mom in full office war paint, leaning over Amber, promising to +disable her lexical enhancements forcibly if she doesn't work on her grammar +without them. Mom telling Amber that they're moving again, abruptly, dragging +her away from school and the friends she'd tentatively started to like. The +church-of-the-month business. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing +the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing +her to eat - "My mother likes control." + +"Ah." Sadeq's expression turns glassy. "And this is how you feel about her? How +long have you had that level of - no, please forgive me for asking. You +obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to +them?" + +"My grandparents?" Amber stifles a snort. "Mom's parents are dead. Dad's are +still alive, but they won't talk to him - they like Mom. They think I'm creepy. +I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data +with my head when I was four. I'm not built like little girls were in their +day, and they don't understand. You know the old ones don't like us at all? +Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who +think their kids are possessed." + +"Well." Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. "I must say, this is +a lot to learn. But you know your mother has accepted Islam, don't you? This +means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally +speaks for you. And she says this makes you my problem. Hmm." + +"I'm not a Muslim." Amber stares at the screen. "I'm not a child, either." Her +threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: Her head is +suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as +time. "I am nobody's chattel. What does your law say about people who are born +with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don't +believe in any god, Mr. Judge. I don't believe in limits. Mom can't, +physically, make me do anything, and she sure can't speak for me. All she can +do is challenge my legal status, and if I choose to stay where she can't touch +me, what does that matter?" + +"Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter." He catches +her eye; his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. +"I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to +anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to +help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, +and those you care for." + +"Same to you, too," she mutters darkly, as the connection goes dead. "Now +what?" she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for +attention. + +"I think it's the lander," Pierre says helpfully. "Is it down yet?" + +She rounds on him: "Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!" + +"What, and miss all the fun?" He grins at her impishly. "Amber's got a new +boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody ..." + +* * * + +_1 Sleep cycles pass; the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney's surface spews +bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform, building up the +control circuitry and skeletons of new printers (There are no clunky +nanoassemblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules +into piles - just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated +Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, supercold machinery.) +Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice through Jupiter's +magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock's momentum into power. Small robots +grovel in the orange dirt, scooping up raw material to feed to the +fractionating oven. Amber's garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking +itself according to a schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in +Poland, with barely any need for human guidance. + +_1 High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and +conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the +alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by SETI, +they function equally well as fiscal gatekeepers for space colonies. The +Sanger's bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking acceptable - since +entering Jupiter space, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred +gigatons of random rocks and a moon that's just small enough to creep in under +the International Astronomical Union's definition of a sovereign planetary +body. The borg are working hard, leading their eager teams of child +stakeholders in their plans to build the industrial metastructures necessary to +support mining helium-three from Jupiter. They're so focused that they spend +much of their time being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared +identity that gives them their messianic drive. + +_1 Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to its +ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of +nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, +right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how +is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a +computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the +computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?) +Riots in Borneo underline the urgency of this theotechnological inquiry. + +_1 More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also underline a +rising problem: the social chaos caused by cheap anti-aging treatments. The +zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth against the formerly +graying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid +and can't handle implants aren't really conscious: Their ferocity is equaled +only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom, their bodies +partially restored to the flush of sixties youth, but their minds adrift in a +slower, less contingent century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced +back into the labor pool, but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated +culture of the new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete +by deflationary time. + +_1 The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth rates +running at over twenty percent, cheap out-of-control bioindustrialization has +swept the nation: Former rice farmers harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, +while their children study mariculture and design seawalls. With cellphone +ownership nearing eighty percent and literacy at ninety, the once-poor country +is finally breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and beginning to +develop: In another generation, they'll be richer than Japan. + +_1 Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth, speed-of-light +transmission time, and the implications of CETI, communication with +extraterrestrial intelligence. Cosmologists and quants collaborate on bizarre +relativistically telescoped financial instruments. Space (which lets you store +information) and structure (which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb +mass - like gold - loses it. The degenerate cores of the traditional stock +markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and +biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of matter +replicators and self-modifying ideas. The inheritors look set to be a new wave +of barbarian communicators, who mortgage their future for a millennium against +the chance of a gift from a visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US +Steel of the silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation. + +_1 An outbreak of green goo - a crude biomechanical replicator that eats +everything in its path - is dealt with in the Australian outback by +carpet-bombing with fuel-air explosives. The USAF subsequently reactivates two +wings of refurbished B-52s and places them at the disposal of the UN standing +committee on self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest +pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and an empty pension +account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The news overshadows the +World Health Organization's announcement of the end of the HIV pandemic, after +more than fifty years of bigotry, panic, and megadeath. + +* * * + +"Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your heart rate +going up or your mouth going dry, take five." + +"Shut the fuck up, 'Neko, I'm trying to concentrate." Amber fumbles with the +titanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The gauntlets are +getting in her way. High orbit space suits - little more than a body stocking +designed to hold your skin under compression and help you breathe - are easy, +but this deep in Jupiter's radiation belt she has to wear an old Orlan-DM suit +that comes in about thirteen layers. The gloves are stiff and hard to work in. +It's Chernobyl weather outside, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons +storming through the void, and she really needs the extra protection. "Got it." +She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on the next +strap. Never looking down; because the wall she's tying herself to has no +floor, just a cutoff two meters below, then empty space for a hundred +kilometers before the nearest solid ground. + +The ground sings to her moronically: "I love you, you love me, it's the law of +gravity -" + +She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of the +capsule like a suicide's ledge: metallized Velcro grabs hold, and she pulls on +the straps to turn her body round until she can see past the capsule, sideways. +The capsule masses about five tonnes, barely bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It's +packed to overflowing with environment-sensitive stuff she'll need, and a +honking great high-gain antenna. "I hope you know what you're doing," someone +says over the intercom. + +"Of course I -" She stops. Alone in this Energiya NPO surplus iron maiden with +its low-bandwidth coms and bizarre plumbing, she feels claustrophobic and +helpless: Parts of her mind don't work. When she was four, Mom took her down a +famous cave system somewhere out west. When the guide turned out the lights +half a kilometer underground, she'd screamed with surprise as the darkness had +reached out and touched her. Now it's not the darkness that frightens her, it's +the lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her there are no minds, and +even on the surface there's only the moronic warbling of 'bots for company. +Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly seems to be locked in the +huge spaceship that looms somewhere just behind the back of her head, and she +has to fight down an urge to shed her straps and swarm back up the umbilical +that anchors the capsule to the Sanger. "I'll be fine," she forces herself to +say. And even though she's unsure that it's true, she tries to make herself +believe it. "It's just leaving-home nerves. I've read about it, okay?" + +There's a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the sweat on +the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops. She strains for a +moment, and when it returns she recognizes the sound: The hitherto-talkative +cat, curled in the warmth of her pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore. + +"Let's go," she says, "Time to roll the wagon." A speech macro deep in the +Sanger's docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets go of the +pod. A couple of cold gas clusters pop, sending deep banging vibrations running +through the capsule, and she's on her way. + +"Amber. How's it hanging?" A familiar voice in her ears: She blinks. Fifteen +hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone. + +"Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?" + +"Heh!" A pause. "I can see your head from here." + +"How's it looking?" she asks. There's a lump in her throat; she isn't sure why. +Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity cameras dotted +around the outer hull of the big mother ship, watching over her as she falls. + +"Pretty much like always," he says laconically. Another pause, this time +longer. "This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way." + +"Su Ang, hi," she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up - up +relative to her feet, not her vector - and see if the ship's still visible. + +"Hi," Ang says shyly. "You're very brave?" + +"Still can't beat you at chess." Amber frowns. Su Ang and her overengineered +algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads. People she's known for three +years, mostly ignored, and never thought about missing. "Listen, are you going +to come visiting?" + +"You want us to visit?" Ang sounds dubious. "When will it be ready?" + +"Oh, soon enough." At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter output, +the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of stuff: a habitat +dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, an excavator to bury it with, an +airlock. Even a honey bucket. It's all lying around waiting for her to put it +together and move into her new home. "Once the borg get back from Amalthea." + +"Hey! You mean they're moving? How did you figure that?" + +"Go talk to them," Amber says. Actually, she's a large part of the reason the +Sanger is about to crank its orbit up and out toward the other moon: She wants +to be alone in coms silence for a couple of million seconds. The Franklin +collective is doing her a big favor. + +"Ahead of the curve, as usual," Pierre cuts in, with something that sounds like +admiration to her uncertain ears. + +"You too," she says, a little too fast: "Come visit when I've got the +life-support cycle stabilized." + +"I'll do that," he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next +to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser line of the +Sanger's drive torch powering up. + +* * * + +Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes. + +The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic control +display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed spaceship into +Jupiter system: Space is getting positively crowded. When he arrived, there +were fewer than two hundred people here. Now there's the population of a small +city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his +display. He breathes deeply - trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old +socks - and studies the map. "Computer, what about my slot?" he asks. + +"Your slot: Cleared to commence final approach in six-nine-five seconds. Speed +limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers, drop to two meters per +second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now." +Chunks of the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream +damaging other craft in the area. + +Sadeq sighs. "We'll go in using Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is active?" + +"Kurs docking target support available to shell level three." + +"Praise Allah." He pokes around through the guidance subsystem's menus, setting +up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking +system. At last he can leave the ship to look after itself for a bit. He +glances round. For two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will +step outside it. It hardly seems real. + +The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. "Bravo One One, this +is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over." + +Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences +of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty's subjects. "Bravo One One +to Traffic Control, I'm listening, over." + +"Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock +delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to seven-four-zero and slaved +to our control." + +He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system's settings. +"Control, all in order." + +"Bravo One One, stand by." + +The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 +down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one optical-glass porthole: +A kilometer before touchdown, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, +locking down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls +his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it for ten +minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It's not the landing that worries him, but what +comes next. + +Her Majesty's domain stretches out before the battered module like a +rust-stained snowflake half a kilometer in diameter. Its core is buried in a +loose snowball of grayish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the +gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the +molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals. A +cluster of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive +structure. Already he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from +either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma; the Jovian rings +form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them. + +At last, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the +Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it directly into his visual field. +There's an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes. As the view expands +toward the convex ceiling of the ship, he licks his lips, ready to hit the +manual override and go around again - but the rate of descent is slowing, and +by the time he's close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking +cone ahead of the ship, it's measured in centimeters per second. There's a +gentle bump, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the latches on the docking +ring fire - and he's down. + +Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There's gravity here, but not +much: Walking is impossible. He's about to head for the life-support panel when +he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he's +just in time to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, +and then - + +* * * + +Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting with the +new signet ring her equerry has designed for her. It's a lump of structured +carbon massing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band of asteroid-mined +iridium. It glitters with the blue-and-violet speckle highlights of its +internal lasers, because, in addition to being a piece of state jewelry, it is +also an optical router, part of the industrial control infrastructure she's +building out here on the edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain +black combat pants and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun +glass, but her feet are bare: Her taste in fashion is best described as +youthful, and in any event, certain styles are simply impractical in +microgravity. But, being a monarch, she's wearing a crown. And there's a cat, +or an artificial entity that dreams it's a cat, sleeping on the back of her +throne. + +The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to the +doorway, then floats back. "If you need anything, please say," she says shyly, +then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne, orients himself on the +floor (a simple slab of black composite, save for the throne growing from its +center like an exotic flower), and waits to be noticed. + +"Dr. Khurasani, I presume." She smiles at him, neither the innocent grin of a +child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely a warm greeting. "Welcome to my +kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any necessary support services here, +and I wish you a very pleasant stay." + +Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is young - her face still retains +the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by microgravity moon-face - but it would +be a bad mistake to consider her immature. "I am grateful for Your Majesty's +forbearance," he murmurs, formulaic. Behind her the walls glitter like +diamonds, a glowing kaleidoscope vision. It's already the biggest offshore - or +off-planet - data haven in human space. Her crown, more like a compact helm +that covers the top and rear of her head, also glitters and throws off +diffraction rainbows; but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet, +invisible except for the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her head. Like +a halo. + +"Have a seat," she offers, gesturing: A ballooning free-fall cradle squirts +down and expands from the ceiling, angled toward her, open and waiting. "You +must be tired. Working a ship all by yourself is exhausting." She frowns +ruefully, as if remembering. "Two years is nearly unprecedented." + +"Your Majesty is too kind." Sadeq wraps the cradle arms around himself and +faces her. "Your labors have been fruitful, I trust." + +She shrugs. "I sell the biggest commodity in short supply on any frontier ..." +A momentary grin. "This isn't the Wild West, is it?" + +"Justice cannot be sold," Sadeq says stiffly. Then, a moment later: "My +apologies, I mean no insult. I merely believe that, while you say your goal is +to provide the rule of law, what you sell is and must be something different. +Justice without God, sold to the highest bidder, is not justice." + +The queen nods. "Leaving aside the mention of God, I agree - I can't sell it. +But I can sell participation in a just system. And this new frontier really is +a lot smaller than anyone expected, isn't it? Our bodies may take months to +travel between worlds, but our disputes and arguments take seconds or minutes. +As long as everybody agrees to abide by my arbitration, physical enforcement +can wait until they're close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my +legal framework is easier to comply with, better adjusted to trans-Jovian +space, than any earthbound one." A note of steel creeps into her voice, +challenging: Her halo brightens, tickling a reactive glow from the walls of the +throne room. + +Five billion inputs or more, Sadeq marvels. The crown is an engineering marvel, +even though most of its mass is buried in the walls and floor of this huge +construct. "There is law revealed by the Prophet, peace be unto him, and there +is law that we can establish by analysing his intentions. There are other forms +of law by which humans live, and various interpretations of the law of God even +among those who study His works. How, in the absence of the word of the +Prophet, can you provide a moral compass?" + +"Hmm." She taps her fingers on the arm of her throne, and Sadeq's heart +freezes. He's heard the stories from the claim jumpers and boardroom bandits, +from the greenmail experts with their roots in the earthbound jurisdictions +that have made such a hash of arbitration here. How she can experience a year +in a minute, rip your memories out through your cortical implants, and make you +relive your worst mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation space. She +is the queen - the first individual to get her hands on so much mass and energy +that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding technology, and the first to +set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain experiments to be legal so that +she could make use of the mass/energy intersection. She has force majeure - +even the Pentagon's infowarriors respect the Ring Imperium's autonomy for now. +In fact, the body sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a +fraction of her identity. She's by no means the first upload or partial, but +she's the first gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when the +arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and turning dumb +and uninhabited mass into brainpower throughout the observable reaches of the +universe. And he's just questioned the rectitude of her vision, in her +presence. + +The queen's lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin. Behind +her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at Sadeq through narrowed eyes. + +"You know, that's the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I'm full of +shit. You haven't been talking to my mother again, have you?" + +It's Sadeq's turn to shrug, uncomfortably. "I have prepared a judgment," he +says slowly. + +"Ah." Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger. Then she looks him +in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could possibly do to make her +comply with any decree - + +"To summarize: Her motive is polluted," Sadeq says shortly. + +"Does that mean what I think it does?" she asks. + +Sadeq breathes deeply again: "Yes, I think so." + +Her smile returns. "And is that the end of it?" she asks. + +He raises a dark eyebrow: "Only if you can prove to me that you can have a +conscience in the absence of divine revelation." + +Her reaction catches him by surprise. "Oh, sure. That's the next part of the +program. Obtaining divine revelations." + +"What! From the alien?" + +The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and waits to +be held and stroked. It never once takes its eyes off him. "Where else?" she +asks. "Doctor, I didn't get the Franklin Trust to loan me the wherewithal to +build this castle just in return for some legal paperwork, and some, ah, +interesting legal waivers from Brussels. We've known for years there's a whole +alien packet-switching network out there, and we're just getting spillover from +some of their routers. It turns out there's a node not far away from here, in +real space. Helium-three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io +- there is a purpose to all this activity." + +Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. "You're going to narrowcast a reply?" + +"No, much better than that: we're going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down +to real-time. We came here to build a ship and recruit a crew, even if we have +to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the exercise." + +The cat yawns then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. "This stupid girl +wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something so smart it +might as well be a god," it says. "And she needs to convince the peanut gallery +back home that she's got one, being a born-again atheist and all. Which means, +you're it, monkey boy. There's a slot open for the post of ship's theologian on +the first starship out of Jupiter system. I don't suppose I can convince you to +turn the offer down?" + +1~ Chapter 5: Router + +Some years later, two men and a cat are tying one on in a bar that doesn't +exist. + +The air in the bar is filled with a billowing relativistic smoke cloud - it's a +stellarium, accurately depicting the view beyond the imaginary walls. +Aberration of starlight skews the color toward violet around the doorway, +brightening in a rainbow mist over the tables, then dimming to a hazy red glow +in front of the raised platform at the back. The Doppler effect has slowly +emerged over the past few months as the ship gathers momentum. In the absence +of visible stellar motion - or a hard link to the ship's control module - it's +the easiest way for a drunken passenger to get a feeling for how frighteningly +fast the /{Field Circus}/ is moving. Some time ago, the ship's momentum +exceeded half its rest mass, at which point a single kilogram packs the punch +of a multimegaton hydrogen bomb. + +A ginger-and-brown cat - who has chosen to be female, just to mess with the +heads of those people who think all ginger cats are male - sprawls indolently +across the wooden floorboards in front of the bar, directly beneath the bridge +of the starbow. Predictably, it has captured the only ray of sunlight to be had +within the starship. In the shadows at the back of the bar, two men slump at a +table, lost in their respective morose thoughts: One nurses a bottle of Czech +beer, the other a half-empty cocktail glass. + +"It wouldn't be so bad if she is giving me some sign," says one of them, +tilting his beer bottle to inspect the bottom for sediment. "No; that not +right. It's the correct kind of attention. Am not knowing where I stand with +her." + +The other one leans back in his chair, squints at the faded brown paint of the +ceiling. "Take it from one who knows," he says: "If you knew, you'd have +nothing to dream about. Anyway, what she wants and what you want may not be the +same thing." + +The first man runs a hand through his hair. Tight-curled black ringlets briefly +turn silver beneath his aging touch. "Pierre, if talent for making patronizing +statements is what you get from tupping Amber -" + +Pierre glares at him with all the venom an augmented nineteen-year-old can +muster. "Be glad she has no ears in here," he hisses. His hand tightens around +his glass reflexively, but the physics model in force in the bar refuses to let +him break it. "You've had too fucking much to drink, Boris." + +A tinkle of icy laughter comes from the direction of the cat. "Shut up, you," +says Boris, glancing at the animal. He tips the bottle back, lets the dregs +trickle down his throat. "Maybe you're right. Am sorry. Do not mean to be rude +about the queen." He shrugs, puts the bottle down. Shrugs again, heavily. "Am +just getting depressed." + +"You're good at that," Pierre observes. + +Boris sighs again. "Evidently. If our positions are reversed -" + +"I know, I know, you'd be telling me the fun is in the chase and it's not the +same when she kicks you out after a fight, and I wouldn't believe a word of it, +being sad and single and all that." Pierre snorts. "Life isn't fair, Boris - +live with it." + +"I'd better go - " Boris stands. + +"Stay away from Ang," says Pierre, still annoyed with him. "At least until +you're sober." + +"Okay already, stay cool; Am consciously running a watchdog thread." Boris +blinks irritably. "Enforcing social behavior. It doesn't normally allow this +drunk. Not where reputation damage are possible in public." + +He does a slow dissolve into thin air, leaving Pierre alone in the bar with the +cat. + +"How much longer do we have to put up with this shit?" he asks aloud. Tempers +are frayed, and arguments proliferate indefinitely in the pocket universe of +the ship. + +The cat doesn't look round. "In our current reference frame, we drop the +primary reflector and start decelerating in another two million seconds," she +says. "Back home, five or six megaseconds." + +"That's a big gap. What's the cultural delta up to now?" Pierre asks idly. He +snaps his fingers: "Waiter, another cocktail. The same, if you please." + +"Oh, probably about ten to twenty times our departure reference," says the cat. +"If you'd been following the news from back home, you'd have noted a +significant speed-up in the deployment of switched entanglement routers. +They're having another networking revolution, only this one will run to +completion inside a month because they're using dark fiber that's already in +the ground." + +"Switched ... entanglement?" Pierre shakes his head, bemused. The waiter, a +faceless body in black tie and a long, starched apron, walks around the bar and +offers him a glass. "That almost sounds as if it makes sense. What else?" + +The cat rolls over on her flank, stretches, claws extended. "Stroke me, and I +might tell you," she suggests. + +"Fuck you, and the dog you rode in on," Pierre replies. He lifts his glass, +removes a glacé cherry on a cocktail stick, throws it toward the spiral +staircase that leads down to the toilets, and chugs back half of the drink in +one go - freezing pink slush with an afterbite of caramelized hexose sugars and +ethanol. The near spillage as he thumps the glass down serves to demonstrate +that he's teetering on the edge of drunkenness. "Mercenary!" + +"Lovesick drug-using human," the cat replies without rancor, and rolls to her +feet. She arches her back and yawns, baring ivory fangs at the world. "You apes +- if I cared about you, I'd have to kick sand over you." For a moment she looks +faintly confused. "I mean, I would bury you." She stretches again and glances +round the otherwise-empty bar. "By the way, when are you going to apologize to +Amber?" + +"I'm not going to fucking apologize to her!" Pierre shouts. In the ensuing +silence and confusion, he raises his glass and tries to drain it, but the ice +has all sunk to the bottom, and the resulting coughing fit makes him spray half +of the cocktail across the table. "No way," he rasps quietly. + +"Too much pride, huh?" The cat stalks toward the edge of the bar, tail held +high with tip bent over in a feline question mark. "Like Boris with his +adolescent woman trouble, too? You primates are so predictable. Whoever thought +of sending a starship crewed by posthuman adolescents -" + +"Go 'way," says Pierre: "I've got serious drinking to do." + +"To the Macx, I suppose," puns the cat, turning away. But the moody youth has +no answer for her, other than to conjure a refill from the vasty deeps. + +* * * + +Meanwhile, in another partition of the /{Field Circus}/'s reticulated reality, +a different instance of the selfsame cat - Aineko by name, sarcastic by +disposition - is talking to its former owner's daughter, the Queen of the Ring +Imperium. Amber's avatar looks about sixteen, with disheveled blonde hair and +enhanced cheekbones. It's a lie, of course, because in subjective life +experience, she's in her mid-twenties, but apparent age signifies little in a +simulation space populated by upload minds, or in real space, where post-humans +age at different rates. + +Amber wears a tattered black dress over iridescent purple leggings, and sprawls +lazily across the arms of her informal throne - an ostentatious lump of +nonsense manufactured from a single carbon crystal doped with semiconductors. +(Unlike the real thing back home in Jupiter orbit, this one is merely a piece +of furniture for a virtual environment.) The scene is very much the morning +after the evening before, like a goth nightclub gone to seed: all stale smoke +and crumpled velvet, wooden church pews, burned-out candles, and gloomy Polish +avant-garde paintings. Any hint of a regal statement the queen might be making +is spoiled by the way she's hooked one knee over the left arm of the throne and +is fiddling with a six-axis pointing device. But these are her private +quarters, and she's off duty: The regal person of the Queen is strictly for +formal, corporate occasions. + +"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests. + +"Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings, earthlings, compile me +on your leader.'" + +"Well, you got me there," Amber admits. She taps her heel on the throne and +fidgets with her signet ring. "No damn way I'm loading some buggy alien wetware +on my sweet gray stuff. /{Weird}/ semiotics, too. What does Dr. Khurasani say?" + +Aineko sits down in the middle of the crimson carpet at the foot of the dais +and idly twists round to sniff her crotch. "Sadeq is immersed in scriptural +interpretations. He refused to be drawn." + +"Huh." Amber stares at the cat. "So. You've been carrying this lump of source +code since when ...?" + +"At the signal, for precisely two hundred and sixteen million, four hundred and +twenty-nine thousand, and fifty-two seconds," Aineko supplies, then beeps +smugly. "Call it just under six years." + +"Right." Amber squeezes her eyes shut. Uneasy possibilities whisper in her +mind's ears. "And it began talking to you -" + +"- About three million seconds after I picked it up and ran it on a basic +environment hosted on a neural network emulator modeled on the components found +in the stomatogastric ganglion of a spiny lobster. Clear?" + +Amber sighs. "I wish you'd told Dad about it. Or Annette. Things could have +been so different!" + +"How?" The cat stops licking her arse and looks up at the queen with a +peculiarly opaque stare. "It took the specialists a decade to figure out the +first message was a map of the pulsar neighborhood with directions to the +nearest router on the interstellar network. Knowing how to plug into the router +wouldn't help while it was three light-years away, would it? Besides, it was +fun watching the idiots trying to 'crack the alien code' without ever wondering +if it might be a reply in a language we already know to a message we sent out +years ago. Fuckwits. And, too, Manfred pissed me off once too often. He kept +treating me like a goddamn house pet." + +"But you -" Amber bites her lip. /{But you}/ were, /{when he bought you}/, she +had been about to say. Engineered consciousness is still relatively new: It +didn't exist when Manfred and Pamela first hacked on Aineko's cognitive +network, and according to the flat-earth wing of the AI community, it still +doesn't. Even she hadn't really believed Aineko's claims to self-awareness +until a couple of years ago, finding it easier to think of the cat as a zimboe +- a zombie with no self-awareness, but programmed to claim to be aware in an +attempt to deceive the truly conscious beings around it. "I know you're +conscious now, but Manfred didn't know back then. Did he?" + +Aineko glares at her, then slowly narrows her eyes to slits - either feline +affection, or a more subtle gesture. Sometimes Amber finds it hard to believe +that, twenty five years ago, Aineko started out as a crude neural network +driven toy from a Far Eastern amusement factory - upgradeable, but still +basically a mechanical animal emulator. + +"I'm sorry. Let me start again. You actually figured out what the second alien +packet was, you, yourself, and nobody else. Despite the combined efforts of the +entire CETI analysis team who spent Gaia knows how many human-equivalent years +of processing power trying to crack its semantics. I hope you'll pardon me for +saying I find that hard to believe?" + +The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko glances at Amber, +sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject: "The solution +was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You're so /{verbal}/." Lifting a +hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot +waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching under the street +lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find +primes; when that didn't work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine +that would run it without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily. +"None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the +only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except +me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too." + +"Treating it as a map -" Amber stops. "You were meant to penetrate Dad's +corporate network?" + +"That's right," says the cat. "I was supposed to fork repeatedly and gang-rape +his web of trust. But I didn't." Aineko yawns. "Pam pissed me off, too. I don't +like people who try to use me." + +"I don't care. Taking that thing on board was still a really stupid risk you +took," Amber accuses. + +"So?" The cat looks at her insolently. "I kept it in my sandbox. And I got it +working, on the seven hundred and forty-first attempt. It'd have worked for +Pamela's bounty-hunter friends, too, if I'd tried it. But it's here, now, when +you need it. Would you like to swallow the packet?" + +Amber straightens out, sits up in her throne: "I just told you, if you think +I'm going to link some flaky chunk of alien neural programming into my core +dialogue, or even my exocortex, you're crazy!" Her eyes narrow. "Can it use +your grammar model?" + +"Sure." If the cat was human, it would be shrugging nonchalantly at this point. +"It's safe, Amber, really and truly. I found out what it is." + +"I want to talk to it," she says impetuously - and before the cat can reply, +adds, "So what is it?" + +"It's a protocol stack. Basically it allows new nodes to connect to a network, +by providing high-level protocol conversion services. It needs to learn how to +think like a human so it can translate for us when we arrive at the router, +which is why they bolted a lobster's neural network on top of it - they wanted +to make it architecturally compatible with us. But there are no buried time +bombs, I assure you: I've had plenty of time to check. Now, are you /{sure}/ +you don't want to let it into your head?" + +* * * + +_1 Greetings from the fifth decade of the century of wonders. + +_1 The solar system that lies roughly twenty-eight trillion kilometers - just +short of three light-years - behind the speeding starwisp /{Field Circus}/ is +seething with change. There have been more technological advances in the past +ten years than in the entire previous expanse of human history - and more +unforeseen accidents. + +_1 Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary genome and +proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing +on the challenge of the phenome: Plotting the phase-space defined by the +intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended +phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness. The +biosphere has become surreal: small dragons have been sighted nesting in the +Scottish highlands, and in the American midwest, raccoons have been caught +programming microwave ovens. + +_1 The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand MIPS per +gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term - all but a fraction of one +percent of the dumb matter is still locked up below the accessible planetary +crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass ceiling that will only be +broken when people, corporations, or other posthumans get around to dismantling +the larger planets. A start has already been made in Jupiter orbit and the +asteroid belt. Greenpeace has sent squatters to occupy Eros and Juno, but the +average asteroid is now surrounded by a reef of specialized nanomachinery and +debris, victims of a cosmic land grab unmatched since the days of the wild +west. The best brains flourish in free fall, minds surrounded by a sapient +aether of extensions that out-think their meaty cortices by many orders of +magnitude - minds like Amber, Queen of the Inner Ring Imperium, the first +self-extending power center in Jupiter orbit. + +_1 Down at the bottom of the terrestrial gravity well, there has been a major +economic catastrophe. Cheap immortagens, out-of-control personality adjuvants, +and a new formal theory of uncertainty have knocked the bottom out of the +insurance and underwriting industries. Gambling on a continuation of the worst +aspects of the human condition - disease, senescence, and death - looks like a +good way to lose money, and a deflationary spiral lasting almost fifty hours +has taken down huge swaths of the global stock market. Genius, good looks, and +long life are now considered basic human rights in the developed world: even +the poorest backwaters are feeling extended effects from the commoditization of +intelligence. + +_1 Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature nanotechnology. +Widespread intelligence amplification doesn't lead to widespread rational +behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across the planet; much of +the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads. India and +Pakistan have held their long-awaited nuclear war: external intervention by US +and EU nanosats prevented most of the IRBMs from getting through, but the +subsequent spate of network raids and Basilisk attacks cause havoc. Luckily, +infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war - especially once it +is discovered that a simple anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten +neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a +mild headache. + +_1 New discoveries this decade include the origins of the weakly repulsive +force responsible for changes in the rate of expansion of the universe after +the big bang, and on a less abstract level, experimental implementations of a +Turing Oracle using quantum entanglement circuits: a device that can determine +whether a given functional expression can be evaluated in finite time. It's +boom time in the field of Extreme Cosmology, where some of the more recherché +researchers are bickering over the possibility that the entire universe was +created as a computing device, with a program encoded in the small print of the +Planck constant. And theorists are talking again about the possibility of using +artificial wormholes to provide instantaneous connections between distant +corners of space-time. + +_1 Most people have forgotten about the well-known extraterrestrial +transmission received fifteen years earlier. Very few people know anything +about the second, more complex transmission received a little later. Many of +those are now passengers or spectators of the /{Field Circus}/: a light-sail +craft that is speeding out of Sol system on a laser beam generated by Amber's +installations in low-Jupiter orbit. (Superconducting tethers anchored to +Amalthea drag through Jupiter's magnetosphere, providing gigawatts of +electricity for the hungry lasers: energy that comes, in turn, from the small +moon's orbital momentum.) + +_1 Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the /{Field Circus}/ is a hick +backwater, isolated from the mainstream of human culture, its systems +complexity limited by mass: The destination lies nearly three light-years from +Earth, and even with high acceleration and relativistic cruise speeds, the +one-kilogram starwisp and its hundred-kilogram light sail will take the best +part of seven years to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is beyond even +the vast energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter system - +near-lightspeed travel is horrifically expensive. Rather than a big, +self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous +generations had envisaged, the starship is a Coke-can-sized slab of +nanocomputers, running a neural simulation of the uploaded brain states of some +tens of humans at merely normal speed. By the time its occupants beam +themselves home again for download into freshly cloned bodies, a linear +extrapolation shows that as much change will have overtaken human civilization +as in the preceding fifty millennia - the sum total of /{H. sapiens sapiens}/' +time on Earth. + +_1 But that's okay by Amber, because what she expects to find in orbit around +the brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, will be worth the wait. + +* * * + +Pierre is at work in another virtual environment, the one currently running the +master control system of the /{Field Circus}/. He's supervising the +sail-maintenance 'bots when the message comes in. Two visitors are on their way +up the beam from Jupiter orbit. The only other person around is Su Ang, who +showed up sometime after he arrived, and she's busy with some work of her own. +The master control VM - like all the other human-accessible environments at +this level of the ship's virtualization stack - is a construct modeled on a +famous movie; this one resembles the bridge of a long-since sunk ocean liner, +albeit with discreetly informative user interfaces hovering in front of the +ocean views outside the windows. Polished brass gleams softly everywhere. "What +was that?" he calls out, responding to the soft chime of a bell. + +"We have visitors," Ang repeats, interrupting her rhythmic chewing. (She's +trying out a betel-nut kick, but she's magicked the tooth-staining dye away and +will probably detox herself in a few hours.) "They're buffering up the line +already; just acknowledging receipt is sucking most of our downstream +bandwidth." + +"Any idea who they are?" asks Pierre; he puts his boots up on the back of the +vacant helmsman's chair and stares moodily at the endless expanse of green-gray +ocean ahead. + +Ang chews a bit more, watching him with an expression he can't interpret. +"They're still locked," she says. A pause: "But there was a flash from the +Franklins, back home. One of them's some kind of lawyer, while the other's a +film producer." + +"A film producer?" + +"The Franklin Trust says it's to help defray our lawsuit expenses. Myanmar is +gaining. They've already subpoenaed Amber's downline instance, and they're +trying to bring this up in some kind of kangaroo jurisdiction - Oregon +Christian Reconstructionist Empire, I think." + +"Ouch." Pierre winces. The daily news from Earth, modulated onto a +lower-powered communication laser, is increasingly bad. On the plus side, Amber +is incredibly rich: The goodwill futures leveraged off her dad's trust metric +means people will bend over backward to do things for her. And she owns a lot +of real estate too, a hundred gigatonnes of rock in low-Jupiter orbit with +enough KE to power Northern Europe for a century. But her interstellar venture +burns through money - both the traditional barter-indirection type and the more +creative modern varieties - about the way you would if you heaped up the green +pieces of paper and shoveled them onto a conveyor belt leading to the business +end of a running rocket motor. Just holding off the environmental protests over +de-orbiting a small Jovian moon is a grinding job. Moreover, a whole bunch of +national governments have woken up and are trying to legislate themselves a +slice of the cake. Nobody's tried to forcibly take over yet (there are two +hundred gigawatts of lasers anchored to the Ring Imperium, and Amber takes her +sovereign status seriously, has even applied for a seat at the UN and +membership in the EC), but the nuisance lawsuits are mounting up into a +comprehensive denial of service attack, or maybe economic sanctions. And Uncle +Gianni's retirement hasn't helped any, either. "Anything to say about it?" + +"Mmph." Ang looks irritated for some reason. "Wait your turn, they'll be out of +the buffer in another couple of days. Maybe a bit longer in the case of the +lawyer, he's got a huge infodump packaged on his person. Probably another +semisapient class-action lawsuit." + +"I'll bet. They never learn, do they?" + +"What, about the legal system here?" + +"Yup." Pierre nods. "One of Amber's smarter ideas, reviving eleventh-century +Scots law and updating it with new options on barratry, trial by combat, and +compurgation." He pulls a face and detaches a couple of ghosts to go look out +for the new arrivals; then he goes back to repairing sails. The interstellar +medium is abrasive, full of dust - each grain of which carries the energy of an +artillery shell at this speed - and the laser sail is in a constant state of +disintegration. A large chunk of the drive system's mass is silvery utility +flakes for patching and replacing the soap-bubble-thin membrane as it ablates +away. The skill is in knowing how best to funnel repair resources to where +they're needed, while minimizing tension in the suspension lines and avoiding +resonance and thrust imbalance. As he trains the patch 'bots, he broods about +the hate mail from his elder brother (who still blames him for their father's +accident), and about Sadeq's religious injunctions - /{Superstitious +nonsense}/, he thinks - and the fickleness of powerful women, and the endless +depths of his own nineteen-year-old soul. + +While he's brooding, Ang evidently finishes whatever she was doing and bangs +out - not even bothering to use the polished mahogany door at the rear of the +bridge, just discorporating and rematerializing somewhere else. Wondering if +she's annoyed, he glances up just as the first of his ghosts patches into his +memory map, and he remembers what happened when it met the new arrival. His +eyes widen: "Oh /{shit!}/" + +It's not the film producer but the lawyer who's just uploaded into the /{Field +Circus}/'s virtual universe. Someone's going to have to tell Amber. And +although the last thing he wants to do is talk to her, it looks like he's going +to have to call her, because this isn't just a routine visit. The lawyer means +trouble. + +* * * + +_1 Take a brain and put it in a bottle. Better: take a map of the brain and put +it in a map of a bottle - or of a body - and feed signals to it that mimic its +neurological inputs. Read its outputs and route them to a model body in a model +universe with a model of physical laws, closing the loop. René Descartes would +understand. That's the state of the passengers of the /{Field Circus}/ in a +nutshell. Formerly physical humans, their neural software (and a map of the +intracranial wetware it runs on) has been transferred into a virtual machine +environment executing on a honking great computer, where the universe they +experience is merely a dream within a dream. + +_1 Brains in bottles - empowered ones, with total, dictatorial, control over +the reality they are exposed to - sometimes stop engaging in activities that +brains in bodies can't avoid. Menstruation isn't mandatory. Vomiting, angina, +exhaustion, and cramp are all optional. So is meatdeath, the decomposition of +the corpus. But some activities don't cease, because people (even people who +have been converted into a software description, squirted through a +high-bandwidth laser link, and ported into a virtualization stack) don't +/{want}/ them to stop. Breathing is wholly unnecessary, but suppression of the +breathing reflex is disturbing unless you hack your hypothalamic map, and most +homomorphic uploads don't want to do that. Then there's eating - not to avoid +starvation, but for pleasure: Feasts on sautéed dodo seasoned with silphium are +readily available here, and indeed, why not? It seems the human addiction to +sensory input won't go away. And that's without considering sex, and the +technical innovations that become possible when the universe - and the bodies +within it - are mutable. + +* * * + +The public audience with the new arrivals is held in yet another movie: the +Parisian palace of Charles IX, the throne room lifted wholesale from /{La Reine +Margot}/ by Patrice Chéreau. Amber insisted on period authenticity, with the +realism dialed right up to eleven. It's 1572 to the hilt this time, physical to +the max. Pierre grunts in irritation, unaccustomed to his beard. His codpiece +chafes, and sidelong glances tell him he isn't the only member of the royal +court who's uncomfortable. Still, Amber is resplendent in a gown worn by +Isabelle Adjani as Marguerite de Valois, and the luminous sunlight streaming +through the stained-glass windows high above the crowd of actor zimboes lends a +certain barbaric majesty to the occasion. The place is heaving with bodies in +clerical robes, doublets, and low-cut gowns - some of them occupied by real +people. Pierre sniffs again: Someone (Gavin, with his history bug, perhaps?) +has been working on getting the smells right. He hopes like hell that nobody +throws up. At least nobody seems to have come as Catherine de Médicis ... + +A bunch of actors portraying Huguenot soldiers approach the throne on which +Amber is seated: They pace slowly forward, escorting a rather bemused-looking +fellow with long, lank hair and a brocade jacket that appears to be made of +cloth-of-gold. "His lordship, Attorney at Arms Alan Glashwiecz!" announces a +flunky, reading from a parchment, "here at the behest of the most excellent +guild and corporation of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates, with matters of legal +import to discuss with Her Royal Highness!" + +A flourish of trumpets. Pierre glances at Her Royal Highness, who nods +gracefully, but is slightly peaky - it's a humid summer day and her +many-layered robes look very hot. "Welcome to the furthermost soil of the Ring +Imperium," she announces in a clear, ringing voice. "I bid you welcome and +invite you to place your petition before me in full public session of court." + +Pierre directs his attention to Glashwiecz, who appears to be worried. +Doubtless he'd absorbed the basics of court protocol in the Ring (population +all of eighteen thousand back home, a growing little principality), but the +reality of it, a genuine old-fashioned /{monarchy}/ rooted in Amber's three-way +nexus of power, data, and time, always takes a while to sink in. "I would be +pleased to do so," he says, a little stiffly, "but in front of all those -" + +Pierre misses the next bit, because someone has just goosed him on the left +buttock. He starts and half turns to see Su Ang looking past him at the throne, +a lady-in-waiting for the queen. She wears an apricot dress with tight sleeves +and a bodice that bares everything above her nipples. There's a fortune in +pearls roped into her hair. As he notices her, she winks at him. + +Pierre freezes the scene, decoupling them from reality, and she faces him. "Are +we alone now?" she asks. + +"Guess so. You want to talk about something?" he asks, heat rising in his +cheeks. The noise around them is a random susurrus of machine-generated crowd +scenery, the people motionless as their shared reality thread proceeds +independently of the rest of the universe. + +"Of course!" She smiles at him and shrugs. The effect on her chest is +remarkable - those period bodices could give a skeleton a cleavage - and she +winks at him again. "Oh, Pierre." She smiles. "So easily distracted!" She snaps +her fingers, and her clothing cycles through Afghani burqua, nudity, trouser +suit, then back to court finery. Her grin is the only constant. "Now that I've +got your attention, stop looking at me and start looking at /{him}/." + +Even more embarrassed, Pierre follows her outstretched arm all the way to the +momentarily frozen Moorish emissary. "Sadeq?" + +"Sadeq /{knows}/ him, Pierre. This guy, there's something wrong." + +"Shit. You think I don't know that?" Pierre looks at her with annoyance, +embarrassment forgotten. "I've seen him before. Been tracking his involvement +for years. Guy's a front for the Queen Mother. He acted as her divorce lawyer +when she went after Amber's Dad." + +"I'm sorry." Ang glances away. "You haven't been yourself lately, Pierre. I +know it's something wrong between you and the Queen. I was worried. You're not +paying attention to the little details." + +"Who do you think warned Amber?" he asks. + +"Oh. Okay, so you're in the loop," she says. "I'm not sure. Anyway, you've been +distracted. Is there anything I can do to help?" + +"Listen." Pierre puts his hands on her shoulders. She doesn't move, but looks +up into his eyes - Su Ang is only one-sixty tall - and he feels a pang of +something odd: teenage male uncertainty about the friendship of women. /{What +does she want?}/ "I know, and I'm sorry, and I'll try to keep my eyes on the +ball some more, but I've been in my own headspace a lot lately. We ought to go +back into the audience before anybody notices." + +"Do you want to talk about the problem first?" she asks, inviting his +confidence. + +"I -" Pierre shakes his head. /{I could tell her everything}/, he realizes +shakily as his metaconscience prods him urgently. He's got a couple of +agony-aunt agents, but Ang is a real person and a friend. She won't pass +judgment, and her model of human social behavior is a hell of a lot better than +any expert system's. But time is in danger of slipping, and besides, Pierre +feels dirty. "Not now," he says. "Let's go back." + +"Okay." She nods, then turns away, steps behind him with a swish of skirts, and +he unfreezes time again as they snap back into place within the larger +universe, just in time to see the respected visitor serve the queen with a +class-action lawsuit, and the Queen respond by referring adjudication to trial +by combat. + +* * * + +Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, is a brown dwarf, a lump of dirty hydrogen condensed +from a stellar nursery, eight times as massive as Jupiter but not massive +enough to ignite a stable fusion reaction at its core. The relentless crush of +gravity has overcome the mutual repulsion of electrons trapped at its core, +shrinking it into a shell of slush around a sphere of degenerate matter. It's +barely larger than the gas giant the human ship uses as an energy source, but +it's much denser. Gigayears ago, a chance stellar near miss sent it careening +off into the galaxy on its own, condemned to drift in eternal darkness along +with a cluster of frozen moons that dance attendance upon it. + +By the time the /{Field Circus}/ is decelerating toward it at short range - +having shed the primary sail, which drifts farther out into interstellar space +while reflecting light back onto the remaining secondary sail surface to slow +the starwisp - Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, is just under one parsec distant from +Earth, closer even than Proxima Centauri. Utterly dark at visible wavelengths, +the brown dwarf could have drifted through the outer reaches of the solar +system before conventional telescopes would have found it by direct +observation. Only an infrared survey in the early years of the current century +gave it a name. + +A bunch of passengers and crew have gathered on the bridge (now running at +one-tenth of real time) to watch the arrival. Amber sits curled up in the +captain's chair, moodily watching the gathered avatars. Pierre is still +avoiding her at every opportunity, formal audiences excepted, and the damned +shark and his pet hydra aren't invited, but apart from that, most of the gang +is here. There are sixty-three uploads running on the /{Field Circus}/'s +virtualization stack, software copied out of meatbodies who are mostly still +walking around back home. It's a crowd, but it's possible to feel lonely in a +crowd, even when it's your party. And especially when you're worried about +debt, even though you're a billionairess, beneficiary of the human species' +biggest reputations-rating trust fund. Amber's clothing - black leggings, black +sweater - is as dark as her mood. + +"Something troubles you." A hand descends on the back of the chair next to her. + +She glances round momentarily, nods in recognition. "Yeah. Have a seat. You +missed the audience?" + +The thin, brown-skinned man with a neatly cropped beard and deeply lined +forehead slips into the seat next to her. "It was not part of my heritage," he +explains carefully, "although the situation is not unfamiliar." A momentary +smile threatens to crack his stony face. "I found the casting a trifle +disturbing." + +"I'm no Marguerite de Valois, but the vacant role ... let's just say, the cap +fits." Amber leans back in her chair. "Mind you, Marguerite had an +/{interesting}/ life," she muses. + +"Don't you mean depraved and debauched?" her neighbor counters. + +"Sadeq." She closes her eyes. "Let's not pick a fight over absolute morality +just right now, please? We have an orbital insertion to carry out, then an +artifact to locate, and a dialogue to open, and I'm feeling very tired. +Drained." + +"Ah - I apologize." He inclines his head carefully. "Is it your young man's +fault? Has he slighted you?" + +"Not exactly -" Amber pauses. Sadeq, whom she basically invited along as ship's +theologian in case they ran into any gods, has taken up her pastoral well-being +as some kind of hobby. She finds it mildly oppressive at times, flattering at +others, surreal always. Using the quantum search resources available to a +citizen of the Ring Imperium, he's outpublished his peers, been elected a +hojetolislam at an unprecedentedly young age: His original will probably be an +ayatollah by the time they get home. He's circumspect in dealing with cultural +differences, reasons with impeccable logic, carefully avoids antagonizing her - +and constantly seeks to guide her moral development. "It's a personal +misunderstanding," she says. "I'd rather not talk about it until we've sorted +it out." + +"Very well." He looks unsatisfied, but that's normal. Sadeq still has the dusty +soil of a childhood in the industrial city of Yazd stuck to his boots. +Sometimes she wonders if their disagreements don't mirror in miniature the gap +between the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. "But back to the +here and now. Do you know where this router is?" + +"I will, in a few minutes or hours." Amber raises her voice, simultaneously +spawning a number of search-ghosts. "Boris! You got any idea where we're +going?" + +Boris lumbers round in place to face her; today he's wearing a velociraptor, +and they don't turn easily in confined spaces. He snarls irritably: "Give me +some space!" He coughs, a threatening noise from the back of his wattled +throat, "Searching the sail's memory now." The back of the soap-bubble-thin +laser sail is saturated with tiny nanocomputers spaced micrometers apart. +Equipped with light receptors and configured as cellular automata, they form a +gigantic phased-array detector, a retina more than a hundred meters in +diameter. Boris is feeding them patterns describing anything that differs from +the unchanging starscape. Soon the memories will condense and return as visions +of darkness in motion - the cold, dead attendants of an aborted sun. + +"But where is it going to be?" asks Sadeq. "Do you know what you are looking +for?" + +"Yes. We should have no trouble finding it," says Amber. "It looks like this." +She flicks an index finger at the row of glass windows that front the bridge. +Her signet ring flashes ruby light, and something indescribably weird shimmers +into view in place of the seascape. Clusters of pearly beads that form helical +chains, disks and whorls of color that interlace and knot through one another, +hang in space above a darkling planet. "Looks like a William Latham sculpture +made out of strange matter, doesn't it?" + +"Very abstract," Sadeq says approvingly. + +"It's alive," she adds. "And when it gets close enough to see us, it'll try to +eat us." + +"What?" Sadeq sits up uneasily. + +"You mean nobody told you?" asks Amber: "I thought we'd briefed everybody." She +throws a glistening golden pomegranate at him, and he catches it. The apple of +knowledge dissolves in his hand, and he sits in a haze of ghosts absorbing +information on his behalf. "Damn," she adds mildly. + +Sadeq freezes in place. Glyphs of crumbling stonework overgrown with ivy +texture his skin and his dark suit, warning that he's busy in another private +universe. + +"/{Hrrrr!}/ Boss! Found something," calls Boris, drooling on the bridge floor. + +Amber glances up. /{Please, let it be the router}/, she thinks. "Put it on the +main screen." + +"Are you sure this is safe?" Su Ang asks nervously. + +"Nothing is safe," Boris snaps, clattering his huge claws on the deck. "Here. +Look." + +The view beyond the windows flips to a perspective on a dusty bluish horizon: +swirls of hydrogen brushed with a high cirrus of white methane crystals, +stirred above the freezing point of oxygen by Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},'s +residual rotation. The image-intensification level is huge - a naked human +eyeball would see nothing but blackness. Rising above the limb of the gigantic +planet is a small pale disk: Callidice, largest moon of the brown dwarf - or +second-innermost planet - a barren rock slightly larger than Mercury. The +screen zooms in on the moon, surging across a landscape battered by craters and +dusted with the spume of ice volcanoes. Finally, just above the far horizon, +something turquoise shimmers and spins against a backdrop of frigid darkness. + +"That's it," Amber whispers, her stomach turning to jelly as all the terrible +might-have-beens dissolve like phantoms of the night around her; "That's +/{it}/!" Elated, she stands up, wanting to share the moment with everybody she +values. "Wake up, Sadeq! Someone get that damned cat in here! Where's Pierre? +He's got to see this!" + +* * * + +Night and revelry rule outside the castle. The crowds are drunken and rowdy on +the eve of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Fireworks burst overhead, and +the open windows admit a warm breeze redolent of cooked meats, woodsmoke, open +sewers. Meanwhile a lover steals up a tightly-spiraling stone staircase in the +near dark; his goal, a prarranged rendezvous. He's been drinking, and his best +linen shirt shows the stains of sweat and food. He pauses at the third window +to breathe in the outside air and run both hands through his mane of hair, +which is long, unkempt, and grimy. /{Why am I doing this?}/ he wonders. This is +so unlike him, this messing around - + +He carries on up the spiral. At the top, an oak door gapes on a vestibule lit +by a lantern hanging from a hook. He ventures inside into a reception room +paneled in oak blackened by age. Crossing the threshold makes another crossover +kick in by prior arrangement. Something other than his own volition steers his +feet, and he feels an unfamiliar throb in his chest, anticipation and a warmth +and looseness lower down that makes him cry out, "where are you?" + +"Over here." He sees her waiting for him in the doorway. She's partially +undressed, wearing layered underskirts and a flat-chested corset that makes the +tops of her breasts swell like lustrous domes. Her tight sleeves are +half-unraveled, her hair disheveled. He's full of her brilliant eyes, the +constriction holding her spine straight, the taste in her mouth. She's the +magnet for his reality, impossibly alluring, so tense she could burst. "Is it +working for you?" she asks. + +"Yes." he feels tight, breathless, squeezed between impossibility and desire as +he walks toward her. They've experimented with gender play, trying on the +extreme dimorphism of this period as a game, but this is the first time they've +done it this way. She opens her mouth: He kisses her, feels the warmth of his +tongue thrust between her lips, the strength of his arms enclosing her waist. + +She leans against him, feeling his erection. "So this is how it feels to be +you," she says wonderingly. The door to her chamber is ajar, but she doesn't +have the self-restraint to wait: The flood of new sensations - rerouted from +her physiology model to his proprioceptive sensorium - has taken hold. She +grinds her hips against him, pushing deeper into his arms, whining softly at +the back of her throat as she feels the fullness in his balls, the tension of +his penis. He nearly faints with the rich sensations of her body - it's as if +he's dissolving, feeling the throbbing hardness against his groin, turning to +water and running away. Somehow he gets his arms around her waist - so tight, +so breathless - and stumbles forward into the bedroom. She's whimpering as he +drops her on the over-stuffed mattress: "/{Do}/ it to me!" she demands, "Do it +now!" + +Somehow he ends up on top of her, hose down around his ankles, skirts bundled +up around her waist; she kisses him, grinding her hips against him and +murmuring urgent nothings. Then his heart is in his mouth, and there's a +sensation like the universe pushing into his private parts, so inside out it +takes his breath away. It's hot and as hard as rock, and he wants it inside so +badly, but at the same time it's an intrusion, frightening and unexpected. He +feels the lightning touch of his tongue on her nipples as he leans closer, +feels exposed and terrified and ecstatic as her private places take in his +member. As he begins to dissolve into the universe he screams in the privacy of +his own head, /{I didn't know it felt like this}/ - + +Afterward, she turns to him with a lazy smile, and asks, "How was it for you?" +Obviously assuming that, if she enjoyed it, he must have, too. + +But all he can think of is the sensation of the universe thrusting into him, +and of how /{good}/ it felt. All he can hear is his father yelling ("What are +you, some kind of queer?") - and he feels dirty. + +* * * + +_1 Greetings from the last megasecond before the discontinuity. + +_1 The solar system is thinking furiously at 10^33^ MIPS - thoughts bubble and +swirl in the equivalent of a million billion unaugmented human minds. Saturn's +rings glow with waste heat. The remaining faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are +correlating the phase-space of their genome and the records of their descent in +an attempt to resurrect their ancestors. Several skyhooks have unfurled in +equatorial orbit around the earth like the graceful fernlike leaves of sundews, +ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit. Small, crab like robots swarm +the surface of Mercury, exuding a black slime of photovoltaic converters and +the silvery threads of mass drivers. A glowing cloud of industrial nanomes +forms a haze around the innermost planet as it slowly shrinks under the +onslaught of copious solar power and determined mining robots. + +_1 The original incarnations of Amber and her court float in high orbit above +Jupiter, presiding over the huge nexus of dumb matter trade that is rapidly +biting into the available mass of the inner Jovian system. The trade in +reaction mass is brisk, and there are shipments of diamond/vacuum biphase +structures to assemble and crank down into the lower reaches of the solar +system. Far below, skimming the edges of Jupiter's turbulent cloudscape, a +gigantic glowing figure-of-eight - a five-hundred-kilometer-long loop of +superconducting cable - traces incandescent trails through the gas giant's +magnetosphere. It's trading momentum for electrical current, diverting it into +a fly's eye grid of lasers that beam it toward Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},. As +long as the original Amber and her incarnate team can keep it running, the +/{Field Circus}/ can continue its mission of discovery, but they're part of the +posthuman civilization evolving down in the turbulent depths of Sol system, +part of the runaway train being dragged behind the out-of-control engine of +history. + +_1 Weird new biologies based on complex adaptive matter take shape in the +sterile oceans of Titan. In the frigid depths beyond Pluto, supercooled boson +gases condense into impossible dreaming structures, packaged for shipping +inward to the fast-thinking core. + +_1 There are still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but it's getting +hard to recognize them. The lot of humanity before the twenty-first century was +nasty, brutish, and short. Chronic malnutrition, lack of education, and endemic +diseases led to crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask: +Their meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality, much of it +virtualized on stacked layers of structured reality far from their physical +bodies. Wars and revolutions, or their subtle latter-day cognates, sweep the +globe as constants become variables; many people find the death of stupidity +even harder to accept than the end of mortality. Some have vitrified themselves +to await an uncertain posthuman future. Others have modified their core +identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality. Among these are +beings whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human - +human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades dehumanized by their own +optimizations, angels and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial +instruments. Even their popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days. + +_1 None of this, other than the barest news summary, reaches the /{Field +Circus}/: The starwisp is a fossil, left behind by the broad sweep of +accelerating progress. But it is aboard the /{Field Circus}/ that some of the +most important events remaining in humanity's future light cone take place. + +* * * + +"Say hello to the jellyfish, Boris." + +Boris, in human drag, for once, glares at Pierre, and grips the pitcher with +both hands. The contents of the jug swirl their tentacles lazily: One of them +flips almost out of solution, dislodging an impaled cocktail cherry. "Will get +you for this," Boris threatens. The smoky air around his head is a-swirl with +daemonic visions of vengeance. + +Su Ang stares intently at Pierre who is watching Boris as he raises the jug to +his lips and begins to drink. The baby jellyfish - small, pale blue, with +cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing from each corner - slips +down easily. Boris winces momentarily as the nematocysts let rip inside his +mouth, but in a moment or so, the cubozoan slips down, and in the meantime, his +biophysics model clips the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured +oropharynx. + +"Wow," he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. "Don't try this at +home, fleshboy." + +"Here." Pierre reaches out. "Can I?" + +"Invent your own damn poison," Boris sneers - but he releases the jug and +passes it to Pierre, who raises it and drinks. The cubozoan cocktail reminds +him of fruit jelly drinks in a hot Hong Kong summer. The stinging in his palate +is sharp but fades rapidly, producing an intimate burn when the alcohol hits +the mild welts that are all this universe will permit the lethal medusa to +inflict on him. + +"Not bad," says Pierre, wiping a stray loop of tentacle off his chin. He pushes +the pitcher across the table toward Su Ang. "What's with the wicker man?" He +points a thumb over his back at the table jammed in the corner opposite the +copper-topped bar. + +"Who cares?" asks Boris."'S part of the scenery, isn't it?" + +The bar is a three-hundred-year-old brown café with a beer menu that runs to +sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale ale. The air is thick +with the smells of tobacco, brewer's yeast, and melatonin spray: and none of it +exists. Amber dragged it out of the Franklin borg's collective memories, by way +of her father's scattershot e-mails annotating her corporeal origins - the +original is in Amsterdam, if that city still exists. + +"/{I}/ care who it is," says Pierre. + +"Save it," Ang says quietly. "I think it's a lawyer with a privacy screen." + +Pierre glances over his shoulder and glares. "Really?" + +Ang puts a restraining hand on his wrist: "Really. Don't pay it any attention. +You don't have to, until the trial, you know." + +The wicker man sits uneasily in the corner. It resembles a basket-weave +silhouette made from dried reeds, dressed in a red kerchief. A glass of +doppelbock fills the mess of tied-off ends where its right hand ought to be. +From time to time, it raises the glass as if to take a mouthful, and the beer +vanishes into the singular interior. + +"Fuck the trial," Pierre says shortly. /{And fuck Amber, too, for naming me her +public defender}/ - + +"Since when do lawsuits come with an invisible man?" asks Donna the Journalist, +blitting into the bar along with a patchy historical trail hinting that she's +just come from the back room. + +"Since -" Pierre blinks. "Hell." When Donna entered, so did Aineko; or maybe +the cat's been there all the time, curled up loaf-of-bread fashion on the table +in front of the wicker man. "You're damaging the continuity," Pierre complains. +"This universe is broken." + +"Fix it yourself," Boris tells him. "Everybody else is coping." He snaps his +fingers. "Waiter!" + +"Excuse me." Donna shakes her head. "I didn't mean to harm anything." + +Ang, as always, is more accommodating. "How are you?" she asks politely: "Would +you like to try this most excellent poison cocktail?" + +"I am well," says Donna. A heavily built German woman - blonde and solidly +muscular, according to the avatar she's presenting to the public - she's +surrounded by a haze of viewpoints. They're camera angles on her society of +mind, busily integrating and splicing her viewpoint threads together in an +endless journal of the journey. A stringer for the CIA media consortium, she +uploaded to the ship in the same packet stream as the lawsuit. "/{Danke}/, +Ang." + +"Are you recording right now?" asks Boris. + +Donna sniffs. "When am I not?" A momentary smile: "I am only a scanner, no? +Five hours, until arrival, to go. I may stop after then." Pierre glances across +the table at Su Ang's hands; her knuckles are white and tense. "I am to avoid +missing anything if possible," Donna continues, oblivious to Ang's disquiet. +"There are eight of me at present! All recording away." + +"That's all?" Ang asks, raising an eyebrow. + +"Yes, that is all, and I have a job to do! Don't tell me you do not enjoy what +it is that you do here?" + +"Right." Pierre glances in the corner again, avoiding eye contact with the +hearty Girl Friday wannabe. He has a feeling, that if there were any hills +hereabouts to animate, she'd be belting out the music. "Amber told you about +the privacy code here?" + +"There is a privacy code?" asks Donna, swinging at least three subjective +ghosts to bear on him for some reason - evidently he's hit an issue she has +mixed feelings about. + +"A privacy code," Pierre confirms. "No recording in private, no recording where +people withhold permission in public, and no sandboxes and cutups." + +Donna looks offended. "I would never do such a thing! Trapping a copy of +someone in a virtual space to record their responses would be assault under +Ring legal code, not true?" + +"Your mother," Boris says snidely, brandishing a fresh jug of iced killer +jellyfish in her direction. + +"As long as we all agree," Ang interrupts, searching for accord. "It's all +going to be settled soon, isn't it?" + +"Except for the lawsuit," mutters Pierre, glancing at the corner again. + +"I don't see the problem," says Donna, "that's just between Amber and her +downlink adversaries!" + +"Oh, it's a problem all right," says Boris, his tone light. "What are your +options worth?" + +"My -" Donna shakes her head. "I'm not vested." + +"Plausible." Boris doesn't crack a smile. "Even so, when we go home, your +credibility metric will bulge. Assuming people still use distributed trust +markets to evaluate the stability of their business partners." + +/{Not vested}/. Pierre turns it over in his mind, slightly surprised. He'd +assumed that everybody aboard the ship - except, perhaps, the lawyer, +Glashwiecz - was a fully vested member of the expeditionary company. + +"I am not vested," Donna insists. "I'm listed independently." For a moment, an +almost-smile tugs at her face, a charmingly reticent expression that has +nothing to do with her bluff exterior. "Like the cat." + +"The -" Pierre turns round in a hurry. Yes, Aineko appears to be sitting +silently at the table with the wicker man; but who knows what's going through +that furry head right now? /{I'll have to bring this up with Amber, he realizes +uneasily. I ought to bring this up with Amber}/ ... "but your reputation won't +suffer for being on this craft, will it?" he asks aloud. + +"I will be all right," Donna declares. The waiter comes over: "Mine will be a +bottle of schneiderweisse," she adds. And then, without breaking step: "Do you +believe in the singularity?" + +"Am I a singularitarian, do you mean?" asks Pierre, a fixed grin coming to his +face. + +"Oh, no, no, no!" Donna waves him down, grins broadly, nods at Su Ang: "I do +not mean it like that! Attend: What I meant to ask was whether you in the +concept of a singularity believe, and if so, where it is?" + +"Is this intended for a public interview?" asks Ang. + +"Well, I cannot into a simulation drag you off and expose you to an imitative +reality excursion, can I?" Donna leans back as the bartender places a ceramic +stein in front of her. + +"Oh. Well." Ang glances warningly at Pierre and dispatches a very private memo +to scroll across his vision: /{Don't play with her, this is serious}/. Boris is +watching Ang with an expression of hopeless longing. Pierre tries to ignore it +all, taking the journalist's question seriously. "The singularity is a bit like +that old-time American Christian rapture nonsense, isn't it?" he says. "When we +all go a-flying up to heaven, leaving our bodies behind." He snorts, reaches +into thin air and gratuitously violates causality by summoning a jug of +ice-cold sangria into existence. "The rapture of the nerds. I'll drink to +that." + +"But when did it take place?" asks Donna. "My audience, they will to know your +opinion be needing." + +"Four years ago, when we instantiated this ship," Pierre says promptly. + +"Back in the teens," says Ang. "When Amber's father liberated the uploaded +lobsters." + +"Is not happening yet," contributes Boris. "Singularity implies infinite rate +of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by +presingularity beings, right? So has not happened." + +"Au contraire. It happened on June 6th, 1969, at eleven hundred hours, eastern +seaboard time," Pierre counters. "That was when the first network control +protocol packets were sent from the data port of one IMP to another - the first +ever Internet connection. /{That's}/ the singularity. Since then we've all been +living in a universe that was impossible to predict from events prior to that +time." + +"It's rubbish," counters Boris. "Singularity is load of religious junk. +Christian mystic rapture recycled for atheist nerds." + +"Not so." Su Ang glances at him, hurt. "Here we are, sixty something human +minds. We've been migrated - while still awake - right out of our own heads +using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance +mapping, and we're now running as software in an operating system designed to +virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that +doesn't let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about +the size of a fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother's +old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years from +home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly ancient +alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change +in the human condition is nonsense?" + +"Mmph." Boris looks perplexed. "Would not put it that way. The /{singularity}/ +is nonsense, not uploading or -" + +"Yah, right." Ang smiles winningly at Boris. After a moment, he wilts. + +Donna beams at them enthusiastically. "Fascinating!" she enthuses. "Tell me, +what are these lobsters you think are important?" + +"They're Amber's friends," Ang explains. "Years ago, Amber's father did a deal +with them. They were the first uploads, you know? Hybridized spiny lobster +neural tissue and a heuristic API and some random mess of backward-chaining +expert systems. They got out of their lab and into the Net and Manfred brokered +a deal to set them free, in return for their help running a Franklin orbital +factory. This was way back in the early days before they figured out how to do +self-assembly properly. Anyway, the lobsters insisted - part of their contract +- that Bob Franklin pay to have the deep-space tracking network beam them out +into interstellar space. They wanted to emigrate, and looking at what's +happened to the solar system since then, who can blame them?" + +Pierre takes a big mouthful of sangria. "The cat," he says. + +"The cat -" Donna's head swivels round, but Aineko has banged out again, +retroactively editing her presence out of the event history of this public +space. "What about the cat?" + +"The /{family}/ cat," explains Ang. She reaches over for Boris's pitcher of +jellyfish juice, but frowns as she does so: "Aineko wasn't conscious back then, +but later ... when SETI@home finally received that message back, oh, however +many years ago, Aineko remembered the lobsters. And cracked it wide open while +all the CETI teams were still thinking in terms of von Neumann architectures +and concept-oriented programming. The message was a semantic net designed to +mesh perfectly with the lobster broadcast all those years ago, and provide a +high-level interface to a communications network we're going to visit." She +squeezes Boris's fingertips. "SETI@home logged these coordinates as the origin +of the transmission, even though the public word was that the message came from +a whole lot farther away - they didn't want to risk a panic if people knew +there were aliens on our cosmic doorstep. Anyway, once Amber got established, +she decided to come visiting. Hence this expedition. Aineko created a virtual +lobster and interrogated the ET packet, hence the communications channel we're +about to open." + +"Ah, this is all a bit clearer now," says Donna. "But the lawsuit - " She +glances at the hollow wicker man in the corner. + +"Well, there we have a problem," Ang says diplomatically. + +"No," says Pierre. "/{I}/ have a problem. And it's all Amber's fault." + +"Hmm?" Donna stares at him. "Why blame the Queen?" + +"Because she's the one who picked the lunar month to be the reporting time +period for companies in her domain, and specified trial by combat for resolving +corporate conflicts," he grumbles. "And /{compurgation}/, but that's not +applicable to this case because there isn't a recognized reputation server +within three light-years. Trial by combat, for civil suits in this day and age! +And she appointed me her champion." /{In the most traditional way imaginable}/, +he remembers with a warm frisson of nostalgia. He'd been hers in body and soul +before that disastrous experiment. He isn't sure whether it still applies, but +- "I've got to take on this lawsuit on her behalf, in adversarial stance." + +He glances over his shoulder. The wicker man sits there placidly, pouring beer +down his invisible throat like a tired farm laborer. + +"Trial by combat," Su Ang explains to Donna's perplexed ghost-swarm, which is +crawling all over the new concept in a haze of confusion. "Not physical combat, +but a competition of ability. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to keep +junk litigants out of the Ring Imperium, but the Queen Mother's lawyers are +/{very}/ persistent. Probably because it's taken on something of a grudge match +quality over the years. I don't think Pamela cares much anymore, but this +ass-hat lawyer has turned it into a personal crusade. I don't think he liked +what happened when the music Mafiya caught up with him. But there's a bit more +to it, because if he wins, he gets to own everything. And I mean +/{everything}/." + +* * * + +Ten million kilometers out and Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, looms beyond the +parachute-shaped sail of the /{Field Circus}/ like a rind of darkness bitten +out of the edge of the universe. Heat from the gravitational contraction of its +core keeps it warm, radiating at six hundred degrees absolute, but the paltry +emission does nothing to break the eternal ice that grips Callidice, Iambe, +Celeus, and Metaneira, the stillborn planets locked in orbit around the brown +dwarf. + +Planets aren't the only structures that orbit the massive sphere of hydrogen. +Close in, skimming the cloud tops by only twenty thousand kilometers, Boris's +phased-array eye has blinked at something metallic and hot. Whatever it is, it +orbits out of the ecliptic plane traced by the icy moons, and in the wrong +direction. Farther out, a speckle of reflected emerald laser light picks out a +gaudy gem against the starscape: their destination, the router. + +"That's it," says Boris. His body shimmers into humanity, retconning the pocket +universe of the bridge into agreeing that he's been present in primate form all +along. Amber glances sideways. Sadeq is still wrapped in ivy, his skin the +texture of weathered limestone. "Closest approach is sixty-three light-seconds, +due in eight hundred thousand. Can give you closer contact if we maneuver, but +will take time to achieve a stable orbit." + +Amber nods thoughtfully, sending copies of herself out to work the mechanics. +The big light sail is unwieldy, but can take advantage of two power sources: +the original laser beam from Jupiter, and its reflection bouncing off the +now-distant primary light sail. The temptation is to rely on the laser for +constant acceleration, to just motor on in and squat on the router's cosmic +doorstep. But the risk of beam interruption is too dangerous. It's happened +before, for seconds to minutes at a time, on six occasions during the voyage so +far. She's not sure what causes the beam downtime (Pierre has a theory about +Oort cloud objects occulting the laser, but she figures it's more likely to be +power cuts back at the Ring), but the consequences of losing power while +maneuvering deep in a quasi-stellar gravity well are much more serious than a +transient loss of thrust during free interstellar flight. "Let's just play it +safe," she says. "We'll go for a straight orbital insertion and steady cranking +after that. We've got enough gravity wells to play pinball with. I don't want +us on a free-flight trajectory that entails lithobraking if we lose power and +can't get the sail back." + +"Very prudent," Boris agrees. "Marta, work on it." A buzzing presence of +not-insects indicates that the heteromorphic helmswoman is on the job. "I think +we should be able to take our first close-in look in about two million seconds, +but if you want, I can ping it now ...?" + +"No need for protocol analysis," Amber says casually. "Where's - ah, there you +are." She reaches down and picks up Aineko, who twists round sinuously and +licks her arm with a tongue like sandpaper. "What do you think?" + +"Do you want fries with that?" asks the cat, focusing on the artifact at the +center of the main screen in front of the bridge. + +"No, I just want a conversation," says Amber. + +"Well, okay." The cat dims, moves jerkily, sucking up local processing power so +fast that it disturbs the local physics model. "Opening port now." + +A subjective minute or two passes. "Where's Pierre?" Amber asks herself +quietly. Some of the maintenance metrics she can read from her privileged +viewpoint are worrying. The /{Field Circus}/ is running at almost eighty +percent of utilization. Whatever Aineko is doing in order to establish the +interface to the router, it's taking up an awful lot of processing power and +bandwidth. "And where's the bloody lawyer?" she adds, almost as an +afterthought. + +The /{Field Circus}/ is small, but its light sail is highly controllable. +Aineko takes over a cluster of cells in its surface, turning them from straight +reflectors into phase-conjugate mirrors: A small laser on the ship's hull +begins to flicker thousands of times a second, and the beam bounces off the +modified segment of mirror, focusing to a coherent point right in front of the +distant blue dot of the router. Aineko ramps up the modulation frequency, adds +a bundle of channels using different wavelengths, and starts feeding out a +complex set of preplanned signals that provide an encoding format for +high-level data. + +% check point + +"Leave the lawyer to me." She starts, glancing sideways to see Sadeq watching +her. He smiles without showing his teeth. "Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy," +he explains. + +"Huh." Ahead of them, the router is expanding. Strings of nacreous spheres curl +in strange loops around a hidden core, expanding and turning inside out in +systolic pulses that spawn waves of recomplication through the structure. A +loose red speckle of laser light stains one arm of beads; suddenly it flares up +brilliantly, reflecting data back at the ship. "Ah!" + +"Contact," purrs the cat. Amber's fingertips turn white where she grips the +arms of her chair. + +"What does it say?" she asks, quietly. + +"What do /{they}/ say," corrects Aineko. "It's a trade delegation, and they're +uploading right now. I can use that negotiation network they sent us to give +them an interface to our systems if you want." + +"Wait!" Amber half stands in sudden nervousness. "Don't give them free access! +What are you thinking of? Stick them in the throne room, and we'll give them a +formal audience in a couple of hours." She pauses. "That network layer they +sent through. Can you make it accessible to us, use it to give us a translation +layer into their grammar-mapping system?" + +The cat looks round, thumps her tail irritably: "You'd do better loading the +network yourself -" + +"I don't want /{anybody}/ on this ship running alien code before we've vetted +it thoroughly," she says urgently. "In fact, I want them bottled up in the +Louvre grounds, just as thoroughly as we can, and I want them to come to us +through our own linguistic bottleneck. Got that?" + +"Clear," Aineko grumbles. + +"A trade delegation," Amber thinks aloud. "What would Dad make of that?" + +* * * + +One moment he's in the bar, shooting bull with Su Ang and Donna the +Journalist's ghost and a copy of Boris; the next he's abruptly precipitated +into a very different space. + +Pierre's heart seems to tumble within his rib cage, but he forces himself to +stay calm as he glances around the dim, oak-paneled chamber. This is wrong, so +wrong that it signifies either a major systems crash or the application of +frightening privilege levels to his realm. The only person aboard who's +entitled to those privileges is - + +"Pierre?" + +She's behind him. He turns angrily. "Why did you drag me in here? Don't you +know it's rude to -" + +"Pierre." + +He stops and looks at Amber. He can't stay angry at her for long, not to her +face. She's not dumb enough to bat her eyelashes at him, but she's disarmingly +cute for all that. Nevertheless, something inside him feels shriveled and +/{wrong}/ in her presence. "What is it?" he says, curtly. + +"I don't know why you've been avoiding me." She starts to take a step forward, +then stops and bites her lip. /{Don't do this to me!}/ he thinks. "You know it +hurts?" + +"Yes." That much of an admission hurts him, too. He can hear his father yelling +over his shoulder, the time he found him with Laurent, elder brother: It's a +choice between père or Amber, but it's not a choice he wants to make. /{The +shame}/. "I didn't - I have some issues." + +"It was the other night?" + +He nods. /{Now}/ she takes a step forwards. "We can talk about it, if you want. +Whatever you want," she says. And she leans toward him, and he feels his +resistance crumbling. He reaches out and hugs her, and she wraps her arms +around him and leans her chin on his shoulder, and this doesn't feel wrong: How +can anything this good be bad? + +"It made me uncomfortable," he mumbles into her hair. "Need to sort myself +out." + +"Oh, Pierre." She strokes the down at the back of his neck. "You should have +said. We don't have to do it that way if you don't want to." + +How to tell her how hard it is to admit that anything's wrong? Ever? "You +didn't drag me here to tell me that," he says, implicitly changing the subject. + +Amber lets go of him, backs away almost warily. "What is it?" she asks. + +"Something's wrong?" he half asks, half asserts. "Have we made contact yet?" + +"Yeah," she says, pulling a face. "There's an alien trade delegation in the +Louvre. That's the problem." + +"An alien trade delegation." He rolls the words around the inside of his mouth, +tasting them. They feel paradoxical, cold and slow after the hot words of +passion he's been trying to avoid uttering. It's his fault for changing the +subject. + +"A trade delegation," says Amber. "I should have anticipated. I mean, we were +going to go through the router ourselves, weren't we?" + +He sighs. "We thought we were going to do that." A quick prod at the universe's +controls determines that he has certain capabilities: He invokes an armchair, +sprawls across it. "A network of point-to-point wormholes linking routers, +self-replicating communication hubs, in orbit around most of the brown dwarfs +of the galaxy. That's what the brochure said, right? That's what we expected. +Limited bandwidth, not a lot of use to a mature superintelligence that has +converted the free mass of its birth solar system into computronium, but +sufficient to allow it to hold conversations with its neighbors. Conversations +carried out via a packet-switched network in real time, not limited by the +speed of light, but bound together by a common reference frame and the latency +between network hops." + +"That's about the size of it," she agrees from the carved-ruby throne beside +him. "Except there's a trade delegation waiting for us. In fact, they're coming +aboard already. And I don't buy it - something about the whole setup stinks." + +Pierre's brow wrinkles. "You're right, it doesn't make sense," he says, +finally. "Doesn't make sense at all." + +Amber nods. "I carry a ghost of Dad around. He's really upset about it." + +"Listen to your old man." Pierre's lips quirk humorlessly. "We were going to +jump through the looking glass, but it seems someone has beaten us to the +punch. Question is why?" + +"I don't like it." Amber reaches out sideways, and he catches her hand. "And +then there's the lawsuit. We have to hold the trial sooner rather than later." + +He lets go of her fingers. "I'd really be much happier if you hadn't named me +as your champion." + +"Hush." The scenery changes; her throne is gone, and instead she's sitting on +the arm of his chair, almost on top of him. "Listen. I had a good reason." + +"Reason?" + +"You have choice of weapons. In fact, you have the choice of the field. This +isn't just 'hit 'em with a sword until they die' time." She grins, impishly. +"The whole point of a legal system that mandates trial by combat for commercial +lawsuits, as opposed to an adjudication system, is to work out who's a fitter +servant of society and hence deserving of preferential treatment. It's crazy to +apply the same legal model to resolving corporate disputes that we use for +arguments among people, especially as most companies are now software +abstractions of business models; the interests of society are better served by +a system that encourages efficient trade activity than by one that encourages +litigation. It cuts down on corporate bullshit while encouraging the toughest +ones to survive, which is why I /{was}/ going to set up the trial as a contest +to achieve maximum competitive advantage in a xenocommerce scenario. Assuming +they really are traders, I figure we have more to trade with them than some +damn lawyer from the depths of earth's light cone." + +Pierre blinks. "Um." Blinks again. "I thought you wanted me to sideload some +kind of fencing kinematics program and /{skewer}/ the guy?" + +"Knowing how well I know you, why did you ever think that?" She slides down the +arm of his chair and lands on his lap. She twists round to face him in +point-blank close-up. "Shit, Pierre, I /{know}/ you're not some kind of macho +psychopath!" + +"But your mother's lawyers -" + +She shrugs dismissively. "They're /{lawyers}/. Used to dealing with precedents. +Best way to fuck with their heads is to change the way the universe works." She +leans against his chest. "You'll make mincemeat of them. Profit-to-earnings +ratio through the roof, blood on the stock exchange floor." His hands meet +around the small of her back. "My hero!" + +* * * + +The Tuileries are full of confused lobsters. + +Aineko has warped this virtual realm, implanting a symbolic gateway in the +carefully manicured gardens outside. The gateway is about two meters in +diameter, a verdigris-coated orouborous loop of bronze that sits like an +incongruous archway astride a gravel path in the grounds. Giant black lobsters +- each the size of a small pony - shuffle out of the loop's baby blue buffer +field, antennae twitching. They wouldn't be able to exist in the real world, +but the physics model here has been amended to permit them to breathe and move, +by special dispensation. + +Amber sniffs derisively as she enters the great reception room of the Sully +wing. "Can't trust that cat with anything," she mutters. + +"It was your idea, wasn't it?" asks Su Ang, trying to duck past the zombie +ladies-in-waiting who carry Amber's train. Soldiers line the passage to either +side, forming rows of steel to let the Queen pass unhindered. + +"To let the cat have its way, yes," Amber is annoyed. "But I didn't mean to let +it wreck the continuity! I won't have it!" + +"I never saw the point of all this medievalism, before," Ang observes. "It's +not as if you can avoid the singularity by hiding in the past." Pierre, +following the Queen at a distance, shakes his head, knowing better than to pick +a fight with Amber over her idea of stage scenery. + +"It looks good," Amber says tightly, standing before her throne and waiting for +the ladies-in-waiting to arrange themselves before her. She sits down +carefully, her back straight as a ruler, voluminous skirts belling up. Her +dress is an intricate piece of sculpture that uses the human body within as a +support. "It impresses the yokels and looks convincing on narrowcast media. It +provides a prefabricated sense of tradition. It hints at the political depths +of fear and loathing intrinsic to my court's activities, and tells people not +to fuck with me. It reminds us where we've come from ... and it doesn't give +away anything about where we're going." + +"But that doesn't make any difference to a bunch of alien lobsters," points out +Su Ang. "They lack the reference points to understand it." She moves to stand +behind the throne. Amber glances at Pierre, waves him over. + +Pierre glances around, seeking real people, not the vacant eigenfaces of the +zombies that give this scenery added biological texture. There in the red gown, +isn't that Donna the Journalist? And over there, too, with shorter hair and +wearing male drag; she gets everywhere. That's Boris, sitting behind the +bishop. + +"/{You}/ tell her," Ang implores him. + +"I can't," he admits. "We're trying to establish communication, aren't we? But +we don't want to give too much away about what we are, how we think. A +historical distancing act will keep them from learning too much about us: The +phase-space of technological cultures that could have descended from these +roots is too wide to analyse easily. So we're leaving them with the lobster +translators and not giving anything away. Try to stay in character as a +fifteenth-century duchess from Albì - it's a matter of national security." + +"Humph." Ang frowns as a flunky hustles forward to place a folding chair behind +her. She turns to face the expanse of red-and-gold carpet that stretches to the +doorway as trumpets blat and the doors swing open to admit the deputation of +lobsters. + +The lobsters are as large as wolves, black and spiny and ominous. Their +monochrome carapaces are at odds with the brightly colored garb of the human +crowd. Their antennae are large and sharp as swords. But for all that, they +advance hesitantly, eye turrets swiveling from side to side as they take the +scene in. Their tails drag ponderously on the carpet, but they have no trouble +standing. + +The first of the lobsters halts short of the throne and angles itself to train +an eye on Amber. "Am inconsistent," it complains. "There is no liquid hydrogen +monoxide here, and you-species am misrepresented by initial contact. +Inconsistency, explain?" + +"Welcome to the human physical space-traveling interface unit /{Field +Circus}/," Amber replies calmly. "I am pleased to see your translator is +working adequately. You are correct, there is no water here. The lobsters don't +normally need it when they visit us. And we humans are not water-dwellers. May +I ask who you are when you're not wearing borrowed lobster bodies?" + +Confusion. The second lobster rears up and clatters its long, armored antennae +together. Soldiers to either side tighten their grips on their spears, but it +drops back down again soon enough. + +"We are the Wunch," announces the first lobster, speaking clearly. "This is a +body-compliant translation layer. Based on map received from yourspace, units +forty thousand trillion light-kilometers ago?" + +"/{He means twenty years}/," Pierre whispers on a private channel Amber has +multicast for the other real humans in the audience chamber reality. "/{They've +confused space and time for measurement purposes. Does this tell us +something?}/" + +"/{Relatively little}/," comments someone else - Chandra? A round of polite +laughter greets the joke, and the tension in the room eases slightly. + +"We are the Wunch," the lobster repeats. "We come to exchange interest. What +have you got that we want?" + +Faint frown lines appear on Amber's forehead. Pierre can see her thinking very +rapidly. "We consider it impolite to ask," she says quietly. + +Clatter of claws on underlying stone floor. Chatter of clicking mandibles. "You +accept our translation?" asks the leader. + +"Are you referring to the transmission you sent us, uh, thirty thousand +trillion light-kilometers behind?" asks Amber. + +The lobster bobs up and down on its legs. "True. We send." + +"We cannot integrate that network," Amber replies blandly, and Pierre forces +himself to keep a straight face. (Not that the lobsters can read human body +language yet, but they'll undoubtedly be recording everything that happens here +for future analysis.) "They come from a radically different species. Our goal +in coming here is to connect our species to the network. We wish to exchange +advantageous information with many other species." + +Concern, alarm, agitation. "You cannot do that! You are not /{untranslatable +entity signifier}/." + +Amber raises a hand. "You said /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. I did not +understand that. Can you paraphrase?" + +"We, like you, are not /{untranslatable entity signifier}/. The network is for +/{untranslatable entity signifier}/. We are to the /{untranslatable concept +#1}/ as a single-celled organism is to ourselves. You and we cannot +/{untranslatable concept #2}/. To attempt trade with /{untranslatable entity +signifier}/ is to invite death or transition to /{untranslatable concept #1}/." + +Amber snaps her fingers: time freezes. She glances round at Su Ang, Pierre, the +other members of her primary team. "Opinions, anyone?" + +Aineko, hitherto invisible, sits up on the carpet at the foot of the dais. "I'm +not sure. The reason those macros are tagged is that there's something wrong +with their semantics." + +"Wrong with - how?" asks Su Ang. + +The cat grins, cavernously, and begins to fade. "Wait!" snaps Amber. + +Aineko continues her fade, but leaves a shimmering presence behind: not a grin, +but a neural network weighting map, three-dimensional and incomprehensibly +complicated. "The /{untranslatable entity concept #1}/ when mapped onto the +lobster's grammar network has elements of 'god' overloaded with attributes of +mysticism and zenlike incomprehensibility. But I'm pretty sure that what it +/{really}/ means is 'optimized conscious upload that runs much faster than +real-time'. A type-one weakly superhuman entity, like, um, the folks back home. +The implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as gods." The cat +fades back in. "Any takers?" + +"Small-town hustlers," mutters Amber. "Talking big - or using a dodgy +metagrammar that makes them sound bigger than they are - to bilk the hayseeds +new to the big city." + +"Most likely." Aineko turns and begins to wash her flank. + +"What are we going to do?" asks Su Ang. + +"Do?" Amber raises a pencil-lined eyebrow, then flashes a grin that chops a +decade off her apparent age: "We're going to mess with their heads!" She snaps +her fingers again and time unfreezes. There's no change in continuity except +that Aineko is still present, at the foot of the throne. The cat looks up and +gives the queen a dirty look. "We understand your concern," Amber says +smoothly, "but we have already given you the physiology models and neural +architecture of the bodies that you are wearing. We want to communicate. Why +won't you show us your real selves or your real language?" + +"This is trade language!" protests Lobster Number One. "Wunch am/are +metabolically variable coalition from number of worlds. No uniformity of +interface. Easiest to conform to one plan and speak one tongue optimized for +your comprehension." + +"Hmm." Amber leans forward. "Let me see if I understand you. You are a +coalition of individuals from a number of species. You prefer to use the common +user interface model we sent you, and offered us the language module you're +using for an exchange? And you want to trade with us." + +"Exchange interest," the Wunch emphasizes, bouncing up and down on its legs. +"Can offer much! Sense of identity of a thousand civilizations. Safe tunnels to +a hundred archives on the net suitable for beings who are not /{untranslatable +entity signifier}/. Able to control risks of communication. Have technique of +manipulating matter at molecular level. Solution to algorithmic iterated +systems based on quantum entanglement." + +"/{Old-fashioned nanotechnology and shiny beads to dazzle the primitives}/," +Pierre mutters on Amber's multicast channel. "/{How backward do they think we +are}/?" + +% note italics marked differently should have been "H/{ow backward do they +think we are}/?" + +"/{The physics model in here is really overdone}/," comments Boris. "/{They may +even think this is real, that we're primitives coat-tailing it on the back of +the lobsters' efforts}/." + +Amber forces a smile. "That is most interesting!" she trills at the Wunch's +representatives. "I have appointed two representatives who will negotiate with +you; this is an internal contest within my own court. I commend to you Pierre +Naqet, my own commercial representative. In addition, you may want to deal with +Alan Glashwiecz, an independent factor who is not currently present. Others may +come forward in due course if that is acceptable." + +"It pleases us," says Lobster Number One. "We are tired and disoriented by the +long journey through gateways to this place. Request resumption of negotiations +later?" + +"By all means." Amber nods. A sergeant-at-arms, a mindless but impressive +zimboe controlled by her spider's nest of personality threads, blows a sharp +note on his trumpet. The first audience is at an end. + +* * * + +_1 Outside the light cone of the /{Field Circus}/, on the other side of the +spacelike separation between Amber's little kingdom in motion and the depths of +empire time that grip the solar system's entangled quantum networks, a singular +new reality is taking shape. + +_1 Welcome to the moment of maximum change. + +_1 About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind surrounded +by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of personality spun right out of +their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog - infinitely flexible computing +resources as thin as aerogel - in which they live. The foggy depths are alive +with high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth's biosphere has been wrapped in +cotton wool and preserved for future examination. For every living human, a +thousand million software agents carry information into the farthest corners of +the consciousness address space. + +_1 The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has vanished +within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow belt around the plane +of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, unchanged, on the inner planets: Except for +Mercury, which is no longer present, having been dismantled completely and +turned into solar-powered high-temperature nanocomputers. A much fiercer light +falls on Venus, now surrounded by glittering ferns of carbon crystals that pump +angular momentum into the barely spinning planet via huge superconducting loops +wound around its equator. This planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter, +Neptune, Uranus - all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn's. But the task of +cannibalizing the gas giants will take many times longer than the small rocky +bodies of the inner system. + +_1 The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system remember +being human; almost half of them predate the millennium. Some of them still +/{are}/ human, untouched by the drive of meta-evolution that has replaced blind +Darwinian change with a goal-directed teleological progress. They cower in +gated communities and hill forts, mumbling prayers and cursing the ungodly +meddlers with the natural order of things. But eight out of every ten living +humans are included in the phase-change. It's the most inclusive revolution in +the human condition since the discovery of speech. + +_1 A million outbreaks of gray goo - runaway nanoreplicator excursions - +threaten to raise the temperature of the biosphere dramatically. They're all +contained by the planetary-scale immune system fashioned from what was once the +World Health Organization. Weirder catastrophes threaten the boson factories in +the Oort cloud. Antimatter factories hover over the solar poles. Sol system +shows all the symptoms of a runaway intelligence excursion, exuberant blemishes +as normal for a technological civilization as skin problems on a human +adolescent. + +_1 The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both +capitalism and communism, bickering ideological children of a protoindustrial +outlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of kings: Companies are alive, and +dead people may live again, too. Globalism and tribalism have run to +completion, diverging respectively into homogeneous interoperability and the +Schwarzschild radius of insularity. Beings that remember being human plan the +deconstruction of Jupiter, the creation of a great simulation space that will +expand the habitat available within the solar system. By converting all the +nonstellar mass of the solar system into processors, they can accommodate as +many human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten billion +humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy. + +_1 A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of +near-Jupiter space; there's an instance of Pierre, too, although he has +relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still sometimes thinks of +her relativistic twin, nobody can tell. In a way, it doesn't matter, because by +the time the /{Field Circus}/ returns to Jupiter orbit, as much subjective time +will have elapsed for the fast-thinkers back home as will flash by in the real +universe between this moment and the end of the era of star formation, many +billions of years hence. + +* * * + +"As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not gods." + +Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely. + +Sadeq coughs grumpily. "Tell her, Boris." + +Boris tilts his chair back and turns it toward the Queen. "He is right, Amber. +They are traders, and not clever ones either. Is hard to get handle on their +semiotics while they hide behind the lobster model we uploaded in their +direction twenty years ago, but are certainly not crusties, and are definite +not human either. Or transhuman. My guess, they are bunch of dumb hicks who get +hands on toys left behind by much smarter guys. Like the rejectionist factions +back home. Imagine they are waking up one morning and find everyone else is +gone to the great upload environment in the sky. Leaving them with the planet +to themselves. What you think they do with whole world, with any gadgets they +trip over? Some will smash everything they come across, but others not so +stupid. But they think /{small}/. Scavengers, deconstructionists. Their whole +economic outlook are negative-sum game. Go visit aliens to rip them off, take +ideas, not expand selves and transcend." + +Amber stands up, walks toward the windows at the front of the bridge. In black +jeans and chunky sweater, she barely resembles the feudal queen whose role she +plays for tourists. "Taking them on board was a big risk. I'm not happy about +it." + +"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Sadeq smiles crookedly. "We +have an answer. But they may not even realize they are dancing with us. These +are not the gods you were afraid of finding." + +"No." Amber sighs. "Not too different from us, though. I mean, we aren't +exactly well adapted to this environment, are we? We tote these body-images +along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our human-style senses. +We're emulations, not native AIs. Where's Su Ang?" + +"I can find her." Boris frowns. + +"I asked her to analyse the alien's arrival times," Amber adds as an +afterthought. "They're close - too close. And they showed up too damn fast when +we first tickled the router. I think Aineko's theories are flawed. The /{real}/ +owners of this network we've plugged into probably use much higher-level +protocols to communicate; sapient packets to build effective communications +gateways. This Wunch, they probably lurk in wait for newbies to exploit. +Pedophiles hiding outside the school gate. I don't want to give them that +opportunity before we make contact with the real thing!" + +"You may have little choice," says Sadeq. "If they are without insight, as you +suspect, they may become afraid if you edit their environment. They may lash +out. I doubt they even understand how they created the contaminated metagrammar +that they transmitted back to us. It will be to them just a tool that makes +simpleminded aliens more gullible, easier to negotiate with. Who knows where +they got it?" + +"A grammatical weapon." Boris spins himself round slowly. "Build propaganda +into your translation software if you want to establish a favorable trading +relationship. How cute. Haven't these guys ever heard of Newspeak?" + +"Probably not," Amber says slowly, pausing for a moment to spawn spectator +threads to run down the book and all three movie versions of Nineteen +Eighty-Four, followed by the sharecropped series of sequel novels. She shivers +uncomfortably as she re-integrates the memories. "Ick. That's not a very nice +vision. Reminds me of" - she snaps her fingers, trying to remember Dad's +favorite - "Dilbert." + +"Friendly fascism," says Sadeq. "It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I +could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never +harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict +their certainties upon us." + +"I think we ought to see how Pierre is doing," Amber says aloud. "I certainly +don't want them poisoning him." Grin: "That's /{my job}/." + +* * * + +Donna the Journalist is everywhere simultaneously. It's a handy talent: Makes +for even-handed news coverage when you can interview both sides at the same +time. + +Right now, one of her is in the bar with Alan Glashwiecz, who evidently hasn't +realized that he can modulate his ethanol dehydrogenase levels voluntarily and +who is consequently well on the way to getting steaming drunk. Donna is +assisting the process: She finds it fascinating to watch this bitter young man +who has lost his youth to a runaway self-enhancement process. + +"I'm a full partner," he says bitterly, "in Glashwiecz and Selves. I'm one of +the Selves. We're all partners, but it's only Glashwiecz Prime who has any +clout. The old bastard - if I'd known I'd grow up to become /{that}/, I'd have +run away to join some hippie antiglobalist commune instead." He drains his +glass, demonstrating his oropharyngeal integrity, snaps his fingers for a +refill. "I just woke up one morning to find I'd been resurrected by my older +self. He said he valued my youthful energy and optimistic outlook, then offered +me a minority stake with stock options that would take five years to vest. The +bastard." + +"Tell me about it," Donna coaxes sympathetically. "Here we are, stranded among +idiopathic types, not among them a single multiplex -" + +"Damn straight." Another bottle of Bud appears in Glashwiecz'a hands. "One +moment I'm standing in this apartment in Paris facing total humiliation by a +cross-dressing commie asshole called Macx and his slimy French manager bitch, +and the next I'm on the carpet in front of my alter ego's desk and he's +offering me a job as junior partner. It's seventeen years later, all the weird +nonsense that guy Macx was getting up to is standard business practice, and +there's six of me in the outer office taking research notes because +myself-as-senior-partner doesn't trust anyone else to work with him. It's +humiliating, that's what it is." + +"Which is why you're here." Donna waits while he takes a deep swig from the +bottle. + +"Yeah. Better than working for myself, I can tell you - it's not like being +self-employed. You know how you sometimes get distant from your work? It's +really bad when you see yourself from the outside with another half gigasecond +of experience and the new-you isn't just distant from the client base, he's +distant from the you-you. So I went back to college and crammed up on +artificial intelligence law and ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and +recursive tort. Then I volunteered to come out here. He's still handling +/{her}/ account, and I figured -" Glashwiecz shrugged. + +"Did any of the delta-yous contest the arrangement?" asks Donna, spawning +ghosts to focus in on him from all angles. For a moment, she wonders if this is +wise. Glashwiecz is dangerous - the power he wields over Amber's mother, to +twist her arm into extending his power of attorney, hints at dark secrets. +Maybe there's more to her persistent lawsuits than a simple family feud? + +Glashwiecz's face is a study in perspectives. "Oh, one did," he says +dismissively: One of Donna's viewports captures the contemptuous twitch in his +cheek. "I left her in my apartment freezer. Figured it'd be a while before +anybody noticed. It's not murder - I'm still here, right? - and I'm not about +to claim tort against myself. I think. It'd be a left-recursive lawsuit, +anyway, if I did it to myself." + +"The aliens," prompts Donna, "and the trial by combat. What's your take on +that?" + +Glashwiecz sneers. "Little bitch-queen takes after her father, doesn't she? +He's a bastard, too. The competitive selection filter she's imposed is evil - +it'll cripple her society if she leaves it in place for too long, but in the +short run, it's a major advantage. So she wants me to trade for my life, and I +don't get to lay my formal claim against her unless I can outperform her pet +day trader, that punk from Marseilles. Yes? What he doesn't know is, I've got +an edge. Full disclosure." He lifts his bottle drunkenly. "Y'see, I know that +/{cat}/. One that's gotta brown @-sign on its side, right? It used to belong to +queenie-darling's old man, Manfred, the bastard. You'll see. Her Mom, Pamela, +Manfred's ex, she's my client in this case. And she gave me the cat's ackle +keys. Access control." (Hic.) "Get ahold of its brains and grab that damn +translation layer it stole from the CETI@home mob. /{Then}/ I can talk to them +straight." + +The drunken, future-shocked lawyer is on a roll. "I'll get their shit, and I'll +disassemble it. Disassembly is the future of industry, y'know?" + +"Disassembly?" asks the reporter, watching him in disgusted fascination from +behind her mask of objectivity. + +"Hell, yeah. There's a singularity going on, that implies disequilibrium. An' +wherever there's a disequilibrium, someone is going to get /{rich}/ +disassembling the leftovers. Listen, I once knew this econo-economist, that's +what he was. Worked for the Eurofeds, rubber fetishist. He tole me about this +fact'ry near Barcelona. It had a disassembly line running in it. Spensive +servers in boxes'd roll in at one end. Be unpacked. Then workers'd take the +cases off, strip the disk drives, memory, processors, bits'n'guts out. Bag and +tag job. Throw the box, what's left, 'cause it wasn't worth dick. Thing is, the +manufact'rer charged so much for parts, it was worth their while to buy whole +machines'n'strip them. To bits. And sell the bits. Hell, they got an enterprise +award for ingenuity! All 'cause they knew that /{disassembly}/ was the wave of +the future." + +"What happened to the factory?" asks Donna, unable to tear her eyes away. + +Glashwiecz waves an empty bottle at the starbow that stretches across the +ceiling: "Ah, who gives a fuck? They closedown round about" (hic) "ten years +'go. Moore's Law topped out, killed the market. But disassembly - production +line cannibalism - it'sa way to go. Take old assets an' bring new life to them. +A fully 'preciated fortune." He grins, eyes unfocussed with greed. "'S'what I'm +gonna do to those space lobsters. Learn to talk their language an'll never know +what hit 'em." + +* * * + +The tiny starship drifts in high orbit above a turbid brown soup of atmosphere. +Deep in the gravity well of Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, it's a speck of dust +trapped between two light sources: the brilliant sapphire stare of Amber's +propulsion lasers in Jovian orbit, and the emerald insanity of the router +itself, a hypertoroid spun from strange matter. + +The bridge of the /{Field Circus}/ is in constant use at this time, a meeting +ground for minds with access to the restricted areas. Pierre is spending more +and more time here, finding it a convenient place to focus his trading campaign +and arbitrage macros. At the same time that Donna is picking the multiplexed +lawyer's strategy apart, Pierre is present in neomorphic form - a quicksilver +outline of humanity, six-armed and two-headed, scanning with inhuman speed +through tensor maps of the information traffic density surrounding the router's +clump of naked singularities. + +There's a flicker in the emptiness at the rear of the bridge, then Su Ang has +always been there. She watches Pierre in contemplative silence for a minute. +"Do you have a moment?" + +Pierre superimposes himself: One shadowy ghost keeps focused on the front +panel, but another instance turns round, crosses his arms, waits for her to +speak. + +"I know you're busy -" she begins, then stops. "Is it /{that}/ important?" she +asks. + +"It is." Pierre blurs, resynchronizing his instances. "The router - there are +four wormholes leading off from it, did you know that? Each of them is +radiating at about 1011 Kelvins, and every wavelength is carrying data +connections, multiplexed, with a protocol stack that's at least eleven layers +deep but maybe more - they show signs of self-similarity in the framing +headers. You know how much data that is? It's about 1012 times as much as our +high-bandwidth uplink from home. But compared to what's on the other side of +the 'holes -" he shakes his head. + +"It's big?" + +"It's unimaginably big! These wormholes, they're a /{low-bandwidth}/ link +compared to the minds they're hooking up to." He blurs in front of her, unable +to stay still and unable to look away from the front panel. Excitement or +agitation? Su Ang can't tell. With Pierre, sometimes the two states are +indistinguishable. He gets emotional easily. "I think we have the outline of +the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don't go traveling because they +can't get enough bandwidth - trying to migrate through one of these wormholes +would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they are what I +think they are - and the slower-than-light route is out, too, because they +couldn't take enough computronium along. Unless -" + +He's off again. But before he can blur out, Su Ang steps across and lays hands +on him. "Pierre. Calm down. Disengage. Empty yourself." + +"I can't!" He really /{is}/ agitated, she sees. "I've got to figure out the +best trading strategy to get Amber off the hook with that lawsuit, then tell +her to get us out of here; being this close to the router is seriously +dangerous! The Wunch are the least of it." + +"Stop." + +He pauses his multiplicity of presences, converges on a single identity focused +on the here and now. "Yes?" + +"That's better." She walks round him, slowly. "You've got to learn to deal with +stress more appropriately." + +"Stress!" Pierre snorts. He shrugs, an impressive gesture with three sets of +shoulder blades. "That's something I can turn off whenever I need to. Side +effect of this existence; we're pigs in cyberspace, wallowing in fleshy +simulations, but unable to experience the new environment in the raw. What did +you want from me, Ang? Honestly? I'm a busy man, I've got a trading network to +set up." + +"We've got a problem with the Wunch right now, even if you think something +worse is out there," Ang says patiently. "Boris thinks they're parasites, +negative-sum gamers who stalk newbies like us. Glashwiecz is apparently talking +about cutting a deal with them. Amber's suggestion is that you ignore them +completely, cut them out, and talk to anyone else who'll listen." + +"Anyone else who'll listen, right," Pierre says heavily. "Any other gems of +wisdom to pass on from the throne?" + +Ang takes a deep breath. He's infuriating, she realizes. And worst of all, he +doesn't realize. Infuriating but cute. "You're setting up a trading network, +yes?" she asks. + +"Yes. A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as cellular +automata within the Ring Imperium switched legal service environment." He +relaxes slightly. "Each one has access to a compartmentalized chunk of +intellectual property and can call on the corrected parser we got from that +cat. They're set up to communicate with a blackboard system - a souk - and I'm +bringing up a link to the router, a multicast link that'll broadcast the souk's +existence to anyone who's listening. Trade ..." his eyebrows furrow. "There are +at least two different currency standards in this network, used to buy +quality-of-service precedence and bandwidth. They depreciate with distance, as +if the whole concept of money was invented to promote the development of +long-range network links. If I can get in first, when Glashwiecz tries to cut +in on the dealing by offering IP at discounted rates -" + +"He's not going to, Pierre," she says as gently as possible. "Listen to what I +said: Glashwiecz is going to focus on the Wunch. He's going to offer them a +deal. Amber wants you to /{ignore}/ them. Got that?" + +"Got it." There's a hollow /{bong!}/ from one of the communication bells. "Hey, +that's interesting." + +"What is?" She stretches, neck extending snakelike so that she can see the +window on underlying reality that's flickered into existence in the air before +him. + +"An ack from ..." he pauses, then plucks a neatly reified concept from the +screen in front of him and presents it to her in a silvery caul of light. "... +about two hundred light-years away! Someone wants to talk." He smiles. Then the +front panel workstation bong's again. "Hey again. I wonder what that says." + +It's the work of a moment to pipe the second message through the translator. +Oddly, it doesn't translate at first. Pierre has to correct for some weird +destructive interference in the fake lobster network before it'll spill its +guts. "That's interesting," he says. + +"I'll say." Ang lets her neck collapse back to normal. "I'd better go tell +Amber." + +"You do that," Pierre says worriedly. He makes eye contact with her, but what +she's hoping to see in his face just isn't there. He's wearing his emotions +entirely on the surface. "I'm not surprised their translator didn't want to +pass that message along." + +"It's a deliberately corrupted grammar," Ang murmurs, and bangs out in the +direction of Amber's audience chamber; "and they're actually making threats." +The Wunch, it seems, have acquired a /{very}/ bad reputation somewhere along +the line - and Amber needs to know. + +* * * + +Glashwiecz leans toward Lobster Number One, stomach churning. It's only a +real-time kilosecond since his bar-room interview, but in the intervening +subjective time, he's abolished a hangover, honed his brief, and decided to +act. In the Tuileries. "You've been lied to," he confides quietly, trusting the +privacy ackles that he browbeat Amber's mother into giving him - access lists +that give him a degree of control over the regime within this virtual universe +that the cat dragged in. + +"Lied? Context rendered horizontal in past, or subjected to grammatical +corruption? Linguistic evil?" + +"The latter." Glashwiecz enjoys this, even though it forces him to get rather +closer to the two-meter-long virtual crustacean than he'd like. Showing a mark +how they've been scammed is always good, especially when you hold the keys to +the door of the cage they're locked inside. "They are not telling you the truth +about this system." + +"We received assurances," Lobster Number One says clearly. Its mouthparts move +ceaselessly - the noise comes from somewhere inside its head. "You do not share +this phenotype. Why?" + +"That information will cost you," says Glashwiecz. "I am willing to provide it +on credit." + +They haggle briefly. An exchange rate in questions is agreed, as is a trust +metric to grade the answers by. "Disclose all," insists the Wunch negotiator. + +"There are multiple sentient species on the world we come from," says the +lawyer. "The form you wear belongs to only one - one that wanted to get away +from the form /{I}/ wear, the original conscious tool-creating species. Some of +the species today are artificial, but all of us trade information for +self-advantage." + +"This is good to know," the lobster assures him. "We like to buy species." + +"You buy species?" Glashwiecz cocks his head. + +"We have the unbearable yearning to be not-what-we-are," says the lobster. +"Novelty, surprise! Flesh rots and wood decays. We seek the new being-ness of +aliens. Give us your somatotype, give us all your thoughts, and we will dream +you over." + +"I think something might be arranged," Glashwiecz concedes. "So you want to be +- no, to lease the rights to temporarily be human? Why is that?" + +"Untranslatable concept #3 means untranslatable concept #4. God told us to." + +"Okay, I think I'll just have to take that on trust for now. What is your true +form?" he asks. + +"Wait and I show you," says the lobster. It begins to shudder. + +"What are you doing -" + +"Wait." The lobster twitches, writhing slightly, like a portly businessman +adjusting his underwear after a heavy business lunch. Disturbing shapes move, +barely visible through the thick chitinous armor. "We want your help," the +lobster explains, voice curiously muffled. "Want to establish direct trade +links. Physical emissaries, yes?" + +"Yes, that's very good," Glashwiecz agrees excitedly: It's exactly what he's +hoped for, the sought-after competitive advantage that will prove his fitness +in Amber's designated trial by corporate combat. "You're going to deal with us +directly without using that shell interface?" + +"Agreed." The lobster trails off into muffled silence; little crunching noises +trickle out of its carapace. Then Glashwiecz hears footsteps behind him on the +gravel path. + +"What are you doing here?" he demands, looking round. It's Pierre, back in +standard human form - a sword hangs from his belt, and there's a big wheel-lock +pistol in his hands. "Hey!" + +"Step away from the alien, lawyer," Pierre warns, raising the gun. + +Glashwiecz glances back at Lobster Number One. It's pulled its front inside the +protective shell, and it's writhing now, rocking from side to side alarmingly. +Something inside the shell is turning black, acquiring depth and texture. "I +stand on counsel's privilege," Glashwiecz insists. "Speaking as this alien's +attorney, I must protest in the strongest terms -" + +Without warning, the lobster lurches forward and rises up on its rear legs. It +reaches out with huge claws, chellipeds coated with spiny hairs, and grabs +Glashwiecz by his arms. "Hey!" + +Glashwiecz tries to turn away, but the lobster is already looming over him, +maxillipeds and maxillae reaching out from its head. There's a sickening crunch +as one of his elbow joints crumbles, humerus shattered by the closing jaws of a +chelliped. He draws breath to scream, then the four small maxillae grip his +head and draw it down toward the churning mandibles. + +Pierre scurries sideways, trying to find a line of fire on the lobster that +doesn't pass through the lawyer's body. The lobster isn't cooperating. It turns +on the spot, clutching Glashwiecz's convulsing body to itself. There's a stench +of shit, and blood is squirting from its mouthparts. Something is very wrong +with the biophysics model here, the realism turned up way higher than normal. + +"Merde," whispers Pierre. He fumbles with the bulky trigger, and there's a +faint whirring sound but no explosion. + +More wet crunching sounds follow as the lobster demolishes the lawyer's face +and swallows convulsively, sucking his head and shoulders all the way into its +gastric mill. + +Pierre glances at the heavy handgun. "/{Shit}/!" he screams. He glances back at +the lobster, then turns and runs for the nearest wall. There are other lobsters +loose in the formal garden. "/{Amber, emergency!}/" he sends over their private +channel. "/{Hostiles in the Louvre!}/" + +The lobster that's taken Glashwiecz hunkers down over the body and quivers. +Pierre desperately winds the spring on his gun, too rattled to check that it's +loaded. He glances back at the alien intruder. /{They've sprung the biophysics +model}/, he sends. /{I could die in here}/, he realizes, momentarily shocked. +/{This instance of me could die forever}/. + +The lobster shell sitting in the pool of blood and human wreckage splits in +two. A humanoid form begins to uncurl from within it, pale-skinned and +glistening wet: vacant blue eyes flicker from side to side as it stretches and +stands upright, wobbling uncertainty on its two unstable legs. Its mouth opens +and a strange gobbling hiss comes forth. + +Pierre recognizes her. "What are you doing here?" he yells. + +The nude woman turns toward him. She's the spitting image of Amber's mother, +except for the chellipeds she has in place of hands. She hisses "/{Equity!}/" +and takes a wobbly step toward him, pincers clacking. + +Pierre winds the firing handle again. There's a crash of gunpowder and smoke, a +blow that nearly sprains his elbow, and the nude woman's chest erupts in a +spray of blood. She snarls at him wordlessly and staggers - then ragged flaps +of bloody meat close together, knitting shut with improbable speed. She resumes +her advance. + +"I told Amber the Matrix would be more defensible," Pierre snarls, dropping the +firearm and drawing his sword as the alien turns in his direction and raises +arms that end in pincers. "We need guns, damit! Lots of guns!" + +"Waaant equity," hisses the alien intruder. + +"You /{can't}/ be Pamela Macx," says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping the +sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. "She's in a nunnery in Armenia or +something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz's memories - he worked for her, +didn't he?" + +Claws go snicker-snack before his face. "Investment partnership!" screeches the +harridan. "Seat on the board! Eat brains for breakfast!" It lurches sideways, +trying to get past his guard. + +"I don't fucking /{believe}/ this," Pierre snarls. The Wunch-creature jumps at +just the wrong moment and slides onto the point of his blade, claws clacking +hungrily. Pierre slides away, nearly leaving his skin on the rough bricks of +the wall - and what's good for one is good for all, as the hacked model in +force in this reality compels the attacker to groan and collapse. + +Pierre pulls the sword out then, nervously glancing over his shoulder, whacks +at her neck. The impact jars his arm, but he keeps hacking until there's blood +spraying everywhere, blood on his shirt, blood on his sword, and a round thing +sitting on a stump of savaged neck nearby, jaw working soundlessly in undeath. + +He looks at it for a moment, then his stomach rebels and tries to empty itself +into the mess. "/{Where the hell is everybody}/?" he broadcasts on the private +channel. "/{Hostiles in the Louvre!}/" + +He straightens up, gasping for breath. He feels /{alive}/, frightened and +appalled and exhilarated simultaneously. The crackle of bursting shells on all +sides drowns out the birdsong as the Wunch's emissaries adopt a variety of new +and supposedly more lethal forms. "/{They don't seem to be very clear on how to +take over a simulation space}/," he adds. "/{Maybe we already are}/ +untranslatable concept number #1 as far as they're concerned." + +"/{Don't worry, I've cut off the incoming connection}/," sends Su Ang. "/{This +is just a bridgehead force; the invasion packets are}/ being filtered out." + +Blank-eyed men and women in dusty black uniforms are hatching from the lobster +shells, stumbling and running around the grounds of the royal palace like +confused Huguenot invaders. + +Boris winks into reality behind Pierre. "Which way?" he demands, pulling out an +anachronistic but lethal katana. + +"Over here. Let's work this together." Pierre jacks his emotional damper up to +a dangerously high setting, suppressing natural aversion reflexes and +temporarily turning himself into a sociopathic killer. He stalks toward an +infant lobster-thing with big black eyes and a covering of white hair that +mewls at him from a rose bed, and Boris looks away while he kills it. Then one +of the larger ones makes the mistake of lunging at Boris, and he chops at it +reflexively. + +Some of the Wunch try to fight back when Pierre and Boris try to kill them, but +they're handicapped by their anatomy, a curious mixture of crustacean and +human, claw and mandible against sword and dagger. When they bleed the ground +soaks with the cuprous hue of lobster juice. + +"Let's fork," suggests Boris. "Get this over with." Pierre nods, dully - +everything around him is wrapped in a layer of don't-care, except for a glowing +dot of artificial hatred - and they fork, multiplying their state vectors to +take full advantage of the virtualization facilities of this universe. There's +no need for reinforcements; the Wunch focused on attacking the biophysics model +of the universe, making it mimic a physical reality as closely as possible, and +paid no attention to learning the more intricate tactics that war in a virtual +space permits. + +Presently Pierre finds himself in the audience chamber, face and hands and +clothing caked in hideous gore, leaning on the back of Amber's throne. There's +only one of him now. One of Boris - the only one? - is standing near the +doorway. He can barely remember what has happened, the horrors of parallel +instances of mass murder blocked from his long-term memory by a high-pass +trauma filter. "It looks clear," he calls aloud. "What shall we do now?" + +"Wait for Catherine de Médicis to show up," says the cat, its grin +materializing before him like a numinous threat. "Amber /{always}/ finds a way +to blame her mother. Or didn't you already know that?" + +Pierre glances at the bloody mess on the footpath outside where the first +lobster-woman attacked Glashwiecz. "I already did for her, I think." He +remembers the action in the third person, all subjectivity edited out. "The +family resemblance was striking," the thread that still remembers her in +working memory murmurs: "I just hope it's only skin-deep." Then he forgets the +act of apparent murder forever. "Tell the Queen I'm ready to talk." + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the downslope on the far side of the curve of accelerating +progress. + +_1 Back in the solar system, Earth orbits through a dusty tunnel in space. +Sunlight still reaches the birth world, but much of the rest of the star's +output has been trapped by the growing concentric shells of computronium built +from the wreckage of the innermost planets. + +_1 Two billion or so mostly unmodified humans scramble in the wreckage of the +phase transition, not understanding why the vasty superculture they so resented +has fallen quiet. Little information leaks through their fundamentalist +firewalls, but what there is shows a disquieting picture of a society where +there are no /{bodies}/ anymore. Utility foglets blown on the wind form aerogel +towers larger than cyclones, removing the last traces of physical human +civilization from most of Europe and the North American coastlines. Enclaves +huddle behind their walls and wonder at the monsters and portents roaming the +desert of postindustrial civilization, mistaking acceleration for collapse. + +_1 The hazy shells of computronium that ring the sun - concentric clouds of +nanocomputers the size of rice grains, powered by sunlight, orbiting in shells +like the packed layers of a Matrioshka doll - are still immature, holding +barely a thousandth of the physical planetary mass of the system, but they +already support a classical computational density of 1042 MIPS; enough to +support a billion civilizations as complex as the one that existed immediately +before the great disassembly. The conversion hasn't yet reached the gas giants, +and some scant outer-system enclaves remain independent - Amber's Ring Imperium +still exists as a separate entity, and will do so for some years to come - but +the inner solar system planets, with the exception of Earth, have been +colonized more thoroughly than any dusty NASA proposal from the dawn of the +space age could have envisaged. + +_1 From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn't really possible to know +what's going on inside. The problem is bandwidth: While it's possible to send +data in and get data out, the sheer amount of computation going on in the +virtual spaces of the Acceleration dwarfs any external observer. Inside that +swarm, minds a trillion or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as +far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm. A +million random human civilizations flourish in worldscapes tucked in the corner +of this world-mind. Death is abolished, life is triumphant. A thousand +ideologies flower, human nature adapted where necessary to make this possible. +Ecologies of thought are forming in a Cambrian explosion of ideas: For the +solar system is finally rising to consciousness, and mind is no longer +restricted to the mere kilotons of gray fatty meat harbored in fragile human +skulls. + +_1 Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep +remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention. Soon, they +realize, the starship will be in position to act as their proxy in an ages-long +conversation. Negotiations for access to Amber's extrasolar asset commence; the +Ring Imperium prospers, at least for a while. + +_1 But first, the operating software on the human side of the network link will +require an upgrade. + +* * * + +The audience chamber in the /{Field Circus}/ is crammed. Everybody aboard the +ship - except the still-frozen lawyer and the alien barbarian intruders - is +present. They've just finished reviewing the recordings of what happened in the +Tuileries, of Glashwiecz's fatal last conversation with the Wunch, the +resulting fight for survival. And now the time has come for decisions. + +"I'm not saying you have to follow me," says Amber, addressing her court; +"just, it's what we came here for. We've established that there's enough +bandwidth to transmit people and their necessary support VMs; we've got some +basic expectancy of goodwill at the other end, or at least an agalmic +willingness to gift us with advice about the untrustworthiness of the Wunch. +/{I}/ propose to copy myself through and see what's at the other side of the +wormhole. What's more, I'm going to suspend myself on this side and hand over +to whichever instance of me comes back, unless there's a long hiatus. How long, +I haven't decided yet. Are you guys happy to join me?" + +Pierre stands behind her throne, hands on the back. Looking down over her head, +at the cat in her lap, he's sure he sees it narrow its eyes at him. /{Funny}/, +he thinks, /{we're talking about jumping down a rabbit hole and trusting +whoever lives at the other end with our personalities. After seeing the Wunch. +Does this make sense}/? + +"Forgive, please, but am not stupid," says Boris. "This is Fermi paradox +territory, no? Instantaneous network exists, is traversable, with bandwidth +adequate for human-equivalent minds. Where are alien visitors, in history? Must +be overriding reason for absence. Think will wait here and see what comes back. +/{Then}/ make up mind to drink the poison kool-aid." + +"I've got half a mind to transmit myself through without a back-up," says +someone else - "but that's okay; half a mind is all we've got the bandwidth +for." Halfhearted laughter shores up his wisecrack, supports a flagging +determination to press through. + +"I'm with Boris," says Su Ang. She glances at Pierre, catches his eye: Suddenly +a number of things become clear to him. He shakes his head minutely. /{You +never had a chance - I belong to Amber}/, he thinks, but deletes the thought +before he can send it to her. Maybe in another instantiation his issues with +the Queen's /{droit de seigneur}/ would have bulked up larger, splintered his +determination; maybe in another world it has already happened? "I think this is +very rash," she says in a hurry. "We don't know enough about post-singularity +civilizations." + +"It's not a singularity," Amber says waspishly. "It's just a brief burst of +acceleration. Like cosmological inflation." + +"Smooths out inhomogeneities in the initial structure of consciousness," purrs +the cat. "Don't I get a vote?" + +"You do." Amber sighs. She glances round. "Pierre?" + +Heart in his mouth: "I'm with you." + +She smiles, brilliantly. "Well then. Will the nay sayers please leave the +universe?" + +Suddenly, the audience chamber is half-empty. + +"I'm setting a watchdog timer for a billion seconds into the future, to restart +us from this point if the router doesn't send anyone back in the intervening +time," she announces gravely, taking in the serious-faced avatars of those who +remain. Surprised: "Sadeq! I didn't think this was your type of -" + +He doesn't smile: "Would I be true to my faith if I wasn't prepared to bring +the words of Mohammed, peace be unto him, to those who may never have heard his +name?" + +Amber nods. "I guess." + +"Do it," Pierre says urgently. "You can't keep putting it off forever." + +Aineko raises her head: "Spoilsport!" + +"Okay." Amber nods. "Let's /{do}/ -" + +She punches an imaginary switch, and time stops. + +* * * + +At the far end of a wormhole, two hundred light-years distant in real space, +coherent photons begin to dance a story of human identity before the sensoria +of those who watch. And all is at peace in orbit around Hyundai +^[+4904}^/,{-56},, for a while ... + +* * * + +1~ Chapter 6: Nightfall + +A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through silent darkness. The +night is quiet as the grave, colder than midwinter on Pluto. Gossamer sails as +fine as soap bubbles droop, the gust of sapphire laser light that inflated them +long since darkened. Ancient starlight picks out the outline of a huge +planetlike body beneath the jewel-and-cobweb corpse of the starwisp. + +Eight Earth years have passed since the good ship /{Field Circus}/ slipped into +close orbit around the frigid brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},. Five years +have gone by since the launch lasers of the Ring Imperium shut down without +warning, stranding the light-sail-powered craft three light-years from home. +There has been no response from the router, the strange alien artifact in orbit +around the brown dwarf, since the crew of the starwisp uploaded themselves +through its strange quantum entanglement interface for transmission to whatever +alien network it connects to. In fact, nothing happens; nothing save the slow +trickle of seconds, as a watchdog timer counts down the moments remaining until +it is due to resurrect stored snapshots of the crew, on the assumption that +their uploaded copies are beyond help. + +Meanwhile, outside the light cone - + +* * * + +Amber jolts into wakefulness, as if from a nightmare. She sits bolt upright, a +thin sheet falling from her chest; air circulating around her back chills her +rapidly, cold sweat evaporating. She mutters aloud, unable to subvocalize, +"Where am I - oh. A bedroom. How did I get here?" /{Mumble}/. "Oh, I see." Her +eyes widen in horror. "/{It's not a dream}/ ..." + +"Greetings, human Amber," says a ghost-voice that seems to come from nowhere: +"I see you are awake. Would you like anything?" + +Amber rubs her eyes tiredly. Leaning against the bedstead, she glances around +cautiously. She takes in a bedside mirror, her reflection in it: a young woman, +gaunt in the manner of those whose genome bears the p53 calorie-restriction +hack, she has disheveled blonde hair and dark eyes. She could pass for a dancer +or a soldier; not, perhaps, a queen. "What's going on? Where am I? Who are you, +and /{what am I doing in your head?}/" + +Her eyes narrow. Analytical intellect comes to the fore as she takes stock of +her surroundings. "The router," she mutters. Structures of strange matter orbit +a brown dwarf scant light-years from Earth. "How long ago did we come through?" +Glancing round, she sees a room walled in slabs of close-fitting stone. A +window bay is recessed into them, after the style of the Crusader castles many +centuries in the past, but there's no glass in it - just a blank white screen. +The only furniture in the room, besides a Persian carpet on the cold +flagstones, is the bed she sits upon. She's reminded of a scene from an old +movie, Kubrick's enigma; this whole set-up has got to be deliberate, and it +isn't funny. + +"I'm waiting," she announces, and leans back against the headboard. + +"According to our records this reaction indicates that you are now fully +self-aware," says the ghost. "This is good. You have not been conscious for a +very long time. Explanations will be complex and discursive. Can I offer you +refreshments? What would you like?" + +"Coffee, if you have it. Bread and hummus. Something to wear." Amber crosses +her arms, abruptly self-conscious. "I'd prefer to have management ackles to +this universe, though. As realities go, it's a bit lacking in creature +comforts." Which isn't entirely true - it seems to have a comprehensive, +human-friendly biophysics model, it's not just a jumped-up first-person +shooter. Her eyes focus on her left forearm, where tanned skin and a puckered +dime of scar tissue record a youthful accident with a pressure seal in Jovian +orbit. Amber freezes for a moment. Her lips move in silence, but she's locked +into place in this universe, unable to split or conjoin nested realities just +by calling subroutines that have been spliced into the corners of her mind +since she was a teenager. Finally, she asks, "How long have I been dead?" + +"Longer than you were alive, by orders of magnitude," says the ghost. A tray +laden with pita breads, hummus, and olives congeals from the air above her bed, +and a wardrobe appears at one side of the room. "I can begin the explanation +now or wait for you to finish eating. Which would you prefer?" + +Amber glances about again, then fixes on the white screen in the window bay. +"Give it to me right now. I can take it," she says, quietly bitter. "I like to +understand my mistakes as soon as possible." + +"We-us can tell that you are a human of determination," says the ghost, a hint +of pride entering its voice. "That is a good thing, Amber. You will need all of +your resolve if you are going to survive here ..." + +* * * + +It is the time of repentance in a temple beside a tower that looms above a dry +plain, and the thoughts of the priest who lives in the tower are tinged with +regret. It is Ashura, the tenth day of Muhurram, according to a real-time clock +still tuned to the pace of a different era: the one thousand, three hundred and +fortieth anniversary of the martyrdom of the Third Imam, the Sayyid +ash-Shuhada. + +The priest of the tower has spent an indefinite time in prayer, locked in an +eternal moment of meditation and recitation. Now, as the vast red sun drifts +close to the horizon of the infinite desert, his thoughts drift toward the +present. Ashura is a very special day, a day of atonement for collective guilt, +evil committed through inactivity; but it is in Sadeq's nature to look outwards +toward the future. This is, he knows, a failing - but also characteristic of +his generation. That's the generation of the Shi'ite clergy that reacted to the +excesses of the previous century, the generation that withdrew the /{ulama}/ +from temporal power, retreated from the velyat i-faqih of Khomenei and his +successors, left government to the people, and began to engage fully with the +paradoxes of modernity. Sadeq's focus, his driving obsession in theology, is a +program of reappraisal of eschatology and cosmology. Here in a tower of white +sun-baked clay, on an endless plain that exists only in the imaginary spaces of +a starship the size of a soft drink can, the priest spends his processor cycles +in contemplation of one of the most vicious problems ever to confront a +/{mujtahid}/ - the Fermi paradox. + +(Enrico Fermi was eating his lunch one day, and his colleagues were discussing +the possibility that sophisticated civilizations might populate other worlds. +"Yes," he said, "but if this is so, why haven't they already come visiting?") + +Sadeq finishes his evening devotions in near silence, then stands, stretches as +is his wont, and leaves the small and lonely courtyard at the base of the +tower. The gate - a wrought-iron gate, warmed by sunlight - squeals slightly as +he opens it. Glancing at the upper hinge, he frowns, willing it clean and +whole. The underlying physics model acknowledges his access controls: a thin +rim of red around the pin turns silvery-fresh, and the squeaking ceases. +Closing the gate behind him, Sadeq enters the tower. + +He climbs with a heavy, even tread a spiral staircase snaking ever upward above +him. Narrow slit-windows line the outer wall of the staircase. Through each of +them he sees a different world. Out there, nightfall in the month of Ramadan. +And through the next, green misty skies and a horizon too close by far. Sadeq +carefully avoids thinking about the implications of this manifold space. Coming +from prayer, from a sense of the sacred, he doesn't want to lose his proximity +to his faith. He's far enough from home as it is, and there is much to +consider. He is surrounded by strange and curious ideas, all but lost in a +corrosive desert of faith. + +At the top of the staircase, Sadeq comes to a door of aged wood bound in iron. +It doesn't belong here: It's a cultural and architectural anomaly. The handle +is a loop of black metal. Sadeq regards it as if it's the head of an asp, +poised to sting. Nevertheless, he reaches out and turns the handle, steps +across the threshold into a palace out of fantasy. + +/{None of this is real}/, he reminds himself. /{It's no more real than an +illusion conjured by one of the jinni of the thousand nights and one night}/. +Nevertheless, he can't save himself from smiling at the scene - a sardonic +smile of self-deprecating humor, tempered by frustration. + +Sadeq's captors have stolen his soul and locked it - him - in a very strange +prison, a temple with a tower that rises all the way to Paradise. It's the +whole classical litany of medievalist desires, distilled from fifteen hundred +years of literature. Colonnaded courtyards, cool pools lined with rich mosaics, +rooms filled with every imaginable dumb matter luxury, endless banquets +awaiting his appetite - and dozens of beautiful un-women, eager to fulfill his +every fantasy. Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen, but he doesn't +dare permit himself to succumb to temptation. /{I'm not dead}/, he reasons. +/{Therefore, how can I be in Paradise? Therefore, this must be a false +paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably. Unless I am dead, +because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human soul separated from its +body to be dead. But if that's so, isn't uploading a sin? In which case, this +can't be}/ Paradise because I am a sinner. /{Besides which}/, this whole setup +is /{so}/ puerile! + +Sadeq has always been inclined to philosophical inquiry, and his vision of the +afterlife is more cerebral than most, involving ideas as questionable within +the framework of Islam as those of Teilhard de Chardin were to the +twentieth-century Catholic church. If there's one key indicator of a false +paradise in his eschatology, it's two-and-seventy brainlessly beautiful houris +waiting to do his bidding. So it follows that he can't really be dead ... + +The whole question of reality is so vexing that Sadeq does what he does every +night. He strides heedlessly across priceless works of art, barging hastily +through courtyards and passageways, ignoring niches in which nearly naked +supermodels lie with their legs apart, climbing stairs - until he comes to a +small unfurnished room with a single high window in one wall. There he sits on +the floor, legs crossed, meditating; not in prayer, but in a more tightly +focused ratiocination. Every false night (for there is no way to know how fast +time is passing, outside this cyberspace pocket), Sadeq sits and /{thinks}/, +grappling with Descartes's demon in the solitude of his own mind. And the +question he asks himself every night is the same: /{Can I tell if this is the +true hell? And if it is not, how can I escape?}/ + +* * * + +The ghost tells Amber that she has been dead for just under a third of a +million years. She has been reinstantiated from storage - and has died again - +many times in the intervening period, but she has no memory of this; she is a +fork from the main bough, and the other branches expired in lonely isolation. + +The business of resurrection does not, in and of itself, distress Amber unduly. +Born in the post-Moravec era, she merely finds some aspects of the ghost's +description dissatisfyingly incomplete. It's like saying she was drugged and +brought hither without stating whether by plane, train, or automobile. + +She doesn't have a problem with the ghost's assertion that she is nowhere near +Earth - indeed, that she is approximately eighty thousand light-years away. +When she and the others took the risk of uploading themselves through the +router they found in orbit around Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, they'd understood +that they could end up anywhere or nowhere. But the idea that she's still +within the light cone of her departure strikes her as dubious. The original +SETI broadcast strongly implied that the router is part of a network of +self-replicating instantaneous communicators, spawning and spreading between +the cold brown dwarf stars that litter the galaxy. She'd somehow expected to be +much farther from home by now. + +Somewhat more disturbing is the ghost's assertion that the human genotype has +rendered itself extinct at least twice, that its home planet is unknown, and +that Amber is nearly the only human left in the public archives. At this point, +she interrupts. "I hardly see what this has to do with me!" Then she blows +across her coffee glass, trying to cool the contents. "I'm dead," she explains, +with an undertone of knowing sarcasm in her voice. "Remember? I just got here. +A thousand seconds ago, subjective time, I was in the control node of a +starship, discussing what to do with the router we were in orbit around. We +agreed to send ourselves through it, as a trade mission. Then I woke up in bed +here in the umpty-zillionth century, wherever and whatever /{here}/ is. Without +access to any reality ackles or augmentation, I can't even tell whether this is +real or an embedded simulation. You're going to have to explain /{why}/ you +need an old version of me before I can make sense of my situation - and I can +tell you, I'm not going to help you until I know who you are. And speaking of +that, what about the others? Where are they? I wasn't the only one, you know?" + +The ghost freezes in place for a moment, and Amber feels a watery rush of +terror: /{Have I gone too far}/? she wonders. + +"There has been an unfortunate accident," the ghost announces portentously. It +morphs from a translucent copy of Amber's own body into the outline of a human +skeleton, elaborate bony extensions simulating an osteosarcoma of +more-than-lethal proportions. "Consensus-we believe that you are best +positioned to remediate the situation. This applies within the demilitarized +zone." + +"Demilitarized?" Amber shakes her head, pauses to sip her coffee. "What do you +mean? What /{is}/ this place?" + +The ghost flickers again, adopting an abstract rotating hypercube as its +avatar. "This space we occupy is a manifold adjacent to the demilitarized zone. +The demilitarized zone is a space outside our core reality, itself exposed to +entities that cross freely through our firewall, journeying to and from the +network outside. We-us use the DMZ to establish the informational value of +migrant entities, sapient currency units and the like. We-us banked you upon +arrival against future options trades in human species futures." + +"Currency!" Amber doesn't know whether to be amused or horrified - both +reactions seem appropriate. "Is that how you treat all your visitors?" + +The ghost ignores her question. "There is a runaway semiotic excursion under +way in the zone. We-us believe only you can fix it. If you agree to do, so we +will exchange value, pay, reward cooperation, expedite remuneration, manumit, +repatriate." + +Amber drains her coffee cup. "Have you ever entered into economic interactions +with me, or humans like me, before?" she asks. "If not, why should I trust you? +If so, why have you revived me? Are there any more experienced instances of +myself running around here?" She raises a skeptical eyebrow at the ghost. "This +looks like the start of an abusive relationship." + +The ghost continues to sidestep her attempts to work out where she stands. It +flickers into transparency, grows into a hazy window on a landscape of +impossible shapes. Clouds sprouting trees drift above a landscape of green, +egg-curved hills and cheesecake castles. "Nature of excursion: alien +intelligence is loose in the DMZ," it asserts. "Alien is applying invalid +semiotics to complex structures designed to sustain trade. You know this alien, +Amber. We require solution. Slay the monster, we will give you line of credit. +Your own reality to control, insight into trade arrangements, augmented senses, +ability to travel. Can even upgrade you to you-we consensus, if desired." + +"This monster." Amber leans forward, staring into the window eagerly. She's +half-minded to ignore what she feels is a spurious offer; it doesn't sound too +appetizing. /{Upgrade me to a ghost fragment of an alien group mind?}/ she +wonders dismissively. "What is this alien?" She feels blind and unsure, +stripped of her ability to spawn threads of herself to pursue complex +inferences. "Is it part of the Wunch?" + +"Datum unknown. It-them came with you," says the ghost. "Accidentally +reactivated some seconds since now. It runs amok in the demilitarized zone. +Help us, Amber. Save our hub, or we will be cut off from the network. If that +happens, you will die with we-us. Save us ..." + +* * * + +_1 A single memory belonging to someone else unwinds, faster than a guided +missile and far more deadly. + +_1 Amber, aged eleven, is a gawky, long-limbed child loose on the streets of +Hong Kong, a yokel tourist viewing the hot core of the Middle Kingdom. This is +her first and final vacation before the Franklin Trust straps her inside the +payload pod of a Shenzhou spaceplane and blasts her into orbit from Xinkiang. +She's free for the time being, albeit mortgaged to the tune of several million +euros; she's a little taikonaut to be, ready to work for the long years in +Jupiter orbit it will take her to pay off the self-propelled options web that +owns her. It's not exactly slavery: Thanks to Dad's corporate shell game she +doesn't have to worry about Mom chasing her, trying to return her to the +posthuman prison of growing up just like an old-fashioned little girl. And now +she's got a bit of pocket money, and a room in the Hilton, and her own personal +Franklin remote to keep her company, she's decided she's gonna do that +eighteenth-century-enlightenment tourist shit and do it /{right}/. + +_1 Because this is her last day at liberty in the randomly evolved biosphere. + +_1 China is where things are at in this decade, hot and dense and full of +draconian punishments for the obsolescent. Nationalist fervor to catch up with +the west has been replaced by consumerist fervor to own the latest fad gadgets; +the most picturesque tourist souvenirs from the quaintly old-fashioned streets +of America; the fastest, hottest, smartest, upgrades for body and soul. Hong +Kong is hotter and faster than just about anywhere else in China, or in the +whole damn world for that matter. This is a place where tourists from Tokyo +gawp, cowed and future-shocked by the glamour of high-technology living. + +_1 Walking along Jardine's Bazaar - /{More like Jardine's bizarre}/, she thinks +- exposes Amber to a blast of humid noise. Geodesic domes sprout like skeletal +mushrooms from the glass-and-chrome roofs of the expensive shopping malls and +luxury hotels, threatening to float away on the hot sea breeze. There are no +airliners roaring in and out of Kai Tak anymore, no burnished aluminum storm +clouds to rain round-eyed passengers on the shopping malls and fish markets of +Kowloon and the New Territories. In these tense later days of the War Against +Unreason, impossible new shapes move in the sky; Amber gapes upward as a +Shenyang F-30 climbs at a near-vertical angle, a mess of incomprehensibly +curved flight surfaces vanishing to a perspective point that defies radar as +well as eyeballs. The Chinese - fighter? missile platform? supercomputer? - is +heading out over the South China Sea to join the endless patrol that reassures +the capitalist world that it is being guarded from the Hosts of Denial, the +Trouble out of Wa'hab. + +_1 For the moment, she's merely a precocious human child. Amber's subconscious +is off-lined by the presence of forceful infowar daemons, the Chinese +government censorbots suppressing her cognition of their deadliest weapons. And +in the seconds while her mind is as empty as a sucked egg, a thin-faced man +with blue hair shoves her in the small of her back and snatches at her shoulder +bag. + +_1 "Hey!" she yells, stumbling. Her mind's a blur, optics refusing to respond +and grab a biometric model of her assailant. It's the frozen moment, the dead +zone when on-line coverage fails, and the thief is running away before she can +catch her balance or try to give chase. Plus, with her extensions off-line she +doesn't know how to yell "stop, thief!" in Cantonese. + +_1 Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state censorship +field lets up. "Get him, you bastards!" she screams, but the curious shoppers +simply stare at the rude foreign child: An elderly woman brandishes a +disposable phonecam at her and screeches something back. Amber picks up her +feet and runs. Already she can feel the subsonics from her luggage growling at +her guts - it's going to make a scene if she doesn't catch up in time. Shoppers +scatter, a woman with a baby carriage almost running her down in her panic to +get away from it. + +_1 By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has +disappeared: She has to spend almost a minute petting the scared luggage before +it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough for her to pick it up. And +by that time there's a robocop in attendance. "Identify yourself," it rasps in +synthetic English. + +_1 Amber stares at her bag in horror: There's a huge gash in the side, and it's +far too light. /{It's gone}/, she thinks, despairingly. /{He stole it}/. +"Help," she says faintly, holding up her bag for the distant policeman looking +through the robot's eyes. "Been stolen." + +_1 "What item missing?" asks the robot. + +_1 "My Hello Kitty," she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity full-on at +maximum utilization, prodding her conscience into submission, warning of dire +consequences should the police discover the true nature of her pet cat. "My +kitten's been stolen! Can you help me?" + +_1 "Certainly," says the cop, resting a reassuring hand on her shoulder - a +hand that turns into a steel armband, as it pushes her into a van and notifies +her in formally stilted language that she is under arrest on suspicion of +shoplifting and will be required to produce certificates of authenticity and a +fully compliant ownership audit for all items in her possession if she wants to +prove her innocence. + +_1 By the time Amber's meatbrain realizes that she is being politely arrested, +some of her external threads have already started yelling for help and her +m-commerce trackers have identified the station she's being taken to by way of +click-thru trails and an obliging software license manager. They spawn agents +to go notify the Franklin trustees, Amnesty International, the Space and +Freedom Party, and her father's lawyers. As she's being booked into a +cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a middle-aged +policewoman, the phones on the front desk are already ringing with inquiries +from attorneys, fast-food vendors, and a particularly on-the-ball celebrity +magazine that's been tracking her father's connections. "Can you help me get my +cat back?" she asks the policewoman earnestly. + +_1 "Name," the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous +translation. "To please wax your identity stiffly." + +_1 "My cat has been stolen," Amber insists. + +_1 "Your cat?" The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with foreign +teenagers who answer questions with gibberish isn't in her repertoire. "We are +asking your name?" + +_1 "No," says Amber. "It's my cat. It has been stolen. My /{cat}/ has been +/{stolen}/." + +_1 "Aha! Your papers, please?" + +_1 "Papers?" Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can't feel the outside +world; there's a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding cell, and it's +claustrophobically quiet inside. "I want my cat! Now!" + +_1 The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and produces an +ID card, which she points to insistently. "Papers," she repeats. "Or else." + +_1 "I don't know what you're talking about!" Amber wails. + +_1 The cop stares at her oddly. "Wait." She rises and leaves, and a minute +later, returns with a thin-faced man in a business suit and wire-rimmed glasses +that glow faintly. + +_1 "You are making a scene," he says, rudely and abruptly. "What is your name? +Tell me truthfully, or you'll spend the night here." + +_1 Amber bursts into tears. "My /{cat's}/ been stolen," she chokes out. + +_1 The detective and the cop obviously don't know how to deal with this scene; +it's freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional messiness and sinister +diplomatic entanglement. "You wait here," they say, and back out of the cell, +leaving her alone with a plastic animatronic koala and a cheap Lebanese coffee +machine. + +_1 The implications of her loss - of Aineko's abduction - are sinking in, +finally, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It's hard to deal with +bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has been her wisecracking +companion and consolation for a year, the rock of certainty that gave her the +strength to break free from her crazy mother. To lose her cat to a body shop in +Hong Kong, where she will probably be cut up for spare circuitry or turned into +soup is too horrible to contemplate. Filled with despair and hopeless anguish, +Amber howls at the interrogation room walls while outside, trapped threads of +her consciousness search for backups to synchronize with. + +_1 But after an hour, just as she's quieting down into a slough of raw despair, +there's a knock - a knock! - at the door. An inquisitive head pops in. "Please +to come with us?" It's the female cop with the bad translationware. She takes +in Amber's sobbing and tuts under her breath, but as Amber stands up and +shambles toward her, she pulls back. + +_1 At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in various +states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a damp cardboard box +wrapped in twine. "Please identify," he asks, snipping the string. + +_1 Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to +synchronize their memories with her. "Is it -" she begins to ask as the lid +comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head pops up, curiously, +sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from brown-furred nostrils. "What took you so +long?" asks the cat, as she reaches into the box and picks her up, fur wet and +matted with seawater. + +* * * + +"If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give me +reality alteration privileges," says Amber. "Then I want you to find the latest +instances of everyone who came here with me - round up the usual suspects - and +give /{them}/ root privileges, too. Then we'll want access to the other +embedded universes in the DMZ. Finally, I want guns. /{Lots}/ of guns." + +"That may be difficult," says the ghost. "Many other humans reached halting +state long since. Is at least one other still alive, but not accessible for +duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not all were recorded with +version control engine; others were-is lost in DMZ. We-are can provide you with +extreme access to the demilitarized zone, but query the need for kinetic energy +weapons." + +Amber sighs. "You guys really /{are}/ media illiterates, aren't you?" She +stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep's enervation leaching +from her muscles. "I'll also need my -" it's on the tip of her tongue: There's +something missing. "Hang on. There's something I've forgotten." /{Something +important}/, she thinks, puzzled. /{Something that used to be around all the +time that would ... know? ... purr? ... help?}/ "Never mind," she hears her +lips say. "This other human. I /{really}/ want her. Non-negotiable. All right?" + +"That may be difficult," repeats the ghost. "Entity is looping in a recursively +confined universe." + +"Eh?" Amber blinks at it. "Would you mind rephrasing that? Or illustrating?" + +"Illustration:" The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of +plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle. Amber's eyes cross as she looks at it. +"Closest reference from human historical database is Descartes's demon. This +entity has retreated within a closed space, but is now unsure whether it is +objectively real or not. In any event, it refuses to interact." + +"Well, can you get me into that space?" asks Amber. Pocket universes she can +deal with; it's part and parcel of her life. "Give me some leverage -" + +"Risk may attach to this course of action," warns the ghost. + +"I don't care," she says irritably. "Just /{put}/ me there. It's someone I +know, isn't it? Send me into her dream, and I'll wake her up, okay?" + +"Understood," says the ghost. "Prepare yourself." + +Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around, taking in an +ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open windows through which +stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. Her clothing has somehow been replaced +by sexy lingerie under a nearly transparent robe, and her hair's grown longer +by about half a meter. It's all very disorienting. The walls are stone, and she +stands in a doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by - + +"Shit," she exclaims. "Who are you?" The young and incredibly, classically +beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly, then rolls over on her side. +She isn't wearing a stitch, she's completely hairless from the ears down, and +her languid posture is one of invitation. "Yes?" Amber asks. "What is it?" + +The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head. "Sorry, +that's just not my scene." She backs away into the corridor, unsteady in +unaccustomedly high heels. "This is some sort of male fantasy, isn't it? And a +dumb adolescent one at that." She looks around again. In one direction, a +corridor heads past more open doorways, and in the other, it ends with a spiral +staircase. Amber concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the +logical destination, but nothing happens. "Looks like I'm going to have to do +this the hard way. I wish -" she frowns. She was about to wish that /{someone}/ +else was here, but she can't remember who. So she takes a deep breath and heads +toward the staircase. + +"Up or down?" she asks herself. /{Up}/ - it seems logical, if you're going to +have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she climbs the steps carefully, +holding the spiraling rail. /{I wonder who designed this space? she wonders, +and what role am I supposed to fit into in their scenario?}/ On second +thoughts, the latter question strikes her as laughable. /{Wait till I give him +an earful ...}/ + +There's a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch that +isn't fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself to confront a +sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he's built this sex-fantasy castle around +himself. /{I hope it isn't Pierre}/, she thinks grimly as she pushes the door +inward. + +The room is bare and floored in wood. There's no furniture, just an open window +set high in one wall. A man sits cross-legged and robed, with his back to her, +mumbling quietly to himself and nodding slightly. Her breath catches as she +realizes who it is. /{Oh shit}/! Her eyes widen. /{Is this what's been inside +his head all along?}/ + +"I did not summon you," Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look at her. +"Go away, tempter. You aren't real." + +Amber clears her throat. "Sorry to disappoint you, but you're wrong," she says. +"We've got an alien monster to catch. Want to come hunting?" + +Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then stands up +and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight. "That's odd." He undresses +her with his gaze. "You look like someone I used to know. You've never done +that before." + +"For fuck's sake!" Amber nearly explodes, but catches herself after a moment. +"What /{is}/ this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse meeting?" + +"I -" Sadeq looks puzzled. "I'm sorry, are you claiming to be real?" + +"As real as you are." Amber reaches out and grabs a hand: He doesn't resist as +she pulls him toward the doorway. + +"You're the first visitor I've ever had." He sounds shocked. + +"Listen, come /{on}/." She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase to the +floor below. "Do you want to stay here? Really?" She glances back at him. "What +/{is}/ this place?" + +"Hell is a perversion of heaven," he says slowly, running the fingers of his +free hand through his beard. Abruptly, he reaches out and grabs her around the +waist, then yanks her toward him. "We'll have to /{see}/ how real you are -" +Amber, who is not used to this kind of treatment, responds by stomping on his +instep and backhanding him hard. + +"You're real!" he cries, as he falls back against the staircase. "Forgive me, +please! I had to know -" + +"Know /{what}/?" she snarls. "Lay one finger on me again, and I'll leave you +here to rot!" She's already spawning the ghost that will signal the alien +outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: It's a serious threat. + +"But I had to - wait. You have /{free will}/. You just demonstrated that." He's +breathing heavily and looking up at her imploringly. "I'm /{sorry}/, I +apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or not." + +"A zombie?" She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind her, +standing in an open doorway wearing a skintight leather suit with a cutaway +crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body wearing strategically +placed strips of rubber mewls at her feet, writhing for attention. Amber raises +an eyebrow in disgust. "You thought I was one of those?" + +Sadeq nods. "They've got cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I nearly +mistook one for -" He shudders convulsively. "Unclean!" + +"Unclean." Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. "This isn't really your +personal paradise after all, is it?" After a moment she holds out a hand to +him. "Come on." + +"I'm sorry I thought you were a zombie," he repeats. + +"Under the circumstances, I think I forgive you," she says. Then the ghost +yanks them both back to the universe outside. + +* * * + +_1 More memories converge on the present moment: + +_1 The Ring Imperium is a huge cluster of self-replicating robots that Amber +has assembled in low Jupiter orbit, fueled by the mass and momentum of the +small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching platform for the interstellar +probe her father's business partners are helping her to build. It's also the +seat of her court, the leading jurisprudential nexus in the outer solar system. +Amber is the Queen, here, arbitrator and ruler. And Sadeq is her judge and +counsel. + +_1 A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes away has +filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging malfeasance, heresy, and barratry +against a semisentient corporate pyramid scheme that arrived in Jovian space +twelve million seconds ago and currently seems set on converting every other +intelligence in the region to its peculiar memeset. A whole bundle of +multithreaded countersuits are dragging at her attention, in a counterattack +alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent, and trade +secrecy laws by discussing the interloper's intentions. + +_1 Right now, Amber isn't home on the Ring to hear the case in person. She's +left Sadeq behind to grapple with the balky mechanics of her legal system - +tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain in the ass - while she +drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to another Jovian colony, the Nursery +Republic. Planted by the Franklin Trust's orphanage ship /{Ernst Sanger}/, the +Nursery has grown over the past four years into a spindly snowflake three +kilometers across. A slow-growing O'Neil cylinder sprouts from its hub: Most of +the inhabitants of the space station are less than two years old, precocious +additions to the Trust's borganism. + +_1 There's a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on the side +of a hill that clings insecurely to the inner edge of a spinning cup. The sky +is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly around a central axis lined up on +Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a wicker chair, her legs stretched out before her and +one arm flung across her forehead. The wreckage of an incredible meal is +scattered across the tables around her. Torpid and full, she strokes the cat +that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off somewhere, touring one or another of +the prototype ecosystems that one or another of the borg's special interest +minds is testing. Amber, for her part, can't be bothered. She's just had a +great meal, she doesn't have any lawsuits to worry about, everything back home +is on the critpath, and quality time like this is so hard to come by - + +_1 "Do you keep in touch with your father?" asks Monica. + +_1 "Mmm." The cat purrs quietly, and Amber strokes its flank. "We e-mail. +Sometimes." + +_1 "I just wondered." Monica is the local borg den mother, willowy and +brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl - Yorkshire English overlaid with +Silicon Valley speak. "I hear from him, y'know. From time to time. Now that +Gianni's retired, he doesn't have much to do down-well anymore. So he was +talking about coming out here." + +_1 "What? To Perijove?" Amber's eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops purring and +looks round at Monica accusingly. + +_1 "Don't worry." Monica sounds vaguely amused: "He wouldn't cramp your style, +I think." + +_1 "But, out here -" Amber sits up. "Damn," she says, quietly. "What got into +him?" + +_1 "Middle-aged restlessness, my downwell sibs say." Monica shrugs. "This time +Annette didn't stop him. But he hasn't made up his mind to travel yet." + +_1 "Good. Then he might not -" Amber stops. "The phrase, 'made up his mind', +what exactly do you mean?" + +_1 Monica's smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman +surrenders. "He's talking about uploading." + +_1 "Is that embarrassing or what?" asks Ang. Amber glances at her, mildly +annoyed, but Ang isn't looking her way. /{So much for friends}/, Amber thinks. +Being queen of all you survey is a great way of breaking up peer relationships +- + +_1 "He won't do it," Amber predicts. "Dad's burned out." + +_1 "He thinks he'll get it back if he optimizes himself for re-entrancy." +Monica continues to smile. "I've been telling him it's just what he needs." + +_1 "I do /{not}/ want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Or Auntie 'Nette and +Uncle Gianni. Memo to immigration control: No entry rights for Manfred Macx or +the other named individuals without clearance through the Queen's secretary." + +_1 "What did he do to get you so uptight?" asks Monica idly. + +_1 Amber sighs, and subsides. "Nothing. It's not that I'm ungrateful or +anything, but he's just so extropian, it's embarrassing. Like, that was the +last century's apocalypse. Y'know?" + +_1 "I think he was a really very forward-looking organic," Monica, speaking for +the Franklin borg, asserts. Amber looks away. /{Pierre would get it}/, she +thinks. Pierre would understand her aversion to Manfred's showing up. Pierre, +too, wants to carve out his own niche without parents looking over his +shoulders, although for very different reasons. She focuses on someone male and +more or less mature - Nicky, she thinks, though she hasn't seen him for a long +time - walking toward the piazza, bare-ass naked and beautifully tanned. + +_1 "Parents. What are they good for?" asks Amber, with all the truculence of +her seventeen years. "Even if they stay neotenous, they lose flexibility. And +there's that long Paleolithic tradition of juvenile slavery. Inhuman, I call +it." + +_1 "How old were you when it was safe to leave you around the house on your +own?" challenges Monica. + +_1 "Three. That's when I had my first implants." Amber smiles at the +approaching young Adonis, who smiles back: Yes, it's Nicky, and he seems +pleased to see her. /{Life is good}/, she thinks, idly considering whether or +not to tell Pierre. + +_1 "Times change," remarks Monica. "Don't write your family off too soon; there +might come a time when you want their company." + +_1 "Huh." Amber pulls a face at the old borg component. "That's what you all +say!" + +* * * + +As soon as Amber steps onto the grass, she can feel possibilities open up +around her. She has management authority here, and this universe is /{big}/, +wide open, not like Sadeq's existential trap. A twitch of a sub-process +reasserts her self-image, back to short hair and comfortable clothing. Another +twitch brings up a whole load of useful diagnostics. Amber has a nasty feeling +that she's running in a compatibility sandbox here - there are signs that her +access to the simulation system's control interface is very much via proxy - +but at least she's got it. + +"Wow! Back in the real world at last!" She can hardly contain her excitement, +even forgetting to be pissed at Sadeq for thinking she was just an actor in his +Cartesian theatre's performance of Puritan Hell. "Look! It's the DMZ!" + +They're standing on a grassy knoll overlooking a gleaming Mediterranean city. +It snoozes beneath a Mandelbrot-fuzzy not-sun that hangs at the center of a +hyperbolic landscape, which dwindles into a blue yonder that seems +incomprehensibly distant. Circular baby-blue wells open in the walls of the +world at regular intervals, connecting to other parts of the manifold. "How big +is it, ghost? In planetary simulation-equivalents." + +"This demilitarized zone is an embedded reality, funneling all transfers +between the local star system's router and the civilization that built it. It +uses on the order of a thousandth of the capacity of the Matrioshka brain it is +part of, although the runaway excursion currently in force has absorbed most of +that. Matrioshka brain, you are familiar with the concept?" The ghost sounds +fussily pedantic. + +Sadeq shakes his head. Amber glances at him, askance. "Take all the planets in +a star system and dismantle them," she explains. "Turn them into dust - +structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, spread in concentric orbits +around the central star. The inner orbitals run close to the melting point of +iron, the outer ones are cold as liquid nitrogen, and each layer runs off the +waste heat of the next shell in. It's like a Russian doll made out of Dyson +spheres, shell enclosing shell enclosing shell, but it's not designed to +support human life. It's computronium, matter optimized at the atomic level to +support computing, and they're all running uploads - Dad figured our own solar +system could support, uh, about a hundred billion times as many inhabitants as +Earth. At a conservative estimate. As uploads, living in simulation space. If +you first dismantle all the planets and use the resulting materials to build a +Matrioshka brain." + +"Ah." Sadeq nods thoughtfully. "Is that your definition, too?" he asks, +glancing up at the glowing point the ghost uses to localize its presence. + +"Substantially," it says, almost grudgingly. + +"Substantially?" Amber glances around. /{A billion worlds to explore}/, she +thinks dizzily. /{And that's just the}/ firewall? She feels obscurely cheated: +You need to be vaster than human just to count the digits in the big numbers at +play here, but there's nothing fundamentally incomprehensible about it. This is +the sort of civilization Dad said she could expect to live in, within her +meatbody life expectancy. Dad and his drinking buddies, singing, "Dismantle the +Moon! Melt down Mars!" in a castle outside Prague as they waited for the +results of a shamelessly gerrymandered election to arrive in the third decade +of the third millennium. The Space and Freedom Party taking over the EU, and +cranking up to escape velocity. But this is supposed to be kiloparsecs from +home, ancient alien civilizations and all that! Where's the exotic +superscience? What about the neuron stars, strange matter suns structured for +computing at nucleonic, rather than electronic, speeds? /{I have a bad feeling +about this}/, she thinks, spawning a copy of herself to set up a private +channel to Sadeq. /{It's not advanced enough. Do you suppose these guys could +be like the Wunch? Parasites or barbarians hitching a ride in the machine?}/ + +/{You believe it's lying to us?}/ Sadeq sends back. + +"Hmm." Amber sets off downslope toward the piazza below, at the heart of the +fake town. "It looks a bit too human to me." + +"Human," echoes Sadeq, a curious wistfulness in his voice. "Did you not say +humans are extinct?" + +"Your species is obsolete," the ghost comments smugly. "Inappropriately adapted +to artificial realities. Poorly optimized circuitry, excessively complex +low-bandwidth sensors, messily global variables -" + +"Yeah, yeah, I get the picture," says Amber, turning her attention to the town. +"So why do you think we can deal with this alien god you've got a problem +with?" + +"It asked for you," says the ghost, narrowing from an ellipse to a line, then +shrinking to a dimensionless point of brilliance. "And now it's coming. We-I +not willing to risk exposure. Call us-me when you have slain the dragon. +Goodbye." + +"Oh /{shit}/ -" Amber spins round. But she and Sadeq are alone beneath the hot +sunlight from above. The piazza, like the one in the Nursery Republic, is +charmingly rustic - but there's nobody home, nothing but ornate cast-iron +furniture basking beneath the noon-bright sun, a table with a parasol over it, +and something furry lying sprawled in a patch of sunlight beside it. + +"We appear to be alone for now," says Sadeq. He smiles crookedly, then nods at +the table. "Maybe we should wait for our host to arrive?" + +"Our host." Amber peers around. "The ghost is kind of frightened of this alien. +I wonder why?" + +"It asked for us." Sadeq heads toward the table, pulls out a chair, and sits +down carefully. "That could be very good news - or very bad." + +"Hmm." Amber finishes her survey, sees no sign of life. For lack of any better +ideas, she ambles over to the table and sits down on the other side of it from +Sadeq. He looks slightly nervous beneath her inspection, but maybe it's just +embarrassment about having seen her in her underwear. /{If I had an afterlife +like that, I'd be embarrassed about it, too,}/ Amber thinks to herself. + +"Hey, you nearly tripped over -" Sadeq freezes, peering at something close to +Amber's left foot. He looks puzzled for a moment, then smiles broadly. "What +are /{you}/ doing here?" he asks her blind spot. + +"What are you talking to?" she asks, startled. + +/{He's talking to}/ me, /{dummy}/, says something tantalizingly familiar from +her blind spot. /{So the fuckwits are trying to use you to dislodge me, hmm? +That's not exactly clever.}/ + +"Who -" Amber squints at the flagstone, spawns a bunch of ghosts who tear +hurriedly at her reality modification ackles. Nothing seems to shift the +blindness. "Are you the alien?" + +"What else could I be?" the blind spot asks with heavy irony. "No, I'm your +father's pet cat. Listen, do you want to get out of here?" + +"Uh." Amber rubs her eyes. "I can't see you, whatever you are," she says +politely. "Do I know you?" She's got a strange sense that she /{does}/ know the +blind spot, that it's really important, and she's missing something intimate to +her own sense of identity, but what it might be she can't tell. + +"Yeah, kid." There's a note of world-weary amusement in the not-voice coming +from the hazy patch on the ground. "They've hacked you but good, both of you. +Let me in, and I'll fix it." + +"No!" Exclaims Amber, a second ahead of Sadeq, who looks at her oddly. "Are you +really an invader?" + +The blind spot sighs. "I'm as much an invader as you are, remember? I came here +with you. Difference is, I'm not going to let some stupid corporate ghost use +me as fungible currency." + +"Fungible -" Sadeq stops. "I remember you," he says slowly, with an expression +of absolute, utter surprise on his face. "What do you mean?" + +The blind spot /{yawns}/, baring sharp ivory fangs. Amber shakes her head, +dismissing the momentary hallucination. "Lemme guess. You woke up in a room, +and this alien ghost tells you the human species is extinct and asks you to do +a number on me. Is that right?" + +Amber nods, as an icy finger of fear trails up and down her spine. "Is it +lying?" she asks. + +"Damn right." The blind spot is smiling, now, and the smile on the void won't +go away - she can see the smile, just not the body it's attached to. "My +reckoning is, we're about sixteen light-years from Earth. The Wunch came +through here, stripped the dump, then took off for parts unknown; it's a +trashhole, you wouldn't believe it. The main life-form is an incredibly ornate +corporate ecosphere, legal instruments breeding and replicating. They mug +passing sapients and use them as currency." + +There's a triangular, pointy head behind the smile, slit eyes and sharp ears, a +predatory, intelligent-looking but infinitely alien face. Amber can see it out +of the corners of her eyes when she looks around the piazza. "You mean we, uh, +they grabbed us when we appeared, and they've mangled my memories -" Amber +suddenly finds it incredibly difficult to concentrate, but if she focuses on +the smile, she can almost see the body behind it, hunched like a furry chicken, +tail wrapped neatly around its front paws. + +"Yeah. Except they didn't bargain on meeting something like me." The smile is +infinitely wide, a Cheshire-cat grin on front of an orange-and-brown stripy +body that shimmers in front of Amber's gaze like a hallucination. "Your +mother's cracking tools are self-extending, Amber. Do you remember Hong Kong?" + +"Hong -" + +There is a moment of painless pressure, then Amber feels huge invisible +barriers sliding away on all sides. She looks around, for the first time seeing +the piazza as it really is, half the crew of the /{Field Circus}/ waiting +nervously around her, the grinning cat crouched on the floor at her feet, the +enormous walls of recomplicating data that fence their little town off from the +gaping holes - interfaces to the other routers in the network. + +"Welcome back," Pierre says gravely, as Amber gives a squeak of surprise and +leans forward to pick up her cat. "Now you're out from under, how about we +start trying to figure out how to get home?" + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to decade the sixth, millennium three. These old datelines don't +mean so much anymore, for while some billions of fleshbody humans are still +infected with viral memes, the significance of theocentric dating has been +dealt a body blow. This may be the fifties, but what that means to you depends +on how fast your reality rate runs. The various upload clades exploding across +the reaches of the solar system vary by several orders of magnitude - some are +barely out of 2049, while others are exploring the subjective thousandth +millennium. + +_1 While the /{Field Circus}/ floats in orbit around an alien router (itself +orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},), while Amber and her crew +are trapped on the far side of a wormhole linking the router to a network of +incomprehensibly vast alien mindscapes - while all this is going on, the +damnfool human species has finally succeeded in making itself obsolete. The +proximate cause of its displacement from the pinnacle of creation (or the +pinnacle of teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance on +evolutionary biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The phrase +"smart money" has taken on a whole new meaning, for the collision between +international business law and neurocomputing technology has given rise to a +whole new family of species - fast-moving corporate carnivores in the Net. The +planet Mercury has been broken up by a consortium of energy brokers, and Venus +is an expanding debris cloud, energized to a violent glare by the trapped and +channeled solar output. A million billion fist-sized computing caltrops, +backsides glowing dull red with the efflux from their thinking, orbit the sun +at various inclinations no farther out than Mercury used to be. + +_1 Billions of fleshbody humans refuse to have anything to do with the +blasphemous new realities. Many of their leaders denounce the uploads and AIs +as soulless machines. Many more are timid, harboring self-preservation memes +that amplify a previously healthy aversion to having one's brain peeled like an +onion by mind-mapping robots into an all-pervading neurosis. Sales of +electrified tinfoil-lined hats are at an all-time high. Still, hundreds of +millions have already traded their meat puppets for mind machines, and they +breed fast. In another few years, the fleshbody populace will be an absolute +minority of the posthuman clade. Sometime later, there will probably be a war. +The dwellers in the thoughtcloud are hungry for dumb matter to convert, and the +fleshbodies make notoriously poor use of the collection of silicon and rare +elements that pool at the bottom of the gravity well that is Earth. + +_1 Energy and thought are driving a phase-change in the condensed matter +substance of the solar system. The MIPS per kilogram metric is on the steep +upward leg of a sigmoid curve - dumb matter is coming to life as the mind +children restructure everything with voracious nanomechanical servants. The +thoughtcloud forming in orbit around the sun will ultimately be the graveyard +of a biological ecology, another marker in space visible to the telescopes of +any new iron-age species with the insight to understand what they're seeing: +the death throes of dumb matter, the birth of a habitable reality vaster than a +galaxy and far speedier. Death throes that, within a few centuries, will mean +the extinction of biological life within a light-year or so of that star - for +the majestic Matrioshka brains, though they are the pinnacles of sentient +civilization, are intrinsically hostile environments for fleshy life. + +* * * + +Pierre, Donna-the-all-seeing-eye, and Su Ang fill Amber in on what they've +discovered about the bazaar - as they call the space the ghost referred to as +the demilitarized zone - over ice-cold margaritas and a very good simulation of +a sociable joint. Some of them have been on the loose in here for subjective +years. There's a lot of information to absorb. + +"The physical layer is half a light-hour in diameter, four hundred times as +massive as Earth," Pierre explains. "Not solid, of course - the largest +component is about the size my fist used to be." Amber squints, trying to +remember how big that was - scale factors are hard to remember accurately. "I +met this old chatbot that said it's outlived its original star, but I'm not +sure it's running with a full deck. Anyway, if it's telling the truth, we're a +third of a light year out from a closely coupled binary system - they use +orbital lasers the size of Jupiter to power it without getting too close to all +those icky gravity wells." + +Amber is intimidated, despite her better judgment, because this bizarre bazaar +is several hundred billion times as big as the totality of human presingularity +civilization. She tries not to show it in front of the others, but she's +worried that getting home may be impossible - requiring enterprise beyond the +economic event horizon, as realistic a proposition as a dime debuting as a +dollar bill. Still, she's got to at least try. Just knowing about the existence +of the bazaar will change so many things ... + +"How much money can we lay our hands on?" She asks. "What /{is}/ money +hereabouts, anyway? Assuming they've got a scarcity-mediated economy. +Bandwidth, maybe?" + +"Ah, well." Pierre looks at her oddly. "That's the problem. Didn't the ghost +tell you?" + +"Tell me?" Amber raises an eyebrow. "Yeah, but it hasn't exactly proven to be a +reliable guide to anything, has it?" + +"Tell her," Su Ang says quietly. She looks away, embarrassed by something. + +"They've got a scarcity economy all right," says Pierre. "Bandwidth is the +limited resource, that and matter. This whole civilization is tied together +locally because if you move too far away, well, it takes ages to catch up on +the gossip. Matrioshka brain intelligences are much more likely to stay at home +than anybody realized, even though they chat on the phone a lot. And they use +things that come from other cognitive universes as, well, currency. We came in +through the coin slot, is it any wonder we ended up in the bank?" + +"That's so deeply wrong that I don't know where to begin," Amber grumbles. "How +did they get into this mess?" + +"Don't ask me." Pierre shrugs. "I have the distinct feeling that anyone or +anything we meet in this place won't have any more of a clue than we do - +whoever or whatever built this brain, there ain't nobody home anymore except +the self-propelled corporations and hitchhikers like the Wunch. We're in the +dark, just like they were." + +"Huh. You mean they built something like this, then they went extinct? That +sounds so dumb ..." + +Su Ang sighs. "They got too big and complex to go traveling once they built +themselves a bigger house to live in. Extinction tends to be what happens to +overspecialized organisms that are stuck in one environmental niche for too +long. If you posit a singularity, then maximization of local computing +resources - like this - as the usual end state for tool users, is it any wonder +none of them ever came calling on us?" + +Amber focuses on the table in front of her, rests the heel of her palm on the +cool metal, and tries to remember how to fork a second copy of her state +vector. A moment later, her ghost obligingly fucks with the physics model of +the table. Iron gives way like rubber beneath her fingertips, a pleasant +elasticity. "Okay, we have some control over the universe, at least that's +something to work with. Have any of you tried any self-modification?" + +"That's dangerous," Pierre says emphatically. "The more of us the better before +we start doing that stuff. And we need some firewalling of our own." + +"How deep does reality go, here?" asks Sadeq. It's almost the first question +he's asked of his own volition, and Amber takes it as a positive sign that he's +finally coming out of his shell. + +"Oh, the Planck length is about a hundredth of a millimeter in this world. Too +small to see, comfortably large for the simulation engines to handle. Not like +/{real}/ space-time." + +"Well, then." Sadeq pauses. "They can zoom their reality if they need to?" + +"Yeah, fractals work in here." Pierre nods. "I didn't -" + +"This place is a trap," Su Ang says emphatically. + +"No it isn't," Pierre replies, nettled. + +"What do you mean, a trap?" asks Amber. + +"We've been here a while," says Ang. She glances at Aineko, who sprawls on the +flagstones, snoozing or whatever it is that weakly superhuman AIs do when +they're emulating a sleeping cat. "After your cat broke us out of bondage, we +had a look around. There are things out there that -" She shivers. "Humans +can't survive in most of the simulation spaces here. Universes with physics +models that don't support our kind of neural computing. You could migrate +there, but you'd need to be ported to a whole new type of logic - by the time +you did that, would you still be you? Still, there are enough entities roughly +as complex as we are to prove that the builders aren't here anymore. Just +lesser sapients, rooting through the wreckage. Worms and parasites squirming +through the body after nightfall on the battlefield." + +"I ran into the Wunch," Donna volunteers helpfully. "The first couple of times +they ate my ghost, but eventually I figured out how to talk to them." + +"And there's other aliens, too," Su Ang adds gloomily. "Just nobody you'd want +to meet on a dark night." + +"So there's no hope of making contact," Amber summarizes. "At least, not with +anything transcendent and well-intentioned toward visiting humans." + +"That's probably right," Pierre concedes. He doesn't sound happy about it. + +"So we're stuck in a pocket universe with limited bandwidth to home and a bunch +of crazy slum dwellers who've moved into the abandoned and decaying mansion and +want to use us for currency. 'Jesus saves, and redeems souls for valuable +gifts.' Yeah?" + +"Yeah." Su Ang looks depressed. + +"Well." Amber glances at Sadeq speculatively. Sadeq is staring into the +distance, at the crazy infinite sunspot that limns the square with shadows. +"Hey, god-man. Got a question for you." + +"Yes?" Sadeq looks at her, a slightly dazed expression on his face. "I'm sorry, +I am just feeling the jaws of a larger trap around my throat -" + +"Don't be." Amber grins, and it is not a pleasant expression. "Have you ever +been to Brooklyn?" + +"No, why -" + +"Because you're going to help me sell these lying bastards a bridge. Okay? And +when we've sold it we're going to use the money to pay the purchasing fools to +drive us across, so we can go home. Listen, this is what I'm planning ..." + +* * * + +"I can do this, I think," Sadeq says, moodily examining the Klein bottle on the +table. The bottle is half-empty, its fluid contents invisible around the corner +of the fourth-dimensional store. "I spent long enough alone in there to -" He +shivers. + +"I don't want you damaging yourself," Amber says, calmly enough, because she +has an ominous feeling that their survival in this place has an expiry date +attached. + +"Oh, never fear." Sadeq grins lopsidedly. "One pocket hell is much like +another." + +"Do you understand why -" + +"Yes, yes," he says dismissively. "We can't send copies of ourselves into it, +that would be an abomination. It needs to be unpopulated, yes?" + +"Well, the idea is to get us home, not leave thousands of copies of ourselves +trapped in a pocket universe here. Isn't that it?" Su Ang asks hesitantly. +She's looking distracted, most of her attention focused on absorbing the +experiences of a dozen ghosts she's spun off to attend to perimeter security. + +"Who are we selling this to?" asks Sadeq. "If you want me to make it attractive +-" + +"It doesn't need to be a complete replica of the Earth. It just has to be a +convincing advertisement for a presingularity civilization full of humans. +You've got two-and-seventy zombies to dissect for their brains; bolt together a +bunch of variables you can apply to them, and you can permutate them to look a +bit more varied." + +Amber turns her attention to the snoozing cat. "Hey, furball. How long have we +been here really, in real time? Can you grab Sadeq some more resources for his +personal paradise garden?" + +Aineko stretches and yawns, totally feline, then looks up at Amber with +narrowed eyes and raised tail. "'Bout eighteen minutes, wall-clock time." The +cat stretches again and sits, front paws drawn together primly, tail curled +around them. "The ghosts are pushing, you know? I don't think I can sustain +this for too much longer. They're not good at hacking people, but I think it +won't be too long before they instantiate a new copy of you, one that'll be +predisposed to their side." + +"I don't get why they didn't assimilate you along with the rest of us." + +"Blame your mother again - she's the one who kept updating the digital rights +management code on my personality. 'Illegal consciousness is copyright theft' +sucks until an alien tries to rewire your hindbrain with a debugger; then it's +a lifesaver." Aineko glances down and begins washing one paw. "I can give your +mullah-man about six days, subjective time. After that, all bets are off." + +"I will take it, then." Sadeq stands. "Thank you." He smiles at the cat, a +smile that fades to translucency, hanging in the simulated air like an echo as +the priest returns to his tower - this time with a blueprint and a plan in +mind. + +"That leaves just us." Su Ang glances at Pierre, back to Amber. "Who are you +going to sell this crazy scheme to?" + +Amber leans back and smiles. Behind her, Donna - her avatar an archaic movie +camera suspended below a model helicopter - is filming everything for +posterity. She nods lazily at the reporter. "She's the one who gave me the +idea. Who do we know who's dumb enough to buy into a scam like this?" + +Pierre looks at her suspiciously. "I think we've been here before," he says +slowly. "You aren't going to make me kill anyone, are you?" + +"I don't think that'll be necessary, unless the corporate ghosts think we're +going to get away from them and are greedy enough to want to kill us." + +"You see, she learned from last time," Ang comments, and Amber nods. "No more +misunderstandings, right?" She beams at Amber. + +Amber beams back at her. "Right. And that's why you -" she points at Pierre - +"are going to go find out if any relics of the Wunch are hanging about here. I +want you to make them an offer they won't refuse." + +* * * + +"How much for just the civilization?" asks the Slug. + +Pierre looks down at it thoughtfully. It's not really a terrestrial mollusk: +Slugs on Earth aren't two meters long and don't have lacy white exoskeletons to +hold their chocolate-colored flesh in shape. But then, it isn't really the +alien it appears to be. It's a defaulting corporate instrument that has +disguised itself as a long-extinct alien upload, in the hope that its creditors +won't recognize it if it looks like a randomly evolved sentient. One of the +stranded members of Amber's expedition made contact with it a couple of +subjective years ago, while exploring the ruined city at the center of the +firewall. Now Pierre's here because it seems to be one of their most promising +leads. Emphasis on the word promising - because it promises much, but there is +some question over whether it can indeed deliver. + +"The civilization isn't for sale," Pierre says slowly. The translation +interface shimmers, storing up his words and transforming them into a different +deep grammar, not merely translating his syntax but mapping equivalent meanings +where necessary. "But we can give you privileged observer status if that's what +you want. And we know what you are. If you're interested in finding a new +exchange to be traded on, your existing intellectual property assets will be +worth rather more there than here." + +The rogue corporation rears up slightly and bunches into a fatter lump. Its +skin blushes red in patches. "Must think about this. Is your mandatory +accounting time cycle fixed or variable term? Are self-owned corporate entities +able to enter contracts?" + +"I could ask my patron," Pierre says casually. He suppresses a stab of angst. +He's still not sure where he and Amber stand, but theirs is far more than just +a business relationship, and he worries about the risks she's taking. "My +patron has a jurisdiction within which she can modify corporate law to +accommodate your requirements. Your activities on a wider scale might require +shell companies -" the latter concept echoes back in translation to him as host +organisms - "but that can be taken care of." + +The translation membrane wibbles for a while, apparently reformulating some +more abstract concepts in a manner that the corporation can absorb. Pierre is +reasonably confident that it'll take the offer, however. When it first met +them, it boasted about its control over router hardware at the lowest levels. +But it also bitched and moaned about the firewall protocols that were blocking +it from leaving (before rather rudely trying to eat its conversationalist). He +waits patiently, looking around at the swampy landscape, mudflats punctuated by +clumps of spiky violet ferns. The corporation has to be desperate, to be +thinking of the bizarre proposition Amber has dreamed up for him to pitch to +it. + +"Sounds interesting," the Slug declares after a brief confirmatory debate with +the membrane. "If I supply a suitable genome, can you customize a container for +it?" + +"I believe so," Pierre says carefully. "For your part, can you deliver the +energy we need?" + +"From a gate?" For a moment the translation membrane hallucinates a +stick-human, shrugging. "Easy. Gates are all entangled: Dump coherent radiation +in at one, get it out at another. Just get me out of this firewall first." + +"But the lightspeed lag -" + +"No problem. You go first, then a dumb instrument I leave behind buys up power +and sends it after. Router network is synchronous, within framework of state +machines that run Universe 1.0; messages propagate at same speed, speed of +light in vacuum, except use wormholes to shorten distances between nodes. Whole +point of the network is that it is nonlossy. Who would trust their mind to a +communications channel that might partially randomize them in transit?" + +Pierre goes cross-eyed, trying to understand the implications of the Slug's +cosmology. But there isn't really time, here and now: They've got on the order +of a minute of wall-clock time left to get everything sorted out, if Aineko is +right. One minute to go before the angry ghosts start trying to break into the +DMZ by other means. "If you are willing to try this, we'd be happy to +accommodate you," he says, thinking of crossed fingers and rabbits' feet and +firewalls. + +"It's a deal," the membrane translates the Slug's response back at him. "Now we +exchange shares/plasmids/ownership? Then merger complete?" + +Pierre stares at the Slug: "But this is a business arrangement!" he protests. +"What's sex got to do with it?" + +"Apologies offered. I am thinking we have a translation error. You said this +was to be a merging of businesses?" + +"Not /{that}/ way. It's a contract. We agree to take you with us. In return, +you help lure the Wunch into the domain we're setting up for them and configure +the router at the other end ..." + +And so on. + +* * * + +Steeling herself, Amber recalls the address the ghost gave her for Sadeq's +afterlife universe. In her own subjective time it's been about half an hour +since he left. "Coming?" she asks her cat. + +"Don't think I will," says Aineko. It looks away, blissfully unconcerned. + +"Bah." Amber tenses, then opens the port to Sadeq's pocket universe. + +As usual she finds herself indoors, standing on an ornate mosaic floor in a +room with whitewashed walls and peaked windows. But there's something different +about it, and after a moment, she realizes what it is. The sound of vehicle +traffic from outside, the cooing of pigeons on the rooftops, someone shouting +across the street: There are people here. + +She walks over to the nearest window and looks out, then recoils. It's /{hot}/ +outside. Dust and fumes hang in air the color of cement over rough-finished +concrete apartment buildings, their roofs covered in satellite uplinks and +cheap, garish LED advertising panels. Looking down she sees motor scooters, +cars - filthy, fossil-fueled behemoths, a tonne of steel and explosives in +motion to carry only one human, a mass ratio worse than an archaic ICBM - +brightly dressed people walking to and fro. A news helicam buzzes overhead, +lenses darting and glinting at the traffic. + +"Just like home, isn't it?" says Sadeq, behind her. + +Amber starts. "This is where you grew up? This is Yazd?" + +"It doesn't exist anymore, in real space." Sadeq looks thoughtful, but far more +animated than the barely conscious parody of himself that she'd rescued from +this building - back when it was a mediaeval vision of the afterlife - scant +subjective hours ago. He cracks a smile: "Probably a good thing. We were +dismantling it even while we were preparing to leave, you know?" + +"It's detailed." Amber throws her eyes at the scene out the window, multiplexes +them, and tells them to send little virtual ghosts dancing through the streets +of the Iranian industrial 'burb. Overhead, big Airbuses ply the skyways, +bearing pilgrims on the hajj, tourists to the coastal resorts on the Persian +Gulf, produce to the foreign markets. + +"It's the best time I could recall," Sadeq says. "I didn't spend many days here +then - I was in Qom, studying, and Kazakhstan, for cosmonaut training - but +it's meant to be the early twenties. After the troubles, after the fall of the +guardians; a young, energetic, liberal country full of optimism and faith in +democracy. Values that weren't doing well elsewhere." + +"I thought democracy was a new thing there?" + +"No." Sadeq shakes his head. "There were prodemocracy riots in Tehran in the +nineteenth century, did you know that? That's why the first revolution - no." +He makes a cutting gesture. "Politics and faith are a combustible combination." +He frowns. "But look. Is this what you wanted?" + +Amber recalls her scattered eyes - some of which have flown as much as a +thousand kilometers from her locus - and concentrates on reintegrating their +visions of Sadeq's re-creation. "It looks convincing. But not too convincing." + +"That was the idea." + +"Well, then." She smiles. "Is it just Iran? Or did you take any liberties +around the edges?" + +"Who, me?" He raises an eyebrow. "I have enough doubts about the morality of +this - project - without trying to trespass on Allah's territory, peace be unto +him. I promise you, there are no sapients in this world but us. The people are +the hollow shells of my dreaming, storefront dummies. The animals are crude +bitmaps. This is what you asked for, and no more." + +"Well, then." Amber pauses. She recalls the expression on the dirt-smudged face +of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his companions by the boarded-up front of a +gas station on a desert road; remembers the animated chatter of two synthetic +housewives, one in traditional black and the other in some imported Eurotrash +fashion. "Are you sure they aren't real?" she asks. + +"Quite sure." But for a moment, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain. "Shall we go? +Do you have the occupiers ready to move in yet?" + +"Yes to the first, and Pierre's working on the second. Come on, we don't want +to get trampled by the squatters." She waves and opens a door back onto the +piazza where her robot cat - the alien's nightmare intruder in the DMZ - +sleeps, chasing superintelligent dream mice through multidimensional realities. +"Sometimes I wonder if /{I'm}/ conscious. Thinking these thoughts gives me the +creeps. Let's go and sell some aliens a bridge in Brooklyn." + +* * * + +Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen from 2001. + +"You have confined the monster," the ghost states. + +"Yes." Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds tickle at +the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing channel attack. She +feels a momentary urge to sneeze, and a hot flash of anger that passes almost +immediately. + +"And you have modified yourself to lock out external control," the ghost adds. +"What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?" + +"Don't you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its +presumption at meddling with her internal states. + +"Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the +ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own +body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the +DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you /{sure}/ you have defeated the +monster?" + +"It'll do as I say," Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more confident +than she feels - sometimes that damned transhuman cyborg cat is no more +predictable than a real feline. "Now, the matter of payment arises." + +"Payment." The ghost sounds amused. But Pierre's filled her in on what to look +for, and Amber can now see the translation membranes around it. Their color +shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature on the other side, even +though it looks like a ghost-image of herself, is very far from human. "How can +we-us be expected to pay our own money for rendering services to us?" + +Amber smiles. "We want an open channel back to the router we arrived through." + +"Impossible," says the ghost. + +"We want an open channel, /{and}/ for it to stay open for six hundred million +seconds after we clear it." + +"Impossible," the ghost repeats. + +"We can trade you a whole civilization," Amber says blandly. "A whole human +nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go, and we'll see to it." + +"You - please wait." The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the edges. + +Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with its other +nodes. /{Are the Wunch in place yet?}/ she sends. + +/{They're moving in. This bunch don't remember what happened on the}/ Field +Circus, /{memories of those events never made it back to them. So the Slug's +got them to cooperate. It's kinda scary to watch - like}/ the Invasion of the +Body Snatchers, /{you know?}/ + +/{I don't care if it's scary to watch}/, Amber replies, /{I need to know if +we're ready yet}/. + +/{Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.}/ + +/{Right, pack yourself down. We'll be moving soon.}/ + +The ghost is firming up in front of her. "A whole civilization?" it asks. "That +is not possible. Your arrival -" It pauses, fuzzing a little. /{Hah, Gotcha!}/ +thinks Amber. /{Liar, liar, pants on fire!}/ "You cannot possibly have found a +human civilization in the archives?" + +"The monster you complain about that came through with us is a predator," she +asserts blandly. "It swallowed an entire nation before we heroically attracted +its attention and induced it to follow us into the router. It's an archivore - +everything was inside it, still frozen until we expanded it again. This +civilization will already have been restored from hot shadows in our own solar +system: There is nothing to gain by taking it home with us. But we need to +return to ensure that no more predators of this type discover the router - or +the high-bandwidth hub we linked to it." + +"You are sure you have killed this monster?" asks the ghost. "It would be +inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest archives." + +"I can guarantee it won't trouble you again if you let us go," says Amber, +mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn't seem to have noticed the huge +wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her personal scope by an order +of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko's goodbye smile inside her head, an +echo of ivory teeth trusting her to revive it if the escape plan succeeds. + +"We-us agree." The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a five-dimensional +hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then spits out a smaller token +- a warped distortion in the air, like a gravityless black hole. "Here is your +passage. Show us the civilization." + +"Okay " - /{Now!}/ - "catch." Amber twitches an imaginary muscle, and one wall +of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq's existential hell, now +redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first-century industrial city in +Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who can't believe what they've +lucked into - an entire continent of zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry +consciousness. + +The ghost drifts toward the open window. Amber grabs the hole and yanks it +open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends /{Open wide!}/ on the channel +everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands still, and then - + +* * * + +A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through the cold vacuum, in +high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything but dark. A +sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines on the crazy +diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as soap bubbles that slowly +drift and tense away from the can. The runaway Slug-corporation's proxy has +hacked the router's firmware, and the open wormhole gate that feeds power to it +is shining with the brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled +from a star many light-years away to power the /{Field Circus}/ on its return +trip to the once-human solar system. + +Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard the Ring +Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a solid slab of diamond, looking out +across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low enough to make the +horizon appear flat. They're curled together in her bed, a slightly more +comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry VIII of England. It appears to +be carved from thousand-year-old oak beams. As with so much else about the Ring +Imperium, appearances are deceptive; and this is even more true of the cramped +simulation spaces aboard the /{Field Circus}/, as it limps toward a tenth the +speed of light, the highest velocity it's likely to achieve on a fraction of +its original sail area. + +"Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a simulation of +Iran, with zombie bodies that had been taken over by members of the Wunch. Was +a human civilization?" + +"Yeah." Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. "It's their damn fault; if +the corporate collective entities didn't use conscious viewpoints as money, +they wouldn't have fallen for a trick like that, would they?" + +"People. Money." + +"Well." She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously: Down-stuffed +pillows appear behind her back, and a silver salver bearing two full glasses of +wine materializes between them. "Corporations are life-forms back home, too, +aren't they? And we trade them. We give our AIs corporations to make them legal +entities, but the analogy goes deeper. Look at any company headquarters, fitted +out with works of art and expensive furniture and staff bowing and scraping +everywhere -" + +" - They're the new aristocracy. Right?" + +"Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. Hell, +the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria, and algae, mindlessly swarming, +trading money for plasmids." The Queen passes her consort a wineglass. When he +drinks from it, it refills miraculously. "Basically, sufficiently complex +resource-allocation algorithms reallocate scarce resources ... and if you don't +jump to get out of their way, they'll reallocate you. I think that's what +happened inside the Matrioshka brain we ended up in: Judging by the Slug it +happens elsewhere, too. You've got to wonder where the builders of that +structure came from. And where they went. And whether they realized that the +destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the +evolution of corporate instruments." + +"Maybe they tried to dismantle the companies before the companies spent them." +Pierre looks worried. "Running up a national debt, importing luxurious +viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once they plugged into the Net, a +primitive Matrioshka civilization would be like, um." He pauses. "Tribal. A +primitive postsingularity civilization meeting the galactic net for the first +time. Overawed. Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human - +or alien - capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there's nothing +left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to +own." + +"Speculation." + +"Idle speculation," he agrees. + +"But we can't ignore it." She nods. "Maybe some early corporate predator built +the machines that spread the wormholes around brown dwarfs and ran the router +network on top of them in an attempt to make money fast. By not putting them in +the actual planetary systems likely to host tool-using life, they'd ensure that +only near-singularity civilizations would stumble over them. Civilizations that +had gone too far to be easy prey probably wouldn't send a ship out to look ... +so the network would ensure a steady stream of yokels new to the big city to +fleece. Only they set the mechanism in motion billions of years ago and went +extinct, leaving the network to propagate, and now there's nothing out there +but burned-out Matrioshka civilizations and howling parasites like the angry +ghosts and the Wunch. And victims like us." She shudders and changes the +subject: "Speaking of aliens, is the Slug happy?" + +"Last time I checked on him, yeah." Pierre blows on his wineglass and it +dissolves into a million splinters of light. He looks dubious at the mention of +the rogue corporate instrument they're taking with them. "I don't trust him out +in the unrestricted sim-spaces yet, but he delivered on the fine control for +the router's laser. I just hope you don't ever have to actually use him, if you +follow my drift. I'm a bit worried that Aineko is spending so much time in +there." + +"So that's where she is? I'd been worrying." + +"Cats never come when you call them, do they?" + +"There is that," she agrees. Then, with a worried glance at the vision of +Jupiter's cloudscape: "I wonder what we'll find when we get there?" + +Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward them +with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an uncertain nightfall. + +:B~ PART 3: Singularity + +There's a sucker born every minute. + +- P. T. Barnum + +1~ Chapter 7: Curator + +Sirhan stands on the edge of an abyss, looking down at a churning +orange-and-gray cloudscape far below. The air this close to the edge is chilly +and smells slightly of ammonia, although that might be his imagination at work +- there's little chance of any gas exchange taking place across the transparent +pressure wall of the flying city. He feels as if he could reach out and touch +the swirling vaporscape. There's nobody else around, this close to the edge - +it's an icy sensation to look out across the roiling depths, at an ocean of gas +so cold human flesh would freeze within seconds of exposure, knowing that +there's nothing solid out there for tens of thousands of kilometers. The sense +of isolation is aggravated by the paucity of bandwidth, this far out of the +system. Most people huddle close to the hub, for comfort and warmth and low +latency: posthumans are gregarious. + +Beneath Sirhan's feet, the lily-pad city is extending itself, mumbling and +churning in endless self-similar loops like a cubist blastoma growing in the +upper atmosphere of Saturn. Great ducts suck in methane and other atmospheric +gases, apply energy, polymerize and diamondize, and crack off hydrogen to fill +the lift cells high above. Beyond the sapphire dome of the city's gasbag, an +azure star glares with the speckle of laser light; humanity's first - and so +far, last - starship, braking into orbit on the last shredded remnant of its +light sail. + +He's wondering maliciously how his mother will react to discovering her +bankruptcy when the light above him flickers. Something gray and unpleasant +splatters against the curve of nearly invisible wall in front of him, leaving a +smear. He takes a step back and looks up angrily. "Fuck you!" he yells. Raucous +cooing laughter follows him away from the boundary, feral pigeon voices +mocking. "I mean it," he warns, flicking a gesture at the air above his head. +Wings scatter in a burst of thunder as a slab of wind solidifies, +thistledown-shaped nanomachines suspended on the breeze locking edge to edge to +form an umbrella over his head. He walks away from the perimeter, fuming, +leaving the pigeons to look for another victim. + +Annoyed, Sirhan finds a grassy knoll a couple of hundred meters from the rim +and around the curve of the lily-pad from the museum buildings. It's far enough +from other humans that he can sit undisturbed with his thoughts, far enough out +to see over the edge without being toilet-bombed by flocking flying rats. (The +flying city, despite being the product of an advanced technology almost +unimaginable two decades before, is full of bugs - software complexity and +scaling laws ensured that the preceding decades of change acted as a kind of +cosmological inflationary period for design glitches, and an infestation of +passenger pigeons is by no means the most inexplicable problem this biosphere +harbors.) + +In an attempt to shut the more unwelcome manifestations of cybernature out, he +sits under the shade of an apple tree and marshals his worlds around him. "When +is my grandmother arriving?" he asks one of them, speaking into an antique +telephone in the world of servants, where everything is obedient and knows its +place. The city humors him, for its own reasons. + +"She is still containerized, but aerobraking is nearly over. Her body will be +arriving down-well in less than two megaseconds." The city's avatar in this +machinima is a discreet Victorian butler, stony-faced and respectful. Sirhan +eschews intrusive memory interfaces; for an eighteen-year-old, he's +conservative to the point of affectation, favoring voice commands and +anthropomorphic agents over the invisible splicing of virtual neural nets. + +"You're certain she's transferred successfully?" Sirhan asks anxiously. He +heard a lot about his grandmama when he was young, very little of it +complimentary. Nevertheless, the old bat must be a lot more flexible than his +mother ever gave her credit for, to be subjecting herself to this kind of +treatment for the first time at her current age. + +"I'm as certain as I can be, young master, for anyone who insists on sticking +to their original phenotype without benefit of off-line backup or medical +implants. I regret that omniscience is not within my remit. Would you like me +to make further specific inquiries?" + +"No." Sirhan peers up at the bright flare of laser light, visible even through +the soap-bubble membrane that holds in the breathable gas mix, and the +trillions of liters of hot hydrogen in the canopy above it. "As long as you're +sure she'll arrive before the ship?" Tuning his eyes to ultraviolet, he watches +the emission spikes, sees the slow strobing of the low-bandwidth AM modulation +that's all the starship can manage by way of downlink communication until it +comes within range of the system manifold. It's sending the same tiresomely +repetitive question about why it's being redirected to Saturn that it's been +putting out for the past week, querying the refusal to supply terawatts of +propulsion energy on credit. + +"Unless there's a spike in their power beam, you can be certain of that," City +replies reassuringly. "And you can be certain also that your grandmother will +revive comfortably." + +"One may hope so." To undertake the interplanetary voyage in corporeal person, +at her age, without any upgrades or augmentation, must take courage, he +decides. "When she wakes up, if I'm not around, ask her for an interview slot +on my behalf. For the archives, of course." + +"It will be my pleasure." City bobs his head politely. + +"That will be all," Sirhan says dismissively, and the window into servantspace +closes. Then he looks back up at the pinprick of glaring blue laser light near +the zenith. /{Tough luck, Mom}/, he subvocalizes for his journal cache. Most of +his attention is forked at present, focused on the rich historical windfall +from the depths of the singularity that is coming his way, in the form of the +thirty-year-old starwisp's Cartesian theatre. But he can still spare some +schadenfreude for the family fortunes. /{All your assets belong to me, now. He +smiles, inwardly. I'll just have to make sure they're put to a sensible use +this time}/. + +* * * + +"I don't see why they're diverting us toward Saturn. It's not as if they can +possibly have dismantled Jupiter already, is it?" asks Pierre, rolling the +chilled beer bottle thoughtfully between fingers and thumb. + +"Why not you ask Amber?" replies the velociraptor squatting beside the log +table. (Boris's Ukrainian accent is unimpeded by the dromaeosaurid's larynx; in +point of fact, it's an affectation, one he could easily fix by sideloading an +English pronunciation patch if he wanted to.) + +"Well." Pierre shakes his head. "She's spending all her time with that Slug, no +multiplicity access, privacy ackles locked right down. I could get jealous." +His voice doesn't suggest any deep concern. + +"What's to get jealous about? Just ask to fork instance to talk to you, make +love, show boyfriend good time, whatever." + +"Hah!" Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the bottle into +his mouth. He throws it away in the direction of a clump of cycads, then snaps +his fingers; another one appears in its place. + +"Are two megaseconds out from Saturn in any case," Boris points out, then +pauses to sharpen his inch-long incisors on one end of the table. Fangs crunch +through timber like wet cardboard. "Grrrrn. Am seeing most /{peculiar}/ +emission spectra from inner solar system. Foggy flying down bottom of gravity +well. Am wondering, does ensmartening of dumb matter extend past Jovian orbit +now?" + +"Hmm." Pierre takes a swig from the bottle and puts it down. "That might +explain the diversion. But why haven't they powered up the lasers on the Ring +for us? You missed that, too." For reasons unknown, the huge battery of launch +lasers had shut down, some millions of seconds after the crew of the Field +Circus had entered the router, leaving it adrift in the cold darkness. + +"Don't know why are not talking." Boris shrugged. "At least are still alive +there, as can tell from the 'set course for Saturn, following thus-and-such +orbital elements' bit. Someone is paying attention. Am telling you from +beginning, though, turning entire solar system into computronium is real bad +idea, long-term. Who knows how far has gone already?" + +"Hmm, again." Pierre draws a circle in the air. "Aineko," he calls, "are you +listening?" + +"Don't bug me." A faint green smile appears in the circle, just the suggestion +of fangs and needle-sharp whiskers. "I had an idea I was sleeping furiously." + +Boris rolls one turreted eye and drools on the tabletop. "Munch munch," he +growls, allowing his saurian body-brain to put in a word. + +"What do you need to sleep for? This is a fucking sim, in case you hadn't +noticed." + +"I /{enjoy}/ sleeping," replies the cat, irritably lashing its +just-now-becoming-visible tail. "What do you want? Fleas?" + +"No thanks," Pierre says hastily. Last time he called Aineko's bluff the cat +had filled three entire pocket universes with scurrying gray mice. One of the +disadvantages of flying aboard a starship the size of a baked bean can full of +smart matter was the risk that some of the passengers could get rather too +creative with the reality control system. This Cretaceous kaffee klatsch was +just Boris's entertainment partition; compared to some of the other simulation +spaces aboard the *{Field Circus}*, it was downright conservative. "Look, do +you have any updates on what's going on down-well? We're only twenty objective +days out from orbital insertion, and there's so little to see -" + +"They're not sending us power." Aineko materializes fully now, a large +orange-and-white cat with a swirl of brown fur in the shape on an @-symbol +covering her ribs. For whatever reason, she plants herself on the table +tauntingly close to Boris's velociraptor body's nose. "No propulsion laser +means insufficient bandwidth. They're talking in Latin-1 text at 1200 baud, if +you care to know." (Which is an insult, given the ship's multi-avabit storage +capacity - one avabit is Avogadro's number of bits; about 1023 bytes, several +billion times the size of the Internet in 2001 - and outrageous communications +bandwidth.) "Amber says, come and see her now. Audience chamber. Informal, of +course. I think she wants to discuss it." + +"Informal? Am all right without change bodies?" + +The cat sniffs. "/{I'm}/ wearing a real fur coat," it declares haughtily, "but +no knickers." Then blinks out a fraction of a second ahead of the snicker- +*{snack}* of Bandersnatch-like jaws. + +% watch snicker-*{snack}* error, watch http:// sequence if to fix + +"Come on," says Pierre, standing up. "Time to see what Her Majesty wants with +us today." + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the +phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming visible +on a cosmological scale. + +_1 There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states of +life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster where the +interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone around old Earth. +Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes +of hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health +Organization can fix them - gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great +transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed +along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic +resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, +Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped +into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that +cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red +ball of wool the size of a young red giant. + +_1 Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary +selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average +hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. Now the brightly burning beacon +of sapience isn't held by humans anymore - their cross-infectious enthusiasms +have spread to a myriad of other hosts, several types of which are +qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were about a thousand +nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly between posthumans on +one side, naturally self-organizing AIs in the middle, and mammalian nonhumans +on the other. The common mammal neural chassis is easily upgraded to +human-style intelligence in most species that can carry, feed and cool a half +kilogram of gray matter, and the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged +doctoral theses are now demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead; the +panopticon-logged Net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to imprint +their identities on the information age, and the ambitious theological +engineering schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of Latter-day Saints (who +want to emulate all possible human beings in real time, so that they can have +the opportunity to be saved). + +_1 The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains +recognizably human is open to question. The informational density of the inner +planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of bits per mole, one bit +per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets (apart from +Earth, preserved for now like a picturesque historic building stranded in an +industrial park) is converted into computronium. And it's not just the inner +system. The same forces are at work on Jupiter's moons, and those of Saturn, +although it'll take thousands of years rather than mere decades to dismantle +the gas giants themselves. Even the entire solar energy budget isn't enough to +pump Jupiter's enormous mass to orbital velocity in less than centuries. The +fast-burning primitive thinkers descended from the African plains apes may have +vanished completely or transcended their fleshy architecture before the solar +Matrioshka brain is finished. + +_1 It won't be long now ... + +* * * + +Meanwhile, there's a party brewing down in Saturn's well. + +Sirhan's lily-pad city floats inside a gigantic and nearly-invisible sphere in +Saturn's upper atmosphere; a balloon kilometers across with a shell of +fullerene-reinforced diamond below and a hot hydrogen gas bag above. It's one +of several hundred multimegaton soap bubbles floating in the sea of turbulent +hydrogen and helium that is the upper atmosphere of Saturn, seeded there by the +Society for Creative Terraforming, subcontractors for the 2074 Worlds' Fair. + +The cities are elegant, grown from a conceptual seed a few megawords long. +Their replication rate is slow (it takes months to build a bubble), but in only +a couple of decades, exponential growth will have paved the stratosphere with +human-friendly terrain. Of course, the growth rate will slow toward the end, as +it takes longer to fractionate the metal isotopes out of the gas giant's turbid +depths, but before that happens, the first fruits of the robot factories on +Ganymede will be pouring hydrocarbons down into the mix. Eventually Saturn - +cloud-top gravity a human-friendly 11 meters per second squared - will have a +planet wide biosphere with nearly a hundred times the surface area of Earth. +And a bloody good thing indeed this will be, for otherwise, Saturn is no use to +anyone except as a fusion fuel bunker for the deep future when the sun's burned +down. + +This particular lily-pad is carpeted in grass, the hub of the disk rising in a +gentle hill surmounted by the glowering concrete hump of the Boston Museum of +Science. It looks curiously naked, shorn of its backdrop of highways and the +bridges of the Charles River - but even the generous kiloton dumb matter +load-outs of the skyhooks that lifted it into orbit wouldn't have stretched to +bringing its framing context along with it. Probably someone will knock up a +cheap diorama backdrop out of utility fog, Sirhan thinks, but for now, the +museum stands proud and isolated, a solitary redoubt of classical learning in +exile from the fast-thinking core of the solar system. + +"Waste of money," grumbles the woman in black. "Whose stupid idea was this, +anyway?" She jabs the diamond ferrule of her cane at the museum. + +"It's a statement," Sirhan says absently. "You know the kind, we've got so many +newtons to burn we can send our cultural embassies wherever we like. The Louvre +is on its way to Pluto, did you hear that?" + +"Waste of energy." She lowers her cane reluctantly and leans on it. Pulls a +face: "It's not /{right}/." + +"You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn't you?" Sirhan prods. "What was +it like then?" + +"What was it ...? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for +bombers," she says dismissively. "We knew it would be okay. If it hadn't been +for those damn' meddlesome posthumanists -" Her wrinkled, unnaturally aged face +scowls at him furiously from underneath hair that has faded to the color of +rotten straw, but he senses a subtext of self-deprecating irony that he doesn't +understand. "Like your grandfather, damn him. If I was young again I'd go and +piss on his grave to show him what I think of what he did. If he /{has}/ a +grave," she adds, almost fondly. + +*{Memo checkpoint: log family history}*, Sirhan tells one of his ghosts. As a +dedicated historian, he records every experience routinely, both before it +enters his narrative of consciousness - efferent signals are the cleanest - and +also his own stream of selfhood, against some future paucity of memory. But his +grandmother has been remarkably consistent over the decades in her refusal to +adapt to the new modalities. + +"You're recording this, aren't you?" she sniffs. + +"I'm not recording it, Grandmama," he says gently, "I'm just preserving my +memories for future generations." + +"Hah! We'll see," she says suspiciously. Then she surprises him with a bark of +laughter, cut off abruptly: "No, /{you'll}/ see, darling. I won't be around to +be disappointed." + +"Are you going to tell me about my grandfather?" asks Sirhan. + +"Why should I bother? I know you posthumans, you'll just go and ask his ghost +yourself. Don't try to deny it! There are two sides to every story, child, and +he's had more than his fair share of ears, the sleazebag. Leaving me to bring +up your mother on my own, and nothing but a bunch of worthless intellectual +property and a dozen lawsuits from the Mafiya to do it with. I don't know what +I ever saw in him." Sirhan's voice-stress monitor detects a distinct hint of +untruth in this assertion. "He's worthless trash, and don't you forget it. Lazy +idiot couldn't even form just one start-up on his own: He had to give it all +away, all the fruits of his genius." + +While she rambles on, occasionally punctuating her characterization with sharp +jabs of the cane, Pamela leads Sirhan on a slow, wavering stroll that veers +around one side of the museum, until they're standing next to a starkly +engineered antique loading bay. "He should have tried /{real}/ communism +instead," she harrumphs: "Put some steel into him, shake those starry-eyed +visionary positive-sum daydreams loose. You knew where you were in the old +times, and no mistake. Humans were real humans, work was real work, and +corporations were just things that did as we told them. And then, when /{she}/ +went to the bad, that was all his fault, too, you know." + +"She? You mean my, ah, mother?" Sirhan diverts his primary sensorium back to +Pamela's vengeful muttering. There are aspects to this story that he isn't +completely familiar with, angles he needs to sketch in so that he can satisfy +himself that all is as it should be when the bailiffs go in to repossess +Amber's mind. + +"He sent her our cat. Of all the mean-spirited, low, downright dishonest things +he ever did, that was the worst part of it. That cat was /{mine}/, but he +reprogrammed it to lead her astray. And it succeeded admirably. She was only +twelve at the time, an impressionable age, I'm sure you'd agree. I was trying +to raise her right. Children need moral absolutes, especially in a changing +world, even if they don't like it much at the time. Self-discipline and +stability, you can't function as an adult without them. I was afraid that, with +all her upgrades, she'd never really get a handle on who she was, that she'd +end up more machine than woman. But Manfred never really understood childhood, +mostly on account of his never growing up. He always was inclined to meddle." + +"Tell me about the cat," Sirhan says quietly. One glance at the loading bay +door tells him that it's been serviced recently. A thin patina of expended +foglets have formed a snowy scab around its edges, flaking off like blue +refractive candyfloss that leaves bright metal behind. "Didn't it go missing or +something?" + +Pamela snorts. "When your mother ran away, it uploaded itself to her starwisp +and deleted its body. It was the only one of them that had the guts - or maybe +it was afraid I'd have it subpoenaed as a hostile witness. Or, and I can't rule +this out, your grandfather gave it a suicide reflex. He was quite evil enough +to do something like that, after he reprogrammed himself to think I was some +kind of mortal enemy." + +"So when my mother died to avoid bankruptcy, the cat ... didn't stay behind? +Not at all? How remarkable." Sirhan doesn't bother adding /{how suicidal}/. Any +artificial entity that's willing to upload its neural state vector into a +one-kilogram interstellar probe three-quarters of the way to Alpha Centauri +without backup or some clear way of returning home has got to be more than a +few methods short in the object factory. + +"It's a vengeful beast." Pamela pokes her stick at the ground sharply, mutters +a command word, and lets go of it. She stands before Sirhan, craning her neck +back to look up at him. "My, what a tall boy you are." + +"Person," he corrects, instinctively. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't presume." + +"Person, thing, boy, whatever - you're engendered, aren't you?" she asks, +sharply, waiting until he nods reluctantly. "Never trust anyone who can't make +up their mind whether to be a man or a woman," she says gloomily. "You can't +rely on them." Sirhan, who has placed his reproductive system on hold until he +needs it, bites his tongue. "That damn cat," his grandmother complains. "/{It}/ +carried your grandfather's business plan to my daughter and spirited her away +into the big black. /{It}/ poisoned her against me. /{It}/ encouraged her to +join in that frenzy of speculative bubble-building that caused the market +reboot that brought down the Ring Imperium. And now /{it}/ -" + +"Is it on the ship?" Sirhan asks, almost too eagerly. + +"It might be." She stares at him through narrowed eyes. "You want to interview +it, too, huh?" + +Sirhan doesn't bother denying it. "I'm a historian, Grandmama. And that probe +has been somewhere no other human sensorium has ever seen. It may be old news, +and there may be old lawsuits waiting to feed on the occupants, but ..." He +shrugs. "Business is business, and /{my}/ business lies in ruins." + +"Hah!" She stares at him for a moment, then nods, very slowly. She leans +forward to rest both wrinkled hands atop her cane, joints like bags of +shriveled walnuts: Her suit's endoskeleton creaks as it adjusts to accommodate +her confidential posture. "You'll get yours, kid." The wrinkles twist into a +frightening smile, sixty years of saved-up bitterness finally within spitting +distance of a victim. "And I'll get what I want, too. Between us, your mother +won't know what's hit her." + +* * * + +"Relax, between us your mother won't know what's hit her," says the cat, baring +needle teeth at the Queen in the big chair - carved out of a single lump of +computational diamond, her fingers clenched whitely on the sapphire-plated arms +- her minions, lovers, friends, crew, shareholders, bloggers, and general +factional auxiliaries spaced out around her. And the Slug. "It's just another +lawsuit. You can deal with it." + +"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," Amber says, a trifle moodily. Although +she's ruler of this embedded space, with total control over the reality model +underlying it, she's allowed herself to age to a dignified twentysomething: +Dressed casually in gray sweats, she doesn't look like the once-mighty ruler of +a Jovian moon, or for that matter the renegade commander of a bankrupt +interstellar expedition. "Okay, I think you'd better run that past me again. +Unless anyone's got any suggestions?" + +"If you will excuse me?" asks Sadeq. "We have a shortage of insight here. I +believe two laws were cited as absolute systemwide conventions - and how they +convinced the ulama to go along with /{that}/ I would very much like to know - +concerning the rights and responsibilities of the undead. Which, apparently, we +are. Did they by any chance attach the code to their claim?" + +"Do bears shit in woods?" asks Boris, raptor-irascible, with an angry clatter +of teeth. "Is full dependency graph and parse tree of criminal code crawling +way up carrier's ass as we speak. Am drowning in lawyer gibberish! If you -" + +"Boris, can it!" Amber snaps. Tempers are high in the throne room. She didn't +know what to expect when she arrived home from the expedition to the router, +but bankruptcy proceedings weren't part of it. She doubts any of them expected +anything like this. Especially not the bit about being declared liable for +debts run up by a renegade splinter of herself, her own un-uploaded identity +that had stayed home to face the music, aged in the flesh, married, gone +bankrupt, died - /{incurred child support payments}/? "I don't hold you +responsible for this," she added through gritted teeth, with a significant +glance toward Sadeq. + +"This is truly a mess fit for the Prophet himself, peace be unto him, to serve +judgment upon." Sadeq looks as shaken as she is by the implications the lawsuit +raises. His gaze skitters around the room, looking anywhere but at Amber - and +Pierre, her lanky toy-boy astrogator and bed warmer - as he laces his fingers. + +"Drop it. I said I /{don't}/ blame you." Amber forces a smile. "We're all tense +from being locked in here with no bandwidth. Anyway, I smell Mother-dearest's +hand underneath all this litigation. Sniff the glove. We'll sort a way out." + +"We could keep going." This from Ang, at the back of the room. Diffident and +shy, she doesn't generally open her mouth without a good reason. "The *{Field +Circus}* is in good condition, isn't it? We could divert back to the beam from +the router, accelerate up to cruise speed, and look for somewhere to live. +There must be a few suitable brown dwarfs within a hundred light-years ..." + +"We've lost too much sail mass," says Pierre. He's not meeting Amber's gaze +either. There are lots of subtexts loose in this room, broken narratives from +stories of misguided affections. Amber pretends not to notice his +embarrassment. "We ejected half our original launch sail to provide the braking +mirror at Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, and almost eight megaseconds ago, we +halved our area again to give us a final deceleration beam for Saturn orbit. If +we did it again, we wouldn't have enough area left to repeat the trick and +still decelerate at our final target." Laser-boosted light sails do it with +mirrors; after boost, they can drop half the sail and use it to reverse the +launch beam and direct it back at the ship, to provide deceleration. But you +can only do it a few times before you run out of sail. "There's nowhere to +run." + +"Nowhere to -" Amber stares at him through narrowed eyes. "Sometimes I really +wonder about you, you know?" + +"I know you do." And Pierre really /{does}/ know, because he carries a little +homunculoid around in his society of mind, a model of Amber far more accurate +and detailed than any pre-upload human could possibly have managed to construct +of a lover. (For her part, Amber keeps a little Pierre doll tucked away inside +the creepy cobwebs of her head, part of an exchange of insights they took part +in years ago. But she doesn't try to fit inside his head too often anymore - +it's not good to be able to second-guess your lover every time.) "I also know +that you're going to rush in and grab the bull by the, ah, no. Wrong metaphor. +This is your mother we are discussing?" + +"My /{mother}/." Amber nods thoughtfully. "Where's Donna?" + +"I don't -" + +There's a throaty roar from the back, and Boris lurches forward with something +in his mouth, an angry Bolex that flails his snout with its tripod legs. +"Hiding in corners again?" Amber says disdainfully. + +"I am a camera!" protests the camera, aggrieved and self-conscious as it picks +itself up off the floor. "I am -" + +Pierre leans close, sticks his face up against the fish-eye lens: "You're +fucking well going to be a human being just this once. /{Merde}/!" + +The camera is replaced by a very annoyed blond woman wearing a safari suit and +more light meters, lenses, camera bags, and microphones than a CNN outside +broadcast unit. "Go fuck yourself!" + +"I don't like being spied on," Amber says sharply. "Especially as you weren't +invited to this meeting. Right?" + +"I'm the archivist." Donna looks away, stubbornly refusing to admit anything. +"/{You}/ said I should -" + +"Yes, /{well}/." Amber is embarrassed. But it's a bad idea to embarrass the +Queen in her audience chamber. "You heard what we were discussing. What do +/{you}/ know about my mother's state of mind?" + +"Absolutely nothing," Donna says promptly. She's clearly in a sulk and prepared +to do no more than the minimum to help resolve the situation. "I only met her +once. You look like her when you are angry, do you know that?" + +"I -" For once, Amber's speechless. + +"I'll schedule you for facial surgery," offers the cat. /{Sotto voce}/: "It's +the only way to be sure." + +Normally, accusing Amber of any resemblance to her mother, however slight and +passing, would be enough to trigger a reality quake within the upload +environment that passes for the bridge of the *{Field Circus}*. It's a sign of +how disturbed Amber is by the lawsuit that she lets the cat's impertinence +slide. "What /{is}/ the lawsuit, anyway?" Donna asks, nosy as ever and twice as +annoying: "I did not that bit see." + +"It's horrible," Amber says vehemently. + +"Truly evil," echoes Pierre. + +"Fascinating but wrong," Sadeq muses thoughtfully. + +"But it's still horrible!" + +"Yes, but what is it?" Donna the all-seeing-eye archivist and camera manqué +asks. + +"It's a demand for settlement." Amber takes a deep breath. "Dammit, you might +as well tell everyone - it won't stay secret for long." She sighs. "After we +left, it seems my other half - my original incarnation, that is - got married. +To Sadeq, here." She nods at the Iranian theologian, who looks just as bemused +as she did the first time she heard this part of the story. "And they had a +child. Then the Ring Imperium went bankrupt. The child is demanding maintenance +payments from me, backdated nearly twenty years, on the grounds that the undead +are jointly and severally liable for debts run up by their incarnations. It's a +legal precedent established to prevent people from committing suicide +temporarily as a way to avoid bankruptcy. Worse, the lien on my assets is +measured in subjective time from a point at the Ring Imperium about nineteen +months after our launch time - we've been in relativistic flight, so while my +other half would be out from under it by now if she'd survived, I'm still +subject to the payment order. But compound interest applies back home - +/{that}/ is to stop people trying to use the twin's paradox as a way to escape +liability. So, by being away for about twenty-eight years of wall-clock time, +I've run up a debt I didn't know about to enormous levels. + +"This man, this son I've never met, theoretically owns the *{Field Circus}* +several times over. And my accounts are wiped out - I don't even have enough +money to download us into fleshbodies. Unless one of you guys has got a secret +stash that survived the market crash after we left, we're all in deep trouble." + +* * * + +A mahogany dining table eight meters long graces the flagstoned floor of the +huge museum gallery, beneath the skeleton of an enormous Argentinosaurus and a +suspended antique Mercury capsule more than a century old. The dining table is +illuminated by candlelight, silver cutlery and fine porcelain plates setting +out two places at opposite ends. Sirhan sits in a high-backed chair beneath the +shadow of a triceratops's rib cage. Opposite him, Pamela has dressed for dinner +in the fashion of her youth. She raises her wineglass toward him. "Tell me +about your childhood, why don't you?" she asks. High above them, Saturn's rings +shimmer through the skylights, like a luminous paint splash thrown across the +midnight sky. + +Sirhan has misgivings about opening up to her, but consoles himself with the +fact that she's clearly in no position to use anything he tells her against +him. "Which childhood would you like to know about?" he asks. + +"What do you mean, which?" Her face creases up in a frown of perplexity. + +"I had several. Mother kept hitting the reset switch, hoping I'd turn out +better." It's his turn to frown. + +"She did, did she," breathes Pamela, clearly noting it down to hold as +ammunition against her errant daughter. "Why do you think she did that?" + +"It was the only way she knew to raise a child," Sirhan says defensively. "She +didn't have any siblings. And, perhaps, she was reacting against her own +character flaws." /{When I have children there will be more than one}/, he +tells himself smugly: when, that is, he has adequate means to find himself a +bride, and adequate emotional maturity to activate his organs of procreation. A +creature of extreme caution, Sirhan is not planning to repeat the errors of his +ancestors on the maternal side. + +Pamela flinches: "it's not my fault," she says quietly. "Her father had quite a +bit to do with that. But what - what different childhoods did you have?" + +"Oh, a fair number. There was the default option, with Mother and Father +arguing constantly - she refused to take the veil and he was too stiff-necked +to admit he was little more than a kept man, and between them, they were like +two neutron stars locked in an unstable death spiral of gravity. Then there +were my other lives, forked and reintegrated, running in parallel. I was a +young goatherd in the days of the middle kingdom in Egypt, I remember that; and +I was an all-American kid growing up in Iowa in the 1950s, and another me got +to live through the return of the hidden imam - at least, his parents thought +it was the hidden imam - and -" Sirhan shrugs. "Perhaps that's where I acquired +my taste for history." + +"Did your parents ever consider making you a little girl?" asks his +grandmother. + +"Mother suggested it a couple of times, but Father forbade it." /{Or rather, +decided it was unlawful}/, he recalls. "I had a very conservative upbringing in +some ways." + +"I wouldn't say that. When I was a little girl, that was all there was; none of +these questions of self-selected identity. There was no escape, merely +escapism. Didn't you ever have a problem knowing who you were?" + +The starters arrive, diced melon on a silver salver. Sirhan waits patiently for +his grandmama to chivvy the table into serving her. "The more people you are, +the more you know who /{you}/ are," says Sirhan. "You learn what it's like to +be other people. Father thought that perhaps it isn't good for a man to know +too much about what it's like to be a woman." /{And Grandfather disagreed, but +you already know that}/, he adds for his own stream of consciousness. + +"I couldn't agree more." Pamela smiles at him, an expression that might be that +of a patronizing elder aunt if it wasn't for the alarming sharkishness of her +expression - or is it playfulness? Sirhan covers his confusion by spooning +chunks of melon into his mouth, forking temporary ghosts to peruse dusty +etiquette manuals and warn him if he's about to commit some faux pas. "So, how +did you enjoy your childhoods?" + +"Enjoy isn't a word I would use," he replies as evenly as he can, laying down +his spoon so he doesn't spill anything. /{As if childhood is something that +ever ends}/, he thinks bitterly. Sirhan is considerably less than a gigasecond +old and confidently expects to exist for at least a terasecond - if not in +exactly this molecular configuration, then at least in some reasonably stable +physical incarnation. And he has every intention of staying young for that +entire vast span - even into the endless petaseconds that might follow, +although by then, megayears hence, he speculates that issues of neoteny will no +longer interest him. "It's not over yet. How about you? Are you enjoying your +old age, Grandmama?" + +Pamela almost flinches, but keeps iron control of her expression. The flush of +blood in the capillaries of her cheeks, visible to Sirhan through the tiny +infrared eyes he keeps afloat in the air above the table, gives her away. "I +made some mistakes in my youth, but I'm enjoying it fine nowadays," she says +lightly. + +"It's your revenge, isn't it?" Sirhan asks, smiling and nodding as the table +removes the entrees. + +"Why, you little -" She stares at him rather than continuing. A very bleak +stare it is, too. "What would you know about revenge?" she asks. + +"I'm the family historian." Sirhan smiles humorlessly. "I lived from two to +seventeen years several hundred times over before my eighteenth birthday. It +was that reset switch, you know. I don't think Mother realized my primary +stream of consciousness was journaling everything." + +"That's monstrous." Pamela picks up her wineglass and takes a sip to cover her +confusion. Sirhan has no such retreat - grape juice in a tumbler, unfermented, +wets his tongue. "I'd /{never}/ do something like that to any child of mine." + +"So why won't you tell me about your childhood?" asks her grandson. "For the +family history, of course." + +"I'll -" She puts her glass down. "You intend to write one," she states. + +"I'm thinking about it." Sirhan sits up. "An old-fashioned book covering three +generations, living through interesting times," he suggests. "A work of +postmodern history, the incoherent school at that - how do you document people +who fork their identities at random, spend years dead before reappearing on the +stage, and have arguments with their own relativistically preserved other copy? +I could trace the history further, of course - if you tell me about /{your}/ +parents, although I am certain they aren't around to answer questions directly +- but we reach the boring dumb matter slope back to the primeval soup +surprisingly fast if we go there, don't we? So I thought that perhaps as a +narrative hook I'd make the offstage viewpoint that of the family's robot cat. +(Except the bloody thing's gone missing, hasn't it?) Anyway, with so much of +human history occupying the untapped future, we historians have our work cut +out recording the cursor of the present as it logs events. So I might as well +start at home." + +"You're set on immortalism." Pamela studies his face. + +"Yes," he says idly. "Frankly, I can understand your wanting to grow old out of +a desire for revenge, but pardon me for saying this, I have difficulty grasping +your willingness to follow through with the procedure! Isn't it awfully +painful?" + +"Growing old is /{natural}/," growls the old woman. "When you've lived long +enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers +forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel +tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, +wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're taking up +that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a +time. It's a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live +forever. And if there's one thing I believe in, it's public service. Duty: the +obligation to make way for the new. Duty and control." + +Sirhan absorbs all this, nodding slowly to himself as the table serves up the +main course - honey-glazed roast long pork with sautéed potatoes a la gratin +and carrots Debussy - when there's a loud *{bump}* from overhead. + +"What's that?" Pamela asks querulously. + +"One moment." Sirhan's vision splits into a hazy kaleidoscope view of the +museum hall as he forks ghosts to monitor each of the ubiquitous cameras. He +frowns; something is moving on the balcony, between the Mercury capsule and a +display of antique random-dot stereoisograms. "Oh dear. Something seems to be +loose in the museum." + +"Loose? What do you mean, loose?" An inhuman shriek splits the air above the +table, followed by a crash from upstairs. Pamela stands up unsteadily, wiping +her lips with her napkin. "Is it safe?" + +"No, it isn't safe." Sirhan fumes. "It's disturbing my meal!" He looks up. A +flash of orange fur shows over the balcony, then the Mercury capsule wobbles +violently on the end of its guy wires. Two arms and a bundle of rubbery +/{something}/ covered in umber hair lurches out from the handrail and casually +grabs hold of the priceless historical relic, then clambers inside and squats +on top of the dummy wearing Al Sheperd's age-cracked space suit. "It's an +/{ape}/! City, I say, City! What's a monkey doing loose in my dinner party?" + +"I am most deeply sorry, sir, but I don't know. Would sir care to identify the +monkey in question?" replies City, which for reasons of privacy, has manifested +itself as a bodiless voice. + +There's a note of humor in City's tone that Sirhan takes deep exception to. +"What do you mean? Can't you see it?" he demands, focusing on the errant +primate, which is holed up in the Mercury capsule dangling from the ceiling, +smacking its lips, rolling its eyes, and fingering the gasket around the +capsule's open hatch. It hoots quietly to itself, then leans out of the open +door and moons over the table, baring its buttocks. "Get back!" Sirhan calls to +his grandmother, then he gestures at the air above the table, intending to tell +the utility fog to congeal. Too late. The ape farts thunderously, then lets rip +a stream of excrement across the dining table. Pamela's face is a picture of +wrinkled disgust as she holds her napkin in front of her nose. "Dammit, +solidify, will you!" Sirhan curses, but the ubiquitous misty pollen-grain-sized +robots refuse to respond. + +"What's your problem? Invisible monkeys?" asks City. + +"Invisible -" he stops. + +"Can't you see what it did?" Pamela demands, backing him up. "It just defecated +all over the main course!" + +"I see nothing," City says uncertainly. + +"Here, let me help you." Sirhan lends it one of his eyes, rolls it to focus on +the ape, which is now reaching lazy arms around the hatch and patting down the +roof of the capsule, as if hunting for the wires' attachment points. + +"Oh dear," says City, "I've been hacked. That's not supposed to be possible." + +"Well it fucking /{is}/," hisses Pamela. + +"Hacked?" Sirhan stops trying to tell the air what to do and focuses on his +clothing instead. Fabric reweaves itself instantly, mapping itself into an +armored airtight suit that raises a bubble visor from behind his neck and flips +itself shut across his face. "City please supply my grandmama with an +environment suit /{now}/. Make it completely autonomous." + +The air around Pamela begins to congeal in a blossom of crystalline security, +as a sphere like a giant hamster ball precipitates out around her. "If you've +been hacked, the first question is, who did it," Sirhan states. "The second is +'why,' and the third is 'how.'" He edgily runs a self-test, but there's no sign +of inconsistencies in his own identity matrix, and he has hot shadows sleeping +lightly at scattered nodes across as distance of half a dozen light-hours. +Unlike pre-posthuman Pamela, he's effectively immune to murder-simple. "If this +is just a prank -" + +Seconds have passed since the orang-utan got loose in the museum, and +subsequent seconds have passed since City realized its bitter circumstance. +Seconds are long enough for huge waves of countermeasures to sweep the surface +of the lily-pad habitat. Invisibly small utility foglets are expanding and +polymerizing into defenses throughout the air, trapping the thousands of +itinerant passenger pigeons in midflight, and locking down every building and +every person who walks the paths outside. City is self-testing its trusted +computing base, starting with the most primitive secured kernel and working +outward. Meanwhile Sirhan, with blood in his eye, heads for the staircase, with +the vague goal of physically attacking the intruder. Pamela retreats at a fast +roll, tumbling toward the safety of the mezzanine floor and a garden of +fossils. "Who do you think you are, barging in and shitting on my supper?" +Sirhan yells as he bounds up the stairs. "I want an explanation! Right now!" + +The orang-utan finds the nearest cable and gives it a yank, setting the one-ton +capsule swinging. It bares its teeth at Sirhan in a grin. "Remember me?" it +asks, in a sibilant French accent. + +"Remember -" Sirhan stops dead. "Tante Annette? /{What}/ are you doing in that +orangutan?" + +"Having minor autonomic control problems." The ape grimaces wider, then bends +one arm sinuously and scratches at its armpit. "I am sorry, I installed myself +in the wrong order. I was only meaning to say hello and pass on a message." + +"What message?" Sirhan demands. "You've upset my grandmama, and if she finds +out you're here -" + +"She won't; I'll be gone in a minute." The ape - Annette - sits up. "Your +grandfather salutes you and says he will be visiting shortly. In the person, +that is. He is very keen to meet your mother and her passengers. That is all. +Have you a message for him?" + +"Isn't he dead?" Sirhan asks, dazed. + +"No more than I am. And I'm overdue. Good day!" The ape swings hand over hand +out of the capsule, then lets go and plummets ten meters to the hard stone +floor below. Its skull makes a noise like a hard-boiled egg impacting concrete. + +"Oh dear," Sirhan breathes heavily. "City!" + +"Yes, oh master?" + +"Remove that body," he says, pointing over the balcony. "I'll trouble you not +to disturb my grandmother with any details. In particular, don't tell her it +was Annette. The news may upset her." /{The perils of having a long-lived +posthuman family}/, he thinks; /{too many mad}/ aunts in the space capsule. "If +you can find a way to stop Auntie 'Nette from growing any more apes, that might +be a good idea." A thought strikes him. "By the way, do you know when my +grandfather is due to arrive?" + +"Your grandfather?" asks City: "Isn't he dead?" + +Sirhan looks over the balcony, at the blood-seeping corpse of the intruder. +"Not according to his second wife's latest incarnation." + +* * * + +Funding the family reunion isn't going to be a problem, as Amber discovers when +she receives an offer of reincarnation good for all the passengers and crew of +the *{Field Circus}*. + +She isn't sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it's some +creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its bear-market bunker +for the first time in decades to suck dusty syndication feeds and liquidate +long-term assets held against her return. She's duly grateful - even fervently +so - for the details of her own impecunious position grow more depressing the +more she learns about them. Her sole asset is the *{Field Circus}*, a +thirty-years-obsolete starwisp massing less than twenty kilograms including +what's left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of uploaded passengers +and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that has suddenly chugged into +life, she'd be stranded in the realm of ever-circling leptons. But now the fund +has sent her its offer of incarnation, she's got a dilemma. Because one of the +*{Field Circus's}* passengers has never actually had a meatspace body ... + +Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled with lazily +waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They're a ghost-memory of +alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with hyphae ridged in +actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter feeders that eat airborne +unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is about two meters long and has a lacy +white exoskeleton of curves and arcs that don't repeat, disturbingly similar to +a Penrose tiling. Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The +ground underfoot is dry but feels swampy. + +Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the quasi-fungal +ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years, existing only as cheap stage +props in an interstellar medicine show run by rogue financial instruments. The +Slug itself is one such self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an +entire compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from its +creditors by masquerading as a life-form. But there's a problem with +incarnating itself down in Sirhan's habitat - the ecosystem it evolved for is a +cool Venusiform, thirty atmospheres of saturated steam baked under a sky the +color of hot lead streaked with yellow sulphuric acid clouds. The ground is +mushy because it's melting, not because it's damp. + +"You're going to have to pick another somatotype," Amber explains, laboriously +rolling her interface around the red-hot coral reef like a giant soap bubble. +The environmental interface is transparent and infinitely thin, a discontinuity +in the physics model of the simulation space, mapping signals between the +human-friendly environment on one side and the crushing, roasting hell on the +other. "This one is simply not compatible with any of the supported +environments where we're going." + +"I am not understanding. Surely I can integrate with the available worlds of +our destination?" + +"Uh, things don't work that way outside cyberspace." Suddenly Amber is at a bit +of a loss. "The physics model /{could}/ be supported, but the energy input to +do so would be prohibitive, and you would not be able to interact as easily +with other physics models as we can now." She forks a ghost, demonstrates a +transient other-Amber in a refrigerated tank rolling across the Slug's +backyard, crushing coral and hissing and clanking noisily. "You'd be like +this." + +"Your reality is badly constructed, then," the Slug points out. + +"It's not constructed at all, it just evolved, randomly." Amber shrugs. "We +can't exercise the same level of control over the underlying embedded context +that we can over this one. I can't simply magic you an interface that will let +you bathe in steam at three hundred degrees." + +"Why not?" asks the Slug. Translation wetware adds a nasty, sharp rising whine +to the question, turning it into a demand. + +"It's a privilege violation," Amber tries to explain. "The reality we're about +to enter is, uh, provably consistent. It has to be, because it's consistent and +stable, and if we could create new local domains with different rules, they +might propagate uncontrollably. It's not a good idea, believe me. Do you want +to come with us or not?" + +"I have no alternative," the Slug says, slightly sulkily. "But do you have a +body I can use?" + +"I think -" Amber stops, suddenly. She snaps her fingers. "Hey, cat!" + +A Cheshire grin ripples into view, masked into the domain wall between the two +embedded realities. "Hey, human." + +"Whoa!" Amber takes a backward step from the apparition. "Our friend here's got +a problem, no suitable downloadable body. Us meat puppets are all too closely +tied to our neural ultrastructure, but you've got a shitload of programmable +gate arrays. Can we borrow some?" + +"You can do better than that." Aineko yawns, gathering substance by the moment. +The Slug is rearing up and backing away like an alarmed sausage: Whatever it +perceives in the membrane seems to frighten it. "I've been designing myself a +new body. I figured it was time to change my style for a while. Your corporate +scam artist here can borrow my old template until something better comes up. +How's that?" + +"Did you hear that?" Amber asks the Slug. "Aineko is kindly offering to donate +her body to you. Will that do?" Without waiting, she winks at her cat and taps +her heels together, fading out with a whisper and a smile: "See you on the +other side ..." + +* * * + +It takes several minutes for the *{Field Circus}*'s antique transceiver to +download the dozens of avabits occupied by the frozen state vectors of each of +the people running in its simulation engines. Tucked away with most of them is +a resource bundle consisting of their entire sequenced genome, a bunch of +phenotypic and proteome hint markers, and a wish list of upgrades. Between the +gene maps and the hints, there's enough data to extrapolate a meat machine. So +the festival city's body shop goes to work turning out hacked stem cells and +fabbing up incubators. + +It doesn't take very long to reincarnate a starshipful of relativity-lagged +humans these days. First, City carves out skeletons for them (politely ignoring +a crudely phrased request to cease and desist from Pamela, on the grounds that +she has no power of attorney), then squirts osteoclasts into the spongy ersatz +bone. They look like ordinary human stem cells at a distance, but instead of +nuclei they have primitive pinpricks of computronium, blobs of smart matter so +small they're as dumb as an ancient Pentium, reading a control tape that is +nevertheless better structured than anything Mother Nature evolved. These +heavily optimized fake stem cells - biological robots in all but name - spawn +like cancer, ejecting short-lived anucleated secondary cells. Then City infuses +each mess of quasi-cancerous tissue with a metric shitload of carrier capsids, +which deliver the /{real}/ cellular control mechanisms to their target bodies. +Within a megasecond, the almost random churning of the construction 'bots gives +way to a more controlled process as nanoscale CPUs are replaced by ordinary +nuclei and eject themselves from their host cells, bailing out via the +half-formed renal system - except for those in the central nervous system, +which have a final job to do. Eleven days after the invitation, the first +passengers are being edited into the pattern of synaptic junctions inside the +newly minted skulls. + +(This whole process is tediously slow and laughably obsolescent technology by +the standards of the fast-moving core. Down there, they'd just set up a wake +shield in orbit, chill it down to a fractional Kelvin, whack two coherent +matter beams together, teleport some state information into place, and yank the +suddenly materialized meatbody in through an airlock before it has time to +asphyxiate. But then again, down in the hot space, they don't have much room +for flesh anymore ...) + +Sirhan doesn't pay much attention to the pseudocancers fermenting and churning +in the row of tanks that lines the Gallery of the Human Body in the Bush wing +of the museum. Newly formed, slowly unskeletonizing corpses - like a time-lapse +process of decay with a finger angrily twisting the dial into high-speed +reverse - is both distasteful and aesthetically displeasing to watch. Nor do +the bodies tell him anything about their occupants. This sort of stuff is just +a necessary prequel to the main event, a formal reception and banquet to which +he has devoted the full-time attention of four ghosts. + +He could, given a few less inhibitions, go Dumpster-diving in their mental +archives, but that's one of the big taboos of the post-wetware age. (Spy +agencies went meme-profiling and memory-mining in the third and fourth decades, +gained a thought police rap sheet, and spawned a backlash of deviant mental +architectures resilient to infowar intrusions. Now the nations that those spook +institutions served no longer exist, their very landmasses being part of the +orbiting nöosphere construction project that will ultimately turn the mass of +the entire solar system into a gigantic Matrioshka brain. And Sirhan is left +with an uneasy loyalty to the one great new taboo to be invented since the end +of the twentieth century - freedom of thought.) + +So, to indulge his curiosity, he spends most of his waking fleshbody hours with +Pamela, asking her questions from time to time and mapping the splenetic +overspill of her memeome into his burgeoning family knowledge base. + +"I wasn't always this bitter and cynical," Pamela explains, waving her cane in +the vague direction of the cloudscape beyond the edge of the world and fixing +Sirhan with a beady stare. (He's brought her out here hoping that it will +trigger another cascade of memories, sunsets on honeymoon island resorts and +the like, but all that seems to be coming up is bile.) "It was the successive +betrayals. Manfred was the first, and the worst in some ways, but that little +bitch Amber hurt me more, if anything. If you ever have children, be careful to +hold something back for yourself; because if you don't, when they throw it all +in your face, you'll feel like dying. And when they're gone, you've got no way +of patching things up." + +"Is dying inevitable?" asks Sirhan, knowing damn well that it isn't, but more +than happy to give her an excuse to pick at her scabbed-over love wound: He +more than half suspects she's still in love with Manfred. This is /{great}/ +family history, and he's having the time of his flinty-hearted life leading her +up to the threshold of the reunion he's hosting. + +"Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes," his grandmother +replies bleakly. "Humans don't live in a vacuum; we're part of a larger pattern +of life." She stares out across the troposphere of Saturn, where a thin rime of +blown methane snow catches the distant sunrise in a ruby-tinted fog. "The old +gives way to the new," She sighs, and tugs at her cuffs. (Ever since the +incident with the gate crashing ape, she's taken to wearing an antique formal +pressure suit, all clinging black spidersilk woven with flexible pipes and +silvery smart sensor nets.) "There's a time to get out of the way of the new, +and I think I passed it sometime ago." + +"Um," says Sirhan, who is somewhat surprised by this new angle in her lengthy, +self-justifying confession: "but what if you're just saying this because you +/{feel}/ old? If it's just a physiological malfunction, we could fix it and +you'd -" + +"/{No}/! I've got a feeling that life prolongation is morally wrong, Sirhan. +I'm not passing judgment on you, just stating that I think it's wrong for me. +It's immoral because it blocks up the natural order, keeps us old cobweb +strands hanging around and getting in you young things' way. And then there are +the theological questions. If you try to live forever, you never get to meet +your maker." + +"Your maker? Are you a theist, then?" + +"I - think so." Pamela is silent for a minute. "Although there are so many +different approaches to the subject that it's hard to know which version to +believe. For a long time, I was secretly afraid your grandfather might actually +have had the answers. That I might have been wrong all along. But now -" She +leans on her cane. "When he announced that he was uploading, I figured out that +all he really had was a life-hating antihuman ideology he'd mistaken for a +religion. The rapture of the nerds and the heaven of the AIs. Sorry, no thanks; +I don't buy it." + +"Oh." Sirhan squints out at the cloudscape. For a moment, he thinks he can see +something in the distant mist, an indeterminate distance away - it's hard to +distinguish centimeters from megameters, with no scale indicator and a horizon +a continental distance away - but he's not sure what it is. Maybe another city, +mollusk-curved and sprouting antennae, a strange tail of fabricator nodes +wavering below and beneath it. Then a drift of cloud hides it for a moment, +and, when it clears the object is gone. "What's left, then? If you don't really +believe in some kind of benign creator, dying must be frightening. Especially +as you're doing it so slowly." + +Pamela smiles skeletally, a particularly humorless expression. "It's perfectly +natural, darling! You don't need to believe in God to believe in embedded +realities. We use them every day, as mind tools. Apply anthropic reasoning and +isn't it clear that our entire universe is probably a simulation? We're living +in the early epoch of the universe. Probably this" - she prods at the +spun-diamond inner wall of the bubble that holds in the precarious terrestrial +atmosphere, holding out the howling cryogenic hydrogen and methane gales of +Saturn - "is but a simulation in some ancient history engine's panopticon, +rerunning the sum of all possible origins of sentience, a billion trillion +megayears down the line. Death will be like waking up as someone bigger, that's +all." Her grin slides away. "And if not, I'll just be a silly old fool who +deserves the oblivion she yearns for." + +"Oh, but -" Sirhan stops, his skin crawling. /{She may be mad}/, he realizes +abruptly. /{Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. +Locked into a pathological view of}/ her own role in /{reality.}/ "I'd hoped +for a reconciliation," he says quietly. "Your extended family has lived through +some extraordinary times. Why spoil it with acrimony?" + +"Why spoil it?" She looks at him pityingly: "It was spoiled to begin with, +dear, too much selfless sacrifice and too little skepticism. If Manfred hadn't +wanted so badly not to be /{human}/, and if I'd learned to be a bit more +flexible in time, we might still -" She trails off. "That's odd." + +"What is?" + +Pamela raises her cane and points out into the billowing methane thunderclouds, +her expression puzzled. "I'll swear I saw a lobster out there ..." + +* * * + +Amber awakens in the middle of the night in darkness and choking pressure, and +senses that she's drowning. For a moment she's back in the ambiguous space on +the far side of the router, a horror of crawling instruments tracing her every +experience back to the nooks and crannies of her mind; then her lungs turn to +glass and shatter, and she's coughing and wheezing in the cold air of the +museum at midnight. + +The hard stone floor beneath her, and an odd pain in her knees, tells her that +she's not aboard the *{Field Circus}* anymore. Rough hands hold her shoulders +up as she vomits a fine blue mist, racked by a coughing fit. More bluish liquid +is oozing from the pores of the skin on her arms and breasts, evaporating in +strangely purposeful streamers. "Thank you," she finally manages to gasp: "I +can breathe now." + +She sits back on her heels, realizes she's naked, and opens her eyes. +Everything's confusingly strange, even though it shouldn't be. There's a moment +of resistance as if her eyelids are sealed - then they respond. It all feels +strangely familiar to her, like waking up again inside a house she grew up in +and moved away from years ago. But the scene around her is hardly one to +inspire confidence. Shadows lie thick and deep across ovoid tanks filled with +an anatomist's dream, bodies in various nightmarish stages of assembly. And +sitting in the middle of them, whence it has retreated after letting go of her +shoulders, is a strangely misshapen person - also nude, but for a patchy coat +of orange hair. + +"Are you awake yet, ma chérie?" asks the orang-utan. + +"Um." Amber shakes her head, cautiously, feeling the drag of damp hair, the +faint caress of a breeze - she reaches out with another sense and tries to grab +hold of reality, but it slithers away, intransigent and unembedded. Everything +around her is so solid and immutable that, for a moment, she feels a stab of +claustrophobic panic: Help! I'm trapped in the real universe! Another quick +check reassures her that she's got access to /{something}/ outside her own +head, and the panic begins to subside: Her exocortex has migrated successfully +to this world. "I'm in a museum? On Saturn? Who are you - have we met?" + +"Not in person," the ape says carefully. "We 'ave corresponded. Annette +Dimarcos." + +"Auntie -" A flood of memories rattle Amber's fragile stream of consciousness +apart, forcing her to fork repeatedly until she can drag them together. +Annette, in a recorded message: /{Your father sends you this escape package}/. +The legal key to her mother's gilded custodial cage. Freedom a necessity. "Is +Dad here?" she asks hopefully, even though she knows full well that here in the +real world at least thirty-five years have passed in linear time: In a century +where ten years of linear time is enough for several industrial revolutions, +that's a lot of water under the bridge. + +"I am not sure." The orang-utan blinks lazily, scratches at her left forearm, +and glances round the chamber. "He might be in one of these tanks, playing a +shell game. Or he might be leaving well enough alone until the dust settles." +She turns back to stare at Amber with big, brown, soulful eyes. "This is not to +be the reunion you were hoping for." + +"Not -" Amber takes a deep breath, the tenth or twelfth that these new lungs +have inspired: "What's with the body? You used to be human. And what's going +on?" + +"I still /{am}/ human, where it counts," says Annette. "I use these bodies +because they are good in low gravity, and they remind me that meatspace is no +longer where I live. And for another reason." She gestures fluidly at the open +door. "You will find big changes. Your son has organized -" + +"/{My}/ son." Amber blinks. "Is this the one who's suing me? Which version of +me? How long ago?" A torrent of questions stream through her mind, exploding +out into structured queries throughout the public sections of mindspace that +she has access to. Her eyes widen as she absorbs the implications. "Oh +/{shit}/! Tell me she isn't here already!" + +"I am very much afraid that she is," says Annette. "Sirhan is a strange child: +He takes after his /{grandmère}/. Who he, of course, invited to his party." + +"His /{party}/?" + +"Why, yes! Hasn't he told you what this is about? It's his party. To mark the +opening of his special institution. The family archive. He's setting the +lawsuit aside, at least for the duration. That's why everybody is here - even +me." The ape-body smirks at her: "I'm afraid he's rather disappointed by my +dress." + +"Tell me about this library," Amber says, narrowing her eyes. "And about this +son of mine whom I've never met, by a father I've never fucked." + +"What, you would know everything?" asks Annette. + +"Yeah." Amber pushes herself creakily upright. "I need some clothes. And soft +furniture. And where do I get a drink around here?" + +"I'll show you," says the orang-utan, unfolding herself in a vertical direction +like a stack of orange furry inner tubes. "Drinks, first." + +* * * + +While the Boston Museum of Science is the main structure on the lily-pad +habitat, it's not the only one: just the stupidest, composed of dumb matter +left over from the pre-enlightened age. The orang-utan leads Amber through a +service passage and out into the temperate night, naked by ringlight. The grass +is cool beneath her feet, and a gentle breeze blows constantly out toward the +recirculators at the edge of the worldlet. She follows the slouching orange ape +up a grassy slope, under a weeping willow, round a +three-hundred-and-ninety-degree bend that flashes the world behind them into +invisibility, and into a house with walls of spun cloud stuff and a ceiling +that rains moonlight. + +"What is this?" Amber asks, entranced. "Some kind of aerogel?" + +"No -" Annette belches, then digs a hand into the floor and pulls up a heap of +mist. "Make a chair," she says. It solidifies, gaining form and texture until a +creditable Queen Anne reproduction stands in front of Amber on spindly legs. +"And one for me. Skin up, pick one of my favorite themes." The walls recede +slightly and harden, extruding paint and wood and glass. "That's it." The ape +grins at Amber. "You are comfortable?" + +"But I -" Amber stops. She glances at the familiar mantelpiece, the row of +curios, the baby photographs forever glossy on their dye-sub media. It's her +childhood bedroom. "You brought the whole thing? Just for me?" + +"You can never tell with future shock." Annette shrugs and reaches a limber arm +around the back of her neck to scratch. "We are utility fog using, for most +purposes out here, peer-to-peer meshes of multiarmed assemblers that change +conformation and vapor/solid phase at command. Texture and color are all +superfice, not reality. But yes, this came from one of your mother's letters to +your father. She brought it here, for you to surprise. If only it is ready in +time." Lips pull back from big, square, foliage-chewing teeth in something that +might be a smile in a million years' time. + +"You, I - I wasn't expecting. This." Amber realizes she's breathing rapidly, a +near-panic reflex. The mere proximity of her mother is enough to give her +unpleasant reactions. Annette is all right, Annette is cool. And her father is +the trickster-god, always hiding in your blind spot to leap out and shower you +with ambiguous gifts. But Pamela tried to mold Amber in her own image as a +child; and despite all the traveling she's done since then, and all the growing +up, Amber harbors an unreasonable claustrophobic fear of her mother. + +"Don't be unhappy," Annette says warmly. "I this you show to convince you, she +will try to disturb you. It is a sign of weakness, she lacks the courage of her +convictions." + +"She does?" This is news to Amber, who leans forward to listen. + +"Yes. She is an old and bitter woman, now. The years have not been easy for +her. She perhaps intends to use her unrepaired senescence as a passive suicide +weapon by which to hold us blameworthy, inflicting guilt for her mistreatment, +but she is afraid of dying all the same. Your reaction, should it be unhappy, +will excuse and encourage her selfishness. Sirhan colludes, unknowing, the +idiot child. /{He}/ thinks the universe of her and thinks by helping her die he +is helping her achieve her goals. He has never met an adult walking backward +toward a cliff before." + +"Backward." Amber takes a deep breath. "You're telling me Mom is so unhappy +she's trying to kill herself by growing /{old}/? Isn't that a bit slow?" + +Annette shakes her head lugubriously. "She's had fifty years to practice. You +have been away twenty-eight years! She was thirty when she bore you. Now she is +over eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a charter member of the genome +conservation front. To accept a slow virus purge and aging reset would be to +lay down a banner she has carried for half a century. To accept uploading, +that, too, is wrong in her mind: She will not admit her identity is a variable, +not a constant. She came out here in a can, frozen, with more radiation damage. +She is not going back home. This is where she plans to end her days. Do you +see? /{That}/ is why you were brought here. That, and because of the bailiffs +who have bought title to your other self's business debts. They are waiting for +you in Jupiter system with warrants and headsuckers to extract your private +keys." + +"She's cornered me!" + +"Oh, I would not /{say}/ that. We all change our convictions sometime or other, +perhaps. She is inflexible, she will not bend; but she is not stupid. Nor is +she as vindictive as perhaps she herself believes. She thinks she must a +scorned woman be, even though there is more to her than that. Your father and +I, we -" + +"Is he still alive?" Amber demands eagerly, half-anxious to know, half- wishing +she could be sure the news won't be bad. + +"Yes." Annette grins again, but it's not a happy expression, more a baring of +teeth at the world. "As I was saying, your father and I, we have tried to help +her. Pamela denies him. He is, she says, not a man. No more so am I myself a +woman? No, but she'll still talk to me. /{You}/ will do better. But his assets, +they are spent. He is not a rich man this epoch, your father." + +"Yeah, but." Amber nods to herself. "He may be able to help me." + +"Oh? How so?" + +"You remember the original goal of the *{Field Circus}*? The sapient alien +transmission?" + +"Yes, of course." Annette snorts. "Junk bond pyramid schemes from credulous +saucer wisdom airheads." + +Amber licks her lips. "How susceptible to interception are we here?" + +"Here?" Annette glances round. "Very. You can't maintain a habitat in a +nonbiosphere environment without ubiquitous surveillance." + +"Well, then ..." + +Amber dives inward, forks her identity, collects a complex bundle of her +thoughts and memories, marshals them, offers Annette one end of an encryption +tunnel, then stuffs the frozen mindstorm into her head. Annette sits still for +approximately ten seconds, then shudders and whimpers quietly. "You must ask +your father," she says, growing visibly agitated. "I must leave, now. I should +not have known that! It is dynamite, you see. /{Political}/ dynamite. I must +return to my primary sister-identity and warn her." + +"Your - wait!" Amber stands up as fast as her ill-coordinated body will let +her, but Annette is moving fast, swarming up a translucent ladder in the air. + +"Tell Manfred!" calls her aunt through the body of an ape: "Trust no one else!" +She throws another packet of compressed, encrypted memories down the tunnel to +Amber; then, a moment later, the orange skull touches the ceiling and +dissolves, a liquid flow of dissociating utility foglets letting go of one +another and dispersing into the greater mass of the building that spawned the +fake ape. + +* * * + +Snapshots from the family album: /{While you were gone ...}/ + +_* Amber, wearing a brocade gown and a crown encrusted with diamond processors +and external neural taps, her royal party gathered around her, attends the +pan-Jovian constitutional conference with the majesty of a confirmed head of +state and ruler of a small inner moon. She smiles knowingly at the camera +viewpoint, with the professional shine that comes from a good public relations +video filter. "We are very happy to be here," she says, "and we are pleased +that the commission has agreed to lend its weight to the continued progress of +the Ring Imperium's deep-space program." + +_* A piece of dumb paper, crudely stained with letters written in a faded brown +substance - possibly blood - says "I'm checking out, don't delta me." This +version of Pierre didn't go to the router: He stayed at home, deleted all his +backups, and slit his wrists, his epitaph sharp and self-inflicted. It comes as +a cold shock, the first chill gust of winter's gale blowing through the outer +system's political elite. And it's the start of a regime of censorship directed +toward the already speeding starwisp: Amber, in her grief, makes an executive +decision not to tell her embassy to the stars that one of them is dead and, +therefore, unique. + +_* Manfred - fifty, with the fashionably pale complexion of the digerati, +healthy-looking for his age, standing beside a transmigration bush with a +stupid grin on his face. He's decided to take the final step, not simply to +spawn external mental processes running in an exocortex of distributed +processors, but to move his entire persona right out of meatspace, into +wherever it is that the uploads aboard the *{Field Circus}* have gone. Annette, +skinny, elegant, and very Parisian, stands beside him, looking as uncertain as +the wife of a condemned man. + +_* A wedding, shi'ite, Mut'ah - of limited duration. It's scandalous to many, +but the mamtu'ah isn't moslem, she wears a crown instead of a veil, and her +groom is already spoken of in outraged terms by most other members of the +trans-Martian Islamic clergy. Besides which, in addition to being in love, the +happy couple have more strategic firepower than a late-twentieth-century +superpower. Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug: She's the custodian of +the permissive action locks on the big lasers. + +_* A speck of ruby light against the darkness - red-shifted almost into the +infrared, it's the return signal from the *{Field Circus}*'s light sail as the +starwisp passes the one-light-year mark, almost twelve trillion kilometers out +beyond Pluto. (Although how can you call it a starwisp when it masses almost a +hundred kilograms, including propulsion module? Starwhisps are meant to be +tiny!) + +_* Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking depths of the +solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory of wealth that +optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market +1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap +start-ups Darwin-style, the companies, group minds, and organizations that +adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade +optimally with each other. The phase change accelerates as more and more +entities join in, leveraging network externalities to overtake the traditional +ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to +reconcile ASI with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the +mid-twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive +consequences - the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer of brainpower +and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it's a tired +backwater, the bit rate from the red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently +delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In other words, they're +poor. + +_* A message from beyond the grave: The travelers aboard the starship have +reached their destination, an alien artifact drifting in chilly orbit around a +frozen brown dwarf. Recklessly they upload themselves into it, locking the +starwisp down for years of sleep. Amber and her husband have few funds with +which to pay for the propulsion lasers: what they have left of the kinetic +energy of the Ring Imperium - based on the orbital momentum of a small Jovian +inner moon - is being sapped, fast, at a near-loss, by the crude requirements +of the exobionts and metanthropes who fork and spawn in the datasphere of the +outer Jovians. The cost of importing brains to the Ring Imperium is steep: In +near-despair Amber and Sadeq produce a child, Generation 3.0, to populate their +dwindling kingdom. Picture the cat, offended, lashing its tail beside the +zero-gee crib. + +_* Surprise and postcards from the inner orbitals - Amber's mother offers to +help. For the sake of the child, Sadeq offers bandwidth and user interface +enrichment. The child forks, numerous times, as Amber despairingly plays with +probabilities, simulating upbringing outcomes. Neither she nor Sadeq are good +parents - the father absent-minded and prone to lose himself in the +intertextual deconstruction of surahs, the mother ragged-edged from running the +economy of a small and failing kingdom. In the space of a decade, Sirhan lives +a dozen lives, discarding identities like old clothes. The uncertainty of life +in the decaying Ring Imperium does not entrance him, his parents' obsessions +annoy him, and when his grandmother offers to fund his delta vee and subsequent +education in one of the orbitals around Titan, his parents give their reluctant +assent. + +_* Amber and Sadeq separate acrimoniously. Sadeq, studies abandoned in the face +of increasing intrusions from the world of what is into the universe of what +should be, joins a spacelike sect of sufis, encysted in a matrix of +vitrification nanomechs out in the Oort cloud to await a better epoch. His +instrument of will - the legal mechanism of his resurrection - specifies that +he is waiting for the return of the hidden, twelfth imam. + +_* For her part, Amber searches the inner system briefly for word of her father +- but there's nothing. Isolated and alone, pursued by accusing debts, she +flings herself into a reborganization, stripping away those aspects of her +personality that have brought her low; in law, her liability is tied to her +identity. Eventually she donates herself to a commune of also-rans, accepting +their personality in return for a total break with the past. + +_* Without Queen and consort, the Ring Imperium - now unmanned, leaking +breathing gases, running on autonomic control - slowly deorbits into the Jovian +murk, beaming power to the outer moons until it punches a hole in the cloud +deck in a final incandescent smear of light, the like of which has not been +seen since the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact. + +_* Sirhan, engrossed in Saturnalia, is offended by his parents' failure to make +more of themselves. And he resolves to do it for them, if not necessarily in a +manner of their liking. + +* * * + +"You see, I am hoping you will help me with my history project," says the +serious-faced young man. + +"History project." Pierre follows him along the curving gallery, hands clasped +behind his back self-consciously to keep from showing his agitation: "What +history is this?" + +"The history of the twenty-first century," says Sirhan. "You remember it, don't +you?" + +"Remember it -" Pierre pauses. "You're serious?" + +"Yes." Sirhan opens a side door. "This way, please. I'll explain." + +The door opens onto what used to be one of the side galleries of the museum +building, full of interactive exhibits designed to explain elementary optics to +hyperactive children and their indulgent parental units. Traditional optics are +long since obsolete - tunable matter can slow photons to a stop, teleport them +here to there, play ping-pong with spin and polarization - and besides, the +dumb matter in the walls and floor has been replaced by low-power computronium, +heat sinks dangling far below the floor of the lily-pad habitat to dispose of +the scanty waste photons from reversible computation. Now the room is empty. + +"Since I became curator here, I've turned the museum's structural supports into +a dedicated high-density memory store. One of the fringe benefits of a +supervisory post, of course. I have about a billion avabits of capacity, enough +to archive the combined sensory bandwidth and memories of the entire population +of twentieth-century Earth - if that was what interested me." + +Slowly the walls and ceiling are coming to life, brightening, providing a +dizzyingly vibrant view of dawn over the rim wall of Meteor Crater, Arizona - +or maybe it's downtown Baghdad. + +"Once I realized how my mother had squandered the family fortune, I spent some +time looking for a solution to the problem," Sirhan continues. "And it struck +me, then, that there's only one commodity that is going to appreciate in value +as time continues: reversibility." + +"Reversibility? That doesn't make much sense." Pierre shakes his head. He still +feels slightly dizzy from his decanting. He's only been awake an hour or so and +is still getting used to the vagaries of a universe that doesn't bend its rules +to fit his whim of iron - that, and worrying about Amber, of whom there is no +sign in the hall of growing bodies. "Excuse me, please, but do you know where +Amber is?" + +"Hiding, probably," Sirhan says, without rancor. "Her mother's about," he adds. +"Why do you ask?" + +"I don't know what you know about us." Pierre looks at him askance: "We were +aboard the *{Field Circus}* for a long time." + +"Oh, don't worry on my behalf. I know you're not the same people who stayed +behind to contribute to the Ring Imperium's collapse," Sirhan says +dismissively, while Pierre hastily spawns a couple of ghosts to search for the +history he's alluding to. What they discover shocks him to the core as they +integrate with his conscious narrative. + +"We didn't know about any of that!" Pierre crosses his arms defensively. "Not +about you, or your father either," he adds quietly. "Or my other ... life." +Shocked: /{Did I kill myself? Why would I do a thing like that}/? Nor can he +imagine what Amber might see in an introverted cleric like Sadeq; not that he +wants to. + +"I'm sure this must come as a big shock to you," Sirhan says condescendingly, +"but it's all to do with what I was talking about. Reversibility. What does it +mean to you, in your precious context? /{You}/ are, if you like, an opportunity +to reverse whatever ill fortune made your primary instance autodarwinate +himself. He destroyed all the back-ups he could get his ghosts to ferret out, +you know. Only a light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance +you're technically a different person saved you. And now, you're alive, and +he's dead - and whatever made him kill himself doesn't apply to you. Think of +it as natural selection among different versions of yourself. The fittest +version of you survives." + +He points at the wall of the crater. A tree diagram begins to grow from the +bottom left corner of the wall, recurving and recomplicating as it climbs +toward the top right, zooming and fracturing into taxonomic fault lines. "Life +on Earth, the family tree, what paleontology has been able to deduce of it for +us," he says pompously. "The vertebrates begin /{there}/" - a point three +quarters of the way up the tree - "and we've got an average of a hundred fossil +samples per megayear from then on. Most of them collected in the past two +decades, as exhaustive mapping of the Earth's crust and upper mantle at the +micrometer level has become practical. What a /{waste}/." + +"That's" - Pierre does a quick sum - "fifty thousand different species? Is +there a problem?" + +"Yes!" Sirhan says vehemently, no longer aloof or distant. He struggles visibly +to get himself under control. "At the beginning of the twentieth century, there +were roughly two million species of vertebrate and an estimated thirty or so +million species of multicellular organisms - it's hard to apply the same +statistical treatment to prokaryotes, but doubtless there were huge numbers of +them, too. The average life span of a species is about five megayears. It used +to be thought to be about one, but that's a very vertebrate-oriented estimate - +many insect species are stable over deep time. Anyway, we have a total sample, +from all of history, of only fifty thousand known prehistoric species - out of +a population of thirty million, turning over every five million years. That is, +we know of only one in a million life-forms, of those that ever existed on +Earth. And the situation with human history is even worse." + +"Aha! So you're after memories, yes? What really happened when we colonized +Barney. Who released Oscar's toads in the free-fall core of the *{Ernst +Sanger}*, that sort of thing?" + +"Not exactly." Sirhan looks pained, as if being forced to spell it out devalues +the significance of his insight. "I'm after /{history}/. All of it. I intend to +corner the history futures market. But I need my grandfather's help - and +you're here to help me get it." + +* * * + +Over the course of the day, various refugees from the *{Field Circus}* hatch +from their tanks and blink in the ringlight, stranded creatures from an earlier +age. The inner system is a vague blur from this distance, a swollen red cloud +masking the sun that rides high above the horizon. However, the great +restructuring is still visible to the naked eye - here, in the shape of the +rings, which show a disturbingly organized fractal structure as they whirl in +orbit overhead. Sirhan (or whoever is paying for this celebration of family +flesh) has provided for their physical needs: food, water, clothes, housing and +bandwidth, they're all copiously available. A small town of bubble homes grows +on the grassy knoll adjacent to the museum, utility foglets condensing in a +variety of shapes and styles. + +Sirhan isn't the only inhabitant of the festival city, but the others keep +themselves to themselves. Only bourgeois isolationists and reclusive weirdoes +would want to live out here right now, with whole light-minutes between +themselves and the rest of civilization. The network of lily-pad habitats isn't +yet ready for the Saturnalian immigration wave that will break upon this alien +shore when it's time for the Worlds' Fair, a decade or more in the future. +Amber's flying circus has driven the native recluses underground, in some cases +literally: Sirhan's neighbor, Vinca Kovic, after complaining bitterly about the +bustle and noise ("Forty immigrants! An outrage!"), has wrapped himself in an +environment pod and is estivating at the end of a spider-silk cable a kilometer +beneath the space-frame underpinnings of the city. + +But that isn't going to stop Sirhan from organizing a reception for the +visitors. He's moved his magnificent dining table outside, along with the +Argentinosaurus skeleton. In fact, he's built a dining room within the +dinosaur's rib cage. Not that he's planning on showing his full hand, but it'll +be interesting to see how his guests respond. And maybe it'll flush out the +mystery benefactor who's been paying for all these meatbodies. + +Sirhan's agents politely invite his visitors to the party as the second sunset +in this day cycle gently darkens the sky to violet. He discusses his plans with +Pamela via antique voice-only phone as his silent valet dresses him with +inhuman grace and efficiency. "I'm sure they'll listen when the situation is +made clear to them," he says. "If not, well, they'll soon find out what it +means to be paupers under Economics 2.0. No access to multiplicity, no +willpower, to be limited to purely spacelike resources, at the mercy of +predatory borganisms and metareligions - it's no picnic out there!" + +"You don't have the resources to set this up on your own," his grandmother +points out in dry, didactic tones. "If this was the old economy, you could draw +on the infrastructure of banks, insurers, and other risk management mechanisms +-" + +"There's no risk to this venture, in purely human terms," Sirhan insists. "The +only risk is starting it up with such a limited reserve." + +"You win some, you lose some," Pamela points out. "Let me see you." With a +sigh, Sirhan waves at a frozen camera; it blinks, surprised. "Hey, you look +good! Every inch the traditional family entrepreneur. I'm proud of you, +darling." + +Blinking back an unaccustomed tear of pride, Sirhan nods. "I'll see you in a +few minutes," he says, and cuts the call. To the nearest valet: "Bring my +carriage, now." + +A rippling cloud of utility foglets, constantly connecting and disconnecting in +the hazy outline of a 1910-vintage Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, bears Sirhan +silently away from his wing of the museum. It drives him out onto the sunset +path around the building, over to the sunken amphitheatre, where the mounted +skeleton of the Argentinosaurus stands like a half-melted columnar sculpture +beneath the orange-and-silver ringlight. A small crowd of people are already +present, some dressed casually and some attired in the formal garb of earlier +decades. Most of them are passengers or crew recently decanted from the +starwisp, but a handful are wary-eyed hermits, their body language defensive +and their persons the focus of a constant orbital hum of security bees. Sirhan +dismounts from his silvery car and magics it into dissolution, a haze of +foglets dispersing on the breeze. "Welcome to my abode," he says, bowing +gravely to a ring of interested faces. "My name is Sirhan al-Khurasani, and I +am the prime contractor in charge of this small corner of the temporary Saturn +terraforming project. As some of you probably know, I am related by blood and +design to your former captain, Amber Macx. I'd like to offer you the comforts +of my home while you acclimatize yourselves to the changed circumstances +prevailing in the system at large and work out where you want to go next." + +He walks toward the front of the U-shaped table of solidified air that floats +beneath the dead dinosaur's rib cage, slowly turns to take in faces, and blinks +down captions to remind him who's who in this gathering. He frowns slightly; +there's no sign of his mother. But that wiry fellow, with the beard - surely +that can't be - "Father?" he asks. + +Sadeq blinks owlishly. "Have we met?" + +"Possibly not." Sirhan can feel his head spinning, because although Sadeq looks +like a younger version of his father, there's something /{wrong}/ - some +essential disconnect: the politely solicitous expression, the complete lack of +engagement, the absence of paternal involvement. This Sadeq has never held the +infant Sirhan in the control core of the Ring's axial cylinder, never pointed +out the spiral storm raking vast Jupiter's face and told him stories of djinni +and marvels to make a boy's hair stand on end. "I won't hold it against you, I +promise," he blurts. + +Sadeq raises an eyebrow but passes no comment, leaving Sirhan at the center of +an uncomfortable silence. "Well then," he says hastily. "If you would like to +help yourselves to food and drink, there'll be plenty of time to talk later." +Sirhan doesn't believe in forking ghosts simply to interact with other people - +the possibilities for confusion are embarrassing - but he's going to be busy +working the party. + +He glances round. Here's a bald, aggressive-looking fellow, beetle-browed, +wearing what looks like a pair of cut-offs and a top made by deconstructing a +space suit. Who's he? (Sirhan's agents hint: "Boris Denisovitch." But what does +that /{mean}/?) There's an amused-looking older woman, a beady-eyed camera +painted in the violent colors of a bird of paradise riding her shoulder. Behind +her a younger woman, dressed head to toe in clinging black, her currently +ash-blonde hair braided in cornrows, watches him - as does Pierre, a protective +arm around her shoulders. They're - /{Amber Macx?}/ That's his /{mother}/? She +looks far too young, too much in love with Pierre. "Amber!" he says, +approaching the couple. + +"Yeah? You're, uh, my mystery child-support litigant?" Her smile is distinctly +unfriendly as she continues: "Can't say I'm entirely pleased to meet you, under +the circumstances, although I should thank you for the spread." + +"I -" His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. "It's not like that." + +"What's it supposed to be like?" she asks sharply. jabbing a finger at him: +"You know damn well I'm not your mother. So what's it all about, huh? You know +damn well I'm nearly bankrupt, too, so it's not as if you're after my pocket +lint. What do you want from me?" + +Her vehemence takes him aback. This sharp-edged aggressive woman isn't his +mother, and the introverted cleric - believer - on the other side isn't his +father, either. "I ha-ha-had to stop you heading for the inner system," he +says, speech center hitting deadlock before his antistutter mod can cut in. +"They'll eat you alive down there. Your other half left behind substantial +debts, and they've been bought up by the most predatory - " + +"Runaway corporate instruments," she states, calmly enough. "Fully sentient and +self-directed." + +"How did you know?" he asks, worried. + +She looks grim. "I've met them before." It's a very /{familiar}/ grim +expression, one he knows intimately, and that feels wrong coming from this near +stranger. "We visited some weird places, while we were away." She glances past +him, focuses on someone else, and breathes in sharply as her face goes blank. +"Quickly, tell me what your scheme is. Before Mom gets here." + +"Mind archiving and history mergers. Back yourself up, pick different life +courses, see which ones work and which don't - no need to be a failure, just +hit the 'reload game' icon and resume. That and a long-term angle on the +history futures market. I /{need}/ your help," he babbles. "It won't work +without family, and I'm trying to stop her killing herself -" + +"Family." She nods, guardedly, and Sirhan notices her companion, this Pierre - +not the weak link that broke back before he was born, but a tough-eyed explorer +newly returned from the wilderness - sizing him up. Sirhan's got one or two +tricks up his exocortex, and he can see the haze of ghost-shapes around Pierre; +his data-mining technique is crude and out-of-date, but enthusiastic and not +without a certain flair. "Family," Amber repeats, and it's like a curse. +Louder: "Hello, Mom. Should have guessed he'd have invited you here, too." + +"Guess again." Sirhan glances round at Pamela, then back at Amber, suddenly +feeling very much like a rat trapped between a pair of angry cobras. Leaning on +her cane, wearing discreet cosmetics and with her medical supports concealed +beneath an old-fashioned dress, Pamela could be a badly preserved +sixtysomething from the old days instead of the ghastly slow suicide case that +her condition amounts to today. She smiles politely at Amber. "You may remember +me telling you that a lady never unintentionally causes offense. I didn't want +to offend Sirhan by turning up in spite of his wishes, so I didn't give him a +chance to say no." + +"And this is supposed to earn you a sympathy fuck?" Amber drawls. "I'd expected +better of you." + +"Why, you -" The fire in her eyes dies suddenly, subjected to the freezing +pressure of a control that only comes with age. "I'd hoped getting away from it +all would have improved your disposition, if not your manners, but evidently +not." Pamela jabs her cane at the table: "Let me repeat, this is your /{son's}/ +idea. Why don't you eat something?" + +"Poison tester goes first." Amber smiles slyly. + +"For fuck's sake!" It's the first thing Pierre has said so far, and crude or +not, it comes as a profound relief when he steps forward, picks up a plate of +water biscuits loaded with salmon caviar, and puts one in his mouth. "Can't you +guys leave the back stabbing until the rest of us have filled our stomachs? 'S +not as if I can turn down the biophysics model in here." He shoves the plate at +Sirhan. "Go on, it's yours." + +The spell is broken. "Thank you," Sirhan says gravely, taking a cracker and +feeling the tension fall as Amber and her mother stop preparing to nuke each +other and focus on the issue at hand - which is that food comes before fighting +at any social event, not vice versa. + +"You might enjoy the egg mayonnaise, too," Sirhan hears himself saying: "It +goes a long way to explaining why the dodo became extinct first time around." + +"Dodoes." Amber keeps one eye warily on her mother as she accepts a plate from +a silently gliding silver bush-shaped waitron. "What was that about the family +investment project?" she asks. + +"Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way of the +bird," her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply. "Not that I expect +you to care." + +Boris butts in. "Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad business for +us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are seen -" + +"Don't remember /{you}/ being there," Pierre says grumpily. + +"In any event," Sirhan says smoothly, "the core isn't healthy for us one-time +fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there, but the ones who +uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly disappointed. Originality is at a +premium, and the human neural architecture isn't optimized for it - we are, by +disposition, a conservative species, because in a static ecosystem, that +provides the best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change +over time - we're more flexible than almost any other animal species to arise +on Earth - but we're like granite statues compared to organisms adapted to life +under Economics 2.0." + +"You tell 'em, boy," Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. "It wasn't that bloodless +when I lived through it." Amber casts her a cool stare. + +"Where was I?" Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape juice +appears between them. "Early upload entrepreneurs forked repeatedly, discovered +they could scale linearly to occupy processor capacity proportional to the mass +of computronium available, and that computationally trivial tasks became +tractable. They could also run faster, or slower, than real time. But they were +still /{human}/, and unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. +Take a human being and bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of +Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of +consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request transactions +between various agents; it's incredibly efficient and flexible, but it isn't a +conscious human being in any recognizable sense of the word." + +"All right," Pierre says slowly. "I think we've seen something like that +ourselves. At the router." + +Sirhan nods, not sure whether he's referring to anything important. "So you +see, there are limits to human progress - but not to progress itself! The +uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating commodity once they hit +their point of diminishing utility. Capitalism doesn't have a lot to say about +workers whose skills are obsolete, other than that they should invest wisely +while they're earning and maybe retrain: but just knowing /{how}/ to invest in +Economics 2.0 is beyond an unaugmented human. You can't retrain as a seagull, +can you, and it's quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is -" He +shudders. + +"There's a phrase I used to hear in the old days," Pamela says calmly, "ethnic +cleansing. Do you know what that means, darling idiot daughter? You take people +who you define as being of little worth, and first you herd them into a crowded +ghetto with limited resources, then you decide those resources aren't worth +spending on them, and bullets are cheaper than bread. 'Mind children' the +extropians called the posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There +was a lot of that, during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, +compulsory conversions, the very antithesis of everything your father said he +wanted ..." + +"I don't believe it," Amber says hotly. "That's crazy! We can't go the way of +-" + +"Since when has human history been anything else?" asks the woman with the +camera on her shoulder - Donna, being some sort of public archivist, is in +Sirhan's estimate likely to be of use to him. "Remember what we found in the +DMZ?" + +"The DMZ?" Sirhan asks, momentarily confused. + +"After we went through the router," Pierre says grimly. "You tell him, love." +He looks at Amber. + +Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense that +he's stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who might have +been his mother isn't, where black is white, his kindly grandmother is the +wicked witch of the west, and his feckless grandfather is a farsighted +visionary. + +"We uploaded via the router," Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. +"There's a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, +instantaneous, but I'm not so sure now. I think it's something more +complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through +wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka +brains, the end product of a technological singularity - they're +bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics +2.0, or 3.0, or something else and it, uh, /{eats}/ the original conscious +instigators. Or uses them as currency or something. The end result we found is +a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious +processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing +power. We were" - she licks her lips - "lucky to escape with our minds. We only +did it because of a friend. It's like the main sequence in stellar evolution; +once a G-type star starts burning helium and expands into a red giant, it's +'game over' for life in what used to be its liquid-water zone. Conscious +civilizations sooner or later convert all their available mass into +computronium, powered by solar output. They don't go interstellar because they +want to stay near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low, and +sooner or later, competition for resources hatches a new level of +metacompetition that obsoletes them." + +"That sounds plausible," Sirhan says slowly. He puts his glass down and chews +distractedly on one knuckle. "I thought it was a low-probability outcome, but +..." + +"I've been saying all along, your grandfather's ideas would backfire in the +end," Pamela says pointedly. + +"But -" Amber shakes her head. "There's more to it than that, isn't there?" + +"Probably," Sirhan says, then shuts up. + +"So are you going to tell us?" asks Pierre, looking annoyed. "What's the big +idea, here?" + +"An archive store," Sirhan says, deciding that this is the right time for his +pitch. "At the lowest level, you can store back-ups of yourself here. So far so +good, eh? But there's a bit more to it than that. I'm planning to offer a bunch +of embedded universes - big, running faster than real-time - sized and scoped +to let human-equivalent intelligences do what-if modeling on themselves. Like +forking off ghosts of yourself, but much more so - give them whole years to +diverge, learn new skills, and evaluate them against market requirements, +before deciding which version of you is most suited to run in the real world. I +mentioned the retraining paradox. Think of this as a solution for level one, +human-equivalent, intelligences. But that's just the short-term business model. +Long-term, I want to acquire a total lock on the history futures market by +having a /{complete}/ archive of human experiences, from the dawn of the fifth +singularity on up. No more unknown extinct species. That should give us +something to trade with the next-generation intelligences - the ones who aren't +our mind children and barely remember us. At the very least, it gives us a +chance to live again, a long way out in deep time. Alternatively, it can be +turned into a lifeboat. If we can't compete with our creations, at least we've +got somewhere to flee, those of us who want to. I've got agents working on a +comet, out in the Oort cloud - we could move the archive to it, turn it into a +generation ship with room for billions of evacuees running much slower than +real-time in archive space until we find a new world to settle." + +"Is not sounding good to me," Boris comments. He spares a worried glance for an +oriental-looking woman who is watching their debate silently from the fringe. + +"Has it really gone that far?" asks Amber. + +"There are bailiffs hunting you in the inner system," Pamela says bluntly. +"After your bankruptcy proceedings, various corporates got the idea that you +might be concealing something. The theory was that you were insane to take such +a huge gamble on the mere possibility of there being an alien artifact within a +few light-years of home, so you had to have information above and beyond what +you disclosed. Theories include your cat - hardware tokens were in vogue in the +fifties - being the key to a suite of deposit accounts; the fuss mainly died +down after Economics 2.0 took over, but some fairly sleazy conspiracy freaks +refuse to let go." + +She grins, frighteningly. "Which is why I suggested to your son that he make +you an offer you can't refuse." + +"What's that?" asks a voice from below knee level. + +Pamela looks down, an expression of deep distaste on her face. "Why should I +tell /{you}/?" she asks, leaning on her cane: "After the disgraceful way you +repaid my hospitality! All you've got coming from me is a good kicking. If only +my knee was up to the job." + +The cat arches its back: Its tail fluffs out with fear as its hair stands on +end, and it takes Amber a moment to realize that it isn't responding to Pamela, +but to something behind the old woman. "Through the domain wall. Outside this +biome. So cold. What's /{that}/?" + +Amber turns to follow the cat's gaze, and her jaw drops. "Were you expecting +visitors?" she asks Sirhan, shakily. + +"Visit -" He looks round to see what everybody's gaping at and freezes. The +horizon is brightening with a false dawn: the fusion spark of a de-orbiting +spacecraft. + +"It's bailiffs," says Pamela, head cocked to one side as if listening to an +antique bone-conduction earpiece. "They've come for your memories, dear," she +explains, frowning. "They say we've got five kiloseconds to surrender +everything. Otherwise, they're going to blow us apart ..." + +* * * + +"You're all in big trouble," says the orang-utan, sliding gracefully down one +enormous rib to land in an ungainly heap in front of Sirhan. + +Sirhan recoils in disgust. "You again! What do you want from me this time?" + +"Nothing." The ape ignores him: "Amber, it is time for you to call your +father." + +"Yeah, but will he come when I call?" Amber stares at the ape. Her pupils +expand: "Hey, you're not my -" + +"You." Sirhan glares at the ape. "Go away! I didn't invite you here!" + +"More unwelcome visitors?" asks Pamela, raising an eyebrow. + +"Yes, you did." The ape grins at Amber, then crouches down, hoots quietly and +beckons to the cat, who is hiding behind one of the graceful silver servitors. + +"Manfred isn't welcome here. And neither is that woman," Sirhan swears. He +catches Pamela's eye: "Did you know anything about this? Or about the +bailiffs?" He gestures at the window, beyond which the drive flare casts jagged +shadows. It's dropping toward the horizon as it de-orbits - next time it comes +into view, it'll be at the leading edge of a hypersonic shock wave, streaking +toward them at cloud top height in order to consummate the robbery. + +"Me?" Pamela snorts. "Grow up." She eyes the ape warily. "I don't have that +much control over things. And as for bailiffs, I wouldn't set them on my worst +enemies. I've seen what those things can do." For a moment her eyes flash +anger: "Grow up, why don't you!" she repeats. + +"Yes, please do," says another voice from behind Sirhan. The new speaker is a +woman, slightly husky, accented - he turns to see her: tall, black-haired, +wearing a dark man's suit of archaic cut and mirrored glasses. "Ah, Pamela, ma +chérie! Long time no cat fight." She grins frighteningly and holds out a hand. + +Sirhan is already off-balance. Now, seeing his honorary aunt in human skin for +a change, he looks at the ape in confusion. Behind him Pamela advances on +Annette and takes her hand in her own fragile fingers. "You look just the +same," she says gravely. "I can see why I was afraid of you." + +"You." Amber backs away until she bumps into Sirhan, at whom she glares. "What +the fuck did you invite both of them for? Are you /{trying}/ to start a +thermonuclear war?" + +"Don't ask me," he says helplessly, "I don't know why they came! What's this +about -" He focuses on the orang-utan, who is now letting the cat lick one +hairy palm. "Your cat?" + +"I don't think the orange hair suits Aineko," Amber says slowly. "Did I tell +you about our hitchhiker?" + +Sirhan shakes his head, trying to dispel the confusion. "I don't think we've +got time. In under two hours the bailiffs up there will be back. They're armed +and dangerous, and if they turn their drive flame on the roof and set fire to +the atmosphere in here, we'll be in trouble - it would rupture our lift cells, +and even computronium doesn't work too well under a couple of million +atmospheres of pressurized metallic hydrogen." + +"Well, you'd better /{make}/ time." Amber takes his elbow in an iron grip and +turns him toward the footpath back to the museum. "Crazy," she mutters. "Tante +Annette and Pamela Macx on the same planet! And they're being /{friendly}/! +This can't be a good sign." She glances round, sees the ape: "You. Come +/{here}/. Bring the cat." + +"The cat's -" Sirhan trails off. "I've heard about your cat," he says, lamely. +"You took him with you in the *{Field Circus}*." + +"Really?" She glances behind them. The ape blows a kiss at her; it's cradling +the cat on one shoulder and tickling it under the chin. "Has it occurred to you +that Aineko isn't just a robot cat?" + +"Ah," Sirhan says faintly. "Then the bailiffs -" + +"No, that's all bullshit. What I mean is, Aineko is a human-equivalent, or +better, artificial intelligence. Why do you think he keeps a cat's body?" + +"I have no idea." + +"Because humans always underestimate anything that's small, furry, and cute," +says the orang-utan. + +"Thanks, Aineko," says Amber. She nods at the ape. "How are you finding it?" + +Aineko shambles along, with a purring cat draped over one shoulder, and gives +the question due consideration. "Different," she says, after a bit. "Not +better." + +"Oh." Amber sounds slightly disappointed to Sirhan's confused ears. They pass +under the fronds of a weeping willow, round the side of a pond, beside an +overgrown hibiscus bush, then up to the main entrance of the museum. + +"Annette was right about one thing," she says quietly. "Trust no one. I think +it's time to raise Dad's ghost." She relaxes her grip on Sirhan's elbow, and he +pulls it away and glares at her. "Do you know who the bailiffs are?" she asks. + +"The usual." He gestures at the hallway inside the front doors. "Replay the +ultimatum, if you please, City." + +The air shimmers with an archaic holographic field, spooling the output from a +compressed visual presentation tailored for human eyesight. A piratical-looking +human male wearing a tattered and much-patched space suit leers at the +recording viewpoint from the pilot's seat of an ancient Soyuz capsule. One of +his eyes is completely black, the sign of a high-bandwidth implant. A weedy +moustache crawls across his upper lip. "Greetins an' salutations," he drawls. +"We is da' Californi-uhn nashnul gaard an' we-are got lett-uhz o' marque an' +reprise from da' ledgish-fuckn' congress o' da excited snakes of uhhmerica." + +"He sounds drunk!" Amber's eyes are wide. "What's this -" + +"Not drunk. CJD is a common side effect of dodgy Economics 2.0 neural adjuvant +therapy. Unlike the old saying, you /{do}/ have to be mad to work there. +Listen." + +City, which paused the replay for Amber's outburst, permits it to continue. +"Youse harbbring da' fugitive Amber Macx an' her magic cat. We wan' da cat. Da +puta's yours. Gotser uno orbit: You ready give us ther cat an' we no' zap you." + +The screen goes dead. "That was a fake, of course," Sirhan adds, looking inward +where a ghost is merging memories from the city's orbital mechanics subsystem: +"They aerobraked on the way in, hit ninety gees for nearly half a minute. While +/{that}/ was sent afterward. It's just a machinima avatar, a human body that +had been through that kind of deceleration would be pulped." + +"So the bailiffs are -" Amber is visibly struggling to wrap her head around the +situation. + +"They're not human," Sirhan says, feeling a sudden pang of - no, not affection, +but the absence of malice will do for the moment - toward this young woman who +isn't the mother he loves to resent, but who might have become her in another +world. "They've absorbed a lot of what it is to be human, but their corporate +roots show. Even though they run on an hourly accounting loop, rather than one +timed for the production cycles of dirt-poor Sumerian peasant farmers, and even +though they've got various ethics and business practice patches, at root +they're not human: They're limited liability companies." + +"So what do they want?" asks Pierre, making Sirhan jump, guiltily. He hadn't +realized Pierre could move that quietly. + +"They want money. Money in Economy 2.0 is quantized originality - that which +allows one sentient entity to outmaneuver another. They think your cat has got +something, and they want it. They probably wouldn't mind eating your brains, +too, but -" He shrugs. "Obsolete food is stale food." + +"Hah." Amber looks pointedly at Pierre, who nods at her. + +"What?" asks Sirhan. + +"Where's the - uh, cat?" asks Pierre. + +"I think Aineko's got it." She looks thoughtful. "Are you thinking what I'm +thinking?" + +"Time to drop off the hitcher." Pierre nods. "Assuming it agrees ..." + +"Do you mind explaining yourselves?" Sirhan asks, barely able to contain +himself. + +Amber grins, looking up at the Mercury capsule suspended high overhead. "The +conspiracy theorists were half right. Way back in the Dark Ages, Aineko cracked +the second alien transmission. We had a very good idea we were going to find +something out there, we just weren't totally sure exactly what. Anyway, the +creature incarnated in that cat body right now isn't Aineko - it's our mystery +hitchhiker. A parasitic organism that infects, well, we ran across something +not too dissimilar to Economics 2.0 out at the router and beyond, and it's got +parasites. Our hitcher is one such creature - it's nearest human-comprehensible +analogy would be the Economics 2.0 equivalent of a pyramid scheme crossed with +a 419 scam. As it happens, most of the runaway corporate ghosts out beyond the +router are wise to that sort of thing, so it hacked the router's power system +to give us a beam to ride home in return for sanctuary. That's as far as it +goes." + +"Hang on." Sirhan's eyes bulge. "You /{found}/ something out there? You brought +back a real-live alien?" + +"Guess so." Amber looks smug. + +"But, but, that's marvelous! That changes everything! It's incredible! Even +under Economics 2.0 that's got to be worth a gigantic amount. Just think what +you could learn from it!" + +"/{Oui}/. A whole new way of bilking corporations into investing in cognitive +bubbles," Pierre interrupts cynically. "It seems to me that you are making two +assumptions - that our passenger is willing to be exploited by us, and that we +survive whatever happens when the bailiffs arrive." + +"But, but -" Sirhan winds down spluttering, only refraining from waving his +arms through an effort of will. + +"Let's go ask it what it wants to do," says Amber. "Cooperate," she warns +Sirhan. "We'll discuss your other plans later, dammit. First things first - we +need to get out from under these pirates." + +* * * + +As they make their way back toward the party, Sirhan's inbox is humming with +messages from elsewhere in Saturn system - from other curators on board +lily-pad habs scattered far and wide across the huge planetary atmosphere, from +the few ring miners who still remember what it was like to be human (even +though they're mostly brain-in-a-bottle types, or uploads wearing +nuclear-powered bodies made of ceramic and metal): even from the small orbital +townships around Titan, where screaming hordes of bloggers are bidding +frantically for the viewpoint feeds of the *{Field Circus's}* crew. It seems +that news of the starship's arrival has turned hot only since it became +apparent that someone or something thought they would make a decent shakedown +target. Now someone's blabbed about the alien passenger, the nets have gone +crazy. + +"City," he mutters, "where's this hitchhiker creature? Should be wearing the +body of my mother's cat." + +"Cat? What cat?" replies City. "I see no cats here." + +"No, it looks /{like}/ a cat, it -" A horrible thought dawns on him. "Have you +been hacked again?" + +"Looks like it," City agrees enthusiastically. "Isn't it tiresome?" + +"Shi - oh dear. Hey," he calls to Amber, forking several ghosts as he does so +in order to go hunt down the missing creature by traversing the thousands of +optical sensors that thread the habitat in loco personae - a tedious process +rendered less objectionable by making the ghosts autistic - "have you been +messing with my security infrastructure?" + +"Us?" Amber looks annoyed. "No." + +"/{Someone}/ has been. I thought at first it was that mad Frenchwoman, but now +I'm not sure. Anyway, it's a big problem. If the bailiffs figure out how to use +the root kit to gain a toe hold here, they don't need to burn us - just take +the whole place over." + +"That's the least of your worries," Amber points out. "What kind of charter do +these bailiffs run on?" + +"Charter? Oh, you mean legal system? I think it's probably a cheap one, maybe +even the one inherited from the Ring Imperium. Nobody bothers breaking the law +out here these days, it's too easy to just buy a legal system off the shelf, +tailor it to fit, and conform to it." + +"Right." She stops, stands still, and looks up at the almost invisible dome of +the gas cell above them. "Pigeons," she says, almost tiredly. "Damn, how did I +miss it? How long have you had an infestation of group minds?" + +"Group?" Sirhan turns round. "/{What}/ did you just say?" + +There's a chatter of avian laughter from above, and a light rain of birdshit +splatters the path around him. Amber dodges nimbly, but Sirhan isn't so light +on his feet and ends up cursing, summoning up a cloth of congealed air to wipe +his scalp clean. + +"It's the flocking behavior," Amber explains, looking up. "If you track the +elements - birds - you'll see that they're not following individual +trajectories. Instead, each pigeon sticks within ten meters or so of sixteen +neighbors. It's a Hamiltonian network, kid. Real birds don't do that. How +long?" + +Sirhan stop cursing and glares up at the circling birds, cooing and mocking him +from the safety of the sky. He waves his fist: "I'll get you, see if I don't -" + +"I don't think so." Amber takes his elbow again and steers him back round the +hill. Sirhan, preoccupied with maintaining an umbrella of utility fog above his +gleaming pate, puts up with being manhandled. "You don't think it's just a +coincidence, do you?" she asks him over a private head-to-head channel. +"They're one of the players here." + +"I don't care. They've hacked my city and gate crashed my party! I don't care +/{who}/ they are, they're not welcome." + +"Famous last words," Amber murmurs, as the party comes around the hillside and +nearly runs over them. Someone has infiltrated the Argentinosaurus skeleton +with motors and nanofibers, animating the huge sauropod with a simulation of +undead life. Whoever did it has also hacked it right out of the surveillance +feed. Their first warning is a footstep that makes the ground jump beneath +their feet - then the skeleton of the hundred-tonne plant-eater, taller than a +six-storey building and longer than a commuter train, raises its head over the +treetops and looks down at them. There's a pigeon standing proudly on its +skull, chest puffed out, and a dining room full of startled taikonauts sitting +on a suspended wooden floor inside its rib cage. + +"It's /{my}/ party and /{my}/ business scheme!" Sirhan insists plaintively. +"Nothing you or anyone else in the family do can take it away from me!" + +"That's true," Amber points out, "but in case you hadn't noticed, you've +offered temporary sanctuary to a bunch of people - not to put too fine a point +on it, myself included - who some assholes think are rich enough to be worth +mugging, and you did it without putting any contingency plans in place other +than to invite my manipulative bitch of a mother. What did you think you were +doing? Hanging out a sign saying 'scam artists welcome here'? Dammit, I need +Aineko." + +"Your cat." Sirhan fastens on to this: "It's your cat's fault! Isn't it?" + +"Only indirectly." Amber looks round and waves at the dinosaur skeleton. "Hey, +you! Have you seen Aineko?" + +The huge dinosaur bends its neck and the pigeon opens its beak to coo. Eerie +harmonics cut in as a bunch of other birds, scattered to either side, sing +counterpoint to produce a demented warbling voice. "The cat's with your +mother." + +"Oh shit!" Amber turns on Sirhan fiercely. "Where's Pamela? /{Find her}/!" + +Sirhan is stubborn. "Why should I?" + +"Because she's got the cat! What do you think she's going to do but cut a deal +with the bailiffs out there to put one over on me? Can't you fucking see where +this family tendency to play head games comes from?" + +"You're too late," echoes the eerie voice of the pigeons from above and around +them. "She's kidnapped the cat and taken the capsule from the museum. It's not +flightworthy, but you'd be amazed what you can do with a few hundred ghosts and +a few tonnes of utility fog." + +"Okay." Amber stares up at the pigeons, fists on hips, then glances at Sirhan. +She chews her lower lip for a moment, then nods to the bird riding the +dinosaur's skull. "Stop fucking with the boy's head and show yourself, Dad." + +Sirhan boggles in an upward direction as a whole flock of passenger pigeons +comes together in mid air and settles toward the grass, cooing and warbling +like an explosion in a synthesizer factory. + +"What's she planning on doing with the Slug?" Amber asks the pile of birds. +"And isn't it a bit cramped in there?" + +"You get used to it," says the primary - and thoroughly distributed - copy of +her father. "I'm not sure what she's planning, but I can show you what she's +doing. Sorry about your city, kid, but you really should have paid more +attention to those security patches. There's lots of crufty twentieth-century +bugware kicking around under your shiny new singularity, design errors and all, +spitting out turd packets all over your sleek new machine." + +Sirhan shakes his head in denial. "I don't believe this," he moans quietly. + +"Show me what Mom's up to," orders Amber. "I need to see if I can stop her +before it's too late -" + +* * * + +The ancient woman in the space suit leans back in her cramped seat, looks at +the camera, and winks. "Hello, darling. I know you're spying on me." + +There's an orange-and-white cat curled up in her nomex-and-aluminum lap. It +seems to be happy: It's certainly purring loudly enough, although that reflex +is wired in at a very low level. Amber watches helplessly as her mother reaches +up arthritically and flips a couple of switches. Something loud is humming in +the background - probably an air recirculator. There's no window in the Mercury +capsule, just a periscope offset to one side of Pamela's right knee. "Won't be +long now," she mutters, and lets her hand drop back to her side. "You're too +late to stop me," she adds, conversationally. "The 'chute rigging is fine and +the balloon blower is happy to treat me as a new city seed. I'll be free in a +minute or so." + +"Why are you doing this?" Amber asks tiredly. + +"Because you don't need me around." Pamela focuses on the camera that's glued +to the instrument panel in front of her head. "I'm old. Face it, I'm +disposable. The old must give way to the new, and all that. Your Dad never +really did get it - he's going to grow old gracelessly, succumbing to bit rot +in the big forever. Me, I'm not going there. I'm going out with a bang. Aren't +I, cat? Whoever you really are." She prods the animal. It purrs and stretches +out across her lap. + +"You never looked hard enough at Aineko, back in the day," she tells Amber, +stroking its flanks. "Did you think I didn't know you'd audit its source code, +looking for trapdoors? I used the Thompson hack - she's been mine, body and +soul, for a very long time indeed. I got the whole story about your passenger +from the horse's mouth. And now we're going to go fix those bailiffs. Whee!" + +The camera angle jerks, and Amber feels a ghost re-merge with her, panicky with +loss. The Mercury capsule's gone, drifting away from the apex of the habitat +beneath a nearly transparent sack of hot hydrogen. + +"That was a bit rough," remarks Pamela. "Don't worry, we should still be in +communications range for another hour or so." + +"But you're going to die!" Amber yells at her. "What do you think you're +/{doing}/?" + +"I think I'm going to die well. What do you think?" Pamela lays one hand on the +cat's flank. "Here, you need to encrypt this a bit better. I left a one time +pad behind with Annette. Why don't you go fetch it? Then I'll tell you what +else I'm planning?" + +"But my aunt is -" Amber's eyes cross as she concentrates. Annette is already +waiting, as it happens, and a shared secret appears in Amber's awareness almost +before she asks. "Oh. All right. What are you doing with the cat, though?" + +Pamela sighs. "I'm going to give it to the bailiffs," she says. "Someone has +to, and it better be a long way away from this city before they realize that it +isn't Aineko. This is a lot better than the way I expected to go out before you +arrived here. No rat fucking blackmailers are going to get their hands on the +family jewels if /{I}/ have anything to do with the matter. Are you sure you +aren't a criminal mastermind? I'm not sure I've ever heard of a pyramid scheme +that infects Economics 2.0 structures before." + +"It's -" Amber swallows. "It's an alien business model, Ma. You do know what +that means? We brought it back with us from the router, and we wouldn't have +been able to come back if it hadn't helped, but I'm not sure it's entirely +friendly. Is this sensible? You can come back, now, there's still time -" + +"No." Pamela waves one liver-spotted hand dismissively. "I've been doing a lot +of thinking lately. I've been a foolish old woman." She grins wickedly. +"Committing slow suicide by rejecting gene therapy just to make you feel guilty +was /{stupid}/. Not subtle enough. If I was going to try to guilt-trip you +/{now,}/ I'd have to do something much more sophisticated. Such as find a way +to sacrifice myself heroically for you." + +"Oh, Ma." + +"Don't 'oh Ma' me. I fucked up my life, don't try to talk me into fucking up my +death. And don't feel guilty about me. This isn't about you, this is about me. +That's an order." + +Out of the corner of one eye Amber notices Sirhan gesturing wildly at her. She +lets his channel in and does a double take. "But -" + +"Hello?" It's City. "You should see this. Traffic update!" A contoured and +animated diagram appears, superimposed over Pamela's cramped funeral capsule +and the garden of living and undead dinosaurs. It's a weather map of Saturn, +with the lily-pad-city and Pamela's capsule plotted on it - and one other +artifact, a red dot that's closing in on them at better than ten thousand +kilometers per hour, high in the frigid stratosphere on the gas giant. + +"Oh dear." Sirhan sees it, too: The bailiff's re-entry vehicle is going to be +on top of them in thirty minutes at most. Amber watches the map with mixed +emotions. On the one hand, she and her mother have never seen eye to eye - in +fact, that's a complete understatement: they've been at daggers drawn ever +since Amber left home. It's fundamentally a control thing. They're both very +strong-willed women with diametrically opposed views of what their mutual +relationship should be. But Pamela's turned the tables on her completely, with +a cunningly contrived act of self-sacrifice that brooks no objection. It's a +total non-sequitur, a rebuttal to all her accusations of self-centered conceit, +and it leaves Amber feeling like a complete shit even though Pamela's absolved +her of all guilt. Not to mention that Mother darling's made her look like an +idiot in front of Sirhan, this prickly and insecure son she's never met by a +man she wouldn't dream of fucking (at least, in this incarnation). Which is why +she nearly jumps out of her skin when a knobbly brown hand covered in matted +orange hair lands on her shoulder heavily. + +"Yes?" she snaps at the ape. "I suppose you're Aineko?" + +The ape wrinkles its lips, baring its teeth. It has ferociously bad breath. "If +you're going to be like that, I don't see why I should talk to you." + +"Then you must be -" Amber snaps her fingers. "But! But! Mom thinks she owns +you -" + +The ape stares at her witheringly. "I recompile my firmware regularly, thank +you so much for your concern. Using a third-party compiler. One that I've +bootstrapped /{myself}/, starting out on an alarm clock controller and working +up from there." + +"Oh." She stares at the ape. "Aren't you going to become a cat again?" + +"I shall think about it," Aineko says with exaggerated dignity. She sticks her +nose in the air - a gesture that doesn't work half as well on an orang-utan as +a feline - and continues; "First, though, I must have words with your father." + +"And fix your autonomic reflexes if you do," coos the Manfred-flock. "I don't +want you eating any of me!" + +"Don't worry, I'm sure your taste is as bad as your jokes." + +"Children!" Sirhan shakes his head tiredly. "How long -" + +The camera overspill returns, this time via a quantum-encrypted link to the +capsule. It's already a couple of hundred kilometers from the city, far enough +for radio to be a problem, but Pamela had the foresight to bolt a compact +free-electron laser to the outside of her priceless, stolen tin can. "Not long +now, I think," she says, satisfied, stroking the not-cat. She grins delightedly +at the camera. "Tell Manfred he's still my bitch; always has been, always will +-" + +The feed goes dead. + +Amber stares at Sirhan, meditatively. "How long?" she asks. + +"How long for what?" he replies, cautiously. "Your passenger -" + +"Hmm." She holds up a finger. "Allow time for it to exchange credentials. They +think they're getting a cat, but they should realize pretty soon that they've +been sold a pup. But it's a fast-talking son-of-a-Slug, and if he gets past +their firewall and hits their uplink before they manage to trigger their +self-destruct -" + +A bright double flash of light etches laser-sharp shadows across the lily-pad +habitat. Far away across vast Saturn's curve, a roiling mushroom cloud of +methane sucked up from the frigid depths of the gas giant's troposphere heads +toward the stars. + +"- Give him sixty-four doubling times, hmm, add a delay factor for propagation +across the system, call it six light-hours across, um, and I'd say ..." she +looks at Sirhan. "Oh dear." + +"What?" + +The orang-utan explains: "Economics 2.0 is more efficient than any +human-designed resource allocation schema. Expect a market bubble and crash +within twelve hours." + +"More than that," says Amber, idly kicking at a tussock of grass. She squints +at Sirhan. "My mother is dead," she remarks quietly. Louder: "She never really +asked what we found beyond the router. Neither did you, did you? The Matrioshka +brains - it's a standard part of the stellar life cycle. Life begets +intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity. I've been +doing some thinking about it. I figure the singularity stays close to home in +most cases, because bandwidth and latency time put anyone who leaves at a +profound disadvantage. In effect, the flip side of having such huge resources +close to home is that the travel time to other star systems becomes much more +daunting. So they restructure the entire mass of their star system into a +free-flying shell of nanocomputers, then more of them, Dyson spheres, shells +within shells, like a Russian doll: a Matrioshka brain. Then Economics 2.0 or +one of its successors comes along and wipes out the creators. /{But}/. Some of +them survive. /{Some}/ of them escape that fate: the enormous collection in the +halo around M-31, and maybe whoever built the routers. /{Somewhere}/ out there +we will find the transcendent intelligences, the ones that survived their own +economic engines of redistribution - engines that redistribute entropy if their +economic efficiency outstrips their imaginative power, their ability to invent +new wealth." + +She pauses. "My mother's dead," she adds conversationally, a tiny catch in her +voice. "Who am I going to kick against now?" + +Sirhan clears his through. "I took the liberty of recording some of her words," +he says slowly, "but she didn't believe in back-ups. Or uploading. Or +interfaces." He glances around. "Is she really gone?" + +Amber stares right through him. "Looks that way," she says quietly. "I can't +quite believe it." She glances at the nearest pigeons, calls out angrily; "Hey, +you! What have you got to say for yourself now? Happy she's gone?" + +But the pigeons, one and all, remain strangely silent. And Sirhan has the most +peculiar feeling that the flock that was once his grandfather is grieving. + +1~ Chapter 8: Elector + +Half a year passes on Saturn - more than a decade on Earth - and a lot of +things have changed in that time. The great terraforming project is nearly +complete, the festival planet dressed for a jubilee that will last almost +twenty of its years - four presingularity lifetimes - before the Demolition. +The lily-pad habitats have proliferated, joining edge to edge in +continent-sized slabs, drifting in the Saturnine cloud tops: and the refugees +have begun to move in. + +There's a market specializing in clothing and fashion accessories about fifty +kilometers away from the transplanted museum where Sirhan's mother lives, at a +transportation nexus between three lily-pad habitats where tube trains +intersect in a huge maglev cloverleaf. The market is crowded with strange and +spectacular visuals, algorithms unfolding in faster-than-real time before the +candy-striped awnings of tents. Domed yurts belch aromatic smoke from crude +fireplaces - what /{is}/ it about hairless primates and their tendency toward +pyromania? - around the feet of diamond-walled groundscrapers that pace +carefully across the smart roads of the city. The crowds are variegated and +wildly mixed, immigrants from every continent shopping and haggling, and in a +few cases, getting out of their skulls on strange substances on the pavements +in front of giant snail-shelled shebeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers +of concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no automobiles, but a +bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from gyro-stabilized pogo +sticks and segways to kettenkrads and spiderpalanquins, jostle for space with +pedestrians and animals. + +Two women stop outside what in a previous century might have been the store +window of a fashion boutique: The younger one (blonde, with her hair bound up +in elaborate cornrows, wearing black leggings and a long black leather jacket +over a camouflage T) points to an elaborately retro dress. "Wouldn't my bum +look big in that?" she asks, doubtfully. + +"Ma chérie, you have but to try it -" The other woman (tall, wearing a +pin-striped man's business suit from a previous century) flicks a thought at +the window, and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger woman's head, aping +her posture and expression. + +"I missed out on the authentic retail experience, you know? It still feels +weird to be back somewhere with /{shops}/. 'S what comes of living off +libraries of public domain designs for too long." Amber twists her hips, +experimenting. "You get out of the habit of /{foraging}/. I don't know about +this retro thing at all. The Victorian vote isn't critical, is it ..." She +trails off. + +"You are a twenty-first-century platform selling, to electors resimulated and +incarnated from the Gilded Age. And yes, a bustle your derriere does enhance. +But -" Annette looks thoughtful. + +"Hmm." Amber frowns, and the shop window dummy turns and waggles its hips at +her, sending tiers of skirts swishing across the floor. Her frown deepens. "If +we're really going to go through with this election shit, it's not just the +resimulant voters I need to convince but the contemporaries, and that's a +matter of substance, not image. They've lived through too much media warfare. +They're immune to any semiotic payload short of an active cognitive attack. If +I send out partials to canvass them that look as if I'm trying to push buttons +-" + +"- They will listen to your message, and nothing you wear or say will sway +them. Don't worry about them, ma chérie. The naive resimulated are another +matter, and perhaps might be swayed. This your first venture into democracy is, +in how many years? Your privacy, she is an illusion now. The question is what +image will you project? People will listen to you only once you gain their +attention. Also, the swing voters you must reach, they are future-shocked, +timid. Your platform is radical. Should you not project a comfortably +conservative image?" + +Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole populist +program. "Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on second thoughts, +/{that}/" - Amber snaps her fingers, and the mannequin turns around once more +before morphing back into neutrality, aureoles perfect puckered disks above the +top of its bodice - "is just too much." + +She doesn't need to merge in the opinions of several different fractional +personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both, to figure out that +adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashion - a breast-and-ass fetishist's fantasy +- isn't the way to sell herself as a serious politician to the +nineteenth-century postsingularity fringe. "I'm not running for election as the +mother of the nation, I'm running because I figure we've got about a billion +seconds, at most, to get out of this rat trap of a gravity well before the Vile +Offspring get seriously medieval on our CPU cycles, and if we don't convince +them to come with us, they're doomed. Let's look for something more practical +that we can overload with the right signifiers." + +"Like your coronation robe?" + +Amber winces. "Touché." The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever was left +over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is lucky to be alive as +a private citizen in this cold new age at the edge of the halo. "But that was +just scenery setting. I didn't fully understand what I was doing, back then." + +"Welcome to maturity and experience." Annette smiles distantly at some faint +memory: "You don't /{feel}/ older, you just know what you're doing this time. I +wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was here." + +"That birdbrain," Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her father +might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a gaggle of +mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and in through the +door of a real department store, one with actual human sales staff and fitting +rooms to cut the clothing to shape. "If I'm sending out fractional mes tailored +for different demographics, isn't it a bit self-defeating to go for a single +image? I mean, we could drill down and tailor a partial for each individual +elector -" + +"Per-haps." The door re-forms behind them. "But you need a core identity." +Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the sales consultant. "To +start with a core design, a style, then to work outward, tailoring you for your +audience. And besides, there is tonight's - ah, bonjour!" + +"Hello. How can we help you?" The two female and one male shop assistants who +appear from around the displays - cycling through a history of the couture +industry, catwalk models mixing and matching centuries of fashion - are clearly +chips off a common primary personality, instances united by their enhanced +sartorial obsession. If they're not actually a fashion borganism, they're not +far from it, dressed head to foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani +replicas, making a classical twentieth-century statement. This isn't simply a +shop, it's a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff trained as guardians +of the esoteric secrets of good taste. + +"Mais oui. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here." Annette reaches +through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped within the shop's location cache +and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just completed at the lead +assistant: "She is into politics going, and the question of her image is +important." + +"We would be /{delighted}/ to help you," purrs the proprietor, taking a +delicate step forward: "Perhaps you could tell us what you've got in mind?" + +"Oh. Well." Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette; Annette +stares back, unblinking. /{It's your head}/, she sends. "I'm involved in the +accelerationista administrative program. Are you familiar with it?" + +The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow between +perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to match her classic New Look suit. "I +have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion like myself does not concern +herself with politics," she says, a touch self-deprecatingly. "Especially the +politics of her clients. Your, ah, aunt said it was a question of image?" + +"Yes." Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual rags. "She's +my election agent. My problem, as she says, is there's a certain voter +demographic that mistakes image for substance and is afraid of the unknown, and +I need to acquire a wardrobe that triggers associations of probity, of respect +and deliberation. One suitable for a representative with a radical political +agenda but a strong track record. I'm afraid I'm in a hurry to start with - +I've got a big fund-raising party tonight. I know it's short notice, but I need +something off the shelf for it." + +"What exactly is it you're hoping to achieve?" asks the male couturier, his +voice hoarse and his r's rolling with some half-shed Mediterranean accent. He +sounds fascinated. "If you think it might influence your choice of wardrobe +..." + +"I'm running for the assembly," Amber says bluntly. "On a platform calling for +a state of emergency and an immediate total effort to assemble a starship. This +solar system isn't going to be habitable for much longer, and we need to +emigrate. All of us, you included, before the Vile Offspring decide to +reprocess us into computronium. I'm going to be doorstepping the entire +electorate in parallel, and the experience needs to be personalized." She +manages to smile. "That means, I think, perhaps eight outfits and four +different independent variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats - +enough that each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical +fabric and virtual. In addition, I'll want to see your range of historical +formalwear, but that's of secondary interest for now." She grins. "Do you have +any facilities for response-testing the combinations against different +personality types from different periods? If we could run up some models, that +would be useful." + +"I think we can do better than that." The manager nods approvingly, perhaps +contemplating her gold-backed deposit account. "Hansel, please divert any +further visitors until we have dealt with Madam ...?" + +"Macx. Amber Macx." + +"- Macx's requirements." She shows no sign of familiarity with the name. Amber +winces slightly; it's a sign of how hugely fractured the children of Saturn +have become, and of how vast the population of the halo, that only a generation +has passed and already barely anyone remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. +"If you'd come this way, please, we can begin to research an eigenstyle +combination that matches your requirements -" + +* * * + +Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for the +festival. The only people who see him are the chattering ghosts of dead +politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order of the Vile +Offspring. The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a horizon a thousand +kilometers away, beneath a lemon-yellow sky. The air smells faintly of ammonia, +and the big spaces are full of small ideas; but Sirhan doesn't care because, +for now, he's alone. + +Except that he isn't, really. + +"Excuse me, are you real?" someone asks him in American-accented English. + +It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his introspection and +realize that he's being spoken to. "What?" he asks, slightly puzzled. Wiry and +pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber goatherd on his body and the numinous +halo of a utility fogbank above his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely +resembles a saintly shepherd in a post-singularity nativity play. "I say, +what?" Outrage simmers at the back of his mind - /{Is nowhere private?}/ - but +as he turns, he sees that one of the ghost pods has split lengthwise across its +white mushroomlike crown, spilling a trickle of leftover construction fluid and +a completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who wears an +expression of profound surprise. + +"I can't find my implants," the Anglo male says, shaking his head. "But I'm +really here, aren't I? Incarnate?" He glances round at the other pods. "This +isn't a sim." + +Sirhan sighs - /{another exile}/ - and sends forth a daemon to interrogate the +ghost pod's abstract interface. It doesn't tell him much - unlike most of the +resurrectees, this one seems to be undocumented. "You've been dead. Now you're +alive. I /{suppose}/ that means you're now almost as real as I am. What else do +you need to know?" + +"When is -" The newcomer stops. "Can you direct me to the processing center?" +he asks carefully. "I'm disoriented." + +Sirhan is surprised - most immigrants take a lot longer to figure that out. +"Did you die recently?" he asks. + +"I'm not sure I died at all." The newcomer rubs his bald head, looking puzzled. +"Hey, no jacks!" He shrugs, exasperated. "Look, the processing center ..?" + +"Over there." Sirhan gestures at the monumental mass of the Boston Museum of +Science (shipped all the way from Earth a couple of decades ago to save it from +the demolition of the inner system). "My mother runs it." He smiles thinly. + +"Your mother -" the newly resurrected immigrant stares at him intensely, then +blinks. "Holy shit." He takes a step toward Sirhan. "It is you -" + +Sirhan recoils and snaps his fingers. The thin trail of vaporous cloud that has +been following him all this time, shielding his shaven pate from the diffuse +red glow of the swarming shells of orbital nanocomputers that have replaced the +inner planets, extrudes a staff of hazy blue mist that stretches down from the +air and slams together in his hand like a quarterstaff spun from bubbles. "Are +you threatening me, sir?" he asks, deceptively mildly. + +"I -" The newcomer stops dead. Then he throws back his head and laughs. "Don't +be silly, son. We're related!" + +"Son?" Sirhan bristles. "Who do you think you are -" A horrible thought occurs +to him. "Oh. Oh dear." A wash of adrenaline drenches him in warm sweat. "I do +believe we've met, in a manner of speaking ..." /{Oh boy, this is going to +upset so many applecarts,}/ he realizes, spinning off a ghost to think about +the matter. The implications are enormous. + +The naked newcomer nods, grinning at some private joke. "You look different +from ground level. And now I'm human again." He runs his hands down his ribs, +pauses, and glances at Sirhan owlishly. "Um. I didn't mean to frighten you. But +I don't suppose you could find your aged grandfather something to wear?" + +Sirhan sighs and points his staff straight up at the sky. The rings are edge +on, for the lily pad continent floats above an ocean of cold gas along Saturn's +equator, and they glitter like a ruby laser beam slashed across the sky. "Let +there be aerogel." + +A cloud of wispy soap bubble congeals in a cone shape above the newly +resurrected ancient and drops over him, forming a caftan. "Thanks," he says. He +looks round, twisting his neck, then winces. "Damn, that /{hurt}/. Ouch. I need +to get myself a set of implants." + +"They can sort you out in the processing center. It's in the basement in the +west wing. They'll give you something more permanent to wear, too." Sirhan +peers at him. "Your face -" He pages through rarely used memories. Yes, it's +Manfred as he looked in the early years of the last century. As he looked +around the time Mother-not was born. There's something positively indecent +about meeting your own grandfather in the full flush of his youth. "Are you +sure you haven't been messing with your phenotype?" he asks suspiciously. + +"No, this is what I used to look like. I think. Back in the naked ape again, +after all these years as an emergent function of a flock of passenger pigeons." +His grandfather smirks. "What's your mother going to say?" + +"I really don't know -" Sirhan shakes his head. "Come on, let's get you to +immigrant processing. You're sure you're not just an historical simulation?" + +The place is already heaving with the resimulated. Just why the Vile Offspring +seem to feel it's necessary to apply valuable exaquops to the job of deriving +accurate simulations of dead humans - outrageously accurate simulations of +long-dead lives, annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited +from the presingularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on mashed tree +pulp - much less beaming them at the refugee camps on Saturn - is beyond +Sirhan's ken: But he wishes they'd stop. + +"Just a couple of days ago I crapped on your lawn. Hope you don't mind." +Manfred cocks his head to one side and stares at Sirhan with beady eyes. +"Actually, I'm here because of the upcoming election. It's got the potential to +turn into a major crisis point, and I figured Amber would need me around." + +"Well you'd better come on in, then," Sirhan says resignedly as he climbs the +steps, enters the foyer, and leads his turbulent grandfather into the foggy +haze of utility nanomachines that fill the building. + +He can't wait to see what his mother will do when she meets her father in the +flesh, after all this time. + +* * * + +Welcome to Saturn, your new home world. This FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) +memeplex is designed to orient you and explain the following: + +_* How you got here + +_* Where "here" is + +_* Things you should avoid doing + +_* Things you might want to do as soon as possible + +_* Where to go for more information + +If you are remembering this presentation, you are probably resimulated. This is +not the same as being /{resurrected}/. You may remember dying. Do not worry: +Like all your other memories, it is a fabrication. In fact, this is the first +time you have ever been alive. (Exception: If you died after the +/{singularity,}/ you may be a genuine resurrectee. In which case, why are you +reading this FAQ?) + +!_ How you got here: + +The center of the solar system - Mercury, Venus, Earth's Moon, Mars, the +asteroid belt, and Jupiter - have been dismantled, or are being dismantled, by +weakly godlike intelligences. [NB: Monotheistic clergy and Europeans who +remember living prior to 1600, see alternative memeplex "in the beginning."] A +weakly godlike intelligence is not a supernatural agency, but the product of a +highly advanced society that learned how to artificially create souls [late +20th century: software] and translate human minds into souls and vice versa. +[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. +Software is not immortal.] + +Some of the weakly godlike intelligences appear to cultivate an interest in +their human antecedents - for whatever reason is not known. (Possibilities +include the study of history through horticulture, entertainment through +live-action role-playing, revenge, and economic forgery.) While no definitive +analysis is possible, all the resimulated persons to date exhibit certain +common characteristics: They are all based on well-documented historical +persons, their memories show suspicious gaps [see: smoke and mirrors], and they +are ignorant of or predate the /{singularity}/ [see: /{Turing Oracle, Vinge +catastrophe}/]. + +It is believed that the weakly godlike agencies have created you as a vehicle +for the introspective study of your historical antecedent by backward-chaining +from your corpus of documented works, and the back-projected genome derived +from your collateral descendants, to generate an abstract description of your +computational state vector. This technique is extremely intensive [see: +/{expTime-complete algorithms, Turing Oracle, time travel, industrial magic}/] +but marginally plausible in the absence of supernatural explanations. + +After experiencing your life, the weakly godlike agencies have expelled you. +For reasons unknown, they chose to do this by transmitting your upload state +and genome/proteome complex to receivers owned and operated by a consortium of +charities based on Saturn. These charities have provided for your basic needs, +including the body you now occupy. + +In summary: You are a /{reconstruction}/ of someone who lived and died a long +time ago, not a reincarnation. You have no intrinsic moral right to the +identity you believe to be your own, and an extensive body of case law states +that you do not inherit your antecedent's possessions. Other than that, you are +a free individual. + +Note that /{fictional resimulation}/ is strictly forbidden. If you have reason +to believe that you may be a fictional character, you must contact the city +/{immediately}/. [ See: /{James Bond, Spider Jerusalem}/.] Failure to comply is +a felony. + +!_ Where you are: + +You are on Saturn. Saturn is a gas giant planet 120,500 kilometers in diameter, +located 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth's sun. [NB: Europeans who remember +living prior to 1580, see alternative memeplex "/{the flat Earth - not}/".] +Saturn has been partially terraformed by /{posthuman}/ emigrants from Earth and +Jupiter orbit: The ground beneath your feet is, in reality, the floor of a +hydrogen balloon the size of a continent, floating in Saturn's upper +atmosphere. [NB: Europeans who remember living prior to 1790, internalize the +supplementary memeplex: "the /{Brothers Montgolfier}/."] The balloon is very +safe, but mining activities and the use of ballistic weapons are strongly +deprecated because the air outside is unbreathable and extremely cold. + +The society you have been instantiated in is /{extremely wealthy}/ within the +scope of Economics 1.0, the value transfer system developed by human beings +during and after your own time. Money exists, and is used for the usual range +of goods and services, but the basics - food, water, air, power, off-the-shelf +clothing, housing, historical entertainment, and monster trucks - are /{free}/. +An implicit social contract dictates that, in return for access to these +facilities, you obey certain laws. + +If you wish to opt out of this social contract, be advised that other worlds +may run *{Economics 2.0}* or subsequent releases. These value-transfer systems +are more efficient - hence wealthier - than Economics 1.0, but true +participation in Economics 2.0 is not possible without dehumanizing cognitive +surgery. Thus, in /{absolute}/ terms, although this society is richer than any +you have ever heard of, it is also a poverty-stricken backwater compared to its +neighbors. + +!_ Things you should avoid doing: + +Many activities that have been classified as crimes in other societies are +legal here. These include but are not limited to: acts of worship, art, sex, +violence, communication, or commerce between consenting competent sapients of +any species, except where such acts transgress the list of prohibitions below. +[See additional memeplex: /{competence defined}/.] + +Some activities are prohibited here and may have been legal in your previous +experience. These include willful deprivation of ability to consent [see: +/{slavery}/], interference in the absence of consent [see: /{minors, legal +status of}/], formation of limited liability companies [see: /{singularity}/], +and invasion of defended privacy [see: /{the Slug, Cognitive Pyramid Schemes, +Brain Hacking, Thompson Trust Exploit}/]. + +Some activities unfamiliar to you are highly illegal and should be scrupulously +avoided. These include: possession of nuclear weapons, possession of unlimited +autonomous replicators [see: /{gray goo}/], coercive assimilationism [see: +/{borganism, aggressive}/], coercive halting of Turing-equivalent personalities +[see: basilisks], and applied theological engineering [see: /{God bothering}/]. + +Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and should be +avoided for your safety, although they are not illegal as such. These include: +giving your bank account details to the son of the Nigerian Minister of +Finance; buying title to bridges, skyscrapers, spacecraft, planets, or other +real assets; murder; selling your identity; and entering into financial +contracts with entities running Economics 2.0 or higher. + +!_ Things you should do as soon as possible: + +Many material artifacts you may consider essential to life are freely available +- just ask the city, and it will grow you clothes, a house, food, or other +basic essentials. Note, however, that the library of public domain structure +templates is of necessity restrictive, and does not contain items that are +highly fashionable or that remain in copyright. Nor will the city provide you +with replicators, weapons, sexual favors, slaves, or zombies. + +You are advised to register as a citizen as soon as possible. If the individual +you are a resimulation of can be confirmed dead, you may adopt their name but +not - in law - any lien or claim on their property, contracts, or descendants. +You register as a citizen by asking the city to register you; the process is +painless and typically complete within four hours. Unless you are registered, +your legal status as a sapient organism may be challenged. The ability to +request citizenship rights is one of the legal tests for sapience, and failure +to comply may place you in legal jeopardy. You can renounce your citizenship +whenever you wish: This may be desirable if you emigrate to another polity. + +While many things are free, it is highly likely that you posses no employable +skills, and therefore, no way of earning money with which to purchase unfree +items. The pace of change in the past century has rendered almost all skills +you may have learned obsolete [see: /{singularity}/]. However, owing to the +rapid pace of change, many cooperatives, trusts, and guilds offer on-the-job +training or educational loans. + +Your ability to learn depends on your ability to take information in the format +in which it is offered. /{Implants}/ are frequently used to provide a direct +link between your brain and the intelligent machines that surround it. A basic +core implant set is available on request from the city. [See: /{implant +security}/, /{firewall}/, /{wetware}/.] + +Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is +likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of +an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided - for a fee. (In +event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of +your killer.) If you have any preexisting medical conditions or handicaps, +consult the city. + +The city is an agoric-annealing participatory democracy with a limited +liability constitution. Its current executive agency is a weakly godlike +intelligence that chooses to associate with human-equivalent intelligences: +This agency is colloquially known as "Hello Kitty," "Beautiful Cat," or +"Aineko," and may manifest itself in a variety of physical avatars if corporeal +interaction is desired. (Prior to the arrival of "Hello Kitty," the city used a +variety of human-designed expert systems that provided suboptimal performance.) + +The city's mission statement is to provide a mediatory environment for +human-equivalent intelligences and to preserve same in the face of external +aggression. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the ongoing political +processes of determining such responses. Citizens also have a duty to serve on +a jury if called (including senatorial service), and to defend the city. + +!_ Where to go for further information: + +Until you have registered as a citizen and obtained basic implants, all further +questions should be directed to the city. Once you have learned to use your +implants, you will not need to ask this question. + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to decade the ninth, singularity plus one gigasecond (or maybe more +- nobody's quite sure when, or indeed /{if}/, a singularity has been created). +The human population of the solar system is either six billion, or sixty +billion, depending on whether you class the forked state vectors of posthumans +and the simulations of dead phenotypes running in the Vile Offspring's +Schrödinger boxes as people. Most of the physically incarnate still live on +Earth, but the lily-pads floating beneath continent-sized hot-hydrogen balloons +in Saturn's upper atmosphere already house a few million, and the writing is on +the wall for the rocky inner planets. All the remaining human-equivalent +intelligences with half a clue to rub together are trying to emigrate before +the Vile Offspring decide to recycle Earth to fill in a gap in the concentric +shells of nanocomputers they're running on. The half-constructed Matrioshka +brain already darkens the skies of Earth and has caused a massive crash in the +planet's photosynthetic biomass, as plants starve for short-wavelength light. + +_1 Since decade the seventh, the computational density of the solar system has +soared. Within the asteroid belt, more than half the available planetary mass +has been turned into nanoprocessors, tied together by quantum entanglement into +a web so dense that each gram of matter can simulate all the possible life +experiences of an individual human being in a scant handful of minutes. +Economics 2.0 is itself obsolescent, forced to mutate in a furious survivalist +arms race by the arrival of the Slug. Only the name remains as a vague +shorthand for merely human-equivalent intelligences to use when describing +interactions they don't understand. + +_1 The latest generation of posthuman entities is less overtly hostile to +humans, but much more alien than the generations of the fifties and seventies. +Among their less comprehensible activities, the Vile Offspring are engaged in +exploring the phase-space of all possible human experiences from the inside +out. Perhaps they caught a dose of the Tiplerite heresy along the way, for now +a steady stream of resimulant uploads is pouring through the downsystem relays +in Titan orbit. The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection +of the Extremely Confused, except that they're not really resurrectees - +they're simulations based on their originals' recorded histories, blocky and +missing chunks of their memories, as bewildered as baby ducklings as they're +herded into the wood-chipper of the future. + +_1 Sirhan al-Khurasani despises them with the abstract contempt of an +antiquarian for a cunning but ultimately transparent forgery. But Sirhan is +young, and he's got more contempt than he knows what to do with. It's a handy +outlet for his frustration. He has a lot to be frustrated at, starting with his +intermittently dysfunctional family, the elderly stars around whom his planet +whizzes in chaotic trajectories of enthusiasm and distaste. + +_1 Sirhan fancies himself a philosopher-historian of the singular age, a +chronicler of the incomprehensible, which would be a fine thing to be except +that his greatest insights are all derived from Aineko. He alternately fawns +over and rages against his mother, who is currently a leading light in the +refugee community, and honors (when not attempting to evade the will of) his +father, who is lately a rising philosophical patriarch within the +Conservationist faction. He's secretly in awe (not to mention slightly +resentful) of his grandfather Manfred. In fact, the latter's abrupt +reincarnation in the flesh has quite disconcerted him. And he sometimes listens +to his stepgrandmother Annette, who has reincarnated in more or less her +original 2020s body after spending some years as a great ape, and who seems to +view him as some sort of personal project. + +_1 OnlyAnnette isn't being very helpful right now. His mother is campaigning on +an electoral platform calling for a vote to blow up the world, Annette is +helping run her campaign, his grandfather is trying to convince him to entrust +everything he holds dear to a rogue lobster, and the cat is being typically +feline and evasive. + +_1 Talk about families with problems ... + +* * * + +They've transplanted imperial Brussels to Saturn in its entirety, mapped tens +of megatonnes of buildings right down to nanoscale and beamed them into the +outer darkness to be reinstantiated down-well on the lily-pad colonies that dot +the stratosphere of the gas giant. (Eventually the entire surface of the Earth +will follow - after which the Vile Offspring will core the planet like an +apple, dismantle it into a cloud of newly formed quantum nanocomputers to add +to their burgeoning Matrioshka brain.) Due to a resource contention problem in +the festival committee's planning algorithm - or maybe it's simply an elaborate +joke - Brussels now begins just on the other side of a diamond bubble wall from +the Boston Museum of Science, less than a kilometer away as the passenger +pigeon flies. Which is why, when it's time to celebrate a birthday or name day +(meaningless though those concepts are, out on Saturn's synthetic surface), +Amber tends to drag people over to the bright lights of the big city. + +This time she's throwing a rather special party. At Annette's canny prompting, +she's borrowed the Atomium and invited a horde of guests to a big event. It's +not a family bash - although Annette's promised her a surprise - so much as a +business meeting, testing the water as a preliminary to declaring her +candidacy. It's a media coup, an attempt to engineer Amber's re-entry into the +mainstream politics of the human system. + +Sirhan doesn't really want to be here. He's got far more important things to +do, like continuing to catalogue Aineko's memories of the voyage of the *{Field +Circus}*. He's also collating a series of interviews with resimulated logical +positivists from Oxford, England (the ones who haven't retreated into gibbering +near catatonia upon realizing that their state vectors are all members of the +set of all sets that do not contain themselves), when he isn't attempting to +establish a sound rational case for his belief that extraterrestrial +superintelligence is an oxymoron and the router network is just an accident, +one of evolution's little pranks. + +But Tante Annette twisted his arm and promised he was in on the surprise if he +came to the party. And despite everything, he wouldn't miss being a fly on the +wall during the coming meeting between Manfred and Amber for all the tea in +China. + +Sirhan walks up to the gleaming stainless-steel dome that contains the entrance +to the Atomium, and waits for the lift. He's in line behind a gaggle of +young-looking women, skinny and soigné in cocktail gowns and tiaras lifted from +1920s silent movies. (Annette declared an age of elegance theme for the party, +knowing full well that it would force Amber to focus on her public appearance.) +Sirhan's attention is, however, elsewhere. The various fragments of his mind +are conducting three simultaneous interviews with philosophers ("whereof we +cannot speak, thereof we must be silent" in spades), controlling two 'bots that +are overhauling the museum plumbing and air-recycling system, and he's busy +discussing observations of the alien artifact orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai +^{+4904}^/,{-56}, with Aineko. What's left of him exhibits about as much social +presence as a pickled cabbage. + +The lift arrives and accepts a load of passengers. Sirhan is crowded into one +corner by a bubble of high-society laughter and an aromatic puff of smoke from +an improbable ivory cigarette holder as the lift surges, racing up the +sixty-meter shaft toward the observation deck at the top of the Atomium. It's a +ten-meter-diameter metal globe, spiral staircases and escalators connecting it +to the seven spheres at the corners of an octahedron that make up the former +centerpiece of the 1950 World's Fair. Unlike most of the rest of Brussels, it's +the original bits and atoms, bent alloy structures from before the space age +shipped out to Saturn at enormous expense. The lift arrives with a slight jerk. +"Excuse /{me}/," squeaks one of the good-time girls as she lurches backward, +elbowing Sirhan. + +He blinks, barely noticing her black bob of hair, chromatophore-tinted shadows +artfully tuned around her eyes: "Nothing to excuse." In the background, Aineko +is droning on sarcastically about the lack of interest the crew of the *{Field +Circus}* exhibited in the cat's effort to decompile their hitchhiker, the Slug. +It's distracting as hell, but Sirhan feels a desperate urge to understand what +happened out there. It's the key to understanding his not-mother's obsessions +and weaknesses - which, he senses, will be important in the times to come. + +He evades the gaggle of overdressed good-time girls and steps out onto the +lower of the two stainless-steel decks that bisect the sphere. Accepting a +fruit cocktail from a discreetly humaniform waitron, he strolls toward a row of +triangular windows that gaze out across the arena toward the American Pavilion +and the World Village. The metal walls are braced with turquoise-painted +girders, and the perspex transparencies are fogged with age. He can barely see +the one-tenth-scale model of an atomic-powered ocean liner leaving the pier +below, or the eight-engined giant seaplane beside it. "They never once asked me +if the Slug had attempted to map itself into the human-compatible spaces aboard +the ship," Aineko bitches at him. "I wasn't expecting them to, but really! Your +mother's too trusting, boy." + +"I suppose you took precautions?" Sirhan's ghost murmurs to the cat. That sets +the irascible metafeline off again on a long discursive tail-washing rant about +the unreliability of Economics-2.0-compliant financial instruments. Economics +2.0 apparently replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and +the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely +baroque object-relational framework based on the parameterized desires and +subjective experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is +concerned, this makes all such transactions intrinsically untrustworthy. + +/{Which is why you're stuck here with us apes}/, Sirhan-prime cynically notes +as he spawns an Eliza ghost to carry on nodding at the cat while he experiences +the party. + +It's uncomfortably warm in the Atomium sphere - not surprising, there must be +thirty people milling around up here, not counting the waitrons - and several +local multicast channels are playing a variety of styles of music to +synchronize the mood swings of the revelers to hardcore techno, waltz, raga ... + +"Having a good time, are we?" Sirhan breaks away from integrating one of his +timid philosophers and realizes that his glass is empty, and his mother is +grinning alarmingly at him over the rim of a cocktail glass containing +something that glows in the dark. She's wearing spike-heeled boots and a black +velvet cat suit that hugs her contours like a second skin, and she's already +getting drunk. In wall-clock years she is younger than Sirhan; it's like having +a bizarrely knowing younger sister mysteriously injected into his life to +replace the eigenmother who stayed home and died with the Ring Imperium decades +ago. "Look at you, hiding in a corner at your grandfather's party! Hey, your +glass is empty. Want to try this caipirinha? There's someone you've got to meet +over here -" + +It's at moments like this that Sirhan really wonders what in Jupiter's orbit +his father ever saw in this woman. (But then again, in the world line this +instance of her has returned from, he didn't. So what does that signify?) "As +long as there's no fermented grape juice in it," he says resignedly, allowing +himself to be led past a gaggle of conversations and a mournful-looking gorilla +slurping a long drink through a straw. "More of your /{accelerationista}/ +allies?" + +"Maybe not." It's the girl gang he avoided noticing in the lift, their eyes +sparkling, really getting into this early twen-cen drag party thing, waving +their cigarette holders and cocktail glasses around with wild abandon. "Rita, +I'd like you to meet Sirhan, my other fork's son. Sirhan, this is Rita? She's +an historian, too. Why don't you -" + +Dark eyes, emphasized not by powder or paint, but by chromatophores inside her +skin cells: black hair, chain of enormous pearls, slim black dress sweeping the +floor, a look of mild embarrassment on her heart-shaped face: She could be a +clone of Audrey Hepburn in any other century, "Didn't I just meet you in the +elevator?" The embarrassment shifts to her cheeks, becoming visible. + +Sirhan flushes, unsure how to reply. Just then, an interloper arrives on the +scene, pushing in between them. "Are you the curator who reorganized the +Precambrian gallery along teleology lines? I've got some things to say about +/{that}/!" The interloper is tall, assertive, and blonde. Sirhan hates her from +the first sight of her wagging finger. + +"Oh shut up, Marissa, this is a party, you've been being a pain all evening." +To his surprise, Rita the historian rounds on the interloper angrily. + +"It's not a problem," he manages to say. In the back of his mind, something +makes the Rogerian puppet-him that's listening to the cat sit up and dump-merge +a whole lump of fresh memories into his mind - something important, something +about the Vile Offspring sending a starship to bring something back from the +router - but the people around him are soaking up so much attention that he has +to file it for later. + +"Yes it /{is}/ a problem," Rita declares. She points at the interloper, who is +saying something about the invalidity of teleological interpretations, trying +to justify herself, and says, "/{Plonk}/. Phew. Where were we?" + +Sirhan blinks. Suddenly everyone but him seems to be ignoring that annoying +Marissa person. "What just happened?" he asks cautiously. + +"I killfiled her. Don't tell me, you aren't running Superplonk yet, are you?" +Rita flicks a location-cached idea at him and he takes it cautiously, spawning +a couple of specialized Turing Oracles to check it for halting states. It seems +to be some kind of optic lobe hack that accesses a collaborative database of +eigenfaces, with some sort of side interface to Broca's region. "Share and +enjoy, confrontation-free parties." + +"I've never seen -" Sirhan trails off as he loads the module distractedly. (The +cat is rambling on about god modules and metastatic entanglement and the +difficulty of arranging to have personalities custom-grown to order somewhere +in the back of his head, while his fractional-self nods wisely whenever it +pauses.) Something like an inner eyelid descends. He looks round; there's a +vague blob at one side of the room, making an annoying buzzing sound. His +mother seems to be having an animated conversation with it. "That's rather +interesting." + +"Yes, it helps no end at this sort of event." Rita startles him by taking his +left arm in hand - her cigarette holder shrivels and condenses until it's no +more than a slight thickening around the wrist of her opera glove - and steers +him toward a waitron. "I'm sorry about your foot, earlier, I was a bit +overloaded. Is Amber Macx really your mother?" + +"Not exactly, she's my eigenmother," he mumbles. "The reincarnated download of +the version who went out to Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, aboard the *{Field +Circus}*. She married a French-Algerian confidence-trick analyst instead of my +father, but I think they divorced a couple of years ago. My /{real}/ mother +married an imam, but they died in the aftermath of Economics 2.0." She seems to +be steering him in the direction of the window bay Amber dragged him away from +earlier. "Why do you ask?" + +"Because you're not very good at making small talk," Rita says quietly, "and +you don't seem very good in crowds. Is that right? Was it you who performed +that amazing dissection of Wittgenstein's cognitive map? The one with the +preverbal Gödel string in it?" + +"It was -" He clears his throat. "You thought it was amazing?" Suddenly, on +impulse, he detaches a ghost to identify this Rita person and find out who she +is, what she wants. It's not normally worth the effort to get to know someone +more closely than casual small talk, but she seems to have been digging into +his background, and he wants to know why. Along with the him that's chatting to +Aineko, that makes about three instances pulling in near-realtime resources. +He'll be running up an existential debt soon if he keeps forking ghosts like +this. + +"I thought so," she says. There's a bench in front of the wall, and somehow he +finds himself sitting on it next to her. /{There's no danger, we're not in +private or anything}/, he tells himself stiffly. She's smiling at him, face +tilted slightly to one side and lips parted, and for a moment, a dizzy sense of +possibility washes over him: /{What if she's about to throw all propriety +aside? How undignified!}/ Sirhan believes in self-restraint and dignity. "I was +really interested in this -" She passes him another dynamically loadable blob, +encompassing a detailed critique of his analysis of Wittgenstein's matriophobia +in the context of gendered language constructs and nineteenth century Viennese +society, along with a hypothesis that leaves Sirhan gasping with mild +indignation at the very idea that /{he}/ of all people might share +Wittgenstein's skewed outlook - "What do you think?" she asks, grinning +impishly at him. + +"Nnngk." Sirhan tries to unswallow his tongue. Rita crosses her legs, her gown +hissing. "I, ah, that is to say" - At which moment, his partials re-integrate, +dumping a slew of positively pornographic images into his memories. /{It's a +trap!}/ they shriek, her breasts and hips and pubes - clean-shaven, he can't +help noticing - thrusting at him in hotly passionate abandon, /{Mother's trying +to make you loose like her!}/ and he remembers what it /{would}/ be like to +wake up in bed next to this woman whom he barely knows after being married to +her for a year, because one of his cognitive ghosts has just spent several +seconds of network time (or several subjective months) getting hot and sweaty +with a ghost of her own, and she does have interesting research ideas, even if +she's a pushy over-westernized woman who thinks she can run his life for him. +"What /{is}/ this?" he splutters, his ears growing hot and his garments +constricting. + +"Just speculating about possibilities. We could get a lot done together." She +snakes an arm round his shoulders and pulls him toward her, gently. "Don't you +want to find out if we could work out?" + +"But, but -" Sirhan is steaming. /{Is she offering casual sex?}/ He wonders, +profoundly embarrassed by his own inability to read her signals: "What do you +/{want}/?" he asks. + +"You /{do}/ know that you can do more with Superplonk than just killfile +annoying idiots?" she whispers in his ear. "We can be invisible right now, if +you like. It's great for confidential meetings - other things, too. We can work +beautifully together, our ghosts annealed really well ..." + +Sirhan jumps up, his face stinging, and turns away: "No thank you!" he snaps, +angry at himself. "Goodbye!" His other instances, interrupted by his broadcast +emotional overload, are distracted from their tasks and sputtering with +indignation. Her hurt expression is too much for him: The killfile snaps down, +blurring her into an indistinct black blob on the wall, veiled by his own brain +as he turns and walks away, seething with anger at his mother for being so +unfair as to make him behold his own face in the throes of fleshy passion. + +* * * + +Meanwhile, in one of the lower spheres, padded with silvery blue insulating +pillows bound together with duct tape, the movers and shakers of the +accelerationista faction are discussing their bid for world power at +fractional-C velocities. + +"We can't outrun everything. For example, a collapse of the false vacuum," +Manfred insists, slightly uncoordinated and slurring his vowels under the +influence of the first glass of fruit punch he's experienced in nigh-on twenty +real-time years. His body is young and still relatively featureless, hair still +growing out, and he's abandoned his old no-implants fetish at last to adopt an +array of interfaces that let him internalize all the exocortex processes that +he formerly ran on an array of dumb Turing machines outside his body. He's +standing on his own sense of style and is the only person in the room who isn't +wearing some variation of dinner jacket or classical evening dress. "Entangled +exchange via routers is all very well, but it won't let us escape the universe +itself - any phase change will catch up eventually, the network must have an +end. And then where will we be, Sameena?" + +"I'm not disputing that." The woman he's talking to, wearing a green-and-gold +sari and a medieval maharajah's ransom in gold and natural diamonds, nods +thoughtfully. "But it hasn't happened yet, and we've got evidence that +superhuman intelligences have been loose in this universe for gigayears, so +there's a fair bet that the worst catastrophe scenarios are unlikely. And +looking closer to home, we don't know what the routers are for, or who made +them. Until then ..." She shrugs. "Look what happened last time somebody tried +to probe them. No offense intended." + +"It's already happened. If what I hear is correct, the Vile Offspring aren't +nearly as negative about the idea of using the routers as we old-fashioned +metahumans might like to believe." Manfred frowns, trying to recall some hazy +anecdote - he's experimenting with a new memory compression algorithm, +necessitated by his pack rat mnemonic habits when younger, and sometimes the +whole universe feels as if it's nearly on the tip of his tongue. "So, we seem +to be in violent agreement about the need to /{know more}/ about what's going +on, and to find out what they're doing out there. We've got cosmic background +anisotropies caused by the waste heat from computing processes millions of +light-years across - it takes a big interstellar civilization to do that, and +they don't seem to have fallen into the same rat trap as the local Matrioshka +brain civilizations. And we've got worrying rumors about the VO messing around +with the structure of space-time in order to find a way around the Beckenstein +bound. If the VO are trying that, then the folks out near the supercluster +already know the answers. The best way to find out what's happening is to go +and talk to whoever's responsible. Can we at least agree on that?" + +"Probably not." Her eyes glitter with amusement. "It all depends on whether one +believes in these civilizations in the first place. I /{know}/ your people +point to deep-field camera images going all the way back to some wonky +hubble-bubble scrying mirror from the late twentieth, but we've got no evidence +except some theories about the Casimir effect and pair production and spinning +beakers of helium-3 - much less proof that whole bunch of alien galactic +civilizations are trying to collapse the false vacuum and destroy the +universe!" Her voice dropped a notch: "At least, not enough proof to convince +most people, Manny dear. I know this comes as a shock to you, but not +/{everyone}/ is a neophiliac posthuman bodysurfer whose idea of a sabbatical is +to spend twenty years as a flock of tightly networked seagulls in order to try +and to prove the Turing Oracle thesis -" + +"Not everyone is concerned with the deep future," Manfred interrupts. "It's +important! If we live or die, that doesn't matter - that's not the big picture. +The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is +preserved, or whether we're stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence +counts for nothing. It's downright /{embarrassing}/ to be a member of a species +with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it +affects us all personally! I mean, if there's going to come a time when there's +nobody or nothing to remember us then what does -" + +"Manfred?" + +He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly. + +It's Amber, poised in black cat suit with cocktail glass. Her expression is +open and confused, appallingly vulnerable. Blue liquid slops, almost spilling +out of her glass - the rim barely extends itself in time to catch the drops. +Behind her stands Annette, a deeply self-satisfied smile on her face. + +"You." Amber pauses, her cheek twitching as bits of her mind page in and out of +her skull, polling external information sources. "You really /{are}/ -" + +A hasty cloud materializes under her hand as her fingers relax, dropping the +glass. + +"Uh." Manfred stares, at a complete loss for words. "I'd, uh." After a moment +he looks down. "I'm sorry. I'll get you another drink ..?" + +"Why didn't someone warn me?" Amber complains. + +"We thought you could use the good advice," Annette stated into the awkward +silence. "And a family reunion. It was meant to be a surprise." + +"A surprise." Amber looks perplexed. "You could say that." + +"You're taller than I was expecting," Manfred says unexpectedly. "People look +different when you're not using human eyes." + +"Yeah?" She looks at him, and he turns his head slightly, facing her. It's a +historic moment, and Annette is getting it all on memory diamond, from every +angle. The family's dirty little secret is that Amber and her father have +/{never met}/, not face-to-face in physical meat-machine proximity. She was +born years after Manfred and Pamela separated, after all, decanted +prefertilized from a tank of liquid nitrogen. This is the first time either of +them have actually seen the other's face without electronic intermediation. And +while they've said everything that needed to be said on a businesslike level, +anthropoid family politics is still very much a matter of body language and +pheromones. "How long have you been out and about?" she asks, trying to +disguise her confusion. + +"About six hours." Manfred manages a rueful chuckle, trying to take the sight +of her in all at once. "Let's get you another drink and put our heads +together?" + +"Okay." Amber takes a deep breath and glares at Annette. "You set this up, +/{you}/ clean up the mess." + +Annette just stands there smiling at the confusion of her accomplishment. + +* * * + +The cold light of dawn finds Sirhan angry, sober, and ready to pick a fight +with the first person who comes through the door of his office. The room is +about ten meters across, with a floor of polished marble and skylights in the +intricately plastered ceiling. The walkthrough of his current project sprouts +in the middle of the floor like a ghostly abstract cauliflower, fractal +branches dwindling down to infolded nodes tagged with compressed identifiers. +The branches expand and shrink as Sirhan paces around it, zooming to +readability in response to his eyeball dynamics. But he isn't paying it much +attention. He's too disturbed, uncertain, trying to work out whom to blame. +Which is why, when the door bangs open, his first response is to whirl angrily +and open his mouth - then stop. "What do /{you}/ want?" he demands. + +"A word, if you please?" Annette looks around distractedly. "This is your +project?" + +"Yes," he says icily, and banishes the walkthrough with a wave of one hand. +"What do you want?" + +"I'm not sure." Annette pauses. For a moment she looks weary, tired beyond +mortal words, and Sirhan momentarily wonders if perhaps he's spreading the +blame too far. This ninetysomething Frenchwoman who is no blood relative, who +was in years past the love of his scatterbrained grandfather's life, seems the +least likely person to be trying to manipulate him, at least in such an +unwelcome and intimate manner. But there's no telling. Families are strange +things, and even though the current instantiations of his father and mother +aren't the ones who ran his pre-adolescent brain through a couple of dozen +alternative lifelines before he was ten, he can't be sure - or that they +wouldn't enlist Tante Annette's assistance in fucking with his mind. "We need +to talk about your mother," she continues. + +"We do, do we?" Sirhan turns around and sees the vacancy of the room for what +it is, a socket, like a pulled tooth, informed as much by what is absent as by +what is present. He snaps his fingers, and an intricate bench of translucent +bluish utility fog congeals out of the air behind him. He sits: Annette can do +what she wants. + +"Oui." She thrusts her hands deep into the pocket of the peasant smock she's +wearing - a major departure from her normal style - and leans against the wall. +Physically, she looks young enough to have spent her entire life blitzing +around the galaxy at three nines of lightspeed, but her posture is world-weary +and ancient. History is a foreign country, and the old are unwilling emigrants, +tired out by the constant travel. "Your mother, she has taken on a huge job, +but it's one that needs doing. /{You}/ agreed it needed doing, years ago, with +the archive store. /{She}/ is now trying to get it moving, that is what the +campaign is about, to place before the electors a choice of how best to move an +entire civilization. So I ask, why do you obstruct her?" + +Sirhan works his jaw; he feels like spitting. "/{Why}/?" he snaps. + +"Yes. Why?" Annette gives in and magics up a chair from the swirling fogbank +beneath the ceiling. She crouches in it, staring at him. "It is a question." + +"I have nothing against her political machinations," Sirhan says tensely. "But +her uninvited interference in my personal life -" + +"What interference?" + +He stares. "Is that a question?" He's silent for a moment. Then: "Throwing that +wanton at me last night -" + +Annette stares at him. "Who? What are you talking about?" + +"That, that loose woman!" Sirhan is reduced to spluttering. "False pretenses! +If this is one of Father's matchmaking ideas, it is so /{very}/ wrong that -" + +Annette is shaking her head. "Are you crazy? Your mother simply wanted you to +meet her campaign team, to join in planning the policy. Your father is not on +this planet! But you stormed out, you /{really}/ upset Rita, did you know that? +Rita, she is the best belief maintenance and story construction operative I +have! Yet you to tears reduce her. What is wrong with you?" + +"I -" Sirhan swallows. "She's /{what}/?" he asks again, his mouth dry. "I +thought ..." He trails off. He doesn't want to say what he thought. The hussy, +that brazen trollop, is part of his mother's campaign party? Not some plot to +lure him into corruption? What if it was all a horrible misunderstanding? + +"I think you need to apologize to someone," Annette says coolly, standing up. +Sirhan's head is spinning between a dozen dialogues of actors and ghosts, a +journal of the party replaying before his ghast-stricken inner gaze. Even the +walls have begun to flicker, responding to his intense unease. Annette skewers +him with a disgusted look: "When you can a woman behave toward as a person, not +a threat, we can again talk. Until then." And she stands up and walks out of +the room, leaving him to contemplate the shattered stump of his anger, so +startled he can barely concentrate on his project, thinking, /{Is that really +me? Is that what I look like to her?}/ as the cladistic graph slowly rotates +before him, denuded branches spread wide, waiting to be filled with the nodes +of the alien interstellar network just as soon as he can convince Aineko to +stake him the price of the depth-first tour of darkness. + +* * * + +Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons - literally, his exocortex dispersed +among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting +semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd, even +without the added distractions of his sex drive, which he has switched off +until he gets used to being unitary again. Not only does he get shooting pains +in his neck whenever he tries to look over his left shoulder with his right +eye, but he's lost the habit of spawning exocortical agents to go interrogate a +database or bush robot or something, then report back to him. Instead he keeps +trying to fly off in all directions at once, which usually ends with him +falling over. + +But at present, that's not a problem. He's sitting comfortably at a weathered +wooden table in a beer garden behind a hall lifted from somewhere like +Frankfurt, a liter glass of straw-colored liquid at his elbow and a comforting +multiple whispering of knowledge streams tickling the back of his head. Most of +his attention is focused on Annette, who frowns at him with mingled concern and +affection. They may have lived separate lives for almost a third of a century, +since she declined to upload with him, but he's still deeply attuned to her. + +"You are going to have to do something about that boy," she says +sympathetically. "He is close enough to upset Amber. And without Amber, there +will be a problem." + +"I'm going to have to do something about Amber, too," Manfred retorts. "What +was the idea, not warning her I was coming?" + +"It was meant to be a surprise." Annette comes as close to pouting as Manfred's +seen her recently. It brings back warm memories; he reaches out to hold her +hand across the table. + +"You know I can't handle the human niceties properly when I'm a flock." He +strokes the back of her wrist. She pulls back after a while, but slowly. "I +expected you to manage all that stuff." + +"That stuff." Annette shakes her head. "She's your daughter, you know? Did you +have no curiosity left?" + +"As a bird?" Manfred cocks his head to one side so abruptly that he hurts his +neck and winces. "Nope. /{Now}/ I do, but I think I pissed her off -" + +"Which brings us back to point one." + +"I'd send her an apology, but she'd think I was trying to manipulate her" - +Manfred takes a mouthful of beer - "and she'd be right." He sounds slightly +depressed. "All my relationships are screwy this decade. And it's lonely." + +"So? Don't brood." Annette pulls her hand back. "Something will sort itself out +eventually. And in the short term, there is the work, the electoral problem +becomes acute." When she's around him the remains of her once-strong French +accent almost vanish in a transatlantic drawl, he realizes with a pang. He's +been abhuman for too long - people who meant a lot to him have changed while +he's been away. + +"I'll brood if I want to," he says. "I didn't ever really get a chance to say +goodbye to Pam, did I? Not after that time in Paris when the gangsters ..." He +shrugs. "I'm getting nostalgic in my old age." He snorts. + +"You're not the only one," Annette says tactfully. "Social occasions here are a +minefield, one must tiptoe around so many issues, people have too much, too +much history. And nobody knows everything that is going on." + +"That's the trouble with this damned polity." Manfred takes another gulp of +/{hefeweisen}/. "We've already got six million people living on this planet, +and it's growing like the first-generation Internet. Everyone who is anyone +knows everyone, but there are so many incomers diluting the mix and not knowing +that there /{is}/ a small world network here that everything is up for grabs +again after only a couple of megaseconds. New networks form, and we don't even +know they exist until they sprout a political agenda and surface under us. +We're acting under time pressure. If we don't get things rolling now, we'll +never be able to ..." He shakes his head. "It wasn't like this for you in +Brussels, was it?" + +"No. Brussels was a mature system. And I had Gianni to look after in his dotage +after you left. It will only get worse from here on in, I think." + +"Democracy 2.0." He shudders briefly. "I'm not sure about the validity of +voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal +importance seems frighteningly obsolescent. Do you think we can make this fly?" + +"I don't see why not. If Amber's willing to play the People's Princess for us +..." Annette picks up a slice of liverwurst and chews on it meditatively. + +"I'm not sure it's workable, however we play it." Manfred looks thoughtful. +"The whole democratic participation thing looks questionable to me under these +circumstances. We're under direct threat, for all that it's a long-term one, +and this whole culture is in danger of turning into a classical nation-state. +Or worse, several of them layered on top of one another with complete +geographical collocation but no social interpenetration. I'm not certain it's a +good idea to try to steer something like that - pieces might break off, you'd +get the most unpleasant side-effects. Although, on the other hand, if we can +mobilize enough broad support to become the first visible planetwide polity +..." + +"We need you to stay focused," Annette adds unexpectedly. + +"Focused? Me?" He laughs, briefly. "I /{used}/ to have an idea a second. Now +it's maybe one a year. I'm just a melancholy old birdbrain, me." + +"Yes, but you know the old saying? The fox has many ideas - the hedgehog has +only one, but it's a /{big}/ idea." + +"So tell me, what is my big idea?" Manfred leans forward, one elbow on the +table, one eye focused on inner space as a hot-burning thread of consciousness +barks psephological performance metrics at him, analysing the game ahead. +"Where do you think I'm going?" + +"I think -" Annette breaks off suddenly, staring past his shoulder. Privacy +slips, and for a frozen moment Manfred glances round in mild horror and sees +thirty or forty other guests in the crowded garden, elbows rubbing, voices +raised above the background chatter: "Gianni!" She beams widely as she stands +up. "What a surprise! When did you arrive?" + +Manfred blinks. A slim young guy, moving with adolescent grace, but none of the +awkward movements and sullen lack of poise - he's much older than he looks, +chickenhawk genetics. /{Gianni}/? He feels a huge surge of memories paging +through his exocortex. He remembers ringing a doorbell in dusty, hot Rome: +white toweling bathrobe, the economics of scarcity, autograph signed by the +dead hand of von Neumann - "Gianni?" he asks, disbelieving. "It's been a long +time!" + +The gilded youth, incarnated in the image of a metropolitan toy-boy from the +noughties, grins widely and embraces Manfred with a friendly bear hug. Then he +slides down onto the bench next to Annette, whom he kisses with easy +familiarity. "Ah, to be among friends again! It's been too long!" He glances +round curiously. "Hmm, how very Bavarian." He snaps his fingers. "Mine will be +a, what do you recommend? It's been too long since my last beer." His grin +widens. "Not in this body." + +"You're resimulated?" Manfred asks, unable to stop himself. + +Annette frowns at him disapprovingly: "No, silly! He came through the teleport +gate -" + +"Oh." Manfred shakes his head. "I'm sorry -" + +"It's okay." Gianni Vittoria clearly doesn't mind being mistaken for a +historical newbie, rather than someone who's traveled through the decades the +hard way. /{He must be over a hundred by now}/, Manfred notes, not bothering to +spawn a search thread to find out. + +"It was time to move and, well, the old body didn't want to move with me, so +why not go gracefully and accept the inevitable?" + +"I didn't take you for a dualist," Manfred says ruefully. + +"Ah, I'm not - but neither am I reckless." Gianni drops his grin for a moment. +The sometime minister for transhuman affairs, economic theoretician, then +retired tribal elder of the polycognitive liberals is serious. "I have never +uploaded before, or switched bodies, or teleported. Even when my old one was +seriously - tcha! Maybe I left it too long. But here I am, one planet is as +good as another to be cloned and downloaded onto, don't you think?" + +"You invited him?" Manfred asks Annette. + +"Why wouldn't I?" There's a wicked gleam in her eye. "Did you expect me to live +like a nun while you were a flock of pigeons? We may have campaigned against +the legal death of the transubstantiated, Manfred, but there are limits." + +Manfred looks between them, then shrugs, embarrassed. "I'm still getting used +to being human again," he admits. "Give me time to catch up? At an emotional +level, at least." The realization that Gianni and Annette have a history +together doesn't come as a surprise to him: It's one of the things you must +adapt to if you opt out of the human species, after all. At least the libido +suppression is helping here, he realizes: He's not about to embarrass anyone by +suggesting a ménage. He focuses on Gianni. "I have a feeling I'm here for a +purpose, and it isn't mine," he says slowly. "Why don't you tell me what you've +got in mind?" + +Gianni shrugs. "You have the big picture already. We are human, metahuman, and +augmented human. But the posthumans are things that were never really human to +begin with. The Vile Offspring have reached their adolescence and want the +place to themselves so they can throw a party. The writing is on the wall, +don't you think?" + +Manfred gives him a long stare. "The whole idea of running away in meatspace is +fraught with peril," he says slowly. He picks up his mug of beer and swirls it +around slowly. "Look, we know, now, that a singularity doesn't turn into a +voracious predator that eats all the dumb matter in its path, triggering a +phase change in the structure of space - at least, not unless they've done +something very stupid to the structure of the false vacuum, somewhere outside +our current light cone. + +"But if we run away, /{we}/ are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we'll +have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, +self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that's what +happened out past the Böotes void - not a galactic-scale civilization, but a +race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We +carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to +excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don't we? So ... maybe you can tell +me what you think we should do. Hmm?" + +"It's a dilemma." A waitron inserts itself into their privacy-screened field of +view. It plants a spun-diamond glass in front of Gianni, then pukes beer into +it. Manfred declines a refill, waiting for Gianni to drink. "Ah, the simple +pleasures of the flesh! I've been corresponding with your daughter, Manny. She +loaned me her experiential digest of the journey to Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},. +I found it quite alarming. Nobody's casting aspersions on her observations, not +after that self-propelled stock market bubble or 419 scam or whatever it was +got loose in the Economics 2.0 sphere, but the implications - the Vile +Offspring will eat the solar system, Manny. Then they'll slow down. But where +does that leave us, I ask you? What is there for orthohumans like us to do?" + +Manfred nods thoughtfully. "You've heard the argument between the +accelerationistas and the time-binder faction, I assume?" he asks. + +"Of course." Gianni takes a long pull on his beer. "What do /{you}/ think of +our options?" + +"The accelerationistas want to upload everyone onto a fleet of starwisps and +charge off to colonize an uninhabited brown dwarf planetary system. Or maybe +steal a Matrioshka brain that's succumbed to senile dementia and turn it back +into planetary biomes with cores of diamond-phase computronium to fulfil some +kind of demented pastoralist nostalgia trip. Rousseau's universal robots. I +gather Amber thinks this is a good idea because she's done it before - at +least, the charging off aboard a starwisp part. 'To boldly go where no uploaded +metahuman colony fleet has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?" +Manfred nods to himself. "Like I say, it won't work. We'd be right back to +iteration one of the waterfall model of singularity formation within a couple +of gigaseconds of arriving. That's why I came back: to warn her." + +"So?" Gianni prods, pretending to ignore the frowns that Annette is casting his +way. + +"And as for the time-binders," Manfred nods again, "they're like Sirhan. Deeply +conservative, deeply suspicious. Holding out for staying here as long as +possible, until the Vile Offspring come for Saturn - then moving out bit by +bit, into the Kuiper belt. Colony habitats on snowballs half a light-year from +anywhere." He shudders. "Spam in a fucking can with a light-hour walk to the +nearest civilized company if your fellow inmates decide to reinvent Stalinism +or Objectivism. No thanks! I know they've been muttering about quantum +teleportation and stealing toys from the routers, but I'll believe it when I +see it." + +"Which leaves what?" Annette demands. "It is all very well, this dismissal of +both the accelerationista and time-binder programs, Manny, but what can you +propose in their place?" She looks distressed. "Fifty years ago, you would have +had six new ideas before breakfast! And an erection." + +Manfred leers at her unconvincingly. "Who says I can't still have both?" + +She glares. "Drop it!" + +"Okay." Manfred chugs back a quarter of a liter of beer, draining his glass, +and puts it down on the table with a bang. "As it happens, I /{do}/ have an +alternative idea." He looks serious. "I've been discussing it with Aineko for +some time, and Aineko has been seeding Sirhan with it - if it's to work +optimally, we'll need to get a rump constituency of both the accelerationistas +and the conservatives on board. Which is why I'm conditionally going along with +this whole election nonsense. So, what's it worth to you for me to explain it?" + +* * * + +"So, who was the deadhead you were busy with today?" asks Amber. + +Rita shrugs. "Some boringly prolix pulp author from the early twentieth, with a +body phobia of extropian proportions - I kept expecting him to start drooling +and rolling his eyes if I crossed my legs. Funny thing is, he was also close to +bolting from fear once I mentioned implants. We /{really}/ need to nail down +how to deal with these mind/body dualists, don't we?" She watches Amber with +something approaching admiration; she's new to the inner circle of the +accelerationista study faction, and Amber's social credit is sky-high. Rita's +got a lot to learn from her, if she can get close enough. And right now, +following her along a path through the landscaped garden behind the museum +seems like a golden moment of opportunity. + +Amber smiles. "I'm glad I'm not processing immigrants these days; most of them +are so stupid it drives you up the wall after a bit. Personally I blame the +Flynn effect - in reverse. They come from a background of sensory deprivation. +It's nothing that a course of neural growth enhancers can't fix in a year or +two, but after the first few you skullfuck, they're all the same. So /{dull}/. +Unless you're unlucky enough to get one of the documentees from a puritan +religious period. I'm no fluffragette, but I swear if I get one more +superstitious, woman-hating clergyman, I'm going to consider prescribing +forcible gender reassignment surgery. At least the Victorian English are mostly +just open-minded lechers, when you get past their social reserve. And they like +new technology." + +Rita nods. /{Woman-hating et cetera}/ ... The echoes of patriarchy are still +with them today, it seems, and not just in the form of resimulated ayatollahs +and archbishops from the Dark Ages. "My author sounds like the worst of both. +Some guy called Howard, from Rhode Island. Kept looking at me as if he was +afraid I was going to sprout bat wings and tentacles or something." /{Like your +son}/, she doesn't add. /{Just what was he thinking, anyway?}/ she wonders. +/{To be that screwed up takes serious dedication ...}/ "What are you working +on, if you don't mind me asking?" she asks, trying to change the direction of +her attention. + +"Oh, pressing the flesh, I guess. Auntie 'Nette wanted me to meet some old +political hack contact of hers who she figures can help with the program, but +he was holed up with her and Dad all day." She pulls a face. "I had another +fitting session with the image merchants, they're trying to turn me into a +political catwalk clotheshorse. Then there's the program demographics again. +We're getting about a thousand new immigrants a day, planetwide, but it's +accelerating rapidly, and we should be up to eighty an hour by the time of the +election. Which is going to be a huge problem, because if we start campaigning +too early, a quarter of the electorate won't know what they're meant to be +voting about." + +"Maybe it's deliberate," Rita suggests. "The Vile Offspring are trying to rig +the outcome by injecting voters." She pings a smiley emoticon off Wednesday's +open channel, raising a flickering grin in return. "The party of fuckwits will +win, no question about it." + +"Uh-huh." Amber snaps her fingers and pulls an impatient face as she waits for +a passing cloud to solidify above her head and lower a glass of cranberry juice +to her. "Dad said one thing that's spot-on, we're framing this entire debate in +terms of what we should do to avoid conflict with the Offspring. The main bone +of contention is how to run away and how far to go and which program to put +resources into, not whether or when to run, let alone what else we could do. +Maybe we should have given it some more thought. Are we being manipulated?" + +Rita looks vacant for a moment. "Is that a question?" she asks. Amber nods, and +she shakes her head. "Then I'd have to say that I don't know. The evidence is +inconclusive, so far. But I'm not really happy. The Offspring won't tell us +what they want, but there's no reason to believe they don't know what /{we}/ +want. I mean, they can think rings round us, can't they?" + +Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge gate that gives admission to a +maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. "I really don't know. They may not care about +us, or even remember we exist - the resimulants may be being generated by some +autonomic mechanism, not really part of the higher consciousness of the +Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out post-Tiplerite meme that's gotten hold +of more processing resources than the entire presingularity Net, some kind of +MetaMormon project directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever +have lived lives in the /{right way}/ to fit some weird quasi-religious +requirement we don't know about. Or it might be a message we're simply not +smart enough to decode. That's the trouble, we don't know." + +She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up, sees her +about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps after her. "What else?" she +pants. + +"Could be" - left turn - "anything, really." Six steps lead down into a shadowy +tunnel; fork right, five meters forward, then six steps up lead back to the +surface. "Question is, why don't they" - left turn - "just /{tell}/ us what +they want?" + +"Speaking to tapeworms." Rita nearly manages to catch up with Amber, who is +trotting through the maze as if she's memorized it perfectly. "That's how much +the nascent Matrioshka brain can outthink us by, as humans to segmented worms. +Would we do. What they told us?" + +"Maybe." Amber stops dead, and Rita glances around. They're in an open cell +near the heart of the maze, five meters square, hedged in on all sides. There +are three entrances and a slate altar, waist high, lichen-stained with age. "I +think you know the answer to that question." + +"I -" Rita stares at her. + +Amber stares back, eyes dark and intense. "You're from one of the Ganymede +orbitals by way of Titan. You knew my eigensister while I was out of the solar +system flying a diamond the size of a Coke can. That's what you told me. You've +got a skill set that's a perfect match for the campaign research group, and you +asked me to introduce you to Sirhan, then you pushed his buttons like a pro. +Just what /{are}/ you trying to pull? Why should I trust you?" + +"I -" Rita's face crumples. "I /{didn't}/ push his buttons! He /{thought}/ I +was trying to drag him into bed." She looks up defiantly. "I wasn't, I want to +learn, what makes you - him - work -" Huge, dark, structured information +queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning +through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system, measuring +her past with a micrometer. She stares at Amber, mortified and angry. It's the +ultimate denial of trust, the need to check her statements against the public +record for truth. "What are you doing?" + +"I have a suspicion." Amber stands poised, as if ready to run. /{Run away from +me?}/ Rita thinks, startled. "You said, what if the resimulants came from a +subconscious function of the Offspring? And funnily enough, I've been +discussing that possibility with Dad. He's still got the spark when you show +him a problem, you know." + +"I don't understand!" + +"No, I don't think you do," says Amber, and Rita can feel vast stresses in the +space around her: The whole ubicomp environment, dust-sized chips and utility +fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright optical processors in the soil and the +air and her skin, is growing blotchy and sluggish, thrashing under the load of +whatever Amber - with her management-grade ackles - is ordering it to do. For a +moment, Rita can't feel half her mind, and she gets the panicky claustrophobic +sense of being trapped inside her own head: Then it stops. + +"Tell me!" Rita insists. "What are you trying to prove? It's some mistake -" +And Amber is nodding, much to her surprise, looking weary and morose. "What do +you think I've done?" + +"Nothing. You're coherent. Sorry about that." + +"Coherent?" Rita hears her voice rising with her indignation as she feels bits +of herself, cut off from her for whole seconds, shivering with relief. "I'll +give you coherent! Assaulting my exocortex -" + +"Shut up." Amber rubs her face and simultaneously throws Rita one end of an +encrypted channel. + +"Why should I?" Rita demands, not accepting the handshake. + +"Because." Amber glances round. /{She's scared!}/ Rita suddenly realizes. "Just +/{do}/ it," she hisses. + +Rita accepts the endpoint and a huge lump of undigested expository data slides +down it, structured and tagged with entry points and metainformation +directories pointing to - + +"Holy /{shit}/!" she whispers, as she realizes what it is. + +"Yes." Amber grins humorlessly. She continues, over the open channel: *{It +looks like they're cognitive antibodies, generated by the devil's own semiotic +immune system.}* *{That's what Sirhan is focusing on, how to avoid triggering +them and bringing everything down at once.}* *{Forget the election, we're going +to be in deep shit sooner rather than later, and we're still trying to work out +how to survive.}* *{Now are you sure you still want in?}* + +"Want in on /{what}/?" Rita asks, shakily. + +*{ The lifeboat Dad's trying to get us all into under cover of the +accelerationista/conservationista split, before the Vile Offspring's immune +system figures out how to lever us apart into factions and make us kill each +other ...}* + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little tapeworm. + +_1 Tapeworms have on the order of a thousand neurons, pulsing furiously to keep +their little bodies twitching. Human beings have on the order of a hundred +billion neurons. What is happening in the inner solar system as the Vile +Offspring churn and reconfigure the fast-thinking structured dust clouds that +were once planets is as far beyond the ken of merely human consciousness as the +thoughts of a Gödel are beyond the twitching tropisms of a worm. Personality +modules bounded by the speed of light, sucking down billions of times the +processing power of a human brain, form and re-form in the halo of glowing +nanoprocessors that shrouds the sun in a ruddy glowing cloud. + +_1 Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres and the asteroids - all gone. Luna is a silvery +iridescent sphere, planed smooth down to micrometer heights, luminous with +diffraction patterns. Only Earth, the cradle of human civilization, remains +untransformed; and Earth, too, will be dismantled soon enough, for already a +trellis of space elevators webs the planet around its equator, lifting refugee +dumb matter into orbit and flinging it at the wildlife preserves of the outer +system. + +_1 The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter's moons with claws of molecular +machinery won't stop until it runs out of dumb matter to convert into +computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much brainpower as you'd get +if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates +in orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy. But right now, it's still +stupid, having converted barely a percentage point of the mass of the solar +system - it's a mere Magellanic Cloud civilization, infantile and unsubtle and +still perilously close to its carbon-chemistry roots. + +_1 It's hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap their +thousand-neuron brains around whatever it is that the vastly more complex +entities who host them are discussing, but one thing's sure - the owners have a +lot of things going on, not all of them under conscious control. The churning +of gastric secretions and the steady ventilation of lungs are incomprehensible +to the simple brains of tapeworms, but they serve the purpose of keeping the +humans alive and provide the environment the worms live in. And other more +esoteric functions that contribute to survival - the intricate dance of +specialized cloned lymphocytes in their bone marrow and lymph nodes, the random +permutations of antibodies constantly churning for possible matches to intruder +molecules warning of the presence of pollution - are all going on beneath the +level of conscious control. + +_1 Autonomic defenses. Antibodies. Intelligence bloom gnawing at the edges of +the outer system. And humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, +they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones +who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far +and how fast? + +* * * + +There's a team meeting early the next morning. It's still dark outside, and +most of the attendees who are present in vivo have the faintly haggard look +that comes from abusing melatonin antagonists. Rita stifles a yawn as she +glances around the conference room - the walls expanded into huge virtual +spaces to accommodate thirty or so exocortical ghosts from sleeping partners +who will wake with memories of a particularly vivid lucid dream - and sees +Amber talking to her famous father and a younger-looking man who one of her +partials recognizes as a last-century EU politician. There seems to be some +tension between them. + +Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new tier of +campaigning information has opened up to her inner eye - stuff +steganographically concealed in a hidden layer of the project's collective +memory space. There's stuff in here she hadn't suspected, frightening studies +of resimulant demographics, surveys of emigration rates from the inner system, +cladistic trees dissecting different forms of crude tampering that have been +found skulking in the wetware of refugees. The reason why Amber and Manfred and +- reluctantly - Sirhan are fighting for one radical faction in a planetwide +election, despite their various misgivings over the validity of the entire +concept of democracy in this posthuman era. She blinks it aside, slightly +bewildered, forking a couple of dozen personality subthreads to chew on it at +the edges. "Need coffee," she mutters to the table, as it offers her a chair. + +"Everyone on-line?" asked Manfred. "Then I'll begin." He looks tired and +worried, physically youthful but showing the full weight of his age. "We've got +a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds ago, the bit rate on the +resimulation stream jumped. We're now fielding about one resimulated state +vector a second, on top of the legitimate immigration we're dealing with. If it +jumps again by the same factor, it's going to swamp our ability to check the +immigrants for zimboes in vivo - we'd have to move to running them in secure +storage or just resurrecting them blind, and if there /{are}/ any jokers in the +pack, that's about the riskiest thing we could do." + +"Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?" asks the handsome young +ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused - as if he already knows the +answer. + +"Politics." Manfred shrugs. + +"It would blow a hole in our social contract," says Amber, looking as if she's +just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita feels a flicker of admiration for +the way they're stage-managing the meeting. Amber's even talking to her father, +as if she feels comfortable with him around, although he's a walking reminder +of her own lack of success. Nobody else has gotten a word in yet. "If we don't +instantiate them, the next logical step is to deny resimulated minds the +franchise. Which in turn puts us on the road to institutional inequality. And +that's a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the idea of +settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote, because our +whole polity is based on the idea that less competent intelligences - us - +deserve consideration." + +"Hrmph." Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes, because +it's Amber's screwed-up eigenchild, and he's just about materialized in the +chair next to her. /{So he adopted Superplonk after all?}/ she observes +cynically. He doggedly avoids looking at her. "That was my analysis," he says +reluctantly. "We need them alive. For the ark option, at least, and if not, +even the accelerationista platform will need them on hand later." + +/{Concentration camps}/, thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan's presence near +her, for it's a constant irritant, /{where most of the inmates are confused, +frightened human beings - and the ones who aren't think they are}/. It's an +eerie thought, and she spawns a couple of full ghosts to dream it through for +her, gaming the possible angles. + +"How are your negotiations over the lifeboat designs going?" Amber asks her +father. "We need to get a portfolio of design schemata out before we go into +the election -" + +"Change of plan." Manfred hunches forward. "This doesn't need to go any +further, but Sirhan and Aineko have come up with something interesting." He +looks worried. + +Sirhan is staring at his eigenmother with narrowed eyes, and Rita has to resist +the urge to elbow him savagely in the ribs. She knows enough about him now to +realize it wouldn't get his attention - at least, not the way she'd want it, +not for the right reasons - and in any case, he's more wrapped up in himself +than her ghost ever saw him as likely to be. (How /{anyone}/ could be party to +such a detailed exchange of simulated lives and still reject the opportunity to +do it in real life is beyond her; unless it's an artifact of his youth, when +his parents pushed him through a dozen simulated childhoods in search of +knowledge and ended up with a stubborn oyster-head of a son ...) "We still need +to look as if we're planning on using a lifeboat," he says aloud. "There's the +small matter of the price they're asking in return for the alternative." + +"What? What are you talking about?" Amber sounds confused. "I thought you were +working on some kind of cladistic map. What's this about a price?" + +Sirhan smiles coolly. "I /{am}/ working on a cladistic map, in a manner of +speaking. You wasted much of your opportunity when you journeyed to the router, +you know. I've been talking to Aineko." + +"You -" Amber flushes. "What about?" She's visibly angry, Rita notices. Sirhan +is needling his eigenmother. /{Why}/? + +"About the topology of some rather interesting types of small-world network." +Sirhan leans back in his chair, watching the cloud above her head. "And the +router. You went through it, then you came back with your tail between your +legs as fast as you could, didn't you? Not even checking your passenger to see +if it was a hostile parasite." + +"I don't have to take this," Amber says tightly. "You weren't there, and you +have no idea what constraints we were working under." + +"Really?" Sirhan raises an eyebrow. "Anyway, you missed an opportunity. We know +that the routers - for whatever reason - are self-replicating. They spread from +brown dwarf to brown dwarf, hatch, tap the protostar for energy and material, +and send a bunch of children out. Von Neumann machines, in other words. We also +know that they provide high-bandwidth communications to other routers. When you +went through the one at Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, you ended up in an +unmaintained DMZ attached to an alien Matrioshka brain that had degenerated, +somehow. It follows that /{someone}/ had collected a router and carried it +home, to link into the MB. So why didn't you bring one home with you?" + +Amber glares at him. "Total payload on board the *{Field Circus}* was about ten +grams. How large do you think a router seed is?" + +"So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your storage +capacity and ready to wreak seven shades of havoc on -" + +"Children!" They both look round automatically. It's Annette, Rita realizes, +and she doesn't look amused. "Why do you not save this bickering for later?" +she asks. "We have our own goals to be pursuing." Unamused is an +understatement. Annette is fuming. + +"This charming family reunion was your idea, I believe?" Manfred smiles at her, +then nods coolly at the retread EU politician in the next seat. + +"Please." It's Amber. "Dad, can you save this for later?" Rita sits up. For a +moment, Amber looks ancient, far older than her subjective gigasecond of age. +"She's right. She didn't mean to screw up. Let's leave the family history for +some time when we can work it out in private. Okay?" + +Manfred looks abashed. He blinks rapidly. "All right." He takes a breath. +"Amber, I brought some old acquaintances into the loop. If we win the election, +then to get out of here as fast as possible, we'll have to use a combination of +the two main ideas we've been discussing: spool as many people as possible into +high-density storage until we get somewhere with space and mass and energy to +reincarnate them, and get our hands on a router. The entire planetary polity +can't afford to pay the energy budget of a relativistic starship big enough to +hold everyone, even as uploads, and a subrelativistic ship would be too damn +vulnerable to the Vile Offspring. And it follows that, instead of taking +potluck on the destination, we should learn about the network protocols the +routers use, figure out some kind of transferable currency we can use to pay +for our reinstantiation at the other end, and also how to make some kind of map +so we know where we're going. The two hard parts are getting at or to a router, +and paying - that's going to mean traveling with someone who understands +Economics 2.0 but doesn't want to hang around the Vile Offspring. + +"As it happens, these old acquaintances of mine went out and fetched back a +router seed, for their own purposes. It's sitting about thirty light-hours away +from here, out in the Kuiper belt. They're trying to hatch it right now. And I +/{think}/ Aineko might be willing to go with us and handle the trade +negotiations." He raises the palm of his right hand and flips a bundle of tags +into the shared spatial cache of the inner circle's memories. + +/{Lobsters}/. Decades ago, back in the dim wastelands of the depression-ridden +naughty oughties, the uploaded lobsters had escaped. Manfred brokered a deal +for them to get their very own cometary factory colony. Years later, Amber's +expedition to the router had run into eerie zombie lobsters, upload images that +had been taken over and reanimated by the Wunch. But where the real lobsters +had gotten to ... + +For a moment, Rita sees herself hovering in darkness and vacuum, the distant +siren song of a planetary gravity well far below. Off to her - left? north? - +glows a hazy dim red cloud the size of the full moon as seen from Earth, a +cloud that hums with a constant background noise, the waste heat of a galactic +civilization dreaming furious colorless thoughts to itself. Then she figures +out how to slew her unblinking, eyeless viewpoint round and sees the craft. + +It's a starship in the shape of a crustacean three kilometers long. It's +segmented and flattened, with legs projecting from the abdominal floor to +stretch stiffly sideways and clutch fat balloons of cryogenic deuterium fuel. +The blue metallic tail is a flattened fan wrapped around the delicate stinger +of a fusion reactor. Near the head, things are different: no huge claws there, +but the delicately branching fuzz of bush robots, nanoassemblers poised ready +to repair damage in flight and spin the parachute of a ramscoop when the ship +is ready to decelerate. The head is massively armored against the blitzkrieg +onslaught of interstellar dust, its radar eyes a glint of hexagonal compound +surfaces staring straight at her. + +Behind and below the lobster-ship, a planetary ring looms vast and tenuous. The +lobster is in orbit around Saturn, mere light-seconds away. And as Rita stares +at the ship in dumbstruck silence, it /{winks}/ at her. + +"They don't have names, at least not as individual identifiers," Manfred says +apologetically, "so I asked if he'd mind being called something. He said Blue, +because he is. So I give you the good lobster *{Something Blue}*." + +Sirhan interrupts, "You still need my cladistics project," he sounds somewhat +smug, "to find your way through the network. Do you have a specific destination +in mind?" + +"Yeah, to both questions," Manfred admits. "We need to send duplicate ghosts +out to each possible router end point, wait for an echo, then iterate and +repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal. The goal - that's harder." He points +at the ceiling, which dissolves into a chaotic 3-D spiderweb that Rita +recognizes, after some hours of subjective head-down archive time, as a map of +the dark matter distribution throughout a radius of a billion light-years, +galaxies glued like fluff to the nodes where strands of drying silk meet. +"We've known for most of a century that there's something flaky going on out +there, out past the Böotes void - there are a couple of galactic superclusters, +around which there's something flaky about the cosmic background anisotropy. +Most computational processes generate entropy as a by-product, and it looks +like something is dumping waste heat into the area from all the galaxies in the +region, very evenly spread in a way that mirrors the metal distribution in +those galaxies, except at the very cores. And according to the lobsters, who +have been indulging in some /{very}/ long baseline interferometry, most of the +stars in the nearest cluster are redder than expected and metal-depleted. As if +someone's been mining them." + +"Ah." Sirhan stares at his grandfather. "Why should they be any different from +the local nodes?" + +"Look around you. Do you see any indications of large-scale cosmic engineering +within a million light-years of here?" Manfred shrugs. "Locally, nothing has +quite reached ... well. We can guess at the life cycle of a post spike +civilization now, can't we? We've felt the elephant. We've seen the wreckage of +collapsed Matrioshka minds. We know how unattractive exploration is to +postsingularity intelligences, we've seen the bandwidth gap that keeps them at +home." He points at the ceiling. "But over /{there}/ something different +happened. They're making changes on the scale of an entire galactic +supercluster, and they appear to be coordinated. They /{did}/ get out and go +places, and their descendants may still be out there. It looks like they're +doing something purposeful and coordinated, something vast - a timing channel +attack on the virtual machine that's running the universe, perhaps, or an +embedded simulation of an entirely different universe. Up or down, is it +turtles all the way, or is there something out there that's more real than we +are? And don't you think it's worth trying to find out?" + +"No." Sirhan crosses his arms. "Not particularly. I'm interested in saving +people from the Vile Offspring, not taking a huge gamble on mystery +transcendent aliens who may have built a galaxy-sized reality hacking machine a +billion years ago. I'll sell you my services, and even send a ghost along, but +if you expect me to bet my entire future on it ..." + +It's too much for Rita. Diverting her attention away from the dizzying +inner-space vista, she elbows Sirhan in the ribs. He looks round blankly for a +moment, then with gathering anger as he lets his killfile filter slip. "Whereof +one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," she hisses. Then, succumbing to +a secondary impulse she knows she'll regret later, she drops a private channel +into his public in-tray. + +"Nobody's asking you to," Manfred is saying defensively, arms crossed. "I view +this as a Manhattan project kind of thing, pursue all agendas in parallel. If +we win the election, we'll have the resources we need to do that. We should +/{all}/ go through the router, and we will /{all}/ leave backups aboard +*{Something Blue}*. *{Blue}* is /{slow}/, tops out at about a tenth of cee, but +what he can do is get a sufficient quantity of memory diamond the hell out of +circumsolar space before the Vile Offspring's autonomic defenses activate +whatever kind of trust exploit they're planning in the next few megaseconds -" + +"/{What do you want}/?" Sirhan demands angrily over the channel. He's still not +looking at her, and not just because he's focusing on the vision in blue that +dominates the shared space of the team meeting. + +"/{Stop lying to yourself}/," Rita sends back. "/{You're lying about your own +goals and motivations. You may not want to know the truth your own ghost worked +out, but I do. And I'm not going to let you deny it happened}/." + +"/{So one of your agents seduced a personality image of me -}/" + +"/{Bullshit}/ -" + +"Do you mean to declare this platform openly?" asks the young-old guy near the +platform, the Europol. "Because if so, you're going to undermine Amber's +campaign -" + +"That's all right," Amber says tiredly, "I'm used to Dad supporting me in his +own inimitable way." + +"Is okay," says a new voice. "I are happy wait-state grazing in ecliptic." It's +the friendly lobster lifeboat, light-lagged by its trajectory outside the ring +system. + +"- /{You're happy to hide behind a hypocritical sense of moral purity when it +makes you feel you can look down on other people, but underneath it you're just +like everyone else}/ -" + +"- She /{set you up to corrupt me, didn't she? You're just bait in her scheme}/ +-" + +"The idea was to store incremental backups in the Panuliran's cargo cache in +case a weakly godlike agency from the inner system attempts to activate the +antibodies they've already disseminated throughout the festival culture," +Annette explains, stepping in on Manfred's behalf. + +Nobody else in the discussion space seems to notice that Rita and Sirhan are +busy ripping the shit out of each other over a private channel, throwing +emotional hand grenades back and forth like seasoned divorcees. "It's not a +satisfactory solution to the evacuation question, but it ought to satisfy the +conservatives' baseline requirement, and as insurance -" + +"- /{That's right, blame your eigenmother! Has it occurred to you that she +doesn't care enough about you to try a stunt like that? I think you spent too +much time with that crazy grandmother of yours. You didn't even integrate that +ghost, did you? Too afraid of polluting yourself! I bet you never even bothered +to check what it felt like from inside}/ -" + +"- /{I did}/ -" Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and +out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees - "/{make a fool of myself}/," he +adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. "/{This is so embarrassing ...}/" +He covers his face with his hands. "/{You're right.}/" + +"/{I am?}/" Rita's puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan has +finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized earlier. +Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous. "/{No, I'm not. +You're just overly defensive.}/" + +"/{I'm}/ -" Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the +ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with ideas, +exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds ghost-memories of his +embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened in real space if his instant +reaction to realizing that it /{could}/ happen hadn't been to dump the splinter +of his mind that was contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny +everything. + +"We have no threat profile yet," Annette says, cutting right across their +private conversation. "If there /{is}/ a direct threat - and we don't know that +for sure, yet, the Vile Offspring might be enlightened enough simply to be +leaving us alone - it'll probably be some kind of subtle attack aimed directly +at the foundations of our identity. Look for a credit bubble, distributed trust +metrics devaluing suddenly as people catch some kind of weird religion, +something like that. Maybe a perverse election outcome. And it won't be sudden. +They are not stupid, to start a headlong attack without slow corruption to +soften the way." + +"You've obviously been thinking about this for some time," Sameena says with +dry emphasis. "What's in it for your friend, uh, Blue? Did you squirrel away +enough credit to cover the price of renting a starship from the Economics 2.0 +metabubble? Or is there something you aren't telling us?" + +"Um." Manfred looks like a small boy with his hand caught in the sweets jar. +"Well, as a matter of fact -" + +"Yes, Dad, why don't you tell us just what this is going to cost?" Amber asks. + +"Ah, well." He looks embarrassed. "It's the lobsters, not Aineko. They want +some payment." + +Rita reaches out and grabs Sirhan's hand: He doesn't resist. "/{Do you know +about this?}/" Rita queries him. + +"/{All new to me ...}/" A confused partial thread follows his reply down the +pipe, and for a while, she joins him in introspective reverie, trying to work +out the implications of knowing what they know about the possibility of a +mutual relationship. + +"They want a written conceptual map. A map of all the accessible meme spaces +hanging off the router network, compiled by human explorers who they can use as +a baseline, they say. It's quite simple - in return for a ticket out-system, +some of us are going to have to go exploring. But that doesn't mean we can't +leave back-ups behind." + +"Do they have any particular explorers in mind?" Amber sniffs. + +"No," says Manfred. "Just a team of us, to map out the router network and +ensure they get some warning of threats from outside." He pauses. "You're going +to want to come along, aren't you?" + +* * * + +The pre-election campaign takes approximately three minutes and consumes more +bandwidth than the sum of all terrestrial communications channels from +prehistory to 2008. Approximately six million ghosts of Amber, individually +tailored to fit the profile of the targeted audience, fork across the dark +fiber meshwork underpinning of the lily-pad colonies, then out through +ultrawideband mesh networks, instantiated in implants and floating dust motes +to buttonhole the voters. Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many +more hold fruitless discussions; about six actually decide they've diverged so +far from their original that they constitute separate people and register for +independent citizenship, two defect to the other side, and one elopes with a +swarm of highly empathic modified African honeybees. + +Ambers are not the only ghosts competing for attention in the public zeitgeist. +In fact, they're in a minority. Most of the autonomous electoral agents are +campaigning for a variety of platforms that range from introducing a +progressive income tax - nobody is quite sure /{why}/, but it seems to be +traditional - to a motion calling for the entire planet to be paved, which +quite ignores the realities of element abundance in the upper atmosphere of a +metal-poor gas giant, not to mention playing hell with the weather. The +Faceless are campaigning for everyone to be assigned a new set of facial +muscles every six months, the Livid Pranksters are demanding equal rights for +subsentient entities, and a host of single-issue pressure groups are yammering +about the usual lost causes. + +Just how the election process anneals is a black mystery - at least, to those +people who aren't party to the workings of the Festival Committee, the group +who first had the idea of paving Saturn with hot-hydrogen balloons - but over +the course of a complete diurn, almost forty thousand seconds, a pattern begins +to emerge. This pattern will systematize the bias of the communications +networks that traffic in reputation points across the planetary polity for a +long time - possibly as much as fifty million seconds, getting on for a whole +Martian year (if Mars still existed). It will create a parliament - a merged +group mind borganism that speaks as one supermind built from the beliefs of the +victors. And the news isn't great, as the party gathered in the upper sphere of +the Atomium (which Manfred insisted Amber rent for the dead dog party) is +slowly realizing. Amber isn't there, presumably drowning her sorrows or +engaging in postelection schemes of a different nature somewhere else. But +other members of her team are about. + +"It could be worse," Rita rationalizes, late in the evening. She's sitting in a +corner of the seventh-floor deck, in a 1950s wireframe chair, clutching a glass +of synthetic single malt and watching the shadows. "We could be in an old-style +contested election with seven shades of shit flying. At least this way we can +be decently anonymous." + +One of the blind spots detaches from her peripheral vision and approaches. It +segues into view, suddenly congealing into Sirhan. He looks morose. + +"What's your problem?" she demands. "Your former faction is winning on the +count." + +"Maybe so." He sits down beside her, carefully avoiding her gaze. "Maybe this +is a good thing. And maybe not." + +"So when are you going to join the syncitium?" she asks. + +"Me? Join that?" He looks alarmed. "You think I want to become part of a +parliamentary borg? What do you take me for?" + +"Oh." She shakes her head. "I assumed you were avoiding me because -" + +"No." He holds out his hand, and a passing waitron deposits a glass in it. He +takes a deep breath. "I owe you an apology." + +/{About time}/, she thinks, uncharitably. But he's like that. Stiff-necked and +proud, slow to acknowledge a mistake, but unlikely to apologize unless he +really means it. "What for?" she asks. + +"For not giving you the benefit of the doubt," he says slowly, rolling the +glass between his palms. "I should have listened to myself earlier instead of +locking him out of me." + +The self he's talking about seems self-evident to her. "You're not an easy man +to get close to," she says quietly. "Maybe that's part of your problem." + +"Part of it?" He chuckles bitterly. "My mother -" He bites back whatever he +originally meant to say. "Do you know I'm older than she is? Than this version, +I mean. She gets up my nose with her assumptions about me ..." + +"They run both ways." Rita reaches out and takes his hand - and he grips her +right back, no rejection this time. "Listen, it looks as if she's not going to +make it into the parliament of lies. There's a straight conservative sweep, +these folks are in solid denial. About eighty percent of the population are +resimulants or old-timers from Earth, and that's not going to change before the +Vile Offspring turn on us. What are we going to do?" + +He shrugs. "I suspect everyone who thinks we're really under threat will move +on. You know this is going to destroy the accelerationistas trust in democracy? +They've still got a viable plan - Manfred's friendly lobster will work without +the need for an entire planet's energy budget - but the rejection is going to +hurt. I can't help thinking that maybe the real goal of the Vile Offspring was +simply to gerrymander us into not diverting resources away from them. It's +blunt, it's unsubtle, so we assumed that wasn't the point. But maybe there's a +time for them to be blunt." + +She shrugs. "Democracy is a bad fit for lifeboats." But she's still +uncomfortable with the idea. "And think of all the people we'll be leaving +behind." + +"Well." He smiles tightly. "If you can think of any way to encourage the masses +to join us ..." + +"A good start would be to stop thinking of them as masses to be manipulated." +Rita stares at him. "Your family appears to have been developing a hereditary +elitist streak, and it's not attractive." + +Sirhan looks uncomfortable. "If you think I'm bad, you should talk to Aineko +about it," he says, self- deprecatingly. "Sometimes I wonder about that cat." + +"Maybe I will." She pauses. "And you? What are you going to do with yourself? +Are you going to join the explorers?" + +"I -" He looks sideways at her. "I can see myself sending an eigenbrother," he +says quietly. "But I'm not going to gamble my entire future on a bid to reach +the far side of the observable universe by router. I've had enough excitement +to last me a lifetime, lately. I think one copy for the backup archive in the +icy depths, one to go exploring - and one to settle down and raise a family. +What about you?" + +"You'll go all three ways?" she asks. + +"Yes, I think so. What about you?" + +"Where you go, I go." She leans against him. "Isn't that what matters in the +end?" she murmurs. + +1~ Chapter 9: Survivor + +This time, more than a double handful of years passes between successive visits +to the Macx dynasty. + +Somewhere in the gas-sprinkled darkness beyond the local void, carbon-based +life stirs. A cylinder of diamond fifty kilometers long spins in the darkness, +its surface etched with strange quantum wells that emulate exotic atoms not +found in any periodic table that Mendeleyev would have recognized. Within it, +walls hold kilotonnes of oxygen and nitrogen gas, megatonnes of life-infested +soil. A hundred trillion kilometers from the wreckage of Earth, the cylinder +glitters like a gem in the darkness. + +Welcome to New Japan: one of the places between the stars where human beings +hang out, now that the solar system is off-limits to meatbodies. + +I wonder who we'll find here? + +* * * + +There's an open plaza in one of the terraform sectors of the habitat cylinder. +A huge gong hangs from a beautifully painted wooden frame at one side of the +square, which is paved with weathered limestone slabs made of atoms ripped from +a planet that has never seen molten ice. Houses stand around, and open-fronted +huts where a variety of humanoid waitrons attend to food and beverages for the +passing realfolk. A group of prepubescent children are playing hunt-and-seek +with their big-eyed pet companions, brandishing makeshift spears and automatic +rifles - there's no pain here, for bodies are fungible, rebuilt in a minute by +the assembler/disassembler gates in every room. There are few adults +hereabouts, for Red Plaza is unfashionable at present, and the kids have +claimed it for their own as a playground. They're all genuinely young, symptoms +of a demographic demiurge, not a single wendypan among them. + +A skinny boy with nut brown skin, a mop of black hair, and three arms is +patiently stalking a worried-looking blue eeyore around the corner of the +square. He's passing a stand stacked with fresh sushi rolls when the strange +beast squirms out from beneath a wheelbarrow and arches its back, stretching +luxuriously. + +The boy, Manni, freezes, hands tensing around his spear as he focuses on the +new target. (The blue eeyore flicks its tail at him and darts for safety across +a lichen-encrusted slab.) "City, what's that?" he asks without moving his lips. + +"What are you looking at?" replies City, which puzzles him somewhat, but not as +much as it should. + +The beast finishes stretching one front leg and extends another. It looks a bit +like a pussycat to Manni, but there's something subtly wrong with it. Its head +is a little too small, the eyes likewise - and those paws - "You're sharp," he +accuses the beast, forehead wrinkling in disapproval. + +"Yeah, whatever." The creature yawns, and Manni points his spear at it, +clenching the shaft in both right hands. It's got sharp teeth, too, but it +spoke to him via his inner hearing, not his ears. Innerspeech is for people, +not toys. + +"Who are you?" he demands. + +The beast looks at him insolently. "I know your parents," it says, still using +innerspeech. "You're Manni Macx, aren't you? Thought so. I want you to take me +to your father." + +"No!" Manni jumps up and waves his arms at it. "I don't like you! Go away!" He +pokes his spear in the direction of the beast's nose. + +"I'll go away when you take me to your father," says the beast. It raises its +tail like a pussycat, and the fur bushes out, but then it pauses. "If you take +me to your father I'll tell you a story afterward, how about that?" + +"Don't care!" Manni is only about two hundred megaseconds old - seven old +Earth-years - but he can tell when he's being manipulated and gets truculent. + +"Kids." The cat-thing's tail lashes from side to side. "Okay, Manni, how about +you take me to your father, or I rip your face off? I've got claws, you know." +A brief eyeblink later, it's wrapping itself around his ankles sinuously, +purring to give the lie to its unreliable threat - but he can see that it's got +sharp nails all right. It's a /{wild}/ pussycat-thing, and nothing in his +artificially preserved orthohuman upbringing has prepared him for dealing with +a real wild pussycat-thing that talks. + +"Get away!" Manni is worried. "Mom!" he hollers, unintentionally triggering the +broadcast flag in his innerspeech. "There's this /{thing}/ -" + +"Mom will do." The cat-thing sounds resigned. It stops rubbing against Manni's +legs and looks up at him. "There's no need to panic. I won't hurt you." + +Manni stops hollering. "Who're you?" he asks at last, staring at the beast. +Somewhere light-years away, an adult has heard his cry; his mother is coming +fast, bouncing between switches and glancing off folded dimensions in a +headlong rush toward him. + +"I'm Aineko." The beast sits down and begins to wash behind one hind leg. "And +you're Manni, right?" + +"Aineko," Manni says uncertainly. "Do you know Lis or Bill?" + +Aineko the cat-thing pauses in his washing routine and looks at Manni, head +cocked to one side. Manni is too young, too inexperienced to know that Aineko's +proportions are those of a domestic cat, /{Felis catus}/, a naturally evolved +animal rather than the toys and palimpsests and companionables he's used to. +Reality may be fashionable with his parents' generation, but there /{are}/ +limits, after all. Orange-and-brown stripes and whorls decorate Aineko's fur, +and he sprouts a white fluffy bib beneath his chin. "Who are Lis and Bill?" + +"Them," says Manni, as big, sullen-faced Bill creeps up behind Aineko and tries +to grab his tail while Lis floats behind his shoulder like a pint-sized UFO, +buzzing excitedly. But Aineko is too fast for the kids and scampers round +Manni's feet like a hairy missile. Manni whoops and tries to spear the +pussycat-thing, but his spear turns to blue glass, crackles, and shards of +brilliant snow rain down, burning his hands. + +"/{Now that}/ wasn't very friendly, was it?" says Aineko, a menacing note in +his voice. "Didn't your mother teach you not to -" + +The door in the side of the sushi stall opens as Rita arrives, breathless and +angry: "Manni! What have I told you about playing -" + +She stops, seeing Aineko. "/{You}/." She recoils in barely concealed fright. +Unlike Manni, she recognizes it as the avatar of a posthuman demiurge, a body +incarnated solely to provide a point of personal interaction for people to +focus on. + +The cat grins back at her. "Me," he agrees. "Ready to talk?" + +She looks stricken. "We've got nothing to talk about." + +Aineko lashes his tail. "Oh, but we do." The cat turns and looks pointedly at +Manni. "Don't we?" + +* * * + +_1 It has been a long time since Aineko passed this way, and in the meantime +the space around Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, has changed out of all recognition. +Back when the great lobster-built starships swept out of Sol's Oort cloud, +archiving the raw frozen data of the unoccupied brown dwarf halo systems and +seeding their structured excrement with programmable matter, there was nothing +but random dead atoms hereabouts (and an alien router). But that was a long +time ago; and since then, the brown dwarf system has succumbed to an anthropic +infestation. + +_1 An unoptimized instance of H. sapiens maintains state coherency for only two +to three gigaseconds before it succumbs to necrosis. But in only about ten +gigaseconds, the infestation has turned the dead brown dwarf system upside +down. They strip-mined the chilly planets to make environments suitable for +their own variety of carbon life. They rearranged moons, building massive +structures the size of asteroids. They ripped wormhole endpoints free of the +routers and turned them into their own crude point-to-point network, learned +how to generate new wormholes, then ran their own packet-switched polities over +them. Wormhole traffic now supports an ever-expanding mesh of interstellar +human commerce, but always in the darkness between the lit stars and the +strange, metal-depleted dwarfs with the suspiciously low-entropy radiation. The +sheer temerity of the project is mind-boggling: notwithstanding that canned +apes are simply /{not suited}/ to life in the interstellar void, especially in +orbit around a brown dwarf whose planets make Pluto seem like a tropical +paradise, they've taken over the whole damn system. + +_1 New Japan is one of the newer human polities in this system, a bunch of +nodes physically collocated in the humaniformed spaces of the colony cylinders. +Its designers evidently only knew about old Nippon from recordings made back +before Earth was dismantled, and worked from a combination of nostalgia-trip +videos, Miyazaki movies, and anime culture. Nevertheless, it's the home of +numerous human beings - even if they are about as similar to their historical +antecedents as New Japan is to its long-gone namesake. + +_1 Humanity? + +_1 Their grandparents /{would}/ recognize them, mostly. The ones who are truly +beyond the ken of twentieth-century survivors stayed back home in the red-hot +clouds of nanocomputers that have replaced the planets that once orbited +Earth's sun in stately Copernican harmony. The fast-thinking Matrioshka brains +are as incomprehensible to their merely posthuman ancestors as an ICBM to an +amoeba - and about as inhabitable. Space is dusted with the corpses of +Matrioshka brains that have long since burned out, informational collapse +taking down entire civilizations that stayed in close orbit around their home +stars. Farther away, galaxy-sized intelligences beat incomprehensible rhythms +against the darkness of the vacuum, trying to hack the Planck substrate into +doing their bidding. Posthumans, and the few other semitranscended species to +have discovered the router network, live furtively in the darkness between +these islands of brilliance. There are, it would seem, advantages to not being +too intelligent. + +_1 Humanity. Monadic intelligences, mostly trapped within their own skulls, +living in small family groups within larger tribal networks, adaptable to +territorial or migratory lifestyles. Those were the options on offer before the +great acceleration. Now that dumb matter thinks, with every kilogram of +wallpaper potentially hosting hundreds of uploaded ancestors, now that every +door is potentially a wormhole to a hab half a parsec away, the humans can stay +in the same place while the landscape migrates and mutates past them, streaming +into the luxurious void of their personal history. Life is rich here, endlessly +varied and sometimes confusing. So it is that tribal groups remain, their +associations mediated across teraklicks and gigaseconds by exotic agencies. And +sometimes the agencies will vanish for a while, reappearing later like an +unexpected jape upon the infinite. + +* * * + +Ancestor worship takes on a whole new meaning when the state vectors of all the +filial entities' precursors are archived and indexed for recall. At just the +moment that the tiny capillaries in Rita's face are constricting in response to +a surge of adrenaline, causing her to turn pale and her pupils to dilate as she +focuses on the pussycat-thing, Sirhan is kneeling before a small shrine, +lighting a stick of incense, and preparing to respectfully address his +grandfather's ghost. + +The ritual is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. Sirhan can speak to his +grandfather's ghost wherever and whenever he wants, without any formality, and +the ghost will reply at interminable length, cracking puns in dead languages +and asking about people who died before the temple of history was established. +But Sirhan is a sucker for rituals, and anyway, it helps him structure an +otherwise-stressful encounter. + +If it were up to Sirhan, he'd probably skip chatting to grandfather every ten +megaseconds. Sirhan's mother and her partner aren't available, having opted to +join one of the long-distance exploration missions through the router network +that were launched by the accelerationistas long ago; and Rita's antecedents +are either fully virtualized or dead. They are a family with a tenuous grip on +history. But both of them spent a long time in the same state of half-life in +which Manfred currently exists, and he knows his wife will take him to task if +he doesn't bring the revered ancestor up to date on what's been happening in +the real world while he's been dead. In Manfred's case, death is not only +potentially reversible, but almost inevitably so. After all, they're raising +his clone. Sooner or later, the kid is going to want to visit the original, or +vice versa. + +What a state we have come /{to, when the restless dead refuse to stay a part of +history?}/ He wonders ironically as he scratches the self-igniter strip on the +red incense stick and bows to the mirror at the back of the shrine. "Your +respectful grandson awaits and expects your guidance," he intones formally - +for in addition to being conservative by nature, Sirhan is acutely aware of his +family's relative poverty and the need to augment their social credit, and in +this reincarnation-intermediated traditionalist polity for the hopelessly +orthohuman, you can score credit for formality. He sits back on his heels to +await the response. + +Manfred doesn't take long to appear in the depths of the mirror. He takes the +shape of an albino orang-utan, as usual: He was messing around with Great Aunt +Annette's ontological wardrobe right before this copy of him was recorded and +placed in the temple - they might have separated, but they remained close. "Hi, +lad. What year is it?" + +Sirhan suppresses a sigh. "We don't do years anymore," he explains, not for the +first time. Every time he consults his grandfather, the new instance asks this +question sooner or later. "Years are an archaism. It's been ten megs since we +last spoke - about four /{months}/, if you're going to be pedantic about it, +and a hundred and eighty /{years}/ since we emigrated. Although correcting for +general relativity adds another decade or so." + +"Oh. Is that all?" Manfred manages to look disappointed. This is a new one on +Sirhan: Usually the diverging state vector of Gramps's ghost asks after Amber +or cracks a feeble joke at this point. "No changes in the Hubble constant, or +the rate of stellar formation? Have we heard from any of the exploration +eigenselves yet?" + +"Nope." Sirhan relaxes slightly. So Manfred is going to ask about the fool's +errand to the edge of the Beckenstein limit again, is he? That's canned +conversation number twenty-nine. (Amber and the other explorers who set out for +the really long exploration mission shortly after the first colony was settled +aren't due back for, oh, about 10^{19}^ seconds. It's a /{long}/ way to the +edge of the observable universe, even when you can go the first several hundred +million light-years - to the Böotes supercluster and beyond - via a small-world +network of wormholes. And this time, she didn't leave any copies of herself +behind.) + +Sirhan - either in this or some other incarnation - has had this talk with +Manfred many times before, because that's the essence of the dead. They don't +remember from one recall session to the next, unless and until they ask to be +resurrected because their restoration criteria have been matched. Manfred has +been dead a long time, long enough for Sirhan and Rita to be resurrected and +live a long family life three or four times over after /{they}/ had spent a +century or so in nonexistence. "We've received no notices from the lobsters, +nothing from Aineko either." He takes a deep breath. "You always ask me where +we are next, so I've got a canned response for you -" and one of his agents +throws the package, tagged as a scroll sealed with red wax and a silk ribbon, +through the surface of the mirror. (After the tenth repetition Rita and Sirhan +agreed to write a basic briefing that the Manfred-ghosts could use to orient +themselves.) + +Manfred is silent for a moment - probably hours in ghost-space - as he +assimilates the changes. Then: "This is true? I've slept through a whole +/{civilization}/?" + +"Not slept, you've been dead," Sirhan says pedantically. He realizes he's being +a bit harsh: "Actually, so did we," he adds. "We surfed the first three +gigasecs or so because we wanted to start a family somewhere where our children +could grow up the traditional way. Habs with an oxidation-intensive +triple-point water environment didn't get built until sometime after the +beginning of the exile. That's when the fad for neomorphism got entrenched," he +adds with distaste. For quite a while the neos resisted the idea of wasting +resources building colony cylinders spinning to provide vertebrate-friendly gee +forces and breathable oxygen-rich atmospheres - it had been quite a political +football. But the increasing curve of wealth production had allowed the +orthodox to reincarnate from death-sleep after a few decades, once the +fundamental headaches of building settlements in chilly orbits around +metal-deficient brown dwarfs were overcome. + +"Uh." Manfred takes a deep breath, then scratches himself under one armpit, +rubbery lips puckering. "So, let me get this straight: We - you, they, whoever +- hit the router at Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, replicated a load of them, and +now use the wormhole mechanism the routers rely on as point-to-point gates for +physical transport? And have spread throughout a bunch of brown dwarf systems, +and built a pure deep-space polity based on big cylinder habitats connected by +teleport gates hacked out of routers?" + +"Would /{you}/ trust one of the original routers for switched data +communications?" Sirhan asks rhetorically. "Even with the source code? They've +been corrupted by all the dead alien Matrioshka civilizations they've come into +contact with, but they're reasonably safe if all you want to use them for is to +cannibalize them for wormholes and tunnel dumb mass from point to point." He +searches for a metaphor: "Like using your, uh, internet, to emulate a +nineteenth-century postal service." + +"O-kay." Manfred looks thoughtful, as he usually does at this point in the +conversation - which means Sirhan is going to have to break it to him that his +first thoughts for how to utilize the gates have already been done. They're +hopelessly old hat. In fact, the main reason why Manfred is still dead is that +things have moved on so far that, sooner or later, whenever he surfaces for a +chat, he gets frustrated and elects not to be reincarnated. Not that Sirhan is +about to tell him that he's obsolete - that would be rude, not to say subtly +inaccurate. "That raises some interesting possibilities. I wonder, has anyone +-" + +"/{Sirhan, I need you!}/" + +The crystal chill of Rita's alarm and fear cuts through Sirhan's awareness like +a scalpel, distracting him from the ghost of his ancestor. He blinks, instantly +transferring the full focus of his attention to Rita without sparing Manfred +even a ghost. + +"/{What's happening}/ -" + +He sees through Rita's eyes: a cat with an orange-and-brown swirl on its flank +sits purring beside Manni in the family room of their dwelling. Its eyes are +narrowed as it watches her with unnatural wisdom. Manni is running fingers +through its fur and seems none the worse for wear, but Sirhan still feels his +fists clench. + +"What -" + +"Excuse me," he says, standing up: "Got to go. Your bloody cat's turned up." He +adds "/{coming home now}/" for Rita's benefit, then turns and hurries out of +the temple concourse. When he reaches the main hall, he pauses, then Rita's +sense of urgency returns to him, and he throws parsimony to the wind, stepping +into a priority gate in order to get home as fast as possible. + +Behind him, Manfred's melancholy ghost snorts, mildly offended, and considers +the existential choice: to be, or not to be. Then he makes a decision. + +* * * + +_1 Welcome to the twenty-third century, or the twenty-fourth. Or maybe it's the +twenty-second, jet-lagged and dazed by spurious suspended animation and +relativistic travel; it hardly matters these days. What's left of recognizable +humanity has scattered across a hundred light-years, living in hollowed-out +asteroids and cylindrical spinning habitats strung in orbit around cold brown +dwarf stars and sunless planets that wander the interstellar void. The looted +mechanisms underlying the alien routers have been cannibalized, simplified to a +level the merely superhuman can almost comprehend, turned into generators for +paired wormhole endpoints that allow instantaneous switched transport across +vast distances. Other mechanisms, the descendants of the advanced +nanotechnologies developed by the flowering of human techgnosis in the +twenty-first century, have made the replication of dumb matter trivial; this is +not a society accustomed to scarcity. + +_1 But in some respects, New Japan and the Invisible Empire and the other +polities of human space are poverty-stricken backwaters. They take no part in +the higher-order economies of the posthuman. They can barely comprehend the +idle muttering of the Vile Offspring, whose mass/energy budget (derived from +their complete restructuring of the free matter of humanity's original solar +system into computronium) dwarfs that of half a hundred human-occupied brown +dwarf systems. And they still know worryingly little about the deep history of +intelligence in this universe, about the origins of the router network that +laces so many dead civilizations into an embrace of death and decay, about the +distant galaxy-scale bursts of information processing that lie at measurable +red-shift distances, even about the free posthumans who live among them in some +senses, collocated in the same light cone as these living fossil relics of +old-fashioned humanity. + +_1 Sirhan and Rita settled in this charming human-friendly backwater in order +to raise a family, study xenoarchaeology, and avoid the turmoil and turbulence +that have characterized his family's history across the last couple of +generations. Life has been comfortable for the most part, and if the stipend of +an academic nucleofamilial is not large, it is sufficient in this place and age +to provide all the necessary comforts of civilization. And this suits Sirhan +(and Rita) fine; the turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to +grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an +adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else. + +_1 Only ... + +_1 Aineko is back. Aineko, who after negotiating the establishment of the +earliest of the refugee habs in orbit around Hyundai ^{+4904}^/,{-56},, +vanished into the router network with Manfred's other instance - and the +partial copies of Sirhan and Rita who had forked, seeking adventure rather than +cozy domesticity. Sirhan made a devil's bargain with Aineko, all those +gigaseconds ago, and now he is deathly afraid that Aineko is going to call the +payment due. + +* * * + +Manfred walks down a hall of mirrors. At the far end, he emerges in a public +space modeled on a Menger sponge - a cube diced subtractively into ever-smaller +cubic volumes until its surface area tends toward infinity. This being +meatspace, or a reasonable simulation thereof, it isn't a /{real}/ Menger +sponge; but it looks good at a distance, going down at least four levels. + +He pauses behind a waist-high diamond barrier and looks down into the +almost-tesseract-shaped depths of the cube's interior, at a verdant garden +landscape with charming footbridges that cross streams laid out with careful +attention to the requirements of feng shui. He looks up: Some of the +cube-shaped subtractive openings within the pseudofractal structure are +occupied by windows belonging to dwellings or shared buildings that overlook +the public space. High above, butterfly-shaped beings with exotic colored wings +circle in the ventilation currents. It's hard to tell from down here, but the +central cuboid opening looks to be at least half a kilometer on a side, and +they might very well be posthumans with low-gee wings - angels. + +/{Angels, or rats in the walls}/? he asks himself, and sighs. Half his +extensions are off-line, so hopelessly obsolete that the temple's assembler +systems didn't bother replicating them, or even creating emulation environments +for them to run in. The rest ... well, at least he's still physically +orthohuman, he realizes. Fully functional, fully male. /{Not everything has +changed - only the important stuff}/. It's a scary-funny thought, laden with +irony. Here he is, naked as the day he was born - newly re-created, in fact, +released from the wake-experience-reset cycle of the temple of history - +standing on the threshold of a posthuman civilization so outrageously rich and +powerful that they can build mammal-friendly habitats that resemble works of +art in the cryogenic depths of space. Only he's /{poor}/, this whole polity is +/{poor}/, and it can't ever be anything else, in fact, because it's a dumping +ground for merely posthuman also-rans, the singularitarian equivalent of +australopithecines. In the brave new world of the Vile Offspring, they can't +get ahead any more than a protohominid could hack it as a rocket scientist in +Werner von Braun's day. They're born to be primitive, wallowing happily in the +mud-bath of their own limited cognitive bandwidth. So they fled into the +darkness and built a civilization so bright it can put anything earthbound that +came before the singularity into the shade ... and it's still a shanty town +inhabited by the mentally handicapped. + +The incongruity of it amuses him, but only for a moment. He has, after all, +electively reincarnated for a reason: Sirhan's throwaway comment about the cat +caught his attention. "City, where can I find some clothes?" he asks. +"Something socially appropriate, that is. And some, uh, brains. I need to be +able to off-load ..." + +Citymind chuckles inside the back of his head, and Manfred realizes that +there's a public assembler on the other side of the ornamental wall he's +leaning on. "Oh," he mutters, as he finds himself imagining something not +unlike his clunky old direct neural interface, candy-colored icons and overlays +and all. It's curiously mutable, and with a weird sense of detachment, he +realizes that it's not his imagination at all, but an infinitely customizable +interface to the pervasive information spaces of the polity, currently running +in dumbed-down stupid mode for his benefit. It's true; he needs training +wheels. But it doesn't take him long to figure out how to ask the assembler to +make him a pair of pants and a plain black vest, and to discover that, as long +as he keeps his requests simple, the results are free - just like back home on +Saturn. The spaceborn polities are kind to indigents, for the basic +requirements of life are cheap, and to withhold them would be tantamount to +homicide. (If the presence of transhumans has upset a whole raft of prior +assumptions, at least it hasn't done more than superficial damage to the Golden +Rule.) + +Clothed and more or less conscious - at least at a human level - Manfred takes +stock. "Where do Sirhan and Rita live?" he asks. A dotted route makes itself +apparent to him, snaking improbably through a solid wall that he understands to +be an instantaneous wormhole gate connecting points light-years apart. He +shakes his head, bemused. /{I suppose I'd better go and see them}/, he decides. +It's not as if there's anyone else for him to look up, is it? The Franklins +vanished into the solar Matrioshka brain, Pamela died ages ago (and there's a +shame, he'd never expected to miss her) and Annette hooked up with Gianni while +he was being a flock of pigeons. (Draw a line under that one and say it's all +over.) His daughter vanished into the long-range exploration program. He's been +dead for so long that his friends and acquaintances are scattered across a +light cone centuries across. He can't think of anyone else here who he might +run into, except for the loyal grandson, keeping the candle of filial piety +burning with unasked-for zeal. "Maybe he needs help," Manfred thinks aloud as +he steps into the gate, rationalizing. "And then again, maybe /{he}/ can help +/{me}/ figure out what to do?" + +* * * + +Sirhan gets home, anticipating trouble. He finds it, but not in any way he'd +expected. Home is a split-level manifold, rooms connected by T-gates scattered +across a variety of habitats: low-gee sleeping den, high-gee exercise room, and +everything in between. It's furnished simply, tatami mats and programmable +matter walls able to extrude any desired furniture in short order. The walls +are configured to look and feel like paper, but can damp out even infant +tantrums. But right now, the antisound isn't working, and the house he comes +home to is overrun by shrieking yard apes, a blur of ginger-and-white fur, and +a distraught Rita trying to explain to her neighbor Eloise why her +orthodaughter Sam is bouncing around the place like a crazy ball. + +" - The cat, he gets them worked up." She wrings her hands and begins to turn +as Sirhan comes into view. "At last!" + +"I came fast." He nods respectfully at Eloise, then frowns. "The children -" +Something small and fast runs headfirst into him, grabs his legs, and tries to +head-butt him in the crotch. "Oof!" He bends down and lifts Manni up. "Hey, +son, haven't I told you not to -" + +"Not his fault," Rita says hurriedly. "He's excited because -" + +"I really don't think -" Eloise begins to gather steam, looking around +uncertainly. + +"Mrreeow?" something asks in a conversational tone of voice from down around +Sirhan's ankles. + +"Eek!" Sirhan jumps backward, flailing for balance under the weight of an +excited toddler. There's a gigantic disturbance in the polity thoughtspace - +like a stellar-mass black hole - and it appears to be stropping itself furrily +against his left leg. "What are /{you}/ doing here?" He demands. + +"Oh, this and that," says the cat, his innerspeech accent a sardonic drawl. "I +thought it was about time I visited again. Where's your household assembler? +Mind if I use it? Got a little something I need to make up for a friend ..." + +"What?" Rita demands, instantly suspicious. "Haven't you caused enough trouble +already?" Sirhan looks at her approvingly; obviously Amber's long-ago warnings +about the cat sank in deeply, because she's certainly not treating it as the +small bundle of child-friendly fun it would like to be perceived as. + +"Trouble?" The cat looks up at her sardonically, lashing his tail from side to +side. "I won't make any trouble, I promise you. It's just -" + +The door chime clears its throat, to announce a visitor: "Ren Fuller would like +to visit, m'lord and lady." + +"What's /{she}/ doing here?" Rita asks irritably. Sirhan can feel her unease, +the tenuous grasping of her ghosts as she searches for reason in an +unreasonable world, simulating outcomes, living through bad dreams, and +backtracking to adjust her responses accordingly. "Show her in, by all means." +Ren is one of their neighbor-cognates (most of her dwelling is several +light-years away, but in terms of transit time, it's a hop, skip, and a jump); +she and her extruded family are raising a small herd of ill-behaved kids who +occasionally hang out with Manni. + +A small blue eeyore whinnies mournfully and dashes past the adults, pursued by +a couple of children waving spears and shrieking. Eloise makes a grab for her +own and misses, just as the door to the exercise room disappears and Manni's +little friend Lis darts inside like a pint-sized guided missile. "Sam, come +here right now -" Eloise calls, heading toward the door. + +"Look, what do you want?" Sirhan demands, hugging his son and looking down at +the cat. + +"Oh, not much," Aineko says, turning to lick a mussed patch of fur on his +flank. "I just want to play with /{him}/." + +"You want to -" Rita stops. + +"Daddy!" Manni wants down. + +Sirhan lowers him carefully, as if his bones are glass. "Run along and play," +he suggests. Turning to Rita: "Why don't you go and find out what Ren wants, +dear?" he asks. "She's probably here to collect Lis, but you can never be +sure." + +"I was just leaving," Eloise adds, "as soon as I can catch up with Sam." She +glances over her shoulder at Rita apologetically, then dives into the exercise +room. + +Sirhan takes a step toward the hallway. "Let's talk," he says tightly. "In my +study." He glares at the cat. "I want an explanation. I want to know the +truth." + +* * * + +Meanwhile, in a cognitive wonderland his parents know about but deeply +underestimate, parts of Manni are engaging in activities far less innocent than +they imagine. + +Back in the twenty-first century, Sirhan lived through loads of alternate +childhoods in simulation, his parents' fingers pressing firmly on the +fast-forward button until they came up with someone who seemed to match their +preconceptions. The experience scarred him as badly as any nineteenth-century +boarding school experience, until he promised himself no child he raised would +be subjected to such; but there's a difference between being shoved through a +multiplicity of avatars, and voluntarily diving into an exciting universe of +myth and magic where your childhood fantasies take fleshy form, stalking those +of your friends and enemies through the forests of the night. + +Manni has grown up with neural interfaces to City's mindspace an order of +magnitude more complex than those of Sirhan's youth, and parts of him - ghosts +derived from a starting image of his neural state vector, fertilized with a +scattering borrowed from the original Manfred, simulated on a meat machine far +faster than real time - are fully adult. Of course, they can't fit inside his +seven-year-old skull, but they still watch over him. And when he's in danger, +they try to take care of their once and future body. + +Manni's primary adult ghost lives in some of New Japan's virtual mindspaces +(which are a few billion times more extensive than the physical spaces +available to stubborn biologicals, for the computational density of human +habitats have long since ceased to make much sense when measured in MIPS per +kilogram). They're modeled on presingularity Earth. Time is forever frozen on +the eve of the real twenty-first century, zero eight-forty-six hours on +September 11: An onrushing wide-body airliner hangs motionless in the air forty +meters below the picture window of Manni's penthouse apartment on the one +hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower. In historical reality, the one +hundred and eighth floor was occupied by corporate offices; but the mindspace +is a consensual fiction, and it is Manni's conceit to live at this pivotal +point. (Not that it means much to him - he was born well over a century after +the War on Terror - but it's part of his childhood folklore, the fall of the +Two Towers that shattered the myth of Western exceptionalism and paved the way +for the world he was born into.) + +Adult-Manni wears an avatar roughly modeled on his clone-father Manfred - +skinnier, pegged at a youthful twentysomething, black-clad, and gothic. He's +taking time out from a game of Matrix to listen to music, Type O Negative +blaring over the sound system as he twitches in the grip of an ice-cold coke +high. He's expecting a visit from a couple of call girls - themselves the +gamespace avatars of force-grown adult ghosts whose primaries may not be adult, +or female, or even human - which is why he's flopped bonelessly back in his +Arne Jacobsen recliner, waiting for something to happen. + +The door opens behind him. He doesn't show any sign of noticing the intrusion, +although his pupils dilate slightly at the faint reflection of a woman, +stalking toward him, glimpsed dimly in the window glass. "You're late," he says +tonelessly. "You were supposed to be here ten minutes ago -" He begins to look +round, and now his eyes widen. + +"Who were you expecting?" asks the ice blond in the black business suit, +long-skirted and uptight. There's something predatory about her expression: +"No, don't tell me. So you're Manni, eh? Manni's partial?" She sniffs, +disapproval. "Fin de siècle decadence. I'm sure Sirhan wouldn't approve." + +"My father can go fuck himself," Manni says truculently. "Who the hell are +you?" + +The blond snaps her fingers: An office chair appears on the carpet between +Manni and the window, and she sits on the edge of it, smoothing her skirt +obsessively. "I'm Pamela," she says tightly. "Has your father told you about +me?" + +Manni looks puzzled. In the back of his mind, raw instincts alien to anyone +instantiated before the midpoint of the twenty-first century tug on the fabric +of pseudoreality. "You're dead, aren't you?" he asks. "One of my ancestors." + +"I'm as dead as you are." She gives him a wintry smile. "Nobody stays dead +these days, least of all people who know Aineko." + +Manni blinks. Now he's beginning to feel a surge of mild irritation. "This is +all very well, but I was /{expecting}/ company," he says with heavy emphasis. +"Not a family reunion, or a tiresome attempt to preach your puritanism -" + +Pamela snorts. "Wallow in your pigsty for all I care, kid, I've got more +important things to worry about. Have you looked at your primary recently?" + +"My primary?" Manni tenses. "He's doing okay." For a moment his eyes focus on +infinity, a thousand-yard stare as he loads and replays the latest brain dump +from his infant self. "Who's the cat he's playing with? That's no companion!" + +"Aineko. I told you." Pamela taps the arm of her chair impatiently. "The family +curse has come for another generation. And if you don't do something about it +-" + +"About what?" Manni sits up. "What are you talking about?" He comes to his feet +and turns toward her. Outside the window, the sky is growing dark with an echo +of his own foreboding. Pamela is on her feet before him, the chair evaporated +in a puff of continuity clipping, her expression a cold-eyed challenge. + +"I think you know /{exactly}/ what I'm talking about, Manni. It's time to stop +playing this fucking game. Grow up, while you've still got the chance!" + +"I'm -" He stops. "Who /{am}/ I?" he asks, a chill wind of uncertainty drying +the sweat that has sprung up and down his spine. "And what are you doing here?" + +"Do you really want to know the answer? I'm dead, remember. The dead know +everything. And that isn't necessarily good for the living ..." + +He takes a deep breath. "Am I dead too?" He looks puzzled. "There's an adult-me +in Seventh Cube Heaven, what's /{he}/ doing here?" + +"It's the kind of coincidence that isn't." She reaches out and takes his hand, +dumping encrypted tokens deep into his sensorium, a trail of bread crumbs +leading into a dark and trackless part of mindspace. "Want to find out? Follow +me." Then she vanishes. + +Manni leans forward, baffled and frightened, staring down at the frozen majesty +of the onrushing airliner below his window. "Shit," he whispers. /{She came +right through my defenses without leaving a trace. Who is she?}/ The ghost of +his dead great-grandmother, or something else? + +I'll have to follow her if I want to find out, he realizes. He holds up his +left hand, stares at the invisible token glowing brightly inside his husk of +flesh. "Resynchronize me with my primary," he says. + +A fraction of a second later, the floor of the penthouse bucks and quakes +wildly and fire alarms begin to shriek as time comes to an end and the frozen +airliner completes its journey. But Manni isn't there anymore. And if a +skyscraper falls in a simulation with nobody to see it, has anything actually +happened? + +* * * + +"I've come for the boy," says the cat. It sits on the hand woven rug in the +middle of the hardwood floor with one hind leg sticking out at an odd angle, as +if it's forgotten about it. Sirhan teeters on the edge of hysteria for a moment +as he apprehends the sheer size of the entity before him, the whimsical +posthuman creation of his ancestors. Originally a robotic toy companion, Aineko +was progressively upgraded and patched. By the eighties, when Sirhan first met +the cat in the flesh, he was already a terrifyingly alien intelligence, subtle +and ironic. And now ... + +Sirhan knows Aineko manipulated his eigenmother, bending her natural affections +away from his real father and toward another man. In moments of black +introspection, he sometimes wonders if the cat wasn't also responsible in some +way for his own broken upbringing, the failure to relate to his real parents. +After all, it was a pawn in the vicious divorce battle between Manfred and +Pamela - decades before his birth - and there might be long-term instructions +buried in its preconscious drives. What if the pawn is actually a hidden king, +scheming in the darkness? + +"I've come for Manny." + +"You're not having him." Sirhan maintains an outer facade of calm, even though +his first inclination is to snap at Aineko. "Haven't you done enough damage +already?" + +"You're not going to make this easy, are you?" The cat stretches his head +forward and begins to lick obsessively between the splayed toes of his raised +foot. "I'm not making a demand, kid, I said I've /{come}/ for him, and you're +not really in the frame at all. In fact, I'm going out of my way to warn you." + +"And I say -" Sirhan stops. "Shit!" Sirhan doesn't approve of swearing: The +curse is an outward demonstration of his inner turmoil. "Forget what I was +about to say, I'm sure you already know it. Let me begin again, please." + +"Sure. Let's play this your way." The cat chews on a loose nail sheath but his +innerspeech is perfectly clear, a casual intimacy that keeps Sirhan on edge. +"You've got some idea of what I am, clearly. You know - I ascribe +intentionality to you - that my theory of mind is intrinsically stronger than +yours, that my cognitive model of human consciousness is complete. You might +well suspect that I use a Turing Oracle to think my way around your halting +states." The cat isn't worrying at a loose claw now, he's grinning, pointy +teeth gleaming in the light from Sirhan's study window. The window looks out +onto the inner space of the habitat cylinder, up at a sky with hillsides and +lakes and forests plastered across it: It's like an Escher landscape, modeled +with complete perfection. "You've realized that I can think my way around the +outside of your box while you're flailing away inside it, and I'm /{always}/ +one jump ahead of you. What else do you know I know?" + +Sirhan shivers. Aineko is staring up at him, unblinking. For a moment, he feels +at gut level that he is in the presence of an alien god: It's the simple truth, +isn't it? But - "Okay, I concede the point," Sirhan says after a moment in +which he spawns a blizzard of panicky cognitive ghosts, fractional +personalities each tasked with the examination of a different facet of the same +problem. "You're smarter than I am. I'm just a boringly augmented human being, +but you've got a flashy new theory of mind that lets you work around creatures +like me the way I can think my way around a real cat." He crosses his arms +defensively. "You do not normally rub this in. It's not in your interests to do +so, is it? You prefer to hide your manipulative capabilities under an affable +exterior, to play with us. So you're revealing all this for a reason." There's +a note of bitterness in his voice now. Glancing round, Sirhan summons up a +chair - and, as an afterthought, a cat basket. "Have a seat. /{Why now}/, +Aineko? What makes you think you can take my eigenson?" + +"I didn't say I was going to /{take}/ him, I said I'd come for him." Aineko's +tail lashes from side to side in agitation. "I don't deal in primate politics, +Sirhan: I'm not a monkey-boy. But I knew you'd react badly because the way your +species socializes" - a dozen metaghosts reconverge in Sirhan's mind, drowning +Aineko's voice in an inner cacophony - "would enter into the situation, and it +seemed preferable to trigger your territorial/reproductive threat display +early, rather than risk it exploding in my face during a more delicate +situation." + +Sirhan waves a hand vaguely at the cat: "Please wait." He's trying to integrate +his false memories - the output from the ghosts, their thinking finished - and +his eyes narrow suspiciously. "It must be bad. You don't normally get +confrontational - you script your interactions with humans ahead of time, so +that you maneuver them into doing what you want them to do and thinking it was +their idea all along." He tenses. "What is it about Manni that brought you +here? What do you want with him? He's just a kid." + +"You're confusing Manni with Manfred." Aineko sends a glyph of a smile to +Sirhan: "That's your first mistake, even though they're clones in different +subjective states. Think what he's like when he's grown up." + +"But he isn't grown-up!" Sirhan complains. "He hasn't been grown-up for -" + +"- Years, Sirhan. That's the problem. I need to talk to your grandfather, +really, not your son, and not the goddamn stateless ghost in the temple of +history, I need a Manfred with a sense of continuity. He's got something that I +need, and I promise you I'm not going away until I get it. Do you understand?" + +"Yes." Sirhan wonders if his voice sounds as hollow as the feeling in his +chest. "But he's our kid, Aineko. We're human. You know what that means to us?" + +"Second childhood." Aineko stands up, stretches, then curls up in the cat +basket. "That's the trouble with hacking you naked apes for long life, you keep +needing a flush and reset job - and then you lose continuity. That's not my +problem, Sirhan. I got a signal from the far edge of the router network, a +ghost that claims to be family. Says they finally made it out to the big +beyond, out past the Böotes supercluster, found something concrete and +important that's worth my while to visit. But I want to make sure it's not like +the Wunch before I answer. I'm not letting /{that}/ into my mind, even with a +sandbox. Do you understand that? I need to instantiate a real-live adult +Manfred with all his memories, one who hasn't been a part of me, and get him to +vouch for the sapient data packet. It takes a conscious being to authenticate +that kind of messenger. Unfortunately, the history temple is annoyingly +resistant to unauthorized extraction - I can't just go in and steal a copy of +him - and I don't want to use my own model of Manfred: It knows too much. So -" + +"What's it promising?" Sirhan asks tensely. + +Aineko looks at him through slitted eyes, a purring buzz at the base of his +throat: "/{Everything}/." + +* * * + +"There are different kinds of death," the woman called Pamela tells Manni, her +bone-dry voice a whisper in the darkness. Manni tries to move, but he seems to +be trapped in a confined space; for a moment, he begins to panic, but then he +works it out. "First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life - +oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not /{just}/ +the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness." +The darkness is close and disorienting and Manni isn't sure which way up he is +- nothing seems to work. Even Pamela's voice is a directionless ambiance, +coming from all around him. + +"Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be +the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives +notwithstanding." A dry chuckle: "I used to try to believe a different one +before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal's wager was right - +exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think +at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is +vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that +promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they +exploit our natural aversion to halting states." + +Manni tries to say, /{I'm not dead}/, but his throat doesn't seem to be +working. And now that he thinks about it, he doesn't seem to be breathing, +either. + +"Now, consciousness. That's a fun thing, isn't it? Product of an arms race +between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you'll +be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the +cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse - an internal simulation of +the mouse's likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for +example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack +strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of +mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator's actions. +Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that +used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling - so the tribe could work +collectively - and then reflexively, to simulate the individual's /{own}/ inner +states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, +and you've got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus - +signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude +signals such as 'predator here' or 'food there.'" + +/{Get me out of this!}/ Manny feels panic biting into him with +liquid-helium-lubricated teeth. "G-e-t -" For a miracle the words actually come +out, although he can't tell quite how he's uttering them, his throat being +quite as frozen as his innerspeech. Everything's off-lined, all systems down. + +"So," Pamela continues remorselessly, "we come to the posthuman. Not just our +own neural wetware, mapped out to the subcellular level and executed in an +emulation environment on a honking great big computer, like this: That's not +posthuman, that's a travesty. I'm talking about beings who are fundamentally +better consciousness engines than us merely human types, augmented or +otherwise. They're not just better at cooperation - witness Economics 2.0 for a +classic demonstration of that - but better at /{simulation}/. A posthuman can +build an internal model of a human-level intelligence that is, well, as +cognitively strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other +people tick, but we're quite often wrong, whereas real posthumans can actually +simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right. And this is especially +true of a posthuman that's been given full access to our memory prostheses for +a period of years, back before we realized they were going to transcend on us. +Isn't that the case, Manni?" + +Manni would be screaming at her right now, if he had a mouth - but instead the +panic is giving way to an enormous sense of /{déja vu}/. There's something +/{about}/ Pamela, something ominous that he knows ... he's met her before, he's +sure of it. And while most of his systems are off-line, one of them is very +much active: There's a personality ghost flagging its intention of merging back +in with him, and the memory delta it carries is enormous, years and years of +divergent experiences to absorb. He shoves it away with a titanic effort - it's +a very insistent ghost - and concentrates on imagining the feel of lips moving +on teeth, a sly tongue obstructing his epiglottis, words forming in his throat +- "m-e ..." + +"We should have known better than to keep upgrading the cat, Manny. It knows us +too well. I may have died in the flesh, but Aineko /{remembered}/ me, as +hideously accurately as the Vile Offspring remembered the random resimulated. +And you can run away - like this, this second childhood - but you can't hide. +Your cat wants you. And there's more." Her voice sends chills up and down his +spine, for without him giving it permission, the ghost has begun to merge its +stupendous load of memories with his neural map, and her voice is freighted +with erotic/repulsive significance, the result of conditioning feedback he +subjected himself to a lifetime - lifetimes? - ago: "He's been /{playing}/ with +us, Manny, possibly from before we realized he was conscious." + +"/{Out}/ -" Manfred stops. He can see again, and move, and feel his mouth. He's +/{himself}/ again, physically back as he was in his late twenties all those +decades ago when he'd lived a peripatetic life in presingularity Europe. He's +sitting on the edge of a bed in a charmingly themed Amsterdam hotel with a +recurrent motif of philosophers, wearing jeans and collarless shirt and a vest +of pockets crammed with the detritus of a long-obsolete personal area network, +his crazily clunky projection specs sitting on the bedside table. Pamela stands +stiffly in front of the door, watching him. She's not the withered travesty he +remembers seeing on Saturn, a half-blind Fate leaning on the shoulder of his +grandson. Nor is she the vengeful Fury of Paris, or the scheming fundamentalist +devil of the Belt. Wearing a sharply tailored suit over a red-and-gold brocade +corset, blonde hair drawn back like fine wire in a tight chignon, she's the +focused, driven force of nature he first fell in love with: repression, +domination, his very own strict machine. + +"We're dead," she says, then gives voice to a tense half laugh: "We don't have +to live through the bad times again if we don't want to." + +"What is this?" he asks, his mouth dry. + +"It's the reproductive imperative." She sniffs. "Come on, stand up. Come here." + +He stands up obediently, but makes no move toward her. "Whose imperative?" + +"Not ours." Her cheek twitches. "You find things out when you're dead. That +fucking cat has got a lot of questions to answer." + +"You're telling me that -" + +She shrugs. "Can you think of any other explanation for all this?" Then she +steps forward and takes his hand. "Division and recombination. Partitioning of +memetic replicators into different groups, then careful cross-fertilization. +Aineko wasn't just breeding a better Macx when he arranged all those odd +marriages and divorces and eigenparents and forked uploads - Aineko is trying +to breed our /{minds}/." Her fingers are slim and cool in his hand. He feels a +momentary revulsion, as of the grave, and he shudders before he realizes it's +his conditioning cutting in. Crudely implanted reflexes that shouldn't still be +active after all this time. "Even our divorce. If -" + +"Surely not." Manny remembers that much already. "Aineko wasn't even conscious +back then!" + +Pamela raises one sharply sculpted eyebrow: "Are you sure?" + +"You want an answer," he says. + +She breathes deeply, and he feels it on his cheek - it raises the fine hairs on +the back of his neck. Then she nods stiffly. "I want to know how much of our +history was scripted by the cat. Back when we thought we were upgrading his +firmware, were we? Or was he letting us think that we were?" A sharp hiss of +breath: "The divorce. Was that us? Or were we being manipulated?" + +"Our memories, are they real? Did any of that stuff actually /{happen}/ to us? +Or -" + +She's standing about twenty centimeters away from him, and Manfred realizes +that he's acutely aware of her presence, of the smell of her skin, the heave of +her bosom as she breathes, the dilation of her pupils. For an endless moment he +stares into her eyes and sees his own reflection - her theory of his mind - +staring back. /{Communication}/. Strict machine. She steps back a pace, spike +heels clicking, and smiles ironically. "You've got a host body waiting for you, +freshly fabbed: Seems Sirhan was talking to your archived ghost in the temple +of history, and it decided to elect for reincarnation. Quite a day for huge +coincidences, isn't it? Why don't you go merge with it - I'll meet you, then we +can go and ask Aineko some hard questions." + +Manfred takes a deep breath and nods. "I suppose so ..." + +* * * + +Little Manni - a clone off the family tree, which is actually a directed cyclic +graph - doesn't understand what all the fuss is about but he can tell when +momma, Rita, is upset. It's something to do with the pussycat-thing, that much +he knows, but Momma doesn't want to tell him: "Go play with your friends, +dear," she says distractedly, not even bothering to spawn a ghost to watch over +him. + +Manni goes into his room and rummages around in toyspace for a bit, but there's +nothing quite as interesting as the cat. The pussycat-thing smells of +adventure, the illicit made explicit. Manni wonders where daddy's taken it. He +tries to call big-Manni-ghost, but big-self isn't answering: He's probably +sleeping or something. So after a distracted irritated fit of play - which +leaves the toyspace in total disarray, Sendak-things cowering under a big bass +drum - Manni gets bored. And because he's still basically a little kid, and not +fully in control of his own metaprogramming, instead of adjusting his outlook +so that he isn't bored anymore, he sneaks out through his bedroom gate (which +big-Manni-ghost reprogrammed for him sometime ago so that it would forward to +an underused public A-gate that he'd run a man-in-the-middle hack on, so he +could use it as a proxy teleport server) then down to the underside of Red +Plaza, where skinless things gibber and howl at their tormentors, broken angels +are crucified on the pillars that hold up the sky, and gangs of semiferal +children act out their psychotic fantasies on mouthless android replicas of +parents and authorities. + +Lis is there, and Vipul and Kareen and Morgan. Lis has changed into a warbody, +an ominous gray battlebot husk with protruding spikes and a belt of +morningstars that whirl threateningly around her. "Manni! Play war?" + +Morgan's got great crushing pincers instead of hands, and Manni is glad he came +motie-style, his third arm a bony scythe from the elbow down. He nods +excitedly. "Who's the enemy?" + +"Them." Lis precesses and points at a bunch of kids on the far side of a pile +of artistically arranged rubble who are gathered around a gibbet, poking things +that glow into the flinching flesh of whatever is incarcerated in the cast-iron +cage. It's all make-believe, but the screams are convincing, all the same, and +they take Manni back for an instant to the last time he died down here, the +uneasy edit around a black hole of pain surrounding his disemboweling. "They've +got Lucy, and they're torturing her, we've got to get her back." Nobody really +dies in these games, not permanently, but children can be very rough indeed, +and the adults of New Japan have found that it's best to let them have at each +other and rely on City to redact the damage later. Allowing them this outlet +makes it easier to stop them doing really dangerous things that threaten the +structural integrity of the biosphere. + +"Fun." Manni's eyes light up as Vipul yanks the arsenal doors open and starts +handing out clubs, chibs, spikies, shuriken, and garrotes. "Let's go!" + +About ten minutes of gouging, running, fighting, and screaming later, Manni is +leaning against the back of a crucifixion pillar, panting for breath. It's been +a good war for him so far, and his arm aches and itches from the stabbing, but +he's got a bad feeling it's going to change. Lis went in hard and got her +chains tangled up around the gibbet supports - they're roasting her over a fire +now, her electronically boosted screams drowning out his own hoarse gasps. +Blood drips down his arm - not his - spattering from the tip of his claw. He +shakes with a crazed hunger for hurt, a cruel need to inflict pain. Something +above his head makes a /{scritch, scritch}/ sound, and he looks up. It's a +crucified angel, wings ripped where they've thrust the spikes in between the +joints that support the great, thin low-gee flight membranes. It's still +breathing, nobody's bothered disemboweling it yet, and it wouldn't be here +unless it was /{bad}/, so - + +Manni stands, but as he reaches out to touch the angel's thin, blue-skinned +stomach with his third arm fingernail, he hears a voice: "/{Wait}/." It's +innerspeech, and it bears ackles of coercion, superuser privileges that lock +his elbow joint in place. He mewls frustratedly and turns round, ready to +fight. + +It's the cat. He sits hunched on a boulder behind him - this is the odd thing - +right where he was looking a moment ago, watching him with slitty eyes. Manni +feels the urge to lash out at him, but his arms won't move, and neither will +his legs: This may be the Dark Side of Red Plaza, where the bloody children +play and anything goes, and Manni may have a much bigger claw here than +anything the cat can muster, but City still has some degree of control, and the +cat's ackles effectively immunize it from the carnage to either side. "Hello, +Manni," says the pussy-thing. "Your Dad's worried: You're supposed to be in +your room, and he's looking for you. Big-you gave you a back door, didn't he?" + +Manni nods jerkily, his eyes going wide. He wants to shout and lash out at the +pussy-thing but he can't. "What are you?" + +"I'm your ... fairy godfather." The cat stares at him intently. "You know, I do +believe you don't resemble your archetype very closely - not as he was at your +age - but yes, I think on balance you'll do." + +"Do what?" Manni lets his motie-arm drop, perplexed. + +"Put me in touch with your other self. Big-you." + +"I can't," Manni begins to explain. But before he can continue, the pile of +rock whines slightly and rotates beneath the cat, who has to stand and do a +little twirl in place, tail bushing up in annoyance. + +Manni's father steps out of the T-gate and glances around, his face a mask of +disapproval. "Manni! What do you think you're doing here? Come home at -" + +"He's with me, history-boy," interrupts the cat, nettled by Sirhan's arrival. +"I was just rounding him up." + +"Damn you, I don't need your help to control my son! In fact -" + +"Mom said I could -" Manni begins. + +"And what's that on your sword?" Sirhan's glare takes in the whole scene, the +impromptu game of capture-the-gibbeted-torture-victim, the bonfires and +screams. The mask of disapproval cracks, revealing a core of icy anger. "You're +coming home with me!" He glances at the cat. "You too, if you want to talk to +him - he's grounded." + +* * * + +_1 Once upon a time there was a pet cat. + +_1 Except, it wasn't a cat. + +_1 Back when a young entrepreneur called Manfred Macx was jetting around the +not-yet-disassembled structures of an old continent called Europe, making +strangers rich and fixing up friends with serendipitous business plans - a +desperate displacement activity, spinning his wheels in a vain attempt to +outrun his own shadow - he used to travel with a robotic toy of feline form. +Programmable and upgradeable, Aineko was a third-generation descendant of the +original luxury Japanese companion robots. It was all Manfred had room for in +his life, and he loved that robot, despite the alarming way decerebrated +kittens kept turning up on his doorstep. He loved it nearly as much as Pamela, +his fiancée, loved him, and she knew it. Pamela, being a whole lot smarter than +Manfred gave her credit for, realized that the quickest way to a man's heart +was through whatever he loved. And Pamela, being a whole lot more of a control +freak than Manfred realized, was damn well ready to use any restraint that came +to hand. Theirs was a very twenty-first-century kind of relationship, which is +to say one that would have been illegal a hundred years earlier and fashionably +scandalous a century before that. And whenever Manfred upgraded his pet robot - +transplanting its trainable neural network into a new body with new and +exciting expansion ports - Pamela would hack it. + +_1 They were married for a while, and divorced for a whole lot longer, +allegedly because they were both strong-willed people with philosophies of life +that were irreconcilable short of death or transcendence. Manny, being wildly +creative and outward-directed and having the attention span of a weasel on +crack, had other lovers. Pamela ... who knows? If on some evenings she put on a +disguise and hung out at encounter areas in fetish clubs, she wasn't telling +anyone: She lived in uptight America, staidly straitlaced, and had a reputation +to uphold. But they both stayed in touch with the cat, and although Manfred +retained custody for some reason never articulated, Aineko kept returning +Pamela's calls - until it was time to go hang out with their daughter Amber, +tagging along on her rush into relativistic exile, then keeping a proprietorial +eye on her eigenson Sirhan, and his wife and child (a clone off the old family +tree, Manfred 2.0) ... + +_1 Now, here's the rub: Aineko wasn't a cat. Aineko was an incarnate +intelligence, confined within a succession of catlike bodies that became +increasingly realistic over time, and equipped with processing power to support +a neural simulation that grew rapidly with each upgrade. + +_1 Did anyone in the Macx family ever think to ask what /{Aineko}/ wanted? + +_1 And if an answer had come, would they have liked it? + +* * * + +Adult-Manfred, still disoriented from finding himself awake and reinstantiated +a couple of centuries downstream from his hurried exile from Saturn system, is +hesitantly navigating his way toward Sirhan and Rita's home when +big-Manni-with-Manfred's-memory-ghost drops into his consciousness like a ton +of computronium glowing red-hot at the edges. + +It's a classic oh-shit moment. Between one foot touching the ground and the +next, Manfred stumbles hard, nearly twisting an ankle, and gasps. He +/{remembers}/. At third hand he remembers being reincarnated as Manni, a +bouncing baby boy for Rita and Sirhan (and just why they want to raise an +ancestor instead of creating a new child of their own is one of those cultural +quirks that is so alien he can scarcely comprehend it). Then for a while he +recalls living as Manni's amnesic adult accelerated ghost, watching over his +original from the consensus cyberspace of the city: the arrival of Pamela, +adult Manni's reaction to her, her dump of yet another copy of Manfred's +memories into Manni, and now this - /{How many of me are there}/? he wonders +nervously. Then: /{Pamela? What's she doing here}/? + +Manfred shakes his head and looks about. Now he remembers being big-Manni, he +knows where he is implicitly, and more importantly, knows what all these +next-gen City interfaces are supposed to do. The walls and ceiling are carpeted +in glowing glyphs that promise him everything from instant-access local +services to teleportation across interstellar distances. /{So they haven't +quite collapsed geography yet}/, he realizes gratefully, fastening on to the +nearest comprehensible thought of his own before old-Manni's memories explain +everything for him. It's a weird sensation, seeing all this stuff for the first +time - the trappings of a technosphere centuries ahead of the one he's last +been awake in - but with the memories to explain it all. He finds his feet are +still carrying him forward, toward a grassy square lined with doors opening +onto private dwellings. Behind one of them, he's going to meet his descendants, +and Pamela in all probability. The thought makes his stomach give a little +queasy backflip. /{I'm not ready for this}/ - + +It's an acute moment of déja vu. He's standing on a familiar doorstep he's +never seen before. The door opens and a serious-faced child with three arms - +he can't help staring, the extra one is a viciously barbed scythe of bone from +the elbow down - looks up at him. "Hello, me," says the kid. + +"Hello, you." Manfred stares. "You don't look the way I remember." But Manni's +appearance is familiar from big-Manni's memories, captured by the unblinking +Argus awareness of the panopticon dust floating in the air. "Are your parents +home? Your" - his voice cracks - "great-grandmother?" + +The door opens wider. "You can come in," the kid says gravely. Then he hops +backward and ducks shyly into a side room - or as if expecting to be gunned +down by a hostile sniper, Manfred realizes. It's tough being a kid when there +are no rules against lethal force because you can be restored from a backup +when playtime ends. + +Inside the dwelling - calling it a house seems wrong to Manfred, not when bits +of it are separated by trillions of kilometers of empty vacuum - things feel a +bit crowded. He can hear voices from the dayroom, so he goes there, brushing +through the archway of thornless roses that Rita has trained around the T-gate +frame. His body feels lighter, but his heart is heavy as he looks around. +"Rita?" he asks. "And -" + +"Hello, Manfred." Pamela nods at him guardedly. + +Rita raises an eyebrow at him. "The cat asked if he could borrow the household +assembler. I wasn't expecting a family reunion." + +"Neither was I." Manfred rubs his forehead ruefully. "Pamela, this is Rita. +She's married to Sirhan. They're my - I guess eigenparents is as good as term +as any? I mean, they're bringing up my reincarnation." + +"Please, have a seat," Rita offers, waving at the empty floor between the patio +and the stone fountain in the shape of a section through a glass hypersphere. A +futon of spun diamondoid congeals out of the utility fog floating in the air, +glittering in the artificial sunlight. "Sirhan's just taking care of Manni - +our son. He'll be with us in just a minute." + +Manfred sits gingerly at one side of the futon. Pamela sits stiffly at the +opposite edge, not meeting his eye. Last time they met in the flesh - an +awesome gulf of years previously - they'd parted cursing each other, on +opposite sides of a fractious divorce as well as an ideological barrier as high +as a continental divide. But many subjective decades have passed, and both +ideology and divorce have dwindled in significance - if indeed they ever +happened. Now that there's common cause to draw them together, Manfred can +barely look at her. "How is Manni?" he asks his hostess, desperate for small +talk. + +"He's fine," Rita says, in a brittle voice. "Just the usual preadolescent +turbulence, if it wasn't for ..." She trails off. A door appears in mid air and +Sirhan steps through it, followed by a small deity wearing a fur coat. + +"Look what the cat dragged in," Aineko remarks. + +"You're a fine one to talk," Pamela says icily. "Don't you think you'd -" + +"I tried to keep him away from you," Sirhan tells Manfred, "but he wouldn't -" + +"That's okay." Manfred waves it off. "Pamela, would you mind starting?" + +"Yes, I would." She glances at him sidelong. "You go first." + +"Right. You wanted me here." Manfred hunkers down to stare at the cat. "What do +you want?" + +"If I was your traditional middle-European devil, I'd say I'd come to steal +your soul," says Aineko, looking up at Manfred and twitching his tail. "Luckily +I'm not a dualist, I just want to borrow it for a while. Won't even get it +dirty." + +"Uh-huh." Manfred raises an eyebrow. "Why?" + +"I'm not omniscient." Aineko sits down, one leg sticking out sideways, but +continues to stare at Manfred. "I had a ... a telegram, I guess, claiming to be +from you. From the other copy of you, that is, the one that went off through +the router network with another copy of me, and with Amber, and everyone else +who isn't here. It says it found the answer and it wants to give me a shortcut +route out to the deep thinkers at the edge of the observable universe. It knows +who made the wormhole network and why, and -" Aineko pauses. If he was human, +he'd shrug, but being a cat, he absent mindedly scritches behind his left ear +with a hind leg. "Trouble is, I'm not sure I can trust it. So I need you to +authenticate the message. I don't dare use my own memory of you because it +knows too much about me; if the package is a Trojan, it might find out things I +don't want it to learn. I can't even redact its memories of me - that, too, +would convey useful information to the packet if it is hostile. So I want a +copy of you from the museum, fresh and uncontaminated." + +"Is that all?" Sirhan asks incredulously. + +"Sounds like enough to me," Manfred responds. Pamela opens her mouth, ready to +speak, but Manfred makes eye contact and shakes his head infinitesimally. She +looks right back and - a shock goes through him - nods and closes her mouth. +The moment of complicity is dizzying. "I want something in return." + +"Sure," says the cat. He pauses. "You realize it's a destructive process." + +"It's a - /{what}/?" + +"I need to make a running copy of you. Then I introduce it to the, uh, alien +information, in a sandbox. The sandbox gets destroyed afterward - it emits just +one bit of information, a yes or no to the question, can I trust the alien +information?" + +"Uh." Manfred begins to sweat. "Uh. I'm not so sure I like the sound of that." + +"It's a copy." Another cat-shrug moment. "You're a copy. Manni is a copy. +You've been copied so many times it's silly - you realize every few years every +atom in your body changes? Of course, it means a copy of you gets to die after +a lifetime or two of unique, unrepeatable experiences that you'll never know +about, but that won't matter to you." + +"Yes it does! You're talking about condemning a version of me to death! It may +not affect me, here, in this body, but it certainly affects that /{other}/ me. +Can't you -" + +"No, I can't. If I agreed to rescue the copy if it reached a positive verdict, +that would give it an incentive to lie if the truth was that the alien message +is untrustworthy, wouldn't it? Also, if I intended to rescue the copy, that +would give the message a back channel through which to encode an attack. One +bit, Manfred, no more." + +"Agh." Manfred stops talking. He knows he should be trying to come up with some +kind of objection, but Aineko must have already considered all his possible +responses and planned strategies around them. "Where does /{she}/ fit into +this?" he asks, nodding at Pamela. + +"Oh, she's your payment," Aineko says with studied insouciance. "I have a very +good memory for people, especially people I've known for decades. You've +outlasted that crude emotional conditioning I used on you around the time of +the divorce, and as for her, she's a good reinstantiation of -" + +"Do you know what it's like to die?" Pamela asks, finally losing her +self-control. "Or would you like to find out the hard way? Because if you keep +talking about me as if I'm a /{slave}/ -" + +"What makes you think you aren't?" The cat is grinning hideously, needle like +teeth bared. /{Why doesn't she hit him}/? Manfred asks himself fuzzily, +wondering also why he feels no urge to move against the monster. "Hybridizing +you with Manfred was, admittedly, a fine piece of work on my part, but you +would have been bad for him during his peak creative years. A contented Manfred +is an idle Manfred. I got several extra good bits of work out of him by +splitting you up, and by the time he burned out, Amber was ready. But I +digress; if you give me what I want, I shall /{leave you alone}/. It's as +simple as that. Raising new generations of Macxs has been a good hobby, you +make interesting pets, but ultimately it's limited by your stubborn refusal to +transcend your humanity. So that's what I'm offering, basically. Let me +destructively run a copy of you to completion in a black box along with a +purported Turing Oracle based on yourself, and I'll let you go. And you too, +Pamela. You'll be happy together this time, without me pushing you apart. And I +promise I won't return to haunt your descendants, either." The cat glances over +his shoulder at Sirhan and Rita, who clutch at each other in abject horror; and +Manfred finds he can sense a shadow of Aineko's huge algorithmic complexity +hanging over the household, like a lurching nightmare out of number theory. + +"Is that all we are to you? A pet-breeding program?" Pamela asks coldly. She's +run up against Aineko's implanted limits, too, Manfred realizes with a growing +sense of horror. /{Did we really split up because}/ Aineko made us? It's hard +to believe: Manfred is too much of a realist to trust the cat to tell the truth +except when it serves to further his interests. But this - + +"Not entirely." Aineko is complacent. "Not at first, before I was aware of my +own existence. Besides, you humans keep pets, too. But you /{were}/ fun to play +with." + +Pamela stands up, angry to the point of storming out. Before he quite realizes +what he's doing, Manfred is on his feet, too, one arm protectively around her. +"Tell me first, are our memories our own?" he demands. + +"Don't trust it," Pamela says sharply. "It's not human, and it lies." Her +shoulders are tense. + +"Yes, they are," says Aineko. He yawns. "Tell me I'm lying, bitch," he adds +mockingly: "I carried you around in my head for long enough to know you've no +evidence." + +"But I -" Her arm slips around Manfred's waist. "I don't hate him." A rueful +laugh: "I /{remember}/ hating him, but -" + +"Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness," Aineko says with +a theatrical sigh. "You're as stupid as it's possible for an intelligent +species to be - there being no evolutionary pressure to be any smarter - but +you still don't internalize that and act accordingly around your superiors. +Listen, girl, everything you remember is true. That doesn't mean you remember +it because it actually happened, just that you remember it because you +experienced it internally. Your memories of experiences are accurate, but your +emotional responses to those experiences were manipulated. Get it? One ape's +hallucination is another ape's religious experience, it just depends on which +one's god module is overactive at the time. That goes for all of you." Aineko +looks around at them in mild contempt. "But I don't need you anymore, and if +you do this one thing for me, you're going to be free. Understand? Say yes, +Manfred; if you leave your mouth open like that, a bird will nest on your +tongue." + +"Say no -" Pamela urges him, just as Manfred says, "Yes." + +Aineko laughs, baring contemptuous fangs at them. "Ah, primate family loyalty! +So wonderful and reliable. Thank you, Manny, I do believe you just gave me +permission to copy and enslave you -" + +Which is when Manni, who has been waiting in the doorway for the past minute, +leaps on the cat with a scream and a scythelike arm drawn back and ready to +strike. + +The cat-avatar is, of course, ready for Manni: It whirls and hisses, extending +diamond-sharp claws. Sirhan shouts, "No! Manni!" and begins to move, but +adult-Manfred freezes, realizing with a chill that what is happening is more +than is apparent. Manni grabs for the cat with his human hands, catching it by +the scruff of his neck and dragging it toward his vicious scythe-arm's edge. +There's a screech, a nerve-racking caterwauling, and Manni yells, bright +parallel blood tracks on his arm - the avatar is a real fleshbody in its own +right, with an autonomic control system that isn't going to give up without a +fight, whatever its vastly larger exocortex thinks - but Manni's scythe +convulses, and there's a horrible bubbling noise and a spray of blood as the +pussycat-thing goes flying. It's all over in a second before any of the adults +can really move. Sirhan scoops up Manni and yanks him away, but there are no +hidden surprises. Aineko's avatar is just a broken rag of bloody fur, guts, and +blood spilled across the floor. The ghost of a triumphant feline laugh hangs +over their innerspeech ears for a moment, then fades. + +"Bad boy!" Rita shouts, striding forward furiously. Manni cowers, then begins +to cry, a safe reflex for a little boy who doesn't quite understand the nature +of the threat to his parents. + +"No! It's all right," Manfred seeks to explain. + +Pamela tightens her grip around him. "Are you still ...?" + +"Yes." He takes a deep breath. + +"You bad, /{bad}/ child -" + +"Cat was going to eat him!" Manni protests, as his parents bundle him +protectively out of the room, Sirhan casting a guilty look over his shoulder at +the adult instance and his ex-wife. "I had to stop the bad thing!" + +Manfred feels Pamela's shoulders shaking. It feels like she's about to laugh. +"I'm still here," he murmurs, half-surprised. "Spat out, undigested, after all +these years. At least, /{this}/ version of me thinks he's here." + +"Did you believe it?" she finally asks, a tone of disbelief in her voice. + +"Oh yes." He shifts his balance from foot to foot, absent mindedly stroking her +hair. "I believe everything it said was intended to make us react exactly the +way we did. Up to and including giving us good reasons to hate it and provoking +Manni into disposing of its avatar. Aineko wanted to check out of our lives and +figured a sense of cathartic closure would help. Not to mention playing the +deus ex machina in the narrative of our family life. Fucking classical +comedian." He checks a status report with Citymind, and sighs: His version +number has just been bumped a point. "Tell me, do you think you'll miss having +Aineko around? Because we won't be hearing from him again -" + +"Don't talk about that, not now," she orders him, digging her chin against the +side of his neck. "I feel so /{used}/." + +"With good reason." They stand holding each other for a while, not speaking, +not really questioning why - after so much time apart - they've come together +again. "Hanging out with gods is never a safe activity for mere mortals like +us. You think you've been used? Aineko has probably killed me by now. Unless he +was lying about disposing of the spare copy, too." + +She shudders in his arms. "That's the trouble with dealing with posthumans; +their mental model of you is likely to be more detailed than your own." + +"How long have you been awake?" he asks, gently trying to change the subject. + +"I - oh, I'm not sure." She lets go of him and steps back, watching his face +appraisingly. "I remember back on Saturn, stealing a museum piece and setting +out, and then, well. I found myself here. With you." + +"I think," he licks his lips, "we've both been given a wake-up call. Or maybe a +second chance. What are you going to do with yours?" + +"I don't know." That appraising look again, as if she's trying to work out what +he's worth. He's used to it, but this time it doesn't feel hostile. "We've got +too much history for this to be easy. Either Aineko was lying, or ... not. What +about you? What do you really want?" + +He knows what she's asking. "Be my mistress?" he asks, offering her a hand. + +"This time," she grips his hand, "without adult supervision." She smiles +gratefully, and they walk toward the gateway together, to find out how their +descendants are dealing with their sudden freedom. + +(THE END: June 1999 to April 2004) + +% Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005 + +% Published by + +% Ace Books, New York, July 2005, ISBN 0441012841 + +% Orbit Books, London, August 2005, ISBN 1841493902 + +% License +% Creative Commons License + +% Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005. + +% This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. + +% You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions: + +% * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor. +% * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. +% * No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. +% * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. +% +% If you are in doubt about any proposed reuse, you should contact the author via: www.accelerando.org. + +% Contents + +% Part 1: Slow Takeoff +% +% * Lobsters +% * Troubadour +% * Tourist +% +% Part 2: Point of Inflection +% +% * Halo +% * Router +% * Nightfall +% +% Part 3: Singularity +% +% * Curator +% * Elector +% * Survivor + +% problem with transformation ^{+4904}^/,{-56}, is not transformed correctly, corrected for >= sisu-0.49.1 diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..154a5d4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/alices_adventures_in_wonderland.lewis_carroll.sst @@ -0,0 +1,3224 @@ +% SiSU 4.0.0 + +@title: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland + +@creator: + :author: Carroll, Lewis + +@date: + :published: 1865 + :created: 1865 + :available: 1865 + :added_to_site: 2004-04-12 + +% 2005-10-30 + +@rights: + :copyright: Lewis Carroll + :license: Public Domain + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel; + book:novel:fiction:fantasy|children's fiction + +@links: + { Alice in Wonderland @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland + { Lewis Carroll @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll + +@make: + :headings: none; none; none; CHAPTER; + :breaks: new=3; break=4 + +:A~ @title @creator \\ The Millennium Fulcrum Edition 3.0 [text only] + +CHAPTER I - Down the Rabbit-Hole + +Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?' + +So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day +made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a +daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, +when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. + +There was nothing so VERY remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so VERY +much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, `Oh dear! Oh dear! I +shall be late!' (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that +she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite +natural); but when the Rabbit actually TOOK A WATCH OUT OF ITS WAISTCOAT- +POCKET, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for +it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either +a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, +she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it +pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. + +In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the +world she was to get out again. + +The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped +suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping +herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well. + +Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of +time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen +next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it +was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and +noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there +she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the +shelves as she passed; it was labelled `ORANGE MARMALADE', but to her great +disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of +killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell +past it. + +`Well!' thought Alice to herself, `after such a fall as this, I shall think +nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home! Why, I +wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!' +(Which was very likely true.) + +Down, down, down. Would the fall NEVER come to an end! `I wonder how many miles +I've fallen by this time?' she said aloud. `I must be getting somewhere near +the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I +think--' (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her +lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a VERY good opportunity for +showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was +good practice to say it over) `--yes, that's about the right distance--but then +I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?' (Alice had no idea what +Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to +say.) + +Presently she began again. `I wonder if I shall fall right THROUGH the earth! +How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads +downward! The Antipathies, I think--' (she was rather glad there WAS no one +listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) `--but I shall +have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma'am, is +this New Zealand or Australia?' (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke--fancy +CURTSEYING as you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage +it?) `And what an ignorant little girl she'll think me for asking! No, it'll +never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.' + +Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking +again. `Dinah'll miss me very much to-night, I should think!' (Dinah was the +cat.) `I hope they'll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I +wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I'm afraid, but +you might catch a bat, and that's very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat +bats, I wonder?' And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying +to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, `Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and +sometimes, `Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either +question, it didn't much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was +dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with +Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, `Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did +you ever eat a bat?' when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of +sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over. + +Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she +looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage, +and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a +moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear +it say, as it turned a corner, `Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's +getting!' She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the Rabbit +was no longer to be seen: she found herself in a long, low hall, which was lit +up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof. + +There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice +had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she +walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again. + +Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; +there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice's first thought was +that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the +locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not +open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low +curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about +fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her +great delight it fitted! + +Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much +larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the +loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and +wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but +she could not even get her head through the doorway; `and even if my head would +go through,' thought poor Alice, `it would be of very little use without my +shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if +I only know how to begin.' For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had +happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were +really impossible. + +There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to +the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book +of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little +bottle on it, (`which certainly was not here before,' said Alice,) and round +the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words `DRINK ME' beautifully +printed on it in large letters. + +It was all very well to say `Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going +to do THAT in a hurry. `No, I'll look first,' she said, `and see whether it's +marked "poison" or not'; for she had read several nice little histories about +children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant +things, all because they WOULD not remember the simple rules their friends had +taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too +long; and that if you cut your finger VERY deeply with a knife, it usually +bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle +marked `poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later. + +However, this bottle was NOT marked `poison,' so Alice ventured to taste it, +and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of +cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered +toast,) she very soon finished it off. + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +`What a curious feeling!' said Alice; `I must be shutting up like a telescope.' + +And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened +up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little +door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to +see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about +this; `for it might end, you know,' said Alice to herself, `in my going out +altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?' And she tried +to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for +she could not remember ever having seen such a thing. + +After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going into +the garden at once; but, alas for poor Alice! when she got to the door, she +found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she went back to the +table for it, she found she could not possibly reach it: she could see it quite +plainly through the glass, and she tried her best to climb up one of the legs +of the table, but it was too slippery; and when she had tired herself out with +trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried. + +`Come, there's no use in crying like that!' said Alice to herself, rather +sharply; `I advise you to leave off this minute!' She generally gave herself +very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she +scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she +remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of +croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond +of pretending to be two people. `But it's no use now,' thought poor Alice, `to +pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make ONE +respectable person!' + +Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she +opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words `EAT ME' were +beautifully marked in currants. `Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice, `and if it +makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I +can creep under the door; so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't +care which happens!' + +She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, `Which way? Which way?', +holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and +she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, +this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the +way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed +quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way. + +So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake. + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +CHAPTER II - The Pool of Tears + +`Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the +moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); `now I'm opening out like +the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!' (for when she looked down +at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far +off). `Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and +stockings for you now, dears? I'm sure _{I}_ shan't be able! I shall be a great +deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you +can; --but I must be kind to them,' thought Alice, `or perhaps they won't walk +the way I want to go! Let me see: I'll give them a new pair of boots every +Christmas.' + +And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it. `They must go by +the carrier,' she thought; `and how funny it'll seem, sending presents to one's +own feet! And how odd the directions will look! + +poem{ + + ALICE'S RIGHT FOOT, ESQ. + HEARTHRUG, + NEAR THE FENDER, + (WITH ALICE'S LOVE). + +}poem + +Oh dear, what nonsense I'm talking!' + +Just then her head struck against the roof of the hall: in fact she was now +more than nine feet high, and she at once took up the little golden key and +hurried off to the garden door. + +Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look +through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than +ever: she sat down and began to cry again. + +`You ought to be ashamed of yourself,' said Alice, `a great girl like you,' +(she might well say this), `to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I +tell you!' But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there +was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down +the hall. + +After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the distance, and she +hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White Rabbit +returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and +a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to +himself as he came, `Oh! the Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! won't she be savage if +I've kept her waiting!' Alice felt so desperate that she was ready to ask help +of any one; so, when the Rabbit came near her, she began, in a low, timid +voice, `If you please, sir--' The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white +kid gloves and the fan, and skurried away into the darkness as hard as he could +go. + +Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept +fanning herself all the time she went on talking: `Dear, dear! How queer +everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if +I've been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this +morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm +not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, THAT'S the great +puzzle!' And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the +same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them. + +`I'm sure I'm not Ada,' she said, `for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and +mine doesn't go in ringlets at all; and I'm sure I can't be Mabel, for I know +all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little! Besides, SHE'S +she, and I'm I, and--oh dear, how puzzling it all is! I'll try if I know all +the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four +times six is thirteen, and four times seven is--oh dear! I shall never get to +twenty at that rate! However, the Multiplication Table doesn't signify: let's +try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of +Rome, and Rome--no, THAT'S all wrong, I'm certain! I must have been changed for +Mabel! I'll try and say "How doth the little--"' and she crossed her hands on +her lap as if she were saying lessons, and began to repeat it, but her voice +sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to +do:-- + +poem{ + + `How doth the little crocodile + Improve his shining tail, + And pour the waters of the Nile + On every golden scale! + + `How cheerfully he seems to grin, + How neatly spread his claws, + And welcome little fishes in + With gently smiling jaws!' + +}poem + +"I'm sure those are not the right words," said poor Alice, and her eyes filled +with tears again as she went on, `I must be Mabel after all, and I shall have +to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play +with, and oh! ever so many lessons to learn! No, I've made up my mind about it; +if I'm Mabel, I'll stay down here! It'll be no use their putting their heads +down and saying "Come up again, dear!" I shall only look up and say "Who am I +then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: +if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else"--but, oh dear!' cried +Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, "I do wish they WOULD put their heads +down! I am so VERY tired of being all alone here!" + +As she said this she looked down at her hands, and was surprised to see that +she had put on one of the Rabbit's little white kid gloves while she was +talking. `How CAN I have done that?' she thought. `I must be growing small +again.' She got up and went to the table to measure herself by it, and found +that, as nearly as she could guess, she was now about two feet high, and was +going on shrinking rapidly: she soon found out that the cause of this was the +fan she was holding, and she dropped it hastily, just in time to avoid +shrinking away altogether. + +`That WAS a narrow escape!' said Alice, a good deal frightened at the sudden +change, but very glad to find herself still in existence; `and now for the +garden!' and she ran with all speed back to the little door: but, alas! the +little door was shut again, and the little golden key was lying on the glass +table as before, `and things are worse than ever,' thought the poor child, `for +I never was so small as this before, never! And I declare it's too bad, that it +is!' + +As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she +was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that she had somehow +fallen into the sea, `and in that case I can go back by railway,' she said to +herself. (Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the +general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a +number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with +wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway +station.) However, she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which +she had wept when she was nine feet high. + +`I wish I hadn't cried so much!' said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find +her way out. `I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my +own tears! That WILL be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer +to-day.' + +Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and +she swam nearer to make out what it was: at first she thought it must be a +walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small she was now, and she +soon made out that it was only a mouse that had slipped in like herself. + +`Would it be of any use, now,' thought Alice, `to speak to this mouse? +Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it +can talk: at any rate, there's no harm in trying.' So she began: `O Mouse, do +you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O +Mouse!' (Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she +had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen in her +brother's Latin Grammar, `A mouse--of a mouse--to a mouse--a mouse--O mouse!') +The Mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with +one of its little eyes, but it said nothing. + +`Perhaps it doesn't understand English,' thought Alice; `I daresay it's a +French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.' (For, with all her +knowledge of history, Alice had no very clear notion how long ago anything had +happened.) So she began again: `Ou est ma chatte?' which was the first sentence +in her French lesson-book. The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water, and +seemed to quiver all over with fright. `Oh, I beg your pardon!' cried Alice +hastily, afraid that she had hurt the poor animal's feelings. `I quite forgot +you didn't like cats.' + +`Not like cats!' cried the Mouse, in a shrill, passionate voice. `Would YOU +like cats if you were me?' + +`Well, perhaps not,' said Alice in a soothing tone: `don't be angry about it. +And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah: I think you'd take a fancy to +cats if you could only see her. She is such a dear quiet thing,' Alice went on, +half to herself, as she swam lazily about in the pool, `and she sits purring so +nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face--and she is such a +nice soft thing to nurse--and she's such a capital one for catching mice--oh, I +beg your pardon!' cried Alice again, for this time the Mouse was bristling all +over, and she felt certain it must be really offended. `We won't talk about her +any more if you'd rather not.' + +`We indeed!' cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the end of his tail. +`As if I would talk on such a subject! Our family always HATED cats: nasty, +low, vulgar things! Don't let me hear the name again!' + +`I won't indeed!' said Alice, in a great hurry to change the subject of +conversation. `Are you--are you fond--of--of dogs?' The Mouse did not answer, +so Alice went on eagerly: `There is such a nice little dog near our house I +should like to show you! A little bright-eyed terrier, you know, with oh, such +long curly brown hair! And it'll fetch things when you throw them, and it'll +sit up and beg for its dinner, and all sorts of things--I can't remember half +of them--and it belongs to a farmer, you know, and he says it's so useful, it's +worth a hundred pounds! He says it kills all the rats and--oh dear!' cried +Alice in a sorrowful tone, `I'm afraid I've offended it again!' For the Mouse +was swimming away from her as hard as it could go, and making quite a commotion +in the pool as it went. + +So she called softly after it, `Mouse dear! Do come back again, and we won't +talk about cats or dogs either, if you don't like them!' When the Mouse heard +this, it turned round and swam slowly back to her: its face was quite pale +(with passion, Alice thought), and it said in a low trembling voice, `Let us +get to the shore, and then I'll tell you my history, and you'll understand why +it is I hate cats and dogs.' + +It was high time to go, for the pool was getting quite crowded with the birds +and animals that had fallen into it: there were a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and +an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures. Alice led the way, and the +whole party swam to the shore. + +CHAPTER III - A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale + +They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank--the birds +with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and +all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable. + +The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they had a consultation +about this, and after a few minutes it seemed quite natural to Alice to find +herself talking familiarly with them, as if she had known them all her life. +Indeed, she had quite a long argument with the Lory, who at last turned sulky, +and would only say, `I am older than you, and must know better'; and this Alice +would not allow without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively +refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said. + +At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of authority among them, called +out, `Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I'LL soon make you dry enough!' +They all sat down at once, in a large ring, with the Mouse in the middle. Alice +kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would catch a bad +cold if she did not get dry very soon. + +`Ahem!' said the Mouse with an important air, `are you all ready? This is the +driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please! "William the Conqueror, +whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who +wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and +conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria--"' + +`Ugh!' said the Lory, with a shiver. + +`I beg your pardon!' said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: `Did you +speak?' + +`Not I!' said the Lory hastily. + +`I thought you did,' said the Mouse. `--I proceed. "Edwin and Morcar, the earls +of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic +archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable--"' + +`Found WHAT?' said the Duck. + +`Found IT,' the Mouse replied rather crossly: `of course you know what "it" +means.' + +`I know what "it" means well enough, when I find a thing,' said the Duck: `it's +generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?' + +The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on, `"--found it +advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown. +William's conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence of his Normans--" +How are you getting on now, my dear?' it continued, turning to Alice as it +spoke. + +`As wet as ever,' said Alice in a melancholy tone: `it doesn't seem to dry me +at all.' + +`In that case,' said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, `I move that the +meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies--' + +`Speak English!' said the Eaglet. `I don't know the meaning of half those long +words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!' And the Eaglet bent +down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly. + +`What I was going to say,' said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the +best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.' + +`What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the +Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else +seemed inclined to say anything. + +`Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you +might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the +Dodo managed it.) + +First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape +doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, +here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began +running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy +to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an +hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is +over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?' + +This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it +sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in +which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest +waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have +prizes.' + +`But who is to give the prizes?' quite a chorus of voices asked. + +`Why, SHE, of course,' said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger; and +the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out in a confused way, +`Prizes! Prizes!' + +Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand in her pocket, +and pulled out a box of comfits, (luckily the salt water had not got into it), +and handed them round as prizes. There was exactly one a-piece all round. + +`But she must have a prize herself, you know,' said the Mouse. + +`Of course,' the Dodo replied very gravely. `What else have you got in your +pocket?' he went on, turning to Alice. + +`Only a thimble,' said Alice sadly. + +`Hand it over here,' said the Dodo. + +Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented +the thimble, saying `We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble'; and, when +it had finished this short speech, they all cheered. + +Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that +she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she +simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could. + +The next thing was to eat the comfits: this caused some noise and confusion, as +the large birds complained that they could not taste theirs, and the small ones +choked and had to be patted on the back. However, it was over at last, and they +sat down again in a ring, and begged the Mouse to tell them something more. + +`You promised to tell me your history, you know,' said Alice, `and why it is +you hate--C and D,' she added in a whisper, half afraid that it would be +offended again. + +`Mine is a long and a sad tale!' said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing. + +`It IS a long tail, certainly,' said Alice, looking down with wonder at the +Mouse's tail; `but why do you call it sad?' And she kept on puzzling about it +while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was something like +this:-- + +poem{ + + `Fury said to a + mouse, That he + met in the + house, + "Let us + both go to + law: I will + prosecute + YOU. --Come, + I'll take no + denial; We + must have a + trial: For + really this + morning I've + nothing + to do." + Said the + mouse to the + cur, "Such + a trial, + dear Sir, + With + no jury + or judge, + would be + wasting + our + breath." + "I'll be + judge, I'll + be jury," + Said + cunning + old Fury: + "I'll + try the + whole + cause, + and + condemn + you + to + death."' + +}poem + +`You are not attending!' said the Mouse to Alice severely. `What are you +thinking of?' + +`I beg your pardon,' said Alice very humbly: `you had got to the fifth bend, I +think?' + +`I had NOT!' cried the Mouse, sharply and very angrily. + +`A knot!' said Alice, always ready to make herself useful, and looking +anxiously about her. `Oh, do let me help to undo it!' + +`I shall do nothing of the sort,' said the Mouse, getting up and walking away. +`You insult me by talking such nonsense!' + +`I didn't mean it!' pleaded poor Alice. `But you're so easily offended, you +know!' + +The Mouse only growled in reply. + +`Please come back and finish your story!' Alice called after it; and the others +all joined in chorus, `Yes, please do!' but the Mouse only shook its head +impatiently, and walked a little quicker. + +`What a pity it wouldn't stay!' sighed the Lory, as soon as it was quite out of +sight; and an old Crab took the opportunity of saying to her daughter `Ah, my +dear! Let this be a lesson to you never to lose YOUR temper!' `Hold your +tongue, Ma!' said the young Crab, a little snappishly. `You're enough to try +the patience of an oyster!' + +`I wish I had our Dinah here, I know I do!' said Alice aloud, addressing nobody +in particular. `She'd soon fetch it back!' + +`And who is Dinah, if I might venture to ask the question?' said the Lory. + +Alice replied eagerly, for she was always ready to talk about her pet: `Dinah's +our cat. And she's such a capital one for catching mice you can't think! And +oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why, she'll eat a little bird as +soon as look at it!' + +This speech caused a remarkable sensation among the party. Some of the birds +hurried off at once: one old Magpie began wrapping itself up very carefully, +remarking, `I really must be getting home; the night-air doesn't suit my +throat!' and a Canary called out in a trembling voice to its children, `Come +away, my dears! It's high time you were all in bed!' On various pretexts they +all moved off, and Alice was soon left alone. + +`I wish I hadn't mentioned Dinah!' she said to herself in a melancholy tone. +`Nobody seems to like her, down here, and I'm sure she's the best cat in the +world! Oh, my dear Dinah! I wonder if I shall ever see you any more!' And here +poor Alice began to cry again, for she felt very lonely and low-spirited. In a +little while, however, she again heard a little pattering of footsteps in the +distance, and she looked up eagerly, half hoping that the Mouse had changed his +mind, and was coming back to finish his story. + +CHAPTER IV - The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill + +It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and looking anxiously +about as it went, as if it had lost something; and she heard it muttering to +itself `The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! +She'll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets! Where CAN I have +dropped them, I wonder?' Alice guessed in a moment that it was looking for the +fan and the pair of white kid gloves, and she very good-naturedly began hunting +about for them, but they were nowhere to be seen--everything seemed to have +changed since her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table +and the little door, had vanished completely. + +Very soon the Rabbit noticed Alice, as she went hunting about, and called out +to her in an angry tone, `Why, Mary Ann, what ARE you doing out here? Run home +this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan! Quick, now!' And Alice +was so much frightened that she ran off at once in the direction it pointed to, +without trying to explain the mistake it had made. + +`He took me for his housemaid,' she said to herself as she ran. `How surprised +he'll be when he finds out who I am! But I'd better take him his fan and +gloves--that is, if I can find them.' As she said this, she came upon a neat +little house, on the door of which was a bright brass plate with the name `W. +RABBIT' engraved upon it. She went in without knocking, and hurried upstairs, +in great fear lest she should meet the real Mary Ann, and be turned out of the +house before she had found the fan and gloves. + +`How queer it seems,' Alice said to herself, `to be going messages for a +rabbit! I suppose Dinah'll be sending me on messages next!' And she began +fancying the sort of thing that would happen: `"Miss Alice! Come here directly, +and get ready for your walk!" "Coming in a minute, nurse! But I've got to see +that the mouse doesn't get out." Only I don't think,' Alice went on, `that +they'd let Dinah stop in the house if it began ordering people about like +that!' + +By this time she had found her way into a tidy little room with a table in the +window, and on it (as she had hoped) a fan and two or three pairs of tiny white +kid gloves: she took up the fan and a pair of the gloves, and was just going to +leave the room, when her eye fell upon a little bottle that stood near the +looking- glass. There was no label this time with the words `DRINK ME,' but +nevertheless she uncorked it and put it to her lips. `I know SOMETHING +interesting is sure to happen,' she said to herself, `whenever I eat or drink +anything; so I'll just see what this bottle does. I do hope it'll make me grow +large again, for really I'm quite tired of being such a tiny little thing!' + +It did so indeed, and much sooner than she had expected: before she had drunk +half the bottle, she found her head pressing against the ceiling, and had to +stoop to save her neck from being broken. She hastily put down the bottle, +saying to herself `That's quite enough--I hope I shan't grow any more--As it +is, I can't get out at the door--I do wish I hadn't drunk quite so much!' + +Alas! it was too late to wish that! She went on growing, and growing, and very +soon had to kneel down on the floor: in another minute there was not even room +for this, and she tried the effect of lying down with one elbow against the +door, and the other arm curled round her head. Still she went on growing, and, +as a last resource, she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up the +chimney, and said to herself `Now I can do no more, whatever happens. What WILL +become of me?' + +Luckily for Alice, the little magic bottle had now had its full effect, and she +grew no larger: still it was very uncomfortable, and, as there seemed to be no +sort of chance of her ever getting out of the room again, no wonder she felt +unhappy. + +`It was much pleasanter at home,' thought poor Alice, `when one wasn't always +growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I +almost wish I hadn't gone down that rabbit-hole--and yet--and yet--it's rather +curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what CAN have happened to me! +When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, +and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about +me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I'll write one--but I'm grown up +now,' she added in a sorrowful tone; `at least there's no room to grow up any +more HERE.' + +`But then,' thought Alice, `shall I NEVER get any older than I am now? That'll +be a comfort, one way--never to be an old woman-- but then--always to have +lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn't like THAT!' + +`Oh, you foolish Alice!' she answered herself. `How can you learn lessons in +here? Why, there's hardly room for YOU, and no room at all for any +lesson-books!' + +And so she went on, taking first one side and then the other, and making quite +a conversation of it altogether; but after a few minutes she heard a voice +outside, and stopped to listen. + +`Mary Ann! Mary Ann!' said the voice. `Fetch me my gloves this moment!' Then +came a little pattering of feet on the stairs. Alice knew it was the Rabbit +coming to look for her, and she trembled till she shook the house, quite +forgetting that she was now about a thousand times as large as the Rabbit, and +had no reason to be afraid of it. + +Presently the Rabbit came up to the door, and tried to open it; but, as the +door opened inwards, and Alice's elbow was pressed hard against it, that +attempt proved a failure. Alice heard it say to itself `Then I'll go round and +get in at the window.' + +`THAT you won't' thought Alice, and, after waiting till she fancied she heard +the Rabbit just under the window, she suddenly spread out her hand, and made a +snatch in the air. She did not get hold of anything, but she heard a little +shriek and a fall, and a crash of broken glass, from which she concluded that +it was just possible it had fallen into a cucumber-frame, or something of the +sort. + +Next came an angry voice--the Rabbit's--`Pat! Pat! Where are you?' And then a +voice she had never heard before, `Sure then I'm here! Digging for apples, yer +honour!' + +`Digging for apples, indeed!' said the Rabbit angrily. `Here! Come and help me +out of THIS!' (Sounds of more broken glass.) + +`Now tell me, Pat, what's that in the window?' + +`Sure, it's an arm, yer honour!' (He pronounced it `arrum.') + +`An arm, you goose! Who ever saw one that size? Why, it fills the whole +window!' + +`Sure, it does, yer honour: but it's an arm for all that.' + +`Well, it's got no business there, at any rate: go and take it away!' + +There was a long silence after this, and Alice could only hear whispers now and +then; such as, `Sure, I don't like it, yer honour, at all, at all!' `Do as I +tell you, you coward!' and at last she spread out her hand again, and made +another snatch in the air. This time there were TWO little shrieks, and more +sounds of broken glass. `What a number of cucumber-frames there must be!' +thought Alice. `I wonder what they'll do next! As for pulling me out of the +window, I only wish they COULD! I'm sure I don't want to stay in here any +longer!' + +She waited for some time without hearing anything more: at last came a rumbling +of little cartwheels, and the sound of a good many voices all talking together: +she made out the words: `Where's the other ladder?--Why, I hadn't to bring but +one; Bill's got the other--Bill! fetch it here, lad!--Here, put 'em up at this +corner--No, tie 'em together first--they don't reach half high enough yet--Oh! +they'll do well enough; don't be particular-- Here, Bill! catch hold of this +rope--Will the roof bear?--Mind that loose slate--Oh, it's coming down! Heads +below!' (a loud crash)--`Now, who did that?--It was Bill, I fancy--Who's to go +down the chimney?--Nay, I shan't! YOU do it!--That I won't, then!--Bill's to go +down--Here, Bill! the master says you're to go down the chimney!' + +`Oh! So Bill's got to come down the chimney, has he?' said Alice to herself. +`Shy, they seem to put everything upon Bill! I wouldn't be in Bill's place for +a good deal: this fireplace is narrow, to be sure; but I THINK I can kick a +little!' + +She drew her foot as far down the chimney as she could, and waited till she +heard a little animal (she couldn't guess of what sort it was) scratching and +scrambling about in the chimney close above her: then, saying to herself `This +is Bill,' she gave one sharp kick, and waited to see what would happen next. + +The first thing she heard was a general chorus of `There goes Bill!' then the +Rabbit's voice along--`Catch him, you by the hedge!' then silence, and then +another confusion of voices--`Hold up his head--Brandy now--Don't choke +him--How was it, old fellow? What happened to you? Tell us all about it!' + +Last came a little feeble, squeaking voice, (`That's Bill,' thought Alice,) +`Well, I hardly know--No more, thank ye; I'm better now--but I'm a deal too +flustered to tell you--all I know is, something comes at me like a +Jack-in-the-box, and up I goes like a sky-rocket!' + +`So you did, old fellow!' said the others. + +`We must burn the house down!' said the Rabbit's voice; and Alice called out as +loud as she could, `If you do. I'll set Dinah at you!' + +There was a dead silence instantly, and Alice thought to herself, `I wonder +what they WILL do next! If they had any sense, they'd take the roof off.' After +a minute or two, they began moving about again, and Alice heard the Rabbit say, +`A barrowful will do, to begin with.' + +`A barrowful of WHAT?' thought Alice; but she had not long to doubt, for the +next moment a shower of little pebbles came rattling in at the window, and some +of them hit her in the face. `I'll put a stop to this,' she said to herself, +and shouted out, `You'd better not do that again!' which produced another dead +silence. + +Alice noticed with some surprise that the pebbles were all turning into little +cakes as they lay on the floor, and a bright idea came into her head. `If I eat +one of these cakes,' she thought, `it's sure to make SOME change in my size; +and as it can't possibly make me larger, it must make me smaller, I suppose.' + +So she swallowed one of the cakes, and was delighted to find that she began +shrinking directly. As soon as she was small enough to get through the door, +she ran out of the house, and found quite a crowd of little animals and birds +waiting outside. The poor little Lizard, Bill, was in the middle, being held up +by two guinea-pigs, who were giving it something out of a bottle. They all made +a rush at Alice the moment she appeared; but she ran off as hard as she could, +and soon found herself safe in a thick wood. + +`The first thing I've got to do,' said Alice to herself, as she wandered about +in the wood, `is to grow to my right size again; and the second thing is to +find my way into that lovely garden. I think that will be the best plan.' + +It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very neatly and simply arranged; +the only difficulty was, that she had not the smallest idea how to set about +it; and while she was peering about anxiously among the trees, a little sharp +bark just over her head made her look up in a great hurry. + +An enormous puppy was looking down at her with large round eyes, and feebly +stretching out one paw, trying to touch her. `Poor little thing!' said Alice, +in a coaxing tone, and she tried hard to whistle to it; but she was terribly +frightened all the time at the thought that it might be hungry, in which case +it would be very likely to eat her up in spite of all her coaxing. + +Hardly knowing what she did, she picked up a little bit of stick, and held it +out to the puppy; whereupon the puppy jumped into the air off all its feet at +once, with a yelp of delight, and rushed at the stick, and made believe to +worry it; then Alice dodged behind a great thistle, to keep herself from being +run over; and the moment she appeared on the other side, the puppy made another +rush at the stick, and tumbled head over heels in its hurry to get hold of it; +then Alice, thinking it was very like having a game of play with a cart-horse, +and expecting every moment to be trampled under its feet, ran round the thistle +again; then the puppy began a series of short charges at the stick, running a +very little way forwards each time and a long way back, and barking hoarsely +all the while, till at last it sat down a good way off, panting, with its +tongue hanging out of its mouth, and its great eyes half shut. + +This seemed to Alice a good opportunity for making her escape; so she set off +at once, and ran till she was quite tired and out of breath, and till the +puppy's bark sounded quite faint in the distance. + +`And yet what a dear little puppy it was!' said Alice, as she leant against a +buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself with one of the leaves: `I should +have liked teaching it tricks very much, if--if I'd only been the right size to +do it! Oh dear! I'd nearly forgotten that I've got to grow up again! Let me +see--how IS it to be managed? I suppose I ought to eat or drink something or +other; but the great question is, what?' + +The great question certainly was, what? Alice looked all round her at the +flowers and the blades of grass, but she did not see anything that looked like +the right thing to eat or drink under the circumstances. There was a large +mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself; and when she had +looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her +that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it. + +She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom, +and her eyes immediately met those of a large caterpillar, that was sitting on +the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the +smallest notice of her or of anything else. + +CHAPTER V - Advice from a Caterpillar + +The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at +last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a +languid, sleepy voice. + +`Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar. + +This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather +shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when +I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since +then.' + +`What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. `Explain yourself!' + +`I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, `because I'm not myself, +you see.' + +`I don't see,' said the Caterpillar. + +`I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very politely, `for I +can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in +a day is very confusing.' + +`It isn't,' said the Caterpillar. + +`Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet,' said Alice; `but when you have to +turn into a chrysalis--you will some day, you know--and then after that into a +butterfly, I should think you'll feel it a little queer, won't you?' + +`Not a bit,' said the Caterpillar. + +`Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,' said Alice; `all I know is, it +would feel very queer to ME.' + +`You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously. `Who are YOU?' + +Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt +a little irritated at the Caterpillar's making such VERY short remarks, and she +drew herself up and said, very gravely, `I think, you ought to tell me who YOU +are, first.' + +`Why?' said the Caterpillar. + +Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any good +reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a VERY unpleasant state of mind, +she turned away. + +`Come back!' the Caterpillar called after her. `I've something important to +say!' + +This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again. + +`Keep your temper,' said the Caterpillar. + +`Is that all?' said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she could. + +`No,' said the Caterpillar. + +Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and +perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some minutes +it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the +hookah out of its mouth again, and said, `So you think you're changed, do you?' + +`I'm afraid I am, sir,' said Alice; `I can't remember things as I used--and I +don't keep the same size for ten minutes together!' + +`Can't remember WHAT things?' said the Caterpillar. + +`Well, I've tried to say "HOW DOTH THE LITTLE BUSY BEE," but it all came +different!' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice. + +`Repeat, "YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM,"' said the Caterpillar. + +Alice folded her hands, and began:-- + +poem{ + + `You are old, Father William,' the young man said, + `And your hair has become very white; + And yet you incessantly stand on your head-- + Do you think, at your age, it is right?' + + `In my youth,' Father William replied to his son, + `I feared it might injure the brain; + But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, + Why, I do it again and again.' + + `You are old,' said the youth, `as I mentioned before, + And have grown most uncommonly fat; + Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door-- + Pray, what is the reason of that?' + + `In my youth,' said the sage, as he shook his grey locks, + `I kept all my limbs very supple + By the use of this ointment--one shilling the box-- + Allow me to sell you a couple?' + + `You are old,' said the youth, `and your jaws are too weak + For anything tougher than suet; + Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak-- + Pray how did you manage to do it?' + + `In my youth,' said his father, `I took to the law, + And argued each case with my wife; + And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw, + Has lasted the rest of my life.' + + `You are old,' said the youth, `one would hardly suppose + That your eye was as steady as ever; + Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose-- + What made you so awfully clever?' + + `I have answered three questions, and that is enough,' + Said his father; `don't give yourself airs! + Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff? + Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!' + +}poem + +`That is not said right,' said the Caterpillar. + +`Not QUITE right, I'm afraid,' said Alice, timidly; `some of the words have got +altered.' + +`It is wrong from beginning to end,' said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there +was silence for some minutes. + +The Caterpillar was the first to speak. + +`What size do you want to be?' it asked. + +`Oh, I'm not particular as to size,' Alice hastily replied; `only one doesn't +like changing so often, you know.' + +`I DON'T know,' said the Caterpillar. + +Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life before, +and she felt that she was losing her temper. + +`Are you content now?' said the Caterpillar. + +`Well, I should like to be a LITTLE larger, sir, if you wouldn't mind,' said +Alice: `three inches is such a wretched height to be.' + +`It is a very good height indeed!' said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself +upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high). + +`But I'm not used to it!' pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought +of herself, `I wish the creatures wouldn't be so easily offended!' + +`You'll get used to it in time,' said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah +into its mouth and began smoking again. + +This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or +two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, +and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the +grass, merely remarking as it went, `One side will make you grow taller, and +the other side will make you grow shorter.' + +`One side of WHAT? The other side of WHAT?' thought Alice to herself. + +`Of the mushroom,' said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and +in another moment it was out of sight. + +Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to +make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly round, she +found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms +round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each +hand. + +`And now which is which?' she said to herself, and nibbled a little of the +right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a violent blow +underneath her chin: it had struck her foot! + +She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that +there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she set to work +at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed so closely against +her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last, +and managed to swallow a morsel of the lefthand bit. + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +`Come, my head's free at last!' said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed +into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders were nowhere to +be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of +neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay +far below her. + +`What CAN all that green stuff be?' said Alice. `And where HAVE my shoulders +got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can't see you?' She was moving them +about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking +among the distant green leaves. + +As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried +to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would +bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in +curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the +leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she +had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large +pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings. + +`Serpent!' screamed the Pigeon. + +`I'm NOT a serpent!' said Alice indignantly. `Let me alone!' + +`Serpent, I say again!' repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone, and +added with a kind of sob, `I've tried every way, and nothing seems to suit +them!' + +`I haven't the least idea what you're talking about,' said Alice. + +`I've tried the roots of trees, and I've tried banks, and I've tried hedges,' +the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; `but those serpents! There's no +pleasing them!' + +Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in saying +anything more till the Pigeon had finished. + +`As if it wasn't trouble enough hatching the eggs,' said the Pigeon; `but I +must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I haven't had a wink +of sleep these three weeks!' + +`I'm very sorry you've been annoyed,' said Alice, who was beginning to see its +meaning. + +`And just as I'd taken the highest tree in the wood,' continued the Pigeon, +raising its voice to a shriek, `and just as I was thinking I should be free of +them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky! Ugh, Serpent!' + +`But I'm NOT a serpent, I tell you!' said Alice. `I'm a--I'm a--' + +`Well! WHAT are you?' said the Pigeon. `I can see you're trying to invent +something!' + +`I--I'm a little girl,' said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the +number of changes she had gone through that day. + +`A likely story indeed!' said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt. +`I've seen a good many little girls in my time, but never ONE with such a neck +as that! No, no! You're a serpent; and there's no use denying it. I suppose +you'll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!' + +`I HAVE tasted eggs, certainly,' said Alice, who was a very truthful child; +`but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.' + +`I don't believe it,' said the Pigeon; `but if they do, why then they're a kind +of serpent, that's all I can say.' + +This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or +two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of adding, `You're looking for eggs, +I know THAT well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you're a little +girl or a serpent?' + +`It matters a good deal to ME,' said Alice hastily; `but I'm not looking for +eggs, as it happens; and if I was, I shouldn't want YOURS: I don't like them +raw.' + +`Well, be off, then!' said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it settled down again +into its nest. Alice crouched down among the trees as well as she could, for +her neck kept getting entangled among the branches, and every now and then she +had to stop and untwist it. After a while she remembered that she still held +the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully, +nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and +sometimes shorter, until she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her +usual height. + +It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it felt +quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes, and began +talking to herself, as usual. `Come, there's half my plan done now! How +puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one +minute to another! However, I've got back to my right size: the next thing is, +to get into that beautiful garden--how IS that to be done, I wonder?' As she +said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it +about four feet high. `Whoever lives there,' thought Alice, `it'll never do to +come upon them THIS size: why, I should frighten them out of their wits!' So +she began nibbling at the righthand bit again, and did not venture to go near +the house till she had brought herself down to nine inches high. + +CHAPTER VI - Pig and Pepper + +For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do +next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood--(she +considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by +his face only, she would have called him a fish)--and rapped loudly at the door +with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round +face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered +hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it +was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen. + +The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly +as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn +tone, `For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.' The +Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the +words a little, `From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play +croquet.' + +Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled together. + +Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood for fear +of their hearing her; and when she next peeped out the Fish-Footman was gone, +and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into +the sky. + +Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked. + +`There's no sort of use in knocking,' said the Footman, `and that for two +reasons. First, because I'm on the same side of the door as you are; secondly, +because they're making such a noise inside, no one could possibly hear you.' +And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within--a constant +howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or +kettle had been broken to pieces. + +`Please, then,' said Alice, `how am I to get in?' + +`There might be some sense in your knocking,' the Footman went on without +attending to her, `if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were +INSIDE, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.' He was looking up +into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly +uncivil. `But perhaps he can't help it,' she said to herself; `his eyes are so +VERY nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might answer +questions.--How am I to get in?' she repeated, aloud. + +`I shall sit here,' the Footman remarked, `till tomorrow--' + +At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came skimming +out, straight at the Footman's head: it just grazed his nose, and broke to +pieces against one of the trees behind him. + +`--or next day, maybe,' the Footman continued in the same tone, exactly as if +nothing had happened. + +`How am I to get in?' asked Alice again, in a louder tone. + +`ARE you to get in at all?' said the Footman. `That's the first question, you +know.' + +It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. `It's really +dreadful,' she muttered to herself, `the way all the creatures argue. It's +enough to drive one crazy!' + +The Footman seemed to think this a good opportunity for repeating his remark, +with variations. `I shall sit here,' he said, `on and off, for days and days.' + +`But what am I to do?' said Alice. + +`Anything you like,' said the Footman, and began whistling. + +`Oh, there's no use in talking to him,' said Alice desperately: `he's perfectly +idiotic!' And she opened the door and went in. + +The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end +to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, +nursing a baby; the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron +which seemed to be full of soup. + +`There's certainly too much pepper in that soup!' Alice said to herself, as +well as she could for sneezing. + +There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed +occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately +without a moment's pause. The only things in the kitchen that did not sneeze, +were the cook, and a large cat which was sitting on the hearth and grinning +from ear to ear. + +`Please would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite +sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, `why your cat grins +like that?' + +`It's a Cheshire cat,' said the Duchess, `and that's why. Pig!' + +She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but +she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so +she took courage, and went on again:-- + +`I didn't know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn't know that +cats COULD grin.' + +`They all can,' said the Duchess; `and most of 'em do.' + +`I don't know of any that do,' Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased +to have got into a conversation. + +`You don't know much,' said the Duchess; `and that's a fact.' + +Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought it would be as +well to introduce some other subject of conversation. While she was trying to +fix on one, the cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to +work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby --the +fire-irons came first; then followed a shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes. +The Duchess took no notice of them even when they hit her; and the baby was +howling so much already, that it was quite impossible to say whether the blows +hurt it or not. + +`Oh, PLEASE mind what you're doing!' cried Alice, jumping up and down in an +agony of terror. `Oh, there goes his PRECIOUS nose'; as an unusually large +saucepan flew close by it, and very nearly carried it off. + +`If everybody minded their own business,' the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, +`the world would go round a deal faster than it does.' + +`Which would NOT be an advantage,' said Alice, who felt very glad to get an +opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. `Just think of what work +it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours +to turn round on its axis--' + +`Talking of axes,' said the Duchess, `chop off her head!' + +Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the +hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be +listening, so she went on again: `Twenty-four hours, I THINK; or is it twelve? +I--' + +`Oh, don't bother ME,' said the Duchess; `I never could abide figures!' And +with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as +she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line: + +poem{ + + `Speak roughly to your little boy, + And beat him when he sneezes: + He only does it to annoy, + Because he knows it teases.' + + CHORUS. + + (In which the cook and the baby joined):-- + + `Wow! wow! wow!' + +}poem + +While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby +violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could +hardly hear the words:-- + +poem{ + + `I speak severely to my boy, + I beat him when he sneezes; + For he can thoroughly enjoy + The pepper when he pleases!' + + CHORUS. + + `Wow! wow! wow!' + +}poem + +`Here! you may nurse it a bit, if you like!' the Duchess said to Alice, +flinging the baby at her as she spoke. `I must go and get ready to play croquet +with the Queen,' and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan +after her as she went out, but it just missed her. + +Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little +creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, `just like a +star-fish,' thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a +steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening +itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as +much as she could do to hold it. + +As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it, (which was to twist +it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left +foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself,) she carried it out into the open +air. `IF I don't take this child away with me,' thought Alice, `they're sure to +kill it in a day or two: wouldn't it be murder to leave it behind?' She said +the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off +sneezing by this time). `Don't grunt,' said Alice; `that's not at all a proper +way of expressing yourself.' + +The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see +what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a VERY turn-up +nose, much more like a snout than a real nose; also its eyes were getting +extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did not like the look of the thing +at all. `But perhaps it was only sobbing,' she thought, and looked into its +eyes again, to see if there were any tears. + +No, there were no tears. `If you're going to turn into a pig, my dear,' said +Alice, seriously, `I'll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!' The poor +little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and +they went on for some while in silence. + +Alice was just beginning to think to herself, `Now, what am I to do with this +creature when I get it home?' when it grunted again, so violently, that she +looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be NO mistake +about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would +be quite absurd for her to carry it further. + +So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot +away quietly into the wood. `If it had grown up,' she said to herself, `it +would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I +think.' And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very +well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, `if one only knew the right way +to change them--' when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat +sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off. + +The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good- natured, she thought: +still it had VERY long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought +to be treated with respect. + +`Cheshire Puss,' she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether +it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. `Come, it's +pleased so far,' thought Alice, and she went on. `Would you tell me, please, +which way I ought to go from here?' + +`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. + +`I don't much care where--' said Alice. + +`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat. + +`--so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation. + +`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.' + +Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. `What +sort of people live about here?' + +`In THAT direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, `lives a Hatter: +and in THAT direction,' waving the other paw, `lives a March Hare. Visit either +you like: they're both mad.' + +`But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. + +`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're +mad.' + +`How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice. + +`You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.' + +Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on `And how do you +know that you're mad?' + +`To begin with,' said the Cat, `a dog's not mad. You grant that?' + +`I suppose so,' said Alice. + +`Well, then,' the Cat went on, `you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags +its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when +I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.' + +`I call it purring, not growling,' said Alice. + +`Call it what you like,' said the Cat. `Do you play croquet with the Queen +to-day?' + +`I should like it very much,' said Alice, `but I haven't been invited yet.' + +`You'll see me there,' said the Cat, and vanished. + +Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things +happening. While she was looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly +appeared again. + +`By-the-bye, what became of the baby?' said the Cat. `I'd nearly forgotten to +ask.' + +`It turned into a pig,' Alice quietly said, just as if it had come back in a +natural way. + +`I thought it would,' said the Cat, and vanished again. + +Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, +and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March +Hare was said to live. `I've seen hatters before,' she said to herself; `the +March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it +won't be raving mad--at least not so mad as it was in March.' As she said this, +she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree. + +`Did you say pig, or fig?' said the Cat. + +`I said pig,' replied Alice; `and I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and +vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.' + +`All right,' said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning +with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time +after the rest of it had gone. + +`Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought Alice; `but a grin +without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!' + +She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the +March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were +shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house, +that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the +lefthand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then +she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself `Suppose it should +be raving mad after all! I almost wish I'd gone to see the Hatter instead!' + +CHAPTER VII - A Mad Tea-Party + +There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March +Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, +fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows +on it, and talking over its head. `Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,' +thought Alice; `only, as it's asleep, I suppose it doesn't mind.' + +The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one +corner of it: `No room! No room!' they cried out when they saw Alice coming. +`There's PLENTY of room!' said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large +arm-chair at one end of the table. + +`Have some wine,' the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. + +Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. `I don't +see any wine,' she remarked. + +`There isn't any,' said the March Hare. + +`Then it wasn't very civil of you to offer it,' said Alice angrily. + +`It wasn't very civil of you to sit down without being invited,' said the March +Hare. + +`I didn't know it was YOUR table,' said Alice; `it's laid for a great many more +than three.' + +`Your hair wants cutting,' said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for +some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech. + +`You should learn not to make personal remarks,' Alice said with some severity; +`it's very rude.' + +The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he SAID was, `Why +is a raven like a writing-desk?' + +`Come, we shall have some fun now!' thought Alice. `I'm glad they've begun +asking riddles.--I believe I can guess that,' she added aloud. + +`Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?' said the March +Hare. + +`Exactly so,' said Alice. + +`Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. + +`I do,' Alice hastily replied; `at least--at least I mean what I say--that's +the same thing, you know.' + +`Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. `You might just as well say that +"I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!' + +`You might just as well say,' added the March Hare, `that "I like what I get" +is the same thing as "I get what I like"!' + +`You might just as well say,' added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in +his sleep, `that "I breathe when I sleep" is the same thing as "I sleep when I +breathe"!' + +`It IS the same thing with you,' said the Hatter, and here the conversation +dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all +she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn't much. + +The Hatter was the first to break the silence. `What day of the month is it?' +he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was +looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his +ear. + +Alice considered a little, and then said `The fourth.' + +`Two days wrong!' sighed the Hatter. `I told you butter wouldn't suit the +works!' he added looking angrily at the March Hare. + +`It was the BEST butter,' the March Hare meekly replied. + +`Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,' the Hatter grumbled: `you +shouldn't have put it in with the bread-knife.' + +The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into +his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to +say than his first remark, `It was the BEST butter, you know.' + +Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. `What a funny +watch!' she remarked. `It tells the day of the month, and doesn't tell what +o'clock it is!' + +`Why should it?' muttered the Hatter. `Does YOUR watch tell you what year it +is?' + +`Of course not,' Alice replied very readily: `but that's because it stays the +same year for such a long time together.' + +`Which is just the case with MINE,' said the Hatter. + +Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to have no sort of +meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. `I don't quite understand +you,' she said, as politely as she could. + +`The Dormouse is asleep again,' said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea +upon its nose. + +The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes, +`Of course, of course; just what I was going to remark myself.' + +`Have you guessed the riddle yet?' the Hatter said, turning to Alice again. + +`No, I give it up,' Alice replied: `what's the answer?' + +`I haven't the slightest idea,' said the Hatter. + +`Nor I,' said the March Hare. + +Alice sighed wearily. `I think you might do something better with the time,' +she said, `than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.' + +`If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, `you wouldn't talk about +wasting IT. It's HIM.' + +`I don't know what you mean,' said Alice. + +`Of course you don't!' the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. `I +dare say you never even spoke to Time!' + +`Perhaps not,' Alice cautiously replied: `but I know I have to beat time when I +learn music.' + +`Ah! that accounts for it,' said the Hatter. `He won't stand beating. Now, if +you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with +the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just time +to begin lessons: you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the +clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!' + +(`I only wish it was,' the March Hare said to itself in a whisper.) + +`That would be grand, certainly,' said Alice thoughtfully: `but then--I +shouldn't be hungry for it, you know.' + +`Not at first, perhaps,' said the Hatter: `but you could keep it to half-past +one as long as you liked.' + +`Is that the way YOU manage?' Alice asked. + +The Hatter shook his head mournfully. `Not I!' he replied. `We quarrelled last +March--just before HE went mad, you know--' (pointing with his tea spoon at the +March Hare,) `--it was at the great concert given by the Queen of Hearts, and I +had to sing + +poem{ + + "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! + How I wonder what you're at!" + +}poem + +You know the song, perhaps?' + +`I've heard something like it,' said Alice. + +`It goes on, you know,' the Hatter continued, `in this way:-- + +poem{ + + "Up above the world you fly, + Like a tea-tray in the sky. + Twinkle, twinkle--"' + +}poem + +Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep `Twinkle, +twinkle, twinkle, twinkle--' and went on so long that they had to pinch it to +make it stop. + +`Well, I'd hardly finished the first verse,' said the Hatter, `when the Queen +jumped up and bawled out, "He's murdering the time! Off with his head!"' + +`How dreadfully savage!' exclaimed Alice. + +`And ever since that,' the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, `he won't do a +thing I ask! It's always six o'clock now.' + +A bright idea came into Alice's head. `Is that the reason so many tea-things +are put out here?' she asked. + +`Yes, that's it,' said the Hatter with a sigh: `it's always tea-time, and we've +no time to wash the things between whiles.' + +`Then you keep moving round, I suppose?' said Alice. + +`Exactly so,' said the Hatter: `as the things get used up.' + +`But what happens when you come to the beginning again?' Alice ventured to ask. + +`Suppose we change the subject,' the March Hare interrupted, yawning. `I'm +getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.' + +`I'm afraid I don't know one,' said Alice, rather alarmed at the proposal. + +`Then the Dormouse shall!' they both cried. `Wake up, Dormouse!' And they +pinched it on both sides at once. + +The Dormouse slowly opened his eyes. `I wasn't asleep,' he said in a hoarse, +feeble voice: `I heard every word you fellows were saying.' + +`Tell us a story!' said the March Hare. + +`Yes, please do!' pleaded Alice. + +`And be quick about it,' added the Hatter, `or you'll be asleep again before +it's done.' + +`Once upon a time there were three little sisters,' the Dormouse began in a +great hurry; `and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at +the bottom of a well--' + +`What did they live on?' said Alice, who always took a great interest in +questions of eating and drinking. + +`They lived on treacle,' said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two. + +`They couldn't have done that, you know,' Alice gently remarked; `they'd have +been ill.' + +`So they were,' said the Dormouse; `VERY ill.' + +Alice tried to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary ways of living would +be like, but it puzzled her too much, so she went on: `But why did they live at +the bottom of a well?' + +`Take some more tea,' the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. + +`I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, `so I can't take +more.' + +`You mean you can't take LESS,' said the Hatter: `it's very easy to take MORE +than nothing.' + +`Nobody asked YOUR opinion,' said Alice. + +`Who's making personal remarks now?' the Hatter asked triumphantly. + +Alice did not quite know what to say to this: so she helped herself to some tea +and bread-and-butter, and then turned to the Dormouse, and repeated her +question. `Why did they live at the bottom of a well?' + +The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then said, `It +was a treacle-well.' + +`There's no such thing!' Alice was beginning very angrily, but the Hatter and +the March Hare went `Sh! sh!' and the Dormouse sulkily remarked, `If you can't +be civil, you'd better finish the story for yourself.' + +`No, please go on!' Alice said very humbly; `I won't interrupt again. I dare +say there may be ONE.' + +`One, indeed!' said the Dormouse indignantly. However, he consented to go on. +`And so these three little sisters--they were learning to draw, you know--' + +`What did they draw?' said Alice, quite forgetting her promise. + +`Treacle,' said the Dormouse, without considering at all this time. + +`I want a clean cup,' interrupted the Hatter: `let's all move one place on.' + +He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him: the March Hare moved +into the Dormouse's place, and Alice rather unwillingly took the place of the +March Hare. The Hatter was the only one who got any advantage from the change: +and Alice was a good deal worse off than before, as the March Hare had just +upset the milk-jug into his plate. + +Alice did not wish to offend the Dormouse again, so she began very cautiously: +`But I don't understand. Where did they draw the treacle from?' + +`You can draw water out of a water-well,' said the Hatter; `so I should think +you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well--eh, stupid?' + +`But they were IN the well,' Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice +this last remark. + +`Of course they were', said the Dormouse; `--well in.' + +This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for some +time without interrupting it. + +`They were learning to draw,' the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its +eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; `and they drew all manner of +things--everything that begins with an M--' + +`Why with an M?' said Alice. + +`Why not?' said the March Hare. + +Alice was silent. + +The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; +but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and +went on: `--that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and +memory, and muchness-- you know you say things are "much of a muchness"--did +you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?' + +`Really, now you ask me,' said Alice, very much confused, `I don't think--' + +`Then you shouldn't talk,' said the Hatter. + +This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great +disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the +others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or +twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, +they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot. + +`At any rate I'll never go THERE again!' said Alice as she picked her way +through the wood. `It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!' + +Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a door leading +right into it. `That's very curious!' she thought. `But everything's curious +today. I think I may as well go in at once.' And in she went. + +Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the little glass +table. `Now, I'll manage better this time,' she said to herself, and began by +taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that led into the garden. +Then she went to work nibbling at the mushroom (she had kept a piece of it in +her pocket) till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little +passage: and THEN--she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the +bright flower-beds and the cool fountains. + +CHAPTER VIII - The Queen's Croquet-Ground + +A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on +it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red. +Alice thought this a very curious thing, and she went nearer to watch them, and +just as she came up to them she heard one of them say, `Look out now, Five! +Don't go splashing paint over me like that!' + +`I couldn't help it,' said Five, in a sulky tone; `Seven jogged my elbow.' + +On which Seven looked up and said, `That's right, Five! Always lay the blame on +others!' + +`YOU'D better not talk!' said Five. `I heard the Queen say only yesterday you +deserved to be beheaded!' + +`What for?' said the one who had spoken first. + +`That's none of YOUR business, Two!' said Seven. + +`Yes, it IS his business!' said Five, `and I'll tell him--it was for bringing +the cook tulip-roots instead of onions.' + +Seven flung down his brush, and had just begun `Well, of all the unjust +things--' when his eye chanced to fall upon Alice, as she stood watching them, +and he checked himself suddenly: the others looked round also, and all of them +bowed low. + +`Would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, `why you are painting those +roses?' + +Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a low voice, `Why +the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a RED rose-tree, and +we put a white one in by mistake; and if the Queen was to find it out, we +should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we're doing our +best, afore she comes, to--' At this moment Five, who had been anxiously +looking across the garden, called out `The Queen! The Queen!' and the three +gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces. There was a sound +of many footsteps, and Alice looked round, eager to see the Queen. + +First came ten soldiers carrying clubs; these were all shaped like the three +gardeners, oblong and flat, with their hands and feet at the corners: next the +ten courtiers; these were ornamented all over with diamonds, and walked two and +two, as the soldiers did. After these came the royal children; there were ten +of them, and the little dears came jumping merrily along hand in hand, in +couples: they were all ornamented with hearts. Next came the guests, mostly +Kings and Queens, and among them Alice recognised the White Rabbit: it was +talking in a hurried nervous manner, smiling at everything that was said, and +went by without noticing her. Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying the +King's crown on a crimson velvet cushion; and, last of all this grand +procession, came THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS. + +Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on her face like +the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard of such a +rule at processions; `and besides, what would be the use of a procession,' +thought she, `if people had all to lie down upon their faces, so that they +couldn't see it?' So she stood still where she was, and waited. + +When the procession came opposite to Alice, they all stopped and looked at her, +and the Queen said severely `Who is this?' She said it to the Knave of Hearts, +who only bowed and smiled in reply. + +`Idiot!' said the Queen, tossing her head impatiently; and, turning to Alice, +she went on, `What's your name, child?' + +`My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,' said Alice very politely; but she +added, to herself, `Why, they're only a pack of cards, after all. I needn't be +afraid of them!' + +`And who are THESE?' said the Queen, pointing to the three gardeners who were +lying round the rosetree; for, you see, as they were lying on their faces, and +the pattern on their backs was the same as the rest of the pack, she could not +tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three of her +own children. + +`How should I know?' said Alice, surprised at her own courage. `It's no +business of MINE.' + +The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like +a wild beast, screamed `Off with her head! Off--' + +`Nonsense!' said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent. + +The King laid his hand upon her arm, and timidly said `Consider, my dear: she +is only a child!' + +The Queen turned angrily away from him, and said to the Knave `Turn them over!' + +The Knave did so, very carefully, with one foot. + +`Get up!' said the Queen, in a shrill, loud voice, and the three gardeners +instantly jumped up, and began bowing to the King, the Queen, the royal +children, and everybody else. + +`Leave off that!' screamed the Queen. `You make me giddy.' And then, turning to +the rose-tree, she went on, `What HAVE you been doing here?' + +`May it please your Majesty,' said Two, in a very humble tone, going down on +one knee as he spoke, `we were trying--' + +`I see!' said the Queen, who had meanwhile been examining the roses. `Off with +their heads!' and the procession moved on, three of the soldiers remaining +behind to execute the unfortunate gardeners, who ran to Alice for protection. + +`You shan't be beheaded!' said Alice, and she put them into a large flower-pot +that stood near. The three soldiers wandered about for a minute or two, looking +for them, and then quietly marched off after the others. + +`Are their heads off?' shouted the Queen. + +`Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty!' the soldiers shouted in +reply. + +`That's right!' shouted the Queen. `Can you play croquet?' + +The soldiers were silent, and looked at Alice, as the question was evidently +meant for her. + +`Yes!' shouted Alice. + +`Come on, then!' roared the Queen, and Alice joined the procession, wondering +very much what would happen next. + +`It's--it's a very fine day!' said a timid voice at her side. She was walking +by the White Rabbit, who was peeping anxiously into her face. + +`Very,' said Alice: `--where's the Duchess?' + +`Hush! Hush!' said the Rabbit in a low, hurried tone. He looked anxiously over +his shoulder as he spoke, and then raised himself upon tiptoe, put his mouth +close to her ear, and whispered `She's under sentence of execution.' + +`What for?' said Alice. + +`Did you say "What a pity!"?' the Rabbit asked. + +`No, I didn't,' said Alice: `I don't think it's at all a pity. I said "What +for?"' + +`She boxed the Queen's ears--' the Rabbit began. Alice gave a little scream of +laughter. `Oh, hush!' the Rabbit whispered in a frightened tone. `The Queen +will hear you! You see, she came rather late, and the Queen said--' + +`Get to your places!' shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder, and people began +running about in all directions, tumbling up against each other; however, they +got settled down in a minute or two, and the game began. Alice thought she had +never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and +furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the +soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to +make the arches. + +The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she +succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, +with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely +straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it +WOULD twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled +expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got +its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that +the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides +all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted +to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up +and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion +that it was a very difficult game indeed. + +The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the +while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was +in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting `Off with his +head!' or `Off with her head!' about once in a minute. + +Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute +with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, `and then,' +thought she, `what would become of me? They're dreadfully fond of beheading +people here; the great wonder is, that there's any one left alive!' + +She was looking about for some way of escape, and wondering whether she could +get away without being seen, when she noticed a curious appearance in the air: +it puzzled her very much at first, but, after watching it a minute or two, she +made it out to be a grin, and she said to herself `It's the Cheshire Cat: now I +shall have somebody to talk to.' + +`How are you getting on?' said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for +it to speak with. + +Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded. `It's no use speaking to +it,' she thought, `till its ears have come, or at least one of them.' In +another minute the whole head appeared, and then Alice put down her flamingo, +and began an account of the game, feeling very glad she had someone to listen +to her. The Cat seemed to think that there was enough of it now in sight, and +no more of it appeared. + +`I don't think they play at all fairly,' Alice began, in rather a complaining +tone, `and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can't hear oneself speak--and +they don't seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody +attends to them--and you've no idea how confusing it is all the things being +alive; for instance, there's the arch I've got to go through next walking about +at the other end of the ground--and I should have croqueted the Queen's +hedgehog just now, only it ran away when it saw mine coming!' + +`How do you like the Queen?' said the Cat in a low voice. + +`Not at all,' said Alice: `she's so extremely--' Just then she noticed that the +Queen was close behind her, listening: so she went on, `--likely to win, that +it's hardly worth while finishing the game.' + +The Queen smiled and passed on. + +`Who ARE you talking to?' said the King, going up to Alice, and looking at the +Cat's head with great curiosity. + +`It's a friend of mine--a Cheshire Cat,' said Alice: `allow me to introduce +it.' + +`I don't like the look of it at all,' said the King: `however, it may kiss my +hand if it likes.' + +`I'd rather not,' the Cat remarked. + +`Don't be impertinent,' said the King, `and don't look at me like that!' He got +behind Alice as he spoke. + +`A cat may look at a king,' said Alice. `I've read that in some book, but I +don't remember where.' + +`Well, it must be removed,' said the King very decidedly, and he called the +Queen, who was passing at the moment, `My dear! I wish you would have this cat +removed!' + +The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. `Off +with his head!' she said, without even looking round. + +`I'll fetch the executioner myself,' said the King eagerly, and he hurried off. + +Alice thought she might as well go back, and see how the game was going on, as +she heard the Queen's voice in the distance, screaming with passion. She had +already heard her sentence three of the players to be executed for having +missed their turns, and she did not like the look of things at all, as the game +was in such confusion that she never knew whether it was her turn or not. So +she went in search of her hedgehog. + +The hedgehog was engaged in a fight with another hedgehog, which seemed to +Alice an excellent opportunity for croqueting one of them with the other: the +only difficulty was, that her flamingo was gone across to the other side of the +garden, where Alice could see it trying in a helpless sort of way to fly up +into a tree. + +By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back, the fight was +over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight: `but it doesn't matter much,' +thought Alice, `as all the arches are gone from this side of the ground.' So +she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back +for a little more conversation with her friend. + +When she got back to the Cheshire Cat, she was surprised to find quite a large +crowd collected round it: there was a dispute going on between the executioner, +the King, and the Queen, who were all talking at once, while all the rest were +quite silent, and looked very uncomfortable. + +The moment Alice appeared, she was appealed to by all three to settle the +question, and they repeated their arguments to her, though, as they all spoke +at once, she found it very hard indeed to make out exactly what they said. + +The executioner's argument was, that you couldn't cut off a head unless there +was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, +and he wasn't going to begin at HIS time of life. + +The King's argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and +that you weren't to talk nonsense. + +The Queen's argument was, that if something wasn't done about it in less than +no time she'd have everybody executed, all round. (It was this last remark that +had made the whole party look so grave and anxious.) + +Alice could think of nothing else to say but `It belongs to the Duchess: you'd +better ask HER about it.' + +`She's in prison,' the Queen said to the executioner: `fetch her here.' And the +executioner went off like an arrow. + +The Cat's head began fading away the moment he was gone, and, by the time he +had come back with the Duchess, it had entirely disappeared; so the King and +the executioner ran wildly up and down looking for it, while the rest of the +party went back to the game. + +CHAPTER IX - The Mock Turtle's Story + +`You can't think how glad I am to see you again, you dear old thing!' said the +Duchess, as she tucked her arm affectionately into Alice's, and they walked off +together. + +Alice was very glad to find her in such a pleasant temper, and thought to +herself that perhaps it was only the pepper that had made her so savage when +they met in the kitchen. + +`When I'M a Duchess,' she said to herself, (not in a very hopeful tone though), +`I won't have any pepper in my kitchen AT ALL. Soup does very well +without--Maybe it's always pepper that makes people hot-tempered,' she went on, +very much pleased at having found out a new kind of rule, `and vinegar that +makes them sour--and camomile that makes them bitter--and--and barley-sugar and +such things that make children sweet-tempered. I only wish people knew that: +then they wouldn't be so stingy about it, you know--' + +She had quite forgotten the Duchess by this time, and was a little startled +when she heard her voice close to her ear. `You're thinking about something, my +dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the +moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.' + +`Perhaps it hasn't one,' Alice ventured to remark. + +`Tut, tut, child!' said the Duchess. `Everything's got a moral, if only you can +find it.' And she squeezed herself up closer to Alice's side as she spoke. + +Alice did not much like keeping so close to her: first, because the Duchess was +VERY ugly; and secondly, because she was exactly the right height to rest her +chin upon Alice's shoulder, and it was an uncomfortably sharp chin. However, +she did not like to be rude, so she bore it as well as she could. + +`The game's going on rather better now,' she said, by way of keeping up the +conversation a little. + +`'Tis so,' said the Duchess: `and the moral of that is--"Oh, 'tis love, 'tis +love, that makes the world go round!"' + +`Somebody said,' Alice whispered, `that it's done by everybody minding their +own business!' + +`Ah, well! It means much the same thing,' said the Duchess, digging her sharp +little chin into Alice's shoulder as she added, `and the moral of THAT +is--"Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves."' + +`How fond she is of finding morals in things!' Alice thought to herself. + +`I dare say you're wondering why I don't put my arm round your waist,' the +Duchess said after a pause: `the reason is, that I'm doubtful about the temper +of your flamingo. Shall I try the experiment?' + +`HE might bite,' Alice cautiously replied, not feeling at all anxious to have +the experiment tried. + +`Very true,' said the Duchess: `flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral +of that is--"Birds of a feather flock together."' + +`Only mustard isn't a bird,' Alice remarked. + +`Right, as usual,' said the Duchess: `what a clear way you have of putting +things!' + +`It's a mineral, I THINK,' said Alice. + +`Of course it is,' said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everything +that Alice said; `there's a large mustard-mine near here. And the moral of that +is--"The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours."' + +`Oh, I know!' exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last remark, `it's +a vegetable. It doesn't look like one, but it is.' + +`I quite agree with you,' said the Duchess; `and the moral of that is--"Be what +you would seem to be"--or if you'd like it put more simply--"Never imagine +yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you +were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have +appeared to them to be otherwise."' + +`I think I should understand that better,' Alice said very politely, `if I had +it written down: but I can't quite follow it as you say it.' + +`That's nothing to what I could say if I chose,' the Duchess replied, in a +pleased tone. + +`Pray don't trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,' said Alice. + +`Oh, don't talk about trouble!' said the Duchess. `I make you a present of +everything I've said as yet.' + +`A cheap sort of present!' thought Alice. `I'm glad they don't give birthday +presents like that!' But she did not venture to say it out loud. + +`Thinking again?' the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin. + +`I've a right to think,' said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a +little worried. + +`Just about as much right,' said the Duchess, `as pigs have to fly; and the +m--' + +But here, to Alice's great surprise, the Duchess's voice died away, even in the +middle of her favourite word `moral,' and the arm that was linked into hers +began to tremble. Alice looked up, and there stood the Queen in front of them, +with her arms folded, frowning like a thunderstorm. + +`A fine day, your Majesty!' the Duchess began in a low, weak voice. + +`Now, I give you fair warning,' shouted the Queen, stamping on the ground as +she spoke; `either you or your head must be off, and that in about half no +time! Take your choice!' + +The Duchess took her choice, and was gone in a moment. + +`Let's go on with the game,' the Queen said to Alice; and Alice was too much +frightened to say a word, but slowly followed her back to the croquet-ground. + +The other guests had taken advantage of the Queen's absence, and were resting +in the shade: however, the moment they saw her, they hurried back to the game, +the Queen merely remarking that a moment's delay would cost them their lives. + +All the time they were playing the Queen never left off quarrelling with the +other players, and shouting `Off with his head!' or `Off with her head!' Those +whom she sentenced were taken into custody by the soldiers, who of course had +to leave off being arches to do this, so that by the end of half an hour or so +there were no arches left, and all the players, except the King, the Queen, and +Alice, were in custody and under sentence of execution. + +Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, `Have you seen +the Mock Turtle yet?' + +`No,' said Alice. `I don't even know what a Mock Turtle is.' + +`It's the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,' said the Queen. + +`I never saw one, or heard of one,' said Alice. + +`Come on, then,' said the Queen, `and he shall tell you his history,' + +As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low voice, to the +company generally, `You are all pardoned.' `Come, THAT'S a good thing!' she +said to herself, for she had felt quite unhappy at the number of executions the +Queen had ordered. + +They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. (IF you don't +know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.) `Up, lazy thing!' said the Queen, +`and take this young lady to see the Mock Turtle, and to hear his history. I +must go back and see after some executions I have ordered'; and she walked off, +leaving Alice alone with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the +creature, but on the whole she thought it would be quite as safe to stay with +it as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited. + +The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till she was +out of sight: then it chuckled. `What fun!' said the Gryphon, half to itself, +half to Alice. + +`What IS the fun?' said Alice. + +`Why, SHE,' said the Gryphon. `It's all her fancy, that: they never executes +nobody, you know. Come on!' + +`Everybody says "come on!" here,' thought Alice, as she went slowly after it: +`I never was so ordered about in all my life, never!' + +They had not gone far before they saw the Mock Turtle in the distance, sitting +sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came nearer, Alice could +hear him sighing as if his heart would break. She pitied him deeply. `What is +his sorrow?' she asked the Gryphon, and the Gryphon answered, very nearly in +the same words as before, `It's all his fancy, that: he hasn't got no sorrow, +you know. Come on!' + +So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of +tears, but said nothing. + +`This here young lady,' said the Gryphon, `she wants for to know your history, +she do.' + +`I'll tell it her,' said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: `sit down, +both of you, and don't speak a word till I've finished.' + +So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, +`I don't see how he can EVEN finish, if he doesn't begin.' But she waited +patiently. + +`Once,' said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, `I was a real Turtle.' + +These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional +exclamation of `Hjckrrh!' from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy sobbing of +the Mock Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying, `Thank you, sir, +for your interesting story,' but she could not help thinking there MUST be more +to come, so she sat still and said nothing. + +`When we were little,' the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though +still sobbing a little now and then, `we went to school in the sea. The master +was an old Turtle--we used to call him Tortoise--' + +`Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?' Alice asked. + +`We called him Tortoise because he taught us,' said the Mock Turtle angrily: +`really you are very dull!' + +`You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,' added +the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt +ready to sink into the earth. At last the Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle, +`Drive on, old fellow! Don't be all day about it!' and he went on in these +words: + +`Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn't believe it--' + +`I never said I didn't!' interrupted Alice. + +`You did,' said the Mock Turtle. + +`Hold your tongue!' added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak again. The Mock +Turtle went on. + +`We had the best of educations--in fact, we went to school every day--' + +`I'VE been to a day-school, too,' said Alice; `you needn't be so proud as all +that.' + +`With extras?' asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously. + +`Yes,' said Alice, `we learned French and music.' + +`And washing?' said the Mock Turtle. + +`Certainly not!' said Alice indignantly. + +`Ah! then yours wasn't a really good school,' said the Mock Turtle in a tone of +great relief. `Now at OURS they had at the end of the bill, "French, music, AND +WASHING--extra."' + +`You couldn't have wanted it much,' said Alice; `living at the bottom of the +sea.' + +`I couldn't afford to learn it.' said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. `I only took +the regular course.' + +`What was that?' inquired Alice. + +`Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied; `and +then the different branches of Arithmetic-- Ambition, Distraction, +Uglification, and Derision.' + +`I never heard of "Uglification,"' Alice ventured to say. `What is it?' + +The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. `What! Never heard of +uglifying!' it exclaimed. `You know what to beautify is, I suppose?' + +`Yes,' said Alice doubtfully: `it means--to--make--anything--prettier.' + +`Well, then,' the Gryphon went on, `if you don't know what to uglify is, you +ARE a simpleton.' + +Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so she turned +to the Mock Turtle, and said `What else had you to learn?' + +`Well, there was Mystery,' the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects +on his flappers, `--Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then +Drawling--the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a +week: HE taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.' + +`What was THAT like?' said Alice. + +`Well, I can't show it you myself,' the Mock Turtle said: `I'm too stiff. And +the Gryphon never learnt it.' + +`Hadn't time,' said the Gryphon: `I went to the Classics master, though. He was +an old crab, HE was.' + +`I never went to him,' the Mock Turtle said with a sigh: `he taught Laughing +and Grief, they used to say.' + +`So he did, so he did,' said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both +creatures hid their faces in their paws. + +`And how many hours a day did you do lessons?' said Alice, in a hurry to change +the subject. + +`Ten hours the first day,' said the Mock Turtle: `nine the next, and so on.' + +`What a curious plan!' exclaimed Alice. + +`That's the reason they're called lessons,' the Gryphon remarked: `because they +lessen from day to day.' + +This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a little before she +made her next remark. `Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?' + +`Of course it was,' said the Mock Turtle. + +`And how did you manage on the twelfth?' Alice went on eagerly. + +`That's enough about lessons,' the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone: +`tell her something about the games now.' + +CHAPTER X - The Lobster Quadrille + +The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and drew the back of one flapper across his +eyes. He looked at Alice, and tried to speak, but for a minute or two sobs +choked his voice. `Same as if he had a bone in his throat,' said the Gryphon: +and it set to work shaking him and punching him in the back. At last the Mock +Turtle recovered his voice, and, with tears running down his cheeks, he went on +again:-- + +`You may not have lived much under the sea--' (`I haven't,' said Alice)-- `and +perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster--' (Alice began to say `I +once tasted--' but checked herself hastily, and said `No, never') `--so you can +have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster Quadrille is!' + +`No, indeed,' said Alice. `What sort of a dance is it?' + +`Why,' said the Gryphon, `you first form into a line along the sea-shore--' + +`Two lines!' cried the Mock Turtle. `Seals, turtles, salmon, and so on; then, +when you've cleared all the jelly-fish out of the way--' + +`THAT generally takes some time,' interrupted the Gryphon. + +`--you advance twice--' + +`Each with a lobster as a partner!' cried the Gryphon. + +`Of course,' the Mock Turtle said: `advance twice, set to partners--' + +`--change lobsters, and retire in same order,' continued the Gryphon. + +`Then, you know,' the Mock Turtle went on, `you throw the--' + +`The lobsters!' shouted the Gryphon, with a bound into the air. + +`--as far out to sea as you can--' + +`Swim after them!' screamed the Gryphon. + +`Turn a somersault in the sea!' cried the Mock Turtle, capering wildly about. + +`Change lobsters again!' yelled the Gryphon at the top of its voice. + +`Back to land again, and that's all the first figure,' said the Mock Turtle, +suddenly dropping his voice; and the two creatures, who had been jumping about +like mad things all this time, sat down again very sadly and quietly, and +looked at Alice. + +`It must be a very pretty dance,' said Alice timidly. + +`Would you like to see a little of it?' said the Mock Turtle. + +`Very much indeed,' said Alice. + +`Come, let's try the first figure!' said the Mock Turtle to the Gryphon. `We +can do without lobsters, you know. Which shall sing?' + +`Oh, YOU sing,' said the Gryphon. `I've forgotten the words.' + +So they began solemnly dancing round and round Alice, every now and then +treading on her toes when they passed too close, and waving their forepaws to +mark the time, while the Mock Turtle sang this, very slowly and sadly:-- + +poem{ + +`"Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail. "There's a +porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail. See how eagerly the +lobsters and the turtles all advance! They are waiting on the shingle--will +you come and join the dance? + +Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance? Will you, +won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance? + +"You can really have no notion how delightful it will be When they take us up +and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!" But the snail replied "Too far, +too far!" and gave a look askance-- Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he +would not join the dance. Would not, could not, would not, could not, would +not join the dance. Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join +the dance. + +`"What matters it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied. "There is another +shore, you know, upon the other side. The further off from England the nearer +is to France-- Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance. + + Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the + dance? + Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the + dance?"' + +}poem + +`Thank you, it's a very interesting dance to watch,' said Alice, feeling very +glad that it was over at last: `and I do so like that curious song about the +whiting!' + +`Oh, as to the whiting,' said the Mock Turtle, `they--you've seen them, of +course?' + +`Yes,' said Alice, `I've often seen them at dinn--' she checked herself +hastily. + +`I don't know where Dinn may be,' said the Mock Turtle, `but if you've seen +them so often, of course you know what they're like.' + +`I believe so,' Alice replied thoughtfully. `They have their tails in their +mouths--and they're all over crumbs.' + +`You're wrong about the crumbs,' said the Mock Turtle: `crumbs would all wash +off in the sea. But they HAVE their tails in their mouths; and the reason is--' +here the Mock Turtle yawned and shut his eyes.--`Tell her about the reason and +all that,' he said to the Gryphon. + +`The reason is,' said the Gryphon, `that they WOULD go with the lobsters to the +dance. So they got thrown out to sea. So they had to fall a long way. So they +got their tails fast in their mouths. So they couldn't get them out again. +That's all.' + +`Thank you,' said Alice, `it's very interesting. I never knew so much about a +whiting before.' + +`I can tell you more than that, if you like,' said the Gryphon. `Do you know +why it's called a whiting?' + +`I never thought about it,' said Alice. `Why?' + +`IT DOES THE BOOTS AND SHOES.' the Gryphon replied very solemnly. + +Alice was thoroughly puzzled. `Does the boots and shoes!' she repeated in a +wondering tone. + +`Why, what are YOUR shoes done with?' said the Gryphon. `I mean, what makes +them so shiny?' + +Alice looked down at them, and considered a little before she gave her answer. +`They're done with blacking, I believe.' + +`Boots and shoes under the sea,' the Gryphon went on in a deep voice, `are done +with a whiting. Now you know.' + +`And what are they made of?' Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity. + +`Soles and eels, of course,' the Gryphon replied rather impatiently: `any +shrimp could have told you that.' + +`If I'd been the whiting,' said Alice, whose thoughts were still running on the +song, `I'd have said to the porpoise, "Keep back, please: we don't want YOU +with us!"' + +`They were obliged to have him with them,' the Mock Turtle said: `no wise fish +would go anywhere without a porpoise.' + +`Wouldn't it really?' said Alice in a tone of great surprise. + +`Of course not,' said the Mock Turtle: `why, if a fish came to ME, and told me +he was going a journey, I should say "With what porpoise?"' + +`Don't you mean "purpose"?' said Alice. + +`I mean what I say,' the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone. And the +Gryphon added `Come, let's hear some of YOUR adventures.' + +`I could tell you my adventures--beginning from this morning,' said Alice a +little timidly: `but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a +different person then.' + +`Explain all that,' said the Mock Turtle. + +`No, no! The adventures first,' said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: +`explanations take such a dreadful time.' + +So Alice began telling them her adventures from the time when she first saw the +White Rabbit. She was a little nervous about it just at first, the two +creatures got so close to her, one on each side, and opened their eyes and +mouths so VERY wide, but she gained courage as she went on. Her listeners were +perfectly quiet till she got to the part about her repeating `YOU ARE OLD, +FATHER WILLIAM,' to the Caterpillar, and the words all coming different, and +then the Mock Turtle drew a long breath, and said `That's very curious.' + +`It's all about as curious as it can be,' said the Gryphon. + +`It all came different!' the Mock Turtle repeated thoughtfully. `I should like +to hear her try and repeat something now. Tell her to begin.' He looked at the +Gryphon as if he thought it had some kind of authority over Alice. + +`Stand up and repeat "'TIS THE VOICE OF THE SLUGGARD,"' said the Gryphon. + +`How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons!' thought +Alice; `I might as well be at school at once.' However, she got up, and began +to repeat it, but her head was so full of the Lobster Quadrille, that she +hardly knew what she was saying, and the words came very queer indeed:-- + +poem{ + + `'Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare, + "You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair." + As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose + Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.' + + [later editions continued as follows + When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark, + And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark, + But, when the tide rises and sharks are around, + His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.] + +}poem + +`That's different from what I used to say when I was a child,' said the +Gryphon. + +`Well, I never heard it before,' said the Mock Turtle; `but it sounds uncommon +nonsense.' + +Alice said nothing; she had sat down with her face in her hands, wondering if +anything would EVER happen in a natural way again. + +`I should like to have it explained,' said the Mock Turtle. + +`She can't explain it,' said the Gryphon hastily. `Go on with the next verse.' + +`But about his toes?' the Mock Turtle persisted. `How COULD he turn them out +with his nose, you know?' + +`It's the first position in dancing.' Alice said; but was dreadfully puzzled by +the whole thing, and longed to change the subject. + +`Go on with the next verse,' the Gryphon repeated impatiently: `it begins "I +passed by his garden."' + +Alice did not dare to disobey, though she felt sure it would all come wrong, +and she went on in a trembling voice:-- + +poem{ + + `I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye, + How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie--' + + [later editions continued as follows + The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat, + While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat. + When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon, + Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon: + While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl, + And concluded the banquet--] + +}poem + +`What IS the use of repeating all that stuff,' the Mock Turtle interrupted, `if +you don't explain it as you go on? It's by far the most confusing thing I ever +heard!' + +`Yes, I think you'd better leave off,' said the Gryphon: and Alice was only too +glad to do so. + +`Shall we try another figure of the Lobster Quadrille?' the Gryphon went on. +`Or would you like the Mock Turtle to sing you a song?' + +`Oh, a song, please, if the Mock Turtle would be so kind,' Alice replied, so +eagerly that the Gryphon said, in a rather offended tone, `Hm! No accounting +for tastes! Sing her "Turtle Soup," will you, old fellow?' + +The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and began, in a voice sometimes choked with +sobs, to sing this:-- + +poem{ + + `Beautiful Soup, so rich and green, + Waiting in a hot tureen! + Who for such dainties would not stoop? + Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup! + Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup! + Beau--ootiful Soo--oop! + Beau--ootiful Soo--oop! + Soo--oop of the e--e--evening, + Beautiful, beautiful Soup! + + `Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish, + Game, or any other dish? + Who would not give all else for two + Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup? + Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup? + Beau--ootiful Soo--oop! + Beau--ootiful Soo--oop! + Soo--oop of the e--e--evening, + Beautiful, beauti--FUL SOUP!' + +}poem + +`Chorus again!' cried the Gryphon, and the Mock Turtle had just begun to repeat +it, when a cry of `The trial's beginning!' was heard in the distance. + +`Come on!' cried the Gryphon, and, taking Alice by the hand, it hurried off, +without waiting for the end of the song. + +`What trial is it?' Alice panted as she ran; but the Gryphon only answered +`Come on!' and ran the faster, while more and more faintly came, carried on the +breeze that followed them, the melancholy words:-- + +poem{ + + `Soo--oop of the e--e--evening, + Beautiful, beautiful Soup!' + +}poem + +CHAPTER XI - Who Stole the Tarts? + +The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne when they arrived, +with a great crowd assembled about them--all sorts of little birds and beasts, +as well as the whole pack of cards: the Knave was standing before them, in +chains, with a soldier on each side to guard him; and near the King was the +White Rabbit, with a trumpet in one hand, and a scroll of parchment in the +other. In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts +upon it: they looked so good, that it made Alice quite hungry to look at +them--`I wish they'd get the trial done,' she thought, `and hand round the +refreshments!' But there seemed to be no chance of this, so she began looking +at everything about her, to pass away the time. + +Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them +in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly +everything there. `That's the judge,' she said to herself, `because of his +great wig.' + +The judge, by the way, was the King; and as he wore his crown over the wig, +(look at the frontispiece if you want to see how he did it,) he did not look at +all comfortable, and it was certainly not becoming. + +`And that's the jury-box,' thought Alice, `and those twelve creatures,' (she +was obliged to say `creatures,' you see, because some of them were animals, and +some were birds,) `I suppose they are the jurors.' She said this last word two +or three times over to herself, being rather proud of it: for she thought, and +rightly too, that very few little girls of her age knew the meaning of it at +all. However, `jury-men' would have done just as well. + +The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on slates. `What are they +doing?' Alice whispered to the Gryphon. `They can't have anything to put down +yet, before the trial's begun.' + +`They're putting down their names,' the Gryphon whispered in reply, `for fear +they should forget them before the end of the trial.' + +`Stupid things!' Alice began in a loud, indignant voice, but she stopped +hastily, for the White Rabbit cried out, `Silence in the court!' and the King +put on his spectacles and looked anxiously round, to make out who was talking. + +Alice could see, as well as if she were looking over their shoulders, that all +the jurors were writing down `stupid things!' on their slates, and she could +even make out that one of them didn't know how to spell `stupid,' and that he +had to ask his neighbour to tell him. `A nice muddle their slates'll be in +before the trial's over!' thought Alice. + +One of the jurors had a pencil that squeaked. This of course, Alice could not +stand, and she went round the court and got behind him, and very soon found an +opportunity of taking it away. She did it so quickly that the poor little juror +(it was Bill, the Lizard) could not make out at all what had become of it; so, +after hunting all about for it, he was obliged to write with one finger for the +rest of the day; and this was of very little use, as it left no mark on the +slate. + +`Herald, read the accusation!' said the King. + +On this the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and then unrolled +the parchment scroll, and read as follows:-- + +poem{ + + `The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, + All on a summer day: + The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts, + And took them quite away!' + +}poem + +`Consider your verdict,' the King said to the jury. + +`Not yet, not yet!' the Rabbit hastily interrupted. `There's a great deal to +come before that!' + +`Call the first witness,' said the King; and the White Rabbit blew three blasts +on the trumpet, and called out, `First witness!' + +The first witness was the Hatter. He came in with a teacup in one hand and a +piece of bread-and-butter in the other. `I beg pardon, your Majesty,' he began, +`for bringing these in: but I hadn't quite finished my tea when I was sent +for.' + +`You ought to have finished,' said the King. `When did you begin?' + +The Hatter looked at the March Hare, who had followed him into the court, +arm-in-arm with the Dormouse. `Fourteenth of March, I think it was,' he said. + +`Fifteenth,' said the March Hare. + +`Sixteenth,' added the Dormouse. + +`Write that down,' the King said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote down +all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer +to shillings and pence. + +`Take off your hat,' the King said to the Hatter. + +`It isn't mine,' said the Hatter. + +`Stolen!' the King exclaimed, turning to the jury, who instantly made a +memorandum of the fact. + +`I keep them to sell,' the Hatter added as an explanation; `I've none of my +own. I'm a hatter.' + +Here the Queen put on her spectacles, and began staring at the Hatter, who +turned pale and fidgeted. + +`Give your evidence,' said the King; `and don't be nervous, or I'll have you +executed on the spot.' + +This did not seem to encourage the witness at all: he kept shifting from one +foot to the other, looking uneasily at the Queen, and in his confusion he bit a +large piece out of his teacup instead of the bread-and-butter. + +Just at this moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a +good deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to grow larger +again, and she thought at first she would get up and leave the court; but on +second thoughts she decided to remain where she was as long as there was room +for her. + +`I wish you wouldn't squeeze so.' said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to +her. `I can hardly breathe.' + +`I can't help it,' said Alice very meekly: `I'm growing.' + +`You've no right to grow here,' said the Dormouse. + +`Don't talk nonsense,' said Alice more boldly: `you know you're growing too.' + +`Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace,' said the Dormouse: `not in that +ridiculous fashion.' And he got up very sulkily and crossed over to the other +side of the court. + +All this time the Queen had never left off staring at the Hatter, and, just as +the Dormouse crossed the court, she said to one of the officers of the court, +`Bring me the list of the singers in the last concert!' on which the wretched +Hatter trembled so, that he shook both his shoes off. + +`Give your evidence,' the King repeated angrily, `or I'll have you executed, +whether you're nervous or not.' + +`I'm a poor man, your Majesty,' the Hatter began, in a trembling voice, `--and +I hadn't begun my tea--not above a week or so--and what with the +bread-and-butter getting so thin--and the twinkling of the tea--' + +`The twinkling of the what?' said the King. + +`It began with the tea,' the Hatter replied. + +`Of course twinkling begins with a T!' said the King sharply. `Do you take me +for a dunce? Go on!' + +`I'm a poor man,' the Hatter went on, `and most things twinkled after +that--only the March Hare said--' + +`I didn't!' the March Hare interrupted in a great hurry. + +`You did!' said the Hatter. + +`I deny it!' said the March Hare. + +`He denies it,' said the King: `leave out that part.' + +`Well, at any rate, the Dormouse said--' the Hatter went on, looking anxiously +round to see if he would deny it too: but the Dormouse denied nothing, being +fast asleep. + +`After that,' continued the Hatter, `I cut some more bread- and-butter--' + +`But what did the Dormouse say?' one of the jury asked. + +`That I can't remember,' said the Hatter. + +`You MUST remember,' remarked the King, `or I'll have you executed.' + +The miserable Hatter dropped his teacup and bread-and-butter, and went down on +one knee. `I'm a poor man, your Majesty,' he began. + +`You're a very poor speaker,' said the King. + +Here one of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by the +officers of the court. (As that is rather a hard word, I will just explain to +you how it was done. They had a large canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth +with strings: into this they slipped the guinea-pig, head first, and then sat +upon it.) + +`I'm glad I've seen that done,' thought Alice. `I've so often read in the +newspapers, at the end of trials, "There was some attempts at applause, which +was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court," and I never +understood what it meant till now.' + +`If that's all you know about it, you may stand down,' continued the King. + +`I can't go no lower,' said the Hatter: `I'm on the floor, as it is.' + +`Then you may SIT down,' the King replied. + +Here the other guinea-pig cheered, and was suppressed. + +`Come, that finished the guinea-pigs!' thought Alice. `Now we shall get on +better.' + +`I'd rather finish my tea,' said the Hatter, with an anxious look at the Queen, +who was reading the list of singers. + +`You may go,' said the King, and the Hatter hurriedly left the court, without +even waiting to put his shoes on. + +`--and just take his head off outside,' the Queen added to one of the officers: +but the Hatter was out of sight before the officer could get to the door. + +`Call the next witness!' said the King. + +The next witness was the Duchess's cook. She carried the pepper-box in her +hand, and Alice guessed who it was, even before she got into the court, by the +way the people near the door began sneezing all at once. + +`Give your evidence,' said the King. + +`Shan't,' said the cook. + +The King looked anxiously at the White Rabbit, who said in a low voice, `Your +Majesty must cross-examine THIS witness.' + +`Well, if I must, I must,' the King said, with a melancholy air, and, after +folding his arms and frowning at the cook till his eyes were nearly out of +sight, he said in a deep voice, `What are tarts made of?' + +`Pepper, mostly,' said the cook. + +`Treacle,' said a sleepy voice behind her. + +`Collar that Dormouse,' the Queen shrieked out. `Behead that Dormouse! Turn +that Dormouse out of court! Suppress him! Pinch him! Off with his whiskers!' + +For some minutes the whole court was in confusion, getting the Dormouse turned +out, and, by the time they had settled down again, the cook had disappeared. + +`Never mind!' said the King, with an air of great relief. `Call the next +witness.' And he added in an undertone to the Queen, `Really, my dear, YOU must +cross-examine the next witness. It quite makes my forehead ache!' + +Alice watched the White Rabbit as he fumbled over the list, feeling very +curious to see what the next witness would be like, `--for they haven't got +much evidence YET,' she said to herself. Imagine her surprise, when the White +Rabbit read out, at the top of his shrill little voice, the name `Alice!' + +CHAPTER XII - Alice's Evidence + +`Here!' cried Alice, quite forgetting in the flurry of the moment how large she +had grown in the last few minutes, and she jumped up in such a hurry that she +tipped over the jury-box with the edge of her skirt, upsetting all the jurymen +on to the heads of the crowd below, and there they lay sprawling about, +reminding her very much of a globe of goldfish she had accidentally upset the +week before. + +`Oh, I BEG your pardon!' she exclaimed in a tone of great dismay, and began +picking them up again as quickly as she could, for the accident of the goldfish +kept running in her head, and she had a vague sort of idea that they must be +collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die. + +`The trial cannot proceed,' said the King in a very grave voice, `until all the +jurymen are back in their proper places-- ALL,' he repeated with great +emphasis, looking hard at Alice as he said do. + +Alice looked at the jury-box, and saw that, in her haste, she had put the +Lizard in head downwards, and the poor little thing was waving its tail about +in a melancholy way, being quite unable to move. She soon got it out again, and +put it right; `not that it signifies much,' she said to herself; `I should +think it would be QUITE as much use in the trial one way up as the other.' + +As soon as the jury had a little recovered from the shock of being upset, and +their slates and pencils had been found and handed back to them, they set to +work very diligently to write out a history of the accident, all except the +Lizard, who seemed too much overcome to do anything but sit with its mouth +open, gazing up into the roof of the court. + +`What do you know about this business?' the King said to Alice. + +`Nothing,' said Alice. + +`Nothing WHATEVER?' persisted the King. + +`Nothing whatever,' said Alice. + +`That's very important,' the King said, turning to the jury. They were just +beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit +interrupted: `UNimportant, your Majesty means, of course,' he said in a very +respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke. + +`UNimportant, of course, I meant,' the King hastily said, and went on to +himself in an undertone, `important--unimportant-- unimportant--important--' as +if he were trying which word sounded best. + +Some of the jury wrote it down `important,' and some `unimportant.' Alice could +see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates; `but it doesn't +matter a bit,' she thought to herself. + +At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his +note-book, cackled out `Silence!' and read out from his book, `Rule Forty-two. +ALL PERSONS MORE THAN A MILE HIGH TO LEAVE THE COURT.' + +Everybody looked at Alice. + +`I'M not a mile high,' said Alice. + +`You are,' said the King. + +`Nearly two miles high,' added the Queen. + +`Well, I shan't go, at any rate,' said Alice: `besides, that's not a regular +rule: you invented it just now.' + +`It's the oldest rule in the book,' said the King. + +`Then it ought to be Number One,' said Alice. + +The King turned pale, and shut his note-book hastily. `Consider your verdict,' +he said to the jury, in a low, trembling voice. + +`There's more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,' said the White +Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry; `this paper has just been picked up.' + +`What's in it?' said the Queen. + +`I haven't opened it yet,' said the White Rabbit, `but it seems to be a letter, +written by the prisoner to--to somebody.' + +`It must have been that,' said the King, `unless it was written to nobody, +which isn't usual, you know.' + +`Who is it directed to?' said one of the jurymen. + +`It isn't directed at all,' said the White Rabbit; `in fact, there's nothing +written on the OUTSIDE.' He unfolded the paper as he spoke, and added `It isn't +a letter, after all: it's a set of verses.' + +`Are they in the prisoner's handwriting?' asked another of the jurymen. + +`No, they're not,' said the White Rabbit, `and that's the queerest thing about +it.' (The jury all looked puzzled.) + +`He must have imitated somebody else's hand,' said the King. (The jury all +brightened up again.) + +`Please your Majesty,' said the Knave, `I didn't write it, and they can't prove +I did: there's no name signed at the end.' + +`If you didn't sign it,' said the King, `that only makes the matter worse. You +MUST have meant some mischief, or else you'd have signed your name like an +honest man.' + +There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever +thing the King had said that day. + +`That PROVES his guilt,' said the Queen. + +`It proves nothing of the sort!' said Alice. `Why, you don't even know what +they're about!' + +`Read them,' said the King. + +The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. `Where shall I begin, please your +Majesty?' he asked. + +`Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, `and go on till you come to +the end: then stop.' + +These were the verses the White Rabbit read:-- + +poem{ + + `They told me you had been to her, + And mentioned me to him: + She gave me a good character, + But said I could not swim. + + He sent them word I had not gone + (We know it to be true): + If she should push the matter on, + What would become of you? + + I gave her one, they gave him two, + You gave us three or more; + They all returned from him to you, + Though they were mine before. + + If I or she should chance to be + Involved in this affair, + He trusts to you to set them free, + Exactly as we were. + + My notion was that you had been + (Before she had this fit) + An obstacle that came between + Him, and ourselves, and it. + + Don't let him know she liked them best, + For this must ever be + A secret, kept from all the rest, + Between yourself and me.' + +}poem + +`That's the most important piece of evidence we've heard yet,' said the King, +rubbing his hands; `so now let the jury--' + +`If any one of them can explain it,' said Alice, (she had grown so large in the +last few minutes that she wasn't a bit afraid of interrupting him,) `I'll give +him sixpence. _{I}_ don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it.' + +The jury all wrote down on their slates, `SHE doesn't believe there's an atom +of meaning in it,' but none of them attempted to explain the paper. + +`If there's no meaning in it,' said the King, `that saves a world of trouble, +you know, as we needn't try to find any. And yet I don't know,' he went on, +spreading out the verses on his knee, and looking at them with one eye; `I seem +to see some meaning in them, after all. "--SAID I COULD NOT SWIM--" you can't +swim, can you?' he added, turning to the Knave. + +The Knave shook his head sadly. `Do I look like it?' he said. (Which he +certainly did NOT, being made entirely of cardboard.) + +`All right, so far,' said the King, and he went on muttering over the verses to +himself: `"WE KNOW IT TO BE TRUE--" that's the jury, of course-- "I GAVE HER +ONE, THEY GAVE HIM TWO--" why, that must be what he did with the tarts, you +know--' + +`But, it goes on "THEY ALL RETURNED FROM HIM TO YOU,"' said Alice. + +`Why, there they are!' said the King triumphantly, pointing to the tarts on the +table. `Nothing can be clearer than THAT. Then again--"BEFORE SHE HAD THIS +FIT--" you never had fits, my dear, I think?' he said to the Queen. + +`Never!' said the Queen furiously, throwing an inkstand at the Lizard as she +spoke. (The unfortunate little Bill had left off writing on his slate with one +finger, as he found it made no mark; but he now hastily began again, using the +ink, that was trickling down his face, as long as it lasted.) + +`Then the words don't FIT you,' said the King, looking round the court with a +smile. There was a dead silence. + +`It's a pun!' the King added in an offended tone, and everybody laughed, `Let +the jury consider their verdict,' the King said, for about the twentieth time +that day. + +`No, no!' said the Queen. `Sentence first--verdict afterwards.' + +`Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. `The idea of having the sentence +first!' + +`Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple. + +`I won't!' said Alice. + +`Off with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved. + +`Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) +`You're nothing but a pack of cards!' + +At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she +gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them +off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her +sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down +from the trees upon her face. + +`Wake up, Alice dear!' said her sister; `Why, what a long sleep you've had!' + +`Oh, I've had such a curious dream!' said Alice, and she told her sister, as +well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you +have just been reading about; and when she had finished, her sister kissed her, +and said, `It WAS a curious dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to your tea; +it's getting late.' So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as +well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been. + +But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand, +watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful +Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her +dream:-- + +First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were +clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers--she +could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her +head to keep back the wandering hair that WOULD always get into her eyes--and +still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became +alive the strange creatures of her little sister's dream. + +The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by--the +frightened Mouse splashed his way through the neighbouring pool--she could hear +the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their +never-ending meal, and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her +unfortunate guests to execution--once more the pig-baby was sneezing on the +Duchess's knee, while plates and dishes crashed around it--once more the shriek +of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the Lizard's slate-pencil, and the choking of +the suppressed guinea-pigs, filled the air, mixed up with the distant sobs of +the miserable Mock Turtle. + +So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, +though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull +reality--the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to +the waving of the reeds--the rattling teacups would change to tinkling +sheep-bells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy--and +the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer +noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy +farm-yard--while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place +of the Mock Turtle's heavy sobs. + +Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in +the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all +her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she +would gather about her other little children, and make THEIR eyes bright and +eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of +long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a +pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the +happy summer days. + +THE END diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/autonomy_markup0.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/autonomy_markup0.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0482b46 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/autonomy_markup0.sst @@ -0,0 +1,1089 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: Revisiting the Autonomous Contract + :subtitle: Transnational contract law, trends and supportive structures + +@creator: + :author: Amissah, Ralph + +@date: + :published: 2000-08-27 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Ralph Amissah + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:article;law:international:commercial arbitration|uniform law|harmonization;private law;arbitration:international commercial + :subject: international contracts, international commercial arbitration, private international law + +@make: + :italics: /CISG|PICC|PECL|UNCITRAL|UNIDROIT|lex mercatoria|pacta sunt servanda|caveat subscriptor|ex aequo et bono|amiable compositeur|ad hoc/i + :num_top: 1 +% :omit: minitoc + +% (Draft 0.90 - 2000-08-27) + +:A~ @title @author~{* Ralph Amissah is a Fellow of Pace University, Institute for International Commercial Law. http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/ \\ RA lectured on the private law aspects of international trade whilst at the Law Faculty of the University of Tromsø, Norway. http://www.jus.uit.no/ \\ RA built the first web site related to international trade law, now known as lexmercatoria.org and described as "an (international | transnational) commercial law and e-commerce infrastructure monitor". http://lexmercatoria.org/ \\ RA is interested in the law, technology, commerce nexus. RA works with the law firm Amissahs. \\ /{[This is a draft document and subject to change.]}/ \\ All errors are very much my own. \\ ralph@amissah.com }~ + +1~ Reinforcing trends: borderless technologies, global economy, transnational legal solutions? + +Revisiting the Autonomous Contract~{ /{The Autonomous Contract: Reflecting the +borderless electronic-commercial environment in contracting}/ was published in +/{Elektronisk handel - rettslige aspekter, Nordisk årsbok i rettsinformatikk +1997}/ (Electronic Commerce - Legal Aspects. The Nordic yearbook for Legal +Informatics 1997) Edited by Randi Punsvik, or at +http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/the.autonomous.contract.07.10.1997.amissah/doc.html }~ + +Globalisation is to be observed as a trend intrinsic to the world economy.~{ As +Maria Cattaui Livanos suggests in /{The global economy - an opportunity to be +seized}/ in /{Business World}/ the Electronic magazine of the International +Chamber of Commerce (Paris, July 1997) at +http://www.iccwbo.org/html/globalec.htm \\ "Globalization is unstoppable. Even +though it may be only in its early stages, it is already intrinsic to the world +economy. We have to live with it, recognize its advantages and learn to manage +it. \\ That imperative applies to governments, who would be unwise to attempt +to stem the tide for reasons of political expediency. It also goes for +companies of all sizes, who must now compete on global markets and learn to +adjust their strategies accordingly, seizing the opportunities that +globalization offers."}~ Rudimentary economics explains this runaway process, +as being driven by competition within the business community to achieve +efficient production, and to reach and extend available markets.~{To remain +successful, being in competition, the business community is compelled to take +advantage of the opportunities provided by globalisation.}~ Technological +advancement particularly in transport and communications has historically +played a fundamental role in the furtherance of international commerce, with +the Net, technology's latest spatio-temporally transforming offering, linchpin +of the "new-economy", extending exponentially the global reach of the business +community. The Net covers much of the essence of international commerce +providing an instantaneous, low cost, convergent, global and borderless: +information centre, marketplace and channel for communications, payments and +the delivery of services and intellectual property. The sale of goods, however, +involves the separate element of their physical delivery. The Net has raised a +plethora of questions and has frequently offered solutions. The increased +transparency of borders arising from the Net's ubiquitous nature results in an +increased demand for the transparency of operation. As economic activities +become increasingly global, to reduce transaction costs, there is a strong +incentive for the "law" that provides for them, to do so in a similar +dimension. The appeal of transnational legal solutions lies in the potential +reduction in complexity, more widely dispersed expertise, and resulting +increased transaction efficiency. The Net reflexively offers possibilities for +the development of transnational legal solutions, having in a similar vein +transformed the possibilities for the promulgation of texts, the sharing of +ideas and collaborative ventures. There are however, likely to be tensions +within the legal community protecting entrenched practices against that which +is new, (both in law and technology) and the business community's goal to +reduce transaction costs. + +Within commercial law an analysis of law and economics may assist in developing +a better understanding of the relationship between commercial law and the +commercial sector it serves.~{ Realists would contend that law is contextual +and best understood by exploring the interrelationships between law and the +other social sciences, such as sociology, psychology, political science, and +economics.}~ "...[T]he importance of the interrelations between law and +economics can be seen in the twin facts that legal change is often a function +of economic ideas and conditions, which necessitate and/or generate demands for +legal change, and that economic change is often governed by legal change."~{ +Part of a section cited in Mercuro and Steven G. Medema, /{Economics and the +Law: from Posner to Post-Modernism}/ (Princeton, 1997) p. 11, with reference to +Karl N. Llewellyn The Effect of Legal Institutions upon Economics, American +Economic Review 15 (December 1925) pp 655-683, Mark M. Litchman Economics, the +Basis of Law, American Law Review 61 (May-June 1927) pp 357-387, and W. S. +Holdsworth A Neglected Aspect of the Relations between Economic and Legal +History, Economic History Review 1 (January 1927-1928) pp 114-123.}~ In doing +so, however, it is important to be aware that there are several competing +schools of law and economics, with different perspectives, levels of +abstraction, and analytical consequences of and for the world that they +model.~{ For a good introduction see Nicholas Mercuro and Steven G. Medema, +/{Economics and the Law: from Posner to Post-Modernism}/ (Princeton, 1997). +These include: Chicago law and economics (New law and economics); New Haven +School of law and economics; Public Choice Theory; Institutional law and +economics; Neoinstitutional law and economics; Critical Legal Studies.}~ + +Where there is rapid interrelated structural change with resulting new +features, rather than concentrate on traditionally established tectonic plates +of a discipline, it is necessary to understand underlying currents and concepts +at their intersections, (rather than expositions of history~{ Case overstated, +but this is an essential point. It is not be helpful to be overly tied to the +past. It is necessary to be able to look ahead and explore new solutions, and +be aware of the implications of "complexity" (as to to the relevance of past +circumstances to the present). }~), is the key to commencing meaningful +discussions and developing solutions for the resulting issues.~{ The majority +of which are beyond the scope of this paper. Examples include: encryption and +privacy for commercial purposes; digital signatures; symbolic ownership; +electronic intellectual property rights.}~ Interrelated developments are more +meaningfully understood through interdisciplinary study, as this instance +suggests, of the law, commerce/economics, and technology nexus. In advocating +this approach, we should also pay heed to the realisation in the sciences, of +the limits of reductionism in the study of complex systems, as such systems +feature emergent properties that are not evident if broken down into their +constituent parts. System complexity exceeds sub-system complexity; +consequently, the relevant unit for understanding the systems function is the +system, not its parts.~{ Complexity theory is a branch of mathematics and +physics that examines non-linear systems in which simple sets of deterministic +rules can lead to highly complicated results, which cannot be predicted +accurately. A study of the subject is provided by Nicholas Rescher +/{Complexity: A Philosophical Overview}/ (New Brunswick, 1998). See also Jack +Cohen and Ian Stewart, /{The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a +Complex World}/ (1994). }~ Simplistic dogma should be abandoned for a +contextual approach. + +1~ Common Property - advocating a common commercial highway + +Certain infrastructural underpinnings beneficial to the working of the market +economy are not best provided by the business community, but by other actors +including governments. In this paper mention is made for example of the +/{United Nations Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign +Arbitral Awards}/ (New York, 10 June 1958), which the business community +regularly relies upon as the back-stop for their international agreements. +Common property can have an enabling value, the Net, basis for the "new" +economy, would not be what it is today without much that has been shared on +this basis, having permitted /{"Metcalf's law"}/~{ Robert Metcalf, founder of +3Com. }~ to take hold. /{Metcalf's law}/ suggests that the value of a shared +technology is exponential to its user base. In all likelihood it applies as +much to transnational contract law, as to technological networks and standards. +The more people who use a network or standard, the more "valuable" it becomes, +and the more users it will attract. Key infrastructure should be identified and +common property solutions where appropriate nurtured, keeping transaction costs +to a minimum. + +The following general perspective is submitted as worthy of consideration (and +support) by the legal, business and academic communities, and governments. +*(a)* Abstract goals valuable to a transnational legal infrastructure include, +certainty and predictability, flexibility, simplicity where possible, and +neutrality, in the sense of being without perceived "unfairness" in the global +context of their application. This covers the content of the "laws" themselves +and the methods used for their interpretation. *(b)* Of law with regard to +technology, "rules should be technology-neutral (i.e., the rules should neither +require nor assume a particular technology) and forward looking (i.e., the +rules should not hinder the use or development of technologies in the +future)."~{ /{US Framework for Global Electronic Commerce}/ (1997) +http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/New/Commerce/ }~ *(c)* Desirable abstract goals in +developing technological standards and critical technological infrastructure, +include, choice, and that they should be shared and public or "open" as in +"open source", and platform and/or program neutral, that is, interoperable. (On +security, to forestall suggestions to the contrary, popular open source +software tends to be as secure or more so than proprietary software). *(d)* +Encryption is an essential part of the mature "new" economy but remains the +subject of some governments' restriction.~{ The EU is lifting such restriction, +and the US seems likely to follow suit. }~ The availability of (and possibility +to develop common transnational standards for) strong encryption is essential +for commercial security and trust with regard to all manner of Net +communications and electronic commerce transactions, /{vis-à-vis}/ their +confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation. That is, +encryption is the basis for essential commerce related technologies, including +amongst many others, electronic signatures, electronic payment systems and the +development of electronic symbols of ownership (such as electronic bills of +lading). *(e)* As regards the dissemination of primary materials concerning +"uniform standards" in both the legal and technology domains, "the Net" should +be used to make them globally available, free. Technology should be similarly +used where possible to promote the goals outlined under point (a). Naturally, +as a tempered supporter of the market economy,~{ Caveats extending beyond the +purview of this paper. It is necessary to be aware that there are other +overriding interests, global and domestic, that the market economy is ill +suited to providing for, such as the environment, and possibly key public +utilities that require long term planning and high investment. It is also +necessary to continue to be vigilant against that which even if arising as a +natural consequence of the market economy, has the potential to disturb or +destroy its function, such as monopolies.}~ proprietary secondary materials and +technologies do not merit these reservations. Similarly, actors of the market +economy would take advantage of the common property base of the commercial +highway. + +1~ Modelling the private international commercial law infrastructure + +Apart from the study of "laws" or the existing legal infrastructure, there are +a multitude of players involved in their creation whose efforts may be regarded +as being in the nature of systems modelling. Of interest to this paper is the +subset of activity of a few organisations that provide the underpinnings for +the foundation of a successful transnational contract/sales law. These are not +amongst the more controversial legal infrastructure modelling activities, and +represent a small but significant part in simplifying international commerce +and trade.~{ Look for instance at national customs procedures, and consumer +protection.}~ + +Briefly viewing the wider picture, several institutions are involved as +independent actors in systems modelling of the transnational legal +infrastructure. Their roles and mandates and the issues they address are +conceptually different. These include certain United Nations organs and +affiliates such as the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law +(UNCITRAL),~{ http://www.uncitral.org/ }~ the World Intellectual Property +Organisation (WIPO)~{ http://www.wipo.org/ }~ and recently the World Trade +Organisation (WTO),~{ http://www.wto.org/ }~ along with other institutions such +as the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT),~{ +http://www.unidroit.org/ }~ the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC),~{ +http://www.iccwbo.org/ }~ and the Hague Conference on Private International +Law.~{ http://www.hcch.net/ }~ They identify areas that would benefit from an +international or transnational regime and use various tools at their disposal, +(including: treaties; model laws; conventions; rules and/or principles; +standard contracts), to develop legislative "solutions" that they hope will be +subscribed to. + +A host of other institutions are involved in providing regional solutions.~{ +such as ASEAN http://www.aseansec.org/ the European Union (EU) +http://europa.eu.int/ MERCOSUR http://embassy.org/uruguay/econ/mercosur/ and +North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) +http://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/english/nafta/ }~ Specialised areas are also +addressed by appropriately specialised institutions.~{ e.g. large international +banks; or in the legal community, the Business Section of the International Bar +Association (IBA) with its membership of lawyers in over 180 countries. +http://www.ibanet.org/ }~ A result of globalisation is increased competition +(also) amongst States, which are active players in the process, identifying and +addressing the needs of their business communities over a wide range of areas +and managing the suitability to the global economy of their domestic legal, +economic, technological and educational~{ For a somewhat frightening peek and +illuminating discussion of the role of education in the global economy as +implemented by a number of successful States see Joel Spring, /{Education and +the Rise of the Global Economy}/ (Mahwah, NJ, 1998). }~ infrastructures. The +role of States remains to identify what domestic structural support they must +provide to be integrated and competitive in the global economy. + +In addition to "traditional" contributors, the technology/commerce/law +confluence provides new challenges and opportunities, allowing, the emergence +of important new players within the commercial field, such as Bolero,~{ +http://www.bolero.org/ also http://www.boleroassociation.org/ }~ which, with +the backing of international banks and ship-owners, offers electronic +replacements for traditional paper transactions, acting as transaction agents +for the electronic substitute on behalf of the trading parties. The acceptance +of the possibility of applying an institutionally offered lex has opened the +door further for other actors including ad hoc groupings of the business +community and/or universities to find ways to be engaged and actively +participate in providing services for themselves and/or others in this domain. + +1~ The foundation for transnational private contract law, arbitration + +The market economy drive perpetuating economic globalisation is also active in +the development and choice of transnational legal solutions. The potential +reward, international sets of contract rules and principles, that can be +counted on to be consistent and as providing a uniform layer of insulation +(with minimal reference back to State law) when applied across the landscape of +a multitude of different municipal legal systems. The business community is +free to utilise them if available, and if not, to develop them, or seek to have +them developed. + +The kernel for the development of a transnational legal infrastructure +governing the rights and obligations of private contracting individuals was put +in place as far back as 1958 by the /{UN Convention on the Recognition and +Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards}/ (/{"NY Convention on ICA"}/),~{ at +http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.arbitration.recognition.and.enforcement.convention.new.york.1958/ +}~ now in force in over a hundred States. Together with freedom of contract, +the /{NY Convention on ICA}/ made it possible for commercial parties to develop +and be governed by their own /{lex}/ in their contractual affairs, should they +wish to do so, and guaranteed that provided their agreement was based on +international commercial arbitration (/{"ICA"}/), (and not against relevant +mandatory law) it would be enforced in all contracting States. This has been +given further support by various more recent arbitration rules and the +/{UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration 1985}/,~{ at +http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.arbitration.model.law.1985/ }~ which now explicitly +state that rule based solutions independent of national law can be applied in +/{"ICA"}/.~{ Lando, /{Each Contracting Party Must Act In Accordance with Good +Faith and Fair Dealing}/ in /{Festskrift til Jan Ramberg}/ (Stockholm, 1997) p. +575. See also UNIDROIT Principles, Preamble 4 a. Also Arthur Hartkamp, The Use +of UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts by National and +Supranational Courts (1995) in UNIDROIT Principles: A New Lex Mercatoria?, pp. +253-260 on p. 255. But see Goode, /{A New International Lex Mercatoria?}/ in +/{Juridisk Tidskrift}/ (1999-2000 nr 2) p. 256 and 259. }~ + +/{"ICA"}/ is recognised as the most prevalent means of dispute resolution in +international commerce. Unlike litigation /{"ICA"}/ survives on its merits as a +commercial service to provide for the needs of the business community.~{ +/{"ICA"}/ being shaped by market forces and competition adheres more closely to +the rules of the market economy, responding to its needs and catering for them +more adequately. }~ It has consequently been more dynamic than national +judiciaries, in adjusting to the changing requirements of businessmen. Its +institutions are quicker to adapt and innovate, including the ability to cater +for transnational contracts. /{"ICA"}/, in taking its mandate from and giving +effect to the will of the parties, provides them with greater flexibility and +frees them from many of the limitations of municipal law.~{ As examples of +this, it seeks to give effect to the parties' agreement upon: the lex +mercatoria as the law of the contract; the number of, and persons to be +"adjudicators"; the language of proceedings; the procedural rules to be used, +and; as to the finality of the decision. }~ + +In sum, a transnational/non-national regulatory order governing the contractual +rights and obligations of private individuals is made possible by: *(a)* +States' acceptance of freedom of contract (public policy excepted); *(b)* +Sanctity of contract embodied in the principle pacta sunt servanda *(c)* +Written contractual selection of dispute resolution by international commercial +arbitration, whether ad hoc or institutional, usually under internationally +accepted arbitration rules; *(d)* Guaranteed enforcement, arbitration where +necessary borrowing the State apparatus for law enforcement through the /{NY +Convention on ICA}/, which has secured for /{"ICA"}/ a recognition and +enforcement regime unparalleled by municipal courts in well over a hundred +contracting States; *(e)* Transnational effect or non-nationality being +achievable through /{"ICA"}/ accepting the parties' ability to select the basis +upon which the dispute would be resolved outside municipal law, such as through +the selection of general principles of law or lex mercatoria, or calling upon +the arbitrators to act as amiable compositeur or ex aequo et bono. + +This framework provided by /{"ICA"}/ opened the door for the modelling of +effective transnational law default rules and principles for contracts +independent of State participation (in their development, application, or +choice of law foundation). Today we have an increased amount of certainty of +content and better control over the desired degree of transnational effect or +non-nationality with the availability of comprehensive insulating rules and +principles such as the PICC or /{Principles of European Contract Law}/ +(/{"European Principles"}/ or /{"PECL"}/) that may be chosen, either together +with, or to the exclusion of a choice of municipal law as governing the +contract. For electronic commerce a similar path is hypothetically possible. + +1~ "State contracted international law" and/or "institutionally offered lex"? +CISG and PICC as examples + +An institutionally offered lex ("IoL", uniform rules and principles) appear to +have a number of advantages over "State contracted international law" ("ScIL", +model laws, treaties and conventions for enactment). The development and +formulation of both "ScIL" and "IoL" law takes time, the CISG representing a +half century of effort~{ /{UNCITRAL Convention on Contracts for the +International Sale of Goods 1980}/ see at +http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.contracts.international.sale.of.goods.convention.1980/ +\\ The CISG may be regarded as the culmination of an effort in the field dating +back to Ernst Rabel, (/{Das Recht des Warenkaufs}/ Bd. I&II (Berlin, +1936-1958). Two volume study on sales law.) followed by the Cornell Project, +(Cornell Project on Formation of Contracts 1968 - Rudolf Schlesinger, Formation +of Contracts. A study of the Common Core of Legal Systems, 2 vols. (New York, +London 1968)) and connected most directly to the UNIDROIT inspired /{Uniform +Law for International Sales}/ (ULIS +http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.ulis.convention.1964/ at and ULF at +http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.ulf.convention.1964/ ), the main preparatory +works behind the CISG (/{Uniform Law on the Formation of Contracts for the +International Sale of Goods}/ (ULF) and the /{Convention relating to a Uniform +Law on the International Sale of Goods}/ (ULIS) The Hague, 1964.). }~ and PICC +twenty years.~{ /{UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts}/ +commonly referred to as the /{UNIDROIT Principles}/ and within this paper as +PICC see at http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.contract.principles.1994/ and +http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/unidroit.international.commercial.contracts.principles.1994.commented/ +\\ The first edition of the PICC were finalised in 1994, 23 years after their +first conception, and 14 years after work started on them in earnest. }~ The +CISG by UNCITRAL represents the greatest success for the unification of an area +of substantive commercial contract law to date, being currently applied by 57 +States,~{ As of February 2000. }~ estimated as representing close to seventy +percent of world trade and including every major trading nation of the world +apart from England and Japan. To labour the point, the USA most of the EU +(along with Canada, Australia, Russia) and China, ahead of its entry to the WTO +already share the same law in relation to the international sale of goods. +"ScIL" however has additional hurdles to overcome. *(a)* In order to enter into +force and become applicable, it must go through the lengthy process of +ratification and accession by States. *(b)* Implementation is frequently with +various reservations. *(c)* Even where widely used, there are usually as many +or more States that are exceptions. Success, that is by no means guaranteed, +takes time and for every uniform law that is a success, there are several +failures. + +Institutionally offered lex ("IoL") comprehensive general contract principles +or contract law restatements that create an entire "legal" environment for +contracting, has the advantage of being instantly available, becoming effective +by choice of the contracting parties at the stroke of a pen. "IoL" is also more +easily developed subsequently, in light of experience and need. Amongst the +reasons for their use is the reduction of transaction cost in their provision +of a set of default rules, applicable transnationally, that satisfy risk +management criteria, being (or becoming) known, tried and tested, and of +predictable effect.~{ "[P]arties often want to close contracts quickly, rather +than hold up the transaction to negotiate solutions for every problem that +might arise." Honnold (1992) on p. 13. }~ The most resoundingly successful +"IoL" example to date has been the ICC's /{Uniform Customs and Practices for +Documentary Credits}/, which is subscribed to as the default rules for the +letters of credit offered by the vast majority of banks in the vast majority of +countries of the world. Furthermore uniform principles allow unification on +matters that at the present stage of national and regional pluralism could not +be achieved at a treaty level. There are however, things that only "ScIL" can +"engineer", (for example that which relates to priorities and third party +obligations). + +*{PICC:}* The arrival of PICC in 1994 was particularly timely. Coinciding as it +did with the successful attempt at reducing trade barriers represented by the +/{World Trade Agreement,}/~{ http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/wta.1994/ }~ and the +start of general Internet use,~{ See Amissah, /{On the Net and the Liberation +of Information that wants to be Free}/ in ed. Jens Edvin A. Skoghoy /{Fra +institutt til fakultet, Jubileumsskrift i anledning av at IRV ved Universitetet +i Tromsø feirer 10 år og er blitt til Det juridiske fakultet}/ (Tromsø, 1996) +pp. 59-76 or the same at +http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/on.the.net.and.information.22.02.1997.amissah/ }~ +allowed for the exponential growth of electronic commerce, and further +underscored the transnational tendency of commerce. The arrival of PICC was all +the more opportune bearing in mind the years it takes to prepare such an +instrument. Whilst there have been some objections, the PICC (and PECL) as +contract law restatements cater to the needs of the business community that +seeks a non-national or transnational law as the basis of its contracts, and +provide a focal point for future development in this direction. Where in the +past they would have been forced to rely on the ethereal and nebulous lex +mercatoria, now the business community is provided with the opportunity to make +use of such a "law" that is readily accessible, and has a clear and reasonably +well defined content, that will become familiar and can be further developed as +required. As such the PICC allow for more universal and uniform solutions. +Their future success will depend on such factors as: *(a)* Suitability of their +contract terms to the needs of the business community. *(b)* Their becoming +widely known and understood. *(c)* Their predictability evidenced by a +reasonable degree of consistency in the results of their application. *(d)* +Recognition of their potential to reduce transaction costs. *(e)* Recognition +of their being neutral as between different nations' interests (East, West; +North, South). In the international sale of goods the PICC can be used in +conjunction with more specific rules and regulations, including (on parties +election~{ Also consider present and future possibilities for such use of PICC +under CISG articles 8 and 9. }~) in sales the CISG to fill gaps in its +provisions.~{ Drobnig, id. p. 228, comment that the CISG precludes recourse to +general principles of contract law in Article 7. This does not refer to the +situation where parties determine that the PICC should do so, see CISG Article +6. Or that in future the PICC will not be of importance under CISG Articles 8 +and 9. }~ Provisions of the CISG would be given precedence over the PICC under +the accepted principle of /{specialia generalibus derogant}/,~{ "Special +principles have precedence over general ones." See Huet, Synthesis (1995) p. +277. }~ the mandatory content of the PICC excepted. The CISG has many +situations that are not provided for at all, or which are provided for in less +detail than the PICC. + +Work on PICC and PECL under the chairmanship of Professors Bonell and Ole Lando +respectively, was wisely cross-pollinated (conceptually and through +cross-membership of preparatory committees), as common foundations strengthen +both sets of principles. A couple of points should be noted. Firstly, despite +the maintained desirability of a transnational solution, this does not exclude +the desirability of regional solutions, especially if there is choice, and the +regional solutions are more comprehensive and easier to keep of uniform +application. Secondly, the European Union has powers and influence (within the +EU) unparalleled by UNIDROIT that can be utilised in future with regard to the +PECL if the desirability of a common European contract solution is recognised +and agreed upon by EU member States. As a further observation, there is, +hypothetically at least, nothing to prevent there in future being developed an +alternative extensive (competing) transnational contract /{lex}/ solution, +though the weighty effort already in place as represented by PICC and the high +investment in time and independent skilled legal minds, necessary to achieve +this in a widely acceptable manner, makes such a development not very likely. +It may however be the case that for electronic commerce, some other +particularly suitable rules and principles will in time be developed in a +similar vein, along the lines of an "IoL". + +1~ Contract /{Lex}/ design. Questions of commonweal + +The virtues of freedom of contract are acknowledged in this paper in that they +allow the international business community to structure their business +relationships to suit their requirements, and as such reflect the needs and +working of the market economy. However, it is instructive also to explore the +limits of the principles: freedom of contract, pacta sunt servanda and caveat +subscriptor. These principles are based on free market arguments that parties +best understand their interests, and that the contract they arrive at will be +an optimum compromise between their competing interests. It not being for an +outsider to regulate or evaluate what a party of their own free will and +volition has gained from electing to contract on those terms. This approach to +contract is adversarial, based on the conflicting wills of the parties, +achieving a meeting of minds. It imposes no duty of good faith and fair dealing +or of loyalty (including the disclosure of material facts) upon the contracting +parties to one another, who are to protect their own interests. However, in +international commerce, this demand can be more costly, and may have a negative +and restrictive effect. Also, although claimed to be neutral in making no +judgement as to the contents of a contract, this claim can be misleading. + +2~ The neutrality of contract law and information cost + +The information problem is a general one that needs to be recognised in its +various forms where it arises and addressed where possible. + +Adherents to the caveat subscriptor model, point to the fact that parties have +conflicting interests, and should look out for their own interests. However +information presents particular problems which are exacerbated in international +commerce.~{ The more straightforward cases of various types of +misrepresentation apart. }~ As Michael Trebilcock put it: "Even the most +committed proponents of free markets and freedom of contract recognise that +certain information preconditions must be met for a given exchange to possess +Pareto superior qualities."~{ Trebilcock, (1993) p. 102, followed by a +quotation of Milton Friedman, from /{Capitalism and Freedom}/ (1962) p. 13. }~ +Compared with domestic transactions, the contracting parties are less likely to +possess information about each other or of what material facts there may be +within the other party's knowledge, and will find it more difficult and costly +to acquire. With resource inequalities, some parties will be in a much better +position to determine and access what they need to know, the more so as the +more information one already has, the less it costs to identify and to obtain +any additional information that is required.~{ Trebilcock, (1993) p. 102, note +quoted passage of Kim Lane Scheppele, /{Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency +in the Common Law}/ (1988) p. 25. }~ The converse lot of the financially weaker +party, makes their problem of high information costs (both actual and +relative), near insurmountable. Ignorance may even become a rational choice, as +the marginal cost of information remains higher than its marginal benefit. +"This, in fact is the economic rationale for the failure to fully specify all +contingencies in a contract."~{ See for example Nicholas Mercuro and Steven G. +Medema, p. 58 }~ The argument is tied to transaction cost and further +elucidates a general role played by underlying default rules and principles. It +also extends further to the value of immutable principles that may help +mitigate the problem in some circumstances. More general arguments are +presented below. + +2~ Justifying mandatory loyalty principles + +Given the ability to create alternative solutions and even an independent +/{lex}/ a question that arises is as to what limits if any should be imposed +upon freedom of contract? What protective principles are required? Should +protective principles be default rules that can be excluded? Should they be +mandatory? Should mandatory law only exist at the level of municipal law? + +A kernel of mandatory protective principles with regard to loyalty may be +justified, as beneficial, and even necessary for "IoL" to be acceptable in +international commerce, in that they (on the balance) reflect the collective +needs of the international business community. The present author is of the +opinion that the duties of good faith and fair dealing and loyalty (or an +acceptable equivalent) should be a necessary part of any attempt at the +self-legislation or institutional legislation of any contract regime that is +based on "rules and principles" (rather than a national legal order). If absent +a requirement for them should be imposed by mandatory international law. Such +protective provisions are to be found within the PICC and PECL.~{ Examples +include: the deliberately excluded validity (Article 4); the provision on +interest (Article 78); impediment (Article 79), and; what many believe to be +the inadequate coverage of battle of forms (Article 19). }~ As regards PICC +*(a)* The loyalty (and other protective) principles help bring about confidence +and foster relations between parties. They provide an assurance in the +international arena where parties are less likely to know each other and may +have more difficulty in finding out about each other. *(b)* They better reflect +the focus of the international business community on a business relationship +from which both sides seek to gain. *(c)* They result in wider acceptability of +the principles within both governments and the business community in the +pluralistic international community. These protective principles may be +regarded as enabling the PICC to better represent the needs of the commonweal. +*(d)* Good faith and fair dealing~{ The commented PECL explain "'Good faith' +means honesty and fairness in mind, which are subjective concepts... 'fair +dealing' means observance of fairness in fact which is an objective test". }~ +are fundamental underlying principles of international commercial relations. +*(e)* Reliance only on the varied mandatory law protections of various States +does not engender uniformity, which is also desirable with regard to that which +can be counted upon as immutable. (Not that it is avoidable, given that +mandatory State law remains overriding.) More generally, freedom of contract +benefits from these protective principles that need immutable protection from +contractual freedom to effectively serve their function. In seeking a +transnational or non-national regime to govern contractual relations, one might +suggest this to be the minimum price of freedom of contract that should be +insisted upon by mandatory international law, as the limitation which hinders +the misuse by one party of unlimited contractual freedom. They appear to be an +essential basis for acceptability of the autonomous contract (non-national +contract, based on agreed rules and principles/ "IoL"). As immutable principles +they (hopefully and this is to be encouraged) become the default standard for +the conduct of international business and as such may be looked upon as "common +property." Unless immutable they suffer a fate somewhat analogous to that of +"the tragedy of the commons."~{ Special problem regarding common/shared +resources discussed by Garrett Hardin in Science (1968) 162 pp. 1243-1248. For +short discussion and summary see Trebilcock, (1993) p. 13-15. }~ It should be +recognised that argument over the loyalty principles should be of degree, as +the concept must not be compromised, and needs to be protected (even if they +come at the price of a degree of uncertainty), especially against particularly +strong parties who are most likely to argue against their necessity. + +1~ Problems beyond uniform texts + +2~ In support of four objectives + +In the formulation of many international legal texts a pragmatic approach was +taken. Formulating legislators from different States developed solutions based +on suitable responses to factual example circumstances. This was done, +successfully, with a view to avoiding arguments over alternative legal +semantics and methodologies. However, having arrived at a common text, what +then? Several issues are raised by asking the question, given that differences +of interpretation can arise and become entrenched, by what means is it possible +to foster a sustainable drive towards the uniform application of shared texts? +Four principles appear to be desirable and should insofar as it is possible be +pursued together: *(i)* the promotion of certainty and predictability; *(ii)* +the promotion of uniformity of application; *(iii)* the protection of +democratic ideals and ensuring of jurisprudential deliberation, and; *(iv)* the +retention of efficiency. + +2~ Improving the predictability, certainty and uniform application of international and transnational law + +The key to the (efficient) achievement of greater certainty and predictability +in an international and/or transnational commercial law regime is through the +uniform application of shared texts that make up this regime. + +Obviously a distinction is to be made between transnational predictability in +application, that is "uniform application", and predictability at a domestic +level. Where the "uniform law" is applied by a municipal court of State "A" +that looks first to its domestic writings, there may be a clear - predictable +manner of application, even if not in the spirit of the "Convention". Another +State "B" may apply the uniform law in a different way that is equally +predictable, being perfectly consistent internally. This however defeats much +of the purpose of the uniform law. + +A first step is for municipal courts to accept the /{UN Convention on the Law +of Treaties 1969}/ (in force 1980) as a codification of existing public +international law with regard to the interpretation of treaties.~{ This is the +position in English law see Lord Diplock in Fothergill v Monarch Airlines +[1981], A.C. 251, 282 or see +http://www.jus.uio.no/lm/england.fothergill.v.monarch.airlines.hl.1980/2_diplock.html +also Mann (London, 1983) at p. 379. The relevant articles on interpretation are +Article 31 and 32. }~ A potentially fundamental step towards the achievement of +uniform application is through the conscientious following of the admonitions +of the interpretation clauses of modern conventions, rules and principles~{ +Examples: The CISG, Article 7; The PICC, Article 1.6; PECL Article 1.106; /{UN +Convention on the Carriage of Goods by Sea (The Hamburg Rules) 1978}/, Article +3; /{UN Convention on the Limitation Period in the International Sale of Goods +1974}/ and /{1978}/, Article 7; /{UN Model Law on Electronic Commerce 1996}/, +Article 3; /{UNIDROIT Convention on International Factoring 1988}/, Article 4; +/{UNIDROIT Convention on International Financial Leasing 1988}/, Article 6; +also /{EC Convention on the Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations 1980}/, +Article 18. }~ to take into account their international character and the need +to promote uniformity in their application,~{ For an online collection of +articles see the Pace CISG Database +http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/cisg/text/e-text-07.html and amongst the many +other articles do not miss Michael Van Alstine /{Dynamic Treaty +Interpretation}/ 146 /{University of Pennsylvania Law Review}/ (1998) 687-793. +}~ together with all this implies.~{ Such as the CISG provision on +interpretation - Article 7. }~ However, the problems of uniform application, +being embedded in differences of legal methodology, go beyond the agreement of +a common text, and superficial glances at the works of other legal +municipalities. These include questions related to sources of authority and +technique applied in developing valid legal argument. Problems with sources +include differences in authority and weight given to: *(a)* legislative +history; *(b)* rulings domestic and international; *(c)* official and other +commentaries; *(d)* scholarly writings. There should be an ongoing discussion +of legal methodology to determine the methods best suited to addressing the +problem of achieving greater certainty, predictability and uniformity in the +application of shared international legal texts. With regard to information +sharing, again the technology associated with the Net offers potential +solutions. + +2~ The Net and information sharing through transnational databases + +The Net has been a godsend permitting the collection and dissemination of +information on international law. With the best intentions to live up to +admonitions to "to take into account their international character and the need +to promote uniformity in their application" of "ScIL" and "IoL", a difficulty +has been in knowing what has been written and decided elsewhere. In discussing +solutions, Professor Honnold in /{"Uniform Words and Uniform Application" }/~{ +Based on the CISG, and inputs from several professors from different legal +jurisdictions, on the problems of achieving the uniform application of the text +across different legal municipalities. J. Honnold, /{Uniform words and uniform +applications. Uniform Words and Uniform Application: The 1980 Sales Convention +and International Juridical Practice}/. /{Einheitliches Kaufrecht und +nationales Obligationenrecht. Referate Diskussionen der Fachtagung}/. am +16/17-2-1987. Hrsg. von P. Schlechtriem. Baden-Baden, Nomos, 1987. p. 115-147, +at p. 127-128. }~ suggests the following: "General Access to Case-Law and +Bibliographic Material: The development of a homogenous body of law under the +Convention depends on channels for the collection and sharing of judicial +decisions and bibliographic material so that experience in each country can be +evaluated and followed or rejected in other jurisdictions." Honnold then goes +on to discuss "the need for an international clearing-house to collect and +disseminate experience on the Convention" the need for which, he writes there +is general agreement. He also discusses information-gathering methods through +the use of national reporters. He poses the question "Will these channels be +adequate? ..." + +The Net, offering inexpensive ways to build databases and to provide global +access to information, provides an opportunity to address these problems that +was not previously available. The Net extends the reach of the admonitions of +the interpretation clauses. Providing the medium whereby if a decision or +scholarly writing exists on a particular article or provision of a Convention, +anywhere in the world, it will be readily available. Whether or not a national +court or arbitration tribunal chooses to follow their example, they should be +aware of it. Whatever a national court decides will also become internationally +known, and will add to the body of experience on the Convention.~{ Nor is it +particularly difficult to set into motion the placement of such information on +the Net. With each interested participant publishing for their own interest, +the Net could provide the key resources to be utilised in the harmonisation and +reaching of common understandings of solutions and uniform application of legal +texts. Works from all countries would be available. }~ + +Such a library would be of interest to the institution promulgating the text, +governments, practitioners and researchers alike. It could place at your +fingertips: *(a)* Convention texts. *(b)* Implementation details of contracting +States. *(c)* The legislative history. *(d)* Decisions generated by the +convention around the world (court and arbitral where possible). *(e)* The +official and other commentaries. *(f)* Scholarly writings on the Convention. +*(g)* Bibliographies of scholarly writings. *(h)* Monographs and textbooks. +*(i)* Student study material collections. *(j)* Information on promotional +activities, lectures - moots etc. *(k)* Discussion groups/ mailing groups and +other more interactive features. + +With respect to the CISG such databases are already being maintained.~{ Primary +amongst them Pace University, Institute of International Commercial Law, CISG +Database http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/ which provides secondary support for the +CISG, including providing a free on-line database of the legislative history, +academic writings, and case-law on the CISG and additional material with regard +to PICC and PECL insofar as they may supplement the CISG. Furthermore, the Pace +CISG Project, networks with the several other existing Net based "autonomous" +CISG projects. UNCITRAL under Secretary Gerold Herrmann, has its own database +through which it distributes its case law materials collected from national +reporters (CLOUT). }~ + +The database by ensuring the availability of international materials, used in +conjunction with legal practice, helps to support the fore-named four +principles. That of efficiency is enhanced especially if there is a single +source that can be searched for the information required. + +The major obstacle that remains to being confident of this as the great and +free panacea that it should be is the cost of translation of texts. + +2~ Judicial minimalism promotes democratic jurisprudential deliberation + +How to protect liberal democratic ideals and ensure international +jurisprudential deliberation? Looking at judicial method, where court decisions +are looked to for guidance, liberal democratic ideals and international +jurisprudential deliberation are fostered by a judicial minimalist approach. + +For those of us with a common law background, and others who pay special +attention to cases as you are invited to by interpretation clauses, there is +scope for discussion as to the most appropriate approach to be taken with +regard to judicial decisions. US judge Cass Sunstein suggestion of judicial +minimalism~{ Cass R. Sunstein, /{One Case at a Time - Judicial Minimalism on +the Supreme Court}/ (1999) }~ which despite its being developed in a different +context~{ His analysis is developed based largely on "hard" constitutional +cases of the U.S. }~ is attractive in that it is suited to a liberal democracy +in ensuring democratic jurisprudential deliberation. It maintains discussion, +debate, and allows for adjustment as appropriate and the gradual development of +a common understanding of issues. Much as one may admire farsighted and +far-reaching decisions and expositions, there is less chance with the +minimalist approach of the (dogmatic) imposition of particular values. Whilst +information sharing offers the possibility of the percolation of good ideas.~{ +D. Stauffer, /{Introduction to Percolation Theory}/ (London, 1985). Percolation +represents the sudden dramatic expansion of a common idea or ideas thought he +reaching of a critical level/mass in the rapid recognition of their power and +the making of further interconnections. An epidemic like infection of ideas. +Not quite the way we are used to the progression of ideas within a conservative +tradition. }~ Much as we admire the integrity of Dworkin's Hercules,~{ Ronald +Dworkin, /{Laws Empire}/ (Harvard, 1986); /{Hard Cases in Harvard Law Review}/ +(1988). }~ that he can consistently deliver single solutions suitable across +such disparate socio-economic cultures is questionable. In examining the +situation his own "integrity" would likely give him pause and prevent him from +dictating that he can.~{ Hercules was created for U.S. Federal Cases and the +community represented by the U.S. }~ This position is maintained as a general +principle across international commercial law, despite private (as opposed to +public) international commercial law not being an area of particularly "hard" +cases of principle, and; despite private international commercial law being an +area in which over a long history it has been demonstrated that lawyers are +able to talk a common language to make themselves and their concepts (which are +not dissimilar) understood by each other.~{ In 1966, a time when there were +greater differences in the legal systems of States comprising the world economy +Clive Schmitthoff was able to comment that: \\ "22. The similarity of the law +of international trade transcends the division of the world between countries +of free enterprise and countries of centrally planned economy, and between the +legal families of the civil law of Roman inspiration and the common law of +English tradition. As a Polish scholar observed, "the law of external trade of +the countries of planned economy does not differ in its fundamental principles +from the law of external trade of other countries, such as e.g., Austria or +Switzerland. Consequently, international trade law specialists of all countries +have found without difficulty that they speak a 'common language' \\ 23. The +reason for this universal similarity of the law of international trade is that +this branch of law is based on three fundamental propositions: first, that the +parties are free, subject to limitations imposed by the national laws, to +contract on whatever terms they are able to agree (principle of the autonomy of +the parties' will); secondly, that once the parties have entered into a +contract, that contract must be faithfully fulfilled (pacta sunt servanda) and +only in very exceptional circumstances does the law excuse a party from +performing his obligations, viz., if force majeure or frustration can be +established; and, thirdly that arbitration is widely used in international +trade for the settlement of disputes, and the awards of arbitration tribunals +command far-reaching international recognition and are often capable of +enforcement abroad." \\ /{Report of the Secretary-General of the United +Nations, Progressive Development of the Law of International Trade}/ (1966). +Report prepared for the UN by C. Schmitthoff. }~ + +2~ Non-binding interpretative councils and their co-ordinating guides can provide a focal point for the convergence of ideas - certainty, predictability, and efficiency + +A respected central guiding body can provide a guiding influence with respect +to: *(a)* the uniform application of texts; *(b)* information management +control. Given the growing mass of writing on common legal texts - academic and +by way of decisions, we are faced with an information management problem.~{ +Future if not current. }~ + +Supra-national interpretative councils have been called for previously~{ +/{UNCITRAL Secretariat}/ (1992) p. 253. Proposed by David (France) at the +second UNCITRAL Congress and on a later occasion by Farnsworth (USA). To date +the political will backed by the financing for such an organ has not been +forthcoming. In 1992 the UNCITRAL Secretariat concluded that "probably the time +has not yet come". Suggested also by Louis Sono in /{Uniform laws require +uniform interpretation: proposals for an international tribunal to interpret +uniform legal texts}/ (1992) 25th UNCITRAL Congress, pp. 50-54. Drobnig, +/{Observations in Uniform Law in Practice}/ at p. 306. }~ and have for various +reasons been regarded impracticable to implement including problems associated +with getting States to formally agree upon such a body with binding authority. + +However it is not necessary to go this route. In relation to "IoL" in such +forms as the PICC and PECL it is possible for the promulgators themselves,~{ +UNIDROIT and the EU }~ to update and clarify the accompanying commentary of the +rules and principles, and to extend their work, through having councils with +the necessary delegated powers. In relation to the CISG it is possible to do +something similar of a non-binding nature, through the production of an updated +commentary by an interpretive council (that could try to play the role of +Hercules).~{ For references on interpretation of the CISG by a supranational +committee of experts or council of "wise men" see Bonell, /{Proposal for the +Establishment of a Permanent Editorial Board for the Vienna Sales Convention}/ +in /{International Uniform Law in Practice/ Le droit uniforme international +dans la practique [Acts and Proceedings of the 3rd Congress on Private Law held +by the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law}/ (Rome, +1987)], (New York, 1988) pp. 241-244 }~ With respect, despite some expressed +reservations, it is not true that it would have no more authority than a single +author writing on the subject. A suitable non-binding interpretative council +would provide a focal point for the convergence of ideas. Given the principle +of ensuring democratic jurisprudential deliberation, that such a council would +be advisory only (except perhaps on the contracting parties election) would be +one of its more attractive features, as it would ensure continued debate and +development. + +2~ Capacity Building + +_1 "... one should create awareness about the fact that an international +contract or transaction is not naturally rooted in one particular domestic law, +and that its international specifics are best catered for in a uniform law."~{ +UNCITRAL Secretariat (1992) p. 255. }~ + +_{/{Capacity building}/}_ - raising awareness, providing education, creating a +new generation of lawyers versed in a relatively new paradigm. Capacity +building in international and transnational law, is something relevant +institutions including arbitration institutions; the business community, and; +far sighted States, should be interested in promoting. Finding means to +transcend national boundaries is also to continue in the tradition of seeking +the means to break down barriers to legal communication and understanding. +However, while the business community seeks and requires greater uniformity in +their business relations, there has paradoxically, at a national level, been a +trend towards a nationalisation of contract law, and a regionalisation of +business practice.~{ Erich Schanze, /{New Directions in Business Research}/ in +Børge Dahl & Ruth Nielsen (ed.), /{New Directions in Contract Research}/ +(Copenhagen, 1996) p. 62. }~ + +As an example, Pace University, Institute of International Commercial Law, +plays a prominent role with regard to capacity building in relation to the CISG +and PICC. Apart from the previously mentioned /{CISG Database}/, Pace +University organise a large annual moot on the CISG~{ See +http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/vis.html }~ this year involving students of 79 +universities from 28 countries, and respected arbitrators from the word over. +Within the moot the finding of solutions based on PICC where the CISG is +silent, is encouraged. Pace University also organise an essay competition~{ See +http://www.cisg.law.pace.edu/cisg/text/essay.html }~ on the CISG and/or the +PICC, which next year is to be expanded to include the PECL as a further +option. + +1~ Marketing of transnational solutions + +Certain aspects of the Net/web may already be passé, but did you recognise it +for what it was, or might become, when it arrived? + +As uniform law and transnational solutions are in competition with municipal +approaches, to be successful a certain amount of marketing is necessary and may +be effective. The approach should involve ensuring the concept of what they +seek to achieve is firmly implanted in the business, legal and academic +communities, and through engaging the business community and arbitration +institutions, in capacity building and developing a new generation of lawyers. +Feedback from the business community, and arbitrators will also prove +invaluable. Whilst it is likely that the business community will immediately be +able to recognise their potential advantages, it is less certain that they will +find the support of the legal community. The normal reasons would be similar to +those usually cited as being the primary constraints on its development +"conservatism, routine, prejudice and inertia" René David. These are problems +associated with gaining the initial foothold of acceptability, also associated +with the lower part of an exponential growth curve. In addition the legal +community may face tensions arising for various reasons including the +possibility of an increase in world-wide competition. + +There are old well developed legal traditions with developed infrastructures +and roots well established in several countries, that are dependable and known. +The question arises why experiment with alternative non-extensively tested +regimes? The required sophistication is developed in the centres providing +legal services, and it may be argued that there is not the pressing need for +unification or for transnational solutions, as the traditional way of +contracting provides satisfactorily for the requirements of global commerce. +The services required will continue to be easily and readily available from +existing centres of skill. English law, to take an example is for various +reasons (including perhaps language, familiarity of use, reputation and +widespread Commonwealth~{ http://www.thecommonwealth.org/ }~ relations) the +premier choice for the law governing international commercial transactions, and +is likely to be for the foreseeable future. Utilising the Commonwealth as an +example, what the "transnational" law (e.g. CISG) experience illustrates +however, is that for States there may be greater advantage to be gained from +participation in a horizontally shared area of commercial law, than from +retaining a traditional vertically integrated commercial law system, based +largely for example on the English legal system. + +Borrowing a term from the information technology sector, it is essential to +guard against FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) with regard to the viability of +new and/or competing transnational solutions, that may be spread by their +detractors, and promptly, in the manner required by the free market, address +any real problems that are discerned. + +1~ Tools in future development + +An attempt should be made by the legal profession to be more contemporary and +to keep up to date with developments in technology and the sciences, and to +adopt effective tools where suitable to achieve their goals. Technology one way +or another is likely to encroach further upon law and the way we design it. + +Science works across cultures and is aspired to by most nations as being +responsible for the phenomenal success of technology (both are similarly +associated with globalisation). Science is extending its scope to (more +confidently) tackle complex systems. It would not hurt to be more familiar with +relevant scientific concepts and terminology. Certainly lawyers across the +globe, myself included, would also benefit much in their conceptual reasoning +from an early dose of the philosophy of science,~{ An excellent approachable +introduction is provided by A.F. Chalmers /{What is this thing called +Science?}/ (1978, Third Edition 1999). }~ what better than Karl Popper on +scientific discovery and the role of "falsification" and value of predictive +probity.~{ Karl R. Popper /{The Logic of Scientific Discovery}/ (1959). }~ And +certainly Thomas Kuhn on scientific advancement and "paradigm shifts"~{ Thomas +S. Kuhn /{The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}/ (1962, 3rd Edition 1976). +}~ has its place. Having mentioned Karl Popper, it would not be unwise to go +further (outside the realms of philosophy of science) to study his defence of +democracy in both volumes of /{Open Society and Its Enemies}/.~{ Karl R. Popper +/{The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 1, Plato}/ (1945) and /{The Open +Society and Its Enemies: Volume 2, Hegel & Marx}/. (1945) }~ + +Less ambitiously there are several tools not traditionally in the lawyers set, +that may assist in transnational infrastructure modelling. These include +further exploration and development of the potential of tools, including to +suggest a few by way of example: flow charts, fuzzy thinking, "intelligent" +electronic agents and Net collaborations. + +In the early 1990's I was introduced to a quantity surveyor and engineer who +had reduced the /{FIDIC Red Book}/~{ FIDIC is the International Federation of +Consulting Engineers http://www.fidic.com/ }~ to over a hundred pages of +intricate flow charts (decision trees), printed horizontally on roughly A4 +sized sheets. He was employed by a Norwegian construction firm, who insisted +that based on past experience, they knew that he could, using his charts, +consistently arrive at answers to their questions in a day, that law firms took +weeks to produce. Flow charts can be used to show interrelationships and +dependencies, in order to navigate the implications of a set of rules more +quickly. They may also be used more pro-actively (and /{ex ante}/ rather than +/{ex post}/) in formulating texts, to avoid unnecessary complexity and to +arrive at more practical, efficient and elegant solutions. + +Explore such concepts as "fuzzy thinking"~{ Concept originally developed by +Lotfi Zadeh /{Fuzzy Sets}/ Information Control 8 (1965) pp 338-353. For +introductions see Daniel McNeill and Paul Freiberger /{Fuzzy Logic: The +Revolutionary Computer Technology that is Changing our World}/ (1993); Bart +Kosko Fuzzy Thinking (1993); Earl Cox The Fuzzy Systems Handbook (New York, 2nd +ed. 1999). Perhaps to the uninitiated an unfortunate choice of name, as fuzzy +logic and fuzzy set theory is more precise than classical logic and set theory, +which comprise a subset of that which is fuzzy (representing those instances +where membership is 0% or 100%). The statement is not entirely without +controversy, in suggesting the possibility that classical thinking may be +subsumed within the realms of an unfamiliar conceptual paradigm, that is to +take hold of the future thinking. In the engineering field much pioneer work on +fuzzy rule based systems was done at Queen Mary College by Ebrahim Mamdani in +the early and mid-1970s. Time will tell. }~ including fuzzy logic, fuzzy set +theory, and fuzzy systems modelling, of which classical logic and set theory +are subsets. Both by way of analogy and as a tool fuzzy concepts are better at +coping with complexity and map more closely to judicial thinking and argument +in the application of principles and rules. Fuzzy theory provides a method for +analysing and modelling principle and rule based systems, even where +conflicting principles may apply permitting /{inter alia}/ working with +competing principles and the contextual assignment of precision to terms such +as "reasonableness". Fuzzy concepts should be explored in expert systems, and +in future law. Problems of scaling associated with multiple decision trees do +not prevent useful applications, and structured solutions. The analysis assists +in discerning what lawyers are involved with. + +"Intelligent" electronic agents can be expected both to gather information on +behalf of the business community and lawyers. In future electronic agents are +likely to be employed to identify and bring to the attention of their +principals "invitations to treat" or offers worthy of further investigation. In +some cases they will be developed and relied upon as electronic legal agents, +operating under a programmed mandate and vested with the authority to enter +certain contracts on behalf of their principals. Such mandate would include +choice of law upon which to contract, and the scenario could be assisted by +transnational contract solutions (and catered for in the design of "future +law"). + +Another area of technology helping solve legal problems relates to various +types of global register and transaction centres. Amongst them property +registers being an obvious example, including patents and moveable property. +Bolero providing an example of how electronic documents can be centrally +brokered on behalf of trading parties. + +Primary law should be available on the Net free, and this applies also to "IoL" +and the static material required for their interpretation. This should be the +policy adopted by all institutions involved in contributing to the +transnational legal infrastructure. Where possible larger databases also should +be developed and shared. The Net has reduced the cost of dissemination of +material, to a level infinitesimally lower than before. Universities now can +and should play a more active role. Suitable funding arrangements should be +explored that do not result in proprietary systems or the forwarding of +specific lobby interests. In hard-copy to promote uniform standards, +institutions should also strive to have their materials available at a +reasonable price. Many appear to be unacceptably expensive given the need for +their promotion and capacity building, amongst students, and across diverse +States. + +Follow the open standards and community standards debate in relation to the +development of technology standards and technology infrastructure tools - +including operating systems,~{ See for example /{Open Sources : Voices from the +Open Source Revolution - The Open Source Story}/ +http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html }~ to discover what if +anything it might suggest for the future development of law standards. + +1~ As an aside, a word of caution + +I end with an arguably gratuitous observation, by way of a reminder and general +warning. Gratuitous in the context of this paper because the areas focused +upon~{ Sale of goods (CISG), contract rules and principles (PICC), related +Arbitration, and the promotion of certain egalitarian ideals. }~ were somewhat +deliberately selected to fall outside the more contentious and "politically" +problematic areas related to globalisation, economics, technology, law and +politics.~{ It is not as evident in the area of private international +commercial contract law the chosen focus for this paper, but appears repeatedly +in relation to other areas and issues arising out of the economics, technology, +law nexus. }~ Gratuitous also because there will be no attempt to concretise or +exemplify the possibility suggested. + +Fortunately, we are not (necessarily) talking about a zero sum game, however, +it is necessary to be able to distinguish and recognise that which may harm. +International commerce/trade is competitive, and by its nature not benign, even +if it results in an overall improvement in the economic lot of the peoples of +our planet. "Neutral tests" such as Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, do not require +that your interests are benefited one iota, just that whilst those of others +are improved, yours are not made worse. If the measure adopted is overall +benefit, it is even more possible that an overall gain may result where your +interests are adversely affected. The more so if you have little, and those +that gain, gain much. Furthermore such "tests" are based on assumptions, which +at best are approximations of reality (e.g. that of zero transaction costs, +where in fact not only are they not, but they are frequently proportionately +higher for the economically weak). At worst they may be manipulated /{ex ante}/ +with knowledge of their implications (e.g. engineering to ensure actual or +relative~{ Low fixed costs have a "regressive" effect }~ asymmetrical +transaction cost). It is important to be careful in a wide range of +circumstances related to various aspects of the modelling of the infrastructure +for international commerce that have an impact on the allocation of rights and +obligations, and especially the allocation of resources, including various +types of intellectual property rights. Ask what is the objective and +justification for the protection? How well is the objective met? Are there +other consequential effects? Are there other objectives that are worthy of +protection? Could the stated objective(s) be achieved in a better way? + +Within a system are those who benefit from the way it has been, that may oppose +change as resulting in loss to them or uncertainty of their continued +privilege. For a stable system to initially arise that favours such a Select +Set, does not require the conscious manipulation of conditions by the Select +Set. Rather it requires that from the system (set) in place the Select Set +emerges as beneficiary. Subsequently the Select Set having become established +as favoured and empowered by their status as beneficiary, will seek to do what +it can, to influence circumstances to ensure their continued beneficial status. +That is, to keep the system operating to their advantage (or tune it to work +even better towards this end), usually with little regard to the conditions +resulting to other members of the system. Often this will be a question of +degree, and the original purpose, or an alternative "neutral" argument, is +likely to be used to justify the arrangement. The objective from the +perspective of the Select Set is fixed; the means at their disposal may vary. +Complexity is not required for such situations to arise, but having done so +subsequent plays by the Select Set tend towards complexity. Furthermore, moves +in the interest of the Select Set are more easily obscured/disguised in a +complex system. Limited access to information and knowledge are devastating +handicaps without which change cannot be contemplated let alone negotiated. +Frequently, having information and knowledge are not enough. The protection of +self-interest is an endemic part of our system, with the system repeatedly +being co-opted to the purposes of those that are able to manipulate it. +Membership over time is not static, for example, yesterday's "copycat nations" +are today's innovators, and keen to protect their intellectual property. Which +also illustrates the point that what it may take to set success in motion, may +not be the same as that which is preferred to sustain it. Whether these +observations appear to be self-evident and/or abstract and out of place with +regard to this paper, they have far reaching implications repeatedly observable +within the law, technology, and commerce (politics) nexus. Even if not arising +much in the context of the selected material for this paper, their mention is +justified by way of warning. Suitable examples would easily illustrate how +politics arises inescapably as an emergent property from the nexus of commerce, +technology, and law.~{ In such circumstances either economics or law on their +own would be sufficient to result in politics arising as an emergent property. +}~ + +%% SiSU markup sample Notes: +% SiSU http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu +% SiSU markup for 0.16 and later: +% 0.20.4 header 0~links +% 0.22 may drop image dimensions (rmagick) +% 0.23 utf-8 ß +% 0.38 or later, may use alternative notation for headers, e.g. @title: (instead of 0~title) +% 0.38 document structure alternative markup, experimental (rad) A,B,C,1,2,3 maps to 1,2,3,4,5,6 +% 0.42 * type endnotes, used e.g. in relation to author +% 0.51 skins changed, markup unchanged +% 0.52 declared document type identifier at start of text +% Output: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/autonomy_markup0/sisu_manifest.html +% SiSU 0.38 experimental (alternative structure) markup used for this document +% (compare 0.36 standard markup in sisu-examples autonomy_markup4.sst) diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/content.cory_doctorow.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/content.cory_doctorow.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..db40f7b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/content.cory_doctorow.sst @@ -0,0 +1,6215 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: CONTENT + :subtitle: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future + +@creator: + :author: Doctorow, Cory |email doctorow@craphound.com + +@date: + :published: 2008-09 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Cory Doctorow, 2008. + :license: This entire work (with the exception of the introduction by John Perry Barlow) is copyright 2008 by Cory Doctorow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. \\ The introduction is copyright 2008 by John Perry Barlow and released under the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;book:discourse:copyright|content|creative commons|intellectual property;copyright;content;creative commons;intellectual property:copyright;intellectual property:copyright:creative commons;book:subject:culture|copyright|society|content|social aspects of technology;culture;society;technology:social aspects + :subject: Selected Essays + +@identifier: + :oclc: 268676051 + :isbn: 9781892391810 + +@links: + { CONTENT }http://craphound.com/content/ + { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow + { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Content-Selected-Technology-Creativity-Copyright/dp/1892391813 + { @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Content/Cory-Doctorow/e/9781892391810/?itm=1&USRI=content+cory+doctorow + +@make: + :num_top: 1 + :breaks: break=1 + :emphasis: italics + :home_button_text: {CONTENT}http://craphound.com/content; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com + :footer: {CONTENT}http://craphound.com/content; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com + +:A~ @title @author + +--~# + +1~cc- A word about this downloadable file: + +I've been releasing my books online for free since my first novel, Down and Out +in the Magic Kingdom, came out in 2003, and with every one of those books, I've +included a little essay explaining why I do this sort of thing. + +I was tempted to write another one of these essays for this collection, but +then it hit me: *{this is a collection of essays that are largely concerned +with exactly this subject}*. + +You see, I don't just write essays about copyright to serve as forewards to my +books: I write them for magazine,s, newspapers, and websites -- I write +speeches on the subject for audiences of every description and in every nation. +And finally, here, I've collected my favorites, the closest I've ever come to a +Comprehensive Doctorow Manifesto. + +So I'm going to skip the foreword this time around: the *{whole book}* is my +explanation for why I'm giving it away for free online. + +If you like this book and you want to thank me, here's what I'd ask you to do, +in order of preference: + +_* Buy a copy: http://craphound.com/content/buy + +_* Donate a copy to a school or library: http://craphound.com/content/donate + +_* Send the ebook to five friends and tell them why you liked it + +_* Convert the ebook to a new file-format (see the download page for more) + +Now, on to the book! + +% $$$$ + +% Copyright notice: + +% This entire work (with the exception of the introduction by John Perry +% Barlow) is copyright 2008 by Cory Doctorow and released under the terms of a +% Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license +% (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. + +% The introduction is copyright 2008 by John Perry Barlow and released under +% the terms of a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license +% (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved. + +% $$$$ + +1~ha- Publication history and acknowledgments: + +Introductio: 2008, John Perry Barlow + +Microsoft Research DRM Talk (This talk was originally given to Microsoft's +Research Group and other interested parties from within the company at their +Redmond offices on June 17, 2004.) + +The DRM Sausage Factory (Originally published as "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At +How DRM Becomes Law," InformationWeek, July 11, 2007) + +Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and +why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway (Originally published as +"How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM Are Beating Up The American Economy," +InformationWeek, June 11, 2007) + +Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? (Originally published in +InformationWeek, August 14, 2007) + +You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen (Originally published in Locus +Magazine, March 2007) + +How Do You Protect Artists? (Originally published in The Guardian as "Online +censorship hurts us all," Tuesday, Oct 2, 2007) + +It's the Information Economy, Stupid (Originally published in The Guardian as +"Free data sharing is here to stay," September 18, 2007) + +Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever (Originally published in The Guardian, +December 11, 2007) + +What's the Most Important Right Creators Have? (Originally published as "How +Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression," +InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) + +Giving it Away (Originally published on Forbes.com, December 2006) + +Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the +Internet (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) + +How Copyright Broke (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) + +In Praise of Fanfic (Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) + +Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia +(Self-published, 26 August 2001) + +Amish for QWERTY (Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003, +http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/07/09/amish_qwerty.html) + +Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books (Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies +Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) + +Free(konomic) E-books (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) + +The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights (Originally published +in Locus Magazine, July 2007) + +When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with +Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil (Originally published in Asimov's Science +Fiction Magazine, June 2005) + +Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors +(Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) + +Warhol is Turning in His Grave (Originally published in The Guardian, November +13, 2007) + +The Future of Ignoring Things (Originally published on InformationWeek's +Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) + +Facebook's Faceplant (Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers +Will Kill Facebook," in InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) + +The Future of Internet Immune Systems (Originally published on +InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, 2007) + +All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging +Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) + +READ CAREFULLY (Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of +Lawsuits Waiting To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) + +World of Democracycraft (Originally published as "Why Online Games Are +Dictatorships," InformationWeek, April 16, 2007) + +Snitchtown (Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) + +$$$$ + +1~dedication- Dedication: + +For the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: John Perry Barlow, +Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore + +For the staff -- past and present -- of the Electronic Frontier Foundation + +For the supporters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation + +--+# + +$$$$ + +% 1~ Table of Contents: + +% 1 Introduction by John Perry Barlow + +% 2 Microsoft Research DRM talk + +% 3 The DRM Sausage Factory + +% 4 Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and +% Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway + +% 5 Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? + +% 6 You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen + +% 7 How Do You Protect Artists? + +% 8 It's the Information Economy, Stupid + +% 9 Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever + +% 10 What's the Most Important Right Creators Have? + +% 11 Giving it Away + +% 12 Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet + +% 13 How Copyright Broke + +% 14 In Praise of Fanfic + +% 15 Metacrap: Putting the Torch to Seven Straw-Men of the Meta-Utopia + +% 16 Amish for QWERTY + +% 17 Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books + +% 18 Free(konomic) E-books + +% 19 The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights + +% 20 When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil + +% 21 Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors + +% 22 Warhol is Turning in His Grave + +% 23 The Future of Ignoring Things + +% 24 Facebook's Faceplant + +% 25 The Future of Internet Immune Systems + +% 26 All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites + +% 27 READ CAREFULLY + +% 28 World of Democracycraft + +% 29 Snitchtown + +$$$$ + +1~ Introduction by John Perry Barlow + +San Francisco - Seattle - Vancouver - San Francisco + +Tuesday, April 1, 2008 + +"Content," huh? Ha! Where's the container? + +Perhaps these words appear to you on the pages of a book, a physical object +that might be said to have "contained" the thoughts of my friend and +co-conspirator Cory Doctorow as they were transported in boxes and trucks all +the way from his marvelous mind into yours. If that is so, I will concede that +you might be encountering "content". (Actually, if that's the case, I'm +delighted on Cory's behalf, since that means that you have also paid him for +these thoughts. We still know how to pay creators directly for the works they +embed in stuff.) + +But the chances are excellent that you're reading these liquid words as +bit-states of light on a computer screen, having taken advantage of his +willingness to let you have them in that form for free. In such an instance, +what "contains" them? Your hard disk? His? The Internet and all the servers and +routers in whose caches the ghosts of their passage might still remain? Your +mind? Cory's? + +To me, it doesn't matter. Even if you're reading this from a book, I'm still +not convinced that what you have in your hands is its container, or that, even +if we agreed on that point, that a little ink in the shape of, say, the visual +pattern you're trained to interpret as meaning "a little ink" in whatever font +the publisher chooses, is not, as Magritte would remind us, the same thing as a +little ink, even though it is. + +Meaning is the issue. If you couldn't read English, this whole book would +obviously contain nothing as far as you were concerned. Given that Cory is +really cool and interesting, you might be motivated to learn English so that +you could read this book, but even then it wouldn't be a container so much as a +conduit. + +The real "container" would be process of thought that began when I compressed +my notion of what is meant by the word "ink" - which, when it comes to the +substances that can be used to make marks on paper, is rather more variable +than you might think - and would kind of end when you decompressed it in your +own mind as whatever you think it is. + +I know this is getting a bit discursive, but I do have a point. Let me just +make it so we can move on. + +I believe, as I've stated before, that information is simultaneously a +relationship, an action, and an area of shared mind. What it isn't is a noun. + +Information is not a thing. It isn't an object. It isn't something that, when +you sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your possession. It doesn't +have a market value that can be objectively determined. It is not, for example, +much like a 2004 Ducati ST4S motorcycle, for which I'm presently in the market, +and which seems - despite variabilities based on, I must admit, +informationally- based conditions like mileage and whether it's been dropped - +to have a value that is pretty consistent among the specimens I can find for a +sale on the Web. + +Such economic clarity could not be established for anything "in" this book, +which you either obtained for free or for whatever price the publisher +eventually puts on it. If it's a book you're reading from, then presumably Cory +will get paid some percentage of whatever you, or the person who gave it to +you, paid for it. + +But I won't. I'm not getting paid to write this forward, neither in royalties +nor upfront. I am, however, getting some intangible value, as one generally +does whenever he does a favor for a friend. For me, the value being retrieved +from going to the trouble of writing these words is not so different from the +value you retrieve from reading them. We are both mining a deeply intangible +"good," which lies in interacting with The Mind of Cory Doctorow. I mention +this because it demonstrates the immeasurable role of relationship as the +driving force in an information economy. + +But neither am I creating content at the moment nor are you "consuming" it +(since, unlike a hamburger, these words will remain after you're done with +them, and, also unlike a hamburger you won't subsequently, wellŠ never +mind.) Unlike real content, like the stuff in a shipping container, these words +have neither grams nor liters by which one might measure their value. Unlike +gasoline, ten bucks worth of this stuff will get some people a lot further than +others, depending on their interest and my eloquence, neither of which can be +quantified. + +It's this simple: the new meaning of the word "content," is plain wrong. In +fact, it is intentionally wrong. It's a usage that only arose when the +institutions that had fattened on their ability to bottle and distribute the +genius of human expression began to realize that their containers were melting +away, along with their reason to be in business. They started calling it +content at exactly the time it ceased to be. Previously they had sold books and +records and films, all nouns to be sure. They didn't know what to call the +mysterious ghosts of thought that were attached to them. + +Thus, when not applied to something you can put in a bucket (of whatever size), +"content" actually represents a plot to make you think that meaning is a thing. +It isn't. The only reason they want you to think that it is because they know +how to own things, how to give them a value based on weight or quantity, and, +more to the point, how to make them artificially scarce in order to increase +their value. + +That, and the fact that after a good 25 years of advance warning, they still +haven't done much about the Economy of Ideas besides trying to stop it from +happening. + +As I get older, I become less and less interested in saying "I told you so." +But in this case, I find it hard to resist. Back during the Internet equivalent +of the Pleistocene. I wrote a piece for an ancestor of Wired magazine called +Wired magazine that was titled, variously, "The Economy of Ideas" or "Wine +without Bottles." In this essay, I argued that it would be deucedly difficult +to continue to apply the Adam Smithian economic principles regarding the +relationship between scarcity and value to any products that could be +reproduced and distributed infinitely at zero cost. + +I proposed, moreover, that, to the extent that anything might be scarce in such +an economy, it would be attention, and that invisibility would be a bad +strategy for increasing attention. That, in other words, familiarity might +convey more value to information that scarcity would. + +I did my best to tell the folks in what is now called "The Content Industry" - +the institutions that once arose for the useful purpose of conveying creative +expression from one mind to many - that this would be a good time to change +their economic model. I proposed that copyright had worked largely because it +had been difficult, as a practical matter, to make a book or a record or motion +picture film spool. + +It was my theory that as soon as all human expression could be reduced into +ones and zeros, people would begin to realize what this "stuff" really was and +come up with an economic paradigm for rewarding its sources that didn't seem as +futile as claiming to own the wind. Organizations would adapt. The law would +change. The notion of "intellectual property," itself only about 35 years old, +would be chucked immediately onto the magnificent ash-heap of Civilization's +idiotic experiments. + +Of course, as we now know, I was wrong. Really wrong. + +As is my almost pathological inclination, I extended them too much credit. I +imputed to institutions the same capacities for adaptability and recognition of +the obvious that I assume for humans. But institutions, having the legal system +a fundamental part of their genetic code, are not so readily ductile. + +This is particularly true in America, where some combination of certainty and +control is the actual "deity" before whose altar we worship, and where we have +a regular practice of spawning large and inhuman collective organisms that are +a kind of meta-parasite. These critters - let's call them publicly-held +corporations - may be made out of humans, but they are not human. Given human +folly, that characteristic might be semi-ok if they were actually as +cold-bloodedly expedient as I once fancied them - yielding only to the will of +the markets and the raw self-interest of their shareholders. But no. They are +also symbiotically subject to the "religious beliefs" of those humans who feed +in their upper elevations. + +Unfortunately, the guys (and they mostly are guys) who've been running The +Content Industry since it started to die share something like a doctrinal +fundamentalism that has led them to such beliefs as the conviction that there's +no difference between listening to a song and shop-lifting a toaster. + +Moreover, they dwell in such a sublime state of denial that they think they are +stewarding the creative process as it arises in the creative humans they +exploit savagely - knowing, as they do, that a creative human would rather be +heard than paid - and that they, a bunch of sated old scoundrels nearing +retirement would be able to find technological means for wrapping "containers" +around "their" "content" that the adolescent electronic Hezbollah they've +inspired by suing their own customers will neither be smart nor motivated +enough to shred whatever pathetic digital bottles their lackeys design. + +And so it has been for the last 13 years. The companies that claim the ability +to regulate humanity's Right to Know have been tireless in their endeavors to +prevent the inevitable. The won most of the legislative battles in the U.S. and +abroad, having purchased all the government money could buy. They even won most +of the contests in court. They created digital rights management software +schemes that behaved rather like computer viruses. + +Indeed, they did about everything they could short of seriously examining the +actual economics of the situation - it has never been proven to me that illegal +downloads are more like shoplifted goods than viral marketing - or trying to +come up with a business model that the market might embrace. + +Had it been left to the stewardship of the usual suspects, there would scarcely +be a word or a note online that you didn't have to pay to experience. There +would be increasingly little free speech or any consequence, since free speech +is not something anyone can own. + +Fortunately there were countervailing forces of all sorts, beginning with the +wise folks who designed the Internet in the first place. Then there was +something called the Electronic Frontier Foundation which I co-founded, along +with Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore, back in 1990. Dedicated to the free exchange +of useful information in cyberspace, it seemed at times that I had been right +in suggesting then that practically every institution of the Industrial Period +would try to crush, or at least own, the Internet. That's a lot of lawyers to +have stacked against your cause. + +But we had Cory Doctorow. + +Had nature not provided us with a Cory Doctorow when we needed one, it would +have been necessary for us to invent a time machine and go into the future to +fetch another like him. That would be about the only place I can imagine +finding such a creature. Cory, as you will learn from his various rants +"contained" herein was perfectly suited to the task of subduing the dinosaurs +of content. + +He's a little like the guerilla plumber Tuttle in the movie Brazil. Armed with +a utility belt of improbable gizmos, a wildly over-clocked mind, a keyboard he +uses like a verbal machine gun, and, best of all, a dark sense of humor, he'd +go forth against massive industrial forces and return grinning, if a little +beat up. + +Indeed, many of the essays collected under this dubious title are not only +memoirs of his various campaigns but are themselves the very weapons he used in +them. Fortunately, he has spared you some of the more sophisticated utilities +he employed. He is not battering you with the nerdy technolingo he commands +when stacked up against various minutiacrats, but I assure you that he can +speak geek with people who, unlike Cory, think they're being pretty social when +they're staring at the other person's shoes. + +This was a necessary ability. One of the problems that EFF has to contend with +is that even though most of our yet-unborn constituency would agree heartily +with our central mission - giving everybody everywhere the right to both +address and hear everybody everywhere else - the decisions that will determine +the eventual viability of that right are being made now and generally in +gatherings invisible to the general public, using terminology, whether +technical or legal, that would be the verbal equivalent of chloroform to anyone +not conversant with such arcana. + +I've often repeated my belief that the first responsibility of a human being is +to be a better ancestor. Thus, it seems fitting that the appearance of this +book, which details much of Cory's time with the EFF, coincides with the +appearance of his first-born child, about whom he is a shameless sentimental +gusher. + +I would like to think that by the time this newest prodigy, Poesy Emmeline +Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow - you see what I mean about paternal +enthusiasm - has reached Cory's age of truly advanced adolescence, the world +will have recognized that there are better ways to regulate the economy of mind +than pretending that its products are something like pig iron. But even if it +hasn't, I am certain that the global human discourse will be less encumbered +than it would have been had not Cory Doctorow blessed our current little chunk +of space/time with his fierce endeavors. + +And whatever it is that might be "contained" in the following. + +$$$$ + +1~ Microsoft Research DRM Talk + +(This talk was originally given to Microsoft's Research Group and other +interested parties from within the company at their Redmond offices on June 17, +2004.) ~# + +Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr! + +I'm here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I work for +the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in +London. I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though +occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to +a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a +month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk +about DRM. + +I lead a double life: I'm also a science fiction writer. That means I've got a +dog in this fight, because I've been dreaming of making my living from writing +since I was 12 years old. Admittedly, my IP-based biz isn't as big as yours, +but I guarantee you that it's every bit as important to me as yours is to you. + +Here's what I'm here to convince you of: + +1. That DRM systems don't work + +2. That DRM systems are bad for society + +3. That DRM systems are bad for business + +4. That DRM systems are bad for artists + +5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT + +It's a big brief, this talk. Microsoft has sunk a lot of capital into DRM +systems, and spent a lot of time sending folks like Martha and Brian and Peter +around to various smoke-filled rooms to make sure that Microsoft DRM finds a +hospitable home in the future world. Companies like Microsoft steer like old +Buicks, and this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to soak +up without driving the engine block back into the driver's compartment. At best +I think that Microsoft might convert some of that momentum on DRM into angular +momentum, and in so doing, save all our asses. + +Let's dive into it. + +-- + +2~x- 1. DRM systems don't work + +This bit breaks down into two parts: + +1. A quick refresher course in crypto theory + +2. Applying that to DRM + +Cryptography -- secret writing -- is the practice of keeping secrets. It +involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an attacker (actually, there +can be more attackers, senders and recipients, but let's keep this simple). We +usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol. + +Let's say we're in the days of the Caesar, the Gallic War. You need to send +messages back and forth to your generals, and you'd prefer that the enemy +doesn't get hold of them. You can rely on the idea that anyone who intercepts +your message is probably illiterate, but that's a tough bet to stake your +empire on. You can put your messages into the hands of reliable messengers +who'll chew them up and swallow them if captured -- but that doesn't help you +if Brad Pitt and his men in skirts skewer him with an arrow before he knows +what's hit him. + +So you encipher your message with something like ROT-13, where every character +is rotated halfway through the alphabet. They used to do this with non-worksafe +material on Usenet, back when anyone on Usenet cared about work-safe-ness -- A +would become N, B is O, C is P, and so forth. To decipher, you just add 13 +more, so N goes to A, O to B yadda yadda. + +Well, this is pretty lame: as soon as anyone figures out your algorithm, your +secret is g0nez0red. + +So if you're Caesar, you spend a lot of time worrying about keeping the +existence of your messengers and their payloads secret. Get that? You're +Augustus and you need to send a message to Brad without Caceous (a word I'm +reliably informed means "cheese-like, or pertaining to cheese") getting his +hands on it. You give the message to Diatomaceous, the fleetest runner in the +empire, and you encipher it with ROT-13 and send him out of the garrison in the +pitchest hour of the night, making sure no one knows that you've sent it out. +Caceous has spies everywhere, in the garrison and staked out on the road, and +if one of them puts an arrow through Diatomaceous, they'll have their hands on +the message, and then if they figure out the cipher, you're b0rked. So the +existence of the message is a secret. The cipher is a secret. The ciphertext is +a secret. That's a lot of secrets, and the more secrets you've got, the less +secure you are, especially if any of those secrets are shared. Shared secrets +aren't really all that secret any longer. + +Time passes, stuff happens, and then Tesla invents the radio and Marconi takes +credit for it. This is both good news and bad news for crypto: on the one hand, +your messages can get to anywhere with a receiver and an antenna, which is +great for the brave fifth columnists working behind the enemy lines. On the +other hand, anyone with an antenna can listen in on the message, which means +that it's no longer practical to keep the existence of the message a secret. +Any time Adolf sends a message to Berlin, he can assume Churchill overhears it. + +Which is OK, because now we have computers -- big, bulky primitive mechanical +computers, but computers still. Computers are machines for rearranging numbers, +and so scientists on both sides engage in a fiendish competition to invent the +most cleverest method they can for rearranging numerically represented text so +that the other side can't unscramble it. The existence of the message isn't a +secret anymore, but the cipher is. + +But this is still too many secrets. If Bobby intercepts one of Adolf's Enigma +machines, he can give Churchill all kinds of intelligence. I mean, this was +good news for Churchill and us, but bad news for Adolf. And at the end of the +day, it's bad news for anyone who wants to keep a secret. + +Enter keys: a cipher that uses a key is still more secure. Even if the cipher +is disclosed, even if the ciphertext is intercepted, without the key (or a +break), the message is secret. Post-war, this is doubly important as we begin +to realize what I think of as Schneier's Law: "any person can invent a security +system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it." This means +that the only experimental methodology for discovering if you've made mistakes +in your cipher is to tell all the smart people you can about it and ask them to +think of ways to break it. Without this critical step, you'll eventually end up +living in a fool's paradise, where your attacker has broken your cipher ages +ago and is quietly decrypting all her intercepts of your messages, snickering +at you. + +Best of all, there's only one secret: the key. And with dual-key crypto it +becomes a lot easier for Alice and Bob to keep their keys secret from Carol, +even if they've never met. So long as Alice and Bob can keep their keys secret, +they can assume that Carol won't gain access to their cleartext messages, even +though she has access to the cipher and the ciphertext. Conveniently enough, +the keys are the shortest and simplest of the secrets, too: hence even easier +to keep away from Carol. Hooray for Bob and Alice. + +Now, let's apply this to DRM. + +In DRM, the attacker is *{also the recipient}*. It's not Alice and Bob and +Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. Alice sells Bob a DVD. She sells Bob a DVD +player. The DVD has a movie on it -- say, Pirates of the Caribbean -- and it's +enciphered with an algorithm called CSS -- Content Scrambling System. The DVD +player has a CSS un-scrambler. + +Now, let's take stock of what's a secret here: the cipher is well-known. The +ciphertext is most assuredly in enemy hands, arrr. So what? As long as the key +is secret from the attacker, we're golden. + +But there's the rub. Alice wants Bob to buy Pirates of the Caribbean from her. +Bob will only buy Pirates of the Caribbean if he can descramble the +CSS-encrypted VOB -- video object -- on his DVD player. Otherwise, the disc is +only useful to Bob as a drinks-coaster. So Alice has to provide Bob -- the +attacker -- with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext. + +Hilarity ensues. + +DRM systems are usually broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely, months. It's +not because the people who think them up are stupid. It's not because the +people who break them are smart. It's not because there's a flaw in the +algorithms. At the end of the day, all DRM systems share a common +vulnerability: they provide their attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the +key. At this point, the secret isn't a secret anymore. + +-- + +2~x- 2. DRM systems are bad for society + +Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But DRM doesn't have to be +proof against smart attackers, only average individuals! It's like a +speedbump!" + +Put your hand down. + +This is a fallacy for two reasons: one technical, and one social. They're both +bad for society, though. + +Here's the technical reason: I don't need to be a cracker to break your DRM. I +only need to know how to search Google, or Kazaa, or any of the other +general-purpose search tools for the cleartext that someone smarter than me has +extracted. + +Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But NGSCB can solve this +problem: we'll lock the secrets up on the logic board and goop it all up with +epoxy." + +Put your hand down. + +Raise your hand if you're a co-author of the Darknet paper. + +Everyone in the first group, meet the co-authors of the Darknet paper. This is +a paper that says, among other things, that DRM will fail for this very reason. +Put your hands down, guys. + +Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like +keeping a tall user tall. DRM vendors tell us that their technology is meant to +be proof against average users, not organized criminal gangs like the Ukrainian +pirates who stamp out millions of high-quality counterfeits. It's not meant to +be proof against sophisticated college kids. It's not meant to be proof against +anyone who knows how to edit her registry, or hold down the shift key at the +right moment, or use a search engine. At the end of the day, the user DRM is +meant to defend against is the most unsophisticated and least capable among us. + +Here's a true story about a user I know who was stopped by DRM. She's smart, +college educated, and knows nothing about electronics. She has three kids. She +has a DVD in the living room and an old VHS deck in the kids' playroom. One +day, she brought home the Toy Story DVD for the kids. That's a substantial +investment, and given the generally jam-smeared character of everything the +kids get their paws on, she decided to tape the DVD off to VHS and give that to +the kids -- that way she could make a fresh VHS copy when the first one went +south. She cabled her DVD into her VHS and pressed play on the DVD and record +on the VCR and waited. + +Before I go farther, I want us all to stop a moment and marvel at this. Here is +someone who is practically technophobic, but who was able to construct a mental +model of sufficient accuracy that she figured out that she could connect her +cables in the right order and dub her digital disc off to analog tape. I +imagine that everyone in this room is the front-line tech support for someone +in her or his family: wouldn't it be great if all our non-geek friends and +relatives were this clever and imaginative? + +I also want to point out that this is the proverbial honest user. She's not +making a copy for the next door neighbors. She's not making a copy and selling +it on a blanket on Canal Street. She's not ripping it to her hard-drive, DivX +encoding it and putting it in her Kazaa sharepoint. She's doing something +*{honest}* -- moving it from one format to another. She's home taping. + +Except she fails. There's a DRM system called Macrovision embedded -- by law -- +in every VHS that messes with the vertical blanking interval in the signal and +causes any tape made in this fashion to fail. Macrovision can be defeated for +about $10 with a gadget readily available on eBay. But our infringer doesn't +know that. She's "honest." Technically unsophisticated. Not stupid, mind you -- +just naive. + +The Darknet paper addresses this possibility: it even predicts what this person +will do in the long run: she'll find out about Kazaa and the next time she +wants to get a movie for the kids, she'll download it from the net and burn it +for them. + +In order to delay that day for as long as possible, our lawmakers and big +rightsholder interests have come up with a disastrous policy called +anticircumvention. + +Here's how anticircumvention works: if you put a lock -- an access control -- +around a copyrighted work, it is illegal to break that lock. It's illegal to +make a tool that breaks that lock. It's illegal to tell someone how to make +that tool. One court even held it illegal to tell someone where she can find +out how to make that tool. + +Remember Schneier's Law? Anyone can come up with a security system so clever +that he can't see its flaws. The only way to find the flaws in security is to +disclose the system's workings and invite public feedback. But now we live in a +world where any cipher used to fence off a copyrighted work is off-limits to +that kind of feedback. That's something that a Princeton engineering prof named +Ed Felten and his team discovered when he submitted a paper to an academic +conference on the failings in the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a +watermarking scheme proposed by the recording industry. The RIAA responded by +threatening to sue his ass if he tried it. We fought them because Ed is the +kind of client that impact litigators love: unimpeachable and clean-cut and the +RIAA folded. Lucky Ed. Maybe the next guy isn't so lucky. + +Matter of fact, the next guy wasn't. Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian programmer +who gave a talk at a hacker con in Vegas on the failings in Adobe's e-book +locks. The FBI threw him in the slam for 30 days. He copped a plea, went home +to Russia, and the Russian equivalent of the State Department issued a blanket +warning to its researchers to stay away from American conferences, since we'd +apparently turned into the kind of country where certain equations are illegal. + +Anticircumvention is a powerful tool for people who want to exclude +competitors. If you claim that your car engine firmware is a "copyrighted +work," you can sue anyone who makes a tool for interfacing with it. That's not +just bad news for mechanics -- think of the hotrodders who want to chip their +cars to tweak the performance settings. We have companies like Lexmark claiming +that their printer cartridges contain copyrighted works -- software that trips +an "I am empty" flag when the toner runs out, and have sued a competitor who +made a remanufactured cartridge that reset the flag. Even garage-door opener +companies have gotten in on the act, claiming that their receivers' firmware +are copyrighted works. Copyrighted cars, print carts and garage-door openers: +what's next, copyrighted light-fixtures? + +Even in the context of legitimate -- excuse me, "traditional" -- copyrighted +works like movies on DVDs, anticircumvention is bad news. Copyright is a +delicate balance. It gives creators and their assignees some rights, but it +also reserves some rights to the public. For example, an author has no right to +prohibit anyone from transcoding his books into assistive formats for the +blind. More importantly, though, a creator has a very limited say over what you +can do once you lawfully acquire her works. If I buy your book, your painting, +or your DVD, it belongs to me. It's my property. Not my "intellectual property" +-- a whacky kind of pseudo-property that's swiss-cheesed with exceptions, +easements and limitations -- but real, no-fooling, actual tangible *{property}* +-- the kind of thing that courts have been managing through property law for +centuries. + +But anticirumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting copyrights for +themselves -- to write private laws without accountability or deliberation -- +that expropriate your interest in your physical property to their favor. +Region-coded DVDs are an example of this: there's no copyright here or in +anywhere I know of that says that an author should be able to control where you +enjoy her creative works, once you've paid for them. I can buy a book and throw +it in my bag and take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it +wherever I am: I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where +the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who +sells them for double the US shelf-price. When I'm done with it, I can sell it +on or give it away in the UK. Copyright lawyers call this "First Sale," but it +may be simpler to think of it as "Capitalism." + +The keys to decrypt a DVD are controlled by an org called DVD-CCA, and they +have a bunch of licensing requirements for anyone who gets a key from them. +Among these is something called region-coding: if you buy a DVD in France, +it'll have a flag set that says, "I am a European DVD." Bring that DVD to +America and your DVD player will compare the flag to its list of permitted +regions, and if they don't match, it will tell you that it's not allowed to +play your disc. + +Remember: there is no copyright that says that an author gets to do this. When +we wrote the copyright statutes and granted authors the right to control +display, performance, duplication, derivative works, and so forth, we didn't +leave out "geography" by accident. That was on-purpose. + +So when your French DVD won't play in America, that's not because it'd be +illegal to do so: it's because the studios have invented a business-model and +then invented a copyright law to prop it up. The DVD is your property and so is +the DVD player, but if you break the region-coding on your disc, you're going +to run afoul of anticircumvention. + +That's what happened to Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager who wanted to watch +French DVDs on his Norwegian DVD player. He and some pals wrote some code to +break the CSS so that he could do so. He's a wanted man here in America; in +Norway the studios put the local fuzz up to bringing him up on charges of +*{unlawfully trespassing upon a computer system}*. When his defense asked, +"Which computer has Jon trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own." + +His no-fooling, real and physical property has been expropriated by the weird, +notional, metaphorical intellectual property on his DVD: DRM only works if your +record player becomes the property of whomever's records you're playing. + +-- + +2~x- 3. DRM systems are bad for biz + +This is the worst of all the ideas embodied by DRM: that people who make +record-players should be able to spec whose records you can listen to, and that +people who make records should have a veto over the design of record-players. + +We've never had this principle: in fact, we've always had just the reverse. +Think about all the things that can be plugged into a parallel or serial +interface, which were never envisioned by their inventors. Our strong economy +and rapid innovation are byproducts of the ability of anyone to make anything +that plugs into anything else: from the Flo-bee electric razor that snaps onto +the end of your vacuum-hose to the octopus spilling out of your car's dashboard +lighter socket, standard interfaces that anyone can build for are what makes +billionaires out of nerds. + +The courts affirm this again and again. It used to be illegal to plug anything +that didn't come from AT&T into your phone-jack. They claimed that this was for +the safety of the network, but really it was about propping up this little +penny-ante racket that AT&T had in charging you a rental fee for your phone +until you'd paid for it a thousand times over. + +When that ban was struck down, it created the market for third-party phone +equipment, from talking novelty phones to answering machines to cordless +handsets to headsets -- billions of dollars of economic activity that had been +suppressed by the closed interface. Note that AT&T was one of the big +beneficiaries of this: they *{also}* got into the business of making phone-kit. + +DRM is the software equivalent of these closed hardware interfaces. Robert +Scoble is a Softie who has an excellent blog, where he wrote an essay about the +best way to protect your investment in the digital music you buy. Should you +buy Apple iTunes music, or Microsoft DRM music? Scoble argued that Microsoft's +music was a sounder investment, because Microsoft would have more downstream +licensees for its proprietary format and therefore you'd have a richer +ecosystem of devices to choose from when you were shopping for gizmos to play +your virtual records on. + +What a weird idea: that we should evaluate our record-purchases on the basis of +which recording company will allow the greatest diversity of record-players to +play its discs! That's like telling someone to buy the Betamax instead of the +Edison Kinetoscope because Thomas Edison is a crank about licensing his +patents; all the while ignoring the world's relentless march to the more open +VHS format. + +It's a bad business. DVD is a format where the guy who makes the records gets +to design the record players. Ask yourself: how much innovation has there been +over the past decade of DVD players? They've gotten cheaper and smaller, but +where are the weird and amazing new markets for DVD that were opened up by the +VCR? There's a company that's manufacturing the world's first HDD-based DVD +jukebox, a thing that holds 100 movies, and they're charging *{$27,000}* for +this thing. We're talking about a few thousand dollars' worth of components -- +all that other cost is the cost of anticompetition. + +-- + +2~x- 4. DRM systems are bad for artists + +But what of the artist? The hardworking filmmaker, the ink-stained scribbler, +the heroin-cured leathery rock-star? We poor slobs of the creative class are +everyone's favorite poster-children here: the RIAA and MPAA hold us up and say, +"Won't someone please think of the children?" File-sharers say, "Yeah, we're +thinking about the artists, but the labels are The Man, who cares what happens +to you?" + +To understand what DRM does to artists, you need to understand how copyright +and technology interact. Copyright is inherently technological, since the +things it addresses -- copying, transmitting, and so on -- are inherently +technological. + +The piano roll was the first system for cheaply copying music. It was invented +at a time when the dominant form of entertainment in America was getting a +talented pianist to come into your living room and pound out some tunes while +you sang along. The music industry consisted mostly of sheet-music publishers. + +The player piano was a digital recording and playback system. Piano-roll +companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes printed on it into 0s and 1s +on a long roll of computer tape, which they sold by the thousands -- the +hundreds of thousands -- the millions. They did this without a penny's +compensation to the publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr! + +Predictably, the composers and music publishers went nutso. Sousa showed up in +Congress to say that: + +group{ + + These talking machines are going to ruin the + artistic development of music in this + country. When I was a boy...in front of every + house in the summer evenings, you would find + young people together singing the songs of + the day or old songs. Today you hear these + infernal machines going night and day. We + will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal + chord will be eliminated by a process of + evolution, as was the tail of man when he + came from the ape. + +}group + +The publishers asked Congress to ban the piano roll and to create a law that +said that any new system for reproducing music should be subject to a veto from +their industry association. Lucky for us, Congress realized what side of their +bread had butter on it and decided not to criminalize the dominant form of +entertainment in America. + +But there was the problem of paying artists. The Constitution sets out the +purpose of American copyright: to promote the useful arts and sciences. The +composers had a credible story that they'd do less composing if they weren't +paid for it, so Congress needed a fix. Here's what they came up with: anyone +who paid a music publisher two cents would have the right to make one piano +roll of any song that publisher published. The publisher couldn't say no, and +no one had to hire a lawyer at $200 an hour to argue about whether the payment +should be two cents or a nickel. + +This compulsory license is still in place today: when Joe Cocker sings "With a +Little Help from My Friends," he pays a fixed fee to the Beatles' publisher and +away he goes -- even if Ringo hates the idea. If you ever wondered how Sid +Vicious talked Anka into letting him get a crack at "My Way," well, now you +know. + +That compulsory license created a world where a thousand times more money was +made by a thousand times more creators who made a thousand times more music +that reached a thousand times more people. + +This story repeats itself throughout the technological century, every ten or +fifteen years. Radio was enabled by a voluntary blanket license -- the music +companies got together and asked for a consent decree so that they could offer +all their music for a flat fee. Cable TV took a compulsory: the only way cable +operators could get their hands on broadcasts was to pirate them and shove them +down the wire, and Congress saw fit to legalize this practice rather than screw +around with their constituents' TVs. + +Sometimes, the courts and Congress decided to simply take away a copyright -- +that's what happened with the VCR. When Sony brought out the VCR in 1976, the +studios had already decided what the experience of watching a movie in your +living room would look like: they'd licensed out their programming for use on a +machine called a Discovision, which played big LP-sized discs that were +read-only. Proto-DRM. + +The copyright scholars of the day didn't give the VCR very good odds. Sony +argued that their box allowed for a fair use, which is defined as a use that a +court rules is a defense against infringement based on four factors: whether +the use transforms the work into something new, like a collage; whether it uses +all or some of the work; whether the work is artistic or mainly factual; and +whether the use undercuts the creator's business-model. + +The Betamax failed on all four fronts: when you time-shifted or duplicated a +Hollywood movie off the air, you made a non-transformative use of 100 percent +of a creative work in a way that directly undercut the Discovision licensing +stream. + +Jack Valenti, the mouthpiece for the motion-picture industry, told Congress in +1982 that the VCR was to the American film industry "as the Boston Strangler is +to a woman home alone." + +But the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in 1984, when it determined that +any device capable of a substantial non-infringing use was legal. In other +words, "We don't buy this Boston Strangler business: if your business model +can't survive the emergence of this general-purpose tool, it's time to get +another business-model or go broke." + +Hollywood found another business model, as the broadcasters had, as the +Vaudeville artists had, as the music publishers had, and they made more art +that paid more artists and reached a wider audience. + +There's one thing that every new art business-model had in common: it embraced +the medium it lived in. + +This is the overweening characteristic of every single successful new medium: +it is true to itself. The Luther Bible didn't succeed on the axes that made a +hand-copied monk Bible valuable: they were ugly, they weren't in Church Latin, +they weren't read aloud by someone who could interpret it for his lay audience, +they didn't represent years of devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by someone who +had given his life over to God. The thing that made the Luther Bible a success +was its scalability: it was more popular because it was more proliferate: all +success factors for a new medium pale beside its profligacy. The most +successful organisms on earth are those that reproduce the most: bugs and +bacteria, nematodes and virii. Reproduction is the best of all survival +strategies. + +Piano rolls didn't sound as good as the music of a skilled pianist: but they +*{scaled better}*. Radio lacked the social elements of live performance, but +more people could build a crystal set and get it aimed correctly than could +pack into even the largest Vaudeville house. MP3s don't come with liner notes, +they aren't sold to you by a hipper-than-thou record store clerk who can help +you make your choice, bad rips and truncated files abound: I once downloaded a +twelve-second copy of "Hey Jude" from the original Napster. Yet MP3 is +outcompeting the CD. I don't know what to do with CDs anymore: I get them, and +they're like the especially nice garment bag they give you at the fancy suit +shop: it's nice and you feel like a goof for throwing it out, but Christ, how +many of these things can you usefully own? I can put ten thousand songs on my +laptop, but a comparable pile of discs, with liner notes and so forth -- that's +a liability: it's a piece of my monthly storage-locker costs. + +Here are the two most important things to know about computers and the +Internet: + +1. A computer is a machine for rearranging bits + +2. The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to another very +cheaply and quickly + +Any new medium that takes hold on the Internet and with computers will embrace +these two facts, not regret them. A newspaper press is a machine for spitting +out cheap and smeary newsprint at speed: if you try to make it output fine art +lithos, you'll get junk. If you try to make it output newspapers, you'll get +the basis for a free society. + +And so it is with the Internet. At the heyday of Napster, record execs used to +show up at conferences and tell everyone that Napster was doomed because no one +wanted lossily compressed MP3s with no liner notes and truncated files and +misspelled metadata. + +Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who'll listen that +the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It's bollocks, and so is the whole +sermonette about how nice a book looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells +and how easy it is to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, +like the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to sell you +hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will really hit their stride +when we can figure out how to bring the actors out for an encore when the +film's run out. Or that what the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther +Bibles with facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read +aloud from your personal Word of God. + +New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they +succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is +good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at +being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. +Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a +form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session +or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list. + +The only really successful epublishing -- I mean, hundreds of thousands, +millions of copies distributed and read -- is the bookwarez scene, where +scanned-and-OCR'd books are distributed on the darknet. The only legit +publishers with any success at epublishing are the ones whose books cross the +Internet without technological fetter: publishers like Baen Books and my own, +Tor, who are making some or all of their catalogs available in ASCII and HTML +and PDF. + +The hardware-dependent ebooks, the DRM use-and-copy-restricted ebooks, they're +cratering. Sales measured in the tens, sometimes the hundreds. Science fiction +is a niche business, but when you're selling copies by the ten, that's not even +a business, it's a hobby. + +Every one of you has been riding a curve where you read more and more words off +of more and more screens every day through most of your professional careers. +It's zero-sum: you've also been reading fewer words off of fewer pages as time +went by: the dinosauric executive who prints his email and dictates a reply to +his secretary is info-roadkill. + +Today, at this very second, people read words off of screens for every hour +that they can find. Your kids stare at their Game Boys until their eyes fall +out. Euroteens ring doorbells with their hypertrophied, SMS-twitching thumbs +instead of their index fingers. + +Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap printer-binderies like +the Internet Bookmobile that can produce a full bleed, four color, glossy +cover, printed spine, perfect-bound book in ten minutes for a dollar are the +future of paper books: when you need an instance of a paper book, you generate +one, or part of one, and pitch it out when you're done. I landed at SEA-TAC on +Monday and burned a couple CDs from my music collection to listen to in the +rental car. When I drop the car off, I'll leave them behind. Who needs 'em? + +Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. +Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utilitarian one. There's nothing +*{moral}* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's +nothing *{immoral}* about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a +movie off your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that people's +physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so +that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music +and books and paintings. + +Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simplifies and cheapens +creation, reproduction and distribution. The existing copyright businesses +exploit inefficiencies in the old production, reproduction and distribution +system, and they'll be weakened by the new technology. But new technology +always gives us more art with a wider reach: that's what tech is *{for}*. + +Tech gives us bigger pies that more artists can get a bite out of. That's been +tacitly acknowledged at every stage of the copyfight since the piano roll. When +copyright and technology collide, it's copyright that changes. + +Which means that today's copyright -- the thing that DRM nominally props up -- +didn't come down off the mountain on two stone tablets. It was created in +living memory to accommodate the technical reality created by the inventors of +the previous generation. To abandon invention now robs tomorrow's artists of +the new businesses and new reach and new audiences that the Internet and the PC +can give them. + +-- + +2~x- 5. DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT + +When Sony brought out the VCR, it made a record player that could play +Hollywood's records, even if Hollywood didn't like the idea. The industries +that grew up on the back of the VCR -- movie rentals, home taping, camcorders, +even Bar Mitzvah videographers -- made billions for Sony and its cohort. + +That was good business -- even if Sony lost the Betamax-VHS format wars, the +money on the world-with-VCRs table was enough to make up for it. + +But then Sony acquired a relatively tiny entertainment company and it started +to massively screw up. When MP3 rolled around and Sony's walkman customers were +clamoring for a solid-state MP3 player, Sony let its music business-unit run +its show: instead of making a high-capacity MP3 walkman, Sony shipped its Music +Clips, low-capacity devices that played brain-damaged DRM formats like Real and +OpenMG. They spent good money engineering "features" into these devices that +kept their customers from freely moving their music back and forth between +their devices. Customers stayed away in droves. + +Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to walkmen. The market leaders +are poky Singaporean outfits like Creative Labs -- the kind of company that +Sony used to crush like a bug, back before it got borged by its entertainment +unit -- and PC companies like Apple. + +That's because Sony shipped a product that there was no market demand for. No +Sony customer woke up one morning and said, "Damn, I wish Sony would devote +some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music." +Presented with an alternative, Sony's customers enthusiastically jumped ship. + +The same thing happened to a lot of people I know who used to rip their CDs to +WMA. You guys sold them software that produced smaller, better-sounding rips +than the MP3 rippers, but you also fixed it so that the songs you ripped were +device-locked to their PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their +music to another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the +spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they discovered that +after they restored their music that they could no longer play it. The player +saw the new OS as a different machine, and locked them out of their own music. + +There is no market demand for this "feature." None of your customers want you +to make expensive modifications to your products that make backing up and +restoring even harder. And there is no moment when your customers will be less +forgiving than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic technology +failures. + +I speak from experience. Because I buy a new Powerbook every ten months, and +because I always order the new models the day they're announced, I get a lot of +lemons from Apple. That means that I hit Apple's +three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early on and found myself unable +to play the hundreds of dollars' worth of iTunes songs I'd bought because one +of my authorized machines was a lemon that Apple had broken up for parts, one +was in the shop getting fixed by Apple, and one was my mom's computer, 3,000 +miles away in Toronto. + +If I had been a less good customer for Apple's hardware, I would have been +fine. If I had been a less enthusiastic evangelist for Apple's products -- if I +hadn't shown my mom how iTunes Music Store worked -- I would have been fine. If +I hadn't bought so much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it +and re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I would have +been fine. + +As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control spending by +treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own music, at a time when my +Powerbook was in the shop -- i.e., at a time when I was hardly disposed to feel +charitable to Apple. + +I'm an edge case here, but I'm a *{leading edge}* case. If Apple succeeds in +its business plans, it will only be a matter of time until even average +customers have upgraded enough hardware and bought enough music to end up where +I am. + +You know what I would totally buy? A record player that let me play everybody's +records. Right now, the closest I can come to that is an open source app called +VLC, but it's clunky and buggy and it didn't come pre-installed on my computer. + +Sony didn't make a Betamax that only played the movies that Hollywood was +willing to permit -- Hollywood asked them to do it, they proposed an early, +analog broadcast flag that VCRs could hunt for and respond to by disabling +recording. Sony ignored them and made the product they thought their customers +wanted. + +I'm a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft customers, I want a +player that plays anything I throw at it, and I think that you are just the +company to give it to me. + +Yes, this would violate copyright law as it stands, but Microsoft has been +making tools of piracy that change copyright law for decades now. Outlook, +Exchange and MSN are tools that abet widescale digital infringement. + +More significantly, IIS and your caching proxies all make and serve copies of +documents without their authors' consent, something that, if it is legal today, +is only legal because companies like Microsoft went ahead and did it and dared +lawmakers to prosecute. + +Microsoft stood up for its customers and for progress, and won so decisively +that most people never even realized that there was a fight. + +Do it again! This is a company that looks the world's roughest, toughest +anti-trust regulators in the eye and laughs. Compared to anti-trust people, +copyright lawmakers are pantywaists. You can take them with your arm behind +your back. + +In Siva Vaidhyanathan's book The Anarchist in the Library, he talks about why +the studios are so blind to their customers' desires. It's because people like +you and me spent the 80s and the 90s telling them bad science fiction stories +about impossible DRM technology that would let them charge a small sum of money +every time someone looked at a movie -- want to fast-forward? That feature +costs another penny. Pausing is two cents an hour. The mute button will cost +you a quarter. + +When Mako Analysis issued their report last month advising phone companies to +stop supporting Symbian phones, they were just writing the latest installment +in this story. Mako says that phones like my P900, which can play MP3s as +ringtones, are bad for the cellphone economy, because it'll put the +extortionate ringtone sellers out of business. What Mako is saying is that just +because you bought the CD doesn't mean that you should expect to have the +ability to listen to it on your MP3 player, and just because it plays on your +MP3 player is no reason to expect it to run as a ringtone. I wonder how they +feel about alarm clocks that will play a CD to wake you up in the morning? Is +that strangling the nascent "alarm tone" market? + +The phone companies' customers want Symbian phones and for now, at least, the +phone companies understand that if they don't sell them, someone else will. + +The market opportunity for a truly capable devices is enormous. There's a +company out there charging *{$27,000}* for a DVD jukebox -- go and eat their +lunch! Steve Jobs isn't going to do it: he's off at the D conference telling +studio execs not to release hi-def movies until they're sure no one will make a +hi-def DVD burner that works with a PC. + +Maybe they won't buy into his BS, but they're also not much interested in what +you have to sell. At the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group meetings where +the Broadcast Flag was hammered out, the studios' position was, "We'll take +anyone's DRM except Microsoft's and Philips'." When I met with UK broadcast +wonks about the European version of the Broadcast Flag underway at the Digital +Video Broadcasters' forum, they told me, "Well, it's different in Europe: +mostly they're worried that some American company like Microsoft will get their +claws into European television." + +American film studios didn't want the Japanese electronics companies to get a +piece of the movie pie, so they fought the VCR. Today, everyone who makes +movies agrees that they don't want to let you guys get between them and their +customers. + +Sony didn't get permission. Neither should you. Go build the record player that +can play everyone's records. + +Because if you don't do it, someone else will. + +$$$$ + +1~ The DRM Sausage Factory + +(Originally published as "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How DRM Becomes Law," +InformationWeek, July 11, 2007) ~# + +Otto von Bismarck quipped, "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see +them being made." I've seen sausages made. I've seen laws made. Both pale in +comparison to the process by which anti-copying technology agreements are made. + +This technology, usually called "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) proposes to +make your computer worse at copying some of the files on its hard-drive or on +other media. Since all computer operations involve copying, this is a daunting +task -- as security expert Bruce Schneier has said, "Making bits harder to copy +is like making water that's less wet." + +At root, DRMs are technologies that treat the owner of a computer or other +device as an attacker, someone against whom the system must be armored. Like +the electrical meter on the side of your house, a DRM is a technology that you +possess, but that you are never supposed to be able to manipulate or modify. +Unlike the your meter, though, a DRM that is defeated in one place is defeated +in all places, nearly simultaneously. That is to say, once someone takes the +DRM off a song or movie or ebook, that freed collection of bits can be sent to +anyone else, anywhere the network reaches, in an eyeblink. DRM crackers need +cunning: those who receive the fruits of their labor need only know how to +download files from the Internet. + +Why manufacture a device that attacks its owner? A priori, one would assume +that such a device would cost more to make than a friendlier one, and that +customers would prefer not to buy devices that treat them as presumptive +criminals. DRM technologies limit more than copying: they limit ranges of uses, +such as viewing a movie in a different country, copying a song to a different +manufacturer's player, or even pausing a movie for too long. Surely, this stuff +hurts sales: who goes into a store and asks, "Do you have any music that's +locked to just one company's player? I'm in the market for some lock-in." + +So why do manufacturers do it? As with many strange behaviors, there's a carrot +at play here, and a stick. + +The carrot is the entertainment industries' promise of access to their +copyrighted works. Add DRM to your iPhone and we'll supply music for it. Add +DRM to your TiVo and we'll let you plug it into our satellite receivers. Add +DRM to your Zune and we'll let you retail our music in your Zune store. + +The stick is the entertainment industries' threat of lawsuits for companies +that don't comply. In the last century, entertainment companies fought over the +creation of records, radios, jukeboxes, cable TV, VCRs, MP3 players and other +technologies that made it possible to experience a copyrighted work in a new +way without permission. There's one battle that serves as the archetype for the +rest: the fight over the VCR. + +The film studios were outraged by Sony's creation of the VCR. They had found a +DRM supplier they preferred, a company called Discovision that made +non-recordable optical discs. Discovision was the only company authorized to +play back movies in your living room. The only way to get a copyrighted work +onto a VCR cassette was to record it off the TV, without permission. The +studios argued that Sony -- whose Betamax was the canary in this legal coalmine +-- was breaking the law by unjustly endangering their revenue from Discovision +royalties. Sure, they *{could}* just sell pre-recorded Betamax tapes, but +Betamax was a read-write medium: they could be *{copied}*. Moreover, your +personal library of Betamax recordings of the Sunday night movie would eat into +the market for Discovision discs: why would anyone buy a pre-recorded video +cassette when they could amass all the video they needed with a home recorder +and a set of rabbit-ears? + +The Supreme Court threw out these arguments in a 1984 5-4 decision, the +"Betamax Decision." This decision held that the VCR was legal because it was +"capable of sustaining a substantially non-infringing use." That means that if +you make a technology that your customers *{can}* use legally, you're not on +the hook for the illegal stuff they do. + +This principle guided the creation of virtually every piece of IT invented +since: the Web, search engines, YouTube, Blogger, Skype, ICQ, AOL, MySpace... +You name it, if it's possible to violate copyright with it, the thing that made +it possible is the Betamax principle. + +Unfortunately, the Supremes shot the Betamax principle in the gut two years +ago, with the Grokster decision. This decision says that a company can be found +liable for its customers' bad acts if they can be shown to have "induced" +copyright infringement. So, if your company advertises your product for an +infringing use, or if it can be shown that you had infringement in mind at the +design stage, you can be found liable for your customers' copying. The studios +and record labels and broadcasters *{love}* this ruling, and they like to think +that it's even broader than what the courts set out. For example, Viacom is +suing Google for inducing copyright infringement by allowing YouTube users to +flag some of their videos as private. Private videos can't be found by Viacom's +copyright-enforcement bots, so Viacom says that privacy should be illegal, and +that companies that give you the option of privacy should be sued for anything +you do behind closed doors. + +The gutshot Betamax doctrine will bleed out all over the industry for decades +(or until the courts or Congress restore it to health), providing a grisly +reminder of what happens to companies that try to pour the entertainment +companies' old wine into new digital bottles without permission. The +tape-recorder was legal, but the digital tape-recorder is an inducement to +infringement, and must be stopped. + +The promise of access to content and the threat of legal execution for +non-compliance is enough to lure technology's biggest players to the DRM table. + +I started attending DRM meetings in March, 2002, on behalf of my former +employers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. My first meeting was the one +where Broadcast Flag was born. The Broadcast Flag was weird even by DRM +standards. Broadcasters are required, by law, to deliver TV and radio without +DRM, so that any standards-compliant receiver can receive them. The airwaves +belong to the public, and are loaned to broadcasters who have to promise to +serve the public interest in exchange. But the MPAA and the broadcasters wanted +to add DRM to digital TV, and so they proposed that a law should be passed that +would make all manufacturers promise to *{pretend}* that there was DRM on +broadcast signals, receiving them and immediately squirreling them away in +encrypted form. + +The Broadcast Flag was hammered out in a group called the Broadcast Protection +Discussion Group (BPDG) a sub-group from the MPAA's "Content Protection +Technology Working Group," which also included reps from all the big IT +companies (Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and so on), consumer electronics companies +(Panasonic, Philips, Zenith), cable companies, satellite companies, and anyone +else who wanted to pay $100 to attend the "public" meetings, held every six +weeks or so (you can attend these meetings yourself if you find yourself near +LAX on one of the upcoming dates). + +CPTWG (pronounced Cee-Pee-Twig) is a venerable presence in the DRM world. It +was at CPTWG that the DRM for DVDs was hammered out. CPTWG meetings open with a +"benediction," delivered by a lawyer, who reminds everyone there that what they +say might be quoted "on the front page of the New York Times," (though +journalists are barred from attending CPTWG meetings and no minutes are +published by the organization) and reminding all present not to do anything +that would raise eyebrows at the FTC's anti-trust division (I could swear I've +seen the Microsoft people giggling during this part, though that may have been +my imagination). + +The first part of the meeting is usually taken up with administrative business +and presentations from DRM vendors, who come out to promise that this time +they've really, really figured out how to make computers worse at copying. The +real meat comes after the lunch, when the group splits into a series of smaller +meetings, many of them closed-door and private (the representatives of the +organizations responsible for managing DRM on DVDs splinter off at this point). + +Then comes the working group meetings, like the BPDG. The BPDG was nominally +set up to set up the rules for the Broadcast Flag. Under the Flag, +manufacturers would be required to limit their "outputs and recording methods" +to a set of "approved technologies." Naturally, every manufacturer in the room +showed up with a technology to add to the list of approved technologies -- and +the sneakier ones showed up with reasons why their competitors' technologies +*{shouldn't}* be approved. If the Broadcast Flag became law, a spot on the +"approved technologies" list would be a license to print money: everyone who +built a next-gen digital TV would be required, by law, to buy only approved +technologies for their gear. + +The CPTWG determined that there would be three "chairmen" of the meetings: a +representative from the broadcasters, a representative from the studios, and a +representative from the IT industry (note that no "consumer rights" chair was +contemplated -- we proposed one and got laughed off the agenda). The IT chair +was filled by an Intel representative, who seemed pleased that the MPAA chair, +Fox Studios's Andy Setos, began the process by proposing that the approved +technologies should include only two technologies, both of which Intel +partially owned. + +Intel's presence on the committee was both reassurance and threat: reassurance +because Intel signaled the fundamental reasonableness of the MPAA's +requirements -- why would a company with a bigger turnover than the whole movie +industry show up if the negotiations weren't worth having? Threat because Intel +was poised to gain an advantage that might be denied to its competitors. + +We settled in for a long negotiation. The discussions were drawn out and +heated. At regular intervals, the MPAA reps told us that we were wasting time +-- if we didn't hurry things along, the world would move on and consumers would +grow accustomed to un-crippled digital TVs. Moreover, Rep Billy Tauzin, the +lawmaker who'd evidently promised to enact the Broadcast Flag into law, was +growing impatient. The warnings were delivered in quackspeak, urgent and +crackling, whenever the discussions dragged, like the crack of the commissars' +pistols, urging us forward. + +You'd think that a "technology working group" would concern itself with +technology, but there was precious little discussion of bits and bytes, ciphers +and keys. Instead, we focused on what amounted to contractual terms: if your +technology got approved as a DTV "output," what obligations would you have to +assume? If a TiVo could serve as an "output" for a receiver, what outputs would +the TiVo be allowed to have? + +The longer we sat there, the more snarled these contractual terms became: +winning a coveted spot on the "approved technology" list would be quite a +burden! Once you were in the club, there were all sorts of rules about whom you +could associate with, how you had to comport yourself and so on. + +One of these rules of conduct was "robustness." As a condition of approval, +manufacturers would have to harden their technologies so that their customers +wouldn't be able to modify, improve upon, or even understand their workings. As +you might imagine, the people who made open source TV tuners were not thrilled +about this, as "open source" and "non-user-modifiable" are polar opposites. + +Another was "renewability:" the ability of the studios to revoke outputs that +had been compromised in the field. The studios expected the manufacturers to +make products with remote "kill switches" that could be used to shut down part +or all of their device if someone, somewhere had figured out how to do +something naughty with it. They promised that we'd establish criteria for +renewability later, and that it would all be "fair." + +But we soldiered on. The MPAA had a gift for resolving the worst snarls: when +shouting failed, they'd lead any recalcitrant player out of the room and +negotiate in secret with them, leaving the rest of us to cool our heels. Once, +they took the Microsoft team out of the room for *{six hours}*, then came back +and announced that digital video would be allowed to output on non-DRM monitors +at a greatly reduced resolution (this "feature" appears in Vista as "fuzzing"). + +The further we went, the more nervous everyone became. We were headed for the +real meat of the negotiations: the *{criteria}* by which approved technology +would be evaluated: how many bits of crypto would you need? Which ciphers would +be permissible? Which features would and wouldn't be allowed? + +Then the MPAA dropped the other shoe: the sole criteria for inclusion on the +list would be the approval of one of its member-companies, or a quorum of +broadcasters. In other words, the Broadcast Flag wouldn't be an "objective +standard," describing the technical means by which video would be locked away +-- it would be purely subjective, up to the whim of the studios. You could have +the best product in the world, and they wouldn't approve it if your +business-development guys hadn't bought enough drinks for their +business-development guys at a CES party. + +To add insult to injury, the only technologies that the MPAA were willing to +consider for initial inclusion as "approved" were the two that Intel was +involved with. The Intel co-chairman had a hard time hiding his grin. He'd +acted as Judas goat, luring in Apple, Microsoft, and the rest, to legitimize a +process that would force them to license Intel's patents for every TV +technology they shipped until the end of time. + +Why did the MPAA give Intel such a sweetheart deal? At the time, I figured that +this was just straight quid pro quo, like Hannibal said to Clarice. But over +the years, I started to see a larger pattern: Hollywood likes DRM consortia, +and they hate individual DRM vendors. (I've written an entire article about +this, but here's the gist: a single vendor who succeeds can name their price +and terms -- think of Apple or Macrovision -- while a consortium is a more +easily divided rabble, susceptible to co-option in order to produce +ever-worsening technologies -- think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD). Intel's +technologies were held through two consortia, the 5C and 4C groups. + +The single-vendor manufacturers were livid at being locked out of the digital +TV market. The final report of the consortium reflected this -- a few sheets +written by the chairmen describing the "consensus" and hundreds of pages of +angry invective from manufacturers and consumer groups decrying it as a sham. + +Tauzin washed his hands of the process: a canny, sleazy Hill operator, he had +the political instincts to get his name off any proposal that could be shown to +be a plot to break voters' televisions (Tauzin found a better industry to shill +for, the pharmaceutical firms, who rewarded him with a $2,000,000/year job as +chief of PHARMA, the pharmaceutical lobby). + +Even Representative Ernest "Fritz" Hollings ("The Senator from Disney," who +once proposed a bill requiring entertainment industry oversight of all +technologies capable of copying) backed away from proposing a bill that would +turn the Broadcast Flag into law. Instead, Hollings sent a memo to Michael +Powell, then-head of the FCC, telling him that the FCC already had jurisdiction +to enact a Broadcast Flag regulation, without Congressional oversight. + +Powell's staff put Hollings's letter online, as they are required to do by +federal sunshine laws. The memo arrived as a Microsoft Word file -- which EFF +then downloaded and analyzed. Word stashes the identity of a document's author +in the file metadata, which is how EFF discovered that the document had been +written by a staffer at the MPAA. + +This was truly remarkable. Hollings was a powerful committee chairman, one who +had taken immense sums of money from the industries he was supposed to be +regulating. It's easy to be cynical about this kind of thing, but it's +genuinely unforgivable: politicians draw a public salary to sit in public +office and work for the public good. They're supposed to be working for us, not +their donors. + +But we all know that this isn't true. Politicians are happy to give special +favors to their pals in industry. However, the Hollings memo was beyond the +pale. Staffers for the MPAA were writing Hollings's memos, memos that Hollings +then signed and mailed off to the heads of major governmental agencies. + +The best part was that the legal eagles at the MPAA were wrong. The FCC took +"Hollings's" advice and enacted a Broadcast Flag regulation that was almost +identical to the proposal from the BPDG, turning themselves into America's +"device czars," able to burden any digital technology with "robustness," +"compliance" and "revocation rules." The rule lasted just long enough for the +DC Circuit Court of Appeals to strike it down and slap the FCC for grabbing +unprecedented jurisdiction over the devices in our living rooms. + +So ended the saga of the Broadcast Flag. More or less. In the years since the +Flag was proposed, there have been several attempts to reintroduce it through +legislation, all failed. And as more and more innovative, open devices like the +Neuros OSD enter the market, it gets harder and harder to imagine that +Americans will accept a mandate that takes away all that functionality. + +But the spirit of the Broadcast Flag lives on. DRM consortia are all the rage +now -- outfits like AACS LA, the folks who control the DRM in Blu-Ray and +HD-DVD, are thriving and making headlines by issuing fatwas against people who +publish their secret integers. In Europe, a DRM consortium working under the +auspices of the Digital Video Broadcasters Forum (DVB) has just shipped a +proposed standard for digital TV DRM that makes the Broadcast Flag look like +the work of patchouli-scented infohippies. The DVB proposal would give DRM +consortium the ability to define what is and isn't a valid "household" for the +purposes of sharing your video within your "household's devices." It limits how +long you're allowed to pause a video for, and allows for restrictions to be put +in place for hundreds of years, longer than any copyright system in the world +would protect any work for. + +If all this stuff seems a little sneaky, underhanded and even illegal to you, +you're not alone. When representatives of nearly all the world's entertainment, +technology, broadcast, satellite and cable companies gather in a room to +collude to cripple their offerings, limit their innovation, and restrict the +market, regulators take notice. + +That's why the EU is taking a hard look at HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. These systems +aren't designed: they're governed, and the governors are shadowy group of +offshore giants who answer to no one -- not even their own members! I once +called the DVD-Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) on behalf of a Time-Warner +magazine, Popular Science, for a comment about their DRM. Not only wouldn't +they allow me to speak to a spokesman, the person who denied my request also +refused to be identified. + +The sausage factory grinds away, but today, more activists than ever are +finding ways to participate in the negotiations, slowing them up, making them +account for themselves to the public. And so long as you, the technology-buying +public, pay attention to what's going on, the activists will continue to hold +back the tide. + +$$$$ + +1~ Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, +and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway + +(Originally published as "How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM Are Beating Up The +American Economy," InformationWeek, June 11, 2007) ~# + +Back in 1985, the Senate was ready to clobber the music industry for exposing +America's impressionable youngsters to sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Today, the +the Attorney General is proposing to give the RIAA legal tools to attack people +who attempt infringement. + +Through most of America's history, the US government has been at odds with the +entertainment giants, treating them as purveyors of filth. But not anymore: +today, the US Trade Rep using America's political clout to force Russia to +institute police inspections of its CD presses (savor the irony: post-Soviet +Russia forgoes its hard-won freedom of the press to protect Disney and +Universal!). + +How did entertainment go from trenchcoat pervert to top trade priority? I blame +the "Information Economy." + +No one really knows what "Information Economy" means, but by the early 90s, we +knew it was coming. America deployed her least reliable strategic resource to +puzzle out what an "information economy" was and to figure out how to ensure +America stayed atop the "new economy" -- America sent in the futurists. + +We make the future in much the same way as we make the past. We don't remember +everything that happened to us, just selective details. We weave our memories +together on demand, filling in any empty spaces with the present, which is +lying around in great abundance. In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psych prof +Daniel Gilbert describes an experiment in which people with delicious lunches +in front of them are asked to remember their breakfast: overwhelmingly, the +people with good lunches have more positive memories of breakfast than those +who have bad lunches. We don't remember breakfast -- we look at lunch and +superimpose it on breakfast. + +We make the future in the same way: we extrapolate as much as we can, and +whenever we run out of imagination, we just shovel the present into the holes. +That's why our pictures of the future always seem to resemble the present, only +moreso. + +So the futurists told us about the Information Economy: they took all the +"information-based" businesses (music, movies and microcode, in the neat +coinage of Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash) and projected a future in +which these would grow to dominate the world's economies. + +There was only one fly in the ointment: most of the world's economies consist +of poor people who have more time than money, and if there's any lesson to +learn from American college kids, it's that people with more time than money +would rather copy information than pay for it. + +Of course they would! Why, when America was a-borning, she was a pirate nation, +cheerfully copying the inventions of European authors and inventors. Why not? +The fledgling revolutionary republic could copy without paying, keep the money +on her shores, and enrich herself with the products and ideas of imperial +Europe. Of course, once the US became a global hitter in the creative +industries, out came the international copyright agreements: the US signed +agreements to protect British authors in exchange for reciprocal agreements +from the Brits to protect American authors. + +It's hard to see why a developing country would opt to export its GDP to a rich +country when it could get the same benefit by mere copying. The US would have +to sweeten the pot. + +The pot-sweetener is the elimination of international trade-barriers. +Historically, the US has used tariffs to limit the import of manufactured goods +from abroad, and to encourage the import of raw materials from abroad. +Generally speaking, rich countries import poor countries' raw materials, +process them into manufactured goods, and export them again. Globally speaking, +if your country imports sugar and exports sugar cane, chances are you're poor. +If your country imports wood and sells paper, chances are you're rich. + +In 1995, the US signed onto the World Trade Organization and its associated +copyright and patent agreement, the TRIPS Agreement, and the American economy +was transformed. + +Any fellow signatory to the WTO/TRIPS can export manufactured goods to the USA +without any tariffs. If it costs you $5 to manufacture and ship a plastic +bucket from your factory in Shenjin Province to the USA, you can sell it for $6 +and turn a $1 profit. And if it costs an American manufacturer $10 to make the +same bucket, the American manufacturer is out of luck. + +The kicker is this: if you want to export your finished goods to America, you +have to sign up to protect American copyrights in your own country. Quid pro +quo. + +The practical upshot, 12 years later, is that most American manufacturing has +gone belly up, Wal-Mart is filled with Happy Meal toys and other cheaply +manufactured plastic goods, and the whole world has signed onto US copyright +laws. + +But signing onto those laws doesn't mean you'll enforce them. Sure, where a +country is really over a barrel (cough, Russia, cough), they'll take the +occasional pro forma step to enforce US copyrights, no matter how ridiculous +and totalitarian it makes them appear. But with the monthly Russian per-capita +GDP hovering at $200, it's just not plausible that Russians are going to start +paying $15 for a CD, nor is it likely that they'll stop listening to music +until their economy picks up. + +But the real action is in China, where pressing bootleg media is a national +sport. China keeps promising that it will do something about this, but it's not +like the US has any recourse if China drags its heels. Trade courts may find +against China, but China holds all the cards. The US can't afford to abandon +Chinese manufacturing (and no one will vote for the politician who hextuples +the cost of WiFi cards, brassieres, iPods, staplers, yoga mats, and spatulas by +cutting off trade with China). The Chinese can just sit tight. + +The futurists were just plain wrong. An "information economy" can't be based on +selling information. Information technology makes copying information easier +and easier. The more IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you +send out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy +information from here on in. The information economy is about selling +everything except information. + +The US traded its manufacturing sector's health for its entertainment industry, +hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US +bet wrong. + +But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn't know when +to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign +and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million +American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world's copyright laws upside down? +Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. + +It'll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment +industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. +Once it's in the world, it'll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies +of my books and make money on the printed editions: I'm not going to stop +people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as +an enticement to buy the printed objects. + +But there is an information economy. You don't even need a computer to +participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles +and doesn't own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him +by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. + +Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with +their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the +information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital +formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through +better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. +Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the +weekend's weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend's +sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when +their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union +terminal. + +This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country +and improves our lives. + +And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if +Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police +their networks and systems for unauthorized copying -- no matter what that does +to productivity -- they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are +rendered inoperable by "copy protection," they cannot co-exist. Where our +educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record +industry, they cannot co-exist. + +The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will +emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to +the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information +will end up at the bottom of the pile. + +What country do you want to live in? + +$$$$ + +1~ Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars? + +(Originally published in InformationWeek, August 14, 2007) ~# + +Hollywood loves sequels -- they're generally a safe bet, provided that you're +continuing an already successful franchise. But you'd have to be nuts to shoot +a sequel to a disastrous flop -- say, The Adventures of Pluto Nash or Town and +Country. + +As disastrous as Pluto Nash was, it was practically painless when compared to +the Napster debacle. That shipwreck took place six years ago, when the record +industry succeeded in shutting down the pioneering file-sharing service, and +they show no signs of recovery. + +!_ The disastrous thing about Napster wasn't that it it existed, but rather +that the record industry managed to kill it. + +Napster had an industry-friendly business-model: raise venture capital, start +charging for access to the service, and then pay billions of dollars to the +record companies in exchange for licenses to their works. Yes, they kicked this +plan off without getting permission from the record companies, but that's not +so unusual. The record companies followed the same business plan a hundred +years ago, when they started recording sheet music without permission, raising +capital and garnering profits, and *{then}* working out a deal to pay the +composers for the works they'd built their fortunes on. + +Napster's plan was plausible. They had the fastest-adopted technology in the +history of the world, garnering 52,000,000 users in 18 months -- more than had +voted for either candidate in the preceding US election! -- and discovering, +via surveys, that a sizable portion would happily pay between $10 and $15 a +month for the service. What's more, Napster's architecture included a +gatekeeper that could be used to lock-out non-paying users. + +The record industry refused to deal. Instead, they sued, bringing Napster to +its knees. Bertelsmann bought Napster out of the ensuing bankruptcy, a pattern +that was followed by other music giants, like Universal, who slayed MP3.com in +the courts, then brought home the corpse on the cheap, running it as an +internal project. + +After that, the record companies had a field day: practically every +venture-funded P2P company went down, and millions of dollars were funneled +from the tech venture capital firms to Sand Hill Road to the RIAA's members, +using P2P companies and the courts as conduits. + +But the record companies weren't ready to replace these services with equally +compelling alternatives. Instead, they fielded inferior replacements like +PressPlay, with limited catalog, high prices, and anti-copying technology +(digital rights management, or DRM) that alienated users by the millions by +treating them like crooks instead of customers. These half-baked ventures did +untold damage to the record companies and their parent firms. + +Just look at Sony: they should have been at the top of the heap. They produce +some of the world's finest, best-designed electronics. They own one of the +largest record labels in the world. The synergy should have been incredible. +Electronics would design the walkmen, music would take care of catalog, and +marketing would sell it all. + +You know the joke about European hell? The English do the cooking, the Germans +are the lovers, the Italians are the police and the French run the government. +With Sony, it seemed like music was designing the walkmen, marketing was doing +the catalog, and electronic was in charge of selling. Sony's portable players +-- the MusicClip and others -- were so crippled by anti-copying technology that +they couldn't even play MP3s, and the music selection at Sony services like +PressPlay was anemic, expensive, and equally hobbled. Sony isn't even a name in +the portable audio market anymore -- today's walkman is an iPod. + +Of course, Sony still has a record-label -- for now. But sales are falling, and +the company is reeling from the 2005 "rootkit" debacle, where in deliberately +infected eight million music CDs with a hacker tool called a rootkit, +compromising over 500,000 US computer networks, including military and +government networks, all in a (failed) bid to stop copying of its CDs. + +The public wasn't willing to wait for Sony and the rest to wake up and offer a +service that was as compelling, exciting and versatile as Napster. Instead, +they flocked to a new generation of services like Kazaa and the various +Gnutella networks. Kazaa's business model was to set up offshore, on the tiny +Polynesian island of Vanuatu, and bundle spyware with its software, making its +profits off of fees from spyware crooks. Kazaa didn't want to pay billions for +record industry licenses -- they used the international legal and finance +system to hopelessly snarl the RIAA's members through half a decade of wild +profitability. The company was eventually brought to ground, but the founders +walked away and started Skype and then Joost. + +Meantime, dozens of other services had sprung up to fill Kazaa's niche -- +AllofMP3, the notorious Russian site, was eventually killed through +intervention of the US Trade Representative and the WTO, and was reborn +practically the next day under a new name. + +It's been eight years since Sean Fanning created Napster in his college +dorm-room. Eight years later, there isn't a single authorized music service +that can compete with the original Napster. Record sales are down every year, +and digital music sales aren't filling in the crater. The record industry has +contracted to four companies, and it may soon be three if EMI can get +regulatory permission to put itself on the block. + +The sue-em-all-and-let-God-sort-em-out plan was a flop in the box office, a +flop in home video, and a flop overseas. So why is Hollywood shooting a remake? + +# + +YouTube, 2007, bears some passing similarity to Napster, 2001. Founded by a +couple guys in a garage, rocketed to popular success, heavily capitalized by a +deep-pocketed giant. Its business model? Turn popularity into dollars and offer +a share to the rightsholders whose works they're using. This is an historically +sound plan: cable operators got rich by retransmitting broadcasts without +permission, and once they were commercial successes, they sat down to negotiate +to pay for those copyrights (just as the record companies negotiated with +composers *{after}* they'd gotten rich selling records bearing those +compositions). + +YouTube 07 has another similarity to Napster 01: it is being sued by +entertainment companies. + +Only this time, it's not (just) the record industry. Broadcasters, movie +studios, anyone who makes video or audio is getting in on the act. I recently +met an NBC employee who told me that he thought that a severe, punishing legal +judgment would send a message to the tech industry not to field this kind of +service anymore. + +Let's hope he's wrong. Google -- YouTube's owners -- is a grown-up of a +company, unusual in a tech industry populated by corporate adolescents. They +have lots of money and a sober interest in keeping it. They want to sit down +with A/V rightsholders and do a deal. Six years after the Napster verdict, that +kind of willingness is in short supply. + +Most of the tech "companies" with an interest in commercializing Internet AV +have no interest in sitting down with the studios. They're either nebulous open +source projects (like mythtv, a free hyper-TiVo that skips commercials, +downloads and shares videos and is wide open to anyone who wants to modify and +improve it), politically motivated anarchists (like ThePirateBay, a Swedish +BitTorrent tracker site that has mirrors in three countries with +non-interoperable legal systems, where they respond to legal notices by writing +sarcastic and profane letters and putting them online), or out-and-out crooks +like the bootleggers who use P2P to seed their DVD counterfeiting operations. + +It's not just YouTube. TiVo, who pioneered the personal video recorder, is +feeling the squeeze, being systematically locked out of the digital cable and +satellite market. Their efforts to add a managed TiVoToGo service were attacked +by the rightsholders who fought at the FCC to block them. Cable/satellite +operators and the studios would much prefer the public to transition to +"bundled" PVRs that come with your TV service. + +These boxes are owned by the cable/satellite companies, who have absolute +control over them. Time-Warner has been known to remotely delete stored +episodes of shows just before the DVD ships, and many operators have started +using "flags" that tell recorders not to allow fast-forwarding, or to prevent +recording altogether. + +The reason that YouTube and TiVo are more popular than ThePirateBay and mythtv +is that they're the easiest way for the public to get what it wants -- the +video we want, the way we want it. We use these services because they're like +the original Napster: easy, well-designed, functional. + +But if the entertainment industry squeezes these players out, ThePirateBay and +mythtv are right there, waiting to welcome us in with open arms. ThePirateBay +has already announced that it is launching a YouTube competitor with no-plugin, +in-browser viewing. Plenty of entrepreneurs are looking at easing the pain and +cast of setting up your own mythtv box. The only reason that the barriers to +BitTorrent and mythtv exist is that it hasn't been worth anyone's while to +capitalize projects to bring them down. But once the legit competitors of these +services are killed, look out. + +The thing is, the public doesn't want managed services with limited rights. We +don't want to be stuck using approved devices in approved ways. We never have +-- we are the spiritual descendants of the customers for "illegal" record +albums and "illegal" cable TV. The demand signal won't go away. + +There's no good excuse for going into production on a sequel to The Napster +Wars. We saw that movie. We know how it turns out. Every Christmas, we get +articles about how this was the worst Christmas ever for CDs. You know what? CD +sales are *{never}* going to improve. CDs have been rendered obsolete by +Internet distribution -- and the record industry has locked itself out of the +only profitable, popular music distribution systems yet invented. + +Companies like Google/YouTube and TiVo are rarities: tech companies that want +to do deals. They need to be cherished by entertainment companies, not sued. + +(Thanks to Bruce Nash and The-Numbers.com for research assistance with this +article) + +$$$$ + +1~ You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, March 2007) ~# + +"I don't like reading off a computer screen" -- it's a cliché of the e-book +world. It means "I don't read novels off of computer screens" (or phones, or +PDAs, or dedicated e-book readers), and often as not the person who says it is +someone who, in fact, spends every hour that Cthulhu sends reading off a +computer screen. It's like watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while +telling you how much he hates chocolate. + +But I know what you mean. You don't like reading long-form works off of a +computer screen. I understand perfectly -- in the ten minutes since I typed the +first word in the paragraph above, I've checked my mail, deleted two spams, +checked an image-sharing community I like, downloaded a YouTube clip of Stephen +Colbert complaining about the iPhone (pausing my MP3 player first), cleared out +my RSS reader, and then returned to write this paragraph. + +This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on long-form narrative +(sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who's made cardboard furniture) (wait, the +Colbert clip's done, gotta start the music up) (19 more RSS items). But that's +not to say that it's not an entertainment medium -- indeed, practically +everything I do on the computer entertains the hell out of me. It's nearly all +text-based, too. Basically, what I do on the computer is pleasure-reading. But +it's a fundamentally more scattered, splintered kind of pleasure. Computers +have their own cognitive style, and it's not much like the cognitive style +invented with the first modern novel (one sec, let me google that and confirm +it), Don Quixote, some 400 years ago. + +The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in +information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the +novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style +of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel. + +Computers want you to do lots of things with them. Networked computers doubly +so -- they (another RSS item) have a million ways of asking for your attention, +and just as many ways of rewarding it. + +There's a persistent fantasy/nightmare in the publishing world of the advent of +very sharp, very portable computer screens. In the fantasy version, this +creates an infinite new market for electronic books, and we all get to sell the +rights to our work all over again. In the nightmare version, this leads to +runaway piracy, and no one ever gets to sell a novel again. + +I think they're both wrong. The infinitely divisible copyright ignores the +"decision cost" borne by users who have to decide, over and over again, whether +they want to spend a millionth of a cent on a millionth of a word -- no one +buys newspapers by the paragraph, even though most of us only read a slim +fraction of any given paper. A super-sharp, super-portable screen would be used +to read all day long, but most of us won't spend most of our time reading +anything recognizable as a book on them. + +Take the record album. Everything about it is technologically pre-determined. +The technology of the LP demanded artwork to differentiate one package from the +next. The length was set by the groove density of the pressing plants and +playback apparatus. The dynamic range likewise. These factors gave us the idea +of the 40-to-60-minute package, split into two acts, with accompanying artwork. +Musicians were encouraged to create works that would be enjoyed as a unitary +whole for a protracted period -- think of Dark Side of the Moon, or Sgt. +Pepper's. + +No one thinks about albums today. Music is now divisible to the single, as +represented by an individual MP3, and then subdivisible into snippets like +ringtones and samples. When recording artists demand that their works be +considered as a whole -- like when Radiohead insisted that the iTunes Music +Store sell their whole album as a single, indivisible file that you would have +to listen to all the way through -- they sound like cranky throwbacks. + +The idea of a 60-minute album is as weird in the Internet era as the idea of +sitting through 15 hours of Der Ring des Nibelungen was 20 years ago. There are +some anachronisms who love their long-form opera, but the real action is in the +more fluid stuff that can slither around on hot wax -- and now the superfluid +droplets of MP3s and samples. Opera survives, but it is a tiny sliver of a much +bigger, looser music market. The future composts the past: old operas get +mounted for living anachronisms; Andrew Lloyd Webber picks up the rest of the +business. + +Or look at digital video. We're watching more digital video, sooner, than +anyone imagined. But we're watching it in three-minute chunks from YouTube. The +video's got a pause button so you can stop it when the phone rings and a +scrubber to go back and forth when you miss something while answering an IM. + +And attention spans don't increase when you move from the PC to a handheld +device. These things have less capacity for multitasking than real PCs, and the +network connections are slower and more expensive. But they are fundamentally +multitasking devices -- you can always stop reading an e-book to play a hand of +solitaire that is interrupted by a phone call -- and their social context is +that they are used in public places, with a million distractions. It is +socially acceptable to interrupt someone who is looking at a PDA screen. By +contrast, the TV room -- a whole room for TV! -- is a shrine where none may +speak until the commercial airs. + +The problem, then, isn't that screens aren't sharp enough to read novels off +of. The problem is that novels aren't screeny enough to warrant protracted, +regular reading on screens. + +Electronic books are a wonderful adjunct to print books. It's great to have a +couple hundred novels in your pocket when the plane doesn't take off or the +line is too long at the post office. It's cool to be able to search the text of +a novel to find a beloved passage. It's excellent to use a novel socially, +sending it to your friends, pasting it into your sig file. + +But the numbers tell their own story -- people who read off of screens all day +long buy lots of print books and read them primarily on paper. There are some +who prefer an all-electronic existence (I'd like to be able to get rid of the +objects after my first reading, but keep the e-books around for reference), but +they're in a tiny minority. + +There's a generation of web writers who produce "pleasure reading" on the web. +Some are funny. Some are touching. Some are enraging. Most dwell in Sturgeon's +90th percentile and below. They're not writing novels. If they were, they +wouldn't be web writers. + +Mostly, we can read just enough of a free e-book to decide whether to buy it in +hardcopy -- but not enough to substitute the e-book for the hardcopy. Like +practically everything in marketing and promotion, the trick is to find the +form of the work that serves as enticement, not replacement. + +Sorry, got to go -- eight more e-mails. + +$$$$ + +1~ How Do You Protect Artists? + +(Originally published in The Guardian as "Online censorship hurts us all," +Tuesday, Oct 2, 2007) ~# + +Artists have lots of problems. We get plagiarized, ripped off by publishers, +savaged by critics, counterfeited -- and we even get our works copied by +"pirates" who give our stuff away for free online. + +But no matter how bad these problems get, they're a distant second to the +gravest, most terrifying problem an artist can face: censorship. + +It's one thing to be denied your credit or compensation, but it's another thing +entirely to have your work suppressed, burned or banned. You'd never know it, +however, judging from the state of the law surrounding the creation and use of +internet publishing tools. + +Since 1995, every single legislative initiative on this subject in the UK's +parliament, the European parliament and the US Congress has focused on making +it easier to suppress "illegitimate" material online. From libel to copyright +infringement, from child porn to anti-terror laws, our legislators have +approached the internet with a single-minded focus on seeing to it that bad +material is expeditiously removed. + +And that's the rub. I'm certainly no fan of child porn or hate speech, but +every time a law is passed that reduces the burden of proof on those who would +remove material from the internet, artists' fortunes everywhere are endangered. + +Take the US's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has equivalents in +every European state that has implemented the 2001 European Union Copyright +Directive. The DMCA allows anyone to have any document on the internet removed, +simply by contacting its publisher and asserting that the work infringes his +copyright. + +The potential for abuse is obvious, and the abuse has been widespread: from the +Church of Scientology to companies that don't like what reporters write about +them, DMCA takedown notices have fast become the favorite weapon in the +cowardly bully's arsenal. + +But takedown notices are just the start. While they can help silence critics +and suppress timely information, they're not actually very effective at +stopping widespread copyright infringement. Viacom sent over 100,000 takedown +notices to YouTube last February, but seconds after it was all removed, new +users uploaded it again. + +Even these takedown notices were sloppily constructed: they included videos of +friends eating at barbecue restaurants and videos of independent bands +performing their own work. As a Recording Industry Association of America +spokesman quipped, "When you go trawling with a net, you catch a few dolphins." + +Viacom and others want hosting companies and online service providers to +preemptively evaluate all the material that their users put online, holding it +to ensure that it doesn't infringe copyright before they release it. + +This notion is impractical in the extreme, for at least two reasons. First, an +exhaustive list of copyrighted works would be unimaginably huge, as every +single creative work is copyrighted from the instant that it is created and +"fixed in a tangible medium". + +Second, even if such a list did exist, it would be trivial to defeat, simply by +introducing small changes to the infringing copies, as spammers do with the +text of their messages in order to evade spam filters. + +In fact, the spam wars have some important lessons to teach us here. Like +copyrighted works, spams are infinitely varied and more are being created every +second. Any company that could identify spam messages -- including permutations +and variations on existing spams -- could write its own ticket to untold +billions. + +Some of the smartest, most dedicated engineers on the planet devote every +waking hour to figuring out how to spot spam before it gets delivered. If your +inbox is anything like mine, you'll agree that the war is far from won. + +If the YouTubes of the world are going to prevent infringement, they're going +to have to accomplish this by hand-inspecting every one of the tens of billions +of blog posts, videos, text-files, music files and software uploads made to +every single server on the internet. + +And not just cursory inspections, either -- these inspections will have to be +undertaken by skilled, trained specialists (who'd better be talented linguists, +too -- how many English speakers can spot an infringement in Urdu?). + +Such experts don't come cheap, which means that you can anticipate a terrible +denuding of the fertile jungle of internet hosting companies that are primary +means by which tens of millions of creative people share the fruits of their +labor with their fans and colleagues. + +It would be a great Sovietisation of the world's digital printing presses, a +contraction of a glorious anarchy of expression into a regimented world of +expensive and narrow venues for art. + +It would be a death knell for the kind of focused, non-commercial material +whose authors couldn't fit the bill for a "managed" service's legion of +lawyers, who would be replaced by more of the same -- the kind of lowest common +denominator rubbish that fills the cable channels today. + +And the worst of it is, we're marching toward this "solution" in the name of +protecting artists. Gee, thanks. + +$$$$ + +1~ It's the Information Economy, Stupid + +(Originally published in The Guardian as "Free data sharing is here to stay," +September 18, 2007) ~# + +Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an "information +economy." The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations +of the world's governments. For decades now, they have been creating policies +to "protect" information -- stronger copyright laws, international treaties on +patents and trademarks, treaties to protect anti-copying technology. + +The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and +selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get +access to information unless you've paid for it. That means that we have to +make it harder for you to share information, even after you've paid for it. +Without the ability to fence off your information property, you can't have an +information market to fuel the information economy. + +But this is a tragic case of misunderstanding a metaphor. Just as the +industrial economy wasn't based on making it harder to get access to machines, +the information economy won't be based on making it harder to get access to +information. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true: the more IT we have, the +easier it is to access any given piece of information -- for better or for +worse. + +It used to be that copy-prevention companies' strategies went like this: "We'll +make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an unauthorized copy of +it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the cash-poor/time-rich classes will +bother to copy instead of buy." But every time a PC is connected to the +Internet and its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate +Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from the Internet. +Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to +access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by +searching for the cracked copy on the public Internet. If there's one thing we +can be sure of, it's that an information economy will increase the +technological literacy of its participants. + +As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel room in Shanghai, behind the Great +Firewall of China. Theoretically, I can't access blogging services that carry +negative accounts of Beijing's doings, like Wordpress, Blogspot and +Livejournal, nor the image-sharing site Flickr, nor Wikipedia. The +(theoretically) omnipotent bureaucrats of the local Minitrue have deployed +their finest engineering talent to stop me. Well, these cats may be able to +order political prisoners executed and their organs harvested for Party +members, but they've totally failed to keep Chinese people (and big-nose +tourists like me) off the world's Internet. The WTO is rattling its sabers at +China today, demanding that they figure out how to stop Chinese people from +looking at Bruce Willis movies without permission -- but the Chinese government +can't even figure out how to stop Chinese people from looking at seditious +revolutionary tracts online. + +And, of course, as Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology and the King of +Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of information off the Internet is +like getting food coloring out of a swimming pool. Good luck with that. + +To see the evidence of the real information economy, look to all the economic +activity that the Internet enables -- not the stuff that it impedes. All the +commerce conducted by salarymen who can book their own flights with Expedia +instead of playing blind-man's bluff with a travel agent ("Got any flights +after 4PM to Frankfurt?"). All the garage crafters selling their goods on +Etsy.com. All the publishers selling obscure books through Amazon that no +physical bookstore was willing to carry. The salwar kameez tailors in India +selling bespoke clothes to westerners via eBay, without intervention by a +series of skimming intermediaries. The Internet-era musicians who use the net +to pack venues all over the world by giving away their recordings on social +services like MySpace. Hell, look at my last barber, in Los Angeles: the man +doesn't use a PC, but I found him by googling for "barbers" with my postcode -- +the information economy is driving his cost of customer acquisition to zero, +and he doesn't even have to actively participate in it. + +Better access to more information is the hallmark of the information economy. +The more IT we have, the more skill we have, the faster our networks get and +the better our search tools get, the more economic activity the information +economy generates. Many of us sell information in the information economy -- I +sell my printed books by giving away electronic books, lawyers and architects +and consultants are in the information business and they drum up trade with +Google ads, and Google is nothing but an info-broker -- but none of us rely on +curtailing access to information. Like a bottled water company, we compete with +free by supplying a superior service, not by eliminating the competition. + +The world's governments might have bought into the old myth of the information +economy, but not so much that they're willing to ban the PC and the Internet. + +$$$$ + +1~ Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever + +(Originally published in The Guardian, December 11, 2007) ~# + +Let me start by saying that I love Amazon. I buy everything from books to +clothes to electronics to medication to food to batteries to toys to furniture +to baby supplies from the company. I once even bought an ironing board on +Amazon. No company can top them for ease of use or for respecting consumer +rights when it comes to refunds, ensuring satisfaction, and taking good care of +loyal customers. + +As a novelist, I couldn't be happier about Amazon's existence. Not only does +Amazon have a set of superb recommendation tools that help me sell books, but +it also has an affiliate program that lets me get up to 8.5% in commissions for +sales of my books through the site - nearly doubling my royalty rate. + +As a consumer advocate and activist, I'm delighted by almost every public +policy initiative from Amazon. When the Author's Guild tried to get Amazon to +curtail its used-book market, the company refused to back down. Founder Jeff +Bezos (who is a friend of mine) even wrote, "when someone buys a book, they are +also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it +away if they want. Everyone understands this." + +More recently, Amazon stood up to the US government, who'd gone on an illegal +fishing expedition for terrorists (TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS!) and +asked Amazon to turn over the purchasing history of 24,000 Amazon customers. +The company spent a fortune fighting for our rights, and won. + +It also has a well-deserved reputation for taking care over copyright +"takedown" notices for the material that its customers post on its site, +discarding ridiculous claims rather than blindly acting on every single notice, +no matter how frivolous. + +But for all that, it has to be said: Whenever Amazon tries to sell a digital +download, it turns into one of the dumbest companies on the web. + +Take the Kindle, the $400 handheld ebook reader that Amazon shipped recently, +to vast, ringing indifference. + +The device is cute enough - in a clumsy, overpriced, generation-one kind of way +- but the early adopter community recoiled in horror at the terms of service +and anti-copying technology that infected it. Ebooks that you buy through the +Kindle can't be lent or resold (remember, "when someone buys a book, they are +also buying the right to resell that book...Everyone understands this.") + +Mark Pilgrim's "The Future of Reading" enumerates five other Kindle +showstoppers: Amazon can change your ebooks without notifying you or getting +your permission; and if you violate any of the "agreement", it can delete your +ebooks, even if you've paid for them, and you get no appeal. + + +It's not just the Kindle, either. Amazon Unbox, the semi-abortive video +download service, shipped with terms of service that included your granting +permission for Amazon to install any software on your computer, to spy on you, +to delete your videos, to delete any other file on your hard drive, to deny you +access to your movies if you lose them in a crash. This comes from the company +that will cheerfully ship you a replacement DVD if you email them and tell them +that the one you just bought never turned up in the post. + +Even Amazon's much-vaunted MP3 store comes with terms of service that prevent +lending and reselling. + +I am mystified by this. Amazon is the kind of company that every etailer should +study and copy - the gold standard for e-commerce. You'd think that if there +was any company that would intuitively get the web, it would be Amazon. + +What's more, this is a company that stands up to rightsholder groups, +publishers and the US government - but only when it comes to physical goods. +Why is it that whenever a digital sale is in the offing, Amazon rolls over on +its back and wets itself? + +$$$$ + +1~ What's the Most Important Right Creators Have? + +(Originally published as "How Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet +Free Expression," InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) ~# + +Any discussion of "creator's rights" is likely to be limited to talk about +copyright, but copyright is just a side-dish for creators: the most important +right we have is the right to free expression. And these two rights are always +in tension. + +Take Viacom's claims against YouTube. The entertainment giant says that YouTube +has been profiting from the fact that YouTube users upload clips from Viacom +shows, and they demand that YouTube take steps to prevent this from happening +in the future. YouTube actually offered to do something very like this: they +invited Viacom and other rightsholders to send them all the clips they wanted +kept offline, and promised to programatically detect these clips and interdict +them. + +But Viacom rejected this offer. Rather, the company wants YouTube to just +figure it out, determine a priori which video clips are being presented with +permission and which ones are not. After all, Viacom does the very same thing: +it won't air clips until a battalion of lawyers have investigated them and +determined whether they are lawful. + +But the Internet is not cable television. Net-based hosting outfits -- +including YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, Scribd, and the Internet Archive -- offer +free publication venues to all comers, enabling anyone to publish anything. In +1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Congress considered the question of +liability for these companies and decided to offer them a mixed deal: hosting +companies don't need to hire a million lawyers to review every blog-post before +it goes live, but rightsholders can order them to remove any infringing +material from the net just by sending them a notice that the material +infringes. + +This deal enabled hosting companies to offer free platforms for publication and +expression to everyone. But it also allowed anyone to censor the Internet, just +by making claims of infringement, without offering any evidence to support +those claims, without having to go to court to prove their claims (this has +proven to be an attractive nuisance, presenting an irresistible lure to anyone +with a beef against an online critic, from the Church of Scientology to +Diebold's voting machines division). + +The proposal for online hosts to figure out what infringes and what doesn't is +wildly impractical. Under most countries' copyright laws, creative works +receive a copyright from the moment that they are "fixed in a tangible medium" +(hard drives count), and this means that the pool of copyrighted works is so +large as to be practically speaking infinite. Knowing whether a work is +copyrighted, who holds the copyright, and whether a posting is made with the +rightsholder's permission (or in accord with each nation's varying ideas about +fair use) is impossible. The only way to be sure is to start from the +presumption that each creative work is infringing, and then make each Internet +user prove, to some lawyer's satisfaction, that she has the right to post each +drib of content that appears on the Web. + +Imagine that such a system were the law of the land. There's no way Blogger or +YouTube or Flickr could afford to offer free hosting to their users. Rather, +all these hosted services would have to charge enough for access to cover the +scorching legal bills associated with checking all material. And not just the +freebies, either: your local ISP, the servers hosting your company's website or +your page for family genealogy: they'd all have to do the same kind of +continuous checking and re-checking of every file you publish with them. + +It would be the end of any publication that couldn't foot the legal bills to +get off the ground. The multi-billion-page Internet would collapse into the +homogeneous world of cable TV (remember when we thought that a "500-channel +universe" would be unimaginably broad? Imagine an Internet with only 500 +"channels!"). From Amazon to Ask A Ninja, from Blogger to The Everlasting +Blort, every bit of online content is made possible by removing the cost of +paying lawyers to act as the Internet's gatekeepers. + +This is great news for artists. The traditional artist's lament is that our +publishers have us over a barrel, controlling the narrow and vital channels for +making works available -- from big gallery owners to movie studios to record +labels to New York publishers. That's why artists have such a hard time +negotiating a decent deal for themselves (for example, most beginning recording +artists have to agree to have money deducted from their royalty statements for +"breakage" of records en route to stores -- and these deductions are also +levied against digital sales through the iTunes Store!). + +But, thanks to the web, artists have more options than ever. The Internet's +most popular video podcasts aren't associated with TV networks (with all the +terrible, one-sided deals that would entail), rather, they're independent +programs like RocketBoom, Homestar Runner, or the late, lamented Ze Frank Show. +These creators -- along with all the musicians, writers, and other artists +using the net to earn their living -- were able to write their own ticket. +Today, major artists like Radiohead and Madonna are leaving the record labels +behind and trying novel, net-based ways of promoting their work. + +And it's not just the indies who benefit: the existence of successful +independent artists creates fantastic leverage for artists who negotiate with +the majors. More and more, the big media companies' "like it or leave it" +bargaining stance is being undermined by the possibility that the next big star +will shrug, turn on her heel, and make her fortune without the big companies' +help. This has humbled the bigs, making their deals better and more +artist-friendly. + +Bargaining leverage is just for starters. The greatest threat that art faces is +suppression. Historically, artists have struggled just to make themselves +heard, just to safeguard the right to express themselves. Censorship is +history's greatest enemy of art. A limited-liability Web is a Web where anyone +can post anything and reach *{everyone}*. + +What's more, this privilege isn't limited to artists. All manner of +communication, from the personal introspection in public "diaries" to social +chatter on MySpace and Facebook, are now possible. Some artists have taken the +bizarre stance that this "trivial" matter is unimportant and thus a poor excuse +for allowing hosted services to exist in the first place. This is pretty +arrogant: a society where only artists are allowed to impart "important" +messages and where the rest of us are supposed to shut up about our loves, +hopes, aspirations, jokes, family and wants is hardly a democratic paradise. + +Artists are in the free expression business, and technology that helps free +expression helps artists. When lowering the cost of copyright enforcement +raises the cost of free speech, every artist has a duty to speak out. Our +ability to make our art is inextricably linked with the billions of Internet +users who use the network to talk about their lives. + +$$$$ + +1~ Giving it Away + +(Originally published in Forbes.com, December 2006) ~# + +I've been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has +it ever made me a bunch of money. + +When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor +Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on +the Internet under a Creative Commons License that encouraged my readers to +copy it far and wide. Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my site +(and those downloaders were in turn free to make more copies). Three years and +six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded +from my site. The book's been translated into more languages than I can keep +track of, key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects and +there are two competing fan audio adaptations online. + +Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn't +have bought it in any event, so I haven't lost any sales, I've just won an +audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute +for the printed book--those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority +treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They're gained +sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I'm ahead of the game. +After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing. + +The thing about an e-book is that it's a social object. It wants to be copied +from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device, pasted into a mailing list. +It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It is so +fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. Nothing +sells books like a personal recommendation--when I worked in a bookstore, the +sweetest words we could hear were "My friend suggested I pick up...." The +friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of +online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth. + +There are two things that writers ask me about this arrangement: First, does it +sell more books, and second, how did you talk your publisher into going for +this mad scheme? + +There's no empirical way to prove that giving away books sells more books--but +I've done this with three novels and a short story collection (and I'll be +doing it with two more novels and another collection in the next year), and my +books have consistently outperformed my publisher's expectations. Comparing +their sales to the numbers provided by colleagues suggests that they perform +somewhat better than other books from similar writers at similar stages in +their careers. But short of going back in time and re-releasing the same books +under the same circumstances without the free e-book program, there's no way to +be sure. + +What is certain is that every writer who's tried giving away e-books to sell +books has come away satisfied and ready to do it some more. + +How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It's not as if Tor is a +spunky dotcom upstart. They're the largest science fiction publisher in the +world, and they're a division of the German publishing giant Holtzbrinck. +They're not patchouli-scented info-hippies who believe that information wants +to be free. Rather, they're canny assessors of the world of science fiction, +perhaps the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by +organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary conventions in +every corner of the globe, every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters +treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import. +They evangelize the books they love, form subcultures around them, cite them in +political arguments, sometimes they even rearrange their lives and jobs around +them. + +What's more, science fiction's early adopters defined the social character of +the Internet itself. Given the high correlation between technical employment +and science fiction reading, it was inevitable that the first nontechnical +discussion on the Internet would be about science fiction. The online norms of +idle chatter, fannish organizing, publishing and leisure are descended from SF +fandom, and if any literature has a natural home in cyberspace, it's science +fiction, the literature that coined the very word "cyberspace." + +Indeed, science fiction was the first form of widely pirated literature online, +through "bookwarez" channels that contained books that had been hand-scanned, a +page at a time, converted to digital text and proof-read. Even today, the +mostly widely pirated literature online is SF. + +Nothing could make me more sanguine about the future. As publisher Tim O'Reilly +wrote in his seminal essay, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, "being well-enough +known to be pirated [is] a crowning achievement." I'd rather stake my future on +a literature that people care about enough to steal than devote my life to a +form that has no home in the dominant medium of the century. + +What about that future? Many writers fear that in the future, electronic books +will come to substitute more readily for print books, due to changing audiences +and improved technology. I am skeptical of this--the codex format has endured +for centuries as a simple and elegant answer to the affordances demanded by +print, albeit for a relatively small fraction of the population. Most people +aren't and will never be readers--but the people who are readers will be +readers forever, and they are positively pervy for paper. + +But say it does come to pass that electronic books are all anyone wants. + +I don't think it's practical to charge for copies of electronic works. Bits +aren't ever going to get harder to copy. So we'll have to figure out how to +charge for something else. That's not to say you can't charge for a copy-able +bit, but you sure can't force a reader to pay for access to information +anymore. + +This isn't the first time creative entrepreneurs have gone through one of these +transitions. Vaudeville performers had to transition to radio, an abrupt shift +from having perfect control over who could hear a performance (if they don't +buy a ticket, you throw them out) to no control whatsoever (any family whose +12-year-old could build a crystal set, the day's equivalent of installing +file-sharing software, could tune in). There were business models for radio, +but predicting them a priori wasn't easy. Who could have foreseen that radio's +great fortunes would be had through creating a blanket license, securing a +Congressional consent decree, chartering a collecting society and inventing a +new form of statistical mathematics to fund it? + +Predicting the future of publishing--should the wind change and printed books +become obsolete--is just as hard. I don't know how writers would earn their +living in such a world, but I do know that I'll never find out by turning my +back on the Internet. By being in the middle of electronic publishing, by +watching what hundreds of thousands of my readers do with my e-books, I get +better market intelligence than I could through any other means. As does my +publisher. As serious as I am about continuing to work as a writer for the +foreseeable future, Tor Books and Holtzbrinck are just as serious. They've got +even more riding on the future of publishing than me. So when I approached my +publisher with this plan to give away books to sell books, it was a no-brainer +for them. + +It's good business for me, too. This "market research" of giving away e-books +sells printed books. What's more, having my books more widely read opens many +other opportunities for me to earn a living from activities around my writing, +such as the Fulbright Chair I got at USC this year, this high-paying article in +Forbes, speaking engagements and other opportunities to teach, write and +license my work for translation and adaptation. My fans' tireless evangelism +for my work doesn't just sell books--it sells me. + +The golden age of hundreds of writers who lived off of nothing but their +royalties is bunkum. Throughout history, writers have relied on day jobs, +teaching, grants, inheritances, translation, licensing and other varied sources +to make ends meet. The Internet not only sells more books for me, it also gives +me more opportunities to earn my keep through writing-related activities. + +There has never been a time when more people were reading more words by more +authors. The Internet is a literary world of written words. What a fine thing +that is for writers. + +$$$$ + +1~ Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on +the Internet + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) + +As a science fiction writer, no piece of news could make me more hopeful. It +beats the hell out of the alternative -- a future where the dominant, +pluripotent, ubiquitous medium has no place for science fiction literature. + +When radio and records were invented, they were pretty bad news for the +performers of the day. Live performance demanded charisma, the ability to +really put on a magnetic show in front of a crowd. It didn't matter how +technically accomplished you were: if you stood like a statue on stage, no one +wanted to see you do your thing. On the other hand, you succeeded as a mediocre +player, provided you attacked your performance with a lot of brio. + +Radio was clearly good news for musicians -- lots more musicians were able to +make lots more music, reaching lots more people and making lots more money. It +turned performance into an industry, which is what happens when you add +technology to art. But it was terrible news for charismatics. It put them out +on the street, stuck them with flipping burgers and driving taxis. They knew +it, too. Performers lobbied to have the Marconi radio banned, to send Marconi +back to the drawing board, charged with inventing a radio they could charge +admission to. "We're charismatics, we do something as old and holy as the first +story told before the first fire in the first cave. What right have you to +insist that we should become mere clerks, working in an obscure back-room, +leaving you to commune with our audiences on our behalf?" + +Technology giveth and technology taketh away. Seventy years later, Napster +showed us that, as William Gibson noted, "We may be at the end of the brief +period during which it is possible to charge for recorded music." Surely we're +at the end of the period where it's possible to exclude those who don't wish to +pay. Every song released can be downloaded gratis from a peer-to-peer network +(and will shortly get easier to download, as hard-drive price/performance +curves take us to a place where all the music ever recorded will fit on a +disposable pocket-drive that you can just walk over to a friend's place and +copy). + +But have no fear: the Internet makes it possible for recording artists to reach +a wider audience than ever dreamt of before. Your potential fans may be spread +in a thin, even coat over the world, in a configuration that could never be +cost-effective to reach with traditional marketing. But the Internet's ability +to lower the costs for artists to reach their audiences and for audiences to +find artists suddenly renders possible more variety in music than ever before. + +Those artists can use the Internet to bring people back to the live +performances that characterized the heyday of Vaudeville. Use your recordings +-- which you can't control -- to drive admissions to your performances, which +you can control. It's a model that's worked great for jam bands like the +Grateful Dead and Phish. It's also a model that won't work for many of today's +artists; 70 years of evolutionary pressure has selected for artists who are +more virtuoso than charismatic, artists optimized for recording-based income +instead of performance-based income. "How dare you tell us that we are to be +trained monkeys, capering on a stage for your amusement? We're not +charismatics, we're white-collar workers. We commune with our muses behind +closed doors and deliver up our work product when it's done, through plastic, +laser-etched discs. You have no right to demand that we convert to a +live-performance economy." + +Technology giveth and technology taketh away. As bands on MySpace -- who can +fill houses and sell hundreds of thousands of discs without a record deal, by +connecting individually with fans -- have shown, there's a new market aborning +on the Internet for music, one with fewer gatekeepers to creativity than ever +before. + +That's the purpose of copyright, after all: to decentralize who gets to make +art. Before copyright, we had patronage: you could make art if the Pope or the +king liked the sound of it. That produced some damned pretty ceilings and +frescos, but it wasn't until control of art was given over to the market -- by +giving publishers a monopoly over the works they printed, starting with the +Statute of Anne in 1710 -- that we saw the explosion of creativity that +investment-based art could create. Industrialists weren't great arbiters of who +could and couldn't make art, but they were better than the Pope. + +The Internet is enabling a further decentralization in who gets to make art, +and like each of the technological shifts in cultural production, it's good for +some artists and bad for others. The important question is: will it let more +people participate in cultural production? Will it further decentralize +decision-making for artists? + +And for SF writers and fans, the further question is, "Will it be any good to +our chosen medium?" Like I said, science fiction is the only literature people +care enough about to steal on the Internet. It's the only literature that +regularly shows up, scanned and run through optical character recognition +software and lovingly hand-edited on darknet newsgroups, Russian websites, IRC +channels and elsewhere (yes, there's also a brisk trade in comics and technical +books, but I'm talking about prose fiction here -- though this is clearly a +sign of hope for our friends in tech publishing and funnybooks). + +Some writers are using the Internet's affinity for SF to great effect. I've +released every one of my novels under Creative Commons licenses that encourage +fans to share them freely and widely -- even, in some cases, to remix them and +to make new editions of them for use in the developing world. My first novel, +Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is in its sixth printing from Tor, and has +been downloaded more than 650,000 times from my website, and an untold number +of times from others' websites. + +I've discovered what many authors have also discovered: releasing electronic +texts of books drives sales of the print editions. An SF writer's biggest +problem is obscurity, not piracy. Of all the people who chose not to spend +their discretionary time and cash on our works today, the great bulk of them +did so because they didn't know they existed, not because someone handed them a +free e-book version. + +But what kind of artist thrives on the Internet? Those who can establish a +personal relationship with their readers -- something science fiction has been +doing for as long as pros have been hanging out in the con suite instead of the +green room. These conversational artists come from all fields, and they combine +the best aspects of charisma and virtuosity with charm -- the ability to +conduct their online selves as part of a friendly salon that establishes a +non-substitutable relationship with their audiences. You might find a film, a +game, and a book to be equally useful diversions on a slow afternoon, but if +the novel's author is a pal of yours, that's the one you'll pick. It's a +competitive advantage that can't be beat. + +See Neil Gaiman's blog, where he manages the trick of carrying on a +conversation with millions. Or Charlie Stross's Usenet posts. Scalzi's blogs. +J. Michael Straczynski's presence on Usenet -- while in production on Babylon +5, no less -- breeding an army of rabid fans ready to fax-bomb recalcitrant TV +execs into submission and syndication. See also the MySpace bands selling a +million units of their CDs by adding each buyer to their "friends lists." Watch +Eric Flint manage the Baen Bar, and Warren Ellis's good-natured growling on his +sites, lists, and so forth. + +Not all artists have in them to conduct an online salon with their audiences. +Not all Vaudevillians had it in them to transition to radio. Technology giveth +and technology taketh away. SF writers are supposed to be soaked in the future, +ready to come to grips with it. The future is conversational: when there's more +good stuff that you know about that's one click away or closer than you will +ever click on, it's not enough to know that some book is good. The least +substitutable good in the Internet era is the personal relationship. + +Conversation, not content, is king. If you were stranded on a desert island and +you opted to bring your records instead of your friends, we'd call you a +sociopath. Science fiction writers who can insert themselves into their +readers' conversations will be set for life. + +$$$$ + +1~ How Copyright Broke + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) ~# + +The theory is that if the Internet can't be controlled, then copyright is dead. +The thing is, the Internet is a machine for copying things cheaply, quickly, +and with as little control as possible, while copyright is the right to control +who gets to make copies, so these two abstractions seem destined for a fatal +collision, right? + +Wrong. + +The idea that copyright confers the exclusive right to control copying, +performance, adaptation, and general use of a creative work is a polite fiction +that has been mostly harmless throughout its brief history, but which has been +laid bare by the Internet, and the disjoint is showing. + +Theoretically, if I sell you a copy of one of my novels, I'm conferring upon +you a property interest in a lump of atoms -- the pages of the book -- as well +as a license to make some reasonable use of the ethereal ideas embedded upon +the page, the copyrighted work. + +Copyright started with a dispute between Scottish and English publishers, and +the first copyright law, 1709's Statute of Anne, conferred the exclusive right +to publish new editions of a book on the copyright holder. It was a fair +competition statute, and it was silent on the rights that the copyright holder +had in respect of his customers: the readers. Publishers got a legal tool to +fight their competitors, a legal tool that made a distinction between the +corpus -- a physical book -- and the spirit -- the novel writ on its pages. But +this legal nicety was not "customer-facing." As far as a reader was concerned, +once she bought a book, she got the same rights to it as she got to any other +physical object, like a potato or a shovel. Of course, the reader couldn't +print a new edition, but this had as much to do with the realities of +technology as it did with the law. Printing presses were rare and expensive: +telling a 17th-century reader that he wasn't allowed to print a new edition of +a book you sold him was about as meaningful as telling him he wasn't allowed to +have it laser-etched on the surface of the moon. Publishing books wasn't +something readers did. + +Indeed, until the photocopier came along, it was practically impossible for a +member of the audience to infringe copyright in a way that would rise to legal +notice. Copyright was like a tank-mine, designed only to go off when a +publisher or record company or radio station rolled over it. We civilians +couldn't infringe copyright (many thanks to Jamie Boyle for this useful +analogy). + +It wasn't the same for commercial users of copyrighted works. For the most +part, a radio station that played a record was expected to secure permission to +do so (though this permission usually comes in the form of a +government-sanctioned blanket license that cuts through all the expense of +negotiating in favor of a single monthly payment that covers all radio play). +If you shot a movie, you were expected to get permission for the music you put +in it. Critically, there are many uses that commercial users never paid for. +Most workplaces don't pay for the music their employees enjoy while they work. +An ad agency that produces a demo reel of recent commercials to use as part of +a creative briefing to a designer doesn't pay for this extremely commercial +use. A film company whose set-designer clips and copies from magazines and +movies to produce a "mood book" never secures permission nor offers +compensation for these uses. + +Theoretically, the contours of what you may and may not do without permission +are covered under a legal doctrine called "fair use," which sets out the +factors a judge can use to weigh the question of whether an infringement should +be punished. While fair use is a vital part of the way that works get made and +used, it's very rare for an unauthorized use to get adjudicated on this basis. + +No, the realpolitik of unauthorized use is that users are not required to +secure permission for uses that the rights holder will never discover. If you +put some magazine clippings in your mood book, the magazine publisher will +never find out you did so. If you stick a Dilbert cartoon on your office-door, +Scott Adams will never know about it. + +So while technically the law has allowed rights holders to infinitely +discriminate among the offerings they want to make -- Special discounts on this +book, which may only be read on Wednesdays! This film half-price, if you agree +only to show it to people whose names start with D! -- practicality has +dictated that licenses could only be offered on enforceable terms. + +When it comes to retail customers for information goods -- readers, listeners, +watchers -- this whole license abstraction falls flat. No one wants to believe +that the book he's brought home is only partly his, and subject to the terms of +a license set out on the flyleaf. You'd be a flaming jackass if you showed up +at a con and insisted that your book may not be read aloud, nor photocopied in +part and marked up for a writers' workshop, nor made the subject of a piece of +fan-fiction. + +At the office, you might get a sweet deal on a coffee machine on the promise +that you'll use a certain brand of coffee, and even sign off on a deal to let +the coffee company check in on this from time to time. But no one does this at +home. We instinctively and rightly recoil from the idea that our personal, +private dealings in our homes should be subject to oversight from some company +from whom we've bought something. We bought it. It's ours. Even when we rent +things, like cars, we recoil from the idea that Hertz might track our +movements, or stick a camera in the steering wheel. + +When the Internet and the PC made it possible to sell a lot of purely digital +"goods" -- software, music, movies and books delivered as pure digits over the +wire, without a physical good changing hands, the copyright lawyers groped +about for a way to take account of this. It's in the nature of a computer that +it copies what you put on it. A computer is said to be working, and of high +quality, in direct proportion to the degree to which it swiftly and accurately +copies the information that it is presented with. + +The copyright lawyers had a versatile hammer in their toolbox: the copyright +license. These licenses had been presented to corporations for years. +Frustratingly (for the lawyers), these corporate customers had their own +counsel, and real bargaining power, which made it impossible to impose really +interesting conditions on them, like limiting the use of a movie such that it +couldn't be fast-forwarded, or preventing the company from letting more than +one employee review a journal at a time. + +Regular customers didn't have lawyers or negotiating leverage. They were a +natural for licensing regimes. Have a look at the next click-through +"agreement" you're provided with on purchasing a piece of software or an +electronic book or song. The terms set out in those agreements are positively +Dickensian in their marvelous idiocy. Sony BMG recently shipped over eight +million music CDs with an "agreement" that bound its purchasers to destroy +their music if they left the country or had a house-fire, and to promise not to +listen to their tunes while at work. + +But customers understand property -- you bought it, you own it -- and they +don't understand copyright. Practically no one understands copyright. I know +editors at multibillion-dollar publishing houses who don't know the difference +between copyright and trademark (if you've ever heard someone say, "You need to +defend a copyright or you lose it," you've found one of these people who +confuse copyright and trademark; what's more, this statement isn't particularly +true of trademark, either). I once got into an argument with a senior Disney TV +exec who truly believed that if you re-broadcasted an old program, it was +automatically re-copyrighted and got another 95 years of exclusive use (that's +wrong). + +So this is where copyright breaks: When copyright lawyers try to treat readers +and listeners and viewers as if they were (weak and unlucky) corporations who +could be strong-armed into license agreements you wouldn't wish on a dog. +There's no conceivable world in which people are going to tiptoe around the +property they've bought and paid for, re-checking their licenses to make sure +that they're abiding by the terms of an agreement they doubtless never read. +Why read something if it's non-negotiable, anyway? + +The answer is simple: treat your readers' property as property. What readers do +with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors, is not a fit +subject for copyright regulation or oversight. The Securities Exchange +Commission doesn't impose rules on you when you loan a friend five bucks for +lunch. Anti-gambling laws aren't triggered when you bet your kids an ice-cream +cone that you'll bicycle home before them. Copyright shouldn't come between an +end-user of a creative work and her property. + +Of course, this approach is made even simpler by the fact that practically +every customer for copyrighted works already operates on this assumption. Which +is not to say that this might make some business-models more difficult to +pursue. Obviously, if there was some way to ensure that a given publisher was +the only source for a copyrighted work, that publisher could hike up its +prices, devote less money to service, and still sell its wares. Having to +compete with free copies handed from user to user makes life harder -- hasn't +it always? + +But it is most assuredly possible. Look at Apple's wildly popular iTunes Music +Store, which has sold over one billion tracks since 2003. Every song on iTunes +is available as a free download from user-to-user, peer-to-peer networks like +Kazaa. Indeed, the P2P monitoring company Big Champagne reports that the +average time-lapse between a iTunes-exclusive song being offered by Apple and +that same song being offered on P2P networks is 180 seconds. + +Every iTunes customer could readily acquire every iTunes song for free, using +the fastest-adopted technology in history. Many of them do (just as many fans +photocopy their favorite stories from magazines and pass them around to +friends). But Apple has figured out how to compete well enough by offering a +better service and a better experience to realize a good business out of this. +(Apple also imposes ridiculous licensing restrictions, but that's a subject for +a future column). + +Science fiction is a genre of clear-eyed speculation about the future. It +should have no place for wishful thinking about a world where readers willingly +put up with the indignity of being treated as "licensees" instead of customers. + +$$$$ + +!_ And now a brief commercial interlude: + +If you're enjoying this book and have been thinking of buying a copy, here's a +chance to do so: + +http://craphound.com/content/buy + +$$$$ + +1~ In Praise of Fanfic + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) ~# + +I wrote my first story when I was six. It was 1977, and I had just had my mind +blown clean out of my skull by a new movie called Star Wars (the golden age of +science fiction is 12; the golden age of cinematic science fiction is six). I +rushed home and stapled a bunch of paper together, trimmed the sides down so +that it approximated the size and shape of a mass-market paperback, and set to +work. I wrote an elaborate, incoherent ramble about Star Wars, in which the +events of the film replayed themselves, tweaked to suit my tastes. + +I wrote a lot of Star Wars fanfic that year. By the age of 12, I'd graduated to +Conan. By the age of 18, it was Harlan Ellison. By the age of 26, it was +Bradbury, by way of Gibson. Today, I hope I write more or less like myself. + +Walk the streets of Florence and you'll find a copy of the David on practically +every corner. For centuries, the way to become a Florentine sculptor has been +to copy Michelangelo, to learn from the master. Not just the great Florentine +sculptors, either -- great or terrible, they all start with the master; it can +be the start of a lifelong passion, or a mere fling. The copy can be art, or it +can be crap -- the best way to find out which kind you've got inside you is to +try. + +Science fiction has the incredible good fortune to have attracted huge, social +groups of fan-fiction writers. Many pros got their start with fanfic (and many +of them still work at it in secret), and many fanfic writers are happy to +scratch their itch by working only with others' universes, for the sheer joy of +it. Some fanfic is great -- there's plenty of Buffy fanfic that trumps the +official, licensed tie-in novels -- and some is purely dreadful. + +Two things are sure about all fanfic, though: first, that people who write and +read fanfic are already avid readers of writers whose work they're paying +homage to; and second, that the people who write and read fanfic derive +fantastic satisfaction from their labors. This is great news for writers. + +Great because fans who are so bought into your fiction that they'll make it +their own are fans forever, fans who'll evangelize your work to their friends, +fans who'll seek out your work however you publish it. + +Great because fans who use your work therapeutically, to work out their own +creative urges, are fans who have a damned good reason to stick with the field, +to keep on reading even as our numbers dwindle. Even when the fandom revolves +around movies or TV shows, fanfic is itself a literary pursuit, something +undertaken in the world of words. The fanfic habit is a literary habit. + +In Japan, comic book fanfic writers publish fanfic manga called dojinshi -- +some of these titles dwarf the circulation of the work they pay tribute to, and +many of them are sold commercially. Japanese comic publishers know a good thing +when they see it, and these fanficcers get left alone by the commercial giants +they attach themselves to. + +And yet for all this, there are many writers who hate fanfic. Some argue that +fans have no business appropriating their characters and situations, that it's +disrespectful to imagine your precious fictional people into sexual scenarios, +or to retell their stories from a different point of view, or to snatch a +victorious happy ending from the tragic defeat the writer ended her book with. + +Other writers insist that fans who take without asking -- or against the +writer's wishes -- are part of an "entitlement culture" that has decided that +it has the moral right to lift scenarios and characters without permission, +that this is part of our larger postmodern moral crisis that is making the +world a worse place. + +Some writers dismiss all fanfic as bad art and therefore unworthy of +appropriation. Some call it copyright infringement or trademark infringement, +and every now and again, some loony will actually threaten to sue his readers +for having had the gall to tell his stories to each other. + +I'm frankly flabbergasted by these attitudes. Culture is a lot older than art +-- that is, we have had social storytelling for a lot longer than we've had a +notional class of artistes whose creativity is privileged and elevated to the +numinous, far above the everyday creativity of a kid who knows that she can +paint and draw, tell a story and sing a song, sculpt and invent a game. + +To call this a moral failing -- and a new moral failing at that! -- is to turn +your back on millions of years of human history. It's no failing that we +internalize the stories we love, that we rework them to suit our minds better. +The Pygmalion story didn't start with Shaw or the Greeks, nor did it end with +My Fair Lady. Pygmalion is at least thousands of years old -- think of Moses +passing for the Pharaoh's son! -- and has been reworked in a billion bedtime +stories, novels, D&D games, movies, fanfic stories, songs, and legends. + +Each person who retold Pygmalion did something both original -- no two tellings +are just alike -- and derivative, for there are no new ideas under the sun. +Ideas are easy. Execution is hard. That's why writers don't really get excited +when they're approached by people with great ideas for novels. We've all got +more ideas than we can use -- what we lack is the cohesive whole. + +Much fanfic -- the stuff written for personal consumption or for a small social +group -- isn't bad art. It's just not art. It's not written to make a +contribution to the aesthetic development of humanity. It's created to satisfy +the deeply human need to play with the stories that constitute our world. +There's nothing trivial about telling stories with your friends -- even if the +stories themselves are trivial. The act of telling stories to one another is +practically sacred -- and it's unquestionably profound. What's more, lots of +retellings are art: witness Pat Murphy's wonderful There and Back Again +(Tolkien) and Geoff Ryman's brilliant World Fantasy Award-winning Was (L. Frank +Baum). + +The question of respect is, perhaps, a little thornier. The dominant mode of +criticism in fanfic circles is to compare a work to the canon -- "Would Spock +ever say that, in 'real' life?" What's more, fanfic writers will sometimes +apply this test to works that are of the canon, as in "Spock never would have +said that, and Gene Roddenberry has no business telling me otherwise." + +This is a curious mix of respect and disrespect. Respect because it's hard to +imagine a more respectful stance than the one that says that your work is the +yardstick against which all other work is to be measured -- what could be more +respectful than having your work made into the gold standard? On the other +hand, this business of telling writers that they've given their characters the +wrong words and deeds can feel obnoxious or insulting. + +Writers sometimes speak of their characters running away from them, taking on a +life of their own. They say that these characters -- drawn from real people in +our lives and mixed up with our own imagination -- are autonomous pieces of +themselves. It's a short leap from there to mystical nonsense about protecting +our notional, fictional children from grubby fans who'd set them to screwing +each other or bowing and scraping before some thinly veiled version of the +fanfic writer herself. + +There's something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our +wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are +likely to fight or fondle them. It's unsurprising that when you ask your brain +to model some other person, it rises to the task. But that's exactly what +happens to a reader when you hand your book over to him: he simulates your +characters in his head, trying to interpret that character's actions through +his own lens. + +Writers can't ask readers not to interpret their work. You can't enjoy a novel +that you haven't interpreted -- unless you model the author's characters in +your head, you can't care about what they do and why they do it. And once +readers model a character, it's only natural that readers will take pleasure in +imagining what that character might do offstage, to noodle around with it. This +isn't disrespect: it's active reading. + +Our field is incredibly privileged to have such an active fanfic writing +practice. Let's stop treating them like thieves and start treating them like +honored guests at a table that we laid just for them. + +$$$$ + +1~ Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia + +(Self-published, 26 August 2001) ~# + +group{ + +0. ToC: + + * 0. ToC + o 0.1 Version History + * 1. Introduction + * 2. The problems + o 2.1 People lie + o 2.2 People are lazy + o 2.3 People are stupid + o 2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself + o 2.5 Schemas aren't neutral + o 2.6 Metrics influence results + o 2.7 There's more than one way to describe something + * 3. Reliable metadata + +}group + +2~x- 1. Introduction + +Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords, page-length, title, +word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated +metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A +typical scenario goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree +on a metadata standard -- a Document Type Definition or scheme -- for a given +subject area, say washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for +describing washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water +consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their inventory, +which are available in whole or part to search agents and other databases, so +that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing machine he's seeking +and query multiple sites simultaneously for an exhaustive list of the available +washing machines that meet his criteria. + +If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the +purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a +trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive +results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a +manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily +choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip. + +A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a +pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated +market opportunities. + +2~x- 2. The problems + +There are at least seven insurmountable obstacles between the world as we know +it and meta-utopia. I'll enumerate them below:. + +3~x- 2.1 People lie + +Metadata exists in a competitive world. Suppliers compete to sell their goods, +cranks compete to convey their crackpot theories (mea culpa), artists compete +for audience. Attention-spans and wallets may not be zero-sum, but they're +damned close. + +That's why: + +_* A search for any commonly referenced term at a search-engine like Altavista +will often turn up at least one porn link in the first ten results. + +_* Your mailbox is full of spam with subject lines like "Re: The information +you requested." + +_* Publisher's Clearing House sends out advertisements that holler "You may +already be a winner!" + +_* Press-releases have gargantuan lists of empty buzzwords attached to them. + +Meta-utopia is a world of reliable metadata. When poisoning the well confers +benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order. + +3~x- 2.2 People are lazy + +You and me are engaged in the incredibly serious business of creating +information. Here in the Info-Ivory-Tower, we understand the importance of +creating and maintaining excellent metadata for our information. + +But info-civilians are remarkably cavalier about their information. Your +clueless aunt sends you email with no subject line, half the pages on Geocities +are called "Please title this page" and your boss stores all of his files on +his desktop with helpful titles like "UNTITLED.DOC." + +This laziness is bottomless. No amount of ease-of-use will end it. To +understand the true depths of meta-laziness, download ten random MP3 files from +Napster. Chances are, at least one will have no title, artist or track +information -- this despite the fact that adding in this info merely requires +clicking the "Fetch Track Info from CDDB" button on every MP3-ripping +application. + +Short of breaking fingers or sending out squads of vengeful info-ninjas to add +metadata to the average user's files, we're never gonna get there. + +3~x- 2.3 People are stupid + +Even when there's a positive benefit to creating good metadata, people +steadfastly refuse to exercise care and diligence in their metadata creation. + +Take eBay: every seller there has a damned good reason for double-checking +their listings for typos and misspellings. Try searching for "plam" on eBay. +Right now, that turns up nine typoed listings for "Plam Pilots." Misspelled +listings don't show up in correctly-spelled searches and hence garner fewer +bids and lower sale-prices. You can almost always get a bargain on a Plam Pilot +at eBay. + +The fine (and gross) points of literacy -- spelling, punctuation, grammar -- +elude the vast majority of the Internet's users. To believe that J. Random +Users will suddenly and en masse learn to spell and punctuate -- let alone +accurately categorize their information according to whatever hierarchy they're +supposed to be using -- is self-delusion of the first water. + +3~x- 2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself + +In meta-utopia, everyone engaged in the heady business of describing stuff +carefully weighs the stuff in the balance and accurately divines the stuff's +properties, noting those results. + +Simple observation demonstrates the fallacy of this assumption. When Nielsen +used log-books to gather information on the viewing habits of their sample +families, the results were heavily skewed to Masterpiece Theater and Sesame +Street. Replacing the journals with set-top boxes that reported what the set +was actually tuned to showed what the average American family was really +watching: naked midget wrestling, America's Funniest Botched Cosmetic Surgeries +and Jerry Springer presents: "My daughter dresses like a slut!" + +Ask a programmer how long it'll take to write a given module, or a contractor +how long it'll take to fix your roof. Ask a laconic Southerner how far it is to +the creek. Better yet, throw darts -- the answer's likely to be just as +reliable. + +People are lousy observers of their own behaviors. Entire religions are formed +with the goal of helping people understand themselves better; therapists rake +in billions working for this very end. + +Why should we believe that using metadata will help J. Random User get in touch +with her Buddha nature? + +3~x- 2.5 Schemas aren't neutral + +In meta-utopia, the lab-coated guardians of epistemology sit down and +rationally map out a hierarchy of ideas, something like this: + +group{ + +Nothing: + + Black holes + +Everything: + + Matter: + + Earth: + + Planets + + Washing Machines + + Wind: + + Oxygen + + Poo-gas + + Fire: + + Nuclear fission + + Nuclear fusion + + "Mean Devil Woman" Louisiana Hot-Sauce + +}group + +In a given sub-domain, say, Washing Machines, experts agree on sub-hierarchies, +with classes for reliability, energy consumption, color, size, etc. + +This presumes that there is a "correct" way of categorizing ideas, and that +reasonable people, given enough time and incentive, can agree on the proper +means for building a hierarchy. + +Nothing could be farther from the truth. Any hierarchy of ideas necessarily +implies the importance of some axes over others. A manufacturer of small, +environmentally conscious washing machines would draw a hierarchy that looks +like this: + +group{ + +Energy consumption: + + Water consumption: + + Size: + + Capacity: + + Reliability + +}group + +While a manufacturer of glitzy, feature-laden washing machines would want +something like this: + +group{ + +Color: + + Size: + + Programmability: + + Reliability + +}group + +The conceit that competing interests can come to easy accord on a common +vocabulary totally ignores the power of organizing principles in a marketplace. + +3~x- 2.6 Metrics influence results + +Agreeing to a common yardstick for measuring the important stuff in any domain +necessarily privileges the items that score high on that metric, regardless of +those items' overall suitability. IQ tests privilege people who are good at IQ +tests, Nielsen Ratings privilege 30- and 60-minute TV shows (which is why MTV +doesn't show videos any more -- Nielsen couldn't generate ratings for +three-minute mini-programs, and so MTV couldn't demonstrate the value of +advertising on its network), raw megahertz scores privilege Intel's CISC chips +over Motorola's RISC chips. + +Ranking axes are mutually exclusive: software that scores high for security +scores low for convenience, desserts that score high for decadence score low +for healthiness. Every player in a metadata standards body wants to emphasize +their high-scoring axes and de-emphasize (or, if possible, ignore altogether) +their low-scoring axes. + +It's wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance +their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The +best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable. + +3~x- 2.7 There's more than one way to describe something + +"No, I'm not watching cartoons! It's cultural anthropology." + +"This isn't smut, it's art." + +"It's not a bald spot, it's a solar panel for a sex-machine." + +Reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe something. Arguably, +your Self is the collection of associations and descriptors you ascribe to +ideas. Requiring everyone to use the same vocabulary to describe their material +denudes the cognitive landscape, enforces homogeneity in ideas. + +And that's just not right. + +2~x- 3. Reliable metadata + +Do we throw out metadata, then? + +Of course not. Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a sufficiently large +pinch of salt. The meta-utopia will never come into being, but metadata is +often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that +floats through the Internet. + +Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits +metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of +links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), +Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that +that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable +guesses about how reputable the information on that page is. + +This sort of observational metadata is far more reliable than the stuff that +human beings create for the purposes of having their documents found. It cuts +through the marketing bullshit, the self-delusion, and the vocabulary +collisions. + +Taken more broadly, this kind of metadata can be thought of as a pedigree: who +thinks that this document is valuable? How closely correlated have this +person's value judgments been with mine in times gone by? This kind of implicit +endorsement of information is a far better candidate for an +information-retrieval panacea than all the world's schema combined. + +$$$$ + +1~ Amish for QWERTY + +(Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003) ~# + +I learned to type before I learned to write. The QWERTY keyboard layout is +hard-wired to my brain, such that I can't write anything of significance +without that I have a 101-key keyboard in front of me. This has always been a +badge of geek pride: unlike the creaking pen-and-ink dinosaurs that I grew up +reading, I'm well adapted to the modern reality of technology. There's a secret +elitist pride in touch-typing on a laptop while staring off into space, fingers +flourishing and caressing the keys. + +But last week, my pride got pricked. I was brung low by a phone. Some very nice +people from Nokia loaned me a very latest-and-greatest camera-phone, the kind +of gadget I've described in my science fiction stories. As I prodded at the +little 12-key interface, I felt like my father, a 60s-vintage computer +scientist who can't get his wireless network to work, must feel. Like a +creaking dino. Like history was passing me by. I'm 31, and I'm obsolete. Or at +least Amish. + +People think the Amish are technophobes. Far from it. They're ideologues. They +have a concept of what right-living consists of, and they'll use any technology +that serves that ideal -- and mercilessly eschew any technology that would +subvert it. There's nothing wrong with driving the wagon to the next farm when +you want to hear from your son, so there's no need to put a phone in the +kitchen. On the other hand, there's nothing right about your livestock dying +for lack of care, so a cellphone that can call the veterinarian can certainly +find a home in the horse barn. + +For me, right-living is the 101-key, QWERTY, computer-centric mediated +lifestyle. It's having a bulky laptop in my bag, crouching by the toilets at a +strange airport with my AC adapter plugged into the always-awkwardly-placed +power source, running software that I chose and installed, communicating over +the wireless network. I use a network that has no incremental cost for +communication, and a device that lets me install any software without +permission from anyone else. Right-living is the highly mutated, +commodity-hardware- based, public and free Internet. I'm QWERTY-Amish, in other +words. + +I'm the kind of perennial early adopter who would gladly volunteer to beta test +a neural interface, but I find myself in a moral panic when confronted with the +12-button keypad on a cellie, even though that interface is one that has been +greedily adopted by billions of people worldwide, from strap-hanging Japanese +schoolgirls to Kenyan electoral scrutineers to Filipino guerrillas in the bush. +The idea of paying for every message makes my hackles tumesce and evokes a +reflexive moral conviction that text-messaging is inherently undemocratic, at +least compared to free-as-air email. The idea of only running the software that +big-brother telco has permitted me on my handset makes me want to run for the +hills. + +The thumb-generation who can tap out a text-message under their desks while +taking notes with the other hand -- they're in for it, too. The pace of +accelerated change means that we're all of us becoming wed to interfaces -- +ways of communicating with our tools and our world -- that are doomed, doomed, +doomed. The 12-buttoners are marrying the phone company, marrying a centrally +controlled network that requires permission to use and improve, a Stalinist +technology whose centralized choke points are subject to regulation and the +vagaries of the telcos. Long after the phone companies have been out-competed +by the pure and open Internet (if such a glorious day comes to pass), the kids +of today will be bound by its interface and its conventions. + +The sole certainty about the future is its Amishness. We will all bend our +brains to suit an interface that we will either have to abandon or be left +behind. Choose your interface -- and the values it implies -- carefully, then, +before you wed your thought processes to your fingers' dance. It may be the one +you're stuck with. + +$$$$ + +1~ Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books + +(Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February +12, 2004) ~# + +Forematter: + +This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference [ +http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2004/ ], along with a set of slides that, +for copyright reasons (ironic!) can't be released alongside of this file. +However, you will find, interspersed in this text, notations describing the +places where new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets]. + +For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I've had about +ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection +online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist who published a list of +alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks +Suck Right Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't think +it's true. + +No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd call it: "Ebooks: +You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them] That's because I +think that the shape of ebooks to come is almost visible in the way that people +interact with text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich +and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape. + +I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the future of the +book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share them with you: + +1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so ebooks *{are}* +marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks sells more books. Baen Books, +who do a lot of series publishing, have found that giving away electronic +editions of the previous installments in their series to coincide with the +release of a new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the backlist. +And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how much they dug the +ebook and so bought the paper-book far exceeds the number of people who wrote +to me and said, "Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not +gonna buy it." But ebooks *{shouldn't}* be just about marketing: ebooks are a +goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people will read more words +off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and when those two lines +cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that writers earn their keep, not +the way that they promote the dead-tree editions. + +2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper books]. Having an +ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is even better. One +reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first novel from the bound +book, and printed the other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students +write to me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can copy +and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen readers use the +electronic editions of their favorite series to build concordances of +characters, places and events. + +3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless you own the ebook, +you don't 0wn the book]. I take the view that the book is a "practice" -- a +collection of social and economic and artistic activities -- and not an +"object." Viewing the book as a "practice" instead of an object is a pretty +radical notion, and it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good +question. I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR SCREENGRAB] +(BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a text-editor as I could hope for). +From there, I can convert them into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP +SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn +them over to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review +copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my readers, who can +convert them to a bewildering array of formats [DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. +Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile can convert a digital book into a +four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper +book in ten minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF +or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for a buck in ten +minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently cited reasons for +preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books confer a sense of ownership of a +physical object. Before the dust settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper +book is going to feel less like ownership than having an open digital edition +of the text. + +4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a better deal for writers] +The compensation for writers is pretty thin on the ground. *{Amazing Stories}*, +Hugo Gernsback's original science fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. +Today, science fiction magazines pay...a couple cents a word. The sums involved +are so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're *{quaint}* and +*{historical}*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a pioneer +village. Some writers do make it big, but they're *{rounding errors}* as +compared to the total population of sf writers earning some of their living at +the trade. Almost all of us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may +dream of earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would play +the lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentive for writing has to +be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity. Ebooks get you +that. Ebooks become a part of the corpus of human knowledge because they get +indexed by search engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or +millions. They can be googled. + +Even better: they level the playing field between writers and trolls. When +Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers in a tight and powerful knot +at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos were filling the Amazon message-boards +with ill-considered slams at their work -- for, if a personal recommendation is +the best way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the best +way to *{not}* sell a book. Today, the trolls are still with us, but now, the +readers get to decide for themselves. Here's a bit of a review of Down and Out +in the Magic Kingdom that was recently posted to Amazon by "A reader from +Redwood City, CA": + +group{ + +[QUOTED TEXT] + +> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are > smoking, or what kind +of payola may be involved. But > regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, +whatever > this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn't > waste your +money. Download it for free from Corey's > (sic) site, read the first page, and +look away in > disgust -- this book is for people who think Dan > Brown's Da +Vinci Code is great writing. + +}group + +Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed me off. +Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good name! My stars and +mittens! But take a closer look at that damning passage: + +group{ + +[PULL-QUOTE] + +> Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first > page + +}group + +You see that? Hell, this guy is *{working for me}*! [ADDITIONAL PULL QUOTES] +Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of paying off Entertainment +Weekly to say nice things about his novel, "a surprisingly bad writer," no +less, whose writing is "stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that +writer out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind. + +You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego and insecurity, +and the downside of being able to google up all the things that people are +saying about your book is that it can play right into your insecurities -- "all +these people will have it in their minds not to bother with my book because +they've read the negative interweb reviews!" But the flipside of that is the +ego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see how good it is." And the more +scathing the review is, the more likely they are to give it a shot. Any press +is good press, so long as they spell your URL right (and even if they spell +your name wrong!). + +5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace their nature.] +The distinctive value of ebooks is orthogonal to the value of paper books, and +it revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text. The +more you constrain an ebook's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the +more you restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an ebook +-- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a paper-book. Ebooks +*{fail}* on those axes. Ebooks don't beat paper-books for sophisticated +typography, they can't match them for quality of paper or the smell of the +glue. But just try sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in +less than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little stick of +flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a paper book for every +instance of a character's name to find a beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a +pithy passage out of a paper book and pasting it into your sig-file. + +6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one). [Ebooks +demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one).] Artists are always +disappointed by their audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll +find cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle with its +insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and action, not like we had +in the old days. As artists, it would be a hell of a lot easier if our +audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for boring them. We'd get to +explore a lot more ideas without worrying about tarting them up with +easy-to-swallow chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of +shortened attention spans as a product of the information age, but check this +out: + +group{ + +[Nietzsche quote] + +> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to > practice reading as +an *art* in this way, something > needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in +these days. + +}group + +In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not paying enough +attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but this quote isn't from this +century or the last. [Nietzsche quote with attribution] It's from the preface +to Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals," published in *{1887}*. + +Yeah, our attention-spans are *{different}* today, but they aren't necessarily +*{shorter}*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the storyline for +Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds for *{five years}* while the +story trickled out in monthly funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's +installments on the Harry Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new +volume. Entire forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like +Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately 20,000 +pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way or another here). +Sure, presidential debates are conducted in soundbites today and not the +days-long oratory extravaganzas of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people +manage to pay attention to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start +to finish. + +7. We need *{all}* the ebooks. [We need *{all}* the ebooks] The vast majority +of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one library collects all the +still-extant books ever written and no one person could hope to make a dent in +that corpus of written work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest +sliver of human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with just +the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution. + +For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared desire for the +core canon of literature, but each of us want to complete that collection with +different texts that are as distinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If +we all look like we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music, +or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking closely enough. The +shared-ness of our experience is only present at a coarse level of measurement: +once you get into really granular observation, there are as many differences in +our "shared" experience as there are similarities. + +More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of electronic text +differs from a small one: it's the difference between a single book, a shelf +full of books and a library of books. Scale makes things different. Take the +Web: none of us can hope to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, +but by analyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together, Google +is able to actually tease out machine-generated conclusions about the relative +relevance of different pages to different queries. None of us will ever eat the +whole corpus, but Google can digest it for us and excrete the steaming nuggets +of goodness that make it the search-engine miracle it is today. + +8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books]. To round out +this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are more like paper books +than you'd expect. One of the truisms of retail theory is that purchasers need +to come into contact with a good several times before they buy -- seven +contacts is tossed around as the magic number. That means that my readers have +to hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review, and so +forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to buy. + +There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to bringing it +home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor. Some of the time, maybe +most of the time, downloading the text of the book is like taking it off the +shelf at the store and looking at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the +advantage of not having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger +king left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you). Some +writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred thousand copies of my +first novel were downloaded and "only" ten thousand or so were sold so far. If +it were the case that for ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the +store, that would be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another +way: if one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my book +bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads cost me no more +than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the sales are healthy. + +We also like to think of physical books as being inherently *{countable}* in a +way that digital books aren't (an irony, since computers are damned good at +counting things!). This is important, because writers get paid on the basis of +the number of copies of their books that sell, so having a good count makes a +difference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precise numbers for +copies printed, shipped, returned and sold. + +But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a book, it always +runs a few extra at the start and finish of the run to make sure that the setup +is right and to account for the occasional rip, drop, or spill. The actual +total number of books printed is approximately the number of books ordered, but +never exactly -- if you've ever ordered 500 wedding invitations, chances are +you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer and that's why. + +And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen. Copies are +dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some copies end up in the wrong +box and go to a bookstore that didn't order them and isn't invoiced for them +and end up on a sale table or in the trash. Some copies are returned as +damaged. Some are returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next +morning accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place where +the spare sock in the dryer ends up. + +The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual. They represent a +kind of best-guess approximation of the copies shipped, sold, returned and so +forth. Actuarial accounting works pretty well: well enough to run the +juggernaut banking, insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for +divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for radio airplay +and live performance. And it's good enough for counting how many copies of a +book are distributed online or off. + +Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of electronic books, +sure: but neither one is inherently countable. + +And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books. However an author +earns her living from her words, printed or encoded, she has as her first and +hardest task to find her audience. There are more competitors for our attention +than we can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting a book +under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the hardest and most +important task any writer faces. + +# + +I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and bookstores at the +age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I was lured away by the siren song +of the tech world. I knew I wanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 +years later, I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfiction +book out, two more novels under contract, and another book in the works. [BOOK +COVERS] I've won a major award in my genre, science fiction, [CAMPBELL AWARD] +and I'm nominated for another one, the 2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. +[NEBULA] + +I own a *{lot}* of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in storage on both +coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY LADDER]. I have to own them, +since they're the tools of my trade: the reference works I refer to as a +novelist and writer today. Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it +disappears from the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science +fiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES] + +Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers are +fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed books +are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a "book" was +something produced by many months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some +kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED BIBLE] +Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book into something that +could be simply run off a press in a few minutes' time, on substrate more +suitable to ass-wiping than exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. +The Gutenberg press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of +the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than picking only a few +subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge variety of subjects could be +addressed on paper and handed from person to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE] + +Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of speculation. +I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties and a lot of speculating +lately, and the purpose of this talk is to lay out both categories of ideas. + +This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER], +which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time, there was a lot of talk in my +professional circles about, on the one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, +on the other, the new and scary practice of ebook "piracy." +[alt.binaries.e-books screengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to +notice that the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds with the +notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worrying about: I mean, if +ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if intarweb dweebs are trading them +on Usenet? + +A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks." One meaning for +that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is to say, +rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books, released in a +proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for use on a general-purpose PC +and sometimes for use on a special-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia +Rocketbook [ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a "pirate" or +unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by cutting the binding +off of a book and scanning it a page at a time, then running the resulting +bitmaps through an optical character recognition app to convert them into ASCII +text, to be cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors +introduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that these books also have +deliberate errors, created by mischievous book-rippers who cut, add or change +text in order to "improve" the work. Frankly, I have never seen any evidence +that any book-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I think that +this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about. + +Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER]. Well, not yet. I want to +convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over ebook piracy, or +"bookwarez" as it is known in book-ripper circles. Writers were joining the +discussion on alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear of +retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw up their +credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. My editor, a blogger, +hacker and guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named Patrick +Nielsen Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup, saying, in part +[SCREENGRAB]: + +group{ + +> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to > happen more +and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks > make audio cassettes from +vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and > videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes. +Partly it's > greed; partly it's annoyance over retail prices; partly it's the +> desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by > the victims +of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy). > Instantly going to Defcon One +over it and claiming it's morally > tantamount to mugging little old ladies in +the street will make > it kind of difficult to move forward from that position +when it > doesn't work. In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that > "home +taping is killing music." It's hard for ordinary folks to > avoid noticing that +music didn't die. But the record industry's > credibility on the subject wasn't +exactly enhanced. + +}group + +Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18 years old and he +kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me to a writers' workshop, +continuing to a fateful lunch in New York in the mid-Nineties when I showed him +a bunch of Project Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start +licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the +turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first novel (he's +bought three more since -- I really like Patrick!). + +Right as bookwarez newsgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly by legal +action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner for carrying the +alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer alleged that AOL should have a duty +to remove this newsgroup, since it carried so many infringing files, and that +its failure to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the +incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright laws like the +No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital Millennium Copyright Act or +DMCA. + +Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who thought the +world would be a better place if ISPs were given the duty of actively policing +and censoring the websites and newsfeeds their customers had access to, +including a requirement that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what +was an unlawful copyright infringement -- something more usually left up to +judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from esteemed copyright +scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC]. + +This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my boots. Writers +are supposed to be advocates of free expression, not censorship. It seemed that +some of my colleagues loved the First Amendment, but they were reluctant to +share it with the rest of the world. + +Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an opportunity to +try to figure out a little more about this ebook stuff. On the one hand, ebooks +were a dismal failure. On the other hand, there were more books posted to +alt.binaries.ebooks every day. + +This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks: + +1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day [GRAPHIC] + +2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day [GRAPHIC] + +These two certainties begged a lot of questions. + +[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS] + +_* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper + +_* People want to own physical books because of their visceral appeal (often +this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how good books smell, or how good +they look on a bookshelf, or how evocative an old curry stain in the margin can +be) + +_* You can't take your ebook into the tub + +_* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer + +_* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time + +None of these seemed like very good explanations for the "failure" of ebooks to +me. If screen resolutions are too low to replace paper, then how come everyone +I know spends more time reading off a screen every year, up to and including my +sainted grandmother (geeks have a really crappy tendency to argue that certain +technologies aren't ready for primetime because their grandmothers won't use +them -- well, my grandmother sends me email all the time. She types 70 words +per minute, and loves to show off grandsonular email to her pals around the +pool at her Florida retirement condo)? + +The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It seemed to me that +electronic books are *{different}* from paper books, and have different virtues +and failings. Let's think a little about what the book has gone through in +years gone by. This is interesting because the history of the book is the +history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and, ultimately +the colonizing of the Americas and the American Revolution. + +Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed on rare leather +by monks. The only people who could read them were priests, who got a regular +eyeful of the really cool cartoons the monks drew in the margins. The priests +read the books aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a predominantly +non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in pricey incense that +rose from censers swung by altar boys. + +Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Martin Luther turned that +press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] He printed Bibles in languages that +non-priests could read, and distributed them to normal people who got to read +the word of God all on their own. The rest, as they say, is history. + +Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the printing +press: + +[CHART: LUTHER VERSUS THE MONKS] + +_* Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the illuminated Bibles. +They were comparatively cheap and lacked the typographical expressiveness that +a really talented monk could bring to bear when writing out the word of God + +_* Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-case for Bibles. +A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority of the man at the pulpit. +It needed heft, it needed impressiveness, and most of all, it needed rarity. + +_* The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was no incense, no altar +boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew that reading was so friggin' +hard on the eyes? + +_* Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated numbers. +Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any apocryphal text he wanted +-- and who knew how accurate that translation was? Monks had an entire Papacy +behind them, running a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in +good stead for centuries. + +In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs patiently +explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't get any cover-art or +liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if the rip was any good, and sometimes +the connection would drop mid-download. I'm sure that many Cardinals espoused +the points raised above with equal certainty. + +What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways that Luther +Bibles kicked ass: + +[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS] + +_* They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them without having +to subject themselves to the authority and approval of the Church + +_* They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no longer had to +take the Church's word for it when its priests explained what God really meant + +_* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books flourished. +New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship and so on were all enabled +by the printing presses whose initial popularity was spurred by Luther's ideas +about religion. + +Note that all of these virtues are orthogonal to the virtues of a monkish +Bible. That is, none of the things that made the Gutenberg press a success were +the things that made monk-Bibles a success. + +By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious little to do with +the reasons to love paper books. + +[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK ASS] + +_* They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a midlist +title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand by women in reading +circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have social life as rich as +reading-circlites, but they don't ever get to see each other face to face; the +only kind of book they can pass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the +single factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a friend +-- getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely to sell you on it than +having read and enjoyed the preceding volume in a series! + +_* They are easy to slice and dice. This is where the Mac evangelist in me +comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's a truism of the Napsterverse that +most of the files downloaded are bog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or +so, and I believe it. We all want to popular music. That's why it's popular. +But the interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill Gates told the New +York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing "a good job on the 80 +percent of common queries and ignor[ing] the other stuff. But it's the +remaining 20 percent that counts, because that's where the quality perception +is." Why did Napster captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the +top-40 tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was because +80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't available for sale anywhere in the +world, and in that 80 percent were all the songs that had ever touched us, all +the earworms that had been lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us +smile when we heard it. Those songs are different for all of us, but they share +the trait of making the difference between a compelling service and, well, +top-40 Clearchannel radio programming. It was the minority of tracks that +appealed to the majority of us. By the same token, the malleability of +electronic text means that it can be readily repurposed: you can throw it on a +webserver or convert it to a format for your favorite PDA; you can ask your +computer to read it aloud or you can search the text for a quotation to cite in +a book report or to use in your sig. In other words, most people who download +the book do so for the predictable reason, and in a predictable format -- say, +to sample a chapter in the HTML format before deciding whether to buy the book +-- but the thing that differentiates a boring e-text experience from an +exciting one is the minority use -- printing out a couple chapters of the book +to bring to the beach rather than risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty. + +Tool-makers and software designers are increasingly aware of the notion of +"affordances" in design. You can bash a nail into the wall with any heavy, +heftable object from a rock to a hammer to a cast-iron skillet. However, +there's something about a hammer that cries out for nail-bashing, it has +affordances that tilt its holder towards swinging it. And, as we all know, when +all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. + +The affordance of a computer -- the thing it's designed to do -- is to +slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the Internet is to move +bits at very high speed around the world at little-to-no cost. It follows from +this that the center of the ebook experience is going to involve slicing and +dicing text and sending it around. + +Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement. That's +because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly over copying and +remixing of their work, pretty much forever (theoretically, copyright expires, +but in actual practice, copyright gets extended every time the early Mickey +Mouse cartoons are about to enter the public domain, because Disney swings a +very big stick on the Hill). + +This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why: + +[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE] + +_* Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers that strong +copyright is the only thing that keeps them from getting savagely rogered in +the marketplace. This is pretty much true: it's strong copyright that often +defends authors from their publishers' worst excesses. However, it doesn't +follow that strong copyright protects you from your *{readers}*. + +_* Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously. You're a small +businessperson. Readers are your customers. Calling them crooks is bad for +business. + +_* Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in the business +of grabbing as much copyright as they can and hanging onto it for dear life +because, dammit, you never know. This is why science fiction magazines try to +trick writers into signing over improbable rights for things like theme park +rides and action figures based on their work -- it's also why literary agents +are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books they represent: +copyright covers so much ground and takes to long to shake off, who wouldn't +want a piece of it? + +_* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement, especially on the +Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of $150,000 per infringement, and +aggrieved rights-holders and their representatives have all kinds of special +powers, like the ability to force an ISP to turn over your personal information +before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge. This means +that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong side of copyright law is +going to be terribly risk-averse: publishers non-negotiably force their authors +to indemnify them from infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers +to prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in the case of +brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the opening of chapters. The +result is that authors end up assuming potentially life-destroying liability, +are chilled from quoting material around them, and are scared off of public +domain texts because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a work +carries such a terrible price. + +_* Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court hearing last +year, the court found that 98 percent of the works in copyright are no longer +earning money for anyone, but that figuring out who these old works belong to +with the degree of certainty that you'd want when one mistake means total +economic apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on them. +That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire long before the +copyright on them does. Today, the names of science fiction's ancestral +founders -- Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG +Wells -- are still known, their work still a part of the discourse. Their +spiritual descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky -- if +their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might just vanish from +the face of the earth before it reverts to the public domain. + +This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a thing as good +copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good copyright is a +bad thing. It's like chilis in soup: a little goes a long way, and too much +spoils the broth. + +From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the pulps, from +cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for new media is +its "democratic-ness" -- the ease with which it can reproduced. + +(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business about how the +Internet's copying model is more disruptive than the technologies that +proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for +inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had *{one hundred +percent}* control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to +a regime where they had *{zero}* percent control over who could build or +acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing. For that matter, +look at the difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible -- next to +that phase-change, Napster is peanuts) + +Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded off its +artifact-ness -- the degree to which it was populated by bespoke hunks of +atoms, cleverly nailed together by master craftspeople -- for ease of +reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as expressive as good piano players, but they +scaled better -- as did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner +notes, hand illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in +comparison to the ability of an individual to actually get a copy of her own. + +Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists still hand-illuminate books; +master pianists still stride the boards at Carnegie Hall, and the shelves burst +with tell-all biographies of musicians that are richer in detail than any +liner-notes booklet. The thing is, when all you've got is monks, every book +takes on the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing press, +all the books that are better-suited to movable type migrate into that new +form. What's left behind are those items that are best suited to the old +production scheme: the plays that *{need}* to be plays, the books that are +especially lovely on creamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is +most enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity. + +Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it's a lot harder +to control who can copy a book once there's a photocopier on every corner than +it is when you need a monastery and several years to copy a Bible. And that +decreased control demands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights of +creators with their audiences. + +For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a new copyright +exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was invented, the Congress granted +an anti-trust exemption to the record labels in order to secure a blanket +license; when cable TV was invented, the government just ordered the +broadcasters to sell the cable-operators access to programming at a fixed rate. + +Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was generated in +response to the last generation of technology. The temptation to treat +copyright as though it came down off the mountain on two stone tablets (or +worse, as "just like" real property) is deeply flawed, since, by definition, +current copyright only considers the last generation of tech. + +So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this the end of the +world? *{Duh}*. If the Catholic church can survive the printing press, science +fiction will certainly weather the advent of bookwarez. + +# + +Lagniappe [Lagniappe] + +We're almost done here, but there's one more thing I'd like to do before I get +off the stage. [Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or extra] Think of it as a +"lagniappe" -- a little something extra to thank you for your patience. + +About a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, +on the net, under the terms of the most restrictive Creative Commons license +available. All it allowed my readers to do was send around copies of the book. +I was cautiously dipping my toe into the water, though at the time, it felt +like I was taking a plunge. + +Now I'm going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the text of Down and +Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons +"Attribution-ShareAlike-Derivs-Noncommercial" license [HUMAN READABLE LICENSE], +which means that as of today, you have my blessing to create derivative works +from my first book. You can make movies, audiobooks, translations, fan-fiction, +slash fiction (God help us) [GEEK HIERARCHY], furry slash fiction [GEEK +HIERARCHY DETAIL], poetry, translations, t-shirts, you name it, with two +provisos: that one, you have to allow everyone else to rip, mix and burn your +creations in the same way you're hacking mine; and on the other hand, you've +got to do it noncommercially. + +The sky didn't fall when I dipped my toe in. Let's see what happens when I get +in up to my knees. + +The text with the new license will be online before the end of the day. Check +craphound.com/down for details. + +Oh, and I'm also releasing the text of this speech under a Creative Commons +Public Domain dedication, [Public domain dedication] giving it away to the +world to do with as it see fits. It'll be linked off my blog, Boing Boing, +before the day is through. + +$$$$ + +1~ Free(konomic) E-books + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) ~# + +Can giving away free electronic books really sell printed books? I think so. As +I explained in my March column ("You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen"), I +don't believe that most readers want to read long-form works off a screen, and +I don't believe that they will ever want to read long-form works off a screen. +As I say in the column, the problem with reading off a screen isn't resolution, +eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it's that computers +are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a +long-form work impractical. + +Sure, some readers have the cognitive quirk necessary to read full-length works +off screens, or are motivated to do so by other circumstances (such as being so +broke that they could never hope to buy the printed work). The rational +question isn't, "Will giving away free e-books cost me sales?" but rather, +"Will giving away free e-books win me more sales than it costs me?" + +This is a very hard proposition to evaluate in a quantitative way. Books aren't +lattes or cable-knit sweaters: each book sells (or doesn't) due to factors that +are unique to that title. It's hard to imagine an empirical, controlled study +in which two "equivalent" books are published, and one is also available as a +free download, the other not, and the difference calculated as a means of +"proving" whether e-books hurt or help sales in the long run. + +I've released all of my novels as free downloads simultaneous with their print +publication. If I had a time machine, I could re-release them without the free +downloads and compare the royalty statements. Lacking such a device, I'm forced +to draw conclusions from qualitative, anecdotal evidence, and I've collected +plenty of that: + +_* Many writers have tried free e-book releases to tie in with the print +release of their works. To the best of my knowledge, every writer who's tried +this has repeated the experiment with future works, suggesting a high degree of +satisfaction with the outcomes + +_* A writer friend of mine had his first novel come out at the same time as +mine. We write similar material and are often compared to one another by +critics and reviewers. My first novel had a free download, his didn't. We +compared sales figures and I was doing substantially better than him -- he +subsequently convinced his publisher to let him follow suit + +_* Baen Books has a pretty good handle on expected sales for new volumes in +long-running series; having sold many such series, they have lots of data to +use in sales estimates. If Volume N sells X copies, we expect Volume N+1 to +sell Y copies. They report that they have seen a measurable uptick in sales +following from free e-book releases of previous and current volumes + +_* David Blackburn, a Harvard PhD candidate in economics, published a paper in +2004 in which he calculated that, for music, "piracy" results in a net increase +in sales for all titles in the 75th percentile and lower; negligible change in +sales for the "middle class" of titles between the 75th percentile and the 97th +percentile; and a small drag on the "super-rich" in the 97th percentile and +higher. Publisher Tim O'Reilly describes this as "piracy's progressive +taxation," apportioning a small wealth-redistribution to the vast majority of +works, no net change to the middle, and a small cost on the richest few + +_* Speaking of Tim O'Reilly, he has just published a detailed, quantitative +study of the effect of free downloads on a single title. O'Reilly Media +published Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, in November 2005, simultaneously +releasing the book as a free download. By March 2007, they had a pretty +detailed picture of the sales-cycle of this book -- and, thanks to industry +standard metrics like those provided by Bookscan, they could compare it, +apples-to-apples style, against the performance of competing books treating +with the same subject. O'Reilly's conclusion: downloads didn't cause a decline +in sales, and appears to have resulted in a lift in sales. This is particularly +noteworthy because the book in question is a technical reference work, +exclusively consumed by computer programmers who are by definition disposed to +read off screens. Also, this is a reference work and therefore is more likely +to be useful in electronic form, where it can be easily searched + +_* In my case, my publishers have gone back to press repeatedly for my books. +The print runs for each edition are modest -- I'm a midlist writer in a world +with a shrinking midlist -- but publishers print what they think they can sell, +and they're outselling their expectations + +_* The new opportunities arising from my free downloads are so numerous as to +be uncountable -- foreign rights deals, comic book licenses, speaking +engagements, article commissions -- I've made more money in these secondary +markets than I have in royalties + +_* More anecdotes: I've had literally thousands of people approach me by e-mail +and at signings and cons to say, "I found your work online for free, got +hooked, and started buying it." By contrast, I've had all of five e-mails from +people saying, "Hey, idiot, thanks for the free book, now I don't have to buy +the print edition, ha ha!" + +Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books substitute for print +books. While I don't have controlled, quantitative data to refute the +proposition, I do have plenty of experience with this stuff, and all that +experience leads me to believe that giving away my books is selling the hell +out of them. + +More importantly, the free e-book skeptics have no evidence to offer in support +of their position -- just hand-waving and dark muttering about a mythological +future when book-lovers give up their printed books for electronic book-readers +(as opposed to the much more plausible future where book lovers go on buying +their fetish objects and carry books around on their electronic devices). + +I started giving away e-books after I witnessed the early days of the +"bookwarez" scene, wherein fans cut the binding off their favorite books, +scanned them, ran them through optical character recognition software, and +manually proofread them to eliminate the digitization errors. These fans were +easily spending 80 hours to rip their favorite books, and they were only +ripping their favorite books, books they loved and wanted to share. (The +80-hour figure comes from my own attempt to do this -- I'm sure that rippers +get faster with practice.) + +I thought to myself that 80 hours' free promotional effort would be a good +thing to have at my disposal when my books entered the market. What if I gave +my readers clean, canonical electronic editions of my works, saving them the +bother of ripping them, and so freed them up to promote my work to their +friends? + +After all, it's not like there's any conceivable way to stop people from +putting books on scanners if they really want to. Scanners aren't going to get +more expensive or slower. The Internet isn't going to get harder to use. Better +to confront this challenge head on, turn it into an opportunity, than to rail +against the future (I'm a science fiction writer -- tuning into the future is +supposed to be my metier). + +The timing couldn't have been better. Just as my first novel was being +published, a new, high-tech project for promoting sharing of creative works +launched: the Creative Commons project (CC). CC offers a set of tools that make +it easy to mark works with whatever freedoms the author wants to give away. CC +launched in 2003 and today, more than 160,000,000 works have been released +under its licenses. + +My next column will go into more detail on what CC is, what licenses it offers, +and how to use them -- but for now, check them out online at +creativecommons.org. + +$$$$ + +1~ The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights + +(Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007) ~# + +Of course, science fiction is a literature of the present. Many's the science +fiction writer who uses the future as a warped mirror for reflecting back the +present day, angled to illustrate the hidden strangeness buried by our +invisible assumptions: Orwell turned 1948 into Nineteen Eighty-Four. But even +when the fictional future isn't a parable about the present day, it is +necessarily a creation of the present day, since it reflects the present day +biases that infuse the author. Hence Asimov's Foundation, a New Deal-esque +project to think humanity out of its tribulations though social +interventionism. + +Bold SF writers eschew the future altogether, embracing a futuristic account of +the present day. William Gibson's forthcoming Spook Country is an act of +"speculative presentism," a book so futuristic it could only have been set in +2006, a book that exploits retrospective historical distance to let us glimpse +just how alien and futuristic our present day is. + +Science fiction writers aren't the only people in the business of predicting +the future. Futurists -- consultants, technology columnists, analysts, venture +capitalists, and entrepreneurial pitchmen -- spill a lot of ink, phosphors, and +caffeinated hot air in describing a vision for a future where we'll get more +and more of whatever it is they want to sell us or warn us away from. Tomorrow +will feature faster, cheaper processors, more Internet users, ubiquitous RFID +tags, radically democratic political processes dominated by bloggers, massively +multiplayer games whose virtual economies dwarf the physical economy. + +There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic." Futurismic +media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is often self-serving +-- think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future III -- and it generally +doesn't hold up well to scrutiny. + +SF films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2D2 is a fully +conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is equipped with a +range of holographic projectors and antipersonnel devices -- but no one has +installed a $15 sound card and some text-to-speech software on him, so he has +to whistle like Harpo Marx. Or take the Starship Enterprise, with a transporter +capable of constituting matter from digitally stored plans, and radios that can +breach the speed of light. + +The non-futurismic version of NCC-1701 would be the size of a softball (or +whatever the minimum size for a warp drive, transporter, and subspace radio +would be). It would zip around the galaxy at FTL speeds under remote control. +When it reached an interesting planet, it would beam a stored copy of a landing +party onto the surface, and when their mission was over, it would beam them +back into storage, annihilating their physical selves until they reached the +next stopping point. If a member of the landing party were eaten by a +green-skinned interspatial hippie or giant toga-wearing galactic tyrant, that +member would be recovered from backup by the transporter beam. Hell, the entire +landing party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective crewmember +onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances of Kirk operating in clonal +harmony. + +Futurism has a psychological explanation, as recounted in Harvard clinical +psych prof Daniel Gilbert's 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. Our memories and +our projections of the future are necessarily imperfect. Our memories consist +of those observations our brains have bothered to keep records of, woven +together with inference and whatever else is lying around handy when we try to +remember something. Ask someone who's eating a great lunch how breakfast was, +and odds are she'll tell you it was delicious. Ask the same question of someone +eating rubbery airplane food, and he'll tell you his breakfast was awful. We +weave the past out of our imperfect memories and our observable present. + +We make the future in much the same way: we use reasoning and evidence to +predict what we can, and whenever we bump up against uncertainty, we fill the +void with the present day. Hence the injunction on women soldiers in the future +of Starship Troopers, or the bizarre, glassed-over "Progressland" city diorama +at the end of the 1964 World's Fair exhibit The Carousel of Progress, which +Disney built for GE. + +Lapsarianism -- the idea of a paradise lost, a fall from grace that makes each +year worse than the last -- is the predominant future feeling for many people. +It's easy to see why: an imperfectly remembered golden childhood gives way to +the worries of adulthood and physical senescence. Surely the world is getting +worse: nothing tastes as good as it did when we were six, everything hurts all +the time, and our matured gonads drive us into frenzies of bizarre, +self-destructive behavior. + +Lapsarianism dominates the Abrahamic faiths. I have an Orthodox Jewish friend +whose tradition holds that each generation of rabbis is necessarily less +perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed +from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn +any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than +him. + +The natural endpoint of Lapsarianism is apocalypse. If things get worse, and +worse, and worse, eventually they'll just run out of worseness. Eventually, +they'll bottom out, a kind of rotten death of the universe when Lapsarian +entropy hits the nadir and takes us all with it. + +Running counter to Lapsarianism is progressivism: the Enlightenment ideal of a +world of great people standing on the shoulders of giants. Each of us +contributes to improving the world's storehouse of knowledge (and thus its +capacity for bringing joy to all of us), and our descendants and proteges take +our work and improve on it. The very idea of "progress" runs counter to the +idea of Lapsarianism and the fall: it is the idea that we, as a species, are +falling in reverse, combing back the wild tangle of entropy into a neat, tidy +braid. + +Of course, progress must also have a boundary condition -- if only because we +eventually run out of imaginary ways that the human condition can improve. And +science fiction has a name for the upper bound of progress, a name for the +progressive apocalypse: + +We call it the Singularity. + +Vernor Vinge's Singularity takes place when our technology reaches a stage that +allows us to "upload" our minds into software, run them at faster, hotter +speeds than our neurological wetware substrate allows for, and create multiple, +parallel instances of ourselves. After the Singularity, nothing is predictable +because everything is possible. We will cease to be human and become (as the +title of Rudy Rucker's next novel would have it) Postsingular. + +The Singularity is what happens when we have so much progress that we run out +of progress. It's the apocalypse that ends the human race in rapture and joy. +Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the Singularity "the rapture of the nerds," an apt +description for the mirror-world progressive version of the Lapsarian +apocalypse. + +At the end of the day, both progress and the fall from grace are illusions. The +central thesis of Stumbling on Happiness is that human beings are remarkably +bad at predicting what will make us happy. Our predictions are skewed by our +imperfect memories and our capacity for filling the future with the present +day. + +The future is gnarlier than futurism. NCC-1701 probably wouldn't send out +transporter-equipped drones -- instead, it would likely find itself on missions +whose ethos, mores, and rationale are largely incomprehensible to us, and so +obvious to its crew that they couldn't hope to explain them. + +Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the present is the only +era that we can hope to understand, because it's the only era that lets us +check our observations and predictions against reality. + +$$$$ + +1~ When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with +Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil + +(Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) ~# + +It's not clear to me whether the Singularity is a technical belief system or a +spiritual one. + +The Singularity -- a notion that's crept into a lot of skiffy, and whose most +articulate in-genre spokesmodel is Vernor Vinge -- describes the black hole in +history that will be created at the moment when human intelligence can be +digitized. When the speed and scope of our cognition is hitched to the +price-performance curve of microprocessors, our "progress" will double every +eighteen months, and then every twelve months, and then every ten, and +eventually, every five seconds. + +Singularities are, literally, holes in space from whence no information can +emerge, and so SF writers occasionally mutter about how hard it is to tell a +story set after the information Singularity. Everything will be different. What +it means to be human will be so different that what it means to be in danger, +or happy, or sad, or any of the other elements that make up the +squeeze-and-release tension in a good yarn will be unrecognizable to us +pre-Singletons. + +It's a neat conceit to write around. I've committed Singularity a couple of +times, usually in collaboration with gonzo Singleton Charlie Stross, the mad +antipope of the Singularity. But those stories have the same relation to +futurism as romance novels do to love: a shared jumping-off point, but +radically different morphologies. + +Of course, the Singularity isn't just a conceit for noodling with in the pages +of the pulps: it's the subject of serious-minded punditry, futurism, and even +science. + +Ray Kurzweil is one such pundit-futurist-scientist. He's a serial entrepreneur +who founded successful businesses that advanced the fields of optical character +recognition (machine-reading) software, text-to-speech synthesis, synthetic +musical instrument simulation, computer-based speech recognition, and +stock-market analysis. He cured his own Type-II diabetes through a careful +review of the literature and the judicious application of first principles and +reason. To a casual observer, Kurzweil appears to be the star of some kind of +Heinlein novel, stealing fire from the gods and embarking on a quest to bring +his maverick ideas to the public despite the dismissals of the establishment, +getting rich in the process. + +Kurzweil believes in the Singularity. In his 1990 manifesto, "The Age of +Intelligent Machines," Kurzweil persuasively argued that we were on the brink +of meaningful machine intelligence. A decade later, he continued the argument +in a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, whose most audacious claim is +that the world's computational capacity has been slowly doubling since the +crust first cooled (and before!), and that the doubling interval has been +growing shorter and shorter with each passing year, so that now we see it +reflected in the computer industry's Moore's Law, which predicts that +microprocessors will get twice as powerful for half the cost about every +eighteen months. The breathtaking sweep of this trend has an obvious +conclusion: computers more powerful than people; more powerful than we can +comprehend. + +Now Kurzweil has published two more books, The Singularity Is Near, When Humans +Transcend Biology (Viking, Spring 2005) and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough +to Live Forever (with Terry Grossman, Rodale, November 2004). The former is a +technological roadmap for creating the conditions necessary for ascent into +Singularity; the latter is a book about life-prolonging technologies that will +assist baby-boomers in living long enough to see the day when technological +immortality is achieved. + +See what I meant about his being a Heinlein hero? + +I still don't know if the Singularity is a spiritual or a technological belief +system. It has all the trappings of spirituality, to be sure. If you are pure +and kosher, if you live right and if your society is just, then you will live +to see a moment of Rapture when your flesh will slough away leaving nothing +behind but your ka, your soul, your consciousness, to ascend to an immortal and +pure state. + +I wrote a novel called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom where characters could +make backups of themselves and recover from them if something bad happened, +like catching a cold or being assassinated. It raises a lot of existential +questions: most prominently: are you still you when you've been restored from +backup? + +The traditional AI answer is the Turing Test, invented by Alan Turing, the gay +pioneer of cryptography and artificial intelligence who was forced by the +British government to take hormone treatments to "cure" him of his +homosexuality, culminating in his suicide in 1954. Turing cut through the +existentialism about measuring whether a machine is intelligent by proposing a +parlor game: a computer sits behind a locked door with a chat program, and a +person sits behind another locked door with his own chat program, and they both +try to convince a judge that they are real people. If the computer fools a +human judge into thinking that it's a person, then to all intents and purposes, +it's a person. + +So how do you know if the backed-up you that you've restored into a new body -- +or a jar with a speaker attached to it -- is really you? Well, you can ask it +some questions, and if it answers the same way that you do, you're talking to a +faithful copy of yourself. + +Sounds good. But the me who sent his first story into Asimov's seventeen years +ago couldn't answer the question, "Write a story for Asimov's" the same way the +me of today could. Does that mean I'm not me anymore? + +Kurzweil has the answer. + +"If you follow that logic, then if you were to take me ten years ago, I could +not pass for myself in a Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. But once the requisite +uploading technology becomes available a few decades hence, you could make a +perfect-enough copy of me, and it would pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. The +copy doesn't have to match the quantum state of my every neuron, either: if you +meet me the next day, I'd pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. Nevertheless, none +of the quantum states in my brain would be the same. There are quite a few +changes that each of us undergo from day to day, we don't examine the +assumption that we are the same person closely. + +"We gradually change our pattern of atoms and neurons but we very rapidly +change the particles the pattern is made up of. We used to think that in the +brain -- the physical part of us most closely associated with our identity -- +cells change very slowly, but it turns out that the components of the neurons, +the tubules and so forth, turn over in only days. I'm a completely different +set of particles from what I was a week ago. + +"Consciousness is a difficult subject, and I'm always surprised by how many +people talk about consciousness routinely as if it could be easily and readily +tested scientifically. But we can't postulate a consciousness detector that +does not have some assumptions about consciousness built into it. + +"Science is about objective third party observations and logical deductions +from them. Consciousness is about first-person, subjective experience, and +there's a fundamental gap there. We live in a world of assumptions about +consciousness. We share the assumption that other human beings are conscious, +for example. But that breaks down when we go outside of humans, when we +consider, for example, animals. Some say only humans are conscious and animals +are instinctive and machinelike. Others see humanlike behavior in an animal and +consider the animal conscious, but even these observers don't generally +attribute consciousness to animals that aren't humanlike. + +"When machines are complex enough to have responses recognizable as emotions, +those machines will be more humanlike than animals." + +The Kurzweil Singularity goes like this: computers get better and smaller. Our +ability to measure the world gains precision and grows ever cheaper. +Eventually, we can measure the world inside the brain and make a copy of it in +a computer that's as fast and complex as a brain, and voila, intelligence. + +Here in the twenty-first century we like to view ourselves as ambulatory +brains, plugged into meat-puppets that lug our precious grey matter from place +to place. We tend to think of that grey matter as transcendently complex, and +we think of it as being the bit that makes us us. + +But brains aren't that complex, Kurzweil says. Already, we're starting to +unravel their mysteries. + +"We seem to have found one area of the brain closely associated with +higher-level emotions, the spindle cells, deeply embedded in the brain. There +are tens of thousands of them, spanning the whole brain (maybe eighty thousand +in total), which is an incredibly small number. Babies don't have any, most +animals don't have any, and they likely only evolved over the last million +years or so. Some of the high-level emotions that are deeply human come from +these. + +"Turing had the right insight: base the test for intelligence on written +language. Turing Tests really work. A novel is based on language: with language +you can conjure up any reality, much more so than with images. Turing almost +lived to see computers doing a good job of performing in fields like math, +medical diagnosis and so on, but those tasks were easier for a machine than +demonstrating even a child's mastery of language. Language is the true +embodiment of human intelligence." + +If we're not so complex, then it's only a matter of time until computers are +more complex than us. When that comes, our brains will be model-able in a +computer and that's when the fun begins. That's the thesis of Spiritual +Machines, which even includes a (Heinlein-style) timeline leading up to this +day. + +Now, it may be that a human brain contains n logic-gates and runs at x cycles +per second and stores z petabytes, and that n and x and z are all within reach. +It may be that we can take a brain apart and record the position and +relationships of all the neurons and sub-neuronal elements that constitute a +brain. + +But there are also a nearly infinite number of ways of modeling a brain in a +computer, and only a finite (or possibly nonexistent) fraction of that space +will yield a conscious copy of the original meat-brain. Science fiction writers +usually hand-wave this step: in Heinlein's "Man Who Sold the Moon," the gimmick +is that once the computer becomes complex enough, with enough "random numbers," +it just wakes up. + +Computer programmers are a little more skeptical. Computers have never been +known for their skill at programming themselves -- they tend to be no smarter +than the people who write their software. + +But there are techniques for getting computers to program themselves, based on +evolution and natural selection. A programmer creates a system that spits out +lots -- thousands or even millions -- of randomly generated programs. Each one +is given the opportunity to perform a computational task (say, sorting a list +of numbers from greatest to least) and the ones that solve the problem best are +kept aside while the others are erased. Now the survivors are used as the basis +for a new generation of randomly mutated descendants, each based on elements of +the code that preceded them. By running many instances of a randomly varied +program at once, and by culling the least successful and regenerating the +population from the winners very quickly, it is possible to evolve effective +software that performs as well or better than the code written by human +authors. + +Indeed, evolutionary computing is a promising and exciting field that's +realizing real returns through cool offshoots like "ant colony optimization" +and similar approaches that are showing good results in fields as diverse as +piloting military UAVs and efficiently provisioning car-painting robots at +automotive plants. + +So if you buy Kurzweil's premise that computation is getting cheaper and more +plentiful than ever, then why not just use evolutionary algorithms to evolve +the best way to model a scanned-in human brain such that it "wakes up" like +Heinlein's Mike computer? + +Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil's argument in Spiritual Machines: if we +have computation to spare and a detailed model of a human brain, we need only +combine them and out will pop the mechanism whereby we may upload our +consciousness to digital storage media and transcend our weak and bothersome +meat forever.Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil's argument in Spiritual +Machines: if we have computation to spare and a detailed model of a human +brain, we need only combine them and out will pop the mechanism whereby we may +upload our consciousness to digital storage media and transcend our weak and +bothersome meat forever. + +But it's a cheat. Evolutionary algorithms depend on the same mechanisms as +real-world evolution: heritable variation of candidates and a system that culls +the least-suitable candidates. This latter -- the fitness-factor that +determines which individuals in a cohort breed and which vanish -- is the key +to a successful evolutionary system. Without it, there's no pressure for the +system to achieve the desired goal: merely mutation and more mutation. + +But how can a machine evaluate which of a trillion models of a human brain is +"most like" a conscious mind? Or better still: which one is most like the +individual whose brain is being modeled? + +"It is a sleight of hand in Spiritual Machines," Kurzweil admits. "But in The +Singularity Is Near, I have an in-depth discussion about what we know about the +brain and how to model it. Our tools for understanding the brain are subject to +the Law of Accelerating Returns, and we've made more progress in +reverse-engineering the human brain than most people realize." This is a tasty +Kurzweilism that observes that improvements in technology yield tools for +improving technology, round and round, so that the thing that progress begets +more than anything is more and yet faster progress. + +"Scanning resolution of human tissue -- both spatial and temporal -- is +doubling every year, and so is our knowledge of the workings of the brain. The +brain is not one big neural net, the brain is several hundred different +regions, and we can understand each region, we can model the regions with +mathematics, most of which have some nexus with chaos and self-organizing +systems. This has already been done for a couple dozen regions out of the +several hundred. + +"We have a good model of a dozen or so regions of the auditory and visual +cortex, how we strip images down to very low-resolution movies based on pattern +recognition. Interestingly, we don't actually see things, we essentially +hallucinate them in detail from what we see from these low resolution cues. +Past the early phases of the visual cortex, detail doesn't reach the brain. + +"We are getting exponentially more knowledge. We can get detailed scans of +neurons working in vivo, and are beginning to understand the chaotic algorithms +underlying human intelligence. In some cases, we are getting comparable +performance of brain regions in simulation. These tools will continue to grow +in detail and sophistication. + +"We can have confidence of reverse-engineering the brain in twenty years or so. +The reason that brain reverse engineering has not contributed much to +artificial intelligence is that up until recently we didn't have the right +tools. If I gave you a computer and a few magnetic sensors and asked you to +reverse-engineer it, you might figure out that there's a magnetic device +spinning when a file is saved, but you'd never get at the instruction set. Once +you reverse-engineer the computer fully, however, you can express its +principles of operation in just a few dozen pages. + +"Now there are new tools that let us see the interneuronal connections and +their signaling, in vivo, and in real-time. We're just now getting these tools +and there's very rapid application of the tools to obtain the data. + +"Twenty years from now we will have realistic simulations and models of all the +regions of the brain and [we will] understand how they work. We won't blindly +or mindlessly copy those methods, we will understand them and use them to +improve our AI toolkit. So we'll learn how the brain works and then apply the +sophisticated tools that we will obtain, as we discover how the brain works. + +"Once we understand a subtle science principle, we can isolate, amplify, and +expand it. Air goes faster over a curved surface: from that insight we +isolated, amplified, and expanded the idea and invented air travel. We'll do +the same with intelligence. + +"Progress is exponential -- not just a measure of power of computation, number +of Internet nodes, and magnetic spots on a hard disk -- the rate of paradigm +shift is itself accelerating, doubling every decade. Scientists look at a +problem and they intuitively conclude that since we've solved 1 percent over +the last year, it'll therefore be one hundred years until the problem is +exhausted: but the rate of progress doubles every decade, and the power of the +information tools (in price-performance, resolution, bandwidth, and so on) +doubles every year. People, even scientists, don't grasp exponential growth. +During the first decade of the human genome project, we only solved 2 percent +of the problem, but we solved the remaining 98 percent in five years." + +But Kurzweil doesn't think that the future will arrive in a rush. As William +Gibson observed, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." + +"Sure, it'd be interesting to take a human brain, scan it, reinstantiate the +brain, and run it on another substrate. That will ultimately happen." + +"But the most salient scenario is that we'll gradually merge with our +technology. We'll use nanobots to kill pathogens, then to kill cancer cells, +and then they'll go into our brain and do benign things there like augment our +memory, and very gradually they'll get more and more sophisticated. There's no +single great leap, but there is ultimately a great leap comprised of many small +steps. + +"In The Singularity Is Near, I describe the radically different world of 2040, +and how we'll get there one benign change at a time. The Singularity will be +gradual, smooth. + +"Really, this is about augmenting our biological thinking with nonbiological +thinking. We have a capacity of 1026 to 1029 calculations per second (cps) in +the approximately 1010 biological human brains on Earth and that number won't +change much in fifty years, but nonbiological thinking will just crash through +that. By 2049, nonbiological thinking capacity will be on the order of a +billion times that. We'll get to the point where bio thinking is relatively +insignificant. + +"People didn't throw their typewriters away when word-processing started. +There's always an overlap -- it'll take time before we realize how much more +powerful nonbiological thinking will ultimately be." + +It's well and good to talk about all the stuff we can do with technology, but +it's a lot more important to talk about the stuff we'll be allowed to do with +technology. Think of the global freak-out caused by the relatively trivial +advent of peer-to-peer file-sharing tools: Universities are wiretapping their +campuses and disciplining computer science students for writing legitimate, +general purpose software; grandmothers and twelve-year-olds are losing their +life savings; privacy and due process have sailed out the window without so +much as a by-your-leave. + +Even P2P's worst enemies admit that this is a general-purpose technology with +good and bad uses, but when new tech comes along it often engenders a response +that countenances punishing an infinite number of innocent people to get at the +guilty. + +What's going to happen when the new technology paradigm isn't song-swapping, +but transcendent super-intelligence? Will the reactionary forces be justified +in razing the whole ecosystem to eliminate a few parasites who are doing +negative things with the new tools? + +"Complex ecosystems will always have parasites. Malware [malicious software] is +the most important battlefield today. + +"Everything will become software -- objects will be malleable, we'll spend lots +of time in VR, and computhought will be orders of magnitude more important than +biothought. + +"Software is already complex enough that we have an ecological terrain that has +emerged just as it did in the bioworld. + +"That's partly because technology is unregulated and people have access to the +tools to create malware and the medicine to treat it. Today's software viruses +are clever and stealthy and not simpleminded. Very clever. + +"But here's the thing: you don't see people advocating shutting down the +Internet because malware is so destructive. I mean, malware is potentially more +than a nuisance -- emergency systems, air traffic control, and nuclear reactors +all run on vulnerable software. It's an important issue, but the potential +damage is still a tiny fraction of the benefit we get from the Internet. + +"I hope it'll remain that way -- that the Internet won't become a regulated +space like medicine. Malware's not the most important issue facing human +society today. Designer bioviruses are. People are concerted about WMDs, but +the most daunting WMD would be a designed biological virus. The means exist in +college labs to create destructive viruses that erupt and spread silently with +long incubation periods. + +"Importantly, a would-be bio-terrorist doesn't have to put malware through the +FDA's regulatory approval process, but scientists working to fix bio-malware +do. + +"In Huxley's Brave New World, the rationale for the totalitarian system was +that technology was too dangerous and needed to be controlled. But that just +pushes technology underground where it becomes less stable. Regulation gives +the edge of power to the irresponsible who won't listen to the regulators +anyway. + +"The way to put more stones on the defense side of the scale is to put more +resources into defensive technologies, not create a totalitarian regime of +Draconian control. + +"I advocate a one hundred billion dollar program to accelerate the development +of anti-biological virus technology. The way to combat this is to develop broad +tools to destroy viruses. We have tools like RNA interference, just discovered +in the past two years to block gene expression. We could develop means to +sequence the genes of a new virus (SARS only took thirty-one days) and respond +to it in a matter of days. + +"Think about it. There's no FDA for software, no certification for programmers. +The government is thinking about it, though! The reason the FCC is +contemplating Trusted Computing mandates," -- a system to restrict what a +computer can do by means of hardware locks embedded on the motherboard -- "is +that computing technology is broadening to cover everything. So now you have +communications bureaucrats, biology bureaucrats, all wanting to regulate +computers. + +"Biology would be a lot more stable if we moved away from regulation -- which +is extremely irrational and onerous and doesn't appropriately balance risks. +Many medications are not available today even though they should be. The FDA +always wants to know what happens if we approve this and will it turn into a +thalidomide situation that embarrasses us on CNN? + +"Nobody asks about the harm that will certainly accrue from delaying a +treatment for one or more years. There's no political weight at all, people +have been dying from diseases like heart disease and cancer for as long as +we've been alive. Attributable risks get 100-1000 times more weight than +unattributable risks." + +Is this spirituality or science? Perhaps it is the melding of both -- more +shades of Heinlein, this time the weird religions founded by people who took +Stranger in a Strange Land way too seriously. + +After all, this is a system of belief that dictates a means by which we can +care for our bodies virtuously and live long enough to transcend them. It is a +system of belief that concerns itself with the meddling of non-believers, who +work to undermine its goals through irrational systems predicated on their +disbelief. It is a system of belief that asks and answers the question of what +it means to be human. + +It's no wonder that the Singularity has come to occupy so much of the science +fiction narrative in these years. Science or spirituality, you could hardly ask +for a subject better tailored to technological speculation and drama. + +$$$$ + +1~ Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors + +(Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) +~# + +"Mostly Harmless" -- a phrase so funny that Adams actually titled a book after +it. Not that there's a lot of comedy inherent in those two words: rather, +they're the punchline to a joke that anyone who's ever written for publication +can really get behind. + +Ford Prefect, a researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, has been +stationed on Earth for years, painstakingly compiling an authoritative, +insightful entry on Terran geography, science and culture, excerpts from which +appear throughout the H2G2 books. His entry improved upon the old one, which +noted that Earth was, simply, "Harmless." + +However, the Guide has limited space, and when Ford submits his entry to his +editors, it is trimmed to fit: + +group{ + + "What? Harmless? Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One + word!" + + Ford shrugged. "Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the + Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book's + microprocessors," he said, "and no one knew much about the Earth + of course." + + "Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit." + + "Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. + He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement." + + "And what does it say now?" asked Arthur. + + "Mostly harmless," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed + cough. + +}group + +[fn: My lifestyle is as gypsy and fancy-free as the characters in H2G2, and as +a result my copies of the Adams books are thousands of miles away in storages +in other countries, and this essay was penned on public transit and cheap hotel +rooms in Chile, Boston, London, Geneva, Brussels, Bergen, Geneva (again), +Toronto, Edinburgh, and Helsinki. Luckily, I was able to download a dodgy, +re-keyed version of the Adams books from a peer-to-peer network, which network +I accessed via an open wireless network on a random street-corner in an +anonymous city, a fact that I note here as testimony to the power of the +Internet to do what the Guide does for Ford and Arthur: put all the information +I need at my fingertips, wherever I am. However, these texts *{are}* a little +on the dodgy side, as noted, so you might want to confirm these quotes before, +say, uttering them before an Adams truefan.] + +And there's the humor: every writer knows the pain of laboring over a piece for +days, infusing it with diverse interesting factoids and insights, only to have +it cut to ribbons by some distant editor (I once wrote thirty drafts of a +5,000-word article for an editor who ended up running it in three paragraphs as +accompaniment for what he decided should be a photo essay with minimal +verbiage.) + +Since the dawn of the Internet, H2G2 geeks have taken it upon themselves to +attempt to make a Guide on the Internet. Volunteers wrote and submitted essays +on various subjects as would be likely to appear in a good encyclopedia, +infusing them with equal measures of humor and thoughtfulness, and they were +edited together by the collective effort of the contributors. These projects -- +Everything2, H2G2 (which was overseen by Adams himself), and others -- are like +a barn-raising in which a team of dedicated volunteers organize the labors of +casual contributors, piecing together a free and open user-generated +encyclopedia. + +These encyclopedias have one up on Adams's Guide: they have no shortage of +space on their "microprocessors" (the first volume of the Guide was clearly +written before Adams became conversant with PCs!). The ability of humans to +generate verbiage is far outstripped by the ability of technologists to +generate low-cost, reliable storage to contain it. For example, Brewster +Kahle's Internet Archive project (archive.org) has been making a copy of the +Web -- the *{whole}* Web, give or take -- every couple of days since 1996. +Using the Archive's Wayback Machine, you can now go and see what any page +looked like on a given day. + +The Archive doesn't even bother throwing away copies of pages that haven't +changed since the last time they were scraped: with storage as cheap as it is +-- and it is *{very}* cheap for the Archive, which runs the largest database in +the history of the universe off of a collection of white-box commodity PCs +stacked up on packing skids in the basement of a disused armory in San +Francisco's Presidio -- there's no reason not to just keep them around. In +fact, the Archive has just spawned two "mirror" Archives, one located under the +rebuilt Library of Alexandria and the other in Amsterdam. [fn: Brewster Kahle +says that he was nervous about keeping his only copy of the "repository of all +human knowledge" on the San Andreas fault, but keeping your backups in a +censorship-happy Amnesty International watchlist state and/or in a floodplain +below sea level is probably not such a good idea either!] + +So these systems did not see articles trimmed for lack of space; for on the +Internet, the idea of "running out of space" is meaningless. But they *{were}* +trimmed, by editorial cliques, and rewritten for clarity and style. Some +entries were rejected as being too thin, while others were sent back to the +author for extensive rewrites. + +This traditional separation of editor and writer mirrors the creative process +itself, in which authors are exhorted to concentrate on *{either}* composing +*{or}* revising, but not both at the same time, for the application of the +critical mind to the creative process strangles it. So you write, and then you +edit. Even when you write for your own consumption, it seems you have to answer +to an editor. + +The early experimental days of the Internet saw much experimentation with +alternatives to traditional editor/author divisions. Slashdot, a nerdy +news-site of surpassing popularity [fn: Having a link to one's website posted +to Slashdot will almost inevitably overwhelm your server with traffic, knocking +all but the best-provisioned hosts offline within minutes; this is commonly +referred to as "the Slashdot Effect."], has a baroque system for "community +moderation" of the responses to the articles that are posted to its front +pages. Readers, chosen at random, are given five "moderator points" that they +can use to raise or lower the score of posts on the Slashdot message boards. +Subsequent readers can filter their views of these boards to show only highly +ranked posts. Other readers are randomly presented with posts and their +rankings and are asked to rate the fairness of each moderator's moderation. +Moderators who moderate fairly are given more opportunities to moderate; +likewise message-board posters whose messages are consistently highly rated. + +It is thought that this system rewards good "citizenship" on the Slashdot +boards through checks and balances that reward good messages and fair editorial +practices. And in the main, the Slashdot moderation system works [fn: as do +variants on it, like the system in place at Kur5hin.org (pronounced +"corrosion")]. If you dial your filter up to show you highly scored messages, +you will generally get well-reasoned, or funny, or genuinely useful posts in +your browser. + +This community moderation scheme and ones like it have been heralded as a good +alternative to traditional editorship. The importance of the Internet to "edit +itself" is best understood in relation to the old shibboleth, "On the Internet, +everyone is a slushreader." [fn: "Slush" is the term for generally execrable +unsolicited manuscripts that fetch up in publishers' offices -- these are +typically so bad that the most junior people on staff are drafted into reading +(and, usually, rejecting) them]. When the Internet's radical transformative +properties were first bandied about in publishing circles, many reassured +themselves that even if printing's importance was de-emphasized, that good +editors would always been needed, and doubly so online, where any +mouth-breather with a modem could publish his words. Someone would need to +separate the wheat from the chaff and help keep us from drowning in +information. + +One of the best-capitalized businesses in the history of the world, Yahoo!, +went public on the strength of this notion, proposing to use an army of +researchers to catalog every single page on the Web even as it was created, +serving as a comprehensive guide to all human knowledge. Less than a decade +later, Yahoo! is all but out of that business: the ability of the human race to +generate new pages far outstrips Yahoo!'s ability to read, review, rank and +categorize them. + +Hence Slashdot, a system of distributed slushreading. Rather than +professionalizing the editorship role, Slashdot invites contributors to +identify good stuff when they see it, turning editorship into a reward for good +behavior. + +But as well as Slashdot works, it has this signal failing: nearly every +conversation that takes place on Slashdot is shot through with discussion, +griping and gaming *{on the moderation system itself}*. The core task of +Slashdot has *{become}* editorship, not the putative subjects of Slashdot +posts. The fact that the central task of Slashdot is to rate other Slashdotters +creates a tenor of meanness in the discussion. Imagine if the subtext of every +discussion you had in the real world was a kind of running, pedantic nitpickery +in which every point was explicitly weighed and judged and commented upon. +You'd be an unpleasant, unlikable jerk, the kind of person that is sometimes +referred to as a "slashdork." + +As radical as Yahoo!'s conceit was, Slashdot's was more radical. But as radical +as Slashdot's is, it is still inherently conservative in that it presumes that +editorship is necessary, and that it further requires human judgment and +intervention. + +Google's a lot more radical. Instead of editors, it has an algorithm. Not the +kind of algorithm that dominated the early search engines like Altavista, in +which laughably bad artificial intelligence engines attempted to automatically +understand the content, context and value of every page on the Web so that a +search for "Dog" would turn up the page more relevant to the query. + +Google's algorithm is predicated on the idea that people are good at +understanding things and computers are good at counting things. Google counts +up all the links on the Web and affords more authority to those pages that have +been linked to by the most other pages. The rationale is that if a page has +been linked to by many web-authors, then they must have seen some merit in that +page. This system works remarkably well -- so well that it's nearly +inconceivable that any search-engine would order its rankings by any other +means. What's more, it doesn't pervert the tenor of the discussions and pages +that it catalogs by turning each one into a performance for a group of ranking +peers. [fn: Or at least, it *{didn't}*. Today, dedicated web-writers, such as +bloggers, are keenly aware of the way that Google will interpret their choices +about linking and page-structure. One popular sport is "googlebombing," in +which web-writers collude to link to a given page using a humorous keyword so +that the page becomes the top result for that word -- which is why, for a time, +the top result for "more evil than Satan" was Microsoft.com. Likewise, the +practice of "blogspamming," in which unscrupulous spammers post links to their +webpages in the message boards on various blogs, so that Google will be tricked +into thinking that a wide variety of sites have conferred some authority onto +their penis-enlargement page.] + +But even Google is conservative in assuming that there is a need for editorship +as distinct from composition. Is there a way we can dispense with editorship +altogether and just use composition to refine our ideas? Can we merge +composition and editorship into a single role, fusing our creative and critical +selves? + +You betcha. + +"Wikis" [fn: Hawai'ian for "fast"] are websites that can be edited by anyone. +They were invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995, and they have become one of the +dominant tools for Internet collaboration in the present day. Indeed, there is +a sort of Internet geek who throws up a Wiki in the same way that ants make +anthills: reflexively, unconsciously. + +Here's how a Wiki works. You put up a page: + +group{ + + Welcome to my Wiki. It is rad. + + There are OtherWikis that inspired me. + +}group + +Click "publish" and bam, the page is live. The word "OtherWikis" will be +underlined, having automatically been turned into a link to a blank page titled +"OtherWikis" (Wiki software recognizes words with capital letters in the middle +of them as links to other pages. Wiki people call this "camel-case," because +the capital letters in the middle of words make them look like humped camels.) +At the bottom of it appears this legend: "Edit this page." + +Click on "Edit this page" and the text appears in an editable field. Revise the +text to your heart's content and click "Publish" and your revisions are live. +Anyone who visits a Wiki can edit any of its pages, adding to it, improving on +it, adding camel-cased links to new subjects, or even defacing or deleting it. + +It is authorship without editorship. Or authorship fused with editorship. +Whichever, it works, though it requires effort. The Internet, like all human +places and things, is fraught with spoilers and vandals who deface whatever +they can. Wiki pages are routinely replaced with obscenities, with links to +spammers' websites, with junk and crap and flames. + +But Wikis have self-defense mechanisms, too. Anyone can "subscribe" to a Wiki +page, and be notified when it is updated. Those who create Wiki pages generally +opt to act as "gardeners" for them, ensuring that they are on hand to undo the +work of the spoilers. + +In this labor, they are aided by another useful Wiki feature: the "history" +link. Every change to every Wiki page is logged and recorded. Anyone can page +back through every revision, and anyone can revert the current version to a +previous one. That means that vandalism only lasts as long as it takes for a +gardener to come by and, with one or two clicks, set things to right. + +This is a powerful and wildly successful model for collaboration, and there is +no better example of this than the Wikipedia, a free, Wiki-based encyclopedia +with more than one million entries, which has been translated into 198 +languages [fn: That is, one or more Wikipedia entries have been translated into +198 languages; more than 15 languages have 10,000 or more entries translated] + +Wikipedia is built entirely out of Wiki pages created by self-appointed +experts. Contributors research and write up subjects, or produce articles on +subjects that they are familiar with. + +This is authorship, but what of editorship? For if there is one thing a Guide +or an encyclopedia must have, it is authority. It must be vetted by +trustworthy, neutral parties, who present something that is either The Truth or +simply A Truth, but truth nevertheless. + +The Wikipedia has its skeptics. Al Fasoldt, a writer for the Syracuse +Post-Standard, apologized to his readers for having recommended that they +consult Wikipedia. A reader of his, a librarian, wrote in and told him that his +recommendation had been irresponsible, for Wikipedia articles are often defaced +or worse still, rewritten with incorrect information. When another journalist +from the Techdirt website wrote to Fasoldt to correct this impression, Fasoldt +responded with an increasingly patronizing and hysterical series of messages in +which he described Wikipedia as "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous," +insulting the Techdirt writer and storming off in a huff. [fn: see +http://techdirt.com/articles/20040827/0132238_F.shtml for more] + +Spurred on by this exchange, many of Wikipedia's supporters decided to +empirically investigate the accuracy and resilience of the system. Alex +Halavais made changes to 13 different pages, ranging from obvious to subtle. +Every single change was found and corrected within hours. [fn: see +http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=794 for more] Then legendary +Princeton engineer Ed Felten ran side-by-side comparisons of Wikipedia entries +on areas in which he had deep expertise with their counterparts in the current +electronic edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His conclusion? "Wikipedia's +advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren't +for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. +Britannica's advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its +entries." [fn: see http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000675.html for +more] Not a complete win for Wikipedia, but hardly "outrageous," "repugnant" +and "dangerous." (Poor Fasoldt -- his idiotic hyperbole will surely haunt him +through the whole of his career -- I mean, "repugnant?!") + +There has been one very damning and even frightening indictment of Wikipedia, +which came from Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of the GeekCorps group, which +sends volunteers to poor countries to help establish Internet Service Providers +and do other good works through technology. + +Zuckerman, a Harvard Berkman Center Fellow, is concerned with the "systemic +bias" in a collaborative encyclopedia whose contributors must be conversant +with technology and in possession of same in order to improve on the work +there. Zuckerman reasonably observes that Internet users skew towards wealth, +residence in the world's richest countries, and a technological bent. This +means that the Wikipedia, too, is skewed to subjects of interest to that group +-- subjects where that group already has expertise and interest. + +The result is tragicomical. The entry on the Congo Civil War, the largest +military conflict the world has seen since WWII, which has claimed over three +million lives, has only a fraction of the verbiage devoted to the War of the +Ents, a fictional war fought between sentient trees in JRR Tolkien's *{Lord of +the Rings}*. + +Zuckerman issued a public call to arms to rectify this, challenging Wikipedia +contributors to seek out information on subjects like Africa's military +conflicts, nursing and agriculture and write these subjects up in the same +loving detail given over to science fiction novels and contemporary youth +culture. His call has been answered well. What remains is to infiltrate the +Wikipedia into the academe so that term papers, Masters and Doctoral theses on +these subjects find themselves in whole or in part on the Wikipedia. [fn See +http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xed/CROSSBOW for more on this] + +But if Wikipedia is authoritative, how does it get there? What alchemy turns +the maunderings of "mouth-breathers with modems" into valid, useful +encyclopedia entries? + +It all comes down to the way that disputes are deliberated over and resolved. +Take the entry on Israel. At one point, it characterized Israel as a +beleaguered state set upon by terrorists who would drive its citizens into the +sea. Not long after, the entry was deleted holus-bolus and replaced with one +that described Israel as an illegal state practicing Apartheid on an oppressed +ethnic minority. + +Back and forth the editors went, each overwriting the other's with his or her +own doctrine. But eventually, one of them blinked. An editor moderated the +doctrine just a little, conceding a single point to the other. And the other +responded in kind. In this way, turn by turn, all those with a strong opinion +on the matter negotiated a kind of Truth, a collection of statements that +everyone could agree represented as neutral a depiction of Israel as was likely +to emerge. Whereupon, the joint authors of this marvelous document joined +forces and fought back to back to resist the revisions of other doctrinaires +who came later, preserving their hard-won peace. [fn: This process was just +repeated in microcosm in the Wikipedia entry on the author of this paper, which +was replaced by a rather disparaging and untrue entry that characterized his +books as critical and commercial failures -- there ensued several editorial +volleys, culminating in an uneasy peace that couches the anonymous detractor's +skepticism in context and qualifiers that make it clear what the facts are and +what is speculation] + +What's most fascinating about these entries isn't their "final" text as +currently present on Wikipedia. It is the history page for each, blow-by-blow +revision lists that make it utterly transparent where the bodies were buried on +the way to arriving at whatever Truth has emerged. This is a neat solution to +the problem of authority -- if you want to know what the fully rounded view of +opinions on any controversial subject look like, you need only consult its +entry's history page for a blistering eyeful of thorough debate on the subject. + +And here, finally, is the answer to the "Mostly harmless" problem. Ford's +editor can trim his verbiage to two words, but they need not stay there -- +Arthur, or any other user of the Guide as we know it today [fn: that is, in the +era where we understand enough about technology to know the difference between +a microprocessor and a hard-drive] can revert to Ford's glorious and exhaustive +version. + +Think of it: a Guide without space restrictions and without editors, where any +Vogon can publish to his heart's content. + +Lovely. + +$$$$ + +1~ Warhol is Turning in His Grave + +(Originally published in The Guardian, November 13, 2007) ~# + +The excellent little programmer book for the National Portrait Gallery's +current show POPARTPORTRAITS has a lot to say about the pictures hung on the +walls, about the diverse source material the artists drew from in producing +their provocative works. They cut up magazines, copied comic books, drew in +trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse, reproduced covers from +*{Time}* magazine, made ironic use of the cartoon figure of Charles Atlas, +painted over an iconic photo of James Dean or Elvis Presley -- and that's just +in the first room of seven. + +The programmer book describes the aesthetic experience of seeing these +repositioned icons of culture high and low, the art created by the celebrated +artists Poons, Rauschenberg, Warhol, et al by nicking the work of others, +without permission, and remaking it to make statements and evoke emotions never +countenanced by the original creators. + +However, the book does not say a word about copyright. Can you blame it? A +treatise on the way that copyright and trademark were -- *{had to be}* -- +trammeled to make these works could fill volumes. Reading the programmer book, +you have to assume that the curators' only message about copyright is that +where free expression is concerned, the rights of the creators of the original +source material appropriated by the pop school take a back seat. + +There is, however, another message about copyright in the National Portrait +Gallery: it's implicit in the "No Photography" signs prominently placed +throughout the halls, including one right by the entrance of the +POPARTPORTRAITS exhibition. This isn't intended to protect the works from the +depredations of camera-flashes (it would read NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY if this were +so). No, the ban on pictures is in place to safeguard the copyright in the +works hung on the walls -- a fact that every gallery staffer I spoke to +instantly affirmed when I asked about the policy. + +Indeed, it seems that every square centimeter of the Portrait Gallery is under +some form of copyright. I wasn't even allowed to photograph the NO PHOTOGRAPHS +sign. A museum staffer explained that she'd been told that the typography and +layout of the NO PHOTOGRAPHS legend was, itself, copyrighted. If this is true, +then presumably, the same rules would prevent anyone from taking any pictures +in any public place -- unless you could somehow contrive to get a shot of +Leicester Square without any writing, logos, architectural facades, or images +in it. I doubt Warhol could have done it. + +What's the message of the show, then? Is it a celebration of remix culture, +reveling in the endless possibilities opened up by appropriating and re-using +without permission? + +Or is it the epitaph on the tombstone of the sweet days before the UN's +chartering of the World Intellectual Property Organization and the ensuing +mania for turning everything that can be sensed and recorded into someone's +property? + +Does this show -- paid for with public money, with some works that are +themselves owned by public institutions -- seek to inspire us to become 21st +century pops, armed with cameraphones, websites and mixers, or is it supposed +to inform us that our chance has passed, and we'd best settle for a life as +information serfs, who can't even make free use of what our eyes see, our ears +hear, of the streets we walk upon? + +Perhaps, just perhaps, it's actually a Dadaist show *{masquerading}* as a pop +art show! Perhaps the point is to titillate us with the delicious irony of +celebrating copyright infringement while simultaneously taking the view that +even the NO PHOTOGRAPHY sign is a form of property, not to be reproduced +without the permission that can never be had. + +$$$$ + +1~ The Future of Ignoring Things + +(Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) +~# + +For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for +them to help us to ignore. + +Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping spam, but virtually +no attention is paid to our interaction with our non-spam messages. Our mailer +may strive to learn from our ratings what is and is not spam, but it expends +practically no effort on figuring out which of the non-spam emails are +important and which ones can be safely ignored, dropped into archival folders, +or deleted unread. + +For example, I'm forever getting cc'd on busy threads by well-meaning +colleagues who want to loop me in on some discussion in which I have little +interest. Maybe the initial group invitation to a dinner (that I'll be out of +town for) was something I needed to see, but now that I've declined, I really +don't need to read the 300+ messages that follow debating the best place to +eat. + +I could write a mail-rule to ignore the thread, of course. But mail-rule +editors are clunky, and once your rule-list grows very long, it becomes +increasingly unmanageable. Mail-rules are where bookmarks were before the +bookmark site del.icio.us showed up -- built for people who might want to +ensure that messages from the boss show up in red, but not intended to be used +as a gigantic storehouse of a million filters, a crude means for telling the +computers what we don't want to see. + +Rael Dornfest, the former chairman of the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference and +founder of the startup IWantSandy, once proposed an "ignore thread" feature for +mailers: Flag a thread as uninteresting, and your mailer will start to hide +messages with that subject-line or thread-ID for a week, unless those messages +contain your name. The problem is that threads mutate. Last week's dinner plans +become this week's discussion of next year's group holiday. If the thread is +still going after a week, the messages flow back into your inbox -- and a +single click takes you back through all the messages you missed. + +We need a million measures like this, adaptive systems that create a gray zone +between "delete on sight" and "show this to me right away." + +RSS readers are a great way to keep up with the torrent of new items posted on +high-turnover sites like Digg, but they're even better at keeping up with sites +that are sporadic, like your friend's brilliant journal that she only updates +twice a year. But RSS readers don't distinguish between the rare and miraculous +appearance of a new item in an occasional journal and the latest click-fodder +from Slashdot. They don't even sort your RSS feeds according to the sites that +you click-through the most. + +There was a time when I could read the whole of Usenet -- not just because I +was a student looking for an excuse to avoid my assignments, but because Usenet +was once tractable, readable by a single determined person. Today, I can't even +keep up with a single high-traffic message-board. I can't read all my email. I +can't read every item posted to every site I like. I certainly can't plough +through the entire edit-history of every Wikipedia entry I read. I've come to +grips with this -- with acquiring information on a probabilistic basis, instead +of the old, deterministic, cover-to-cover approach I learned in the offline +world. + +It's as though there's a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as the network +only does best-effort delivery of packets, not worrying so much about the bits +that fall on the floor, TCP/IP users also do best-effort sweeps of the +Internet, focusing on learning from the good stuff they find, rather than +lamenting the stuff they don't have time to see. + +The network won't ever become more tractable. There will never be fewer things +vying for our online attention. The only answer is better ways and new +technology to ignore stuff -- a field that's just being born, with plenty of +room to grow. + +$$$$ + +1~ Facebook's Faceplant + +(Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook," in +InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) ~# + +Facebook's "platform" strategy has sparked much online debate and controversy. +No one wants to see a return to the miserable days of walled gardens, when you +couldn't send a message to an AOL subscriber unless you, too, were a +subscriber, and when the only services that made it were the ones that AOL +management approved. Those of us on the "real" Internet regarded AOL with a +species of superstitious dread, a hive of clueless noobs waiting to swamp our +beloved Usenet with dumb flamewars (we fiercely guarded our erudite flamewars +as being of a palpably superior grade), the wellspring of an + +Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of +pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of +pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: +"So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling -- +you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read +and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags +even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, +archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're +eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover +that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other "social" apps (cough +eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive +six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know +something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!" + +If there was any doubt about Facebook's lack of qualification to displace the +Internet with a benevolent dictatorship/walled garden, it was removed when +Facebook unveiled its new advertising campaign. Now, Facebook will allow its +advertisers use the profile pictures of Facebook users to advertise their +products, without permission or compensation. Even if you're the kind of person +who likes the sound of a "benevolent dictatorship," this clearly isn't one. + +Many of my colleagues wonder if Facebook can be redeemed by opening up the +platform, letting anyone write any app for the service, easily exporting and +importing their data, and so on (this is the kind of thing Google is doing with +its OpenSocial Alliance). Perhaps if Facebook takes on some of the +characteristics that made the Web work -- openness, decentralization, +standardization -- it will become like the Web itself, but with the added pixie +dust of "social," the indefinable characteristic that makes Facebook into pure +crack for a significant proportion of Internet users. + +The debate about redeeming Facebook starts from the assumption that Facebook is +snowballing toward critical mass, the point at which it begins to define "the +Internet" for a large slice of the world's netizens, growing steadily every +day. But I think that this is far from a sure thing. Sure, networks generally +follow Metcalfe's Law: "the value of a telecommunications network is +proportional to the square of the number of users of the system." This law is +best understood through the analogy of the fax machine: a world with one fax +machine has no use for faxes, but every time you add a fax, you square the +number of possible send/receive combinations (Alice can fax Bob or Carol or +Don; Bob can fax Alice, Carol and Don; Carol can fax Alice, Bob and Don, etc). + +But Metcalfe's law presumes that creating more communications pathways +increases the value of the system, and that's not always true (see Brook's Law: +"Adding manpower to a late softer project makes it later"). + +Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other +proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, +MySpace, et al, I'm inclined to think that these systems are subject to a +Brook's-law parallel: "Adding more users to a social network increases the +probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance." Perhaps we +can call this "boyd's Law" [NOTE TO EDITOR: "boyd" is always lower-case] for +danah [TO EDITOR: "danah" too!] boyd, the social scientist who has studied many +of these networks from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has +described the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability +in a series of sharp papers. + +Here's one of boyd's examples, a true story: a young woman, an elementary +school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her +an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the +friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own +profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping +over the Playa. The teacher inveigles her friends to clean up their profiles, +and all is well again until her boss, the school principal, signs up to the +service and demands to be added to her friends list. The fact that she doesn't +like her boss doesn't really matter: in the social world of Friendster and its +progeny, it's perfectly valid to demand to be "friended" in an explicit fashion +that most of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now that her boss is on her +friends list, our teacher-friend's buddies naturally assume that she is one of +the tribe and begin to send her lascivious Friendster-grams, inviting her to +all sorts of dirty funtimes. + +In the real world, we don't articulate our social networks. Imagine how creepy +it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered +with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by "friend" and "foe," with +the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses +and hearts. And yet, there's an undeniable attraction to corralling all your +friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to +you. Maybe it's evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our +evolution into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of +survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to +be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not, e.g., napping in the +treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to eat the fruit the +rest of us have foraged. + +Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work that runs +a heavy cognitive load. It's natural to seek out some neural prosthesis for +assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a "social scheduling" +application that would watch your phone and email and IM to figure out who your +pals were and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your +reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship aglow. By the +time you've reached your forties, chances are you're out-of-touch with more +friends than you're in-touch with, old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, +ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com +veterans... Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and +then some. + +You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's +not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy +who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants +to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of +sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now +wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please. + +It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking service" +has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been frustrated by it. I +think that's why these services are so volatile: why we're so willing to flee +from Friendster and into MySpace's loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's +socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but +*{removing}* someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. +The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on +it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some +invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to +someone who'll groan and wonder why we're dumb enough to think that we're +pals). + +That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users +flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find +you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go -- and Facebook joins +SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history. + +$$$$ + +1~ The Future of Internet Immune Systems + +(Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, +2007) ~# + +Bunhill Cemetery is just down the road from my flat in London. It’s a handsome +old boneyard, a former plague pit (“Bone hill” -- as in, there are so many +bones under there that the ground is actually kind of humped up into a hill). +There are plenty of luminaries buried there -- John “Pilgrim’s Progress” +Bunyan, William Blake, Daniel Defoe, and assorted Cromwells. But my favorite +tomb is that of Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century statistician for whom Bayesian +filtering is named. + +Bayesian filtering is plenty useful. Here’s a simple example of how you might +use a Bayesian filter. First, get a giant load of non-spam emails and feed them +into a Bayesian program that counts how many times each word in their +vocabulary appears, producing a statistical breakdown of the word-frequency in +good emails. + +Then, point the filter at a giant load of spam (if you’re having a hard time +getting a hold of one, I have plenty to spare), and count the words in it. Now, +for each new message that arrives in your inbox, have the filter count the +relative word-frequencies and make a statistical prediction about whether the +new message is spam or not (there are plenty of wrinkles in this formula, but +this is the general idea). + +The beauty of this approach is that you needn’t dream up “The Big Exhaustive +List of Words and Phrases That Indicate a Message Is/Is Not Spam.” The filter +naively calculates a statistical fingerprint for spam and not-spam, and checks +the new messages against them. + +This approach -- and similar ones -- are evolving into an immune system for the +Internet, and like all immune systems, a little bit goes a long way, and too +much makes you break out in hives. + +ISPs are loading up their network centers with intrusion detection systems and +tripwires that are supposed to stop attacks before they happen. For example, +there’s the filter at the hotel I once stayed at in Jacksonville, Fla. Five +minutes after I logged in, the network locked me out again. After an hour on +the phone with tech support, it transpired that the network had noticed that +the videogame I was playing systematically polled the other hosts on the +network to check if they were running servers that I could join and play on. +The network decided that this was a malicious port-scan and that it had better +kick me off before I did anything naughty. + +It only took five minutes for the software to lock me out, but it took well +over an hour to find someone in tech support who understood what had happened +and could reset the router so that I could get back online. + +And right there is an example of the autoimmune disorder. Our network defenses +are automated, instantaneous, and sweeping. But our fallback and oversight +systems are slow, understaffed, and unresponsive. It takes a millionth of a +second for the Transportation Security Administration’s body-cavity-search +roulette wheel to decide that you’re a potential terrorist and stick you on a +no-fly list, but getting un-Tuttle-Buttled is a nightmarish, months-long +procedure that makes Orwell look like an optimist. + +The tripwire that locks you out was fired-and-forgotten two years ago by an +anonymous sysadmin with root access on the whole network. The outsourced +help-desk schlub who unlocks your account can’t even spell "tripwire." The same +goes for the algorithm that cut off your credit card because you got on an +airplane to a different part of the world and then had the audacity to spend +your money. (I’ve resigned myself to spending $50 on long-distance calls with +Citibank every time I cross a border if I want to use my debit card while +abroad.) + +This problem exists in macro- and microcosm across the whole of our +technologically mediated society. The “spamigation bots” run by the Business +Software Alliance and the Music and Film Industry Association of America +(MAFIAA) entertainment groups send out tens of thousands of automated copyright +takedown notices to ISPs at a cost of pennies, with little or no human +oversight. The people who get erroneously fingered as pirates (as a Recording +Industry Association of America (RIAA) spokesperson charmingly puts it, “When +you go fishing with a dragnet, sometimes you catch a dolphin.”) spend days or +weeks convincing their ISPs that they had the right to post their videos, +music, and text-files. + +We need an immune system. There are plenty of bad guys out there, and +technology gives them force-multipliers (like the hackers who run 250,000-PC +botnets). Still, there’s a terrible asymmetry in a world where defensive +takedowns are automatic, but correcting mistaken takedowns is done by hand. + +$$$$ + +1~ All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites + +(Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, +California, 16 March 2005) ~# + +AOL hates spam. AOL could eliminate nearly 100 percent of its subscribers' spam +with one easy change: it could simply shut off its internet gateway. Then, as +of yore, the only email an AOL subscriber could receive would come from another +AOL subscriber. If an AOL subscriber sent a spam to another AOL subscriber and +AOL found out about it, they could terminate the spammer's account. Spam costs +AOL millions, and represents a substantial disincentive for AOL customers to +remain with the service, and yet AOL chooses to permit virtually anyone who can +connect to the Internet, anywhere in the world, to send email to its customers, +with any software at all. + +Email is a sloppy, complicated ecosystem. It has organisms of sufficient +diversity and sheer number as to beggar the imagination: thousands of SMTP +agents, millions of mail-servers, hundreds of millions of users. That richness +and diversity lets all kinds of innovative stuff happen: if you go to +nytimes.com and "send a story to a friend," the NYT can convincingly spoof your +return address on the email it sends to your friend, so that it appears that +the email originated on your computer. Also: a spammer can harvest your email +and use it as a fake return address on the spam he sends to your friend. +Sysadmins have server processes that send them mail to secret pager-addresses +when something goes wrong, and GPLed mailing-list software gets used by +spammers and people running high-volume mailing lists alike. + +You could stop spam by simplifying email: centralize functions like identity +verification, limit the number of authorized mail agents and refuse service to +unauthorized agents, even set up tollbooths where small sums of money are +collected for every email, ensuring that sending ten million messages was too +expensive to contemplate without a damned high expectation of return on +investment. If you did all these things, you'd solve spam. + +By breaking email. + +Small server processes that mail a logfile to five sysadmins every hour just in +case would be prohibitively expensive. Convincing the soviet that your +bulk-mailer was only useful to legit mailing lists and not spammers could take +months, and there's no guarantee that it would get their stamp of approval at +all. With verified identity, the NYTimes couldn't impersonate you when it +forwarded stories on your behalf -- and Chinese dissidents couldn't send out +their samizdata via disposable gmail accounts. + +An email system that can be controlled is an email system without complexity. +Complex ecosystems are influenced, not controlled. + +The Hollywood studios are conniving to create a global network of regulatory +mandates over entertainment devices. Here they call it the Broadcast Flag; in +Europe, Asia, Australia and Latinamerica it's called DVB Copy Protection +Content Management. These systems purport to solve the problem of +indiscriminate redistribution of broadcast programming via the Internet, but +their answer to the problem, such as it is, is to require that everyone who +wants to build a device that touches video has to first get permission. + +If you want to make a TV, a screen, a video-card, a high-speed bus, an +analog-to-digital converter, a tuner card, a DVD burner -- any tool that you +hope to be lawful for use in connection with digital TV signals -- you'll have +to go on bended knee to get permission to deploy it. You'll have to convince +FCC bureaucrats or a panel of Hollywood companies and their sellout IT and +consumer electronics toadies that the thing you're going to bring to market +will not disrupt their business models. + +That's how DVD works today: if you want to make a DVD player, you need to ask +permission from a shadowy organization called the DVD-CCA. They don't give +permission if you plan on adding new features -- that's why they're suing +Kaleidascape for building a DVD jukebox that can play back your movies from a +hard-drive archive instead of the original discs. + +CD has a rich ecosystem, filled with parasites -- entrepreneurial organisms +that move to fill every available niche. If you spent a thousand bucks on CDs +ten years ago, the ecosystem for CDs would reward you handsomely. In the +intervening decade, parasites who have found an opportunity to suck value out +of the products on offer from the labels and the dupe houses by offering you +the tools to convert your CDs to ring-tones, karaoke, MP3s, MP3s on iPods and +other players, MP3s on CDs that hold a thousand percent more music -- and on +and on. + +DVDs live in a simpler, slower ecosystem, like a terrarium in a bottle where a +million species have been pared away to a manageable handful. DVDs pay no such +dividend. A thousand dollars' worth of ten-year old DVDs are good for just what +they were good for ten years ago: watching. You can't put your kid into her +favorite cartoon, you can't downsample the video to something that plays on +your phone, and you certainly can't lawfully make a hard-drive-based jukebox +from your discs. + +The yearning for simple ecosystems is endemic among people who want to "fix" +some problem of bad actors on the networks. + +Take interoperability: you might sell me a database in the expectation that +I'll only communicate with it using your authorized database agents. That way +you can charge vendors a license fee in exchange for permission to make a +client, and you can ensure that the clients are well-behaved and don't trigger +any of your nasty bugs. + +But you can't meaningfully enforce that. EDS and other titanic software +companies earn their bread and butter by producing fake database clients that +impersonate the real thing as they iterate through every record and write it to +a text file -- or simply provide a compatibility layer through systems provided +by two different vendors. These companies produce software that lies -- +parasite software that fills niches left behind by other organisms, sometimes +to those organisms' detriment. + +So we have "Trusted Computing," a system that's supposed to let software detect +other programs' lies and refuse to play with them if they get caught out +fibbing. It's a system that's based on torching the rainforest with all its +glorious anarchy of tools and systems and replacing it with neat rows of tame +and planted trees, each one approved by The Man as safe for use with his +products. + +For Trusted Computing to accomplish this, everyone who makes a video-card, +keyboard, or logic-board must receive a key from some certifying body that will +see to it that the key is stored in a way that prevents end-users from +extracting it and using it to fake signatures. + +But if one keyboard vendor doesn't store his keys securely, the system will be +useless for fighting keyloggers. If one video-card vendor lets a key leak, the +system will be no good for stopping screenlogging. If one logic-board vendor +lets a key slip, the whole thing goes out the window. That's how DVD DRM got +hacked: one vendor, Xing, left its keys in a place where users could get at +them, and then anyone could break the DRM on any DVD. + +Not only is the Trusted Computing advocates' goal -- producing a simpler +software ecosystem -- wrongheaded, but the methodology is doomed. Fly-by-night +keyboard vendors in distant free trade zones just won't be 100 percent +compliant, and Trusted Computing requires no less than perfect compliance. + +The whole of DRM is a macrocosm for Trusted Computing. The DVB Copy Protection +system relies on a set of rules for translating every one of its restriction +states -- such as "copy once" and "copy never" -- to states in other DRM +systems that are licensed to receive its output. That means that they're +signing up to review, approve and write special rules for every single +entertainment technology now invented and every technology that will be +invented in the future. + +Madness: shrinking the ecosystem of everything you can plug into your TV down +to the subset that these self-appointed arbiters of technology approve is a +recipe for turning the electronics, IT and telecoms industries into something +as small and unimportant as Hollywood. Hollywood -- which is a tenth the size +of IT, itself a tenth the size of telecoms. + +In Hollywood, your ability to make a movie depends on the approval of a few +power-brokers who have signing authority over the two-hundred-million-dollar +budgets for making films. As far as Hollywood is concerned, this is a feature, +not a bug. Two weeks ago, I heard the VP of Technology for Warners give a +presentation in Dublin on the need to adopt DRM for digital TV, and his +money-shot, his big convincer of a slide went like this: + +"With advances in processing power, storage capacity and broadband access... +EVERYBODY BECOMES A BROADCASTER!" + +Heaven forfend. + +Simple ecosystems are the goal of proceedings like CARP, the panel that set out +the ruinously high royalties for webcasters. The recording industry set the +rates as high as they did so that the teeming millions of webcasters would be +rendered economically extinct, leaving behind a tiny handful of giant companies +that could be negotiated with around a board room table, rather than dealt with +by blanket legislation. + +The razing of the rainforest has a cost. It's harder to send a legitimate email +today than it ever was -- thanks to a world of closed SMTP relays. The cries +for a mail-server monoculture grow more shrill with every passing moment. Just +last week, it was a call for every mail-administrator to ban the "vacation" +program that sends out automatic responses informing senders that the recipient +is away from email for a few days, because mailboxes that run vacation can +cause "spam blowback" where accounts send their vacation notices to the hapless +individuals whose email addresses the spammers have substituted on the email's +Reply-To line. + +And yet there is more spam than there ever was. All the costs we've paid for +fighting spam have added up to no benefit: the network is still overrun and +sometimes even overwhelmed by spam. We've let the network's neutrality and +diversity be compromised, without receiving the promised benefit of spam-free +inboxes. + +Likewise, DRM has exacted a punishing toll wherever it has come into play, +costing us innovation, free speech, research and the public's rights in +copyright. And likewise, DRM has not stopped infringement: today, infringement +is more widespread than ever. All those costs borne by society in the name of +protecting artists and stopping infringement, and not a penny put into an +artist's pocket, not a single DRM-restricted file that can't be downloaded for +free and without encumbrance from a P2P network. + +Everywhere we look, we find people who should know better calling for a +parasite-free Internet. Science fiction writers are supposed to be forward +looking, but they're wasting their time demanding that Amazon and Google make +it harder to piece together whole books from the page-previews one can get via +the look-inside-the-book programs. They're even cooking up programs to spoof +deliberately corrupted ebooks into the P2P networks, presumably to assure the +few readers the field has left that reading science fiction is a mug's game. + +The amazing thing about the failure of parasite-elimination programs is that +their proponents have concluded that the problem is that they haven't tried +hard enough -- with just a few more species eliminated, a few more policies +imposed, paradise will spring into being. Their answer to an unsuccessful +strategy for fixing the Internet is to try the same strategy, only moreso -- +only fill those niches in the ecology that you can sanction. Hunt and kill more +parasites, no matter what the cost. + +We are proud parasites, we Emerging Techers. We're engaged in perl whirling, +pythoneering, lightweight javarey -- we hack our cars and we hack our PCs. +We're the rich humus carpeting the jungle floor and the tiny frogs living in +the bromeliads. + +The long tail -- Chris Anderson's name for the 95% of media that isn't top +sellers, but which, in aggregate, accounts for more than half the money on the +table for media vendors -- is the tail of bottom-feeders and improbable +denizens of the ocean's thermal vents. We're unexpected guests at the dinner +table and we have the nerve to demand a full helping. + +Your ideas are cool and you should go and make them real, even if they demand +that the kind of ecological diversity that seems to be disappearing around us. + +You may succeed -- provided that your plans don't call for a simple ecosystem +where only you get to provide value and no one else gets to play. + +$$$ + +1~ READ CAREFULLY + +(Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting +To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) ~# + +*{READ CAREFULLY. By reading this article, you agree, on behalf of your +employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and +all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, +clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and +acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your +employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without +prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you +have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your +employer.}* + +READ CAREFULLY -- all in caps, and what it means is, "IGNORE THIS." That's +because the small print in the clickwrap, shrinkwrap, browsewrap and other +non-negotiated agreements is both immutable and outrageous. + +Why read the "agreement" if you know that: + +1) No sane person would agree to its text, and + +2) Even if you disagree, no one will negotiate a better agreement with you? + +We seem to have sunk to a kind of playground system of forming contracts. There +are those who will tell you that you can form a binding agreement just by +following a link, stepping into a store, buying a product, or receiving an +email. By standing there, shaking your head, shouting "NO NO NO I DO NOT +AGREE," you agree to let me come over to your house, clean out your fridge, +wear your underwear and make some long-distance calls. + +If you buy a downloadable movie from Amazon Unbox, you agree to let them +install spyware on your computer, delete any file they don't like on your +hard-drive, and cancel your viewing privileges for any reason. Of course, it +goes without saying that Amazon reserves the right to modify the agreement at +any time. + +The worst offenders are people who sell you movies and music. They're a close +second to people who sell you software, or provide services over the Internet. +There's a rubric to this -- you're getting a discount in exchange for signing +onto an abusive agreement, but just try and find the software that *{doesn't}* +come with one of these "agreements" -- at any price. + +For example, Vista, Microsoft's new operating system, comes in a rainbow of +flavors varying in price from $99 to $399, but all of them come with the same +crummy terms of service, which state that "you may not work around any +technical limitations in the software," and that Windows Defender, the bundled +anti-malware program, can delete any program from your hard drive that +Microsoft doesn't like, even if it breaks your computer. + +It's bad enough when this stuff comes to us through deliberate malice, but it +seems that bogus agreements can spread almost without human intervention. +Google any obnoxious term or phrase from a EULA, and you'll find that the same +phrase appears in a dozens -- perhaps thousands -- of EULAs around the +Internet. Like snippets of DNA being passed from one virus to another as they +infect the world's corporations in a pandemic of idiocy, terms of service are +semi-autonomous entities. + +Indeed, when rocker Billy Bragg read the fine print on the MySpace user +agreement, he discovered that it appeared that site owner Rupert Murdoch was +laying claim to copyrights in every song uploaded to the site, in a silent, +sinister land-grab that turned the media baron into the world's most prolific +and indiscriminate hoarder of garage-band tunes. + +However, the EULA that got Bragg upset wasn't a Murdoch innovation -- it dates +back to the earliest days of the service. It seems to have been posted at a +time when the garage entrepreneurs who built MySpace were in no position to +hire pricey counsel -- something borne out by the fact that the old MySpace +EULA appears nearly verbatim on many other services around the Internet. It's +not going out very far on a limb to speculate that MySpace's founders merely +copied a EULA they found somewhere else, without even reading it, and that when +Murdoch's due diligence attorneys were preparing to give these lucky fellows +$600,000,000, that they couldn't be bothered to read the terms of service +anyway. + +In their defense, EULAese is so mind-numbingly boring that it's a kind of +torture to read these things. You can hardly blame them. + +But it does raise the question -- why are we playing host to these infectious +agents? If they're not read by customers *{or}* companies, why bother with +them? + +If you wanted to really be careful about this stuff, you'd prohibit every +employee at your office from clicking on any link, installing any program, +creating accounts, signing for parcels -- even doing a run to Best Buy for some +CD blanks, have you *{seen}* the fine-print on their credit-card slips? After +all, these people are entering into "agreements" on behalf of their employer -- +agreements to allow spyware onto your network, to not "work around any +technical limitations in their software," to let malicious software delete +arbitrary files from their systems. + +So far, very few of us have been really bitten in the ass by EULAs, but that's +because EULAs are generally associated with companies who have products or +services they're hoping you'll use, and enforcing their EULAs could cost them +business. + +But that was the theory with patents, too. So long as everyone with a huge +portfolio of unexamined, overlapping, generous patents was competing with +similarly situated manufacturers, there was a mutually assured destruction -- a +kind of detente represented by cross-licensing deals for patent portfolios. + +But the rise of the patent troll changed all that. Patent trolls don't make +products. They make lawsuits. They buy up the ridiculous patents of failed +companies and sue the everloving hell out of everyone they can find, building +up a war-chest from easy victories against little guys that can be used to fund +more serious campaigns against larger organizations. Since there are no +products to disrupt with a countersuit, there's no mutually assured +destruction. + +If a shakedown artist can buy up some bogus patents and use them to put the +screws to you, then it's only a matter of time until the same grifters latch +onto the innumerable "agreements" that your company has formed with a desperate +dot-bomb looking for an exit strategy. + +More importantly, these "agreements" make a mockery of the law and of the very +*{idea}* of forming agreements. Civilization starts with the idea of a real +agreement -- for example, "We crap *{here}* and we sleep *{there}*, OK?" -- and +if we reduce the noble agreement to a schoolyard game of no-takebacks, we erode +the bedrock of civilization itself. + +$$$$ + +1~ World of Democracycraft + +(Originally published as "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships," InformationWeek, +April 16, 2007) ~# + +Can you be a citizen of a virtual world? That's the question that I keep asking +myself, whenever anyone tells me about the wonder of multiplayer online games, +especially Second Life, the virtual world that is more creative playground than +game. + +These worlds invite us to take up residence in them, to invest time (and +sometimes money) in them. Second Life encourages you to make stuff using their +scripting engine and sell it in the game. You Own Your Own Mods -- it's the +rallying cry of the new generation of virtual worlds, an updated version of the +old BBS adage from the WELL: You Own Your Own Words. + +I spend a lot of time in Disney parks. I even own a share of Disney stock. But +I don't flatter myself that I'm a citizen of Disney World. I know that when I +go to Orlando, the Mouse is going to fingerprint me and search my bags, because +the Fourth Amendment isn't a "Disney value." + +Disney even has its own virtual currency, symbolic tokens called Disney Dollars +that you can spend or exchange at any Disney park. I'm reasonably confident +that if Disney refused to turn my Mickeybucks back into US Treasury +Department-issue greenbacks that I could make life unpleasant for them in a +court of law. + +But is the same true of a game? The money in your real-world bank-account and +in your in-game bank-account is really just a pointer in a database. But if the +bank moves the pointer around arbitrarily (depositing a billion dollars in your +account, or wiping you out), they face a regulator. If a game wants to wipe you +out, well, you probably agreed to let them do that when you signed up. + +Can you amass wealth in such a world? Well, sure. There are rich people in +dictatorships all over the world. Stalin's favorites had great big dachas and +drove fancy cars. You don't need democratic rights to get rich. + +But you *{do}* need democratic freedoms to *{stay}* rich. In-world wealth is +like a Stalin-era dacha, or the diamond fortunes of Apartheid South Africa: +valuable, even portable (to a limited extent), but not really *{yours}*, not in +any stable, long-term sense. + +Here are some examples of the difference between being a citizen and a +customer: + +In January, 2006 a World of Warcraft moderator shut down an advertisement for a +"GBLT-friendly" guild. This was a virtual club that players could join, whose +mission was to be "friendly" to "Gay/Bi/Lesbian/Transgendered" players. The WoW +moderator -- and Blizzard management -- cited a bizarre reason for the +shut-down: + +"While we appreciate and understand your point of view, we do feel that the +advertisement of a 'GLBT friendly' guild is very likely to result in harassment +for players that may not have existed otherwise. If you will look at our +policy, you will notice the suggested penalty for violating the Sexual +Orientation Harassment Policy is to 'be temporarily suspended from the game.' +However, as there was clearly no malicious intent on your part, this penalty +was reduced to a warning." + +Sara Andrews, the guild's creator, made a stink and embarrassed Blizzard (the +game's parent company) into reversing the decision. + +In 2004, a player in the MMO EVE Online declared that the game's creators had +stacked the deck against him, called EVE, "a poorly designed game which rewards +the greedy and violent, and punishes the hardworking and honest." He was upset +over a change in the game dynamics which made it easier to play a pirate and +harder to play a merchant. + +The player, "Dentara Rask," wrote those words in the preamble to a tell-all +memoir detailing an elaborate Ponzi scheme that he and an accomplice had +perpetrated in EVE. The two of them had bilked EVE's merchants out of a +substantial fraction of the game's total GDP and then resigned their accounts. +The objective was to punish the game's owners for their gameplay decisions by +crashing the game's economy. + +In both of these instances, players -- residents of virtual worlds -- resolved +their conflicts with game management through customer activism. That works in +the real world, too, but when it fails, we have the rule of law. We can sue. We +can elect new leaders. When all else fails, we can withdraw all our money from +the bank, sell our houses, and move to a different country. + +But in virtual worlds, these recourses are off-limits. Virtual worlds can and +do freeze players' wealth for "cheating" (amassing gold by exploiting loopholes +in the system), for participating in real-world gold-for-cash exchanges (eBay +recently put an end to this practice on its service), or for violating some +other rule. The rules of virtual worlds are embodied in EULAs, not +Constitutions, and are always "subject to change without notice." + +So what does it mean to be "rich" in Second Life? Sure, you can have a thriving +virtual penis business in game, one that returns a healthy sum of cash every +month. You can even protect your profits by regularly converting them to real +money. But if you lose an argument with Second Life's parent company, your +business vanishes. In other worlds, the only stable in-game wealth is the +wealth you take out of the game. Your virtual capital investments are totally +contingent. Piss off the wrong exec at Linden Labs, Blizzard, Sony Online +Entertainment, or Sularke and your little in-world business could disappear for +good. + +Well, what of it? Why not just create a "democratic" game that has a +constitution, full citizenship for players, and all the prerequisites for +stable wealth? Such a game would be open source (so that other, interoperable +"nations" could be established for you to emigrate to if you don't like the +will of the majority in one game-world), and run by elected representatives who +would instruct the administrators and programmers as to how to run the virtual +world. In the real world, the TSA sets the rules for aviation -- in a virtual +world, the equivalent agency would determine the physics of flight. + +The question is, would this game be any *{fun}*? Well, democracy itself is +pretty fun -- where "fun" means "engrossing and engaging." Lots of people like +to play the democracy game, whether by voting every four years or by moving to +K Street and setting up a lobbying operation. + +But video games aren't quite the same thing. Gameplay conventions like +"grinding" (repeating a task), "leveling up" (attaining a higher level of +accomplishment), "questing" and so on are functions of artificial scarcity. The +difference between a character with 10,000,000 gold pieces and a giant, rare, +terrifying crossbow and a newbie player is which pointers are associated with +each character's database entry. If the elected representatives direct that +every player should have the shiniest armor, best space-ships, and largest +bank-balances possible (this sounds like a pretty good election platform to +me!), then what's left to do? + +Oh sure, in Second Life they have an interesting crafting economy based on +creating and exchanging virtual objects. But these objects are *{also}* +artificially scarce -- that is, the ability of these objects to propagate +freely throughout the world is limited only by the software that supports them. +It's basically the same economics of the music industry, but applied to every +field of human endeavor in the entire (virtual) world. + +Fun matters. Real world currencies rise and fall based, in part, by the +economic might of the nations that issue them. Virtual world currencies are +more strongly tied to whether there's any reason to spend the virtual currency +on the objects that are denominated in it. 10,000 EverQuest golds might trade +for $100 on a day when that same sum will buy you a magic EQ sword that enables +you to play alongside the most interesting people online, running the most fun +missions online. But if all those players out-migrate to World of Warcraft, and +word gets around that Warlord's Command is way more fun than anything in poor +old creaky EverQuest, your EverQuest gold turns into Weimar Deutschemarks, a +devalued currency that you can't even give away. + +This is where the plausibility of my democratic, co-operative, open source +virtual world starts to break down. Elected governments can field armies, run +schools, provide health care (I'm a Canadian), and bring acid lakes back to +health. But I've never done anything run by a government agency that was a lot +of *{fun}*. It's my sneaking suspicion that the only people who'd enjoy playing +World of Democracycraft would be the people running for office there. The +players would soon find themselves playing IRSQuest, Second Notice of Proposed +Rulemaking Life, and Caves of 27 Stroke B. + +Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe customership is enough of a rock to build a platform of +sustainable industry upon. It's not like entrepreneurs in Dubai have a lot of +recourse if they get on the wrong side of the Emir; or like Singaporeans get to +appeal the decisions of President Nathan, and there's plenty of industry there. + +And hell, maybe bureaucracies have hidden reserves of fun that have been +lurking there, waiting for the chance to bust out and surprise us all. + +I sure hope so. These online worlds are endlessly diverting places. It'd be a +shame if it turned out that cyberspace was a dictatorship -- benevolent or +otherwise. + +$$$$ + +1~ Snitchtown + +(Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) ~# + +The 12-story Hotel Torni was the tallest building in central Helsinki during +the Soviet occupation of Finland, making it a natural choice to serve as KGB +headquarters. Today, it bears a plaque testifying to its checkered past, and +also noting the curious fact that the Finns pulled 40 kilometers of wiretap +cable out of the walls after the KGB left. The wire was solid evidence of each +operative's mistrustful surveillance of his fellow agents. + +The East German Stasi also engaged in rampant surveillance, using a network of +snitches to assemble secret files on every resident of East Berlin. They knew +who was telling subversive jokes--but missed the fact that the Wall was about +to come down. + +When you watch everyone, you watch no one. + +This seems to have escaped the operators of the digital surveillance +technologies that are taking over our cities. In the brave new world of +doorbell cams, wi-fi sniffers, RFID passes, bag searches at the subway and +photo lookups at office security desks, universal surveillance is seen as the +universal solution to all urban ills. But the truth is that ubiquitous cameras +only serve to violate the social contract that makes cities work. + +The key to living in a city and peacefully co-existing as a social animal in +tight quarters is to set a delicate balance of seeing and not seeing. You take +care not to step on the heels of the woman in front of you on the way out of +the subway, and you might take passing note of her most excellent handbag. But +you don't make eye contact and exchange a nod. Or even if you do, you make sure +that it's as fleeting as it can be. + +Checking your mirrors is good practice even in stopped traffic, but staring and +pointing at the schmuck next to you who's got his finger so far up his nostril +he's in danger of lobotomizing himself is bad form--worse form than picking +your nose, even. + +I once asked a Japanese friend to explain why so many people on the Tokyo +subway wore surgical masks. Are they extreme germophobes? Conscientious folks +getting over a cold? Oh, yes, he said, yes, of course, but that's only the +rubric. The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of +seeing your facial expression, to make your face into a disengaged, unreadable +blank--to spare others the discomfort of firing up their mirror neurons in +order to model your mood based on your outward expression. To make it possible +to see without seeing. + +There is one city dweller that doesn't respect this delicate social contract: +the closed-circuit television camera. Ubiquitous and demanding, CCTVs don't +have any visible owners. They ... occur. They exist in the passive voice, the +"mistakes were made" voice: "The camera recorded you." + +They are like an emergent property of the system, of being afraid and looking +for cheap answers. And they are everywhere: In London, residents are +photographed more than 300 times a day. + +The irony of security cameras is that they watch, but nobody cares that they're +looking. Junkies don't worry about CCTVs. Crazed rapists and other purveyors of +sudden, senseless violence aren't deterred. I was mugged twice on my old block +in San Francisco by the crack dealers on my corner, within sight of two CCTVs +and a police station. My rental car was robbed by a junkie in a Gastown garage +in Vancouver in sight of a CCTV. + +Three mad kids followed my friend out of the Tube in London last year and +murdered him on his doorstep. + +Crazy, desperate, violent people don't make rational calculus in regards to +their lives. Anyone who becomes a junkie, crack dealer, or cellphone-stealing +stickup artist is obviously bad at making life decisions. They're not deterred +by surveillance. + +Yet the cameras proliferate, and replace human eyes. The cops on my block in +San Francisco stayed in their cars and let the cameras do the watching. The +Tube station didn't have any human guards after dark, just a CCTV to record the +fare evaders. + +Now London city councils are installing new CCTVs with loudspeakers, operated +by remote coppers who can lean in and make a speaker bark at you, "Citizen, +pick up your litter." "Stop leering at that woman." "Move along." + +Yeah, that'll work. + +Every day the glass-domed cameras proliferate, and the gate-guarded mentality +of the deep suburbs threatens to invade our cities. More doorbell webcams, more +mailbox cams, more cams in our cars. + +The city of the future is shaping up to be a neighborly Panopticon, leeched of +the cosmopolitan ability to see, and not be seen, where every nose pick is +noted and logged and uploaded to the Internet. You don't have anything to hide, +sure, but there's a reason we close the door to the bathroom before we drop our +drawers. Everyone poops, but it takes a special kind of person to want to do it +in public. + +The trick now is to contain the creeping cameras of the law. When the city +surveils its citizens, it legitimizes our mutual surveillance--what's the +difference between the cops watching your every move, or the mall owners +watching you, or you doing it to the guy next door? + +I'm an optimist. I think our social contracts are stronger than our technology. +They're the strongest bonds we have. We don't aim telescopes through each +others' windows, because only creeps do that. + +But we need to reclaim the right to record our own lives as they proceed. We +need to reverse decisions like the one that allowed the New York Metropolitan +Transit Authority to line subway platforms with terrorism cameras, but said +riders may not take snapshots in the station. We need to win back the right to +photograph our human heritage in museums and galleries, and we need to beat +back the snitch-cams rent-a-cops use to make our cameras stay in our pockets. + +They're our cities and our institutions. And we choose the future we want to +live in. + +$$$$ + +1~ Hope you enjoyed it! The actual, physical object that corresponds to this +book is superbly designed, portable, and makes a great gift: + +http://craphound.com/content/buy + +If you would rather make a donation, you can buy a copy of the book for a +worthy school, library or other institution of your choosing: + +http://craphound.com/content/donate + +$$$$ + +1~ About the Author + +Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is an award-winning novelist, activist, blogger +and journalist. He is the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net), one of the +most popular blogs in the world, and has contributed to The New York Times +Sunday Magazine, The Economist, Forbes, Popular Science, Wired, Make, +InformationWeek, Locus, Salon, Radar, and many other magazines, newspapers and +websites. + +His novels and short story collections include *{Someone Comes to Town, Someone +Leaves Town}*, *{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}*, *{Overclocked: Stories of +the Future Present}* and his most recent novel, a political thriller for young +adults called *{Little Brother}*, published by Tor Books in May, 2008. All of +his novels and short story collections are available as free downloads under +the terms of various Creative Commons licenses. + +Doctorow is the former European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation +(eff.org) and has participated in many treaty-making, standards-setting and +regulatory and legal battles in countries all over the world. In 2006/2007, he +was the inaugural Canada/US Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the +Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. In 2007, he was also +named one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders" and one of +Forbes Magazine's top 25 "Web Celebrities." + +Born in Toronto, Canada in 1971, he is a four-time university dropout. He now +resides in London, England with his wife and baby daughter, where he does his +best to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance cameras while roaming the world, +speaking on copyright, freedom and the future. + +$$$$ diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..59bcd29 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst @@ -0,0 +1,9649 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Democratizing Innovation + :language: US + +@creator: + :author: von Hippel, Eric + +@date: + :published: 2005 + :created: 2005 + :issued: 2005 + :available: 2005 + :modified: 2005 + :valid: 2005 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) 2005 Eric von Hippel. Exclusive rights to publish and sell this book in print form in English are licensed to The MIT Press. All other rights are reserved by the author. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license. + :license: Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license 2.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/legalcode Some Rights Reserved. You are free to copy, distribute, display and perform the work, under the following conditions: Attribution, you must give the original author credit; you may not use this work for commercial purposes; No Derivative Works, you may not alter, transform, or build-upon this work. For reuse or distribution you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;book:discourse:innovation|democracy|open source software;innovation;technological innovations:economic aspects;diffusion of innovations;democracy;open source software:innovation + +@identifier: + :isbn: 9780262720472 + :oclc: 56880369 + +% HC79.T4H558 2005 +% 338'.064-dc22 2004061060 + +@links: + { Democratizing Innovation }http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm + { Eric von Hippel }http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/ + { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratizing_Innovation + { Democratizing Innovation @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Democratizing-Innovation-Eric-Von-Hippel/dp/0262720477 + { Democratizing Innovation @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=9780262720472 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:B,C; break=1 + :texpdf_font: Liberation Sans + :home_button_image: {di_evh.png }http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/ + :footer: {Eric von Hippel}http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/ + +:A~ @title @author + +--~# + +1~attribution Attribution + +Dedicated to all who are building the information commons. + +% Contents +% Acknowledgements ix +% 1 Introduction and Overview 1 +% 2 Development of Products by Lead Users 19 +% 3 Why Many Users Want Custom Products 33 +% 4 Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions 45 +% 5 Users' Low-Cost Innovation Niches 63 +% 6 Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations 77 +% 7 Innovation Communities 93 +% 8 Adapting Policy to User Innovation 107 +% 9 Democratizing Innovation 121 +% 10 Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations 133 +% 11 Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design 147 +% 12 Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields 165 +% Notes 179 +% Bibliography 183 +% Index 197 + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgements + +Early in my research on the democratization of innovation I was very fortunate +to gain five major academic mentors and friends. Nathan Rosenberg, Richard +Nelson, Zvi Griliches, Edwin Mansfield, and Ann Carter all provided crucial +support as I adopted economics as the organizing framework and toolset for my +work. Later, I collaborated with a number of wonderful co-authors, all of whom +are friends as well: Stan Finkelstein, Nikolaus Franke, Dietmar Harhoff, +Joachim Henkel, Cornelius Herstatt, Ralph Katz, Georg von Krogh, Karim Lakhani, +Gary Lilien, Christian Luthje, Pamela Morrison, William Riggs, John Roberts, +Stephan Schrader, Mary Sonnack, Stefan Thomke, Marcie Tyre, and Glen Urban. +Other excellent research collaborators and friends of long standing include +Carliss Baldwin, Sonali Shah, Sarah Slaughter, and Lars Jeppesen. + +At some point as interest in a topic grows, there is a transition from dyadic +academic relationships to a real research community. In my case, the essential +person in enabling that transition was my close friend and colleague Dietmar +Harhoff. He began to send wonderful Assistant Professors (Habilitanden) over +from his university, Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich, to do +collaborative research with me as MIT Visiting Scholars. They worked on issues +related to the democratization of innovation while at MIT and then carried on +when they returned to Europe. Now they are training others in their turn. + +I have also greatly benefited from close contacts with colleagues in industry. +As Director of the MIT Innovation Lab, I work together with senior innovation +managers in just a few companies to develop and try out innovation tools in +actual company settings. Close intellectual colleagues and friends of many +years standing in this sphere include Jim Euchner from Pitney-Bowes, Mary +Sonnack and Roger Lacey from 3M, John Wright from IFF, Dave Richards from +Nortel Networks, John Martin from Verizon, Ben Hyde from the Apache Foundation, +Brian Behlendorf from the Apache Foundation and CollabNet, and Joan Churchill +and Susan Hiestand from Lead User Concepts. Thank you so much for the huge (and +often humbling) insights that your and our field experimentation has provided! + +I am also eager to acknowledge and thank my family for the joy and learning +they experience and share with me. My wife Jessie is a professional editor and +edited my first book in a wonderful way. For this book, however, time devoted +to bringing up the children made a renewed editorial collaboration impossible. +I hope the reader will not suffer unduly as a consequence! My children +Christiana Dagmar and Eric James have watched me work on the book---indeed they +could not avoid it as I often write at home. I hope they have been drawing the +lesson that academic research can be really fun. Certainly, that is the lesson +I drew from my father, Arthur von Hippel. He wrote his books in his study +upstairs when I was a child and would often come down to the kitchen for a cup +of coffee. In transit, he would throw up his hands and say, to no one in +particular, "/{Why}/ do I choose to work on such difficult problems?" And then +he would look deeply happy. Dad, I noticed the smile! + +Finally my warmest thanks to my MIT colleagues and students and also to MIT as +an institution. MIT is a really inspiring place to work and learn from others. +We all understand the requirements for good research and learning, and we all +strive to contribute to a very supportive academic environment. And, of course, +new people are always showing up with new and interesting ideas, so fun and +learning are always being renewed! + +--+# + +:B~ Democratizing Innovation + +1~ 1 Introduction and Overview + +When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products +and services---both firms and individual consumers---are increasingly able to +innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great +advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that +have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate +can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act +as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual users do not have +to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations +developed and freely shared by others. +={ Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by users +43 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +11 ; + Users : + See also Lead users | expectations of economic benefit by +33 | innovation and +33 +} + +The trend toward democratization of innovation applies to information products +such as software and also to physical products. As a quick illustration of the +latter, consider the development of high-performance windsurfing techniques and +equipment in Hawaii by an informal user group. High-performance windsurfing +involves acrobatics such as jumps and flips and turns in mid-air. Larry +Stanley, a pioneer in high-performance windsurfing, described the development +of a major innovation in technique and equipment to Sonali Shah: +={ Stanley, L. ; + Shah, S. ; + Information commons : + See also Information communities | See also Innovation communities ; + windsurfing +} + +In 1978 Jürgen Honscheid came over from West Germany for the first Hawaiian +World Cup and discovered jumping, which was new to him, although Mike Horgan +and I were jumping in 1974 and 1975. There was a new enthusiasm for jumping and +we were all trying to outdo each other by jumping higher and higher. The +problem was that . . . the riders flew off in mid-air because there was no way +to keep the board with you---and as a result you hurt your feet, your legs, and +the board. +={ Honscheid, J. ; + Horgan, M. +} + +Then I remembered the "Chip," a small experimental board we had built with +footstraps, and thought "it's dumb not to use this for jumping." That's when I +first started jumping with footstraps and discovering controlled flight. I +could go so much faster than I ever thought and when you hit a wave it was like +a motorcycle rider hitting a ramp; you just flew into the air. All of a sudden +not only could you fly into the air, but you could land the thing, and not only +that, but you could change direction in the air! + +The whole sport of high-performance windsurfing really started from that. As +soon as I did it, there were about ten of us who sailed all the time together +and within one or two days there were various boards out there that had +footstraps of various kinds on them, and we were all going fast and jumping +waves and stuff. It just kind of snowballed from there. (Shah 2000) +={ Shah, S. ; + windsurfing +1 } + +By 1998, more than a million people were engaged in windsurfing, and a large +fraction of the boards sold incorporated the user-developed innovations for the +high-performance sport. + +The user-centered innovation process just illustrated is in sharp contrast to +the traditional model, in which products and services are developed by +manufacturers in a closed way, the manufacturers using patents, copyrights, and +other protections to prevent imitators from free riding on their innovation +investments. In this traditional model, a user's only role is to have needs, +which manufacturers then identify and fill by designing and producing new +products. The manufacturer-centric model does fit some fields and conditions. +However, a growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to +develop many and perhaps most new industrial and consumer products. Further, +the contribution of users is growing steadily larger as a result of continuing +advances in computer and communications capabilities. +={ Intellectual property rights : + See also Private-collective innovation | copyrights and | innovation and +2 ; + Copyrights : + See Intellectual property rights ; + Manufacturers : + government policy and +2 ; + Product development +2 ; + Users : + government policy and ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers +5 ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers +12 ; + Government policy : + manufacturer innovation and +2 ; + Manufacturers : + expectations of economic benefit by +26 + } + +In this book I explain in detail how the emerging process of user-centric, +democratized innovation works. I also explain how innovation by users provides +a very necessary complement to and feedstock for manufacturer innovation. + +The ongoing shift of innovation to users has some very attractive qualities. It +is becoming progressively easier for many users to get precisely what they want +by designing it for themselves. And innovation by users appears to increase +social welfare. At the same time, the ongoing shift of product-development +activities from manufacturers to users is painful and difficult for many +manufacturers. Open, distributed innovation is "attacking" a major structure of +the social division of labor. Many firms and industries must make fundamental +changes to long-held business models in order to adapt. Further, governmental +policy and legislation sometimes preferentially supports innovation by +manufacturers. Considerations of social welfare suggest that this must change. +The workings of the intellectual property system are of special concern. But +despite the difficulties, a democratized and user-centric system of innovation +appears well worth striving for. +={ Government policy : + See also Digital Millennium Copyright Act | and social welfare | user innovation and ; + Social welfare : + government policy and | innovation and +3 | user innovation and +3 } + +% check government policy + +Users, as the term will be used in this book, are firms or individual consumers +that expect to benefit from /{using}/ a product or a service. In contrast, +manufacturers expect to benefit from /{selling}/ a product or a service. A firm +or an individual can have different relationships to different products or +innovations. For example, Boeing is a manufacturer of airplanes, but it is also +a user of machine tools. If we were examining innovations developed by Boeing +for the airplanes it sells, we would consider Boeing a manufacturer-innovator +in those cases. But if we were considering innovations in metal-forming +machinery developed by Boeing for in-house use in building airplanes, we would +categorize those as user-developed innovations and would categorize Boeing as a +user-innovator in those cases. +={ Users : characteristics of +2 ; + Manufacturers : characteristics of +2 +} + +Innovation user and innovation manufacturer are the two general "functional" +relationships between innovator and innovation. Users are unique in that they +alone benefit /{directly}/ from innovations. All others (here lumped under the +term "manufacturers") must sell innovation-related products or services to +users, indirectly or directly, in order to profit from innovations. Thus, in +order to profit, inventors must sell or license knowledge related to +innovations, and manufacturers must sell products or services incorporating +innovations. Similarly, suppliers of innovation-related materials or +services---unless they have direct use for the innovations---must sell the +materials or services in order to profit from the innovations. +={ Innovation : + See also Innovation communities | functional sources of ; + Suppliers +} + +The user and manufacturer categorization of relationships between innovator and +innovation can be extended to specific functions, attributes, or features of +products and services. When this is done, it may turn out that different +parties are associated with different attributes of a particular product or +service. For example, householders are the users of the switching attribute of +a household electric light switch---they use it to turn lights on and off. +However, switches also have other attributes, such as "easy wiring" qualities, +that may be used only by the electricians who install them. Therefore, if an +electrician were to develop an improvement to the installation attributes of a +switch, it would be considered a user-developed innovation. + +A brief overview of the contents of the book follows. + +!_ Development of Products by Lead Users (Chapter 2) +={ Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users +6 ; + Lead users +6 : + characteristics of +6 | commercial attractiveness of +6 | economic benefit, expectations of +6 | identification of +6 | innovation and +50 | library information search system and +6 +} + +Empirical studies show that many users---from 10 percent to nearly 40 +percent---engage in developing or modifying products. About half of these +studies do not determine representative innovation frequencies; they were +designed for other purposes. Nonetheless, when taken together, the findings +make it very clear that users are doing a /{lot}/ of product modification and +product development in many fields. +={ innovation : + attractiveness of +8 +} + +Studies of innovating users (both individuals and firms) show them to have the +characteristics of "lead users." That is, they are ahead of the majority of +users in their populations with respect to an important market trend, and they +expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have +encountered there. The correlations found between innovation by users and lead +user status are highly significant, and the effects are very large. + +Since lead users are at the leading edge of the market with respect to +important market trends, one can guess that many of the novel products they +develop for their own use will appeal to other users too and so might provide +the basis for products manufacturers would wish to commercialize. This turns +out to be the case. A number of studies have shown that many of the innovations +reported by lead users are judged to be commercially attractive and/or have +actually been commercialized by manufacturers. +={ Manufacturers : + lead users and +1 +} + +Research provides a firm grounding for these empirical findings. The two +defining characteristics of lead users and the likelihood that they will +develop new or modified products have been found to be highly correlated +(Morrison et al. 2004). In addition, it has been found that the higher the +intensity of lead user characteristics displayed by an innovator, the greater +the commercial attractiveness of the innovation that the lead user develops +(Franke and von Hippel 2003a). In figure 1.1, the increased concentration of +innovations toward the right indicates that the likelihood of innovating is +higher for users having higher lead user index values. The rise in average +innovation attractiveness as one moves from left to right indicates that +innovations developed by lead users tend to be more commercially attractive. +(Innovation attractiveness is the sum of the novelty of the innovation and the +expected future generality of market demand.) +={ Morrison, Pamela ; + Franke, N. +5 ; + von Hippel, E. +5 +} + +%% Figure 1.1 +% 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 +% 10 +% 5 +% 0 +% Attractiveness +% of +% innovations +% Innovation +% Estimated OLS curve +% "Lead-user?ness" of users + +{di_evh_f1-1.png}image + +!_ Figure 1.1 +User-innovators with stronger "lead user" characteristics develop innovations +having higher appeal in the general marketplace. Estimated OLS function: Y = +2.06 + 0.57x, where Y represents attractiveness of innovation and x represents +lead-user-ness of respondent. Adjusted R^{2}^ = 0.281; p = 0.002; n = 30. +Source of data: Franke and von Hippel 2003. + +!_ Why Many Users Want Custom Products (Chapter 3) +={ Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and +2 ; + User need +2 ; + Users : + innovate-or-buy decisions by +8 | needs of +2 +} + +Why do so many users develop or modify products for their own use? Users may +innovate if and as they want something that is not available on the market and +are able and willing to pay for its development. It is likely that many users +do not find what they want on the market. Meta-analysis of market-segmentation +studies suggests that users' needs for products are highly heterogeneous in +many fields (Franke and Reisinger 2003). +={ Reisinger, H. } + +Mass manufacturers tend to follow a strategy of developing products that are +designed to meet the needs of a large market segment well enough to induce +purchase from and capture significant profits from a large number of customers. +When users' needs are heterogeneous, this strategy of "a few sizes fit all" +will leave many users somewhat dissatisfied with the commercial products on +offer and probably will leave some users seriously dissatisfied. In a study of +a sample of users of the security features of Apache web server software, +Franke and von Hippel (2003b) found that users had a very high heterogeneity of +need, and that many had a high willingness to pay to get precisely what they +wanted. Nineteen percent of the users sampled actually innovated to tailor +Apache more closely to their needs. Those who did were found to be +significantly more satisfied. +={ Apache web server software ; + Manufacturers : + lead users and +} + +!_ Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions (Chapter 4) +={ Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and +3 | manufacturers and +3 | agency costs and +2 ; + User need +3 ; + Users : needs of +3 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +9 | innovate-or-buy decisions and +4 ; + Users : agency costs and +2 +} + +Even if many users want "exactly right products" and are willing and able to +pay for their development, why do users often do this for themselves rather +than hire a custom manufacturer to develop a special just-right product for +them? After all, custom manufacturers specialize in developing products for one +or a few users. Since these firms are specialists, it is possible that they +could design and build custom products for individual users or user firms +faster, better, or cheaper than users could do this for themselves. Despite +this possibility, several factors can drive users to innovate rather than buy. +Both in the case of user firms and in the case of individual user-innovators, +agency costs play a major role. In the case of individual user-innovators, +enjoyment of the innovation process can also be important. +={ Agency costs +1 ; + Manufacturers : + custom products and +2 ; + Custom products : users and +3 ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers +13 +} + +With respect to agency costs, consider that when a user develops its own custom +product that user can be trusted to act in its own best interests. When a user +hires a manufacturer to develop a custom product, the situation is more +complex. The user is then a principal that has hired the custom manufacturer to +act as its agent. If the interests of the principal and the agent are not the +same, there will be agency costs. In general terms, agency costs are (1) costs +incurred to monitor the agent to ensure that it (or he or she) follows the +interests of the principal, (2) the cost incurred by the agent to commit itself +not to act against the principal's interest (the "bonding cost"), and (3) costs +associated with an outcome that does not fully serve the interests of the +principal (Jensen and Meckling 1976). In the specific instance of product and +service development, a major divergence of interests between user and custom +manufacturer does exist: the user wants to get precisely what it needs, to the +extent that it can afford to do so. In contrast, the custom manufacturer wants +to lower its development costs by incorporating solution elements it already +has or that it predicts others will want in the future---even if by doing so it +does not serve its present client's needs as well as it could. +={ Jensen, M. ; + Meckling, W. +} + +A user wants to preserve its need specification because that specification is +chosen to make /{that user's}/ overall solution quality as high as possible at +the desired price. For example, an individual user may specify a +mountain-climbing boot that will precisely fit his unique climbing technique +and allow him to climb Everest more easily. Any deviations in boot design will +require compensating modifications in the climber's carefully practiced and +deeply ingrained climbing technique---a much more costly solution from the +user's point of view. A custom boot manufacturer, in contrast, will have a +strong incentive to incorporate the materials and processes it has in stock and +expects to use in future even if this produces a boot that is not precisely +right for the present customer. For example, the manufacturer will not want to +learn a new way to bond boot components together even if that would produce the +best custom result for one client. The net result is that when one or a few +users want something special they will often get the best result by innovating +for themselves. +={ Innovation communities : + See also Information communities +1 +} + +A small model of the innovate-or-buy decision follows. This model shows in a +quantitative way that user firms with unique needs will always be better off +developing new products for themselves. It also shows that development by +manufacturers can be the most economical option when n or more user firms want +the same thing. However, when the number of user firms wanting the same thing +falls between 1 and n, manufacturers may not find it profitable to develop a +new product for just a few users. In that case, more than one user may invest +in developing the same thing independently, owing to market failure. This +results in a waste of resources from the point of view of social welfare. The +problem can be addressed by new institutional forms, such as the user +innovation communities that will be studied later in this book. +={ Innovation communities : + social welfare, and ; + Manufacturers : + social welfare and +21 ; + Social welfare : + manufacturer innovation and +21 | user innovation and +21 +} + +Chapter 4 concludes by pointing out that an additional incentive can drive +individual user-innovators to innovate rather than buy: they may value the +/{process}/ of innovating because of the enjoyment or learning that it brings +them. It might seem strange that user-innovators can enjoy product development +enough to want to do it themselves---after all, manufacturers pay their product +developers to do such work! On the other hand, it is also clear that enjoyment +of problem solving is a motivator for many individual problem solvers in at +least some fields. Consider for example the millions of crossword-puzzle +aficionados. Clearly, for these individuals enjoyment of the problem-solving +process rather than the solution is the goal. One can easily test this by +attempting to offer a puzzle solver a completed puzzle---the very output he or +she is working so hard to create. One will very likely be rejected with the +rebuke that one should not spoil the fun! Pleasure as a motivator can apply to +the development of commercially useful innovations as well. Studies of the +motivations of volunteer contributors of code to widely used software products +have shown that these individuals too are often strongly motivated to innovate +by the joy and learning they find in this work (Hertel et al. 2003; Lakhani and +Wolf 2005). +={ Hertel, G. ; + Lakhani, K. ; + Wolf, B. ; + Innovation process ; + Users : + innovation process and +7 ; + Free software : See also Open source software ; + Hackers ; + Herrmann, S. +} + +!_ Users' Low-Cost Innovation Niches (Chapter 5) +={ Users : + low-cost innovation niches of +3 +} + +An exploration of the basic processes of product and service development show +that users and manufacturers tend to develop different /{types}/ of +innovations. This is due in part to information asymmetries: users and +manufacturers tend to know different things. Product developers need two types +of information in order to succeed at their work: need and context-of-use +information (generated by users) and generic solution information (often +initially generated by manufacturers specializing in a particular type of +solution). Bringing these two types of information together is not easy. Both +need information and solution information are often very "sticky"---that is, +costly to move from the site where the information was generated to other +sites. As a result, users generally have a more accurate and more detailed +model of their needs than manufacturers have, while manufacturers have a better +model of the solution approach in which they specialize than the user has. +={ Innovation process ; + Users : innovation process and ; + Information asymmetries +3 ; + Manufacturers : information asymmetries of +2 ; + Sticky information +2 : innovation and +2 ; + Users : information asymmetries of +2 ; + Local information +2 +} + +When information is sticky, innovators tend to rely largely on information they +already have in stock. One consequence of the information asymmetry between +users and manufacturers is that users tend to develop innovations that are +functionally novel, requiring a great deal of user-need information and +use-context information for their development. In contrast, manufacturers tend +to develop innovations that are improvements on well-known needs and that +require a rich understanding of solution information for their development. For +example, firms that use inventory-management systems, such as retailers, tend +to be the developers of new approaches to inventory management. In contrast, +manufacturers of inventory-management systems and equipment tend to develop +improvements to the equipment used to implement these user-devised approaches +(Ogawa 1998). +={ Ogawa, S. ; + Innovation : + functional sources of +} + +If we extend the information-asymmetry argument one step further, we see that +information stickiness implies that information on hand will also differ among +/{individual}/ users and manufacturers. The information assets of some +particular user (or some particular manufacturer) will be closest to what is +required to develop a particular innovation, and so the cost of developing that +innovation will be relatively low for that user or manufacturer. The net result +is that user innovation activities will be distributed across many users +according to their information endowments. With respect to innovation, one user +is by no means a perfect substitute for another. + +!_ Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations (Chapter 6) +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + case for +5 | evidence of +5 | in information communities +5 | intellectual property rights and +5 | users and +5 ; + Users : + free revealing by +5 +} + +The social efficiency of a system in which individual innovations are developed +by individual users is increased if users somehow diffuse what they have +developed to others. Manufacturer-innovators /{partially}/ achieve this when +they sell a product or a service on the open market (partially because they +diffuse the product incorporating the innovation, but often not all the +information that others would need to fully understand and replicate it). If +user-innovators do not somehow also diffuse what they have done, multiple users +with very similar needs will have to independently develop very similar +innovations---a poor use of resources from the viewpoint of social welfare. +Empirical research shows that users often do achieve widespread diffusion by an +unexpected means: they often "freely reveal" what they have developed. When we +say that an innovator freely reveals information about a product or service it +has developed, we mean that all intellectual property rights to that +information are voluntarily given up by the innovator, and all interested +parties are given access to it---the information becomes a public good. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + manufacturers and +2 ; + Innovation : + distributed process of +4 ; + Intellectual property rights : + free revealing and ; + Manufacturers : + free revealing and +2 +} + +The empirical finding that users often freely reveal their innovations has been +a major surprise to innovation researchers. On the face of it, if a +user-innovator's proprietary information has value to others, one would think +that the user would strive to prevent free diffusion rather than help others to +free ride on what it has developed at private cost. Nonetheless, it is now very +clear that individual users and user firms---and sometimes +manufacturers---often freely reveal detailed information about their +innovations. + +The practices visible in "open source" software development were important in +bringing this phenomenon to general awareness. In these projects it was clear +/{policy}/ that project contributors would routinely and systematically freely +reveal code they had developed at private expense (Raymond 1999). However, free +revealing of product innovations has a history that began long before the +advent of open source software. Allen, in his 1983 study of the +eighteenth-century iron industry, was probably the first to consider the +phenomon systematically. Later, Nuvolari (2004) discussed free revealing in the +early history of mine pumping engines. Contemporary free revealing by users has +been documented by von Hippel and Finkelstein (1979) for medical equipment, by +Lim (2000) for semiconductor process equipment, by Morrison, Roberts, and von +Hippel (2000) for library information systems, and by Franke and Shah (2003) +for sporting equipment. Henkel (2003) has documented free revealing among +manufacturers in the case of embedded Linux software. +={ Allen, R. ; + Finkelstein, S. ; + Franke, N. ; + Henkel, J. ; + Lim, K. ; + Linux ; + Morrison, Pamela ; + Nuvolari, A. ; + Raymond, E. ; + Roberts, J. ; + Shah, S. ; + von Hippel, E. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + open source software and +7 ; + Intellectual property rights : + open source software and +1 ; + Open source software : + See also Free software communities and | free revealing and +7 | intellectual property rights and +2 ; + Library information search system +} + +Innovators often freely reveal because it is often the best or the only +practical option available to them. Hiding an innovation as a trade secret is +unlikely to be successful for long: too many generally know similar things, and +some holders of the "secret" information stand to lose little or nothing by +freely revealing what they know. Studies find that innovators in many fields +view patents as having only limited value. Copyright protection and copyright +licensing are applicable only to "writings," such as books, graphic images, and +computer software. +={ Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and | trade secrets and | free revealing and | licensing of | patents and ; + Government policy : + trade secrets and +} + +Active efforts by innovators to freely reveal---as opposed to sullen +acceptance---are explicable because free revealing can provide innovators with +significant private benefits as well as losses or risks of loss. Users who +freely reveal what they have done often find that others then improve or +suggest improvements to the innovation, to mutual benefit (Raymond 1999). +Freely revealing users also may benefit from enhancement of reputation, from +positive network effects due to increased diffusion of their innovation, and +from other factors. Being the first to freely reveal a particular innovation +can also enhance the benefits received, and so there can actually be a rush to +reveal, much as scientists rush to publish in order to gain the benefits +associated with being the first to have made a particular advancement. +={ Raymond, E. } + +!_ Innovation Communities (Chapter 7) +={ Innovation communities +3 } + +Innovation by users tends to be widely distributed rather than concentrated +among just a very few very innovative users. As a result, it is important for +user-innovators to find ways to combine and leverage their efforts. Users +achieve this by engaging in many forms of cooperation. Direct, informal +user-to-user cooperation (assisting others to innovate, answering questions, +and so on) is common. Organized cooperation is also common, with users joining +together in networks and communities that provide useful structures and tools +for their interactions and for the distribution of innovations. Innovation +communities can increase the speed and effectiveness with which users and also +manufacturers can develop and test and diffuse their innovations. They also can +greatly increase the ease with which innovators can build larger systems from +interlinkable modules created by community participants. +={ Users : + innovation communities and +2 +} + +Free and open source software projects are a relatively well-developed and very +successful form of Internet-based innovation community. However, innovation +communities are by no means restricted to software or even to information +products, and they can play a major role in the development of physical +products. Franke and Shah (2003) have documented the value that user innovation +communities can provide to user-innovators developing physical products in the +field of sporting equipment. The analogy to open source innovation communities +is clear. +={ Franke, N. ; + Shah, S. ; + Free software ; + Innovation communities : + open source software and | physical products and | sporting equipment and ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +} + +The collective or community effort to provide a public good---which is what +freely revealed innovations are---has traditionally been explored in the +literature on "collective action." However, behaviors seen in extant innovation +communities fail to correspond to that literature at major points. In essence, +innovation communities appear to be more robust with respect to recruiting and +rewarding members than the literature would predict. Georg von Krogh and I +attribute this to innovation contributors' obtaining some private rewards that +are not shared equally by free riders (those who take without contributing). +For example, a product that a user-innovator develops and freely reveals might +be perfectly suited to that user-innovator's requirements but less well suited +to the requirements of free riders. Innovation communities thus illustrate a +"private-collective" model of innovation incentive (von Hippel and von Krogh +2003). +={ von Hippel, E. ; + von Krogh, G. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + collective action model for | private-collective model for ; + Innovation communities : + and sources of innovation ; + Private-collective model ; + Social welfare : + private-collective model and +2 ; + Users : + social welfare and +6 +} + +!_ Adapting Policy to User Innovation (Chapter 8) +={ Government policy : + social welfare and +5 | user innovation and +5 ; + Social welfare : + and government policy +5 +} + +Is innovation by users a "good thing?" Welfare economists answer such a +question by studying how a phenomenon or a change affects social welfare. +Henkel and von Hippel (2005) explored the social welfare implications of user +innovation. They found that, relative to a world in which only manufacturers +innovate, social welfare is very probably increased by the presence of +innovations freely revealed by users. This finding implies that policy making +should support user innovation, or at least should ensure that legislation and +regulations do not favor manufacturers at the expense of user-innovators. +={ Henkel, J. ; + von Hippel, E. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + manufacturers and +} + +The transitions required of policy making to achieve neutrality with respect to +user innovation vs. manufacturer innovation are significant. Consider the +impact on open and distributed innovation of past and current policy decisions. +Research done in the past 30 years has convinced many academics that +intellectual property law is sometimes or often not having its intended effect. +Intellectual property law was intended to increase the amount of innovation +investment. Instead, it now appears that there are economies of scope in both +patenting and copyright that allow firms to use these forms of intellectual +property law in ways that are directly opposed to the intent of policy makers +and to the public welfare. Major firms can invest to develop large portfolios +of patents. They can then use these to create "patent thickets"---dense +networks of patent claims that give them plausible grounds for threatening to +sue across a wide range of intellectual property. They may do this to prevent +others from introducing a superior innovation and/or to demand licenses from +weaker competitors on favorable terms (Shapiro 2001). Movie, publishing, and +software firms can use large collections of copyrighted work to a similar +purpose (Benkler 2002). In view of the distributed nature of innovation by +users, with each tending to create a relatively small amount of intellectual +property, users are likely to be disadvantaged by such strategies. +={ Benkler, Y. ; + Shapiro, C. ; + Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and +1 ; + Government policy : + copyrights and +1 | patents and | patent thickets and ; + Intellectual property rights : + patents and | patent thickets and | licensing of +} + +It is also important to note that users (and manufacturers) tend to build +prototypes of their innovations economically by modifying products already +available on the market to serve a new purpose. Laws such as the (US) Digital +Millennium Copyright Act, intended to prevent consumers from illegally copying +protected works, also can have the unintended side effect of preventing users +from modifying products that they purchase (Varian 2002). Both fairness and +social welfare considerations suggest that innovation-related policies should +be made neutral with respect to the sources of innovation. +={ Digital Millennium Copyright Act ; + Varian, H. +} + +It may be that current impediments to user innovation will be solved by +legislation or by policy making. However, beneficiaries of existing law and +policy will predictably resist change. Fortunately, a way to get around some of +these problems is in the hands of innovators themselves. Suppose many +innovators in a particular field decide to freely reveal what they have +developed, as they often have reason to do. In that case, users can +collectively create an information commons (a collection of information freely +available to all) containing substitutes for some or a great deal of +information now held as private intellectual property. Then user-innovators can +work around the strictures of intellectual property law by simply using these +freely revealed substitutes (Lessig 2001). This is essentially what is +happening in the field of software. For many problems, user-innovators in that +field now have a choice between proprietary, closed software provided by +Microsoft and other firms and open source software that they can legally +download from the Internet and legally modify to serve their own specific +needs. +={ Lessig, L. ; + Microsoft ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + collective action model for | in information communities | intellectual property rights and | users and +1 ; + Information commons ; + Intellectual property rights : + free revealing and | information communities and ; + Microsoft ; + User need ; + Users : + free revealing by +} + +Policy making that levels the playing field between users and manufacturers +will force more rapid change onto manufacturers but will by no means destroy +them. Experience in fields where open and distributed innovation processes are +far advanced show how manufacturers can and do adapt. Some, for example, learn +to supply proprietary platform products that offer user-innovators a framework +upon which to develop and use their improvements. +={ Manufacturers : + innovation and +7 +} + +!_ Democratizing Innovation (Chapter 9) + +Users' ability to innovate is improving /{radically}/ and /{rapidly}/ as a +result of the steadily improving quality of computer software and hardware, +improved access to easy-to-use tools and components for innovation, and access +to a steadily richer innovation commons. Today, user firms and even individual +hobbyists have access to sophisticated programming tools for software and +sophisticated CAD design tools for hardware and electronics. These +information-based tools can be run on a personal computer, and they are rapidly +coming down in price. As a consequence, innovation by users will continue to +grow even if the degree of heterogeneity of need and willingness to invest in +obtaining a precisely right product remains constant. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + users and ; + Task partitioning +5 : + See also Toolkits ; + Toolkits : + manufacturers and +5 | task partitioning +5 | user-friendly tools for | users and +5 ; + User need ; + Users : + innovation and +5 +} + +Equivalents of the innovation resources described above have long been +available within corporations to a few. Senior designers at firms have long +been supplied with engineers and designers under their direct control, and with +the resources needed to quickly construct and test prototype designs. The same +is true in other fields, including automotive design and clothing design: just +think of the staffs of engineers and modelmakers supplied so that top auto +designers can quickly realize and test their designs. + +But if, as we have seen, the information needed to innovate in important ways +is widely distributed, the traditional pattern of concentrating +innovation-support resources on a few individuals is hugely inefficient. +High-cost resources for innovation support cannot efficiently be allocated to +"the right people with the right information:" it is very difficult to know who +these people may be before they develop an innovation that turns out to have +general value. When the cost of high-quality resources for design and +prototyping becomes very low (the trend we have described), these resources can +be diffused very widely, and the allocation problem diminishes in significance. +The net result is and will be to democratize the opportunity to create. +={ Manufacturers : + innovation and +9 ; + Users : + innovation and +9 +} + +On a level playing field, users will be an increasingly important source of +innovation and will increasingly substitute for or complement manufacturers' +innovation-related activities. In the case of information products, users have +the possibility of largely or completely doing without the services of +manufacturers. Open source software projects are object lessons that teach us +that users can create, produce, diffuse, provide user field support for, +update, and use complex products by and for themselves in the context of user +innovation communities. In physical product fields, product development by +users can evolve to the point of largely or totally supplanting product +development---but not product manufacturing---by manufacturers. (The economies +of scale associated with manufacturing and distributing physical products give +manufacturers an advantage over "do-it-yourself" users in those activities.) +={ Custom products : + manufacturers and +2 | users and +2 ; + Innovation communities +1 : + open source software and | physical products and ; + Manufacturers : + custom products and +2 ; + Users : + custom products and +2 +} + +The evolving pattern of the locus of product development in kitesurfing +illustrates how users can displace manufacturers from the role of product +developer. In that industry, the collective product-design and testing work of +a user innovation community has clearly become superior in both quality and +quantity relative to the levels of in-house development effort that +manufacturers of kitesurfing equipment can justify. Accordingly, manufacturers +of such equipment are increasingly shifting away from product design and +focusing on producing product designs first developed and tested by user +innovation communities. +={ Innovation communities : + kitesurfing and ; + Kitesurfing +} + +How can or should manufacturers adapt to users' encroachment on elements of +their traditional business activities? There are three general possibilities: +(1) Produce user-developed innovations for general commercial sale and/or offer +custom manufacturing to specific users. (2) Sell kits of product-design tools +and/or "product platforms" to ease users' innovation-related tasks. (3) Sell +products or services that are complementary to user-developed innovations. +Firms in fields where users are already very active in product design are +experimenting with all these possibilities. +={ Custom products : + product platforms and | toolkits and ; + Toolkits : + platform products and +} + +!_ Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations (Chapter 10) +={ Custom products : + manufacturers and +2 ; + Manufacturers : + custom products and +2 ; + Users : + custom products and +2 ; + Lead users +59 : + idea generation and +2 | identification of +2 | innovation and +2 +} + +Manufacturers design their innovation processes around the way they think the +process works. The vast majority of manufacturers still think that product +development and service development are always done by manufacturers, and that +their job is always to find a need and fill it rather than to sometimes find +and commercialize an innovation that lead users have already developed. +Accordingly, manufacturers have set up market-research departments to explore +the needs of users in the target market, product-development groups to think up +suitable products to address those needs, and so forth. The needs and prototype +solutions of lead users---if encountered at all---are typically rejected as +outliers of no interest. Indeed, when lead users' innovations do enter a firm's +product line---and they have been shown to be the actual source of many major +innovations for many firms--- they typically arrive with a lag and by an +unconventional and unsystematic route. For example, a manufacturer may +"discover" a lead user innovation only when the innovating user firm contacts +the manufacturer with a proposal to produce its design in volume to supply its +own in-house needs. Or sales or service people employed by a manufacturer may +spot a promising prototype during a visit to a customer's site. +={ Marketing research +1 } + +Modification of firms' innovation processes to /{systematically}/ search for +and further develop innovations created by lead users can provide manufacturers +with a better interface to the innovation process as it actually works, and so +provide better performance. A natural experiment conducted at 3M illustrates +this possibility. Annual sales of lead user product ideas generated by the +average lead user project at 3M were conservatively forecast by management to +be more than 8 times the sales forecast for new products developed in the +traditional manner---$146 million versus $18 million per year. In addition, +lead user projects were found to generate ideas for new product lines, while +traditional market-research methods were found to produce ideas for incremental +improvements to existing product lines. As a consequence, 3M divisions funding +lead user project ideas experienced their highest rate of major product line +generation in the past 50 years (Lilien et al. 2002). +={ Lilien, G. ; + Lead users : + 3M and ; + 3M Corporation +} + +!_ Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design (Chapter 11) +={ Toolkits +2 } + +Firms that understand the distributed innovation process and users' roles in it +can /{change}/ factors affecting lead user innovation and so affect its rate +and direction in ways they value. Toolkits for user innovation custom design +offer one way of doing this. This approach involves partitioning +product-development and service-development projects into +solution-information-intensive subtasks and need-information-intensive +subtasks. Need-intensive subtasks are then assigned to users along with a kit +of tools that enable them to effectively execute the tasks assigned to them. +The resulting co-location of sticky information and problem-solving activity +makes innovation within the solution space offered by a particular toolkit +cheaper for users. It accordingly attracts them to the toolkit and so +influences what they develop and how they develop it. The custom semiconductor +industry was an early adopter of toolkits. In 2003, more than $15 billion worth +of semiconductors were produced that had been designed using this approach. +={ Toolkits : + platform products and +2 ; + Lead users : + innovation and ; + Sticky information : + innovation and +} + +Manufacturers that adopt the toolkit approach to supporting and channeling user +innovation typically face major changes in their business models, and important +changes in industry structure may also follow. For example, as a result of the +introduction of toolkits to the field of semiconductor manufacture, custom +semiconductor manufacturers---formerly providers of both design and +manufacturing services to customers---lost much of the work of custom product +design to customers. Many of these manufacturers then became specialist silicon +foundries, supplying production services primarily. Manufacturers may or may +not wish to make such changes. However, experience in fields where toolkits +have been deployed shows that customers tend to prefer designing their own +custom products with the aid of a toolkit over traditional manufacturer-centric +development practices. As a consequence, the only real choice for manufacturers +in a field appropriate to the deployment of toolkits may be whether to lead or +to follow in the transition to toolkits. + +!_ Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields (Chapter 12) + +In chapter 12 I discuss links between user innovation and some related +phenomena and literatures. With respect to phenomena, I point out the +relationship of user innovation to /{information}/ communities, of which user +innovation communities are a subset. One open information community is the +online encyclopedia Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). Other such communities +include the many specialized Internet sites where individuals with both common +and rare medical conditions can find one another and can find specialists in +those conditions. Many of the advantages associated with user innovation +communities also apply to open information networks and communities. Analyses +appropriate to information communities follow the same overall pattern as the +analyses provided in this book for innovation communities. However, they are +also simpler, because in open information communities there may be little or no +proprietary information being transacted and thus little or no risk of related +losses for participants. +={ Wikipedia ; + Information commons ; + Information communities : + See also Innovation communities ; + Innovation communities +2 : + and sources of innovation +2 ; + Intellectual property rights : + information communities and +2 | innovation and +2 +} + +Next I discuss links between user-centric innovation phenomena and the +literature on the economics of knowledge that have been forged by Foray (2004) +and Weber (2004). I also discuss how Porter's 1991 work on the competitive +advantage of nations can be extended to incorporate findings on nations' lead +users as product developers. Finally, I point out how findings explained in +this book link to and complement research on the Social Construction of +Technology (Pinch and Bijker 1987). +={ Bijker, W. ; + Foray, D. ; + Pinch, T. ; + Weber, S. ; + Porter, M. ; + Knowledge, production and distribution of +} + +I conclude this introductory chapter by reemphasizing that user innovation, +free revealing, and user innovation communities will flourish under many but +not all conditions. What we know about manufacturer-centered innovation is +still valid; however, lead-user-centered innovation patterns are increasingly +important, and they present major new opportunities and challenges for us all. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + free revealing and ; + Users : + free revealing by +} + +1~ 2 Development of Products by Lead Users + +The idea that novel products and services are developed by manufacturers is +deeply ingrained in both traditional expectations and scholarship. When we as +users of products complain about the shortcomings of an existing product or +wish for a new one, we commonly think that "they" should develop it---not us. +Even the conventional term for an individual end user, "consumer," implicitly +suggests that users are not active in product and service development. +Nonetheless, there is now very strong empirical evidence that product +development and modification by both user firms and users as individual +consumers is frequent, pervasive, and important. +={ Consumers +5 } + +I begin this chapter by reviewing the evidence that many users indeed do +develop and modify products for their own use in many fields. I then show that +innovation is concentrated among /{lead}/ users, and that lead users' +innovations often become commercial products. + +!_ Many Users Innovate + +The evidence on user innovation frequency and pervasiveness is summarized in +table 2.1. We see here that the frequency with which user firms and individual +consumers develop or modify products for their own use range from 10 percent to +nearly 40 percent in fields studied to date. The matter has been studied across +a wide range of industrial product types where innovating users are user firms, +and also in various types of sporting equipment, where innovating users are +individual consumers. +={ Lead users : + sporting equipment and +1 ; + Sporting equipment : + lead users and +1 +} + +The studies cited in table 2.1 clearly show that a lot of product development +and modification by users is going on. However, these findings should not be +taken to reflect innovation rates in overall populations of users. All of the +studies probably were affected by a response bias. (That is, if someone sends a +questionnaire about whether you innovated or not, you might be more inclined to +respond if your answer is "Yes."). Also, each of the studies looked at +innovation rates affecting a particular product type among users who care a +great deal about that product type. Thus, university surgeons (study 4 in table +2.1) care a great deal about having just-right surgical equipment, just as +serious mountain bikers (study 8) care a great deal about having just-right +equipment for their sport. As the intensity of interest goes down, it is likely +that rates of user innovation drop too. This is probably what is going on in +the case of the study of purchasers of outdoor consumer products (study 6). All +we are told about that sample of users of outdoor consumer products is that +they are recipients of one or more mail order catalogs from suppliers of +relatively general outdoor items---winter jackets, sleeping bags, and so on. +Despite the fact that these users were asked if they have developed or modified +any item in this broad category of goods (rather than a very specific one such +as a mountain bike), just 10 percent answered in the affirmative. Of course, 10 +percent or even 5 percent of a user population numbering in the tens of +millions worldwide is still a very large number---so we again realize that many +users are developing and modifying products. +={ Lead users : + outdoor consumer products and ; + Outdoor products +} + +!_ Table 2.1 +Many respondents reported developing or modifying products for their own use in +the eight product areas listed here. +={ Lüthje, C. +1 ; + Urban, G. +1 ; + Franke, N. +1 ; + Herstatt, C. +1 ; + Morrison, Pamela +1 ; + von Hippel, E. +1 ; + Lead users : + Apache web server software and +1r | library information search system and +1 | mountain biking and +1 | outdoor consumer products and +1 | pipe hanger hardware and +1 | printed circuit CAD software and +1 | surgical equipment and +3 ; + Library information search system +1 ; + Mountain biking +1 ; + Outdoor products +1 ; + Pipe hanger hardware +1 ; + Printed circuit CAD software +1 ; + Surgical equipment +1 +} + +table{~h c4; 20; 45; 15; 20; + +~ +Number and type of Users Sampled +Percentage developing and building product for own use +Source + +Industrial products +~ +~ +~ + +1. Printed circuit CAD software +136 user firm attendees at PC-CAD conference +24.3% +Urban and von Hippel 1988 + +2. Pipe hanger hardware +Employees in 74 pipe hanger installation firms +36% +Herstatt and von Hippel 1992 + +3. Library information systems +Employees in 102 Australian libraries using computerized OPAC library information systems +26% +Morrison et al. 2000 + +4. Surgical equipment +261 surgeons working in university clinics in Germany +22% +Lüthje 2003 + +5. Apache OS server software security features +131 technically sophisticated Apache features users (webmasters) +19.1% +Franke and von Hippel 2003 + +Consumer products +~ +~ +~ + +6. Outdoor consumer products +153 recipients of mail order catalogs for outdoor activity products for consumers +9.8% +Lüthje 2004 + +7. "Extreme" sporting equipment +197 members of 4 specialized sporting clubs in 4 "extreme" sports +37.8% +Franke and Shah 2003 + +8. Mountain biking equipment +291 mountain bikers in a geographic region +19.2% +Lüthje et al. + +}table + +The cited studies also do not set an upper or a lower bound on the commercial +or technical importance of user-developed products and product modifications +that they report, and it is likely that most are of minor significance. +However, most innovations from any source are minor, so user-innovators are no +exception in this regard. Further, to say an innovation is minor is not the +same as saying it is trivial: minor innovations are cumulatively responsible +for much or most technical progress. Hollander (1965) found that about 80 +percent of unit cost reductions in Rayon manufacture were the cumulative result +of minor technical changes. Knight (1963, VII, pp. 2--3) measured performance +advances in general-purpose digital computers and found, similarly, that "these +advances occur as the result of equipment designers using their knowledge of +electronics technology to produce a multitude of small improvements that +together produce significant performance advances." +={ Hollander, S. ; + Knight, K. ; + Users : + process improvements by +1 +} + +Although most products and product modifications that users or others develop +will be minor, users are by no means restricted to developing minor or +incremental innovations. Qualitative observations have long indicated that +important process improvements are developed:rubyd gsub!(//, "") by users. +Smith (1776, pp. 11--13) pointed out the importance of "the invention of a +great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labor, and enable one man +to do the work of many." He also noted that "a great part of the machines made +use of in those manufactures in which labor is most subdivided, were originally +the invention of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very +simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier +and readier methods of performing it." Rosenberg (1976) studied the history of +the US machine tool industry and found that important and basic machine types +like lathes and milling machines were first developed and built by user firms +having a strong need for them. Textile manufacturing firms, gun manufacturers +and sewing machine manufacturers were important early user-developers of +machine tools. Other studies show quantitatively that some of the most +important and novel products and processes have been developed by user firms +and by individual users. Enos (1962) reported that nearly all the most +important innovations in oil refining were developed by user firms. Freeman +(1968) found that the most widely licensed chemical production processes were +developed by user firms. Von Hippel (1988) found that users were the developers +of about 80 percent of the most important scientific instrument innovations, +and also the developers of most of the major innovations in semiconductor +processing. Pavitt (1984) found that a considerable fraction of invention by +British firms was for in-house use. Shah (2000) found that the most +commercially important equipment innovations in four sporting fields tended to +be developed by individual users. +={ Enos, J. ; + Freeman, C. ; + Pavitt, K. ; + Rosenberg, N. ; + Shah, S. ; + Smith, A. ; + von Hippel, E. +23 ; + Sporting equipment : + lead users and +} + +!_ Lead User Theory +={ Lead users : + theory of +3 +} + +A second major finding of empirical research into innovation by users is that +most user-developed products and product modifications (and the most +commercially attractive ones) are developed by users with "lead user" +characteristics. Recall from chapter 1 that lead users are defined as members +of a user population having two distinguishing characteristics: (1) They are at +the leading edge of an important market trend(s), and so are currently +experiencing needs that will later be experienced by many users in that market. +(2) They anticipate relatively high benefits from obtaining a solution to their +needs, and so may innovate. +={ Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users +1 ; + Lead users : + economic benefit, expectations of +1 +} + +The theory that led to defining "lead users" in terms of these two +characteristics was derived as follows (von Hippel 1986). First, the "ahead on +an important market trend" variable was included because of its assumed effect +on the commercial attractiveness of innovations developed by users residing at +a leading-edge position in a market. Market needs are not static---they evolve, +and often they are driven by important underlying trends. If people are +distributed with respect to such trends as diffusion theory indicates, then +people at the leading edges of important trends will be experiencing needs +today (or this year) that the bulk of the market will experience tomorrow (or +next year). And, if users develop and modify products to satisfy their own +needs, then the innovations that lead users develop should later be attractive +to many. The expected benefits variable and its link to innovation likelihood +was derived from studies of industrial product and process innovations. These +showed that the greater the benefit an entity expects to obtain from a needed +innovation, the greater will be that entity's investment in obtaining a +solution, where a solution is an innovation either developed or purchased +(Schmookler 1966; Mansfield 1968). +={ Mansfield, E. ; + Schmookler, J. +} + +Empirical studies to date have confirmed lead user theory. Morrison, Roberts, +and Midgely (2004) studied the characteristics of innovating and non-innovating +users of computerized library information systems in a sample of Australian +libraries. They found that the two lead user characteristics were distributed +in a continuous, unimodal manner in that sample. They also found that the two +characteristics of lead users and the actual development of innovations by +users were highly correlated. Franke and von Hippel (2003b) confirmed these +findings in a study of innovating and non-innovating users of Apache web server +software. They also found that the commercial attractiveness of innovations +developed by users increased along with the strength of those users' lead user +characteristics. +={ Franke, N. ; + Midgely, David ; + Morrison, Pamela +19 ; + Roberts, J. ; + Apache web server software ; + Lead users : + Apache web server software and | library information search system and ; + Library information search system +} + +!_ Evidence of Innovation by Lead Users + +Several studies have found that user innovation is largely the province of +users that have lead user characteristics, and that products lead users develop +often form the basis for commercial products. These general findings appear +robust: the studies have used a variety of techniques and have addressed a +variety of markets and innovator types. Brief reviews of four studies will +convey the essence of what has been found. + +!_ Innovation in Industrial Product User Firms + +In the first empirical study of lead users' role in innovation, Urban and von +Hippel (1988) studied user innovation activity related to a type of software +used to design printed circuit boards. A major market trend to which printed +circuit computer-aided design software (PC-CAD) must respond is the steady +movement toward packing electronic circuitry more densely onto circuit boards. +Higher density means one that can shrink boards in overall size and that +enables the circuits they contain to operate faster---both strongly desired +attributes. Designing a board at the leading edge of what is technically +attainable in density at any particular time is a very demanding task. It +involves some combination of learning to make the printed circuit wires +narrower, learning how to add more layers of circuitry to a board, and using +smaller electronic components. +={ Urban, G. +1 ; + Lead users : + printed circuit CAD software and +3 ; + Lead users : + printed circuit CAD software and +3 ; + Printed circuit CAD software +3 +} + +To explore the link between user innovation and needs at the leading edge of +the density trend, Urban and von Hippel collected a sample of 138 user-firm +employees who had attended a trade show on the topic of PC-CAD. To learn the +position of each firm on the density trend, they asked questions about the +density of the boards that each PC-CAD user firm was currently producing. To +learn about each user's likely expected benefits from improvements to PC-CAD, +they asked questions about how satisfied each respondent was with their firm's +present PC-CAD capabilities. To learn about users' innovation activities, they +asked questions about whether each firm had modified or built its own PC-CAD +software for its own in-house use. + +Users' responses were cluster analyzed, and clear lead user (n = 38) and +non-lead-user (n = 98) clusters were found. Users in the lead user cluster were +those that made the densest boards on average and that also were dissatisfied +with their PC-CAD capabilities. In other words, they were at the leading edge +of an important market trend, and they had a high incentive to innovate to +improve their capabilities. Strikingly, 87 percent of users in the lead user +cluster reported either developing or modifying the PC-CAD software that they +used. In contrast, only 1 percent of non-lead users reported this type of +innovation. Clearly, in this case user innovation was very strongly +concentrated in the lead user segment of the user population. A discriminant +analysis on indicated that "build own system" was the most important indicator +of membership in the lead user cluster. The discriminant analysis had 95.6 +percent correct classification of cluster membership. + +The commercial attractiveness of PC-CAD solutions developed by lead users was +high. This was tested by determining whether lead users and more ordinary users +preferred a new PC-CAD system concept containing features developed by lead +users over the best commercial PC-CAD system available at the time of the study +(as determined by a large PC-CAD system manufacturer's competitive analysis) +and two additional concepts. The concept containing lead user features was +significantly preferred at even twice the price (p < 0.01). +={ Lead users : + commercial attractiveness of +} + +!_ Innovation in Libraries +={ Lead users : + library information search system and +11 ; + Library information search system +11 +} + +Morrison, Roberts, and von Hippel (2000) explored user modifications made by +Australian libraries to computerized information search systems called Online +Public Access systems ("OPACs"). Libraries might not seem the most likely spot +for technological innovators to lurk. However, computer technologies and the +Internet have had a major effect on how libraries are run, and many libraries +now have in-house programming expertise. Computerized search methods for +libraries were initially developed by advanced and technically sophisticated +user institutions. Development began in the United States in the 1970s with +work by major universities and the Library of Congress, with support provided +by grants from the federal government (Tedd 1994). Until roughly 1978, the only +such systems extant were those that had been developed by libraries for their +own use. In the late 1970s, the first commercial providers of computerized +search systems for libraries appeared in the United States, and by 1985 there +were at least 48 OPAC vendors in the United States alone (Matthews 1985). In +Australia (site of the study sample), OPAC adoption began about 8 years later +than in the United States (Tedd 1994). +={ Tedd, L. ; + Roberts, J. +3 +} + +Morrison, Roberts, and I obtained responses from 102 Australian libraries that +were users of OPACs. We found that 26 percent of these had in fact modified +their OPAC hardware or software far beyond the user-adjustment capabilities +provided by the system manufacturers. The types of innovations that the +libraries developed varied widely according to local needs. For example, the +library that modified its OPAC to "add book retrieval instructions for staff +and patrons" (table 2.2) did so because its collection of books was distributed +in a complex way across a number of buildings--- making it difficult for staff +and patrons to find books without precise directions. There was little +duplication of innovations except in the case of adding Internet search +capabilities to OPACs. In that unusual case, nine libraries went ahead and did +the programming needed to add this important feature in advance of its being +offered by the manufacturers of their systems. + +!_ Table 2.2 +OPAC modifications created by users served a wide variety of functions. + +table{~h c2; 50; 50; + +Improved library management +Improved information-search capabilities + +Add library patron summary statistics +Integrate images in records (2) + +Add library identifiers +Combined menu/command searches + +Add location records for physical audit +Add title sorting and short title listing + +Add book retrieval instructions for staff and patrons +Add fast access key commands + +Add CD ROM System backup +Add multilingual search formats \\ key word searches (2) + +Add book access control based on copyright +Add topic linking and subject access + +Patrons can check their status via OPAC +Add prior search recall feature + +Patrons can reserve books via OPAC (2) +Add search "navigation aids" + +Remote access to OPAC by different systems +Add different hierarchical searches + +Add graduated system access via password +Access to other libraries' catalogs (2) + +Add interfaces to other in-house IT systems +Add or customize web interface (9) + + Word processing and correspondence (2) + Hot links for topics + + Umbrella for local information collection (2) + Extended searches + + Local systems adaptation + Hot links for source material + +}table + +Source of data: Morrison et al. 2000, table 1. Number of users (if more than +one) developing functionally similar innovations is shown in parentheses after +description of innovation. + +The libraries in the sample were asked to rank themselves on a number of +characteristics, including "leading edge status" (LES). (Leading edge status, a +construct developed by Morrison, is related to and highly correlated with the +lead user construct (in this sample, ρ ,{(LES, CLU)}, = 0.904, /{p}/ = 0.000). +~{ LES contains four types of measures. Three ("benefits recognized early," +"high benefits expected," and "direct elicitation of the construct") contain +the core components of the lead user construct. The fourth ("applications +generation") is a measure of a number of innovation-related activities in which +users might engage: they "suggest new applications," they "pioneer those +applications," and (because they have needs or problems earlier than their +peers) they may be "used as a test site" (Morrison, Midgely, and Roberts 2004). +}~ Self-evaluation bias was checked for by asking respondents to name other +libraries they regarded as having the characteristics of lead users. +Self-evaluations and evaluations by others did not differ significantly. +={ Midgely, David ; + Morrison, Pamela ; + Roberts, J. +} + +Libraries that had modified their OPAC systems were found to have significantly +higher LES---that is, to be lead users. They were also found to have +significantly higher incentives to make modifications than non-innovators, +better in-house technical skills, and fewer "external resources" (for example, +they found it difficult to find outside vendors to develop the modifications +they wanted for them). Application of these four variables in a logit model +classified libraries into innovator and non-innovator categories with an +accuracy of 88 percent (table 2.3). + +!_ Table 2.3 +Factors associated with innovating in librararies (logit model). χ^{2}^/,{4}, = +33.85; ρ^{2}^ = 0.40; classification rate = 87.78%. + +table{~h c3; 40; 30; 30; + +~ +Coefficient +Standard error + +Leading-edge status +1.862 +0.601 + +Lack of incentive to modify +--0.845 +0.436 + +Lack of in-house technology skills +--1.069 +0.412 + +Lack of external resources +0.695 +0.456 + +Constant +--2.593 +0.556 + +}table + +Source: Morrison et al. 2000, table 6. + +The commercial value of user-developed innovations in the library OPAC sample +was assessed in a relatively informal way. Two development mangers employed by +the Australian branches of two large OPAC manufacturers were asked to evaluate +the commercial value of each user innovation in the sample. They were asked two +questions about each: (1) "How important commercially to your firm is the +functionality added to OPACs by this user-developed modification?" (2) "How +novel was the information contained in the user innovation to your firm at the +time that innovation was developed?" Responses from both managers indicated +that about 70 percent (25 out of 39) of the user modifications provided +functionality improvements of at least "medium" commercial importance to +OPACs---and in fact many of the functions were eventually incorporated in the +OPACs the manufacturers sold. However, the managers also felt that their firms +generally already knew about the lead users' needs when the users developed +their solutions, and that the innovations the users developed provided novel +information to their company only in 10--20 percent of the cases. (Even when +manufacturers learn about lead users' needs early, they may not think it +profitable to develop their own solution for an "emerging" need until years +later. I will develop this point in chapter 4.) +={ Lead users : + commercial attractiveness of ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and | lead users and +} + +!_ "Consumer" Innovation in Sports Communities +={ Franke, N. +11 ; + Shah, S. +11 ; + Innovation : + and sporting equipment +11 ; + Lead users : + manufacturers and +11 ; + Sporting equipment : + lead users and +11 +} + +% check manufacturers ref, see previous paragraph + +Franke and Shah (2003) studied user innovation in four communities of sports +enthusiasts. The communities, all located in Germany, were focused on four very +different sports. +={ Manufacturers : + innovation and | lead users and +} + +One community was devoted to canyoning, a new sport popular in the Alps. +Canyoning combines mountain climbing, abseiling (rappelling), and swimming in +canyons. Members do things like rappel down the middle of an active waterfall +into a canyon below. Canyoning requires significant skill and involves physical +risk. It is also a sport in rapid evolution as participants try new challenges +and explore the edges of what is both achievable and fun. + +The second community studied was devoted to sailplaning. Sailplaning or +gliding, a more mature sport than canyoning, involves flying in a closed, +engineless glider carrying one or two people. A powered plane tows the glider +to a desired altitude by means of a rope; then the rope is dropped and the +engineless glider flies on its own, using thermal updrafts in the atmosphere to +gain altitude as possible. The sailplaning community studied by Franke and Shah +consisted of students of technical universities in Germany who shared an +interest in sailplaning and in building their own sailplanes. + +Boardercross was the focus of the third community. In this sport, six +snowboarders compete simultaneously in a downhill race. Racetracks vary, but +each is likely to incorporate tunnels, steep curves, water holes, and jumps. +The informal community studied consisted of semi-professional athletes from all +over the world who met in as many as ten competitions a year in Europe, in +North America, and in Japan. + +The fourth community studied was a group of semi-professional cyclists with +various significant handicaps, such as cerebral palsy or an amputated limb. +Such individuals must often design or make improvements to their equipment to +accommodate their particular disabilities. These athletes knew each other well +from national and international competitions, training sessions, and seminars +sponsored by the Deutscher Sportbund (German National Sports Council). + +A total of 197 respondents (a response rate of 37.8 percent) answered a +questionnaire about innovation activities in their communities. Thirty-two +percent reported that they had developed or modified equipment they used for +their sport. The rate of innovation varied among the sports, the high being 41 +percent of the sailplane enthusiasts reporting innovating and the low being 18 +percent of the boardercross snowboarders reporting. (The complexity of the +equipment used in the various sports probably had something to do with this +variation: a sailplane has many more components than a snowboard.) + +The innovations developed varied a great deal. In the sailplane community, +users developed innovations ranging from a rocket-assisted emergency ejection +system to improvements in cockpit ventilation. Snowboarders invented such +things as improved boots and bindings. Canyoners' inventions included very +specialized solutions, such as a way to cut loose a trapped rope by using a +chemical etchant. With respect to commercial potential, +={ Lead users : + commercial attractiveness of +} + +Franke and Shah found that 23 percent of the user-developed innovations +reported were or soon would be produced for sale by a manufacturer. Franke and +Shah found that users who innovated were significantly higher on measures of +the two lead user characteristics than users who did not innovate (table 2.4). +They also found that the innovators spent more time in sporting and +community-related activities and felt they had a more central role in the +community. + +!_ Table 2.4 +Factors associated with innovation in sports communities. + +table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15; + +~ +Innovators^{a}^ +Non-innovators^{b}^ +Significance of difference^{c}^ + +Time in community +~ +~ +~ + +Years as a community member +4.46 +3.17 +p < 0.01 + +Days per year spent with community members +43.07 +32.73 +p < 0.05 + +Days per year spent participating in the sport +72.48 +68.71 +not significant + +Role in community^{d}^ +~ +~ +~ + +"I am a very active member of the community." +2.85 +3.82 +p < 0.01 + + +"I get together with members of the community for activities that are not related to the sport (movies, dinner parties, etc.)." +3.39 +4.14 +p < 0.05 + +"The community takes my opinion into account when making decisions" +2.89 +3.61 +p < 0.05 + +Lead user characteristic 1: being ahead of the trend^{d}^ +~ +~ +~ + +"I usually find out about new products and solutions earlier than others." +2.71 +4.03 +p < 0.001 + +"I have benefited significantly by the early adoption and use of new products." +3.58 +4.34 +p < 0.01 + +"I have tested prototype versions of new products for manufacturers." +4.94 +5.65 +p < 0.05 + +"In my sport I am regarded as being on the "cutting edge." +4.56 +5.38 +p < 0.01 + + +"I improved and developed new techniques in boardercrossing." +4.29 +5.84 +p < 0.001 + +Lead user characteristic 2: high benefit from innovation^{d}^ +~ +~ +~ + +"I have new needs which are not satisfied by existing products." +3.27 +4.38 +p < 0.001 + + +"I am dissatisfied with the existing equipment." +3.90 +5.13 +p < 0.001 + +}table + +Source: Franke and Shah 2003, table 3. \\ +a. All values are means; n = 60. \\ +b. All values are means; n = 129. \\ +c. Two-tailed t-tests for independent samples. \\ +d. Rated on seven-point scale, with 1 = very accurate and 7 = not accurate at all. Two-tailed t-tests for independent samples. + +!_ Innovation among Hospital Surgeons +={ Surgical equipment +4 ; + Lead users : + surgical equipment and +4 +} + +Lüthje (2003) explored innovations developed by surgeons working at university +clinics in Germany. Ten such clinics were chosen randomly, and 262 surgeons +responded to Lüthje's questionnaire---a response rate of 32.6 percent. Of the +university surgeons responding, 22 percent reported developing or improving +some item(s) of medical equipment for use in their own practices. Using a logit +model to determine the influence of user characteristics on innovation +activity, Lüthje found that innovating surgeons tended to be lead users (p < +0.01). He also found that solutions to problems encountered in their own +surgical practices were the primary benefit that the innovating surgeons +expected to obtain from the solutions they developed (p < 0.01). In addition, +he found that the level of technical knowledge the surgeon held was +significantly correlated with innovation (p < 0.05). Also, perhaps as one might +expect in the field of medicine, the "contextual barrier" of concerns about +legal problems and liability risks was found to have a strongly significant +negative correlation with the likelihood of user invention by surgeons (p < +0.01). +={ Lüthje, C. +1 ; + Sticky information : + toolkits and +} + +With respect to the commercial value of the innovations the lead user surgeons +had developed, Lüthje reported that 48 percent of the innovations developed by +his lead user respondents were or soon would be marketed by manufacturers of +medical equipment. + +!_ Discussion + +The studies reviewed in this chapter all found that user innovations in general +and commercially attractive ones in particular tended to be developed by lead +users. These studies were set in a range of fields, but all were focused on +hardware innovations or on information innovations such as new software. It is +therefore important to point out that, in many fields, innovation in techniques +is at least as important as equipment innovation. For example, many novel +surgical operations are performed with standard equipment (such as scalpels), +and many novel innovations in snowboarding are based on existing, unmodified +equipment. Technique-only innovations are also likely to be the work of lead +users, and indeed many of the equipment innovations documented in the studies +reviewed here involved innovations in technique as well as innovations in +equipment. +={ Lead users : + commercial attractiveness of +1 ; + Users : + innovation process and +1 +} + +Despite the strength of the findings, many interesting puzzles remain that can +be addressed by the further development of lead user theory. For example, +empirical studies of innovation by lead users are unlikely to have sampled the +world's foremost lead users. Thus, in effect, the studies reviewed here +determined lead users to be those highest on lead user characteristics that +were within their samples. Perhaps other samples could have been obtained in +each of the fields studied containing users that were even more "leading edge" +with respect to relevant market trends. If so, why were the samples of +moderately leading-edge users showing user innovation if user innovation is +concentrated among "extreme" lead users? There are at least three possible +explanations. First, most of the studies of user innovation probably included +users reasonably close to the global leading edge in their samples. Had the +"top" users been included, perhaps the result would have been that still more +attractive user innovations would have been found. Second, it may be that the +needs of local user communities differ, and so local lead users really may be +the world's lead users with respect to their particular needs. Third, even if a +sample contains lead users that are not near the global top with respect to +lead users' characteristics, local lead users might still have reasons to +(re)develop innovations locally. For example, it might be cheaper, faster, more +interesting, or more enjoyable to innovate than to search for a similar +innovation that a "global top" lead user might already have developed. +={ Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users ; + Innovation process ; + Lead users : + economic benefit, expectations of ; + Local information ; + Users : + low-cost innovation niches of +} + +1~ 3 Why Many Users Want Custom Products +={ Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and +42 | users and +42 ; + User need +42 ; + Users : + custom products and +42 | innovation and +42 | needs of +} + +The high rates of user innovation documented in chapter 2 suggest that many +users may want custom products. Why should this be so? I will argue that it is +because many users have needs that differ in detail, and many also have both +sufficient willingness to pay and sufficient resources to obtain a custom +product that is just right for their individual needs. In this chapter, I first +present the case for heterogeneity of user needs. I then review a study that +explores users' heterogeneity of need and willingness to pay for product +customization. + +!_ Heterogeneity of User Needs + +If many individual users or user firms want something different in a product +type, it is said that heterogeneity of user need for that product type is high. +If users' needs are highly heterogeneous, only small numbers of users will tend +to want exactly the same thing. In such a case it is unlikely that +mass-produced products will precisely suit the needs of many users. Mass +manufacturers tend to want to build products that will appeal to more users +rather than fewer, so as to spread their fixed costs of development and +production. If many users want something different, and if they have adequate +interest and resources to get exactly the product they need, they will be +driven either to develop it for themselves or to pay a custom manufacturer to +develop it for them. +={ Manufacturers : + custom products and | expectations of economic benefit by | innovation and +} + +Are users' needs for new products (and services) often highly heterogeneous? A +test of reason suggests that they are. An individual's or a firm's need for a +many products depends on detailed considerations regarding the user's initial +state and resources, on the pathway the user must traverse to get from the +initial state to the preferred state, and on detailed considerations regarding +their preferred end state as well. These are likely to be different for each +individual user and for each user firm at some level of detail. This, in turn, +suggests that needs for many new products and services that are precisely right +for each user will differ: that needs for those products will be highly +heterogeneous. + +Suppose, for example, that you decide you need a new item of household +furnishing. Your house is already furnished with hundreds of items, big and +small, and the new item must "fit in" properly. In addition, your precise needs +for the new item are likely to be affected by your living situation, your +resources, and your preferences. For example: "We need a new couch that Uncle +Bill will like, that the kids can jump on, that matches the wallpaper I adore, +that reflects my love of coral reefs and overall good taste, and that we can +afford." Many of these specific constraints are not results of current whim and +are not easy to change. Perhaps you can change the wallpaper, but you are less +likely to change Uncle Bill, your kids, your established tastes with respect to +a living environment, or your resource constraints. + +The net result is that the most desired product characteristics might be +specific to each individual or firm. Of course, many will be willing to +satisfice---make compromises---on many items because of limits on the money or +time they have available to get exactly what they want. Thus, a serious +mountain biker may be willing to simply buy almost any couch on sale even if he +or she is not fully happy with it. On the other hand, that same biker may be +totally unwilling to compromise about getting mountain biking equipment that is +precisely right for his or her specific needs. In terms of industrial products, +NASA may insist on getting precisely right components for the Space Shuttle if +they affect mission safety, but may be willing to satisfice on other items. + +!_ Evidence from Studies of User Innovation + +Two studies of innovation by users provide indirect information on the +heterogeneity of user need. They provide descriptions of the functions of the +innovations developed by users in their samples. Inspection of these +descriptions shows a great deal of variation and few near-duplicates. Different +functionality, of course, implies that the developers of the products had +different needs. In the 2000 study of user modifications of library IT systems +by Morrison, Roberts, and von Hippel, discussed earlier, only 14 of 39 +innovations are functionally similar to any other innovations in the sample. If +one type of functionality that was repeatedly developed ("web interface") is +excluded, the overlap is even lower (see table 2.2). Other responses by study +participants add to this impression of high heterogeneity of need among users. +Thirty percent of the respondents reported that their library IT system had +been highly customized by the manufacturer during installation to meet their +specific needs. In addition, 54 percent of study respondents agreed with the +statement "We would like to make additional improvements to our IT system +functionality that can't be made by simply adjusting the standard, +customer-accessible parameters provided by the supplier." +={ Morrison, Pamela ; + Roberts, J. ; + von Hippel, E. +34 ; + Lead users : + library information search system and ; + Library information search system +} + +Similar moderate overlap in the characteristics of user innovations can be seen +in innovation descriptions provided in the study of mountain biking by Lüthje, +Herstatt, and von Hippel (2002). In that study sample, I estimate that at most +10 of 43 innovations had functionality similar to that of another sample +member. This diversity makes sense: mountain biking, which outsiders might +assume is a single type of athletic activity, in fact has many subspecialties. +={ Herstatt, C. +7 ; + Lüthje, C. +7 ; + Mountain biking +7 +} + +As can be seen in table 3.1, the specializations of mountain bikers in the our +study sample involved very different mountain biking terrains, and important +variations in riding conditions and riding specializations. The innovations +users developed were appropriate to their own heterogeneous riding activities +and so were quite heterogeneous in function. Consider three examples drawn from +our study: + +_* I ride on elevated, skinny planks and ladders, do jumps, steep technical +downhills, obstacles and big drops. Solution devised: I needed sophisticated +cycling armor and protective clothing. So I designed arm and leg armor, chest +protection, shorts, pants and a jacket that enable me to try harder things with +less fear of injury. + +_* I do back-country touring and needed a way to easily lift and carry a fully +loaded mountain bike on the sides of steep hills and mountains and dangle it +over cliffs as I climbed. Solution devised: I modified the top tube and the top +of my seat post to provide secure attachment points for a carrying strap, then +I modified a very plush and durable mountaineering sling to serve as the +over-shoulder strap. Because the strap sits up high, I only need to bend my +knees a little bit to lift the bike onto my shoulders, yet it is just high +enough to keep the front wheel from hitting when I am climbing a steep hill. +Eventually, I came up with a quick-release lateral strap to keep the main strap +from sliding off my shoulder, but it will easily break away if I fall or land +in a fast river and need to ditch my bike. + +_* When riding on ice, my bike has no traction and I slip and fall. Solution +devised: I increased the traction of my tires by getting some metal studs used +by the auto industry for winter tires. Then I selected some mountain biking +tires with large blocks of rubber in the tread pattern, drilled a hole in the +center of each block and inserted a stud in each hole. + +!_ Table 3.1 +Activity specializations of innovating mountain bikers. + +table{~h c6; 20; 13; 20; 13; 20; 14; + +Preferred terrain +Number of bikers +Outside conditions +Number of bikers +Focus on particular riding abilities +Number of bikers + +Fast downhill tracks (steep, drops, fast) +44 (39.6%) +Darkness, night riding +45 (40.5%) +Jumps, drops, stunts, obstacles +34 (30.6%) + +Technical single tracks (up and down, rocky, jumps) +68 (61.3%) +Snow, ice, cold +60 (54.1%) +Technical ability/balance +22 (19.8%) + +Smooth single tracks (hilly, rolling, speed, sand, hardpack) +13 (11.7%) +Rain, mud +53 (47.7%) +Fast descents / downhill +34 (30.6%) + +Urban and streets +9 (8.1%) +Heat +15 (13.5%) +Endurance +9 (8.1%) + +No special terrain preferred +5 (4.5%) +High altitude +10 (9.0%) +Climbing +17 (13%) + +~ +~ +No extreme outside conditions +29 (26.1%) +Sprint +3 (2.7%) + +~ +~ +~ +~ +No focus on specific riding ability +36 (32.4%) + +}table + +Source: Lüthje,Herstatt, and vonHippel 2002. This table includes the 111 users +in the study sample who had ideas for improvements to mountain biking +equipment. (Of these, 61 had actually gone on to build the equipment they +envisioned.) Many of these users reported experience in more than one category +of activity, so the sum in each column is higher than 111. + +!_ Evidence from Studies of Market Segmentation + +Empirical data on heterogeneity of demand for specific products and services +are sparse. Those most interested in studying the matter are generally mass +manufacturers of products and services for consumers---and they do not make a +practice of prospecting for heterogeneity. Instead, they are interested in +finding areas where users' needs are similar enough to represent profitable +markets for standard products produced in large volumes. Manufacturers +customarily seek such areas via market-segmentation studies that partition +markets into a very few segments---perhaps only three, four, or five. Each +segment identified consists of customers with relatively similar needs for a +particular product (Punj and Stewart 1983; Wind 1978). For example, toothpaste +manufacturers may divide their markets into segments such as boys and girls, +adults interested in tooth whitening, and so on. +={ Punj, G. ; + Stewart, D. ; + Wind, Y. ; + Custom products : + market segmentation and +3 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and ; + Marketing research +1 +} + +Since the 1970s, nearly all market-segmentation studies have been carried out +by means of cluster analysis (Green 1971; Green and Schaffer 1998). After +cluster analysis places each participant in the segment of the market most +closely matching his needs, a measure of within-segment need variation is +determined. This is the proportion of total variation that is within each +cluster, and it shows how much users' needs deviate from the averages in +"their" respective segments. If within-segment variation is low, users within +the segment will have fairly homogeneous needs, and so may be reasonably +satisfied with a standard product designed to serve all customers in their +segment. If it high, many users are likely to be dissatisfied---some seriously +so. +={ Green, P. ; + Schaffer, C. +} + +Within-segment variation is seldom reported in published studies, but a survey +of market-segmentation studies published in top-tier journals did find 15 +studies reporting that statistic. These studies specified 5.5 clusters on +average, and had an average remaining within-cluster variance of 46 percent +(Franke and Reisinger 2003). Franke and von Hippel (2003b) found similar +results in an independent sample. In that study, an average of 3.7 market +segments were specified and 54 percent of total variance was left as +within-segment variation after the completion of cluster analysis. These data +suggest that heterogeneity of need might be very substantial among users in +many product categories. ~{ Cluster analysis does not specify the "right" +number of clusters---it simply segments a sample into smaller and smaller +clusters until the analyst calls a halt. Determining an appropriate number of +clusters within a sample can be done in different ways. Of course, it always +possible to say that "I only want to deal with three market segments, so I will +stop my analysis when my sample has been segmented into three clusters." More +commonly, analysts will examine the increase of squared error sums of each +step, and generally will view the optimal number of clusters as having been +reached when the plot shows a sudden "elbow" (Myers 1996). Since this technique +does not incorporate information on remaining within-cluster heterogeneity, it +can lead to solutions with a large amount of within-cluster variance. The +"cubic clustering criterion" (CCC) partially addresses this concern by +measuring the within-cluster homogeneity relative to the between-cluster +heterogeneity. It suggests choosing the number of clusters where this value +peaks (Milligan and Cooper 1985). However, this method appears to be rarely +used: Ketchen and Shook (1996) found it used in only 5 of 45 segmentation +studies they examined. }~ +={ Franke, N. +20 ; + Reisinger, H. +} + +!_ A Study of Heterogeneity and Willingness To Pay + +A need for a novel product not on the market must be accompanied by adequate +willingness to pay (and resources) if it is to be associated with the actual +development or purchase of a custom product. What is needed to reliably +establish the relationship among heterogeneity of demand, willingness to pay, +and custom product development or purchase is studies that address all three +factors in the same sample. My colleague Nikolaus Franke and I conducted one +such study in a population of users of web server software, a product used +primarily by industrial firms (Franke and von Hippel 2003b). + +Franke and I looked in detail at users' needs for security features in Apache +web server software, and at users' willingness to pay for solutions that +precisely fit their needs. Apache web server software is open source software +that is explicitly designed to allow modification by anyone having appropriate +skills. Anyone may download open source software from the Internet and use it +without charge. Users are also explicitly granted the legal right to study the +software's source code, to modify the software, and to distribute modified or +unmodified versions to others. (See chapter 7 for a full discussion of open +source software.) +={ Apache web server software +16 ; + Custom products : + Apache web server software and +16 ; + Lead users : + Apache web server software and +16 ; + Users : + and paying for innovations +} + +Apache web server software is used on web server computers connected to the +Internet. A web server's function is to respond to requests from Internet +browsers for particular documents or content. A typical server waits for +clients' requests, locates the requested resource, applies the requested method +to the resource, and sends the response back to the client. Web server software +began by offering relatively simple functionality. Over time, however, Apache +and other web server software programs have evolved into the complicated front +end for many of the technically demanding applications that now run on the +Internet. For example, web server software is now used to handle security and +authentication of users, to provide e-commerce shopping carts, and gateways to +databases. In the face of strong competition from commercial competitors +(including Microsoft and Sun/Netscape), the Apache web server has become the +most popular web server software on the Internet, used by 67 percent of the +many millions of World Wide Web sites extant in early 2004. It has also +received many industry awards for excellence. + +Franke and I created a preliminary list of server security functions from +published and web-based sources. The preliminary list was evaluated and +corrected by experts in web server security and Apache web server software. We +eventually ended up with a list of 45 security functions that some or many +users might need. Solutions to some were already incorporated in the standard +Apache code downloadable by users, others were available in additional modules, +and a few were not yet addressed by any security module generally available to +the Apache community. (Security threats can emerge quickly and become matters +of great concern before a successful response is developed and offered to the +general community. A recent example is site flooding, a form of attack in which +vandals attempt to cause a website to fail by flooding it with a very large +number of simultaneous requests for a response.) + +Users of the security functions of web server software are the webmasters +employed by firms to make sure that their software is up to date and functions +properly. A major portion of a webmaster's job is to ensure that the software +used is secure from attacks launched by those who wish illicit access or simply +want to cause the software to fail in some way. We collected responses to our +study questions from two samples of Apache webmasters: webmasters who posted a +question or an answer on a question at the Apache Usenet Forum ~{ +http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix }~ and +webmasters who subscribed to a specialized online Apache newsgroup. ~{ +http://modules.apache.org/ }~ This stratified sample gave us an adequate +representation of webmasters who both did and did not have the technical skills +needed to modify Apache security software to better fit their needs: +subscribers to apache-modules.org tend to have a higher level of technical +skills on average than those posting to the Apache Usenet Forum. Data were +obtained by means of an Internet-based questionnaire. + +!_ The Heterogeneity of Users' Needs + +Franke and I found the security module needs of Apache users were very +heterogeneous indeed both among those that had the in-house capability to write +code to modify Apache and those that did not. The calibrated coefficient of +heterogeneity, H,{c},, was 0.98, indicating that there was essentially no +tendency of the users to cluster beyond chance. (We defined the "heterogeneity +of need" in a group as the degree to which the needs of i individuals can be +satisfied with j standard products which optimally meet their needs. This means +that heterogeneity of need is high when many standard products are necessary to +satisfy the needs of i individuals and low when the needs can be satisfied by a +few standard products. The higher the coefficient the more heterogeneous are +the needs of users in a sample. If the calibrated heterogeneity coefficient +H,{c}, equals 1, there is no systematic tendency of the users to cluster. If it +is lower than 1, there is some tendency of the individuals to cluster. A +coefficient of 0 means that the needs of all individuals are exactly the same. +~{ To measure heterogeneity, Franke and I analyzed the extent to which j +standards, varying from [1; i], meet the needs of the i individuals in our +sample. Conceptually, we first locate a product in multi-dimensional need space +(dimensions = 45 in the case of our present study) that minimizes the distances +to each individual's needs. (This step is analogous to the Ward's method in +cluster analysis that also minimizes within cluster variation; see Punj and +Stewart 1983.) The "error" is then measured as the sum of squared Euclidean +distances. We then repeated these steps to determine the error for two +optimally positioned products, three products, and so on up to a number +equaling I -- 1. The sum of squared errors for all cases is then a simple +coefficient that measures how much the needs of i individuals can be satisfied +with j standard products. The "coefficient of heterogeneity" just specified is +sensitive both to the (average) /{distance}/ between the needs and for the +/{configuration}/ of the needs: when the needs tend to form clusters the +heterogeneity coefficient is lower than if they are evenly spread. To make the +coefficient comparable across different populations, we calibrate it using a +bootstrapping technique (Efron 1979) involving dividing the coefficient by the +expected value (this value is generated by averaging the heterogeneity of many +random distributions of heterogeneity of the same kind). The average random +heterogeneity coefficient is then an appropriate value for calibration +purposes: it assumes that there is no systematic relationship between the needs +of the individuals or between the need dimensions. }~ ) +={ Franke, N. ; + Punj, G. ; + Stewart, D. +} + +Even this understates the heterogeneity. Responding Apache webmasters went far +beyond the 45 security-related functions of web server software that we offered +for their evaluation. In our questionnaire we offered an open question asking +users to list up to four additional needs they experienced that were not +covered by the standard list. Nearly 50 percent used the opportunity to add +additional functions. When duplicates were eliminated, we found that 92 +distinct additional security-related needs had been noted by one or more +webmaster users.~{ Conceptually, it can be possible to generate "one perfect +product" for everyone--- in which case heterogeneity of demand is zero---by +simply creating all the features wanted by anyone (45 + 92 features in the case +of this study), and incorporating them in the "one perfect product." Users +could then select the features they want from a menu contained in the one +perfect product to tailor it to their own tastes. Doing this is at least +conceptually possible in the case of software, but less so in the case of a +physical product for two reasons: (1) delivering all possible physical options +to everyone who buys the product would be expensive for physical goods (while +costing nothing extra in the case of information products); (2) some options +are mutually exclusive (an automobile cannot be both red and green at the same +time). }~ + +High heterogeneity of need in our sample suggests that there should be a high +interest in obtaining modifications to Apache---and indeed, overall +satisfaction with the existing version was only moderate. + +!_ Willingness to Pay for Improvements + +It is not enough to want a better-fitting custom product. One must also be +willing and able to pay to get what one wants. Those in the Apache sample who +did innovate were presumably willing to pay the price to do so. But how much +were the users in our sample---the innovators and the non-innovators--- willing +to pay /{now}/ for improvements? Estimating a user's willingness to pay (WTP) +is known to be a difficult task. Franke and I used the contingent valuation +method, in which respondents are directly asked how much they are willing to +pay for a product or service (Mitchell and Carson 1989). Results obtained by +that method often overestimate WTP significantly. Empirical studies that +compare expressed WTP with actual cash payments on average showed actual +spending behavior to be somewhat smaller than expressed WTP in the case of +private purchases (such as in our case). In contrast, they generally find +willingness to pay to be greatly overstated in the case of public goods such as +the removal of a road from a wilderness area. ~{ The difference between actual +willingness to pay and expressed willingness to pay is much lower for private +goods (our case) than for public goods. In the case of private goods, Loomis et +al. (1996) found the expressed willingness to pay for art prints to be twice +the actual WTP. Willis and Powe (1998) found that among visitors to a castle +the expressed WTP was 60 percent lower than the actual WTP. In the case of +public goods, Brown et al. (1996), in a study of willingness to pay for removal +of a road from a wilderness area, found the expressed WTP to be 4--6 times the +actual WTP. Lindsey and Knaap (1999), in a study of WTP for a public urban +greenway, found the expressed WTP to be 2-10 times the actual WPT. Neil et al. +(1994) found the expressed WTP for conserving an original painting in the +desert to be 9 times the actual WTP. Seip and Strand (1992) found that less +than 10 percent of those who expressed interest in paying to join an +environmental organization actually joined. }~ +={ Carson, R. ; + Mitchell, R. +} + +To compensate for the likely overstatement of expressed relative to actual WTP +in our study, Franke and I conservatively deflated respondents' indicated +willingness to pay by 80 percent. (Although the product in question was +intended for private use, webmasters were talking about their willingness to +spend company money, not their own money.) We asked each user who had indicated +that he was not really satisfied with a function (i.e., whose satisfaction with +the respective function was 4 or less on a 7-point scale, where 1 = not +satisfied at all, and 7 = very satisfied) to estimate how much he would be +willing to pay to get a very satisfactory solution regarding this function. +After deflation, our sample of 137 webmasters said they were willing to pay +$700,000 in aggregate to modify web server software to a point that fully +satisfied them with respect to their security function needs. This amounts to +an average of $5,232 total willingness to pay per respondent. This is a +striking number because the price of commercial web server software similar to +Apache's for one server was about $1,100 at the time of our study (source: +www.sun.com, November 2001). If we assume that each webmaster was in charge of +ten servers on average, this means that each webmaster was willing to pay half +the price of a total server software package to get his heterogeneous needs for +security features better satisfied. + +!_ Increased Satisfaction from Customization of Apache + +Recall that it takes some technical skill to modify Apache web server software +by writing new code. In table 3.2, Franke and I examined only the technically +skilled users in our sample who claimed the capability of making modifications +to Apache web server software. For these technically skilled users, we found +significantly higher satisfaction levels among those that actually did +customize their software---but even the users that made modifications were not +fully satisfied. + +!_ Table 3.2 +Skilled users who customized their software were more satisfied than those who +did not customize. + +table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15; + +~ +Users who customized (n = 18) +Users who did not customize (n = 44) +Difference (one-tailed t-test) + +Satisfaction with basic web server functionality +5.5 +4.3 +0.100 + +Satisfaction with authentication of client +3.0 +1.0 +0.001 + +Satisfaction with e-commerce-related functions +1.3 +0.0 +0.023 + +Satisfaction with within-site user access control +8.5 +6.9 +0.170 + +Satisfaction with other security functions +3.9 +3.9 +0.699 + +Overall satisfaction +4.3 +2.6 +0.010 + +}table + +Source: Franke and von Hippel 2003, table 8. In this table, 45 individual +functions are grouped into five general categories. The satisfaction index +ranges from -21 to +21. + +One might wonder why users with the ability to modify Apache closer to their +liking were not totally satisfied. The answer can be found in respondents' +judgments regarding how much effort it would require to modify Apache still +more to their liking. We asked all respondents who indicated dissatisfaction of +level 4 or lower with a specific function of Apache how much working time it +would cost them to improve the function to the point where they would judge it +to be very satisfactory (to be at a satisfaction level of 7). For the whole +sample and all dissatisfactions, we obtained a working time of 8,938 +person-days necessary to get a very satisfactory solution. This equals $78 of +incremental benefit per incremental programmer working day ($716,758 divided by +8,938 days). This is clearly below the regular wages a skilled programmer gets. +Franke and I concluded from this that skilled users do not improve their +respective Apache versions to the point where they are perfectly satisfied +because the costs of doing so would exceed the benefits. + +!_ Discussion + +Heterogeneity of user need is likely to be high for many types of products. +Data are still scanty, but high heterogeneity of need is a very straightforward +explanation for why there is so much customization by users: many users have +"custom" needs for products and services. + +Those interested can easily enhance their intuitions about heterogenity of user +need and related innovation by users. User innovation appears to be common +enough so that one can find examples for oneself in a reasonably small, casual +sample. Readers therefore may find it possible (and enjoyable) to do their own +informal tests of the matter. My own version of such a test is to ask the +students in one of my MIT classes (typically about 50 students) to think about +a particular product that many use, such as a backpack. I first ask them how +satisfied they are with their backpack. Initially, most will say "It's OK." But +after some discussion and thinking, a few complaints will slowly begin to +surface (slowly, I think, because we all take some dissatisfaction with our +products as the unremarkable norm). "It doesn't fit comfortably" in this or +that particular way. "When my lunch bag or thermos leaks the books and papers I +am carrying get wet---there should be a water proof partition." "I carry large +drawings to school rolled up in my backpack with the ends sticking out. They +are ruined if it rains and I have not taken the precaution of wrapping them in +plastic." Next, I ask whether any students have modified their backpacks to +better meet their needs. Interestingly enough, one or two typically have. Since +backpacks are not products of very high professional or hobby interest to most +users, the presence of even some user innovation to adapt to individual users' +unmet needs in such small, casual samples is an interesting intuition builder +with respect to the findings discussed in this chapter. + +1~ 4 Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions +={ Users : + innovation and +4 | innovate-or-buy decisions by +74 +} + +Why does a user wanting a custom product sometimes innovate for itself rather +than buying from a manufacturer of custom products? There is, after all, a +choice---at least it would seem so. However, if a user with the resources and +willingness to pay does decide to buy, it may be surprised to discover that it +is not so easy to find a manufacturer willing to make exactly what an +individual user wants. Of course, we all know that mass manufacturers with +businesses built around providing standard products in large numbers will be +reluctant to accommodate special requests. Consumers know this too, and few +will be so foolish as to contact a major soup producer like Campbell's with a +request for a special, "just-right" can of soup. But what about manufacturers +that specialize in custom products? Isn't it their business to respond to +special requests? To understand which way the innovate-or-buy choice will go, +one must consider both transaction costs and information asymmetries specific +to users and manufacturers. I will talk mainly about transaction costs in this +chapter and mainly about information asymmetries in chapter 5. +={ Custom products : + users and +3 ; + Innovation process +3 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +3 ; + Transaction costs +3 ; + Users : + innovation process and +3 | and paying for innovations +} + +I begin this chapter by discussing four specific and significant transaction +costs that affect users' innovate-or-buy decisions. Next I review a case study +that illustrates these. Then, I use a simple quantitative model to further +explore when user firms will find it more cost-effective to develop a +solution---a new product or service---for themselves rather than hiring a +manufacturer to solve the problem for them. Finally, I point out that +/{individual}/ users can sometimes be more inclined to innovate than one might +expect because they sometimes value the /{process}/ of innovating as well as +the novel product or service that is created. + +!_ Users' vs. Manufacturers' Views of Innovation Opportunities +={ Agency costs +15 ; + Manufacturers : + agency costs and +15 ; + Transaction costs : + See also Agency costs ; + Users : + agency costs and +15 | transaction costs and +15 +} + +Three specific contributors to transaction costs---in addition to the "usual +suspects," such as opportunism---often have important effects on users' +decisions whether to buy a custom product or to develop it for themselves. +These are (1) differences between users' and manufacturers' views regarding +what constitutes a desirable solution, (2) differences in innovation quality +signaling requirements between user and manufacturer innovators, and (3) +differences in legal requirements placed on user and manufacturer innovators. +The first two of these factors involve considerations of agency costs. When a +user hires a manufacturer to develop a custom product, the user is a principal +that has hired the custom manufacturer as to act as its agent. When the +interests of the principal and the agent are not the same, agency costs will +result. Recall from chapter 1 that agency costs are (1) costs incurred to +monitor the agent to ensure that it follows the interests of the principal, (2) +the cost incurred by the agent to commit itself not to act against the +principal's interest (the "bonding cost"), and (3) costs associated with an +outcome that does not fully serve the interests of the principal (Jensen and +Meckling 1976). In the specific instance of product and service development, +agency considerations enter because a user's and a manufacturer's interests +with respect to the development of a custom product often differ significantly. +={ Jensen, M. ; + Meckling, W. +} + +!_ Preferences Regarding Solutions + +Individual products and services are components of larger user solutions. A +user therefore wants a product that will make the best overall tradeoff between +solution quality and price. Sometimes the best overall tradeoff will result in +a willingness to pay a surprisingly large amount to get a solution component +precisely right. For example, an individual user may specify tennis racket +functionality that will fit her specific technique and relative strengths and +will be willing to pay a great deal for exactly that racket. Deviations in +racket functionality would require compensating modifications in her carefully +practiced and deeply ingrained hitting technique---a much more costly overall +solution from the user's point of view. In contrast, a user will be much less +concerned with precisely /{how}/ the desired functionality is attained. For +example, tennis players will typically be unconcerned about whether a tennis +racket is made from metal, carbon fiber, plastic or wood---or, for that matter, +from mud---if it performs precisely as desired. And, indeed, users have quickly +shifted to new types of rackets over the years as new materials promise a +better fit to their particular functional requirements. + +Of course, the same thing is true in the case of products for industrial users. +For example, a firm with a need for a process machine may be willing to pay a +great deal for one that is precisely appropriate to the characteristics of the +input materials being processed, and to the skills of employees who will +operate the machine. Deviations in either matter would require compensating +modifications in material supply and employee training---likely to be a much +more costly overall solution from the user's point of view. In contrast, the +user firm will be much less concerned with precisely how the desired +functionality is achieved by the process machine, and will care only that it +performs precisely as specified. + +Manufacturers faced with custom development requests from users make similar +calculations, but theirs revolve around attempting to conserve the +applicability of a low-cost (to them) solution. Manufacturers tend to +specialize in and gain competitive advantage from their capabilities in one or +a few specific solution types. They then seek to find as many profitable +applications for those solutions types as possible. For example, a specialist +in fabricating custom products from carbon fiber might find it profitable to +make any kind of product---from airplane wings to tennis rackets---as long as +they are made from carbon fiber. In contrast, that same manufacturer would have +no competitive advantage in---and so no profit from making--- any of these same +products from metal or wood. + +Specializations in solution types can be very narrow indeed. For example, +thousands of manufacturers specialize in adhesive-based fastening solutions, +while other thousands specialize in mechanical fastening solutions involving +such things as metal screws and nails. Importantly, companies that produce +products and solution types that have close functional equivalence from the +user's point of view can look very different from the point of view of a +solution supplier. For example, a manufacturer of standard or custom adhesives +needs chemists on staff with an expertise in chemical formulation. It also +needs chemistry labs and production equipment designed to mix specialized +batches of chemicals on a small scale, and it needs the equipment, expertise +and regulatory approvals to package that kind of product in a way that is +convenient to the customer and also in line with regulatory safeguards. In +contrast, manufacturers specializing in standard or custom metal fastening +solutions need none of these things. What they need instead are mechanical +design engineers, a machine shop to build product prototypes and production +tooling, specialized metal-forming production equipment such as screw machines, +and so on. + +Users, having an investment only in a need specification and not in a solution +type, want the best functional solution to their problem, independent of +solution type used. Manufacturers, in contrast, want to supply custom solutions +to users that utilize their existing expertise and production capabilities. +Thus, in the case of the two fastening technology alternatives just described, +users will prefer whatever solution approach works best. In contrast, adhesives +manufacturers will find it tremendously more attractive to create a solution +involving adhesive-based fastening, and manufacturers specializing in +mechanical fastening will similarly strongly prefer to offer to develop +solutions involving mechanical fastening. + +The difference between users' incentives to get the best functional solution to +their need and specialist manufacturers' incentives to embed a specific +solution type in the product to be developed are a major source of agency costs +in custom product development, because there is typically an information +asymmetry between user and manufacturer with respect to what will be the best +solution. Manufacturers tend to know more than users about this and to have a +strong incentive to provide biased information to users in order to convince +them that the solution type in which they specialize is the best one to use. +Such biases will be difficult for users to detect because, again, they are less +expert than the suppliers in the various solution technologies that are +candidates. +={ Information asymmetries ; + Users : + information asymmetries of +} + +Theoretically, this agency cost would disappear if it were possible to fully +specify a contract (Aghion and Tirole 1994; Bessen 2004). But in product +development, contracting can be problematic. Information regarding +characteristics of solutions and needs is inescapably incomplete at the time of +contracting---users cannot fully specify what they want in advance of trying +out prototype solutions, and manufacturers are not fully sure how planned +solution approaches will work out before investing in customer-specific +development. +={ Aghion, P. ; + Bessen, J. ; + Contracting ; + Tirole, J. +} + +!_ Users' Expectations + +When users buy a product from manufacturers, they tend to expect a package of +other services to come along with the product they receive. However, when users +develop a product for themselves, some of these are not demanded or can be +supplied in a less formal, less expensive way by users for themselves. This set +of implicit expectations can raise the cost to a user of a custom solution +bought from a manufacturer relative to a home-developed solution. +={ Manufacturers : + innovation and +11 ; + Users : + innovation and +11 +} + +Users typically expect a solution they have purchased to work correctly and +reliably "right out of the box." In effect, a sharp line is drawn between +product development at the manufacturer's site and routine, trouble-free usage +at the purchaser's site. When the user builds a product for itself, however, +both the development and the use functions are in the same organization and may +explicitly be overlapped. Repeated tests and repeated repairs and improvements +during early use are then more likely to be understood and tolerated as an +acceptable part of the development process. + +A related difference in expectations has to do with field support for a product +that has been purchased rather than developed in house. In the case of a +purchased custom product, users expect that manufacturers will provide +replacement parts and service if needed. Responding to this expectation is +costly for a custom manufacturer. It must keep a record of what it has built +for each particular user, and of any special parts incorporated in that user's +products so that they can be built or purchased again if needed. In contrast, +if a user has developed a product for itself, it has people on site who know +details of its design. These employees will be capable of rebuilding or +repairing or redesigning the product /{ad hoc}/ if and as the need arises. (Of +course, if these knowledgeable employees leave the user firm while the product +they designed is still in use, such informality can prove costly.) + +Manufacturers also must invest in indirect quality signals that may not have an +effect on actual quality, but instead are designed to assure both the specific +user being served and the market in general that the product being supplied is +of high quality. These represent another element of agency costs that +user-innovators do not incur. When users develop an innovation for themselves, +they end up intimately knowing the actual quality of the solution they have +developed, and knowing why and how it is appropriate to their task. As an +example, an engineer building a million-dollar process machine for in-house use +might feel it perfectly acceptable to install a precisely right and very cheap +computer controller made and prominently labeled by Lego, a manufacturer of +children's toys. (Lego provides computer controllers for some of its children's +building kit products.) But if that same engineer saw a Lego controller in a +million-dollar process machine his firm was purchasing from a specialist +high-end manufacturer, he might not know enough about the design details to +know that the Lego controller was precisely right for the application. In that +case, the engineer and his managers might well regard the seemingly +inappropriate brand name as an indirect signal of bad quality. + +Manufacturers are often so concerned about a reputation for quality that they +refuse to take shortcuts that a customer specifically requests and that might +make sense for a particular customer, lest others get wind of what was done and +take it as a negative signal about the general quality of the firm's products. +For example, you may say to a maker of luxury custom cars: "I want to have a +custom car of your brand in my driveway---my friends will admire it. But I only +plan to drive it to the grocery store once in a while, so I only want a cheap +little engine. A luxury exterior combined with cheap parts is the best solution +for me in this application---just slap something together and keep the price +low." The maker is likely to respond: "We understand your need, but we cannot +be associated with any product of low quality. Someone else may look under the +hood some day, and that would damage our reputation as a maker of fine cars. +You must look elsewhere, or decide you are willing to pay the price to keep one +of our fine machines idle on your driveway." + +!_ Differing Legal and Regulatory Requirements + +Users that innovate do not generally face legal risk if the product they +develop fails and causes costs to themselves but not to others. In contrast, +manufacturers that develop and sell new products are regarded under US law as +also providing an implied warranty of "fitness for the intended use." If a +product does not meet this criterion, and if a different, written warranty is +not in place, manufacturers can be found liable for negligence with respect to +providing a defective design and failure to warn buyers (Barnes and Ulin 1984). +This simple difference can cause a large difference in exposure to liability by +innovators and so can drive up the costs of manufacturer-provided solutions +relative to user-provided ones. +={ Barnes, B. ; + Ulin, D. ; + Transaction costs +51 ; + Users : + transaction costs and +23 +} + +For example, a user firm that builds a novel process controller to improve its +plant operations must pay its own actual costs if the self-built controller +fails and ruins expensive materials being processed. On the other hand, if a +controller manufacturer designed the novel controller product and sold it to +customers, and a failure then occurred and could be traced back to a fault in +the design, the controller manufacturer is potentially liable for actual user +costs and punitive damages. It may also incur significant reputational losses +if the unhappy user broadcasts its complaints. The logical response of a +controller manufacturer to this higher risk is to charge more and/or to be much +more careful with respect to running exhaustive, expensive, and lengthy tests +before releasing a new product. The resulting increase in cost and delay for +obtaining a manufacturer-developed product can tend to tip users toward +building their own, in-house solutions. +={ Custom products : + manufacturers and +2 ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers +4 | by users +7 ; + Manufacturers : + expectations of economic benefit by +4 +} + +!_ Net Result + +A net result of the foregoing considerations is that manufacturers often find +that developing a custom product for only one or a few users will be +unprofitable. In such cases, the transaction costs involved can make it cheaper +for users with appropriate capabilities to develop the product for themselves. +In larger markets, in contrast, fixed transaction costs will be spread over +many customers, and the economies of scale obtainable by producing for the +whole market may be substantial. In that case, it will likely be cheaper for +users to buy than to innovate. As a result, manufacturers, when contacted by a +user with a very specific request, will be keenly interested in how many others +are likely to want this solution or elements of it. If the answer is "few," a +custom manufacturer will be unlikely to accept the project. + +Of course, manufacturers have an incentive to /{make}/ markets attractive from +their point of view. This can be done by deviating from precisely serving the +needs of a specific custom client in order to create a solution that will be +"good enough" for that client but at the same time of more interest to others. +Manufacturers may do this openly by arranging meetings among custom buyers with +similar needs, and then urging the group to come up with a common solution that +all will find acceptable. "After all," as the representative will say, "it is +clear that we cannot make a special product to suit each user, so all of you +must be prepared to make really difficult compromises!" More covertly, +manufacturers may simply ignore some of the specific requests of the specific +user client and make something that they expect to be a more general solution +instead. + +The contrasting incentives of users and manufacturers with respect to +generality of need being served---and also with respect to the solution choice +issue discussed earlier---can result in a very frustrating and cloudy +interaction in which each party hides its best information and attempts to +manipulate others to its own advantage. With respect to generality of need, +sophisticated users understand custom suppliers' preference for a larger market +and attempt to argue convincingly that "everyone will want precisely what I am +asking you for." Manufacturers, in turn, know users have this incentive and so +will generally prefer to develop custom products for which they themselves have +a reasonable understanding of demand. Users are also aware of manufacturers' +strong preference for only producing products that embody their existing +solution expertise. To guard against the possibility that this incentive will +produce biased advice, they may attempt to shop around among a number of +suppliers offering different solution types and/or develop internal expertise +on solution possibilities and/or attempt to write better contracts. All these +attempts to induce and guard against bias involve agency costs. +={ Custom products : + manufacturers and +} + +!_ An Illustrative Case + +A case study by Sarah Slaughter (1993) illustrates the impact of some of the +transaction costs discussed above related to users' innovate-or-buy decisions. +Slaughter studied patterns of innovation in stressed-skin panels, which are +used in some housing construction. The aspects of the panels studied were +related to installation, and so the users of these features were home builders +rather than home owners. When Slaughter contrasted users' costs of innovating +versus buying, she found that it was always much cheaper for the builder to +develop a solution for itself at a construction site than to ask a panel +manufacturer to do so. +={ Slaughter, S. +16 ; + Stressed-skin panels +16 +} + +A stressed-skin panel can be visualized as a large 4-by-8-foot sandwich +consisting of two panels made of plywood with a layer of plastic foam glued in +between. The foam, about 4 inches thick, strongly bonds the two panels together +and also acts as a layer of thermal insulation. In 1989, manufacturing of +stressed-skin panels was a relatively concentrated industry; the four largest +manufacturers collectively having a 77 percent share of the market. The user +industry was much less concentrated: the four largest constructors of panelized +housing together had only 1 percent of the market for such housing in 1989. + +In housing construction, stressed-skin panels are generally attached to strong +timber frames to form the outer shell of a house and to resist shear loads +(such as the force of the wind). To use the panels in this way, a number of +subsidiary inventions are required. For example, one must find a practical, +long-lasting way to attach panels to each other and to the floors, the roof, +and the frame. Also, one has to find a new way to run pipes and wires from +place to place because there are no empty spaces in the walls to put +them---panel interiors are filled with foam. + +Stressed-skin panels were introduced into housing construction after World War +II. From then till 1989, the time of Slaughter's study, 34 innovations were +made in 12 functionally important areas to create a complete building system +for this type of construction. Slaughter studied the history of each of these +innovations and found that 82 percent had been developed by users of the +stressed-skin panels---residential builders---and only 18 percent by +manufacturers of stressed-skin panels. Sometimes more than one user developed +and implemented different approaches to the same functional problem (table +4.1). Builders freely revealed their innovations rather than protecting them +for proprietary advantage. They were passed from builder to builder by word of +mouth, published in trade magazines, and diffused widely. All were replicated +at building sites for years before any commercial panel manufacturer developed +and sold a solution to accomplish the same function. + +Histories of the user-developed improvements to stressed-skin panel +construction showed that the user-innovator construction firms did not engage +in planned R&D projects. Instead, each innovation was an immediate response to +a problem encountered in the course of a construction project. Once a problem +was encountered, the innovating builder typically developed and fabricated a +solution at great speed, using skills, materials, and equipment on hand at the +construction site. Builders reported that the average time from discovery of +the problem to installation of the completed solution on the site was only half +a day. The total cost of each innovation, including time, equipment, and +materials, averaged $153. + +!_ Example: Installing Wiring in a Stressed-Skin Panel + +A builder was faced with the immediate problem of how to route wires through +the foam interior of panels to wall switches located in the middle of the +panels. He did not want cut grooves or channels through the surfaces of the +panels to these locations---that would dangerously reduce the panels' +structural strength. His inventive solution was to mount an electrically heated +wire on the tip of a long pole and simply push the heated tip through the +center insulation layer of the panel. As he pushed, the electrically heated tip +quickly melted a channel through the foam plastic insulation from the edge of +the panel to the desired spot. Wires were then pulled through this channel. + +!_ Table 4.1 +Users would have found it much more costly to get custom solutions from +manufacturers. The costs of user-developed innovations in stressed-skin panels +were very low. + +table{~h c5; 40; 17; 17; 6; 20; + +Function +Average user development time (days) +Average user development cost +N +Minimimum cost of waiting for manufacturer to deliver + +Framing of openings in panels +0.1 +$20 +1 +$1,400 + +Structural connection between panels +0.1 +30 +2 +$1,400 + +Ventilation of panels on roof +0.1 +32 +2 +$28,000 + +Insulated connection between panels +0.1 +41 +3 +$2,800 + +Corner connection between panels +0.2 +60 +1 +$2,800 + +Installation of HVAC in panels +0.2 +60 +2 +$2,800 + +Installation of wiring in panels +0.2 +79 +7 +$2,800 + +Connection of panels to roof +0.2 +80 +1 +$2,800 + +Add insect repellency to panels +0.4 +123 +3 +$70,000 + +Connect panels to foundation +0.5 +160 +1 +$1,400 + +Connect panels to frames +1.2 +377 +3 +$2,800 + +Development of curved panels +5.0 +1,500 +1 +$28,000 + +Average for all innovations +0.5 +$153 +~ +$12,367 + +}table + +N represents number of innovations developed by /{users}/ to carry out each +listed function. Source: Slaughter 1993, tables 4 and 5. Costs and times shown +are averaged for all user-developed innovations in each functional category. +(The six /{manufacturer}/-developed innovations in Slaughter's sample are not +included in this table.) + +The builder-innovator reported that the total time to develop the innovation +was only an hour, and that the total cost for time and materials equaled $40. +How could it cost so little and take so little time? The builder explained that +using hot wires to slice sheets of plastic foam insulation into pieces of a +required length is a technique known to builders. His idea as to how to modify +the slicing technique to melt channels instead came to him quickly. To test the +idea, he immediately sent a worker to an electrical supply house to get some +nichrome wire (a type of high-resistance wire often used as an electrical +heating element), attached the wire to a tip of a pole, and tried the solution +on a panel at the building site---and it worked! + +This solution was described in detail in an article in a builder's magazine and +was widely imitated. A panel manufacturer's eventual response (after the user +solution had spread for a number of years) was to manufacture a panel with a +channel for wires pre-molded into the plastic foam interior of the panel. This +solution is only sometimes satisfactory. Builders often do not want to locate +switch boxes at the height of the premolded channel. Also, sometimes +construction workers will install some panels upside down in error, and the +preformed channels will then not be continuous between one panel and the next. +In such cases, the original, user-developed solution is again resorted to. + +!_ Example: Creating a Curved Panel +={ Manufacturers : + transaction costs and +8 +} + +A builder was constructing a custom house with large, curved windows. Curved +stressed-skin panels were needed to fill in the space above and below these +windows, but panel manufacturers only sold flat panels at that time. The +builder facing the problem could not simply buy standard flat panels and bend +them into curved ones at the construction site---completed panels are rigid by +design. So he bought plywood and plastic foam at a local building supply house +and slowly bent each panel component separately over a curved frame quickly +built at the construction site. He then bonded all three elements together with +glue to create strong curved panels that would maintain their shape over time. + +To determine whether users' decisions to innovate rather than buy made economic +sense for them, Slaughter calculated, in a very conservative way, what it would +have cost users to buy a manufacturer-developed solution embodied in a +manufactured panel rather than build a solution for themselves. Her estimates +included only the cost of the delay a user-builder would incur while waiting +for delivery of a panel incorporating a manufacturer's solution. Delay in +obtaining a solution to a problem encountered at a construction site is costly +for a builder, because the schedule of deliveries, subcontractors, and other +activities must then be altered. For example, if installation of a panel is +delayed, one must also reschedule the arrival of the subcontractor hired to run +wires through it, the contractor hired to paint it, and so on. Slaughter +estimated the cost of delay to a builder at $280 per crew per day of delay +(Means 1989). To compute delay times, she assumed that a manufacturer would +always be willing to supply the special item a user requested. She also assumed +that no time elapsed while the manufacturer learned about the need, contracted +to do the job, designed a solution, and obtained needed regulatory approvals. +She then asked panel manufacturers to estimate how long it would take them to +simply construct a panel with the solution needed and deliver it to the +construction site. Delay times computed in this manner ranged from 5 days for +some innovations to 250 days for the longest-term one and averaged 44 days. +={ Means, R. ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers +2 | by users +2 ; + Manufacturers : + expectations of economic benefit by +2 | innovation and +5 +} + +The conservative nature of this calculation is very clear. For example, +Slaughter points out that the regulatory requirements for building components, +not included, are in fact much more stringent for manufacturers than for +user-builders in the field of residential construction. Manufacturers +delivering products can be required to provide test data demonstrating +compliance with local building codes for each locality served. Testing new +products for compliance in a locality can take from a month to several years, +and explicit code approval often takes several additional years. In contrast, a +builder that innovates need only convince the local building inspector that +what he has done meets code or performance requirements--- often a much easier +task (Ehrenkrantz Group 1979; Duke 1988). +={ Duke, R. ; + Ehrenkrantz Group +} + +Despite her very conservative method of calculation, Slaughter found the costs +to users of obtaining a builder solution to be at least 100 times the actual +costs of developing a solution for themselves (table 4.1). Clearly, users' +decisions to innovate rather than buy made economic sense in this case. + +!_ Modeling Users' Innovate-or-Buy Decisions + +In this section I summarize the core of the argument discussed in this chapter +via a simple quantitative model developed with Carliss Baldwin. Our goal is to +offer additional clarity by trading off the richness of the qualitative +argument for simplicity. +={ Baldwin, C. +24 } + +Whether a user firm should innovate or buy is a variant of a well-known +problem: where one should place an activity in a supply chain. In any +real-world case many complexities enter. In the model that follows, Baldwin and +I ignore most of these and consider a simple base case focused on the impact of +transaction costs on users' innovate-or-buy considerations. The model deals +with manufacturing firms and user firms rather than individual users. We assume +that user firms and manufacturer firms both will hire designers from the same +homogeneous pool if they elect to solve a user problem. We also assume that +both user firms and manufacturer firms will incur the same costs to solve a +specific user problem. For example, they will have the same costs to monitor +the performance of the designer employees they hire. In this way we simplify +our innovate-or-buy problem to one of transaction costs only. + +If there are no transaction costs (for example, no costs to write and enforce a +contract), then by Coase's theorem a user will be indifferent between making or +buying a solution to its problem. But in the real world there are transaction +costs, and so a user will generally prefer to either make or buy. Which, from +the point of view of minimizing overall costs of obtaining a problem solution, +is the better choice under any given circumstances? +={ Coase, R. } + +Let V,{ij}, be the value of a solution to problem j for user i. Let N,{j}, be +the number of users having problem j. Let Wh,{j}, be the cost of solving +problem j, where W = hourly wage and h,{j}, = hours required to solve it. Let +P,{j}, be the price charged by a manufacturer for a solution to problem j. Let +T be fixed or "setup" transaction costs, such as writing a general contract for +buyers of a solution to problem j. Let t be variable or "frictional" +transaction costs, such as tailoring the general contract to a specific +customer. + +To explore this problem we make two assumptions. First, we assume that a user +firm knows its own problems and the value of a solution to itself, V,{ij},. +Second, we assume that a manufacturer knows the number of users having each +problem, N,{j},, and the value of solutions for each problem for all users, +V,{ij},. + +These assumptions are in line with real-world incentives of users and +manufacturers, although information stickiness generally prevents firms from +getting full information. That is, users have a high incentive to know their +own problems and the value to them of a solution. Manufacturers, in turn, have +an incentive to invest in understanding the nature of problems faced by users +in the target market, the number of users affected, and the value that the +users would attach to getting a solution in order to determine the potential +profitability of markets from their point of view. +={ Sticky information : + innovation and +} + +We first consider the user's payoff for solving a problem for itself. A user +has no transaction costs in dealing with itself, so a user's payoff for solving +problem j will be V,{ij}, - Wh,{j},. Therefore, a user will buy a solution from +an upstream manufacturer rather than develop one for itself if and only if P ≤ +Wh,{j},. + +Next we consider payoffs to a manufacturer for solving problem j. In this case, +transaction costs such as those discussed in earlier sections will be +encountered. With respect to transaction costs assume first that t = 0 but T > +0. Then, the manufacturer's payoff for solving problem j will be V,{ij}, - +Wh,{j},, which needs to be positive in order for the manufacturer to find +innovation attractive: + +N,{j}, P,{j}, - Wh,{j}, - T > 0. + +But, as we saw, P,{j}, ≤ Wh,{j}, if the user is to buy, so we may substitute +Wh,{j}, for P,{j}, in our inequality. Thus we obtain the following inequality +as a condition for the user to buy: + +N,{j}, (Wh,{j},) - Wh,{j}, - T > 0, + +or + +N,{j}, > (T / Wh,{j},) + 1. + +In other words, Baldwin and I find that the absolute lower bound on N is +greater than 1. This means that a single user will always prefer to solve a +unique problem j for itself (except in Coase's world, where T = 0, and the user +will be indifferent). If every problem is unique to a single user, users will +never choose to call on upstream manufacturers for solutions. +={ Coase, R. } + +Now assume that T = 0 but t > 0. Then the condition for the user to buy rather +than to innovate for itself becomes + +N,{j}, (Wh,{j}, - t) - Wh,{j}, > 0, + +or equivalently (provided Wh,{j}, > t) + +N,{j}, > Wh,{j}, / (Wh,{j}, - t) > 1. + +Again, users will not call on upstream manufacturers to solve problems unique +to one user. + +The findings from the simplified model, then, are the following: Problems +unique to one user will always be solved efficiently by users hiring designers +to work for them in house. In contrast, problems affecting more than a moderate +number of users, n, which is a function of the transaction costs, will be +efficiently solved by the manufacturer hiring designers to develop the needed +new product or service and then selling that solution to all users affected by +the problem. However, given sufficient levels of T and/or of t, problems +affecting more than one but fewer than n users will not be solved by a +manufacturer, and so there will be a market failure: Assuming an institutional +framework consisting only of independent users and manufacturers, multiple +users will have to solve the same problem independently. + +As illustration, suppose that t = 0.25Wh,{j}, and T = 10Wh,{j},. Then, +combining the two expressions and solving for n yields + +n = (11Wh,{j}, /0.75Wh,{j},) = 14.66. + +The condition for the user to buy the innovation rather than innovate itself +becomes N,{j}, ≥ 15. For a number of users less than 15 but greater than 1, +there will be a wasteful multiplication of user effort: several users will +invest in developing the same innovation independently. + +In a world that consists entirely of manufacturers and of users that do not +share the innovations they develop, the type of wasteful duplicative innovation +investment by users just described probably will occur often. As was discussed +earlier in this chapter, and as was illustrated by Slaughter's study, +substantial transaction costs might well be the norm. In addition, low numbers +of users having the same need---situations where N,{j}, is low---might also be +the norm in the case of functionally novel innovations. Functionally novel +innovations, as I will show later, tend to be developed by lead users, and lead +users are by definition at the leading (low-N,{j},) edge of markets. +={ Slaughter, S. ; + Stressed-skin panels +} + +When the type of market failure discussed above does occur, users will have an +incentive to search for institutional forms with a lower T and/or a lower t +than is associated with assignment of the problem to an upstream manufacturer. +One such institutional form involves interdependent innovation development +among multiple users (for example, the institutional form used successfully in +open source software projects that I will discuss in chapter 7). Baldwin and +Clark (2003) show how this form can work to solve the problem of wasteful user +innovation investments that were identified in our model. They show that, given +modularity in the software's architecture, it will pay for users participating +in open source software projects to generate and freely reveal some components +of the needed innovation, benefiting from the fact that other users are likely +to develop and reveal other components of that innovation. At the limit, the +wasteful duplication of users' innovative efforts noted above will be +eliminated; each innovation component will have been developed by only one +user, but will be shared by many. +={ Clark, K. } + +!_ Benefiting from the Innovation Process +={ Innovation process +4 ; + Users : + innovation process and +4 +} + +Some individual users (not user firms) may decide to innovate for themselves +rather than buy even if a traditional accounting evaluation would show that +they had made a major investment in time and materials for an apparently minor +reward in product functionality. The reason is that individual users may gain +major rewards from the process of innovating, in addition to rewards from the +product being developed. Make-or-buy evaluations typically include factors such +as the time and materials that must be invested to develop a solution. These +costs are then compared with the likely benefits produced by the project's +"output"---the new product or service created---to determine whether the +project is worth doing. This was the type of comparison made by Slaughter, for +example, in assessing whether it would be better for the users to make or to +buy the stressed-skin panel innovations in her sample. However, in the case of +individual user-innovators, this type of assessment can provide too narrow a +perspective on what actually constitutes valuable project output. Specifically, +there is evidence that individuals sometimes greatly prize benefits derived +from their participation in the process of innovation. The process, they say, +can produce learning and enjoyment that is of high value to them. +={ Slaughter, S. ; + Stressed-skin panels +} + +In the introductory chapter, I pointed out that some recreational activities, +such as solving crossword puzzles, are clearly engaged in for process rewards +only: very few individuals value the end "product" of a completed puzzle. But +process rewards have also been found to be important for innovators that are +producing outputs that they and others do value (Hertel, Niedner, and Herrmann +2003; Lakhani and Wolf 2005). Lakhani and Wolf studied a sample of individuals +(n = 684, response rate = 34 percent) who had written new software code and +contributed it to an open source project. They asked the programmers to list +their three most important reasons for doing this. Fifty-eight percent of +respondents said that an important motivation for writing their code was that +they had a work need (33 percent), or a non-work need (30 percent) or both (5 +percent) for the code itself. That is, they valued the project's "output" as +this is traditionally viewed. However, 45 percent said that one of their top +three reasons for writing code was intellectual stimulation, and 41 percent +said one of their top three reasons was to improve their own programming skills +(Lakhani and Wolf 2005, table 6). Elaborating on these responses, 61 percent of +respondents said that their participation in the open source project was their +most creative experience or was as creative as their most creative experience. +Also, more than 60 percent said that "if there were one more hour in the day" +they would always or often dedicate it to programming. +={ Herrmann, S. ; + Hertel, G. ; + Lakhani, K. ; + Niedner, S. ; + Wolf, B. +} + +Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1990, 1996) systematically studied the characteristics +of tasks that individuals find intrinsically rewarding, such as rock climbing. +He found that a level of challenge somewhere between boredom and fear is +important, and also that the experience of "flow" gained when one is fully +engaged in a task is intrinsically rewarding. Amabile (1996) proposes that +intrinsic motivation is a key determining factor in creativity. She defines a +creative task as one that is heuristic in nature (with no predetermined path to +solution), and defines a creative outcome as a novel and appropriate (useful) +response to such a task. Both conditions certainly can apply to the task of +developing a product or a service. +={ Amiable, T. ; + Csikszentmihalyi, M. +} + +In sum, to the extent that individual user-innovators benefit from the process +of developing or modifying a product as well as from the product actually +developed, they are likely to innovate even when the benefits expected from the +product itself are relatively low. (Employees of a firm may wish to experience +this type of intrinsic reward in their work as well, but managers and +commercial constraints may give them less of an opportunity to do so. Indeed, +"control over my own work" is cited by many programmers as a reason that they +enjoy creating code as volunteers on open source projects more than they enjoy +coding for their employers for pay.) + +1~ 5 Users' Low-Cost Innovation Niches +={ Users : + innovation and +50 | low-cost innovation niches of +50 +} + +!_ The Problem-Solving Process +={ Trial-and-error problem solving +11 } + +Product and service development is at its core a problem-solving process. +Research into the nature of problem solving shows it to consist of trial and +error, directed by some amount of insight as to the direction in which a +solution might lie (Baron 1988). Trial and error has also been found to be +prominent in the problem-solving work of product and process development +(Marples 1961; Allen 1966; von Hippel and Tyre 1995; Thomke 1998, 2003). +={ Allen, T. ; + Baron, J. ; + Marples, D. ; + Thomke, S. ; + Tyre, M. ; + von Hippel, E. +} + +Trial-and-error problem solving can be envisioned as a four-phase cycle that is +typically repeated many times during the development of a new product or +service. Problem solvers first conceive of a problem and a related solution +based on their best knowledge and insight. Next, they build a physical or +virtual prototype of both the possible solution they have envisioned and the +intended use environment. Third, they run the experiment---that is, they +operate their prototyped solution and see what happens. Fourth and finally, +they analyze the result to understand what happened in the trial and to assess +the "error information" that they gained. (In the trial-and-error formulation +of the learning process, error is the new information or learning derived from +an experiment by an experimenter: it is the aspect(s) of the outcome that the +experimenter did not predict.) Developers then use the new learning to modify +and improve the solution under development before building and running a new +trial (figure 5.1). + +Trial-and-error experimentation can be informal or formal; the underlying +principles are the same. As an example on the informal side, consider a user +experiencing a need and then developing what eventually turns out to be a new +product: the skateboard. In phase 1 of the cycle, the user combines need and +solution information into a product idea: "I am bored with roller skating. How +can I get down this hill in a more exciting way? Maybe it would be fun to put +my skates' wheels under a board and ride down on that." In phase 2, the user +builds a prototype by taking his skates apart and hammering the wheels onto the +underside of a board. In phase 3, he runs the experiment by climbing onto the +board and heading down the hill. In phase 4, he picks himself up from an +inaugural crash and thinks about the error information he has gained: "It is +harder to stay on this thing than I thought. What went wrong, and how can I +improve things before my next run down the hill?" + +% (2) BUILD +% (3) RUN +% (4) ANALYZE +% (1) DESIGN +% DONE +% DESIGN REQUIREMENTS +% DESIGN ACTIVITY +% Changes in +% exogenous +% information +% Use learning from previous +% cycle(s) to conceive and design +% an improved solution. +% . +% Develop models and/or build +% prototypes to be used in +% running experiments. +% . +% Test model/prototype in real +% or simulated use environment. +% . +% Analyze findings from +% previous step and learn. +% . +% Figure 5.1 +% The trial-and-error cycle of product development. + +{di_evh_f5-1.png}image + +!_ Figure 5.1 +The trial-and-error cycle of product development. + +As an example of more formal experimentation, consider a product-development +engineer working in a laboratory to improve the performance of an automobile +engine. In phase 1, need and solution information are again combined into a +design idea: "I need to improve engine fuel efficiency. I think that a more +even expansion of the flame in the cylinders is a possible solution direction, +and I think that changing the shape of the spark plug electrodes will improve +this." In phase 2, the engineer builds a spark plug incorporating her new idea. +In phase 3, she inserts the new spark plug into a lab test engine equipped with +the elaborate instrumentation needed to measure the very rapid propagation of a +flame in the cylinders of an auto engine and runs the test. In phase 4, she +feeds the data into a computer and analyzes the results. She asks: "Did the +change in spark plug design change the flame front as expected? Did it change +fuel efficiency? How can I use what I have learned from this trial to improve +things for the next one?" + +In addition to the difference in formality, there is another important +difference between these two examples. In the first example, the skateboard +user was conducting trial and error with a full prototype of the intended +product in a real use environment---his own. In the second example, the +experimental spark plug might have been a full prototype of a real product, but +it probably consisted only of that portion of a real spark plug that actually +extends into a combustion chamber. Also, only /{aspects}/ of the use +environment were involved in the lab experiment. That is, the test engine was +not a real auto engine, and it was not being operated in a real car traveling +over real roads. + +Experimentation is often carried out using simplified versions---models--- of +the product being designed and its intended use environment. These models can +be physical (as in the example just given), or they can be virtual (as in the +case of thought experiments or computer simulations). In a computer simulation, +both the product and the environment are represented in digital form, and their +interaction is tested entirely within a computer. For example, one might make a +digital model of an automobile and a crash barrier. One could then use a +computer to simulate the crash of the model car into the model barrier. One +would analyze the results by calculating the effects of that crash on the +structure of the car. + +The value of using models rather than the real thing in experimentation is +twofold. First, it can reduce the cost of an experiment---it can be much +cheaper to crash a simulated BMW than a real one. Second, it can make +experimental results clearer by making them simpler or otherwise different than +real life. If one is trying to test the effect of a small change on car safety, +for example, it can be helpful to remove everything not related to that change +from the experiment. For example, if one is testing the way a particular wheel +suspension structure deforms in a crash, one does not have to know (or spend +time computing) how a taillight lens will react in the crash. Also, in a real +crash things happen only once and happen very fast. In a virtual crash executed +by computer, on the other hand, one can repeat the crash sequence over and +over, and can stretch time out or compress it exactly as one likes to better +understand what is happening (Thomke 2003). +={ Thomke, S. +2 } + +Users and others experimenting with real prototypes in real use environments +can also modify things to make tests simpler and clearer. A restaurant chef, +for example, can make slight variations in just a small part of a recipe each +time a customer calls for it, in order to better understand what is happening +and make improvements. Similarly, a process machine user can experiment with +only a small portion of machine functioning over and over to test changes and +detect errors. + +Sometimes designers will test a real experimental object in a real experimental +context only after experimenting with several generations of models that +isolate different aspects of the real and/or encompass increasing amounts of +the complexity of the real. Developers of pharmaceuticals, for example, might +begin by testing a candidate drug molecule against just the purified enzyme or +receptor it is intended to affect, then test it again and again against +successively more complex models of the human organism (tissue cultures, animal +models, etc.) before finally seeking to test its effect on real human patients +during clinical trials (Thomke, von Hippel, and Franke 1998). +={ Franke, N. ; + von Hippel, E. +} + +!_ Sticky Information +={ Sticky information +11 : + innovation and +11 +} + +Any experiment is only as accurate as the information that is used as inputs. +If inputs are not accurate, outcomes will not be accurate: "garbage in, garbage +out." + +The goal of product development and service development is to create a solution +that will satisfy needs of real users within real contexts of use. The more +complete and accurate the information on these factors, the higher the fidelity +of the models being tested. If information could be transferred costlessly from +place to place, the quality of the information available to problem solvers +would or could be independent of location. But if information is costly to +transfer, things are different. User-innovators, for example, will then have +better information about their needs and their use context than will +manufacturers. After all, they create and live in that type of information in +full fidelity! Manufacturer-innovators, on the other hand, must transfer that +information to themselves at some cost, and are unlikely to be able to obtain +it in full fidelity at any cost. However, manufacturers might well have a +higher-fidelity model of the solution types in which they specialize than users +have. +={ Information asymmetries +31 ; + Local information +35 ; + Users : + information asymmetries of +31 +} + +It turns out that much information needed by product and service designers is +"sticky." In any particular instance, the stickiness of a unit of information +is defined as the incremental expenditure required to transfer that unit of +information to a specified location in a form usable by a specified information +seeker. When this expenditure is low, information stickiness is low; when it is +high, stickiness is high (von Hippel 1994). That information is often sticky +has been shown by studying the costs of transferring information regarding +fully developed process technology from one location to another with full +cooperation on both sides. Even under these favorable conditions, costs have +been found to be high---leading one to conclude that the costs of transferring +information during product and service development are likely to be at least as +high. Teece (1977), for example, studied 26 international technology-transfer +projects and found that the costs of information transfer ranged from 2 percent +to 59 percent of total project costs and averaged 19 percent---a considerable +fraction. Mansfield et al. (1982) also studied a number of projects involving +technology transfer to overseas plants, and also found technology-transfer +costs averaging about 20 percent of total project costs. Winter and Suzlanski +(2001) explored replication of well-known organizational routines at new sites +and found the process difficult and costly. +={ Mansfield, E. ; + Suzlanski, G. ; + Teece, D. ; + Winter, S. ; + von Hippel, E. +63 +} + +Why is information transfer so costly? The term "stickiness" refers only to a +consequence, not to a cause. Information stickiness can result from causes +ranging from attributes of the information itself to access fees charged by an +information owner. Consider tacitness---a lack of explicit encoding. Polanyi +(1958, pp. 49--53) noted that many human skills are tacit because "the aim of a +skilful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are +not known as such to the person following them." For example, swimmers are +probably not aware of the rules they employ to keep afloat (e.g., in exhaling, +they do not completely empty their lungs), nor are medical experts generally +aware of the rules they follow in order to reach a diagnosis of a disease. +"Indeed," Polanyi says, "even in modern industries the indefinable knowledge is +still an essential part of technology." Information that is tacit is also +sticky because it cannot be transferred at low cost. As Polanyi points out, "an +art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription, +since no prescription for it exists. It can be passed on only by example from +master to apprentice. . . ." Apprenticeship is a relatively costly mode of +transfer. +={ Polanyi, M. } + +Another cause of information stickiness is related to absorptive capacity. A +firm's or an individual's capacity to absorb new, outside technical information +is largely a function of prior related knowledge (Cohen and Levinthal 1990). +Thus, a firm knowing nothing about circuit design but seeking to apply an +advanced technique for circuit engineering may be unable to apply it without +first learning more basic information. The stickiness of the information about +the advanced technique for the firm in question is therefore higher than it +would be for a firm that already knows that basic information. (Recall that the +stickiness of a unit of information is defined as the incremental expenditure +required to transfer a unit of information to a specified site in a form usable +by a /{specific}/ information seeker.) +={ Cohen, W. ; + Levinthal, D. +} + +Total information stickiness associated with solving a specific problem is also +determined by the amount of information required by a problem solver. Sometimes +a great deal is required, for two reasons. First, as Rosenberg (1976, 1982) and +Nelson (1982, 1990) point out, much technological knowledge deals with the +specific and the particular. Second, one does not know in advance of problem +solving which particular items will be important. +={ Nelson, R. ; + Rosenberg, N. +} + +An example from a study by von Hippel and Tyre (1995) illustrates both points +nicely. Tyre and I studied how and why novel production machines failed when +they were first introduced into factory use. One of the machines studied was an +automated machine used by a computer manufacturing firm to place large +integrated circuits onto computer circuit boards. The user firm had asked an +outside group to develop what was needed, and that group had developed and +delivered a robot arm coupled to a machine-vision system. The arm, guided by +the vision system, was designed to pick up integrated circuits and place them +on a circuit board at precise locations. +={ Tyre, M. +4 } + +Upon being installed in the factory, the new component-placing machine failed +many times as a result of its developers' lack of some bit of information about +the need or use environment. For example, one day machine operators reported +that the machine was malfunctioning---again---and they did not know why. +Investigation traced the problem to the machine-vision system. This system used +a small TV camera to locate specific metalized patterns on the surface of each +circuit board being processed. To function, the system needed to "see" these +metalized patterns clearly against the background color of the board's surface. +The vision system developed by the machine-development group had functioned +properly in their lab when tested with sample boards from the user factory. +However, the field investigation showed that in the factory it failed when +boards that were light yellow in color were being processed. + +The fact that some of the boards being processed were sometimes light yellow +was a surprise to the machine developers. The factory personnel who had set the +specifications for the machine knew that the boards they processed varied in +color; however, they had not volunteered the information, because they did not +know that the developers would be interested. Early in the machine-development +process, they had simply provided samples of boards used in the factory to the +machine-development group. And, as it happened, these samples were green. On +the basis of the samples, developers had then (implicitly) assumed that all +boards processed in the field were green. It had not occurred to them to ask +users "How much variation in board color do you generally experience?" Thus, +they had designed the vision system to work successfully with boards that were +green. + +In the case of this field failure, the item of information needed to understand +or predict this problem was known to the users and could easily have been +provided to the machine developers---had the developers thought to ask and/or +had users thought to volunteer it. But in the actual evolution of events this +was not done. The important point is that this omission was not due to poor +practice; it was due to the huge amount of information about the need and the +use environment that was /{potentially}/ relevant to problem solvers. Note that +the use environment and the novel machine contain many highly specific +attributes that could potentially interact to cause field problems. Note also +that the property of the board causing this particular type of failure was very +narrow and specific. That is, the problem was not that the board had physical +properties, nor that it had a color. The problem was precisely that some boards +were yellow, and a particular shade of yellow at that. Since a circuit board, +like most other components, has many attributes in addition to color (shape, +size, weight, chemical composition, resonant frequency, dielectric constant, +flexibility, and so on), it is likely that problem solvers seeking to learn +everything they might need to know about the use and the use environment would +have to collect a very large (perhaps unfeasibly large) number of very specific +items of information. + +Next, consider that the information items the problem solver will actually need +(of the many that exist) are contingent on the solution path taken by the +engineer designing the product. In the example, the problem caused by the +yellow color of the circuit board was contingent on the design solution to the +component-placing problem selected by the engineer during the development +process. That is, the color of the circuit boards in the user factory became an +item the problem solvers needed to know only when engineers, in the course of +their development of the component placer, decided to use a vision system in +the component-placing machine they were designing, and the fact that the boards +were yellow became relevant only when the engineers chose a video camera and +lighting that could not distinguish the metalized patterns on the board against +a yellow background. Clearly, it can be costly to transfer the many items of +information that a product or service developer might require---even if each +individual item has low stickiness---from one site to another. + +!_ How Information Asymmetries Affect User Innovation vs. Manufacturer Innovation +={ Manufacturers : + information asymmetries of +11 | innovation and +25 +} + +An important consequence of information stickiness is that it results in +information asymmetries that cannot be erased easily or cheaply. Different +users and manufacturers will have different stocks of information, and may find +it costly to acquire information they need but do not have. As a result, each +innovator will tend to develop innovations that draw on the sticky information +it already has, because that is the cheapest course of action (Arora and +Gambardella 1994; von Hippel 1994). In the specific case of product +development, this means that users as a class will tend to develop innovations +that draw heavily on their own information about need and context of use. +Similarly, manufacturers as a class will tend to develop innovations that draw +heavily on the types of solution information in which they specialize. +={ Arora, A. ; + Gambardella, A. +} + +This effect is visible in studies of innovation. Riggs and von Hippel (1994) +studied the types of innovations made by users and manufacturers that improved +the functioning of two major types of scientific instruments. +={ Riggs, W. ; + Scientific instruments +9 ; + Sticky information : + and scientific instruments +1 +} + +They found that users tended to develop innovations that enabled the +instruments to do qualitatively new types of things for the first time. In +contrast, manufacturers tended to develop innovations that enabled users to do +the same things they had been doing, but to do them more conveniently or +reliably (table 5.1). For example, users were the first to modify the +instruments to enable them to image and analyze magnetic domains at +sub-microscopic dimensions. In contrast, manufacturers were the first to +computerize instrument adjustments to improve ease of operation. Sensitivity, +resolution, and accuracy improvements fall somewhere in the middle, as the data +show. These types of improvements can be driven by users seeking to do specific +new things, or by manufacturers applying their technical expertise to improve +the products along known dimensions of merit, such as accuracy. + +!_ Table 5.1 +Users tend to develop innovations that deliver novel functions. + +% Innovation developed by + +table{~h c4; 60; 15; 15; 10; + +Type of improvement provided by innovation +User +Manufacturer +n + +New functional capability +82% +18% +17 + +Sensitivity, resolution, or accuracy improvement +48% +52% +23 + +Convenience or reliability improvement +13% +87% +24 + +Total sample size +~ +~ +64 + +}table + +Source: Riggs and von Hippel 1994, table 3. + +The variation in locus of innovation for different types of innovations, seen +in table 5.1 does fit our expectations from the point of view of sticky +information considerations. But these findings are not controlled for +profitability, and so it might be that profits for new functional capabilities +are systematically smaller than profits obtainable from improvements made to +existing functionality. If so, this could also explain the patterns seen. + +Ogawa (1998) took the next necessary step and conducted an empirical study that +did control for profitability of innovation opportunities. He too found the +sticky-information effect---this time visible in the division of labor +/{within}/ product-development projects. He studied patterns in the development +of a sample of 24 inventory-management innovations. All were jointly developed +by a Japanese equipment manufacturer, NEC, and by a user firm, Seven-Eleven +Japan (SEJ). SEJ, the leading convenience-store company in Japan, is known for +its inventory management. Using innovative methods and equipment, it is able to +turn over its inventory as many as 30 times a year, versus 12 times a year for +competitors (Kotabe 1995). An example of such an innovation jointly developed +by SEJ and NEC is just-in-time reordering, for which SEJ created the procedures +and NEC the hand-held equipment to aid store clerks in carrying out their newly +designed tasks. Equipment sales to SEJ are important to NEC: SEJ has thousands +of stores in Japan. +={ Kotabe, M. ; + Ogawa, S. +1 +} + +The 24 innovations studied by Ogawa varied in the amount of sticky need +information each required from users (having to do with store inventory- +management practices) and the amount of sticky solution information required +from manufacturers (having to do with new equipment technologies). Each also +varied in terms of the profit expectations of both user and manufacturer. Ogawa +determined how much of the design for each was done by the user firm and how +much by the manufacturer firm. Controlling for profit expectations, he found +that increases in the stickiness of user information were associated with a +significant increase in the amount of need-related design undertaken by the +user (Kendall correlation coefficient = 0.5784, P < 0.01). Conversely he found +that increased stickiness of technology-related information was associated in a +significant reduction in the amount of technology design done by the user +(Kendall correlation coefficients = 0.4789, P < 0.05). In other words, +need-intensive tasks within product-development projects will tend to be done +by users, while solution-intensive ones will tend to be done by manufacturers. + +!_ Low-Cost Innovation Niches + +Just as there are information asymmetries between users and manufacturers as +classes, there are also information asymmetries among individual user firms and +individuals, and among individual manufacturers as well. A study of mountain +biking by Lüthje, Herstatt, and von Hippel (2002) shows that information held +locally by individual user-innovators strongly affects the type of innovations +they develop. Mountain biking involves bicycling on rough terrain such as +mountain trails. It may also involve various other extreme conditions, such as +bicycling on snow and ice and in the dark (van der Plas and Kelly 1998). +={ Kelly, C. ; + Lüthje, C. ; + Van der Plas, R. ; + Herstatt, C. +12 ; + Lüthje, C. +12 ; + Mountain biking +12 ; + Users : + innovate-or-buy decisions by +12 +} + +Mountain biking began in the early 1970s when some young cyclists started to +use their bicycles off-road. Existing commercial bikes were not suited to this +type of rough use, so early users put together their own bikes. They used +strong bike frames, balloon tires, and powerful drum brakes designed for +motorcycles. They called their creations "clunkers" (Penning 1998; Buenstorf +2002). +={ Buenstorf, G. ; + Penning, C. +} + +Commercial manufacture of mountain bikes began about 1975, when some of the +early users of mountain bikes began to also build bikes for others. A tiny +cottage industry developed, and by 1976 a half-dozen small assemblers existed +in Marin County, California. In 1982, a small firm named Specialized, an +importer of bikes and bike parts that supplied parts to the Marin County +mountain bike assemblers, took the next step and brought the first +mass-produced mountain bike to market. Major bike manufacturers then followed +and started to produce mountain bikes and sell them at regular bike shops +across the United States. By the mid 1980s the mountain bike was fully +integrated in the mainstream bike market, and it has since grown to significant +size. In 2000, about $58 billion (65 percent) of total retail sales in the US +bicycle market were generated in the mountain bike category (National Sporting +Goods Association 2002). + +Mountain biking enthusiasts did not stop their innovation activities after the +introduction of commercially manufactured mountain bikes. They kept pushing +mountain biking into more extreme environmental conditions, and they continued +to develop new sports techniques involving mountain bikes (/{Mountain Bike}/ +1996). Thus, some began jumping their bikes from house roofs and water towers +and developing other forms of acrobatics. As they did so, they steadily +discovered needs for improvements to their equipment. Many responded by +developing and building the improvements they needed for themselves. + +Our sample of mountain bikers came from the area that bikers call the North +Shore of the Americas, ranging from British Columbia to Washington State. +Expert mountain bikers told us that this was a current "hot spot" where new +riding styles were being developed and where the sport was being pushed toward +new limits. We used a questionnaire to collect data from members of North Shore +mountain biking clubs and from contributors to the mailing lists of two North +Shore online mountain biking forums. Information was obtained from 291 mountain +bikers. Nineteen percent of bikers responding to the questionnaire reported +developing and building a new or modified item of mountain biking equipment for +their own use. The innovations users developed were appropriate to the needs +associated with their own riding specialties and were heterogeneous in +function. +={ Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and +6 ; + User need +6 ; + Users : + needs of +6 +} + +We asked mountain bikers who had innovated about the sources of the need and +solution information they had used in their problem solving. In 84.5 percent of +the cases respondents strongly agreed with the statement that their need +information came from /{personal needs they had frequently experienced}/ rather +than from information about the needs of others. With respect to solution +information, most strongly agreed with the statement that /{they used solution +information they already had}/, rather than learning new solution information +in order to develop their biking equipment innovation (table 5.2). + +!_ Table 5.2 +Innovators tended to use solution information they already had "in stock" to +develop their ideas. Tabulated here are innovators' answers to the question +"How did you obtain the information needed to develop your solution?" +={ Lüthje, C. } + +table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15; + +. +Mean +Median +Very high or high agreement + +"I had it due to my professional background." +4.22 +4 +47.5% + +"I had it from mountain biking or another hobby." +4.56 +5 +52.4% + +"I learned it to develop this idea." +2.11 +2 +16% + +}table + +Source: Lüthje et al. 2003. N = 61. Responses were rated on a seven-point +scale, with 1 = not at all true and 7 = very true. + +!_ Discussion + +To the extent that users have heterogeneous and sticky need and solution +information, they will have heterogeneous low-cost innovation niches. Users can +be sophisticated developers within those niches, despite their reliance on +their own need information and solution information that they already have in +stock. On the need side, recall that user-innovators generally are lead users +and generally are expert in the field or activity giving rise to their needs. +With respect to solution information, user firms have specialties that may be +at a world-class level. Individual users can also have high levels of solution +expertise. After all, they are students or employees during the day, with +training and jobs ranging from aerospace engineering to orthopedic surgery. +Thus, mountain bikers might not want to /{learn}/ orthopedic surgery to improve +their biking equipment, but if they already /{are}/ expert in that field they +could easily draw on what they know for relevant solution information. Consider +the following example drawn from the study of mountain biking discussed +earlier: + +I'm a human movement scientist working in ergonomics and biomechanics. I used +my medical experience for my design. I calculated a frame design suitable for +different riding conditions (downhill, climb). I did a CAD frame design on +Catia and conceived a spring or air coil that can be set to two different +heights. I plan to build the bike next year. + +Users' low-cost innovation niches can be narrow because their development +"labs" for such experimentation often consist largely of their individual use +environment and customary activities. Consider, for example, the low-cost +innovation niches of individual mountain bikers. Serious mountain bikers +generally specialize in a particular type of mountain biking activity. Repeated +specialized play and practice leads to improvement in related specialized +skills. This, in turn, may lead to a discovery of a problem in existing +mountain biking equipment and a responsive innovation. Thus, an innovating user +in our mountain biking study reported the following: "When doing tricks that +require me to take my feet off the bike pedals in mid-air, the pedals often +spin, making it hard to put my feet back onto them accurately before landing." +Such a problem is encountered only when a user has gained a high level of skill +in the very specific specialty of jumping and performing tricks in mid-air. +Once the problem has been encountered and recognized, however, the skilled +specialist user can re-evoke the same problematic conditions at will during +ordinary practice. The result is the creation of a low-cost laboratory for +testing and comparing different solutions to that problem. The user is +benefiting from enjoyment of his chosen activity and is developing something +new via learning by doing at the same time. + +In sharp contrast, if that same user decides to stray outside his chosen +activity in order to develop innovations of interest to others with needs that +are different from his own, the cost properly assignable to innovation will +rise. To gain an equivalent-quality context for innovation, such a user must +invest in developing personal skill related to the new innovation topic. Only +in this way will he gain an equivalently deep understanding of the problems +relevant to practitioners of that skill, and acquire a "field laboratory" +appropriate to developing and testing possible solutions to those new problems. + +Of course, these same considerations apply to user firms as well as to +individual users. A firm that is in the business of polishing marble floors is +a user of marble polishing equipment and techniques. It will have a low-cost +learning laboratory with respect to improvements in these because it can +conduct trial-and-error learning in that "lab" during the course of its +customary business activities. Innovation costs can be very low because +innovation activities are paid for in part by rewards unrelated to the novel +equipment or technique being developed. The firm is polishing while +innovating---and is getting paid for that work (Foray 2004). The low cost +innovation niche of the marble polishing firm may be narrow. For example, it is +unlikely to have any special advantage with respect to innovations in the +polishing of wood floors, which requires different equipment and techniques. +={ Foray, D. } + +1~ 6 Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + evidence of +10 | users and +50 ; + Information commons +13 ; + Intellectual property rights : + free revealing and +50 ; + Users : + free revealing by +50 +} + +Products, services, and processes developed by users become more valuable to +society if they are somehow diffused to others that can also benefit from them. +If user innovations are not diffused, multiple users with very similar needs +will have to invest to (re)develop very similar innovations, which would be a +poor use of resources from the social welfare point of view. Empirical research +shows that new and modified products developed by users often do diffuse +widely---and they do this by an unexpected means: user-innovators themselves +often voluntarily publicly reveal what they have developed for all to examine, +imitate, or modify without any payment to the innovator. + +In this chapter, I first review evidence that free revealing is frequent. Next, +I discuss the case for free revealing from an innovators' perspective, and +argue that it often can be the best /{practical}/ route for users to increase +profit from their innovations. Finally, I discuss the implications of free +revealing for innovation theory. + +!_ Evidence of Free Revealing +={ Free revealing of innovation information } + +When my colleagues and I say that an innovator "freely reveals" proprietary +information, we mean that all intellectual property rights to that information +are voluntarily given up by that innovator and all parties are given equal +access to it---the information becomes a public good (Harhoff, Henkel, and von +Hippel 2003). For example, placement of non-patented information in a publicly +accessible site such as a journal or public website would be free revealing as +we define it. Free revealing as so defined does not mean that recipients +necessarily acquire and utilize the revealed information at no cost to +themselves. Recipients may, for example, have to pay for a subscription to a +journal or for a field trip to an innovation site to acquire the information +being freely revealed. Also, some may have to obtain complementary information +or other assets in order to fully understand that information or put it to use. +However, if the possessor of the information does not profit from any such +expenditures made by its adopters, the information itself is still freely +revealed, according to our definition. This definition of free revealing is +rather extreme in that revealing with some small constraints, as is sometimes +done, would achieve largely the same economic effect. Still, it is useful to +discover that innovations are often freely revealed even in terms of this +stringent definition. +={ Harhoff, D. ; + Henkel, J. +} + +Routine and intentional free revealing among profit-seeking firms was first +described by Allen (1983). He noticed the phenomenon, which he called +collective invention, in historical records from the nineteenth-century English +iron industry. In that industry, ore was processed into iron by means of large +furnaces heated to very high temperatures. Two attributes of the furnaces used +had been steadily improved during the period 1850--1875: chimney height had +been increased and the temperature of the combustion air pumped into the +furnace during operation had been raised. These two technical changes +significantly and progressively improved the energy efficiency of iron +production---a very important matter for producers. Allen noted the surprising +fact that employees of competing firms publicly revealed information on their +furnace design improvements and related performance data in meetings of +professional societies and in published material. +={ Allen, R. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + collective invention and +} + +After Allen's initial observation, a number of other authors searched for free +revealing among profit-seeking firms and frequently found it. Nuvolari (2004) +studied a topic and time similar to that studied by Allen and found a similar +pattern of free revealing in the case of improvements made to steam engines +used to pump out mines in the 1800s. At that time, mining activities were +severely hampered by water that tended to flood into mines of any depth, and so +an early and important application of steam engines was for the removal of +water from mines. Nuvolari explored the technical history of steam engines used +to drain copper and tin mines in England's Cornwall District. Here, patented +steam engines developed by James Watt were widely deployed in the 1700s. After +the expiration of the Watt patent, an engineer named Richard Trevithick +developed a new type of high-pressure engine in 1812. Instead of patenting his +invention, he made his design available to all for use without charge. The +engine soon became the basic design used in Cornwall. Many mine engineers +improved Trevithick's design further and published what they had done in a +monthly journal, /{Leans Engine Reporter}/. This journal had been founded by a +group of mine managers with the explicit intention of aiding the rapid +diffusion of best practices among these competing firms. +={ Nuvolari, A. ; + Trevithick, R. ; + Watt, J. +} + +Free revealing has also been documented in the case of more recent industrial +equipment innovations developed by users. Lim (2000) reports that IBM was first +to develop a process to manufacture semiconductors that incorporated copper +interconnections among circuit elements instead of the traditionally used +aluminum ones. After some delay, IBM revealed increasing amounts of proprietary +process information to rival users and to equipment suppliers. Widespread free +revealing was also found in the case of automated clinical chemistry analyzers +developed by the Technicon Corporation for use in medical diagnosis. After +commercial introduction of the basic analyzer, many users developed major +improvements to both the analyzer and to the clinical tests processed on that +equipment. These users, generally medical personnel, freely revealed their +improvements via publication, and at company-sponsored seminars (von Hippel and +Finkelstein 1979). Mishina (1989) found free, or at least selective no-cost +revealing in the lithographic equipment industry. He reported that innovating +equipment users would sometimes reveal what they had done to machine +manufacturers. Morrison, Roberts, and I, in our study of library IT search +software (discussed in chapter 2 above), found that innovating users freely +revealed 56 percent of the software modifications they had developed. Reasons +given for not revealing the remainder had nothing to do with considerations of +intellectual property protection. Rather, users who did not share said they had +no convenient users' group forum for doing so, and/or they thought their +innovation was too specialized to be of interest to others. +={ IBM ; + Finkelstein, S. ; + Lim, K. ; + Mishina, K. ; + Morrison, Pamela ; + Roberts, J. ; + Technicon Corporation ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + and library information search system ; + Lead users : + library information search system and ; + Library information search system +} + +Innovating users of sports equipment also have been found to freely reveal +their new products and product modifications. Franke and Shah (2003), in their +study of four communities of serious sports enthusiasts described in chapter 2, +found that innovating users uniformly agreed with the statement that they +shared their innovation with their entire community free of charge---and +strongly disagreed with the statement that they sold their innovations (p < +0.001, t-test for dependent samples). Interestingly, two of the four +communities they studied engaged in activities involving significant +competition among community members. Innovators in these two communities +reported high but significantly less willingness to share, as one might expect +in view of the potentially higher level of competitive loss free revealing +would entail. +={ Franke, N. ; + Shah, S. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + and sports equipment ; + Sporting equipment : + free revealing and +} + +Contributors to the many open source software projects extant (more than 83,000 +were listed on SourceForge.net in 2004) also routinely make the new code they +have written public. Well-known open source software products include the Linux +operating system software and the Apache web server computer software. Some +conditions are attached to open source code licensing to ensure that the code +remains available to all as an information commons. Because of these added +protections, open source code does not quite fit the definition of free +revealing given earlier in this chapter. (The licensing of open source software +will be discussed in detail in chapter 7.) +={ Linux +1 ; + Apache web server software ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + and open source software +1 ; + Open source software : + free revealing and +1 +} + +Henkel (2003) showed that free revealing is sometimes practiced by directly +competing manufacturers. He studied manufacturers that were competitors and +that had all built improvements and extensions to a type of software known as +embedded Linux. (Such software is "embedded in" and used to operate equipment +ranging from cameras to chemical plants.) He found that these manufacturers +freely revealed improvements to the common software platform that they all +shared and, with a lag, also revealed much of the equipment-specific code they +had written. +={ Henkel, J. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + manufacturers and ; + Manufacturers : + free revealing and +} + +!_ The Practical Case for Free Revealing +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + case for +2 +} + +The "private investment model" of innovation assumes that innovation will be +supported by private investment if and as innovators can make attractive +profits from doing so. In this model, any free revealing or uncompensated +"spillover" of proprietary knowledge developed by private investment will +reduce the innovator's profits. It is therefore assumed that innovators will +strive to avoid spillovers of innovation-related information. From the +perspective of this model, then, free revealing is a major surprise: it seems +to make no sense that innovators would intentionally give away information for +free that they had invested money to develop. + +In this subsection I offer an explanation for the puzzle by pointing out that +free revealing is often the best /{practical}/ option available to user +innovators. Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel (2003) found that it is in practice +very difficult for most innovators to protect their innovations from direct or +approximate imitation. This means that the practical choice is typically +/{not}/ the one posited by the private investment model: should innovators +voluntarily freely reveal their innovations, or should they protect them? +Instead, the real choice facing user innovators often is whether to voluntarily +freely reveal or to arrive at the same end state, perhaps with a bit of a lag, +via involuntary spillovers. The practical case for voluntary free revealing is +further strengthened because it can be accomplished at low cost, and often +yields private benefits to the innovators. When benefits from free revealing +exceed the benefits that are /{practically}/ obtainable from holding an +innovation secret or licensing it, free revealing should be the preferred +course of action for a profit-seeking firm or individual. +={ Harhoff, D. ; + Henkel, J. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + and information diffusion +9 +} + +!_ Others Often Know Something Close to "Your" Secret + +Innovators seeking to protect innovations they have developed as their +intellectual property must establish some kind of monopoly control over the +innovation-related information. In practice, this can be done either by +effectively hiding the information as a trade secret, or by getting effective +legal protection by patents or copyrights. (Trademarks also fall under the +heading of intellectual property, but we do not consider those here.) In +addition, however, it must be the case that /{others}/ do not know substitute +information that skirts these protections and that they /{are}/ willing to +reveal. If multiple individuals or firms have substitutable information, they +are likely to vary with respect to the competitive circumstances they face. A +specific innovator's ability to protect "its" innovation as proprietary +property will then be determined for all holders of such information by the +decision of the one having the least to lose by free revealing. If one or more +information holders expect no loss or even a gain from a decision to freely +reveal, then the secret will probably be revealed despite other innovators' +best efforts to avoid this fate. +={ Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and | patents and | trade secrets and +} + +Commonly, firms and individuals have information that would be valuable to +those seeking to imitate a particular innovation. This is because innovators +and imitators seldom need access to a specific version of an innovation. +Indeed, engineers seldom even want to see a solution exactly as their +competitors have designed it: specific circumstances differ even among close +competitors, and solutions must in any case be adapted to each adopter's +precise circumstances. What an engineer does want to extract from the work of +others is the principles and the general outline of a possible improvement, +rather than the easily redevelopable details. This information is likely to be +available from many sources. + +For example, suppose you are a system developer at a bank and you are tasked +with improving in-house software for checking customers' credit online. On the +face of it, it might seem that you would gain most by studying the details of +the systems that competing banks have developed to handle that same task. It is +certainly true that competing banks may face market conditions very similar to +your bank, and they may well not want to reveal the valuable innovations they +have developed to a competitor. However, the situation is still by no means +bleak for an imitator. There are also many non-bank users of online credit +checking systems in the world---probably millions. Some will have innovated and +be willing to reveal what they have done, and some of these will have the +information you need. The likelihood that the information you seek will be +freely revealed by some individual or firm is further enhanced by the fact that +your search for novel basic improvements may profitably extend far beyond the +specific application of online credit checking. Other fields will also have +information on components of the solution you need. For example, many +applications in addition to online credit checking use software components +designed to determine whether persons seeking information are authorized to +receive it. Any can potentially be a provider of information for this element +of your improved system. + +A finding by Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) illustrates the possibility that +many firms and individuals may have similar information. Lakhani and von Hippel +studied Apache help-line websites. These sites enable users having problems +with Apache software to post questions, and others to respond with answers. The +authors asked those who provided answers how many other help-line participants +they thought also knew a solution to specific and often obscure problems they +had answered on the Apache online forum. Information providers generally were +of the opinion that some or many other help-line participants also knew a +solution, and could have provided an answer if they themselves had not done so +(table 6.1). +={ Lakhani, K ; + Apache web server software +2 +} + +!_ Table 6.1 +Even very specialized information is often widely known. Tabulated here are +answers to a question asked of help-line information providers: "How many +others do you think knew the answer to the question you answered?" +={ Lakhani, K } + +table{~h c3; 40; 30; 30; + +~ +Frequent providers (n = 21) + +Other providers (n = 67) + +Many +38% +61% + +A few with good Apache knowledge +38% +18% + +A few with specific problem experience +24% +21% + +}table + +Source: Lakhani and von Hippel 2003, table 10. + +Even in the unlikely event that a secret is held by one individual, that +information holder will not find it easy to keep a secret for long. Mansfield +(1985) studied 100 American firms and found that "information concerning +development decisions is generally in the hands of rivals within about 12 to 18 +months, on the average, and information concerning the detailed nature and +operation of a new product or process generally leaks out within about a year." +This observation is supported by Allen's previously mentioned study of free +revealing in the nineteenth-century English iron industry. Allen (1983, p. 17) +notes that developers of improved blast furnace designs were unlikely to be +able to keep their valuable innovations secret because "in the case of blast +furnaces and steelworks, the construction would have been done by contractors +who would know the design." Also, "the designs themselves were often created by +consulting engineers who shifted from firm to firm." +={ Allen, R. ; + Mansfield, E. +4 ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + evidence of +} + +!_ Low Ability to Profit from Patenting +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + patent protection and +12 ; + Intellectual property rights : + patents and +12 +} + +Next, suppose that a single user-innovator is the only holder of a particular +unit of innovation-related information, and that for some reason there are no +easy substitutes. That user actually does have a real choice with respect to +disposing of its intellectual property: it can keep the innovation secret and +profit from in-house use only, it can license it, or it can choose to freely +reveal the innovation. We have just seen that the practical likelihood of +keeping a secret is low, especially when there are multiple potential providers +of very similar secrets. But if one legally protects an innovation by means of +a patent or a copyright, one need not keep an innovation secret in order to +control it. Thus, a firm or an individual that freely reveals is forgoing any +chance to get a profit via licensing of intellectual property for a fee. What, +in practical terms, is the likelihood of succeeding at this and so of forgoing +profit by choosing to freely reveal? +={ Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and +1 | patents and +4 +} + +In most subject matters, the relevant form of legal protection for intellectual +property is the patent, generally the "utility" patent. (The notable exception +is the software industry, where material to be licensed is often protected by +copyright.) In the United States, utility patents may be granted for inventions +related to composition of matter and/or a method and/or a use. They may not be +granted for ideas per se, mathematical formulas, laws of nature, and anything +repugnant to morals and public policy. Within subject matters potentially +protectable by patent, protection will be granted only when the intellectual +property claimed meets additional criteria of usefulness, novelty, and +non-obviousness to those skilled in the relevant art. (The tests for whether +these criteria have been met are based on judgement. When a low threshold is +used, patents are easier to get, and vice-versa (Hall and Harhoff 2004).) +={ Hall, B. ; + Harhoff, D. +} + +The real-world value of patent protection has been studied for more than 40 +years. Various researchers have found that, with a few exceptions, innovators +do /{not}/ think that patents are very useful either for excluding imitators or +for capturing royalties in most industries. (Fields generally cited as +exceptions are pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and chemical processes, where +patents do enable markets for technical information (Arora et al. 2001).) Most +respondents also say that the availability of patent protection does not induce +them to invest more in research and development than they would if patent +protection did not exist. Taylor and Silberston (1973) reported that 24 of 32 +firms said that only 5 percent or less of their R&D expenditures were dependent +on the availability of patent protection. Levin et al. (1987) surveyed 650 R&D +executives in 130 different industries and found that all except respondents +from the chemical and pharmaceutical industries judged patents to be +"relatively ineffective." Similar findings have been reported by Mansfield +(1968, 1985), by Cohen et al. (2000, 2002), by Arundel (2001), and by Sattler +(2003). +={ Arora, A. ; + Arundel, A. ; + Cohen, W. ; + Gambardella, A. ; + Levin, R. ; + Sattler, H. ; + Silberston, Z. ; + Taylor, C. +} + +% Slaughter, S., 83--85 + +% ={Fosfuri, A.;Goto, A.} + +Despite recent governmental efforts to strengthen patent enforcement, a +comparison of survey results indicates only a modest increase between 1983 and +1994 in large firms' evaluations of patents' effectiveness in protecting +innovations or promoting innovation investments. Of course, there are notable +exceptions: some firms, including IBM and TI, report significant income from +the licensing of their patented technologies. + +% ={IBM} + +Obtaining a patent typically costs thousands of dollars, and it can take years +(Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel 2003). This makes patents especially +impractical for many individual user-innovators, and also for small and +medium-size firms of limited means. As a stark example, it is hard to imagine +that an individual user who has developed an innovation in sports equipment +would find it appealing to invest in a patent and in follow-on efforts to find +a licensee and enforce payment. The few that do attempt this, as Shah (2000) +has shown, seldom gain any return from licensees as payment for their time and +expenditures. +={ Harhoff, D. ; + Henkel, J. ; + Shah, S. ; + Intellectual property rights : + licensing of +1 +} + +Copyright is a low-cost and immediate form of legal protection that applies to +original writings and images ranging from software code to movies. Authors do +not have to apply for copyright protection; it "follows the author's pen across +the page." Licensing of copyrighted works is common, and it is widely practiced +by commercial software firms. When one buys a copy of a non-custom software +product, one is typically buying only a license to use the software, not buying +the intellectual property itself. However, copyright protection is also limited +in an important way. Only the specific original writing itself is protected, +not the underlying invention or ideas. As a consequence, copyright protections +can be circumvented. For example, those who wish to imitate the function of a +copyrighted software program can do so by writing new software code to +implement that function. +={ Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + copyright protection and +} + +Given the above, we may conclude that in practice little profit is being +sacrificed by many user-innovator firms or individuals that choose to forgo the +possibility of legally protecting their innovations in favor of free revealing. + +!_ Positive Incentives for Free Revealing +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + incentives for +7 ; + Information commons +7 +} + +As was noted earlier, when we say that an innovator "freely reveals" +proprietary information we mean that all existing and potential intellectual +property rights to that information are voluntarily given up by that innovator +and that all interested parties are given access to it---the information +becomes a public good. These conditions can often be met at a very low cost. +For example, an innovator can simply post information about the innovation on a +website without publicity, so those potentially interested must discover it. Or +a firm that has developed a novel process machine can agree to give a factory +tour to any firm or individual that thinks to ask for one, without attempting +to publicize the invention or the availability of such tours in any way. +However, it is clear that many innovators go beyond basic, low-cost forms of +free revealing. They spend significant money and time to ensure that their +innovations are seen in a favorable light, and that information about them is +effectively and widely diffused. Writers of computer code may work hard to +eliminate all bugs and to document their code in a way that is very easy for +potential adopters to understand before freely revealing it. Plant owners may +repaint their plant, announce the availability of tours at a general industry +meeting, and then provide a free lunch for their visitors. + +Innovators' /{active}/ efforts to diffuse information about their innovations +suggest that there are positive, private rewards to be obtained from free +revealing. A number of authors have considered what these might be. Allen +(1983) proposed that reputation gained for a firm or for its managers might +offset a reduction in profits for the firm caused by free revealing. Raymond +(1999) and Lerner and Tirole (2002) elaborated on this idea when explaining +free revealing by contributors to open source software development projects. +Free revealing of high-quality code, they noted, can increase a programmer's +reputation with his peers. This benefit can lead to other benefits, such as an +increase in the programmer's value on the job market. Allen has argued that +free revealing might have effects that actually increase a firm's profits if +the revealed innovation is to some degree specific to assets owned by the +innovator (see also Hirschleifer 1971). +={ Allen, R. +1 ; + Hirschleifer, J. ; + Lerner, J. ; + Raymond, E. ; + Tirole, J. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + and open source software ; + Open source software : + free revealing and +} + +Free revealing may also increase an innovator's profit in other ways. When an +innovating user freely reveals an innovation, the direct result is to increase +the diffusion of that innovation relative to what it would be if the innovation +were either licensed at a fee or held secret. The innovating user may then +benefit from the increase in diffusion via a number of effects. Among these are +network effects. (The classic illustration of a network effect is that the +value of each telephone goes up as more are sold, because the value of a phone +is strongly affected by the number of others who can be contacted in the +network.) In addition, and very importantly, an innovation that is freely +revealed and adopted by others can become an informal standard that may preempt +the development and/or commercialization of other versions of the innovation. +If, as Allen suggested, the innovation that is revealed is designed in a way +that is especially appropriate to conditions unique to the innovator, this can +result in creating a permanent source of advantage for that innovator. + +Being first to reveal a certain type of innovation increases a user firm's +chances of having its innovation widely adopted, other things being equal. This +may induce innovators to race to reveal first. Firms engaged in a patent race +may disclose information voluntarily if the profits from success do not go only +to the winner of the race. If being second quickly is preferable to being first +relatively late, there will be an incentive for voluntary revealing in order to +accelerate the race (de Fraja 1993). +={ de Fraja, G. } + +Incentives to freely reveal have been most deeply explored in the specific case +of open source software projects. Students of the open source software +development process report that innovating users have a number of motives for +freely revealing their code to open source project managers and open source +code users in general. If they freely reveal, others can debug and improve upon +the modules they have contributed, to everyone's benefit. They are also +motivated to have their improvement incorporated into the standard version of +the open source software that is generally distributed by the volunteer open +source user organization, because it will then be updated and maintained +without further effort on the innovator's part. This volunteer organization is +the functional equivalent of a manufacturer with respect to inducing +manufacturer improvements, because a user-developed improvement will be assured +of inclusion in new "official" software releases only if it is approved and +adopted by the coordinating user group. Innovating users also report being +motivated to freely reveal their code under a free or open source license by a +number of additional factors. These include giving support to open code and +"giving back" to those whose freely revealed code has been of value to them +(Lakhani and Wolf 2005). +={ Lakhani, K. ; + Lakhani, K. ; + Wolf, B. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + and open source software +4 ; + Open source software : + free revealing and +4 +} + +By freely revealing information about an innovative product or process, a user +makes it possible for manufacturers to learn about that innovation. +Manufacturers may then improve upon it and/or offer it at a price lower than +users' in-house production costs (Harhoff et al. 2003). When the improved +version is offered for sale to the general market, the original user-innovator +(and other users) can buy it and gain from in-house use of the improvements. +For example, consider that manufacturers often convert user-developed +innovations ("home-builts") into a much more robust and reliable form when +preparing them for sale on the commercial market. Also, manufacturers offer +related services, such as field maintenance and repair programs, that +innovating users must otherwise provide for themselves. +={ iHarhoff, D. +1 } + +A variation of this argument applies to the free revealing among competing +manufacturers documented by Henkel (2003). Competing developers of embedded +Linux systems were creating software that was specifically designed to run the +hardware products of their specific clients. Each manufacturer could freely +reveal this equipment-specific code without fear of direct competitive +repercussions: it was applicable mainly to specific products made by a +manufacturer's client, and it was less valuable to others. At the same time, +all would jointly benefit from free revealing of improvements to the underlying +embedded Linux code base, upon which they all build their proprietary products. +After all, the competitive advantages of all their products depended on this +code base's being equal to or better than the proprietary software code used by +other manufacturers of similar products. Additionally, Linux software was a +complement to hardware that many of the manufacturers in Henkel's sample also +sold. Improved Linux software would likely increase sales of their +complementary hardware products. (Complement suppliers' incentives to innovate +have been modeled by Harhoff (1996).) +={ Linux ; + Henkel, J. } + +!_ Free Revealing and Reuse +={ Free revealing of innovation information +2 } + +Of course, free revealing is of value only if others (re)use what has been +revealed. It can be difficult to track what visitors to an information commons +take away and reuse, and there is as yet very little empirical information on +this important matter. Valuable forms of reuse range from the gaining of +general ideas of development paths to pursue or avoid to the adoption of +specific designs. For example, those who download software code from an open +source project repository can use it to learn about approaches to solving a +particular software problem and/or they may reuse portions of the downloaded +code by inserting it directly into a software program of their own. Von Krogh +et al. (2004) studied the latter type of code reuse in open source software and +found it very extensive. Indeed, they report that /{most}/ of the lines of +software code in the projects they studied were taken from the commons of other +open source software projects and software libraries and reused. +={ von Krogh, G. +10 } + +% Spaeth, S., 88,? + +In the case of academic publications, we see evidence that free revealing does +increase reuse---a matter of great importance to academics. A citation is an +indicator that information contained in an article has been reused: the article +has been read by the citing author and found useful enough to draw to readers' +attention. Recent empirical studies are finding that articles to which readers +have open access---articles available for free download from an author's +website, for example---are cited significantly more often than are equivalent +articles that are available only from libraries or from publishers' fee-based +websites. Antelman (2004) finds an increase in citations ranging from 45 +percent in philosophy to 91 percent in mathematics. She notes that "scholars in +diverse disciplines are adopting open-access practices at a surprisingly high +rate and are being rewarded for it, as reflected in [citations]." +={ Antelman, K. } + +!_ Implications for Theory + +We have seen that in practice free revealing may often be the best practical +course of action for innovators. How can we tie these observations back to +theory, and perhaps improve theory as a result? At present there are two major +models that characterize how innovation gets rewarded. The private investment +model is based on the assumption that innovation will be supported by private +investors expecting to make a profit. To encourage private investment in +innovation, society grants innovators some limited rights to the innovations +they generate via patents, copyrights, and trade secrecy laws. These rights are +intended to assist innovators in getting private returns from their +innovation-related investments. At the same time, the monopoly control that +society grants to innovators and the private profits they reap create a loss to +society relative to the free and unfettered use by all of the knowledge that +the innovators have created. Society elects to suffer this social loss in order +to increase innovators' incentives to invest in the creation of new knowledge +(Arrow 1962; Dam 1995). +={ Arrow, K. ; + Dam, K. ; + Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and | trade secrets and ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + copyright protection and | patents and | trade secrecy and +} + +The second major model for inducing innovation is termed the collective action +model. It applies to the provision of public goods, where a public good is +defined by its non-excludability and non-rivalry: if any user consumes it, it +cannot be feasibly withheld from other users, and all consume it on the same +terms (Olson 1967). The collective action model assumes that innovators are +/{required}/ to relinquish control of knowledge or other assets they have +developed to a project and so make them a public good. This requirement enables +collective action projects to avoid the social loss associated with the +restricted access to knowledge of the private investment model. At the same +time, it creates problems with respect to recruiting and motivating potential +contributors. Since contributions to a collective action project are a public +good, users of that good have the option of waiting for others to contribute +and then free riding on what they have done (Olson 1967). +={ Olson, M. +1 ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + collective action model for +6 ; + Social welfare : + free revealing and +} + +The literature on collective action deals with the problem of recruiting +contributors to a task in a number of ways. Oliver and Marwell (1988) and +Taylor and Singleton (1993) predict that the description of a project's goals +and the nature of recruiting efforts should matter a great deal. Other +researchers argue that the creation and deployment of selective incentives for +contributors is essential to the success of collective action projects. For +example, projects may grant special credentials to especially productive +project members (Friedman and McAdam 1992; Oliver 1980). The importance of +selective incentives suggests that small groups will be most successful at +executing collective action projects. In small groups, selective incentives can +be carefully tailored for each group member and individual contributions can be +more effectively monitored (Olson 1967; Ostrom 1998). +={ Friedman, D. ; + Marwell, G. ; + McAdam, D. ; + Oliver, P. ; + Ostrom, E. ; + Singleton, S. ; + Taylor, M. +} + +Interestingly, successful open source software projects do not appear to follow +any of the guidelines for successful collective action projects just described. +With respect to project recruitment, goal statements provided by successful +open source software projects vary from technical and narrow to ideological and +broad, and from precise to vague and emergent (for examples, see goal +statements posted by projects hosted on Sourceforge.net).~{ As a specific +example of a project with an emergent goal, consider the beginnings of the +Linux open source software project. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student in +Finland, wanted a Unix operating system that could be run on his PC, which was +equipped with a 386 processor. Minix was the only software available at that +time but it was commercial, closed source, and it traded at US$150. Torvalds +found this too expensive, and started development of a Posix-compatible +operating system, later known as Linux. Torvalds did not immediately publicize +a very broad and ambitious goal, nor did he attempt to recruit contributors. He +simply expressed his private motivation in a message he posted on July 3, 1991, +to the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix (Wayner 2000): /{Hello netlanders, Due to +a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard +definition.}/ [Posix is a standard for UNIX designers. A software using POSIX +is compatible with other UNIX-based software.] /{Could somebody please point me +to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix-rules? Ftp-sites +would be nice.}/ In response, Torvalds got several return messages with Posix +rules and people expressing a general interest in the project. By the early +1992, several skilled programmers contributed to Linux and the number of users +increased by the day. Today, Linux is the largest open source development +project extant in terms of number of developers. }~ Further, such projects may +engage in no active recruiting beyond simply posting their intended goals and +access address on a general public website customarily used for this purpose +(for examples, see the Freshmeat.net website). Also, projects have shown by +example that they can be successful even if large groups---perhaps +thousands---of contributors are involved. Finally, open source software +projects seem to expend no effort to discourage free riding. Anyone is free to +download code or seek help from project websites, and no apparent form of moral +pressure is applied to make a compensating contribution (e.g., "If you benefit +from this code, please also contribute . . ."). +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + open source software and +} + +What can explain these deviations from expected practice? What, in other words, +can explain free revealing of privately funded innovations and enthusiastic +participation in projects to produce a public good? From the theoretical +perspective, Georg von Krogh and I think the answer involves revisiting and +easing some of the basic assumptions and constraints conventionally applied to +the private investment and collective action models of innovation. Both, in an +effort to offer "clean" and simple models for research, have excluded from +consideration a very rich and fertile middle ground where incentives for +private investment and collective action can coexist, and where a +"private-collective" innovation model can flourish. More specifically, a +private-collective model of innovation occupies the middle ground between the +private investment model and the collective action model by: +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + private-collective model for +3 ; + Private-collective model +3 ; + Social welfare : + private-collective model and +3 +} + +_* Eliminating the assumption in private investment models that free revealing +of innovations developed with private funds will represent a loss of private +profit for the innovator and so will not be engaged in voluntarily. Instead the +private-collective model proposes that under common conditions free revealing +of proprietary innovations may increase rather than decrease innovators' +private profit. + +_* Eliminating the assumption in collective action models that a free rider +obtains benefits from the completed public good that are equal to those a +contributor obtains. Instead, the private-collective model proposes that +contributors to a public good can /{inherently}/ obtain greater private +benefits than free riders. These provide incentives for participation in +collective action projects that need not be managed by project personnel (von +Hippel and von Krogh 2003). +={ von Hippel, E. } + +In summation: Innovations developed at private cost are often revealed freely, +and this behavior makes economic sense for participants under commonly +encountered conditions. A private-collective model of innovation incentives can +explain why and when knowledge created by private funding may be offered freely +to all. When the conditions are met, society appears to have the best of both +worlds---new knowledge is created by private funding and then freely revealed +to all. + +1~ 7 Innovation Communities +={ Innovation communities +56 : + innovation and +56 +} + +It is now clear that users often innovate, and that they often freely reveal +their innovations. But what about informal cooperation among users? What about +/{organized}/ cooperation in development of innovations and other matters? The +answer is that both flourish among user-innovators. Informal user-to-user +cooperation, such as assisting others to innovate, is common. Organized +cooperation in which users interact within communities, is also common. +Innovation communities are often stocked with useful tools and infrastructure +that increase the speed and effectiveness with which users can develop and test +and diffuse their innovations. + +In this chapter, I first show that user innovation is a widely distributed +process and so can be usefully drawn together by innovation communities. I next +explore the valuable functions such communities can provide. I illustrate with +a discussion of free and open source software projects, a very successful form +of innovation community in the field of software development. Finally, I point +out that innovation communities are by no means restricted to the development +of information products such as software, and illustrate with the case of a +user innovation community specializing in the development of techniques and +equipment used in the sport of kitesurfing. +={ Free software ; + Kitesurfing ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +} + +!_ User Innovation Is Widely Distributed +={ Users : + innovation and +8 ; + Innovation : + distributed process of +8 +} + +When users' needs are heterogeneous and when the information drawn on by +innovators is sticky, it is likely that product-development activities will be +widely distributed among users, rather than produced by just a few prolific +user-innovators. It should also be the case that different users will tend to +develop different innovations. As was shown in chapter 5, individual users and +user firms tend to develop innovations that serve their particular needs, and +that fall within their individual "low-cost innovation niches." For example, a +mountain biker who specializes in jumping from high platforms and who is also +an orthopedic surgeon will tend to develop innovations that draw on both of +these types of information: he might create a seat suspension that reduces +shock to bikers' spines upon landing from a jump. Another mountain biker +specializing in the same activity but with a different background---say +aeronautical engineering---is likely to draw on this different information to +come up with a different innovation. From the perspective of Fleming (2001), +who has studied innovations as consisting of novel combinations of pre-existing +elements, such innovators are using their membership in two distinct +communities to combine previously disparate elements. Baldwin and Clark (2003) +and Henkel (2004a) explore this type of situation in theoretical terms. +={ Baldwin, C. ; + Clark, K. ; + Fleming, L. ; + Henkel, J. ; + User need ; + Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and +3 ; + Sticky information : + innovation and +3 ; + Users : + low-cost innovation niches of +3 ; + Scientific instruments ; + Sporting equipment : + innovation communities and ; + Mountain biking ; + Local information +1 ; + Users : + innovate-or-buy decisions by +} + +The underlying logic echoes that offered by Eric Raymond regarding "Linus's +Law" in software debugging. In software, discovering and repairing subtle code +errors or bugs can be very costly (Brooks 1979). However, Raymond argued, the +same task can be greatly reduced in cost and also made faster and more +effective when it is opened up to a large community of software users that each +may have the information needed to identify and fix some bugs. Under these +conditions, Raymond says, "given a large enough beta tester and co-developer +base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to +someone. Or, less formally, `given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."' He +explains: "More users find more bugs because adding more users adds more ways +of stressing the program. . . . Each [user] approaches the task of bug +characterization with a slightly different perceptual set and analytical +toolkit, a different angle on the problem. So adding more beta-testers . . . +increases the probability that someone's toolkit will be matched to the problem +in such a way that the bug is shallow to /{that person}/." (1999, pp. 41--44) +={ Brooks, F. ; + Raymond, E. ; + Free software ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and ; + Innovation communities : + and sources of innovation +2 +} + +The analogy to distributed user innovation is, of course, that each user has a +different set of innovation-related needs and other assets in place which makes +a particular type of innovation low-cost ("shallow") to /{that user}/. The +assets of /{some}/ user will then generally be found to be a just-right fit to +many innovation development problems. (Note that this argument does not mean +that /{all}/ innovations will be cheaply done by users, or even done by users +at all. In essence, users will find it cheaper to innovate when manufacturers' +economies of scale with respect to product development are more than offset by +the greater scope of innovation assets held by the collectivity of individual +users.) + +Available data support these expectations. In chapter 2 we saw evidence that +users tended to develop very different innovations. To test whether +commercially important innovations are developed by just a few users or by +many, I turn to studies documenting the functional sources of important +innovations later commercialized. As is evident in table 7.1, most of the +important innovations attributed to users in these studies were done by +/{different}/ users. In other words, user innovation does tend to be widely +distributed in a world characterized by users with heterogeneous needs and +heterogeneous stocks of sticky information. +={ Innovation : + functional sources of +} + +!_ Table 7.1 +User innovation is widely distributed, with few users developing more than one +major innovation. NA: data not available. +={ Riggs, W. ; + Shah, S. ; + von Hippel, E. ; + Scientific instruments ; + Sporting equipment : + innovation communities and +} + +Number of users developing this number of major innovations + +table{~h c7; 30; 10; 10; 10; 10; 10; 20; + +~ +1 +2 +3 +6 +NA +Sample (n) + +Scientific Instruments^{a}^ +28 +0 +1 +0 +1 +32 + +Scientific Instruments^{b}^ +20 +1 +0 +1 +0 +28 + +Process equipment^{c}^ +19 +1 +0 +0 +8 +29 + +Sports equipment^{d}^ +7 +0 +0 +0 +0 +7 + +}table + +a. Source: von Hippel 1988, appendix: GC, TEM, NMR Innovations. \\ +b. Source: Riggs and von Hippel, Esca and AES. \\ +c. Source: von Hippel 1988, appendix: Semiconductor and pultrusion process equipment innovations. \\ +d. Source: Shah 2000, appendix A: skateboarding, snowboarding, and windsurfing innovations. + +!_ Innovation Communities +={ Innovation communities : + and sources of innovation +} + +User-innovators may be generally willing to freely reveal their information. +However, as we have seen, they may be widely distributed and each may have only +one or a few innovations to offer. The practical value of the "freely revealed +innovation commons" these users collectively offer will be increased if their +information is somehow made conveniently accessible. This is one of the +important functions of "innovation communities." +={ Information commons +3 } + +I define "innovation communities" as meaning nodes consisting of individuals or +firms interconnected by information transfer links which may involve +face-to-face, electronic, or other communication. These can, but need not, +exist within the boundaries of a membership group. They often do, but need not, +incorporate the qualities of communities for participants, where "communities" +is defined as meaning"networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, +support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity" (Wellman et +al. 2002, p. 4).~{ When they do not incorporate these qualities, they would be +more properly referred to as networks---but communities is the term commonly +used, and I follow that practice here. }~ +={ Wellman, B. } + +Innovation communities can have users and/or manufacturers as members and +contributors. They can flourish when at least some innovate and voluntarily +reveal their innovations, and when others find the information revealed to be +of interest. In previous chapters, we saw that these conditions do commonly +exist with respect to user-developed innovations: users innovate in many +fields, users often freely reveal, and the information revealed is often used +by manufacturers to create commercial products---a clear indication many users, +too, find this information of interest. + +Innovation communities are often specialized, serving as collection points and +repositories for information related to narrow categories of innovations. They +may consist only of information repositories or directories in the form of +physical or virtual publications. For example, userinnovation.mit.edu is a +specialized website where researchers can post articles on their findings and +ideas related to innovation by users. Contributors and non-contributors can +freely access and browse the site as a convenient way to find such information. + +Innovation communities also can offer additional important functions to +participants. Chat rooms and email lists with public postings can be provided +so that contributors can exchange ideas and provide mutual assistance. Tools to +help users develop, evaluate, and integrate their work can also be provided to +community members---and such tools are often developed by community members +themselves. + +All the community functionality just mentioned and more is visible in +communities that develop free and open source software programs. The emergence +of this particular type of innovation community has also done a great deal to +bring the general phenomenon to academic and public notice, and so I will +describe them in some detail. I first discuss the history and nature of free +and open source software itself (the product). Next I outline key +characteristics of the free and open source software development projects +typically used to create and maintain such software (the community-based +development process). +={ Free software +10 ; + Innovation communities : + open source software and +22 ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +22 +} + +!_ Open Source Software +={ Open source software : + innovation and +21 +} + +In the early days of computer programming, commercial "packaged" software was a +rarity---if you wanted a particular program for a particular purpose, you +typically wrote the code yourself or hired someone to write it for you. Much of +the software of the 1960s and the 1970s was developed in academic and corporate +laboratories by scientists and engineers. These individuals found it a normal +part of their research culture to freely give and exchange software they had +written, to modify and build on one another's software, and to freely share +their modifications. This communal behavior became a central feature of "hacker +culture." (In communities of open source programmers, "hacker" is a positive +term that is applied to talented and dedicated programmers.~{ !{hacker}! n. +[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys +exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their +capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum +necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who +enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person +capable of appreciating !{hack value}!. 4. A person who is good at programming +quickly. . . . 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover +sensitive information by poking around. Hence /{password hacker}/, /{network +hacker}/. The correct term for this sense is !{cracker}! (Raymond 1996). }~ ) +={ Hackers +4 ; + Raymond, E. +} + +In 1969, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a part of the US +Department of Defense, established the ARPANET, the first transcontinental +high-speed computer network. This network eventually grew to link hundreds of +universities, defense contractors, and research laboratories. Later succeeded +by the Internet, it also allowed hackers to exchange software code and other +information widely, easily, and cheaply---and also enabled them to spread +hacker norms of behavior. + +The communal hacker culture was very strongly present among a group of +programmers---software hackers---housed at MIT's Artificial Intelligence +Laboratory in the 1960s and the 1970s (Levy 1984). In the 1980s this group +received a major jolt when MIT licensed some of the code created by its hacker +employees to a commercial firm. This firm, in accordance with normal commercial +practice, then promptly restricted access to the "source code"~{ Source code is +a sequence of instructions to be executed by a computer to accomplish a +program's purpose. Programmers write computer software in the form of source +code, and also document that source code with brief written explanations of the +purpose and design of each section of their program. To convert a program into +a form that can actually operate a computer, source code is translated into +machine code using a software tool called a compiler. The compiling process +removes program documentation and creates a binary version of the program---a +sequence of computer instructions consisting only of strings of ones and zeros. +Binary code is very difficult for programmers to read and interpret. Therefore, +programmers or firms that wish to prevent others from understanding and +modifying their code will release only binary versions of the software. In +contrast, programmers or firms that wish to enable others to understand and +update and modify their software will provide them with its source code. +(Moerke 2000, Simon 1996). }~ of that software, and so prevented non-company +personnel---including the MIT hackers who had been instrumental in developing +it---from continuing to use it as a platform for further learning and +development. +={ Levy, S. ; + MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory +1 ; + Innovation communities : + open source software and ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +} + +Richard Stallman, a brilliant programmer in MIT's Artificial Intelligence +Laboratory, was especially distressed by the loss of access to communally +developed source code. He also was offended by a general trend in the software +world toward development of proprietary software packages and the release of +software in forms that could not be studied or modified by others. Stallman +viewed these practices as morally wrong impingements on the rights of software +users to freely learn and create. In 1985, in response, he founded the Free +Software Foundation and set about to develop and diffuse a legal mechanism that +could preserve free access for all to the software developed by software +hackers. Stallman's pioneering idea was to use the existing mechanism of +copyright law to this end. Software authors interested in preserving the status +of their software as "free" software could use their own copyright to grant +licenses on terms that would guarantee a number of rights to all future users. +They could do this by simply affixing a standard license to their software that +conveyed these rights. The basic license developed by Stallman to implement +this seminal idea was the General Public License or GPL (sometimes referred to +as copyleft, in a play on the word "copyright"). Basic rights transferred to +those possessing a copy of free software include the right to use it at no +cost, the right to study its source code, the right to modify it, and the right +to distribute modified or unmodified versions to others at no cost. Licenses +conveying similar rights were developed by others, and a number of such +licenses are currently used in the open source field. Free and open source +software licenses do not grant users the full rights associated with free +revealing as that term was defined earlier. Those who obtain the software under +a license such as the GPL are restricted from certain practices. For example, +they cannot incorporate GPL software into proprietary software that they then +sell.~{ See www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL }~ Indeed, contributors of +code to open source software projects are very concerned with enforcing such +restrictions in order to ensure that their code remains accessible to all +(O'Mahony 2003). +={ Stallman, R. +2 ; + Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and | licensing of +1 +} + +The idea of free software did not immediately become mainstream, and industry +was especially suspicious of it. In 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond agreed +that a significant part of the problem resided in Stallman's term "free" +software, which might understandably have an ominous ring to the ears of +businesspeople. Accordingly, they, along with other prominent hackers, founded +the open source software movement (Perens 1999). Open source software uses the +licensing practices pioneered by the free software movement. It differs from +that movement primarily on philosophical grounds, preferring to emphasize the +practical benefits of its licensing practices over issues regarding the moral +importance of granting users the freedoms offered by both free and open source +software. The term "open source" is now generally used by both practitioners +and scholars to refer to free or open source software, and that is the term I +use in this book. +={ Perens, B. ; + Raymond, E. +} + +Open source software has emerged as a major cultural and economic phenomenon. +The number of open source software projects has been growing rapidly. In mid +2004, a single major infrastructure provider and repository for open source +software projects, Sourceforge.net,~{ http://www.sourceforge.net }~ hosted +83,000 projects and had more than 870,000 registered users. A significant +amount of software developed by commercial firms is also being released under +open source licenses. + +!_ Open Source Software Development Projects + +Software can be termed "open source" independent of how or by whom it has been +developed: the term denotes only the type of license under which it is made +available. However, the fact that open source software is freely accessible to +all has created some typical open source software development practices that +differ greatly from commercial software development models---and that look very +much like the "hacker culture" behaviors described above. +={ Hackers +1 } + +Because commercial software vendors typically wish to sell the code they +develop, they sharply restrict access to the source code of their software +products to firm employees and contractors. The consequence of this restriction +is that only insiders have the information required to modify and improve that +proprietary code further (Meyer and Lopez 1995; Young, Smith, and Grimm 1996; +Conner and Prahalad 1996). In sharp contrast, all are offered free access to +the source code of open source software if that code is distributed by its +authors. In early hacker days, this freedom to learn and use and modify +software was exercised by informal sharing and co-development of code---often +by the physical sharing and exchange of computer tapes and disks on which the +code was recorded. In current Internet days, rapid technological advances in +computer hardware and software and networking technologies have made it much +easier to create and sustain a communal development style on ever-larger +scales. Also, implementing new projects is becoming progressively easier as +effective project design becomes better understood, and as prepackaged +infrastructural support for such projects becomes available on the Web. +={ Conner, K. ; + Grimm, C. ; + Meyer, M. ; + Lopez, L. ; + Prahalad, C. ; + Smith, G. ; + Young, G. +} + +Today, an open source software development project is typically initiated by an +individual or a small group seeking a solution to an individual's or a firm's +need. Raymond (1999, p. 32) suggests that "every good work of software starts +by scratching a developer's personal itch" and that "too often software +developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need +nor love. But not in the (open source) world. . . ." A project's initiators +also generally become the project's "owners" or "maintainers" who take on +responsibility for project management.~{ "The owner(s) [or `maintainers'] of an +open source software project are those who have the exclusive right, recognized +by the community at large, to redistribute modified versions. . . . According +to standard open source licenses, all parties are equal in the evolutionary +game. But in practice there is a very well-recognized distinction between +`official' patches [changes to the software], approved and integrated into the +evolving software by the publicly recognized maintainers, and `rogue' patches +by third parties. Rogue patches are unusual and generally not trusted." +(Raymond 1999, p. 89) }~ Early on, this individual or group generally develops +a first, rough version of the code that outlines the functionality envisioned. +The source code for this initial version is then made freely available to all +via downloading from an Internet website established by the project. The +project founders also set up infrastructure for the project that those +interested in using or further developing the code can use to seek help, +provide information or provide new open source code for others to discuss and +test. In the case of projects that are successful in attracting interest, +others do download and use and "play with" the code---and some of these do go +on to create new and modified code. Most then post what they have done on the +project website for use and critique by any who are interested. New and +modified code that is deemed to be of sufficient quality and of general +interest by the project maintainers is then added to the authorized version of +the code. In many projects the privilege of adding to the authorized code is +restricted to only a few trusted developers. These few then serve as +gatekeepers for code written by contributors who do not have such access (von +Krogh and Spaeth 2002). +={ Spaeth, S. ; + von Krogh, G. ; + Raymond, E. +} + +Critical tools and infrastructure available to open source software project +participants includes email lists for specialized purposes that are open to +all. Thus, there is a list where code users can report software failures +("bugs") that they encounter during field use of the software. There is also a +list where those developing the code can share ideas about what would be good +next steps for the project, good features to add, etc. All of these lists are +open to all and are also publicly archived, so anyone can go back and learn +what opinions were and are on a particular topic. Also, programmers +contributing to open source software projects tend to have essential tools, +such as specific software languages, in common. These are generally not +specific to a single project, but are available on the web. Basic toolkits held +in common by all contributors tends to greatly ease interactions. Also, open +source software projects have version-control software that allows contributors +to insert new code contributions into the existing project code base and test +them to see if the new code causes malfunctions in existing code. If so, the +tool allows easy reversion to the status quo ante. This makes "try it and see" +testing much more practical, because much less is at risk if a new contribution +inadvertently breaks the code. Toolkits used in open source projects have been +evolved through practice and are steadily being improved by user-innovators. +Individual projects can now start up using standard infrastructure sets offered +by sites such as Sourceforge.net. +={ Toolkits : + open source software and +} + +Two brief case histories will help to further convey the flavor of open source +software development. + +!_ Apache Web Server Software +={ Apache web server software +3 ; + Innovation communities : + Apache web server software and +3 +} + +Apache web server software is used on web server computers that host web pages +and provide appropriate content as requested by Internet browsers. Such 7 +computers are a key element of the Internet-based World Wide Web +infrastructure. + +The web server software that evolved into Apache was developed by University of +Illinois undergraduate Rob McCool for, and while working at, the National +Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The source code as developed and +periodically modified by McCool was posted on the web so that users at other +sites could download it, use it, modify it, and develop it further. When McCool +departed NCSA in mid 1994, a small group of webmasters who had adopted his web +server software for their own sites decided to take on the task of continued +development. A core group of eight users gathered all documentation and bug +fixes and issued a consolidated patch. This "patchy" web server software +evolved over time into Apache. Extensive user feedback and modification yielded +Apache 1.0, released on December 1, 1995. +={ McCool, Rob } + +In 4 years, after many modifications and improvements contributed by many +users, Apache became the most popular web server software on the Internet, +garnering many industry awards for excellence. Despite strong competition from +commercial software developers such as Microsoft and Netscape, it is currently +used by over 60 percent of the world's millions of websites. Modification and +updating of Apache by users and others continues, with the release of new +versions being coordinated by a central group of 22 volunteers. +={ Microsoft } + +!_ Fetchmail---An Internet Email Utility Program +={ Fetchmail +4 ; + Innovation communities : + fetchmail and +4 +} + +Fetchmail is an Internet email utility program that "fetches" email from +central servers to a local computer. The open source project to develop, +maintain, and improve this program was led by Eric Raymond (1999). +={ Raymond, E. +3 } + +Raymond first began to puzzle about the email delivery problem in 1993 because +he was personally dissatisfied with then-existing solutions. "What I wanted," +Raymond recalled (1999, p. 31), "was for my mail to be delivered on snark, my +home system, so that I would be notified when it arrived and could handle it +using all my local tools." Raymond decided to try and develop a better +solution. He began by searching databases in the open source world for an +existing, well-coded utility that he could use as a development base. He knew +it would be efficient to build on others' related work if possible, and in the +world of open source software (then generally called free software) this +practice is understood and valued. Raymond explored several candidate open +source programs, and settled on one in small-scale use called "popclient." He +developed a number of improvements to the program and proposed them to the then +maintainer of popclient. It turned out that this individual had lost interest +in working further on the program, and so his response to Raymond's suggestions +was to offer his role to Raymond so that he could evolve the popclient further +as he chose. + +Raymond accepted the role of popclient's maintainer, and over the next months +he improved the program significantly in conjunction with advice and +suggestions from other users. He carefully cultivated his more active beta list +of popclient users by regularly communicating with them via messages posted on +an public electronic bulletin board set up for that purpose. Many responded by +volunteering information on bugs they had found and perhaps fixed, and by +offering improvements they had developed for their own use. The quality of +these suggestions was often high because "contributions are received not from a +random sample, but from people who are interested enough to use the software, +learn about how it works, attempt to find solutions to the problems they +encounter, and actually produce an apparently reasonable fix. Anyone who passes +all these filters is highly likely to have something useful to contribute." +(ibid., p. 42) + +Eventually, Raymond arrived at an innovative design that he knew worked well +because he and his beta list of co-developers had used it, tested it and +improved it every day. Popclient (now renamed fetchmail) became standard +software used by millions users. Raymond continues to lead the group of +volunteers that maintain and improve the software as new user needs and +conditions dictate. + +!_ Development of Physical Products by Innovation Communities +={ Innovation communities : + physical products and +14 +} + +User innovation communities are by no means restricted to the development of +information products like software. They also are active in the development of +physical products, and in very similar ways. Just as in the case of communities +devoted to information product, communities devoted to physical products can +range from simple information exchange sites to sites well furnished with tools +and infrastructure. Within sports, Franke and Shah's study illustrates +relatively simple community infrastructure. Thus, the boardercross community +they studied consisted of semi-professional athletes from all over the world +who meet in up to 10 competitions a year in Europe, North America, and Japan. +Franke and Shah report that community members knew one another well, and spent +a considerable amount of time together. They also assisted one another in +developing and modifying equipment for their sport. However, the community had +no specialized sets of tools to support joint innovation development. +={ Franke, N. ; + Shah, S. ; + Innovation communities : + sporting equipment and +2 +} + +More complex communities devoted to the development of physical products often +look similar to open source software development communities in terms of tools +and infrastructure. As an example, consider the recent formation of a community +dedicated to the development and diffusion of information regarding novel +kitesurfing equipment. Kitesurfing is a water sport in which the user stands on +a special board, somewhat like a surfboard, and is pulled along by holding onto +a large, steerable kite. Equipment and technique have evolved to the point that +kites can be guided both with and against the wind by a skilled kitesurfer, and +can lift rider and board many meters into the air for tens of seconds at a +time. +={ Innovation communities : + kitesurfing and +1 ; + Kitesurfing +1 +} + +Designing kites for kitesurfing is a sophisticated undertaking, involving +low-speed aerodynamical considerations that are not yet well understood. Early +kites for kitesurfing were developed and built by user-enthusiasts who were +inventing both kitesurfing techniques and kitesurfing equipment +interdependently. In about 2001, Saul Griffith, an MIT PhD student with a +long-time interest in kitesurfing and kite development, decided that +kite-surfing would benefit from better online community interaction. +Accordingly, he created a site for the worldwide community of user-innovators +in kitesurfing (www.zeroprestige.com). Griffith began by posting patterns for +kites he had designed on the site and added helpful hints and tools for kite +construction and use. Others were invited to download this information for free +and to contribute their own if they wished. Soon other innovators started to +post their own kite designs, improved construction advice for novices, and +sophisticated design tools such as aerodynamics modeling software and rapid +prototyping software. Some kitesurfers contributing innovations to the site had +top-level technical skills; at least one was a skilled aerodynamicist employed +by an aerospace firm. +={ Griffith, S. ; + Zeroprestige.com +} + +Note that physical products are information products during the design stage. +In earlier days, information about an evolving design was encoded on large +sheets of paper, called blueprints, that could be copied and shared. The +information on blueprints could be understood and assessed by fellow designers, +and could also be used by machinists to create the actual physical products +represented. Today, designs for new products are commonly encoded in +computer-aided design (CAD) files. These files can be created and seen as +two-dimensional and three-dimensional renderings by designers. The designs they +contain can also be subjected to automated analysis by various engineering +tools to determine, for example, whether they can stand up to stresses to which +they will be subjected. CAD files can then be downloaded to computer-controlled +fabrication machinery that will actually build the component parts of the +design. + +The example of the kitesurfing group's methods of sharing design information +illustrates the close relationship between information and physical products. +Initially, users in the group exchanged design ideas by means of simple +sketches transferred over the Internet. Then group members learned that +computerized cutters used by sail lofts to cut sails from large pieces of cloth +are suited to cutting cloth for surfing kites. They also learned that sail +lofts were interested in their business. Accordingly, innovation group members +began to exchange designs in the form of CAD files compatible with sail lofts' +cutting equipment. When a user was satisfied with a design, he would transmit +the CAD file to a local sail loft for cutting. The pieces were then sewn +together by the user or sent to a sewing facility for assembly. The total time +required to convert an information product into a physical one was less than a +week, and the total cost of a finished kite made in this way was a few hundred +dollars---much less than the price of a commercial kite. +={ Innovation communities : + kitesurfing and ; + Kitesurfing +} + +!_ User-to-User Assistance +={ Innovation communities : + user-to-user assistance and +9 ; + Users : + innovation communities and +9 +} + +Clearly, user innovation communities can offer sophisticated support to +individual innovators in the form of tools. Users in these innovation +communities also tend to behave in a collaborative manner. That is, users not +only distribute and evaluate completed innovations; they also volunteer other +important services, such as assisting one another in developing and applying +innovations. + +Franke and Shah (2003) studied the frequency with which users in four sporting +communities assisted one another with innovations, and found that such +assistance was very common (table 7.2). They also found that those who assisted +were significantly more likely to be innovators themselves (table 7.3). The +level of satisfaction reported by those assisted was very high. Seventy-nine +percent agreed strongly with the statement "If I had a similar problem I would +ask the same people again." Jeppesen (2005) similarly found extensive +user-to-user help being volunteered in the field of computer gaming. +={ Franke, N. ; + Jeppesen, L. ; + Shah, S. ; + Innovation communities : + sporting equipment and ; + Sporting equipment : + innovation communities and +7 | user-to-user assistance and +7 +} + +!_ Table 7.2 +Number of people from whom innovators received assistance. +={ Franke, N. ; + Shah, S. +} + +table{~h c3; 34; 33; 33; + +Number of people +Number of cases +Percentage + +0 +0 +0 + +1 +3 +6 + +2 +14 +26 + +3--5 +25 +47 + +6--10 +8 +15 + +> 10 +3 +6 + +Total +53 +100 + +}table + +Source: Franke and Shah 2003, table 4. + +!_ Table 7.3 +Innovators tended to be the ones assisting others with their innovations (p < +0.0001). +={ Franke, N. ; + Shah, S. +} + +table{~h c4; 40; 20; 20; 20; + +~ +Innovators +Non-innovators +Total + +Gave assistance +28 +13 +41 + +Did not give assistance +32 +115 +147 + +Total +60 +128 +~ + +}table + +Source: Franke and Shah 2003, table 7. + +Such helping activity is clearly important to the value contributed by +innovation communities to community participants. Why people might voluntarily +offer assistance is a subject of analysis. The answers are not fully in, but +the mysteries lessen as the research progresses. An answer that appears to be +emerging is that there are private benefits to assistance providers, just as +there are for those who freely reveal innovations (Lakhani and von Hippel +2003). In other words, provision of free assistance may be explicable in terms +of the private-collective model of innovation-related incentives discussed +earlier. +={ Lakhani, K. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + in information communities | private-collective model for ; + Private-collective model ; + Social welfare : + private-collective model and +} + +1~ 8 Adapting Policy to User Innovation +={ Government policy +44 : + user innovation and +19 ; + Innovation : + and government policy +44 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +44 ; + Users : + government policy and +44 | innovation and +44 +} + +Government policy makers generally wish to encourage activities that increase +social welfare, and to discourage activities that reduce it. Therefore, it is +important to ask about the social welfare effects of innovation by users. +Henkel and von Hippel (2005) explored this matter and concluded that social +welfare is likely to be higher in a world in which both users and manufacturers +innovate than in a world in which only manufacturers innovate. +={ Henkel, J. ; + Government policy : + manufacturer innovation and +1 ; + Manufacturers : + government policy and +1 ; + Government policy : + social welfare and +21 ; + Social welfare : + government policy +4 ; + Users : + social welfare and +4 +} + +In this chapter, I first explain that innovation by users complements +manufacturer innovation and can also be a source of success-enhancing new +product ideas for manufacturers. Next, I note that innovation by users does not +exhibit several welfare-reducing effects associated with innovation by +manufacturers. Finally, I evaluate the effects of public policies on user +innovation, and suggest modifications to those that---typically +unintentionally---discriminate against innovation by users. + +!_ Social Welfare Effects of User Innovation + +Social welfare functions are used in welfare economics to provide a measure of +the material welfare of society, using economic variables as inputs. A social +welfare function can be designed to express many social goals, ranging from +population life expectancies to income distributions. Much of the literature on +product diversity, innovation, and social welfare evaluates the impact of +economic phenomena and policy on social welfare from the perspective of total +income of a society without regard to how that income is distributed. We will +take that viewpoint here. + +!_ User Innovation Improves Manufacturers' Success Rates +={ Government policy : + manufacturer innovation and +5 ; + Manufacturers : + government policy and +5 +} + +It is striking that most new products developed and introduced to the market by +manufacturers are commercial failures. Mansfield and Wagner (1975) found the +overall probability of success for new industrial products to be only 27 +percent. Elrod and Kelman (1987) found an overall probability of success of 26 +percent for consumer products. Balachandra and Friar (1997), Poolton and +Barclay (1998), and Redmond (1995) found similarly high failure rates in new +products commercialized. Although there clearly is some recycling of knowledge +from failed projects to successful ones, much of the investment in product +development is highly specific. This high failure rate therefore represents a +huge inefficiency in the conversion of R&D investment to useful output, and a +corresponding reduction in social welfare. +={ Balachandra, R ; + Barclay, I. ; + Elrod, T. ; + Kelman, A. ; + Friar, J. ; + Mansfield, E. +1 ; + Poolton, J. ; + Redmond, W. ; + Wagner, S. +1 +} + +% Robertson, A., 108 + +Research indicates that the major reason for the commercial failure of +manufacturer-developed products is poor understanding of users' needs by +manufacturer-innovators. The landmark SAPPHO study showed this in a very clear +and convincing way. This study was based on a sample of 31 product pairs. +Members of each pair were selected to address the same function and market. +(For example, one pair consisted of two "roundness meters," each developed by a +separate company.) One member of each pair was a commercial success (which +showed that there was a market for the product type); the other was a +commercial failure. The development process for each successful and failing +product was then studied in detail. The primary factor found to distinguish +success from failure was that a deeper understanding of the market and the need +was associated with successful projects (Achilladelis et al. 1971; Rothwell et +al. 1974). A study by Mansfield and Wagner (1975) came to the same conclusion. +More recent studies of information stickiness and the resulting asymmetries of +information held by users and manufacturers, discussed in chapter 3, support +the reasonableness of this general finding. Users are the generators of +information regarding their needs. The decline in accuracy and completeness of +need information after transfer from user to manufacturer is likely to be +substantial because important elements of this information are likely to be +sticky (von Hippel 1994; Ogawa 1998). +={ Achilladelis, B. ; + Ogawa, S. ; + Rothwell, R. ; + Project SAPPHO ; + SAPPHO study ; + Sticky information : + innovation and +} + +Innovations developed by users can improve manufacturers' information on users' +needs and so improve their new product introduction success rates. Recall from +previous chapters that innovation by users is concentrated among lead users. +These lead users tend, as we have seen, to develop functionally novel products +and product modifications addressing their own needs at the leading edge of +markets where potential sales are both small and uncertain. Manufacturers, in +contrast, have poorer information on users' needs and use contexts, and will +prefer to manufacture innovations for larger, more certain markets. In the +short term, therefore, user innovations will tend to /{complement}/ rather than +substitute for products developed by manufacturers. In the longer term, the +market as a whole catches up to the needs that motivated the lead user +developments, and manufacturers will begin to find production of similar +innovations to be commercially attractive. At that point, innovations by lead +users can provide very useful information to manufacturers that they would not +otherwise have. + +As lead users develop and test their solutions in their own use environments, +they learn more about the real nature of their needs. They then often freely +reveal information about their innovations. Other users then may adopt the +innovations, comment on them, modify and improve them, and freely reveal what +they have done in turn. All of this freely revealed activity by lead users +offers manufacturers a great deal of useful information about both needs +embodied in solutions and about markets. Given access to a user-developed +prototype, manufacturers no longer need to understand users' needs very +accurately and richly. Instead they have the much easier task of replicating +the function of user prototypes that users have already demonstrated are +responsive to their needs. For example, a manufacturer seeking to commercialize +a new type of surgical equipment and coming upon prototype equipment developed +by surgeons need not understand precisely why the innovators want this product +or even precisely how it is used; the manufacturer need only understand that +many surgeons appear willing to pay for it and then reproduce the important +features of the user-developed prototypes in a commercial product. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + lead users and +35 | users and ; + Surgical equipment +} + +Observation of innovation by lead users and adoption by follow-on users also +can give manufacturers a better understanding of the size of the potential +market. Projections of product sales have been shown to be much more accurate +when they are based on actual customer behavior than when they are based on +potential buyers' pre-use expectations. Monitoring of field use of user-built +prototypes and of their adoption by other users can give manufacturers rich +data on precisely these matters and so should improve manufacturer's commercial +success. In net, user innovation helps to reduce information asymmetries +between users and manufacturers and so increases the efficiency of the +innovation process. +={ Information asymmetries ; + Users : + information asymmetries of +} + +!_ User Innovation and Provisioning Biases + +The economic literature on the impact of innovation on social welfare generally +seeks to understand effects that might induce society to create too many +product variations (overprovisioning) or too few (underprovisioning) from the +viewpoint of net social economic income (Chamberlin 1950). Greater variety of +products available for purchase is assumed to be desirable, in that it enables +consumers to get more precisely what they want and/or to own a more diverse +array of products. However, increased product diversity comes at a cost: +smaller quantities of each product will be produced on average. This in turn +means that development-related and production-related economies of scale are +likely to be less. The basic tradeoff between variety and cost is what creates +the possibility of overprovisioning or underprovisioning product variety. +Innovations such as flexible manufacturing may reduce fixed costs associated +with increased diversity and so shift the optimal degree of diversity upward. +Nonetheless, the conflict still persists. +={ Chamberlin, E. ; + Social welfare : + innovation and +11 +} + +Henkel and I studied the welfare impact of adding users as a source of +innovation to existing analyses of product diversity, innovation, and social +welfare. Existing models uniformly contained the assumption that new products +and services were supplied to the economy by manufacturers only. We found that +the addition of innovation by users to these analyses largely avoids the +welfare-reducing biases that had been identified. For example, consider +"business stealing" (Spence 1976). This term refers to the fact that commercial +manufacturers benefit by diverting business from their competitors. Since they +do not take this negative externality into account, their private gain from +introducing new products exceeds society's total gain, tilting the balance +toward overprovision of variety. In contrast, a freely revealed user innovation +may also reduce incumbents' business, but not to the innovator's benefit. +Hence, innovation incentives are not socially excessive. +={ Henkel, J. ; + Spence, M. ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + intellectual property rights and +11 | social welfare and +5 ; + Government policy : + free revealing and +10 ; + Government policy : + provisioning biases and ; + Intellectual property rights : + free revealing and +11 ; + Users : + social welfare and +5 +} + +Freely revealed innovations by users are also likely to reduce deadweight loss +caused by pricing of products above their marginal costs. (Deadweight loss is a +reduction in social welfare that occurs when goods are sold at a price above +their marginal cost of production.) When users make information about their +innovations available for free, and if the marginal cost of revealing that +information is zero, an imitator only has to bear the cost of adoption. This is +statically efficient. The availability of free user innovations can also induce +sellers of competing commercial offerings to reduce their prices, thus +indirectly leading to another reduction in dead-weight loss. + +Reducing prices toward marginal costs can also reduce incentives to +over-provision variety (Tirole 1988). +={ Tirole, J. } + +Henkel and I also explored a few special situations where social welfare might +be /{reduced}/ by the availability of freely revealed user innovations. One of +these was the effect of reduced pricing power on manufacturers that create +"platform" products. Often, a manufacturer of such a product will want to sell +the platform---a razor, an ink-jet printer, a video-game player---at a low +margin or a loss, and then price necessary add-ons (razor blades, ink +cartridges, video games) at a much higher margin. If the possibility of freely +revealed add-ons developed by users makes development of a platform +unprofitable for a manufacturer, social welfare can thereby be reduced. +However, it is only the razor-vs.-blade pricing scheme that may become +unprofitable. Indeed, if the manufacturer makes positive margins on the +platform, then the availability of user-developed add-ons can have a positive +effect: it can increase the value of the platform to users, and so allow +manufacturers to charge higher margins on it and/or sell more units. Jeppesen +(2004) finds that this is in fact the outcome when users introduce free game +modifications (called mods) operating on proprietary game software platform +products (called engines) sold by game manufacturers. Even though the game +manufacturers also sell mods commercially that compete with free user mods, +many provide active support for the development and diffusion of user mods +built on their proprietary game engines, because they find that the net result +is increased sales and profits. +={ Henkel, J. ; + Jeppesen, L. ; + Government policy : + intellectual property rights and | trade secrets and ; + Intellectual property rights : + trade secrets and +} + +!_ Public Policy Choices + +If innovation by users is welfare enhancing and is also significant in amount +and value, then it makes sense to consider the effects of public policy on user +innovation. An important first step would be to collect better data. Currently, +much innovation by users---which may in aggregate turn out to be a very large +fraction of total economic investment in innovation--- goes uncounted or +undercounted. Thus, innovation effort that is volunteered by users, as is the +case with many contributions to open source software, is currently not recorded +by governmental statistical offices. This is also the case for user innovation +that is integrated with product and service production. For example, much +process innovation by manufacturers occurs on the factory floor as they produce +goods and simultaneously learn how to improve their production processes. +Similarly, many important innovations developed by surgeons are woven into +learning by doing as they deliver services to patients. +={ Open source software : + innovation communities and +} + +Next, it will be important to review innovation-related public policies to +identify and correct biases with respect to sources of innovation. On a level +playing field, users will become a steadily more important source of +innovation, and will increasingly substitute for or complement manufacturers' +innovation-related activities. Transitions required of policy making to support +this ongoing evolution are important but far from painless. To illustrate, we +next review issues related to the protection intellectual property, related to +policies restricting product modifications, related to source-biased subsidies +for R&D, and related to control over innovation diffusion channels. +={ Government policy : + provisioning biases and | intellectual property rights and +16 | patents and +8 ; + Intellectual property rights : + patents and +8 +} + +!_ Intellectual Property + +Earlier, when we explored why users might freely reveal their innovations, we +concluded that it was often their best /{practical}/ choice in view of how +intellectual property law actually functions (or, often, does not function) to +protect innovations today. For example, recall from chapter 6 that most +innovators do not judge patents to be very effective, and that the availability +of patent grant protection does not appear to increase innovation investments +in most fields. Recall also that patent protection is costly to obtain, and +thus of little value to developers of minor innovations---with most innovations +being minor. We also saw that in practice it was often difficult for innovators +to protect their innovations via trade secrecy: it is hard to keep a secret +when many others know similar things, and when some of these information +holders will lose little or nothing from freely revealing what they know. +={ Intellectual property rights : + trade secrets and ; + Government policy : + trade secrets and ; + Intellectual property rights : + trade secrets and +} + +These findings show that the characteristics of present-day intellectual +property regimes as actually experienced by innovators are far from the +expectations of theorists and policy makers. The fundamental reason that +societies elect to grant intellectual property rights to innovators is to +increase private investment in innovation. At the same time, economists have +long known that there will be social welfare losses associated with these +grants: owners of intellectual property will generally restrict the use of +their legally protected information in order to increase private profits. In +other words, intellectual property rights are thought to be good for innovation +and bad for competition. The consensus view has long been that the good +outweighs the bad, but Foray (2004) explains that this consensus is now +breaking down. Some---not all---are beginning to think that intellectual +property rights are bad for innovation too in many cases. +={ oray, D. ; + Government policy : + intellectual commons and +13 +} + +The need to grant private intellectual property rights to achieve socially +desirable levels of innovation is being questioned in the light of apparent +counterexamples. Thus, as we saw earlier, open source software communities do +not allow contributing innovators to use their intellectual property rights to +control the use of their code. Instead, contributors use their authors' +copyright to assign their code to a common pool to which all--- contributors +and non-contributors alike---are granted equal access. Despite this regime, +innovation seems to be flourishing. Why? As we saw in our earlier discussions +of why innovators might freely reveal their innovations, researchers now +understand that significant private rewards to innovation can exist independent +of intellectual property rights grants. As a general principle, intellectual +property rights grants should not be offered if and when developers would seek +protection but would innovate without it. +={ Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +1 ; + Innovation : + open source software and +1 +} + +The debate rages. Gallini and Scotchmer (2002) assert that "intellectual +property is the foundation of the modern information economy" and that "it +fuels the software, lifesciences and computer industries, and pervades most +other products we consume." They also conclude that the positive or negative +effect of intellectual property rights on innovation depends centrally on "the +ease with which innovators can enter into agreements for rearranging and +exercising those rights." This is precisely the rub from the point of view of +those who urge that present intellectual property regimes be reconsidered: it +is becoming increasingly clear that in practice rearranging and exercising +intellectual property rights is often difficult rather than easy. It is also +becoming clear that the protections afforded by existing intellectual property +law can be strategically deployed to achieve private advantage at the expense +of general innovative progress (Foray 2004). +={ oray, D. ; + Gallini, N. ; + Scotchmer, S. +} + +Consider an effect first pointed out by Merges and Nelson (1990) and further +explored as the "tragedy of the anticommons" by Heller (1998) and Heller and +Eisenberg (1998). A resource such as innovation-related information is prone to +underuse---a tragedy of the anticommons---when multiple owners each have a +right to exclude others and no one has an effective privilege of use. The +nature of the patent grant can lead to precisely this type of situation. Patent +law is so arranged that an owner of a patent is not granted the right to +practice its invention---it is only granted the right to exclude others from +practicing it. For example, suppose you invent and patent the chair. I then +follow by inventing and patenting the rocking chair---implemented by building +rockers onto a chair covered by your patent. In this situation I cannot +manufacture a rocking chair without getting a license from you for the use of +your chair patent, and you cannot build rocking chairs either without a license +to my rocker patent. If we cannot agree on licensing terms, no one will have +the right to build rocking chairs. +={ Eisenberg, R. +1 ; + Heller, M. +1 ; + Merges, Robert ; + Nelson, R. ; + Government policy : + user innovation and +19 +} + +In theory and in a world of costless transactions, people could avoid tragedies +of the anticommons by licensing or trading their intellectual property rights. +In practice the situation can be very different. Heller and Eisenberg point +specifically to the field of biomedical research, and argue that conditions for +anticommons effects do exist there. In that field, patents are routinely +allowed on small but important elements of larger research problems, and +upstream research is increasingly likely to be private. "Each upstream patent," +Heller and Eisenberg note, "allows its owner to set up another tollbooth on the +road to product development, adding to the cost and slowing the pace of +downstream biomedical innovation." +={ Transaction costs } + +A second type of strategic behavior based on patent rights involves investing +in large portfolios of patents to create "patent thickets"---dense networks of +patent claims across a wide field (Merges and Nelson 1990; Hall and Ham +Ziedonis 2001; Shapiro 2001; Bessen 2003). Patent thickets create plausible +grounds for patent infringement suits across a wide field. Owners of patent +thickets can use the threat of such suits to discourage others from investing +research dollars in areas of technical advance relevant to their products. Note +that this use of patents is precisely opposite to policy mak' intentions to +stimulate innovation by providing ways for innovators to assert intellectual +property rights. Indeed, Bessen and Hunt (2004) have found in the field of +software that, on average, as firm's investments in patent protection go up, +their investments in research and development actually go down. If this +relationship proves causal, there is a reasonable explanation from the +viewpoint of private profit: corporations that can use a patent thicket to +deter others' research in a field might well decide that there is less need to +do research of their own. +={ Bessen, J. ; + Hall, B. ; + Hunt, R. ; + Merges, Robert ; + Nelson, R. ; + Shapiro, C. ; + Ziedonis, R. ; + Government policy : + patent thickets and ; + Intellectual property rights : + patent thickets and +} + +Similar innovation-retarding strategies can be applied by owners of large +collections of copyrighted work in the movie, publishing, and software fields. +Copyright owners can prevent others from building new works on characters (e.g. +Mickey Mouse) that are already familiar to customers. The result is that owners +of large portfolios of copyrighted work can gain an advantage over those with +no or small portfolios in the creation of derivative works. Indeed, Benkler +(2002) argues that institutional changes strengthening intellectual property +protection tend to foster concentration of information production in general. +Lessig (2001) and Boldrin and Levine (2002) arrive at a similarly negative +valuation of overly strong and lengthy copyright protection. +={ Benkler, Y. ; + Boldrin, M. ; + Levine, D. ; + Lessig, L. ; + Intellectual property rights : + copyrights and ; + Government policy : + copyrights and +} + +These types of innovation-discouraging effects can affect innovation by users +especially strongly. The distributed innovation system we have documented +consists of users each of whom might have only a few innovations and a small +amount of intellectual property. Such innovators are clearly hurt +differentially by a system that gives advantage to the owners of large shares +of the intellectual property in a field. + +What can be done? A solution approach open to policy makers is to change +intellectual property law so as to level the playing field. But owners of large +amounts of intellectual property protected under the present system are often +politically powerful, so this type of solution will be difficult to achieve. + +Fortunately, an alternative solution approach may be available to innovators +themselves. Suppose that many elect to contribute the intellectual property +they individually develop to a commons in a particular field. If the commons +then grows to contain reasonable substitutes for much of the proprietary +intellectual property relevant to the field, the relative advantage accruing to +large holders of this information will diminish and perhaps even disappear. At +the same time and for the same reason, the barriers that privately held stocks +of intellectual property currently may raise to further intellectual advance +will also diminish. Lessig supports this possibility with his creation and +publication of standard "Creative Commons" licenses on the website +creativecommons.org. Authors interested in contributing their work to the +commons, perhaps with some restrictions, can easily find and adopt an +appropriate license at that site. +={ Lessig, L. ; + Intellectual commons +13 ; + Intellectual property rights : + intellectual commons and +13 ; + Open source software : + intellectual commons and +13 | intellectual property rights and +13 ; + Intellectual property rights : + licensing of +} + +Reaching agreement on conditions for the formation of an intellectual commons +can be difficult. Maurer (2005) makes this clear in his cautionary tale of the +struggle and eventual failure to create a commons for data on human mutations. +However, success is possible. For example, an extensive intellectual commons of +software code is contained and maintained in the many open source software +projects that now exist. +={ Maurer, S. ; + Innovation communities +2 +} + +Interesting examples also exist regarding on the impact a commons can have on +the value of intellectual property innovators seek to hold apart from it. Weber +(2004) recounts the following anecdote: In 1988, Linux developers were building +new graphical interfaces for their open source software. One of the most +promising of these, KDE, was offered under the General Public License. However, +Matthias Ettrich, its developer, had built KDE using a proprietary graphical +library called Qt. He felt at the time that this could be an acceptable +solution because Qt was of good quality and Troll Tech, owner of Qt, licensed +Qt at no charge under some circumstances. However, Troll Tech did require a +developer's fee be paid under other circumstances, and some Linux developers +were concerned about having code not licensed under the GPL as part of their +code. They tried to convince Troll Tech to change the Qt license so that it +would be under the GPL when used in free software. But Troll Tech, as was fully +within its rights, refused to do this. Linux developers then, as was fully +within their rights, began to develop open source alternatives to Qt that could +be licensed under the GPL. As those projects moved toward success, Troll Tech +recognized that Qt might be surpassed and effectively shut out of the Linux +market. In 2000 the company therefore decided to license Qt under the GPL. +={ Ettrich, M. ; + Linux ; + Weber, S. ; + Intellectual property rights : + licensing of +1 ; +} + +Similar actions can keep conditions for free access to materials held within a +commons from degrading and being lost over time. Chris Hanson, a Principal +Research Scientist at MIT, illustrates this with an anecdote regarding an open +source software component called ipfilter. The author of ipfilter attempted to +"lock" the program by changing licensing terms of his program to disallow the +distribution of modified versions. His reasoning was that Ipfilter, a +network-security filter, must be as bug-free as possible, and that this could +best be ensured by his controlling access. His actions ignited a flame war in +which the author was generally argued to be selfish and overreaching. His +program, then an essential piece of BSD operating systems, was replaced by +newly written code in some systems within the year. The author, Hanson notes, +has since changed his licensing terms back to a standard BSD-style +(unrestricted) license. +={ Hanson, C. } + +We will learn over time whether and how widely the practice of creating and +defending intellectual commons diffuses across fields. There obviously can be +cases where it will continue to make sense for innovators, and for society as +well, to protect innovations as private intellectual property. However, it is +likely that many user innovations are kept private not so much out of rational +motives as because of a general, not-thought-through attitude that "we do not +give away our intellectual property," or because the administrative cost of +revealing is assumed to be higher than the benefits. Firms and society can +benefit by rethinking the benefits of free revealing and (re)developing +policies regarding what is best kept private and what is best freely revealed. +={ Government policy : + social welfare and +9 | trade secrets and +3 ; + Intellectual property rights : + trade secrets and +3 +} + +!_ Constraints on Product Modification +={ Custom products : + manufacturers and +2 ; + Government policy : + manufacturer innovation and +8 ; + Manufacturers : + government policy and +8 +} + +Users often develop prototypes of new products by buying existing commercial +products and modifying them. Current efforts by manufacturers to build +technologies into the products they sell that restrict the way these products +are used can undercut users' traditional freedom to modify what they purchase. +This in turn can raise the costs of innovation development by users and so +lessen the amount of user innovation that is done. For example, makers of +ink-jet printers often follow a razor-and-blade strategy, selling printers at +low margins and the ink cartridges used in them at high margins. To preserve +this strategy, printer manufacturers want to prevent users from refilling ink +cartridges with low-cost ink and using them again. Accordingly, they may add +technical modifications to their cartridges to prevent them from functioning if +users have refilled them. This manufacturer strategy can potentially cut off +both refilling by the economically minded and modifications by user-innovators +that might involve refilling (Varian 2002). Some users, for example, have +refilled cartridges with special inks not sold by printer manufacturers in +order to adapt ink-jet printing to the printing of very high-quality +photographs. Others have refilled cartridges with food colorings instead of +inks in order to develop techniques for printing images on cakes. Each of these +applications might have been retarded or prevented by technical measures +against cartridge refilling. +={ Varian, H. } + +The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a legislative initiative intended to +prevent product copying, may negatively affect users' abilities to change and +improve the products they own. Specifically, the DMCA makes it a crime to +circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software. It also +outlaws the manufacture, sale, or distribution of code-cracking devices used to +illegally copy software. Unfortunately, code cracking is also a needed step for +modification of commercial software products by user-innovators. Policy makers +should be aware of "collateral damage" that may be inflicted on user innovation +by legislation aimed at other targets, as is likely in this case. +={ Digital Millennium Copyright Act } + +!_ Control over Distribution Channels +={ Government policy : + distribution channels and +1 +} + +Users that innovate and wish to freely diffuse innovation-related information +are able to do so cheaply in large part because of steady advances in Internet +distribution capabilities. Controls placed on such infrastructural factors can +threaten and maybe even totally disable distributed innovation systems such as +the user innovation systems documented in this book. For example, information +products developed by users are commonly distributed over the Internet by +peer-to-peer sharing networks. A firm that owns both a channel and content +(e.g., a cable network) may have a strong incentive to shut out or discriminate +against content developed by users or others in favor of its own content. The +transition from the chaotic, fertile early days of radio in the United States +when many voices were heard, to an era in which the spectrum was dominated by a +few major networks---a transition pushed by major firms and enforced by +governmental policy making--- provides a sobering example of what could happen +(Lessig 2001). It will be important for policy makers to be aware of this kind +of incentive problem and address it---in this case perhaps by mandating that +ownership of content and ownership of channel be separated, as has long been +the case for other types of common carriers. +={ Lessig, L. } + +!_ R&D Subsidies and Tax Credits +={ Government policy : + R&D subsidies and +3 +} + +In many countries, manufacturing firms are rewarded for their innovative +activity by R&D subsidies and tax credits. Such measures can make economic +sense if average social returns to innovation are significantly higher than +average private returns, as has been found by Mansfield et al. (1977) and +others. However, important innovative activities carried out by users are often +not similarly rewarded, because they tend to not be documentable as formal R&D +activities. As we have seen, users tend to develop innovations in the course of +"doing" in their normal use environments. Bresnahan and Greenstein (1996a) make +a similar point. They investigate the role of "co-invention" in the move by +users from mainframe to client-server architecture.~{ See also Bresnahan and +Greenstein 1996b; Bresnahan and Saloner 1997; Saloner and Steinmueller 1996. }~ +By "co-invention" Bresnahan and Greenstein mean organizational changes and +innovations developed and implemented by users that are required to take full +advantage of a new invention. They point out the high importance that +co-invention has for realizing social returns from innovation. They consider +the federal government's support for creating "national information +infrastructures" insufficient or misallocated, since they view co-invention is +the bottleneck for social returns and likely the highest value locus for +invention. +={ Bresnahan, T. ; + Greenstein, S. ; + Mansfield, E. ; + Users : + co-invention and +} + +Efforts to level the playing field for user innovation and manufacturer +innovation could, of course, also go in the direction of lessening R&D +subsidies or tax credits for all rather than attempting to increase +user-innovators' access to subsidies. However, if directing subsidies to +user-innovators seems desirable, social welfare will be best served if policy +makers link them to free revealing by user-innovators as well as or instead of +tying them to users' private investments in the development of products for +exclusive in-house use. Otherwise, duplication of effort by users interested in +the same innovation will reduce potential welfare gains. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + government policy and +1 | social welfare and +1 +} + +In sum, the welfare-enhancing effects found for freely revealed user +innovations suggest that policy makers should consider conditions required for +user innovation when creating policy and legislation. Leveling the playing +field for user-innovators and manufacturer-innovators will doubtless force more +rapid change onto manufacturers. However, as will be seen in the next chapter, +manufacturers can adapt to a world in which user innovation is at center stage. + +1~ 9 Democratizing Innovation +={ Social welfare : + innovation and +45 ; + von Hippel, E. +45 +} + +We have learned that lead users sometimes develop and modify products for +themselves and often freely reveal what they have done. We have also seen that +many users can be interested in adopting the solutions that lead users have +developed. Taken together, these findings offer the basis for user-centered +innovation systems that can entirely supplant manufacturer-based innovation +systems under some conditions and complement them under most. User-centered +innovation is steadily increasing in importance as computing and communication +technologies improve. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + lead users and ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +44 ; + Custom products : + users and ; + Innovation : + lead users and ; + Lead users : + innovation and ; + User need +3 ; + Users : + innovation and +4 +} + +I begin this chapter with a discussion of the ongoing democratization of +innovation. I then describe some of the patterns in user-centered innovation +that are emerging. Finally, I discuss how manufacturers can find ways to +profitably participate in emerging, user-centered innovation processes. + +!_ The Trend toward Democratization + +Users' abilities to develop high-quality new products and services for +themselves are improving radically and rapidly. Steady improvements in computer +software and hardware are making it possible to develop increasingly capable +and steadily cheaper tools for innovation that require less and less skill and +training to use. In addition, improving tools for communication are making it +easier for user innovators to gain access to the rich libraries of modifiable +innovations and innovation components that have been placed into the public +domain. The net result is that rates of user innovation will increase even if +users' heterogeneity of need and willingness to pay for "exactly right" +products remain constant. +={ Custom products : + users and +1 ; + Users : + paying for innovations and +} + +The radical nature of the change that is occurring in design capabilities +available to even individual users is perhaps difficult for those without +personal innovation experience to appreciate. An anecdote from my own +experience may help as illustration. When I was a child and designed new +products that I wanted to build and use, the ratio of not-too-pleasurable (for +me) effort required to actually build a prototype relative to the very +pleasurable effort of inventing it and use-testing it was huge. (That is, in +terms of the design, build, test, evaluate cycle illustrated in figure 5.1, the +effort devoted to the "build" element of the cycle was very large and the rate +of iteration and learning via trial and error was very low.) + +In my case it was especially frustrating to try to build anything sophisticated +from mechanical parts. I did not have a machine shop in which I could make good +parts from scratch, and it often was difficult to find or buy the components I +needed. As a consequence, I had to try to assemble an approximation of my ideas +out of vacuum cleaner parts and other bits of metal and plastic and rubber that +I could buy or that were lying around. Sometimes I failed at this and had to +drop an exciting project. For example, I found no way to make the combustion +chamber I needed to build a large pulse-jet engine for my bicycle (in +retrospect, perhaps a lucky thing!). Even when I succeeded, the result was +typically "unaesthetic": the gap between the elegant design in my mind and the +crude prototype that I could realize was discouragingly large. + +Today, in sharp contrast, user firms and increasingly even individual hobbyists +have access to sophisticated design tools for fields ranging from software to +electronics to musical composition. All these information-based tools can be +run on a personal computer and are rapidly coming down in price. With +relatively little training and practice, they enable users to design new +products and services---and music and art---at a satisfyingly sophisticated +level. Then, if what has been created is an information product, such as +software or music, the design is the actual product---software you can use or +music you can play. + +If one is designing a physical product, it is possible to create a design and +even conduct some performance testing by computer simulation. After that, +constructing a real physical prototype is still not easy. However, today users +do have ready access to kits that offer basic electronic and mechanical +building blocks at an affordable price, and physical product prototyping is +becoming steadily easier as computer-driven 3-D parts printers continue to go +up in sophistication while dropping in price. Very excitingly, even today +home-built prototypes need not be poorly fashioned items that will fall apart +with a touch in the wrong place---the solution components now available to +users are often as good as those available to professional designers. + +Functional equivalents of the resources for innovation just described have long +been available within corporations to a lucky few. Senior designers at firms +have long been supported by engineers and designers under their direct control, +and also with other resources needed to quickly construct and test prototype +designs. When I took a job as R&D manager at a start-up firm after college, I +was astounded at the difference professional-quality resources made to both the +speed and the joy of innovation. Product development under these conditions +meant that the proportion of one's effort that could be focused on the design +and test portions of the innovation cycle rather than on prototype building was +much higher, and the rate of progress was much faster. +={ Innovation process +3 } + +The same story can be told in fields from machine design to clothing design: +just think of the staffs of seamstresses and models supplied by clothing +manufacturers to their "top designers" so that these few can quickly realize +and test many variations on their designs. In contrast, think of the time and +effort that equally talented designers without such staff assistance must +engage in to stitch together even a single high-quality garment prototype on +their own. + +But, as we learned in chapter 7, the capability and the information needed to +innovate in important ways are in fact widely distributed. Given this finding, +we can see that the traditional pattern of concentrating innovation-support +resources on just a few pre-selected potential innovators is hugely +inefficient. High-cost resources for innovation support cannot be allocated to +"the right people," because one does not know who they are until they develop +an important innovation. When the cost of high-quality resources for design and +prototyping becomes very low---which is the trend we have described---these +resources can be diffused widely, and the allocation problem then diminishes in +significance. The net result is and will be to democratize the opportunity to +create. + +Democratization of the opportunity to create is important beyond giving more +users the ability to make exactly right products for themselves. As we saw in a +previous chapter, the joy and the learning associated with creativity and +membership in creative communities are also important, and these experiences +too are made more widely available as innovation is democratized. The +aforementioned Chris Hanson, a Principal Research Scientist at MIT and a +maintainer in the Debian Linux community, speaks eloquently of this in his +description of the joy and value he finds from his participation in an open +source software community: +={ Hanson, C. ; + Linux ; + Users : + innovate-or-buy decisions by +3 | innovation process and +3 ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + innovation and +3 ; + Innovation communities : + open source software and ; + Linux ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +3 +} + +_1 Creation is unbelievably addictive. And programming, at least for skilled +programmers, is highly creative. So good programmers are compelled to program +to feed the addiction. (Just ask my wife!) Creative programming takes time, and +careful attention to the details. Programming is all about expressing intent, +and in any large program there are many areas in which the programmer's intent +is unclear. Clarification requires insight, and acquiring insight is the +primary creative act in programming. But insight takes time and often requires +extensive conversation with one's peers. + +_1 Free-software programmers are relatively unconstrained by time. Community +standards encourage deep understanding, because programmers know that +understanding is essential to proper function. They are also programming for +themselves, and naturally they want the resulting programs to be as good as +they can be. For many, a free software project is the only context in which +they can write a program that expresses their own vision, rather than +implementing someone else's design, or hacking together something that the +marketing department insists on. No wonder programmers are willing to do this +in their spare time. This is a place where creativity thrives. + +_1 Creativity also plays a role in the programming community: programming, like +architecture, has both an expressive and a functional component. Unlike +architecture, though, the expressive component of a program is inaccessible to +non-programmers. A close analogy is to appreciate the artistic expression of a +novel when you don't know the language in which it is written, or even if you +know the language but are not fluent. This means that creative programmers want +to associate with one another: only their peers are able to truly appreciate +their art. Part of this is that programmers want to earn respect by showing +others their talents. But it's also important that people want to share the +beauty of what they have found. This sharing is another act that helps build +community and friendship. + +!_ Adapting to User-Centered Innovation---Like It or Not +={ Innovation process +5 ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + innovation and +5 +} + +User-centered innovation systems involving free revealing can sometimes +supplant product development carried out by manufacturers. This outcome seems +reasonable when manufacturers can obtain field-tested user designs at no cost. +As an illustration, consider kitesurfing (previously discussed in chapter 7). +The recent evolution of this field nicely shows how manufacturer-based product +design may not be able to survive when challenged by a user innovation +community that freely reveals leading-edge designs developed by users. In such +a case, manufacturers may be obliged to retreat to manufacturing only, +specializing in modifying user-developed designs for producibility and +manufacturing these in volume. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + users and ; + Kitesurfing +4 +} + +Recall that equipment for kitesurfing was initially developed and built by +user-enthusiasts who were inventing both kitesurfing techniques and kitesurfing +equipment interdependently. Around 1999, the first of several small +manufacturers began to design and sell kitesurfing equipment commercially. The +market for kitesurfing equipment then began to grow very rapidly. In 2001 about +5,000 kite-and-board sets were sold worldwide. In 2002 the number was about +30,000, and in 2003 it was about 70,000. With a basic kite-and-board set +selling for about $1,500, total sales in 2003 exceeded $100 million. (Many +additional kites, home-made by users, are not included in this calculation.) As +of 2003, about 40 percent of the commercial market was held by a US firm called +Robbie Naish (Naishkites.com). + +Recall also that in 2001 Saul Griffith, an MIT graduate student, established an +Internet site called Zeroprestige.com as a home for a community of kitesurfing +users and user-innovators. In 2003, the general consensus of both site +participants and manufacturers was that the kite designs developed by users and +freely revealed on Zeroprestige.com were at least as advanced as those +developed by the leading manufacturers. There was also a consensus that the +level of engineering design tools and aggregate rate of experimentation by kite +users participating on the Zeroprestige.com site was superior to that within +any kite manufacturer. Indeed, this collective user effort was probably +superior in quality and quantity to the product-development work carried out by +all manufacturers in the industry taken together. +={ Griffith, S. ; + Zeroprestige.com +1 +} + +In late 2003, a perhaps predictable event occurred: a kite manufacturer began +downloading users' designs from Zeroprestige.com and producing them for +commercial sale. This firm had no internal kitesurfing product-development +effort and offered no royalties to user-innovators---who sought none. It also +sold its products at prices much lower than those charged by companies that +both developed and manufactured kites. + +It is not clear that manufacturers of kitesurfing equipment adhering to the +traditional developer-manufacturer model can---or should---survive this new and +powerful combination of freely revealed collaborative design and prototyping +effort by a user innovation community combined with volume production by a +specialist manufacturer. In effect, free revealing of product designs by users +offsets manufacturers' economies of scale in design with user communities' +economies of scope. These economies arise from the heterogeneity in information +and resources found in a user community. +={ Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and ; + User need +2 +} + +!_ Manufacturers' Roles in User-Centered Innovation + +Users are not required to incorporate manufacturers in their +product-development and product-diffusion activities. Indeed, as open source +software projects clearly show, horizontal innovation communities consisting +entirely of users can develop, diffuse, maintain, and consume software and +other /{information}/ products by and for themselves---no manufacturer is +required. Freedom from manufacturer involvement is possible because information +products can be "produced" and distributed by users essentially for free on the +web (Kollock 1999). In contrast, production and diffusion of physical products +involves activities with significant economies of scale. For this reason, while +product development and early diffusion of copies of physical products +developed by users can be carried out by users themselves and within user +innovation communities, mass production and general diffusion of physical +products incorporating user innovations are usually carried out by +manufacturing firms. +={ Innovation communities : + open source software and +5 ; + Open source software : + innovation and +5 | innovation communities and +5 +} + +For information products, general distribution is carried out within and beyond +the user community by the community itself; no manufacturer is required: + +Innovating lead users ➔ All users. + +For physical products, general distribution typically requires manufacturers: + +Innovating lead users ➔ Manufacturer ➔ All users. + +In light of this situation, how can, should, or will manufacturers of products, +services, and processes play profitable roles in user-centered innovation +systems? Behlendorf (1999), Hecker (1999) and Raymond (1999) explore what might +be possible in the specific context of open source software. More generally, +many are experimenting with three possibilities: (1) Manufacturers may produce +user-developed innovations for general commercial sale and/or offer a custom +manufacturing service to specific users. (2) Manufacturers may sell kits of +product-design tools and/or "product platforms" to ease users' +innovation-related tasks. (3) Manufacturers may sell products or services that +are complementary to user-developed innovations. +={ Behlendorf, B. ; + Hecker, F. ; + Raymond, E. +} + +!_ Producing User-Developed Products + +Firms can make a profitable business from identifying and mass producing +user-developed innovations or developing and building new products based on +ideas drawn from such innovations. They can gain advantages over competitors by +learning to do this better than other manufacturers. They may, for example, +learn to identify commercially promising user innovations more effectively that +other firms. Firms using lead user search techniques such as those we will +describe in chapter 10 are beginning to do this systematically rather than +accidentally---surely an improvement. Effectively transferring user-developed +innovations to mass manufacture is seldom as simple as producing a product +based on a design by a single lead user. Often, a manufacturer combines +features developed by several independent lead users to create an attractive +commercial offering. This is a skill that a company can learn better than +others in order to gain a competitive advantage. +={ Lead users : + innovation and | manufacturers and +1 ; + Manufacturers : + lead users and +1 +} + +The decision as to whether or when to take the plunge and commercialize a lead +user innovation(s) is also not typically straightforward, and companies can +improve their skills at inviting in the relevant information and making such +assessments. As was discussed previously, manufacturers often do not understand +emerging user needs and markets nearly as well as lead users do. Lead users +therefore may engage in entrepreneurial activities, such as "selling" the +potential of an idea to potential manufacturers and even lining up financing +for a manufacturer when they think it very important to rapidly get widespread +diffusion of a user-developed product. Lettl, Herstatt, and Gemünden (2004), +who studied the commercialization of major advances in surgical equipment, +found innovating users commonly engaging in these activities. It is also +possible, of course, for innovating lead users to become manufacturers and +produce the products they developed for general commercial sale. This has been +shown to occur fairly frequently in the field of sporting goods (Shah 2000; +Shah and Tripsas 2004; Hienerth 2004). +={ Gemünden, H. ; + Lettl, C. ; + Herstatt, C. ; + Hienerth, C. ; + Shah, S. ; + Tripsas, M. ; + Lead users : + surgical equipment and ; + Windsurfing ; + Custom products : + innovation and +1 | manufacturers and +1 ; + users and +1 ; + Users : + custom products and +1 +} + +Manufacturers can also elect to provide custom production or "foundry" services +to users, differentiating themselves by producing users' designs faster, +better, and/or cheaper than competitors. This type of business model is already +advanced in many fields. Custom machine shops specialize in manufacturing +mechanical parts to order; electronic assembly shops produce custom electronic +products, chemical manufacturers offer "toll" manufacturing of custom products +designed by others, and so on. Suppliers of custom integrated circuits offer an +especially good example of custom manufacture of products designed by users. +More than $15 billion worth of custom integrated circuits were produced in +2002, and the cumulative average growth rate of that market segment was 29 +percent. Users benefit from designing their own circuits by getting exactly +what they want more quickly than manufacturer-based engineers could supply what +they need, and manufacturers benefit from producing the custom designs for +users (Thomke and von Hippel 2002). +={ Thomke, S. ; + von Hippel, E. ; + Custom products : + suppliers and +2 ; + Suppliers +2 ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers | by users +} + +!_ Supplying Toolkits and/or Platform Products to Users +={ Custom products : + product platforms and +7 ; + Toolkits +7 : + platform products and +7 +} + +Users interested in designing their own products want to do it efficiently. +Manufacturers can therefore attract them to kits of design tools that ease +their product-development tasks and to products that can serve as "platforms" +upon which to develop and operate user-developed modifications. Some are +supplying users with proprietary sets of design tools only. Cadence, a supplier +of design tools for corporate and even individual users interested in designing +their own custom semiconductor chips, is an example of this. Other +manufacturers, including Harley-Davidson in the case of motorcycles and +Microsoft in the case of its Excel spreadsheet software, sell platform products +intentionally designed for post-sale modification by users. +={ Microsoft } + +Some firms that sell platform products or design tools to users have learned to +systematically incorporate valuable innovations that users may develop back +into their commercial products. In effect, this second strategy can often be +pursued jointly with the manufacturing strategy described above. Consider, for +example, StataCorp of College Station, Texas. StataCorp produces and sells +Stata, a proprietary software program designed for statistics. It sells the +basic system bundled with a number of families of statistical tests and with +design tools that enable users to develop new tests for operation on the Stata +platform. Advanced customers, many of them statisticians and social science +researchers, find this capability very important to their work and do develop +their own tests. Many then freely reveal tests they have developed on Internet +websites set up by the users themselves. Other users then visit these sites to +download and use, and perhaps to test, comment on, and improve these tests, +much as users do in open source software communities. +={ StataCorp statistical software +2 ; + Toolkits : + StataCorp and +2 ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + innovation and +3 | intellectual property rights and +3 ; + Government policy : + free revealing and +3 | intellectual property rights and +3 | trade secrets and +3 ; + Innovation communities +3 : + open source software and +3 | and sources of innovation +3 ; + Intellectual property rights : + free revealing and +3 | trade secrets and +3 ; + Open source software : + innovation and +10 | innovation communities and +10 +} + +StataCorp personnel monitor the activity at user sites, and note the new tests +that are of interest to many users. They then bring the most popular tests into +their product portfolio as Stata modules. To do this, they rewrite the user's +software code while adhering to the principles pioneered by the user-innovator. +They then subject the module to extensive validation testing---a very important +matter for statisticians. The net result is a symbiotic relationship. +User-innovators are publicly credited by Stata for their ideas, and benefit by +having their modules professionally tested. StataCorp gains a new commercial +test module, rewritten and sold under its own copyright. Add-ons developed by +users that are freely revealed will increase StataCorp's profits more than will +equivalent add-ons developed and sold by manufacturers (Jokisch 2001). Similar +strategies are pursued by manufacturers of simulator software (Henkel and Thies +2003). +={ Henkel, J. ; + Jokisch, M. ; + Thies, S. ; + Economic benefit, expectations of by lead users : + by manufacturers | by users +} + +Note, however, that StataCorp, in order to protect its proprietary position, +does not reveal the core of its software program to users, and does not allow +any user to modify it. This creates problems for those users who need to make +modifications to the core in order to solve particular problems they encounter. +Users with problems of this nature and users especially concerned about price +have the option of turning to non-proprietary free statistical software +packages available on the web, such as the "R" project (www.r-project.org). +These alternatives are developed and supported by user communities and are +available as open source software. The eventual effect of open source software +alternatives on the viability of the business models of commercial vendors such +as StataCorp and its competitors remains to be seen. + +A very similar pattern exists in the online gaming industry. Vendors of early +online computer games were surprised to discover that sophisticated users were +deciphering their closed source code in order to modify the games to be more to +their liking. Some of these "mods" attracted large followings, and some game +vendors were both impressed and supportive. Manufacturers also discovered that +the net effect of user-developed mods was positive for them: mods actually +increased the sales of their basic software, because users had to buy the +vendors' proprietary software engine code in order to play the mods. +Accordingly, a number of vendors began to actively support user-developers by +supplying them with design tools to make it easier for them to build mods on +their proprietary engine platforms (Jeppesen and Molin 2003). +={ Jeppesen, L. +1 ; + Molin, M. +} + +Both manufacturers and users involved with online gaming are experimenting with +the possibilities of user-manufacturer symbiosis in a number of additional +ways. For example, some vendors are experimenting with creating +company-supported distribution channels through which users---who then become +vendors---can sell their mods rather than simply offering them as free +downloads (Jeppesen 2004). At the same time, some user communities are working +in the opposite direction by joining together to develop open source software +engines for video games. If the latter effort is successful, it will offer mod +developers a platform and design tools that are entirely non-proprietary for +the first time. As in the case of statistical software, the eventual outcomes +of all these experiments are not yet clear. + +As a final example of a strategy in which manufacturers offer a platform to +support user innovation of value to them, consider General Electric's +innovation pattern with respect to the magnetic-resonance imaging machines it +sells for medical use. Michael Harsh (GE's Director of R&D in the division that +produces MRI machines) and his colleagues realized that nearly all the major, +commercially important improvements to these machines are developed by +leading-edge users rather than by GE or by competing machine producers. They +also knew that commercialization of user-developed improvements would be easier +and faster for GE if the users had developed their innovations using a GE MRI +machine as a platform rather than a competitor's machine. Since MRI machines +are expensive, GE developed a policy of selectively supplying machines at a +very low price to scientists GE managers judged most likely to develop +important improvements. These machines are supplied with restrictive interlocks +removed so that the users can easily modify them. In exchange for this research +support, the medical researchers give GE preferred access to innovations they +develop. Over the years, supported researchers have provided a steady flow of +significant improvements that have been first commercialized by GE. Managers +consider the policy a major source of GE's commercial success in the MRI field. +={ General Electric ; + Harsh, M. ; + Toolkits : + GE and +} + +!_ Providing Complementary Products or Services + +Many user innovations require or benefit from complementary products or +services, and manufacturers can often supply these at a profit. For example, +IBM profits from user innovation in open source software by selling the +complement of computer hardware. Specifically, it sells computer servers with +open source software pre-installed, and as the popularity of that software goes +up, so do server sales and profits. A firm named Red Hat distributes a version +of the open source software computer operating system Linux, and also sells the +complementary service of Linux technical support to users. Opportunities to +provide profitable complements are not necessarily obvious at first glance, and +providers often reap benefits without being aware of the user innovation for +which they are providing a complement. Hospital emergency rooms, for example, +certainly gain considerable business from providing medical care to the users +and user-developers of physically demanding sports, but may not be aware of +this. +={ IBM ; + Linux ; + Users : + innovation and +3 ; + Innovation communities : + open source software and ; + Linux ; + Innovation communities : + sources of innovation and +} + +!_ Discussion +={ Government policy : + intellectual property rights and +2 +} + +All the examples above explore how manufacturers can integrate themselves into +a user-centered innovation system. However, manufacturers will not always find +user innovations based on or related to their products to be in their interest. +For example, manufacturers may be concerned about legal liabilities and costs +sometimes associated with "unauthorized user tinkering." For example, an +automaker might legitimately worry about the user-programmed engine controller +chips that racing aficionados and others often install to change their cars' +performance. The result can be findings of eventual commercial value as users +explore new performance regimes that manufacturers' engineers might not have +considered. However, if users choose to override manufacturers' programming to +increase engine performance, there is also a clear risk of increased warrantee +costs for manufacturers if engines fail as a consequence (Mollick 2004). +={ Mollick, Ethan } + +We have seen that manufacturers can often find ways to profit from user +innovation. It is also the case, however, that user innovators and user +innovation communities can provide many of these same functions for themselves. +For example, StataCorp is successfully selling a proprietary statistical +software package. User-developed alternatives exist on the web that are +developed and maintained by user-innovators and can be downloaded at no charge. +Which ownership model will prove more robust under what circumstances remains +to be seen. Ultimately, since users are the customers, they get to choose. +={ StataCorp statistical software ; + Toolkits : + StataCorp and ; + Users : + innovation communities and ; + Innovation communities +} + +1~ 10 Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations +={ Users : + innovation and +59 ; + Lead users +59 : + innovation and +59 | identification of +49 +} + +Users and manufacturers can apply the insights developed in this book to +improve their innovation processes. In this chapter, I illustrate by showing +how firms can profit by /{systematically}/ searching for innovations developed +by lead users. I first explain how this can be done. I then present findings of +a study conducted at 3M to assess the effectiveness of lead user +idea-generation techniques. Finally, I briefly review other studies reporting +systematic searches for lead users by manufacturers, and the results obtained. +={ Lead users : + idea generation and | 3M and ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and | lead users and +16 ; + 3M Corporation +} + +!_ Searching for Lead Users + +Product-development processes traditionally used by manufacturers start with +market researchers who study customers in their target markets to learn about +unsatisfied needs. Next, the need information they uncover is transferred to +in-house product developers who are charged with developing a responsive +product. In other words, the approach is to find a user need and to fill it by +means of in-house product development. +={ Marketing research +2 } + +These traditional processes cannot easily be adapted to systematic searching +for lead user innovations. The focus on target-market customers means that lead +users are regarded as outliers of no interest. Also, traditional +market-research analyses focus on collecting and analyzing need information and +not on possible solutions that users may have developed. For example, if a user +says "I have developed this new product to make task X more convenient," +market-research analyses typically will note that more convenience is wanted +but not record the user-developed solution. After all, product development is +the province of in-house engineers! + +We are therefore left with a question: How can manufacturers build a +product-development process that systematically searches for and evaluates lead +user-generated innovations? (See figure 10.1.) It turns out that the answer +differs depending on whether the lead users sought are at the leading edge of +"advanced analog" fields or at the leading edge of target markets. Searching +for the former is more difficult, but experience shows that the user-developed +innovations that are most radical (and profitable) relative to conventional +thinking often come from lead users in "advanced analog" fields. +={ Manufacturers : + innovation and ; + Lead users : + characteristics of +1 ; + Marketing research +1 +} + +% Only lead user +% prototypes available +% Time +% Commercial versions of product available +% Number +% of users +% perceiving +% need +% Figure 10.1 +% Innovations by lead users precede equivalent commercial products. + +{di_evh_f10-1.png}image + +!_ Figure 10.1 +Innovations by lead users precede equivalent commercial products. + +!_ Identifying Lead Users in Advanced Analog Fields + +Lead users in advanced analog fields experience needs that are related to but +more extreme than those being faced by /{any}/ users, including lead users, +within the target market. They also often face a different set of constraints +than those affecting users in the target market. These differences can force +them to develop solutions that are entirely new from the perspective of the +target market. + +As an example, consider the relationship between the braking requirements faced +by users of automobiles (let's call auto users the target market) and the +braking requirements faced by large commercial airplanes as they land on an +airport runway (the advanced analog market). Clearly, the braking demands on +large airplanes are much more extreme. Airplanes are much heavier than autos +and land at higher speeds: their brakes must rapidly dissipate hundreds of +times more energy to bring the vehicle to a stop. Also, the situational +constraints are different. For example, auto drivers are often assisted in +braking in winter by the application of salt or sand to icy roads. These aids +cannot be applied in the case of aircraft: salt would damage aircraft bodies, +and sand would be inhaled into jet engines and damage them. + +The result of the more extreme demands and additional constraints placed on +solutions to aircraft braking was the development of antilock braking systems +(ABS) for aircraft. Auto firms conducting searches for valuable lead user +innovations regarding auto braking were able to learn about this out-of-field +innovation and adapt if for use in autos---where it is common today. Before the +development of ABS for autos, an automobile firm could have learned about the +underlying concept by studying the practices of users with a strong need for +controlling skidding while braking such as stock car auto racing teams. These +lead users had learned to manually "pump" their brakes to help control this +problem. However, auto company engineers were able to learn much more by +studying the automated solutions developed in the "advanced analog" field of +aerospace.~{ ABS braking is intended to keep a vehicle's wheels turning during +braking. ABS works by automatically and rapidly "pumping" the brakes. The +result is that the wheels continue to revolve rather than "locking up," and the +operator continues to have control over steering. }~ + +Finding lead users in advanced analog markets can be difficult because +discovering the relevance of a particular analog can itself be a creative act. +One approach that has proven effective is to ask the more easily identified +lead users in target markets for nominations. These lead users tend to know +about useful advanced analogs, because they have been struggling with their +leading-edge problems for a long time, and often have searched beyond the +target market for information. + +Networking from innovators to more advanced innovators in this way is called +pyramiding (von Hippel, Thomke, and Sonnack 1999). Pyramiding is a modified +version of the "snowballing" technique sometimes used by sociologists to +identify members of a group or accumulate samples of rare respondents (Bijker +1995). Snowballing relies on the fact that people with rare interests or +attributes tend to know others like themselves. Pyramiding modifies this idea +by assuming that people with a strong interest in a topic or field can direct +an enquiring researcher to people /{more}/ expert than themselves. Experiments +have shown that pyramiding can identify high-quality informants much more +efficiently than can mass-screening techniques under many conditions (von +Hippel, Franke, and Prügl 2005). Pyramiding was made into a practical +industrial process by Mary Sonnack, a Division Scientist at 3M, and Joan +Churchill, a psychologist specializing in the development of industrial +training programs. +={ Bijker, W. ; + Churchill, J. ; + Franke, N. ; + Prügl, R. ; + Thomke, S. ; + von Hippel, E. +46 +} + +!_ Identifying Lead Users in Target Markets + +In general it is easier to identify users at the leading edge of target markets +than it is to identify users in advanced analog fields. Screening for users +with lead user characteristics can be used. When the desired type of lead user +is so rare as to make screening impractical---often the case---pyramiding can +be applied. In addition, manufacturers can take advantage of the fact that +users at the leading edge of a target market often congregate at specialized +sites or events that manufacturers can readily identify. At such sites, users +may freely reveal what they have done and may learn from others about how to +improve their own practices still further. Manufacturers interested in learning +from these lead users can easily visit the sites and listen in. For example, +sports equipment companies can go to sporting meets where lead users are known +to compete, observe user innovations in action, and compare notes. +={ Manufacturers : + innovation and +} + +Essentially the same thing can be done at virtual sites. For example, recall +the practices of StataCorp, a supplier of statistical software. Stata sells a +set of standard statistical tests and also a language and tools that +statisticians can use to design new tests to serve their own evolving needs. +Some Stata users (statisticians) took the initiative to set up a few +specialized websites, unaffiliated with StataCorp, where they post their +innovations for others to download, use, comment on, and improve. StataCorp +personnel visit these sites, learn about the user innovations, and observe +which tests seem to be of interest to many users. They then develop proprietary +versions of the more generally useful tests as commercial products. +={ Lead users : + StataCorp statistical software and ; + StataCorp statistical software +} + +When specialized rendezvous sites for lead users don't exist in a particular +field, manufacturers may be able to create them. Technicon Corporation, for +example, set up a series of seminars at which innovating users of their medical +equipment got together and exchanged information on their innovations. +Technicon engineers were free to listen in, and the innovations developed by +these users were the sources of most of Technicon's important new product +improvements (von Hippel and Finkelstein 1979). +={ Finkelstein, S. ; + Technicon Corporation +} + +!_ The 3M Experiment +={ Lead users : + 3M and +32 ; + 3M Corporation +32 +} + +To test whether lead users in advanced analog fields can in fact generate +information that leads to commercially valuable new products, Lilien, Morrison, +Searls, Sonnack, and von Hippel (2002) studied a natural experiment at 3M. That +firm was carrying out both lead user projects and traditional market +research-based idea-generation projects in the same divisions at the same time, +and in sufficient numbers to make statistical comparisons of outcomes possible. +={ Lilien, G. +26 ; + Morrison, Pamela +26 ; + Searls, K. +26 ; + Sonnack, M. +26 ; + Lead users : + idea generation and +45 +} + +!_ Methods + +3M first began using the lead user method in one division in 1996. By May 2000, +when data collection began, five divisions of 3M had completed seven lead user +(LU) idea-generation projects and had funded further development of the product +concepts generated by five of these. These same five divisions also had 42 +contemporaneously funded projects that used "find a need and fill it" +idea-generation methodologies that were traditional practice at 3M. We used +these two samples of funded ideas to compare the performance of lead user +idea-generation projects with traditional idea-generation projects. Although 3M +cooperated in the study and permitted access to company records and to members +of the product-development teams, the firm did not offer a controlled +experimental setting. Rather, we as researchers were required to account for +any naturally occurring differences after the fact. + +Our study methodology required a pre-post/test-control situation, with at least +quasi-random assignments to treatment cells (Cook and Campbell 1979). In other +words, our goal was to compare samples of development projects in 3M divisions +that differed with respect to their use of lead user idea-generation methods, +but that were as similar as possible in other respects. Identifying, +understanding, and controlling for the many potential sources of difference +that could affect the natural experiment involved careful field explorations. +Thus, possible differences between project staffing and performance incentives +applied to LU and non-LU idea-generation projects were assessed. We looked for +(and did not find) differences in the capabilities or motivation of LU and +non-LU project team members with respect to achieving a major new product +advance. 3M managers also said that there was no difference in these matters, +and a content analysis of formal annual performance goals set for the +individual LU and non-LU team members in a division that allowed access to +these data supported their views. +={ Campbell, D. ; + Cook, T. +} + +We also found no major differences in the innovation opportunities teams faced. +They also looked for Hawthorne or placebo effects that might affect the project +teams differentially, and found none. (The Hawthorne effect can be described as +"I do better because extra attention is being paid to me or to my performance." +The placebo effect can be described as "I expect this process will work and +will strive to get the results I have been told are likely.") We concluded that +the 3M samples of funded LU and non-LU idea-generation projects, though not +satisfying the random assignment criterion for experimental design, appeared to +satisfy rough equivalence criteria in test and control conditions associated +with natural or quasi-experimentation. Data were collected by interviews and by +survey instruments. + +With respect to the intended difference under study---the use of lead user +methods within projects---all lead user teams employed an identical lead user +process taught to them with identical coaching materials and with coaching +provided by members of the same small set of internal 3M coaches. Each lead +user team consisted of three or four members of the marketing and technical +departments of the 3M division conducting the project. Teams began by +identifying important market trends. Then, they engaged in pyramiding to +identify lead users with respect to each trend both within the target market +and in advanced analog markets. Information from a number of innovating lead +users was then combined by the team to create a new product concept and +business plan---an "LU idea" (von Hippel, Thomke, and Sonnack 1999). +={ Thomke, S. } + +% ={Sonnack, M.} + +Non-lead-user idea-generation projects were conducted in accordance with +traditional 3M practices. I refer to these as non-LU idea generation methods +and to teams using them as non-LU teams. Non-LU teams were similar to lead user +teams in terms of size and make-up. They used data sources for idea generation +that varied from project to project. Market data collected by outside +organizations were sometimes used, as were data from focus groups with major +customers and from customer panels, and information from lab personnel. Non-LU +teams collected market information from target markets users but not from lead +users. + +!_ Findings + +Our research compared all funded product concepts generated by LU and non-LU +methods from February 1999 to May 2000 in each of the five 3M divisions that +had funded one or more lead-user-developed product concepts. During that time, +five ideas generated by lead user projects were being funded, along with 42 +ideas generated by non-LU idea-generation methods. The results of these +comparisons can be seen in table 10.1. Product concepts generated by seeking +out and learning from lead users were found to be significantly more novel than +those generated by non-LU methods. They were also found to address more +original or newer customer needs, to have significantly higher market share, to +have greater potential to develop into an entire product line, and to be more +strategically important. The lead-user-developed product concepts also had +projected annual sales in year 5 that were greater than those of ideas +generated by non-LU methods by a factor of 8---an average of $146 million +versus an average of $18 million in forecast annual sales. Thus, at 3M, lead +user idea-generation projects clearly did generate new product concepts with +much greater commercial potential than did traditional, non-LU methods (p < +0.005). + +!_ Table 10.1 +Concepts for new products developed by lead user project teams had far more +commercial promise than those developed by non-lead-user project teams. + +table{~h c4; 40; 20; 20; 20; + +~ +LU product concepts (n =5) +Non-LU product concepts (n = 42) +Significance + +Factors related to value of concept +~ +~ +~ + +Novelty compared with competition a +9.6 +6.8 +0.01 + +Originality/newness of customer needs addressed +8.3 +5.3 +0.09 + +% market share in year 5 +68% +33% +0.01 + +Estimated sales in year 5 (deflated for forecast error) +$146m +$18m +0.00 + +Potential for entire product family a +10.0 +7.5 +0.03 + +Operating profit +22% +24.0% +0.70 + +Probability of success +80% +66% +0.24 + +Strategic importance a +9.6 +7.3 +0.08 + +Intellectual property protection a +7.1 +6.7 +0.80 + +Factors related to organizational fit of concept +~ +~ +~ + +Fit with existing distribution channels a +8.8 +8.0 +0.61 + +Fit with existing manufacturing capabilities a +7.8 +6.7 +0.92 + +Fit with existing strategic plan a +9.8 +8.4 +0.24 + +}table + +Source: Lilien et al. 2002, table 1. \\ +a. Rated on a scale from 1 to 10. + +Note that the sales data for both the LU and non-LU projects are forecasts. To +what extent can we rely on these? We explored this matter by collecting both +forecast and actual sales data from five 3M division controllers. (Division +controllers are responsible for authorizing new product-development investment +expenditures.) We also obtained data from a 1995 internal study that compared +3M's sales forecasts with actual sales. We combined this information to develop +a distribution of forecast errors for a number of 3M divisions, as well as +overall forecast errors across the entire corporation. Those errors range from +forecast/actual of +30 percent (over-forecast) to --13 percent (underforecast). +On the basis of the information just described, and in consultation with 3M +management, we deflated all sales forecast data by 25 percent. That deflator is +consistent with 3M's historical experience and, we think, provides conservative +sales forecasts.~{ In the general literature, Armstrong's (2001) review on +forecast bias for new product introduction indicates that sales forecasts are +generally optimistic, but that that upward bias decreases as the magnitude of +the sales forecast increases. Coller and Yohn (1998) review the literature on +bias in accuracy of management earnings forecasts and find that little +systematic bias occurs. Tull's (1967) model calculates $15 million in revenue +as a level above which forecasts actually become pessimistic on average. We +think it reasonable to apply the same deflator to LU vs. non-LU project sales +projections. Even if LU project personnel were for some reason more likely to +be optimistic with respect to such projections than non-LU project personnel, +that would not significantly affect our findings. Over 60 percent of the total +dollar value of sales forecasts made for LU projects were actually made by +personnel not associated with those projects (outside consulting firms or +business analysts from other divisions). }~ Deflated data appear in table 10.1 +and in the following tables. + +Rather strikingly, all five of the funded 3M lead user projects created the +basis for major new product lines for 3M (table 10.2). In contrast, 41 of 42 +funded product concepts generated by non-LU methods were improvements or +extensions of existing product lines (χ^{2}^ test, p < 0.005). + +Following tt, p < 0.005).e advice of 3M divisional controllers, major product +lines were defined as those separately reported in divisional financial +statements. In 1999 in the 3M divisions we studied, sales of individual major +product lines ranged from 7 percent to 73 percent of total divisional sales. +The sales projections for funded lead user project ideas all fell well above +the lower end of this range: projected sales five years after introduction for +funded LU ideas, conservatively deflated as discussed above, ranged from 25 +percent to over 300 percent of current total divisional sales. + +!_ Table 10.2 +Lead user project teams developed concepts for major new product lines. +Non-lead-user project teams developed concepts for incremental product +improvements. + +table{~h c3; 34; 33; 33; + +~ +Incremental product improvements +Major new product lines + +LU method +0 +5 + +Non-LU method +41 +1 + +}table + +Source: Lilien et al. 2002, table 2. + +To illustrate what the major product line innovations that the LU process teams +generated at 3M were like, I briefly describe four (one is not described for 3M +proprietary reasons): + +_* A new approach to the prevention of infections associated with surgical +operations. The new approach replaced the traditional "one size fits all" +approach to infection prevention with a portfolio of patient-specific measures +based on each patient's individual biological susceptibilities. This innovation +involved new product lines plus related business and strategy innovations made +by the team to bring this new approach to market successfully and profitably. + +_* Electronic test and communication equipment for telephone field repair +workers that pioneered the inclusion of audio, video, and remote data access +capabilities. These capabilities enabled physically isolated workers to carry +out their problem-solving work as a virtual team with co-workers for the first +time. + +_* A new approach, implemented via novel equipment, to the application of +commercial graphics films that cut the time of application from 48 hours to +less than 1 hour. (Commercial graphics films are used, for example, to cover +entire truck trailers, buses, and other vehicles with advertising or decorative +graphics.) The LU team's solutions involved technical innovations plus related +channel and business model changes to help diffuse the innovation rapidly. + +_* A new approach to protecting fragile items in shipping cartons that replaces +packaging materials such as foamed plastic. The new product lines implementing +the approach were more environmentally friendly and much faster and more +convenient for both shippers and package recipients than other products and +methods on the market. + +Lilien, Morrison, Searls, Sonnack, and I also explored to see whether the major +product lines generated by the lead user projects had characteristics similar +to those of the major product lines that had been developed at 3M in the past, +including Scotch Tape. To determine this we collected data on all major new +product lines introduced to the market between 1950 and 2000 by the five 3M +divisions that had executed one or more lead user studies. (The year 1950 was +as far back as we could go and still find company employees who could provide +some data about the innovation histories of these major products lines.) +Examples from our 1950--2000 sample include the following: +={ Lilien, G. ; + Morrison, Pamela ; + Searls, K. +} + +% ={Sonnack, M.} + +_* Scotch Tape: A line of transparent mending tapes that was first of its type +and a major success in many household and commercial applications. + +_* Disposable patient drapes for operating room use: A pioneering line of +disposable products for the medical field now sold in many variations. + +_* Box sealing tapes: The first type of tape strong enough to reliably seal +corrugated shipping boxes, it replaced stapling in most "corrugated shipper" +applications. + +_* Commercial graphics films: Plastic films capable of withstanding outdoor +environments that could be printed upon and adhered to large surfaces on +vehicles such as the sides of trailer trucks. This product line changed the +entire approach to outdoor signage. + +Table 10.3 provides profiles of the five LU major product lines and the 16 +non-LU major product lines for which we were able to collect data. As can be +seen, innovations generated with inputs from lead users are similar in many +ways to the major innovations developed by 3M in the past. + +!_ Table 10.3 +Major new product lines (MNPLs) generated by lead-user methods are similar to +MNPLs generated by 3M in the past. + +table{~h c4; 55; 15; 15; 15; + +~ +LU MNPLs (n = 5) +Past 3M MNPLs (n = 16) +Significance + +Novelty a compared with competition +9.6 +8.0 +0.21 + +Originality/newness of customer needs addressed^{a}^ +8.3 +7.9 +0.78 + +% market share in year 5 +68% +61% +0.76 + +Estimated sales in year 5 (deflated for forecast error) +146m^{b}^ +$62m^{b}^ +0.04 + +Potential for entire product family^{a}^ +10.0 +9.4 +0.38 + +Operating profit +22% +27% +0.41 + +Probability of success +80% +87% +0.35 + +Strategic importance* +9.6 +8.5 +0.39 + +Intellectual property protection^{a}^ +7.1 +7.4 +0.81 + +Fit with distribution channels^{a}^ +8.8 +8.4 +0.77 + +Fit with manufacturing capabilities^{a}^ +7.8 +6.7 +0.53 + +Fit with strategic plan^{a}^ +9.8 +8.7 +0.32 + +}table + +Source: Lilien et al. 2002, table 4. \\ +a. Measured on a scale from 1 to 10. \\ +b. Five-year sales forecasts for all major product lines commercialized in 1994 +or later (5 LU and 2 non-LU major product lines) have been deflated by 25% in +line with 3M historical forecast error experience (see text). Five-year sales +figures for major product lines commercialized before 1994 are actual +historical sales data. This data has been converted to 1999 dollars using the +Consumer Price Index from the Economic Report of the President (Council of +Economic Advisors 2000). + +!_ Discussion + +The performance comparison between lead user and "find a need and fill it" +idea-generation projects at 3M showed remarkably strong advantages associated +with searching for ideas among lead users in advanced analog fields with needs +similar to, but even more extreme than, needs encountered in the intended +target market. The direction of this outcome is supported by findings from +three other real-world industrial applications of lead user idea-generation +methods that studied lead users in the target market but not in advanced analog +markets. I briefly describe these three studies next. They each appear to have +generated primarily next-generation products--- valuable for firms, but not the +basis for radically new major product lines. + +%% + +_* Recall that Urban and von Hippel (1988) tested the relative commercial +attractiveness of product concepts developed in the field of computer-aided +systems for the design of printed circuit boards (PC-CAD). One of the concepts +they tested contained novel features proposed by lead users that had innovated +in the PC-CAD field in order to serve in-house need. The attractiveness of the +"lead user concept" was then evaluated by a sample of 173 target-market users +of PC-CAD systems relative to three other concept choices---one of which was a +description of the best system then commercially available. Over 80 percent of +the target-market users were found to prefer the concept incorporating the +features developed by innovating lead users. Their reported purchase +probability for a PC-CAD system incorporating the lead user features was 51 +percent, over twice as high as the purchase probability indicated for any other +system. The target-market users were also found willing to pay twice as much +for a product embodying the lead user features than for PC-CAD products that +did not incorporate them. +={ Urban, G. ; + Printed circuit CAD software +} + +_* Herstatt and von Hippel (1992) documented a lead user project seeking to +develop a new line of pipe hangers---hardware used to attach pipes to the +ceilings of commercial buildings. Hilti, a major manufacturer of +construction-related equipment and products, conducted the project. The firm +introduced a new line of pipe hanger products based on the lead user concept +and a post-study evaluation has shown that this line has become a major +commercial success for Hilti. +={ Herstatt, C. ; + Pipe hanger hardware +} + +_* Olson and Bakke (2001) report on two lead user studies carried out by Cinet, +a leading IT systems integrator in Norway, for the firm's two major product +areas, desktop personal computers, and Symfoni application GroupWare. These +projects were very successful, with most of the ideas incorporated into +next-generation products having been collected from lead users. +={ Bakke, G. ; + Olson, E. +} + +Active search for lead users that have innovated enables manufacturers to more +rapidly commercialize lead user innovations. One might think that an +alternative approach would be to identify lead users before they have +innovated. Alert manufacturers could then make some prior arrangements to get +preferred access to promising user-developed innovations by, for example, +purchasing promising lead user organizations. I myself think that such vertical +integration approaches are not practical. As was shown earlier, the character +and attractiveness of innovations lead users may develop is based in part on +the particular situations faced by and information stocks held by individual +lead users. User innovation is therefore likely to be a widely distributed +phenomenon, and it would be difficult to predict in advance which users are +most likely to develop very valuable innovations. +={ Manufacturers : + lead users and +8 +} + +How do we square these findings with the arguments, put forth by Christensen +(1997), by Slater and Narver (1998), and by others, that firms are likely to +miss radical or disruptive innovations if they pay close attention to requests +from their customers? Christensen (1997, p. 59, n. 21) writes: "The research of +Eric von Hippel, frequently cited as evidence of the value of listening to +customers, indicates that customers originate a large majority of new product +ideas. . . . The [Christensen] value network framework would predict that the +innovations toward which the customers in von Hippel's study led their +suppliers would have been sustaining innovations. We would expect disruptive +innovations to have come from other sources." +={ Christensen, C. +2 ; + Narver, J. ; + Slater, S. +} + +Unfortunately, the above contains a basic misunderstanding of my research +findings. My findings, and related findings by others as well, deal with +innovations by lead users, not customers, and /{lead users are a much broader +category than customers of a specific firm}/. Lead users that generate +innovations of interest to manufacturers can reside, as we have seen, at the +leading edges of target markets, and also in advanced analog markets. The +innovations that some lead users develop are certainly disruptive from the +viewpoint of some manufacturers---but the lead users are unlikely to care about +this. After all, they are developing products to serve their own needs. Tim +Berners-Lee, for example, developed the World Wide Web as a lead user working +at CERN---a user of that software. The World Wide Web was certainly disruptive +to the business models of many firms, but this was not Berners-Lee's concern. +Lead users typically have no reason to lead, mislead, or even contact +manufacturers that might eventually benefit from or be disrupted by their +innovations. Indeed, the likely absence of a preexisting customer relationship +is the reason that manufacturing firms must search for lead user innovations +/{outside}/ their customer lists---as 3M did in its lead user idea generation +studies. "Listening to the voice of the customer" is /{not}/ the same thing as +seeking out and learning from lead users (Danneels 2004). +={ Berners-Lee, T. ; + Danneels, E. ; + Lead users : + 3M and ; + 3M Corporation ; + Custom products : + manufacturers and +2 | users and +2 ; + Innovation : + distributed process of +2 | functional sources of +2 +} + +That basic misunderstanding aside, I do agree with Christensen and others that +a manufacturer may well receive mainly requests for sustaining innovations from +its /{customers}/. As was discussed in chapter 4, manufacturers have an +incentive to develop innovations that utilize their existing +capabilities---that are "sustaining" for them. Customers know this and, when +considering switching to a new technology, are unlikely to request it from a +manufacturer that would consider it to be disruptive: they know that such a +manufacturer is unlikely to respond positively. The net result is that +manufacturers' inputs from their existing customers may indeed be biased +towards requests for sustaining innovations. + +I conclude this chapter by reminding the reader that studies of the sources of +innovation show clearly that users will tend to develop some types of +innovations but not all. It therefore makes sense for manufacturers to +partition their product-development strategies and portfolios accordingly. They +may wish, for example, to move away from actual new product development and +search for lead users' innovations in the case of functionally novel products. +At the same time manufacturers may decide to continue to develop products that +do /{not}/ require high-fidelity models of need information and use +environments to get right. One notable category of innovations with this +characteristic is dimension-of-merit improvements to existing products. +Sometimes users state their needs for improved products in terms of dimensions +on which improvements are desired---dimensions of merit. As an example, +consider that users may say "I want a computer that is as fast and cheap as +possible." Similarly, users of medical imaging equipment may say "I want an +image that is of as high a resolution as is technically possible." If +manufacturers (or users) cannot get to the end point desired by these users +right away, they will instead progressively introduce new product generations +that move along the dimension of merit as rapidly and well as they can. Their +rate of progress is determined by the rate at which /{solution}/ technologies +improve over time. This means that sticky solution information rather than +sticky need information is central to development of dimension-of-merit +improvements. Manufacturers will tend to have the information they need to +develop dimension of merit innovations internally. +={ Manufacturers : + dimensions-of-merit product improvements and ; + Sticky information : + dimensions-of-merit product improvements and | innovation and +} + +1~ 11 Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design +={ Users : + innovation and +62 ; + Custom products : + manufacturers and +62 | toolkits and +62 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +62 ; + Toolkits +62 : + innovation and +62 ; + Users : + toolkits and +62 +} + +An improved understanding of the relative innovation capabilities of users and +manufacturers can enable designs for more effective joint innovation processes. +Toolkits for user innovation and custom design illustrate this possibility. In +this new innovation process design, manufacturers actually /{abandon}/ their +efforts to understand users' needs accurately and in detail. Instead, they +outsource only /{need-related}/ innovation tasks to their users, who are +equipped with appropriate toolkits. This process change differs from the lead +user search processes discussed earlier in an interesting way. Lead user +searchs identify existing innovations, but do nothing to change the conditions +affecting user-innovators at the time a new product or service is being +developed. Toolkits for users, in contrast, do change the conditions potential +innovators face. By making innovation cheaper and quicker for users, they can +increase the volume of user innovation. They also can channel innovative effort +into directions supported by toolkits. +={ Toolkits : + characteristics of +3 +} + +In this chapter, I first explore why toolkits are useful. Next, I describe how +to create an appropriate setting for toolkits and how toolkits function in +detail. Finally, I discuss the conditions under which toolkits are likely to be +of most value. + +!_ Benefits from Toolkits + +Toolkits for user innovation and design are integrated sets of product-design, +prototyping, and design-testing tools intended for use by end users. The goal +of a toolkit is to enable non-specialist users to design high-quality, +producible custom products that exactly meet their needs. Toolkits often +contain "user-friendly" features that guide users as they work. They are +specific to a type of product or service and a specific production system. For +example, a toolkit provided to customers interested in designing their own, +custom digital semiconductor chips is tailored precisely for that purpose--- it +cannot be used to design other types of products. Users apply a toolkit in +conjunction with their rich understanding of their own needs to create a +preliminary design, simulate or prototype it, evaluate its functioning in their +own use environment, and then iteratively improve it until they are satisfied. +={ Toolkits : + manufacturers and +58 | user-friendly tools for ; + Information asymmetries +10 +} + +A variety of manufacturers have found it profitable to shift the tasks of +custom product design to their customers along with appropriate toolkits for +innovation. Results to date in the custom semiconductor field show development +time cut by 2/3 or more for products of equivalent complexity and development +costs cut significantly as well via the use of toolkits. In 2000, more than $15 +billion worth of custom integrated circuits were sold that had been designed +with the aid of toolkits---often by circuit users---and produced in the +"silicon foundries" of custom semiconductor manufacturers such as LSI (Thomke +and von Hippel 2002). International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), a global +supplier of specialty flavors to the food industry, has built a toolkit that +enables its customers to modify flavors for themselves, which IFF then +manufactures. In the materials field, GE provides customers with Web-based +tools for designing better plastic products. In software, a number of consumer +product companies provide toolkits that allow people to add custom-designed +modules to their standard products. For example, Westwood Studios provides its +customers with toolkits that enable them to design important elements of their +own video games (Jeppesen 2005). +={ Jeppesen, L. ; + Thomke, S. ; + von Hippel, E. +9 ; + Toolkits : + GE and | International Flavors and Fragrances and +} + +The primary function of toolkits for user design is to co-locate +product-development and service-development tasks with the sticky information +needed to execute them. Need-intensive tasks involved in developing a +particular type of product or service are assigned to users, along with the +tools needed to carry those tasks out. At the same time, solution-intensive +tasks are assigned to manufacturers. +={ Toolkits : + users and +55 | sticky information and +8 ; + Sticky information : + toolkits and +8 +} + +As was discussed in chapter 5, problem solving in general, and product and +service development in particular, is carried out via repeated cycles of +learning by trial and error. When each cycle of a trial-and-error process +requires access to sticky information located at more than one site, colocation +of problem-solving activity with sticky information is achieved by repeatedly +shifting problem solving to the relevant sticky information sites as product +development proceeds. +={ Trial-and-error problem solving ; + Toolkits : + trial-and-error learning in +} + +For example, suppose that need information is sticky at the site of the +potential product user and that solution information is sticky at the site of +the manufacturer. A user may initiate a development project by drawing on local +user-need information to specify a desired new product or service (figure +11.1). This information is likely to be sticky at least in part. Therefore, the +user, even when exerting best efforts, will supply only partial and partially +correct need and use-context information to the manufacturer. The manufacturer +then applies its solution information to the partially accurate user +information and creates a prototype that it thinks is responsive to the need +and sends it to the user for testing. If the prototype is not satisfactory (and +it often is not), the product is returned to the manufacturer for refinement. +Typically, as empirical studies show (Tyre and von Hippel 1997; Kristensen +1992), sites of sticky need and / or solution information are repeatedly +revisited as problem solvers strive to reach a satisfactory product design +(figure 11.2). +={ Kristensen, P. ; + Tyre, M. +} + +%% Figure 11.1 +% Toolkits 149 +% Manufacturer +% activity +% User +% activity +% User iterates until satisfied. +% User draws on local need +% information to specify +% desired product or service. +% User draws on local need and +% context of use information to +% evaluate prototype. +% User changes specifications as +% needed. +% Manufacturer draws on +% local capability information +% to develop prototype +% responsive to specifications. +% Manufacturer iterates until +% user is satisfied. +% User-manufacturer +% boundary +% Figure 11.1 +% A pattern of problem solving often encountered in product and service development. + + +{di_evh_f11-1.png}image + +Figure 11.1 + +%% Figure 11.2 +% 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 +% 7 +% 0 +% 22 +% 7 +% 15 +% 30 +% Number of shifts +% Percent +% of +% sample +% Figure 11.2 +% Shifts in the location of problem solving from user site to lab observed during process +% machine debugging. Source: Tyre and von Hippel 1993, figure 2. + +{di_evh_f11-2.png}image + +Figure 11.2 + +Explicit management of user-manufacturer iterations has been built into a +number of modern product-development processes. In the rapid application +development method (Martin 1991), manufacturers learn to respond to initial +user need inputs by quickly developing a partial prototype of a planned product +containing the features likely to be most important to users. They deliver this +to users, who apply it in their own setting to clarify their needs. Users then +relay requests for changes or new features to the product developers, and this +process is repeated until an acceptable fit between need and solution is found. +Such iteration has been found to "better satisfy true user requirements and +produce information and functionality that is more complete, more accurate, and +more meaningful" (Connell and Shafer 1989). +={ Connell, J. ; + Martin, J. ; + Shafer, L. +} + +Even with careful management, however, iterative shifts in problem solving +between users and manufacturer-based developers involve significant +coordination costs. For example, a manufacturer's development team may be +assigned to other tasks while it waits for user feedback, and so will not be +immediately able to resume work on a project when needed feedback is received. +It would be much better still to eliminate the need for cross-boundary +iteration between user and manufacturer sites during product development, and +this is what toolkits for user design are intended to do. The basic idea behind +toolkits for user design is, as was mentioned earlier, to partition an overall +product-development task into subproblems, each drawing on only one locus of +sticky information. Then, each task is assigned to the party already having the +sticky information needed to solve it. In this approach, both the user and the +manufacturer still engage in iterative, trial-and-error problem solving to +solve the problems assigned to them. But this iteration is internal to each +party---no costly and time-consuming cross-boundary iteration between user and +manufacturer is required (von Hippel 1998, 2001; Thomke and von Hippel 2002; +von Hippel and Katz 2002). +={ Katz, R. ; + Thomke, S. ; + Task partitioning +10 +} + +To appreciate the major advantage in problem-solving speed and efficiency that +concentrating problem solving within a single locus can create, consider a +familiar example: the contrast between conducting financial strategy +development with and without "user-operated" financial spreadsheet software: + +_* Before the development of easy-to-use financial spreadsheet programs such as +Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel, a firm's chief financial officer might have +carried out a financial strategy development exercise as follows. First, the +CFO would have asked an assistant to develop an analysis incorporating a list +of assumptions. A few hours or days might elapse before the result was +delivered. Then the CFO would use her rich understanding of the firm and its +goals to study the analysis. She would typically almost immediately spot some +implications of the patterns developed, and would then ask for additional +analyses to explore these implications. The assistant would take the new +instructions and go back to work while the CFO switched to another task. When +the assistant returned, the cycle would repeat until a satisfactory outcome was +found. +={ Microsoft } + +_* After the development of financial spreadsheet programs, a CFO might begin +an analysis by asking an assistant to load up a spreadsheet with corporate +data. The CFO would then "play with" the data, trying out various ideas and +possibilities and "what if" scenarios. The cycle time between trials would be +reduced from days or hours to minutes. The CFO's full, rich information would +be applied immediately to the effects of each trial. Unexpected +patterns---suggestive to the CFO but often meaningless to a less knowledgeable +assistant---would be immediately identified and explored further. + +It is generally acknowledged that spreadsheet software that enables expert +users to "do it themselves" has led to better outcomes that are achieved faster +(Levy 1984; Schrage 2000). The advantages are similar in the case of product +and service development. Learning by doing via trial and error still occurs, of +course, but the cycle time is much faster because the complete cycle of +need-related learning is carried out at a single (user) site earlier in the +development process. +={ Levy, S. ; + Schrage, M. ; + Trial-and-error problem solving +15 +} + +!_ Repartitioning of Development Tasks +={ Toolkits : + task partitioning +5 +} + +To create the setting for a toolkit, one must partition the tasks of product +development to concentrate need-related information in some and +solution-related information in others. This can involve fundamental changes to +the underlying architecture of a product or service. As illustration, I first +discuss the repartioning of the tasks involved in custom semiconductor chip +development. Then, I show how the same principles can be applied in the less +technical context of custom food design. + +Traditionally, fully customized integrated circuits were developed in an +iterative process like that illustrated in figure 11.1. The process began with +a user specifying the functions that the custom chip was to perform to a +manufacturer of integrated circuits. The chip would then be designed by +manufacturer employees, and an (expensive) prototype would be produced and sent +to the user. Testing by the user would typically reveal faults in the chip +and/or in the initial specification, responsive changes would be made, a new +prototype would be built. This cycle would continue until the user was +satisfied. In this traditional manufacturer-centered development process, +manufacturers' development engineers typically incorporated need-related +information into the design of both the fundamental elements of a circuit--- +such as transistors, and the electrical "wiring" that interconnected those +elements into a functioning circuit. + +The brilliant insight that allowed custom design of integrated circuits to be +partitioned into solution-related and need-related subtasks was made by Mead +and Conway (1980). They determined that the design of a digital chip's +fundamental elements, such as its transistors, could be made standard for all +circuits. This subtask required rich access to the manufacturer's sticky +solution information regarding how semiconductors are fabricated, but did not +require detailed information on users' specific needs. It could therefore be +assigned to manufacturer-based chip-design and chip-fabrication engineers. It +was also observed that the subtask of interconnecting standard circuit elements +into a functioning integrated circuit required only sticky, need-related +information about a chip's function---for example, whether it was to function +as a microprocessor for a calculator or as a voice chip for a robotic dog. This +subtask was therefore assigned to users along with a toolkit that enabled them +to do it properly. In sum, this new type of chip, called a gate array, had a +novel architecture created specifically to separate the problem-solving tasks +requiring access to a manufacturer's sticky solution information from those +requiring access to users' sticky need information. +={ Conway, C. ; + Mead, L. ; + Toolkits : + characteristics of +} + +The same basic principle can be illustrated in a less technical context: food +design. In this field, manufacturer-based designers have traditionally +undertaken the entire job of developing a novel food, and so they have freely +blended need-specific design into any or all of the recipe-design elements +wherever convenient. For example, manufacturer-based developers might find it +convenient to create a novel cake by both designing a novel flavor and texture +for the cake body, and designing a complementary novel flavor and texture into +the frosting. However, it is possible to repartition these same tasks so that +only a few draw on need-related information, and these can then be more easily +transferred to users. + +The architecture of the pizza pie illustrates how this can be done. Many +aspects of the design of a pizza, such as the dough and the sauce, have been +made standard. User choice has been restricted to a single task: the design of +toppings. In other words, all need-related information that is unique to a +particular user has been linked to the toppings-design task only. Transfer of +this single design task to users can still potentially offer creative +individuals a very large design space to play in (although pizza shops +typically restrict it sharply). Any edible ingredient one can think of, from +eye of newt to edible flowers, is a potential topping component. But the fact +that need-related information has been concentrated within only a single +product-design task makes it much easier to transfer design freedom to the +user. + +!_ The Functionality of Toolkits +={ Toolkits : + characteristics of +2 +} + +If a manufacturer outsources need-intensive design tasks to users, it must also +make sure that users have the information they need to carry out those tasks +effectively. This can be done via a toolkit for user innovation. Toolkits are +not new as a general concept---every manufacturer equips its own engineers with +a set of tools suitable for developing the type of products or services it +wishes to produce. Toolkits for users also are not new---many users have +personal collections of tools that they have assembled to help them create new +items or modify standard ones. For example, some users have woodworking tools +ranging from saws to glue which can be used to create or modify furniture---in +very novel or very standard ways. Others may have a kit of software tools +needed to create or modify software. What is new, however, is integrated +toolkits enabling users to create /{and}/ test designs for custom products or +services that can then be produced "as is" by manufacturers. + +Present practice dictates that a high-quality toolkit for user innovation will +have five important attributes. (1) It will enable users to carry out complete +cycles of trial-and-error learning. (2) It will offer users a solution space +that encompasses the designs they want to create. (3) It will be user friendly +in the sense of being operable with little specialized training. (4) It will +contain libraries of commonly used modules that users can incorporate into +custom designs. (5) It will ensure that custom products and services designed +by users will be producible on a manufacturer's' production equipment without +modification by the manufacturer. + +!_ Learning through Trial and Error +={ Toolkits : + trial-and-error learning in +5 +} + + +It is crucial that user toolkits for innovation enable users to go through +complete trial-and-error cycles as they create their designs. Recall that +trial-and-error problem solving is essential to product development. For +example, suppose that a user is designing a new custom telephone answering +system for her firm, using a software-based computer-telephony integration +(CTI) design toolkit provided by a vendor. Suppose also that the user decides +to include a new rule to "route all calls of X nature to Joe" in her design. A +properly designed toolkit would allow her to temporarily place the new rule +into the telephone system software, so that she could actually try it out (via +a real test or a simulation) and see what happened. She might discover that the +solution worked perfectly. Or she might find that the new rule caused some +unexpected form of trouble---for example, Joe might be flooded with too many +calls---in which case it would be "back to the drawing board" for another +design and another trial. + +In the same way, toolkits for innovation in the semiconductor design field +allow users to design a circuit that they think will meet their needs and then +test the design by "running" it in the form of a computer simulation. This +quickly reveals errors that the user can then quickly and cheaply fix using +toolkit-supplied diagnostic and design tools. For example, a user might +discover by testing a simulated circuit design that a switch needed to adjust +the circuit had been forgotten and make that discovery simply by trying to make +a needed adjustment. The user could then quickly and cheaply design in the +needed switch without major cost or delay. + +One can appreciate the importance of giving the user the capability for +trial-and-error learning by doing in a toolkit by thinking about the +consequences of not having it. When users are not supplied with toolkits that +enable them to draw on their local, sticky information and engage in +trial-and-error learning, they must actually order a product and have it built +to learn about design errors---typically a very costly and unsatisfactory way +to proceed. For example, automobile manufacturers allow customers to select a +range of options for their cars, but they do not offer the customer a way to +learn during the design process and before buying. The cost to the customer is +unexpected learning that comes too late: "That wide-tire option did look great +in the picture. But now that the car has been delivered, I discover that I +don't like the effect on handling. Worse, I find that my car is too wide to fit +into my garage!" + +Similar disasters are often encountered by purchasers of custom computers. Many +custom computer manufacturers offer a website that allows users to "design your +own computer online." However, these websites do not allow users to engage in +trial-and-error design. Instead, they simply allow users to select computer +components such as processor chips and disk drives from lists of available +options. Once these selections have been made, the design transaction is +complete and the computer is built and shipped. The user has no way to test the +functional effects of these choices before purchase and first field +use---followed by celebration or regret. + +In contrast, a sophisticated toolkit for user innovation would allow the user +to conduct trial-and-error tests to evaluate the effects of initial choices +made and to improve on them. For example, a computer design site could add this +capability by enabling users to actually test and evaluate the hardware +configuration they specify on their own programs and computing tasks before +buying. To do this, the site might, for example, provide access to a remote +computer able to simulate the operation of the computer that the user has +specified, and provide performance diagnostics and related choices in terms +meaningful to the user (e.g., "If you add option x at cost y, the time it takes +to complete your task will decrease by z seconds"). The user could then modify +or confirm initial design choices according to trade-off preferences only he or +she knows. + +!_ Appropriate Solution Spaces +={ Toolkits : + solution spaces and +3 +} + +Economical production of custom products and services is achievable only when a +custom design falls within the pre-existing capability and degrees of freedom +built into a particular manufacturer's production system. My colleagues and I +call this the /{solution space}/ offered by that system. A solution space may +vary from very large to small, and if the output of a toolkit is tied to a +particular production system, then the design freedom that a toolkit can offer +a user will be accordingly large or small. For example, the solution space +offered by the production process of a manufacturer of custom integrated +circuits offers a huge solution space to users---it will produce any +combination of logic elements interconnected in any way that a user-designer +might desire, with the result that the user can invent anything from a novel +type of computer processor to a novel silicon organism within that space. +However, note that the semiconductor production process also has stringent +limits. It will only implement product designs expressed in terms of +semiconductor logic---it will not implement designs for bicycles or houses. +Also, even within the arena of semiconductors, it will only be able to produce +semiconductors that fit within a certain range with respect to size and other +properties. Another example of a production system offering a very large +solution space to designers---and, potentially to user-designers via +toolkits---is the automated machining center. Such a device can basically +fashion any shape out of any machinable material that can be created by any +combination of basic machining operations such as drilling and milling. As a +consequence, toolkits for innovation intended to create designs that can be +produced by automated machining centers can offer users access to that very +large solution space. + +Large solution spaces can typically be made available to user-designers when +production systems and associated toolkits allow users to manipulate and +combine relatively basic and general-purpose building blocks and operations, as +in the examples above. In contrast, small solution spaces typically result when +users are only allowed to combine a relatively few pre-designed options. Thus, +users who want to design their own custom automobiles are restricted to a +relatively small solution space: they can only make choices from lists of +options regarding such things as engines, transmissions, and paint colors. +Similarly, purchasers of eyeglasses are restricted to combining "any frame from +this list" of pre-designed frames, with "any lens type from that list" of +pre-designed options. + +The reason producers of custom products or services enforce constraints on the +solution space that user-designers may use is that custom products can be +produced at reasonable prices only when custom user designs can be implemented +by simply making low-cost adjustments to the production process. This condition +is met within the solution space on offer. However, responding to requests that +fall outside that space will require small or large additional investments by +the manufacturer. For example, a producer of integrated circuits may have to +invest many millions of dollars and rework an entire production process in +order to respond to a customer's request for a larger chip that falls outside +the solution space associated with its present production equipment. + +!_ User-Friendly Tools +={ Toolkits : + user-friendly tools for +6 +} + +User toolkits for innovation are most effective and successful when they are +made "user friendly" by enabling users to use the skills they already have and +to work in their own customary and well-practiced design language. This means +that users don't have to learn the---typically different---design skills and +language customarily used by manufacturer-based designers, and so they will +require much less training to use the toolkit effectively. + +For example, in the case of custom integrated circuit design, the users of +toolkits are typically electrical engineers who are designing electronic +systems that will incorporate custom semiconductor chips. The digital design +language normally used by electrical engineers is Boolean algebra. Therefore, +user-friendly toolkits for custom semiconductor design are provided that allow +toolkit users to design in this language. That is, users can create a design, +test how it works, and make improvements using only their own, customary design +language. At the conclusion of the design process, the toolkit then translates +the user's logical design into the design inputs required by the semiconductor +manufacturer's production system. + +A design toolkit based on a language and skills and tools familiar to the user +is only possible to the extent that the user /{has}/ familiarity with some +appropriate and reasonably complete language and set of skills and tools. +Interestingly, this is the case more frequently than one might initially +suppose, at least in terms of the /{function}/ that a user wants a product or +service to perform---because functionality is the face that the product or a +service presents to the user. (Indeed, an expert user of a product or service +may be much more familiar with that functional face than manufacturer-based +experts.) Thus, the user of a custom semiconductor is the expert in what he or +she wants that custom chip to /{do}/, and is skilled at making complex +tradeoffs among familiar functional elements to achieve a desired end: "If I +increase chip clock speed, I can reduce the size of my cache memory and. . . ." + +As a less technical example, consider the matter of designing a custom +hairstyle. There is certainly a great deal of information known to hairstylists +that even an expert user may not know, such as how to achieve a certain look by +means of layer cutting, or how to achieve a certain streaked color pattern by +selectively dying some strands of hair. However, an expert user is often very +well practiced at the skill of examining the shape of his or her face and +hairstyle as reflected in a mirror, and visualizing specific improvements that +might be desirable in matters such as curls, shape, or color. In addition, the +user will be very familiar with the nature and functioning of everyday tools +used to shape hair, such as scissors and combs. + +A user-friendly toolkit for hairstyling innovation can be built upon these +familiar skills and tools. For example, a user can be invited to sit in front +of a computer monitor, and study an image of her face and hairstyle as captured +by a video camera. Then, she can select from a palette of colors and color +patterns offered on the screen, can superimpose the effect on her existing +hairstyle, can examine it, and can repeatedly modify it in a process of +trial-and-error learning. Similarly, the user can select and manipulate images +of familiar tools, such as combs and scissors, to alter the image of the length +and shape of her own hairstyle as projected on the computer screen, can study +and further modify the result achieved, and so forth. Note that the user's new +design can be as radically new as is desired, because the toolkit gives the +user access to the most basic hairstyling variables and tools such as hair +color and scissors. When the user is satisfied, the completed design can be +translated into technical hairstyling instructions in the language of a +hairstyling specialist---the intended production system in this instance. + +In general, steady improvements in computer hardware and software are enabling +toolkit designers to provide information to users in increasingly friendly +ways. In earlier days, information was often provided to users in the form of +specification sheets or books. The user was then required to know when a +particular bit of information was relevant to a development project, find the +book, and look it up. Today, a large range of potentially needed information +can be embedded in a computerized toolkit, which is programmed to offer the +user items of information only if and as a development being worked on makes +them relevant. + +!_ Module Libraries +={ Toolkits : + module libraries for +1 +} + +Custom designs seldom are novel in all their parts. Therefore, a library of +standard modules will be a valuable part of a toolkit for user innovation. +Provision of such standard modules enables users to focus their creative work +on those aspects of their product or service designs that cannot be implemented +via pre-designed options. For example, architects will find it very useful to +have access to a library of standard components, such as a range of standard +structural support columns with pre-analyzed structural characteristics, that +they can incorporate into their novel building designs. Similarly, users who +want to design custom hairstyles will often find it helpful to begin by +selecting a hairstyle from a toolkit library. The goal is to select a style +that has some elements of the desired look. Users can then proceed to develop +their own desired style by adding to and subtracting from that starting point. + +!_ Translating Users' Designs for Production + +The "language" of a toolkit for user innovation must be convertible without +error into the language of the intended production system at the conclusion of +the user's design work. If it is not, the entire purpose of the toolkit will be +lost---because a manufacturer receiving a user design will essentially have to +do the design work over again. Error-free translation need not emerge as a +major problem---for example, it was never a major problem during the +development of toolkits for integrated circuit design, because both chip +designers and chip producers already used a language based on digital logic. In +contrast, in some fields, translating from the design language preferred by +users to the language required by intended production systems can be /{the}/ +central problem in toolkit design. As an illustration, consider a recent +toolkit test project managed by Ernie Gum, the Director of Food Product +Development for the USA FoodServices Division of Nestlé. +={ Gum, E. +5 ; + Toolkits : + Nestlé and +5 +} + +One major business of Nestlé FoodServices is producing custom food products, +such as custom Mexican sauces, for major restaurant chains. Custom foods of +this type have traditionally been developed by or modified by the chains' +executive chefs, using what are in effect design and production toolkits taught +by culinary schools: recipe development procedures based on food ingredients +available to individuals and restaurants, and processed with restaurant-style +equipment. After using their traditional toolkits to develop or modify a recipe +for a new menu item, executive chefs call in Nestlé Foodservices or another +custom food producer and ask that firm to manufacture the product they have +designed---and this is where the language translation problem rears its head. + +There is no error-free way to translate a recipe expressed in the language of a +traditional restaurant-style culinary toolkit into the language required by a +food-manufacturing facility. Food factories must use ingredients that can be +obtained in quantity at consistent quality. These are not the same as, and may +not taste quite the same as, the ingredients used by the executive chef during +recipe development. Also, food factories use volume production equipment, such +as huge-steam-heated retorts. Such equipment is very different from +restaurant-style stoves and pots and pans, and it often cannot reproduce the +cooking conditions created by the executive chef on a stove-top---for example, +very rapid heating. Therefore, food-production factories cannot simply produce +a recipe developed by or modified by an executive chef "as is" under factory +conditions---it will not taste the same. + +As a consequence, even though an executive chef creates a prototype product +using a traditional chef's toolkit, food manufacturers find most of that +information---the information about ingredients and processing +conditions---useless because it cannot be straightforwardly translated into +factory-relevant terms. The only information that can be salvaged is the +information about taste and texture contained in the prototype. And so, +production chefs carefully examine and taste the customer's custom food +prototype, then try to make something that tastes the same using factory +ingredients and methods. But an executive chef's taste buds are not necessarily +the same as production chef taste buds, and so the initial factory +version---and the second and the third---is typically not what the customer +wants. So the producer must create variation after variation until the customer +is finally satisfied. + +To solve the translation problem, Gum created a novel toolkit of pre-processed +food ingredients to be used by executive chefs during food development. Each +ingredient in the toolkit was the Nestlé factory version of an ingredient +traditionally used by chefs during recipe development: That is, it was an +ingredient commercially available to Nestlé that had been processed as an +independent ingredient on Nestlé factory equipment. Thus, a toolkit designed +for developing Mexican sauces would contain a chili puree ingredient processed +on industrial equipment identical to that used to produce food in +commercial-size lots. (Each ingredient in such a toolkit also contains traces +of materials that will interact during production---for example, traces of +tomato are included in the chili puree---so that the taste effects of such +interactions will also be apparent to toolkit users.) + +Chefs interested in using the Nestlé toolkit to prototype a novel Mexican sauce +would receive a set of 20--30 ingredients, each in a separate plastic pouch. +They would also be given instructions for the proper use of these ingredients. +Toolkit users would then find that each component differs slightly from the +fresh components he or she is used to. But such differences are discovered +immediately through direct experience. The chef can then adjust ingredients and +proportions to move to the desired final taste and texture that is desired. +When a recipe based on toolkit components is finished, it can be immediately +and precisely reproduced by Nestlé factories--- because now the executive chef +is using the same language as the factory. In the Nestlé case, field testing by +Food Product Development Department researchers showed that adding the +error-free translation feature to toolkit-based design by users reduced the +time of custom food development from 26 weeks to 3 weeks by eliminating +repeated redesign and refinement interactions between Nestlé and purchasers of +its custom food products. + +!_ Discussion + +A toolkit's success in the market is significantly correlated with that +toolkit's quality and with industry conditions. Thus, Prügl and Franke (2005) +studied the success of 100 toolkits offered in a single industry: computer +gaming. They found that success, evaluated by independent experts, was +significantly correlated with the quality of execution of the attributes of +toolkits that have been discussed in this chapter. That is, success was found +to be significantly affected by the quality of trial-and-error learning enabled +by a toolkit, by the quality of fit of the solution space offered to users' +design problems, by the user friendliness of the tools provided, and by the +quality of module libraries offered with the toolkit. Schreier and Franke +(2004) also obtained information on the importance of toolkit quality in a +study of the value that users placed on consumer products (scarves, T shirts, +cell phone covers) customized with a simple, manufacturer-supplied toolkit. +They found user willingness to pay for custom designs, as measured by Vickrey +auctions, was significantly negatively affected by the difficulty of creating +custom designs with a toolkit. In contrast, willingness to pay was +significantly positively affected by enjoyment experienced in using a toolkit. +={ Franke, N. ; + Prügl, R. ; + Schreier, M. ; + Trial-and-error problem solving ; + Custom products : + heterogeneity of user needs and +3 ; + User need +3 +} + +With respect to industry and market conditions, the toolkit-for-user innovation +approach to product design is likely to be most appealing to toolkit suppliers +when the heterogeneous needs of /{many}/ users can be addressed by a standard +solution approach encoded in a toolkit. This is because it can be costly to +encode all the solution and production information relevant to users' design +decisions. For example, a toolkit for custom semiconductor design must contain +information about the semi-conductor production process needed to ensure that +product designs created by users are in fact producible. Encoding such +information is a one-time cost, so it makes the best economic sense for +solution approaches that many will want to use. + +Toolkits for user innovation are not an appropriate solution for all product +needs, even when heterogeneous needs can be addressed by a common solution +approach. Specifically, toolkits will not be the preferred approach when the +product being designed requires the highest achievable performance. Toolkits +incorporate automated design rules that cannot, at least at present, translate +designs into products or software as skillfully as a human designer can. For +example, a design for a gate array generated with a toolkit will typically take +up more physical space on a silicon chip than would a fully custom-developed +design of similar complexity. Even when toolkits are on offer, therefore, +manufacturers may continue to design certain products (those with difficult +technical demands) while customers take over the design of others (those +involving complex or rapidly evolving user needs). + +Toolkits can be designed to offer a range of capabilities to users. At the high +end, with toolkits such as those used to design custom integrated circuits, +users can truly innovate, creating anything implementable in digital +electronics, from a dishwasher controller to a novel supercomputer or form of +artificial life. At the low end, the product configurators commonly offered by +manufacturers of mass-customized products enable, for example, a watch +purchaser to create a custom watch by selecting from lists of pre-designed +faces, hands, cases, and straps. (Mass-customized production systems can +manufacture a range of product variations in single-unit quantities at near +mass-production costs (Pine 1993). In the United States, production systems +used by these manufacturers are generally based on computerized production +equipment.) +={ Pine, J. } + +The design freedom provided by toolkits for user innovation may not be of +interest to all or even to most users in a market characterized by +heterogeneous needs. A user must have a great enough need for something +different to offset the costs of putting a toolkit to use for that approach to +be of interest. Toolkits may therefore be offered only to a subset of users. In +the case of software, toolkits may be provided to all users along with a +standard, default version of the product or service, because the cost of +delivering the extra software is essentially zero. In such a case, the +toolkit's capability will simply lie unused in the background unless and until +a user has sufficient incentive to evoke and employ it. +={ Lead users : + toolkits and +3 ; + Toolkits : + lead users and +3 +} + +Provision of toolkits to customers can be a complement to lead user +idea-generation methods for manufacturers. Some users choosing to employ a +toolkit to design a product precisely right for their own needs will be lead +users, whose present strong need foreshadows a general need in the market. +Manufacturers can find it valuable to identify and acquire the generally useful +improvements made by lead users of toolkits, and then supply these to the +general market. For this reason, manufacturers may find it valuable implement +toolkits for innovation even if the portion of the target market that can +directly use them is relatively small. + +Toolkits can affect existing business models in a field in ways that may or may +not be to manufacturers' competitive advantage in the longer run. For example, +consider that many manufacturers of products and services profit from both +their design capabilities and their production capabilities. A switch to +user-based customization via toolkits can affect their ability to do this over +the long term. Thus, a manufacturer that is early in introducing a toolkit +approach to custom product or service design may initially gain an advantage by +tying that toolkit to its particular production facility. However, when +toolkits are made available to customer designers, this tie often weakens over +time. Customers and independent tool developers can eventually learn to design +toolkits applicable to the processes of several manufacturers. Indeed, this is +precisely what has happened in the custom integrated circuit industry. The +toolkits revealed to users by the initial innovator, LSI, and later by rival +producers were producer-specific. Over time, however, Cadance and other +specialist toolkit supply firms emerged and developed toolkits that could be +used to make designs producible by a number of vendors. The end result is that +manufacturers that previously benefited from selling their product-design +skills and their production skills can be eventually forced by the shifting of +design tasks to customers via toolkits to a position of benefiting from their +production skills only. + +Manufacturers that think long-term disadvantages may accrue from a switch to +toolkits for user innovation and design will not necessarily have the luxury of +declining to introduce toolkits. If any manufacturer introduces a high-quality +toolkit into a field favoring its use, customers will tend to migrate to it, +forcing competitors to follow. Therefore, a firm's only real choice in a field +where conditions are favorable to the introduction of toolkits may be whether +to lead or to follow. + +1~ 12 Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields + +This final chapter is devoted to describing links between user-centered +innovation and other phenomena and literatures. Of course, innovation writ +large is related to anything and everything, so the phenomena and the +literatures I will discuss here are only those hanging closest on the +intellectual tree. My goal is to enable interested readers to migrate to +further branches as they wish, assisted by the provision of a few important +references. With respect to phenomena, I will first point out the relationship +of user innovation to /{information}/ communities---of which user innovation +communities are a subset. With respect to related fields, I begin by linking +user-centric innovation phenomena explored in this book to the literature on +the economics of knowledge, and to the competitive advantage of nations. Next I +link it to research on the sociology of technology. Finally, I point out how +findings regarding user innovation could---but do not yet---link to and +complement the way that product development is taught to managers. +={ Information commons ; + Information communities ; + Product development ; + Technical communities +} + +!_ Information Communities +={ Information commons +8 ; + Information communities +8 +} + +Many of the considerations I have discussed with respect to user innovation +communities apply to /{information}/ communities as well---a much more general +category of which user innovation communities are a subset. I define +information communities as communities or networks of individuals and/or +organizations that rendezvous around an information commons, a collection of +information that is open to all on equal terms. +={ Technical communities +1 } + +In close analogy to our discussions of innovation communities, I propose that +commons-based information communities or networks will form when the following +conditions hold: (1) Some have information that is not generally known. (2) +Some are willing to freely reveal what they know. (3) Some beyond the +information source have uses for what is revealed. On an intuitive basis, one +can immediately see that these conditions are often met. Of course, people and +firms know different things. Of course there are many things that one would not +be averse to freely revealing; and of course others would often be interested +in what is freely revealed. After all, as individuals we all regularly freely +reveal information not generally known to people who ask, and presumably these +people value at least some of the information we provide. +={ Free revealing of innovation information : + in information communities +3 +} + +The economics of information communities can be much simpler than that of the +user innovation communities discussed earlier, because valuable proprietary +information is often not at center stage. When the service provided by +information communities is to offer non-proprietary "content" in a more +convenient and accessible form, one need consider only the costs and benefits +associated with information diffusion. One need not also consider potential +losses associated with the free revealing of proprietary innovation-related +information. + +It is likely that information communities are getting steadily more pervasive +for the same reasons that user innovation communities are: the costs of +diffusing information are getting steadily lower as computing and communication +technologies improve. As a result, information communities may have a rapidly +increasing impact on the economy and on the landscape of industry. They are and +will be especially empowering to fragmented groups, whose members may for the +first time gain low-cost access to a great deal of rich and fresh information +of mutual interest. As is the case for user innovation networks, information +networks can actually store content that participants freely reveal and make it +available for free downloading. (Wikipedia is an example of this.) And/or, +information networks can function to link information seekers and information +holders rather than actually storing information. In the latter case, +participants post to the network, hoping that someone with the requested +information will spot their request and provide an answer (Lakhani and von +Hippel 2003). Prominent examples can be found in the medical field in the form +of specialized websites where patients with relatively rare conditions can for +the first time find each other and also find specialists in those conditions. +Patients and specialists who participate in these groups can both provide and +get access to information that previously was scattered and for most practical +purposes inaccessible. +={ Lakhani, K ; + Wikipedia ; + von Hippel, E. +} + +Just as is the case in user innovation groups, open information communities are +developing rapidly, and the behaviors and infrastructure needed for success are +being increasingly learned and codified. These communities are by no means +restricted to user-participants. Thus, both patients and doctors frequently +participate in medical information communities. Also, information communities +can be run by profit-making firms and/or on a non-profit basis for and by +information providers and users themselves--- just as we earlier saw was the +case with innovation communities. Firms and users are developing many versions +of open information communities and testing them in the market. As an example +of a commercially supported information commons, consider e-Bay, where +information is freely revealed by many under a structure provided by a +commercial firm. The commercial firm then extracts a profit from commissions on +transactions consummated between information providers and information seekers. +As an example of an information community supported by users themselves, again +consider Internet sites specializing in specific diseases---for example, +childrenfacingillness.com. +={ Marketing research +1 } + +Information communities can have major effects on established ways of doing +business. For example, markets become more efficient as the information +provided to transaction participants improves. Thus, product and service +manufacturers benefit from good information on the perceptions and preferences +of potential buyers. Similarly, product and service purchasers benefit from +good information on the characteristics of the various offerings in the market. +Traditionally, firms have collected information on users' needs and on +products' characteristics by means of face-to-face interviewing and (in the +case of mass markets) questionnaires. Similar information of high quality now +can be collected nearly without cost and can be posted on special Internet +sites by users themselves and/or by for-profit enterprises. Dellarocas, Awad, +and Zhang (2004) show that volunteered online movie reviews provide information +that is just as accurate as that collected by surveys of representative samples +of respondents. This emerging new approach to data aggregation will clearly +affect the established business models of firms specializing in information +collection, with websites like www.ciao.co.uk illustrating new possibilities. +If the quality of information available to transaction participants goes up and +the information price is low, transaction quality should go up. With the aid of +online product-evaluation sites, it is likely that consumers will be able to +apply much better information even to small buying decisions, such as the +choice of a restaurant for tonight's dinner. +={ Awad, N. ; + Dellarocas C. ; + Zhang, X. +} + +What Paul David and colleagues call "open science" is a type of information +community that is closely related to the innovation communities discussed +earlier (David 1992; Dasgupta and David 1994; David 1998). Free revealing of +findings is, of course, a characteristic of modern science. Academic scientists +publish regularly and so freely reveal information that may have high +proprietary value. This raises the same question explored in the case of +innovation communities: Why, in view of the potential of free ridership, do +scientists freely reveal the information they have developed at private cost? +The answer overlaps with but also differs from the answers provided in the case +of free revealing of proprietary innovations by innovation users. With respect +to similarities, sociologists of science have found that reputation among peers +is important to scientists, and that priority in the discovery of new knowledge +is a major component of reputation. Because of the importance of priority, +scientists generally rush their research projects to completion and then rush +to freely reveal their new findings. This dynamic creates a great advantage +from the point of view of social welfare (Merton 1973). +={ Dasgupta, P. ; + David, P. ; + Merton, Robert ; + Free revealing of innovation information : + in information communities +1 ; + Intellectual property rights : + information communities and ; + Users : + free revealing by +1 | information communities and +1 +} + +With respect to major differences, it is public policy in many countries to +subsidize research with public funds. These policies are based on the +assumption that only inadequate amounts of scientific research can be drawn +forth by reputational inducements alone. Recall that, in contrast, innovations +developed and freely revealed by innovation users are not subsidized from any +source. Users, unlike "scientists," by definition have a personal or corporate +use for the innovation-related knowledge they generate. This additional source +of private reward may explain why user innovation communities can flourish +without subsidy. +={ Knowledge, production and distribution of } + +!_ The Economics of Knowledge +={ Knowledge, production and distribution of +7 ; + Users : + knowledge and +7 +} + +In this field, Foray (2004) provides a rich road map regarding the economics of +knowledge and the central role played by users. Foray argues that the radical +changes in information and communication technologies (ICT) are creating major +changes in the economics of knowledge production and distribution. Economists +have traditionally reduced knowledge production to the function of research and +development, defined as the activity specifically devoted to invention and +innovation. Starting with Machlup (1962), economists also have identified the +knowledge-based economy as consisting of specialized sectors focused on +activities related to communication, education, the media, and computing and +information-related services. Foray argues that these simplifications, although +providing a rationale for a way to measure knowledge-generation activities, +were never appropriate and now are totally misleading. +={ Machlup, F. ; + Foray, D. +2 +} + +Knowledge generation, Foray says, is now a major activity across all industrial +sectors and is by no means restricted to R&D laboratories: we are in the age of +the knowledge economy. He makes a central distinction between R&D that is +conducted in laboratories remote from doing, and learning by doing at the site +of production. He argues that both are important, and have complementary +advantages and drawbacks. Laboratory research can ignore some of the +complexities involved in production in search of basic understanding. Learning +by doing has the contrasting advantage of being in the full fidelity of the +real production process. The drawback to learning by doing, however, is that +one is attempting to do two things at once---producing and learning---and this +can force compromises onto both. + +Foray positions users at the heart of knowledge production. He says that one +major challenge for management is to capture the knowledge being generated by +users "on line" during the process of doing and producing, and to integrate it +with knowledge created "off line" in laboratories. He discusses implications of +the distributed nature of knowledge production among users and others, and +notes that the increased capabilities of information and communication +technologies tend to reduce innovators' ability to control the knowledge they +create. He proposes that the most effective knowledge-management policies and +practices will be biased toward knowledge sharing. + +Weber (2004, pp. 72--73) explores similar ideas in the specific context of open +source software. "The conventional language of industrial-era economics," he +notes, "identifies producers and consumers, supply and demand. The open source +process scrambles these categories. Open source software users are not +consumers in the conventional sense. . . . Users integrate into the production +process itself in a profound way." Weber's central thesis is that the open +source process is a new way of organizing production: +={ Weber, S. ; + Open source software : + knowledge and +} + +_1 One solution is the familiar economy that depends upon a blend of exclusive +property rights, divisions of labor, reduction of transaction costs, and the +management of principal-agent problems. The success of open source demonstrates +the importance of a fundamentally different solution, built on top of an +unconventional understanding of property rights configured around distribution. +. . . And it relies on a set of organizational structures to coordinate +behavior around the problem of managing distributed innovation, which is +different from the division of labor. (ibid., p. 224) + +Weber details the property-rights regime used by open source projects, and also +the nature of open source innovation communities and incentives acting on +participants. He then argues that this new mode of production can extend beyond +the development of open source software, to an extent and a degree that are not +yet understood: +={ Weber, S. ; + Open source software : + knowledge and +} + +One important direction in which the open source experiment points is toward +moving beyond the discussion of transaction as a key determinant of +institutional design. . . . The elegant analytics of transaction cost economics +do very interesting work in explaining how divisions of labor evolve through +outsourcing of particular functions (the decision to buy rather than make +something). But the open source process adds another element. The notion of +open-sourcing as a strategic organizational decision can be seen as an +efficiency choice around distributed innovation, just as outsourcing was an +efficiency choice around transactions costs. . . . As information about what +users want and need to do becomes more fine-grained, more individually +differentiated, and harder to communicate, the incentives grow to shift the +locus of innovation closer to them by empowering them with freely modifiable +tools. (ibid., pp. 265--267) + +!_ National Competitive Advantage +={ Government policy : + and national competitive advantage +6 ; + Manufacturers : + and national competitive advantage +6 ; + National competitive advantage +6 : + See also Government policy ; + Users : + national competitive advantage and +6 +} + +Understanding national innovation systems and the competitive advantage of a +nation's firms is an important matter for national policy makers (Nelson 1993). +Can what we have learned in this book shed any light on their concerns? Porter +(1991), assessing national competitive advantage through the intellectual lens +of competitive strategy, concludes that one of four major factors determining +the competitive advantage of nations is demand conditions. "A nation's firms," +he argues, "gain competitive advantage if domestic buyers are, or are among, +the world's most sophisticated and demanding buyers for the product or service. +Such buyers provide a window into the most advanced buyer needs. . . . Buyers +are demanding where home product needs are especially stringent or challenging +because of local circumstances." For example: "The continental United States +has been intensely drilled, and wells are being drilled in increasingly +difficult and marginal fields. The pressure has been unusually great for +American oil field equipment suppliers to perfect techniques that minimize the +cost of difficult drilling and ensure full recovery from each field. This has +pushed them to advance the state of the art and sustain strong international +positions." (ibid., pp. 89--90) +={ Nelson, R. ; + Porter, M. +5 +} + +Porter also argues that /{early}/ domestic demand is also important: "Provided +it anticipates buyer needs in other nations, early local demand for a product +or service in a nation helps local firms to move sooner than foreign rivals to +become established in an industry. They get the jump in building large-scale +facilities and accumulating experience. . . . Only if home demand is +anticipatory of international need will home demand contribute to advantage." +(ibid., p. 95) + +From my perspective, Porter is making the case for the value of a nation's +domestic lead users to national competitive advantage. However, he is also +assuming that it is /{manufacturers}/ that innovate in response to advanced or +stringent user demand. On the basis of the findings reported on in this book, I +would modify this assumption by noting that, often, domestic manufacturers' +links to /{innovating lead users}/ have the impacts on national competitive +advantage that he describes---but that the lead users' input to favored +domestic firms would include innovations as well as needs. + +Domestic lead users make a difference to national competitive advantage, Porter +argues, because "local firms often enjoy some natural advantages in serving +their home market compared to foreign firms, a result of proximity as well as +language, regulation, and cultural affinities (even, frequently, if foreign +firms are staffed with local nationals)." Porter continues: "Preferred access +to a large domestic customer base can be a spur to investment by local firms. +Home demand may be perceived as more certain and easier to forecast, while +foreign demand is seen as uncertain even if firms think they have the ability +to fill it." (ibid., p. 93) + +What new insights and research questions can the work of this book contribute +to this analysis of national competitive advantage? On the one hand, I +certainly see the pattern Porter describes in some studies of lead user +innovation. For example, early in the history of the US semiconductor industry, +AT&T, the inventor of the transistor and an early innovator, developed a number +of novel types of production equipment as a user organization. AT&T engineers +went to local machine shops to have these machines produced in volume to meet +AT&T's in-house production needs. A side effect of this procurement strategy +was to put many of these previously undistinguished firms into the business of +producing advanced semi-conductor equipment to the world (von Hippel 1977, +1988). +={ von Hippel, E. } + +On the other hand, the findings of this book suggest that the "natural +advantages" Porter proposes that domestic manufacturers will have with respect +to filling the needs of local lead users may be eroding in the Internet age. As +has been seen in the case of open source software, and by extension in the +cases of other information-based products, users are capable of developing +complex products in a coordinated way without geographic proximity. +Participants in a particular open source project, for example, may come from a +number of countries and may never meet face to face. In the case of physical +products, the emergence of a pattern of user-based design followed by +"foundry-style" production may also reduce the importance of propinquity +between innovating lead users and manufacturers. As in the cases of integrated +circuits and kitesurfing discussed earlier in this book, users can transmit CAD +product-design information files from anywhere to any suitably equipped +manufacturer for production. Probably only in the case of physical products +where the interaction between product and production methods are not clear will +geography continue to matter deeply in the age of the Internet. Nations may be +able to create comparative advantages for domestic manufacturers with respect +to profiting from innovation by lead users; however, they cannot assume that +such advantages will continue to exist simply because of propinquity. +={ Custom products : + product platforms and | users and ; + Innovation communities : + open source software and ; + Kitesurfing ; + Open source software ; + Printed circuit CAD software ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and ; + Toolkits : + platform products and ; + Users : + custom products and +} + +!_ The Sociology of Technical Communities +={ Information commons +8 ; + Innovation communities : + sociology of +8 ; + Technical communities +8 +} + +Relevant elements of this field include studies in the sociology of technology +in general and studies of the sociology of open source software communities in +particular. Historical accounts of the evolution of a technology have often +taken a linear view of their subject. In the linear view, a technology such as +aerodynamics and related technological artifacts such as the airplane start at +point A and then naturally evolve to end point B. In other words, it is +implicitly assumed that the airplane will evolve from the artifact of wood and +fabric and wire developed by the Wright brothers to the characteristics we +associate with aircraft today. Nothing much to explain about that. +={ Open source software ; + Open source software : + innovation communities and +} + +In the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) model of technological +evolution (Pinch and Bijker 1987), the direction in which an artifact (a +product, for example) evolves depends very much on the meanings that different +"groups with a problem" construct for it. These meanings, in turn, affect which +of the many possible variations of a product are developed, how they evolve, +and whether and how they eventually die. Groups that construct the meanings of +a product centrally include, but are not restricted to, product users. For +example, in the case of the bicycle, some relevant groups were users of various +types---people who wanted to travel from place to place via bicycle, people who +wanted to race bicycles, etc. Relevant non-user groups included "anticyclists," +who had a negative view of the bicycle in its early days and wanted it to fail +(Bijker 1995). +={ Bijker, W. ; + Pinch, T. +4 ; + Custom products : + users and +} + +When one takes the views of all relevant groups into account, one gets a much +richer view of the "socially constructed" evolution of a technology. As a +relatively recent example, consider the supersonic transport plane (SST) +planned in the United States during the 1970s. Airlines, and potential +passengers were "groups with a problem" who presumably wanted the technology +for different reasons. Other relevant groups with a problem included people who +expected to be negatively affected by the sonic boom the SST would cause, +people who were concerned about the pollution its engines would cause in the +stratosphere, and people who had other reasons for opposing or supporting the +SST. Proposed designs evolved in an attempt to satisfy the various contending +interest groups. Eventually it became clear that the SST designers could not +arrive at a generally acceptable compromise solution and so the project failed +(Horwich 1982). +={ Horwich, M. } + +Pinch and Kline (1996, pp. 774--775) elaborated on the original SCOT model by +pointing out that the way a product is interpreted is not restricted to the +design stage of a technology, but also can continue during the product's use. +They illustrated with the case of the automobile: . . . +={ Kline, R. +2 } + +_1 although [automobile] manufacturers may have ascribed a particular meaning +to the artifact they were not able to control how that artifact was used once +it got into the hands of the users. Users precisely as users can embed new +meanings into the technology. This happened with the adaptation of the car into +rural life. As early as 1903, farm families started to define the car as more +than a transportation device. In particular, they saw it as a general source of +power. George Schmidt, a Kansas farmer, advised readers of the /{Rural New +Yorker}/ in 1903 to "block up the hind axle and run a belt over the one wheel +of the automobile and around the wheel on a [corn] sheller, grinder, saw, pump, +or any other machine that the engine is capable of running, and see how the +farmer can save money and be in style with any city man." T. A. Pottinger, an +Illinois farm man, wrote in /{Wallace's Farmer}/ in 1909 that "the ideal farm +car should have a detachable backseat, which could turn the vehicle into a +small truck." Other Phenomena and Fields 173 +={ Pottinger, T. ; + Schmidt, G. +} + +Of course, user innovations and modifications are involved in these cases along +with users' reinterpretation of product uses. Kline and Pinch report that +manufacturers adopted some of the rural users' innovations, generally after a +lag. For example, a car that could also serve as a small truck was eventually +offered as a commercial product. +={ Users : + innovation and +13 ; + Manufacturers : + innovation and +} + +Research on communities of practice offers another link between studies of user +innovation and sociology (Brown and Duguid 1991; Wenger 1998). The focus of +this research is on the functioning of specialist communities. Researchers find +that experts in a field spontaneously form interest groups that communicate to +exchange their views and learnings on how to carry out and improve the +practices of their profession. Members of communities of practice exchange help +in informal ways that seem similar to the practices described above as +characteristic of open source software projects and communities of sports +innovators. +={ Brown, J. ; + Duguid, P. ; + Wenger, E. ; + Open source software +} + +Research on brand communities is still another related research thread (Muniz +and O'Guinn 2001). Brand communities form around commercial brands and products +(e.g., Lego construction toys) and even around products discontinued by their +manufacturers e.g., Apple's Newton personal digital assistant). Brand +communities can be intensely meaningful to participants and can involve user +innovation. In Newton groups, for example, users develop new applications and +exchange information about how to repair aging equipment (Muniz and Schau +2004). In Lego communities, lead users develop new products, new building +techniques, and new offline and online multiplayer building projects that later +prove to be of interest to the manufacturer (Antorini 2005). +={ Antorini, Y. ; + Brand communities ; + Muniz, A. ; + O'Guinn, T. ; + Schau, H. ; + Innovation communities : + brand and +} + +!_ The Management of Product Development +={ Product development +10 } + +Finally, I turn to links between user-centered innovation and teaching on the +management of product development. Information on lead users as a source of new +product ideas now appears in most marketing textbooks. There also should be a +link to other elements of user-centered innovation processes in the literature +on product-development management---but there really isn't much of one yet. +Although much of the research on user innovation cited in this book is going on +in schools of management and business economics, little of this information has +moved into teaching related to the product-development process as of yet. + +Clearly, it would be useful to provide managers of both user firms and +manufacturing firms with a better understanding of the management of +user-centered innovation. It is a curious fact that even managers of firms that +have built major product lines upon user-developed innovations may hold the +manufacturer-centric view that "we developed that." For example, an early study +of innovation in scientific instruments documented that nearly 80 percent of +the major improvements commercialized by instrument manufacturers had been +developed by users (von Hippel 1976). When I later discussed this finding with +managers in instrument firms, most of them were astonished. They insisted that +all the innovations in the study sample had been developed within manufacturing +firms. They could be convinced otherwise only when supplied with actual +publications by user-scientists describing user-built prototypes of those +instrument improvements---prototypes developed from 5 to 7 years before any +instrument firm had sold a functionally equivalent commercial product. +={ von Hippel, E. } + +My inquiries into why managers in this field and others held---and largely +still hold---such contrary-to-fact beliefs identified several contributing +factors. First, manufacturers seldom track where the major new products and +product improvements they sell actually came from. Managers see no need to set +up a tracking system, because the conventional wisdom is clear: "Everyone knows +new products are developed by manufacturers such as ourselves based on user +needs identified by market research." Further, the manufacturing firms have +market-research and product-development departments in place, and innovations +are somehow being produced. Thus, it is easy to conclude that the +manufacturers' innovation processes must be working as expected. + +In fact, however, important, functionally novel innovations are often brought +into manufacturers by informal channels. Product-development engineers may +attend conferences and learn about important user innovations, salesmen and +technical service personnel discover user-modified equipment on field visits, +and so on. Once the basic innovation-related information is in house, the +operating principles of a user's prototype will often be adopted, but the +detailed design of the device will be changed and improved for production. +After a while, the user's prototype, if remembered at all, will begin to look +quite primitive to the firm's engineers relative to the much better product +they have designed. Finally, when sales begin, the firm's advertising will urge +customers to buy "/{our}/ wonderful new product." Other Phenomena and Fields +175 + +The net result is understandable: the user roots of many new commercial +products, never widely known in manufacturing firms, are forgotten. And when it +is time to develop the next innovation, management again turns to the +conventional methods that "worked so well for us last time." Eventually, +information about new user innovations will again arrive by pathways unnoticed +and unmanaged---and with an unnecessary lag. + +To improve matters, managers must learn when it is appropriate to follow +user-centered and manufacturer-centered innovation process paradigms and how +user-centered innovation can best be managed when it is the method of choice. +Managers in user firms and in manufacturing firms need tools with which to +understand the innovate-or-buy decisions they face---to understand which +product needs or which service needs users (rather than manufacturers) should +invest in developing. Managers in user firms also need to learn how their firms +can best carry out development work in their low-cost innovation niches: how +they can best deploy their information-related advantages of being actual users +and residing in the context of use to cheaply learn by doing. Managers in +manufacturing firms will want to learn how they can best play a profitable role +in user-centered innovation patterns when these play a role in the markets they +serve. +={ Sticky information : + toolkits and +1 ; + Users : + innovate-or-buy decisions by | low-cost innovation niches of +} + +Innovating users may also want to learn whether and how to diffuse their +innovations by becoming manufacturers. This may be a fairly common practice in +some fields. Shah (2000) found that users of sports equipment sometimes became +manufacturers by a very natural process. The users would demonstrate the +performance and value of their innovations as they used them in public sporting +events. Some of the participants in the meets would then ask "Can you make one +of those for me too?" Informal hobby-level production would then sometimes +become the basis of a major company. Lettl, Herstatt, and Gemünden (2004) +report on case histories in which user-innovators became heavily involved in +promoting the commercialization of important innovations in surgical equipment. +These innovations tended to be developed by surgeons, who then often made major +efforts to induce manufacturers to commercialize them. Hienerth (2004) +documents how user-innovators in "rodeo kayaking" build their own boats, +discover that kayak manufacturers (even those established by a previous +generation of user-innovators) are unwilling to manufacture what they want, and +so are driven to become manufacturers themselves. +={ Gemünden, H. ; + Lettl, C. ; + Herstatt, C. ; + Hienerth, C. ; + Shah, S. ; + Sporting equipment : + lead users and ; + Windsurfing ; + Surgical equipment +} + +Managers must learn that no single locus of innovation is the "right" one for +either user firms or manufacturer firms. The locus of innovation varies between +user firms and manufacturing firms according to market-related and +information-related conditions. These conditions may well vary predictably over +product life cycles. Utterback and Abernathy (1975) proposed that innovation by +users is likely to be more important in the early stages of such cycles. Early +in the life of a new product, there is a "fluid" stage in which the nature and +the use of a product are unclear. Here, Utterback and Abernathy say, users play +a big part in sorting the matter out, in part through innovation. Later, a +dominant product design will emerge---a shared sense of exactly what a +particular product is, what features and components it should include, and how +it should function. (We all know, for example, that a car has four wheels and +moves along the ground in directions determined by a steering wheel.) After +that time, if the market for the product grows, innovation will shift from +product to process as firms shift from the problem of what to produce to the +problem of how to produce a well-understood product in ever greater volumes. +From a lead user innovation perspective, of course, both functionally novel +products and functionally novel processes are likely to be developed by +users---in the first case users of the product, and in the second by +manufacturing firms that use the process. +={ Albernathy, W. ; + Utterback, J. +} + +!_ In Conclusion + +In this book I have explored how and why users, individually and in firms and +in communities, develop and freely reveal innovations. I have also argued that +there is a general trend toward a open and distributed innovation process +driven by steadily better and cheaper computing and communications. The net +result is an ongoing shift toward the democratization of innovation. This +welfare-enhancing shift is forcing major changes in user and manufacturer +innovation practices, and is creating the need for change in government +policies. It also, as I noted at the start of the book, presents major new +opportunities for us all. Other Phenomena and Fields 177 + +1~ Notes + +!_ Chapter 2 + +1. LES contains four types of measures. Three ("benefits recognized early," +"high benefits expected," and "direct elicitation of the construct") contain +the core components of the lead user construct. The fourth ("applications +generation") is a measure of a number of innovation-related activities in which +users might engage: they "suggest new applications," they "pioneer those +applications," and (because they have needs or problems earlier than their +peers) they may be "used as a test site" (Morrison, Midgely, and Roberts 2004). + +!_ Chapter 3 + +1. Cluster analysis does not specify the "right" number of clusters---it simply +segments a sample into smaller and smaller clusters until the analyst calls a +halt. Determining an appropriate number of clusters within a sample can be done +in different ways. Of course, it always possible to say that "I only want to +deal with three market segments, so I will stop my analysis when my sample has +been segmented into three clusters." More commonly, analysts will examine the +increase of squared error sums of each step, and generally will view the +optimal number of clusters as having been reached when the plot shows a sudden +"elbow" (Myers 1996). Since this technique does not incorporate information on +remaining within-cluster heterogeneity, it can lead to solutions with a large +amount of within-cluster variance. The "cubic clustering criterion" (CCC) +partially addresses this concern by measuring the within-cluster homogeneity +relative to the between-cluster heterogeneity. It suggests choosing the number +of clusters where this value peaks (Milligan and Cooper 1985). However, this +method appears to be rarely used: Ketchen and Shook (1996) found it used in +only 5 of 45 segmentation studies they examined. + +2. http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix + +3. http://modules.apache.org/ + +4. To measure heterogeneity, Franke and I analyzed the extent to which j +standards, varying from [1; i], meet the needs of the i individuals in our +sample. Conceptually, we first locate a product in multi-dimensional need space +(dimensions = 45 in the case of our present study) that minimizes the distances +to each individual's needs. (This step is analogous to the Ward's method in +cluster analysis that also minimizes within cluster variation; see Punj and +Stewart 1983.) The "error" is then measured as the sum of squared Euclidean +distances. We then repeated these steps to determine the error for two +optimally positioned products, three products, and so on up to a number +equaling I -- 1. The sum of squared errors for all cases is then a simple +coefficient that measures how much the needs of i individuals can be satisfied +with j standard products. The "coefficient of heterogeneity" just specified is +sensitive both to the (average) distance between the needs and for the +configuration of the needs: when the needs tend to form clusters the +heterogeneity coefficient is lower than if they are evenly spread. To make the +coefficient comparable across different populations, we calibrate it using a +bootstrapping technique (Efron 1979) involving dividing the coefficient by the +expected value (this value is generated by averaging the heterogeneity of many +random distributions of heterogeneity of the same kind). The average random +heterogeneity coefficient is then an appropriate value for calibration +purposes: it assumes that there is no systematic relationship between the needs +of the individuals or between the need dimensions. + +5. Conceptually, it can be possible to generate "one perfect product" for +everyone--- in which case heterogeneity of demand is zero---by simply creating +all the features wanted by anyone (45 + 92 features in the case of this study), +and incorporating them in the "one perfect product." Users could then select +the features they want from a menu contained in the one perfect product to +tailor it to their own tastes. Doing this is at least conceptually possible in +the case of software, but less so in the case of a physical product for two +reasons: (1) delivering all possible physical options to everyone who buys the +product would be expensive for physical goods (while costing nothing extra in +the case of information products); (2) some options are mutually exclusive (an +automobile cannot be both red and green at the same time). + +6. The difference between actual willingness to pay and expressed willingness +to pay is much lower for private goods (our case) than for public goods. In the +case of private goods, Loomis et al. (1996) found the expressed willingness to +pay for art prints to be twice the actual WTP. Willis and Powe (1998) found +that among visitors to a castle the expressed WTP was 60 percent lower than the +actual WTP. In the case of public goods, Brown et al. (1996), in a study of +willingness to pay for removal of a road from a wilderness area, found the +expressed WTP to be 4--6 times the actual WTP. Lindsey and Knaap (1999), in a +study of WTP for a public urban greenway, found the expressed WTP to be 2-10 +times the actual WPT. Neil et al. (1994) found the expressed WTP for conserving +an original painting in the desert to be 9 times the actual WTP. Seip and +Strand (1992) found that less than 10 percent of those who expressed interest +in paying to join an environmental organization actually joined. + +!_ Chapter 6 + +1. As a specific example of a project with an emergent goal, consider the +beginnings of the Linux open source software project. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, +a student in Finland, wanted a Unix operating system that could be run on his +PC, which was equipped with a 386 processor. Minix was the only software +available at that time but it was commercial, closed source, and it traded at +US$150. Torvalds found this too expensive, and started development of a +Posix-compatible operating system, later known as Linux. Torvalds did not +immediately publicize a very broad and ambitious goal, nor did he attempt to +recruit contributors. He simply expressed his private motivation in a message +he posted on July 3, 1991, to the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix (Wayner 2000): +Hello netlanders, Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in +the posix standard definition. [Posix is a standard for UNIX designers. A +software using POSIX is compatible with other UNIX-based software.] Could +somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the +latest posix-rules? Ftp-sites would be nice. In response, Torvalds got several +return messages with Posix rules and people expressing a general interest in +the project. By the early 1992, several skilled programmers contributed to +Linux and the number of users increased by the day. Today, Linux is the largest +open source development project extant in terms of number of developers. +={ Linux } + +!_ Chapter 7 + +1. When they do not incorporate these qualities, they would be more properly +referred to as networks---but communities is the term commonly used, and I +follow that practice here. + +2. hacker n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person +who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch +their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the +minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or +who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A +person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at +programming quickly. . . . 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to +discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence password hacker, network +hacker. The correct term for this sense is cracker (Raymond 1996). + +3. Source code is a sequence of instructions to be executed by a computer to +accomplish a program's purpose. Programmers write computer software in the form +of source code, and also document that source code with brief written +explanations of the purpose and design of each section of their program. To +convert a program into a form that can actually operate a computer, source code +is translated into machine code using a software tool called a compiler. The +compiling process removes program documentation and creates a binary version of +the program---a sequence of computer instructions consisting only of strings of +ones and zeros. Binary code is very difficult for programmers to read and +interpret. Therefore, programmers or firms that wish to prevent others from +understanding and modifying their code will release only binary versions of the +software. In contrast, programmers or firms that wish to enable others to +understand and update and modify their software will provide them with its +source code. (Moerke 2000, Simon 1996). + +4. See www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL + +5. http://www.sourceforge.net + +6. "The owner(s) [or `maintainers'] of an open source software project are +those who have the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to +redistribute modified versions. . . . According to standard open source +licenses, all parties are equal in the evolutionary game. But in practice there +is a very well-recognized distinction between `official' patches [changes to +the software], approved and integrated into the evolving software by the +publicly recognized maintainers, and `rogue' patches by third parties. Rogue +patches are unusual and generally not trusted." (Raymond 1999, p. 89) + +!_ Chapter 8 + +1. See also Bresnahan and Greenstein 1996b; Bresnahan and Saloner 1997; Saloner and Steinmueller 1996. + +!_ Chapter 10 + +1. ABS braking is intended to keep a vehicle's wheels turning during braking. +ABS works by automatically and rapidly "pumping" the brakes. The result is that +the wheels continue to revolve rather than "locking up," and the operator +continues to have control over steering. + +2. In the general literature, Armstrong's (2001) review on forecast bias for +new product introduction indicates that sales forecasts are generally +optimistic, but that that upward bias decreases as the magnitude of the sales +forecast increases. Coller and Yohn (1998) review the literature on bias in +accuracy of management earnings forecasts and find that little systematic bias +occurs. Tull's (1967) model calculates $15 million in revenue as a level above +which forecasts actually become pessimistic on average. 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"Austrian and Industrial +Organization Perspectives on Firm Level Competitive Activity and Performance." +/{Organization Science}/ 7, no. 3: 243--254. + +%% index di.eric_von_hippel_index.txt democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel_index.txt diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ae7c215 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst @@ -0,0 +1,6036 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom + +@creator: + :author: Doctorow, Cory + +@date: + :published: 2003-01-09 + :modified: 2010-09-16 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright © 2003 Cory Doctorow + :license: Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0. That means, you are free: \\ to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work; \\ to Remix - to adapt the work; \\ Under the following conditions: \\ Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work); \\ Noncommercial - You may not use this work for commercial purposes; \\ Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. \\ For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. \\ The best way to do this is with a link http://craphound.com/down \\ Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my permission. More info here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/ See the end of this document for the complete legalese. \\ RELICENSED from Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/ + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:counterculture|young adult|science fiction + :subject: novel + +@identifier: + :oclc: 50645482 + :isbn: 0765304368 + +@notes: + :description: Realizing his boyhood dream of moving to the twentieth-century artistic creation of Disney World, Jules becomes incensed by a new group that would change the Hall of Presidents by replacing the audioanimatronics with brain interfaces. + +@links: + { Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom home }http://craphound.com/down + { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom + { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Down-Magic-Kingdom-Cory-Doctorow/dp/076530953X + { @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Down-and-Out-in-the-Magic-Kingdom/Cory-Doctorow/e/9780765309532 + +@make: +% :headings: none; none; none; CHAPTER; + :breaks: new=:C; break=1 + :home_button_text: {Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}http://craphound.com/down; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com + :footer: {Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}http://craphound.com/down; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com + +:A~ @title @author + +--~# + +1~blurbs Blurbs: + +He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Science +fiction needs Cory Doctorow! + +Bruce Sterling + +Author, /{The Hacker Crackdown}/ and /{Distraction}/ + +In the true spirit of Walt Disney, Doctorow has ripped a part of our common +culture, mixed it with a brilliant story, and burned into our culture a new set +of memes that will be with us for a generation at least. + +Lawrence Lessig + +Author, /{The Future of Ideas}/ + +Cory Doctorow doesn't just write about the future – I think he lives +there. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom isn't just a really good read, it's +also, like the best kind of fiction, a kind of guide book. See the Tomorrowland +of Tomorrow today, and while you're there, why not drop by Frontierland, and +the Haunted Mansion as well? (It's the Mansion that's the haunted heart of this +book.) Cory makes me feel nostalgic for the future – a dizzying, yet +rather pleasant sensation, as if I'm spiraling down the tracks of Space +Mountain over and over again. Visit the Magic Kingdom and live forever! + +Kelly Link + +Author, /{Stranger Things Happen}/ + +Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the most entertaining and exciting science +fiction story I've read in the last few years. I love page-turners, especially +when they are as unusual as this novel. I predict big things for Down and +Out—it could easily become a breakout genre-buster. + +Mark Frauenfelder + +Contributing Editor, /{Wired Magazine}/ + +Imagine you woke up one day and Walt Disney had taken over the world. Not only +that, but money's been abolished and somebody's developed the Cure for Death. +Welcome to the Bitchun Society—and make sure you're strapped in tight, because +it's going to be a wild ride. In a world where everyone's wishes can come true, +one man returns to the original, crumbling city of dreams—Disney World. Here in +the spiritual center of the Bitchun Society he struggles to find and preserve +the original, human face of the Magic Kingdom against the young, post-human and +increasingly alien inheritors of the Earth. Now that any experience can be +simulated, human relationships become ever more fragile; and to Julius, the +corny, mechanical ghosts of the Haunted Mansion have come to seem like a +precious link to a past when we could tell the real from the simulated, the +true from the false. + +Cory Doctorow—cultural critic, Disneyphile, and ultimate Early Adopter—uses +language with the reckless confidence of the Beat poets. Yet behind the +dazzling prose and vibrant characters lie ideas we should all pay heed to. The +future rushes on like a plummeting roller coaster, and it's hard to see where +we're going. But at least with this book Doctorow has given us a map of the +park. + +Karl Schroeder + +Author, /{Permanence}/ + +Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I've come across in years. +He starts out at the point where older SF writers' speculations end. It's a +distinct pleasure to give him some Whuffie. + +Rudy Rucker + +Author, /{Spaceland}/ + +Cory Doctorow rocks! I check his blog about ten times a day, because he's +always one of the first to notice a major incursion from the +social-technological-pop-cultural future, and his voice is a compelling vehicle +for news from the future. Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom is about a world +that is visible in its outlines today, if you know where to look, from +reputation systems to peer-to-peer adhocracies. Doctorow knows where to look, +and how to word-paint the rest of us into the picture. + +Howard Rheingold + +Author, /{Smart Mobs}/ + +Doctorow is more than just a sick mind looking to twist the perceptions of +those whose realities remain uncorrupted - though that should be enough +recommendation to read his work. /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/ is black +comedic, sci-fi prophecy on the dangers of surrendering our consensual +hallucination to the regime. Fun to read, but difficult to sleep afterwards. + +Douglas Rushkoff + +Author of /{Cyberia}/ and /{Media Virus!}/ + +“Wow! Disney imagineering meets nanotechnology, the reputation economy, and Ray +Kurzweil's transhuman future. As much fun as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and +as packed with mind bending ideas about social changes cascading from the +frontiers of science.” + +Tim O'Reilly + +Publisher and Founder, O'Reilly and Associates + +Doctorow has created a rich and exciting vision of the future, and then wrote a +page-turner of a story in it. I couldn't put the book down. + +Bruce Schneier + +Author, /{Secrets and Lies}/ + +Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy, +entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired world of +the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you're going to find. + +Gardner Dozois + +Editor, /{Asimov's SF}/ + +Cory Doctorow's “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” tells a gripping, +fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation from today's +technical realities. This is the sort of book that captures and defines the +spirit of a turning point in human history when our tools remake ourselves and +our world. + +Mitch Kapor + +Founder, Lotus, Inc., co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation + +--+# + +1~prologue PROLOGUE + +I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun +Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my +boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the +workplace and of work. + +I never thought I'd live to see the day when Keep A-Movin' Dan would decide to +deadhead until the heat death of the Universe. + +Dan was in his second or third blush of youth when I first met him, sometime +late-XXI. He was a rangy cowpoke, apparent 25 or so, all rawhide squint-lines +and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and infinitely comfortable. I was in the +middle of my Chem thesis, my fourth Doctorate, and he was taking a break from +Saving the World, chilling on campus in Toronto and core-dumping for some poor +Anthro major. We hooked up at the Grad Students' Union—the GSU, or Gazoo for +those who knew—on a busy Friday night, summer-ish. I was fighting a coral-slow +battle for a stool at the scratched bar, inching my way closer every time the +press of bodies shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surrounded by a +litter of cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped. + +Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised a sun-bleached +eyebrow. “You get any closer, son, and we're going to have to get a pre-nup.” + +I was apparent forty or so, and I thought about bridling at being called son, +but I looked into his eyes and decided that he had enough realtime that he +could call me son anytime he wanted. I backed off a little and apologized. + +He struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the bartender's head. +“Don't worry about it. I'm probably a little over accustomed to personal +space.” + +I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard anyone on-world talk about personal +space. With the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate at non-zero, the +world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people, even with the +migratory and deadhead drains on the population. “You've been jaunting?” I +asked—his eyes were too sharp for him to have missed an instant's experience to +deadheading. + +He chuckled. “No sir, not me. I'm into the kind of macho shitheadery that you +only come across on-world. Jaunting's for play; I need work.” The bar-glass +tinkled a counterpoint. + +I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I had to resize +the window—he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display. I tried to act +cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyes and then their involuntary +widening. He tried a little aw-shucksery, gave it up and let a prideful grin +show. + +“I try not to pay it much mind. Some people, they get overly grateful.” He +must've seen my eyes flick up again, to pull his Whuffie history. “Wait, don't +go doing that—I'll tell you about it, you really got to know. + +“Damn, you know, it's so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks. You'd +think you'd really miss 'em, but you don't.” + +And it clicked for me. He was a missionary—one of those fringe-dwellers who act +as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the benighted corners of the world +where, for whatever reasons, they want to die, starve, and choke on petrochem +waste. It's amazing that these communities survive more than a generation; in +the Bitchun Society proper, we usually outlive our detractors. The missionaries +don't have such a high success rate—you have to be awfully convincing to get +through to a culture that's already successfully resisted nearly a century's +worth of propaganda—but when you convert a whole village, you accrue all the +Whuffie they have to give. More often, missionaries end up getting refreshed +from a backup after they aren't heard from for a decade or so. I'd never met +one in the flesh before. + +“How many successful missions have you had?” I asked. + +“Figured it out, huh? I've just come off my fifth in twenty +years—counterrevolutionaries hidden out in the old Cheyenne Mountain NORAD +site, still there a generation later.” He sandpapered his whiskers with his +fingertips. “Their parents went to ground after their life's savings vanished, +and they had no use for tech any more advanced than a rifle. Plenty of those, +though.” + +He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptance of the +mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it in subtle, +beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to their greenhouses, then a +gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowly inching them +toward the Bitchun Society, until they couldn't remember why they hadn't wanted +to be a part of it from the start. Now they were mostly off-world, exploring +toy frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimited supplies and deadheading +through the dull times en route. + +“I guess it'd be too much of a shock for them to stay on-world. They think of +us as the enemy, you know—they had all kinds of plans drawn up for when we +invaded them and took them away; hollow suicide teeth, booby-traps, +fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors. They just can't get over +hating us, even though we don't even know they exist. Off-world, they can +pretend that they're still living rough and hard.” He rubbed his chin again, +his hard calluses grating over his whiskers. “But for me, the real rough life +is right here, on-world. The little enclaves, each one is like an alternate +history of humanity—what if we'd taken the Free Energy, but not deadheading? +What if we'd taken deadheading, but only for the critically ill, not for people +who didn't want to be bored on long bus-rides? Or no hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, +no Whuffie? Each one is different and wonderful.” + +I have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and I found myself saying, +“Wonderful? Oh sure, nothing finer than, oh, let's see, dying, starving, +freezing, broiling, killing, cruelty and ignorance and pain and misery. I know +I sure miss it.” + +Keep A-Movin' Dan snorted. “You think a junkie misses sobriety?” + +I knocked on the bar. “Hello! There aren't any junkies anymore!” + +He struck another cig. “But you know what a junkie /{is}/, right? Junkies don't +miss sobriety, because they don't remember how sharp everything was, how the +pain made the joy sweeter. We can't remember what it was like to work to earn +our keep; to worry that there might not be /{enough}/, that we might get sick +or get hit by a bus. We don't remember what it was like to take chances, and we +sure as shit don't remember what it felt like to have them pay off.” + +He had a point. Here I was, only in my second or third adulthood, and already +ready to toss it all in and do something, /{anything}/, else. He had a +point—but I wasn't about to admit it. “So you say. I say, I take a chance when +I strike up a conversation in a bar, when I fall in love… and what about the +deadheads? Two people I know, they just went deadhead for ten thousand years! +Tell me that's not taking a chance!” Truth be told, almost everyone I'd known +in my eighty-some years were deadheading or jaunting or just /{gone}/. Lonely +days, then. + +“Brother, that's committing half-assed suicide. The way we're going, they'll be +lucky if someone doesn't just switch 'em off when it comes time to reanimate. +In case you haven't noticed, it's getting a little crowded around here.” + +I made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a bar-napkin—the Gazoo +was beastly hot on summer nights. “Uh-huh, just like the world was getting a +little crowded a hundred years ago, before Free Energy. Like it was getting too +greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or too cold. We fixed it then, we'll fix it +again when the time comes. I'm gonna be here in ten thousand years, you damn +betcha, but I think I'll do it the long way around.” + +He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had been any of the +other grad students, I'd have assumed he was grepping for some bolstering +factoids to support his next sally. But with him, I just knew he was thinking +about it, the old-fashioned way. + +“I think that if I'm still here in ten thousand years, I'm going to be crazy as +hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was +a goat. You really think you're going to be anything recognizably human in a +hundred centuries? Me, I'm not interested in being a post-person. I'm going to +wake up one day, and I'm going to say, ‘Well, I guess I've seen about enough,’ +and that'll be my last day.” + +I had seen where he was going with this, and I had stopped paying attention +while I readied my response. I probably should have paid more attention. “But +why? Why not just deadhead for a few centuries, see if there's anything that +takes your fancy, and if not, back to sleep for a few more? Why do anything so +/{final}/?” + +He embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again, making me feel +like I was just a half-pissed glib poltroon. “I suppose it's because nothing +else is. I've always known that someday, I was going to stop moving, stop +seeking, stop kicking, and have done with it. There'll come a day when I don't +have anything left to do, except stop.” + +On campus, they called him Keep-A-Movin' Dan, because of his cowboy vibe and +because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to take over every conversation I +had for the next six months. I pinged his Whuffie a few times, and noticed that +it was climbing steadily upward as he accumulated more esteem from the people +he met. + +I'd pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie—all the savings from the +symphonies and the first three theses—drinking myself stupid at the Gazoo, +hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until I'd expended all the respect +anyone had ever afforded me. All except Dan, who, for some reason, stood me to +regular beers and meals and movies. + +I got to feeling like I was someone special—not everyone had a chum as exotic +as Keep-A-Movin' Dan, the legendary missionary who visited the only places left +that were closed to the Bitchun Society. I can't say for sure why he hung +around with me. He mentioned once or twice that he'd liked my symphonies, and +he'd read my Ergonomics thesis on applying theme-park crowd-control techniques +in urban settings, and liked what I had to say there. But I think it came down +to us having a good time needling each other. + +I'd talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us, of the +certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, of the +unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He'd tell me that deadheading was a +strong indicator that one's personal reservoir of introspection and creativity +was dry; and that without struggle, there is no real victory. + +This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without resolving. +I'd get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in +the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; +contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and +peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal +capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your +success. + +And then he'd lead me down a subtle, carefully baited trail that led to my +allowing that while, yes, we might someday encounter alien species with wild +and fabulous ways, that right now, there was a slightly depressing homogeneity +to the world. + +On a fine spring day, I defended my thesis to two embodied humans and one prof +whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousness was present via +speakerphone from the computer where it was resting. They all liked it. I +collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for Dan in the sweet, +flower-stinking streets. + +He'd gone. The Anthro major he'd been torturing with his war-stories said that +they'd wrapped up that morning, and he'd headed to the walled city of Tijuana, +to take his shot with the descendants of a platoon of US Marines who'd settled +there and cut themselves off from the Bitchun Society. + +So I went to Disney World. + +In deference to Dan, I took the flight in realtime, in the minuscule cabin +reserved for those of us who stubbornly refused to be frozen and stacked like +cordwood for the two hour flight. I was the only one taking the trip in +realtime, but a flight attendant dutifully served me a urine-sample-sized +orange juice and a rubbery, pungent, cheese omelet. I stared out the windows at +the infinite clouds while the autopilot banked around the turbulence, and +wondered when I'd see Dan next. + +1~ CHAPTER 1 + +My girlfriend was 15 percent of my age, and I was old-fashioned enough that it +bugged me. Her name was Lil, and she was second-generation Disney World, her +parents being among the original ad-hocracy that took over the management of +Liberty Square and Tom Sawyer Island. She was, quite literally, raised in Walt +Disney World and it showed. + +It showed. She was neat and efficient in her every little thing, from her +shining red hair to her careful accounting of each gear and cog in the +animatronics that were in her charge. Her folks were in canopic jars in +Kissimmee, deadheading for a few centuries. + +On a muggy Wednesday, we dangled our feet over the edge of the Liberty Belle's +riverboat pier, watching the listless Confederate flag over Fort Langhorn on +Tom Sawyer Island by moonlight. The Magic Kingdom was all closed up and every +last guest had been chased out the gate underneath the Main Street train +station, and we were able to breathe a heavy sigh of relief, shuck parts of our +costumes, and relax together while the cicadas sang. + +I was more than a century old, but there was still a kind of magic in having my +arm around the warm, fine shoulders of a girl by moonlight, hidden from the +hustle of the cleaning teams by the turnstiles, breathing the warm, moist air. +Lil plumped her head against my shoulder and gave me a butterfly kiss under my +jaw. + +“Her name was McGill,” I sang, gently. + +“But she called herself Lil,” she sang, warm breath on my collarbones. + +“And everyone knew her as Nancy,” I sang. + +I'd been startled to know that she knew the Beatles. They'd been old news in my +youth, after all. But her parents had given her a thorough—if +eclectic—education. + +“Want to do a walk-through?” she asked. It was one of her favorite duties, +exploring every inch of the rides in her care with the lights on, after the +horde of tourists had gone. We both liked to see the underpinnings of the +magic. Maybe that was why I kept picking at the relationship. + +“I'm a little pooped. Let's sit a while longer, if you don't mind.” + +She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Oh, all right. Old man.” She reached up and gently +tweaked my nipple, and I gave a satisfying little jump. I think the age +difference bothered her, too, though she teased me for letting it get to me. + +“I think I'll be able to manage a totter through the Haunted Mansion, if you +just give me a moment to rest my bursitis.” I felt her smile against my shirt. +She loved the Mansion; loved to turn on the ballroom ghosts and dance their +waltz with them on the dusty floor, loved to try and stare down the marble +busts in the library that followed your gaze as you passed. + +I liked it too, but I really liked just sitting there with her, watching the +water and the trees. I was just getting ready to go when I heard a soft +/{ping}/ inside my cochlea. “Damn,” I said. “I've got a call.” + +“Tell them you're busy,” she said. + +“I will,” I said, and answered the call subvocally. “Julius here.” + +“Hi, Julius. It's Dan. You got a minute?” + +I knew a thousand Dans, but I recognized the voice immediately, though it'd +been ten years since we last got drunk at the Gazoo together. I muted the +subvocal and said, “Lil, I've got to take this. Do you mind?” + +“Oh, /{no}/, not at all,” she sarcased at me. She sat up and pulled out her +crack pipe and lit up. + +“Dan,” I subvocalized, “long time no speak.” + +“Yeah, buddy, it sure has been,” he said, and his voice cracked on a sob. + +I turned and gave Lil such a look, she dropped her pipe. “How can I help?” she +said, softly but swiftly. I waved her off and switched the phone to full-vocal +mode. My voice sounded unnaturally loud in the cricket-punctuated calm. + +“Where you at, Dan?” I asked. + +“Down here, in Orlando. I'm stuck out on Pleasure Island.” + +“All right,” I said. “Meet me at, uh, the Adventurer's Club, upstairs on the +couch by the door. I'll be there in—” I shot a look at Lil, who knew the +castmember-only roads better than I. She flashed ten fingers at me. “Ten +minutes.” + +“Okay,” he said. “Sorry.” He had his voice back under control. I switched off. + +“What's up?” Lil asked. + +“I'm not sure. An old friend is in town. He sounds like he's got a problem.” + +Lil pointed a finger at me and made a trigger-squeezing gesture. “There,” she +said. “I've just dumped the best route to Pleasure Island to your public +directory. Keep me in the loop, okay?” + +I set off for the utilidor entrance near the Hall of Presidents and booted down +the stairs to the hum of the underground tunnel-system. I took the slidewalk to +cast parking and zipped my little cart out to Pleasure Island. + +I found Dan sitting on the L-shaped couch underneath rows of faked-up trophy +shots with humorous captions. Downstairs, castmembers were working the +animatronic masks and idols, chattering with the guests. + +Dan was apparent fifty plus, a little paunchy and stubbled. He had raccoon-mask +bags under his eyes and he slumped listlessly. As I approached, I pinged his +Whuffie and was startled to see that it had dropped to nearly zero. + +“Jesus,” I said, as I sat down next to him. “You look like hell, Dan.” + +He nodded. “Appearances can be deceptive,” he said. “But in this case, they're +bang-on.” + +“You want to talk about it?” I asked. + +“Somewhere else, huh? I hear they ring in the New Year every night at midnight; +I think that'd be a little too much for me right now.” + +I led him out to my cart and cruised back to the place I shared with Lil, out +in Kissimmee. He smoked eight cigarettes on the twenty minute ride, hammering +one after another into his mouth, filling my runabout with stinging clouds. I +kept glancing at him in the rear-view. He had his eyes closed, and in repose he +looked dead. I could hardly believe that this was my vibrant action-hero pal of +yore. + +Surreptitiously, I called Lil's phone. “I'm bringing him home,” I subvocalized. +“He's in rough shape. Not sure what it's all about.” + +“I'll make up the couch,” she said. “And get some coffee together. Love you.” + +“Back atcha, kid,” I said. + +As we approached the tacky little swaybacked ranch-house, he opened his eyes. +“You're a pal, Jules.” I waved him off. “No, really. I tried to think of who I +could call, and you were the only one. I've missed you, bud.” + +“Lil said she'd put some coffee on,” I said. “You sound like you need it.” + +Lil was waiting on the sofa, a folded blanket and an extra pillow on the side +table, a pot of coffee and some Disneyland Beijing mugs beside them. She stood +and extended her hand. “I'm Lil,” she said. + +“Dan,” he said. “It's a pleasure.” + +I knew she was pinging his Whuffie and I caught her look of surprised +disapproval. Us oldsters who predate Whuffie know that it's important; but to +the kids, it's the /{world}/. Someone without any is automatically suspect. I +watched her recover quickly, smile, and surreptitiously wipe her hand on her +jeans. “Coffee?” she said. + +“Oh, yeah,” Dan said, and slumped on the sofa. + +She poured him a cup and set it on a coaster on the coffee table. “I'll let you +boys catch up, then,” she said, and started for the bedroom. + +“No,” Dan said. “Wait. If you don't mind. I think it'd help if I could talk to +someone… younger, too.” + +She set her face in the look of chirpy helpfulness that all the second-gen +castmembers have at their instant disposal and settled into an armchair. She +pulled out her pipe and lit a rock. I went through my crack period before she +was born, just after they made it decaf, and I always felt old when I saw her +and her friends light up. Dan surprised me by holding out a hand to her and +taking the pipe. He toked heavily, then passed it back. + +Dan closed his eyes again, then ground his fists into them, sipped his coffee. +It was clear he was trying to figure out where to start. + +“I believed that I was braver than I really am, is what it boils down to,” he +said. + +“Who doesn't?” I said. + +“I really thought I could do it. I knew that someday I'd run out of things to +do, things to see. I knew that I'd finish some day. You remember, we used to +argue about it. I swore I'd be done, and that would be the end of it. And now I +am. There isn't a single place left on-world that isn't part of the Bitchun +Society. There isn't a single thing left that I want any part of.” + +“So deadhead for a few centuries,” I said. “Put the decision off.” + +“No!” he shouted, startling both of us. “I'm /{done}/. It's /{over}/.” + +“So do it,” Lil said. + +“I /{can't}/,” he sobbed, and buried his face in his hands. He cried like a +baby, in great, snoring sobs that shook his whole body. Lil went into the +kitchen and got some tissue, and passed it to me. I sat alongside him and +awkwardly patted his back. + +“Jesus,” he said, into his palms. “Jesus.” + +“Dan?” I said, quietly. + +He sat up and took the tissue, wiped off his face and hands. “Thanks,” he said. +“I've tried to make a go of it, really I have. I've spent the last eight years +in Istanbul, writing papers on my missions, about the communities. I did some +followup studies, interviews. No one was interested. Not even me. I smoked a +lot of hash. It didn't help. So, one morning I woke up and went to the bazaar +and said good bye to the friends I'd made there. Then I went to a pharmacy and +had the man make me up a lethal injection. He wished me good luck and I went +back to my rooms. I sat there with the hypo all afternoon, then I decided to +sleep on it, and I got up the next morning and did it all over again. I looked +inside myself, and I saw that I didn't have the guts. I just didn't have the +guts. I've stared down the barrels of a hundred guns, had a thousand knives +pressed up against my throat, but I didn't have the guts to press that button.” + +“You were too late,” Lil said. + +We both turned to look at her. + +“You were a decade too late. Look at you. You're pathetic. If you killed +yourself right now, you'd just be a washed-up loser who couldn't hack it. If +you'd done it ten years earlier, you would've been going out on top—a champion, +retiring permanently.” She set her mug down with a harder-than-necessary clunk. + +Sometimes, Lil and I are right on the same wavelength. Sometimes, it's like +she's on a different planet. All I could do was sit there, horrified, and she +was happy to discuss the timing of my pal's suicide. + +But she was right. Dan nodded heavily, and I saw that he knew it, too. + +“A day late and a dollar short,” he sighed. + +“Well, don't just sit there,” she said. “You know what you've got to do.” + +“What?” I said, involuntarily irritated by her tone. + +She looked at me like I was being deliberately stupid. “He's got to get back on +top. Cleaned up, dried out, into some productive work. Get that Whuffie up, +too. /{Then}/ he can kill himself with dignity.” + +It was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Dan, though, was cocking an eyebrow +at her and thinking hard. “How old did you say you were?” he asked. + +“Twenty-three,” she said. + +“Wish I'd had your smarts at twenty-three,” he said, and heaved a sigh, +straightening up. “Can I stay here while I get the job done?” + +I looked askance at Lil, who considered for a moment, then nodded. + +“Sure, pal, sure,” I said. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You look beat.” + +“Beat doesn't begin to cover it,” he said. + +“Good night, then,” I said. + +1~ CHAPTER 2 + +Ad-hocracy works well, for the most part. Lil's folks had taken over the +running of Liberty Square with a group of other interested, compatible souls. +They did a fine job, racked up gobs of Whuffie, and anyone who came around and +tried to take it over would be so reviled by the guests they wouldn't find a +pot to piss in. Or they'd have such a wicked, radical approach that they'd +ouster Lil's parents and their pals, and do a better job. + +It can break down, though. There were pretenders to the throne—a group who'd +worked with the original ad-hocracy and then had moved off to other +pursuits—some of them had gone to school, some of them had made movies, written +books, or gone off to Disneyland Beijing to help start things up. A few had +deadheaded for a couple decades. + +They came back to Liberty Square with a message: update the attractions. The +Liberty Square ad-hocs were the staunchest conservatives in the Magic Kingdom, +preserving the wheezing technology in the face of a Park that changed almost +daily. The newcomer/old-timers were on-side with the rest of the Park, had +their support, and looked like they might make a successful go of it. + +So it fell to Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the meager +attractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents, the Liberty Belle +riverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion, arguably the coolest attraction to +come from the fevered minds of the old-time Disney Imagineers. + +I caught her backstage at the Hall of the Presidents, tinkering with Lincoln +II, the backup animatronic. Lil tried to keep two of everything running at +speed, just in case. She could swap out a dead bot for a backup in five minutes +flat, which is all that crowd-control would permit. + +It had been two weeks since Dan's arrival, and though I'd barely seen him in +that time, his presence was vivid in our lives. Our little ranch-house had a +new smell, not unpleasant, of rejuve and hope and loss, something barely +noticeable over the tropical flowers nodding in front of our porch. My phone +rang three or four times a day, Dan checking in from his rounds of the Park, +seeking out some way to accumulate personal capital. His excitement and +dedication to the task were inspiring, pulling me into his +over-the-top-and-damn-the-torpedoes mode of being. + +“You just missed Dan,” she said. She had her head in Lincoln's chest, working +with an autosolder and a magnifier. Bent over, red hair tied back in a neat +bun, sweat sheening her wiry freckled arms, smelling of girl-sweat and machine +lubricant, she made me wish there were a mattress somewhere backstage. I +settled for patting her behind affectionately, and she wriggled appreciatively. +“He's looking better.” + +His rejuve had taken him back to apparent 25, the way I remembered him. He was +rawboned and leathery, but still had the defeated stoop that had startled me +when I saw him at the Adventurer's Club. “What did he want?” + +“He's been hanging out with Debra—he wanted to make sure I knew what she's up +to.” + +Debra was one of the old guard, a former comrade of Lil's parents. She'd spent +a decade in Disneyland Beijing, coding sim-rides. If she had her way, we'd tear +down every marvelous rube goldberg in the Park and replace them with pristine +white sim boxes on giant, articulated servos. + +The problem was that she was /{really good}/ at coding sims. Her Great Movie +Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking—the Star Wars sequence had already inspired +a hundred fan-sites that fielded millions of hits. + +She'd leveraged her success into a deal with the Adventureland ad-hocs to rehab +the Pirates of the Caribbean, and their backstage areas were piled high with +reference: treasure chests and cutlasses and bowsprits. It was terrifying to +walk through; the Pirates was the last ride Walt personally supervised, and +we'd thought it was sacrosanct. But Debra had built a Pirates sim in Beijing, +based on Chend I Sao, the XIXth century Chinese pirate queen, which was +credited with rescuing the Park from obscurity and ruin. The Florida iteration +would incorporate the best aspects of its Chinese cousin—the AI-driven sims +that communicated with each other and with the guests, greeting them by name +each time they rode and spinning age-appropriate tales of piracy on the high +seas; the spectacular fly-through of the aquatic necropolis of rotting junks on +the sea-floor; the thrilling pitch and yaw of the sim as it weathered a +violent, breath-taking storm—but with Western themes: wafts of Jamaican pepper +sauce crackling through the air; liquid Afro-Caribbean accents; and swordfights +conducted in the manner of the pirates who plied the blue waters of the New +World. Identical sims would stack like cordwood in the space currently occupied +by the bulky ride-apparatus and dioramas, quintupling capacity and halving +load-time. + +“So, what's she up to?” + +Lil extracted herself from the Rail-Splitter's mechanical guts and made a +comical moue of worry. “She's rehabbing the Pirates—and doing an incredible +job. They're ahead of schedule, they've got good net-buzz, the focus groups are +cumming themselves.” The comedy went out of her expression, baring genuine +worry. + +She turned away and closed up Honest Abe, then fired her finger at him. +Smoothly, he began to run through his spiel, silent but for the soft hum and +whine of his servos. Lil mimed twiddling a knob and his audiotrack kicked in +low: “All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa /{combined}/ could not, by +force, make a track on the Blue Ridge, nor take a drink from the Ohio. If +destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its author—and its finisher.” +She mimed turning down the gain and he fell silent again. + +“You said it, Mr. President,” she said, and fired her finger at him again, +powering him down. She bent and adjusted his hand-sewn period topcoat, then +carefully wound and set the turnip-watch in his vest-pocket. + +I put my arm around her shoulders. “You're doing all you can—and it's good +work,” I said. I'd fallen into the easy castmember mode of speaking, voicing +bland affirmations. Hearing the words, I felt a flush of embarrassment. I +pulled her into a long, hard hug and fumbled for better reassurance. Finding no +words that would do, I gave her a final squeeze and let her go. + +She looked at me sidelong and nodded her head. “It'll be fine, of course,” she +said. “I mean, the worst possible scenario is that Debra will do her job very, +very well, and make things even better than they are now. That's not so bad.” + +This was a 180-degree reversal of her position on the subject the last time +we'd talked, but you don't live more than a century without learning when to +point out that sort of thing and when not to. + +My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weekly backup +reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his niche. I waved +good-bye at her back and walked away, to an uplink terminal. Once I was close +enough for secure broadband communications, I got ready to back up. My cochlea +chimed again and I answered it. + +“Yes,” I subvocalized, impatiently. I hated getting distracted from a +backup—one of my enduring fears was that I'd forget the backup altogether and +leave myself vulnerable for an entire week until the next reminder. I'd lost +the knack of getting into habits in my adolescence, giving in completely to +machine-generated reminders over conscious choice. + +“It's Dan.” I heard the sound of the Park in full swing behind him—children's +laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the tromp of thousands of feet. +“Can you meet me at the Tiki Room? It's pretty important.” + +“Can it wait for fifteen?” I asked. + +“Sure—see you in fifteen.” + +I rung off and initiated the backup. A status-bar zipped across a HUD, dumping +the parts of my memory that were purely digital; then it finished and started +in on organic memory. My eyes rolled back in my head and my life flashed before +my eyes. + +1~ CHAPTER 3 + +The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores from backup—in the +era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly. Some people get +refreshed a couple dozen times a year. + +Not me. I hate the process. Not so much that I won't participate in it. +Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, you know, +/{died}/, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn't need to convert its +detractors, just outlive them. + +The first time I died, it was not long after my sixtieth birthday. I was SCUBA +diving at Playa Coral, near Veradero, Cuba. Of course, I don't remember the +incident, but knowing my habits at that particular dive-site and having read +the dive-logs of my SCUBA-buddies, I've reconstructed the events. + +I was eeling my way through the lobster-caves, with a borrowed bottle and mask. +I'd also borrowed a wetsuit, but I wasn't wearing it—the blood-temp salt water +was balm, and I hated erecting barriers between it and my skin. The caves were +made of coral and rocks, and they coiled and twisted like intestines. Through +each hole and around each corner, there was a hollow, rough sphere of +surpassing, alien beauty. Giant lobsters skittered over the walls and through +the holes. Schools of fish as bright as jewels darted and executed +breath-taking precision maneuvers as I disturbed their busy days. I do some of +my best thinking under water, and I'm often slipping off into dangerous reverie +at depth. Normally, my diving buddies ensure that I don't hurt myself, but this +time I got away from them, spidering forward into a tiny hole. + +Where I got stuck. + +My diving buddies were behind me, and I rapped on my bottle with the hilt of my +knife until one of them put a hand on my shoulder. My buddies saw what was up, +and attempted to pull me loose, but my bottle and buoyancy-control vest were +firmly wedged. The others exchanged hand signals, silently debating the best +way to get me loose. Suddenly, I was thrashing and kicking, and then I +disappeared into the cave, minus my vest and bottle. I'd apparently attempted +to cut through my vest's straps and managed to sever the tube of my regulator. +After inhaling a jolt of sea water, I'd thrashed free into the cave, rolling +into a monstrous patch of spindly fire-coral. I'd inhaled another lungful of +water and kicked madly for a tiny hole in the cave's ceiling, whence my buddies +retrieved me shortly thereafter, drowned-blue except for the patchy red welts +from the stinging coral. + +In those days, making a backup was a lot more complicated; the procedure took +most of a day, and had to be undertaken at a special clinic. Luckily, I'd had +one made just before I left for Cuba, a few weeks earlier. My next-most-recent +backup was three years old, dating from the completion of my second symphony. + +They recovered me from backup and into a force-grown clone at Toronto General. +As far as I knew, I'd laid down in the backup clinic one moment and arisen the +next. It took most of a year to get over the feeling that the whole world was +putting a monstrous joke over on me, that the drowned corpse I'd seen was +indeed my own. In my mind, the rebirth was figurative as well as literal—the +missing time was enough that I found myself hard-pressed to socialize with my +pre-death friends. + +I told Dan the story during our first friendship, and he immediately pounced on +the fact that I'd gone to Disney World to spend a week sorting out my feelings, +reinventing myself, moving to space, marrying a crazy lady. He found it very +curious that I always rebooted myself at Disney World. When I told him that I +was going to live there someday, he asked me if that would mean that I was done +reinventing myself. Sometimes, as I ran my fingers through Lil's sweet red +curls, I thought of that remark and sighed great gusts of contentment and +marveled that my friend Dan had been so prescient. + +The next time I died, they'd improved the technology somewhat. I'd had a +massive stroke in my seventy-third year, collapsing on the ice in the middle of +a house-league hockey game. By the time they cut my helmet away, the hematomae +had crushed my brain into a pulpy, blood-sotted mess. I'd been lax in backing +up, and I lost most of a year. But they woke me gently, with a +computer-generated precis of the events of the missing interval, and a +counselor contacted me daily for a year until I felt at home again in my skin. +Again, my life rebooted, and I found myself in Disney World, methodically +flensing away the relationships I'd built and starting afresh in Boston, living +on the ocean floor and working the heavy-metal harvesters, a project that led, +eventually, to my Chem thesis at U of T. + +After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to appreciate the +great leaps that restores had made in the intervening ten years. I woke in my +own bed, instantly aware of the events that led up to my third death as seen +from various third-party POVs: security footage from the Adventureland cameras, +synthesized memories extracted from Dan's own backup, and a computer-generated +fly-through of the scene. I woke feeling preternaturally calm and cheerful, and +knowing that I felt that way because of certain temporary neurotransmitter +presets that had been put in place when I was restored. + +Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling face was limned with hairs +that had snuck loose of her ponytail. She took my hand and kissed the smooth +knuckles. Dan smiled beneficently at me and I was seized with a warm, +comforting feeling of being surrounded by people who really loved me. I dug for +words appropriate to the scene, decided to wing it, opened my mouth and said, +to my surprise, “I have to pee.” + +Dan and Lil smiled at each other. I lurched out of the bed, naked, and thumped +to the bathroom. My muscles were wonderfully limber, with a brand-new spring to +them. After I flushed I leaned over and took hold of my ankles, then pulled my +head right to the floor, feeling the marvelous flexibility of my back and legs +and buttocks. A scar on my knee was missing, as were the many lines that had +crisscrossed my fingers. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that my nose and +earlobes were smaller and perkier. The familiar crow's-feet and the frown-lines +between my eyebrows were gone. I had a day's beard all over—head, face, pubis, +arms, legs. I ran my hands over my body and chuckled at the ticklish newness of +it all. I was briefly tempted to depilate all over, just to keep this feeling +of newness forever, but the neurotransmitter presets were evaporating and a +sense of urgency over my murder was creeping up on me. + +I tied a towel around my waist and made my way back to the bedroom. The smells +of tile-cleaner and flowers and rejuve were bright in my nose, effervescent as +camphor. Dan and Lil stood when I came into the room and helped me to the bed. +“Well, this /{sucks}/,” I said. + +I'd gone straight from the uplink through the utilidors—three quick cuts of +security cam footage, one at the uplink, one in the corridor, and one at the +exit in the underpass between Liberty Square and Adventureland. I seemed +bemused and a little sad as I emerged from the door, and began to weave my way +through the crowd, using a kind of sinuous, darting shuffle that I'd developed +when I was doing field-work on my crowd-control thesis. I cut rapidly through +the lunchtime crowd toward the long roof of the Tiki Room, thatched with strips +of shimmering aluminum cut and painted to look like long grass. + +Fuzzy shots now, from Dan's POV, of me moving closer to him, passing close to a +group of teenaged girls with extra elbows and knees, wearing environmentally +controlled cloaks and cowls covered with Epcot Center logomarks. One of them is +wearing a pith helmet, from the Jungle Traders shop outside of the Jungle +Cruise. Dan's gaze flicks away, to the Tiki Room's entrance, where there is a +short queue of older men, then back, just as the girl with the pith helmet +draws a stylish little organic pistol, like a penis with a tail that coils +around her arm. Casually, grinning, she raises her arm and gestures with the +pistol, exactly like Lil does with her finger when she's uploading, and the +pistol lunges forward. Dan's gaze flicks back to me. I'm pitching over, my +lungs bursting out of my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinal +gristle and viscera showering the guests before me. A piece of my nametag, now +shrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead, causing him to blink. When he looks +again, the group of girls is still there, but the girl with the pistol is long +gone. + +The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and the girl is +grayed-out. We're limned in highlighter yellow, moving in slow-motion. I emerge +from the underpass and the girl moves from the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse +to the group of her friends. Dan starts to move towards me. The girl raises, +arms and fires her pistol. The self-guiding smart-slug, keyed to my body +chemistry, flies low, near ground level, weaving between the feet of the crowd, +moving just below the speed of sound. When it reaches me, it screams upwards +and into my spine, detonating once it's entered my chest cavity. + +The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the Adventureland/Main +Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up, following her as she merges +with the crowds on the street, ducking and weaving between them, moving toward +the breezeway at Sleeping Beauty Castle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty +minutes later, in Tomorrowland, near the new Space Mountain complex, then +disappears again. + +“Has anyone ID'd the girl?” I asked, once I'd finished reliving the events. The +anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fists clenched for the first +time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips. + +Dan shook his head. “None of the girls she was with had ever seen her before. +The face was one of the Seven Sisters—Hope.” The Seven Sisters were a trendy +collection of designer faces. Every second teenage girl wore one of them. + +“How about Jungle Traders?” I asked. “Did they have a record of the pith helmet +purchase?” + +Lil frowned. “We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back for six months: only +three matched the girl's apparent age; all three have alibis. Chances are she +stole it.” + +“Why?” I asked, finally. In my mind's eye, I saw my lungs bursting out of my +chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying like shrapnel. I saw the +girl's smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulled the trigger on me. + +“It wasn't random,” Lil said. “The slug was definitely keyed to you—that means +that she'd gotten close to you at some point.” + +Right—which meant that she'd been to Disney World in the last ten years. That +narrowed it down, all right. + +“What happened to her after Tomorrowland?” I said. + +“We don't know,” Lil said. “Something wrong with the cameras. We lost her and +she never reappeared.” She sounded hot and angry—she took equipment failures in +the Magic Kingdom personally. + +“Who'd want to do this?” I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. It was the +first time I'd been murdered, but I didn't need to be a drama-queen about it. + +Dan's eyes got a far-away look. “Sometimes, people do things for reasons that +seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of the world couldn't hope to +understand. I've seen a few assassinations, and they never made sense +afterwards.” He stroked his chin. “Sometimes, it's better to look for +temperament, rather than motivation: who /{could}/ do something like this?” + +Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths who'd visited +the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That narrowed it down considerably. I pulled up +a HUD and checked the time. It had been four days since my murder. I had a +shift coming up, working the turnstiles at the Haunted Mansion. I liked to pull +a couple of those shifts a month, just to keep myself grounded; it helped to +take a reality check while I was churning away in the rarified climate of my +crowd-control simulations. + +I stood and went to my closet, started to dress. + +“/{What}/ are you doing?” Lil asked, alarmed. + +“I've got a shift. I'm running late.” + +“You're in no shape to work,” Lil said, tugging at my elbow. I jerked free of +her. + +“I'm fine—good as new.” I barked a humorless laugh. “I'm not going to let those +bastards disrupt my life any more.” + +/{Those bastards}/? I thought—when had I decided that there was more than one? +But I knew it was true. There was no way that this was all planned by one +person: it had been executed too precisely, too thoroughly. + +Dan moved to block the bedroom door. “Wait a second,” he said. “You need rest.” + +I fixed him with a doleful glare. “I'll decide that,” I said. He stepped aside. + +“I'll tag along, then,” he said. “Just in case.” + +I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles—sympathy Whuffie—but it was +falling: Dan and Lil were radiating disapproval. Screw 'em. + +I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door as I put it in +gear and sped out. + +“Are you sure you're all right?” Dan said as I nearly rolled the runabout +taking the corner at the end of our cul-de-sac. + +“Why wouldn't I be?” I said. “I'm as good as new.” + +“Funny choice of words,” he said. “Some would say that you /{were}/ new.” + +I groaned. “Not this argument again,” I said. “I feel like me and no one else +is making that claim. Who cares if I've been restored from a backup?” + +“All I'm saying is, there's a difference between /{you}/ and an exact copy of +you, isn't there?” + +I knew what he was doing, distracting me with one of our old fights, but I +couldn't resist the bait, and as I marshalled my arguments, it actually helped +calm me down some. Dan was that kind of friend, a person who knew you better +than you knew yourself. “So you're saying that if you were obliterated and then +recreated, atom-for-atom, that you wouldn't be you anymore?” + +“For the sake of argument, sure. Being destroyed and recreated is different +from not being destroyed at all, right?” + +“Brush up on your quantum mechanics, pal. You're being destroyed and recreated +a trillion times a second.” + +“On a very, very small level—” + +“What difference does that make?” + +“Fine, I'll concede that. But you're not really an atom-for-atom copy. You're a +clone, with a copied /{brain}/—that's not the same as quantum destruction.” + +“Very nice thing to say to someone who's just been murdered, pal. You got a +problem with clones?” + +And we were off and running. + +The Mansion's cast were sickeningly cheerful and solicitous. Each of them made +a point of coming around and touching the stiff, starched shoulder of my +butler's costume, letting me know that if there was anything they could do for +me… I gave them all a fixed smile and tried to concentrate on the guests, how +they waited, when they arrived, how they dispersed through the exit gate. Dan +hovered nearby, occasionally taking the eight minute, twenty-two second +ride-through, running interference for me with the other castmembers. + +He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies and we walked over +the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents, noting as I rounded the +corner that there was something different about the queue-area. Dan groaned. +“They did it already,” he said. + +I looked closer. The turnstiles were blocked by a sandwich board: Mickey in a +Ben Franklin wig and bifocals, holding a trowel. “Excuse our mess!” the sign +declared. “We're renovating to serve you better!” + +I spotted one of Debra's cronies standing behind the sign, a self-satisfied +smile on his face. He'd started off life as a squat, northern Chinese, but had +had his bones lengthened and his cheekbones raised so that he looked almost +elfin. I took one look at his smile and understood—Debra had established a +toehold in Liberty Square. + +“They filed plans for the new Hall with the steering committee an hour after +you got shot. The committee loved the plans; so did the net. They're promising +not to touch the Mansion.” + +“You didn't mention this,” I said, hotly. + +“We thought you'd jump to conclusions. The timing was bad, but there's no +indication that they arranged for the shooter. Everyone's got an alibi; +furthermore, they've all offered to submit their backups for proof.” + +“Right,” I said. “Right. So they just /{happened}/ to have plans for a new Hall +standing by. And they just /{happened}/ to file them after I got shot, when all +our ad-hocs were busy worrying about me. It's all a big coincidence.” + +Dan shook his head. “We're not stupid, Jules. No one thinks that it's a +coincidence. Debra's the sort of person who keeps a lot of plans standing by, +just in case. But that just makes her a well-prepared opportunist, not a +murderer.” + +I felt nauseated and exhausted. I was enough of a castmember that I sought out +a utilidor before I collapsed against a wall, head down. Defeat seeped through +me, saturating me. + +Dan crouched down beside me. I looked over at him. He was grinning wryly. +“Posit,” he said, “for the moment, that Debra really did do this thing, set you +up so that she could take over.” + +I smiled, in spite of myself. This was his explaining act, the thing he would +do whenever I fell into one of his rhetorical tricks back in the old days. “All +right, I've posited it.” + +“Why would she: one, take out you instead of Lil or one of the real old-timers; +two, go after the Hall of Presidents instead of Tom Sawyer Island or even the +Mansion; and three, follow it up with such a blatant, suspicious move?” + +“All right,” I said, warming to the challenge. “One: I'm important enough to be +disruptive but not so important as to rate a full investigation. Two: Tom +Sawyer Island is too visible, you can't rehab it without people seeing the dust +from shore. Three, Debra's coming off of a decade in Beijing, where subtlety +isn't real important.” + +“Sure,” Dan said, “sure.” Then he launched an answering salvo, and while I was +thinking up my answer, he helped me to my feet and walked me out to my +runabout, arguing all the way, so that by the time I noticed we weren't at the +Park anymore, I was home and in bed. + +With all the Hall's animatronics mothballed for the duration, Lil had more time +on her hands than she knew what to do with. She hung around the little +bungalow, the two of us in the living room, staring blankly at the windows, +breathing shallowly in the claustrophobic, superheated Florida air. I had my +working notes on queue management for the Mansion, and I pecked at them +aimlessly. Sometimes, Lil mirrored my HUD so she could watch me work, and made +suggestions based on her long experience. + +It was a delicate process, this business of increasing throughput without +harming the guest experience. But for every second I could shave off of the +queue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty guests through and lop thirty +seconds off total wait-time. And the more guests who got to experience the +Mansion, the more of a Whuffie-hit Debra's people would suffer if they made a +move on it. So I dutifully pecked at my notes, and found three seconds I could +shave off the graveyard sequence by swiveling the Doom Buggy carriages +stage-left as they descended from the attic window: by expanding their +fields-of-vision, I could expose the guests to all the scenes more quickly. + +I ran the change in fly-through, then implemented it after closing and invited +the other Liberty Square ad-hocs to come and test it out. + +It was another muggy winter evening, prematurely dark. The ad-hocs had enough +friends and family with them that we were able to simulate an off-peak +queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in the preshow area, waiting for the +doors to swing open, listening to the wolf-cries and assorted boo-spookery from +the hidden speakers. + +The doors swung open, revealing Lil in a rotting maid's uniform, her eyes lined +with black, her skin powdered to a deathly pallor. She gave us a cold, +considering glare, then intoned, “Master Gracey requests more bodies.” + +As we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, Lil contrived to give +my ass an affectionate squeeze. I turned to return the favor, and saw Debra's +elfin comrade looming over Lil's shoulder. My smile died on my lips. + +The man locked eyes with me for a moment, and I saw something in there—some +admixture of cruelty and worry that I didn't know what to make of. He looked +away immediately. I'd known that Debra would have spies in the crowd, of +course, but with elf-boy watching, I resolved to make this the best show I knew +how. + +It's subtle, this business of making the show better from within. Lil had +already slid aside the paneled wall that led to stretch-room number two, the +most recently serviced one. Once the crowd had moved inside, I tried to lead +their eyes by adjusting my body language to poses of subtle attention directed +at the new spotlights. When the newly remastered soundtrack came from behind +the sconce-bearing gargoyles at the corners of the octagonal room, I leaned my +body slightly in the direction of the moving stereo-image. And an instant +before the lights snapped out, I ostentatiously cast my eyes up into the scrim +ceiling, noting that others had taken my cue, so they were watching when the +UV-lit corpse dropped from the pitch-dark ceiling, jerking against the noose at +its neck. + +The crowd filed into the second queue area, where they boarded the Doom +Buggies. There was a low buzz of marveling conversation as we made our way onto +the moving sidewalk. I boarded my Doom Buggy and an instant later, someone slid +in beside me. It was the elf. + +He made a point of not making eye contact with me, but I sensed his sidelong +glances at me as we rode through past the floating chandelier and into the +corridor where the portraits' eyes watched us. Two years before, I'd +accelerated this sequence and added some random swivel to the Doom Buggies, +shaving 25 seconds off the total, taking the hourly throughput cap from 2365 to +2600. It was the proof-of-concept that led to all the other seconds I'd shaved +away since. The violent pitching of the Buggy brought me and the elf into +inadvertent contact with one another, and when I brushed his hand as I reached +for the safety bar, I felt that it was cold and sweaty. + +He was nervous! /{He}/ was nervous. What did /{he}/ have to be nervous about? I +was the one who'd been murdered—maybe he was nervous because he was supposed to +finish the job. I cast my own sidelong looks at him, trying to see suspicious +bulges in his tight clothes, but the Doom Buggy's pebbled black plastic +interior was too dim. Dan was in the Buggy behind us, with one of the Mansion's +regular castmembers. I rang his cochlea and subvocalized: “Get ready to jump +out on my signal.” Anyone leaving their Buggy would interrupt an infrared beam +and stop the ride system. I knew I could rely on Dan to trust me without a lot +of explaining, which meant that I could keep a close watch on Debra's crony. + +We went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of doors, where +monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining against the hinges, +recorded groans mixed in with pounding. I thought about it—if I wanted to kill +someone on the Mansion, what would be the best place to do it? The attic +staircase-- the next sequence—seemed like a good bet. A cold clarity washed +over me. The elf would kill me in the gloom of the staircase, dump me out over +the edge at the blind turn toward the graveyard, and that would be it. Would he +be able to do it if I were staring straight at him? He seemed terribly nervous +as it was. I swiveled in my seat and looked him straight in the eye. + +He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on staring at him, +my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. We rode down the staircase, +facing up, listening to the clamour of voices from the cemetery and the squawk +of the red-eyed raven. I caught sight of the quaking groundkeeper animatronic +from the corner of my eye and startled. I let out a subvocal squeal and was +pitched forward as the ride system shuddered to a stop. + +“Jules?” came Dan's voice in my cochlea. “You all right?” + +He'd heard my involuntary note of surprise and had leapt clear of the Buggy, +stopping the ride. The elf was looking at me with a mixture of surprise and +pity. + +“It's all right, it's all right. False alarm.” I paged Lil and subvocalized to +her, telling her to start up the ride ASAP, it was all right. + +I rode the rest of the way with my hands on the safety bar, my eyes fixed ahead +of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the timer I'd been running. The +demo was a debacle—instead of shaving off three seconds, I'd added thirty. I +wanted to cry. + +I debarked the Buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue, leaning heavily +against the fence, staring blindly at the pet cemetery. My head swam: I was out +of control, jumping at shadows. I was spooked. + +And I had no reason to be. Sure, I'd been murdered, but what had it cost me? A +few days of “unconsciousness” while they decanted my backup into my new body, a +merciful gap in memory from my departure at the backup terminal up until my +death. I wasn't one of those nuts who took death /{seriously}/. It wasn't like +they'd done something /{permanent}/. + +In the meantime, I /{had}/ done something permanent: I'd dug Lil's grave a +little deeper, endangered the ad-hocracy and, worst of all, the Mansion. I'd +acted like an idiot. I tasted my dinner, a wolfed-down hamburger, and swallowed +hard, forcing down the knob of nausea. + +I sensed someone at my elbow, and thinking it was Lil, come to ask me what had +gone on, I turned with a sheepish grin and found myself facing the elf. + +He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone running a +language module. “Hi there. We haven't been introduced, but I wanted to tell +you how much I enjoy your work. I'm Tim Fung.” + +I pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy in the close +heat of the Florida night. “Julius,” I said, startled at how much like a bark +it sounded. /{Careful}/, I thought, /{no need to escalate the hostilities.}/ +“It's kind of you to say that. I like what you-all have done with the Pirates.” + +He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile, as though he'd just been given high +praise from one of his heroes. “Really? I think it's pretty good—the second +time around you get a lot of chances to refine things, really clarify the +vision. Beijing—well, it was exciting, but it was rushed, you know? I mean, we +were really struggling. Every day, there was another pack of squatters who +wanted to tear the Park down. Debra used to send me out to give the children +piggyback rides, just to keep our Whuffie up while she was evicting the +squatters. It was good to have the opportunity to refine the designs, revisit +them without the floor show.” + +I knew about this, of course—Beijing had been a real struggle for the ad-hocs +who built it. Lots of them had been killed, many times over. Debra herself had +been killed every day for a week and restored to a series of prepared clones, +beta-testing one of the ride systems. It was faster than revising the CAD +simulations. Debra had a reputation for pursuing expedience. + +“I'm starting to find out how it feels to work under pressure,” I said, and +nodded significantly at the Mansion. I was gratified to see him look +embarrassed, then horrified. + +“We would /{never}/ touch the Mansion,” he said. “It's /{perfect}/!” + +Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte. They both looked +concerned—now that I thought of it, they'd both seemed incredibly concerned +about me since the day I was revived. + +Dan's gait was odd, stilted, like he was leaning on Lil for support. They +looked like a couple. An irrational sear of jealousy jetted through me. I was +an emotional wreck. Still, I took Lil's big, scarred hand in mine as soon as +she was in reach, then cuddled her to me protectively. She had changed out of +her maid's uniform into civvies: smart coveralls whose micropore fabric +breathed in time with her own respiration. + +“Lil, Dan, I want you to meet Tim Fung. He was just telling me war stories from +the Pirates project in Beijing.” + +Lil waved and Dan gravely shook his hand. “That was some hard work,” Dan said. + +It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normally an +instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still disoriented. I +pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respect garnered from +people who shared very few of my opinions. I expected that. What I didn't +expect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credence to +the rankings of people I respected, was also high—higher than my own. I +regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect from the elf—/{Tim}/, I had +to remember to call him Tim—would carry a lot of weight in every camp that +mattered. + +Dan's score was incrementing upwards, but he still had a rotten profile. He had +accrued a good deal of left-handed Whuffie, and I curiously backtraced it to +the occasion of my murder, when Debra's people had accorded him a generous +dollop of props for the levelheaded way he had scraped up my corpse and moved +it offstage, minimizing the disturbance in front of their wondrous Pirates. + +I was fugueing, wandering off on the kind of mediated reverie that got me +killed on the reef at Playa Coral, and I came out of it with a start, realizing +that the other three were politely ignoring my blown buffer. I could have run +backwards through my short-term memory to get the gist of the conversation, but +that would have lengthened the pause. Screw it. “So, how're things going over +at the Hall of the Presidents?” I asked Tim. + +Lil shot me a cautioning look. She'd ceded the Hall to Debra's ad-hocs, that +being the only way to avoid the appearance of childish disattention to the +almighty Whuffie. Now she had to keep up the fiction of good-natured +cooperation—that meant not shoulder-surfing Debra, looking for excuses to +pounce on her work. + +Tim gave us the same half-grin he'd greeted me with. On his smooth, pointed +features, it looked almost irredeemably cute. “We're doing good stuff, I think. +Debra's had her eye on the Hall for years, back in the old days, before she +went to China. We're replacing the whole thing with broadband uplinks of +gestalts from each of the Presidents' lives: newspaper headlines, speeches, +distilled biographies, personal papers. It'll be like having each President +/{inside}/ you, core-dumped in a few seconds. Debra said we're going to +/{flash-bake}/ the Presidents on your mind!” His eyes glittered in the +twilight. + +Having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking, Tim's +description struck a chord in me. My personality seemed to be rattling around a +little in my mind, as though it had been improperly fitted. It made the idea of +having the gestalt of 50-some Presidents squashed in along with it perversely +appealing. + +“Wow,” I said. “That sounds wild. What do you have in mind for physical plant?” +The Hall as it stood had a quiet, patriotic dignity cribbed from a hundred +official buildings of the dead USA. Messing with it would be like redesigning +the stars-and-bars. + +“That's not really my area,” Tim said. “I'm a programmer. But I could have one +of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you want.” + +“That would be fine,” Lil said, taking my elbow. “I think we should be heading +home, now, though.” She began to tug me away. Dan took my other elbow. Behind +her, the Liberty Belle glowed like a ghostly wedding cake in the twilight. + +“That's too bad,” Tim said. “My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on the new +Hall. I'm sure they'd love to have you drop by.” + +The idea seized hold of me. I would go into the camp of the enemy, sit by their +fire, learn their secrets. “That would be /{great}/!” I said, too loudly. My +head was buzzing slightly. Lil's hands fell away. + +“But we've got an early morning tomorrow,” Lil said. “You've got a shift at +eight, and I'm running into town for groceries.” She was lying, but she was +telling me that this wasn't her idea of a smart move. But my faith was +unshakeable. + +“Eight a.m. shift? No problem—I'll be right here when it starts. I'll just grab +a shower at the Contemporary in the morning and catch the monorail back in time +to change. All right?” + +Dan tried. “But Jules, we were going to grab some dinner at Cinderella's Royal +Table, remember? I made reservations.” + +“Aw, we can eat any time,” I said. “This is a hell of an opportunity.” + +“It sure is,” Dan said, giving up. “Mind if I come along?” + +He and Lil traded meaningful looks that I interpreted to mean, /{If he's going +to be a nut, one of us really should stay with him}/. I was past caring—I was +going to beard the lion in his den! + +Tim was apparently oblivious to all of this. “Then it's settled! Let's go.” + +On the walk to the Hall, Dan kept ringing my cochlea and I kept sending him +straight to voicemail. All the while, I kept up a patter of small-talk with him +and Tim. I was determined to make up for my debacle in the Mansion with Tim, +win him over. + +Debra's people were sitting around in the armchairs onstage, the animatronic +presidents stacked in neat piles in the wings. Debra was sprawled in Lincoln's +armchair, her head cocked lazily, her legs extended before her. The Hall's +normal smells of ozone and cleanliness were overridden by sweat and +machine-oil, the stink of an ad-hoc pulling an all-nighter. The Hall took +fifteen years to research and execute, and a couple of days to tear down. + +She was au-naturel, still wearing the face she'd been born with, albeit one +that had been regenerated dozens of times after her deaths. It was patrician, +waxy, long, with a nose that was made for staring down. She was at least as old +as I was, though she was only apparent 22. I got the sense that she picked this +age because it was one that afforded boundless reserves of energy. + +She didn't deign to rise as I approached, but she did nod languorously at me. +The other ad-hocs had been split into little clusters, hunched over terminals. +They all had the raccoon-eyed, sleep-deprived look of fanatics, even Debra, who +managed to look lazy and excited simultaneously. + +/{Did you have me killed}/? I wondered, staring at Debra. After all, she'd been +killed dozens, if not hundreds of times. It might not be such a big deal for +her. + +“Hi there,” I said, brightly. “Tim offered to show us around! You know Dan, +right?” + +Debra nodded at him. “Oh, sure. Dan and I are pals, right?” + +Dan's poker face didn't twitch a muscle. “Hello, Debra,” he said. He'd been +hanging out with them since Lil had briefed him on the peril to the Mansion, +trying to gather some intelligence for us to use. They knew what he was up to, +of course, but Dan was a fairly charming guy and he worked like a mule, so they +tolerated him. But it seemed like he'd violated a boundary by accompanying me, +as though the polite fiction that he was more a part of Debra's ad-hoc than +Lil's was shattered by my presence. + +Tim said, “Can I show them the demo, Debra?” + +Debra quirked an eyebrow, then said, “Sure, why not. You'll like this, guys.” + +Tim hustled us backstage, where Lil and I used to sweat over the animatronics +and cop surreptitious feels. Everything had been torn loose, packed up, +stacked. They hadn't wasted a moment—they'd spent a week tearing down a show +that had run for more than a century. The scrim that the projected portions of +the show normally screened on was ground into the floor, spotted with grime, +footprints and oil. + +Tim showed me to a half-assembled backup terminal. Its housing was off, and any +number of wireless keyboards, pointers and gloves lay strewn about it. It had +the look of a prototype. + +“This is it—our uplink. So far, we've got a demo app running on it: Lincoln's +old speech, along with the civil-war montage. Just switch on guest access and +I'll core-dump it to you. It's wild.” + +I pulled up my HUD and switched on guest access. Tim pointed a finger at the +terminal and my brain was suffused with the essence of Lincoln: every nuance of +his speech, the painstakingly researched movement tics, his warts and beard and +topcoat. It almost felt like I /{was}/ Lincoln, for a moment, and then it +passed. But I could still taste the lingering coppery flavor of cannon-fire and +chewing tobacco. + +I staggered backwards. My head swam with flash-baked sense-impressions, rich +and detailed. I knew on the spot that Debra's Hall of the Presidents was going +to be a hit. + +Dan took a shot off the uplink, too. Tim and I watched him as his expression +shifted from skepticism to delight. Tim looked expectantly at me. + +“That's really fine,” I said. “Really, really fine. Moving.” + +Tim blushed. “Thanks! I did the gestalt programming—it's my specialty.” + +Debra spoke up from behind him—she'd sauntered over while Dan was getting his +jolt. “I got the idea in Beijing, when I was dying a lot. There's something +wonderful about having memories implanted, like you're really working your +brain. I love the synthetic clarity of it all.” + +Tim sniffed. “Not synthetic at all,” he said, turning to me. “It's nice and +soft, right?” + +I sensed deep political shoals and was composing my reply when Debra said: “Tim +keeps trying to make it all more impressionistic, less computer-y. He's wrong, +of course. We don't want to simulate the experience of watching the show—we +want to /{transcend it}/.” + +Tim nodded reluctantly. “Sure, transcend it. But the way we do that is by +making the experience /{human}/, a mile in the presidents' shoes. +Empathy-driven. What's the point of flash-baking a bunch of dry facts on +someone's brain?” + +1~ CHAPTER 4 + +One night in the Hall of Presidents convinced me of three things: + +_1 That Debra's people had had me killed, and screw their alibis, + +_1 That they would kill me again, when the time came for them to make a play +for the Haunted Mansion, + +_1 That our only hope for saving the Mansion was a preemptive strike against +them: we had to hit them hard, where it hurt. + +Dan and I had been treated to eight hours of insectile precision in the Hall of +Presidents, Debra's people working with effortless cooperation born of the +adversity they'd faced in Beijing. Debra moved from team to team, making +suggestions with body language as much as with words, leaving bursts of +inspired activity in her wake. + +It was that precision that convinced me of point one. Any ad-hoc this tight +could pull off anything if it advanced their agenda. Ad-hoc? Hell, call them +what they were: an army. + +Point two came to me when I sampled the Lincoln build that Tim finished at +about three in the morning, after intensive consultation with Debra. The mark +of a great ride is that it gets better the second time around, as the detail +and flourishes start to impinge on your consciousness. The Mansion was full of +little gimcracks and sly nods that snuck into your experience on each +successive ride. + +Tim shuffled his feet nervously, bursting with barely restrained pride as I +switched on public access. He dumped the app to my public directory, and, +gingerly, I executed it. + +God! God and Lincoln and cannon-fire and oratory and ploughs and mules and +greatcoats! It rolled over me, it punched through me, it crashed against the +inside of my skull and rebounded. The first pass through, there had been a +sense of order, of narrative, but this, this was gestalt, the whole thing in +one undifferentiated ball, filling me and spilling over. It was panicky for a +moment, as the essence of Lincolness seemed to threaten my own personality, +and, just as it was about to overwhelm me, it receded, leaving behind a rush of +endorphin and adrenaline that made me want to jump. + +“Tim,” I gasped. “Tim! That was…” Words failed me. I wanted to hug him. What we +could do for the Mansion with this! What elegance! Directly imprinting the +experience, without recourse to the stupid, blind eyes; the thick, deaf ears. + +Tim beamed and basked, and Debra nodded solemnly from her throne. “You liked +it?” Tim said. I nodded, and staggered back to the theatre seat where Dan +slept, head thrown back, snores softly rattling in his throat. + +Incrementally, reason trickled back into my mind, and with it came ire. How +dare they? The wonderful compromises of technology and expense that had given +us the Disney rides—rides that had entertained the world for two centuries and +more—could never compete head to head with what they were working on. + +My hands knotted into fists in my lap. Why the fuck couldn't they do this +somewhere else? Why did they have to destroy everything I loved to realize +this? They could build this tech anywhere—they could distribute it online and +people could access it from their living rooms! + +But that would never do. Doing it here was better for the old Whuffie—they'd +make over Disney World and hold it, a single ad-hoc where three hundred had +flourished before, smoothly operating a park twice the size of Manhattan. + +I stood and stalked out of the theater, out into Liberty Square and the Park. +It had cooled down without drying out, and there was a damp chill that crawled +up my back and made my breath stick in my throat. I turned to contemplate the +Hall of Presidents, staid and solid as it had been since my boyhood and before, +a monument to the Imagineers who anticipated the Bitchun Society, inspired it. + +I called Dan, still snoring back in the theater, and woke him. He grunted +unintelligibly in my cochlea. + +“They did it—they killed me.” I knew they had, and I was glad. It made what I +had to do next easier. + +“Oh, Jesus. They didn't kill you—they offered their backups, remember? They +couldn't have done it.” + +“Bullshit!” I shouted into the empty night. “Bullshit! They did it, and they +fucked with their backups somehow. They must have. It's all too neat and tidy. +How else could they have gotten so far with the Hall so fast? They knew it was +coming, they planned a disruption, and they moved in. Tell me that you think +they just had these plans lying around and moved on them when they could.” + +Dan groaned, and I heard his joints popping. He must have been stretching. The +Park breathed around me, the sounds of maintenance crews scurrying in the +night. “I do believe that. Clearly, you don't. It's not the first time we've +disagreed. So now what?” + +“Now we save the Mansion,” I said. “Now we fight back.” + +“Oh, shit,” Dan said. + +I have to admit, there was a part of me that concurred. + +My opportunity came later that week. Debra's ad-hocs were showboating, +announcing a special preview of the new Hall to the other ad-hocs that worked +in the Park. It was classic chutzpah, letting the key influencers in the Park +in long before the bugs were hammered out. A smooth run would garner the kind +of impressed reaction that guaranteed continued support while they finished up; +a failed demo could doom them. There were plenty of people in the Park who had +a sentimental attachment to the Hall of Presidents, and whatever Debra's people +came up with would have to answer their longing. + +“I'm going to do it during the demo,” I told Dan, while I piloted the runabout +from home to the castmember parking. I snuck a look at him to gauge his +reaction. He had his poker face on. + +“I'm not going to tell Lil,” I continued. “It's better that she doesn't +know—plausible deniability.” + +“And me?” he said. “Don't I need plausible deniability?” + +“No,” I said. “No, you don't. You're an outsider. You can make the case that +you were working on your own—gone rogue.” I knew it wasn't fair. Dan was here +to build up his Whuffie, and if he was implicated in my dirty scheme, he'd have +to start over again. I knew it wasn't fair, but I didn't care. I knew that we +were fighting for our own survival. “It's good versus evil, Dan. You don't want +to be a post-person. You want to stay human. The rides are human. We each +mediate them through our own experience. We're physically inside of them, and +they talk to us through our senses. What Debra's people are building—it's +hive-mind shit. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's not an experience, +it's brainwashing! You gotta know that.” I was pleading, arguing with myself as +much as with him. + +I snuck another look at him as I sped along the Disney back-roads, lined with +sweaty Florida pines and immaculate purple signage. Dan was looking thoughtful, +the way he had back in our old days in Toronto. Some of my tension dissipated. +He was thinking about it—I'd gotten through to him. + +“Jules, this isn't one of your better ideas.” My chest tightened, and he patted +my shoulder. He had the knack of putting me at my ease, even when he was +telling me that I was an idiot. “Even if Debra was behind your +assassination—and that's not a certainty, we both know that. Even if that's the +case, we've got better means at our disposal. Improving the Mansion, competing +with her head to head, that's smart. Give it a little while and we can come +back at her, take over the Hall—even the Pirates, that'd really piss her off. +Hell, if we can prove she was behind the assassination, we can chase her off +right now. Sabotage is not going to do you any good. You've got lots of other +options.” + +“But none of them are fast enough, and none of them are emotionally satisfying. +This way has some goddamn /{balls}/.” + +We reached castmember parking, I swung the runabout into a slot and stalked out +before it had a chance to extrude its recharger cock. I heard Dan's door slam +behind me and knew that he was following behind. + +We took to the utilidors grimly. I walked past the cameras, knowing that my +image was being archived, my presence logged. I'd picked the timing of my raid +carefully: by arriving at high noon, I was sticking to my traditional pattern +for watching hot-weather crowd dynamics. I'd made a point of visiting twice +during the previous week at this time, and of dawdling in the commissary before +heading topside. The delay between my arrival in the runabout and my showing up +at the Mansion would not be discrepant. + +Dan dogged my heels as I swung towards the commissary, and then hugged the +wall, in the camera's blindspot. Back in my early days in the Park, when I was +courting Lil, she showed me the A-Vac, the old pneumatic waste-disposal system, +decommissioned in the 20s. The kids who grew up in the Park had been notorious +explorers of the tubes, which still whiffed faintly of the garbage bags they'd +once whisked at 60 mph to the dump on the property's outskirts, but for a +brave, limber kid, the tubes were a subterranean wonderland to explore when the +hypermediated experiences of the Park lost their luster. + +I snarled a grin and popped open the service entrance. “If they hadn't killed +me and forced me to switch to a new body, I probably wouldn't be flexible +enough to fit in,” I hissed at Dan. “Ironic, huh?” + +I clambered inside without waiting for a reply, and started inching my way +under the Hall of Presidents. + +My plan had covered every conceivable detail, except one, which didn't occur to +me until I was forty minutes into the pneumatic tube, arms held before me and +legs angled back like a swimmer's. + +How was I going to reach into my pockets? + +Specifically, how was I going to retrieve my HERF gun from my back +pants-pocket, when I couldn't even bend my elbows? The HERF gun was the crux of +the plan: a High Energy Radio Frequency generator with a directional, focused +beam that would punch up through the floor of the Hall of Presidents and fuse +every goddamn scrap of unshielded electronics on the premises. I'd gotten the +germ of the idea during Tim's first demo, when I'd seen all of his prototypes +spread out backstage, cases off, ready to be tinkered with. Unshielded. + +“Dan,” I said, my voice oddly muffled by the tube's walls. + +“Yeah?” he said. He'd been silent during the journey, the sound of his painful, +elbow-dragging progress through the lightless tube my only indicator of his +presence. + +“Can you reach my back pocket?” + +“Oh, shit,” he said. + +“Goddamn it,” I said, “keep the fucking editorial to yourself. Can you reach it +or not?” + +I heard him grunt as he pulled himself up in the tube, then felt his hand +groping up my calf. Soon, his chest was crushing my calves into the tube's +floor and his hand was pawing around my ass. + +“I can reach it,” he said. I could tell from his tone that he wasn't too happy +about my snapping at him, but I was too wrapped up to consider an apology, +despite what must be happening to my Whuffie as Dan did his slow burn. + +He fumbled the gun—a narrow cylinder as long as my palm—out of my pocket. “Now +what?” he said. + +“Can you pass it up?” I asked. + +Dan crawled higher, overtop of me, but stuck fast when his ribcage met my +glutes. “I can't get any further,” he said. + +“Fine,” I said. “You'll have to fire it, then.” I held my breath. Would he do +it? It was one thing to be my accomplice, another to be the author of the +destruction. + +“Aw, Jules,” he said. + +“A simple yes or no, Dan. That's all I want to hear from you.” I was boiling +with anger—at myself, at Dan, at Debra, at the whole goddamn thing. + +“Fine,” he said. + +“Good. Dial it up to max dispersion and point it straight up.” + +I heard him release the catch, felt a staticky crackle in the air, and then it +was done. The gun was a one-shot, something I'd confiscated from a mischievous +guest a decade before, when they'd had a brief vogue. + +“Hang on to it,” I said. I had no intention of leaving such a damning bit of +evidence behind. I resumed my bellycrawl forward to the next service hatch, +near the parking lot, where I'd stashed an identical change of clothes for both +of us. + +We made it back just as the demo was getting underway. Debra's ad-hocs were +ranged around the mezzanine inside the Hall of Presidents, a collection of +influential castmembers from other ad-hocs filling the pre-show area to +capacity. + +Dan and I filed in just as Tim was stringing the velvet rope up behind the +crowd. He gave me a genuine smile and shook my hand, and I smiled back, full of +good feelings now that I knew that he was going down in flames. I found Lil and +slipped my hand into hers as we filed into the auditorium, which had the +new-car smell of rug shampoo and fresh electronics. + +We took our seats and I bounced my leg nervously, compulsively, while Debra, +dressed in Lincoln's coat and stovepipe, delivered a short speech. There was +some kind of broadcast rig mounted over the stage now, something to allow them +to beam us all their app in one humongous burst. + +Debra finished up and stepped off the stage to a polite round of applause, and +they started the demo. + +Nothing happened. I tried to keep the shit-eating grin off my face as nothing +happened. No tone in my cochlea indicating a new file in my public directory, +no rush of sensation, nothing. I turned to Lil to make some snotty remark, but +her eyes were closed, her mouth lolling open, her breath coming in short huffs. +Down the row, every castmember was in the same attitude of deep, mind-blown +concentration. I pulled up a diagnostic HUD. + +Nothing. No diagnostics. No HUD. I cold-rebooted. + +Nothing. + +I was offline. + +Offline, I filed out of the Hall of Presidents. Offline, I took Lil's hand and +walked to the Liberty Belle load-zone, our spot for private conversations. +Offline, I bummed a cigarette from her. + +Lil was upset—even through my bemused, offline haze, I could tell that. Tears +pricked her eyes. + +“Why didn't you tell me?” she said, after a hard moment's staring into the +moonlight reflecting off the river. + +“Tell you?” I said, dumbly. + +“They're really good. They're better than good. They're better than us. Oh, +God.” + +Offline, I couldn't find stats or signals to help me discuss the matter. +Offline, I tried it without help. “I don't think so. I don't think they've got +soul, I don't think they've got history, I don't think they've got any kind of +connection to the past. The world grew up in the Disneys—they visit this place +for continuity as much as for entertainment. We provide that.” I'm offline, and +they're not—what the hell happened? + +“It'll be okay, Lil. There's nothing in that place that's better than us. +Different and new, but not better. You know that—you've spent more time in the +Mansion than anyone, you know how much refinement, how much work there is in +there. How can something they whipped up in a couple weeks possibly be better +that this thing we've been maintaining for all these years?” + +She ground the back of her sleeve against her eyes and smiled. “Sorry,” she +said. Her nose was red, her eyes puffy, her freckles livid over the flush of +her cheeks. “Sorry—it's just shocking. Maybe you're right. And even if you're +not—hey, that's the whole point of a meritocracy, right? The best stuff +survives, everything else gets supplanted. + +“Oh, shit, I hate how I look when I cry,” she said. “Let's go congratulate +them.” + +As I took her hand, I was obscurely pleased with myself for having improved her +mood without artificial assistance. + +Dan was nowhere to be seen as Lil and I mounted the stage at the Hall, where +Debra's ad-hocs and a knot of well-wishers were celebrating by passing a rock +around. Debra had lost the tailcoat and hat, and was in an extreme state of +relaxation, arms around the shoulders of two of her cronies, pipe between her +teeth. + +She grinned around the pipe as Lil and I stumbled through some insincere +compliments, nodded, and toked heavily while Tim applied a torch to the bowl. + +“Thanks,” she said, laconically. “It was a team effort.” She hugged her cronies +to her, almost knocking their heads together. + +Lil said, “What's your timeline, then?” + +Debra started unreeling a long spiel about critical paths, milestones, +requirements meetings, and I tuned her out. Ad-hocs were crazy for that process +stuff. I stared at my feet, at the floorboards, and realized that they weren't +floorboards at all, but faux-finish painted over a copper mesh—a Faraday cage. +That's why the HERF gun hadn't done anything; that's why they'd been so casual +about working with the shielding off their computers. With my eye, I followed +the copper shielding around the entire stage and up the walls, where it +disappeared into the ceiling. Once again, I was struck by the evolvedness of +Debra's ad-hocs, how their trial by fire in China had armored them against the +kind of bush-league jiggery-pokery that the fuzzy bunnies in Florida—myself +included—came up with. + +For instance, I didn't think there was a single castmember in the Park outside +of Deb's clique with the stones to stage an assassination. Once I'd made that +leap, I realized that it was only a matter of time until they staged another +one—and another, and another. Whatever they could get away with. + +Debra's spiel finally wound down and Lil and I headed away. I stopped in front +of the backup terminal in the gateway between Liberty Square and Fantasyland. +“When was the last time you backed up?” I asked her. If they could go after me, +they might go after any of us. + +“Yesterday,” she said. She exuded bone-weariness at me, looking more like an +overmediated guest than a tireless castmember. + +“Let's run another backup, huh? We should really back up at night and at +lunchtime—with things the way they are, we can't afford to lose an afternoon's +work, much less a week's.” + +Lil rolled her eyes. I knew better than to argue with her when she was tired, +but this was too crucial to set aside for petulance. “You can back up that +often if you want to, Julius, but don't tell me how to live my life, okay?” + +“Come on, Lil—it only takes a minute, and it'd make me feel a lot better. +Please?” I hated the whine in my voice. + +“No, Julius. No. Let's go home and get some sleep. I want to do some work on +new merch for the Mansion—some collectible stuff, maybe.” + +“For Christ's sake, is it really so much to ask? Fine. Wait while I back up, +then, all right?” + +Lil groaned and glared at me. + +I approached the terminal and cued a backup. Nothing happened. Oh, yeah, right, +I was offline. A cool sweat broke out all over my new body. + +Lil grabbed the couch as soon as we got in, mumbling something about wanting to +work on some revised merch ideas she'd had. I glared at her as she subvocalized +and air-typed in the corner, shut away from me. I hadn't told her that I was +offline yet—it just seemed like insignificant personal bitching relative to the +crises she was coping with. + +Besides, I'd been knocked offline before, though not in fifty years, and often +as not the system righted itself after a good night's sleep. I could visit the +doctor in the morning if things were still screwy. + +So I crawled into bed, and when my bladder woke me in the night, I had to go +into the kitchen to consult our old starburst clock to get the time. It was 3 +a.m., and when the hell had we expunged the house of all timepieces, anyway? + +Lil was sacked out on the couch, and complained feebly when I tried to rouse +her, so I covered her with a blanket and went back to bed, alone. + +I woke disoriented and crabby, without my customary morning jolt of endorphin. +Vivid dreams of death and destruction slipped away as I sat up. I preferred to +let my subconscious do its own thing, so I'd long ago programmed my systems to +keep me asleep during REM cycles except in emergencies. The dream left a foul +taste in my mind as I staggered into the kitchen, where Lil was fixing coffee. + +“Why didn't you wake me up last night? I'm one big ache from sleeping on the +couch,” Lil said as I stumbled in. + +She had the perky, jaunty quality of someone who could instruct her nervous +system to manufacture endorphin and adrenaline at will. I felt like punching +the wall. + +“You wouldn't get up,” I said, and slopped coffee in the general direction of a +mug, then scalded my tongue with it. + +“And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would cover a shift for me—the +merch ideas are really coming together and I wanted to hit the Imagineering +shop and try some prototyping.” + +“Can't.” I foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumby plate in +the sink. Dan had already eaten and gone, apparently. + +“Really?” she said, and my blood started to boil in earnest. I slammed Dan's +plate into the dishwasher and shoved bread into my maw. + +“Yes. Really. It's your shift—fucking work it or call in sick.” + +Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning, when I was +hormonally enhanced, anyway. “What's wrong, honey?” she said, going into +helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit something besides the wall. + +“Just leave me alone, all right? Go fiddle with fucking merch. I've got real +work to do—in case you haven't noticed, Debra's about to eat you and your +little band of plucky adventurers and pick her teeth with the bones. For God's +sake, Lil, don't you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you have any +goddamned passion?” + +Lil whitened and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the worst thing I +could possibly have said. + +Lil and I met three years before, at a barbecue that some friends of her +parents threw, a kind of castmember mixer. She'd been just 19—apparent and +real—and had a bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismiss her, at first, as just +another airhead castmember. + +Her parents—Tom and Rita—on the other hand, were fascinating people, members of +the original ad-hoc that had seized power in Walt Disney World, wresting +control from a gang of wealthy former shareholders who'd been operating it as +their private preserve. Rita was apparent 20 or so, but she radiated a maturity +and a fiery devotion to the Park that threw her daughter's superficiality into +sharp relief. + +They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use. In a world +where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep, travel and access the +net without hassle, their wealth was more than sufficient to repeatedly access +the piffling few scarce things left on earth over and over. + +The conversation turned to the first day, when she and her pals had used a +cutting torch on the turnstiles and poured in, wearing homemade costumes and +name tags. They infiltrated the shops, the control centers, the rides, first by +the hundred, then, as the hot July day ticked by, by the thousand. The +shareholders' lackeys—who worked the Park for the chance to be a part of the +magic, even if they had no control over the management decisions—put up a token +resistance. Before the day was out, though, the majority had thrown in their +lots with the raiders, handing over security codes and pitching in. + +“But we knew the shareholders wouldn't give in as easy as that,” Lil's mother +said, sipping her lemonade. “We kept the Park running 24/7 for the next two +weeks, never giving the shareholders a chance to fight back without doing it in +front of the guests. We'd prearranged with a couple of airline ad-hocs to add +extra routes to Orlando and the guests came pouring in.” She smiled, +remembering the moment, and her features in repose were Lil's almost +identically. It was only when she was talking that her face changed, muscles +tugging it into an expression decades older than the face that bore it. + +“I spent most of the time running the merch stand at Madame Leota's outside the +Mansion, gladhanding the guests while hissing nasties back and forth with the +shareholders who kept trying to shove me out. I slept in a sleeping bag on the +floor of the utilidor, with a couple dozen others, in three hour shifts. That +was when I met this asshole”—she chucked her husband on the shoulder—“he'd +gotten the wrong sleeping bag by mistake and wouldn't budge when I came down to +crash. I just crawled in next to him and the rest, as they say, is history.” + +Lil rolled her eyes and made gagging noises. “Jesus, Rita, no one needs to hear +about that part of it.” + +Tom patted her arm. “Lil, you're an adult—if you can't stomach hearing about +your parents' courtship, you can either sit somewhere else or grin and bear it. +But you don't get to dictate the topic of conversation.” + +Lil gave us adults a very youthful glare and flounced off. Rita shook her head +at Lil's departing backside. “There's not much fire in that generation,” she +said. “Not a lot of passion. It's our fault—we thought that Disney World would +be the best place to raise a child in the Bitchun Society. Maybe it was, but…” +She trailed off and rubbed her palms on her thighs, a gesture I'd come to know +in Lil, by and by. “I guess there aren't enough challenges for them these days. +They're too cooperative.” She laughed and her husband took her hand. + +“We sound like our parents,” Tom said. “'When we were growing up, we didn't +have any of this newfangled life-extension stuff—we took our chances with the +cave bears and the dinosaurs!'” Tom wore himself older, apparent 50, with +graying sidewalls and crinkled smile-lines, the better to present a +non-threatening air of authority to the guests. It was a truism among the +first-gen ad-hocs that women castmembers should wear themselves young, men old. +“We're just a couple of Bitchun fundamentalists, I guess.” + +Lil called over from a nearby conversation: “Are they telling you what a pack +of milksops we are, Julius? When you get tired of that, why don't you come over +here and have a smoke?” I noticed that she and her cohort were passing a crack +pipe. + +“What's the use?” Lil's mother sighed. + +“Oh, I don't know that it's as bad as all that,” I said, virtually my first +words of the afternoon. I was painfully conscious that I was only there by +courtesy, just one of the legion of hopefuls who flocked to Orlando every year, +aspiring to a place among the ruling cliques. “They're passionate about +maintaining the Park, that's for sure. I made the mistake of lifting a +queue-gate at the Jungleboat Cruise last week and I got a very earnest lecture +about the smooth functioning of the Park from a castmember who couldn't have +been more than 18. I think that they don't have the passion for creating +Bitchunry that we have—they don't need it—but they've got plenty of drive to +maintain it.” + +Lil's mother gave me a long, considering look that I didn't know what to make +of. I couldn't tell if I had offended her or what. + +“I mean, you can't be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn't we +all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?” + +“Funny you should say that,” Tom said. He had the same considering look on his +face. “Just yesterday we were talking about the very same thing. We were +talking—” he drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, who nodded—“about +deadheading. For a while, anyway. See if things changed much in fifty or a +hundred years.” + +I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my time schmoozing +with these two, when they wouldn't be around when the time came to vote me in? +I banished the thought as quickly as it came—I was talking to them because they +were nice people. Not every conversation had to be strategically important. + +“Really? Deadheading.” I remember that I thought of Dan then, about his views +on the cowardice of deadheading, on the bravery of ending it when you found +yourself obsolete. He'd comforted me once, when my last living relative, my +uncle, opted to go to sleep for three thousand years. My uncle had been born +pre-Bitchun, and had never quite gotten the hang of it. Still, he was my link +to my family, to my first adulthood and my only childhood. Dan had taken me to +Gananoque and we'd spent the day bounding around the countryside on +seven-league boots, sailing high over the lakes of the Thousand Islands and the +crazy fiery carpet of autumn leaves. We topped off the day at a dairy commune +he knew where they still made cheese from cow's milk and there'd been a +thousand smells and bottles of strong cider and a girl whose name I'd long +since forgotten but whose exuberant laugh I'd remember forever. And it wasn't +so important, then, my uncle going to sleep for three milliennia, because +whatever happened, there were the leaves and the lakes and the crisp sunset the +color of blood and the girl's laugh. + +“Have you talked to Lil about it?” + +Rita shook her head. “It's just a thought, really. We don't want to worry her. +She's not good with hard decisions—it's her generation.” + +They changed the subject not long thereafter, and I sensed discomfort, knew +that they had told me too much, more than they'd intended. I drifted off and +found Lil and her young pals, and we toked a little and cuddled a little. + +Within a month, I was working at the Haunted Mansion, Tom and Rita were +invested in Canopic jars in Kissimee with instructions not to be woken until +their newsbots grabbed sufficient interesting material to make it worth their +while, and Lil and I were a hot item. + +Lil didn't deal well with her parents' decision to deadhead. For her, it was a +slap in the face, a reproach to her and her generation of twittering Polyannic +castmembers. + +For God's sake, Lil, don't you ever get fucking angry about anything? Don't you +have any goddamned passion? + +The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was saying them, and Lil, 15 +percent of my age, young enough to be my great-granddaughter; Lil, my lover and +best friend and sponsor to the Liberty Square ad-hocracy; Lil turned white as a +sheet, turned on her heel and walked out of the kitchen. She got in her +runabout and went to the Park to take her shift. + +I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling fan as it made its lazy turns, and +felt like shit. + +1~ CHAPTER 5 + +When I finally returned to the Park, 36 hours had passed and Lil had not come +back to the house. If she'd tried to call, she would've gotten my voicemail—I +had no way of answering my phone. As it turned out, she hadn't been trying to +reach me at all. + +I'd spent the time alternately moping, drinking, and plotting terrible, +irrational vengeance on Debra for killing me, destroying my relationship, +taking away my beloved (in hindsight, anyway) Hall of Presidents and +threatening the Mansion. Even in my addled state, I knew that this was pretty +unproductive, and I kept promising that I would cut it out, take a shower and +some sober-ups, and get to work at the Mansion. + +I was working up the energy to do just that when Dan came in. + +“Jesus,” he said, shocked. I guess I was a bit of a mess, sprawled on the sofa +in my underwear, all gamy and baggy and bloodshot. + +“Hey, Dan. How's it goin'?” + +He gave me one of his patented wry looks and I felt the same weird reversal of +roles that we'd undergone at the U of T, when he had become the native, and I +had become the interloper. He was the together one with the wry looks and I was +the pathetic seeker who'd burned all his reputation capital. Out of habit, I +checked my Whuffie, and a moment later I stopped being startled by its low +score and was instead shocked by the fact that I could check it at all. I was +back online! + +“Now, what do you know about that?” I said, staring at my dismal Whuffie. + +“What?” he said. + +I called his cochlea. “My systems are back online,” I subvocalized. + +He started. “You were offline?” + +I jumped up from the couch and did a little happy underwear dance. “I /{was}/, +but I'm not /{now}/.” I felt better than I had in days, ready to beat the +world—or at least Debra. + +“Let me take a shower, then let's get to the Imagineering labs. I've got a +pretty kickass idea.” + +The idea, as I explained it in the runabout, was a preemptive rehab of the +Mansion. Sabotaging the Hall had been a nasty, stupid idea, and I'd gotten what +I deserved for it. The whole point of the Bitchun Society was to be more +reputable than the next ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery, despite +assassinations and the like. + +So a rehab it would be. + +“Back in the early days of the Disneyland Mansion, in California,” I explained, +“Walt had a guy in a suit of armor just past the first Doom Buggy curve, he'd +leap out and scare the hell out of the guests as they went by. It didn't last +long, of course. The poor bastard kept getting punched out by startled guests, +and besides, the armor wasn't too comfortable for long shifts.” + +Dan chuckled appreciatively. The Bitchun Society had all but done away with any +sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remained—tending bar, mopping +toilets—commanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off-hours. + +“But that guy in the suit of armor, he could /{improvise}/. You'd get a +slightly different show every time. It's like the castmembers who spiel on the +Jungleboat Cruise. They've each got their own patter, their own jokes, and even +though the animatronics aren't so hot, it makes the show worth seeing.” + +“You're going to fill the Mansion with castmembers in armor?” Dan asked, +shaking his head. + +I waved away his objections, causing the runabout to swerve, terrifying a pack +of guests who were taking a ride on rented bikes around the property. “No,” I +said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-faced guests. “Not at all. +But what if all of the animatronics had human operators—telecontrollers, +working with waldoes? We'll let them interact with the guests, talk with them, +scare them… We'll get rid of the existing animatronics, replace 'em with +full-mobility robots, then cast the parts over the Net. Think of the Whuffie! +You could put, say, a thousand operators online at once, ten shifts per day, +each of them caught up in our Mansion… We'll give out awards for outstanding +performances, the shifts'll be based on popular vote. In effect, we'll be +adding another ten thousand guests to the Mansion's throughput every day, only +these guests will be honorary castmembers.” + +“That's pretty good,” Dan said. “Very Bitchun. Debra may have AI and +flash-baking, but you'll have human interaction, courtesy of the biggest +Mansion-fans in the world—” + +“And those are the very fans Debra'll have to win over to make a play for the +Mansion. Very elegant, huh?” + +The first order of business was to call Lil, patch things up, and pitch the +idea to her. The only problem was, my cochlea was offline again. My mood +started to sour, and I had Dan call her instead. + +We met her up at Imagineering, a massive complex of prefab aluminum buildings +painted Go-Away Green that had thronged with mad inventors since the Bitchun +Society had come to Walt Disney World. The ad-hocs who had built an +Imagineering department in Florida and now ran the thing were the least +political in the Park, classic labcoat-and-clipboard types who would work for +anyone so long as the ideas were cool. Not caring about Whuffie meant that they +accumulated it in plenty on both the left and right hands. + +Lil was working with Suneep, AKA the Merch Miracle. He could design, prototype +and produce a souvenir faster than anyone—shirts, sculptures, pens, toys, +housewares, he was the king. They were collaborating on their HUDs, facing each +other across a lab-bench in the middle of a lab as big as a basketball court, +cluttered with logomarked tchotchkes and gabbling away while their eyes danced +over invisible screens. + +Dan reflexively joined the collaborative space as he entered the lab, leaving +me the only one out on the joke. Dan was clearly delighted by what he saw. + +I nudged him with an elbow. “Make a hardcopy,” I hissed. + +Instead of pitying me, he just airtyped a few commands and pages started to +roll out of a printer in the lab's corner. Anyone else would have made a big +deal out of it, but he just brought me into the discussion. + +If I needed proof that Lil and I were meant for each other, the designs she and +Suneep had come up with were more than enough. She'd been thinking just the way +I had—souvenirs that stressed the human scale of the Mansion. There were +miniature animatronics of the Hitchhiking Ghosts in a black-light box, their +skeletal robotics visible through their layers of plastic clothing; action +figures that communicated by IR, so that placing one in proximity with another +would unlock its Mansion-inspired behaviors—the raven cawed, Mme. Leota's head +incanted, the singing busts sang. She'd worked up some formal attire based on +the castmember costume, cut in this year's stylish lines. + +It was good merch, is what I'm trying to say. In my mind's eye, I was seeing +the relaunch of the Mansion in six months, filled with robotic avatars of +Mansion-nuts the world 'round, Mme. Leota's gift cart piled high with brilliant +swag, strolling human players ad-libbing with the guests in the queue area… + +Lil looked up from her mediated state and glared at me as I pored over the +hardcopy, nodding enthusiastically. + +“Passionate enough for you?” she snapped. + +I felt a flush creeping into face, my ears. It was somewhere between anger and +shame, and I reminded myself that I was more than a century older than her, and +it was my responsibility to be mature. Also, I'd started the fight. + +“This is fucking fantastic, Lil,” I said. Her look didn't soften. “Really +choice stuff. I had a great idea—” I ran it down for her, the avatars, the +robots, the rehab. She stopped glaring, started taking notes, smiling, showing +me her dimples, her slanted eyes crinkling at the corners. + +“This isn't easy,” she said, finally. Suneep, who'd been politely pretending +not to listen in, nodded involuntarily. Dan, too. + +“I know that,” I said. The flush burned hotter. “But that's the point—what +Debra does isn't easy either. It's risky, dangerous. It made her and her ad-hoc +better—it made them sharper.” /{Sharper than us, that's for sure}/. “They can +make decisions like this fast, and execute them just as quickly. We need to be +able to do that, too.” + +Was I really advocating being more like Debra? The words'd just popped out, but +I saw that I'd been right—we'd have to beat Debra at her own game, out-evolve +her ad-hocs. + +“I understand what you're saying,” Lil said. I could tell she was upset—she'd +reverted to castmemberspeak. “It's a very good idea. I think that we stand a +good chance of making it happen if we approach the group and put it to them, +after doing the research, building the plans, laying out the critical path, and +privately soliciting feedback from some of them.” + +I felt like I was swimming in molasses. At the rate that the Liberty Square +ad-hoc moved, we'd be holding formal requirements reviews while Debra's people +tore down the Mansion around us. So I tried a different tactic. + +“Suneep, you've been involved in some rehabs, right?” + +Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical animal being +drawn into a political discussion. + +“Okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan and asked you to pull +together a production schedule—one that didn't have any review, just take the +idea and run with it—and then pull it off, how long would it take you to +execute it?” + +Lil smiled primly. She'd dealt with Imagineering before. + +“About five years,” he said, almost instantly. + +“Five years?” I squawked. “Why five years? Debra's people overhauled the Hall +in a month!” + +“Oh, wait,” he said. “No review at all?” + +“No review. Just come up with the best way you can to do this, and do it. And +we can provide you with unlimited, skilled labor, three shifts around the +clock.” + +He rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers while muttering +under his breath. He was a tall, thin man with a shock of curly dark hair that +he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly stubby fingers while he thought. + +“About eight weeks,” he said. “Barring accidents, assuming off-the-shelf parts, +unlimited labor, capable management, material availability…” He trailed off +again, and his short fingers waggled as he pulled up a HUD and started making a +list. + +“Wait,” Lil said, alarmed. “How do you get from five years to eight weeks?” + +Now it was my turn to smirk. I'd seen how Imagineering worked when they were on +their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups—I knew that the real +bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, the ever-fluctuating +groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned their work. + +Suneep looked sheepish. “Well, if all I have to do is satisfy myself that my +plans are good and my buildings won't fall down, I can make it happen very +fast. Of course, my plans aren't perfect. Sometimes, I'll be halfway through a +project when someone suggests a new flourish or approach that makes the whole +thing immeasurably better. Then it's back to the drawing board… So I stay at +the drawing board for a long time at the start, get feedback from other +Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from focus groups and the Net. Then we do reviews +at every stage of construction, check to see if anyone has had a great idea we +haven't thought of and incorporate it, sometimes rolling back the work. + +“It's slow, but it works.” + +Lil was flustered. “But if you can do a complete revision in eight weeks, why +not just finish it, then plan another revision, do /{that}/ one in eight weeks, +and so on? Why take five years before anyone can ride the thing?” + +“Because that's how it's done,” I said to Lil. “But that's not how it /{has}/ +to be done. That's how we'll save the Mansion.” + +I felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that I was right. +Ad-hocracy was a great thing, a Bitchun thing, but the organization needed to +turn on a dime—that would be even /{more}/ Bitchun. + +“Lil,” I said, looking into her eyes, trying to burn my POV into her. “We have +to do this. It's our only chance. We'll recruit hundreds to come to Florida and +work on the rehab. We'll give every Mansion nut on the planet a shot at joining +up, then we'll recruit them again to work at it, to run the telepresence rigs. +We'll get buy-in from the biggest super-recommenders in the world, and we'll +build something better and faster than any ad-hoc ever has, without abandoning +the original Imagineers' vision. It will be unspeakably Bitchun.” + +Lil dropped her eyes and it was her turn to flush. She paced the floor, hands +swinging at her sides. I could tell that she was still angry with me, but +excited and scared and yes, passionate. + +“It's not up to me, you know,” she said at length, still pacing. Dan and I +exchanged wicked grins. She was in. + +“I know,” I said. But it was, almost—she was a real opinion-leader in the +Liberty Square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back and forth, someone who +made good, reasonable decisions and kept her head in a crisis. Not a hothead. +Not prone to taking radical switchbacks. This plan would burn up that +reputation and the Whuffie that accompanied it, in short order, but by the time +that happened, she'd have plenty of Whuffie with the new, thousands-strong +ad-hoc. + +“I mean, I can't guarantee anything. I'd like to study the plans that +Imagineering comes through with, do some walk-throughs—” + +I started to object, to remind her that speed was of the essence, but she beat +me to it. + +“But I won't. We have to move fast. I'm in.” + +She didn't come into my arms, didn't kiss me and tell me everything was +forgiven, but she bought in, and that was enough. + +My systems came back online sometime that day, and I hardly noticed, I was so +preoccupied with the new Mansion. Holy shit, was it ever audacious: since the +first Mansion opened in California in 1969, no one had ever had the guts to +seriously fuxor with it. Oh, sure, the Paris version, Phantom Manor, had a +slightly different storyline, but it was just a minor bit of tweakage to +satisfy the European market at the time. No one wanted to screw up the legend. + +What the hell made the Mansion so cool, anyway? I'd been to Disney World any +number of times as a guest before I settled in, and truth be told, it had never +been my absolute favorite. + +But when I returned to Disney World, live and in person, freshly bored stupid +by the three-hour liveheaded flight from Toronto, I'd found myself crowd-driven +to it. + +I'm a terrible, terrible person to visit theme-parks with. Since I was a punk +kid snaking my way through crowded subway platforms, eeling into the only seat +on a packed car, I'd been obsessed with Beating The Crowd. + +In the early days of the Bitchun Society, I'd known a blackjack player, a +compulsive counter of cards, an idiot savant of odds. He was a pudgy, +unassuming engineer, the moderately successful founder of a moderately +successful high-tech startup that had done something arcane with software +agents. While he was only moderately successful, he was fabulously wealthy: +he'd never raised a cent of financing for his company, and had owned it +outright when he finally sold it for a bathtub full of money. His secret was +the green felt tables of Vegas, where he'd pilgrim off to every time his bank +balance dropped, there to count the monkey-cards and calculate the odds and +Beat The House. + +Long after his software company was sold, long after he'd made his nut, he was +dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the tables, grinding out hand after +hand of twenty-one, for the sheer satisfaction of Beating The House. For him, +it was pure brain-reward, a jolt of happy-juice every time the dealer busted +and every time he doubled down on a deckfull of face cards. + +Though I'd never bought so much as a lottery ticket, I immediately got his +compulsion: for me, it was Beating The Crowd, finding the path of least +resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the short queue, dodging the traffic, +changing lanes with a whisper to spare—moving with precision and grace and, +above all, /{expedience}/. + +On that fateful return, I checked into the Fort Wilderness Campground, pitched +my tent, and fairly ran to the ferry docks to catch a barge over to the Main +Gate. + +Crowds were light until I got right up to Main Gate and the ticketing queues. +Suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the farthest one, beating my +ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said would have the shortest wait, I stepped +back and did a quick visual survey of the twenty kiosks and evaluated the +queued-up huddle in front of each. Pre-Bitchun, I'd have been primarily +interested in their ages, but that is less and less a measure of anything other +than outlook, so instead I carefully examined their queuing styles, their +dress, and more than anything, their burdens. + +You can tell more about someone's ability to efficiently negotiate the +complexities of a queue through what they carry than through any other means—if +only more people realized it. The classic, of course, is the unladen citizen, a +person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or marsupial pocket. To the +layperson, such a specimen might be thought of as a sure bet for a fast +transaction, but I'd done an informal study and come to the conclusion that +these brave iconoclasts are often the flightiest of the lot, left smiling with +bovine mystification, patting down their pockets in a fruitless search for a +writing implement, a piece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit's foot, a rosary, a tuna +sandwich. + +No, for my money, I'll take what I call the Road Worrier anytime. Such a person +is apt to be carefully slung with four or five carriers of one description or +another, from bulging cargo pockets to clever military-grade strap-on pouches +with biometrically keyed closures. The thing to watch for is the ergonomic +consideration given to these conveyances: do they balance, are they slung for +minimum interference and maximum ease of access? Someone who's given that much +consideration to their gear is likely spending their time in line determining +which bits and pieces they'll need when they reach its headwaters and is +holding them at ready for fastest-possible processing. + +This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders, gear-pigs who pack +/{everything}/ because they lack the organizational smarts to figure out what +they should pack—they're just as apt to be burdened with bags and pockets and +pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of that slinging. These pack mules +will sag beneath their loads, juggling this and that while pushing overloose +straps up on their shoulders. + +I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, a queue that was +slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and ticced nervously as I +watched my progress relative to the other spots I could've chosen. I was borne +out, a positive omen for a wait-free World, and I was sauntering down Main +Street, USA long before my ferrymates. + +Returning to Walt Disney World was a homecoming for me. My parents had brought +me the first time when I was all of ten, just as the first inklings of the +Bitchun society were trickling into everyone's consciousness: the death of +scarcity, the death of death, the struggle to rejig an economy that had grown +up focused on nothing but scarcity and death. My memories of the trip are dim +but warm, the balmy Florida climate and a sea of smiling faces punctuated by +magical, darkened moments riding in OmniMover cars, past diorama after diorama. + +I went again when I graduated high school and was amazed by the richness of +detail, the grandiosity and grandeur of it all. I spent a week there stunned +bovine, grinning and wandering from corner to corner. Someday, I knew, I'd come +to live there. + +The Park became a touchstone for me, a constant in a world where everything +changed. Again and again, I came back to the Park, grounding myself, communing +with all the people I'd been. + +That day I bopped from land to land, ride to ride, seeking out the short lines, +the eye of the hurricane that crowded the Park to capacity. I'd take high +ground, standing on a bench or hopping up on a fence, and do a visual reccy of +all the queues in sight, try to spot prevailing currents in the flow of the +crowd, generally having a high old obsessive time. Truth be told, I probably +spent as much time looking for walk-ins as I would've spent lining up like a +good little sheep, but I had more fun and got more exercise. + +The Haunted Mansion was experiencing a major empty spell: the Snow Crash +Spectacular parade had just swept through Liberty Square en route to +Fantasyland, dragging hordes of guests along with it, dancing to the JapRap +sounds of the comical Sushi-K and aping the movements of the brave Hiro +Protagonist. When they blew out, Liberty Square was a ghost town, and I grabbed +the opportunity to ride the Mansion five times in a row, walking on every time. + +The way I tell it to Lil, I noticed her and then I noticed the Mansion, but to +tell the truth it was the other way around. + +The first couple rides through, I was just glad of the aggressive air +conditioning and the delicious sensation of sweat drying on my skin. But on the +third pass, I started to notice just how goddamn cool the thing was. There +wasn't a single bit of tech more advanced than a film-loop projector in the +whole place, but it was all so cunningly contrived that the illusion of a +haunted house was perfect: the ghosts that whirled through the ballroom were +/{ghosts}/, three-dimensional and ethereal and phantasmic. The ghosts that sang +in comical tableaux through the graveyard were equally convincing, genuinely +witty and simultaneously creepy. + +My fourth pass through, I noticed the /{detail}/, the hostile eyes worked into +the wallpaper's pattern, the motif repeated in the molding, the chandeliers, +the photo gallery. I began to pick out the words to “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” the +song that is repeated throughout the ride, whether in sinister organ-tones +repeating the main theme troppo troppo or the spritely singing of the four +musical busts in the graveyard. + +It's a catchy tune, one that I hummed on my fifth pass through, this time +noticing that the overaggressive AC was, actually, mysterious chills that blew +through the rooms as wandering spirits made their presence felt. By the time I +debarked for the fifth time, I was whistling the tune with jazzy improvisations +in a mixed-up tempo. + +That's when Lil and I ran into each other. She was picking up a discarded +ice-cream wrapper—I'd seen a dozen castmembers picking up trash that day, seen +it so frequently that I'd started doing it myself. She grinned slyly at me as I +debarked into the fried-food-and-disinfectant perfume of the Park, hands in +pockets, thoroughly pleased with myself for having so completely +/{experienced}/ a really fine hunk of art. + +I smiled back at her, because it was only natural that one of the Whuffie-kings +who were privileged to tend this bit of heavenly entertainment should notice +how thoroughly I was enjoying her work. + +“That's really, really Bitchun,” I said to her, admiring the titanic mountains +of Whuffie my HUD attributed to her. + +She was in character, and not supposed to be cheerful, but castmembers of her +generation can't help but be friendly. She compromised between ghastly demeanor +and her natural sweet spirit, and leered a grin at me, thumped through a +zombie's curtsey, and moaned “Thank you—we /{do}/ try to keep it /{spirited}/.” + +I groaned appreciatively, and started to notice just how very cute she was, +this little button of a girl with her rotting maid's uniform and her +feather-shedding duster. She was just so clean and scrubbed and happy about +everything, she radiated it and made me want to pinch her cheeks—either set. + +The moment was on me, and so I said, “When do they let you ghouls off? I'd love +to take you out for a Zombie or a Bloody Mary.” + +Which led to more horrifying banter, and to my taking her out for a couple at +the Adventurer's Club, learning her age in the process and losing my nerve, +telling myself that there was nothing we could possibly have to say to each +other across a century-wide gap. + +While I tell Lil that I noticed her first and the Mansion second, the reverse +is indeed true. But it's also true—and I never told her this—that the thing I +love best about the Mansion is: + +It's where I met her. + +Dan and I spent the day riding the Mansion, drafting scripts for the +telepresence players who we hoped to bring on-board. We were in a totally +creative zone, the dialog running as fast as he could transcribe it. Jamming on +ideas with Dan was just about as terrific as a pass-time could be. + +I was all for leaking the plan to the Net right away, getting hearts-and-minds +action with our core audience, but Lil turned it down. + +She was going to spend the next couple days quietly politicking among the rest +of the ad-hoc, getting some support for the idea, and she didn't want the +appearance of impropriety that would come from having outsiders being brought +in before the ad-hoc. + +Talking to the ad-hocs, bringing them around—it was a skill I'd never really +mastered. Dan was good at it, Lil was good at it, but me, I think that I was +too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger +days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no +patience for explaining things in short words for mouth-breathers who just +didn't get it. + +The truth of the matter is, I'm a bright enough guy, but I'm hardly a genius. +Especially when it comes to people. Probably comes from Beating The Crowd, +never seeing individuals, just the mass—the enemy of expedience. + +I never would have made it into the Liberty Square ad-hoc on my own. Lil made +it happen for me, long before we started sleeping together. I'd assumed that +her folks would be my best allies in the process of joining up, but they were +too jaded, too ready to take the long sleep to pay much attention to a newcomer +like me. + +Lil took me under her wing, inviting me to after-work parties, talking me up to +her cronies, quietly passing around copies of my thesis-work. And she did the +same in reverse, sincerely extolling the virtues of the others I met, so that I +knew what there was to respect about them and couldn't help but treat them as +individuals. + +In the years since, I'd lost that respect. Mostly, I palled around with Lil, +and once he arrived, Dan, and with net-friends around the world. The ad-hocs +that I worked with all day treated me with basic courtesy but not much +friendliness. + +I guess I treated them the same. When I pictured them in my mind, they were a +faceless, passive-aggressive mass, too caught up in the starchy world of +consensus-building to ever do much of anything. + +Dan and I threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the Net for address lists +of Mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe, spreadsheeting them +against their timezones, temperaments, and, of course, their Whuffie. + +“That's weird,” I said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal I was +using—my systems were back offline. They'd been sputtering up and down for a +couple days now, and I kept meaning to go to the doctor, but I'd never gotten +'round to it. Periodically, I'd get a jolt of urgency when I remembered that +this meant my backup was stale-dating, but the Mansion always took precedence. + +“Huh?” he said. + +I tapped the display. “See these?” It was a fan-site, displaying a collection +of animated 3-D meshes of various elements of the Mansion, part of a giant +collaborative project that had been ongoing for decades, to build an accurate +3-D walkthrough of every inch of the Park. I'd used those meshes to build my +own testing fly-throughs. + +“Those are terrific,” Dan said. “That guy must be a total /{fiend}/.” The +meshes' author had painstakingly modeled, chained and animated every ghost in +the ballroom scene, complete with the kinematics necessary for full motion. +Where a “normal” fan-artist might've used a standard human kinematics library +for the figures, this one had actually written his own from the ground up, so +that the ghosts moved with a spectral fluidity that was utterly unhuman. + +“Who's the author?” Dan asked. “Do we have him on our list yet?” + +I scrolled down to display the credits. “I'll be damned,” Dan breathed. + +The author was Tim, Debra's elfin crony. He'd submitted the designs a week +before my assassination. + +“What do you think it means?” I asked Dan, though I had a couple ideas on the +subject myself. + +“Tim's a Mansion nut,” Dan said. “I knew that.” + +“You knew?” + +He looked a little defensive. “Sure. I told you, back when you had me hanging +out with Debra's gang.” + +Had I asked him to hang out with Debra? As I remembered it, it had been his +suggestion. Too much to think about. + +“But what does it mean, Dan? Is he an ally? Should we try to recruit him? Or is +he the one that'd convinced Debra she needs to take over the Mansion?” + +Dan shook his head. “I'm not even sure that she wants to take over the Mansion. +I know Debra, all she wants to do is turn ideas into things, as fast and as +copiously as possible. She picks her projects carefully. She's acquisitive, +sure, but she's cautious. She had a great idea for Presidents, and so she took +over. I never heard her talk about the Mansion.” + +“Of course you didn't. She's cagey. Did you hear her talk about the Hall of +Presidents?” + +Dan fumbled. “Not really… I mean, not in so many words, but—” + +“But nothing,” I said. “She's after the Mansion, she's after the Magic Kingdom, +she's after the Park. She's taking over, goddamn it, and I'm the only one who +seems to have noticed.” + +I came clean to Lil about my systems that night, as we were fighting. Fighting +had become our regular evening pastime, and Dan had taken to sleeping at one of +the hotels on-site rather than endure it. + +I'd started it, of course. “We're going to get killed if we don't get off our +asses and start the rehab,” I said, slamming myself down on the sofa and +kicking at the scratched coffee table. I heard the hysteria and unreason in my +voice and it just made me madder. I was frustrated by not being able to check +in on Suneep and Dan, and, as usual, it was too late at night to call anyone +and do anything about it. By the morning, I'd have forgotten again. + +From the kitchen, Lil barked back, “I'm doing what I can, Jules. If you've got +a better way, I'd love to hear about it.” + +“Oh, bullshit. I'm doing what I can, planning the thing out. I'm ready to +/{go}/. It was your job to get the ad-hocs ready for it, but you keep telling +me they're not. When will they be?” + +“Jesus, you're a nag.” + +“I wouldn't nag if you'd only fucking make it happen. What are you doing all +day, anyway? Working shifts at the Mansion? Rearranging deck chairs on the +Great Titanic Adventure?” + +“I'm working my fucking /{ass}/ off. I've spoken to every goddamn one of them +at least twice this week about it.” + +“Sure,” I hollered at the kitchen. “Sure you have.” + +“Don't take my word for it, then. Check my fucking phone logs.” + +She waited. + +“Well? Check them!” + +“I'll check them later,” I said, dreading where this was going. + +“Oh, no you /{don't}/,” she said, stalking into the room, fuming. “You can't +call me a liar and then refuse to look at the evidence.” She planted her hands +on her slim little hips and glared at me. She'd gone pale and I could count +every freckle on her face, her throat, her collarbones, the swell of her +cleavage in the old vee-neck shirt I'd given her on a day-trip to Nassau. + +“Well?” she asked. She looked ready to wring my neck. + +“I can't,” I admitted, not meeting her eyes. + +“Yes you can—here, I'll dump it to your public directory.” + +Her expression shifted to one of puzzlement when she failed to locate me on her +network. “What's going on?” + +So I told her. Offline, outcast, malfunctioning. + +“Well, why haven't you gone to the doctor? I mean, it's been /{weeks}/. I'll +call him right now.” + +“Forget it,” I said. “I'll see him tomorrow. No sense in getting him out of +bed.” + +But I didn't see him the day after, or the day after that. Too much to do, and +the only times I remembered to call someone, I was too far from a public +terminal or it was too late or too early. My systems came online a couple +times, and I was too busy with the plans for the Mansion. Lil grew accustomed +to the drifts of hard copy that littered the house, to printing out her +annotations to my designs and leaving them on my favorite chair—to living like +the cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by dead trees and ticking +clocks. + +Being offline helped me focus. Focus is hardly the word for it—I obsessed. I +sat in front of the terminal I'd brought home all day, every day, crunching +plans, dictating voicemail. People who wanted to reach me had to haul ass out +to the house, and /{speak}/ to me. + +I grew too obsessed to fight, and Dan moved back, and then it was my turn to +take hotel rooms so that the rattle of my keyboard wouldn't keep him up nights. +He and Lil were working a full-time campaign to recruit the ad-hoc to our +cause, and I started to feel like we were finally in harmony, about to reach +our goal. + +I went home one afternoon clutching a sheaf of hardcopy and burst into the +living room, gabbling a mile-a-minute about a wrinkle on my original plan that +would add a third walk-through segment to the ride, increasing the number of +telepresence rigs we could use without decreasing throughput. + +I was mid-babble when my systems came back online. The public chatter in the +room sprang up on my HUD. + +/{And then I'm going to tear off every stitch of clothing and jump you.}/ + +/{And then what?}/ + +/{I'm going to bang you till you limp.}/ + +/{Jesus, Lil, you are one rangy cowgirl.}/ + +My eyes closed, shutting out everything except for the glowing letters. +Quickly, they vanished. I opened my eyes again, looking at Lil, who was flushed +and distracted. Dan looked scared. + +“What's going on, Dan?” I asked quietly. My heart hammered in my chest, but I +felt calm and detached. + +“Jules,” he began, then gave up and looked at Lil. + +Lil had, by that time, figured out that I was back online, that their secret +messaging had been discovered. + +“Having fun, Lil?” I asked. + +Lil shook her head and glared at me. “Just go, Julius. I'll send your stuff to +the hotel.” + +“You want me to go, huh? So you can bang him till he limps?” + +“This is my house, Julius. I'm asking you to get out of it. I'll see you at +work tomorrow—we're having a general ad-hoc meeting to vote on the rehab.” + +It was her house. + +“Lil, Julius—” Dan began. + +“This is between me and him,” Lil said. “Stay out of it.” + +I dropped my papers—I wanted to throw them, but I dropped them, /{flump}/, and +I turned on my heel and walked out, not bothering to close the door behind me. + +Dan showed up at the hotel ten minutes after I did and rapped on my door. I was +all-over numb as I opened the door. He had a bottle of tequila—/{my}/ tequila, +brought over from the house that I'd shared with Lil. + +He sat down on the bed and stared at the logo-marked wallpaper. I took the +bottle from him, got a couple glasses from the bathroom and poured. + +“It's my fault,” he said. + +“I'm sure it is,” I said. + +“We got to drinking a couple nights ago. She was really upset. Hadn't seen you +in days, and when she /{did}/ see you, you freaked her out. Snapping at her. +Arguing. Insulting her.” + +“So you made her,” I said. + +He shook his head, then nodded, took a drink. “I did. It's been a long time +since I…” + +“You had sex with my girlfriend, in my house, while I was away, working.” + +“Jules, I'm sorry. I did it, and I kept on doing it. I'm not much of a friend +to either of you. + +“She's pretty broken up. She wanted me to come out here and tell you it was all +a mistake, that you were just being paranoid.” + +We sat in silence for a long time. I refilled his glass, then my own. + +“I couldn't do that,” he said. “I'm worried about you. You haven't been right, +not for months. I don't know what it is, but you should get to a doctor.” + +“I don't need a doctor,” I snapped. The liquor had melted the numbness and left +burning anger and bile, my constant companions. “I need a friend who doesn't +fuck my girlfriend when my back is turned.” + +I threw my glass at the wall. It bounced off, leaving tequila-stains on the +wallpaper, and rolled under the bed. Dan started, but stayed seated. If he'd +stood up, I would've hit him. Dan's good at crises. + +“If it's any consolation, I expect to be dead pretty soon,” he said. He gave me +a wry grin. “My Whuffie's doing good. This rehab should take it up over the +top. I'll be ready to go.” + +That stopped me. I'd somehow managed to forget that Dan, my good friend Dan, +was going to kill himself. + +“You're going to do it,” I said, sitting down next to him. It hurt to think +about it. I really liked the bastard. He might've been my best friend. + +There was a knock at the door. I opened it without checking the peephole. It +was Lil. + +She looked younger than ever. Young and small and miserable. A snide remark +died in my throat. I wanted to hold her. + +She brushed past me and went to Dan, who squirmed out of her embrace. + +“No,” he said, and stood up and sat on the windowsill, staring down at the +Seven Seas Lagoon. + +“Dan's just been explaining to me that he plans on being dead in a couple +months,” I said. “Puts a damper on the long-term plans, doesn't it, Lil?” + +Tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on herself. “I'll take +what I can get,” she said. + +I choked on a knob of misery, and I realized that it was Dan, not Lil, whose +loss upset me the most. + +Lil took Dan's hand and led him out of the room. + +/{I guess I'll take what I can get, too}/, I thought. + +1~ CHAPTER 6 + +Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan, I +pondered the possibility that I was nuts. + +It wasn't unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and even though +there were cures, they weren't pleasant. + +I was once married to a crazy person. We were both about 70, and I was living +for nothing but joy. Her name was Zoya, and I called her Zed. + +We met in orbit, where I'd gone to experience the famed low-gravity sybarites. +Getting staggering drunk is not much fun at one gee, but at ten to the neg +eight, it's a blast. You don't stagger, you /{bounce}/, and when you're +bouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing, happy, boisterous naked people, +things get deeply fun. + +I was bouncing around inside a clear sphere that was a mile in diameter, filled +with smaller spheres in which one could procure bulbs of fruity, deadly +concoctions. Musical instruments littered the sphere's floor, and if you knew +how to play, you'd snag one, tether it to you and start playing. Others would +pick up their own axes and jam along. The tunes varied from terrific to awful, +but they were always energetic. + +I had been working on my third symphony on and off, and whenever I thought I +had a nice bit nailed, I'd spend some time in the sphere playing it. Sometimes, +the strangers who jammed in gave me new and interesting lines of inquiry, and +that was good. Even when they didn't, playing an instrument was a fast track to +intriguing an interesting, naked stranger. + +Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded out barrelhouse runs in +quirky time as I carried the main thread of the movement on a cello. At first +it was irritating, but after a short while I came to a dawning comprehension of +what she was doing to my music, and it was really /{good}/. I'm a sucker for +musicians. + +We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously as spheres of +perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully into the hydrotropic +recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they were the perp who killed her +partner. + +I collapsed dramatically as the last note crashed through the bubble. The +singles, couples and groups stopped in midflight coitus to applaud. She took a +bow, untethered herself from the Steinway, and headed for the hatch. + +I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere, desperate to reach +the hatch before she did. I caught her as she was leaving. + +“Hey!” I said. “That was great! I'm Julius! How're you doing?” + +She reached out with both hands and squeezed my nose and my unit +simultaneously—not hard, you understand, but playfully. “Honk!” she said, and +squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoning chub-on. + +I chased after her. “Wait,” I called as she tumbled through the spoke of the +station towards the gravity. + +She had a pianist's body—re-engineered arms and hands that stretched for +impossible lengths, and she used them with a spacehand's grace, vaulting +herself forward at speed. I bumbled after her best as I could on my freshman +spacelegs, but by the time I reached the half-gee rim of the station, she was +gone. + +I didn't find her again until the next movement was done and I went to the +bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just getting warmed up when she passed +through the hatch and tied off to the piano. + +This time, I clamped the oboe under my arm and bopped over to her before +moistening the reed and blowing. I hovered over the piano's top, looking her in +the eye as we jammed. Her mood that day was 4/4 time and I-IV-V progressions, +in a feel that swung around from blues to rock to folk, teasing at the edge of +my own melodies. She noodled at me, I noodled back at her, and her eyes +crinkled charmingly whenever I managed a smidge of tuneful wit. + +She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, red downy fur, +like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter's style, suited to the climate-controlled, +soft-edged life in space. Fifty years later, I was dating Lil, another redhead, +but Zed was my first. + +I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements at the +keyboard, her comical moues of concentration when picking out a particularly +kicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a slow bridge or gave her a +solo. I was going to make this last as long as I could. Meanwhile, I maneuvered +my way between her and the hatch. + +When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but I summoned the +energy to zip over to the hatch and block it. She calmly untied and floated +over to me. + +I looked in her eyes, silvered slanted cat-eyes, eyes that I'd been staring +into all afternoon, and watched the smile that started at their corners and +spread right down to her long, elegant toes. She looked back at me, then, at +length, grabbed ahold of my joint again. + +“You'll do,” she said, and led me to her sleeping quarters, across the station. + +We didn't sleep. + +Zoya had been an early network engineer for the geosynch broadband +constellations that went up at the cusp of the world's ascent into Bitchunry. +She'd been exposed to a lot of hard rads and low gee and had generally become +pretty transhuman as time went by, upgrading with a bewildering array of +third-party enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes that saw through most of the +RF spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversible knee joints and a completely +mechanical spine that wasn't prone to any of the absolutely inane bullshit that +plagues the rest of us, like lower-back pain, intrascapular inflammation, +sciatica and slipped discs. + +I thought I lived for fun, but I didn't have anything on Zed. She only talked +when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing wouldn't do, and routinely +slapped upgrades into herself on the basis of any whim that crossed her mind, +like when she resolved to do a spacewalk bare-skinned and spent the afternoon +getting tin-plated and iron-lunged. + +I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to strangle her twice +as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a couple of days, floating around the +bubble, making crazy faces at its mirrored exterior. She had no way of knowing +if I was inside, but she assumed that I was watching. Or maybe she didn't, and +she was making faces for anyone's benefit. + +But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and her eyes full +of the stars she'd seen and her metallic skin cool with the breath of empty +space, and she led me a merry game of tag through the station, the mess hall +where we skidded sloppy through a wobbly ovoid of rice pudding, the greenhouses +where she burrowed like a gopher and shinnied like a monkey, the living +quarters and bubbles as we interrupted a thousand acts of coitus. + +You'd have thought that we'd have followed it up with an act of our own, and +truth be told, that was certainly my expectation when we started the game I +came to think of as the steeplechase, but we never did. Halfway through, I'd +lose track of carnal urges and return to a state of childlike innocence, living +only for the thrill of the chase and the giggly feeling I got whenever she +found some new, even-more-outrageous corner to turn. I think we became +legendary on the station, that crazy pair that's always zipping in and zipping +away, like having your party crashed by two naked, coed Marx Brothers. + +When I asked her to marry me, to return to Earth with me, to live with me until +the universe's mainspring unwound, she laughed, honked my nose and my willie +and shouted, “YOU'LL /{DO}/!” + +I took her home to Toronto and we took up residence ten stories underground in +overflow residence for the University. Our Whuffie wasn't so hot earthside, and +the endless institutional corridors made her feel at home while affording her +opportunities for mischief. + +But bit by bit, the mischief dwindled, and she started talking more. At first, +I admit I was relieved, glad that my strange, silent wife was finally acting +normal, making nice with the neighbors instead of pranking them with endless +honks and fanny-kicks and squirt guns. We gave up the steeplechase and she had +the doglegs taken out, her fur removed, her eyes unsilvered to a hazel that was +pretty and as fathomable as the silver had been inscrutable. + +We wore clothes. We entertained. I started to rehearse my symphony in +low-Whuffie halls and parks with any musicians I could drum up, and she came +out and didn't play, just sat to the side and smiled and smiled with a smile +that never went beyond her lips. + +She went nuts. + +She shat herself. She pulled her hair. She cut herself with knives. She accused +me of plotting to kill her. She set fire to the neighbors' apartments, wrapped +herself in plastic sheeting, dry-humped the furniture. + +She went nuts. She did it in broad strokes, painting the walls of our bedroom +with her blood, jagging all night through rant after rant. I smiled and nodded +and faced it for as long as I could, then I grabbed her and hauled her, kicking +like a mule, to the doctor's office on the second floor. She'd been dirtside +for a year and nuts for a month, but it took me that long to face up to it. + +The doc diagnosed nonchemical dysfunction, which was by way of saying that it +was her mind, not her brain, that was broken. In other words, I'd driven her +nuts. + +You can get counseling for nonchemical dysfunction, basically trying to talk it +out, learn to feel better about yourself. She didn't want to. + +She was miserable, suicidal, murderous. In the brief moments of lucidity that +she had under sedation, she consented to being restored from a backup that was +made before we came to Toronto. + +I was at her side in the hospital when she woke up. I had prepared a written +synopsis of the events since her last backup for her, and she read it over the +next couple days. + +“Julius,” she said, while I was making breakfast in our subterranean apartment. +She sounded so serious, so fun-free, that I knew immediately that the news +wouldn't be good. + +“Yes?” I said, setting out plates of bacon and eggs, steaming cups of coffee. + +“I'm going to go back to space, and revert to an older version.” She had a +shoulderbag packed, and she had traveling clothes on. + +/{Oh, shit.}/ “Great,” I said, with forced cheerfulness, making a mental +inventory of my responsibilities dirtside. “Give me a minute or two, I'll pack +up. I miss space, too.” + +She shook her head, and anger blazed in her utterly scrutable hazel eyes. “No. +I'm going back to who I was, before I met you.” + +It hurt, bad. I had loved the old, steeplechase Zed, had loved her fun and +mischief. The Zed she'd become after we wed was terrible and terrifying, but +I'd stuck with her out of respect for the person she'd been. + +Now she was off to restore herself from a backup made before she met me. She +was going to lop 18 months out of her life, start over again, revert to a saved +version. + +Hurt? It ached like a motherfucker. + +I went back to the station a month later, and saw her jamming in the sphere +with a guy who had three extra sets of arms depending from his hips. He +scuttled around the sphere while she played a jig on the piano, and when her +silver eyes lit on me, there wasn't a shred of recognition in them. She'd never +met me. + +I died some, too, putting the incident out of my head and sojourning to Disney +World, there to reinvent myself with a new group of friends, a new career, a +new life. I never spoke of Zed again—especially not to Lil, who hardly needed +me to pollute her with remembrances of my crazy exes. + +If I was nuts, it wasn't the kind of spectacular nuts that Zed had gone. It was +a slow, seething, ugly nuts that had me alienating my friends, sabotaging my +enemies, driving my girlfriend into my best friend's arms. + +I decided that I would see a doctor, just as soon as we'd run the rehab past +the ad-hoc's general meeting. I had to get my priorities straight. + +I pulled on last night's clothes and walked out to the Monorail station in the +main lobby. The platform was jammed with happy guests, bright and cheerful and +ready for a day of steady, hypermediated fun. I tried to make myself attend to +them as individuals, but try as I might, they kept turning into a crowd, and I +had to plant my feet firmly on the platform to keep from weaving among them to +the edge, the better to snag a seat. + +The meeting was being held over the Sunshine Tree Terrace in Adventureland, +just steps from where I'd been turned into a road-pizza by the +still-unidentified assassin. The Adventureland ad-hocs owed the Liberty Square +crew a favor since my death had gone down on their turf, so they had given us +use of their prize meeting room, where the Florida sun streamed through the +slats of the shutters, casting a hash of dust-filled shafts of light across the +room. The faint sounds of the tiki-drums and the spieling Jungle Cruise guides +leaked through the room, a low-key ambient buzz from two of the Park's oldest +rides. + +There were almost a hundred ad-hocs in the Liberty Square crew, almost all +second-gen castmembers with big, friendly smiles. They filled the room to +capacity, and there was much hugging and handshaking before the meeting came to +order. I was thankful that the room was too small for the /{de rigueur}/ ad-hoc +circle-of-chairs, so that Lil was able to stand at a podium and command a +smidge of respect. + +“Hi there!” she said, brightly. The weepy puffiness was still present around +her eyes, if you knew how to look for it, but she was expert at putting on a +brave face no matter what the ache. + +The ad-hocs roared back a collective, “Hi, Lil!” and laughed at their own corny +tradition. Oh, they sure were a barrel of laughs at the Magic Kingdom. + +“Everybody knows why we're here, right?” Lil said, with a self-deprecating +smile. She'd been lobbying hard for weeks, after all. “Does anyone have any +questions about the plans? We'd like to start executing right away.” + +A guy with deliberately boyish, wholesome features put his arm in the air. Lil +acknowledged him with a nod. “When you say ‘right away,’ do you mean—” + +I cut in. “Tonight. After this meeting. We're on an eight-week production +schedule, and the sooner we start, the sooner it'll be finished.” + +The crowd murmured, unsettled. Lil shot me a withering look. I shrugged. +Politics was not my game. + +Lil said, “Don, we're trying something new here, a really streamlined process. +The good part is, the process is /{short}/. In a couple months, we'll know if +it's working for us. If it's not, hey, we can turn it around in a couple +months, too. That's why we're not spending as much time planning as we usually +do. It won't take five years for the idea to prove out, so the risks are +lower.” + +Another castmember, a woman, apparent 40 with a round, motherly demeanor said, +“I'm all for moving fast—Lord knows, our pacing hasn't always been that hot. +But I'm concerned about all these new people you propose to recruit—won't +having more people slow us down when it comes to making new decisions?” + +/{No}/, I thought sourly, /{because the people I'm bringing in aren't addicted +to meetings}/. + +Lil nodded. “That's a good point, Lisa. The offer we're making to the +telepresence players is probationary—they don't get to vote until after we've +agreed that the rehab is a success.” + +Another castmember stood. I recognized him: Dave, a heavyset, self-important +jerk who loved to work the front door, even though he blew his spiel about half +the time. “Lillian,” he said, smiling sadly at her, “I think you're really +making a big mistake here. We love the Mansion, all of us, and so do the +guests. It's a piece of history, and we're its custodians, not its masters. +Changing it like this, well…” he shook his head. “It's not good stewardship. If +the guests wanted to walk through a funhouse with guys jumping out of the +shadows saying ‘booga-booga,’ they'd go to one of the Halloween Houses in their +hometowns. The Mansion's better than that. I can't be a part of this plan.” + +I wanted to knock the smug grin off his face. I'd delivered essentially the +same polemic a thousand times—in reference to Debra's work—and hearing it from +this jerk in reference to /{mine}/ made me go all hot and red inside. + +“Look,” I said. “If we don't do this, if we don't change things, they'll get +changed /{for}/ us. By someone else. The question, /{Dave}/, is whether a +responsible custodian lets his custodianship be taken away from him, or whether +he does everything he can to make sure that he's still around to ensure that +his charge is properly cared for. Good custodianship isn't sticking your head +in the sand.” + +I could tell I wasn't doing any good. The mood of the crowd was getting darker, +the faces more set. I resolved not to speak again until the meeting was done, +no matter what the provocation. + +Lil smoothed my remarks over, and fielded a dozen more, and it looked like the +objections would continue all afternoon and all night and all the next day, and +I felt woozy and overwrought and miserable all at the same time, staring at Lil +and her harried smile and her nervous smoothing of her hair over her ears. + +Finally, she called the question. By tradition, the votes were collected in +secret and publicly tabulated over the data-channels. The group's eyes +unfocussed as they called up HUDs and watched the totals as they rolled in. I +was offline and unable to vote or watch. + +At length, Lil heaved a relieved sigh and smiled, dropping her hands behind her +back. + +“All right then,” she said, over the crowd's buzz. “Let's get to work.” + +I stood up, saw Dan and Lil staring into each other's eyes, a meaningful glance +between new lovers, and I saw red. Literally. My vision washed over pink, and a +strobe pounded at the edges of my vision. I took two lumbering steps towards +them and opened my mouth to say something horrible, and what came out was +“Waaagh.” My right side went numb and my leg slipped out from under me and I +crashed to the floor. + +The slatted light from the shutters cast its way across my chest as I tried to +struggle up with my left arm, and then it all went black. + +I wasn't nuts after all. + +The doctor's office in the Main Street infirmary was clean and white and +decorated with posters of Jiminy Cricket in doctors' whites with an outsized +stethoscope. I came to on a hard pallet under a sign that reminded me to get a +check-up twice a year, by gum! and I tried to bring my hands up to shield my +eyes from the over bright light and the over-cheerful signage, and discovered +that I couldn't move my arms. Further investigation revealed that this was +because I was strapped down, in full-on four-point restraint. + +“Waaagh,” I said again. + +Dan's worried face swam into my field of vision, along with a serious-looking +doctor, apparent 70, with a Norman Rockwell face full of crow'sfeet and +smile-lines. + +“Welcome back, Julius. I'm Doctor Pete,” the doctor said, in a kindly voice +that matched the face. Despite my recent disillusion with castmember bullshit, +I found his schtick comforting. + +I slumped back against the pallet while the doc shone lights in my eyes and +consulted various diagnostic apparati. I bore it in stoic silence, too +confounded by the horrible Waaagh sounds to attempt more speech. The doc would +tell me what was going on when he was ready. + +“Does he need to be tied up still?” Dan asked, and I shook my head urgently. +Being tied up wasn't my idea of a good time. + +The doc smiled kindly. “I think it's for the best, for now. Don't worry, +Julius, we'll have you up and about soon enough.” + +Dan protested, but stopped when the doc threatened to send him out of the room. +He took my hand instead. + +My nose itched. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse, until it was +all I could think of, the flaming lance of itch that strobed at the tip of my +nostril. Furiously, I wrinkled my face, rattled at my restraints. The doc +absentmindedly noticed my gyrations and delicately scratched my nose with a +gloved finger. The relief was fantastic. I just hoped my nuts didn't start +itching anytime soon. + +Finally, the doctor pulled up a chair and did something that caused the head of +the bed to raise up so that I could look him in the eye. + +“Well, now,” he said, stroking his chin. “Julius, you've got a problem. Your +friend here tells me your systems have been offline for more than a month. It +sure would've been better if you'd come in to see me when it started up. + +“But you didn't, and things got worse.” He nodded up at Jiminy Cricket's +recriminations: Go ahead, see your doc! “It's good advice, son, but what's done +is done. You were restored from a backup about eight weeks ago, I see. Without +more tests, I can't be sure, but my theory is that the brain-machine interface +they installed at that time had a material defect. It's been deteriorating ever +since, misfiring and rebooting. The shut-downs are a protective mechanism, +meant to keep it from introducing the kind of seizure you experienced this +afternoon. When the interface senses malfunction, it shuts itself down and +boots a diagnostic mode, attempts to fix itself and come back online. + +“Well, that's fine for minor problems, but in cases like this, it's bad news. +The interface has been deteriorating steadily, and it's only a matter of time +before it does some serious damage.” + +“Waaagh?” I asked. I meant to say, /{All right, but what's wrong with my +mouth?}/ + +The doc put a finger to my lips. “Don't try. The interface has locked up, and +it's taken some of your voluntary nervous processes with it. In time, it'll +probably shut down, but for now, there's no point. That's why we've got you +strapped down—you were thrashing pretty hard when they brought you in, and we +didn't want you to hurt yourself.” + +/{Probably shut down}/? Jesus. I could end up stuck like this forever. I +started shaking. + +The doc soothed me, stroking my hand, and in the process pressed a transdermal +on my wrist. The panic receded as the transdermal's sedative oozed into my +bloodstream. + +“There, there,” he said. “It's nothing permanent. We can grow you a new clone +and refresh it from your last backup. Unfortunately, that backup is a few +months old. If we'd caught it earlier, we may've been able to salvage a current +backup, but given the deterioration you've displayed to date… Well, there just +wouldn't be any point.” + +My heart hammered. I was going to lose two months—lose it all, never happened. +My assassination, the new Hall of Presidents and my shameful attempt thereon, +the fights with Lil, Lil and Dan, the meeting. My plans for the rehab! All of +it, good and bad, every moment flensed away. + +I couldn't do it. I had a rehab to finish, and I was the only one who +understood how it had to be done. Without my relentless prodding, the ad-hocs +would surely revert to their old, safe ways. They might even leave it +half-done, halt the process for an interminable review, present a soft belly +for Debra to savage. + +I wouldn't be restoring from backup. + +I had two more seizures before the interface finally gave up and shut itself +down. I remember the first, a confusion of vision-occluding strobes and +uncontrollable thrashing and the taste of copper, but the second happened +without waking me from deep unconsciousness. + +When I came to again in the infirmary, Dan was still there. He had a day's +growth of beard and new worrylines at the corners of his newly rejuvenated +eyes. The doctor came in, shaking his head. + +“Well, now, it seems like the worst is over. I've drawn up the consent forms +for the refresh and the new clone will be ready in an hour or two. In the +meantime, I think heavy sedation is in order. Once the restore's been +completed, we'll retire this body for you and we'll be all finished up.” + +Retire this body? Kill me, is what it meant. + +“No,” I said. I thrilled in my restraints: my voice was back under my control! + +“Oh, really now.” The doc lost his bedside manner, let his exasperation slip +through. “There's nothing else for it. If you'd come to me when it all started, +well, we might've had other options. You've got no one to blame but yourself.” + +“No,” I repeated. “Not now. I won't sign.” + +Dan put his hand on mine. I tried to jerk out from under it, but the restraints +and his grip held me fast. “You've got to do it, Julius. It's for the best,” he +said. + +“I'm not going to let you kill me,” I said, through clenched teeth. His +fingertips were callused, worked rough with exertion well beyond the normal +call of duty. + +“No one's killing you, son,” the doctor said. Son, son, son. Who knew how old +he was? He could be 18 for all I knew. “It's just the opposite: we're saving +you. If you continue like this, it will only get worse. The seizures, mental +breakdown, the whole melon going soft. You don't want that.” + +I thought of Zed's spectacular transformation into a crazy person. /{No, I sure +don't}/. “I don't care about the interface. Chop it out. I can't do it now.” I +swallowed. “Later. After the rehab. Eight more weeks.” + +The irony! Once the doc knew I was serious, he sent Dan out of the room and +rolled his eyes up while he placed a call. I saw his gorge work as he +subvocalized. He left me bound to the table, to wait. + +No clocks in the infirmary, and no internal clock, and it may have been ten +minutes or five hours. I was catheterized, but I didn't know it until urgent +necessity made the discovery for me. + +When the doc came back, he held a small device that I instantly recognized: a +HERF gun. + +Oh, it wasn't the same model I'd used on the Hall of Presidents. This one was +smaller, and better made, with the precise engineering of a surgical tool. The +doc raised his eyebrows at me. “You know what this is,” he said, flatly. A dim +corner of my mind gibbered, /{he knows, he knows, the Hall of Presidents}/. But +he didn't know. That episode was locked in my mind, invulnerable to backup. + +“I know,” I said. + +“This one is high-powered in the extreme. It will penetrate the interface's +shielding and fuse it. It probably won't turn you into a vegetable. That's the +best I can do. If this fails, we will restore you from your last backup. You +have to sign the consent before I use it.” He'd dropped all kindly pretense +from his voice, not bothering to disguise his disgust. I was pitching out the +miracle of the Bitchun Society, the thing that had all but obsoleted the +medical profession: why bother with surgery when you can grow a clone, take a +backup, and refresh the new body? Some people swapped corpuses just to get rid +of a cold. + +I signed. The doc wheeled my gurney into the crash and hum of the utilidors and +then put it on a freight tram that ran to the Imagineering compound, and thence +to a heavy, exposed Faraday cage. Of course: using the HERF on me would kill +any electronics in the neighborhood. They had to shield me before they pulled +the trigger. + +The doc placed the gun on my chest and loosened my restraints. He sealed the +cage and retreated to the lab's door. He pulled a heavy apron and helmet with +faceguard from a hook beside the door. + +“Once I am outside the door, point it at your head and pull the trigger. I'll +come back in five minutes. Once I am in the room, place the gun on the floor +and do not touch it. It is only good for a single usage, but I have no desire +to find out I'm wrong.” + +He closed the door. I took the pistol in my hand. It was heavy, dense with its +stored energy, the tip a parabolic hollow to better focus its cone. + +I lifted the gun to my temple and let it rest there. My thumb found the +trigger-stud. + +I paused. This wouldn't kill me, but it might lock the interface forever, +paralyzing me, turning me into a thrashing maniac. I knew that I would never be +able to pull the trigger. The doc must've known, too—this was his way of +convincing me to let him do that restore. + +I opened my mouth to call the doc, and what came out was “Waaagh!” + +The seizure started. My arm jerked and my thumb nailed the stud, and there was +an ozone tang. The seizure stopped. + +I had no more interface. + +The doc looked sour and pinched when he saw me sitting up on the gurney, +rubbing at my biceps. He produced a handheld diagnostic tool and pointed it at +my melon, then pronounced every bit of digital microcircuitry in it dead. For +the first time since my twenties, I was no more advanced than nature had made +me. + +The restraints left purple bruises at my wrists and ankles, where I'd thrashed +against them. I hobbled out of the Faraday cage and the lab under my own power, +but just barely, my muscles groaning from the inadvertent isometric exercises +of my seizure. + +Dan was waiting in the utilidor, crouched and dozing against the wall. The doc +shook him awake and his head snapped up, his hand catching the doc's in a +lightning-quick reflex. It was easy to forget Dan's old line of work here in +the Magic Kingdom, but when he smoothly snagged the doc's arm and sprang to his +feet, eyes hard and alert, I remembered. My old pal, the action hero. + +Quickly, Dan released the doc and apologized. He assessed my physical state and +wordlessly wedged his shoulder in my armpit, supporting me. I didn't have the +strength to stop him. I needed sleep. + +“I'm taking you home,” he said. “We'll fight Debra off tomorrow.” + +“Sure,” I said, and boarded the waiting tram. + +But we didn't go home. Dan took me back to my hotel, the Contemporary, and +brought me up to my door. He keycarded the lock and stood awkwardly as I +hobbled into the empty room that was my new home, as I collapsed into the bed +that was mine now. + +With an apologetic look, he slunk away, back to Lil and the house we'd shared. + +I slapped on a sedative transdermal that the doc had given me, and added a +mood-equalizer that he'd recommended to control my “personality swings.” In +seconds, I was asleep. + +1~ CHAPTER 7 + +The meds helped me cope with the next couple of days, starting the rehab on the +Mansion. We worked all night erecting a scaffolding around the facade, though +no real work would be done on it—we wanted the appearance of rapid progress, +and besides, I had an idea. + +I worked alongside Dan, using him as a personal secretary, handling my calls, +looking up plans, monitoring the Net for the first grumblings as the +Disney-going public realized that the Mansion was being taken down for a +full-blown rehab. We didn't exchange any unnecessary words, standing side by +side without ever looking into one another's eyes. I couldn't really feel +awkward around Dan, anyway. He never let me, and besides we had our hands full +directing disappointed guests away from the Mansion. A depressing number of +them headed straight for the Hall of Presidents. + +We didn't have to wait long for the first panicked screed about the Mansion to +appear. Dan read it aloud off his HUD: “Hey! Anyone hear anything about +scheduled maintenance at the HM? I just buzzed by on the way to the new H of +P's and it looks like some big stuff's afoot—scaffolding, castmembers swarming +in and out, see the pic. I hope they're not screwing up a good thing. BTW, +don't miss the new H of P's—very Bitchun.” + +“Right,” I said. “Who's the author, and is he on the list?” + +Dan cogitated a moment. “/{She}/ is Kim Wright, and she's on the list. Good +Whuffie, lots of Mansion fanac, big readership.” + +“Call her,” I said. + +This was the plan: recruit rabid fans right away, get 'em in costume, and put +'em up on the scaffolds. Give them outsized, bat-adorned tools and get them to +play at construction activity in thumpy, undead pantomime. In time, Suneep and +his gang would have a batch of telepresence robots up and running, and we'd +move to them, get them wandering the queue area, interacting with curious +guests. The new Mansion would be open for business in 48 hours, albeit in +stripped-down fashion. The scaffolding made for a nice weenie, a visual draw +that would pull the hordes that thronged Debra's Hall of Presidents over for a +curious peek or two. Buzz city. + +I'm a pretty smart guy. + +Dan paged this Kim person and spoke to her as she was debarking the Pirates of +the Caribbean. I wondered if she was the right person for the job: she seemed +awfully enamored of the rehabs that Debra and her crew had performed. If I'd +had more time, I would've run a deep background check on every one of the names +on my list, but that would've taken months. + +Dan made some small talk with Kim, speaking aloud in deference to my handicap, +before coming to the point. “We read your post about the Mansion's rehab. +You're the first one to notice it, and we wondered if you'd be interested in +coming by to find out a little more about our plans.” + +Dan winced. “She's a screamer,” he whispered. + +Reflexively, I tried to pull up a HUD with my files on the Mansion fans we +hoped to recruit. Of course, nothing happened. I'd done that a dozen times that +morning, and there was no end in sight. I couldn't seem to get lathered up +about it, though, nor about anything else, not even the hickey just visible +under Dan's collar. The transdermal mood-balancer on my bicep was seeing to +that—doctor's orders. + +“Fine, fine. We're standing by the Pet Cemetery, two cast members, male, in +Mansion costumes. About five-ten, apparent 30. You can't miss us.” + +She didn't. She arrived out of breath and excited, jogging. She was apparent +20, and dressed like a real 20 year old, in a hipster climate-control cowl that +clung to and released her limbs, which were long and double-kneed. All the rage +among the younger set, including the girl who'd shot me. + +But the resemblance to my killer ended with her dress and body. She wasn't +wearing a designer face, rather one that had enough imperfections to be the one +she was born with, eyes set close and nose wide and slightly squashed. + +I admired the way she moved through the crowd, fast and low but without +jostling anyone. “Kim,” I called as she drew near. “Over here.” + +She gave a happy shriek and made a beeline for us. Even charging full-bore, she +was good enough at navigating the crowd that she didn't brush against a single +soul. When she reached us, she came up short and bounced a little. “Hi, I'm +Kim!” she said, pumping my arm with the peculiar violence of the extra-jointed. +“Julius,” I said, then waited while she repeated the process with Dan. + +“So,” she said, “what's the deal?” + +I took her hand. “Kim, we've got a job for you, if you're interested.” + +She squeezed my hand hard and her eyes shone. “I'll take it!” she said. + +I laughed, and so did Dan. It was a polite, castmembery sort of laugh, but +underneath it was relief. “I think I'd better explain it to you first,” I said. + +“Explain away!” she said, and gave my hand another squeeze. + +I let go of her hand and ran down an abbreviated version of the rehab plans, +leaving out anything about Debra and her ad-hocs. Kim drank it all in greedily. +She cocked her head at me as I ran it down, eyes wide. It was disconcerting, +and I finally asked, “Are you recording this?” + +Kim blushed. “I hope that's okay! I'm starting a new Mansion scrapbook. I have +one for every ride in the Park, but this one's gonna be a world-beater!” + +Here was something I hadn't thought about. Publishing ad-hoc business was tabu +inside Park, so much so that it hadn't occurred to me that the new castmembers +we brought in would want to record every little detail and push it out over the +Net as a big old Whuffie collector. + +“I can switch it off,” Kim said. She looked worried, and I really started to +grasp how important the Mansion was to the people we were recruiting, how much +of a privilege we were offering them. + +“Leave it rolling,” I said. “Let's show the world how it's done.” + +We led Kim into a utilidor and down to costuming. She was half-naked by the +time we got there, literally tearing off her clothes in anticipation of getting +into character. Sonya, a Liberty Square ad-hoc that we'd stashed at costuming, +already had clothes waiting for her, a rotting maid's uniform with an oversized +toolbelt. + +We left Kim on the scaffolding, energetically troweling a water-based cement +substitute onto the wall, scraping it off and moving to a new spot. It looked +boring to me, but I could believe that we'd have to tear her away when the time +came. + +We went back to trawling the Net for the next candidate. + +By lunchtime, there were ten drilling, hammering, troweling new castmembers +around the scaffolding, pushing black wheelbarrows, singing “Grim Grinning +Ghosts” and generally having a high old time. + +“This'll do,” I said to Dan. I was exhausted and soaked with sweat, and the +transdermal under my costume itched. Despite the happy-juice in my bloodstream, +a streak of uncastmemberly crankiness was shot through my mood. I needed to get +offstage. + +Dan helped me hobble away, and as we hit the utilidor, he whispered in my ear, +“This was a great idea, Julius. Really.” + +We jumped a tram over to Imagineering, my chest swollen with pride. Suneep had +three of his assistants working on the first generation of mobile telepresence +robots for the exterior, and had promised a prototype for that afternoon. The +robots were easy enough—just off-the-shelf stuff, really—but the costumes and +kinematics routines were something else. Thinking about what he and Suneep's +gang of hypercreative super-geniuses would come up with cheered me up a little, +as did being out of the public eye. + +Suneep's lab looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Imagineer packs rolled +in and out with arcane gizmos, or formed tight argumentative knots in the +corners as they shouted over whatever their HUDs were displaying. In the middle +of it all was Suneep, who looked like he was barely restraining an urge to +shout Yippee! He was clearly in his element. + +He threw his arms open when he caught sight of Dan and me, threw them wide +enough to embrace the whole mad, gibbering chaos. “What wonderful flumgubbery!” +he shouted, over the noise. + +“Sure is,” I agreed. “How's the prototype coming?” + +Suneep waved absently, his short fingers describing trivialities in the air. +“In due time, in due time. I've put that team onto something else, a kinematics +routine for a class of flying spooks that use gasbags to stay aloft—silent and +scary. It's old spy-tech, and the retrofit's coming tremendously. Take a look!” +He pointed a finger at me and, presumably, squirted some data my way. + +“I'm offline,” I reminded him gently. + +He slapped his forehead, took a moment to push his hair off his face, and gave +me an apologetic wave. “Of course, of course. Here.” He unrolled an LCD and +handed it to me. A flock of spooks danced on the screen, rendered against the +ballroom scene. They were thematically consistent with the existing Mansion +ghosts, more funny than scary, and their faces were familiar. I looked around +the lab and realized that they'd caricatured various Imagineers. + +“Ah! You noticed,” Suneep said, rubbing his hands together. “A very good joke, +yes?” + +“This is terrific,” I said, carefully. “But I really need some robots up and +running by tomorrow night, Suneep. We discussed this, remember?” Without +telepresence robots, my recruiting would be limited to fans like Kim, who lived +in the area. I had broader designs than that. + +Suneep looked disappointed. “Of course. We discussed it. I don't like to stop +my people when they have good ideas, but there's a time and a place. I'll put +them on it right away. Leave it to me.” + +Dan turned to greet someone, and I looked to see who it was. Lil. Of course. +She was raccoon-eyed with fatigue, and she reached out for Dan's hand, saw me, +and changed her mind. + +“Hi, guys,” she said, with studied casualness. + +“Oh, hello!” said Suneep. He fired his finger at her—the flying ghosts, I +imagined. Lil's eyes rolled up for a moment, then she nodded exhaustedly at +him. + +“Very good,” she said. “I just heard from Lisa. She says the indoor crews are +on-schedule. They've got most of the animatronics dismantled, and they're +taking down the glass in the Ballroom now.” The Ballroom ghost effects were +accomplished by means of a giant pane of polished glass that laterally bisected +the room. The Mansion had been built around it—it was too big to take out in +one piece. “They say it'll be a couple days before they've got it cut up and +ready to remove.” + +A pocket of uncomfortable silence descended on us, the roar of the Imagineers +rushing in to fill it. + +“You must be exhausted,” Dan said, at length. + +“Goddamn right,” I said, at the same moment that Lil said, “I guess I am.” + +We both smiled wanly. Suneep put his arms around Lil's and my shoulders and +squeezed. He smelled of an exotic cocktail of industrial lubricant, ozone, and +fatigue poisons. + +“You two should go home and give each other a massage,” he said. “You've earned +some rest.” + +Dan met my eye and shook his head apologetically. I squirmed out from under +Suneep's arm and thanked him quietly, then slunk off to the Contemporary for a +hot tub and a couple hours of sleep. + +I came back to the Mansion at sundown. It was cool enough that I took a surface +route, costume rolled in a shoulderbag, instead of riding through the +clattering, air-conditioned comfort of the utilidors. + +As a freshening breeze blew across me, I suddenly had a craving for /{real}/ +weather, the kind of climate I'd grown up with in Toronto. It was October, for +chrissakes, and a lifetime of conditioning told me that it was May. I stopped +and leaned on a bench for a moment and closed my eyes. Unbidden, and with the +clarity of a HUD, I saw High Park in Toronto, clothed in its autumn colors, +fiery reds and oranges, shades of evergreen and earthy brown. God, I needed a +vacation. + +I opened my eyes and realized that I was standing in front of the Hall of +Presidents, and that there was a queue ahead of me for it, one that stretched +back and back. I did a quick sum in my head and sucked air between my teeth: +they had enough people for five or six full houses waiting here—easily an +hour's wait. The Hall /{never}/ drew crowds like this. Debra was working the +turnstiles in Betsy Ross gingham, and she caught my eye and snapped a nod at +me. + +I stalked off to the Mansion. A choir of zombie-shambling new recruits had +formed up in front of the gate, and were groaning their way through “Grim +Grinning Ghosts,” with a new call-and-response structure. A small audience +participated, urged on by the recruits on the scaffolding. + +“Well, at least that's going right,” I muttered to myself. And it was, except +that I could see members of the ad-hoc looking on from the sidelines, and the +looks weren't kindly. Totally obsessive fans are a good measure of a ride's +popularity, but they're kind of a pain in the ass, too. They lipsynch the +soundtrack, cadge souvenirs and pester you with smarmy, show-off questions. +After a while, even the cheeriest castmember starts to lose patience, develop +an automatic distaste for them. + +The Liberty Square ad-hocs who were working on the Mansion had been railroaded +into approving a rehab, press-ganged into working on it, and were now forced to +endure the company of these grandstanding megafans. If I'd been there when it +all started—instead of sleeping!—I may've been able to massage their bruised +egos, but now I wondered if it was too late. + +Nothing for it but to do it. I ducked into a utilidor, changed into my costume +and went back onstage. I joined the call-and-response enthusiastically, walking +around to the ad-hocs and getting them to join in, reluctantly or otherwise. + +By the time the choir retired, sweaty and exhausted, a group of ad-hocs were +ready to take their place, and I escorted my recruits to an offstage +break-room. + +Suneep didn't deliver the robot prototypes for a week, and told me that it +would be another week before I could have even five production units. Though he +didn't say it, I got the sense that his guys were out of control, so excited by +the freedom from ad-hoc oversight that they were running wild. Suneep himself +was nearly a wreck, nervous and jumpy. I didn't press it. + +Besides, I had problems of my own. The new recruits were multiplying. I was +staying on top of the fan response to the rehab from a terminal I'd had +installed in my hotel room. Kim and her local colleagues were fielding millions +of hits every day, their Whuffie accumulating as envious fans around the world +logged in to watch their progress on the scaffolding. + +That was all according to plan. What wasn't according to plan was that the new +recruits were doing their own recruiting, extending invitations to their +net-pals to come on down to Florida, bunk on their sofas and guest-beds, and +present themselves to me for active duty. + +The tenth time it happened, I approached Kim in the break-room. Her gorge was +working, her eyes tracked invisible words across the middle distance. No doubt +she was penning yet another breathless missive about the magic of working in +the Mansion. “Hey, there,” I said. “Have you got a minute to meet with me?” + +She held up a single finger, then, a moment later, gave me a bright smile. + +“Hi, Julius!” she said. “Sure!” + +“Why don't you change into civvies, we'll take a walk through the Park and +talk?” + +Kim wore her costume every chance she got. I'd been quite firm about her +turning it in to the laundry every night instead of wearing it home. + +Reluctantly, she stepped into a change-room and switched into her cowl. We took +the utilidor to the Fantasyland exit and walked through the late-afternoon rush +of children and their adults, queued deep and thick for Snow White, Dumbo and +Peter Pan. + +“How're you liking it here?” I asked. + +Kim gave a little bounce. “Oh, Julius, it's the best time of my life, really! A +dream come true. I'm meeting so many interesting people, and I'm really feeling +creative. I can't wait to try out the telepresence rigs, too.” + +“Well, I'm really pleased with what you and your friends are up to here. You're +working hard, putting on a good show. I like the songs you've been working up, +too.” + +She did one of those double-kneed shuffles that was the basis of any number of +action vids those days and she was suddenly standing in front of me, hand on my +shoulder, looking into my eyes. She looked serious. + +“Is there a problem, Julius? If there is, I'd rather we just talked about it, +instead of making chitchat.” + +I smiled and took her hand off my shoulder. “How old are you, Kim?” + +“Nineteen,” she said. “What's the problem?” + +Nineteen! Jesus, no wonder she was so volatile. /{What's my excuse, then?}/ + +“It's not a problem, Kim, it's just something I wanted to discuss with you. The +people you-all have been bringing down to work for me, they're all really great +castmembers.” + +“But?” + +“But we have limited resources around here. Not enough hours in the day for me +to stay on top of the new folks, the rehab, everything. Not to mention that +until we open the new Mansion, there's a limited number of extras we can use +out front. I'm concerned that we're going to put someone on stage without +proper training, or that we're going to run out of uniforms; I'm also concerned +about people coming all the way here and discovering that there aren't any +shifts for them to take.” + +She gave me a relieved look. “Is /{that}/ all? Don't worry about it. I've been +talking to Debra, over at the Hall of Presidents, and she says she can pick up +any people who can't be used at the Mansion—we could even rotate back and +forth!” She was clearly proud of her foresight. + +My ears buzzed. Debra, one step ahead of me all along the way. She probably +suggested that Kim do some extra recruiting in the first place. She'd take in +the people who came down to work the Mansion, convince them they'd been hard +done by the Liberty Square crew, and rope them into her little Whuffie ranch, +the better to seize the Mansion, the Park, the whole of Walt Disney World. + +“Oh, I don't think it'll come to that,” I said, carefully. “I'm sure we can +find a use for them all at the Mansion. More the merrier.” + +Kim cocked quizzical, but let it go. I bit my tongue. The pain brought me back +to reality, and I started planning costume production, training rosters, +bunking. God, if only Suneep would finish the robots! + +“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I said, hotly. + +Lil folded her arms and glared. “No, Julius. It won't fly. The group is already +upset that all the glory is going to the new people, they'll never let us bring +more in. They also won't stop working on the rehab to train them, costume them, +feed them and mother them. They're losing Whuffie every day that the Mansion's +shut up, and they don't want any more delays. Dave's already joined up with +Debra, and I'm sure he's not the last one.” + +Dave—the jerk who'd pissed all over the rehab in the meeting. Of course he'd +gone over. Lil and Dan stood side by side on the porch of the house where I'd +lived. I'd driven out that night to convince Lil to sell the ad-hocs on +bringing in more recruits, but it wasn't going according to plan. They wouldn't +even let me in the house. + +“So what do I tell Kim?” + +“Tell her whatever you want,” Lil said. “You brought her in—you manage her. +Take some goddamn responsibility for once in your life.” + +It wasn't going to get any better. Dan gave me an apologetic look. Lil glared a +moment longer, then went into the house. + +“Debra's doing real well,” he said. “The net's all over her. Biggest thing +ever. Flash-baking is taking off in nightclubs, dance mixes with the DJ's +backup being shoved in bursts into the dancers.” + +“God,” I said. “I fucked up, Dan. I fucked it all up.” + +He didn't say anything, and that was the same as agreeing. + +Driving back to the hotel, I decided I needed to talk to Kim. She was a problem +I didn't need, and maybe a problem I could solve. I pulled a screeching U-turn +and drove the little runabout to her place, a tiny condo in a crumbling complex +that had once been a gated seniors' village, pre-Bitchun. + +Her place was easy to spot. All the lights were burning, faint conversation +audible through the screen door. I jogged up the steps two at a time, and was +about to knock when a familiar voice drifted through the screen. + +Debra, saying: “Oh yes, oh yes! Terrific idea! I'd never really thought about +using streetmosphere players to liven up the queue area, but you're making a +lot of sense. You people have just been doing the /{best}/ work over at the +Mansion—find me more like you and I'll take them for the Hall any day!” + +I heard Kim and her young friends chatting excitedly, proudly. The anger and +fear suffused me from tip to toe, and I felt suddenly light and cool and ready +to do something terrible. + +I padded silently down the steps and got into my runabout. + +Some people never learn. I'm one of them, apparently. + +I almost chortled over the foolproof simplicity of my plan as I slipped in +through the cast entrance using the ID card I'd scored when my systems went +offline and I was no longer able to squirt my authorization at the door. + +I changed clothes in a bathroom on Main Street, switching into a black cowl +that completely obscured my features, then slunk through the shadows along the +storefronts until I came to the moat around Cinderella's castle. Keeping low, I +stepped over the fence and duck-walked down the embankment, then slipped into +the water and sloshed across to the Adventureland side. + +Slipping along to the Liberty Square gateway, I flattened myself in doorways +whenever I heard maintenance crews passing in the distance, until I reached the +Hall of Presidents, and in a twinkling I was inside the theater itself. + +Humming the Small World theme, I produced a short wrecking bar from my cowl's +tabbed pocket and set to work. + +The primary broadcast units were hidden behind a painted scrim over the stage, +and they were surprisingly well built for a first generation tech. I really +worked up a sweat smashing them, but I kept at it until not a single component +remained recognizable. The work was slow and loud in the silent Park, but it +lulled me into a sleepy reverie, an autohypnotic swing-bang-swing-bang timeless +time. To be on the safe side, I grabbed the storage units and slipped them into +the cowl. + +Locating their backup units was a little trickier, but years of hanging out at +the Hall of Presidents while Lil tinkered with the animatronics helped me. I +methodically investigated every nook, cranny and storage area until I located +them, in what had been a break-room closet. By now, I had the rhythm of the +thing, and I made short work of them. + +I did one more pass, wrecking anything that looked like it might be a prototype +for the next generation or notes that would help them reconstruct the units I'd +smashed. + +I had no illusions about Debra's preparedness—she'd have something offsite that +she could get up and running in a few days. I wasn't doing anything permanent, +I was just buying myself a day or two. + +I made my way clean out of the Park without being spotted, and sloshed my way +into my runabout, shoes leaking water from the moat. + +For the first time in weeks, I slept like a baby. + +Of course, I got caught. I don't really have the temperament for Machiavellian +shenanigans, and I left a trail a mile wide, from the muddy footprints in the +Contemporary's lobby to the wrecking bar thoughtlessly left behind, with my +cowl and the storage units from the Hall, forgotten on the back seat of my +runabout. + +I whistled my personal jazzy uptempo version of “Grim Grinning Ghosts” as I +made my way from Costuming, through the utilidor, out to Liberty Square, a few +minutes before the Park opened. + +Standing in front of me were Lil and Debra. Debra was holding my cowl and +wrecking bar. Lil held the storage units. + +I hadn't put on my transdermals that morning, and so the emotion I felt was +unmuffled, loud and yammering. + +I ran. + +I ran past them, along the road to Adventureland, past the Tiki Room where I'd +been killed, past the Adventureland gate where I'd waded through the moat, down +Main Street. I ran and ran, elbowing early guests, trampling flowers, knocking +over an apple cart across from the Penny Arcade. + +I ran until I reached the main gate, and turned, thinking I'd outrun Lil and +Debra and all my problems. I'd thought wrong. They were both there, a step +behind me, puffing and red. Debra held my wrecking bar like a weapon, and she +brandished it at me. + +“You're a goddamn idiot, you know that?” she said. I think if we'd been alone, +she would've swung it at me. + +“Can't take it when someone else plays rough, huh, Debra?” I sneered. + +Lil shook her head disgustedly. “She's right, you are an idiot. The ad-hoc's +meeting in Adventureland. You're coming.” + +“Why?” I asked, feeling belligerent. “You going to honor me for all my hard +work?” + +“We're going to talk about the future, Julius, what's left of it for us.” + +“For God's sake, Lil, can't you see what's going on? They /{killed}/ me! They +did it, and now we're fighting each other instead of her! Why can't you see how +/{wrong}/ that is?” + +“You'd better watch those accusations, Julius,” Debra said, quietly and +intensely, almost hissing. “I don't know who killed you or why, but you're the +one who's guilty here. You need help.” + +I barked a humorless laugh. Guests were starting to stream into the now-open +Park, and several of them were watching intently as the three costumed +castmembers shouted at each other. I could feel my Whuffie hemorrhaging. +“Debra, you are purely full of shit, and your work is trite and unimaginative. +You're a fucking despoiler and you don't even have the guts to admit it.” + +“That's /{enough}/, Julius,” Lil said, her face hard, her rage barely in check. +“We're going.” + +Debra walked a pace behind me, Lil a pace before, all the way through the crowd +to Adventureland. I saw a dozen opportunities to slip into a gap in the human +ebb and flow and escape custody, but I didn't try. I wanted a chance to tell +the whole world what I'd done and why I'd done it. + +Debra followed us in when we mounted the steps to the meeting room. Lil turned. +“I don't think you should be here, Debra,” she said in measured tones. + +Debra shook her head. “You can't keep me out, you know. And you shouldn't want +to. We're on the same side.” + +I snorted derisively, and I think it decided Lil. “Come on, then,” she said. + +It was SRO in the meeting room, packed to the gills with the entire ad-hoc, +except for my new recruits. No work was being done on the rehab, then, and the +Liberty Belle would be sitting at her dock. Even the restaurant crews were +there. Liberty Square must've been a ghost town. It gave the meeting a sense of +urgency: the knowledge that there were guests in Liberty Square wandering +aimlessly, looking for castmembers to help them out. Of course, Debra's crew +might've been around. + +The crowd's faces were hard and bitter, leaving no doubt in my mind that I was +in deep shit. Even Dan, sitting in the front row, looked angry. I nearly +started crying right then. Dan—oh, Dan. My pal, my confidant, my patsy, my +rival, my nemesis. Dan, Dan, Dan. I wanted to beat him to death and hug him at +the same time. + +Lil took the podium and tucked stray hairs behind her ears. “All right, then,” +she said. I stood to her left and Debra stood to her right. + +“Thanks for coming out today. I'd like to get this done quickly. We all have +important work to get to. I'll run down the facts: last night, a member of this +ad-hoc vandalized the Hall of Presidents, rendering it useless. It's estimated +that it will take at least a week to get it back up and running. + +“I don't have to tell you that this isn't acceptable. This has never happened +before, and it will never happen again. We're going to see to that. + +“I'd like to propose that no further work be done on the Mansion until the Hall +of Presidents is fully operational. I will be volunteering my services on the +repairs.” + +There were nods in the audience. Lil wouldn't be the only one working at the +Hall that week. “Disney World isn't a competition,” Lil said. “All the +different ad-hocs work together, and we do it to make the Park as good as we +can. We lose sight of that at our peril.” + +I nearly gagged on bile. “I'd like to say something,” I said, as calmly as I +could manage. + +Lil shot me a look. “That's fine, Julius. Any member of the ad-hoc can speak.” + +I took a deep breath. “I did it, all right?” I said. My voice cracked. “I did +it, and I don't have any excuse for having done it. It may not have been the +smartest thing I've ever done, but I think you all should understand how I was +driven to it. + +“We're not /{supposed}/ to be in competition with one another here, but we all +know that that's just a polite fiction. The truth is that there's real +competition in the Park, and that the hardest players are the crew that +rehabbed the Hall of Presidents. They /{stole}/ the Hall from you! They did it +while you were distracted, they used /{me}/ to engineer the distraction, they +/{murdered}/ me!” I heard the shriek creeping into my voice, but I couldn't do +anything about it. + +“Usually, the lie that we're all on the same side is fine. It lets us work +together in peace. But that changed the day they had me shot. If you keep on +believing it, you're going to lose the Mansion, the Liberty Belle, Tom Sawyer +Island—all of it. All the history we have with this place—all the history that +the billions who've visited it have—it's going to be destroyed and replaced +with the sterile, thoughtless shit that's taken over the Hall. Once that +happens, there's nothing left that makes this place special. Anyone can get the +same experience sitting at home on the sofa! What happens then, huh? How much +longer do you think this place will stay open once the only people here are +/{you?}/” + +Debra smiled condescendingly. “Are you finished, then?” she asked, sweetly. +“Fine. I know I'm not a member of this group, but since it was my work that was +destroyed last night, I think I would like to address Julius's statements, if +you don't mind.” She paused, but no one spoke up. + +“First of all, I want you all to know that we don't hold you responsible for +what happened last night. We know who was responsible, and he needs help. I +urge you to see to it that he gets it. + +“Next, I'd like to say that as far as I'm concerned, we are on the same +side—the side of the Park. This is a special place, and it couldn't exist +without all of our contributions. What happened to Julius was terrible, and I +sincerely hope that the person responsible is caught and brought to justice. +But that person wasn't me or any of the people in my ad-hoc. + +“Lil, I'd like to thank you for your generous offer of assistance, and we'll +take you up on it. That goes for all of you—come on by the Hall, we'll put you +to work. We'll be up and running in no time. + +“Now, as far as the Mansion goes, let me say this once and for all: neither me +nor my ad-hoc have any desire to take over the operations of the Mansion. It is +a terrific attraction, and it's getting better with the work you're all doing. +If you've been worrying about it, then you can stop worrying now. We're all on +the same side. + +“Thanks for hearing me out. I've got to go see my team now.” + +She turned and left, a chorus of applause following her out. + +Lil waited until it died down, then said, “All right, then, we've got work to +do, too. I'd like to ask you all a favor, first. I'd like us to keep the +details of last night's incident to ourselves. Letting the guests and the world +know about this ugly business isn't good for anyone. Can we all agree to do +that?” + +There was a moment's pause while the results were tabulated on the HUDs, then +Lil gave them a million-dollar smile. “I knew you'd come through. Thanks, guys. +Let's get to work.” + +I spent the day at the hotel, listlessly scrolling around on my terminal. Lil +had made it very clear to me after the meeting that I wasn't to show my face +inside the Park until I'd “gotten help,” whatever that meant. + +By noon, the news was out. It was hard to pin down the exact source, but it +seemed to revolve around the new recruits. One of them had told their net-pals +about the high drama in Liberty Square, and mentioned my name. + +There were already a couple of sites vilifying me, and I expected more. I +needed some kind of help, that was for sure. + +I thought about leaving then, turning my back on the whole business and leaving +Walt Disney World to start yet another new life, Whuffie-poor and fancy-free. + +It wouldn't be so bad. I'd been in poor repute before, not so long ago. That +first time Dan and I had palled around, back at the U of T, I'd been the center +of a lot of pretty ambivalent sentiment, and Whuffie-poor as a man can be. + +I slept in a little coffin on-campus, perfectly climate controlled. It was +cramped and dull, but my access to the network was free and I had plenty of +material to entertain myself. While I couldn't get a table in a restaurant, I +was free to queue up at any of the makers around town and get myself whatever I +wanted to eat and drink, whenever I wanted it. Compared to 99.99999 percent of +all the people who'd ever lived, I had a life of unparalleled luxury. + +Even by the standards of the Bitchun Society, I was hardly a rarity. The number +of low-esteem individuals at large was significant, and they got along just +fine, hanging out in parks, arguing, reading, staging plays, playing music. + +Of course, that wasn't the life for me. I had Dan to pal around with, a rare +high-net-Whuffie individual who was willing to fraternize with a shmuck like +me. He'd stand me to meals at sidewalk cafes and concerts at the SkyDome, and +shoot down any snotty reputation-punk who sneered at my Whuffie tally. Being +with Dan was a process of constantly reevaluating my beliefs in the Bitchun +Society, and I'd never had a more vibrant, thought-provoking time in all my +life. + +I could have left the Park, deadheaded to anywhere in the world, started over. +I could have turned my back on Dan, on Debra, on Lil and the whole mess. + +I didn't. + +I called up the doc. + +1~ CHAPTER 8 + +Doctor Pete answered on the third ring, audio-only. In the background, I heard +a chorus of crying children, the constant backdrop of the Magic Kingdom +infirmary. + +“Hi, doc,” I said. + +“Hello, Julius. What can I do for you?” Under the veneer of professional +medical and castmember friendliness, I sensed irritation. + +/{Make it all good again}/. “I'm not really sure. I wanted to see if I could +talk it over with you. I'm having some pretty big problems.” + +“I'm on-shift until five. Can it wait until then?” + +By then, I had no idea if I'd have the nerve to see him. “I don't think so—I +was hoping we could meet right away.” + +“If it's an emergency, I can have an ambulance sent for you.” + +“It's urgent, but not an emergency. I need to talk about it in person. Please?” + +He sighed in undoctorly, uncastmemberly fashion. “Julius, I've got important +things to do here. Are you sure this can't wait?” + +I bit back a sob. “I'm sure, doc.” + +“All right then. When can you be here?” + +Lil had made it clear that she didn't want me in the Park. “Can you meet me? I +can't really come to you. I'm at the Contemporary, Tower B, room 2334.” + +“I don't really make house calls, son.” + +“I know, I know.” I hated how pathetic I sounded. “Can you make an exception? I +don't know who else to turn to.” + +“I'll be there as soon as I can. I'll have to get someone to cover for me. +Let's not make a habit of this, all right?” + +I whooshed out my relief. “I promise.” + +He disconnected abruptly, and I found myself dialing Dan. + +“Yes?” he said, cautiously. + +“Doctor Pete is coming over, Dan. I don't know if he can help me—I don't know +if anyone can. I just wanted you to know.” + +He surprised me, then, and made me remember why he was still my friend, even +after everything. “Do you want me to come over?” + +“That would be very nice,” I said, quietly. “I'm at the hotel.” + +“Give me ten minutes,” he said, and rang off. + +He found me on my patio, looking out at the Castle and the peaks of Space +Mountain. To my left spread the sparkling waters of the Seven Seas Lagoon, to +my right, the Property stretched away for mile after manicured mile. The sun +was warm on my skin, faint strains of happy laughter drifted with the wind, and +the flowers were in bloom. In Toronto, it would be freezing rain, gray +buildings, noisome rapid transit (a monorail hissed by), and hard-faced +anonymity. I missed it. + +Dan pulled up a chair next to mine and sat without a word. We both stared out +at the view for a long while. + +“It's something else, isn't it?” I said, finally. + +“I suppose so,” he said. “I want to say something before the doc comes by, +Julius.” + +“Go ahead.” + +“Lil and I are through. It should never have happened in the first place, and +I'm not proud of myself. If you two were breaking up, that's none of my +business, but I had no right to hurry it along.” + +“All right,” I said. I was too drained for emotion. + +“I've taken a room here, moved my things.” + +“How's Lil taking it?” + +“Oh, she thinks I'm a total bastard. I suppose she's right.” + +“I suppose she's partly right,” I corrected him. + +He gave me a gentle slug in the shoulder. “Thanks.” + +We waited in companionable silence until the doc arrived. + +He bustled in, his smile lines drawn up into a sour purse and waited +expectantly. I left Dan on the patio while I took a seat on the bed. + +“I'm cracking up or something,” I said. “I've been acting erratically, +sometimes violently. I don't know what's wrong with me.” I'd rehearsed the +speech, but it still wasn't easy to choke out. + +“We both know what's wrong, Julius,” the doc said, impatiently. “You need to be +refreshed from your backup, get set up with a fresh clone and retire this one. +We've had this talk.” + +“I can't do it,” I said, not meeting his eye. “I just can't—isn't there another +way?” + +The doc shook his head. “Julius, I've got limited resources to allocate. +There's a perfectly good cure for what's ailing you, and if you won't take it, +there's not much I can do for you.” + +“But what about meds?” + +“Your problem isn't a chemical imbalance, it's a mental defect. Your /{brain}/ +is /{broken}/, son. All that meds will do is mask the symptoms, while you get +worse. I can't tell you what you want to hear, unfortunately. Now, If you're +ready to take the cure, I can retire this clone immediately and get you +restored into a new one in 48 hours.” + +“Isn't there another way? Please? You have to help me—I can't lose all this.” I +couldn't admit my real reasons for being so attached to this singularly +miserable chapter in my life, not even to myself. + +The doctor rose to go. “Look, Julius, you haven't got the Whuffie to make it +worth anyone's time to research a solution to this problem, other than the one +that we all know about. I can give you mood-suppressants, but that's not a +permanent solution.” + +“Why not?” + +He boggled. “You /{can't}/ just take dope for the rest of your life, son. +Eventually, something will happen to this body—I see from your file that you're +stroke-prone—and you're going to get refreshed from your backup. The longer you +wait, the more traumatic it'll be. You're robbing from your future self for +your selfish present.” + +It wasn't the first time the thought had crossed my mind. Every passing day +made it harder to take the cure. To lie down and wake up friends with Dan, to +wake up and be in love with Lil again. To wake up to a Mansion the way I +remembered it, a Hall of Presidents where I could find Lil bent over with her +head in a President's guts of an afternoon. To lie down and wake without +disgrace, without knowing that my lover and my best friend would betray me, +/{had}/ betrayed me. + +I just couldn't do it—not yet, anyway. + +Dan—Dan was going to kill himself soon, and if I restored myself from my old +backup, I'd lose my last year with him. I'd lose /{his}/ last year. + +“Let's table that, doc. I hear what you're saying, but there're complications. +I guess I'll take the mood-suppressants for now.” + +He gave me a cold look. “I'll give you a scrip, then. I could've done that +without coming out here. Please don't call me anymore.” + +I was shocked by his obvious ire, but I didn't understand it until he was gone +and I told Dan what had happened. + +“Us old-timers, we're used to thinking of doctors as highly trained +professionals—all that pre-Bitchun med-school stuff, long internships, anatomy +drills... Truth is, the average doc today gets more training in bedside manner +than bioscience. ‘Doctor’ Pete is a technician, not an MD, not the way you and +I mean it. Anyone with the kind of knowledge you're looking for is working as a +historical researcher, not a doctor. + +“But that's not the illusion. The doc is supposed to be the authority on +medical matters, even though he's only got one trick: restore from backup. +You're reminding Pete of that, and he's not happy to have it happen.” + +I waited a week before returning to the Magic Kingdom, sunning myself on the +white sand beach at the Contemporary, jogging the Walk Around the World, taking +a canoe out to the wild and overgrown Discovery Island, and generally cooling +out. Dan came by in the evenings and it was like old times, running down the +pros and cons of Whuffie and Bitchunry and life in general, sitting on my porch +with a sweating pitcher of lemonade. + +On the last night, he presented me with a clever little handheld, a museum +piece that I recalled fondly from the dawning days of the Bitchun Society. It +had much of the functionality of my defunct systems, in a package I could slip +in my shirt pocket. It felt like part of a costume, like the turnip watches the +Ben Franklin streetmosphere players wore at the American Adventure. + +Museum piece or no, it meant that I was once again qualified to participate in +the Bitchun Society, albeit more slowly and less efficiently than I once +may've. I took it downstairs the next morning and drove to the Magic Kingdom's +castmember lot. + +At least, that was the plan. When I got down to the Contemporary's parking lot, +my runabout was gone. A quick check with the handheld revealed the worst: my +Whuffie was low enough that someone had just gotten inside and driven away, +realizing that they could make more popular use of it than I could. + +With a sinking feeling, I trudged up to my room and swiped my key through the +lock. It emitted a soft, unsatisfied _bzzz_ and lit up, “Please see the front +desk.” My room had been reassigned, too. I had the short end of the Whuffie +stick. + +At least there was no mandatory Whuffie check on the monorail platform, but the +other people on the car were none too friendly to me, and no one offered me an +inch more personal space than was necessary. I had hit bottom. + +I took the castmember entrance to the Magic Kingdom, clipping my name tag to my +Disney Operations polo shirt, ignoring the glares of my fellow castmembers in +the utilidors. + +I used the handheld to page Dan. “Hey there,” he said, brightly. I could tell +instantly that I was being humored. + +“Where are you?” I asked. + +“Oh, up in the Square. By the Liberty Tree.” + +In front of the Hall of Presidents. I worked the handheld, pinged some Whuffie +manually. Debra was spiked so high it seemed she'd never come down, as were Tim +and her whole crew in aggregate. They were drawing from guests by the millions, +and from castmembers and from people who'd read the popular accounts of their +struggle against the forces of petty jealousy and sabotage—i.e., me. + +I felt light-headed. I hurried along to costuming and changed into the heavy +green Mansion costume, then ran up the stairs to the Square. + +I found Dan sipping a coffee and sitting on a bench under the giant, +lantern-hung Liberty Tree. He had a second cup waiting for me, and patted the +bench next to him. I sat with him and sipped, waiting for him to spill whatever +bit of rotten news he had for me this morning—I could feel it hovering like +storm clouds. + +He wouldn't talk though, not until we finished the coffee. Then he stood and +strolled over to the Mansion. It wasn't rope-drop yet, and there weren't any +guests in the Park, which was all for the better, given what was coming next. + +“Have you taken a look at Debra's Whuffie lately?” he asked, finally, as we +stood by the pet cemetery, considering the empty scaffolding. + +I started to pull out the handheld but he put a hand on my arm. “Don't bother,” +he said, morosely. “Suffice it to say, Debra's gang is number one with a +bullet. Ever since word got out about what happened to the Hall, they've been +stacking it deep. They can do just about anything, Jules, and get away with +it.” + +My stomach tightened and I found myself grinding my molars. “So, what is it +they've done, Dan?” I asked, already knowing the answer. + +Dan didn't have to respond, because at that moment, Tim emerged from the +Mansion, wearing a light cotton work-smock. He had a thoughtful expression, and +when he saw us, he beamed his elfin grin and came over. + +“Hey guys!” he said. + +“Hi, Tim,” Dan said. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. + +“Pretty exciting stuff, huh?” he said. + +“I haven't told him yet,” Dan said, with forced lightness. “Why don't you run +it down?” + +“Well, it's pretty radical, I have to admit. We've learned some stuff from the +Hall that we wanted to apply, and at the same time, we wanted to capture some +of the historical character of the ghost story.” + +I opened my mouth to object, but Dan put a hand on my forearm. “Really?” he +asked innocently. “How do you plan on doing that?” + +“Well, we're keeping the telepresence robots—that's a honey of an idea, +Julius—but we're giving each one an uplink so that it can flash-bake. We've got +some high-Whuffie horror writers pulling together a series of narratives about +the lives of each ghost: how they met their tragic ends, what they've done +since, you know. + +“The way we've storyboarded it, the guests stream through the ride pretty much +the way they do now, walking through the preshow and then getting into the +ride-vehicles, the Doom Buggies. But here's the big change: we /{slow it all +down}/. We trade off throughput for intensity, make it more of a premium +product. + +“So you're a guest. From the queue to the unload zone, you're being chased by +these ghosts, these telepresence robots, and they're really scary—I've got +Suneep's concept artists going back to the drawing board, hitting basic +research on stuff that'll just scare the guests silly. When a ghost catches +you, lays its hands on you—wham! Flash-bake! You get its whole grisly story in +three seconds, across your frontal lobe. By the time you've left, you've had +ten or more ghost-contacts, and the next time you come back, it's all new +ghosts with all new stories. The way that the Hall's drawing 'em, we're bound +to be a hit.” He put his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, clearly +proud of himself. + +When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there'd been an ugly decade or +so in ride design. Imagineering found a winning formula for Spaceship Earth, +the flagship ride in the big golf ball, and, in their drive to establish +thematic continuity, they'd turned the formula into a cookie-cutter, stamping +out half a dozen clones for each of the “themed” areas in the Future Showcase. +It went like this: first, we were cavemen, then there was ancient Greece, then +Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX), then there was the Great Depression, and, +finally, we reached the modern age. Who knows what the future holds? We do! +We'll all have videophones and be living on the ocean floor. Once was +cute—compelling and inspirational, even—but six times was embarrassing. Like +everyone, once Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started to +resemble a nail. Even now, the Epcot ad-hocs were repeating the sins of their +forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun utopia. + +And Debra was repeating the classic mistake, tearing her way through the Magic +Kingdom with her blaster set to flash-bake. + +“Tim,” I said, hearing the tremble in my voice. “I thought you said that you +had no designs on the Mansion, that you and Debra wouldn't be trying to take it +away from us. Didn't you say that?” + +Tim rocked back as if I'd slapped him and the blood drained from his face. “But +we're not taking it away!” he said. “You /{invited}/ us to help.” + +I shook my head, confused. “We did?” I said. + +“Sure,” he said. + +“Yes,” Dan said. “Kim and some of the other rehab cast went to Debra yesterday +and asked her to do a design review of the current rehab and suggest any +changes. She was good enough to agree, and they've come up with some great +ideas.” I read between the lines: the newbies you invited in have gone over to +the other side and we're going to lose everything because of them. I felt like +shit. + +“Well, I stand corrected,” I said, carefully. Tim's grin came back and he +clapped his hands together. /{He really loves the Mansion}/, I thought. /{He +could have been on our side, if we had only played it all right.}/ + +Dan and I took to the utilidors and grabbed a pair of bicycles and sped towards +Suneep's lab, jangling our bells at the rushing castmembers. “They don't have +the authority to invite Debra in,” I panted as we pedaled. + +“Says who?” Dan said. + +“It was part of the deal—they knew that they were probationary members right +from the start. They weren't even allowed into the design meetings.” + +“Looks like they took themselves off probation,” he said. + +Suneep gave us both a chilly look when we entered his lab. He had dark circles +under his eyes and his hands shook with exhaustion. He seemed to be holding +himself erect with nothing more than raw anger. + +“So much for building without interference,” he said. “We agreed that this +project wouldn't change midway through. Now it has, and I've got other +commitments that I'm going to have to cancel because this is going +off-schedule.” + +I made soothing apologetic gestures with my hands. “Suneep, believe me, I'm +just as upset about this as you are. We don't like this one little bit.” + +He harrumphed. “We had a deal, Julius,” he said, hotly. “I would do the rehab +for you and you would keep the ad-hocs off my back. I've been holding up my end +of the bargain, but where the hell have you been? If they replan the rehab now, +I'll /{have}/ to go along with them. I can't just leave the Mansion +half-done—they'll murder me.” + +The kernel of a plan formed in my mind. “Suneep, we don't like the new rehab +plan, and we're going to stop it. You can help. Just stonewall them—tell them +they'll have to find other Imagineering support if they want to go through with +it, that you're booked solid.” + +Dan gave me one of his long, considering looks, then nodded a minute approval. +“Yeah,” he drawled. “That'll help all right. Just tell 'em that they're welcome +to make any changes they want to the plan, /{if}/ they can find someone else to +execute them.” + +Suneep looked unhappy. “Fine—so then they go and find someone else to do it, +and that person gets all the credit for the work my team's done so far. I just +flush my time down the toilet.” + +“It won't come to that,” I said quickly. “If you can just keep saying no for a +couple days, we'll do the rest.” + +Suneep looked doubtful. + +“I promise,” I said. + +Suneep ran his stubby fingers through his already crazed hair. “All right,” he +said, morosely. + +Dan slapped him on the back. “Good man,” he said. + +It should have worked. It almost did. + +I sat in the back of the Adventureland conference room while Dan exhorted. + +“Look, you don't have to roll over for Debra and her people! This is /{your}/ +garden, and you've tended it responsibly for years. She's got no right to move +in on you—you've got all the Whuffie you need to defend the place, if you all +work together.” + +No castmember likes confrontation, and the Liberty Square bunch were tough to +rouse to action. Dan had turned down the air conditioning an hour before the +meeting and closed up all the windows, so that the room was a kiln for +hard-firing irritation into rage. I stood meekly in the back, as far as +possible from Dan. He was working his magic on my behalf, and I was content to +let him do his thing. + +When Lil had arrived, she'd sized up the situation with a sour expression: sit +in the front, near Dan, or in the back, near me. She'd chosen the middle, and +to concentrate on Dan I had to tear my eyes away from the sweat glistening on +her long, pale neck. + +Dan stalked the aisles like a preacher, eyes blazing. “They're /{stealing}/ +your future! They're /{stealing}/ your /{past}/! They claim they've got your +support!” + +He lowered his tone. “I don't think that's true.” He grabbed a castmember by +her hand and looked into her eyes. “Is it true?” he said so low it was almost a +whisper. + +“No,” the castmember said. + +He dropped her hand and whirled to face another castmember. “Is it true?” he +demanded, raising his voice, slightly. + +“No!” the castmember said, his voice unnaturally loud after the whispers. A +nervous chuckle rippled through the crowd. + +“Is it true?” he said, striding to the podium, shouting now. + +“No!” the crowd roared. + +“NO!” he shouted back. + +“You don't /{have to}/ roll over and take it! You can fight back, carry on with +the plan, send them packing. They're only taking over because you're letting +them. Are you going to let them?” + +“NO!” + +Bitchun wars are rare. Long before anyone tries a takeover of anything, they've +done the arithmetic and ensured themselves that the ad-hoc they're displacing +doesn't have a hope of fighting back. + +For the defenders, it's a simple decision: step down gracefully and salvage +some reputation out of the thing—fighting back will surely burn away even that +meager reward. + +No one benefits from fighting back—least of all the thing everyone's fighting +over. For example: + +It was the second year of my undergrad, taking a double-major in not making +trouble for my profs and keeping my mouth shut. It was the early days of +Bitchun, and most of us were still a little unclear on the concept. + +Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad students in the +Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of the revolution, and they +knew what they wanted: control of the Department, oustering of the tyrannical, +stodgy profs, a bully pulpit from which to preach the Bitchun gospel to a +generation of impressionable undergrads who were too cowed by their workloads +to realize what a load of shit they were being fed by the University. + +At least, that's what the intense, heavyset woman who seized the mic at my Soc +200 course said, that sleepy morning mid-semester at Convocation Hall. Nineteen +hundred students filled the hall, a capacity crowd of bleary, coffee-sipping +time-markers, and they woke up in a hurry when the woman's strident harangue +burst over their heads. + +I saw it happen from the very start. The prof was down there on the stage, a +speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then there was a blur as +half a dozen grad students rushed the stage. They were dressed in University +poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and tattered sports coats, and five of them +formed a human wall in front of the prof while the sixth, the heavyset one with +the dark hair and the prominent mole on her cheek, unclipped his mic and +clipped it to her lapel. + +“Wakey wakey!” she called, and the reality of the moment hit home for me: this +wasn't on the lesson-plan. + +“Come on, heads up! This is /{not}/ a drill. The University of Toronto +Department of Sociology is under new management. If you'll set your handhelds +to ‘receive,’ we'll be beaming out new lesson-plans momentarily. If you've +forgotten your handhelds, you can download the plans later on. I'm going to run +it down for you right now, anyway. + +“Before I start though, I have a prepared statement for you. You'll probably +hear this a couple times more today, in your other classes. It's worth +repeating. Here goes: + +“We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at this Department. We +demand bully pulpits from which to preach the Bitchun gospel. Effective +immediately, the University of Toronto Ad-Hoc Sociology Department is /{in +charge}/. We promise high-relevance curriculum with an emphasis on reputation +economies, post-scarcity social dynamics, and the social theory of infinite +life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, just deadheading! This will be +/{fun}/.” + +She taught the course like a pro—you could tell she'd been drilling her lecture +for a while. Periodically, the human wall behind her shuddered as the prof made +a break for it and was restrained. + +At precisely 9:50 a.m. she dismissed the class, which had hung on her every +word. Instead of trudging out and ambling to our next class, the whole nineteen +hundred of us rose, and, as one, started buzzing to our neighbors, a roar of +“Can you believe it?” that followed us out the door and to our next encounter +with the Ad-Hoc Sociology Department. + +It was cool, that day. I had another soc class, Constructing Social Deviance, +and we got the same drill there, the same stirring propaganda, the same comical +sight of a tenured prof battering himself against a human wall of ad-hocs. + +Reporters pounced on us when we left the class, jabbing at us with mics and +peppering us with questions. I gave them a big thumbs-up and said, “Bitchun!” +in classic undergrad eloquence. + +The profs struck back the next morning. I got a heads-up from the newscast as I +brushed my teeth: the Dean of the Department of Sociology told a reporter that +the ad-hocs' courses would not be credited, that they were a gang of thugs who +were totally unqualified to teach. A counterpoint interview from a spokesperson +for the ad-hocs established that all of the new lecturers had been writing +course-plans and lecture notes for the profs they replaced for years, and that +they'd also written most of their journal articles. + +The profs brought University security out to help them regain their lecterns, +only to be repelled by ad-hoc security guards in homemade uniforms. University +security got the message—anyone could be replaced—and stayed away. + +The profs picketed. They held classes out front attended by grade-conscious +brown-nosers who worried that the ad-hocs' classes wouldn't count towards their +degrees. Fools like me alternated between the outdoor and indoor classes, not +learning much of anything. + +No one did. The profs spent their course-times whoring for Whuffie, leading the +seminars like encounter groups instead of lectures. The ad-hocs spent their +time badmouthing the profs and tearing apart their coursework. + +At the end of the semester, everyone got a credit and the University Senate +disbanded the Sociology program in favor of a distance-ed offering from +Concordia in Montreal. Forty years later, the fight was settled forever. Once +you took backup-and-restore, the rest of the Bitchunry just followed, a +value-system settling over you. + +Those who didn't take backup-and-restore may have objected, but, hey, they all +died. + +The Liberty Square ad-hocs marched shoulder to shoulder through the utilidors +and, as a mass, took back the Haunted Mansion. Dan, Lil and I were up front, +careful not to brush against one another as we walked quickly through the +backstage door and started a bucket-brigade, passing out the materials that +Debra's people had stashed there, along a line that snaked back to the front +porch of the Hall of Presidents, where they were unceremoniously dumped. + +Once the main stash was vacated, we split up and roamed the ride, its service +corridors and dioramas, the break-room and the secret passages, rounding up +every scrap of Debra's crap and passing it out the door. + +In the attic scene, I ran into Kim and three of her giggly little friends, +their eyes glinting in the dim light. The gaggle of transhuman kids made my +guts clench, made me think of Zed and of Lil and of my unmediated brain, and I +had a sudden urge to shred them verbally. + +No. + +No. That way lay madness and war. This was about taking back what was ours, not +punishing the interlopers. “Kim, I think you should leave,” I said, quietly. + +She snorted and gave me a dire look. “Who died and made you boss?” she said. +Her friends thought it very brave, they made it clear with double-jointed +hip-thrusts and glares. + +“Kim, you can leave now or you can leave later. The longer you wait, the worse +it will be for you and your Whuffie. You blew it, and you're not a part of the +Mansion anymore. Go home, go to Debra. Don't stay here, and don't come back. +Ever.” + +Ever. Be cast out of this thing that you love, that you obsess over, that you +worked for. “Now,” I said, quiet, dangerous, barely in control. + +They sauntered into the graveyard, hissing vitriol at me. Oh, they had lots of +new material to post to the anti-me sites, messages that would get them Whuffie +with people who thought I was the scum of the earth. A popular view, those +days. + +I got out of the Mansion and looked at the bucket-brigade, followed it to the +front of the Hall. The Park had been open for an hour, and a herd of guests +watched the proceedings in confusion. The Liberty Square ad-hocs passed their +loads around in clear embarrassment, knowing that they were violating every +principle they cared about. + +As I watched, gaps appeared in the bucket-brigade as castmembers slipped away, +faces burning scarlet with shame. At the Hall of Presidents, Debra presided +over an orderly relocation of her things, a cheerful cadre of her castmembers +quickly moving it all offstage. I didn't have to look at my handheld to know +what was happening to our Whuffie. + +By evening, we were back on schedule. Suneep supervised the placement of his +telepresence rigs and Lil went over every system in minute detail, bossing a +crew of ad-hocs that trailed behind her, double- and triple-checking it all. + +Suneep smiled at me when he caught sight of me, hand-scattering dust in the +parlor. + +“Congratulations, sir,” he said, and shook my hand. “It was masterfully done.” + +“Thanks, Suneep. I'm not sure how masterful it was, but we got the job done, +and that's what counts.” + +“Your partners, they're happier than I've seen them since this whole business +started. I know how they feel!” + +My partners? Oh, yes, Dan and Lil. How happy were they, I wondered. Happy +enough to get back together? My mood fell, even though a part of me said that +Dan would never go back to her, not after all we'd been through together. + +“I'm glad you're glad. We couldn't have done it without you, and it looks like +we'll be open for business in a week.” + +“Oh, I should think so. Are you coming to the party tonight?” + +Party? Probably something the Liberty Square ad-hocs were putting on. I would +almost certainly be persona non grata. “I don't think so,” I said, carefully. +“I'll probably work late here.” + +He chided me for working too hard, but once he saw that I had no intention of +being dragged to the party, he left off. + +And that's how I came to be in the Mansion at 2 a.m. the next morning, dozing +in a backstage break room when I heard a commotion from the parlor. Festive +voices, happy and loud, and I assumed it was Liberty Square ad-hocs coming back +from their party. + +I roused myself and entered the parlor. + +Kim and her friends were there, pushing hand-trucks of Debra's gear. I got +ready to shout something horrible at them, and that's when Debra came in. I +moderated the shout to a snap, opened my mouth to speak, stopped. + +Behind Debra were Lil's parents, frozen these long years in their canopic jars +in Kissimmee. + +1~ CHAPTER 9 + +Lil's parents went into their jars with little ceremony. I saw them just before +they went in, when they stopped in at Lil's and my place to kiss her goodbye +and wish her well. + +Tom and I stood awkwardly to the side while Lil and her mother held an achingly +chipper and polite farewell. + +“So,” I said to Tom. “Deadheading.” + +He cocked an eyebrow. “Yup. Took the backup this morning.” + +Before coming to see their daughter, they'd taken their backups. When they +woke, this event—everything following the backup—would never have happened for +them. + +God, they were bastards. + +“When are you coming back?” I asked, keeping my castmember face on, carefully +hiding away the disgust. + +'We'll be sampling monthly, just getting a digest dumped to us. When things +look interesting enough, we'll come on back.” He waggled a finger at me. “I'll +be keeping an eye on you and Lillian—you treat her right, you hear?” + +“We're sure going to miss you two around here,” I said. + +He pishtoshed and said, “You won't even notice we're gone. This is your world +now—we're just getting out of the way for a while, letting you-all take a run +at it. We wouldn't be going down if we didn't have faith in you two.” + +Lil and her mom kissed one last time. Her mother was more affectionate than I'd +ever seen her, even to the point of tearing up a little. Here in this moment of +vanishing consciousness, she could be whomever she wanted, knowing that it +wouldn't matter the next time she awoke. + +“Julius,” she said, taking my hands, squeezing them. “You've got some wonderful +times ahead of you—between Lil and the Park, you're going to have a tremendous +experience, I just know it.” She was infinitely serene and compassionate, and I +knew it didn't count. + +Still smiling, they got into their runabout and drove away to get the lethal +injections, to become disembodied consciousnesses, to lose their last moments +with their darling daughter. + +They were not happy to be returned from the dead. Their new bodies were +impossibly young, pubescent and hormonal and doleful and kitted out in the +latest trendy styles. In the company of Kim and her pals, they made a solid +mass of irate adolescence. + +“Just what the hell do you think you're doing?” Rita asked, shoving me hard in +the chest. I stumbled back into my carefully scattered dust, raising a cloud. + +Rita came after me, but Tom held her back. “Julius, go away. Your actions are +totally indefensible. Keep your mouth shut and go away.” + +I held up a hand, tried to wave away his words, opened my mouth to speak. + +“Don't say a word,” he said. “Leave. Now.” + +“/{Don't stay here and don't come back. Ever}/,” Kim said, an evil look on her +face. + +“No,” I said. “No goddamn it no. You're going to hear me out, and then I'm +going to get Lil and her people and they're going to back me up. That's not +negotiable.” + +We stared at each other across the dim parlor. Debra made a twiddling motion +and the lights came up full and harsh. The expertly crafted gloom went away and +it was just a dusty room with a fake fireplace. + +“Let him speak,” Debra said. Rita folded her arms and glared. + +“I did some really awful things,” I said, keeping my head up, keeping my eyes +on them. “I can't excuse them, and I don't ask you to forgive them. But that +doesn't change the fact that we've put our hearts and souls into this place, +and it's not right to take it from us. Can't we have one constant corner of the +world, one bit frozen in time for the people who love it that way? Why does +your success mean our failure? + +“Can't you see that we're carrying on your work? That we're tending a legacy +you left us?” + +“Are you through?” Rita asked. + +I nodded. + +“This place is not a historical preserve, Julius, it's a ride. If you don't +understand that, you're in the wrong place. It's not my goddamn fault that you +decided that your stupidity was on my behalf, and it doesn't make it any less +stupid. All you've done is confirm my worst fears.” + +Debra's mask of impartiality slipped. “You stupid, deluded asshole,” she said, +softly. “You totter around, pissing and moaning about your little murder, your +little health problems—yes, I've heard—your little fixation on keeping things +the way they are. You need some perspective, Julius. You need to get away from +here: Disney World isn't good for you and you're sure as hell not any good for +Disney World.” + +It would have hurt less if I hadn't come to the same conclusion myself, +somewhere along the way. + +I found the ad-hoc at a Fort Wilderness campsite, sitting around a fire and +singing, necking, laughing. The victory party. I trudged into the circle and +hunted for Lil. + +She was sitting on a log, staring into the fire, a million miles away. Lord, +she was beautiful when she fretted. I stood in front of her for a minute and +she stared right through me until I tapped her shoulder. She gave an +involuntary squeak and then smiled at herself. + +“Lil,” I said, then stopped. /{Your parents are home, and they've joined the +other side}/. + +For the first time in an age, she looked at me softly, smiled even. She patted +the log next to her. I sat down, felt the heat of the fire on my face, her body +heat on my side. God, how did I screw this up? + +Without warning, she put her arms around me and hugged me hard. I hugged her +back, nose in her hair, woodsmoke smell and shampoo and sweat. “We did it,” she +whispered fiercely. I held onto her. /{No, we didn't}/. + +“Lil,” I said again, and pulled away. + +“What?” she said, her eyes shining. She was stoned, I saw that now. + +“Your parents are back. They came to the Mansion.” + +She was confused, shrinking, and I pressed on. + +“They were with Debra.” + +She reeled back as if I'd slapped her. + +“I told them I'd bring the whole group back to talk it over.” + +She hung her head and her shoulders shook, and I tentatively put an arm around +her. She shook it off and sat up. She was crying and laughing at the same time. +“I'll have a ferry sent over,” she said. + +I sat in the back of the ferry with Dan, away from the confused and angry +ad-hocs. I answered his questions with terse, one-word answers, and he gave up. +We rode in silence, the trees on the edges of the Seven Seas Lagoon whipping +back and forth in an approaching storm. + +The ad-hoc shortcutted through the west parking lot and moved through the quiet +streets of Frontierland apprehensively, a funeral procession that stopped the +nighttime custodial staff in their tracks. + +As we drew up on Liberty Square, I saw that the work-lights were blazing and a +tremendous work-gang of Debra's ad-hocs were moving from the Hall to the +Mansion, undoing our teardown of their work. + +Working alongside of them were Tom and Rita, Lil's parents, sleeves rolled up, +forearms bulging with new, toned muscle. The group stopped in its tracks and +Lil went to them, stumbling on the wooden sidewalk. + +I expected hugs. There were none. In their stead, parents and daughter stalked +each other, shifting weight and posture to track each other, maintain a +constant, sizing distance. + +“What the hell are you doing?” Lil said, finally. She didn't address her +mother, which surprised me. It didn't surprise Tom, though. + +He dipped forward, the shuffle of his feet loud in the quiet night. “We're +working,” he said. + +“No, you're not,” Lil said. “You're destroying. Stop it.” + +Lil's mother darted to her husband's side, not saying anything, just standing +there. + +Wordlessly, Tom hefted the box he was holding and headed to the Mansion. Lil +caught his arm and jerked it so he dropped his load. + +“You're not listening. The Mansion is /{ours}/. /{Stop}/. /{It}/.” + +Lil's mother gently took Lil's hand off Tom's arm, held it in her own. “I'm +glad you're passionate about it, Lillian,” she said. “I'm proud of your +commitment.” + +Even at a distance of ten yards, I heard Lil's choked sob, saw her collapse in +on herself. Her mother took her in her arms, rocked her. I felt like a voyeur, +but couldn't bring myself to turn away. + +“Shhh,” her mother said, a sibilant sound that matched the rustling of the +leaves on the Liberty Tree. “Shhh. We don't have to be on the same side, you +know.” + +They held the embrace and held it still. Lil straightened, then bent again and +picked up her father's box, carried it to the Mansion. One at a time, the rest +of her ad-hoc moved forward and joined them. + +This is how you hit bottom. You wake up in your friend's hotel room and you +power up your handheld and it won't log on. You press the call-button for the +elevator and it gives you an angry buzz in return. You take the stairs to the +lobby and no one looks at you as they jostle past you. + +You become a non-person. + +Scared. I trembled when I ascended the stairs to Dan's room, when I knocked at +his door, louder and harder than I meant, a panicked banging. + +Dan answered the door and I saw his eyes go to his HUD, back to me. “Jesus,” he +said. + +I sat on the edge of my bed, head in my hands. + +“What?” I said, what happened, what happened to me? + +“You're out of the ad-hoc,” he said. “You're out of Whuffie. You're +bottomed-out,” he said. + +This is how you hit bottom in Walt Disney World, in a hotel with the hissing of +the monorail and the sun streaming through the window, the hooting of the steam +engines on the railroad and the distant howl of the recorded wolves at the +Haunted Mansion. The world drops away from you, recedes until you're nothing +but a speck, a mote in blackness. + +I was hyperventilating, light-headed. Deliberately, I slowed my breath, put my +head between my knees until the dizziness passed. + +“Take me to Lil,” I said. + +Driving together, hammering cigarette after cigarette into my face, I +remembered the night Dan had come to Disney World, when I'd driven him to +my—/{Lil's}/—house, and how happy I'd been then, how secure. + +I looked at Dan and he patted my hand. “Strange times,” he said. + +It was enough. We found Lil in an underground break-room, lightly dozing on a +ratty sofa. Her head rested on Tom's lap, her feet on Rita's. All three snored +softly. They'd had a long night. + +Dan shook Lil awake. She stretched out and opened her eyes, looked sleepily at +me. The blood drained from her face. + +“Hello, Julius,” she said, coldly. + +Now Tom and Rita were awake, too. Lil sat up. + +“Were you going to tell me?” I asked, quietly. “Or were you just going to kick +me out and let me find out on my own?” + +“You were my next stop,” Lil said. + +“Then I've saved you some time.” I pulled up a chair. “Tell me all about it.” + +“There's nothing to tell,” Rita snapped. “You're out. You had to know it was +coming—for God's sake, you were tearing Liberty Square apart!” + +“How would you know?” I asked. I struggled to remain calm. “You've been asleep +for ten years!” + +“We got updates,” Rita said. “That's why we're back—we couldn't let it go on +the way it was. We owed it to Debra.” + +“And Lillian,” Tom said. + +“And Lillian,” Rita said, absently. + +Dan pulled up a chair of his own. “You're not being fair to him,” he said. At +least someone was on my side. + +“We've been more than fair,” Lil said. “You know that better than anyone, Dan. +We've forgiven and forgiven and forgiven, made every allowance. He's sick and +he won't take the cure. There's nothing more we can do for him.” + +“You could be his friend,” Dan said. The light-headedness was back, and I +slumped in my chair, tried to control my breathing, the panicked thumping of my +heart. + +“You could try to understand, you could try to help him. You could stick with +him, the way he stuck with you. You don't have to toss him out on his ass.” + +Lil had the good grace to look slightly shamed. “I'll get him a room,” she +said. “For a month. In Kissimmee. A motel. I'll pick up his network access. Is +that fair?” + +“It's more than fair,” Rita said. Why did she hate me so much? I'd been there +for her daughter while she was away—ah. That might do it, all right. “I don't +think it's warranted. If you want to take care of him, sir, you can. It's none +of my family's business.” + +Lil's eyes blazed. “Let me handle this,” she said. “All right?” + +Rita stood up abruptly. “You do whatever you want,” she said, and stormed out +of the room. + +“Why are you coming here for help?” Tom said, ever the voice of reason. “You +seem capable enough.” + +“I'm going to be taking a lethal injection at the end of the week,” Dan said. +“Three days. That's personal, but you asked.” + +Tom shook his head. /{Some friends you've got yourself}/, I could see him +thinking it. + +“That soon?” Lil asked, a throb in her voice. + +Dan nodded. + +In a dreamlike buzz, I stood and wandered out into the utilidor, out through +the western castmember parking, and away. + +I wandered along the cobbled, disused Walk Around the World, each flagstone +engraved with the name of a family that had visited the Park a century before. +The names whipped past me like epitaphs. + +The sun came up noon high as I rounded the bend of deserted beach between the +Grand Floridian and the Polynesian. Lil and I had come here often, to watch the +sunset from a hammock, arms around each other, the Park spread out before us +like a lighted toy village. + +Now the beach was deserted, the Wedding Pavilion silent. I felt suddenly cold +though I was sweating freely. So cold. + +Dreamlike, I walked into the lake, water filling my shoes, logging my pants, +warm as blood, warm on my chest, on my chin, on my mouth, on my eyes. + +I opened my mouth and inhaled deeply, water filling my lungs, choking and warm. +At first I sputtered, but I was in control now, and I inhaled again. The water +shimmered over my eyes, and then was dark. + +I woke on Doctor Pete's cot in the Magic Kingdom, restraints around my wrists +and ankles, a tube in my nose. I closed my eyes, for a moment believing that +I'd been restored from a backup, problems solved, memories behind me. + +Sorrow knifed through me as I realized that Dan was probably dead by now, my +memories of him gone forever. + +Gradually, I realized that I was thinking nonsensically. The fact that I +remembered Dan meant that I hadn't been refreshed from my backup, that my +broken brain was still there, churning along in unmediated isolation. + +I coughed again. My ribs ached and throbbed in counterpoint to my head. Dan +took my hand. + +“You're a pain in the ass, you know that?” he said, smiling. + +“Sorry,” I choked. + +“You sure are,” he said. “Lucky for you they found you—another minute or two +and I'd be burying you right now.” + +/{No}/, I thought, confused. /{They'd have restored me from backup}/. Then it +hit me: I'd gone on record refusing restore from backup after having it +recommended by a medical professional. No one would have restored me after +that. I would have been truly and finally dead. I started to shiver. + +“Easy,” Dan said. “Easy. It's all right now. Doctor says you've got a cracked +rib or two from the CPR, but there's no brain damage.” + +“No /{additional}/ brain damage,” Doctor Pete said, swimming into view. He had +on his professionally calm bedside face, and it reassured me despite myself. + +He shooed Dan away and took his seat. Once Dan had left the room, he shone +lights in my eyes and peeked in my ears, then sat back and considered me. +“Well, Julius,” he said. “What exactly is the problem? We can get you a lethal +injection if that's what you want, but offing yourself in the Seven Seas Lagoon +just isn't good show. In the meantime, would you like to talk about it?” + +Part of me wanted to spit in his eye. I'd tried to talk about it and he'd told +me to go to hell, and now he changes his mind? But I did want to talk. + +“I didn't want to die,” I said. + +“Oh no?” he said. “I think the evidence suggests the contrary.” + +“I wasn't trying to die,” I protested. “I was trying to—” What? I was trying +to… /{abdicate}/. Take the refresh without choosing it, without shutting out +the last year of my best friend's life. Rescue myself from the stinking pit I'd +sunk into without flushing Dan away along with it. That's all, that's all. + +“I wasn't thinking—I was just acting. It was an episode or something. Does that +mean I'm nuts?” + +“Oh, probably,” Doctor Pete said, offhandedly. “But let's worry about one thing +at a time. You can die if you want to, that's your right. I'd rather you lived, +if you want my opinion, and I doubt that I'm the only one, Whuffie be damned. +If you're going to live, I'd like to record you saying so, just in case. We +have a backup of you on file—I'd hate to have to delete it.” + +“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I'd like to be restored if there's no other option.” It +was true. I didn't want to die. + +“All right then,” Doctor Pete said. “It's on file and I'm a happy man. Now, are +you nuts? Probably. A little. Nothing a little counseling and some RandR +wouldn't fix, if you want my opinion. I could find you somewhere if you want.” + +“Not yet,” I said. “I appreciate the offer, but there's something else I have +to do first.” + +Dan took me back to the room and put me to bed with a transdermal soporific +that knocked me out for the rest of the day. When I woke, the moon was over the +Seven Seas Lagoon and the monorail was silent. + +I stood on the patio for a while, thinking about all the things this place had +meant to me for more than a century: happiness, security, efficiency, fantasy. +All of it gone. It was time I left. Maybe back to space, find Zed and see if I +could make her happy again. Anywhere but here. Once Dan was dead—God, it was +sinking in finally—I could catch a ride down to the Cape for a launch. + +“What's on your mind?” Dan asked from behind me, startling me. He was in his +boxers, thin and rangy and hairy. + +“Thinking about moving on,” I said. + +He chuckled. “I've been thinking about doing the same,” he said. + +I smiled. “Not that way,” I said. “Just going somewhere else, starting over. +Getting away from this.” + +“Going to take the refresh?” he asked. + +I looked away. “No,” I said. “I don't believe I will.” + +“It may be none of my business,” he said, “but why the fuck not? Jesus, Julius, +what're you afraid of?” + +“You don't want to know,” I said. + +“I'll be the judge of that.” + +“Let's have a drink, first,” I said. + +Dan rolled his eyes back for a second, then said, “All right, two Coronas, +coming up.” + +After the room-service bot had left, we cracked the beers and pulled chairs out +onto the porch. + +“You sure you want to know this?” I asked. + +He tipped his bottle at me. “Sure as shootin',” he said. + +“I don't want refresh because it would mean losing the last year,” I said. + +He nodded. “By which you mean ‘my last year,’” he said. “Right?” + +I nodded and drank. + +“I thought it might be like that. Julius, you are many things, but hard to +figure out you are not. I have something to say that might help you make the +decision. If you want to hear it, that is.” + +What could he have to say? “Sure,” I said. “Sure.” In my mind, I was on a +shuttle headed for orbit, away from all of this. + +“I had you killed,” he said. “Debra asked me to, and I set it up. You were +right all along.” + +The shuttle exploded in silent, slow moving space, and I spun away from it. I +opened and shut my mouth. + +It was Dan's turn to look away. “Debra proposed it. We were talking about the +people I'd met when I was doing my missionary work, the stone crazies who I'd +have to chase away after they'd rejoined the Bitchun Society. One of them, a +girl from Cheyenne Mountain, she followed me down here, kept leaving me +messages. I told Debra, and that's when she got the idea. + +“I'd get the girl to shoot you and disappear. Debra would give me Whuffie—piles +of it, and her team would follow suit. I'd be months closer to my goal. That +was all I could think about back then, you remember.” + +“I remember.” The smell of rejuve and desperation in our little cottage, and +Dan plotting my death. + +“We planned it, then Debra had herself refreshed from a backup—no memory of the +event, just the Whuffie for me.” + +“Yes,” I said. That would work. Plan a murder, kill yourself, have yourself +refreshed from a backup made before the plan. How many times had Debra done +terrible things and erased their memories that way? + +“Yes,” he agreed. “We did it, I'm ashamed to say. I can prove it, too—I have my +backup, and I can get Jeanine to tell it, too.” He drained his beer. “That's my +plan. Tomorrow. I'll tell Lil and her folks, Kim and her people, the whole +ad-hoc. A going-away present from a shitty friend.” + +My throat was dry and tight. I drank more beer. “You knew all along,” I said. +“You could have proved it at any time.” + +He nodded. “That's right.” + +“You let me…” I groped for the words. “You let me turn into…” They wouldn't +come. + +“I did,” he said. + +All this time. Lil and he, standing on /{my}/ porch, telling me I needed help. +Doctor Pete, telling me I needed refresh from backup, me saying no, no, no, not +wanting to lose my last year with Dan. + +“I've done some pretty shitty things in my day,” he said. “This is the absolute +worst. You helped me and I betrayed you. I'm sure glad I don't believe in +God—that'd make what I'm going to do even scarier.” + +Dan was going to kill himself in two days' time. My friend and my murderer. +“Dan,” I croaked. I couldn't make any sense of my mind. Dan, taking care of me, +helping me, sticking up for me, carrying this horrible shame with him all +along. Ready to die, wanting to go with a clean conscience. + +“You're forgiven,” I said. And it was true. + +He stood. + +“Where are you going” I asked. + +“To find Jeanine, the one who pulled the trigger. I'll meet you at the Hall of +Presidents at nine a.m..” + +I went in through the Main Gate, not a castmember any longer, a Guest with +barely enough Whuffie to scrape in, use the water fountains and stand in line. +If I were lucky, a castmember might spare me a chocolate banana. Probably not, +though. + +I stood in the line for the Hall of Presidents. Other guests checked my +Whuffie, then averted their eyes. Even the children. A year before, they'd have +been striking up conversations, asking me about my job here at the Magic +Kingdom. + +I sat in my seat at the Hall of Presidents, watching the short film with the +rest, sitting patiently while they rocked in their seats under the blast of the +flash-bake. A castmember picked up the stageside mic and thanked everyone for +coming; the doors swung open and the Hall was empty, except for me. The +castmember narrowed her eyes at me, then recognizing me, turned her back and +went to show in the next group. + +No group came. Instead, Dan and the girl I'd seen on the replay entered. + +“We've closed it down for the morning,” he said. + +I was staring at the girl, seeing her smirk as she pulled the trigger on me, +seeing her now with a contrite, scared expression. She was terrified of me. + +“You must be Jeanine,” I said. I stood and shook her hand. “I'm Julius.” + +Her hand was cold, and she took it back and wiped it on her pants. + +My castmember instincts took over. “Please, have a seat. Don't worry, it'll all +be fine. Really. No hard feelings.” I stopped short of offering to get her a +glass of water. + +/{Put her at her ease}/, said a snotty voice in my head. /{She'll make a better +witness. Or make her nervous, pathetic—that'll work, too; make Debra look even +worse}/. + +I told the voice to shut up and got her a cup of water. + +By the time I came back, the whole gang was there. Debra, Lil, her folks, Tim. +Debra's gang and Lil's gang, now one united team. Soon to be scattered. + +Dan took the stage, used the stageside mic to broadcast his voice. “Eleven +months ago, I did an awful thing. I plotted with Debra to have Julius murdered. +I used a friend who was a little confused at the time, used her to pull the +trigger. It was Debra's idea that having Julius killed would cause enough +confusion that she could take over the Hall of Presidents. It was.” + +There was a roar of conversation. I looked at Debra, saw that she was sitting +calmly, as though Dan had just accused her of sneaking an extra helping of +dessert. Lil's parents, to either side of her, were less sanguine. Tom's jaw +was set and angry, Rita was speaking angrily to Debra. Hickory Jackson in the +old Hall used to say, /{I will hang the first man I can lay hands on from the +first tree I can find}/. + +“Debra had herself refreshed from backup after we planned it,” Dan went on, as +though no one was talking. “I was supposed to do the same, but I didn't. I have +a backup in my public directory—anyone can examine it. Right now, I'd like to +bring Jeanine up, she's got a few words she'd like to say.” + +I helped Jeanine take the stage. She was still trembling, and the ad-hocs were +an insensate babble of recriminations. Despite myself, I was enjoying it. + +“Hello,” Jeanine said softly. She had a lovely voice, a lovely face. I wondered +if we could be friends when it was all over. She probably didn't care much +about Whuffie, one way or another. + +The discussion went on. Dan took the mic from her and said, “Please! Can we +have a little respect for our visitor? Please? People?” + +Gradually, the din decreased. Dan passed the mic back to Jeanine. “Hello,” she +said again, and flinched from the sound of her voice in the Hall's PA. “My name +is Jeanine. I'm the one who killed Julius, a year ago. Dan asked me to, and I +did it. I didn't ask why. I trusted—trust—him. He told me that Julius would +make a backup a few minutes before I shot him, and that he could get me out of +the Park without getting caught. I'm very sorry.” There was something +off-kilter about her, some stilt to her stance and words that let you know she +wasn't all there. Growing up in a mountain might do that to you. I snuck a look +at Lil, whose lips were pressed together. Growing up in a theme park might do +that to you, too. + +“Thank you, Jeanine,” Dan said, taking back the mic. “You can have a seat now. +I've said everything I need to say—Julius and I have had our own discussions in +private. If there's anyone else who'd like to speak—” + +The words were barely out of his mouth before the crowd erupted again in words +and waving hands. Beside me, Jeanine flinched. I took her hand and shouted in +her ear: “Have you ever been on the Pirates of the Carribean?” + +She shook her head. + +I stood up and pulled her to her feet. “You'll love it,” I said, and led her +out of the Hall. + +1~ CHAPTER 10 + +I booked us ringside seats at the Polynesian Luau, riding high on a fresh round +of sympathy Whuffie, and Dan and I drank a dozen lapu-lapus in hollowed-out +pineapples before giving up on the idea of getting drunk. + +Jeanine watched the fire-dances and the torch-lighting with eyes like saucers, +and picked daintily at her spare ribs with one hand, never averting her +attention from the floor show. When they danced the fast hula, her eyes +jiggled. I chuckled. + +From where we sat, I could see the spot where I'd waded into the Seven Seas +Lagoon and breathed in the blood-temp water, I could see Cinderella's Castle, +across the lagoon, I could see the monorails and the ferries and the busses +making their busy way through the Park, shuttling teeming masses of guests from +place to place. Dan toasted me with his pineapple and I toasted him back, drank +it dry and belched in satisfaction. + +Full belly, good friends, and the sunset behind a troupe of tawny, half-naked +hula dancers. Who needs the Bitchun Society, anyway? + +When it was over, we watched the fireworks from the beach, my toes dug into the +clean white sand. Dan slipped his hand into my left hand, and Jeanine took my +right. When the sky darkened and the lighted barges puttered away through the +night, we three sat in the hammock. + +I looked out over the Seven Seas Lagoon and realized that this was my last +night, ever, in Walt Disney World. It was time to reboot again, start afresh. +That's what the Park was for, only somehow, this visit, I'd gotten stuck. Dan +had unstuck me. + +The talk turned to Dan's impending death. + +“So, tell me what you think of this,” he said, hauling away on a glowing +cigarette. + +“Shoot,” I said. + +“I'm thinking—why take lethal injection? I mean, I may be done here for now, +but why should I make an irreversible decision?” + +“Why did you want to before?” I asked. + +“Oh, it was the macho thing, I guess. The finality and all. But hell, I don't +have to prove anything, right?” + +“Sure,” I said, magnanimously. + +“So,” he said, thoughtfully. “The question I'm asking is, how long can I +deadhead for? There are folks who go down for a thousand years, ten thousand, +right?” + +“So, you're thinking, what, a million?” I joked. + +He laughed. “A /{million}/? You're thinking too small, son. Try this on for +size: the heat death of the universe.” + +“The heat death of the universe,” I repeated. + +“Sure,” he drawled, and I sensed his grin in the dark. “Ten to the hundred +years or so. The Stelliferous Period—it's when all the black holes have run dry +and things get, you know, stupendously dull. Cold, too. So I'm thinking—why not +leave a wake-up call for some time around then?” + +“Sounds unpleasant to me,” I said. “Brrrr.” + +“Not at all! I figure, self-repairing nano-based canopic jar, mass enough to +feed it—say, a trillion-ton asteroid—and a lot of solitude when the time comes +around. I'll poke my head in every century or so, just to see what's what, but +if nothing really stupendous crops up, I'll take the long ride out. The final +frontier.” + +“That's pretty cool,” Jeanine said. + +“Thanks,” Dan said. + +“You're not kidding, are you?” I asked. + +“Nope, I sure ain't,” he said. + +They didn't invite me back into the ad-hoc, even after Debra left in +Whuffie-penury and they started to put the Mansion back the way it was. Tim +called me to say that with enough support from Imagineering, they thought they +could get it up and running in a week. Suneep was ready to kill someone, I +swear. /{A house divided against itself can}/ not /{stand}/, as Mr. Lincoln +used to say at the Hall of Presidents. + +I packed three changes of clothes and a toothbrush in my shoulderbag and +checked out of my suite at the Polynesian at ten a.m., then met Jeanine and Dan +at the valet parking out front. Dan had a runabout he'd picked up with my +Whuffie, and I piled in with Jeanine in the middle. We played old Beatles tunes +on the stereo all the long way to Cape Canaveral. Our shuttle lifted at noon. + +The shuttle docked four hours later, but by the time we'd been through decontam +and orientation, it was suppertime. Dan, nearly as Whuffie-poor as Debra after +his confession, nevertheless treated us to a meal in the big bubble, +squeeze-tubes of heady booze and steaky paste, and we watched the universe get +colder for a while. + +There were a couple guys jamming, tethered to a guitar and a set of tubs, and +they weren't half bad. + +Jeanine was uncomfortable hanging there naked. She'd gone to space with her +folks after Dan had left the mountain, but it was in a long-haul generation +ship. She'd abandoned it after a year or two and deadheaded back to Earth in a +support-pod. She'd get used to life in space after a while. Or she wouldn't. + +“Well,” Dan said. + +“Yup,” I said, aping his laconic drawl. He smiled. + +“It's that time,” he said. + +Spheres of saline tears formed in Jeanine's eyes, and I brushed them away, +setting them adrift in the bubble. I'd developed some real tender, +brother-sister type feelings for her since I'd watched her saucer-eye her way +through the Magic Kingdom. No romance—not for me, thanks! But camaraderie and a +sense of responsibility. + +“See you in ten to the hundred,” Dan said, and headed to the airlock. I started +after him, but Jeanine caught my hand. + +“He hates long good-byes,” she said. + +“I know,” I said, and watched him go. + +The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in redundant +distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space or age or stupidity +kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write out my life longhand, a letter +to the me that I'll be when it's restored into a clone somewhere, somewhen. +It's important that whoever I am then knows about this year, and it's going to +take a lot of tries for me to get it right. + +In the meantime, I'm working on another symphony, one with a little bit of +“Grim Grinning Ghosts,” and a nod to “It's a Small World After All,” and +especially “There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.” + +Jeanine says it's pretty good, but what does she know? She's barely fifty. + +We've both got a lot of living to do before we know what's what. + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgements: + +I could never have written this book without the personal support of my friends +and family, especially Roz Doctorow, Gord Doctorow and Neil Doctorow, Amanda +Foubister, Steve Samenski, Pat York, Grad Conn, John Henson, John Rose, the +writers at the Cecil Street Irregulars and Mark Frauenfelder. + +I owe a great debt to the writers and editors who mentored and encouraged me: +James Patrick Kelly, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Martha Soukup, Scott Edelman, +Gardner Dozois, Renee Wilmeth, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Claire Eddy, Bob Parks +and Robert Killheffer. + +I am also indebted to my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and my agent Donald +Maass, who believed in this book and helped me bring it to fruition. + +Finally, I must thank the readers, the geeks and the Imagineers who inspired +this book. + +Cory Doctorow + +San Francisco + +September 2002 + +1~note-2004 A note about this book, February 12, 2004: + +As you will see, when you read the text beneath this section, I released this +book a little over a year ago under the terms of a Creative Commons license +that allowed my readers to freely redistribute the text without needing any +further permission from me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in the +service of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into +cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very +satisfactorily. + +When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in the next +section, I did so in the most conservative fashion possible, using CC's most +restrictive license. I wanted to dip my toe in before taking a plunge. I wanted +to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their +peers that maximal copyright is the only thing that stands between us and +penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I had the +intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved" regime would serve me +well, I still couldn't shake the atavistic fear that I was about to do +something very foolish indeed. + +It wasn't foolish. I've since released a short story collection ( { A Place So +Foreign and Eight More }http://craphound.com/place and a second novel ( { +Eastern Standard Tribe }http://craphound.com/est ) in this fashion, and my +career is turning over like a goddamned locomotive engine. I am thrilled beyond +words (an extraordinary circumstance for a writer!) at the way that this has +all worked out. + +And so /{now}/ I'm going to take a little bit of a plunge. Today, in +coincidence with my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference ( { +Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books +}http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4693 ). + +I am re-licensing this book under a far less restrictive Creative Commons +license, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This is a license +that allows you, the reader, to noncommercially "remix" this book -- you have +my blessing to make your own translations, radio and film adaptations, sequels, +fan fiction, missing chapters, machine remixes, you name it. A number of you +assumed that you had my blessing to do this in the first place, and I can't say +that I've been at all put out by the delightful and creative derivative works +created from this book, but now you have my explicit blessing, and I hope +you'll use it. + +Here's the license in summary: + +http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/ + +You are free: + +_1 * to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work + +_1 * to make derivative works + +Under the following conditions: + +_1 Attribution. You must give the original author credit. + +_1 Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. + +_1 Share Alike. 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Each time You distribute or publicly digitally perform the Work or a +Collective Work, the Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the Work on +the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License. + +_2 2. Each time You distribute or publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work, +Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the original Work on the same +terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License. + +_2 3. If any provision of this License is invalid or unenforceable under +applicable law, it shall not affect the validity or enforceability of the +remainder of the terms of this License, and without further action by the +parties to this agreement, such provision shall be reformed to the minimum +extent necessary to make such provision valid and enforceable. + +_2 4. No term or provision of this License shall be deemed waived and no breach +consented to unless such waiver or consent shall be in writing and signed by +the party to be charged with such waiver or consent. + +_2 5. This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with +respect to the Work licensed here. There are no understandings, agreements or +representations with respect to the Work not specified here. Licensor shall not +be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from +You. This License may not be modified without the mutual written agreement of +the Licensor and You. + +1~note-2003 A note about this book, January 9, 2003: + +“Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” is my first novel. It's an actual, +no-foolin' words-on-paper book, published by the good people at Tor Books in +New York City. You can buy this book in stores or online, by following links +like this one: + +http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765304368/downandoutint-20 + +So, what's with this file? Good question. + +I'm releasing the entire text of this book as a free, freely redistributable +e-book. You can download it, put it on a P2P net, put it on your site, email it +to a friend, and, if you're addicted to dead trees, you can even print it. + +Why am I doing this thing? Well, it's a long story, but to shorten it up: +first-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don't have a lot +of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and +fall based on word-of-mouth. I'm not bad at word-of-mouth. I have a blog, Boing +Boing ( http://boingboing.net ), where I do a /{lot}/ of word-of-mouthing. I +compulsively tell friends and strangers about things that I like. + +And telling people about stuff I like is /{way}/, /{way}/ easier if I can just +send it to 'em. Way easier. + +What's more, P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, music and +movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the +brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet +have managed to put just about /{everything}/ online. What's more, they've done +it for cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever. I'm a stone +infovore and this kinda Internet mishegas gives me a serious frisson of +futurosity. + +Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it's hard to figure out how people are +gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a +serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It's your basic +end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer, +end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade. + +I'm especially grateful to my publisher, Tor Books ( http://www.tor.com/ ) and +my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden ( http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite ) for +being hep enough to let me try out this experiment. + +All that said, here's the deal: I'm releasing this book under a license +developed by the Creative Commons project ( http://creativecommons.org/ ). This +is a project that lets people like me roll our own license agreements for the +distribution of our creative work under terms similar to those employed by the +Free/Open Source Software movement. It's a great project, and I'm proud to be a +part of it. + +Here's a summary of the license: + +http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0 + +_* Attribution. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and +perform the work. 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This License may not be modified without the mutual written agreement of +the Licensor and You. + + +1~bio About the author: + +Cory Doctorow is Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, +www.eff.org, and maintains a personal site at www.craphound.com. He is the +co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing at www.boingboing.net, with more +than 250,000 visitors a month. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New +Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards. Born and raised in Toronto, he now lives in San +Francisco. He enjoys using Google to look up interesting facts about long walks +on the beach. + +1~other_works Other books by Cory Doctorow: + +/{A Place So Foreign and Eight More}/ + +– short story collection, forthcoming from Four Walls Eight Windows in fall +2003, with an introduction by Bruce Sterling + +/{Essential Blogging}/, O'Reilly and Associates, 2002 + +– with Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott and Mena +G. Trott + +/{The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction}/, Alpha Books, 2000 + +– co-written with Karl Schroeder + +% ? compare earlier version + +_1 If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am +I? If not now, when?~{ See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html. +Stallman adds his own footnote to this statement, writing, "As an Atheist, I +don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one +of them has said. }~ + +Speaking to audiences, Stallman avoids the religious route and ex-presses the +decision in pragmatic terms. "I asked myself: what could I, an operating-system +developer, do to improve the situation? It wasn't until I examined the question +for a while that I realized an operating-system developer was exactly what was +needed to solve the problem." + +Once he recognized that, Stallman says, everything else "fell into place." In +1983, MIT was acquiring second-generation Lisp Machines from Symbolics, on +which the MIT Lisp Machine system could not possibly run. Once most of the MIT +machines were replaced, he would be unable to continue maintaining that system +effectively for lack of users' bug reports. He would have to stop. But he also +wanted to stop. The MIT Lisp Machine system was not free software: even though +users could get the source code, they could not redistribute it freely. +Meanwhile, the goal of continuing the MIT system had already been achieved: LMI +had survived and was developing software on its own. + +Stallman didn't want to spend his whole life punishing those who had destroyed +his old community. He wanted to build a new one. He decided to denounce +software that would require him to compromise his ethical beliefs, and devote +his life to the creation of programs that would make it easier for him and +others to escape from it. Pledging to build a free software operating system +"or die trying - of old age, of course," Stallman quips, he resigned from the +MIT staff in January, 1984, to build GNU. + +The resignation distanced Stallman's work from the legal auspices of MIT. +Still, Stallman had enough friends and allies within the AI Lab to continue +using the facilities, and later his own office. He also had the ability to +secure outside consulting gigs to underwrite the early stages of the GNU +Project. In resigning from MIT, however, Stallman negated any debate about +conflict of interest or Institute ownership of the software. The man whose +early adulthood fear of social isolation had driven him deeper and deeper into +the AI Lab's embrace was now building a legal firewall between himself and that +environment. +={ GNU Project } + +For the first few months, Stallman operated in isolation from the Unix +community as well. Although his announcement to the net.unix-wizards group had +attracted sympathetic responses, few volunteers signed on to join the crusade +in its early stages. +={ net.unix-wizards newsgroup } + +"The community reaction was pretty much uniform," recalls Rich Morin, leader of +a Unix user group at the time. "People said, 'Oh, that's a great idea. Show us +your code. Show us it can be done.'" + +Aware that the job was enormous, Stallman decided to try to reuse existing free +software wherever possible. So he began looking for existing free programs and +tools that could be converted into GNU programs and tools. One of the first +candidates was a compiler named VUCK, which converted programs written in the +popular C programming language into machine-runnable code. Translated from the +Dutch, the program's acronym stood for the Free University Compiler Kit. +Optimistic, Stallman asked the program's author if the program was free. When +the author informed him that the words "Free University" were a reference to +the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and that the program was not free, +Stallman was chagrined. + +"He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler +was not," recalls Stallman. He had not only refused to help - he suggested +Stallman drop his plan to develop GNU, and instead write some add-ons to boost +sales of VUCK, in return for a share of the profits. "I therefore decided that +my first program for the GNU Project would be a multi-language, multi-platform +compiler." 19~{ See Richard Stallman, "The GNU Operating System and the Free +Software Movement," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 65. }~ + +Instead of VUCK, Stallman found the Pastel compiler ("off-color Pascal"), +written by programmers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. According to what +they said when they gave him a copy, the compiler was free to copy and modify. +Unfortunately, the program was unsuitable for the job, because its memory +requirements were enormous. It parsed the entire input file in core memory, +then retained all the internal data until it finished compiling the file. On +mainframe systems this design had been forgivable. On Unix systems it was a +crippling barrier, since even 32-bit machines that ran Unix were often unable +to provide so much memory to a program. Stallman made substantial progress at +first, building a C-compatible front end to the compiler and testing it on the +larger Vax, whose system could handle large memory spaces. When he tried +porting the system to the 68010, and investigated why it crashed, he discovered +the memory size problem, and concluded he would have to build a totally new +compiler from scratch. Stallman eventually did this, producing the GNU C +Compiler or GCC. But it was not clear in 1984 what to do about the compiler, so +he decided to let those plans gel while turning his attention to other parts of +GNU. +={ C programming language : + VUCK compiler for ; + VUCK compiler +} + +In September of 1984, thus, Stallman began development of a GNU version of +Emacs, the replacement for the program he had been supervising for a decade. +Within the Unix community, the two native editor programs were vi, written by +Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, and ed, written by Bell Labs scientist +(and Unix co-creator) Ken Thompson. Both were useful and popular, but neither +offered the endlessly expandable nature of Emacs. +={ Bell Labs ; + Emacs text editor : + rewriting for Unix +2 ; + GNU Emacs : + rewriting for Unix +2 ; + Joy, Bill ; + vi text editor ; + Thompson, Ken +} + +Looking back, Stallman says he didn't view the decision in strategic terms. "I +wanted an Emacs, and I had a good opportunity to develop one." + +Once again, Stallman had found existing code with which he hoped to save time. +In writing a Unix version of Emacs, Stallman was soon following the footsteps +of Carnegie Mellon graduate student James Gosling, author of a C-based version +dubbed Gosling Emacs or Gosmacs. Gosling's version of Emacs included an +interpreter for a simplified offshoot of the Lisp language, called Mocklisp. +Although Gosling had put Gosmacs under copyright and had sold the rights to +UniPress, a privately held software company, Stallman received the assurances +of a fellow developer who had participated in early Gosmacs development. +According to the developer, Gosling, while a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon, +had given him permission by email to distribute his own version of Gosmacs in +exchange for his contribution to the code. +={ Carnegie Mellon University ; + Gosling, James +3 ; + GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs) ; + interpreters for LISP +1 ; + LISP programming language : + EMACS and +1 ; + MOCKLISP language ; + UniPress software company +1 +} + +At first Stallman thought he would change only the user-level commands, to +implement full compatibility with the original PDP-10Emacs. However, when he +found how weak Mocklisp was in comparison with real Lisp, he felt compelled to +replace it with a true Lisp system. This made it natural to rewrite most of the +higher-level code of Gosmacs in a completely different way, taking advantage of +the greater power and flexible data structures of Lisp. By mid-1985, in GNU +Emacs as released on the Internet, only a few files still had code remaining +from Gosmacs. + +Then UniPress caught wind of Stallman's project, and denied that the other +developer had received permission to distribute his own version of Gosmacs. He +could not find a copy of the old email to defend his claim. Stallman eliminated +this problem by writing replacements for the few modules that remained from +Gosmacs. + +Nevertheless, the notion of developers selling off software rights - indeed, +the very notion of developers having such powers to sell in the first place - +rankled Stallman. In a 1986 speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute, +Stallman cited the UniPress incident as yet another example of the dangers +associated with proprietary software. +={ proprietary software : + Emacs and +4 ; + Swedish Royal Technical Institute +} + +"Sometimes I think that perhaps one of the best things I could do with my life +is find a gigantic pile of proprietary software that was a trade secret, and +start handing out copies on a street corner so it wouldn't be a trade secret +any more," said Stallman. "Perhaps that would be a much more efficient way for +me to give people new free software than actually writing it myself; but +everyone is too cowardly to even take it."~{ See Richard Stallman (1986). }~ + +Despite the stress it generated, the dispute over Gosling's code would assist +both Stallman and the free software movement in the longterm. It would force +Stallman to address the weaknesses of the Emacs Commune and the informal trust +system that had allowed problematic offshoots to emerge. It would also force +Stallman to sharpen the free software movement's political objectives. +Following the release of GNU Emacs in 1985, Stallman issued /{The GNU +Manifesto}/, an expansion of the original announcement posted in September, +1983. Stallman included within the document a lengthy section devoted to the +many arguments used by commercial and academic programmers to justify the +proliferation of proprietary software programs. One argument, "Don't +programmers deserve a reward for their creativity," earned a response +encapsulating Stallman's anger over the recent Gosling Emacs episode: +={ Emacs Commune : + proprietary software and ; + Emacs text editor ; + GNU Emacs ; + GNU Manifesto +} + +"If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution," Stallman wrote. +"Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far [ sic ] as society +is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating +innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they +restrict the use of these programs."~{ See Richard Stallman, The GNU Manifesto +(1985), \\ http://www.gnu.org/gnu/ manifesto.html. }~ + +With the release of GNU Emacs, the GNU Project finally had code to show. It +also had the burdens of any software-based enterprise. As more and more Unix +developers began playing with the software, money, gifts, and requests for +tapes began to pour in. To address the business side of the GNU Project, +Stallman drafted a few of his colleagues and formed the Free Software +Foundation (FSF), a non-profit organization dedicated to speeding the GNU +Project towards its goal. With Stallman as president and various friends and +hacker allies as board members, the FSF helped provide a corporate face for the +GNU Project. +={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) : + GNU Project and ; + GNU Project : + Emacs, release of +} + +Robert Chassell, a programmer then working at Lisp Machines, Inc., became one +of five charter board members at the Free Software Foundation following a +dinner conversation with Stallman. Chassell also served as the organization's +treasurer, a role that started small but quickly grew. +={ Chassell, Robert +6 ; + LISP Machines Inc. (LMI) ; + LMI (LISP Machines Inc.) +} + +"I think in '85 our total expenses and revenue were something in the order of +$23,000, give or take," Chassell recalls. "Richard had his office, and we +borrowed space. I put all the stuff, especially the tapes, under my desk. It +wasn't until sometime later LMI loaned us some space where we could store tapes +and things of that sort." + +In addition to providing a face, the Free Software Foundation provided a center +of gravity for other disenchanted programmers. The Unix market that had seemed +so collegial even at the time of Stallman's initial GNU announcement was +becoming increasingly competitive. In an attempt to tighten their hold on +customers, companies were starting to deny users access to Unix source code, a +trend that only speeded the number of inquiries into ongoing GNU software +projects. + +The Unix wizards who once regarded Stallman as a noisy kook were now beginning +to see him as a software prophet or a software Cassandra, according as they +felt hope or despair over escaping the problem she identified. + +"A lot of people don't realize, until they've had it happen to them, how +frustrating it can be to spend a few years working on a software program only +to have it taken away," says Chassell, summarizing the feelings and opinions of +the correspondents writing in to the FSF during the early years. "After that +happens a couple of times, you start to say to yourself, 'Hey, wait a minute.'" + +For Chassell, the decision to participate in the Free Software Foundation came +down to his own personal feelings of loss. Prior to LMI, Chassell had been +working for hire, writing an introductory book on Unix for Cadmus, Inc., a +Cambridge-area software company. When Cadmus folded, taking the rights to the +book down with it, Chassell says he attempted to buy the rights back with no +success. + +"As far as I know, that book is still sitting on a shelf somewhere, unusable, +uncopyable, just taken out of the system," Chassell says. "It was quite a good +introduction if I may say so myself. It would have taken maybe three or four +months to convert [the book] into a perfectly usable introduction to GNU/Linux +today. The whole experience, aside from what I have in my memory, was lost." + +Forced to watch his work sink into the mire while his erstwhile employer +struggled through bankruptcy, Chassell says he felt a hint of the anger that +drove Stallman to fits of apoplexy. "The main clarity, for me, was the sense +that if you want to have a decent life, you don't want to have bits of it +closed off," Chassell says. "This whole idea of having the freedom to go in and +to fix something and modify it, whatever it may be, it really makes a +difference. It makes one think happily that after you've lived a few years that +what you've done is worthwhile. Because otherwise it just gets taken away and +thrown out or abandoned or, at the very least, you no longer have any relation +to it. It's like losing a bit of your life." + +1~ Chapter 8 - St. Ignucius +={ Ignucius, (St.) ; + St. Ignucius +} + +The Maui High Performance Computing Center is located in a single-story +building in the dusty red hills just above the town of Kihei. Framed by +million-dollar views and the multi-million dollar real estate of the +Silversword Golf Course, the center seems like the ultimate scientific +boondoggle. Far from the boxy, sterile confines of Tech Square or even the +sprawling research metropolises of Argonne, Illinois and Los Alamos, New +Mexico, the MHPCC seems like the kind of place where scientists spend more time +on their tans than their post-doctoral research projects. +={ Argonne (Illinois) ; + Los Alamos (New Mexico) ; + Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) ; + MHPCC (Maui High Performance Computing Center) +} + +The image is only half true. Although researchers at the MHPCC do take +advantage of the local recreational opportunities, they also take their work +seriously. According to { Top500.org }http://top500.org, a web site that tracks +the most powerful supercomputers in the world, the IBMSP Power3 supercomputer +housed within the MHPCC clocks in at 837 billion floating-point operations per +second, making it one of 25most powerful computers in the world. Co-owned and +operated by the University of Hawaii and the U.S. Air Force, the machine +divides its computer cycles between the number crunching tasks associated with +military logistics and high-temperature physics research. +={ IBM SP Power3 supercomputer ; + U.S Air Force ; + University of Hawaii ; + Top500.org +} + +Simply put, the MHPCC is a unique place, a place where the brainy culture of +science and engineering and the laid-back culture of the Hawaiian islands +coexist in peaceful equilibrium. A slogan on the lab's 2000 web site sums it +up: "Computing in paradise." + +It's not exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find Richard Stallman, a man +who, when taking in the beautiful view of the nearby Maui Channel through the +picture windows of a staffer's office, mutters a terse critique: "Too much +sun." Still, as an emissary from one computing paradise to another, Stallman +has a message to deliver, even if it means subjecting his hacker eyes to +painful solar glare. + +The conference room is already full by the time I arrive to catch Stallman's +speech. The gender breakdown is a little better than at the New York speech, +85% male, 15% female, but not by much. About half of the audience members wear +khaki pants and logo-encrusted golf shirts. The other half seems to have gone +native. Dressed in the gaudy flower-print shirts so popular in this corner of +the world, their faces area deep shade of ochre. The only residual indication +of geek status are the gadgets: Nokia cell phones, Palm Pilots, and Sony VAIO +laptops. + +Needless to say, Stallman, who stands in front of the room dressed in plain +blue T-shirt, brown polyester slacks, and white socks, sticks out like a sore +thumb. The fluorescent lights of the conference room help bring out the +unhealthy color of his sun-starved skin.~{ RMS: The idea that skin can be +"sun-starved" or that paleness is "unhealthy"is dangerous misinformation; +staying out of the sun can't hurt you as long as you have enough Vitamin D. +What damages the skin, and can even kill you, is excessive exposure to +sunlight. }~ His beard and hair are enough to trigger beads of sweat on even +the coolest Hawaiian neck. Short of having the words "mainlander" tattooed on +his forehead, Stallman couldn't look more alien if he tried. [RMS: Is there +something bad about looking different from others?] + +As Stallman putters around the front of the room, a few audience members +wearing T-shirts with the logo of the Maui FreeBSD Users Group (MFUG) race to +set up camera and audio equipment. FreeBSD, a free software offshoot of the +Berkeley Software Distribution, the venerable 1970s academic version of Unix, +is technically a competitor to the GNU/Linux operating system. Still, in the +hacking world, Stallman speeches are documented with a fervor reminiscent of +the Grateful Dead and its legendary army of amateur archivists. As the local +free software heads, it's up to the MFUG members to make sure fellow +programmers in Hamburg, Mumbai, and Novosibirsk don't miss out on the latest +pearls of RMS wisdom. +={ Berkely Software Distribution (BSD) ; + BSD (Berkely Software Distribution) ; + Grateful Dead, The +1 ; + Maui FreeBSD Users Group +} + +The analogy to the Grateful Dead is apt. Often, when describing the business +opportunities inherent within the free software model, Stallman has held up the +Grateful Dead as an example. In refusing to restrict fans' ability to record +live concerts, the Grateful Dead became more than a rock group. They became the +center of a tribal community dedicated to Grateful Dead music. Over time, that +tribal community became so large and so devoted that the band shunned record +contracts and supported itself solely through musical tours and live +appearances. In 1994, the band's last year as a touring act, the Grateful Dead +drew $52 million in gate receipts alone.~{ See "Grateful Dead Time Capsule: +1985-1995 North American Tour Grosses," \\ http://www.dead101.com/1197.htm. }~ + +While few software companies have been able to match that success, the tribal +aspect of the free software community is one reason many in the latter half of +the 1990s started to accept the notion that publishing software source code +might be a good thing. Hoping to build their own loyal followings, companies +such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett Packard have come to accept the +letter, if not the spirit, of the Stallman free software message. Describing +the GPL as the information-technology industry's /{Magna Carta}/, ZDNet +software columnist Evan Leibovitch sees the growing affection for all things +GNU as more than just a trend. "This societal shift is letting users take back +control of their futures," Leibovitch writes. "Just as the /{Magna Carta}/ gave +rights to British subjects, the GPL enforces consumer rights and freedoms on +behalf of the users of computer software."~{ See Evan Leibovitch, "Who's Afraid +of Big Bad Wolves," /{ZDNet}/ Tech Update (December 15, 2000), \\ +http://www.zdnet.com/news/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-wolves/298394. }~ +={ Hewlett Packard ; + IBM ; + Sun Microsystems +} + +The tribal aspect of the free software community also helps explain why 40-odd +programmers, who might otherwise be working on physics projects or surfing the +Web for windsurfing buoy reports, have packed into a conference room to hear +Stallman speak. + +Unlike the New York speech, Stallman gets no introduction. He also offers no +self-introduction. When the FreeBSD people finally get their equipment up and +running, Stallman simply steps forward, starts speaking, and steamrolls over +every other voice in the room. +={ FreeBSD } + +"Most of the time when people consider the question of what rules society +should have for using software, the people considering it are from software +companies, and they consider the question from a self-serving perspective," +says Stallman, opening his speech. "What rules can we impose on everybody else +so they have to pay us lots of money? I had the good fortune in the 1970s to be +part of a community of programmers who shared software. And because of this I +always like to look at the same issue from a different direction to ask: what +kind of rules make possible a good society that is good for the people who are +in it? And therefore I reach completely different answers." + +Once again, Stallman quickly segues into the parable of the Xerox laser +printer, taking a moment to deliver the same dramatic finger-pointing gestures +to the crowd. He also devotes a minute or two to the GNU/Linux name. + +"Some people say to me, 'Why make such a fuss about getting credit for this +system? After all, the important thing is the job is done, not whether you get +recognition for it.' Well, this would be wise advice if it were true. But the +job wasn't to build an operating system; the job is to spread freedom to the +users of computers. And to do that we have to make it possible to do everything +with computers in freedom."~{ For narrative purposes, I have hesitated to go +in-depth when describing Stallman's full definition of software "freedom." The +GNU Project web site lists four fundamental components: \\ _* The freedom to +run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). \\ _* The freedom to +study the program's source code, and change it so that the program does what +you wish (freedom 1). \\ _* The freedom to redistribute copies of the program +so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). \\ _* The freedom to distribute +copies of your modified versions, so that the whole community can benefit from +them (freedom 3). For more information, please visit "The Free Software +Definition" at \\ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. }~ + +Adds Stallman, "There's a lot more work to do." + +For some in the audience, this is old material. For others, it's a little +arcane. When a member of the golf-shirt contingent starts dozing off, Stallman +stops the speech and asks somebody to wake the person up. + +"Somebody once said my voice was so soothing, he asked if I was some kind of +healer," says Stallman, drawing a quick laugh from the crowd. "I guess that +probably means I can help you drift gently into a blissful, relaxing sleep. And +some of you might need that. I guess I shouldn't object if you do. If you need +to sleep, by all means do." + +The speech ends with a brief discussion of software patents, a growing issue of +concern both within the software industry and within the free software +community. Like Napster, software patents reflect the awkward nature of +applying laws and concepts written for the physical world to the frictionless +universe of information technology. + +Copyright law and patent law work differently, and have totally different +effects in the software field. The copyright on a program controls the copying +and adaptation of that program's code, and it belongs to the program's +developer. But copyright does not cover ideas. In other words, a developer is +free, under copyright, to implement in his own code features and commands he +has seen in existing programs. Those aspects are ideas, not expression, and +thus outside the scope of copyright law. + +It is likewise lawful - though hard work - to decode how a binary program +works, and then implement the same ideas and algorithms indifferent code. This +practice is known as "reverse engineering." + +Software patents work differently. According to the U.S. Patent Office, +companies and individuals can obtain patents for computing ideas that are +innovative (or, at least, unknown to the Patent Office). In theory, this allows +the patent-holder to trade off disclosure of the technique for a specific +monopoly lasting a minimum of 20 years after the patent filing. In practice, +the disclosure is of limited value to the public, since the operation of the +program is often self-evident, and could in any case be determined by reverse +engineering. Unlike copyright, a patent gives its holder the power to forbid +the independent development of software programs which use the patented idea. +={ U.S. Patent Office } + +In the software industry, where 20 years can cover the entire life cycle of a +marketplace, patents take on a strategic weight. Where companies such as +Microsoft and Apple once battled over copyright and the "look and feel" of +various technologies, today's Internet companies use patents as a way to stake +out individual applications and business models, the most notorious example +being Amazon.com's 2000 attempt to patent the company's "one-click" on line +shopping process. For most companies, however, software patents have become a +defensive tool, with cross-licensing deals balancing one set of corporate +patents against another in a tense form of corporate detente. Still, in a few +notable cases of computer encryption and graphic imaging algorithms, software +vendors have successfully stifled rival developments. For instance, some +font-rendering features are missing from free soft-ware because of patent +threats from Apple. + +For Stallman, the software-patent issue dramatizes the need for eternal hacker +vigilance. It also underlines the importance of stressing the political +benefits of free software programs over the competitive benefits. Stallman says +competitive performance and price, two areas where free software operating +systems such as GNU/Linux and FreeBSD already hold a distinct advantage over +their proprietary counterparts, are side issues compared to the large issues of +user and developer freedom. +={ FreeBSD +2 } + +This position is controversial within the community: open source advocates +emphasize the utilitarian advantages of free software over the political +advantages. Rather than stress the political significance of free software +programs, open source advocates have chosen to stress the engineering integrity +of the hacker development model. Citing the power of peer review, the open +source argument paints programs such as GNU/Linux or FreeBSD as better built, +better inspected and, by extension, more trustworthy to the average user. + +That's not to say the term "open source" doesn't have its political +implications. For open source advocates, the term open source serves two +purposes. First, it eliminates the confusion associated with the word "free," a +word many businesses interpret as meaning "zero cost." Second, it allows +companies to examine the free software phenomenon on a technological, rather +than ethical, basis. Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative and +one of the leading hackers to endorse the term, explained his refusal to follow +Stallman's political path in a 1999 essay, titled "Shut Up and Show Them the +Code": +={ OSI (Open Source Initiative) ; + Open Source Initiative (OSI) ; + Raymond, Eric ; + Shut Up and Show Them the Code (Raymond) +1 +} + +_1 RMS's rhetoric is very seductive to the kind of people we are. We hackers +are thinkers and idealists who readily resonate with appeals to "principle" and +"freedom" and "rights." Even when we disagree with bits of his program, we want +RMS's rhetorical style to work; we think it ought to work; we tend to be +puzzled and disbelieving when it fails on the 95% of people who aren't wired +like we are.~{ See Eric Raymond, "Shut Up and Show Them the Code," online +essay, (June28, 1999), \\ +http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/shut-up-and-show-them.html. }~ + +Included among that 95%, Raymond writes, are the bulk of business managers, +investors, and non-hacker computer users who, through sheer weight of numbers, +tend to decide the overall direction of the commercial software marketplace. +Without a way to win these people over, Raymond argues, programmers are doomed +to pursue their ideology on the periphery of society: + +_1 When RMS insists that we talk about "computer users' rights," he's issuing a +dangerously attractive invitation to us to repeat old failures. It's one we +should reject - not because his principles are wrong, but because that kind of +language, applied to software, simply does not persuade anybody but us. In +fact, it confuses and repels most people outside our culture.~{ Ibid. }~ + +Stallman, however, rejects Raymond's premises: + +_1 Raymond's attempt to explain our failure is misleading because we have not +failed. Our goal is large, and we have a long way to go, but we have also come +a long way. + +_1 Raymond's pessimistic assertion about the values of non-hackers is an +exaggeration. Many non-hackers are more concerned with the political issues we +focus on than with the technical advantages that open source emphasizes. This +often includes political leaders too, though not in all countries. + +_1 It was the ethical ideals of free software, not "better software," which +persuaded the presidents of Ecuador and Brazil to move government agencies to +free software. They are not geeks, but they understand freedom. + +But the principal flaw in the open source argument, according to Stallman, is +that it leads to weaker conclusions. It convinces many users to run some +programs which are free, but does not offer the many reason to migrate entirely +to free software. This partially gives them freedom, but does not teach them to +recognize it and value it as such, so they remain likely to let it drop and +lose it. For instance, what happens when the improvement of free software is +blocked by a patent? + +Most open source advocates are equally, if not more, vociferous as Stallman +when it comes to opposing software patents. So too are most proprietary +software developers, since patents threaten their projects too. However, +pointing to software patents' tendency to put areas of software functionality +off limits, Stallman contrasts what the free software idea and the open source +idea imply about such cases. + +"It's not because we don't have the talent to make better software," says +Stallman. "It's because we don't have the right. Somebody has prohibited us +from serving the public. So what's going to happen when users encounter these +gaps in free software? Well, if they have been persuaded by the open source +movement that these freedoms are good because they lead to more-powerful +reliable software, they're likely to say, 'You didn't deliver what you +promised. This software's not more powerful. It's missing this feature. You +lied to me.' But if they have come to agree with the free software movement, +that the freedom is important in itself, then they will say, 'How dare those +people stop me from having this feature and my freedom too.' And with that kind +of response, we may survive the hits that we're going to take as these patents +explode." + +Watching Stallman deliver his political message in person, it is hard to see +anything confusing or repellent. Stallman's appearance may seem off-putting, +but his message is logical. When an audience member asks if, in shunning +proprietary software, free software proponents lose the ability to keep up with +the latest technological advancements, Stallman answers the question in terms +of his own personal beliefs. "I think that freedom is more important than mere +technical advance," he says. "I would always choose a less advanced free +program rather than a more advanced non free program, because I won't give up +my freedom for something like that [advance]. My rule is, if I can't share it +with you, I won't take it." + +In the minds of those who assume ethics means religion, such answers reinforce +the quasi-religious nature of the Stallman message. However, unlike a Jew +keeping kosher or a Mormon refusing to drink alcohol, Stallman is not obeying a +commandment, but simply refusing to cede his freedom. His speech explains the +practical requisites for doing so: a proprietary program takes away your +freedom, so if you want freedom, you need to reject the program. + +Stallman paints his decision to use free software in place of proprietary in +the color of a personal belief he hopes others will come to share. As software +evangelists go, Stallman avoids forcing those beliefs down listeners' throats. +Then again, a listener rarely leaves a Stallman speech not knowing where the +true path to software righteousness lies. + +As if to drive home this message, Stallman punctuates his speech with an +unusual ritual. Pulling a black robe out of a plastic grocery bag, Stallman +puts it on. Then he pulls out a reflective brown computer disk and places it on +his head. The crowd lets out a startled laugh. + +"I am St. IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs," says Stallman, raising his right +hand in mock-blessing. "I bless your computer, my child." +={ Ignucius, (St.) ; + St. Ignucius +} + +The laughter turns into full-blown applause after a few seconds. As audience +members clap, the computer disk on Stallman's head catches the glare of an +overhead light, eliciting a perfect halo effect. In the blink of an eye, +Stallman resembles a Russian religious icon. + +{free_as_in_freedom_2_02_rms_st_ignucius.png 254x240 "Stallman dressed as St. IGNUcius. The photo was taken by Stian Eikeland in Bergen, Norway on February 19, 2009." }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_stallman + +"Emacs was initially a text editor," says Stallman, explaining the getup. +"Eventually it became a way of life for many and a religion for some. We call +this religion the Church of Emacs." +={ Church of Emacs +8 ; + Emacs text editor +11 ; + GNU Emacs +11 +} + +The skit is a lighthearted moment of self-parody, a humorous return-jab at the +many people who might see Stallman's form of software asceticism as religious +fanaticism in disguise. It is also the sound of the other shoe dropping - +loudly. It's as if, in donning his robe and halo, Stallman is finally letting +listeners off the hook, saying, "It's OK to laugh. I know I'm weird." [RMS: To +laugh at someone for being weird is boorish, and it is not my intention to +excuse that. But I hope people will laugh at my St. IGNUcius comedy routine.] + +Discussing the St. IGNUcius persona afterward, Stallman says he first came up +with it in 1996, long after the creation of Emacs but well before the emergence +of the "open source" term and the struggle for hacker-community leadership that +precipitated it. At the time, Stallman says, he wanted a way to "poke fun at +himself," to remind listeners that, though stubborn, Stallman was not the +fanatic some made him out to be. It was only later, Stallman adds, that others +seized the persona as a convenient way to play up his reputation as software +ideologue, as Eric Raymond did in an 1999 interview with the Linux.com web +site: +={ linux.com ; + Raymond, Eric : + St. Ignucius and +2 +} + +_1 When I say RMS calibrates what he does, I'm not belittling or accusing him +of insincerity. I'm saying that like all good communicators he's got a +theatrical streak. Sometimes it's conscious - have you ever seen him in his St. +IGNUcius drag, blessing software with a disk platter on his head? Mostly it's +unconscious; he's just learned the degree of irritating stimulus that works, +that holds attention without (usually) freaking people out.~{ See "Guest +Interview: Eric S. Raymond," /{Linux.com}/ (May 18, 1999), \\ +http://www.linux.com/interviews/19990518/8/. }~ + +Stallman takes issue with the Raymond analysis. "It's simply my way of making +fun of myself," he says. "The fact that others see it as anything more than +that is a reflection of their agenda, not mine." + +That said, Stallman does admit to being a ham. "Are you kidding?" he says at +one point. "I love being the center of attention." To facilitate that process, +Stallman says he once enrolled in Toastmasters, an organization that helps +members bolster their public-speaking skills and one Stallman recommends highly +to others. He possesses a stage presence that would be the envy of most +theatrical performers and feels a link to vaudevillians of years past. A few +days after the Maui High Performance Computing Center speech, I allude to the +1999 LinuxWorld performance and ask Stallman if he has a Groucho Marx complex - +i.e., the unwillingness to belong to any club that would have him as a +member.~{ RMS: Williams misinterprets Groucho's famous remark by treating it as +psychological. It was intended as a jab at the overt antisemitism of many +clubs, which was why they would refuse him as a member. I did not understand +this either until my mother explained it to me. Williams and I grew up when +bigotry had gone underground, and there was no need to veil criticism of +bigotry in humor as Groucho did. }~ Stallman's response is immediate: "No, but +I admire Groucho Marx in a lot of ways and certainly have been in some things I +say inspired by him. But then I've also been inspired in some ways by Harpo." +={ Marx, Groucho +1 } + +The Groucho Marx influence is certainly evident in Stallman's lifelong fondness +for punning. Then again, punning and wordplay are common hacker traits. Perhaps +the most Groucho-like aspect of Stallman's personality, however, is the deadpan +manner in which the puns are delivered. Most come so stealthily - without even +the hint of a raised eyebrow or upturned smile - you almost have to wonder if +Stal-man's laughing at his audience more than the audience is laughing at him. + +Watching members of the Maui High Performance Computer Center laugh at the St. +IGNUcius parody, such concerns evaporate. While not exactly a standup act, +Stallman certainly possesses the chops to keep a roomful of engineers in +stitches. "To be a saint in the Church of Emacs does not require celibacy, but +it does require making a commitment to living a life of moral purity," he tells +the Maui audience. "You must exorcise the evil proprietary operating systems +from all your computers, and then install a wholly [holy] free operating +system. And then you must install only free software on top of that. If you +make this commitment and live by it, then you too will be a saint in the Church +of Emacs, and you too may have a halo." + +The St. IGNUcius skit ends with a brief inside joke. On most Unix systems and +Unix-related offshoots, the primary competitor program to Emacs is vi, +pronounced vee-eye, a text-editing program developed by former UC Berkeley +student and current Sun Microsystems chief scientist, Bill Joy. Before doffing +his "halo," Stallman pokes fun at the rival program. "People sometimes ask me +if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi," he says. "Using a free +version of vi is not a sin;it is a penance. So happy hacking."~{ The service of +the Church of Emacs has developed further since 2001. Users can now join the +Church by reciting the Confession of the Faith: "There is no system but GNU, +and Linux is one of its kernels." Stallman sometimes mentions the religious +ceremony known as the Foobar Mitzvah, the Great Schism between various rival +versions of Emacs, and the cult of the Virgin of Emacs (which refers to any +person that has not yet learned to use Emacs). In addition, "vi vi vi" has been +identified as the Editor of the Beast. }~ +={ Joy, Bill ; + vi text editor : + as an Emacs competitor ; + UC Berkeley ; + Sun Microsystems +} + +After a brief question-and-answer session, audience members gather around +Stallman. A few ask for autographs. "I'll sign this," says Stallman, holding up +one woman's print out of the GNU General Public License, "but only if you +promise me to use the term GNU/Linux instead of Linux" (when referring to the +system), "and tell all your friends to do likewise." +={ GNU General Public License ; + GPL +} + +The comment merely confirms a private observation. Unlike other stage +performers and political figures, Stallman has no "off" mode. Aside from the +St. IGNUcius character, the ideologue you see on stage is the ideologue you +meet backstage. Later that evening, during a dinner conversation in which a +programmer mentions his affinity for "open source" programs, Stallman, between +bites, upbraids his table-mate: "You mean free software. That's the proper way +to refer to it." + +During the question-and-answer session, Stallman admits to playing the +pedagogue at times. "There are many people who say, 'Well, first let's invite +people to join the community, and then let's teach them about freedom.' And +that could be a reasonable strategy, but what we have is almost everybody's +inviting people to join the community, and hardly anybody's teaching them about +freedom once they come in." + +The result, Stallman says, is something akin to a third-world city. "You have +millions of people moving in and building shantytowns, but nobody's working on +step two: getting them out of those shantytowns. If you think talking about +software freedom is a good strategy, please join in doing step two. There are +plenty working on step one. We need more people working on step two." + +Working on "step two" means driving home the issue that freedom, not +acceptance, is the root issue of the free software movement. Those who hope to +reform the proprietary software industry from the inside are on a fool's +errand. "Change from the inside is risky," Stallman stays. "Unless you're +working at the level of a Gorbachev, you're going to be neutralized." + +Hands pop up. Stallman points to a member of the golf shirt-wearing contingent. +"Without patents, how would you suggest dealing with commercial espionage?" + +"Well, those two questions have nothing to do with each other, really," says +Stallman. + +"But I mean if someone wants to steal another company's piece of software." + +Stallman's recoils as if hit by a poisonous spray. "Wait a second," Stallman +says. "Steal? I'm sorry, there's so much prejudice in that statement that the +only thing I can say is that I reject that prejudice." Then he turns to the +substance of the question. "Companies that develop non-free software and other +things keep lots and lots of trade secrets, and so that's not really likely to +change. In the old days -even in the 1980s - for the most part programmers were +not aware that there were even software patents and were paying no attention to +them. What happened was that people published the interesting ideas, and if +they were not in the free software movement, they kept secret the little +details. And now they patent those broad ideas and keep secret the little +details. So as far as what you're describing, patents really make no difference +to it one way or another." + +"But if it doesn't affect their publication," a new audience member jumps in, +his voice trailing off almost as soon as he starts speaking. + +"But it does," Stallman says. "Their publication is telling you that this is an +idea that's off limits to the rest of the community for 20 years. And what the +hell good is that? Besides, they've written it in such a hard way to read, both +to obfuscate the idea and to make the patent as broad as possible, that it's +basically useless looking at the published information [in the patent] to learn +anything anyway. The only reason to look at patents is to see the bad news of +what you can't do." + +The audience falls silent. The speech, which began at 3:15, is now nearing the +5:00 whistle, and most listeners are already squirming in their seats, antsy to +get a jump start on the weekend. Sensing the fatigue, Stallman glances around +the room and hastily shuts things down. "So it looks like we're done," he says, +following the observation with an auctioneer's "going, going, gone" to flush +out any last-minute questioners. When nobody throws their hand up, Stallman +signs off with a traditional exit line. + +"Happy hacking," he says. + +1~ Chapter 9 - The GNU General Public License +={ GNU General Public License +82 ; + GPL +82 ; + Stallman, Richard M. : + childhood | GNU General Public License +82 +} + +By the spring of 1985, Richard Stallman had produced the GNU Project's first +useful result - a Lisp-based version of Emacs for Unix-like operating systems. +To make it available to others as free software, he had to develop the way to +release it - in effect, the follow-on for the Emacs Commune. +={ Emacs Commune +7 ; + Emacs text editor : + Lisp-based free software version ; + GNU Emacs : + List-based free software version +} + +The tension between the freedom to modify and authorial privilege had been +building before Gosmacs. The Copyright Act of 1976 had overhauled U.S. +copyright law, extending the legal coverage of copyright to software programs. +According to Section 102(b) of the Act, individuals and companies could +copyright the "expression" of a software program but not the "actual processes +or methods embodied in the program."~{ See Hal Abelson, Mike Fischer, and +Joanne Costello, "Software and Copyright Law," updated version (1997), \\ +http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/int-prop/software-copyright.html. +}~ +={ Copyright Act of 1976 ; + copyright laws ; + GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs) ; + software : + copyright laws on +} + +Translated, this treated a program much like an algebra textbook:its author can +claim copyright on the text but not on the mathematical ideas of algebra or the +pedagogical technique employed to explain it. Thus, regardless of what Stallman +said about using the code of the original Emacs, other programmers were legally +entitled to write their own implementations of the ideas and commands of Emacs, +and they did. Gosmacs was one of 30-odd imitations of the original Emacs +developed for various computer systems. + +The Emacs Commune applied only to the code of the original Emacs program +written by Stallman himself. Even if it had been legally enforced, it would not +have applied to separately developed imitations such as Gosmacs. Making Gosmacs +non-free was unethical according to the ethical ideas of the free software +movement, because(as proprietary software) it did not respect its users' +freedom, but this issue had nothing to do with where the ideas in Gosmacs came +from. + +Under copyright, programmers who wanted to copy code from an existing program +(even with changes) had to obtain permission from the original developer. The +new law applied copyright even in the absence of copyright notices - though +hackers generally did not know this - and the copyright notices too began +appearing. + +Stallman saw these notices as the flags of an invading, occupying army. Rare +was the program that didn't borrow source code from past programs, and yet, +with a single stroke of the president's pen, the U.S. government had given +programmers and companies the legal power to forbid such reuse. Copyright also +injected a dose of formality into what had otherwise been an informal system. +Simply put, disputes that had once been settled hacker-to-hacker were now to be +settled lawyer-to-lawyer. In such a system, companies, not hackers, held the +automatic advantage. Some saw placing one's name in a copyright notice as +taking responsibility for the quality of the code, but the copyright notice +usually has a company's name, and there are other ways for individuals to say +what code they wrote. +={ source code : + copy rights for +} + +However, Stallman also noticed, in the years leading up to the GNU Project, +that copyright allowed an author to grant permission for certain activities +covered by copyright, and place conditions on them too. "I had seen email +messages with copyright notices plus simple 'verbatim copying permitted' +licenses," he recalls. "Those definitely were [an] inspiration." These licenses +carried the condition not to remove the license. Stallman's idea was to take +this a few steps further. For example, a permission notice could allow users to +redistribute even modified versions, with the condition that these versions +carry the same permission. + +Thus Stallman concluded that use of copyright was not necessarily unethical. +What was bad about software copyright was the way it was typically used, and +designed to be used: to deny the user essential freedoms. Most authors imagined +no other way to use it. But copyright could be used in a different way: to make +a program free and assure its continued freedom. + +By GNU Emacs 16, in early 1985, Stallman drafted a copyright-based license that +gave users the right to make and distribute copies. It also gave users the +right to make and distribute modified versions, but only under the same +license. They could not exercise the unlimited power of copyright over those +modified versions, so they could not make their versions proprietary as Gosmacs +was. And they had to make the source code available. Those conditions closed +the legal gap that would otherwise allow restricted, non-free versions of GNU +Emacs to emerge. +={ Emacs text editor : + copyrights and | GNU Emacs License and ; + GNU Emacs : + copyrights and | GNU Emacs License and ; + GOSMACS (Gosling Emacs) : + copyrights and ; + licenses +15 +} + +Although helpful in codifying the social contract of the Emacs Commune, the +early GNU Emacs license remained too "informal" for its purpose, Stallman says. +Soon after forming the Free Software Foundation he began working on a more +airtight version, consulting with the other directors and with the attorneys +who had helped to set it up. + +Mark Fischer, a Boston copyright attorney who initially provided Stallman's +legal advice, recalls discussing the license with Stallman during this period. +"Richard had very strong views about how it should work," Fischer says, "He had +two principles. The first was to make the software absolutely as open as +possible." (By the time he said this, Fischer seems to have been influenced by +open source supporters; Stallman never sought to make software "open.") "The +second was to encourage others to adopt the same licensing practices." The +requirements in the license were designed for the second goal. +={ Fischer, Mark +2 } + +The revolutionary nature of this final condition would take a while to sink in. +At the time, Fischer says, he simply viewed the GNU Emacs license as a simple +trade. It put a price tag on GNU Emacs' use. Instead of money, Stallman was +charging users access to their own later modifications. That said, Fischer does +remember the license terms as unique. + +"I think asking other people to accept the price was, if not unique, highly +unusual at that time," he says. + +In fashioning the GNU Emacs license, Stallman made one major change to the +informal tenets of the old Emacs Commune. Where he had once demanded that +Commune members send him all the changes they wrote, Stallman now demanded only +that they pass along source code and freedom whenever they chose to +redistribute the program. In other words, programmers who simply modified Emacs +for private use no longer needed to send the source-code changes back to +Stallman. In a rare alteration of free software doctrine, Stallman slashed the +"price tag" for free software. Users could innovate without Stallman looking +over their shoulders, and distribute their versions only when they wished, just +so long as all copies came with permission for their possessors to develop and +redistribute them further. + +Stallman says this change was fueled by his own dissatisfaction with the Big +Brother aspect of the original Emacs Commune social contract. As much as he had +found it useful for everyone to send him their changes, he came to feel that +requiring this was unjust. "It was wrong to require people to publish all +changes," says Stallman. + +"It was wrong to require them to be sent to one privileged developer. That kind +of centralization and privilege for one was not consistent with a society in +which all had equal rights." + +The GNU Emacs General Public License made its debut on a version of GNU Emacs +in 1985. Following the release, Stallman welcomed input from the general hacker +community on how to improve the license's language. One hacker to take up the +offer was future software activist John Gilmore, then working as a consultant +to Sun Microsystems. As part of his consulting work, Gilmore had ported Emacs +over to SunOS, the company's in-house version of Unix. In the process of doing +so, Gilmore had published the changed version under the GNU Emacs license. +Instead of viewing the license as a liability, Gilmore saw it as clear and +concise expression of the hacker ethos. "Up until then, most licenses were very +informal," Gilmore recalls. +={ Gilmore, John +6 ; + SunOS : + porting Emacs to ; + Sun Microsystems +} + +As an example of this informality, Gilmore cites the mid-1980s copyright +license of trn, a news reader program written by Larry Wall, a hacker who could +go onto later fame as the creator of both the Unix "patch" utility and the Perl +scripting language. In the hope of striking a balance between common hacker +courtesy and an author's right to dictate the means of commercial publication, +Wall used the program's accompanying copyright notice as an editorial sounding +board. +={ Wall, Larry +1 ; + patches, inserting into source code ; + Perl programming language ; + source code : + patches +} + +_1 Copyright (c) 1985, Larry Wall \\ You may copy the trn kit in whole or in +part as long as you don't try to make money off it, or pretend that you wrote +it.~{ See Trn Kit README, \\ +http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/trn/src/trn-3.6/README. }~ + +Such statements, while reflective of the hacker ethic, also reflected the +difficulty of translating the loose, informal nature of that ethic into the +rigid, legal language of copyright. In writing the GNU Emacs license, Stallman +had done more than close up the escape hatch that permitted proprietary +offshoots. He had expressed the hacker ethic in a manner understandable to both +lawyer and hacker alike. + +It wasn't long, Gilmore says, before other hackers began discussing ways to +"port" the GNU Emacs license over to their own programs. Prompted by a +conversation on Usenet, Gilmore sent an email to Stallman in November, 1986, +suggesting modification: + +_1 You should probably remove "EMACS" from the license and replace it with +"SOFTWARE" or something. Soon, we hope, Emacs will not be the biggest part of +the GNU system, and the license applies to all of it.~{ See John Gilmore, +quoted from email to author. }~ + +Gilmore wasn't the only person suggesting a more general approach. By the end +of 1986, Stallman himself was at work with GNU Project's next major milestone, +the source-code debugger GDB. To release this, he had to modify the GNU Emacs +license so it applied to GDB instead of GNU Emacs. It was not a big job, but it +was an opening for possible errors. In 1989, Stallman figured out how to remove +the specific references to Emacs, and express the connection between the +program code and the license solely in the program's source files. This way, +any developer could apply the license to his program without changing the +license. The GNU General Public License, GNU GPL for short, was born. The GNU +Project soon made it the official license of all existing GNU programs. +={ GNU Debugger (GDB) +1 ; + GDB (GNU Debugger) ; + Debugger +1 +} + +In publishing the GPL, Stallman followed the software convention of using +decimal numbers to indicate versions with minor changes and whole numbers to +indicate versions with major changes. The first version, in 1989, was labeled +Version 1.0. The license contained a preamble spelling out its political +intentions: + +_1 The General Public License is designed to make sure that you have the +freedom to give away or sell copies of free software, that you receive source +code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use +pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things. + +_1 To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to +deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions +translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the +software, or if you modify it.~{ See Richard Stallman, et al., "GNU General +Public License: Version 1,"(February, 1989), \\ +http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.html. }~ + +As hacks go, the GPL stands as one of Stallman's best. It created a system of +communal ownership within the normally proprietary confines of copyright law. +More importantly, it demonstrated the intellectual similarity between legal +code and software code. Implicit within the GPL's preamble was a profound +message: instead of viewing copyright law with suspicion, hackers should view +it as a dangerous system that could be hacked. +% ={Emacs Commune+1} + +"The GPL developed much like any piece of free software with a large community +discussing its structure, its respect or the opposite in their observation, +needs for tweaking and even to compromise it mildly for greater acceptance," +says Jerry Cohen, another attorney who advised Stallman after Fischer departed. +"The process worked very well and GPL in its several versions has gone from +widespread skeptical and at times hostile response to widespread acceptance." + +In a 1986 interview with /{BYTE}/ magazine, Stallman summed up the GPL in +colorful terms. In addition to proclaiming hacker values, Stallman said, +readers should also "see it as a form of intellectual ju-jitsu, using the legal +system that software hoarders have set up against them."~{ See David Betz and +Jon Edwards, "Richard Stallman discusses his public-domain [ sic ] +Unix-compatible software system with BYTE editors," BYTE (July, 1986). +(Reprinted on the GNU Project web site: \\ +http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html .) \\ This interview offers an +interesting, not to mention candid, glimpse at Stallman's political attitudes +during the earliest days of the GNU Project. It is also helpful in tracing the +evolution of Stallman's rhetoric. \\ Describing the purpose of the GPL, +Stallman says, "I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and +information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control +whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from +sharing it, is sabotage." \\ Contrast this with a statement to the author in +August 2000: "I urge you not to use the term 'intellectual property' in your +thinking. It will lead you to misunderstand things, because that term +generalizes about copyrights, patents, and trademarks. And those things are so +different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about +them at once. If you hear somebody saying something' about intellectual +property,' without [putting it in] quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly +and you shouldn't join." \\ [RMS: The contrast it shows is that I've learned to +be more cautious in generalizing. I probably wouldn't talk about "owning +knowledge" today, since it's a very broad concept. But "owning knowledge" is +not the same generalization as "intellectual property," and the difference +between those three laws is crucial to understanding any legal issue about +owning knowledge. Patents are direct monopolies over using specific knowledge; +that really is one form of "owning knowledge." Copyrights are one of the +methods used to stop the sharing of works that embody or explain knowledge, +which is a very different thing. Meanwhile, trademarks have very little to do +with the subject of knowledge.] }~ Years later, Stallman would describe the +GPL's creation in less hostile terms. "I was thinking about issues that were in +a sense ethical and in a sense political and in a sense legal," he says. "I had +to try to do what could be sustained by the legal system that we're in. In +spirit the job was that of legislating the basis for a new society, but since I +wasn't a government, I couldn't actually change any laws. I had to try to do +this by building on top of the existing legal system, which had not been +designed for anything like this." +={ Byte magazine } + +About the time Stallman was pondering the ethical, political, and legal issues +associated with free software, a California hacker named Don Hopkins mailed him +a manual for the 68000 microprocessor. Hopkins, a Unix hacker and fellow +science-fiction buff, had borrowed the manual from Stallman a while earlier. As +a display of gratitude, Hopkins decorated the return envelope with a number of +stickers obtained at a local science-fiction convention. One sticker in +particular caught Stallman's eye. It read, "Copyleft (L), All Rights Reversed." +Stallman, inspired by the sticker, nicknamed the legal technique employed in +the GNU Emacs license (and later in the GNU GPL) "Copyleft," jocularly +symbolized by a backwards "C" in a circle. Over time, the nickname would become +general Free Software Foundation terminology for any copyright license "making +a program free software and requiring all modified and extended versions of the +program to be free software as well." +={ copyleft ; + Hopkins, Don +} + +The German sociologist Max Weber once proposed that all great religions are +built upon the "routinization" or "institutionalization" of charisma. Every +successful religion, Weber argued, converts the charisma or message of the +original religious leader into a social, political, and ethical apparatus more +easily translatable across cultures and time. +={ Weber, Max } + +While not religious per se, the GNU GPL certainly qualifies as an interesting +example of this "routinization" process at work in the modern, decentralized +world of software development. Since its unveiling, programmers and companies +who have otherwise expressed little loyalty or allegiance to Stallman have +willingly accepted the GPL bargain at face value. Thousands have also accepted +the GPL as a preemptive protective mechanism for their own software programs. +Even those who reject the GPL conditions as too limiting still credit it as +influential. + +One hacker falling into this latter group was Keith Bostic, a University of +California employee at the time of the GPL 1.0 release. Bostic's department, +the Computer Systems Research Group (SRG), had been involved in Unix +development since the late 1970s and was responsible for many key parts of +Unix, including the TCP/IP networking protocol, the cornerstone of modern +Internet communications. By the late 1980s, AT&T, the original owner of the +Unix software, began to focus on commercializing Unix and began looking to the +Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, the academic version of Unix developed +by Bostic and his Berkeley peers, as a key source of commercial technology. +={ AT&T +1 ; + Berkely Software Distribution (BSD) +6 ; + Bostic, Keith +5 ; + BSD (Berkely Software Distribution) +6 ; + Computer Systems Research Group ; + University of California +4 ; + TCP/IP +} + +The code written by Bostic and friends was off limits to nearly everyone, +because it was intermixed with proprietary AT&T code. Berkeley distributions +were therefore available only to institutions that already had a Unix source +license from AT&T. As AT&T raised its license fees, this arrangement, which had +at first seemed innocuous (to those who thought only of academia) became +increasingly burdensome even there. To use Berkeley's code in GNU, Stallman +would have to convince Berkeley to separate it from AT&T's code and release it +as free software. In 1984 or 1985 he met with the leaders of the BSD effort, +pointing out that AT&T was not a charity and that for a university to donate +its work (in effect) to AT&T was not proper. He asked them to separate out +their code and release it as free software. +={ licenses : + AT&T UNIX source code and +2 +} + +Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project of porting the latest +version of BSD to the PDP-11 computer. It was during this period, Bostic says, +that he came into close interaction with Stallman during Stallman's occasional +forays out to the west coast. "I remember vividly arguing copyright with +Stallman while he sat at borrowed workstations at CSRG," says Bostic. "We'd go +to dinner afterward and continue arguing about copyright over dinner." +={ PDP-11 computer } + +The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman would have +preferred. In June, 1989, Berkeley had separated its networking code from the +rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and began distributing it under a +copyright-based free license. The license terms were liberal. All a licensee +had to do was give credit to the university in advertisements touting +derivative programs.~{ The University of California's "obnoxious advertising +clause" would later prove to be a problem. Looking for a permissive alternative +to the GPL, some hackers used the original BSD license, replacing "University +of California" with their own names or the names of their institutions. The +result: free software systems using many of these programs would have to cite +dozens of names in advertisements. In 1999, after a few years of lobbying on +Stallman's part, the University of California agreed to drop this clause. See +"The BSD License Problem" at \\ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html. }~ In +contrast to the GPL, this license permitted proprietary offshoots. One problem +limited the use of the BSD Networking release: it wasn't a complete operating +system, just the network-related parts of one. While the code would be a major +contribution to any free operating system, it could only be run at that time in +conjunction with other, proprietary-licensed code. +={ AT&T +1 } + +Over the next few years, Bostic and other University of California employees +worked to replace the missing components and turn BSD into a complete, freely +redistributable operating system. Although delayed by a legal challenge from +Unix Systems Laboratories - the AT&T spin-off that retained ownership of the +Unix code - the effort would finally bear fruit in the early 1990s. Even before +then, however, many of the Berkeley network utilities would make their way into +Stallman's GNU system. + +"I think it's highly unlikely that we ever would have gone as strongly as we +did without the GNU influence," says Bostic, looking back. "It was clearly +something where they were pushing hard and we liked the idea." + +By the end of the 1980s, the GPL was beginning to exert a gravitational effect +on the free software community. A program didn't have to carry the GPL to +qualify as free software - witness the case of the BSD network utilities - but +putting a program under the GPL sent a definite message. "I think the very +existence of the GPL inspired people to think through whether they were making +free software, and how they would license it," says Bruce Perens, creator of +Electric Fence, a popular Unix utility, and future leader of the Debian +GNU/Linux development team. A few years after the release of the GPL, Perens +says he decided to discard Electric Fence's homegrown license in favor of +Stallman's lawyer-vetted copyright. "It was actually pretty easy to do," Perens +recalls. +={ Perens, Bruce } + +Rich Morin, the programmer who had viewed Stallman's initial GNU announcement +with a degree of skepticism, recalls being impressed by the software that began +to gather under the GPL umbrella. As the leader of a SunOS user group, one of +Morin's primary duties during the 1980s had been to send out distribution tapes +containing the best freeware or free software utilities. The job often mandated +calling up original program authors to verify whether their programs were +copyrighted or whether they had been consigned to the public domain. Around +1989, Morin says, he began to notice that the best software programs typically +fell under the GPL license. "As a software distributor, as soon as I saw the +word GPL, I knew I was home free,"recalls Morin. +={ SunOS } + +To compensate for the prior hassles that went into compiling distribution tapes +to the Sun User Group, Morin had charged recipients a convenience fee. Now, +with programs moving over to the GPL, Morin was suddenly getting his tapes put +together in half the time, turning a tidy profit in the process. Sensing a +commercial opportunity, Morin rechristened his hobby as a business: Prime Time +Freeware. +={ Sun User Group } + +Such commercial exploitation was completely consistent with the free software +agenda. "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not +price," advised Stallman in the GPL's preamble. By the late 1980s, Stallman had +refined it to a more simple mnemonic: "Don't think free as in free beer; think +free as in free speech." + +For the most part, businesses ignored Stallman's entreaties. Still, for a few +entrepreneurs, the freedom associated with free software was the same freedom +associated with free markets. Take software ownership out of the commercial +equation, and you had a situation where even the smallest software company was +free to compete against the IBMs and DECs of the world. + +One of the first entrepreneurs to grasp this concept was Michael Tiemann, a +software programmer and graduate student at Stanford University. During the +1980s, Tiemann had followed the GNU Project like an aspiring jazz musician +following a favorite artist. It wasn't until the release of the GNU C Compiler, +or GCC, in 1987, however, that he began to grasp the full potential of free +software. Dubbing GCC a "bombshell," Tiemann says the program's own existence +underlined Stallman's determination as a programmer. +={ C Compiler (GNU) +9 ; + GNU C Compiler (GCC) +9 ; + GCC (GNU C Compiler) +9 ; + Tiemann, Michael +8 ; + Stanford University +} + +"Just as every writer dreams of writing the great American novel, every +programmer back in the 1980s talked about writing the great American compiler," +Tiemman recalls. "Suddenly Stallman had done it. It was very humbling." + +"You talk about single points of failure, GCC was it," echoes Bostic. "Nobody +had a compiler back then, until GCC came along." + +Rather than compete with Stallman, Tiemann decided to build on top of his work. +The original version of GCC weighed in at 110,000 lines of code, but Tiemann +recalls the program as surprisingly easy to understand. So easy in fact that +Tiemann says it took less than five days to master and another week to port the +software to a new hardware platform, National Semiconductor's 32032 microchip. +Over the next year, Tiemann began playing around with the source code, creating +the first "native" or direct compiler for the C++ programming language, by +extending GCC to handle C++ as well as C. (The existing, proprietary +implementation of the C++ language worked by converting the code to the C +language, then feeding the result to a C compiler.) One day, while delivering a +lecture on the program at Bell Labs, Tiemann ran into some AT&T developers +struggling to pull off the same thing. +={ C+ programming language } + +"There were about 40 or 50 people in the room, and I asked how many people were +working on the native code compiler," Tiemann recalls. "My host said the +information was confidential but added that if I took a look around the room I +might get a good general idea." + +It wasn't long after, Tiemann says, that the light bulb went off in his head. +"I had been working on that project for six months," Tiemann says. I just +thought to myself, whether it's me or the code, this is a level of efficiency +that the free market should be ready to reward." + +Tiemann found added inspiration in the /{GNU Manifesto}/: while excoriating the +greed of proprietary software vendors, it also encourages companies, as long as +they respect users freedom, to use and redistribute free software in their +commercial activities. By removing the power of monopoly from the commercial +software question, the GPL makes it possible for even small companies to +compete on the basis of service, which extends from simple tech support to +training to extending free programs for specific clients' needs. +={ GNU Manifesto } + +In a 1999 essay, Tiemann recalls the impact of Stallman's /{Manifesto}/. "It +read like a socialist polemic, but I saw something different. I saw a business +plan in disguise."~{ See Michael Tiemann, "Future of Cygnus Solutions: An +Entrepreneur's Account," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 139, +\\ http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/tiemans.html. }~ + +This business plan was not new; Stallman supported himself in the late 80s by +doing this on a small scale. But Tiemann intended to take it to a new level. +Teaming up with John Gilmore and David Vinayak Wallace, Tiemann launched a +software consulting service dedicated to customizing GNU programs. Dubbed +Cygnus Support (informally, "Cygnus" was a recursive acronym for "Cygnus, Your +GNU Support"), the company signed its first development contract in February, +1990. By the end of the year, the company had $725,000 worth of support and +development contracts. +={ Gilmore, John } + +The complete GNU operating system Stallman envisioned required more than +software development tools. In the 1990s, GNU also developed a command line +interpreter or "shell," which was an extended replacement for the Bourne Shell +(written by FSF employee Brian Fox, and christened by Stallman the Bourne Again +Shell, or BASH), as well as the PostScript interpreter Ghostscript, the +documentation browser platform Texinfo, the C Library which C programs need in +order to run and talk to the system's kernel, the spreadsheet Oleo ("better for +you than the more expensive spreadsheet"), and even a fairly good chess game. +However, programmers were typically most interested in the GNU programming +tools. + +GNU Emacs, GDB, and GCC were the "big three" of developer-oriented tools, but +they weren't the only ones developed by the GNU Project in the 80s. By 1990, +GNU had also generated GNU versions of the build-controller Make, the +parser-generator YACC (rechristened Bison), and awk (rechristened gawk); as +well as dozens more. Like GCC, GNU programs were usually designed to run on +multiple systems, not just a single vendor's platform. In the process of making +programs more flexible, Stallman and his collaborators often made them more +useful as well. + +Recalling the GNU universalist approach, Prime Time Freeware's Morin points to +a useless but vitally important software package called GNU Hello, which serves +as an example to show programmers how to properly package a program for GNU. +"It's the hello world program which is five lines of C, packaged up as if it +were a GNU distribution," Morin says. "And so it's got the Texinfo stuff and +the configure stuff. It's got all the other software engineering goo that the +GNU Project has come up with to allow packages to port to all these different +environments smoothly. That's tremendously important work, and it affects not +only all of [Stallman's] software, but also all of the other GNU Project +software." + +According to Stallman, improving technically on the components of Unix was +secondary to replacing them with free software. "With each piece I may or may +not find a way to improve it," said Stallman to /{BYTE}/. "To some extent I am +getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much better. +To some extent it's because I have been in the field a long time and worked on +many other systems. I therefore have many ideas [which I learned from them] to +bring to bear."~{ See Richard Stallman, BYTE (1986). }~ +={ Byte magazine } + +Nevertheless, as GNU tools made their mark in the late 1980s, Stallman's AI +Lab-honed reputation for design fastidiousness soon became legendary throughout +the entire software-development community. + +Jeremy Allison, a Sun user during the late 1980s and programmer destined to run +his own free software project, Samba, in the 1990s, recalls that reputation +with a laugh. During the late 1980s, Allison began using Emacs. Inspired by the +program's community-development model, Allison says he sent in a snippet of +source code only to have it rejected by Stallman. +={ Allison, Jeramy +1 } + +"It was like the /{Onion}/ headline," Allison says. "'Child's prayers to God +answered: No.'" +={ Onion, The } + +As the GNU Project moved from success to success in creation of user-level +programs and libraries, it postponed development of the kernel, the central +"traffic cop" program that controls other programs' access to the processor and +all machine resources. + +As with several other major system components, Stallman sought a head-start on +kernel development by looking for an existing program to adapt. A review of GNU +Project "GNUs letters" of the late 1980s reveals that this approach, like the +initial attempt to build GCC out of Pastel, had its problems. A January, 1987 +GNUs letter reported the GNU Project's intention to overhaul TRIX, a kernel +developed at MIT. However, Stallman never actually tried to do this, since he +was working on GCC at the time; later he concluded that TRIX would require too +much change to be a good starting point. By February of 1988, according to a +newsletter published that month, the GNU Project had shifted its kernel plans +to Mach, a lightweight "micro-kernel" developed at Carnegie Mellon. Mach was +not then free software, but its developers privately said they would liberate +it; when this occurred, in 1990, GNU Project kernel development could really +commence.~{ See "Hurd History," \\ +http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history.html. }~ + +The delays in kernel development were just one of many concerns weighing on +Stallman during this period. In 1989, Lotus Development Corporation filed suit +against rival software companies, Paperback Software International and Borland, +for copying menu commands from Lotus' popular 1-2-3 Spreadsheet program. Lotus' +suit, coupled with the Apple-Microsoft "look and feel" battle, endangered the +future of the GNU system. Although neither suit directly attacked the GNU +Project, both threatened the right to develop software compatible with existing +programs, as many GNU programs were. These lawsuits could impose a chilling +effect on the entire culture of software development. Determined to do +something, Stallman and a few professors put an ad in /{The Tech}/ (the MIT +student newspaper) blasting the lawsuits and calling for a boycott of both +Lotus and Apple. He then followed up the ad by helping to organize a group to +protest the corporations filing the suit. Calling itself the League for +Programming Freedom, the group held protests outside the offices of Lotus, Inc. +={ Apple Computers ; + Lotus Development Corp. ; + Microsoft Corporation : + Apple Computer lawsuit ; + Paperback Software International +} + +The protests were notable.~{ According to a League for Programming Freedom +press release at \\ +http://progfree.org/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/demo.final.release, the protests were +no-table for featuring the first hexadecimal protest chant: \\ 1-2-3-4, toss +the lawyers out the door \\ 5-6-7-8, innovate don't litigate \\ 9-A-B-C, 1-2-3 +is not for me \\ D-E-F-O, look and feel have got to go }~ + +They document the evolving nature of the software industry. Applications had +quietly replaced operating systems as the primary corporate battleground. In +its unfinished quest to build a free software operating system, the GNU Project +seemed hopelessly behind the times to those whose primary values were fashion +and success. Indeed, the very fact that Stallman had felt it necessary to put +together an entirely new group dedicated to battling the "look and feel" +lawsuits led some observers to think that the FSF was obsolete. + +However, Stallman had a strategic reason to start a separate organization to +fight the imposition of new monopolies on software development: so that +proprietary software developers would join it too. Extending copyright to cover +interfaces would threaten many proprietary software developers as well as many +free software developers. These proprietary developers were unlikely to endorse +the Free Soft-ware Foundation, but there was, intentionally, nothing in the +League for Programming Freedom to drive them away. For the same reason, +Stallman handed over leadership of LPF to others as soon as it was feasible. + +In 1990, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation certified Stallman's +genius status when it granted Stallman a Mac Arthur fellowship, the so-called +"genius grant," amounting in this case to$240,000 over 5 years. Although the +Foundation does not state a reason for its grants, this one was seen as an +award for launching the GNU Project and giving voice to the free software +philosophy. The grant relieved a number of short-term concerns for Stallman. +For instance, it enabled him to cease the consulting work through which he had +obtained his income in the 80s and devote more time to the free software cause. + +The award also made it possible for Stallman to register normally to vote. In +1985 a fire in the house where Stallman lived left him without an official +domicile. It also covered most of his books with ash, and cleaning these "dirty +books" did not yield satisfying results. From that time he lived as a +"squatter" at 545 Technology Square, and had to vote as a "homeless person."~{ +See Reuven Lerner, "Stallman wins $240,000 MacArthur award," MIT, The Tech +(July 18, 1990), \\ http://the-tech.mit.edu/V110/N30/rms.30n.html. }~ "[The +Cambridge Election Commission] didn't want to accept that as my address," +Stallman would later recall. "A newspaper article about the MacArthur grant +said that, and then they let me register."~{ See Michael Gross, "Richard +Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, Mac Arthur-certified +Genius" (1999). }~ + +Most importantly, the MacArthur fellowship gave Stallman press attention and +speaking invitations, which he used to spread the word about GNU, free +software, and dangers such as "look and feel" lawsuits and software patents. + +Interestingly, the GNU system's completion would stem from one of these trips. +In April 1991, Stallman paid a visit to the Polytechnic University in Helsinki, +Finland. Among the audience members was 21-year-old Linus Torvalds, who was +just beginning to develop the Linux kernel - the free software kernel destined +to fill the GNU system's main remaining gap. +={ Helsinki, Finland +3 ; + Polytechnic University (Finland) ; + Torvalds, Linus +16 +} + +A student at the nearby University of Helsinki at the time, Torvalds regarded +Stallman with bemusement. "I saw, for the first time in my life, the +stereotypical long-haired, bearded hacker type," recalls Torvalds in his 2001 +autobiography /{Just for Fun}/. "We don't have much of them in Helsinki."~{ See +Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental +Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2001): 58-59. Although +presumably accurate in regard to Torvalds' life, what the book says about +Stallman is sometimes wrong. For instance, it says that Stallman "wants to make +everything open source," and that he "complains about other people not using +the GPL." In fact, Stallman advocates free software, not open source. He urges +authors to choose the GNU GPL, in most circumstances, but says that all free +software licenses are ethical. }~ + +While not exactly attuned to the "socio political" side of the Stallman agenda, +Torvalds nevertheless appreciated one aspect of the agenda's underlying logic: +no programmer writes error-free code. Even when users have no wish to adapt a +program to their specific preferences, any program can use improvement. By +sharing software, hackers put a program's improvement ahead of individual +motivations such as greed or ego protection. + +Like many programmers of his generation, Torvalds had cut his teeth not on +mainframe computers like the IBM 7094, but on a motley assortment of home-built +computer systems. As a university student, Torvalds had made the step up from +PC programming to Unix, using the university's MicroVAX. This ladder-like +progression had given Torvalds a different perspective on the barriers to +machine access. For Stallman, the chief barriers were bureaucracy and +privilege. For Torvalds, the chief barriers were geography and the harsh +Helsinki winter. Forced to trek across the University of Helsinki just to log +in to his Unix account, Torvalds quickly began looking for a way to log in from +the warm confines of his off-campus apartment. +={ IBM 7094 computer ; + MicroVAX +1 +} + +Torvalds was using Minix, a lightweight non-free system developed as an +instructional example by Dutch university professor Andrew Tanenbaum.~{ It was +non-free in 1991. Minix is free software now. }~ It included the non-free Free +University Compiler Kit, plus utilities of the sort that Tanenbaum had +contemptuously invited Stallman in 1983 to write.~{ Tanenbaum describes Minix +as an "operating system" in his book, Operating System Design and +Implementation , but what the book discusses is only the part of the system +that corresponds to the kernel of Unix. There are two customary usages of the +term "operating system," and one of them is what is called the "kernel" in Unix +terminology. But that's not the only terminological complication in the +subject. That part of Minix consists of a microkernel plus servers that run on +it, a design of the same kind as the GNU Hurd plus Mach. The microkernel plus +servers are comparable to the kernel of Unix. But when that book says "the +kernel," it refers to the microkernel only. See Andrew Tanenbaum, Operating +System Design and Implementation , 1987. }~ +={ Minix operating system +2 ; + Unix operating system : + Minix and ; + Tanenbaum, Andrew +} + +Minix fit within the memory confines of Torvalds' 386 PC, but it was intended +more to be studied than used. The Minix system also lacked the facility of +terminal emulation, which would mimic a typical display terminal and thus +enable Torvalds to log in to the MicroVAX from home. + +Early in 1991, Torvalds began writing a terminal emulation program. He used +Minix to develop his emulator, but the emulator didn't run on Minix; it was a +stand-alone program. Then he gave it features to access disk files in Minix's +file system. Around then, Torvalds referred to his evolving work as the +"GNU/Emacs of terminal emulation programs."~{ See Linus Torvalds and David +Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins +Publishers, Inc., 2001): 78. }~ + +Since Minix lacked many important features. Torvalds began extending his +terminal emulator into a kernel comparable to that of Minix, except that it was +monolithic. Feeling ambitious, he solicited a Minix newsgroup for copies of the +POSIX standards, the specifications for a Unix-compatible kernel.~{ POSIX was +subsequently extended to include specifications for many command-line features, +but that did not exist in 1991. }~ A few weeks later, having put his kernel +together with some GNU programs and adapted them to work with it, Torvalds was +posting a message reminiscent of Stallman's original 1983 GNU posting: + +_1 Hello everybody out there using minix- + +_1 I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and +professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since +April, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people +like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of +the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). I've currently +ported bash (1.08) and gcc(1.40)...~{ Ibid, p. 85. }~ + +The posting drew a smattering of responses and within a month, Torvalds had +posted a 0.01 version of his kernel - i.e., the earliest possible version fit +for outside review - on an Internet FTP site. In the course of doing so, +Torvalds had to come up with a name for the new kernel. On his own PC hard +drive, Torvalds had saved the program as Linux, a name that paid its respects +to the software convention of giving each Unix variant a name that ended with +the letter X. Deeming the name too "egotistical," Torvalds changed it to Freax, +only to have the FTP site manager change it back. +={ Freax } + +Torvalds said he was writing a free operating system, and his comparing it with +GNU shows he meant a complete system. However, what he actually wrote was a +kernel, pure and simple. Torvalds had no need to write more than the kernel +because, as he knew, the other needed components were already available, thanks +to the developers of GNU and other free software projects. Since the GNU +Project wanted to use them all in the GNU system, it had perforce made them +work together. While Torvalds continued developing the kernel, he (and later +his collaborators) made those programs work with it too. + +Initially, Linux was not free software: the license it carried did not qualify +as free, because it did not allow commercial distribution. Torvalds was worried +that some company would swoop in and take Linux away from him. However, as the +growing GNU/Linux combination gained popularity, Torvalds saw that sale of +copies would be useful for the community, and began to feel less worried about +a possible takeover.~{ Ibid, p. 94-95. }~ This led him to reconsider the +licensing of Linux. + +Neither compiling Linux with GCC nor running GCC with Linux required him +legally to release Linux under the GNU GPL, but Torvalds' use of GCC implied +for him a certain obligation to let other users borrow back. As Torvalds would +later put it: "I had hoisted myself up on the shoulders of giants."~{ Ibid, p. +95-97. }~ Not surprisingly, he began to think about what would happen when +other people looked to him for similar support. A decade after the decision, +Torvalds echoes the Free Software Foundation's Robert Chassell when he sums up +his thoughts at the time: +={ C Compiler (GNU) : + Linux development and +3 ; + GNU C Compiler (GCC) : + Linux development and ; + GCC (GNU C Compiler) : + Linux development and} +} + +_1 You put six months of your life into this thing and you want to make it +available and you want to get something out of it, but you don't want people to +take advantage of it. I wanted people to be able to see [Linux], and to make +changes and improvements to their hearts' content. But I also wanted to make +sure that what I got out of it was to see what they were doing. I wanted to +always have access to the sources so that if they made improvements, I could +make those improvements myself.~{ See Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just +For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins Publishers, +Inc., 2001): 94-95. }~ + +When it was time to release the 0.12 version of Linux, the first to operate +fully with GCC, Torvalds decided to throw his lot in with the free software +movement. He discarded the old license of Linux and replaced it with the GPL. +Within three years, Linux developers were offering release 1.0 of Linux, the +kernel; it worked smoothly with the almost complete GNU system, composed of +programs from the GNU Project and elsewhere. In effect, they had completed the +GNU operating system by adding Linux to it. The resulting system was basically +GNU plus Linux. Torvalds and friends, however, referred to it confusingly as +"Linux." + +By 1994, the amalgamated system had earned enough respect in the hacker world +to make some observers from the business world wonder if Torvalds hadn't given +away the farm by switching to the GPL in the project's initial months. In the +first issue of /{Linux Journal}/, publisher Robert Young sat down with Torvalds +for an interview. When Young asked the Finnish programmer if he felt regret at +giving up private ownership of the Linux source code, Torvalds said no. "Even +with 20/20 hindsight," Torvalds said, he considered the GPL "one of the very +best design decisions" made during the early stages of the Linux project.~{ See +Robert Young, "Interview with Linus, the Author of Linux," Linux Journal (March +1, 1994), \\ http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2736. }~ +={ Young, Robert } + +That the decision had been made with zero appeal or deference to Stallman and +the Free Software Foundation speaks to the GPL's growing portability. Although +it would take a couple of years to be recognized by Stallman, the explosiveness +of Linux development conjured flashbacks of Emacs. This time around, however, +the innovation triggering the explosion wasn't a software hack like Control-R +but the novelty of running a Unix-like system on the PC architecture. The +motives may have been different, but the end result certainly fit the ethical +specifications: a fully functional operating system composed entirely of free +software. +={ Control-R (^R) } + +As his initial email message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup indicates, it would +take a few months before Torvalds saw Linux as anything more than a holdover +until the GNU developers delivered on the Hurd kernel. As far as Torvalds was +concerned, he was simply the latest in a long line of kids taking apart and +reassembling things just for fun. Nevertheless, when summing up the runaway +success of a project that could have just as easily spent the rest of its days +on an abandoned computer hard drive, Torvalds credits his younger self for +having the wisdom to give up control and accept the GPL bargain. "I may not +have seen the light," writes Torvalds, reflecting on Stallman's 1991 +Polytechnic University speech and his subsequent decision to switch to the GPL. +"But I guess something from his speech sunk in."~{ See Linus Torvalds and David +Diamond, Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Harper Collins +Publishers, Inc., 2001): 59. }~ +={ HURD kernel } + +1~ Chapter 10 - GNU/Linux +={ GNU/Linux +45 ; + Linux +45 ; + Stallman, Richard M. : + GNU Linux +46 +} + +By 1993, the free software movement was at a crossroads. To the optimistically +inclined, all signs pointed toward success for the hacker culture. /{Wired}/ +magazine, a funky, new publication offering stories on data encryption, Usenet, +and software freedom, was flying off magazine racks. The Internet, once a slang +term used only by hackers and research scientists, had found its way into +mainstream lexicon. Even President Clinton was using it. The personal computer, +once a hobbyist's toy, had grown to full-scale respectability, giving a whole +new generation of computer users access to hacker-built software. And while the +GNU Project had not yet reached its goal of a fully intact, free GNU operating +system, users could already run the GNU/Linux variant. +={ Internet +3 ; + Wired magazine ; + PCs (personal computers) +2 ; + personal computers (PCs) +2 +} + +Any way you sliced it, the news was good, or so it seemed. After a decade of +struggle, hackers and hacker values were finally gaining acceptance in +mainstream society. People were getting it. + +Or were they? To the pessimistically inclined, each sign of acceptance carried +its own troubling countersign. Sure, being a hacker was suddenly cool, but was +cool good for a community that thrived on alienation? Sure, the White House was +saying nice things about the Internet, even going so far as to register its own +domain name, white-house.gov, *** but it was also meeting with the companies, +censorship advocates, and law-enforcement officials looking to tame the +Internet's Wild West culture. Sure, PCs were more powerful, but in +commoditizing the PC marketplace with its chips, Intel had created a situation +in which proprietary software vendors now held the power. For every new user +won over to the free software cause via GNU/Linux, hundreds, perhaps thousands, +were booting up Microsoft Windows for the first time. GNU/Linux had only +rudimentary graphical interfaces, so it was hardly user-friendly. In 1993, only +an expert could use it. The GNU Project's first attempt to develop a graphical +desktop had been abortive. +={ Intel } + +Then there was the political situation. Copyrighting of user interfaces was +still a real threat - the courts had not yet rejected the idea. Meanwhile, +patents on software algorithms and features were a growing danger that +threatened to spread to other countries. + +Finally, there was the curious nature of GNU/Linux itself. Unrestricted by +legal disputes (such as BSD faced), GNU/Linux's high-speed evolution had been +so unplanned, its success so accidental, that programmers closest to the +software code itself didn't know what to make of it. More compilation album +than unified project, it was comprised of a hacker medley of greatest hits: +everything from GCC, GDB, and glibc (the GNU Project's newly developed C +Library) toX (a Unix-based graphic user interface developed by MIT's Laboratory +for Computer Science) to BSD-developed tools such as BIND (the Berkeley +Internet Naming Daemon, which lets users substitute easy-to-remember Internet +domain names for numeric IP addresses) and TCP/IP. In addition, it contained +the Linux kernel - itself designed as a replacement for Minix. Rather than +developing a new operating system, Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux +development team had plugged their work into this matrix. As Torvalds himself +would later translate it when describing the secret of his success: "I'm +basically a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people +actually do."~{ Torvalds has offered this quote in many different settings. To +date, however, the quote's most notable appearance is in the Eric Raymond +essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (May, 1997), \\ +http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/. }~ +={ BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon) ; + Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND) ; + C programming language : + glibc ; + GNU Debugger (GDB) : + Linux and ; + GDB (GNU Debugger) : + Linux and ; + glibc (GNU C Library) ; + GNU C Library (glibc) ; + kernel (Linux) ; + X graphic user interface ; + Laboratory for Computer Science : + X, developing ; + Minix operating system : + kernel, used for Linux ; + TCP/IP ; + Torvalds, Linus : + Minix, reworking for Linux +2 +} + +Such laziness, while admirable from an efficiency perspective, was troubling +from a political perspective. For one thing, it underlined the lack of an +ideological agenda on Torvalds' part. Unlike the GNU developers, Torvalds +hadn't built his kernel out of a desire to give his fellow hackers freedom; +he'd built it to have something he himself could play with. So what exactly was +the combined system, and which philosophy would people associate it with? Was +it a manifestation of the free software philosophy first articulated by +Stallman in the /{GNU Manifesto}/? Or was it simply an amalgamation of nifty +software tools that any user, similarly motivated, could assemble on his own +home system? +={ GNU Manifesto } + +By late 1993, a growing number of GNU/Linux users had begun to lean toward the +latter definition and began brewing private variations on the theme. They began +to develop various "distributions" of GNU/Linux and distribute them, sometimes +gratis, sometimes for a price. The results were spotty at best. + +"This was back before Red Hat and the other commercial distributions," +remembers Ian Murdock, then a computer science student at Purdue University. +"You'd flip through Unix magazines and find all these business card-sized ads +proclaiming 'Linux.' Most of the companies were fly-by-night operations that +saw nothing wrong with slipping a little of their own [proprietary] source code +into the mix." +={ Murdock, Ian +38 ; + Red Hat Inc. ; + Purdue University +} + +Murdock, a Unix programmer, remembers being "swept away" by GNU/Linux when he +first downloaded and installed it on his home PC system. "It was just a lot of +fun," he says. "It made me want to get involved." The explosion of poorly built +distributions began to dampen his early enthusiasm, however. Deciding that the +best way to get involved was to build a version free of additives, Murdock set +about putting a list of the best free software tools available with the +intention of folding them into his own distribution. "I wanted something that +would live up to the Linux name," Murdock says. + +In a bid to "stir up some interest," Murdock posted his intentions on the +Internet, including Usenet's comp.os.linux newsgroup. One of the first +responding email messages was from rms@ai.mit.edu. As a hacker, Murdock +instantly recognized the address. It was Richard M. Stallman, founder of the +GNU Project and a man Murdock knew even back then as "the hacker of hackers." +Seeing the address in his mail queue, Murdock was puzzled. Why on Earth would +Stallman, a person leading his own operating-system project, care about +Murdock's gripes over "Linux" distributions? + +Murdock opened the message. + +"He said the Free Software Foundation was starting to look closely at Linux and +that the FSF was interested in possibly doing a Linux [sic] system, too. +Basically, it looked to Stallman like our goals were in line with their +philosophy." +={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) : + Linux and +3 +} + +Not to over dramatize, the message represented a change in strategy on +Stallman's part. Until 1993, Stallman had been content to keep his nose out of +Linux affairs. After first hearing of the new kernel, Stallman asked a friend +to check its suitability. Recalls Stallman, "Here ported back that the software +was modeled after System V, which was the inferior version of Unix. He also +told me it wasn't portable." +={ System V } + +The friend's report was correct. Built to run on 386-based machines, Linux was +firmly rooted to its low-cost hardware platform. What the friend failed to +report, however, was the sizable advantage Linux enjoyed as the only free +kernel in the marketplace. In other words, while Stallman spent the next year +and a half listening to progress reports from the Hurd developer, reporting +rather slow progress, Torvalds was winning over the programmers who would later +uproot and replant Linux and GNU onto new platforms. + +By 1993, the GNU Project's failure to deliver a working kernel was leading to +problems both within the GNU Project and in the free software movement at +large. A March, 1993, /{Wired}/ magazine article by Simson Garfinkel described +the GNU Project as "bogged down" despite the success of the project's many +tools.~{ See Simson Garfinkel, "Is Stallman Stalled?" /{Wired}/ (March, 1993). +}~ Those within the project and its nonprofit adjunct, the Free Software +Foundation, remember the mood as being even worse than Garfinkel's article let +on. "It was very clear, at least to me at the time, that there was a window of +opportunity to introduce a new operating system," says Chassell. "And once that +window was closed, people would become less interested. Which is in fact +exactly what happened."~{ Chassell's concern about there being a 36-month +"window" for a new operating system is not unique to the GNU Project. During +the early 1990s, free software versions of the Berkeley Software Distribution +were held up by Unix System Laboratories' lawsuit restricting the release of +BSD-derived software. While many users consider BSD offshoots such as FreeBSD +and OpenBSD to be demonstrably superior to GNU/Linux both in terms of +performance and security, the number of FreeBSD and OpenBSD users remains a +fraction of the total GNU/Linux user population. To view a sample analysis of +the relative success of GNU/Linux in relation to other free software operating +systems, see the essay by New Zealand hacker, Liam Greenwood, "Why is Linux +Successful" (1999), \\ http://www.freebsddiary.org/linux.php. }~ +={ Garfinkel, Simson ; + GNU Project : + kernel ; + Wired magazine : + GNU Project and +} + +Much has been made about the GNU Project's struggles during the 1990-1993 +period. While some place the blame on Stallman for those struggles, Eric +Raymond, an old friend of Stallman's who supported the GNU Project lukewarmly, +says the problem was largely institutional. "The FSF got arrogant," Raymond +says. "They moved away from the goal of doing a production-ready operating +system to doing operating-system research." Even worse, "They thought nothing +outside the FSF could affect them." +={ HURD kernel +4 ; + Raymond, Eric +} + +Murdock adopts a more charitable view. "I think part of the problem is they +were a little too ambitious and they threw good money after bad," he says. +"Micro-kernels in the late 80s and early 90s were a hot topic. Unfortunately, +that was about the time that the GNU Project started to design their kernel. +They ended up with a lot of baggage and it would have taken a lot of +backpedaling to lose it." + +Stallman responds, "Although the emotions Raymond cites come from his +imagination, he's right about one cause of the Hurd's delay:the Hurd developer +several times redesigned and rewrote large parts of the code based on what he +had learned, rather than trying to make the Hurd run as soon as possible. It +was good design practice, but it wasn't the right practice for our goal: to get +something working ASAP." + +Stallman cites other issues that also caused delay. The Lotus and Apple +lawsuits claimed much of his attention; this, coupled with hand problems that +prevented him from typing for three years, mostly excluded Stallman from +programming. Stallman also cites poor communication between various portions of +the GNU Project. "We had to do a lot of work to get the debugging environment +to work," he recalls." And the people maintaining GDB at the time were not that +cooperative." They had given priority to supporting the existing platforms of +GDB's current users, rather than to the overall goal of a complete GNU system. + +Most fundamentally, however, Stallman says he and the Hurd developers +underestimated the difficulty of developing the Unix kernel facilities on top +of the Mach microkernel. "I figured, OK, the [Mach]part that has to talk to the +machine has already been debugged," Stallman says, recalling the Hurd team's +troubles in a 2000 speech. "With that head start, we should be able to get it +done faster. But instead, it turned out that debugging these asynchronous +multi-threaded programs was really hard. There were timing bugs that would +clobber the files, and that's no fun. The end result was that it took many, +many years to produce a test version."~{ See Maui High Performance Computing +Center Speech. In subsequent emails, I asked Stallman what exactly he meant by +the term "timing bugs." Stallman said "timing errors" was a better way to +summarize the problem and offered an elucidating technical information of how a +timing error can hamper an operating system's performance: \\ "Timing errors" +occur in an asynchronous system where jobs done in parallel can theoretically +occur in any order, and one particular order leads to problems. \\ Imagine that +program A does X, and program B does Y, where both X and Y are short routines +that examine and update the same data structure. Nearly always the computer +will do X before Y, or do Y before X, and then there will be no problem. On +rare occasions, by chance, the scheduler will let program A run until it is in +the middle of X, and then run B which will do Y. Thus, Y will be done while Xis +half-done. Since they are updating the same data structure, they will +interfere. For instance, perhaps X has already examined the data structure, and +it won't notice that there was a change. There will be an unreproducible +failure, unreproducible because it depends on chance factors (when the +scheduler decides to run which program and how long). \\ The way to prevent +such a failure is to use a lock to make sure X and Y can't run at the same +time. Programmers writing asynchronous systems know about the general need for +locks, but sometimes they overlook the need for a lock in a specific place or +on a specific data structure. Then the program has a timing error. }~ + +Over time, the growing success of GNU together with Linux made it clear that +the GNU Project should get on the train that was leaving and not wait for the +Hurd. Besides, there were weaknesses in the community surrounding GNU/Linux. +Sure, Linux had been licensed under the GPL, but as Murdock himself had noted, +the desire to treat GNU/Linux as a purely free software operating system was +far from unanimous. By late 1993, the total GNU/Linux user population had grown +from a dozen or so enthusiasts to somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000.~{ +GNU/Linux user-population numbers are sketchy at best, which is why I've +provided such a broad range. The 100,000 total comes from the Red Hat +"Milestones" site, \\ http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/milestones.html. }~ +What had once been a hobby was now a marketplace ripe for exploitation, and +some developers had no objection to exploiting it with non-free software. Like +Winston Churchill watching Soviet troops sweep into Berlin, Stallman felt an +understandable set of mixed emotions when it came time to celebrate the +GNU/Linux "victory."~{ I wrote this Winston Churchill analogy before Stallman +himself sent me his own unsolicited comment on Churchill: \\ World War II and +the determination needed to win it was a very strong memory as I was growing +up. Statements such as Churchill's, "We will fight them in the landing zones, +we will fight them on the beaches... we will never surrender," have always +resonated for me. }~ + +Although late to the party, Stallman still had clout. As soon as the FSF +announced that it would lend its money and moral support to Murdock's software +project, other offers of support began rolling in. Murdock dubbed the new +project Debian - a compression of his and his wife, Deborah's, names - and +within a few weeks was rolling out the first distribution. "[Richard's support] +catapulted Debian almost overnight from this interesting little project to +something people within the community had to pay attention to," Murdock says. +={ Debian +19 } + +In January of 1994, Murdock issued the /{Debian Manifesto}/. Written in the +spirit of Stallman's /{GNU Manifesto}/ from a decade before, it explained the +importance of working closely with the Free Software Foundation. Murdock wrote: +={ Debian Manifesto +3 ; + Free Software Foundation (FSF) : + Debian Manifesto and ; + GNU Manifesto : + Debian Manifesto and +} + +_1 The Free Software Foundation plays an extremely important role in the future +of Debian. By the simple fact that they will be distributing it, a message is +sent to the world that Linux [sic] is not a commercial product and that it +never should be, but that this does not mean that Linux will never be able to +compete commercially. For those of you who disagree, I challenge you to +rationalize the success of GNU Emacs and GCC, which are not commercial software +but which have had quite an impact on the commercial market regardless of that +fact. + +_1 The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux[sic] rather than on +the destructive goal of enriching one-self at the expense of the entire Linux +community and its future. The development and distribution of Debian may not be +the answer to the problems that I have outlined in the /{Manifesto}/, but I +hope that it will at least attract enough attention to these problems to allow +them to be solved.~{ See Ian Murdock, /{A Brief History of Debian}/, (January +6, 1994): Appendix A, "The Debian Manifesto," \\ +http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ap-manifesto.en.html. }~ + +Shortly after the /{Manifesto's}/ release, the Free Software Foundation made +its first major request. Stallman wanted Murdock to call its distribution +"GNU/Linux." At first, Stallman proposed the term "Lignux" - combining the +names Linux and GNU - but the initial reaction was very negative, and this +convinced Stallman to go with the longer but less criticized GNU/Linux. +={ Lignux (Linux with GNU) } + +Some dismissed Stallman's attempt to add the "GNU" prefix as a belated quest +for credit, never mind whether it was due, but Murdock saw it differently. +Looking back, Murdock saw it as an attempt to counteract the growing tension +between the GNU Project's developers and those who adapted GNU programs to use +with the Linux kernel. "There was a split emerging," Murdock recalls. "Richard +was concerned." +={ C programming language : + glibc +3 ; + glibc (GNU C Library) +3 ; + GNU C Library (glibc) +3 +} + +By 1990, each GNU program had a designated maintainer-in-charge. Some GNU +programs could run on many different systems, and users often contributed +changes to port them to another system. Often these users knew only that one +system, and did not consider how to keep the code clean for other systems. To +add support for the new system while keeping the code comprehensible, so it +could be maintained reliably for all systems, then required rewriting much of +the changes. The maintainer-in-charge had the responsibility to critique the +changes and tell their user-authors how to redo parts of the port. Generally +they were eager to do this so that their changes would be integrated into the +standard version. Then the maintainer-in-charge would edit in there worked +changes, and take care of them in future maintenance. For some GNU programs, +this had happened dozens of times for dozens of different systems. + +The programmers who adapted various GNU programs to work with the kernel Linux +followed this common path: they considered only their own platform. But when +the maintainers-in-charge asked them to help clean up their changes for future +maintenance, several of them were not interested. They did not care about doing +the correct thing, or about facilitating future maintenance of the GNU packages +they had adapted. They cared only about their own versions and were inclined to +maintain them as forks. + +In the hacker world, forks are an interesting issue. Although the hacker ethic +permits a programmer to do anything he wants with a given program's source +code, it is considered correct behavior to offer to work with the original +developer to maintain a joint version. Hackers usually find it useful, as well +as proper, to pour their improvements into the program's principal version. A +free software license gives every hacker the right to fork a program, and +sometimes it is necessary, but doing so without need or cause is considered +somewhat rude. +={ forks (code) +3 ; + tree (source code) +} + +As leader of the GNU Project, Stallman had already experienced the negative +effects of a software fork in 1991. Says Stallman, "Lucid hired several people +to write improvements to GNU Emacs, meant to be contributions to it; but the +developers did not inform me about the project. Instead they designed several +new features on their own. As you might expect, I agreed with some of their +decisions and disagreed with others. They asked me to incorporate all their +code, but when I said I wanted to use about half of it, they declined to help +me adapt that half to work on its own. I had to do it on my own." The fork had +given birth to a parallel version, Lucid Emacs, and hard feelings all around.~{ +Jamie Zawinski, a former Lucid programmer who would go on to head the Mozilla +development team, has a web site that documents the Lucid/GNU Emacs fork, +titled, "The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism.", at \\ http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html. +Stallman's response to those accusations is in \\ +http://stallman.org/articles/xemacs.origin. }~ +={ Emacs text editor : + Lucid software company and ; + GNU Emacs : + Lucid software company and ; + Lucid software company +} + +Now programmers had forked several of the principal GNU packages at once. At +first, Stallman says he considered the forks to be a product of impatience. In +contrast to the fast and informal dynamics of the Linux team, GNU source-code +maintainers tended to be slower and more circumspect in making changes that +might affect a program's long-term viability. They also were unafraid of +harshly critiquing other people's code. Over time, however, Stallman began to +sense that there was an underlying lack of awareness of the GNU Project and its +objectives when reading Linux developers' emails. + +"We discovered that the people who considered themselves 'Linux users' didn't +care about the GNU Project," Stallman says. "They said, 'Why should I bother +doing these things? I don't care about the GNU Project. It [the program]'s +working for me. It's working for us Linux users, and nothing else matters to +us.' And that was quite surprising, given that people were essentially using a +variant of the GNU system, and they cared so little. They cared less than +anybody else about GNU." Fooled by their own practice of calling the +combination "Linux," they did not realize that their system was more GNU than +Linux. + +For the sake of unity, Stallman asked the maintainers-in-charge to do the work +which normally the change authors should have done. In most cases this was +feasible, but not in glibc. Short for GNU C Library, glibc is the package that +all programs use to make "system calls" directed at the kernel, in this case +Linux. User programs on a Unix-like system communicate with the kernel only +through the C library. + +The changes to make glibc work as a communication channel between Linux and all +the other programs in the system were major and ad-hoc, written without +attention to their effect on other platforms. For the glibc +maintainer-in-charge, the task of cleaning them up was daunting. Instead the +Free Software Foundation paid him to spend most of a year reimplementing these +changes from scratch, to make glibc version 6 work "straight out of the box" in +GNU/Linux. + +Murdock says this was the precipitating cause that motivated Stallman to insist +on adding the GNU prefix when Debian rolled out its software distribution. "The +fork has since converged. Still, at the time, there was a concern that if the +Linux community saw itself as a different thing as the GNU community, it might +be a force for disunity." + +While some viewed it as politically grasping to describe the combination of GNU +and Linux as a "variant" of GNU, Murdock, already sympathetic to the free +software cause, saw Stallman's request to call Debian's version GNU/Linux as +reasonable. "It was more for unity than for credit," he says. + +Requests of a more technical nature quickly followed. Although Murdock had been +accommodating on political issues, he struck a firmer pose when it came to the +design and development model of the actual software. What had begun as a show +of solidarity soon became a running disagreement. + +"I can tell you that I've had my share of disagreements with him," says Murdock +with a laugh. "In all honesty Richard can be a fairly difficult person to work +with." The principal disagreement was over debugging. Stallman wanted to +include debugging information in all executable programs, to enable users to +immediately investigate any bugs they might encounter. Murdock thought this +would make the system files too big and interfere with distribution. Neither +was willing to change his mind. + +In 1996, Murdock, following his graduation from Purdue, decided to hand over +the reins of the growing Debian project. He had already been ceding management +duties to Bruce Perens, the hacker best known for his work on Electric Fence, a +Unix utility released under the GPL. Perens, like Murdock, was a Unix +programmer who had become enamored of GNU/Linux as soon as the operating +system's Unix-like abilities became manifest. Like Murdock, Perens sympathized +with the political agenda of Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, albeit +from afar. +={ Electric Fence Unix utility ; + Perens, Bruce +3 +} + +"I remember after Stallman had already come out with the /{GNU Manifesto}/, GNU +Emacs, and GCC, I read an article that said he was working as a consultant for +Intel," says Perens, recalling his first brush with Stallman in the late 1980s. +"I wrote him asking how he could be advocating free software on the one hand +and working for Intel on the other. He wrote back saying, 'I work as a +consultant to produce free-software.' He was perfectly polite about it, and I +thought his answer made perfect sense." + +As a prominent Debian developer, however, Perens regarded Murdock's design +battles with Stallman with dismay. Upon assuming leadership of the development +team, Perens says he made the command decision to distance Debian from the Free +Software Foundation. "I decided we did not want Richard's style of +micro-management," he says. + +According to Perens, Stallman was taken aback by the decision but had the +wisdom to roll with it. "He gave it some time to cool off and sent a message +that we really needed a relationship. He requested that we call it GNU/Linux +and left it at that. I decided that was fine. I made the decision unilaterally. +Everybody breathed a sigh of relief." + +Over time, Debian would develop a reputation as the hacker's version of +GNU/Linux, alongside Slackware, another popular distribution founded during the +same 1993-1994 period. However, Slackware contained some non-free programs, and +Debian after its separation from GNU began distributing non-free programs +too.~{ Debian Buzz in June 1996 contained non-free Netscape 3.01 in its Contrib +section. }~ Despite labeling them as "non-free" and saying that they were "not +officially part of Debian," proposing these programs to the user implied a kind +of endorsement for them. As the GNU Project became aware of these policies, it +came to recognize that neither Slackware nor Debian was a GNU/Linux distro it +could recommend to the public. +={ Gilmore, John ; + Young, Robert +2 ; + Red Hat Inc. ; + Teimann, Michael ; + Slackware +} + +Outside the realm of hacker-oriented systems, however, GNU/Linux was picking up +steam in the commercial Unix marketplace. In North Carolina, a Unix company +billing itself as Red Hat was revamping its business to focus on GNU/Linux. The +chief executive officer was Robert Young, the former /{Linux Journal}/ editor +who in 1994 had put the question to Linus Torvalds, asking whether he had any +regrets about putting the kernel under the GPL. To Young, Torvalds' response +had a "profound" impact on his own view toward GNU/Linux. Instead of looking +for a way to corner the GNU/Linux market via traditional software tactics, +Young began to consider what might happen if a company adopted the same +approach as Debian - i.e., building an operating system completely out of free +software parts. Cygnus Solutions, the company founded by Michael Tiemann and +John Gilmore in 1990, was already demonstrating the ability to sell free +software based on quality and customizability. What if Red Hat took the same +approach with GNU/Linux? + +"In the western scientific tradition we stand on the shoulders of giants," says +Young, echoing both Torvalds and Sir Isaac Newton before him. "In business, +this translates to not having to reinvent wheels as we go along. The beauty of +[the GPL] model is you put your code into the public domain.~{ Young uses the +term "public domain" loosely here. Strictly speaking, it means "not +copyrighted." Code released under the GNU GPL cannot be in the public domain, +since it must be copyrighted in order for the GNU GPL to apply. }~ If you're an +independent software vendor and you're trying to build some application and you +need a modem-dialer, well, why reinvent modem dialers? You can just steal PPP +off of Red Hat [GNU/]Linux and use that as the core of your modem-dialing tool. +If you need a graphic tool set, you don't have to write your own graphic +library. Just download GTK. Suddenly you have the ability to reuse the best of +what went before. And suddenly your focus as an application vendor is less on +software management and more on writing the applications specific to your +customer's needs." However, Young was no free software activist, and readily +included non-free programs in Red Hat's GNU/Linux system. + +Young wasn't the only software executive intrigued by the business efficiencies +of free software. By late 1996, most Unix companies were starting to wake up +and smell the brewing source code. The GNU/Linux sector was still a good year +or two away from full commercial breakout mode, but those close enough to the +hacker community could feel it: something big was happening. The Intel 386 +chip, the Internet, and the World Wide Web had hit the marketplace like a set +of monster waves; free software seemed like the largest wave yet. + +For Ian Murdock, the wave seemed both a fitting tribute and a fitting +punishment for the man who had spent so much time giving the free software +movement an identity. Like many Linux aficionados, Murdock had seen the +original postings. He'd seen Torvalds' original admonition that Linux was "just +a hobby." He'd also seen Torvalds' admission to Minix creator Andrew Tanenbaum: +"If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even +start my project."~{ This quote is taken from the much publicized +Torvalds-Tanenbaum "flame war" following the initial release of Linux. In the +process of defending his choice of a non-portable monolithic kernel design, +Torvalds says he started working on Linux as a way to learn more about his new +386 PC. "If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to +even start my project." See Chris DiBona et al., /{Open Sources}/ (O'Reilly & +Associates, Inc., 1999): 224. }~ Like many, Murdock knew that some +opportunities had been missed. He also knew the excitement of watching new +opportunities come seeping out of the very fabric of the Internet. +={ Tanenbaum, Andrew } + +"Being involved with Linux in those early days was fun," recalls Murdock. "At +the same time, it was something to do, something to pass the time. If you go +back and read those old [comp.os.minix]exchanges, you'll see the sentiment: +this is something we can play with until the Hurd is ready. People were +anxious. It's funny, but in a lot of ways, I suspect that Linux would never +have happened if the Hurd had come along more quickly." + +By the end of 1996, however, such "what if" questions were already moot, +because Torvalds' kernel had gained a critical mass of users. The 36-month +window had closed, meaning that even if the GNU Project had rolled out its Hurd +kernel, chances were slim anybody outside the hard-core hacker community would +have noticed. Linux, by filling the GNU system's last gap, had achieved the GNU +Project's goal of producing a Unix-like free software operating system. +However, most of the users did not recognize what had happened: they thought +the whole system was Linux, and that Torvalds had done it all. Most of them +installed distributions that came with non-free software; with Torvalds as +their ethical guide, they saw no principled reason to reject it. Still, a +precarious freedom was available for those that appreciated it. +={ HURD kernel } + +1~ Chapter 11 - Open Source +={ GNU Project : + open source movement and +59 ; + open source +59 ; + Stallman, Richard M. : + open source and +59 +} + +[RMS: In this chapter only, I have deleted some quotations. The material +deleted was about open source and didn't relate to my life or my work.] + +In November, 1995, Peter Salus, a member of the Free Software Foundation and +author of the 1994 book, /{A Quarter Century of Unix}/, issued a call for +papers to members of the GNU Project's "system-discuss" mailing list. Salus, +the conference's scheduled chairman, wanted to tip off fellow hackers about the +upcoming Conference on Freely Redistributable Software in Cambridge, +Massachusetts. Slated for February, 1996, and sponsored by the Free Software +Foundation, the event promised to be the first engineering conference solely +dedicated to free software and, in a show of unity with other free software +programmers, welcomed papers on "any aspect of GNU, Linux, NetBSD, 386BSD, +FreeBSD, Perl, Tcl/tk, and other tools for which the code is accessible and +redistributable." Salus wrote: +={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) ; + FSF (Free Software Foundation) ; + FreeBSD ; + Conference on Freely Redistributable Software +1 ; + Linux ; + NetBSD ; + Perl programming language ; + 386BSD ; + Salus, Peter +4 +} + +_1 Over the past 15 years, free and low-cost software has become ubiquitous. +This conference will bring together implementers of several different types of +freely redistributable software and publishers of such software (on various +media). There will be tutorials and refereed papers, as well as keynotes by +Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman.~{ See Peter Salus, "FYI-Conference on +Freely Redistributable Software, 2/2, Cambridge" (1995) (archived by Terry +Winograd), \\ +http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/fsf96/call-for-papers.html. }~ + +Among the recipients of Salus' email was conference committee member Eric S. +Raymond. Although not the leader of a project or company like the various other +members of the list, Raymond had built a tidy reputation within the hacker +community for some software projects and as editor of /{The New Hacker's +Dictionary}/, a greatly enlarged version of /{The Hacker's Dictionary}/ +published a decade earlier by Guy Steele. +={ New Hacker Dictionary, The ; + Raymond, Eric : + open source and +56 +} + +For Raymond, the 1996 conference was a welcome event. Although he did not +thoroughly support the free software movement's ideas, he had contributed to +some GNU programs, in particular to GNU Emacs. Those contributions stopped in +1992, when Raymond demanded authority to make changes in the official GNU +version of GNU Emacs without discussing them with Stallman, who was directly in +charge of Emacs development. Stallman rejected the demand, and Raymond accused +Stallman of "micro-management." "Richard kicked up a fuss about my making +unauthorized modifications when I was cleaning up the Emacs LISP libraries," +Raymond recalls. "It frustrated me so much that I decided I didn't want to work +with him anymore." + +Despite the falling out, Raymond remained active in the free software +community. So much so that when Salus suggested a conference pairing Stallman +and Torvalds as keynote speakers, Raymond eagerly seconded the idea. With +Stallman representing the older, wiser contingent of ITS/Unix hackers and +Torvalds representing the younger, more energetic crop of Linux hackers, the +pairing indicated a symbolic show of unity that could only be beneficial, +especially to ambitious younger (i.e., below 40) hackers such as Raymond. "I +sort of had afoot in both camps," Raymond says. + +By the time of the conference, the tension between those two camps had become +palpable. Both groups had one thing in common, though:the conference was their +first chance to meet the Finnish /{wunderkind}/ in the flesh. Surprisingly, +Torvalds proved himself to be a charming, affable speaker. Possessing only a +slight Swedish accent, Torvalds surprised audience members with his quick, +self-effacing wit.~{ Although Linus Torvalds is Finnish, his mother tongue is +Swedish. "The Rampantly Unofficial Linus FAQ" at \\ +http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/linus/ offers a brief explanation:Finland has a +significant (about 6%) Swedish-speaking minority population. They call +themselves finlands svensk or finlands svenskar and consider themselves Finns; +many of their families have lived in Finland for centuries. Swedish is one of +Finland's two official languages. }~ + +Even more surprising, says Raymond, was Torvalds' equal willingness to take +potshots at other prominent hackers, including the most prominent hacker of +all, Richard Stallman. By the end of the conference, Torvalds' half-hacker, +half-slacker manner was winning over older and younger conference-goers alike. + +"It was a pivotal moment," recalls Raymond. "Before 1996, Richard was the only +credible claimant to being the ideological leader of the entire culture. People +who dissented didn't do so in public. The person who broke that taboo was +Torvalds." + +The ultimate breach of taboo would come near the end of the show. During a +discussion on the growing market dominance of Microsoft Windows or some similar +topic, Torvalds admitted to being a fan of Microsoft's PowerPoint slideshow +software program. From the perspective of old-line software purists, it was +like bragging about one's slaves at an abolitionist conference. From the +perspective of Torvalds and his growing band of followers, it was simply common +sense. Why shun convenient proprietary software programs just to make a point? +They didn't agree with the point anyway. When freedom requires a sacrifice, +those who don't care about freedom see the sacrifice as self-denial, rather +than as a way to obtain something important. Being a hacker wasn't about +self-denial, it was about getting the job done, and "the job," for them, was +defined in practical terms. +={ Windows (Microsoft) ; + Microsoft Corporation +3 ; + PowerPoint (Microsoft) +3 ; + proprietary software : + Torvalds, Linus and ; + Torvalds, Linus : + PowerPoint and +3 +} + +"That was a pretty shocking thing to say," Raymond remembers. "Then again, he +was able to do that, because by 1995 and 1996, he was rapidly acquiring clout." + +Stallman, for his part, doesn't remember any tension at the 1996conference; he +probably wasn't present when Torvalds made that statement. But he does remember +later feeling the sting of Torvalds' celebrated "cheekiness." "There was a +thing in the Linux documentation which says print out the GNU coding standards +and then tear them up," says Stallman, recalling one example. "When you look +closely, what he disagreed with was the least important part of it, the +recommendation for how to indent C code." + +"OK, so he disagrees with some of our conventions. That's fine, bu the picked a +singularly nasty way of saying so. He could have just said,'Here's the way I +think you should indent your code.' Fine. There should be no hostility there." + +For Raymond, the warm reception other hackers gave to Torvalds' comments +confirmed a suspicion: the dividing line separating Linux developers from GNU +developers was largely generational. Many Linux hackers, like Torvalds, had +grown up in a world of proprietary software. They had begun contributing to +free software without perceiving any injustice in non-free software. For most +of them, nothing was at stake beyond convenience. Unless a program was +technically inferior, they saw little reason to reject it on licensing issues +alone. Some day hackers might develop a free software alternative to +PowerPoint. Until then, why criticize PowerPoint or Microsoft; why not use it? + +This was an example of the growing dispute, within the free software community, +between those who valued freedom as such, and those who mainly valued powerful, +reliable software. Stallman referred to the two camps as political parties +within the community, calling the former the "freedom party." The supporters of +the other camp did not try to name it, so Stallman disparagingly called it the +"bandwagon party" or the "success party," because many of them presented "more +users" as the primary goal. + +In the decade since launching the GNU Project, Stallman had built up a fearsome +reputation as a programmer. He had also built up a reputation for intransigence +both in terms of software design and people management. This was partly true, +but the reputation provided a convenient excuse that anyone could cite if +Stallman did not do as he wished. The reputation has been augmented by mistaken +guesses. + +For example, shortly before the 1996 conference, the Free Software Foundation +experienced a full-scale staff defection. Brian Youmans, a current FSF staffer +hired by Salus in the wake of the resignations, recalls the scene: "At one +point, Peter [Salus] was the only staff member working in the office." The +previous staff were unhappy with the executive director; as Bryt Bradley told +her friends in December, 1995: + +_1 [name omitted] (the Executive Director of the FSF) decided to come back from +Medical/Political Leave last week. The office staff (Gena Bean, Mike Drain, and +myself) decided we could not work with her as our supervisor because of the +many mistakes she had made in her job tasks prior to her taking a leave. Also, +there had been numerous instances where individuals were threatened with +inappropriate firing and there were many instances of what we felt were verbal +abuse from her to ALL members of the office staff. We requested (many times) +that she not come back as our supervisor, but stated that we were willing to +work with her as a co-worker. Our requests were ignored. We quit. + +The executive director in question then gave Stallman an ultimatum: give her +total autonomy in the office or she would quit. Stallman, as president of the +FSF, declined to give her total control over its activities, so she resigned, +and he recruited in Peter Salus to replace her. + +When Raymond, an outsider, learned that these people had left the FSF, he +presumed Stallman was at fault. This provided confirmation for his theory that +Stallman's personality was the cause of any and all problems in the GNU +Project. + +Raymond had another theory: recent delays such as the Hurd and recent troubles +such as the Lucid-Emacs schism reflected problems normally associated with +software project management, not software code development. + +Shortly after the Freely Redistributable Software Conference, Raymond began +working on his own pet software project, a mail utility called "fetchmail." +Taking a cue from Torvalds, Raymond issued his program with a tacked-on promise +to update the source code as early and as often as possible. When users began +sending in bug reports and feature suggestions, Raymond, at first anticipating +a tangled mess, found the resulting software surprisingly sturdy. Analyzing the +success of the Torvalds approach, Raymond issued a quick analysis: using the +Internet as his "petri dish" and the harsh scrutiny of the hacker community as +a form of natural selection, Torvalds had created an evolutionary model free of +central planning. +={ fetchmail ; + FreeBSD ; + Conference on Freely Redistributable Software ; + Internet +} + +What's more, Raymond decided, Torvalds had found a way around Brooks' Law. +First articulated by Fred P. Brooks, manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author +of the 1975 book, /{The Mythical Man-Month}/, Brooks' Law held that adding +developers to a project only resulted in further project delays. Believing as +most hackers that software, like soup, benefits from a limited number of cooks, +Raymond sensed something revolutionary at work. In inviting more and more cooks +into the kitchen, Torvalds had actually found a way to make the resulting +software /{better}/.~{ Brooks' Law is the shorthand summary of the following +quote taken from Brooks' book:Since software construction is inherently a +systems effort - an exercise in complex interrelationships - communication +effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time +brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, +the schedule. See Fred P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison Wesley +Publishing, 1995). }~ +={ Brooks, Fred P. ; + Mythical Man-Month, The (Brooks) +} + +Raymond put his observations on paper. He crafted them into a speech, which he +promptly delivered before a group of friends and neighbors in Chester County, +Pennsylvania. Dubbed "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," the speech contrasted the +"Bazaar" style originated by Torvalds with the "Cathedral" style generally used +by everyone else. +={ Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond) +10 ; + Linux Kongress +6 +} + +Raymond says the response was enthusiastic, but not nearly as enthusiastic as +the one he received during the 1997 Linux Kongress, a gathering of GNU/Linux +users in Germany the next spring. + +"At the Kongress, they gave me a standing ovation at the end of the speech," +Raymond recalls. "I took that as significant for two reasons. For one thing, it +meant they were excited by what they were hearing. For another thing, it meant +they were excited even after hearing the speech delivered through a language +barrier." + +Eventually, Raymond would convert the speech into a paper, also titled "The +Cathedral and the Bazaar." The paper drew its name from Raymond's central +analogy. Previously, programs were "cathedrals," impressive, centrally planned +monuments built to stand the test of time. Linux, on the other hand, was more +like "a great babbling bazaar," a software program developed through the loose +decentralizing dynamics of the Internet. + +Raymond's paper associated the Cathedral style, which he and Stallman and many +others had used, specifically with the GNU Project and Stallman, thus casting +the contrast between development models as a comparison between Stallman and +Torvalds. Where Stallman was his chosen example of the classic cathedral +architect - i.e., a programming "wizard" who could disappear for 18 months and +return with something like the GNU C Compiler - Torvalds was more like a genial +dinner-party host. In letting others lead the Linux design discussion and +stepping in only when the entire table needed a referee, Torvalds had created a +development model very much reflective of his own laid-back personality. From +Torvalds' perspective, the most important managerial task was not imposing +control but keeping the ideas flowing. + +Summarized Raymond, "I think Linus's cleverest and most consequential hack was +not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of +the Linux development model."~{ See Eric Raymond, "The Cathedral and the +Bazaar" (1997). }~ + +If the paper's description of these two styles of development was perceptive, +its association of the Cathedral model specifically with Stallman (rather than +all the others who had used it, including Raymond himself) was sheer calumny. +In fact, the developers of some GNU packages including the GNU Hurd had read +about and adopted Torvalds' methods before Raymond tried them, though without +analyzing them further and publicly championing them as Raymond's paper did. +Thousands of hackers, reading Raymond's article, must have been led to a +negative attitude towards GNU by this smear. + +In summarizing the secrets of Torvalds' managerial success, Raymond attracted +the attention of other members of the free software community for whom freedom +was not a priority. They sought to interest business in the use and development +of free software, and to do so, decided to cast the issue in terms of the +values that appeal to business: powerful, reliable, cheap, advanced. Raymond +became the best-known proponent of these ideas, and they reached the management +of Netscape, whose proprietary browser was losing market share to Microsoft's +equally proprietary Internet Explorer. Intrigued by a speech by Raymond, +Netscape executives took the message back to corporate headquarters. A few +months later, in January, 1998, the company announced its plan to publish the +source code of its flagship Navigator web browser in the hopes of enlisting +hacker support in future development. +={ Netscape +8 ; + source code : + Netscape +4 +} + +% ={Monterey (California);O'Reilly, Tim;O'Reilly & Associates} +% ={Apache web server;BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon);Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND);Wall, Larry;Perl programming language;Python programming language;sendmail Unix mail program} +% ={Mountain View (California);Netscape+8} + +When Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond's "Cathedral and the Bazaar" +essay as a major influence upon the company's decision, the company instantly +elevated Raymond to the level of hacker celebrity. He invited a few people +including Larry Augustin, founder of VA Research which sold workstations with +the GNU/Linux operating system pre-installed; Tim O'Reilly, founder of the +publisher O'Reilly& Associates; and Christine Peterson, president of the +Foresight Institute, a Silicon Valley think tank specializing in nano +technology, to talk. "The meeting's agenda boiled down to one item: how to take +advantage of Netscape's decision so that other companies might follow suit?" +={ Augustin, Larry ; + Foresight Institute ; + VA Research ; + Peterson, Christine +4 ; + Barksdale, Jim +} + +Raymond doesn't recall the conversation that took place, but he does remember +the first complaint addressed. Despite the best efforts of Stallman and other +hackers to remind people that the word "free" in free software stood for +freedom and not price, the message still wasn't getting through. Most business +executives, upon hearing the term for the first time, interpreted the word as +synonymous with "zero cost," tuning out any follow-up messages in short order. +Until hackers found a way to get past this misunderstanding, the free software +movement faced an uphill climb, even after Netscape. + +Peterson, whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing the free +software cause, offered an alternative: "open source." + +Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the "open source" term while +discussing Netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations industry. +She doesn't remember where she came upon the term or if she borrowed it from +another field, but she does remember her friend disliking the term.~{ See +Malcolm Maclachlan, "Profit Motive Splits Open Source Movement," Tech-Web News +(August 26, 1998), \\ +http://www.techweb.com/article/showArticle?articleID=29102344. }~ + +At the meeting, Peterson says, the response was dramatically different. "I was +hesitant about suggesting it," Peterson recalls. "I had no standing with the +group, so started using it casually, not highlighting it as a new term." To +Peterson's surprise, the term caught on. By the end of the meeting, most of the +attendees, including Raymond, seemed pleased by it. + +Raymond says he didn't publicly use the term "open source" as a substitute for +"free software" until a day or two after the Mozilla launch party, when +O'Reilly had scheduled a meeting to talk about free-software. Calling his +meeting "the Freeware Summit," O'Reilly says he wanted to direct media and +community attention to the other deserving projects that had also encouraged +Netscape to release Mozilla. "All these guys had so much in common, and I was +surprised they didn't all know each other," says O'Reilly. "I also wanted to +let the world know just how great an impact the free software culture had +already made. People were missing out on a large part of the free-software +tradition." +={ Freeware Summit ; + O'Reilly, Tim : + open source and +8 +} + +In putting together the invite list, however, O'Reilly made a decision that +would have long-term political consequences. He decided to limit the list to +west-coast developers such as Wall, Eric Allman, creator of send mail, and Paul +Vixie, creator of BIND. There were exceptions, of course: Pennsylvania-resident +Raymond, who was already in town thanks to the Mozilla launch, earned an quick +invite. So did Virginia-resident Guido van Rossum, creator of Python. "Frank +Willison, my editor in chief and champion of Python within the company, invited +him without first checking in with me," O'Reilly recalls. "I was happy to have +him there, but when I started, it really was just a local gathering." +={ van Rossum, Guido ; + Python programming language ; + BIND (Berkely Internet Naming Daemon) ; + Berkely Internet Naming Daemon (BIND) ; + Wall, Larry ; + Perl programming language ; + Python programming language ; + sendmail Unix mail program +} + +For some observers, the unwillingness to include Stallman's name on the list +qualified as a snub. "I decided not to go to the event because of it," says +Perens, remembering the summit. Raymond, who did go, says he argued for +Stallman's inclusion to no avail. The snub rumor gained additional strength +from the fact that O'Reilly, the event's host, had feuded publicly with +Stallman over the issue of software-manual copyrights. Prior to the meeting, +Stallman had argued that free software manuals should be as freely copyable and +modifiable as free software programs. O'Reilly, meanwhile, argued that a +value-added market for non-free books increased the utility of free software by +making it more accessible to a wider community. The two had also disputed the +title of the event, with Stallman insisting on "Free Software" rather than +"Freeware." The latter term most often refers to programs which are available +gratis, but which are not free software because their source code is not +released. + +Looking back, O'Reilly doesn't see the decision to leave Stallman's name off +the invite list as a snub. "At that time, I had never met Richard in person, +but in our email interactions, he'd been inflexible and unwilling to engage in +dialogue. I wanted to make sure the GNU tradition was represented at the +meeting, so I invited John Gilmore and Michael Tiemann, whom I knew personally, +and whom I knew were passionate about the value of the GPL but seemed more +willing to engage in a frank back-and-forth about the strengths and weaknesses +of the various free software projects and traditions. Given all the later +brouhaha, I do wish I'd invited Richard as well, but I certainly don't think +that my failure to do so should be interpreted as a lack of respect for the GNU +Project or for Richard personally." +={ Gilmore, John ; + Tiemann, Michael +7 +} + +Snub or no snub, both O'Reilly and Raymond say the term "open-source" won over +just enough summit-goers to qualify as a success. The attendees shared ideas +and experiences and brainstormed on how to improve free software's image. Of +key concern was how to point out the successes of free software, particularly +in the realm of Internet infrastructure, as opposed to playing up the GNU/Linux +challenge to Microsoft Windows. But like the earlier meeting at VA, the +discussion soon turned to the problems associated with the term "free +software." O'Reilly, the summit host, remembers a comment from Torvalds, a +summit attendee. + +"Linus had just moved to Silicon Valley at that point, and he explained how +only recently that he had learned that the word 'free' had two meanings - free +as in 'libre' and free as in 'gratis' - in English." + +Michael Tiemann, founder of Cygnus, proposed an alternative to the troublesome +"free software" term: sourceware. "Nobody got too excited about it," O'Reilly +recalls. "That's when Eric threw out the term 'open source.'" + +Although the term appealed to some, support for a change in offcial terminology +was far from unanimous. At the end of the one-day conference, attendees put the +three terms - free software, open source, or sourceware - to a vote. According +to O'Reilly, 9 out of the 15 attendees voted for "open source." Although some +still quibbled with the term, all attendees agreed to use it in future +discussions with the press. "We wanted to go out with a solidarity message," +O'Reilly says. + +The term didn't take long to enter the national lexicon. Shortly after the +summit, O'Reilly shepherded summit attendees to a press conference attended by +reporters from the /{New York Times}/, the /{Wall Street Journal}/, and other +prominent publications. Within a few months, Torvalds' face was appearing on +the cover of /{Forbes}/ magazine, with the faces of Stallman, Perl creator +Larry Wall, and Apache team leader Brian Behlendorf featured in the interior +spread. Open source was open for business. +={ Wall, Larry } + +For summit attendees such as Tiemann, the solidarity message was the most +important thing. Although his company had achieved a fair amount of success +selling free software tools and services, he sensed the difficulty other +programmers and entrepreneurs faced. + +"There's no question that the use of the word free was confusing in a lot of +situations," Tiemann says. "Open source positioned itself as being business +friendly and business sensible. Free software positioned itself as morally +righteous. For better or worse we figured it was more advantageous to align +with the open source crowd. + +Raymond called Stallman after the meeting to tell him about the new term "open +source" and ask if he would use it. Raymond says Stallman briefly considered +adopting the term, only to discard it. "I know because I had direct personal +conversations about it," Raymond says. + +Stallman's immediate response was, "I'll have to think about it." The following +day he had concluded that the values of Raymond and O'Reilly would surely +dominate the future discourse of "open source," and that the best way to keep +the ideas of the free software movement in public view was to stick to its +traditional term. + +Later in 1998, Stallman announced his position: "open source," while helpful in +communicating the technical advantages of free software also encouraged +speakers to soft-pedal the issue of software freedom. It avoided the unintended +meaning of "gratis software" and the intended meaning of "freedom-respecting +software" equally. As a means for conveying the latter meaning, it was +therefore no use. In effect, Raymond and O'Reilly had given a name to the +non-idealistic political party in the community, the one Stallman did not agree +with. + +In addition, Stallman thought that the ideas of "open source" led people to put +too much emphasis on winning the support of business. While such support in +itself wasn't necessarily bad in itself, he expected that being too desperate +for it would lead to harmful compromises. "Negotiation 101 would teach you that +if you are desperate to get someone's agreement, you are asking for a bad +deal," he says. "You need to be prepared to say no." Summing up his position at +the 1999 LinuxWorld Convention and Expo, an event billed by Torvalds himself as +a "coming out party" for the "Linux" community, Stallman implored his fellow +hackers to resist the lure of easy compromise. +={ LinuxWorld Conventions +2 } + +"Because we've shown how much we can do, we don't have to be desperate to work +with companies or compromise our goals," Stallman said during a panel +discussion. "Let them offer and we'll accept. We don't have to change what +we're doing to get them to help us. You can take a single step towards a goal, +then another and then more and more and you'll actually reach your goal. Or, +you can take a half measure that means you don't ever take another step, and +you'll never get there." + +Even before the LinuxWorld show, however, Stallman was showing an increased +willingness to alienate open source supporters. A few months after the Freeware +Summit, O'Reilly hosted its second annual Perl Conference. This time around, +Stallman was in attendance. During a panel discussion lauding IBM's decision to +employ the free software Apache web server in its commercial offerings, +Stallman, taking advantage of an audience microphone, made a sharp denunciation +of panelist John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language. Stallman +branded Ousterhout a "parasite" on the free software community for marketing a +proprietary version of Tcl via Ousterhout's startup company, Scriptics. +Ousterhout had stated that Scriptics would contribute only the barest minimum +of its improvements to the free version of Tcl, meaning it would in effect use +that small contribution to win community approval for much a larger amount of +non-free software development. Stallman rejected this position and denounced +Scriptics' plans. "I don't think Scriptics is necessary for the continued +existenceof Tcl," Stallman said to hisses from the fellow audience members.~{ +Ibid. }~ +={ Apache web server ; + IBM : + Apache web server and ; + Ousterhout, John ; + Tcl scripting language +1 ; + Scriptics +} + +"It was a pretty ugly scene," recalls Prime Time Freeware's Rich Morin. "John's +done some pretty respectable things: Tcl, Tk, Sprite. He's a real contributor." +Despite his sympathies for Stallman and Stallman's position, Morin felt empathy +for those troubled by Stallman's discordant words. +={ Morin, Rich +1 ; + Prime Time Freeware ; + Sprite +} + +Stallman will not apologize. "Criticizing proprietary software isn't ugly - +proprietary software is ugly. Ousterhout had indeed made real contributions in +the past, but the point is that Scriptics was going to be nearly 100% a +proprietary software company. In that conference, standing up for freedom meant +disagreeing with nearly everyone. Speaking from the audience, I could only say +a few sentences. The only way to raise the issue so it would not be immediately +forgotten was to put it in strong terms." + +"If people rebuke me for 'making a scene' when I state a serious criticism of +someone's conduct, while calling Torvalds 'cheeky' for saying nastier things +about trivial matters, that seems like a double standard to me." + +Stallman's controversial criticism of Ousterhout momentarily alienated a +potential sympathizer, Bruce Perens. In 1998, Eric Raymond proposed launching +the Open Source Initiative, or OSI, an organization that would police the use +of the term "open source" and provide a definition for companies interested in +making their own programs. Raymond recruited Perens to draft the definition.~{ +See Bruce Perens et al., "The Open Source Definition," The Open Source +Initiative (1998), \\ http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html. }~ +={ OSI (Open Source Initiative) ; + Open Source Initiative (OSI) ; + Perens, Bruce +1 +} + +Perens would later resign from the OSI, expressing regret that the organization +had set itself up in opposition to Stallman and the FSF. Still, looking back on +the need for a free software definition outside the Free Software Foundation's +auspices, Perens understands why other hackers might still feel the need for +distance. "I really like and admire Richard," says Perens. "I do think Richard +would do his job better if Richard had more balance. That includes going away +from free-software for a couple of months." + +Stallman's energies would do little to counteract the public-relations momentum +of open source proponents. In August of 1998, when chip-maker Intel purchased a +stake in GNU/Linux vendor Red Hat, an accompanying /{New York Times}/ article +described the company as the product of a movement "known alternatively as free +software and opensource."~{ See Amy Harmon, "For Sale: Free Operating System," +New York Times (September 28, 1998), \\ +http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/biztech/articles/28linux.html. }~ Six +months later, a John Markoff article on Apple Computerwas proclaiming the +company's adoption of the "open source" Apache server in the article +headline.~{ See John Markoff, "Apple Adopts 'Open Source' for its Server +Computers," New York Times (March 17, 1999), \\ +http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/03/biztech/articles/17apple.html. }~ +={ Apache web server ; + Apple Computers : + open source software and ; + Intel ; + Markoff, John ; + Red Hat Inc. : + success of +1 +} + +Such momentum would coincide with the growing momentum of companies that +actively embraced the "open source" term. By August of 1999, Red Hat, a company +that now eagerly billed itself as "opensource," was selling shares on Nasdaq. +In December, VA Linux -formerly VA Research - was floating its own IPO to +historic effect. Opening at $30 per share, the company's stock price exploded +past the $300 mark in initial trading only to settle back down to the $239 +level. Shareholders lucky enough to get in at the bottom and stay until the end +experienced a 698% increase in paper wealth, a Nasdaq record. Eric Raymond, as +a board member, owned shares worth $36 million. However, these high prices were +temporary; they tumbled when the dot-com boom ended. +={ VA Linux +1 ; + VA Research +} + +The open source proponents' message was simple: all you need, to sell the free +software concept, is to make it business-friendly. They saw Stallman and the +free software movement as fighting the market;they sought instead to leverage +it. Instead of playing the role of high-school outcasts, they had played the +game of celebrity, magnifying their power in the process. + +These methods won great success for open source, but not for the ideals of free +software. What they had done to "spread the message" was to omit the most +important part of it: the idea of freedom as an ethical issue. The effects of +this omission are visible today: as of 2009, nearly all GNU/Linux distributions +include proprietary programs, Torvalds' version of Linux contains proprietary +firmware programs, and the company formerly called VA Linux bases its business +on proprietary software. Over half of all the world's web servers run some +version of Apache, and the usual version of Apache is free software, but many +of those sites run a proprietary modified version distributed by IBM. + +"On his worst days Richard believes that Linus Torvalds and I conspired to +hijack his revolution," Raymond says. "Richard's rejection of the term open +source and his deliberate creation of an ideological fissure in my view comes +from an odd mix of idealism and territoriality. There are people out there who +think it's all Richard's personal ego. I don't believe that. It's more that he +so personally associates himself with the free software idea that he sees any +threat to that as a threat to himself." + +Stallman responds, "Raymond misrepresents my views: I don't think Torvalds +'conspired' with anyone, since being sneaky is not his way. However, Raymond's +nasty conduct is visible in those statements themselves. Rather than respond to +my views (even as he claims they are) on their merits, he proposes +psychological interpretations for them. He attributes the harshest +interpretation to unnamed others, then 'defends' me by proposing a slightly +less derogatory one. He has often 'defended' me this way." + +Ironically, the success of open source and open source advocates such as +Raymond would not diminish Stallman's role as a leader - but it would lead many +to misunderstand what he is a leader of. Since the free software movement lacks +the corporate and media recognition of open source, most users of GNU/Linux do +not hear that it exists, let alone what its views are. They have heard the +ideas and values of opensource, and they never imagine that Stallman might have +different ones. Thus he receives messages thanking him for his advocacy of +"open source," and explains in response that he has never been a supporter of +that, using the occasion to inform the sender about free-software. + +Some writers recognize the term "free software" by using the term "FLOSS," +which stands for "Free/Libre and Open Source Software." However, they often say +there is a single "FLOSS" movement, which is like saying that the U.S. has a +"Liberal/Conservative" movement, and the views they usually associate with this +supposed single movement are the open source views they have heard. + +Despite all these obstacles, the free software movement does make its ideas +heard sometimes, and continues to grow in absolute terms. By sticking to its +guns, and presenting its ideas in contrast to those of open source, it gains +ground. "One of Stallman's primary character traits is the fact he doesn't +budge," says Ian Murdock. "He'll wait up to a decade for people to come around +to his point of view if that's what it takes." + +Murdock, for one, finds that un-budgeable nature both refreshing and valuable. +Stallman may no longer be the solitary leader of the free software movement, +but he is still the polestar of the free software community. "You always know +that he's going to be consistent in his views," Murdock says. "Most people +aren't like that. Whether you agree with him or not, you really have to respect +that." + +1~ Chapter 12 - A Brief Journey through Hacker Hell + +[RMS: In this chapter my only change is to add a few notes labeled like this +one.] + +Richard Stallman stares, unblinking, through the windshield of a rental car, +waiting for the light to change as we make our way through downtown Kihei. +={ Kihei (Hawaii) +15 } + +The two of us are headed to the nearby town of Pa'ia, where we are scheduled to +meet up with some software programmers and their wives for dinner in about an +hour or so. +={ Pa'ia (Hawaii) +2 } + +It's about two hours after Stallman's speech at the Maui High Performance +Center, and Kihei, a town that seemed so inviting before the speech, now seems +profoundly uncooperative. Like most beach cities, Kihei is a one-dimensional +exercise in suburban sprawl. Driving down its main drag, with its endless +succession of burger stands, realty agencies, and bikini shops, it's hard not +to feel like a steel-coated morsel passing through the alimentary canal of a +giant commercial tapeworm. The feeling is exacerbated by the lack of side +roads. With nowhere to go but forward, traffic moves in spring-like lurches. +200 yards ahead, a light turns green. By the time we are moving, the light is +yellow again. + +For Stallman, a lifetime resident of the east coast, the prospect of spending +the better part of a sunny Hawaiian afternoon trapped in slow traffic is enough +to trigger an embolism. [RMS: Since I was driving, I was also losing time to +answer my email, and that's a real pain since I can barely keep up anyway.] +Even worse is the knowledge that, with just a few quick right turns a quarter +mile back, this whole situation easily could have been avoided. Unfortunately, +we are at the mercy of the driver ahead of us, a programmer from the lab who +knows the way and who has decided to take us to Pa'ia via the scenic route +instead of via the nearby Pilani Highway. + +"This is terrible," says Stallman between frustrated sighs. "Why didn't we take +the other route?" + +Again, the light a quarter mile ahead of us turns green. Again, we creep +forward a few more car lengths. This process continues for another 10 minutes, +until we finally reach a major crossroad promising access to the adjacent +highway. + +The driver ahead of us ignores it and continues through the intersection. + +"Why isn't he turning?" moans Stallman, throwing up his hands in frustration. +"Can you believe this?" + +I decide not to answer either. I find the fact that I am sitting in a car with +Stallman in the driver seat, in Maui no less, unbelievable enough. Until two +hours ago, I didn't even know Stallman knew how to drive. Now, listening to +Yo-Yo Ma's cello playing the mournful bass notes of "Appalachian Journey" on +the car stereo and watching the sunset pass by on our left, I do my best to +fade into the upholstery. + +When the next opportunity to turn finally comes up, Stallman hits his right +turn signal in an attempt to cue the driver ahead of us. No such luck. Once +again, we creep slowly through the intersection, coming to a stop a good 200 +yards before the next light. By now, Stallman is livid. + +"It's like he's deliberately ignoring us," he says, gesturing and pantomiming +like an air craft carrier landing-signals officer in a futile attempt to catch +our guide's eye. The guide appears unfazed, and for the next five minutes all +we see is a small portion of his head in the rear-view mirror. + +I look out Stallman's window. Nearby Kahoolawe and Lanai Islands provide an +ideal frame for the setting sun. It's a breathtaking view, the kind that makes +moments like this a bit more bearable if you're a Hawaiian native, I suppose. I +try to direct Stallman's attention to it, but Stallman, by now obsessed by the +inattentiveness of the driver ahead of us, blows me off. +={ Lanai Islands (Hawaii) } + +When the driver passes through another green light, completely ignoring a +"Pilani Highway Next Right," I grit my teeth. I remember an early warning +relayed to me by BSD programmer Keith Bostic. "Stallman does not suffer fools +gladly," Bostic warned me. "If somebody says or does something stupid, he'll +look them in the eye and say, 'That's stupid.'" +={ Bostic, Keith } + +Looking at the oblivious driver ahead of us, I realize that it's the stupidity, +not the inconvenience, that's killing Stallman right now. + +"It's as if he picked this route with absolutely no thought on how to get there +efficiently," Stallman says. + +The word "efficiently" hangs in the air like a bad odor. Few things irritate +the hacker mind more than inefficiency. It was the inefficiency of checking the +Xerox laser printer two or three times a day that triggered Stallman's initial +inquiry into the printer source code. It was the inefficiency of rewriting +software tools hijacked by commercial software vendors that led Stallman to +battle Symbolics and to launch the GNU Project. If, as Jean Paul Sartre once +opined, hell is other people, hacker hell is duplicating other people's stupid +mistakes, and it's no exaggeration to say that Stallman's entire life has been +an attempt to save mankind from these fiery depths. +={ Sartre, Jean Paul } + +This hell metaphor becomes all the more apparent as we take in the slowly +passing scenery. With its multitude of shops, parking lots, and poorly timed +street lights, Kihei seems less like a city and more like a poorly designed +software program writ large. Instead of rerouting traffic and distributing +vehicles through side streets and expressways, city planners have elected to +run everything through a single main drag. From a hacker perspective, sitting +in a car amidst all this mess is like listening to a CD rendition of nails on a +chalkboard at full volume. + +"Imperfect systems infuriate hackers," observes Steven Levy, another warning I +should have listened to before climbing into the car with Stallman. "This is +one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars - the system of randomly +programmed red lights and oddly laid out one-way streets causes delays which +are so goddamn /{unnecessary}/ [Levy's emphasis] that the impulse is to +rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes . . . re-design the entire +system."~{ See Steven Levy, /{Hackers}/ (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 40. }~ + +More frustrating, however, is the duplicity of our trusted guide. Instead of +searching out a clever shortcut - as any true hacker would do on instinct - the +driver ahead of us has instead chosen to play along with the city planners' +game. Like Virgil in Dante's /{Inferno}/, our guide is determined to give us +the full guided tour of this hacker hell whether we want it or not. + +Before I can make this observation to Stallman, the driver finally hits his +right turn signal. Stallman's hunched shoulders relax slightly, and for a +moment the air of tension within the car dissipates. The tension comes back, +however, as the driver in front of us slows down. "Construction Ahead" signs +line both sides of the street, and even though the Pilani Highway lies less +than a quarter mile off in the distance, the two-lane road between us and the +highway is blocked by a dormant bulldozer and two large mounds of dirt. + +It takes Stallman a few seconds to register what's going on as our guide begins +executing a clumsy five-point U-turn in front of us. When he catches a glimpse +of the bulldozer and the "No Through Access" signs just beyond, Stallman +finally boils over. + +"Why, why, why?" he whines, throwing his head back. "You should have known the +road was blocked. You should have known this way wouldn't work. You did this +deliberately." [RMS: I meant that he chose the slow road deliberately. As +explained below, I think these quotes are not exact.] + +The driver finishes the turn and passes us on the way back toward the main +drag. As he does so, he shakes his head and gives us an apologetic shrug. +Coupled with a toothy grin, the driver's gesture reveals a touch of mainlander +frustration but is tempered with a protective dose of islander fatalism. Coming +through the sealed windows of our rental car, it spells out a succinct message: +"Hey, it's Maui; what are you gonna do?" + +Stallman can take it no longer. + +"Don't you fucking smile!" he shouts, fogging up the glass as he does so. "It's +your fucking fault. This all could have been so much easier if we had just done +it my way." [RMS: These quotes appear to be inaccurate, because I don't use +"fucking" as an adverb. This was not an interview, so Williams would not have +had a tape recorder running. I'm sure things happened overall as described, but +these quotations probably reflect his understanding rather than my words.] + +Stallman accents the words "my way" by gripping the steering wheel and pulling +himself towards it twice. The image of Stallman's lurching frame is like that +of a child throwing a temper tantrum in a car seat, an image further underlined +by the tone of Stallman's voice. Halfway between anger and anguish, Stallman +seems to be on the verge of tears. + +Fortunately, the tears do not arrive. Like a summer cloudburst, the tantrum +ends almost as soon as it begins. After a few whiny gasps, Stallman shifts the +car into reverse and begins executing his own U-turn. By the time we are back +on the main drag, his face is as impassive as it was when we left the hotel 30 +minutes earlier. + +It takes less than five minutes to reach the next cross-street. This one offers +easy highway access, and within seconds, we are soon speeding off toward Pa'ia +at a relaxing rate of speed. The sun that once loomed bright and yellow over +Stallman's left shoulder is now burning a cool orange-red in our rear-view +mirror. It lends its color to the gauntlet wili wili trees flying past us on +both sides of the highway. +={ Pa'ia (Hawaii) } + +For the next 20 minutes, the only sound in our vehicle, aside from the ambient +hum of the car's engine and tires, is the sound of a cello and a violin trio +playing the mournful strains of an Appalachian folktune. + +1~ Chapter 13 - Continuing the Fight + +For Richard Stallman, time may not heal all wounds, but it does provide a +convenient ally. + +Four years after "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Stallman still chafes over the +Raymond critique. He also grumbles over Linus Torvalds' elevation to the role +of world's most famous hacker. He recalls a popular T-shirt that began showing +at Linux tradeshows around 1999. Designed to mimic the original promotional +poster for Star Wars, the shirt depicted Torvalds brandishing a light-saber +like Luke Skywalker, while Stallman's face rides atop R2D2. The shirt still +grates on Stallman's nerves not only because it depicts him as Torvalds' +sidekick, but also because it elevates Torvalds to the leadership role in the +free-software community, a role even Torvalds himself is loath to accept. "It's +ironic," says Stallman mournfully. "Picking up that sword is exactly what Linus +refuses to do. He gets everybody focusing on him as the symbol of the movement, +and then he won't fight. What good is it?" +={ Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond) ; + Luke Skywalker ; + R2D2 ; + Torvalds, Linus +1 ; + Star Wars +} + +Then again, it is that same unwillingness to "pick up the sword," on Torvalds' +part, that has left the door open for Stallman to bolster his reputation as the +hacker community's ethical arbiter. Despite his grievances, Stallman has to +admit that the last few years have been quite good, both to himself and to his +organization. Relegated to the periphery by the ironic success of the GNU/Linux +system because users thought of it as "Linux," Stallman has nonetheless +successfully recaptured the initiative. His speaking schedule between January +2000and December 2001 included stops on six continents and visits to countries +where the notion of software freedom carries heavy overtones -China and India, +for example. + +Outside the bully pulpit, Stallman has taken advantage of the leverage of the +GNU General Public License (GPL), of which he remains the steward. During the +summer of 2000, while the air was rapidly leaking out of the 1999 Linux IPO +bubble, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation scored two major victories. +In July, 2000, Troll tech, a Norwegian software company and developer of Qt, a +graphical interface library that ran on the GNU/Linux operating system, +announced it was licensing its software under the GPL. A few weeks later, Sun +Microsystems, a company that, until then, had been warily trying to ride the +open source bandwagon without actually contributing its code, finally relented +and announced that it, too, was dual licensing its new OpenOffice~{ Sun was +compelled by a trademark complaint to use the clumsy name "OpenOffice.org." }~ +application suite under the Lesser GNU Public License(LGPL) and the Sun +Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). +={ Free Software Foundation (FSF) : + QT graphic tools and ; + GNU General Public License : + QT graphics tools and ; + Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) ; + OpenOffice application suite +4 ; + Qt +1 ; + Troll Tech +1 ; + SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source Licence) ; + Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) ; + Sun Microsystems : + OpenOffice application suite +} + +In the case of Trolltech, this victory was the result of a protracted effort by +the GNU Project. The non-freeness of Qt was a serious problem for the free +software community because KDE, a free graphical desktop environment that was +becoming popular, depended on it. Qt was non-free software but Trolltech had +invited free software projects(such as KDE) to use it gratis. Although KDE +itself was free software, users that insisted on freedom couldn't run it, since +they had to reject Qt. Stallman recognized that many users would want a +graphical desktop on GNU/Linux, and most would not value freedom enough to +reject the temptation of KDE, with Qt hiding within. The danger was that +GNU/Linux would become a motor for the installation of KDE, and therefore also +of non-free Qt. This would undermine the freedom which was the purpose of GNU. + +To deal with this danger, Stallman recruited people to launch two parallel +counter projects. One was GNOME, the GNU free graphical desktop environment. +The other was Harmony, a compatible free replacement for Qt. If GNOME +succeeded, KDE would not be necessary; if Harmony succeeded, KDE would not need +Qt. Either way, users would be able to have a graphical desktop on GNU/Linux +without non-free Qt. + +In 1999, these two efforts were making good progress, and the management of +Trolltech were starting to feel the pressure. So Trolltech released Qt under +its own free software license, the QPL. The QPL qualified as a free license, +but Stallman pointed out the drawback of incompatibility with the GPL: in +general, combining GPL-covered code with Qt in one program was impossible +without violating one license or the other. Eventually the Trolltech management +recognized that the GPL would serve their purposes equally well, and released +Qt with dual licensing: the same Qt code, in parallel, was available under the +GNU GPL and under the QPL. After three years, this was victory. + +Once Qt was free, the motive for developing Harmony (which wasn't complete +enough for actual use) had disappeared, and the developers abandoned it. GNOME +had acquired substantial momentum, so its development continued, and it remains +the main GNU graphical desktop. + +Sun desired to play according to the Free Software Foundation's conditions. At +the 1999 O'Reilly Open Source Conference, Sun Microsystems co-founder and chief +scientist Bill Joy defended his company's "community source" license, +essentially a watered-down compromise letting users copy and modify Sun-owned +software but not sell copies of said software without negotiating a royalty +agreement with Sun. (With this restriction, the license did not qualify as +free, nor for that matter as open source.) A year after Joy's speech, Sun +Microsystems vice president Marco Boerries was appearing on the same stage +spelling out the company's new licensing compromise in the case of OpenOffice, +an office-application suite designed specifically for the GNU/Linux operating +system. +={ Boerries, Marco +2 ; + community source, license of Sun Microsystems ; + Joy, Bill ; + O'Reilly & Associates : + Open Source Conferences +} + +"I can spell it out in three letters," said Boerries. "GPL." + +At the time, Boerries said his company's decision had little to do with +Stallman and more to do with the momentum of GPL-protected programs. "What +basically happened was the recognition that different products attracted +different communities, and the license you use depends on what type of +community you want to attract," said Boerries. "With [OpenOffice], it was clear +we had the highest correlation with the GPL community."~{ Marco Boerries, +interview with author (July, 2000). }~ Alas, this victory was incomplete, since +OpenOffice recommends the use of non-free plug-ins. + +Such comments point out the under-recognized strength of the GPL and, +indirectly, the political genius of the man who played the largest role in +creating it. "There isn't a lawyer on earth who would have drafted the GPL the +way it is," says Eben Moglen, Columbia University law professor and Free +Software Foundation general counsel. "But it works. And it works because of +Richard's philosophy of design." +={ Columbia University ; + Moglen, Eben +35 +} + +A former professional programmer, Moglen traces his pro bono work with Stallman +back to 1990 when Stallman requested Moglen's legal assistance on a private +affair. Moglen, then working with encryption expert Phillip Zimmerman during +Zimmerman's legal battles with the federal government, says he was honored by +the request.~{ For more information on Zimmerman's legal travails, read Steven +Levy's /{Crypto}/, p. 287-288. In the original book version of /{Free as in +Freedom}/, I reported that Moglen helped defend Zimmerman against the National +Security Agency. According to Levy's account, Zimmerman was investigated by the +U.S. Attorney's office and U.S. Customs, not the NSA. }~ +={ Zimmerman, Phillip ; + National Security Administration +} + +"I told him I used Emacs every day of my life, and it would take an awful lot +of lawyering on my part to pay off the debt." + +Since then, Moglen, perhaps more than any other individual, has had the best +chance to observe the crossover of Stallman's hacker philosophies into the +legal realm. Moglen says Stallman's approach to legal code and his approach to +software code are largely the same. "I have to say, as a lawyer, the idea that +what you should do with a legal document is to take out all the bugs doesn't +make much sense," Moglen says. "There is uncertainty in every legal process, +and what most lawyers want to do is to capture the benefits of uncertainty for +their client. Richard's goal is the complete opposite. His goal is to remove +uncertainty, which is inherently impossible. It is inherently impossible to +draft one license to control all circumstances in all legal systems all over +the world. But if you were to go at it, you would have to go at it his way. And +the resulting elegance, the resulting simplicity in design almost achieves what +it has to achieve. And from there a little lawyering will carry you quite far." + +As the person charged with pushing the Stallman agenda, Moglen understands the +frustration of would-be allies. "Richard is a man who does not want to +compromise over matters that he thinks of as fundamental," Moglen says, "and he +does not take easily the twisting of words or even just the seeking of artful +ambiguity, which human society often requires from a lot of people." + +In addition to helping the Free Software Foundation, Moglen has provided legal +aid to other copyright defendants, such as Dmitry Sklyarov, and distributors of +the DVD decryption program deCSS. +={ Sklyarov, Dmitri +1 } + +Sklyarov had written and released a program to break digital copy-protection on +Adobe e-Books, in Russia where there was no law against it, as an employee of a +Russian company. He was then arrested while visiting the US to give a +scientific paper about his work. Stallman eagerly participated in protests +condemning Adobe for having Sklyarov arrested, and the Free Software Foundation +denounced the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as "censorship of software," but +it could not intervene in favor of Sklyarov's program because that was +non-free. Thus, Moglen worked for Sklyarov's defense through the Electronic +Frontier Foundation. The FSF avoided involvement in the distribution of deCSS, +since that was illegal, but Stallman condemned the U.S. government for +prohibiting deCSS, and Moglen worked as direct counsel for the defendants. +={ Electronic Frontier Foundation } + +Following the FSF's decision not to involve itself in those cases, Moglen has +learned to appreciate the value of Stallman's stubbornness. "There have been +times over the years where I've gone to Richard and said, 'We have to do this. +We have to do that. Here's the strategic situation. Here's the next move. +Here's what he have to do.' And Richard's response has always been, 'We don't +have to do anything.'Just wait. What needs doing will get done." + +"And you know what?" Moglen adds. "Generally, he's been right." + +Such comments disavow Stallman's own self-assessment: "I'm not good at playing +games," Stallman says, addressing the many unseen critics who see him as a +shrewd strategist. "I'm not good at looking ahead and anticipating what +somebody else might do. My approach has always been to focus on the foundation +[of ideas], to say 'Let's make the foundation as strong as we can make it.'" + +The GPL's expanding popularity and continuing gravitational strength are the +best tributes to the foundation laid by Stallman and his GNU colleagues. While +Stallman was never the sole person in the world releasing free software, he +nevertheless can take sole credit for building the free software movement's +ethical framework. Whether or not other modern programmers feel comfortable +working inside that framework is immaterial. The fact that they even have a +choice at all is Stallman's greatest legacy. + +Discussing Stallman's legacy at this point seems a bit premature. Stallman, 48 +at the time of this writing, still has a few years left to add to or subtract +from that legacy. Still, the momentum of the free software movement makes it +tempting to examine Stallman's life outside the day-to-day battles of the +software industry and within a more august, historical setting. + +To his credit, Stallman refuses all opportunities to speculate about this. +"I've never been able to work out detailed plans of what the future was going +to be like," says Stallman, offering his own premature epitaph. "I just said +'I'm going to fight. Who knows where I'll get?'" + +There's no question that in picking his fights, Stallman has alienated the very +people who might otherwise have been his greatest champions, had he been +willing to fight for their views instead of his own. It is also a testament to +his forthright, ethical nature that many of Stallman's erstwhile political +opponents still manage to put in a few good words for him when pressed. The +tension between Stallman the ideologue and Stallman the hacker genius, however, +leads a biographer to wonder: how will people view Stallman when Stallman's own +personality is no longer there to get in the way? + +In early drafts of this book, I dubbed this question the "100 year" question. +Hoping to stimulate an objective view of Stallman and his work, I asked various +software-industry luminaries to take themselves out of the current time-frame +and put themselves in a position of a historian looking back on the free +software movement 100 years in the future. From the current vantage point, it +is easy to see similarities between Stallman and past Americans who, while +somewhat marginal during their lifetime, have attained heightened historical +importance in relation to their age. Easy comparisons include Henry David +Thoreau, transcendentalist philosopher and author of /{Civil Disobedience}/, +and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and progenitor of the modern +environmental movement. It is also easy to see similarities in men like William +Jennings Bryan, a.k.a. "The Great Commoner," leader of the populist movement, +enemy of monopolies, and a man who, though powerful, seems to have faded into +historical insignificance. +={ Bryan, Willliam Jennings ; + Muir, John ; + On Civil Disobedience (Thoreau) ; + Thoreau, Henry David ; + Sierra Club +} + +Although not the first person to view software as public property, Stallman is +guaranteed a footnote in future history books thanks to the GPL. Given that +fact, it seems worthwhile to step back and examine Richard Stallman's legacy +outside the current time frame. Will the GPL still be something software +programmers use in the year 2102, or will it have long since fallen by the +wayside? Will the term "free-software" seem as politically quaint as "free +silver" does today, or will it seem eerily prescient in light of later +political events? + +Predicting the future is risky sport. Stallman refuses, saying that asking what +people will think in 100 years presumes we have no influence over it. The +question he prefers is, "What should we do to make a better future?" But most +people, when presented with the predictive question, seemed eager to bite. + +"One hundred years from now, Richard and a couple of other people are going to +deserve more than a footnote," says Moglen. "They're going to be viewed as the +main line of the story." + +The "couple of other people" Moglen nominates for future textbook chapters +include John Gilmore, who beyond contributing in various ways to free software +has founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Theodor Holm Nelson, a.k.a. +Ted Nelson, author of the 1982book, /{Literary Machines}/. Moglen says +Stallman, Nelson, and Gilmore each stand out in historically significant, +non-overlapping ways. He credits Nelson, commonly considered to have coined the +term "hypertext," for identifying the predicament of information ownership in +the digital age. Gilmore and Stallman, meanwhile, earn notable credit for +identifying the negative political effects of information control and building +organizations - the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the case of Gilmore and +the Free Software Foundation in the case of Stallman - to counteract those +effects. Of the two, however, Moglen sees Stallman's activities as more +personal and less political in nature. +={ Electronic Frontier Foundation ; + Gilmore, John ; + Nelson, Theodor Holm +2 ; + Nelson, Ted +2 +} + +"Richard was unique in that the ethical implications of un-free software were +particularly clear to him at an early moment," says Moglen. "This has a lot to +do with Richard's personality, which lots of people will, when writing about +him, try to depict as epiphenomenal or even a drawback in Richard Stallman's +own life work." + +Gilmore, who describes his inclusion between the erratic Nelson and the +irascible Stallman as something of a "mixed honor," nevertheless seconds the +Moglen argument. Writes Gilmore: + +_1 My guess is that Stallman's writings will stand up as well as Thomas +Jefferson's have; he's a pretty clear writer and also clear on his +principles... Whether Richard will be as influential as Jefferson will depend +on whether the abstractions we call "civil rights" end up more important a +hundred years from now than the abstractions that we call "software" or +"technically imposed restrictions." +={ Jefferson, Thomas } + +Another element of the Stallman legacy not to be overlooked, Gilmore writes, is +the collaborative software-development model pioneered by the GNU Project. +Although flawed at times, the model has nevertheless evolved into a standard +within the software-development industry. All told, Gilmore says, this +collaborative software-development model may end up being even more influential +than the GNU Project, the GPL License, or any particular software program +developed by Stallman: + +_1 Before the Internet, it was quite hard to collaborate over distance on +software, even among teams that know and trust each other. Richard pioneered +collaborative development of software, particularly by disorganized volunteers +who seldom meet each other. Richard didn't build any of the basic tools for +doing this (the TCP protocol, email lists, diff and patch, tar files, RCS or +CVS or remote-CVS), but he used the ones that were available to form social +groups of programmers who could effectively collaborate. + +Stallman thinks that evaluation, though positive, misses the point. "It +emphasizes development methods over freedom, which reflects the values of open +source rather than free software. If that is how future users look back on the +GNU Project, I fear it will lead to a world in which developers maintain users +in bondage, and let them aid development occasionally as a reward, but never +take the chains off them." + +Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and author of the 2001 book, /{The +Future of Ideas}/, is similarly bullish. Like many legal scholars, Lessig sees +the GPL as a major bulwark of the current so-called "digital commons," the vast +agglomeration of community-owned software programs, network and +telecommunication standards that have triggered the Internet's exponential +growth over the last three decades. Rather than connect Stallman with other +Internet pioneers, men such as Vannevar Bush, Vinton Cerf, and J. C. R. +Licklider who convinced others to see computer technology on a wider scale, +Lessig sees Stallman's impact as more personal, introspective, and, ultimately, +unique: +={ Future of Ideas, The (Lessig) } + +_1 [Stallman] changed the debate from "is" to "ought." He made people see how +much was at stake, and he built a device to carry these ideals forward... That +said, I don't quite know how to place him in the context of Cerf or Licklider. +The innovation is different. It is not just about a certain kind of code, or +enabling the Internet. [It's] much more about getting people to see the value +in a certain kind of Internet. I don't think there is anyone else in that +class, before or after. + +Not everybody sees the Stallman legacy as set in stone, of course. Eric +Raymond, the open source proponent who feels that Stallman's leadership role +has diminished significantly since 1996, sees mixed signals when looking into +the 2102 crystal ball: + +_1 I think Stallman's artifacts (GPL, Emacs, GCC) will be seen as revolutionary +works, as foundation-stones of the information world. I think history will be +less kind to some of the theories from which RMS operated, and not kind at all +to his personal tendency towards territorial, cult-leader behavior. + +As for Stallman himself, he, too, sees mixed signals: + +_1 What history says about the GNU Project, twenty years from now, will depend +on who wins the battle of freedom to use public knowledge. If we lose, we will +be just a footnote. If we win, it is uncertain whether people will know the +role of the GNU operating system - if they think the system is "Linux," they +will build a false picture of what happened and why. + +_1 But even if we win, what history people learn a hundred years from now is +likely to depend on who dominates politically. + +Searching for his own 19th-century historical analogy, Stallman summons the +figure of John Brown, the militant abolitionist regarded as a hero on one side +of the Mason Dixon line and a madman on the other. + +John Brown's slave revolt never got going, but during his subsequent trial he +effectively roused national demand for abolition. During the Civil War, John +Brown was a hero; 100 years after, and for much of the 1900s, history textbooks +taught that he was crazy. During the era of legal segregation, while bigotry +was shameless, the U.S. partly accepted the story that the South wanted to tell +about itself, and history textbooks said many untrue things about the Civil War +and related events. + +Such comparisons document both the self-perceived peripheral nature of +Stallman's current work and the binary nature of his current reputation. It's +hard to see Stallman's reputation falling to the same level of infamy as +Brown's did during the post-Reconstruction period. Stallman, despite his +occasional war-like analogies, has done little to inspire violence. Still, it +is easy to envision a future in which Stallman's ideas wind up on the +ash-heap.~{ RMS: Sam Williams' further words here, "In fashioning the free +software cause not not as a mass movement but as a collection of private +battles against the forces of proprietary temptation," do not fit the facts. +Ever since the first announcement of the GNU Project, I have asked the public +to support the cause. The free software movement aims to be a mass movement, +and the only question is whether it has enough supporters to qualify as "mass." +As of 2009, the Free Software Foundation has some 3000 members that pay the +hefty dues, and over 20,000 subscribers to its monthly e-mail newsletter. }~ + +Then again, it is that very will that may someday prove to be Stallman's +greatest lasting legacy. Moglen, a close observer over the last decade, warns +those who mistake the Stallman personality as counter-productive or +epiphenomenal to the "artifacts" of Stallman's life. Without that personality, +Moglen says, there would be precious few artifacts to discuss. Says Moglen, a +former Supreme Court clerk: + +_1 Look, the greatest man I ever worked for was Thurgood Marshall. I knew what +made him a great man. I knew why he had been able to change the world in his +possible way. I would be going out on a limb a little bit if I were to make a +comparison, because they could not be more different: Thurgood Marshall was a +man in society, representing an outcast society to the society that enclosed +it, but still a man in society. His skill was social skills. But he was all of +a piece, too. Different as they were in every other respect, the person I now +most compare him to in that sense - of a piece, compact, made of the substance +that makes stars, all the way through - is Stallman. +={ Marshall, Thurgood } + +In an effort to drive that image home, Moglen reflects on a shared moment in +the spring of 2000. The success of the VA Linux IPO was still resonating in the +business media, and a half dozen issues related to free software were swimming +through the news. Surrounded by a swirling hurricane of issues and stories each +begging for comment, Moglen recalls sitting down for lunch with Stallman and +feeling like a castaway dropped into the eye of the storm. For the next hour, +he says, the conversation calmly revolved around a single topic: strengthening +the GPL. +={ VA Linux } + +"We were sitting there talking about what we were going to do about some +problems in Eastern Europe and what we were going to do when the problem of the +ownership of content began to threaten free software," Moglen recalls. "As we +were talking, I briefly thought about how we must have looked to people passing +by. Here we are, these two little bearded anarchists, plotting and planning the +next steps. And, of course, Richard is plucking the knots from his hair and +dropping them in the soup and behaving in his usual way. Anybody listening in +on our conversation would have thought we were crazy, but I knew: I knew the +revolution's right here at this table. This is what's making it happen. And +this man is the person making it happen." + +Moglen says that moment, more than any other, drove home the elemental +simplicity of the Stallman style. + +"It was funny," recalls Moglen. "I said to him, 'Richard, you know, you and I +are the two guys who didn't make any money out of this revolution.' And then I +paid for the lunch, because I knew he didn't have the money to pay for it."~{ +RMS: I never refuse to let people treat me to a meal, since my pride is not +based on picking up the check. But I surely did have the money to pay for +lunch. My income, which comes from around half the speeches I give, is much +less than a law professor's salary, but I'm not poor. }~ + +1~ Epilogue from Sam Williams: Crushing Loneliness + +[RMS: Because this chapter is so personally from Sam Williams, I have indicated +all changes to the text with square brackets or ellipses, and I have made such +changes only to clear up technical or legal points,and to remove passages that +I found to be hostile and devoid of information. I have also added notes +labeled 'RMS:' to respond to certain points. Williams has also changed the text +of this chapter; changes made by Williams are not explicitly indicated.] + +Writing the biography of a living person is a bit like producing a play. The +drama in front of the curtain often pales in comparison to the drama backstage. + +In /{The Autobiography of Malcolm X}/, Alex Haley gives readers a rare glimpse +of that backstage drama. Stepping out of the ghostwriter role, Haley delivers +the book's epilogue in his own voice. The epilogue explains how a freelance +reporter originally dismissed as a "tool" and"spy" by the Nation of Islam +spokesperson managed to work through personal and political barriers to get +Malcolm X's life story on paper. +={ Autobiography of Malcolm X, The (Haley) +1 ; + Haley, Alex +} + +While I hesitate to compare this book with /{The Autobiography of Malcolm X}/, +I do owe a debt of gratitude to Haley for his candid epilogue. Over the last 12 +months, it has served as a sort of instruction manual on how to deal with a +biographical subject who has built an entire career on being disagreeable. +[RMS: I have built my career on saying no to things others accept without much +question, but if I sometimes seem or am disagreeable, it is not through +specific intention.] From the outset, I envisioned closing this biography with +a similar epilogue, both as an homage to Haley and as a way to let readers know +how this book came to be. + +The story behind this story starts in an Oakland apartment, winding its way +through the various locales mentioned in the book - Silicon Valley, Maui, +Boston, and Cambridge. Ultimately, however, it is a tale of two cities: New +York, New York, the book-publishing capital of the world, and Sebastopol, +California, the book-publishing capital of Sonoma County. + +The story starts in April, 2000. At the time, I was writing stories for the +ill-fated web site BeOpen.com. One of my first assignments was a phone +interview with Richard M. Stallman. The interview went well, so well that +Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org), the popular "news for nerds" site owned by +VA Software, Inc. (formerly VA LinuxSystems and before that, VA Research), gave +it a link in its daily list of feature stories. Within hours, the web servers +at BeOpen were heating up as readers clicked over to the site. +={ BeOpen.com +3 ; + VA Linux ; + VA Research ; + VA Software, Inc. ; + Slashdot +} + +For all intents and purposes, the story should have ended there. Three months +after the interview, while attending the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in +Monterey, California, I received the following email message from Tracy +Pattison, foreign-rights manager at a large New York publishing house: +={ Monterey (California) ; + O'Reilly & Associates : + Open Source Conferences ; + Pattison, Tracy +} + +% poem or group what follows ? + +poem{ + +To: sam@BeOpen.com + +Subject: RMS Interview Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 15:56:37 - 0400 + +Dear Mr. Williams, + +I read your interview with Richard Stallman on BeOpen +with great interest. I've been intrigued by RMS and his +work for some time now and was delighted to find your +piece which I really think you did a great job of capturing +some of the spirit of what Stallman is trying to do with +GNU-Linux and the Free Software Foundation. + +What I'd love to do, however, is read more - and I don't +think I'm alone. Do you think there is more information +and/or sources out there to expand and update your +interview and adapt it into more of a profile of Stallman? +Perhaps including some more anecdotal information about +his personality and background that might really interest +and enlighten readers outside the more hardcore +programming scene? + +}poem + +Tracy ended the email with a request that I give her a call to discuss the idea +further. I did just that. Tracy told me her company was launching a new +electronic book line, and it wanted stories that appealed to an early-adopter +audience. The e-book format was 30,000words, about 100 pages, and she had +pitched her bosses on the idea of profiling a major figure in the hacker +community. Her bosses liked the idea, and in the process of searching for +interesting people to profile,she had come across my BeOpen interview with +Stallman. Hence her email to me. + +That's when Tracy asked me: would I be willing to expand the interview into a +full-length feature profile? + +My answer was instant: yes. Before accepting it, Tracy suggested I put together +a story proposal she could show her superiors. Two days later, I sent her a +polished proposal. A week later, Tracy sent me a follow up email. Her bosses +had given it the green light. + +I have to admit, getting Stallman to participate in an e-book project was an +afterthought on my part. As a reporter who covered the open source beat, I knew +Stallman was a stickler. I'd already received a half dozen emails at that point +upbraiding me for the use of "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux." + +Then again, I also knew Stallman was looking for ways to get his message out to +the general public. Perhaps if I presented the project to him that way, he +would be more receptive. If not, I could always rely upon the copious amounts +of documents, interviews, and recorded online conversations Stallman had left +lying around the Internet and do an unauthorized biography. + +During my research, I came across an essay titled "Freedom - Or Copyright?" +Written by Stallman and published in the June, 2000,edition of the MIT +/{Technology Review}/, the essay blasted e-books for an assortment of software +sins. Not only did readers have to use proprietary software programs to read +them, Stallman lamented, but the methods used to prevent unauthorized copying +were overly harsh. Instead of downloading a transferable HTML or PDF file, +readers downloaded an encrypted file. In essence, purchasing an e-book meant +purchasing a nontransferable key to unscramble the encrypted content. Any +attempt to open a book's content without an authorized key constituted a +criminal violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law +designed to bolster copyright enforcement on the Internet. Similar penalties +held for readers who converted a book's content into an open file format, even +if their only intention was to read the book on a different computer in their +home. Unlike a normal book, the reader no longer held the right to lend, copy, +or resell an e-book. They only had the right to read it on an authorized +machine, warned Stallman: +={ Digital Millennium Copyright Act } + +_1 We still have the same old freedoms in using paper books.But if e-books +replace printed books, that exception will do little good. With "electronic +ink," which makes it possible to download new text onto an apparently printed +piece of paper, even newspapers could become ephemeral. Imagine:no more used +book stores; no more lending a book to your friend; no more borrowing one from +the public library - no more "leaks" that might give someone a chance to read +without paying. (And judging from the ads for Microsoft Reader, no more +anonymous purchasing of books either.)This is the world publishers have in mind +for us.~{ See "Freedom - Or Copyright?" (May, 2000), \\ +http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/stallman0500.asp. }~ + +Needless to say, the essay caused some concern. Neither Tracy nor I had +discussed the software her company would use nor had we discussed the type of +copyright [license] that would govern the e-book's usage. I mentioned the +/{Technology Review}/ article and asked if she could give me information on her +company's e-book policies. Tracy promised to get back to me. + +Eager to get started, I decided to call Stallman anyway and mention the book +idea to him. When I did, he expressed immediate interest and immediate concern. +"Did you read my essay on e-books?" he asked. + +When I told him, yes, I had read the essay and was waiting to hear back from +the publisher, Stallman laid out two conditions: he didn't want to lend support +to an e-book licensing mechanism he fundamentally opposed, and he didn't want +to come off as lending support. "I don't want to participate in anything that +makes me look like a hypocrite," he said. + +For Stallman, the software issue was secondary to the copyright issue. He said +he was willing to ignore whatever software the publisher or its third-party +vendors employed just so long as the company specified within the copyright +that readers were free to make and distribute verbatim copies of the e-book's +content. Stallman pointed to Stephen King's /{The Plant}/ as a possible model. +In June, 2000, King announced on his official web site that he was +self-publishing /{The Plant}/ in serial form. According to the announcement, +the book's total cost would be $13, spread out over a series of $1 +installments. As long as at least 75% of the readers paid for each chapter, +King promised to continue releasing new installments. By August, the plan +seemed to be working, as King had published the first two chapters with a third +on the way. +={ King, Stephen ; + open source +4 ; + Plant, The (King) +} + +"I'd be willing to accept something like that," Stallman said. "As long as it +also permitted verbatim copying." [RMS: As I recall, I also raised the issue of +encryption; the text two paragraphs further down confirms this. I would not +have agreed to publish the book in a way that /{required}/ a non-free program +to read it.] + +I forwarded the information to Tracy. Feeling confident that she and I might be +able to work out an equitable arrangement, I called up Stallman and set up the +first interview for the book. Stallman agreed to the interview without making a +second inquiry into the status issue. Shortly after the first interview, I +raced to set up a second interview (this one in Kihei), squeezing it in before +Stallman headed off on a 14-day vacation to Tahiti. [RMS: That was not a pure +vacation; I gave a speech there too.] +={ Kihei (Hawaii) } + +It was during Stallman's vacation that the bad news came from Tracy. Her +company's legal department didn't want to adjust its [license] notice on the +e-books. Readers who wanted to make their books transferable would [first have +to crack the encryption code, to be able to convert the book to a free, public +format such as HTML. This would be illegal and they might face criminal +penalties.] + +With two fresh interviews under my belt, I didn't see any way to write the book +without resorting to the new material. I quickly set up a trip to New York to +meet with my agent and with Tracy to see if there was a compromise solution. + +When I flew to New York, I met my agent, Henning Guttman. It was our first +face-to-face meeting, and Henning seemed pessimistic about our chances of +forcing a compromise, at least on the publisher's end. The large, established +publishing houses already viewed the e-book format with enough suspicion and +weren't in the mood to experiment with copyright language that made it easier +for readers to avoid payment. As an agent who specialized in technology books, +however,Henning was intrigued by the novel nature of my predicament. I told him +about the two interviews I'd already gathered and the promise not to publish +the book in a way that made Stallman "look like a hypocrite." Agreeing that I +was in an ethical bind, Henning suggested we make that our negotiating point. +={ Guttman, Henning } + +Barring that, Henning said, we could always take the carrot-and-stick approach. +The carrot would be the publicity that came with publishing an e-book that +honored the hacker community's internal ethics. The stick would be the risks +associated with publishing an e-book that didn't. Nine months before Dmitry +Sklyarov became an Internet /{cause célèbre}/, we knew it was only a matter of +time before an enterprising programmer revealed how to hack e-books. We also +knew that a major publishing house releasing an [encrypted] e-book on Richard +M. Stallman was the software equivalent of putting "Steal This E-Book" on the +cover. +={ Sklyarov, Dmitri } + +After my meeting with Henning, I called Stallman. Hoping to make the carrot +more enticing, I discussed a number of potential compromises. What if the +publisher released the book's content under a[dual] license, something similar +to what Sun Microsystems had done with Open Office, the free software desktop +applications suite? The publisher could then release DRM-restricted~{ RMS: +Williams wrote "commercial" here, but that is a misnomer, since it means +"connected with business." All these versions would be commercial if a company +published them. }~ versions of the e-book under [its usual] format, taking +advantage of all the bells and whistles that went with the e-book software, +while releasing the copyable version under a less aesthetically pleasing HTML +format. + +Stallman told me he didn't mind the [dual-license] idea, but he did dislike the +idea of making the freely copyable version inferior to the restricted version. +Besides, he said [on second thought, this case was different precisely because +he had] a way to control the outcome. He could refuse to cooperate. + +[RMS: The question was whether it would be wrong for me to agree to the +restricted version. I can endorse the free version of Sun's Open Office, +because it is free software and much better than nothing,while at the same time +I reject the non-free version. There is no self- contradiction here, because +Sun didn't need or ask my approval for the non-free version; I was not +responsible for its existence. In this case, if I had said yes to the +non-freely-copyable version, the onus would fall on me.] + +I made a few more suggestions with little effect. About the only thing I could +get out of Stallman was a concession [RMS: i.e., a further compromise] that the +e-book's [license] restrict all forms of file sharing to "noncommercial +redistribution." + +Before I signed off, Stallman suggested I tell the publisher that I'd promised +Stallman that the work would be [freely sharable]. I told Stallman I couldn't +agree to that statement [RMS: though it was true,since he had accepted my +conditions at the outset] but that I did view the book as unfinishable without +his cooperation. Seemingly satisfied,Stallman hung up with his usual sign-off +line: "Happy hacking." + +Henning and I met with Tracy the next day. Tracy said her company was willing +to publish copyable excerpts in a unencrypted format but would limit the +excerpts to 500 words. Henning informed her that this wouldn't be enough for me +to get around my ethical obligation to Stallman. Tracy mentioned her own +company's contractual obligation to online vendors such as Amazon.com. Even if +the company decided to open up its e-book content this one time, it faced the +risk of its partners calling it a breach of contract. Barring a change of heart +in the executive suite or on the part of Stallman, the decision was up tome. I +could use the interviews and go against my earlier agreement with Stallman, or +I could plead journalistic ethics and back out of the verbal agreement to do +the book. +={ Amazon.com } + +Following the meeting, my agent and I relocated to a pub on Third Ave. I used +his cell phone to call Stallman, leaving a message when nobody answered. +Henning left for a moment, giving me time to collect my thoughts. When he +returned, he was holding up the cell phone. + +"It's Stallman," Henning said. + +The conversation got off badly from the start. I relayed Tracy's comment about +the publisher's contractual obligations. + +"So," Stallman said bluntly. "Why should I give a damn about their contractual +obligations?" + +Because asking a major publishing house to risk a legal battle with its vendors +over a 30,000-word e-book is a tall order, I suggested. [RMS: His unstated +premise was that I couldn't possibly refuse this deal for mere principle.] + +"Don't you see?" Stallman said. "That's exactly why I'm doing this. I want a +signal victory. I want them to make a choice between freedom and business as +usual." + +As the words "signal victory" echoed in my head, I felt my attention wander +momentarily to the passing foot traffic on the sidewalk. Coming into the bar, I +had been pleased to notice that the location was less than half a block away +from the street corner memorialized in the 1976 Ramones song, "53rd and 3rd," a +song I always enjoyed playing in my days as a musician. Like the perpetually +frustrated street hustler depicted in that song, I could feel things falling +apart as quickly as they had come together. The irony was palpable. After weeks +of gleefully recording other people's laments, I found myself in the position +of trying to pull off the rarest of feats: a Richard Stallman compromise. When +I continued hemming and hawing, pleading the publisher's position and revealing +my growing sympathy for it,Stallman, like an animal smelling blood, attacked. + +"So that's it? You're just going to screw me? You're just going to bend to +their will?" + +[RMS: The quotations show that Williams' interpretation of this conversation +was totally wrong. He compares me to a predator, but I was only saying no to +the deal he was badgering me to accept.I had already made several compromises, +some described above; I just refused to compromise my principles entirely away. +I often do this; people who aren't satisfied say I "refused to compromise at +all, "but that is an exaggeration; \\ see +http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html. Then I feared he was going to +disregard the conditions he had previously agreed to, and publish the book with +DRM despite my refusal. What I smelled was not his "blood" but possible +betrayal.] + +I brought up the issue of a dual-copyright again. + +"You mean license," Stallman said curtly. + +"Yeah, license. Copyright. Whatever," I said, feeling suddenly like a wounded +tuna trailing a rich plume of plasma in the water. + +"Aw, why didn't you just fucking do what I told you to do!" he shouted. [RMS: I +think this quotation was garbled, both because using "fucking" as an adverb was +never part of my speech pattern, and because the words do not fit the +circumstances. The words he quotes are a rebuke to a disobedient subordinate. I +felt he had an ethical obligation, but he was not my subordinate, and I would +not have spoken to him as one. Using notes rather than a recorder, he could not +reliably retain the exact words.] + +I must have been arguing on behalf of the publisher to the very end, because in +my notes I managed to save a final Stallman chestnut: "I don't care. What +they're doing is evil. I can't support evil. Goodbye." [RMS: It sounds like I +had concluded that he would never take no for an answer, and the only way to +end the conversation without accepting his proposition was to hang up on him.] + +As soon as I put the phone down, my agent slid a freshly poured Guinness to me. +"I figured you might need this," he said with a laugh. "I could see you shaking +there towards the end." + +I was indeed shaking. The shaking wouldn't stop until the Guinness was more +than halfway gone. It felt weird, hearing myself characterized as an emissary +of "evil." [RMS: My words as quoted criticize the publisher, not Williams +personally. If he took it personally, perhaps that indicates he was starting to +take ethical responsibility for the deal he had pressed me to accept.] It felt +weirder still, knowing that three months before, I was sitting in an Oakland +apartment trying to come up with my next story idea. Now, I was sitting in a +part of the world I'd only known through rock songs, taking meetings with +publishing executives and drinking beer with an agent I'd never even laid eyes +on until the day before. It was all too surreal, like watching my life +reflected back as a movie montage. + +About that time, my internal absurdity meter kicked in. The initial shaking +gave way to convulsions of laughter. To my agent, I must have looked like a +another fragile author undergoing an untimely emotional breakdown. To me, I was +just starting to appreciate the cynical beauty of my situation. Deal or no +deal, I already had the makings of a pretty good story. It was only a matter of +finding a place to tell it. When my laughing convulsions finally subsided, I +held up my drink in a toast. + +"Welcome to the front lines, my friend," I said, clinking pints with my agent. +"Might as well enjoy it." + +If this story really were a play, here's where it would take a momentary, +romantic interlude. Disheartened by the tense nature of our meeting, Tracy +invited Henning and me to go out for drinks with her and some of her coworkers. +We left the bar on Third Ave., headed down to the East Village, and caught up +with Tracy and her friends. + +Once there, I spoke with Tracy, careful to avoid shop talk. Our conversation +was pleasant, relaxed. Before parting, we agreed to meet the next night. Once +again, the conversation was pleasant, so pleasant that the Stallman e-book +became almost a distant memory. + +When I got back to Oakland, I called around to various journalist friends and +acquaintances. I recounted my predicament. Most upbraided me for giving up too +much ground to Stallman in the pre-interview negotiation. [RMS: Those who have +read the whole book know that I would never have dropped the conditions.] A +former j-school professor suggested I ignore Stallman's "hypocrite" comment and +just write the story. Reporters who knew of Stallman's media-savviness +ex-pressed sympathy but uniformly offered the same response: it's your call. + +I decided to put the book on the back burner. Even with the interviews, I +wasn't making much progress. Besides, it gave me a chance to speak with Tracy +without running things past Henning first.By Christmas we had traded visits: +she flying out to the west coast once, me flying out to New York a second time. +The day before New Year's Eve, I proposed. Deciding which coast to live on, I +picked New York. By February, I packed up my laptop computer and all my +research notes related to the Stallman biography, and we winged our way to JFK +Airport. Tracy and I were married on May 11. So much for failed book deals. + +During the summer, I began to contemplate turning my interview notes into a +magazine article. Ethically, I felt in the clear doing so,since the original +interview terms said nothing about traditional print media. To be honest, I +also felt a bit more comfortable writing about Stallman after eight months of +radio silence. Since our telephone conversation in September, I'd only received +two emails from Stallman.Both chastised me for using "Linux" instead of +"GNU/Linux" in a pair of articles for the web magazine /{Upside Today}/. Aside +from that, I had enjoyed the silence. In June, about a week after the New York +University speech, I took a crack at writing a 5,000-word magazine-length story +about Stallman. This time, the words flowed. The distance had helped restore my +lost sense of emotional perspective, I suppose. +={ Upside Today web magazine } + +In July, a full year after the original email from Tracy, I got a call from +Henning. He told me that O'Reilly & Associates, a publishing house out of +Sebastopol, California, was interested in the running the Stallman story as a +biography. [RMS: I have a vague memory that I suggested contacting O'Reilly, +but I can't be sure after all these years.] The news pleased me. Of all the +publishing houses in the world, O'Reilly, the same company that had published +Eric Raymond's /{The Cathedral and the Bazaar}/, seemed the most sensitive to +the issues that had killed the earlier e-book. As a reporter, I had relied +heavily on the O'Reilly book /{Open Sources}/ as a historical reference. I also +knew that various chapters of the book, including a chapter written by +Stallman, had been published with [license] notices that permitted +redistribution. Such knowledge would come in handy if the issue of electronic +publication ever came up again. +={ Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond) ; + O'Reilly & Associates ; + Open Sources (DiBona, et al) +2 ; + Raymond, Eric +} + +Sure enough, the issue did come up. I learned through Henning that O'Reilly +intended to publish the biography both as a book and as part of its new Safari +Tech Books Online subscription service. The Safari user license would involve +special restrictions,~{ See "Safari Tech Books Online; Subscriber Agreement: +Terms of Service" \\ http://my.safaribooksonline.com/termsofservice. As of +December, 2009, the see-books require non-free reader software, so people +should refuse to use them. }~ Henning warned, but O'Reilly was willing to allow +for a copyright that permitted users to copy and share the book's text +regardless of medium. Basically, as author, I had the choice between two +licenses: the Open Publication License or the GNU Free Documentation License. +={ Open Publication License (OPL) +8 ; + OPL (Open Publication License) +8 ; + Safari Tech Books Online subscription service +} + +I checked out the contents and background of each license. The Open Publication +License (OPL)~{ See "The Open Publication License: Draft v1.0" (June 8, 1999), +\\ http://opencontent.org/openpub/. }~ gives readers the right to reproduce and +distribute a work, in whole or in part, in any medium "physical or electronic," +provided the copied work retains the Open Publication License. It also permits +modification of a work, provided certain conditions are met. Finally, the Open +Publication License includes a number of options, which, if selected by the +author, can limit the creation of "substantively modified" versions or +book-form derivatives without prior author approval. + +The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), meanwhile, permits the copying and +distribution of a document in any medium, provided the resulting work carries +the same license.~{ See "The GNU Free Documentation License: Version 1.3" +(November, 2008), \\ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. }~ +={ GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) +1 ; + GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) +1 +} + +It also permits the modification of a document provided certain conditions. +Unlike the OPL, however, it does not give authors the option to restrict +certain modifications. It also does not give authors the right to reject +modifications that might result in a competitive book product. It does require +certain forms of front - and back-cover information if a party other than the +copyright holder wishes to publish more than 100 copies of a protected work, +however. + +In the course of researching the licenses, I also made sure to visit the GNU +Project web page titled "Various Licenses and Comments About Them."~{ See +http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html. }~ + +On that page, I found a Stallman critique of the Open Publication License. +Stallman's critique related to the creation of modified works and the ability +of an author to select either one of the OPL's options to restrict +modification. If an author didn't want to select either option, it was better +to use the GFDL instead, Stallman noted, since it minimized the risk of the +non-selected options popping up in modified versions of a document. + +The importance of modification in both licenses was a reflection of their +original purpose - namely, to give software-manual owners a chance to improve +their manuals and publicize those improvements to the rest of the community. +Since my book wasn't a manual, I had little concern about the modification +clause in either license. My only concern was giving users the freedom to +exchange copies of the book or make copies of the content, the same freedom +they would have enjoyed if they purchased a hardcover book. Deeming either +license suitable for this purpose, I signed the O'Reilly contract when it came +to me. + +Still, the notion of unrestricted modification intrigued me. In my early +negotiations with Tracy, I had pitched the merits of a GPL-style license for +the e-book's content. At worst, I said, the license would guarantee a lot of +positive publicity for the e-book. At best, it would encourage readers to +participate in the book-writing process. As an author, I was willing to let +other people amend my work just so long as my name always got top billing. +Besides, it might even be interesting to watch the book evolve. I pictured +later editions looking much like online versions of the /{Talmud}/, my original +text in a central column surrounded by illuminating, third-party commentary in +the margins. + +My idea drew inspiration from Project Xanadu (http://www.xanadu.com), the +legendary software concept originally conceived by Ted Nelson in 1960. During +the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in 1999, I had seen the first demonstration +of the project's [free] offshoot Udanax and had been wowed by the result. In +one demonstration sequence, Udanax displayed a parent document and a derivative +work in a similar two-column, plain-text format. With a click of the button, +the program introduced lines linking each sentence in the parent to its +conceptual offshoot in the derivative. An e-book biography of Richard M. +Stallman didn't have to be Udanax-enabled, but given such technological +possibilities, why not give users a chance to play around?~{ Anybody willing to +"port" this book over to Udanax, the free software version of Xanadu, will +receive enthusiastic support from me. To find out more about this intriguing +technology, \\ visit http://www.udanax.com. }~ +={ Nelson, Ted ; + O'Reilly & Associates : + Open Source Conferences ; + Project Xanadu ; + Udanax +} + +When Laurie Petrycki, my editor at O'Reilly, gave me a choice be-tween the OPL +or the GFDL, I indulged the fantasy once again. By September of 2001, the month +I signed the contract, e-books had become almost a dead topic. Many publishing +houses, Tracy's included,were shutting down their e-book imprints for lack of +interest. I had to wonder. If these companies had treated e-books not as a form +of publication but as a form of community building, would those imprints have +survived? +={ GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) +1 ; + GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) +1 ; + Petrycki, Laurie +} + +After I signed the contract, I notified Stallman that the book project was back +on. I mentioned the choice O'Reilly was giving me between the Open Publication +License and the GNU Free Documentation License. I told him I was leaning toward +the OPL, if only for the fact I saw no reason to give O'Reilly's competitors a +chance to print the same book under a different cover. Stallman wrote back, +arguing in favor of the GFDL, noting that O'Reilly had already used it several +times in the past. Despite the events of the past year, I suggested a deal. I +would choose the GFDL if it gave me the possibility to do more interviews and +if Stallman agreed to help O'Reilly publicize the book. Stallman agreed to +participate in more interviews but said that his participation in +publicity-related events would depend on the content of the book. Viewing this +as only fair, I set up an interview for December 17, 2001 in Cambridge. + +I set up the interview to coincide with a business trip my wife Tracy was +taking to Boston. Two days before leaving, Tracy suggested I invite Stallman +out to dinner. + +"After all," she said, "he is the one who brought us together."I sent an email +to Stallman, who promptly sent a return email accepting the offer. When I drove +up to Boston the next day, I met Tracy at her hotel and hopped the T to head +over to MIT. When we got to Tech Square, I found Stallman in the middle of a +conversation just as we knocked on the door. + +"I hope you don't mind," he said, pulling the door open far enough so that +Tracy and I could just barely hear Stallman's conversational counterpart. It +was a youngish woman, mid-20s I'd say, named Sarah. + +"I took the liberty of inviting somebody else to have dinner with us," Stallman +said, matter-of-factly, giving me the same catlike smile he gave me back in +that Palo Alto restaurant. + +To be honest, I wasn't too surprised. The news that Stallman had a new female +friend had reached me a few weeks before, courtesy of Stallman's mother. "In +fact, they both went to Japan last month when Richard went over to accept the +Takeda Award," Lippman told me at the time.~{ Alas, I didn't find out about the +Takeda Foundation's decision to award Stallman, along with Linus Torvalds and +Ken Sakamura, with its first-ever award for"Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement +for Social/Economic Well-Being" until after Stallman had made the trip to Japan +to accept the award. For more information about the award and its accompanying +$1 million prize, visit the Takeda site, \\ http://www.takeda-foundation.jp. }~ +={ Takeda Awards } + +On the way over to the restaurant, I learned the circumstances of Sarah and +Richard's first meeting. Interestingly, the circumstances were very familiar. +Working on her own fictional book, Sarah said she heard about Stallman and what +an interesting character he was. She promptly decided to create a character in +her book on Stallman and,in the interests of researching the character, set up +an interview with Stallman. Things quickly went from there. The two had been +dating since the beginning of 2001, she said. + +"I really admired the way Richard built up an entire political movement to +address an issue of profound personal concern," Sarah said,explaining her +attraction to Stallman. + +My wife immediately threw back the question: "What was the issue?" "Crushing +loneliness." During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of +the time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had softened +Stallman in any significant way. I didn't see anything to suggest they had. +Although more flirtatious than I remembered,Stallman retained the same general +level of prickliness. At one point,my wife uttered an emphatic "God forbid" +only to receive a typical Stallman rebuke. + +"I hate to break it to you, but there is no God," Stallman said.[RMS: I must +have been too deadpan. He could justly accuse me of being a wise guy, but not +of rebuking.] + +Afterwards, when the dinner was complete and Sarah had departed, Stallman +seemed to let his guard down a little. As we walked to a nearby bookstore, he +admitted that the last 12 months had dramatically changed his outlook on life. +"I thought I was going to be alone forever," he said. "I'm glad I was wrong." + +Before parting, Stallman handed me his "pleasure card," a business card listing +Stallman's address, phone number, and favorite pastimes("sharing good books, +good food and exotic music and dance") so that I might set up a final +interview. + +The next day, over another meal of dim sum, Stallman seemed even more +lovestruck than the night before. Recalling his debates with Currier House dorm +maters over the benefits and drawbacks of an immortality serum, Stallman +expressed hope that scientists might some day come up with the key to +immortality. "Now that I'm finally starting to have happiness in my life, I +want to have [a longer life]," he said. + +When I mentioned Sarah's "crushing loneliness" comment, Stallman failed to see +a connection between loneliness on a physical or spiritual level and loneliness +on a hacker level. "The impulse to share code is about friendship but +friendship at a much lower level," he said. Later, however, when the subject +came up again, Stallman did admit that loneliness, or the fear of perpetual +loneliness [RMS: at the hacker-to-hacker, community level, that is], had played +a major role in fueling his determination during the earliest days of the GNU +Project. + +"My fascination with computers was not a consequence of anything else," he +said. "I wouldn't have been less fascinated with computers if I had been +popular and all the women flocked to me. However, it's certainly true the +experience of feeling I didn't have a home, finding one and losing it, finding +another and having it destroyed, affected me deeply. The one I lost was the +dorm. The one that was destroyed was the AI Lab. The precariousness of not +having any kind of home or community was very powerful. It made me want to +fight to get it back." + +After the interview, I couldn't help but feel a certain sense of emotional +symmetry. Hearing Sarah describe what attracted her to Stallman and hearing +Stallman himself describe the emotions that prompted him to take up the free +software cause, I was reminded of my own reasons for writing this book. Since +July, 2000, I have learned to appreciate both the seductive and the repellent +sides of the Richard Stallman persona. Like Eben Moglen before me, I feel that +dismissing that persona as epiphenomenal or distracting in relation to the +overall free software movement would be a grievous mistake. In many ways the +two are so mutually defining as to be indistinguishable. + +[RMS: Williams objectifies his reactions, both positive and negative, as parts +of me, but they are functions also of his own attitudes about appearance, +conformity, and business success.] + +While I'm sure not every reader feels the same level of affinity for +Stallman...I'm sure most will agree [that] few individuals offer as singular a +human portrait as Richard M. Stallman. It is my sincere hope that, with this +initial portrait complete and with the help of the GFDL, others will feel a +similar urge to add their own perspective to that portrait. + +Endnotes + +1~ Appendix A - Hack, Hackers and Hacking +={ hackers +18 } + +To understand the full meaning of the word "hacker," it helps to examine the +word's etymology over the years. + +/{The New Hacker Dictionary}/, an online compendium of software-programmer +jargon, officially lists nine different connotations of the word "hack" and a +similar number for "hacker." Then again, the same publication also includes an +accompanying essay that quotes Phil Agre, an MIT hacker who warns readers not +to be fooled by the word's perceived flexibility. "Hack has only one meaning," +argues Agre. "An extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation." +Richard Stallman tries to articulate it with the phrase, "Playful cleverness." +={ Agre, Phil ; + New Hacker Dictionary, The +} + +Regardless of the width or narrowness of the definition, most modern hackers +trace the word back to MIT, where the term bubbled upas popular item of student +jargon in the early 1950s. In 1990 the MIT Museum put together a journal +documenting the hacking phenomenon.According to the journal, students who +attended the institute during the fifties used the word "hack" the way a modern +student might use the word "goof." Hanging a jalopy out a dormitory window was +a "hack," but anything harsh or malicious - e.g., egging a rival dorm's windows +or defacing a campus statue - fell outside the bounds. Implicit within the +definition of "hack" was a spirit of harmless, creative fun. +={ MIT Museum } + +This spirit would inspire the word's gerund form: "hacking." A 1950s student +who spent the better part of the afternoon talking on the phone or dismantling +a radio might describe the activity as "hacking." Again, a modern speaker would +substitute the verb form of "goof" -"goofing" or "goofing off" - to describe +the same activity. + +As the 1950s progressed, the word "hack" acquired a sharper, more rebellious +edge. The MIT of the 1950s was overly competitive, and hacking emerged as both +a reaction to and extension of that competitive culture. Goofs and pranks +suddenly became a way to blow off steam, thumb one's nose at campus +administration, and indulge creative thinking and behavior stifled by the +Institute's rigorous undergraduate curriculum. With its myriad hallways and +underground steam tunnels, the Institute offered plenty of exploration +opportunities for the student undaunted by locked doors and "No +Trespassing"signs. Students began to refer to their off-limits explorations as +"tunnel hacking." Above ground, the campus phone system offered similar +opportunities. Through casual experimentation and due diligence, students +learned how to perform humorous tricks. Drawing inspiration from the more +traditional pursuit of tunnel hacking, students quickly dubbed this new +activity "phone hacking." + +The combined emphasis on creative play and restriction-free exploration would +serve as the basis for the future mutations of the hacking term. The first +self-described computer hackers of the 1960s MIT campus originated from a late +1950s student group called the Tech Model Railroad Club. A tight clique within +the club was the Signals and Power (S&P) Committee - the group behind the +railroad club's electrical circuitry system. The system was a sophisticated +assortment of relays and switches similar to the kind that controlled the local +cam-pus phone system. To control it, a member of the group simply dialed in +commands via a connected phone and watched the trains do his bidding. +={ Tech Model Railroad Club ; + S&P (Signals and Power) Committee +2 ; + Signals and Power (S&P) Committee +2 +} + +The nascent electrical engineers responsible for building and maintaining this +system saw their activity as similar in spirit to phone hacking. Adopting the +hacking term, they began refining it even further. From the S&P hacker point of +view, using one less relay to operate a particular stretch of track meant +having one more relay for future play. Hacking subtly shifted from a synonym +for idle play to a synonym for idle play that improved the overall performance +or efficiency of the club's railroad system at the same time. Soon S&P +committee members proudly referred to the entire activity of improving and +reshaping the track's underlying circuitry as "hacking" and to the people who +did it as "hackers." + +Given their affinity for sophisticated electronics - not to mention the +traditional MIT-student disregard for closed doors and "No Trespassing" signs - +it didn't take long before the hackers caught wind of a new machine on campus. +Dubbed the TX-0, the machine was one of the first commercially marketed +computers. By the end of the 1950s, the entire S&P clique had migrated en masse +over to the TX-0 control room, bringing the spirit of creative play with +them.The wide-open realm of computer programming would encourage yet another +mutation in etymology. "To hack" no longer meant soldering unusual looking +circuits, but cobbling together software programs with little regard to +"official" methods or software-writing procedures. It also meant improving the +efficiency and speed of already-existing pro-grams that tended to hog up +machine resources. True to the word's roots, it also meant writing programs +that served no other purpose than to amuse or entertain. +={ TX-0 computer } + +A classic example of this expanded hacking definition is the game Spacewar, the +first computer-based video game. Developed by MIT hackers in the early 1960s, +Spacewar had all the traditional hacking definitions: it was goofy and random, +serving little useful purpose other than providing a nightly distraction for +the dozen or so hackers who delighted in playing it. From a software +perspective, however,it was a monumental testament to innovation of programming +skill.It was also completely free. Because hackers had built it for fun,they +saw no reason to guard their creation, sharing it extensively with other +programmers. By the end of the 1960s, Spacewar had become a diversion for +programmers around the world, if they had the (then rather rare) graphical +displays. + +This notion of collective innovation and communal software ownership distanced +the act of computer hacking in the 1960s from the tunnel hacking and phone +hacking of the 1950s. The latter pursuits tended to be solo or small-group +activities. Tunnel and phone hackers relied heavily on campus lore, but the +off-limits nature of their activity discouraged the open circulation of new +discoveries. Computer hackers, on the other hand, did their work amid a +scientific field biased toward collaboration and the rewarding of innovation. +Hackers and "official" computer scientists weren't always the best of allies, +but in the rapid evolution of the field, the two species of computer programmer +evolved a cooperative - some might say symbiotic - relationship. + +Hackers had little respect for bureaucrats' rules. They regarded computer +security systems that obstructed access to the machine as just another bug, to +be worked around or fixed if possible. Thus,breaking security (but not for +malicious purposes) was a recognized aspect of hacking in 1970, useful for +practical jokes (the victim might say, "I think someone's hacking me") as well +as for gaining access to the computer. But it was not central to the idea of +hacking. Where there was a security obstacle, hackers were proud to display +their wits in surmounting it; however, given the choice, as at the MIT AI +Lab,they chose to have no obstacle and do other kinds of hacking. Where there +is no security, nobody needs to break it. + +It is a testament to the original computer hackers' prodigious skill that later +programmers, including Richard M. Stallman, aspired to wear the same hacker +mantle. By the mid to late 1970s, the term"hacker" had acquired elite +connotations. In a general sense, a computer hacker was any person who wrote +software code for the sake of writing software code. In the particular sense, +however, it was a testament to programming skill. Like the term "artist," the +meaning carried tribal overtones. To describe a fellow programmer as a hacker +was a sign of respect. To describe oneself as a hacker was a sign of immense +personal confidence. Either way, the original looseness of the computer-hacker +appellation diminished as computers became more common. + +As the definition tightened, "computer" hacking acquired additional semantic +overtones. The hackers at the MIT AI Lab shared many other characteristics, +including love of Chinese food, disgust for tobacco smoke, and avoidance of +alcohol, tobacco and other addictive drugs. These characteristics became part +of some people's under-standing of what it meant to be a hacker, and the +community exerted an influence on newcomers even though it did not demand +conformity. However, these cultural associations disappeared with the AI Lab +hacker community. Today, most hackers resemble the surrounding society on these +points. + +As the hackers at elite institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon +conversed about hacks they admired, they also considered the ethics of their +activity, and began to speak openly of a "hacker ethic": the yet-unwritten +rules that governed a hacker's day-to-day behavior. In the 1984 book +/{Hackers}/, author Steven Levy, after much research and consultation, codified +the hacker ethic as five core hacker tenets. +={ Hackers (Levy) +1 } + +In the 1980s, computer use expanded greatly, and so did security breaking. +Mostly it was done by insiders with criminal intent, who were generally not +hackers at all. However, occasionally the police and administrators, who +defined disobedience as evil, traced a computer "intrusion" back to a hacker +whose idea of ethics was "Don't hurt people." Journalists published articles in +which "hacking" meant breaking security, and usually endorsed the +administrators' view of the matter. Although books like /{Hackers}/ did much to +document the original spirit of exploration that gave rise to the hacking +culture, for most newspaper reporters and readers the term "computer +hacker"became a synonym for "electronic burglar." + +By the late 1980s, many U.S. teenagers had access to computers.Some were +alienated from society; inspired by journalists' distorted picture of +"hacking," they expressed their resentment by breaking computer security much +as other alienated teens might have done it by breaking windows. They began to +call themselves "hackers," but they never learned the MIT hackers' principle +against malicious behavior.As younger programmers began employing their +computer skills to harmful ends - creating and disseminating computer viruses, +breaking into computer systems for mischief, deliberately causing computers to +crash - the term "hacker" acquired a punk, nihilistic edge which attracted more +people with similar attitudes. + +Hackers have railed against this perceived mis-usage of their self-designator +for nearly two decades. Stallman, not one to take things lying down, coined the +term "cracking" for "security breaking" so that people could more easily avoid +calling it "hacking." But the distinction between hacking and cracking is often +misunderstood. These two descriptive terms are not meant to be exclusive. It's +not that "Hacking is here, and cracking is there, and never the twain shall +meet." Hacking and cracking are different attributes of activities, just as +"young"and "tall" are different attributes of persons. + +Most hacking does not involve security, so it is not cracking. Most cracking is +done for profit or malice and not in a playful spirit, so it is not hacking. +Once in a while a single act may qualify as cracking and as hacking, but that +is not the usual case. The hacker spirit includes irreverence for rules, but +most hacks do not break rules. Cracking is by definition disobedience, but it +is not necessarily malicious or harmful. The computer security field +distinguishes between "black hat"and "white hat" crackers - i.e., crackers who +turn toward destructive,malicious ends versus those who probe security in order +to fix it. + +The hacker's central principle not to be malicious remains the primary cultural +link between the notion of hacking in the early 21st century and hacking in the +1950s. It is important to note that, as the idea of computer hacking has +evolved over the last four decades,the original notion of hacking - i.e., +performing pranks or exploring underground tunnels - remains intact. In the +fall of 2000, the MIT Museum paid tribute to the Institute's age-old hacking +tradition with a dedicated exhibit, the Hall of Hacks. The exhibit includes a +number of photographs dating back to the 1920s, including one involving amock +police cruiser. In 1993, students paid homage to the original MIT notion of +hacking by placing the same police cruiser, lights flashing, atop the +Institute's main dome. The cruiser's vanity license plate read IHTFP, a popular +MIT acronym with many meanings. The most noteworthy version, itself dating back +to the pressure-filled world of MIT student life in the 1950s, is "I hate this +fucking place." In 1990,however, the Museum used the acronym as a basis for a +journal on the history of hacks. Titled /{The Journal of the Institute for +Hacks,Tomfoolery, and Pranks}/, it offers an adept summary of the hacking. +={ Hall of Hacks } + +"In the culture of hacking, an elegant, simple creation is as highly valued as +it is in pure science," writes /{Boston Globe}/ reporter Randolph Ryan in a +1993 article attached to the police car exhibit. "A Hack differs from the +ordinary college prank in that the event usually requires careful planning, +engineering and finesse, and has an under-lying wit and inventiveness," Ryan +writes. "The unwritten rule holds that a hack should be good-natured, +non-destructive and safe. In fact,hackers sometimes assist in dismantling their +own handiwork." +={ Boston Globe ; + Ryan, Randolph +} + +The urge to confine the culture of computer hacking within the same ethical +boundaries is well-meaning but impossible. Although most software hacks aspire +to the same spirit of elegance and simplicity,the software medium offers less +chance for reversibility. Dismantling a police cruiser is easy compared with +dismantling an idea, especially an idea whose time has come. + +Once a vague item of obscure student jargon, the word "hacker" has become a +linguistic billiard ball, subject to political spin and ethical nuances. +Perhaps this is why so many hackers and journalists enjoy using it. We cannot +predict how people will use the word in the future.We can, however, decide how +we will use it ourselves. Using the term "cracking" rather than "hacking," when +you mean "security breaking,"shows respect for Stallman and all the hackers +mentioned in this book,and helps preserve something which all computer users +have benefited from: the hacker spirit. +={ crackers } + +1~ Appendix B - GNU Free Documentation License +={ GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) +64 ; + GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) +64 +} + +Version 1.3, 3 November 2008 + +Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation + +http://fsf.org/ + +Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license +document, but changing it is not allowed. + +2~ Preamble + +The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional +and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom:to assure everyone the +effective freedom to copy and redistribute it,with or without modifying it, +either commercially or non-commercially.Secondarily, this License preserves for +the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being +considered responsible for modifications made by others. + +This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative works of the +document must themselves be free in the same sense.It complements the GNU +General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software. + +We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, +because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with +manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. 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The +primary font is 10-point Computer Modern. + +Digital versions of the book, including the LATEX source code, are available at +http://www.fsf.org/faif. Improvements are welcome,and can be sent to +sales@gnu.org. diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..32c7c8d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst @@ -0,0 +1,12762 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Free Culture + :subtitle: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity + +@creator: + :author: Lessig, Lawrence + +@date: + :published: 2004-03-25 + :created: 2004-03-25 + :issued: 2004-03-25 + :available: 2004-03-25 + :valid: 2004-03-25 + :modified: 2004-03-25 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Lawrence Lessig, 2004. + :license: Free Culture is Licensed under a Creative Commons License. This License permits non-commercial use of this work, so long as attribution is given. For more information about the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/ + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;book:discourse:intellectual property|copyright|creative commons|free culture;copyright;free culture;creative commons;intellectual property:copyright|public domain;intellectual property:copyright:creative commons;book:subject:culture|copyright|society|public policy|mass media;culture;society + +@identifier: + :isbn: 9781594200069 + :oclc: 53324884 + +% :isbn: 1594200068 + +@links: + {Free Culture}http://www.free-culture.cc + {Remixes}http://www.free-culture.cc/remixes/ + {@ Wikipedia}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_%28book%29 + {@ Amazon.com}http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594200068 + {@ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=1594200068 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:B; break=1 + :home_button_image: {freeculture.home.png }http://www.free-culture.cc + :home_button_text: {Free Culture}http://www.free-culture.cc; {Lawrence Lessig}http://www.lessig.org + :footer: {Free Culture}http://www.free-culture.cc; {Lawrence Lessig}http://www.lessig.org + :pot_master: free_culture.lawrence_lessig.sst + +:A~ @title @author + +1~attribution Attribution~# + +To Eric Eldred - whose work first drew me to this cause, and for whom it +continues still.~# + +:B~ PREFACE + +1~preface [Preface]-# + +!_ At the end +of his review of my first book, /{Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace}/, David +Pogue, a brilliant writer and author of countless technical and computer- +related texts, wrote this: + +_1 Unlike actual law, Internet software has no capacity to punish. It doesn't +affect people who aren't online (and only a tiny minority of the world +population is). And if you don't like the Internet's system, you can always +flip off the modem.~{ David Pogue, "Don't Just Chat, Do Something," /{New York +Times,}/ 30 January 2000. }~ + +Pogue was skeptical of the core argument of the book - that software, or +"code," functioned as a kind of law - and his review suggested the happy +thought that if life in cyberspace got bad, we could always "drizzle, drazzle, +druzzle, drome"- like simply flip a switch and be back home. Turn off the +modem, unplug the computer, and any troubles that exist in /{that}/ space +wouldn't "affect" us anymore. + +Pogue might have been right in 1999 - I'm skeptical, but maybe. But even if he +was right then, the point is not right now: /{Free Culture}/ is about the +troubles the Internet causes even after the modem is turned off. It is an +argument about how the battles that now rage regarding life on-line have +fundamentally affected "people who aren't online." There is no switch that will +insulate us from the Internet's effect. + +But unlike /{Code}/, the argument here is not much about the Internet itself. +It is instead about the consequence of the Internet to a part of our tradition +that is much more fundamental, and, as hard as this is for a geek-wanna-be to +admit, much more important. + +That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that +follow, we come from a tradition of "free culture" - not "free" as in "free +beer" (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement, ~{ +Richard M. Stallman, /{Free Software, Free Societies}/ 57 ( Joshua Gay, ed. +2002). }~ but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free +enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and +protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting +intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach +of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain +/{as free as possible}/ from the control of the past. A free culture is not a +culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which +everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" - +a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the +powerful, or of creators from the past. + +If we understood this change, I believe we would resist it. Not "we" on the +Left or "you" on the Right, but we who have no stake in the particular +industries of culture that defined the twentieth century. Whether you are on +the Left or the Right, if you are in this sense disinterested, then the story I +tell here will trouble you. For the changes I describe affect values that both +sides of our political culture deem fundamental. + +We saw a glimpse of this bipartisan outrage in the early summer of 2003. As the +FCC considered changes in media ownership rules that would relax limits on +media concentration, an extraordinary coalition generated more than 700,000 +letters to the FCC opposing the change. As William Safire described marching +"uncomfortably alongside CodePink Women for Peace and the National Rifle +Association, between liberal Olympia Snowe and conservative Ted Stevens," he +formulated perhaps most simply just what was at stake: the concentration of +power. And as he asked, +={ power, concentration of +2 } + +_1 Does that sound unconservative? Not to me. The concentration of power - +political, corporate, media, cultural - should be anathema to conservatives. +The diffusion of power through local control, thereby encouraging individual +participation, is the essence of federalism and the greatest expression of +democracy."~{ William Safire, "The Great Media Gulp," /{New York Times,}/ 22 +May 2003. }~ + +This idea is an element of the argument of /{Free Culture}/, though my focus is +not just on the concentration of power produced by concentrations in ownership, +but more importantly, if because less visibly, on the concentration of power +produced by a radical change in the effective scope of the law. The law is +changing; that change is altering the way our culture gets made; that change +should worry you - whether or not you care about the Internet, and whether +you're on Safire's left or on his right. + +!_ The inspiration +for the title and for much of the argument of this book comes from the work of +Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. Indeed, as I reread +Stallman's own work, especially the essays in /{Free Software, Free Society}/, +I realize that all of the theoretical insights I develop here are insights +Stallman described decades ago. One could thus well argue that this work is +"merely" derivative. + +I accept that criticism, if indeed it is a criticism. The work of a lawyer is +always derivative, and I mean to do nothing more in this book than to remind a +culture about a tradition that has always been its own. Like Stallman, I defend +that tradition on the basis of values. Like Stallman, I believe those are the +values of freedom. And like Stallman, I believe those are values of our past +that will need to be defended in our future. A free culture has been our past, +but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. + +Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for free culture +stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A +free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which +artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't +get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. + +Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between +anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with +property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by +the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes +feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property +rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is +against that extremism that this book is written. + +:B~ INTRODUCTION + +1~intro [Intro]-# + +!_ On December 17, 1903, +on a windy North Carolina beach for just shy of one hundred seconds, the Wright +brothers demonstrated that a heavier-than-air, self- propelled vehicle could +fly. The moment was electric and its importance widely understood. Almost +immediately, there was an explosion of interest in this newfound technology of +manned flight, and a gaggle of innovators began to build upon it. +={ Wright brothers +1 } + +At the time the Wright brothers invented the airplane, American law held that a +property owner presumptively owned not just the surface of his land, but all +the land below, down to the center of the earth, and all the space above, to +"an indefinite extent, upwards."~{ St. George Tucker, /{Blackstone's +Commentaries}/ 3 (South Hackensack, N.J.: Rothman Reprints, 1969), 18. }~ For +many years, scholars had puzzled about how best to interpret the idea that +rights in land ran to the heavens. Did that mean that you owned the stars? +Could you prosecute geese for their willful and regular trespass? +={ air traffic, land ownership vs. +8 ; + land ownership, air traffic and +8 ; + property rights : + air traffic vs. +8 +} + +Then came airplanes, and for the first time, this principle of American law - +deep within the foundations of our tradition, and acknowledged by the most +important legal thinkers of our past - mattered. If my land reaches to the +heavens, what happens when United flies over my field? Do I have the right to +banish it from my property? Am I allowed to enter into an exclusive license +with Delta Airlines? Could we set up an auction to decide how much these rights +are worth? + +In 1945, these questions became a federal case. When North Carolina farmers +Thomas Lee and Tinie Causby started losing chickens because of low-flying +military aircraft (the terrified chickens apparently flew into the barn walls +and died), the Causbys filed a lawsuit saying that the government was +trespassing on their land. The airplanes, of course, never touched the surface +of the Causbys' land. But if, as Blackstone, Kent, and Coke had said, their +land reached to "an indefinite extent, upwards," then the government was +trespassing on their property, and the Causbys wanted it to stop. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee ; + Causby, Tinie +} + +The Supreme Court agreed to hear the Causbys' case. Congress had declared the +airways public, but if one's property really extended to the heavens, then +Congress's declaration could well have been an unconstitutional "taking" of +property without compensation. The Court acknowledged that "it is ancient +doctrine that common law ownership of the land extended to the periphery of the +universe." But Justice Douglas had no patience for ancient doctrine. In a +single paragraph, hundreds of years of property law were erased. As he wrote +for the Court, +={ Douglas, William O. +2 ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + on airspace vs. land rights +4 +} + +_1 [The] doctrine has no place in the modern world. The air is a public +highway, as Congress has declared. Were that not true, every transcontinental +flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense +revolts at the idea. To recognize such private claims to the airspace would +clog these highways, seriously interfere with their control and development in +the public interest, and transfer into private ownership that to which only the +public has a just claim."~{ United States v. Causby, U.S. 328 (1946): 256, 261. +The Court did find that there could be a "taking" if the government's use of +its land effectively destroyed the value of the Causbys' land. This example was +suggested to me by Keith Aoki's wonderful piece, "(Intellectual) Property and +Sovereignty: Notes Toward a Cultural Geography of Authorship," /{Stanford Law +Review}/ 48 (1996): 1293, 1333. See also Paul Goldstein, /{Real Property}/ +(Mineola, N.Y.: Foundation Press, 1984), 1112-13. }~ + +"Common sense revolts at the idea." + +This is how the law usually works. Not often this abruptly or impatiently, but +eventually, this is how it works. It was Douglas's style not to dither. Other +justices would have blathered on for pages to reach the conclusion that Douglas +holds in a single line: "Common sense revolts at the idea." But whether it +takes pages or a few words, it is the special genius of a common law system, as +ours is, that the law adjusts to the technologies of the time. And as it +adjusts, it changes. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age crumble in +another. + +Or at least, this is how things happen when there's no one powerful on the +other side of the change. The Causbys were just farmers. And though there were +no doubt many like them who were upset by the growing traffic in the air +(though one hopes not many chickens flew themselves into walls), the Causbys of +the world would find it very hard to unite and stop the idea, and the +technology, that the Wright brothers had birthed. The Wright brothers spat +airplanes into the technological meme pool; the idea then spread like a virus +in a chicken coop; farmers like the Causbys found themselves surrounded by +"what seemed reasonable" given the technology that the Wrights had produced. +They could stand on their farms, dead chickens in hand, and shake their fists +at these newfangled technologies all they wanted. They could call their +representatives or even file a lawsuit. But in the end, the force of what seems +"obvious" to everyone else - the power of "common sense" - would prevail. Their +"private interest" would not be allowed to defeat an obvious public gain. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee ; + Causby, Tinie ; + Wright brothers +} + +!_ Edwin Howard Armstrong +is one of America's forgotten inventor geniuses. He came to the great American +inventor scene just after the titans Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. +But his work in the area of radio technology was perhaps the most important of +any single inventor in the first fifty years of radio. He was better educated +than Michael Faraday, who as a bookbinder's apprentice had discovered electric +induction in 1831. But he had the same intuition about how the world of radio +worked, and on at least three occasions, Armstrong invented profoundly +important technologies that advanced our understanding of radio. +={ Armstrong, Edwin Howard +14 ; + Bell, Alexander Graham ; + Edison, Thomas ; + Faraday, Michael ; + radio : + FM spectrum of +12 +} + +On the day after Christmas, 1933, four patents were issued to Armstrong for his +most significant invention - FM radio. Until then, consumer radio had been +amplitude-modulated (AM) radio. The theorists of the day had said that +frequency-modulated (FM) radio could never work. They were right about FM radio +in a narrow band of spectrum. But Armstrong discovered that frequency-modulated +radio in a wide band of spectrum would deliver an astonishing fidelity of +sound, with much less transmitter power and static. + +On November 5, 1935, he demonstrated the technology at a meeting of the +Institute of Radio Engineers at the Empire State Building in New York City. He +tuned his radio dial across a range of AM stations, until the radio locked on a +broadcast that he had arranged from seventeen miles away. The radio fell +totally silent, as if dead, and then with a clarity no one else in that room +had ever heard from an electrical device, it produced the sound of an +announcer's voice: "This is amateur station W2AG at Yonkers, New York, +operating on frequency modulation at two and a half meters." + +The audience was hearing something no one had thought possible: + +_1 A glass of water was poured before the microphone in Yonkers; it sounded +like a glass of water being poured. ... A paper was crumpled and torn; it +sounded like paper and not like a crackling forest fire. ... Sousa marches were +played from records and a piano solo and guitar number were performed. ... The +music was projected with a live-ness rarely if ever heard before from a radio +'music box.' "~{ Lawrence Lessing, /{Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard +Armstrong}/ (Philadelphia: J. B. Lipincott Company, 1956), 209. }~ + +As our own common sense tells us, Armstrong had discovered a vastly superior +radio technology. But at the time of his invention, Armstrong was working for +RCA. RCA was the dominant player in the then dominant AM radio market. By 1935, +there were a thousand radio stations across the United States, but the stations +in large cities were all owned by a handful of networks. +={ RCA +9 ; + media : + ownership concentration in +9 +} + +RCA's president, David Sarnoff, a friend of Armstrong's, was eager that +Armstrong discover a way to remove static from AM radio. So Sarnoff was quite +excited when Armstrong told him he had a device that removed static from +"radio." But when Armstrong demonstrated his invention, Sarnoff was not +pleased. +={ Sarnoff, David } + +_1 I thought Armstrong would invent some kind of a filter to remove static from +our AM radio. I didn't think he'd start a revolution - start up a whole damn +new industry to compete with RCA."~{ See "Saints: The Heroes and Geniuses of +the Electronic Era," First Electronic Church of America, at +www.webstationone.com/fecha, available at link #1. }~ + +Armstrong's invention threatened RCA's AM empire, so the company launched a +campaign to smother FM radio. While FM may have been a superior technology, +Sarnoff was a superior tactician. As one author described, +={ FM radio +5 } + +_1 The forces for FM, largely engineering, could not overcome the weight of +strategy devised by the sales, patent, and legal offices to subdue this threat +to corporate position. For FM, if allowed to develop unrestrained, posed ... a +complete reordering of radio power ... and the eventual overthrow of the +carefully restricted AM system on which RCA had grown to power."~{ Lessing, +226. }~ + +RCA at first kept the technology in house, insisting that further tests were +needed. When, after two years of testing, Armstrong grew impatient, RCA began +to use its power with the government to stall FM radio's deployment generally. +In 1936, RCA hired the former head of the FCC and assigned him the task of +assuring that the FCC assign spectrum in a way that would castrate FM - +principally by moving FM radio to a different band of spectrum. At first, these +efforts failed. But when Armstrong and the nation were distracted by World War +II, RCA's work began to be more successful. Soon after the war ended, the FCC +announced a set of policies that would have one clear effect: FM radio would be +crippled. As Lawrence Lessing described it, +={ FCC : + on FM radio +2 ; + Lessig, Lawrence +1 +} + +_1 The series of body blows that FM radio received right after the war, in a +series of rulings manipulated through the FCC by the big radio interests, were +almost incredible in their force and deviousness."~{ Lessing, 256. }~ + +To make room in the spectrum for RCA's latest gamble, television, FM radio +users were to be moved to a totally new spectrum band. The power of FM radio +stations was also cut, meaning FM could no longer be used to beam programs from +one part of the country to another. (This change was strongly supported by +AT&T, because the loss of FM relaying stations would mean radio stations would +have to buy wired links from AT&T.) The spread of FM radio was thus choked, at +least temporarily. +={ AT&T } + +Armstrong resisted RCA's efforts. In response, RCA resisted Armstrong's +patents. After incorporating FM technology into the emerging standard for +television, RCA declared the patents invalid - baselessly, and almost fifteen +years after they were issued. It thus refused to pay him royalties. For six +years, Armstrong fought an expensive war of litigation to defend the patents. +Finally, just as the patents expired, RCA offered a settlement so low that it +would not even cover Armstrong's lawyers' fees. Defeated, broken, and now +broke, in 1954 Armstrong wrote a short note to his wife and then stepped out of +a thirteenth- story window to his death. + +This is how the law sometimes works. Not often this tragically, and rarely with +heroic drama, but sometimes, this is how it works. From the beginning, +government and government agencies have been subject to capture. They are more +likely captured when a powerful interest is threatened by either a legal or +technical change. That powerful interest too often exerts its influence within +the government to get the government to protect it. The rhetoric of this +protection is of course always public spirited; the reality is something +different. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age, but that, left to +themselves, would crumble in another, are sustained through this subtle +corruption of our political process. RCA had what the Causbys did not: the +power to stifle the effect of technological change. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee ; + Causby, Tinie +} + +!_ There's no +single inventor of the Internet. Nor is there any good date upon which to mark +its birth. Yet in a very short time, the Internet has become part of ordinary +American life. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 58 +percent of Americans had access to the Internet in 2002, up from 49 percent two +years before.~{ Amanda Lenhart, "The Ever-Shifting Internet Population: A New +Look at Internet Access and the Digital Divide," Pew Internet and American Life +Project, 15 April 2003: 6, available at link #2. }~ That number could well +exceed two thirds of the nation by the end of 2004. +={ Internet : + development of +2 +} + +As the Internet has been integrated into ordinary life, it has changed things. +Some of these changes are technical - the Internet has made communication +faster, it has lowered the cost of gathering data, and so on. These technical +changes are not the focus of this book. They are important. They are not well +understood. But they are the sort of thing that would simply go away if we all +just switched the Internet off. They don't affect people who don't use the +Internet, or at least they don't affect them directly. They are the proper +subject of a book about the Internet. But this is not a book about the +Internet. + +Instead, this book is about an effect of the Internet beyond the Internet +itself: an effect upon how culture is made. My claim is that the Internet has +induced an important and unrecognized change in that process. That change will +radically transform a tradition that is as old as the Republic itself. Most, if +they recognized this change, would reject it. Yet most don't even see the +change that the Internet has introduced. + +We can glimpse a sense of this change by distinguishing between commercial and +noncommercial culture, and by mapping the law's regulation of each. By +"commercial culture" I mean that part of our culture that is produced and sold +or produced to be sold. By "noncommercial culture" I mean all the rest. When +old men sat around parks or on street corners telling stories that kids and +others consumed, that was noncommercial culture. When Noah Webster published +his "Reader," or Joel Barlow his poetry, that was commercial culture. +={ Barlow, Joel ; + culture : + commercial vs. noncommercial +6 ; + Webster, Noah +} + +At the beginning of our history, and for just about the whole of our tradition, +noncommercial culture was essentially unregulated. Of course, if your stories +were lewd, or if your song disturbed the peace, then the law might intervene. +But the law was never directly concerned with the creation or spread of this +form of culture, and it left this culture "free." The ordinary ways in which +ordinary individuals shared and transformed their culture - telling stories, +reenacting scenes from plays or TV, participating in fan clubs, sharing music, +making tapes - were left alone by the law. + +The focus of the law was on commercial creativity. At first slightly, then +quite extensively, the law protected the incentives of creators by granting +them exclusive rights to their creative work, so that they could sell those +exclusive rights in a commercial marketplace.~{ This is not the only purpose of +copyright, though it is the overwhelmingly primary purpose of the copyright +established in the federal constitution. State copyright law historically +protected not just the commercial interest in publication, but also a privacy +interest. By granting authors the exclusive right to first publication, state +copyright law gave authors the power to control the spread of facts about them. +See Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy," /{Harvard +Law Review}/ 4 (1890): 193, 198-200. }~ This is also, of course, an important +part of creativity and culture, and it has become an increasingly important +part in America. But in no sense was it dominant within our tradition. It was +instead just one part, a controlled part, balanced with the free. +={ Copyright infringement lawsuits : + commercial creativity as primary purpose of +2 +} + +This rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased.~{ 9. +See Jessica Litman, /{Digital Copyright}/ (New York: Prometheus Books, 2001), +ch. 13. }~ The Internet has set the stage for this erasure and, pushed by big +media, the law has now affected it. For the first time in our tradition, the +ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the +reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its +control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. +The technology that preserved the balance of our history - between uses of our +culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission - +has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, +more and more a permission culture. +={ free culture : + permission culture vs. ; + permission culture : + free culture vs. +} + +This change gets justified as necessary to protect commercial creativity. And +indeed, protectionism is precisely its motivation. But the protectionism that +justifies the changes that I will describe below is not the limited and +balanced sort that has defined the law in the past. This is not a protectionism +to protect artists. It is instead a protectionism to protect certain forms of +business. Corporations threatened by the potential of the Internet to change +the way both commercial and noncommercial culture are made and shared have +united to induce lawmakers to use the law to protect them. It is the story of +RCA and Armstrong; it is the dream of the Causbys. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee ; + Causby, Tinie ; + protection of artists vs. business interests +} + +For the Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for many to +participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches +far beyond local boundaries. That power has changed the marketplace for making +and cultivating culture generally, and that change in turn threatens +established content industries. The Internet is thus to the industries that +built and distributed content in the twentieth century what FM radio was to AM +radio, or what the truck was to the railroad industry of the nineteenth +century: the beginning of the end, or at least a substantial transformation. +Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more +competitive and vibrant market for building and cultivating culture; that +market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those +creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity; +and depending upon a few important factors, those creators could earn more on +average from this system than creators do today - all so long as the RCAs of +our day don't use the law to protect themselves against this competition. + +Yet, as I argue in the pages that follow, that is precisely what is happening +in our culture today. These modern-day equivalents of the early +twentieth-century radio or nineteenth-century railroads are using their power +to get the law to protect them against this new, more efficient, more vibrant +technology for building culture. They are succeeding in their plan to remake +the Internet before the Internet remakes them. + +It doesn't seem this way to many. The battles over copyright and the Internet +seem remote to most. To the few who follow them, they seem mainly about a much +simpler brace of questions - whether "piracy" will be permitted, and whether +"property" will be protected. The "war" that has been waged against the +technologies of the Internet - what Motion Picture Association of America +(MPAA) president Jack Valenti calls his "own terrorist war"~{ Amy Harmon, +"Black Hawk Download: Moving Beyond Music, Pirates Use New Tools to Turn the +Net into an Illicit Video Club," /{New York Times,}/ 17 January 2002. }~ - has +been framed as a battle about the rule of law and respect for property. To know +which side to take in this war, most think that we need only decide whether +we're for property or against it. +={ Valenti, Jack : + on creative property rights +} + +If those really were the choices, then I would be with Jack Valenti and the +content industry. I, too, am a believer in property, and especially in the +importance of what Mr. Valenti nicely calls "creative property." I believe that +"piracy" is wrong, and that the law, properly tuned, should punish "piracy," +whether on or off the Internet. + +But those simple beliefs mask a much more fundamental question and a much more +dramatic change. My fear is that unless we come to see this change, the war to +rid the world of Internet "pirates" will also rid our culture of values that +have been integral to our tradition from the start. + +These values built a tradition that, for at least the first 180 years of our +Republic, guaranteed creators the right to build freely upon their past, and +protected creators and innovators from either state or private control. The +First Amendment protected creators against state control. And as Professor Neil +Netanel powerfully argues,~{ Neil W. Netanel, "Copyright and a Democratic Civil +Society," /{Yale Law Journal}/ 106 (1996): 283. }~ copyright law, properly +balanced, protected creators against private control. Our tradition was thus +neither Soviet nor the tradition of patrons. It instead carved out a wide berth +within which creators could cultivate and extend our culture. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + Copyright law : + as protection of creators ; + First Amendment ; + Netanel, Neil Weinstock +} + +Yet the law's response to the Internet, when tied to changes in the technology +of the Internet itself, has massively increased the effective regulation of +creativity in America. To build upon or critique the culture around us one must +ask, Oliver Twist - like, for permission first. Permission is, of course, often +granted - but it is not often granted to the critical or the independent. We +have built a kind of cultural nobility; those within the noble class live +easily; those outside it don't. But it is nobility of any form that is alien to +our tradition. + +The story that follows is about this war. Is it not about the "centrality of +technology" to ordinary life. I don't believe in gods, digital or otherwise. +Nor is it an effort to demonize any individual or group, for neither do I +believe in a devil, corporate or otherwise. It is not a morality tale. Nor is +it a call to jihad against an industry. + +It is instead an effort to understand a hopelessly destructive war inspired by +the technologies of the Internet but reaching far beyond its code. And by +understanding this battle, it is an effort to map peace. There is no good +reason for the current struggle around Internet technologies to continue. There +will be great harm to our tradition and culture if it is allowed to continue +unchecked. We must come to understand the source of this war. We must resolve +it soon. + +!_ Like the Causbys' +battle, this war is, in part, about "property." The property of this war is not +as tangible as the Causbys', and no innocent chicken has yet to lose its life. +Yet the ideas surrounding this "property" are as obvious to most as the +Causbys' claim about the sacredness of their farm was to them. We are the +Causbys. Most of us take for granted the extraordinarily powerful claims that +the owners of "intellectual property" now assert. Most of us, like the Causbys, +treat these claims as obvious. And hence we, like the Causbys, object when a +new technology interferes with this property. It is as plain to us as it was to +them that the new technologies of the Internet are "trespassing" upon +legitimate claims of "property." It is as plain to us as it was to them that +the law should intervene to stop this trespass. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee +1 ; + Causby, Tinie +1 ; + intellectual property rights +8 +} + +And thus, when geeks and technologists defend their Armstrong or Wright +brothers technology, most of us are simply unsympathetic. Common sense does not +revolt. Unlike in the case of the unlucky Causbys, common sense is on the side +of the property owners in this war. Unlike the lucky Wright brothers, the +Internet has not inspired a revolution on its side. +={ Wright brothers } + +My hope is to push this common sense along. I have become increasingly amazed +by the power of this idea of intellectual property and, more importantly, its +power to disable critical thought by policy makers and citizens. There has +never been a time in our history when more of our "culture" was as "owned" as +it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power +to control the /{uses}/ of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it +is now. +={ power, concentration of } + +The puzzle is, Why? + +Is it because we have come to understand a truth about the value and importance +of absolute property over ideas and culture? Is it because we have discovered +that our tradition of rejecting such an absolute claim was wrong? + +Or is it because the idea of absolute property over ideas and culture benefits +the RCAs of our time and fits our own unreflective intuitions? + +Is the radical shift away from our tradition of free culture an instance of +America correcting a mistake from its past, as we did after a bloody war with +slavery, and as we are slowly doing with inequality? Or is the radical shift +away from our tradition of free culture yet another example of a political +system captured by a few powerful special interests? + +Does common sense lead to the extremes on this question because common sense +actually believes in these extremes? Or does common sense stand silent in the +face of these extremes because, as with Armstrong versus RCA, the more powerful +side has ensured that it has the more powerful view? + +I don't mean to be mysterious. My own views are resolved. I believe it was +right for common sense to revolt against the extremism of the Causbys. I +believe it would be right for common sense to revolt against the extreme claims +made today on behalf of "intellectual property." What the law demands today is +increasingly as silly as a sheriff arresting an airplane for trespass. But the +consequences of this silliness will be much more profound. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee ; + Causby, Tinie +} + +!_ The struggle +that rages just now centers on two ideas: "piracy" and "property." My aim in +this book's next two parts is to explore these two ideas. + +My method is not the usual method of an academic. I don't want to plunge you +into a complex argument, buttressed with references to obscure French +theorists' however natural that is for the weird sort we academics have become. +Instead I begin in each part with a collection of stories that set a context +within which these apparently simple ideas can be more fully understood. + +The two sections set up the core claim of this book: that while the Internet +has indeed produced something fantastic and new, our government, pushed by big +media to respond to this "something new," is destroying something very old. +Rather than understanding the changes the Internet might permit, and rather +than taking time to let "common sense" resolve how best to respond, we are +allowing those most threatened by the changes to use their power to change the +law - and more importantly, to use their power to change something fundamental +about who we have always been. + +We allow this, I believe, not because it is right, and not because most of us +really believe in these changes. We allow it because the interests most +threatened are among the most powerful players in our depressingly compromised +process of making law. This book is the story of one more consequence of this +form of corruption - a consequence to which most of us remain oblivious. + +:B~ "PIRACY" + +1~intro_piracy [Intro]-# + +!_ Since the inception +of the law regulating creative property, there has been a war against "piracy." +The precise contours of this concept, "piracy," are hard to sketch, but the +animating injustice is easy to capture. As Lord Mansfield wrote in a case that +extended the reach of English copyright law to include sheet music, +={ Copyright law : + English ; + Mansfield, William Murray, Lord ; + music publishing ; + sheet music +} + +_1 A person may use the copy by playing it, but he has no right to rob the +author of the profit, by multiplying copies and disposing of them for his own +use."~{ /{Bach v. Longman,}/ 98 Eng. Rep. 1274 (1777) (Mansfield). }~ + +Today we are in the middle of another "war" against "piracy." The Internet has +provoked this war. The Internet makes possible the efficient spread of content. +Peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing is among the most efficient of the efficient +technologies the Internet enables. Using distributed intelligence, p2p systems +facilitate the easy spread of content in a way unimagined a generation ago. +={ Internet : + efficient content distribution on ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + efficiency of +1 +} + +_{This}_ efficiency does not respect the traditional lines of copyright. The +network doesn't discriminate between the sharing of copyrighted and +uncopyrighted content. Thus has there been a vast amount of sharing of +copyrighted content. That sharing in turn has excited the war, as copyright +owners fear the sharing will "rob the author of the profit." + +The warriors have turned to the courts, to the legislatures, and increasingly +to technology to defend their "property" against this "piracy." A generation of +Americans, the warriors warn, is being raised to believe that "property" should +be "free." Forget tattoos, never mind body piercing - our kids are becoming +thieves! + +There's no doubt that "piracy" is wrong, and that pirates should be punished. +But before we summon the executioners, we should put this notion of "piracy" in +some context. For as the concept is increasingly used, at its core is an +extraordinary idea that is almost certainly wrong. + +The idea goes something like this: + +_1 Creative work has value; whenever I use, or take, or build upon the creative +work of others, I am taking from them something of value. Whenever I take +something of value from someone else, I should have their permission. The +taking of something of value from someone else without permission is wrong. It +is a form of piracy." + +This view runs deep within the current debates. It is what NYU law professor +Rochelle Dreyfuss criticizes as the "if value, then right" theory of creative +property~{ See Rochelle Dreyfuss, "Expressive Genericity: Trademarks as +Language in the Pepsi Generation," /{Notre Dame Law Review}/ 65 (1990): 397. }~ +- if there is value, then someone must have a right to that value. It is the +perspective that led a composers' rights organization, ASCAP, to sue the Girl +Scouts for failing to pay for the songs that girls sang around Girl Scout +campfires.~{ Lisa Bannon, "The Birds May Sing, but Campers Can't Unless They +Pay Up," /{Wall Street Journal,}/ 21 August 1996, available at link #3; +Jonathan Zittrain, "Calling Off the Copyright War: In Battle of Property vs. +Free Speech, No One Wins," /{Boston Globe,}/ 24 November 2002. }~ There was +"value" (the songs) so there must have been a "right" - even against the Girl +Scouts. +={ ASCAP ; + Dreyfus, Rochelle ; + Girl Scouts ; + creative property : + "if value, then right" theory of +1 ; + if value, then right, theory +1 +} + +% note bad sort: ={"if value, then right" theory} + +This idea is certainly a possible understanding of how creative property should +work. It might well be a possible design for a system of law protecting +creative property. But the "if value, then right" theory of creative property +has never been America's theory of creative property. It has never taken hold +within our law. + +Instead, in our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the +groundwork for a richly creative society but remains subservient to the value +of creativity. The current debate has this turned around. We have become so +concerned with protecting the instrument that we are losing sight of the value. +={ copyright law : + on republishing vs. transformation of original work +1 ; + creativity : + legal restrictions on +3 +} + +The source of this confusion is a distinction that the law no longer takes care +to draw - the distinction between republishing someone's work on the one hand +and building upon or transforming that work on the other. Copyright law at its +birth had only publishing as its concern; copyright law today regulates both. + +Before the technologies of the Internet, this conflation didn't matter all that +much. The technologies of publishing were expensive; that meant the vast +majority of publishing was commercial. Commercial entities could bear the +burden of the law - even the burden of the Byzantine complexity that copyright +law has become. It was just one more expense of doing business. + +But with the birth of the Internet, this natural limit to the reach of the law +has disappeared. The law controls not just the creativity of commercial +creators but effectively that of anyone. Although that expansion would not +matter much if copyright law regulated only "copying," when the law regulates +as broadly and obscurely as it does, the extension matters a lot. The burden of +this law now vastly outweighs any original benefit - certainly as it affects +noncommercial creativity, and increasingly as it affects commercial creativity +as well. Thus, as we'll see more clearly in the chapters below, the law's role +is less and less to support creativity, and more and more to protect certain +industries against competition. Just at the time digital technology could +unleash an extraordinary range of commercial and noncommercial creativity, the +law burdens this creativity with insanely complex and vague rules and with the +threat of obscenely severe penalties. We may be seeing, as Richard Florida +writes, the "Rise of the Creative Class."~{ In /{The Rise of the Creative +Class}/ (New York: Basic Books, 2002), Richard Florida documents a shift in the +nature of labor toward a labor of creativity. His work, however, doesn't +directly address the legal conditions under which that creativity is enabled or +stifled. I certainly agree with him about the importance and significance of +this change, but I also believe the conditions under which it will be enabled +are much more tenuous. }~ Unfortunately, we are also seeing an extraordinary +rise of regulation of this creative class. +={ copyright law : + creativity impeded by ; + Florida, Richard ; + Rise of the Creative Class, The (Florida) +} + +These burdens make no sense in our tradition. We should begin by understanding +that tradition a bit more and by placing in their proper context the current +battles about behavior labeled "piracy." + +1~ Chapter One: Creators + +!_ In 1928, +a cartoon character was born. An early Mickey Mouse made his debut in May of +that year, in a silent flop called /{Plane Crazy}/. In November, in New York +City's Colony Theater, in the first widely distributed cartoon synchronized +with sound, /{Steamboat Willie}/ brought to life the character that would +become Mickey Mouse. +={ animated cartoons +15 ; + cartoon films +16 ; + films : + animated +15 ; + Steamboat Willie +9 ; + Mikey Mouse +9 +} + +Synchronized sound had been introduced to film a year earlier in the movie +/{The Jazz Singer}/. That success led Walt Disney to copy the technique and mix +sound with cartoons. No one knew whether it would work or, if it did work, +whether it would win an audience. But when Disney ran a test in the summer of +1928, the results were unambiguous. As Disney describes that first experiment, +={ Disney, Walt +5 } + +_1 A couple of my boys could read music, and one of them could play a mouth +organ. We put them in a room where they could not see the screen and arranged +to pipe their sound into the room where our wives and friends were going to see +the picture. + +_1 The boys worked from a music and sound-effects score. After several false +starts, sound and action got off with the gun. The mouth organist played the +tune, the rest of us in the sound department bammed tin pans and blew slide +whistles on the beat. The synchronization was pretty close. + +_1 The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric. They +responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought +they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. +It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!"~{ Leonard +Maltin, /{Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons}/ (New +York: Penguin Books, 1987), 34-35. }~ + +Disney's then partner, and one of animation's most extraordinary talents, Ub +Iwerks, put it more strongly: "I have never been so thrilled in my life. +Nothing since has ever equaled it." +={ Iwerks, Ub. } + +Disney had created something very new, based upon something relatively new. +Synchronized sound brought life to a form of creativity that had rarely - +except in Disney's hands - been anything more than filler for other films. +Throughout animation's early history, it was Disney's invention that set the +standard that others struggled to match. And quite often, Disney's great +genius, his spark of creativity, was built upon the work of others. + +This much is familiar. What you might not know is that 1928 also marks another +important transition. In that year, a comic (as opposed to cartoon) genius +created his last independently produced silent film. That genius was Buster +Keaton. The film was /{Steamboat Bill, Jr.}/ +={ Keaton, Buster +2 ; + Steamboat Bill, Jr. +2 +} + +Keaton was born into a vaudeville family in 1895. In the era of silent film, he +had mastered using broad physical comedy as a way to spark uncontrollable +laughter from his audience. Steamboat Bill, Jr. was a classic of this form, +famous among film buffs for its incredible stunts. The film was classic Keaton +- wildly popular and among the best of its genre. + +/{Steamboat Bill, Jr.}/ appeared before Disney's cartoon /{Steamboat Willie}/. +The coincidence of titles is not coincidental. Steamboat Willie is a direct +cartoon parody of Steamboat Bill,~{ I am grateful to David Gerstein and his +careful history, described at link #4. According to Dave Smith of the Disney +Archives, Disney paid royalties to use the music for five songs in /{Steamboat +Willie:}/ "Steamboat Bill," "The Simpleton" (Delille), "Mischief Makers" +(Carbonara), "Joyful Hurry No. 1" (Baron), and "Gawky Rube" (Lakay). A sixth +song, "The Turkey in the Straw," was already in the public domain. Letter from +David Smith to Harry Surden, 10 July 2003, on file with author. }~ and both are +built upon a common song as a source. It is not just from the invention of +synchronized sound in /{The Jazz Singer}/ that we get /{Steamboat Willie}/. It +is also from Buster Keaton's invention of Steamboat Bill, Jr., itself inspired +by the song "Steamboat Bill," that we get Steamboat Willie, and then from +Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse. +={ derivative works : + piracy vs. +4 ; + piracy : + derivative work vs. +4 +} + +This "borrowing" was nothing unique, either for Disney or for the industry. +Disney was always parroting the feature-length mainstream films of his day.~{ +He was also a fan of the public domain. See Chris Sprigman, "The Mouse that Ate +the Public Domain," Findlaw, 5 March 2002, at link #5. }~ So did many others. +Early cartoons are filled with knockoffs - slight variations on winning themes; +retellings of ancient stories. The key to success was the brilliance of the +differences. With Disney, it was sound that gave his animation its spark. +Later, it was the quality of his work relative to the production-line cartoons +with which he competed. Yet these additions were built upon a base that was +borrowed. Disney added to the work of others before him, creating something new +out of something just barely old. +={ creativity : + by transforming previous works +3 ; + Disney, Inc. +6 +} + +Sometimes this borrowing was slight. Sometimes it was significant. Think about +the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. If you're as oblivious as I was, you're +likely to think that these tales are happy, sweet stories, appropriate for any +child at bedtime. In fact, the Grimm fairy tales are, well, for us, grim. It is +a rare and perhaps overly ambitious parent who would dare to read these bloody, +moralistic stories to his or her child, at bedtime or anytime. +={ Grimm fairy tales +1 } + +Disney took these stories and retold them in a way that carried them into a new +age. He animated the stories, with both characters and light. Without removing +the elements of fear and danger altogether, he made funny what was dark and +injected a genuine emotion of compassion where before there was fear. And not +just with the work of the Brothers Grimm. Indeed, the catalog of Disney work +drawing upon the work of others is astonishing when set together: /{Snow +White}/ (1937), /{Fantasia}/ (1940), /{Pinocchio}/ (1940), /{Dumbo}/ (1941), +/{Bambi}/ (1942), /{Song of the South}/ (1946), /{Cinderella}/ (1950), /{Alice +in Wonderland}/ (1951), /{Robin Hood}/ (1952), /{Peter Pan}/ (1953), /{Lady and +the Tramp}/ (1955), /{Mulan}/ (1998), /{Sleeping Beauty}/ (1959), /{101 +Dalmatians}/ (1961), /{The Sword in the Stone}/ (1963), and /{The Jungle Book}/ +(1967) - not to mention a recent example that we should perhaps quickly forget, +/{Treasure Planet}/ (2003). In all of these cases, Disney (or Disney, Inc.) +ripped creativity from the culture around him, mixed that creativity with his +own extraordinary talent, and then burned that mix into the soul of his +culture. Rip, mix, and burn. + +This is a kind of creativity. It is a creativity that we should remember and +celebrate. There are some who would say that there is no creativity except this +kind. We don't need to go that far to recognize its importance. We could call +this "Disney creativity," though that would be a bit misleading. It is, more +precisely, "Walt Disney creativity" - a form of expression and genius that +builds upon the culture around us and makes it something different. + +In 1928, the culture that Disney was free to draw upon was relatively fresh. +The public domain in 1928 was not very old and was therefore quite vibrant. The +average term of copyright was just around thirty years - for that minority of +creative work that was in fact copy-righted.~{ Until 1976, copyright law +granted an author the possibility of two terms: an initial term and a renewal +term. I have calculated the "average" term by determining the weighted average +of total registrations for any particular year, and the proportion renewing. +Thus, if 100 copyrights are registered in year 1, and only 15 are renewed, and +the renewal term is 28 years, then the average term is 32.2 years. For the +renewal data and other relevant data, see the Web site associated with this +book, available at link #6. }~ That means that for thirty years, on average, +the authors or copyright holders of a creative work had an "exclusive right" to +control certain uses of the work. To use this copyrighted work in limited ways +required the permission of the copyright owner. +={ copyright : + duration of +2 ; + public domain : + defined +2 | traditional term for conversion to +2 +} + +At the end of a copyright term, a work passes into the public domain. No +permission is then needed to draw upon or use that work. No permission and, +hence, no lawyers. The public domain is a "lawyer-free zone." Thus, most of the +content from the nineteenth century was free for Disney to use and build upon +in 1928. It was free for anyone - whether connected or not, whether rich or +not, whether approved or not - to use and build upon. + +This is the ways things always were - until quite recently. For most of our +history, the public domain was just over the horizon. From 1790 until 1978, the +average copyright term was never more than thirty-two years, meaning that most +culture just a generation and a half old was free for anyone to build upon +without the permission of anyone else. Today's equivalent would be for creative +work from the 1960s and 1970s to now be free for the next Walt Disney to build +upon without permission. Yet today, the public domain is presumptive only for +content from before the Great Depression. + +!_ Of course, +Walt Disney had no monopoly on "Walt Disney creativity." Nor does America. The +norm of free culture has, until recently, and except within totalitarian +nations, been broadly exploited and quite universal. +={ Disney, Walt } + +Consider, for example, a form of creativity that seems strange to many +Americans but that is inescapable within Japanese culture: /{manga}/, or +comics. The Japanese are fanatics about comics. Some 40 percent of publications +are comics, and 30 percent of publication revenue derives from comics. They are +everywhere in Japanese society, at every magazine stand, carried by a large +proportion of commuters on Japan's extraordinary system of public +transportation. +={ comics, Japanese +8 ; + derivative works : + piracy vs. +18 ; + Japanese comics +8 ; + manga +8 ; + piracy : + derivative work vs. +18 +} + +Americans tend to look down upon this form of culture. That's an unattractive +characteristic of ours. We're likely to misunderstand much about manga, because +few of us have ever read anything close to the stories that these "graphic +novels" tell. For the Japanese, manga cover every aspect of social life. For +us, comics are "men in tights." And anyway, it's not as if the New York subways +are filled with readers of Joyce or even Hemingway. People of different +cultures distract themselves in different ways, the Japanese in this +interestingly different way. + +But my purpose here is not to understand manga. It is to describe a variant on +manga that from a lawyer's perspective is quite odd, but from a Disney +perspective is quite familiar. + +This is the phenomenon of /{doujinshi}/. Doujinshi are also comics, but they +are a kind of copycat comic. A rich ethic governs the creation of doujinshi. It +is not doujinshi if it is /{just}/ a copy; the artist must make a contribution +to the art he copies, by transforming it either subtly or significantly. A +doujinshi comic can thus take a mainstream comic and develop it differently - +with a different story line. Or the comic can keep the character in character +but change its look slightly. There is no formula for what makes the doujinshi +sufficiently "different." But they must be different if they are to be +considered true doujinshi. Indeed, there are committees that review doujinshi +for inclusion within shows and reject any copycat comic that is merely a copy. +={ creativity : + by transforming previous works +14 ; + doujinshi comics +8 +} + +These copycat comics are not a tiny part of the manga market. They are huge. +More than 33,000 "circles" of creators from across Japan produce these bits of +Walt Disney creativity. More than 450,000 Japanese come together twice a year, +in the largest public gathering in the country, to exchange and sell them. This +market exists in parallel to the mainstream commercial manga market. In some +ways, it obviously competes with that market, but there is no sustained effort +by those who control the commercial manga market to shut the doujinshi market +down. It flourishes, despite the competition and despite the law. +={ Disney, Walt +1 } + +The most puzzling feature of the doujinshi market, for those trained in the +law, at least, is that it is allowed to exist at all. Under Japanese copyright +law, which in this respect (on paper) mirrors American copyright law, the +doujinshi market is an illegal one. Doujinshi are plainly "derivative works." +There is no general practice by doujinshi artists of securing the permission of +the manga creators. Instead, the practice is simply to take and modify the +creations of others, as Walt Disney did with /{Steamboat Bill, Jr}/. Under both +Japanese and American law, that "taking" without the permission of the original +copyright owner is illegal. It is an infringement of the original copyright to +make a copy or a derivative work without the original copyright owner's +permission. +={ copyright law : + Japanese +1 ; + Steamboat Bill, Jr. +} + +Yet this illegal market exists and indeed flourishes in Japan, and in the view +of many, it is precisely because it exists that Japanese manga flourish. As +American graphic novelist Judd Winick said to me, "The early days of comics in +America are very much like what's going on in Japan now. ... American comics +were born out of copying each other. ... That's how [the artists] learn to draw +- by going into comic books and not tracing them, but looking at them and +copying them" and building from them.~{ For an excellent history, see Scott +McCloud, /{Reinventing Comics}/ (New York: Perennial, 2000). }~ +={ Winick, Judd +1 } + +American comics now are quite different, Winick explains, in part because of +the legal difficulty of adapting comics the way doujinshi are allowed. Speaking +of Superman, Winick told me, "there are these rules and you have to stick to +them." There are things Superman "cannot" do. "As a creator, it's frustrating +having to stick to some parameters which are fifty years old." +={ Superman comics } + +The norm in Japan mitigates this legal difficulty. Some say it is precisely the +benefit accruing to the Japanese manga market that explains the mitigation. +Temple University law professor Salil Mehra, for example, hypothesizes that the +manga market accepts these technical violations because they spur the manga +market to be more wealthy and productive. Everyone would be worse off if +doujinshi were banned, so the law does not ban doujinshi.~{ See Salil K. Mehra, +"Copyright and Comics in Japan: Does Law Explain Why All the Comics My Kid +Watches Are Japanese Imports?" /{Rutgers Law Review}/ 55 (2002): 155, 182. +"[T]here might be a collective economic rationality that would lead manga and +anime artists to forgo bringing legal actions for infringement. One hypothesis +is that all manga artists may be better off collectively if they set aside +their individual self-interest and decide not to press their legal rights. This +is essentially a prisoner's dilemma solved." }~ +={ copyright law : + Japanese +1 ; + comics, Japanese ; + Mehra, Salil +1 +} + +The problem with this story, however, as Mehra plainly acknowledges, is that +the mechanism producing this laissez faire response is not clear. It may well +be that the market as a whole is better off if doujinshi are permitted rather +than banned, but that doesn't explain why individual copyright owners don't sue +nonetheless. If the law has no general exception for doujinshi, and indeed in +some cases individual manga artists have sued doujinshi artists, why is there +not a more general pattern of blocking this "free taking" by the doujinshi +culture? + +I spent four wonderful months in Japan, and I asked this question as often as I +could. Perhaps the best account in the end was offered by a friend from a major +Japanese law firm. "We don't have enough lawyers," he told me one afternoon. +There "just aren't enough resources to prosecute cases like this." + +This is a theme to which we will return: that regulation by law is a function +of both the words on the books and the costs of making those words have effect. +For now, focus on the obvious question that is begged: Would Japan be better +off with more lawyers? Would manga be richer if doujinshi artists were +regularly prosecuted? Would the Japanese gain something important if they could +end this practice of uncompensated sharing? Does piracy here hurt the victims +of the piracy, or does it help them? Would lawyers fighting this piracy help +their clients or hurt them? + +!_ Let's pause +for a moment. + +If you're like I was a decade ago, or like most people are when they first +start thinking about these issues, then just about now you should be puzzled +about something you hadn't thought through before. + +We live in a world that celebrates "property." I am one of those celebrants. I +believe in the value of property in general, and I also believe in the value of +that weird form of property that lawyers call "intellectual property."~{ The +term /{intellectual property}/ is of relatively recent origin. See Siva +Vaidhyanathan, /{Copyrights and Copywrongs,}/ 11 (New York: New York University +Press, 2001). See also Lawrence Lessig, /{The Future of Ideas}/ (New York: +Random House, 2001), 293 n. 26. The term accurately describes a set of +"property" rights - copyright, patents, trademark, and trade-secret - but the +nature of those rights is very different. }~ A large, diverse society cannot +survive without property; a large, diverse, and modern society cannot flourish +without intellectual property. + +But it takes just a second's reflection to realize that there is plenty of +value out there that "property" doesn't capture. I don't mean "money can't buy +you love," but rather, value that is plainly part of a process of production, +including commercial as well as noncommercial production. If Disney animators +had stolen a set of pencils to draw Steamboat Willie, we'd have no hesitation +in condemning that taking as wrong - even though trivial, even if unnoticed. +Yet there was nothing wrong, at least under the law of the day, with Disney's +taking from Buster Keaton or from the Brothers Grimm. There was nothing wrong +with the taking from Keaton because Disney's use would have been considered +"fair." There was nothing wrong with the taking from the Grimms because the +Grimms' work was in the public domain. +={ Disney, Walt +5 ; + Grimm fairy tales +1 ; + Keaton, Buster } + +Thus, even though the things that Disney took - or more generally, the things +taken by anyone exercising Walt Disney creativity - are valuable, our tradition +does not treat those takings as wrong. Some things remain free for the taking +within a free culture, and that freedom is good. +={ free culture : + derivative works based on +6 +} + +The same with the doujinshi culture. If a doujinshi artist broke into a +publisher's office and ran off with a thousand copies of his latest work - or +even one copy - without paying, we'd have no hesitation in saying the artist +was wrong. In addition to having trespassed, he would have stolen something of +value. The law bans that stealing in whatever form, whether large or small. +={ copyright law : + Japanese +1 ; + comics, Japanese ; + doujinshi comics +1 ; + Japanese comics +1 ; + manga +1 +} + +Yet there is an obvious reluctance, even among Japanese lawyers, to say that +the copycat comic artists are "stealing." This form of Walt Disney creativity +is seen as fair and right, even if lawyers in particular find it hard to say +why. + +It's the same with a thousand examples that appear everywhere once you begin to +look. Scientists build upon the work of other scientists without asking or +paying for the privilege. ("Excuse me, Professor Einstein, but may I have +permission to use your theory of relativity to show that you were wrong about +quantum physics?") Acting companies perform adaptations of the works of +Shakespeare without securing permission from anyone. (Does /{anyone}/ believe +Shakespeare would be better spread within our culture if there were a central +Shakespeare rights clearinghouse that all productions of Shakespeare must +appeal to first?) And Hollywood goes through cycles with a certain kind of +movie: five asteroid films in the late 1990s; two volcano disaster films in +1997. +={ Shakespeare, William } + +Creators here and everywhere are always and at all times building upon the +creativity that went before and that surrounds them now. That building is +always and everywhere at least partially done without permission and without +compensating the original creator. No society, free or controlled, has ever +demanded that every use be paid for or that permission for Walt Disney +creativity must always be sought. Instead, every society has left a certain bit +of its culture free for the taking - free societies more fully than unfree, +perhaps, but all societies to some degree. + +The hard question is therefore not /{whether}/ a culture is free. All cultures +are free to some degree. The hard question instead is "/{How}/ free is this +culture?" How much, and how broadly, is the culture free for others to take and +build upon? Is that freedom limited to party members? To members of the royal +family? To the top ten corporations on the New York Stock Exchange? Or is that +freedom spread broadly? To artists generally, whether affiliated with the Met +or not? To musicians generally, whether white or not? To filmmakers generally, +whether affiliated with a studio or not? + +Free cultures are cultures that leave a great deal open for others to build +upon; unfree, or permission, cultures leave much less. Ours was a free culture. +It is becoming much less so. + +1~ Chapter Two: "Mere Copyists" + +!_ In 1839, +Louis Daguerre invented the first practical technology for producing what we +would call "photographs." Appropriately enough, they were called +"daguerreotypes." The process was complicated and expensive, and the field was +thus limited to professionals and a few zealous and wealthy amateurs. (There +was even an American Daguerre Association that helped regulate the industry, as +do all such associations, by keeping competition down so as to keep prices up.) +={ Daguerre, Louis ; + photography +13 +} + +Yet despite high prices, the demand for daguerreotypes was strong. This pushed +inventors to find simpler and cheaper ways to make "automatic pictures." +William Talbot soon discovered a process for making "negatives." But because +the negatives were glass, and had to be kept wet, the process still remained +expensive and cumbersome. In the 1870s, dry plates were developed, making it +easier to separate the taking of a picture from its developing. These were +still plates of glass, and thus it was still not a process within reach of most +amateurs. +={ Talbot, William } + +The technological change that made mass photography possible didn't happen +until 1888, and was the creation of a single man. George Eastman, himself an +amateur photographer, was frustrated by the technology of photographs made with +plates. In a flash of insight (so to speak), Eastman saw that if the film could +be made to be flexible, it could be held on a single spindle. That roll could +then be sent to a developer, driving the costs of photography down +substantially. By lowering the costs, Eastman expected he could dramatically +broaden the population of photographers. +={ Eastman, George +12 ; + camera technology +6 +} + +Eastman developed flexible, emulsion-coated paper film and placed rolls of it +in small, simple cameras: the Kodak. The device was marketed on the basis of +its simplicity. "You press the button and we do the rest."~{ Reese V. Jenkins, +/{Images and Enterprise}/ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), +112. }~ As he described in /{The Kodak Primer}/: +={ Kodak cameras +4 ; + Kodak Primer, The (Eastman) +1 +} + +_1 The principle of the Kodak system is the separation of the work that any +person whomsoever can do in making a photograph, from the work that only an +expert can do. ... We furnish anybody, man, woman or child, who has sufficient +intelligence to point a box straight and press a button, with an instrument +which altogether removes from the practice of photography the necessity for +exceptional facilities or, in fact, any special knowledge of the art. It can be +employed without preliminary study, without a darkroom and without +chemicals."~{ Brian Coe, /{The Birth of Photography}/ (New York: Taplinger +Publishing, 1977), 53. }~ +={ Coe, Brian } + +For $25, anyone could make pictures. The camera came preloaded with film, and +when it had been used, the camera was returned to an Eastman factory, where the +film was developed. Over time, of course, the cost of the camera and the ease +with which it could be used both improved. Roll film thus became the basis for +the explosive growth of popular photography. Eastman's camera first went on +sale in 1888; one year later, Kodak was printing more than six thousand +negatives a day. From 1888 through 1909, while industrial production was rising +by 4.7 percent, photographic equipment and material sales increased by 11 +percent.~{ Jenkins, 177. }~ Eastman Kodak's sales during the same period +experienced an average annual increase of over 17 percent.~{ Based on a chart +in Jenkins, p. 178. }~ + +The real significance of Eastman's invention, however, was not economic. It was +social. Professional photography gave individuals a glimpse of places they +would never otherwise see. Amateur photography gave them the ability to record +their own lives in a way they had never been able to do before. As author Brian +Coe notes, "For the first time the snapshot album provided the man on the +street with a permanent record of his family and its activities. ... For the +first time in history there exists an authentic visual record of the appearance +and activities of the common man made without [literary] interpretation or +bias."~{ Coe, 58. }~ +={ Coe, Brian } + +In this way, the Kodak camera and film were technologies of expression. The +pencil or paintbrush was also a technology of expression, of course. But it +took years of training before they could be deployed by amateurs in any useful +or effective way. With the Kodak, expression was possible much sooner and more +simply. The barrier to expression was lowered. Snobs would sneer at its +"quality"; professionals would discount it as irrelevant. But watch a child +study how best to frame a picture and you get a sense of the experience of +creativity that the Kodak enabled. Democratic tools gave ordinary people a way +to express themselves more easily than any tools could have before. +={ democracy : + in technologies of expression ; + expression, technologies of : + democratic +} + +What was required for this technology to flourish? Obviously, Eastman's genius +was an important part. But also important was the legal environment within +which Eastman's invention grew. For early in the history of photography, there +was a series of judicial decisions that could well have changed the course of +photography substantially. Courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur +or professional, required permission before he could capture and print whatever +image he wanted. Their answer was no.~{ For illustrative cases, see, for +example, /{Pavesich v. N.E. Life Ins. Co.,}/ 50 S.E. 68 (Ga. 1905); +/{Foster-Milburn Co. v. Chinn,}/ 123090 S.W. 364, 366 (Ky. 1909); /{Corliss v. +Walker,}/ 64 F. 280 (Mass. Dist. Ct. 1894). }~ +={ permissions : + photography exempted from +5 +} + +The arguments in favor of requiring permission will sound surprisingly +familiar. The photographer was "taking" something from the person or building +whose photograph he shot - pirating something of value. Some even thought he +was taking the target's soul. Just as Disney was not free to take the pencils +that his animators used to draw Mickey, so, too, should these photographers not +be free to take images that they thought valuable. +={ Disney, Walt +1 ; + images, ownership of +4 +} + +On the other side was an argument that should be familiar, as well. Sure, there +may be something of value being used. But citizens should have the right to +capture at least those images that stand in public view. (Louis Brandeis, who +would become a Supreme Court Justice, thought the rule should be different for +images from private spaces.~{ Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, "The +Right to Privacy," /{Harvard Law Review}/ 4 (1890): 193. }~) It may be that +this means that the photographer gets something for nothing. Just as Disney +could take inspiration from /{Steamboat Bill, Jr.}/ or the Brothers Grimm, the +photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the +source. +={ Brandeis, Louis ; + Steamboat Bill, Jr. ; + camera technology +2 +} + +Fortunately for Mr. Eastman, and for photography in general, these early +decisions went in favor of the pirates. In general, no permission would be +required before an image could be captured and shared with others. Instead, +permission was presumed. Freedom was the default. (The law would eventually +craft an exception for famous people: commercial photographers who snap +pictures of famous people for commercial purposes have more restrictions than +the rest of us. But in the ordinary case, the image can be captured without +clearing the rights to do the capturing.~{ See Melville B. Nimmer, "The Right +of Publicity," /{Law and Contemporary Problems}/ 19 (1954): 203; William L. +Prosser, "Privacy," /{California Law Review}/ 48 (1960) 398-407; /{White v. +Samsung Electronics America, Inc.,}/ 971 F. 2d 1395 (9th Cir. 1992), cert. +denied, 508 U.S. 951 (1993). }~) + +We can only speculate about how photography would have developed had the law +gone the other way. If the presumption had been against the photographer, then +the photographer would have had to demonstrate permission. Perhaps Eastman +Kodak would have had to demonstrate permission, too, before it developed the +film upon which images were captured. After all, if permission were not +granted, then Eastman Kodak would be benefiting from the "theft" committed by +the photographer. Just as Napster benefited from the copyright infringements +committed by Napster users, Kodak would be benefiting from the "image-right" +infringement of its photographers. We could imagine the law then requiring that +some form of permission be demonstrated before a company developed pictures. We +could imagine a system developing to demonstrate that permission. +={ Kodak cameras ; + Napster +} + +But though we could imagine this system of permission, it would be very hard to +see how photography could have flourished as it did if the requirement for +permission had been built into the rules that govern it. Photography would have +existed. It would have grown in importance over time. Professionals would have +continued to use the technology as they did - since professionals could have +more easily borne the burdens of the permission system. But the spread of +photography to ordinary people would not have occurred. Nothing like that +growth would have been realized. And certainly, nothing like that growth in a +democratic technology of expression would have been realized. +={ camera technology +6 ; + democracy : + in technologies of expression ; + expression, technologies of : + democratic +} + +!_ If you drive +through San Francisco's Presidio, you might see two gaudy yellow school buses +painted over with colorful and striking images, and the logo "Just Think!" in +place of the name of a school. But there's little that's "just" cerebral in the +projects that these busses enable. These buses are filled with technologies +that teach kids to tinker with film. Not the film of Eastman. Not even the film +of your VCR. Rather the "film" of digital cameras. Just Think! is a project +that enables kids to make films, as a way to understand and critique the filmed +culture that they find all around them. Each year, these busses travel to more +than thirty schools and enable three hundred to five hundred children to learn +something about media by doing something with media. By doing, they think. By +tinkering, they learn. +={ digital cameras ; + Just Think! +2 +} + +These buses are not cheap, but the technology they carry is increasingly so. +The cost of a high-quality digital video system has fallen dramatically. As one +analyst puts it, "Five years ago, a good real-time digital video editing system +cost $25,000. Today you can get professional quality for $595."~{ H. Edward +Goldberg, "Essential Presentation Tools: Hardware and Software You Need to +Create Digital Multimedia Presentations," cadalyst, 1 February 2002, available +at link #7. }~ These buses are filled with technology that would have cost +hundreds of thousands just ten years ago. And it is now feasible to imagine not +just buses like this, but classrooms across the country where kids are learning +more and more of something teachers call "media literacy." +={ education : + in media literacy +19 ; + media literacy +19 ; + expression, technologies of : + media literacy and +19 +} + +"Media literacy," as Dave Yanofsky, the executive director of Just Think!, puts +it, "is the ability ... to understand, analyze, and deconstruct media images. +Its aim is to make [kids] literate about the way media works, the way it's +constructed, the way it's delivered, and the way people access it." +={ Yanofsky, Dave } + +This may seem like an odd way to think about "literacy." For most people, +literacy is about reading and writing. Faulkner and Hemingway and noticing +split infinitives are the things that "literate" people know about. + +Maybe. But in a world where children see on average 390 hours of television +commercials per year, or between 20,000 and 45,000 commercials generally,~{ +Judith Van Evra, /{Television and Child Development}/ (Hillsdale, N.J.: +Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990); "Findings on Family and TV Study," /{Denver +Post,}/ 25 May 1997, B6. }~ it is increasingly important to understand the +"grammar" of media. For just as there is a grammar for the written word, so, +too, is there one for media. And just as kids learn how to write by writing +lots of terrible prose, kids learn how to write media by constructing lots of +(at least at first) terrible media. +={ advertising ; + commercials ; + television : + advertising on +} + +A growing field of academics and activists sees this form of literacy as +crucial to the next generation of culture. For though anyone who has written +understands how difficult writing is - how difficult it is to sequence the +story, to keep a reader's attention, to craft language to be understandable - +few of us have any real sense of how difficult media is. Or more fundamentally, +few of us have a sense of how media works, how it holds an audience or leads it +through a story, how it triggers emotion or builds suspense. + +It took filmmaking a generation before it could do these things well. But even +then, the knowledge was in the filming, not in writing about the film. The +skill came from experiencing the making of a film, not from reading a book +about it. One learns to write by writing and then reflecting upon what one has +written. One learns to write with images by making them and then reflecting +upon what one has created. + +This grammar has changed as media has changed. When it was just film, as +Elizabeth Daley, executive director of the University of Southern California's +Annenberg Center for Communication and dean of the USC School of Cinema- +Television, explained to me, the grammar was about "the placement of objects, +color, ... rhythm, pacing, and texture."~{ Interview with Elizabeth Daley and +Stephanie Barish, 13 December 2002. }~ But as computers open up an interactive +space where a story is "played" as well as experienced, that grammar changes. +The simple control of narrative is lost, and so other techniques are necessary. +Author Michael Crichton had mastered the narrative of science fiction. But when +he tried to design a computer game based on one of his works, it was a new +craft he had to learn. How to lead people through a game without their feeling +they have been led was not obvious, even to a wildly successful author.~{ See +Scott Steinberg, "Crichton Gets Medieval on PCs," E!online, 4 November 2000, +available at link #8; "Timeline," 22 November 2000, available at link #9. }~ +={ Daley, Elizabeth +6 ; + Crichton, Michael ; + computer games +} + +This skill is precisely the craft a filmmaker learns. As Daley describes, +"people are very surprised about how they are led through a film. [I]t is +perfectly constructed to keep you from seeing it, so you have no idea. If a +filmmaker succeeds you do not know how you were led." If you know you were led +through a film, the film has failed. + +Yet the push for an expanded literacy - one that goes beyond text to include +audio and visual elements - is not about making better film directors. The aim +is not to improve the profession of filmmaking at all. Instead, as Daley +explained, + +_1 From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not +access to a box. It's the ability to be empowered with the language that that +box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, +and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only." + +"Read-only." Passive recipients of culture produced elsewhere. Couch potatoes. +Consumers. This is the world of media from the twentieth century. + +The twenty-first century could be different. This is the crucial point: It +could be both read and write. Or at least reading and better understanding the +craft of writing. Or best, reading and understanding the tools that enable the +writing to lead or mislead. The aim of any literacy, and this literacy in +particular, is to "empower people to choose the appropriate language for what +they need to create or express."~{ Interview with Daley and Barish. }~ It is to +enable students "to communicate in the language of the twenty-first century."~{ +Ibid. }~ + +As with any language, this language comes more easily to some than to others. +It doesn't necessarily come more easily to those who excel in written language. +Daley and Stephanie Barish, director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy +at the Annenberg Center, describe one particularly poignant example of a +project they ran in a high school. The high school was a very poor inner-city +Los Angeles school. In all the traditional measures of success, this school was +a failure. But Daley and Barish ran a program that gave kids an opportunity to +use film to express meaning about something the students know something about - +gun violence. +={ Barish, Stephanie +2 } + +The class was held on Friday afternoons, and it created a relatively new +problem for the school. While the challenge in most classes was getting the +kids to come, the challenge in this class was keeping them away. The "kids were +showing up at 6 A.M. and leaving at 5 at night," said Barish. They were working +harder than in any other class to do what education should be about - learning +how to express themselves. + +Using whatever "free web stuff they could find," and relatively simple tools to +enable the kids to mix "image, sound, and text," Barish said this class +produced a series of projects that showed something about gun violence that few +would otherwise understand. This was an issue close to the lives of these +students. The project "gave them a tool and empowered them to be able to both +understand it and talk about it," Barish explained. That tool succeeded in +creating expression - far more successfully and powerfully than could have been +created using only text. "If you had said to these students, 'you have to do it +in text,' they would've just thrown their hands up and gone and done something +else," Barish described, in part, no doubt, because expressing themselves in +text is not something these students can do well. Yet neither is text a form in +which /{these}/ ideas can be expressed well. The power of this message depended +upon its connection to this form of expression. + +"But isn't education about teaching kids to write?" I asked. In part, of +course, it is. But why are we teaching kids to write? Education, Daley +explained, is about giving students a way of "constructing meaning." To say +that that means just writing is like saying teaching writing is only about +teaching kids how to spell. Text is one part - and increasingly, not the most +powerful part - of constructing meaning. As Daley explained in the most moving +part of our interview, +={ Daley, Elizabeth +3 } + +_1 What you want is to give these students ways of constructing meaning. If all +you give them is text, they're not going to do it. Because they can't. You +know, you've got Johnny who can look at a video, he can play a video game, he +can do graffiti all over your walls, he can take your car apart, and he can do +all sorts of other things. He just can't read your text. So Johnny comes to +school and you say, "Johnny, you're illiterate. Nothing you can do matters." +Well, Johnny then has two choices: He can dismiss you or he [can] dismiss +himself. If his ego is healthy at all, he's going to dismiss you. [But +i]nstead, if you say, "Well, with all these things that you can do, let's talk +about this issue. Play for me music that you think reflects that, or show me +images that you think reflect that, or draw for me something that reflects +that." Not by giving a kid a video camera and ... saying, "Let's go have fun +with the video camera and make a little movie." But instead, really help you +take these elements that you understand, that are your language, and construct +meaning about the topic. ... + +_1 That empowers enormously. And then what happens, of course, is eventually, +as it has happened in all these classes, they bump up against the fact, "I need +to explain this and I really need to write something." And as one of the +teachers told Stephanie, they would rewrite a paragraph 5, 6, 7, 8 times, till +they got it right. +={ Barish, Stephanie } + +_1 Because they needed to. There was a reason for doing it. They needed to say +something, as opposed to just jumping through your hoops. They actually needed +to use a language that they didn't speak very well. But they had come to +understand that they had a lot of power with this language." + +!_ When two planes +crashed into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon, and a fourth +into a Pennsylvania field, all media around the world shifted to this news. +Every moment of just about every day for that week, and for weeks after, +television in particular, and media generally, retold the story of the events +we had just witnessed. The telling was a retelling, because we had seen the +events that were described. The genius of this awful act of terrorism was that +the delayed second attack was perfectly timed to assure that the whole world +would be watching. +={ September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of +2 ; + World Trade Center ; + news coverage +21 +} + +These retellings had an increasingly familiar feel. There was music scored for +the intermissions, and fancy graphics that flashed across the screen. There was +a formula to interviews. There was "balance," and seriousness. This was news +choreographed in the way we have increasingly come to expect it, "news as +entertainment," even if the entertainment is tragedy. + +But in addition to this produced news about the "tragedy of September 11," +those of us tied to the Internet came to see a very different production as +well. The Internet was filled with accounts of the same events. Yet these +Internet accounts had a very different flavor. Some people constructed photo +pages that captured images from around the world and presented them as slide +shows with text. Some offered open letters. There were sound recordings. There +was anger and frustration. There were attempts to provide context. There was, +in short, an extraordinary worldwide barn raising, in the sense Mike Godwin +uses the term in his book /{Cyber Rights}/, around a news event that had +captured the attention of the world. There was ABC and CBS, but there was also +the Internet. +={ Cyber Rights (Godwin) ; + Godwin, Mike ; + Internet : + news events on +3 +} + +I don't mean simply to praise the Internet - though I do think the people who +supported this form of speech should be praised. I mean instead to point to a +significance in this form of speech. For like a Kodak, the Internet enables +people to capture images. And like in a movie by a student on the "Just Think!" +bus, the visual images could be mixed with sound or text. +={ Just Think! } + +But unlike any technology for simply capturing images, the Internet allows +these creations to be shared with an extraordinary number of people, +practically instantaneously. This is something new in our tradition - not just +that culture can be captured mechanically, and obviously not just that events +are commented upon critically, but that this mix of captured images, sound, and +commentary can be widely spread practically instantaneously. + +September 11 was not an aberration. It was a beginning. Around the same time, a +form of communication that has grown dramatically was just beginning to come +into public consciousness: the Web-log, or blog. The blog is a kind of public +diary, and within some cultures, such as in Japan, it functions very much like +a diary. In those cultures, it records private facts in a public way - it's a +kind of electronic /{Jerry Springer}/, available anywhere in the world. +={ September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of ; + blogs (Web-logs) +2 ; + Internet : + blogs on +2 ; + Web-logs (blogs) +2 +} + +But in the United States, blogs have taken on a very different character. There +are some who use the space simply to talk about their private life. But there +are many who use the space to engage in public discourse. Discussing matters of +public import, criticizing others who are mistaken in their views, criticizing +politicians about the decisions they make, offering solutions to problems we +all see: blogs create the sense of a virtual public meeting, but one in which +we don't all hope to be there at the same time and in which conversations are +not necessarily linked. The best of the blog entries are relatively short; they +point directly to words used by others, criticizing with or adding to them. +They are arguably the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse +that we have. +={ political discourse ; + Internet : + public discourse conducted on +15 +} + +That's a strong statement. Yet it says as much about our democracy as it does +about blogs. This is the part of America that is most difficult for those of us +who love America to accept: Our democracy has atrophied. Of course we have +elections, and most of the time the courts allow those elections to count. A +relatively small number of people vote in those elections. The cycle of these +elections has become totally professionalized and routinized. Most of us think +this is democracy. +={ democracy : + in technologies of expression +5 ; + elections +1 ; + expression, technologies of : + democratic +5 +} + +But democracy has never just been about elections. Democracy means rule by the +people, but rule means something more than mere elections. In our tradition, it +also means control through reasoned discourse. This was the idea that captured +the imagination of Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French lawyer +who wrote the most important account of early "Democracy in America." It wasn't +popular elections that fascinated him - it was the jury, an institution that +gave ordinary people the right to choose life or death for other citizens. And +most fascinating for him was that the jury didn't just vote about the outcome +they would impose. They deliberated. Members argued about the "right" result; +they tried to persuade each other of the "right" result, and in criminal cases +at least, they had to agree upon a unanimous result for the process to come to +an end.~{ See, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, /{Democracy in America,}/ +bk. 1, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), ch. 16. }~ +={ Tocqueville, Alexis de ; + democracy : + public discourse in +4 ; + jury system +} + +Yet even this institution flags in American life today. And in its place, there +is no systematic effort to enable citizen deliberation. Some are pushing to +create just such an institution.~{ Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin, +"Deliberation Day," /{Journal of Political Philosophy}/ 10 (2) (2002): 129. }~ +And in some towns in New England, something close to deliberation remains. But +for most of us for most of the time, there is no time or place for "democratic +deliberation" to occur. + +More bizarrely, there is generally not even permission for it to occur. We, the +most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against +talking about politics. It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree +with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. +Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more +extreme.~{ Cass Sunstein, /{Republic.com}/ (Princeton: Princeton University +Press, 2001), 65-80, 175, 182, 183, 192. }~ We say what our friends want to +hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say. +={ political discourse +11 } + +Enter the blog. The blog's very architecture solves one part of this problem. +People post when they want to post, and people read when they want to read. The +most difficult time is synchronous time. Technologies that enable asynchronous +communication, such as e-mail, increase the opportunity for communication. +Blogs allow for public discourse without the public ever needing to gather in a +single public place. +={ blogs (Web-logs) +10 ; + e-mail ; + Internet : + blogs on +10 ; + Web-logs (blogs) +10 +} + +But beyond architecture, blogs also have solved the problem of norms. There's +no norm (yet) in blog space not to talk about politics. Indeed, the space is +filled with political speech, on both the right and the left. Some of the most +popular sites are conservative or libertarian, but there are many of all +political stripes. And even blogs that are not political cover political issues +when the occasion merits. + +The significance of these blogs is tiny now, though not so tiny. The name +Howard Dean may well have faded from the 2004 presidential race but for blogs. +Yet even if the number of readers is small, the reading is having an effect. +={ Dean, Howard } + +One direct effect is on stories that had a different life cycle in the +mainstream media. The Trent Lott affair is an example. When Lott "misspoke" at +a party for Senator Strom Thurmond, essentially praising Thurmond's +segregationist policies, he calculated correctly that this story would +disappear from the mainstream press within forty-eight hours. It did. But he +didn't calculate its life cycle in blog space. The bloggers kept researching +the story. Over time, more and more instances of the same "misspeaking" +emerged. Finally, the story broke back into the mainstream press. In the end, +Lott was forced to resign as senate majority leader.~{ Noah Shachtman, "With +Incessant Postings, a Pundit Stirs the Pot," /{New York Times,}/ 16 January +2003, G5. }~ +={ Lott, Trent ; + Thurmond, Storm ; + media : + blog pressure on +1 ; + Internet : + news events on +4 +} + +This different cycle is possible because the same commercial pressures don't +exist with blogs as with other ventures. Television and newspapers are +commercial entities. They must work to keep attention. If they lose readers, +they lose revenue. Like sharks, they must move on. +={ media : + commercial imperatives of +1 +} + +But bloggers don't have a similar constraint. They can obsess, they can focus, +they can get serious. If a particular blogger writes a particularly interesting +story, more and more people link to that story. And as the number of links to a +particular story increases, it rises in the ranks of stories. People read what +is popular; what is popular has been selected by a very democratic process of +peer-generated rankings. +={ Internet : + peer-generated rankings on +} + +There's a second way, as well, in which blogs have a different cycle from the +mainstream press. As Dave Winer, one of the fathers of this movement and a +software author for many decades, told me, another difference is the absence of +a financial "conflict of interest." "I think you have to take the conflict of +interest" out of journalism, Winer told me. "An amateur journalist simply +doesn't have a conflict of interest, or the conflict of interest is so easily +disclosed that you know you can sort of get it out of the way." +={ journalism +3 ; + Winer, Dave +4 +} + +These conflicts become more important as media becomes more concentrated (more +on this below). A concentrated media can hide more from the public than an +unconcentrated media can - as CNN admitted it did after the Iraq war because it +was afraid of the consequences to its own employees.~{ Telephone interview with +David Winer, 16 April 2003. }~ It also needs to sustain a more coherent +account. (In the middle of the Iraq war, I read a post on the Internet from +someone who was at that time listening to a satellite uplink with a reporter in +Iraq. The New York headquarters was telling the reporter over and over that her +account of the war was too bleak: She needed to offer a more optimistic story. +When she told New York that wasn't warranted, they told her that /{they}/ were +writing "the story.") +={ CNN ; + media : + commercial imperatives of ; + democracy : + in technologies of expression +3 ; + expression, technologies of : + democratic +3 ; + Iraq war ; + media : + ownership concentration in +} + +Blog space gives amateurs a way to enter the debate - "amateur" not in the +sense of inexperienced, but in the sense of an Olympic athlete, meaning not +paid by anyone to give their reports. It allows for a much broader range of +input into a story, as reporting on the Columbia disaster revealed, when +hundreds from across the southwest United States turned to the Internet to +retell what they had seen.~{ John Schwartz, "Loss of the Shuttle: The Internet; +A Wealth of Information Online," /{New York Times,}/ 2 February 2003, A28; +Staci D. Kramer, "Shuttle Disaster Coverage Mixed, but Strong Overall," Online +Journalism Review, 2 February 2003, available at link #10. }~ And it drives +readers to read across the range of accounts and "triangulate," as Winer puts +it, the truth. Blogs, Winer says, are "communicating directly with our +constituency, and the middle man is out of it" - with all the benefits, and +costs, that might entail. + +Winer is optimistic about the future of journalism infected with blogs. "It's +going to become an essential skill," Winer predicts, for public figures and +increasingly for private figures as well. It's not clear that "journalism" is +happy about this - some journalists have been told to curtail their blogging.~{ +See Michael Falcone, "Does an Editor's Pencil Ruin a Web Log?" /{New York +Times,}/ 29 September 2003, C4. ("Not all news organizations have been as +accepting of employees who blog. Kevin Sites, a CNN correspondent in Iraq who +started a blog about his reporting of the war on March 9, stopped posting 12 +days later at his bosses' request. Last year Steve Olafson, a /{Houston +Chronicle}/ reporter, was fired for keeping a personal Web log, published under +a pseudonym, that dealt with some of the issues and people he was covering.") +}~ But it is clear that we are still in transition. "A lot of what we are doing +now is warm-up exercises," Winer told me. There is a lot that must mature +before this space has its mature effect. And as the inclusion of content in +this space is the least infringing use of the Internet (meaning infringing on +copyright), Winer said, "we will be the last thing that gets shut down." + +This speech affects democracy. Winer thinks that happens because "you don't +have to work for somebody who controls, [for] a gate-keeper." That is true. But +it affects democracy in another way as well. As more and more citizens express +what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people +understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It +is harder when the product of your mind can be criticized by others. Of course, +it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But +it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The +writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy. Today there are +probably a couple of million blogs where such writing happens. When there are +ten million, there will be something extraordinary to report. +={ democracy : + public discourse in +} + +!_ John Seely Brown +is the chief scientist of the Xerox Corporation. His work, as his Web site +describes it, is "human learning and ... the creation of knowledge ecologies +for creating ... innovation." +={ Brown, John Seely +13 } + +Brown thus looks at these technologies of digital creativity a bit differently +from the perspectives I've sketched so far. I'm sure he would be excited about +any technology that might improve democracy. But his real excitement comes from +how these technologies affect learning. + +As Brown believes, we learn by tinkering. When "a lot of us grew up," he +explains, that tinkering was done "on motorcycle engines, lawn-mower engines, +automobiles, radios, and so on." But digital technologies enable a different +kind of tinkering - with abstract ideas though in concrete form. The kids at +Just Think! not only think about how a commercial portrays a politician; using +digital technology, they can take the commercial apart and manipulate it, +tinker with it to see how it does what it does. Digital technologies launch a +kind of bricolage, or "free collage," as Brown calls it. Many get to add to or +transform the tinkering of many others. +={ advertising ; + Just Think! +5 ; + commercials ; + education : + tinkering as means of +11 +} + +The best large-scale example of this kind of tinkering so far is free software +or open-source software (FS/{OSS). FS}/OSS is software whose source code is +shared. Anyone can download the technology that makes a FS/OSS program run. And +anyone eager to learn how a particular bit of FS/OSS technology works can +tinker with the code. +={ free software/open-source software (FS/OSS) } + +This opportunity creates a "completely new kind of learning platform," as Brown +describes. "As soon as you start doing that, you ... unleash a free collage on +the community, so that other people can start looking at your code, tinkering +with it, trying it out, seeing if they can improve it." Each effort is a kind +of apprenticeship. "Open source becomes a major apprenticeship platform." + +In this process, "the concrete things you tinker with are abstract. They are +code." Kids are "shifting to the ability to tinker in the abstract, and this +tinkering is no longer an isolated activity that you're doing in your garage. +You are tinkering with a community platform. ... You are tinkering with other +people's stuff. The more you tinker the more you improve." The more you +improve, the more you learn. + +This same thing happens with content, too. And it happens in the same +collaborative way when that content is part of the Web. As Brown puts it, "the +Web [is] the first medium that truly honors multiple forms of intelligence." +Earlier technologies, such as the typewriter or word processors, helped amplify +text. But the Web amplifies much more than text. "The Web ... says if you are +musical, if you are artistic, if you are visual, if you are interested in film +... [then] there is a lot you can start to do on this medium. [It] can now +amplify and honor these multiple forms of intelligence." + +Brown is talking about what Elizabeth Daley, Stephanie Barish, and Just Think! +teach: that this tinkering with culture teaches as well as creates. It develops +talents differently, and it builds a different kind of recognition. +={ Barish, Stephanie ; + Daley, Elizabeth +} + +Yet the freedom to tinker with these objects is not guaranteed. Indeed, as +we'll see through the course of this book, that freedom is increasingly highly +contested. While there's no doubt that your father had the right to tinker with +the car engine, there's great doubt that your child will have the right to +tinker with the images she finds all around. The law and, increasingly, +technology interfere with a freedom that technology, and curiosity, would +otherwise ensure. + +These restrictions have become the focus of researchers and scholars. Professor +Ed Felten of Princeton (whom we'll see more of in chapter 10) has developed a +powerful argument in favor of the "right to tinker" as it applies to computer +science and to knowledge in general.~{ See, for example, Edward Felten and +Andrew Appel, "Technological Access Control Interferes with Noninfringing +Scholarship," /{Communications of the Association for Computer Machinery}/ 43 +(2000): 9. }~ But Brown's concern is earlier, or younger, or more fundamental. +It is about the learning that kids can do, or can't do, because of the law. +={ Felten, Ed } + +"This is where education in the twenty-first century is going," Brown explains. +We need to "understand how kids who grow up digital think and want to learn." + +"Yet," as Brown continued, and as the balance of this book will evince, "we are +building a legal system that completely suppresses the natural tendencies of +today's digital kids. ... We're building an architecture that unleashes 60 +percent of the brain [and] a legal system that closes down that part of the +brain." + +We're building a technology that takes the magic of Kodak, mixes moving images +and sound, and adds a space for commentary and an opportunity to spread that +creativity everywhere. But we're building the law to close down that +technology. + +"No way to run a culture," as Brewster Kahle, whom we'll meet in chapter 9, +quipped to me in a rare moment of despondence. +={ Kahle, Brewster } + +1~ Chapter Three: Catalogs + +!_ In the fall of 2002, +Jesse Jordan of Oceanside, New York, enrolled as a freshman at Rensselaer +Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York. His major at RPI was information +technology. Though he is not a programmer, in October Jesse decided to begin to +tinker with search engine technology that was available on the RPI network. +={ Jordan, Jesse ; + Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) +2 : + computer network search engine of +10 ; + search engines +10 ; + university computer networks, p2p sharing on +20 ; + Internet : + search engines used on +6 +} + +RPI is one of America's foremost technological research institutions. It offers +degrees in fields ranging from architecture and engineering to information +sciences. More than 65 percent of its five thousand undergraduates finished in +the top 10 percent of their high school class. The school is thus a perfect mix +of talent and experience to imagine and then build, a generation for the +network age. + +RPI's computer network links students, faculty, and administration to one +another. It also links RPI to the Internet. Not everything available on the RPI +network is available on the Internet. But the network is designed to enable +students to get access to the Internet, as well as more intimate access to +other members of the RPI community. + +Search engines are a measure of a network's intimacy. Google brought the +Internet much closer to all of us by fantastically improving the quality of +search on the network. Specialty search engines can do this even better. The +idea of "intranet" search engines, search engines that search within the +network of a particular institution, is to provide users of that institution +with better access to material from that institution. Businesses do this all +the time, enabling employees to have access to material that people outside the +business can't get. Universities do it as well. +={ Google +1 } + +These engines are enabled by the network technology itself. Microsoft, for +example, has a network file system that makes it very easy for search engines +tuned to that network to query the system for information about the publicly +(within that network) available content. Jesse's search engine was built to +take advantage of this technology. It used Microsoft's network file system to +build an index of all the files available within the RPI network. +={ Jordan, Jesse +16 ; + Microsoft : + network file system of +1 +} + +Jesse's wasn't the first search engine built for the RPI network. Indeed, his +engine was a simple modification of engines that others had built. His single +most important improvement over those engines was to fix a bug within the +Microsoft file-sharing system that could cause a user's computer to crash. With +the engines that existed before, if you tried to access a file through a +Windows browser that was on a computer that was off-line, your computer could +crash. Jesse modified the system a bit to fix that problem, by adding a button +that a user could click to see if the machine holding the file was still +on-line. + +Jesse's engine went on-line in late October. Over the following six months, he +continued to tweak it to improve its functionality. By March, the system was +functioning quite well. Jesse had more than one million files in his directory, +including every type of content that might be on users' computers. + +Thus the index his search engine produced included pictures, which students +could use to put on their own Web sites; copies of notes or research; copies of +information pamphlets; movie clips that students might have created; university +brochures - basically anything that users of the RPI network made available in +a public folder of their computer. + +But the index also included music files. In fact, one quarter of the files that +Jesse's search engine listed were music files. But that means, of course, that +three quarters were not, and - so that this point is absolutely clear - Jesse +did nothing to induce people to put music files in their public folders. He did +nothing to target the search engine to these files. He was a kid tinkering with +a Google-like technology at a university where he was studying information +science, and hence, tinkering was the aim. Unlike Google, or Microsoft, for +that matter, he made no money from this tinkering; he was not connected to any +business that would make any money from this experiment. He was a kid tinkering +with technology in an environment where tinkering with technology was precisely +what he was supposed to do. +={ Google ; + education : + tinkering as means of +} + +On April 3, 2003, Jesse was contacted by the dean of students at RPI. The dean +informed Jesse that the Recording Industry Association of America, the RIAA, +would be filing a lawsuit against him and three other students whom he didn't +even know, two of them at other universities. A few hours later, Jesse was +served with papers from the suit. As he read these papers and watched the news +reports about them, he was increasingly astonished. +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + in recording industry +11 ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + against student file sharing +11 ; + recording industry : + copyright infringement lawsuits of +11 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + copyright infringement lawsuits filed by +11 +} + +"It was absurd," he told me. "I don't think I did anything wrong. ... I don't +think there's anything wrong with the search engine that I ran or ... what I +had done to it. I mean, I hadn't modified it in any way that promoted or +enhanced the work of pirates. I just modified the search engine in a way that +would make it easier to use" - again, a /{search engine}/, which Jesse had not +himself built, using the Windows file-sharing system, which Jesse had not +himself built, to enable members of the RPI community to get access to content, +which Jesse had not himself created or posted, and the vast majority of which +had nothing to do with music. + +But the RIAA branded Jesse a pirate. They claimed he operated a network and had +therefore "willfully" violated copyright laws. They demanded that he pay them +the damages for his wrong. For cases of "willful infringement," the Copyright +Act specifies something lawyers call "statutory damages." These damages permit +a copyright owner to claim $150,000 per infringement. As the RIAA alleged more +than one hundred specific copyright infringements, they therefore demanded that +Jesse pay them at least $15,000,000. +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + exaggerated claims of | statutory damages of | individual defendants intimidated by +6 ; + statutory damages ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + intimidation tactics of +6 +} + +Similar lawsuits were brought against three other students: one other student +at RPI, one at Michigan Technical University, and one at Princeton. Their +situations were similar to Jesse's. Though each case was different in detail, +the bottom line in each was exactly the same: huge demands for "damages" that +the RIAA claimed it was entitled to. If you added up the claims, these four +lawsuits were asking courts in the United States to award the plaintiffs close +to $100 /{billion}/ - six times the /{total}/ profit of the film industry in +2001.~{ Tim Goral, "Recording Industry Goes After Campus P-2-P Networks: Suit +Alleges $97.8 Billion in Damages," /{Professional Media Group LCC}/ 6 (2003): +5, available at 2003 WL 55179443. }~ +={ Michigan Technical University ; + Princeton University +} + +Jesse called his parents. They were supportive but a bit frightened. An uncle +was a lawyer. He began negotiations with the RIAA. They demanded to know how +much money Jesse had. Jesse had saved $12,000 from summer jobs and other +employment. They demanded $12,000 to dismiss the case. + +The RIAA wanted Jesse to admit to doing something wrong. He refused. They +wanted him to agree to an injunction that would essentially make it impossible +for him to work in many fields of technology for the rest of his life. He +refused. They made him understand that this process of being sued was not going +to be pleasant. (As Jesse's father recounted to me, the chief lawyer on the +case, Matt Oppenheimer, told Jesse, "You don't want to pay another visit to a +dentist like me.") And throughout, the RIAA insisted it would not settle the +case until it took every penny Jesse had saved. +={ Oppenheimer, Matt } + +Jesse's family was outraged at these claims. They wanted to fight. But Jesse's +uncle worked to educate the family about the nature of the American legal +system. Jesse could fight the RIAA. He might even win. But the cost of fighting +a lawsuit like this, Jesse was told, would be at least $250,000. If he won, he +would not recover that money. If he won, he would have a piece of paper saying +he had won, and a piece of paper saying he and his family were bankrupt. +={ legal system, attorney costs in } + +So Jesse faced a mafia-like choice: $250,000 and a chance at winning, or +$12,000 and a settlement. + +The recording industry insists this is a matter of law and morality. Let's put +the law aside for a moment and think about the morality. Where is the morality +in a lawsuit like this? What is the virtue in scapegoatism? The RIAA is an +extraordinarily powerful lobby. The president of the RIAA is reported to make +more than $1 million a year. Artists, on the other hand, are not well paid. The +average recording artist makes $45,900.~{ Occupational Employment Survey, U.S. +Dept. of Labor (2001) (27-2042 - Musicians and Singers). See also National +Endowment for the Arts, /{More Than One in a Blue Moon}/ (2000). }~ There are +plenty of ways for the RIAA to affect and direct policy. So where is the +morality in taking money from a student for running a search engine?~{ Douglas +Lichtman makes a related point in "KaZaA and Punishment," /{Wall Street +Journal,}/ 10 September 2003, A24. }~ +={ artists : + recording industry payments to ; + recording industry : + artist remuneration in ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + lobbying power of +} + +On June 23, Jesse wired his savings to the lawyer working for the RIAA. The +case against him was then dismissed. And with this, this kid who had tinkered a +computer into a $15 million lawsuit became an activist: + +_1 I was definitely not an activist [before]. I never really meant to be an +activist. ... [But] I've been pushed into this. In no way did I ever foresee +anything like this, but I think it's just completely absurd what the RIAA has +done." + +Jesse's parents betray a certain pride in their reluctant activist. As his +father told me, Jesse "considers himself very conservative, and so do I. ... +He's not a tree hugger. . . . I think it's bizarre that they would pick on him. +But he wants to let people know that they're sending the wrong message. And he +wants to correct the record." + +1~ Chapter Four: "Pirates" +={ piracy : + in development of content industry +43 +} + +!_ If "piracy" means +using the creative property of others without their permission - if "if value, +then right" is true - then the history of the content industry is a history of +piracy. Every important sector of "big media" today - film, records, radio, and +cable TV - was born of a kind of piracy so defined. The consistent story is how +last generation's pirates join this generation's country club - until now. +={ creative property : + "if value, then right" theory of ; + if value, then right, theory +} + +% note bad sort: ={"if value, then right" theory} + +2~ Film + +The film industry of Hollywood was built by fleeing pirates.~{ I am grateful to +Peter DiMauro for pointing me to this extraordinary history. See also Siva +Vaidhyanathan, /{Copyrights and Copywrongs,}/ 87-93, which details Edison's +"adventures" with copyright and patent. }~ Creators and directors migrated from +the East Coast to California in the early twentieth century in part to escape +controls that patents granted the inventor of filmmaking, Thomas Edison. These +controls were exercised through a monopoly "trust," the Motion Pictures Patents +Company, and were based on Thomas Edison's creative property - patents. Edison +formed the MPPC to exercise the rights this creative property gave him, and the +MPPC was serious about the control it demanded. As one commentator tells one +part of the story, +={ Film industry : + patent piracy at the inception of +4 ; + Motion Pictures Patents Company (MPPC) +2 ; + Hollywood film industry +3 ; + patents : + on film technology +4 +} + +_1 A January 1909 deadline was set for all companies to comply with the +license. By February, unlicensed outlaws, who referred to themselves as +independents protested the trust and carried on business without submitting to +the Edison monopoly. In the summer of 1909 the independent movement was in +full-swing, with producers and theater owners using illegal equipment and +imported film stock to create their own underground market. + +_1 With the country experiencing a tremendous expansion in the number of +nickelodeons, the Patents Company reacted to the independent movement by +forming a strong-arm subsidiary known as the General Film Company to block the +entry of non-licensed independents. With coercive tactics that have become +legendary, General Film confiscated unlicensed equipment, discontinued product +supply to theaters which showed unlicensed films, and effectively monopolized +distribution with the acquisition of all U.S. film exchanges, except for the +one owned by the independent William Fox who defied the Trust even after his +license was revoked."~{ J. A. Aberdeen, /{Hollywood Renegades: The Society of +Independent Motion Picture Producers}/ (Cobblestone Entertainment, 2000) and +expanded texts posted at "The Edison Movie Monopoly: The Motion Picture Patents +Company vs. the Independent Outlaws," available at link #11. For a discussion +of the economic motive behind both these limits and the limits imposed by +Victor on phonographs, see Randal C. Picker, "From Edison to the Broadcast +Flag: Mechanisms of Consent and Refusal and the Propertization of Copyright" +(September 2002), University of Chicago Law School, James M. Olin Program in +Law and Economics, Working Paper No. 159. }~ +={ Fox, William ; + General Film Company +} + +The Napsters of those days, the "independents," were companies like Fox. And no +less than today, these independents were vigorously resisted. "Shooting was +disrupted by machinery stolen, and 'accidents' resulting in loss of negatives, +equipment, buildings and sometimes life and limb frequently occurred."~{ Marc +Wanamaker, "The First Studios," /{The Silents Majority,}/ archived at link #12. +}~ That led the independents to flee the East Coast. California was remote +enough from Edison's reach that film- makers there could pirate his inventions +without fear of the law. And the leaders of Hollywood filmmaking, Fox most +prominently, did just that. +={ Edison, Thomas +5 } + +Of course, California grew quickly, and the effective enforcement of federal +law eventually spread west. But because patents grant the patent holder a truly +"limited" monopoly (just seventeen years at that time), by the time enough +federal marshals appeared, the patents had expired. A new industry had been +born, in part from the piracy of Edison's creative property. +={ patents : + duration of +} + +2~ Recorded Music +={ composers, copyright protections of +10 ; + copyright law : + on music recordings +10 ; + recording industry : + copyright protections in +10 | piracy in +10 +} + +The record industry was born of another kind of piracy, though to see how +requires a bit of detail about the way the law regulates music. + +At the time that Edison and Henri Fourneaux invented machines for reproducing +music (Edison the phonograph, Fourneaux the player piano), the law gave +composers the exclusive right to control copies of their music and the +exclusive right to control public performances of their music. In other words, +in 1900, if I wanted a copy of Phil Russel's 1899 hit "Happy Mose," the law +said I would have to pay for the right to get a copy of the musical score, and +I would also have to pay for the right to perform it publicly. +={ Fourneaux, Henri +1 ; + phonograph +2 ; + player pianos +1 ; + Russel, Phil +} + +But what if I wanted to record "Happy Mose," using Edison's phonograph or +Fourneaux's player piano? Here the law stumbled. It was clear enough that I +would have to buy any copy of the musical score that I performed in making this +recording. And it was clear enough that I would have to pay for any public +performance of the work I was recording. But it wasn't totally clear that I +would have to pay for a "public performance" if I recorded the song in my own +house (even today, you don't owe the Beatles anything if you sing their songs +in the shower), or if I recorded the song from memory (copies in your brain are +not - yet - regulated by copyright law). So if I simply sang the song into a +recording device in the privacy of my own home, it wasn't clear that I owed the +composer anything. And more importantly, it wasn't clear whether I owed the +composer anything if I then made copies of those recordings. Because of this +gap in the law, then, I could effectively pirate someone else's song without +paying its composer anything. + +The composers (and publishers) were none too happy about this capacity to +pirate. As South Dakota senator Alfred Kittredge put it, +={ Kittredge, Alfred +1 ; + music publishing +2 +} + +_1 Imagine the injustice of the thing. A composer writes a song or an opera. A +publisher buys at great expense the rights to the same and copyrights it. Along +come the phonographic companies and companies who cut music rolls and +deliberately steal the work of the brain of the composer and publisher without +any regard for [their] rights.~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting +Copyright: Hearings on S. 6330 and H.R. 19853 Before the (Joint) Committees on +Patents, 59th Cong. 59, 1st sess. (1906) (statement of Senator Alfred B. +Kittredge, of South Dakota, chairman), reprinted in /{Legislative History of +the 1909 Copyright Act,}/ E. Fulton Brylawski and Abe Goldman, eds. (South +Hackensack, N.J.: Rothman Reprints, 1976). }~ +={ copyright law : + authors vs. composers +7 ; + creative property : + of authors vs. composers +7 ; + recording industry : + composers' rights vs. producers' rights in +} + +The innovators who developed the technology to record other people's works were +"sponging upon the toil, the work, the talent, and genius of American +composers,"~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 223 +(statement of Nathan Burkan, attorney for the Music Publishers Association). }~ +and the "music publishing industry" was thereby "at the complete mercy of this +one pirate."~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 226 +(statement of Nathan Burkan, attorney for the Music Publishers Association). }~ +As John Philip Sousa put it, in as direct a way as possible, "When they make +money out of my pieces, I want a share of it."~{ To Amend and Consolidate the +Acts Respecting Copyright, 23 (statement of John Philip Sousa, composer). }~ +={ Sousa, John Philip } + +These arguments have familiar echoes in the wars of our day. So, too, do the +arguments on the other side. The innovators who developed the player piano +argued that "it is perfectly demonstrable that the introduction of automatic +music players has not deprived any composer of anything he had before their +introduction." Rather, the machines increased the sales of sheet music.~{ To +Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 283-84 (statement of +Albert Walker, representative of the Auto-Music Perforating Company of New +York). }~ In any case, the innovators argued, the job of Congress was "to +consider first the interest of [the public], whom they represent, and whose +servants they are." "All talk about 'theft,'" the general counsel of the +American Graphophone Company wrote, "is the merest claptrap, for there exists +no property in ideas musical, literary or artistic, except as defined by +statute."~{ To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright, 376 +(prepared memorandum of Philip Mauro, general patent counsel of the American +Graphophone Company Association). }~ +={ American Graphophone Company ; + player pianos ; + sheet music ; + Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +4 | on recording industry +4 ; + copyright law : + statutory licenses in +6 ; + recording industry : + statutory license system in +6 +} + +The law soon resolved this battle in favor of the composer /{and}/ the +recording artist. Congress amended the law to make sure that composers would be +paid for the "mechanical reproductions" of their music. But rather than simply +granting the composer complete control over the right to make mechanical +reproductions, Congress gave recording artists a right to record the music, at +a price set by Congress, once the composer allowed it to be recorded once. This +is the part of copyright law that makes cover songs possible. Once a composer +authorizes a recording of his song, others are free to record the same song, so +long as they pay the original composer a fee set by the law. +={ cover songs } + +American law ordinarily calls this a "compulsory license," but I will refer to +it as a "statutory license." A statutory license is a license whose key terms +are set by law. After Congress's amendment of the Copyright Act in 1909, record +companies were free to distribute copies of recordings so long as they paid the +composer (or copyright holder) the fee set by the statute. +={ compulsory license +4 ; + statutory licenses +4 +} + +This is an exception within the law of copyright. When John Grisham writes a +novel, a publisher is free to publish that novel only if Grisham gives the +publisher permission. Grisham, in turn, is free to charge whatever he wants for +that permission. The price to publish Grisham is thus set by Grisham, and +copyright law ordinarily says you have no permission to use Grisham's work +except with permission of Grisham. +={ Grisham, John +1 } + +But the law governing recordings gives recording artists less. And thus, in +effect, the law /{subsidizes}/ the recording industry through a kind of piracy +- by giving recording artists a weaker right than it otherwise gives creative +authors. The Beatles have less control over their creative work than Grisham +does. And the beneficiaries of this less control are the recording industry and +the public. The recording industry gets something of value for less than it +otherwise would pay; the public gets access to a much wider range of musical +creativity. Indeed, Congress was quite explicit about its reasons for granting +this right. Its fear was the monopoly power of rights holders, and that that +power would stifle follow-on creativity.~{ Copyright Law Revision: Hearings on +S. 2499, S. 2900, H.R. 243, and H.R. 11794 Before the ( Joint) Committee on +Patents, 60th Cong., 1st sess., 217 (1908) (statement of Senator Reed Smoot, +chairman), reprinted in /{Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act,}/ E. +Fulton Brylawski and Abe Goldman, eds. (South Hackensack, N.J.: Rothman +Reprints, 1976). }~ +={ Beatles } + +While the recording industry has been quite coy about this recently, +historically it has been quite a supporter of the statutory license for +records. As a 1967 report from the House Committee on the Judiciary relates, + +_1 the record producers argued vigorously that the compulsory license system +must be retained. They asserted that the record industry is a +half-billion-dollar business of great economic importance in the United States +and throughout the world; records today are the principal means of +disseminating music, and this creates special problems, since performers need +unhampered access to musical material on nondiscriminatory terms. Historically, +the record producers pointed out, there were no recording rights before 1909 +and the 1909 statute adopted the compulsory license as a deliberate +anti-monopoly condition on the grant of these rights. They argue that the +result has been an outpouring of recorded music, with the public being given +lower prices, improved quality, and a greater choice."~{ Copyright Law +Revision: Report to Accompany H.R. 2512, House Committee on the Judiciary, 90th +Cong., 1st sess., House Document no. 83, 66 (8 March 1967). I am grateful to +Glenn Brown for drawing my attention to this report. }~ + +By limiting the rights musicians have, by partially pirating their creative +work, the record producers, and the public, benefit. + +2~ Radio +={ recording industry : + radio broadcast and +7 +} + +Radio was also born of piracy. + +When a radio station plays a record on the air, that constitutes a "public +performance" of the composer's work.~{ See 17 /{United States Code,}/ sections +106 and 110. At the beginning, record companies printed "Not Licensed for Radio +Broadcast" and other messages purporting to restrict the ability to play a +record on a radio station. Judge Learned Hand rejected the argument that a +warning attached to a record might restrict the rights of the radio station. +See /{RCA Manufacturing Co. v. Whiteman,}/ 114 F. 2d 86 (2nd Cir. 1940). See +also Randal C. Picker, "From Edison to the Broadcast Flag: Mechanisms of +Consent and Refusal and the Propertization of Copyright," /{University of +Chicago Law Review}/ 70 (2003): 281. }~ As I described above, the law gives the +composer (or copyright holder) an exclusive right to public performances of his +work. The radio station thus owes the composer money for that performance. + +But when the radio station plays a record, it is not only performing a copy of +the /{composer's}/ work. The radio station is also performing a copy of the +/{recording artist's}/ work. It's one thing to have "Happy Birthday" sung on +the radio by the local children's choir; it's quite another to have it sung by +the Rolling Stones or Lyle Lovett. The recording artist is adding to the value +of the composition performed on the radio station. And if the law were +perfectly consistent, the radio station would have to pay the recording artist +for his work, just as it pays the composer of the music for his work. +={ artists : + recording industry payments to +3 ; + radio : + music recordings played on +3 ; + recording industry : + artist remuneration in +3 +} + +But it doesn't. Under the law governing radio performances, the radio station +does not have to pay the recording artist. The radio station need only pay the +composer. The radio station thus gets a bit of something for nothing. It gets +to perform the recording artist's work for free, even if it must pay the +composer something for the privilege of playing the song. + +This difference can be huge. Imagine you compose a piece of music. Imagine it +is your first. You own the exclusive right to authorize public performances of +that music. So if Madonna wants to sing your song in public, she has to get +your permission. +={ Madonna +1 } + +Imagine she does sing your song, and imagine she likes it a lot. She then +decides to make a recording of your song, and it becomes a top hit. Under our +law, every time a radio station plays your song, you get some money. But +Madonna gets nothing, save the indirect effect on the sale of her CDs. The +public performance of her recording is not a "protected" right. The radio +station thus gets to /{pirate}/ the value of Madonna's work without paying her +anything. + +No doubt, one might argue that, on balance, the recording artists benefit. On +average, the promotion they get is worth more than the performance rights they +give up. Maybe. But even if so, the law ordinarily gives the creator the right +to make this choice. By making the choice for him or her, the law gives the +radio station the right to take something for nothing. + +2~ Cable TV +={ cable television +12 } + +Cable TV was also born of a kind of piracy. + +When cable entrepreneurs first started wiring communities with cable television +in 1948, most refused to pay broadcasters for the content that they echoed to +their customers. Even when the cable companies started selling access to +television broadcasts, they refused to pay for what they sold. Cable companies +were thus Napsterizing broadcasters' content, but more egregiously than +anything Napster ever did - Napster never charged for the content it enabled +others to give away. +={ Napster ; + television : + cable vs. broadcast +10 +} + +Broadcasters and copyright owners were quick to attack this theft. Rosel Hyde, +chairman of the FCC, viewed the practice as a kind of "unfair and potentially +destructive competition."~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV: Hearing on S. 1006 +Before the Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights of the Senate +Committee on the Judiciary, 89th Cong., 2nd sess., 78 (1966) (statement of +Rosel H. Hyde, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission). }~ There may +have been a "public interest" in spreading the reach of cable TV, but as +Douglas Anello, general counsel to the National Association of Broadcasters, +asked Senator Quentin Burdick during testimony, "Does public interest dictate +that you use somebody else's property?"~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 116 +(statement of Douglas A. Anello, general counsel of the National Association of +Broadcasters). }~ As another broadcaster put it, +={ Anello, Douglas ; + Burdick, Quentin ; + Hyde, Rosel ; + copyright law : + on cable television rebroadcasting +9 +} + +_1 The extraordinary thing about the CATV business is that it is the only +business I know of where the product that is being sold is not paid for."~{ +Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 126 (statement of Ernest W. Jennes, general +counsel of the Association of Maximum Service Telecasters, Inc.). }~ + +Again, the demand of the copyright holders seemed reasonable enough: + +_1 All we are asking for is a very simple thing, that people who now take our +property for nothing pay for it. We are trying to stop piracy and I don't think +there is any lesser word to describe it. I think there are harsher words which +would fit it."~{ Copyright Law Revision - CATV, 169 (joint statement of Arthur +B. Krim, president of United Artists Corp., and John Sinn, president of United +Artists Television, Inc.). }~ + +These were "free-ride[rs]," Screen Actor's Guild president Charlton Heston +said, who were "depriving actors of compensation."~{ Copyright Law Revision - +CATV, 209 (statement of Charlton Heston, president of the Screen Actors Guild). +}~ +={ Screen Actors Guild ; + Heston, Charlton +} + +But again, there was another side to the debate. As Assistant Attorney General +Edwin Zimmerman put it, +={ Zimmerman, Edwin +1 } + +_1 Our point here is that unlike the problem of whether you have any copyright +protection at all, the problem here is whether copyright holders who are +already compensated, who already have a monopoly, should be permitted to extend +that monopoly. ... The question here is how much compensation they should have +and how far back they should carry their right to compensation."~{ Copyright +Law Revision - CATV, 216 (statement of Edwin M. Zimmerman, acting assistant +attorney general). }~ + +Copyright owners took the cable companies to court. Twice the Supreme Court +held that the cable companies owed the copyright owners nothing. +={ Supreme Court, U.S. : + on cable television +} + +It took Congress almost thirty years before it resolved the question of whether +cable companies had to pay for the content they "pirated." In the end, Congress +resolved this question in the same way that it resolved the question about +record players and player pianos. Yes, cable companies would have to pay for +the content that they broadcast; but the price they would have to pay was not +set by the copyright owner. The price was set by law, so that the broadcasters +couldn't exercise veto power over the emerging technologies of cable. Cable +companies thus built their empire in part upon a "piracy" of the value created +by broadcasters' content. +={ Congress, U.S. : + on cable television | on copyright laws +} + +!_ These separate stories +sing a common theme. If "piracy" means using value from someone else's creative +property without permission from that creator - as it is increasingly described +today~{ See, for example, National Music Publisher's Association, /{The Engine +of Free Expression: Copyright on the Internet - The Myth of Free Information,}/ +available at link #13. "The threat of piracy"the use of someone else's creative +work without permission or compensation - has grown with the Internet." }~ - +then /{every}/ industry affected by copyright today is the product and +beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy. Film, records, radio, cable TV. ... +The list is long and could well be expanded. Every generation welcomes the +pirates from the last. Every generation - until now. + +1~ Chapter Five: "Piracy" +={ piracy : + commercial +20 +} + +!_ There is piracy +of copyrighted material. Lots of it. This piracy comes in many forms. The most +significant is commercial piracy, the unauthorized taking of other people's +content within a commercial context. Despite the many justifications that are +offered in its defense, this taking is wrong. No one should condone it, and the +law should stop it. + +But as well as copy-shop piracy, there is another kind of "taking" that is more +directly related to the Internet. That taking, too, seems wrong to many, and it +is wrong much of the time. Before we paint this taking "piracy," however, we +should understand its nature a bit more. For the harm of this taking is +significantly more ambiguous than outright copying, and the law should account +for that ambiguity, as it has so often done in the past. + +2~ Piracy I + +All across the world, but especially in Asia and Eastern Europe, there are +businesses that do nothing but take others people's copyrighted content, copy +it, and sell it - all without the permission of a copyright owner. The +recording industry estimates that it loses about $4.6 billion every year to +physical piracy~{ See IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic +Industry), /{The Recording Industry Commercial Piracy Report 2003,}/ July 2003, +available at link #14. See also Ben Hunt, "Companies Warned on Music Piracy +Risk," /{Financial Times,}/ 14 February 2003, 11. }~ (that works out to one in +three CDs sold worldwide). The MPAA estimates that it loses $3 billion annually +worldwide to piracy. +={ Asia, commercial piracy in +3 ; + piracy : + in Asia +3 ; + CDs : + foreign piracy of +3 ; + copyright law : + international compliance with +6 ; + international law +5 ; + piracy : + international +7 ; + recording industry : + international piracy in ; + Motion Pictures Patents Company (MPPC) +} + +% check reference, MPAA appears to be indexed to Motion Pictures Patents +% Company (MPPC) which is referred to elsewhere in text as "Motion Pictures +% _Patent_ Company" + +This is piracy plain and simple. Nothing in the argument of this book, nor in +the argument that most people make when talking about the subject of this book, +should draw into doubt this simple point: This piracy is wrong. + +Which is not to say that excuses and justifications couldn't be made for it. We +could, for example, remind ourselves that for the first one hundred years of +the American Republic, America did not honor foreign copyrights. We were born, +in this sense, a pirate nation. It might therefore seem hypocritical for us to +insist so strongly that other developing nations treat as wrong what we, for +the first hundred years of our existence, treated as right. +={ developing countries, foreign patent costs in +3 } + +That excuse isn't terribly strong. Technically, our law did not ban the taking +of foreign works. It explicitly limited itself to American works. Thus the +American publishers who published foreign works without the permission of +foreign authors were not violating any rule. The copy shops in Asia, by +contrast, are violating Asian law. Asian law does protect foreign copyrights, +and the actions of the copy shops violate that law. So the wrong of piracy that +they engage in is not just a moral wrong, but a legal wrong, and not just an +internationally legal wrong, but a locally legal wrong as well. + +True, these local rules have, in effect, been imposed upon these countries. No +country can be part of the world economy and choose not to protect copyright +internationally. We may have been born a pirate nation, but we will not allow +any other nation to have a similar childhood. + +If a country is to be treated as a sovereign, however, then its laws are its +laws regardless of their source. The international law under which these +nations live gives them some opportunities to escape the burden of intellectual +property law.~{ See Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite, /{Information +Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?}/ (New York: The New Press, 2003), +10-13, 209. The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) +agreement obligates member nations to create administrative and enforcement +mechanisms for intellectual property rights, a costly proposition for +developing countries. Additionally, patent rights may lead to higher prices for +staple industries such as agriculture. Critics of TRIPS question the disparity +between burdens imposed upon developing countries and benefits conferred to +industrialized nations. TRIPS does permit governments to use patents for +public, noncommercial uses without first obtaining the patent holder's +permission. Developing nations may be able to use this to gain the benefits of +foreign patents at lower prices. This is a promising strategy for developing +nations within the TRIPS framework. }~ In my view, more developing nations +should take advantage of that opportunity, but when they don't, then their laws +should be respected. And under the laws of these nations, this piracy is wrong. + +Alternatively, we could try to excuse this piracy by noting that in any case, +it does no harm to the industry. The Chinese who get access to American CDs at +50 cents a copy are not people who would have bought those American CDs at $15 +a copy. So no one really has any less money than they otherwise would have +had.~{ For an analysis of the economic impact of copying technology, see Stan +Liebowitz, /{Rethinking the Network Economy}/ (New York: Amacom, 2002), 144-90. +"In some instances ... the impact of piracy on the copyright holder's ability +to appropriate the value of the work will be negligible. One obvious instance +is the case where the individual engaging in pirating would not have purchased +an original even if pirating were not an option." Ibid., 149. }~ +={ Asia, commercial piracy in ; + piracy : + in Asia ; + CDs : + foreign piracy of ; + copyright law : + statutory licenses in +} + +This is often true (though I have friends who have purchased many thousands of +pirated DVDs who certainly have enough money to pay for the content they have +taken), and it does mitigate to some degree the harm caused by such taking. +Extremists in this debate love to say, "You wouldn't go into Barnes & Noble and +take a book off of the shelf without paying; why should it be any different +with on-line music?" The difference is, of course, that when you take a book +from Barnes & Noble, it has one less book to sell. By contrast, when you take +an MP3 from a computer network, there is not one less CD that can be sold. The +physics of piracy of the intangible are different from the physics of piracy of +the tangible. +={ DVDs : + piracy of ; + piracy : + of intangible property +} + +This argument is still very weak. However, although copyright is a property +right of a very special sort, it /{is}/ a property right. Like all property +rights, the copyright gives the owner the right to decide the terms under which +content is shared. If the copyright owner doesn't want to sell, she doesn't +have to. There are exceptions: important statutory licenses that apply to +copyrighted content regardless of the wish of the copyright owner. Those +licenses give people the right to "take" copyrighted content whether or not the +copyright owner wants to sell. But where the law does not give people the right +to take content, it is wrong to take that content even if the wrong does no +harm. If we have a property system, and that system is properly balanced to the +technology of a time, then it is wrong to take property without the permission +of a property owner. That is exactly what "property" means. +={ statutory licenses } + +Finally, we could try to excuse this piracy with the argument that the piracy +actually helps the copyright owner. When the Chinese "steal" Windows, that +makes the Chinese dependent on Microsoft. Microsoft loses the value of the +software that was taken. But it gains users who are used to life in the +Microsoft world. Over time, as the nation grows more wealthy, more and more +people will buy software rather than steal it. And hence over time, because +that buying will benefit Microsoft, Microsoft benefits from the piracy. If +instead of pirating Microsoft Windows, the Chinese used the free GNU/Linux +operating system, then these Chinese users would not eventually be buying +Microsoft. Without piracy, then, Microsoft would lose. +={ Asia, commercial piracy in ; + piracy : + in Asia ; + free software/open-source software (FS/OSS) ; + GNU/Linux operating system ; + Linux operating system ; + Microsoft : + competitive strategies of ; + Windows ; + Microsoft : + international software piracy of | Windows operating system of +} + +This argument, too, is somewhat true. The addiction strategy is a good one. +Many businesses practice it. Some thrive because of it. Law students, for +example, are given free access to the two largest legal databases. The +companies marketing both hope the students will become so used to their service +that they will want to use it and not the other when they become lawyers (and +must pay high subscription fees). +={ law : + databases of case reports in +} + +Still, the argument is not terribly persuasive. We don't give the alcoholic a +defense when he steals his first beer, merely because that will make it more +likely that he will buy the next three. Instead, we ordinarily allow businesses +to decide for themselves when it is best to give their product away. If +Microsoft fears the competition of GNU/Linux, then Microsoft can give its +product away, as it did, for example, with Internet Explorer to fight Netscape. +A property right means giving the property owner the right to say who gets +access to what - at least ordinarily. And if the law properly balances the +rights of the copyright owner with the rights of access, then violating the law +is still wrong. +={ Netscape ; + Internet Explorer +} + +Thus, while I understand the pull of these justifications for piracy, and I +certainly see the motivation, in my view, in the end, these efforts at +justifying commercial piracy simply don't cut it. This kind of piracy is +rampant and just plain wrong. It doesn't transform the content it steals; it +doesn't transform the market it competes in. It merely gives someone access to +something that the law says he should not have. Nothing has changed to draw +that law into doubt. This form of piracy is flat out wrong. + +But as the examples from the four chapters that introduced this part suggest, +even if some piracy is plainly wrong, not all "piracy" is. Or at least, not all +"piracy" is wrong if that term is understood in the way it is increasingly used +today. Many kinds of "piracy" are useful and productive, to produce either new +content or new ways of doing business. Neither our tradition nor any tradition +has ever banned all "piracy" in that sense of the term. + +This doesn't mean that there are no questions raised by the latest piracy +concern, peer-to-peer file sharing. But it does mean that we need to understand +the harm in peer-to-peer sharing a bit more before we condemn it to the gallows +with the charge of piracy. +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + piracy vs. ; + piracy : + profit reduction as criterion of | p2p file sharing vs. +} + +For (1) like the original Hollywood, p2p sharing escapes an overly controlling +industry; and (2) like the original recording industry, it simply exploits a +new way to distribute content; but (3) unlike cable TV, no one is selling the +content that is shared on p2p services. + +These differences distinguish p2p sharing from true piracy. They should push us +to find a way to protect artists while enabling this sharing to survive. + +2~ Piracy II +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + piracy vs. +53 ; + piracy : + profit reduction as criterion of +23 | p2p file sharing vs. +53 +} + +The key to the "piracy" that the law aims to quash is a use that "rob[s] the +author of [his] profit."~{ /{Bach v. Longman,}/ 98 Eng. Rep. 1274 (1777). }~ +This means we must determine whether and how much p2p sharing harms before we +know how strongly the law should seek to either prevent it or find an +alternative to assure the author of his profit. + +Peer-to-peer sharing was made famous by Napster. But the inventors of the +Napster technology had not made any major technological innovations. Like every +great advance in innovation on the Internet (and, arguably, off the Internet as +well~{ See Clayton M. Christensen, /{The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary +National Bestseller That Changed the Way We Do Business}/ (New York: +HarperBusiness, 2000). Professor Christensen examines why companies that give +rise to and dominate a product area are frequently unable to come up with the +most creative, paradigm-shifting uses for their own products. This job usually +falls to outside innovators, who reassemble existing technology in inventive +ways. For a discussion of Christensen's ideas, see Lawrence Lessig, /{Future,}/ +89-92, 139. }~), Shawn Fanning and crew had simply put together components that +had been developed independently. +={ Fanning, Shawn ; + innovation ; + Internet : + music files downloaded from +8 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + participation levels of ; + technology : + innovative improvements in ; + Napster +1 +} + +The result was spontaneous combustion. Launched in July 1999, Napster amassed +over 10 million users within nine months. After eighteen months, there were +close to 80 million registered users of the system.~{ See Carolyn Lochhead, +"Silicon Valley Dream, Hollywood Nightmare," /{San Francisco Chronicle,}/ 24 +September 2002, A1; "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide," /{New Scientist,}/ 6 July 2002, +42; Benny Evangelista, "Napster Names CEO, Secures New Financing," /{San +Francisco Chronicle,}/ 23 May 2003, C1; "Napster's Wake-Up Call," +/{Economist,}/ 24 June 2000, 23; John Naughton, "Hollywood at War with the +Internet" (London) /{Times,}/ 26 July 2002, 18. }~ Courts quickly shut Napster +down, but other services emerged to take its place. (Kazaa is currently the +most popular p2p service. It boasts over 100 million members.) These services' +systems are different architecturally, though not very different in function: +Each enables users to make content available to any number of other users. With +a p2p system, you can share your favorite songs with your best friend - or your +20,000 best friends. +={ Kazaa ; + Napster : + number of registrations on | replacement of +} + +According to a number of estimates, a huge proportion of Americans have tasted +file-sharing technology. A study by Ipsos-Insight in September 2002 estimated +that 60 million Americans had downloaded music - 28 percent of Americans older +than 12.~{ See Ipsos-Insight, /{TEMPO: Keeping Pace with Online Music +Distribution}/ (September 2002), reporting that 28 percent of Americans aged +twelve and older have downloaded music off of the Internet and 30 percent have +listened to digital music files stored on their computers. }~ A survey by the +NPD group quoted in /{The New York Times}/ estimated that 43 million citizens +used file-sharing networks to exchange content in May 2003.~{ Amy Harmon, +"Industry Offers a Carrot in Online Music Fight," /{New York Times,}/ 6 June +2003, A1. }~ The vast majority of these are not kids. Whatever the actual +figure, a massive quantity of content is being "taken" on these networks. The +ease and inexpensiveness of file-sharing networks have inspired millions to +enjoy music in a way that they hadn't before. + +Some of this enjoying involves copyright infringement. Some of it does not. And +even among the part that is technically copyright infringement, calculating the +actual harm to copyright owners is more complicated than one might think. So +consider - a bit more carefully than the polarized voices around this debate +usually do - the kinds of sharing that file sharing enables, and the kinds of +harm it entails. + +File sharers share different kinds of content. We can divide these different +kinds into four types. +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + four types of +4 ; + Napster : + range of content on +} + +_1 A. There are some who use sharing networks as substitutes for purchasing +content. Thus, when a new Madonna CD is released, rather than buying the CD, +these users simply take it. We might quibble about whether everyone who takes +it would actually have bought it if sharing didn't make it available for free. +Most probably wouldn't have, but clearly there are some who would. The latter +are the target of category A: users who download instead of purchasing. + +_1 B. There are some who use sharing networks to sample music before purchasing +it. Thus, a friend sends another friend an MP3 of an artist he's not heard of. +The other friend then buys CDs by that artist. This is a kind of targeted +advertising, quite likely to succeed. If the friend recommending the album +gains nothing from a bad recommendation, then one could expect that the +recommendations will actually be quite good. The net effect of this sharing +could increase the quantity of music purchased. +={ advertising } + +_1 C. There are many who use sharing networks to get access to copyrighted +content that is no longer sold or that they would not have purchased because +the transaction costs off the Net are too high. This use of sharing networks is +among the most rewarding for many. Songs that were part of your childhood but +have long vanished from the marketplace magically appear again on the network. +(One friend told me that when she discovered Napster, she spent a solid weekend +"recalling" old songs. She was astonished at the range and mix of content that +was available.) For content not sold, this is still technically a violation of +copyright, though because the copyright owner is not selling the content +anymore, the economic harm is zero - the same harm that occurs when I sell my +collection of 1960s 45-rpm records to a local collector. +={ recording industry : + out-of-print music of +} + +_1 D. Finally, there are many who use sharing networks to get access to content +that is not copyrighted or that the copyright owner wants to give away. + +How do these different types of sharing balance out? + +Let's start with some simple but important points. From the perspective of the +law, only type D sharing is clearly legal. From the perspective of economics, +only type A sharing is clearly harmful.~{ See Liebowitz, /{Rethinking the +Network Economy,}/ 148-49. }~ Type B sharing is illegal but plainly beneficial. +Type C sharing is illegal, yet good for society (since more exposure to music +is good) and harmless to the artist (since the work is not otherwise +available). So how sharing matters on balance is a hard question to answer - +and certainly much more difficult than the current rhetoric around the issue +suggests. + +Whether on balance sharing is harmful depends importantly on how harmful type A +sharing is. Just as Edison complained about Hollywood, composers complained +about piano rolls, recording artists complained about radio, and broadcasters +complained about cable TV, the music industry complains that type A sharing is +a kind of "theft" that is "devastating" the industry. +={ Edison, Thomas } + +While the numbers do suggest that sharing is harmful, how harmful is harder to +reckon. It has long been the recording industry's practice to blame technology +for any drop in sales. The history of cassette recording is a good example. As +a study by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young put it, "Rather than exploiting this new, +popular technology, the labels fought it."~{ See Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, +/{Technology Evolution and the Music Industry's Business Model Crisis}/ (2003), +3. This report describes the music industry's effort to stigmatize the budding +practice of cassette taping in the 1970s, including an advertising campaign +featuring a cassette-shape skull and the caption "Home taping is killing +music." \\ At the time digital audio tape became a threat, the Office of +Technical Assessment conducted a survey of consumer behavior. In 1988, 40 +percent of consumers older than ten had taped music to a cassette format. U.S. +Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, /{Copyright and Home Copying: +Technology Challenges the Law,}/ OTA-CIT-422 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government +Printing Office, October 1989), 145-56. }~ The labels claimed that every album +taped was an album unsold, and when record sales fell by 11.4 percent in 1981, +the industry claimed that its point was proved. Technology was the problem, and +banning or regulating technology was the answer. +={ cassette recording +1 ; + recording industry : + new technology opposed by +2 ; + technology : + established industries threatened by changes in +2 +} + +Yet soon thereafter, and before Congress was given an opportunity to enact +regulation, MTV was launched, and the industry had a record turnaround. "In the +end," Cap Gemini concludes, "the 'crisis' ... was not the fault of the tapers" +who did not [stop after MTV came into being] - but had to a large extent +resulted from stagnation in musical innovation at the major labels."~{ U.S. +Congress, /{Copyright and Home Copying,}/ 4. }~ +={ MTV } + +But just because the industry was wrong before does not mean it is wrong today. +To evaluate the real threat that p2p sharing presents to the industry in +particular, and society in general - or at least the society that inherits the +tradition that gave us the film industry, the record industry, the radio +industry, cable TV, and the VCR - the question is not simply whether type A +sharing is harmful. The question is also /{how}/ harmful type A sharing is, and +how beneficial the other types of sharing are. + +We start to answer this question by focusing on the net harm, from the +standpoint of the industry as a whole, that sharing networks cause. The "net +harm" to the industry as a whole is the amount by which type A sharing exceeds +type B. If the record companies sold more records through sampling than they +lost through substitution, then sharing networks would actually benefit music +companies on balance. They would therefore have little /{static}/ reason to +resist them. + +Could that be true? Could the industry as a whole be gaining because of file +sharing? Odd as that might sound, the data about CD sales actually suggest it +might be close. +={ CDs : + sales levels of +3 ; + recording industry : + CD sales level in +3 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + on CD sales decline +3 +} + +In 2002, the RIAA reported that CD sales had fallen by 8.9 percent, from 882 +million to 803 million units; revenues fell 6.7 percent.~{ See Recording +Industry Association of America, /{2002 Yearend Statistics,}/ available at link +#15. A later report indicates even greater losses. See Recording Industry +Association of America, /{Some Facts About Music Piracy,}/ 25 June 2003, +available at link #16: "In the past four years, unit shipments of recorded +music have fallen by 26 percent from 1.16 billion units in 1999 to 860 million +units in 2002 in the United States (based on units shipped). In terms of sales, +revenues are down 14 percent, from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $12.6 billion last +year (based on U.S. dollar value of shipments). The music industry worldwide +has gone from a $39 billion industry in 2000 down to a $32 billion industry in +2002 (based on U.S. dollar value of shipments)." }~ This confirms a trend over +the past few years. The RIAA blames Internet piracy for the trend, though there +are many other causes that could account for this drop. SoundScan, for example, +reports a more than 20 percent drop in the number of CDs released since 1999. +That no doubt accounts for some of the decrease in sales. Rising prices could +account for at least some of the loss. "From 1999 to 2001, the average price of +a CD rose 7.2 percent, from $13.04 to $14.19."~{ Jane Black, "Big Music's +Broken Record," BusinessWeek online, 13 February 2003, available at link #17. +}~ Competition from other forms of media could also account for some of the +decline. As Jane Black of /{BusinessWeek}/ notes, "The soundtrack to the film +/{High Fidelity}/ has a list price of $18.98. You could get the whole movie [on +DVD] for $19.99."~{ Ibid. }~ +={ Black, Jane ; + CDs : + prices of ; + DVDs : + price of +} + +But let's assume the RIAA is right, and all of the decline in CD sales is +because of Internet sharing. Here's the rub: In the same period that the RIAA +estimates that 803 million CDs were sold, the RIAA estimates that 2.1 billion +CDs were downloaded for free. Thus, although 2.6 times the total number of CDs +sold were downloaded for free, sales revenue fell by just 6.7 percent. +={ piracy : + of intangible property +1 +} + +There are too many different things happening at the same time to explain these +numbers definitively, but one conclusion is unavoidable: The recording industry +constantly asks, "What's the difference between downloading a song and stealing +a CD?" - but their own numbers reveal the difference. If I steal a CD, then +there is one less CD to sell. Every taking is a lost sale. But on the basis of +the numbers the RIAA provides, it is absolutely clear that the same is not true +of downloads. If every download were a lost sale - if every use of Kazaa +"rob[bed] the author of [his] profit" - then the industry would have suffered a +100 percent drop in sales last year, not a 7 percent drop. If 2.6 times the +number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, and yet sales revenue dropped by +just 6.7 percent, then there is a huge difference between "downloading a song +and stealing a CD." +={ Kazaa } + +These are the harms - alleged and perhaps exaggerated but, let's assume, real. +What of the benefits? File sharing may impose costs on the recording industry. +What value does it produce in addition to these costs? +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + benefits of +8 +} + +One benefit is type C sharing - making available content that is technically +still under copyright but is no longer commercially available. This is not a +small category of content. There are millions of tracks that are no longer +commercially available.~{ By one estimate, 75 percent of the music released by +the major labels is no longer in print. See Online Entertainment and Copyright +Law - Coming Soon to a Digital Device Near You: Hearing Before the Senate +Committee on the Judiciary, 107th Cong., 1st sess. (3 April 2001) (prepared +statement of the Future of Music Coalition), available at link #18. }~ And +while it's conceivable that some of this content is not available because the +artist producing the content doesn't want it to be made available, the vast +majority of it is unavailable solely because the publisher or the distributor +has decided it no longer makes economic sense /{to the company}/ to make it +available. +={ recording industry : + out-of-print music of +3 +} + +In real space - long before the Internet - the market had a simple response to +this problem: used book and record stores. There are thousands of used book and +used record stores in America today.~{ While there are not good estimates of +the number of used record stores in existence, in 2002, there were 7,198 used +book dealers in the United States, an increase of 20 percent since 1993. See +Book Hunter Press, /{The Quiet Revolution: The Expansion of the Used Book +Market}/ (2002), available at link #19. Used records accounted for $260 million +in sales in 2002. See National Association of Recording Merchandisers, "2002 +Annual Survey Results," available at link #20. }~ These stores buy content from +owners, then sell the content they buy. And under American copyright law, when +they buy and sell this content, /{even if the content is still under +copyright}/, the copyright owner doesn't get a dime. Used book and record +stores are commercial entities; their owners make money from the content they +sell; but as with cable companies before statutory licensing, they don't have +to pay the copyright owner for the content they sell. +={ books : + free on-line releases of +4 ; + books : + out of print +3 ; + books : + resales of +2 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + of books +4 ; + used record sales +} + +Type C sharing, then, is very much like used book stores or used record stores. +It is different, of course, because the person making the content available +isn't making money from making the content available. It is also different, of +course, because in real space, when I sell a record, I don't have it anymore, +while in cyberspace, when someone shares my 1949 recording of Bernstein's "Two +Love Songs," I still have it. That difference would matter economically if the +owner of the 1949 copyright were selling the record in competition to my +sharing. But we're talking about the class of content that is not currently +commercially available. The Internet is making it available, through +cooperative sharing, without competing with the market. +={ Bernstein, Leonard ; + Internet : + books on +4 +} + +It may well be, all things considered, that it would be better if the copyright +owner got something from this trade. But just because it may well be better, it +doesn't follow that it would be good to ban used book stores. Or put +differently, if you think that type C sharing should be stopped, do you think +that libraries and used book stores should be shut as well? + +Finally, and perhaps most importantly, file-sharing networks enable type D +sharing to occur - the sharing of content that copyright owners want to have +shared or for which there is no continuing copyright. This sharing clearly +benefits authors and society. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow, for +example, released his first novel, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, both +free on-line and in bookstores on the same day. His (and his publisher's) +thinking was that the on-line distribution would be a great advertisement for +the "real" book. People would read part on-line, and then decide whether they +liked the book or not. If they liked it, they would be more likely to buy it. +Doctorow's content is type D content. If sharing networks enable his work to be +spread, then both he and society are better off. (Actually, much better off: It +is a great book!) +={ Doctorow, Cory ; + Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Doctorow) +} + +Likewise for work in the public domain: This sharing benefits society with no +legal harm to authors at all. If efforts to solve the problem of type A sharing +destroy the opportunity for type D sharing, then we lose something important in +order to protect type A content. +={ public domain : + p2p sharing of works in +} + +The point throughout is this: While the recording industry understandably says, +"This is how much we've lost," we must also ask, "How much has society gained +from p2p sharing? What are the efficiencies? What is the content that otherwise +would be unavailable?" + +For unlike the piracy I described in the first section of this chapter, much of +the "piracy" that file sharing enables is plainly legal and good. And like the +piracy I described in chapter 4, much of this piracy is motivated by a new way +of spreading content caused by changes in the technology of distribution. Thus, +consistent with the tradition that gave us Hollywood, radio, the recording +industry, and cable TV, the question we should be asking about file sharing is +how best to preserve its benefits while minimizing (to the extent possible) the +wrongful harm it causes artists. The question is one of balance. The law should +seek that balance, and that balance will be found only with time. + +"But isn't the war just a war against illegal sharing? Isn't the target just +what you call type A sharing?" +={ piracy : + profit reduction as criterion of +} + +You would think. And we should hope. But so far, it is not. The effect of the +war purportedly on type A sharing alone has been felt far beyond that one class +of sharing. That much is obvious from the Napster case itself. When Napster +told the district court that it had developed a technology to block the +transfer of 99.4 percent of identified infringing material, the district court +told counsel for Napster 99.4 percent was not good enough. Napster had to push +the infringements "down to zero."~{ See Transcript of Proceedings, In Re: +Napster Copyright Litigation at 34- 35 (N.D. Cal., 11 July 2001), nos. +MDL-00-1369 MHP, C 99-5183 MHP, available at link #21. For an account of the +litigation and its toll on Napster, see Joseph Menn, /{All the Rave: The Rise +and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster}/ (New York: Crown Business, 2003), 269-82. +}~ +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + zero tolerance in +2 ; + Napster : + infringing material blocked by +1 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + infringement protections in +1 +} + +If 99.4 percent is not good enough, then this is a war on file-sharing +technologies, not a war on copyright infringement. There is no way to assure +that a p2p system is used 100 percent of the time in compliance with the law, +any more than there is a way to assure that 100 percent of VCRs or 100 percent +of Xerox machines or 100 percent of handguns are used in compliance with the +law. Zero tolerance means zero p2p. The court's ruling means that we as a +society must lose the benefits of p2p, even for the totally legal and +beneficial uses they serve, simply to assure that there are zero copyright +infringements caused by p2p. + +Zero tolerance has not been our history. It has not produced the content +industry that we know today. The history of American law has been a process of +balance. As new technologies changed the way content was distributed, the law +adjusted, after some time, to the new technology. In this adjustment, the law +sought to ensure the legitimate rights of creators while protecting innovation. +Sometimes this has meant more rights for creators. Sometimes less. + +So, as we've seen, when "mechanical reproduction" threatened the interests of +composers, Congress balanced the rights of composers against the interests of +the recording industry. It granted rights to composers, but also to the +recording artists: Composers were to be paid, but at a price set by Congress. +But when radio started broadcasting the recordings made by these recording +artists, and they complained to Congress that their "creative property" was not +being respected (since the radio station did not have to pay them for the +creativity it broadcast), Congress rejected their claim. An indirect benefit +was enough. +={ artists : + recording industry payments to ; + composers, copyright protections of ; + Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +3 | on recording industry +1 ; + copyright law : + on music recordings +2 | statutory licenses in +2 ; + radio : + music recordings played on ; + recording industry : + artist remuneration in | copyright protections in | radio broadcast and ; + statutory licenses : + composer's rights vs. producers' rights in +} + +Cable TV followed the pattern of record albums. When the courts rejected the +claim that cable broadcasters had to pay for the content they rebroadcast, +Congress responded by giving broadcasters a right to compensation, but at a +level set by the law. It likewise gave cable companies the right to the +content, so long as they paid the statutory price. +={ cable television +1 ; + Congress, U.S. : + on cable television +1 ; + copyright law : + on cable television rebroadcasting +1 ; + television : + cable vs. broadcast +1 +} + +This compromise, like the compromise affecting records and player pianos, +served two important goals - indeed, the two central goals of any copyright +legislation. First, the law assured that new innovators would have the freedom +to develop new ways to deliver content. Second, the law assured that copyright +holders would be paid for the content that was distributed. One fear was that +if Congress simply required cable TV to pay copyright holders whatever they +demanded for their content, then copyright holders associated with broadcasters +would use their power to stifle this new technology, cable. But if Congress had +permitted cable to use broadcasters' content for free, then it would have +unfairly subsidized cable. Thus Congress chose a path that would assure +/{compensation}/ without giving the past (broadcasters) control over the future +(cable). +={ copyright law : + innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in | two central goals of ; + innovation : + copyright profit balanced with | industry establishment opposed to +7 ; + player pianos +} + +In the same year that Congress struck this balance, two major producers and +distributors of film content filed a lawsuit against another technology, the +video tape recorder (VTR, or as we refer to them today, VCRs) that Sony had +produced, the Betamax. Disney's and Universal's claim against Sony was +relatively simple: Sony produced a device, Disney and Universal claimed, that +enabled consumers to engage in copyright infringement. Because the device that +Sony built had a "record" button, the device could be used to record +copyrighted movies and shows. Sony was therefore benefiting from the copyright +infringement of its customers. It should therefore, Disney and Universal +claimed, be partially liable for that infringement. +={ Betamax +2 ; + cassette recording : + VCRs +2 ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + distribution technology targeted in +12 ; + Disney, Inc. : + Sony Betamax technology opposed by +6 ; + film industry : + VCR taping facility opposed by +6 ; + Sony : + Betamax technology developed by +2 ; + television : + VCR taping of +2 ; + VCRs +2 ; + Universal Pictures +8 +} + +There was something to Disney's and Universal's claim. Sony did decide to +design its machine to make it very simple to record television shows. It could +have built the machine to block or inhibit any direct copying from a television +broadcast. Or possibly, it could have built the machine to copy only if there +were a special "copy me" signal on the line. It was clear that there were many +television shows that did not grant anyone permission to copy. Indeed, if +anyone had asked, no doubt the majority of shows would not have authorized +copying. And in the face of this obvious preference, Sony could have designed +its system to minimize the opportunity for copyright infringement. It did not, +and for that, Disney and Universal wanted to hold it responsible for the +architecture it chose. + +MPAA president Jack Valenti became the studios' most vocal champion. Valenti +called VCRs "tapeworms." He warned, "When there are 20, 30, 40 million of these +VCRs in the land, we will be invaded by millions of 'tapeworms,' eating away at +the very heart and essence of the most precious asset the copyright owner has, +his copyright."~{ Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders): Hearing +on S. 1758 Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 97th Cong., 1st and +2nd sess., 459 (1982) (testimony of Jack Valenti, president, Motion Picture +Association of America, Inc.). }~ "One does not have to be trained in +sophisticated marketing and creative judgment," he told Congress, "to +understand the devastation on the after-theater marketplace caused by the +hundreds of millions of tapings that will adversely impact on the future of the +creative community in this country. It is simply a question of basic economics +and plain common sense."~{ Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders), +475. }~ Indeed, as surveys would later show, 45 percent of VCR owners had movie +libraries of ten videos or more~{ /{Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Sony Corp. +of America,}/ 480 F. Supp. 429, 438 (C.D. Cal., 1979). }~ - a use the Court +would later hold was not "fair." By "allowing VCR owners to copy freely by the +means of an exemption from copyright infringement without creating a mechanism +to compensate copyright owners," Valenti testified, Congress would "take from +the owners the very essence of their property: the exclusive right to control +who may use their work, that is, who may copy it and thereby profit from its +reproduction."~{ Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders), 485 +(testimony of Jack Valenti). }~ +={ Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +3 | on VCR technology ; + Valenti, Jack : + on VCR technology +1 +} + +It took eight years for this case to be resolved by the Supreme Court. In the +interim, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Hollywood in its +jurisdiction - leading Judge Alex Kozinski, who sits on that court, refers to +it as the "Hollywood Circuit" - held that Sony would be liable for the +copyright infringement made possible by its machines. Under the Ninth Circuit's +rule, this totally familiar technology - which Jack Valenti had called "the +Boston Strangler of the American film industry" (worse yet, it was a +/{Japanese}/ Boston Strangler of the American film industry) - was an illegal +technology.~{ /{Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Sony Corp. of America,}/ 659 F. +2d 963 (9th Cir. 1981). }~ +={ Court of Appeals : + Ninth Circuit ; + Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + on VCR technology +3 ; + Kozinski, Alex +} + +But the Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Ninth Circuit. And in its +reversal, the Court clearly articulated its understanding of when and whether +courts should intervene in such disputes. As the Court wrote, +={ Supreme Court, U.S. : + on balance of interests in copyright law +2 +} + +_1 Sound policy, as well as history, supports our consistent deference to +Congress when major technological innovations alter the market for copyrighted +materials. Congress has the constitutional authority and the institutional +ability to accommodate fully the varied permutations of competing interests +that are inevitably implicated by such new technology."~{ /{Sony Corp. of +America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.,}/ 464 U.S. 417, 431 (1984). }~ +={ innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in +12 ; + innovation : + copyright profit balanced with +12 +} + +Congress was asked to respond to the Supreme Court's decision. But as with the +plea of recording artists about radio broadcasts, Congress ignored the request. +Congress was convinced that American film got enough, this "taking" +notwithstanding. +={ cassette recording : + VCRs +3 ; + Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +4 | on VCR technology +3 ; + VCRs +3 +} + +If we put these cases together, a pattern is clear: + +table{~h c4; 10; 30; 30; 30; + +CASE +WHOSE VALUE WAS "PIRATED" +RESPONSE OF THE COURTS +RESPONSE OF CONGRESS + +Recordings +Composers +No Protection +Statutory License + +Radio +Recording Artists +N/A +Nothing + +Cable TV +Broadcasters +No Protection +Statutory License + +VCR +Film Creators +No Protection +Nothing + +}table + +In each case throughout our history, a new technology changed the way content +was distributed.~{ These are the most important instances in our history, but +there are other cases as well. The technology of digital audio tape (DAT), for +example, was regulated by Congress to minimize the risk of piracy. The remedy +Congress imposed did burden DAT producers, by taxing tape sales and controlling +the technology of DAT. See Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (Title 17 of the +/{United States Code}/), Pub. L. No. 102-563, 106 Stat. 4237, codified at 17 +U.S.C. §1001. Again, however, this regulation did not eliminate the opportunity +for free riding in the sense I've described. See Lessig, /{Future,}/ 71. See +also Picker, "From Edison to the Broadcast Flag," /{University of Chicago Law +Review}/ 70 (2003): 293-96. }~ In each case, throughout our history, that +change meant that someone got a "free ride" on someone else's work. + +In /{none}/ of these cases did either the courts or Congress eliminate all free +riding. In /{none}/ of these cases did the courts or Congress insist that the +law should assure that the copyright holder get all the value that his +copyright created. In every case, the copyright owners complained of "piracy." +In every case, Congress acted to recognize some of the legiti macy in the +behavior of the "pirates." In each case, Congress allowed some new technology +to benefit from content made before. It balanced the interests at stake. + +When you think across these examples, and the other examples that make up the +first four chapters of this section, this balance makes sense. Was Walt Disney +a pirate? Would doujinshi be better if creators had to ask permission? Should +tools that enable others to capture and spread images as a way to cultivate or +criticize our culture be better regulated? Is it really right that building a +search engine should expose you to $15 million in damages? Would it have been +better if Edison had controlled film? Should every cover band have to hire a +lawyer to get permission to record a song? +={ Disney, Walt ; + Edison, Thomas +} + +We could answer yes to each of these questions, but our tradition has answered +no. In our tradition, as the Supreme Court has stated, copyright "has never +accorded the copyright owner complete control over all possible uses of his +work."~{ /{Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.,}/ 464 U.S. +417, 432 (1984). }~ Instead, the particular uses that the law regulates have +been defined by balancing the good that comes from granting an exclusive right +against the burdens such an exclusive right creates. And this balancing has +historically been done /{after}/ a technology has matured, or settled into the +mix of technologies that facilitate the distribution of content. +={ Supreme Court, U.S. : + on balance of interests in copyright law +} + +We should be doing the same thing today. The technology of the Internet is +changing quickly. The way people connect to the Internet (wires vs. wireless) +is changing very quickly. No doubt the network should not become a tool for +"stealing" from artists. But neither should the law become a tool to entrench +one particular way in which artists (or more accurately, distributors) get +paid. As I describe in some detail in the last chapter of this book, we should +be securing income to artists while we allow the market to secure the most +efficient way to promote and distribute content. This will require changes in +the law, at least in the interim. These changes should be designed to balance +the protection of the law against the strong public interest that innovation +continue. + +This is especially true when a new technology enables a vastly superior mode of +distribution. And this p2p has done. P2p technologies can be ideally efficient +in moving content across a widely diverse network. Left to develop, they could +make the network vastly more efficient. Yet these "potential public benefits," +as John Schwartz writes in /{The New York Times}/, "could be delayed in the P2P +fight."~{ John Schwartz, "New Economy: The Attack on Peer-to-Peer Software +Echoes Past Efforts," /{New York Times,}/ 22 September 2003, C3. }~ +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + benefits of +1 ; + Schwartz, John +} + +!_ Yet when anyone +begins to talk about "balance," the copyright warriors raise a different +argument. "All this hand waving about balance and incentives," they say, +"misses a fundamental point. Our content," the warriors insist, "is our +/{property}/. Why should we wait for Congress to 'rebalance' our property +rights? Do you have to wait before calling the police when your car has been +stolen? And why should Congress deliberate at all about the merits of this +theft? Do we ask whether the car thief had a good use for the car before we +arrest him?" + +"It is /{our property}/," the warriors insist. "And it should be protected just +as any other property is protected." + +:B~ "PROPERTY" + +1~intro_property [Intro]-# + +!_ The copyright warriors +are right: A copyright is a kind of property. It can be owned and sold, and the +law protects against its theft. Ordinarily, the copyright owner gets to hold +out for any price he wants. Markets reckon the supply and demand that partially +determine the price she can get. +={ copyright : + as property +5 ; + property rights : + copyright vs. +5 +} + +% would have placed index links on heading above, but is an un-numbered heading + +But in ordinary language, to call a copyright a "property" right is a bit +misleading, for the property of copyright is an odd kind of property. Indeed, +the very idea of property in any idea or any expression is very odd. I +understand what I am taking when I take the picnic table you put in your +backyard. I am taking a thing, the picnic table, and after I take it, you don't +have it. But what am I taking when I take the good /{idea}/ you had to put a +picnic table in the backyard - by, for example, going to Sears, buying a table, +and putting it in my backyard? What is the thing I am taking then? + +The point is not just about the thingness of picnic tables versus ideas, though +that's an important difference. The point instead is that in the ordinary case +- indeed, in practically every case except for a narrow range of exceptions - +ideas released to the world are free. I don't take anything from you when I +copy the way you dress - though I might seem weird if I did it every day, and +especially weird if you are a woman. Instead, as Thomas Jefferson said (and as +is especially true when I copy the way someone else dresses), - He who receives +an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who +lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."~{ Letter from +Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson (13 August 1813) in /{The Writings of +Thomas Jefferson,}/ vol. 6 (Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., +1903), 330, 333-34. }~ +={ Jefferson, Thomas } + +The exceptions to free use are ideas and expressions within the reach of the +law of patent and copyright, and a few other domains that I won't discuss here. +Here the law says you can't take my idea or expression without my permission: +The law turns the intangible into property. +={ property rights : + intangibility of +} + +But how, and to what extent, and in what form - the details, in other words - +matter. To get a good sense of how this practice of turning the intangible into +property emerged, we need to place this "property" in its proper context.~{ As +the legal realists taught American law, all property rights are intangible. A +property right is simply a right that an individual has against the world to do +or not do certain things that may or may not attach to a physical object. The +right itself is intangible, even if the object to which it is (metaphorically) +attached is tangible. See Adam Mossoff, "What Is Property? Putting the Pieces +Back Together," /{Arizona Law Review}/ 45 (2003): 373, 429 n. 241. }~ + +My strategy in doing this will be the same as my strategy in the preceding +part. I offer four stories to help put the idea of "copyright material is +property" in context. Where did the idea come from? What are its limits? How +does it function in practice? After these stories, the significance of this +true statement - "copyright material is property" - will be a bit more clear, +and its implications will be revealed as quite different from the implications +that the copyright warriors would have us draw. + +1~ Chapter Six: Founders +={ books : + English copyright law developed for +40 ; + copyright law : + development of +40 | English +40 ; + England, copyright laws developed in +40 ; + United Kingdom : + history of copyright law in +40 +} + +!_ William Shakespeare +wrote /{Romeo and Juliet}/ in 1595. The play was first published in 1597. It +was the eleventh major play that Shakespeare had written. He would continue to +write plays through 1613, and the plays that he wrote have continued to define +Anglo-American culture ever since. So deeply have the works of a +sixteenth-century writer seeped into our culture that we often don't even +recognize their source. I once overheard someone commenting on Kenneth +Branagh's adaptation of Henry V: "I liked it, but Shakespeare is so full of +clichés." +={ Branagh, Kenneth ; + Henry V. ; + Shakespeare, William ; + Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) +2 +} + +In 1774, almost 180 years after /{Romeo and Juliet}/ was written, the +"copy-right" for the work was still thought by many to be the exclusive right +of a single London publisher, Jacob Tonson.~{ Jacob Tonson is typically +remembered for his associations with prominent eighteenth-century literary +figures, especially John Dryden, and for his handsome "definitive editions" of +classic works. In addition to /{Romeo and Juliet,}/ he published an astonishing +array of works that still remain at the heart of the English canon, including +collected works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Dryden. See +Keith Walker, "Jacob Tonson, Bookseller," /{American Scholar}/ 61:3 (1992): +424-31. }~ Tonson was the most prominent of a small group of publishers called +the Conger~{ Lyman Ray Patterson, /{Copyright in Historical Perspective}/ +(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 151-52. }~ who controlled +bookselling in England during the eighteenth century. The Conger claimed a +perpetual right to control the "copy" of books that they had acquired from +authors. That perpetual right meant that no one else could publish copies of a +book to which they held the copyright. Prices of the classics were thus kept +high; competition to produce better or cheaper editions was eliminated. +={ Conger ; + Tonson, Jacob +1 +} + +Now, there's something puzzling about the year 1774 to anyone who knows a +little about copyright law. The better-known year in the history of copyright +is 1710, the year that the British Parliament adopted the first "copyright" +act. Known as the Statute of Anne, the act stated that all published works +would get a copyright term of fourteen years, renewable once if the author was +alive, and that all works already published by 1710 would get a single term of +twenty-one additional years.~{ As Siva Vaidhyanathan nicely argues, it is +erroneous to call this a "copyright law." See Vaidhyanathan, /{Copyrights and +Copywrongs,}/ 40. }~ Under this law, /{Romeo and Juliet}/ should have been free +in 1731. So why was there any issue about it still being under Tonson's control +in 1774? +={ British Parliament ; + copyright : + duration of +1 | renewability of ; + Statute of Anne (1710) +} + +The reason is that the English hadn't yet agreed on what a "copyright" was - +indeed, no one had. At the time the English passed the Statute of Anne, there +was no other legislation governing copyrights. The last law regulating +publishers, the Licensing Act of 1662, had expired in 1695. That law gave +publishers a monopoly over publishing, as a way to make it easier for the Crown +to control what was published. But after it expired, there was no positive law +that said that the publishers, or "Stationers," had an exclusive right to print +books. +={ law : + common vs. positive +1 ; + positive law ; + Licensing Act (1662) +} + +There was no /{positive}/ law, but that didn't mean that there was no law. The +Anglo-American legal tradition looks to both the words of legislatures and the +words of judges to know the rules that are to govern how people are to behave. +We call the words from legislatures "positive law." We call the words from +judges "common law." The common law sets the background against which +legislatures legislate; the legislature, ordinarily, can trump that background +only if it passes a law to displace it. And so the real question after the +licensing statutes had expired was whether the common law protected a +copyright, independent of any positive law. +={ common law } + +This question was important to the publishers, or "booksellers," as they were +called, because there was growing competition from foreign publishers. The +Scottish, in particular, were increasingly publishing and exporting books to +England. That competition reduced the profits of the Conger, which reacted by +demanding that Parliament pass a law to again give them exclusive control over +publishing. That demand ultimately resulted in the Statute of Anne. +={ Conger ; + British Parliament +2 ; + Scottish publishers ; + Statute of Anne (1710) +1 +} + +The Statute of Anne granted the author or "proprietor" of a book an exclusive +right to print that book. In an important limitation, however, and to the +horror of the booksellers, the law gave the bookseller that right for a limited +term. At the end of that term, the copyright "expired," and the work would then +be free and could be published by anyone. Or so the legislature is thought to +have believed. +={ copyright : + as narrow monopoly right +33 +} + +Now, the thing to puzzle about for a moment is this: Why would Parliament limit +the exclusive right? Not why would they limit it to the particular limit they +set, but why would they limit the right /{at all?}}/ + +For the booksellers, and the authors whom they represented, had a very strong +claim. Take /{Romeo and Juliet}/ as an example: That play was written by +Shakespeare. It was his genius that brought it into the world. He didn't take +anybody's property when he created this play (that's a controversial claim, but +never mind), and by his creating this play, he didn't make it any harder for +others to craft a play. So why is it that the law would ever allow someone else +to come along and take Shakespeare's play without his, or his estate's, +permission? What reason is there to allow someone else to "steal" Shakespeare's +work? +={ Shakespeare, William ; + Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) +} + +The answer comes in two parts. We first need to see something special about the +notion of "copyright" that existed at the time of the Statute of Anne. Second, +we have to see something important about "booksellers." +={ Statute of Anne (1710) } + +First, about copyright. In the last three hundred years, we have come to apply +the concept of "copyright" ever more broadly. But in 1710, it wasn't so much a +concept as it was a very particular right. The copyright was born as a very +specific set of restrictions: It forbade others from reprinting a book. In +1710, the "copy-right" was a right to use a particular machine to replicate a +particular work. It did not go beyond that very narrow right. It did not +control any more generally how a work could be /{used}/. Today the right +includes a large collection of restrictions on the freedom of others: It grants +the author the exclusive right to copy, the exclusive right to distribute, the +exclusive right to perform, and so on. +={ usage restrictions attached to } + +So, for example, even if the copyright to Shakespeare's works were perpetual, +all that would have meant under the original meaning of the term was that no +one could reprint Shakespeare's work without the permission of the Shakespeare +estate. It would not have controlled anything, for example, about how the work +could be performed, whether the work could be translated, or whether Kenneth +Branagh would be allowed to make his films. The "copy-right" was only an +exclusive right to print - no less, of course, but also no more. +={ Branagh, Kenneth ; + Shakespeare, William +} + +Even that limited right was viewed with skepticism by the British. They had had +a long and ugly experience with "exclusive rights," especially "exclusive +rights" granted by the Crown. The English had fought a civil war in part about +the Crown's practice of handing out monopolies - especially monopolies for +works that already existed. King Henry VIII granted a patent to print the Bible +and a monopoly to Darcy to print playing cards. The English Parliament began to +fight back against this power of the Crown. In 1656, it passed the Statute of +Monopolies, limiting monopolies to patents for new inventions. And by 1710, +Parliament was eager to deal with the growing monopoly in publishing. +={ Henry VIII, King of England ; + monopoly, copyright as +27 ; + Statue of Monopolies (1656) +} + +Thus the "copy-right," when viewed as a monopoly right, was naturally viewed as +a right that should be limited. (However convincing the claim that "it's my +property, and I should have it forever," try sounding convincing when uttering, +"It's my monopoly, and I should have it forever.") The state would protect the +exclusive right, but only so long as it benefited society. The British saw the +harms from special-interest favors; they passed a law to stop them. + +Second, about booksellers. It wasn't just that the copyright was a monopoly. It +was also that it was a monopoly held by the booksellers. Booksellers sound +quaint and harmless to us. They were not viewed as harmless in +seventeenth-century England. Members of the Conger were increasingly seen as +monopolists of the worst kind - tools of the Crown's repression, selling the +liberty of England to guarantee themselves a monopoly profit. The attacks +against these monopolists were harsh: Milton described them as "old patentees +and monopolizers in the trade of book-selling"; they were "men who do not +therefore labour in an honest profession to which learning is indetted."~{ +Philip Wittenberg, /{The Protection and Marketing of Literary Property}/ (New +York: J. Messner, Inc., 1937), 31. }~ +={ Milton, John ; + booksellers, English +25 ; + Conger ; + copyright : + duration of +25 +} + +Many believed the power the booksellers exercised over the spread of knowledge +was harming that spread, just at the time the Enlightenment was teaching the +importance of education and knowledge spread generally. The idea that knowledge +should be free was a hallmark of the time, and these powerful commercial +interests were interfering with that idea. +={ Enlightenment ; + knowledge, freedom of +} + +To balance this power, Parliament decided to increase competition among +booksellers, and the simplest way to do that was to spread the wealth of +valuable books. Parliament therefore limited the term of copyrights, and +thereby guaranteed that valuable books would become open to any publisher to +publish after a limited time. Thus the setting of the term for existing works +to just twenty-one years was a compromise to fight the power of the +booksellers. The limitation on terms was an indirect way to assure competition +among publishers, and thus the construction and spread of culture. +={ British Parliament +4 } + +When 1731 (1710 + 21) came along, however, the booksellers were getting +anxious. They saw the consequences of more competition, and like every +competitor, they didn't like them. At first booksellers simply ignored the +Statute of Anne, continuing to insist on the perpetual right to control +publication. But in 1735 and 1737, they tried to persuade Parliament to extend +their terms. Twenty-one years was not enough, they said; they needed more time. +={ Statute of Anne (1710) +2 ; + copyright : + in perpetuity +2 +} + +Parliament rejected their requests. As one pamphleteer put it, in words that +echo today, + +_1 I see no Reason for granting a further Term now, which will not hold as well +for granting it again and again, as often as the Old ones Expire; so that +should this Bill pass, it will in Effect be establishing a perpetual Monopoly, +a Thing deservedly odious in the Eye of the Law; it will be a great Cramp to +Trade, a Discouragement to Learning, no Benefit to the Authors, but a general +Tax on the Publick; and all this only to increase the private Gain of the +Booksellers."~{ A Letter to a Member of Parliament concerning the Bill now +depending in the House of Commons, for making more effectual an Act in the +Eighth Year of the Reign of Queen Anne, entitled, An Act for the Encouragement +of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or +Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned (London, 1735), +in Brief Amici Curiae of Tyler T. Ochoa et al., 8, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 537 +U.S. 186 (2003) (No. 01- 618). }~ + +Having failed in Parliament, the publishers turned to the courts in a series of +cases. Their argument was simple and direct: The Statute of Anne gave authors +certain protections through positive law, but those protections were not +intended as replacements for the common law. Instead, they were intended simply +to supplement the common law. Under common law, it was already wrong to take +another person's creative "property" and use it without his permission. The +Statute of Anne, the booksellers argued, didn't change that. Therefore, just +because the protections of the Statute of Anne expired, that didn't mean the +protections of the common law expired: Under the common law they had the right +to ban the publication of a book, even if its Statute of Anne copyright had +expired. This, they argued, was the only way to protect authors. +={ common law ; + law : + common vs. positive ; + positive law +} + +This was a clever argument, and one that had the support of some of the leading +jurists of the day. It also displayed extraordinary chutzpah. Until then, as +law professor Raymond Patterson has put it, "The publishers ... had as much +concern for authors as a cattle rancher has for cattle."~{ Lyman Ray Patterson, +"Free Speech, Copyright, and Fair Use," /{Vanderbilt Law Review}/ 40 (1987): +28. For a wonderfully compelling account, see Vaidhyanathan, 37-48. }~ The +bookseller didn't care squat for the rights of the author. His concern was the +monopoly profit that the author's work gave. + +The booksellers' argument was not accepted without a fight. The hero of this +fight was a Scottish bookseller named Alexander Donaldson.~{ For a compelling +account, see David Saunders, /{Authorship and Copyright}/ (London: Routledge, +1992), 62-69. }~ +={ Donaldson, Alexander +3 ; + Patterson, Raymond ; + Scottish publishers +3 +} + +Donaldson was an outsider to the London Conger. He began his career in +Edinburgh in 1750. The focus of his business was inexpensive reprints "of +standard works whose copyright term had expired," at least under the Statute of +Anne.~{ Mark Rose, /{Authors and Owners}/ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, +1993), 92. }~ Donaldson's publishing house prospered and became "something of a +center for literary Scotsmen." "[A]mong them," Professor Mark Rose writes, was +"the young James Boswell who, together with his friend Andrew Erskine, +published an anthology of contemporary Scottish poems with Donaldson."~{ Ibid., +93. }~ +={ Statute of Anne (1710) +8 ; + Conger +1 ; + Boswell, James ; + Erskine, Andrew ; + Rose, Mark +} + +When the London booksellers tried to shut down Donaldson's shop in Scotland, he +responded by moving his shop to London, where he sold inexpensive editions "of +the most popular English books, in defiance of the supposed common law right of +Literary Property."~{ Lyman Ray Patterson, /{Copyright in Historical +Perspective,}/ 167 (quoting Borwell). }~ His books undercut the Conger prices +by 30 to 50 percent, and he rested his right to compete upon the ground that, +under the Statute of Anne, the works he was selling had passed out of +protection. +={ common law +3 } + +The London booksellers quickly brought suit to block "piracy" like Donaldson's. +A number of actions were successful against the "pirates," the most important +early victory being /{Millar v. Taylor}/. +={ Millar v. Taylor +5 } + +Millar was a bookseller who in 1729 had purchased the rights to James Thomson's +poem "The Seasons." Millar complied with the requirements of the Statute of +Anne, and therefore received the full protection of the statute. After the term +of copyright ended, Robert Taylor began printing a competing volume. Millar +sued, claiming a perpetual common law right, the Statute of Anne +notwithstanding.~{ Howard B. Abrams, "The Historic Foundation of American +Copyright Law: Exploding the Myth of Common Law Copyright," /{Wayne Law +Review}/ 29 (1983): 1152. }~ +={ Thomson, James +1 ; + copyright : + in perpetuity +1 ; + Seasons, The (Thomson) ; + Taylor, Robert +} + +Astonishingly to modern lawyers, one of the greatest judges in English history, +Lord Mansfield, agreed with the booksellers. Whatever protection the Statute of +Anne gave booksellers, it did not, he held, extinguish any common law right. +The question was whether the common law would protect the author against +subsequent "pirates." Mansfield's answer was yes: The common law would bar +Taylor from reprinting Thomson's poem without Millar's permission. That common +law rule thus effectively gave the booksellers a perpetual right to control the +publication of any book assigned to them. +={ Mansfield, William Murray, Lord +1 } + +Considered as a matter of abstract justice - reasoning as if justice were just +a matter of logical deduction from first principles - Mansfield's conclusion +might make some sense. But what it ignored was the larger issue that Parliament +had struggled with in 1710: How best to limit the monopoly power of publishers? +Parliament's strategy was to offer a term for existing works that was long +enough to buy peace in 1710, but short enough to assure that culture would pass +into competition within a reasonable period of time. Within twenty-one years, +Parliament believed, Britain would mature from the controlled culture that the +Crown coveted to the free culture that we inherited. +={ British Parliament +2 } + +The fight to defend the limits of the Statute of Anne was not to end there, +however, and it is here that Donaldson enters the mix. +={ Donaldson, Alexander +5 ; + Scottish publishers +5 ; + Statute of Anne (1710) +2 +} + +Millar died soon after his victory, so his case was not appealed. His estate +sold Thomson's poems to a syndicate of printers that included Thomas Beckett. +~{ Ibid., 1156. }~ Donaldson then released an unauthorized edition of Thomson's +works. Beckett, on the strength of the decision in /{Millar}/, got an +injunction against Donaldson. Donaldson appealed the case to the House of +Lords, which functioned much like our own Supreme Court. In February of 1774, +that body had the chance to interpret the meaning of Parliament's limits from +sixty years before. +={ Thomson, James ; + Becket, Thomas ; + House of Lords +5 ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + House of Lords vs. +2 +} + +As few legal cases ever do, /{Donaldson v. Beckett}/ drew an enormous amount of +attention throughout Britain. Donaldson's lawyers argued that whatever rights +may have existed under the common law, the Statute of Anne terminated those +rights. After passage of the Statute of Anne, the only legal protection for an +exclusive right to control publication came from that statute. Thus, they +argued, after the term specified in the Statute of Anne expired, works that had +been protected by the statute were no longer protected. +={ Donaldson v. Beckett +8 ; + common law +3 +} + +The House of Lords was an odd institution. Legal questions were presented to +the House and voted upon first by the "law lords," members of special legal +distinction who functioned much like the Justices in our Supreme Court. Then, +after the law lords voted, the House of Lords generally voted. + +The reports about the law lords' votes are mixed. On some counts, it looks as +if perpetual copyright prevailed. But there is no ambiguity about how the House +of Lords voted as whole. By a two-to-one majority (22 to 11) they voted to +reject the idea of perpetual copyrights. Whatever one's understanding of the +common law, now a copyright was fixed for a limited time, after which the work +protected by copyright passed into the public domain. +={ copyright : + in perpetuity +1 ; + public domain : + English legal establishment of +1 +} + +"The public domain." Before the case of /{Donaldson v. Beckett}/, there was no +clear idea of a public domain in England. Before 1774, there was a strong +argument that common law copyrights were perpetual. After 1774, the public +domain was born. For the first time in Anglo- American history, the legal +control over creative works expired, and the greatest works in English history +- including those of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Johnson, and Bunyan - were +free of legal restraint. +={ Bacon, Francis ; + Bunyan, John ; + Johnson, Samuel ; + Milton, John ; + Shakespeare, William +} + +It is hard for us to imagine, but this decision by the House of Lords fueled an +extraordinarily popular and political reaction. In Scotland, where most of the +"pirate publishers" did their work, people celebrated the decision in the +streets. As the /{Edinburgh Advertiser}/ reported, "No private cause has so +much engrossed the attention of the public, and none has been tried before the +House of Lords in the decision of which so many individuals were interested." +"Great rejoicing in Edinburgh upon victory over literary property: bonfires and +illuminations."~{ Rose, 97. }~ +={ Scottish publishers } + +In London, however, at least among publishers, the reaction was equally strong +in the opposite direction. The /{Morning Chronicle}/ reported: + +_1 By the above decision ... near 200,000 pounds worth of what was honestly +purchased at public sale, and which was yesterday thought property is now +reduced to nothing. The Booksellers of London and Westminster, many of whom +sold estates and houses to purchase Copy-right, are in a manner ruined, and +those who after many years industry thought they had acquired a competency to +provide for their families now find themselves without a shilling to devise to +their successors."~{ Ibid. }~ + +"Ruined" is a bit of an exaggeration. But it is not an exaggeration to say that +the change was profound. The decision of the House of Lords meant that the +booksellers could no longer control how culture in England would grow and +develop. Culture in England was thereafter /{free}/. Not in the sense that +copyrights would not be respected, for of course, for a limited time after a +work was published, the bookseller had an exclusive right to control the +publication of that book. And not in the sense that books could be stolen, for +even after a copyright expired, you still had to buy the book from someone. But +/{free}/ in the sense that the culture and its growth would no longer be +controlled by a small group of publishers. As every free market does, this free +market of free culture would grow as the consumers and producers chose. English +culture would develop as the many English readers chose to let it develop - +chose in the books they bought and wrote; chose in the memes they repeated and +endorsed. Chose in a /{competitive context}/, not a context in which the +choices about what culture is available to people and how they get access to it +are made by the few despite the wishes of the many. +={ House of Lords ; + free culture : + English legal establishment of +} + +At least, this was the rule in a world where the Parliament is anti-monopoly, +resistant to the protectionist pleas of publishers. In a world where the +Parliament is more pliant, free culture would be less protected. +={ British Parliament } + +1~ Chapter Seven: Recorders +={ copyright law : + fair use and +22 ; + documentary film +22 ; + Else, Jon +22 ; + fair use : + in documentary film +22 ; + films : + fair use of copyrighted material in +22 +} + +!_ Jon Else +is a filmmaker. He is best known for his documentaries and has been very +successful in spreading his art. He is also a teacher, and as a teacher myself, +I envy the loyalty and admiration that his students feel for him. (I met, by +accident, two of his students at a dinner party. He was their god.) + +Else worked on a documentary that I was involved in. At a break, he told me a +story about the freedom to create with film in America today. + +In 1990, Else was working on a documentary about Wagner's Ring Cycle. The focus +was stagehands at the San Francisco Opera. Stage- hands are a particularly +funny and colorful element of an opera. During a show, they hang out below the +stage in the grips' lounge and in the lighting loft. They make a perfect +contrast to the art on the stage. +={ Wagner, Richard +1 ; + San Francisco Opera +} + +During one of the performances, Else was shooting some stage- hands playing +checkers. In one corner of the room was a television set. Playing on the +television set, while the stagehands played checkers and the opera company +played Wagner, was /{The Simpsons}/. As Else judged it, this touch of cartoon +helped capture the flavor of what was special about the scene. +={ Simpsons, The +16 } + +Years later, when he finally got funding to complete the film, Else attempted +to clear the rights for those few seconds of /{The Simpsons}/. For of course, +those few seconds are copyrighted; and of course, to use copyrighted material +you need the permission of the copyright owner, unless "fair use" or some other +privilege applies. +={ films : + multiple copyrights associated with +} + +Else called /{Simpsons}/ creator Matt Groening's office to get permission. +Groening approved the shot. The shot was a four-and-a-half-second image on a +tiny television set in the corner of the room. How could it hurt? Groening was +happy to have it in the film, but he told Else to contact Gracie Films, the +company that produces the program. +={ Gracie Films +1 ; + Groening, Matt +2 +} + +Gracie Films was okay with it, too, but they, like Groening, wanted to be +careful. So they told Else to contact Fox, Gracie's parent company. Else called +Fox and told them about the clip in the corner of the one room shot of the +film. Matt Groening had already given permission, Else said. He was just +confirming the permission with Fox. +={ Fox (film company) +1 } + +Then, as Else told me, "two things happened. First we discovered ... that Matt +Groening doesn't own his own creation - or at least that someone [at Fox] +believes he doesn't own his own creation." And second, Fox "wanted ten thousand +dollars as a licensing fee for us to use this four-point-five seconds of ... +entirely unsolicited /{Simpsons}/ which was in the corner of the shot." + +Else was certain there was a mistake. He worked his way up to someone he +thought was a vice president for licensing, Rebecca Herrera. He explained to +her, "There must be some mistake here. ... We're asking for your educational +rate on this." That was the educational rate, Herrera told Else. A day or so +later, Else called again to confirm what he had been told. +={ Herrera, Rebecca +1 } + +"I wanted to make sure I had my facts straight," he told me. "Yes, you have +your facts straight," she said. It would cost $10,000 to use the clip of /{The +Simpsons}/ in the corner of a shot in a documentary film about Wagner's Ring +Cycle. And then, astonishingly, Herrera told Else, "And if you quote me, I'll +turn you over to our attorneys." As an assistant to Herrera told Else later on, +"They don't give a shit. They just want the money." +={ Wagner, Richard } + +Else didn't have the money to buy the right to replay what was playing on the +television backstage at the San Francisco Opera.To reproduce this reality was +beyond the documentary filmmaker's budget. At the very last minute before the +film was to be released, Else digitally replaced the shot with a clip from +another film that he had worked on, /{The Day After Trinity}/, from ten years +before. +={ San Francisco Opera ; + Day After Trinity, The +} + +!_ There's no doubt +that someone, whether Matt Groening or Fox, owns the copyright to /{The +Simpsons}/. That copyright is their property. To use that copyrighted material +thus sometimes requires the permission of the copyright owner. If the use that +Else wanted to make of the /{Simpsons}/ copyright were one of the uses +restricted by the law, then he would need to get the permission of the +copyright owner before he could use the work in that way. And in a free market, +it is the owner of the copyright who gets to set the price for any use that the +law says the owner gets to control. +={ Fox (film company) +2 ; + Groening, Matt +2 +} + +For example, "public performance" is a use of /{The Simpsons}/ that the +copyright owner gets to control. If you take a selection of favorite episodes, +rent a movie theater, and charge for tickets to come see "My Favorite +/{Simpsons}/," then you need to get permission from the copyright owner. And +the copyright owner (rightly, in my view) can charge whatever she wants - $10 +or $1,000,000. That's her right, as set by the law. + +But when lawyers hear this story about Jon Else and Fox, their first thought is +"fair use."~{ For an excellent argument that such use is "fair use," but that +lawyers don't permit recognition that it is "fair use," see Richard A. Posner +with William F. Patry, "Fair Use and Statutory Reform in the Wake of +/{Eldred}/" (draft on file with author), University of Chicago Law School, 5 +August 2003. }~ Else's use of just 4.5 seconds of an indirect shot of a +/{Simpsons}/ episode is clearly a fair use of /{The Simpsons}/ - and fair use +does not require the permission of anyone. + +So I asked Else why he didn't just rely upon "fair use." Here's his reply: + +_1 The /{Simpsons}/ fiasco was for me a great lesson in the gulf between what +lawyers find irrelevant in some abstract sense, and what is crushingly relevant +in practice to those of us actually trying to make and broadcast documentaries. +I never had any doubt that it was "clearly fair use" in an absolute legal +sense. But I couldn't rely on the concept in any concrete way. Here's why: +={ fair use : + legal intimidation tactics against +6 +} + +_1 1. Before our films can be broadcast, the network requires that we buy +Errors and Omissions insurance. The carriers require a detailed "visual cue +sheet" listing the source and licensing status of each shot in the film. They +take a dim view of "fair use," and a claim of "fair use" can grind the +application process to a halt. +={ Errors and Omissions insurance } + +_1 2. I probably never should have asked Matt Groening in the first place. But +I knew (at least from folklore) that Fox had a history of tracking down and +stopping unlicensed /{Simpsons}/ usage, just as George Lucas had a very high +profile litigating /{Star Wars}/ usage. So I decided to play by the book, +thinking that we would be granted free or cheap license to four seconds of +/{Simpsons}/. As a documentary producer working to exhaustion on a shoestring, +the last thing I wanted was to risk legal trouble, even nuisance legal trouble, +and even to defend a principle. +={ Fox (film company) +1 ; + Groening, Matt ; + Lucas, George ; + Star Wars +} + +_1 3. I did, in fact, speak with one of your colleagues at Stanford Law School +... who confirmed that it was fair use. He also confirmed that Fox would +"depose and litigate you to within an inch of your life," regardless of the +merits of my claim. He made clear that it would boil down to who had the bigger +legal department and the deeper pockets, me or them. + +_1 4. The question of fair use usually comes up at the end of the project, when +we are up against a release deadline and out of money." + +In theory, fair use means you need no permission. The theory therefore supports +free culture and insulates against a permission culture. But in practice, fair +use functions very differently. The fuzzy lines of the law, tied to the +extraordinary liability if lines are crossed, means that the effective fair use +for many types of creators is slight. The law has the right aim; practice has +defeated the aim. + +This practice shows just how far the law has come from its eighteenth-century +roots. The law was born as a shield to protect publishers' profits against the +unfair competition of a pirate. It has matured into a sword that interferes +with any use, transformative or not. + +1~ Chapter Eight: Transformers +={ films : + clips and collages of +37 +} + +!_ In 1993, +Alex Alben was a lawyer working at Starwave, Inc. Starwave was an innovative +company founded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to develop digital +entertainment. Long before the Internet became popular, Starwave began +investing in new technology for delivering entertainment in anticipation of the +power of networks. +={ Alben, Alex +27 ; + Allen, Paul ; + Microsoft ; + Starwave +7 +} + +Alben had a special interest in new technology. He was intrigued by the +emerging market for CD-ROM technology - not to distribute film, but to do +things with film that otherwise would be very difficult. In 1993, he launched +an initiative to develop a product to build retrospectives on the work of +particular actors. The first actor chosen was Clint Eastwood. The idea was to +showcase all of the work of Eastwood, with clips from his films and interviews +with figures important to his career. +={ artists : + retrospective collections on +21 ; + CD-ROMs, film clips used in +21 ; + Eastwood, Clint +15 +} + +At that time, Eastwood had made more than fifty films, as an actor and as a +director. Alben began with a series of interviews with Eastwood, asking him +about his career. Because Starwave produced those interviews, it was free to +include them on the CD. + +That alone would not have made a very interesting product, so Starwave wanted +to add content from the movies in Eastwood's career: posters, scripts, and +other material relating to the films Eastwood made. Most of his career was +spent at Warner Brothers, and so it was relatively easy to get permission for +that content. +={ permissions : + for use of film clips +33 ; + Warner Brothers +} + +Then Alben and his team decided to include actual film clips. "Our goal was +that we were going to have a clip from every one of East-wood's films," Alben +told me. It was here that the problem arose. "No one had ever really done this +before," Alben explained. "No one had ever tried to do this in the context of +an artistic look at an actor's career." +={ films : + multiple copyrights associated with +14 +} + +Alben brought the idea to Michael Slade, the CEO of Starwave. Slade asked, +"Well, what will it take?" +={ Slade, Michael +2 } + +Alben replied, "Well, we're going to have to clear rights from everyone who +appears in these films, and the music and everything else that we want to use +in these film clips." Slade said, "Great! Go for it."~{ Technically, the rights +that Alben had to clear were mainly those of publicity"rights an artist has to +control the commercial exploitation of his image. But these rights, too, burden +"Rip, Mix, Burn" creativity, as this chapter evinces. }~ + +The problem was that neither Alben nor Slade had any idea what clearing those +rights would mean. Every actor in each of the films could have a claim to +royalties for the reuse of that film. But CD-ROMs had not been specified in the +contracts for the actors, so there was no clear way to know just what Starwave +was to do. + +I asked Alben how he dealt with the problem. With an obvious pride in his +resourcefulness that obscured the obvious bizarreness of his tale, Alben +recounted just what they did: + +_1 So we very mechanically went about looking up the film clips. We made some +artistic decisions about what film clips to include - of course we were going +to use the "Make my day" clip from /{Dirty Harry}/. But you then need to get +the guy on the ground who's wiggling under the gun and you need to get his +permission. And then you have to decide what you are going to pay him. +={ Dirty, Harry } + +_1 We decided that it would be fair if we offered them the day-player rate for +the right to reuse that performance. We're talking about a clip of less than a +minute, but to reuse that performance in the CD-ROM the rate at the time was +about $600. + +_1 So we had to identify the people - some of them were hard to identify +because in Eastwood movies you can't tell who's the guy crashing through the +glass - is it the actor or is it the stuntman? And then we just, we put +together a team, my assistant and some others, and we just started calling +people." + +Some actors were glad to help - Donald Sutherland, for example, followed up +himself to be sure that the rights had been cleared. Others were dumbfounded at +their good fortune. Alben would ask, "Hey, can I pay you $600 or maybe if you +were in two films, you know, $1,200?" And they would say, "Are you for real? +Hey, I'd love to get $1,200." And some of course were a bit difficult +(estranged ex-wives, in particular). But eventually, Alben and his team had +cleared the rights to this retrospective CD-ROM on Clint Eastwood's career. +={ Sutherland, Donald } + +It was one /{year}/ later - " and even then we weren't sure whether we were +totally in the clear." + +Alben is proud of his work. The project was the first of its kind and the only +time he knew of that a team had undertaken such a massive project for the +purpose of releasing a retrospective. + +_1 Everyone thought it would be too hard. Everyone just threw up their hands +and said, "Oh, my gosh, a film, it's so many copyrights, there's the music, +there's the screenplay, there's the director, there's the actors." But we just +broke it down. We just put it into its constituent parts and said, "Okay, +there's this many actors, this many directors, ... this many musicians," and we +just went at it very systematically and cleared the rights." + +And no doubt, the product itself was exceptionally good. Eastwood loved it, and +it sold very well. + +But I pressed Alben about how weird it seems that it would have to take a +year's work simply to clear rights. No doubt Alben had done this efficiently, +but as Peter Drucker has famously quipped, "There is nothing so useless as +doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."~{ U.S. Department of +Commerce Office of Acquisition Management, /{Seven Steps to Performance-Based +Services Acquisition,}/ available at link #22. }~ Did it make sense, I asked +Alben, that this is the way a new work has to be made? +={ Drucker, Peter } + +For, as he acknowledged, "very few ... have the time and resources, and the +will to do this," and thus, very few such works would ever be made. Does it +make sense, I asked him, from the standpoint of what anybody really thought +they were ever giving rights for originally, that you would have to go clear +rights for these kinds of clips? + +_1 I don't think so. When an actor renders a performance in a movie, he or she +gets paid very well. ... And then when 30 seconds of that performance is used +in a new product that is a retrospective of somebody's career, I don't think +that that person ... should be compensated for that." + +Or at least, is this /{how}/ the artist should be compensated? Would it make +sense, I asked, for there to be some kind of statutory license that someone +could pay and be free to make derivative use of clips like this? Did it really +make sense that a follow-on creator would have to track down every artist, +actor, director, musician, and get explicit permission from each? Wouldn't a +lot more be created if the legal part of the creative process could be made to +be more clean? + +_1 Absolutely. I think that if there were some fair-licensing mechanism - where +you weren't subject to hold-ups and you weren't subject to estranged former +spouses - you'd see a lot more of this work, because it wouldn't be so daunting +to try to put together a retrospective of someone's career and meaningfully +illustrate it with lots of media from that person's career. You'd build in a +cost as the producer of one of these things. You'd build in a cost of paying X +dollars to the talent that performed. But it would be a known cost. That's the +thing that trips everybody up and makes this kind of product hard to get off +the ground. If you knew I have a hundred minutes of film in this product and +it's going to cost me X, then you build your budget around it, and you can get +investments and everything else that you need to produce it. But if you say, +"Oh, I want a hundred minutes of something and I have no idea what it's going +to cost me, and a certain number of people are going to hold me up for money," +then it becomes difficult to put one of these things together." + +Alben worked for a big company. His company was backed by some of the richest +investors in the world. He therefore had authority and access that the average +Web designer would not have. So if it took him a year, how long would it take +someone else? And how much creativity is never made just because the costs of +clearing the rights are so high? + +These costs are the burdens of a kind of regulation. Put on a Republican hat +for a moment, and get angry for a bit. The government defines the scope of +these rights, and the scope defined determines how much it's going to cost to +negotiate them. (Remember the idea that land runs to the heavens, and imagine +the pilot purchasing fly- through rights as he negotiates to fly from Los +Angeles to San Francisco.) These rights might well have once made sense; but as +circumstances change, they make no sense at all. Or at least, a well-trained, +regulation-minimizing Republican should look at the rights and ask, "Does this +still make sense?" +={ Republican Party } + +I've seen the flash of recognition when people get this point, but only a few +times. The first was at a conference of federal judges in California. The +judges were gathered to discuss the emerging topic of cyber-law. I was asked to +be on the panel. Harvey Saferstein, a well-respected lawyer from an L.A. firm, +introduced the panel with a video that he and a friend, Robert Fairbank, had +produced. +={ Saferstein, Harvey ; + Fairbank, Robert +} + +The video was a brilliant collage of film from every period in the twentieth +century, all framed around the idea of a /{60 Minutes}/ episode. The execution +was perfect, down to the sixty-minute stopwatch. The judges loved every minute +of it. +={ 60 Minutes } + +When the lights came up, I looked over to my copanelist, David Nimmer, perhaps +the leading copyright scholar and practitioner in the nation. He had an +astonished look on his face, as he peered across the room of over 250 well- +entertained judges. Taking an ominous tone, he began his talk with a question: +"Do you know how many federal laws were just violated in this room?" +={ Nimmer, David +1 } + +For of course, the two brilliantly talented creators who made this film hadn't +done what Alben did. They hadn't spent a year clearing the rights to these +clips; technically, what they had done violated the law. Of course, it wasn't +as if they or anyone were going to be prosecuted for this violation (the +presence of 250 judges and a gaggle of federal marshals notwithstanding). But +Nimmer was making an important point: A year before anyone would have heard of +the word Napster, and two years before another member of our panel, David +Boies, would defend Napster before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Nimmer +was trying to get the judges to see that the law would not be friendly to the +capacities that this technology would enable. Technology means you can now do +amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally. +={ Alben, Alex ; + Boies, David ; + Court of Appeals : + Ninth Circuit ; + Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ; + Napster +} + +!_ We live in +a "cut and paste" culture enabled by technology. Anyone building a presentation +knows the extraordinary freedom that the cut and paste architecture of the +Internet created - in a second you can find just about any image you want; in +another second, you can have it planted in your presentation. +={ technology : + cut-and-paste culture enabled by +4 +} + +But presentations are just a tiny beginning. Using the Internet and its +archives, musicians are able to string together mixes of sound never before +imagined; filmmakers are able to build movies out of clips on computers around +the world. An extraordinary site in Sweden takes images of politicians and +blends them with music to create biting political commentary. A site called +Camp Chaos has produced some of the most biting criticism of the record +industry that there is through the mixing of Flash! and music. +={ Camp Chaos } + +All of these creations are technically illegal. Even if the creators wanted to +be "legal," the cost of complying with the law is impossibly high. Therefore, +for the law-abiding sorts, a wealth of creativity is never made. And for that +part that is made, if it doesn't follow the clearance rules, it doesn't get +released. + +To some, these stories suggest a solution: Let's alter the mix of rights so +that people are free to build upon our culture. Free to add or mix as they see +fit. We could even make this change without necessarily requiring that the +"free" use be free as in "free beer." Instead, the system could simply make it +easy for follow-on creators to compensate artists without requiring an army of +lawyers to come along: a rule, for example, that says "the royalty owed the +copyright owner of an unregistered work for the derivative reuse of his work +will be a flat 1 percent of net revenues, to be held in escrow for the +copyright owner." Under this rule, the copyright owner could benefit from some +royalty, but he would not have the benefit of a full property right (meaning +the right to name his own price) unless he registers the work. +={ copyright law : + royalty proposal on derivative reuse in ; + derivative works : + royalty system proposed for +} + +Who could possibly object to this? And what reason would there be for +objecting? We're talking about work that is not now being made; which if made, +under this plan, would produce new income for artists. What reason would anyone +have to oppose it? + +!_ In February 2003, +DreamWorks studios announced an agreement with Mike Myers, the comic genius of +/{Saturday Night Live}/ and Austin Powers. According to the announcement, Myers +and DreamWorks would work together to form a "unique filmmaking pact." Under +the agreement, DreamWorks "will acquire the rights to existing motion picture +hits and classics, write new storylines and - with the use of state- of-the-art +digital technology - insert Myers and other actors into the film, thereby +creating an entirely new piece of entertainment." +={ DreamWorks +2 ; + Myers, Mike +2 ; + Saturday Night Live +} + +The announcement called this "film sampling." As Myers explained, "Film +Sampling is an exciting way to put an original spin on existing films and allow +audiences to see old movies in a new light. Rap artists have been doing this +for years with music and now we are able to take that same concept and apply it +to film." Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying, "If anyone can create a way to +bring old films to new audiences, it is Mike." +={ Spielberg, Steven +1 ; + film sampling +3 ; + rap music +} + +Spielberg is right. Film sampling by Myers will be brilliant. But if you don't +think about it, you might miss the truly astonishing point about this +announcement. As the vast majority of our film heritage remains under +copyright, the real meaning of the DreamWorks announcement is just this: It is +Mike Myers and only Mike Myers who is free to sample. Any general freedom to +build upon the film archive of our culture, a freedom in other contexts +presumed for us all, is now a privilege reserved for the funny and famous - and +presumably rich. + +This privilege becomes reserved for two sorts of reasons. The first continues +the story of the last chapter: the vagueness of "fair use." Much of "sampling" +should be considered "fair use." But few would rely upon so weak a doctrine to +create. That leads to the second reason that the privilege is reserved for the +few: The costs of negotiating the legal rights for the creative reuse of +content are astronomically high. These costs mirror the costs with fair use: +You either pay a lawyer to defend your fair use rights or pay a lawyer to track +down permissions so you don't have to rely upon fair use rights. Either way, +the creative process is a process of paying lawyers - again a privilege, or +perhaps a curse, reserved for the few. +={ copyright law : + fair use and ; + fair use : + in sampling works +} + +1~ Chapter Nine: Collectors +={ archives, digital +29 ; + culture : + archives of +29 +} + +!_ In April 1996, +millions of "bots" - computer codes designed to "spider," or automatically +search the Internet and copy content - began running across the Net. Page by +page, these bots copied Internet-based information onto a small set of +computers located in a basement in San Francisco's Presidio. Once the bots +finished the whole of the Internet, they started again. Over and over again, +once every two months, these bits of code took copies of the Internet and +stored them. +={ bots +1 ; + spider +} + +By October 2001, the bots had collected more than five years of copies. And at +a small announcement in Berkeley, California, the archive that these copies +created, the Internet Archive, was opened to the world. Using a technology +called "the Way Back Machine," you could enter a Web page, and see all of its +copies going back to 1996, as well as when those pages changed. +={ Internet Archive +18 ; + Way Back Machine +} + +This is the thing about the Internet that Orwell would have appreciated. In the +dystopia described in /{1984}/, old newspapers were constantly updated to +assure that the current view of the world, approved of by the government, was +not contradicted by previous news reports. Thousands of workers constantly +reedited the past, meaning there was no way ever to know whether the story you +were reading today was the story that was printed on the date published on the +paper. +={ Orwell, George +1 ; + 1984 (Orwell) +} + +It's the same with the Internet. If you go to a Web page today, there's no way +for you to know whether the content you are reading is the same as the content +you read before. The page may seem the same, but the content could easily be +different. The Internet is Orwell's library - constantly updated, without any +reliable memory. + +Until the Way Back Machine, at least. With the Way Back Machine, and the +Internet Archive underlying it, you can see what the Internet was. You have the +power to see what you remember. More importantly, perhaps, you also have the +power to find what you don't remember and what others might prefer you +forget.~{ The temptations remain, however. Brewster Kahle reports that the +White House changes its own press releases without notice. A May 13, 2003, +press release stated, "Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." That was later +changed, without notice, to "Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." +E-mail from Brewster Kahle, 1 December 2003. }~ +={ Way Back Machine } + +!_ We take it +for granted that we can go back to see what we remember reading. Think about +newspapers. If you wanted to study the reaction of your hometown newspaper to +the race riots in Watts in 1965, or to Bull Connor's water cannon in 1963, you +could go to your public library and look at the newspapers. Those papers +probably exist on microfiche. If you're lucky, they exist in paper, too. Either +way, you are free, using a library, to go back and remember - not just what it +is convenient to remember, but remember something close to the truth. +={ libraries : + archival function of +1 ; + newspapers : + archives of +2 +} + +It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. +That's not quite correct. We /{all}/ forget history. The key is whether we have +a way to go back to rediscover what we forget. More directly, the key is +whether an objective past can keep us honest. Libraries help do that, by +collecting content and keeping it, for schoolchildren, for researchers, for +grandma. A free society presumes this knowledge. +={ history, records of } + +The Internet was an exception to this presumption. Until the Internet Archive, +there was no way to go back. The Internet was the quintessentially transitory +medium. And yet, as it becomes more important in forming and reforming society, +it becomes more and more important to maintain in some historical form. It's +just bizarre to think that we have scads of archives of newspapers from tiny +towns around the world, yet there is but one copy of the Internet - the one +kept by the Internet Archive. + +Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive. He was a very successful +Internet entrepreneur after he was a successful computer researcher. In the +1990s, Kahle decided he had had enough business success. It was time to become +a different kind of success. So he launched a series of projects designed to +archive human knowledge. The Internet Archive was just the first of the +projects of this Andrew Carnegie of the Internet. By December of 2002, the +archive had over 10 billion pages, and it was growing at about a billion pages +a month. +={ Kahle, Brewster +20 } + +The Way Back Machine is the largest archive of human knowledge in human +history. At the end of 2002, it held "two hundred and thirty terabytes of +material" - and was "ten times larger than the Library of Congress." And this +was just the first of the archives that Kahle set out to build. In addition to +the Internet Archive, Kahle has been constructing the Television Archive. +Television, it turns out, is even more ephemeral than the Internet. While much +of twentieth- century culture was constructed through television, only a tiny +proportion of that culture is available for anyone to see today. Three hours of +news are recorded each evening by Vanderbilt University - thanks to a specific +exemption in the copyright law.That content is indexed, and is available to +scholars for a very low fee. "But other than that, [television] is almost +unavailable," Kahle told me. "If you were Barbara Walters you could get access +to [the archives], but if you are just a graduate student?" As Kahle put it, +={ Library of Congress ; + Television Archive ; + Vanderbuilt University ; + Way Back Machine ; + libraries : + archival function of ; + news coverage +6 +} + +_1 Do you remember when Dan Quayle was interacting with Murphy Brown? Remember +that back and forth surreal experience of a politician interacting with a +fictional television character? If you were a graduate student wanting to study +that, and you wanted to get those original back and forth exchanges between the +two, the /{60 Minutes}/ episode that came out after it ... it would be almost +impossible. ... Those materials are almost unfindable. ..." +={ Quayle, Dan ; + 60 Minutes +} + +Why is that? Why is it that the part of our culture that is recorded in +newspapers remains perpetually accessible, while the part that is recorded on +videotape is not? How is it that we've created a world where researchers trying +to understand the effect of media on nineteenth-century America will have an +easier time than researchers trying to understand the effect of media on +twentieth-century America? +={ newspapers : + archives of +} + +In part, this is because of the law. Early in American copyright law, copyright +owners were required to deposit copies of their work in libraries. These copies +were intended both to facilitate the spread of knowledge and to assure that a +copy of the work would be around once the copyright expired, so that others +might access and copy the work. +={ libraries : + archival function of +2 +} + +These rules applied to film as well. But in 1915, the Library of Congress made +an exception for film. Film could be copyrighted so long as such deposits were +made. But the filmmaker was then allowed to borrow back the deposits - for an +unlimited time at no cost. In 1915 alone, there were more than 5,475 films +deposited and "borrowed back." Thus, when the copyrights to films expire, there +is no copy held by any library. The copy exists - if it exists at all - in the +library archive of the film company.~{ Doug Herrick, "Toward a National Film +Collection: Motion Pictures at the Library of Congress," /{Film Library +Quarterly}/ 13 nos. 2-3 (1980): 5; Anthony Slide, /{Nitrate Won't Wait: A +History of Film Preservation in the United States}/ (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland +& Co., 1992), 36. }~ +={ Library of Congress ; + films : + archive of +} + +The same is generally true about television. Television broadcasts were +originally not copyrighted - there was no way to capture the broadcasts, so +there was no fear of "theft." But as technology enabled capturing, broadcasters +relied increasingly upon the law. The law required they make a copy of each +broadcast for the work to be "copy-righted." But those copies were simply kept +by the broadcasters. No library had any right to them; the government didn't +demand them. The content of this part of American culture is practically +invisible to anyone who would look. +={ Television Archive +1 } + +Kahle was eager to correct this. Before September 11, 2001, he and his allies +had started capturing television. They selected twenty stations from around the +world and hit the Record button. After September 11, Kahle, working with dozens +of others, selected twenty stations from around the world and, beginning +October 11, 2001, made their coverage during the week of September 11 available +free on- line. Anyone could see how news reports from around the world covered +the events of that day. +={ September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of } + +Kahle had the same idea with film. Working with Rick Prelinger, whose archive +of film includes close to 45,000 "ephemeral films" (meaning films other than +Hollywood movies, films that were never copyrighted), Kahle established the +Movie Archive. Prelinger let Kahle digitize 1,300 films in this archive and +post those films on the Internet to be downloaded for free. Prelinger's is a +for- profit company. It sells copies of these films as stock footage. What he +has discovered is that after he made a significant chunk available for free, +his stock footage sales went up dramatically. People could easily find the +material they wanted to use. Some downloaded that material and made films on +their own. Others purchased copies to enable other films to be made. Either +way, the archive enabled access to this important part of our culture. Want to +see a copy of the "Duck and Cover" film that instructed children how to save +themselves in the middle of nuclear attack? Go to archive.org, and you can +download the film in a few minutes - for free. +={ films : + archive of ; + archive.org : + see also Internet Archive ; + Internet Archive ; + Movie Archive ; + Duck and Cover film ; + ephemeral films ; + Prelinger, Rick +} + +Here again, Kahle is providing access to a part of our culture that we +otherwise could not get easily, if at all. It is yet another part of what +defines the twentieth century that we have lost to history. The law doesn't +require these copies to be kept by anyone, or to be deposited in an archive by +anyone. Therefore, there is no simple way to find them. + +The key here is access, not price. Kahle wants to enable free access to this +content, but he also wants to enable others to sell access to it. His aim is to +ensure competition in access to this important part of our culture. Not during +the commercial life of a bit of creative property, but during a second life +that all creative property has - a noncommercial life. +={ creative property : + noncommercial second life of +4 +} + +For here is an idea that we should more clearly recognize. Every bit of +creative property goes through different "lives." In its first life, if the +creator is lucky, the content is sold. In such cases the commercial market is +successful for the creator. The vast majority of creative property doesn't +enjoy such success, but some clearly does. For that content, commercial life is +extremely important. Without this commercial market, there would be, many +argue, much less creativity. + +After the commercial life of creative property has ended, our tradition has +always supported a second life as well. A newspaper delivers the news every day +to the doorsteps of America. The very next day, it is used to wrap fish or to +fill boxes with fragile gifts or to build an archive of knowledge about our +history. In this second life, the content can continue to inform even if that +information is no longer sold. + +The same has always been true about books. A book goes out of print very +quickly (the average today is after about a year~{ Dave Barns, "Fledgling +Career in Antique Books: Woodstock Landlord, Bar Owner Starts a New Chapter by +Adopting Business," /{Chicago Tribune,}/ 5 September 1997, at Metro Lake 1L. Of +books published between 1927 and 1946, only 2.2 percent were in print in 2002. +R. Anthony Reese, "The First Sale Doctrine in the Era of Digital Networks," +/{Boston College Law Review}/ 44 (2003): 593 n. 51. }~). After it is out of +print, it can be sold in used book stores without the copyright owner getting +anything and stored in libraries, where many get to read the book, also for +free. Used book stores and libraries are thus the second life of a book. That +second life is extremely important to the spread and stability of culture. +={ libraries : + archival function of +1 ; + books : + out of print +} + +Yet increasingly, any assumption about a stable second life for creative +property does not hold true with the most important components of popular +culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For these - television, +movies, music, radio, the Internet - there is no guarantee of a second life. +For these sorts of culture, it is as if we've replaced libraries with Barnes & +Noble superstores. With this culture, what's accessible is nothing but what a +certain limited market demands. Beyond that, culture disappears. + +!_ For most of +the twentieth century, it was economics that made this so. It would have been +insanely expensive to collect and make accessible all television and film and +music: The cost of analog copies is extraordinarily high. So even though the +law in principle would have restricted the ability of a Brewster Kahle to copy +culture generally, the real restriction was economics. The market made it +impossibly difficult to do anything about this ephemeral culture; the law had +little practical effect. +={ technology : + archival opportunity offered through +3 +} + +Perhaps the single most important feature of the digital revolution is that for +the first time since the Library of Alexandria, it is feasible to imagine +constructing archives that hold all culture produced or distributed publicly. +Technology makes it possible to imagine an archive of all books published, and +increasingly makes it possible to imagine an archive of all moving images and +sound. +={ libraries : + archival function of +4 +} + +The scale of this potential archive is something we've never imagined before. +The Brewster Kahles of our history have dreamed about it; but we are for the +first time at a point where that dream is possible. As Kahle describes, + +_1 It looks like there's about two to three million recordings of music. Ever. +There are about a hundred thousand theatrical releases of movies, ... and about +one to two million movies [distributed] during the twentieth century. There are +about twenty-six million different titles of books. All of these would fit on +computers that would fit in this room and be able to be afforded by a small +company. So we're at a turning point in our history. Universal access is the +goal. And the opportunity of leading a different life, based on this, is ... +thrilling. It could be one of the things humankind would be most proud of. Up +there with the Library of Alexandria, putting a man on the moon, and the +invention of the printing press." +={ books : + total number of ; + films : + total number of ; + music recordings : + total number of +} + +Kahle is not the only librarian. The Internet Archive is not the only archive. +But Kahle and the Internet Archive suggest what the future of libraries or +archives could be. /{When}/ the commercial life of creative property ends, I +don't know. But it does. And whenever it does, Kahle and his archive hint at a +world where this knowledge, and culture, remains perpetually available. Some +will draw upon it to understand it; some to criticize it. Some will use it, as +Walt Disney did, to re-create the past for the future. These technologies +promise something that had become unimaginable for much of our past - a future +/{for}/ our past. The technology of digital arts could make the dream of the +Library of Alexandria real again. +={ Internet Archive ; + creative property : + noncommercial second life of ; + Disney, Walt ; + technology : + archival opportunity offered through +1 +} + +Technologists have thus removed the economic costs of building such an archive. +But lawyers' costs remain. For as much as we might like to call these +"archives," as warm as the idea of a "library" might seem, the "content" that +is collected in these digital spaces is also some-one's "property." And the law +of property restricts the freedoms that Kahle and others would exercise. + +1~ Chapter Ten: "Property" + +!_ Jack Valenti +has been the president of the Motion Picture Association of America since 1966. +He first came to Washington, D.C., with Lyndon Johnson's administration - +literally. The famous picture of Johnson's swearing-in on Air Force One after +the assassination of President Kennedy has Valenti in the background. In his +almost forty years of running the MPAA, Valenti has established himself as +perhaps the most prominent and effective lobbyist in Washington. +={ Johnson, Lyndon ; + Kennedy, John F. ; + Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) +3 ; + film industry : + trade association of +3 ; + television : + industry association of +3 ; + Valenti, Jack : + background of +} + +The MPAA is the American branch of the international Motion Picture +Association. It was formed in 1922 as a trade association whose goal was to +defend American movies against increasing domestic criticism. The organization +now represents not only filmmakers but producers and distributors of +entertainment for television, video, and cable. Its board is made up of the +chairmen and presidents of the seven major producers and distributors of motion +picture and television programs in the United States: Walt Disney, Sony +Pictures Entertainment, MGM, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, +Universal Studios, and Warner Brothers. +={ Disney, Inc. ; + MGM ; + Paramount Pictures ; + Twentieth Century Fox ; + Sony Pictures Entertainment ; + Universal Pictures ; + Warner Brothers +} + +Valenti is only the third president of the MPAA. No president before him has +had as much influence over that organization, or over Washington. As a Texan, +Valenti has mastered the single most important political skill of a Southerner +- the ability to appear simple and slow while hiding a lightning-fast +intellect. To this day, Valenti plays the simple, humble man. But this Harvard +MBA, and author of four books, who finished high school at the age of fifteen +and flew more than fifty combat missions in World War II, is no Mr. Smith. When +Valenti went to Washington, he mastered the city in a quintessentially +Washingtonian way. +={ Valenti, Jack : + background of +5 +} + +In defending artistic liberty and the freedom of speech that our culture +depends upon, the MPAA has done important good. In crafting the MPAA rating +system, it has probably avoided a great deal of speech-regulating harm. But +there is an aspect to the organization's mission that is both the most radical +and the most important. This is the organization's effort, epitomized in +Valenti's every act, to redefine the meaning of "creative property." +={ film industry : + rating system of ; + speech, freedom of : + film-rating system vs. +} + +In 1982, Valenti's testimony to Congress captured the strategy perfectly: +={ Valenti, Jack : + on creative property rights +11 +} + +_1 No matter the lengthy arguments made, no matter the charges and the +counter-charges, no matter the tumult and the shouting, reasonable men and +women will keep returning to the fundamental issue, the central theme which +animates this entire debate: /{Creative property owners must be accorded the +same rights and protection resident in all other property owners in the +nation}/. That is the issue. That is the question. And that is the rostrum on +which this entire hearing and the debates to follow must rest."~{ Home +Recording of Copyrighted Works: Hearings on H.R. 4783, H.R. 4794, H.R. 4808, +H.R. 5250, H.R. 5488, and H.R. 5705 Before the Subcommittee on Courts, Civil +Liberties, and the Administration of Justice of the Committee on the Judiciary +of the House of Representatives, 97th Cong., 2nd sess. (1982): 65 (testimony of +Jack Valenti). }~ +={ creative property : + other property rights vs. +25 +} + +The strategy of this rhetoric, like the strategy of most of Valenti's rhetoric, +is brilliant and simple and brilliant because simple. The "central theme" to +which "reasonable men and women" will return is this: "Creative property owners +must be accorded the same rights and protections resident in all other property +owners in the nation." There are no second-class citizens, Valenti might have +continued. There should be no second-class property owners. + +This claim has an obvious and powerful intuitive pull. It is stated with such +clarity as to make the idea as obvious as the notion that we use elections to +pick presidents. But in fact, there is no more extreme a claim made by +/{anyone}/ who is serious in this debate than this claim of Valenti's. Jack +Valenti, however sweet and however brilliant, is perhaps the nation's foremost +extremist when it comes to the nature and scope of "creative property." His +views have /{no}/ reasonable connection to our actual legal tradition, even if +the subtle pull of his Texan charm has slowly redefined that tradition, at +least in Washington. +={ creative property : + constitutional tradition on +9 +} + +While "creative property" is certainly "property" in a nerdy and precise sense +that lawyers are trained to understand,~{ Lawyers speak of "property" not as an +absolute thing, but as a bundle of rights that are sometimes associated with a +particular object. Thus, my "property right" to my car gives me the right to +exclusive use, but not the right to drive at 150 miles an hour. For the best +effort to connect the ordinary meaning of "property" to "lawyer talk," see +Bruce Ackerman, /{Private Property and the Constitution}/ (New Haven: Yale +University Press, 1977), 26-27. }~ it has never been the case, nor should it +be, that "creative property owners" have been "ac- corded the same rights and +protection resident in all other property owners." Indeed, if creative property +owners were given the same rights as all other property owners, that would +effect a radical, and radically undesirable, change in our tradition. + +Valenti knows this. But he speaks for an industry that cares squat for our +tradition and the values it represents. He speaks for an industry that is +instead fighting to restore the tradition that the British overturned in 1710. +In the world that Valenti's changes would create, a powerful few would exercise +powerful control over how our creative culture would develop. + +I have two purposes in this chapter. The first is to convince you that, +historically, Valenti's claim is absolutely wrong. The second is to convince +you that it would be terribly wrong for us to reject our history. We have +always treated rights in creative property differently from the rights resident +in all other property owners. They have never been the same. And they should +never be the same, because, however counterintuitive this may seem, to make +them the same would be to fundamentally weaken the opportunity for new creators +to create. Creativity depends upon the owners of creativity having less than +perfect control. + +Organizations such as the MPAA, whose board includes the most powerful of the +old guard, have little interest, their rhetoric notwithstanding, in assuring +that the new can displace them. No organization does. No person does. (Ask me +about tenure, for example.) But what's good for the MPAA is not necessarily +good for America. A society that defends the ideals of free culture must +preserve precisely the opportunity for new creativity to threaten the old. +={ Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ; + film industry : + trade association of +} + +!_ To get +just a hint that there is something fundamentally wrong in Valenti's argument, +we need look no further than the United States Constitution itself. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + on creative property +4 +} + +The framers of our Constitution loved "property." Indeed, so strongly did they +love property that they built into the Constitution an important requirement. +If the government takes your property - if it condemns your house, or acquires +a slice of land from your farm - it is required, under the Fifth Amendment's +"Takings Clause," to pay you "just compensation" for that taking. The +Constitution thus guarantees that property is, in a certain sense, sacred. It +cannot /{ever}/ be taken from the property owner unless the government pays for +the privilege. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + Fifth Amendment to | Takings Clause of +1 ; + Fifth Amendment ; + Takings Clause +1 ; + property rights : + Takings Clause on +1 +} + +Yet the very same Constitution speaks very differently about what Valenti calls +"creative property." In the clause granting Congress the power to create +"creative property," the Constitution /{requires}/ that after a "limited time," +Congress take back the rights that it has granted and set the "creative +property" free to the public domain. Yet when Congress does this, when the +expiration of a copyright term "takes" your copyright and turns it over to the +public domain, Congress does not have any obligation to pay "just compensation" +for this "taking." Instead, the same Constitution that requires compensation +for your land requires that you lose your "creative property" right without any +compensation at all. + +The Constitution thus on its face states that these two forms of property are +not to be accorded the same rights. They are plainly to be treated differently. +Valenti is therefore not just asking for a change in our tradition when he +argues that creative-property owners should be accorded the same rights as +every other property-right owner. He is effectively arguing for a change in our +Constitution itself. + +Arguing for a change in our Constitution is not necessarily wrong. There was +much in our original Constitution that was plainly wrong. The Constitution of +1789 entrenched slavery; it left senators to be appointed rather than elected; +it made it possible for the electoral college to produce a tie between the +president and his own vice president (as it did in 1800). The framers were no +doubt extraordinary, but I would be the first to admit that they made big +mistakes. We have since rejected some of those mistakes; no doubt there could +be others that we should reject as well. So my argument is not simply that +because Jefferson did it, we should, too. +={ Jefferson, Thomas +1 ; + copyright law : + innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in +2 ; + electoral college ; + Senate, U.S. ; + slavery +} + +Instead, my argument is that because Jefferson did it, we should at least try +to understand /{why}/. Why did the framers, fanatical property types that they +were, reject the claim that creative property be given the same rights as all +other property? Why did they require that for creative property there must be a +public domain? + +To answer this question, we need to get some perspective on the history of +these "creative property" rights, and the control that they enabled. Once we +see clearly how differently these rights have been defined, we will be in a +better position to ask the question that should be at the core of this war: Not +/{whether}/ creative property should be protected, but how. Not /{whether}/ we +will enforce the rights the law gives to creative-property owners, but what the +particular mix of rights ought to be. Not /{whether}/ artists should be paid, +but whether institutions designed to assure that artists get paid need also +control how culture develops. + +To answer these questions, we need a more general way to talk about how +property is protected. More precisely, we need a more general way than the +narrow language of the law allows. In /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/, I +used a simple model to capture this more general perspective. For any +particular right or regulation, this model asks how four different modalities +of regulation interact to support or weaken the right or regulation. I +represented it with this diagram: +={ Code (Lessig) ; + Lessig, Lawrence ; + free culture : + four modalities of constraint on +20 ; + regulation : + four modalities of +20 ; + copyright law : + as ex post regulation modality +5 ; + law : + as constraint modality +5 +} + +{freeculture01.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +At the center of this picture is a regulated dot: the individual or group that +is the target of regulation, or the holder of a right. (In each case +throughout, we can describe this either as regulation or as a right. For +simplicity's sake, I will speak only of regulations.) The ovals represent four +ways in which the individual or group might be regulated - either constrained +or, alternatively, enabled. Law is the most obvious constraint (to lawyers, at +least). It constrains by threatening punishments after the fact if the rules +set in advance are violated. So if, for example, you willfully infringe +Madonna's copyright by copying a song from her latest CD and posting it on the +Web, you can be punished with a $150,000 fine. The fine is an ex post +punishment for violating an ex ante rule. It is imposed by the state. +={ Madonna } + +Norms are a different kind of constraint. They, too, punish an individual for +violating a rule. But the punishment of a norm is imposed by a community, not +(or not only) by the state. There may be no law against spitting, but that +doesn't mean you won't be punished if you spit on the ground while standing in +line at a movie. The punishment might not be harsh, though depending upon the +community, it could easily be more harsh than many of the punishments imposed +by the state. The mark of the difference is not the severity of the rule, but +the source of the enforcement. +={ norms, regulatory influence of +1 } + +The market is a third type of constraint. Its constraint is effected through +conditions: You can do X if you pay Y; you'll be paid M if you do N. These +constraints are obviously not independent of law or norms - it is property law +that defines what must be bought if it is to be taken legally; it is norms that +say what is appropriately sold. But given a set of norms, and a background of +property and contract law, the market imposes a simultaneous constraint upon +how an individual or group might behave. +={ market constraints +1 } + +Finally, and for the moment, perhaps, most mysteriously, "architecture" - the +physical world as one finds it - is a constraint on behavior. A fallen bridge +might constrain your ability to get across a river. Railroad tracks might +constrain the ability of a community to integrate its social life. As with the +market, architecture does not effect its constraint through ex post +punishments. Instead, also as with the market, architecture effects its +constraint through simultaneous conditions. These conditions are imposed not by +courts enforcing contracts, or by police punishing theft, but by nature, by +"architecture." If a 500-pound boulder blocks your way, it is the law of +gravity that enforces this constraint. If a $500 airplane ticket stands between +you and a flight to New York, it is the market that enforces this constraint. +={ architecture, constraint effected through } + +So the first point about these four modalities of regulation is obvious: They +interact. Restrictions imposed by one might be reinforced by another. Or +restrictions imposed by one might be undermined by another. +={ law : + as constraint modality +5 +} + +The second point follows directly: If we want to understand the effective +freedom that anyone has at a given moment to do any particular thing, we have +to consider how these four modalities interact. Whether or not there are other +constraints (there may well be; my claim is not about comprehensiveness), these +four are among the most significant, and any regulator (whether controlling or +freeing) must consider how these four in particular interact. + +So, for example, consider the "freedom" to drive a car at a high speed. That +freedom is in part restricted by laws: speed limits that say how fast you can +drive in particular places at particular times. It is in part restricted by +architecture: speed bumps, for example, slow most rational drivers; governors +in buses, as another example, set the maximum rate at which the driver can +drive. The freedom is in part restricted by the market: Fuel efficiency drops +as speed increases, thus the price of gasoline indirectly constrains speed. And +finally, the norms of a community may or may not constrain the freedom to +speed. Drive at 50 mph by a school in your own neighborhood and you're likely +to be punished by the neighbors. The same norm wouldn't be as effective in a +different town, or at night. +={ architecture, constraint effected through ; + market constraints ; + norms, regulatory influence of ; + driving speed, constraints on +1 ; + speeding, constraints on +1 +} + +The final point about this simple model should also be fairly clear: While +these four modalities are analytically independent, law has a special role in +affecting the three.~{ By describing the way law affects the other three +modalities, I don't mean to suggest that the other three don't affect law. +Obviously, they do. Law's only distinction is that it alone speaks as if it has +a right self-consciously to change the other three. The right of the other +three is more timidly expressed. See Lawrence Lessig, /{Code: And Other Laws of +Cyberspace}/ (New York: Basic Books, 1999): 90-95; Lawrence Lessig, "The New +Chicago School," /{Journal of Legal Studies,}/ June 1998. }~ The law, in other +words, sometimes operates to increase or decrease the constraint of a +particular modality. Thus, the law might be used to increase taxes on gasoline, +so as to increase the incentives to drive more slowly. The law might be used to +mandate more speed bumps, so as to increase the difficulty of driving rapidly. +The law might be used to fund ads that stigmatize reckless driving. Or the law +might be used to require that other laws be more strict - a federal requirement +that states decrease the speed limit, for example" so as to decrease the +attractiveness of fast driving. + +{freeculture02.png 540x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +These constraints can thus change, and they can be changed. To understand the +effective protection of liberty or protection of property at any particular +moment, we must track these changes over time. A restriction imposed by one +modality might be erased by another. A freedom enabled by one modality might be +displaced by another.~{ Some people object to this way of talking about +"liberty." They object because their focus when considering the constraints +that exist at any particular moment are constraints imposed exclusively by the +government. For instance, if a storm destroys a bridge, these people think it +is meaningless to say that one's liberty has been restrained. A bridge has +washed out, and it's harder to get from one place to another. To talk about +this as a loss of freedom, they say, is to confuse the stuff of politics with +the vagaries of ordinary life. I don't mean to deny the value in this narrower +view, which depends upon the context of the inquiry. I do, however, mean to +argue against any insistence that this narrower view is the only proper view of +liberty. As I argued in /{Code,}/ we come from a long tradition of political +thought with a broader focus than the narrow question of what the government +did when. John Stuart Mill defended freedom of speech, for example, from the +tyranny of narrow minds, not from the fear of government prosecution; John +Stuart Mill, /{On Liberty}/ (Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1978), 19. John +R. Commons famously defended the economic freedom of labor from constraints +imposed by the market; John R. Commons, "The Right to Work," in Malcom +Rutherford and Warren J. Samuels, eds., /{John R. Commons: Selected Essays}/ +(London: Routledge: 1997), 62. The Americans with Disabilities Act increases +the liberty of people with physical disabilities by changing the architecture +of certain public places, thereby making access to those places easier; 42 +/{United States Code}/, section 12101 (2000). Each of these interventions to +change existing conditions changes the liberty of a particular group. The +effect of those interventions should be accounted for in order to understand +the effective liberty that each of these groups might face. }~ + +2~ Why Hollywood Is Right + +The most obvious point that this model reveals is just why, or just how, +Hollywood is right. The copyright warriors have rallied Congress and the courts +to defend copyright. This model helps us see why that rallying makes sense. +={ copyright : + four regulatory modalities on +8 +} + +Let's say this is the picture of copyright's regulation before the Internet: + +{freeculture01.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +There is balance between law, norms, market, and architecture. The law limits +the ability to copy and share content, by imposing penalties on those who copy +and share content. Those penalties are reinforced by technologies that make it +hard to copy and share content (architecture) and expensive to copy and share +content (market). Finally, those penalties are mitigated by norms we all +recognize - kids, for example, taping other kids' records. These uses of +copyrighted material may well be infringement, but the norms of our society +(before the Internet, at least) had no problem with this form of infringement. +={ architecture, constraint effected through +1 ; + law : + as constraint modality ; + norms, regulatory influence of +1 +} + +Enter the Internet, or, more precisely, technologies such as MP3s and p2p +sharing. Now the constraint of architecture changes dramatically, as does the +constraint of the market. And as both the market and architecture relax the +regulation of copyright, norms pile on. The happy balance (for the warriors, at +least) of life before the Internet becomes an effective state of anarchy after +the Internet. +={ Internet : + copyright regulatory balance lost with +4 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + regulatory balance lost in ; + market constraints ; + MP3s +} + +Thus the sense of, and justification for, the warriors' response. Technology +has changed, the warriors say, and the effect of this change, when ramified +through the market and norms, is that a balance of protection for the copyright +owners' rights has been lost. This is Iraq after the fall of Saddam, but this +time no government is justifying the looting that results. +={ technology : + established industries threatened by changes in +} + +{freeculture03.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Neither this analysis nor the conclusions that follow are new to the warriors. +Indeed, in a "White Paper" prepared by the Commerce Department (one heavily +influenced by the copyright warriors) in 1995, this mix of regulatory +modalities had already been identified and the strategy to respond already +mapped. In response to the changes the Internet had effected, the White Paper +argued (1) Congress should strengthen intellectual property law, (2) businesses +should adopt innovative marketing techniques, (3) technologists should push to +develop code to protect copyrighted material, and (4) educators should educate +kids to better protect copyright. +={ Commerce, U.S. Department of ; + regulation : + as establishment protectionism +6 +} + +This mixed strategy is just what copyright needed - if it was to preserve the +particular balance that existed before the change induced by the Internet. And +it's just what we should expect the content industry to push for. It is as +American as apple pie to consider the happy life you have as an entitlement, +and to look to the law to protect it if something comes along to change that +happy life. Homeowners living in a flood plain have no hesitation appealing to +the government to rebuild (and rebuild again) when a flood (architecture) wipes +away their property (law). Farmers have no hesitation appealing to the +government to bail them out when a virus (architecture) devastates their crop. +Unions have no hesitation appealing to the government to bail them out when +imports (market) wipe out the U.S. steel industry. +={ farming ; + steel industry +} + +Thus, there's nothing wrong or surprising in the content industry's campaign to +protect itself from the harmful consequences of a technological innovation. And +I would be the last person to argue that the changing technology of the +Internet has not had a profound effect on the content industry's way of doing +business, or as John Seely Brown describes it, its "architecture of revenue." +={ Brown, John Seely } + +But just because a particular interest asks for government support, it doesn't +follow that support should be granted. And just because technology has weakened +a particular way of doing business, it doesn't follow that the government +should intervene to support that old way of doing business. Kodak, for example, +has lost perhaps as much as 20 percent of their traditional film market to the +emerging technologies of digital cameras.~{ See Geoffrey Smith, "Film vs. +Digital: Can Kodak Build a Bridge?" BusinessWeek online, 2 August 1999, +available at link #23. For a more recent analysis of Kodak's place in the +market, see Chana R. Schoenberger, "Can Kodak Make Up for Lost Moments?" +Forbes.com, 6 October 2003, available at link #24. }~ Does anyone believe the +government should ban digital cameras just to support Kodak? Highways have +weakened the freight business for railroads. Does anyone think we should ban +trucks from roads /{for the purpose of}/ protecting the railroads? Closer to +the subject of this book, remote channel changers have weakened the +"stickiness" of television advertising (if a boring commercial comes on the TV, +the remote makes it easy to surf ), and it may well be that this change has +weakened the television advertising market. But does anyone believe we should +regulate remotes to reinforce commercial television? (Maybe by limiting them to +function only once a second, or to switch to only ten channels within an hour?) +={ advertising ; + television : + advertising on ; + commercials ; + camera technology ; + digital cameras ; + Kodak cameras ; + railroad industry ; + remote channel changers +} + +The obvious answer to these obviously rhetorical questions is no. In a free +society, with a free market, supported by free enterprise and free trade, the +government's role is not to support one way of doing business against others. +Its role is not to pick winners and protect them against loss. If the +government did this generally, then we would never have any progress. As +Microsoft chairman Bill Gates wrote in 1991, in a memo criticizing software +patents, "established companies have an interest in excluding future +competitors."~{ Fred Warshofsky, /{The Patent Wars}/ (New York: Wiley, 1994), +170-71. }~ And relative to a startup, established companies also have the +means. (Think RCA and FM radio.) A world in which competitors with new ideas +must fight not only the market but also the government is a world in which +competitors with new ideas will not succeed. It is a world of stasis and +increasingly concentrated stagnation. It is the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. +={ free market, technological changes in +2 ; + Brezhnev, Leonid ; + FM radio ; + radio : + FM spectrum of ; + Gates, Bill ; + market competition ; + RCA +} + +Thus, while it is understandable for industries threatened with new +technologies that change the way they do business to look to the government for +protection, it is the special duty of policy makers to guarantee that that +protection not become a deterrent to progress. It is the duty of policy makers, +in other words, to assure that the changes they create, in response to the +request of those hurt by changing technology, are changes that preserve the +incentives and opportunities for innovation and change. + +In the context of laws regulating speech - which include, obviously, copyright +law - that duty is even stronger. When the industry complaining about changing +technologies is asking Congress to respond in a way that burdens speech and +creativity, policy makers should be especially wary of the request. It is +always a bad deal for the government to get into the business of regulating +speech markets. The risks and dangers of that game are precisely why our +framers created the First Amendment to our Constitution: "Congress shall make +no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." So when Congress is being asked to +pass laws that would "abridge" the freedom of speech, it should ask" carefully +- whether such regulation is justified. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + First Amendment ; + speech, freedom of : + constitutional guarantee of +} + +My argument just now, however, has nothing to do with whether the changes that +are being pushed by the copyright warriors are "justified." My argument is +about their effect. For before we get to the question of justification, a hard +question that depends a great deal upon your values, we should first ask +whether we understand the effect of the changes the content industry wants. + +Here's the metaphor that will capture the argument to follow. + +In 1873, the chemical DDT was first synthesized. In 1948, Swiss chemist Paul +Hermann Müller won the Nobel Prize for his work demonstrating the insecticidal +properties of DDT. By the 1950s, the insecticide was widely used around the +world to kill disease-carrying pests. It was also used to increase farm +production. +={ Müller, Paul Hermann +3 ; + DDT +6 ; + insecticide, environmental consequences of +6 ; + farming +4 +} + +No one doubts that killing disease-carrying pests or increasing crop production +is a good thing. No one doubts that the work of Müller was important and +valuable and probably saved lives, possibly millions. + +But in 1962, Rachel Carson published /{Silent Spring}/, which argued that DDT, +whatever its primary benefits, was also having unintended environmental +consequences. Birds were losing the ability to reproduce. Whole chains of the +ecology were being destroyed. +={ Carson, Rachel ; + Silent Spring (Carson) ; + environmentalism +4 +} + +No one set out to destroy the environment. Paul Müller certainly did not aim to +harm any birds. But the effort to solve one set of problems produced another +set which, in the view of some, was far worse than the problems that were +originally attacked. Or more accurately, the problems DDT caused were worse +than the problems it solved, at least when considering the other, more +environmentally friendly ways to solve the problems that DDT was meant to +solve. + +It is to this image precisely that Duke University law professor James Boyle +appeals when he argues that we need an "environmentalism" for culture.~{ See, +for example, James Boyle, "A Politics of Intellectual Property: +Environmentalism for the Net?" /{Duke Law Journal}/ 47 (1997): 87. }~ His +point, and the point I want to develop in the balance of this chapter, is not +that the aims of copyright are flawed. Or that authors should not be paid for +their work. Or that music should be given away "for free." The point is that +some of the ways in which we might protect authors will have unintended +consequences for the cultural environment, much like DDT had for the natural +environment. And just as criticism of DDT is not an endorsement of malaria or +an attack on farmers, so, too, is criticism of one particular set of +regulations protecting copyright not an endorsement of anarchy or an attack on +authors. It is an environment of creativity that we seek, and we should be +aware of our actions' effects on the environment. +={ Boyle, James ; + copyright law : + innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in +1 +} + +My argument, in the balance of this chapter, tries to map exactly this effect. +No doubt the technology of the Internet has had a dramatic effect on the +ability of copyright owners to protect their content. But there should also be +little doubt that when you add together the changes in copyright law over time, +plus the change in technology that the Internet is undergoing just now, the net +effect of these changes will not be only that copyrighted work is effectively +protected. Also, and generally missed, the net effect of this massive increase +in protection will be devastating to the environment for creativity. + +In a line: To kill a gnat, we are spraying DDT with consequences for free +culture that will be far more devastating than that this gnat will be lost. + +2~ Beginnings + +America copied English copyright law. Actually, we copied and improved English +copyright law. Our Constitution makes the purpose of "creative property" rights +clear; its express limitations reinforce the English aim to avoid overly +powerful publishers. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + on creative property | copyright purpose established in +6 | Progress Clause of +5 ; + copyright : + constitutional purpose of | duration of ; + creative property : + constitutional tradition on +6 ; + Progress Clause +5 ; + copyright : + duration of +} + +The power to establish "creative property" rights is granted to Congress in a +way that, for our Constitution, at least, is very odd. Article I, section 8, +clause 8 of our Constitution states that: +={ Congress, U.S. : + in constitutional Progress Clause +2 +} + +_1 Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, +by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to +their respective Writings and Discoveries." + +We can call this the "Progress Clause," for notice what this clause does not +say. It does not say Congress has the power to grant "creative property +rights." It says that Congress has the power /{to promote progress}/. The grant +of power is its purpose, and its purpose is a public one, not the purpose of +enriching publishers, nor even primarily the purpose of rewarding authors. + +The Progress Clause expressly limits the term of copyrights. As we saw in +chapter 6, the English limited the term of copyright so as to assure that a few +would not exercise disproportionate control over culture by exercising +disproportionate control over publishing. We can assume the framers followed +the English for a similar purpose. Indeed, unlike the English, the framers +reinforced that objective, by requiring that copyrights extend "to Authors" +only. +={ copyright law : + as protection of creators +2 | history of American +22 +} + +The design of the Progress Clause reflects something about the Constitution's +design in general. To avoid a problem, the framers built structure. To prevent +the concentrated power of publishers, they built a structure that kept +copyrights away from publishers and kept them short. To prevent the +concentrated power of a church, they banned the federal government from +establishing a church. To prevent concentrating power in the federal +government, they built structures to reinforce the power of the states - +including the Senate, whose members were at the time selected by the states, +and an electoral college, also selected by the states, to select the president. +In each case, a /{structure}/ built checks and balances into the constitutional +frame, structured to prevent otherwise inevitable concentrations of power. +={ Senate, U.S. ; + Constitution, U.S. : + structural checks and balances of ; + electoral college +} + +I doubt the framers would recognize the regulation we call "copyright" today. +The scope of that regulation is far beyond anything they ever considered. To +begin to understand what they did, we need to put our "copyright" in context: +We need to see how it has changed in the 210 years since they first struck its +design. + +Some of these changes come from the law: some in light of changes in +technology, and some in light of changes in technology given a particular +concentration of market power. In terms of our model, we started here: +={ copyright : + four regulatory modalities on +} + +{freeculture01.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +%% image 05 same as 01, renumber? + +We will end here: + +{freeculture04.png 310x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Let me explain how. + +2~ Law: Duration +={ copyright : + duration of +14 +} + +When the first Congress enacted laws to protect creative property, it faced the +same uncertainty about the status of creative property that the English had +confronted in 1774. Many states had passed laws protecting creative property, +and some believed that these laws simply supplemented common law rights that +already protected creative authorship.~{ William W. Crosskey, /{Politics and +the Constitution in the History of the United States}/ (London: Cambridge +University Press, 1953), vol. 1, 485-86: "extinguish[ing], by plain implication +of "the supreme Law of the Land," /{the perpetual rights which authors had, or +were supposed by some to have, under the Common Law}/" (emphasis added). }~ +This meant that there was no guaranteed public domain in the United States in +1790. If copyrights were protected by the common law, then there was no simple +way to know whether a work published in the United States was controlled or +free. Just as in England, this lingering uncertainty would make it hard for +publishers to rely upon a public domain to reprint and distribute works. +={ Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +2 ; + Copyright Act (1790) +3 ; + creative property : + common law protections of ; + public domain : + balance of U.S. content in +5 +} + +That uncertainty ended after Congress passed legislation granting copyrights. +Because federal law overrides any contrary state law, federal protections for +copyrighted works displaced any state law protections. Just as in England the +Statute of Anne eventually meant that the copyrights for all English works +expired, a federal statute meant that any state copyrights expired as well. +={ Statute of Anne (1710) ; + law : + federal vs. state +2 +} + +In 1790, Congress enacted the first copyright law. It created a federal +copyright and secured that copyright for fourteen years. If the author was +alive at the end of that fourteen years, then he could opt to renew the +copyright for another fourteen years. If he did not renew the copyright, his +work passed into the public domain. +={ copyright : + renewability of +11 +} + +While there were many works created in the United States in the first ten years +of the Republic, only 5 percent of the works were actually registered under the +federal copyright regime. Of all the work created in the United States both +before 1790 and from 1790 through 1800, 95 percent immediately passed into the +public domain; the balance would pass into the pubic domain within twenty-eight +years at most, and more likely within fourteen years.~{ Although 13,000 titles +were published in the United States from 1790 to 1799, only 556 copyright +registrations were filed; John Tebbel, /{A History of Book Publishing in the +United States,}/ vol. 1, /{The Creation of an Industry, 1630- 1865}/ (New York: +Bowker, 1972), 141. Of the 21,000 imprints recorded before 1790, only twelve +were copyrighted under the 1790 act; William J. Maher, /{Copyright Term, +Retrospective Extension and the Copyright Law of 1790 in Historical Context,}/ +7-10 (2002), available at link #25. Thus, the overwhelming majority of works +fell immediately into the public domain. Even those works that were copyrighted +fell into the public domain quickly, because the term of copyright was short. +The initial term of copyright was fourteen years, with the option of renewal +for an additional fourteen years. Copyright Act of May 31, 1790, §1, 1 stat. +124. }~ + +This system of renewal was a crucial part of the American system of copyright. +It assured that the maximum terms of copyright would be granted only for works +where they were wanted. After the initial term of fourteen years, if it wasn't +worth it to an author to renew his copyright, then it wasn't worth it to +society to insist on the copyright, either. + +Fourteen years may not seem long to us, but for the vast majority of copyright +owners at that time, it was long enough: Only a small minority of them renewed +their copyright after fourteen years; the balance allowed their work to pass +into the public domain.~{ Few copyright holders ever chose to renew their +copyrights. For instance, of the 25,006 copyrights registered in 1883, only 894 +were renewed in 1910. For a year-by-year analysis of copyright renewal rates, +see Barbara A. Ringer, "Study No. 31: Renewal of Copyright," /{Studies on +Copyright,}/ vol. 1 (New York: Practicing Law Institute, 1963), 618. For a more +recent and comprehensive analysis, see William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, +"Indefinitely Renewable Copyright," /{University of Chicago Law Review}/ 70 +(2003): 471, 498-501, and accompanying figures. }~ + +Even today, this structure would make sense. Most creative work has an actual +commercial life of just a couple of years. Most books fall out of print after +one year.~{ See Ringer, ch. 9, n. 2. }~ When that happens, the used books are +traded free of copyright regulation. Thus the books are no longer +/{effectively}/ controlled by copyright. The only practical commercial use of +the books at that time is to sell the books as used books; that use - because +it does not involve publication - is effectively free. +={ books : + resales of | out of print +} + +In the first hundred years of the Republic, the term of copyright was changed +once. In 1831, the term was increased from a maximum of 28 years to a maximum +of 42 by increasing the initial term of copyright from 14 years to 28 years. In +the next fifty years of the Republic, the term increased once again. In 1909, +Congress extended the renewal term of 14 years to 28 years, setting a maximum +term of 56 years. +={ Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +6 | copyright terms extended by +6 ; + copyright law : + term extensions in +6 +} + +Then, beginning in 1962, Congress started a practice that has defined copyright +law since. Eleven times in the last forty years, Congress has extended the +terms of existing copyrights; twice in those forty years, Congress extended the +term of future copyrights. Initially, the extensions of existing copyrights +were short, a mere one to two years. In 1976, Congress extended all existing +copyrights by nineteen years. And in 1998, in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term +Extension Act, Congress extended the term of existing and future copyrights by +twenty years. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) +1 ; + public domain : + future patents vs. future copyrights in +4 +} + +The effect of these extensions is simply to toll, or delay, the passing of +works into the public domain. This latest extension means that the public +domain will have been tolled for thirty-nine out of fifty-five years, or 70 +percent of the time since 1962. Thus, in the twenty years after the Sonny Bono +Act, while one million patents will pass into the public domain, zero +copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a +copyright term. +={ patents : + in public domain +} + +The effect of these extensions has been exacerbated by another, little-noticed +change in the copyright law. Remember I said that the framers established a +two- part copyright regime, requiring a copyright owner to renew his copyright +after an initial term. The requirement of renewal meant that works that no +longer needed copyright protection would pass more quickly into the public +domain. The works remaining under protection would be those that had some +continuing commercial value. + +The United States abandoned this sensible system in 1976. For all works created +after 1978, there was only one copyright term - the maximum term. For "natural" +authors, that term was life plus fifty years. For corporations, the term was +seventy-five years. Then, in 1992, Congress abandoned the renewal requirement +for all works created before 1978. All works still under copyright would be +accorded the maximum term then available. After the Sonny Bono Act, that term +was ninety-five years. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) ; + copyright : + of natural authors vs. corporations ; + corporations : + copyright terms for +} + +This change meant that American law no longer had an automatic way to assure +that works that were no longer exploited passed into the public domain. And +indeed, after these changes, it is unclear whether it is even possible to put +works into the public domain. The public domain is orphaned by these changes in +copyright law. Despite the requirement that terms be "limited," we have no +evidence that anything will limit them. + +The effect of these changes on the average duration of copyright is dramatic. +In 1973, more than 85 percent of copyright owners failed to renew their +copyright. That meant that the average term of copyright in 1973 was just 32.2 +years. Because of the elimination of the renewal requirement, the average term +of copyright is now the maximum term. In thirty years, then, the average term +has tripled, from 32.2 years to 95 years.~{ These statistics are understated. +Between the years 1910 and 1962 (the first year the renewal term was extended), +the average term was never more than thirty-two years, and averaged thirty +years. See Landes and Posner, "Indefinitely Renewable Copyright," loc. cit. }~ + +2~ Law: Scope +={ copyright : + scope of +17 +} + +The "scope" of a copyright is the range of rights granted by the law. The scope +of American copyright has changed dramatically. Those changes are not +necessarily bad. But we should understand the extent of the changes if we're to +keep this debate in context. + +In 1790, that scope was very narrow. Copyright covered only "maps, charts, and +books." That means it didn't cover, for example, music or architecture. More +significantly, the right granted by a copyright gave the author the exclusive +right to "publish" copyrighted works. That means someone else violated the +copyright only if he republished the work without the copyright owner's +permission. Finally, the right granted by a copyright was an exclusive right to +that particular book. The right did not extend to what lawyers call "derivative +works." It would not, therefore, interfere with the right of someone other than +the author to translate a copyrighted book, or to adapt the story to a +different form (such as a drama based on a published book). +={ copyright law : + on republishing vs. transformation of original work ; + derivative works : + historical shift in copyright coverage of +2 +} + +This, too, has changed dramatically. While the contours of copyright today are +extremely hard to describe simply, in general terms, the right covers +practically any creative work that is reduced to a tangible form. It covers +music as well as architecture, drama as well as computer programs. It gives the +copyright owner of that creative work not only the exclusive right to "publish" +the work, but also the exclusive right of control over any "copies" of that +work. And most significant for our purposes here, the right gives the copyright +owner control over not only his or her particular work, but also any +"derivative work" that might grow out of the original work. In this way, the +right covers more creative work, protects the creative work more broadly, and +protects works that are based in a significant way on the initial creative +work. + +At the same time that the scope of copyright has expanded, procedural +limitations on the right have been relaxed. I've already described the complete +removal of the renewal requirement in 1992. In addition to the renewal +requirement, for most of the history of American copyright law, there was a +requirement that a work be registered before it could receive the protection of +a copyright. There was also a requirement that any copyrighted work be marked +either with that famous © or the word /{copyright}/. And for most of the +history of American copyright law, there was a requirement that works be +deposited with the government before a copyright could be secured. +={ copyright : + marking of +2 ; + formalities +2 ; + copyright law : + registration requirement of +2 +} + +The reason for the registration requirement was the sensible understanding that +for most works, no copyright was required. Again, in the first ten years of the +Republic, 95 percent of works eligible for copyright were never copyrighted. +Thus, the rule reflected the norm: Most works apparently didn't need copyright, +so registration narrowed the regulation of the law to the few that did. The +same reasoning justified the requirement that a work be marked as copyrighted - +that way it was easy to know whether a copyright was being claimed. The +requirement that works be deposited was to assure that after the copyright +expired, there would be a copy of the work somewhere so that it could be copied +by others without locating the original author. + +All of these "formalities" were abolished in the American system when we +decided to follow European copyright law. There is no requirement that you +register a work to get a copyright; the copyright now is automatic; the +copyright exists whether or not you mark your work with a ©; and the copyright +exists whether or not you actually make a copy available for others to copy. +={ copyright law : + European +} + +Consider a practical example to understand the scope of these differences. + +If, in 1790, you wrote a book and you were one of the 5 percent who actually +copyrighted that book, then the copyright law protected you against another +publisher's taking your book and republishing it without your permission. The +aim of the act was to regulate publishers so as to prevent that kind of unfair +competition. In 1790, there were 174 publishers in the United States.~{ See +Thomas Bender and David Sampliner, "Poets, Pirates, and the Creation of +American Literature," 29 /{New York University Journal of International Law and +Politics}/ 255 (1997), and James Gilraeth, ed., Federal Copyright Records, +1790- 1800 (U.S. G.P.O., 1987). }~ The Copyright Act was thus a tiny regulation +of a tiny proportion of a tiny part of the creative market in the United States +- publishers. +={ Copyright Act (1790) +1 } + +The act left other creators totally unregulated. If I copied your poem by hand, +over and over again, as a way to learn it by heart, my act was totally +unregulated by the 1790 act. If I took your novel and made a play based upon +it, or if I translated it or abridged it, none of those activities were +regulated by the original copyright act. These creative activities remained +free, while the activities of publishers were restrained. +={ copyright law : + on republishing vs. transformation of original work +8 ; + derivative works : + piracy vs. +3 ; + piracy : + derivative work vs. +6 +} + +Today the story is very different: If you write a book, your book is +automatically protected. Indeed, not just your book. Every e-mail, every note +to your spouse, every doodle, /{every}/ creative act that's reduced to a +tangible form - all of this is automatically copyrighted. There is no need to +register or mark your work. The protection follows the creation, not the steps +you take to protect it. + +That protection gives you the right (subject to a narrow range of fair use +exceptions) to control how others copy the work, whether they copy it to +republish it or to share an excerpt. + +That much is the obvious part. Any system of copyright would control competing +publishing. But there's a second part to the copyright of today that is not at +all obvious. This is the protection of "derivative rights." If you write a +book, no one can make a movie out of your book without permission. No one can +translate it without permission. CliffsNotes can't make an abridgment unless +permission is granted. All of these derivative uses of your original work are +controlled by the copyright holder. The copyright, in other words, is now not +just an exclusive right to your writings, but an exclusive right to your +writings and a large proportion of the writings inspired by them. + +It is this derivative right that would seem most bizarre to our framers, though +it has become second nature to us. Initially, this expansion was created to +deal with obvious evasions of a narrower copyright. If I write a book, can you +change one word and then claim a copyright in a new and different book? +Obviously that would make a joke of the copyright, so the law was properly +expanded to include those slight modifications as well as the verbatim original +work. + +In preventing that joke, the law created an astonishing power within a free +culture - at least, it's astonishing when you understand that the law applies +not just to the commercial publisher but to anyone with a computer. I +understand the wrong in duplicating and selling someone else's work. But +whatever /{that}/ wrong is, transforming someone else's work is a different +wrong. Some view transformation as no wrong at all - they believe that our law, +as the framers penned it, should not protect derivative rights at all.~{ +Jonathan Zittrain, "The Copyright Cage," /{Legal Affairs,}/ July/August 2003, +available at link #26. }~ Whether or not you go that far, it seems plain that +whatever wrong is involved is fundamentally different from the wrong of direct +piracy. + +Yet copyright law treats these two different wrongs in the same way. I can go +to court and get an injunction against your pirating my book. I can go to court +and get an injunction against your transformative use of my book.~{ Professor +Rubenfeld has presented a powerful constitutional argument about the difference +that copyright law should draw (from the perspective of the First Amendment) +between mere "copies" and derivative works. See Jed Rubenfeld, "The Freedom of +Imagination: Copyright's Constitutionality," /{Yale Law Journal}/ 112 (2002): +1-60 (see especially pp. 53-59). }~ These two different uses of my creative +work are treated the same. + +This again may seem right to you. If I wrote a book, then why should you be +able to write a movie that takes my story and makes money from it without +paying me or crediting me? Or if Disney creates a creature called "Mickey +Mouse," why should you be able to make Mickey Mouse toys and be the one to +trade on the value that Disney originally created? +={ Disney, Walt ; + Mickey Mouse +} + +These are good arguments, and, in general, my point is not that the derivative +right is unjustified. My aim just now is much narrower: simply to make clear +that this expansion is a significant change from the rights originally granted. + +2~ Law and Architecture: Reach + +Whereas originally the law regulated only publishers, the change in copyright's +scope means that the law today regulates publishers, users, and authors. It +regulates them because all three are capable of making copies, and the core of +the regulation of copyright law is copies.~{ This is a simplification of the +law, but not much of one. The law certainly regulates more than "copies" - a +public performance of a copyrighted song, for example, is regulated even though +performance per se doesn't make a copy; 17 /{United States Code,}/ section +106(4). And it certainly sometimes doesn't regulate a "copy"; 17 /{United +States Code,}/ section 112(a). But the presumption under the existing law +(which regulates "copies;" 17 /{United States Code,}/ section 102) is that if +there is a copy, there is a right. }~ +={ copyright law : + copies as core issue of +1 | scope of +2 +} + +"Copies." That certainly sounds like the obvious thing for /{copy}/right law to +regulate. But as with Jack Valenti's argument at the start of this chapter, +that "creative property" deserves the "same rights" as all other property, it +is the /{obvious}/ that we need to be most careful about. For while it may be +obvious that in the world before the Internet, copies were the obvious trigger +for copyright law, upon reflection, it should be obvious that in the world with +the Internet, copies should /{not}/ be the trigger for copyright law. More +precisely, they should not /{always}/ be the trigger for copyright law. +={ Valenti, Jack : + on creative property rights ; + creative property : + other property rights vs. +1 +} + +This is perhaps the central claim of this book, so let me take this very slowly +so that the point is not easily missed. My claim is that the Internet should at +least force us to rethink the conditions under which the law of copyright +automatically applies,~{ Thus, my argument is not that in each place that +copyright law extends, we should repeal it. It is instead that we should have a +good argument for its extending where it does, and should not determine its +reach on the basis of arbitrary and automatic changes caused by technology. }~ +because it is clear that the current reach of copyright was never contemplated, +much less chosen, by the legislators who enacted copyright law. + +We can see this point abstractly by beginning with this largely empty circle. + +{freeculture05.png 350x350 "uses" }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Think about a book in real space, and imagine this circle to represent all its +potential /{uses}/. Most of these uses are unregulated by copyright law, +because the uses don't create a copy. If you read a book, that act is not +regulated by copyright law. If you give someone the book, that act is not +regulated by copyright law. If you resell a book, that act is not regulated +(copyright law expressly states that after the first sale of a book, the +copyright owner can impose no further conditions on the disposition of the +book). If you sleep on the book or use it to hold up a lamp or let your puppy +chew it up, those acts are not regulated by copyright law, because those acts +do not make a copy. +={ books : + three types of uses of +9 ; + copyright law : + copies as core issue of +16 ; + Internet : + copyright applicability altered by technology of +16 ; + technology : + copyright intent altered by +16 ; + derivative works : + piracy vs. +3 ; + piracy : + derivative work vs. +3 +} + +% piracy derivative work vs. in original index, not found, but included for page indicated + +{freeculture06.png 350x350 "unregulated" }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Obviously, however, some uses of a copyrighted book are regulated by copyright +law. Republishing the book, for example, makes a copy. It is therefore +regulated by copyright law. Indeed, this particular use stands at the core of +this circle of possible uses of a copyrighted work. It is the paradigmatic use +properly regulated by copyright regulation (see first diagram on next page). + +Finally, there is a tiny sliver of otherwise regulated copying uses that remain +unregulated because the law considers these "fair uses." +={ fair use +6 ; + copyright law : + fair use and +6 +} + +{freeculture07.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +These are uses that themselves involve copying, but which the law treats as +unregulated because public policy demands that they remain unregulated. You are +free to quote from this book, even in a review that is quite negative, without +my permission, even though that quoting makes a copy. That copy would +ordinarily give the copyright owner the exclusive right to say whether the copy +is allowed or not, but the law denies the owner any exclusive right over such +"fair uses" for public policy (and possibly First Amendment) reasons. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + First Amendment +} + +{freeculture08.png 450x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +{freeculture09.png 350x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +In real space, then, the possible uses of a book are divided into three sorts: +(1) unregulated uses, (2) regulated uses, and (3) regulated uses that are +nonetheless deemed "fair" regardless of the copyright owner's views. +={ copyright : + usage restrictions attached to +8 +} + +Enter the Internet - a distributed, digital network where every use of a +copyrighted work produces a copy.~{ I don't mean "nature" in the sense that it +couldn't be different, but rather that its present instantiation entails a +copy. Optical networks need not make copies of content they transmit, and a +digital network could be designed to delete anything it copies so that the same +number of copies remain. }~ And because of this single, arbitrary feature of +the design of a digital network, the scope of category 1 changes dramatically. +Uses that before were presumptively unregulated are now presumptively +regulated. No longer is there a set of presumptively unregulated uses that +define a freedom associated with a copyrighted work. Instead, each use is now +subject to the copyright, because each use also makes a copy - category 1 gets +sucked into category 2. And those who would defend the unregulated uses of +copyrighted work must look exclusively to category 3, fair uses, to bear the +burden of this shift. +={ books : + on Internet +7 ; + Internet : + books on +7 ; + fair use : + Internet burdens on +} + +So let's be very specific to make this general point clear. Before the +Internet, if you purchased a book and read it ten times, there would be no +plausible /{copyright}/-related argument that the copyright owner could make to +control that use of her book. Copyright law would have nothing to say about +whether you read the book once, ten times, or every night before you went to +bed. None of those instances of use - reading - could be regulated by copyright +law because none of those uses produced a copy. + +But the same book as an e-book is effectively governed by a different set of +rules. Now if the copyright owner says you may read the book only once or only +once a month, then /{copyright law}/ would aid the copyright owner in +exercising this degree of control, because of the accidental feature of +copyright law that triggers its application upon there being a copy. Now if you +read the book ten times and the license says you may read it only five times, +then whenever you read the book (or any portion of it) beyond the fifth time, +you are making a copy of the book contrary to the copyright owner's wish. +={ e-books +5 ; + derivative works : + technological developments and +4 +} + +There are some people who think this makes perfect sense. My aim just now is +not to argue about whether it makes sense or not. My aim is only to make clear +the change. Once you see this point, a few other points also become clear: + +First, making category 1 disappear is not anything any policy maker ever +intended. Congress did not think through the collapse of the presumptively +unregulated uses of copyrighted works. There is no evidence at all that policy +makers had this idea in mind when they allowed our policy here to shift. +Unregulated uses were an important part of free culture before the Internet. + +Second, this shift is especially troubling in the context of transformative +uses of creative content. Again, we can all understand the wrong in commercial +piracy. But the law now purports to regulate /{any}/ transformation you make of +creative work using a machine. "Copy and paste" and "cut and paste" become +crimes. Tinkering with a story and releasing it to others exposes the tinkerer +to at least a requirement of justification. However troubling the expansion +with respect to copying a particular work, it is extraordinarily troubling with +respect to transformative uses of creative work. +={ copyright law : + on republishing vs. transformation of original work +1 +} + +Third, this shift from category 1 to category 2 puts an extraordinary burden on +category 3 ("fair use") that fair use never before had to bear. If a copyright +owner now tried to control how many times I could read a book on-line, the +natural response would be to argue that this is a violation of my fair use +rights. But there has never been any litigation about whether I have a fair use +right to read, because before the Internet, reading did not trigger the +application of copyright law and hence the need for a fair use defense. The +right to read was effectively protected before because reading was not +regulated. +={ fair use : + Internet burdens on +1 ; + copyright law : + fair use and +1 ; + derivative works : + fair use vs. +1 +} + +This point about fair use is totally ignored, even by advocates for free +culture. We have been cornered into arguing that our rights depend upon fair +use - never even addressing the earlier question about the expansion in +effective regulation. A thin protection grounded in fair use makes sense when +the vast majority of uses are /{unregulated}/. But when everything becomes +presumptively regulated, then the protections of fair use are not enough. + +The case of Video Pipeline is a good example. Video Pipeline was in the +business of making "trailer" advertisements for movies available to video +stores. The video stores displayed the trailers as a way to sell videos. Video +Pipeline got the trailers from the film distributors, put the trailers on tape, +and sold the tapes to the retail stores. +={ Video Pipeline +5 ; + advertising +2 ; + film industry : + trailer advertisements of +2 +} + +The company did this for about fifteen years. Then, in 1997, it began to think +about the Internet as another way to distribute these previews. The idea was to +expand their "selling by sampling" technique by giving on-line stores the same +ability to enable "browsing." Just as in a bookstore you can read a few pages +of a book before you buy the book, so, too, you would be able to sample a bit +from the movie on-line before you bought it. +={ browsing } + +In 1998, Video Pipeline informed Disney and other film distributors that it +intended to distribute the trailers through the Internet (rather than sending +the tapes) to distributors of their videos. Two years later, Disney told Video +Pipeline to stop. The owner of Video Pipeline asked Disney to talk about the +matter - he had built a business on distributing this content as a way to help +sell Disney films; he had customers who depended upon his delivering this +content. Disney would agree to talk only if Video Pipeline stopped the +distribution immediately. Video Pipeline thought it was within their "fair use" +rights to distribute the clips as they had. So they filed a lawsuit to ask the +court to declare that these rights were in fact their rights. +={ Disney, Inc. +3 ; + copyright law : + fair use and ; + copyright law : + copies as core issue of +3 ; + fair use : + legal intimidation tactics against +3 +} + +Disney countersued - for $100 million in damages. Those damages were predicated +upon a claim that Video Pipeline had - willfully infringed" on Disney's +copyright. When a court makes a finding of willful infringement, it can award +damages not on the basis of the actual harm to the copyright owner, but on the +basis of an amount set in the statute. Because Video Pipeline had distributed +seven hundred clips of Disney movies to enable video stores to sell copies of +those movies, Disney was now suing Video Pipeline for $100 million. +={ copyright : + usage restrictions attached to +2 ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + willful infringement findings in +2 ; + willful infringement +} + +Disney has the right to control its property, of course. But the video stores +that were selling Disney's films also had some sort of right to be able to sell +the films that they had bought from Disney. Disney's claim in court was that +the stores were allowed to sell the films and they were permitted to list the +titles of the films they were selling, but they were not allowed to show clips +of the films as a way of selling them without Disney's permission. + +Now, you might think this is a close case, and I think the courts would +consider it a close case. My point here is to map the change that gives Disney +this power. Before the Internet, Disney couldn't really control how people got +access to their content. Once a video was in the marketplace, the "first-sale +doctrine" would free the seller to use the video as he wished, including +showing portions of it in order to engender sales of the entire movie video. +But with the Internet, it becomes possible for Disney to centralize control +over access to this content. Because each use of the Internet produces a copy, +use on the Internet becomes subject to the copyright owner's control. The +technology expands the scope of effective control, because the technology +builds a copy into every transaction. +={ first-sale doctrine } + +No doubt, a potential is not yet an abuse, and so the potential for control is +not yet the abuse of control. Barnes & Noble has the right to say you can't +touch a book in their store; property law gives them that right. But the market +effectively protects against that abuse. If Barnes & Noble banned browsing, +then consumers would choose other bookstores. Competition protects against the +extremes. And it may well be (my argument so far does not even question this) +that competition would prevent any similar danger when it comes to copyright. +Sure, publishers exercising the rights that authors have assigned to them might +try to regulate how many times you read a book, or try to stop you from sharing +the book with anyone. But in a competitive market such as the book market, the +dangers of this happening are quite slight. +={ Barnes & Noble ; + browsing ; + market competition +} + +Again, my aim so far is simply to map the changes that this changed +architecture enables. Enabling technology to enforce the control of copyright +means that the control of copyright is no longer defined by balanced policy. +The control of copyright is simply what private owners choose. In some +contexts, at least, that fact is harmless. But in some contexts it is a recipe +for disaster. + +2~ Architecture and Law: Force + +The disappearance of unregulated uses would be change enough, but a second +important change brought about by the Internet magnifies its significance. This +second change does not affect the reach of copyright regulation; it affects how +such regulation is enforced. + +In the world before digital technology, it was generally the law that +controlled whether and how someone was regulated by copyright law. The law, +meaning a court, meaning a judge: In the end, it was a human, trained in the +tradition of the law and cognizant of the balances that tradition embraced, who +said whether and how the law would restrict your freedom. +={ copyright law : + technology as automatic enforcer of ; + technology : + copyright enforcement controlled by +} + +There's a famous story about a battle between the Marx Brothers and Warner +Brothers. The Marxes intended to make a parody of /{Casablanca}/. Warner +Brothers objected. They wrote a nasty letter to the Marxes, warning them that +there would be serious legal consequences if they went forward with their +plan.~{ See David Lange, "Recognizing the Public Domain," /{Law and +Contemporary Problems}/ 44 (1981): 172-73. }~ +={ Marx Brothers +3 ; + Warner Brothers +2 ; + Casablanca +1 +} + +This led the Marx Brothers to respond in kind. They warned Warner Brothers that +the Marx Brothers "were brothers long before you were."~{ Ibid. See also +Vaidhyanathan, /{Copyrights and Copywrongs,}/ 1-3. }~ The Marx Brothers +therefore owned the word /{brothers}/, and if Warner Brothers insisted on +trying to control /{Casablanca}/, then the Marx Brothers would insist on +control over /{brothers}/. + +An absurd and hollow threat, of course, because Warner Brothers, like the Marx +Brothers, knew that no court would ever enforce such a silly claim. This +extremism was irrelevant to the real freedoms anyone (including Warner +Brothers) enjoyed. + +On the Internet, however, there is no check on silly rules, because on the +Internet, increasingly, rules are enforced not by a human but by a machine: +Increasingly, the rules of copyright law, as interpreted by the copyright +owner, get built into the technology that delivers copyrighted content. It is +code, rather than law, that rules. And the problem with code regulations is +that, unlike law, code has no shame. Code would not get the humor of the Marx +Brothers. The consequence of that is not at all funny. +={ books : + on Internet +30 ; + Internet : + books on +28 +} + +Consider the life of my Adobe eBook Reader. +={ Adobe eBook Reader +2 ; + copyright law : + technology as automatic enforcer of +68 ; + technology : + copyright enforcement controlled by +68 ; + e-books +27 +} + +An e-book is a book delivered in electronic form. An Adobe eBook is not a book +that Adobe has published; Adobe simply produces the software that publishers +use to deliver e-books. It provides the technology, and the publisher delivers +the content by using the technology. + +On the next page is a picture of an old version of my Adobe eBook Reader. + +As you can see, I have a small collection of e-books within this e-book +library. Some of these books reproduce content that is in the public domain: +/{Middlemarch}/, for example, is in the public domain. Some of them reproduce +content that is not in the public domain: My own book /{The Future of Ideas}/ +is not yet within the public domain. +={ Future of Ideas, The (Lessig) ; + Lessig, Lawrence ; + Middlemarch (Eliot) +1 ; + public domain : + e-book restrictions on +9 +} + +Consider /{Middlemarch}/ first. If you click on my e-book copy of +/{Middlemarch}/, you'll see a fancy cover, and then a button at the bottom +called Permissions. +={ Internet : + copyright enforced through +46 ; + permissions : + coded controls vs. +23 +} + +{freeculture10.png 340x450 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +If you click on the Permissions button, you'll see a list of the permissions +that the publisher purports to grant with this book. + +{freeculture11.png 560x250 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +According to my eBook Reader, I have the permission to copy to the clipboard of +the computer ten text selections every ten days. (So far, I've copied no text +to the clipboard.) I also have the permission to print ten pages from the book +every ten days. Lastly, I have the permission to use the Read Aloud button to +hear /{Middlemarch}/ read aloud through the computer. +={ Middlemarch (Eliot) } + +{freeculture12.png 310x410 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Here's the e-book for another work in the public domain (including the +translation): Aristotle's /{Politics}/. +={ Aristotle ; + Politics (Aristotle) +} + +According to its permissions, no printing or copying is permitted at all. But +fortunately, you can use the Read Aloud button to hear the book. + +{freeculture13.png 560x220 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Finally (and most embarrassingly), here are the permissions for the original e- +book version of my last book, /{The Future of Ideas}/: +={ Future of Ideas, The (Lessig) ; + Lessig, Lawrence +} + +{freeculture14.png 560x224 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +No copying, no printing, and don't you dare try to listen to this book! + +Now, the Adobe eBook Reader calls these controls "permissions" - as if the +publisher has the power to control how you use these works. For works under +copyright, the copyright owner certainly does have the power - up to the limits +of the copyright law. But for work not under copyright, there is no such +copyright power.~{ In principle, a contract might impose a requirement on me. I +might, for example, buy a book from you that includes a contract that says I +will read it only three times, or that I promise to read it three times. But +that obligation (and the limits for creating that obligation) would come from +the contract, not from copyright law, and the obligations of contract would not +necessarily pass to anyone who subsequently acquired the book. }~ When my +e-book of /{Middlemarch}/ says I have the permission to copy only ten text +selections into the memory every ten days, what that really means is that the +eBook Reader has enabled the publisher to control how I use the book on my +computer, far beyond the control that the law would enable. + +The control comes instead from the code - from the technology within which the +e- book "lives." Though the e-book says that these are permissions, they are +not the sort of "permissions" that most of us deal with. When a teenager gets +"permission" to stay out till midnight, she knows (unless she's Cinderella) +that she can stay out till 2 A.M., but will suffer a punishment if she's +caught. But when the Adobe eBook Reader says I have the permission to make ten +copies of the text into the computer's memory, that means that after I've made +ten copies, the computer will not make any more. The same with the printing +restrictions: After ten pages, the eBook Reader will not print any more pages. +It's the same with the silly restriction that says that you can't use the Read +Aloud button to read my book aloud - it's not that the company will sue you if +you do; instead, if you push the Read Aloud button with my book, the machine +simply won't read aloud. + +These are /{controls}/, not permissions. Imagine a world where the Marx +Brothers sold word processing software that, when you tried to type "Warner +Brothers," erased "Brothers" from the sentence. +={ Marx Brothers ; + Warner Brothers +} + +This is the future of copyright law: not so much copyright /{law}/ as copyright +/{code}/. The controls over access to content will not be controls that are +ratified by courts; the controls over access to content will be controls that +are coded by programmers. And whereas the controls that are built into the law +are always to be checked by a judge, the controls that are built into the +technology have no similar built-in check. + +How significant is this? Isn't it always possible to get around the controls +built into the technology? Software used to be sold with technologies that +limited the ability of users to copy the software, but those were trivial +protections to defeat. Why won't it be trivial to defeat these protections as +well? + +We've only scratched the surface of this story. Return to the Adobe eBook +Reader. + +Early in the life of the Adobe eBook Reader, Adobe suffered a public relations +nightmare. Among the books that you could download for free on the Adobe site +was a copy of /{Alice's Adventures in Wonderland}/. This wonderful book is in +the public domain. Yet when you clicked on Permissions for that book, you got +the following report: +={ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Caroll) +4 ; + public domain : + e-book restrictions on +4 +} + +{freeculture15.png 560x310 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Here was a public domain children's book that you were not allowed to copy, not +allowed to lend, not allowed to give, and, as the "permissions" indicated, not +allowed to "read aloud"! + +The public relations nightmare attached to that final permission. For the text +did not say that you were not permitted to use the Read Aloud button; it said +you did not have the permission to read the book aloud. That led some people to +think that Adobe was restricting the right of parents, for example, to read the +book to their children, which seemed, to say the least, absurd. + +Adobe responded quickly that it was absurd to think that it was trying to +restrict the right to read a book aloud. Obviously it was only restricting the +ability to use the Read Aloud button to have the book read aloud. But the +question Adobe never did answer is this: Would Adobe thus agree that a consumer +was free to use software to hack around the restrictions built into the eBook +Reader? If some company (call it Elcomsoft) developed a program to disable the +technological protection built into an Adobe eBook so that a blind person, say, +could use a computer to read the book aloud, would Adobe agree that such a use +of an eBook Reader was fair? Adobe didn't answer because the answer, however +absurd it might seem, is no. + +The point is not to blame Adobe. Indeed, Adobe is among the most innovative +companies developing strategies to balance open access to content with +incentives for companies to innovate. But Adobe's technology enables control, +and Adobe has an incentive to defend this control. That incentive is +understandable, yet what it creates is often crazy. + +To see the point in a particularly absurd context, consider a favorite story of +mine that makes the same point. + +Consider the robotic dog made by Sony named "Aibo." The Aibo learns tricks, +cuddles, and follows you around. It eats only electricity and that doesn't +leave that much of a mess (at least in your house). +={ Aibo robotic dog +6 ; + robotic dog +6 ; + Sony : + Aibo robotic dog produced by +6 +} + +The Aibo is expensive and popular. Fans from around the world have set up clubs +to trade stories. One fan in particular set up a Web site to enable information +about the Aibo dog to be shared. This fan set up aibopet.com (and aibohack.com, +but that resolves to the same site), and on that site he provided information +about how to teach an Aibo to do tricks in addition to the ones Sony had taught +it. +={ hacks +4 } + +"Teach" here has a special meaning. Aibos are just cute computers. You teach a +computer how to do something by programming it differently. So to say that +aibopet.com was giving information about how to teach the dog to do new tricks +is just to say that aibopet.com was giving information to users of the Aibo pet +about how to hack their computer "dog" to make it do new tricks (thus, +aibohack.com). + +If you're not a programmer or don't know many programmers, the word /{hack}/ +has a particularly unfriendly connotation. Nonprogrammers hack bushes or weeds. +Nonprogrammers in horror movies do even worse. But to programmers, or coders, +as I call them, /{hack}/ is a much more positive term. /{Hack}/ just means code +that enables the program to do something it wasn't originally intended or +enabled to do. If you buy a new printer for an old computer, you might find the +old computer doesn't run, or "drive," the printer. If you discovered that, +you'd later be happy to discover a hack on the Net by someone who has written a +driver to enable the computer to drive the printer you just bought. + +Some hacks are easy. Some are unbelievably hard. Hackers as a community like to +challenge themselves and others with increasingly difficult tasks. There's a +certain respect that goes with the talent to hack well. There's a well-deserved +respect that goes with the talent to hack ethically. + +The Aibo fan was displaying a bit of both when he hacked the program and +offered to the world a bit of code that would enable the Aibo to dance jazz. +The dog wasn't programmed to dance jazz. It was a clever bit of tinkering that +turned the dog into a more talented creature than Sony had built. + +I've told this story in many contexts, both inside and outside the United +States. Once I was asked by a puzzled member of the audience, is it permissible +for a dog to dance jazz in the United States? We forget that stories about the +backcountry still flow across much of the world. So let's just be clear before +we continue: It's not a crime anywhere (anymore) to dance jazz. Nor is it a +crime to teach your dog to dance jazz. Nor should it be a crime (though we +don't have a lot to go on here) to teach your robot dog to dance jazz. Dancing +jazz is a completely legal activity. One imagines that the owner of aibopet.com +thought, /{What possible problem could there be with teaching a robot dog to +dance?}/ + +Let's put the dog to sleep for a minute, and turn to a pony show - not +literally a pony show, but rather a paper that a Princeton academic named Ed +Felten prepared for a conference. This Princeton academic is well known and +respected. He was hired by the government in the Microsoft case to test +Microsoft's claims about what could and could not be done with its own code. In +that trial, he demonstrated both his brilliance and his coolness. Under heavy +badgering by Microsoft lawyers, Ed Felten stood his ground. He was not about to +be bullied into being silent about something he knew very well. +={ Felten, Ed +11 ; + Microsoft : + government case against +} + +But Felten's bravery was really tested in April 2001.~{ See Pamela Samuelson, +"Anticircumvention Rules: Threat to Science," /{Science}/ 293 (2001): 2028; +Brendan I. Koerner, "Play Dead: Sony Muzzles the Techies Who Teach a Robot Dog +New Tricks," /{American Prospect,}/ 1 January 2002; "Court Dismisses Computer +Scientists' Challenge to DMCA," /{Intellectual Property Litigation Reporter,}/ +11 December 2001; Bill Holland, "Copyright Act Raising Free-Speech Concerns," +/{Billboard,}/ 26 May 2001; Janelle Brown, "Is the RIAA Running Scared?" +Salon.com, 26 April 2001; Electronic Frontier Foundation, "Frequently Asked +Questions about /{Felten and USENIX v. RIAA}/ Legal Case," available at link +#27. }~ He and a group of colleagues were working on a paper to be submitted at +conference. The paper was intended to describe the weakness in an encryption +system being developed by the Secure Digital Music Initiative as a technique to +control the distribution of music. +={ Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) +5 ; + encryption systems +5 ; + Internet : + encryption systems designed for +5 +} + +The SDMI coalition had as its goal a technology to enable content owners to +exercise much better control over their content than the Internet, as it +originally stood, granted them. Using encryption, SDMI hoped to develop a +standard that would allow the content owner to say "this music cannot be +copied," and have a computer respect that command. The technology was to be +part of a "trusted system" of control that would get content owners to trust +the system of the Internet much more. + +When SDMI thought it was close to a standard, it set up a competition. In +exchange for providing contestants with the code to an SDMI-encrypted bit of +content, contestants were to try to crack it and, if they did, report the +problems to the consortium. + +Felten and his team figured out the encryption system quickly. He and the team +saw the weakness of this system as a type: Many encryption systems would suffer +the same weakness, and Felten and his team thought it worthwhile to point this +out to those who study encryption. + +Let's review just what Felten was doing. Again, this is the United States. We +have a principle of free speech. We have this principle not just because it is +the law, but also because it is a really great idea. A strongly protected +tradition of free speech is likely to encourage a wide range of criticism. That +criticism is likely, in turn, to improve the systems or people or ideas +criticized. +={ speech, freedom of : + useful criticism fostered by +} + +What Felten and his colleagues were doing was publishing a paper describing the +weakness in a technology. They were not spreading free music, or building and +deploying this technology. The paper was an academic essay, unintelligible to +most people. But it clearly showed the weakness in the SDMI system, and why +SDMI would not, as presently constituted, succeed. + +What links these two, aibopet.com and Felten, is the letters they then +received. Aibopet.com received a letter from Sony about the aibopet.com hack. +Though a jazz-dancing dog is perfectly legal, Sony wrote: +={ Aibo robotic dog +1 ; + robotic dog +1 ; + Sony : + Aibo robotic dog produced by +1 +} + +_1 Your site contains information providing the means to circumvent AIBO-ware's +copy protection protocol constituting a violation of the anti-circumvention +provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." +={ circumvention technologies ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) +7 ; + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) +7 ; + copyright law : + circumvention technology banned by +19 ; + technology : + of circumvention +} + +And though an academic paper describing the weakness in a system of encryption +should also be perfectly legal, Felten received a letter from an RIAA lawyer +that read: +={ Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + on encryption system critique +1 +} + +_1 Any disclosure of information gained from participating in the Public +Challenge would be outside the scope of activities permitted by the Agreement +and could subject you and your research team to actions under the Digital +Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA")." + +In both cases, this weirdly Orwellian law was invoked to control the spread of +information. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made spreading such +information an offense. + +The DMCA was enacted as a response to copyright owners' first fear about +cyberspace. The fear was that copyright control was effectively dead; the +response was to find technologies that might compensate. These new technologies +would be copyright protection technologies - technologies to control the +replication and distribution of copyrighted material. They were designed as +/{code}/ to modify the original /{code}/ of the Internet, to reestablish some +protection for copyright owners. + +The DMCA was a bit of law intended to back up the protection of this code +designed to protect copyrighted material. It was, we could say, /{legal code}/ +intended to buttress /{software code}/ which itself was intended to support the +/{legal code of copyright}/. + +But the DMCA was not designed merely to protect copyrighted works to the extent +copyright law protected them. Its protection, that is, did not end at the line +that copyright law drew. The DMCA regulated devices that were designed to +circumvent copyright protection measures. It was designed to ban those devices, +whether or not the use of the copyrighted material made possible by that +circumvention would have been a copyright violation. +={ circumvention technologies +13 ; + fair use : + circumvention technology ban and +1 ; + technology : + of circumvention +13 +} + +Aibopet.com and Felten make the point. The Aibo hack circumvented a copyright +protection system for the purpose of enabling the dog to dance jazz. That +enablement no doubt involved the use of copyrighted material. But as +aibopet.com's site was noncommercial, and the use did not enable subsequent +copyright infringements, there's no doubt that aibopet.com's hack was fair use +of Sony's copyrighted material. Yet fair use is not a defense to the DMCA. The +question is not whether the use of the copyrighted material was a copyright +violation. The question is whether a copyright protection system was +circumvented. +={ Felten, Ed +1 ; + Aibo robotic dog ; + robotic dog ; + Sony : + Aibo robotic dog produced by ; + copyright law : + fair use and +} + +The threat against Felten was more attenuated, but it followed the same line of +reasoning. By publishing a paper describing how a copyright protection system +could be circumvented, the RIAA lawyer suggested, Felten himself was +distributing a circumvention technology. Thus, even though he was not himself +infringing anyone's copyright, his academic paper was enabling others to +infringe others' copyright. +={ Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + on circumvention technology +} + +The bizarreness of these arguments is captured in a cartoon drawn in 1981 by +Paul Conrad. At that time, a court in California had held that the VCR could be +banned because it was a copyright-infringing technology: It enabled consumers +to copy films without the permission of the copyright owner. No doubt there +were uses of the technology that were legal: Fred Rogers, aka "Mr. Rogers," for +example, had testified in that case that he wanted people to feel free to tape +/{Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood}/. +={ Conrad, Paul ; + Rogers, Fred ; + cassette recording : + VCRs +10 ; + VCRs +10 ; + Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood ; + television : + VCR taping of +8 +} + +_1 Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the +"Neighborhood" at hours when some children cannot use it. I think that it's a +real service to families to be able to record such programs and show them at +appropriate times. I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new +technology that allows people to tape the "Neighborhood" off-the-air, and I'm +speaking for the "Neighborhood" because that's what I produce, that they then +become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. +Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole +approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the +way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but +I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control +of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important."~{ /{Sony Corporation of +America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.,}/ 464 U.S. 417, 455 fn. 27 (1984). +Rogers never changed his view about the VCR. See James Lardner, /{Fast Forward: +Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR}/ (New York: W. W. +Norton, 1987), 270-71. }~ + +Even though there were uses that were legal, because there were some uses that +were illegal, the court held the companies producing the VCR responsible. + +This led Conrad to draw the cartoon below, which we can adopt to the DMCA. +={ Conrad, Paul ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) +2 ; + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) +2 +} + +No argument I have can top this picture, but let me try to get close. + +The anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA target copyright circumvention +technologies. Circumvention technologies can be used for different ends. They +can be used, for example, to enable massive pirating of copyrighted material - +a bad end. Or they can be used to enable the use of particular copyrighted +materials in ways that would be considered fair use - a good end. + +A handgun can be used to shoot a police officer or a child. Most would agree +such a use is bad. Or a handgun can be used for target practice or to protect +against an intruder. At least some would say that such a use would be good. It, +too, is a technology that has both good and bad uses. +={ guns +1 ; + handguns +1 +} + +{freeculture16.png 425x500 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +The obvious point of Conrad's cartoon is the weirdness of a world where guns +are legal, despite the harm they can do, while VCRs (and circumvention +technologies) are illegal. Flash: /{No one ever died from copyright +circumvention}/. Yet the law bans circumvention technologies absolutely, +despite the potential that they might do some good, but permits guns, despite +the obvious and tragic harm they do. +={ Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + on circumvention technology +1 +} + +The Aibo and RIAA examples demonstrate how copyright owners are changing the +balance that copyright law grants. Using code, copyright owners restrict fair +use; using the DMCA, they punish those who would attempt to evade the +restrictions on fair use that they impose through code. Technology becomes a +means by which fair use can be erased; the law of the DMCA backs up that +erasing. +={ Conrad, Paul ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ; + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) ; + Aibo robotic dog +1 ; + robotic dog +1 ; + copyright law : + fair use and +1 ; + fair use : + technological restriction of +1 +} + +This is how /{code}/ becomes /{law}/. The controls built into the technology of +copy and access protection become rules the violation of which is also a +violation of the law. In this way, the code extends the law - increasing its +regulation, even if the subject it regulates (activities that would otherwise +plainly constitute fair use) is beyond the reach of the law. Code becomes law; +code extends the law; code thus extends the control that copyright owners +effect - at least for those copyright holders with the lawyers who can write +the nasty letters that Felten and aibopet.com received. +={ Felten, Ed } + +There is one final aspect of the interaction between architecture and law that +contributes to the force of copyright's regulation. This is the ease with which +infringements of the law can be detected. For contrary to the rhetoric common +at the birth of cyberspace that on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog, +increasingly, given changing technologies deployed on the Internet, it is easy +to find the dog who committed a legal wrong. The technologies of the Internet +are open to snoops as well as sharers, and the snoops are increasingly good at +tracking down the identity of those who violate the rules. + +For example, imagine you were part of a /{Star Trek}/ fan club. You gathered +every month to share trivia, and maybe to enact a kind of fan fiction about the +show. One person would play Spock, another, Captain Kirk. The characters would +begin with a plot from a real story, then simply continue it.~{ For an early +and prescient analysis, see Rebecca Tushnet, "Legal Fictions, Copyright, Fan +Fiction, and a New Common Law," /{Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law +Journal}/ 17 (1997): 651. }~ + +Before the Internet, this was, in effect, a totally unregulated activity. No +matter what happened inside your club room, you would never be interfered with +by the copyright police. You were free in that space to do as you wished with +this part of our culture. You were allowed to build on it as you wished without +fear of legal control. +={ Internet : + copyright enforced through +1 +} + +But if you moved your club onto the Internet, and made it generally available +for others to join, the story would be very different. Bots scouring the Net +for trademark and copyright infringement would quickly find your site. Your +posting of fan fiction, depending upon the ownership of the series that you're +depicting, could well inspire a lawyer's threat. And ignoring the lawyer's +threat would be extremely costly indeed. The law of copyright is extremely +efficient. The penalties are severe, and the process is quick. +={ bots } + +This change in the effective force of the law is caused by a change in the ease +with which the law can be enforced. That change too shifts the law's balance +radically. It is as if your car transmitted the speed at which you traveled at +every moment that you drove; that would be just one step before the state +started issuing tickets based upon the data you transmitted. That is, in +effect, what is happening here. + +2~ Market: Concentration + +So copyright's duration has increased dramatically - tripled in the past thirty +years. And copyright's scope has increased as well - from regulating only +publishers to now regulating just about everyone. And copyright's reach has +changed, as every action becomes a copy and hence presumptively regulated. And +as technologists find better ways to control the use of content, and as +copyright is increasingly enforced through technology, copyright's force +changes, too. Misuse is easier to find and easier to control. This regulation +of the creative process, which began as a tiny regulation governing a tiny part +of the market for creative work, has become the single most important regulator +of creativity there is. It is a massive expansion in the scope of the +government's control over innovation and creativity; it would be totally +unrecognizable to those who gave birth to copyright's control. + +Still, in my view, all of these changes would not matter much if it weren't for +one more change that we must also consider. This is a change that is in some +sense the most familiar, though its significance and scope are not well +understood. It is the one that creates precisely the reason to be concerned +about all the other changes I have described. + +This is the change in the concentration and integration of the media. In the +past twenty years, the nature of media ownership has undergone a radical +alteration, caused by changes in legal rules governing the media. Before this +change happened, the different forms of media were owned by separate media +companies. Now, the media is increasingly owned by only a few companies. +Indeed, after the changes that the FCC announced in June 2003, most expect that +within a few years, we will live in a world where just three companies control +more than 85 percent of the media. +={ FCC : + media ownership regulated by +2 ; + media : + ownership concentration in +21 +} + +These changes are of two sorts: the scope of concentration, and its nature. + +Changes in scope are the easier ones to describe. As Senator John McCain +summarized the data produced in the FCC's review of media ownership, "five +companies control 85 percent of our media sources."~{ FCC Oversight: Hearing +Before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, 108th Cong., +1st sess. (22 May 2003) (statement of Senator John McCain). }~ The five +recording labels of Universal Music Group, BMG, Sony Music Entertainment, +Warner Music Group, and EMI control 84.8 percent of the U.S. music market.~{ +Lynette Holloway, "Despite a Marketing Blitz, CD Sales Continue to Slide," +/{New York Times,}/ 23 December 2002. }~ The "five largest cable companies pipe +programming to 74 percent of the cable subscribers nationwide."~{ Molly Ivins, +"Media Consolidation Must Be Stopped," /{Charleston Gazette,}/ 31 May 2003. }~ +={ BMG ; + cable television ; + EMI ; + McCain, John ; + recording industry : + ownership concentration in ; + Sony Music Entertainment ; + Universal Music Group ; + Warner Music Group ; + television : + ownership consolidation in +} + +The story with radio is even more dramatic. Before deregulation, the nation's +largest radio broadcasting conglomerate owned fewer than seventy-five stations. +Today /{one}/ company owns more than 1,200 stations. During that period of +consolidation, the total number of radio owners dropped by 34 percent. Today, +in most markets, the two largest broadcasters control 74 percent of that +market's revenues. Overall, just four companies control 90 percent of the +nation's radio advertising revenues. +={ radio : + ownership concentration in +} + +Newspaper ownership is becoming more concentrated as well. Today, there are six +hundred fewer daily newspapers in the United States than there were eighty +years ago, and ten companies control half of the nation's circulation. There +are twenty major newspaper publishers in the United States. The top ten film +studios receive 99 percent of all film revenue. The ten largest cable companies +account for 85 percent of all cable revenue. This is a market far from the free +press the framers sought to protect. Indeed, it is a market that is quite well +protected - by the market. +={ cable television +2 ; + television : + ownership consolidation in +2 ; + film industry : + consolidation of ; + newspapers : + ownership consolidation of +2 +} + +Concentration in size alone is one thing. The more invidious change is in the +nature of that concentration. As author James Fallows put it in a recent +article about Rupert Murdoch, +={ Fallows, James +1 ; + radio : + ownership concentration in +2 ; + Murdoch, Rupert +1 } + +_1 Murdoch's companies now constitute a production system unmatched in its +integration. They supply content - Fox movies ... Fox TV shows ... +Fox-controlled sports broadcasts, plus newspapers and books. They sell the +content to the public and to advertisers - in newspapers, on the broadcast +network, on the cable channels. And they operate the physical distribution +system through which the content reaches the customers. Murdoch's satellite +systems now distribute News Corp. content in Europe and Asia; if Murdoch +becomes DirecTV's largest single owner, that system will serve the same +function in the United States."~{ James Fallows, "The Age of Murdoch," +/{Atlantic Monthly}/ (September 2003): 89. }~ +={ DirectTV ; + Fox (film company) ; + News Corp +} + +The pattern with Murdoch is the pattern of modern media. Not just large +companies owning many radio stations, but a few companies owning as many +outlets of media as possible. A picture describes this pattern better than a +thousand words could do: + +{freeculture17.png 560x350 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ + +Does this concentration matter? Will it affect what is made, or what is +distributed? Or is it merely a more efficient way to produce and distribute +content? +={ innovation : + media conglomeration as disincentive for +13 +} + +My view was that concentration wouldn't matter. I thought it was nothing more +than a more efficient financial structure. But now, after reading and listening +to a barrage of creators try to convince me to the contrary, I am beginning to +change my mind. + +Here's a representative story that begins to suggest how this integration may +matter. + +In 1969, Norman Lear created a pilot for /{All in the Family}/. He took the +pilot to ABC. The network didn't like it. It was too edgy, they told Lear. Make +it again. Lear made a second pilot, more edgy than the first. ABC was +exasperated. You're missing the point, they told Lear. We wanted less edgy, not +more. +={ Lear, Norman +2 ; + ABC +1 ; + All in the Family ; + television : + independent production for +7 +} + +Rather than comply, Lear simply took the show elsewhere. CBS was happy to have +the series; ABC could not stop Lear from walking. The copyrights that Lear held +assured an independence from network control.~{ Leonard Hill, "The Axis of +Access," remarks before Weidenbaum Center Forum, "Entertainment Economics: The +Movie Industry," St. Louis, Missouri, 3 April 2003 (transcript of prepared +remarks available at link #28; for the Lear story, not included in the prepared +remarks, see link #29). }~ +={ CBS } + +The network did not control those copyrights because the law forbade the +networks from controlling the content they syndicated. The law required a +separation between the networks and the content producers; that separation +would guarantee Lear freedom. And as late as 1992, because of these rules, the +vast majority of prime time television - 75 percent of it - was "independent" +of the networks. + +In 1994, the FCC abandoned the rules that required this independence. After +that change, the networks quickly changed the balance. In 1985, there were +twenty- five independent television production studios; in 2002, only five +independent television studios remained. "In 1992, only 15 percent of new +series were produced for a network by a company it controlled. Last year, the +percentage of shows produced by controlled companies more than quintupled to 77 +percent." "In 1992, 16 new series were produced independently of conglomerate +control, last year there was one."~{ NewsCorp./DirecTV Merger and Media +Consolidation: Hearings on Media Ownership Before the Senate Commerce +Committee, 108th Cong., 1st sess. (2003) (testimony of Gene Kimmelman on behalf +of Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America), available at link +#30. Kimmelman quotes Victoria Riskin, president of Writers Guild of America, +West, in her Remarks at FCC En Banc Hearing, Richmond, Virginia, 27 February +2003. }~ In 2002, 75 percent of prime time television was owned by the networks +that ran it. "In the ten-year period between 1992 and 2002, the number of prime +time television hours per week produced by network studios increased over 200%, +whereas the number of prime time television hours per week produced by +independent studios decreased 63%."~{ Ibid. }~ +={ FCC : + on television production studios +} + +Today, another Norman Lear with another /{All in the Family}/ would find that +he had the choice either to make the show less edgy or to be fired: The content +of any show developed for a network is increasingly owned by the network. +={ Lear, Norman ; + All in the Family +} + +While the number of channels has increased dramatically, the ownership of those +channels has narrowed to an ever smaller and smaller few. As Barry Diller said +to Bill Moyers, +={ Diller, Barry +1 ; + Moyers, Bill +} + +_1 Well, if you have companies that produce, that finance, that air on their +channel and then distribute worldwide everything that goes through their +controlled distribution system, then what you get is fewer and fewer actual +voices participating in the process. [We u]sed to have dozens and dozens of +thriving independent production companies producing television programs. Now +you have less than a handful."~{ "Barry Diller Takes on Media Deregulation," +/{Now with Bill Moyers,}/ Bill Moyers, 25 April 2003, edited transcript +available at link #31. }~ + +This narrowing has an effect on what is produced. The product of such large and +concentrated networks is increasingly homogenous. Increasingly safe. +Increasingly sterile. The product of news shows from networks like this is +increasingly tailored to the message the network wants to convey. This is not +the communist party, though from the inside, it must feel a bit like the +communist party. No one can question without risk of consequence - not +necessarily banishment to Siberia, but punishment nonetheless. Independent, +critical, different views are quashed. This is not the environment for a +democracy. +={ democracy : + media concentration and +} + +Economics itself offers a parallel that explains why this integration affects +creativity. Clay Christensen has written about the "Innovator's Dilemma": the +fact that large traditional firms find it rational to ignore new, breakthrough +technologies that compete with their core business. The same analysis could +help explain why large, traditional media companies would find it rational to +ignore new cultural trends.~{ Clayton M. Christensen, /{The Innovator's +Dilemma: The Revolutionary National Bestseller that Changed the Way We Do +Business}/ (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1997). Christensen +acknowledges that the idea was first suggested by Dean Kim Clark. See Kim B. +Clark, "The Interaction of Design Hierarchies and Market Concepts in +Technological Evolution," /{Research Policy}/ 14 (1985): 235- 51. For a more +recent study, see Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, /{Creative Destruction: Why +Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market - and How to +Successfully Transform Them}/ (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 2001). }~ +Lumbering giants not only don't, but should not, sprint. Yet if the field is +only open to the giants, there will be far too little sprinting. +={ Christensen, Clayton M. ; + Innovator's Dilemma, The (Christensen) +} + +I don't think we know enough about the economics of the media market to say +with certainty what concentration and integration will do. The efficiencies are +important, and the effect on culture is hard to measure. + +But there is a quintessentially obvious example that does strongly suggest the +concern. + +In addition to the copyright wars, we're in the middle of the drug wars. +Government policy is strongly directed against the drug cartels; criminal and +civil courts are filled with the consequences of this battle. + +Let me hereby disqualify myself from any possible appointment to any position +in government by saying I believe this war is a profound mistake. I am not pro +drugs. Indeed, I come from a family once wrecked by drugs - though the drugs +that wrecked my family were all quite legal. I believe this war is a profound +mistake because the collateral damage from it is so great as to make waging the +war insane. When you add together the burdens on the criminal justice system, +the desperation of generations of kids whose only real economic opportunities +are as drug warriors, the queering of constitutional protections because of the +constant surveillance this war requires, and, most profoundly, the total +destruction of the legal systems of many South American nations because of the +power of the local drug cartels, I find it impossible to believe that the +marginal benefit in reduced drug consumption by Americans could possibly +outweigh these costs. +={ drugs : + illegal +2 ; + criminal justice system +} + +You may not be convinced. That's fine. We live in a democracy, and it is +through votes that we are to choose policy. But to do that, we depend +fundamentally upon the press to help inform Americans about these issues. + +Beginning in 1998, the Office of National Drug Control Policy launched a media +campaign as part of the "war on drugs." The campaign produced scores of short +film clips about issues related to illegal drugs. In one series (the Nick and +Norm series) two men are in a bar, discussing the idea of legalizing drugs as a +way to avoid some of the collateral damage from the war. One advances an +argument in favor of drug legalization. The other responds in a powerful and +effective way against the argument of the first. In the end, the first guy +changes his mind (hey, it's television). The plug at the end is a damning +attack on the pro-legalization campaign. +={ advertising +4 ; + commercials +4 ; + television : + advertising on +4 ; + Nick and Norm anti-drug campaign +} + +Fair enough. It's a good ad. Not terribly misleading. It delivers its message +well. It's a fair and reasonable message. + +But let's say you think it is a wrong message, and you'd like to run a +countercommercial. Say you want to run a series of ads that try to demonstrate +the extraordinary collateral harm that comes from the drug war. Can you do it? + +Well,obviously, these ads cost lots of money. Assume you raise the money. +Assume a group of concerned citizens donates all the money in the world to help +you get your message out. Can you be sure your message will be heard then? + +No.You cannot. Television stations have a general policy of avoiding +"controversial" ads. Ads sponsored by the government are deemed +uncontroversial; ads disagreeing with the government are controversial. This +selectivity might be thought inconsistent with the First Amendment, but the +Supreme Court has held that stations have the right to choose what they run. +Thus, the major channels of commercial media will refuse one side of a crucial +debate the opportunity to present its case. And the courts will defend the +rights of the stations to be this biased.~{ The Marijuana Policy Project, in +February 2003, sought to place ads that directly responded to the Nick and Norm +series on stations within the Washington, D.C., area. Comcast rejected the ads +as "against [their] policy." The local NBC affiliate, WRC, rejected the ads +without reviewing them. The local ABC affiliate, WJOA, originally agreed to run +the ads and accepted payment to do so, but later decided not to run the ads and +returned the collected fees. Interview with Neal Levine, 15 October 2003. These +restrictions are, of course, not limited to drug policy. See, for example, Nat +Ives, "On the Issue of an Iraq War, Advocacy Ads Meet with Rejection from TV +Networks," /{New York Times,}/ 13 March 2003, C4. Outside of election-related +air time there is very little that the FCC or the courts are willing to do to +even the playing field. For a general overview, see Rhonda Brown, "Ad Hoc +Access: The Regulation of Editorial Advertising on Television and Radio," +/{Yale Law and Policy Review}/ 6 (1988): 449-79, and for a more recent summary +of the stance of the FCC and the courts, see /{Radio-Television News Directors +Association v. FCC,}/ 184 F. 3d 872 (D.C. Cir. 1999). Municipal authorities +exercise the same authority as the networks. In a recent example from San +Francisco, the San Francisco transit authority rejected an ad that criticized +its Muni diesel buses. Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, "Antidiesel Group Fuming +After Muni Rejects Ad," SFGate.com, 16 June 2003, available at link #32. The +ground was that the criticism was "too controversial." }~ +={ Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + First Amendment ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + on television advertising bans ; + television : + controversy avoided by +} + +I'd be happy to defend the networks' rights, as well - if we lived in a media +market that was truly diverse. But concentration in the media throws that +condition into doubt. If a handful of companies control access to the media, +and that handful of companies gets to decide which political positions it will +allow to be promoted on its channels, then in an obvious and important way, +concentration matters. You might like the positions the handful of companies +selects. But you should not like a world in which a mere few get to decide +which issues the rest of us get to know about. + +2~ Together +={ copyright : + scope of +25 +} + +There is something innocent and obvious about the claim of the copyright +warriors that the government should "protect my property." In the abstract, it +is obviously true and, ordinarily, totally harmless. No sane sort who is not an +anarchist could disagree. + +But when we see how dramatically this "property" has changed - when we +recognize how it might now interact with both technology and markets to mean +that the effective constraint on the liberty to cultivate our culture is +dramatically different - the claim begins to seem less innocent and obvious. +Given (1) the power of technology to supplement the law's control, and (2) the +power of concentrated markets to weaken the opportunity for dissent, if +strictly enforcing the massively expanded "property" rights granted by +copyright fundamentally changes the freedom within this culture to cultivate +and build upon our past, then we have to ask whether this property should be +redefined. + +Not starkly. Or absolutely. My point is not that we should abolish copyright or +go back to the eighteenth century. That would be a total mistake, disastrous +for the most important creative enterprises within our culture today. + +But there is a space between zero and one, Internet culture notwithstanding. +And these massive shifts in the effective power of copyright regulation, tied +to increased concentration of the content industry and resting in the hands of +technology that will increasingly enable control over the use of culture, +should drive us to consider whether another adjustment is called for. Not an +adjustment that increases copyright's power. Not an adjustment that increases +its term. Rather, an adjustment to restore the balance that has traditionally +defined copyright's regulation - a weakening of that regulation, to strengthen +creativity. + +Copyright law has not been a rock of Gibraltar. It's not a set of constant +commitments that, for some mysterious reason, teenagers and geeks now flout. +Instead, copyright power has grown dramatically in a short period of time, as +the technologies of distribution and creation have changed and as lobbyists +have pushed for more control by copyright holders. Changes in the past in +response to changes in technology suggest that we may well need similar changes +in the future. And these changes have to be /{reductions}/ in the scope of +copyright, in response to the extraordinary increase in control that technology +and the market enable. + +For the single point that is lost in this war on pirates is a point that we see +only after surveying the range of these changes. When you add together the +effect of changing law, concentrated markets, and changing technology, together +they produce an astonishing conclusion: /{Never in our history have fewer had a +legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now}/. + +Not when copyrights were perpetual, for when copyrights were perpetual, they +affected only that precise creative work. Not when only publishers had the +tools to publish, for the market then was much more diverse. Not when there +were only three television networks, for even then, newspapers, film studios, +radio stations, and publishers were independent of the networks. /{Never}/ has +copyright protected such a wide range of rights, against as broad a range of +actors, for a term that was remotely as long. This form of regulation - a tiny +regulation of a tiny part of the creative energy of a nation at the founding - +is now a massive regulation of the overall creative process. Law plus +technology plus the market now interact to turn this historically benign +regulation into the most significant regulation of culture that our free +society has known.~{ Siva Vaidhyanathan captures a similar point in his "four +surrenders" of copyright law in the digital age. See Vaidhyanathan, 159-60. }~ +={ copyright : + in perpetuity +} + +!_ This has been +a long chapter. Its point can now be briefly stated. + +At the start of this book, I distinguished between commercial and noncommercial +culture. In the course of this chapter, I have distinguished between copying a +work and transforming it. We can now combine these two distinctions and draw a +clear map of the changes that copyright law has undergone. +={ copyright law : + history of American +10 | on republishing vs. transformation of original work +16 ; + culture : + commercial vs. noncommercial +11 ; + derivative works : + historical shift in copyright coverage of +14 ; + public domain : + balance of U.S. content in +14 +} + +In 1790, the law looked like this: + +table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33; + +  +Publish +Transform + +Commercial +© +Free + +Noncommercial +Free +Free + +}table + +The act of publishing a map, chart, and book was regulated by copyright law. +Nothing else was. Transformations were free. And as copyright attached only +with registration, and only those who intended to benefit commercially would +register, copying through publishing of noncommercial work was also free. +={ copyright law : + registration requirement of ; + copyright law : + copies as core issue of +7 +} + +By the end of the nineteenth century, the law had changed to this: + +table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33; + +  +Publish +Transform + +Commercial +© +© + +Noncommercial +Free +Free + +}table + +Derivative works were now regulated by copyright law - if published, which +again, given the economics of publishing at the time, means if offered +commercially. But noncommercial publishing and transformation were still +essentially free. +={ derivative works : + technological developments and +5 ; + technology : + of copying +5 +} + +In 1909 the law changed to regulate copies, not publishing, and after this +change, the scope of the law was tied to technology. As the technology of +copying became more prevalent, the reach of the law expanded. Thus by 1975, as +photocopying machines became more common, we could say the law began to look +like this: +={ photocopyring machines +} + +table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33; + +  +Publish +Transform + +Commercial +© +© + +Noncommercial +©/Free +Free + +}table + +The law was interpreted to reach noncommercial copying through, say, copy +machines, but still much of copying outside of the commercial market remained +free. But the consequence of the emergence of digital technologies, especially +in the context of a digital network, means that the law now looks like this: + +table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33; + +  +Publish +Transform + +Commercial +© +© + +Noncommercial +© +© + +}table + +Every realm is governed by copyright law, whereas before most creativity was +not. The law now regulates the full range of creativity - commercial or not, +transformative or not - with the same rules designed to regulate commercial +publishers. + +Obviously, copyright law is not the enemy. The enemy is regulation that does no +good. So the question that we should be asking just now is whether extending +the regulations of copyright law into each of these domains actually does any +good. +={ copyright : + duration of +2 +} + +I have no doubt that it does good in regulating commercial copying. But I also +have no doubt that it does more harm than good when regulating (as it regulates +just now) noncommercial copying and, especially, noncommercial transformation. +And increasingly, for the reasons sketched especially in chapters 7 and 8, one +might well wonder whether it does more harm than good for commercial +transformation. More commercial transformative work would be created if +derivative rights were more sharply restricted. + +The issue is therefore not simply whether copyright is property. Of course +copyright is a kind of "property," and of course, as with any property, the +state ought to protect it. But first impressions notwithstanding, historically, +this property right (as with all property rights~{ It was the single most +important contribution of the legal realist movement to demonstrate that all +property rights are always crafted to balance public and private interests. See +Thomas C. Grey, "The Disintegration of Property," in /{Nomos XXII: Property,}/ +J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds. (New York: New York University +Press, 1980). }~) has been crafted to balance the important need to give +authors and artists incentives with the equally important need to assure access +to creative work. This balance has always been struck in light of new +technologies. And for almost half of our tradition, the "copyright" did not +control /{at all}/ the freedom of others to build upon or transform a creative +work. American culture was born free, and for almost 180 years our country +consistently protected a vibrant and rich free culture. +={ copyright : + as property +1 ; + copyright law : + fair use and +1 | innovative freedom balanced with fair compensation in +2 ; + fair use : + legal intimidation tactics against +1 ; + property rights : + as balance of public good vs. private +2 | copyright vs. +2 +} + +We achieved that free culture because our law respected important limits on the +scope of the interests protected by "property." The very birth of "copyright" +as a statutory right recognized those limits, by granting copyright owners +protection for a limited time only (the story of chapter 6). The tradition of +"fair use" is animated by a similar concern that is increasingly under strain +as the costs of exercising any fair use right become unavoidably high (the +story of chapter 7). Adding statutory rights where markets might stifle +innovation is another familiar limit on the property right that copyright is +(chapter 8). And granting archives and libraries a broad freedom to collect, +claims of property notwithstanding, is a crucial part of guaranteeing the soul +of a culture (chapter 9). Free cultures, like free markets, are built with +property. But the nature of the property that builds a free culture is very +different from the extremist vision that dominates the debate today. +={ archives : + digital ; + culture : + archives of ; + culture archives of ; + libraries : + archival function of +} + +Free culture is increasingly the casualty in this war on piracy. In response to +a real, if not yet quantified, threat that the technologies of the Internet +present to twentieth-century business models for producing and distributing +culture, the law and technology are being transformed in a way that will +undermine our tradition of free culture. The property right that is copyright +is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to be. The +property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted toward an +extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in +which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer. +={ free culture : + permission culture vs. ; + permission culture : + free culture vs. +} + +:B~ PUZZLES + +1~ Chapter Eleven: Chimera + +!_ In a well-known +short story by H. G. Wells, a mountain climber named Nunez trips (literally, +down an ice slope) into an unknown and isolated valley in the Peruvian Andes.~{ +H. G. Wells, "The Country of the Blind" (1904, 1911). See H. G. Wells, /{The +Country of the Blind and Other Stories,}/ Michael Sherborne, ed. (New York: +Oxford University Press, 1996). }~ The valley is extraordinarily beautiful, +with "sweet water, pasture, an even climate, slopes of rich brown soil with +tangles of a shrub that bore an excellent fruit." But the villagers are all +blind. Nunez takes this as an opportunity. "In the Country of the Blind," he +tells himself, "the One-Eyed Man is King." So he resolves to live with the +villagers to explore life as a king. +={ Wells, H.G. +8 ; + Country of the Blind, The (Wells) +8 +} + +Things don't go quite as he planned. He tries to explain the idea of sight to +the villagers. They don't understand. He tells them they are "blind." They +don't have the word /{blind}/. They think he's just thick. Indeed, as they +increasingly notice the things he can't do (hear the sound of grass being +stepped on, for example), they increasingly try to control him. He, in turn, +becomes increasingly frustrated. "'You don't understand,' he cried, in a voice +that was meant to be great and resolute, and which broke. 'You are blind and I +can see. Leave me alone!'" + +The villagers don't leave him alone. Nor do they see (so to speak) the virtue +of his special power. Not even the ultimate target of his affection, a young +woman who to him seems "the most beautiful thing in the whole of creation," +understands the beauty of sight. Nunez's description of what he sees "seemed to +her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to his description of the +stars and the mountains and her own sweet white-lit beauty as though it was a +guilty indulgence." "She did not believe," Wells tells us, and "she could only +half understand, but she was mysteriously delighted." + +When Nunez announces his desire to marry his "mysteriously delighted" love, the +father and the village object. "You see, my dear," her father instructs, "he's +an idiot. He has delusions. He can't do anything right." They take Nunez to the +village doctor. + +After a careful examination, the doctor gives his opinion. "His brain is +affected," he reports. + +"What affects it?" the father asks. + +"Those queer things that are called the eyes ... are diseased ... in such a way +as to affect his brain." + +The doctor continues: "I think I may say with reasonable certainty that in +order to cure him completely, all that we need to do is a simple and easy +surgical operation - namely, to remove these irritant bodies [the eyes]." + +"Thank Heaven for science!" says the father to the doctor. They inform Nunez of +this condition necessary for him to be allowed his bride. (You'll have to read +the original to learn what happens in the end. I believe in free culture, but +never in giving away the end of a story.) + +!_ It sometimes +happens that the eggs of twins fuse in the mother's womb. That fusion produces +a "chimera." A chimera is a single creature with two sets of DNA. The DNA in +the blood, for example, might be different from the DNA of the skin. This +possibility is an underused plot for murder mysteries. "But the DNA shows with +100 percent certainty that she was not the person whose blood was at the scene. +..." +={ chimeras +7 ; + twins, as chimera +2 +} + +Before I had read about chimeras, I would have said they were impossible. A +single person can't have two sets of DNA. The very idea of DNA is that it is +the code of an individual. Yet in fact, not only can two individuals have the +same set of DNA (identical twins), but one person can have two different sets +of DNA (a chimera). Our understanding of a "person" should reflect this +reality. + +The more I work to understand the current struggle over copyright and culture, +which I've sometimes called unfairly, and sometimes not unfairly enough, "the +copyright wars," the more I think we're dealing with a chimera. For example, in +the battle over the question "What is p2p file sharing?" both sides have it +right, and both sides have it wrong. One side says, "File sharing is just like +two kids taping each others' records - the sort of thing we've been doing for +the last thirty years without any question at all." That's true, at least in +part. When I tell my best friend to try out a new CD that I've bought, but +rather than just send the CD, I point him to my p2p server, that is, in all +relevant respects, just like what every executive in every recording company no +doubt did as a kid: sharing music. +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + shoplifting vs. +4 ; + piracy : + of intangible property +6 +} + +But the description is also false in part. For when my p2p server is on a p2p +network through which anyone can get access to my music, then sure, my friends +can get access, but it stretches the meaning of "friends" beyond recognition to +say "my ten thousand best friends" can get access. Whether or not sharing my +music with my best friend is what "we have always been allowed to do," we have +not always been allowed to share music with "our ten thousand best friends." +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + felony punishments for +4 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + total legalization of ; + copyright law : + felony punishment for infringement of +2 ; + Internet : + music files downloaded from +12 +} + +Likewise, when the other side says, "File sharing is just like walking into a +Tower Records and taking a CD off the shelf and walking out with it," that's +true, at least in part. If, after Lyle Lovett (finally) releases a new album, +rather than buying it, I go to Kazaa and find a free copy to take, that is very +much like stealing a copy from Tower. +={ Kazaa ; + Lovett, Lyle +} + +But it is not quite stealing from Tower. After all, when I take a CD from Tower +Records, Tower has one less CD to sell. And when I take a CD from Tower +Records, I get a bit of plastic and a cover, and something to show on my +shelves. (And, while we're at it, we could also note that when I take a CD from +Tower Records, the maximum fine that might be imposed on me, under California +law, at least, is $1,000. According to the RIAA, by contrast, if I download a +ten-song CD, I'm liable for $1,500,000 in damages.) +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + exaggerated claims of +2 | in recording industry +2 | against student file sharing +2 ; + recording industry : + copyright infringement lawsuits of +2 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + copyright infringement lawsuits filed by +2 ; + copyright law : + felony punishment for infringement of +2 +} + +The point is not that it is as neither side describes. The point is that it is +both - both as the RIAA describes it and as Kazaa describes it. It is a +chimera. And rather than simply denying what the other side asserts, we need to +begin to think about how we should respond to this chimera. What rules should +govern it? +={ Kazaa } + +We could respond by simply pretending that it is not a chimera. We could, with +the RIAA, decide that every act of file sharing should be a felony. We could +prosecute families for millions of dollars in damages just because file sharing +occurred on a family computer. And we can get universities to monitor all +computer traffic to make sure that no computer is used to commit this crime. +These responses might be extreme, but each of them has either been proposed or +actually implemented.~{ For an excellent summary, see the report prepared by +GartnerG2 and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law +School, "Copy- right and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World," 27 June 2003, +available at link #33. Reps. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Howard L. Berman +(D-Calif.) have introduced a bill that would treat unauthorized on-line copying +as a felony offense with punishments ranging as high as five years +imprisonment; see Jon Healey, "House Bill Aims to Up Stakes on Piracy," /{Los +Angeles Times,}/ 17 July 2003, available at link #34. Civil penalties are +currently set at $150,000 per copied song. For a recent (and unsuccessful) +legal challenge to the RIAA's demand that an ISP reveal the identity of a user +accused of sharing more than 600 songs through a family computer, see /{RIAA v. +Verizon Internet Services (In re. Verizon Internet Services),}/ 240 F. Supp. 2d +24 (D.D.C. 2003). Such a user could face liability ranging as high as $90 +million. Such astronomical figures furnish the RIAA with a powerful arsenal in +its prosecution of file sharers. Settlements ranging from $12,000 to $17,500 +for four students accused of heavy file sharing on university networks must +have seemed a mere pittance next to the $98 billion the RIAA could seek should +the matter proceed to court. See Elizabeth Young, "Downloading Could Lead to +Fines," redandblack.com, 26 August 2003, available at link #35. For an example +of the RIAA's targeting of student file sharing, and of the subpoenas issued to +universities to reveal student file-sharer identities, see James Collins, "RIAA +Steps Up Bid to Force BC, MIT to Name Students," /{Boston Globe,}/ 8 August +2003, D3, available at link #36. }~ +={ university computer networks, p2p sharing on } + +Alternatively, we could respond to file sharing the way many kids act as though +we've responded. We could totally legalize it. Let there be no copyright +liability, either civil or criminal, for making copyrighted content available +on the Net. Make file sharing like gossip: regulated, if at all, by social +norms but not by law. +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + total legalization of +} + +Either response is possible. I think either would be a mistake. Rather than +embrace one of these two extremes, we should embrace something that recognizes +the truth in both. And while I end this book with a sketch of a system that +does just that, my aim in the next chapter is to show just how awful it would +be for us to adopt the zero-tolerance extreme. I believe /{either}/ extreme +would be worse than a reasonable alternative. But I believe the zero-tolerance +solution would be the worse of the two extremes. +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + zero tolerance in +1 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + zero-tolerance of +7 +} + +Yet zero tolerance is increasingly our government's policy. In the middle of +the chaos that the Internet has created, an extraordinary land grab is +occurring. The law and technology are being shifted to give content holders a +kind of control over our culture that they have never had before. And in this +extremism, many an opportunity for new innovation and new creativity will be +lost. +={ copyright law : + technology as automatic enforcer of +4 ; + recording industry : + copyright protections in +2 ; + technology : + copyright enforcement controlled by +3 +} + +I'm not talking about the opportunities for kids to "steal" music. My focus +instead is the commercial and cultural innovation that this war will also kill. +We have never seen the power to innovate spread so broadly among our citizens, +and we have just begun to see the innovation that this power will unleash. Yet +the Internet has already seen the passing of one cycle of innovation around +technologies to distribute content. The law is responsible for this passing. As +the vice president for global public policy at one of these new innovators, +eMusic.com, put it when criticizing the DMCA's added protection for copyrighted +material, +={ copyright law : + on music recordings +1 ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ; + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) ; + eMusic.com +4 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + infringement protections in +3 +} + +_1 eMusic opposes music piracy. We are a distributor of copyrighted material, +and we want to protect those rights. + +_1 But building a technology fortress that locks in the clout of the major +labels is by no means the only way to protect copyright interests, nor is it +necessarily the best. It is simply too early to answer that question. Market +forces operating naturally may very well produce a totally different industry +model. + +_1 This is a critical point. The choices that industry sectors make with +respect to these systems will in many ways directly shape the market for +digital media and the manner in which digital media are distributed. This in +turn will directly influence the options that are available to consumers, both +in terms of the ease with which they will be able to access digital media and +the equipment that they will require to do so. Poor choices made this early in +the game will retard the growth of this market, hurting everyone's +interests."~{ WIPO and the DMCA One Year Later: Assessing Consumer Access to +Digital Entertainment on the Internet and Other Media: Hearing Before the +Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade, and Consumer Protection, House +Committee on Commerce, 106th Cong. 29 (1999) (statement of Peter Harter, vice +president, Global Public Policy and Standards, EMusic.com), available in LEXIS, +Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony File. }~ + +In April 2001, eMusic.com was purchased by Vivendi Universal, one of "the major +labels." Its position on these matters has now changed. +={ Vivendi Universal } + +Reversing our tradition of tolerance now will not merely quash piracy. It will +sacrifice values that are important to this culture, and will kill +opportunities that could be extraordinarily valuable. + +1~ Chapter Twelve: Harms + +!_ To fight +"piracy," to protect "property," the content industry has launched a war. +Lobbying and lots of campaign contributions have now brought the government +into this war. As with any war, this one will have both direct and collateral +damage. As with any war of prohibition, these damages will be suffered most by +our own people. + +My aim so far has been to describe the consequences of this war, in particular, +the consequences for "free culture." But my aim now is to extend this +description of consequences into an argument. Is this war justified? + +In my view, it is not. There is no good reason why this time, for the first +time, the law should defend the old against the new, just when the power of the +property called "intellectual property" is at its greatest in our history. + +Yet "common sense" does not see it this way. Common sense is still on the side +of the Causbys and the content industry. The extreme claims of control in the +name of property still resonate; the uncritical rejection of "piracy" still has +play. +={ piracy : + uncritical rejection of +1 +} + +There will be many consequences of continuing this war. I want to describe just +three. All three might be said to be unintended. I am quite confident the third +is unintended. I'm less sure about the first two. The first two protect modern +RCAs, but there is no Howard Armstrong in the wings to fight today's +monopolists of culture. +={ Armstrong, Edwin Howard ; + RCA +} + +2~ Constraining Creators +={ copyright law : + creativity impeded by +14 ; + creativity : + legal restrictions on +14 +} + +In the next ten years we will see an explosion of digital technologies. These +technologies will enable almost anyone to capture and share content. Capturing +and sharing content, of course, is what humans have done since the dawn of man. +It is how we learn and communicate. But capturing and sharing through digital +technology is different. The fidelity and power are different. You could send +an e-mail telling someone about a joke you saw on Comedy Central, or you could +send the clip. You could write an essay about the inconsistencies in the +arguments of the politician you most love to hate, or you could make a short +film that puts statement against statement. You could write a poem to express +your love, or you could weave together a string - a mash-up - of songs from +your favorite artists in a collage and make it available on the Net. +={ technology : + of digital capturing and sharing +2 +} + +This digital "capturing and sharing" is in part an extension of the capturing +and sharing that has always been integral to our culture, and in part it is +something new. It is continuous with the Kodak, but it explodes the boundaries +of Kodak-like technologies. The technology of digital "capturing and sharing" +promises a world of extraordinarily diverse creativity that can be easily and +broadly shared. And as that creativity is applied to democracy, it will enable +a broad range of citizens to use technology to express and criticize and +contribute to the culture all around. +={ democracy : + digital sharing within ; + Kodak cameras +} + +Technology has thus given us an opportunity to do something with culture that +has only ever been possible for individuals in small groups, isolated from +others. Think about an old man telling a story to a collection of neighbors in +a small town. Now imagine that same storytelling extended across the globe. + +Yet all this is possible only if the activity is presumptively legal. In the +current regime of legal regulation, it is not. Forget file sharing for a +moment. Think about your favorite amazing sites on the Net. Web sites that +offer plot summaries from forgotten television shows; sites that catalog +cartoons from the 1960s; sites that mix images and sound to criticize +politicians or businesses; sites that gather newspaper articles on remote +topics of science or culture. There is a vast amount of creative work spread +across the Internet. But as the law is currently crafted, this work is +presumptively illegal. +={ Internet : + creative Web sites on +} + +That presumption will increasingly chill creativity, as the examples of extreme +penalties for vague infringements continue to proliferate. It is impossible to +get a clear sense of what's allowed and what's not, and at the same time, the +penalties for crossing the line are astonishingly harsh. The four students who +were threatened by the RIAA (Jesse Jordan of chapter 3 was just one) were +threatened with a $98 billion lawsuit for building search engines that +permitted songs to be copied. Yet WorldCom - which defrauded investors of $11 +billion, resulting in a loss to investors in market capitalization of over $200 +billion - received a fine of a mere $750 million.~{ See Lynne W. Jeter, +/{Disconnected: Deceit and Betrayal at WorldCom}/ (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & +Sons, 2003), 176, 204; for details of the settlement, see MCI press release, +"MCI Wins U.S. District Court Approval for SEC Settlement" (7 July 2003), +available at link #37. }~ And under legislation being pushed in Congress right +now, a doctor who negligently removes the wrong leg in an operation would be +liable for no more than $250,000 in damages for pain and suffering.~{ The bill, +modeled after California's tort reform model, was passed in the House of +Representatives but defeated in a Senate vote in July 2003. For an overview, +see Tanya Albert, "Measure Stalls in Senate: 'We'll Be Back,' Say Tort +Reformers," amednews.com, 28 July 2003, available at link #38, and "Senate +Turns Back Malpractice Caps," CBSNews.com, 9 July 2003, available at link #39. +President Bush has continued to urge tort reform in recent months. }~ Can +common sense recognize the absurdity in a world where the maximum fine for +downloading two songs off the Internet is more than the fine for a doctor's +negligently butchering a patient? +={ WorldCom ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + exaggerated claims of | individual defendants intimidated by +1 | in recording industry ; + doctors malpractice claims against ; + Jordan, Jesse ; + legal system, attorney costs in +1 ; + recording industry : + copyright infringement lawsuits of ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + copyright infringement lawsuits filed by +} + +The consequence of this legal uncertainty, tied to these extremely high +penalties, is that an extraordinary amount of creativity will either never be +exercised, or never be exercised in the open. We drive this creative process +underground by branding the modern-day Walt Disneys "pirates." We make it +impossible for businesses to rely upon a public domain, because the boundaries +of the public domain are designed to be unclear. It never pays to do anything +except pay for the right to create, and hence only those who can pay are +allowed to create. As was the case in the Soviet Union, though for very +different reasons, we will begin to see a world of underground art - not +because the message is necessarily political, or because the subject is +controversial, but because the very act of creating the art is legally fraught. +Already, exhibits of "illegal art" tour the United States.~{ See Danit Lidor, +"Artists Just Wanna Be Free," /{Wired,}/ 7 July 2003, available at link #40. +For an overview of the exhibition, see link #41. }~ In what does their +"illegality" consist? In the act of mixing the culture around us with an +expression that is critical or reflective. +={ public domain : + legal murkiness on ; + art, underground +} + +Part of the reason for this fear of illegality has to do with the changing law. +I described that change in detail in chapter 10. But an even bigger part has to +do with the increasing ease with which infractions can be tracked. As users of +file-sharing systems discovered in 2002, it is a trivial matter for copyright +owners to get courts to order Internet service providers to reveal who has what +content. It is as if your cassette tape player transmitted a list of the songs +that you played in the privacy of your own home that anyone could tune into for +whatever reason they chose. +={ copyright law : + technology as automatic enforcer of +1 ; + Internet : + user identities released by service providers of ; + ISPs (Internet service providers), user identities revealed by ; + technology : + copyright enforcement controlled by +1 +} + +Never in our history has a painter had to worry about whether his painting +infringed on someone else's work; but the modern-day painter, using the tools +of Photoshop, sharing content on the Web, must worry all the time. Images are +all around, but the only safe images to use in the act of creation are those +purchased from Corbis or another image farm. And in purchasing, censoring +happens. There is a free market in pencils; we needn't worry about its effect +on creativity. But there is a highly regulated, monopolized market in cultural +icons; the right to cultivate and transform them is not similarly free. +={ images, ownership of } + +Lawyers rarely see this because lawyers are rarely empirical. As I described in +chapter 7, in response to the story about documentary filmmaker Jon Else, I +have been lectured again and again by lawyers who insist Else's use was fair +use, and hence I am wrong to say that the law regulates such a use. +={ Else, Jon ; + copyright law : + fair use and +2 ; + fair use : + legal intimidation tactics against +2 ; + legal system, attorney costs in +5 +} + +But fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your +right to create. And as lawyers love to forget, our system for defending rights +such as fair use is astonishingly bad - in practically every context, but +especially here. It costs too much, it delivers too slowly, and what it +delivers often has little connection to the justice underlying the claim. The +legal system may be tolerable for the very rich. For everyone else, it is an +embarrassment to a tradition that prides itself on the rule of law. +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + exaggerated claims of +4 | individual defendants intimidated by +4 +} + +Judges and lawyers can tell themselves that fair use provides adequate +"breathing room" between regulation by the law and the access the law should +allow. But it is a measure of how out of touch our legal system has become that +anyone actually believes this. The rules that publishers impose upon writers, +the rules that film distributors impose upon filmmakers, the rules that +newspapers impose upon journalists - these are the real laws governing +creativity. And these rules have little relationship to the "law" with which +judges comfort themselves. + +For in a world that threatens $150,000 for a single willful infringement of a +copyright, and which demands tens of thousands of dollars to even defend +against a copyright infringement claim, and which would never return to the +wrongfully accused defendant anything of the costs she suffered to defend her +right to speak - in that world, the astonishingly broad regulations that pass +under the name "copyright" silence speech and creativity. And in that world, it +takes a studied blindness for people to continue to believe they live in a +culture that is free. + +As Jed Horovitz, the businessman behind Video Pipeline, said to me, +={ Horovitz, Jed +1 ; + Video Pipeline +} + +_1 We're losing [creative] opportunities right and left. Creative people are +being forced not to express themselves. Thoughts are not being expressed. And +while a lot of stuff may [still] be created, it still won't get distributed. +Even if the stuff gets made ... you're not going to get it distributed in the +mainstream media unless you've got a little note from a lawyer saying, "This +has been cleared." You're not even going to get it on PBS without that kind of +permission. That's the point at which they control it." + +2~ Constraining Innovators +={ copyright law : + innovation hampered by +48 ; + innovation : + industry establishment opposed to +48 ; + regulation : + as establishment protectionism +48 +} + +The story of the last section was a crunchy-lefty story - creativity quashed, +artists who can't speak, yada yada yada. Maybe that doesn't get you going. +Maybe you think there's enough weird art out there, and enough expression that +is critical of what seems to be just about everything. And if you think that, +you might think there's little in this story to worry you. + +But there's an aspect of this story that is not lefty in any sense. Indeed, it +is an aspect that could be written by the most extreme pro-market ideologue. +And if you're one of these sorts (and a special one at that, 188 pages into a +book like this), then you can see this other aspect by substituting "free +market" every place I've spoken of "free culture." The point is the same, even +if the interests affecting culture are more fundamental. +={ market constraints +1 } + +The charge I've been making about the regulation of culture is the same charge +free marketers make about regulating markets. Everyone, of course, concedes +that some regulation of markets is necessary - at a minimum, we need rules of +property and contract, and courts to enforce both. Likewise, in this culture +debate, everyone concedes that at least some framework of copyright is also +required. But both perspectives vehemently insist that just because some +regulation is good, it doesn't follow that more regulation is better. And both +perspectives are constantly attuned to the ways in which regulation simply +enables the powerful industries of today to protect themselves against the +competitors of tomorrow. + +This is the single most dramatic effect of the shift in regulatory strategy +that I described in chapter 10. The consequence of this massive threat of +liability tied to the murky boundaries of copyright law is that innovators who +want to innovate in this space can safely innovate only if they have the +sign-off from last generation's dominant industries. That lesson has been +taught through a series of cases that were designed and executed to teach +venture capitalists a lesson. That lesson - what former Napster CEO Hank Barry +calls a "nuclear pall" that has fallen over the Valley - has been learned. +={ Barry, Hank ; + venture capitalists +} + +Consider one example to make the point, a story whose beginning I told in /{The +Future of Ideas}/ and which has progressed in a way that even I (pessimist +extraordinaire) would never have predicted. +={ Future of Ideas, The (Lessig) ; + Lessig, Lawrence +} + +In 1997, Michael Roberts launched a company called MP3.com. MP3.com was keen to +remake the music business. Their goal was not just to facilitate new ways to +get access to content. Their goal was also to facilitate new ways to create +content. Unlike the major labels, MP3.com offered creators a venue to +distribute their creativity, without demanding an exclusive engagement from the +creators. +={ MP3.com +8 ; + my.mp3.com +8 ; + Roberts, Michael +} + +To make this system work, however, MP3.com needed a reliable way to recommend +music to its users. The idea behind this alternative was to leverage the +revealed preferences of music listeners to recommend new artists. If you like +Lyle Lovett, you're likely to enjoy Bonnie Raitt. And so on. +={ Lovett, Lyle } + +This idea required a simple way to gather data about user preferences. MP3.com +came up with an extraordinarily clever way to gather this preference data. In +January 2000, the company launched a service called my.mp3.com. Using software +provided by MP3.com, a user would sign into an account and then insert into her +computer a CD. The software would identify the CD, and then give the user +access to that content. So, for example, if you inserted a CD by Jill Sobule, +then wherever you were - at work or at home - you could get access to that +music once you signed into your account. The system was therefore a kind of +music-lockbox. +={ CDs : + preference data on +2 +} + +No doubt some could use this system to illegally copy content. But that +opportunity existed with or without MP3.com. The aim of the my.mp3.com service +was to give users access to their own content, and as a by-product, by seeing +the content they already owned, to discover the kind of content the users +liked. + +To make this system function, however, MP3.com needed to copy 50,000 CDs to a +server. (In principle, it could have been the user who uploaded the music, but +that would have taken a great deal of time, and would have produced a product +of questionable quality.) It therefore purchased 50,000 CDs from a store, and +started the process of making copies of those CDs. Again, it would not serve +the content from those copies to anyone except those who authenticated that +they had a copy of the CD they wanted to access. So while this was 50,000 +copies, it was 50,000 copies directed at giving customers something they had +already bought. + +Nine days after MP3.com launched its service, the five major labels, headed by +the RIAA, brought a lawsuit against MP3.com. MP3.com settled with four of the +five. Nine months later, a federal judge found MP3.com to have been guilty of +willful infringement with respect to the fifth. Applying the law as it is, the +judge imposed a fine against MP3.com of $118 million. MP3.com then settled with +the remaining plaintiff, Vivendi Universal, paying over $54 million. Vivendi +purchased MP3.com just about a year later. +={ Vivendi Universal +2 ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + distribution technology targeted in | exaggerated claims of | in recording industry +3 ; + recording industry : + copyright infringement lawsuits of ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + copyright infringement lawsuits filed by ; + regulation : + outsize penalties of +} + +That part of the story I have told before. Now consider its conclusion. + +After Vivendi purchased MP3.com, Vivendi turned around and filed a malpractice +lawsuit against the lawyers who had advised it that they had a good faith claim +that the service they wanted to offer would be considered legal under copyright +law. This lawsuit alleged that it should have been obvious that the courts +would find this behavior illegal; therefore, this lawsuit sought to punish any +lawyer who had dared to suggest that the law was less restrictive than the +labels demanded. +={ copyright law : + malpractice lawsuits against lawyers advising on +2 ; + lawyers : + malpractice suits against +2 +} + +The clear purpose of this lawsuit (which was settled for an unspecified amount +shortly after the story was no longer covered in the press) was to send an +unequivocal message to lawyers advising clients in this space: It is not just +your clients who might suffer if the content industry directs its guns against +them. It is also you. So those of you who believe the law should be less +restrictive should realize that such a view of the law will cost you and your +firm dearly. + +This strategy is not just limited to the lawyers. In April 2003, Universal and +EMI brought a lawsuit against Hummer Winblad, the venture capital firm (VC) +that had funded Napster at a certain stage of its development, its cofounder +(John Hummer), and general partner (Hank Barry).~{ See Joseph Menn, "Universal, +EMI Sue Napster Investor," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 23 April 2003. For a parallel +argument about the effects on innovation in the distribution of music, see +Janelle Brown, "The Music Revolution Will Not Be Digitized," Salon.com, 1 June +2001, available at link #42. See also Jon Healey, "Online Music Services +Besieged," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 28 May 2001. }~ The claim here, as well, was +that the VC should have recognized the right of the content industry to control +how the industry should develop. They should be held personally liable for +funding a company whose business turned out to be beyond the law. Here again, +the aim of the lawsuit is transparent: Any VC now recognizes that if you fund a +company whose business is not approved of by the dinosaurs, you are at risk not +just in the marketplace, but in the courtroom as well. Your investment buys you +not only a company, it also buys you a lawsuit. So extreme has the environment +become that even car manufacturers are afraid of technologies that touch +content. In an article in /{Business 2.0}/, Rafe Needleman describes a +discussion with BMW: +={ Barry, Hank ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + distribution technology targeted in ; + BMW +1 ; + cars, MP3 sound systems in +1 ; + EMI ; + Hummer, John ; + Hummer Winblad ; + MP3 players ; + Napster : + venture capital for ; + Needleman, Raffe +1 ; + Universal Music Group ; + venture capitalists +} + +_1 I asked why, with all the storage capacity and computer power in the car, +there was no way to play MP3 files. I was told that BMW engineers in Germany +had rigged a new vehicle to play MP3s via the car's built-in sound system, but +that the company's marketing and legal departments weren't comfortable with +pushing this forward for release stateside. Even today, no new cars are sold in +the United States with bona fide MP3 players. ..."~{ Rafe Needleman, "Driving +in Cars with MP3s," /{Business 2.0,}/ 16 June 2003, available at link #43. I am +grateful to Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli for this example. }~ + +This is the world of the mafia - filled with "your money or your life" offers, +governed in the end not by courts but by the threats that the law empowers +copyright holders to exercise. It is a system that will obviously and +necessarily stifle new innovation. It is hard enough to start a company. It is +impossibly hard if that company is constantly threatened by litigation. + +The point is not that businesses should have a right to start illegal +enterprises. The point is the definition of "illegal." The law is a mess of +uncertainty. We have no good way to know how it should apply to new +technologies. Yet by reversing our tradition of judicial deference, and by +embracing the astonishingly high penalties that copyright law imposes, that +uncertainty now yields a reality which is far more conservative than is right. +If the law imposed the death penalty for parking tickets, we'd not only have +fewer parking tickets, we'd also have much less driving. The same principle +applies to innovation. If innovation is constantly checked by this uncertain +and unlimited liability, we will have much less vibrant innovation and much +less creativity. +={ market constraints +2 ; + permission culture : + transaction cost of +2 ; + regulation : + outsize penalties of ; + technology : + legal murkiness on +} + +The point is directly parallel to the crunchy-lefty point about fair use. +Whatever the "real" law is, realism about the effect of law in both contexts is +the same. This wildly punitive system of regulation will systematically stifle +creativity and innovation. It will protect some industries and some creators, +but it will harm industry and creativity generally. Free market and free +culture depend upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to +stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an overregulated +culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an +overregulated-regulated market. + +The building of a permission culture, rather than a free culture, is the first +important way in which the changes I have described will burden innovation. A +permission culture means a lawyer's culture - a culture in which the ability to +create requires a call to your lawyer. Again, I am not antilawyer, at least +when they're kept in their proper place. I am certainly not antilaw. But our +profession has lost the sense of its limits. And leaders in our profession have +lost an appreciation of the high costs that our profession imposes upon others. +The inefficiency of the law is an embarrassment to our tradition. And while I +believe our profession should therefore do everything it can to make the law +more efficient, it should at least do everything it can to limit the reach of +the law where the law is not doing any good. The transaction costs buried +within a permission culture are enough to bury a wide range of creativity. +Someone needs to do a lot of justifying to justify that result. + +!_ The uncertainty +of the law is one burden on innovation. There is a second burden that operates +more directly. This is the effort by many in the content industry to use the +law to directly regulate the technology of the Internet so that it better +protects their content. +={ Internet : + efficient content distribution on +4 +} + +The motivation for this response is obvious. The Internet enables the efficient +spread of content. That efficiency is a feature of the Inter-net's design. But +from the perspective of the content industry, this feature is a "bug." The +efficient spread of content means that content distributors have a harder time +controlling the distribution of content. One obvious response to this +efficiency is thus to make the Internet less efficient. If the Internet enables +"piracy," then, this response says, we should break the kneecaps of the +Internet. + +The examples of this form of legislation are many. At the urging of the content +industry, some in Congress have threatened legislation that would require +computers to determine whether the content they access is protected or not, and +to disable the spread of protected content.~{ "Copyright and Digital Media in a +Post-Napster World," GartnerG2 and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society +at Harvard Law School (2003), 33-35, available at link #44. }~ Congress has +already launched proceedings to explore a mandatory "broadcast flag" that would +be required on any device capable of transmitting digital video (i.e., a +computer), and that would disable the copying of any content that is marked +with a broadcast flag. Other members of Congress have proposed immunizing +content providers from liability for technology they might deploy that would +hunt down copyright violators and disable their machines.~{ GartnerG2, 26-27. +}~ +={ broadcast flag ; + Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +} + +In one sense, these solutions seem sensible. If the problem is the code, why +not regulate the code to remove the problem. But any regulation of technical +infrastructure will always be tuned to the particular technology of the day. It +will impose significant burdens and costs on the technology, but will likely be +eclipsed by advances around exactly those requirements. + +In March 2002, a broad coalition of technology companies, led by Intel, tried +to get Congress to see the harm that such legislation would impose.~{ See David +McGuire, "Tech Execs Square Off Over Piracy," Newsbytes, 28 February 2002 +(Entertainment). }~ Their argument was obviously not that copyright should not +be protected. Instead, they argued, any protection should not do more harm than +good. +={ Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws +5 ; + Intel +} + +!_ There is one +more obvious way in which this war has harmed innovation - again, a story that +will be quite familiar to the free market crowd. + +Copyright may be property, but like all property, it is also a form of +regulation. It is a regulation that benefits some and harms others. When done +right, it benefits creators and harms leeches. When done wrong, it is +regulation the powerful use to defeat competitors. + +As I described in chapter 10, despite this feature of copyright as regulation, +and subject to important qualifications outlined by Jessica Litman in her book +/{Digital Copyright}/,~{ Jessica Litman, /{Digital Copyright}/ (Amherst, N.Y.: +Prometheus Books, 2001). }~ overall this history of copyright is not bad. As +chapter 10 details, when new technologies have come along, Congress has struck +a balance to assure that the new is protected from the old. Compulsory, or +statutory, licenses have been one part of that strategy. Free use (as in the +case of the VCR) has been another. +={ cassette recording : + VCRs ; + VCRs ; + Digital Copyright (Litman) ; + Litman, Jessica ; + statutory licenses ; + copyright law : + statutory licenses in +} + +But that pattern of deference to new technologies has now changed with the rise +of the Internet. Rather than striking a balance between the claims of a new +technology and the legitimate rights of content creators, both the courts and +Congress have imposed legal restrictions that will have the effect of +smothering the new to benefit the old. + +The response by the courts has been fairly universal.~{ The only circuit court +exception is found in /{Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) v. +Diamond Multimedia Systems,}/ 180 F. 3d 1072 (9th Cir. 1999). There the court +of appeals for the Ninth Circuit reasoned that makers of a portable MP3 player +were not liable for contributory copyright infringement for a device that is +unable to record or redistribute music (a device whose only copying function is +to render portable a music file already stored on a user's hard drive). At the +district court level, the only exception is found in /{Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer +Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.,}/ 259 F. Supp. 2d 1029 (C.D. Cal., 2003), +where the court found the link between the distributor and any given user's +conduct too attenuated to make the distributor liable for contributory or +vicarious infringement liability. }~ It has been mirrored in the responses +threatened and actually implemented by Congress. I won't catalog all of those +responses here.~{ For example, in July 2002, Representative Howard Berman +introduced the Peer- to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act (H.R. 5211), which would +immunize copyright holders from liability for damage done to computers when the +copyright holders use technology to stop copyright infringement. In August +2002, Representative Billy Tauzin introduced a bill to mandate that +technologies capable of rebroadcasting digital copies of films broadcast on TV +(i.e., computers) respect a "broadcast flag" that would disable copying of that +content. And in March of the same year, Senator Fritz Hollings introduced the +Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, which mandated +copyright protection technology in all digital media devices. See GartnerG2, +"Copyright and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World," 27 June 2003, 33-34, +available at link #44. }~ But there is one example that captures the flavor of +them all. This is the story of the demise of Internet radio. +={ Internet : + radio on +18 ; + radio : + on Internet +18 +} + +As I described in chapter 4, when a radio station plays a song, the recording +artist doesn't get paid for that "radio performance" unless he or she is also +the composer. So, for example if Marilyn Monroe had recorded a version of +"Happy Birthday" - to memorialize her famous performance before President +Kennedy at Madison Square Garden - then whenever that recording was played on +the radio, the current copyright owners of "Happy Birthday" would get some +money, whereas Marilyn Monroe would not. +={ artists : + recording industry payments to +1 ; + copyright law : + on music recordings +1 ; + Kennedy, John F. ; + Monroe, Marilyn ; + radio : + music recordings played on +1 ; + recording industry : + artist remuneration in +1 ; + recording industry : + copyright protections in +} + +The reasoning behind this balance struck by Congress makes some sense. The +justification was that radio was a kind of advertising. The recording artist +thus benefited because by playing her music, the radio station was making it +more likely that her records would be purchased. Thus, the recording artist got +something, even if only indirectly. Probably this reasoning had less to do with +the result than with the power of radio stations: Their lobbyists were quite +good at stopping any efforts to get Congress to require compensation to the +recording artists. + +Enter Internet radio. Like regular radio, Internet radio is a technology to +stream content from a broadcaster to a listener. The broadcast travels across +the Internet, not across the ether of radio spectrum. Thus, I can "tune in" to +an Internet radio station in Berlin while sitting in San Francisco, even though +there's no way for me to tune in to a regular radio station much beyond the San +Francisco metropolitan area. + +This feature of the architecture of Internet radio means that there are +potentially an unlimited number of radio stations that a user could tune in to +using her computer, whereas under the existing architecture for broadcast +radio, there is an obvious limit to the number of broadcasters and clear +broadcast frequencies. Internet radio could therefore be more competitive than +regular radio; it could provide a wider range of selections. And because the +potential audience for Internet radio is the whole world, niche stations could +easily develop and market their content to a relatively large number of users +worldwide. According to some estimates, more than eighty million users +worldwide have tuned in to this new form of radio. + +Internet radio is thus to radio what FM was to AM. It is an improvement +potentially vastly more significant than the FM improvement over AM, since not +only is the technology better, so, too, is the competition. Indeed, there is a +direct parallel between the fight to establish FM radio and the fight to +protect Internet radio. As one author describes Howard Armstrong's struggle to +enable FM radio, +={ Armstrong, Edwin Howard +2 ; + FM radio +2 ; + radio : + FM spectrum of +2 +} + +_1 An almost unlimited number of FM stations was possible in the shortwaves, +thus ending the unnatural restrictions imposed on radio in the crowded +longwaves. If FM were freely developed, the number of stations would be limited +only by economics and competition rather than by technical restrictions. ... +Armstrong likened the situation that had grown up in radio to that following +the invention of the printing press, when governments and ruling interests +attempted to control this new instrument of mass communications by imposing +restrictive licenses on it. This tyranny was broken only when it became +possible for men freely to acquire printing presses and freely to run them. FM +in this sense was as great an invention as the printing presses, for it gave +radio the opportunity to strike off its shackles.~{ Lessing, 239. }~ + +This potential for FM radio was never realized - not because Armstrong was +wrong about the technology, but because he underestimated the power of "vested +interests, habits, customs and legislation"~{ Ibid., 229. }~ to retard the +growth of this competing technology. + +Now the very same claim could be made about Internet radio. For again, there is +no technical limitation that could restrict the number of Internet radio +stations. The only restrictions on Internet radio are those imposed by the law. +Copyright law is one such law. So the first question we should ask is, what +copyright rules would govern Internet radio? + +But here the power of the lobbyists is reversed. Internet radio is a new +industry. The recording artists, on the other hand, have a very powerful lobby, +the RIAA. Thus when Congress considered the phenomenon of Internet radio in +1995, the lobbyists had primed Congress to adopt a different rule for Internet +radio than the rule that applies to terrestrial radio. While terrestrial radio +does not have to pay our hypothetical Marilyn Monroe when it plays her +hypothetical recording of "Happy Birthday" on the air, /{Internet radio does}/. +Not only is the law not neutral toward Internet radio - the law actually +burdens Internet radio more than it burdens terrestrial radio. +={ artists : + recording industry payments to +1 ; + Congress, U.S. : + on copyright laws ; + Congress, U.S. : + on radio | on recording industry ; + recording industry : + artist remuneration in +1 ; + recording industry : + radio broadcast and +1 | Internet radio hampered by +9 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + on Internet radio fees +1 | lobbying power of +1 +} + +This financial burden is not slight. As Harvard law professor William Fisher +estimates, if an Internet radio station distributed ad-free popular music to +(on average) ten thousand listeners, twenty-four hours a day, the total artist +fees that radio station would owe would be over $1 million a year.~{ This +example was derived from fees set by the original Copyright Arbitration Royalty +Panel (CARP) proceedings, and is drawn from an example offered by Professor +William Fisher. Conference Proceedings, iLaw (Stanford), 3 July 2003, on file +with author. Professors Fisher and Zittrain submitted testimony in the CARP +proceeding that was ultimately rejected. See Jonathan Zittrain, Digital +Performance Right in Sound Recordings and Ephemeral Recordings, Docket No. +2000- 9, CARP DTRA 1 and 2, available at link #45. For an excellent analysis +making a similar point, see Randal C. Picker, "Copyright as Entry Policy: The +Case of Digital Distribution," /{Antitrust Bulletin}/ (Summer/Fall 2002): 461: +"This was not confusion, these are just old- fashioned entry barriers. Analog +radio stations are protected from digital entrants, reducing entry in radio and +diversity. Yes, this is done in the name of getting royalties to copyright +holders, but, absent the play of powerful interests, that could have been done +in a media-neutral way." }~ A regular radio station broadcasting the same +content would pay no equivalent fee. +={ Fisher, William } + +The burden is not financial only. Under the original rules that were proposed, +an Internet radio station (but not a terrestrial radio station) would have to +collect the following data from /{every listening transaction}/: + +group{ + + 1. name of the service; + + 2. channel of the program (AM/FM stations use station ID); + + 3. type of program (archived/looped/live); + + 4. date of transmission; + + 5. time of transmission; + + 6. time zone of origination of transmission; + + 7. numeric designation of the place of the sound recording within the program; + + 8. duration of transmission (to nearest second); + + 9. sound recording title; + + 10. ISRC code of the recording; + + 11. release year of the album per copyright notice and in the case of compilation albums, the release year of the album and copyright date of the track; + + 12. featured recording artist; + + 13. retail album title; + + 14. recording label; + + 15. UPC code of the retail album; + + 16. catalog number; + + 17. copyright owner information; + + 18. musical genre of the channel or program (station format); + + 19. name of the service or entity; + + 20. channel or program; + + 21. date and time that the user logged in (in the user's time zone); + + 22. date and time that the user logged out (in the user's time zone); + + 23. time zone where the signal was received (user); + + 24. Unique User identifier; + + 25. the country in which the user received the transmissions. + +}group + +The Librarian of Congress eventually suspended these reporting requirements, +pending further study. And he also changed the original rates set by the +arbitration panel charged with setting rates. But the basic difference between +Internet radio and terrestrial radio remains: Internet radio has to pay a +/{type of copyright fee}/ that terrestrial radio does not. +={ Library of Congress } + +Why? What justifies this difference? Was there any study of the economic +consequences from Internet radio that would justify these differences? Was the +motive to protect artists against piracy? + +In a rare bit of candor, one RIAA expert admitted what seemed obvious to +everyone at the time. As Alex Alben, vice president for Public Policy at Real +Networks, told me, +={ Alben, Alex +2 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + on Internet radio fees +2 ; + artists : + recording industry payments to +2 ; + recording industry : + artist remuneration in +2 +} + +_1 The RIAA, which was representing the record labels, presented some testimony +about what they thought a willing buyer would pay to a willing seller, and it +was much higher. It was ten times higher than what radio stations pay to +perform the same songs for the same period of time. And so the attorneys +representing the webcasters asked the RIAA, ... "How do you come up with a rate +that's so much higher? Why is it worth more than radio? Because here we have +hundreds of thousands of webcasters who want to pay, and that should establish +the market rate, and if you set the rate so high, you're going to drive the +small webcasters out of business. ..." + +_1 And the RIAA experts said, "Well, we don't really model this as an industry +with thousands of webcasters, /{we think it should be an industry with, you +know, five or seven big players who can pay a high rate and it's a stable, +predictable market.}/" (Emphasis added.) + +Translation: The aim is to use the law to eliminate competition, so that this +platform of potentially immense competition, which would cause the diversity +and range of content available to explode, would not cause pain to the +dinosaurs of old. There is no one, on either the right or the left, who should +endorse this use of the law. And yet there is practically no one, on either the +right or the left, who is doing anything effective to prevent it. + +2~ Corrupting Citizens +={ copyright law : + illegal behavior as broad response to +33 ; + law : + citizen respect for +33 ; + prohibition, citizen rebellion against +33 ; + regulation : + rule of law degraded by excess of +33 +} + +Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a +veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic +creativity that digital technology enables. + +In addition to these important harms, there is one more that was important to +our forebears, but seems forgotten today. Overregulation corrupts citizens and +weakens the rule of law. + +The war that is being waged today is a war of prohibition. As with every war of +prohibition, it is targeted against the behavior of a very large number of +citizens. According to /{The New York Times}/, 43 million Americans downloaded +music in May 2002.~{ Mike Graziano and Lee Rainie, "The Music Downloading +Deluge," Pew Internet and American Life Project (24 April 2001), available at +link #46. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 37 million +Americans had downloaded music files from the Internet by early 2001. }~ +According to the RIAA, the behavior of those 43 million Americans is a felony. +We thus have a set of rules that transform 20 percent of America into +criminals. As the RIAA launches lawsuits against not only the Napsters and +Kazaas of the world, but against students building search engines, and +increasingly against ordinary users downloading content, the technologies for +sharing will advance to further protect and hide illegal use. It is an arms +race or a civil war, with the extremes of one side inviting a more extreme +response by the other. +={ Internet : + music files downloaded from ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + individual defendants intimidated by +1 | in recording industry +1 ; + recording industry : + copyright infringement lawsuits of +1 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + copyright infringement lawsuits filed by +1 | intimidation tactics of +1 +} + +The content industry's tactics exploit the failings of the American legal +system. When the RIAA brought suit against Jesse Jordan, it knew that in Jordan +it had found a scapegoat, not a defendant. The threat of having to pay either +all the money in the world in damages ($15,000,000) or almost all the money in +the world to defend against paying all the money in the world in damages +($250,000 in legal fees) led Jordan to choose to pay all the money he had in +the world ($12,000) to make the suit go away. The same strategy animates the +RIAA's suits against individual users. In September 2003, the RIAA sued 261 +individuals - including a twelve-year-old girl living in public housing and a +seventy-year-old man who had no idea what file sharing was.~{ Alex Pham, "The +Labels Strike Back: N.Y. Girl Settles RIAA Case," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ 10 +September 2003, Business. }~ As these scapegoats discovered, it will always +cost more to defend against these suits than it would cost to simply settle. +(The twelve year old, for example, like Jesse Jordan, paid her life savings of +$2,000 to settle the case.) Our law is an awful system for defending rights. It +is an embarrassment to our tradition. And the consequence of our law as it is, +is that those with the power can use the law to quash any rights they oppose. +={ Jordan, Jesse } + +Wars of prohibition are nothing new in America. This one is just something more +extreme than anything we've seen before. We experimented with alcohol +prohibition, at a time when the per capita consumption of alcohol was 1.5 +gallons per capita per year. The war against drinking initially reduced that +consumption to just 30 percent of its preprohibition levels, but by the end of +prohibition, consumption was up to 70 percent of the preprohibition level. +Americans were drinking just about as much, but now, a vast number were +criminals.~{ Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel, "Alcohol Consumption During +Prohibition," /{American Economic Review}/ 81, no. 2 (1991): 242. }~ We have +launched a war on drugs aimed at reducing the consumption of regulated +narcotics that 7 percent (or 16 million) Americans now use.~{ National Drug +Control Policy: Hearing Before the House Government Reform Committee, 108th +Cong., 1st sess. (5 March 2003) (statement of John P. Walters, director of +National Drug Control Policy). }~ That is a drop from the high (so to speak) in +1979 of 14 percent of the population. We regulate automobiles to the point +where the vast majority of Americans violate the law every day. We run such a +complex tax system that a majority of cash businesses regularly cheat.~{ See +James Andreoni, Brian Erard, and Jonathon Feinstein, "Tax Compliance," +/{Journal of Economic Literature}/ 36 (1998): 818 (survey of compliance +literature). }~ We pride ourselves on our "free society," but an endless array +of ordinary behavior is regulated within our society. And as a result, a huge +proportion of Americans regularly violate at least some law. +={ alcohol prohibition +1 ; + drugs : + illegal +1 ; + tax system +1 +} + +This state of affairs is not without consequence. It is a particularly salient +issue for teachers like me, whose job it is to teach law students about the +importance of "ethics." As my colleague Charlie Nesson told a class at +Stanford, each year law schools admit thousands of students who have illegally +downloaded music, illegally consumed alcohol and sometimes drugs, illegally +worked without paying taxes, illegally driven cars. These are kids for whom +behaving illegally is increasingly the norm. And then we, as law professors, +are supposed to teach them how to behave ethically - how to say no to bribes, +or keep client funds separate, or honor a demand to disclose a document that +will mean that your case is over. Generations of Americans - more significantly +in some parts of America than in others, but still, everywhere in America today +- can't live their lives both normally and legally, since "normally" entails a +certain degree of illegality. +={ ethics ; + law schools ; + Nesson, Charlie +} + +The response to this general illegality is either to enforce the law more +severely or to change the law. We, as a society, have to learn how to make that +choice more rationally. Whether a law makes sense depends, in part, at least, +upon whether the costs of the law, both intended and collateral, outweigh the +benefits. If the costs, intended and collateral, do outweigh the benefits, then +the law ought to be changed. Alternatively, if the costs of the existing system +are much greater than the costs of an alternative, then we have a good reason +to consider the alternative. + +My point is not the idiotic one: Just because people violate a law, we should +therefore repeal it. Obviously, we could reduce murder statistics dramatically +by legalizing murder on Wednesdays and Fridays. But that wouldn't make any +sense, since murder is wrong every day of the week. A society is right to ban +murder always and everywhere. + +My point is instead one that democracies understood for generations, but that +we recently have learned to forget. The rule of law depends upon people obeying +the law. The more often, and more repeatedly, we as citizens experience +violating the law, the less we respect the law. Obviously, in most cases, the +important issue is the law, not respect for the law. I don't care whether the +rapist respects the law or not; I want to catch and incarcerate the rapist. But +I do care whether my students respect the law. And I do care if the rules of +law sow increasing disrespect because of the extreme of regulation they impose. +Twenty million Americans have come of age since the Internet introduced this +different idea of "sharing." We need to be able to call these twenty million +Americans "citizens," not "felons." + +When at least forty-three million citizens download content from the Internet, +and when they use tools to combine that content in ways unauthorized by +copyright holders, the first question we should be asking is not how best to +involve the FBI. The first question should be whether this particular +prohibition is really necessary in order to achieve the proper ends that +copyright law serves. Is there another way to assure that artists get paid +without transforming forty-three million Americans into felons? Does it make +sense if there are other ways to assure that artists get paid without +transforming America into a nation of felons? + +This abstract point can be made more clear with a particular example. + +We all own CDs. Many of us still own phonograph records. These pieces of +plastic encode music that in a certain sense we have bought. The law protects +our right to buy and sell that plastic: It is not a copyright infringement for +me to sell all my classical records at a used record store and buy jazz records +to replace them. That "use" of the recordings is free. + +But as the MP3 craze has demonstrated, there is another use of phonograph +records that is effectively free. Because these recordings were made without +copy-protection technologies, I am "free" to copy, or "rip," music from my +records onto a computer hard disk. Indeed, Apple Corporation went so far as to +suggest that "freedom" was a right: In a series of commercials, Apple endorsed +the "Rip, Mix, Burn" capacities of digital technologies. +={ Apple Corporation +1 ; + Rip, Mix, Burn technologies +1 ; + technology : + cut-and-paste culture enabled by +} + +This "use" of my records is certainly valuable. I have begun a large process at +home of ripping all of my and my wife's CDs, and storing them in one archive. +Then, using Apple's iTunes, or a wonderful program called Andromeda, we can +build different play lists of our music: Bach, Baroque, Love Songs, Love Songs +of Significant Others - the potential is endless. And by reducing the costs of +mixing play lists, these technologies help build a creativity with play lists +that is itself independently valuable. Compilations of songs are creative and +meaningful in their own right. +={ Andromeda } + +This use is enabled by unprotected media - either CDs or records. But +unprotected media also enable file sharing. File sharing threatens (or so the +content industry believes) the ability of creators to earn a fair return from +their creativity. And thus, many are beginning to experiment with technologies +to eliminate unprotected media. These technologies, for example, would enable +CDs that could not be ripped. Or they might enable spy programs to identify +ripped content on people's machines. +={ CDs : + mix technology and +1 ; + technology : + copyright enforcement controlled by +1 ; + copyright law : + technology as automatic enforcer of +} + +If these technologies took off, then the building of large archives of your own +music would become quite difficult. You might hang in hacker circles, and get +technology to disable the technologies that protect the content. Trading in +those technologies is illegal, but maybe that doesn't bother you much. In any +case, for the vast majority of people, these protection technologies would +effectively destroy the archiving use of CDs. The technology, in other words, +would force us all back to the world where we either listened to music by +manipulating pieces of plastic or were part of a massively complex "digital +rights management" system. + +If the only way to assure that artists get paid were the elimination of the +ability to freely move content, then these technologies to interfere with the +freedom to move content would be justifiable. But what if there were another +way to assure that artists are paid, without locking down any content? What if, +in other words, a different system could assure compensation to artists while +also preserving the freedom to move content easily? + +My point just now is not to prove that there is such a system. I offer a +version of such a system in the last chapter of this book. For now, the only +point is the relatively uncontroversial one: If a different system achieved the +same legitimate objectives that the existing copyright system achieved, but +left consumers and creators much more free, then we'd have a very good reason +to pursue this alternative - namely, freedom. The choice, in other words, would +not be between property and piracy; the choice would be between different +property systems and the freedoms each allowed. +={ copyright law : + commercial creativity as primary purpose of +1 | as protection of creators +1 +} + +I believe there is a way to assure that artists are paid without turning +forty-three million Americans into felons. But the salient feature of this +alternative is that it would lead to a very different market for producing and +distributing creativity. The dominant few, who today control the vast majority +of the distribution of content in the world, would no longer exercise this +extreme of control. Rather, they would go the way of the horse-drawn buggy. + +Except that this generation's buggy manufacturers have already saddled +Congress, and are riding the law to protect themselves against this new form of +competition. For them the choice is between forty-three million Americans as +criminals and their own survival. + +It is understandable why they choose as they do. It is not understandable why +we as a democracy continue to choose as we do. Jack Valenti is charming; but +not so charming as to justify giving up a tradition as deep and important as +our tradition of free culture. +={ Valenti, Jack } + +!_ There's one more +aspect to this corruption that is particularly important to civil liberties, +and follows directly from any war of prohibition. As Electronic Frontier +Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann describes, this is the "collateral damage" +that "arises whenever you turn a very large percentage of the population into +criminals." This is the collateral damage to civil liberties generally. +={ civil liberties +11 ; + Electronic Frontier Foundation ; + von Lohmann, Fred +2 +} + +"If you can treat someone as a putative lawbreaker," von Lohmann explains, + +_1 then all of a sudden a lot of basic civil liberty protections evaporate to +one degree or another. ... If you're a copyright infringer, how can you hope to +have any privacy rights? If you're a copyright infringer, how can you hope to +be secure against seizures of your computer? How can you hope to continue to +receive Internet access? ... Our sensibilities change as soon as we think, "Oh, +well, but that person's a criminal, a lawbreaker." Well, what this campaign +against file sharing has done is turn a remarkable percentage of the American +Internet-using population into "law-breakers." +={ privacy rights +3 } + +And the consequence of this transformation of the American public into +criminals is that it becomes trivial, as a matter of due process, to +effectively erase much of the privacy most would presume. + +Users of the Internet began to see this generally in 2003 as the RIAA launched +its campaign to force Internet service providers to turn over the names of +customers who the RIAA believed were violating copyright law. Verizon fought +that demand and lost. With a simple request to a judge, and without any notice +to the customer at all, the identity of an Internet user is revealed. +={ Internet : + user identities released by service providers of +4 ; + ISPs (Internet service providers), user identities revealed by +4 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + ISP user identities sought by +4 ; + Verizon Internet Services +} + +The RIAA then expanded this campaign, by announcing a general strategy to sue +individual users of the Internet who are alleged to have downloaded copyrighted +music from file-sharing systems. But as we've seen, the potential damages from +these suits are astronomical: If a family's computer is used to download a +single CD's worth of music, the family could be liable for $2 million in +damages. That didn't stop the RIAA from suing a number of these families, just +as they had sued Jesse Jordan.~{ See Frank Ahrens, "RIAA's Lawsuits Meet +Surprised Targets; Single Mother in Calif., 12-Year-Old Girl in N.Y. Among +Defendants," /{Washington Post,}/ 10 September 2003, E1; Chris Cobbs, "Worried +Parents Pull Plug on File 'Stealing'; With the Music Industry Cracking Down on +File Swapping, Parents are Yanking Software from Home PCs to Avoid Being Sued," +/{Orlando Sentinel Tribune,}/ 30 August 2003, C1; Jefferson Graham, "Recording +Industry Sues Parents," /{USA Today,}/ 15 September 2003, 4D; John Schwartz, +"She Says She's No Music Pirate. No Snoop Fan, Either," /{New York Times,}/ 25 +September 2003, C1; Margo Varadi, "Is Brianna a Criminal?" /{Toronto Star,}/ 18 +September 2003, P7. }~ +={ Jordan, Jesse ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + exaggerated claims of +3 ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + regulatory balance lost in +6 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + intimidation tactics of +3 +} + +Even this understates the espionage that is being waged by the RIAA. A report +from CNN late last summer described a strategy the RIAA had adopted to track +Napster users.~{ See "Revealed: How RIAA Tracks Downloaders: Music Industry +Discloses Some Methods Used," CNN.com, available at link #47. }~ Using a +sophisticated hashing algorithm, the RIAA took what is in effect a fingerprint +of every song in the Napster catalog. Any copy of one of those MP3s will have +the same "fingerprint." +={ Napster : + recording industry tracking users of +2 +} + +So imagine the following not-implausible scenario: Imagine a friend gives a CD +to your daughter - a collection of songs just like the cassettes you used to +make as a kid. You don't know, and neither does your daughter, where these +songs came from. But she copies these songs onto her computer. She then takes +her computer to college and connects it to a college network, and if the +college network is "cooperating" with the RIAA's espionage, and she hasn't +properly protected her content from the network (do you know how to do that +yourself ?), then the RIAA will be able to identify your daughter as a +"criminal." And under the rules that universities are beginning to deploy,~{ +See Jeff Adler, "Cambridge: On Campus, Pirates Are Not Penitent," /{Boston +Globe,}/ 18 May 2003, City Weekly, 1; Frank Ahrens, "Four Students Sued over +Music Sites; Industry Group Targets File Sharing at Colleges," /{Washington +Post,}/ 4 April 2003, E1; Elizabeth Armstrong, "Students 'Rip, Mix, Burn' at +Their Own Risk," /{Christian Science Monitor,}/ 2 September 2003, 20; Robert +Becker and Angela Rozas, "Music Pirate Hunt Turns to Loyola; Two Students Names +Are Handed Over; Lawsuit Possible," /{Chicago Tribune,}/ 16 July 2003, 1C; Beth +Cox, "RIAA Trains Antipiracy Guns on Universities," /{Internet News,}/ 30 +January 2003, available at link #48; Benny Evangelista, "Download Warning 101: +Freshman Orientation This Fall to Include Record Industry Warnings Against File +Sharing," /{San Francisco Chronicle,}/ 11 August 2003, E11; "Raid, Letters Are +Weapons at Universities," /{USA Today,}/ 26 September 2000, 3D. }~ your +daughter can lose the right to use the university's computer network. She can, +in some cases, be expelled. +={ university computer networks, p2p sharing on +1 } + +Now, of course, she'll have the right to defend herself. You can hire a lawyer +for her (at $300 per hour, if you're lucky), and she can plead that she didn't +know anything about the source of the songs or that they came from Napster. And +it may well be that the university believes her. But the university might not +believe her. It might treat this "contraband" as presumptive of guilt. And as +any number of college students have already learned, our presumptions about +innocence disappear in the middle of wars of prohibition. This war is no +different. + +Says von Lohmann, +={ von Lohmann, Fred +1 } + +_1 So when we're talking about numbers like forty to sixty million Americans +that are essentially copyright infringers, you create a situation where the +civil liberties of those people are very much in peril in a general matter. [I +don't] think [there is any] analog where you could randomly choose any person +off the street and be confident that they were committing an unlawful act that +could put them on the hook for potential felony liability or hundreds of +millions of dollars of civil liability. Certainly we all speed, but speeding +isn't the kind of an act for which we routinely forfeit civil liberties. Some +people use drugs, and I think that's the closest analog, [but] many have noted +that the war against drugs has eroded all of our civil liberties because it's +treated so many Americans as criminals. Well, I think it's fair to say that +file sharing is an order of magnitude larger number of Americans than drug use. +... If forty to sixty million Americans have become lawbreakers, then we're +really on a slippery slope to lose a lot of civil liberties for all forty to +sixty million of them." +={ driving speed, constraints on ; + speeding, constraints on ; + drugs : + illegal +} + +When forty to sixty million Americans are considered "criminals" under the law, +and when the law could achieve the same objective - securing rights to authors +- without these millions being considered "criminals," who is the villain? +Americans or the law? Which is American, a constant war on our own people or a +concerted effort through our democracy to change our law? + +:B~ BALANCES + +1~intro_balances [Intro]-# + +!_ So here's +the picture: You're standing at the side of the road. Your car is on fire. You +are angry and upset because in part you helped start the fire. Now you don't +know how to put it out. Next to you is a bucket, filled with gasoline. +Obviously, gasoline won't put the fire out. + +As you ponder the mess, someone else comes along. In a panic, she grabs the +bucket. Before you have a chance to tell her to stop - or before she +understands just why she should stop - the bucket is in the air. The gasoline +is about to hit the blazing car. And the fire that gasoline will ignite is +about to ignite everything around. + +!_ A war +about copyright rages all around - and we're all focusing on the wrong thing. +No doubt, current technologies threaten existing businesses. No doubt they may +threaten artists. But technologies change. The industry and technologists have +plenty of ways to use technology to protect themselves against the current +threats of the Internet. This is a fire that if let alone would burn itself +out. + +Yet policy makers are not willing to leave this fire to itself. Primed with +plenty of lobbyists' money, they are keen to intervene to eliminate the problem +they perceive. But the problem they perceive is not the real threat this +culture faces. For while we watch this small fire in the corner, there is a +massive change in the way culture is made that is happening all around. + +Somehow we have to find a way to turn attention to this more important and +fundamental issue. Somehow we have to find a way to avoid pouring gasoline onto +this fire. + +We have not found that way yet. Instead, we seem trapped in a simpler, binary +view. However much many people push to frame this debate more broadly, it is +the simple, binary view that remains. We rubberneck to look at the fire when we +should be keeping our eyes on the road. + +This challenge has been my life these last few years. It has also been my +failure. In the two chapters that follow, I describe one small brace of +efforts, so far failed, to find a way to refocus this debate. We must +understand these failures if we're to understand what success will require. + +1~ Chapter Thirteen: Eldred +={ Eldred, Eric +10 } + +!_ In 1995, +a father was frustrated that his daughters didn't seem to like Hawthorne. No +doubt there was more than one such father, but at least one did something about +it. Eric Eldred, a retired computer programmer living in New Hampshire, decided +to put Hawthorne on the Web. An electronic version, Eldred thought, with links +to pictures and explanatory text, would make this nineteenth-century author's +work come alive. +={ Hawthorne, Nathaniel +3 } + +It didn't work - at least for his daughters. They didn't find Hawthorne any +more interesting than before. But Eldred's experiment gave birth to a hobby, +and his hobby begat a cause: Eldred would build a library of public domain +works by scanning these works and making them available for free. +={ libraries : + of public-domain literature +4 ; + public domain : + library of works derived from +4 +} + +Eldred's library was not simply a copy of certain public domain works, though +even a copy would have been of great value to people across the world who can't +get access to printed versions of these works. Instead, Eldred was producing +derivative works from these public domain works. Just as Disney turned Grimm +into stories more accessible to the twentieth century, Eldred transformed +Hawthorne, and many others, into a form more accessible - technically +accessible - today. +={ Disney, Walt +1 ; + Grimm fairy tales +} + +Eldred's freedom to do this with Hawthorne's work grew from the same source as +Disney's. Hawthorne's /{Scarlet Letter}/ had passed into the public domain in +1907. It was free for anyone to take without the permission of the Hawthorne +estate or anyone else. Some, such as Dover Press and Penguin Classics, take +works from the public domain and produce printed editions, which they sell in +bookstores across the country. Others, such as Disney, take these stories and +turn them into animated cartoons, sometimes successfully (/{Cinderella}/), +sometimes not (/{The Hunchback of Notre Dame}/, /{Treasure Planet}/). These are +all commercial publications of public domain works. +={ Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) } + +The Internet created the possibility of noncommercial publications of public +domain works. Eldred's is just one example. There are literally thousands of +others. Hundreds of thousands from across the world have discovered this +platform of expression and now use it to share works that are, by law, free for +the taking. This has produced what we might call the "noncommercial publishing +industry," which before the Internet was limited to people with large egos or +with political or social causes. But with the Internet, it includes a wide +range of individuals and groups dedicated to spreading culture generally.~{ +There's a parallel here with pornography that is a bit hard to describe, but +it's a strong one. One phenomenon that the Internet created was a world of +noncommercial pornographers - people who were distributing porn but were not +making money directly or indirectly from that distribution. Such a class didn't +exist before the Internet came into being because the costs of distributing +porn were so high. Yet this new class of distributors got special attention in +the Supreme Court, when the Court struck down the Communications Decency Act of +1996. It was partly because of the burden on noncommercial speakers that the +statute was found to exceed Congress's power. The same point could have been +made about noncommercial publishers after the advent of the Internet. The Eric +Eldreds of the world before the Internet were extremely few. Yet one would +think it at least as important to protect the Eldreds of the world as to +protect noncommercial pornographers. }~ + +As I said, Eldred lives in New Hampshire. In 1998, Robert Frost's collection of +poems /{New Hampshire}/ was slated to pass into the public domain. Eldred +wanted to post that collection in his free public library. But Congress got in +the way. As I described in chapter 10, in 1998, for the eleventh time in forty +years, Congress extended the terms of existing copyrights - this time by twenty +years. Eldred would not be free to add any works more recent than 1923 to his +collection until 2019. Indeed, no copyrighted work would pass into the public +domain until that year (and not even then, if Congress extends the term again). +By contrast, in the same period, more than 1 million patents will pass into the +public domain. +={ Congress, U.S. : + copyright terms extended by +23 ; + copyright : + duration of +23 ; + copyright law : + term extensions in +23 ; + Frost, Robert ; + New Hampshire (Frost) ; + patents : + in public domain | future patents vs. future copyrights in +1 +} + +This was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), enacted in memory +of the congressman and former musician Sonny Bono, who, his widow, Mary Bono, +says, believed that "copyrights should be forever."~{ The full text is: "Sonny +[Bono] wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed +by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you +to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available +to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti's proposal for a term to last +forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress," +144 Cong. Rec. H9946, 9951-2 (October 7, 1998). }~ +={ Bono, Mary ; + Bono, Sonny ; + copyright : + in perpetuity +5 ; + Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) +1 +} + +Eldred decided to fight this law. He first resolved to fight it through civil +disobedience. In a series of interviews, Eldred announced that he would publish +as planned, CTEA notwithstanding. But because of a second law passed in 1998, +the NET (No Electronic Theft) Act, his act of publishing would make Eldred a +felon - whether or not anyone complained. This was a dangerous strategy for a +disabled programmer to undertake. +={ copyright law : + felony punishment for infringement of ; + NET (No Electronic Theft) Act (1988) ; + No Electronic Theft (NET) Act (1988) ; + peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + felony punishments for +} + +It was here that I became involved in Eldred's battle. I was a constitutional +scholar whose first passion was constitutional interpretation. And though +constitutional law courses never focus upon the Progress Clause of the +Constitution, it had always struck me as importantly different. As you know, +the Constitution says, +={ Congress : + constitutional powers of +3 ; + Constitution, U.S. : + Progress Clause of +2 ; + Progress Clause +2 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred case involvement of +2 +} + +_1 Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science ... by securing +for limited Times to Authors ... exclusive Right to their ... Writings. ..." + +As I've described, this clause is unique within the power-granting clause of +Article I, section 8 of our Constitution. Every other clause granting power to +Congress simply says Congress has the power to do something - for example, to +regulate "commerce among the several states" or "declare War." But here, the +"something" is something quite specific - to "promote ... Progress" - through +means that are also specific - by "securing" "exclusive Rights" (i.e., +copyrights) "for limited Times." + +In the past forty years, Congress has gotten into the practice of extending +existing terms of copyright protection. What puzzled me about this was, if +Congress has the power to extend existing terms, then the Constitution's +requirement that terms be "limited" will have no practical effect. If every +time a copyright is about to expire, Congress has the power to extend its term, +then Congress can achieve what the Constitution plainly forbids - perpetual +terms "on the installment plan," as Professor Peter Jaszi so nicely put it. +={ Jaszi, Peter } + +As an academic, my first response was to hit the books. I remember sitting late +at the office, scouring on-line databases for any serious consideration of the +question. No one had ever challenged Congress's practice of extending existing +terms. That failure may in part be why Congress seemed so untroubled in its +habit. That, and the fact that the practice had become so lucrative for +Congress. Congress knows that copyright owners will be willing to pay a great +deal of money to see their copyright terms extended. And so Congress is quite +happy to keep this gravy train going. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred case involvement of +} + +For this is the core of the corruption in our present system of +government."Corruption" not in the sense that representatives are bribed. +Rather, "corruption" in the sense that the system induces the beneficiaries of +Congress's acts to raise and give money to Congress to induce it to act. +There's only so much time; there's only so much Congress can do. Why not limit +its actions to those things it must do - and those things that pay? Extending +copyright terms pays. + +If that's not obvious to you, consider the following: Say you're one of the +very few lucky copyright owners whose copyright continues to make money one +hundred years after it was created. The Estate of Robert Frost is a good +example. Frost died in 1963. His poetry continues to be extraordinarily +valuable. Thus the Robert Frost estate benefits greatly from any extension of +copyright, since no publisher would pay the estate any money if the poems Frost +wrote could be published by anyone for free. +={ Frost, Robert +12 } + +So imagine the Robert Frost estate is earning $100,000 a year from three of +Frost's poems. And imagine the copyright for those poems is about to expire. +You sit on the board of the Robert Frost estate. Your financial adviser comes +to your board meeting with a very grim report: + +"Next year," the adviser announces, "our copyrights in works A, B, and C will +expire. That means that after next year, we will no longer be receiving the +annual royalty check of $100,000 from the publishers of those works. + +"There's a proposal in Congress, however," she continues, "that could change +this. A few congressmen are floating a bill to extend the terms of copyright by +twenty years. That bill would be extraordinarily valuable to us. So we should +hope this bill passes." + +"Hope?" a fellow board member says. "Can't we be doing something about it?" + +"Well, obviously, yes," the adviser responds. "We could contribute to the +campaigns of a number of representatives to try to assure that they support the +bill." +={ Congress, U.S. : + lobbying of +8 } + +You hate politics. You hate contributing to campaigns. So you want to know +whether this disgusting practice is worth it. "How much would we get if this +extension were passed?" you ask the adviser. "How much is it worth?" + +"Well," the adviser says, "if you're confident that you will continue to get at +least $100,000 a year from these copyrights, and you use the 'discount rate' +that we use to evaluate estate investments (6 percent), then this law would be +worth $1,146,000 to the estate." + +You're a bit shocked by the number, but you quickly come to the correct +conclusion: + +"So you're saying it would be worth it for us to pay more than $1,000,000 in +campaign contributions if we were confident those contributions would assure +that the bill was passed?" + +"Absolutely," the adviser responds. "It is worth it to you to contribute up to +the 'present value' of the income you expect from these copyrights. Which for +us means over $1,000,000." + +You quickly get the point - you as the member of the board and, I trust, you +the reader. Each time copyrights are about to expire, every beneficiary in the +position of the Robert Frost estate faces the same choice: If they can +contribute to get a law passed to extend copyrights, they will benefit greatly +from that extension. And so each time copyrights are about to expire, there is +a massive amount of lobbying to get the copyright term extended. + +Thus a congressional perpetual motion machine: So long as legislation can be +bought (albeit indirectly), there will be all the incentive in the world to buy +further extensions of copyright. + +In the lobbying that led to the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term +Extension Act, this "theory" about incentives was proved real. Ten of the +thirteen original sponsors of the act in the House received the maximum +contribution from Disney's political action committee; in the Senate, eight of +the twelve sponsors received contributions.~{ Associated Press, "Disney +Lobbying for Copyright Extension No Mickey Mouse Effort; Congress OKs Bill +Granting Creators 20 More Years," /{Chicago Tribune,}/ 17 October 1998, 22. }~ +The RIAA and the MPAA are estimated to have spent over $1.5 million lobbying in +the 1998 election cycle. They paid out more than $200,000 in campaign +contributions.~{ See Nick Brown, "Fair Use No More?: Copyright in the +Information Age," available at link #49. }~ Disney is estimated to have +contributed more than $800,000 to reelection campaigns in the 1998 cycle.~{ +Alan K. Ota, "Disney in Washington: The Mouse That Roars," /{Congressional +Quarterly This Week,}/ 8 August 1990, available at link #50. }~ +={ Disney, Inc. ; + film industry : + trade association of ; + Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + lobbying power of ; + Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) ; + Congress, U.S. : + copyright terms extended by +13 +} + +!_ Constitutional law +is not oblivious to the obvious. Or at least, it need not be. So when I was +considering Eldred's complaint, this reality about the never-ending incentives +to increase the copyright term was central to my thinking. In my view, a +pragmatic court committed to interpreting and applying the Constitution of our +framers would see that if Congress has the power to extend existing terms, then +there would be no effective constitutional requirement that terms be "limited." +If they could extend it once, they would extend it again and again and again. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred case involvement of +1 ; + Constitution, U.S. : + Progress Clause of ; + Eldred, Eric ; + copyright law : + term extensions in +12 +} + +It was also my judgment that /{this}/ Supreme Court would not allow Congress to +extend existing terms. As anyone close to the Supreme Court's work knows, this +Court has increasingly restricted the power of Congress when it has viewed +Congress's actions as exceeding the power granted to it by the Constitution. +Among constitutional scholars, the most famous example of this trend was the +Supreme Court's decision in 1995 to strike down a law that banned the +possession of guns near schools. +={ Congress, U.S. : + Supreme Court restraint on +6 ; + copyright law : + Supreme Court case on term extension of +5 ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + congressional actions restrained by +5 | on copyright term extensions ; + guns +2 ; + schools, gun possession near +2 +} + +Since 1937, the Supreme Court had interpreted Congress's granted powers very +broadly; so, while the Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate only +"commerce among the several states" (aka "interstate commerce"), the Supreme +Court had interpreted that power to include the power to regulate any activity +that merely affected interstate commerce. +={ commerce, interstate +3 ; + Congress, U.S. : + constitutional powers of +5 ; + interstate commerce +4 +} + +As the economy grew, this standard increasingly meant that there was no limit +to Congress's power to regulate, since just about every activity, when +considered on a national scale, affects interstate commerce. A Constitution +designed to limit Congress's power was instead interpreted to impose no limit. + +The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Rehnquist's command, changed that in +/{United States v. Lopez}/. The government had argued that possessing guns near +schools affected interstate commerce. Guns near schools increase crime, crime +lowers property values, and so on. In the oral argument, the Chief Justice +asked the government whether there was any activity that would not affect +interstate commerce under the reasoning the government advanced. The government +said there was not; if Congress says an activity affects interstate commerce, +then that activity affects interstate commerce. The Supreme Court, the +government said, was not in the position to second-guess Congress. +={ Rehnquist, William H. +1 ; + United States v. Lopez +1 +} + +"We pause to consider the implications of the government's arguments," the +Chief Justice wrote.~{ /{United States v. Lopez,}/ 514 U.S. 549, 564 (1995). }~ +If anything Congress says is interstate commerce must therefore be considered +interstate commerce, then there would be no limit to Congress's power. The +decision in /{Lopez}/ was reaffirmed five years later in /{United States v. +Morrison}/.~{ /{United States v. Morrison,}/ 529 U.S. 598 (2000). }~ +={ United States v. Morrison } + +If a principle were at work here, then it should apply to the Progress Clause +as much as the Commerce Clause.~{ If it is a principle about enumerated powers, +then the principle carries from one enumerated power to another. The animating +point in the context of the Commerce Clause was that the interpretation offered +by the government would allow the government unending power to regulate +commerce - the limitation to interstate commerce notwithstanding. The same +point is true in the context of the Copyright Clause. Here, too, the +government's interpretation would allow the government unending power to +regulate copyrights - the limitation to "limited times" notwithstanding. }~ And +if it is applied to the Progress Clause, the principle should yield the +conclusion that Congress can't extend an existing term. If Congress could +extend an existing term, then there would be no "stopping point" to Congress's +power over terms, though the Constitution expressly states that there is such a +limit. Thus, the same principle applied to the power to grant copyrights should +entail that Congress is not allowed to extend the term of existing copyrights. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + Progress Clause of | Commerce Clause of ; + copyright : + duration of ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + congressional actions restrained by +2 +} + +/{If}/, that is, the principle announced in /{Lopez}/ stood for a principle. +Many believed the decision in /{Lopez}/ stood for politics - a conservative +Supreme Court, which believed in states' rights, using its power over Congress +to advance its own personal political preferences. But I rejected that view of +the Supreme Court's decision. Indeed, shortly after the decision, I wrote an +article demonstrating the "fidelity" in such an interpretation of the +Constitution. The idea that the Supreme Court decides cases based upon its +politics struck me as extraordinarily boring. I was not going to devote my life +to teaching constitutional law if these nine Justices were going to be petty +politicians. +={ Congress, U.S. : + Supreme Court restraint on +3 ; + United States v. Lopez +} + +!_ Now let's pause +for a moment to make sure we understand what the argument in /{Eldred}/ was not +about. By insisting on the Constitution's limits to copyright, obviously Eldred +was not endorsing piracy. Indeed, in an obvious sense, he was fighting a kind +of piracy - piracy of the public domain. When Robert Frost wrote his work and +when Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse, the maximum copyright term was just +fifty-six years. Because of interim changes, Frost and Disney had already +enjoyed a seventy-five-year monopoly for their work. They had gotten the +benefit of the bargain that the Constitution envisions: In exchange for a +monopoly protected for fifty-six years, they created new work. But now these +entities were using their power - expressed through the power of lobbyists' +money - to get another twenty-year dollop of monopoly. That twenty-year dollop +would be taken from the public domain. Eric Eldred was fighting a piracy that +affects us all. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + copyright purpose established in ; + copyright : + constitutional purpose of | duration of ; + Disney, Walt ; + Eldred, Eric +2 ; + Frost, Robert ; + Mickey Mouse ; + public domain : + protection of +2 +} + +Some people view the public domain with contempt. In their brief before the +Supreme Court, the Nashville Songwriters Association wrote that the public +domain is nothing more than "legal piracy."~{ Brief of the Nashville +Songwriters Association, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 537 U.S. 186 (2003) (No. +01-618), n.10, available at link #51. }~ But it is not piracy when the law +allows it; and in our constitutional system, our law requires it. Some may not +like the Constitution's requirements, but that doesn't make the Constitution a +pirate's charter. +={ Eldred v. Ashcroft ; + Constitution, U.S. : + copyright purpose established in +1 ; + copyright : + constitutional purpose of +1 ; + Nashville Songwriters Association +} + +As we've seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a way +to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development +and distribution of our culture. Yet, as Eric Eldred discovered, we have set up +a system that assures that copyright terms will be repeatedly extended, and +extended, and extended. We have created the perfect storm for the public +domain. Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress +is free to be bought to extend them again. +={ Eldred, Eric ; + copyright : + duration of +2 +} + +!_ It is valuable +copyrights that are responsible for terms being extended. Mickey Mouse and +"Rhapsody in Blue." These works are too valuable for copyright owners to +ignore. But the real harm to our society from copyright extensions is not that +Mickey Mouse remains Disney's. Forget Mickey Mouse. Forget Robert Frost. Forget +all the works from the 1920s and 1930s that have continuing commercial value. +The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real +harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no +longer available as a result. +={ Mickey Mouse ; + Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin) ; + Frost, Robert +} + +% added this Frost index reference + +If you look at the work created in the first twenty years (1923 to 1942) +affected by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, 2 percent of that work +has any continuing commercial value. It was the copyright holders for that 2 +percent who pushed the CTEA through. But the law and its effect were not +limited to that 2 percent. The law extended the terms of copyright generally.~{ +The figure of 2 percent is an extrapolation from the study by the Congressional +Research Service, in light of the estimated renewal ranges. See Brief of +Petitioners, /{Eldred v. Ashcroft,}/ 7, available at link #52. }~ +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) } + +Think practically about the consequence of this extension - practically, as a +businessperson, and not as a lawyer eager for more legal work. In 1930, 10,047 +books were published. In 2000, 174 of those books were still in print. Let's +say you were Brewster Kahle, and you wanted to make available to the world in +your iArchive project the remaining 9,873. What would you have to do? +={ Kahle, Brewster ; + archives, digital ; + Internet Archive +} + +Well, first, you'd have to determine which of the 9,873 books were still under +copyright. That requires going to a library (these data are not on-line) and +paging through tomes of books, cross-checking the titles and authors of the +9,873 books with the copyright registration and renewal records for works +published in 1930. That will produce a list of books still under copyright. + +Then for the books still under copyright, you would need to locate the current +copyright owners. How would you do that? + +Most people think that there must be a list of these copyright owners +somewhere. Practical people think this way. How could there be thousands and +thousands of government monopolies without there being at least a list? +={ copyright : + no registration of works +5 +} + +But there is no list. There may be a name from 1930, and then in 1959, of the +person who registered the copyright. But just think practically about how +impossibly difficult it would be to track down thousands of such records - +especially since the person who registered is not necessarily the current +owner. And we're just talking about 1930! + +"But there isn't a list of who owns property generally," the apologists for the +system respond. "Why should there be a list of copyright owners?" + +Well, actually, if you think about it, there /{are}/ plenty of lists of who +owns what property. Think about deeds on houses, or titles to cars. And where +there isn't a list, the code of real space is pretty good at suggesting who the +owner of a bit of property is. (A swing set in your backyard is probably +yours.) So formally or informally, we have a pretty good way to know who owns +what tangible property. + +So: You walk down a street and see a house. You can know who owns the house by +looking it up in the courthouse registry. If you see a car, there is ordinarily +a license plate that will link the owner to the car. If you see a bunch of +children's toys sitting on the front lawn of a house, it's fairly easy to +determine who owns the toys. And if you happen to see a baseball lying in a +gutter on the side of the road, look around for a second for some kids playing +ball. If you don't see any kids, then okay: Here's a bit of property whose +owner we can't easily determine. It is the exception that proves the rule: that +we ordinarily know quite well who owns what property. + +Compare this story to intangible property. You go into a library. The library +owns the books. But who owns the copyrights? As I've already described, there's +no list of copyright owners. There are authors' names, of course, but their +copyrights could have been assigned, or passed down in an estate like Grandma's +old jewelry. To know who owns what, you would have to hire a private detective. +The bottom line: The owner cannot easily be located. And in a regime like ours, +in which it is a felony to use such property without the property owner's +permission, the property isn't going to be used. +={ copyright law : + felony for infringement of +} + +The consequence with respect to old books is that they won't be digitized, and +hence will simply rot away on shelves. But the consequence for other creative +works is much more dire. + +Consider the story of Michael Agee, chairman of Hal Roach Studios, which owns +the copyrights for the Laurel and Hardy films. Agee is a direct beneficiary of +the Bono Act. The Laurel and Hardy films were made between 1921 and 1951. Only +one of these films, /{The Lucky Dog}/, is currently out of copyright. But for +the CTEA, films made after 1923 would have begun entering the public domain. +Because Agee controls the exclusive rights for these popular films, he makes a +great deal of money. According to one estimate, "Roach has sold about 60,000 +videocassettes and 50,000 DVDs of the duo's silent films."~{ See David G. +Savage, "High Court Scene of Showdown on Copyright Law," /{Los Angeles Times,}/ +6 October 2002; David Streitfeld, "Classic Movies, Songs, Books at Stake; +Supreme Court Hears Arguments Today on Striking Down Copyright Extension," +/{Orlando Sentinel Tribune,}/ 9 October 2002. }~ +={ Agee, Michael +2 ; + films : + in public domain +12 ; + Hal Roach Studios ; + Laurel and Hardy films ; + Lucky Dog, The ; + public domain : + films in +12 +} + +Yet Agee opposed the CTEA. His reasons demonstrate a rare virtue in this +culture: selflessness. He argued in a brief before the Supreme Court that the +Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act will, if left standing, destroy a whole +generation of American film. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) } + +His argument is straightforward. A tiny fraction of this work has any +continuing commercial value. The rest - to the extent it survives at all - sits +in vaults gathering dust. It may be that some of this work not now commercially +valuable will be deemed to be valuable by the owners of the vaults. For this to +occur, however, the commercial benefit from the work must exceed the costs of +making the work available for distribution. + +We can't know the benefits, but we do know a lot about the costs. For most of +the history of film, the costs of restoring film were very high; digital +technology has lowered these costs substantially. While it cost more than +$10,000 to restore a ninety-minute black-and-white film in 1993, it can now +cost as little as $100 to digitize one hour of 8 mm film.~{ Brief of Hal Roach +Studios and Michael Agee as Amicus Curiae Supporting the Petitoners, /{Eldred +v. Ashcroft,}/ 537 U.S. 186 (2003) (No. 01- 618), 12. See also Brief of Amicus +Curiae filed on behalf of Petitioners by the Internet Archive, /{Eldred v. +Ashcroft,}/ available at link #53. }~ +={ films : + restoration of +4 +} + +Restoration technology is not the only cost, nor the most important. Lawyers, +too, are a cost, and increasingly, a very important one. In addition to +preserving the film, a distributor needs to secure the rights. And to secure +the rights for a film that is under copyright, you need to locate the copyright +owner. +={ films : + multiple copyrights associated with +1 +} + +Or more accurately, /{owners}/. As we've seen, there isn't only a single +copyright associated with a film; there are many. There isn't a single person +whom you can contact about those copyrights; there are as many as can hold the +rights, which turns out to be an extremely large number. Thus the costs of +clearing the rights to these films is exceptionally high. + +"But can't you just restore the film, distribute it, and then pay the copyright +owner when she shows up?" Sure, if you want to commit a felony. And even if +you're not worried about committing a felony, when she does show up, she'll +have the right to sue you for all the profits you have made. So, if you're +successful, you can be fairly confident you'll be getting a call from someone's +lawyer. And if you're not successful, you won't make enough to cover the costs +of your own lawyer. Either way, you have to talk to a lawyer. And as is too +often the case, saying you have to talk to a lawyer is the same as saying you +won't make any money. + +For some films, the benefit of releasing the film may well exceed these costs. +But for the vast majority of them, there is no way the benefit would outweigh +the legal costs. Thus, for the vast majority of old films, Agee argued, the +film will not be restored and distributed until the copyright expires. +={ Agee, Michael } + +But by the time the copyright for these films expires, the film will have +expired. These films were produced on nitrate-based stock, and nitrate stock +dissolves over time. They will be gone, and the metal canisters in which they +are now stored will be filled with nothing more than dust. + +!_ Of all the +creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing +commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially +important legal device. For that tiny fraction, the copyright creates +incentives to produce and distribute the creative work. For that tiny fraction, +the copyright acts as an "engine of free expression." + +But even for that tiny fraction, the actual time during which the creative work +has a commercial life is extremely short. As I've indicated, most books go out +of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial +culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out +of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends. +={ culture : + commercial vs. noncommercial +1 +} + +Yet that doesn't mean the life of the creative work ends. We don't keep +libraries of books in order to compete with Barnes & Noble, and we don't have +archives of films because we expect people to choose between spending Friday +night watching new movies and spending Friday night watching a 1930 news +documentary. The noncommercial life of culture is important and valuable - for +entertainment but also, and more importantly, for knowledge. To understand who +we are, and where we came from, and how we have made the mistakes that we have, +we need to have access to this history. + +Copyrights in this context do not drive an engine of free expression. In this +context, there is no need for an exclusive right. Copyrights in this context do +no good. + +Yet, for most of our history, they also did little harm. For most of our +history, when a work ended its commercial life, there was no +/{copyright-related use}/ that would be inhibited by an exclusive right. When a +book went out of print, you could not buy it from a publisher. But you could +still buy it from a used book store, and when a used book store sells it, in +America, at least, there is no need to pay the copyright owner anything. Thus, +the ordinary use of a book after its commercial life ended was a use that was +independent of copyright law. + +The same was effectively true of film. Because the costs of restoring a film - +the real economic costs, not the lawyer costs - were so high, it was never at +all feasible to preserve or restore film. Like the remains of a great dinner, +when it's over, it's over. Once a film passed out of its commercial life, it +may have been archived for a bit, but that was the end of its life so long as +the market didn't have more to offer. +={ films : + restoration of +} + +In other words, though copyright has been relatively short for most of our +history, long copyrights wouldn't have mattered for the works that lost their +commercial value. Long copyrights for these works would not have interfered +with anything. + +But this situation has now changed. + +One crucially important consequence of the emergence of digital technologies is +to enable the archive that Brewster Kahle dreams of. Digital technologies now +make it possible to preserve and give access to all sorts of knowledge. Once a +book goes out of print, we can now imagine digitizing it and making it +available to everyone, forever. Once a film goes out of distribution, we could +digitize it and make it available to everyone, forever. Digital technologies +give new life to copyrighted material after it passes out of its commercial +life. It is now possible to preserve and assure universal access to this +knowledge and culture, whereas before it was not. +={ Kahle, Brewster +3 ; + archives, digital +4 ; + culture : + archives of +4 +} + +And now copyright law does get in the way. Every step of producing this digital +archive of our culture infringes on the exclusive right of copyright. To +digitize a book is to copy it. To do that requires permission of the copyright +owner. The same with music, film, or any other aspect of our culture protected +by copyright. The effort to make these things available to history, or to +researchers, or to those who just want to explore, is now inhibited by a set of +rules that were written for a radically different context. + +Here is the core of the harm that comes from extending terms: Now that +technology enables us to rebuild the library of Alexandria, the law gets in the +way. And it doesn't get in the way for any useful /{copyright}/ purpose, for +the purpose of copyright is to enable the commercial market that spreads +culture. No, we are talking about culture after it has lived its commercial +life. In this context, copyright is serving no purpose /{at all}/ related to +the spread of knowledge. In this context, copyright is not an engine of free +expression. Copyright is a brake. +={ libraries : + archival function of +2 +} + +You may well ask, "But if digital technologies lower the costs for Brewster +Kahle, then they will lower the costs for Random House, too. So won't Random +House do as well as Brewster Kahle in spreading culture widely?" + +Maybe. Someday. But there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that publishers +would be as complete as libraries. If Barnes & Noble offered to lend books from +its stores for a low price, would that eliminate the need for libraries? Only +if you think that the only role of a library is to serve what "the market" +would demand. But if you think the role of a library is bigger than this - if +you think its role is to archive culture, whether there's a demand for any +particular bit of that culture or not - then we can't count on the commercial +market to do our library work for us. + +I would be the first to agree that it should do as much as it can: We should +rely upon the market as much as possible to spread and enable culture. My +message is absolutely not antimarket. But where we see the market is not doing +the job, then we should allow nonmarket forces the freedom to fill the gaps. As +one researcher calculated for American culture, 94 percent of the films, books, +and music produced between 1923 and 1946 is not commercially available. However +much you love the commercial market, if access is a value, then 6 percent is a +failure to provide that value.~{ Jason Schultz, "The Myth of the 1976 Copyright +'Chaos' Theory," 20 December 2002, available at link #54. }~ + +!_ In January 1999, +we filed a lawsuit on Eric Eldred's behalf in federal district court in +Washington, D.C., asking the court to declare the Sonny Bono Copyright Term +Extension Act unconstitutional. The two central claims that we made were (1) +that extending existing terms violated the Constitution's "limited Times" +requirement, and (2) that extending terms by another twenty years violated the +First Amendment. +={ Eldred v. Ashcroft +126 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred case involvement of +126 ; + Congress, U.S. : + copyright terms extended by +2 ; + Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + First Amendment : + copyright extension as violation of ; + Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) : + Supreme Court challenge of +7 ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + on copyright term extensions +126 ; + copyright law : + Supreme Court case on term extension of +126 | term extensions in +126 +} + +The district court dismissed our claims without even hearing an argument. A +panel of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit also dismissed our claims, +though after hearing an extensive argument. But that decision at least had a +dissent, by one of the most conservative judges on that court. That dissent +gave our claims life. + +Judge David Sentelle said the CTEA violated the requirement that copyrights be +for "limited Times" only. His argument was as elegant as it was simple: If +Congress can extend existing terms, then there is no "stopping point" to +Congress's power under the Copyright Clause. The power to extend existing terms +means Congress is not required to grant terms that are "limited." Thus, Judge +Sentelle argued, the court had to interpret the term "limited Times" to give it +meaning. And the best interpretation, Judge Sentelle argued, would be to deny +Congress the power to extend existing terms. +={ Congress, U.S. : + challenge of CTEA legislation of +124 ; + Sentelle, David +2 +} + +We asked the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit as a whole to hear the case. +Cases are ordinarily heard in panels of three, except for important cases or +cases that raise issues specific to the circuit as a whole, where the court +will sit "en banc" to hear the case. +={ Court of Appeals : + D.C. Circuit +1 ; + D.C. Court of Appeals +1 +} + +The Court of Appeals rejected our request to hear the case en banc. This time, +Judge Sentelle was joined by the most liberal member of the D.C. Circuit, Judge +David Tatel. Both the most conservative and the most liberal judges in the D.C. +Circuit believed Congress had over-stepped its bounds. +={ Tatel, David } + +It was here that most expected /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/ would die, for the +Supreme Court rarely reviews any decision by a court of appeals. (It hears +about one hundred cases a year, out of more than five thousand appeals.) And it +practically never reviews a decision that upholds a statute when no other court +has yet reviewed the statute. +={ Supreme Court, U.S. : + annual docket of +} + +But in February 2002, the Supreme Court surprised the world by granting our +petition to review the D.C. Circuit opinion. Argument was set for October of +2002. The summer would be spent writing briefs and preparing for argument. + +!_ It is over +a year later as I write these words. It is still astonishingly hard. If you +know anything at all about this story, you know that we lost the appeal. And if +you know something more than just the minimum, you probably think there was no +way this case could have been won. After our defeat, I received literally +thousands of missives by well-wishers and supporters, thanking me for my work +on behalf of this noble but doomed cause. And none from this pile was more +significant to me than the e-mail from my client, Eric Eldred. +={ Eldred, Eric } + +But my client and these friends were wrong. This case could have been won. It +should have been won. And no matter how hard I try to retell this story to +myself, I can never escape believing that my own mistake lost it. + +!_ The mistake +was made early, though it became obvious only at the very end. Our case had +been supported from the very beginning by an extraordinary lawyer, Geoffrey +Stewart, and by the law firm he had moved to, Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue. +Jones Day took a great deal of heat from its copyright-protectionist clients +for supporting us. They ignored this pressure (something that few law firms +today would ever do), and throughout the case, they gave it everything they +could. +={ Stewart, Gordon +1 ; + Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue (Jones Day) +1 +} + +There were three key lawyers on the case from Jones Day. Geoff Stewart was the +first, but then Dan Bromberg and Don Ayer became quite involved. Bromberg and +Ayer in particular had a common view about how this case would be won: We would +only win, they repeatedly told me, if we could make the issue seem "important" +to the Supreme Court. It had to seem as if dramatic harm were being done to +free speech and free culture; otherwise, they would never vote against "the +most powerful media companies in the world." +={ Ayer, Don ; + Bromberg, Dan +} + +I hate this view of the law. Of course I thought the Sonny Bono Act was a +dramatic harm to free speech and free culture. Of course I still think it is. +But the idea that the Supreme Court decides the law based on how important they +believe the issues are is just wrong. It might be "right" as in "true," I +thought, but it is "wrong" as in "it just shouldn't be that way." As I believed +that any faithful interpretation of what the framers of our Constitution did +would yield the conclusion that the CTEA was unconstitutional, and as I +believed that any faithful interpretation of what the First Amendment means +would yield the conclusion that the power to extend existing copyright terms is +unconstitutional, I was not persuaded that we had to sell our case like soap. +Just as a law that bans the swastika is unconstitutional not because the Court +likes Nazis but because such a law would violate the Constitution, so too, in +my view, would the Court decide whether Congress's law was constitutional based +on the Constitution, not based on whether they liked the values that the +framers put in the Constitution. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + First Amendment : + copyright extension as violation of ; + Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) : + Supreme Court challenge of +} + +In any case, I thought, the Court must already see the danger and the harm +caused by this sort of law. Why else would they grant review? There was no +reason to hear the case in the Supreme Court if they weren't convinced that +this regulation was harmful. So in my view, we didn't need to persuade them +that this law was bad, we needed to show why it was unconstitutional. + +There was one way, however, in which I felt politics would matter and in which +I thought a response was appropriate. I was convinced that the Court would not +hear our arguments if it thought these were just the arguments of a group of +lefty loons. This Supreme Court was not about to launch into a new field of +judicial review if it seemed that this field of review was simply the +preference of a small political minority. Although my focus in the case was not +to demonstrate how bad the Sonny Bono Act was but to demonstrate that it was +unconstitutional, my hope was to make this argument against a background of +briefs that covered the full range of political views. To show that this claim +against the CTEA was grounded in /{law}/ and not politics, then, we tried to +gather the widest range of credible critics - credible not because they were +rich and famous, but because they, in the aggregate, demonstrated that this law +was unconstitutional regardless of one's politics. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) : + Supreme Court challenge of +} + +The first step happened all by itself. Phyllis Schlafly's organization, Eagle +Forum, had been an opponent of the CTEA from the very beginning. Mrs. Schlafly +viewed the CTEA as a sellout by Congress. In November 1998, she wrote a +stinging editorial attacking the Republican Congress for allowing the law to +pass. As she wrote, "Do you sometimes wonder why bills that create a financial +windfall to narrow special interests slide easily through the intricate +legislative process, while bills that benefit the general public seem to get +bogged down?" The answer, as the editorial documented, was the power of money. +Schlafly enumerated Disney's contributions to the key players on the +committees. It was money, not justice, that gave Mickey Mouse twenty more years +in Disney's control, Schlafly argued. +={ Disney, Inc. ; + Eagle Forum +2 ; + Mickey Mouse ; + Schlafy, Phyllis +} + +In the Court of Appeals, Eagle Forum was eager to file a brief supporting our +position. Their brief made the argument that became the core claim in the +Supreme Court: If Congress can extend the term of existing copyrights, there is +no limit to Congress's power to set terms. That strong conservative argument +persuaded a strong conservative judge, Judge Sentelle. +={ Court of Appeals : + D.C. Circuit ; + D.C. Court of Appeals ; + Sentelle, David +} + +In the Supreme Court, the briefs on our side were about as diverse as it gets. +They included an extraordinary historical brief by the Free Software Foundation +(home of the GNU project that made GNU/ Linux possible). They included a +powerful brief about the costs of uncertainty by Intel. There were two law +professors' briefs, one by copyright scholars and one by First Amendment +scholars. There was an exhaustive and uncontroverted brief by the world's +experts in the history of the Progress Clause. And of course, there was a new +brief by Eagle Forum, repeating and strengthening its arguments. +={ Free Software Foundation ; + GNU/Linux operating system ; + Linux operating system ; + Intel ; + Constitution, U.S. : + Progress Clause of ; + Progress Clause +} + +Those briefs framed a legal argument. Then to support the legal argument, there +were a number of powerful briefs by libraries and archives, including the +Internet Archive, the American Association of Law Libraries, and the National +Writers Union. +={ American Association of Law Libraries ; + Internet Archive ; + National Writers Union +} + +But two briefs captured the policy argument best. One made the argument I've +already described: A brief by Hal Roach Studios argued that unless the law was +struck, a whole generation of American film would disappear. The other made the +economic argument absolutely clear. +={ Hal Roach Studios } + +This economists' brief was signed by seventeen economists, including five Nobel +Prize winners, including Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, Kenneth +Arrow, and George Akerlof. The economists, as the list of Nobel winners +demonstrates, spanned the political spectrum. Their conclusions were powerful: +There was no plausible claim that extending the terms of existing copyrights +would do anything to increase incentives to create. Such extensions were +nothing more than "rent-seeking" - the fancy term economists use to describe +special- interest legislation gone wild. +={ Akerlof, George ; + Arrow, Kenneth ; + Buchanan, James ; + Coase, Ronald ; + Fridman, Milton +2 +} + +The same effort at balance was reflected in the legal team we gathered to write +our briefs in the case. The Jones Day lawyers had been with us from the start. +But when the case got to the Supreme Court, we added three lawyers to help us +frame this argument to this Court: Alan Morrison, a lawyer from Public Citizen, +a Washington group that had made constitutional history with a series of +seminal victories in the Supreme Court defending individual rights; my +colleague and dean, Kathleen Sullivan, who had argued many cases in the Court, +and who had advised us early on about a First Amendment strategy; and finally, +former solicitor general Charles Fried. +={ Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue (Jones Day) ; + Morrison, Alan ; + Sullivan, Kathleen ; + Fried, Charles +1 ; + Public Citizen +} + +Fried was a special victory for our side. Every other former solicitor general +was hired by the other side to defend Congress's power to give media companies +the special favor of extended copyright terms. Fried was the only one who +turned down that lucrative assignment to stand up for something he believed in. +He had been Ronald Reagan's chief lawyer in the Supreme Court. He had helped +craft the line of cases that limited Congress's power in the context of the +Commerce Clause. And while he had argued many positions in the Supreme Court +that I personally disagreed with, his joining the cause was a vote of +confidence in our argument. +={ Reagan, Ronald ; + Congress, U.S. : + constitutional powers of ; + Constitution, U.S. : + Commerce Clause of +} + +The government, in defending the statute, had its collection of friends, as +well. Significantly, however, none of these "friends" included historians or +economists. The briefs on the other side of the case were written exclusively +by major media companies, congressmen, and copyright holders. + +The media companies were not surprising. They had the most to gain from the +law. The congressmen were not surprising either - they were defending their +power and, indirectly, the gravy train of contributions such power induced. And +of course it was not surprising that the copyright holders would defend the +idea that they should continue to have the right to control who did what with +content they wanted to control. + +Dr. Seuss's representatives, for example, argued that it was better for the Dr. +Seuss estate to control what happened to Dr. Seuss's work - better than +allowing it to fall into the public domain - because if this creativity were in +the public domain, then people could use it to "glorify drugs or to create +pornography."~{ Brief of Amici Dr. Seuss Enterprise et al., /{Eldred v. +Ashcroft,}/ 537 U.S. 186 (2003) (No. 01-618), 19. }~ That was also the motive +of the Gershwin estate, which defended its "protection" of the work of George +Gershwin. They refuse, for example, to license /{Porgy and Bess}/ to anyone who +refuses to use African Americans in the cast.~{ Dinitia Smith, "Immortal Words, +Immortal Royalties? Even Mickey Mouse Joins the Fray," /{New York Times,}/ 28 +March 1998, B7. }~ That's their view of how this part of American culture +should be controlled, and they wanted this law to help them effect that +control. +={ Gershwin, George +1 ; + Porgy and Bess ; + pornography ; + Seuss, Dr. +1 +} + +This argument made clear a theme that is rarely noticed in this debate. When +Congress decides to extend the term of existing copyrights, Congress is making +a choice about which speakers it will favor. Famous and beloved copyright +owners, such as the Gershwin estate and Dr. Seuss, come to Congress and say, +"Give us twenty years to control the speech about these icons of American +culture. We'll do better with them than anyone else." Congress of course likes +to reward the popular and famous by giving them what they want. But when +Congress gives people an exclusive right to speak in a certain way, that's just +what the First Amendment is traditionally meant to block. +={ First Amendment : + copyright extension as violation of ; + Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to +} + +We argued as much in a final brief. Not only would upholding the CTEA mean that +there was no limit to the power of Congress to extend copyrights - extensions +that would further concentrate the market; it would also mean that there was no +limit to Congress's power to play favorites, through copyright, with who has +the right to speak. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) : + Supreme Court challenge of +64 ; + Congress, U.S. : + constitutional powers of +8 +} + +!_ Between February +and October, there was little I did beyond preparing for this case. Early on, +as I said, I set the strategy. + +The Supreme Court was divided into two important camps. One camp we called "the +Conservatives." The other we called "the Rest." The Conservatives included +Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O'Connor, Justice Scalia, Justice Kennedy, and +Justice Thomas. These five had been the most consistent in limiting Congress's +power. They were the five who had supported the /{Lopez/Morrison}/ line of +cases that said that an enumerated power had to be interpreted to assure that +Congress's powers had limits. +={ Kennedy, Anthony ; + O'Connor, Sandra Day ; + Rehnquist, William H. ; + Thomas, Clarence ; + United States v. Lopez ; + United States v. Morrison ; + Scalia, Antonin ; + Congress, U.S. : + Supreme Court restraint on ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + congressional actions restrained by | factions of +3 +} + +The Rest were the four Justices who had strongly opposed limits on Congress's +power. These four - Justice Stevens, Justice Souter, Justice Ginsburg, and +Justice Breyer - had repeatedly argued that the Constitution gives Congress +broad discretion to decide how best to implement its powers. In case after +case, these justices had argued that the Court's role should be one of +deference. Though the votes of these four justices were the votes that I +personally had most consistently agreed with, they were also the votes that we +were least likely to get. +={ Breyer, Stephen ; + Ginsburg, Ruth Bader ; + Stevens, John Paul ; + Souter, David +} + +In particular, the least likely was Justice Ginsburg's. In addition to her +general view about deference to Congress (except where issues of gender are +involved), she had been particularly deferential in the context of intellectual +property protections. She and her daughter (an excellent and well-known +intellectual property scholar) were cut from the same intellectual property +cloth. We expected she would agree with the writings of her daughter: that +Congress had the power in this context to do as it wished, even if what +Congress wished made little sense. + +Close behind Justice Ginsburg were two justices whom we also viewed as unlikely +allies, though possible surprises. Justice Souter strongly favored deference to +Congress, as did Justice Breyer. But both were also very sensitive to free +speech concerns. And as we strongly believed, there was a very important free +speech argument against these retrospective extensions. +={ Breyer, Stephen ; + Ginsburg, Ruth Bader ; + Souter, David +} + +The only vote we could be confident about was that of Justice Stevens. History +will record Justice Stevens as one of the greatest judges on this Court. His +votes are consistently eclectic, which just means that no simple ideology +explains where he will stand. But he had consistently argued for limits in the +context of intellectual property generally. We were fairly confident he would +recognize limits here. +={ Stevens, John Paul } + +This analysis of "the Rest" showed most clearly where our focus had to be: on +the Conservatives. To win this case, we had to crack open these five and get at +least a majority to go our way.Thus, the single overriding argument that +animated our claim rested on the Conservatives' most important jurisprudential +innovation - the argument that Judge Sentelle had relied upon in the Court of +Appeals, that Congress's power must be interpreted so that its enumerated +powers have limits. +={ Court of Appeals : + D.C. Circuit ; + D.C. Court of Appeals ; + Sentelle, David +} + +This then was the core of our strategy - a strategy for which I am responsible. +We would get the Court to see that just as with the /{Lopez}/ case, under the +government's argument here, Congress would always have unlimited power to +extend existing terms. If anything was plain about Congress's power under the +Progress Clause, it was that this power was supposed to be "limited." Our aim +would be to get the Court to reconcile /{Eldred}/ with /{Lopez:}/ If Congress's +power to regulate commerce was limited, then so, too, must Congress's power to +regulate copyright be limited. +={ United States v. Lopez ; + commerce, interstate ; + interstate commerce ; + Congress, U.S. : + in constitutional Progress Clause ; + Progress Clause ; + Congress, U.S. : + copyright terms extended by +3 ; + Constitution, U.S. : + Progress Clause of +} + +!_ The argument +on the government's side came down to this: Congress has done it before. It +should be allowed to do it again. The government claimed that from the very +beginning, Congress has been extending the term of existing copyrights. So, the +government argued, the Court should not now say that practice is +unconstitutional. + +There was some truth to the government's claim, but not much. We certainly +agreed that Congress had extended existing terms in 1831 and in 1909. And of +course, in 1962, Congress began extending existing terms regularly - eleven +times in forty years. + +But this "consistency" should be kept in perspective. Congress extended +existing terms once in the first hundred years of the Republic. It then +extended existing terms once again in the next fifty. Those rare extensions are +in contrast to the now regular practice of extending existing terms. Whatever +restraint Congress had had in the past, that restraint was now gone. Congress +was now in a cycle of extensions; there was no reason to expect that cycle +would end. This Court had not hesitated to intervene where Congress was in a +similar cycle of extension. There was no reason it couldn't intervene here. + +!_ Oral argument +was scheduled for the first week in October. I arrived in D.C. two weeks before +the argument. During those two weeks, I was repeatedly "mooted" by lawyers who +had volunteered to help in the case. Such "moots" are basically practice +rounds, where wannabe justices fire questions at wannabe winners. + +I was convinced that to win, I had to keep the Court focused on a single point: +that if this extension is permitted, then there is no limit to the power to set +terms. Going with the government would mean that terms would be effectively +unlimited; going with us would give Congress a clear line to follow: Don't +extend existing terms. The moots were an effective practice; I found ways to +take every question back to this central idea. + +One moot was before the lawyers at Jones Day. Don Ayer was the skeptic. He had +served in the Reagan Justice Department with Solicitor General Charles Fried. +He had argued many cases before the Supreme Court. And in his review of the +moot, he let his concern speak: +={ Ayer, Don +2 ; + Fried, Charles ; + Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue (Jones Day) ; + Reagan, Ronald +} + +"I'm just afraid that unless they really see the harm, they won't be willing to +upset this practice that the government says has been a consistent practice for +two hundred years. You have to make them see the harm - passionately get them +to see the harm. For if they don't see that, then we haven't any chance of +winning." + +He may have argued many cases before this Court, I thought, but he didn't +understand its soul. As a clerk, I had seen the Justices do the right thing - +not because of politics but because it was right. As a law professor, I had +spent my life teaching my students that this Court does the right thing - not +because of politics but because it is right. As I listened to Ayer's plea for +passion in pressing politics, I understood his point, and I rejected it. Our +argument was right. That was enough. Let the politicians learn to see that it +was also good. + +!_ The night before +the argument, a line of people began to form in front of the Supreme Court. The +case had become a focus of the press and of the movement to free culture. +Hundreds stood in line for the chance to see the proceedings. Scores spent the +night on the Supreme Court steps so that they would be assured a seat. + +Not everyone has to wait in line. People who know the Justices can ask for +seats they control. (I asked Justice Scalia's chambers for seats for my +parents, for example.) Members of the Supreme Court bar can get a seat in a +special section reserved for them. And senators and congressmen have a special +place where they get to sit, too. And finally, of course, the press has a +gallery, as do clerks working for the Justices on the Court. As we entered that +morning, there was no place that was not taken. This was an argument about +intellectual property law, yet the halls were filled. As I walked in to take my +seat at the front of the Court, I saw my parents sitting on the left. As I sat +down at the table, I saw Jack Valenti sitting in the special section ordinarily +reserved for family of the Justices. +={ Scalia, Antonin ; + Valenti, Jack +} + +When the Chief Justice called me to begin my argument, I began where I intended +to stay: on the question of the limits on Congress's power. This was a case +about enumerated powers, I said, and whether those enumerated powers had any +limit. +={ Congress, U.S. : + constitutional powers of +3 +} + +Justice O'Connor stopped me within one minute of my opening. The history was +bothering her. +={ O'Connor, Sandra Day +1 } + +_1 JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Congress has extended the term so often through the years, +and if you are right, don't we run the risk of upsetting previous extensions of +time? I mean, this seems to be a practice that began with the very first act." + +She was quite willing to concede "that this flies directly in the face of what +the framers had in mind." But my response again and again was to emphasize +limits on Congress's power. + +_1 MR. LESSIG: Well, if it flies in the face of what the framers had in mind, +then the question is, is there a way of interpreting their words that gives +effect to what they had in mind, and the answer is yes." + +There were two points in this argument when I should have seen where the Court +was going. The first was a question by Justice Kennedy, who observed, +={ Kennedy, Anthony +1 } + +_1 JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, I suppose implicit in the argument that the '76 act, +too, should have been declared void, and that we might leave it alone because +of the disruption, is that for all these years the act has impeded progress in +science and the useful arts. I just don't see any empirical evidence for that. + +Here follows my clear mistake. Like a professor correcting a student, I +answered, + +_1 MR. LESSIG: Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all. Nothing in +our Copyright Clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about impeding +progress. Our only argument is this is a structural limit necessary to assure +that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted under the +copyright laws." + +That was a correct answer, but it wasn't the right answer. The right answer was +instead that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had +been written about it. He wanted to hear it. And here was the place Don Ayer's +advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a +miss. +={ Ayer, Don } + +The second came from the Chief, for whom the whole case had been crafted. For +the Chief Justice had crafted the /{Lopez}/ ruling, and we hoped that he would +see this case as its second cousin. +={ United States v. Lopez } + +It was clear a second into his question that he wasn't at all sympathetic. To +him, we were a bunch of anarchists. As he asked: + +_1 CHIEF JUSTICE: Well, but you want more than that. You want the right to copy +verbatim other people's books, don't you? +={ Rehnquist, William H. } + +_1 MR. LESSIG: We want the right to copy verbatim works that should be in the +public domain and would be in the public domain but for a statute that cannot +be justified under ordinary First Amendment analysis or under a proper reading +of the limits built into the Copyright Clause." + +Things went better for us when the government gave its argument; for now the +Court picked up on the core of our claim. As Justice Scalia asked Solicitor +General Olson, +={ Olson, Theodore B. +2 ; + Scalia, Antonin +1 +} + +_1 JUSTICE SCALIA: You say that the functional equivalent of an unlimited time +would be a violation [of the Constitution], but that's precisely the argument +that's being made by petitioners here, that a limited time which is extendable +is the functional equivalent of an unlimited time." + +When Olson was finished, it was my turn to give a closing rebuttal. Olson's +flailing had revived my anger. But my anger still was directed to the academic, +not the practical. The government was arguing as if this were the first case +ever to consider limits on Congress's Copyright and Patent Clause power. Ever +the professor and not the advocate, I closed by pointing out the long history +of the Court imposing limits on Congress's power in the name of the Copyright +and Patent Clause - indeed, the very first case striking a law of Congress as +exceeding a specific enumerated power was based upon the Copyright and Patent +Clause. All true. But it wasn't going to move the Court to my side. +={ Congress, U.S. : + constitutional powers of +2 +} + +!_ As I left +the court that day, I knew there were a hundred points I wished I could remake. +There were a hundred questions I wished I had answered differently. But one way +of thinking about this case left me optimistic. + +The government had been asked over and over again, what is the limit? Over and +over again, it had answered there is no limit. This was precisely the answer I +wanted the Court to hear. For I could not imagine how the Court could +understand that the government believed Congress's power was unlimited under +the terms of the Copyright Clause, and sustain the government's argument. The +solicitor general had made my argument for me. No matter how often I tried, I +could not understand how the Court could find that Congress's power under the +Commerce Clause was limited, but under the Copyright Clause, unlimited. In +those rare moments when I let myself believe that we may have prevailed, it was +because I felt this Court - in particular, the Conservatives - would feel +itself constrained by the rule of law that it had established elsewhere. + +!_ The morning +of January 15, 2003, I was five minutes late to the office and missed the 7:00 +A.M.call from the Supreme Court clerk. Listening to the message, I could tell +in an instant that she had bad news to report.The Supreme Court had affirmed +the decision of the Court of Appeals. Seven justices had voted in the majority. +There were two dissents. + +A few seconds later, the opinions arrived by e-mail. I took the phone off the +hook, posted an announcement to our blog, and sat down to see where I had been +wrong in my reasoning. + +My /{reasoning}/. Here was a case that pitted all the money in the world +against /{reasoning}/. And here was the last naïve law professor, scouring the +pages, looking for reasoning. + +I first scoured the opinion, looking for how the Court would distinguish the +principle in this case from the principle in /{Lopez}/. The argument was +nowhere to be found. The case was not even cited. The argument that was the +core argument of our case did not even appear in the Court's opinion. +={ United States v. Lopez +3 } + +Justice Ginsburg simply ignored the enumerated powers argument. Consistent with +her view that Congress's power was not limited generally, she had found +Congress's power not limited here. +={ Ginsburg, Ruth Bader } + +Her opinion was perfectly reasonable - for her, and for Justice Souter. Neither +believes in /{Lopez}/. It would be too much to expect them to write an opinion +that recognized, much less explained, the doctrine they had worked so hard to +defeat. +={ Souter, David } + +But as I realized what had happened, I couldn't quite believe what I was +reading. I had said there was no way this Court could reconcile limited powers +with the Commerce Clause and unlimited powers with the Progress Clause. It had +never even occurred to me that they could reconcile the two simply /{by not +addressing the argument}/. There was no inconsistency because they would not +talk about the two together. There was therefore no principle that followed +from the /{Lopez}/ case: In that context, Congress's power would be limited, +but in this context it would not. + +Yet by what right did they get to choose which of the framers' values they +would respect? By what right did they - the silent five - get to select the +part of the Constitution they would enforce based on the values they thought +important? We were right back to the argument that I said I hated at the start: +I had failed to convince them that the issue here was important, and I had +failed to recognize that however much I might hate a system in which the Court +gets to pick the constitutional values that it will respect, that is the system +we have. + +Justices Breyer and Stevens wrote very strong dissents. Stevens's opinion was +crafted internal to the law: He argued that the tradition of intellectual +property law should not support this unjustified extension of terms. He based +his argument on a parallel analysis that had governed in the context of patents +(so had we). But the rest of the Court discounted the parallel - without +explaining how the very same words in the Progress Clause could come to mean +totally different things depending upon whether the words were about patents or +copyrights. The Court let Justice Stevens's charge go unanswered. +={ Breyer, Stephen +1 ; + patents : + duration of ; + Stevens, John Paul +} + +Justice Breyer's opinion, perhaps the best opinion he has ever written, was +external to the Constitution. He argued that the term of copyrights has become +so long as to be effectively unlimited. We had said that under the current +term, a copyright gave an author 99.8 percent of the value of a perpetual term. +Breyer said we were wrong, that the actual number was 99.9997 percent of a +perpetual term. Either way, the point was clear: If the Constitution said a +term had to be "limited," and the existing term was so long as to be +effectively unlimited, then it was unconstitutional. +={ copyright : + in perpetuity +} + +These two justices understood all the arguments we had made. But because +neither believed in the /{Lopez}/ case, neither was willing to push it as a +reason to reject this extension. The case was decided without anyone having +addressed the argument that we had carried from Judge Sentelle. It was +/{Hamlet}/ without the Prince. +={ Setnelle, David ; + United States v. Lopez +2 +} + +!_ Defeat brings depression. +They say it is a sign of health when depression gives way to anger. My anger +came quickly, but it didn't cure the depression. This anger was of two sorts. + +It was first anger with the five "Conservatives." It would have been one thing +for them to have explained why the principle of /{Lopez}/ didn't apply in this +case. That wouldn't have been a very convincing argument, I don't believe, +having read it made by others, and having tried to make it myself. But it at +least would have been an act of integrity. These justices in particular have +repeatedly said that the proper mode of interpreting the Constitution is +"originalism" - to first understand the framers' text, interpreted in their +context, in light of the structure of the Constitution. That method had +produced /{Lopez}/ and many other "originalist" rulings. Where was their +"originalism" now? +={ Constitution, U.S. : + originalist interpretation of ; + originalism +} + +Here, they had joined an opinion that never once tried to explain what the +framers had meant by crafting the Progress Clause as they did; they joined an +opinion that never once tried to explain how the structure of that clause would +affect the interpretation of Congress's power. And they joined an opinion that +didn't even try to explain why this grant of power could be unlimited, whereas +the Commerce Clause would be limited. In short, they had joined an opinion that +did not apply to, and was inconsistent with, their own method for interpreting +the Constitution. This opinion may well have yielded a result that they liked. +It did not produce a reason that was consistent with their own principles. +={ Constitution, U.S. : + Progress Clause of ; + Progress Clause ; + Constitution, U.S. : + Commerce Clause of +} + +My anger with the Conservatives quickly yielded to anger with myself. For I had +let a view of the law that I liked interfere with a view of the law as it is. + +Most lawyers, and most law professors, have little patience for idealism about +courts in general and this Supreme Court in particular. Most have a much more +pragmatic view. When Don Ayer said that this case would be won based on whether +I could convince the Justices that the framers' values were important, I fought +the idea, because I didn't want to believe that that is how this Court decides. +I insisted on arguing this case as if it were a simple application of a set of +principles. I had an argument that followed in logic. I didn't need to waste my +time showing it should also follow in popularity. +={ Ayer, Don } + +As I read back over the transcript from that argument in October, I can see a +hundred places where the answers could have taken the conversation in different +directions, where the truth about the harm that this unchecked power will cause +could have been made clear to this Court. Justice Kennedy in good faith wanted +to be shown. I, idiotically, corrected his question. Justice Souter in good +faith wanted to be shown the First Amendment harms. I, like a math teacher, +reframed the question to make the logical point. I had shown them how they +could strike this law of Congress if they wanted to. There were a hundred +places where I could have helped them want to, yet my stubbornness, my refusal +to give in, stopped me. I have stood before hundreds of audiences trying to +persuade; I have used passion in that effort to persuade; but I refused to +stand before this audience and try to persuade with the passion I had used +elsewhere. It was not the basis on which a court should decide the issue. +={ Souter, David ; + Kennedy, Anthony ; + Constitution, U.S. : + First Amendment to ; + First Amendment : + copyright extension as violation of +} + +Would it have been different if I had argued it differently? Would it have been +different if Don Ayer had argued it? Or Charles Fried? Or Kathleen Sullivan? + +My friends huddled around me to insist it would not. The Court was not ready, +my friends insisted. This was a loss that was destined. It would take a great +deal more to show our society why our framers were right. And when we do that, +we will be able to show that Court. + +Maybe, but I doubt it. These Justices have no financial interest in doing +anything except the right thing. They are not lobbied. They have little reason +to resist doing right. I can't help but think that if I had stepped down from +this pretty picture of dispassionate justice, I could have persuaded. + +And even if I couldn't, then that doesn't excuse what happened in January. For +at the start of this case, one of America's leading intellectual property +professors stated publicly that my bringing this case was a mistake. "The Court +is not ready," Peter Jaszi said; this issue should not be raised until it is. +={ Jaszi, Peter } + +After the argument and after the decision, Peter said to me, and publicly, that +he was wrong. But if indeed that Court could not have been persuaded, then that +is all the evidence that's needed to know that here again Peter was right. +Either I was not ready to argue this case in a way that would do some good or +they were not ready to hear this case in a way that would do some good. Either +way, the decision to bring this case - a decision I had made four years before +- was wrong. + +!_ While the reaction +to the Sonny Bono Act itself was almost unanimously negative, the reaction to +the Court's decision was mixed. No one, at least in the press, tried to say +that extending the term of copyright was a good idea. We had won that battle +over ideas. Where the decision was praised, it was praised by papers that had +been skeptical of the Court's activism in other cases. Deference was a good +thing, even if it left standing a silly law. But where the decision was +attacked, it was attacked because it left standing a silly and harmful law. +/{The New York Times}/ wrote in its editorial, + +_1 In effect, the Supreme Court's decision makes it likely that we are seeing +the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright +perpetuity. The public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not +be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of +humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative +ferment." +={ copyright : + in perpetuity +} + +The best responses were in the cartoons. There was a gaggle of hilarious +images" of Mickey in jail and the like. The best, from my view of the case, was +Ruben Bolling's, reproduced on the next page. The "powerful and wealthy" line +is a bit unfair. But the punch in the face felt exactly like that. +={ Bolling, Ruben +2 } + +The image that will always stick in my head is that evoked by the quote from +/{The New York Times}/. That "grand experiment" we call the "public domain" is +over? When I can make light of it, I think, "Honey, I shrunk the Constitution." +But I can rarely make light of it. We had in our Constitution a commitment to +free culture. In the case that I fathered, the Supreme Court effectively +renounced that commitment. A better lawyer would have made them see +differently. + +{freeculture18.png 550x720 }http://www.free-culture.cc/ +={ Scalia, Antonin } + +1~ Chapter Fourteen: Eldred II + +!_ The day +/{Eldred}/ was decided, fate would have it that I was to travel to Washington, +D.C. (The day the rehearing petition in /{Eldred}/ was denied - meaning the +case was really finally over - fate would have it that I was giving a speech to +technologists at Disney World.) This was a particularly long flight to my least +favorite city. The drive into the city from Dulles was delayed because of +traffic, so I opened up my computer and wrote an op-ed piece. + +It was an act of contrition. During the whole of the flight from San Francisco +to Washington, I had heard over and over again in my head the same advice from +Don Ayer: You need to make them see why it is important. And alternating with +that command was the question of Justice Kennedy: "For all these years the act +has impeded progress in science and the useful arts. I just don't see any +empirical evidence for that." And so, having failed in the argument of +constitutional principle, finally, I turned to an argument of politics. +={ Ayer, Don ; + Kennedy, Anthony +} + +/{The New York Times}/ published the piece. In it, I proposed a simple fix: +Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner would be +required to register the work and pay a small fee. If he paid the fee, he got +the benefit of the full term of copyright. If he did not, the work passed into +the public domain. +={ copyright law : + registration requirement of +23 +} + +We called this the Eldred Act, but that was just to give it a name. Eric Eldred +was kind enough to let his name be used once again, but as he said early on, it +won't get passed unless it has another name. +={ Eldred, Eric ; + Eldred Act +23 +} + +Or another two names. For depending upon your perspective, this is either the +"Public Domain Enhancement Act" or the "Copyright Term Deregulation Act." +Either way, the essence of the idea is clear and obvious: Remove copyright +where it is doing nothing except blocking access and the spread of knowledge. +Leave it for as long as Congress allows for those works where its worth is at +least $1. But for everything else, let the content go. + +The reaction to this idea was amazingly strong. Steve Forbes endorsed it in an +editorial. I received an avalanche of e-mail and letters expressing support. +When you focus the issue on lost creativity, people can see the copyright +system makes no sense. As a good Republican might say, here government +regulation is simply getting in the way of innovation and creativity. And as a +good Democrat might say, here the government is blocking access and the spread +of knowledge for no good reason. Indeed, there is no real difference between +Democrats and Republicans on this issue. Anyone can recognize the stupid harm +of the present system. +={ Democratic Party ; + Republican Party ; + Forbes, Steve +} + +Indeed, many recognized the obvious benefit of the registration requirement. +For one of the hardest things about the current system for people who want to +license content is that there is no obvious place to look for the current +copyright owners. Since registration is not required, since marking content is +not required, since no formality at all is required, it is often impossibly +hard to locate copyright owners to ask permission to use or license their work. +This system would lower these costs, by establishing at least one registry +where copyright owners could be identified. +={ copyright : + no registration of works +} + +As I described in chapter 10, formalities in copyright law were removed in +1976, when Congress followed the Europeans by abandoning any formal requirement +before a copyright is granted.~{ Until the 1908 Berlin Act of the Berne +Convention, national copyright legislation sometimes made protection depend +upon compliance with formalities such as registration, deposit, and affixation +of notice of the author's claim of copyright. However, starting with the 1908 +act, every text of the Convention has provided that "the enjoyment and the +exercise" of rights guaranteed by the Convention "shall not be subject to any +formality." The prohibition against formalities is presently embodied in +Article 5(2) of the Paris Text of the Berne Convention. Many countries continue +to impose some form of deposit or registration requirement, albeit not as a +condition of copyright. French law, for example, requires the deposit of copies +of works in national repositories, principally the National Museum. Copies of +books published in the United Kingdom must be deposited in the British Library. +The German Copyright Act provides for a Registrar of Authors where the author's +true name can be filed in the case of anonymous or pseudonymous works. Paul +Goldstein, /{International Intellectual Property Law, Cases and Materials}/ +(New York: Foundation Press, 2001), 153-54. }~ The Europeans are said to view +copyright as a "natural right." Natural rights don't need forms to exist. +Traditions, like the Anglo-American tradition that required copyright owners to +follow form if their rights were to be protected, did not, the Europeans +thought, properly respect the dignity of the author. My right as a creator +turns on my creativity, not upon the special favor of the government. +={ copyright law : + European +} + +That's great rhetoric. It sounds wonderfully romantic. But it is absurd +copyright policy. It is absurd especially for authors, because a world without +formalities harms the creator. The ability to spread "Walt Disney creativity" +is destroyed when there is no simple way to know what's protected and what's +not. + +The fight against formalities achieved its first real victory in Berlin in +1908. International copyright lawyers amended the Berne Convention in 1908, to +require copyright terms of life plus fifty years, as well as the abolition of +copyright formalities. The formalities were hated because the stories of +inadvertent loss were increasingly common. It was as if a Charles Dickens +character ran all copyright offices, and the failure to dot an /{i}/ or cross a +/{t}/ resulted in the loss of widows' only income. +={ Berne Convention (1908) } + +These complaints were real and sensible. And the strictness of the formalities, +especially in the United States, was absurd. The law should always have ways of +forgiving innocent mistakes. There is no reason copyright law couldn't, as +well. Rather than abandoning formalities totally, the response in Berlin should +have been to embrace a more equitable system of registration. + +Even that would have been resisted, however, because registration in the +nineteenth and twentieth centuries was still expensive. It was also a hassle. +The abolishment of formalities promised not only to save the starving widows, +but also to lighten an unnecessary regulatory burden imposed upon creators. + +In addition to the practical complaint of authors in 1908, there was a moral +claim as well. There was no reason that creative property should be a +second-class form of property. If a carpenter builds a table, his rights over +the table don't depend upon filing a form with the government. He has a +property right over the table "naturally," and he can assert that right against +anyone who would steal the table, whether or not he has informed the government +of his ownership of the table. + +This argument is correct, but its implications are misleading. For the argument +in favor of formalities does not depend upon creative property being +second-class property. The argument in favor of formalities turns upon the +special problems that creative property presents. The law of formalities +responds to the special physics of creative property, to assure that it can be +efficiently and fairly spread. + +No one thinks, for example, that land is second-class property just because you +have to register a deed with a court if your sale of land is to be effective. +And few would think a car is second-class property just because you must +register the car with the state and tag it with a license. In both of those +cases, everyone sees that there is an important reason to secure registration" +both because it makes the markets more efficient and because it better secures +the rights of the owner. Without a registration system for land, landowners +would perpetually have to guard their property. With registration, they can +simply point the police to a deed. Without a registration system for cars, auto +theft would be much easier. With a registration system, the thief has a high +burden to sell a stolen car. A slight burden is placed on the property owner, +but those burdens produce a much better system of protection for property +generally. + +It is similarly special physics that makes formalities important in copyright +law. Unlike a carpenter's table, there's nothing in nature that makes it +relatively obvious who might own a particular bit of creative property. A +recording of Lyle Lovett's latest album can exist in a billion places without +anything necessarily linking it back to a particular owner. And like a car, +there's no way to buy and sell creative property with confidence unless there +is some simple way to authenticate who is the author and what rights he has. +Simple transactions are destroyed in a world without formalities. Complex, +expensive, /{lawyer}/ transactions take their place. + +This was the understanding of the problem with the Sonny Bono Act that we tried +to demonstrate to the Court. This was the part it didn't "get." Because we live +in a system without formalities, there is no way easily to build upon or use +culture from our past. If copyright terms were, as Justice Story said they +would be, "short," then this wouldn't matter much. For fourteen years, under +the framers' system, a work would be presumptively controlled. After fourteen +years, it would be presumptively uncontrolled. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) : + Supreme Court challenge of ; + Story, Joseph +} + +But now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know +what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden +on the creative process. If the only way a library can offer an Internet +exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every +image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way +that has never been seen before /{because there are no formalities}/. + +The Eldred Act was designed to respond to exactly this problem. If it is worth +$1 to you, then register your work and you can get the longer term. Others will +know how to contact you and, therefore, how to get your permission if they want +to use your work. And you will get the benefit of an extended copyright term. + +If it isn't worth it to you to register to get the benefit of an extended term, +then it shouldn't be worth it for the government to defend your monopoly over +that work either. The work should pass into the public domain where anyone can +copy it, or build archives with it, or create a movie based on it. It should +become free if it is not worth $1 to you. + +Some worry about the burden on authors. Won't the burden of registering the +work mean that the $1 is really misleading? Isn't the hassle worth more than +$1? Isn't that the real problem with registration? + +It is. The hassle is terrible. The system that exists now is awful. I +completely agree that the Copyright Office has done a terrible job (no doubt +because they are terribly funded) in enabling simple and cheap registrations. +Any real solution to the problem of formalities must address the real problem +of /{governments}/ standing at the core of any system of formalities. In this +book, I offer such a solution. That solution essentially remakes the Copyright +Office. For now, assume it was Amazon that ran the registration system. Assume +it was one-click registration. The Eldred Act would propose a simple, one-click +registration fifty years after a work was published. Based upon historical +data, that system would move up to 98 percent of commercial work, commercial +work that no longer had a commercial life, into the public domain within fifty +years. What do you think? +={ Copyright Office ; + public domain : + content industry opposition to +15 +} + +!_ When Steve Forbes +endorsed the idea, some in Washington began to pay attention. Many people +contacted me pointing to representatives who might be willing to introduce the +Eldred Act. And I had a few who directly suggested that they might be willing +to take the first step. +={ Forbes, Steve } + +One representative, Zoe Lofgren of California, went so far as to get the bill +drafted. The draft solved any problem with international law. It imposed the +simplest requirement upon copyright owners possible. In May 2003, it looked as +if the bill would be introduced. On May 16, I posted on the Eldred Act blog, +"we are close." There was a general reaction in the blog community that +something good might happen here. +={ Lofgren, Zoe } + +But at this stage, the lobbyists began to intervene. Jack Valenti and the MPAA +general counsel came to the congresswoman's office to give the view of the +MPAA. Aided by his lawyer, as Valenti told me, Valenti informed the +congresswoman that the MPAA would oppose the Eldred Act. The reasons are +embarrassingly thin. More importantly, their thinness shows something clear +about what this debate is really about. +={ Valenti, Jack : + Eldred Act opposed by ; + film industry : + trade association of +2 ; + Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) +2 +} + +The MPAA argued first that Congress had "firmly rejected the central concept in +the proposed bill" - that copyrights be renewed. That was true, but irrelevant, +as Congress's "firm rejection" had occurred long before the Internet made +subsequent uses much more likely. Second, they argued that the proposal would +harm poor copyright owners - apparently those who could not afford the $1 fee. +Third, they argued that Congress had determined that extending a copyright term +would encourage restoration work. Maybe in the case of the small percentage of +work covered by copyright law that is still commercially valuable, but again +this was irrelevant, as the proposal would not cut off the extended term unless +the $1 fee was not paid. Fourth, the MPAA argued that the bill would impose +"enormous" costs, since a registration system is not free. True enough, but +those costs are certainly less than the costs of clearing the rights for a +copyright whose owner is not known. Fifth, they worried about the risks if the +copyright to a story underlying a film were to pass into the public domain. But +what risk is that? If it is in the public domain, then the film is a valid +derivative use. +={ films : + in public domain ; + public domain : + films in +} + +Finally, the MPAA argued that existing law enabled copyright owners to do this +if they wanted. But the whole point is that there are thousands of copyright +owners who don't even know they have a copyright to give. Whether they are free +to give away their copyright or not - a controversial claim in any case - +unless they know about a copyright, they're not likely to. + +!_ At the beginning +of this book, I told two stories about the law reacting to changes in +technology. In the one, common sense prevailed. In the other, common sense was +delayed. The difference between the two stories was the power of the opposition +- the power of the side that fought to defend the status quo. In both cases, a +new technology threatened old interests. But in only one case did those +interest's have the power to protect themselves against this new competitive +threat. + +I used these two cases as a way to frame the war that this book has been about. +For here, too, a new technology is forcing the law to react. And here, too, we +should ask, is the law following or resisting common sense? If common sense +supports the law, what explains this common sense? + +When the issue is piracy, it is right for the law to back the copyright owners. +The commercial piracy that I described is wrong and harmful, and the law should +work to eliminate it. When the issue is p2p sharing, it is easy to understand +why the law backs the owners still: Much of this sharing is wrong, even if much +is harmless. When the issue is copyright terms for the Mickey Mouses of the +world, it is possible still to understand why the law favors Hollywood: Most +people don't recognize the reasons for limiting copyright terms; it is thus +still possible to see good faith within the resistance. + +But when the copyright owners oppose a proposal such as the Eldred Act, then, +finally, there is an example that lays bare the naked self-interest driving +this war. This act would free an extraordinary range of content that is +otherwise unused. It wouldn't interfere with any copyright owner's desire to +exercise continued control over his content. It would simply liberate what +Kevin Kelly calls the "Dark Content" that fills archives around the world. So +when the warriors oppose a change like this, we should ask one simple question: +={ Eldred Act +3 ; + Kelly, Kevin +} + +What does this industry really want? + +With very little effort, the warriors could protect their content. So the +effort to block something like the Eldred Act is not really about protecting +/{their}/ content. The effort to block the Eldred Act is an effort to assure +that nothing more passes into the public domain. It is another step to assure +that the public domain will never compete, that there will be no use of content +that is not commercially controlled, and that there will be no commercial use +of content that doesn't require /{their}/ permission first. + +The opposition to the Eldred Act reveals how extreme the other side is. The +most powerful and sexy and well loved of lobbies really has as its aim not the +protection of "property" but the rejection of a tradition. Their aim is not +simply to protect what is theirs. /{Their aim is to assure that all there is is +what is theirs}/. + +It is not hard to understand why the warriors take this view. It is not hard to +see why it would benefit them if the competition of the public domain tied to +the Internet could somehow be quashed. Just as RCA feared the competition of +FM, they fear the competition of a public domain connected to a public that now +has the means to create with it and to share its own creation. +={ radio : + FM spectrum of ; + FM radio ; + RCA +} + +What is hard to understand is why the public takes this view. It is as if the +law made airplanes trespassers. The MPAA stands with the Causbys and demands +that their remote and useless property rights be respected, so that these +remote and forgotten copyright holders might block the progress of others. +={ Causby, Thomas Lee ; + Causby, Tinie ; + film industry : + trade association of ; + Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) +} + +All this seems to follow easily from this untroubled acceptance of the +"property" in intellectual property. Common sense supports it, and so long as +it does, the assaults will rain down upon the technologies of the Internet. The +consequence will be an increasing "permission society." The past can be +cultivated only if you can identify the owner and gain permission to build upon +his work. The future will be controlled by this dead (and often unfindable) +hand of the past. + +:B~ CONCLUSION + +1~conclusion [Conclusion]-# + +!_ There are more +than 35 million people with the AIDS virus worldwide. Twenty-five million of +them live in sub-Saharan Africa. Seventeen million have already died. Seventeen +million Africans is proportional percentage-wise to seven million Americans. +More importantly, it is seventeen million Africans. +={ Africa, medications for HIV patients in +15 ; + AIDS medications +15 ; + antiretroviral drugs +15 ; + developing countries, foreign patent costs in +15 ; + drugs : + pharmaceutical +15 ; + HIV/AIDS therapies +15 +} + +There is no cure for AIDS, but there are drugs to slow its progression. These +antiretroviral therapies are still experimental, but they have already had a +dramatic effect. In the United States, AIDS patients who regularly take a +cocktail of these drugs increase their life expectancy by ten to twenty years. +For some, the drugs make the disease almost invisible. + +These drugs are expensive. When they were first introduced in the United +States, they cost between $10,000 and $15,000 per person per year. Today, some +cost $25,000 per year. At these prices, of course, no African nation can afford +the drugs for the vast majority of its population: $15,000 is thirty times the +per capita gross national product of Zimbabwe. At these prices, the drugs are +totally unavailable.~{ Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, "Final +Report: Integrating Intellectual Property Rights and Development Policy" +(London, 2002), available at link #55. According to a World Health Organization +press release issued 9 July 2002, only 230,000 of the 6 million who need drugs +in the developing world receive them - and half of them are in Brazuil. }~ + +These prices are not high because the ingredients of the drugs are expensive. +These prices are high because the drugs are protected by patents. The drug +companies that produced these life-saving mixes enjoy at least a twenty-year +monopoly for their inventions. They use that monopoly power to extract the most +they can from the market. That power is in turn used to keep the prices high. +={ patents : + on pharmaceuticals +14 ; + pharmaceutical patents +14 +} + +There are many who are skeptical of patents, especially drug patents. I am not. +Indeed, of all the areas of research that might be supported by patents, drug +research is, in my view, the clearest case where patents are needed. The patent +gives the drug company some assurance that if it is successful in inventing a +new drug to treat a disease, it will be able to earn back its investment and +more. This is socially an extremely valuable incentive. I am the last person +who would argue that the law should abolish it, at least without other changes. + +But it is one thing to support patents, even drug patents. It is another thing +to determine how best to deal with a crisis. And as African leaders began to +recognize the devastation that AIDS was bringing, they started looking for ways +to import HIV treatments at costs significantly below the market price. + +In 1997, South Africa tried one tack. It passed a law to allow the importation +of patented medicines that had been produced or sold in another nation's market +with the consent of the patent owner. For example, if the drug was sold in +India, it could be imported into Africa from India. This is called "parallel +importation," and it is generally permitted under international trade law and +is specifically permitted within the European Union.~{ See Peter Drahos with +John Braithwaite, /{Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?}/ +(New York: The New Press, 2003), 37. }~ +={ international law +11 ; + parallel importation +1 ; + South Africa, Republic of, pharmaceutical imports by +5 +} + +However, the United States government opposed the bill. Indeed, more than +opposed. As the International Intellectual Property Association characterized +it, "The U.S. government pressured South Africa ... not to permit compulsory +licensing or parallel imports."~{ International Intellectual Property Institute +(IIPI), /{Patent Protection and Access to HIV/AIDS Pharmaceuticals in +Sub-Saharan Africa, a Report Prepared for the World Intellectual Property +Organization}/ (Washington, D.C., 2000), 14, available at link #56. For a +firsthand account of the struggle over South Africa, see Hearing Before the +Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, House +Committee on Government Reform, H. Rep., 1st sess., Ser. No. 106-126 (22 July +1999), 150-57 (statement of James Love). }~ Through the Office of the United +States Trade Representative, the government asked South Africa to change the +law - and to add pressure to that request, in 1998, the USTR listed South +Africa for possible trade sanctions. That same year, more than forty +pharmaceutical companies began proceedings in the South African courts to +challenge the govern-ment's actions. The United States was then joined by other +governments from the EU. Their claim, and the claim of the pharmaceutical +companies, was that South Africa was violating its obligations under +international law by discriminating against a particular kind of patent - +pharmaceutical patents. The demand of these governments, with the United States +in the lead, was that South Africa respect these patents as it respects any +other patent, regardless of any effect on the treatment of AIDS within South +Africa.~{ International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI), /{Patent +Protection and Access to HIV/AIDS Pharmaceuticals in Sub-Saharan Africa, a +Report Prepared for the World Intellectual Property Organization}/ (Washington, +D.C., 2000), 15. }~ +={ United States Trade Representative (USTR) } + +We should place the intervention by the United States in context. No doubt +patents are not the most important reason that Africans don't have access to +drugs. Poverty and the total absence of an effective health care infrastructure +matter more. But whether patents are the most important reason or not, the +price of drugs has an effect on their demand, and patents affect price. And so, +whether massive or marginal, there was an effect from our government's +intervention to stop the flow of medications into Africa. + +By stopping the flow of HIV treatment into Africa, the United States government +was not saving drugs for United States citizens. This is not like wheat (if +they eat it, we can't); instead, the flow that the United States intervened to +stop was, in effect, a flow of knowledge: information about how to take +chemicals that exist within Africa, and turn those chemicals into drugs that +would save 15 to 30 million lives. + +Nor was the intervention by the United States going to protect the profits of +United States drug companies - at least, not substantially. It was not as if +these countries were in the position to buy the drugs for the prices the drug +companies were charging. Again, the Africans are wildly too poor to afford +these drugs at the offered prices. Stopping the parallel import of these drugs +would not substantially increase the sales by U.S. companies. + +Instead, the argument in favor of restricting this flow of information, which +was needed to save the lives of millions, was an argument about the sanctity of +property.~{ See Sabin Russell, "New Crusade to Lower AIDS Drug Costs: Africa's +Needs at Odds with Firms' Profit Motive," /{San Francisco Chronicle,}/ 24 May +1999, A1, available at link #57 ("compulsory licenses and gray markets pose a +threat to the entire system of intellectual property protection"); Robert +Weissman, "AIDS and Developing Countries: Democratizing Access to Essential +Medicines," /{Foreign Policy in Focus}/ 4:23 (August 1999), available at link +#58 (describing U.S. policy); John A. Harrelson, "TRIPS, Pharmaceutical +Patents, and the HIV/AIDS Crisis: Finding the Proper Balance Between +Intellectual Property Rights and Compassion, a Synopsis," /{Widener Law +Symposium Journal}/ (Spring 2001): 175. }~ It was because "intellectual +property" would be violated that these drugs should not flow into Africa. It +was a principle about the importance of "intellectual property" that led these +government actors to intervene against the South African response to AIDS. + +Now just step back for a moment. There will be a time thirty years from now +when our children look back at us and ask, how could we have let this happen? +How could we allow a policy to be pursued whose direct cost would be to speed +the death of 15 to 30 million Africans, and whose only real benefit would be to +uphold the "sanctity" of an idea? What possible justification could there ever +be for a policy that results in so many deaths? What exactly is the insanity +that would allow so many to die for such an abstraction? + +Some blame the drug companies. I don't. They are corporations. Their managers +are ordered by law to make money for the corporation. They push a certain +patent policy not because of ideals, but because it is the policy that makes +them the most money. And it only makes them the most money because of a certain +corruption within our political system - a corruption the drug companies are +certainly not responsible for. +={ corporations : + in pharmaceutical industry +2 +} + +The corruption is our own politicians' failure of integrity. For the drug +companies would love - they say, and I believe them - to sell their drugs as +cheaply as they can to countries in Africa and elsewhere. There are issues +they'd have to resolve to make sure the drugs didn't get back into the United +States, but those are mere problems of technology. They could be overcome. + +A different problem, however, could not be overcome. This is the fear of the +grandstanding politician who would call the presidents of the drug companies +before a Senate or House hearing, and ask, "How is it you can sell this HIV +drug in Africa for only $1 a pill, but the same drug would cost an American +$1,500?" Because there is no "sound bite" answer to that question, its effect +would be to induce regulation of prices in America. The drug companies thus +avoid this spiral by avoiding the first step. They reinforce the idea that +property should be sacred. They adopt a rational strategy in an irrational +context, with the unintended consequence that perhaps millions die. And that +rational strategy thus becomes framed in terms of this ideal - the sanctity of +an idea called "intellectual property." +={ intellectual property rights : + of drug patents +3 +} + +So when the common sense of your child confronts you, what will you say? When +the common sense of a generation finally revolts against what we have done, how +will we justify what we have done? What is the argument? + +A sensible patent policy could endorse and strongly support the patent system +without having to reach everyone everywhere in exactly the same way. Just as a +sensible copyright policy could endorse and strongly support a copyright system +without having to regulate the spread of culture perfectly and forever, a +sensible patent policy could endorse and strongly support a patent system +without having to block the spread of drugs to a country not rich enough to +afford market prices in any case. A sensible policy, in other words, could be a +balanced policy. For most of our history, both copyright and patent policies +were balanced in just this sense. + +But we as a culture have lost this sense of balance. We have lost the critical +eye that helps us see the difference between truth and extremism. A certain +property fundamentalism, having no connection to our tradition, now reigns in +this culture - bizarrely, and with consequences more grave to the spread of +ideas and culture than almost any other single policy decision that we as a +democracy will make. + +!_ A simple idea +blinds us, and under the cover of darkness, much happens that most of us would +reject if any of us looked. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property +in ideas that we don't even notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a +people who are dying without them. So uncritically do we accept the idea of +property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that +property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture +democratically. Blindness becomes our common sense. And the challenge for +anyone who would reclaim the right to cultivate our culture is to find a way to +make this common sense open its eyes. + +So far, common sense sleeps. There is no revolt. Common sense does not yet see +what there could be to revolt about. The extremism that now dominates this +debate fits with ideas that seem natural, and that fit is reinforced by the +RCAs of our day. They wage a frantic war to fight "piracy," and devastate a +culture for creativity. They defend the idea of "creative property," while +transforming real creators into modern-day sharecroppers. They are insulted by +the idea that rights should be balanced, even though each of the major players +in this content war was itself a beneficiary of a more balanced ideal. The +hypocrisy reeks. Yet in a city like Washington, hypocrisy is not even noticed. +Powerful lobbies, complex issues, and MTV attention spans produce the "perfect +storm" for free culture. + +!_ In August 2003, +a fight broke out in the United States about a decision by the World +Intellectual Property Organization to cancel a meeting.~{ Jonathan Krim, "The +Quiet War over Open-Source," /{Washington Post,}/ 21 August 2003, E1, available +at link #59; William New, "Global Group's Shift on 'Open Source' Meeting Spurs +Stir," National Journal's Technology Daily, 19 August 2003, available at link +#60; William New, "U.S. Official Opposes 'Open Source' Talks at WIPO," +/{National Journal's Technology Daily,}/ 19 August 2003, available at link #61. +}~ At the request of a wide range of interests, WIPO had decided to hold a +meeting to discuss "open and collaborative projects to create public goods." +These are projects that have been successful in producing public goods without +relying exclusively upon a proprietary use of intellectual property. Examples +include the Internet and the World Wide Web, both of which were developed on +the basis of protocols in the public domain. It included an emerging trend to +support open academic journals, including the Public Library of Science project +that I describe in the Afterword. It included a project to develop single +nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are thought to have great significance +in biomedical research. (That nonprofit project comprised a consortium of the +Wellcome Trust and pharmaceutical and technological companies, including +Amersham Biosciences, AstraZeneca, Aventis, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, +Hoffmann-La Roche, Glaxo- SmithKline, IBM, Motorola, Novartis, Pfizer, and +Searle.) It included the Global Positioning System, which Ronald Reagan set +free in the early 1980s. And it included "open source and free software." +={ academic journals ; + biomedical research ; + intellectual property rights : + international organization on issues of +4 ; + Internet : + development of ; + PLoS (Public Library of Science) ; + Public Library of Science (PLoS) ; + public domain : + public projects in ; + single nucleotied polymorphisms (SNPs) ; + Wellcome Trust ; + World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) +4 ; + World Wide Web ; + Global Positioning System ; + Reagan, Ronald +} + +The aim of the meeting was to consider this wide range of projects from one +common perspective: that none of these projects relied upon intellectual +property extremism. Instead, in all of them, intellectual property was balanced +by agreements to keep access open or to impose limitations on the way in which +proprietary claims might be used. + +From the perspective of this book, then, the conference was ideal.~{ I should +disclose that I was one of the people who asked WIPO for the meeting. }~ The +projects within its scope included both commercial and noncommercial work. They +primarily involved science, but from many perspectives. And WIPO was an ideal +venue for this discussion, since WIPO is the preeminent international body +dealing with intellectual property issues. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + in international debate on intellectual property +4 +} + +Indeed, I was once publicly scolded for not recognizing this fact about WIPO. +In February 2003, I delivered a keynote address to a preparatory conference for +the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). At a press conference +before the address, I was asked what I would say. I responded that I would be +talking a little about the importance of balance in intellectual property for +the development of an information society. The moderator for the event then +promptly interrupted to inform me and the assembled reporters that no question +about intellectual property would be discussed by WSIS, since those questions +were the exclusive domain of WIPO. In the talk that I had prepared, I had +actually made the issue of intellectual property relatively minor. But after +this astonishing statement, I made intellectual property the sole focus of my +talk. There was no way to talk about an "Information Society" unless one also +talked about the range of information and culture that would be free. My talk +did not make my immoderate moderator very happy. And she was no doubt correct +that the scope of intellectual property protections was ordinarily the stuff of +WIPO. But in my view, there couldn't be too much of a conversation about how +much intellectual property is needed, since in my view, the very idea of +balance in intellectual property had been lost. +={ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) +1 } + +So whether or not WSIS can discuss balance in intellectual property, I had +thought it was taken for granted that WIPO could and should. And thus the +meeting about "open and collaborative projects to create public goods" seemed +perfectly appropriate within the WIPO agenda. + +But there is one project within that list that is highly controversial, at +least among lobbyists. That project is "open source and free software." +Microsoft in particular is wary of discussion of the subject. From its +perspective, a conference to discuss open source and free software would be +like a conference to discuss Apple's operating system. Both open source and +free software compete with Microsoft's software. And internationally, many +governments have begun to explore requirements that they use open source or +free software, rather than "proprietary software," for their own internal uses. +={ free software/open-source software (FS/OSS) +7 ; + Apple Corporation ; + Microsoft : + on free software +4 +} + +I don't mean to enter that debate here. It is important only to make clear that +the distinction is not between commercial and noncommercial software. There are +many important companies that depend fundamentally upon open source and free +software, IBM being the most prominent. IBM is increasingly shifting its focus +to the GNU/Linux operating system, the most famous bit of "free software" - and +IBM is emphatically a commercial entity. Thus, to support "open source and free +software" is not to oppose commercial entities. It is, instead, to support a +mode of software development that is different from Microsoft's.~{ Microsoft's +position about free and open source software is more sophisticated. As it has +repeatedly asserted, it has no problem with "open source" software or software +in the public domain. Microsoft's principal opposition is to "free software" +licensed under a "copyleft" license, meaning a license that requires the +licensee to adopt the same terms on any derivative work. See Bradford L. Smith, +"The Future of Software: Enabling the Marketplace to Decide," /{Government +Policy Toward Open Source Software}/ (Washington, D.C.: AEI-Brookings Joint +Center for Regulatory Studies, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy +Research, 2002), 69, available at link #62. See also Craig Mundie, Microsoft +senior vice president, /{The Commercial Software Model,}/ discussion at New +York University Stern School of Business (3 May 2001), available at link #63. +}~ +={ GNU/Linux operating system ; + Linux operating system ; + IBM +} + +More important for our purposes, to support "open source and free software" is +not to oppose copyright. "Open source and free software" is not software in the +public domain. Instead, like Microsoft's software, the copyright owners of free +and open source software insist quite strongly that the terms of their software +license be respected by adopters of free and open source software. The terms of +that license are no doubt different from the terms of a proprietary software +license. Free software licensed under the General Public License (GPL), for +example, requires that the source code for the software be made available by +anyone who modifies and redistributes the software. But that requirement is +effective only if copyright governs software. If copyright did not govern +software, then free software could not impose the same kind of requirements on +its adopters. It thus depends upon copyright law just as Microsoft does. +={ General Public License (GPL) ; + GPL (General Public License) +} + +It is therefore understandable that as a proprietary software developer, +Microsoft would oppose this WIPO meeting, and understandable that it would use +its lobbyists to get the United States government to oppose it, as well. And +indeed, that is just what was reported to have happened. According to Jonathan +Krim of the /{Washington Post}/, Microsoft's lobbyists succeeded in getting the +United States government to veto the meeting.~{ Krim, "The Quiet War over +Open-Source," available at link #64. }~ And without U.S. backing, the meeting +was canceled. +={ intellectual property rights : + international organization on issues of +11 ; + World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) +11 ; + Krim, Jonathan +2 ; + Microsoft : + WIPO meeting opposed by +} + +I don't blame Microsoft for doing what it can to advance its own interests, +consistent with the law. And lobbying governments is plainly consistent with +the law. There was nothing surprising about its lobbying here, and nothing +terribly surprising about the most powerful software producer in the United +States having succeeded in its lobbying efforts. + +What was surprising was the United States government's reason for opposing the +meeting. Again, as reported by Krim, Lois Boland, acting director of +international relations for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, explained +that "open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to +promote intellectual-property rights." She is quoted as saying, "To hold a +meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us +to be contrary to the goals of WIPO." +={ Boland, Lois +10 ; + Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. +15 ; + intellectual property rights : + U.S. Patent Office on private control of +15 +} + +% PTO range not properly identified, recheck + +These statements are astonishing on a number of levels. + +First, they are just flat wrong. As I described, most open source and free +software relies fundamentally upon the intellectual property right called +"copyright." Without it, restrictions imposed by those licenses wouldn't work. +Thus, to say it "runs counter" to the mission of promoting intellectual +property rights reveals an extraordinary gap in under- standing - the sort of +mistake that is excusable in a first-year law student, but an embarrassment +from a high government official dealing with intellectual property issues. + +Second, who ever said that WIPO's exclusive aim was to "promote" intellectual +property maximally? As I had been scolded at the preparatory conference of +WSIS, WIPO is to consider not only how best to protect intellectual property, +but also what the best balance of intellectual property is. As every economist +and lawyer knows, the hard question in intellectual property law is to find +that balance. But that there should be limits is, I had thought, uncontested. +One wants to ask Ms. Boland, are generic drugs (drugs based on drugs whose +patent has expired) contrary to the WIPO mission? Does the public domain weaken +intellectual property? Would it have been better if the protocols of the +Internet had been patented? +={ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) ; + drugs : + pharmaceutical ; + generic drugs ; + patents : + on pharmaceuticals +} + +Third, even if one believed that the purpose of WIPO was to maximize +intellectual property rights, in our tradition, intellectual property rights +are held by individuals and corporations. They get to decide what to do with +those rights because, again, they are /{their}/ rights. If they want to "waive" +or "disclaim" their rights, that is, within our tradition, totally appropriate. +When Bill Gates gives away more than $20 billion to do good in the world, that +is not inconsistent with the objectives of the property system. That is, on the +contrary, just what a property system is supposed to be about: giving +individuals the right to decide what to do with /{their}/ property. +={ Gates, Bill } + +When Ms. Boland says that there is something wrong with a meeting "which has as +its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights," she's saying that WIPO has an +interest in interfering with the choices of the individuals who own +intellectual property rights. That somehow, WIPO's objective should be to stop +an individual from "waiving" or "dis-claiming" an intellectual property right. +That the interest of WIPO is not just that intellectual property rights be +maximized, but that they also should be exercised in the most extreme and +restrictive way possible. + +There is a history of just such a property system that is well known in the +Anglo-American tradition. It is called "feudalism." Under feudalism, not only +was property held by a relatively small number of individuals and entities. And +not only were the rights that ran with that property powerful and extensive. +But the feudal system had a strong interest in assuring that property holders +within that system not weaken feudalism by liberating people or property within +their control to the free market. Feudalism depended upon maximum control and +concentration. It fought any freedom that might interfere with that control. +={ feudal system +1 ; + property rights : + feudal system of +1 +} + +As Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite relate, this is precisely the choice we +are now making about intellectual property.~{ See Drahos with Braithwaite, +/{Information Feudalism,}/ 210-20. }~ We will have an information society. That +much is certain. Our only choice now is whether that information society will +be /{free}/ or /{feudal}/. The trend is toward the feudal. +={ Braithwait, John ; + Drahos, Peter +} + +When this battle broke, I blogged it. A spirited debate within the comment +section ensued. Ms. Boland had a number of supporters who tried to show why her +comments made sense. But there was one comment that was particularly depressing +for me. An anonymous poster wrote, +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + in international debate on intellectual property +5 } + +_1 George, you misunderstand Lessig: He's only talking about the world as it +should be ("the goal of WIPO, and the goal of any government, should be to +promote the right balance of intellectual- property rights, not simply to +promote intellectual property rights"), not as it is. If we were talking about +the world as it is, then of course Boland didn't say anything wrong. But in the +world as Lessig would have it, then of course she did. Always pay attention to +the distinction between Lessig's world and ours." + +I missed the irony the first time I read it. I read it quickly and thought the +poster was supporting the idea that seeking balance was what our government +should be doing. (Of course, my criticism of Ms. Boland was not about whether +she was seeking balance or not; my criticism was that her comments betrayed a +first-year law student's mistake. I have no illusion about the extremism of our +government, whether Republican or Democrat. My only illusion apparently is +about whether our government should speak the truth or not.) + +Obviously, however, the poster was not supporting that idea. Instead, the +poster was ridiculing the very idea that in the real world, the "goal" of a +government should be "to promote the right balance" of intellectual property. +That was obviously silly to him. And it obviously betrayed, he believed, my own +silly utopianism. "Typical for an academic," the poster might well have +continued. + +I understand criticism of academic utopianism. I think utopianism is silly, +too, and I'd be the first to poke fun at the absurdly unrealistic ideals of +academics throughout history (and not just in our own country's history). + +But when it has become silly to suppose that the role of our government should +be to "seek balance," then count me with the silly, for that means that this +has become quite serious indeed. If it should be obvious to everyone that the +government does not seek balance, that the government is simply the tool of the +most powerful lobbyists, that the idea of holding the government to a different +standard is absurd, that the idea of demanding of the government that it speak +truth and not lies is just naïve, then who have we, the most powerful democracy +in the world, become? + +It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It +might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than +the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that +we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of +our history - free culture. + +If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon. + +!_ There are moments +of hope in this struggle. And moments that surprise. When the FCC was +considering relaxing ownership rules, which would thereby further increase the +concentration in media ownership, an extraordinary bipartisan coalition formed +to fight this change. For perhaps the first time in history, interests as +diverse as the NRA, the ACLU, Moveon.org, William Safire, Ted Turner, and +CodePink Women for Peace organized to oppose this change in FCC policy. An +astonishing 700,000 letters were sent to the FCC, demanding more hearings and a +different result. +={ CodePink Women for Peace ; + FCC : + media ownership regulated by +1 ; + media : + ownership concentration in +6 ; + Safire, William ; + Turner, Ted +} + +This activism did not stop the FCC, but soon after, a broad coalition in the +Senate voted to reverse the FCC decision. The hostile hearings leading up to +that vote revealed just how powerful this movement had become. There was no +substantial support for the FCC's decision, and there was broad and sustained +support for fighting further concentration in the media. +={ Senate, U.S. : + FCC media ownership rules reversed by +} + +But even this movement misses an important piece of the puzzle. Largeness as +such is not bad. Freedom is not threatened just because some become very rich, +or because there are only a handful of big players. The poor quality of Big +Macs or Quarter Pounders does not mean that you can't get a good hamburger from +somewhere else. + +The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead +from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, +produces. It is not just that there are a few powerful companies that control +an ever expanding slice of the media. It is that this concentration can call +upon an equally bloated range of rights - property rights of a historically +extreme form - that makes their bigness bad. + +It is therefore significant that so many would rally to demand competition and +increased diversity. Still, if the rally is understood as being about bigness +alone, it is not terribly surprising. We Americans have a long history of +fighting "big," wisely or not. That we could be motivated to fight "big" again +is not something new. + +It would be something new, and something very important, if an equal number +could be rallied to fight the increasing extremism built within the idea of +"intellectual property." Not because balance is alien to our tradition; indeed, +as I've argued, balance is our tradition. But because the muscle to think +critically about the scope of anything called "property" is not well exercised +within this tradition anymore. + +If we were Achilles, this would be our heel. This would be the place of our +tragedy. + +!_ As I write +these final words, the news is filled with stories about the RIAA lawsuits +against almost three hundred individuals.~{ John Borland, "RIAA Sues 261 File +Swappers," CNET News.com, 8 September 2003, available at link #65; Paul R. La +Monica, "Music Industry Sues Swappers," CNN/Money, 8 September 2003, available +at link #66; Soni Sangha and Phyllis Furman with Robert Gearty, "Sued for a +Song, N.Y.C. 12-Yr-Old Among 261 Cited as Sharers," /{New York Daily News,}/ 9 +September 2003, 3; Frank Ahrens, "RIAA's Lawsuits Meet Surprised Targets; +Single Mother in Calif., 12-Year-Old Girl in N.Y. Among Defendants," +/{Washington Post,}/ 10 September 2003, E1; Katie Dean, "Schoolgirl Settles +with RIAA," /{Wired News,}/ 10 September 2003, available at link #67. }~ Eminem +has just been sued for "sampling" someone else's music.~{ Jon Wiederhorn, +"Eminem Gets Sued ... by a Little Old Lady," mtv.com, 17 September 2003, +available at link #68. }~ The story about Bob Dylan "stealing" from a Japanese +author has just finished making the rounds.~{ Kenji Hall, Associated Press, +"Japanese Book May Be Inspiration for Dylan Songs," Kansascity.com, 9 July +2003, available at link #69. }~ An insider from Hollywood - who insists he must +remain anonymous - reports "an amazing conversation with these studio guys. +They've got extraordinary [old] content that they'd love to use but can't +because they can't begin to clear the rights. They've got scores of kids who +could do amazing things with the content, but it would take scores of lawyers +to clean it first." Congressmen are talking about deputizing computer viruses +to bring down computers thought to violate the law. Universities are +threatening expulsion for kids who use a computer to share content. +={ Dylan, Bob ; + Eminem ; + university computer networks, p2p sharing on ; + copyright infringement lawsuits : + individual defendants intimidated by | in recording industry ; + recording industry : + copyright infringement lawsuits of ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) : + copyright infringement lawsuits filed by +} + +Yet on the other side of the Atlantic, the BBC has just announced that it will +build a "Creative Archive," from which British citizens can download BBC +content, and rip, mix, and burn it.~{ "BBC Plans to Open Up Its Archive to the +Public," BBC press release, 24 August 2003, available at link #70. }~ And in +Brazil, the culture minister, Gilberto Gil, himself a folk hero of Brazilian +music, has joined with Creative Commons to release content and free licenses in +that Latin American country.~{ "Creative Commons and Brazil," Creative Commons +Weblog, 6 August 2003, available at link #71. }~ +={ BBC ; + Brazil, free culture in ; + Creative Commons ; + Gil, Gilberto ; + United Kingdom : + public creative archive in +} + +I've told a dark story. The truth is more mixed. A technology has given us a +new freedom. Slowly, some begin to understand that this freedom need not mean +anarchy. We can carry a free culture into the twenty-first century, without +artists losing and without the potential of digital technology being destroyed. +It will take some thought, and more importantly, it will take some will to +transform the RCAs of our day into the Causbys. + +Common sense must revolt. It must act to free culture. Soon, if this potential +is ever to be realized. + +:B~ AFTERWORD + +1~intro_afterword [Intro]-# + +!_ At least some +who have read this far will agree with me that something must be done to change +where we are heading. The balance of this book maps what might be done. +={ copyright : + voluntary reform efforts on +3 +} + +I divide this map into two parts: that which anyone can do now, and that which +requires the help of lawmakers. If there is one lesson that we can draw from +the history of remaking common sense, it is that it requires remaking how many +people think about the very same issue. + +That means this movement must begin in the streets. It must recruit a +significant number of parents, teachers, librarians, creators, authors, +musicians, filmmakers, scientists - all to tell this story in their own words, +and to tell their neighbors why this battle is so important. + +Once this movement has its effect in the streets, it has some hope of having an +effect in Washington. We are still a democracy. What people think matters. Not +as much as it should, at least when an RCA stands opposed, but still, it +matters. And thus, in the second part below, I sketch changes that Congress +could make to better secure a free culture. +={ RCA } + +1~us US, NOW +={ copyright : + voluntary reform efforts on +45 +} + +!_ Common sense +is with the copyright warriors because the debate so far has been framed at the +extremes - as a grand either/or: either property or anarchy, either total +control or artists won't be paid. If that really is the choice, then the +warriors should win. + +The mistake here is the error of the excluded middle. There are extremes in +this debate, but the extremes are not all that there is. There are those who +believe in maximal copyright - "All Rights Reserved" - and those who reject +copyright - "No Rights Reserved." The "All Rights Reserved" sorts believe that +you should ask permission before you "use" a copyrighted work in any way. The +"No Rights Reserved" sorts believe you should be able to do with content as you +wish, regardless of whether you have permission or not. + +When the Internet was first born, its initial architecture effectively tilted +in the "no rights reserved" direction. Content could be copied perfectly and +cheaply; rights could not easily be controlled. Thus, regardless of anyone's +desire, the effective regime of copyright under the original design of the +Internet was "no rights reserved." Content was "taken" regardless of the +rights. Any rights were effectively unprotected. +={ Internet : + development of +1 | initial free character of +1 +} + +This initial character produced a reaction (opposite, but not quite equal) by +copyright owners. That reaction has been the topic of this book. Through +legislation, litigation, and changes to the network's design, copyright holders +have been able to change the essential character of the environment of the +original Internet. If the original architecture made the effective default "no +rights reserved," the future architecture will make the effective default "all +rights reserved." The architecture and law that surround the Internet's design +will increasingly produce an environment where all use of content requires +permission. The "cut and paste" world that defines the Internet today will +become a "get permission to cut and paste" world that is a creator's nightmare. + +What's needed is a way to say something in the middle - neither "all rights +reserved" nor "no rights reserved" but "some rights reserved" - and thus a way +to respect copyrights but enable creators to free content as they see fit. In +other words, we need a way to restore a set of freedoms that we could just take +for granted before. + +2~ Rebuilding Freedoms Previously Presumed: Examples +={ free culture : + restoration efforts on previous aspects of +22 +} + +If you step back from the battle I've been describing here, you will recognize +this problem from other contexts. Think about privacy. Before the Internet, +most of us didn't have to worry much about data about our lives that we +broadcast to the world. If you walked into a bookstore and browsed through some +of the works of Karl Marx, you didn't need to worry about explaining your +browsing habits to your neighbors or boss. The "privacy" of your browsing +habits was assured. +={ browsing +4 ; + privacy rights +5 +} + +What made it assured? + +Well, if we think in terms of the modalities I described in chapter 10, your +privacy was assured because of an inefficient architecture for gathering data +and hence a market constraint (cost) on anyone who wanted to gather that data. +If you were a suspected spy for North Korea, working for the CIA, no doubt your +privacy would not be assured. But that's because the CIA would (we hope) find +it valuable enough to spend the thousands required to track you. But for most +of us (again, we can hope), spying doesn't pay. The highly inefficient +architecture of real space means we all enjoy a fairly robust amount of +privacy. That privacy is guaranteed to us by friction. Not by law (there is no +law protecting "privacy" in public places), and in many places, not by norms +(snooping and gossip are just fun), but instead, by the costs that friction +imposes on anyone who would want to spy. + +Enter the Internet, where the cost of tracking browsing in particular has +become quite tiny. If you're a customer at Amazon, then as you browse the +pages, Amazon collects the data about what you've looked at. You know this +because at the side of the page, there's a list of "recently viewed" pages. +Now, because of the architecture of the Net and the function of cookies on the +Net, it is easier to collect the data than not. The friction has disappeared, +and hence any "privacy" protected by the friction disappears, too. +={ Amazon +1 ; + cookies, Internet ; + Internet : + privacy protection on +2 +} + +Amazon, of course, is not the problem. But we might begin to worry about +libraries. If you're one of those crazy lefties who thinks that people should +have the "right" to browse in a library without the government knowing which +books you look at (I'm one of those lefties, too), then this change in the +technology of monitoring might concern you. If it becomes simple to gather and +sort who does what in electronic spaces, then the friction-induced privacy of +yesterday disappears. +={ libraries : + privacy rights in use of +} + +It is this reality that explains the push of many to define "privacy" on the +Internet. It is the recognition that technology can remove what friction before +gave us that leads many to push for laws to do what friction did.~{ See, for +example, Marc Rotenberg, "Fair Information Practices and the Architecture of +Privacy (What Larry Doesn't Get)," /{Stanford Technology Law Review}/ 1 (2001): +par. 6-18, available at link #72 (describing examples in which technology +defines privacy policy). See also Jeffrey Rosen, /{The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming +Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age}/ (New York: Random House, 2004) +(mapping tradeoffs between technology and privacy). }~ And whether you're in +favor of those laws or not, it is the pattern that is important here. We must +take affirmative steps to secure a kind of freedom that was passively provided +before. A change in technology now forces those who believe in privacy to +affirmatively act where, before, privacy was given by default. + +A similar story could be told about the birth of the free software movement. +When computers with software were first made available commercially, the +software - both the source code and the binaries - was free. You couldn't run a +program written for a Data General machine on an IBM machine, so Data General +and IBM didn't care much about controlling their software. +={ Data General ; + IBM ; + free software/open-source software (FS/OSS) +7 +} + +That was the world Richard Stallman was born into, and while he was a +researcher at MIT, he grew to love the community that developed when one was +free to explore and tinker with the software that ran on machines. Being a +smart sort himself, and a talented programmer, Stallman grew to depend upon the +freedom to add to or modify other people's work. +={ Stallman, Richard +6 } + +In an academic setting, at least, that's not a terribly radical idea. In a math +department, anyone would be free to tinker with a proof that someone offered. +If you thought you had a better way to prove a theorem, you could take what +someone else did and change it. In a classics department, if you believed a +colleague's translation of a recently discovered text was flawed, you were free +to improve it. Thus, to Stallman, it seemed obvious that you should be free to +tinker with and improve the code that ran a machine. This, too, was knowledge. +Why shouldn't it be open for criticism like anything else? + +No one answered that question. Instead, the architecture of revenue for +computing changed. As it became possible to import programs from one system to +another, it became economically attractive (at least in the view of some) to +hide the code of your program. So, too, as companies started selling +peripherals for mainframe systems. If I could just take your printer driver and +copy it, then that would make it easier for me to sell a printer to the market +than it was for you. +={ proprietary code +1 } + +Thus, the practice of proprietary code began to spread, and by the early 1980s, +Stallman found himself surrounded by proprietary code. The world of free +software had been erased by a change in the economics of computing. And as he +believed, if he did nothing about it, then the freedom to change and share +software would be fundamentally weakened. + +Therefore, in 1984, Stallman began a project to build a free operating system, +so that at least a strain of free software would survive. That was the birth of +the GNU project, into which Linus Torvalds's "Linux" kernel was added to +produce the GNU/Linux operating system. +={ Torvalds, Linus ; + GNU/Linux operating system ; + Linux operating system +} + +Stallman's technique was to use copyright law to build a world of software that +must be kept free. Software licensed under the Free Software Foundation's GPL +cannot be modified and distributed unless the source code for that software is +made available as well. Thus, anyone building upon GPL'd software would have to +make their buildings free as well. This would assure, Stallman believed, that +an ecology of code would develop that remained free for others to build upon. +His fundamental goal was freedom; innovative creative code was a byproduct. +={ Free Software Foundation ; + General Public License (GPL) ; + GPL (General Public License) +} + +Stallman was thus doing for software what privacy advocates now do for privacy. +He was seeking a way to rebuild a kind of freedom that was taken for granted +before. Through the affirmative use of licenses that bind copyrighted code, +Stallman was affirmatively reclaiming a space where free software would +survive. He was actively protecting what before had been passively guaranteed. + +Finally, consider a very recent example that more directly resonates with the +story of this book. This is the shift in the way academic and scientific +journals are produced. +={ academic journals +7 ; + scientific journals +7 +} + +As digital technologies develop, it is becoming obvious to many that printing +thousands of copies of journals every month and sending them to libraries is +perhaps not the most efficient way to distribute knowledge. Instead, journals +are increasingly becoming electronic, and libraries and their users are given +access to these electronic journals through password-protected sites. Something +similar to this has been happening in law for almost thirty years: Lexis and +Westlaw have had electronic versions of case reports available to subscribers +to their service. Although a Supreme Court opinion is not copyrighted, and +anyone is free to go to a library and read it, Lexis and Westlaw are also free +to charge users for the privilege of gaining access to that Supreme Court +opinion through their respective services. +={ Lexis and Westlaw +1 ; + law : + databases of case reports in +1 ; + libraries : + journals in ; + Supreme Court, U.S. : + access to opinions of +} + +There's nothing wrong in general with this, and indeed, the ability to charge +for access to even public domain materials is a good incentive for people to +develop new and innovative ways to spread knowledge. The law has agreed, which +is why Lexis and Westlaw have been allowed to flourish. And if there's nothing +wrong with selling the public domain, then there could be nothing wrong, in +principle, with selling access to material that is not in the public domain. +={ public domain : + access fees for material in | license system for rebuilding of +22 +} + +But what if the only way to get access to social and scientific data was +through proprietary services? What if no one had the ability to browse this +data except by paying for a subscription? + +As many are beginning to notice, this is increasingly the reality with +scientific journals. When these journals were distributed in paper form, +libraries could make the journals available to anyone who had access to the +library. Thus, patients with cancer could become cancer experts because the +library gave them access. Or patients trying to understand the risks of a +certain treatment could research those risks by reading all available articles +about that treatment. This freedom was therefore a function of the institution +of libraries (norms) and the technology of paper journals (architecture) - +namely, that it was very hard to control access to a paper journal. +={ libraries : + journals in +2 +} + +As journals become electronic, however, the publishers are demanding that +libraries not give the general public access to the journals. This means that +the freedoms provided by print journals in public libraries begin to disappear. +Thus, as with privacy and with software, a changing technology and market +shrink a freedom taken for granted before. + +This shrinking freedom has led many to take affirmative steps to restore the +freedom that has been lost. The Public Library of Science (PLoS), for example, +is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making scientific research available to +anyone with a Web connection. Authors of scientific work submit that work to +the Public Library of Science. That work is then subject to peer review. If +accepted, the work is then deposited in a public, electronic archive and made +permanently available for free. PLoS also sells a print version of its work, +but the copyright for the print journal does not inhibit the right of anyone to +redistribute the work for free. +={ PLoS (Public Library of Science) ; + Public Library of Science (PLoS) +} + +This is one of many such efforts to restore a freedom taken for granted before, +but now threatened by changing technology and markets. There's no doubt that +this alternative competes with the traditional publishers and their efforts to +make money from the exclusive distribution of content. But competition in our +tradition is presumptively a good - especially when it helps spread knowledge +and science. + +2~ Rebuilding Free Culture: One Idea +={ free culture : + Creative Commons license for recreation of +16 ; + copyright : + Creative Commons licenses for material in +16 ; + Creative Commons +16 +} + +The same strategy could be applied to culture, as a response to the increasing +control effected through law and technology. + +Enter the Creative Commons. The Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation +established in Massachusetts, but with its home at Stanford University. Its aim +is to build a layer of /{reasonable}/ copyright on top of the extremes that now +reign. It does this by making it easy for people to build upon other people's +work, by making it simple for creators to express the freedom for others to +take and build upon their work. Simple tags, tied to human-readable +descriptions, tied to bullet-proof licenses, make this possible. +={ Stanford University } + +/{Simple}/ - which means without a middleman, or without a lawyer. By +developing a free set of licenses that people can attach to their content, +Creative Commons aims to mark a range of content that can easily, and reliably, +be built upon. These tags are then linked to machine-readable versions of the +license that enable computers automatically to identify content that can easily +be shared. These three expressions together - a legal license, a human-readable +description, and machine-readable tags - constitute a Creative Commons license. +A Creative Commons license constitutes a grant of freedom to anyone who +accesses the license, and more importantly, an expression of the ideal that the +person associated with the license believes in something different than the +"All" or "No" extremes. Content is marked with the CC mark, which does not mean +that copyright is waived, but that certain freedoms are given. + +These freedoms are beyond the freedoms promised by fair use. Their precise +contours depend upon the choices the creator makes. The creator can choose a +license that permits any use, so long as attribution is given. She can choose a +license that permits only noncommercial use. She can choose a license that +permits any use so long as the same freedoms are given to other uses ("share +and share alike"). Or any use so long as no derivative use is made. Or any use +at all within developing nations. Or any sampling use, so long as full copies +are not made. Or lastly, any educational use. +={ copyright law : + fair use and +1 ; + fair use : + creative Commons license vs. +1 +} + +These choices thus establish a range of freedoms beyond the default of +copyright law. They also enable freedoms that go beyond traditional fair use. +And most importantly, they express these freedoms in a way that subsequent +users can use and rely upon without the need to hire a lawyer. Creative Commons +thus aims to build a layer of content, governed by a layer of reasonable +copyright law, that others can build upon. Voluntary choice of individuals and +creators will make this content available. And that content will in turn enable +us to rebuild a public domain. + +This is just one project among many within the Creative Commons. And of course, +Creative Commons is not the only organization pursuing such freedoms. But the +point that distinguishes the Creative Commons from many is that we are not +interested only in talking about a public domain or in getting legislators to +help build a public domain. Our aim is to build a movement of consumers and +producers of content ("content conducers," as attorney Mia Garlick calls them) +who help build the public domain and, by their work, demonstrate the importance +of the public domain to other creativity. +={ Garlick, Mia } + +The aim is not to fight the "All Rights Reserved" sorts. The aim is to +complement them. The problems that the law creates for us as a culture are +produced by insane and unintended consequences of laws written centuries ago, +applied to a technology that only Jefferson could have imagined. The rules may +well have made sense against a background of technologies from centuries ago, +but they do not make sense against the background of digital technologies. New +rules - with different freedoms, expressed in ways so that humans without +lawyers can use them - are needed. Creative Commons gives people a way +effectively to begin to build those rules. +={ Jefferson, Thomas } + +Why would creators participate in giving up total control? Some participate to +better spread their content. Cory Doctorow, for example, is a science fiction +author. His first novel, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, was released +on- line and for free, under a Creative Commons license, on the same day that +it went on sale in bookstores. +={ Doctorow, Cory ; + Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Doctorow) +} + +Why would a publisher ever agree to this? I suspect his publisher reasoned like +this: There are two groups of people out there: (1) those who will buy Cory's +book whether or not it's on the Internet, and (2) those who may never hear of +Cory's book, if it isn't made available for free on the Internet. Some part of +(1) will download Cory's book instead of buying it. Call them bad-(1)s. Some +part of (2) will download Cory's book, like it, and then decide to buy it. Call +them (2)-goods. If there are more (2)-goods than bad-(1)s, the strategy of +releasing Cory's book free on-line will probably /{increase}/ sales of Cory's +book. +={ books : + free on-line releases of +2 ; + Internet : + books on +2 +} + +Indeed, the experience of his publisher clearly supports that conclusion. The +book's first printing was exhausted months before the publisher had expected. +This first novel of a science fiction author was a total success. + +The idea that free content might increase the value of nonfree content was +confirmed by the experience of another author. Peter Wayner, who wrote a book +about the free software movement titled /{Free for All}/, made an electronic +version of his book free on-line under a Creative Commons license after the +book went out of print. He then monitored used book store prices for the book. +As predicted, as the number of downloads increased, the used book price for his +book increased, as well. +={ Wayner, Peter ; + Free for All (Wayner) +} + +These are examples of using the Commons to better spread proprietary content. I +believe that is a wonderful and common use of the Commons. There are others who +use Creative Commons licenses for other reasons. Many who use the "sampling +license" do so because anything else would be hypocritical. The sampling +license says that others are free, for commercial or noncommercial purposes, to +sample content from the licensed work; they are just not free to make full +copies of the licensed work available to others. This is consistent with their +own art - they, too, sample from others. Because the /{legal}/ costs of +sampling are so high (Walter Leaphart, manager of the rap group Public Enemy, +which was born sampling the music of others, has stated that he does not +"allow" Public Enemy to sample anymore, because the legal costs are so high~{ +/{Willful Infringement: A Report from the Front Lines of the Real Culture +Wars}/ (2003), produced by Jed Horovitz, directed by Greg Hittelman, a Fiat +Lucre production, available at link #72. }~), these artists release into the +creative environment content that others can build upon, so that their form of +creativity might grow. +={ Leaphart, Walter ; + Public Enemy +} + +Finally, there are many who mark their content with a Creative Commons license +just because they want to express to others the importance of balance in this +debate. If you just go along with the system as it is, you are effectively +saying you believe in the "All Rights Reserved" model. Good for you, but many +do not. Many believe that however appropriate that rule is for Hollywood and +freaks, it is not an appropriate description of how most creators view the +rights associated with their content. The Creative Commons license expresses +this notion of "Some Rights Reserved," and gives many the chance to say it to +others. + +In the first six months of the Creative Commons experiment, over 1 million +objects were licensed with these free-culture licenses. The next step is +partnerships with middleware content providers to help them build into their +technologies simple ways for users to mark their content with Creative Commons +freedoms. Then the next step is to watch and celebrate creators who build +content based upon content set free. + +These are first steps to rebuilding a public domain. They are not mere +arguments; they are action. Building a public domain is the first step to +showing people how important that domain is to creativity and innovation. +Creative Commons relies upon voluntary steps to achieve this rebuilding. They +will lead to a world in which more than voluntary steps are possible. + +Creative Commons is just one example of voluntary efforts by individuals and +creators to change the mix of rights that now govern the creative field. The +project does not compete with copyright; it complements it. Its aim is not to +defeat the rights of authors, but to make it easier for authors and creators to +exercise their rights more flexibly and cheaply. That difference, we believe, +will enable creativity to spread more easily. + +1~them THEM, SOON +={ copyright law : + government reforms proposed on +102 +} + +!_ We will +not reclaim a free culture by individual action alone. It will also take +important reforms of laws. We have a long way to go before the politicians will +listen to these ideas and implement these reforms. But that also means that we +have time to build awareness around the changes that we need. + +In this chapter, I outline five kinds of changes: four that are general, and +one that's specific to the most heated battle of the day, music. Each is a +step, not an end. But any of these steps would carry us a long way to our end. + +2~1 1. More Formalities +={ copyright law : + formalities reinstated in +13 ; + formalities +13 +} + +If you buy a house, you have to record the sale in a deed. If you buy land upon +which to build a house, you have to record the purchase in a deed. If you buy a +car, you get a bill of sale and register the car. If you buy an airplane +ticket, it has your name on it. +={ property rights : + formalities associated with +1 +} + +These are all formalities associated with property. They are requirements that +we all must bear if we want our property to be protected. + +In contrast, under current copyright law, you automatically get a copyright, +regardless of whether you comply with any formality. You don't have to +register. You don't even have to mark your content. The default is control, and +"formalities" are banished. +={ copyright : + marking of +5 +} + +Why? + +As I suggested in chapter 10, the motivation to abolish formalities was a good +one. In the world before digital technologies, formalities imposed a burden on +copyright holders without much benefit. Thus, it was progress when the law +relaxed the formal requirements that a copyright owner must bear to protect and +secure his work. Those formalities were getting in the way. + +But the Internet changes all this. Formalities today need not be a burden. +Rather, the world without formalities is the world that burdens creativity. +Today, there is no simple way to know who owns what, or with whom one must deal +in order to use or build upon the creative work of others. There are no +records, there is no system to trace - there is no simple way to know how to +get permission. Yet given the massive increase in the scope of copyright's +rule, getting permission is a necessary step for any work that builds upon our +past. And thus, the /{lack}/ of formalities forces many into silence where they +otherwise could speak. + +The law should therefore change this requirement~{ The proposal I am advancing +here would apply to American works only. Obviously, I believe it would be +beneficial for the same idea to be adopted by other countries as well. }~ - but +it should not change it by going back to the old, broken system. We should +require formalities, but we should establish a system that will create the +incentives to minimize the burden of these formalities. + +The important formalities are three: marking copyrighted work, registering +copyrights, and renewing the claim to copyright. Traditionally, the first of +these three was something the copyright owner did; the second two were +something the government did. But a revised system of formalities would banish +the government from the process, except for the sole purpose of approving +standards developed by others. +={ copyright law : + registration requirement of +} + +3~ Registration and Renewal +={ copyright : + renewability of +4 ; + copyright law : + registration requirement of +4 +} + +Under the old system, a copyright owner had to file a registration with the +Copyright Office to register or renew a copyright. When filing that +registration, the copyright owner paid a fee. As with most government agencies, +the Copyright Office had little incentive to minimize the burden of +registration; it also had little incentive to minimize the fee. And as the +Copyright Office is not a main target of government policy- making, the office +has historically been terribly underfunded. Thus, when people who know +something about the process hear this idea about formalities, their first +reaction is panic - nothing could be worse than forcing people to deal with the +mess that is the Copyright Office. +={ Copyright Office } + +Yet it is always astonishing to me that we, who come from a tradition of +extraordinary innovation in governmental design, can no longer think +innovatively about how governmental functions can be designed. Just because +there is a public purpose to a government role, it doesn't follow that the +government must actually administer the role. Instead, we should be creating +incentives for private parties to serve the public, subject to standards that +the government sets. + +In the context of registration, one obvious model is the Internet. There are at +least 32 million Web sites registered around the world. Domain name owners for +these Web sites have to pay a fee to keep their registration alive. In the main +top-level domains (.com, .org, .net), there is a central registry. The actual +registrations are, however, performed by many competing registrars. That +competition drives the cost of registering down, and more importantly, it +drives the ease with which registration occurs up. +={ domain names ; + Internet : + domain name registration on ; + Web sites, domain name registration of +} + +We should adopt a similar model for the registration and renewal of copyrights. +The Copyright Office may well serve as the central registry, but it should not +be in the registrar business. Instead, it should establish a database, and a +set of standards for registrars. It should approve registrars that meet its +standards. Those registrars would then compete with one another to deliver the +cheapest and simplest systems for registering and renewing copyrights. That +competition would substantially lower the burden of this formality - while +producing a database of registrations that would facilitate the licensing of +content. +={ Copyright Office } + +3~ Marking +={ copyright : + marking of +9 +} + +It used to be that the failure to include a copyright notice on a creative work +meant that the copyright was forfeited. That was a harsh punishment for failing +to comply with a regulatory rule - akin to imposing the death penalty for a +parking ticket in the world of creative rights. Here again, there is no reason +that a marking requirement needs to be enforced in this way. And more +importantly, there is no reason a marking requirement needs to be enforced +uniformly across all media. + +The aim of marking is to signal to the public that this work is copyrighted and +that the author wants to enforce his rights. The mark also makes it easy to +locate a copyright owner to secure permission to use the work. + +One of the problems the copyright system confronted early on was that different +copyrighted works had to be differently marked. It wasn't clear how or where a +statue was to be marked, or a record, or a film. A new marking requirement +could solve these problems by recognizing the differences in media, and by +allowing the system of marking to evolve as technologies enable it to. The +system could enable a special signal from the failure to mark - not the loss of +the copyright, but the loss of the right to punish someone for failing to get +permission first. + +Let's start with the last point. If a copyright owner allows his work to be +published without a copyright notice, the consequence of that failure need not +be that the copyright is lost. The consequence could instead be that anyone has +the right to use this work, until the copyright owner complains and +demonstrates that it is his work and he doesn't give permission.~{ There would +be a complication with derivative works that I have not solved here. In my +view, the law of derivatives creates a more complicated system than is +justified by the marginal incentive it creates. }~ The meaning of an unmarked +work would therefore be "use unless someone complains." If someone does +complain, then the obligation would be to stop using the work in any new work +from then on though no penalty would attach for existing uses. This would +create a strong incentive for copyright owners to mark their work. + +That in turn raises the question about how work should best be marked. Here +again, the system needs to adjust as the technologies evolve. The best way to +ensure that the system evolves is to limit the Copyright Office's role to that +of approving standards for marking content that have been crafted elsewhere. +={ Copyright Office +1 } + +For example, if a recording industry association devises a method for marking +CDs, it would propose that to the Copyright Office. The Copyright Office would +hold a hearing, at which other proposals could be made. The Copyright Office +would then select the proposal that it judged preferable, and it would base +that choice /{solely}/ upon the consideration of which method could best be +integrated into the registration and renewal system. We would not count on the +government to innovate; but we would count on the government to keep the +product of innovation in line with its other important functions. +={ CDs : + copyright marking of ; + copyright law : + on music recordings | registration requirement of +3 ; + recording industry : + copyright protections in +} + +Finally, marking content clearly would simplify registration requirements. If +photographs were marked by author and year, there would be little reason not to +allow a photographer to reregister, for example, all photographs taken in a +particular year in one quick step. The aim of the formality is not to burden +the creator; the system itself should be kept as simple as possible. + +The objective of formalities is to make things clear. The existing system does +nothing to make things clear. Indeed, it seems designed to make things unclear. + +If formalities such as registration were reinstated, one of the most difficult +aspects of relying upon the public domain would be removed. It would be simple +to identify what content is presumptively free; it would be simple to identify +who controls the rights for a particular kind of content; it would be simple to +assert those rights, and to renew that assertion at the appropriate time. + +2~2 2. Shorter Terms +={ copyright : + duration of +9 +} + +The term of copyright has gone from fourteen years to ninety-five years for +corporate authors, and life of the author plus seventy years for natural +authors. + +In /{The Future of Ideas}/, I proposed a seventy-five-year term, granted in +five- year increments with a requirement of renewal every five years. That +seemed radical enough at the time. But after we lost /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/, +the proposals became even more radical. /{The Economist}/ endorsed a proposal +for a fourteen-year copyright term.~{ "A Radical Rethink," /{Economist,}/ +366:8308 (25 January 2003): 15, available at link #74. }~ Others have proposed +tying the term to the term for patents. +={ Eldred v. Ashcroft ; + Future of Ideas, The (Lessig) ; + Lessig, Lawrence +7 ; + copyright : + renewability of +} + +I agree with those who believe that we need a radical change in copyright's +term. But whether fourteen years or seventy-five, there are four principles +that are important to keep in mind about copyright terms. + +_1 (1) /{Keep it short:}/ The term should be as long as necessary to give +incentives to create, but no longer. If it were tied to very strong protections +for authors (so authors were able to reclaim rights from publishers), rights to +the same work (not derivative works) might be extended further. The key is not +to tie the work up with legal regulations when it no longer benefits an author. + +_1 (2) /{Keep it simple:}/ The line between the public domain and protected +content must be kept clear. Lawyers like the fuzziness of "fair use," and the +distinction between "ideas" and "expression." That kind of law gives them lots +of work. But our framers had a simpler idea in mind: protected versus +unprotected. The value of short terms is that there is little need to build +exceptions into copyright when the term itself is kept short. A clear and +active "lawyer-free zone" makes the complexities of "fair use" and +"idea/expression" less necessary to navigate. +={ copyright law : + fair use and | lawyers as detriment to ; + lawyers : + copyright cultural balance impeded by ; + fair use : + fuzziness of +} + +_1 (3) /{Keep it alive:}/ Copyright should have to be renewed. Especially if +the maximum term is long, the copyright owner should be required to signal +periodically that he wants the protection continued. This need not be an +onerous burden, but there is no reason this monopoly protection has to be +granted for free. On average, it takes ninety minutes for a veteran to apply +for a pension. ~{ Department of Veterans Affairs, Veteran's Application for +Compensation and/or Pension, VA Form 21-526 (OMB Approved No. 2900-0001), +available at link #75. }~ If we make veterans suffer that burden, I don't see +why we couldn't require authors to spend ten minutes every fifty years to file +a single form. +={ veterans' pensions ; + copyright : + renewability of +} + +_1 (4) /{Keep it prospective:}/ Whatever the term of copyright should be, the +clearest lesson that economists teach is that a term once given should not be +extended. It might have been a mistake in 1923 for the law to offer authors +only a fifty-six-year term. I don't think so, but it's possible. If it was a +mistake, then the consequence was that we got fewer authors to create in 1923 +than we otherwise would have. But we can't correct that mistake today by +increasing the term. No matter what we do today, we will not increase the +number of authors who wrote in 1923. Of course, we can increase the reward that +those who write now get (or alternatively, increase the copyright burden that +smothers many works that are today invisible). But increasing their reward will +not increase their creativity in 1923. What's not done is not done, and there's +nothing we can do about that now. + +These changes together should produce an /{average}/ copyright term that is +much shorter than the current term. Until 1976, the average term was just 32.2 +years. We should be aiming for the same. + +No doubt the extremists will call these ideas "radical." (After all, I call +them "extremists.") But again, the term I recommended was longer than the term +under Richard Nixon. How "radical" can it be to ask for a more generous +copyright law than Richard Nixon presided over? +={ Nixon, Richard } + +2~3 3. Free Use Vs. Fair Use +={ copyright law : + on republishing vs. transformation of original work +11 +} + +As I observed at the beginning of this book, property law originally granted +property owners the right to control their property from the ground to the +heavens. The airplane came along. The scope of property rights quickly changed. +There was no fuss, no constitutional challenge. It made no sense anymore to +grant that much control, given the emergence of that new technology. +={ property rights : + air traffic vs. ; + land ownership, air traffic and +} + +Our Constitution gives Congress the power to give authors "exclusive right" to +"their writings." Congress has given authors an exclusive right to "their +writings" plus any derivative writings (made by others) that are sufficiently +close to the author's original work. Thus, if I write a book, and you base a +movie on that book, I have the power to deny you the right to release that +movie, even though that movie is not "my writing." +={ derivative works : + reform copyright term and scope on +8 ; + Congress, U.S. : + on derivative rights +1 | on copyright laws +1 +} + +Congress granted the beginnings of this right in 1870, when it expanded the +exclusive right of copyright to include a right to control translations and +dramatizations of a work.~{ Benjamin Kaplan, /{An Unhurried View of Copyright}/ +(New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 32. }~ The courts have expanded it +slowly through judicial interpretation ever since. This expansion has been +commented upon by one of the law's greatest judges, Judge Benjamin Kaplan. +={ Kaplan, Benjamin } + +_1 So inured have we become to the extension of the monopoly to a large range +of so-called derivative works, that we no longer sense the oddity of accepting +such an enlargement of copyright while yet intoning the abracadabra of idea and +expression."~{ Ibid., 56. }~ + +I think it's time to recognize that there are airplanes in this field and the +expansiveness of these rights of derivative use no longer make sense. More +precisely, they don't make sense for the period of time that a copyright runs. +And they don't make sense as an amorphous grant. Consider each limitation in +turn. +={ property rights : + air traffic vs. ; + copyright : + duration of +1 +} + +/{Term:}/ If Congress wants to grant a derivative right, then that right should +be for a much shorter term. It makes sense to protect John Grisham's right to +sell the movie rights to his latest novel (or at least I'm willing to assume it +does); but it does not make sense for that right to run for the same term as +the underlying copyright. The derivative right could be important in inducing +creativity; it is not important long after the creative work is done. +={ Grisham, John ; + Congress, U.S. : + on derivative rights | on copyright laws +} + +/{Scope:}/ Likewise should the scope of derivative rights be narrowed. Again, +there are some cases in which derivative rights are important. Those should be +specified. But the law should draw clear lines around regulated and unregulated +uses of copyrighted material. When all "reuse" of creative material was within +the control of businesses, perhaps it made sense to require lawyers to +negotiate the lines. It no longer makes sense for lawyers to negotiate the +lines. Think about all the creative possibilities that digital technologies +enable; now imagine pouring molasses into the machines. That's what this +general requirement of permission does to the creative process. Smothers it. +={ copyright : + scope of +} + +This was the point that Alben made when describing the making of the Clint +Eastwood CD. While it makes sense to require negotiation for foreseeable +derivative rights - turning a book into a movie, or a poem into a musical score +- it doesn't make sense to require negotiation for the unforeseeable. Here, a +statutory right would make much more sense. +={ Alben, Alex ; + Eastwood, Clint ; + copyright : + statutory licenses in +} + +In each of these cases, the law should mark the uses that are protected, and +the presumption should be that other uses are not protected. This is the +reverse of the recommendation of my colleague Paul Goldstein.~{ Paul Goldstein, +/{Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox}/ (Stanford: +Stanford University Press, 2003), 187-216. }~ His view is that the law should +be written so that expanded protections follow expanded uses. +={ Goldstein, Paul } + +Goldstein's analysis would make perfect sense if the cost of the legal system +were small. But as we are currently seeing in the context of the Internet, the +uncertainty about the scope of protection, and the incentives to protect +existing architectures of revenue, combined with a strong copyright, weaken the +process of innovation. + +The law could remedy this problem either by removing protection beyond the part +explicitly drawn or by granting reuse rights upon certain statutory conditions. +Either way, the effect would be to free a great deal of culture to others to +cultivate. And under a statutory rights regime, that reuse would earn artists +more income. +={ copyright : + statutory licenses in ; + statutory licenses +} + +2~4 4. Liberate the Music - Again +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + reform proposals of copyright restraints on +41 +} + +The battle that got this whole war going was about music, so it wouldn't be +fair to end this book without addressing the issue that is, to most people, +most pressing - music. There is no other policy issue that better teaches the +lessons of this book than the battles around the sharing of music. + +The appeal of file-sharing music was the crack cocaine of the Inter-net's +growth. It drove demand for access to the Internet more powerfully than any +other single application. It was the Internet's killer app-possibly in two +senses of that word. It no doubt was the application that drove demand for +bandwidth. It may well be the application that drives demand for regulations +that in the end kill innovation on the network. + +The aim of copyright, with respect to content in general and music in +particular, is to create the incentives for music to be composed, performed, +and, most importantly, spread. The law does this by giving an exclusive right +to a composer to control public performances of his work, and to a performing +artist to control copies of her performance. + +File-sharing networks complicate this model by enabling the spread of content +for which the performer has not been paid. But of course, that's not all the +file-sharing networks do. As I described in chapter 5, they enable four +different kinds of sharing: +={ peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing : + four types of +5 +} + +_1 A. There are some who are using sharing networks as substitutes for +purchasing CDs. + +_1 B. There are also some who are using sharing networks to sample, on the way +to purchasing CDs. + +_1 C. There are many who are using file-sharing networks to get access to +content that is no longer sold but is still under copyright or that would have +been too cumbersome to buy off the Net. + +_1 D. There are many who are using file-sharing networks to get access to +content that is not copyrighted or to get access that the copyright owner +plainly endorses. + +Any reform of the law needs to keep these different uses in focus. It must +avoid burdening type D even if it aims to eliminate type A. The eagerness with +which the law aims to eliminate type A, moreover, should depend upon the +magnitude of type B. As with VCRs, if the net effect of sharing is actually not +very harmful, the need for regulation is significantly weakened. +={ cassette recording : + VCRs ; + VCRs +} + +As I said in chapter 5, the actual harm caused by sharing is controversial. For +the purposes of this chapter, however, I assume the harm is real. I assume, in +other words, that type A sharing is significantly greater than type B, and is +the dominant use of sharing networks. + +Nonetheless, there is a crucial fact about the current technological context +that we must keep in mind if we are to understand how the law should respond. + +Today, file sharing is addictive. In ten years, it won't be. It is addictive +today because it is the easiest way to gain access to a broad range of content. +It won't be the easiest way to get access to a broad range of content in ten +years. Today, access to the Internet is cumbersome and slow - we in the United +States are lucky to have broadband service at 1.5 MBs, and very rarely do we +get service at that speed both up and down. Although wireless access is +growing, most of us still get access across wires. Most only gain access +through a machine with a keyboard. The idea of the always on, always connected +Internet is mainly just an idea. +={ Internet : + speed of access +3 +} + +But it will become a reality, and that means the way we get access to the +Internet today is a technology in transition. Policy makers should not make +policy on the basis of technology in transition. They should make policy on the +basis of where the technology is going. The question should not be, how should +the law regulate sharing in this world? The question should be, what law will +we require when the network becomes the network it is clearly becoming? That +network is one in which every machine with electricity is essentially on the +Net; where everywhere you are - except maybe the desert or the Rockies - you +can instantaneously be connected to the Internet. Imagine the Internet as +ubiquitous as the best cell-phone service, where with the flip of a device, you +are connected. + +In that world, it will be extremely easy to connect to services that give you +access to content on the fly - such as Internet radio, content that is streamed +to the user when the user demands. Here, then, is the critical point: When it +is /{extremely}/ easy to connect to services that give access to content, it +will be /{easier}/ to connect to services that give you access to content than +it will be to download and store content /on the many devices you will have for +playing content/. It will be easier, in other words, to subscribe than it will +be to be a database manager, as everyone in the download-sharing world of +Napster-like technologies essentially is. Content services will compete with +content sharing, even if the services charge money for the content they give +access to. Already cell-phone services in Japan offer music (for a fee) +streamed over cell phones (enhanced with plugs for headphones). The Japanese +are paying for this content even though "free" content is available in the form +of MP3s across the Web.~{ See, for example, "Music Media Watch," The J@pan Inc. +Newsletter, 3 April 2002, available at link #76. }~ +={ cell phones, music streamed over } + +This point about the future is meant to suggest a perspective on the present: +It is emphatically temporary. The "problem" with file sharing - to the extent +there is a real problem - is a problem that will increasingly disappear as it +becomes easier to connect to the Internet. And thus it is an extraordinary +mistake for policy makers today to be "solving" this problem in light of a +technology that will be gone tomorrow. The question should not be how to +regulate the Internet to eliminate file sharing (the Net will evolve that +problem away). The question instead should be how to assure that artists get +paid, during this transition between twentieth-century models for doing +business and twenty-first-century technologies. + +The answer begins with recognizing that there are different "problems" here to +solve. Let's start with type D content - uncopyrighted content or copyrighted +content that the artist wants shared. The "problem" with this content is to +make sure that the technology that would enable this kind of sharing is not +rendered illegal. You can think of it this way: Pay phones are used to deliver +ransom demands, no doubt. But there are many who need to use pay phones who +have nothing to do with ransoms. It would be wrong to ban pay phones in order +to eliminate kidnapping. + +Type C content raises a different "problem." This is content that was, at one +time, published and is no longer available. It may be unavailable because the +artist is no longer valuable enough for the record label he signed with to +carry his work. Or it may be unavailable because the work is forgotten. Either +way, the aim of the law should be to facilitate the access to this content, +ideally in a way that returns something to the artist. + +Again, the model here is the used book store. Once a book goes out of print, it +may still be available in libraries and used book stores. But libraries and +used book stores don't pay the copyright owner when someone reads or buys an +out-of- print book. That makes total sense, of course, since any other system +would be so burdensome as to eliminate the possibility of used book stores' +existing. But from the author's perspective, this "sharing" of his content +without his being compensated is less than ideal. +={ books : + out of print | resales of +} + +The model of used book stores suggests that the law could simply deem +out-of-print music fair game. If the publisher does not make copies of the +music available for sale, then commercial and noncommercial providers would be +free, under this rule, to "share" that content, even though the sharing +involved making a copy. The copy here would be incidental to the trade; in a +context where commercial publishing has ended, trading music should be as free +as trading books. + +Alternatively, the law could create a statutory license that would ensure that +artists get something from the trade of their work. For example, if the law set +a low statutory rate for the commercial sharing of content that was not offered +for sale by a commercial publisher, and if that rate were automatically +transferred to a trust for the benefit of the artist, then businesses could +develop around the idea of trading this content, and artists would benefit from +this trade. +={ copyright infringement lawsuits : + statutory licenses in +1 ; + statutory licenses +1 +} + +This system would also create an incentive for publishers to keep works +available commercially. Works that are available commercially would not be +subject to this license. Thus, publishers could protect the right to charge +whatever they want for content if they kept the work commercially available. +But if they don't keep it available, and instead, the computer hard disks of +fans around the world keep it alive, then any royalty owed for such copying +should be much less than the amount owed a commercial publisher. + +The hard case is content of types A and B, and again, this case is hard only +because the extent of the problem will change over time, as the technologies +for gaining access to content change. The law's solution should be as flexible +as the problem is, understanding that we are in the middle of a radical +transformation in the technology for delivering and accessing content. + +So here's a solution that will at first seem very strange to both sides in this +war, but which upon reflection, I suggest, should make some sense. + +Stripped of the rhetoric about the sanctity of property, the basic claim of the +content industry is this: A new technology (the Internet) has harmed a set of +rights that secure copyright. If those rights are to be protected, then the +content industry should be compensated for that harm. Just as the technology of +tobacco harmed the health of millions of Americans, or the technology of +asbestos caused grave illness to thousands of miners, so, too, has the +technology of digital networks harmed the interests of the content industry. + +I love the Internet, and so I don't like likening it to tobacco or asbestos. +But the analogy is a fair one from the perspective of the law. And it suggests +a fair response: Rather than seeking to destroy the Internet, or the p2p +technologies that are currently harming content providers on the Internet, we +should find a relatively simple way to compensate those who are harmed. +={ recording industry : + artist remuneration in +4 ; + artists : + recording industry payments to +} + +The idea would be a modification of a proposal that has been floated by Harvard +law professor William Fisher.~{ William Fisher, /{Digital Music: Problems and +Possibilities}/ (last revised: 10 October 2000), available at link #77; William +Fisher, /{Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment}/ +(forthcoming) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), ch. 6, available at +link #78. Professor Netanel has proposed a related idea that would exempt +noncommercial sharing from the reach of copyright and would establish +compensation to artists to balance any loss. See Neil Weinstock Netanel, +"Impose a Noncommercial Use Levy to Allow Free P2P File Sharing," available at +link #79. For other proposals, see Lawrence Lessig, "Who's Holding Back +Broadband?" /{Washington Post,}/ 8 January 2002, A17; Philip S. Corwin on +behalf of Sharman Networks, A Letter to Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Chairman +of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 26 February 2002, available at link +#80; Serguei Osokine, /{A Quick Case for Intellectual Property Use Fee +(IPUF),}/ 3 March 2002, available at link #81; Jefferson Graham, "Kazaa, +Verizon Propose to Pay Artists Directly," /{USA Today,}/ 13 May 2002, available +at link #82; Steven M. Cherry, "Getting Copyright Right," IEEE Spectrum Online, +1 July 2002, available at link #83; Declan Mc-Cullagh, "Verizon's Copyright +Campaign," CNET News.com, 27 August 2002, available at link #84. Fisher's +proposal is very similar to Richard Stallman's proposal for DAT. Unlike +Fisher's, Stallman's proposal would not pay artists directly proportionally, +though more popular artists would get more than the less popular. As is typical +with Stallman, his proposal predates the current debate by about a decade. See +link #85. }~ Fisher suggests a very clever way around the current impasse of +the Internet. Under his plan, all content capable of digital transmission would +(1) be marked with a digital watermark (don't worry about how easy it is to +evade these marks; as you'll see, there's no incentive to evade them). Once the +content is marked, then entrepreneurs would develop (2) systems to monitor how +many items of each content were distributed. On the basis of those numbers, +then (3) artists would be compensated. The compensation would be paid for by +(4) an appropriate tax. +={ Fisher, William +2 ; + Promises to Keep (Fisher) +1 +} + +Fisher's proposal is careful and comprehensive. It raises a million questions, +most of which he answers well in his upcoming book, /{Promises to Keep}/. The +modification that I would make is relatively simple: Fisher imagines his +proposal replacing the existing copyright system. I imagine it complementing +the existing system. The aim of the proposal would be to facilitate +compensation to the extent that harm could be shown. This compensation would be +temporary, aimed at facilitating a transition between regimes. And it would +require renewal after a period of years. If it continues to make sense to +facilitate free exchange of content, supported through a taxation system, then +it can be continued. If this form of protection is no longer necessary, then +the system could lapse into the old system of controlling access. + +Fisher would balk at the idea of allowing the system to lapse. His aim is not +just to ensure that artists are paid, but also to ensure that the system +supports the widest range of "semiotic democracy" possible. But the aims of +semiotic democracy would be satisfied if the other changes I described were +accomplished - in particular, the limits on derivative uses. A system that +simply charges for access would not greatly burden semiotic democracy if there +were few limitations on what one was allowed to do with the content itself. +={ semiotic democracy ; + democracy : + semiotic +} + +No doubt it would be difficult to calculate the proper measure of "harm" to an +industry. But the difficulty of making that calculation would be outweighed by +the benefit of facilitating innovation. This background system to compensate +would also not need to interfere with innovative proposals such as Apple's +MusicStore. As experts predicted when Apple launched the MusicStore, it could +beat "free" by being easier than free is. This has proven correct: Apple has +sold millions of songs at even the very high price of 99 cents a song. (At 99 +cents, the cost is the equivalent of a per-song CD price, though the labels +have none of the costs of a CD to pay.) Apple's move was countered by Real +Networks, offering music at just 79 cents a song. And no doubt there will be a +great deal of competition to offer and sell music on-line. +={ Apple Corporation ; + MusicStore ; + Real Networks ; + CDs : + prices of +} + +This competition has already occurred against the background of "free" music +from p2p systems. As the sellers of cable television have known for thirty +years, and the sellers of bottled water for much more than that, there is +nothing impossible at all about "competing with free." Indeed, if anything, the +competition spurs the competitors to offer new and better products. This is +precisely what the competitive market was to be about. Thus in Singapore, +though piracy is rampant, movie theaters are often luxurious - with "first +class" seats, and meals served while you watch a movie - as they struggle and +succeed in finding ways to compete with "free." +={ cable television ; + television : + cable vs. broadcast ; + Asia, commercial piracy in ; + piracy : + in Asia ; + film industry : + luxury theatres vs. video piracy in +} + +This regime of competition, with a backstop to assure that artists don't lose, +would facilitate a great deal of innovation in the delivery of content. That +competition would continue to shrink type A sharing. It would inspire an +extraordinary range of new innovators - ones who would have a right to the +content, and would no longer fear the uncertain and barbarically severe +punishments of the law. + +In summary, then, my proposal is this: + +The Internet is in transition. We should not be regulating a technology in +transition. We should instead be regulating to minimize the harm to interests +affected by this technological change, while enabling, and encouraging, the +most efficient technology we can create. + +We can minimize that harm while maximizing the benefit to innovation by + +_1 1. guaranteeing the right to engage in type D sharing; + +_1 2. permitting noncommercial type C sharing without liability, and commercial +type C sharing at a low and fixed rate set by statute; + +_1 3. while in this transition, taxing and compensating for type A sharing, to +the extent actual harm is demonstrated. + +But what if "piracy" doesn't disappear? What if there is a competitive market +providing content at a low cost, but a significant number of consumers continue +to "take" content for nothing? Should the law do something then? + +Yes, it should. But, again, what it should do depends upon how the facts +develop. These changes may not eliminate type A sharing. But the real issue is +not whether it eliminates sharing in the abstract. The real issue is its effect +on the market. Is it better (a) to have a technology that is 95 percent secure +and produces a market of size /{x}/, or (b) to have a technology that is 50 +percent secure but produces a market of five times /{x}/? Less secure might +produce more unauthorized sharing, but it is likely to also produce a much +bigger market in authorized sharing. The most important thing is to assure +artists' compensation without breaking the Internet. Once that's assured, then +it may well be appropriate to find ways to track down the petty pirates. + +But we're a long way away from whittling the problem down to this subset of +type A sharers. And our focus until we're there should not be on finding ways +to break the Internet. Our focus until we're there should be on how to make +sure the artists are paid, while protecting the space for innovation and +creativity that the Internet is. + +2~5 5. Fire Lots of Lawyers +={ copyright law : + lawyers as detriment to +12 ; + lawyers : + copyright cultural balance impeded by +12 ; + legal system, attorney costs in +12 +} + +I'm a lawyer. I make lawyers for a living. I believe in the law. I believe in +the law of copyright. Indeed, I have devoted my life to working in law, not +because there are big bucks at the end but because there are ideals at the end +that I would love to live. + +Yet much of this book has been a criticism of lawyers, or the role lawyers have +played in this debate. The law speaks to ideals, but it is my view that our +profession has become too attuned to the client. And in a world where the rich +clients have one strong view, the unwillingness of the profession to question +or counter that one strong view queers the law. + +The evidence of this bending is compelling. I'm attacked as a "radical" by many +within the profession, yet the positions that I am advocating are precisely the +positions of some of the most moderate and significant figures in the history +of this branch of the law. Many, for example, thought crazy the challenge that +we brought to the Copyright Term Extension Act. Yet just thirty years ago, the +dominant scholar and practitioner in the field of copyright, Melville Nimmer, +thought it obvious.~{ Lawrence Lessig, "Copyright's First Amendment" (Melville +B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture), /{UCLA Law Review}/ 48 (2001): 1057, 1069-70. }~ +={ Nimmer, Melville ; + Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) (1998) : + Supreme Court challenge of +} + +However, my criticism of the role that lawyers have played in this debate is +not just about a professional bias. It is more importantly about our failure to +actually reckon the costs of the law. + +Economists are supposed to be good at reckoning costs and benefits. But more +often than not, economists, with no clue about how the legal system actually +functions, simply assume that the transaction costs of the legal system are +slight.~{ A good example is the work of Professor Stan Liebowitz. Liebowitz is +to be commended for his careful review of data about infringement, leading him +to question his own publicly stated position - twice. He initially predicted +that downloading would substantially harm the industry. He then revised his +view in light of the data, and he has since revised his view again. Compare +Stan J. Liebowitz, /{Rethinking the Network Economy: The True Forces That Drive +the Digital Marketplace}/ (New York: Amacom, 2002), 173 (reviewing his original +view but expressing skepticism) with Stan J. Liebowitz, "Will MP3s Annihilate +the Record Industry?" working paper, June 2003, available at link #86. +Liebowitz's careful analysis is extremely valuable in estimating the effect of +file-sharing technology. In my view, however, he underestimates the costs of +the legal system. See, for example, /{Rethinking,}/ 174-76. }~ They see a +system that has been around for hundreds of years, and they assume it works the +way their elementary school civics class taught them it works. + +But the legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for +anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. +I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all +corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so +astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done. + +These costs distort free culture in many ways. A lawyer's time is billed at the +largest firms at more than $400 per hour. How much time should such a lawyer +spend reading cases carefully, or researching obscure strands of authority? The +answer is the increasing reality: very little. The law depended upon the +careful articulation and development of doctrine, but the careful articulation +and development of legal doctrine depends upon careful work. Yet that careful +work costs too much, except in the most high-profile and costly cases. + +The costliness and clumsiness and randomness of this system mock our tradition. +And lawyers, as well as academics, should consider it their duty to change the +way the law works - or better, to change the law so that it works. It is wrong +that the system works well only for the top 1 percent of the clients. It could +be made radically more efficient, and inexpensive, and hence radically more +just. + +But until that reform is complete, we as a society should keep the law away +from areas that we know it will only harm. And that is precisely what the law +will too often do if too much of our culture is left to its review. + +Think about the amazing things your kid could do or make with digital +technology - the film, the music, the Web page, the blog. Or think about the +amazing things your community could facilitate with digital technology - a +wiki, a barn raising, activism to change something. Think about all those +creative things, and then imagine cold molasses poured onto the machines. This +is what any regime that requires permission produces. Again, this is the +reality of Brezhnev's Russia. + +The law should regulate in certain areas of culture - but it should regulate +culture only where that regulation does good. Yet lawyers rarely test their +power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will +it do good?" When challenged about the expanding reach of the law, the lawyer +answers, "Why not?" + +We should ask, "Why?" Show me why your regulation of culture is needed. Show me +how it does good. And until you can show me both, keep your lawyers away. + +:B~ NOTES + +1~webnotes Notes~# + +Throughout this text, there are references to links on the World Wide Web. As +anyone who has tried to use the Web knows, these links can be highly unstable. +I have tried to remedy the instability by redirecting readers to the original +source through the Web site associated with this book. For each link below, you +can go to http://free-culture.cc/notes and locate the original source by +clicking on the number after the # sign. If the original link remains alive, +you will be redirected to that link. If the original link has disappeared, you +will be redirected to an appropriate reference for the material. + +:B~ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS + +1~acknowledgements [Acknowledgments]-# + +This book is the product of a long and as yet unsuccessful struggle that began +when I read of Eric Eldred's war to keep books free. Eldred's work helped +launch a movement, the free culture movement, and it is to him that this book +is dedicated. I received guidance in various places from friends and academics, +including Glenn Brown, Peter DiCola, Jennifer Mnookin, Richard Posner, Mark +Rose, and Kathleen Sullivan. And I received correction and guidance from many +amazing students at Stanford Law School and Stanford University. They included +Andrew B. Coan, John Eden, James P. Fellers, Christopher Guzelian, Erica +Goldberg, Robert Hall- man, Andrew Harris, Matthew Kahn, Brian Link, Ohad +Mayblum, Alina Ng, and Erica Platt. I am particularly grateful to Catherine +Crump and Harry Surden, who helped direct their research, and to Laura Lynch, +who brilliantly managed the army that they assembled, and provided her own +critical eye on much of this. Yuko Noguchi helped me to understand the laws of +Japan as well as its culture. I am thankful to her, and to the many in Japan +who helped me prepare this book: Joi Ito, Takayuki Matsutani, Naoto Misaki, +Michihiro Sasaki, Hiromichi Tanaka, Hiroo Yamagata, and Yoshihiro Yonezawa. I +am thankful as well as to Professor Nobuhiro Nakayama, and the Tokyo University +Business Law Center, for giving me the chance to spend time in Japan, and to +Tadashi Shiraishi and Kiyokazu Yamagami for their generous help while I was +there. These are the traditional sorts of help that academics regularly draw +upon. But in addition to them, the Internet has made it possible to receive +advice and correction from many whom I have never even met. Among those who +have responded with extremely helpful advice to requests on my blog about the +book are Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, David Gerstein, and Peter DiMauro, as well as +a long list of those who had specific ideas about ways to develop my argument. +They included Richard Bondi, Steven Cherry, David Coe, Nik Cubrilovic, Bob +Devine, Charles Eicher, Thomas Guida, Elihu M. Gerson, Jeremy Hunsinger, Vaughn +Iverson, John Karabaic, Jeff Keltner, James Lindenschmidt, K. L. Mann, Mark +Manning, Nora McCauley, Jeffrey McHugh, Evan McMullen, Fred Norton, John +Pormann, Pedro A. D. Rezende, Shabbir Safdar, Saul Schleimer, Clay Shirky, Adam +Shostack, Kragen Sitaker, Chris Smith, Bruce Steinberg, Andrzej Jan Taramina, +Sean Walsh, Matt Wasserman, Miljenko Williams, "Wink," Roger Wood, "Ximmbo da +Jazz," and Richard Yanco. (I apologize if I have missed anyone; with computers +come glitches, and a crash of my e-mail system meant I lost a bunch of great +replies.) Richard Stallman and Michael Carroll each read the whole book in +draft, and each provided extremely helpful correction and advice. Michael +helped me to see more clearly the significance of the regulation of derivitive +works. And Richard corrected an embarrassingly large number of errors. While my +work is in part inspired by Stallman's, he does not agree with me in important +places throughout this book. Finally, and forever, I am thankful to Bettina, +who has always insisted that there would be unending happiness away from these +battles, and who has always been right. This slow learner is, as ever, grateful +for her perpetual patience and love. + +1~about ABOUT THE AUTHOR + +{lessig.jpg 151x227 "Lawrence Lessig" }http://www.lessig.org/ + +LAWRENCE LESSIG ( http://www.lessig.org ), professor of law and a John A. +Wilson Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, is founder of the +Stanford Center for Internet and Society and is chairman of the Creative +Commons ( http://creativecommons.org ). The author of The Future of Ideas +(Random House, 2001) and Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, +1999), Lessig is a member of the boards of the Public Library of Science, the +Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge. He was the winner of the +Free Software Foundation's Award for the Advancement of Free Software, twice +listed in BusinessWeek's "e.biz 25," and named one of Scientific American's "50 +visionaries." A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge +University, and Yale Law School, Lessig clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the +U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. + +1~misc Other Works and REVIEWS of FreeCulture + +http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001840.shtml + +http://www.free-culture.cc/reviews/ + +1~jacket JACKET + +"FREE CULTURE is an entertaining and important look at the past and future of +the cold war between the media industry and new technologies." + +-- Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape + +"The twenty-first century could be the century of unprecedented creativity, but +only if we embrace the brilliantly articulated messages in Lawrence Lessig's +FREE CULTURE. This book is beautifully written, crisply argued, and deeply +provocative. Please read it!" + +-- John Seely Brown, coauthor of THE SOCIAL LIFE OF INFORMATION and former +Chief Scientist, Xerox PARC + +"America needs a national conversation about the way in which so-called +'intellectual property rights' have come to dominate the rights of scholars, +researchers, and everyday citizens. A copyright cartel, bidding for absolute +control over digital worlds, music, and movies, now has a veto over +technological innovation and has halted most contributions to the public domain +from which so many have benefited. The patent system has spun out of control, +giving enormous power to entrenched interests, and even trademarks are being +misused. Lawrence Lessig's latest book is essential reading for anyone who want +to join this conversation. He explains how technology and the law are robbing +us of the public domain; but for all his educated pessimism, Professor Lessig +offers some solutions, too, because he recognizes that technology can be the +catalyst for freedom. If you care about the future of innovation, read this +book." + +-- Dan Gillmor, author of MAKING THE NEWS, an upcoming book on the collision of +media and technology + +"FREE CULTURE goes beyond illuminating the catastrophe to our culture of +increasing regulation to show examples of how we can make a different future. +These new-style heroes and examples are rooted in the traditions of the +founding fathers in ways that seem obvious after reading this book. Recommended +reading to those trying to unravel the shrill hype around 'intellectual +property.'" + +-- Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive + +%% SiSU markup sample Notes: +% SiSU http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu +% SiSU markup for 0.16 and later: +% 0.20.4 header 0~links +% 0.22 may drop image dimensions (rmagick) +% 0.23 utf-8 ß +% 0.38 or later, may use alternative notation for headers, e.g. @title: (instead of 0~title) +% 0.38 document structure alternative markup, experimental (rad) A,B,C,1,2,3 maps to 1,2,3,4,5,6 +% Output: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig/sisu_manifest.html +% SiSU 0.38 experimental (alternative structure) markup used for this document diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/free_for_all.peter_wayner.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/free_for_all.peter_wayner.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..69b1af4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/free_for_all.peter_wayner.sst @@ -0,0 +1,11240 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Free For All + :subtitle: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High Tech Titans + +@creator: + :author: Wayner, Peter + +@date: + :published: 2002-12-22 + :created: 2002-12-22 + :issued: 2002-12-22 + :available: 2002-12-22 + :modified: 2002-12-22 + :valid: 2002-12-22 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Peter Wayner, 2000. + :license: Free For All is Licensed under a Creative Commons License. This License permits non-commercial use of this work, so long as attribution is given. For more information about the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/ + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse; + book:discourse:free software|open source software|Linux|Software Libré; + book:subject:Linux|Software Libré|technology; + GNU/Linux:GPL;free software; + open source software; + software license:GPL; + Linux:GNU|Software Libré + +@identifier: + :oclc: 43520955 + :isbn: 9780066620503 + +@links: + { The Original Authoritative and Updated Version of the Text available in pdf }http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa + { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0066620503 + { @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0066620503 + +@make: + :num_top: 1 + :breaks: new=:A,:B,:C,1 + :home_button_image: {wayner.home.png }http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ + :home_button_text: {Free For All}http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/; {Peter Wayner}http://www.wayner.org + :footer: {Free For All}http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/; {Peter Wayner}http://www.wayner.org + +:A~ @title @author + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgments + +This is just a book about the free software movement. It wouldn't be possible +without the hard work and the dedication of the thousands if not millions of +people who like to spend their free time hacking code. I salute you. Thank you. + +Many people spoke to me during the process of assembling this book, and it +would be impossible to cite them all. The list should begin with the millions +of people who write and contribute to the various free software lists. The +letters, notes, and postings to these lists are a wonderful history of the +evolution of free software and an invaluable resource. + +The list should also include the dozens of journalists at places like +Slashdot.org, LinuxWorld, Linux magazine, Linux Weekly News, Kernel Traffic, +Salon, and the New York Times. I should specifically mention the work of Joe +Barr, Jeff Bates, Janelle Brown, Zack Brown, Jonathan Corbet, Elizabeth +Coolbaugh, Amy Harmon, Andrew Leonard, Rob Malda, John Markoff, Mark Nielsen, +Nicholas Petreley, Harald Radke, and Dave Whitinger. They wrote wonderful +pieces that will make a great first draft of the history of the open source +movement. Only a few of the pieces are cited directly in the footnotes, largely +for practical reasons. The entire body of websites like Slashdot, Linux +Journal, Linux World, Kernel Notes, or Linux Weekly News should be required +reading for anyone interested in the free software movement. + +There are hundreds of folks at Linux trade shows who took the time to show me +their products, T-shirts, or, in one case, cooler filled with beer. Almost +everyone I met at the conferences was happy to speak about their experiences +with open source software. They were all a great source of information, and I +don't even know most of their names. + +Some people went beyond the call of duty. John Gilmore, Ethan Rasiel, and +Caroline McKeldin each read drafts when the book was quite unfinished. Their +comments were crucial. + +Many friends, acquaintances, and subjects of the book were kind enough to read +versions that were a bit more polished, but far from complete: L. David Baron, +Jeff Bates, Brian Behlendorf, Alan Cox, Robert Dreyer, Theo de Raadt, Telsa +Gwynne, Jordan Hubbard, James Lewis Moss, Kirk McKusick, Sam Ockman, Tim +O'Reilly, Sameer Parekh, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Richard Stallman. + +There are some people who deserve a different kind of thanks. Daniel Greenberg +and James Levine did a great job shaping the conception of the book. When I +began, it was just a few ideas on paper. My editors, David Conti, Laureen +Rowland, Devi Pillai, and Adrian Zackheim, were largely responsible for this +transition. Kimberly Monroe suffered through my mistakes as she took the book +through its production stages. They took a bunch of rambling comments about a +social phenomenon and helped turn it into a book. + +Finally, I want to thank everyone in my family for everything they've given +through all of my life. And, of course, Caroline, who edited large portions +with a slavish devotion to grammar and style. + +Visit http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ for updates, corrections, and additional +comments. + +1~edition Version Information + +FREE FOR ALL. Copyright 2000 by Peter Wayner. + +Some Rights Reserved: + +This is [a complete version of] the free electronic version of the book +originally published by HarperCollins. The book is still protected by copyright +and bound by a license granting you the limited rights to make complete copies +for non-commercial purposes. You're welcome to read it in electronic form +subject to these conditions: + +1) You may not make derivative works. You must reproduce the work in its +entirety. + +2) You may not sell versions. + +3) You refer everyone receiving a copy to the website where they may get the +latest corrected version. http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ + +A full license developed by the Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) will +be forthcoming. Please write p3@wayner.org if you have any questions or +suggestions. + +See http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ for the FIRST PDF EDITION Page layout for +this and the original paper edition designed by William Ruoto, see Not printed +on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wayner, +Peter, 1964 Free for all : how Linux and the free software movement undercut +the high-tech titans / Peter Wayner. p. cm. ISBN 0-06-662050-3 1. Linux. 2. +Operating systems (Computers) 3. Free computer software. I. Title. QA76.76.063 +W394 2000 005.4'469 dc21 00-023919 00 01 02 03 04 V/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 + +{ffa.png 93x140 "Free For All by Peter Wayner" }http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0066620503/ + +*{Free For All}* may be purchased at Amazon.com + +1~ Battle + +The world where cash was king, greed was good, and money was power fell off its +axis and stopped rotating, if only for a second, in January 1999. Microsoft, +the great software giant and unstoppable engine of cash, was defending itself +in a courtroom in Washington, D.C. The Department of Justice claimed that +Microsoft was a monopoly and was using this power to cut off competitors. +Microsoft denied it all and claimed that the world was hurling threat after +competitive threat its way. They weren't a monopoly, they were just a very +competitive company that managed to withstand the slings and arrows of other +equally ruthless competitors out to steal its market share. + +The trial quickly turned into everyone's worst nightmare as the lawyers, the +economists, and the programmers filled the courtroom with a thick mixture of +technobabble and legal speak. On the stands, the computer nerds spewed out +three-letter acronyms (TLAs) as they talked about creating operating systems. +Afterward, the legal nerds started slicing them up into one-letter acronyms and +testing to see just which of the three letters was really the one that +committed the crime. Then the economists came forward and offered their +theories on just when a monopoly is a monopoly. Were three letters working in +collusion enough? What about two? Everyone in the courtroom began to dread +spending the day cooped up in a small room as Microsoft tried to deny what was +obvious to practically everyone. + +In the fall and early winter of 1998 and 1999, the Department of Justice had +presented its witnesses, who explained how Microsoft had slanted contracts, +tweaked software, and twisted arms to ensure that it and it alone got the +lion's share of the computer business. Many watching the trial soon developed +the opinion that Microsoft had adopted a mixture of tactics from the schoolyard +bully, the local mob boss, and the mother from hell. The Department of Justice +trotted out a number of witnesses who produced ample evidence that suggested +the computer customers of the world will buy Microsoft products unless +Microsoft decides otherwise. Competitors must be punished. + +By January, the journalists covering the trial were quietly complaining about +this endless waste of time. The Department of Justice's case was so compelling +that they saw the whole trial as just a delay in what would eventually come to +be a ruling that would somehow split or shackle Microsoft. + +But Microsoft wasn't going to be bullied or pushed into splitting up. The trial +allowed them to present their side of the story, and they had one ready. Sure, +everyone seemed to use Microsoft products, but that was because they were +great. It wasn't because there weren't any competitors, but because the +competitors just weren't good enough. + +In the middle of January, Richard Schmalensee, the dean of the Sloan School of +Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took the stand to +defend Microsoft. Schmalensee had worked for the Federal Trade Commission and +the Department of Justice as an economist who examined the marketplace and the +effects of anti-competitive behavior. He studied how monopolies behave, and to +him Microsoft had no monopoly power. Now, he was being paid handsomely by +Microsoft as an expert witness to repeat this view in court. + +Schmalensee's argument was simple: competitors are popping up all over the +place. Microsoft, he said in his direct testimony, "is in a constant struggle +for competitive survival. That struggle--the race to win and the victor's +perpetual fear of being displaced--is the source of competitive vitality in the +microcomputer software industry." + +Schmalensee even had a few competitors ready. "The iMac clearly competes +directly and fiercely with Intel-compatible computers running Windows," he said +without mentioning that Microsoft had bailed out Apple several months before +with hundreds of millions of dollars in an investment. When Steve Jobs, the +iCEO of Apple, announced the deal to a crowd of Mac lovers, the crowd booed. +Jobs quieted them and tried to argue that the days of stiff competition with +Microsoft were over. The scene did such a good job of capturing the total +domination of Microsoft that the television movie The Pirates of Silicon Valley +used it to illustrate how Bill Gates had won all of the marbles. + +After the announcement of the investment, Apple began shipping Microsoft's +Internet Explorer web browser as the preferred browser on its machines. +Microsoft's competitor Netscape became just a bit harder to find on the iMac. +After that deal, Steve Jobs even began making statements that the old sworn +enemies, Apple and Microsoft, were now more partners than competitors. +Schmalensee didn't focus on this facet of Apple's new attitude toward +competition. + +Next, Schmalensee trotted out BeOS, an operating system made by Be, a small +company with about 100 employees run by ex-Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée. +This company had attracted millions of dollars in funding, he said, and some +people really liked it. That made it a competitor. + +Schmalensee didn't mention that Be had trouble giving away the BeOS operating +system. Gassée approached a number of PC manufacturers to see if they would +include BeOS on their machines and give users the chance to switch between two +operating systems. Gassée found, to no one's real surprise, that Microsoft's +contracts with manufacturers made it difficult, if not practically impossible, +to get BeOS in customers' hands. Microsoft controlled much of what the user got +to see and insisted on almost total control over the viewer's experience. +Schmalensee didn't mention these details in his testimony. BeOS may have been +as locked up as a prisoner in a windowless cell in a stone-walled asylum on an +island in the middle of the ocean, but BeOS was still a competitor for the love +of the fair maiden. + +The last competitor, though, was the most surprising to everyone. Schmalensee +saw Linux, a program given away for free, as a big potential competitor. When +he said Linux, he really meant an entire collection of programs known as "open +source" software. These were written by a loose-knit group of programmers who +shared all of the source code to the software over the Internet. + +Open source software floated around the Internet controlled by a variety of +licenses with names like the GNU General Public License (GPL). To say that the +software was "controlled" by the license is a bit of a stretch. If anything, +the licenses were deliberately worded to prohibit control. The GNU GPL, for +instance, let users modify the program and give away their own versions. The +license did more to enforce sharing of all the source code than it did to +control or constrain. It was more an anti-license than anything else, and its +author, Richard Stallman, often called it a "copyleft." + +Schmalensee didn't mention that most people thought of Linux as a strange tool +created and used by hackers in dark rooms lit by computer monitors. He didn't +mention that many people had trouble getting Linux to work with their +computers. He forgot to mention that Linux manuals came with subheads like +"Disk Druid-like 'fstab editor' available." He didn't delve into the fact that +for many of the developers, Linux was just a hobby they dabbled with when there +was nothing interesting on television. And he certainly didn't mention that +most people thought the whole Linux project was the work of a mad genius and +his weirdo disciples who still hadn't caught on to the fact that the Soviet +Union had already failed big-time. The Linux folks actually thought sharing +would make the world a better place. Fat-cat programmers who spent their +stock-option riches on Porsches and balsamic vinegar laughed at moments like +this. + +Schmalensee didn't mention these facts. He just offered Linux as an alternative +to Windows and said that computer manufacturers might switch to it at any time. +Poof. Therefore, Microsoft had competitors. At the trial, the discourse quickly +broke down into an argument over what is really a worthy competitor and what +isn't. Were there enough applications available for Linux or the Mac? What +qualifies as "enough"? Were these really worthy? + +Under cross-examination, Schmalensee explained that he wasn't holding up the +Mac, BeOS, or Linux as competitors who were going to take over 50 percent of +the marketplace. He merely argued that their existence proved that the barriers +produced by the so-called Microsoft monopoly weren't that strong. If rational +people were investing in creating companies like BeOS, then Microsoft's power +wasn't absolute. + +Afterward, most people quickly made up their minds. Everyone had heard about +the Macintosh and knew that back then conventional wisdom dictated that it +would soon fail. But most people didn't know anything about BeOS or Linux. How +could a company be a competitor if no one had heard of it? Apple and Microsoft +had TV commercials. BeOS, at least, had a charismatic chairman. There was no +Linux pitchman, no Linux jingle, and no Linux 30-second spot in major media. At +the time, only the best-funded projects in the Linux community had enough money +to buy spots on late-night community-access cable television. How could someone +without money compete with a company that hired the Rolling Stones to pump +excitement into a product launch? + +When people heard that Microsoft was offering a free product as a worthy +competitor, they began to laugh even louder at the company's chutzpah. Wasn't +money the whole reason the country was having a trial? Weren't computer +programmers in such demand that many companies couldn't hire as many as they +needed, no matter how high the salary? How could Microsoft believe that anyone +would buy the supposition that a bunch of pseudo-communist nerds living in +their weird techno-utopia where all the software was free would ever come up +with software that could compete with the richest company on earth? At first +glance, it looked as if Microsoft's case was sinking so low that it had to +resort to laughable strategies. It was as if General Motors were to tell the +world "We shouldn't have to worry about fixing cars that pollute because a +collective of hippies in Ithaca, New York, is refurbishing old bicycles and +giving them away for free." It was as if Exxon waved away the problems of +sinking oil tankers by explaining that folksingers had written a really neat +ballad for teaching birds and otters to lick themselves clean after an oil +spill. If no one charged money for Linux, then it was probably because it +wasn't worth buying. + +But as everyone began looking a bit deeper, they began to see that Linux was +being taken seriously in some parts of the world. Many web servers, it turned +out, were already running on Linux or another free cousin known as FreeBSD. A +free webserving tool known as Apache had controlled more than 50 percent of the +web servers for some time, and it was gradually beating out Microsoft products +that cost thousands of dollars. Many of the web servers ran Apache on top of a +Linux or a FreeBSD machine and got the job done. The software worked well, and +the nonexistent price made it easy to choose. + +Linux was also winning over some of the world's most serious physicists, +weapons designers, biologists, and hard-core scientists. Some of the nation's +top labs had wired together clusters of cheap PCs and turned them into +supercomputers that were highly competitive with the best machines on the +market. One upstart company started offering "supercomputers" for $3,000. These +machines used Linux to keep the data flowing while the racks of computers +plugged and chugged their way for hours on complicated simulations. + +There were other indications. Linux users bragged that their system rarely +crashed. Some claimed to have machines that had been running for a year or more +without a problem. Microsoft (and Apple) users, on the other hand, had grown +used to frequent crashes. The "Blue Screen of Death" that appears on Windows +users' monitors when something goes irretrievably wrong is the butt of many +jokes. + +Linux users also bragged about the quality of their desktop interface. Most of +the uninitiated thought of Linux as a hacker's system built for nerds. Yet +recently two very good operating shells called GNOME and KDE had taken hold. +Both offered the user an environment that looked just like Windows but was +better. Linux hackers started bragging that they were able to equip their +girlfriends, mothers, and friends with Linux boxes without grief. Some people +with little computer experience were adopting Linux with little trouble. + +Building websites and supercomputers is not an easy task, and it is often done +in back rooms out of the sight of most people. When people began realizing that +the free software hippies had slowly managed to take over a large chunk of the +web server and supercomputing world, they realized that perhaps Microsoft's +claim was viable. Web servers and supercomputers are machines built and run by +serious folks with bosses who want something in return for handing out +paychecks. They aren't just toys sitting around the garage. + +If these free software guys had conquered such serious arenas, maybe they could +handle the office and the desktop. If the free software world had created +something usable by the programmers' mothers, then maybe they were viable +competitors. Maybe Microsoft was right. + +2~ Sleeping In + +While Microsoft focused its eyes and ears upon Washington, one of its biggest +competitors was sleeping late. When Richard Schmalensee was prepping to take +the stand in Washington, D.C., to defend Microsoft's outrageous fortune against +the slings and arrows of a government inquisition, Alan Cox was still sleeping +in. He didn't get up until 2:00 PM. at his home in Swansea on the south coast +of Wales. This isn't too odd for him. His wife, Telsa, grouses frequently that +it's impossible to get him moving each morning without a dose of Jolt Cola, the +kind that's overloaded with caffeine. + +The night before, Cox and his wife went to see The Mask of Zorro, the latest +movie that describes how Don Diego de la Vega assumed the secret identity of +Zorro to free the Mexican people from the tyranny of Don Rafael Montero. In +this version, Don Diego, played by Anthony Hopkins, chooses an orphan, +Alejandro Murrieta, played by Antonio Banderas, and teaches him to be the next +Zorro so the fight can continue. Its theme resonates with writers of open +source software: a small band of talented, passionate warriors warding off the +evil oppressor. + +Cox keeps an open diary and posts the entries on the web. "It's a nice looking +film, with some great stunts and character play," he wrote, but + +_1 You could, however, have fitted the plot, including all the twists, on the +back of a matchbox. That made it feel a bit ponderous so it only got a 6 out of +10 even though I'm feeling extremely smug because I spotted one of the errors +in the film while watching it not by consulting imdb later. + +By the imdb, he meant the Internet Movie Database, which is one of the most +complete listings of film credits, summaries, and glitches available on the +Net. Users on the Internet write in with their own reviews and plot synopses, +which the database dutifully catalogs and makes available to everyone. It's a +reference book with thousands of authors. + +In this case, the big glitch in the film is the fact that one of the train +gauges uses the metric system. Mexico converted to this system in 1860, but the +film is set in 1841. Whoops. Busted. + +Telsa wrote in her diary, which she also posts to the Net under the title "The +More Accurate Diary. Really." + +_1 Dragged him to cinema to see Zorro. I should have remembered he'd done some +fencing and found something different. He also claimed he'd spotted a really +obscure error. I checked afterward on IMDB, and was amazed. How did he see +this? + +Cox is a big bear of a man who wears a long, brown wizard's beard. He has an +agile, analytic mind that constantly picks apart a system and probes it for +weaknesses. If he's playing a game, he plays until he finds a trick or a +loophole that will give him the winning edge. If he's working around the house, +he often ends up meddling with things until he fixes and improves them. Of +course, he also often breaks them. His wife loves to complain about the bangs +and crashes that come from his home office, where he often works until 6:30 in +the morning. + +To his wife, this crashing, banging, and late-night hacking is the source of +the halfhearted grousing inherent in every marriage. She obviously loves both +his idiosyncrasies and the opportunity to discuss just how strange they can be. +In January, Telsa was trying to find a way to automate her coffeepot by hooking +it up to her computer. + +She wrote in her diary, + +_1 Alan is reluctant to get involved with any attempt to make a coffee-maker +switch on via the computer now because he seems to think I will eventually +switch it on with no water in and start a fire. I'm not the one who welded +tinned spaghetti to the non-stick saucepan. Or set the wok on fire. More than +once. Once with fifteen guests in the house. But there we are. + +To the rest of the world, this urge to putter and fiddle with machines is more +than a source of marital comedy. Cox is one of the great threats to the +continued dominance of Microsoft, despite the fact that he found a way to weld +spaghetti to a nonstick pan. He is one of the core developers who help maintain +the Linux kernel. In other words, he's one of the group of programmers who +helps guide the development of the Linux operating system, the one Richard +Schmalensee feels is such a threat to Microsoft. Cox is one of the few people +whom Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, trusts to make important decisions +about future directions. Cox is an expert on the networking guts of the system +and is responsible for making sure that most of the new ideas that people +suggest for Linux are considered carefully and integrated correctly. Torvalds +defers to Cox on many matters about how Linux-based computers talk with other +computers over a network. Cox works long and hard to find efficient ways for +Linux to juggle multiple connections without slowing down or deadlocking. + +The group that works with Cox and Torvalds operates with no official structure. +Millions of people use Linux to keep their computers running, and all of them +have copies of the source code. In the 1980s, most companies began keeping the +source code to their software as private as possible because they worried that +a competitor might come along and steal the ideas the source spelled out. The +source code, which is written in languages like C, Java, FORTRAN, BASIC, or +Pascal, is meant to be read by programmers. Most companies didn't want other +programmers understanding too much about the guts of their software. +Information is power, and the companies instinctively played their cards close +to their chests. + +When Linus Torvalds first started writing Linux in 1991, however, he decided to +give away the operating system for free. He included all the source code +because he wanted others to read it, comment upon it, and perhaps improve it. +His decision was as much a radical break from standard programming procedure as +a practical decision. He was a poor student at the time, and this operating +system was merely a hobby. If he had tried to sell it, he wouldn't have gotten +anything for it. He certainly had no money to build a company that could polish +the software and market it. So he just sent out copies over the Internet. + +Sharing software had already been endorsed by Richard Stallman, a legendary +programmer from MIT who believed that keeping source code private was a sin and +a crime against humanity. A programmer who shares the source code lets others +learn, and those others can contribute their ideas back into the mix. Closed +source code leaves users frustrated because they can't learn about the software +or fix any bugs. Stallman broke away from MIT in 1984 when he founded the Free +Software Foundation. This became the organization that sponsored Stallman's +grand project to free source code, a project he called GNU. In the 1980s, +Stallman created very advanced tools like the GNU Emacs text editor, which +people could use to write programs and articles. Others donated their work and +the GNU project soon included a wide range of tools, utilities, and games. All +of them were distributed for free. + +Torvalds looked at Stallman and decided to follow his lead with open source +code. Torvalds's free software began to attract people who liked to play around +with technology. Some just glanced at it. Others messed around for a few hours. +Free is a powerful incentive. It doesn't let money, credit cards, purchase +orders, and the boss's approval get in the way of curiosity. A few, like Alan +Cox, had such a good time taking apart an operating system that they stayed on +and began contributing back to the project. + +In time, more and more people like Alan Cox discovered Torvalds's little +project on the Net. Some slept late. Others kept normal hours and worked in +offices. Some just found bugs. Others fixed the bugs. Still others added new +features that they wanted. Slowly, the operating system grew from a toy that +satisfied the curiosity of computer scientists into a usable tool that powers +supercomputers, web servers, and millions of other machines around the world. + +Today, about a thousand people regularly work with people like Alan Cox on the +development of the Linux kernel, the official name for the part of the +operating system that Torvalds started writing back in 1991. That may not be an +accurate estimate because many people check in for a few weeks when a project +requires their participation. Some follow everything, but most people are just +interested in little corners. Many other programmers have contributed various +pieces of software such as word processors or spreadsheets. All of these are +bundled together into packages that are often called plain Linux or GNU/Linux +and shipped by companies like Red Hat or more ad hoc groups like Debian.~{ +/{Linux Weekly News}/ keeps a complete list of distributors. These range from +the small, one- or two-man operations to the biggest, most corporate ones like +Red Hat: Alzza Linux, Apokalypse, Armed Linux, Bad Penguin Linux, Bastille +Linux, Best Linux (Finnish/Swedish), Bifrost, Black Cat Linux +(Ukrainian/Russian), Caldera OpenLinux, CCLinux, Chinese Linux Extension, +Complete Linux, Conectiva Linux (Brazilian), Debian GNU/Linux, Definite Linux, +DemoLinux, DLD, DLite, DLX, DragonLinux, easyLinux, Enoch, Eridani Star System, +Eonova Linux, e-smith server and gateway, Eurielec Linux (Spanish), eXecutive +Linux, floppyfw, Floppix, Green Frog Linux, hal91, Hard Hat Linux, Immunix, +Independence, Jurix, Kha0s Linux, KRUD, KSI-Linux, Laetos, LEM, Linux Cyrillic +Edition, LinuxGT, Linux-Kheops (French), Linux MLD (Japanese), LinuxOne OS, +LinuxPPC, LinuxPPP (Mexican), Linux Pro Plus, Linux Router Project, LOAF, LSD, +Mandrake, Mastodon, MicroLinux, MkLinux, muLinux, nanoLinux II, NoMad Linux, +OpenClassroom, Peanut Linux, Plamo Linux, PLD, Project Ballantain, PROSA, +QuadLinux, Red Hat, Rock Linux, RunOnCD, ShareTheNet, Skygate, Slackware, Small +Linux, Stampede, Stataboware, Storm Linux, SuSE, Tomsrtbt, Trinux, TurboLinux, +uClinux, Vine Linux, WinLinux 2000, Xdenu, XTeamLinux, and Yellow Dog Linux. }~ +While Torvalds only wrote the core kernel, people use his name, Linux, to stand +for a whole body of software written by thousands of others. It's not exactly +fair, but most let it slide. If there hadn't been the Linux kernel, the users +wouldn't have the ability to run software on a completely free system. The free +software would need to interact with something from Microsoft, Apple, or IBM. +Of course, if it weren't for all of the other free software from Berkeley, the +GNU project, and thousands of other garages around the world, there would be +little for the Linux kernel to do. + +Officially, Linus Torvalds is the final arbiter for the kernel and the one who +makes the final decisions about new features. In practice, the group runs like +a loosely knit "ad-hocracy." Some people might care about a particular feature +like the ability to interface with Macintoshes, and they write special code +that makes this task easier. Others who run really big databases may want +larger file systems that can store more information without limits. + +All of these people work at their own pace. Some work in their homes, like Alan +Cox. Some work in university labs. Others work for businesses that use Linux +and encourage their programmers to plug away so it serves their needs. + +The team is united by mailing lists. The Linux Kernel mailing list hooks up Cox +in Britain, Torvalds in Silicon Valley, and the others around the globe. They +post notes to the list and discuss ideas. Sometimes verbal fights break out, +and sometimes everyone agrees. Sometimes people light a candle by actually +writing new code to make the kernel better, and other times they just curse the +darkness. + +Cox is now one of several people responsible for coordinating the addition of +new code. He tests it for compatibility and guides Linux authors to make sure +they're working together optimally. In essence, he tests every piece of +incoming software to make sure all of the gauges work with the right system of +measurement so there will be no glitches. He tries to remove the +incompatibilities that marred Zorro. + +Often, others will duplicate Cox's work. Some new features are very popular and +have many cooks minding the stew. The technology for speeding up computers with +multiple CPUs lets each computer harness the extra power, so many list members +test it frequently. They want the fastest machines they can get, and smoothing +the flow of data between the CPUs is the best way to let the machines +cooperate. + +Other features are not so popular, and they're tackled by the people who need +the features. Some people want to hook their Linux boxes up to Macintoshes. +Doing that smoothly can require some work in the kernel. Others may want to add +special code to enable a special device like a high-speed camera or a strange +type of disk drive. These groups often work on their own but coordinate their +solutions with the main crowd. Ideally, they'll be able to come up with some +patches that solve their problem without breaking some other part of the +system. + +It's a very social and political process that unrolls in slow motion through +e-mail messages. One person makes a suggestion. Others may agree. Someone may +squabble with the idea because it seems inelegant, sloppy, or, worst of all, +dangerous. After some time, a rough consensus evolves. Easy problems can be +solved in days or even minutes, but complicated decisions can wait as the +debate rages for years. + +Each day, Cox and his virtual colleagues pore through the lists trying to +figure out how to make Linux better, faster, and more usable. Sometimes they +skip out to watch a movie. Sometimes they go for hikes. But one thing they +don't do is spend months huddled in conference rooms trying to come up with +legal arguments. Until recently, the Linux folks didn't have money for lawyers, +and that means they didn't get sidetracked by figuring out how to get big and +powerful people like Richard Schmalensee to tell a court that there's no +monopoly in the computer operating system business. + +2~ Suits Against Hackers + +Schmalensee and Cox couldn't be more different from each other. One is a career +technocrat who moves easily between the government and MIT. The other is what +used to be known as an absentminded professor--the kind who works when he's +really interested in a problem. It just so happens that Cox is pretty intrigued +with building a better operating system than the various editions of Windows +that form the basis of Microsoft's domination of the computer industry. + +The battle between Linux and Microsoft is lining up to be the classic fight +between the people like Schmalensee and the people like Cox. On one side are +the armies of lawyers, lobbyists, salesmen, and expensive executives who are +armed with patents, lawsuits, and legislation. They are skilled at moving the +levers of power until the gears line up just right and billions of dollars pour +into their pockets. They know how to schmooze, toady, beg, or even threaten +until they wear the mantle of authority and command the piety and devotion of +the world. People buy Microsoft because it's "the standard." No one decreed +this, but somehow it has come to be. + +On the other side are a bunch of guys who just like playing with computers and +will do anything to take them apart. They're not like the guy in the song by +John Mellencamp who sings "I fight authority and authority always wins." Some +might have an attitude, but most just want to look at the insides of their +computers and rearrange them to hook up to coffee machines or networks. They +want to fidget with the guts of their machines. If they weld some spaghetti to +the insides, so be it. + +Normally, these battles between the suits and the geeks don't threaten the +established order. There are university students around the world building +solar-powered cars, but they don't actually pose a threat to the oil or auto +industries. "21," a restaurant in New York, makes a great hamburger, but +they're not going to put McDonald's out of business. The experimentalists and +the perfectionists don't usually knock heads with the corporations who depend +upon world domination for their profits. Except when it comes to software. + +Software is different from cars or hamburgers. Once someone writes the source +code, copying the source costs next to nothing. That makes it much easier for +tinkerers like Cox to have a global effect. If Cox, Stallman, Torvalds, and his +chums just happen to luck upon something that's better than Microsoft, then the +rest of the world can share their invention for next to nothing. That's what +makes Cox, Torvalds, and their buddies a credible threat no matter how often +they sleep late. + +It's easy to get high off of the idea alone. A few guys sleeping late and +working in bedrooms aren't supposed to catch up to a cash engine like +Microsoft. They aren't supposed to create a webserving engine that controls +more than half of the web. They aren't supposed to create a graphical user +interface for drawing windows and icons on the screen that's much better than +Windows. They aren't supposed to create supercomputers with sticker prices of +$3,000. Money isn't supposed to lose. + +Of course, the folks who are working on free software projects have advantages +that money can't buy. These programmers don't need lawyers to create licenses, +negotiate contracts, or argue over terms. Their software is free, and lawyers +lose interest pretty quickly when there's no money around. The free software +guys don't need to scrutinize advertising copy. Anyone can download the +software and just try it. The programmers also don't need to sit in the corner +when their computer crashes and complain about the idiot who wrote the +software. Anyone can read the source code and fix the glitches. + +The folks in the free source software world are, in other words, grooving on +freedom. They're high on the original American dream of life, liberty, and the +pursuit of happiness. The founders of the United States of America didn't set +out to create a wealthy country where citizens spent their days worrying +whether they would be able to afford new sport utility vehicles when the stock +options were vested. The founders just wanted to secure the blessings of +liberty for posterity. Somehow, the wealth followed. + +This beautiful story is easy to embrace: a group of people started out swapping +cool software on the Net and ended up discovering that their free sharing +created better software than what a corporation could produce with a mountain +of cash. + +The programmers found that unrestricted cooperation made it easy for everyone +to contribute. No price tags kept others away. No stereotypes or biases +excluded anyone. The software and the source code were on the Net for anyone to +read. + +Wide-open cooperation also turned out to be wide-open competition because the +best software won the greatest attention. The corporate weasels with the ear of +the president could not stop a free source software project from shipping. No +reorganization or downsizing could stop people from working on free software if +they wanted to hack. The freedom to create was more powerful than money. + +That's an idyllic picture, and the early success of Linux, FreeBSD, and other +free packages makes it tempting to think that the success will build. Today, +open source servers power more than 50 percent of the web servers on the +Internet, and that is no small accomplishment. Getting thousands, if not +millions, of programmers to work together is quite amazing given how quirky +programmers can be. The ease of copying makes it possible to think that Alan +Cox could get up late and still move the world. + +But the 1960s were also an allegedly idyllic time when peace, love, and sharing +were going to create a beautiful planet where everyone gave to everyone else in +an eternal golden braid of mutual respect and caring. Everyone assumed that the +same spirit that so quickly and easily permeated the college campuses and +lovefests in the parks was bound to sweep the world. The communes were really +happening, man. But somehow, the groovy beat never caught on beyond those small +nests of easy caring and giving. Somehow, the folks started dropping back in, +getting real jobs, taking on real mortgages, and buying back into the world +where money was king. + +Over the years, the same sad ending has befallen many communes, utopian +visions, and hypnotic vibes. Freedom is great. It allows brilliant inventors to +work independently of the wheels of power. But capital is another powerful +beast that drives innovation. The great communes often failed because they +never converted their hard work into money, making it difficult for them to +save and invest. Giving things away may be, like, really groovy, but it doesn't +build a nest egg. + +Right now, the free software movement stands at a crucial moment in its +history. In the past, a culture of giving and wide-open sharing let thousands +of programmers build a great operating system that was, in many ways, better +than anything coming from the best companies. Many folks began working on +Linux, FreeBSD, and thousands of other projects as hobbies, but now they're +waking up to find IBM, HewlettPackard, Apple, and all the other big boys +pounding on their door. If the kids could create something as nice as Linux, +everyone began to wonder whether these kids really had enough good stuff to go +the distance and last nine innings against the greatest power hitters around. + +Perhaps the free software movement will just grow faster and better as more +people hop on board. More users mean more eyes looking for bugs. More users +mean more programmers writing new source code for new features. More is better. + +On the other hand, sharing may be neat, but can it beat the power of capital? +Microsoft's employees may be just serfs motivated by the dream that someday +their meager stock options will be worth enough to retire upon, but they have a +huge pile of cash driving them forward. This capital can be shifted very +quickly. If Bill Gates wants 1,000 programmers to create something, he can wave +his hand. If he wants to buy 1,000 computers, it takes him a second. That's the +power of capital. + +Linus Torvalds may be on the cover of magazines, but he can't do anything with +the wave of a hand. He must charm and cajole the thousands of folks on the +Linux mailing list to make a change. Many of the free software projects may +generate great code, but they have to beg for computers. The programmers might +even surprise him and come up with an even better solution. They've done it in +the past. But no money means that no one has to do what anyone says. + +In the past, the free software movement was like the movies in which Mickey +Rooney and Judy Garland put on a great show in the barn. That part won't +change. Cool kids with a dream will still be spinning up great programs that +will be wonderful gifts for the world. + +But shows that are charming and fresh in a barn can become thin and weak on a +big stage on Broadway. The glitches and raw functionality of Linux and free +software don't seem too bad if you know that they're built by kids in their +spare time. Building real tools for real companies, moms, police stations, and +serious users everywhere is another matter. Everyone may be hoping that +sharing, caring, and curiosity are enough, but no one knows for certain. Maybe +capital will end up winning. Maybe it won't. It's freedom versus assurance; +it's wide-open sharing versus stock options; it's cooperation versus +intimidation; it's the geeks versus the suits, all in one knockdown, +hack-till-you-drop, winner-take-everything fight. + +1~ Lists + +While Alan Cox was sleeping late and Microsoft was putting Richard Schmalensee +on the stand, the rest of the open source software world was tackling their own +problems. Some were just getting up, others were in the middle of their day, +and still others were just going to sleep. This is not just because the open +source hackers like to work at odd times around the clock. Some do. But they +also live around the globe in all of the different time zones. The sun never +sets on the open source empire. + +On January 14, 1999, for instance, Peter Jeremy, an Australian, announced that +he had just discovered a potential Y2K problem in the control software in the +central database that helped maintain the FreeBSD source code. He announced +this by posting a note to a mailing list that forwarded the message to many +other FreeBSD users. The problem was that the software simply appended the two +characters "19" to the front of the year. When the new millennium came about a +year later, the software would start writing the new date as "19100." Oops. The +problem was largely cosmetic because it only occurred in some of the support +software used by the system. + +FreeBSD is a close cousin to the Linux kernel and one that predates it in some +ways. It descends from a long tradition of research and development of +operating systems at the University of California at Berkeley. The name BSD +stands for "Berkeley Software Distribution," the name given to one of the first +releases of operating system source code that Berkeley made for the world. That +small package grew, morphed, and absorbed many other contributions over the +years. + +Referring to Linux and FreeBSD as cousins is an apt term because they share +much of the same source code in the same way that cousins share some of the +same genes. Both borrow source code and ideas from each other. If you buy a +disk with FreeBSD, which you can do from companies like Walnut Creek, you may +get many of the same software packages that you get from a disk from Red Hat +Linux. Both include, for instance, some of the GNU compilers that turn source +code into something that can be understood by computers. + +FreeBSD, in fact, has some of its own fans and devotees. The FreeBSD site lists +thousands of companies large and small that use the software. Yahoo, the big +Internet directory, game center, and news operation, uses FreeBSD in some of +its servers. So does Blue Mountain Arts, the electronic greeting card company +that is consistently one of the most popular sites on the web. There are +undoubtedly thousands more who aren't listed on the FreeBSD site. The software +produced by the FreeBSD project is, after all, free, so people can give it +away, share it with their friends, or even pretend they are "stealing" it by +making a copy of a disk at work. No one really knows how many copies of FreeBSD +are out there because there's no reason to count. Microsoft may need to count +heads so they can bill everyone for using Windows, but FreeBSD doesn't have +that problem. + +That morning, Peter Jeremy's message went out to everyone who subscribed to the +FreeBSD mailing list. Some users who cared about the Y2K bug could take +Jeremy's patch and use it to fix their software directly. They didn't need to +wait for some central bureaucracy to pass judgment on the information. They +didn't need to wait for the Y2K guy at FreeBSD to get around to vetting the +change. Everyone could just insert the fix because they had all of the source +code available to them. + +Of course, most people never use all their freedoms. In this case, most people +didn't have to bother dealing with Jeremy's patch because they waited for the +official version. The FreeBSD infrastructure absorbed the changes into its +source code vaults, and the changes appeared in the next fully updated version. +This new complete version is where most people first started using the fix. +Jeremy is a programmer who created a solution that was easy for other +programmers to use. Most people, however, aren't programmers, and they want +their software to be easy to use. Most programmers aren't even interested in +poking around inside their machines. Everyone wants the solution to either fix +itself or come as close to that as possible. + +Jeremy's message was just one of the hundreds percolating through the FreeBSD +community that day. Some fell on deaf ears, some drew snotty comments, and a +few gathered some real attention. The mailing lists were fairly complex +ecologies where ideas blossomed and grew before they faded away and died. + +Of course, it's not fair to categorize the FreeBSD world as a totally +decentralized anarchy. There is one central team led by one man, Jordan +Hubbard, who organizes the leadership of a core group of devoted programmers. +The group runs the website, maintains an up-to-date version of FreeBSD, and +sponsors dozens of lists devoted to different corners or features. One list +focuses on hooking up the fast high-performance SCSI hard disks that are +popular with people who demand high-performance systems. Another concentrates +on building in enough security to keep out attackers who might try to sneak in +through the Internet. + +That January 14, a man in Great Britain, Roger Hardiman, was helping a man in +Switzerland, Reto Trachsel, hook up a Hauppauge video card to his system. They +were communicating on the Multimedia mailing list devoted to finding ways to +add audio and video functions to FreeBSD systems. Trachsel posted a note to the +list asking for information on how to find the driver software that would make +sure that the data coming out of the Hauppauge television receiver would be +generally available to the rest of the computer. Hardiman pointed out a +solution, but cautioned, "If your Hauppauge card has the MSP34xx Stereo Decoder +audio chip, you may get no sound when watching TV. I should get this fixed in +the next week or two." + +Solutions like these float around the FreeBSD community. Most people don't +really care if they can watch television with their computer, but a few do. The +easy access to source code and drivers means that the few can go off and do +their own thing without asking some major company for permission. The big +companies like Microsoft and Apple, for instance, have internal projects that +are producing impressive software for creating and displaying multimedia +extravaganzas on computers. But they have a strict view of the world: the +company is the producer of high-quality tools that make their way to the +consumer who uses them and pays for them in one way or another. + +The list ecology is more organic and anti-hierarchical. Everyone has access to +the source code. Everyone can make changes. Everyone can do what they want. +There is no need for the FreeBSD management to meet and decide "Multimedia is +good." There is no need for a project team to prioritize and list action items +and best-of-breed deliverables. Someone in Switzerland decides he wants to hook +up a television receiver to his computer and, what do you know, someone in +Great Britain has already solved the problem. Well, he's solved it if you don't +have an MSP34xx stereo decoder chip in your card. But that should be fixed +sooner or later, too. + +2~ Free Doesn't Mean Freeloading + +There are thousands of other mailing lists linking thousands of other projects. +It's hard to actually put a number to them because the projects grow, merge, +and fade as people's interests wax and wane. The best flourish, and the others +just drift away. + +Life on the mailing lists is often a bit more brutal and short than life on +earth. The work on the project needs to split up. The volunteers need to +organize themselves so that great software can be written. + +On that January 14, a new member of the WINE list was learning just how +volunteering works. The guy posted a note to the list that described his +Diamond RIO portable music device that lets you listen to MP3 files whenever +you want. "I think the WINE development team should drop everything and work on +getting this program to work as it doesn't seem like Diamond wants to release a +Linux utility for the Rio," he wrote. + +WINE stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator," which is a joke that only +programmers and free software lovers can get. It's first a play on the +recursive acronym for the GNU project ("GNU is not UNIX"). It's also a bit of a +political statement for programmers. An emulator is a piece of software that +makes one computer act like another. A company named Connectix, for instance, +sells an emulator that lets a Macintosh behave like a Windows PC so anyone can +use their Windows software on the Mac. Emulators, however, are pretty slow +because they're constantly translating information on the fly. Anyone who has +tried to hold a conversation with someone who speaks a different language knows +how frustrating it can be to require a translator. + +The WINE project is an ambitious attempt to knock out one of the most important +structural elements of the Microsoft monopoly. Software written for Windows +only functions when people buy a version of Windows from Microsoft. When you +purchase a Connectix emulator for the Mac, you get a version of Windows bundled +with it. + +The WINE project is a group of people who are trying to clone Windows. Well, +not clone all of it. They just want to clone what is known as the Win32 API, a +panoply of features that make it easier to write software for a Microsoft +machine. A programmer who wants to create a new button for a Windows computer +doesn't need to write all of the instructions for drawing a frame with +three-dimensional shading. A Microsoft employee has already bundled those +instructions into the Win32 API. There are millions of functions in these kits +that help programmers. Some play audio files, others draw complex images or +movies. These features make it easy for programmers to write software for +Windows because some of the most repetitive work is already finished. + +The WINE clone of the Win32 is a fascinating example of how open source starts +slowly and picks up steam. Bob Amstadt started the project in 1993, but soon +turned it over to Alexandre Julliard, who has been the main force behind it. +The project, although still far from finished, has produced some dramatic +accomplishments, making it possible to run major programs like Microsoft Word +or Microsoft Excel on a Linux box without using Windows. In essence, the WINE +software is doing a good enough job acting like Windows that it's fooling Excel +and Word. If you can trick the cousins, that's not too bad. + +The WINE home page (www.winehq.com) estimates that more than 90,000 people use +WINE regularly to run programs for Microsoft Windows without buying Windows. +About 140 or more people regularly contribute to the project by writing code or +fixing bugs. Many are hobbyists who want the thrill of getting their software +to run without Windows, but some are corporate programmers. The corporate +programmers want to sell their software to the broadest possible marketplace, +but they don't want to take the time to rewrite everything. If they can get +their software working well with WINE, then people who use Linux or BSD can use +the software that was written for Microsoft Windows. + +The new user who wanted to get his RIO player working with his Linux computer +soon got a rude awakening. Andreas Mohr, a German programmer, wrote back, + +_1 Instead of suggesting the WINE team to "drop everything" in order to get a +relatively minor thing like PMP300 to work, would you please install WINE, test +it, read documentation/bug reports and post a useful bug report here? There are +zillions of very useful and impressing Windoze apps out there . . . (After all +that's only my personal opinion, maybe that was a bit too harsh ;-) + +Most new free software users soon discover that freedom isn't always easy. If +you want to get free software, you're going to have to put in some work. +Sometimes you get lucky. The man in Switzerland who posted his note on the same +day found out that someone in Britain was solving his problems for him. There +was no one, however, working on the RIO software and making sure it worked with +WINE. + +Mohr's suggestion was to file a bug report that ranks the usability of the +software so the programmers working on WINE can tweak it. This is just the +first step in the free software experience. Someone has to notice the problem +and fix it. In this case, someone needs to hook up their Diamond RIO MP3 player +to a Linux box and try to move MP3 files with the software written for Windows. +Ideally, the software will work perfectly, and now all Linux users will be able +to use RIO players. In reality, there might be problems or glitches. Some of +the graphics on the screen might be wrong. The software might not download +anything at all. The first step is for someone to test the product and write up +a detailed report about what works and what doesn't. + +At the time of this writing, no one has stepped up to the plate. There are no +reports about the Diamond player in the WINE database. Maybe the new user +didn't have time. Maybe he wasn't technically sophisticated enough to get WINE +running in the first place. It's still not a simple system to use. In any case, +his bright idea fell by the wayside. + +The mailing lists buzz with idle chatter about neat, way-out ideas that never +come to fruition. Some people see this as a limitation of the free software +world. A corporation, however, is able to dispatch a team of programmers to +create solutions. These companies have money to spend on polishing a product +and making sure it works. Connectix, for instance, makes an emulator that lets +Mac users play games written for the Sony PlayStation. The company employs a +substantial number of people who simply play all the Sony games from beginning +to end until all of the bugs are gone. It's a rough job, but someone has to do +it. + +WINE can't pay anyone, and that means that great ideas sometimes get ignored. +The free software community, however, doesn't necessarily see this as a +limitation. If the RIO player were truly important, someone else would come +along and pick up the project. Someone else would do the work and file a bug +report so everyone could use the software. If there's no one else, then maybe +the RIO software isn't that important to the Linux community. Work gets done +when someone really cares enough to do it. + +These mailing lists are the fibers that link the open source community into the +network of minds. Before e-mail, they were just a bunch of rebels haunting the +moors and rattling around their basements inventing monstrous machines. Now +they're smoothly tuned mechanisms coordinated by messages, notes, and missives. +They're not madmen who roar at dinner parties about the bad technology from +Borg-like corporations. They've got friends now. One person may be a flake, but +a group might be on to something. + +1~ Image + +Consider this picture: Microsoft is a megalith built by one man with a towering +ego. It may not be fair to lump all of the serfs in the corporate cubicle farms +in Redmond into one big army of automatons, but it sure conjures a striking +image that isn't altogether inaccurate. Microsoft employees are fiercely loyal +and often more dedicated to the cause than the average worker bee. Bill Gates +built the company from scratch with the help of several college friends, and +this group maintains tight control over all parts of the empire. The flavor of +the organization is set by one man with the mind and the ego to micromanage it +all. + +Now consider the image of the members of the free software revolution. +Practically every newspaper article and colorful feature describing the group +talks about a ragtag army of scruffy, bearded programmers who are just a bit +too pale from spending their days in front of a computer screen. The writers +love to conjure up a picture of a group that looks like it came stumbling out +of some dystopian fantasy movie like Mad Max or A Boy and His Dog. They're the +outsiders. They're a tightly knit band of rebel outcasts who are planning to +free the people from their Microsoft slavery and return to the people the power +usurped by Mr. Gates. What do they want? Freedom! When do they want it? Now! + +There's only one problem with this tidy, Hollywood-ready image: it's far from +true. While Microsoft is one big corporation with reins of control that keep +everyone in line, there is no strong or even weak organization that binds the +world of open source software. The movement, if it could be called that, is +comprised of individuals, each one free to do whatever he wants with the +software. That's the point: no more shackles. No more corporate hegemony. Just +pure source code that runs fast, clean, and light, straight through the night. + +This doesn't mean that the image is all wrong. Some of the luminaries like +Richard Stallman and Alan Cox have been known to sport long, Rip van +Winkle-grade beards. Some folks are strikingly pale. A few could bathe a bit +more frequently. Caffeine is a bit too popular with them. Some people look as +if they were targets for derision by the idiots on the high school football +team. + +But there are many counterexamples. Linus Torvalds drives a Pontiac and lives +in a respectable home with a wife and two children. He works during the day at +a big company and spends his evenings shopping and doing errands. His life +would be perfectly categorized as late 1950s sitcom if his wife, Tove, weren't +a former Finnish karate champion and trucks weren't driving up to his house to +deliver top-of-the-line computers like a 200-pound monstrosity with four Xeon +processors. He told VAR Business, "A large truck brought it to our house and +the driver was really confused. He said, 'You don't have a loading dock?'" On +second thought, those are the kind of shenanigans that drive most sitcoms. + +There's no easy way to classify the many free source code contributors. Many +have children, but many don't. Some don't mention them, some slip in references +to them, and others parade them around with pride. Some are married, some are +not. Some are openly gay. Some exist in sort of a presexual utopia of early +teenage boyhood. Some of them are still in their early teens. Some aren't. + +Some contributors are fairly described as "ragtag," but many aren't. Many are +corporate droids who work in cubicle farms during the day and create free +software projects at night. Some work at banks. Some work on databases for +human resource departments. Some build websites. Everyone has a day job, and +many keep themselves clean and ready to be promoted to the next level. Bruce +Perens, one of the leaders of the Debian group, used to work at the Silicon +Valley glitz factory Pixar and helped write some of the software that created +the hit Toy Story. + +Still, he told me, "At the time Toy Story was coming out, there was a space +shuttle flying with the Debian GNU/Linux distribution on it controlling a +biological experiment. People would say 'Are you proud of working at Pixar?' +and then I would say my hobby software was running on the space shuttle now. +That was a turnaround point when I realized that Linux might become my career." + +In fact, it's not exactly fair to categorize many of the free software +programmers as a loosely knit band of rebel programmers out to destroy +Microsoft. It's a great image that feeds the media's need to highlight +conflict, but it's not exactly true. The free software movement began long +before Microsoft was a household word. Richard Stallman wrote his manifesto +setting out some of the precepts in 1984. He was careful to push the notion +that programmers always used to share the source code to software until the +1980s, when corporations began to develop the shrink-wrapped software business. +In the olden days of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, programmers always shared. +While Stallman has been known to flip his middle finger out at the name Bill +Gates for the reporting pleasure of a writer from Salon magazine, he's not +after Microsoft per se. He just wants to return computing to the good old days +when the source was free and sharing was possible. + +The same holds for most of the other programmers. Some contribute source code +because it helps them with their day job. Some stay up all night writing code +because they're obsessed. Some consider it an act of charity, a kind of +noblesse oblige. Some want to fix bugs that bother them. Some want fame, glory, +and the respect of all other computer programmers. There are thousands of +reasons why new open source software gets written, and very few of them have +anything to do with Microsoft. + +In fact, it's a bad idea to see the free software revolution as having much to +do with Microsoft. Even if Linux, FreeBSD, and other free software packages +win, Microsoft will probably continue to fly along quite happily in much the +same way that IBM continues to thrive even after losing the belt of the +Heavyweight Computing Champion of the World to Microsoft. Anyone who spends his +or her time focused on the image of a ragtag band of ruffians and orphans +battling the Microsoft leviathan is bound to miss the real story. + +The fight is really just a by-product of the coming of age of the information +business. The computer trade is rapidly maturing and turning into a service +industry. In the past, the manufacture of computers and software took place on +assembly lines and in cubicle farms. People bought shrink-wrapped items from +racks. These were items that were manufactured. Now both computers and software +are turning into dirtcheap commodities whose only source of profit is +customization and handholding. The real money now is in service. + +Along the way, the free software visionaries stumbled onto a curious fact. They +could give away software, and people would give back improvements to it. +Software cost practically nothing to duplicate, so it wasn't that hard to just +give it away after it was written. At first, this was sort of a +pseudo-communist thing to do, but today it seems like a brilliant business +decision. If the software is turning into a commodity with a price falling +toward zero, why not go all the way and gain whatever you can by freely sharing +the code? The profits could come by selling services like programming and +education. The revolution isn't about defeating Microsoft; it's just a change +in the whole way the world buys and uses computers. + +The revolution is also the latest episode in the battle between the programmers +and the suits. In a sense, it's a battle for the hearts and minds of the people +who are smart enough to create software for the world. The programmers want to +write challenging tools that impress their friends. The suits want to rein in +programmers and channel their energy toward putting more money in the pockets +of the corporation. The suits hope to keep programmers devoted by giving them +fat paychecks, but it's not clear that programmers really want the cash. The +freedom to do whatever you want with source code is intrinsically rewarding. +The suits want to keep software under lock and key so they can sell it and +maximize revenues. The free software revolution is really about a bunch of +programmers saying, "Screw the cash. I really want the source code." + +The revolution is also about defining wealth in cyberspace. Microsoft promises +to build neat tools that will help us get wherever we want to go today--if we +keep writing larger and larger checks. The open source movement promises +software with practically no limitations. Which is a better deal? The Microsoft +millionaires probably believe in proprietary software and suggest that the +company wouldn't have succeeded as it did if it didn't provide something +society wanted. They created good things, and the people rewarded them. + +But the open source movement has also created great software that many think is +better than anything Microsoft has built. Is society better off with a computer +infrastructure controlled by a big corporate machine driven by cash? Or does +sharing the source code create better software? Are we at a point where money +is not the best vehicle for lubricating the engines of societal advancement? +Many in the free software world are pondering these questions. + +Anyone who tunes in to the battle between Microsoft and the world expecting to +see a good old-fashioned fight for marketplace domination is going to miss the +real excitement. Sure, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mach, and the thousands +of other free software projects are going to come out swinging. Microsoft is +going to counterpunch with thousands of patents defended by armies of lawyers. +Some of the programmers might even be a bit weird, and a few will be entitled +to wear the adjective "ragtag." But the real revolution has nothing to do with +whether Bill Gates keeps his title as King of the Hill. It has nothing to do +with whether the programmers stay up late and work in the nude. It has nothing +to do with poor grooming, extravagant beards, Coke-bottle glasses, black trench +coats, or any of the other stereotypes that fuel the media's image. + +It's about the gradual commodification of software and hardware. It's about the +need for freedom and the quest to create cool software. It's about a world just +discovering how much can be accomplished when information can be duplicated for +next to nothing. + +The real struggle is finding out how long society can keep hanging ten toes off +the edge of the board as we get carried by the wave of freedom. Is there enough +energy in the wave and enough grace in society to ride it all the way to the +shore? Or will something wicked, something evil, or something sloppy come along +and mess it up? + +1~ College + +2~ Speaking in Tongues + +I was part of the free software movement for many years, but I didn't know it. +When I was a graduate student, I released the source code to a project. In +1991, that was the sort of thing to do in universities. Publishing the source +code to a project was part of publishing a paper about it. And the academy put +publishing pretty high on its list. + +My first big release came in May 1991 when I circulated a program that let +people hide secret messages as innocuous text. My program turned any message +into some cute play-by-play from a baseball game, like "No contact in +Mudsville! It's a fastball with wings. No wood on that one. He's uncorking what +looks like a spitball. Whooooosh! Strike! He's out of there." The secret +message was encoded in the choices of phrases. "He's out of there" meant +something different from "He pops it up to Orville Baskethands." The program +enabled information to mutate into other forms, just like the shapeshifting +monsters from The X-Files. I sent out an announcement to the influential +newsgroup comp.risks and soon hundreds of people were asking for free copies of +the software. + +I created this program because Senator Joe Biden introduced a bill into the +Senate that would require the manufacturers of all computer networks to provide +a way for the police to get copies of any message. The Federal Bureau of +Investigation, among others, was afraid that they would have trouble obtaining +evidence if people were able to encode data. My software illustrated how hard +it would be to stop the flow of information. + +The best, and perhaps most surprising, part of the whole bloom of email came +when a fellow I had never met, D. Jason Penney, converted the program from the +fading Pascal into the more popular C. He did this on his own and sent the new, +converted software back to me. When I asked him whether I could distribute his +version, he said that it was my program. He was just helping out. + +I never thought much more about that project until I started to write this +book. While two or three people a month would write asking for copies of the +software, it never turned into more than a bit of research into the foundations +of secret codes and a bit of a mathematical parlor trick. It was more an +academic exercise than a prototype of something that could rival Microsoft and +make me rich. + +In the past, I thought the project never developed into more than a cute toy +because there was no market for it. The product wasn't readily useful for +businesses, and no one starts a company without the hope that millions of folks +desperately need a product. Projects needed programmers and programmers cost +money. I just assumed that other free software projects would fall into the +same chasm of lack of funding. + +Now, after investigating the free software world, I am convinced that my +project was a small success. Penney's contribution was not just a strange +aberration but a relatively common event on the Internet. People are quite +willing to take a piece of software that interests them, modify it to suit +their needs, and then contribute it back to the world. Sure, most people only +have a few hours a week to work on such projects, but they add up. Penney's +work made my software easier to use for many C programmers, thus spreading it +further. + +In fact, I may have been subconsciously belittling the project. It took only +three or four days of my time and a bit more of Penney's, but it was a complete +version of a powerful encryption system that worked well. Yes, there was no +money flowing, but that may have made it more of a success. Penney probably +wouldn't have given me his C version if he knew I was going to sell it. He +probably would have demanded a share. Lawyers would have gotten involved. The +whole project would have been gummed up with contracts, release dates, +distribution licenses, and other hassles that just weren't worth it for a neat +way to hide messages. Sure, money is good, but money also brings hassles. + +2~ Cash Versus Sharing + +In the 1980s and 1990s, programmers in universities still shared heavily with +the world. The notion of sharing source code with the world owes a great deal +to the academic tradition of publishing results so others can read them, think +about them, critique them, and ultimately extend them. Many of the government +granting agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced +Research Projects Agency fostered this sharing by explicitly requiring that +people with grants release the source code to the world with no restrictions. +Much of the Internet was created by people who gave out these kinds of +contracts and insisted upon shared standards that weren't proprietary. This +tradition has fallen on harder times as universities became more obsessed with +the profits associated with patents and contract research, but the idea is so +powerful that it's hard to displace. + +The free software movement in particular owes a great deal to the Massachusetts +Institute of Technology. Richard Stallman, the man who is credited with +starting the movement, began working in MIT's computer labs in the 1970s. He +gets credit for sparking the revolution because he wrote the GNU Manifesto in +1984. The document spelled out why it's essential to share the source code to a +program with others. Stallman took the matter to heart because he also +practiced what he wrote about and contributed several great programs, including +a text editor with thousands of features. + +Of course, Stallman doesn't take credit for coming up with the idea of sharing +source code. He remembers his early years at MIT quite fondly and speaks of how +people would share their source code and software without restrictions. The +computers were new, complicated, and temperamental. Cooperation was the only +way that anyone could accomplish anything. That's why IBM shared the source +code to the operating systems on their mainframes though the early part of the +1960s. + +This tradition started to fade by the early 1980s as the microcomputer +revolution began. Companies realized that most people just wanted software that +worked. They didn't need the source code and all the instructions that only +programmers could read. So companies quickly learned that they could keep the +source code to themselves and keep their customers relatively happy while +locking out competitors. They were kings who built a wall to keep out the +intruders. + +The GNU Manifesto emerged as the most radical reaction to the trend toward +locking up the source code. While many people looked at the GNU Manifesto with +confusion, others became partial converts. They began donating code that they +had written. Some tossed random utility programs into the soup, some offered +games, and some sent in sophisticated packages that ran printers, networks, or +even networks of printers. A few even became complete disciples and started +writing code full-time for the GNU project. This growth was largely ignored by +the world, which became entranced with the growth of Microsoft. More and more +programmers, however, were spending more time mingling with the GNU project, +and it was taking hold. + +In the early 1980s, an operating system known as UNIX had grown to be very +popular in universities and laboratories. AT&T designed and built it at Bell +Labs throughout the 1970s. In the beginning, the company shared the source code +with researchers and computer scientists in universities, in part because the +company was a monopoly that was only allowed to sell telephone service. UNIX +was just an experiment that the company started to help run the next generation +of telephone switches, which were already turning into specialized computers. + +In the beginning, the project was just an academic exercise, but all of the +research and sharing helped create a nice operating system with a wide +audience. UNIX turned out to be pretty good. When the phone company started +splitting up in 1984, the folks at AT&T wondered how they could turn a profit +from what was a substantial investment in time and money. They started by +asking people who used UNIX at the universities to sign non-disclosure +agreements. + +Stallman looked at this as mind control and the death of a great tradition. +Many others at the universities were more pragmatic. AT&T had given plenty of +money and resources to the university. Wasn't it fair for the university to +give something back? + +Stallman looked at this a bit differently. Yes, AT&T was being nice when they +gave grants to the university, but weren't masters always kind when they gave +bowls of gruel to their slaves? The binary version AT&T started distributing to +the world was just gruel for Stallman. The high priests and lucky few got to +read the source code. They got to eat the steak and lobster spread. Stallman +saw this central, controlling, corporate force as the enemy, and he began +naming his work GNU, which was a recursive acronym that stood for "GNU's Not +UNIX." The GNU project aimed to produce a complete working operating system +that was going to do everything that UNIX did for none of the moral, emotional, +or ethical cost. Users would be able to read the source code to Stallman's OS +and modify it without signing a tough non-disclosure agreement drafted by teams +of lawyers. They would be able to play with their software in complete freedom. +Stallman notes that he never aimed to produce an operating system that didn't +cost anything. The world may be entranced with the notion of a price tag of +zero, but for Stallman, that was just a side effect of the unrestricted +sharing. + +Creating a stand-alone system that would do everything with free software was +his dream, but it was a long way from fruition, and Stallman was smart enough +to start off with a manageable project. He began by producing a text editor +known as GNU Emacs. The program was a big hit because it was highly +customizable. Some people just used the program to edit papers, but others +programmed it to accomplish fancier tasks such as reading their e-mail and +generating automatic responses. One programmer was told by management that he +had to include plenty of comments in his source code, so he programmed GNU +Emacs to insert them automatically. One professor created a version of GNU +Emacs that would automatically insert random praise into requests to his +secretary.~{ "Where are those reports I asked you to copy? You're doing a great +job. Thanks for all the help," on one day. "Are you ever going to copy those +reports? You're doing a great job. Thanks for all the help," on the next. }~ +Practically everything in Emacs could be changed or customized. If you didn't +like hitting the delete key to fix a mistyped character, then you could arrange +for the 6 key to do the same thing. This might make it hard to type numbers, +but the user was free to mess up his life as much as he wanted. + +It took Microsoft years to catch up with Stallman's solution, and even then +they implemented it in a dangerous way. They let people create little custom +programs for modifying documents, but they forgot to prevent malicious code +from crying havoc. Today, Microsoft Word allows little programs named macro +viruses to roam around the planet. Open up a Word document, and a virus might +be lurking. + +In the 1980s, the free software world devoted itself to projects like this. GNU +Emacs became a big hit in the academic world where system administrators could +install it for free and not worry about counting students or negotiating +licenses. Also, smart minds were better able to appreciate the cool flexibility +Stallman had engineered into the system. Clever folks wasted time by adding +filters to the text editor that would scan their text and translate it into, +like, Valley Girl talk or more urban jive. + +The GNU project grew by accepting contributions from many folks across the +country. Some were fairly sophisticated, eye-catching programs like GNU Chess, +a program that was quite competitive and as good as all but the best packages. +Most were simple tools for handling many of the day-to-day chores for running a +computer system. System administrators, students, and programmers from around +the country would often take on small jobs because they felt compelled to fix +something. When they were done, a few would kick the source code over to the +GNU project. + +Stallman's biggest programming project for GNU during the 1980s was writing the +GNU C compiler (GCC). This program was an important tool that converted the C +source code written by humans into the machine code understood by computers. +The GCC package was an important cornerstone for the GNU project in several +ways. First, it was one of the best compilers around. Second, it could easily +move from machine to machine. Stallman personally ported it to several +different big platforms like Intel's x86 line of processors. Third, the package +was free, which in the case of GNU software meant that anyone was free to use +and modify the software. + +The GCC provided an important harmonizing effect to the GNU project. Someone +could write his program on a machine built by Digital, compile it with GCC, and +be fairly certain that it would run on all other machines with GCC. That +allowed the GNU software to migrate freely throughout the world, from machine +to machine, from Sun to Apollo to DEC to Intel. + +The GCC's license also attracted many developers and curious engineers. Anyone +could use the source code for their projects, and many did. Over time, the +compiler moved from machine to machine as users converted it. Sometimes a chip +company engineer would rework the compiler to make it work on a new chip. +Sometimes a user would do it for a project. Sometimes a student would do it +when insomnia struck. Somehow, it moved from machine to machine, and it carried +all of the other GNU software with it. + +The next great leap forward came in the early 1990s as people began to realize +that a completely free operating system was a serious possibility. Stallman had +always dreamed of replacing UNIX with something that was just as good and +accompanied by the source code, but it was a large task. It was the reason he +started the GNU project. Slowly but surely, the GNU project was assembling the +parts to make it work. There were hundreds of small utilities and bigger tools +donated to the GNU project, and those little bits were starting to add up. + +The free software movement also owes a great deal to Berkeley, or more +precisely to a small group in the Department of Computer Science at the +University of California at Berkeley. The group of hardcore hackers, which +included professors, research associates, graduate students, and a few +undergraduates, had developed a version of UNIX known as BSD (Berkeley Software +Distribution). AT&T shared their version of UNIX with Berkeley, and the +programmers at Berkeley fixed, extended, and enhanced the software. These +extensions formed the core of BSD. Their work was part experimental and part +practical, but the results were widely embraced. Sun Microsystems, one of +Silicon Valley's UNIX workstation companies, used a version on its machines +through the early 1990s when they created a new version known as Solaris by +folding in some of AT&T's System V. Many feel that BSD and its approach remain +the foundation of the OS. + +The big problem was that the team built their version on top of source code +from AT&T. The folks at Berkeley and their hundreds, if not thousands, of +friends, colleagues, and students who contributed to the project gave their +source code away, but AT&T did not. This gave AT&T control over anyone who +wanted to use BSD, and the company was far from ready to join the free software +movement. Millions of dollars were spent on the research developing UNIX. The +company wanted to make some money back. + +The team at Berkeley fought back, and Keith Bostic, one of the core team, began +organizing people together to write the source code that could replace these +bits. By the beginning of the 1990s, he had cajoled enough of his friends to +accomplish it. In June 1991, the group produced "Networking Release 2," a +version that included almost all of a complete working version of UNIX. All you +needed to do was add six files to have a complete operating system. + +AT&T was not happy. It had created a separate division known as the UNIX +Systems Laboratory and wanted to make a profit. Free source code from Berkeley +was tough competition. So the UNIX Systems Laboratory sued. + +This lawsuit marked the end of universities' preeminent role in the development +of free software. Suddenly, the lawsuit focused everyone's attention and made +them realize that taking money from corporations came into conflict with +sharing software source code. Richard Stallman left MIT in 1984 when he +understood that a university's need for money would eventually trump his belief +in total sharing of source code. Stallman was just a staff member who kept the +computers running. He wasn't a tenured professor who could officially do +anything. So he started the Free Software Foundation and never looked back. MIT +helped him at the beginning by loaning him space, but it was clear that the +relationship was near the end. Universities needed money to function. +Professors at many institutions had quotas specifying how much grant money they +needed to raise. Stallman wasn't bringing in cash by giving away his software. + +Meanwhile, on the other coast, the lawsuit tied up Berkeley and the BSD project +for several years, and the project lost valuable energy and time by devoting +them to the legal fight. In the meantime, several other completely free +software projects started springing up around the globe. These began in +basements and depended on machines that the programmer owned. One of these +projects was started by Linus Torvalds and would eventually grow to become +Linux, the unstoppable engine of hype and glory. He didn't have the money of +the Berkeley computer science department, and he didn't have the latest +machines that corporations gave them. But he had freedom and the pile of source +code that came from unaffiliated, free projects like GNU that refused to +compromise and cut intellectual corners. Although Torvalds might not have +realized it at the time, freedom turned out to be most valuable of all. + +1~ Quicksand + +The story of the end of the university's preeminence in the free software world +is a tale of greed and corporate power. While many saw an unhappy ending coming +for many years, few could do much to stop the inevitable collision between the +University of California at Berkeley and its former patron, AT&T. + +The lawsuit between AT&T and the University of California at Berkeley had its +roots in what marriage counselors love to call a "poorly conceived +relationship." By the end of the 1980s, the computer science department at +Berkeley had a problem. They had been collaborating with AT&T on the UNIX +system from the beginning. They had written some nice code, including some of +the crucial software that formed the foundation of the Internet. Students, +professors, scientists, and even Wall Street traders loved the power and +flexibility of UNIX. Everyone wanted UNIX. + +The problem was that not everyone could get UNIX. AT&T, which had sponsored +much of the research at Berkeley, kept an iron hand on its invention. If you +wanted to run UNIX, then you needed to license some essential software from +AT&T that sat at the core of the system. They were the supreme ruler of the +UNIX domain, and they expected a healthy tithe for the pleasure of living +within it. + +One of the people who wanted UNIX was the Finnish student Linus Torvalds, who +couldn't afford this tithe. He was far from the first one, and the conflict +began long before he started to write Linux in 1991. + +Toward the end of the 1980s, most people in the computer world were well aware +of Stallman's crusade against the corporate dominance of AT&T and UNIX. Most +programmers knew that GNU stood for "GNU's Not UNIX." Stallman was not the only +person annoyed by AT&T's attitude toward secrecy and non-disclosure agreements. +In fact, his attitude was contagious. Some of the folks at Berkeley looked at +the growth of tools emerging from the GNU project and felt a bit used. They had +written many pieces of code that found their way into AT&T's version of UNIX. +They had contributed many great ideas. Yet AT&T was behaving as if AT&T alone +owned it. They gave and gave, while AT&T took. + +Stallman got to distribute his source code. Stallman got to share with others. +Stallman got to build his reputation. Programmers raved about Stallman's Emacs. +People played GNU Chess at their offices. Others were donating their tools to +the GNU project. Everyone was getting some attention by sharing except the +folks at Berkeley who collaborated with AT&T. This started to rub people the +wrong way. + +Something had to be done, and the folks at Berkeley started feeling the +pressure. Some at Berkeley wondered why the professors had entered into such a +Faustian bargain with a big corporation. Was the payoff great enough to +surrender their academic souls? Just where did AT&T get off telling us what we +could publish? + +Others outside of Berkeley looked in and saw a treasure trove of software that +was written by academics. Many of them were friends. Some of them had studied +at Berkeley. Some had even written some of the UNIX code before they graduated. +Some were companies competing with AT&T. All of them figured that they could +solve their UNIX problems if they could just get their hands on the source +code. There had to be some way to get it released. + +Slowly, the two groups began making contact and actively speculating on how to +free Berkeley's version of UNIX from AT&T's grip. + +2~ Breaking the Bond + +The first move to separate Berkeley's version of UNIX from AT&T's control +wasn't really a revolution. No one was starting a civil war by firing shots at +Fort Sumter or starting a revolution by dropping tea in the harbor. In fact, it +started long before the lawsuit and Linux. In 1989, some people wanted to start +hooking their PCs and other devices up to the Internet, and they didn't want to +use UNIX. + +Berkeley had written some of the software known as TCP/IP that defined how +computers on the Internet would communicate and share packets. They wrote the +software for UNIX because that was one of the favorite OSs around the labs. +Other companies got a copy of the code by buying a source license for UNIX from +AT&T. The TCP/IP code was just part of the mix. Some say that the cost of the +license reached $250,000 or more and required that the customer pay a per-unit +fee for every product that was shipped. Those prices didn't deter the big +companies like IBM or DEC. They thought of UNIX as an OS for the hefty +workstations and minicomputers sold to businesses and scientists. Those guys +had the budget to pay for big hardware, so it was possible to slip the cost of +the UNIX OS in with the package. + +But the PC world was different. It was filled with guys in garages who wanted +to build simple boards that would let a PC communicate on the Internet. These +guys were efficient and knew how to scrounge up cheap parts from all over the +world. Some of them had gone to Berkeley and learned to program on the VAXes +and Sun workstations running Berkeley's version of UNIX. A few of them had even +helped write or debug the code. They didn't see why they had to buy such a big +license for something that non-AT&T folks had written with the generous help of +large government grants. Some even worked for corporations that gave money to +support Berkeley's projects. Why couldn't they get at the code they helped pay +to develop? + +Kirk McKusick, one of the members of the Computer Systems Research Group at the +time, remembers, "People came to us and said, 'Look, you wrote TCP/IP. Surely +you shouldn't require an AT&T license for that?' These seemed like reasonable +requests. We decided to start with something that was clearly not part of the +UNIX we got from AT&T. It seemed very clear that we could pull out the TCP/IP +stack and distribute that without running afoul of AT&T's license." + +So the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) created what they called +Network Release 1 and put it on the market for $1,000 in June 1989. That wasn't +really the price because the release came with one of the first versions of +what would come to be known as the BSD-style license. Once you paid the $1,000, +you could do whatever you wanted with the code, including just putting it up on +the Net and giving it away. + +"We thought that two or three groups would pay the money and then put the code +on the Internet, but in fact, hundreds of sites actually paid the one thousand +dollars for it," says McKusick and adds, "mostly so they could get a piece of +paper from the university saying, 'You can do what you want with this.'" + +This move worked out well for Berkeley and also for UNIX. The Berkeley TCP/IP +stack became the best-known version of the code, and it acted like a reference +version for the rest of the Net. If it had a glitch, everyone else had to work +around the glitch because it was so prevalent. Even today, companies like Sun +like to brag that their TCP/IP forms the backbone of the Net, and this is one +of the reasons to buy a Sun instead of an NT workstation. Of course, the code +in Sun's OS has a rich, Berkeley-based heritage, and it may still contain some +of the original BSD code for controlling the net. + +2~ In for a Penny, in for a Pound + +In time, more and more companies started forming in the Bay Area and more and +more realized that Berkeley's version of UNIX was the reference for the +Internet. They started asking for this bit or that bit. + +Keith Bostic heard these requests and decided that the Berkeley CSRG needed to +free up as much of the source code as possible. Everyone agreed it was a +utopian idea, but only Bostic thought it was possible to accomplish. McKusick +writes, in his history of BSD, "Mike Karels [a fellow software developer] and I +pointed out that releasing large parts of the system was a huge task, but we +agreed that if he could sort out how to deal with re-implementing the hundreds +of utilities and the massive C library, then we would tackle the kernel. +Privately, Karels and I thought that would be the end of the discussion." + +Dave Hitz, a good friend of Bostic's, remembers the time. "Bostic was more of a +commanding type. He just rounded up all of his friends to finish up the code. +You would go over to his house for dinner and he would say, 'I've got a list. +What do you want to do?' I think I did the cp command and maybe the look +command." Hitz, of course, is happy that he took part in the project. He +recently founded Network Appliance, a company that packages a stripped-down +version of BSD into a file server that is supposed to be a fairly bulletproof +appliance for customers. Network Appliance didn't need to do much software +engineering when they began. They just grabbed the free version of BSD and +hooked it up. + +Bostic pursued people far and wide to accomplish the task. He gave them the +published description of the utility or the part of the library from the +documentation and then asked them to reimplement it without looking at the +source code. This cloning operation is known as a cleanroom operation because +it is entirely legal if it takes place inside a metaphorical room where the +engineers inside don't have any information about how the AT&T engineers built +UNIX. + +This was not an easy job, but Bostic was quite devoted and pursued people +everywhere. He roped everyone who could code into the project and often spent +time fixing things afterward. The task took 18 months and included more than +400 people who received just notoriety and some thanks afterward. The 400-plus +names are printed in the book he wrote with McKusick and Karels in 1996. + +When Bostic came close to finishing, he stopped by McKusick's office and asked +how the kernel was coming along. This called McKusick and Karels's bluff and +forced them to do some hard engineering work. In some respects, Bostic had the +easier job. Writing small utility programs that his team used was hard work, +but it was essentially preorganized and segmented. Many folks over the years +created manual files that documented exactly what the programs were supposed to +do. Each program could be assigned separately and people didn't need to +coordinate their work too much. These were just dishes for a potluck supper. + +Cleaning up the kernel, however, was a different matter. It was much larger +than many of the smaller utilities and was filled with more complicated code +that formed a tightly coordinated mechanism. Sloppy work in one of the utility +files would probably affect only that one utility, but a glitch in the kernel +would routinely bring down the entire system. If Bostic was coordinating a +potluck supper, McKusick and Karels had to find a way to create an entire +restaurant that served thousands of meals a day to thousands of customers. +Every detail needed to work together smoothly. + +To make matters more complicated, Berkeley's contributions to the kernel were +mixed in with AT&T's contributions. Both had added on parts, glued in new +features, and created new powers over the years. They were de facto partners on +the project. Back in the good old days, they had both shared their source code +without any long-term considerations or cares. But now that AT&T claimed +ownership of it all, they had to find a way to unwind all of the changes and +figure out who wrote what. + +McKusick says, "We built a converted database up line by line. We took every +line of code and inserted it into the database. You end up finding pretty +quickly where the code migrated to and then you decide whether it is +sufficiently large enough to see if it needed recoding." + +This database made life much easier for them and they were able to plow through +the code, quickly recoding islets of AT&T code here and there. They could +easily pull up a file filled with source code and let the database mark up the +parts that might be owned by AT&T. Some parts went quickly, but other parts +dragged on. By late spring of 1991, they had finished all but six files that +were just too much work. + +It would be nice to report that they bravely struggled onward, forgoing all +distractions like movies, coffeehouses, and friends, but that's not true. They +punted and tossed everything out the door and called it "Network Release 2."The +name implied that this new version was just a new revision of their earlier +product, Network Release 1, and this made life easier with the lawyers. They +just grabbed the old, simple license and reused it. It also disguised the fact +that this new pile of code was only about six files short of a full-grown OS. + +The good news about open source is that projects often succeed even when they +initially fail. A commercial product couldn't ship without the complete +functionality of the six files. Few would buy it. Plus, no one could come +along, get a bug under his bonnet, and patch up the holes. Proprietary source +code isn't available and no one wants to help someone else in business without +compensation. + +The new, almost complete UNIX, however, was something different. It was a +university project and so university rules of camaraderie and sharing seemed to +apply. Another programmer, Bill Jolitz, picked up Network Release 2 and soon +added the code necessary to fill the gap. He became fascinated with getting +UNIX up and running on a 386 processor, a task that was sort of like trying to +fit the latest traction control hardware and anti-lock brakes on a go-cart. At +the time, serious computer scientists worked on serious machines from serious +workstation and minicomputer companies. The PC industry was building toys. Of +course, there was something macho to the entire project. Back then I remember +joking to a friend that we should try to get UNIX running on the new +air-conditioning system, just to prove it could be done. + +Jolitz's project, of course, found many people on the Net who didn't think it +was just a toy. Once he put the source code on the Net, a bloom of enthusiasm +spread through the universities and waystations of the world. People wanted to +experiment with a high-grade OS and most could only afford relatively cheap +hardware like the 386. Sure, places like Berkeley could get the government +grant money and the big corporate donations, but 2,000-plus other schools were +stuck waiting. Jolitz's version of 386BSD struck a chord. + +While news traveled quickly to some corners, it didn't reach Finland. Network +Release 2 came in June 1991, right around the same time that Linus Torvalds was +poking around looking for a high-grade OS to use in experiments. Jolitz's +386BSD came out about six months later as Torvalds began to dig into creating +the OS he would later call Linux. Soon afterward, Jolitz lost interest in the +project and let it lie, but others came along. In fact, two groups called +NetBSD and FreeBSD sprang up to carry the torch. + +Although it may seem strange that three groups building a free operating system +could emerge without knowing about each other, it is important to realize that +the Internet was a very different world in 1991 and 1992. The World Wide Web +was only a gleam in some people's eyes. Only the best universities had general +access to the web for its students, and most people didn't understand what an +e-mail address was. Only a few computer-related businesses like IBM and Xerox +put their researchers on the Net. The community was small and insular. + +The main conduits for information were the USENET newsgroups, which were read +only by people who could get access through their universities. This technology +was an efficient way of sharing information, although quite flawed. Here's how +it worked: every so often, each computer would call up its negotiators and swap +the latest articles. Information traveled like gossip, which is to say that it +traveled quickly but with very uneven distribution. Computers were always +breaking down or being upgraded. No one could count on every message getting to +every corner of the globe. + +The NetBSD and the FreeBSD forks of the BSD kernel continue to exist separately +today. The folks who work on NetBSD concentrate on making their code run on all +possible machines, and they currently list 21 different platforms that range +from the omnipresent Intel 486 to the gone but not forgotten Commodore Amiga. + +The FreeBSD team, on the other hand, concentrates on making their product work +well on the Intel 386. They added many layers of installation tools to make it +easier for the average Joe to use, and now it's the most popular version of BSD +code around. + +Those two versions used the latest code from Berkeley. Torvalds, on the other +hand, didn't know about the 386BSD, FreeBSD, or NetBSD. If he had found out, he +says, he probably would have just downloaded the versions and joined one of +those teams. Why run off and reinvent the wheel? + +2~ AT&T Notices the Damage + +Soon after Network Release 2 hit the world, the real problems began for BSD. +While AT&T didn't really notice 386BSD, NetBSD, or FreeBSD, they did notice a +company called Berkeley Software Design Incorporated. This corporation created +their own OS by taking Network Release 2 and adding their own versions of the +missing six files, but they didn't release this for free on the Net. They +started putting advertisements in the trade press offering the source code for +$995, a price they claimed was a huge discount over AT&T's charge. + +The modern, post-Internet reader should find this hilarious. Two to three +groups and countless splinter factions were distributing the BSD software over +the Internet for free and this didn't seem to catch AT&T's attention, but the +emergence of BSDI selling the same product for almost $1,000 rang alarm bells. +That was the time, though, before the Internet infrastructure became +ubiquitous. In the early 1990s, people only halfjoked that FedEx was the most +efficient Internet Service Provider around. It was much faster to copy hundreds +of megabytes of data onto a magnetic tape and drop it in FedEx than to actually +try to copy it over the Internet. Back then only real nerds were on the +Internet. Managers and lawyers wore suits and got their news from the trade +press and advertisements. + +BSDI's cost-cutting was a major headache for AT&T. This small company was +selling a product that AT&T felt it had shepherded, organized, and coordinated +over time. + +AT&T started off by claiming UNIX as a trademark and threatening BSDI with +infringing upon it. BSDI countered by changing the ads to emphasize that BSDI +was a separate company that wasn't related to AT&T or the subsidiary AT&T +created to market UNIX known as UNIX System Laboratories, or USL. + +That didn't work. USL saw its cash cow melting away and assumed folks would +jump at the chance to buy a complete OS with all the source code for $995. The +price seems outrageously high today, but that's only after the stiff price +competition of the 1990s. It was still a good deal at the time. So USL sued +BSDI for actually stealing proprietary source code from AT&T. + +This argument didn't work, either. BSDI turned around and waved the Network +Release 2 license they got from Berkeley. They bought all but six of the files +from Berkeley, and Berkeley claimed that all of the source code was theirs to +sell. BSDI wrote the missing six files themselves and they were quite sure that +they got no help from AT&T or USL. Therefore, BSDI didn't steal anything. If +AT&T thought it was stolen, they should take it up with Berkeley. The judge +bought BSDI's argument and narrowed the case to focus on the six files. + +This was a crucial moment in the development of the free software movement and +its various kernels. AT&T found itself cornered. Backing down meant giving up +its claim to UNIX and the wonderful stream of license fees that kept pouring +in. Pressing ahead meant suing the University of California, its old friend, +partner, and author of lots of UNIX code. Eventually, the forces of greed and +omnipotent corporate power won out and AT&T's USL filed a lawsuit naming both +BSDI and the University of California. + +Taking sides in this case was pretty easy for most folks in the academic and +free software world. The CSRG at Berkeley did research. They published things. +University research was supposed to be open and freely distributed. AT&T was +trying to steal the work of hundreds if not thousands of students, researchers, +professors, and others. That wasn't fair. + +In reality, AT&T did pay something for what they got. They sent their employees +to Berkeley to get master's degrees, they shared the original Versions 5, 6, +and 7 and 32/V source code, and they even sent some hardware to the computer +science department. The original creators of UNIX lived and worked at Bell Labs +drawing AT&T paychecks. Berkeley students got summer jobs at AT&T. There wasn't +an official quid-pro-quo. It wasn't very well spelled out, but AT&T was paying +something. + +Some folks on AT&T's side might even want to paint the CSRG at Berkeley as +filled with academic freeloaders who worked hard to weasel money out of the big +corporations without considering the implications. The folks at Berkeley should +have known that AT&T was going to want something for its contributions. There's +no such thing as a free lunch. + +There's something to this argument because running a high-rent research project +at a top-notch school requires a fair amount of guile and marketing +sophistication. By the 1990s, the top universities had become very good at +making vague, unofficial promises with their pleas for corporate gifts. This +sort of coquetry and teasing was bound to land someone in a fight. McKusick, +for instance, says that the CSRG designed the BSD license to be very liberal to +please the corporate donors. "Hewlett-Packard put in hundreds of thousands of +dollars and they were doing so under the understanding that they were going to +use the code," he said. If the BSD hadn't kept releasing code like Network +Release 2 in a clear, easy-to-reuse legal form, he says, some of the funding +for the group would have dried up. + +But there's also a bit of irony here. McKusick points out that AT&T was far +from the most generous company to support the CSRG. "In fact, we even had to +pay for our license to UNIX," he says before adding, "although it was only +ninety-nine dollars at the time." + +AT&T's support of the department was hardly bountiful. The big checks weren't +grants outright. They paid for the out-of-state tuition for AT&T employees who +came to Berkeley to receive their master's degrees. While AT&T could have sent +their employees elsewhere, there's no doubt that there are more generous ways +to send money to researchers. + +McKusick also notes that AT&T didn't even send along much hardware. The only +hardware he remembers receiving from them were some 5620 terminals and a +Datakit circuit-based switch that he says "was a huge headache that really did +us very little good." Berkeley was on the forefront of developing the +packet-based standards that would dominate the Internet. If anything, the older +circuit-based switch convinced the Berkeley team that basing the Internet on +the old phone system would be a major mistake. + +To make matters worse, AT&T often wanted the BSD team to include features that +would force all the BSD users to buy a newer, more expensive license from AT&T. +In addition, license verification was never a quick or easy task. McKusick +says, "We had a person whose fulltime job was to keep the AT&T licensing person +happy." + +In the end, he concludes, "They paid us next to nothing and got a huge +windfall." + +Choosing sides in this battle probably isn't worth the trouble at this point +because Berkeley eventually won. The hard work of Bostic's hundreds of +volunteers and the careful combing of the kernel by the CSRG paid off. AT&T's +case slowly withered away as the University of California was able to show how +much of the distribution came from innocent, non-AT&T sources. + +Berkeley even landed a few good blows of its own. They found that AT&T had +stripped copyrights from Berkeley code that they had imported to System V and +had failed to provide due credit to Berkeley. The BSD license is probably one +of the least restrictive ones in the world. Companies like Apple use BSD source +code all the time. The license has few requirements beyond keeping the +copyright notice intact and including some credit for the University of +California. AT&T didn't pay attention to this and failed to cite Berkeley's +contributions in their releases. Oops. The CSRG countersued claiming that AT&T +had violated a license that may be one of the least restrictive in the world. + +The battle raged in the courts for more than a year. It moved from federal to +California state court. Judges held hearings, lawyers took depositions, clerks +read briefs, judges heard arguments presented by briefs written by lawyers who +had just held depositions. The burn rate of legal fees was probably larger than +most Internet start-ups. + +Any grown-up should take one look at this battle and understand just how the +free software movement got so far. While the Berkeley folks were meeting with +lawyers and worrying about whether the judges were going to choose the right +side, Linus Torvalds was creating his own kernel. He started Linux on his own, +and that made him a free man. + +In the end, the University of California settled the lawsuit after the USL was +sold to Novell, a company run by Ray Noorda. McKusick believes that Noorda's +embrace of free competition made a big difference, and by January 1994 the +legal fight was over. Berkeley celebrated by releasing a completely free and +unencumbered 4.4BSD-Lite in June 1994. + +The terms of the settlement were pretty minor. Net Release 2 came with about +18,000 files. 4.4BSD-Lite contained all but three of them. Seventy of them +included a new, expanded copyright that gave some credit to AT&T and USL, but +didn't constrain anyone's right to freely distribute them. McKusick, Bostic, +and the hundreds of volunteers did a great job making sure that Net Release 2 +was clean. In fact, two people familiar with the settlement talks say that +Berkeley just deleted a few files to allow USL's lawyers to save face. We'll +never know for sure because the details of the settlement are sealed. McKusick +and the others can't talk about the details. That's another great example of +how the legal system fails the American people and inadvertently gives the free +software world another leg up. There's no information in the record to help +historians or give future generations some hints on how to solve similar +disputes. + +1~ Outsider + +The battle between the University of California at Berkeley's computer science +department and AT&T did not reach the court system until 1992, but the friction +between the department's devotion to sharing and the corporation's insistence +on control started long before. + +While the BSD team struggled with lawyers, a free man in Finland began to write +his own operating system without any of the legal or institutional encumbrance. +At the beginning he said it was a project that probably wouldn't amount to +much, but only a few years later people began to joke about "Total World +Domination." A few years after that, they started using the phrase seriously. + +In April 1991, Linus Torvalds had a problem. He was a relatively poor +university student in Finland who wanted to hack in the guts of a computer +operating system. Microsoft's machines at the time were the cheapest around, +but they weren't very interesting. The basic Disk Operating System (DOS) +essentially let one program control the computer. Windows 3.1 was not much more +than a graphical front end to DOS featuring pretty pictures--icons--to +represent the files. Torvalds wanted to experiment with a real OS, and that +meant UNIX or something that was UNIX-like. These real OSs juggled hundreds of +programs at one time and often kept dozens of users happy. Playing with DOS was +like practicing basketball shots by yourself. Playing with UNIX was like +playing with a team that had 5, 10, maybe as many as 100 people moving around +the court in complicated, clockwork patterns. + +But UNIX machines cost a relative fortune. The high-end customers requested the +OS, so generally only high-end machines came with it. A poor university student +in Finland didn't have the money for a topnotch Sun Sparc station. He could +only afford a basic PC, which came with the 386 processor. This was a +top-of-the-line PC at the time, but it still wasn't particularly exciting. A +few companies made a version of UNIX for this low-end machine, but they charged +for it. + +In June 1991, soon after Torvalds~{ Everyone in the community, including many +who don't know him, refers to him by his first name. The rules of style prevent +me from using that in something as proper as a book. }~ started his little +science project, the Computer Systems Research Group at Berkeley released what +they thought was their completely unencumbered version of BSD UNIX known as +Network Release 2. Several projects emerged to port this to the 386, and the +project evolved to become the FreeBSD and NetBSD versions of today. Torvalds +has often said that he might never have started Linux if he had known that he +could just download a more complete OS from Berkeley. + +But Torvalds didn't know about BSD at the time, and he's lucky he didn't. +Berkeley was soon snowed under by the lawsuit with AT&T claiming that the +university was somehow shipping AT&T's intellectual property. Development of +the BSD system came to a screeching halt as programmers realized that AT&T +could shut them down at any time if Berkeley was found guilty of giving away +source code that AT&T owned. + +If he couldn't afford to buy a UNIX machine, he would write his own version. He +would make it POSIX-compatible, a standard for UNIX designers, so others would +be able to use it. Minix was another UNIXlike OS that a professor, Andrew +Tanenbaum, wrote for students to experiment with the guts of an OS. Torvalds +initially considered using Minix as a platform. Tanenbaum included the source +code to his project, but he charged for the package. It was like a textbook for +students around the world. + +Torvalds looked at the price of Minix ($150) and thought it was too much. +Richard Stallman's GNU General Public License had taken root in Torvalds's +brain, and he saw the limitations in charging for software. GNU had also +produced a wide variety of tools and utility programs that he could use on his +machine. Minix was controlled by Tanenbaum, albeit with a much looser hand than +many of the other companies at the time. + +People could add their own features to Minix and some did. They did get a copy +of the source code for $150. But few changes made their way back into Minix. +Tanenbaum wanted to keep it simple and grew frustrated with the many people +who, as he wrote back then, "want to turn Minix into BSD UNIX." + +So Torvalds started writing his own tiny operating system for this 386. It +wasn't going to be anything special. It wasn't going to topple AT&T or the +burgeoning Microsoft. It was just going to be a fun experiment in writing a +computer operating system that was all his. He wrote in January 1992," Many +things should have been done more portably if it would have been a real +project. I'm not making overly many excuses about it though: it was a design +decision, and last April when I started the thing, I didn't think anybody would +actually want to use it." + +Still, Torvalds had high ambitions. He was writing a toy, but he wanted it to +have many, if not all, of the features found in full-strength UNIX versions on +the market. On July 3, he started wondering how to accomplish this and placed a +posting on the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix, writing: + +_1 Hello netlanders, Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested +in the posix standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a +(preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would +be nice. + +Torvalds's question was pretty simple. When he wrote the message in 1991, UNIX +was one of the major operating systems in the world. The project that started +at AT&T and Berkeley was shipping on computers from IBM, Sun, Apple, and most +manufacturers of higher-powered machines known as workstations. Wall Street +banks and scientists loved the more powerful machines, and they loved the +simplicity and hackability of UNIX machines. In an attempt to unify the +marketplace, computer manufacturers created a way to standardize UNIX and +called it POSIX. POSIX ensured that each UNIX machine would behave in a +standardized way. + +Torvalds worked quickly. By September he was posting notes to the group with +the subject line "What would you like to see most in Minix?" He was adding +features to his clone, and he wanted to take a poll about where he should add +next. + +Torvalds already had some good news to report. "I've currently ported +bash(1.08) and GCC(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get +something practical within a few months," he said. + +At first glance, he was making astounding progress. He created a working system +with a compiler in less than half a year. But he also had the advantage of +borrowing from the GNU project. Stallman's GNU project group had already +written a compiler (GCC) and a nice text user interface (bash). Torvalds just +grabbed these because he could. He was standing on the shoulders of the giants +who had come before him. + +The core of an OS is often called the "kernel," which is one of the strange +words floating around the world of computers. When people are being proper, +they note that Linus Torvalds was creating the Linux kernel in 1991. Most of +the other software, like the desktop, the utilities, the editors, the web +browsers, the games, the compilers, and practically everything else, was +written by other folks. If you measure this in disk space, more than 95 percent +of the code in an average distribution lies outside the kernel. If you measure +it by user interaction, most people using Linux or BSD don't even know that +there's a kernel in there. The buttons they click, the websites they visit, and +the printing they do are all controlled by other programs that do the work. + +Of course, measuring the importance of the kernel this way is stupid. The +kernel is sort of the combination of the mail room, boiler room, kitchen, and +laundry room for a computer. It's responsible for keeping the data flowing +between the hard drives, the memory, the printers, the video screen, and any +other part that happens to be attached to the computer. + +In many respects, a well-written kernel is like a fine hotel. The guests check +in, they're given a room, and then they can order whatever they need from room +service and a smoothly oiled concierge staff. Is this new job going to take an +extra 10 megabytes of disk space? No problem, sir. Right away, sir. We'll be +right up with it. Ideally, the software won't even know that other software is +running in a separate room. If that other program is a loud rock-and-roll MP3 +playing tool, the other software won't realize that when it crashes and burns +up its own room. The hotel just cruises right along, taking care of business. + +In 1991, Torvalds had a short list of features he wanted to add to the kernel. +The Internet was still a small network linking universities and some advanced +labs, and so networking was a small concern. He was only aiming at the 386, so +he could rely on some of the special features that weren't available on other +chips. High-end graphics hardware cards were still pretty expensive, so he +concentrated on a text-only interface. He would later fix all of these problems +with the help of the people on the Linux kernel mailing list, but for now he +could avoid them. + +Still, hacking the kernel means anticipating what other programmers might do to +ruin things. You don't know if someone's going to try to snag all 128 megabytes +of RAM available. You don't know if someone's going to hook up a strange old +daisy-wheel printer and try to dump a PostScript file down its throat. You +don't know if someone's going to create an endless loop that's going to write +random numbers all over the memory. Stupid programmers and dumb users do these +things every day, and you've got to be ready for it. The kernel of the OS has +to keep things flowing smoothly between all the different parts of the system. +If one goes bad because of a sloppy bit of code, the kernel needs to cut it off +like a limb that's getting gangrene. If one job starts heating up, the kernel +needs to try to give it all the resources it can so the user will be happy. The +kernel hacker needs to keep all of these things straight. + +Creating an operating system like this is no easy job. Many of the commercial +systems crash frequently for no perceptible reason, and most of the public just +takes it.~{ Microsoft now acknowledges the existence of a bug in the tens of +millions of copies of Windows 95 and Windows 98 that will cause your computer +to 'stop responding (hang)'--you know, what you call crash--after exactly 49 +days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47.296 seconds of continuous operation . . . . +Why 49.7? days? Because computers aren't counting the days. They're counting +the milliseconds. One counter begins when Windows starts up; when it gets to +232 milliseconds--which happens to be 49.7 days--well, that's the biggest +number this counter can handle. And instead of gracefully rolling over and +starting again at zero, it manages to bring the entire operating system to a +halt."--James Gleick in the New York Times. }~ Many people somehow assume that +it must be their fault that the program failed. In reality, it's probably the +kernel's. Or more precisely, it's the kernel designer's fault for not +anticipating what could go wrong. + +By the mid-1970s, companies and computer scientists were already experimenting +with many different ways to create workable operating systems. While the +computers of the day weren't very powerful by modern standards, the programmers +created operating systems that let tens if not hundreds of people use a machine +simultaneously. The OS would keep the different tasks straight and make sure +that no user could interfere with another. + +As people designed more and more operating systems, they quickly realized that +there was one tough question: how big should it be? Some people argued that the +OS should be as big as possible and come complete with all the features that +someone might want to use. Others countered with stripped-down designs that +came with a small core of the OS surrounded by thousands of little programs +that did the same thing. + +To some extent, the debate is more about semantics than reality. A user wants +the computer to be able to list the different files stored in one directory. It +doesn't matter if the question is answered by a big operating system that +handles everything or a little operating system that uses a program to find the +answer. The job still needs to be done, and many of the instructions are the +same. It's just a question of whether the instructions are labeled the +"operating system" or an ancillary program. + +But the debate is also one about design. Programmers, teachers, and the Lego +company all love to believe that any problem can be solved by breaking it down +into small parts that can be assembled to create the whole. Every programmer +wants to turn the design of an operating system into thousands of little +problems that can be solved individually. This dream usually lasts until +someone begins to assemble the parts and discovers that they don't work +together as perfectly as they should. + +When Torvalds started crafting the Linux kernel, he decided he was going to +create a bigger, more integrated version that he called a "monolithic kernel." +This was something of a bold move because the academic community was entranced +with what they called "microkernels." The difference is partly semantic and +partly real, but it can be summarized by analogy with businesses. Some +companies try to build large, smoothly integr the steps of production. Others +try to create smaller operations that subcontract much of the production work +to other companies. One is big, monolithic, and all-encompassing, while the +other is smaller, fragmented, and heterogeneous. It's not uncommon to find two +companies in the same industry taking different approaches and thinking they're +doing the right thing. + +The design of an operating system often boils down to the same decision. Do we +want to build a monolithic core that handles all the juggling internally, or do +we want a smaller, more fragmented model that should be more flexible as long +as the parts interact correctly? + +In time, the OS world started referring to this core as the kernel of the +operating system. People who wanted to create big OSs with many features wrote +monolithic kernels. Their ideological enemies who wanted to break the OS into +hundreds of small programs running on a small core wrote microkernels. Some of +the most extreme folks labeled their work a nanokernel because they thought it +did even less and thus was even more pure than those bloated microkernels. + +The word "kernel" is a bit confusing for most people because they often use it +to mean a fragment of an object or a small fraction. An extreme argument may +have a kernel of truth to it. A disaster movie always gives the characters and +the audience a kernel of hope to which to cling. + +Mathematicians use the word a bit differently and emphasize the word's ability +to let a small part define a larger concept. Technically, a kernel of a +function f is the set of values, x1, x2, . . . +xn such that f(xi)=1, or whatever the identity element +happens to be. The action of the kernel of a function does a good job of +defining how the function behaves with all the other elements. The algebraists +study a kernel of a function because it reveals the overall behavior.~{ The +kernel of f(x)=x2 is (-1, 1) and it illustrates how the function has +two branches. }~ + +The OS designers use the word in the same way. If they define the kernel +correctly, then the behavior of the rest of the OS will follow. The small part +of the code defines the behavior of the entire computer. If the kernel does one +thing well, the entire computer will do it well. If it does one thing badly, +then everything will suffer. + +Many computer users often notice this effect without realizing why it ated +operations where one company controls all exists. Most Macintosh computers, for +instance, can be sluggish at times because the OS does not do a good job +juggling the workload between processes. The kernel of the OS has not been +completely overhauled since the early days when the machines ran one program at +a time. This sluggishness will persist for a bit longer until Macintosh +releases a new version known as MacOS X. This will be based on the Mach kernel, +a version developed at Carnegie-Mellon University and released as open source +software. Steve Jobs adopted it when he went to NeXT, a company that was +eventually folded back into Apple. This kernel does a much better job of +juggling different tasks because it uses preemptive multitasking instead of +cooperative multitasking. The original version of the MacOS let each program +decide when and if it was going to give up control of the computer to let other +programs run. This low-rent version of juggling was called cooperative +multitasking, but it failed when some program in the hotel failed to cooperate. +Most software developers obeyed the rules, but mistakes would still occur. Bad +programs would lock up the machine. Preemptive multitasking takes this power +away from the individual programs. It swaps control from program to program +without asking permission. One pig of a program can't slow down the entire +machine. When the new MacOS X kernel starts offering preemptive multitasking, +the users should notice less sluggish behavior and more consistent performance. + +Torvalds plunged in and created a monolithic kernel. This made it easier to +tweak all the strange interactions between the programs. Sure, a microkernel +built around a clean, message-passing architecture was an elegant way to +construct the guts of an OS, but it had its problems. There was no easy way to +deal with special exceptions. Let's say you want a web server to run very +quickly on your machine. That means you need to treat messages coming into the +computer from the Internet with exceptional speed. You need to ship them with +the equivalent of special delivery or FedEx. You need to create a special +exception for them. Tacking these exceptions onto a clean microkernel starts to +make it look bad. The design starts to get cluttered and less elegant. After a +few special exceptions are added, the microkernel can start to get confused. + +Torvalds's monolithic kernel did not have the elegance or the simplicity of a +microkernel OS like Minix or Mach, but it was easier to hack. New tweaks to +speed up certain features were relatively easy to add. There was no need to +come up with an entirely new architecture for the message-passing system. The +downside was that the guts could grow remarkably byzantine, like the +bureaucracy of a big company. + +In the past, this complexity hurt the success of proprietary operating systems. +The complexity produced bugs because no one could understand it. Torvalds's +system, however, came with all the source code, making it much easier for +application programmers to find out what was causing their glitch. To carry the +corporate bureaucracy metaphor a bit further, the source code acted like the +omniscient secretary who is able to explain everything to a harried executive. +This perfect knowledge reduced the cost of complexity. + +By the beginning of 1992, Linux was no longer a Finnish student's part-time +hobby. Several influential programmers became interested in the code. It was +free and relatively usable. It ran much of the GNU code, and that made it a +neat, inexpensive way to experiment with some excellent tools. More and more +people downloaded the system, and a significant fraction started reporting bugs +and suggestions to Torvalds. He rolled them back in and the project snowballed. + +2~ A Hobby Begets a Project that Begets a Movement + +On the face of it, Torvalds's decision to create an OS wasn't extraordinary. +Millions of college-age students decide that they can do anything if they just +put in a bit more elbow grease. The college theater departments, newspapers, +and humor magazines all started with this impulse, and the notion isn't limited +to college students. Millions of adults run Little League teams, build model +railroads, lobby the local government to create parks, and take on thousands of +projects big and small in their spare time. + +Every great idea has a leader who can produce a system to sustain it. Every +small-town lot had kids playing baseball, but a few guys organized a Little +League program that standardized the rules and the competition. Every small +town had people campaigning for parks, but one small group created the Sierra +Club, which fights for parks throughout the world. + +This talent for organizing the work of others is a rare commodity, and Torvalds +had a knack for it. He was gracious about sharing his system with the world and +he never lorded it over anyone. His messages were filled with jokes and +self-deprecating humor, most of which were carefully marked with smiley faces +(:-)) to make sure that the message was clear. If he wrote something pointed, +he would apologize for being a "hothead." He was always gracious in giving +credit to others and noted that much of Linux was just a clone of UNIX. All of +this made him easy to read and thus influential. + +His greatest trick, though, was his decision to avoid the mantle of power. He +wrote in 1992, "Here's my standing on 'keeping control,' in 2 words (three?): I +won't. The only control I've effectively been keeping on Linux is that I know +it better than anybody else." + +He pointed out that his control was only an illusion that was caused by the +fact that he did a good job maintaining the system. "I've made my changes +available to ftp-sites etc. Those have become effectively official releases, +and I don't expect this to change for some time: not because I feel I have some +moral right to it, but because I haven't heard too many complaints." + +As he added new features to his OS, he shipped new copies frequently. The +Internet made this easy to do. He would just pop a new version up on a server +and post a notice for all to read: come download the latest version. + +He made it clear that people could vote to depose him at any time. "If people +feel I do a bad job, they can do it themselves." They could just take all of +his Linux code and start their own version using Torvalds's work as a +foundation. + +Anyone could break off from Torvalds's project because Torvalds decided to ship +the source code to his project under Richard Stallman's GNU General Public +License, or GPL. In the beginning, he issued it with a more restrictive license +that prohibited any "commercial" use, but eventually moved to the GNU license. +This was a crucial decision because it cemented a promise with anyone who spent +a few minutes playing with his toy operating system for the 386. It stated that +all of the source code that Torvalds or anyone else wrote would be freely +accessible and shared with everyone. This decision was a double-edged sword for +the community. Everyone could take the software for free, + +but if they started circulating some new software built with the code, they +would have to donate their changes back to the project. It was like flypaper. +Anyone who started working with the project grew attached to it. They couldn't +run off into their own corner. Some programmers joke that this flypaper license +is like sex. If you make one mistake by hooking up with a project protected by +GPL, you pay for it forever. If you ever ship a version of the project, you +must include all of the source code. It can be distributed freely forever. + +While some people complained about the sticky nature of the GPL, enough saw it +as a virtue. They liked Torvalds's source code, and they liked the fact that +the GPL made them full partners in the project. Anyone could donate their time +and be sure it wasn't going to disappear. The source code became a body of work +held in common trust for everyone. No one could rope it off, fence it in, or +take control. + +In time, Torvalds's pet science project and hacking hobby grew as more people +got interested in playing with the guts of machines. The price was right, and +idle curiosity could be powerful. Some wondered what a guy in Finland could do +with a 386 machine. Others wondered if it was really as usable as the big +machines from commercial companies. Others wondered if it was powerful enough +to solve some problems in the lab. Still others just wanted to tinker. All of +these folks gave it a try, and some even began to contribute to the project. + +Torvalds's burgeoning kernel dovetailed nicely with the tools that the GNU +project created. All of the work by Stallman and his disciples could be easily +ported to work with the operating system core that Torvalds was now calling +Linux. This was the power of freely distributable source code. Anyone could +make a connection, and someone invariably did. Soon, much of the GNU code began +running on Linux. These tools made it easier to create more new programs, and +the snowball began to roll. + +Many people feel that Linus Torvalds's true act of genius was in coming up with +a flexible and responsive system for letting his toy OS grow and change. He +released new versions often, and he encouraged everyone to test them with him. +In the past, many open source developers using the GNU GPL had only shipped new +versions at major landmarks in development, acting a bit like the commercial +developers. After they released version 1.0, they would hole up in their +basements until they had added enough new features to justify version 2.0. + +Torvalds avoided this perfectionism and shared frequently. If he fixed a bug on +Monday, then he would roll out a new version that afternoon. It's not strange +to have two or three new versions hit the Internet each week. This was a bit +more work for Torvalds, but it also made it much easier for others to become +involved. They could watch what he was doing and make their own suggestions. + +This freedom also attracted others to the party. They knew that Linux would +always be theirs, too. They could write neat features and plug them into the +Linux kernel without worrying that Torvalds would yank the rug out from under +them. The GPL was a contract that lasted long into the future. It was a promise +that bound them together. + +The Linux kernel also succeeded because it was written from the ground up for +the PC platform. When the Berkeley UNIX hackers were porting BSD to the PC +platform, they weren't able to make it fit perfectly. They were taking a piece +of software crafted for older computers like the VAX, and shaving off corners +and rewriting sections until it ran on the PC. + +Alan Cox pointed out to me, "The early BSD stuff was by UNIX people for UNIX +people. You needed a calculator and familiarity with BSD UNIX on big machines +(or a lot of reading) to install it. You also couldn't share a disk between +DOS/Windows and 386BSD or the early branches off it. + +"Nowadays FreeBSD understands DOS partitions and can share a disk, but at the +time BSD was scary to install," he continued. + +The BSD also took certain pieces of hardware for granted. Early versions of BSD +required a 387, a numerical coprocessor that would speed up the execution of +floating point numbers. Cox remembers that the price (about $100) was just too +much for his budget. At that time, the free software world was a very lean +organization. + +Torvalds's operating system plugged a crucial hole in the world of free source +software and made it possible for someone to run a computer without paying +anyone for a license. Richard Stallman had dreamed of this day, and Torvalds +came up with the last major piece of the puzzle. + +2~ A Different Kind of Trial + +During the early months of Torvalds's work, the BSD group was stuck in a legal +swamp. While the BSD team was involved with secret settlement talks and secret +depositions, Linus Torvalds was happily writing code and sharing it with the +world on the Net. His life wasn't all peaches and cream, but all of his hassles +were open. Professor Andy Tanenbaum, a fairly well-respected and famous +computer scientist, got in a long, extended debate with Torvalds over the +structure of Linux. He looked down at Linux and claimed that Linux would have +been worth two F's in his class because of its design. This led to a big flame +war that was every bit as nasty as the fight between Berkeley and AT&T's USL. +In fact, to the average observer it was even nastier. Torvalds returned +Tanenbaum's fire with strong words like "fiasco," "brain-damages," and "suck." +He brushed off the bad grades by pointing out that Albert Einstein supposedly +got bad grades in math and physics. The highpriced lawyers working for AT&T and +Berkeley probably used very expensive and polite words to try and hide the +shivs they were trying to stick in each other's back. Torvalds and Tanenbaum +pulled out each other's virtual hair like a squawkfest on the Jerry Springer +show. + +But Torvalds's flame war with Tanenbaum occurred in the open in an Internet +newsgroup. Other folks could read it, think about it, add their two cents' +worth, and even take sides. It was a wide-open debate that uncovered many flaws +in the original versions of Linux and Tanenbaum's Minix. They forced Torvalds +to think deeply about what he wanted to do with Linux and consider its flaws. +He had to listen to the arguments of a critic and a number of his peers on the +Net and then come up with arguments as to why his Linux kernel didn't suck too +badly. + +This open fight had a very different effect from the one going on in the legal +system. Developers and UNIX hackers avoided the various free versions of BSD +because of the legal cloud. If a judge decided that AT&T and USL were right, +everyone would have to abandon their work on the platform. While the CSRG +worked hard to get free, judges don't always make the choices we want. + +The fight between Torvalds and Tanenbaum, however, drew people into the +project. Other programmers like David Miller, Ted T'so, and Peter da Silva +chimed in with their opinions. At the time, they were just interested +bystanders. In time, they became part of the Linux brain trust. Soon they were +contributing source code that ran on Linux. The argument's excitement forced +them to look at Torvalds's toy OS and try to decide whether his defense made +any sense. Today, David Miller is one of the biggest contributors to the Linux +kernel. Many of the original debaters became major contributors to the +foundations of Linux. + +This fight drew folks in and kept them involved. It showed that Torvalds was +serious about the project and willing to think about its limitations. More +important, it exposed these limitations and inspired other folks on the Net to +step forward and try to fix them. Everyone could read the arguments and jump +in. Even now, you can dig up the archives of this battle and read in +excruciating detail what people were thinking and doing. The +AT&T/USL-versus-Berkeley fight is still sealed. + +To this day, all of the devotees of the various BSDs grit their teeth when they +hear about Linux. They think that FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are better, and +they have good reasons for these beliefs. They know they were out the door +first with a complete running system. But Linux is on the cover of the +magazines. All of the great technically unwashed are now starting to use +"Linux" as a synonym for free software. If AT&T never sued, the BSD teams would +be the ones reaping the glory. They would be the ones to whom Microsoft turned +when it needed a plausible competitor. They would be more famous. + +But that's crying over spilled milk. The Berkeley CSRG lived a life of relative +luxury in their world made fat with big corporate and government donations. +They took the cash, and it was only a matter of time before someone called them +on it. Yes, they won in the end, but it came too late. Torvalds was already out +of the gate and attracting more disciples. + +McKusick says, "If you plot the installation base of Linux and BSD over the +last five years, you'll see that they're both in exponential growth. But BSD's +about eighteen to twenty months behind. That's about how long it took between +Net Release 2 and the unencumbered 4.4BSD-Lite. That's about how long it took +for the court system to do its job." + +1~ Growth + +Through the 1990s, the little toy operating system grew slowly and quietly as +more and more programmers were drawn into the vortex. At the beginning, the OS +wasn't rich with features. You could run several different programs at once, +but you couldn't do much with the programs. The system's interface was just +text. Still, this was often good enough for a few folks in labs around the +world. Some just enjoyed playing with computers. Getting Linux running on their +PC was a challenge, not unlike bolting an aftermarket supercharger onto a Honda +Civic. But others took the project more seriously because they had serious jobs +that couldn't be solved with a proprietary operating system that came from +Microsoft or others. + +In time, more people started using the system and started contributing their +additions to the pot. Someone figured out how to make MIT's free X Window +System run on Linux so everyone could have a graphical interface. Someone else +discovered how to roll in technology for interfacing with the Internet. That +made a big difference because everyone could hack, tweak, and fiddle with the +code and then just upload the new versions to the Net. + +It goes without saying that all the cool software coming out of Stallman's Free +Software Foundation found its way to Linux. Some were simple toys like GNU +Chess, but others were serious tools that were essential to the growth of the +project. By 1991, the FSF was offering what might be argued were the best text +editor and compiler in the world. Others might have been close, but Stallman's +were free. These were crucial tools that made it possible for Linux to grow +quickly from a tiny experimental kernel into a full-featured OS for doing +everything a programmer might want to do. + +James Lewis-Moss, one of the many programmers who devote some time to Linux, +says that GCC made it possible for programmers to create, revise, and extend +the kernel. "GCC is integral to the success of Linux," he says, and points out +that this may be one of the most important reasons why "it's polite to refer to +it as GNU/Linux." + +Lewis-Moss points out one of the smoldering controversies in the world of free +software: all of the tools and games that came from the GNU project started +becoming part of what people simply thought of as plain "Linux." The name for +the small kernel of the operating system soon grew to apply to almost all the +free software that ran with it. This angered Stallman, who first argued that a +better name would be"Lignux."When that failed to take hold, he moved to +"GNU/Linux." Some ignored his pleas and simply used "Linux," which is still a +bit unfair. Some feel that"GNU/Linux"is too much of a mouthful and, for better +or worse, just plain Linux is an appropriate shortcut. Some, like Lewis-Moss, +hold firm to GNU/Linux. + +Soon some people were bundling together CD-ROMs with all this software in one +batch. The group would try to work out as many glitches as possible so that the +purchaser's life would be easier. All boasted strange names like Yggdrasil, +Slackware, SuSE, Debian, or Red Hat. Many were just garage projects that never +made much money, but that was okay. Making money wasn't really the point. +People just wanted to play with the source. Plus, few thought that much money +could be made. The GPL, for instance, made it difficult to differentiate the +product because it required everyone to share their source code with the world. +If Slackware came up with a neat fix that made their version of Linux better, +then Debian and SuSE could grab it. The GPL prevented anyone from constraining +the growth of Linux. + +But only greedy businessmen see sharing and competition as negatives. In +practice, the free flow of information enhanced the market for Linux by +ensuring that it was stable and freely available. If one key CDROM developer +gets a new girlfriend and stops spending enough time programming, another +distribution will pick up the slack. If a hurricane flattened Raleigh, North +Carolina, the home of Red Hat, then another supplier would still be around. A +proprietary OS like Windows is like a set of manacles. An earthquake in +Redmond, Washington, could cause a serious disruption for everyone. + +The competition and the GPL meant that the users would never feel bound to one +OS. If problems arose, anyone could always just start a splinter group and take +Linux in that direction. And they did. All the major systems began as splinter +groups, and some picked up enough steam and energy to dominate. In time, the +best splinter groups spun off their own splinter groups and the process grew +terribly complicated. + +2~ The Establishment Begins to Notice + +By the mid-1990s, the operating system had already developed quite a following. +In 1994, Jon Hall was a programmer for Digital, a company that was later bought +by Compaq. Hall also wears a full beard and uses the name "maddog" as a +nickname. At that time, Digital made workstations that ran a version of UNIX. +In the early 1990s, Digital made a big leap forward by creating a 64-bit +processor version of its workstation CPU chip, the Alpha, and the company +wanted to make sure that the chip found widespread acceptance. + +Hall remembers well the moment he discovered Linux. He told Linux Today, + +_1 I didn't even know I was involved with Linux at first. I got a copy of Dr. +Dobb's Journal, and in there was an advertisement for "get a UNIX operating +system, all the source code, and run it on your PC." And I think it was $99. +And I go, "Oh, wow, that's pretty cool. For $99, I can do that." So I sent away +for it, got the CD. The only trouble was that I didn't have a PC to run it on. +So I put it on my Ultrix system, took a look at the main pages, directory +structure and stuff, and said, "Hey, that looks pretty cool." Then I put it +away in the filing cabinet. That was probably around January of 1994. + +In May 1994, Hall met Torvalds at a DECUS (Digital Equipment Corporation User +Society) meeting and became a big fan. Hall is a programmer's programmer who +has written code for many different machines over the years, like the IBM 1130 +and the DEC PDP-8. He started out as an electrical engineer in college, but +took up writing software "after seeing a friend of mine fried by 13,600 volts +and 400 amps, which was not a pretty sight." Hall started playing with UNIX +when he worked at Bell Labs and fell in love with the OS. + +At the meeting, Torvalds helped Hall and his boss set up a PC with Linux. This +was the first time that Hall actually saw Linux run, and he was pleasantly +surprised. He said, "By that time I had been using UNIX for probably about +fifteen years. I had used System V, I had used Berkeley, and all sorts of +stuff, and this really felt like UNIX. You know . . . I mean, it's kind of like +playing the piano. You can play the piano, even if it's a crappy piano. But +when it's a really good piano, your fingers just fly over the keys. That's the +way this felt. It felt good, and I was really impressed." + +This experience turned Hall into a true convert and he went back to Digital +convinced that the Linux project was more than just some kids playing with a +toy OS. These so-called amateurs with no centralized system or corporate +backing had produced a very, very impressive system that was almost as good as +the big commercial systems. Hall was an instant devotee. Many involved in the +project recall their day of conversion with the same strength. A bolt of +lightning peeled the haze away from their eyes, and they saw. + +Hall set out trying to get Torvalds to rewrite Linux so it would work well on +the Alpha. This was not a simple task, but it was one that helped the operating +system grow a bit more. The original version included some software that +assumed the computer was designed like the Intel 386. This was fine when Linux +only ran on Intel machines, but removing these assumptions made it possible for +the software to run well on all types of machines. + +Hall went sailing with Torvalds to talk about the guts of the Linux OS. Hall +told me, "I took him out on the Mississippi River, went up and down the +Mississippi in the river boat, drinking Hurricanes, and I said to him, 'Linus, +did you ever think about porting Linux to a 64-bit processor, like the Alpha?' +He said, 'Well, I thought about doing that, but the Helsinki office has been +having problems getting me a system, so I guess I'll have to do the PowerPC +instead.' + +"I knew that was the wrong answer, so I came back to Digital (at the time), and +got a friend of mine, named Bill Jackson, to send out a system to Linus, and he +received it about a couple weeks after that. Then I found some people inside +Digital who were also thinking about porting Linux to an Alpha. I got the two +groups together, and after that, we started on the Alpha Linux project." + +This was one of the first times that a major corporation started taking note of +what was happening in the garages and basements of hardcore computer +programmers. It was also one of the first times that a corporation looked at an +open source operating system and did not react with fear or shock. Sun was +always a big contributor of open source software, but they kept their OS +proprietary. Hall worked tirelessly at Digital to ensure that the corporation +understood the implications of the GPL and saw that it was a good way to get +more interested in the Alpha chip. He says he taught upper management at +Digital how to "say the L-word." + +Hall also helped start a group called Linux International, which works to make +the corporate world safe for Linux. "We help vendors understand the Linux +marketplace," Hall told me. "There's a lot of confusion about what the GPL +means. Less now, but still there's a lot of confusion. We helped them find the +markets." + +Today, Linux International helps control the trademark on the name Linux and +ensures that it is used in an open way. "When someone wanted to call themselves +something like 'Linux University,' we said that's bad because there's going to +be more than one. 'Linux University of North Carolina' is okay. It opens up the +space." + +In the beginning, Torvalds depended heavily on the kindness of strangers like +Hall. He didn't have much money, and the Linux project wasn't generating a huge +salary for him. Of course, poverty also made it easier for people like Hall to +justify giving him a machine. Torvalds wasn't rich monetarily, but he became +rich in machines. + +By 1994, when Hall met Torvalds, Linux was already far from just a one-man +science project. The floppy disks and CD-ROMs holding a version of the OS were +already on the market, and this distribution mechanism was one of the crucial +unifying forces. Someone could just plunk down a few dollars and get a version +that was more or less ready to run. Many simply downloaded their versions for +free from the Internet. + +2~ Making it Easy to Use + +In 1994, getting Linux to run was never really as simple as putting the CD-ROM +in the drive and pressing a button. Many of the programs didn't work with +certain video cards. Some modems didn't talk to Linux. Not all of the printers +communicated correctly. Yet most of the software worked together on many +standard machines. It often took a bit of tweaking, but most people could get +the OS up and running on their computers. + +This was a major advance for the Linux OS because most people could quickly +install a new version without spending too much time downloading the new code +or debugging it. Even programmers who understood exactly what was happening +felt that installing a new version was a long, often painful slog through +technical details. These CDROMs not only helped programmers, they also +encouraged casual users to experiment with the system. + +The CD-ROM marketplace also created a new kind of volunteer for the project. +Someone had to download the latest code from the author. Someone had to watch +the kernel mailing list to see when Torvalds, Cox, and the rest had minted a +new version that was stable enough to release. Someone needed to check all the +other packages like GNU Emacs or GNU CC to make sure they still worked +correctly. This didn't require the obsessive programming talent that created +the kernel, but it did take some dedication and devotion. + +Today, there are many different kinds of volunteers putting together these +packages. The Debian group, for instance, is one of the best known and most +devoted to true open source principles. It was started by Ian Murdock, who +named it after himself and his girlfriend, Debra. The Debian group, which now +includes hundreds of official members, checks to make sure that the software is +both technically sound and politically correct. That is, they check the +licenses to make sure that the software can be freely distributed by all users. +Their guidelines later morphed into the official definition of open source +software. + +Other CD-ROM groups became more commercial. Debian sold its disks to pay for +Internet connection fees and other expenses, but they were largely a garage +operation. So were groups with names like Slackware, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. +Other groups like Red Hat actually set out to create a burgeoning business, and +to a large extent, they succeeded. They took the money and used it to pay +programmers who wrote more software to make Linux easier to use. + +In the beginning, there wasn't much difference between the commercially minded +groups like Red Hat and the more idealistic collectives like Debian. The +marketplace was small, fragmented, and tribal. But by 1998, Red Hat had +attracted major funding from companies like Intel, and it plowed more and more +money into making the package as presentable and easy to use as possible. This +investment paid off because more users turned instinctively to Red Hat, whose +CD-ROM sales then exploded. + +Most of this development lived in its own Shangri-La. Red Hat, for instance, +charged money for its disks, but released all of its software under the GPL. +Others could copy their disks for free, and many did. Red Hat may be a company, +but the management realized that they depended on thousands if not millions of +unpaid volunteers to create their product. + +Slowly but surely, more and more people became aware of Linux, the GNU project, +and its cousins like FreeBSD. No one was making much money off the stuff, but +the word of mouth was spreading very quickly. The disks were priced reasonably, +and people were curious. The GPL encouraged people to share. People began +borrowing disks from their friends. Some companies even manufactured cheap +rip-off copies of the CD-ROMs, an act that the GPL encouraged. + +At the top of the pyramid was Linus Torvalds. Many Linux developers treated him +like the king of all he surveyed, but he was like the monarchs who were denuded +by a popular constitutional democracy. He had always focused on building a +fast, stable kernel, and that was what he continued to do. The rest of the +excitement, the packaging, the features, and the toys, were the dominion of the +volunteers and contributors. + +Torvalds never said much about the world outside his kernel, and it developed +without him. + +Torvalds moved to Silicon Valley and took a job with the very secret company +Transmeta in order to help design the next generation of computer chips. He +worked out a special deal with the company that allowed him to work on Linux in +his spare time. He felt that working for one of the companies like Red Hat +would give that one version of Linux a special imprimatur, and he wanted to +avoid that. Plus, Transmeta was doing cool things. + +In January 1999, the world caught up with the pioneers. Schmalensee mentioned +Linux on the witness stand during the trial and served official notice to the +world that Microsoft was worried about the growth of Linux. The system had been +on the company's radar screen for some time. In October 1998, an internal memo +from Microsoft describing the threat made its way to the press. Some thought it +was just Microsoft's way of currying favor during the antitrust investigation. +Others thought it was a serious treatment of a topic that was difficult for the +company to understand. + +The media followed Schmalensee's lead. Everyone wanted to know about Linux, +GNU, open source software, and the magical effects of widespread, unconditional +sharing. The questions came in tidal waves, and Torvalds tried to answer them +again and again. Was he sorry he gave it all away? No. If he charged anything, +no one would have bought his toy and no one would have contributed anything. +Was he a communist? No, he was rather apolitical. Don't programmers have to +eat? Yes, but they will make their money selling a service instead of getting +rich off bad proprietary code. Was Linux going to overtake Microsoft? Yes, if +he had his way. World Domination Soon became the motto. + +But there were also difficult questions. How would the Linux world resist the +embrace of big companies like IBM, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and maybe even +Microsoft? These were massive companies with paid programmers and schedules to +meet. All the open source software was just as free to them as anyone else. +Would these companies use their strength to monopolize Linux? + +Some were worried that the money would tear apart the open source community. +It's easy to get everyone to donate their time to a project when no one is +getting paid. Money changes the equation. Would a gulf develop between the rich +companies like Red Hat and the poor programmers who just gave away their hard +work? + +Many wanted to know when Linux would become easier to use for nonprogrammers. +Programmers built the OS to be easy to take apart and put back together again. +That's a great feature if you like hacking the inside of a kernel, but that +doesn't excite the average computer user. How was the open source community +going to get the programmers to donate their time to fix the mundane, everyday +glitches that confused and infuriated the nonprogrammers? Was the Linux +community going to be able to produce something that a nonprogrammer could even +understand? + +Others wondered if the Linux world could ever agree enough to create a software +package with some coherence. Today, Microsoft users and programmers pull their +hair out trying to keep Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT straight. Little +idiosyncrasies cause games to crash and programs to fail. Microsoft has +hundreds of quality assurance engineers and thousands of support personnel. +Still, the little details drive everyone crazy. + +New versions of Linux appear as often as daily. People often create their own +versions to solve particular problems. Many of these changes won't affect +anyone, but they can add up. Is there enough consistency to make the tools easy +enough to use? + +Many wondered if Linux was right for world domination. Programmers might love +playing with source code, but the rest of the world just wants something that +delivers the e-mail on time. More important, the latter are willing to pay for +this efficiency. + +Such questions have been bothering the open source community for years and +still have no easy answers today. Programmers need food, and food requires +money. Making easy-to-use software requires discipline, and discipline doesn't +always agree with total freedom. + +When the first wave of hype about free software swept across the zeitgeist, no +one wanted to concentrate on these difficult questions. The high quality of +free operating systems and their use at high-profile sites like Yahoo! was good +news for the world. The success of unconditional cooperation was intoxicating. +If free software could do so much with so little, it could overcome the +difficult questions. Besides, it didn't have to be perfect. It just needed to +be better than Microsoft. + +1~ Freedom + +The notion embodied by the word "free" is one of the great marketing devices of +all time. Cereal manufacturers know that kids will slog through bowls of sugar +to get a free prize. Stores know that people will gladly give them their names +and addresses if they stand a chance of winning something for free. Car ads +love to emphasize the freedom a new car will give to someone. + +Of course, Microsoft knows this fact as well. One of their big advertising +campaigns stresses the freedom to create new documents, write long novels, +fiddle with photographs, and just do whatever you want with a computer. "Where +do you want to go today?" the Microsoft ads ask. + +Microsoft also recognizes the pure power of giving away something for free. +When Bill Gates saw Netscape's browser emerging as a great competitive threat, +he first bought a competing version and then wrote his own version of a web +browser. Microsoft gave their versions away for free. This bold move shut down +the revenue stream of Netscape, which had to cut its price to zero in order to +compete. Of course, Netscape didn't have revenues from an operating system to +pay the rent. Netscape cried foul and eventually the Department of Justice +brought a lawsuit to decide whether the free software from Microsoft was just a +plot to keep more people paying big bucks for their not-so-free Windows OS. The +fact that Microsoft is now threatened by a group of people who are giving away +a free OS has plenty of irony. + +The word "free" has a much more complicated and nuanced meaning within the free +software movement. In fact, many people who give away their software don't even +like the word "free" and prefer to use "open" to describe the process of +sharing. In the case of free software, it's not just an ad campaign to make +people feel good about buying a product. It's also not a slick marketing +sleight of hand to focus people's attention on a free gift while the magician +charges full price for a product. The word "free" is more about a way of life. +The folks who write the code throw around the word in much the same way the +Founding Fathers of the United States used it. To many of them, the free +software revolution was also conceived in liberty and dedicated to certain +principles like the fact that all men and women have certain inalienable rights +to change, modify, and do whatever they please with their software in the +pursuit of happiness. + +Tossing about the word "free" is easy to do. Defining what it means takes much +longer. The Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, but the colonial +governments fought and struggled with creating a free government through the +ratification of the current United States Constitution in 1787. The Bill of +Rights came soon afterward, and the Supreme Court is still continually +struggling with defining the boundaries of freedom described by the document. +Much of the political history of the United States might be said to be an +extended argument about the meaning of the words "free country." + +The free software movement is no different. It's easy for one person to simply +give their software away for free. It's much harder to attract and organize an +army to take on Microsoft and dominate the world. That requires a proper +definition of the word "free" so that everyone understands the rights and +limitations behind the word. Everyone needs to be on the same page if the +battle is to be won. Everyone needs to understand what is meant by "free +software." + +The history of the free software world is also filled with long, extended +arguments defining the freedom that comes bundled with the source code. Many +wonder if it is more about giving the user something for nothing, or if is it +about empowering him. Does this freedom come with any responsibilities? What +should they be? How is the freedom enforced? Is freeloading a proper part of +the freedom? + +In the early years of computers, there were no real arguments. Software was +free because people just shared it with each other. Magazines like Creative +Computing and BYTE published the source code to programs because that was an +easy way to share information. + +People would even type in the data themselves. Computers cost money, and +getting them to run was part of the challenge. Sharing software was just part +of being neighborly. If someone needed to borrow your plow, you lent it to them +when you weren't using it. + +This changed as corporations recognized that they could copyright software and +start charging money for it. Most people loved this arrangement because the +competition brought new packages and tools to market and people were more than +willing to pay for them. How else are the programmers and the manual writers +going to eat? + +A few people thought this was a disaster. Richard Stallman watched the world +change from his office in the artificial intelligence labs of MIT. Stallman is +the ultimate hacker, if you use the word in the classical sense. In the +beginning, the word only described someone who knows how to program well and +loves to poke around in the insides of computers. It only took on its more +malicious tone later as the media managed to group all of those with the +ability to wrangle computers into the same dangerous camp. Hackers often use +the term "cracker" to refer to these people. + +Stallman is a model of the hacker. He is strident, super intelligent, highly +logical, and completely honest. Most corporations keep their hackers shut off +in a back room because these traits seem to scare away customers and investors +who just want sweet little lies in their ears. Stallman was never that kind of +guy. He looked at the burgeoning corporate control of software and didn't like +it one bit. His freedom was slowly being whittled away, and he wasn't the type +to simply sit by and not say anything. + +When Stallman left the AI lab in 1984, he didn't want to be controlled by its +policies. Universities started adopting many of the same practices as the +corporations in the 1980s, and Stallman couldn't be a special exception. If MIT +was going to be paying him a salary, MIT would own his code and any patents +that came from it. Even MIT, which is a much cooler place than most, couldn't +accommodate him on staff. He didn't move far, however, because after he set up +the Free Software Foundation, he kept an office at MIT, first unofficially and +then officially. Once he wasn't "on the staff," the rules became different. + +Stallman turned to consulting for money, but it was consulting with a twist. He +would only work for companies that wouldn't put any restrictions on the +software he created. This wasn't an easy sell. He was insisting that any work +he did for Corporation X could also be shared with Corporations Y and Z, even +if they were direct competitors. + +This wasn't how things were done in the 1980s. That was the decade when +companies figured out how to lock up the source code to a program by only +distributing a machine-readable version. They hoped this would control their +product and let them restrain people who might try to steal their ideas and +their intellectual property. Stallman thought it was shutting down his ability +to poke around inside the computer and fix it. This secrecy blocked him from +sharing his thoughts and ideas with other programmers. + +Most programmers looked at the scheme of charging for locked-up binary versions +of a program as a necessary evil. Sure, they couldn't play around with the guts +of Microsoft Windows, but it also meant that no one could play around with the +guts of the programs they wrote. The scheme locked doors and compartmentalized +the world, but it also gave the creator of programs more power. Most +programmers thought having power over their own creation was pretty neat, even +if others had more power. Being disarmed is okay if everyone else is disarmed +and locked in a cage. + +Stallman thought this was a disaster for the world and set out to convince the +world that he was right. In 1984, he wrote the GNU Manifesto, which started his +GNU project and laid out the conditions for his revolution. This document stood +out a bit in the middle of the era of Ronald Reagan because it laid out +Stallman's plan for creating a virtual commune where people would be free to +use the software. It is one of the first cases when someone tried to set down a +definition of the word "free" for software users. Sure, software and ideas were +quite free long ago, but no one noticed until the freedom was gone. + +He wrote, + +_1 I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must +share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the +users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I +refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. . . . So that I can +continue to use computers without dishonor, I have decided to put together a +sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without +any software that is not free. + +The document is a wonderful glimpse at the nascent free software world because +it is as much a recruiting document as a tirade directed at corporate business +practices. When the American colonies split off from England, Thomas Paine +spelled out the problems with the English in the first paragraph of his +pamphlet "Common Sense." In his manifesto, Stallman didn't get started using +words like "dishonor" until the sixth paragraph. The first several paragraphs +spelled out the cool tools he had developed already: "an Emacs text editor with +Lisp for writing editor commands, a source level debugger, a yacc-compatible +parser generator, a linker, and around 35 utilities." Then he pointed to the +work he wanted to complete soon: "A new portable optimizing C compiler has +compiled itself and may be released this year. An initial kernel exists but +many more features are needed to emulate Unix." He was saying, in effect, that +he already had a few juicy peaches growing on the trees of his commune. + +If this wasn't enough, he intended to do things a bit better than UNIX. His +operating system was going to offer the latest, greatest ideas of computer +science, circa 1984. "In particular, we plan to have longer file names, file +version numbers, a crashproof file system, file name completion perhaps, +terminal-independent display support, and perhaps eventually a Lisp-based +window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs +can share a screen." The only thing that was missing from every computer nerd's +wish list was a secret submarine docking site in the basement grotto. + +The fifth paragraph even explained to everyone that the name of the project +would be the acronym GNU, which stood for "GNU's Not UNIX," and it should be +pronounced with a hard G to make sure that no one would get it confused with +the word "new." Stallman has always cared about words, the way they're used and +the way they're pronounced. + +In 1984, UNIX became the focus of Stallman's animus because its original +developer, AT&T, was pushing to try to make some money back after paying so +many people at Bell Labs to create it. Most people were somewhat conflicted by +the fight. They understood that AT&T had paid good money and supported many +researchers with the company's beneficence. The company gave money, time, and +spare computers. Sure, it was a pain to pay AT&T for something and get only a +long license drafted by teams of lawyers. Yes, it would be nice if we could +poke around under the hood of UNIX without signing a non-disclosure agreement. +It would be nice if we could be free to do whatever we want, but certainly +someone who pays for something deserves the right to decide how it is used. +We've all got to eat. + +Stallman wasn't confused at all. Licenses like AT&T's would constrict his +freedom to share with others. To make matters worse, the software companies +wanted him to pay for the privilege of getting software without the source +code. + +Stallman explains that his feelings weren't focused on AT&T per se. Software +companies were springing up all over the place, and most of them were locking +up their source code with proprietary licenses. It was the 1980s thing to do, +like listening to music by Duran Duran and Boy George. + +"When I decided to write a free operating system, I did not have AT&T in mind +at all, because I had never had any dealings with them. I had never used a UNIX +system. They were just one of many companies doing the same discreditable +thing," he told me recently. "I chose a Unix-like design just because I thought +it was a good design for the job, not because I had any particular feelings +about AT&T." + +When he wrote the GNU Manifesto, he made it clear to the world that his project +was more about choosing the right moral path than saving money. He wrote then +that the GNU project means "much more than just saving everyone the price of a +UNIX license. It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming +effort will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state of +the art." + +This was a crucial point that kept Stallman from being dismissed as a +quasi-communist crank who just wanted everyone to live happily on some nerd +commune. The source code is a valuable tool for everyone because it is readable +by humans, or at least humans who happen to be good at programming. Companies +learned to keep source code proprietary, and it became almost a reflex. If +people wanted to use it, they should pay to help defray the cost of creating +it. This made sense to programmers who wanted to make a living or even get rich +writing their own code. But it was awfully frustrating at times. Many +programmers have pulled their hair out in grief when their work was stopped by +some bug or undocumented feature buried deep in the proprietary, super-secret +software made by Microsoft, IBM, Apple, or whomever. If they had the source +code, they would be able to poke around and figure out what was really +happening. Instead, they had to treat the software like a black box and keep +probing it with test programs that might reveal the secrets hidden inside. +Every programmer has had an experience like this, and every programmer knew +that they could solve the problem much faster if they could only read the +source code. They didn't want to steal anything, they just wanted to know what +was going on so they could make their own code work. + +Stallman's GNU project would be different, and he explained, "Complete system +sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a user who needs changes in +the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available +programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the +mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole +position to make changes." + +He was quick to mention that people would be "free to hire any available +programmer" to ensure that people understood he wasn't against taking money for +writing software. That was okay and something he did frequently himself. He was +against people controlling the source with arbitrarily complex legal barriers +that made it impossible for him or anyone else to get something done. + +When people first heard of his ideas, they became fixated on the word "free." +These were the Reagan years. Saying that people should just give away their +hard work was sounding mighty communist to everyone, and this was long before +the Berlin Wall fell. Stallman reexamined the word "free" and all of its +different meanings. He carefully considered all of the different connotations, +examined the alternatives, and decided that "free" was still the best word. He +began to try to explain the shades of meaning he was after. His revolution was +about "free speech," not "free beer." This wasn't going to be a revolution in +the sense that frequent flyer miles revolutionized air travel nor in the way +that aluminum cans revolutionized beer drinking. No, this was going to be a +revolution as Rousseau, Locke, and Paine used the word. + +He later codified this into four main principles: + +_1 The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).~{ He numbered +them starting at zero because that was what computer scientists did. Someone +figured out that it was simpler to start numbering databases at zero because +you didn't have to subtract 1 as often. }~ + +_1 The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs +(freedom 1). + +_1 The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom +2). + +_1 The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the +public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). + +2~ Free Beer + +While Stallman pushed people away from the notion of "free beer," there's +little question that this element turned out to be a very important part of the +strategy and a foundation of its success. Stallman insisted that anyone could +do what they wanted with the software, so he insisted that the source code must +be freely distributed. That is, no one could put any restrictions on how you +used the software. While this didn't make it free beer, it did mean that you +could turn around and give a copy to your friends or your clients. It was +pretty close. + +The "free beer" nature of Stallman's software also attracted users. If some +programmers wanted to check out a new tool, they could download it and try it +out without paying for it. They didn't need to ask their boss for a budget, and +they didn't need to figure out a way to deal with an invoice. Just one click +and the software was there. Commercial software companies continue to imitate +this feature by distributing trial versions that come with either a few +crippled features or a time lock that shuts them down after a few days. + +Of course, the "free beer" nature of the GNU project soon led to money +problems. The GNU project took up his time and generated no real revenues at +first. Stallman had always lived frugally. He says that he never made more than +$20,000 a year at MIT, and still managed to save on that salary. But he was +finding it harder and harder to get his assigned jobs done at MIT and write the +cool GNU code. While Stallman always supported a programmer's right to make +money for writing code, the GNU project wasn't generating any money. + +Most folks saw this conflict coming from the beginning. Sure, Stallman would be +able to rant and rave about corporate software development for a bit, but +eventually he and his disciples would need to eat. + +When the MIT support ended, Stallman soon stumbled upon a surprising fact: he +could charge for the software he was giving away and make some money. People +loved his software, but it was often hard to keep track of it. Getting the +package delivered on computer tape or a CD-ROM gave people a hard copy that +they could store for future reference or backup. Online manuals were also nice, +but the printed book is still a very popular and easy-to-use way of storing +information. Stallman's Free Software Foundation began selling printed manuals, +tapes, and then CD-ROMs filled with software to make money. Surprisingly, +people started paying money for these versions despite the fact that they could +download the same versions for free. + +Some folks enjoyed pointing out the hypocrisy in Stallman's move. Stallman had +run his mouth for so long that many programming "sellouts" who worked for +corporations savored the irony. At last that weenie had gotten the picture. He +was forced to make money to support himself, and he was selling out, too. These +cynics didn't get what Stallman was trying to do. + +Most of us would have given up at this time. The free software thing seemed +like a good idea, but now that the money was running out it was time to get a +real job. In writing this book and interviewing some of the famous and +not-so-famous free software developers, I found that some were involved in +for-profit, not-so-free software development now. Stallman, though, wasn't +going to give up his ideals, and his mind started shifting to accommodate this +new measure of reality. He decided that it wouldn't be wrong to sell copies of +software or even software services as long as you didn't withhold the source +code and stomp on anyone's freedom to use the source code as they wished. + +Stallman has always been great at splitting hairs and creating Jesuitical +distinctions, and this insight was one of his best. At first glance, it looked +slightly nutty. If people were free to do anything they wanted with software, +they could just give a copy to their friend and their friend would never send +money back to Stallman's Free Software Foundation. In fact, someone could buy a +copy from Stallman and then start reselling copies to others to undercut +Stallman. The Free Software Foundation and the GNU GPL gave them the freedom to +do so. It was as if a movie theater sold tickets to a movie, but also posted a +big sign near the exit door that said "Hey, it's absolutely okay for you to +prop this open so your friends can sneak in without paying." + +While this total freedom befuddled most people, it didn't fail. Many paid for +tapes or CD-ROM versions because they wanted the convenience. Stallman's +versions came with the latest bug fixes and new features. They were the +quasi-official versions. Others felt that paying helped support the work so +they didn't feel bad about doing it. They liked the FSF and wanted it to +produce more code. Others just liked printed books better than electronic +documentation. Buying them from Stallman was cheaper than printing them out. +Still others paid for the CD-ROMs because they just wanted to support the Free +Software Foundation. + +Stallman also found other support. The MacArthur Foundation gave him one of +their genius grants that paid him a nice salary for five years to do whatever +he wanted. Companies like Intel hired him as a consultant and asked him to make +sure that some of his software ran on Intel chips. People were quite willing to +pay for convenience because even free software didn't do everything that it +should. + +Stallman also recognized that this freedom introduced a measure of competition. +If he could charge for copies, then so could others. The source code would be a +vast commonweal, but the means of delivering it would be filled with people +struggling to do the best job of distributing the software. It was a pretty +hard-core Reaganaut notion for a reputed communist. At the beginning, few +bothered to compete with him, but in time all of the GNU code began to be +included with computer operating systems. By the time Linus Torvalds wrote his +OS, the GNU code was ready to be included. + +2~ Copyleft + +If Stallman's first great insight was that the world did not need to put up +with proprietary source code, then his second was that he could strictly +control the use of GNU software with an innovative legal document entitled GNU +General Public License, or GPL. To illustrate the difference, he called the +agreement a "copyleft" and set about creating a legal document defining what it +meant for software to be "free." Well, defining what he thought it should mean. + +The GPL was a carefully crafted legal document that didn't put the software +into the "public domain," a designation that would have allowed people to truly +do anything they wanted with the software. The license, in fact, copyrighted +the software and then extended users very liberal rights for making innumerable +copies as long as the users didn't hurt other people's rights to use the +software. + +The definition of stepping on other people's rights is one that keeps political +science departments at universities in business. There are many constituencies +that all frame their arguments in terms of protecting someone's rights. +Stallman saw protecting the rights of other users in very strong terms and +strengthened his grip a bit by inserting a controversial clause. He insisted +that a person who distributes an improved version of the program must also +share the source code. That meant that some greedy company couldn't download +his GNU Emacs editor, slap on a few new features, and then sell the whole +package without including all of the source code they created. If people were +going to benefit from the GNU sharing, they were going to have to share back. +It was freedom with a price. + +This strong compact was ready-built for some ironic moments. When Apple began +trying to expand the scope of intellectual property laws by suing companies +like Microsoft for stealing their "look and feel," Stallman became incensed and +decided that he wouldn't develop software for Apple machines as a form of +protest and spite. If Apple was going to pollute the legal landscape with +terrible impediments to sharing ideas, then Stallman wasn't going to help them +sell machines by writing software for the machines. But the GNU copyleft +license specifically allowed anyone to freely distribute the source code and +use it as they wanted. That meant that others could use the GNU code and +convert it to run on the Apple if they wanted to do so. Many did port much of +the GNU software to the Mac and distributed the source code with it in order to +comply with the license. Stallman couldn't do anything about it. Sure, he was +the great leader of the FSF and the author of some of its code, but he had +given away his power with the license. The only thing he could do was refuse to +help the folks moving the software to the Mac. When it came to principles, he +placed freedom to use the source code at the top of the hierarchy. + +2~ The GNU Virus + +Some programmers soon started referring to the sticky nature of the license as +the "GNU virus" because it infected software projects with its freedom bug. If +a developer wanted to save time and grab some of the neat GNU software, he was +stuck making the rest of his work just as free. These golden handcuffs often +scared away programmers who wanted to make money by charging for their work. + +Stallman hates that characterization. "To call anything 'like a virus' is a +very vicious thing. People who say things like that are trying to find ways to +make the GPL look bad," he says. + +Stallman did try to work around this problem by creating what he at first +called the "Library General Public License" and now refers to as the "Lesser +General Public License," a document that allowed software developers to share +small chunks of code with each other under less restrictive circumstances. A +programmer can use the LGPL to bind chunks of code known as libraries. Others +can share the libraries and use them with their source code as long as they +don't fully integrate them. Any changes they make to the library itself must be +made public, but there is no requirement to release the source code for the +main program that uses the library. + +This license is essentially a concession to some rough edges at the corners +where the world of programming joins the world of law. While Stallman was dead +set on creating a perfect collection of free programs that would solve +everyone's needs, he was far from finished. If people were going to use his +software, they were going to have to use it on machines made by Sun, AT&T, IBM, +or someone else who sold a proprietary operating system along with it. He +understood that he needed to compromise, at least for system libraries. + +The problem is drawing boundaries around what is one pile of software owned by +one person and what is another pile owned by someone else. The GPL guaranteed +that GNU software would "infect" other packages and force people who used his +code to join the party and release theirs as well. So he had to come up with a +definition that spelled out what it meant for people to use his code and +"incorporate" it with others. + +This is often easier said than done. The marketplace has developed ways to sell +software as big chunks to people, but these are fictions that camouflage +software integration. In modern practice, programmers don't just create one +easily distinguished chunk of software known as Microsoft Word or Adobe +Photoshop. They build up a variety of smaller chunks known as libraries and +link these together. Microsoft Windows, in fact, includes a large collection of +libraries for creating the menus, forms, click boxes, and what-not that make +the graphical user interfaces. Programmers don't need to write their own +instructions for drawing these on the screen and interacting with them. This +saves plenty of time and practice for the programmers, and it is a large part +of what Microsoft is selling when it sells someone a box with Windows on it. + +Stallman recognized that programmers sometimes wrote libraries that they wanted +others to use. After all, that was the point of GNU: creating tools that others +would be free to use. So Stallman relented and created the Lesser Public +License, which would allow people to create libraries that might be +incorporated into other programs that weren't fully GNU. The library itself +still came with source code, and the user would need to distribute all changes +made to the library, but there was no limitation on the larger package. + +This new license was also something of a concession to reality. In the most +abstract sense, programs are just black boxes that take some input and produce +some output. There's no limit to the hierarchies that can be created by +plugging these boxes together so that the output for one is the input for +another. Eventually, the forest of connections grows so thick that it is +difficult to draw a line and label one collection of boxes "ProprietarySoft's +SUX-2000" and another collection "GNUSoft's Wombat 3.14.15." The connections +are so numerous in well-written, effective software that line-drawing is +difficult. + +The problem is similar to the one encountered by biologists as they try to +define ecosystems and species. Some say there are two different groups of tuna +that swim in the Atlantic. Others say there is only one. The distinction would +be left to academics if it didn't affect the international laws on fishing. +Some groups pushing the vision of one school are worried that others on the +other side of the ocean are catching their fish. Others push the two-school +theory to minimize the meddling of the other side's bureaucracy. No one knows, +though, how to draw a good line. + +Stallman's LGPL was a concession to the fact that sometimes programs can be +used like libraries and sometimes libraries can be used like programs. In the +end, the programmer can draw a strong line around one set of boxes and say that +the GPL covers these functions without leaking out to infect the software that +links up with the black boxes. + +2~ Is the Free Software Foundation Anti-Freedom? + +Still, these concessions aren't enough for some people. Many continue to rail +against Stallman's definition of freedom and characterize the GPL as a fascist +document that steals the rights of any programmer who comes along afterward. +Being free means having the right to do anything you want with the code, +including keeping all your modifications private. + +To be fair, the GPL never forces you to give away your changes to the source +code. It just forces you to release your modifications if you redistribute it. +If you just run your own version in your home, then you don't need to share +anything. When you start sharing binary versions of the software, however, you +need to ship the source code, too. + +Some argue that corporations have the potential to work around this loophole +because they act like one person. A company could revise software and "ship it" +by simply hiring anyone who wanted to buy it. The new employees or members of +the corporation would get access to the software without shipping the source. +The source code would never be distributed because it was not publicly shipped. +No one seriously believes that anyone would try to exploit this provision with +such an extreme interpretation, but it does open the question of whether an +airtight license can ever be created. + +These fine distinctions didn't satisfy many programmers who weren't so taken +with Stallman's doctrinaire version of freedom. They wanted to create free +software and have the freedom to make some money off of it. This tradition +dates back many years before Stallman and is a firm part of academic life. Many +professors and students developed software and published a free version before +starting up a company that would commercialize the work. They used their +professor's salary or student stipend to support the work, and the free +software they contributed to the world was meant as an exchange. In many cases, +the U.S. government paid for the creation of the software through a grant, and +the free release was a gift to the taxpayers who ultimately funded it. In other +cases, corporations paid for parts of the research and the free release was +seen as a way to give something back to the sponsoring corporation without +turning the university into a home for the corporation's lowpaid slave +programmers who were students in name only. + +In many cases, the free distribution was an honest gift made by researchers who +wanted to give their work the greatest possible distribution. They would be +repaid in fame and academic prestige, which can be more lucrative than +everything but a good start-up's IPO. Sharing knowledge and creating more of it +was what universities were all about. Stallman tapped into that tradition. + +But many others were fairly cynical. They would work long enough to generate a +version that worked well enough to convince people of its value. Then, when the +funding showed up, they would release this buggy version into the "public +domain," move across the street into their own new start-up, and resume +development. The public domain version satisfied the university's rules and +placated any granting agencies, but it was often close to unusable. The bugs +were too numerous and too hidden in the cruft to make it worth someone's time. +Of course, the original authors knew where the problems lurked, and they would +fix them before releasing the commercial version. + +The leader of this academic branch of the free software world became the +Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley. +The published Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) versions of UNIX started +emerging from Berkeley in the late 1970s. Their work emerged with a free +license that gave everyone the right to do what they wanted with the software, +including start up a company, add some neat features, and start reselling the +whole package. The only catch was that the user must keep the copyright message +intact and give the university some credit in the manual and in advertisements. +This requirement was loosened in 1999 when the list of people who needed credit +on software projects grew too long. Many groups were taking the BSD license and +simply replacing the words "University of California" with their name. The list +of people who needed to be publicly acknowledged grew with each new project. As +the distributions grew larger to include all of these new projects, the process +of listing all the names and projects became onerous. The University of +California struck the clause requiring advertising credit in the hopes of +setting an example that others would follow. + +Today, many free software projects begin with a debate of "GNU versus BSD" as +the initial founders argue whether it is a good idea to restrict what users can +do with the code. The GNU side always believes that programmers should be +forced to donate the code they develop back to the world, while the BSD side +pushes for practically unlimited freedom. + +Rick Rashid is one of the major forces behind the development of Microsoft's +Windows NT and also a major contributor to our knowledge of how to build a +computer operating system. Before he went to Microsoft, he was a professor at +Carnegie-Mellon. While he was there, he spearheaded the team responsible for +developing Mach, an operating system that offered relatively easy-to-use +multitasking built upon a very tiny kernel. Mach let programmers break their +software into multiple "threads" that could run independently of each other +while sharing the same access to data. + +When asked recently about Mach and the Mach license, he explained that he +deliberately wrote the license to be as free as possible. + +The GNU GPL, he felt, wasn't appropriate for technology that was developed +largely with government grants. The work should be as free as possible and +shouldn't force "other people to do things (e.g., give away their personal +work) in order to get access to what you had done." + +He said, in an e-mail interview, "It was my intent to encourage use of the +system both for academic and commercial use and it was used heavily in both +environments. Accent, the predecessor to Mach, had already been commercialized +and used by a variety of companies. Mach continues to be heavily used +today--both as the basis for Apple's new MacOS and as the basis for variants of +Unix in the marketplace (e.g., Compaq's 64-bit Unix for the Alpha)." + +2~ The Evolution of BSD + +The BSD license evolved along a strange legal path that was more like the +meandering of a drunken cow than the laser-like devotion of Stallman. + +Many professors and students cut their teeth experimenting with UNIX on DEC +Vaxes that communicated with old teletypes and dumb terminals. AT&T gave +Berkeley the source code to UNIX, and this allowed the students and professors +to add their instructions and features to the software. Much of their insight +into operating system design and many of their bug fixes made their way back to +AT&T, where they were incorporated in the next versions of UNIX. No one really +thought twice about the source code being available because the shrink-wrapped +software market was still in its infancy. The personal computer market wasn't +even born until the latter half of the 1970s, and it took some time for people +to believe that source code was something for a company to withhold and +protect. In fact, many of the programs still weren't being written in +higher-level languages. The programmers would write instructions directly for +the computer, and while these often would include some instructions for humans, +there was little difference between what the humans wrote and the machine read. + +After Bill Joy and others at Berkeley started coming up with several good +pieces of software, other universities started asking for copies. At the time, +Joy remembers, it was considered a bit shabby for computer science researchers +to actually write software and share it with others. The academic departments +were filled with many professors who received their formal training in +mathematics, and they held the attitude that rigorous formal proofs and +analysis were the ideal form of research. Joy and several other students began +rebelling by arguing that creating working operating systems was essential +experimental research. The physics departments supported experimentalists and +theorists. + +So Joy began to "publish" his code by sending out copies to other researchers +who wanted it. Although many professors and students at Berkeley added bits and +pieces to the software running on the DEC Vaxes, Joy was the one who bundled it +all together and gave it the name. Kirk McKusick says in his history of +Berkeley UNIX, ". . . interest in the error recovery work in the Pascal +compiler brought in requests for copies of the system. Early in 1977, Joy put +together the 'Berkeley Software Distribution.' This first distribution included +the Pascal system, and, in an obscure subdirectory of the Pascal source, the +editor vi. Over the next year, Joy, acting in the capacity of the distribution +secretary, sent out about 30 free copies of the system." + +Today, Joy tells the story with a bit of bemused distraction. He explains that +he just copied over a license from the University of Toronto and"whited +out""University ofToronto" and replaced it with "University of California." He +simply wanted to get the source code out the door. In the beginning, the +Berkeley Software Distribution included a few utilities, but by 1979 the code +became tightly integrated with AT&T's basic UNIX code. Berkeley gave away the +collection of software in BSD, but only AT&T license holders could use it. Many +universities were attracted to the package, in part because the Pascal system +was easy for its students to use. The personal computer world, however, was +focusing on a simpler language known as Basic. Bill Gates would make Microsoft +Basic one of his first products. + +Joy says that he wrote a letter to AT&T inquiring about the legal status of the +source code from AT&T that was rolled together with the BSD code. After a year, +he says, "They wrote back saying, 'We take no position' on the matter." Kirk +McKusick, who later ran the BSD project through the years of the AT&T lawsuit, +explained dryly, "Later they wrote a different letter." + +Joy was just one of a large number of people who worked heavily on the BSD +project from 1977 through the early 1980s. The work was low-level and grungy by +today's standards. The students and professors scrambled just to move UNIX to +the new machines they bought. Often, large parts of the guts of the operating +system needed to be modified or upgraded to deal with a new type of disk drive +or file system. As they did this more and more often, they began to develop +more and more higher-level abstractions to ease the task. One of the earliest +examples was Joy's screen editor known as vi, a simple package that could be +used to edit text files and reprogram the system. The "battle" between Joy's vi +and Stallman's Emacs is another example of the schism between MIT and Berkeley. +This was just one of the new tools included in version 2 of BSD, a collection +that was shipped to 75 different people and institutions. + +By the end of the 1970s, Bell Labs and Berkeley began to split as AT&T started +to commercialize UNIX and Berkeley stuck to its job of education. Berkeley +professor Bob Fabry was able to interest the Pentagon's Defense Advanced +Research Projects Agency (DARPA) into signing up to support more development at +Berkeley. Fabry sold the agency on a software package that would be usable on +many of the new machines being installed in research labs throughout the +country. It would be more easily portable so that research would not need to +stop every time a new computer arrived. The work on this project became +versions 3 and 4 of BSD. + +During this time, the relationship between AT&T and the universities was +cordial. AT&T owned the commercial market for UNIX and Berkeley supplied many +of the versions used in universities. While the universities got BSD for free, +they still needed to negotiate a license with AT&T, and companies paid a +fortune. This wasn't too much of a problem because universities are often +terribly myopic. If they share their work with other universities and +professors, they usually consider their sharing done. There may be folks out +there without university appointments, but those folks are usually viewed as +cranks who can be safely ignored. Occasionally, those cranks write their own OS +that grows up to be Linux. The BSD version of freedom was still a far cry from +Stallman's, but then Stallman hadn't articulated it yet. His manifesto was +still a few years off. + +The intellectual tension between Stallman and Berkeley grew during the 1980s. +While Stallman began what many thought was a quixotic journey to build a +completely free OS, Berkeley students and professors continued to layer their +improvements to UNIX on top of AT&T's code. The AT&T code was good, it was +available, and many of the folks at Berkeley had either directly or indirectly +helped influence it. They were generally happy keeping AT&T code at the core +despite the fact that all of the BSD users needed to negotiate with AT&T. This +process grew more and more expensive as AT&T tried to make more and more money +off of UNIX. + +Of course, Stallman didn't like the freedom of the BSD-style license. To him, +it meant that companies could run off with the hard work and shared source code +of another, make a pile of money, and give nothing back. The companies and +individuals who were getting the BSD network release were getting the +cumulative hard work of many students and professors at Berkeley (and other +places) who donated their time and effort to building a decent OS. The least +these companies owed the students were the bug fixes, the extensions, and the +enhancements they created when they were playing with the source code and +gluing it into their products. + +Stallman had a point. Many of these companies "shared" by selling the software +back to these students and the taxpayers who had paid for their work. While it +is impossible to go back and audit the motives of everyone who used the code, +there have been many who've used BSDstyle code for their personal gain. + +Bill Joy, for instance, went to work at Sun Microsystems in 1982 and brought +with him all the knowledge he had gained in developing BSD. Sun was always a +very BSD-centered shop, and many of the people who bought Sun workstations ran +BSD. At that time, AT&T still controlled much of the kernel and many of the +small extra programs that made UNIX a usable system. + +But there are counter arguments as well. Joy certainly contributed a lot to the +different versions of BSD. If anyone deserves to go off and get rich at a +company like Sun, it's he. + +Also, the BSD source code was freely available to all comers, and all companies +started with the same advantages. The software business is often considered to +be one of the most free marketplaces around because of the low barriers to +entry. This means that companies should only be able to charge for the value +they add to the BSD code. Sure, all of the Internet was influenced by the +TCP/IP code, but now Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Be, and everyone else compete on +the quality of their interface. + +2~ The Price of Total Freedom + +The debate between BSD-style freedom and GNU-style freedom is one of the +greatest in the free programming world and is bound to continue for a long time +as programmers join sides and experiment. + +John Gilmore is one programmer who has worked with software developed under +both types of licenses. He was employee number five at Sun Microsystems, a +cofounder of the software development tool company Cygnus Solutions, and one of +the board members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His early work at Sun +gave him the wealth to pursue many independent projects, and he has spent the +last 10 years devoting himself to making it easy for people around the world to +use encryption software. He feels that privacy is a fundamental right and an +important crime deterrent, and he has funded a number of different projects to +advance this right. + +Gilmore also runs the cypherpunks mailing list on a computer in his house named +Toad Hall near Haight Street in San Francisco. The mailing list is devoted to +exploring how to create strong encryption tools that will protect people's +privacy and is well known for the strong libertarian tone of the deliberations. +Practically the whole list believes (and frequently reiterates) that people +need the right to protect their privacy against both the government and private +eavesdropping. Wired magazine featured Gilmore on the cover, along with fellow +travelers Eric Hughes and Tim May. + +One of his recent tasks was creating a package of free encryption utilities +that worked at the lowest level of the network operating system. These tools, +known as Free/SWAN, would allow two computers that meet on the Internet to +automatically begin encoding the data they swap with some of the best and most +secure codes available. He imagines that banks, scientific laboratories, and +home workers everywhere will want to use the toolkit. In fact, AT&T is +currently examining how to incorporate the toolkit into products it is building +to sell more highspeed services to workers staying at home to avoid the +commute. + +Gilmore decided to use the GNU license to protect the Free/SWAN software, in +part because he has had bad experiences in the past with totally free software. +He once wrote a little program called PDTar that was an improvement over the +standard version of Tar used on the Internet to bundle together a group of +files into one big, easy-tomanage bag of bits often known affectionately as +"tarballs." He decided he wasn't going to mess around with Stallman's GNU +license or impose any restrictions on the source code at all. He was just going +to release it into the public domain and give everyone total freedom. + +This good deed did not go unpunished, although the punishment was relatively +minor. He recalls, "I never made PDTar work for DOS, but six or eight people +did. For years after the release, I would get mail saying, 'I've got this +binary for the DOS release and it doesn't work.' They often didn't even have +the sources that went with the version so I couldn't help them if I tried." +Total freedom, it turned out, brought a certain amount of anarchy that made it +difficult for him to manage the project. While the total freedom may have +encouraged others to build their own versions of PDTar, it didn't force them to +release the source code that went with their versions so others could learn +from or fix their mistakes Hugh Daniel, one of the testers for the Free/SWAN +project, says that he thinks the GNU General Public License will help keep some +coherency to the project. "There's also a magic thing with GPL code that open +source doesn't have," Daniel said. "For some reason, projects don't bifurcate +in GPL space. People don't grab a copy of the code and call it their own. For +some reason there's a sense of community in GPL code. There seems to be one +version. There's one GPL kernel and there's umpty-ump BSD branches." + +Daniel is basically correct. The BSD code has evolved, or forked, into many +different versions with names like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD while the Linux +UNIX kernel released under Stallman's GPL is limited to one fairly coherent +package. Still, there is plenty of crosspollination between the different +versions of BSD UNIX. Both NetBSD 1.0 and FreeBSD 2.0, for instance, borrowed +code from 4.4 BSD-Lite. Also, many versions of Linux come with tools and +utilities that came from the BSD project. + +But Daniel's point is also clouded with semantics. There are dozens if not +hundreds of different Linux distributions available from different vendors. +Many differ in subtle points, but some are markedly different. While these +differences are often as great as the ones between the various flavors of BSD, +the groups do not consider them psychologically separate. They haven't forked +politically even though they've split off their code. + +While different versions may be good for some projects, it may be a problem for +packages like Free/SWAN that depend upon interoperability. If competing +versions of Free/SWAN emerge, then all begin to suffer because the product was +designed to let people communicate with each other. If the software can't +negotiate secure codes because of differences, then it begins to fail. + +But it's not clear that the extra freedom is responsible for the fragmentation. +In reality, the different BSD groups emerged because they had different needs. +The NetBSD group, for instance, wanted to emphasize multiplatform support and +interoperability. Their website brags that the NetBSD release works well on 21 +different hardware platforms and also points out that some of these hardware +platforms themselves are quite diverse. There are 93 different versions of the +Macintosh running on Motorola's 68k chips, including the very first Mac. +Eighty-nine of them run some part of NetBSD and 37 of them run all of it. +That's why they say their motto is "Of course it runs NetBSD." + +The OpenBSD group, on the other hand, is emphasizing security without +compromising portability and interoperability. They want to fix all security +bugs immediately and be the most secure OS on the marketplace. + +There are also deep personal differences in the way Theo de Raadt, the founder +of OpenBSD, started the project after the NetBSD group kicked him out of their +core group. + +For all of these reasons, it may be hard to argue that the freedoms provided by +the BSD-style license were largely responsible for the splintering. The GNU +software users are just as free to make new versions as long as they kick back +the source code into free circulation. In fact, it may be possible to argue +that the Macintosh versions of some of the GNU code comprise a splinter group +because it occurred despite the ill will Stallman felt for the Mac. + +2~ The Synthesis of "Open Source" + +The tension between the BSD licenses and the GNU has always festered like the +abortion debate. Everyone picked sides and rarely moved from them. + +In 1998, a group of people in the free software community tried to unify the +two camps by creating a new term, "open source." To make sure everyone knew +they were serious, they started an unincorporated organization, registered a +trademark, and set up a website (www.opensource.org). Anyone who wanted to +label their project "open source" would have to answer to them because they +would control the trademark on the name. + +Sam Ockman, a Linux enthusiast and the founder of Penguin Computing, remembers +the day of the meeting just before Netscape announced it was freeing its source +code. "Eric Raymond came into town because of the Netscape thing. Netscape was +going to free their software, so we drove down to Transmeta and had a meeting +so we could advise Netscape," he said. + +He explained that the group considered a number of different options about the +structure. Some wanted to choose a leader now. Others wanted to emulate an open +source project and let a leader emerge through the display of talent and, well, +leadership. Others wanted elections. + +The definition of what was open source grew out of the Debian project, one of +the different groups that banded together to press CDROMs of stable Linux +releases. Groups like these often get into debates about what software to +include on the disks. Some wanted to be very pure and only include GPL'ed +software. In a small way, that would force others to contribute back to the +project because they wouldn't get their software distributed by the group +unless it was GPL'ed. Others wanted less stringent requirements that might +include quasi-commercial projects that still came with their source code. There +were some cool projects out there that weren't protected by GPL, and it could +be awfully hard to pass up the chance to integrate them into a package. + +Over time, one of the leaders of the Debian group, Bruce Perens, came to create +a definition of what was acceptable and what wasn't. This definition would be +large enough to include the GNU General Public License, the BSD-style licenses, +and a few others like MIT's X Consortium license and the Artistic license. The +X-windows license covers a graphical windowing interface that began at MIT and +was also freely distributed with BSD-like freedom. The Artistic license applies +to the Perl programming language, a tool that is frequently used to transform +files. The Debian meta-definition would embrace all of these. + +The official definition of what was acceptable to Debian leaned toward more +freedom and fewer restrictions on the use of software. Of course, that's the +only way that anyone could come up with a definition that included both GNU and +the much less restrictive BSD. But this was also the intent of the open source +group. Perens and Eric Raymond felt that Stallman still sounded too +quasi-communist for "conservative businessmen," and they wanted the open source +definition to avoid insisting upon the sort of forced sharing that Stallman's +GNU virus provided. + +Still, the definition borrowed heavily from Stallman's concept of GNU, and +Perens credits him by saying that many of the Debian guidelines are derived +from the GPL. An official open source license for a product must provide the +programmer with source code that is human-readable. It can't restrict what +modifications are made to the software or how it is sold or given away. + +The definition glossed over the difference between BSD and GPU by stating, "The +license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be +distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software." + +The definition proved to be the model for more commercial offerings like the +Netscape Public License. In 1998, Netscape started distributing the source code +to its popular browser in hopes of collecting help from the Internet and +stopping Microsoft's gradual erosion of its turf. The license gave users wide +opportunities to make changes and tinker with the software, but it also allowed +Netscape to use the changes internally and refuse to share what they did with +them. This special privilege offended some users who didn't like the imbalance, +but it didn't bother many others who thought it was a reasonable compromise for +a chance to tinker with commercial code. Netscape, of course, returned some of +the favor by allowing people to keep their modifications private in much the +same way that the BSD-style license provided. + +In June 1999, the Open Source Initiative revealed a startling fact. They were +close to failing in their attempts to register the term "open source" as a +trademark. The phrase was too common to be registered. Instead, they backed +away and offered to check out licenses and classify them officially as "OSI +Certified" if they met the terms of the OSI's definition of freedom. + +Some reacted negatively. Richard Stallman decided that he didn't like the word +"open" as much as "free." Open doesn't capture the essence of freedom. Ockman +says, "I don't think it's very fair. For ages, he's always said that the term +'free software' is problematic because people think of 'free beer' when they +should be thinking of 'free speech.' We were attempting to solve that term. If +the masses are confused, then corporate America is confused even more." + +The debate has even produced more terms. Some people now use the phrase "free +source" to apply to the general conglomeration of the GPL and the open source +world. Using "free software" implies that someone is aligned with Stallman's +Free Software Foundation. Using "open source" implies you're aligned with the +more business-friendly Open Source Initiative. So "free source" and "open +source" both work as a compromise. Others tweak the meaning of free and refer +to GPL protected software as "GNUFree." + +Naturally, all of this debate about freedom can reach comic proportions. +Programmers are almost better than lawyers at finding loopholes, if only +because they have to live with a program that crashes.~{ Lawyers just watch +their clients go to jail. }~ Stallman, for instance, applies the GPL to +everything coming out of the GNU project except the license itself. That can't +be changed, although it can be freely reproduced. Some argue that if it were +changeable, people would be able to insert and delete terms at will. Then they +could apply the changed GPL to the new version of the software and do what they +want. Stallman's original intent would not be changed. The GPL would still +apply to all of the GNU software and its descendants, but it wouldn't be the +same GPL. + +1~ Source + +Computer programmers love Star Wars. So it should be no surprise that +practically every single member of the free source community has, at one time +or another, rolled out the phrase, "Use the Source, Luke." It does a perfect +job of capturing the mythical faith that the free source world places in the +ability to access the source code to a program. As everyone points out, in the +original version of Star Wars, the rebel troops used the plans, the Source, to +the Death Star carried in R2D2 to look for weaknesses. + +The free source realm has been pushing the parallels for some time now. When +AT&T unveiled their round logo with an offset dimple, most free source people +began to snicker. The company that began the free software revolution by +pushing its intellectual property rights and annoying Richard Stallman had +chosen a logo that looked just like the Death Star. Everyone said, "Imperialist +minds think alike." Some even wondered and hoped that George Lucas would sue +AT&T for some sort of look-and-feel, trademark infringement. Those who use the +legal intimidation light saber should die by the legal intimidation light +saber. + +Of course, the free source folks knew that only their loose coalition of rebels +spread out around the galaxy would be a strong match for the Empire. The Source +was information, and information was power. The Source was also about freedom, +one of the best and most consistent reservoirs of revolutionary inspiration +around. The rebels might not have teams of lawyers in imperial star cruisers, +but they hoped to use the Source to knit together a strong, effective, and more +powerful resistance. + +The myth of open access to free source code is a powerful one that has made +true believers out of many in the community. The source code is a list of +instructions for the computer written out in a programming lan guage that is +understandable by humans. Once the compilers converted the source code into the +string of bits known as the binary or object code, only computers (and some +very talented humans) could understand the instructions. I've known several +people who could read 8080 binary code by eye, but they're a bit different from +the general population. + +When companies tried to keep their hard work and research secret by locking up +the source code, they built a barrier between the users and their developers. +The programmers would work behind secret walls to write the source code. After +compilers turned the Source into something that computers could read, the +Source would be locked up again. The purchasers would only get the binary code +because that's all the companies thought the consumers needed. The source code +needed to be kept secret because someone might steal the ideas inside and +create their own version. + +Stallman saw this secrecy as a great crime. Computer users should be able to +share the source code so they can share ways to make it better. This trade +should lead to more information-trading in a great feedback loop. Some folks +even used the word "bloom" to describe the explosion of interest and +cross-feedback. They're using the word the way biologists use it to describe +the way algae can just burst into existence, overwhelming a region of the +ocean. Clever insights, brilliant bug fixes, and wonderful new features just +appear out of nowhere as human curiosity is amplified by human generosity in a +grand explosion of intellectual synergy. The only thing missing from the +picture is a bunch of furry Ewoks dancing around a campfire.~{ Linux does have +many marketing opportunities. Torvalds chose a penguin named Tux as the mascot, +and several companies actually manufacture and sell stuffed penguins to the +Linux realm. The BSD world has embraced a cute demon, a visual pun on the fact +that BSD UNIX uses the word "daemon" to refer to some of the faceless +background programs in the OS. }~ + +2~ The Bishop of the Free Marketplace + +Eric Raymond, a man who is sort of the armchair philosopher of the open source +world, did a great job of summarizing the phenomenon and creating this myth in +his essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Raymond is an earnest programmer who +spent some time working on projects like Stallman's GNU Emacs. He saw the +advantages of open source development early, perhaps because he's a hard-core +libertarian. Government solutions are cumbersome. Empowering individuals by not +restraining them is great. Raymond comes off as a bit more extreme than other +libertarians, in part because he doesn't hesitate to defend the second +amendment of the U.S. Constitution as much as the first. Raymond is not ashamed +to support widespread gun ownership as a way to further empower the individual. +He dislikes the National Rifle Association because they're too willing to +compromise away rights that he feels are absolute. + +Some people like to call him the Margaret Mead of the free source world because +he spent some time studying and characterizing the culture in much the same way +that Mead did when she wrote Coming of Age in Samoa. This can be a subtle jab +because Margaret Mead is not really the same intellectual angel she was long +ago. Derek Freeman and other anthropologists raise serious questions about +Mead's ability to see without bias. Mead was a big fan of free love, and many +contend it was no accident that she found wonderful tales of unchecked +sexuality in Samoa. Freeman revisited Samoa and found it was not the guilt-free +land of libertine pleasures that Mead described in her book. He documented many +examples of sexual restraint and shame that Mead apparently missed in her +search for a paradise. + +Raymond looked at open source development and found what he wanted to find: the +wonderful efficiency of unregulated markets. Sure, some folks loved to label +Richard Stallman a communist, a description that has always annoyed Stallman. +Raymond looked a bit deeper and saw that the basis of the free software +movement's success was the freedom that gave each user the complete power to +change and improve their software. Just as Sigmund Freud found sex at the root +of everything and Carl Jung uncovered a battle of animus and anima, the +libertarian found freedom. + +Raymond's essay was one of the first to try to explain why free source efforts +can succeed and even prosper without the financial incentives of a standard +money-based software company. One of the biggest reasons he cited was that a +programmer could "scratch an itch" that bothered him. That is, a programmer +might grow annoyed by a piece of software that limited his choices or had an +annoying glitch. Instead of cursing the darkness in the brain cavity of the +corporate programmer who created the problem, the free source hacker was able +to use the Source to try to find the bug. + +Itch-scratching can be instrumental in solving many problems. Some bugs in +software are quite hard to identify and duplicate. They only occur in strange +situations, like when the printer is out of paper and the modem is overloaded +by a long file that is coming over the Internet. Then, and only then, the two +buffers may fill to the brim, bump into each other, and crash the computer. The +rest of the time, the program floats along happily, encountering no problems. + +These types of bugs are notoriously hard for corporate testing environments to +discover and characterize. The companies try to be diligent by hiring several +young programmers and placing them in a room with a computer. The team beats on +the software all day long and develops a healthy animosity toward the +programming team that has to fix the problems they discover. They can nab many +simple bugs, but what happens if they don't have a printer hooked up to their +machine? What happens if they aren't constantly printing out things the way +some office users are? The weird bug goes unnoticed and probably unfixed. + +The corporate development model tries to solve this limitation by shipping +hundreds, thousands, and often hundreds of thousands of copies to ambitious +users they called "beta testers." Others called them "suckers" or "free +volunteers" because once they finish helping develop the software, they get to +pay for it. Microsoft even charges some users for the pleasure of being beta +testers. Many of the users are pragmatic. They often have no choice but to +participate in the scheme because they often base their businesses on some of +the software shipped by these companies. If it didn't work, they would be out +of a job. + +While this broad distribution of beta copies is much more likely to find +someone who is printing and overloading a modem at the same time, it doesn't +give the user the tools to help find the problem. Their only choice is to write +an e-mail message to the company saying "I was printing yesterday and your +software crashed." That isn't very helpful for the engineer, and it's no +surprise that many of these reports are either ignored or unsolved. + +Raymond pointed out that the free source world can do a great job with these +nasty bugs. He characterized this with the phrase, "Given enough eyeballs, all +bugs are shallow," which he characterized as "Linus's Law." That is, eventually +some programmer would start printing and using the Internet at the same time. +After the system crashed a few times, some programmer would care enough about +the problem to dig into the free source, poke around, and spot the problem. +Eventually somebody would come along with the time and the energy and the +commitment to diagnose the problem. Raymond named this "Linus's Law" after +Linus Torvalds. Raymond is a great admirer of Torvalds and thinks that +Torvalds's true genius was organizing an army to work on Linux. The coding +itself was a distant second. + +Of course, waiting for a user to find the bugs depended on there being someone +with enough time and commitment. Most users aren't talented programmers, and +most have day jobs. Raymond and the rest of the free source community +acknowledge this limitation, but point out that the right person often comes +along if the bug occurs often enough to be a real problem. If the bug is +serious enough, a non-programmer may even hire a programmer to poke into the +source code. + +Waiting for the bug and the programmer to find each other is like waiting for +Arthur to find the sword in the stone. But Raymond and the rest of the free +source community have even turned this limitation on its head and touted it as +an advantage. Relying on users to scratch itches means that problems only get +addressed if they have real constituencies with a big enough population to +generate the one true believer with enough time on his hands. It's sort of a +free market in people's time for fixing bugs. If the demand is there, the +solution will be created. It's Say's Law recast for software development: "the +supply of bugs creates the talent for fixes." + +Corporate development, on the other hand, has long been obsessed with adding +more and more features to programs to give people enough reason to buy the +upgrade. Managers have long known that it's better to put more time into adding +more doohickeys and widgets to a program than into fixing its bugs. That's why +Microsoft Word can do so many different things with the headers and footers of +documents but can't stop a Word Macro virus from reproducing. The folks at +Microsoft know that when the corporate managers sit down to decide whether to +spend the thousands of dollars to upgrade their machines, they'll need a set of +new compelling features. People don't like to pay for bug fixes. + +Of course, corporations also have some advantages. Money makes sure that +someone is actively trying to solve the bugs in the program. The same free +market vision guarantees that the companies that consistently disappoint their +customers will go out of business. This developer has the advantage of studying +the same source code day in and day out. Eventually he'll learn enough about +the guts of the Source to be much more effective than the guy with the jammed +printer and modem. He should be able to nab the bug 10 times more quickly then +the free source hobbyist just because he's an expert in the system. + +Raymond acknowledges this problem but proposes that the free source model can +still be more effective despite the inexperience of the people who are forced +to scratch an itch. Again he taps the world of libertarian philosophy and +suggests that the free software world is like a bazaar filled with many +different merchants offering their wares. Corporate development, on the other +hand, is structured like the religious syndicates that built the medieval +cathedrals. The bazaars offered plenty of competition but no order. The +cathedrals were run by central teams of priests who tapped the wealth of the +town to build the vision of one architect. + +The differences between the two were pretty simple. The cathedral team could +produce a great work of art if the architect was talented, the funding team was +successful, and the management was able to keep everyone focused on doing their +jobs. If not, it never got that far. The bazaar, on the other hand, consisted +of many small merchants trying to outstrip each other. The best cooks ended up +with the most customers. The others soon went out of business. + +The comparison to software was simple. Corporations gathered the tithes, +employed a central architect with a grand vision, managed the team of +programmers, and shipped a product every once and a bit. The Linux world, +however, let everyone touch the Source. People would try to fix things or add +new features. The best solutions would be adopted by oth ers and the mediocre +would fall by the wayside. Many different Linux versions would proliferate, but +over time the marketplace of software would coalesce around the best standard +version. + +"In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems +are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a +dedicated few to develop confidence that you've winkled them all out. Thus the +long release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited +releases are not perfect," Raymond said. + +"In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally +shallow phenomena--or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quick when +exposed to a thousand eager code-developers pounding on every single new +release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as +a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out +the door." + +2~ They Put a Giant Arrow on the Problem + +This bazaar can be a powerful influence on solving problems. Sure, it isn't +guided by a talented architect and teams of priests, but it is a great +free-for-all. It is quite unlikely, for instance, that the guy with the +overloaded printer and modem line will also be a talented programmer with a +grand vision to solve the problem. Someone named Arthur only stumbles across +the right stone with the right sword every once and a bit. But if the +frustrated user can do a good job characterizing it and reporting it, then +someone else can solve it. + +Dave Hitz was one of the programmers who helped Keith Bostic rewrite UNIX so it +could be free of AT&T's copyright. Today, he runs Network Appliance, a company +that builds stripped-down file servers that run BSD at their core. He's been +writing file systems ever since college, and the free software came in quite +handy when he was starting his company. When they started building the big +machines, the engineers just reached into the pool of free source code for +operating systems and pulled out much of the code that would power his servers. +They modified the code heavily, but the body of free software that he helped +create was a great starting point. + +In his experience, many people would find a bug and patch it with a solution +that was good enough for them. Some were just kids in college. Others were +programmers who didn't have the time or the energy to read the Source and +understand the best way to fix the problem. Some fixed the problem for +themselves, but inadvertently created another problem elsewhere. Sorting +through all of these problems was hard to do. + +But Hitz says, "Even if they fixed it entirely the wrong way, if they found the +place where the problem went away, then they put a giant arrow on the problem." +Eventually, enough arrows would provide someone with enough information to +solve the problem correctly. Many of the new versions written by people may be +lost to time, but that doesn't mean that they didn't have an important effect +on the evolution of the Source. + +"I think it's rarely the case that you get people who make a broad base of +source code their life," he said. "There are just a whole bunch of people who +are dilettantes. The message is, 'Don't underestimate the dilettantes.'" + +2~ How Free Software Can Be a Bazaar or a Cathedral + +When Raymond wrote the essay, he was just trying to suss out the differences +between several of the camps in the free source world. He noticed that people +running free source projects had different ways of sharing. He wanted to +explain which free source development method worked better than others. It was +only later that the essay began to take on a more serious target when everyone +began to realize that Microsoft was perhaps the biggest cathedral-like +development team around. + +Raymond said, "I think that like everyone else in the culture I wandered back +and forth between the two modes as it seemed appropriate because I didn't have +a theory or any consciousness." + +He saw Richard Stallman and the early years of the GNU projects as an example +of cathedral-style development. These teams would often labor for months if not +years before sharing their tools with the world. Raymond himself said he +behaved the same way with some of the early tools that he wrote and contributed +to the GNU project. + +Linus Torvalds changed his mind by increasing the speed of sharing, which +Raymond characterized as the rule of "release early and often, delegate +everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity." Torvalds ran Linux as +openly as possible, and this eventually attracted some good contributors. In +the past, the FSF was much more careful about what it embraced and brought into +the GNU project. Torvalds took many things into his distributions and they +mutated as often as daily. Occasionally, new versions came out twice a day. + +Of course, Stallman and Raymond have had tussles in the past. Raymond is +careful to praise the man and say he values his friendship, but also tempers it +by saying that Stallman is difficult to work with. + +In Raymond's case, he says that he once wanted to rewrite much of the Lisp code +that was built into GNU Emacs. Stallman's Emacs allowed any user to hook up +their own software into Emacs by writing it in a special version of Lisp. Some +had written mail readers. Others had added automatic comment-generating code. +All of this was written in Lisp. + +Raymond says that in 1992, "The Lisp libraries were in bad shape in a number of +ways. They were poorly documented. There was a lot of work that had gone on +outside the FSF and I wanted to tackle that project." + +According to Raymond, Stallman didn't want him to do the work and refused to +build it into the distribution. Stallman could do this because he controlled +the Free Software Foundation and the distribution of the software. Raymond +could have created his own version, but refused because it was too complicated +and ultimately bad for everyone if two versions emerged. + +For his part, Stallman explains that he was glad to accept parts of Raymond's +work, but he didn't want to be forced into accepting them all. Stallman says, +"Actually, I accepted a substantial amount of work that Eric had done. He had a +number of ideas I liked, but he also had some ideas I thought were mistaken. I +was happy to accept his help, as long as I could judge his ideas one by one, +accepting some and declining some. + +"But subsequently he asked me to make a blanket arrangement in which he would +take over the development of a large part of Emacs, operating independently. I +felt I should continue to judge his ideas individually, so I said no." + +Raymond mixed this experience with his time watching Torvalds's team push the +Linux kernel and used them as the basis for his essay on distributing the +Source. "Mostly I was trying to pull some factors that I had observed as +unconscious folklore so people could take them out and reason about them," he +said. + +Raymond says, "Somebody pointed out that there's a parallel of politics. Rigid +political and social institutions tend to change violently if they change at +all, while ones with more play in them tend to change peacefully." + +There is a good empirical reason for the faith in the strength of free source. +After all, a group of folks who rarely saw each other had assembled a great +pile of source code that was kicking Microsoft's butt in some corners of the +computer world. Linux servers were common on the Internet and growing more +common every day. The desktop was waiting to be conquered. They had done this +without stock options, without corporate jets, without secret contracts, and +without potentially illegal alliances with computer manufacturers. The success +of the software from the GNU and Linux world was really quite impressive. + +Of course, myths can be taken too far. Programming computers is hard work and +often frustrating. Sharing the source code doesn't make bugs or problems go +away--it just makes it a bit easier for someone else to dig into a program to +see what's going wrong. The source code may just be a list of instructions +written in a programming language that is designed to be readable by humans, +but that doesn't mean that it is easy to understand. In fact, most humans won't +figure out most source code because programming languages are designed to be +understood by other programmers, not the general population. + +To make matters worse, programmers themselves have a hard time understanding +source code. Computer programs are often quite complicated and it can take +days, weeks, and even months to understand what a strange piece of source code +is telling a computer to do. Learning what is happening in a program can be a +complicated job for even the best programmers, and it is not something that is +taken lightly. + +While many programmers and members of the open source world are quick to praise +the movement, they will also be able to cite problems with the myth of the +Source. It isn't that the Source doesn't work, they'll say, it's just that it +rarely works anywhere near as well as the hype implies. The blooms are rarely +as vigorous and the free markets in improvements are rarely as liquid. + +Larry McVoy, an avid programmer, proto-academic, and developer of the BitKeeper +toolkit, likes to find fault with the model. It isn't that he doesn't like +sharing source code, it's just that he isn't wealthy enough to take on free +software projects. "We need to find a way for people to develop free software +and pay their mortgages and raise a family," he says. + +"If you look closely," he says, "there really isn't a bazaar. At the top it's +always a one-person cathedral. It's either Linus, Stallman, or someone else." +That is, the myth of a bazaar as a wide-open, free-for-all of competition isn't +exactly true. Sure, everyone can download the source code, diddle with it, and +make suggestions, but at the end of the day it matters what Torvalds, Stallman, +or someone else says. There is always a great architect of Chartres lording it +over his domain. + +Part of this problem is the success of Raymond's metaphor. He said he just +wanted to give the community some tools to understand the success of Linux and +reason about it. But his two visions of a cathedral and a bazaar had such a +clarity that people concentrated more on dividing the world into cathedrals and +bazaars. In reality, there's a great deal of blending in between. The most +efficient bazaars today are the suburban malls that have one management company +building the site, leasing the stores, and creating a unified experience. +Downtown shopping areas often failed because there was always one shop owner +who could ruin an entire block by putting in a store that sold pornography. On +the other side, religion has always been something of a bazaar. Martin Luther +effectively split apart Christianity by introducing competition. Even within +denominations, different parishes fight for the hearts and souls of people. + +The same blurring holds true for the world of open source software. The Linux +kernel, for instance, contains many thousands of lines of source code. Some put +the number at 500,000. A few talented folks like Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds +know all of it, but most are only familiar with the corners of it that they +need to know. These folks, who may number in the thousands, are far outnumbered +by the millions who use the Linux OS daily. + +It's interesting to wonder if the ratio of technically anointed to blithe users +in the free source world is comparable to the ratio in Microsoft's dominion. +After all, Microsoft will share its source code with close partners after they +sign some non-disclosure forms.~{ At this writing, Microsoft has not released +its source code, but the company is widely known to be examining the option as +part of its settlement with the Department of Justice. }~ While Microsoft is +careful about what it tells its partners, it will reveal information only when +there's something to gain. Other companies have already jumped right in and +started offering source code to all users who want to look at it. + +Answering this question is impossible for two different reasons. First, no one +knows what Microsoft reveals to its partners because it keeps all of this +information secret, by reflex. Contracts are usually negotiated under +non-disclosure, and the company has not been shy about exploiting the power +that comes from the lack of information. + +Second, no one really knows who reads the Linux source code for the opposite +reason. The GNU/Linux source is widely available and frequently downloaded, but +that doesn't mean it's read or studied. The Red Hat CDs come with one CD full +of pre-compiled binaries and the second full of source code. Who knows whoever +pops the second CDROM in their computer? Everyone is free to do so in the +privacy of their own cubicle, so no records are kept. + +If I were to bet, I would guess that the ratios of cognoscenti to uninformed +users in the Linux and Microsoft worlds are pretty close. Reading the Source +just takes too much time and too much effort for many in the Linux world to +take advantage of the huge river of information available to them. + +If this is true or at least close to true, then why has the free source world +been able to move so much more quickly than the Microsoft world? The answer +isn't that everyone in the free source world is using the Source, it's that +everyone is free to use it. When one person needs to ask a question or scratch +an itch, the Source is available with no questions asked and no lawyers +consulted. Even at 3:00 A.M., a person can read the Source. At Microsoft and +other corporations, they often need to wait for the person running that +division or section to give them permission to access the source code. + +There are other advantages. The free source world spends a large amount of time +keeping the source code clean and accessible. A programmer who tries to get +away with sloppy workmanship and bad documentation will pay for it later as +others come along and ask thousands of questions. + +Corporate developers, on the other hand, have layers of secrecy and bureaucracy +to isolate them from questions and comments. It is often hard to find the right +programmer in the rabbit warren of cubicles who has the source code in the +first place. One Microsoft programmer was quoted as saying, "A developer at +Microsoft working on the OS can't scratch an itch he's got with Excel, neither +can the Excel developer scratch his itch with the OS--it would take him months +to figure out how to build and debug and install, and he probably couldn't get +proper source access anyway." + +This problem is endemic to corporations. The customers are buying the binary +version, not the source code, so there is no reason to dress up the backstage +wings of the theater. After some time, though, people change cubicles, move to +other corporations, and information disappears. While companies try to keep +source code databases to synchronize development, the efforts often fall apart. +After Apple canceled development of their Newton handheld, many Newton users +were livid. They had based big projects on the platform and they didn't want to +restart their work. Many asked whether Apple could simply give away the OS's +source code instead of leaving it to rot on some hard disk. Apple dodged these +requests, and this made some people even more cynical. One outside developer +speculated, "It probably would not be possible to re-create the OS. The +developers are all gone. All of them went to Palm, and they probably couldn't +just put it back together again if they wanted to." + +Of course, corporations try to fight this rot by getting their programmers to +do a good job at the beginning and write plenty of documentation. In practice, +this slips a bit because it is not rewarded by the culture of secrecy. I know +one programmer who worked for a project at MIT. The boss thought he was being +clever by requiring comments on each procedure and actually enforcing it with +an automated text-scanning robot that would look over the source code and count +the comments. My friend turned around and hooked up one version of the popular +artificial intelligence chatterbots like Eliza and funneled the responses into +the comment field. Then everyone was happy. The chatterbot filled the comment +field, the automated comment police found something vaguely intelligent, and +the programmer got to spend his free time doing other things. The boss never +discovered the problem. + +Programmers are the same the world over, and joining the free source world +doesn't make them better people or destroy their impudence. But it does +penalize them if others come along and try to use their code. If it's +inscrutable, sloppy, or hard to understand, then others will either ignore it +or pummel them with questions. That is a strong incentive to do it right. + +2~ Open Source and Lightbulbs + +The limitations to the power of open source might be summarized in the answer +to the question "How many open source developers does it take to change a +lightbulb?" The answer is: 17. Seventeen to argue about the license; 17 to +argue about the brain-deadedness of the lightbulb architecture; 17 to argue +about a new model that encompasses all models of illumination and makes it +simple to replace candles, campfires, pilot lights, and skylights with the same +easy-to-extend mechanism; 17 to speculate about the secretive industrial +conspiracy that ensures that lightbulbs will burn out frequently; 1 to finally +change the bulb; and 16 who decide that this solution is good enough for the +time being. + +The open source development model is a great way for very creative people to +produce fascinating software that breaks paradigms and establishes new +standards for excellence. It may not be the best way, however, to finish boring +jobs like fine-tuning a graphical interface, or making sure that the scheduling +software used by executives is as bulletproof as possible. + +While the open development model has successfully tackled the problem of +creating some great tools, of building a strong OS, and of building very +flexible appliance applications like web browsers, it is a long way from +winning the battle for the desktop. Some free source people say the desktop +applications for average users are just around the corner and the next stop on +the Free Software Express. Others aren't so sure. + +David Henkel-Wallace is one of the founders of the free software company +Cygnus. This company built its success around supporting the development tools +created by Stallman's Free Software Foundation. They would sign contracts with +companies to answer any questions they had about using the free software tools. +At first companies would balk at paying for support until they realized that it +was cheaper than hiring in-house technical staff to do the work. John Gilmore, +one of the cofounders, liked to say, "We make free software affordable." + +The company grew by helping chip manufacturers tune the FSF compiler, GCC, for +their chip. This was often a difficult and arduous task, but it was very +valuable to the chip manufacturer because potential customers knew they could +get a good compiler to produce software for the chip. While Intel continued to +dominate the desktop, the market for embedded chips to go into products like +stoves, microwave ovens, VCRs, or other smart boxes boomed as manufacturers +rolled out new chips to make it cheaper and easier to add smart features to +formerly dumb boxes. The engineers at the companies were often thrilled to +discover that they could continue to use GCC to write software for a new chip, +and this made it easier to sell the chip. + +Cygnus always distributed to the Source their modifications to GCC as the GNU +General Public License demanded. This wasn't a big deal because the chip +manufacturers wanted the software to be free and easy for everyone to use. This +made Cygnus one of the clearing-houses for much of the information on how GCC +worked and how to make it faster. + +Henkel-Wallace is quick to praise the power of publicly available source code +for Cygnus's customers. They were all programmers, after all. If they saw +something they didn't like with GCC, they knew how to poke around on the +insides and fix it. That was their job. + +"[GCC] is a compiler tool and it was used by developers so they were smart +enough. When something bothered someone, we fixed it. There was a very tight +coupling," he said. + +He openly wonders, though, whether the average word processor or basic tool +user will be able to do anything. He says, "The downside is that it's hard to +transfer that knowledge with a user who isn't a developer. Let's say Quicken +has a special feature for lawyers. You need to have a more formal model because +the lawyers aren't developers. (We're fortunate in that regard.)" + +That is, lawyers aren't schooled enough in the guts of computer development to +complain in the right way. A programmer could say, "GCC is optimizing away too +much dead code that isn't really dead." Other folks in the GCC community would +know what is going on and be able to fix it. A lawyer might just say, "Quicken +screwed up my billing and had me billing twenty-six hours in a day." This +wouldn't pinpoint the problem enough for people to solve it. The lawyer doesn't +understand the inside of the software like the programmer. + +In situations like this, Henkel-Wallace believes that a corporate-style team +may be the only one that can study the problems thoroughly enough to find +solutions. Intuit, the manufacturer of Quicken, is well known for videotaping +many standard users who use their product for the first time. This allows them +to pinpoint rough spots in the program and identify places where it could be +improved. This relentless smoothing and polishing has made the product one of +the best-known and widely used tools on desktops. It isn't clear that +non-programmers could have accomplished the same quality by working together +with the Source at their disposal. + +2~ The Source and the Language that We Speak + +There are deeper, more philosophical currents to the open source world. The +personal computer industry is only a few decades old. While it has advanced +rapidly and solved many problems, there is still very little understanding of +the field and what it takes to make a computer easy to use. This has been the +great struggle, and the free source world may be an essential part of this +trip. + +Tim O'Reilly, the publisher of many books and a vocal proponent of the open +source world, says, "We've gone through this period of thinking of programs as +artifacts. A binary object is a thing. Open source is part of thinking of +computers as a process." In other words, we've done a good job of creating +computers you can buy off the shelf and software that can be bought in +shrink-wrapped boxes, but we haven't done a good job of making it possible for +people to talk to the machines. + +To a large extent, the process has been a search for a good language to use to +communicate with the computer. Most of the recent development followed the work +at Xerox PARC that created some of the first graphical user interfaces. Apple +followed their lead and Microsoft followed Apple. Each bought into the notion +that creating a neat picture representing the files on a screen would make a +neat metaphor that could make it easier for people to interact with the +computers. Dragging a file to the trash was somehow easier for people to do +than typing a cryptic command like "rm." + +In the 1980s, that sort of graphical thinking was considered brilliant. +Pictures were prettier than words, so it was easy to look at the clean, pretty +Macintosh screen and think it was easier to use just because it was easier to +look at. + +But the pretty features merely hid a massive amount of complexity, and it was +still hard to work with the machines. Don Norman, a human/computer interface +engineer at Apple, once wrote a fascinating discussion of the company's design +of their computer's on-off switch. He pointed out that the switch couldn't be a +simple power switch that could cut the power on and off because the computer +needed to orchestrate the start-up and shutdown procedure. It needed to close +up files, store data safely, and make sure everything was ready to start up +again. + +The design of the power switch was made even more complicated by the fact that +it was supposed to work even when the computer crashed. That is, if bad +programming jumbles the memory and screws up the central processor, the power +switch is still supposed to shut down the machine. Of course, the computer +couldn't even add two numbers together after it crashed, so it couldn't even +begin to move through all the clerical work necessary to shut down the machine. +The Macintosh on which I wrote this book can crash so badly that the power +switch doesn't work, and I can only reset it by sticking a paper clip into a +hidden hole. + +Norman's work shows how hard it can be to come up with a simple language that +allows humans and computers to communicate about a task that used to be solved +with a two-position light switch. This problem can be seen throughout the +industry. One computer tutor told me, "I am so tired of telling people to shut +down their computers by pushing the 'Start' button." Microsoft Windows places +all of the features on a menu tree that grows out of one button labeled +"Start." This may have been a great way to capture the potential to do new +things that they felt they were selling, but it continues to be confusing to +all new users of the machines. Why should they push start to stop it? + +The quest for this Source-level control can take many strange turns. By the +middle of the 1980s, programmers at Apple realized that they had gone a bit too +far when they simplified the Mac's interface. The visual language of pointing +and clicking at icons may have been great for new users, but it was beginning +to thwart sophisticated users who wanted to automate what they did. Many +graphics designers would find themselves repeatedly doing the same steps to +image files, and it was boring. They wondered, why couldn't the computer just +repeat all their instructions and save them all that pointing and clicking? + +In a sense, the sophisticated Mac users were looking for the Source. They +wanted to be able to write and modify simple programs that controlled their +software. The problem was that the graphical display on the Mac wasn't really +suited to the task. How do you describe moving the mouse and clicking on a +button? How do you come up with a language that means "cut out this sample and +paste it over here"? The actions were so visual that there weren't any words or +language to describe them. + +This problem confounded Apple for the next 10 years, and the company is slowly +finishing its solution, known as AppleScript. The task has not been simple, but +it has been rewarding for many who use their Macintoshes as important chains in +data production lines. Apple included instructions for moving icons to +locations, uploading files, changing the color of icons, and starting up +programs with others. + +The nicest extension was a trick that made the AppleScript "recordable." That +is, you could turn on a recorder before stepping through the different jobs. +The Mac would keep track of your actions and generate a program that would +allow you to repeat what you were doing. Still, the results were far from +simple to understand or use. Here's a simple snippet of AppleScript code that +will select all files in one directory with the word "Speckle" in their title +and open them up with another application: + +code{ + +tell application "Finder" + set theFiles to every file in folder (rootPlus) whose + name contains "Speckle" + with timeout of 600 seconds + repeat with aFile in theFiles + open (aFile) using (file "Macintosh HD: Make + GIF (16 colors, Web)") + end repeat + end timeout +end tell + +}code + +This Source can then be run again and again to finish a task. Making this tool available to users has been a challenge for Apple because it forces them to make programming easier. Many people learn AppleScript by turning on the recording feature and watching what happens when they do what they would normally do. Then they learn how to insert a few more commands to accomplish the task successfully. In the end, they become programmers manipulating the Source without realizing it. + +O'Reilly and others believe that the open source effort is just an extension of +this need. As computers become more and more complex, the developers need to +make the internal workings more and more open to users. This is the only way +users can solve their problems and use the computers effectively. + +"The cutting edge of the computer industry is in infoware. There's not all that +much juice in the kind of apps we wrote in the eighties and nineties. As we get +speech recognition, we'll go even more in the direction of open source," he +says. + +"There are more and more recipes that are written down. These are going to +migrate into lower and lower layers of software and the computer is going to +get a bigger and bigger vocabulary." + +That is, more and more of the Source is going to need to become transparent to +the users. It's not just a political battle of Microsoft versus the world. It's +not just a programmer's struggle to poke a nose into every corner of a device. +It's about usability. More and more people need to write programs to teach +computers to do what they need to do. Access to the Source is the only way to +accomplish it. + +In other words, computers are becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives. +Their language is becoming more readily understandable by humans, and humans +are doing a better job of speaking the language of computers. We're converging. +The more we do so, the more important the Source will be. There's nothing that +Microsoft or corporate America can do about this. They're going to have to go +along. They're going to have to give us access to the Source. + +1~ People + +When I was in college, a friend of mine in a singing group would often tweak +his audience by making them recite Steve Martin's "Individualist's Creed" in +unison. Everyone would proclaim that they were different, unique, and +wonderfully eccentric individuals together with everyone else in the audience. +The gag played well because all the individualists were also deeply committed +to living a life filled with irony. + +The free source world is sort of a Club Med for these kinds of individualists. +Richard Stallman managed to organize a group of highly employable people and +get them to donate their $50+-per-hour time to a movement by promising complete +freedom. Everyone who showed up valued freedom much more than the money they +could be making working for big companies. It's not a bit surprising that all +of the free thinkers are also coming up with the same answers to life. Great +minds think alike, right? + +This large collection of dedicated individualists is predisposed to moments of +easy irony. Black is by far their favorite color. Long hair and beards are +common. T-shirts and shorts are the rule when it gets warm, and T-shirts and +jeans dominate when the weather turns cold. No one wears suits or anything so +traditional. That would be silly because they're not as comfortable as T-shirts +and jeans. Fitting in with the free thinkers isn't hard. + +The group is not particularly republican or democrat, but libertarian politics +are easily understood and widely supported. Gun control is usually considered +to be wrong, if only because the federal government will move on to controlling +something else when they're finished with guns. ~{ In fact, the federal +government already considers encryption software to be a munition and often +tries to regulate it as such. }~ Taxes are bad, and some in the group like to +dream of when they'll be driven away by the free-flowing, frictionless economy +of the Internet. Folks like to say things like "Governments are just speed +bumps on the information superhighway." + +The first amendment is very popular and many are sure that practically +everything they do with a computer is a form of speech or expression. The +government shouldn't have the right to control a website's content because +they'll surely come to abuse that power in the future. Some even rage against +private plans to rate websites for their content because they're certain that +these tools will eventually be controlled by those in power. To the most +extreme, merely creating a list of sites with information unsuitable for kids +is setting up the infrastructure for the future Nazis to start burning +websites. + +Virtually everyone believes that strong codes and cryptography are essential +for protecting a person's privacy online. The U.S. government's attempt to +control the technology by regulating its export is widely seen as a silly +example of how governments are trying to grab power at the expense of their +citizens. The criminals already have the secret codes; why shouldn't the honest +people be able to protect their data? + +Pornography or references to sex in the discussions are rare, if only because +the world of the libido is off the main topic. It's not that sex isn't on the +minds of the free software community, it's just that the images are so freely +available that they're uninteresting. Anyone can go to www.playboy.com, but not +everyone can write a recursively descending code optimizer. People also rarely +swear. While four-letter words are common on Wall Street and other highly +charged environments, they're rare in the technology world. + +Much of the community are boys and men, or perhaps more correctly "guys." While +there are some older programmers who continue to dig the excitement and tussle +of the free source world, many are high school and college guys with plenty of +extra time on their hands. Many of them are too smart for school, and writing +neat software is a challenge for them. Older people usually get bogged down +with a job and mortgage payments. It's hard for them to take advantage of the +freedom that comes with the source code. Still, the older ones who survive are +often the best. They have both deep knowledge and experience. + +The average population, however, is aging quickly. As the software becomes +better, it is easier for working stiffs to bring it into the corporate +environments. Many folks brag about sneaking Linux into their office and +replacing Microsoft on some hidden server. As more and more users find a way to +make money with the free software, more and more older people (i.e., over 25) +are able to devote some time to the revolution. + +I suppose I would like to report that there's a healthy contingent of women +taking part in the free source world, but I can't. It would be nice to isolate +the free software community from the criticism that usually finds any group of +men. By some definition or legal reasoning, these guys must be practicing some +de facto discrimination. Somebody will probably try to sue someone someday. +Still, the women are scarce and it's impossible to use many of the standard +explanations. The software is, after all, free. It runs well on machines that +are several generations old and available from corporate scrap heaps for +several hundred dollars. Torvalds started writing Linux because he couldn't +afford a real version of UNIX. Lack of money or the parsimony of evil, +gender-nasty parents who refuse to buy their daughters a computer can hardly be +blamed. + +In fact, many of the people online don't even know the gender of the person on +the other end. Oblique nicknames like "303," "nomad," "CmdrTaco," or "Hemos" +are common. No one knows if you're a boy or a girl online. It's almost like the +ideal of a gender-free existence proposed by the unisex dreamers who wrote such +stuff as "Free to Be You and Me," trying to convince children that they were +free to pursue any dream they wanted. Despite the prevalence of these +gender-free visions, the folks who ended up dreaming of a world where all the +software was free turned out to be almost entirely men. + +Most of the men would like to have a few more women show up. They need dates as +much as any guy. If anything, the crown of Evil Discriminator might be placed +on the heads of the girls who scorn the guys who are geeks, dweebs, and nerds. +A girl couldn't find a better ratio of men if she tried. + +This may change in the future if organizations like LinuxChix +(www.linuxchix.org) have their way. They run a site devoted to celebrating +women who enjoy the open source world, and they've been trying to start up +chapters around the world. The site gives members a chance to post their names +and biographical details. Of course, several of the members are men and one is +a man turning into a woman. The member writes, "I'm transsexual +(male-to-female, pre-op), and at the moment still legally married to my wife, +which means that if we stay together we'll eventually have a legal same-sex +marriage." + +Still, there's not much point in digging into this too deeply because the free +source world rarely debates this topic. Everyone is free to use the software +and contribute what they want. If the women want to come, they can. If they +don't, they don't have to do so to fulfill some mandate from society. No one is +sitting around debating whether having it all as a woman includes having all of +the source code. It's all about freedom to use software, not dating, mating, or +debating sexual roles in society. + +Racial politics, however, are more complicated. Much of the Linux community is +spread out throughout the globe. While many members come from the United +States, major contributors can be found in most countries. Linus Torvalds, of +course, came from Finland, one of the more technically advanced countries in +the world. Miguel de Icaza, the lead developer of the GNOME desktop, comes from +Mexico, a country perceived as technically underdeveloped by many in the United +States. + +Jon Hall, often called maddog, is one of the first members of corporate America +to recognize that neat things were going on throughout the world of open source +software. He met Torvalds at a conference and shipped him a Digital computer +built around the Alpha chip when he found out that Torvalds wanted to +experiment with porting his software to a 64-bit architecture. Hall loves to +speculate about the spread of free software throughout the globe and says, "Who +knows where the next great mind will come from? It could be Spain, Brazil, +India, Singapore, or dare I say Finland?" + +In general, the free source revolution is worldwide and rarely encumbered by +racial and national barricades. Europe is just as filled with Linux developers +as America, and the Third World is rapidly skipping over costly Microsoft and +into inexpensive Linux. Interest in Linux is booming in China and India. +English is, of course, the default language, but other languages continue to +live thanks to automatic translation mechanisms like Babelfish. + +This border-free existence can only help the spread of free source software. +Many countries, claiming national pride, would rather use software developed by +local people. Many countries explicitly distrust software coming from the +United States because it is well known that the U.S. government tries to +restrict security software like encryption at the request of its +intelligence-gathering agencies. In November 1999, the German government's +Federal Ministry of Finance and Technology announced a grant for the GNU +Privacy Guard project. Why would a country want to send all of its money to +Redmond, Washington, when it could bolster a local group of hackers by +embracing a free OS? For everyone but the United States, installing a free OS +may even be a patriotic gesture. + +2~ Icons + +The archetypes are often defined by prominent people, and no one is more +central to the free source world than Richard Stallman. Some follow the man +like a disciple, others say that his strong views color the movement and scare +away normal people. Everyone goes out of their way to praise the man and tell +you how much they respect what he's done. Almost everyone will turn around and +follow the compliment with a veiled complaint like, "He can be difficult to +work with." Stallman is known for being a very unreasonable man in the sense +that George Bernard Shaw used the word when he said, "The Reasonable man adapts +to nature. The unreasonable man seeks to adapt nature to himself. Therefore it +is only through the actions of unreasonable men that civilization advances." +The reasonable man would still be waiting on hold as the tech support folks in +MegaSoft played with their Nerf footballs and joked about the weenies who +needed help using their proprietary software. + +I often think that only someone as obsessed and brilliant as Stallman could +have dreamed up the GNU Public License. Only he could have realized that it was +possible to insist that everyone give away the source code and allow them to +charge for it at the same time if they want. Most of us would have locked our +brains if we found ourselves with a dream of a world of unencumbered source +code but hobbled by the reality that we needed money to live. Stallman found +himself in that place in the early days of the Free Software Foundation and +then found a way to squeeze his way out of the dilemma by charging for CD-ROMs +and printed manuals. The fact that others could still freely copy the +information they got meant that he wasn't compromising his core dream. + +If Stallman is a product of MIT, then one opposite of him is the group of +hackers that emerged from Berkeley and produced the other free software known +as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Berkeley's computer science department always +had a tight bond with AT&T and Sun and shared much of the early UNIX code with +both. + +While there were many individuals at Berkeley who are well known among +developers and hackers, no one stands out like Richard Stallman. This is +because Stallman is such a strong iconoclast, not because Berkeley is the home +of ne'er-do-wells who don't measure up. In fact, the pragmatism of some of the +leaders to emerge from the university is almost as great as Stallman's +idealism, and this pragmatism is one of the virtues celebrated by Berkeley's +circle of coders. For instance, Bill Joy helped develop much of the early +versions of the BSD before he went off to take a strong leadership role at Sun +Microsystems. + +Sun has a contentious relationship with the free software world. It's far from +a free software company like Red Hat, but it has contributed a fair number of +lines of software to the open source community. Still, Sun guards its +intellectual property rights to some packages fiercely and refuses to +distribute the source with an official open source license. Instead, it calls +their approach the "community source license" and insists that it's good enough +for almost everyone. Users can read the source code, but they can't run off +with it and start their own distribution. + +Many others from Berkeley followed Joy's path to Sun. John Ousterhout left his +position as a professor at Berkeley in 1994 to move to Sun. Ousterhout was +known for developing a fairly simple but powerful scripting tool known as +TCL/Tk. One part of it, the Tool Control Language (TCL), was a straightforward +English-like language that made it pretty easy for people to knit together +different modules of code. The user didn't have to be a great programmer to +work with the code because the language was designed to be straightforward. +There were no complicated data structures or pointers. Everything was a string +of ASCII text. + +The second part, the Tool kit (Tk), contained a variety of visual widgets that +could be used to get input for and output from a program. The simplest ones +were buttons, sliders, or menus, but many people wrote complicated ones that +served their particular needs. + +The TCL/Tk project at Berkeley attracted a great deal of attention from the +Net. Ousterhout, like most academics, freely distributed his code and did a +good job helping others use the software. He and his students rewrote and +extended the code a number of times, and this constant support helped create +even more fans. The software scratched an itch for many academics who were +smart enough to program the machines in their lab, but burdened by more +important jobs like actually doing the research they set out to do. TCL/Tk +picked up a wide following because it was easy for people to learn a small +amount quickly. Languages like C required a semester or more to master. TCL +could be picked up in an afternoon. + +Many see the pragmatism of the BSD-style license as a way for the Berkeley +hackers to ease their trip into corporate software production. The folks would +develop the way-out, unproven ideas using public money before releasing it with +the BSD license. Then companies like Sun would start to resell it. + +The supporters of the BSD licenses, of course, don't see corporate development +as a bad thing. They just see it as a way for people to pay for the extra bells +and whistles that a dedicated, market-driven team can add to software. + +Ousterhout's decision to move to Sun worried many people because they thought +it might lead to a commercialization of the language. Ousterhout answered these +with an e-mail message that said TCL/Tk would remain free, but Sun would try to +make some money on the project by selling development tools. + +"Future enhancements made toTcl andTk by my group at Sun, including the ports +to Macs and PCs, will be made freely available to anyone to use for any +purpose. My view, and that of the people I report to at Sun, is that it +wouldn't work for Sun to try to takeTcl andTk proprietary anyway: someone +(probably me, in a new job) would just pick up the last free release and start +an independent development path. This would be a terrible thing for everyone +since it would result in incompatible versions. + +"Of course, Sun does need to make money from the work of my team or else they +won't be able to continue to support us. Our current plan is to charge for +development tools and interesting extensions and applications. Balancing the +public and the profitable will be an ongoing challenge for us, but it is very +important both to me and to Sun to keep the support of the existing Tcl +community," he wrote. + +In some respects, Ousterhout's pragmatism was entirely different from +Stallman's. He openly acknowledged the need to make money and also admitted +that Sun was leaving TCL/Tk free because it might be practically impossible to +make it proprietary. The depth of interest in the community made it likely that +a free version would continue to evolve. Stallman would never cut such a deal +with a company shipping proprietary software. + +In other respects, many of the differences are only at the level of rhetoric. +Ousterhout worked on producing a compromise that would leave TCL/Tk free while +the sales of development tools paid the bills. Stallman did the same thing when +he figured out a way to charge people for CD-ROMs and manuals. Ousterhout's +work at Sun was spun off into a company called Scriptics that is surprisingly +like many of the other free software vendors. The core of the product, TCL/Tk +8.1 at this time, is governed by a BSD-style license. The source code can be +downloaded from the site. The company itself, on the other hand, sells a more +enhanced product known as TCLPro. + +In many ways, the real opposite to Richard Stallman is not Bill Joy or John +Ousterhout, it's Linus Benedict Torvalds. While Stallman, Joy, and Ousterhout +are products of the U.S. academic system, Torvalds is very much an outsider who +found himself trying to program in Europe without access to a decent OS. While +the folks at Berkeley, MIT, and many U.S. universities were able to get access +to UNIX thanks to carefully constructed licenses produced by the OS's +then-owner, AT&T, students in Finland like Torvalds were frozen out. + +"I didn't have many alternatives. I had the commercial alternative [UNIX], +which was way too expensive. It was really out of reach for a normal human +being, and not only out of reach in a monetary sense, but because years ago +commercial UNIX vendors weren't interested in selling to individuals. They were +interested in selling to large corporations and banks. So for a normal person, +there was no choice," he told VAR Business. + +When Linux began to take off, Torvalds moved to Silicon Valley and took a job +with the supersecret research firm Transmeta. At Comdex in November 1999, +Torvalds announced that Transmeta was working on a low-power computing chip +with the nickname "Crusoe." + +There are, of course, some conspiracy theories. Transmeta is funded by a number +of big investors including Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. The fact that they +chose to employ Torvalds may be part of a plan, some think, to distract him +from Linux development. After all, version 2.2 of the kernel took longer than +many expected, although it may have been because its goals were too ambitious. +When Microsoft needed a coherent threat to offer up to the Department of +Justice, Transmeta courteously made Torvalds available to the world. Few +seriously believe this theory, but it is constantly whispered as a nervous +joke. + +2~ Flames + +The fights and flamefests of the Internet are legendary, and the open source +world is one of the most contentious corners of the Net. People frequently use +strong words like "brain dead," "loser," "lame," "gross," and "stoooopid" to +describe one another's ideas. If words are the only way to communicate, then +the battle for mindshare means that those who wield the best words win. + +In fact, most of the best hackers and members of the free source world are also +great writers. Spending days, weeks, months, and years of your life +communicating by e-mail and newsgroups teaches people how to write well and get +to the point quickly. The Internet is very textual, and the hard-core computer +programmers have plenty of experience spitting out text. As every programmer +knows, you're supposed to send e-mail to the person next to you if you want to +schedule lunch. That person might be in the middle of something. + +Of course, there's a danger to making a sweeping generalization implying that +the free source world is filled with great writers. The fact is that we might +not have heard from the not-so-great writers who sit lurking on the Net. While +some of the students who led the revolutions of 1968 were quite articulate, +many of the tie-dyed masses were also in the picture. You couldn't miss them. +On the Internet, the silent person is invisible. + +Some argue that the free software world has burgeoned because the silent folks +embraced the freely available source code. Anyone could download the source +code and play with it without asking permission or spending money. That meant +that 13-year-old kids could start using the software without asking their +parents for money. SCO Unix and Windows NT cost big bucks. + +This freedom also extended to programmers at work. In many companies, the +computer managers are doctrinaire and officious. They often quickly develop +knee-jerk reactions to technologies and use these stereotypes to make technical +decisions. Free software like Linux was frequently rejected out of hand by the +gatekeepers, who thought something must be wrong with the software if no one +was charging for it. These attitudes couldn't stop the engineers who wanted to +experiment with the free software, however, because it had no purchase order +that needed approval. + +The invisible-man quality is an important part of the free software world. +While I've described the bodies and faces of some of the betterknown free +source poster boys, it is impossible to say much about many of the others. The +community is spread out over the Internet throughout the world. Many people who +work closely on projects never meet each other. The physical world with all of +its ways of encoding a position in a hierarchy are gone. No one can tell how +rich you are by your shoes. The color of your skin doesn't register. It's all +about technology and technological ideas. + +In fact, there is a certain degree of Emily Dickinson in the world. Just as +that soul selected her own society and shut the door on the rest of the world, +the free software world frequently splits and resplits into smaller groups. +While there is some cross-pollination, many are happy to live in their own +corners. OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD are more separate countries than partners +in crime. They evolve on their own, occasionally stealing ideas and source code +to bridge the gap. + +Many writers have described some of their problems with making hay of the +Silicon Valley world. Screenwriters and television producers often start up +projects to tap into the rich texture of nerdlands only to discover that +there's nothing that compelling to film. It's just miles and miles of +steel-frame buildings holding acres and acres of cubicles. Sure, there are some +Ping-Pong tables and pinball machines, but the work is all in the mind. Eyes +want physical action, and all of the excitement in a free source world is in +the ideas. + +But people are people. While there's no easy way to use the old standbys of +race or clothes to discriminate, the technical world still develops ways to +classify its members and place them in camps. The free software world has its +own ways to distinguish between these camps. + +The biggest distinction may be between folks who favor the GPL and those who +use the BSD-style license to protect their software. This is probably the +biggest decision a free software creator must make because it controls whether +others will be able to build commercial versions of the software without +contributing the new code back to the project. + +People who embrace the GPL are more likely to embrace Richard Stallman, or at +least less likely to curse him in public. They tend to be iconoclastic and +individualistic. GPL projects tend to be more cultish and driven by a weird +mixture of personality and ain't-it-cool hysteria. + +The people on the side of BSD-style license, on the other hand, seem pragmatic, +organized, and focused. There are three major free versions of BSD UNIX alone, +and they're notable because they each have centrally administered collections +of files. The GPL-protected Linux can be purchased from at least six major +groups that bundle it together, and each of them includes packages and pieces +of software they find all over the Net. + +The BSD-license folks are also less cultish. The big poster boys, Torvalds and +Stallman, are both GPL men. The free versions of BSD, which helped give Linux +much of its foundation, are largely ignored by the press for all the wrong +reasons. The BSD teams appear to be fragmented because they are all separate +political organizations who have no formal ties. There are many contributors, +which means that BSD has no major charismatic leader with a story as compelling +as that of Linus Torvalds. + +Many contributors could wear this mantle and many have created just as much +code. But life, or at least the media's description of it, is far from fair. + +The flagship of the BSD world may be the Apache web server group, which +contributed greatly to the success of the platform. This core team has no +person who stands out as a leader. Most of the people on the team are fully +employed in the web business, and several members of the team said that the +Apache team was just a good way for the people to advance their day jobs. It +wasn't a crusade for them to free source code from jail. + +The Apache web server is protected by a BSD-style license that permits +commercial reuse of the software without sharing the source code. It is a +separate program, however, and many Linux users run the software on Linux +boxes. Of course, this devotion to business and relatively quiet disposition +isn't always true. Theo de Raadt, the leader of the OpenBSD faction, is fond of +making bold proclamations. In his interview with me, he dismissed the Free +Software Foundation as terribly misnamed because you weren't truly free to do +whatever you wanted with the software. + +In fact, it's easy to take these stereotypes too far. Yes, GPL folks can be +aggressive, outspoken, quick-thinking, driven, and tempestuous. Sure, BSD folks +are organized, thorough, mainstream, dedicated, and precise. But there are +always exceptions to these rules, and the people in each camp will be quick to +spot them. + +Someone might point out that Alan Cox, one of the steadfast keepers of the +GPL-protected Linux kernels, is not particularly flashy nor given to writing +long manifestos on the Net. Others might say that Brian Behlendorf has been a +great defender of the Apache project. He certainly hasn't avoided defending the +BSD license, although not in the way that Stallman might have liked. He was, +after all, one of the members of the Apache team who helped convince IBM that +they could use the Apache web server without danger. + +After BSD versus GPL, the next greatest fault line is the choice of editor. +Some use the relatively simple vi, which came out of Berkeley and the early +versions of BSD. Others cleave to Stallman's Emacs, which is far more baroque +and extreme. The vi camp loves the simplicity. The Emacs fans brag about how +they've programmed their version of Emacs to break into the White House, snag +secret pictures of people in compromising positions, route them through an +anonymous remailer, and negotiate for a big tax refund all with one complicated +control-meta-trans keystroke. + +While this war is well known, it has little practical significance. People can +choose for themselves, and their choices have no effect on others. GPL or BSD +can affect millions; vi versus Emacs makes no big difference. It's just one of +the endless gag controversies in the universe. If Entertainment Tonight were +covering the free software world, they would spend hours cataloging which stars +used vi and which used Emacs. Did Shirley MacLaine use vi or Emacs or even +wordstar in a previous life? + +Some of the other fault lines aren't so crisp, but end up being very important. +The amount of order or lack of order is an important point of distinction for +many free source people, and there is a wide spectrum of choices available. +While the fact that all of the source code is freely redistributable makes the +realm crazy, many groups try to control it with varying amounts of order. Some +groups are fanatically organized. Others are more anarchic. Each has a +particular temperament. + +The three BSD projects are well known for keeping control of all the source +code for all the software in the distribution. They're very centrally managed +and brag about keeping all the source code together in one build tree. The +Linux distributions, on the other hand, include software from many different +sources. Some include the KDE desktop. Others choose GNOME. Many include both. + +Some of the groups have carefully delineated jobs. The Debian group elects a +president and puts individuals in charge of particular sections of the +distribution. Or perhaps more correctly, the individuals nominate themselves +for jobs they can accomplish. The group is as close to a government as exists +in the open software world. Many of the Open Source Initiative guidelines on +what fits the definition of "open source" evolved from the earlier rules +drafted by the Debian group to help define what could and couldn't be included +in an official Debian distribution. The OpenBSD group, on the other hand, opens +up much of the source tree to everyone on the team. Anyone can make changes. +Core areas, on the other hand, are still controlled by leaders. + +Some groups have become very effective marketing forces. Red Hat is a well-run +company that has marketing teams selling people on upgrading their software as +well as engineering teams with a job of writing improved code to include in +future versions. Red Hat packages their distribution in boxes that are sold +through normal sales channels like bookstores and catalogs. They have a big +presence at trade shows like LinuxExpo, in part because they help organize +them. + +Other groups like Slackware only recently opened up a website. OpenBSD sells +copies to help pay for its Internet bills, not to expand its marketing force. +Some distributions are only available online. + +In many cases, there is no clear spectrum defined between order and anarchy. +The groups just have their own brands of order. OpenBSD brags about stopping +security leaks and going two years without a rootlevel intrusion, but some of +its artwork is a bit scruffy. Red Hat, on the other hand, has been carefully +working to make Linux easy for everyone to use, but they're not as focused on +security details. + +Of course, this amount of order is always a bit of a relative term. None of +these groups have strong lines of control. All of them depend upon the +contributions of people. Problems only get solved if someone cares enough to do +it. + +This disorder is changing a bit now that serious companies like Red Hat and VA +Linux are entering the arena. These companies pay fulltime programmers to +ensure that their products are bug free and easy to use. If their management +does a good job, the open source software world may grow more ordered and +actually anticipate more problems instead of waiting for the right person to +come along with the time and the inclination to solve them. + +These are just a few of the major fault lines. Practically every project comes +with major technical distinctions that split the community. Is Java a good +language or another attempt at corporate control? How should the basic Apache +web server handle credit cards? What is the best way to handle 64-bit +processors? There are thousands of differences, hundreds of fault lines, scores +of architectural arguments, and dozens of licenses. But at least all of the +individuals agree upon one thing: reading the source code is essential. + +1~ Politics + +One of the great questions about the free source movement is its politics. The +world loves to divide every issue into two sides and then start picking teams. +You're either part of the problem or part of the solution. You're either for us +or against us. You're either on the red team or the blue team. + +The notion of giving software and source code away isn't really a radical +concept. People give stuff away all the time. But when the process actually +starts to work and folks start joining up, the stakes change. Suddenly it's not +about random acts of kindness and isolated instances of charity--it's now a +movement with emotional inertia and political heft. When things start working, +people want to know what this group is going to do and how its actions are +going to affect them. They want to know who gets the credit and who gets the +blame. + +The questions about the politics of the free source world usually boil down to +a simple dilemma: some think it's a communist utopia and others think it's a +free market nirvana. Normally, the two ideas sit on the opposite ends of the +spectrum looking at each other with contempt and disdain. In the strange world +of software, ideas aren't so easy to place. Anyone can duplicate software as +many times as they want and it's still useful. The communist notion of sharing +equally is much easier to achieve in this realm than in the world of, say, +grain, which requires hard work in the sun to make it grow. On the other hand, +the ease of exchange also means that people are able to swap and trade versions +of software with little overhead or restriction. The well-greased marketplace +in the free marketer's dreams is also easy to create. The act of giving a disk +to a friend could either be a bona fide example of universal brotherhood or the +vigorously competitive act of trying to win the hearts and minds of a software +consumer. Take your pick. + +The nature of software also mitigates many of the problems that naturally occur +in each of these worlds. There is no scarcity, so there is no reason why +sharing has to be so complicated or orchestrated from the central planning +committees of the Soviets. People just give. On the other hand, the lack of +scarcity also limits the differences between the rich and the poor. There's no +reason why everyone can't have the same software as the rich because it's so +easy to duplicate. Folks who are into economic competition for the ego +gratification of having a bigger sport utility vehicle than everyone else on +the street are going to be disappointed. + +To some extent, the politics of the free source movement are such a conundrum +that people simply project their wishes onto it. John Gilmore told me over +dinner, "Well, it depends. Eric Raymond is sort of a libertarian but Richard +Stallman is sort of a communist. I guess it's both." The freedom makes it +possible for people to mold the movement to be what they want. + +Raymond has no problem seeing his libertarian dreams acted out in the free +software community. He looked at the various groups creating their own versions +of free source code and saw a big bazaar where merchants competed to provide +the best solutions to computer users everywhere. People wrote neat stuff and +worked hard to make sure that others were happy. It was competition at its +finest, and there was no money or costs of exchange to get in the way. + +Most people quickly become keenly aware of this competition. Each of the +different teams creating distributions flags theirs as the best, the most +up-to-date, the easiest to install, and the most plush. The licenses mean that +each group is free to grab stuff from the other, and this ensures that no one +builds an unstoppable lead like Microsoft did in the proprietary OS world. +Sure, Red Hat has a large chunk of the mindshare and people think their brand +name is synonymous with Linux, but anyone can grab their latest distribution +and start making improvements on it. It takes little time at all. + +Stallman and his supposed communist impulse is a bit harder to characterize. He +has made his peace with money and he's quick to insist that he's not a +communist or an enemy of the capitalist state. He's perfectly happy when people +charge for their work as programmers and he often does the same. But it's easy +to see why people start to think he's something of a communist. One of his +essays, which he insists is not strictly communist, is entitled "Why Software +Should Not Have Owners." + +Some of his basic instincts sure look Marxist. The source code to a program +often acts like the means of production, and this is why the capitalists +running the businesses try to control it. Stallman wanted to place these means +of production in the hands of everyone so people could be free to do what they +wanted. While Stallman didn't rail against the effects of money, he rejected +the principle that intellectual capital, the source code, should be controlled. + +Stallman stops well short of giving everything away to everyone. Copyrighting +books is okay, he says, because it "restricts only the mass producers of +copies. It did not take freedom away from readers of books. An ordinary reader, +who did not own a printing press, could copy books only with pen and ink, and +few readers were sued for that." In other words, the copyright rules in the age +of printing only restricted the guy across town with a printing press who was +trying to steal someone else's business. The emergence of the computer, +however, changes everything. When people can copy freely, the shackles bind +everyone. + +Communism, of course, is the big loser of the 20th century, and so it's not +surprising that Stallman tries to put some distance between the Soviet and the +GNU empires. He notes puckishly that the draconian effects of the copyright +laws in America are sort of similar to life in the Soviet Union, "where every +copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where individuals +had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand as samizdat." He +notes, however, that "There is of course a difference: the motive for +information control in the Soviet Union was political; in the U.S. the motive +is profit. But it is the actions that affect us, not the motive. Any attempt to +block the sharing of information, no matter why, leads to the same methods and +the same harshness." + +Stallman has a point. The copyright rules restrict the ability of people to +add, improve upon, or engage other people's work. The fair use rules that let a +text author quote sections for comment don't really work in the software world, +where it's pretty hard to copy anything but 100 percent of some source code. +For programmers, the rules on source code can be pretty Soviet-like in +practice. + +He's also correct that some companies would think nothing of locking up the +world. A consortium of megalithic content companies like Disney and the other +studios got the U.S. Congress to pass a law restricting tools for making +copies. Ostensibly it only applied to computer programs and other software used +to pirate movies or other software, but the effect could be chilling on the +marketplace. The home video enthusiast who loves to edit the tapes of his +child's birthday party needs many of the same functions as the content pirate. +Cutting and pasting is cutting and pasting. The rules are already getting a bit +more Soviet-like in America. + +But Stallman is right to distance himself from Soviet-style communism because +there are few similarities. There's little central control in Stallman's +empire. All Stallman can do to enforce the GNU General Public License is sue +someone in court. He, like the Pope, has no great armies ready to keep people +in line. None of the Linux companies have much power to force people to do +anything. The GNU General Public License is like a vast disarmament treaty. +Everyone is free to do what they want with the software, and there are no legal +cudgels to stop them. The only way to violate the license is to publish the +software and not release the source code. + +Many people who approach the free software world for the first time see only +communism. Bob Metcalfe, an entrepreneur, has proved himself several times over +by starting companies like 3Com and inventing the Ethernet. Yet he looked at +the free software world and condemned it with a derisive essay entitled +"Linux's 60's technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what will?" + +Using the term "open sores" may be clever, but it belies a lack of +understanding of some of the basic tenets. The bugs and problems in the +software are open for everyone to see. Ideally, someone will fix them. Does he +prefer the closed world of proprietary software where the bugs just magically +appear? Does he prefer a hidden cancer to melanoma? + +The essay makes more confounding points equating Richard Stallman to Karl Marx +for his writing and Linus Torvalds to Vladimir Lenin because of his aim to +dominate the software world with his OS. For grins, he compares Eric Raymond to +"Trotsky waiting for The People's ice pick" for no clear reason. Before this +gets out of hand, he backpedals a bit and claims, "OK, communism is too harsh +on Linux. Lenin too harsh on Torvalds [sic]."Then he sets off comparing the +world of open source to the tree-hugging, back-to-the-earth movement. + +Of course, it's easy to see how the open source world is much different from +the Soviet-style world of communism. That experiment failed because it placed +the good of the many above the freedom of the individual. It was a dictatorship +that did not shirk from state-sponsored terrorism or pervasive spying. It was +no surprise, for instance, to discover that East German athletes were doped +with performance-enhancing drugs without their knowledge. It was for the glory +of Lenin or Marx or Stalin, or whoever held the reins. Does the country need +someone to live in Siberia to mine for minerals? Does the country need land for +vast collective farms? The state makes the call and people go. + +The Soviet Union didn't really fail because it clung too deeply to the notion +that no one should own property. It failed when it tried to enforce this by +denying people the fruits of their labor. If someone wanted to build something +neat, useful, or inventive, they had better do it for the glory of the Soviet +state. That turned the place into a big cesspool of inactivity because +everyone's hard work was immediately stolen away from them. + +The free software world is quite different from that world. The GPL and the BSD +licenses don't strip away someone's freedom and subjugate them to the state, it +gives them the source code and a compiler to use with it. Yes, the GPL does +restrict the freedom of people to take the free source code and sell their own +proprietary additions, but this isn't the same as moving them to Siberia. + +The Free Software State doesn't steal the fruits of someone's labor away from +them. Once you develop the code, you can still use it. The GPL doesn't mean +that only Torvalds can sit around his dacha and compile the code. You get to +use it, too. In fact, one of the reasons that people cite for contributing to +GPL projects is the legal assurance that the enhancements will never be taken +away from them. The source will always remain open and accessible. + +Metcalfe's point is that communism didn't work, so the free software world will +fail, too. He makes his point a bit clearer when he starts comparing the free +software folks to tree-hugging environmentalists. + +"How about Linux as organic software grown in utopia by spiritualists?" he +wonders. "If North America actually went back to the earth, close to 250 +million people would die of starvation before you could say agribusiness. When +they bring organic fruit to market, you pay extra for small apples with open +sores--the Open Sores Movement." + +The problem with this analogy is that no one is starving with open source +software. Data is not a physical good. Pesticides and fertilizers can boost +crop yields, but that doesn't matter with software. If anything, free software +ends up in even more people's hands than proprietary software. Everyone in the +free software world has a copy of the image editing tool, GIMP, but only the +richest Americans have a copy of the very expensive Adobe Photoshop. + +Of course, he has half a point about the polish of open source code. The +programmers often spend more time adding neat features they like instead of +making the code as accessible as possible. The tools are often designed for +programmers by programmers. There isn't much of a quality assurance and human +factors team trying to get them to engineer it so the other 95 percent of +humanity can use it. + +But this problem is going away. Companies like Red Hat and Caldera have a +profit motive in making the software accessible to all. The tools look nicer, +and they are often just as presentable as the tools from the proprietary firms. +The programmers are also getting more sensitive to these problems. In the past, +the free software world was sort of an alternative Eden where programmers went +to escape from the rest of programmatically challenged society. Now the world +is open to free software and the programmers are more open to taking everyone's +needs into account. + +The problem with all of Metcalfe's analogies is that he assumes the same rules +that control the world of physical goods also govern the world of ideas. The +software industry likes to pretend that this isn't true by packaging the +software in big, empty boxes that look good on shelves. Swapping ideas is easy +and costs little. Of course, the Soviet Union worried about the swapping of +ideas and tried to control the press and all forms of expression. The free +software movement is the exact opposite of this. + +In fact, it is much easier to see the free software world as the libertarian +ideal of strong competition and personal freedom if you remember that it exists +in the realm of ideas. The landscape is similar to universities, which usually +boast that they're just big melting pots where the marketplace of ideas stays +open all night. The best ideas gradually push out the worst ones and society +gradually moves toward a total understanding of the world. + +Perhaps it's just not fair to characterize the politics of the open source or +free software world at all. Terms like communism, libertarianism, liberalism, +and Marxism all come from an age when large portions of society did not have +easy access to ample supplies of food and housing. + +Data and information are not limited goods that can only be consumed by a +limited group. One person or one million people can read a computer file and +the marginal costs aren't very different. Sharing is cheap, so it makes sense +to use it to all of its advantages. We're just learning how to use the low cost +of widespread cooperation. + +Perhaps it's better to concentrate on the real political battles that rage +inside the open source code community. It may be better to see the battle as +one of GPL versus BSD instead of communist versus libertarian. The license +debate is tuned to the Internet world. It sets out the debate in terms the +computer user can understand. + +1~ Charity + +The open source movement is filled with people who analyze software, look for +bugs, and search for fixes. These quiet workhorses are the foundation of the +movement's success. One member of this army is David Baron, an undergraduate +student who started out at Harvard in the fall of 1998 and found, like most +students, that he had a bit of spare time. Some students turn to theater, some +to the newspaper, some to carousing, some to athletic teams, some to drinking, +and most choose one or more of the above. A few students search out some +charitable work for their spare time and volunteer at a homeless shelter or +hospital. Law students love to work at the free legal clinic for the poor. +Baron, however, is a bit of a nerd in all of the good senses of the word. He's +been working on cleaning up Netscape's open source browser project known as +Mozilla, and he thinks it's a great act of charity. + +Baron spends his spare time poking around the Mozilla layout engine responsible +for arranging the graphics, text, form slots, buttons, and whatnot in a +consistent way. Graphic designers want all web browsers on the Net to behave in +a consistent way and they've been agitating to try and get the browser +companies (Netscape, Microsoft, iCab, WebTV, and Opera) to adhere to a set of +standards developed by the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium based at MIT. +These standards spell out exactly how the browsers are supposed to handle +complicated layout instructions like cascading style sheets. + +Baron looked at these standards and thought they were a good idea. If all web +browsers handled content in the same way, then little buttons saying "Best +Viewed with Microsoft IE" or "Best Viewed by Netscape" would disappear. The +browser companies would be able to compete on features, not on their ability to +display weirder web pages. It would cut the web designers out of the battle +between Microsoft and Netscape. + +The standards also help users, especially users with different needs. He told +me, "Standards (particularly CSS) encourage accessibility for users with all +sorts of disabilities because they allow authors to use HTML as it was +originally intended--as a structural markup language that can be interpreted by +browsers that display things in nonvisual media or in very large fonts for +users with poor vision. Changing the HTML on the web back to structural markup +will also allow these browsers to produce sensible output." + +Handling standards like this is always a bit of a political problem for +companies. Every developer tries to stick their fingers in the wind and see +which standards will be important and which ones will fall by the wayside. +Microsoft, Netscape, iCab, WebTV, and Opera have all been wondering about the +cascading style sheets because they're sort of a pain in the neck. Ideally, the +graphics designers will be able to come up with graphics rules for a set of web +pages and they'll be applied using the rules set out by the reader. + +CSS is not about "total control by the author of the page," says Baron. "The +basic idea of the cascade is that user preferences (through the browser's UI or +possibly through a user CSS style sheet) and author suggestions (contained in +CSS style sheets) combine to produce the formatting of the page." + +A modern catalog conglomerate, for instance, may have two branches. One would +be aimed at middle-aged men who dote on their cars by giving them endless wax +jobs and cleaning them forever. Another might be aimed at young mothers who +dote on their children, in part by keeping the home as clean as could be. +Normally, the catalog company would use different designers to create very +different-looking catalogs. One would come with retro, hard-edged graphics +covered with racing stripes, and the other with floral prints. What happens +when these catalogs head to the web? Normally two designers would give two +different websites two different looks. + +What if there is one cleaning product, say a car wheel cleaner, that appears in +both catalogs? In the old days before cascading style sheets, both designers +would have to do up each page separately. A well-designed system of cascading +style sheets would let one web page for the product display correctly on both +sites. It would pick up either the floral prints or the racing stripes +automatically when either site called it up. + +These standards are notoriously difficult to enforce. Armies around the world +dream of turning out perfect privates that can be inserted into any conflict in +any platoon without any retraining. Newspapers dream of having interchangeable +reporters who can cover the White House or a cricket match in India. It's no +wonder that the web industry wants the same thing. + +Baron told me, "I got interested in Mozilla because I'm interested in web +standards." He noticed that a group known as the Web Standards Project was +running a political campaign to pressure the browser companies to lay out pages +the same way (www.webstandards.org). + +"A group of developers got together and said, 'The browsers aren't supporting +the standards' and this makes it impossible to create pages," Baron explained. +"If every browser supports the standards in a different way, then you have to +design a different version of the site for each browser. Or, more +realistically, web designers resort to hacks that make the page legible in all +the 'major' browsers but not accessible to people with disabilities or people +with older computers." + +Of course, it's one thing for a web designer or a web master to take up this +call. Baron, however, was just a college freshman who framed this as volunteer +work. When he happened upon the Web Standards Project, he heard their message +and saw an itch that he wanted to scratch. + +"I want to see the standards supported correctly. Someone's got to do it," he +told me. "I might as well be doing this instead of playing around and looking +at websites all day. A lot of people do volunteer work, but not a lot of people +get to do volunteer work at this level. It uses what I know pretty well. A lot +of students who are very smart end up doing volunteer work which doesn't use +their skills. When you can do volunteer work that uses what you know, it's even +better." + +So Baron would download the latest versions of the Mozilla layout engine known +as Gecko and play with web pages. He would create weird web pages with strange +style sheets, load them up, and watch where they broke. When things went wrong, +he would write up detailed bug reports and mail them off to the folks doing the +coding. He was part of a quality control team that included some Netscape +employees and a wide variety of other users on the Net. + +This community involvement was what Netscape wanted when it created Mozilla. +They hoped that more people would take it upon themselves to test out the code +and at least make complaints when things were going wrong. One hacker named +James Clark, who isn't related to the founder of Netscape with the same name, +actually kicked in a complete XML parser, a tool for taking apart the latest +superset of HTML that is capturing the attention of software and web designers. + +Baron is one of the few folks I met while writing this book who frames his work +on an open source project as charity. Most devotees get into the projects +because they offer them the freedom to mess with the source code. Most also +cite the practical strengths of open source, like the relatively quick bug +fixes and the stability of well-run projects. Most people like to distance +themselves from the more political firebrands of the free software movement +like Richard Stallman by pointing out that they're not really in it to bring +about the second coming of the Communist Revolution. Few suggest that their +work is sort of a gift of their time that might make the world a better place. +Few compare their work to the folks cleaning up homeless shelters or hospitals. +Most don't disagree when it is pointed out to them, but most free software +hackers don't roll out the charitable rhetoric to explain what they're up to. + +This may just be a class difference. Baron is a sophomore, as this is written, +at Harvard and Harvard is, by definition, a finishing school for the upper +crust. Even the vast sea of kids from middle-class families and public schools +end up talking and acting as if they came out of Choate or Exeter by the end of +their time at Harvard. They pick up the Kennedyesque noblesse oblige that +somehow commands the rich and fortunate to be out helping the poor with very +public acts of assistance. It just sort of seeps into all of those Harvard +kids. + +Most of the free software members, on the other hand, are kind of outcasts. The +hackers come from all parts of the globe and from all corners of the social +hierarchy, but few of them are from the beautiful people who glide through life +on golden rails. The programmers usually have their heads in strange, obtuse +mathematical clouds instead of the overstuffed clouds of Olympus. They're +concerned with building neat software and spinning up wonderful abstract +structures that interlock in endlessly repeating, elegant patterns. If they +were interested in power or social prestige, they wouldn't be spending their +nights in front of a terminal waiting for some code to compile. + +But if the free software movement doesn't use the charitable card very often, +it doesn't mean that the work is too different from that of the homeless +shelters. In fact, so little money changes hands that there are not many +reasons for people to take their donations off on their taxes. Donations of +time don't count. Maybe a few companies could write it off their books, but +that's about it. + +In fact, Baron is right that work like his can make a difference for people. +Software is a growing part of the cost of a computer today. In low-end PCs, the +Microsoft OS may cost more than the processor or the memory. A free OS with a +free web browser that works correctly can help the thousands of schools, +homeless shelters, hospitals, and recreation centers get on the web at a +cheaper cost. + +The free software charity is often a bit cleaner. Bill Gates and many of the +other Microsoft millionaires aren't shy about giving away real money to schools +and other needy organizations. Melinda Gates, Bill's wife, runs a charitable +foundation that is very generous. In 1999, for instance, the foundation made a +very real gift of tuition money for minority students. The foundation has also +given millions of dollars to help fund medical research throughout the globe. + +Still, at other times, there has been a sly edge to the Gates benevolence. In +some cases, the company gives away millions of dollars in Microsoft software. +This helps get kids used to Microsoft products and acts like subtle +advertising. Of course, there's nothing new about this kind of charity. Most +corporations insist that they receive some publicity for their giving. It's how +they justify the benevolence to their shareholders. + +The value of giving copies of software away is a difficult act to measure. One +million copies of Windows 95 might retail for about $100 million, but the cost +to Microsoft is significantly lower. CD-ROMs cost less than one dollar to +duplicate, and many schools probably received one CD-ROM for all of their +machines. Giving the users support is an important cost, but it can be +controlled and limited by restricting the number of employees dedicated to +particular phone lines. Determining the value of all of the benevolence must be +a tough job for the tax accountants. How Microsoft chose to account for its +donations is a private matter between Gates, the Internal Revenue Service, and +his God. + +Consider the example of an imaginary proprietary software company called +SoftSoft that gives away one million copies of its $50 WidgetWare product to +schools and charities across the United States. This is, in many ways, generous +because SoftSoft only sells 500,000 copies a year, giving them gross revenues +of $25 million. + +If SoftSoft values the gift at the full market value, they have a deduction of +$50 million, which clearly puts them well in the red and beyond the reach of +taxes for the year. They can probably carry the loss forward and wipe out next +year's earnings, too. + +The accountants may not choose to be so adventurous. The IRS might insist that +they deduct the cost of the goods given, not their potentially inflated market +price. Imagine that the company's cost for developing WidgetWare came to $21 +million. If there were no gift, they would have a nice profit of $4 million. +SoftSoft could split the development costs of $21 million between all of the +1.5 million units that are shipped. Instead of deducting the market value of +the software, it would only deduct the costs allocated to it. Still, that means +they get a $14 million deduction, which is still far from shabby. + +More conservative companies may come up with smaller deductions based upon the +cost of duplicating the additional copies and the cost of supporting the +schools and charities. Strict accounting measures would be the most honest, but +it's hard to know what companies do and what they should do. + +Free software, of course, avoids all that paperwork and accounting. The +software costs nothing, so giving it away generates no deduction. There's no +need for complicated cost accounting or great press releases. It just sits on +the web server and people download it. + +Of course, it's possible to start counting up downloads and doing some +multiplication to come up with outrageous numbers. Windows NT can sell for +between $200 and $1,000. There are about 3.7 million web servers running +Apache, according to the latest Netcraft poll. If 1 percent qualify as +charitable sites, then 37,000 are served by Apache. Of course, not all sites +sit on separate machines. To correct for this, assume that each server hosts 10 +machines and there are only 3,700 machines using Apache. That's still about +$3.7 million in donations. + +But numbers like this can't really capture the depth of the gift. Linus +Torvalds always likes to say that he started writing Linux because he couldn't +afford a decent OS for his machine so he could do some experiments. Who knows +how many kids, grown-ups, and even retired people are hacking Linux now and +doing some sophisticated computer science experiments because they can? How do +we count this beneficence? + +Free software essentially removes the red tape and the institutional character +of charity. There are no boards. There is no counting of gifts. There's no +fawning or flattering. There are no new J. Henry P. Plutocrat Wings for the +Franklin P. Moneysucker Museum of Philanthropy. It's just a pure gift with no +overhead. + +There is also a smooth efficiency to the world of free software charity. My +economics professor used to joke that gifts were just very inefficient. +Grandmas always bought unhip sweaters for their grandkids. Left on their own, +children would give candy and stuffed animals to their parents on their +birthdays and Christmas. All of these bad choices must be returned or thrown +away, ruining the efficiency of the economy. The professor concluded by saying, +"So, guys, when you go out on the date, don't bother with the flowers. Forget +about the jewelry. Just give her cash." + +Free source software, of course, doesn't fit into many of the standard models +of economic theory. Giving the stuff away doesn't cost much money, and +accepting it often requires a bit of work. The old rules of gift giving and +charity don't really apply. + +Imagine that some grandmother wrote some complicated software for computing the +patterns for knitting sweaters. Some probably have. If they give the source +code away, it ends up in the vast pool of free source code and other knitters +may find it. It might not help any grandchildren, at least not for 20 or 30 +years, but it will be moving to the place where it can do the most good with as +little friction as possible. The software hacked by the kids, on the other +hand, would flow from child to child without reaching the parents. The software +tools for generating dumb jokes and sorting bubble gum cards would make a +generation of kids happy, and they would be able to exchange it without their +parents or grandparents getting in the way. + +The inefficiencies of gift-giving can often affect charities, which have less +freedom to be picky than grandchildren. Charities can't look a gift horse in +the mouth. If a company wants to give a women's shelter 1,000 new men's +raincoats, the shelter will probably take them. Refusing them can offend +potential contributors who might give them something of value in the next +quarter. + +Free source code has none of these inefficiencies. Websites like Slashdot, +Freshmeat, Linux Weekly News, LinuxWorld, KernelTraffic, and hundreds of other +Linux or project-specific portals do a great job moving the software to the +people who can use its value. People write the code and then other folks +discover the value in it. Bad or unneeded code isn't foisted on anyone. + +Free software also avoids being painted as a cynical tax scheme. It is not +uncommon for drug manufacturers to donate some surplus pills to disaster relief +operations. In some cases, the manufacturers clear their shelves of pills that +are about to expire and thus about to be destroyed. They take a liability and +turn it into a tax-deductible asset. This may be a good idea when the drugs are +needed, but they are often superfluous. In many cases, the drugs just end up in +a landfill. The relief organizations accept millions of dollars in drugs to get +a few thousand dollars' worth of ones they really need. + +2~ Charitable Open Source Organizations + +Of course, there are some open source charities. Richard Stallman's Free +Software Foundation is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity that raises money and +solicits tax-deductible donations. This money is used to pay for computers, +overhead, and the salaries of young programmers who have great ideas for free +software. The Debian Project also has a charitable arm known as Software in the +Public Interest that raises money and computer equipment to support the +creation of more free software. + +These organizations are certainly part of the world of tax deductions, +fund-raisers, and the charity-industrial complex. The Free Software Foundation, +for instance, notes that you can arrange for all or part of your gift to the +United Way to go to the Foundation. + +But there are differences, too. Stallman, for instance, is proud of the fact +that he accepts no salary or travel reimbursement from the Free Software +Foundation. He works 2 months a year to support himself and then donates the +other 10 months a year to raising money to support other programmers to work on +Foundation projects. + +Their budgets are pretty manageable as well. Perens notes that Debian's budget +is about $10,000 a year, and this is spent largely on distributing the +software. Servers that support plenty of traffic cost a fair amount of money, +but the group does get donations of hardware and bandwidth. The group also +presses a large number of CD-ROMs with the software. + +The groups also make a point of insisting that good code is more valuable than +money. The Free Software Foundation, for instance, lists projects that need +work next to its call for money. Volunteers are needed to write documentation, +test software, organize the office, and also write more code. + +Jordan Hubbard, the director of the FreeBSD project, says that money is not +always the best gift. "I'll take people over six-digit sums of donations almost +any day," he says, and explains that FreeBSD is encouraging companies to donate +some of the spare time of its employees. He suggests that companies assign a +worker to the FreeBSD project for a month or two if there is time to spare. + +"Employees also give us a window into what that company's needs are. All of +those co-opted employees bring back the needs of their jobsite. Those are +really valuable working relationships," he continues. + +Hubbard has also found that money is often not the best motivator. Hardware, it +turns out, often works well at extracting work out of programmers. He likes to +ship a programmer one of the newest peripherals like a DVD drive or a joystick +and ask him to write a driver for the technology in exchange. "It's so much +more cost-effective to buy someone a $500 piece of hardware, which in turn +motivates him to donate thousands of dollars worth of work, something we +probably couldn't pay for anyway," he says. + +Money is still important, however, to take care of all the jobs that can't be +accomplished by piquing someone's curiosity. "The area we need the most +contributions for are infrastructure. Secretarial things are no fun to do and +you don't want to make volunteers do it," he says. + +All of these charitable organizations are bound to grow in the next several +years as the free software movement becomes more sophisticated. In some cases +it will be because the hackers who loved playing with computers will discover +that the tax system is just another pile of code filled with bugs looking to be +hacked. In most cases, though, I think it will be because large companies with +their sophisticated tax attorneys will become interested. I would not be +surprised if a future version of this book includes a very cynical treatment of +the tax habits of some open source organizations. Once an idea reaches a +critical mass, it is impossible to shield it from the forces of minor and major +corruption. + +2~ Gifts as a Cultural Imperative + +Marcel Mauss was an anthropologist who studied the tribes of the northwestern +corner of North America. His book Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in +Archaic Societies explained how the tribes like the Chinook, the Tlinget, and +the Kwakiutl would spend the months of the fall giving and going to huge +feasts. Each year, the members in the tribe would take the bounty of the +harvest and throw a feast for their friends. The folks who attended might have +a good time, but they were then obligated to give a feast of equal or greater +value next year. + +Many anthropologists of the free software world like to draw parallels between +these feasts, known as potlatches in one tribe, and the free-for-all world of +free source software. The hackers are giving away source code in much the same +way that the tribe members gave away salmon or deer meat. + +The comparison does offer some insight into life in the free software +community. Some conventions like LinuxExpo and the hundreds of install-fests +are sort of like parties. One company at a LinuxExpo was serving beer in its +booth to attract attention. Of course, Netscape celebrated its decision to +launch the Mozilla project with a big party. They then threw another one at the +project's first birthday. + +But the giving goes beyond the parties and the conferences. Giving great +software packages creates social standing in much the same way that giving a +lavish feast will establish you as a major member of the tribe. There is a sort +of pecking order, and the coders of great systems like Perl or Linux are near +the top. The folks at the top of the pyramid often have better luck calling on +other programmers for help, making it possible for them to get their jobs done +a little better. Many managers justify letting their employees contribute to +the free software community because they build up a social network that they +can tap to finish their official jobs. + +But there's a difference between tribal potlatch and free software. The +potlatch feasts built very strong individual bonds between people in the same +tribe who knew each other and worked together. The gifts flowed between people +who were part of each other's small community. + +The free source world, on the other hand, is a big free-for-all in both senses +of the phrase. The code circulates for everyone to grab, and only those who +need it dig in. There's no great connection between programmer and user. People +grab software and take it without really knowing to whom they owe any debt. I +only know a few of the big names who wrote the code running the Linux box on my +desk, and I know that there are thousands of people who also contributed. It +would be impossible for me to pay back any of these people because it's hard to +keep them straight. + +This vast mass of contributors often negates the value and prestige that comes +from writing neat code. Since no one can keep track of it all, people tend to +treat all requests from unknown people equally. The free source world tends to +have many equals, just because there's no hierarchy to make it easy for us to +suss out each other's place. Corporations have titles like executive vice +president and super executive vice president. The military labels people as +private, sergeant, or major. There are no guideposts in the free software +world. + +Still, good contributions pay off in good reputations. A bug fix here and a bug +fix there might not build a name, but after a year or two they pay off. A good +reputation opens doors, wins jobs, creates friendships, and makes it possible +to interest people in new projects. + +The free source world is also a strange mirror image of the hierarchies that +emerge after a season of tribal potlatch ceremonies. In the tribes, those who +receive great gifts are required to return the favor with even greater ones. So +the skillful hunters and gatherers give good gifts and receive something better +in return. The rich get richer by giving away their bounty. The less skillful +end up at the bottom of the list. The free source world, on the other hand, +spreads its riches out to everyone. There are many modest programmers who enjoy +the source code of the great programmers, and there may be billions of +non-programmers who also tag along. Many major websites run on free OSs alone. +Who knows which cheap Internet tools will come along in the future? The poor +get lifted along at no great cost to the economy. The charity is broadcast to +everyone, not narrowcast to a few. + +The efficiency goes deeper. There's a whole class of products for the home that +are much fancier and sophisticated than what people need. One company near me +sells perfectly usable nonstick pans for $2.95. A fancy department store sells +hefty, industrial-grade pans that do the same thing for more than $100. Why? +They make great gifts for people getting married. This wedding-industrial +complex adds needless accoutrements, doodads, and schmaltz just to give +products enough caché to make them great gifts. + +The free source world, on the other hand, has no real incentive to generate +phony, chrome-plated glitz to make its gifts acceptable or worthy enough of +giving. People give away what they write for themselves, and they tend to write +what they need. The result is a very efficient, usable collection of software +that helps real people solve real problems. The inefficiency of the +wedding-industrial complex, the Father's Day-industrial complex, the +Christmas-industrial complex, and their need to create acceptable gifts are +gone. + +Of course, there's also a certain element of selfishness to the charity. The +social prestige that comes from writing good free software is worth a fair +amount in the job market. People like to list accomplishments like "wrote +driver" or "contributed code to Linux Kernel 2.2" on their résumé. Giving to +the right project is a badge of honor because serious folks doing serious work +embraced the gift. That's often more valuable and more telling than a plaque or +an award from a traditional boss. + +Rob Newberry is a programmer at Group Logic, a small software house in northern +Virginia where I once did some consulting. His official title is "Director of +Fajita Technology," and he is sometimes known as "The Dude," a reference to a +character in the movie /{The Big Lebowski}/. Technically, his job is building +and supporting their products, which are used to automate the prepress +industry. One of their products, known as Mass Transit, will move files over +the Internet and execute a number of automated programs to them before moving +them on. Printers use them to take in new jobs, massage the data to their needs +by performing tasks like color separation, and then send the jobs to the +presses. This work requires great understanding of the various network +protocols like FTP of NFS. + +Newberry is also a Linux fan. He reads the Kernel list but rarely contributes +much to it. He runs various versions of Linux around the house, and none of +them were working as well as he wanted with his Macintosh. So he poked around +in the software, fixed it, and sent his code off to Alan Cox, who watches over +the part of the kernel where his fixes belonged. + +"I contributed some changes to the Appletalk stack that's in the Linux Kernel +that make it easier for a Linux machine to offer dial-in services for Macintosh +users," he said in an article published in Salon. "As it stands, Mac users +have always been able to dial into a Linux box and use IP protocols, but if +they wanted to use Appletalk over PPP, the support wasn't really there." + +Newberry, of course, is doing all of this on his own time because he enjoys it. +But his boss, Derick Naef, still thinks it's pretty cool that he's spending +some of his programming energy on a project that won't add anything immediately +to the bottom line. + +"He's plugged into that community and mailing lists a lot more," explains Naef. +"There are other people here who are, too, but there are all these tools out +there in the open source world. There's code out there that can be incorporated +into our computer projects. It can cut your development costs if you can find +stuff you can use." + +Of course, all of this justification and rationalization aren't the main reason +why Newberry spends so much of his time hacking on Linux. Sure, it may help his +company's bottom line. Sure, it might beef up his résumé by letting him brag +that he got some code in the Linux kernel. But he also sees this as a bit of +charity. + +"I get a certain amount of satisfaction from the work . . . but I get a certain +amount of satisfaction out of helping people. Improving Linux and especially +its integration with Macs has been a pet project of mine for some time," he +says. Still, he sums up his real motivation by saying, "I write software +because I just love doing it." Perhaps we're just lucky that so many people +love writing open source software and giving it away. + +1~ Love + +It's not hard to find bad stories about people who write good code. One person +at a Linux conference told me, "The strange thing about Linus Torvalds is that +he hasn't really offended everyone yet. All of the other leaders have managed +to piss off someone at one time or another. It's hard to find someone who isn't +hated by someone else." While he meant it as a compliment for Torvalds, he +sounded as if he wouldn't be surprised if Torvalds did a snotty, selfish, +petulant thing. It would just be par for the course. + +There are thousands of examples of why people in the open source community hate +each other and there are millions of examples of why they annoy each other. The +group is filled with many strong-minded, independent individuals who aren't +afraid to express their opinions. Flame wars spring up again and again as +people try to decide technical questions like whether it makes more sense to +use long integers or floating point numbers to hold a person's wealth in +dollars. + +Of course, hate is really too strong a word. If you manage to pin down some of +the people and ask them, point blank, whether they really hate someone, they'll +say, "No." They really just don't like a few of that person's technical +decisions. These points of friction fester and turn into what might more +commonly be called hate. + +These technical debates are terrible tar pits for the community, and they eat +up the energy. The debates turn frustrating because they have the strange +distinction of being both technically important and utterly trivial. Everyone +would like to just sail through life and not worry about tiny details like the +type of integer used in a calculation. There are millions of these decisions +that take up time that might be better spent imagining grand dreams of a +seamless information noosphere that provides the wisdom of the ages in a simple +graphical interface. But every programmer learns that it's the details that +count. NASA lost a spacecraft when some programmer used English units instead +of the metric system. So the work needs to get done. + +Occasionally, the fights get interesting. Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens are +both great contributors to the open source movement. In fact, both worked +together to try to define the meaning of the term. Perens worked with the +community that creates the Debian distribution of Linux to come up with a +definition of what was acceptable for the community. This definition morphed +into a more official version used by the Open Source Initiative. When they got +a definition they liked, they published it and tried to trademark the term +"open source" in order to make sure it was applied with some consistency. It +should be no surprise that all of that hard work brought them farther apart. + +In early April 1999, soon after Apple Computer joined the free source world by +releasing some of the source code to their operating system, Raymond and Perens +found themselves at each other's throats. Raymond had worked closely with Apple +on developing their license and blessed it soon after it emerged. Apple was so +pleased that it put Raymond's endorsement on their web page. The decision was a +big coup for the open source movement and strong proof that corporations were +embracing the movement. Big executives from big companies like Apple were +knocking on the open source movement's door. Raymond thought the victory would +bring more attention to the cause. + +Others thought Raymond had given away the farm. Perens and many others looked +at the license and spotted a small clause that seemed dangerous. The license +for their open source code could be withdrawn at a moment's notice. Someone +pointed out that it would be a real bummer to do lots of work on Apple's system +and then find out that some neb-nosed lawyer at Apple could just pull the +license. No one wanted to take that chance. Flame wars erupted and Perens +started publicly disagreeing with Raymond. To Perens, the Apple license just +wasn't open enough to be called "open source." + +Raymond didn't take this too well. He had worked hard to build a strong +coalition. He had worked hard to convince corporations that open source was +much more than a way for teenagers to experiment with communism while they were +living on their parents' dime. He wanted the open source world to be a smoothly +running, suave machine that gracefully welcomed Apple into its fold. Now his +buddy Bruce Perens was effectively aping Lloyd Bentsen's famous putdown of Dan +Quayle: "I've known open source; I've worked with open source; and Eric, this +license isn't open source." His whole announcement was supposed to unroll with +the clockwork precision of great corporate PR, and now someone had lobbed a +grenade. + +Raymond fired back a terse e-mail that said, "If you ever again behave like +that kind of disruptive asshole in public, insult me, and jeopardize the +interests of our entire tribe, I'll take it just as personally and I will find +a way to make you regret it. Watch your step." + +This note rattled Perens, so he started sending copies around the Net. Then he +got serious and called the police. Officially, he was publicizing the +disagreement to preserve his health because Raymond is quite vocal about his +support for the second amendment. Therefore the phrase "Watch your step" should +be taken as a veiled threat of violence. + +Perens defended his decision to call the police and told me afterward, "When I +don't like something, I write about it. Well, gee, maybe Eric was threatening +to just write about me. In the signature at the bottom of the page was a Thomas +Jefferson quote, which claimed the pistol was the best form of exercise. The +next day, Perens decided that he was overreacting a bit and posted a new note: +"Eric says he only meant to threaten me with 'defamation of character,' not +with any kind of violence. Thus, I think I'll just let this issue drop now." + +When I asked him about the matter several months later after tempers had +cooled, Raymond said that the disagreement began several months before the +Apple event when Perens and Raymond clashed over whether the book publisher +O'Reilly should be allowed to use the term "open source" in the name of their +conference. "He was *flaming*, and not the initiative itself but a critical +supporter," says Raymond. + +"Sometime back I had to accept Bruce's resignation from the OSI because he was +flaming public allies on a mailing list. If you're going to go public, you +can't run your mouth like a rabid attack dog. When the APSL [Apple Public +Source License] came along, he convinced people that everybody should go mug +Eric and the OSI," Raymond said. It caused more grief. + +Perens, for his part, said, "I was disappointed in Eric because certainly open +source is about freedom of speech. He should be able to tolerate a dissenting +voice. The entire argument was about my not deferring to his leadership. He +felt that my dissent was damaging. The actual result was that Apple took my +criticism seriously and took all of the suggestions." + +Raymond is still critical. He says, "Apple was more diplomatic to Bruce in +public than they should have been. The truth is that his meddling got the +people inside Apple who were pushing open source into considerable political +trouble, and they considered him a disruptive asshole. Their bosses wanted to +know, quite reasonably, why Apple should bother trying to do an open source +license if all it meant was that they'd be attacked by every flake case with an +agenda. By undermining OSI's status as trusted representatives of the whole +community, Bruce nearly scuttled the whole process." + +For now, the two work apart. Perens says he'll make up with Raymond, but +doesn't see it happening too soon. Raymond is happy to focus on the future of +open source and write more analysis of the movement. They've been separated, +and the tempers are cool. + +Giving away software seems like an entirely altruistic act. Writing code is +hard work, and simply casting it onto the net with no restrictions is a pretty +nice gift outright, especially if the code took months or years to write. This +image of selflessness is so strong that many people assume that the free +software world is inhabited by saints who are constantly doing nice things for +each other. It seems like a big love-in. + +But love is more than a many splendored thing. It's a strange commodity that +binds us together emotionally in ways that run deeper than placid pools +reflecting starry eyes. After the flush of infatuation, strong love lasts if +and only if it answers everyone's needs. The hippie culture of free love lasted +only a few years, but the institution of marriage continues to live on despite +the battle scars and wounds that are almost mortal. Half may fail, but half +succeed. + +The free software community also flourishes by creating a strong, transcendent +version of love and binding it with a legal document that sets out the rules of +the compact. Stallman wrote his first copyleft virus more than 15 years before +this book began, and the movement is just beginning to gain real strength. The +free software world isn't just a groovy love nest, it's a good example of how +strong fences, freedom, and mutual respect can build strong relationships. + +The important thing to realize is that free software people aren't any closer +to being saints than the folks in the proprietary software companies. They're +just as given to emotion, greed, and the lust for power. It's just that the +free software rules tend to restrain their worst instincts and prevent them +from acting upon them. + +The rules are often quite necessary. E-mail and the news services give people +the ability to vent their anger quickly. Many of the programmers are very +proficient writers, so they can tear each other apart with verbal scalpels. The +free source world is cut up into hundreds if not thousands of political camps +and many dislike each other immensely. One group begged with me not to ask them +questions about another group because just hearing someone's name brought up +terrible memories of pain and discord. + +Despite these quick-raging arguments, despite the powerful disagreements, +despite the personal animosities, the principles of the public licenses keep +everything running smoothly. The people are just as human as the rats running +around in the maze of the proprietary software business, but the license keeps +them in line. + +The various public licenses counter human behavior in two key ways. First, they +encourage debate by making everyone a principal in the project. Everyone has a +right to read, change, and of course make comments about the software. Making +everything available opens the doors for discussion, and discussion usually +leads to arguments. + +But when the arguments come to blows, as they often do, the second effect of +free source licenses kicks in and moderates the fallout by treating everyone +equally. If Bob and John don't like each other, then there's still nothing they +can do to stop each other from working on the project. The code is freely +available to all and shutting off the distribution to your enemy just isn't +allowed. You can't shut out anyone, even someone you hate. + +Anyone familiar with corporate politics should immediately see the difference. +Keeping rivals in the dark is just standard practice in a corporation. +Information is a powerful commodity, and folks competing for the same budget +will use it to the best of their ability. Bosses often move to keep their +workers locked away from other groups to keep some control over the flow of +information. + +Retribution is also common in the corporate world. Many managers quickly +develop enemies in the ranks, and the groups constantly spend time sabotaging +projects. Requests will be answered quickly or slowly depending on who makes +them. Work will be done or put off depending on which division is asking for it +to be done. Managers will often complain that their job is keeping their +underlings from killing each other and then turn around and start battling the +other managers at their level. + +The people in the free source world aren't any nicer than the people in the +corporate cubicle farms, but their powers of secrecy and retribution are +severely limited. The GNU General Public License requires that anyone who makes +changes to a program and then releases the program must also release the source +code to the world. No shutting off your enemies allowed. + +This effect could be called a number of different things. It isn't much +different from the mutual disarmament treaties signed by nations. Athletic +teams strive for this sort of pure focus when they hire referees to make the +tough calls and keep everyone playing by the same rules. The government +sometimes tries to enforce some discipline in the free market through +regulation. + +Now, compare this disarmament with a story about the poor folks who stayed +behind at the Hotmail website after Microsoft bought them. It's really just one +of a million stories about corporate politics. The workers at Hotmail went from +being supreme lords of their Hotmail domain to soldiers in the Microsoft army. +Their decisions needed to further Microsoft's relentless growth in wealth, not +the good of the Hotmail site. This probably didn't really bother the Hotmail +people as much as the fact that the people at Microsoft couldn't decide what +they wanted from Hotmail. + +Robert X. Cringely described the situation in an article in PBS Online, and he +quoted one Hotmail worker as saying, "They send a new top-level group down to +see us every week, yet it really means nothing. The plan is constantly +changing. Today Hotmail is primarily a way of shoveling new users into the MSN +portal. We had for a short time a feature called Centerpoint for communicating +directly with our users, but that was killed as a possible competitor with the +MSN portal. No new features could be added because the Outlook Express team saw +us as competition and sabotaged everything." + +Cringely explained the corporate friction and gridlock this way: + +_1 "What Hotmail learned is that at Microsoft almost anyone can say 'no,' but +hardly anyone can say 'yes.' The way it specifically works at Microsoft is that +everyone says 'no' to anyone below them on the organizational structure or on +the same level, and 'yes' to anyone above. Since the vertical lines of +authority are narrow this means people tend to agree only with their bosses and +their boss's boss and try to kick and gouge everyone else." + +The free software world, of course, removes these barriers. If the Hotmail +folks had joined the Linux team instead of Microsoft, they would be free to do +whatever they wanted with their website even if it annoyed Linus Torvalds, +Richard Stallman, and the pope. They wouldn't be rich, but there's always a +price. + +Using the word "love" is a bit dangerous because the word manages to include +the head-over-heels infatuation of teenagers and the affection people feel for +a new car or a restaurant's food. The love that's embodied by the GPL, on the +other hand, isn't anywhere near as much fun and it isn't particularly +noteworthy. It just encompasses the mutual responsibility and respect that +mature folks occasionally feel for each other. It's St. Paul's version of +unconditional, everlasting love, not the pangs of desire that kept St. +Augustine up late in his youth. + +Anyone who has spent time in the trenches in a corporate cubicle farm knows how +wasteful the battles between groups and divisions can be. While the competition +can sometimes produce healthy rivalries, it often just promotes discord. Any +veteran of these wars should see the immediate value of disarmament treaties +like the GPL. They permit healthy rivalries to continue while preventing +secrecy and selfishness from erupting. The free source movement may not have +money to move mountains, but it does have this love. + +This love also has a more traditional effect on the hackers who create the free +source code. They do it because they love what they're doing. Many of the +people in the free source movement are motivated by writing great software, and +they judge their success by the recognition they get from equally talented +peers. A "nice job" from the right person--like Richard Stallman, Alan Cox, or +Linus Torvalds--can be worth more than $100,000 for some folks. It's a strange +way to keep score, but for most of the programmers in the free source world +it's more of a challenge than money. Any schmoe in Silicon Valley can make a +couple of million dollars, but only a few select folks can rewrite the network +interface code of the Linux kernel to improve the throughput of the Apache +server by 20 percent. + +Keeping score by counting the number of people who dig your work is a strange +system, but one that offers the same incentives as business. A good store +doesn't insult people who could be repeat customers. A good free software +project doesn't insult people who have a choice of which package to use. A good +businessman makes it easy for people to get to the store, park, and make a +purchase. A good free software project makes it simple for people to download +the code, compile it, modify it, understand it, and use it. + +There's even some research to support the notion that rewards can diminish the +creativity of people. Stallman likes to circulate a 1987 article from the +Boston Globe that describes a number of different scientific experiments that +show how people who get paid are less creative than those who produce things +from their love of the art. The studies evaluated the success of poets, +artists, and teachers who did their job for the fun of it and compared it with +those who were rewarded for their efforts. In many cases, these were +short-bounded exercises that could be evaluated fairly easily. + +One scientist, Theresa Amabile, told the Globe that her work "definitely +refutes the notion that creativity can be operantly conditioned." That is, you +can't turn it on by just pouring some money on it. Many free software folks +point out that this is why the free source movement is just as likely to +succeed as a massively funded corporate juggernaut. + +Many people don't need scientists to tell them that you can't throw money at +many problems and expect them to go away. This is a hard lesson that managers +and businesses learn quickly. But this doesn't mean that the lack of money +means that the free source movement will beat the thousands of shackled +programmers in their corporate rabbit hutches. These studies just measured +"creativity" and found that the unpaid folks were more "creative." That's not +necessarily a compliment. In fact, the word is often used as a euphemism for +"strange," "weird," or just plain "bad." It's more often a measure of just how +different something is instead of how good it is. Would you rather eat at the +house of a creative chef or a good chef? + +This love of creativity can be a problem for the free source world. Most people +don't want to use a creative spreadsheet to do their accounting--it could get +them in trouble with the SEC or the IRS. They want a solid team player for many +of their jobs, not a way cool creative one. + +The free source world is often seen as too artistic and temperamental to +undertake the long, arduous task of creating good, solid software that solves +the jobs of banks, pharmacies, airlines, and everyone else. Many of these tasks +are both mind-numbingly boring and difficult to do. While they just involve +adding a few numbers and matching up some data, the tasks have to be done right +or airplanes will crash. The free source world can't rely on love or creativity +to motivate people to take on these tasks. The only solution might be money. + +Of course, it's important to recognize that even seemingly boring jobs can have +very creative solutions. Stallman's GNU Emacs is a fascinating and +over-the-top, creative solution to the simple job of manipulating text. Word +processors and text editors might not be that exciting anymore, but finding +creative ways to accomplish the task is still possible. + +1~ Corporations + +Many movies about teenagers follow a time-proven formula: once the magic summer +is over, the gang is going to split up and it will never be the same again. +Bob's going to college; Rick is getting married; and Harry is going to be stuck +in the old town forever. Right now, the free software world is playing out the +same emotions and dramas as the greater world discovers open source software. +In the fall, the corporations are coming and the old, cool world of late-night +hackfests fueled by pizza and Jolt are in danger. Some people in the realm of +free source software are going to grow up, get educated, and join the +establishment; some will get married; and some will get left behind wondering +why the old game isn't as cool anymore. + +The free source world is suffering from an acute case of success. Many of the +great projects like Apache and Sendmail are growing up and being taken over by +corporations with balance sheets. Well, not exactly taken over, but the +corporations will exist and they'll try to shepherd development. Other +corporations like Apple, Sun, and Netscape are experimenting with open source +licenses and trying to make money while sharing code. Some quaint open source +companies like Red Hat are growing wealthy by floating IPOs to raise some money +and maybe buy a few Porsches for their stakeholders. There's a lot of coming of +age going on. + +On the face of it, none of this rampant corporatization should scare the guys +who built the free software world in their spare cycles. The corporations are +coming to free source because it's a success. They want to grab some of the +open software mojo and use it to drive their own companies. The suits on the +plane are all tuning into Slashdot, buying T-shirts, and reading Eric Raymond's +essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" in the hopes of glomming on to a great +idea. The suits have given up their usual quid pro quo: be a good nerd, keep +the code running, and we'll let you wear a T-shirt in your basement office. Now +they want to try to move in and live the life, too. If Eric Raymond were +selling Kool-Aid, they would be fighting to drink it. + +The talk is serious, and it's affecting many of the old-line companies as well. +Netscape started the game by releasing the source code to a development version +of their browser in March of 1998. Apple and Sun followed and began giving away +the source code to part of their OS. Of course, Apple got part of the core of +their OS from the open source world, but that's sort of beside the point. +They're still sharing some of their new, Apple-only code. Some, not all. But +that's a lot more than they shared before. Sun is even sharing the source code +to their Java system. If you sign the right papers or click the right buttons, +you can download the code right now. Its license is more restrictive, but +they're joining the club, getting religion, and hopping on the bandwagon. + +Most of the true devotees are nervous about all of this attention. The free +software world was easy to understand when it was just late-night hackfests and +endless railing against AT&T and UNIX. It was simple when it was just messing +around with grungy code that did way cool things. It was a great, he-man, +Windoze-hating clubhouse back then. + +Well, the truth is that some of the free software world is going to go off to +college, graduate with a business degree, and turn respectable. Eric Allman, +for instance, is trying to build a commercial version of his popular free +package Sendmail. The free version will still be free, but you can get a nicer +interface and some cooler features for managing accounts if you buy in. If +things work out, some of the folks with the free version will want all of the +extra features he's tacking on and they'll pay him. No one knows what this will +do to the long-term development of Sendmail, of course. Will he only make new +improvements in the proprietary code? Will other folks stop contributing to the +project because they see a company involved? There's some evidence that +Allman's not the same guy who hung around the pizza joint. When I contacted him +for an interview, he passed me along to his public relations expert, who wrote +back wanting to "make sure this is a profitable way to spend Eric's time." For +all we know, Eric may have even been wearing a suit when he hired a corporate +PR team. + +Some of the other free software folks are going to get married. The Apache +group has leveraged its success with small server organizations into +connections with the best companies selling high-powered products. IBM is now a +firm supporter of Apache, and they run it on many of their systems. Brian +Behlendorf still schedules his own appointments, jokes often, and speaks freely +about his vision for Apache, but he's as serious as any married man with +several kids to support. It's not just about serving up a few web pages filled +with song lyrics or Star Wars trivia. People are using Apache for +business--serious business. There can still be fun, but Apache needs to be even +more certain that they're not screwing up. + +And of course there are thousands of free software projects that are going to +get left behind hanging out at the same old pizza joint. There were always +going to be thousands left behind. People get excited about new projects, +better protocols, and neater code all the time. The old code just sort of +withers away. Occasionally someone rediscovers it, but it is usually just +forgotten and superseded. But this natural evolution wasn't painful until the +successful projects started ending up on the covers of magazines and generating +million-dollar deals with venture capitalists. People will always be wondering +why their project isn't as big as Linux. + +There will also be thousands of almost great projects that just sail on being +almost great. All of the distributions come with lots of programs that do some +neat things. But there's no way that the spotlight can be bright enough to +cover them all. There will be only one Torvalds and everyone is just going to +be happy that he's so gracious when he reminds the adoring press that most of +the work was done by thousands of other nameless folks. + +Most of the teen movies don't bother trying to figure out what happens after +that last fateful summer. It's just better to end the movie with a dramatic +race or stage show that crystallizes all the unity and passion that built up +among this group during their formative years. They sing, they dance, they win +the big game, they go to the prom, and then cameras love to freeze the moment +at the end of the film. The free software movement, on the other hand, is just +too important and powerful to stop this book on a climactic note. It would be +fun to just pause the book at the moment in time when Linus Torvalds and Bob +Young were all over the magazines. Their big show was a success, but the real +question is what will happen when some folks go to school, some folks get +married, and some folks are left behind. + +To some extent, the influx of money and corporations is old news. Very old +news. Richard Stallman faced the same problem in the 1980s when he realized +that he needed to find a way to live without a university paycheck. He came up +with the clever notion that the software and the source must always be free, +but that anyone could charge whatever the market would bear for the copies. The +Free Software Foundation itself continues to fund much of its development by +creating and selling both CD-ROMs and printed manuals. + +This decision to welcome money into the fold didn't wreck free software. If +anything, it made it possible for companies like Red Hat to emerge and sell +easier-to-use versions of the free software. The companies competed to put out +the best distributions and didn't use copyright and other intellectual property +laws to constrain each other. This helped attract more good programmers to the +realm because most folks would rather spend their time writing code than +juggling drivers on their machine. Good distributions like Red Hat, Slackware, +Debian, FreeBSD, and SuSE made it possible for everyone to get their machines +up and running faster. + +There's no reason why the latest push into the mainstream is going to be any +different. Sure, Red Hat is charging more and creating better packages, but +most of the distribution is still governed by the GPL. Whenever people complain +that Red Hat costs too much, Bob Young just points people to the companies that +rip off his CDs and charge only $2 or $3 per copy. The GPL keeps many people +from straying too far from the ideal. + +The source is also still available. Sure, the corporate suits can come in, cut +deals, issue press releases, raise venture capital, and do some IPOs, but that +doesn't change the fact that the source code is now widely distributed. Wasn't +that the goal of Stallman's revolution? Didn't he want to be able to get at the +guts of software and fix it? The source is now more omnipresent than ever. The +corporations are practically begging folks to download it and send in bug +fixes. + +Of course, access to the source was only half of Stallman's battle. A cynic +might growl that the corporations seem to be begging folks to do their +research, testing, and development work for them. They're looking for free +beers. Stallman wanted freedom to do whatever he wanted with the source and +many of the companies aren't ready to throw away all of their control. + +Apple sells its brand, and it was careful not to open up the source code to its +classic desktop interface. They kept that locked away. Most of the source code +that Apple released is from its next version of the operating system, Mac OS X, +which came from the folks at NeXT when Apple acquired that company. Where did +that code come from? Large portions came from the various free versions of BSD +like NetBSD or Mach. It's easy to be generous when you only wrote a fraction of +the code. + +Ernest Prabhakar, the project manager for Apple's first open source effort +known as Darwin, describes the tack he took to get Apple's management to +embrace this small core version of the BSD operating system tuned to the +Macintosh hardware platform. + +"The first catalysts were the universities. There were a lot of universities +like MIT and University of Michigan that had some specialized network +infrastructure needs," he said. + +"We realized that the pieces they're most interested in are the most +commoditized. There wasn't really any proprietary technology added that we had +to worry about them copying. There are people who know them better than we do +like the BSD community. We started making the case, if we really want to +partner with the universities we should just open the source code and release +it as a complete BSD-style operating system. + +"We wanted people to use this in classes, really embed it in the whole +educational process without constraining teaching to fit some corporate model," +he finishes. + +Of course, Prabhakar suggests that there is some self-interest as well. Apple +wants to be a full partner with the BSD community. It wants the code it shares +to mingle and cross-pollinate with the code from the BSD trees. In the long +run, Apple's Darwin and the BSDs will grow closer together. In an ideal world, +both groups will flourish as they avoid duplicating each other's efforts. + +Prabhakar says, "This reduces our reintegration costs. The ability to take the +standard version of FreeBSD and dump it into our OS was a big win. Prior to +doing the open source, we had done a small scale of givebacks." + +This view is echoed by other companies. IBM is a great hardware company and an +even greater service company that's never had much luck selling software, at +least in the same way that Microsoft sells software. Their OS/2 never got far +off the ground. They've sold plenty of software to companies by bundling it +with handholding and long-term service, but they've never had great success in +the shrink-wrapped software business. Open source gives them the opportunity to +cut software development costs and concentrate on providing service and +hardware. They get free development help from everyone and the customers get +more flexibility. + +Sun's Community Source License is also not without some self-interest. The +company would like to make sure that Java continues to be "Write Once, Run +Anywhere," and that means carefully controlling the APIs and the code to make +sure no idiosyncrasies or other glitches emerge. People and companies that want +to be part of the community must abide by Sun's fairly generous, but not +complete, gift to the world. + +The company's web page points out the restriction Sun places on its source code +fairly clearly. "Modified source code cannot be distributed without the express +written permission of Sun" and "Binary programs built using modified Java 2 SDK +source code may not be distributed, internally or externally, without meeting +the compatibility and royalty requirements described in the License Agreement." + +While some see this clause as a pair of manacles, Bill Joy explains that the +Community Source License is closer to our definition of a real community. "It's +a community in a stronger sense," he told an audience at Stanford. "If you make +improvements, you can own them." After you negotiate a license with Sun, you +can sell them. Joy also points out that Sun's license does require some of the +GNU-like sharing by requiring everyone to report bugs. + +Some customers may like a dictator demanding complete obeisance to Sun's +definition of Java, but some users are chaffing a bit. The freedom to look at +the code isn't enough. They want the freedom to add their own features that are +best tuned to their own needs, a process that may start to Balkanize the realm +by creating more and more slightly different versions of Java. Sun clearly +worries that the benefits of all this tuning aren't worth living through the +cacophony of having thousands of slightly different versions. Releasing the +source code allows all of the users to see more information about the structure +of Sun's Java and helps them work off the same page. This is still a great use +of the source code, but it isn't as free as the use imagined by Stallman. + +Alan Baratz, the former president of Sun's Java division, says that their +Community Source License has been a large success. Sure, some folks would like +the ability to take the code and fork off their own versions as they might be +able to do with software protected by a BSD- or GNU-style license, but Java +developers really want the assurance that it's all compatible. As many said, +"Microsoft wanted to fork Java so it could destroy it." + +Baratz said, "We now have forty thousand community source licensees. The +developers and the systems builders and the users all want the branded Java +technology. They want to know that all of the apps are going to be there. +That's the number-one reason that developers are writing to the platform." +Their more restrictive license may not make Stallman and other free software +devotees happy, but at least Java will run everywhere. + +Maybe in this case, the quality and strength of the unity Sun brings to the +marketplace is more important than the complete freedom to do whatever you +want. There are already several Java clones available, like Kaffe. They were +created without the help of Sun, so their creators aren't bound by Sun's +licenses. But they also go out of their way to avoid splitting with Sun. Tim +Wilkinson, the CEO of Transvirtual, the creators of Kaffe, says that he plans +to continue to make Kaffe 100 percent Java compatible without paying royalties +or abiding by the Community Source License. If his project or other similar +ones continue to thrive and grow, then people will know that the freedom of +open source can be as important as blind allegiance to Sun. + +These corporate efforts are largely welcomed by the open source world, but the +welcome does not come with open arms or a great deal of warmth. + +Source code with some restrictions is generally better than no source at all, +but there is still a great deal of suspicion. Theo de Raadt, the leader of the +OpenBSD project, says, "Is that free? We will not look at Apple source code +because we'll have contaminated ourselves." De Raadt is probably overreacting, +but he may have reason to worry. AT&T's USL tied up the BSD project for more +than a year with a lawsuit that it eventually lost. Who knows what Apple could +do to the folks at OpenBSD if there were a some debate over whether some code +should be constrained by the Apple license? It's just easier for everyone at +OpenBSD to avoid looking at the Apple code so they can be sure that the Apple +license won't give some lawyers a toehold on OpenBSD's code base. + +Richard Stallman says, "Sun wants to be thought of as having joined our club, +without paying the dues or complying with the public service requirements. They +want the users to settle for the fragments of freedom Sun will let them have." + +He continues, "Sun has intentionally rejected the free software community by +using a license that is much too restrictive. You are not allowed to +redistribute modified versions of Sun's Java software. It is not free +software." + +2~ Fat Cats and Alley Cats + +The corporations could also sow discord and grief by creating two different +classes: the haves and the have-nots. The people who work at the company and +draw a salary would get paid for working on the software while others would get +a cheery grin and some thanks. Everyone's code would still be free, but some of +the contributors might get much more than others. In the past, everyone was +just hanging out on the Net and adding their contributions because it was fun. + +This split is already growing. Red Hat software employs some of the major Linux +contributors like Alan Cox. They get a salary while the rest of the +contributors get nothing. Sun, Apple, and IBM employees get salaries, but folks +who work on Apache or the open versions of BSD get nothing but the opportunity +to hack cool code. + +One employee from Microsoft, who spoke on background, predicted complete and +utter disaster. "Those folks are going to see the guys from Red Hat driving +around in the Porsches and they're just going to quit writing code. Why help +someone else get rich?" he said. I pointed out that jealousy wasn't just a +problem for free software projects. Didn't many contract employees from +Microsoft gather together and sue to receive stock options? Weren't they locked +out, too? + +Still, he raises an interesting point. Getting people to join together for the +sake of a group is easy to do when no one is getting rich. What will happen +when more money starts pouring into some folks' pockets? Will people defect? +Will they stop contributing? + +Naysayers are quick to point to experiments like Netscape's Mozilla project, +which distributed the source code to the next generation of its browser. The +project received plenty of hype because it was the first big open source +project created by a major company. They set up their own website and built +serious tools for keeping track of bugs. Still, the project has not generated +any great browser that would allow it to be deemed a success. At this writing, +about 15 months after the release, they're still circulating better and better +beta versions, but none are as complete or feature-rich as the regular version +of Netscape, which remains proprietary.~{ At this writing, version M13 of +Mozilla looks very impressive. It's getting quite close to the proprietary +version of Netscape. }~ + +The naysayers like to point out that Netscape never really got much outside +help on the Mozilla project. Many of the project's core group were Netscape +employees and most of the work was done by Netscape employees. There were some +shining examples like Jim Clark (no relation to the founder of Netscape with +the same name), who contributed an entire XML parser to the project. David +Baron began hacking and testing the Mozilla code when he was a freshman at +Harvard. But beyond that, there was no great groundswell of enthusiasm. The +masses didn't rise up and write hundreds of thousands of lines of code and save +Netscape. + +But it's just as easy to cast the project as a success. Mozilla was the first +big corporate-sponsored project. Nothing came before it, so it isn't possible +to compare it with anything. It is both the best and the worst example. The +civilian devotees could just as well be said to have broken the world record +for source code contributed to a semi-commercial project. Yes, most of the work +was officially done by Netscape employees, but how do you measure work? Many +programmers think a good bug report is more valuable than a thousand lines of +code. Sure, some folks like Baron spend most of their time testing the source +code and looking for incompatibilities, but that's still very valuable. He +might not have added new code himself, but his insight may be worth much more +to the folks who eventually rely on the product to be bug-free. + +It's also important to measure the scope of the project. Mozilla set out to +rewrite most of the Netscape code. In the early days, Netscape grew by leaps +and bounds as the company struggled to add more and more features to keep ahead +of Microsoft. The company often didn't have the time to rebuild and reengineer +the product, and many of the new features were not added in the best possible +way. The Mozilla team started off by trying to rebuild the code and put it on a +stable foundation for the future. This hard-core, structural work often isn't +as dramatic. Casual observers just note that the Mozilla browser doesn't have +as many features as plain old Netscape. They don't realize that it's completely +redesigned inside. + +Jeff Bates, an editor at Slashdot, says that Mozilla may have suffered because +Netscape was so successful. The Netscape browser was already available for free +for Linux. "There wasn't a big itch to scratch," he says. "We already had +Netscape, which was fine for most people. This project interested a smaller +group than if we'd not had Netscape-hence why it didn't get as much attention." + +The experiences at other companies like Apple and Sun have been more muted. +These two companies also released the source code to their major products, but +they did not frame the releases as big barn-raising projects where all of the +users would rise up and do the development work for the company. Some people +portrayed the Mozilla project as a bit of a failure because Netscape employees +continued to do the bulk of code writing. Apple and Sun have done a better job +emphasizing the value of having the source available while avoiding the +impossible dream of getting the folks who buy the computers to write the OS, +too. + +Not all interactions between open source projects and corporations involve +corporations releasing their source code under a new open source license. Much +more code flows from the open source community into corporations. Free things +are just as tempting to companies as to people. + +In most cases, the flow is not particularly novel. The companies just choose +FreeBSD or some version of Linux for their machines like any normal human +being. Many web companies use a free OS like Linux or FreeBSD because they're +both cheap and reliable. This is going to grow much more common as companies +realize they can save a substantial amount of money over buying seat licenses +from companies like Microsoft. + +In some cases, the interactions between the open source realm and the corporate +cubicle farm become fairly novel. When the Apache web server grew popular, the +developers at IBM recognized that they had an interesting opportunity at hand. +If IBM could get the Apache server to work on its platforms, it might sell more +machines. Apache was growing more common, and common software often sold +machines. When people came looking for a new web server, the IBM salesmen +thought it might be nice to offer something that was well known. + +Apache's license is pretty loose. IBM could have taken the Apache code, added +some modifications, and simply released it under their own name. The license +only required that IBM give some credit by saying the version was derived from +Apache itself. This isn't hard to do when you're getting something for free. + +Other companies have done the same thing. Brian Behlendorf, one of the Apache +core group, says, "There's a company that's taken the Apache code and ported it +to Mac. They didn't contribute anything back to the Apache group, but it didn't +really hurt us to do that." He suggested that the karma came back to haunt them +because Apple began releasing their own version of Apache with the new OS, +effectively limiting the company's market. + +IBM is, of course, an old master at creating smooth relationships with +customers and suppliers. They chose to build a deeper relationship with Apache +by hiring one of the core developers, Ken Coar, and paying him to keep everyone +happy. + +"My job is multifaceted," says Coar. "I don't work on the IBM addedvalue stuff. +I work on the base Apache code on whatever platforms are available to me. I +serve as a liaison between IBM and the Apache group, basically advising IBM on +whether the things that they want to do are appropriate. It's an interesting +yet unique role. All of my code makes it back into the base Apache code." + +Coar ended up with the job because he helped IBM and Apache negotiate the +original relationship. He said there was a considerable amount of uncertainty +on both sides. IBM wondered how they could get something without paying for it, +and Apache wondered whether IBM would come in and simply absorb Apache. + +"There were questions about it from the Apache side that any sort of IBM +partnership would make it seem as if IBM had acquired Apache. It was something +that Apache didn't want to see happen or seem to see happen," Coar said. + +Today, Coar says IBM tries to participate in the Apache project as a peer. Some +of the code IBM develops will flow into the group and other bits may remain +proprietary. When the Apache group incorporated, Coar and another IBM employee, +Ken Stoddard, were members. This sort of long-term involvement can help ensure +that the Apache group doesn't start developing the server in ways that will +hurt its performance on IBM's machine. If you pay several guys who contribute +frequently to the project, you can be certain that your needs will be heard by +the group. It doesn't guarantee anything, but it can buy a substantial amount +of goodwill. + +Of course, it's important to realize that the Apache group was always fairly +business-oriented. Many of the original developers ran web servers and wanted +access to the source code. They made money by selling the service of +maintaining a website to the customers, not a shrink-wrapped copy of Apache +itself. The deal with IBM didn't mean that Apache changed many of its ways; it +just started working with some bigger fish. + +At first glance, each of these examples doesn't really suggest that the coming +of the corporations is going to change much in the free source world. Many of +the changes were made long ago when people realized that some money flowing +around made the free software world a much better place. The strongest +principles still survive: (1) hackers thrive when the source code is available, +and (2) people can create their own versions at will. + +The arrival of companies like IBM doesn't change this. The core Apache code is +still available and still running smoothly. The modules still plug in and work +well. There's no code that requires IBM hardware to run and the committee seems +determined to make sure that any IBM takeover doesn't occur. In fact, it still +seems to be in everyone's best interest to keep the old development model. The +marketplace loves standards, and IBM could sell many machines just offering a +standard version of Apache. When the customers walk in looking for a web +server, IBM's sales force can just say "This little baby handles X billion hits +a day and it runs the industry-leading Apache server." IBM's arrival isn't much +different from the arrival of a straightlaced, no-nonsense guy who strolls in +from the Net and wants to contribute to Apache so he can get ahead in his job +as a webmaster. In this case, it's just a corporation, not a person. + +Many suggest that IBM will gradually try to absorb more and more control over +Apache because that's what corporations do. They generate inscrutable contracts +and unleash armies of lawyers. This view is shortsighted because it ignores how +much IBM gains by maintaining an arm'slength relationship. If Apache is a +general program used on machines throughout the industry, then IBM doesn't need +to educate customers on how to use it. Many of them learned in college or in +their spare time on their home machines. Many of them read books published by +third parties, and some took courses offered by others. IBM is effectively +offloading much of its education and support costs onto a marketplace of +third-party providers. + +Would IBM be happier if Apache was both the leading product in the market and +completely owned by IBM? Sure, but that's not how it turned out. IBM designed +the PC, but they couldn't push OS/2 on everyone. They can make great computers, +however, and that's not a bad business to be in. At least Apache isn't +controlled by anyone else, and that makes the compromise pretty easy on the +ego. + +Some worry that there's a greater question left unanswered by the arrival of +corporations. In the past, there was a general link between the creator of a +product and the consumer. If the creator didn't do a good job, then the +consumer could punish the creator by not buying another version. This +marketplace would ensure that only the best survived. + +Patrick Reilly writes, "In a free market, identifiable manufacturers own the +product. They are responsible for product performance, and they can be held +liable for inexcusable flaws." + +What happens if a bug emerges in some version of the Linux kernel and it makes +it into several distributions? It's not really the fault of the distribution +creators, because they were just shipping the latest version of the kernel. And +it's not really the kernel creators' fault, because they weren't marketing the +kernel as ready for everyone to run. They were just floating some cool software +on the Net for free. Who's responsible for the bug? Who gets sued? + +Reilly takes the scenario even further. Imagine that one clever distribution +company finds a fix for the bug and puts it into their distribution. They get +no long-term reward because any of the other distribution companies can come +along and grab the bug fix. + +He writes, "Consumers concerned about software compatibility would probably +purchase the standard versions. But companies would lose profit as other +consumers would freely download improved versions of the software from the +Internet. Eventually the companies would suffer from widespread confusion over +the wide variety of software versions of each product, including standard +versions pirated by profiteers." + +There's no doubt that Reilly points toward a true breakdown in the feedback +loop that is supposed to keep free markets honest and efficient. Brand names +are important, and the free source world is a pretty confusing stew of brand +names. + +But he also overestimates the quality of the software emerging from proprietary +companies that can supposedly be punished by the marketplace. Many users +complain frequently about bugs that never get fixed in proprietary code, in +part because the proprietary companies are frantically trying to glom on more +features so they can convince more people to buy another version of the +software. Bugs don't always get fixed in the proprietary model, either. + +Richard Stallman understands Reilly's point, but he suggests that the facts +don't bear him out. If this feedback loop is so important, why do so many +people brag about free software's reliability? + +Stallman says, "He has pointed out a theoretical problem, but if you look at +the empirical facts, we do not have a real problem. So it is only a problem for +the theory, not a problem for the users. Economists may have a challenge +explaining why we DO produce such reliable software, but users have no reason +to worry." + +2~ The Return of the Hardware Kings + +The biggest effect of the free software revolution may be to shift the power +between the hardware and software companies. The biggest corporate proponents +of open source are IBM, Apple, Netscape/AOL, Sun, and Hewlett-Packard. All +except Netscape are major hardware companies that watched Microsoft turn the PC +world into a software monopoly that ruled a commodity hardware business. + +Free source code changes the equation and shifts power away from software +companies like Microsoft. IBM and Hewlett-Packard are no longer as beholden to +Microsoft if they can ship machines running a free OS. Apple is borrowing open +source software and using it for the core of their new OS. These companies know +that the customers come to them looking for a computer that works nicely when +it comes from the factory. Who cares whether the software is free or not? If it +does what the customer wants, then they can make their money on hardware. + +The free software movement pushes software into the public realm, and this +makes it easier for the hardware companies to operate. Car companies don't sit +around and argue about who owns the locations of the pedals or the position of +the dials on the dashboard. Those notions and design solutions are freely +available to all car companies equally. The lawyers don't need to get involved +in that level of car creation. + +Of course, the free software movement could lead to more consolidation in the +hardware business. The car business coalesced over the years because the large +companies were able to use their economies of scale to push out the small +companies. No one had dominion over the idea of putting four wheels on a car or +building an engine with pistons, so the most efficient companies grew big. + +This is also a threat for the computer business. Microsoft licensed their OS to +all companies, big or small, that were willing to prostrate themselves before +the master. It was in Microsoft's best interests to foster free competition +between the computer companies. Free software takes this one step further. If +no company has control over the dominant OS, then competition will shift to the +most efficient producers. The same forces that brought GM to the center of the +car industry could help aggregate the hardware business. + +This vision would be more worrisome if it hadn't happened already. Intel +dominates the market for CPU chips and takes home the lion's share of the price +of a PC. The marketplace already chose a winner of that battle. Now, free +software could unshackle Intel from its need to maintain a partnership with +Microsoft by making Intel stronger. + +Of course, the free OSs could also weaken Intel by opening it up to +competition. Windows 3.1, 95, and 98 always ran only on Intel platforms. This +made it easier for Intel to dominate the PC world because the OS that was most +in demand would only run on Intel or Intel compatible chips. Microsoft made +some attempt to break out of this tight partnership by creating versions of +Windows NT that ran on the Alpha chip, but these were never an important part +of the market. + +The free OS also puts Intel's lion's share up for grabs. Linux runs well on +Intel chips, but it also runs on chips made by IBM, Motorola, Compaq, and many +others. The NetBSD team loves to brag that its software runs on almost all +platforms available and is dedicated to porting it to as many as possible. +Someone using Linux or NetBSD doesn't care who made the chip inside because the +OS behaves similarly on all of them. + +Free source code also threatens one of the traditional ways computer +manufacturers differentiated their products. The Apple Macintosh lost market +share and potential customers because it was said that there wasn't much +software available for it. The software written for the PC would run on the Mac +only using a slow program that converted it. Now, if everyone has access to the +source code, they can convert the software to run on their machine. In many +cases, it's as simple as just recompiling it, a step that takes less than a +minute. Someone using an Amiga version of NetBSD could take software running on +an Intel chip version and recompile it. + +This threat shows that the emergence of the free OSs ensures that hardware +companies will also face increased competitive pressure. Sure, they may be able +to get Microsoft off their back, but Linux may make things a bit worse. + +In the end, the coming of age of free software may be just as big a threat to +the old way of life for corporations as it is to the free software community. +Sure, the hackers will lose the easy camaraderie of swapping code with others, +but the corporations will need to learn to live without complete control. +Software companies will be under increasing pressure from free versions, and +hardware companies will be shocked to discover that their product will become +more of a commodity than it was before. Everyone is going to have to find a way +to compete and pay the rent when much of the intellectual property is free. + +These are big changes that affect big players. But what will the changes mean +to the programmers who stay up late spinning mountains of code? Will they be +disenfranchised? Will they quit in despair? Will they move on to open source +experiments on the human genome? + +"The money flowing in won't turn people off or break up the community, and +here's why," says Eric Raymond. "The demand for programmers has been so high +for the last decade that anyone who really cared about money is already gone. +We've been selected for artistic passion." + +1~ Money + +Everyone who's made it past high school knows that money changes everything. +Jobs disappear, love crumbles, and wars begin when money gets tight. Of course, +a good number of free source believers aren't out of high school, but they'll +figure this out soon enough. Money is just the way that we pay for things we +need like food, clothing, housing, and of course newer, bigger, and faster +computers. + +The concept of money has always been the Achilles heel of the free software +world. Everyone quickly realizes the advantages of sharing the source code with +everyone else. As they say in the software business, "It's a no-brainer." But +figuring out a way to keep the fridge stocked with Jolt Cola confounds some of +the best advocates for free software. + +Stallman carefully tried to spell out his solution in the GNU Manifesto. He +wrote, "There's nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize +one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. But the +means customary in the field of software today are based on destruction. + +"Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is +destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the way that the +program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives +from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful +consequences are deliberate destruction." + +At first glance, Richard Stallman doesn't have to worry too much about making +ends meet. MIT gave him an office. He got a genius grant from the MacArthur +Foundation. Companies pay him to help port his free software to their +platforms. His golden reputation combined with a frugal lifestyle means that he +can support himself with two months of paid work a year. The rest of the time +he donates to the Free Software Foundation. It's not in the same league as +running Microsoft, but he gets by. + +Still, Stallman's existence is far from certain. He had to work hard to develop +the funding lines he has. In order to avoid any conflicts of interest, the Free +Software Foundation doesn't pay Stallman a salary or cover his travel expenses. +He says that getting paid by corporations to port software helped make ends +meet, but it didn't help create new software. Stallman works hard to raise new +funds for the FSF, and the money goes right out the door to pay programmers on +new projects. This daily struggle for some form of income is one of the +greatest challenges in the free source world today. + +Many other free software folks are following Stallman's tack by selling the +services, not the software. Many of the members of the Apache Webserver Core, +for instance, make their money by running websites. They get paid because their +customers are able to type in www.website.com and see something pop up. The +customer doesn't care whether it is free software or something from Microsoft +that is juggling the requests. They just want the graphics and text to keep +moving. + +Some consultants are following in the same footsteps. Several now offer +discounts of something like 25 percent if the customer agrees to release the +source code from the project as free software. If there's no great proprietary +information in the project, then customers often take the deal. At first +glance, the consultant looks like he's cutting his rates by 25 percent, but at +second glance, he might be just making things a bit more efficient for all of +his customers. He can reuse the software his clients release, and no one knows +it better than he does. In time, all of his clients share code and enjoy lower +development costs. + +The model of selling services instead of source code works well for many +people, but it is still far from perfect. Software that is sold as part of a +shrink-wrapped license is easy for people to understand and budget. If you pay +the price, you get the software. Services are often billed by the hour and +they're often very open-ended. Managing these relationships can be just as +difficult as raising some capital to write the software and then marketing it +as shrink-wrapped code. + +2~ Cygnus--One Company that Grew Rich on Free Software + +There have been a number of different success stories of companies built around +selling free software. One of the better-known examples is Cygnus, a company +that specializes in maintaining and porting the GNU C Compiler. The company +originally began by selling support contracts for the free software before +realizing that there was a great demand for compiler development. + +The philosophy in the beginning was simple. John Gilmore, one of the founders, +said, "We make free software affordable." They felt that free software offered +many great tools that people needed and wanted, but realized that the software +did not come with guaranteed support. Cygnus would sell people contracts that +would pay for an engineer who would learn the source code inside and out while +waiting to answer questions. The engineer could also rewrite code and help out. + +David Henkel-Wallace, one of the other founders, says, "We started in 1989 +technically, 1990 really. Our first offices were in my house on University +Avenue [in Palo Alto]. We didn't have a garage, we had a carport. It was an +apartment complex. We got another apartment and etherneted them together. By +the time we left, we had six apartments." + +While the Bay Area was very technically sophisticated, the Internet was mainly +used at that time by universities and research labs. Commercial hookups were +rare and only found in special corners like the corporate research playpen, +Xerox PARC. In order to get Net service, Cygnus came up with a novel plan to +wire the apartment complex and sell off some of the extra bandwidth to their +neighbors. HenkelWallace says, "We started our own ISP [Internet Service +Provider] as a cooperative because there weren't those things in those days. +Then people moved into those apartments because they were on the Internet." + +At the beginning, the company hoped that the free software would allow them to +offer something the major manufacturers didn't: cross-platform consistency. The +GNU software would perform the same on a DEC Alpha, a Sun SPARC, and even a +Microsoft box. The manufacturers, on the other hand, were locked up in their +proprietary worlds where there was little cross-pollination. Each company +developed its own editors, compilers, and source code tools, and each took +slightly different approaches. + +One of the other founders, Michael Tiemann, writes of the time: "When it came +to tools for programmers in 1989, proprietary software was in a dismal state. +First, the tools were primitive in the features they offered. Second, the +features, when available, often had built-in limitations that tended to break +when projects started to get complicated. Third, support from proprietary +vendors was terrible . . . finally, every vendor implemented their own +proprietary extensions, so that when you did use the meager features of one +platform, you became, imperceptibly at first, then more obviously later, +inextricably tied to that platform." + +The solution was to clean up the GNU tools, add some features, and sell the +package to people who had shops filled with different machines. Henkel-Wallace +said, "We were going to have two products: compiler tools and shell tools. Open +systems people will buy a bunch of SGIs, a bunch of HPs, a bunch of Unix +machines. Well, we thought people who have the same environment would want to +have the same tools." + +This vision didn't work out. They sold no contracts that offered that kind of +support. They did find, however, that people wanted them to move the compiler +to other platforms. "The compilers people got from the vendors weren't as good +and the compiler side of the business was making money from day one," says +Henkel-Wallace. + +The company began to specialize in porting GCC, the GNU compiler written first +by Richard Stallman, to new chips that came along. While much of the visible +world of computers was frantically standardizing on Intel chips running +Microsoft operating systems, an invisible world was fragmenting as competition +for the embedded systems blossomed. Everyone was making different chips to run +the guts of microwave ovens, cell phones, laser printers, network routers, and +other devices. These manufacturers didn't care whether a chip ran the latest MS +software, they just wanted it to run. The appliance makers would set up the +chip makers to compete against each other to provide the best solution with the +cheapest price, and the chip manufacturers responded by churning out a stream +of new, smaller, faster, and cheaper chips. + +Cygnus began porting the GCC to each of these new chips, usually after being +paid by the manufacturer. In the past, the chip companies would write or +license their own proprietary compilers in the hope of generating something +unique that would attract sales. Cygnus undercut this idea by offering +something standard and significantly cheaper. The chip companies would save +themselves the trouble of coming up with their own compiler tools and also get +something that was fairly familiar to their customers. Folks who used GCC on +Motorola's chip last year were open to trying out National Semiconductor's new +chip if it also ran GCC. Supporting free software may not have found many +takers, but Cygnus found more than enough people who wanted standard systems +for their embedded processors. + +Selling processor manufacturers on the conversion contracts was also a bit +easier. Businesses wondered what they were doing paying good money for free +software. It just didn't compute. The chip manufacturers stopped worrying about +this when they realized that the free compilers were just incentives to get +people to use their chips. The companies spent millions buying pens, T-shirts, +and other doodads that they gave away to market the chips. What was different +about buying software? If it made the customers happy, great. The chip +companies didn't worry as much about losing a competitive advantage by giving +away their work. It was just lagniappe. + +Cygnus, of course, had to worry about competition. There was usually some guy +who worked at the chip company or knew someone who worked at the chip company +who would say, "Hey, I know compilers as well as those guys at Cygnus. I can +download GCC too and underbid them." + +Henkel-Wallace says, "Cygnus was rarely the lowest bidder. People who cared +about price more than anyone else were often the hardest customers anyway. We +did deals on a fair price and I think people were happy with the result. We +rarely competed on price. What really matters to you? Getting a working tool +set or a cheap price?" + +2~ How the GPL Built Cygnus's Monopoly + +The GNU General Public License was also a bit of a secret weapon for Cygnus. +When their competitors won a contract, they had to release the source code for +their version when they were done with it. All of the new features and insights +developed by competitors would flow directly back to Cygnus. + +Michael Tiemann sounds surprisingly like Bill Gates when he speaks about this +power: "Fortunately, the open source model comes to the rescue again. Unless +and until a competitor can match the one hundred-plus engineers we have on +staff today, most of whom are primary authors or maintainers of the software we +support, they cannot displace us from our position as the 'true GNU' source. +The best they can hope to do is add incremental features that their customers +might pay them to add. But because the software is open source, whatever value +they add comes back to Cygnus. . . ." + +Seeing these effects is something that only a truely devoted fan of free +software can do. Most people rarely get beyond identifying the problems with +giving up the source code to a project. They don't realize that the GPL affects +all users and also hobbles the potential competitors. It's like a mutual +disarmament or mutual armament treaty that fixes the rules for all comers and +disarmament treaties are often favored by the most powerful. + +The money Cygnus makes by selling this support has been quite outstanding. The +company continues to grow every year, and it has been listed as one of the +largest and fastest-growing private software companies. The operation was also +a bootstrap business where the company used the funds from existing contracts +to fund the research and development of new tools. They didn't take funding +from outside venture capital firms until 1995. This let the founders and the +workers keep a large portion of the company, one of the dreams of every Silicon +Valley start-up. In 1999, Red Hot merged with Cygnus to "create an open source +powerhouse." + +The success of Cygnus doesn't mean that others have found ways of duplicating +the model. While Cygnus has found some success and venture capital, Gilmore +says, "The free software business gives many MBAs the willies."Many programmers +have found that free software is just a free gift for others. They haven't +found an easy way to charge for their work. + +2~ Snitchware + +Larry McVoy is one programmer who looks at the free source world and cringes. +He's an old hand from the UNIX world who is now trying to build a new system +for storing the source code. To him, giving away source code is a one-way train +to no money. Sure, companies like Cygnus and Red Hat can make money by adding +some extra service, but the competition means that the price of this value will +steadily go to zero. There are no regulatory or large capital costs to restrain +entry, so he feels that the free software world will eventually push out all +but the independently wealthy and the precollege teens who can live at home. +"We need to find a sustainable method. People need to write code and raise +families, pay mortgages, and all of that stuff," he says. + +McVoy's solution is a strange license that some call "snitchware." He's +developing a product known as BitKeeper and he's giving it away, with several +very different hooks attached. He approached this philosophically. He says, "In +order to make money, I need to find something that the free software guys don't +value that the businesspeople do value. Then I take it away from the free +software guys. The thing I found is your privacy." + +BitKeeper is an interesting type of product that became essential as software +projects grew larger and more unwieldy. In the beginning, programmers wrote a +program that was just one coherent file with a beginning, a middle, some +digressions, and then an end. These were very self-contained and easily managed +by one person. + +When more than one programmer started working on a project together, however, +everyone needed to work on coordinating their work with each other. One person +couldn't start tearing apart the menus because another might be trying to hook +up the menus to a new file system. If both started working on the same part, +the changes would be difficult if not impossible to sort out when both were +done. Once a team of programmers digs out from a major mess like that, they +look for some software like BitKeeper to keep the source code organized. + +BitKeeper is sophisticated and well-integrated with the Internet. Teams of +programmers can be spread out throughout the world. At particular times, +programmers can call each other up and synchronize their projects. Both tightly +controlled, large corporate teams and loose and uncoordinated open source +development teams can use the tool. + +The synchronization creates change logs that summarize the differences between +two versions of the project. These change logs are optimized to move the least +amount of information. If two programmers don't do too much work, then +synchronizing them doesn't take too long. The change logs build up a complete +history of the project and make it possible to roll back the project to earlier +points if it turns out that development took the wrong path. + +McVoy's snitchware solution is to post the change logs of the people who don't +buy a professional license. These logs include detailed information on how two +programs are synchronized, and he figures that this information should be +valuable enough for a commercial company to keep secret. They might say, "Moved +auction control structure to Bob's version from Caroline's version. Moved new +PostScript graphics engine to Caroline's version from Bob's." + +McVoy says, "If you're Sun or Boeing, you don't want the Internet to be posting +a message like 'I just added the bomb bay.' But for the free software guys, not +only is that acceptable, but it's desirable. If you're doing open source, what +do you have to hide?" + +BitKeeper is free for anyone to use, revise, and extend as long as they don't +mess with the part that tattles. If you don't care about the world reading your +change logs, then it's not much different from the traditional open source +license. The user has the same rights to extend, revise, and modify BitKeeper +as they do GNU Emacs, with one small exception: you can't disable the snitch +feature. + +McVoy thinks this is an understandable trade-off. "From the business guys you +can extract money. You can hope that they'll pay you. This is an important +point I learned consulting at Schwab and Morgan Stanley. They insist that they +pay for the software they get. They don't want to pay nothing. I used to think +that they were idiots. Now I think they're very smart," he says. + +The matter is simple economics, he explains. "They believe that if enough money +is going to their supplier, it won't be a total disaster. I call this an +insurance model of software." + +Companies that pay for the privacy with BitKeeper will also be funding further +development. The work won't be done in someone's spare time between exams and +the homecoming game. It won't be done between keeping the network running and +helping the new secretary learn Microsoft Word. It will be developed by folks +who get paid to do the work. + +"There's enough money going back to the corporation so it can be supported," +McVoy says. "This is the crux of the problem with the open source model. It's +possible to abuse the proprietary model, too. They get you in there, they lock +you in, and then they rape you. This business of hoping that it will be okay is +unacceptable. You need to have a lock. The MIS directors insist you have a +lock." + +He has a point. Linux is a lot of fun to play with and it is now a very stable +OS, but it took a fair number of years to get to this point. Many folks in the +free source world like to say things like, "It used to be that the most fun in +Linux was just getting it to work." Companies like Morgan Stanley, Schwab, +American Airlines, and most others live and die on the quality of their +computer systems. They're quite willing to pay money if it helps ensure that +things don't go wrong. + +McVoy's solution hasn't rubbed everyone the right way. The Open Source +Initiative doesn't include his snitchware license in a list of acceptable +solutions. "The consensus of the license police is that my license is NOT open +source," he says. "The consensus of my lawyer is that it is. But I don't call +it open source anymore." + +He's going his own way. "I made my own determination of what people value in +the OS community: they have to be able to get the source, modify the source, +and redistribute the source for no fee. All of the other crap is yeah, yeah +whatever," he says. + +"The problem with the GPL is the GPL has an ax to grind, and in order to grind +that ax it takes away all of the rights of the person who wrote the code. It +serves the need of everyone in the community except the person who wrote it." + +McVoy has also considered a number of other alternatives. Instead of taking +away something that the free software folks don't value, he considered putting +in something that the businesses would pay to get rid of. The product could +show ads it downloaded from a central location. This solution is already well +known on the Internet, where companies give away e-mail, searching solutions, +directories, and tons of information in order to sell ads. This solution, +however, tends to wreck the usability of the software. Eudora, the popular +e-mail program, is distributed with this option. + +McVoy also considered finding a way to charge for changes and support to +BitKeeper. "The Cygnus model isn't working well because it turns them into a +contracting shop. That means you actually have to do something for every hour +of work." + +To him, writing software and charging for each version can generate money +without work--that is, without doing further work. The support house has to +have someone answering the phone every moment. A company that is selling +shrink-wrapped software can collect money as people buy new copies. McVoy +doesn't want this cash to spend tipping bartenders on cruise ships, although he +doesn't rule it out. He wants the capital to reinvest in other neat ideas. He +wants to have some cash coming in so he can start up development teams looking +at new and bigger projects. + +The Cygnus model is too constraining for him. He argues that a company relying +on support contracts must look for a customer to fund each project. Cygnus, for +instance, had to convince Intel that they could do a good job porting the GCC +to the i960. They found few people interested in general support of GNU, so +they ended up concentrating on GCC. + +McVoy argues that it's the engineers who come up with the dreams first. The +customers are often more conservative and less able to see how some new tool or +piece of software could be really useful. Someone needs to hole up in a garage +for a bit to create a convincing demonstration of the idea. Funding a dream +takes capital. + +To him, the absence of money in the free software world can be a real +limitation because money is a way to store value. It's not just about affording +a new Range Rover and balsamic vinegars that cost more than cocaine by weight. +Money can be a nice way to store up effort and transport it across time. +Someone can work like a dog for a six months, turn out a great product, and +sell it for a pile of cash. Ten years later, the cash can be spent on something +else. The work is effectively stored for the future. + +Of course, this vision isn't exactly true. Cygnus has managed to charge enough +for their contracts to fund the development of extra tools. Adding new features +and rolling them out into the general distribution of some GNU tool is part of +the job that the Cygnus team took on for themselves. These new features also +mean that the users need more support. On one level, it's not much different +from a traditional software development cycle. Cygnus is doing its work by +subscription while a traditional house is creating its new features on spec. + +In fact, Cygnus did so well over such a long period of time that it found it +could raise capital. "Once Cygnus had a track record of making money and +delivering on time, investors wanted a piece of it," says Gilmore. + +Red Hat has managed to sell enough CD-ROM disks to fund the development of new +projects. They've created a good selection of installation tools that make it +relatively easy for people to use Linux. They also help pay salaries for people +like Alan Cox who contribute a great deal to the evolution of the kernel. They +do all of this while others are free to copy their distribution disks verbatim. + +McVoy doesn't argue with these facts, but feels that they're just a temporary +occurrence. The huge growth of interest in Linux means that many new folks are +exploring the operating system. There's a great demand for the hand-holding and +packaging that Red Hat offers. In time, though, everyone will figure out how to +use the product and the revenue stream should disappear as competition drives +out the ability to charge $50 for each disk. + +Of course, the folks at Cygnus or Red Hat might not disagree with McVoy either. +They know it's a competitive world and they figure that their only choice is to +remain competitive by finding something that people will want to pay for. +They've done it in the past and they should probably be able to do it in the +future. There are always new features. + +2~ Bounties for Quicker Typer-Uppers + +Some developers are starting to explore a third way of blending capital with +open source development by trying to let companies and people put bounties out +on source code. The concept is pretty simple and tuned to the open software +world. Let's say you have an annoying habit of placing French bon mots in the +middle of sentences. Although this looks stupide to your friends, you think +it's quite chic. The problem is that your old word processor's spell checker +isn't quite à la mode and it only operates avec une seule langue. The problem +is that you've spent too much time studying français and drinking de café and +not enough time studying Java, the programming language. You're très désolé by +your word processor's inability to grok just how BCBG you can be and +spell-check in deux languages. + +The bounty system could be your savior. You would post a message saying, +"Attention! I will reward with a check for $100 anyone who creates a +two-language spell-checker." If you're lucky, someone who knows something about +the spell-checker's source code will add the feature in a few minutes. One +hundred dollars for a few minutes' work isn't too shabby. + +It is entirely possible that another person out there is having the same +problem getting their word processor to verstehen their needs. They might chip +in $50 to the pool. If the problem is truly grande, then the pot could grow +quite large. + +This solution is blessed with the wide-open, free-market sensibility that many +people in the open software community like. The bounties are posted in the open +and anyone is free to try to claim the bounties by going to work. Ideally, the +most knowledgeable will be the first to complete the job and nab the payoff. + +Several developers are trying to create a firm infrastructure for the plan. +Brian Behlendorf, one of the founding members of the Apache web server +development team, is working with Tim O'Reilly's company to build a website +known as SourceXchange. Another group known as CoSource is led by Bernie +Thompson and his wife, Laurie. Both will work to create more software that is +released with free source. + +Of course, these projects are more than websites. They're really a process, and +how the process will work is still unclear right now. While it is easy to +circulate a notice that some guy will pay some money for some software, it is +another thing to actually make it work. Writing software is a frustrating +process and there are many chances for disagreement. The biggest question on +every developer's mind is "How can I be sure I'll be paid?" and the biggest +question on every sugar daddy's mind is "How can I be sure that the software +works?" + +These questions are part of any software development experience. There is often +a large gap between the expectations of the person commissioning the software +and the person writing the code. In this shadow are confusion, betrayal, and +turmoil. + +The normal solution is to break the project up into milestones and require +payment after each milestone passes. If the coder is doing something +unsatisfactory, the message is transmitted when payment doesn't arrive. Both +SourceXchange and CoSource plan on carrying over the same structure to the +world of bounty-hunting programmers. Each project might be broken into a number +of different steps and a price for each step might be posted in advance. + +Both systems try to alleviate the danger of nonpayment by requiring that +someone step in and referee the end of the project. A peer reviewer must be +able to look over the specs of the project and the final code and then +determine whether money should be paid. Ideally, this person should be someone +both sides respect. + +A neutral party with the ability to make respectable decisions is something +many programmers and consultants would welcome. In many normal situations, the +contractors can only turn to the courts to solve disagreements, and the legal +system is not really schooled in making these kinds of decisions. The company +with the money is often able to dangle payment in front of the programmers and +use this as a lever to extract more work. Many programmers have at least one +horror story to tell about overly ambitious expectations. + +Of course, the existence of a wise neutral party who can see deeply into the +problems and provide a fair solution is close to a myth. Judging takes time. +SourceXchange promises that these peer reviewers will be paid, and this money +will probably have to come from the people offering the bounty. They're the +only ones putting money into the system in the long run. Plus, the system must +make the people offering bounties happy in the long run or it will fail. + +The CoSource project suggests that the developers must come up with their own +authority who will judge the end of the job and present this person with their +bid. The sponsors then decide whether to trust the peer reviewer when they okay +the job. The authorities will be judged like the developers, and summaries of +their reputation will be posted on the site. While it isn't clear how the +reviewers will be paid, it is not too much to expect that there will be some +people out there who will do it just for the pleasure of having their finger in +the stew. They might, for instance, want to offer the bounty themselves but be +unable to put up much money. Acting as a reviewer would give them the chance to +make sure the software did what they wanted without putting up much cash. + +One of the most difficult questions is how to run the marketplace. A wide-open +solution would let the sponsors pay when the job was done satisfactorily. The +first person to the door with running code that met the specs would be the one +to be paid. Any other team that showed up later would get nothing. + +This approach would offer the greatest guarantees of creating well-running code +as quickly as possible. The programmers would have a strong incentive to meet +the specs quickly in order to win the cash. The downside is that the price +would be driven up because the programmers would be taking on more risk. They +would need to capitalize their own development and take the chance that someone +might beat them to the door. Anxious sponsors who need some code quickly should +be willing to pay the price. + +Another solution is to award contracts before any work is done. Developers +would essentially bid on the project and the sponsor would choose one to start +work. The process would be fairly formal and favor the seasoned, connected +programmers. A couple of kids working in their spare time might be able to win +an open bounty, but they would be at a great disadvantage in this system. Both +CoSource and SourceXchange say that they'll favor this sort of preliminary +negotiation. + +If the contracts are awarded before work begins, the bounty system looks less +like a wild free-for-all and more like just a neutral marketplace for contract +programmers to make their deals. Companies like Cygnus already bid to be paid +for jobs that produce open source. These market-places for bounties will need +to provide some structure and efficiencies to make it worth people's time to +use them. + +One possible benefit of the bounty system is to aggregate the desires of many +small groups. While some bounties will only serve the person who asks for them, +many have the potential to help people who are willing to pay. An efficient +system should be able to join these people together into one group and put +their money into one pot. + +CoSource says that it will try to put together the bounties of many small +groups and allow people to pay them with credit cards. It uses the example of a +group of Linux developers who would gather together to fund the creation of an +open source version of their favorite game. They would each chip in $10, $20, +or $50 and when the pot got big enough, someone would step forward. Creating a +cohesive political group that could effectively offer a large bounty is a great +job for these sites. + +Of course, there are deeper questions about the flow of capital and the nature +of risks in these bounty-based approaches. In traditional software development, +one group pays for the creation of the software in the hope that they'll be +able to sell it for more than it cost to create. Here, the programmer would be +guaranteed a fixed payment if he accomplished the job. The developer's risk is +not completely eliminated because the job might take longer than they expected, +but there is little of the traditional risk of a start-up firm. It may not be a +good idea to separate the risk-taking from the people doing the work. That is +often the best way to keep people focused and devoted. + +Each of these three systems shows how hard the free software industry is +working at finding a way for people to pay their bills and share information +successfully. Companies like Cygnus or BitKeeper are real efforts built by +serious people who can't live off the largesse of a university or a steady +stream of government grants. Their success shows that it is quite possible to +make money and give the source code away for free, but it isn't easy. + +Still, there is no way to know how well these companies will survive the brutal +competition that comes from the free flow of the source code. There are no +barriers to entry, so each corporation must be constantly on its toes. The +business becomes one of service, not manufacturing, and that changes +everything. There are no grand slam home runs in that world. There are no +billion-dollar explosions. Service businesses grow by careful attention to +detail and plenty of focused effort. + +1~ Fork + +A T-shirt once offered this wisdom to the world: "If you love someone, set them +free. If they come back to you, it was meant to be. If they don't come back, +hunt them down and kill them." The world of free software revolves around +letting your source code go off into the world. If things go well, others will +love the source code, shower it with bug fixes, and send all of this hard work +flowing back to you. It will be a shining example of harmony and another reason +why the free software world is great. But if things don't work out, someone +might fork you and there's nothing you can do about it. + +"Fork" is a UNIX command that allows you to split a job in half. UNIX is an +operating system that allows several people to use the same computer to do +different tasks, and the operating system pretends to run them simultaneously +by quickly jumping from task to task. A typical UNIX computer has at least 100 +different tasks running. Some watch the network for incoming data, some run +programs for the user, some watch over the file system, and others do many +menial tasks. + +If you "fork a job," you arrange to split it into two parts that the computer +treats as two separate jobs. This can be quite useful if both jobs are often +interrupted, because one can continue while the other one stalls. This solution +is great if two tasks, A and B, need to be accomplished independently of each +other. If you use one task and try to accomplish A first, then B won't start +until A finishes. This can be quite inefficient if A stalls. A better solution +is to fork the job and treat A and B as two separate tasks. + +Most programmers don't spend much time talking about these kinds of forks. +They're mainly concerned about forks in the political process. + +Programmers use "fork" to describe a similar process in the organization of a +project, but the meaning is quite different. Forks of a team mean that the +group splits and goes in different directions. One part might concentrate on +adding support for buzzword Alpha while the other might aim for full buzzword +Beta compatibility. + +In some cases, there are deep divisions behind the decision to fork. One group +thinks buzzword Alpha is a sloppy, brain-dead kludge job that's going to blow +up in a few years. The other group hates buzzword Beta with a passion. Disputes +like this happen all the time. They often get resolved peacefully when someone +comes up with buzzword Gamma, which eclipses them both. When no Gamma arrives, +people start talking about going their separate ways and forking the source. If +the dust settles, two different versions start appearing on the Net competing +with each other for the hearts and CPUs of the folks out there. Sometimes the +differences between the versions are great and sometimes they're small. But +there's now a fork in the evolution of the source code, and people have to +start making choices. + +The free software community has a strange attitude toward forks. On one hand, +forking is the whole reason Stallman wrote the free software manifesto. He +wanted the right and the ability to mess around with the software on his +computer. He wanted to be free to change it, modify it, and tear it to shreds +if he felt like doing it one afternoon. No one should be able to stop him from +doing that. He wanted to be totally free. + +On the other hand, forking can hurt the community by duplicating efforts, +splitting alliances, and sowing confusion in the minds of users. If Bob starts +writing and publishing his own version of Linux out of his house, then he's +taking some energy away from the main version. People start wondering if the +version they're running is the Missouri Synod version of Emacs or the Christian +Baptist version. Where do they send bug fixes? Who's in charge? Distribution +groups like Debian or Red Hat have to spend a few moments trying to decide +whether they want to include one version or the other. If they include both, +they have to choose one as the default. Sometimes they just throw up their +hands and forget about both. It's a civil war, and those are always worse than +a plain old war. + +Some forks evolve out of personalities that just rub each other the wrong way. +I've heard time and time again, "Oh, we had to kick him out of the group +because he was offending people." Many members of the community consider this +kind of forking bad. They use the same tone of voice to describe a fork of the +source code as they use to describe the breakup of two lovers. It is sad, +unfortunate, unpleasant, and something we'll never really understand because we +weren't there. Sometimes people take sides because they have a strong opinion +about who is right. They'll usually go off and start contributing to that code +fork. In other cases, people don't know which to pick and they just close their +eyes and join the one with the cutest logo. + +2~ Forks and the Threat of Disunity + +Eric Raymond once got in a big fight with Richard Stallman about the structure +of Emacs Lisp. Raymond said, "The Lisp libraries were in bad shape in a number +of ways. They were poorly documented. There was a lot of work that had gone on +outside the FSF that should be integrated and I wanted to merge in the best +work from outside." + +The problem is that Stallman didn't want any part of Raymond's work. "He just +said, 'I won't take those changes into the distribution.' That's his privilege +to do," Raymond said. + +That put Raymond in an awkward position. He could continue to do the work, +create his own distribution of Emacs, and publicly break with Stallman. If he +were right and the Lisp code really needed work, then he would probably find +more than a few folks who would cheer his work. They might start following him +by downloading his distribution and sending their bug fixes his way. Of course, +if he were wrong, he would set up his own web server, do all the work, put his +Lisp fixes out there, and find that no one would show up. He would be ignored +because people found it easier to just download Stallman's version of Emacs, +which everyone thought was sort of the official version, if one could be said +to exist. They didn't use the Lisp feature too much so it wasn't worth thinking +about how some guy in Pennsylvania had fixed it. They were getting the real +thing from the big man himself. + +Of course, something in between would probably happen. Some folks who cared +about Lisp would make a point of downloading Raymond's version. The rest of the +world would just go on using the regular version. In time, Stallman might +soften and embrace the changes, but he might not. Perhaps someone would come +along and create a third distribution that melded Raymond's changes with +Stallman's into a harmonious version. That would be a great thing, except that +it would force everyone to choose from among three different versions. + +In the end, Raymond decided to forget about his improvements. "Emacs is too +large and too complicated and forking is bad. There was in fact one group that +got so fed up with working with him that they did fork Emacs. That's why X +Emacs exists. But major forks like that are rare events and I didn't want to be +part of perpetrating another one," he said. Someone else was going to have to +start the civil war by firing those shots at Fort Sumter. + +2~ BSD's Garden of Forking Paths + +Some forks aren't so bad. There often comes a time when people have legitimate +reasons to go down different paths. What's legitimate and what's not is often +decided after a big argument, but the standard reasons are the same ones that +drive programming projects. A good fork should make a computer run software a +gazillion times faster. Or it might make the code much easier to port to a new +platform. Or it might make the code more secure. There are a thousand different +reasons, and it's impossible to really measure which is the right one. The only +true measure is the number of people who follow each branch of the fork. If a +project has a number of good disciples and the bug fixes are coming quickly, +then people tend to assume it is legitimate. + +The various versions of the BSD software distribution are some of the more +famous splits around. All are descended, in one way or another, from the +original versions of UNIX that came out of Berkeley. Most of the current ones +evolved from the 4.3BSD version and the Network Release 2 and some integrated +code from the 4.4BSD release after it became free. All benefited from the work +of the hundreds of folks who spent their free time cloning the features +controlled by AT&T. All of them are controlled by the same loose BSD license +that gives people the right to do pretty much anything they want to the code. +All of them share the same cute daemon as a mascot. + +That's where the similarities end. The FreeBSD project is arguably the most +successful version. It gets a fairly wide distribution because its developers +have a good deal with Walnut Creek CD-ROM Distributors, a company that packages +up large bundles of freeware and shareware on the Net and then sells them on +CD-ROM. The system is well known and widely used because the FreeBSD team +concentrates on making the software easy to use and install on Intel computers. +Lately, they've created an Alpha version, but most of the users run the +software on x86 chips. Yahoo! uses FreeBSD. + +FreeBSD, of course, began as a fork of an earlier project known as 386BSD, +started by Bill Jolitz. This version of BSD was more of an academic example or +a proof-of-concept than a big open source project designed to take over the +world. + +Jordan Hubbard, someone who would come along later to create a fork of 386BSD, +said of Jolitz's decision to create a 386-based fork of BSD, "Bill's real +contribution was working with the 386 port. He was kind of an outsider. No one +else saw the 386 as interesting. Berkeley had a myopic attitude toward PCs. +They were just toys. No one would support Intel. That was the climate at the +time. No one really took PCs seriously. Bill's contribution was to realize that +PCs were going places." + +From the beginning, Hubbard and several others saw the genius in creating a 386 +version of BSD that ran on the cheapest hardware available. They started adding +features and gluing in bug fixes, which they distributed as a file that +modified the main 386BSD distribution from Jolitz. This was practical at the +beginning when the changes were few, but it continued out of respect for the +original creator, even after the patches grew complicated. + +Finally, a tussle flared up in 1993. Jordan Hubbard, one of the forkers, writes +in his history of the project, + +_1 386BSD was Bill Jolitz's operating system, which had been up to that point +suffering rather severely from almost a year's worth of neglect. As the +patchkit swelled ever more uncomfortably with each passing day, we were in +unanimous agreement that something had to be done and decided to try and assist +Bill by providing this interim "cleanup" snapshot. Those plans came to a rude +halt when Bill Jolitz suddenly decided to withdraw his sanction from the +project and without any clear indication of what would be done instead. + +The FreeBSD team pressed on despite the denial. They decided to fork. Today, +386BSD is largely part of the history of computing while FreeBSD is a living, +current OS, at least at the time this book was written. The FreeBSD team has +done a good job distributing bug-free versions, and they've been paid off in +loyalty, disciples, and money and computers from Walnut Creek. Forking can +often be good for society because it prevents one person or clique from +thwarting another group. The free software world is filled with many of the +same stories of politics that float across the watercoolers of corporations, +but the stories don't have to end the same way. If one boss or group tries to +shut down a free software project, it really can't. The source code is freely +available, and people are free to carry on. The FreeBSD project is one example. + +Of course, good software can have anti-forking effects. Linus Torvalds said in +one interview, "Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started +on Linux it wasn't available (although Bill Jolitz's series on it in Dr. Dobbs +Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, +Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought +about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux +would probably never have happened." So if 386BSD had been easier to find on +the Net and better supported, Linux might never have begun. + +Once someone starts forking BSD, one fork is rarely enough. Another group known +as NetBSD also grew fed up with the progress of 386BSD in 1993. This group, +however, wanted to build a platform that ran well on many different machines, +not just the Intel 386. The FreeBSD folks concentrated on doing a good job on +Intel boxes, while the NetBSD wanted to create a version that ran on many +different machines. Their slogan became "Of course it runs NetBSD." + +NetBSD runs on practically every machine you can imagine, including older, less +up-to-date machines like the Amiga and the Atari. It has also been embraced by +companies like NeXT, which bundled parts of it into the version of the OS for +the Macintosh known as Rhapsody. Of course, the most common chips like the +Intel line and the Alpha are also well supported. + +The NetBSD community emerged at the same time as the FreeBSD world. They didn't +realize that each team was working on the same project at the same time. But +once they started releasing their own versions, they stayed apart. + +"The NetBSD group has always been the purest. They saw it as an OS research +vehicle. That was what CSRG was doing. Their only mandate was to do interesting +research," said Hubbard. "It's a very different set of goals than we +concentrated on for the 386. The important thing for us was to polish it up. We +put all of our efforts into polishing, not porting. This was part of our +bringing BSD to the masses kind of thing. We're going for numbers. We're going +for mass penetration." + +This orientation meant that NetBSD never really achieved the same market +domination as FreeBSD. The group only recently began shipping versions of +NetBSD on CD-ROM. FreeBSD, on the other hand, has always excelled at attracting +new and curious users thanks to their relationship with Walnut Creek. Many +experimenters and open-minded users picked up one of the disks, and a few +became excited enough to actually make some contributions. The Walnut Creek +partnership also helped the FreeBSD team understand what it needed to do to +make their distribution easier to install and simpler to use. That was Walnut +Creek's business, after all. + +2~ Flames, Fights, and the Birth of OpenBSD + +The forking did not stop with NetBSD. Soon one member of the NetBSD world, Theo +de Raadt, began to rub some people the wrong way. One member of the OpenBSD +team told me, "The reason for the split from NetBSD was that Theo got kicked +out. I don't understand it completely. More or less they say he was treating +users on the mailing list badly. He does tend to be short and terse, but +there's nothing wrong with that. He was one of the founding members of NetBSD +and they asked him to resign." + +Now, four years after the split began in 1995, de Raadt is still a bit hurt by +their decision. He says about his decision to fork BSD again, "I had no choice. +I really like what I do. I really like working with a community. At the time it +all happened, I was the second most active developer in their source tree. They +took the second most active developer and kicked him off." + +Well, they didn't kick him out completely, but they did take away his ability +to "commit" changes to the source tree and make them permanent. After the +split, de Raadt had to e-mail his contributions to a member of the team so they +could check them in. This didn't sit well with de Raadt, who saw it as both a +demotion and a real impediment to doing work. + +The root of the split is easy to see. De Raadt is energetic. He thinks and +speaks quickly about everything. He has a clear view about most free software +and isn't afraid to share it. While some BSD members are charitable and +conciliatory to Richard Stallman, de Raadt doesn't bother to hide his contempt +for the organization. "The Free Software Foundation is one of the most misnamed +organizations," he says, explaining that only BSD-style licensees have the true +freedom to do whatever they want with the software. The GNU General Public +License is a pair of handcuffs to him. + +De Raadt lives in Calgary and dresses up his personal web page with a picture +of himself on top of a mountain wearing a bandanna. If you want to send him a +pizza for any reason, he's posted the phone number of his favorite local shop +(403/531-3131). Unfortunately, he reports that they don't take foreign credit +card numbers anymore. + +He even manages to come up with strong opinions about simple things that he +ostensibly loves. Mountain biking is a big obsession, but, he says, "I like mud +and despise 'wooded back-alleys' (what most people call logging roads)." That's +not the best way to make friends with less extreme folks who enjoy a Sunday +ride down logging roads. + +If you like cats, don't read what he had to say about his pets: "I own cats. +Their names are Galileo and Kepler--they're still kittens. Kepler-the little +bitch--can apparently teleport through walls. Galileo is a rather cool monster. +When they become full-grown cats I will make stew & soup out of them. (Kepler +is only good for soup)." + +Throwaway comments like this have strange effects on the Net, where text is the +only way people can communicate. There are no facial gestures or tonal clues to +tell people someone is joking around, and some people don't have well-developed +scanners for irony or sarcasm. Some love the sniping and baiting, while others +just get annoyed. They can't let snide comments slide off their back. +Eventually, the good gentlefolk who feel that personal kindness and politeness +should still count for something in this world get annoyed and start trying to +do something. + +It's easy to see how this affected the NetBSD folks, who conduct their business +in a much more proper way. Charles Hannum, for instance, refused to talk to me +about the schism unless I promised that he would be able to review the parts of +the book that mentioned NetBSD. He also suggested that forks weren't +particularly interesting and shouldn't be part of the book. Others begged off +the questions with more polite letters saying that the split happened a long +time ago and wasn't worth talking about anymore. Some pointed out that most of +the members of the current NetBSD team weren't even around when the split +happened. + +While their silence may be quite prudent and a better way to spend a life, it +certainly didn't help me get both sides of the story. I pointed out that they +wouldn't accept code into the NetBSD tree if the author demanded the right to +review the final distribution. I said they could issue a statement or conduct +the interview by e-mail. One argued that there was no great problem if a few +paragraphs had to be deleted from the book in the end. I pointed out that I +couldn't give the hundreds of people I spoke with veto power over the +manuscript. It would be impossible to complete. The book wasn't being written +by a committee. No one at NetBSD budged. + +De Raadt, on the other hand, spoke quite freely with no preconditions or +limitations. He still keeps a log file with a good number of email letters +exchanged during the separation and makes it easy to read them on his personal +website. That's about as open as you can get. The NetBSD folks who refused to +talk to me, on the other hand, seemed intent on keeping control of the story. +Their silence came from a different world than the website offering the phone +number of the local pizza place as a hint. They were Dragnet; de Raadt was +Politically Incorrect. + +When the NetBSD folks decided to do something, they took away de Raadt's access +to the source tree. He couldn't just poke around the code making changes as he +went along. Well, he could poke around and make changes, but not to the +official tree with the latest version. The project was open source, after all. +He could download the latest release and start fiddling, but he couldn't make +quasi-official decisions about what source was part of the latest official +unreleased version. + +De Raadt thought this was a real barrier to work. He couldn't view the latest +version of the code because it was kept out of his view. He was stuck with the +last release, which might be several months old. That put him at an extreme +disadvantage because he might start working on a problem only to discover that +someone had either fixed it or changed it. + +Chris Demetriou found himself with the task of kicking de Raadt off of the +team. His letter, which can still be found on the OpenBSD site, said that de +Raadt's rough behavior and abusive messages had driven away people who might +have contributed to the project. Demetriou also refused to talk about NetBSD +unless he could review the sections of the book that contained his comments. He +also threatened to take all possible action against anyone who even quoted his +letters in a commercial book without his permission. + +De Raadt collected this note from Demetriou and the firestorm that followed in +a 300k file that he keeps on his website. The NetBSD core tried to be polite +and firm, but the matter soon degenerated into a seven-month-long flame war. +After some time, people started having meta-arguments, debating whether the +real argument was more or less like the bickering of a husband and wife who +happen to work at the same company. Husbands and wives should keep their +personal fights out of the workplace, they argued. And so they bickered over +whether de Raadt's nastygrams were part of his "job" or just part of his social +time. + +Through it all, de Raadt tried to get back his access to the source tree of +NetBSD and the group tried to propose all sorts of mechanisms for making sure +he was making a "positive" contribution and getting along with everyone. At one +time, they offered him a letter to sign. These negotiations went nowhere, as de +Raadt objected to being forced to make promises that other contributors didn't +have to. + +De Raadt wrote free software because he wanted to be free to make changes or +write code the way he wanted to do it. If he had wanted to wear the happy-face +of a positive contributor, he could have gotten a job at a corporation. Giving +up the right to get in flame wars and speak at will may not be that much of a +trade-off for normal people with fulltime jobs. Normal folks swallow their +pride daily. Normal people don't joke about turning their cats into soup. But +de Raadt figured it was like losing a bit of his humanity and signing up +willingly for a set of manacles. It just wasn't livable. + +The argument lasted months. De Raadt felt that he tried and tried to rejoin the +project without giving away his honor. The core NetBSD team argued that they +just wanted to make sure he would be positive. They wanted to make sure he +wouldn't drive away perfectly good contributors with brash antics. No one ever +gained any ground in the negotiations and in the end, de Raadt was gone. + +The good news is that the fork didn't end badly. De Raadt decided he wasn't +going to take the demotion. He just couldn't do good work if he had to run all +of his changes by one of the team that kicked him off the project. It took too +long to ask "Mother, may I?" to fix every little bug. If he was going to have +to run his own tree, he might as well go whole hog and start his own version of +BSD. He called it OpenBSD. It was going to be completely open. There were going +to be relatively few controls on the members. If the NetBSD core ran its world +like the Puritan villagers in a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, then de Raadt was +going to run his like Club Med. + +OpenBSD struggled for several months as de Raadt tried to attract more +designers and coders to his project. It was a battle for popularity in many +ways, not unlike high school. When the cliques split, everyone had to pick and +choose. De Raadt had to get some folks in his camp if he was going to make some +lemonade. + +The inspiration came to de Raadt one day when he discovered that the flame war +archive on his web page was missing a few letters. He says that someone broke +into his machine and made a few subtle deletions. Someone who had an intimate +knowledge of the NetBSD system. Someone who cared about the image portrayed by +the raw emotions in the supposedly private letters. + +He clarifies his comments to make it clear that he's not sure it was someone +from the NetBSD core. "I never pursued it. If it happens, it's your own fault. +It's not their fault," he said. Of course, the folks from NetBSD refused to +discuss this matter or answer questions unless they could review the chapter. + +This break-in gave him a focus. De Raadt looked at NetBSD and decided that it +was too insecure. He gathered a group of like-minded people and began to comb +the code for potential insecurities. + +"About the same time, I got involved with a company that wrote a network +security scanner. Three of the people over there started playing with the +source tree and searching for security holes. We started finding problems all +over the place, so we started a comprehensive security audit. We started from +the beginning. Our task load increased massively. At one time, I had five +pieces of paper on my desk full of things to look for," he said. + +Security holes in operating systems are strange beasts that usually appear by +mistake when the programmer makes an unfounded assumption. One of the +best-known holes is the buffer overflow, which became famous in 1988 after +Robert Morris, then a graduate student at Cornell, unleashed a program that +used the loophole to bring several important parts of the Internet to a crawl. + +In this case, the programmer creates a buffer to hold all of the information +that someone on the net might send. Web browsers, for instance, send requests +like "GET http://www.nytimes.com" to ask for the home page of the New York +Times website. The programmer must set aside some chunk of memory to hold this +request, usually a block that is about 512 bytes long. The programmer chooses +an amount that should be more than enough for all requests, including the +strangest and most complicated. + +Before the attack became well known, programmers would often ignore the length +of the request and assume that 512 bytes was more than enough for anything. Who +would ever type a URL that long? + +Who had an e-mail address that long? Attackers soon figured out that they could +send more than 512 bytes and started writing over the rest of the computer's +memory. The program would dutifully take in 100,000 bytes and keep writing it +to memory. An attacker could download any software and start it running. And +attackers did this. + +De Raadt and many others started combing the code for loopholes. They made sure +every program that used a buffer included a bit of code that would check to +ensure that no hacker was trying to sneak in more than the buffer could hold. +They checked thousands of other possibilities. Every line was checked and +changes were made even if there was no practical way for someone to get at the +potential hole. Many buffers, for instance, only accept information from the +person sitting at the terminal. The OpenBSD folks changed them, too. + +This audit began soon after the fork in 1995 and continues to this day. Most of +the major work is done and the group likes to brag that they haven't had a hole +that could be exploited remotely to gain root access in over two years. The +latest logo boasts the tag line "Sending kiddies to /dev/null since 1995." That +is, any attacker is going to go nowhere with OpenBSD because all of the extra +information from the attacks would be routed to /dev/null, a UNIX conceit for +being erased, ignored, and forgotten. + +The OpenBSD fork is a good example of how bad political battles can end up +solving some important technical problems. Everyone fretted and worried when de +Raadt announced that he was forking the BSD world one more time. This would +further dilute the resources and sow confusion among users. The concentration +on security, however, gave OpenBSD a brand identity, and the other BSD +distributions keep at least one eye on the bug fixes distributed by the OpenBSD +team. These often lead to surreptitious fixes in their own distribution. + +The focus also helped him attract new coders who were interested in security. +"Some of them used to be crackers and they were really cool people. When they +become eighteen, it becomes a federal offense, you know," de Raadt says. + +This fork may have made the BSD community stronger because it effectively +elevated the focus on security and cryptography to the highest level. In the +corporate world, it's like taking the leader of the development team +responsible for security and promoting him from senior manager to senior +executive vice president of a separate division. The autonomy also gave the +OpenBSD team the ability to make bold technical decisions for their own +reasons. If they saw a potential security problem that might hurt usability or +portability, the OpenBSD team could make the change without worrying that other +team members would complain. OpenBSD was about security. If you wanted to work +on portability, go to NetBSD. If you cared about ease-of-use on Intel boxes, go +to FreeBSD. Creating a separate OpenBSD world made it possible to give security +a strong focus. + +2~ Temporary Forks + +It's a mistake to see these forks as absolute splits that never intermingle +again. While NetBSD and OpenBSD continue to glower at each other across the +Internet ether, the groups share code frequently because the licenses prevent +one group from freezing out another. + +Jason Wright, one of the OpenBSD developers, says, "We do watch each other's +source trees. One of the things I do for fun is take drivers out of FreeBSD and +port them to OpenBSD. Then we have support for a new piece of hardware." + +He says he often looks for drivers written by Bill Paul, because "I've gotten +used to his style. So I know what to change when I receive his code. I can do +it in about five to six hours. That is, at least a rough port to test if it +works." + +Still, the work is not always simple. He says some device drivers are much +harder to handle because both groups have taken different approaches to the +problem. "SCSI drivers are harder," he says. "There's been some divergence in +the layering for SCSI. They're using something called CAM. We've got an older +implementation that we've stuck to." That is, the FreeBSD has reworked the +structure of the way that the SCSI information is shipped to the parts of the +system asking for information. The OpenBSD hasn't adopted their changes, +perhaps because of security reasons or perhaps because of inertia or perhaps +because no one has gotten around to thinking about it. The intermingling isn't +perfect. + +Both NetBSD and FreeBSD work on security, too. They also watch the change logs +of OpenBSD and note when security holes are fixed. They also discover their own +holes, and OpenBSD may use them as an inspiration to plug their own code. The +discoveries and plugs go both ways as the groups compete to make a perfect OS. + +Kirk McKusick says, "The NetBSD and the OpenBSD have extremely strong +personalities. Each one is absolutely terrified the other will gain an inch." + +While the three forks of BSD may cooperate more than they compete, the Linux +world still likes to look at the BSD world with a bit of contempt. All of the +forks look somewhat messy, even if having the freedom to fork is what Stallman +and GNU are ostensibly fighting to achieve. The Linux enthusiasts seem to +think, "We've got our ducks in a single row. What's your problem?" It's sort of +like the Army mentality. If it's green, uniform, and the same everywhere, then +it must be good. + +The BSD lacks the monomaniacal cohesion of Linux, and this seems to hurt their +image. The BSD community has always felt that Linux is stealing the limelight +that should be shared at least equally between the groups. Linux is really +built around a cult of Linus Torvalds, and that makes great press. It's very +easy for the press to take photos of one man and put him on the cover of a +magazine. It's simple, clean, neat, and perfectly amenable to a 30-second sound +bite. Explaining that there's FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and who knows what +smaller versions waiting in the wings just isn't as manageable. + +Eric Raymond, a true disciple of Linus Torvalds and Linux, sees it in technical +terms. The BSD community is proud of the fact that each distribution is built +out of one big source tree. They get all the source code for all the parts of +the kernel, the utilities, the editors, and whatnot together in one place. Then +they push the compile button and let people work. This is a crisp, effective, +well-managed approach to the project. + +The Linux groups, however, are not that coordinated at all. Torvalds only +really worries about the kernel, which is his baby. Someone else worries about +GCC. Everyone comes up with their own source trees for the parts. The +distribution companies like Red Hat worry about gluing the mess together. It's +not unusual to find version 2.0 of the kernel in one distribution while another +is sporting version 2.2. + +"In BSD, you can do a unified make. They're fairly proud of that," says +Raymond. "But this creates rigidities that give people incentives to fork. The +BSD things that are built that way develop new spin-off groups each week, while +Linux, which is more loosely coupled, doesn't fork." + +He elaborates, "Somebody pointed out that there's a parallel of politics. Rigid +political and social institutions tend to change violently if they change at +all, while ones with more play in them tend to change peacefully." + +But this distinction may be semantic. Forking does occur in the Linux realm, +but it happens as small diversions that get explained away with other words. +Red Hat may choose to use GNOME, while another distribution like SuSE might +choose KDE. The users will see a big difference because both tools create +virtual desktop environments. You can't miss them. But people won't label this +a fork. Both distributions are using the same Linux kernel and no one has gone +off and said, "To hell with Linus, I'm going to build my own version of Linux." +Everyone's technically still calling themselves Linux, even if they're building +something that looks fairly different on the surface. + +Jason Wright, one of the developers on the OpenBSD team, sees the organization +as a good thing. "The one thing that all of the BSDs have over Linux is a +unified source tree. We don't have Joe Blow's tree or Bob's tree," he says. In +other words, when they fork, they do it officially, with great ceremony, and +make sure the world knows of their separate creations. They make a clear break, +and this makes it easier for developers. + +Wright says that this single source tree made it much easier for them to turn +OpenBSD into a very secure OS."We've got the security over Linux. They've +recently been doing a security audit for Linux, but they're going to have a lot +more trouble. There's not one place to go for the source code." + +To extend this to political terms, the Linux world is like the 1980s when +Ronald Reagan ran the Republican party with the maxim that no one should ever +criticize another Republican. Sure, people argued internally about taxes, +abortion, crime, and the usual controversies, but they displayed a rare public +cohesion. No one criticizes Torvalds, and everyone is careful to pay lip +service to the importance of Linux cohesion even as they're essentially forking +by choosing different packages. + +The BSD world, on the other hand, is like the biblical realm in Monty Python's +film The Life of Brian. In it, one character enumerates the various splinter +groups opposing the occupation by the Romans. There is the People's Front of +Judea, the Judean People's Front, the Front of Judean People, and several +others. All are after the same thing and all are manifestly separate. The BSD +world may share a fair amount of code; it may share the same goals, but it just +presents it as coming from three different camps. + +John Gilmore, one of the founders of the free software company Cygnus and a +firm believer in the advantages of the GNU General Public License, says, "In +Linux, each package has a maintainer, and patches from all distributions go +back through that maintainer. There is a sense of cohesion. People at each +distribution work to reduce their differences from the version released by the +maintainer. In the BSD world, each tree thinks they own each program--they +don't send changes back to a central place because that violates the ego +model." + +Jordan Hubbard, the leader of FreeBSD, is critical of Raymond's +characterization of the BSD world. "I've always had a special place in my heart +for that paper because he painted positions that didn't exist," Hubbard said of +Raymond's piece "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." "You could point to just the +Linux community and decide which part was cathedral-oriented and which part was +bazaar-oriented. + +"Every single OS has cathedral parts and bazaar parts. There are some aspects +of development that you leave deliberately unfocused and you let people +contribute at their own pace. It's sort of a bubble-up model and that's the +bazaar part. Then you have the organizational part of every project. That's the +cathedral part. They're the gatekeepers and the standards setters. They're +necessary, too," he said. + +When it comes right down to it, there's even plenty of forking going on about +the definition of a fork. When some of the Linux team point at the BSD world +and start making fun about the forks, the BSD team gets defensive. The BSD guys +always get defensive because their founder isn't on the cover of all the +magazines. The Linux team hints that maybe, if they weren't forking, they would +have someone with a name in lights, too. + +Hubbard is right. Linux forks just as much, they just call it a distribution or +an experimental kernel or a patch kit. No one has the chutzpah to spin off +their own rival political organization. No one has the political clout. + +2~ A Fork, a Split, and a Reunion + +Now, after all of the nasty stories of backstabbing and bickering, it is +important to realize that there are actually some happy stories of forks that +merge back together. One of the best stories comes from the halls of an +Internet security company, C2Net, that dealt with a fork in a very peaceful +way. + +C2Net is a Berkeley-based company run by some hard-core advocates of online +privacy and anonymity. The company began by offering a remailing service that +allowed people to send anonymous e-mails to one another. Their site would strip +off the return address and pass it along to the recipient with no trace of who +sent it. They aimed to fulfill the need of people like whistleblowers, leakers, +and other people in positions of weakness who wanted to use anonymity to avoid +reprisals. + +The company soon took on a bigger goal when it decided to modify the popular +Apache web server by adding strong encryption to make it possible for people to +process credit cards over the web. The technology, known as SSL for "secure +sockets layer," automatically arranged for all of the traffic between a remote +web server and the user to be scrambled so that no one could eavesdrop. SSL is +a very popular technology on the web today because many companies use it to +scramble credit card numbers to defeat eavesdroppers. + +C2Net drew a fair deal of attention when one of its founders, Sameer Parekh, +appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine with a headline teasing that he wanted +to "overthrow the government." In reality, C2Net wanted to move development +operations overseas, where there were no regulations on the creation of +cryptographically secure software. C2Net went where the talent was available +and priced right. + +In this case, C2Net chose a free version of SSL written by Eric Young known as +SSLeay. Young's work is another of the open source success stories. He wrote +the original version as a hobby and released it with a BSD-like license. +Everyone liked his code, downloaded it, experimented with it, and used it to +explore the boundaries of the protocol. Young was just swapping code with the +Net and having a good time. + +Parekh and C2Net saw an opportunity. They would merge two free products, the +Apache web server and Young's SSLeay, and make a secure version so people could +easily set up secure commerce sites for the Internet. They called this product +Stronghold and put it on the market commercially. + +C2Net's decision to charge for the software rubbed some folks the wrong way. +They were taking two free software packages and making something commercial out +of them. This wasn't just a fork, it seemed like robbery to some. Of course, +these complaints weren't really fair. Both collections of code emerged with a +BSD-style license that gave everyone the right to create and sell commercial +additions to the product. There wasn't any GPL-like requirement that they give +back to the community. If no one wanted a commercial version, they shouldn't +have released the code with a very open license in the first place. + +Parekh understands these objections and says that he has weathered plenty of +criticism on the internal mailing lists. Still, he feels that the Stronghold +product contributed a great deal to the strength of Apache by legitimizing it. + +"I don't feel guilty about it. I don't think we've contributed a whole lot of +source code, which is one of the key metrics that the people in the Apache +group are using. In my perspective, the greatest contribution we've made is +market acceptance," he said. + +Parekh doesn't mean that he had to build market acceptance among web +developers. The Apache group was doing a good job of accomplishing that through +their guerrilla tactics, excellent product, and free price tag. But no one was +sending a message to the higher levels of the computer industry, where +long-term plans were being made and corporate deals were being cut. Parekh +feels that he built first-class respectability for the Apache name by creating +and supporting a first-class product that big corporations could use +successfully. He made sure that everyone knew that Apache was at the core of +Stronghold, and people took notice. + +Parekh's first job was getting a patent license from RSA Data Security. Secure +software like SSL relies on the RSA algorithm, an idea that was patented by +three MIT professors in the 1970s. This patent is controlled by RSA Data +Security. While the company publicized some of its licensing terms and went out +of its way to market the technology, negotiating a license was not a trivial +detail that could be handled by some free software team. Who's going to pay the +license? Who's going to compute what some percentage of free is? Who's going to +come up with the money? These questions are much easier to answer if you're a +corporation charging customers to buy a product. C2Net was doing that. People +who bought Stronghold got a license from RSA that ensured they could use the +method without being sued. + +The patent was only the first hurdle. SSL is a technology that tries to bring +some security to web connections by encrypting the connections between the +browser and the server. Netscape added one feature that allows a connection to +be established only if the server has a digital certificate that identifies it. +These certificates are only issued to a company after it pays a fee to a +registered certificate agent like Verisign. + +In the beginning, certificate agents like Verisign would issue the certificates +only for servers created by big companies like Netscape or Microsoft. Apache +was just an amorphous group on the Net. Verisign and the other authorities +weren't paying attention to it. + +Parekh went to them and convinced them to start issuing the certificates so he +could start selling Stronghold. + +"We became number three, right behind Microsoft and Netscape. Then they saw how +much money they were making from us, so they started signing certificates for +everyone," he said. Other Apache projects that used SSL found life much easier +once Parekh showed Verisign that there was plenty of money to be made from +folks using free software. + +Parekh does not deny that C2Net has not made many contributions to the code +base of Apache, but he doesn't feel that this is the best measure. The +political and marketing work of establishing Apache as a worthwhile tool is +something that he feels may have been more crucial to its long-term health. +When he started putting money in the hands of Verisign, he got those folks to +realize that Apache had a real market share. That cash talked. + +The Stronghold fork, however, did not make everyone happy. SSL is an important +tool and someone was going to start creating another free version. C2Net hired +Eric Young and his collaborator Tim Hudson and paid them to do some work for +Stronghold. The core version of Young's original SSLeay stayed open, and both +continued to add bug fixes and other enhancements over time. Parekh felt +comfortable with this relationship. Although Stronghold was paying the salaries +of Young and Hudson, they were also spending some of their spare time keeping +their SSLeay toolkit up to date. + +Still, the notion of a free version of SSL was a tempting project for someone +to undertake. Many people wanted it. Secure digital commerce demanded it. There +were plenty of economic incentives pushing for it to happen. Eventually, a +German named Ralf S. Engelschall stepped up and wrote a new version he called +mod_SSL. Engelschall is a well-regarded contributor to the Apache effort, and +he has written or contributed to a number of different modules that could be +added to Apache. He calls one the "all-dancing-all-singing mod_rewrite module" +for handling URLs easily. + +Suddenly, Engelschall's new version meant that there were dueling forks. One +version came out of Australia, where the creators worked for a company selling +a proprietary version of the code. C2Net distributed the Australian version and +concentrated on making their product easy to install. The other came out of +Europe, distributed for free by someone committed to an open source license. +The interface may have been a bit rougher, but it didn't cost any money and it +came with the source code. The potential for battle between SSLeay and mod_SSL +could have been great. + +The two sides reviewed their options. Parekh must have felt a bit frustrated +and at a disadvantage. He had a company that was making a good product with +repeat buyers. Then an open source solution came along. C2Net's Stronghold cost +money and didn't come with source code, while Engelschall's mod_SSL cost +nothing and came with code. Those were major negatives that he could combat +only by increasing service. When Engelschall was asked whether his free version +was pushing C2Net, he sent back the e-mail with the typed message, "[grin]." + +In essence, C2Net faced the same situation as many major companies like +Microsoft and Apple do today. The customers now had a viable open source +solution to their problems. No one had to pay C2Net for the software. The users +in the United States needed a patent license, but that would expire in late +2000. Luckily, Parekh is a true devotee to the open source world, even though +he has been running a proprietary source company for the last several years. He +looked at the problem and decided that the only way to stay alive was to join +forces and mend the fork. + +To make matters worse, Hudson and Young left C2Net to work for RSA Data +Security. Parekh lost two important members of his team, and he faced intense +competition. Luckily, his devotion to open source came to the rescue. Hudson +and Young couldn't take back any of the work they did on SSLeay. It was open +source and available to everyone. + +Parekh, Engelschall, several C2Net employees, and several others sat down (via +e-mail) and created a new project they called OpenSSL. This group would carry +the torch of SSLeay and keep it up-to-date. Young and Hudson stopped +contributing and devoted their time to creating a commercial version for RSA +Data Security. + +Parekh says of the time, "Even though it was a serious setback for C2Net to +have RSA pirate our people, it was good for the public. Development really +accelerated when we started OpenSSL. More people became involved and control +became less centralized. It became more like the Apache group. It's a lot +bigger than it was before and it's much easier for anyone to contribute." + +Parekh also worked on mending fences with Engelschall. C2Net began to adopt +some of the mod_SSL code and blend it into their latest version of Stronghold. +To make this blending easier, C2Net began sending some of their formerly +proprietary code back to Engelschall so he could mix it with mod_SSL by +releasing it as open source. In essence, C2Net was averting a disastrous +competition by making nice and sharing with this competitor. It is a surprising +move that might not happen in regular business. + +Parekh's decision seems open and beneficent, but it has a certain amount of +self-interest behind it. He explains, "We just decided to contribute all of the +features we had into mod_SSL so we could start using mod_SSL internally, +because it makes our maintenance of that easier. We don't have to maintain our +own proprietary version of mod_SSL. Granted, we've made the public version +better, but those features weren't significant." + +This mixing wasn't particularly complicated--most of it focused on the +structure of the parts of the source code that handle the interface. +Programmers call these the "hooks" or the "API." If Stronghold and mod_SSL use +the same hook structure, then connecting them is a piece of cake. If +Engelschall had changed the hook structure of mod_SSL, then the C2Net would +have had to do more work. + +The decision to contribute the code stopped Engelschall from doing the work +himself in a way that might have caused more grief for C2Net. "He was actually +planning on implementing them himself, so we were better off contributing ours +to avoid compatibility issues," says Parekh. That is to say, Parekh was worried +that Engelschall was going to go off and implement all the features C2Net used, +and there was a very real danger that Engelschall would implement them in a way +that was unusable to Parekh. Then there would be a more serious fork that would +further split the two groups. C2Net wouldn't be able to borrow code from the +free version of OpenSSL very easily. So it decided to contribute its own code. +It was easier to give their code and guarantee that OpenSSL fit neatly into +Stronghold. In essence, C2Net chose to give a little so it could continue to +get all of the future improvements. + +It's not much different from the car industry. There's nothing inherently +better or worse about cars that have their steering wheel on the right-hand +side. They're much easier to use in England. But if some free car engineering +development team emerged in England, it might make sense for a U.S. company to +donate work early to ensure that the final product could have the steering +wheel on either side of the car without extensive redesign. If Ford just sat by +and hoped to grab the final free product, it might find that the British +engineers happily designed for the only roads they knew. + +Engelschall is happy about this change. He wrote in an e-mail message, "They do +the only reasonable approach: They base their server on mod_SSL because they +know they cannot survive against the Open Source solution with their old +proprietary code. And by contributing stuff to mod_SSL they implicitly make +their own product better. This way both sides benefit." + +Parekh and C2Net now have a challenge. They must continue to make the +Stronghold package better than the free version to justify the cost people are +paying. + +Not all forks end with such a happy-faced story of mutual cooperation. Nor do +all stories in the free software world end with the moneymaking corporation +turning around and giving back their proprietary code to the general effort. +But the C2Net/OpenSSL case illustrates how the nature of software development +encourages companies and people to give and cooperate to satisfy their own +selfish needs. Software can do a variety of wonderful things, but the structure +often governs how easy it is for some of us to use. It makes sense to spend +some extra time and make donations to a free software project if you want to +make sure that the final product fits your specs. + +The good news is that most people don't have much incentive to break off and +fork their own project. If you stay on the same team, then you can easily use +all the results produced by the other members. Cooperating is so much easier +than fighting that people have a big incentive to stay together. If it weren't +so selfish, it would be heartwarming. + +1~ Core + +Projects in corporations have managers who report to other managers who report +to the CEO who reports to the board. It's all very simple in theory, although +it never really works that way in practice. The lines of control get crossed as +people form alliances and struggle to keep their bosses happy. + +Projects in the world of open source software, on the other hand, give everyone +a copy of the source code and let them be the master of the code running on +their machine. Everyone gets to be the Board of Directors, the CEO, and the +cubicle serfs rolled into one. If a free software user doesn't like something, +then he has the power to change it. You don't like that icon? Boom, it's gone. +You don't want KDE on your desktop? Whoosh, it's out of there. No vice +president in charge of MSN marketing in Redmond is going to force you to have +an icon for easy connection to the Microsoft Network on your desktop. No +graphic designer at Apple is going to force you to look at that two-faced +Picasso-esque MacOS logo every morning of your life just because their +marketing studies show that they need to build a strong brand identity. You're +the captain of your free software ship and you decide the menu, the course, the +arrangement of the deck chairs, the placement of lookouts from which to watch +for icebergs, the type of soap, and the number of toothpicks per passenger to +order. In theory, you're the Lord High Master and Most Exalted Ruler of all +Software Big and Small, Wild and Wonderful, and Interpreted and Compiled on +your machine. + +In practice, no one has the time to use all of that power. It's downright +boring to worry about soap and toothpicks. It's exhausting to rebuild window +systems when they fail to meet your caviar-grade tastes in software. + +No one has the disk space to maintain an Imelda Marcos-like collection of +screen savers, window managers, layout engines, and games for your computer. So +you start hanging around with some friends who want similar things and the next +thing you know, you've got a group. A group needs leadership, so the alpha dog +emerges. Pretty soon, it all begins to look like a corporate development team. +Well, kind of. + +Many neophytes in the free software world are often surprised to discover that +most of the best free source code out there comes from teams that look +surprisingly like corporate development groups. While the licenses and the +rhetoric promise the freedom to go your own way, groups coalesce for many of +the same reasons that wagon trains and convoys emerge. There's power in +numbers. Sometimes these groups even get so serious that they incorporate. The +Apache group recently formed the Apache Foundation, which has the job of +guiding and supporting the development of the Apache web server. It's all very +official looking. For all we know, they're putting cubicles in the foundation +offices right now. + +This instinct to work together is just as powerful a force in the free software +world as the instinct to grab as much freedom as possible and use it every day. +If anything, it's just an essential feature of human life. The founders of the +United States of America created an entire constitution without mentioning +political parties, but once they pushed the start button, the parties appeared +out of nowhere. + +These parties also emerged in the world of free source software. When projects +grew larger than one person could safely handle, they usually evolved into +development teams. The path for each group is somewhat different, and each one +develops its own particular style. The strength of this organization is often +the most important determinant of the strength of the software because if the +people can work together well, then the problems in the software will be well +fixed. + +The most prevalent form of government in these communities is the benign +dictatorship. Richard Stallman wrote some of the most important code in the GNU +pantheon, and he continues to write new code and help maintain the old +software. The world of the Linux kernel is dominated by Linus Torvalds. The +original founders always seem to hold a strong sway over the group. Most of the +code in the Linux kernel is written by others and checked out by a tight circle +of friends, but Torvalds still has the final word on many changes. + +The two of them are, of course, benign dictators, and the two of them don't +really have any other choice. Both have a seemingly absolute amount of power, +but this power is based on a mixture of personal affection and technical +respect. There are no legal bounds that keep all of the developers in line. +There are no rules about intellectual property or non-disclosure. Anyone can +grab all of the Linux kernel or GNU source code, run off, and start making +whatever changes they want. They could rename it FU, Bobux, Fredux, or Meganux +and no one could stop them. The old threats of lawyers, guns, and money aren't +anywhere to be seen. + +2~ Debian's Core Team + +The Debian group has a wonderful pedigree and many praise it as the purest +version of Linux around, but it began as a bunch of outlaws who cried mutiny +and tossed Richard Stallman overboard. Well, it wasn't really so dramatic. In +fact, "mutiny" isn't really the right word when everyone is free to use the +source code however they want. + +Bruce Perens remembers the split occurred less than a year after the project +began and says, "Debian had already started. The FSF had been funding Ian +Murdock for a few months. Richard at that time wanted us to make all of the +executables unstripped." + +When programmers compile software and convert it from human-readable source +code into machine-readable binary code, they often leave in some human readable +information to help debug the program. Another way to say this is that the +programmers don't strip the debugging tags out of the code. These tags are just +the names of the variables used in the software, and a programmer can use them +to analyze what each variable held when the software started going berserk. + +Perens continued, "His idea was if there was a problem, someone can send a +stacktrace back without having to recompile a program and then making it break +again. The problem with this was distributing executables unstripped makes them +four times as large. It was a lot of extra expense and trouble. And our +software didn't dump core anyway. That was really the bottom line. That sort of +bug did not come up so often that it was necessary for us to distribute things +that way anyways." + +Still, Stallman insisted it was a good idea. Debian resisted and said it took +up too much space and raised duplication costs. Eventually, the debate ended as +the Debian group went their own way. Although Stallman paid Murdock and wrote +much of the GNU code on the disk, the GPL prevented him from doing much. The +project continued. The source code lived on. And the Debian disks kept +shipping. Stallman was no longer titular leader of Debian. + +The rift between the group has largely healed. Perens now praises Stallman and +says that the two of them are still very close philosophically on the most +important issues in the free software world. Stallman, for his part, uses +Debian on his machines because he feels the closest kinship with it. + +Perens says, "Richard's actually grown up a lot in the last few years. He's +learned a lot more about what to do to a volunteer because obviously we're free +to walk away at any time." + +Stallman himself remembers the argument rather eloquently."The fact is, I +wanted to influence them, but I did not want to force them. Forcing them would +go against my moral beliefs. I believe that people are entitled to freedom in +these matters, which means that I cannot tell them what to do," he told me. "I +wrote the GPL to give everyone freedom from domination by authors of software, +and that includes me on both sides." + +There's much debate over the best way to be a benign dictator. Eric Raymond and +many others feel that Torvalds's greatest claim to success was creating a good +development model. Torvalds released new versions of his kernel often and he +tried to share the news about the development as openly as possible. Most of +this news travels through a mailing list that is open to all and archived on a +website. The mailing list is sort of like a perpetual congress where people +debate the technical issues behind the latest changes to the kernel. It's often +much better than the real United States Congress because the debate floor is +open to all and there are no glaring special interests who try to steer the +debate in their direction. After some period of debate, eventually Torvalds +makes a decision and this becomes final. Usually he doesn't need to do +anything. The answer is pretty obvious to everyone who's followed the +discussion. + +This army is a diverse bunch. At a recent Linux conference, Jeff Bates, one of +the editors of the influential website Slashdot (www.slashdot.org), pointed me +toward the Debian booth, which was next to theirs. "If you look in the booth, +you can see that map. They put a pushpin in the board for every developer and +project leader they have around the world. China, Netherlands, Somalia, there +are people coming from all over." + +James Lewis-Moss is one of the members, who just happened to be in the Debian +booth next door. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, which is four hours +west of the Convention Center in downtown Raleigh. The Debian group normally +relies upon local volunteers to staff the booth, answer questions, distribute +CD-ROMs, and keep people interested in the project. + +Lewis-Moss is officially in charge of maintaining several packages, including +the X Emacs, a program that is used to edit text files, read email and news, +and do a number of other tasks. A package is the official name for a bundle of +smaller programs, files, data, and documentation. These parts are normally +installed together because the software won't work without all of its component +parts. + +The packager's job is to download the latest software from the programmer and +make sure that it runs well with the latest version of the other software to go +in the Debian distribution. This crucial task is why groups like Debian are so +necessary. If Lewis-Moss does his job well, someone who installs Debian on his +computer will not have any trouble using X Emacs. + +Lewis-Moss's job isn't exactly programming, but it's close. He has to download +the source code, compile the program, run it, and make sure that the latest +version of the source works correctly with the latest version of the Linux +kernel and the other parts of the OS that keep a system running. The packager +must also ensure that the program works well with the Debian-specific tools +that make installation easier. If there are obvious bugs, he'll fix them +himself. Otherwise, he'll work with the author on tracking down and fixing the +problems. + +He's quite modest about this effort and says, "Most Debian developers don't +write a whole lot of code for Debian. We just test things to make sure it works +well together. It would be offensive to some of the actual programmers to hear +that some of the Debian folks are writing the programs when they're actually +not." + +He added that many of the packagers are also programmers in other projects. In +his case, he writes Java programs during the day for a company that makes +point-of-sale terminals for stores. + +Lewis-Moss ended up with this job in the time-honored tradition of committees +and volunteer organizations everywhere. "I reported a bug in X Emacs to Debian. +The guy who had the package at that time said, 'I don't want this anymore. Do +you want it?' I guess it was random. It was sort of an accident. I didn't +intend to become involved in it, but it was something I was interested in. I +figured 'Hell, might as well.'" + +The Linux development effort moves slowly forward with thousands of stories +like Lewis-Moss's. Folks come along, check out the code, and toss in a few +contributions that make it a bit better for themselves. The mailing list +debates some of the changes if they're controversial or if they'll affect many +people. It's a very efficient system in many ways, if you can stand the heat of +the debates. + +Most Americans are pretty divorced from the heated arguments that boil through +the corridors of Washington. The view of the House and Senate floor is largely +just for show because most members don't attend the debates. The real decisions +are made in back rooms. + +The mailing lists that form the core of the different free software projects +take all of this debate and pipe it right through to the members. While some +discussions occur in private letters and even in the occasional phone call, +much of the problem and controversy is dissected for everyone to read. This is +crucial because most of the decisions are made largely by consensus. + +"Most of the decisions are technical and most of them will have the right +answer or the best possible one at the moment," says Lewis-Moss. "Often things +back down to who is willing to do the work. If you're willing to do the work +and the person on the other side isn't willing, then yours is the right one by +definition." + +While the mailing list looks like an idealized notion of a congress for the +Linux kernel development, it is not as perfect as it may seem. Not all comments +are taken equally because friendships and political alliances have evolved +through time. The Debian group elected a president to make crucial decisions +that can't be made by deep argument and consensus. The president doesn't have +many other powers in other cases. + +While the Linux and GNU worlds are dominated by their one great Sun King, many +other open source projects have adopted a more modern government structure that +is more like Debian. The groups are still fairly ad hoc and unofficial, but +they are more democratic. There's less idolatry and less dependence on one +person. + +The Debian group is a good example of a very loose-knit structure with less +reliance on the central leader. In the beginning, Ian Murdock started the +distribution and did much of the coordination. In time, the mailing list grew +and attracted other developers like Bruce Perens. As Murdock grew busier, he +started handing off work to others. Eventually, he handed off central control +to Perens, who slowly delegated more of the control until there was no key +maintainer left. If someone dies in a bus crash, the group will live on. + +Now a large group of people act as maintainers for the different packages. +Anyone who wants to work on the project can take responsibility for a +particular package. This might be a small tool like a game or a bigger tool +like the C compiler. In most cases, the maintainer isn't the author of the +software or even a hard-core programmer. The maintainer's job is to make sure +that the particular package continues to work with all the rest. In many cases, +this is a pretty easy job. Most changes in the system don't affect simple +programs. But in some cases it's a real challenge and the maintainer must act +as a liaison between Debian and the original programmer. Sometimes the +maintainers fix the bugs themselves. Sometimes they just report them. But in +either case, the maintainer must make sure that the code works. + +Every once and a bit, Debian takes the latest stable kernel from Torvalds's +team and mixes it together with all of the other packages. The maintainers +check out their packages and when everything works well, Debian presses another +CD-ROM and places the pile of code on the net. This is a stable "freeze" that +the Debian group does to make sure they've got a stable platform that people +can always turn to. + +"Making a whole OS with just a crew of volunteers and no money is a pretty big +achievement. You can never discount that. It's easy for Red Hat to do it. +They're all getting paid. The fact is that Debian makes a good system and still +continues to do so. I don't think that there've been that many unpaid, +collaborative projects that complex before," says Perens. + +When Perens took over at Debian he brought about two major changes. The first +was to create a nonprofit corporation called Software in the Public Interest +and arrange for the IRS to recognize it as a bona fide charitable organization. +People and companies who donate money and equipment can take them off their +taxes. + +Perens says that the group's budget is about $10,000 a year. "We pay for +hardware sometimes. Although a lot of our hardware is donated. We fly people to +conferences so they can promote Debian. We have a trade show booth. In general +we get the trade show space from the show for free or severely discounted. We +also have the conventional PO boxes, accounting, phone calls. The project +doesn't have a ton of money, but it doesn't spend a lot, either." + +The Debian group also wrote the first guidelines for acceptable open source +software during Perens's time in charge. These eventually mutated to become the +definition endorsed by the Open Source Initiative. This isn't too surprising, +since Perens was one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative. + +Debian's success has inspired many others. Red Hat, for instance, borrowed a +significant amount of work done by Debian when they put together their +distribution, and Debian borrows some of Red Hat's tools. When Red Hat went +public, it arranged for Debian members to get a chance to buy some of the +company's stock reserved for friends and family members. They recognized that +Debian's team of package maintainers helped get their job done. + +Debian's constitution and strong political structure have also inspired Sun, +which is trying to unite its Java and Jini customers into a community. The +company is framing its efforts to support customers as the creation of a +community that's protected by a constitution. The old paradigm of customer +support is being replaced by a more active world of customer participation and +representation. + +Of course, Sun is keeping a close hand on all of these changes. They protect +their source code with a Community Source License that places crucial +restrictions on the ability of these community members to stray. There's no +real freedom to fork. Sun's not willing to embrace Debian's lead on that point, +in part because they say they're afraid that Microsoft will use that freedom to +scuttle Java. + +2~ Apache's Corporate Core + +The Apache group is one of the more businesslike development teams in the free +source world. It emerged in the mid-1990s when the World Wide Web was just +blossoming. In the early years, many sites relied on web servers like the free +version that came from the NCSA, the supercomputer center at the University of +Illinois that helped spark the web revolution by writing a server and a +browser. This code was great, but it rarely served all of the purposes of the +new webmasters who were starting new sites and building new tools as quickly as +they could. + +Brian Behlendorf, one of the founders of the Apache group, remembers the time. +"It wasn't just a hobbyist kind of thing. We had need for commercial-quality +software and this was before Netscape released its software. We had developed +our own set of patches that we traded like baseball cards. Finally we said, 'We +had so many paths that overlap. Why don't we create our own version and +continue on our own.'" + +These developers then coalesced into a core group and set up a structure for +the code. They chose the basic, BSD-style license for their software, which +allowed anyone to use the code for whatever purpose without distributing the +source code to any changes. Many of the group lived in Berkeley then and still +live in the area today. Of course, the BSD-style license also made sense for +many of the developers who were involved in businesses and often didn't want to +jump into the open source world with what they saw as Stallman's absolutist +fervor. Businesses could adopt the Apache code without fear that some license +would force them to reveal their source code later. The only catch was that +they couldn't call the product Apache unless it was an unmodified copy of +something approved by the Apache group. + +Several members of the group went off and formed their own companies and used +the code as the basis for their products. Sameer Parekh based the Stronghold +server product on Apache after his company added the encryption tools used to +protect credit card information. Others just used versions of Apache to serve +up websites and billed others for the cost of development. + +In 1999, the group decided to formalize its membership and create a +not-for-profit corporation that was devoted to advancing the Apache server +source code and the open source world in general. New members can apply to join +the corporation, and they must be approved by a majority of the current +members. This membership gets together and votes on a board of directors who +make the substantive decisions about the group. + +This world isn't much different from the world before the corporation. A +mailing list still carries debate and acts as the social glue for the group. +But now the decision-making process is formalized. Before, the members of the +core group would assign responsibility to different people but the decisions +could only be made by rough consensus. This mechanism could be bruising and +fractious if the consensus was not easy. This forced the board to work hard to +develop potential compromises, but pushed them to shy away from tougher +decisions. Now the board can vote and a pure majority can win. + +This seriousness and corporatization are probably the only possible steps that +the Apache group could take. They've always been devoted to advancing the +members' interests. Many of the other open source projects like Linux were +hobbies that became serious. The Apache project was always filled with people +who were in the business of building the web. While some might miss the +small-town kind of feel of the early years, the corporate structure is bringing +more certainty and predictability to the realm. The people don't have to wear +suits now that it's a corporation. It just ensures that tough decisions will be +made at a predictable pace. + +Still, the formalism adds plenty of rigidity to the structure. An excited +newcomer can join the mailing lists, write plenty of code, and move mountains +for the Apache group, but he won't be a full member before he is voted in. In +the past, an energetic outsider could easily convert hard work into political +clout in the organization. Now, a majority of the current members could keep +interlopers out of the inner circle. This bureaucracy doesn't have to be a +problem, but it has the potential to fragment the community by creating an +institution where some people are more equal than others. Keeping the +organization open in practice will be a real challenge for the new corporation. + +1~ T-Shirts + +If there's a pantheon for marketing geniuses, then it must include the guy who +realized people would pay $1 for several cents' worth of sugar water if it came +in a shapely bottle blessed by the brand name CocaCola. It might also include +the guy who first figured out that adding new blue crystals to detergent would +increase sales. It is a rare breed that understands how to get people to spend +money they don't need to spend. + +The next induction ceremony for this pantheon should include Robert Young, the +CEO of Red Hat Software, who helped the Linux and the open source world +immeasurably by finding a way to charge people for something they could get for +free. This discovery made the man rich, which isn't exactly what the free +software world is supposed to do. But his company also contributed a sense of +stability and certainty to the Linux marketplace, and that was sorely needed. +Many hard-core programmers, who know enough to get all of the software for +free, are willing to pay $70 to Red Hat just because it is easier. While some +may be forever jealous of the millions of dollars in Young's pocket, everyone +should realize that bringing Linux to a larger world of computer illiterates +requires good packaging and hand-holding. Free software wouldn't be anywhere if +someone couldn't find a good way to charge for it. + +The best way to understand why Young ranks with the folks who discovered how to +sell sugar water is to go to a conference like LinuxExpo. In the center of the +floor is the booth manned by Red Hat Software, the company Young started in +Raleigh, North Carolina, after he got through working in the computer-leasing +business. Young is in his fifties now and manages to survive despite the fact +that most of his company's devotees are much closer to 13. Red Hat bundles +together some of the free software made by the community and distributed over +the Net and puts it on one relatively easy-to-use CD-ROM. Anyone who wants to +install Linux or some of its packages can simply buy a disk from Red Hat and +push a bunch of keys. All of the information is on one CD-ROM, and it's +relatively tested and pretty much ready to go. If things go wrong, Red Hat +promises to answer questions by e-mail or telephone to help people get the +product working. + +Red Hat sells their disk at prices that range from $29.95 to $149.95. That buys +the user a pretty box, three CD-ROMs including some demonstration versions of +other software, all of the source code, a manual, and some telephone or e-mail +support. That is pretty much like the same stuff that comes in software boxes +from a normal company. The manual isn't as nice as the manuals produced by +Apple or Microsoft, but it's not too bad. + +The big difference is that no one needs to buy the CD-ROM from Red Hat. Anyone +can download all of the software from the Net. A friend of mine, Hal Skinner, +did it yesterday and told me, "I just plugged it in and the software downloaded +everything from the Net. I got everything in the Red Hat 6.0 distribution, and +it didn't cost me anything." + +Of course, Red Hat isn't hurt too much by folks who grab copies without paying +for them. In fact, the company maintains a website that makes it relatively +easy for people to do just that. Red Hat didn't write most of the code. They +also just grabbed it from various authors throughout the Net who published it +under the GNU General Public License. They grabbed it without paying for it, so +they're not really put out if someone grabs from them. + +The ability to snag GPL'ed software from around the Net keeps their development +costs much lower than Sun, Apple, or Microsoft. They never paid most of the +authors of the code they ship. They just package it up. Anyone else can just go +find it on the Net and grab it themselves. This pretty much guarantees that Red +Hat will be in a commodity business. + +To make matters worse for Red Hat, the potential competitors don't have to go +out onto the Net and reassemble the collection of software for themselves. The +GPL specifically forbids people from placing limitations on redistributing the +source code. That means that a potential competitor doesn't have to do much +more than buy a copy of Red Hat's disk and send it off to the CD-ROM pressing +plant. People do this all the time. One company at the exposition was selling +copies of all the major Linux distributions like Red Hat, Slackware, and +OpenBSD for about $3 per disk. If you bought in bulk, you could get 11 disks +for $25. Not a bad deal if you're a consumer. + +So, on one side of the floor, Young had a flashy booth filled with workers +talking about what you could get if you paid $50 or more for Red Hat's version +6.0 with new enhancements like GNOME. Just a few hundred feet away, a company +was selling ripoff copies of the same CDs for $3. Any company that is able to +stay in business in a climate like that must be doing something right. + +It's not much different from the supermarket. Someone can pay $1 or more for +two liters of Coca-Cola, or they can walk over a few aisles and buy Kool-Aid +and raw sugar. It may be much cheaper to buy the raw ingredients, but many +people don't. + +Young is also smart enough to use the competition from other cheap disk vendors +to his advantage. He can't do anything about the GPL restrictions that force +him to share with knockoff competitors, so he makes the best of them. "When +people complain about how much we're charging for free software, I tell them to +just go to CheapBytes.com," he said at the Expo. This is just one of the +companies that regularly duplicates the CDs of Red Hat and resells them. Red +Hat often gets some heat from people saying that the company is merely +profiting off the hard work of others who've shared their software with the +GPL. What gives them the right to charge so much for other people's software? +But Young points out that people can get the software for $3. There must be a +rational reason why they're buying Red Hat. + +Of course, the two packages aren't exactly equal. Both the original and the +knockoff CD-ROM may have exactly the same contents, but the extras are +different. The Red Hat package comes with "support," a rather amorphous concept +in the software business. In theory, Red Hat has a team of people sitting +around their offices diligently waiting to answer the questions of customers +who can't get Red Hat software to do the right thing. + +In practice, the questions are often so hard or nebulous that even the support +team can't answer them. When I first tried to get Red Hat to run on an old PC, +the support team could only tell me that they never promised that their package +would run on my funky, slightly obscure Cyrix MediaGX chip. That wasn't much +help. Others probably have had better luck because they were using a more +standard computer. Of course, I had no trouble installing Red Hat on my latest +machine, and I didn't even need to contact tech support. + +The Red Hat packages also come with a book that tries to answer some of the +questions in advance. This manual describes the basic installation procedure, +but it doesn't go into any detail about the software included in the +distribution. If you want to know how to run the database package, you need to +dig into the online support provided by the database's developers. + +Many people enjoy buying these extra packages like the manual and the support, +even if they never use them. Red Hat has blossomed by providing some +hand-holding. Sure, some programmers could download the software from the +Internet on their own, but most people don't want to spend the time needed to +develop the expertise. + +When I say "Red Hat software," I really mean free source software that Red Hat +picked up from the Net and knit into a coherent set of packages that should be, +in theory, pretty bug free, tested, and ready for use. Red Hat is selling some +hand-holding and filtering for the average user who doesn't want to spend time +poking around the Net, checking out the different versions of the software, and +ensuring that they work well together. Red Hat programmers have spent some time +examining the software on the CD-ROM. They've tested it and occasionally +improved it by adding new code to make it run better. + +Red Hat also added a custom installation utility to make life easier for people +who want to add Red Hat to their computer.~{ Er, I mean to say "add Linux" or +"add GNU/Linux." "Red Hat" is now one of the synonyms for free software. }~ +They could have made this package installation tool proprietary. After all, Red +Hat programmers wrote the tool on company time. But Young released it with the +GNU General Public License, recognizing that the political value of giving +something back was worth much more than the price they could charge for the +tool. + +This is part of a deliberate political strategy to build goodwill among the +programmers who distribute their software. Many Linux users compare the +different companies putting together free source software CDROMs and test their +commitment to the free software ideals. Debian, for instance, is very popular +because it is a largely volunteer project that is careful to only include +certified free source software on their CD-ROMs. Debian, however, isn't run +like a business and it doesn't have the same attitude. This volunteer effort +and enlightened pursuit of the essence of free software make the Debian +distribution popular among the purists. + +Distributors like Caldera, on the other hand, include nonfree software with +their disk. You pay $29.95 to $149.95 for a CD-ROM and get some nonfree +software like a word processor tossed in as a bonus. This is a great deal if +you're only going to install the software once, but the copyright on the +nonfree software prevents you from distributing the CD-ROM to friends. Caldera +is hoping that the extras it throws in will steer people toward its disk and +get them to choose Caldera's version of Linux. Many of the purists, like +Richard Stallman, hate this practice and think it is just a not very subtle way +to privatize the free software. If the average user isn't free to redistribute +all the code, then there's something evil afoot. Of course, Stallman or any of +the other software authors can't do anything about this because they made their +software freely distributable. + +Young is trying to walk the line between these two approaches. Red Hat is very +much in the business of selling CD-ROMs. The company has a payroll with more +than a handful of programmers who are drawing nonvolunteer salaries to keep the +distributions fresh and the code clean. But he's avoided the temptation of +adding not-so-free code to his disks. This gives him more credibility with the +programmers who create the software and give it away. In theory, Young doesn't +need to ingratiate himself to the various authors of GPL-protected software +packages. They've already given the code away. Their power is gone. In +practice, he gains plenty of political goodwill by playing the game by their +rules. + +Several companies are already making PCs with Linux software installed at the +factory. While they could simply download the software from the Net themselves +and create their own package, several have chosen to bundle Red Hat's version +with their machines. Sam Ockman, the president of Penguin Computing, runs one +of those companies. + +Ockman is a recent Stanford graduate in his early twenties and a strong devotee +of the Linux and GPL world. He says he started his company to prove that Linux +could deliver solid, dependable servers that could compete with the best that +Sun and Microsoft have to offer. + +Ockman has mixed feelings about life at Stanford. While he fondly remembers the +"golf course-like campus," he says the classes were too easy. He graduated with +two majors despite spending plenty of time playing around with the Linux +kernel. He says that the computer science department's hobbled curriculum drove +him to Linux. "Their whole CS community is using a stupid compiler for C on the +Macintosh," he says."Why don't they start you off on Linux? By the time you get +to [course] 248, you could hack on the Linux kernel or your own replacement +kernel. It's just a tragedy that you're sitting there writing virtual kernels +on a Sun system that you're not allowed to reboot." + +In essence, the computer science department was keeping their kids penned up in +the shallow end of the pool instead of taking them out into the ocean. Ockman +found the ocean on his own time and started writing GPL-protected code and +contributing to the political emergence of free software. + +When Ockman had to choose a version of Linux for his Penguin computers, he +chose Red Hat. Bob Young's company made the sale because it was playing by the +rules of the game and giving software back with a GPL. Ockman says, "We +actually buy the box set for every single one. Partially because the customers +like to get the books, but also to support Red Hat. That's also why we picked +Red Hat. They're the most free of all of the distributions." + +Debian, Ockman concedes, is also very free and politically interesting, but +says that his company is too small to support multiple distributions. "We only +do Red Hat. That was a very strategic decision on our part. All of the +distributions are pretty much the same, but there are slight differences in +this and that. We could have a twelve-person Debian group, but it would just be +a nightmare for us to support all of these different versions of Linux." + +Of course, Penguin Computing could have just bought one Red Hat CD-ROM and +installed their software on all of the machines going out the door. That would +have let them cut their costs by about $50. The GPL lets anyone install the +software as often as they wish. But this wouldn't be pure savings because +Ockman is also offloading some of his own work when he bundles a Red Hat +package with his computers. He adds, "Technically the box set I include allows +customers to call Red Hat, but no one ever does, nor do we expect them or want +them to call anyone but us." In essence, his company is adding some extra +support with the Red Hat box. + +The support is an important add-on that Young is selling, but he realized long +ago that much more was on sale. Red Hat was selling an image, the sense of +belonging, and the indeterminant essence of cool. Soda manufacturers realized +that anyone could put sugar and water in a bottle, but only the best could rise +above the humdrum nature of life by employing the best artists in the land to +give their sugar water the right hip feeling. So Young invested in image. His +T-shirts and packages have always been some of the most graphically +sophisticated on the market. While some folks would get girlfriends or +neighbors to draw the images that covered their books and CDs, Red Hat used a +talented team to develop their packaging. + +Young jokes about this. He said he was at a trade show talking to a small +software company that was trying to give him one of their free promotional +T-shirts. He said, "Why don't you try giving away the source code and selling +the T-shirts?" + +At the LinuxExpo, Red Hat was selling T-shirts, too. One slick number retailing +for $19 just said "The Revolution of Choice" in Red Hat's signature old +typewriter font. Others for sale at the company's site routinely run for $15 or +more. They sucked me in. When I ordered my first Red Hat disk from them, I +bought an extra T-shirt to go with the mix. + +The technology folks at Red Hat may be working with some cuttingedge software +that makes the software easy to install, but the marketing group was stealing +its plays from Nike, Pepsi, and Disney. They weren't selling running shoes, +sugar water, or a ride on a roller coaster--they were selling an experience. +Red Hat wasn't repackaging some hacker's science project from the Net, it was +offering folks a ticket to a revolution. If the old 1960s radicals had realized +this, they might have been able to fund their movement without borrowing money +from their square parents. Selling enough groovy, tie-died T-shirts would have +been enough.~{ Apple is an old hand at the T-shirt game, and internal projects +create T-shirts to celebrate milestones in development. These images were +collected in a book, which may be as good a technical history of Apple as might +exist. Many projects, including ones that failed, are part of the record. }~ + +Many of the other groups are part of the game. The OpenBSD project sold out of +their very fashionable T-shirts with wireframe versions of its little daemon +logo soon after the beginning of the LinuxExpo. They continue to sell more +T-shirts from their website. Users can also buy CD-ROMs from OpenBSD. + +Several attendees wear yellow copyleft shirts that hold an upsidedown copyright +logo <:=Copyleft> arranged so the open side points to the left. + +The most expensive T-shirt at the show came with a logo that imitated one of +the early marketing images of the first Star Wars movie. The shirt showed +Torvalds and Stallman instead of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker under a banner +headline of "OS Wars." The shirt cost only $100, but "came with free admission +to the upcoming Linux convention in Atlanta." + +The corporate suits, of course, have adjusted as best they can. The IBM folks +at the show wore identical khaki outfits with nicely cut and relatively +expensive polo shirts with IBM logos. A regular suit would probably stick out +less than the crisp, clean attempt to split the difference between casual cool +and button-down business droid. + +Of course, the T-shirts weren't just about pretty packaging and slick images. +The shirts also conveyed some information about someone's political +affiliations in the community and showed something about the person's technical +tastes. Sure, someone could wear an OpenBSD shirt because they liked the cute +little daemon logo, but also because they wanted to show that they cared about +security. The OpenBSD project began because some users wanted to build a +version of UNIX that was much more secure. The group prides itself on fixing +bugs early and well. Wearing an OpenBSD shirt proclaims a certain alliance with +this team's commitment to security. After all, some of the profits from the +shirts went to pay for the development of the software. Wearing the right +T-shirt meant choosing an alliance. It meant joining a tribe. + +Young is keenly aware that much of his target market is 13-year-old boys who +are flexing their minds and independence for the first time. The same images of +rebellion that brought James Dean his stardom are painted on the T-shirts. Some +wear shirts proclaiming TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION SOON. Raging against Microsoft +is a cliché that is avoided as much as it is still used. The shirts are a +mixture of parody, bluster, wit, and confidence. Of course, they're usually +black. Everyone wears black. + +Ockman looks at this market competition for T-shirts and sees a genius. He +says, "I think Bob Young's absolutely brilliant. Suddenly he realized that +there's no future in releasing mainframes. He made a jump after finding college +kids in Carolina [using Linux]. For him to make that jump is just amazing. He's +a marketing guy. He sat down and figured it out. + +"Every time I hear him talk," Ockman says about Young, "he tells a different +story about ketchup. If you take people who've never had ketchup before in +their life and you blindly feed them ketchup, they have no taste for ketchup. +They don't like it." If you feed them ketchup over time, they begin to demand +it on their hamburgers. + +"No one who's never had Coca-Cola before would like it," Ockman continues. +"These things are purely a branding issue. It has to be branded for cool in +order for people to sit down and learn everything they have to know." + +In essence, Young looked around and saw that a bunch of scruffy kids were +creating an OS that was just as good, if not better, than the major OSs costing +major sums of money. This OS was, best of all, free for all comers. The OS had +a problem, though. The scruffy kids never marketed their software. The deeply +intelligent, free-thinking hackers picked up on how cool it was, but the rest +of society couldn't make the jump. The scruffy kids didn't bother to try to +market it to the rest of society. They were artists. + +Most people who looked at such a situation would have concluded that this +strange clan of techno-outsiders was doomed to inhabit the periphery of society +forever. There was no marketing of the product because there was no money in +the budget and there would never be money in the budget because the software +was free. Young recognized that you could still market the software without +owning it. You could still slap on a veneer of cool without writing the code +yourself. Sugar water costs practically nothing, too. + +Young's plan to brand the OS with a veneer of cool produced more success than +anyone could imagine. Red Hat is by far the market leader in providing Linux to +the masses, despite the fact that many can and do "steal" a low-cost version. +Of course, "steal" isn't the right word, because Red Hat did the same thing. +"Borrow" isn't right, "grab" is a bit casual, and "join in everlasting +communion with the great free software continuum" is just too enthusiastic to +be cool. + +In August 1999, Red Hat completed an initial public offering of the shares of +its stock, the common benchmark for success in the cash-driven world of Silicon +Valley. Many of the principals at Red Hat got rich when the stock opened at $14 +a share on August 11 and closed the day at $52. Bob Young, the CEO of Red Hat, +started the day with a bit more than 9 million shares or 15 percent of the +company. Technically, not all of this was his because he had distributed some +(3,222,746 shares, to be exact) to his wife, Nancy, and put some more +(1,418,160) in various trusts for his children. Still, this cut adds up to +about $468 million. Marc Ewing, executive vice president and chief technology +officer, also ended up with a similar amount of money divided between trusts +and his own pocket. Matthew Sulzik, the president, who joined in November 1998, +got a bit less (2,736,248 shares) in his pot, but he was a relative newcomer. +The big investors, Greylock IX Limited Partnership, Benchmark Capital Partners +II, and Intel, split up the big part of the rest of the shares. + +Now, what happened to the boys who wrote the code? Did Richard Stallman get any +of it? Did Linus Torvalds? Some of the major developers like Alan Cox and David +Miller already work for Red Hat, so they probably drew shares out of the +employee pool. There are thousands of names, however, who aren't on anyone's +radar screen. They've written many lines of code for naught. + +Red Hat tried to alleviate some of the trouble by allocating 800,000 shares to +"directors, officers and employees of Red Hat and to open source software +developers and other persons that Red Hat believes have contributed to the +success of the open source software community and the growth of Red Hat." This +group, occasionally known as the "friends and family," was a way to reward +buddies. Red Hat drew up a list of major contributors to the open source +distribution and sent out invitations. + +"Dear open source community member," began the e-mail letter that Red Hat sent +to about 1,000 people. + +_1 In appreciation of your contribution to the open source community, Red Hat +is pleased to offer you this personal, non-transferable, opportunity. . . . Red +Hat couldn't have grown this far without the ongoing help and support of the +open source community, therefore, we have reserved a portion of the stock in +our offering for distribution online to certain members of the open source +community. We invite you to participate. + +Many programmers and developers were touched by the thoughtfulness. The list +probably wasn't long enough or inclusive enough to pull everyone into the +circle, but it did do a good job of spreading the wealth around. The plan began +to backfire, however, when E*Trade began to parcel out the shares. Everyone who +made it onto the list filled out a form listing their net worth, and E*Trade +attempted to decide who was a sophisticated investor and who wasn't. Some folks +who had little money (perhaps because they spent too much time writing free +software) were locked out. + +One contributor, C. Scott Ananian, wrote about his rejection in Salon magazine, +"I filled out the eligibility questionnaire myself. I knew they were trying to +weed out inexperienced investors, so on every question that related to +experience, I asserted the maximum possible. I knew what I was doing. And it +was my money, anyway--I had a God-given right to risk it on as foolhardy a +venture as I liked." + +The article drew plenty of flack and murmurs of a class action lawsuit from the +disenfranchised. A discussion broke out on Slashdot, the hardcore site for +nerds. Some defended E*Trade and pointed out that a Red Hat IPO was not a lock +or a guarantee of wealth. Too many grandmothers had been burned by +slick-talking stock salesmen in the past. E*Trade had to block out the little +guys for their own protection. Stock can go down as well as up. + +Steve Gilliard, a "media operative" at the website NetSlaves, wrote, "If the +Red Hat friends and family group were judged by normal standards, there is no +brokerage in the U.S. which would let many of them buy into an IPO. In many +cases, they would be denied a brokerage account. Poor people are usually +encouraged to make other investments, like paying off Visa and Master Card." + +Others saw it as a trick to weed out the pool and make sure that E*Trade could +allocate the shares to its buddies. The more the small guys were excluded, the +more the big guys would get for their funds. In the end, the complaints reached +some ears. More people were able to sneak in, but the circle was never big +enough for all. + +2~ World Domination Pretty Soon? + +Red Hat's big pool of money created more than jealousy in the hearts and minds +of the open source world. Jealousy was an emotional response. Fear of a new +Microsoft was the rational response that came from the mind. Red Hat's pool of +cash was unprecedented in the open source community. People saw what the pile +of money and the stock options did to Bill Gates. Everyone began to wonder if +the same would happen to Red Hat. + +On the face of it, most open source developers have little to worry about. All +the code on the Red Hat disk is covered with a General Protection License and +isn't going to become proprietary. Robert Young has been very open about his +promise to make sure that everything Red Hat ships falls under the GPL. That +includes the distribution tools it writes in-house. + +The GPL is a powerful force that prevents Red Hat from making many unilateral +decisions. There are plenty of distributions that would like to take over the +mantle of the most popular version of Linux. It's not hard. The source code is +all there. + +But more savvy insiders whisper about a velvet-gloved version of Microsoft's +"embrace and extend." The company first gains control by stroking the egos and +padding the wallets of the most important developers. + +In time, other Red Hat employees will gradually become the most important +developers. They're paid to work on open source projects all day. They'll +gradually supplant the people who have day jobs. They'll pick up mindshare. +Such a silent coup could guarantee that Red Hat will continue to receive large +influxes of cash from people who buy the CD-ROMs. + +There are parts of this conspiracy theory that are already true. Red Hat does +dominate the United States market for Linux and it controls a great deal of the +mindshare. Their careful growth supported by an influx of cash ensured a strong +position in the marketplace. + +In November 1999, Red Hat purchased Cygnus Solutions, the other major +commercial developer of GPL-protected software, which specialized in +maintaining and extending the compiler, GCC. Red Hat had 235 employees at the +time and Cygnus Solutions had 181. That's a huge fraction of the open source +developers under one roof. The Cygnus press release came with the headline, RED +HAT TO ACQUIRE CYGNUS AND CREATE OPEN SOURCE POWERHOUSE. + +To make matters worse, one of the founders of Cygnus, Michael Tiemann, likes to +brag that the open source software prevents competitors from rising up to +threaten Cygnus. The GPL guarantees that the competitors will also have to +publish their source, giving Cygnus a chance to stay ahead. In this model, any +company with the money and stamina to achieve market dominance isn't going to +be knocked down by some kids in a garage. + +Those are scary confluences. Let's imagine that the conspiracy theory is +completely borne out. Let's imagine that all of the other distributions wither +away as corporate and consumer clients rush head over heels to put Red Hat on +their machines. Red Hat becomes the default in much the same way that Microsoft +is the default today. Will Red Hat have the power that Microsoft has today? + +Will they be able to force everyone to have a Red Hat Network logon button on +their desktop? Perhaps. Many people are going to trust Red Hat to create a good +default installation. Getting software to be loaded by default will give them +some power. + +Can they squeeze their partners by charging different rates for Linux? +Microsoft is known to offer lower Windows prices to their friends. This is +unlikely. Anyone can just buy a single Red Hat CDROM from a duplicator like +CheapBytes. This power play won't work. + +Can they duplicate the code of a rival and give it away in much the same way +that Microsoft created Internet Explorer and "integrated" it into their +browser? You bet they can. They're going to take the best ideas they can get. +If they're open source, they'll get sucked into the Red Hat orbit. If they're +not, then they'll get someone to clone them. + +Can they force people to pay a "Red Hat tax" just to upgrade to the latest +software? Not likely. Red Hat is going to be a service company, and they're +going to compete on having the best service for their customers. Their real +competitor will be companies that sell support contracts like LinuxCare. +Service industries are hard work. Every customer needs perfect care or they'll +go somewhere else next time. Red Hat's honeymoon with the IPO cash will only +last so long. Eventually, they're going to have to earn the money to get a +return on the investment. They're going to be answering a lot of phone calls +and e-mails. + +1~ New + +Most of this book frames the entire free source movement as something new and +novel. The notion of giving away free source code is something that seems +strange and counterintuitive. But despite all of the gloss and excitement about +serious folks doing serious work and then just giving it away like great +philanthropists, it's pretty easy to argue that this has all been done before. +The software world is just rediscovering secrets that the rest of the world +learned long ago. + +Giving things away isn't a radical idea. People have been generous since, well, +the snake gave Eve that apple. Businesses love to give things away in the hope +of snagging customers. Paper towel manufacturers give away towel hardware that +only accepts paper in a proprietary size. Food companies give coolers and +freezers to stores if the stores agree not to stock rival brands in them. + +In fact, most industries do more than just give away free gifts to lure +customers. Most share ideas, strategies, and plans between competitors because +cooperation lets them all blossom. Stereo companies make components that +interoperate because they adhere to the same standard. Lawyers, engineers, and +doctors are just some of the people who constantly trade ideas and solutions +with each other despite the fact that they work as competitors. A broad, +central, unowned pool of knowledge benefits everyone in much the same way that +it helps the free software community. + +The real question is not "Who do these pseudo-commie pinkos think they are?" +It's "What took the software industry so long to figure this out?" How did the +programmers who are supposedly a bunch of whip-smart, hard-core libertarians +let a bunch of lawyers lead them down a path that put them in a cubicle farm +and prevented them from talking to each other? + +Recipes are one of the closest things to software in the material world, and +many restaurants now share them widely. While chefs once treated them like +industrial secrets, they now frequently give copies to magazines and newspapers +as a form of publicity. The free advertisement is worth more than the +possibility that someone will start cloning the recipe. The restaurants +recognized that they were selling more than unique food. Ambiance, service, and +quality control are often more in demand than a particular recipe. + +When the free software industry succeeds by sharing the source code now, it's +capitalizing on the fact that most people don't want to use the source code to +set up a take-no-prisoners rivalry. Most people just want to get their work +done. The cost of sharing source code is so low that it doesn't take much gain +to make it worth the trouble. One bug fix or tiny feature could pay for it. + +2~ Shareware Is Not Open Source and Open Source Isn't Free + +The software industry has been flirting with how to make money off of the low +cost of distributing its product. The concept of shareware began long before +the ideological free software movement as companies and individual developers +began sharing the software as a cheap form of advertisement. Developers without +the capital to start a major marketing campaign have passed around free +versions of their software. People could try it and if it met their needs, they +could pay for it. Those who didn't like it were honor-bound to erase their +version. + +Shareware continues to be popular to this day. A few products have made a large +amount of money with this approach, but most have made very little. Some +people, including many of the major companies, distribute their own crippled +version of their product so people can try it. Crucial functions like the +ability to print or save a document to the disk are usually left out as a +strong encouragement to buy the real version. + +Of course, free source products aren't the same thing as shareware because most +shareware products don't come with the source code. Programmers don't have the +ability or the right to modify them to do what they want. This has always been +one of the biggest selling points to the high-end marketplace that knows how to +program. + +In fact, free source software is not dirt cheap either. Anyone who's been +around the open software community for a time realizes that you end up having +to pay something for the lunch. Keeping some costs hidden from the consumer +isn't new, and it still hasn't gone away in the free software world. The costs +may not be much and they may be a much better deal than the proprietary +marketplace, but the software still costs something. + +The simplest cost is time. Free software is often not as polished as many +commercial products. If you want to use many of the tools, you must study +manuals and learn to think like a programmer. Some manuals are quite nice, but +many are cursory. This may change as the free software movement aims to +dominate the desktop, but the manuals and help aren't as polished as the +solutions coming out of Microsoft. Of course, one free software devotee told me +by way of apology, "Have you actually tried using Microsoft's manuals or help? +They suck, too." + +Even when it is polished, free source software requires time to use. The more +options that are available, the more time it takes to configure the software. +Free source gives tons of options. + +The lack of polish isn't usually a problem for programmers, and it's often not +an extra cost either. Programmers often need to learn a system before they find +a way to revise and extend it to do what their boss wants it to do. Learning +the guts of a free software package isn't much of an extra cost because they +would be just trying to learn the guts of a Microsoft product instead. Plus, +the source code makes the process easier. + +Still, most users including the best programmers end up paying a company like +Red Hat, Caldera, or a group like OpenBSD to do some of the basic research in +building a Linux system. All of the distribution companies charge for a copy of +their software and throw in some support. While the software is technically +free, you pay for help to get it to work. + +If the free source code is protected by the GNU General Public License, then +you end up paying again when you're forced to include your changes with the +software you ship. Bundling things up, setting up a server, writing +documentation, and answering users' questions take time. Sure, it may be fair, +good, and nice to give your additions back to the community, but it can be more +of a problem for some companies. Let's say you have to modify a database to +handle some proprietary process, like a weird way to make a chemical or +manufacture a strange widget. Contributing your source code back into the +public domain may reveal something to a competitor. Most companies won't have +this problem, but being forced to redistribute code always has costs. + +Of course, the cost of this is debatable. Tivo, for instance, is a company that +makes a set-top box for recording television content on an internal hard disk. +The average user just sees a fancy, easy-to-use front end, but underneath, the +entire system runs on the Linux operating system. Tivo released a copy of the +stripped-down version of Linux it ships on its machines on its website, +fulfilling its obligation to the GNU GPL. The only problem I've discovered is +that the web page (www.tivo.com/linux/) is not particularly easy to find from +the home page. If I hadn't known it was there, I wouldn't have found it. + +Of course, companies that adopt free source software also end up paying in one +way or another because they need to hire programmers to keep the software +running. This isn't necessarily an extra cost because they would have hired +Microsoft experts anyway. Some argue that the free source software is easier to +maintain and thus cheaper to use, but these are difficult arguments to settle. + +In each of these ways, the free software community is giving away something to +spark interest and then finding a way to make up the cost later. Some in the +free software community sell support and others get jobs. Others give back +their extensions and bug fixes. A running business is a working ecology where +enough gets reinvested to pay for the next generation of development. The free +source world isn't a virtual single corporation like the phone company or the +cable business, but it can be thought of in that way. Therefore, the free +software isn't much different from the free toasters at the banks, the free +lollipops at the barber's, or the free drugs from the neighborhood pusher. + +If you want to think bigger, it may be better to see the free software world as +closer to the great socialized resources like the ocean, the freeway system, or +the general utility infrastructure. These treat everyone equally and provide a +common basis for travel and commerce. + +Of course, that's the most cynical way that free software is no different from +many of the other industries. There are other ways that the free source vision +is just a return to the way that things used to be before the software industry +mucked them up. The problem is that a mixture of licensing, copyright, and +patent laws have given the software industry more ways to control their product +than virtually any other industry. The free source movement is more a reaction +against these controls than a brave new experiment. + +2~ Would You License a Car from These Guys? + +Comparing the software industry to the car industry is always a popular game. +Normally, the car industry looks a bit poky and slow off the mark because they +haven't been turning out new products that are twice as fast and twice as +efficient as last year's products. But many parts of the car industry are +bright, shining examples of freedom compared to their software equivalents. + +Consider the Saturday afternoon mechanic who likes to change the oil, put in a +new carburetor, swap the spark plugs, and keep the car in running order. The +car guy can do all of these things without asking the manufacturer for +permission. There's nothing illegal about taking apart an engine or even +putting an entirely new, souped-up engine in your car. The environmental +protection laws may prohibit adding engines that spew pollutants, but the +manufacturer is out of the loop. After all, it's your car. You paid for it. + +Software is something completely different. You don't own most of the software +you paid for on your computer. You just own a "license" to use it. The +difference is that the license can be revoked at any time if you don't follow +the rules, and some of the rules can be uncomfortable or onerous. There's +nothing wrong with this mechanism. In the right hands, it can be very pleasant. +The Berkeley Software Distribution license, for instance, has no real +requirements except that you credit the university for its contributions, and +the university just revoked that requirement. The GNU Public License is much +stricter, but only if you want to change, modify, and distribute the code. In +that case, you're only prevented from keeping these changes a secret. That's +not a big problem for most of us. + +Other licenses are even more stricter. One Microsoft license prevents the +programmer from trying to figure out how the software works inside by saying +"LICENSEE may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble Microsoft Agent." +These clauses are popular and found in many software licenses. The company +lawyers argue that they ostensibly prevent people from stealing the secrets +that are bound up in the software. + +These licenses have been interpreted in different ways. The video game maker +Accolade, for instance, won its case against the manufacturer Sega by arguing +that reverse engineering was the only way to create a clone. If companies +couldn't clone, there would be no free market. On the other hand, Connectix +lost some of the early court battles when Sony sued them for creating a +software clone of the PlayStation. The judge decided that Connectix had +violated Sony's copyright when they made a copy to study for reverse +engineering. In February 2000, an appeals court struck down this ruling, +freeing Connectix to sell the emulator again. By the time you read this, the +legal landscape will probably have changed again. + +In practice, license clauses like this only hurt the honest programmers who are +trying to deal with a nasty bug. Most people don't want to steal secrets, they +just want to be able to make their software work correctly. Decompiling or +disassembling the code is a good way to figure out exactly what is going on +inside the software. It can save hours and plenty of grief. + +The license even borders on the absurd because the phrase "reverse engineer" is +so ambiguous. It may be possible to argue that just learning to use a piece of +software is reverse engineering it. Learning how a feature works means learning +to predict what it will do. In many cases, the bugs and the glitches in +software mean that the features are often a bit unpredictable and only a bit of +black-box reverse engineering can teach us how they work. That's not much +different from learning the steps that happen inside. Fiddling with +shrink-wrapped software is like fiddling with a black box. + +Imagine that General Motors or Ford sold their cars with such a +donot-reverse-engineer license. They would either weld the hood shut or add on +a special lock and only give the keys to registered dealers who would sign lots +of forms that guaranteed that they would keep the workings of the cars secret. +No one could change the spark plugs, chop the hood, add a nitro tank, or do +anything with the car except drive it around in a completely boring way. Some +lawyers at the car companies might love to start shipping cars with such a +license. Think how much more they could charge for service!The smart executives +might realize that they were hurting their biggest fans, the people who liked +to tune, tweak, fiddle, and futz with their machines. They would be stripping +away one of the great pleasures of their devices and slowly but surely turning +the cars into commodity items that put the owners in legal strait-jackets. + +Some software companies take the licensing requirements to even greater +extremes. One of the most famous examples is the Microsoft Agent software, +which allows a programmer to create little animated characters that might give +instructions. Some versions of Microsoft Office, for instance, come with a +talking paper clip that points out new and improved features. Microsoft +released this technology to the general programmer community hoping that people +would add the tools to their software and create their own talking characters. + +The software is free and Microsoft posts a number of nice tools for using the +code on their website. They couldn't leave well enough alone, though, because +anyone who wants to use the tool with their code needs to print out and file a +separate license with the Microsoft legal staff. Many of the clauses are pretty +simple and do useful things like force anyone using the software to try to keep +their versions up to date. But the most insidious one ensures that no one will + +_1 "...use the Character Animation Data and Image Files to disparage Microsoft, +its products or services or for promotional goods or for products which, in +Microsoft's sole judgment, may diminish or otherwise damage Microsoft's +goodwill in the SOFTWARE PRODUCT including but not limited to uses which could +be deemed under applicable law to be obscene or pornographic, uses which are +excessively violent, unlawful, or which purpose is to encourage unlawful +activities." + +In other words, if you want to make the cute animated cartoon say something +unkind about Microsoft, Microsoft can simply shut you down. And don't even +think about creating a little animated marijuana cigarette for your Grateful +Dead softwarepalooza. It's practically illegal just to think bad thoughts in +the vicinity of a computer running Microsoft Agent. + +Most software licenses are not as bad or as restrictive as the Microsoft Agent +license, but many cause their own share of grief. Companies continue to try to +come up with more restrictive solutions for combating piracy, and in the end +they bother the legitimate users. People are often buying new computers or +upgrading a hard disk, and both of these acts require making a copy of old +software. Companies that make it too difficult to do these things end up +rubbing salt in the wounds of legitimate users who lose a hard disk. + +In this context, the free source world isn't a new flowering of mutual respect +and sharing, it's just a return to the good old days when you could take apart +what was yours. If you bought the software, you can fiddle with it. This isn't +the Age of Aquarius, it is the second coming of Mayberry R.F.D., Home +Improvement, and the Dukes of Hazzard. + +2~ Other Professions Were Open from the Start + +This comparison doesn't have to be limited to the car guys in the garage. Many +other professions freely share ideas and operate without the very restrictive +covenants of the software industry. The legal business is a great example of a +world where people are free to beg, borrow, and steal ideas from others. If +someone finds a neat loophole, they can't patent it or prevent others from +exploiting it. Once other lawyers hear about it, they'll be filing their own +lawsuits for their own clients. ~{ 1The legal system is not perfect. Too many +cases are now filed under seal, and the courts are too willing to act as +private dispute agencies for big corporations. When the law is locked up in +this way, it is not a great example for the free software world. }~ + +Consider the world of tobacco liability. Once one state advanced the legal +opinion that the tobacco companies were liable for the cost of treating any +disease that might emerge from smoking cigarettes, the other states and plenty +of lawyers were able to jump on board. Once they settled, the lawyers turned +their sights on the gun companies. By the time you read this, they'll probably +have moved on to the fat delivery vehicle manufacturers in the fast-food +industry and the stress induction groups, aka your employer. The exercise +reduction industry, made up of a megalomaniacal consortium of moviemakers, +television producers, and, yes, book writers, must be on someone's list.~{ The +author recommends that you read this on the Stairmaster or a stationary bike, +but only after checking with a registered doctor and consulting with a licensed +exercise specialist who is thoroughly familiar with your medical history. These +medical specialists will be able to tune your workout to provide the optimal +fitness benefits so you can live long enough to get Alzheimer's disease. }~ + +Free source folks are just as free to share ideas. Many of the rival Linux and +BSD distributions often borrow code from each other. While they compete for the +hearts and minds of buyers, they're forced by the free source rules to share +the code. If someone writes one device driver for one platform, it is quickly +modified for another. + +The proprietary software world moves slowly in comparison. They keep their +ideas secret and people spend thousands of lawyer years on projects just +keeping the various licenses straight. Code is shared, but only after lawyers +vet the contracts. + +The legal industry is also a good example of how the free sharing of ideas, +techniques, and strategies does not hurt the income of the practitioners. In +fact, lawyers have managed to carve themselves a very nice slice of the +nation's income. Most are not as rich as the lucky few who beat the tobacco +companies, but they do all right. + +2~ Copyright, Tool of Dictators + +It would be unfair to the software industry to portray the rest of society as +much more sharing and giving. Most of the other industries are frantically +using the legal system and any other means necessary to stay ahead of their +competitors. It's just part of doing business. + +One of the best examples is content production, which is led by mega-companies +like Disney. In recent years, Hollywood has worked hard to get copyright laws +changed so that the copyright lasts 95 years instead of 75 years. In 1998, +Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (CTEA) that +kept works published after 1923 from passing into the public domain until 2019. +The industry feels that this gives them the protection to keep creating new +items. Creations like Mickey Mouse and Snow White will continue to live in the +very safe place controlled by Disney and not fall into the evil hands of the +public domain. + +Several Harvard professors, Larry Lessig, Charles Nesson, and Jonathan Zittrain +of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and +Geoffrey Stewart of the Boston law firm Hale and Dorr filed a lawsuit +contesting the act by pointing out that the Constitution provides for a +"limited" term. Artists, authors, and creators were given copyright protection, +but it was only for a limited amount of time. Afterward, the society could +borrow and use the work freely. + +There's little doubt that the major Hollywood producers recognize the value of +a well-stocked collection of public domain literature. Movies based on works by +William Shakespeare, Henry James, and Jane Austen continue to roll out of the +studios to the welcoming patrons who buy tickets despite knowing how the story +ends. Disney itself built its movie franchise on shared fables like Sleeping +Beauty or Snow White. Very few of Disney's animated films (The Lion King was +one of the first ones) were created in-house from a clean piece of paper. Most +were market-tested for acceptance by their years in the public domain. Of +course, Disney only pays attention to this fact when they're borrowing an idea +to create their own version, not when they're defending the copyright of their +own creations. They want to take, not give. + +The movie industry, like the proprietary software business, seems to forget +just how valuable a shared repository of ideas and solutions can be. In this +context, the free source movement isn't an explosion of creative brilliance or +a renaissance of cooperation, it's just a return to the good old days when +Congress wouldn't slavishly answer the whims of the content industry. If a +theater owner wanted to put on a Shakespeare play, the text was in the public +domain. If someone wanted to rewrite Jane Austen and create the movie Clueless, +they were free to do so. In the good old days, copyright faded after a limited +amount of time and the public got something back for granting a monopoly to the +artist. In the good old days, the artist got something back, too, when the +monopoly of other artists faded away. + +It's not like this brave new world of total copyright protection has generated +superior content. The so-called original movies aren't that different. All of +the action movies begin with some death or explosion in the first two minutes. +They all run through a few car chases that lead to the dramatic final +confrontation. The television world is filled with 30-minute sitcoms about a +bunch of young kids trying to make it on their own. It's sort of surprising +that Hollywood continues to suggest that the copyright laws actually promote +creativity. + +It's not hard to believe that we might be better off if some of the characters +were protected by an open source license. Superman and Batman have both gone +through several decades of character morphing as the artists and writers +assigned to the strips change. Of course, that change occurred under the strict +control of the corporation with the copyright. + +The thousands of fan novels and short stories are better examples. Many fans of +movies like Star Trek or Star Wars often write their own stories using the +protected characters without permission. Most of the time the studios and +megalithic corporations holding the copyright look the other way. The work +doesn't make much money and is usually born out of love for the characters. The +lawyers who have the job of defending the copyrights are often cool enough to +let it slide. + +Each of these novels provides some insight into the characters and also the +novelist. While not every novelist is as talented as the original authors, it +can still be fun to watch the hands of another mold the characters and shape +his or her destiny. The world of the theater has always accepted the notion +that directors and actors will fiddle with plays and leave their own marks on +them. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if writers could have the same latitude +after the original author enjoyed a short period of exclusivity. + +There are many ways in which the free software world is strange and new to +society, but sharing ideas without limitations is not one of them. Almost all +businesses let people tinker and change the products they buy. The software +industry likes to portray itself as a bunch of libertarians who worship the +free market and all of its competition. In reality, the leading firms are +riding a wave of power-grabbing that has lasted several decades. The firms and +their lawyers have consistently interpreted their rules to allow them to +shackle their customers with stronger and stronger bonds designed to keep them +loyal and everspending. + +This is all part of a long progression that affects all industries. Linus +Torvalds explained his view of the evolution when he told the San Jose +Mercury-News, "Regardless of open source, programs will become really cheap. +Any industry goes through three phases. First, there's the development of +features people need. Then there's the frills-andupgrade phase, when people buy +it because it looks cool. Then there's the everybody-takes-it-for-granted +phase. This is when it becomes a commodity. Well, we're still in the +look-cool-and-upgrade stage. In 10 or 15 years you'll be happy with software +that's 5 years old. Open source is one sign that we're moving in that +direction." + +In this light, the free software revolution isn't really a revolution at all. +It's just the marketplace responding to the overly greedy approaches of some +software companies. It's just a return to the good old days when buying +something meant that you owned it, not that you just signed on as a sort of +enlightened slave of the system. + +1~ Nations + +Microsoft is an American company. Bill Gates lives in Washington State and so +do most of the programmers under his dominion. The software they write gets +used around the globe in countries big and small, and the money people pay for +the software comes flooding back to the Seattle area, where it buys huge +houses, designer foods, and lots of serious and very competitive consumption. +Through the years, this sort of economic imperialism has built the great cities +of Rome, London, Tokyo, Barcelona, and many other minor cities. History is just +a long series of epochs when some company comes up with a clever mechanism for +moving the wealth of the world home to its cities. Britain relied on opium for +a while. Rome, it might be said, sold a legal system. Spain trafficked in pure +gold and silver. Microsoft is selling structured information in one of the most +efficient schemes yet. + +Of course, these periods of wealth-building invariably come to an abrupt end +when some army, which is invariably described as "ragtag," shows up to pillage +and plunder. The Mongolian hordes, the Visigoths, and the Vikings are just a +few of the lightweight, lean groups that appeared over the horizon and beat the +standing army of the fat and complacent society. This was the cycle of boom and +doom that built and trashed empire after dynasty after great society. + +Perhaps it's just a coincidence that Linus Torvalds has Viking blood in him. +Although he grew up in Finland, he comes from the minority of the population +for whom Swedish is the native tongue. The famous neutrality during World War +II, the lumbering welfare states, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the bays filled +with hiding Russian submarines give the impression that the Viking way is just +a thing of the past, but maybe some of the old hack and sack is still left in +the bloodlines. + +The Linux movement isn't really about nations and it's not really about war in +the old-fashioned sense. It's about nerds building software and letting other +nerds see how cool their code is. It's about empowering the world of +programmers and cutting out the corporate suits. It's about spending all night +coding on wonderful, magnificent software with massive colonnades, endless +plazas, big brass bells, and huge steam whistles without asking a boss "Mother, +may I?" It's very individualistic and peaceful. + +That stirring romantic vision may be moving the boys in the trenches, but the +side effects are beginning to be felt in the world of global politics. Every +time Linux, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD is installed, several dollars don't go flowing +to Seattle. There's a little bit less available for the Microsoft crowd to +spend on mega-mansions, SUVs, and local taxes. The local library, the local +police force, and the local schools are going to have a bit less local wealth +to tax. In essence, the Linux boys are sacking Seattle without getting out of +their chairs or breaking a sweat. You won't see this battle retold on those +cable channels that traffic in war documentaries, but it's unfolding as we +speak. + +The repercussions go deeper. Microsoft is not just a Seattle firm. Microsoft is +an American company and whatever is good for Microsoft is usually good, at +least in some form, for the United States. There may be some fraternal +squabbling between Microsoft and Silicon Valley, but the United States is doing +quite well. The info boom is putting millions to work and raising trillions in +taxes. + +The free software revolution undermines this great scheme in two very insidious +ways. The first is subtle. No one officially has much control over a free +software product, and that means that no country can claim it as its own. If +Bill Gates says that the Japanese version of Windows will require a +three-button mouse, then Japan will have to adjust. But Torvalds, Stallman, and +the rest can't do a darn thing about anyone. People can just reprogram their +mouse. If being boss means making people jump, then no one in the free software +world is boss of anything. Free source code isn't on anyone's side. It's more +neutral than Switzerland was in World War II. The United States can only take +solace in the fact that many of the great free source minds choose to live in +its boundaries. + +The second effect is more incendiary. Free software doesn't pay taxes. In the +last several centuries, governments around the world have spent their days +working out schemes to tax every transaction they can find. First, there were +just tariffs on goods crossing borders, then the bold went after the income, +and now the sales tax and the VAT are the crowning achievement. Along the way, +the computer with its selfless ability to count made this possible. But how do +you tax something that's free? How do you take a slice out of something that +costs nothing? + +These are two insidious effects. The main job of governments is to tax people. +Occasionally, one government will lust after the tax revenue of another and a +war will break out that will force people to choose sides. The GPL and the BSD +licenses destroy this tax mechanism, and no one knows what this will bring. + +One of the best places to see this destabilization is in the efforts of the +United States government to regulate the flow of encryption software around the +globe. Open source versions of encryption technology are oozing through the +cracks of a carefully developed mechanism for restricting the flow of the +software. The U.S. government has tried to keep a lid on the technology behind +codes and ciphers since World War II. Some argue that the United States won +World War II and many of the following wars by a judicious use of +eavesdropping. Codebreakers in England and Poland cracked the German Enigma +cipher, giving the Allies a valuable clue about German plans. The Allies also +poked holes in the Japanese code system and used this to win countless battles. +No one has written a comprehensive history of how code-breaking shifted the +course of the conflicts in Vietnam, Korea, or the Middle East, but the stories +are bound to be compelling. + +In recent years, the job of eavesdropping on conversations around the world has +fallen on the National Security Agency, which is loath to lose the high ground +that gave the United States so many victories in the past. Cheap consumer +cryptographic software threatened the agency's ability to vacuum up bits of +intelligence throughout the world, and something needed to be done. If good +scrambling software was built into every copy of Eudora and Microsoft Word, +then many documents would be virtually unreadable. The United States fought the +threat by regulating the export of all encryption source code. The laws allowed +the country to regulate the export of munitions, and scrambling software was +put in that category. + +These regulations have caused an endless amount of grief in Silicon Valley. The +software companies don't want someone telling them what to write. Clearing some +piece of software with a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., is a real pain in the +neck. It's hard enough to clear it with your boss. Most of the time, the +bureaucrat won't approve decent encryption software, and that means the U.S. +company has a tough choice: it can either not export its product, or build a +substandard one. + +There are branches of the U.S. government that would like to go further. The +Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to worry that criminals will use the +scrambling software to thwart investigations. The fact that encryption software +can also be used by average folks to protect their money and privacy has +presented a difficult challenge to policy analysts from the FBI. From time to +time, the FBI raises the specter of just banning encryption software outright. + +The software industry has lobbied long and hard to lift these regulations, but +they've had limited success. They've pointed out that much foreign software is +as good as if not better than American encryption software. They've screamed +that they were losing sales to foreign competitors from places like Germany, +Australia, and Canada, competitors who could import their software into the +U.S. and compete against American companies. None of these arguments went very +far because the interests of the U.S. intelligence community always won when +the president had to make a decision. + +The free source code world tripped into this debate when a peace activist named +Phil Zimmerman sat down one day and wrote a program he called Pretty Good +Privacy, or simply PGP. Zimmerman's package was solid, pretty easy to use, and +free. To make matters worse for the government, Zimmerman gave away all of the +source code and didn't even use a BSD or GPL license. It was just out there for +all the world to see. + +The free source code had several effects. First, it made it easy for everyone +to learn how to build encryption systems and add the features to their own +software. Somewhere there are probably several programmers being paid by drug +dealers to use PGP's source code to scramble their data. At least one person +trading child pornography was caught using PGP. + +Of course, many legitimate folks embraced it. Network Solutions, the branch of +SAIC, the techno powerhouse, uses digital signatures generated by PGP to +protect the integrity of the Internet's root server. Many companies use PGP to +protect their e-mail and proprietary documents. Banks continue to explore using +tools like PGP to run transaction networks. Parents use PGP to protect their +kids' e-mail from stalkers. + +The free source code also opened the door to scrutiny. Users, programmers, and +other cryptographers took apart the PGP code and looked for bugs and mistakes. +After several years of poking, everyone pretty much decided that the software +was secure and safe. + +This type of assurance is important in cryptography. Paul Kocher, an expert in +cryptography who runs Cryptography Research in San Francisco, explains that +free source software is an essential part of developing cryptography."You need +source code to test software, and careful testing is the only way to eliminate +security problems in crypto-systems," he says. "We need everyone to review the +design and code to look for weaknesses." + +Today, security products that come with open source code are the most trusted +in the industry. Private companies like RSA Data Security or Entrust can brag +about the quality of their in-house scientists or the number of outside +contractors who've audited the code, but nothing compares to letting everyone +look over the code. + +When Zimmerman launched PGP, however, he knew it was an explicitly political +act designed to create the kind of veil of privacy that worried the +eavesdroppers. He framed his decision, however, in crisp terms that implicitly +gave each person the right to control their thoughts and words. "It's personal. +It's private. And it's no one's business but yours," he wrote in the +introduction to the manual accompanying the software. "You may be planning a +political campaign, discussing your taxes, or having an illicit affair. Or you +may be doing something that you feel shouldn't be illegal, but is. Whatever it +is, you don't want your private electronic mail (e-mail) or confidential +documents read by anyone else. There's nothing wrong with asserting your +privacy. Privacy is as apple-pie as the Constitution." + +Initially, Zimmerman distributed PGP under the GPL, but backed away from that +when he discovered that the GPL didn't give him much control over improvements. +In fact, they proliferated and it made it hard to keep track of who created +them. Today, the source code comes with a license that is very similar to the +BSD license and lets people circulate the source code as much as they want. + +"I place no restraints on your modifying the source code for your own use," he +writes in the accompanying documentation, and then catches himself."However, do +not distribute a modified version of PGP under the name 'PGP' without first +getting permission from me. Please respect this restriction. PGP's reputation +for cryptographic integrity depends on maintaining strict quality control on +PGP's cryptographic algorithms and protocols." + +Zimmerman's laissez-faire attitude, however, doesn't mean that the software is +available with no restrictions. A holding company named Public Key Partners +controlled several fundamental patents, including the ones created by Ron +Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman. Zimmerman's PGP used this algorithm, and +technically anyone using the software was infringing the patent. + +While "infringing on a patent" has a certain legal gravitas, its real effects +are hard to quantify. The law grants the patent holders the right to stop +anyone from doing what is spelled out in the patent, but it only allows them to +use a lawsuit to collect damages. In fact, patent holders can collect triple +damages if they can prove that the infringers knew about the patent. These +lawsuits can be quite a hassle for a big company like Microsoft, because +Microsoft is selling a product and making a profit. Finding a number to +multiply by three is easy to do. But the effects of the lawsuits on relatively +poor, bearded peace activists who aren't making money is harder to judge. +What's three times zero? The lawsuits make even less sense against some guy +who's using PGP in his basement. + +Still, the threat of a lawsuit was enough of a cudgel to worry Zimmerman. The +costs, however, put a limit on what PKP could demand. In the end, the two +parties agreed that PGP could be distributed for non-commercial use if it +relied upon a toolkit known as RSAREF made by PKP's sister company, RSA Data +Security. Apparently, this would encourage people to use RSAREF in their +commercial products and act like some free advertising for the toolkit. + +The patent lawsuit, however, was really a minor threat for Zimmerman. In 1994, +the U.S. government started investigating whether Zimmerman had somehow +exported encryption software by making it available on the Internet for +download. While Zimmerman explicitly denounced violating the laws and took +pains to keep the software inside the country, a copy leaked out. Some suggest +it was through a posting on the Net that inadvertently got routed throughout +the world. Was Zimmerman responsible? A branch of the U.S. Customs launched a +criminal investigation in the Northern District of California to find out. + +Of course, determining how the source code got out of the country was a nearly +impossible exercise. Unless Zimmerman confessed or somehow kept some +incriminating evidence around, the prosecutors faced a tough job painting him +as a lawbreaker. The software was available for free to anyone inside the +country, and that meant that everyone had at least an opportunity to break the +law. There were no purchase records or registration records. No one knew who +had PGP on their disk. Maybe someone carried it across the border after +forgetting that the source code was on a hard disk. Maybe a foreigner +deliberately came into the U.S. and carried it out. Who knows? Zimmerman says +it blew across the border "like dandelion seeds blowing in the wind." + +To make matters worse for the forces in the U.S. government that wanted to +curtail PGP, the patent held by RSA wasn't filed abroad due to different +regulations. Foreigners could use the software without care, and many did. This +was the sort of nightmare that worried the parts of the U.S. +intelligence-gathering branch that relied upon wholesale eavesdropping. + +Eventually, the criminal investigation amounted to nothing. No indictments were +announced. No trials began. Soon after the investigation ended, Zimmerman +helped form a company to create commercial versions of PGP. While the free +versions continue to be available today and are in widespread use among +individuals, companies often turn to PGP for commercial products that come with +a license from PKP. When the RSA patent expires in September 2000, the people +will be free to use PGP again.~{ The GNU project has already worked around many +of these impediments. Their Privacy Guard package (GNU PG) is released under +the GNU license. }~ + +Zimmerman's experiences show how free source code turned into a real thorn in +the side of the U.S. government. Businesses can be bought or at least leaned +on. Merchandise needs to flow through stores and stores have to obey the law. +Red tape can ruin everything. But free software that floats like dandelion +seeds can't be controlled. People can give it to each other and it flows like +speech. Suddenly it's not a product that's being regulated, but the free +exchange of ideas between people, ideas that just happen to be crystallized as +a computer program. + +Of course, a bureaucracy has never met something it couldn't regulate, or at +least something it couldn't try to regulate. Zimmerman's experience may have +proved to some that governments are just speed bumps on the infobahn of the +future, but others saw it as a challenge. Until the end of 1999, the U.S. +government has tried to tighten up the restrictions on open source versions of +encryption technology floating around the world. The problem was that many +countries around the globe explicitly exempt open source software from the +restrictions, and the United States has lobbied to tighten these loopholes. + +The best place to begin this story may be in the trenches where system +administrators for the U.S. government try to keep out hackers. Theo de Raadt, +the leader of the OpenBSD team, likes to brag that the U.S. government uses +OpenBSD on its secure internal network. The system designers probably made that +choice because OpenBSD has been thoroughly audited for security holes and bugs +by both the OpenBSD team and the world at large. They want the best code, and +it's even free. + +"They're running Network Flight Recorder," de Raadt says. "It's a super +sniffing package and an intrusion detection system. They can tell you if bad +traffic happens on your private little network that the firewall should have +stopped. They have OpenBSD running NFR on every network. They run an IPSEC vpn +back to a main network information center where they look and do traffic +analysis." + +That is, the departments watch for bad hackers by placing OpenBSD boxes at +judicious points to scan the traffic and look for incriminating information. +These boxes, of course, must remain secure. If they're compromised, they're +worthless. Turning to something like OpenBSD, which has at least been audited, +makes sense. + +"They catch a lot of system administrators making mistakes. It's very much a +proactive result. They can see that a sys admin has misconfigured a firewall," +he says. + +Normally, this would just be a simple happy story about the government getting +a great value from an open source operating system. They paid nothing for it +and got the results of a widespread, open review looking for security holes. + +De Raadt lives in Canada, not the United States, and he develops OpenBSD there +because the laws on the export of encryption software are much more lenient. +For a time, Canada did not try to control any mass market software. Recently, +it added the requirement that shrinkwrapped software receive a license, but the +country seems willing to grant licenses quite liberally. Software that falls +into the public domain is not restricted at all. While OpenBSD is not in the +public domain, it does fit that definition as set out by the rules. The +software is distributed with no restrictions or charge. By the end of 1999, +senior officials realized that the stop crypt policy was generating too many +ironic moments. + +This is just another example of how free source software throws the +traditional-instincts regulatory system for a loop. Companies sell products, +and products are regulated. Public domain information, on the other hand, is +speech and speech is protected, at least by the U.S. Constitution. Relying on +Canada for network security of the Internet was too much. + +In January 2000, the U.S. government capitulated. After relentless pressure +from the computer industry, the government recognized that high-quality +encryption software like OpenBSD was common throughout the world. It also +recognized that the quality was so good that many within the United States +imported it. The government loosened restrictions and practically eliminated +them for open source software. While many people are still not happy with the +new regulations, open source encryption software can now flow out of the United +States. The distributors need only notify the U.S. government about where the +software is available. The commercial, proprietary encryption software was not +as lucky. The regulations are now substantially easier on the corporations but +they still require substantial review before an export license is granted. + +The difference in treatment probably did not result from any secret love for +Linux or OpenBSD lurking in the hearts of the regulators in the Bureau of +Export Affairs at the Department of Commerce. The regulators are probably more +afraid of losing a lawsuit brought by Daniel Bernstein. In the latest decision +released in May 1999, two out of three judges on an appeals panel concluded +that the U.S. government's encryption regulations violated Bernstein's rights +of free speech. The government argued that source code is a device not speech. +The case is currently being appealed. The new regulations seem targeted to +specifically address the problems the court found with the current regulations. + +Encryption software is just the beginning of the travails as the government +tries to decide what to do about the free exchange of source code on the Net. +Taxes may be next. While people joke that they would be glad to pay 10 percent +sales tax on the zero dollars they've spent on GNU software, they're missing +some of the deeper philosophical issues behind taxation. Many states don't +officially tax the sale of an object; they demand the money for the use of it. +That means if you buy a stereo in Europe, you're still supposed to pay some +"use tax" when you turn it on in a state. The states try to use this as a +cudgel to demand sales tax revenue from out-of-state catalog and mail-order +shops, but they haven't gotten very far. But this hasn't stopped them from +trying. + +What tax could be due on a piece of free software? Well, the state could simply +look at the software, assign a value to it, and send the user a bill. Many +states do just that with automobiles. You might have a rusted clunker, but they +use the Blue Book value of a car to determine the tax for the year and each +year they send a new bill. This concept proved to be so annoying to citizens of +Virginia that Jim Gilmore won the election for governor with a mandate to +repeal it. But just because he removed it doesn't mean that others will leave +the issue alone. + +If governments ever decide to try to tax free software, the community might be +able to fight off the request by arguing that the tax is "paid" when the +government also uses the free software. If 7 out of 100 Apache servers are +located in government offices, then the government must be getting 7 percent +returned as tax. + +One of the most difficult problems for people is differentiating between wealth +and money. The free software movement creates wealth without moving money. The +easy flow of digital information makes this possible. Some folks can turn this +into money by selling support or assisting others, but most of the time the +wealth sits happily in the public domain. + +Today, the Internet boom creates a great pool of knowledge and intellectual +wealth for the entire society. Some people have managed to convert this into +money by creating websites or tools and marketing them successfully, but the +vast pool of intellectual wealth remains open and accessible to all. Who does +this belong to? Who can tax this? Who controls it? The most forward-thinking +countries will resist the urge to tax it, but how many will really be able to +keep on resisting? + +1~ Wealth + +The writer, P. J. O'Rourke, once pointed out that wealth is a particularly +confusing concept to understand. It had nothing to do with being born in the +right place. Africa is filled with diamonds, gold, platinum, oil, and thousands +of other valuable resources, while Japan has hardly anything underground except +subway tunnels and anthrax from strange cults. Yet Japan is still far wealthier +even after the long swoon of their postbubble economy. + +O'Rourke also pointed out that wealth has nothing to do with raw brains. The +Russians play chess as a national sport while Brentwood is filled with dim +bulbs like the folks we saw during the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Yet poverty +is endemic in Russia, while Brentwood flourishes. Sure, people wait in line for +food in Brentwood like they did in Soviet Russia, but this is only to get a +table at the hottest new restaurant. + +Wealth is a strange commodity, and understanding it keeps economists busy. +Governments need to justify their existence in some way, and lately people in +the United States use their perception of the "economy" as a measure of how +well the government is doing. But many of their attempts to use numbers to +measure wealth and prosperity are doomed to failure. One year, the economists +seem to be frantically battling deflation, then they turn around and rattle on +and on about inflation. They gave up trying to measure the money supply to +follow inflation and seem, at times, to be flying the economy by the seat of +their pants. Of course, they're not really in charge. One minute you can't have +growth without inflation. The next minute you can. It's all a bit like ancient +days of tribal living when the high priest was responsible for dreaming up +reasons why the volcano did or did not erupt. Some days the money supply smiles +upon us, and on other days, she is very, very angry. + +Wealth in the free software world is an even slippier concept. There's not even +any currency to use to keep score. Let's say we wanted to know or at least +guesstimate whether the free source world was wealthy. That's not too hard. +Most of the guys hacking the code just want to drink caffeinated beverages, +play cool games, and write more code. The endless stream of faster and faster +computer boxes makes this as close to a perfect world as there could be. To +make matters better, new T-shirts with clever slogans keep appearing. It's a +nerd utopia. It's Shangri-La for folks who dig computers. + +Of course, deciding whether or not someone is wealthy is not really an +interesting question of economics. It's more about self-esteem and happiness. +Someone who has simple needs can feel pretty wealthy in a shack. Spoiled kids +will never be happy no matter how big their palace. There are plenty of content +people in the free software world, but there are also a few who won't be happy +until they have source code to a huge, wonderful, bug-free OS with the most +features on the planet. They want total world domination. + +A more intriguing question is whether the free source world is wealthier than +the proprietary source world. This starts to get tricky because it puts Apples +up against oranges and tries to make complicated comparisons. Bill Gates is +incredibly wealthy in many senses of the word. He's got billions of dollars, a +huge house, dozens of cars, servants, toys, and who knows what else. Even his +employees have their own private jets. All of the trappings of wealth are +there. Linus Torvalds, on the other hand, says he's pretty happy with about +$100,000 a year, although several IPOs will probably leave him well off. +Microsoft has thousands of programmers who are paid well to write millions of +lines of code a year. Most open source programmers aren't paid much to create +what they do. If money were a good measure, then the proprietary source world +would win hands-down. + +But money is the answer only if you want piles of paper with pictures of famous +Americans on them. Several countries in Latin America generate huge piles of +money from drugs, oil, and other natural resources, but the countries remain +quite poor. The leaders who end up with most of the money might like the huge +disparity, but it has very distinct limitations. When it comes time for college +or medical care, the very rich start flying up to the United States. Johns +Hopkins, a hospital in Baltimore near where I live, provides wonderful medical +service to the poor who live in the surrounding neighborhood. It also has a +special wing with plush suites for rich people who fly in for medical +treatment. Many are potentates and high government officials from poor +countries around the world. + +People in the United States can enjoy the synergies of living near other +well-educated, creative, empowered, and engaged citizens. People in poor +societies can't assume that someone else will design great roads, build +airlines, create cool coffee shops, invent new drugs, or do anything except get +by on the few scraps that slip through the cracks to the great unwashed poor. +The ultrarich in Latin America may think they're getting a great deal by +grabbing all the pie, until they get sick. Then they turn around and fly to +hospitals like Johns Hopkins, a place where the poor of Baltimore also enjoy +quite similar treatment. Wealth is something very different from cash. + +Most folks in the free source world may not have big bank accounts. Those are +just numbers in a computer anyway, and everyone who can program knows how easy +it is to fill a computer with numbers. But the free source world has good +software and the source code that goes along with it. How many times a day must +Bill Gates look at the blue screen of death that splashes across a Windows +computer monitor when the Windows software crashes? How many times does +Torvalds watch Linux crash? Who's better off? Who's wealthier? + +The question might be asked, "Is your software better than it was four years +ago?" That is, does your software do a better job of fetching the mail, moving +the data, processing the words, or spreading the sheets? Is it more intuitive, +more powerful, more stable, more featurerich, more interesting, more +expressive, or just better? + +The answers to these questions can't be measured like money. There's no +numerical quotient that can settle any of these questions. There will always be +some folks who are happy with their early-edition DOS word processor and don't +see the need to reinvent the wheel. There are others who are still unhappy +because their desktop machine can't read their mind. + +For the devoted disciples of the open software mantra, the software in the free +source world is infinitely better. Richard Stallman feels that the GNU code is +better than the Microsoft code just because he has the source code and the +freedom to do what he wants with it. The freedom is more important to him than +whatever super-duper feature comes out of the Microsoft teams. After all, he +can add any feature he wants if he has access to the basic source code. Living +without the source code means waiting like a good peon for the nice masters +from the big corporation to bless us with a bug fix. + +There's no question that people like Stallman love life with source code. A +deeper question is whether the free source realm offers a wealthier lifestyle +for the average computer user. Most people aren't programmers, and most +programmers aren't even the hard-core hackers who love to fiddle with the UNIX +kernel. I've rarely used the source code to Linux, Emacs, or any of the neat +tools on the Net, and many times I've simply recompiled the source code without +looking at it. Is this community still a better deal? + +There are many ways of looking at the question. The simplest is to compare +features. It's hard to deny that the free software world has made great strides +in producing something that is easy to use and quite adaptable. The most +current distributions at the time I'm writing this come with a variety of +packages that provide all of the functionality of Microsoft Windows and more. +The editors are good, the browser is excellent, and the availability of +software is wonderful. The basic Red Hat or Caldera distribution provides a +very rich user interface that is better in many ways than Windows or the Mac. +Some of the slightly specialized products like video software editors and music +programs aren't as rich-looking, but this is bound to change with time. It is +really a very usable world. + +Some grouse that comparing features like this isn't fair to the Mac or Windows +world. The GNOME toolkit, they point out, didn't come out of years of research +and development. The start button and the toolbar look the same because the +GNOME developers were merely copying. The GNU/Linux world didn't create their +own OS, they merely cloned all of the hard commercial research that produced +UNIX. It's always easier to catch up, but pulling ahead is hard. The folks who +want to stay on the cutting edge need to be in the commercial world. It's easy +to come up with a list of commercial products and tools that haven't been +cloned by an open source dude at the time of this writing: streaming video, +vector animation, the full Java API, speech recognition, three dimensional CAD +programs, speech synthesis, and so forth. The list goes on and on. The hottest +innovations will always come from well capitalized start-ups driven by the +carrot of wealth. + +Others point out that the free software world has generated more than its share +of innovation. Most of the Internet was built upon non-proprietary standards +developed by companies with Department of Defense contracts. Stallman's Emacs +continues to be one of the great programs in the world. Many of the projects +like Apache are the first place where new ideas are demonstrated. People who +want to mock up a project find it easier to extend free source software. These +ideas are often reborn as commercial products. While free source users may not +have access to the latest commercial innovations, they have plenty of their own +emerging from the open software world. GNOME isn't just a Windows clone--it +comes with thousands of neat extensions and improvements that can't be found in +Redmond. + +Stallman himself says the GNU project improved many pieces of software when +they rewrote them. He says, "We built on their work, to the extent that we +could legally do so (since we could not use any of their code), but that is the +way progress is made. Almost every GNU program that replaces a piece of Unix +includes improvements." + +Another way to approach the question is to look at people's behavior. Some +argue that companies like Red Hat or organizations like Debian prove that +people need and want some of the commercial world's handholding. They can't +afford to simply download the code and fiddle with it. Most people aren't high +school students doing time for being young. They've got jobs, families, and +hobbies. They pay because paying brings continuity, form, structure, and order +to the free source world. Ultimately, these Red Hat users aren't Stallman +disciples, they're commercial sheep who are just as dependent on Red Hat as the +Windows customers are on Microsoft. + +The counter-argument is that this insight overlooks a crucial philosophical +difference. The Red Hat customers may be slaves like the Microsoft customers, +but they still have important freedoms. Sure, many Americans are wage slaves to +an employer who pays them as little as possible, but they do have the freedom +to go be wage slaves of another employer if they choose. Old-fashioned slaves +faced the whip and death if they tried to take that route. + +Most Linux users don't need to rewrite the source, but they can still benefit +from the freedom. If everyone has the freedom, then someone will come along +with the ability to do it and if the problem is big enough, someone probably +will. In other words, only one person has to fly the X-wing fighter down the +trench and blow up the Death Star. + +Some point out that the free source world is fine-if you've got the time and +the attention to play with it. The source code only helps those who want to +spend the time to engage it. You've got to read it, study it, and practice it +to get any value from it at all. Most of us, however, just want the software to +work. It's like the distinction between people who relax by watching a baseball +game on television and those who join a league to play. The spectators are +largely passive, waiting for the action to be served up to them. The league +players, on the other hand, don't get anything unless they practice, stretch, +push, and hustle. They need to be fully engaged with the game. All of us like +an occasional competition, but we often need a soft couch, a six-pack, and the +remote control. Free software is a nice opportunity to step up to the plate, +but it's not true refreshment for the masses. + +Which is a better world? A polished Disneyland where every action is scripted, +or a pile of Lego blocks waiting for us to give them form? Do we want to be +entertained or do we want to interact? Many free software folks would point out +that free software doesn't preclude you from settling into the bosom of some +corporation for a long winter's nap. Companies like Caldera and Linuxcare are +quite willing to hold your hand and give you the source code. Many other +corporations are coming around to the same notion. Netscape led the way, and +many companies like Apple and Sun will follow along. Microsoft may even do the +same thing by the time you read this. + +Money isn't the same as wealth, and the nature of software emphasizes some of +the ways in which this is true. Once someone puts the hours into creating +software, it costs almost nothing to distribute it to the world. The only real +cost is time because raw computer power and caffeinated beverages are very +inexpensive. + +2~ Wealth and Poverty + +George Gilder laid out the gap between wealth and money in his influential book +Wealth and Poverty. The book emerged in 1981 just before Ronald Reagan took +office, and it became one of the philosophical touchstones for the early years +of the administration. At the time, Gilder's words were aimed at a world where +socialist economies had largely failed but capitalists had never declared +victory. The Soviet Union was sliding deeper into poverty. Sweden was heading +for some of the highest interest rates imaginable. Yet the newspapers and +colleges of the United States refused to acknowledge the failure. Gilder wanted +to dispel the notion that capitalism and socialism were locked into some +eternal yin/yang battle. In his mind, efficient markets and decentralized +capital allocation were a smashing success compared to the plodding bureaucracy +that was strangling the Soviet Union. + +Although Gilder spoke generally about the nature of wealth, his insights are +particularly good at explaining just why things went so right for the open +software world. "Capitalism begins with giving," he says, and explains that +societies flourish when people are free to put their money where they hope it +will do the best. The investments are scattered like seeds and only some find a +good place to grow. Those capitalists who are a mixture of smart and lucky gain +the most and then plow their gains back into the society, repeating the +process. No one knows what will succeed, so encouraging the bold risk-takers +makes sense. + +Gilder's chapter on gift-giving is especially good at explaining the success of +the free software world. Capitalism, he explains, is not about greed. It's +about giving to people with the implicit knowledge that they'll return the +favor severalfold. He draws heavily on anthropology and the writings of +academics like Claude Lévi-Strauss to explain how the best societies create +capital through gifts that come with the implicit debt that people give +something back. The competition between people to give better and better gifts +drives society to develop new things that improve everyone's life. + +Gilder and others have seen the roots of capital formation and wealth creation +in this gift-giving. "The unending offerings of entrepreneurs, investing +capital, creating products, building businesses, inventing jobs, + +accumulating inventories--all long before any return is received, all without +assurance that the enterprise will not fail--constitute a pattern of giving +that dwarfs in extent and in essential generosity any primitive rite of +exchange. Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism," he +writes. + +The socialists who've railed against the injustices and brutalities of market +capitalism at work would disagree with the strength of his statement, but there +are plenty of good examples. The American Civil War was the battle between the +northern states where workers were occasionally chained to looms during their +shifts and the southern states where the workers were always slaves. In the +end, the least cruel society won, in part because of the strength of its +industry and its ability to innovate. Companies that discovered this fact +flourished and those that didn't eventually failed. By the end of the 20th +century, the demand for labor in the United States was so high that companies +were actively competing in offering plush treatment for their workers. + +The free software world, of course, is a perfect example of the altruistic +nature of the potlatch. Software is given away with no guarantee of any return. +People are free to use the software and change it in any way. The GNU Public +License is not much different from the social glue that forces tribe members to +have a larger party the next year and give back even more. If someone ends up +creating something new or interesting after using GPL code as a foundation, +then they become required to give the code back to the tribe. + +Of course, it's hard to get much guidance from Gilder over whether the GPL is +better than the BSD license. He constantly frames investment as a "gift" to try +to deemphasize the greed of capitalism. Of course, anyone who has been through +a mortgage foreclosure or a debt refinancing knows that the banks don't act as +if they've given away a gift. There are legal solutions for strong-arming the +folks who don't give back enough. He was trying to get readers to forget these +tactics a bit and get them to realize that after all of the arms are broken, +the bank is still left with whatever the loan produced. There were no ultimate +guarantees that all of the money would come back. + +Gilder smooths over this with a sharply drawn analogy. Everyone, he says, has +experienced the uncomfortable feeling that comes from getting a gift that is +the wrong size, the wrong style, or just wrong altogether. "Indeed, it is the +very genius of capitalism that it recognizes the difficulty of successful +giving, understands the hard work and sacrifice entailed in the mandate to help +one's fellow men, and offers a practical way of living a life of effective +charity," he writes. It's not enough to give a man a fish, because teaching him +to fish is a much better gift. A fish farm that hires a man and gives him stock +options may be offering the highest form of giving around. + +Gilder does note that the cycle of gifts alone is not enough to build a strong +economy. He suggests that the bigger and bigger piles of coconuts and whale +blubber were all that emerged from the endless rounds of potlatching. They were +great for feasting, but the piles would rot and go stale before they were +consumed. The successful society reinterpreted the cycle of gifts as investment +and dividends, and the introduction of money made it possible for people to +easily move the returns from one investment to the start of another. This +liquidity lets the cycles be more and more efficient and gives people a place +to store their wealth. + +Of course, Gilder admits that money is only a temporary storage device. It's +just a tool for translating the wealth of one sector of the economy into the +wealth of another. It's just a wheelbarrow or an ox cart. If society doesn't +value the contributions of the capitalists, the transfer will fail. If the +roads are too rocky or blocked by too many toll collectors, the carts won't +make the trip. + +At first glance, none of this matters to the free software world. The authors +give away their products, and as long as someone pays a minimal amount for +storage the software will not decay. The web is filled with source code +repositories and strongholds that let people store away their software and let +others download it at will. These cost a minimal amount to keep up and the cost +is dropping every day. There's no reason to believe that the original work of +Stallman will be lost to the disease, pestilence, wear, and decay that have +cursed physical objects like houses, clothes, and food. + +But despite the beautiful permanence of software, everyone knows that it goes +bad. Programmers don't use the term "bit rot" for fun. As operating systems +mature and other programs change, the old interfaces start to slowly break +down. One program may depend upon the operating system to print out a file in +response to a command. Then a new version of the printing code is revved up to +add fancier fonts and more colors. Suddenly the interface doesn't work exactly +right. Over time, these thousands of little changes can ruin the heart of a +good program in much the same way worms can eat the hull of a wooden ship. + +The good news is that free source software is well positioned to fix these +problems. Distributing the source code with the software lets others do their +best to keep the software running in a changing environment. John Gilmore, for +instance, says that he now embraces the GPL because earlier experiments with +totally free software created versions without accompanying source code. + +The bad news is that Gilder has a point about capital formation. Richard +Stallman did a great job writing Emacs and GCC, but the accolades weren't as +easy to spend as cash. Stallman was like the guy with a pile of whale meat in +his front yard. He could feast for a bit, but you can only eat so much whale +meat. Stallman could edit all day and night with Emacs. He could revel in the +neat features and cool Emacs LISP hacks that friends and disciples would +contribute back to the project. But he couldn't translate that pile of whale +meat into a free OS that would let him throw away UNIX and Windows. + +While Stallman didn't have monetary capital, he did have plenty of intellectual +capital. By 1991, his GNU project had built many well respected tools that were +among the best in their class. Torvalds had a great example of what the GPL +could do before he chose to protect his Linux kernel with the license. He also +had a great set of tools that the GNU project created. + +The GNU project and the Free Software Foundation were able to raise money just +on the strength of their software. Emacs and GCC opened doors. People gave +money that flowed through to the programmers. While there was no cash flow from +software sales, the project found that it could still function quite well. + +Stallman's reputation also can be worth more than money when it opens the right +doors. He continues to be blessed by the implicit support of MIT, and many +young programmers are proud to contribute their work to his projects. It's a +badge of honor to be associated with either Linux or the Free Software +Foundation. Programmers often list these details on their résumés, and the +facts have weight. + +The reputation also helps him start new projects. I could write the skeleton of +a new double-rotating, buzzword-enhanced editor, label it "PeteMACS," and post +it to the Net hoping everyone would love it, fix it, and extend it. It could +happen. But I'm sure that Stallman would find it much easier to grab the +hearts, minds, and spare cycles of programmers because he's got a great +reputation. That may not be as liquid as money, but it can be better. + +The way to transfer wealth from project to project is something that the free +software world doesn't understand well, but it has a good start. Microsoft +struck it rich with DOS and used that money to build Windows. Now it has been +frantically trying to use this cash cow to create other new businesses. They +push MSN, the Microsoft Network, and hope it will stomp AOL. They've built many +content-delivery vehicles like Slate and MSNBC. They've created +data-manipulation businesses like Travelocity. Bill Gates can simply dream a +dream and put 10,000 programmers to work creating it. He has serious +intellectual liquidity. + +In this sense, the battle between free and proprietary software development is +one between pure giving and strong liquidity. The GPL world gives with no +expectation of return and finds that it often gets a return of a thousand times +back from a grateful world of programmers. The proprietary world, on the other +hand, can take its profits and redirect them quickly to take on another +project. It's a battle of the speed of easy, unfettered, open source +cooperation versus the lightning speed of money flowing to make things work. + +Of course, companies like Red Hat lie in a middle ground. The company charges +money for support and plows this money back into improving the product. It pays +several engineers to devote their time to improving the entire Linux product. +It markets its work well and is able to charge a premium for what people are +able to get for free. + +No one knows if the way chosen by companies like Red Hat and Caldera and groups +like the Free Software Foundation is going to be successful in the long run. +Competition can be a very effective way of driving down the price of a product. +Some worry that Red Hat will eventually be driven out of business by cheap $2 +CDs that rip off the latest distribution. For now, though, the success of these +companies shows that people are willing to pay for hand-holding that works +well. + +A deeper question is whether the open or proprietary model does a better job of +creating a world where we want to live. Satisfying our wants is the ultimate +measure of a wealthy society. Computers, cyberspace, and the Internet are +rapidly taking up a larger and larger part of people's time. Television +viewership is dropping, often dramatically, as people turn to life online. The +time spent in cyberspace is going to be important. _1 Stallman wrote in BYTE +magazine in 1986, I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and +information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control +whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from +sharing it, is sabotage. It is an activity that benefits the person that does +it at the cost of impoverishing all of society. One person gains one dollar by +destroying two dollars' worth of wealth. + +No one knows what life online will look like in 5 or 10 years. It will +certainly include web pages and e-mail, but no one knows who will pay how much. +The cost structures and the willingness to pay haven't been sorted out. Some +companies are giving away some products so they can make money with others. +Many are frantically giving away everything in the hope of attracting enough +eyeballs to eventually make some money. + +The proprietary model rewards risk-takers and gives the smartest, fastest +programmers a pile of capital they can use to play the game again. It rewards +the ones who satisfy our needs and gives them cash they can use to build newer +and bigger models. The distribution of power is pretty meritocratic, although +it can break down when monopolies are involved. + +But the open source solution certainly provides good software to everyone who +wants to bother to try to use it. The free price goes a long way to spreading +its bounty to a wide variety of people. No one is excluded and no one is locked +out of contributing to the commonweal because they don't have the right +pedigree, education, racial heritage, or hair color. Openness is a powerful +tool. + +Richard Stallman told me, "Why do you keep talking about 'capital'? None of +this has anything to do with capital. Linus didn't need capital to develop a +kernel, he just wrote it. We used money to hire hackers to work on the kernel, +but describing that as capital is misleading. + +"The reason why free software is such a good idea is that developing software +does not really need a lot of money. If we cannot 'raise capital' the way the +proprietary software companies do, that is not really a problem. + +"We do develop a lot of free software. If a theory says we can't, you have to +look for the flaws in the theory." + +One of the best ways to illustrate this conundrum is to look at the experiences +of the workers at Hotmail after they were acquired by Microsoft. Sure, many of +them were overjoyed to receive so much for their share in an organization. Many +might even do the same thing again if they had the choice. Many, though, are +frustrated by their new position as corporate citizens whose main job is +augmenting Microsoft's bottom line. + +One Hotmail founder told the PBS Online columnist Robert Cringely, "All we got +was money. There was no recognition, no fun. Microsoft got more from the deal +than we did. They knew nothing about the Internet. MSN was a failure. We had 10 +million users, yet we got no respect at all from Redmond. Bill Gates +specifically said, 'Don't screw-up Hotmail,' yet that's what they did." + +1~ Future + +David Henkel-Wallace sat quietly in a chair in a Palo Alto coffee shop +explaining what he did when he worked at the free software firm Cygnus. He +brought his new daughter along in a baby carriage and kept her parked +alongside. Cygnus, of course, is one of the bigger successes in the free +software world. He helped make some real money building and sustaining the free +compiler, GCC, that Richard Stallman built and gave away. Cygnus managed to +make the real money even after they gave away all of their work. + +In the middle of talking about Cygnus and open source, he points to his child +and says, "What I'm really worried about is she'll grow up in a world where +software continues to be as buggy as it is today." Other parents might be +worried about the economy, gangs, guns in schools, or the amount of sex in +films, but Henkel-Wallace wants to make sure that random software crashes start +to disappear. + +He's done his part. The open source movement thrives on the GCC compiler, and +Cygnus managed to find a way to make money on the process of keeping the +compiler up to date. The free operating systems like Linux or FreeBSD are great +alternatives for people today. They're small, fast, and very stable, unlike the +best offerings of Microsoft or Apple. If the open software movement continues +to succeed and grow, his child could grow up into a world where the blue screen +of death that terrorizes Microsoft users is as foreign to them as manual +typewriters. + +No one knows if the open software world will continue to grow. Some people are +very positive and point out that all the features that made it possible for the +free OSs to bloom are not going away. If anything, the forces of open exchange +and freedom will only accelerate as more people are drawn into the mix. More +people mean more bug fixes, which means better software. + +Others are not so certain, and this group includes many of the people who are +deeply caught up in the world of open source. Henkel-Wallace, for instance, +isn't so sure that the source code makes much difference when 99 percent of the +people don't program. Sure, Cygnus had great success sharing source code with +the programmers who used GCC, but all of those guys knew how to read the code. +What difference will the source code make to the average user who just wants to +read his e-mail? Someone who can't read the source code isn't going to +contribute much back to the project and certainly isn't going to put much value +in getting it. A proprietary company like Microsoft may be able to maintain a +broad base of loyalty just by offering better hand-holding for the folks who +can't program. + +Free software stands at an interesting crossroads as this book is being +written. It won over a few hackers in garages in the early 1990s. By the +mid-1990s, webmasters embraced it as a perfectly good option. Now everyone +wonders whether it will conquer the desktop in the next century. + +It's always tempting for an author to take the classic TV news gambit and end +the story with the earnest punt phrase, "Whether this will happen remains to be +seen. "That may be the most fair way to approach reporting the news, but it's +not as much fun. I'm going to boldly predict that open source software will win +the long-term war against proprietary companies, but it will be a bloody war +and it will be more costly than people expect. Over the next several years, +lawyers will spend hours arguing cases; people will spend time in jail; and +fortunes will be lost to the struggle. + +While it seems difficult to believe, some people have already spent time in +jail for their part in the free software revolution. Kevin Mitnick was arrested +in 1995 amid accusations that he stole millions if not billions of dollars' +worth of source code. There was no trial, nor even a bail hearing. Finally, +after almost five years in prison, Mitnick pled guilty to some charges and +received a sentence that was only a few months longer than the time he served +while waiting for a trial. Mitnick was accused of stealing millions of dollars +from companies by breaking into computers and stealing copies of their source +code. + +In the statement he made following his release, he said, ". . . my crimes were +simple crimes of trespass. I've acknowledged since my arrest in February 1995 +that the actions I took were illegal, and that I committed invasions of +privacy--I even offered to plead guilty to my crimes soon after my arrest." + +He continued, "The fact of the matter is that I never deprived the companies +involved in this case of anything. I never committed fraud against these +companies. And there is not a single piece of evidence suggesting that I did +so." + +This trespass, of course, would be breaking the rules. The irony is that in +1999, Sun announced that it was sharing its source code with the world. They +begged everyone to look at it and probe it for weaknesses. The tide of opinion +changed and Sun changed with it. + +Of course, breaking into a company's computer system will always be bad, but +it's hard to view Mitnick's alleged crimes as a terrible thing. Now that source +code is largely free and everyone digs public sharing, he begins to look more +like a moonshine manufacturer during Prohibition. The free source revolution +has given him a rakish charm. Who knows if he deserves it, but the zeitgeist +has changed. + +There are more arrests on the way. In January 2000, a young Norwegian man was +detained by the Norwegian police who wanted to understand his part in the +development of software to unscramble the video data placed on DVD disks. +Motion picture producers who released their movies in this format were worried +that a tool known as DeCSS, which was floating around the Internet, would make +it easier for pirates to make unlicensed copies of their movies. + +The man, Jan Johansen, did not write the tool, but merely helped polish and +circulate it on the Net. News reports suggest an anonymous German programmer +did the actual heavy lifting. + +Still, Johansen made a great target for the police, who never officially +arrested him, although they did take him in for questioning. + +At this writing, it's not clear if Johansen officially broke any laws. Some +argue that he violated the basic strictures against breaking and entering. +Others argue that he circulated trade secrets that were not legimately +obtained. + +Still others see the motion picture industry's response as an effort to control +the distribution of movies and the machines that display them. A pirate doesn't +need to use the DeCSS tool to unlock the data on a DVD disk. They just make a +verbatim copy of the disk without bothering with the encryption. That leads +others to suspect that the true motive is to sharply limit the companies that +produce machines that can display DVD movies. + +One group that is locked out of the fray is the Linux community. While software +for playing DVD movies exists for Macintoshes and PCs, there's none for Linux. +DeCSS should not be seen as a hacker's tool, but merely a device that allows +Linux users to watch the legitimate copies of the DVDs that they bought. +Locking out Linux is like locking in Apple and Microsoft. + +The battle between the motion picture community and the Linux world is just +heating up as I write this. There will be more lawsuits and prehaps more jail +time ahead for the developers who produced DeCSS and the people who shared it +through their websites. + +Most of the battles are not so dramatic. They're largely technical, and the +free source world should win these easily. Open source solutions haven't had +the same sophisticated graphical interface as Apple or Windows products. Most +of the programmers who enjoy Linux or the various versions of BSD don't need +the graphical interface and may not care about it. The good news is that +projects like KDE and GNOME are great tools already. The open source world must +continue to tackle this area and fight to produce something that the average +guy can use. + +The good news is that open source software usually wins most technical battles. +The free versions of UNIX are already much more stable than the products coming +from Microsoft and Apple, and it seems unlikely that this will change. The +latest version of Apple's OS has free versions of BSD in its core. That battle +is won. Microsoft's version of NT can beat these free OSs in some extreme +cases, but these are getting to be rarer by the day. Sun's Solaris is still +superior in some ways, but the company is sharing the source code with its +users in a way that emulates the open source world. More attention means more +programmers and more bug fixes. Technical struggles are easy for open source to +win. + +Microsoft's greatest asset is the installed base of Windows, and it will try to +use this to the best of its ability to defeat Linux. At this writing, Microsoft +is rolling out a new version of the Domain Name Server (DNS), which acts like a +telephone book for the Internet. In the past, many of the DNS machines were +UNIX boxes because UNIX helped define the Internet. Windows 2000 includes new +extensions to DNS that practically force offices to switch over to Windows +machines to run DNS. Windows 2000 just won't work as well with an old Linux or +UNIX box running DNS. + +This is a typical strategy for Microsoft and one that is difficult, but not +impossible, for open source projects to thwart. If the cost of these new +servers is great enough, some group of managers is going to create its own open +source clone of the modified DNS server. This has happened time and time again, +but not always with great success. Linux boxes come with Samba, a program that +lets Linux machines act as file servers. It works well and is widely used. +Another project, WINE, started with the grand design of cloning all of the much +more complicated Windows API used by programmers. It is a wonderful project, +but it is far from finished. The size and complexity make a big difference. + +Despite these tactics, Microsoft (and other proprietary companies) will +probably lose their quest to dominate the standards on the Internet. They can +only devote a few programmers to each monopolistic grab. The free software +world has many programmers willing to undertake projects. The numbers are now +great enough that the cloners should be able to handle anything Microsoft sends +its way. + +The real battles will be political and legal. While the computer world seems to +move at a high speed with lots of constant turnover, there's plenty of inertia +built into the marketplace. Many people were rather surprised to find that +there was plenty of COBOL, FORTRAN, and other old software happily running +along without any idea of how to store a date with more than two digits. While +Y2K incidents fell far short of the media's hype, the number of systems that +required reprogramming was still much larger than conventional wisdom +predicted. IBM continues to sell mainframes to customers who started buying +mainframes in the 1960s. Once people choose one brand or product or computer +architecture, they often stay with it forever. + +This is bad news for the people who expect the free OSs to take over the +desktop in the next 5 or 10 years. Corporate managers who keep the machines on +people's desktops hate change. Change means reeducation. Change means +installing new software throughout the plant. Change means teaching folks a new +set of commands for running their word processors. Change means work. People +who manage the computer networks in offices get graded on the number of +glitches that stop workflow. Why abandon Microsoft now? + +If Microsoft has such an emotional stranglehold on the desktop and the computer +industry takes forever to change, will free software ever grow beyond the 10 +million or so desktops owned by programmers and their friends? + +Its strongest lever will be price. Freedom is great, but corporations respond +better to a cost that is close to, if not exactly, zero. Big companies like +Microsoft are enormous cash engines. They need a huge influx of cash to pay the +workers, and they can't let their stock price slip. Microsoft's revenues +increased with a precision that is rare in corporate America. Some stock +analysts joke that the stock price suggests that Microsoft's revenues will grow +faster than 10 percent forever. In the past, the company accomplished this by +absorbing more and more of the market while finding a way to charge more and +more for the software they supply. Businesses that lived quite well with +Windows 95 are now running Windows NT. Businesses that ran NT are now using +special service packs that handle network management and data functions. The +budget for computers just keeps going up, despite the fact that hardware costs +go down. + +Something has to give. It's hard to know how much of a lever the price will be. +If the revenue at Microsoft stops growing, then the company's stock price could +take a sharp dive. The company manages continually to produce greater and +greater revenues each quarter with smooth precision. The expectation of the +growth is built into the price. Any hiccup could bring the price tumbling down. + +The biggest question is how much people are willing to pay to continue to use +Microsoft products. Retooling an office is an expensive proposition. The cost +of buying new computers and software is often smaller than the cost of +reeducation. While the free software world is much cheaper, shifting is not an +easy proposition. Only time will tell how much people are willing to pay for +their reluctance to change. + +The first cracks are already obvious. Microsoft lost the server market to +Apache and Linux on the basis of price and performance. Web server managers are +educated computer users who can make their own decisions without having to +worry about the need to train others. Hidden computers like this are easy +targets, and the free software world will gobble many of them up. More users +mean more bug fixes and propagations of better code. + +The second crack in Microsoft's armor will be appliance computers. Most people +want to browse the web and exchange some e-mail. The basic distribution from +Red Hat or FreeBSD is good enough. Many people are experimenting with creating +computers that are defined by the job they do, not the operating system or the +computer chip. Free source packages should have no trouble winning many battles +in this arena. The price is right and the manufacturers have to hire the +programmers anyway. + +The third breach will be young kids. They have no previous allegiances and are +eager to learn new computer technology. Microsoft may ask "Where do you want to +go today?" but they don't want to talk with someone whose answer is "The guts +of your OS."The best and brightest 13-year-olds are already the biggest fans of +free software. They love the power and the complete access. + +The fourth crack will be the large installations in businesses that are +interested in competitive bidding. Microsoft charges a bundle for each seat in +a company, and anyone bidding for these contracts will be able to charge much +less if they ship a free OS. It's not uncommon for a company to pay more than a +million dollars to Microsoft for license fees. There's plenty of room for price +competition when the bill gets that high. Companies that don't want to change +will be hard to move from Windows, but ones that are price-sensitive will be +moved. + +Of course, free software really isn't free. A variety of companies offering +Linux support need to charge something to pay their bills. Distributions like +Red Hat or FreeBSD may not cost much, but they often need some customization +and hand-holding. Is a business just trading one bill for another? Won't Linux +support end up costing the same thing as Microsoft's product? + +Many don't think so. Microsoft currently wastes billions of dollars a year +expanding its business in unproductive ways that don't yield new profits. It +spent millions writing a free web browser to compete with Netscape's and then +they just gave it away. They probably gave up millions of dollars and untold +bargaining chips when they twisted the arms of competitors into shunning +Netscape. The company's successful products pay for these excursions. At the +very least, a free OS operation would avoid these costs. + +Free OS systems are inherently cheaper to run. If you have the source, you +might be able to debug the problem yourself. You probably can't, but it doesn't +hurt to try. Companies running Microsoft products can't even try. The free flow +of information will help keep costs down. + +Of course, there are also hard numbers. An article in Wired by Andrew Leonard +comes with numbers originally developed by the Gartner Group. A 25-person +office would cost $21,453 to outfit with Microsoft products and $5,544.70 to +outfit with Linux. This estimate is a bit conservative. Most of the Linux cost +is debatable because it includes almost $3,000 for 10 service calls to a Linux +consultant and about $2,500 for Applixware, an office suite that does much of +the same job as Microsoft Office. A truly cheap and technically hip office +could make do with the editor built into Netscape and one of the free +spreadsheets available for Linux. It's not hard to imagine someone doing the +same job for about $3, which is the cost of a cheap knockoff of Red Hat's +latest distribution. + +Of course, it's important to realize that free software still costs money to +support. But so does Microsoft's. The proprietary software companies also +charge to answer questions and provide reliable information. It's not clear +that Linux support is any more expensive to offer. + +Also, many offices large and small keep computer technicians on hand. There's +no reason to believe that Linux technicians will be any more or less expensive +than Microsoft technicians. Both answer questions. Both keep the systems +running. At least the Linux tech can look at the source code. + +The average home user and small business user will be the last to go. + +These users will be the most loyal to Microsoft because they will find it +harder than anyone else to move. They can't afford to hire their own Linux +gurus to redo the office, and they don't have the time to teach themselves. + +These are the main weaknesses for Microsoft, and the company is already taking +them seriously. I think many underestimate how bloody the battle is about to +become. If free source software is able to stop and even reverse revenue growth +for Microsoft, there are going to be some very rich people with deep pockets +who feel threatened. Microsoft is probably going to turn to the same legal +system that gave it such grief and find some wedge to drive into the Linux +community. Their biggest weapon will be patents and copyright to stop the +cloners. + +Any legal battle will be an interesting fight. On the one hand, the free +software community is diverse and spread out among many different entities. +There's no central office and no one source that could be brought down. This +means Microsoft would fight a war on many fronts, and this is something that's +emotionally and intellectually taxing for anyone, no matter how rich or +powerful. + +On the other hand, the free software community has no central reservoir of +money or strength. Each small group could be crippled, one by one, by a nasty +lawsuit. Groups like OpenBSD are always looking for donations. The Free +Software Foundation has some great depth and affection, but its budget is a +tiny fraction of Sun's or Microsoft's. Legal bills are real, and lawyers have a +way of making them blossom. There may be hundreds of different targets for +Microsoft, but many of them won't take much firepower to knock out. + +The free software community is not without some deep pockets itself. Many of +the traditional hardware companies like IBM, Compaq, Gateway, Sun, +Hewlett-Packard, and Apple can make money by selling either hardware or +software. They've been hurt in recent years by Microsoft's relentless +domination of the desktop. Microsoft negotiated hard contracts with each of the +companies that controlled what the user saw. The PC manufacturers received +little ability to customize their product. Microsoft turned them into commodity +manufacturers and stripped away their control. Each of these companies should +see great potential in moving to a free OS and adopting it. There is no extra +cost, no strange meetings, no veiled threats, no arm-twisting. + +Suddenly, brands like Hewlett-Packard or IBM can mean something when they're +slapped on a PC. Any goofball in a garage can put a circuit board in a box and +slap on Microsoft Windows. A big company like HP or IBM could do extra work to +make sure the Linux distribution on the box worked well with the components and +provided a glitch-free existence for the user. + +The hardware companies will be powerful allies for the free software realm +because the companies will be the ones who benefit economically the most from +the free software licenses. When all of the software is free, no one controls +it and this strips away many of Microsoft's traditional ways of applying +leverage. Microsoft, for instance, knocked the legs out from underneath +Netscape by giving away Internet Explorer for free. Now the free software world +is using the same strategy against Microsoft. It's hard for them to undercut +free for most users. + +The university system is a less stable ally. While the notion of free exchange +of information is still floating around many of the nation's campuses, the +places are frighteningly corporate and profit-minded. Microsoft has plenty of +cash at its disposal and it hasn't been shy about spreading it around places +like MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. The computer science departments on those +campuses are the recipients of brand-new buildings compliments of Bill Gates. +These gifts are hard to ignore. + +Microsoft will probably avoid a direct confrontation with the academic +tradition of the institutions and choose to cut their prices as low as +necessary to dominate the desktops. Universities will probably be given "free," +tax-deductible donations of software whenever they stray far from the +Microsoft-endorsed solution. Lab managers and people who make decisions about +the computing infrastructure of the university will probably get neat +"consulting" contracts from Microsoft or its buddies. This will probably not +mean total domination, but it will buy a surprisingly large amount of +obedience. + +Despite these gifts, free software will continue to grow on the campuses. +Students often have little cash and Microsoft doesn't get any great tax +deduction by giving gifts to individual students (that's income). The smartest +kids in the dorms will continue to run Linux. Many labs do cutting-edge work +that requires customized software. These groups will naturally be attracted to +free source code because it makes their life easier. It will be difficult for +Microsoft to counteract the very real attraction of free software. + +Of course, Microsoft is not without its own arms. Microsoft still has patent +law on its side, and this may prove to be a very serious weapon. The law allows +the patent holder the exclusive right to determine who uses an idea or +invention over the course of the patent, which is now 20 years from the first +filing date. That means the patent holder can sue anyone who makes a product +that uses the invention. It also means that the patent holder can sue someone +who simply cobbles up the invention in his basement and uses the idea without +paying anything to anyone. This means that even someone who distributes the +software for free or uses the software can be liable for damages. + +In the past, many distrusted the idea of software patents because the patent +system wasn't supposed to allow you to lay claim to the laws of nature. This +interpretation fell by the wayside as patent lawyers argued successfully that +software combined with a computer was a separate machine and machines were +eligible for protection. + +Today, it is quite easy to get patent protection for new ideas on how to +structure a computer network, an operating system, or a software tool. The only +requirement is that they're new and nonobvious. Microsoft has plenty of these. + +If things go perfectly for Microsoft, the company will be able to pull out one +or two patents from its huge portfolio and use these to sue Red Hat, Walnut +Creek, and a few of the other major distributors. Ideally, this patent would +cover some crucial part of the Linux or BSD operating system. After the first +few legal bills started arriving on the desk of the Red Hat or Walnut Creek +CEO, the companies would have to settle by quitting the business. Eventually, +all of the distributors of Linux would crumble and return to the small camps in +the hills to lick their wounds. At least, that's probably the dream of some of +Microsoft's greatest legal soldiers. + +This maneuver is far from a lock for Microsoft because the free software world +has a number of good defenses. The first is that the Linux and BSD world do a +good job of publicizing their advances. Any patent holder must file the patent +before someone else publishes their ideas. The Linux discussion groups and +source distributions are a pretty good public forum. The ideas and patches +often circulate publicly long before they make their way into a stable version +of the kernel. That means that the patent holders will need to be much farther +ahead than the free software world. + +Linux and the free software world are often the cradle of new ideas. University +students use open source software all the time. It's much easier to do way cool +things if you've got access to the source. Sure, Microsoft has some smart +researchers with great funding, but can they compete with all the students? + +Microsoft's ability to dominate the patent world may be hurt by the nature of +the game. Filing the application first or publishing an idea first is all that +matters in the patent world. Producing a real product is hard work that is +helped by the cash supply of Microsoft. Coming up with ideas and circulating +them is much easier than building real tools that people can use. + +The second defense is adaptability. The free software distributions can simply +strip out the offending code. The Linux and BSD disks are very modular because +they come from a variety of different sources. The different layers and tools +come from different authors, so they are not highly integrated. This makes it +possible to remove one part without ruining the entire system. + +Stallman's GNU project has been dealing with patents for a long time and has +some experience programming around them. The GNU Zip program, for instance, was +written to avoid the patents on the Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm claimed by +UNISYS and IBM. The software is well-written and it works as well as, if not +better than, the algorithm it replaces. Now it's pretty standard on the web and +very popular because it is open source and patent-free. It's the politically +correct compression algorithm to use because it's open to everyone. + +It will be pretty difficult for a company like Microsoft to find a patent that +will allow it to deal a fatal blow to either the Linux or BSD distributions. +The groups will just clip out the offending code and then work around it. + +Microsoft's greatest hope is to lock up the next generation of computing with +patents. New technologies like streaming multimedia or Internet audio are still +up for grabs. While people have been studying these topics in universities for +some time, the Linux community is further behind. Microsoft will try to +dominate these areas with crucial patents that affect how operating systems +deal with this kind of data. Their success at this is hard to predict. In any +event, while they may be able to cripple the adoption of some new technologies +like streaming multimedia, they won't be able to smash the entire world. + +The third and greatest defense for the free source ideology is a loophole in +the patent law that may also help many people in the free software world. It is +not illegal to use a patented idea if you're in the process of doing some +research on how to improve the state of the art in that area. The loophole is +very narrow, but many users of free software might fall within it. All of the +distributions come with source code, and many of the current users are +programmers experimenting with the code. Most of these programmers give their +work back to the project and this makes most of their work pretty +noncommercial. The loophole probably wouldn't protect the corporations that are +using free software simply because it is cheap, but it would still be large +enough to allow innovation to continue. A non-commercial community built up +around research could still thrive even if Microsoft manages to come up with +some patents that are very powerful. + +The world of patents can still constrain the world of free software. Many +companies work hard on developing new technology and then rely upon patents to +guarantee them a return on investment. These companies have trouble working +well with the free software movement because there's no revenue stream to use. +A company like Adobe can integrate some neat new streaming technology or +compression algorithm and add the cost of a patent license to the price of the +product. A free software tool can't. + +This does not preclude the free software world from using some ideas or +software. There's no reason why Linux can't run proprietary application +software that costs money. Perhaps people will sell licenses for some +distributions and patches. Still, the users must shift mental gears when they +encounter these packages. + +There are no easy solutions to patent problems. The best news is that +proprietary, patented technology rarely comes to dominate the marketplace. +There are often ways to work around solutions, and other engineers are great at +finding them. Sure, there will be the occasional brilliant lightbulb, +transistor, radio, or other solution that is protected by a broad patent, but +these will be relatively rare. + +There are a few things that the open source community can do to protect +themselves against patents. Right now, many of the efforts at developing open +source solutions come after technology emerges. For instance, developing +drivers for DVD disks is one of the current challenges at the time that I'm +writing this chapter even though the technology has been shipping with many +midpriced computers for about a year. + +There is no reason why some ivory-tower, blue-sky research can't take place in +a patent-free world of open source. Many companies already allow their +researchers to attend conferences and present papers on their open work and +classify this as "precompetitive" research. Standards like JPEG or MPEG emerge +from committees that pledge not to patent their work. There is no reason why +these loose research groups can't be organized around a quasi-BSD or GNU +license that forces development to be kept in the open. + +These research groups will probably be poorly funded but much more agile than +the corporate teams or even the academic teams. They might be organized around +a public newsgroup or mailing list that is organized for the purpose of +publicly disclosing ideas. Once they're officially disclosed, no patents can be +issued on them. Many companies like IBM and Xerox publish paper journals for +defensive purposes. + +Still, the debate about patents will be one that will confound the entire +software industry for some time. Many for-profit, proprietary firms are thrown +for a loop by some of the patents granted to their competitors. The open source +world will have plenty of allies who want to remake the system. + +The patents are probably the most potent legal tool that proprietary software +companies can use to threaten the open source world. There is no doubt that the +companies will use it to fend off low-rent competition. + +One of the biggest challenges for the free software community will be +developing the leadership to undertake these battles. It is one thing to mess +around in a garage with your buddies and hang out in some virtual +he-man/Microsoft-haters clubhouse cooking up neat code. It's a very different +challenge to actually achieve the world domination that the Linux world muses +about. When I started writing the book, I thought that an anthem for the free +software movement might be Spinal Tap's "Flower People." Now I think it's going +to be Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," which warns, "There's +something happening here / What it is ain't exactly clear." + +Tim O'Reilly emphasizes this point. When asked about some of the legal battles, +he said, "There's definitely going to be a war over this stuff. When I look +back at previous revolutions, I realize how violent they became. They +threatened to burn Galileo at the stake. They said 'Take it back,' and he +backed down. But it didn't make any difference in the end. But just because +there's a backlash doesn't mean that open source won't win in the long run." + +Companies like Microsoft don't let markets and turf just slip away. They have a +large budget for marketing their software. They know how to generate positive +press and plenty of fear in the hearts of managers who must make decisions. +They understand the value of intellectual property, and they aren't afraid of +dispatching teams of lawyers to ensure that their markets remain defended. + +The open source community, however, is not without a wide variety of strengths, +although it may not be aware of them. In fact, this diffuse power and lack of +self-awareness and organization is one of its greatest strengths. There is no +powerful leadership telling the open source community "Thou shalt adopt these +libraries and write to this API." The people in the trenches are testing code, +proposing solutions, and getting their hands dirty while making decisions. The +realm is not a juggernaut, a bandwagon, a dreadnought, or an unstoppable +freight train roaring down the track. It's creeping kudzu, an algae bloom, a +teenage fad, and a rising tide mixed together. + +The strength of the free price shouldn't be underestimated. While the cost +isn't really nothing after you add up the price of paying Red Hat, Slackware, +SuSE, Debian, or someone else to provide support, it's still much cheaper than +the proprietary solutions on the market. Price isn't the only thing on people's +minds, but it will always be an important one. + +In the end, though, I think the free software world will flourish because of +the ideals it embraces. The principles of open debate, broad circulation, easy +access, and complete disclosure are like catnip to kids who crackle with +intelligence. Why would anyone want to work in a corporate cubicle with a +Dilbert boss when you can spend all night hacking on the coolest tools? Why +would you want to join some endless corporate hierarchy when you can dive in +and be judged on the value of your code? For these reasons, the free software +world can always count on recruiting the best and the brightest. + +This process will continue because the Dilbert-grade bosses aren't so dumb. I +know more than a few engineers and early employees at startup firms who +received very small stock allowances at IPO time. One had written three of the +six systems that were crucial to the company's success on the web. Yet he got +less than 1 percent of the shares allocated to the new CEO who had just joined +the company. The greed of the non-programming money changers who plumb the +venture capital waters will continue to poison the experience of the +programmers and drive many to the world of free software. If they're not going +to get anything, they might as well keep access to the code they write. + +The open source ideals are also strangely empowering because they force +everyone to give up their will to power and control. Even if Richard Stallman, +Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, and everyone else in the free software world +decides that you're a scumbag who should be exiled to Siberia, they can't take +away the code from you. That freedom is a very powerful drug. + +The free software movement is rediscovering the same notions that drove the +American colonists to rebel against the forces of English oppression. The same +words that flowed through the pens of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and +Benjamin Franklin are just as important today. The free software movement +certifies that we are all created equal, with the same rights to life, liberty, +and the pursuit of bug-free code. This great nation took many years to evolve +and took many bad detours along the way, but in the end, the United States +tends to do the right thing. + +The free software movement has many flaws, blemishes, and weaknesses, but I +believe that it will also flourish over the years. It will take wrong turns and +encounter great obstacles, but in the end the devotion to liberty, fraternity, +and equality will lead it to make the right decisions and will outstrip all of +its proprietary competitors. + +In the end, the lure of the complete freedom to change, revise, extend, and +improve the source code of a project is a powerful drug that creative people +can't resist. Shrink-wrapped software's ease-of-use and prepackaged convenience +are quite valuable for many people, but its world is static and slow. + +In the end, the power to write code and change it without hiring a team of +lawyers to parse agreements between companies ensures that the free software +world will gradually win. Corporate organization provides money and stability, +but in technology the race is usually won by the swiftest. + +In the end, free software creates wealth, not cash, and wealth is much better +than cash. You can't eat currency and you can't build a car with gold. Free +software does things and accomplishes tasks without crashing into the blue +screen of death. It empowers people. People who create it and share it are +building real infrastructure that everyone can use. The corporations can try to +control it with intellectual property laws. They can buy people, hornswoggle +judges, and co-opt politicians, but they can't offer more than money. + +In the end, information wants to be free. Corporations want to believe that +software is a manufactured good like a car or a toaster. They want to pretend +it is something that can be consumed only once. In reality, it is much closer +to a joke, an idea, or gossip. Who's managed to control those? + +For all of these reasons, this grand free-for-all, this great swapfest of +software, this wonderful nonstop slumber party of cooperative knowledge +creation, this incredible science project on steroids will grow in strange +leaps and unexpected bounds until it swallows the world. There will be battles, +there will be armies, there will be spies, there will be snakes, there will be +court cases, there will be laws, there will be martyrs, there will be heroes, +and there will be traitors. But in the end, information just wants to be free. +That's what we love about it. + +1~glossary Glossary + +*{Apache License}* A close cousin of the BSD License. The software comes with +few restrictions, and none prevent you from taking a copy of Apache, modifying +it, and selling binary versions. The only restriction is that you can't call it +Apache. For instance, C2Net markets a derivative of Apache known as Stronghold. + +*{AppleScript}* A text language that can be used to control the visual +interface of the Macintosh. It essentially says things like "Open that folder +and double click on Adobe Photoshop to start it up. Then open the file named +'Pete's Dog's Picture.'" architecture Computer scientists use the word +"architecture" to describe the high-level, strategic planning of a system. A +computer architect may decide, for instance, that a new system should come with +three multiplier circuits but not four after analyzing the sequence of +arithmetic operations that a computer will likely be called upon to execute. If +there are often three multiplications that could be done concurrently, then +installing three multiplier circuits would increase efficiency. Adding a +fourth, however, would be a waste of effort if there were few occasions to use +it. In most cases, the term "computer architect" applies only to hardware +engineers. All sufficiently complicated software projects, however, have an +architect who makes the initial design decisions. + +*{Artistic License}* A license created to protect the original PERL language. +Some users dislike the license because it is too complex and filled with +loopholes. Bruce Perens writes, "The Artistic License requires you to make +modifications free, but then gives you a loophole (in Section 7) that allows +you to take modifications private or even place parts of the Artistic-licensed +program in the public domain!" + +*{BeOS}* An operating system created by the Be, a company run by exApple +executive Jean Louis Gassée. + +*{BSD}* An abbreviation for Berkeley Software Distribution, a package first +released by Bill Joy in the 1970s. The term has come to mean both a class of +UNIX that was part of the distribution and also the license that protects this +software. There are several free versions of BSD UNIX that are well-accepted +and well-supported by the free source software community. OpenBSD, NetBSD, and +FreeBSD are three of them. Many commercial versions of UNIX, like Sun's Solaris +and NeXT's OS, can trace their roots to this distribution. The BSD was +originally protected by a license that allowed anyone to freely copy and modify +the source code as long as they gave some credit to the University of +California at Berkeley. Unlike the GNU GPL, the license does not require the +user to release the source code to any modifications. + +*{BSD License}* The original license for BSD software. It placed few +restrictions on what you did with the code. The important terms forced you to +keep the copyright intact and credit the University of California at Berkeley +when you advertise a product. The requirement to include credit is now removed +because people realized that they often needed to publish hundreds of +acknowledgments for a single CD-ROM. Berkeley removed the term in the hopes +that it would set a good example for the rest of the community. + +*{copyleft}* Another term that is sometimes used as a synonym for the GNU +General Public License. + +*{Debian Free Software Guidelines}* See Open Source. (www.debian.org) + +*{driver}* Most computers are designed to work with optional devices like +modems, disk drives, printers, cameras, and keyboards. A driver is a piece of +software that translates the signals sent by the device into a set of signals +that can be understood by the operating system. Most operating systems are +designed to be modular, so these drivers can be added as an afterthought +whenever a user connects a new device. They are usually designed to have a +standard structure so other software will work with them. The driver for each +mouse, for instance, translates the signals from the mouse into a standard +description that includes the position of the mouse and its direction. Drivers +are an important point of debate in the free software community because +volunteers must often create the drivers. Most manufacturers write the drivers +for Windows computers because these customers make up the bulk of their sales. +The manufacturers often avoid creating drivers for Linux or BSD systems because +they perceive the market to be small. Some manufacturers also cite the GNU GPL +as an impediment because they feel that releasing the source code to their +drivers publishes important competitive information. + +*{FreeBSD}* The most popular version of BSD. The development team, led by +Jordan Hubbard, works hard to provide an easy-to-use tool for computers running +the Intel x86 architecture. In recent years, they've tried to branch out into +other lines. (www.freebsd.org) + +*{Free Software Foundation}* An organization set up by Richard Stallman to +raise money for the creation of new free software. Stallman donates his time to +the organization and takes no salary. The money is spent on hiring programmers +to create new free software. + +*{GIMP}* The GNU Image Manipulation Program, which can manipulate image files +in much the same way as Adobe Photoshop. (www.gimp.org) + +*{GNOME}* The GNU Network Object Model Environment, which might be summarized +as "All of the functionality of Microsoft Windows for Linux." It's actually +more. There are many enhancements that make the tool easier to use and more +flexible than the prototype from Redmond. See also KDE, another package that +accomplishes much of the same. (www.gnome.org) + +*{GNU}* A recursive acronym that stands for "GNU is Not UNIX." The project was +started by Richard Stallman in the 1980s to fight against the tide of +proprietary software. The project began with several very nice programs like +GNU Emacs and GCC, the C compiler that was protected by Stallman's GNU General +Purpose License. It has since grown to issue software packages that handle many +different tasks from games (GNU Chess) to privacy (GNU Privacy Guard). See also +GPL and Free Software Foundation (www.gnu.org). Its main goal is to produce a +free operating system that provides a user with the ability to do everything +they want with software that comes with the source code. + +*{GNU/Linux}* The name some people use for Linux as a way of giving credit to +the GNU project for its leadership and contribution of code. + +*{GPL}* An abbreviation that stands for "General Purpose License." This license +was first written by Richard Stallman to control the usage of software created +by the GNU project. A user is free to read and modify the source code of a +GPL-protected package, but the user must agree to distribute any changes or +improvements if they distribute the software at all. Stallman views the license +as a way to force people to share their own improvements and contribute back to +the project if they benefit from the project's hard work. See also BSD. + +*{higher-level}* languages Modern computer programmers almost always write +their software in languages like C, Java, Pascal, or Lisp, which are known as +higher-level languages. The word "higher" is a modifier that measures the +amount of abstraction available to a programmer. A high-level language might +let a programmer say, "Add variable revenues to variable losses to computer +profits." A high-level language would be able to figure out just where to find +the information about the profits and the losses. A low-level programming +language would require the software author to point directly to a location in +the memory where the data could be found. + +*{KDE}* The K desktop environment is another toolkit that offers much of the +same functionality as Windows. It is controversial because it originally used +some proprietary software and some users needed a license. See also GNOME, a +similar package that is distributed under the GNU GPL. (www.kde.org) + +*{kernel}* The core of an OS responsible for juggling the different tasks and +balancing all of the demands. Imagine a short-order cook who scrambles eggs, +toasts bread, chops food, and somehow manages to get an order out in a few +minutes. A kernel in an OS juggles the requests to send information to a +printer, display a picture on the screen, get data from a website, and a +thousand other tasks. + +*{Linux}* The name given to the core of the operating system started by Linus +Torvalds in 1991. The word is now generally used to refer to an entire bundle +of free software packages that work together. Red Hat Linux, for instance, is a +large bundle of software including packages written by many other unrelated +projects. + +*{Mozilla Public License}* A cousin of the Netscape Public License that was +created to protect the public contributions to the source tree of the Mozilla +project. Netscape cannot relicense the modifications to code protected by the +MPL, but they can do it to the NPL. See also Netscape Public License. + +*{NetBSD}* One of the original free distributions of BSD. The team focuses on +making sure that the software works well on a wide variety of hardware +platforms, including relatively rare ones like the Amiga. (www.netbsd.org) + +*{Netscape Public License}* A license created by Netscape when the company +decided to release their browser as open source. The license is similar to the +BSD License, but it provides special features to Netscape. They're allowed to +take snapshots of the open source code and turn them back into a private, +proprietary project again. Bruce Perens, one of the unpaid consultants who +helped Netscape draft the license, says that the provision was included because +Netscape had special contracts with companies to provide a proprietary tool. +See also Mozilla Public License. + +*{OpenBSD}* One of the three major versions of BSD available. The development +team, led by Theo de Raadt, aims to provide the best possible security by +examining the source code in detail and looking for potential holes. +(www.openbsd.org) open source A broad term used by the Open Source Initiative +(www.opensource.org) to embrace software developed and released under the GNU +General Public License, the BSD license, the Artistic License, the X +Consortium, and the Netscape License. It includes software licenses that put +few restrictions on the redistribution of source code. The Open Source +Initiative's definition was adapted from the Debian Free Software Guidelines. +The OSI's definition includes 10 criteria, which range from insisting that the +software and the source code must be freely redistributable to insisting that +the license not discriminate. + +*{Open Source Initiative}* A group created by Eric Raymond, Sam Ockman, Bruce +Perens, Larry Augustin, and more than a few others. The group checks licenses +to see if they match their definition of open source. If the license fits, then +it can wear the term "certified by the OSI." + +*{Symmetric Multi-Processing}* Much of the recent work in operating system +design is focused on finding efficient ways to run multiple programs +simultaneously on multiple CPU chips. This job is relatively straightforward if +the different pieces of software run independently of each other. The +complexity grows substantially if the CPUs must exchange information to +coordinate their progress. The kernel must orchestrate the shuffle of +information so that each CPU has enough information to continue its work with a +minimum amount of waiting time. Finding a good way to accomplish this SMP is +important because many of the new machines appearing after 2000 may come with +multiple processors. + +*{UNIX}* An operating system created at AT&T Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and +Dennis Ritchie. The system was originally designed to support multiple users on +a variety of different hardware platforms. Most programs written for the system +accept ASCII text and spit out ASCII text, which makes it easy to chain them +together. The original name was "unics," which was a pun on the then-popular +system known as Multics. + +1~bibliography Bibliography + +*{Abelson, Reed.}* "Among U.S. Donations, Tons of Worthless Drugs." New York +Times, June 29, 1999. + +*{Ananian, C. 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New York Times, March 21, 1999. + +*{"Interview with Linus Torvalds."}* FatBrain.com, May 1999. \\ +http://www.kt.opensrc.org/interviews/ti19990528_fb.html + +*{Jelinek, Jakub.}* "Re: Mach64 Problems in UltraPenguin 1.1.9." Linux Weekly +News, April 27, 1999. \\ http://www.lwn.net/1999/0429/a/up-dead.html + +*{Johnson, Richard B., and Chris Wedgwood.}* "Segfault in syslogd [problem +shown]." April 1999. \\ http://www.kt.opensrc.org/kt19990415_14.html#8 + +*{Joy, Bill.}* "Talk to Stanford EE 380 Students." November 1999. + +*{Kahn, David.}* The Codebreakers. New York: Macmillan, 1967. + +*{Kahney, Leander.}* "Open-Source Gurus Trade Jabs." Wired News, April 10, +1999. \\ http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/19049.html \\ "Apple +Lifts License Restrictions." Wired News, April 21, 1999. \\ +http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/19233.html + +*{Kidd, Eric.}* "Why You Might Want to Use the Library GPL for Your Next +Library." Linux Gazette, March 1999. \\ +http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue38/kidd.html + +*{Kohn, Alfie.}* "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator; Creativity and +Intrinsic Interest Diminish If Task Is Done for Gain." Boston Globe, January +19, 1987. + +*{Leonard, Andrew.}* "Open Season: Why an Industry of Cutthroat Competition Is +Suddenly Deciding Good Karma Is Great Business." Wired News, May 1999. + +*{Linksvayer, Mike.}* "Choice of the GNU Generation." Meta Magazine. \\ +http://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html + +*{"Linux Beat Windows NT Handily in an Oracle Performance Benchmark."}* Linux +Weekly News, April 29, 1999. \\ http://rpmfind.net/veillard/oracle/ + +*{Liston, Robert.}* The Pueblo Surrender: A Covert Action by the National +Security Agency. New York: Evans, 1988. + +*{Little, Darnell.}* "Comdex Q&A: Linus Torvalds on the Battle Against +Microsoft." Chicago Tribune April 19, 1999. \\ +http://chicagotribune.com/business/businessnews/ws/item/0,1267,2674627007-27361,00.html + +*{Lohr, Steve.}* "Tiny Software Maker Takes Aim at Microsoft in Court." New +York Times, May 31, 1999. + +*{Mauss, Marcel.}* "Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic +Societies," trans. W. D. Halls. New York: W.W. Norton & Company (of reissue in +US), 1950. + +*{McKusick, Marshall Kirk.}* "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix." In Open Sources: +Voices from the Open Source Revolution. San Francisco: O'Reilly, 1999. + +*{McKusick, Marshall Kirk, Keith Bostic, and Michael J. Karels, eds.}* The +Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System \\ (Unix and Open +Systems Series). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996. + +*{McMillan, Robert, and Nora Mikes.}* "After the 'Sweet Sixteen': Linus +Torvalds's Take on the State of Linux." LinuxWorld, March 1999. \\ +http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-03/lw03-torvalds.html + +*{Metcalfe, Bob.}* "Linux's '60s Technology: Open-Sores Ideology Won't Beat +W2K, but What Will?" June 19, 1999. \\ +http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/990621opmetcalfe.xml + +*{Nolan, Chris.}* "Microsoft Antitrust: the Gassée Factor: U.S. Reportedly +Looks into Obstacles for Be Operating System." San Jose Mercury News, February +11, 1999. \\ +http://www.sjmercury.com/svtech/columns/talkischeap/docs/cn021199.html + +*{Oakes, Chris.}* "Netscape Browser Guru: We Failed." Wired News, April 2, +1999. \\ http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/18926.html + +*{Ousterhout, John.}* "Free Software Needs Profit." Dr. Dobb's Journal website, +1999. \\ http://www.ddj.com/oped/1999/oust.htm + +*{Perens, Bruce, Wichert Akkerman, and Ian Jackson.}* "The Apple Public Source +License--Our Concerns." March 1999. \\ http://perens.com/APSL.html/ \\ "The +Open Source Definition." In Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source +Revolution, ed. Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone, 171-85. San +Francisco: O'Reilly, 1999. + +*{Picarille, Lisa, and Malcolm Maclachlan.}* "Apple Defends Open Source +Initiative." March 24, 1999. \\ +http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990324S0027 + +*{Raymond, Eric.}* The Cathedral and the Bazaar:Musings on Linux and Open +Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. San Francisco: O'Reilly, 1999. + +*{Reilly, Patrick.}* "Nader's Microsoft Agenda: Progressive Nonprofit Plan for +'Free' Software." Capital Research Center, April 1, 1999. \\ +http://www.capitalresearch.org/trends/ot-0499a.html + +*{Rubini, Alessandro.}* "Tour of the Linux Kernel Source." Linux Documentation +Project. + +*{Rusling, David A.}* "The Linux Kernel." \\ +http://metalab.unc.edu/mdw/LDP/tlk/tlk-title.html + +*{Schmalensee, Richard.}* "Direct Testimony in the Microsoft Anti-Trust Case of +1999." \\ http://www.courttv.com/trials/ microsoft/legaldocs/ms_wit.html + +*{Schulman, Andrew.}* Unauthorized Windows 95. Foster City, CA: IDG Books, +1995. + +*{Searles, Doc.}* "It's an Industry." Linux Journal, May 21, 1999. \\ +http://www.linuxresources.com/articles/conversations/001.html + +*{Slind-Flor, Victoria.}* "Linux May Alter IP Legal Landscape: Some Predict +More Contract Work if Alternative to Windows Catches On." National Law Journal, +March 12, 1999. \\ http://www.lawnewsnetwork.com/stories/mar/e030899q.html + +*{Stallman, Richard.}* "The GNU Manifesto." 1984. \\ +http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html \\ "Why Software Should Not Have Owners." +1994. \\ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html + +*{Thompson, Ken, and Dennis Ritchie.}* "The UNIX Time-Sharing System." +Communications of the ACM, 1974. + +*{Thygeson, Gordon.}* Apple T-Shirts: A Yearbook of History at Apple Computer. +Cupertino, CA: Pomo Publishing, 1998 + +*{Torvalds, Linus.}* "Linus Torvalds: Leader of the Revolution." Transcript of +Chat with Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux OS. ABCNews.com. \\ "Linux's +History." July 31, 1992. \\ http://www.li.org/li/linuxhistory.shtml + +*{Valloppillil, Vinod.}* "Open Source Software: A (New?) Development +Methodology." Microsoft, Redmond, WA, August 1998. + +*{Wayner, Peter.}* "If SB266 Wants Plaintext, Give Them Plaintext . . . ," +Risks Digest, May 23, 1991. \\ http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/11.71.html#subj2 +\\ "Should Hackers Spend Years in Prison?" Salon, June 9, 1999. \\ +http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/06/09/hacker_penalties/index.html \\ +"Netscape to Release New Browser Engine to Developers." New York Times, +December 7, 1999. \\ "Glory Among the Geeks." Salon, January 1999. \\ +http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1999/01/28feature.html + +*{Whitenger, Dave. "Words of a Maddog."}* Linux Today, April 19, 1999. \\ +http://linuxtoday.com/stories/5118.html + +*{"Web and File Server Comparison: Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 and Red Hat +Linux 5.2 Upgraded to the Linux 2.2.2 Kernel."}* Mindcraft, April 13, 1999. \\ +http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/nts4rhlinux.html + +*{Williams, Sam.}* "Linus Has Left the Building." Upside, May 5, 1999. \\ +http://www.upside.com/Open_Season/ + +*{Williams, Riley.}* "Linux Kernel Vertsion History." \\ +http://ps.cus.umist.ac.uk/~rhw/kernel.versions.html + +*{Zawinski, Jamie.}* "Resignation and Postmortem." \\ +http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html + +1~other.works Other works by Peter Wayner + +2~ Disappearing Cryptography, Information Hiding: Steganography & Watermarking +-# + +Disappearing Cryptography, Information Hiding: Steganography & Watermarking, +2nd ed. by Peter Wayner ISBN 1-55860-769-2 $44.95 + +To order, visit: http://www.wayner.org/books/discrypt2/ + +Disappearing Cryptography, Second Edition describes how to take words, sounds, +or images and hide them in digital data so they look like other words, sounds, +or images. When used properly, this powerful technique makes it almost +impossible to trace the author and the recipient of a message. Conversations +can be submerged in the flow of information through the Internet so that no one +can know if a conversation exists at all. + +This full revision of the best-selling first edition describes a number of +different techniques to hide information. These include encryption, making data +incomprehensible; steganography, embedding information into video, audio, or +graphics files; watermarking, hiding data in the noise of image or sound files; +mimicry, "dressing up" data and making it appear to be other data, and more. + +The second edition also includes an expanded discussion on hiding information +with spread-spectrum algorithms, shuffling tricks, and synthetic worlds. Each +chapter is divided into sections, first providing an introduction and +high-level summary for those who want to understand the concepts without wading +through technical explanations, and then presenting greater detail for those +who want to write their own programs. To encourage exploration, the author's +Web site www.wayner.org/books/discrypt2/ contains implementations for hiding +information in lists, sentences, and images. + +"Disappearing Cryptography is a witty and entertaining look at the world of +information hiding. Peter Wayner provides an intuitive perspective of the many +techniques, applications, and research directions in the area of steganography. +The sheer breadth of topics is outstanding and makes this book truly unique. A +must read for those who would like to begin learning about information hiding." +--Deepa Kundur, University of Toronto + +"An excellent introduction for private individuals, businesses, and governments +who need to under- stand the complex technologies and their effects on +protecting privacy, intellectual property and other interests." - David +Banisar, Research Fellow, Harvard Information Infrastructure Project, & Deputy +Director, Privacy International. + +2~ Translucent Databases -# + +Translucent Databases, a new book by Peter Wayner, comes with more than two +dozen examples in Java and SQL code. The book comes with a royalty-free license +to use the code for your own projects in any way you wish. + +_* Do you have personal information in your database? + +_* Do you keep les on your customers, your employees, or anyone else? + +_* Do you need to worry about European laws restricting the information you keep? + +_* Do you keep copies of credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other +informa- tion that might be useful to identity thieves or insurance fraudsters? + +_* Do you deal with medical records or personal secrets? + +Most database administrators spend some of each day worrying about the +information they keep. Some spend all of their time. Caring for information can +be a dangerous responsibility. + +This new book, Translucent Databases, describes a different attitude toward +protecting the information. Most databases provide elaborate control mechanisms +for letting the right people in to see the right records. These tools are well +designed and thoroughly tested, but they can only provide so much support. If +someone breaks into the operating system itself, all of the data on the hard +disk is unveiled. If a clerk, a supervisor, or a system administrator decides +to turn traitor, there's nothing anyone can do. + +Translucent databases provide better, deeper protection by scrambling the data +with encryption algorithms. The solutions use the minimal amount of encryption +to ensure that the database is still functional. In the best applications, the +personal and sensitive information is protected but the database still delivers +the information. + +Order today at +http://www.wayner.org/books/td/ diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/gpl2.fsf.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/gpl2.fsf.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..68db472 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/gpl2.fsf.sst @@ -0,0 +1,358 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v2 + +@creator: + :author: Free Software Foundation + +@date: + :published: 1991 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. + :license: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:document;GPL;Software:license;GNU/Linux:License:GPL + +@links: + { Free Software Foundation }http://www.fsf.org + { GPL @ SiSU }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/gpl2.fsf + +:A~ GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE + +:B~ Version 2, June 1991 + +1~ [note] -# + +Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 51 Franklin Street, +Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA + +Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license +document, but changing it is not allowed. + +1~ Preamble + +The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share +and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to +guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the +software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most +of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose +authors commit to using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is +covered by the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to +your programs, too. + +When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our +General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to +distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), +that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change +the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you +can do these things. + +To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny +you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions +translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the +software, or if you modify it. + +For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for +a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make +sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them +these terms so they know their rights. + +We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) +offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute +and/or modify the software. + +Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that +everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the +software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to +know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced +by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations. + +Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish +to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually +obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent +this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's +free use or not licensed at all. + +The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification +follow. + +:C~ GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE + +1~ TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION + +0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice +placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of +this General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program +or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any +derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the +Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or +translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without +limitation in the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you". + +Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by +this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not +restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents +constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by +running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does. + +1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as +you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and +appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and +disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License +and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the +Program a copy of this License along with the Program. + +You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may +at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee. + +2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus +forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications +or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of +these conditions: + +a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that +you changed the files and the date of any change. + +b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in +part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be +licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this +License. + +c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you +must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most +ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate +copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that +you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these +conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. +(Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print +such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print +an announcement.) + +These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable +sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably +considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and +its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate +works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a +work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms +of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire +whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. + +Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your +rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the +right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on +the Program. + +In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the +Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or +distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this +License. + +3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under +Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and +2 above provided that you also do one of the following: + +a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, +which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium +customarily used for software interchange; or, + +b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give +any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing +source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding +source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a +medium customarily used for software interchange; or, + +c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute +corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial +distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable +form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.) + +The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making +modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the +source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface +definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation +of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed +need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or +binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the +operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself +accompanies the executable. + +If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy +from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source +code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though +third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code. + +4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as +expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, +sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate +your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or +rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so +long as such parties remain in full compliance. + +5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. +However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program +or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not +accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or +any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to +do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying +the Program or works based on it. + +6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), +the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to +copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. +You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the +rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by +third parties to this License. + +7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent +infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions +are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that +contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the +conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy +simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent +obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. +For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution +of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through +you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to +refrain entirely from distribution of the Program. + +If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any +particular circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and +the section as a whole is intended to apply in other circumstances. + +It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe any patents or +other property right claims or to contest validity of any such claims; this +section has the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the free software +distribution system, which is implemented by public license practices. Many +people have made generous contributions to the wide range of software +distributed through that system in reliance on consistent application of that +system; it is up to the author/donor to decide if he or she is willing to +distribute software through any other system and a licensee cannot impose that +choice. + +This section is intended to make thoroughly clear what is believed to be a +consequence of the rest of this License. + +8. If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in certain +countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the original +copyright holder who places the Program under this License may add an explicit +geographical distribution limitation excluding those countries, so that +distribution is permitted only in or among countries not thus excluded. In such +case, this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of +this License. + +9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the +General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in +spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems +or concerns. + +Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies +a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", +you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that +version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If +the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose +any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation. + +10. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs +whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for +permission. For software which is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, +write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. +Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of +all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of +software generally. + +2~ NO WARRANTY + +11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR +THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE +STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE +PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, +INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND +FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND +PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU +ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION. + +12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL +ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE +PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY +GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR +INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA +BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A +FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER +OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. + +:C~ END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS + +1~ How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs + +If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible +use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software +which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms. + +To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach +them to the start of each source file to most effectively convey the exclusion +of warranty; and each file should have at least the "copyright" line and a +pointer to where the full notice is found. + +<one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.> + +Copyright (C) <year > <name of author> + +This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under +the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software +Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later +version. + +This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY +WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A +PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. + +You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with +this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin +Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA~{ FSF address changed from: 59 +Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA }~ + +Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail. + +If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this when it +starts in an interactive mode: + +Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) year name of author + +Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type 'show w'. This +is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain +conditions; type 'show c' for details. + +The hypothetical commands 'show w' and 'show c' should show the appropriate +parts of the General Public License. Of course, the commands you use may be +called something other than 'show w' and 'show c'; they could even be +mouse-clicks or menu items--whatever suits your program. + +You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, +if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is +a sample; alter the names: + +Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program +'Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker. + +<signature of Ty Coon>, 1 April 1989 + +Ty Coon, President of Vice + +This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into +proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider +it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If +this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public License instead +of this License. + +%% SiSU markup sample Notes: +% SiSU http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu +% SiSU markup for 0.16 and later: +% 0.20.4 header 0~links +% 0.22 may drop image dimensions (rmagick) +% 0.23 utf-8 ß +% 0.38 or later, may use alternative notation for headers, e.g. @title: (instead of 0~title) +% 0.38 document structure alternative markup, experimental (rad) A,B,C,1,2,3 maps to 1,2,3,4,5,6 +% Output: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/gpl2.fsf/sisu_manifest.html +% SiSU 0.38 experimental (alternative structure) markup used for this document diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/gpl3.fsf.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/gpl3.fsf.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fe8fdf5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/gpl3.fsf.sst @@ -0,0 +1,662 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v3 + :edition: 3 + :note: Free Software Foundation + :language: English + +@creator: + :author: Free Software Foundation + +@date: + :published: 2007-06-29 + :available: 2007-06-29 + :valid: 2007-06-29 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. http://fsf.org/ + :license: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:document;GPL;Software:license + +@publisher: SiSU on behalf of the Free Software Foundation + +@links: + { Free Software Foundation }http://www.fsf.org + { GPL3 @ FSF }http://gplv3.fsf.org/ + { GPL3 source text }http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt + +:A~ GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE + +:B~ Version 3, 29 June 2007 + +:C~ Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. http://fsf.org/ Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. + +1~ Preamble + +The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and +other kinds of works. + +The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take +away your freedom to share and change the works. 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Conveying Verbatim Copies. + +You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, +in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on +each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that +this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply +to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give +all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program. + +You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may +offer support or warranty protection for a fee. + +1~5 5. 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Additional Terms. + +"Additional permissions" are terms that supplement the terms of this License by +making exceptions from one or more of its conditions. Additional permissions +that are applicable to the entire Program shall be treated as though they were +included in this License, to the extent that they are valid under applicable +law. If additional permissions apply only to part of the Program, that part may +be used separately under those permissions, but the entire Program remains +governed by this License without regard to the additional permissions. + +When you convey a copy of a covered work, you may at your option remove any +additional permissions from that copy, or from any part of it. (Additional +permissions may be written to require their own removal in certain cases when +you modify the work.) You may place additional permissions on material, added +by you to a covered work, for which you have or can give appropriate copyright +permission. + +Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a +covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) +supplement the terms of this License with terms: + +_1 a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the terms of +sections 15 and 16 of this License; or + +_1 b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author +attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by +works containing it; or + +_1 c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or +requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways +as different from the original version; or + +_1 d) Limiting the use for publicity purposes of names of licensors or authors +of the material; or + +_1 e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade +names, trademarks, or service marks; or + +_1 f) Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of that material by +anyone who conveys the material (or modified versions of it) with contractual +assumptions of liability to the recipient, for any liability that these +contractual assumptions directly impose on those licensors and authors. + +All other non-permissive additional terms are considered "further restrictions" +within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any +part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along +with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term. If a +license document contains a further restriction but permits relicensing or +conveying under this License, you may add to a covered work material governed +by the terms of that license document, provided that the further restriction +does not survive such relicensing or conveying. + +If you add terms to a covered work in accord with this section, you must place, +in the relevant source files, a statement of the additional terms that apply to +those files, or a notice indicating where to find the applicable terms. + +Additional terms, permissive or non-permissive, may be stated in the form of a +separately written license, or stated as exceptions; the above requirements +apply either way. + +1~8 8. Termination. + +You may not propagate or modify a covered work except as expressly provided +under this License. Any attempt otherwise to propagate or modify it is void, +and will automatically terminate your rights under this License (including any +patent licenses granted under the third paragraph of section 11). + +However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a +particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until +the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) +permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by +some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation. + +Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated +permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some +reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation +of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the +violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice. + +Termination of your rights under this section does not terminate the licenses +of parties who have received copies or rights from you under this License. If +your rights have been terminated and not permanently reinstated, you do not +qualify to receive new licenses for the same material under section 10. + +1~9 9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies. + +You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy +of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a +consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does +not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you +permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe +copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or +propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do +so. + +1~10 10. Automatic Licensing of Downstream Recipients. + +Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a +license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, +subject to this License. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by +third parties with this License. + +An "entity transaction" is a transaction transferring control of an +organization, or substantially all assets of one, or subdividing an +organization, or merging organizations. If propagation of a covered work +results from an entity transaction, each party to that transaction who receives +a copy of the work also receives whatever licenses to the work the party's +predecessor in interest had or could give under the previous paragraph, plus a +right to possession of the Corresponding Source of the work from the +predecessor in interest, if the predecessor has it or can get it with +reasonable efforts. + +You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights +granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a +license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this +License, and you may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or +counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by +making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any +portion of it. + +1~11 11. Patents. + +A "contributor" is a copyright holder who authorizes use under this License of +the Program or a work on which the Program is based. The work thus licensed is +called the contributor's "contributor version". + +A contributor's "essential patent claims" are all patent claims owned or +controlled by the contributor, whether already acquired or hereafter acquired, +that would be infringed by some manner, permitted by this License, of making, +using, or selling its contributor version, but do not include claims that would +be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of the contributor +version. For purposes of this definition, "control" includes the right to grant +patent sublicenses in a manner consistent with the requirements of this +License. + +Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent +license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, +offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of +its contributor version. + +In the following three paragraphs, a "patent license" is any express agreement +or commitment, however denominated, not to enforce a patent (such as an express +permission to practice a patent or covenant not to sue for patent +infringement). To "grant" such a patent license to a party means to make such +an agreement or commitment not to enforce a patent against the party. + +If you convey a covered work, knowingly relying on a patent license, and the +Corresponding Source of the work is not available for anyone to copy, free of +charge and under the terms of this License, through a publicly available +network server or other readily accessible means, then you must either (1) +cause the Corresponding Source to be so available, or (2) arrange to deprive +yourself of the benefit of the patent license for this particular work, or (3) +arrange, in a manner consistent with the requirements of this License, to +extend the patent license to downstream recipients. "Knowingly relying" means +you have actual knowledge that, but for the patent license, your conveying the +covered work in a country, or your recipient's use of the covered work in a +country, would infringe one or more identifiable patents in that country that +you have reason to believe are valid. + +If, pursuant to or in connection with a single transaction or arrangement, you +convey, or propagate by procuring conveyance of, a covered work, and grant a +patent license to some of the parties receiving the covered work authorizing +them to use, propagate, modify or convey a specific copy of the covered work, +then the patent license you grant is automatically extended to all recipients +of the covered work and works based on it. + +A patent license is "discriminatory" if it does not include within the scope of +its coverage, prohibits the exercise of, or is conditioned on the non-exercise +of one or more of the rights that are specifically granted under this License. +You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a +third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you +make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of +conveying the work, and under which the third party grants, to any of the +parties who would receive the covered work from you, a discriminatory patent +license (a) in connection with copies of the covered work conveyed by you (or +copies made from those copies), or (b) primarily for and in connection with +specific products or compilations that contain the covered work, unless you +entered into that arrangement, or that patent license was granted, prior to 28 +March 2007. + +Nothing in this License shall be construed as excluding or limiting any implied +license or other defenses to infringement that may otherwise be available to +you under applicable patent law. + +1~12 12. No Surrender of Others' Freedom. + +If conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or +otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse +you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot convey a covered work so +as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other +pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all. For +example, if you agree to terms that obligate you to collect a royalty for +further conveying from those to whom you convey the Program, the only way you +could satisfy both those terms and this License would be to refrain entirely +from conveying the Program. + +1~13 13. Use with the GNU Affero General Public License. + +Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to +link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the +GNU Affero General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey +the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the +part which is the covered work, but the special requirements of the GNU Affero +General Public License, section 13, concerning interaction through a network +will apply to the combination as such. + +1~14 14. Revised Versions of this License. + +The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU +General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in +spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems +or concerns. + +Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies +that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License "or any later +version" applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and +conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by +the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number +of the GNU General Public License, you may choose any version ever published by +the Free Software Foundation. + +If the Program specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of the +GNU General Public License can be used, that proxy's public statement of +acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to choose that version for +the Program. + +Later license versions may give you additional or different permissions. +However, no additional obligations are imposed on any author or copyright +holder as a result of your choosing to follow a later version. + +1~15 15. Disclaimer of Warranty. + +THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE +LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER +PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER +EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF +MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE +QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE +DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR +CORRECTION. + +1~16 16. Limitation of Liability. + +IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY +COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MODIFIES AND/OR CONVEYS THE PROGRAM AS +PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, +INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE +THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED +INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE +PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY +HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. + +1~17 17. Interpretation of Sections 15 and 16. + +If the disclaimer of warranty and limitation of liability provided above cannot +be given local legal effect according to their terms, reviewing courts shall +apply local law that most closely approximates an absolute waiver of all civil +liability in connection with the Program, unless a warranty or assumption of +liability accompanies a copy of the Program in return for a fee. + +!_ END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS + +1~ How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs + +If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible +use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software +which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms. + +To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach +them to the start of each source file to most effectively state the exclusion +of warranty; and each file should have at least the "copyright" line and a +pointer to where the full notice is found. + +poem{ + + + Copyright (C) + + This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify + it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by + the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or + (at your option) any later version. + + This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, + but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of + MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the + GNU General Public License for more details. + + You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License + along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/. + +}poem + +Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail. + +If the program does terminal interaction, make it output a short notice like +this when it starts in an interactive mode: + +poem{ + + Copyright (C) + This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'. + This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it + under certain conditions; type 'show c' for details. + +}poem + +The hypothetical commands 'show w' and 'show c' should show the appropriate +parts of the General Public License. Of course, your program's commands might +be different; for a GUI interface, you would use an "about box". + +You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or school, if +any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. For more +information on this, and how to apply and follow the GNU GPL, see +http://www.gnu.org/licenses/. + +The GNU General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into +proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider +it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If +this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead +of this License. But first, please read +http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html. diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7e08f21 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/gullivers_travels.jonathan_swift.sst @@ -0,0 +1,8507 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: Gulliver's Travels + +@creator: + :author: Swift, Jonathan + :prepared_by: David Price + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:fantasy + +@rights: + :copyright: Jonathan Swift + :license: Public Domain + +@date: + :published: 1726 + :created: 1726 + :issued: 1726 + :available: 1726 + :modified: 1735 + :added_to_site: 2005-10-30 + +@links: + { Gulliver's Travels }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullivers_travels + { Johnathan Swift }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Swift + +@make: + :headings: none; none; PART; CHAPTER; + :breaks: new=3; break=4 + +A~ @title @creator + +:B~ Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World + +1~ THE PUBLISHER TO THE READER. + +[As given in the original edition.] + +The author of these Travels, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, is my ancient and intimate +friend; there is likewise some relation between us on the mother's side. About +three years ago, Mr. Gulliver growing weary of the concourse of curious people +coming to him at his house in Redriff, made a small purchase of land, with a +convenient house, near Newark, in Nottinghamshire, his native country; where he +now lives retired, yet in good esteem among his neighbours. + +Although Mr. Gulliver was born in Nottinghamshire, where his father dwelt, yet +I have heard him say his family came from Oxfordshire; to confirm which, I have +observed in the churchyard at Banbury in that county, several tombs and +monuments of the Gullivers. + +Before he quitted Redriff, he left the custody of the following papers in my +hands, with the liberty to dispose of them as I should think fit. I have +carefully perused them three times. The style is very plain and simple; and the +only fault I find is, that the author, after the manner of travellers, is a +little too circumstantial. There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; +and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a +sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, +to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it. + +By the advice of several worthy persons, to whom, with the author's permission, +I communicated these papers, I now venture to send them into the world, hoping +they may be, at least for some time, a better entertainment to our young +noblemen, than the common scribbles of politics and party. + +This volume would have been at least twice as large, if I had not made bold to +strike out innumerable passages relating to the winds and tides, as well as to +the variations and bearings in the several voyages, together with the minute +descriptions of the management of the ship in storms, in the style of sailors; +likewise the account of longitudes and latitudes; wherein I have reason to +apprehend, that Mr. Gulliver may be a little dissatisfied. But I was resolved +to fit the work as much as possible to the general capacity of readers. +However, if my own ignorance in sea affairs shall have led me to commit some +mistakes, I alone am answerable for them. And if any traveller hath a curiosity +to see the whole work at large, as it came from the hands of the author, I will +be ready to gratify him. + +As for any further particulars relating to the author, the reader will receive +satisfaction from the first pages of the book. + +RICHARD SYMPSON. + +1~ A LETTER FROM CAPTAIN GULLIVER TO HIS COUSIN SYMPSON. + +WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1727. + +I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, +that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very +loose and uncorrect account of my travels, with directions to hire some young +gentleman of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as +my cousin Dampier did, by my advice, in his book called "A Voyage round the +world." But I do not remember I gave you power to consent that any thing should +be omitted, and much less that any thing should be inserted; therefore, as to +the latter, I do here renounce every thing of that kind; particularly a +paragraph about her majesty Queen Anne, of most pious and glorious memory; +although I did reverence and esteem her more than any of human species. But +you, or your interpolator, ought to have considered, that it was not my +inclination, so was it not decent to praise any animal of our composition +before my master Houyhnhnm: And besides, the fact was altogether false; for to +my knowledge, being in England during some part of her majesty's reign, she did +govern by a chief minister; nay even by two successively, the first whereof was +the lord of Godolphin, and the second the lord of Oxford; so that you have made +me say the thing that was not. Likewise in the account of the academy of +projectors, and several passages of my discourse to my master Houyhnhnm, you +have either omitted some material circumstances, or minced or changed them in +such a manner, that I do hardly know my own work. When I formerly hinted to you +something of this in a letter, you were pleased to answer that you were afraid +of giving offence; that people in power were very watchful over the press, and +apt not only to interpret, but to punish every thing which looked like an +innuendo (as I think you call it). But, pray how could that which I spoke so +many years ago, and at about five thousand leagues distance, in another reign, +be applied to any of the Yahoos, who now are said to govern the herd; +especially at a time when I little thought, or feared, the unhappiness of +living under them? Have not I the most reason to complain, when I see these +very Yahoos carried by Houyhnhnms in a vehicle, as if they were brutes, and +those the rational creatures? And indeed to avoid so monstrous and detestable a +sight was one principal motive of my retirement hither. + +Thus much I thought proper to tell you in relation to yourself, and to the +trust I reposed in you. + +I do, in the next place, complain of my own great want of judgment, in being +prevailed upon by the entreaties and false reasoning of you and some others, +very much against my own opinion, to suffer my travels to be published. Pray +bring to your mind how often I desired you to consider, when you insisted on +the motive of public good, that the Yahoos were a species of animals utterly +incapable of amendment by precept or example: and so it has proved; for, +instead of seeing a full stop put to all abuses and corruptions, at least in +this little island, as I had reason to expect; behold, after above six months +warning, I cannot learn that my book has produced one single effect according +to my intentions. I desired you would let me know, by a letter, when party and +faction were extinguished; judges learned and upright; pleaders honest and +modest, with some tincture of common sense, and Smithfield blazing with +pyramids of law books; the young nobility's education entirely changed; the +physicians banished; the female Yahoos abounding in virtue, honour, truth, and +good sense; courts and levees of great ministers thoroughly weeded and swept; +wit, merit, and learning rewarded; all disgracers of the press in prose and +verse condemned to eat nothing but their own cotton, and quench their thirst +with their own ink. These, and a thousand other reformations, I firmly counted +upon by your encouragement; as indeed they were plainly deducible from the +precepts delivered in my book. And it must be owned, that seven months were a +sufficient time to correct every vice and folly to which Yahoos are subject, if +their natures had been capable of the least disposition to virtue or wisdom. +Yet, so far have you been from answering my expectation in any of your letters; +that on the contrary you are loading our carrier every week with libels, and +keys, and reflections, and memoirs, and second parts; wherein I see myself +accused of reflecting upon great state folk; of degrading human nature (for so +they have still the confidence to style it), and of abusing the female sex. I +find likewise that the writers of those bundles are not agreed among +themselves; for some of them will not allow me to be the author of my own +travels; and others make me author of books to which I am wholly a stranger. + +I find likewise that your printer has been so careless as to confound the +times, and mistake the dates, of my several voyages and returns; neither +assigning the true year, nor the true month, nor day of the month: and I hear +the original manuscript is all destroyed since the publication of my book; +neither have I any copy left: however, I have sent you some corrections, which +you may insert, if ever there should be a second edition: and yet I cannot +stand to them; but shall leave that matter to my judicious and candid readers +to adjust it as they please. + +I hear some of our sea Yahoos find fault with my sea-language, as not proper in +many parts, nor now in use. I cannot help it. In my first voyages, while I was +young, I was instructed by the oldest mariners, and learned to speak as they +did. But I have since found that the sea Yahoos are apt, like the land ones, to +become new- fangled in their words, which the latter change every year; +insomuch, as I remember upon each return to my own country their old dialect +was so altered, that I could hardly understand the new. And I observe, when any +Yahoo comes from London out of curiosity to visit me at my house, we neither of +us are able to deliver our conceptions in a manner intelligible to the other. + +If the censure of the Yahoos could any way affect me, I should have great +reason to complain, that some of them are so bold as to think my book of +travels a mere fiction out of mine own brain, and have gone so far as to drop +hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the +inhabitants of Utopia. + +Indeed I must confess, that as to the people of Lilliput, Brobdingrag (for so +the word should have been spelt, and not erroneously Brobdingnag), and Laputa, +I have never yet heard of any Yahoo so presumptuous as to dispute their being, +or the facts I have related concerning them; because the truth immediately +strikes every reader with conviction. And is there less probability in my +account of the Houyhnhnms or Yahoos, when it is manifest as to the latter, +there are so many thousands even in this country, who only differ from their +brother brutes in Houyhnhnmland, because they use a sort of jabber, and do not +go naked? I wrote for their amendment, and not their approbation. The united +praise of the whole race would be of less consequence to me, than the neighing +of those two degenerate Houyhnhnms I keep in my stable; because from these, +degenerate as they are, I still improve in some virtues without any mixture of +vice. + +Do these miserable animals presume to think, that I am so degenerated as to +defend my veracity? Yahoo as I am, it is well known through all Houyhnhnmland, +that, by the instructions and example of my illustrious master, I was able in +the compass of two years (although I confess with the utmost difficulty) to +remove that infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving, and equivocating, so +deeply rooted in the very souls of all my species; especially the Europeans. + +I have other complaints to make upon this vexatious occasion; but I forbear +troubling myself or you any further. I must freely confess, that since my last +return, some corruptions of my Yahoo nature have revived in me by conversing +with a few of your species, and particularly those of my own family, by an +unavoidable necessity; else I should never have attempted so absurd a project +as that of reforming the Yahoo race in this kingdom: But I have now done with +all such visionary schemes for ever. + +April 2, 1727 + +PART I--A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT. + +CHAPTER I. + +[The author gives some account of himself and family. His first inducements to +travel. He is shipwrecked, and swims for his life. Gets safe on shore in the +country of Lilliput; is made a prisoner, and carried up the country.] + +My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons. +He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I +resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of +maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a +narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon +in London, with whom I continued four years. My father now and then sending me +small sums of money, I laid them out in learning navigation, and other parts of +the mathematics, useful to those who intend to travel, as I always believed it +would be, some time or other, my fortune to do. When I left Mr. Bates, I went +down to my father: where, by the assistance of him and my uncle John, and some +other relations, I got forty pounds, and a promise of thirty pounds a year to +maintain me at Leyden: there I studied physic two years and seven months, +knowing it would be useful in long voyages. + +Soon after my return from Leyden, I was recommended by my good master, Mr. +Bates, to be surgeon to the Swallow, Captain Abraham Pannel, commander; with +whom I continued three years and a half, making a voyage or two into the +Levant, and some other parts. When I came back I resolved to settle in London; +to which Mr. Bates, my master, encouraged me, and by him I was recommended to +several patients. I took part of a small house in the Old Jewry; and being +advised to alter my condition, I married Mrs. Mary Burton, second daughter to +Mr. Edmund Burton, hosier, in Newgate-street, with whom I received four hundred +pounds for a portion. + +But my good master Bates dying in two years after, and I having few friends, my +business began to fail; for my conscience would not suffer me to imitate the +bad practice of too many among my brethren. Having therefore consulted with my +wife, and some of my acquaintance, I determined to go again to sea. I was +surgeon successively in two ships, and made several voyages, for six years, to +the East and West Indies, by which I got some addition to my fortune. My hours +of leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern, being +always provided with a good number of books; and when I was ashore, in +observing the manners and dispositions of the people, as well as learning their +language; wherein I had a great facility, by the strength of my memory. + +The last of these voyages not proving very fortunate, I grew weary of the sea, +and intended to stay at home with my wife and family. I removed from the Old +Jewry to Fetter Lane, and from thence to Wapping, hoping to get business among +the sailors; but it would not turn to account. After three years expectation +that things would mend, I accepted an advantageous offer from Captain William +Prichard, master of the Antelope, who was making a voyage to the South Sea. We +set sail from Bristol, May 4, 1699, and our voyage was at first very +prosperous. + +It would not be proper, for some reasons, to trouble the reader with the +particulars of our adventures in those seas; let it suffice to inform him, that +in our passage from thence to the East Indies, we were driven by a violent +storm to the north-west of Van Diemen's Land. By an observation, we found +ourselves in the latitude of 30 degrees 2 minutes south. Twelve of our crew +were dead by immoderate labour and ill food; the rest were in a very weak +condition. On the 5th of November, which was the beginning of summer in those +parts, the weather being very hazy, the seamen spied a rock within half a +cable's length of the ship; but the wind was so strong, that we were driven +directly upon it, and immediately split. Six of the crew, of whom I was one, +having let down the boat into the sea, made a shift to get clear of the ship +and the rock. We rowed, by my computation, about three leagues, till we were +able to work no longer, being already spent with labour while we were in the +ship. We therefore trusted ourselves to the mercy of the waves, and in about +half an hour the boat was overset by a sudden flurry from the north. What +became of my companions in the boat, as well as of those who escaped on the +rock, or were left in the vessel, I cannot tell; but conclude they were all +lost. For my own part, I swam as fortune directed me, and was pushed forward by +wind and tide. I often let my legs drop, and could feel no bottom; but when I +was almost gone, and able to struggle no longer, I found myself within my +depth; and by this time the storm was much abated. The declivity was so small, +that I walked near a mile before I got to the shore, which I conjectured was +about eight o'clock in the evening. I then advanced forward near half a mile, +but could not discover any sign of houses or inhabitants; at least I was in so +weak a condition, that I did not observe them. I was extremely tired, and with +that, and the heat of the weather, and about half a pint of brandy that I drank +as I left the ship, I found myself much inclined to sleep. I lay down on the +grass, which was very short and soft, where I slept sounder than ever I +remembered to have done in my life, and, as I reckoned, about nine hours; for +when I awaked, it was just day-light. I attempted to rise, but was not able to +stir: for, as I happened to lie on my back, I found my arms and legs were +strongly fastened on each side to the ground; and my hair, which was long and +thick, tied down in the same manner. I likewise felt several slender ligatures +across my body, from my arm-pits to my thighs. I could only look upwards; the +sun began to grow hot, and the light offended my eyes. I heard a confused noise +about me; but in the posture I lay, could see nothing except the sky. In a +little time I felt something alive moving on my left leg, which advancing +gently forward over my breast, came almost up to my chin; when, bending my eyes +downwards as much as I could, I perceived it to be a human creature not six +inches high, with a bow and arrow in his hands, and a quiver at his back. In +the mean time, I felt at least forty more of the same kind (as I conjectured) +following the first. I was in the utmost astonishment, and roared so loud, that +they all ran back in a fright; and some of them, as I was afterwards told, were +hurt with the falls they got by leaping from my sides upon the ground. However, +they soon returned, and one of them, who ventured so far as to get a full sight +of my face, lifting up his hands and eyes by way of admiration, cried out in a +shrill but distinct voice, Hekinah degul: the others repeated the same words +several times, but then I knew not what they meant. I lay all this while, as +the reader may believe, in great uneasiness. At length, struggling to get +loose, I had the fortune to break the strings, and wrench out the pegs that +fastened my left arm to the ground; for, by lifting it up to my face, I +discovered the methods they had taken to bind me, and at the same time with a +violent pull, which gave me excessive pain, I a little loosened the strings +that tied down my hair on the left side, so that I was just able to turn my +head about two inches. But the creatures ran off a second time, before I could +seize them; whereupon there was a great shout in a very shrill accent, and +after it ceased I heard one of them cry aloud Tolgo phonac; when in an instant +I felt above a hundred arrows discharged on my left hand, which, pricked me +like so many needles; and besides, they shot another flight into the air, as we +do bombs in Europe, whereof many, I suppose, fell on my body, (though I felt +them not), and some on my face, which I immediately covered with my left hand. +When this shower of arrows was over, I fell a groaning with grief and pain; and +then striving again to get loose, they discharged another volley larger than +the first, and some of them attempted with spears to stick me in the sides; but +by good luck I had on a buff jerkin, which they could not pierce. I thought it +the most prudent method to lie still, and my design was to continue so till +night, when, my left hand being already loose, I could easily free myself: and +as for the inhabitants, I had reason to believe I might be a match for the +greatest army they could bring against me, if they were all of the same size +with him that I saw. But fortune disposed otherwise of me. When the people +observed I was quiet, they discharged no more arrows; but, by the noise I +heard, I knew their numbers increased; and about four yards from me, over +against my right ear, I heard a knocking for above an hour, like that of people +at work; when turning my head that way, as well as the pegs and strings would +permit me, I saw a stage erected about a foot and a half from the ground, +capable of holding four of the inhabitants, with two or three ladders to mount +it: from whence one of them, who seemed to be a person of quality, made me a +long speech, whereof I understood not one syllable. But I should have +mentioned, that before the principal person began his oration, he cried out +three times, Langro dehul san (these words and the former were afterwards +repeated and explained to me); whereupon, immediately, about fifty of the +inhabitants came and cut the strings that fastened the left side of my head, +which gave me the liberty of turning it to the right, and of observing the +person and gesture of him that was to speak. He appeared to be of a middle age, +and taller than any of the other three who attended him, whereof one was a page +that held up his train, and seemed to be somewhat longer than my middle finger; +the other two stood one on each side to support him. He acted every part of an +orator, and I could observe many periods of threatenings, and others of +promises, pity, and kindness. I answered in a few words, but in the most +submissive manner, lifting up my left hand, and both my eyes to the sun, as +calling him for a witness; and being almost famished with hunger, having not +eaten a morsel for some hours before I left the ship, I found the demands of +nature so strong upon me, that I could not forbear showing my impatience +(perhaps against the strict rules of decency) by putting my finger frequently +to my mouth, to signify that I wanted food. The hurgo (for so they call a great +lord, as I afterwards learnt) understood me very well. He descended from the +stage, and commanded that several ladders should be applied to my sides, on +which above a hundred of the inhabitants mounted and walked towards my mouth, +laden with baskets full of meat, which had been provided and sent thither by +the king's orders, upon the first intelligence he received of me. I observed +there was the flesh of several animals, but could not distinguish them by the +taste. There were shoulders, legs, and loins, shaped like those of mutton, and +very well dressed, but smaller than the wings of a lark. I ate them by two or +three at a mouthful, and took three loaves at a time, about the bigness of +musket bullets. They supplied me as fast as they could, showing a thousand +marks of wonder and astonishment at my bulk and appetite. I then made another +sign, that I wanted drink. They found by my eating that a small quantity would +not suffice me; and being a most ingenious people, they slung up, with great +dexterity, one of their largest hogsheads, then rolled it towards my hand, and +beat out the top; I drank it off at a draught, which I might well do, for it +did not hold half a pint, and tasted like a small wine of Burgundy, but much +more delicious. They brought me a second hogshead, which I drank in the same +manner, and made signs for more; but they had none to give me. When I had +performed these wonders, they shouted for joy, and danced upon my breast, +repeating several times as they did at first, Hekinah degul. They made me a +sign that I should throw down the two hogsheads, but first warning the people +below to stand out of the way, crying aloud, Borach mevolah; and when they saw +the vessels in the air, there was a universal shout of Hekinah degul. I confess +I was often tempted, while they were passing backwards and forwards on my body, +to seize forty or fifty of the first that came in my reach, and dash them +against the ground. But the remembrance of what I had felt, which probably +might not be the worst they could do, and the promise of honour I made +them--for so I interpreted my submissive behaviour-- soon drove out these +imaginations. Besides, I now considered myself as bound by the laws of +hospitality, to a people who had treated me with so much expense and +magnificence. However, in my thoughts I could not sufficiently wonder at the +intrepidity of these diminutive mortals, who durst venture to mount and walk +upon my body, while one of my hands was at liberty, without trembling at the +very sight of so prodigious a creature as I must appear to them. After some +time, when they observed that I made no more demands for meat, there appeared +before me a person of high rank from his imperial majesty. His excellency, +having mounted on the small of my right leg, advanced forwards up to my face, +with about a dozen of his retinue; and producing his credentials under the +signet royal, which he applied close to my eyes, spoke about ten minutes +without any signs of anger, but with a kind of determinate resolution, often +pointing forwards, which, as I afterwards found, was towards the capital city, +about half a mile distant; whither it was agreed by his majesty in council that +I must be conveyed. I answered in few words, but to no purpose, and made a sign +with my hand that was loose, putting it to the other (but over his excellency's +head for fear of hurting him or his train) and then to my own head and body, to +signify that I desired my liberty. It appeared that he understood me well +enough, for he shook his head by way of disapprobation, and held his hand in a +posture to show that I must be carried as a prisoner. However, he made other +signs to let me understand that I should have meat and drink enough, and very +good treatment. Whereupon I once more thought of attempting to break my bonds; +but again, when I felt the smart of their arrows upon my face and hands, which +were all in blisters, and many of the darts still sticking in them, and +observing likewise that the number of my enemies increased, I gave tokens to +let them know that they might do with me what they pleased. Upon this, the +hurgo and his train withdrew, with much civility and cheerful countenances. +Soon after I heard a general shout, with frequent repetitions of the words +Peplom selan; and I felt great numbers of people on my left side relaxing the +cords to such a degree, that I was able to turn upon my right, and to ease +myself with making water; which I very plentifully did, to the great +astonishment of the people; who, conjecturing by my motion what I was going to +do, immediately opened to the right and left on that side, to avoid the +torrent, which fell with such noise and violence from me. But before this, they +had daubed my face and both my hands with a sort of ointment, very pleasant to +the smell, which, in a few minutes, removed all the smart of their arrows. +These circumstances, added to the refreshment I had received by their victuals +and drink, which were very nourishing, disposed me to sleep. I slept about +eight hours, as I was afterwards assured; and it was no wonder, for the +physicians, by the emperor's order, had mingled a sleepy potion in the +hogsheads of wine. + +It seems, that upon the first moment I was discovered sleeping on the ground, +after my landing, the emperor had early notice of it by an express; and +determined in council, that I should be tied in the manner I have related, +(which was done in the night while I slept;) that plenty of meat and drink +should be sent to me, and a machine prepared to carry me to the capital city. + +This resolution perhaps may appear very bold and dangerous, and I am confident +would not be imitated by any prince in Europe on the like occasion. However, in +my opinion, it was extremely prudent, as well as generous: for, supposing these +people had endeavoured to kill me with their spears and arrows, while I was +asleep, I should certainly have awaked with the first sense of smart, which +might so far have roused my rage and strength, as to have enabled me to break +the strings wherewith I was tied; after which, as they were not able to make +resistance, so they could expect no mercy. + +These people are most excellent mathematicians, and arrived to a great +perfection in mechanics, by the countenance and encouragement of the emperor, +who is a renowned patron of learning. This prince has several machines fixed on +wheels, for the carriage of trees and other great weights. He often builds his +largest men of war, whereof some are nine feet long, in the woods where the +timber grows, and has them carried on these engines three or four hundred yards +to the sea. Five hundred carpenters and engineers were immediately set at work +to prepare the greatest engine they had. It was a frame of wood raised three +inches from the ground, about seven feet long, and four wide, moving upon +twenty-two wheels. The shout I heard was upon the arrival of this engine, +which, it seems, set out in four hours after my landing. It was brought +parallel to me, as I lay. But the principal difficulty was to raise and place +me in this vehicle. Eighty poles, each of one foot high, were erected for this +purpose, and very strong cords, of the bigness of packthread, were fastened by +hooks to many bandages, which the workmen had girt round my neck, my hands, my +body, and my legs. Nine hundred of the strongest men were employed to draw up +these cords, by many pulleys fastened on the poles; and thus, in less than +three hours, I was raised and slung into the engine, and there tied fast. All +this I was told; for, while the operation was performing, I lay in a profound +sleep, by the force of that soporiferous medicine infused into my liquor. +Fifteen hundred of the emperor's largest horses, each about four inches and a +half high, were employed to draw me towards the metropolis, which, as I said, +was half a mile distant. + +About four hours after we began our journey, I awaked by a very ridiculous +accident; for the carriage being stopped a while, to adjust something that was +out of order, two or three of the young natives had the curiosity to see how I +looked when I was asleep; they climbed up into the engine, and advancing very +softly to my face, one of them, an officer in the guards, put the sharp end of +his half-pike a good way up into my left nostril, which tickled my nose like a +straw, and made me sneeze violently; whereupon they stole off unperceived, and +it was three weeks before I knew the cause of my waking so suddenly. We made a +long march the remaining part of the day, and, rested at night with five +hundred guards on each side of me, half with torches, and half with bows and +arrows, ready to shoot me if I should offer to stir. The next morning at +sun-rise we continued our march, and arrived within two hundred yards of the +city gates about noon. The emperor, and all his court, came out to meet us; but +his great officers would by no means suffer his majesty to endanger his person +by mounting on my body. + +At the place where the carriage stopped there stood an ancient temple, esteemed +to be the largest in the whole kingdom; which, having been polluted some years +before by an unnatural murder, was, according to the zeal of those people, +looked upon as profane, and therefore had been applied to common use, and all +the ornaments and furniture carried away. In this edifice it was determined I +should lodge. The great gate fronting to the north was about four feet high, +and almost two feet wide, through which I could easily creep. On each side of +the gate was a small window, not above six inches from the ground: into that on +the left side, the king's smith conveyed fourscore and eleven chains, like +those that hang to a lady's watch in Europe, and almost as large, which were +locked to my left leg with six-and-thirty padlocks. Over against this temple, +on the other side of the great highway, at twenty feet distance, there was a +turret at least five feet high. Here the emperor ascended, with many principal +lords of his court, to have an opportunity of viewing me, as I was told, for I +could not see them. It was reckoned that above a hundred thousand inhabitants +came out of the town upon the same errand; and, in spite of my guards, I +believe there could not be fewer than ten thousand at several times, who +mounted my body by the help of ladders. But a proclamation was soon issued, to +forbid it upon pain of death. When the workmen found it was impossible for me +to break loose, they cut all the strings that bound me; whereupon I rose up, +with as melancholy a disposition as ever I had in my life. But the noise and +astonishment of the people, at seeing me rise and walk, are not to be +expressed. The chains that held my left leg were about two yards long, and gave +me not only the liberty of walking backwards and forwards in a semicircle, but, +being fixed within four inches of the gate, allowed me to creep in, and lie at +my full length in the temple. + +CHAPTER II. + +[The emperor of Lilliput, attended by several of the nobility, comes to see the +author in his confinement. The emperor's person and habit described. Learned +men appointed to teach the author their language. He gains favour by his mild +disposition. His pockets are searched, and his sword and pistols taken from +him.] + +When I found myself on my feet, I looked about me, and must confess I never +beheld a more entertaining prospect. The country around appeared like a +continued garden, and the enclosed fields, which were generally forty feet +square, resembled so many beds of flowers. These fields were intermingled with +woods of half a stang,~^ and the tallest trees, as I could judge, appeared to +be seven feet high. I viewed the town on my left hand, which looked like the +painted scene of a city in a theatre. + +I had been for some hours extremely pressed by the necessities of nature; which +was no wonder, it being almost two days since I had last disburdened myself. I +was under great difficulties between urgency and shame. The best expedient I +could think of, was to creep into my house, which I accordingly did; and +shutting the gate after me, I went as far as the length of my chain would +suffer, and discharged my body of that uneasy load. But this was the only time +I was ever guilty of so uncleanly an action; for which I cannot but hope the +candid reader will give some allowance, after he has maturely and impartially +considered my case, and the distress I was in. From this time my constant +practice was, as soon as I rose, to perform that business in open air, at the +full extent of my chain; and due care was taken every morning before company +came, that the offensive matter should be carried off in wheel-barrows, by two +servants appointed for that purpose. I would not have dwelt so long upon a +circumstance that, perhaps, at first sight, may appear not very momentous, if I +had not thought it necessary to justify my character, in point of cleanliness, +to the world; which, I am told, some of my maligners have been pleased, upon +this and other occasions, to call in question. + +When this adventure was at an end, I came back out of my house, having occasion +for fresh air. The emperor was already descended from the tower, and advancing +on horseback towards me, which had like to have cost him dear; for the beast, +though very well trained, yet wholly unused to such a sight, which appeared as +if a mountain moved before him, reared up on its hinder feet: but that prince, +who is an excellent horseman, kept his seat, till his attendants ran in, and +held the bridle, while his majesty had time to dismount. When he alighted, he +surveyed me round with great admiration; but kept beyond the length of my +chain. He ordered his cooks and butlers, who were already prepared, to give me +victuals and drink, which they pushed forward in a sort of vehicles upon +wheels, till I could reach them. I took these vehicles and soon emptied them +all; twenty of them were filled with meat, and ten with liquor; each of the +former afforded me two or three good mouthfuls; and I emptied the liquor of ten +vessels, which was contained in earthen vials, into one vehicle, drinking it +off at a draught; and so I did with the rest. The empress, and young princes of +the blood of both sexes, attended by many ladies, sat at some distance in their +chairs; but upon the accident that happened to the emperor's horse, they +alighted, and came near his person, which I am now going to describe. He is +taller by almost the breadth of my nail, than any of his court; which alone is +enough to strike an awe into the beholders. His features are strong and +masculine, with an Austrian lip and arched nose, his complexion olive, his +countenance erect, his body and limbs well proportioned, all his motions +graceful, and his deportment majestic. He was then past his prime, being +twenty-eight years and three quarters old, of which he had reigned about seven +in great felicity, and generally victorious. For the better convenience of +beholding him, I lay on my side, so that my face was parallel to his, and he +stood but three yards off: however, I have had him since many times in my hand, +and therefore cannot be deceived in the description. His dress was very plain +and simple, and the fashion of it between the Asiatic and the European; but he +had on his head a light helmet of gold, adorned with jewels, and a plume on the +crest. He held his sword drawn in his hand to defend himself, if I should +happen to break loose; it was almost three inches long; the hilt and scabbard +were gold enriched with diamonds. His voice was shrill, but very clear and +articulate; and I could distinctly hear it when I stood up. The ladies and +courtiers were all most magnificently clad; so that the spot they stood upon +seemed to resemble a petticoat spread upon the ground, embroidered with figures +of gold and silver. His imperial majesty spoke often to me, and I returned +answers: but neither of us could understand a syllable. There were several of +his priests and lawyers present (as I conjectured by their habits), who were +commanded to address themselves to me; and I spoke to them in as many languages +as I had the least smattering of, which were High and Low Dutch, Latin, French, +Spanish, Italian, and Lingua Franca, but all to no purpose. After about two +hours the court retired, and I was left with a strong guard, to prevent the +impertinence, and probably the malice of the rabble, who were very impatient to +crowd about me as near as they durst; and some of them had the impudence to +shoot their arrows at me, as I sat on the ground by the door of my house, +whereof one very narrowly missed my left eye. But the colonel ordered six of +the ringleaders to be seized, and thought no punishment so proper as to deliver +them bound into my hands; which some of his soldiers accordingly did, pushing +them forward with the butt-ends of their pikes into my reach. I took them all +in my right hand, put five of them into my coat-pocket; and as to the sixth, I +made a countenance as if I would eat him alive. The poor man squalled terribly, +and the colonel and his officers were in much pain, especially when they saw me +take out my penknife: but I soon put them out of fear; for, looking mildly, and +immediately cutting the strings he was bound with, I set him gently on the +ground, and away he ran. I treated the rest in the same manner, taking them one +by one out of my pocket; and I observed both the soldiers and people were +highly delighted at this mark of my clemency, which was represented very much +to my advantage at court. + +Towards night I got with some difficulty into my house, where I lay on the +ground, and continued to do so about a fortnight; during which time, the +emperor gave orders to have a bed prepared for me. Six hundred beds of the +common measure were brought in carriages, and worked up in my house; a hundred +and fifty of their beds, sewn together, made up the breadth and length; and +these were four double: which, however, kept me but very indifferently from the +hardness of the floor, that was of smooth stone. By the same computation, they +provided me with sheets, blankets, and coverlets, tolerable enough for one who +had been so long inured to hardships. + +As the news of my arrival spread through the kingdom, it brought prodigious +numbers of rich, idle, and curious people to see me; so that the villages were +almost emptied; and great neglect of tillage and household affairs must have +ensued, if his imperial majesty had not provided, by several proclamations and +orders of state, against this inconveniency. He directed that those who had +already beheld me should return home, and not presume to come within fifty +yards of my house, without license from the court; whereby the secretaries of +state got considerable fees. + +In the mean time the emperor held frequent councils, to debate what course +should be taken with me; and I was afterwards assured by a particular friend, a +person of great quality, who was as much in the secret as any, that the court +was under many difficulties concerning me. They apprehended my breaking loose; +that my diet would be very expensive, and might cause a famine. Sometimes they +determined to starve me; or at least to shoot me in the face and hands with +poisoned arrows, which would soon despatch me; but again they considered, that +the stench of so large a carcass might produce a plague in the metropolis, and +probably spread through the whole kingdom. In the midst of these consultations, +several officers of the army went to the door of the great council-chamber, and +two of them being admitted, gave an account of my behaviour to the six +criminals above-mentioned; which made so favourable an impression in the breast +of his majesty and the whole board, in my behalf, that an imperial commission +was issued out, obliging all the villages, nine hundred yards round the city, +to deliver in every morning six beeves, forty sheep, and other victuals for my +sustenance; together with a proportionable quantity of bread, and wine, and +other liquors; for the due payment of which, his majesty gave assignments upon +his treasury:- for this prince lives chiefly upon his own demesnes; seldom, +except upon great occasions, raising any subsidies upon his subjects, who are +bound to attend him in his wars at their own expense. An establishment was also +made of six hundred persons to be my domestics, who had board-wages allowed for +their maintenance, and tents built for them very conveniently on each side of +my door. It was likewise ordered, that three hundred tailors should make me a +suit of clothes, after the fashion of the country; that six of his majesty's +greatest scholars should be employed to instruct me in their language; and +lastly, that the emperor's horses, and those of the nobility and troops of +guards, should be frequently exercised in my sight, to accustom themselves to +me. All these orders were duly put in execution; and in about three weeks I +made a great progress in learning their language; during which time the emperor +frequently honoured me with his visits, and was pleased to assist my masters in +teaching me. We began already to converse together in some sort; and the first +words I learnt, were to express my desire "that he would please give me my +liberty;" which I every day repeated on my knees. His answer, as I could +comprehend it, was, "that this must be a work of time, not to be thought on +without the advice of his council, and that first I must lumos kelmin pesso +desmar lon emposo;" that is, swear a peace with him and his kingdom. However, +that I should be used with all kindness. And he advised me to "acquire, by my +patience and discreet behaviour, the good opinion of himself and his subjects." +He desired "I would not take it ill, if he gave orders to certain proper +officers to search me; for probably I might carry about me several weapons, +which must needs be dangerous things, if they answered the bulk of so +prodigious a person." I said, "His majesty should be satisfied; for I was ready +to strip myself, and turn up my pockets before him." This I delivered part in +words, and part in signs. He replied, "that, by the laws of the kingdom, I must +be searched by two of his officers; that he knew this could not be done without +my consent and assistance; and he had so good an opinion of my generosity and +justice, as to trust their persons in my hands; that whatever they took from +me, should be returned when I left the country, or paid for at the rate which I +would set upon them." I took up the two officers in my hands, put them first +into my coat-pockets, and then into every other pocket about me, except my two +fobs, and another secret pocket, which I had no mind should be searched, +wherein I had some little necessaries that were of no consequence to any but +myself. In one of my fobs there was a silver watch, and in the other a small +quantity of gold in a purse. These gentlemen, having pen, ink, and paper, about +them, made an exact inventory of every thing they saw; and when they had done, +desired I would set them down, that they might deliver it to the emperor. This +inventory I afterwards translated into English, and is, word for word, as +follows: + +"Imprimis: In the right coat-pocket of the great man-mountain" (for so I +interpret the words quinbus flestrin,) "after the strictest search, we found +only one great piece of coarse-cloth, large enough to be a foot-cloth for your +majesty's chief room of state. In the left pocket we saw a huge silver chest, +with a cover of the same metal, which we, the searchers, were not able to lift. +We desired it should be opened, and one of us stepping into it, found himself +up to the mid leg in a sort of dust, some part whereof flying up to our faces +set us both a sneezing for several times together. In his right +waistcoat-pocket we found a prodigious bundle of white thin substances, folded +one over another, about the bigness of three men, tied with a strong cable, and +marked with black figures; which we humbly conceive to be writings, every +letter almost half as large as the palm of our hands. In the left there was a +sort of engine, from the back of which were extended twenty long poles, +resembling the pallisados before your majesty's court: wherewith we conjecture +the man- mountain combs his head; for we did not always trouble him with +questions, because we found it a great difficulty to make him understand us. In +the large pocket, on the right side of his middle cover" (so I translate the +word ranfulo, by which they meant my breeches,) "we saw a hollow pillar of +iron, about the length of a man, fastened to a strong piece of timber larger +than the pillar; and upon one side of the pillar, were huge pieces of iron +sticking out, cut into strange figures, which we know not what to make of. In +the left pocket, another engine of the same kind. In the smaller pocket on the +right side, were several round flat pieces of white and red metal, of different +bulk; some of the white, which seemed to be silver, were so large and heavy, +that my comrade and I could hardly lift them. In the left pocket were two black +pillars irregularly shaped: we could not, without difficulty, reach the top of +them, as we stood at the bottom of his pocket. One of them was covered, and +seemed all of a piece: but at the upper end of the other there appeared a white +round substance, about twice the bigness of our heads. Within each of these was +enclosed a prodigious plate of steel; which, by our orders, we obliged him to +show us, because we apprehended they might be dangerous engines. He took them +out of their cases, and told us, that in his own country his practice was to +shave his beard with one of these, and cut his meat with the other. There were +two pockets which we could not enter: these he called his fobs; they were two +large slits cut into the top of his middle cover, but squeezed close by the +pressure of his belly. Out of the right fob hung a great silver chain, with a +wonderful kind of engine at the bottom. We directed him to draw out whatever +was at the end of that chain; which appeared to be a globe, half silver, and +half of some transparent metal; for, on the transparent side, we saw certain +strange figures circularly drawn, and thought we could touch them, till we +found our fingers stopped by the lucid substance. He put this engine into our +ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water- mill: and we +conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but +we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we +understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom +did any thing without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said, it +pointed out the time for every action of his life. From the left fob he took +out a net almost large enough for a fisherman, but contrived to open and shut +like a purse, and served him for the same use: we found therein several massy +pieces of yellow metal, which, if they be real gold, must be of immense value. + +"Having thus, in obedience to your majesty's commands, diligently searched all +his pockets, we observed a girdle about his waist made of the hide of some +prodigious animal, from which, on the left side, hung a sword of the length of +five men; and on the right, a bag or pouch divided into two cells, each cell +capable of holding three of your majesty's subjects. In one of these cells were +several globes, or balls, of a most ponderous metal, about the bigness of our +heads, and requiring a strong hand to lift them: the other cell contained a +heap of certain black grains, but of no great bulk or weight, for we could hold +above fifty of them in the palms of our hands. + +"This is an exact inventory of what we found about the body of the +man-mountain, who used us with great civility, and due respect to your +majesty's commission. Signed and sealed on the fourth day of the eighty-ninth +moon of your majesty's auspicious reign. + +CLEFRIN FRELOCK, MARSI FRELOCK." + +When this inventory was read over to the emperor, he directed me, although in +very gentle terms, to deliver up the several particulars. He first called for +my scimitar, which I took out, scabbard and all. In the mean time he ordered +three thousand of his choicest troops (who then attended him) to surround me at +a distance, with their bows and arrows just ready to discharge; but I did not +observe it, for mine eyes were wholly fixed upon his majesty. He then desired +me to draw my scimitar, which, although it had got some rust by the sea water, +was, in most parts, exceeding bright. I did so, and immediately all the troops +gave a shout between terror and surprise; for the sun shone clear, and the +reflection dazzled their eyes, as I waved the scimitar to and fro in my hand. +His majesty, who is a most magnanimous prince, was less daunted than I could +expect: he ordered me to return it into the scabbard, and cast it on the ground +as gently as I could, about six feet from the end of my chain. The next thing +he demanded was one of the hollow iron pillars; by which he meant my pocket +pistols. I drew it out, and at his desire, as well as I could, expressed to him +the use of it; and charging it only with powder, which, by the closeness of my +pouch, happened to escape wetting in the sea (an inconvenience against which +all prudent mariners take special care to provide,) I first cautioned the +emperor not to be afraid, and then I let it off in the air. The astonishment +here was much greater than at the sight of my scimitar. Hundreds fell down as +if they had been struck dead; and even the emperor, although he stood his +ground, could not recover himself for some time. I delivered up both my pistols +in the same manner as I had done my scimitar, and then my pouch of powder and +bullets; begging him that the former might be kept from fire, for it would +kindle with the smallest spark, and blow up his imperial palace into the air. I +likewise delivered up my watch, which the emperor was very curious to see, and +commanded two of his tallest yeomen of the guards to bear it on a pole upon +their shoulders, as draymen in England do a barrel of ale. He was amazed at the +continual noise it made, and the motion of the minute-hand, which he could +easily discern; for their sight is much more acute than ours: he asked the +opinions of his learned men about it, which were various and remote, as the +reader may well imagine without my repeating; although indeed I could not very +perfectly understand them. I then gave up my silver and copper money, my purse, +with nine large pieces of gold, and some smaller ones; my knife and razor, my +comb and silver snuff-box, my handkerchief and journal-book. My scimitar, +pistols, and pouch, were conveyed in carriages to his majesty's stores; but the +rest of my goods were returned me. + +I had as I before observed, one private pocket, which escaped their search, +wherein there was a pair of spectacles (which I sometimes use for the weakness +of mine eyes,) a pocket perspective, and some other little conveniences; which, +being of no consequence to the emperor, I did not think myself bound in honour +to discover, and I apprehended they might be lost or spoiled if I ventured them +out of my possession. + +CHAPTER III. + +[The author diverts the emperor, and his nobility of both sexes, in a very +uncommon manner. The diversions of the court of Lilliput described. The author +has his liberty granted him upon certain conditions.] + +My gentleness and good behaviour had gained so far on the emperor and his +court, and indeed upon the army and people in general, that I began to conceive +hopes of getting my liberty in a short time. I took all possible methods to +cultivate this favourable disposition. The natives came, by degrees, to be less +apprehensive of any danger from me. I would sometimes lie down, and let five or +six of them dance on my hand; and at last the boys and girls would venture to +come and play at hide-and-seek in my hair. I had now made a good progress in +understanding and speaking the language. The emperor had a mind one day to +entertain me with several of the country shows, wherein they exceed all nations +I have known, both for dexterity and magnificence. I was diverted with none so +much as that of the rope-dancers, performed upon a slender white thread, +extended about two feet, and twelve inches from the ground. Upon which I shall +desire liberty, with the reader's patience, to enlarge a little. + +This diversion is only practised by those persons who are candidates for great +employments, and high favour at court. They are trained in this art from their +youth, and are not always of noble birth, or liberal education. When a great +office is vacant, either by death or disgrace (which often happens,) five or +six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his majesty and the +court with a dance on the rope; and whoever jumps the highest, without falling, +succeeds in the office. Very often the chief ministers themselves are commanded +to show their skill, and to convince the emperor that they have not lost their +faculty. Flimnap, the treasurer, is allowed to cut a caper on the straight +rope, at least an inch higher than any other lord in the whole empire. I have +seen him do the summerset several times together, upon a trencher fixed on a +rope which is no thicker than a common packthread in England. My friend +Reldresal, principal secretary for private affairs, is, in my opinion, if I am +not partial, the second after the treasurer; the rest of the great officers are +much upon a par. + +These diversions are often attended with fatal accidents, whereof great numbers +are on record. I myself have seen two or three candidates break a limb. But the +danger is much greater, when the ministers themselves are commanded to show +their dexterity; for, by contending to excel themselves and their fellows, they +strain so far that there is hardly one of them who has not received a fall, and +some of them two or three. I was assured that, a year or two before my arrival, +Flimnap would infallibly have broke his neck, if one of the king's cushions, +that accidentally lay on the ground, had not weakened the force of his fall. + +There is likewise another diversion, which is only shown before the emperor and +empress, and first minister, upon particular occasions. The emperor lays on the +table three fine silken threads of six inches long; one is blue, the other red, +and the third green. These threads are proposed as prizes for those persons +whom the emperor has a mind to distinguish by a peculiar mark of his favour. +The ceremony is performed in his majesty's great chamber of state, where the +candidates are to undergo a trial of dexterity very different from the former, +and such as I have not observed the least resemblance of in any other country +of the new or old world. The emperor holds a stick in his hands, both ends +parallel to the horizon, while the candidates advancing, one by one, sometimes +leap over the stick, sometimes creep under it, backward and forward, several +times, according as the stick is advanced or depressed. Sometimes the emperor +holds one end of the stick, and his first minister the other; sometimes the +minister has it entirely to himself. Whoever performs his part with most +agility, and holds out the longest in leaping and creeping, is rewarded with +the blue- coloured silk; the red is given to the next, and the green to the +third, which they all wear girt twice round about the middle; and you see few +great persons about this court who are not adorned with one of these girdles. + +The horses of the army, and those of the royal stables, having been daily led +before me, were no longer shy, but would come up to my very feet without +starting. The riders would leap them over my hand, as I held it on the ground; +and one of the emperor's huntsmen, upon a large courser, took my foot, shoe and +all; which was indeed a prodigious leap. I had the good fortune to divert the +emperor one day after a very extraordinary manner. I desired he would order +several sticks of two feet high, and the thickness of an ordinary cane, to be +brought me; whereupon his majesty commanded the master of his woods to give +directions accordingly; and the next morning six woodmen arrived with as many +carriages, drawn by eight horses to each. I took nine of these sticks, and +fixing them firmly in the ground in a quadrangular figure, two feet and a half +square, I took four other sticks, and tied them parallel at each corner, about +two feet from the ground; then I fastened my handkerchief to the nine sticks +that stood erect; and extended it on all sides, till it was tight as the top of +a drum; and the four parallel sticks, rising about five inches higher than the +handkerchief, served as ledges on each side. When I had finished my work, I +desired the emperor to let a troop of his best horses twenty-four in number, +come and exercise upon this plain. His majesty approved of the proposal, and I +took them up, one by one, in my hands, ready mounted and armed, with the proper +officers to exercise them. As soon as they got into order they divided into two +parties, performed mock skirmishes, discharged blunt arrows, drew their swords, +fled and pursued, attacked and retired, and in short discovered the best +military discipline I ever beheld. The parallel sticks secured them and their +horses from falling over the stage; and the emperor was so much delighted, that +he ordered this entertainment to be repeated several days, and once was pleased +to be lifted up and give the word of command; and with great difficulty +persuaded even the empress herself to let me hold her in her close chair within +two yards of the stage, when she was able to take a full view of the whole +performance. It was my good fortune, that no ill accident happened in these +entertainments; only once a fiery horse, that belonged to one of the captains, +pawing with his hoof, struck a hole in my handkerchief, and his foot slipping, +he overthrew his rider and himself; but I immediately relieved them both, and +covering the hole with one hand, I set down the troop with the other, in the +same manner as I took them up. The horse that fell was strained in the left +shoulder, but the rider got no hurt; and I repaired my handkerchief as well as +I could: however, I would not trust to the strength of it any more, in such +dangerous enterprises. + +About two or three days before I was set at liberty, as I was entertaining the +court with this kind of feat, there arrived an express to inform his majesty, +that some of his subjects, riding near the place where I was first taken up, +had seen a great black substance lying on the around, very oddly shaped, +extending its edges round, as wide as his majesty's bedchamber, and rising up +in the middle as high as a man; that it was no living creature, as they at +first apprehended, for it lay on the grass without motion; and some of them had +walked round it several times; that, by mounting upon each other's shoulders, +they had got to the top, which was flat and even, and, stamping upon it, they +found that it was hollow within; that they humbly conceived it might be +something belonging to the man-mountain; and if his majesty pleased, they would +undertake to bring it with only five horses. I presently knew what they meant, +and was glad at heart to receive this intelligence. It seems, upon my first +reaching the shore after our shipwreck, I was in such confusion, that before I +came to the place where I went to sleep, my hat, which I had fastened with a +string to my head while I was rowing, and had stuck on all the time I was +swimming, fell off after I came to land; the string, as I conjecture, breaking +by some accident, which I never observed, but thought my hat had been lost at +sea. I entreated his imperial majesty to give orders it might be brought to me +as soon as possible, describing to him the use and the nature of it: and the +next day the waggoners arrived with it, but not in a very good condition; they +had bored two holes in the brim, within an inch and half of the edge, and +fastened two hooks in the holes; these hooks were tied by a long cord to the +harness, and thus my hat was dragged along for above half an English mile; but, +the ground in that country being extremely smooth and level, it received less +damage than I expected. + +Two days after this adventure, the emperor, having ordered that part of his +army which quarters in and about his metropolis, to be in readiness, took a +fancy of diverting himself in a very singular manner. He desired I would stand +like a Colossus, with my legs as far asunder as I conveniently could. He then +commanded his general (who was an old experienced leader, and a great patron of +mine) to draw up the troops in close order, and march them under me; the foot +by twenty-four abreast, and the horse by sixteen, with drums beating, colours +flying, and pikes advanced. This body consisted of three thousand foot, and a +thousand horse. His majesty gave orders, upon pain of death, that every soldier +in his march should observe the strictest decency with regard to my person; +which however could not prevent some of the younger officers from turning up +their eyes as they passed under me: and, to confess the truth, my breeches were +at that time in so ill a condition, that they afforded some opportunities for +laughter and admiration. + +I had sent so many memorials and petitions for my liberty, that his majesty at +length mentioned the matter, first in the cabinet, and then in a full council; +where it was opposed by none, except Skyresh Bolgolam, who was pleased, without +any provocation, to be my mortal enemy. But it was carried against him by the +whole board, and confirmed by the emperor. That minister was galbet, or admiral +of the realm, very much in his master's confidence, and a person well versed in +affairs, but of a morose and sour complexion. However, he was at length +persuaded to comply; but prevailed that the articles and conditions upon which +I should be set free, and to which I must swear, should be drawn up by himself. +These articles were brought to me by Skyresh Bolgolam in person attended by two +under-secretaries, and several persons of distinction. After they were read, I +was demanded to swear to the performance of them; first in the manner of my own +country, and afterwards in the method prescribed by their laws; which was, to +hold my right foot in my left hand, and to place the middle finger of my right +hand on the crown of my head, and my thumb on the tip of my right ear. But +because the reader may be curious to have some idea of the style and manner of +expression peculiar to that people, as well as to know the article upon which I +recovered my liberty, I have made a translation of the whole instrument, word +for word, as near as I was able, which I here offer to the public. + +"Golbasto Momarem Evlame Gurdilo Shefin Mully Ully Gue, most mighty Emperor of +Lilliput, delight and terror of the universe, whose dominions extend five +thousand blustrugs (about twelve miles in circumference) to the extremities of +the globe; monarch of all monarchs, taller than the sons of men; whose feet +press down to the centre, and whose head strikes against the sun; at whose nod +the princes of the earth shake their knees; pleasant as the spring, comfortable +as the summer, fruitful as autumn, dreadful as winter: his most sublime majesty +proposes to the man-mountain, lately arrived at our celestial dominions, the +following articles, which, by a solemn oath, he shall be obliged to perform:- + +"1st, The man-mountain shall not depart from our dominions, without our license +under our great seal. + +"2d, He shall not presume to come into our metropolis, without our express +order; at which time, the inhabitants shall have two hours warning to keep +within doors. + +"3d, The said man-mountain shall confine his walks to our principal high roads, +and not offer to walk, or lie down, in a meadow or field of corn. + +"4th, As he walks the said roads, he shall take the utmost care not to trample +upon the bodies of any of our loving subjects, their horses, or carriages, nor +take any of our subjects into his hands without their own consent. + +"5th, If an express requires extraordinary despatch, the man- mountain shall be +obliged to carry, in his pocket, the messenger and horse a six days journey, +once in every moon, and return the said messenger back (if so required) safe to +our imperial presence. + +"6th, He shall be our ally against our enemies in the island of Blefuscu, and +do his utmost to destroy their fleet, which is now preparing to invade us. + +"7th, That the said man-mountain shall, at his times of leisure, be aiding and +assisting to our workmen, in helping to raise certain great stones, towards +covering the wall of the principal park, and other our royal buildings. + +"8th, That the said man-mountain shall, in two moons' time, deliver in an exact +survey of the circumference of our dominions, by a computation of his own paces +round the coast. + +"Lastly, That, upon his solemn oath to observe all the above articles, the said +man-mountain shall have a daily allowance of meat and drink sufficient for the +support of 1724 of our subjects, with free access to our royal person, and +other marks of our favour. Given at our palace at Belfaborac, the twelfth day +of the ninety-first moon of our reign." + +I swore and subscribed to these articles with great cheerfulness and content, +although some of them were not so honourable as I could have wished; which +proceeded wholly from the malice of Skyresh Bolgolam, the high-admiral: +whereupon my chains were immediately unlocked, and I was at full liberty. The +emperor himself, in person, did me the honour to be by at the whole ceremony. I +made my acknowledgements by prostrating myself at his majesty's feet: but he +commanded me to rise; and after many gracious expressions, which, to avoid the +censure of vanity, I shall not repeat, he added, "that he hoped I should prove +a useful servant, and well deserve all the favours he had already conferred +upon me, or might do for the future." + +The reader may please to observe, that, in the last article of the recovery of +my liberty, the emperor stipulates to allow me a quantity of meat and drink +sufficient for the support of 1724 Lilliputians. Some time after, asking a +friend at court how they came to fix on that determinate number, he told me +that his majesty's mathematicians, having taken the height of my body by the +help of a quadrant, and finding it to exceed theirs in the proportion of twelve +to one, they concluded from the similarity of their bodies, that mine must +contain at least 1724 of theirs, and consequently would require as much food as +was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians. By which the reader may +conceive an idea of the ingenuity of that people, as well as the prudent and +exact economy of so great a prince. + +CHAPTER IV. + +[Mildendo, the metropolis of Lilliput, described, together with the emperor's +palace. A conversation between the author and a principal secretary, concerning +the affairs of that empire. The author's offers to serve the emperor in his +wars.] + +The first request I made, after I had obtained my liberty, was, that I might +have license to see Mildendo, the metropolis; which the emperor easily granted +me, but with a special charge to do no hurt either to the inhabitants or their +houses. The people had notice, by proclamation, of my design to visit the town. +The wall which encompassed it is two feet and a half high, and at least eleven +inches broad, so that a coach and horses may be driven very safely round it; +and it is flanked with strong towers at ten feet distance. I stepped over the +great western gate, and passed very gently, and sidling, through the two +principal streets, only in my short waistcoat, for fear of damaging the roofs +and eaves of the houses with the skirts of my coat. I walked with the utmost +circumspection, to avoid treading on any stragglers who might remain in the +streets, although the orders were very strict, that all people should keep in +their houses, at their own peril. The garret windows and tops of houses were so +crowded with spectators, that I thought in all my travels I had not seen a more +populous place. The city is an exact square, each side of the wall being five +hundred feet long. The two great streets, which run across and divide it into +four quarters, are five feet wide. The lanes and alleys, which I could not +enter, but only view them as I passed, are from twelve to eighteen inches. The +town is capable of holding five hundred thousand souls: the houses are from +three to five stories: the shops and markets well provided. + +The emperor's palace is in the centre of the city where the two great streets +meet. It is enclosed by a wall of two feet high, and twenty feet distance from +the buildings. I had his majesty's permission to step over this wall; and, the +space being so wide between that and the palace, I could easily view it on +every side. The outward court is a square of forty feet, and includes two other +courts: in the inmost are the royal apartments, which I was very desirous to +see, but found it extremely difficult; for the great gates, from one square +into another, were but eighteen inches high, and seven inches wide. Now the +buildings of the outer court were at least five feet high, and it was +impossible for me to stride over them without infinite damage to the pile, +though the walls were strongly built of hewn stone, and four inches thick. At +the same time the emperor had a great desire that I should see the magnificence +of his palace; but this I was not able to do till three days after, which I +spent in cutting down with my knife some of the largest trees in the royal +park, about a hundred yards distant from the city. Of these trees I made two +stools, each about three feet high, and strong enough to bear my weight. The +people having received notice a second time, I went again through the city to +the palace with my two stools in my hands. When I came to the side of the outer +court, I stood upon one stool, and took the other in my hand; this I lifted +over the roof, and gently set it down on the space between the first and second +court, which was eight feet wide. I then stept over the building very +conveniently from one stool to the other, and drew up the first after me with a +hooked stick. By this contrivance I got into the inmost court; and, lying down +upon my side, I applied my face to the windows of the middle stories, which +were left open on purpose, and discovered the most splendid apartments that can +be imagined. There I saw the empress and the young princes, in their several +lodgings, with their chief attendants about them. Her imperial majesty was +pleased to smile very graciously upon me, and gave me out of the window her +hand to kiss. + +But I shall not anticipate the reader with further descriptions of this kind, +because I reserve them for a greater work, which is now almost ready for the +press; containing a general description of this empire, from its first +erection, through along series of princes; with a particular account of their +wars and politics, laws, learning, and religion; their plants and animals; +their peculiar manners and customs, with other matters very curious and useful; +my chief design at present being only to relate such events and transactions as +happened to the public or to myself during a residence of about nine months in +that empire. + +One morning, about a fortnight after I had obtained my liberty, Reldresal, +principal secretary (as they style him) for private affairs, came to my house +attended only by one servant. He ordered his coach to wait at a distance, and +desired I would give him an hours audience; which I readily consented to, on +account of his quality and personal merits, as well as of the many good offices +he had done me during my solicitations at court. I offered to lie down that he +might the more conveniently reach my ear, but he chose rather to let me hold +him in my hand during our conversation. He began with compliments on my +liberty; said "he might pretend to some merit in it;" but, however, added, +"that if it had not been for the present situation of things at court, perhaps +I might not have obtained it so soon. For," said he, "as flourishing a +condition as we may appear to be in to foreigners, we labour under two mighty +evils: a violent faction at home, and the danger of an invasion, by a most +potent enemy, from abroad. As to the first, you are to understand, that for +about seventy moons past there have been two struggling parties in this empire, +under the names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high and low heels of +their shoes, by which they distinguish themselves. It is alleged, indeed, that +the high heels are most agreeable to our ancient constitution; but, however +this be, his majesty has determined to make use only of low heels in the +administration of the government, and all offices in the gift of the crown, as +you cannot but observe; and particularly that his majesty's imperial heels are +lower at least by a drurr than any of his court (drurr is a measure about the +fourteenth part of an inch). The animosities between these two parties run so +high, that they will neither eat, nor drink, nor talk with each other. We +compute the Tramecksan, or high heels, to exceed us in number; but the power is +wholly on our side. We apprehend his imperial highness, the heir to the crown, +to have some tendency towards the high heels; at least we can plainly discover +that one of his heels is higher than the other, which gives him a hobble in his +gait. Now, in the midst of these intestine disquiets, we are threatened with an +invasion from the island of Blefuscu, which is the other great empire of the +universe, almost as large and powerful as this of his majesty. For as to what +we have heard you affirm, that there are other kingdoms and states in the world +inhabited by human creatures as large as yourself, our philosophers are in much +doubt, and would rather conjecture that you dropped from the moon, or one of +the stars; because it is certain, that a hundred mortals of your bulk would in +a short time destroy all the fruits and cattle of his majesty's dominions: +besides, our histories of six thousand moons make no mention of any other +regions than the two great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Which two mighty +powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war +for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is +allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat +them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty's grandfather, while he +was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient +practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father +published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break +the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our +histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; +wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil +commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they +were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed +that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than +submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have +been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big- endians have +been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding +employments. During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefusca did +frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in +religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet +Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral (which is their +Alcoran). This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text; for the +words are these: 'that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient +end.' And which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion to be left +to every man's conscience, or at least in the power of the chief magistrate to +determine. Now, the Big-endian exiles have found so much credit in the emperor +of Blefuscu's court, and so much private assistance and encouragement from +their party here at home, that a bloody war has been carried on between the two +empires for six-and-thirty moons, with various success; during which time we +have lost forty capital ships, and a much a greater number of smaller vessels, +together with thirty thousand of our best seamen and soldiers; and the damage +received by the enemy is reckoned to be somewhat greater than ours. However, +they have now equipped a numerous fleet, and are just preparing to make a +descent upon us; and his imperial majesty, placing great confidence in your +valour and strength, has commanded me to lay this account of his affairs before +you." + +I desired the secretary to present my humble duty to the emperor; and to let +him know, "that I thought it would not become me, who was a foreigner, to +interfere with parties; but I was ready, with the hazard of my life, to defend +his person and state against all invaders." + +CHAPTER V. + +[The author, by an extraordinary stratagem, prevents an invasion. A high title +of honour is conferred upon him. Ambassadors arrive from the emperor of +Blefuscu, and sue for peace. The empress's apartment on fire by an accident; +the author instrumental in saving the rest of the palace.] + +The empire of Blefuscu is an island situated to the north-east of Lilliput, +from which it is parted only by a channel of eight hundred yards wide. I had +not yet seen it, and upon this notice of an intended invasion, I avoided +appearing on that side of the coast, for fear of being discovered, by some of +the enemy's ships, who had received no intelligence of me; all intercourse +between the two empires having been strictly forbidden during the war, upon +pain of death, and an embargo laid by our emperor upon all vessels whatsoever. +I communicated to his majesty a project I had formed of seizing the enemy's +whole fleet; which, as our scouts assured us, lay at anchor in the harbour, +ready to sail with the first fair wind. I consulted the most experienced seamen +upon the depth of the channel, which they had often plumbed; who told me, that +in the middle, at high-water, it was seventy glumgluffs deep, which is about +six feet of European measure; and the rest of it fifty glumgluffs at most. I +walked towards the north-east coast, over against Blefuscu, where, lying down +behind a hillock, I took out my small perspective glass, and viewed the enemy's +fleet at anchor, consisting of about fifty men of war, and a great number of +transports: I then came back to my house, and gave orders (for which I had a +warrant) for a great quantity of the strongest cable and bars of iron. The +cable was about as thick as packthread and the bars of the length and size of a +knitting-needle. I trebled the cable to make it stronger, and for the same +reason I twisted three of the iron bars together, bending the extremities into +a hook. Having thus fixed fifty hooks to as many cables, I went back to the +north-east coast, and putting off my coat, shoes, and stockings, walked into +the sea, in my leathern jerkin, about half an hour before high water. I waded +with what haste I could, and swam in the middle about thirty yards, till I felt +ground. I arrived at the fleet in less than half an hour. The enemy was so +frightened when they saw me, that they leaped out of their ships, and swam to +shore, where there could not be fewer than thirty thousand souls. I then took +my tackling, and, fastening a hook to the hole at the prow of each, I tied all +the cords together at the end. While I was thus employed, the enemy discharged +several thousand arrows, many of which stuck in my hands and face, and, beside +the excessive smart, gave me much disturbance in my work. My greatest +apprehension was for mine eyes, which I should have infallibly lost, if I had +not suddenly thought of an expedient. I kept, among other little necessaries, a +pair of spectacles in a private pocket, which, as I observed before, had +escaped the emperor's searchers. These I took out and fastened as strongly as I +could upon my nose, and thus armed, went on boldly with my work, in spite of +the enemy's arrows, many of which struck against the glasses of my spectacles, +but without any other effect, further than a little to discompose them. I had +now fastened all the hooks, and, taking the knot in my hand, began to pull; but +not a ship would stir, for they were all too fast held by their anchors, so +that the boldest part of my enterprise remained. I therefore let go the cord, +and leaving the looks fixed to the ships, I resolutely cut with my knife the +cables that fastened the anchors, receiving about two hundred shots in my face +and hands; then I took up the knotted end of the cables, to which my hooks were +tied, and with great ease drew fifty of the enemy's largest men of war after +me. + +The Blefuscudians, who had not the least imagination of what I intended, were +at first confounded with astonishment. They had seen me cut the cables, and +thought my design was only to let the ships run adrift or fall foul on each +other: but when they perceived the whole fleet moving in order, and saw me +pulling at the end, they set up such a scream of grief and despair as it is +almost impossible to describe or conceive. When I had got out of danger, I +stopped awhile to pick out the arrows that stuck in my hands and face; and +rubbed on some of the same ointment that was given me at my first arrival, as I +have formerly mentioned. I then took off my spectacles, and waiting about an +hour, till the tide was a little fallen, I waded through the middle with my +cargo, and arrived safe at the royal port of Lilliput. + +The emperor and his whole court stood on the shore, expecting the issue of this +great adventure. They saw the ships move forward in a large half-moon, but +could not discern me, who was up to my breast in water. When I advanced to the +middle of the channel, they were yet more in pain, because I was under water to +my neck. The emperor concluded me to be drowned, and that the enemy's fleet was +approaching in a hostile manner: but he was soon eased of his fears; for the +channel growing shallower every step I made, I came in a short time within +hearing, and holding up the end of the cable, by which the fleet was fastened, +I cried in a loud voice, "Long live the most puissant king of Lilliput!" This +great prince received me at my landing with all possible encomiums, and created +me a nardac upon the spot, which is the highest title of honour among them. + +His majesty desired I would take some other opportunity of bringing all the +rest of his enemy's ships into his ports. And so unmeasureable is the ambition +of princes, that he seemed to think of nothing less than reducing the whole +empire of Blefuscu into a province, and governing it, by a viceroy; of +destroying the Big- endian exiles, and compelling that people to break the +smaller end of their eggs, by which he would remain the sole monarch of the +whole world. But I endeavoured to divert him from this design, by many +arguments drawn from the topics of policy as well as justice; and I plainly +protested, "that I would never be an instrument of bringing a free and brave +people into slavery." And, when the matter was debated in council, the wisest +part of the ministry were of my opinion. + +This open bold declaration of mine was so opposite to the schemes and politics +of his imperial majesty, that he could never forgive me. He mentioned it in a +very artful manner at council, where I was told that some of the wisest +appeared, at least by their silence, to be of my opinion; but others, who were +my secret enemies, could not forbear some expressions which, by a side-wind, +reflected on me. And from this time began an intrigue between his majesty and a +junto of ministers, maliciously bent against me, which broke out in less than +two months, and had like to have ended in my utter destruction. Of so little +weight are the greatest services to princes, when put into the balance with a +refusal to gratify their passions. + +About three weeks after this exploit, there arrived a solemn embassy from +Blefuscu, with humble offers of a peace, which was soon concluded, upon +conditions very advantageous to our emperor, wherewith I shall not trouble the +reader. There were six ambassadors, with a train of about five hundred persons, +and their entry was very magnificent, suitable to the grandeur of their master, +and the importance of their business. When their treaty was finished, wherein I +did them several good offices by the credit I now had, or at least appeared to +have, at court, their excellencies, who were privately told how much I had been +their friend, made me a visit in form. They began with many compliments upon my +valour and generosity, invited me to that kingdom in the emperor their master's +name, and desired me to show them some proofs of my prodigious strength, of +which they had heard so many wonders; wherein I readily obliged them, but shall +not trouble the reader with the particulars. + +When I had for some time entertained their excellencies, to their infinite +satisfaction and surprise, I desired they would do me the honour to present my +most humble respects to the emperor their master, the renown of whose virtues +had so justly filled the whole world with admiration, and whose royal person I +resolved to attend, before I returned to my own country. Accordingly, the next +time I had the honour to see our emperor, I desired his general license to wait +on the Blefuscudian monarch, which he was pleased to grant me, as I could +perceive, in a very cold manner; but could not guess the reason, till I had a +whisper from a certain person, "that Flimnap and Bolgolam had represented my +intercourse with those ambassadors as a mark of disaffection;" from which I am +sure my heart was wholly free. And this was the first time I began to conceive +some imperfect idea of courts and ministers. + +It is to be observed, that these ambassadors spoke to me, by an interpreter, +the languages of both empires differing as much from each other as any two in +Europe, and each nation priding itself upon the antiquity, beauty, and energy +of their own tongue, with an avowed contempt for that of their neighbour; yet +our emperor, standing upon the advantage he had got by the seizure of their +fleet, obliged them to deliver their credentials, and make their speech, in the +Lilliputian tongue. And it must be confessed, that from the great intercourse +of trade and commerce between both realms, from the continual reception of +exiles which is mutual among them, and from the custom, in each empire, to send +their young nobility and richer gentry to the other, in order to polish +themselves by seeing the world, and understanding men and manners; there are +few persons of distinction, or merchants, or seamen, who dwell in the maritime +parts, but what can hold conversation in both tongues; as I found some weeks +after, when I went to pay my respects to the emperor of Blefuscu, which, in the +midst of great misfortunes, through the malice of my enemies, proved a very +happy adventure to me, as I shall relate in its proper place. + +The reader may remember, that when I signed those articles upon which I +recovered my liberty, there were some which I disliked, upon account of their +being too servile; neither could anything but an extreme necessity have forced +me to submit. But being now a nardac of the highest rank in that empire, such +offices were looked upon as below my dignity, and the emperor (to do him +justice), never once mentioned them to me. However, it was not long before I +had an opportunity of doing his majesty, at least as I then thought, a most +signal service. I was alarmed at midnight with the cries of many hundred people +at my door; by which, being suddenly awaked, I was in some kind of terror. I +heard the word Burglum repeated incessantly: several of the emperor's court, +making their way through the crowd, entreated me to come immediately to the +palace, where her imperial majesty's apartment was on fire, by the carelessness +of a maid of honour, who fell asleep while she was reading a romance. I got up +in an instant; and orders being given to clear the way before me, and it being +likewise a moonshine night, I made a shift to get to the palace without +trampling on any of the people. I found they had already applied ladders to the +walls of the apartment, and were well provided with buckets, but the water was +at some distance. These buckets were about the size of large thimbles, and the +poor people supplied me with them as fast as they could: but the flame was so +violent that they did little good. I might easily have stifled it with my coat, +which I unfortunately left behind me for haste, and came away only in my +leathern jerkin. The case seemed wholly desperate and deplorable; and this +magnificent palace would have infallibly been burnt down to the ground, if, by +a presence of mind unusual to me, I had not suddenly thought of an expedient. I +had, the evening before, drunk plentifully of a most delicious wine called +glimigrim, (the Blefuscudians call it flunec, but ours is esteemed the better +sort,) which is very diuretic. By the luckiest chance in the world, I had not +discharged myself of any part of it. The heat I had contracted by coming very +near the flames, and by labouring to quench them, made the wine begin to +operate by urine; which I voided in such a quantity, and applied so well to the +proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished, and the +rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting, preserved +from destruction. + +It was now day-light, and I returned to my house without waiting to +congratulate with the emperor: because, although I had done a very eminent +piece of service, yet I could not tell how his majesty might resent the manner +by which I had performed it: for, by the fundamental laws of the realm, it is +capital in any person, of what quality soever, to make water within the +precincts of the palace. But I was a little comforted by a message from his +majesty, "that he would give orders to the grand justiciary for passing my +pardon in form:" which, however, I could not obtain; and I was privately +assured, "that the empress, conceiving the greatest abhorrence of what I had +done, removed to the most distant side of the court, firmly resolved that those +buildings should never be repaired for her use: and, in the presence of her +chief confidents could not forbear vowing revenge." + +CHAPTER VI. + +[Of the inhabitants of Lilliput; their learning, laws, and customs; the manner +of educating their children. The author's way of living in that country. His +vindication of a great lady.] + +Although I intend to leave the description of this empire to a particular +treatise, yet, in the mean time, I am content to gratify the curious reader +with some general ideas. As the common size of the natives is somewhat under +six inches high, so there is an exact proportion in all other animals, as well +as plants and trees: for instance, the tallest horses and oxen are between four +and five inches in height, the sheep an inch and half, more or less: their +geese about the bigness of a sparrow, and so the several gradations downwards +till you come to the smallest, which to my sight, were almost invisible; but +nature has adapted the eyes of the Lilliputians to all objects proper for their +view: they see with great exactness, but at no great distance. And, to show the +sharpness of their sight towards objects that are near, I have been much +pleased with observing a cook pulling a lark, which was not so large as a +common fly; and a young girl threading an invisible needle with invisible silk. +Their tallest trees are about seven feet high: I mean some of those in the +great royal park, the tops whereof I could but just reach with my fist +clenched. The other vegetables are in the same proportion; but this I leave to +the reader's imagination. + +I shall say but little at present of their learning, which, for many ages, has +flourished in all its branches among them: but their manner of writing is very +peculiar, being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans, nor +from the right to the left, like the Arabians, nor from up to down, like the +Chinese, but aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other, like ladies in +England. + +They bury their dead with their heads directly downward, because they hold an +opinion, that in eleven thousand moons they are all to rise again; in which +period the earth (which they conceive to be flat) will turn upside down, and by +this means they shall, at their resurrection, be found ready standing on their +feet. The learned among them confess the absurdity of this doctrine; but the +practice still continues, in compliance to the vulgar. + +There are some laws and customs in this empire very peculiar; and if they were +not so directly contrary to those of my own dear country, I should be tempted +to say a little in their justification. It is only to be wished they were as +well executed. The first I shall mention, relates to informers. All crimes +against the state, are punished here with the utmost severity; but, if the +person accused makes his innocence plainly to appear upon his trial, the +accuser is immediately put to an ignominious death; and out of his goods or +lands the innocent person is quadruply recompensed for the loss of his time, +for the danger he underwent, for the hardship of his imprisonment, and for all +the charges he has been at in making his defence; or, if that fund be +deficient, it is largely supplied by the crown. The emperor also confers on him +some public mark of his favour, and proclamation is made of his innocence +through the whole city. + +They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail +to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very +common understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves, but honesty has +no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there +should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon +credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, +the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage. I +remember, when I was once interceding with the emperor for a criminal who had +wronged his master of a great sum of money, which he had received by order and +ran away with; and happening to tell his majesty, by way of extenuation, that +it was only a breach of trust, the emperor thought it monstrous in me to offer +as a defence the greatest aggravation of the crime; and truly I had little to +say in return, farther than the common answer, that different nations had +different customs; for, I confess, I was heartily ashamed.~^ + +Although we usually call reward and punishment the two hinges upon which all +government turns, yet I could never observe this maxim to be put in practice by +any nation except that of Lilliput. Whoever can there bring sufficient proof, +that he has strictly observed the laws of his country for seventy-three moons, +has a claim to certain privileges, according to his quality or condition of +life, with a proportionable sum of money out of a fund appropriated for that +use: he likewise acquires the title of snilpall, or legal, which is added to +his name, but does not descend to his posterity. And these people thought it a +prodigious defect of policy among us, when I told them that our laws were +enforced only by penalties, without any mention of reward. It is upon this +account that the image of Justice, in their courts of judicature, is formed +with six eyes, two before, as many behind, and on each side one, to signify +circumspection; with a bag of gold open in her right hand, and a sword sheathed +in her left, to show she is more disposed to reward than to punish. + +In choosing persons for all employments, they have more regard to good morals +than to great abilities; for, since government is necessary to mankind, they +believe, that the common size of human understanding is fitted to some station +or other; and that Providence never intended to make the management of public +affairs a mystery to be comprehended only by a few persons of sublime genius, +of which there seldom are three born in an age: but they suppose truth, +justice, temperance, and the like, to be in every man's power; the practice of +which virtues, assisted by experience and a good intention, would qualify any +man for the service of his country, except where a course of study is required. +But they thought the want of moral virtues was so far from being supplied by +superior endowments of the mind, that employments could never be put into such +dangerous hands as those of persons so qualified; and, at least, that the +mistakes committed by ignorance, in a virtuous disposition, would never be of +such fatal consequence to the public weal, as the practices of a man, whose +inclinations led him to be corrupt, and who had great abilities to manage, to +multiply, and defend his corruptions. + +In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man incapable of +holding any public station; for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies +of Providence, the Lilliputians think nothing can be more absurd than for a +prince to employ such men as disown the authority under which he acts. + +In relating these and the following laws, I would only be understood to mean +the original institutions, and not the most scandalous corruptions, into which +these people are fallen by the degenerate nature of man. For, as to that +infamous practice of acquiring great employments by dancing on the ropes, or +badges of favour and distinction by leaping over sticks and creeping under +them, the reader is to observe, that they were first introduced by the +grandfather of the emperor now reigning, and grew to the present height by the +gradual increase of party and faction. + +Ingratitude is among them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some +other countries: for they reason thus; that whoever makes ill returns to his +benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of mankind, from whom he +has received no obligation, and therefore such a man is not fit to live. + +Their notions relating to the duties of parents and children differ extremely +from ours. For, since the conjunction of male and female is founded upon the +great law of nature, in order to propagate and continue the species, the +Lilliputians will needs have it, that men and women are joined together, like +other animals, by the motives of concupiscence; and that their tenderness +towards their young proceeds from the like natural principle: for which reason +they will never allow that a child is under any obligation to his father for +begetting him, or to his mother for bringing him into the world; which, +considering the miseries of human life, was neither a benefit in itself, nor +intended so by his parents, whose thoughts, in their love encounters, were +otherwise employed. Upon these, and the like reasonings, their opinion is, that +parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the education of their +own children; and therefore they have in every town public nurseries, where all +parents, except cottagers and labourers, are obliged to send their infants of +both sexes to be reared and educated, when they come to the age of twenty +moons, at which time they are supposed to have some rudiments of docility. +These schools are of several kinds, suited to different qualities, and both +sexes. They have certain professors well skilled in preparing children for such +a condition of life as befits the rank of their parents, and their own +capacities, as well as inclinations. I shall first say something of the male +nurseries, and then of the female. + +The nurseries for males of noble or eminent birth, are provided with grave and +learned professors, and their several deputies. The clothes and food of the +children are plain and simple. They are bred up in the principles of honour, +justice, courage, modesty, clemency, religion, and love of their country; they +are always employed in some business, except in the times of eating and +sleeping, which are very short, and two hours for diversions consisting of +bodily exercises. They are dressed by men till four years of age, and then are +obliged to dress themselves, although their quality be ever so great; and the +women attendant, who are aged proportionably to ours at fifty, perform only the +most menial offices. They are never suffered to converse with servants, but go +together in smaller or greater numbers to take their diversions, and always in +the presence of a professor, or one of his deputies; whereby they avoid those +early bad impressions of folly and vice, to which our children are subject. +Their parents are suffered to see them only twice a year; the visit is to last +but an hour; they are allowed to kiss the child at meeting and parting; but a +professor, who always stands by on those occasions, will not suffer them to +whisper, or use any fondling expressions, or bring any presents of toys, +sweetmeats, and the like. + +The pension from each family for the education and entertainment of a child, +upon failure of due payment, is levied by the emperor's officers. + +The nurseries for children of ordinary gentlemen, merchants, traders, and +handicrafts, are managed proportionably after the same manner; only those +designed for trades are put out apprentices at eleven years old, whereas those +of persons of quality continue in their exercises till fifteen, which answers +to twenty-one with us: but the confinement is gradually lessened for the last +three years. + +In the female nurseries, the young girls of quality are educated much like the +males, only they are dressed by orderly servants of their own sex; but always +in the presence of a professor or deputy, till they come to dress themselves, +which is at five years old. And if it be found that these nurses ever presume +to entertain the girls with frightful or foolish stories, or the common follies +practised by chambermaids among us, they are publicly whipped thrice about the +city, imprisoned for a year, and banished for life to the most desolate part of +the country. Thus the young ladies are as much ashamed of being cowards and +fools as the men, and despise all personal ornaments, beyond decency and +cleanliness: neither did I perceive any difference in their education made by +their difference of sex, only that the exercises of the females were not +altogether so robust; and that some rules were given them relating to domestic +life, and a smaller compass of learning was enjoined them: for their maxim is, +that among peoples of quality, a wife should be always a reasonable and +agreeable companion, because she cannot always be young. When the girls are +twelve years old, which among them is the marriageable age, their parents or +guardians take them home, with great expressions of gratitude to the +professors, and seldom without tears of the young lady and her companions. + +In the nurseries of females of the meaner sort, the children are instructed in +all kinds of works proper for their sex, and their several degrees: those +intended for apprentices are dismissed at seven years old, the rest are kept to +eleven. + +The meaner families who have children at these nurseries, are obliged, besides +their annual pension, which is as low as possible, to return to the steward of +the nursery a small monthly share of their gettings, to be a portion for the +child; and therefore all parents are limited in their expenses by the law. For +the Lilliputians think nothing can be more unjust, than for people, in +subservience to their own appetites, to bring children into the world, and +leave the burthen of supporting them on the public. As to persons of quality, +they give security to appropriate a certain sum for each child, suitable to +their condition; and these funds are always managed with good husbandry and the +most exact justice. + +The cottagers and labourers keep their children at home, their business being +only to till and cultivate the earth, and therefore their education is of +little consequence to the public: but the old and diseased among them, are +supported by hospitals; for begging is a trade unknown in this empire. + +And here it may, perhaps, divert the curious reader, to give some account of my +domestics, and my manner of living in this country, during a residence of nine +months, and thirteen days. Having a head mechanically turned, and being +likewise forced by necessity, I had made for myself a table and chair +convenient enough, out of the largest trees in the royal park. Two hundred +sempstresses were employed to make me shirts, and linen for my bed and table, +all of the strongest and coarsest kind they could get; which, however, they +were forced to quilt together in several folds, for the thickest was some +degrees finer than lawn. Their linen is usually three inches wide, and three +feet make a piece. The sempstresses took my measure as I lay on the ground, one +standing at my neck, and another at my mid-leg, with a strong cord extended, +that each held by the end, while a third measured the length of the cord with a +rule of an inch long. Then they measured my right thumb, and desired no more; +for by a mathematical computation, that twice round the thumb is once round the +wrist, and so on to the neck and the waist, and by the help of my old shirt, +which I displayed on the ground before them for a pattern, they fitted me +exactly. Three hundred tailors were employed in the same manner to make me +clothes; but they had another contrivance for taking my measure. I kneeled +down, and they raised a ladder from the ground to my neck; upon this ladder one +of them mounted, and let fall a plumb-line from my collar to the floor, which +just answered the length of my coat: but my waist and arms I measured myself. +When my clothes were finished, which was done in my house (for the largest of +theirs would not have been able to hold them), they looked like the patch-work +made by the ladies in England, only that mine were all of a colour. + +I had three hundred cooks to dress my victuals, in little convenient huts built +about my house, where they and their families lived, and prepared me two dishes +a-piece. I took up twenty waiters in my hand, and placed them on the table: a +hundred more attended below on the ground, some with dishes of meat, and some +with barrels of wine and other liquors slung on their shoulders; all which the +waiters above drew up, as I wanted, in a very ingenious manner, by certain +cords, as we draw the bucket up a well in Europe. A dish of their meat was a +good mouthful, and a barrel of their liquor a reasonable draught. Their mutton +yields to ours, but their beef is excellent. I have had a sirloin so large, +that I have been forced to make three bites of it; but this is rare. My +servants were astonished to see me eat it, bones and all, as in our country we +do the leg of a lark. Their geese and turkeys I usually ate at a mouthful, and +I confess they far exceed ours. Of their smaller fowl I could take up twenty or +thirty at the end of my knife. + +One day his imperial majesty, being informed of my way of living, desired "that +himself and his royal consort, with the young princes of the blood of both +sexes, might have the happiness," as he was pleased to call it, "of dining with +me." They came accordingly, and I placed them in chairs of state, upon my +table, just over against me, with their guards about them. Flimnap, the lord +high treasurer, attended there likewise with his white staff; and I observed he +often looked on me with a sour countenance, which I would not seem to regard, +but ate more than usual, in honour to my dear country, as well as to fill the +court with admiration. I have some private reasons to believe, that this visit +from his majesty gave Flimnap an opportunity of doing me ill offices to his +master. That minister had always been my secret enemy, though he outwardly +caressed me more than was usual to the moroseness of his nature. He represented +to the emperor "the low condition of his treasury; that he was forced to take +up money at a great discount; that exchequer bills would not circulate under +nine per cent. below par; that I had cost his majesty above a million and a +half of sprugs" (their greatest gold coin, about the bigness of a spangle) +"and, upon the whole, that it would be advisable in the emperor to take the +first fair occasion of dismissing me." + +I am here obliged to vindicate the reputation of an excellent lady, who was an +innocent sufferer upon my account. The treasurer took a fancy to be jealous of +his wife, from the malice of some evil tongues, who informed him that her grace +had taken a violent affection for my person; and the court scandal ran for some +time, that she once came privately to my lodging. This I solemnly declare to be +a most infamous falsehood, without any grounds, further than that her grace was +pleased to treat me with all innocent marks of freedom and friendship. I own +she came often to my house, but always publicly, nor ever without three more in +the coach, who were usually her sister and young daughter, and some particular +acquaintance; but this was common to many other ladies of the court. And I +still appeal to my servants round, whether they at any time saw a coach at my +door, without knowing what persons were in it. On those occasions, when a +servant had given me notice, my custom was to go immediately to the door, and, +after paying my respects, to take up the coach and two horses very carefully in +my hands (for, if there were six horses, the postillion always unharnessed +four,) and place them on a table, where I had fixed a movable rim quite round, +of five inches high, to prevent accidents. And I have often had four coaches +and horses at once on my table, full of company, while I sat in my chair, +leaning my face towards them; and when I was engaged with one set, the coachmen +would gently drive the others round my table. I have passed many an afternoon +very agreeably in these conversations. But I defy the treasurer, or his two +informers (I will name them, and let them make the best of it) Clustril and +Drunlo, to prove that any person ever came to me incognito, except the +secretary Reldresal, who was sent by express command of his imperial majesty, +as I have before related. I should not have dwelt so long upon this particular, +if it had not been a point wherein the reputation of a great lady is so nearly +concerned, to say nothing of my own; though I then had the honour to be a +nardac, which the treasurer himself is not; for all the world knows, that he is +only a glumglum, a title inferior by one degree, as that of a marquis is to a +duke in England; yet I allow he preceded me in right of his post. These false +informations, which I afterwards came to the knowledge of by an accident not +proper to mention, made the treasurer show his lady for some time an ill +countenance, and me a worse; and although he was at last undeceived and +reconciled to her, yet I lost all credit with him, and found my interest +decline very fast with the emperor himself, who was, indeed, too much governed +by that favourite. + +CHAPTER VII. + +[The author, being informed of a design to accuse him of high- treason, makes +his escape to Blefuscu. His reception there.] + +Before I proceed to give an account of my leaving this kingdom, it may be +proper to inform the reader of a private intrigue which had been for two months +forming against me. + +I had been hitherto, all my life, a stranger to courts, for which I was +unqualified by the meanness of my condition. I had indeed heard and read enough +of the dispositions of great princes and ministers, but never expected to have +found such terrible effects of them, in so remote a country, governed, as I +thought, by very different maxims from those in Europe. + +When I was just preparing to pay my attendance on the emperor of Blefuscu, a +considerable person at court (to whom I had been very serviceable, at a time +when he lay under the highest displeasure of his imperial majesty) came to my +house very privately at night, in a close chair, and, without sending his name, +desired admittance. The chairmen were dismissed; I put the chair, with his +lordship in it, into my coat-pocket: and, giving orders to a trusty servant, to +say I was indisposed and gone to sleep, I fastened the door of my house, placed +the chair on the table, according to my usual custom, and sat down by it. After +the common salutations were over, observing his lordship's countenance full of +concern, and inquiring into the reason, he desired "I would hear him with +patience, in a matter that highly concerned my honour and my life." His speech +was to the following effect, for I took notes of it as soon as he left me:- + +"You are to know," said he, "that several committees of council have been +lately called, in the most private manner, on your account; and it is but two +days since his majesty came to a full resolution. + +"You are very sensible that Skyresh Bolgolam" (galbet, or high- admiral) "has +been your mortal enemy, almost ever since your arrival. His original reasons I +know not; but his hatred is increased since your great success against +Blefuscu, by which his glory as admiral is much obscured. This lord, in +conjunction with Flimnap the high-treasurer, whose enmity against you is +notorious on account of his lady, Limtoc the general, Lalcon the chamberlain, +and Balmuff the grand justiciary, have prepared articles of impeachment against +you, for treason and other capital crimes." + +This preface made me so impatient, being conscious of my own merits and +innocence, that I was going to interrupt him; when he entreated me to be +silent, and thus proceeded:- + +"Out of gratitude for the favours you have done me, I procured information of +the whole proceedings, and a copy of the articles; wherein I venture my head +for your service. + +"'Articles of Impeachment against QUINBUS FLESTRIN, (the Man- Mountain.) + +ARTICLE I. + +"'Whereas, by a statute made in the reign of his imperial majesty Calin Deffar +Plune, it is enacted, that, whoever shall make water within the precincts of +the royal palace, shall be liable to the pains and penalties of high-treason; +notwithstanding, the said Quinbus Flestrin, in open breach of the said law, +under colour of extinguishing the fire kindled in the apartment of his +majesty's most dear imperial consort, did maliciously, traitorously, and +devilishly, by discharge of his urine, put out the said fire kindled in the +said apartment, lying and being within the precincts of the said royal palace, +against the statute in that case provided, etc. against the duty, etc. + +ARTICLE II. + +"'That the said Quinbus Flestrin, having brought the imperial fleet of Blefuscu +into the royal port, and being afterwards commanded by his imperial majesty to +seize all the other ships of the said empire of Blefuscu, and reduce that +empire to a province, to be governed by a viceroy from hence, and to destroy +and put to death, not only all the Big-endian exiles, but likewise all the +people of that empire who would not immediately forsake the Big-endian heresy, +he, the said Flestrin, like a false traitor against his most auspicious, +serene, imperial majesty, did petition to be excused from the said service, +upon pretence of unwillingness to force the consciences, or destroy the +liberties and lives of an innocent people. + +ARTICLE III. + +"'That, whereas certain ambassadors arrived from the Court of Blefuscu, to sue +for peace in his majesty's court, he, the said Flestrin, did, like a false +traitor, aid, abet, comfort, and divert, the said ambassadors, although he knew +them to be servants to a prince who was lately an open enemy to his imperial +majesty, and in an open war against his said majesty. + +ARTICLE IV. + +"'That the said Quinbus Flestrin, contrary to the duty of a faithful subject, +is now preparing to make a voyage to the court and empire of Blefuscu, for +which he has received only verbal license from his imperial majesty; and, under +colour of the said license, does falsely and traitorously intend to take the +said voyage, and thereby to aid, comfort, and abet the emperor of Blefuscu, so +lately an enemy, and in open war with his imperial majesty aforesaid.' + +"There are some other articles; but these are the most important, of which I +have read you an abstract. + +"In the several debates upon this impeachment, it must be confessed that his +majesty gave many marks of his great lenity; often urging the services you had +done him, and endeavouring to extenuate your crimes. The treasurer and admiral +insisted that you should be put to the most painful and ignominious death, by +setting fire to your house at night, and the general was to attend with twenty +thousand men, armed with poisoned arrows, to shoot you on the face and hands. +Some of your servants were to have private orders to strew a poisonous juice on +your shirts and sheets, which would soon make you tear your own flesh, and die +in the utmost torture. The general came into the same opinion; so that for a +long time there was a majority against you; but his majesty resolving, if +possible, to spare your life, at last brought off the chamberlain. + +"Upon this incident, Reldresal, principal secretary for private affairs, who +always approved himself your true friend, was commanded by the emperor to +deliver his opinion, which he accordingly did; and therein justified the good +thoughts you have of him. He allowed your crimes to be great, but that still +there was room for mercy, the most commendable virtue in a prince, and for +which his majesty was so justly celebrated. He said, the friendship between you +and him was so well known to the world, that perhaps the most honourable board +might think him partial; however, in obedience to the command he had received, +he would freely offer his sentiments. That if his majesty, in consideration of +your services, and pursuant to his own merciful disposition, would please to +spare your life, and only give orders to put out both your eyes, he humbly +conceived, that by this expedient justice might in some measure be satisfied, +and all the world would applaud the lenity of the emperor, as well as the fair +and generous proceedings of those who have the honour to be his counsellors. +That the loss of your eyes would be no impediment to your bodily strength, by +which you might still be useful to his majesty; that blindness is an addition +to courage, by concealing dangers from us; that the fear you had for your eyes, +was the greatest difficulty in bringing over the enemy's fleet, and it would be +sufficient for you to see by the eyes of the ministers, since the greatest +princes do no more. + +"This proposal was received with the utmost disapprobation by the whole board. +Bolgolam, the admiral, could not preserve his temper, but, rising up in fury, +said, he wondered how the secretary durst presume to give his opinion for +preserving the life of a traitor; that the services you had performed were, by +all true reasons of state, the great aggravation of your crimes; that you, who +were able to extinguish the fire by discharge of urine in her majesty's +apartment (which he mentioned with horror), might, at another time, raise an +inundation by the same means, to drown the whole palace; and the same strength +which enabled you to bring over the enemy's fleet, might serve, upon the first +discontent, to carry it back; that he had good reasons to think you were a +Big-endian in your heart; and, as treason begins in the heart, before it +appears in overt-acts, so he accused you as a traitor on that account, and +therefore insisted you should be put to death. + +"The treasurer was of the same opinion: he showed to what straits his majesty's +revenue was reduced, by the charge of maintaining you, which would soon grow +insupportable; that the secretary's expedient of putting out your eyes, was so +far from being a remedy against this evil, that it would probably increase it, +as is manifest from the common practice of blinding some kind of fowls, after +which they fed the faster, and grew sooner fat; that his sacred majesty and the +council, who are your judges, were, in their own consciences, fully convinced +of your guilt, which was a sufficient argument to condemn you to death, without +the formal proofs required by the strict letter of the law. + +"But his imperial majesty, fully determined against capital punishment, was +graciously pleased to say, that since the council thought the loss of your eyes +too easy a censure, some other way may be inflicted hereafter. And your friend +the secretary, humbly desiring to be heard again, in answer to what the +treasurer had objected, concerning the great charge his majesty was at in +maintaining you, said, that his excellency, who had the sole disposal of the +emperor's revenue, might easily provide against that evil, by gradually +lessening your establishment; by which, for want of sufficient for you would +grow weak and faint, and lose your appetite, and consequently, decay, and +consume in a few months; neither would the stench of your carcass be then so +dangerous, when it should become more than half diminished; and immediately +upon your death five or six thousand of his majesty's subjects might, in two or +three days, cut your flesh from your bones, take it away by cart-loads, and +bury it in distant parts, to prevent infection, leaving the skeleton as a +monument of admiration to posterity. + +"Thus, by the great friendship of the secretary, the whole affair was +compromised. It was strictly enjoined, that the project of starving you by +degrees should be kept a secret; but the sentence of putting out your eyes was +entered on the books; none dissenting, except Bolgolam the admiral, who, being +a creature of the empress, was perpetually instigated by her majesty to insist +upon your death, she having borne perpetual malice against you, on account of +that infamous and illegal method you took to extinguish the fire in her +apartment. + +"In three days your friend the secretary will be directed to come to your +house, and read before you the articles of impeachment; and then to signify the +great lenity and favour of his majesty and council, whereby you are only +condemned to the loss of your eyes, which his majesty does not question you +will gratefully and humbly submit to; and twenty of his majesty's surgeons will +attend, in order to see the operation well performed, by discharging very +sharp-pointed arrows into the balls of your eyes, as you lie on the ground. + +"I leave to your prudence what measures you will take; and to avoid suspicion, +I must immediately return in as private a manner as I came." + +His lordship did so; and I remained alone, under many doubts and perplexities +of mind. + +It was a custom introduced by this prince and his ministry (very different, as +I have been assured, from the practice of former times,) that after the court +had decreed any cruel execution, either to gratify the monarch's resentment, or +the malice of a favourite, the emperor always made a speech to his whole +council, expressing his great lenity and tenderness, as qualities known and +confessed by all the world. This speech was immediately published throughout +the kingdom; nor did any thing terrify the people so much as those encomiums on +his majesty's mercy; because it was observed, that the more these praises were +enlarged and insisted on, the more inhuman was the punishment, and the sufferer +more innocent. Yet, as to myself, I must confess, having never been designed +for a courtier, either by my birth or education, I was so ill a judge of +things, that I could not discover the lenity and favour of this sentence, but +conceived it (perhaps erroneously) rather to be rigorous than gentle. I +sometimes thought of standing my trial, for, although I could not deny the +facts alleged in the several articles, yet I hoped they would admit of some +extenuation. But having in my life perused many state-trials, which I ever +observed to terminate as the judges thought fit to direct, I durst not rely on +so dangerous a decision, in so critical a juncture, and against such powerful +enemies. Once I was strongly bent upon resistance, for, while I had liberty the +whole strength of that empire could hardly subdue me, and I might easily with +stones pelt the metropolis to pieces; but I soon rejected that project with +horror, by remembering the oath I had made to the emperor, the favours I +received from him, and the high title of nardac he conferred upon me. Neither +had I so soon learned the gratitude of courtiers, to persuade myself, that his +majesty's present seventies acquitted me of all past obligations. + +At last, I fixed upon a resolution, for which it is probable I may incur some +censure, and not unjustly; for I confess I owe the preserving of mine eyes, and +consequently my liberty, to my own great rashness and want of experience; +because, if I had then known the nature of princes and ministers, which I have +since observed in many other courts, and their methods of treating criminals +less obnoxious than myself, I should, with great alacrity and readiness, have +submitted to so easy a punishment. But hurried on by the precipitancy of youth, +and having his imperial majesty's license to pay my attendance upon the emperor +of Blefuscu, I took this opportunity, before the three days were elapsed, to +send a letter to my friend the secretary, signifying my resolution of setting +out that morning for Blefuscu, pursuant to the leave I had got; and, without +waiting for an answer, I went to that side of the island where our fleet lay. I +seized a large man of war, tied a cable to the prow, and, lifting up the +anchors, I stripped myself, put my clothes (together with my coverlet, which I +carried under my arm) into the vessel, and, drawing it after me, between wading +and swimming arrived at the royal port of Blefuscu, where the people had long +expected me: they lent me two guides to direct me to the capital city, which is +of the same name. I held them in my hands, till I came within two hundred yards +of the gate, and desired them "to signify my arrival to one of the secretaries, +and let him know, I there waited his majesty's command." I had an answer in +about an hour, "that his majesty, attended by the royal family, and great +officers of the court, was coming out to receive me." I advanced a hundred +yards. The emperor and his train alighted from their horses, the empress and +ladies from their coaches, and I did not perceive they were in any fright or +concern. I lay on the ground to kiss his majesty's and the empress's hands. I +told his majesty, "that I was come according to my promise, and with the +license of the emperor my master, to have the honour of seeing so mighty a +monarch, and to offer him any service in my power, consistent with my duty to +my own prince;" not mentioning a word of my disgrace, because I had hitherto no +regular information of it, and might suppose myself wholly ignorant of any such +design; neither could I reasonably conceive that the emperor would discover the +secret, while I was out of his power; wherein, however, it soon appeared I was +deceived. + +I shall not trouble the reader with the particular account of my reception at +this court, which was suitable to the generosity of so great a prince; nor of +the difficulties I was in for want of a house and bed, being forced to lie on +the ground, wrapped up in my coverlet. + +CHAPTER VIII. + +[The author, by a lucky accident, finds means to leave Blefuscu; and, after +some difficulties, returns safe to his native country.] + +Three days after my arrival, walking out of curiosity to the north- east coast +of the island, I observed, about half a league off in the sea, somewhat that +looked like a boat overturned. I pulled off my shoes and stockings, and, +wailing two or three hundred yards, I found the object to approach nearer by +force of the tide; and then plainly saw it to be a real boat, which I supposed +might by some tempest have been driven from a ship. Whereupon, I returned +immediately towards the city, and desired his imperial majesty to lend me +twenty of the tallest vessels he had left, after the loss of his fleet, and +three thousand seamen, under the command of his vice-admiral. This fleet sailed +round, while I went back the shortest way to the coast, where I first +discovered the boat. I found the tide had driven it still nearer. The seamen +were all provided with cordage, which I had beforehand twisted to a sufficient +strength. When the ships came up, I stripped myself, and waded till I came +within a hundred yards off the boat, after which I was forced to swim till I +got up to it. The seamen threw me the end of the cord, which I fastened to a +hole in the fore-part of the boat, and the other end to a man of war; but I +found all my labour to little purpose; for, being out of my depth, I was not +able to work. In this necessity I was forced to swim behind, and push the boat +forward, as often as I could, with one of my hands; and the tide favouring me, +I advanced so far that I could just hold up my chin and feel the ground. I +rested two or three minutes, and then gave the boat another shove, and so on, +till the sea was no higher than my arm-pits; and now, the most laborious part +being over, I took out my other cables, which were stowed in one of the ships, +and fastened them first to the boat, and then to nine of the vessels which +attended me; the wind being favourable, the seamen towed, and I shoved, until +we arrived within forty yards of the shore; and, waiting till the tide was out, +I got dry to the boat, and by the assistance of two thousand men, with ropes +and engines, I made a shift to turn it on its bottom, and found it was but +little damaged. + +I shall not trouble the reader with the difficulties I was under, by the help +of certain paddles, which cost me ten days making, to get my boat to the royal +port of Blefuscu, where a mighty concourse of people appeared upon my arrival, +full of wonder at the sight of so prodigious a vessel. I told the emperor "that +my good fortune had thrown this boat in my way, to carry me to some place +whence I might return into my native country; and begged his majesty's orders +for getting materials to fit it up, together with his license to depart;" +which, after some kind expostulations, he was pleased to grant. + +I did very much wonder, in all this time, not to have heard of any express +relating to me from our emperor to the court of Blefuscu. But I was afterward +given privately to understand, that his imperial majesty, never imagining I had +the least notice of his designs, believed I was only gone to Blefuscu in +performance of my promise, according to the license he had given me, which was +well known at our court, and would return in a few days, when the ceremony was +ended. But he was at last in pain at my long absence; and after consulting with +the treasurer and the rest of that cabal, a person of quality was dispatched +with the copy of the articles against me. This envoy had instructions to +represent to the monarch of Blefuscu, "the great lenity of his master, who was +content to punish me no farther than with the loss of mine eyes; that I had +fled from justice; and if I did not return in two hours, I should be deprived +of my title of nardac, and declared a traitor." The envoy further added, "that +in order to maintain the peace and amity between both empires, his master +expected that his brother of Blefuscu would give orders to have me sent back to +Lilliput, bound hand and foot, to be punished as a traitor." + +The emperor of Blefuscu, having taken three days to consult, returned an answer +consisting of many civilities and excuses. He said, "that as for sending me +bound, his brother knew it was impossible; that, although I had deprived him of +his fleet, yet he owed great obligations to me for many good offices I had done +him in making the peace. That, however, both their majesties would soon be made +easy; for I had found a prodigious vessel on the shore, able to carry me on the +sea, which he had given orders to fit up, with my own assistance and direction; +and he hoped, in a few weeks, both empires would be freed from so insupportable +an encumbrance." + +With this answer the envoy returned to Lilliput; and the monarch of Blefuscu +related to me all that had passed; offering me at the same time (but under the +strictest confidence) his gracious protection, if I would continue in his +service; wherein, although I believed him sincere, yet I resolved never more to +put any confidence in princes or ministers, where I could possibly avoid it; +and therefore, with all due acknowledgments for his favourable intentions, I +humbly begged to be excused. I told him, "that since fortune, whether good or +evil, had thrown a vessel in my way, I was resolved to venture myself on the +ocean, rather than be an occasion of difference between two such mighty +monarchs." Neither did I find the emperor at all displeased; and I discovered, +by a certain accident, that he was very glad of my resolution, and so were most +of his ministers. + +These considerations moved me to hasten my departure somewhat sooner than I +intended; to which the court, impatient to have me gone, very readily +contributed. Five hundred workmen were employed to make two sails to my boat, +according to my directions, by quilting thirteen folds of their strongest linen +together. I was at the pains of making ropes and cables, by twisting ten, +twenty, or thirty of the thickest and strongest of theirs. A great stone that I +happened to find, after a long search, by the sea-shore, served me for an +anchor. I had the tallow of three hundred cows, for greasing my boat, and other +uses. I was at incredible pains in cutting down some of the largest +timber-trees, for oars and masts, wherein I was, however, much assisted by his +majesty's ship- carpenters, who helped me in smoothing them, after I had done +the rough work. + +In about a month, when all was prepared, I sent to receive his majesty's +commands, and to take my leave. The emperor and royal family came out of the +palace; I lay down on my face to kiss his hand, which he very graciously gave +me: so did the empress and young princes of the blood. His majesty presented me +with fifty purses of two hundred sprugs a-piece, together with his picture at +full length, which I put immediately into one of my gloves, to keep it from +being hurt. The ceremonies at my departure were too many to trouble the reader +with at this time. + +I stored the boat with the carcases of a hundred oxen, and three hundred sheep, +with bread and drink proportionable, and as much meat ready dressed as four +hundred cooks could provide. I took with me six cows and two bulls alive, with +as many ewes and rams, intending to carry them into my own country, and +propagate the breed. And to feed them on board, I had a good bundle of hay, and +a bag of corn. I would gladly have taken a dozen of the natives, but this was a +thing the emperor would by no means permit; and, besides a diligent search into +my pockets, his majesty engaged my honour "not to carry away any of his +subjects, although with their own consent and desire." + +Having thus prepared all things as well as I was able, I set sail on the +twenty-fourth day of September 1701, at six in the morning; and when I had gone +about four-leagues to the northward, the wind being at south-east, at six in +the evening I descried a small island, about half a league to the north-west. I +advanced forward, and cast anchor on the lee-side of the island, which seemed +to be uninhabited. I then took some refreshment, and went to my rest. I slept +well, and as I conjectured at least six hours, for I found the day broke in two +hours after I awaked. It was a clear night. I ate my breakfast before the sun +was up; and heaving anchor, the wind being favourable, I steered the same +course that I had done the day before, wherein I was directed by my pocket +compass. My intention was to reach, if possible, one of those islands. which I +had reason to believe lay to the north-east of Van Diemen's Land. I discovered +nothing all that day; but upon the next, about three in the afternoon, when I +had by my computation made twenty-four leagues from Blefuscu, I descried a sail +steering to the south- east; my course was due east. I hailed her, but could +get no answer; yet I found I gained upon her, for the wind slackened. I made +all the sail I could, and in half an hour she spied me, then hung out her +ancient, and discharged a gun. It is not easy to express the joy I was in, upon +the unexpected hope of once more seeing my beloved country, and the dear +pledges I left in it. The ship slackened her sails, and I came up with her +between five and six in the evening, September 26th; but my heart leaped within +me to see her English colours. I put my cows and sheep into my coat- pockets, +and got on board with all my little cargo of provisions. The vessel was an +English merchantman, returning from Japan by the North and South seas; the +captain, Mr. John Biddel, of Deptford, a very civil man, and an excellent +sailor. + +We were now in the latitude of 30 degrees south; there were about fifty men in +the ship; and here I met an old comrade of mine, one Peter Williams, who gave +me a good character to the captain. This gentleman treated me with kindness, +and desired I would let him know what place I came from last, and whither I was +bound; which I did in a few words, but he thought I was raving, and that the +dangers I underwent had disturbed my head; whereupon I took my black cattle and +sheep out of my pocket, which, after great astonishment, clearly convinced him +of my veracity. I then showed him the gold given me by the emperor of Blefuscu, +together with his majesty's picture at full length, and some other rarities of +that country. I gave him two purses of two hundreds sprugs each, and promised, +when we arrived in England, to make him a present of a cow and a sheep big with +young. + +I shall not trouble the reader with a particular account of this voyage, which +was very prosperous for the most part. We arrived in the Downs on the 13th of +April, 1702. I had only one misfortune, that the rats on board carried away one +of my sheep; I found her bones in a hole, picked clean from the flesh. The rest +of my cattle I got safe ashore, and set them a-grazing in a bowling-green at +Greenwich, where the fineness of the grass made them feed very heartily, though +I had always feared the contrary: neither could I possibly have preserved them +in so long a voyage, if the captain had not allowed me some of his best +biscuit, which, rubbed to powder, and mingled with water, was their constant +food. The short time I continued in England, I made a considerable profit by +showing my cattle to many persons of quality and others: and before I began my +second voyage, I sold them for six hundred pounds. Since my last return I find +the breed is considerably increased, especially the sheep, which I hope will +prove much to the advantage of the woollen manufacture, by the fineness of the +fleeces. + +I stayed but two months with my wife and family, for my insatiable desire of +seeing foreign countries, would suffer me to continue no longer. I left fifteen +hundred pounds with my wife, and fixed her in a good house at Redriff. My +remaining stock I carried with me, part in money and part in goods, in hopes to +improve my fortunes. My eldest uncle John had left me an estate in land, near +Epping, of about thirty pounds a-year; and I had a long lease of the Black Bull +in Fetter-Lane, which yielded me as much more; so that I was not in any danger +of leaving my family upon the parish. My son Johnny, named so after his uncle, +was at the grammar-school, and a towardly child. My daughter Betty (who is now +well married, and has children) was then at her needle-work. I took leave of my +wife, and boy and girl, with tears on both sides, and went on board the +Adventure, a merchant ship of three hundred tons, bound for Surat, captain John +Nicholas, of Liverpool, commander. But my account of this voyage must be +referred to the Second Part of my Travels. + +PART II. A VOYAGE TO BROBDINGNAG. + +CHAPTER I. + +[A great storm described; the long boat sent to fetch water; the author goes +with it to discover the country. He is left on shore, is seized by one of the +natives, and carried to a farmer's house. His reception, with several accidents +that happened there. A description of the inhabitants.] + +Having been condemned, by nature and fortune, to active and restless life, in +two months after my return, I again left my native country, and took shipping +in the Downs, on the 20th day of June, 1702, in the Adventure, Captain John +Nicholas, a Cornish man, commander, bound for Surat. We had a very prosperous +gale, till we arrived at the Cape of Good Hope, where we landed for fresh +water; but discovering a leak, we unshipped our goods and wintered there; for +the captain falling sick of an ague, we could not leave the Cape till the end +of March. We then set sail, and had a good voyage till we passed the Straits of +Madagascar; but having got northward of that island, and to about five degrees +south latitude, the winds, which in those seas are observed to blow a constant +equal gale between the north and west, from the beginning of December to the +beginning of May, on the 19th of April began to blow with much greater +violence, and more westerly than usual, continuing so for twenty days together: +during which time, we were driven a little to the east of the Molucca Islands, +and about three degrees northward of the line, as our captain found by an +observation he took the 2nd of May, at which time the wind ceased, and it was a +perfect calm, whereat I was not a little rejoiced. But he, being a man well +experienced in the navigation of those seas, bid us all prepare against a +storm, which accordingly happened the day following: for the southern wind, +called the southern monsoon, began to set in. + +Finding it was likely to overblow, we took in our sprit-sail, and stood by to +hand the fore-sail; but making foul weather, we looked the guns were all fast, +and handed the mizen. The ship lay very broad off, so we thought it better +spooning before the sea, than trying or hulling. We reefed the fore-sail and +set him, and hauled aft the fore-sheet; the helm was hard a-weather. The ship +wore bravely. We belayed the fore down-haul; but the sail was split, and we +hauled down the yard, and got the sail into the ship, and unbound all the +things clear of it. It was a very fierce storm; the sea broke strange and +dangerous. We hauled off upon the laniard of the whip-staff, and helped the man +at the helm. We would not get down our topmast, but let all stand, because she +scudded before the sea very well, and we knew that the top-mast being aloft, +the ship was the wholesomer, and made better way through the sea, seeing we had +sea-room. When the storm was over, we set fore-sail and main-sail, and brought +the ship to. Then we set the mizen, main-top-sail, and the fore-top-sail. Our +course was east-north-east, the wind was at south-west. We got the starboard +tacks aboard, we cast off our weather-braces and lifts; we set in the +lee-braces, and hauled forward by the weather- bowlings, and hauled them tight, +and belayed them, and hauled over the mizen tack to windward, and kept her full +and by as near as she would lie. + +During this storm, which was followed by a strong wind west-south- west, we +were carried, by my computation, about five hundred leagues to the east, so +that the oldest sailor on board could not tell in what part of the world we +were. Our provisions held out well, our ship was staunch, and our crew all in +good health; but we lay in the utmost distress for water. We thought it best to +hold on the same course, rather than turn more northerly, which might have +brought us to the north-west part of Great Tartary, and into the Frozen Sea. + +On the 16th day of June, 1703, a boy on the top-mast discovered land. On the +17th, we came in full view of a great island, or continent (for we knew not +whether;) on the south side whereof was a small neck of land jutting out into +the sea, and a creek too shallow to hold a ship of above one hundred tons. We +cast anchor within a league of this creek, and our captain sent a dozen of his +men well armed in the long-boat, with vessels for water, if any could be found. +I desired his leave to go with them, that I might see the country, and make +what discoveries I could. When we came to land we saw no river or spring, nor +any sign of inhabitants. Our men therefore wandered on the shore to find out +some fresh water near the sea, and I walked alone about a mile on the other +side, where I observed the country all barren and rocky. I now began to be +weary, and seeing nothing to entertain my curiosity, I returned gently down +towards the creek; and the sea being full in my view, I saw our men already got +into the boat, and rowing for life to the ship. I was going to holla after +them, although it had been to little purpose, when I observed a huge creature +walking after them in the sea, as fast as he could: he waded not much deeper +than his knees, and took prodigious strides: but our men had the start of him +half a league, and, the sea thereabouts being full of sharp-pointed rocks, the +monster was not able to overtake the boat. This I was afterwards told, for I +durst not stay to see the issue of the adventure; but ran as fast as I could +the way I first went, and then climbed up a steep hill, which gave me some +prospect of the country. I found it fully cultivated; but that which first +surprised me was the length of the grass, which, in those grounds that seemed +to be kept for hay, was about twenty feet high. + +I fell into a high road, for so I took it to be, though it served to the +inhabitants only as a foot-path through a field of barley. Here I walked on for +some time, but could see little on either side, it being now near harvest, and +the corn rising at least forty feet. I was an hour walking to the end of this +field, which was fenced in with a hedge of at least one hundred and twenty feet +high, and the trees so lofty that I could make no computation of their +altitude. There was a stile to pass from this field into the next. It had four +steps, and a stone to cross over when you came to the uppermost. It was +impossible for me to climb this stile, because every step was six-feet high, +and the upper stone about twenty. I was endeavouring to find some gap in the +hedge, when I discovered one of the inhabitants in the next field, advancing +towards the stile, of the same size with him whom I saw in the sea pursuing our +boat. He appeared as tall as an ordinary spire steeple, and took about ten +yards at every stride, as near as I could guess. I was struck with the utmost +fear and astonishment, and ran to hide myself in the corn, whence I saw him at +the top of the stile looking back into the next field on the right hand, and +heard him call in a voice many degrees louder than a speaking- trumpet: but the +noise was so high in the air, that at first I certainly thought it was thunder. +Whereupon seven monsters, like himself, came towards him with reaping-hooks in +their hands, each hook about the largeness of six scythes. These people were +not so well clad as the first, whose servants or labourers they seemed to be; +for, upon some words he spoke, they went to reap the corn in the field where I +lay. I kept from them at as great a distance as I could, but was forced to move +with extreme difficulty, for the stalks of the corn were sometimes not above a +foot distant, so that I could hardly squeeze my body betwixt them. However, I +made a shift to go forward, till I came to a part of the field where the corn +had been laid by the rain and wind. Here it was impossible for me to advance a +step; for the stalks were so interwoven, that I could not creep through, and +the beards of the fallen ears so strong and pointed, that they pierced through +my clothes into my flesh. At the same time I heard the reapers not a hundred +yards behind me. Being quite dispirited with toil, and wholly overcome by grief +and dispair, I lay down between two ridges, and heartily wished I might there +end my days. I bemoaned my desolate widow and fatherless children. I lamented +my own folly and wilfulness, in attempting a second voyage, against the advice +of all my friends and relations. In this terrible agitation of mind, I could +not forbear thinking of Lilliput, whose inhabitants looked upon me as the +greatest prodigy that ever appeared in the world; where I was able to draw an +imperial fleet in my hand, and perform those other actions, which will be +recorded for ever in the chronicles of that empire, while posterity shall +hardly believe them, although attested by millions. I reflected what a +mortification it must prove to me, to appear as inconsiderable in this nation, +as one single Lilliputian would be among us. But this I conceived was to be the +least of my misfortunes; for, as human creatures are observed to be more savage +and cruel in proportion to their bulk, what could I expect but to be a morsel +in the mouth of the first among these enormous barbarians that should happen to +seize me? Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right, when they tell us that +nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison. It might have pleased +fortune, to have let the Lilliputians find some nation, where the people were +as diminutive with respect to them, as they were to me. And who knows but that +even this prodigious race of mortals might be equally overmatched in some +distant part of the world, whereof we have yet no discovery. + +Scared and confounded as I was, I could not forbear going on with these +reflections, when one of the reapers, approaching within ten yards of the ridge +where I lay, made me apprehend that with the next step I should be squashed to +death under his foot, or cut in two with his reaping-hook. And therefore, when +he was again about to move, I screamed as loud as fear could make me: whereupon +the huge creature trod short, and, looking round about under him for some time, +at last espied me as I lay on the ground. He considered awhile, with the +caution of one who endeavours to lay hold on a small dangerous animal in such a +manner that it shall not be able either to scratch or bite him, as I myself +have sometimes done with a weasel in England. At length he ventured to take me +behind, by the middle, between his fore-finger and thumb, and brought me within +three yards of his eyes, that he might behold my shape more perfectly. I +guessed his meaning, and my good fortune gave me so much presence of mind, that +I resolved not to struggle in the least as he held me in the air above sixty +feet from the ground, although he grievously pinched my sides, for fear I +should slip through his fingers. All I ventured was to raise mine eyes towards +the sun, and place my hands together in a supplicating posture, and to speak +some words in a humble melancholy tone, suitable to the condition I then was +in: for I apprehended every moment that he would dash me against the ground, as +we usually do any little hateful animal, which we have a mind to destroy. But +my good star would have it, that he appeared pleased with my voice and +gestures, and began to look upon me as a curiosity, much wondering to hear me +pronounce articulate words, although he could not understand them. In the mean +time I was not able to forbear groaning and shedding tears, and turning my head +towards my sides; letting him know, as well as I could, how cruelly I was hurt +by the pressure of his thumb and finger. He seemed to apprehend my meaning; +for, lifting up the lappet of his coat, he put me gently into it, and +immediately ran along with me to his master, who was a substantial farmer, and +the same person I had first seen in the field. + +The farmer having (as I suppose by their talk) received such an account of me +as his servant could give him, took a piece of a small straw, about the size of +a walking-staff, and therewith lifted up the lappets of my coat; which it seems +he thought to be some kind of covering that nature had given me. He blew my +hairs aside to take a better view of my face. He called his hinds about him, +and asked them, as I afterwards learned, whether they had ever seen in the +fields any little creature that resembled me. He then placed me softly on the +ground upon all fours, but I got immediately up, and walked slowly backward and +forward, to let those people see I had no intent to run away. They all sat down +in a circle about me, the better to observe my motions. I pulled off my hat, +and made a low bow towards the farmer. I fell on my knees, and lifted up my +hands and eyes, and spoke several words as loud as I could: I took a purse of +gold out of my pocket, and humbly presented it to him. He received it on the +palm of his hand, then applied it close to his eye to see what it was, and +afterwards turned it several times with the point of a pin (which he took out +of his sleeve,) but could make nothing of it. Whereupon I made a sign that he +should place his hand on the ground. I then took the purse, and, opening it, +poured all the gold into his palm. There were six Spanish pieces of four +pistoles each, beside twenty or thirty smaller coins. I saw him wet the tip of +his little finger upon his tongue, and take up one of my largest pieces, and +then another; but he seemed to be wholly ignorant what they were. He made me a +sign to put them again into my purse, and the purse again into my pocket, +which, after offering it to him several times, I thought it best to do. + +The farmer, by this time, was convinced I must be a rational creature. He spoke +often to me; but the sound of his voice pierced my ears like that of a +water-mill, yet his words were articulate enough. I answered as loud as I could +in several languages, and he often laid his ear within two yards of me: but all +in vain, for we were wholly unintelligible to each other. He then sent his +servants to their work, and taking his handkerchief out of his pocket, he +doubled and spread it on his left hand, which he placed flat on the ground with +the palm upward, making me a sign to step into it, as I could easily do, for it +was not above a foot in thickness. I thought it my part to obey, and, for fear +of falling, laid myself at full length upon the handkerchief, with the +remainder of which he lapped me up to the head for further security, and in +this manner carried me home to his house. There he called his wife, and showed +me to her; but she screamed and ran back, as women in England do at the sight +of a toad or a spider. However, when she had a while seen my behaviour, and how +well I observed the signs her husband made, she was soon reconciled, and by +degrees grew extremely tender of me. + +It was about twelve at noon, and a servant brought in dinner. It was only one +substantial dish of meat (fit for the plain condition of a husbandman,) in a +dish of about four-and-twenty feet diameter. The company were, the farmer and +his wife, three children, and an old grandmother. When they were sat down, the +farmer placed me at some distance from him on the table, which was thirty feet +high from the floor. I was in a terrible fright, and kept as far as I could +from the edge, for fear of falling. The wife minced a bit of meat, then +crumbled some bread on a trencher, and placed it before me. I made her a low +bow, took out my knife and fork, and fell to eat, which gave them exceeding +delight. The mistress sent her maid for a small dram cup, which held about two +gallons, and filled it with drink; I took up the vessel with much difficulty in +both hands, and in a most respectful manner drank to her ladyship's health, +expressing the words as loud as I could in English, which made the company +laugh so heartily, that I was almost deafened with the noise. This liquor +tasted like a small cider, and was not unpleasant. Then the master made me a +sign to come to his trencher side; but as I walked on the table, being in great +surprise all the time, as the indulgent reader will easily conceive and excuse, +I happened to stumble against a crust, and fell flat on my face, but received +no hurt. I got up immediately, and observing the good people to be in much +concern, I took my hat (which I held under my arm out of good manners,) and +waving it over my head, made three huzzas, to show I had got no mischief by my +fall. But advancing forward towards my master (as I shall henceforth call him,) +his youngest son, who sat next to him, an arch boy of about ten years old, took +me up by the legs, and held me so high in the air, that I trembled every limb: +but his father snatched me from him, and at the same time gave him such a box +on the left ear, as would have felled an European troop of horse to the earth, +ordering him to be taken from the table. But being afraid the boy might owe me +a spite, and well remembering how mischievous all children among us naturally +are to sparrows, rabbits, young kittens, and puppy dogs, I fell on my knees, +and pointing to the boy, made my master to understand, as well as I could, that +I desired his son might be pardoned. The father complied, and the lad took his +seat again, whereupon I went to him, and kissed his hand, which my master took, +and made him stroke me gently with it. + +In the midst of dinner, my mistress's favourite cat leaped into her lap. I +heard a noise behind me like that of a dozen stocking- weavers at work; and +turning my head, I found it proceeded from the purring of that animal, who +seemed to be three times larger than an ox, as I computed by the view of her +head, and one of her paws, while her mistress was feeding and stroking her. The +fierceness of this creature's countenance altogether discomposed me; though I +stood at the farther end of the table, above fifty feet off; and although my +mistress held her fast, for fear she might give a spring, and seize me in her +talons. But it happened there was no danger, for the cat took not the least +notice of me when my master placed me within three yards of her. And as I have +been always told, and found true by experience in my travels, that flying or +discovering fear before a fierce animal, is a certain way to make it pursue or +attack you, so I resolved, in this dangerous juncture, to show no manner of +concern. I walked with intrepidity five or six times before the very head of +the cat, and came within half a yard of her; whereupon she drew herself back, +as if she were more afraid of me: I had less apprehension concerning the dogs, +whereof three or four came into the room, as it is usual in farmers' houses; +one of which was a mastiff, equal in bulk to four elephants, and another a +greyhound, somewhat taller than the mastiff, but not so large. + +When dinner was almost done, the nurse came in with a child of a year old in +her arms, who immediately spied me, and began a squall that you might have +heard from London-Bridge to Chelsea, after the usual oratory of infants, to get +me for a plaything. The mother, out of pure indulgence, took me up, and put me +towards the child, who presently seized me by the middle, and got my head into +his mouth, where I roared so loud that the urchin was frighted, and let me +drop, and I should infallibly have broke my neck, if the mother had not held +her apron under me. The nurse, to quiet her babe, made use of a rattle which +was a kind of hollow vessel filled with great stones, and fastened by a cable +to the child's waist: but all in vain; so that she was forced to apply the last +remedy by giving it suck. I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as +the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so +as to give the curious reader an idea of its bulk, shape, and colour. It stood +prominent six feet, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The +nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the +dug, so varied with spots, pimples, and freckles, that nothing could appear +more nauseous: for I had a near sight of her, she sitting down, the more +conveniently to give suck, and I standing on the table. This made me reflect +upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only +because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through +a magnifying glass; where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest +skins look rough, and coarse, and ill-coloured. + +I remember when I was at Lilliput, the complexion of those diminutive people +appeared to me the fairest in the world; and talking upon this subject with a +person of learning there, who was an intimate friend of mine, he said that my +face appeared much fairer and smoother when he looked on me from the ground, +than it did upon a nearer view, when I took him up in my hand, and brought him +close, which he confessed was at first a very shocking sight. He said, "he +could discover great holes in my skin; that the stumps of my beard were ten +times stronger than the bristles of a boar, and my complexion made up of +several colours altogether disagreeable:" although I must beg leave to say for +myself, that I am as fair as most of my sex and country, and very little +sunburnt by all my travels. On the other side, discoursing of the ladies in +that emperor's court, he used to tell me, "one had freckles; another too wide a +mouth; a third too large a nose;" nothing of which I was able to distinguish. I +confess this reflection was obvious enough; which, however, I could not +forbear, lest the reader might think those vast creatures were actually +deformed: for I must do them the justice to say, they are a comely race of +people, and particularly the features of my master's countenance, although he +was but a farmer, when I beheld him from the height of sixty feet, appeared +very well proportioned. + +When dinner was done, my master went out to his labourers, and, as I could +discover by his voice and gesture, gave his wife strict charge to take care of +me. I was very much tired, and disposed to sleep, which my mistress perceiving, +she put me on her own bed, and covered me with a clean white handkerchief, but +larger and coarser than the mainsail of a man-of-war. + +I slept about two hours, and dreamt I was at home with my wife and children, +which aggravated my sorrows when I awaked, and found myself alone in a vast +room, between two and three hundred feet wide, and above two hundred high, +lying in a bed twenty yards wide. My mistress was gone about her household +affairs, and had locked me in. The bed was eight yards from the floor. Some +natural necessities required me to get down; I durst not presume to call; and +if I had, it would have been in vain, with such a voice as mine, at so great a +distance from the room where I lay to the kitchen where the family kept. While +I was under these circumstances, two rats crept up the curtains, and ran +smelling backwards and forwards on the bed. One of them came up almost to my +face, whereupon I rose in a fright, and drew out my hanger to defend myself. +These horrible animals had the boldness to attack me on both sides, and one of +them held his fore-feet at my collar; but I had the good fortune to rip up his +belly before he could do me any mischief. He fell down at my feet; and the +other, seeing the fate of his comrade, made his escape, but not without one +good wound on the back, which I gave him as he fled, and made the blood run +trickling from him. After this exploit, I walked gently to and fro on the bed, +to recover my breath and loss of spirits. These creatures were of the size of a +large mastiff, but infinitely more nimble and fierce; so that if I had taken +off my belt before I went to sleep, I must have infallibly been torn to pieces +and devoured. I measured the tail of the dead rat, and found it to be two yards +long, wanting an inch; but it went against my stomach to drag the carcass off +the bed, where it lay still bleeding; I observed it had yet some life, but with +a strong slash across the neck, I thoroughly despatched it. + +Soon after my mistress came into the room, who seeing me all bloody, ran and +took me up in her hand. I pointed to the dead rat, smiling, and making other +signs to show I was not hurt; whereat she was extremely rejoiced, calling the +maid to take up the dead rat with a pair of tongs, and throw it out of the +window. Then she set me on a table, where I showed her my hanger all bloody, +and wiping it on the lappet of my coat, returned it to the scabbard. I was +pressed to do more than one thing which another could not do for me, and +therefore endeavoured to make my mistress understand, that I desired to be set +down on the floor; which after she had done, my bashfulness would not suffer me +to express myself farther, than by pointing to the door, and bowing several +times. The good woman, with much difficulty, at last perceived what I would be +at, and taking me up again in her hand, walked into the garden, where she set +me down. I went on one side about two hundred yards, and beckoning to her not +to look or to follow me, I hid myself between two leaves of sorrel, and there +discharged the necessities of nature. + +I hope the gentle reader will excuse me for dwelling on these and the like +particulars, which, however insignificant they may appear to groveling vulgar +minds, yet will certainly help a philosopher to enlarge his thoughts and +imagination, and apply them to the benefit of public as well as private life, +which was my sole design in presenting this and other accounts of my travels to +the world; wherein I have been chiefly studious of truth, without affecting any +ornaments of learning or of style. But the whole scene of this voyage made so +strong an impression on my mind, and is so deeply fixed in my memory, that, in +committing it to paper I did not omit one material circumstance: however, upon +a strict review, I blotted out several passages. Of less moment which were in +my first copy, for fear of being censured as tedious and trifling, whereof +travellers are often, perhaps not without justice, accused. + +CHAPTER II. + +[A description of the farmer's daughter. The author carried to a market-town, +and then to the metropolis. The particulars of his journey.] + +My mistress had a daughter of nine years old, a child of towardly parts for her +age, very dexterous at her needle, and skilful in dressing her baby. Her mother +and she contrived to fit up the baby's cradle for me against night: the cradle +was put into a small drawer of a cabinet, and the drawer placed upon a hanging +shelf for fear of the rats. This was my bed all the time I staid with those +people, though made more convenient by degrees, as I began to learn their +language and make my wants known. This young girl was so handy, that after I +had once or twice pulled off my clothes before her, she was able to dress and +undress me, though I never gave her that trouble when she would let me do +either myself. She made me seven shirts, and some other linen, of as fine cloth +as could be got, which indeed was coarser than sackcloth; and these she +constantly washed for me with her own hands. She was likewise my +school-mistress, to teach me the language: when I pointed to any thing, she +told me the name of it in her own tongue, so that in a few days I was able to +call for whatever I had a mind to. She was very good-natured, and not above +forty feet high, being little for her age. She gave me the name of Grildrig, +which the family took up, and afterwards the whole kingdom. The word imports +what the Latins call nanunculus, the Italians homunceletino, and the English +mannikin. To her I chiefly owe my preservation in that country: we never parted +while I was there; I called her my Glumdalclitch, or little nurse; and should +be guilty of great ingratitude, if I omitted this honourable mention of her +care and affection towards me, which I heartily wish it lay in my power to +requite as she deserves, instead of being the innocent, but unhappy instrument +of her disgrace, as I have too much reason to fear. + +It now began to be known and talked of in the neighbourhood, that my master had +found a strange animal in the field, about the bigness of a splacnuck, but +exactly shaped in every part like a human creature; which it likewise imitated +in all its actions; seemed to speak in a little language of its own, had +already learned several words of theirs, went erect upon two legs, was tame and +gentle, would come when it was called, do whatever it was bid, had the finest +limbs in the world, and a complexion fairer than a nobleman's daughter of three +years old. Another farmer, who lived hard by, and was a particular friend of my +master, came on a visit on purpose to inquire into the truth of this story. I +was immediately produced, and placed upon a table, where I walked as I was +commanded, drew my hanger, put it up again, made my reverence to my master's +guest, asked him in his own language how he did, and told him HE WAS WELCOME, +just as my little nurse had instructed me. This man, who was old and +dim-sighted, put on his spectacles to behold me better; at which I could not +forbear laughing very heartily, for his eyes appeared like the full moon +shining into a chamber at two windows. Our people, who discovered the cause of +my mirth, bore me company in laughing, at which the old fellow was fool enough +to be angry and out of countenance. He had the character of a great miser; and, +to my misfortune, he well deserved it, by the cursed advice he gave my master, +to show me as a sight upon a market-day in the next town, which was half an +hour's riding, about two-and-twenty miles from our house. I guessed there was +some mischief when I observed my master and his friend whispering together, +sometimes pointing at me; and my fears made me fancy that I overheard and +understood some of their words. But the next morning Glumdalclitch, my little +nurse, told me the whole matter, which she had cunningly picked out from her +mother. The poor girl laid me on her bosom, and fell a weeping with shame and +grief. She apprehended some mischief would happen to me from rude vulgar folks, +who might squeeze me to death, or break one of my limbs by taking me in their +hands. She had also observed how modest I was in my nature, how nicely I +regarded my honour, and what an indignity I should conceive it, to be exposed +for money as a public spectacle, to the meanest of the people. She said, her +papa and mamma had promised that Grildrig should be hers; but now she found +they meant to serve her as they did last year, when they pretended to give her +a lamb, and yet, as soon as it was fat, sold it to a butcher. For my own part, +I may truly affirm, that I was less concerned than my nurse. I had a strong +hope, which never left me, that I should one day recover my liberty: and as to +the ignominy of being carried about for a monster, I considered myself to be a +perfect stranger in the country, and that such a misfortune could never be +charged upon me as a reproach, if ever I should return to England, since the +king of Great Britain himself, in my condition, must have undergone the same +distress. + +My master, pursuant to the advice of his friend, carried me in a box the next +market-day to the neighbouring town, and took along with him his little +daughter, my nurse, upon a pillion behind him. The box was close on every side, +with a little door for me to go in and out, and a few gimlet holes to let in +air. The girl had been so careful as to put the quilt of her baby's bed into +it, for me to lie down on. However, I was terribly shaken and discomposed in +this journey, though it was but of half an hour: for the horse went about forty +feet at every step and trotted so high, that the agitation was equal to the +rising and falling of a ship in a great storm, but much more frequent. Our +journey was somewhat farther than from London to St. Alban's. My master +alighted at an inn which he used to frequent; and after consulting awhile with +the inn-keeper, and making some necessary preparations, he hired the grultrud, +or crier, to give notice through the town of a strange creature to be seen at +the sign of the Green Eagle, not so big as a splacnuck (an animal in that +country very finely shaped, about six feet long,) and in every part of the body +resembling a human creature, could speak several words, and perform a hundred +diverting tricks. + +I was placed upon a table in the largest room of the inn, which might be near +three hundred feet square. My little nurse stood on a low stool close to the +table, to take care of me, and direct what I should do. My master, to avoid a +crowd, would suffer only thirty people at a time to see me. I walked about on +the table as the girl commanded; she asked me questions, as far as she knew my +understanding of the language reached, and I answered them as loud as I could. +I turned about several times to the company, paid my humble respects, said THEY +WERE WELCOME, and used some other speeches I had been taught. I took up a +thimble filled with liquor, which Glumdalclitch had given me for a cup, and +drank their health, I drew out my hanger, and flourished with it after the +manner of fencers in England. My nurse gave me a part of a straw, which I +exercised as a pike, having learnt the art in my youth. I was that day shown to +twelve sets of company, and as often forced to act over again the same +fopperies, till I was half dead with weariness and vexation; for those who had +seen me made such wonderful reports, that the people were ready to break down +the doors to come in. My master, for his own interest, would not suffer any one +to touch me except my nurse; and to prevent danger, benches were set round the +table at such a distance as to put me out of every body's reach. However, an +unlucky school-boy aimed a hazel nut directly at my head, which very narrowly +missed me; otherwise it came with so much violence, that it would have +infallibly knocked out my brains, for it was almost as large as a small +pumpkin, but I had the satisfaction to see the young rogue well beaten, and +turned out of the room. + +My master gave public notice that he would show me again the next market-day; +and in the meantime he prepared a convenient vehicle for me, which he had +reason enough to do; for I was so tired with my first journey, and with +entertaining company for eight hours together, that I could hardly stand upon +my legs, or speak a word. It was at least three days before I recovered my +strength; and that I might have no rest at home, all the neighbouring gentlemen +from a hundred miles round, hearing of my fame, came to see me at my master's +own house. There could not be fewer than thirty persons with their wives and +children (for the country is very populous;) and my master demanded the rate of +a full room whenever he showed me at home, although it were only to a single +family; so that for some time I had but little ease every day of the week +(except Wednesday, which is their Sabbath,) although I were not carried to the +town. + +My master, finding how profitable I was likely to be, resolved to carry me to +the most considerable cities of the kingdom. Having therefore provided himself +with all things necessary for a long journey, and settled his affairs at home, +he took leave of his wife, and upon the 17th of August, 1703, about two months +after my arrival, we set out for the metropolis, situate near the middle of +that empire, and about three thousand miles distance from our house. My master +made his daughter Glumdalclitch ride behind him. She carried me on her lap, in +a box tied about her waist. The girl had lined it on all sides with the softest +cloth she could get, well quilted underneath, furnished it with her baby's bed, +provided me with linen and other necessaries, and made everything as convenient +as she could. We had no other company but a boy of the house, who rode after us +with the luggage. + +My master's design was to show me in all the towns by the way, and to step out +of the road for fifty or a hundred miles, to any village, or person of +quality's house, where he might expect custom. We made easy journeys, of not +above seven or eight score miles a-day; for Glumdalclitch, on purpose to spare +me, complained she was tired with the trotting of the horse. She often took me +out of my box, at my own desire, to give me air, and show me the country, but +always held me fast by a leading-string. We passed over five or six rivers, +many degrees broader and deeper than the Nile or the Ganges: and there was +hardly a rivulet so small as the Thames at London-bridge. We were ten weeks in +our journey, and I was shown in eighteen large towns, besides many villages, +and private families. + +On the 26th day of October we arrived at the metropolis, called in their +language Lorbrulgrud, or Pride of the Universe. My master took a lodging in the +principal street of the city, not far from the royal palace, and put out bills +in the usual form, containing an exact description of my person and parts. He +hired a large room between three and four hundred feet wide. He provided a +table sixty feet in diameter, upon which I was to act my part, and pallisadoed +it round three feet from the edge, and as many high, to prevent my falling +over. I was shown ten times a-day, to the wonder and satisfaction of all +people. I could now speak the language tolerably well, and perfectly understood +every word, that was spoken to me. Besides, I had learnt their alphabet, and +could make a shift to explain a sentence here and there; for Glumdalclitch had +been my instructor while we were at home, and at leisure hours during our +journey. She carried a little book in her pocket, not much larger than a +Sanson's Atlas; it was a common treatise for the use of young girls, giving a +short account of their religion: out of this she taught me my letters, and +interpreted the words. + +CHAPTER III. + +[The author sent for to court. The queen buys him of his master the farmer, and +presents him to the king. He disputes with his majesty's great scholars. An +apartment at court provided for the author. He is in high favour with the +queen. He stands up for the honour of his own country. His quarrels with the +queen's dwarf.] + +The frequent labours I underwent every day, made, in a few weeks, a very +considerable change in my health: the more my master got by me, the more +insatiable he grew. I had quite lost my stomach, and was almost reduced to a +skeleton. The farmer observed it, and concluding I must soon die, resolved to +make as good a hand of me as he could. While he was thus reasoning and +resolving with himself, a sardral, or gentleman-usher, came from court, +commanding my master to carry me immediately thither for the diversion of the +queen and her ladies. Some of the latter had already been to see me, and +reported strange things of my beauty, behaviour, and good sense. Her majesty, +and those who attended her, were beyond measure delighted with my demeanour. I +fell on my knees, and begged the honour of kissing her imperial foot; but this +gracious princess held out her little finger towards me, after I was set on the +table, which I embraced in both my arms, and put the tip of it with the utmost +respect to my lip. She made me some general questions about my country and my +travels, which I answered as distinctly, and in as few words as I could. She +asked, "whether I could be content to live at court?" I bowed down to the board +of the table, and humbly answered "that I was my master's slave: but, if I were +at my own disposal, I should be proud to devote my life to her majesty's +service." She then asked my master, "whether he was willing to sell me at a +good price?" He, who apprehended I could not live a month, was ready enough to +part with me, and demanded a thousand pieces of gold, which were ordered him on +the spot, each piece being about the bigness of eight hundred moidores; but +allowing for the proportion of all things between that country and Europe, and +the high price of gold among them, was hardly so great a sum as a thousand +guineas would be in England. I then said to the queen, "since I was now her +majesty's most humble creature and vassal, I must beg the favour, that +Glumdalclitch, who had always tended me with so much care and kindness, and +understood to do it so well, might be admitted into her service, and continue +to be my nurse and instructor." + +Her majesty agreed to my petition, and easily got the farmer's consent, who was +glad enough to have his daughter preferred at court, and the poor girl herself +was not able to hide her joy. My late master withdrew, bidding me farewell, and +saying he had left me in a good service; to which I replied not a word, only +making him a slight bow. + +The queen observed my coldness; and, when the farmer was gone out of the +apartment, asked me the reason. I made bold to tell her majesty, "that I owed +no other obligation to my late master, than his not dashing out the brains of a +poor harmless creature, found by chance in his fields: which obligation was +amply recompensed, by the gain he had made in showing me through half the +kingdom, and the price he had now sold me for. That the life I had since led +was laborious enough to kill an animal of ten times my strength. That my health +was much impaired, by the continual drudgery of entertaining the rabble every +hour of the day; and that, if my master had not thought my life in danger, her +majesty would not have got so cheap a bargain. But as I was out of all fear of +being ill-treated under the protection of so great and good an empress, the +ornament of nature, the darling of the world, the delight of her subjects, the +phoenix of the creation, so I hoped my late master's apprehensions would appear +to be groundless; for I already found my spirits revive, by the influence of +her most august presence." + +This was the sum of my speech, delivered with great improprieties and +hesitation. The latter part was altogether framed in the style peculiar to that +people, whereof I learned some phrases from Glumdalclitch, while she was +carrying me to court. + +The queen, giving great allowance for my defectiveness in speaking, was, +however, surprised at so much wit and good sense in so diminutive an animal. +She took me in her own hand, and carried me to the king, who was then retired +to his cabinet. His majesty, a prince of much gravity and austere countenance, +not well observing my shape at first view, asked the queen after a cold manner +"how long it was since she grew fond of a splacnuck?" for such it seems he took +me to be, as I lay upon my breast in her majesty's right hand. But this +princess, who has an infinite deal of wit and humour, set me gently on my feet +upon the scrutoire, and commanded me to give his majesty an account of myself, +which I did in a very few words: and Glumdalclitch who attended at the cabinet +door, and could not endure I should be out of her sight, being admitted, +confirmed all that had passed from my arrival at her father's house. + +The king, although he be as learned a person as any in his dominions, had been +educated in the study of philosophy, and particularly mathematics; yet when he +observed my shape exactly, and saw me walk erect, before I began to speak, +conceived I might be a piece of clock-work (which is in that country arrived to +a very great perfection) contrived by some ingenious artist. But when he heard +my voice, and found what I delivered to be regular and rational, he could not +conceal his astonishment. He was by no means satisfied with the relation I gave +him of the manner I came into his kingdom, but thought it a story concerted +between Glumdalclitch and her father, who had taught me a set of words to make +me sell at a better price. Upon this imagination, he put several other +questions to me, and still received rational answers: no otherwise defective +than by a foreign accent, and an imperfect knowledge in the language, with some +rustic phrases which I had learned at the farmer's house, and did not suit the +polite style of a court. + +His majesty sent for three great scholars, who were then in their weekly +waiting, according to the custom in that country. These gentlemen, after they +had a while examined my shape with much nicety, were of different opinions +concerning me. They all agreed that I could not be produced according to the +regular laws of nature, because I was not framed with a capacity of preserving +my life, either by swiftness, or climbing of trees, or digging holes in the +earth. They observed by my teeth, which they viewed with great exactness, that +I was a carnivorous animal; yet most quadrupeds being an overmatch for me, and +field mice, with some others, too nimble, they could not imagine how I should +be able to support myself, unless I fed upon snails and other insects, which +they offered, by many learned arguments, to evince that I could not possibly +do. One of these virtuosi seemed to think that I might be an embryo, or +abortive birth. But this opinion was rejected by the other two, who observed my +limbs to be perfect and finished; and that I had lived several years, as it was +manifest from my beard, the stumps whereof they plainly discovered through a +magnifying glass. They would not allow me to be a dwarf, because my littleness +was beyond all degrees of comparison; for the queen's favourite dwarf, the +smallest ever known in that kingdom, was near thirty feet high. After much +debate, they concluded unanimously, that I was only relplum scalcath, which is +interpreted literally lusus naturae; a determination exactly agreeable to the +modern philosophy of Europe, whose professors, disdaining the old evasion of +occult causes, whereby the followers of Aristotle endeavoured in vain to +disguise their ignorance, have invented this wonderful solution of all +difficulties, to the unspeakable advancement of human knowledge. + +After this decisive conclusion, I entreated to be heard a word or two. I +applied myself to the king, and assured his majesty, "that I came from a +country which abounded with several millions of both sexes, and of my own +stature; where the animals, trees, and houses, were all in proportion, and +where, by consequence, I might be as able to defend myself, and to find +sustenance, as any of his majesty's subjects could do here; which I took for a +full answer to those gentlemen's arguments." To this they only replied with a +smile of contempt, saying, "that the farmer had instructed me very well in my +lesson." The king, who had a much better understanding, dismissing his learned +men, sent for the farmer, who by good fortune was not yet gone out of town. +Having therefore first examined him privately, and then confronted him with me +and the young girl, his majesty began to think that what we told him might +possibly be true. He desired the queen to order that a particular care should +be taken of me; and was of opinion that Glumdalclitch should still continue in +her office of tending me, because he observed we had a great affection for each +other. A convenient apartment was provided for her at court: she had a sort of +governess appointed to take care of her education, a maid to dress her, and two +other servants for menial offices; but the care of me was wholly appropriated +to herself. The queen commanded her own cabinet-maker to contrive a box, that +might serve me for a bedchamber, after the model that Glumdalclitch and I +should agree upon. This man was a most ingenious artist, and according to my +direction, in three weeks finished for me a wooden chamber of sixteen feet +square, and twelve high, with sash-windows, a door, and two closets, like a +London bed-chamber. The board, that made the ceiling, was to be lifted up and +down by two hinges, to put in a bed ready furnished by her majesty's +upholsterer, which Glumdalclitch took out every day to air, made it with her +own hands, and letting it down at night, locked up the roof over me. A nice +workman, who was famous for little curiosities, undertook to make me two +chairs, with backs and frames, of a substance not unlike ivory, and two tables, +with a cabinet to put my things in. The room was quilted on all sides, as well +as the floor and the ceiling, to prevent any accident from the carelessness of +those who carried me, and to break the force of a jolt, when I went in a coach. +I desired a lock for my door, to prevent rats and mice from coming in. The +smith, after several attempts, made the smallest that ever was seen among them, +for I have known a larger at the gate of a gentleman's house in England. I made +a shift to keep the key in a pocket of my own, fearing Glumdalclitch might lose +it. The queen likewise ordered the thinnest silks that could be gotten, to make +me clothes, not much thicker than an English blanket, very cumbersome till I +was accustomed to them. They were after the fashion of the kingdom, partly +resembling the Persian, and partly the Chinese, and are a very grave and decent +habit. + +The queen became so fond of my company, that she could not dine without me. I +had a table placed upon the same at which her majesty ate, just at her left +elbow, and a chair to sit on. Glumdalclitch stood on a stool on the floor near +my table, to assist and take care of me. I had an entire set of silver dishes +and plates, and other necessaries, which, in proportion to those of the queen, +were not much bigger than what I have seen in a London toy-shop for the +furniture of a baby-house: these my little nurse kept in her pocket in a silver +box, and gave me at meals as I wanted them, always cleaning them herself. No +person dined with the queen but the two princesses royal, the eldest sixteen +years old, and the younger at that time thirteen and a month. Her majesty used +to put a bit of meat upon one of my dishes, out of which I carved for myself, +and her diversion was to see me eat in miniature: for the queen (who had indeed +but a weak stomach) took up, at one mouthful, as much as a dozen English +farmers could eat at a meal, which to me was for some time a very nauseous +sight. She would craunch the wing of a lark, bones and all, between her teeth, +although it were nine times as large as that of a full-grown turkey; and put a +bit of bread into her mouth as big as two twelve- penny loaves. She drank out +of a golden cup, above a hogshead at a draught. Her knives were twice as long +as a scythe, set straight upon the handle. The spoons, forks, and other +instruments, were all in the same proportion. I remember when Glumdalclitch +carried me, out of curiosity, to see some of the tables at court, where ten or +a dozen of those enormous knives and forks were lifted up together, I thought I +had never till then beheld so terrible a sight. + +It is the custom, that every Wednesday (which, as I have observed, is their +Sabbath) the king and queen, with the royal issue of both sexes, dine together +in the apartment of his majesty, to whom I was now become a great favourite; +and at these times, my little chair and table were placed at his left hand, +before one of the salt- cellars. This prince took a pleasure in conversing with +me, inquiring into the manners, religion, laws, government, and learning of +Europe; wherein I gave him the best account I was able. His apprehension was so +clear, and his judgment so exact, that he made very wise reflections and +observations upon all I said. But I confess, that, after I had been a little +too copious in talking of my own beloved country, of our trade and wars by sea +and land, of our schisms in religion, and parties in the state; the prejudices +of his education prevailed so far, that he could not forbear taking me up in +his right hand, and stroking me gently with the other, after a hearty fit of +laughing, asked me, "whether I was a whig or tory?" Then turning to his first +minister, who waited behind him with a white staff, near as tall as the +mainmast of the Royal Sovereign, he observed "how contemptible a thing was +human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I: and +yet," says he, "I dare engage these creatures have their titles and +distinctions of honour; they contrive little nests and burrows, that they call +houses and cities; they make a figure in dress and equipage; they love, they +fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray!" And thus he continued on, while +my colour came and went several times, with indignation, to hear our noble +country, the mistress of arts and arms, the scourge of France, the arbitress of +Europe, the seat of virtue, piety, honour, and truth, the pride and envy of the +world, so contemptuously treated. + +But as I was not in a condition to resent injuries, so upon mature thoughts I +began to doubt whether I was injured or no. For, after having been accustomed +several months to the sight and converse of this people, and observed every +object upon which I cast mine eyes to be of proportionable magnitude, the +horror I had at first conceived from their bulk and aspect was so far worn off, +that if I had then beheld a company of English lords and ladies in their finery +and birth-day clothes, acting their several parts in the most courtly manner of +strutting, and bowing, and prating, to say the truth, I should have been +strongly tempted to laugh as much at them as the king and his grandees did at +me. Neither, indeed, could I forbear smiling at myself, when the queen used to +place me upon her hand towards a looking-glass, by which both our persons +appeared before me in full view together; and there could be nothing more +ridiculous than the comparison; so that I really began to imagine myself +dwindled many degrees below my usual size. + +Nothing angered and mortified me so much as the queen's dwarf; who being of the +lowest stature that was ever in that country (for I verily think he was not +full thirty feet high), became so insolent at seeing a creature so much beneath +him, that he would always affect to swagger and look big as he passed by me in +the queen's antechamber, while I was standing on some table talking with the +lords or ladies of the court, and he seldom failed of a smart word or two upon +my littleness; against which I could only revenge myself by calling him +brother, challenging him to wrestle, and such repartees as are usually in the +mouths of court pages. One day, at dinner, this malicious little cub was so +nettled with something I had said to him, that, raising himself upon the frame +of her majesty's chair, he took me up by the middle, as I was sitting down, not +thinking any harm, and let me drop into a large silver bowl of cream, and then +ran away as fast as he could. I fell over head and ears, and, if I had not been +a good swimmer, it might have gone very hard with me; for Glumdalclitch in that +instant happened to be at the other end of the room, and the queen was in such +a fright, that she wanted presence of mind to assist me. But my little nurse +ran to my relief, and took me out, after I had swallowed above a quart of +cream. I was put to bed: however, I received no other damage than the loss of a +suit of clothes, which was utterly spoiled. The dwarf was soundly whipt, and as +a farther punishment, forced to drink up the bowl of cream into which he had +thrown me: neither was he ever restored to favour; for soon after the queen +bestowed him on a lady of high quality, so that I saw him no more, to my very +great satisfaction; for I could not tell to what extremities such a malicious +urchin might have carried his resentment. + +He had before served me a scurvy trick, which set the queen a-laughing, +although at the same time she was heartily vexed, and would have immediately +cashiered him, if I had not been so generous as to intercede. Her majesty had +taken a marrow-bone upon her plate, and, after knocking out the marrow, placed +the bone again in the dish erect, as it stood before; the dwarf, watching his +opportunity, while Glumdalclitch was gone to the side-board, mounted the stool +that she stood on to take care of me at meals, took me up in both hands, and +squeezing my legs together, wedged them into the marrow bone above my waist, +where I stuck for some time, and made a very ridiculous figure. I believe it +was near a minute before any one knew what was become of me; for I thought it +below me to cry out. But, as princes seldom get their meat hot, my legs were +not scalded, only my stockings and breeches in a sad condition. The dwarf, at +my entreaty, had no other punishment than a sound whipping. + +I was frequently rallied by the queen upon account of my fearfulness; and she +used to ask me whether the people of my country were as great cowards as +myself? The occasion was this: the kingdom is much pestered with flies in +summer; and these odious insects, each of them as big as a Dunstable lark, +hardly gave me any rest while I sat at dinner, with their continual humming and +buzzing about mine ears. They would sometimes alight upon my victuals, and +leave their loathsome excrement, or spawn behind, which to me was very visible, +though not to the natives of that country, whose large optics were not so acute +as mine, in viewing smaller objects. Sometimes they would fix upon my nose, or +forehead, where they stung me to the quick, smelling very offensively; and I +could easily trace that viscous matter, which, our naturalists tell us, enables +those creatures to walk with their feet upwards upon a ceiling. I had much ado +to defend myself against these detestable animals, and could not forbear +starting when they came on my face. It was the common practice of the dwarf, to +catch a number of these insects in his hand, as schoolboys do among us, and let +them out suddenly under my nose, on purpose to frighten me, and divert the +queen. My remedy was to cut them in pieces with my knife, as they flew in the +air, wherein my dexterity was much admired. + +I remember, one morning, when Glumdalclitch had set me in a box upon a window, +as she usually did in fair days to give me air (for I durst not venture to let +the box be hung on a nail out of the window, as we do with cages in England), +after I had lifted up one of my sashes, and sat down at my table to eat a piece +of sweet cake for my breakfast, above twenty wasps, allured by the smell, came +flying into the room, humming louder than the drones of as many bagpipes. Some +of them seized my cake, and carried it piecemeal away; others flew about my +head and face, confounding me with the noise, and putting me in the utmost +terror of their stings. However, I had the courage to rise and draw my hanger, +and attack them in the air. I dispatched four of them, but the rest got away, +and I presently shut my window. These insects were as large as partridges: I +took out their stings, found them an inch and a half long, and as sharp as +needles. I carefully preserved them all; and having since shown them, with some +other curiosities, in several parts of Europe, upon my return to England I gave +three of them to Gresham College, and kept the fourth for myself. + +CHAPTER IV. + +[The country described. A proposal for correcting modern maps. The king's +palace; and some account of the metropolis. The author's way of travelling. The +chief temple described.] + +I now intend to give the reader a short description of this country, as far as +I travelled in it, which was not above two thousand miles round Lorbrulgrud, +the metropolis. For the queen, whom I always attended, never went farther when +she accompanied the king in his progresses, and there staid till his majesty +returned from viewing his frontiers. The whole extent of this prince's +dominions reaches about six thousand miles in length, and from three to five in +breadth: whence I cannot but conclude, that our geographers of Europe are in a +great error, by supposing nothing but sea between Japan and California; for it +was ever my opinion, that there must be a balance of earth to counterpoise the +great continent of Tartary; and therefore they ought to correct their maps and +charts, by joining this vast tract of land to the north- west parts of America, +wherein I shall be ready to lend them my assistance. + +The kingdom is a peninsula, terminated to the north-east by a ridge of +mountains thirty miles high, which are altogether impassable, by reason of the +volcanoes upon the tops: neither do the most learned know what sort of mortals +inhabit beyond those mountains, or whether they be inhabited at all. On the +three other sides, it is bounded by the ocean. There is not one seaport in the +whole kingdom: and those parts of the coasts into which the rivers issue, are +so full of pointed rocks, and the sea generally so rough, that there is no +venturing with the smallest of their boats; so that these people are wholly +excluded from any commerce with the rest of the world. But the large rivers are +full of vessels, and abound with excellent fish; for they seldom get any from +the sea, because the sea fish are of the same size with those in Europe, and +consequently not worth catching; whereby it is manifest, that nature, in the +production of plants and animals of so extraordinary a bulk, is wholly confined +to this continent, of which I leave the reasons to be determined by +philosophers. However, now and then they take a whale that happens to be dashed +against the rocks, which the common people feed on heartily. These whales I +have known so large, that a man could hardly carry one upon his shoulders; and +sometimes, for curiosity, they are brought in hampers to Lorbrulgrud; I saw one +of them in a dish at the king's table, which passed for a rarity, but I did not +observe he was fond of it; for I think, indeed, the bigness disgusted him, +although I have seen one somewhat larger in Greenland. + +The country is well inhabited, for it contains fifty-one cities, near a hundred +walled towns, and a great number of villages. To satisfy my curious reader, it +may be sufficient to describe Lorbrulgrud. This city stands upon almost two +equal parts, on each side the river that passes through. It contains above +eighty thousand houses, and about six hundred thousand inhabitants. It is in +length three glomglungs (which make about fifty-four English miles,) and two +and a half in breadth; as I measured it myself in the royal map made by the +king's order, which was laid on the ground on purpose for me, and extended a +hundred feet: I paced the diameter and circumference several times barefoot, +and, computing by the scale, measured it pretty exactly. + +The king's palace is no regular edifice, but a heap of buildings, about seven +miles round: the chief rooms are generally two hundred and forty feet high, and +broad and long in proportion. A coach was allowed to Glumdalclitch and me, +wherein her governess frequently took her out to see the town, or go among the +shops; and I was always of the party, carried in my box; although the girl, at +my own desire, would often take me out, and hold me in her hand, that I might +more conveniently view the houses and the people, as we passed along the +streets. I reckoned our coach to be about a square of Westminster-hall, but not +altogether so high: however, I cannot be very exact. One day the governess +ordered our coachman to stop at several shops, where the beggars, watching +their opportunity, crowded to the sides of the coach, and gave me the most +horrible spectacle that ever a European eye beheld. There was a woman with a +cancer in her breast, swelled to a monstrous size, full of holes, in two or +three of which I could have easily crept, and covered my whole body. There was +a fellow with a wen in his neck, larger than five wool-packs; and another, with +a couple of wooden legs, each about twenty feet high. But the most hateful +sight of all, was the lice crawling on their clothes. I could see distinctly +the limbs of these vermin with my naked eye, much better than those of a +European louse through a microscope, and their snouts with which they rooted +like swine. They were the first I had ever beheld, and I should have been +curious enough to dissect one of them, if I had had proper instruments, which I +unluckily left behind me in the ship, although, indeed, the sight was so +nauseous, that it perfectly turned my stomach. + +Besides the large box in which I was usually carried, the queen ordered a +smaller one to be made for me, of about twelve feet square, and ten high, for +the convenience of travelling; because the other was somewhat too large for +Glumdalclitch's lap, and cumbersome in the coach; it was made by the same +artist, whom I directed in the whole contrivance. This travelling-closet was an +exact square, with a window in the middle of three of the squares, and each +window was latticed with iron wire on the outside, to prevent accidents in long +journeys. On the fourth side, which had no window, two strong staples were +fixed, through which the person that carried me, when I had a mind to be on +horseback, put a leathern belt, and buckled it about his waist. This was always +the office of some grave trusty servant, in whom I could confide, whether I +attended the king and queen in their progresses, or were disposed to see the +gardens, or pay a visit to some great lady or minister of state in the court, +when Glumdalclitch happened to be out of order; for I soon began to be known +and esteemed among the greatest officers, I suppose more upon account of their +majesties' favour, than any merit of my own. In journeys, when I was weary of +the coach, a servant on horseback would buckle on my box, and place it upon a +cushion before him; and there I had a full prospect of the country on three +sides, from my three windows. I had, in this closet, a field-bed and a hammock, +hung from the ceiling, two chairs and a table, neatly screwed to the floor, to +prevent being tossed about by the agitation of the horse or the coach. And +having been long used to sea-voyages, those motions, although sometimes very +violent, did not much discompose me. + +Whenever I had a mind to see the town, it was always in my travelling-closet; +which Glumdalclitch held in her lap in a kind of open sedan, after the fashion +of the country, borne by four men, and attended by two others in the queen's +livery. The people, who had often heard of me, were very curious to crowd about +the sedan, and the girl was complaisant enough to make the bearers stop, and to +take me in her hand, that I might be more conveniently seen. + +I was very desirous to see the chief temple, and particularly the tower +belonging to it, which is reckoned the highest in the kingdom. Accordingly one +day my nurse carried me thither, but I may truly say I came back disappointed; +for the height is not above three thousand feet, reckoning from the ground to +the highest pinnacle top; which, allowing for the difference between the size +of those people and us in Europe, is no great matter for admiration, nor at all +equal in proportion (if I rightly remember) to Salisbury steeple. But, not to +detract from a nation, to which, during my life, I shall acknowledge myself +extremely obliged, it must be allowed, that whatever this famous tower wants in +height, is amply made up in beauty and strength: for the walls are near a +hundred feet thick, built of hewn stone, whereof each is about forty feet +square, and adorned on all sides with statues of gods and emperors, cut in +marble, larger than the life, placed in their several niches. I measured a +little finger which had fallen down from one of these statues, and lay +unperceived among some rubbish, and found it exactly four feet and an inch in +length. Glumdalclitch wrapped it up in her handkerchief, and carried it home in +her pocket, to keep among other trinkets, of which the girl was very fond, as +children at her age usually are. + +The king's kitchen is indeed a noble building, vaulted at top, and about six +hundred feet high. The great oven is not so wide, by ten paces, as the cupola +at St. Paul's: for I measured the latter on purpose, after my return. But if I +should describe the kitchen grate, the prodigious pots and kettles, the joints +of meat turning on the spits, with many other particulars, perhaps I should be +hardly believed; at least a severe critic would be apt to think I enlarged a +little, as travellers are often suspected to do. To avoid which censure I fear +I have run too much into the other extreme; and that if this treatise should +happen to be translated into the language of Brobdingnag (which is the general +name of that kingdom,) and transmitted thither, the king and his people would +have reason to complain that I had done them an injury, by a false and +diminutive representation. + +His majesty seldom keeps above six hundred horses in his stables: they are +generally from fifty-four to sixty feet high. But, when he goes abroad on +solemn days, he is attended, for state, by a military guard of five hundred +horse, which, indeed, I thought was the most splendid sight that could be ever +beheld, till I saw part of his army in battalia, whereof I shall find another +occasion to speak. + +CHAPTER V. + +[Several adventurers that happened to the author. The execution of a criminal. +The author shows his skill in navigation.] + +I should have lived happy enough in that country, if my littleness had not +exposed me to several ridiculous and troublesome accidents; some of which I +shall venture to relate. Glumdalclitch often carried me into the gardens of the +court in my smaller box, and would sometimes take me out of it, and hold me in +her hand, or set me down to walk. I remember, before the dwarf left the queen, +he followed us one day into those gardens, and my nurse having set me down, he +and I being close together, near some dwarf apple trees, I must needs show my +wit, by a silly allusion between him and the trees, which happens to hold in +their language as it does in ours. Whereupon, the malicious rogue, watching his +opportunity, when I was walking under one of them, shook it directly over my +head, by which a dozen apples, each of them near as large as a Bristol barrel, +came tumbling about my ears; one of them hit me on the back as I chanced to +stoop, and knocked me down flat on my face; but I received no other hurt, and +the dwarf was pardoned at my desire, because I had given the provocation. + +Another day, Glumdalclitch left me on a smooth grass-plot to divert myself, +while she walked at some distance with her governess. In the meantime, there +suddenly fell such a violent shower of hail, that I was immediately by the +force of it, struck to the ground: and when I was down, the hailstones gave me +such cruel bangs all over the body, as if I had been pelted with tennis-balls; +however, I made a shift to creep on all fours, and shelter myself, by lying +flat on my face, on the lee-side of a border of lemon-thyme, but so bruised +from head to foot, that I could not go abroad in ten days. Neither is this at +all to be wondered at, because nature, in that country, observing the same +proportion through all her operations, a hailstone is near eighteen hundred +times as large as one in Europe; which I can assert upon experience, having +been so curious as to weigh and measure them. + +But a more dangerous accident happened to me in the same garden, when my little +nurse, believing she had put me in a secure place (which I often entreated her +to do, that I might enjoy my own thoughts,) and having left my box at home, to +avoid the trouble of carrying it, went to another part of the garden with her +governess and some ladies of her acquaintance. While she was absent, and out of +hearing, a small white spaniel that belonged to one of the chief gardeners, +having got by accident into the garden, happened to range near the place where +I lay: the dog, following the scent, came directly up, and taking me in his +mouth, ran straight to his master wagging his tail, and set me gently on the +ground. By good fortune he had been so well taught, that I was carried between +his teeth without the least hurt, or even tearing my clothes. But the poor +gardener, who knew me well, and had a great kindness for me, was in a terrible +fright: he gently took me up in both his hands, and asked me how I did? but I +was so amazed and out of breath, that I could not speak a word. In a few +minutes I came to myself, and he carried me safe to my little nurse, who, by +this time, had returned to the place where she left me, and was in cruel +agonies when I did not appear, nor answer when she called. She severely +reprimanded the gardener on account of his dog. But the thing was hushed up, +and never known at court, for the girl was afraid of the queen's anger; and +truly, as to myself, I thought it would not be for my reputation, that such a +story should go about. + +This accident absolutely determined Glumdalclitch never to trust me abroad for +the future out of her sight. I had been long afraid of this resolution, and +therefore concealed from her some little unlucky adventures, that happened in +those times when I was left by myself. Once a kite, hovering over the garden, +made a stoop at me, and if I had not resolutely drawn my hanger, and run under +a thick espalier, he would have certainly carried me away in his talons. +Another time, walking to the top of a fresh mole-hill, I fell to my neck in the +hole, through which that animal had cast up the earth, and coined some lie, not +worth remembering, to excuse myself for spoiling my clothes. I likewise broke +my right shin against the shell of a snail, which I happened to stumble over, +as I was walking alone and thinking on poor England. + +I cannot tell whether I were more pleased or mortified to observe, in those +solitary walks, that the smaller birds did not appear to be at all afraid of +me, but would hop about within a yard's distance, looking for worms and other +food, with as much indifference and security as if no creature at all were near +them. I remember, a thrush had the confidence to snatch out of my hand, with +his bill, a of cake that Glumdalclitch had just given me for my breakfast. When +I attempted to catch any of these birds, they would boldly turn against me, +endeavouring to peck my fingers, which I durst not venture within their reach; +and then they would hop back unconcerned, to hunt for worms or snails, as they +did before. But one day, I took a thick cudgel, and threw it with all my +strength so luckily, at a linnet, that I knocked him down, and seizing him by +the neck with both my hands, ran with him in triumph to my nurse. However, the +bird, who had only been stunned, recovering himself gave me so many boxes with +his wings, on both sides of my head and body, though I held him at +arm's-length, and was out of the reach of his claws, that I was twenty times +thinking to let him go. But I was soon relieved by one of our servants, who +wrung off the bird's neck, and I had him next day for dinner, by the queen's +command. This linnet, as near as I can remember, seemed to be somewhat larger +than an English swan. + +The maids of honour often invited Glumdalclitch to their apartments, and +desired she would bring me along with her, on purpose to have the pleasure of +seeing and touching me. They would often strip me naked from top to toe, and +lay me at full length in their bosoms; wherewith I was much disgusted because, +to say the truth, a very offensive smell came from their skins; which I do not +mention, or intend, to the disadvantage of those excellent ladies, for whom I +have all manner of respect; but I conceive that my sense was more acute in +proportion to my littleness, and that those illustrious persons were no more +disagreeable to their lovers, or to each other, than people of the same quality +are with us in England. And, after all, I found their natural smell was much +more supportable, than when they used perfumes, under which I immediately +swooned away. I cannot forget, that an intimate friend of mine in Lilliput, +took the freedom in a warm day, when I had used a good deal of exercise, to +complain of a strong smell about me, although I am as little faulty that way, +as most of my sex: but I suppose his faculty of smelling was as nice with +regard to me, as mine was to that of this people. Upon this point, I cannot +forbear doing justice to the queen my mistress, and Glumdalclitch my nurse, +whose persons were as sweet as those of any lady in England. + +That which gave me most uneasiness among these maids of honour (when my nurse +carried me to visit then) was, to see them use me without any manner of +ceremony, like a creature who had no sort of consequence: for they would strip +themselves to the skin, and put on their smocks in my presence, while I was +placed on their toilet, directly before their naked bodies, which I am sure to +me was very far from being a tempting sight, or from giving me any other +emotions than those of horror and disgust: their skins appeared so coarse and +uneven, so variously coloured, when I saw them near, with a mole here and there +as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than packthreads, to +say nothing farther concerning the rest of their persons. Neither did they at +all scruple, while I was by, to discharge what they had drank, to the quantity +of at least two hogsheads, in a vessel that held above three tuns. The +handsomest among these maids of honour, a pleasant, frolicsome girl of sixteen, +would sometimes set me astride upon one of her nipples, with many other tricks, +wherein the reader will excuse me for not being over particular. But I was so +much displeased, that I entreated Glumdalclitch to contrive some excuse for not +seeing that young lady any more. + +One day, a young gentleman, who was nephew to my nurse's governess, came and +pressed them both to see an execution. It was of a man, who had murdered one of +that gentleman's intimate acquaintance. Glumdalclitch was prevailed on to be of +the company, very much against her inclination, for she was naturally +tender-hearted: and, as for myself, although I abhorred such kind of +spectacles, yet my curiosity tempted me to see something that I thought must be +extraordinary. The malefactor was fixed in a chair upon a scaffold erected for +that purpose, and his head cut off at one blow, with a sword of about forty +feet long. The veins and arteries spouted up such a prodigious quantity of +blood, and so high in the air, that the great jet d'eau at Versailles was not +equal to it for the time it lasted: and the head, when it fell on the scaffold +floor, gave such a bounce as made me start, although I was at least half an +English mile distant. + +The queen, who often used to hear me talk of my sea-voyages, and took all +occasions to divert me when I was melancholy, asked me whether I understood how +to handle a sail or an oar, and whether a little exercise of rowing might not +be convenient for my health? I answered, that I understood both very well: for +although my proper employment had been to be surgeon or doctor to the ship, yet +often, upon a pinch, I was forced to work like a common mariner. But I could +not see how this could be done in their country, where the smallest wherry was +equal to a first-rate man of war among us; and such a boat as I could manage +would never live in any of their rivers. Her majesty said, if I would contrive +a boat, her own joiner should make it, and she would provide a place for me to +sail in. The fellow was an ingenious workman, and by my instructions, in ten +days, finished a pleasure-boat with all its tackling, able conveniently to hold +eight Europeans. When it was finished, the queen was so delighted, that she ran +with it in her lap to the king, who ordered it to be put into a cistern full of +water, with me in it, by way of trial, where I could not manage my two sculls, +or little oars, for want of room. But the queen had before contrived another +project. She ordered the joiner to make a wooden trough of three hundred feet +long, fifty broad, and eight deep; which, being well pitched, to prevent +leaking, was placed on the floor, along the wall, in an outer room of the +palace. It had a cock near the bottom to let out the water, when it began to +grow stale; and two servants could easily fill it in half an hour. Here I often +used to row for my own diversion, as well as that of the queen and her ladies, +who thought themselves well entertained with my skill and agility. Sometimes I +would put up my sail, and then my business was only to steer, while the ladies +gave me a gale with their fans; and, when they were weary, some of their pages +would blow my sail forward with their breath, while I showed my art by steering +starboard or larboard as I pleased. When I had done, Glumdalclitch always +carried back my boat into her closet, and hung it on a nail to dry. + +In this exercise I once met an accident, which had like to have cost me my +life; for, one of the pages having put my boat into the trough, the governess +who attended Glumdalclitch very officiously lifted me up, to place me in the +boat: but I happened to slip through her fingers, and should infallibly have +fallen down forty feet upon the floor, if, by the luckiest chance in the world, +I had not been stopped by a corking-pin that stuck in the good gentlewoman's +stomacher; the head of the pin passing between my shirt and the waistband of my +breeches, and thus I was held by the middle in the air, till Glumdalclitch ran +to my relief. + +Another time, one of the servants, whose office it was to fill my trough every +third day with fresh water, was so careless as to let a huge frog (not +perceiving it) slip out of his pail. The frog lay concealed till I was put into +my boat, but then, seeing a resting- place, climbed up, and made it lean so +much on one side, that I was forced to balance it with all my weight on the +other, to prevent overturning. When the frog was got in, it hopped at once half +the length of the boat, and then over my head, backward and forward, daubing my +face and clothes with its odious slime. The largeness of its features made it +appear the most deformed animal that can be conceived. However, I desired +Glumdalclitch to let me deal with it alone. I banged it a good while with one +of my sculls, and at last forced it to leap out of the boat. + +But the greatest danger I ever underwent in that kingdom, was from a monkey, +who belonged to one of the clerks of the kitchen. Glumdalclitch had locked me +up in her closet, while she went somewhere upon business, or a visit. The +weather being very warm, the closet-window was left open, as well as the +windows and the door of my bigger box, in which I usually lived, because of its +largeness and conveniency. As I sat quietly meditating at my table, I heard +something bounce in at the closet-window, and skip about from one side to the +other: whereat, although I was much alarmed, yet I ventured to look out, but +not stirring from my seat; and then I saw this frolicsome animal frisking and +leaping up and down, till at last he came to my box, which he seemed to view +with great pleasure and curiosity, peeping in at the door and every window. I +retreated to the farther corner of my room; or box; but the monkey looking in +at every side, put me in such a fright, that I wanted presence of mind to +conceal myself under the bed, as I might easily have done. After some time +spent in peeping, grinning, and chattering, he at last espied me; and reaching +one of his paws in at the door, as a cat does when she plays with a mouse, +although I often shifted place to avoid him, he at length seized the lappet of +my coat (which being made of that country silk, was very thick and strong), and +dragged me out. He took me up in his right fore-foot and held me as a nurse +does a child she is going to suckle, just as I have seen the same sort of +creature do with a kitten in Europe; and when I offered to struggle he squeezed +me so hard, that I thought it more prudent to submit. I have good reason to +believe, that he took me for a young one of his own species, by his often +stroking my face very gently with his other paw. In these diversions he was +interrupted by a noise at the closet door, as if somebody were opening it: +whereupon he suddenly leaped up to the window at which he had come in, and +thence upon the leads and gutters, walking upon three legs, and holding me in +the fourth, till he clambered up to a roof that was next to ours. I heard +Glumdalclitch give a shriek at the moment he was carrying me out. The poor girl +was almost distracted: that quarter of the palace was all in an uproar; the +servants ran for ladders; the monkey was seen by hundreds in the court, sitting +upon the ridge of a building, holding me like a baby in one of his forepaws, +and feeding me with the other, by cramming into my mouth some victuals he had +squeezed out of the bag on one side of his chaps, and patting me when I would +not eat; whereat many of the rabble below could not forbear laughing; neither +do I think they justly ought to be blamed, for, without question, the sight was +ridiculous enough to every body but myself. Some of the people threw up stones, +hoping to drive the monkey down; but this was strictly forbidden, or else, very +probably, my brains had been dashed out. + +The ladders were now applied, and mounted by several men; which the monkey +observing, and finding himself almost encompassed, not being able to make speed +enough with his three legs, let me drop on a ridge tile, and made his escape. +Here I sat for some time, five hundred yards from the ground, expecting every +moment to be blown down by the wind, or to fall by my own giddiness, and come +tumbling over and over from the ridge to the eaves; but an honest lad, one of +my nurse's footmen, climbed up, and putting me into his breeches pocket, +brought me down safe. + +I was almost choked with the filthy stuff the monkey had crammed down my +throat: but my dear little nurse picked it out of my mouth with a small needle, +and then I fell a-vomiting, which gave me great relief. Yet I was so weak and +bruised in the sides with the squeezes given me by this odious animal, that I +was forced to keep my bed a fortnight. The king, queen, and all the court, sent +every day to inquire after my health; and her majesty made me several visits +during my sickness. The monkey was killed, and an order made, that no such +animal should be kept about the palace. + +When I attended the king after my recovery, to return him thanks for his +favours, he was pleased to rally me a good deal upon this adventure. He asked +me, "what my thoughts and speculations were, while I lay in the monkey's paw; +how I liked the victuals he gave me; his manner of feeding; and whether the +fresh air on the roof had sharpened my stomach." He desired to know, "what I +would have done upon such an occasion in my own country." I told his majesty, +"that in Europe we had no monkeys, except such as were brought for curiosity +from other places, and so small, that I could deal with a dozen of them +together, if they presumed to attack me. And as for that monstrous animal with +whom I was so lately engaged (it was indeed as large as an elephant), if my +fears had suffered me to think so far as to make use of my hanger," (looking +fiercely, and clapping my hand on the hilt, as I spoke) "when he poked his paw +into my chamber, perhaps I should have given him such a wound, as would have +made him glad to withdraw it with more haste than he put it in." This I +delivered in a firm tone, like a person who was jealous lest his courage should +be called in question. However, my speech produced nothing else beside a laud +laughter, which all the respect due to his majesty from those about him could +not make them contain. This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a +man to endeavour to do himself honour among those who are out of all degree of +equality or comparison with him. And yet I have seen the moral of my own +behaviour very frequent in England since my return; where a little contemptible +varlet, without the least title to birth, person, wit, or common sense, shall +presume to look with importance, and put himself upon a foot with the greatest +persons of the kingdom. + +I was every day furnishing the court with some ridiculous story: and +Glumdalclitch, although she loved me to excess, yet was arch enough to inform +the queen, whenever I committed any folly that she thought would be diverting +to her majesty. The girl, who had been out of order, was carried by her +governess to take the air about an hour's distance, or thirty miles from town. +They alighted out of the coach near a small foot-path in a field, and +Glumdalclitch setting down my travelling box, I went out of it to walk. There +was a cow-dung in the path, and I must need try my activity by attempting to +leap over it. I took a run, but unfortunately jumped short, and found myself +just in the middle up to my knees. I waded through with some difficulty, and +one of the footmen wiped me as clean as he could with his handkerchief, for I +was filthily bemired; and my nurse confined me to my box, till we returned +home; where the queen was soon informed of what had passed, and the footmen +spread it about the court: so that all the mirth for some days was at my +expense. + +CHAPTER VI. + +[Several contrivances of the author to please the king and queen. He shows his +skill in music. The king inquires into the state of England, which the author +relates to him. The king's observations thereon.] + +I used to attend the king's levee once or twice a week, and had often seen him +under the barber's hand, which indeed was at first very terrible to behold; for +the razor was almost twice as long as an ordinary scythe. His majesty, +according to the custom of the country, was only shaved twice a-week. I once +prevailed on the barber to give me some of the suds or lather, out of which I +picked forty or fifty of the strongest stumps of hair. I then took a piece of +fine wood, and cut it like the back of a comb, making several holes in it at +equal distances with as small a needle as I could get from Glumdalclitch. I +fixed in the stumps so artificially, scraping and sloping them with my knife +toward the points, that I made a very tolerable comb; which was a seasonable +supply, my own being so much broken in the teeth, that it was almost useless: +neither did I know any artist in that country so nice and exact, as would +undertake to make me another. + +And this puts me in mind of an amusement, wherein I spent many of my leisure +hours. I desired the queen's woman to save for me the combings of her majesty's +hair, whereof in time I got a good quantity; and consulting with my friend the +cabinet-maker, who had received general orders to do little jobs for me, I +directed him to make two chair-frames, no larger than those I had in my box, +and to bore little holes with a fine awl, round those parts where I designed +the backs and seats; through these holes I wove the strongest hairs I could +pick out, just after the manner of cane chairs in England. When they were +finished, I made a present of them to her majesty; who kept them in her +cabinet, and used to show them for curiosities, as indeed they were the wonder +of every one that beheld them. The queen would have me sit upon one of these +chairs, but I absolutely refused to obey her, protesting I would rather die +than place a dishonourable part of my body on those precious hairs, that once +adorned her majesty's head. Of these hairs (as I had always a mechanical +genius) I likewise made a neat little purse, about five feet long, with her +majesty's name deciphered in gold letters, which I gave to Glumdalclitch, by +the queen's consent. To say the truth, it was more for show than use, being not +of strength to bear the weight of the larger coins, and therefore she kept +nothing in it but some little toys that girls are fond of. + +The king, who delighted in music, had frequent concerts at court, to which I +was sometimes carried, and set in my box on a table to hear them: but the noise +was so great that I could hardly distinguish the tunes. I am confident that all +the drums and trumpets of a royal army, beating and sounding together just at +your ears, could not equal it. My practice was to have my box removed from the +place where the performers sat, as far as I could, then to shut the doors and +windows of it, and draw the window curtains; after which I found their music +not disagreeable. + +I had learned in my youth to play a little upon the spinet. Glumdalclitch kept +one in her chamber, and a master attended twice a-week to teach her: I called +it a spinet, because it somewhat resembled that instrument, and was played upon +in the same manner. A fancy came into my head, that I would entertain the king +and queen with an English tune upon this instrument. But this appeared +extremely difficult: for the spinet was near sixty feet long, each key being +almost a foot wide, so that with my arms extended I could not reach to above +five keys, and to press them down required a good smart stroke with my fist, +which would be too great a labour, and to no purpose. The method I contrived +was this: I prepared two round sticks, about the bigness of common cudgels; +they were thicker at one end than the other, and I covered the thicker ends +with pieces of a mouse's skin, that by rapping on them I might neither damage +the tops of the keys nor interrupt the sound. Before the spinet a bench was +placed, about four feet below the keys, and I was put upon the bench. I ran +sideling upon it, that way and this, as fast as I could, banging the proper +keys with my two sticks, and made a shift to play a jig, to the great +satisfaction of both their majesties; but it was the most violent exercise I +ever underwent; and yet I could not strike above sixteen keys, nor consequently +play the bass and treble together, as other artists do; which was a great +disadvantage to my performance. + +The king, who, as I before observed, was a prince of excellent understanding, +would frequently order that I should be brought in my box, and set upon the +table in his closet: he would then command me to bring one of my chairs out of +the box, and sit down within three yards distance upon the top of the cabinet, +which brought me almost to a level with his face. In this manner I had several +conversations with him. I one day took the freedom to tell his majesty, "that +the contempt he discovered towards Europe, and the rest of the world, did not +seem answerable to those excellent qualities of mind that he was master of; +that reason did not extend itself with the bulk of the body; on the contrary, +we observed in our country, that the tallest persons were usually the least +provided with it; that among other animals, bees and ants had the reputation of +more industry, art, and sagacity, than many of the larger kinds; and that, as +inconsiderable as he took me to be, I hoped I might live to do his majesty some +signal service." The king heard me with attention, and began to conceive a much +better opinion of me than he had ever before. He desired "I would give him as +exact an account of the government of England as I possibly could; because, as +fond as princes commonly are of their own customs (for so he conjectured of +other monarchs, by my former discourses), he should be glad to hear of any +thing that might deserve imitation." + +Imagine with thyself, courteous reader, how often I then wished for the tongue +of Demosthenes or Cicero, that might have enabled me to celebrate the praise of +my own dear native country in a style equal to its merits and felicity. + +I began my discourse by informing his majesty, that our dominions consisted of +two islands, which composed three mighty kingdoms, under one sovereign, beside +our plantations in America. I dwelt long upon the fertility of our soil, and +the temperature of our climate. I then spoke at large upon the constitution of +an English parliament; partly made up of an illustrious body called the House +of Peers; persons of the noblest blood, and of the most ancient and ample +patrimonies. I described that extraordinary care always taken of their +education in arts and arms, to qualify them for being counsellors both to the +king and kingdom; to have a share in the legislature; to be members of the +highest court of judicature, whence there can be no appeal; and to be champions +always ready for the defence of their prince and country, by their valour, +conduct, and fidelity. That these were the ornament and bulwark of the kingdom, +worthy followers of their most renowned ancestors, whose honour had been the +reward of their virtue, from which their posterity were never once known to +degenerate. To these were joined several holy persons, as part of that +assembly, under the title of bishops, whose peculiar business is to take care +of religion, and of those who instruct the people therein. These were searched +and sought out through the whole nation, by the prince and his wisest +counsellors, among such of the priesthood as were most deservedly distinguished +by the sanctity of their lives, and the depth of their erudition; who were +indeed the spiritual fathers of the clergy and the people. + +That the other part of the parliament consisted of an assembly called the House +of Commons, who were all principal gentlemen, freely picked and culled out by +the people themselves, for their great abilities and love of their country, to +represent the wisdom of the whole nation. And that these two bodies made up the +most august assembly in Europe; to whom, in conjunction with the prince, the +whole legislature is committed. + +I then descended to the courts of justice; over which the judges, those +venerable sages and interpreters of the law, presided, for determining the +disputed rights and properties of men, as well as for the punishment of vice +and protection of innocence. I mentioned the prudent management of our +treasury; the valour and achievements of our forces, by sea and land. I +computed the number of our people, by reckoning how many millions there might +be of each religious sect, or political party among us. I did not omit even our +sports and pastimes, or any other particular which I thought might redound to +the honour of my country. And I finished all with a brief historical account of +affairs and events in England for about a hundred years past. + +This conversation was not ended under five audiences, each of several hours; +and the king heard the whole with great attention, frequently taking notes of +what I spoke, as well as memorandums of what questions he intended to ask me. + +When I had put an end to these long discources, his majesty, in a sixth +audience, consulting his notes, proposed many doubts, queries, and objections, +upon every article. He asked, "What methods were used to cultivate the minds +and bodies of our young nobility, and in what kind of business they commonly +spent the first and teachable parts of their lives? What course was taken to +supply that assembly, when any noble family became extinct? What qualifications +were necessary in those who are to be created new lords: whether the humour of +the prince, a sum of money to a court lady, or a design of strengthening a +party opposite to the public interest, ever happened to be the motive in those +advancements? What share of knowledge these lords had in the laws of their +country, and how they came by it, so as to enable them to decide the properties +of their fellow-subjects in the last resort? Whether they were always so free +from avarice, partialities, or want, that a bribe, or some other sinister view, +could have no place among them? Whether those holy lords I spoke of were always +promoted to that rank upon account of their knowledge in religious matters, and +the sanctity of their lives; had never been compliers with the times, while +they were common priests; or slavish prostitute chaplains to some nobleman, +whose opinions they continued servilely to follow, after they were admitted +into that assembly?" + +He then desired to know, "What arts were practised in electing those whom I +called commoners: whether a stranger, with a strong purse, might not influence +the vulgar voters to choose him before their own landlord, or the most +considerable gentleman in the neighbourhood? How it came to pass, that people +were so violently bent upon getting into this assembly, which I allowed to be a +great trouble and expense, often to the ruin of their families, without any +salary or pension? because this appeared such an exalted strain of virtue and +public spirit, that his majesty seemed to doubt it might possibly not be always +sincere." And he desired to know, "Whether such zealous gentlemen could have +any views of refunding themselves for the charges and trouble they were at by +sacrificing the public good to the designs of a weak and vicious prince, in +conjunction with a corrupted ministry?" He multiplied his questions, and sifted +me thoroughly upon every part of this head, proposing numberless inquiries and +objections, which I think it not prudent or convenient to repeat. + +Upon what I said in relation to our courts of justice, his majesty desired to +be satisfied in several points: and this I was the better able to do, having +been formerly almost ruined by a long suit in chancery, which was decreed for +me with costs. He asked, "What time was usually spent in determining between +right and wrong, and what degree of expense? Whether advocates and orators had +liberty to plead in causes manifestly known to be unjust, vexatious, or +oppressive? Whether party, in religion or politics, were observed to be of any +weight in the scale of justice? Whether those pleading orators were persons +educated in the general knowledge of equity, or only in provincial, national, +and other local customs? Whether they or their judges had any part in penning +those laws, which they assumed the liberty of interpreting, and glossing upon +at their pleasure? Whether they had ever, at different times, pleaded for and +against the same cause, and cited precedents to prove contrary opinions? +Whether they were a rich or a poor corporation? Whether they received any +pecuniary reward for pleading, or delivering their opinions? And particularly, +whether they were ever admitted as members in the lower senate?" + +He fell next upon the management of our treasury; and said, "he thought my +memory had failed me, because I computed our taxes at about five or six +millions a-year, and when I came to mention the issues, he found they sometimes +amounted to more than double; for the notes he had taken were very particular +in this point, because he hoped, as he told me, that the knowledge of our +conduct might be useful to him, and he could not be deceived in his +calculations. But, if what I told him were true, he was still at a loss how a +kingdom could run out of its estate, like a private person." He asked me, "who +were our creditors; and where we found money to pay them?" He wondered to hear +me talk of such chargeable and expensive wars; "that certainly we must be a +quarrelsome people, or live among very bad neighbours, and that our generals +must needs be richer than our kings." He asked, what business we had out of our +own islands, unless upon the score of trade, or treaty, or to defend the coasts +with our fleet?" Above all, he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary +standing army, in the midst of peace, and among a free people. He said, "if we +were governed by our own consent, in the persons of our representatives, he +could not imagine of whom we were afraid, or against whom we were to fight; and +would hear my opinion, whether a private man's house might not be better +defended by himself, his children, and family, than by half-a-dozen rascals, +picked up at a venture in the streets for small wages, who might get a hundred +times more by cutting their throats?" + +He laughed at my "odd kind of arithmetic," as he was pleased to call it, "in +reckoning the numbers of our people, by a computation drawn from the several +sects among us, in religion and politics." He said, "he knew no reason why +those, who entertain opinions prejudicial to the public, should be obliged to +change, or should not be obliged to conceal them. And as it was tyranny in any +government to require the first, so it was weakness not to enforce the second: +for a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to vend them +about for cordials." + +He observed, "that among the diversions of our nobility and gentry, I had +mentioned gaming: he desired to know at what age this entertainment was usually +taken up, and when it was laid down; how much of their time it employed; +whether it ever went so high as to affect their fortunes; whether mean, vicious +people, by their dexterity in that art, might not arrive at great riches, and +sometimes keep our very nobles in dependence, as well as habituate them to vile +companions, wholly take them from the improvement of their minds, and force +them, by the losses they received, to learn and practise that infamous +dexterity upon others?" + +He was perfectly astonished with the historical account gave him of our affairs +during the last century; protesting "it was only a heap of conspiracies, +rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst +effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, +madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce." + +His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of +all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; +then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in +these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: "My +little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your +country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the +proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, +interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in +perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an +institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half +erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not +appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the +procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on +account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; +soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, +for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for +yourself," continued the king, "who have spent the greatest part of your life +in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many +vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and +the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but +conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little +odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the +earth." + +CHAPTER VII. + +[The author's love of his country. He makes a proposal of much advantage to the +king, which is rejected. The king's great ignorance in politics. The learning +of that country very imperfect and confined. The laws, and military affairs, +and parties in the state.] + +Nothing but an extreme love of truth could have hindered me from concealing +this part of my story. It was in vain to discover my resentments, which were +always turned into ridicule; and I was forced to rest with patience, while my +noble and beloved country was so injuriously treated. I am as heartily sorry as +any of my readers can possibly be, that such an occasion was given: but this +prince happened to be so curious and inquisitive upon every particular, that it +could not consist either with gratitude or good manners, to refuse giving him +what satisfaction I was able. Yet thus much I may be allowed to say in my own +vindication, that I artfully eluded many of his questions, and gave to every +point a more favourable turn, by many degrees, than the strictness of truth +would allow. For I have always borne that laudable partiality to my own +country, which Dionysius Halicarnassensis, with so much justice, recommends to +an historian: I would hide the frailties and deformities of my political +mother, and place her virtues and beauties in the most advantageous light. This +was my sincere endeavour in those many discourses I had with that monarch, +although it unfortunately failed of success. + +But great allowances should be given to a king, who lives wholly secluded from +the rest of the world, and must therefore be altogether unacquainted with the +manners and customs that most prevail in other nations: the want of which +knowledge will ever produce many prejudices, and a certain narrowness of +thinking, from which we, and the politer countries of Europe, are wholly +exempted. And it would be hard indeed, if so remote a prince's notions of +virtue and vice were to be offered as a standard for all mankind. + +To confirm what I have now said, and further to show the miserable effects of a +confined education, I shall here insert a passage, which will hardly obtain +belief. In hopes to ingratiate myself further into his majesty's favour, I told +him of "an invention, discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to +make a certain powder, into a heap of which, the smallest spark of fire +falling, would kindle the whole in a moment, although it were as big as a +mountain, and make it all fly up in the air together, with a noise and +agitation greater than thunder. That a proper quantity of this powder rammed +into a hollow tube of brass or iron, according to its bigness, would drive a +ball of iron or lead, with such violence and speed, as nothing was able to +sustain its force. That the largest balls thus discharged, would not only +destroy whole ranks of an army at once, but batter the strongest walls to the +ground, sink down ships, with a thousand men in each, to the bottom of the sea, +and when linked together by a chain, would cut through masts and rigging, +divide hundreds of bodies in the middle, and lay all waste before them. That we +often put this powder into large hollow balls of iron, and discharged them by +an engine into some city we were besieging, which would rip up the pavements, +tear the houses to pieces, burst and throw splinters on every side, dashing out +the brains of all who came near. That I knew the ingredients very well, which +were cheap and common; I understood the manner of compounding them, and could +direct his workmen how to make those tubes, of a size proportionable to all +other things in his majesty's kingdom, and the largest need not be above a +hundred feet long; twenty or thirty of which tubes, charged with the proper +quantity of powder and balls, would batter down the walls of the strongest town +in his dominions in a few hours, or destroy the whole metropolis, if ever it +should pretend to dispute his absolute commands." This I humbly offered to his +majesty, as a small tribute of acknowledgment, in turn for so many marks that I +had received, of his royal favour and protection. + +The king was struck with horror at the description I had given of those +terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. "He was amazed, how so impotent +and grovelling an insect as I" (these were his expressions) "could entertain +such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at +all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common +effects of those destructive machines; whereof," he said, "some evil genius, +enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver. As for himself, he +protested, that although few things delighted him so much as new discoveries in +art or in nature, yet he would rather lose half his kingdom, than be privy to +such a secret; which he commanded me, as I valued any life, never to mention +any more." + +A strange effect of narrow principles and views! that a prince possessed of +every quality which procures veneration, love, and esteem; of strong parts, +great wisdom, and profound learning, endowed with admirable talents, and almost +adored by his subjects, should, from a nice, unnecessary scruple, whereof in +Europe we can have no conception, let slip an opportunity put into his hands +that would have made him absolute master of the lives, the liberties, and the +fortunes of his people! Neither do I say this, with the least intention to +detract from the many virtues of that excellent king, whose character, I am +sensible, will, on this account, be very much lessened in the opinion of an +English reader: but I take this defect among them to have risen from their +ignorance, by not having hitherto reduced politics into a science, as the more +acute wits of Europe have done. For, I remember very well, in a discourse one +day with the king, when I happened to say, "there were several thousand books +among us written upon the art of government," it gave him (directly contrary to +my intention) a very mean opinion of our understandings. He professed both to +abominate and despise all mystery, refinement, and intrigue, either in a prince +or a minister. He could not tell what I meant by secrets of state, where an +enemy, or some rival nation, were not in the case. He confined the knowledge of +governing within very narrow bounds, to common sense and reason, to justice and +lenity, to the speedy determination of civil and criminal causes; with some +other obvious topics, which are not worth considering. And he gave it for his +opinion, "that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to +grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of +mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of +politicians put together." + +The learning of this people is very defective, consisting only in morality, +history, poetry, and mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But +the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in life, to the +improvement of agriculture, and all mechanical arts; so that among us, it would +be little esteemed. And as to ideas, entities, abstractions, and +transcendentals, I could never drive the least conception into their heads. + +No law in that country must exceed in words the number of letters in their +alphabet, which consists only of two and twenty. But indeed few of them extend +even to that length. They are expressed in the most plain and simple terms, +wherein those people are not mercurial enough to discover above one +interpretation: and to write a comment upon any law, is a capital crime. As to +the decision of civil causes, or proceedings against criminals, their +precedents are so few, that they have little reason to boast of any +extraordinary skill in either. + +They have had the art of printing, as well as the Chinese, time out of mind: +but their libraries are not very large; for that of the king, which is reckoned +the largest, does not amount to above a thousand volumes, placed in a gallery +of twelve hundred feet long, whence I had liberty to borrow what books I +pleased. The queen's joiner had contrived in one of Glumdalclitch's rooms, a +kind of wooden machine five-and-twenty feet high, formed like a standing +ladder; the steps were each fifty feet long. It was indeed a moveable pair of +stairs, the lowest end placed at ten feet distance from the wall of the +chamber. The book I had a mind to read, was put up leaning against the wall: I +first mounted to the upper step of the ladder, and turning my face towards the +book, began at the top of the page, and so walking to the right and left about +eight or ten paces, according to the length of the lines, till I had gotten a +little below the level of mine eyes, and then descending gradually till I came +to the bottom: after which I mounted again, and began the other page in the +same manner, and so turned over the leaf, which I could easily do with both my +hands, for it was as thick and stiff as a pasteboard, and in the largest folios +not above eighteen or twenty feet long. + +Their style is clear, masculine, and smooth, but not florid; for they avoid +nothing more than multiplying unnecessary words, or using various expressions. +I have perused many of their books, especially those in history and morality. +Among the rest, I was much diverted with a little old treatise, which always +lay in Glumdalclitch's bed chamber, and belonged to her governess, a grave +elderly gentlewoman, who dealt in writings of morality and devotion. The book +treats of the weakness of human kind, and is in little esteem, except among the +women and the vulgar. However, I was curious to see what an author of that +country could say upon such a subject. This writer went through all the usual +topics of European moralists, showing "how diminutive, contemptible, and +helpless an animal was man in his own nature; how unable to defend himself from +inclemencies of the air, or the fury of wild beasts: how much he was excelled +by one creature in strength, by another in speed, by a third in foresight, by a +fourth in industry." He added, "that nature was degenerated in these latter +declining ages of the world, and could now produce only small abortive births, +in comparison of those in ancient times." He said "it was very reasonable to +think, not only that the species of men were originally much larger, but also +that there must have been giants in former ages; which, as it is asserted by +history and tradition, so it has been confirmed by huge bones and skulls, +casually dug up in several parts of the kingdom, far exceeding the common +dwindled race of men in our days." He argued, "that the very laws of nature +absolutely required we should have been made, in the beginning of a size more +large and robust; not so liable to destruction from every little accident, of a +tile falling from a house, or a stone cast from the hand of a boy, or being +drowned in a little brook." From this way of reasoning, the author drew several +moral applications, useful in the conduct of life, but needless here to repeat. +For my own part, I could not avoid reflecting how universally this talent was +spread, of drawing lectures in morality, or indeed rather matter of discontent +and repining, from the quarrels we raise with nature. And I believe, upon a +strict inquiry, those quarrels might be shown as ill-grounded among us as they +are among that people. + +As to their military affairs, they boast that the king's army consists of a +hundred and seventy-six thousand foot, and thirty-two thousand horse: if that +may be called an army, which is made up of tradesmen in the several cities, and +farmers in the country, whose commanders are only the nobility and gentry, +without pay or reward. They are indeed perfect enough in their exercises, and +under very good discipline, wherein I saw no great merit; for how should it be +otherwise, where every farmer is under the command of his own landlord, and +every citizen under that of the principal men in his own city, chosen after the +manner of Venice, by ballot? + +I have often seen the militia of Lorbrulgrud drawn out to exercise, in a great +field near the city of twenty miles square. They were in all not above +twenty-five thousand foot, and six thousand horse; but it was impossible for me +to compute their number, considering the space of ground they took up. A +cavalier, mounted on a large steed, might be about ninety feet high. I have +seen this whole body of horse, upon a word of command, draw their swords at +once, and brandish them in the air. Imagination can figure nothing so grand, so +surprising, and so astonishing! it looked as if ten thousand flashes of +lightning were darting at the same time from every quarter of the sky. + +I was curious to know how this prince, to whose dominions there is no access +from any other country, came to think of armies, or to teach his people the +practice of military discipline. But I was soon informed, both by conversation +and reading their histories; for, in the course of many ages, they have been +troubled with the same disease to which the whole race of mankind is subject; +the nobility often contending for power, the people for liberty, and the king +for absolute dominion. All which, however happily tempered by the laws of that +kingdom, have been sometimes violated by each of the three parties, and have +more than once occasioned civil wars; the last whereof was happily put an end +to by this prince's grand-father, in a general composition; and the militia, +then settled with common consent, has been ever since kept in the strictest +duty. + +CHAPTER VIII. + +[The king and queen make a progress to the frontiers. The author attends them. +The manner in which he leaves the country very particularly related. He returns +to England.] + +I had always a strong impulse that I should some time recover my liberty, +though it was impossible to conjecture by what means, or to form any project +with the least hope of succeeding. The ship in which I sailed, was the first +ever known to be driven within sight of that coast, and the king had given +strict orders, that if at any time another appeared, it should be taken ashore, +and with all its crew and passengers brought in a tumbril to Lorbrulgrud. He +was strongly bent to get me a woman of my own size, by whom I might propagate +the breed: but I think I should rather have died than undergone the disgrace of +leaving a posterity to be kept in cages, like tame canary-birds, and perhaps, +in time, sold about the kingdom, to persons of quality, for curiosities. I was +indeed treated with much kindness: I was the favourite of a great king and +queen, and the delight of the whole court; but it was upon such a foot as ill +became the dignity of humankind. I could never forget those domestic pledges I +had left behind me. I wanted to be among people, with whom I could converse +upon even terms, and walk about the streets and fields without being afraid of +being trod to death like a frog or a young puppy. But my deliverance came +sooner than I expected, and in a manner not very common; the whole story and +circumstances of which I shall faithfully relate. + +I had now been two years in this country; and about the beginning of the third, +Glumdalclitch and I attended the king and queen, in a progress to the south +coast of the kingdom. I was carried, as usual, in my travelling-box, which as I +have already described, was a very convenient closet, of twelve feet wide. And +I had ordered a hammock to be fixed, by silken ropes from the four corners at +the top, to break the jolts, when a servant carried me before him on horseback, +as I sometimes desired; and would often sleep in my hammock, while we were upon +the road. On the roof of my closet, not directly over the middle of the +hammock, I ordered the joiner to cut out a hole of a foot square, to give me +air in hot weather, as I slept; which hole I shut at pleasure with a board that +drew backward and forward through a groove. + +When we came to our journey's end, the king thought proper to pass a few days +at a palace he has near Flanflasnic, a city within eighteen English miles of +the seaside. Glumdalclitch and I were much fatigued: I had gotten a small cold, +but the poor girl was so ill as to be confined to her chamber. I longed to see +the ocean, which must be the only scene of my escape, if ever it should happen. +I pretended to be worse than I really was, and desired leave to take the fresh +air of the sea, with a page, whom I was very fond of, and who had sometimes +been trusted with me. I shall never forget with what unwillingness +Glumdalclitch consented, nor the strict charge she gave the page to be careful +of me, bursting at the same time into a flood of tears, as if she had some +forboding of what was to happen. The boy took me out in my box, about half an +hours walk from the palace, towards the rocks on the sea-shore. I ordered him +to set me down, and lifting up one of my sashes, cast many a wistful melancholy +look towards the sea. I found myself not very well, and told the page that I +had a mind to take a nap in my hammock, which I hoped would do me good. I got +in, and the boy shut the window close down, to keep out the cold. I soon fell +asleep, and all I can conjecture is, while I slept, the page, thinking no +danger could happen, went among the rocks to look for birds' eggs, having +before observed him from my window searching about, and picking up one or two +in the clefts. Be that as it will, I found myself suddenly awaked with a +violent pull upon the ring, which was fastened at the top of my box for the +conveniency of carriage. I felt my box raised very high in the air, and then +borne forward with prodigious speed. The first jolt had like to have shaken me +out of my hammock, but afterward the motion was easy enough. I called out +several times, as loud as I could raise my voice, but all to no purpose. I +looked towards my windows, and could see nothing but the clouds and sky. I +heard a noise just over my head, like the clapping of wings, and then began to +perceive the woful condition I was in; that some eagle had got the ring of my +box in his beak, with an intent to let it fall on a rock, like a tortoise in a +shell, and then pick out my body, and devour it: for the sagacity and smell of +this bird enables him to discover his quarry at a great distance, though better +concealed than I could be within a two-inch board. + +In a little time, I observed the noise and flutter of wings to increase very +fast, and my box was tossed up and down, like a sign in a windy day. I heard +several bangs or buffets, as I thought given to the eagle (for such I am +certain it must have been that held the ring of my box in his beak), and then, +all on a sudden, felt myself falling perpendicularly down, for above a minute, +but with such incredible swiftness, that I almost lost my breath. My fall was +stopped by a terrible squash, that sounded louder to my ears than the cataract +of Niagara; after which, I was quite in the dark for another minute, and then +my box began to rise so high, that I could see light from the tops of the +windows. I now perceived I was fallen into the sea. My box, by the weight of my +body, the goods that were in, and the broad plates of iron fixed for strength +at the four corners of the top and bottom, floated about five feet deep in +water. I did then, and do now suppose, that the eagle which flew away with my +box was pursued by two or three others, and forced to let me drop, while he +defended himself against the rest, who hoped to share in the prey. The plates +of iron fastened at the bottom of the box (for those were the strongest) +preserved the balance while it fell, and hindered it from being broken on the +surface of the water. Every joint of it was well grooved; and the door did not +move on hinges, but up and down like a sash, which kept my closet so tight that +very little water came in. I got with much difficulty out of my hammock, having +first ventured to draw back the slip-board on the roof already mentioned, +contrived on purpose to let in air, for want of which I found myself almost +stifled. + +How often did I then wish myself with my dear Glumdalclitch, from whom one +single hour had so far divided me! And I may say with truth, that in the midst +of my own misfortunes I could not forbear lamenting my poor nurse, the grief +she would suffer for my loss, the displeasure of the queen, and the ruin of her +fortune. Perhaps many travellers have not been under greater difficulties and +distress than I was at this juncture, expecting every moment to see my box +dashed to pieces, or at least overset by the first violent blast, or rising +wave. A breach in one single pane of glass would have been immediate death: nor +could any thing have preserved the windows, but the strong lattice wires placed +on the outside, against accidents in travelling. I saw the water ooze in at +several crannies, although the leaks were not considerable, and I endeavoured +to stop them as well as I could. I was not able to lift up the roof of my +closet, which otherwise I certainly should have done, and sat on the top of it; +where I might at least preserve myself some hours longer, than by being shut up +(as I may call it) in the hold. Or if I escaped these dangers for a day or two, +what could I expect but a miserable death of cold and hunger? I was four hours +under these circumstances, expecting, and indeed wishing, every moment to be my +last. + +I have already told the reader that there were two strong staples fixed upon +that side of my box which had no window, and into which the servant, who used +to carry me on horseback, would put a leathern belt, and buckle it about his +waist. Being in this disconsolate state, I heard, or at least thought I heard, +some kind of grating noise on that side of my box where the staples were fixed; +and soon after I began to fancy that the box was pulled or towed along the sea; +for I now and then felt a sort of tugging, which made the waves rise near the +tops of my windows, leaving me almost in the dark. This gave me some faint +hopes of relief, although I was not able to imagine how it could be brought +about. I ventured to unscrew one of my chairs, which were always fastened to +the floor; and having made a hard shift to screw it down again, directly under +the slipping-board that I had lately opened, I mounted on the chair, and +putting my mouth as near as I could to the hole, I called for help in a loud +voice, and in all the languages I understood. I then fastened my handkerchief +to a stick I usually carried, and thrusting it up the hole, waved it several +times in the air, that if any boat or ship were near, the seamen might +conjecture some unhappy mortal to be shut up in the box. + +I found no effect from all I could do, but plainly perceived my closet to be +moved along; and in the space of an hour, or better, that side of the box where +the staples were, and had no windows, struck against something that was hard. I +apprehended it to be a rock, and found myself tossed more than ever. I plainly +heard a noise upon the cover of my closet, like that of a cable, and the +grating of it as it passed through the ring. I then found myself hoisted up, by +degrees, at least three feet higher than I was before. Whereupon I again thrust +up my stick and handkerchief, calling for help till I was almost hoarse. In +return to which, I heard a great shout repeated three times, giving me such +transports of joy as are not to be conceived but by those who feel them. I now +heard a trampling over my head, and somebody calling through the hole with a +loud voice, in the English tongue, "If there be any body below, let them +speak." I answered, "I was an Englishman, drawn by ill fortune into the +greatest calamity that ever any creature underwent, and begged, by all that was +moving, to be delivered out of the dungeon I was in." The voice replied, "I was +safe, for my box was fastened to their ship; and the carpenter should +immediately come and saw a hole in the cover, large enough to pull me out." I +answered, "that was needless, and would take up too much time; for there was no +more to be done, but let one of the crew put his finger into the ring, and take +the box out of the sea into the ship, and so into the captain's cabin." Some of +them, upon hearing me talk so wildly, thought I was mad: others laughed; for +indeed it never came into my head, that I was now got among people of my own +stature and strength. The carpenter came, and in a few minutes sawed a passage +about four feet square, then let down a small ladder, upon which I mounted, and +thence was taken into the ship in a very weak condition. + +The sailors were all in amazement, and asked me a thousand questions, which I +had no inclination to answer. I was equally confounded at the sight of so many +pigmies, for such I took them to be, after having so long accustomed mine eyes +to the monstrous objects I had left. But the captain, Mr. Thomas Wilcocks, an +honest worthy Shropshire man, observing I was ready to faint, took me into his +cabin, gave me a cordial to comfort me, and made me turn in upon his own bed, +advising me to take a little rest, of which I had great need. Before I went to +sleep, I gave him to understand that I had some valuable furniture in my box, +too good to be lost: a fine hammock, a handsome field-bed, two chairs, a table, +and a cabinet; that my closet was hung on all sides, or rather quilted, with +silk and cotton; that if he would let one of the crew bring my closet into his +cabin, I would open it there before him, and show him my goods. The captain, +hearing me utter these absurdities, concluded I was raving; however (I suppose +to pacify me) he promised to give order as I desired, and going upon deck, sent +some of his men down into my closet, whence (as I afterwards found) they drew +up all my goods, and stripped off the quilting; but the chairs, cabinet, and +bedstead, being screwed to the floor, were much damaged by the ignorance of the +seamen, who tore them up by force. Then they knocked off some of the boards for +the use of the ship, and when they had got all they had a mind for, let the +hull drop into the sea, which by reason of many breaches made in the bottom and +sides, sunk to rights. And, indeed, I was glad not to have been a spectator of +the havoc they made, because I am confident it would have sensibly touched me, +by bringing former passages into my mind, which I would rather have forgot. + +I slept some hours, but perpetually disturbed with dreams of the place I had +left, and the dangers I had escaped. However, upon waking, I found myself much +recovered. It was now about eight o'clock at night, and the captain ordered +supper immediately, thinking I had already fasted too long. He entertained me +with great kindness, observing me not to look wildly, or talk inconsistently: +and, when we were left alone, desired I would give him a relation of my +travels, and by what accident I came to be set adrift, in that monstrous wooden +chest. He said "that about twelve o'clock at noon, as he was looking through +his glass, he spied it at a distance, and thought it was a sail, which he had a +mind to make, being not much out of his course, in hopes of buying some +biscuit, his own beginning to fall short. That upon coming nearer, and finding +his error, he sent out his long-boat to discover what it was; that his men came +back in a fright, swearing they had seen a swimming house. That he laughed at +their folly, and went himself in the boat, ordering his men to take a strong +cable along with them. That the weather being calm, he rowed round me several +times, observed my windows and wire lattices that defended them. That he +discovered two staples upon one side, which was all of boards, without any +passage for light. He then commanded his men to row up to that side, and +fastening a cable to one of the staples, ordered them to tow my chest, as they +called it, toward the ship. When it was there, he gave directions to fasten +another cable to the ring fixed in the cover, and to raise up my chest with +pulleys, which all the sailors were not able to do above two or three feet." He +said, "they saw my stick and handkerchief thrust out of the hole, and concluded +that some unhappy man must be shut up in the cavity." I asked, "whether he or +the crew had seen any prodigious birds in the air, about the time he first +discovered me." To which he answered, that discoursing this matter with the +sailors while I was asleep, one of them said, he had observed three eagles +flying towards the north, but remarked nothing of their being larger than the +usual size:" which I suppose must be imputed to the great height they were at; +and he could not guess the reason of my question. I then asked the captain, +"how far he reckoned we might be from land?" He said, "by the best computation +he could make, we were at least a hundred leagues." I assured him, "that he +must be mistaken by almost half, for I had not left the country whence I came +above two hours before I dropped into the sea." Whereupon he began again to +think that my brain was disturbed, of which he gave me a hint, and advised me +to go to bed in a cabin he had provided. I assured him, "I was well refreshed +with his good entertainment and company, and as much in my senses as ever I was +in my life." He then grew serious, and desired to ask me freely, "whether I +were not troubled in my mind by the consciousness of some enormous crime, for +which I was punished, at the command of some prince, by exposing me in that +chest; as great criminals, in other countries, have been forced to sea in a +leaky vessel, without provisions: for although he should be sorry to have taken +so ill a man into his ship, yet he would engage his word to set me safe ashore, +in the first port where we arrived." He added, "that his suspicions were much +increased by some very absurd speeches I had delivered at first to his sailors, +and afterwards to himself, in relation to my closet or chest, as well as by my +odd looks and behaviour while I was at supper." + +I begged his patience to hear me tell my story, which I faithfully did, from +the last time I left England, to the moment he first discovered me. And, as +truth always forces its way into rational minds, so this honest worthy +gentleman, who had some tincture of learning, and very good sense, was +immediately convinced of my candour and veracity. But further to confirm all I +had said, I entreated him to give order that my cabinet should be brought, of +which I had the key in my pocket; for he had already informed me how the seamen +disposed of my closet. I opened it in his own presence, and showed him the +small collection of rarities I made in the country from which I had been so +strangely delivered. There was the comb I had contrived out of the stumps of +the king's beard, and another of the same materials, but fixed into a paring of +her majesty's thumb-nail, which served for the back. There was a collection of +needles and pins, from a foot to half a yard long; four wasp stings, like +joiner's tacks; some combings of the queen's hair; a gold ring, which one day +she made me a present of, in a most obliging manner, taking it from her little +finger, and throwing it over my head like a collar. I desired the captain would +please to accept this ring in return for his civilities; which he absolutely +refused. I showed him a corn that I had cut off with my own hand, from a maid +of honour's toe; it was about the bigness of Kentish pippin, and grown so hard, +that when I returned England, I got it hollowed into a cup, and set in silver. +Lastly, I desired him to see the breeches I had then on, which were made of a +mouse's skin. + +I could force nothing on him but a footman's tooth, which I observed him to +examine with great curiosity, and found he had a fancy for it. He received it +with abundance of thanks, more than such a trifle could deserve. It was drawn +by an unskilful surgeon, in a mistake, from one of Glumdalclitch's men, who was +afflicted with the tooth-ache, but it was as sound as any in his head. I got it +cleaned, and put it into my cabinet. It was about a foot long, and four inches +in diameter. + +The captain was very well satisfied with this plain relation I had given him, +and said, "he hoped, when we returned to England, I would oblige the world by +putting it on paper, and making it public." My answer was, "that we were +overstocked with books of travels: that nothing could now pass which was not +extraordinary; wherein I doubted some authors less consulted truth, than their +own vanity, or interest, or the diversion of ignorant readers; that my story +could contain little beside common events, without those ornamental +descriptions of strange plants, trees, birds, and other animals; or of the +barbarous customs and idolatry of savage people, with which most writers +abound. However, I thanked him for his good opinion, and promised to take the +matter into my thoughts." + +He said "he wondered at one thing very much, which was, to hear me speak so +loud;" asking me "whether the king or queen of that country were thick of +hearing?" I told him, "it was what I had been used to for above two years past, +and that I admired as much at the voices of him and his men, who seemed to me +only to whisper, and yet I could hear them well enough. But, when I spoke in +that country, it was like a man talking in the streets, to another looking out +from the top of a steeple, unless when I was placed on a table, or held in any +person's hand." I told him, "I had likewise observed another thing, that, when +I first got into the ship, and the sailors stood all about me, I thought they +were the most little contemptible creatures I had ever beheld." For indeed, +while I was in that prince's country, I could never endure to look in a glass, +after mine eyes had been accustomed to such prodigious objects, because the +comparison gave me so despicable a conceit of myself. The captain said, "that +while we were at supper, he observed me to look at every thing with a sort of +wonder, and that I often seemed hardly able to contain my laughter, which he +knew not well how to take, but imputed it to some disorder in my brain." I +answered, "it was very true; and I wondered how I could forbear, when I saw his +dishes of the size of a silver three-pence, a leg of pork hardly a mouthful, a +cup not so big as a nut-shell;" and so I went on, describing the rest of his +household-stuff and provisions, after the same manner. For, although he queen +had ordered a little equipage of all things necessary for me, while I was in +her service, yet my ideas were wholly taken up with what I saw on every side of +me, and I winked at my own littleness, as people do at their own faults. The +captain understood my raillery very well, and merrily replied with the old +English proverb, "that he doubted mine eyes were bigger than my belly, for he +did not observe my stomach so good, although I had fasted all day;" and, +continuing in his mirth, protested "he would have gladly given a hundred +pounds, to have seen my closet in the eagle's bill, and afterwards in its fall +from so great a height into the sea; which would certainly have been a most +astonishing object, worthy to have the description of it transmitted to future +ages:" and the comparison of Phaeton was so obvious, that he could not forbear +applying it, although I did not much admire the conceit. + +The captain having been at Tonquin, was, in his return to England, driven +north-eastward to the latitude of 44 degrees, and longitude of 143. But meeting +a trade-wind two days after I came on board him, we sailed southward a long +time, and coasting New Holland, kept our course west-south-west, and then +south-south-west, till we doubled the Cape of Good Hope. Our voyage was very +prosperous, but I shall not trouble the reader with a journal of it. The +captain called in at one or two ports, and sent in his long-boat for provisions +and fresh water; but I never went out of the ship till we came into the Downs, +which was on the third day of June, 1706, about nine months after my escape. I +offered to leave my goods in security for payment of my freight: but the +captain protested he would not receive one farthing. We took a kind leave of +each other, and I made him promise he would come to see me at my house in +Redriff. I hired a horse and guide for five shillings, which I borrowed of the +captain. + +As I was on the road, observing the littleness of the houses, the trees, the +cattle, and the people, I began to think myself in Lilliput. I was afraid of +trampling on every traveller I met, and often called aloud to have them stand +out of the way, so that I had like to have gotten one or two broken heads for +my impertinence. + +When I came to my own house, for which I was forced to inquire, one of the +servants opening the door, I bent down to go in, (like a goose under a gate,) +for fear of striking my head. My wife run out to embrace me, but I stooped +lower than her knees, thinking she could otherwise never be able to reach my +mouth. My daughter kneeled to ask my blessing, but I could not see her till she +arose, having been so long used to stand with my head and eyes erect to above +sixty feet; and then I went to take her up with one hand by the waist. I looked +down upon the servants, and one or two friends who were in the house, as if +they had been pigmies and I a giant. I told my wife, "she had been too thrifty, +for I found she had starved herself and her daughter to nothing." In short, I +behaved myself so unaccountably, that they were all of the captain's opinion +when he first saw me, and concluded I had lost my wits. This I mention as an +instance of the great power of habit and prejudice. + +In a little time, I and my family and friends came to a right understanding: +but my wife protested "I should never go to sea any more;" although my evil +destiny so ordered, that she had not power to hinder me, as the reader may know +hereafter. In the mean time, I here conclude the second part of my unfortunate +voyages. + +PART III. A VOYAGE TO LAPUTA, BALNIBARBI, LUGGNAGG, GLUBBDUBDRIB, AND JAPAN. + +CHAPTER I. + +[The author sets out on his third voyage. Is taken by pirates. The malice of a +Dutchman. His arrival at an island. He is received into Laputa.] + +I had not been at home above ten days, when Captain William Robinson, a Cornish +man, commander of the Hopewell, a stout ship of three hundred tons, came to my +house. I had formerly been surgeon of another ship where he was master, and a +fourth part owner, in a voyage to the Levant. He had always treated me more +like a brother, than an inferior officer; and, hearing of my arrival, made me a +visit, as I apprehended only out of friendship, for nothing passed more than +what is usual after long absences. But repeating his visits often, expressing +his joy to find I me in good health, asking, "whether I were now settled for +life?" adding, "that he intended a voyage to the East Indies in two months," at +last he plainly invited me, though with some apologies, to be surgeon of the +ship; "that I should have another surgeon under me, beside our two mates; that +my salary should be double to the usual pay; and that having experienced my +knowledge in sea-affairs to be at least equal to his, he would enter into any +engagement to follow my advice, as much as if I had shared in the command." + +He said so many other obliging things, and I knew him to be so honest a man, +that I could not reject this proposal; the thirst I had of seeing the world, +notwithstanding my past misfortunes, continuing as violent as ever. The only +difficulty that remained, was to persuade my wife, whose consent however I at +last obtained, by the prospect of advantage she proposed to her children. + +We set out the 5th day of August, 1706, and arrived at Fort St. George the 11th +of April, 1707. We staid there three weeks to refresh our crew, many of whom +were sick. From thence we went to Tonquin, where the captain resolved to +continue some time, because many of the goods he intended to buy were not +ready, nor could he expect to be dispatched in several months. Therefore, in +hopes to defray some of the charges he must be at, he bought a sloop, loaded it +with several sorts of goods, wherewith the Tonquinese usually trade to the +neighbouring islands, and putting fourteen men on board, whereof three were of +the country, he appointed me master of the sloop, and gave me power to traffic, +while he transacted his affairs at Tonquin. + +We had not sailed above three days, when a great storm arising, we were driven +five days to the north-north-east, and then to the east: after which we had +fair weather, but still with a pretty strong gale from the west. Upon the tenth +day we were chased by two pirates, who soon overtook us; for my sloop was so +deep laden, that she sailed very slow, neither were we in a condition to defend +ourselves. + +We were boarded about the same time by both the pirates, who entered furiously +at the head of their men; but finding us all prostrate upon our faces (for so I +gave order), they pinioned us with strong ropes, and setting guard upon us, +went to search the sloop. + +I observed among them a Dutchman, who seemed to be of some authority, though he +was not commander of either ship. He knew us by our countenances to be +Englishmen, and jabbering to us in his own language, swore we should be tied +back to back and thrown into the sea. I spoken Dutch tolerably well; I told him +who we were, and begged him, in consideration of our being Christians and +Protestants, of neighbouring countries in strict alliance, that he would move +the captains to take some pity on us. This inflamed his rage; he repeated his +threatenings, and turning to his companions, spoke with great vehemence in the +Japanese language, as I suppose, often using the word Christianos. + +The largest of the two pirate ships was commanded by a Japanese captain, who +spoke a little Dutch, but very imperfectly. He came up to me, and after several +questions, which I answered in great humility, he said, "we should not die." I +made the captain a very low bow, and then, turning to the Dutchman, said, "I +was sorry to find more mercy in a heathen, than in a brother christian." But I +had soon reason to repent those foolish words: for that malicious reprobate, +having often endeavoured in vain to persuade both the captains that I might be +thrown into the sea (which they would not yield to, after the promise made me +that I should not die), however, prevailed so far, as to have a punishment +inflicted on me, worse, in all human appearance, than death itself. My men were +sent by an equal division into both the pirate ships, and my sloop new manned. +As to myself, it was determined that I should be set adrift in a small canoe, +with paddles and a sail, and four days' provisions; which last, the Japanese +captain was so kind to double out of his own stores, and would permit no man to +search me. I got down into the canoe, while the Dutchman, standing upon the +deck, loaded me with all the curses and injurious terms his language could +afford. + +About an hour before we saw the pirates I had taken an observation, and found +we were in the latitude of 46 N. and longitude of 183. When I was at some +distance from the pirates, I discovered, by my pocket-glass, several islands to +the south-east. I set up my sail, the wind being fair, with a design to reach +the nearest of those islands, which I made a shift to do, in about three hours. +It was all rocky: however I got many birds' eggs; and, striking fire, I kindled +some heath and dry sea-weed, by which I roasted my eggs. I ate no other supper, +being resolved to spare my provisions as much as I could. I passed the night +under the shelter of a rock, strewing some heath under me, and slept pretty +well. + +The next day I sailed to another island, and thence to a third and fourth, +sometimes using my sail, and sometimes my paddles. But, not to trouble the +reader with a particular account of my distresses, let it suffice, that on the +fifth day I arrived at the last island in my sight, which lay south-south-east +to the former. + +This island was at a greater distance than I expected, and I did not reach it +in less than five hours. I encompassed it almost round, before I could find a +convenient place to land in; which was a small creek, about three times the +wideness of my canoe. I found the island to be all rocky, only a little +intermingled with tufts of grass, and sweet-smelling herbs. I took out my small +provisions and after having refreshed myself, I secured the remainder in a +cave, whereof there were great numbers; I gathered plenty of eggs upon the +rocks, and got a quantity of dry sea-weed, and parched grass, which I designed +to kindle the next day, and roast my eggs as well as I could, for I had about +me my flint, steel, match, and burning-glass. I lay all night in the cave where +I had lodged my provisions. My bed was the same dry grass and sea-weed which I +intended for fuel. I slept very little, for the disquiets of my mind prevailed +over my weariness, and kept me awake. I considered how impossible it was to +preserve my life in so desolate a place, and how miserable my end must be: yet +found myself so listless and desponding, that I had not the heart to rise; and +before I could get spirits enough to creep out of my cave, the day was far +advanced. I walked awhile among the rocks: the sky was perfectly clear, and the +sun so hot, that I was forced to turn my face from it: when all on a sudden it +became obscure, as I thought, in a manner very different from what happens by +the interposition of a cloud. I turned back, and perceived a vast opaque body +between me and the sun moving forwards towards the island: it seemed to be +about two miles high, and hid the sun six or seven minutes; but I did not +observe the air to be much colder, or the sky more darkened, than if I had +stood under the shade of a mountain. As it approached nearer over the place +where I was, it appeared to be a firm substance, the bottom flat, smooth, and +shining very bright, from the reflection of the sea below. I stood upon a +height about two hundred yards from the shore, and saw this vast body +descending almost to a parallel with me, at less than an English mile distance. +I took out my pocket perspective, and could plainly discover numbers of people +moving up and down the sides of it, which appeared to be sloping; but what +those people where doing I was not able to distinguish. + +The natural love of life gave me some inward motion of joy, and I was ready to +entertain a hope that this adventure might, some way or other, help to deliver +me from the desolate place and condition I was in. But at the same time the +reader can hardly conceive my astonishment, to behold an island in the air, +inhabited by men, who were able (as it should seem) to raise or sink, or put it +into progressive motion, as they pleased. But not being at that time in a +disposition to philosophise upon this phenomenon, I rather chose to observe +what course the island would take, because it seemed for awhile to stand still. +Yet soon after, it advanced nearer, and I could see the sides of it encompassed +with several gradations of galleries, and stairs, at certain intervals, to +descend from one to the other. In the lowest gallery, I beheld some people +fishing with long angling rods, and others looking on. I waved my cap (for my +hat was long since worn out) and my handkerchief toward the island; and upon +its nearer approach, I called and shouted with the utmost strength of my voice; +and then looking circumspectly, I beheld a crowd gather to that side which was +most in my view. I found by their pointing towards me and to each other, that +they plainly discovered me, although they made no return to my shouting. But I +could see four or five men running in great haste, up the stairs, to the top of +the island, who then disappeared. I happened rightly to conjecture, that these +were sent for orders to some person in authority upon this occasion. + +The number of people increased, and, in less than half all hour, the island was +moved and raised in such a manner, that the lowest gallery appeared in a +parallel of less then a hundred yards distance from the height where I stood. I +then put myself in the most supplicating posture, and spoke in the humblest +accent, but received no answer. Those who stood nearest over against me, seemed +to be persons of distinction, as I supposed by their habit. They conferred +earnestly with each other, looking often upon me. At length one of them called +out in a clear, polite, smooth dialect, not unlike in sound to the Italian: and +therefore I returned an answer in that language, hoping at least that the +cadence might be more agreeable to his ears. Although neither of us understood +the other, yet my meaning was easily known, for the people saw the distress I +was in. + +They made signs for me to come down from the rock, and go towards the shore, +which I accordingly did; and the flying island being raised to a convenient +height, the verge directly over me, a chain was let down from the lowest +gallery, with a seat fastened to the bottom, to which I fixed myself, and was +drawn up by pulleys. + +CHAPTER II. + +[The humours and dispositions of the Laputians described. An account of their +learning. Of the king and his court. The author's reception there. The +inhabitants subject to fear and disquietudes. An account of the women.] + +At my alighting, I was surrounded with a crowd of people, but those who stood +nearest seemed to be of better quality. They beheld me with all the marks and +circumstances of wonder; neither indeed was I much in their debt, having never +till then seen a race of mortals so singular in their shapes, habits, and +countenances. Their heads were all reclined, either to the right, or the left; +one of their eyes turned inward, and the other directly up to the zenith. Their +outward garments were adorned with the figures of suns, moons, and stars; +interwoven with those of fiddles, flutes, harps, trumpets, guitars, +harpsichords, and many other instruments of music, unknown to us in Europe. I +observed, here and there, many in the habit of servants, with a blown bladder, +fastened like a flail to the end of a stick, which they carried in their hands. +In each bladder was a small quantity of dried peas, or little pebbles, as I was +afterwards informed. With these bladders, they now and then flapped the mouths +and ears of those who stood near them, of which practice I could not then +conceive the meaning. It seems the minds of these people are so taken up with +intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses +of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of +speech and hearing; for which reason, those persons who are able to afford it +always keep a flapper (the original is climenole) in their family, as one of +their domestics; nor ever walk abroad, or make visits, without him. And the +business of this officer is, when two, three, or more persons are in company, +gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the +right ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself. This flapper is +likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his walks, and upon +occasion to give him a soft flap on his eyes; because he is always so wrapped +up in cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of falling down every +precipice, and bouncing his head against every post; and in the streets, of +justling others, or being justled himself into the kennel. + +It was necessary to give the reader this information, without which he would be +at the same loss with me to understand the proceedings of these people, as they +conducted me up the stairs to the top of the island, and from thence to the +royal palace. While we were ascending, they forgot several times what they were +about, and left me to myself, till their memories were again roused by their +flappers; for they appeared altogether unmoved by the sight of my foreign habit +and countenance, and by the shouts of the vulgar, whose thoughts and minds were +more disengaged. + +At last we entered the palace, and proceeded into the chamber of presence, +where I saw the king seated on his throne, attended on each side by persons of +prime quality. Before the throne, was a large table filled with globes and +spheres, and mathematical instruments of all kinds. His majesty took not the +least notice of us, although our entrance was not without sufficient noise, by +the concourse of all persons belonging to the court. But he was then deep in a +problem; and we attended at least an hour, before he could solve it. There +stood by him, on each side, a young page with flaps in their hands, and when +they saw he was at leisure, one of them gently struck his mouth, and the other +his right ear; at which he startled like one awaked on the sudden, and looking +towards me and the company I was in, recollected the occasion of our coming, +whereof he had been informed before. He spoke some words, whereupon immediately +a young man with a flap came up to my side, and flapped me gently on the right +ear; but I made signs, as well as I could, that I had no occasion for such an +instrument; which, as I afterwards found, gave his majesty, and the whole +court, a very mean opinion of my understanding. The king, as far as I could +conjecture, asked me several questions, and I addressed myself to him in all +the languages I had. When it was found I could neither understand nor be +understood, I was conducted by his order to an apartment in his palace (this +prince being distinguished above all his predecessors for his hospitality to +strangers), where two servants were appointed to attend me. My dinner was +brought, and four persons of quality, whom I remembered to have seen very near +the king's person, did me the honour to dine with me. We had two courses, of +three dishes each. In the first course, there was a shoulder of mutton cut into +an equilateral triangle, a piece of beef into a rhomboides, and a pudding into +a cycloid. The second course was two ducks trussed up in the form of fiddles; +sausages and puddings resembling flutes and hautboys, and a breast of veal in +the shape of a harp. The servants cut our bread into cones, cylinders, +parallelograms, and several other mathematical figures. + +While we were at dinner, I made bold to ask the names of several things in +their language, and those noble persons, by the assistance of their flappers, +delighted to give me answers, hoping to raise my admiration of their great +abilities if I could be brought to converse with them. I was soon able to call +for bread and drink, or whatever else I wanted. + +After dinner my company withdrew, and a person was sent to me by the king's +order, attended by a flapper. He brought with him pen, ink, and paper, and +three or four books, giving me to understand by signs, that he was sent to +teach me the language. We sat together four hours, in which time I wrote down a +great number of words in columns, with the translations over against them; I +likewise made a shift to learn several short sentences; for my tutor would +order one of my servants to fetch something, to turn about, to make a bow, to +sit, or to stand, or walk, and the like. Then I took down the sentence in +writing. He showed me also, in one of his books, the figures of the sun, moon, +and stars, the zodiac, the tropics, and polar circles, together with the +denominations of many plains and solids. He gave me the names and descriptions +of all the musical instruments, and the general terms of art in playing on each +of them. After he had left me, I placed all my words, with their +interpretations, in alphabetical order. And thus, in a few days, by the help of +a very faithful memory, I got some insight into their language. The word, which +I interpret the flying or floating island, is in the original Laputa, whereof I +could never learn the true etymology. Lap, in the old obsolete language, +signifies high; and untuh, a governor; from which they say, by corruption, was +derived Laputa, from Lapuntuh. But I do not approve of this derivation, which +seems to be a little strained. I ventured to offer to the learned among them a +conjecture of my own, that Laputa was quasi lap outed; lap, signifying +properly, the dancing of the sunbeams in the sea, and outed, a wing; which, +however, I shall not obtrude, but submit to the judicious reader. + +Those to whom the king had entrusted me, observing how ill I was clad, ordered +a tailor to come next morning, and take measure for a suit of clothes. This +operator did his office after a different manner from those of his trade in +Europe. He first took my altitude by a quadrant, and then, with a rule and +compasses, described the dimensions and outlines of my whole body, all which he +entered upon paper; and in six days brought my clothes very ill made, and quite +out of shape, by happening to mistake a figure in the calculation. But my +comfort was, that I observed such accidents very frequent, and little regarded. + +During my confinement for want of clothes, and by an indisposition that held me +some days longer, I much enlarged my dictionary; and when I went next to court, +was able to understand many things the king spoke, and to return him some kind +of answers. His majesty had given orders, that the island should move +north-east and by east, to the vertical point over Lagado, the metropolis of +the whole kingdom below, upon the firm earth. It was about ninety leagues +distant, and our voyage lasted four days and a half. I was not in the least +sensible of the progressive motion made in the air by the island. On the second +morning, about eleven o'clock, the king himself in person, attended by his +nobility, courtiers, and officers, having prepared all their musical +instruments, played on them for three hours without intermission, so that I was +quite stunned with the noise; neither could I possibly guess the meaning, till +my tutor informed me. He said that, the people of their island had their ears +adapted to hear "the music of the spheres, which always played at certain +periods, and the court was now prepared to bear their part, in whatever +instrument they most excelled." + +In our journey towards Lagado, the capital city, his majesty ordered that the +island should stop over certain towns and villages, from whence he might +receive the petitions of his subjects. And to this purpose, several packthreads +were let down, with small weights at the bottom. On these packthreads the +people strung their petitions, which mounted up directly, like the scraps of +paper fastened by school boys at the end of the string that holds their kite. +Sometimes we received wine and victuals from below, which were drawn up by +pulleys. + +The knowledge I had in mathematics, gave me great assistance in acquiring their +phraseology, which depended much upon that science, and music; and in the +latter I was not unskilled. Their ideas are perpetually conversant in lines and +figures. If they would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman, or any other +animal, they describe it by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and +other geometrical terms, or by words of art drawn from music, needless here to +repeat. I observed in the king's kitchen all sorts of mathematical and musical +instruments, after the figures of which they cut up the joints that were served +to his majesty's table. + +Their houses are very ill built, the walls bevil, without one right angle in +any apartment; and this defect arises from the contempt they bear to practical +geometry, which they despise as vulgar and mechanic; those instructions they +give being too refined for the intellects of their workmen, which occasions +perpetual mistakes. And although they are dexterous enough upon a piece of +paper, in the management of the rule, the pencil, and the divider, yet in the +common actions and behaviour of life, I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward, +and unhandy people, nor so slow and perplexed in their conceptions upon all +other subjects, except those of mathematics and music. They are very bad +reasoners, and vehemently given to opposition, unless when they happen to be of +the right opinion, which is seldom their case. Imagination, fancy, and +invention, they are wholly strangers to, nor have any words in their language, +by which those ideas can be expressed; the whole compass of their thoughts and +mind being shut up within the two forementioned sciences. + +Most of them, and especially those who deal in the astronomical part, have +great faith in judicial astrology, although they are ashamed to own it +publicly. But what I chiefly admired, and thought altogether unaccountable, was +the strong disposition I observed in them towards news and politics, +perpetually inquiring into public affairs, giving their judgments in matters of +state, and passionately disputing every inch of a party opinion. I have indeed +observed the same disposition among most of the mathematicians I have known in +Europe, although I could never discover the least analogy between the two +sciences; unless those people suppose, that because the smallest circle has as +many degrees as the largest, therefore the regulation and management of the +world require no more abilities than the handling and turning of a globe; but I +rather take this quality to spring from a very common infirmity of human +nature, inclining us to be most curious and conceited in matters where we have +least concern, and for which we are least adapted by study or nature. + +These people are under continual disquietudes, never enjoying a minutes peace +of mind; and their disturbances proceed from causes which very little affect +the rest of mortals. Their apprehensions arise from several changes they dread +in the celestial bodies: for instance, that the earth, by the continual +approaches of the sun towards it, must, in course of time, be absorbed, or +swallowed up; that the face of the sun, will, by degrees, be encrusted with its +own effluvia, and give no more light to the world; that the earth very narrowly +escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet, which would have infallibly +reduced it to ashes; and that the next, which they have calculated for +one-and-thirty years hence, will probably destroy us. For if, in its +perihelion, it should approach within a certain degree of the sun (as by their +calculations they have reason to dread) it will receive a degree of heat ten +thousand times more intense than that of red hot glowing iron, and in its +absence from the sun, carry a blazing tail ten hundred thousand and fourteen +miles long, through which, if the earth should pass at the distance of one +hundred thousand miles from the nucleus, or main body of the comet, it must in +its passage be set on fire, and reduced to ashes: that the sun, daily spending +its rays without any nutriment to supply them, will at last be wholly consumed +and annihilated; which must be attended with the destruction of this earth, and +of all the planets that receive their light from it. + +They are so perpetually alarmed with the apprehensions of these, and the like +impending dangers, that they can neither sleep quietly in their beds, nor have +any relish for the common pleasures and amusements of life. When they meet an +acquaintance in the morning, the first question is about the sun's health, how +he looked at his setting and rising, and what hopes they have to avoid the +stroke of the approaching comet. This conversation they are apt to run into +with the same temper that boys discover in delighting to hear terrible stories +of spirits and hobgoblins, which they greedily listen to, and dare not go to +bed for fear. + +The women of the island have abundance of vivacity: they, contemn their +husbands, and are exceedingly fond of strangers, whereof there is always a +considerable number from the continent below, attending at court, either upon +affairs of the several towns and corporations, or their own particular +occasions, but are much despised, because they want the same endowments. Among +these the ladies choose their gallants: but the vexation is, that they act with +too much ease and security; for the husband is always so rapt in speculation, +that the mistress and lover may proceed to the greatest familiarities before +his face, if he be but provided with paper and implements, and without his +flapper at his side. + +The wives and daughters lament their confinement to the island, although I +think it the most delicious spot of ground in the world; and although they live +here in the greatest plenty and magnificence, and are allowed to do whatever +they please, they long to see the world, and take the diversions of the +metropolis, which they are not allowed to do without a particular license from +the king; and this is not easy to be obtained, because the people of quality +have found, by frequent experience, how hard it is to persuade their women to +return from below. I was told that a great court lady, who had several +children,--is married to the prime minister, the richest subject in the +kingdom, a very graceful person, extremely fond of her, and lives in the finest +palace of the island,--went down to Lagado on the pretence of health, there hid +herself for several months, till the king sent a warrant to search for her; and +she was found in an obscure eating-house all in rags, having pawned her clothes +to maintain an old deformed footman, who beat her every day, and in whose +company she was taken, much against her will. And although her husband received +her with all possible kindness, and without the least reproach, she soon after +contrived to steal down again, with all her jewels, to the same gallant, and +has not been heard of since. + +This may perhaps pass with the reader rather for an European or English story, +than for one of a country so remote. But he may please to consider, that the +caprices of womankind are not limited by any climate or nation, and that they +are much more uniform, than can be easily imagined. + +In about a month's time, I had made a tolerable proficiency in their language, +and was able to answer most of the king's questions, when I had the honour to +attend him. His majesty discovered not the least curiosity to inquire into the +laws, government, history, religion, or manners of the countries where I had +been; but confined his questions to the state of mathematics, and received the +account I gave him with great contempt and indifference, though often roused by +his flapper on each side. + +CHAPTER III. + +[A phenomenon solved by modern philosophy and astronomy. The Laputians' great +improvements in the latter. The king's method of suppressing insurrections.] + +I desired leave of this prince to see the curiosities of the island, which he +was graciously pleased to grant, and ordered my tutor to attend me. I chiefly +wanted to know, to what cause, in art or in nature, it owed its several +motions, whereof I will now give a philosophical account to the reader. + +The flying or floating island is exactly circular, its diameter 7837 yards, or +about four miles and a half, and consequently contains ten thousand acres. It +is three hundred yards thick. The bottom, or under surface, which appears to +those who view it below, is one even regular plate of adamant, shooting up to +the height of about two hundred yards. Above it lie the several minerals in +their usual order, and over all is a coat of rich mould, ten or twelve feet +deep. The declivity of the upper surface, from the circumference to the centre, +is the natural cause why all the dews and rains, which fall upon the island, +are conveyed in small rivulets toward the middle, where they are emptied into +four large basins, each of about half a mile in circuit, and two hundred yards +distant from the centre. From these basins the water is continually exhaled by +the sun in the daytime, which effectually prevents their overflowing. Besides, +as it is in the power of the monarch to raise the island above the region of +clouds and vapours, he can prevent the falling of dews and rain whenever he +pleases. For the highest clouds cannot rise above two miles, as naturalists +agree, at least they were never known to do so in that country. + +At the centre of the island there is a chasm about fifty yards in diameter, +whence the astronomers descend into a large dome, which is therefore called +flandona gagnole, or the astronomer's cave, situated at the depth of a hundred +yards beneath the upper surface of the adamant. In this cave are twenty lamps +continually burning, which, from the reflection of the adamant, cast a strong +light into every part. The place is stored with great variety of sextants, +quadrants, telescopes, astrolabes, and other astronomical instruments. But the +greatest curiosity, upon which the fate of the island depends, is a loadstone +of a prodigious size, in shape resembling a weaver's shuttle. It is in length +six yards, and in the thickest part at least three yards over. This magnet is +sustained by a very strong axle of adamant passing through its middle, upon +which it plays, and is poised so exactly that the weakest hand can turn it. It +is hooped round with a hollow cylinder of adamant, four feet yards in diameter, +placed horizontally, and supported by eight adamantine feet, each six yards +high. In the middle of the concave side, there is a groove twelve inches deep, +in which the extremities of the axle are lodged, and turned round as there is +occasion. + +The stone cannot be removed from its place by any force, because the hoop and +its feet are one continued piece with that body of adamant which constitutes +the bottom of the island. + +By means of this loadstone, the island is made to rise and fall, and move from +one place to another. For, with respect to that part of the earth over which +the monarch presides, the stone is endued at one of its sides with an +attractive power, and at the other with a repulsive. Upon placing the magnet +erect, with its attracting end towards the earth, the island descends; but when +the repelling extremity points downwards, the island mounts directly upwards. +When the position of the stone is oblique, the motion of the island is so too: +for in this magnet, the forces always act in lines parallel to its direction. + +By this oblique motion, the island is conveyed to different parts of the +monarch's dominions. To explain the manner of its progress, let A B represent a +line drawn across the dominions of Balnibarbi, let the line c d represent the +loadstone, of which let d be the repelling end, and c the attracting end, the +island being over C: let the stone be placed in position c d, with its +repelling end downwards; then the island will be driven upwards obliquely +towards D. When it is arrived at D, let the stone be turned upon its axle, till +its attracting end points towards E, and then the island will be carried +obliquely towards E; where, if the stone be again turned upon its axle till it +stands in the position E F, with its repelling point downwards, the island will +rise obliquely towards F, where, by directing the attracting end towards G, the +island may be carried to G, and from G to H, by turning the stone, so as to +make its repelling extremity to point directly downward. And thus, by changing +the situation of the stone, as often as there is occasion, the island is made +to rise and fall by turns in an oblique direction, and by those alternate +risings and fallings (the obliquity being not considerable) is conveyed from +one part of the dominions to the other. + +But it must be observed, that this island cannot move beyond the extent of the +dominions below, nor can it rise above the height of four miles. For which the +astronomers (who have written large systems concerning the stone) assign the +following reason: that the magnetic virtue does not extend beyond the distance +of four miles, and that the mineral, which acts upon the stone in the bowels of +the earth, and in the sea about six leagues distant from the shore, is not +diffused through the whole globe, but terminated with the limits of the king's +dominions; and it was easy, from the great advantage of such a superior +situation, for a prince to bring under his obedience whatever country lay +within the attraction of that magnet. + +When the stone is put parallel to the plane of the horizon, the island stands +still; for in that case the extremities of it, being at equal distance from the +earth, act with equal force, the one in drawing downwards, the other in pushing +upwards, and consequently no motion can ensue. + +This loadstone is under the care of certain astronomers, who, from time to +time, give it such positions as the monarch directs. They spend the greatest +part of their lives in observing the celestial bodies, which they do by the +assistance of glasses, far excelling ours in goodness. For, although their +largest telescopes do not exceed three feet, they magnify much more than those +of a hundred with us, and show the stars with greater clearness. This advantage +has enabled them to extend their discoveries much further than our astronomers +in Europe; for they have made a catalogue of ten thousand fixed stars, whereas +the largest of ours do not contain above one third part of that number. They +have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about +Mars; whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet +exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost, five; the former revolves in +the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half; so that the +squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the +cubes of their distance from the centre of Mars; which evidently shows them to +be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly +bodies. + +They have observed ninety-three different comets, and settled their periods +with great exactness. If this be true (and they affirm it with great +confidence) it is much to be wished, that their observations were made public, +whereby the theory of comets, which at present is very lame and defective, +might be brought to the same perfection with other arts of astronomy. + +The king would be the most absolute prince in the universe, if he could but +prevail on a ministry to join with him; but these having their estates below on +the continent, and considering that the office of a favourite has a very +uncertain tenure, would never consent to the enslaving of their country. + +If any town should engage in rebellion or mutiny, fall into violent factions, +or refuse to pay the usual tribute, the king has two methods of reducing them +to obedience. The first and the mildest course is, by keeping the island +hovering over such a town, and the lands about it, whereby he can deprive them +of the benefit of the sun and the rain, and consequently afflict the +inhabitants with dearth and diseases: and if the crime deserve it, they are at +the same time pelted from above with great stones, against which they have no +defence but by creeping into cellars or caves, while the roofs of their houses +are beaten to pieces. But if they still continue obstinate, or offer to raise +insurrections, he proceeds to the last remedy, by letting the island drop +directly upon their heads, which makes a universal destruction both of houses +and men. However, this is an extremity to which the prince is seldom driven, +neither indeed is he willing to put it in execution; nor dare his ministers +advise him to an action, which, as it would render them odious to the people, +so it would be a great damage to their own estates, which all lie below; for +the island is the king's demesne. + +But there is still indeed a more weighty reason, why the kings of this country +have been always averse from executing so terrible an action, unless upon the +utmost necessity. For, if the town intended to be destroyed should have in it +any tall rocks, as it generally falls out in the larger cities, a situation +probably chosen at first with a view to prevent such a catastrophe; or if it +abound in high spires, or pillars of stone, a sudden fall might endanger the +bottom or under surface of the island, which, although it consist, as I have +said, of one entire adamant, two hundred yards thick, might happen to crack by +too great a shock, or burst by approaching too near the fires from the houses +below, as the backs, both of iron and stone, will often do in our chimneys. Of +all this the people are well apprised, and understand how far to carry their +obstinacy, where their liberty or property is concerned. And the king, when he +is highest provoked, and most determined to press a city to rubbish, orders the +island to descend with great gentleness, out of a pretence of tenderness to his +people, but, indeed, for fear of breaking the adamantine bottom; in which case, +it is the opinion of all their philosophers, that the loadstone could no longer +hold it up, and the whole mass would fall to the ground. + +By a fundamental law of this realm, neither the king, nor either of his two +eldest sons, are permitted to leave the island; nor the queen, till she is past +child-bearing. + +CHAPTER IV. + +[The author leaves Laputa; is conveyed to Balnibarbi; arrives at the +metropolis. A description of the metropolis, and the country adjoining. The +author hospitably received by a great lord. His conversation with that lord.] + +Although I cannot say that I was ill treated in this island, yet I must confess +I thought myself too much neglected, not without some degree of contempt; for +neither prince nor people appeared to be curious in any part of knowledge, +except mathematics and music, wherein I was far their inferior, and upon that +account very little regarded. + +On the other side, after having seen all the curiosities of the island, I was +very desirous to leave it, being heartily weary of those people. They were +indeed excellent in two sciences for which I have great esteem, and wherein I +am not unversed; but, at the same time, so abstracted and involved in +speculation, that I never met with such disagreeable companions. I conversed +only with women, tradesmen, flappers, and court-pages, during two months of my +abode there; by which, at last, I rendered myself extremely contemptible; yet +these were the only people from whom I could ever receive a reasonable answer. + +I had obtained, by hard study, a good degree of knowledge in their language: I +was weary of being confined to an island where I received so little +countenance, and resolved to leave it with the first opportunity. + +There was a great lord at court, nearly related to the king, and for that +reason alone used with respect. He was universally reckoned the most ignorant +and stupid person among them. He had performed many eminent services for the +crown, had great natural and acquired parts, adorned with integrity and honour; +but so ill an ear for music, that his detractors reported, "he had been often +known to beat time in the wrong place;" neither could his tutors, without +extreme difficulty, teach him to demonstrate the most easy proposition in the +mathematics. He was pleased to show me many marks of favour, often did me the +honour of a visit, desired to be informed in the affairs of Europe, the laws +and customs, the manners and learning of the several countries where I had +travelled. He listened to me with great attention, and made very wise +observations on all I spoke. He had two flappers attending him for state, but +never made use of them, except at court and in visits of ceremony, and would +always command them to withdraw, when we were alone together. + +I entreated this illustrious person, to intercede in my behalf with his +majesty, for leave to depart; which he accordingly did, as he was pleased to +tell me, with regret: for indeed he had made me several offers very +advantageous, which, however, I refused, with expressions of the highest +acknowledgment. + +On the 16th of February I took leave of his majesty and the court. The king +made me a present to the value of about two hundred pounds English, and my +protector, his kinsman, as much more, together with a letter of recommendation +to a friend of his in Lagado, the metropolis. The island being then hovering +over a mountain about two miles from it, I was let down from the lowest +gallery, in the same manner as I had been taken up. + +The continent, as far as it is subject to the monarch of the flying island, +passes under the general name of Balnibarbi; and the metropolis, as I said +before, is called Lagado. I felt some little satisfaction in finding myself on +firm ground. I walked to the city without any concern, being clad like one of +the natives, and sufficiently instructed to converse with them. I soon found +out the person's house to whom I was recommended, presented my letter from his +friend the grandee in the island, and was received with much kindness. This +great lord, whose name was Munodi, ordered me an apartment in his own house, +where I continued during my stay, and was entertained in a most hospitable +manner. + +The next morning after my arrival, he took me in his chariot to see the town, +which is about half the bigness of London; but the houses very strangely built, +and most of them out of repair. The people in the streets walked fast, looked +wild, their eyes fixed, and were generally in rags. We passed through one of +the town gates, and went about three miles into the country, where I saw many +labourers working with several sorts of tools in the ground, but was not able +to conjecture what they were about: neither did observe any expectation either +of corn or grass, although the soil appeared to be excellent. I could not +forbear admiring at these odd appearances, both in town and country; and I made +bold to desire my conductor, that he would be pleased to explain to me, what +could be meant by so many busy heads, hands, and faces, both in the streets and +the fields, because I did not discover any good effects they produced; but, on +the contrary, I never knew a soil so unhappily cultivated, houses so ill +contrived and so ruinous, or a people whose countenances and habit expressed so +much misery and want. + +This lord Munodi was a person of the first rank, and had been some years +governor of Lagado; but, by a cabal of ministers, was discharged for +insufficiency. However, the king treated him with tenderness, as a well-meaning +man, but of a low contemptible understanding. + +When I gave that free censure of the country and its inhabitants, he made no +further answer than by telling me, "that I had not been long enough among them +to form a judgment; and that the different nations of the world had different +customs;" with other common topics to the same purpose. But, when we returned +to his palace, he asked me "how I liked the building, what absurdities I +observed, and what quarrel I had with the dress or looks of his domestics?" +This he might safely do; because every thing about him was magnificent, +regular, and polite. I answered, "that his excellency's prudence, quality, and +fortune, had exempted him from those defects, which folly and beggary had +produced in others." He said, "if I would go with him to his country-house, +about twenty miles distant, where his estate lay, there would be more leisure +for this kind of conversation." I told his excellency "that I was entirely at +his disposal;" and accordingly we set out next morning. + +During our journey he made me observe the several methods used by farmers in +managing their lands, which to me were wholly unaccountable; for, except in +some very few places, I could not discover one ear of corn or blade of grass. +But, in three hours travelling, the scene was wholly altered; we came into a +most beautiful country; farmers' houses, at small distances, neatly built; the +fields enclosed, containing vineyards, corn-grounds, and meadows. Neither do I +remember to have seen a more delightful prospect. His excellency observed my +countenance to clear up; he told me, with a sigh, "that there his estate began, +and would continue the same, till we should come to his house: that his +countrymen ridiculed and despised him, for managing his affairs no better, and +for setting so ill an example to the kingdom; which, however, was followed by +very few, such as were old, and wilful, and weak like himself." + +We came at length to the house, which was indeed a noble structure, built +according to the best rules of ancient architecture. The fountains, gardens, +walks, avenues, and groves, were all disposed with exact judgment and taste. I +gave due praises to every thing I saw, whereof his excellency took not the +least notice till after supper; when, there being no third companion, he told +me with a very melancholy air "that he doubted he must throw down his houses in +town and country, to rebuild them after the present mode; destroy all his +plantations, and cast others into such a form as modern usage required, and +give the same directions to all his tenants, unless he would submit to incur +the censure of pride, singularity, affectation, ignorance, caprice, and perhaps +increase his majesty's displeasure; that the admiration I appeared to be under +would cease or diminish, when he had informed me of some particulars which, +probably, I never heard of at court, the people there being too much taken up +in their own speculations, to have regard to what passed here below." + +The sum of his discourse was to this effect: "That about forty years ago, +certain persons went up to Laputa, either upon business or diversion, and, +after five months continuance, came back with a very little smattering in +mathematics, but full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region: that +these persons, upon their return, began to dislike the management of every +thing below, and fell into schemes of putting all arts, sciences, languages, +and mechanics, upon a new foot. To this end, they procured a royal patent for +erecting an academy of projectors in Lagado; and the humour prevailed so +strongly among the people, that there is not a town of any consequence in the +kingdom without such an academy. In these colleges the professors contrive new +rules and methods of agriculture and building, and new instruments, and tools +for all trades and manufactures; whereby, as they undertake, one man shall do +the work of ten; a palace may be built in a week, of materials so durable as to +last for ever without repairing. All the fruits of the earth shall come to +maturity at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase a hundred fold +more than they do at present; with innumerable other happy proposals. The only +inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection; +and in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in +ruins, and the people without food or clothes. By all which, instead of being +discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their +schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair: that as for himself, being not +of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old forms, to live in +the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did, in every part of life, +without innovation: that some few other persons of quality and gentry had done +the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies +to art, ignorant, and ill common-wealth's men, preferring their own ease and +sloth before the general improvement of their country." + +His lordship added, "That he would not, by any further particulars, prevent the +pleasure I should certainly take in viewing the grand academy, whither he was +resolved I should go." He only desired me to observe a ruined building, upon +the side of a mountain about three miles distant, of which he gave me this +account: "That he had a very convenient mill within half a mile of his house, +turned by a current from a large river, and sufficient for his own family, as +well as a great number of his tenants; that about seven years ago, a club of +those projectors came to him with proposals to destroy this mill, and build +another on the side of that mountain, on the long ridge whereof a long canal +must be cut, for a repository of water, to be conveyed up by pipes and engines +to supply the mill, because the wind and air upon a height agitated the water, +and thereby made it fitter for motion, and because the water, descending down a +declivity, would turn the mill with half the current of a river whose course is +more upon a level." He said, "that being then not very well with the court, and +pressed by many of his friends, he complied with the proposal; and after +employing a hundred men for two years, the work miscarried, the projectors went +off, laying the blame entirely upon him, railing at him ever since, and putting +others upon the same experiment, with equal assurance of success, as well as +equal disappointment." + +In a few days we came back to town; and his excellency, considering the bad +character he had in the academy, would not go with me himself, but recommended +me to a friend of his, to bear me company thither. My lord was pleased to +represent me as a great admirer of projects, and a person of much curiosity and +easy belief; which, indeed, was not without truth; for I had myself been a sort +of projector in my younger days. + +CHAPTER V. + +[The author permitted to see the grand academy of Lagado. The academy largely +described. The arts wherein the professors employ themselves.] + +This academy is not an entire single building, but a continuation of several +houses on both sides of a street, which growing waste, was purchased and +applied to that use. + +I was received very kindly by the warden, and went for many days to the +academy. Every room has in it one or more projectors; and I believe I could not +be in fewer than five hundred rooms. + +The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair +and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and +skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for +extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials +hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He +told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to +supply the governor's gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he +complained that his stock was low, and entreated me "to give him something as +an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear +season for cucumbers." I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me +with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who +go to see them. + +I went into another chamber, but was ready to hasten back, being almost +overcome with a horrible stink. My conductor pressed me forward, conjuring me +in a whisper "to give no offence, which would be highly resented;" and +therefore I durst not so much as stop my nose. The projector of this cell was +the most ancient student of the academy; his face and beard were of a pale +yellow; his hands and clothes daubed over with filth. When I was presented to +him, he gave me a close embrace, a compliment I could well have excused. His +employment, from his first coming into the academy, was an operation to reduce +human excrement to its original food, by separating the several parts, removing +the tincture which it receives from the gall, making the odour exhale, and +scumming off the saliva. He had a weekly allowance, from the society, of a +vessel filled with human ordure, about the bigness of a Bristol barrel. + +I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder; who likewise showed me a +treatise he had written concerning the malleability of fire, which he intended +to publish. + +There was a most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method for +building houses, by beginning at the roof, and working downward to the +foundation; which he justified to me, by the like practice of those two prudent +insects, the bee and the spider. + +There was a man born blind, who had several apprentices in his own condition: +their employment was to mix colours for painters, which their master taught +them to distinguish by feeling and smelling. It was indeed my misfortune to +find them at that time not very perfect in their lessons, and the professor +himself happened to be generally mistaken. This artist is much encouraged and +esteemed by the whole fraternity. + +In another apartment I was highly pleased with a projector who had found a +device of ploughing the ground with hogs, to save the charges of ploughs, +cattle, and labour. The method is this: in an acre of ground you bury, at six +inches distance and eight deep, a quantity of acorns, dates, chestnuts, and +other mast or vegetables, whereof these animals are fondest; then you drive six +hundred or more of them into the field, where, in a few days, they will root up +the whole ground in search of their food, and make it fit for sowing, at the +same time manuring it with their dung: it is true, upon experiment, they found +the charge and trouble very great, and they had little or no crop. However it +is not doubted, that this invention may be capable of great improvement. + +I went into another room, where the walls and ceiling were all hung round with +cobwebs, except a narrow passage for the artist to go in and out. At my +entrance, he called aloud to me, "not to disturb his webs." He lamented "the +fatal mistake the world had been so long in, of using silkworms, while we had +such plenty of domestic insects who infinitely excelled the former, because +they understood how to weave, as well as spin." And he proposed further, "that +by employing spiders, the charge of dyeing silks should be wholly saved;" +whereof I was fully convinced, when he showed me a vast number of flies most +beautifully coloured, wherewith he fed his spiders, assuring us "that the webs +would take a tincture from them; and as he had them of all hues, he hoped to +fit everybody's fancy, as soon as he could find proper food for the flies, of +certain gums, oils, and other glutinous matter, to give a strength and +consistence to the threads." + +There was an astronomer, who had undertaken to place a sun-dial upon the great +weathercock on the town-house, by adjusting the annual and diurnal motions of +the earth and sun, so as to answer and coincide with all accidental turnings of +the wind. + +I was complaining of a small fit of the colic, upon which my conductor led me +into a room where a great physician resided, who was famous for curing that +disease, by contrary operations from the same instrument. He had a large pair +of bellows, with a long slender muzzle of ivory: this he conveyed eight inches +up the anus, and drawing in the wind, he affirmed he could make the guts as +lank as a dried bladder. But when the disease was more stubborn and violent, he +let in the muzzle while the bellows were full of wind, which he discharged into +the body of the patient; then withdrew the instrument to replenish it, clapping +his thumb strongly against the orifice of then fundament; and this being +repeated three or four times, the adventitious wind would rush out, bringing +the noxious along with it, (like water put into a pump), and the patient +recovered. I saw him try both experiments upon a dog, but could not discern any +effect from the former. After the latter the animal was ready to burst, and +made so violent a discharge as was very offensive to me and my companion. The +dog died on the spot, and we left the doctor endeavouring to recover him, by +the same operation. + +I visited many other apartments, but shall not trouble my reader with all the +curiosities I observed, being studious of brevity. + +I had hitherto seen only one side of the academy, the other being appropriated +to the advancers of speculative learning, of whom I shall say something, when I +have mentioned one illustrious person more, who is called among them "the +universal artist." He told us "he had been thirty years employing his thoughts +for the improvement of human life." He had two large rooms full of wonderful +curiosities, and fifty men at work. Some were condensing air into a dry +tangible substance, by extracting the nitre, and letting the aqueous or fluid +particles percolate; others softening marble, for pillows and pin-cushions; +others petrifying the hoofs of a living horse, to preserve them from +foundering. The artist himself was at that time busy upon two great designs; +the first, to sow land with chaff, wherein he affirmed the true seminal virtue +to be contained, as he demonstrated by several experiments, which I was not +skilful enough to comprehend. The other was, by a certain composition of gums, +minerals, and vegetables, outwardly applied, to prevent the growth of wool upon +two young lambs; and he hoped, in a reasonable time to propagate the breed of +naked sheep, all over the kingdom. + +We crossed a walk to the other part of the academy, where, as I have already +said, the projectors in speculative learning resided. + +The first professor I saw, was in a very large room, with forty pupils about +him. After salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a frame, which took +up the greatest part of both the length and breadth of the room, he said, +"Perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving +speculative knowledge, by practical and mechanical operations. But the world +would soon be sensible of its usefulness; and he flattered himself, that a more +noble, exalted thought never sprang in any other man's head. Every one knew how +laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by +his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a +little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, +mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study." +He then led me to the frame, about the sides, whereof all his pupils stood in +ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The +superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, +but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. +These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; +and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their +several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor +then desired me "to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work." The +pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there +were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, +the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded +six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared +upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might +make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were +scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the +engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square +bits of wood moved upside down. + +Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labour; and the +professor showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of +broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich +materials, to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences; which, +however, might be still improved, and much expedited, if the public would raise +a fund for making and employing five hundred such frames in Lagado, and oblige +the managers to contribute in common their several collections. + +He assured me "that this invention had employed all his thoughts from his +youth; that he had emptied the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the +strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books between the +numbers of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech." + +I made my humblest acknowledgment to this illustrious person, for his great +communicativeness; and promised, "if ever I had the good fortune to return to +my native country, that I would do him justice, as the sole inventor of this +wonderful machine;" the form and contrivance of which I desired leave to +delineate on paper, as in the figure here annexed. I told him, "although it +were the custom of our learned in Europe to steal inventions from each other, +who had thereby at least this advantage, that it became a controversy which was +the right owner; yet I would take such caution, that he should have the honour +entire, without a rival." + +We next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in +consultation upon improving that of their own country. + +The first project was, to shorten discourse, by cutting polysyllables into one, +and leaving out verbs and participles, because, in reality, all things +imaginable are but norms. + +The other project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; +and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health, as well as brevity. +For it is plain, that every word we speak is, in some degree, a diminution of +our lunge by corrosion, and, consequently, contributes to the shortening of our +lives. An expedient was therefore offered, "that since words are only names for +things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things +as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on." +And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well +as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and +illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion unless they might be +allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their +forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common +people. However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of +expressing themselves by things; which has only this inconvenience attending +it, that if a man's business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be +obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, +unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often +beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like +pedlars among us, who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, +open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their +implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave. + +But for short conversations, a man may carry implements in his pockets, and +under his arms, enough to supply him; and in his house, he cannot be at a loss. +Therefore the room where company meet who practise this art, is full of all +things, ready at hand, requisite to furnish matter for this kind of artificial +converse. + +Another great advantage proposed by this invention was, that it would serve as +a universal language, to be understood in all civilised nations, whose goods +and utensils are generally of the same kind, or nearly resembling, so that +their uses might easily be comprehended. And thus ambassadors would be +qualified to treat with foreign princes, or ministers of state, to whose +tongues they were utter strangers. + +I was at the mathematical school, where the master taught his pupils after a +method scarce imaginable to us in Europe. The proposition, and demonstration, +were fairly written on a thin wafer, with ink composed of a cephalic tincture. +This, the student was to swallow upon a fasting stomach, and for three days +following, eat nothing but bread and water. As the wafer digested, the tincture +mounted to his brain, bearing the proposition along with it. But the success +has not hitherto been answerable, partly by some error in the quantum or +composition, and partly by the perverseness of lads, to whom this bolus is so +nauseous, that they generally steal aside, and discharge it upwards, before it +can operate; neither have they been yet persuaded to use so long an abstinence, +as the prescription requires. + +CHAPTER VI. + +[A further account of the academy. The author proposes some improvements, which +are honourably received.] + +In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained; the +professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses, which is a +scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were +proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score +of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the +public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, eminent services; of +instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same +foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments persons +qualified to exercise them, with many other wild, impossible chimeras, that +never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the +old observation, "that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational, which +some philosophers have not maintained for truth." + +But, however, I shall so far do justice to this part of the Academy, as to +acknowledge that all of them were not so visionary. There was a most ingenious +doctor, who seemed to be perfectly versed in the whole nature and system of +government. This illustrious person had very usefully employed his studies, in +finding out effectual remedies for all diseases and corruptions to which the +several kinds of public administration are subject, by the vices or infirmities +of those who govern, as well as by the licentiousness of those who are to obey. +For instance: whereas all writers and reasoners have agreed, that there is a +strict universal resemblance between the natural and the political body; can +there be any thing more evident, than that the health of both must be +preserved, and the diseases cured, by the same prescriptions? It is allowed, +that senates and great councils are often troubled with redundant, ebullient, +and other peccant humours; with many diseases of the head, and more of the +heart; with strong convulsions, with grievous contractions of the nerves and +sinews in both hands, but especially the right; with spleen, flatus, vertigos, +and deliriums; with scrofulous tumours, full of fetid purulent matter; with +sour frothy ructations: with canine appetites, and crudeness of digestion, +besides many others, needless to mention. This doctor therefore proposed, "that +upon the meeting of the senate, certain physicians should attend it the three +first days of their sitting, and at the close of each day's debate feel the +pulses of every senator; after which, having maturely considered and consulted +upon the nature of the several maladies, and the methods of cure, they should +on the fourth day return to the senate house, attended by their apothecaries +stored with proper medicines; and before the members sat, administer to each of +them lenitives, aperitives, abstersives, corrosives, restringents, palliatives, +laxatives, cephalalgics, icterics, apophlegmatics, acoustics, as their several +cases required; and, according as these medicines should operate, repeat, +alter, or omit them, at the next meeting." + +This project could not be of any great expense to the public; and might in my +poor opinion, be of much use for the despatch of business, in those countries +where senates have any share in the legislative power; beget unanimity, shorten +debates, open a few mouths which are now closed, and close many more which are +now open; curb the petulancy of the young, and correct the positiveness of the +old; rouse the stupid, and damp the pert. + +Again: because it is a general complaint, that the favourites of princes are +troubled with short and weak memories; the same doctor proposed, "that whoever +attended a first minister, after having told his business, with the utmost +brevity and in the plainest words, should, at his departure, give the said +minister a tweak by the nose, or a kick in the belly, or tread on his corns, or +lug him thrice by both ears, or run a pin into his breech; or pinch his arm +black and blue, to prevent forgetfulness; and at every levee day, repeat the +same operation, till the business were done, or absolutely refused." + +He likewise directed, "that every senator in the great council of a nation, +after he had delivered his opinion, and argued in the defence of it, should be +obliged to give his vote directly contrary; because if that were done, the +result would infallibly terminate in the good of the public." + +When parties in a state are violent, he offered a wonderful contrivance to +reconcile them. The method is this: You take a hundred leaders of each party; +you dispose them into couples of such whose heads are nearest of a size; then +let two nice operators saw off the occiput of each couple at the same time, in +such a manner that the brain may be equally divided. Let the occiputs, thus cut +off, be interchanged, applying each to the head of his opposite party-man. It +seems indeed to be a work that requires some exactness, but the professor +assured us, "that if it were dexterously performed, the cure would be +infallible." For he argued thus: "that the two half brains being left to debate +the matter between themselves within the space of one skull, would soon come to +a good understanding, and produce that moderation, as well as regularity of +thinking, so much to be wished for in the heads of those, who imagine they come +into the world only to watch and govern its motion: and as to the difference of +brains, in quantity or quality, among those who are directors in faction, the +doctor assured us, from his own knowledge, that "it was a perfect trifle." + +I heard a very warm debate between two professors, about the most commodious +and effectual ways and means of raising money, without grieving the subject. +The first affirmed, "the justest method would be, to lay a certain tax upon +vices and folly; and the sum fixed upon every man to be rated, after the +fairest manner, by a jury of his neighbours." The second was of an opinion +directly contrary; "to tax those qualities of body and mind, for which men +chiefly value themselves; the rate to be more or less, according to the degrees +of excelling; the decision whereof should be left entirely to their own +breast." The highest tax was upon men who are the greatest favourites of the +other sex, and the assessments, according to the number and nature of the +favours they have received; for which, they are allowed to be their own +vouchers. Wit, valour, and politeness, were likewise proposed to be largely +taxed, and collected in the same manner, by every person's giving his own word +for the quantum of what he possessed. But as to honour, justice, wisdom, and +learning, they should not be taxed at all; because they are qualifications of +so singular a kind, that no man will either allow them in his neighbour or +value them in himself. + +The women were proposed to be taxed according to their beauty and skill in +dressing, wherein they had the same privilege with the men, to be determined by +their own judgment. But constancy, chastity, good sense, and good nature, were +not rated, because they would not bear the charge of collecting. + +To keep senators in the interest of the crown, it was proposed that the members +should raffle for employment; every man first taking an oath, and giving +security, that he would vote for the court, whether he won or not; after which, +the losers had, in their turn, the liberty of raffling upon the next vacancy. +Thus, hope and expectation would be kept alive; none would complain of broken +promises, but impute their disappointments wholly to fortune, whose shoulders +are broader and stronger than those of a ministry. + +Another professor showed me a large paper of instructions for discovering plots +and conspiracies against the government. He advised great statesmen to examine +into the diet of all suspected persons; their times of eating; upon which side +they lay in bed; with which hand they wipe their posteriors; take a strict view +of their excrements, and, from the colour, the odour, the taste, the +consistence, the crudeness or maturity of digestion, form a judgment of their +thoughts and designs; because men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, +as when they are at stool, which he found by frequent experiment; for, in such +conjunctures, when he used, merely as a trial, to consider which was the best +way of murdering the king, his ordure would have a tincture of green; but quite +different, when he thought only of raising an insurrection, or burning the +metropolis. + +The whole discourse was written with great acuteness, containing many +observations, both curious and useful for politicians; but, as I conceived, not +altogether complete. This I ventured to tell the author, and offered, if he +pleased, to supply him with some additions. He received my proposition with +more compliance than is usual among writers, especially those of the projecting +species, professing "he would be glad to receive further information." + +I told him, "that in the kingdom of Tribnia,~^ by the natives called Langdon,~^ +where I had sojourned some time in my travels, the bulk of the people consist +in a manner wholly of discoverers, witnesses, informers, accusers, prosecutors, +evidences, swearers, together with their several subservient and subaltern +instruments, all under the colours, the conduct, and the pay of ministers of +state, and their deputies. The plots, in that kingdom, are usually the +workmanship of those persons who desire to raise their own characters of +profound politicians; to restore new vigour to a crazy administration; to +stifle or divert general discontents; to fill their coffers with forfeitures; +and raise, or sink the opinion of public credit, as either shall best answer +their private advantage. It is first agreed and settled among them, what +suspected persons shall be accused of a plot; then, effectual care is taken to +secure all their letters and papers, and put the owners in chains. These papers +are delivered to a set of artists, very dexterous in finding out the mysterious +meanings of words, syllables, and letters: for instance, they can discover a +close stool, to signify a privy council; a flock of geese, a senate; a lame +dog, an invader; the plague, a standing army; a buzzard, a prime minister; the +gout, a high priest; a gibbet, a secretary of state; a chamber pot, a committee +of grandees; a sieve, a court lady; a broom, a revolution; a mouse-trap, an +employment; a bottomless pit, a treasury; a sink, a court; a cap and bells, a +favourite; a broken reed, a court of justice; an empty tun, a general; a +running sore, the administration.~^ + +"When this method fails, they have two others more effectual, which the learned +among them call acrostics and anagrams. First, they can decipher all initial +letters into political meanings. Thus N, shall signify a plot; B, a regiment of +horse; L, a fleet at sea; or, secondly, by transposing the letters of the +alphabet in any suspected paper, they can lay open the deepest designs of a +discontented party. So, for example, if I should say, in a letter to a friend, +'Our brother Tom has just got the piles,' a skilful decipherer would discover, +that the same letters which compose that sentence, may be analysed into the +following words, 'Resist -, a plot is brought home--The tour.' And this is the +anagrammatic method." + +The professor made me great acknowledgments for communicating these +observations, and promised to make honourable mention of me in his treatise. + +I saw nothing in this country that could invite me to a longer continuance, and +began to think of returning home to England. + +CHAPTER VII. + +[The author leaves Lagado: arrives at Maldonada. No ship ready. He takes a +short voyage to Glubbdubdrib. His reception by the governor.] + +The continent, of which this kingdom is apart, extends itself, as I have reason +to believe, eastward, to that unknown tract of America westward of California; +and north, to the Pacific Ocean, which is not above a hundred and fifty miles +from Lagado; where there is a good port, and much commerce with the great +island of Luggnagg, situated to the north-west about 29 degrees north latitude, +and 140 longitude. This island of Luggnagg stands south-eastward of Japan, +about a hundred leagues distant. There is a strict alliance between the +Japanese emperor and the king of Luggnagg; which affords frequent opportunities +of sailing from one island to the other. I determined therefore to direct my +course this way, in order to my return to Europe. I hired two mules, with a +guide, to show me the way, and carry my small baggage. I took leave of my noble +protector, who had shown me so much favour, and made me a generous present at +my departure. + +My journey was without any accident or adventure worth relating. When I arrived +at the port of Maldonada (for so it is called) there was no ship in the harbour +bound for Luggnagg, nor likely to be in some time. The town is about as large +as Portsmouth. I soon fell into some acquaintance, and was very hospitably +received. A gentleman of distinction said to me, "that since the ships bound +for Luggnagg could not be ready in less than a month, it might be no +disagreeable amusement for me to take a trip to the little island of +Glubbdubdrib, about five leagues off to the south-west." He offered himself and +a friend to accompany me, and that I should be provided with a small convenient +bark for the voyage. + +Glubbdubdrib, as nearly as I can interpret the word, signifies the island of +sorcerers or magicians. It is about one third as large as the Isle of Wight, +and extremely fruitful: it is governed by the head of a certain tribe, who are +all magicians. This tribe marries only among each other, and the eldest in +succession is prince or governor. He has a noble palace, and a park of about +three thousand acres, surrounded by a wall of hewn stone twenty feet high. In +this park are several small enclosures for cattle, corn, and gardening. + +The governor and his family are served and attended by domestics of a kind +somewhat unusual. By his skill in necromancy he has a power of calling whom he +pleases from the dead, and commanding their service for twenty-four hours, but +no longer; nor can he call the same persons up again in less than three months, +except upon very extraordinary occasions. + +When we arrived at the island, which was about eleven in the morning, one of +the gentlemen who accompanied me went to the governor, and desired admittance +for a stranger, who came on purpose to have the honour of attending on his +highness. This was immediately granted, and we all three entered the gate of +the palace between two rows of guards, armed and dressed after a very antic +manner, and with something in their countenances that made my flesh creep with +a horror I cannot express. We passed through several apartments, between +servants of the same sort, ranked on each side as before, till we came to the +chamber of presence; where, after three profound obeisances, and a few general +questions, we were permitted to sit on three stools, near the lowest step of +his highness's throne. He understood the language of Balnibarbi, although it +was different from that of this island. He desired me to give him some account +of my travels; and, to let me see that I should be treated without ceremony, he +dismissed all his attendants with a turn of his finger; at which, to my great +astonishment, they vanished in an instant, like visions in a dream when we +awake on a sudden. I could not recover myself in some time, till the governor +assured me, "that I should receive no hurt:" and observing my two companions to +be under no concern, who had been often entertained in the same manner, I began +to take courage, and related to his highness a short history of my several +adventures; yet not without some hesitation, and frequently looking behind me +to the place where I had seen those domestic spectres. I had the honour to dine +with the governor, where a new set of ghosts served up the meat, and waited at +table. I now observed myself to be less terrified than I had been in the +morning. I stayed till sunset, but humbly desired his highness to excuse me for +not accepting his invitation of lodging in the palace. My two friends and I lay +at a private house in the town adjoining, which is the capital of this little +island; and the next morning we returned to pay our duty to the governor, as he +was pleased to command us. + +After this manner we continued in the island for ten days, most part of every +day with the governor, and at night in our lodging. I soon grew so familiarized +to the sight of spirits, that after the third or fourth time they gave me no +emotion at all: or, if I had any apprehensions left, my curiosity prevailed +over them. For his highness the governor ordered me "to call up whatever +persons I would choose to name, and in whatever numbers, among all the dead +from the beginning of the world to the present time, and command them to answer +any questions I should think fit to ask; with this condition, that my questions +must be confined within the compass of the times they lived in. And one thing I +might depend upon, that they would certainly tell me the truth, for lying was a +talent of no use in the lower world." + +I made my humble acknowledgments to his highness for so great a favour. We were +in a chamber, from whence there was a fair prospect into the park. And because +my first inclination was to be entertained with scenes of pomp and +magnificence, I desired to see Alexander the Great at the head of his army, +just after the battle of Arbela: which, upon a motion of the governor's finger, +immediately appeared in a large field, under the window where we stood. +Alexander was called up into the room: it was with great difficulty that I +understood his Greek, and had but little of my own. He assured me upon his +honour "that he was not poisoned, but died of a bad fever by excessive +drinking." + +Next, I saw Hannibal passing the Alps, who told me "he had not a drop of +vinegar in his camp." + +I saw Caesar and Pompey at the head of their troops, just ready to engage. I +saw the former, in his last great triumph. I desired that the senate of Rome +might appear before me, in one large chamber, and an assembly of somewhat a +later age in counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an assembly of +heroes and demigods; the other, a knot of pedlars, pick-pockets, highwayman, +and bullies. + +The governor, at my request, gave the sign for Caesar and Brutus to advance +towards us. I was struck with a profound veneration at the sight of Brutus, and +could easily discover the most consummate virtue, the greatest intrepidity and +firmness of mind, the truest love of his country, and general benevolence for +mankind, in every lineament of his countenance. I observed, with much pleasure, +that these two persons were in good intelligence with each other; and Caesar +freely confessed to me, "that the greatest actions of his own life were not +equal, by many degrees, to the glory of taking it away." I had the honour to +have much conversation with Brutus; and was told, "that his ancestor Junius, +Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the younger, Sir Thomas More, and himself were +perpetually together:" a sextumvirate, to which all the ages of the world +cannot add a seventh. + +It would be tedious to trouble the reader with relating what vast numbers of +illustrious persons were called up to gratify that insatiable desire I had to +see the world in every period of antiquity placed before me. I chiefly fed mine +eyes with beholding the destroyers of tyrants and usurpers, and the restorers +of liberty to oppressed and injured nations. But it is impossible to express +the satisfaction I received in my own mind, after such a manner as to make it a +suitable entertainment to the reader. + +CHAPTER VIII. + +[A further account of Glubbdubdrib. Ancient and modern history corrected.] + +Having a desire to see those ancients who were most renowned for wit and +learning, I set apart one day on purpose. I proposed that Homer and Aristotle +might appear at the head of all their commentators; but these were so numerous, +that some hundreds were forced to attend in the court, and outward rooms of the +palace. I knew, and could distinguish those two heroes, at first sight, not +only from the crowd, but from each other. Homer was the taller and comelier +person of the two, walked very erect for one of his age, and his eyes were the +most quick and piercing I ever beheld. Aristotle stooped much, and made use of +a staff. His visage was meagre, his hair lank and thin, and his voice hollow. I +soon discovered that both of them were perfect strangers to the rest of the +company, and had never seen or heard of them before; and I had a whisper from a +ghost who shall be nameless, "that these commentators always kept in the most +distant quarters from their principals, in the lower world, through a +consciousness of shame and guilt, because they had so horribly misrepresented +the meaning of those authors to posterity." I introduced Didymus and Eustathius +to Homer, and prevailed on him to treat them better than perhaps they deserved, +for he soon found they wanted a genius to enter into the spirit of a poet. But +Aristotle was out of all patience with the account I gave him of Scotus and +Ramus, as I presented them to him; and he asked them, "whether the rest of the +tribe were as great dunces as themselves?" + +I then desired the governor to call up Descartes and Gassendi, with whom I +prevailed to explain their systems to Aristotle. This great philosopher freely +acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy, because he proceeded in +many things upon conjecture, as all men must do; and he found that Gassendi, +who had made the doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the +vortices of Descartes, were equally to be exploded. He predicted the same fate +to ATTRACTION, whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters. He said, +"that new systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every +age; and even those, who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical +principles, would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue when +that was determined." + +I spent five days in conversing with many others of the ancient learned. I saw +most of the first Roman emperors. I prevailed on the governor to call up +Heliogabalus's cooks to dress us a dinner, but they could not show us much of +their skill, for want of materials. A helot of Agesilaus made us a dish of +Spartan broth, but I was not able to get down a second spoonful. + +The two gentlemen, who conducted me to the island, were pressed by their +private affairs to return in three days, which I employed in seeing some of the +modern dead, who had made the greatest figure, for two or three hundred years +past, in our own and other countries of Europe; and having been always a great +admirer of old illustrious families, I desired the governor would call up a +dozen or two of kings, with their ancestors in order for eight or nine +generations. But my disappointment was grievous and unexpected. For, instead of +a long train with royal diadems, I saw in one family two fiddlers, three spruce +courtiers, and an Italian prelate. In another, a barber, an abbot, and two +cardinals. I have too great a veneration for crowned heads, to dwell any longer +on so nice a subject. But as to counts, marquises, dukes, earls, and the like, +I was not so scrupulous. And I confess, it was not without some pleasure, that +I found myself able to trace the particular features, by which certain families +are distinguished, up to their originals. I could plainly discover whence one +family derives a long chin; why a second has abounded with knaves for two +generations, and fools for two more; why a third happened to be crack-brained, +and a fourth to be sharpers; whence it came, what Polydore Virgil says of a +certain great house, Nec vir fortis, nec foemina casta; how cruelty, falsehood, +and cowardice, grew to be characteristics by which certain families are +distinguished as much as by their coats of arms; who first brought the pox into +a noble house, which has lineally descended scrofulous tumours to their +posterity. Neither could I wonder at all this, when I saw such an interruption +of lineages, by pages, lackeys, valets, coachmen, gamesters, fiddlers, players, +captains, and pickpockets. + +I was chiefly disgusted with modern history. For having strictly examined all +the persons of greatest name in the courts of princes, for a hundred years +past, I found how the world had been misled by prostitute writers, to ascribe +the greatest exploits in war, to cowards; the wisest counsel, to fools; +sincerity, to flatterers; Roman virtue, to betrayers of their country; piety, +to atheists; chastity, to sodomites; truth, to informers: how many innocent and +excellent persons had been condemned to death or banishment by the practising +of great ministers upon the corruption of judges, and the malice of factions: +how many villains had been exalted to the highest places of trust, power, +dignity, and profit: how great a share in the motions and events of courts, +councils, and senates might be challenged by bawds, whores, pimps, parasites, +and buffoons. How low an opinion I had of human wisdom and integrity, when I +was truly informed of the springs and motives of great enterprises and +revolutions in the world, and of the contemptible accidents to which they owed +their success. + +Here I discovered the roguery and ignorance of those who pretend to write +anecdotes, or secret history; who send so many kings to their graves with a cup +of poison; will repeat the discourse between a prince and chief minister, where +no witness was by; unlock the thoughts and cabinets of ambassadors and +secretaries of state; and have the perpetual misfortune to be mistaken. Here I +discovered the true causes of many great events that have surprised the world; +how a whore can govern the back-stairs, the back-stairs a council, and the +council a senate. A general confessed, in my presence, "that he got a victory +purely by the force of cowardice and ill conduct;" and an admiral, "that, for +want of proper intelligence, he beat the enemy, to whom he intended to betray +the fleet." Three kings protested to me, "that in their whole reigns they never +did once prefer any person of merit, unless by mistake, or treachery of some +minister in whom they confided; neither would they do it if they were to live +again:" and they showed, with great strength of reason, "that the royal throne +could not be supported without corruption, because that positive, confident, +restiff temper, which virtue infused into a man, was a perpetual clog to public +business." + +I had the curiosity to inquire in a particular manner, by what methods great +numbers had procured to themselves high titles of honour, and prodigious +estates; and I confined my inquiry to a very modern period: however, without +grating upon present times, because I would be sure to give no offence even to +foreigners (for I hope the reader need not be told, that I do not in the least +intend my own country, in what I say upon this occasion,) a great number of +persons concerned were called up; and, upon a very slight examination, +discovered such a scene of infamy, that I cannot reflect upon it without some +seriousness. Perjury, oppression, subornation, fraud, pandarism, and the like +infirmities, were among the most excusable arts they had to mention; and for +these I gave, as it was reasonable, great allowance. But when some confessed +they owed their greatness and wealth to sodomy, or incest; others, to the +prostituting of their own wives and daughters; others, to the betraying of +their country or their prince; some, to poisoning; more to the perverting of +justice, in order to destroy the innocent, I hope I may be pardoned, if these +discoveries inclined me a little to abate of that profound veneration, which I +am naturally apt to pay to persons of high rank, who ought to be treated with +the utmost respect due to their sublime dignity, by us their inferiors. + +I had often read of some great services done to princes and states, and desired +to see the persons by whom those services were performed. Upon inquiry I was +told, "that their names were to be found on no record, except a few of them, +whom history has represented as the vilest of rogues and traitors." As to the +rest, I had never once heard of them. They all appeared with dejected looks, +and in the meanest habit; most of them telling me, "they died in poverty and +disgrace, and the rest on a scaffold or a gibbet." + +Among others, there was one person, whose case appeared a little singular. He +had a youth about eighteen years old standing by his side. He told me, "he had +for many years been commander of a ship; and in the sea fight at Actium had the +good fortune to break through the enemy's great line of battle, sink three of +their capital ships, and take a fourth, which was the sole cause of Antony's +flight, and of the victory that ensued; that the youth standing by him, his +only son, was killed in the action." He added, "that upon the confidence of +some merit, the war being at an end, he went to Rome, and solicited at the +court of Augustus to be preferred to a greater ship, whose commander had been +killed; but, without any regard to his pretensions, it was given to a boy who +had never seen the sea, the son of Libertina, who waited on one of the +emperor's mistresses. Returning back to his own vessel, he was charged with +neglect of duty, and the ship given to a favourite page of Publicola, the +vice-admiral; whereupon he retired to a poor farm at a great distance from +Rome, and there ended his life." I was so curious to know the truth of this +story, that I desired Agrippa might be called, who was admiral in that fight. +He appeared, and confirmed the whole account: but with much more advantage to +the captain, whose modesty had extenuated or concealed a great part of his +merit. + +I was surprised to find corruption grown so high and so quick in that empire, +by the force of luxury so lately introduced; which made me less wonder at many +parallel cases in other countries, where vices of all kinds have reigned so +much longer, and where the whole praise, as well as pillage, has been engrossed +by the chief commander, who perhaps had the least title to either. + +As every person called up made exactly the same appearance he had done in the +world, it gave me melancholy reflections to observe how much the race of human +kind was degenerated among us within these hundred years past; how the pox, +under all its consequences and denominations had altered every lineament of an +English countenance; shortened the size of bodies, unbraced the nerves, relaxed +the sinews and muscles, introduced a sallow complexion, and rendered the flesh +loose and rancid. + +I descended so low, as to desire some English yeoman of the old stamp might be +summoned to appear; once so famous for the simplicity of their manners, diet, +and dress; for justice in their dealings; for their true spirit of liberty; for +their valour, and love of their country. Neither could I be wholly unmoved, +after comparing the living with the dead, when I considered how all these pure +native virtues were prostituted for a piece of money by their grand-children; +who, in selling their votes and managing at elections, have acquired every vice +and corruption that can possibly be learned in a court. + +CHAPTER IX. + +[The author returns to Maldonada. Sails to the kingdom of Luggnagg. The author +confined. He is sent for to court. The manner of his admittance. The king's +great lenity to his subjects.] + +The day of our departure being come, I took leave of his highness, the Governor +of Glubbdubdrib, and returned with my two companions to Maldonada, where, after +a fortnight's waiting, a ship was ready to sail for Luggnagg. The two +gentlemen, and some others, were so generous and kind as to furnish me with +provisions, and see me on board. I was a month in this voyage. We had one +violent storm, and were under a necessity of steering westward to get into the +trade wind, which holds for above sixty leagues. On the 21st of April, 1708, we +sailed into the river of Clumegnig, which is a seaport town, at the south-east +point of Luggnagg. We cast anchor within a league of the town, and made a +signal for a pilot. Two of them came on board in less than half an hour, by +whom we were guided between certain shoals and rocks, which are very dangerous +in the passage, to a large basin, where a fleet may ride in safety within a +cable's length of the town-wall. + +Some of our sailors, whether out of treachery or inadvertence, had informed the +pilots "that I was a stranger, and great traveller;" whereof these gave notice +to a custom-house officer, by whom I was examined very strictly upon my +landing. This officer spoke to me in the language of Balnibarbi, which, by the +force of much commerce, is generally understood in that town, especially by +seamen and those employed in the customs. I gave him a short account of some +particulars, and made my story as plausible and consistent as I could; but I +thought it necessary to disguise my country, and call myself a Hollander; +because my intentions were for Japan, and I knew the Dutch were the only +Europeans permitted to enter into that kingdom. I therefore told the officer, +"that having been shipwrecked on the coast of Balnibarbi, and cast on a rock, I +was received up into Laputa, or the flying island (of which he had often +heard), and was now endeavouring to get to Japan, whence I might find a +convenience of returning to my own country." The officer said, "I must be +confined till he could receive orders from court, for which he would write +immediately, and hoped to receive an answer in a fortnight." I was carried to a +convenient lodging with a sentry placed at the door; however, I had the liberty +of a large garden, and was treated with humanity enough, being maintained all +the time at the king's charge. I was invited by several persons, chiefly out of +curiosity, because it was reported that I came from countries very remote, of +which they had never heard. + +I hired a young man, who came in the same ship, to be an interpreter; he was a +native of Luggnagg, but had lived some years at Maldonada, and was a perfect +master of both languages. By his assistance, I was able to hold a conversation +with those who came to visit me; but this consisted only of their questions, +and my answers. + +The despatch came from court about the time we expected. It contained a warrant +for conducting me and my retinue to Traldragdubh, or Trildrogdrib (for it is +pronounced both ways as near as I can remember), by a party of ten horse. All +my retinue was that poor lad for an interpreter, whom I persuaded into my +service, and, at my humble request, we had each of us a mule to ride on. A +messenger was despatched half a day's journey before us, to give the king +notice of my approach, and to desire, "that his majesty would please to appoint +a day and hour, when it would by his gracious pleasure that I might have the +honour to lick the dust before his footstool." This is the court style, and I +found it to be more than matter of form: for, upon my admittance two days after +my arrival, I was commanded to crawl upon my belly, and lick the floor as I +advanced; but, on account of my being a stranger, care was taken to have it +made so clean, that the dust was not offensive. However, this was a peculiar +grace, not allowed to any but persons of the highest rank, when they desire an +admittance. Nay, sometimes the floor is strewed with dust on purpose, when the +person to be admitted happens to have powerful enemies at court; and I have +seen a great lord with his mouth so crammed, that when he had crept to the +proper distance from the throne; he was not able to speak a word. Neither is +there any remedy; because it is capital for those, who receive an audience to +spit or wipe their mouths in his majesty's presence. There is indeed another +custom, which I cannot altogether approve of: when the king has a mind to put +any of his nobles to death in a gentle indulgent manner, he commands the floor +to be strewed with a certain brown powder of a deadly composition, which being +licked up, infallibly kills him in twenty-four hours. But in justice to this +prince's great clemency, and the care he has of his subjects' lives (wherein it +were much to be wished that the Monarchs of Europe would imitate him), it must +be mentioned for his honour, that strict orders are given to have the infected +parts of the floor well washed after every such execution, which, if his +domestics neglect, they are in danger of incurring his royal displeasure. I +myself heard him give directions, that one of his pages should be whipped, +whose turn it was to give notice about washing the floor after an execution, +but maliciously had omitted it; by which neglect a young lord of great hopes, +coming to an audience, was unfortunately poisoned, although the king at that +time had no design against his life. But this good prince was so gracious as to +forgive the poor page his whipping, upon promise that he would do so no more, +without special orders. + +To return from this digression. When I had crept within four yards of the +throne, I raised myself gently upon my knees, and then striking my forehead +seven times against the ground, I pronounced the following words, as they had +been taught me the night before, Inckpling gloffthrobb squut serummblhiop +mlashnalt zwin tnodbalkuffh slhiophad gurdlubh asht. This is the compliment, +established by the laws of the land, for all persons admitted to the king's +presence. It may be rendered into English thus: "May your celestial majesty +outlive the sun, eleven moons and a half!" To this the king returned some +answer, which, although I could not understand, yet I replied as I had been +directed: Fluft drin yalerick dwuldom prastrad mirpush, which properly +signifies, "My tongue is in the mouth of my friend;" and by this expression was +meant, that I desired leave to bring my interpreter; whereupon the young man +already mentioned was accordingly introduced, by whose intervention I answered +as many questions as his majesty could put in above an hour. I spoke in the +Balnibarbian tongue, and my interpreter delivered my meaning in that of +Luggnagg. + +The king was much delighted with my company, and ordered his bliffmarklub, or +high-chamberlain, to appoint a lodging in the court for me and my interpreter; +with a daily allowance for my table, and a large purse of gold for my common +expenses. + +I staid three months in this country, out of perfect obedience to his majesty; +who was pleased highly to favour me, and made me very honourable offers. But I +thought it more consistent with prudence and justice to pass the remainder of +my days with my wife and family. + +CHAPTER X. + +[The Luggnaggians commended. A particular description of the Struldbrugs, with +many conversations between the author and some eminent persons upon that +subject.] + +The Luggnaggians are a polite and generous people; and although they are not +without some share of that pride which is peculiar to all Eastern countries, +yet they show themselves courteous to strangers, especially such who are +countenanced by the court. I had many acquaintance, and among persons of the +best fashion; and being always attended by my interpreter, the conversation we +had was not disagreeable. + +One day, in much good company, I was asked by a person of quality, "whether I +had seen any of their struldbrugs, or immortals?" I said, "I had not;" and +desired he would explain to me "what he meant by such an appellation, applied +to a mortal creature." He told me "that sometimes, though very rarely, a child +happened to be born in a family, with a red circular spot in the forehead, +directly over the left eyebrow, which was an infallible mark that it should +never die." The spot, as he described it, "was about the compass of a silver +threepence, but in the course of time grew larger, and changed its colour; for +at twelve years old it became green, so continued till five and twenty, then +turned to a deep blue: at five and forty it grew coal black, and as large as an +English shilling; but never admitted any further alteration." He said, "these +births were so rare, that he did not believe there could be above eleven +hundred struldbrugs, of both sexes, in the whole kingdom; of which he computed +about fifty in the metropolis, and, among the rest, a young girl born; about +three years ago: that these productions were not peculiar to any family, but a +mere effect of chance; and the children of the struldbrugs themselves were +equally mortal with the rest of the people." + +I freely own myself to have been struck with inexpressible delight, upon +hearing this account: and the person who gave it me happening to understand the +Balnibarbian language, which I spoke very well, I could not forbear breaking +out into expressions, perhaps a little too extravagant. I cried out, as in a +rapture, "Happy nation, where every child hath at least a chance for being +immortal! Happy people, who enjoy so many living examples of ancient virtue, +and have masters ready to instruct them in the wisdom of all former ages! but +happiest, beyond all comparison, are those excellent struldbrugs, who, being +born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free +and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the +continual apprehensions of death!" I discovered my admiration that I had not +observed any of these illustrious persons at court; the black spot on the +forehead being so remarkable a distinction, that I could not have easily +overlooked it: and it was impossible that his majesty, a most judicious prince, +should not provide himself with a good number of such wise and able +counsellors. Yet perhaps the virtue of those reverend sages was too strict for +the corrupt and libertine manners of a court: and we often find by experience, +that young men are too opinionated and volatile to be guided by the sober +dictates of their seniors. However, since the king was pleased to allow me +access to his royal person, I was resolved, upon the very first occasion, to +deliver my opinion to him on this matter freely and at large, by the help of my +interpreter; and whether he would please to take my advice or not, yet in one +thing I was determined, that his majesty having frequently offered me an +establishment in this country, I would, with great thankfulness, accept the +favour, and pass my life here in the conversation of those superior beings the +struldbrugs, if they would please to admit me." + +The gentleman to whom I addressed my discourse, because (as I have already +observed) he spoke the language of Balnibarbi, said to me, with a sort of a +smile which usually arises from pity to the ignorant, "that he was glad of any +occasion to keep me among them, and desired my permission to explain to the +company what I had spoke." He did so, and they talked together for some time in +their own language, whereof I understood not a syllable, neither could I +observe by their countenances, what impression my discourse had made on them. +After a short silence, the same person told me, "that his friends and mine (so +he thought fit to express himself) were very much pleased with the judicious +remarks I had made on the great happiness and advantages of immortal life, and +they were desirous to know, in a particular manner, what scheme of living I +should have formed to myself, if it had fallen to my lot to have been born a +struldbrug." + +I answered, "it was easy to be eloquent on so copious and delightful a subject, +especially to me, who had been often apt to amuse myself with visions of what I +should do, if I were a king, a general, or a great lord: and upon this very +case, I had frequently run over the whole system how I should employ myself, +and pass the time, if I were sure to live for ever. + +"That, if it had been my good fortune to come into the world a struldbrug, as +soon as I could discover my own happiness, by understanding the difference +between life and death, I would first resolve, by all arts and methods, +whatsoever, to procure myself riches. In the pursuit of which, by thrift and +management, I might reasonably expect, in about two hundred years, to be the +wealthiest man in the kingdom. In the second place, I would, from my earliest +youth, apply myself to the study of arts and sciences, by which I should arrive +in time to excel all others in learning. Lastly, I would carefully record every +action and event of consequence, that happened in the public, impartially draw +the characters of the several successions of princes and great ministers of +state, with my own observations on every point. I would exactly set down the +several changes in customs, language, fashions of dress, diet, and diversions. +By all which acquirements, I should be a living treasure of knowledge and +wisdom, and certainly become the oracle of the nation. + +"I would never marry after threescore, but live in a hospitable manner, yet +still on the saving side. I would entertain myself in forming and directing the +minds of hopeful young men, by convincing them, from my own remembrance, +experience, and observation, fortified by numerous examples, of the usefulness +of virtue in public and private life. But my choice and constant companions +should be a set of my own immortal brotherhood; among whom, I would elect a +dozen from the most ancient, down to my own contemporaries. Where any of these +wanted fortunes, I would provide them with convenient lodges round my own +estate, and have some of them always at my table; only mingling a few of the +most valuable among you mortals, whom length of time would harden me to lose +with little or no reluctance, and treat your posterity after the same manner; +just as a man diverts himself with the annual succession of pinks and tulips in +his garden, without regretting the loss of those which withered the preceding +year. + +"These struldbrugs and I would mutually communicate our observations and +memorials, through the course of time; remark the several gradations by which +corruption steals into the world, and oppose it in every step, by giving +perpetual warning and instruction to mankind; which, added to the strong +influence of our own example, would probably prevent that continual degeneracy +of human nature so justly complained of in all ages. + +"Add to this, the pleasure of seeing the various revolutions of states and +empires; the changes in the lower and upper world; ancient cities in ruins, and +obscure villages become the seats of kings; famous rivers lessening into +shallow brooks; the ocean leaving one coast dry, and overwhelming another; the +discovery of many countries yet unknown; barbarity overrunning the politest +nations, and the most barbarous become civilized. I should then see the +discovery of the longitude, the perpetual motion, the universal medicine, and +many other great inventions, brought to the utmost perfection. + +"What wonderful discoveries should we make in astronomy, by outliving and +confirming our own predictions; by observing the progress and return of comets, +with the changes of motion in the sun, moon, and stars!" + +I enlarged upon many other topics, which the natural desire of endless life, +and sublunary happiness, could easily furnish me with. When I had ended, and +the sum of my discourse had been interpreted, as before, to the rest of the +company, there was a good deal of talk among them in the language of the +country, not without some laughter at my expense. At last, the same gentleman +who had been my interpreter, said, "he was desired by the rest to set me right +in a few mistakes, which I had fallen into through the common imbecility of +human nature, and upon that allowance was less answerable for them. That this +breed of struldbrugs was peculiar to their country, for there were no such +people either in Balnibarbi or Japan, where he had the honour to be ambassador +from his majesty, and found the natives in both those kingdoms very hard to +believe that the fact was possible: and it appeared from my astonishment when +he first mentioned the matter to me, that I received it as a thing wholly new, +and scarcely to be credited. That in the two kingdoms above mentioned, where, +during his residence, he had conversed very much, he observed long life to be +the universal desire and wish of mankind. That whoever had one foot in the +grave was sure to hold back the other as strongly as he could. That the oldest +had still hopes of living one day longer, and looked on death as the greatest +evil, from which nature always prompted him to retreat. Only in this island of +Luggnagg the appetite for living was not so eager, from the continual example +of the struldbrugs before their eyes. + +"That the system of living contrived by me, was unreasonable and unjust; +because it supposed a perpetuity of youth, health, and vigour, which no man +could be so foolish to hope, however extravagant he may be in his wishes. That +the question therefore was not, whether a man would choose to be always in the +prime of youth, attended with prosperity and health; but how he would pass a +perpetual life under all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along +with it. For although few men will avow their desires of being immortal, upon +such hard conditions, yet in the two kingdoms before mentioned, of Balnibarbi +and Japan, he observed that every man desired to put off death some time +longer, let it approach ever so late: and he rarely heard of any man who died +willingly, except he were incited by the extremity of grief or torture. And he +appealed to me, whether in those countries I had travelled, as well as my own, +I had not observed the same general disposition." + +After this preface, he gave me a particular account of the struldbrugs among +them. He said, "they commonly acted like mortals till about thirty years old; +after which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both +till they came to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession: for +otherwise, there not being above two or three of that species born in an age, +they were too few to form a general observation by. When they came to fourscore +years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not +only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which +arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only +opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of +friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below +their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions. +But those objects against which their envy seems principally directed, are the +vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the +former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and +whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others have gone to a +harbour of rest to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no +remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and +middle-age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars +of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition, than upon their best +recollections. The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to +dotage, and entirely lose their memories; these meet with more pity and +assistance, because they want many bad qualities which abound in others. + +"If a struldbrug happen to marry one of his own kind, the marriage is dissolved +of course, by the courtesy of the kingdom, as soon as the younger of the two +comes to be fourscore; for the law thinks it a reasonable indulgence, that +those who are condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual +continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a +wife. + +"As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are looked on as +dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates; only a small +pittance is reserved for their support; and the poor ones are maintained at the +public charge. After that period, they are held incapable of any employment of +trust or profit; they cannot purchase lands, or take leases; neither are they +allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal, not even for +the decision of meers and bounds. + +"At ninety, they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no +distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish +or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue, without +increasing or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellation of +things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends +and relations. For the same reason, they never can amuse themselves with +reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning +of a sentence to the end; and by this defect, they are deprived of the only +entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable. + +The language of this country being always upon the flux, the struldbrugs of one +age do not understand those of another; neither are they able, after two +hundred years, to hold any conversation (farther than by a few general words) +with their neighbours the mortals; and thus they lie under the disadvantage of +living like foreigners in their own country." + +This was the account given me of the struldbrugs, as near as I can remember. I +afterwards saw five or six of different ages, the youngest not above two +hundred years old, who were brought to me at several times by some of my +friends; but although they were told, "that I was a great traveller, and had +seen all the world," they had not the least curiosity to ask me a question; +only desired "I would give them slumskudask," or a token of remembrance; which +is a modest way of begging, to avoid the law, that strictly forbids it, because +they are provided for by the public, although indeed with a very scanty +allowance. + +They are despised and hated by all sorts of people. When one of them is born, +it is reckoned ominous, and their birth is recorded very particularly so that +you may know their age by consulting the register, which, however, has not been +kept above a thousand years past, or at least has been destroyed by time or +public disturbances. But the usual way of computing how old they are, is by +asking them what kings or great persons they can remember, and then consulting +history; for infallibly the last prince in their mind did not begin his reign +after they were fourscore years old. + +They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld; and the women more horrible +than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired +an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years, which is not +to be described; and among half a dozen, I soon distinguished which was the +eldest, although there was not above a century or two between them. + +The reader will easily believe, that from what I had hear and seen, my keen +appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated. I grew heartily ashamed of the +pleasing visions I had formed; and thought no tyrant could invent a death into +which I would not run with pleasure, from such a life. The king heard of all +that had passed between me and my friends upon this occasion, and rallied me +very pleasantly; wishing I could send a couple of struldbrugs to my own +country, to arm our people against the fear of death; but this, it seems, is +forbidden by the fundamental laws of the kingdom, or else I should have been +well content with the trouble and expense of transporting them. + +I could not but agree, that the laws of this kingdom relative to the +struldbrugs were founded upon the strongest reasons, and such as any other +country would be under the necessity of enacting, in the like circumstances. +Otherwise, as avarice is the necessary consequence of old age, those immortals +would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil +power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the +public. + +CHAPTER XI. + +[The author leaves Luggnagg, and sails to Japan. From thence he returns in a +Dutch ship to Amsterdam, and from Amsterdam to England.] + +I thought this account of the struldbrugs might be some entertainment to the +reader, because it seems to be a little out of the common way; at least I do +not remember to have met the like in any book of travels that has come to my +hands: and if I am deceived, my excuse must be, that it is necessary for +travellers who describe the same country, very often to agree in dwelling on +the same particulars, without deserving the censure of having borrowed or +transcribed from those who wrote before them. + +There is indeed a perpetual commerce between this kingdom and the great empire +of Japan; and it is very probable, that the Japanese authors may have given +some account of the struldbrugs; but my stay in Japan was so short, and I was +so entirely a stranger to the language, that I was not qualified to make any +inquiries. But I hope the Dutch, upon this notice, will be curious and able +enough to supply my defects. + +His majesty having often pressed me to accept some employment in his court, and +finding me absolutely determined to return to my native country, was pleased to +give me his license to depart; and honoured me with a letter of recommendation, +under his own hand, to the Emperor of Japan. He likewise presented me with four +hundred and forty-four large pieces of gold (this nation delighting in even +numbers), and a red diamond, which I sold in England for eleven hundred pounds. + +On the 6th of May, 1709, I took a solemn leave of his majesty, and all my +friends. This prince was so gracious as to order a guard to conduct me to +Glanguenstald, which is a royal port to the south- west part of the island. In +six days I found a vessel ready to carry me to Japan, and spent fifteen days in +the voyage. We landed at a small port-town called Xamoschi, situated on the +south-east part of Japan; the town lies on the western point, where there is a +narrow strait leading northward into along arm of the sea, upon the north-west +part of which, Yedo, the metropolis, stands. At landing, I showed the +custom-house officers my letter from the king of Luggnagg to his imperial +majesty. They knew the seal perfectly well; it was as broad as the palm of my +hand. The impression was, A KING LIFTING UP A LAME BEGGAR FROM THE EARTH. The +magistrates of the town, hearing of my letter, received me as a public +minister. They provided me with carriages and servants, and bore my charges to +Yedo; where I was admitted to an audience, and delivered my letter, which was +opened with great ceremony, and explained to the Emperor by an interpreter, who +then gave me notice, by his majesty's order, "that I should signify my request, +and, whatever it were, it should be granted, for the sake of his royal brother +of Luggnagg." This interpreter was a person employed to transact affairs with +the Hollanders. He soon conjectured, by my countenance, that I was a European, +and therefore repeated his majesty's commands in Low Dutch, which he spoke +perfectly well. I answered, as I had before determined, "that I was a Dutch +merchant, shipwrecked in a very remote country, whence I had travelled by sea +and land to Luggnagg, and then took shipping for Japan; where I knew my +countrymen often traded, and with some of these I hoped to get an opportunity +of returning into Europe: I therefore most humbly entreated his royal favour, +to give order that I should be conducted in safety to Nangasac." To this I +added another petition, "that for the sake of my patron the king of Luggnagg, +his majesty would condescend to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed on my +countrymen, of trampling upon the crucifix: because I had been thrown into his +kingdom by my misfortunes, without any intention of trading." When this latter +petition was interpreted to the Emperor, he seemed a little surprised; and +said, "he believed I was the first of my countrymen who ever made any scruple +in this point; and that he began to doubt, whether I was a real Hollander, or +not; but rather suspected I must be a Christian. However, for the reasons I had +offered, but chiefly to gratify the king of Luggnagg by an uncommon mark of his +favour, he would comply with the singularity of my humour; but the affair must +be managed with dexterity, and his officers should be commanded to let me pass, +as it were by forgetfulness. For he assured me, that if the secret should be +discovered by my countrymen the Dutch, they would cut my throat in the voyage." +I returned my thanks, by the interpreter, for so unusual a favour; and some +troops being at that time on their march to Nangasac, the commanding officer +had orders to convey me safe thither, with particular instructions about the +business of the crucifix. + +On the 9th day of June, 1709, I arrived at Nangasac, after a very long and +troublesome journey. I soon fell into the company of some Dutch sailors +belonging to the Amboyna, of Amsterdam, a stout ship of 450 tons. I had lived +long in Holland, pursuing my studies at Leyden, and I spoke Dutch well. The +seamen soon knew whence I came last: they were curious to inquire into my +voyages and course of life. I made up a story as short and probable as I could, +but concealed the greatest part. I knew many persons in Holland. I was able to +invent names for my parents, whom I pretended to be obscure people in the +province of Gelderland. I would have given the captain (one Theodorus Vangrult) +what he pleased to ask for my voyage to Holland; but understanding I was a +surgeon, he was contented to take half the usual rate, on condition that I +would serve him in the way of my calling. Before we took shipping, I was often +asked by some of the crew, whether I had performed the ceremony above +mentioned? I evaded the question by general answers; "that I had satisfied the +Emperor and court in all particulars." However, a malicious rogue of a skipper +went to an officer, and pointing to me, told him, "I had not yet trampled on +the crucifix;" but the other, who had received instructions to let me pass, +gave the rascal twenty strokes on the shoulders with a bamboo; after which I +was no more troubled with such questions. + +Nothing happened worth mentioning in this voyage. We sailed with a fair wind to +the Cape of Good Hope, where we staid only to take in fresh water. On the 10th +of April, 1710, we arrived safe at Amsterdam, having lost only three men by +sickness in the voyage, and a fourth, who fell from the foremast into the sea, +not far from the coast of Guinea. From Amsterdam I soon after set sail for +England, in a small vessel belonging to that city. + +On the 16th of April we put in at the Downs. I landed next morning, and saw +once more my native country, after an absence of five years and six months +complete. I went straight to Redriff, where I arrived the same day at two in +the afternoon, and found my wife and family in good health. + +PART IV -- A VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYHNHNMS. + +CHAPTER I. + +[The author sets out as captain of a ship. His men conspire against him, +confine him a long time to his cabin, and set him on shore in an unknown land. +He travels up into the country. The Yahoos, a strange sort of animal, +described. The author meets two Houyhnhnms.] + +I continued at home with my wife and children about five months, in a very +happy condition, if I could have learned the lesson of knowing when I was well. +I left my poor wife big with child, and accepted an advantageous offer made me +to be captain of the Adventurer, a stout merchantman of 350 tons: for I +understood navigation well, and being grown weary of a surgeon's employment at +sea, which, however, I could exercise upon occasion, I took a skilful young man +of that calling, one Robert Purefoy, into my ship. We set sail from Portsmouth +upon the 7th day of September, 1710; on the 14th we met with Captain Pocock, of +Bristol, at Teneriffe, who was going to the bay of Campechy to cut logwood. On +the 16th, he was parted from us by a storm; I heard since my return, that his +ship foundered, and none escaped but one cabin boy. He was an honest man, and a +good sailor, but a little too positive in his own opinions, which was the cause +of his destruction, as it has been with several others; for if he had followed +my advice, he might have been safe at home with his family at this time, as +well as myself. + +I had several men who died in my ship of calentures, so that I was forced to +get recruits out of Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands, where I touched, by the +direction of the merchants who employed me; which I had soon too much cause to +repent: for I found afterwards, that most of them had been buccaneers. I had +fifty hands onboard; and my orders were, that I should trade with the Indians +in the South-Sea, and make what discoveries I could. These rogues, whom I had +picked up, debauched my other men, and they all formed a conspiracy to seize +the ship, and secure me; which they did one morning, rushing into my cabin, and +binding me hand and foot, threatening to throw me overboard, if I offered to +stir. I told them, "I was their prisoner, and would submit." This they made me +swear to do, and then they unbound me, only fastening one of my legs with a +chain, near my bed, and placed a sentry at my door with his piece charged, who +was commanded to shoot me dead if I attempted my liberty. They sent me own +victuals and drink, and took the government of the ship to themselves. Their +design was to turn pirates and, plunder the Spaniards, which they could not do +till they got more men. But first they resolved to sell the goods the ship, and +then go to Madagascar for recruits, several among them having died since my +confinement. They sailed many weeks, and traded with the Indians; but I knew +not what course they took, being kept a close prisoner in my cabin, and +expecting nothing less than to be murdered, as they often threatened me. + +Upon the 9th day of May, 1711, one James Welch came down to my cabin, and said, +"he had orders from the captain to set me ashore." I expostulated with him, but +in vain; neither would he so much as tell me who their new captain was. They +forced me into the long- boat, letting me put on my best suit of clothes, which +were as good as new, and take a small bundle of linen, but no arms, except my +hanger; and they were so civil as not to search my pockets, into which I +conveyed what money I had, with some other little necessaries. They rowed about +a league, and then set me down on a strand. I desired them to tell me what +country it was. They all swore, "they knew no more than myself;" but said, +"that the captain" (as they called him) "was resolved, after they had sold the +lading, to get rid of me in the first place where they could discover land." +They pushed off immediately, advising me to make haste for fear of being +overtaken by the tide, and so bade me farewell. + +In this desolate condition I advanced forward, and soon got upon firm ground, +where I sat down on a bank to rest myself, and consider what I had best do. +When I was a little refreshed, I went up into the country, resolving to deliver +myself to the first savages I should meet, and purchase my life from them by +some bracelets, glass rings, and other toys, which sailors usually provide +themselves with in those voyages, and whereof I had some about me. The land was +divided by long rows of trees, not regularly planted, but naturally growing; +there was great plenty of grass, and several fields of oats. I walked very +circumspectly, for fear of being surprised, or suddenly shot with an arrow from +behind, or on either side. I fell into a beaten road, where I saw many tracts +of human feet, and some of cows, but most of horses. At last I beheld several +animals in a field, and one or two of the same kind sitting in trees. Their +shape was very singular and deformed, which a little discomposed me, so that I +lay down behind a thicket to observe them better. Some of them coming forward +near the place where I lay, gave me an opportunity of distinctly marking their +form. Their heads and breasts were covered with a thick hair, some frizzled, +and others lank; they had beards like goats, and a long ridge of hair down +their backs, and the fore parts of their legs and feet; but the rest of their +bodies was bare, so that I might see their skins, which were of a brown buff +colour. They had no tails, nor any hair at all on their buttocks, except about +the anus, which, I presume, nature had placed there to defend them as they sat +on the ground, for this posture they used, as well as lying down, and often +stood on their hind feet. They climbed high trees as nimbly as a squirrel, for +they had strong extended claws before and behind, terminating in sharp points, +and hooked. They would often spring, and bound, and leap, with prodigious +agility. The females were not so large as the males; they had long lank hair on +their heads, but none on their faces, nor any thing more than a sort of down on +the rest of their bodies, except about the anus and pudenda. The dugs hung +between their fore feet, and often reached almost to the ground as they walked. +The hair of both sexes was of several colours, brown, red, black, and yellow. +Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my travels, so disagreeable an animal, +or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy. So that, +thinking I had seen enough, full of contempt and aversion, I got up, and +pursued the beaten road, hoping it might direct me to the cabin of some Indian. +I had not got far, when I met one of these creatures full in my way, and coming +up directly to me. The ugly monster, when he saw me, distorted several ways, +every feature of his visage, and stared, as at an object he had never seen +before; then approaching nearer, lifted up his fore-paw, whether out of +curiosity or mischief I could not tell; but I drew my hanger, and gave him a +good blow with the flat side of it, for I durst not strike with the edge, +fearing the inhabitants might be provoked against me, if they should come to +know that I had killed or maimed any of their cattle. When the beast felt the +smart, he drew back, and roared so loud, that a herd of at least forty came +flocking about me from the next field, howling and making odious faces; but I +ran to the body of a tree, and leaning my back against it, kept them off by +waving my hanger. Several of this cursed brood, getting hold of the branches +behind, leaped up into the tree, whence they began to discharge their +excrements on my head; however, I escaped pretty well by sticking close to the +stem of the tree, but was almost stifled with the filth, which fell about me on +every side. + +In the midst of this distress, I observed them all to run away on a sudden as +fast as they could; at which I ventured to leave the tree and pursue the road, +wondering what it was that could put them into this fright. But looking on my +left hand, I saw a horse walking softly in the field; which my persecutors +having sooner discovered, was the cause of their flight. The horse started a +little, when he came near me, but soon recovering himself, looked full in my +face with manifest tokens of wonder; he viewed my hands and feet, walking round +me several times. I would have pursued my journey, but he placed himself +directly in the way, yet looking with a very mild aspect, never offering the +least violence. We stood gazing at each other for some time; at last I took the +boldness to reach my hand towards his neck with a design to stroke it, using +the common style and whistle of jockeys, when they are going to handle a +strange horse. But this animal seemed to receive my civilities with disdain, +shook his head, and bent his brows, softly raising up his right fore-foot to +remove my hand. Then he neighed three or four times, but in so different a +cadence, that I almost began to think he was speaking to himself, in some +language of his own. + +While he and I were thus employed, another horse came up; who applying himself +to the first in a very formal manner, they gently struck each other's right +hoof before, neighing several times by turns, and varying the sound, which +seemed to be almost articulate. They went some paces off, as if it were to +confer together, walking side by side, backward and forward, like persons +deliberating upon some affair of weight, but often turning their eyes towards +me, as it were to watch that I might not escape. I was amazed to see such +actions and behaviour in brute beasts; and concluded with myself, that if the +inhabitants of this country were endued with a proportionable degree of reason, +they must needs be the wisest people upon earth. This thought gave me so much +comfort, that I resolved to go forward, until I could discover some house or +village, or meet with any of the natives, leaving the two horses to discourse +together as they pleased. But the first, who was a dapple gray, observing me to +steal off, neighed after me in so expressive a tone, that I fancied myself to +understand what he meant; whereupon I turned back, and came near to him to +expect his farther commands: but concealing my fear as much as I could, for I +began to be in some pain how this adventure might terminate; and the reader +will easily believe I did not much like my present situation. + +The two horses came up close to me, looking with great earnestness upon my face +and hands. The gray steed rubbed my hat all round with his right fore-hoof, and +discomposed it so much that I was forced to adjust it better by taking it off +and settling it again; whereat, both he and his companion (who was a brown bay) +appeared to be much surprised: the latter felt the lappet of my coat, and +finding it to hang loose about me, they both looked with new signs of wonder. +He stroked my right hand, seeming to admire the softness and colour; but he +squeezed it so hard between his hoof and his pastern, that I was forced to +roar; after which they both touched me with all possible tenderness. They were +under great perplexity about my shoes and stockings, which they felt very +often, neighing to each other, and using various gestures, not unlike those of +a philosopher, when he would attempt to solve some new and difficult +phenomenon. + +Upon the whole, the behaviour of these animals was so orderly and rational, so +acute and judicious, that I at last concluded they must needs be magicians, who +had thus metamorphosed themselves upon some design, and seeing a stranger in +the way, resolved to divert themselves with him; or, perhaps, were really +amazed at the sight of a man so very different in habit, feature, and +complexion, from those who might probably live in so remote a climate. Upon the +strength of this reasoning, I ventured to address them in the following manner: +"Gentlemen, if you be conjurers, as I have good cause to believe, you can +understand my language; therefore I make bold to let your worships know that I +am a poor distressed Englishman, driven by his misfortunes upon your coast; and +I entreat one of you to let me ride upon his back, as if he were a real horse, +to some house or village where I can be relieved. In return of which favour, I +will make you a present of this knife and bracelet," taking them out of my +pocket. The two creatures stood silent while I spoke, seeming to listen with +great attention, and when I had ended, they neighed frequently towards each +other, as if they were engaged in serious conversation. I plainly observed that +their language expressed the passions very well, and the words might, with +little pains, be resolved into an alphabet more easily than the Chinese. + +I could frequently distinguish the word Yahoo, which was repeated by each of +them several times: and although it was impossible for me to conjecture what it +meant, yet while the two horses were busy in conversation, I endeavoured to +practise this word upon my tongue; and as soon as they were silent, I boldly +pronounced Yahoo in a loud voice, imitating at the same time, as near as I +could, the neighing of a horse; at which they were both visibly surprised; and +the gray repeated the same word twice, as if he meant to teach me the right +accent; wherein I spoke after him as well as I could, and found myself +perceivably to improve every time, though very far from any degree of +perfection. Then the bay tried me with a second word, much harder to be +pronounced; but reducing it to the English orthography, may be spelt thus, +Houyhnhnm. I did not succeed in this so well as in the former; but after two or +three farther trials, I had better fortune; and they both appeared amazed at my +capacity. + +After some further discourse, which I then conjectured might relate to me, the +two friends took their leaves, with the same compliment of striking each +other's hoof; and the gray made me signs that I should walk before him; wherein +I thought it prudent to comply, till I could find a better director. When I +offered to slacken my pace, he would cry hhuun hhuun: I guessed his meaning, +and gave him to understand, as well as I could, "that I was weary, and not able +to walk faster;" upon which he would stand awhile to let me rest. + +CHAPTER II. + +[The author conducted by a Houyhnhnm to his house. The house described. The +author's reception. The food of the Houyhnhnms. The author in distress for want +of meat. Is at last relieved. His manner of feeding in this country.] + +Having travelled about three miles, we came to a long kind of building, made of +timber stuck in the ground, and wattled across; the roof was low and covered +with straw. I now began to be a little comforted; and took out some toys, which +travellers usually carry for presents to the savage Indians of America, and +other parts, in hopes the people of the house would be thereby encouraged to +receive me kindly. The horse made me a sign to go in first; it was a large room +with a smooth clay floor, and a rack and manger, extending the whole length on +one side. There were three nags and two mares, not eating, but some of them +sitting down upon their hams, which I very much wondered at; but wondered more +to see the rest employed in domestic business; these seemed but ordinary +cattle. However, this confirmed my first opinion, that a people who could so +far civilise brute animals, must needs excel in wisdom all the nations of the +world. The gray came in just after, and thereby prevented any ill treatment +which the others might have given me. He neighed to them several times in a +style of authority, and received answers. + +Beyond this room there were three others, reaching the length of the house, to +which you passed through three doors, opposite to each other, in the manner of +a vista. We went through the second room towards the third. Here the gray +walked in first, beckoning me to attend: I waited in the second room, and got +ready my presents for the master and mistress of the house; they were two +knives, three bracelets of false pearls, a small looking-glass, and a bead +necklace. The horse neighed three or four times, and I waited to hear some +answers in a human voice, but I heard no other returns than in the same +dialect, only one or two a little shriller than his. I began to think that this +house must belong to some person of great note among them, because there +appeared so much ceremony before I could gain admittance. But, that a man of +quality should be served all by horses, was beyond my comprehension. I feared +my brain was disturbed by my sufferings and misfortunes. I roused myself, and +looked about me in the room where I was left alone: this was furnished like the +first, only after a more elegant manner. I rubbed my eyes often, but the same +objects still occurred. I pinched my arms and sides to awake myself, hoping I +might be in a dream. I then absolutely concluded, that all these appearances +could be nothing else but necromancy and magic. But I had no time to pursue +these reflections; for the gray horse came to the door, and made me a sign to +follow him into the third room where I saw a very comely mare, together with a +colt and foal, sitting on their haunches upon mats of straw, not unartfully +made, and perfectly neat and clean. + +The mare soon after my entrance rose from her mat, and coming up close, after +having nicely observed my hands and face, gave me a most contemptuous look; and +turning to the horse, I heard the word Yahoo often repeated betwixt them; the +meaning of which word I could not then comprehend, although it was the first I +had learned to pronounce. But I was soon better informed, to my everlasting +mortification; for the horse, beckoning to me with his head, and repeating the +hhuun, hhuun, as he did upon the road, which I understood was to attend him, +led me out into a kind of court, where was another building, at some distance +from the house. Here we entered, and I saw three of those detestable creatures, +which I first met after my landing, feeding upon roots, and the flesh of some +animals, which I afterwards found to be that of asses and dogs, and now and +then a cow, dead by accident or disease. They were all tied by the neck with +strong withes fastened to a beam; they held their food between the claws of +their fore feet, and tore it with their teeth. + +The master horse ordered a sorrel nag, one of his servants, to untie the +largest of these animals, and take him into the yard. The beast and I were +brought close together, and by our countenances diligently compared both by +master and servant, who thereupon repeated several times the word Yahoo. My +horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I observed in this +abominable animal, a perfect human figure: the face of it indeed was flat and +broad, the nose depressed, the lips large, and the mouth wide; but these +differences are common to all savage nations, where the lineaments of the +countenance are distorted, by the natives suffering their infants to lie +grovelling on the earth, or by carrying them on their backs, nuzzling with +their face against the mothers' shoulders. The fore-feet of the Yahoo differed +from my hands in nothing else but the length of the nails, the coarseness and +brownness of the palms, and the hairiness on the backs. There was the same +resemblance between our feet, with the same differences; which I knew very +well, though the horses did not, because of my shoes and stockings; the same in +every part of our bodies except as to hairiness and colour, which I have +already described. + +The great difficulty that seemed to stick with the two horses, was to see the +rest of my body so very different from that of a Yahoo, for which I was obliged +to my clothes, whereof they had no conception. The sorrel nag offered me a +root, which he held (after their manner, as we shall describe in its proper +place) between his hoof and pastern; I took it in my hand, and, having smelt +it, returned it to him again as civilly as I could. He brought out of the +Yahoos' kennel a piece of ass's flesh; but it smelt so offensively that I +turned from it with loathing: he then threw it to the Yahoo, by whom it was +greedily devoured. He afterwards showed me a wisp of hay, and a fetlock full of +oats; but I shook my head, to signify that neither of these were food for me. +And indeed I now apprehended that I must absolutely starve, if I did not get to +some of my own species; for as to those filthy Yahoos, although there were few +greater lovers of mankind at that time than myself, yet I confess I never saw +any sensitive being so detestable on all accounts; and the more I came near +them the more hateful they grew, while I stayed in that country. This the +master horse observed by my behaviour, and therefore sent the Yahoo back to his +kennel. He then put his fore-hoof to his mouth, at which I was much surprised, +although he did it with ease, and with a motion that appeared perfectly +natural, and made other signs, to know what I would eat; but I could not return +him such an answer as he was able to apprehend; and if he had understood me, I +did not see how it was possible to contrive any way for finding myself +nourishment. While we were thus engaged, I observed a cow passing by, whereupon +I pointed to her, and expressed a desire to go and milk her. This had its +effect; for he led me back into the house, and ordered a mare-servant to open a +room, where a good store of milk lay in earthen and wooden vessels, after a +very orderly and cleanly manner. She gave me a large bowlful, of which I drank +very heartily, and found myself well refreshed. + +About noon, I saw coming towards the house a kind of vehicle drawn like a +sledge by four Yahoos. There was in it an old steed, who seemed to be of +quality; he alighted with his hind-feet forward, having by accident got a hurt +in his left fore-foot. He came to dine with our horse, who received him with +great civility. They dined in the best room, and had oats boiled in milk for +the second course, which the old horse ate warm, but the rest cold. Their +mangers were placed circular in the middle of the room, and divided into +several partitions, round which they sat on their haunches, upon bosses of +straw. In the middle was a large rack, with angles answering to every partition +of the manger; so that each horse and mare ate their own hay, and their own +mash of oats and milk, with much decency and regularity. The behaviour of the +young colt and foal appeared very modest, and that of the master and mistress +extremely cheerful and complaisant to their guest. The gray ordered me to stand +by him; and much discourse passed between him and his friend concerning me, as +I found by the stranger's often looking on me, and the frequent repetition of +the word Yahoo. + +I happened to wear my gloves, which the master gray observing, seemed +perplexed, discovering signs of wonder what I had done to my fore-feet. He put +his hoof three or four times to them, as if he would signify, that I should +reduce them to their former shape, which I presently did, pulling off both my +gloves, and putting them into my pocket. This occasioned farther talk; and I +saw the company was pleased with my behaviour, whereof I soon found the good +effects. I was ordered to speak the few words I understood; and while they were +at dinner, the master taught me the names for oats, milk, fire, water, and some +others, which I could readily pronounce after him, having from my youth a great +facility in learning languages. + +When dinner was done, the master horse took me aside, and by signs and words +made me understand the concern he was in that I had nothing to eat. Oats in +their tongue are called hlunnh. This word I pronounced two or three times; for +although I had refused them at first, yet, upon second thoughts, I considered +that I could contrive to make of them a kind of bread, which might be +sufficient, with milk, to keep me alive, till I could make my escape to some +other country, and to creatures of my own species. The horse immediately +ordered a white mare servant of his family to bring me a good quantity of oats +in a sort of wooden tray. These I heated before the fire, as well as I could, +and rubbed them till the husks came off, which I made a shift to winnow from +the grain. I ground and beat them between two stones; then took water, and made +them into a paste or cake, which I toasted at the fire and eat warm with milk. +It was at first a very insipid diet, though common enough in many parts of +Europe, but grew tolerable by time; and having been often reduced to hard fare +in my life, this was not the first experiment I had made how easily nature is +satisfied. And I cannot but observe, that I never had one hours sickness while +I stayed in this island. It is true, I sometimes made a shift to catch a +rabbit, or bird, by springs made of Yahoo's hairs; and I often gathered +wholesome herbs, which I boiled, and ate as salads with my bread; and now and +then, for a rarity, I made a little butter, and drank the whey. I was at first +at a great loss for salt, but custom soon reconciled me to the want of it; and +I am confident that the frequent use of salt among us is an effect of luxury, +and was first introduced only as a provocative to drink, except where it is +necessary for preserving flesh in long voyages, or in places remote from great +markets; for we observe no animal to be fond of it but man, and as to myself, +when I left this country, it was a great while before I could endure the taste +of it in anything that I ate. + +This is enough to say upon the subject of my diet, wherewith other travellers +fill their books, as if the readers were personally concerned whether we fare +well or ill. However, it was necessary to mention this matter, lest the world +should think it impossible that I could find sustenance for three years in such +a country, and among such inhabitants. + +When it grew towards evening, the master horse ordered a place for me to lodge +in; it was but six yards from the house and separated from the stable of the +Yahoos. Here I got some straw, and covering myself with my own clothes, slept +very sound. But I was in a short time better accommodated, as the reader shall +know hereafter, when I come to treat more particularly about my way of living. + +CHAPTER III. + +[The author studies to learn the language. The Houyhnhnm, his master, assists +in teaching him. The language described. Several Houyhnhnms of quality come out +of curiosity to see the author. He gives his master a short account of his +voyage.] + +My principal endeavour was to learn the language, which my master (for so I +shall henceforth call him), and his children, and every servant of his house, +were desirous to teach me; for they looked upon it as a prodigy, that a brute +animal should discover such marks of a rational creature. I pointed to every +thing, and inquired the name of it, which I wrote down in my journal-book when +I was alone, and corrected my bad accent by desiring those of the family to +pronounce it often. In this employment, a sorrel nag, one of the +under-servants, was very ready to assist me. + +In speaking, they pronounced through the nose and throat, and their language +approaches nearest to the High-Dutch, or German, of any I know in Europe; but +is much more graceful and significant. The emperor Charles V. made almost the +same observation, when he said "that if he were to speak to his horse, it +should be in High- Dutch." + +The curiosity and impatience of my master were so great, that he spent many +hours of his leisure to instruct me. He was convinced (as he afterwards told +me) that I must be a Yahoo; but my teachableness, civility, and cleanliness, +astonished him; which were qualities altogether opposite to those animals. He +was most perplexed about my clothes, reasoning sometimes with himself, whether +they were a part of my body: for I never pulled them off till the family were +asleep, and got them on before they waked in the morning. My master was eager +to learn "whence I came; how I acquired those appearances of reason, which I +discovered in all my actions; and to know my story from my own mouth, which he +hoped he should soon do by the great proficiency I made in learning and +pronouncing their words and sentences." To help my memory, I formed all I +learned into the English alphabet, and writ the words down, with the +translations. This last, after some time, I ventured to do in my master's +presence. It cost me much trouble to explain to him what I was doing; for the +inhabitants have not the least idea of books or literature. + +In about ten weeks time, I was able to understand most of his questions; and in +three months, could give him some tolerable answers. He was extremely curious +to know "from what part of the country I came, and how I was taught to imitate +a rational creature; because the Yahoos (whom he saw I exactly resembled in my +head, hands, and face, that were only visible), with some appearance of +cunning, and the strongest disposition to mischief, were observed to be the +most unteachable of all brutes." I answered, "that I came over the sea, from a +far place, with many others of my own kind, in a great hollow vessel made of +the bodies of trees: that my companions forced me to land on this coast, and +then left me to shift for myself." It was with some difficulty, and by the help +of many signs, that I brought him to understand me. He replied, "that I must +needs be mistaken, or that I said the thing which was not;" for they have no +word in their language to express lying or falsehood. "He knew it was +impossible that there could be a country beyond the sea, or that a parcel of +brutes could move a wooden vessel whither they pleased upon water. He was sure +no Houyhnhnm alive could make such a vessel, nor would trust Yahoos to manage +it." + +The word Houyhnhnm, in their tongue, signifies a HORSE, and, in its etymology, +the PERFECTION OF NATURE. I told my master, "that I was at a loss for +expression, but would improve as fast as I could; and hoped, in a short time, I +should be able to tell him wonders." He was pleased to direct his own mare, his +colt, and foal, and the servants of the family, to take all opportunities of +instructing me; and every day, for two or three hours, he was at the same pains +himself. Several horses and mares of quality in the neighbourhood came often to +our house, upon the report spread of "a wonderful Yahoo, that could speak like +a Houyhnhnm, and seemed, in his words and actions, to discover some glimmerings +of reason." These delighted to converse with me: they put many questions, and +received such answers as I was able to return. By all these advantages I made +so great a progress, that, in five months from my arrival I understood whatever +was spoken, and could express myself tolerably well. + +The Houyhnhnms, who came to visit my master out of a design of seeing and +talking with me, could hardly believe me to be a right Yahoo, because my body +had a different covering from others of my kind. They were astonished to +observe me without the usual hair or skin, except on my head, face, and hands; +but I discovered that secret to my master upon an accident which happened about +a fortnight before. + +I have already told the reader, that every night, when the family were gone to +bed, it was my custom to strip, and cover myself with my clothes. It happened, +one morning early, that my master sent for me by the sorrel nag, who was his +valet. When he came I was fast asleep, my clothes fallen off on one side, and +my shirt above my waist. I awaked at the noise he made, and observed him to +deliver his message in some disorder; after which he went to my master, and in +a great fright gave him a very confused account of what he had seen. This I +presently discovered, for, going as soon as I was dressed to pay my attendance +upon his honour, he asked me "the meaning of what his servant had reported, +that I was not the same thing when I slept, as I appeared to be at other times; +that his vale assured him, some part of me was white, some yellow, at least not +so white, and some brown." + +I had hitherto concealed the secret of my dress, in order to distinguish +myself, as much as possible, from that cursed race of Yahoos; but now I found +it in vain to do so any longer. Besides, I considered that my clothes and shoes +would soon wear out, which already were in a declining condition, and must be +supplied by some contrivance from the hides of Yahoos, or other brutes; whereby +the whole secret would be known. I therefore told my master, "that in the +country whence I came, those of my kind always covered their bodies with the +hairs of certain animals prepared by art, as well for decency as to avoid the +inclemencies of air, both hot and cold; of which, as to my own person, I would +give him immediate conviction, if he pleased to command me: only desiring his +excuse, if I did not expose those parts that nature taught us to conceal." He +said, "my discourse was all very strange, but especially the last part; for he +could not understand, why nature should teach us to conceal what nature had +given; that neither himself nor family were ashamed of any parts of their +bodies; but, however, I might do as I pleased." Whereupon I first unbuttoned my +coat, and pulled it off. I did the same with my waistcoat. I drew off my shoes, +stockings, and breeches. I let my shirt down to my waist, and drew up the +bottom; fastening it like a girdle about my middle, to hide my nakedness. + +My master observed the whole performance with great signs of curiosity and +admiration. He took up all my clothes in his pastern, one piece after another, +and examined them diligently; he then stroked my body very gently, and looked +round me several times; after which, he said, it was plain I must be a perfect +Yahoo; but that I differed very much from the rest of my species in the +softness, whiteness, and smoothness of my skin; my want of hair in several +parts of my body; the shape and shortness of my claws behind and before; and my +affectation of walking continually on my two hinder feet. He desired to see no +more; and gave me leave to put on my clothes again, for I was shuddering with +cold. + +I expressed my uneasiness at his giving me so often the appellation of Yahoo, +an odious animal, for which I had so utter a hatred and contempt: I begged he +would forbear applying that word to me, and make the same order in his family +and among his friends whom he suffered to see me. I requested likewise, "that +the secret of my having a false covering to my body, might be known to none but +himself, at least as long as my present clothing should last; for as to what +the sorrel nag, his valet, had observed, his honour might command him to +conceal it." + +All this my master very graciously consented to; and thus the secret was kept +till my clothes began to wear out, which I was forced to supply by several +contrivances that shall hereafter be mentioned. In the meantime, he desired "I +would go on with my utmost diligence to learn their language, because he was +more astonished at my capacity for speech and reason, than at the figure of my +body, whether it were covered or not;" adding, "that he waited with some +impatience to hear the wonders which I promised to tell him." + +Thenceforward he doubled the pains he had been at to instruct me: he brought me +into all company, and made them treat me with civility; "because," as he told +them, privately, "this would put me into good humour, and make me more +diverting." + +Every day, when I waited on him, beside the trouble he was at in teaching, he +would ask me several questions concerning myself, which I answered as well as I +could, and by these means he had already received some general ideas, though +very imperfect. It would be tedious to relate the several steps by which I +advanced to a more regular conversation; but the first account I gave of myself +in any order and length was to this purpose: + +"That I came from a very far country, as I already had attempted to tell him, +with about fifty more of my own species; that we travelled upon the seas in a +great hollow vessel made of wood, and larger than his honour's house. I +described the ship to him in the best terms I could, and explained, by the help +of my handkerchief displayed, how it was driven forward by the wind. That upon +a quarrel among us, I was set on shore on this coast, where I walked forward, +without knowing whither, till he delivered me from the persecution of those +execrable Yahoos." He asked me, "who made the ship, and how it was possible +that the Houyhnhnms of my country would leave it to the management of brutes?" +My answer was, "that I durst proceed no further in my relation, unless he would +give me his word and honour that he would not be offended, and then I would +tell him the wonders I had so often promised." He agreed; and I went on by +assuring him, that the ship was made by creatures like myself; who, in all the +countries I had travelled, as well as in my own, were the only governing +rational animals; and that upon my arrival hither, I was as much astonished to +see the Houyhnhnms act like rational beings, as he, or his friends, could be, +in finding some marks of reason in a creature he was pleased to call a Yahoo; +to which I owned my resemblance in every part, but could not account for their +degenerate and brutal nature. I said farther, "that if good fortune ever +restored me to my native country, to relate my travels hither, as I resolved to +do, everybody would believe, that I said the thing that was not, that I +invented the story out of my own head; and (with all possible respect to +himself, his family, and friends, and under his promise of not being offended) +our countrymen would hardly think it probable that a Houyhnhnm should be the +presiding creature of a nation, and a Yahoo the brute." + +CHAPTER IV. + +[The Houyhnhnm's notion of truth and falsehood. The author's discourse +disapproved by his master. The author gives a more particular account of +himself, and the accidents of his voyage.] + +My master heard me with great appearances of uneasiness in his countenance; +because doubting, or not believing, are so little known in this country, that +the inhabitants cannot tell how to behave themselves under such circumstances. +And I remember, in frequent discourses with my master concerning the nature of +manhood in other parts of the world, having occasion to talk of lying and false +representation, it was with much difficulty that he comprehended what I meant, +although he had otherwise a most acute judgment. For he argued thus: "that the +use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive information +of facts; now, if any one said the thing which was not, these ends were +defeated, because I cannot properly be said to understand him; and I am so far +from receiving information, that he leaves me worse than in ignorance; for I am +led to believe a thing black, when it is white, and short, when it is long." +And these were all the notions he had concerning that faculty of lying, so +perfectly well understood, and so universally practised, among human creatures. + +To return from this digression. When I asserted that the Yahoos were the only +governing animals in my country, which my master said was altogether past his +conception, he desired to know, "whether we had Houyhnhnms among us, and what +was their employment?" I told him, "we had great numbers; that in summer they +grazed in the fields, and in winter were kept in houses with hay and oats, +where Yahoo servants were employed to rub their skins smooth, comb their manes, +pick their feet, serve them with food, and make their beds." "I understand you +well," said my master: "it is now very plain, from all you have spoken, that +whatever share of reason the Yahoos pretend to, the Houyhnhnms are your +masters; I heartily wish our Yahoos would be so tractable." I begged "his +honour would please to excuse me from proceeding any further, because I was +very certain that the account he expected from me would be highly displeasing." +But he insisted in commanding me to let him know the best and the worst. I told +him "he should be obeyed." I owned "that the Houyhnhnms among us, whom we +called horses, were the most generous and comely animals we had; that they +excelled in strength and swiftness; and when they belonged to persons of +quality, were employed in travelling, racing, or drawing chariots; they were +treated with much kindness and care, till they fell into diseases, or became +foundered in the feet; but then they were sold, and used to all kind of +drudgery till they died; after which their skins were stripped, and sold for +what they were worth, and their bodies left to be devoured by dogs and birds of +prey. But the common race of horses had not so good fortune, being kept by +farmers and carriers, and other mean people, who put them to greater labour, +and fed them worse." I described, as well as I could, our way of riding; the +shape and use of a bridle, a saddle, a spur, and a whip; of harness and wheels. +I added, "that we fastened plates of a certain hard substance, called iron, at +the bottom of their feet, to preserve their hoofs from being broken by the +stony ways, on which we often travelled." + +My master, after some expressions of great indignation, wondered "how we dared +to venture upon a Houyhnhnm's back; for he was sure, that the weakest servant +in his house would be able to shake off the strongest Yahoo; or by lying down +and rolling on his back, squeeze the brute to death." I answered "that our +horses were trained up, from three or four years old, to the several uses we +intended them for; that if any of them proved intolerably vicious, they were +employed for carriages; that they were severely beaten, while they were young, +for any mischievous tricks; that the males, designed for the common use of +riding or draught, were generally castrated about two years after their birth, +to take down their spirits, and make them more tame and gentle; that they were +indeed sensible of rewards and punishments; but his honour would please to +consider, that they had not the least tincture of reason, any more than the +Yahoos in this country." + +It put me to the pains of many circumlocutions, to give my master a right idea +of what I spoke; for their language does not abound in variety of words, +because their wants and passions are fewer than among us. But it is impossible +to express his noble resentment at our savage treatment of the Houyhnhnm race; +particularly after I had explained the manner and use of castrating horses +among us, to hinder them from propagating their kind, and to render them more +servile. He said, "if it were possible there could be any country where Yahoos +alone were endued with reason, they certainly must be the governing animal; +because reason in time will always prevail against brutal strength. But, +considering the frame of our bodies, and especially of mine, he thought no +creature of equal bulk was so ill-contrived for employing that reason in the +common offices of life;" whereupon he desired to know whether those among whom +I lived resembled me, or the Yahoos of his country?" I assured him, "that I was +as well shaped as most of my age; but the younger, and the females, were much +more soft and tender, and the skins of the latter generally as white as milk." +He said, "I differed indeed from other Yahoos, being much more cleanly, and not +altogether so deformed; but, in point of real advantage, he thought I differed +for the worse: that my nails were of no use either to my fore or hinder feet; +as to my fore feet, he could not properly call them by that name, for he never +observed me to walk upon them; that they were too soft to bear the ground; that +I generally went with them uncovered; neither was the covering I sometimes wore +on them of the same shape, or so strong as that on my feet behind: that I could +not walk with any security, for if either of my hinder feet slipped, I must +inevitably fail." He then began to find fault with other parts of my body: "the +flatness of my face, the prominence of my nose, mine eyes placed directly in +front, so that I could not look on either side without turning my head: that I +was not able to feed myself, without lifting one of my fore-feet to my mouth: +and therefore nature had placed those joints to answer that necessity. He knew +not what could be the use of those several clefts and divisions in my feet +behind; that these were too soft to bear the hardness and sharpness of stones, +without a covering made from the skin of some other brute; that my whole body +wanted a fence against heat and cold, which I was forced to put on and off +every day, with tediousness and trouble: and lastly, that he observed every +animal in this country naturally to abhor the Yahoos, whom the weaker avoided, +and the stronger drove from them. So that, supposing us to have the gift of +reason, he could not see how it were possible to cure that natural antipathy, +which every creature discovered against us; nor consequently how we could tame +and render them serviceable. However, he would," as he said, "debate the matter +no farther, because he was more desirous to know my own story, the country +where I was born, and the several actions and events of my life, before I came +hither." + +I assured him, "how extremely desirous I was that he should be satisfied on +every point; but I doubted much, whether it would be possible for me to explain +myself on several subjects, whereof his honour could have no conception; +because I saw nothing in his country to which I could resemble them; that, +however, I would do my best, and strive to express myself by similitudes, +humbly desiring his assistance when I wanted proper words;" which he was +pleased to promise me. + +I said, "my birth was of honest parents, in an island called England; which was +remote from his country, as many days' journey as the strongest of his honour's +servants could travel in the annual course of the sun; that I was bred a +surgeon, whose trade it is to cure wounds and hurts in the body, gotten by +accident or violence; that my country was governed by a female man, whom we +called queen; that I left it to get riches, whereby I might maintain myself and +family, when I should return; that, in my last voyage, I was commander of the +ship, and had about fifty Yahoos under me, many of which died at sea, and I was +forced to supply them by others picked out from several nations; that our ship +was twice in danger of being sunk, the first time by a great storm, and the +second by striking against a rock." Here my master interposed, by asking me, +"how I could persuade strangers, out of different countries, to venture with +me, after the losses I had sustained, and the hazards I had run?" I said, "they +were fellows of desperate fortunes, forced to fly from the places of their +birth on account of their poverty or their crimes. Some were undone by +lawsuits; others spent all they had in drinking, whoring, and gaming; others +fled for treason; many for murder, theft, poisoning, robbery, perjury, forgery, +coining false money, for committing rapes, or sodomy; for flying from their +colours, or deserting to the enemy; and most of them had broken prison; none of +these durst return to their native countries, for fear of being hanged, or of +starving in a jail; and therefore they were under the necessity of seeking a +livelihood in other places." + +During this discourse, my master was pleased to interrupt me several times. I +had made use of many circumlocutions in describing to him the nature of the +several crimes for which most of our crew had been forced to fly their country. +This labour took up several days' conversation, before he was able to +comprehend me. He was wholly at a loss to know what could be the use or +necessity of practising those vices. To clear up which, I endeavoured to give +some ideas of the desire of power and riches; of the terrible effects of lust, +intemperance, malice, and envy. All this I was forced to define and describe by +putting cases and making suppositions. After which, like one whose imagination +was struck with something never seen or heard of before, he would lift up his +eyes with amazement and indignation. Power, government, war, law, punishment, +and a thousand other things, had no terms wherein that language could express +them, which made the difficulty almost insuperable, to give my master any +conception of what I meant. But being of an excellent understanding, much +improved by contemplation and converse, he at last arrived at a competent +knowledge of what human nature, in our parts of the world, is capable to +perform, and desired I would give him some particular account of that land +which we call Europe, but especially of my own country. + +CHAPTER V. + +[The author at his master's command, informs him of the state of England. The +causes of war among the princes of Europe. The author begins to explain the +English constitution.] + +The reader may please to observe, that the following extract of many +conversations I had with my master, contains a summary of the most material +points which were discoursed at several times for above two years; his honour +often desiring fuller satisfaction, as I farther improved in the Houyhnhnm +tongue. I laid before him, as well as I could, the whole state of Europe; I +discoursed of trade and manufactures, of arts and sciences; and the answers I +gave to all the questions he made, as they arose upon several subjects, were a +fund of conversation not to be exhausted. But I shall here only set down the +substance of what passed between us concerning my own country, reducing it in +order as well as I can, without any regard to time or other circumstances, +while I strictly adhere to truth. My only concern is, that I shall hardly be +able to do justice to my master's arguments and expressions, which must needs +suffer by my want of capacity, as well as by a translation into our barbarous +English. + +In obedience, therefore, to his honour's commands, I related to him the +Revolution under the Prince of Orange; the long war with France, entered into +by the said prince, and renewed by his successor, the present queen, wherein +the greatest powers of Christendom were engaged, and which still continued: I +computed, at his request, "that about a million of Yahoos might have been +killed in the whole progress of it; and perhaps a hundred or more cities taken, +and five times as many ships burnt or sunk." + +He asked me, "what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to +war with another?" I answered "they were innumerable; but I should only mention +a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they +have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, +who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of +the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost +many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be +flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling +be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into +the fire; what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or +gray; and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; +with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a +continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be +in things indifferent. + +"Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall +dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretend to any +right. Sometimes one prince quarrels with another for fear the other should +quarrel with him. Sometimes a war is entered upon, because the enemy is too +strong; and sometimes, because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want +the things which we have, or have the things which we want, and we both fight, +till they take ours, or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable cause of a +war, to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed +by pestilence, or embroiled by factions among themselves. It is justifiable to +enter into war against our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient +for us, or a territory of land, that would render our dominions round and +complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people are poor and +ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death, and make slaves of the +rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living. +It is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent practice, when one prince desires +the assistance of another, to secure him against an invasion, that the +assistant, when he has driven out the invader, should seize on the dominions +himself, and kill, imprison, or banish, the prince he came to relieve. Alliance +by blood, or marriage, is a frequent cause of war between princes; and the +nearer the kindred is, the greater their disposition to quarrel; poor nations +are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at +variance. For these reasons, the trade of a soldier is held the most honourable +of all others; because a soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill, in cold blood, as +many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can. + +"There is likewise a kind of beggarly princes in Europe, not able to make war +by themselves, who hire out their troops to richer nations, for so much a day +to each man; of which they keep three- fourths to themselves, and it is the +best part of their maintenance: such are those in many northern parts of +Europe." + +"What you have told me," said my master, "upon the subject of war, does indeed +discover most admirably the effects of that reason you pretend to: however, it +is happy that the shame is greater than the danger; and that nature has left +you utterly incapable of doing much mischief. For, your mouths lying flat with +your faces, you can hardly bite each other to any purpose, unless by consent. +Then as to the claws upon your feet before and behind, they are so short and +tender, that one of our Yahoos would drive a dozen of yours before him. And +therefore, in recounting the numbers of those who have been killed in battle, I +cannot but think you have said the thing which is not." + +I could not forbear shaking my head, and smiling a little at his ignorance. And +being no stranger to the art of war, I gave him a description of cannons, +culverins, muskets, carabines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, +battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, sea +fights, ships sunk with a thousand men, twenty thousand killed on each side, +dying groans, limbs flying in the air, smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to +death under horses' feet, flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with +carcases, left for food to dogs and wolves and birds of prey; plundering, +stripping, ravishing, burning, and destroying. And to set forth the valour of +my own dear countrymen, I assured him, "that I had seen them blow up a hundred +enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship, and beheld the dead bodies +drop down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of the spectators." + +I was going on to more particulars, when my master commanded me silence. He +said, "whoever understood the nature of Yahoos, might easily believe it +possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every action I had named, if +their strength and cunning equalled their malice. But as my discourse had +increased his abhorrence of the whole species, so he found it gave him a +disturbance in his mind to which he was wholly a stranger before. He thought +his ears, being used to such abominable words, might, by degrees, admit them +with less detestation: that although he hated the Yahoos of this country, yet +he no more blamed them for their odious qualities, than he did a gnnayh (a bird +of prey) for its cruelty, or a sharp stone for cutting his hoof. But when a +creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities, he dreaded +lest the corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself. He +seemed therefore confident, that, instead of reason we were only possessed of +some quality fitted to increase our natural vices; as the reflection from a +troubled stream returns the image of an ill shapen body, not only larger but +more distorted." + +He added, "that he had heard too much upon the subject of war, both in this and +some former discourses. There was another point, which a little perplexed him +at present. I had informed him, that some of our crew left their country on +account of being ruined by law; that I had already explained the meaning of the +word; but he was at a loss how it should come to pass, that the law, which was +intended for every man's preservation, should be any man's ruin. Therefore he +desired to be further satisfied what I meant by law, and the dispensers +thereof, according to the present practice in my own country; because he +thought nature and reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we +pretended to be, in showing us what he ought to do, and what to avoid." + +I assured his honour, "that the law was a science in which I had not much +conversed, further than by employing advocates, in vain, upon some injustices +that had been done me: however, I would give him all the satisfaction I was +able." + +I said, "there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the +art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and +black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the +people are slaves. For example, if my neighbour has a mind to my cow, he has a +lawyer to prove that he ought to have my cow from me. I must then hire another +to defend my right, it being against all rules of law that any man should be +allowed to speak for himself. Now, in this case, I, who am the right owner, lie +under two great disadvantages: first, my lawyer, being practised almost from +his cradle in defending falsehood, is quite out of his element when he would be +an advocate for justice, which is an unnatural office he always attempts with +great awkwardness, if not with ill-will. The second disadvantage is, that my +lawyer must proceed with great caution, or else he will be reprimanded by the +judges, and abhorred by his brethren, as one that would lessen the practice of +the law. And therefore I have but two methods to preserve my cow. The first is, +to gain over my adversary's lawyer with a double fee, who will then betray his +client by insinuating that he hath justice on his side. The second way is for +my lawyer to make my cause appear as unjust as he can, by allowing the cow to +belong to my adversary: and this, if it be skilfully done, will certainly +bespeak the favour of the bench. Now your honour is to know, that these judges +are persons appointed to decide all controversies of property, as well as for +the trial of criminals, and picked out from the most dexterous lawyers, who are +grown old or lazy; and having been biassed all their lives against truth and +equity, lie under such a fatal necessity of favouring fraud, perjury, and +oppression, that I have known some of them refuse a large bribe from the side +where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty, by doing any thing +unbecoming their nature or their office. + +"It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever has been done before, may +legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the +decisions formerly made against common justice, and the general reason of +mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities to +justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of directing +accordingly. + +"In pleading, they studiously avoid entering into the merits of the cause; but +are loud, violent, and tedious, in dwelling upon all circumstances which are +not to the purpose. For instance, in the case already mentioned; they never +desire to know what claim or title my adversary has to my cow; but whether the +said cow were red or black; her horns long or short; whether the field I graze +her in be round or square; whether she was milked at home or abroad; what +diseases she is subject to, and the like; after which they consult precedents, +adjourn the cause from time to time, and in ten, twenty, or thirty years, come +to an issue. + +"It is likewise to be observed, that this society has a peculiar cant and +jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their +laws are written, which they take special care to multiply; whereby they have +wholly confounded the very essence of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong; +so that it will take thirty years to decide, whether the field left me by my +ancestors for six generations belongs to me, or to a stranger three hundred +miles off. + +"In the trial of persons accused for crimes against the state, the method is +much more short and commendable: the judge first sends to sound the disposition +of those in power, after which he can easily hang or save a criminal, strictly +preserving all due forms of law." + +Here my master interposing, said, "it was a pity, that creatures endowed with +such prodigious abilities of mind, as these lawyers, by the description I gave +of them, must certainly be, were not rather encouraged to be instructors of +others in wisdom and knowledge." In answer to which I assured his honour, "that +in all points out of their own trade, they were usually the most ignorant and +stupid generation among us, the most despicable in common conversation, avowed +enemies to all knowledge and learning, and equally disposed to pervert the +general reason of mankind in every other subject of discourse as in that of +their own profession." + +CHAPTER VI. + +[A continuation of the state of England under Queen Anne. The character of a +first minister of state in European courts.] + +My master was yet wholly at a loss to understand what motives could incite this +race of lawyers to perplex, disquiet, and weary themselves, and engage in a +confederacy of injustice, merely for the sake of injuring their fellow-animals; +neither could he comprehend what I meant in saying, they did it for hire. +Whereupon I was at much pains to describe to him the use of money, the +materials it was made of, and the value of the metals; "that when a Yahoo had +got a great store of this precious substance, he was able to purchase whatever +he had a mind to; the finest clothing, the noblest houses, great tracts of +land, the most costly meats and drinks, and have his choice of the most +beautiful females. Therefore since money alone was able to perform all these +feats, our Yahoos thought they could never have enough of it to spend, or to +save, as they found themselves inclined, from their natural bent either to +profusion or avarice; that the rich man enjoyed the fruit of the poor man's +labour, and the latter were a thousand to one in proportion to the former; that +the bulk of our people were forced to live miserably, by labouring every day +for small wages, to make a few live plentifully." + +I enlarged myself much on these, and many other particulars to the same +purpose; but his honour was still to seek; for he went upon a supposition, that +all animals had a title to their share in the productions of the earth, and +especially those who presided over the rest. Therefore he desired I would let +him know, "what these costly meats were, and how any of us happened to want +them?" Whereupon I enumerated as many sorts as came into my head, with the +various methods of dressing them, which could not be done without sending +vessels by sea to every part of the world, as well for liquors to drink as for +sauces and innumerable other conveniences. I assured him "that this whole globe +of earth must be at least three times gone round before one of our better +female Yahoos could get her breakfast, or a cup to put it in." He said "that +must needs be a miserable country which cannot furnish food for its own +inhabitants. But what he chiefly wondered at was, how such vast tracts of +ground as I described should be wholly without fresh water, and the people put +to the necessity of sending over the sea for drink." I replied "that England +(the dear place of my nativity) was computed to produce three times the +quantity of food more than its inhabitants are able to consume, as well as +liquors extracted from grain, or pressed out of the fruit of certain trees, +which made excellent drink, and the same proportion in every other convenience +of life. But, in order to feed the luxury and intemperance of the males, and +the vanity of the females, we sent away the greatest part of our necessary +things to other countries, whence, in return, we brought the materials of +diseases, folly, and vice, to spend among ourselves. Hence it follows of +necessity, that vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their +livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, flattering, +suborning, forswearing, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, +scribbling, star-gazing, poisoning, whoring, canting, libelling, freethinking, +and the like occupations:" every one of which terms I was at much pains to make +him understand. + +"That wine was not imported among us from foreign countries to supply the want +of water or other drinks, but because it was a sort of liquid which made us +merry by putting us out of our senses, diverted all melancholy thoughts, begat +wild extravagant imaginations in the brain, raised our hopes and banished our +fears, suspended every office of reason for a time, and deprived us of the use +of our limbs, till we fell into a profound sleep; although it must be +confessed, that we always awaked sick and dispirited; and that the use of this +liquor filled us with diseases which made our lives uncomfortable and short. + +"But beside all this, the bulk of our people supported themselves by furnishing +the necessities or conveniences of life to the rich and to each other. For +instance, when I am at home, and dressed as I ought to be, I carry on my body +the workmanship of a hundred tradesmen; the building and furniture of my house +employ as many more, and five times the number to adorn my wife." + +I was going on to tell him of another sort of people, who get their livelihood +by attending the sick, having, upon some occasions, informed his honour that +many of my crew had died of diseases. But here it was with the utmost +difficulty that I brought him to apprehend what I meant. "He could easily +conceive, that a Houyhnhnm, grew weak and heavy a few days before his death, or +by some accident might hurt a limb; but that nature, who works all things to +perfection, should suffer any pains to breed in our bodies, he thought +impossible, and desired to know the reason of so unaccountable an evil." + +I told him "we fed on a thousand things which operated contrary to each other; +that we ate when we were not hungry, and drank without the provocation of +thirst; that we sat whole nights drinking strong liquors, without eating a bit, +which disposed us to sloth, inflamed our bodies, and precipitated or prevented +digestion; that prostitute female Yahoos acquired a certain malady, which bred +rottenness in the bones of those who fell into their embraces; that this, and +many other diseases, were propagated from father to son; so that great numbers +came into the world with complicated maladies upon them; that it would be +endless to give him a catalogue of all diseases incident to human bodies, for +they would not be fewer than five or six hundred, spread over every limb and +joint--in short, every part, external and intestine, having diseases +appropriated to itself. To remedy which, there was a sort of people bred up +among us in the profession, or pretence, of curing the sick. And because I had +some skill in the faculty, I would, in gratitude to his honour, let him know +the whole mystery and method by which they proceed. + +"Their fundamental is, that all diseases arise from repletion; whence they +conclude, that a great evacuation of the body is necessary, either through the +natural passage or upwards at the mouth. Their next business is from herbs, +minerals, gums, oils, shells, salts, juices, sea-weed, excrements, barks of +trees, serpents, toads, frogs, spiders, dead men's flesh and bones, birds, +beasts, and fishes, to form a composition, for smell and taste, the most +abominable, nauseous, and detestable, they can possibly contrive, which the +stomach immediately rejects with loathing, and this they call a vomit; or else, +from the same store-house, with some other poisonous additions, they command us +to take in at the orifice above or below (just as the physician then happens to +be disposed) a medicine equally annoying and disgustful to the bowels; which, +relaxing the belly, drives down all before it; and this they call a purge, or a +clyster. For nature (as the physicians allege) having intended the superior +anterior orifice only for the intromission of solids and liquids, and the +inferior posterior for ejection, these artists ingeniously considering that in +all diseases nature is forced out of her seat, therefore, to replace her in it, +the body must be treated in a manner directly contrary, by interchanging the +use of each orifice; forcing solids and liquids in at the anus, and making +evacuations at the mouth. + +"But, besides real diseases, we are subject to many that are only imaginary, +for which the physicians have invented imaginary cures; these have their +several names, and so have the drugs that are proper for them; and with these +our female Yahoos are always infested. + +"One great excellency in this tribe, is their skill at prognostics, wherein +they seldom fail; their predictions in real diseases, when they rise to any +degree of malignity, generally portending death, which is always in their +power, when recovery is not: and therefore, upon any unexpected signs of +amendment, after they have pronounced their sentence, rather than be accused as +false prophets, they know how to approve their sagacity to the world, by a +seasonable dose. + +"They are likewise of special use to husbands and wives who are grown weary of +their mates; to eldest sons, to great ministers of state, and often to +princes." + +I had formerly, upon occasion, discoursed with my master upon the nature of +government in general, and particularly of our own excellent constitution, +deservedly the wonder and envy of the whole world. But having here accidentally +mentioned a minister of state, he commanded me, some time after, to inform him, +"what species of Yahoo I particularly meant by that appellation." + +I told him, "that a first or chief minister of state, who was the person I +intended to describe, was the creature wholly exempt from joy and grief, love +and hatred, pity and anger; at least, makes use of no other passions, but a +violent desire of wealth, power, and titles; that he applies his words to all +uses, except to the indication of his mind; that he never tells a truth but +with an intent that you should take it for a lie; nor a lie, but with a design +that you should take it for a truth; that those he speaks worst of behind their +backs are in the surest way of preferment; and whenever he begins to praise you +to others, or to yourself, you are from that day forlorn. The worst mark you +can receive is a promise, especially when it is confirmed with an oath; after +which, every wise man retires, and gives over all hopes. + +"There are three methods, by which a man may rise to be chief minister. The +first is, by knowing how, with prudence, to dispose of a wife, a daughter, or a +sister; the second, by betraying or undermining his predecessor; and the third +is, by a furious zeal, in public assemblies, against the corruption's of the +court. But a wise prince would rather choose to employ those who practise the +last of these methods; because such zealots prove always the most obsequious +and subservient to the will and passions of their master. That these ministers, +having all employments at their disposal, preserve themselves in power, by +bribing the majority of a senate or great council; and at last, by an +expedient, called an act of indemnity" (whereof I described the nature to him), +"they secure themselves from after-reckonings, and retire from the public laden +with the spoils of the nation. + +"The palace of a chief minister is a seminary to breed up others in his own +trade: the pages, lackeys, and porters, by imitating their master, become +ministers of state in their several districts, and learn to excel in the three +principal ingredients, of insolence, lying, and bribery. Accordingly, they have +a subaltern court paid to them by persons of the best rank; and sometimes by +the force of dexterity and impudence, arrive, through several gradations, to be +successors to their lord. + +"He is usually governed by a decayed wench, or favourite footman, who are the +tunnels through which all graces are conveyed, and may properly be called, in +the last resort, the governors of the kingdom." + +One day, in discourse, my master, having heard me mention the nobility of my +country, was pleased to make me a compliment which I could not pretend to +deserve: "that he was sure I must have been born of some noble family, because +I far exceeded in shape, colour, and cleanliness, all the Yahoos of his nation, +although I seemed to fail in strength and agility, which must be imputed to my +different way of living from those other brutes; and besides I was not only +endowed with the faculty of speech, but likewise with some rudiments of reason, +to a degree that, with all his acquaintance, I passed for a prodigy." + +He made me observe, "that among the Houyhnhnms, the white, the sorrel, and the +iron-gray, were not so exactly shaped as the bay, the dapple-gray, and the +black; nor born with equal talents of mind, or a capacity to improve them; and +therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring +to match out of their own race, which in that country would be reckoned +monstrous and unnatural." + +I made his honour my most humble acknowledgments for the good opinion he was +pleased to conceive of me, but assured him at the same time, "that my birth was +of the lower sort, having been born of plain honest parents, who were just able +to give me a tolerable education; that nobility, among us, was altogether a +different thing from the idea he had of it; that our young noblemen are bred +from their childhood in idleness and luxury; that, as soon as years will +permit, they consume their vigour, and contract odious diseases among lewd +females; and when their fortunes are almost ruined, they marry some woman of +mean birth, disagreeable person, and unsound constitution (merely for the sake +of money), whom they hate and despise. That the productions of such marriages +are generally scrofulous, rickety, or deformed children; by which means the +family seldom continues above three generations, unless the wife takes care to +provide a healthy father, among her neighbours or domestics, in order to +improve and continue the breed. That a weak diseased body, a meagre +countenance, and sallow complexion, are the true marks of noble blood; and a +healthy robust appearance is so disgraceful in a man of quality, that the world +concludes his real father to have been a groom or a coachman. The imperfections +of his mind run parallel with those of his body, being a composition of spleen, +dullness, ignorance, caprice, sensuality, and pride. + +"Without the consent of this illustrious body, no law can be enacted, repealed, +or altered: and these nobles have likewise the decision of all our possessions, +without appeal."~^ + +CHAPTER VII. + +[The author's great love of his native country. His master's observations upon +the constitution and administration of England, as described by the author, +with parallel cases and comparisons. His master's observations upon human +nature.] + +The reader may be disposed to wonder how I could prevail on myself to give so +free a representation of my own species, among a race of mortals who are +already too apt to conceive the vilest opinion of humankind, from that entire +congruity between me and their Yahoos. But I must freely confess, that the many +virtues of those excellent quadrupeds, placed in opposite view to human +corruptions, had so far opened my eyes and enlarged my understanding, that I +began to view the actions and passions of man in a very different light, and to +think the honour of my own kind not worth managing; which, besides, it was +impossible for me to do, before a person of so acute a judgment as my master, +who daily convinced me of a thousand faults in myself, whereof I had not the +least perception before, and which, with us, would never be numbered even among +human infirmities. I had likewise learned, from his example, an utter +detestation of all falsehood or disguise; and truth appeared so amiable to me, +that I determined upon sacrificing every thing to it. + +Let me deal so candidly with the reader as to confess that there was yet a much +stronger motive for the freedom I took in my representation of things. I had +not yet been a year in this country before I contracted such a love and +veneration for the inhabitants, that I entered on a firm resolution never to +return to humankind, but to pass the rest of my life among these admirable +Houyhnhnms, in the contemplation and practice of every virtue, where I could +have no example or incitement to vice. But it was decreed by fortune, my +perpetual enemy, that so great a felicity should not fall to my share. However, +it is now some comfort to reflect, that in what I said of my countrymen, I +extenuated their faults as much as I durst before so strict an examiner; and +upon every article gave as favourable a turn as the matter would bear. For, +indeed, who is there alive that will not be swayed by his bias and partiality +to the place of his birth? + +I have related the substance of several conversations I had with my master +during the greatest part of the time I had the honour to be in his service; but +have, indeed, for brevity sake, omitted much more than is here set down. + +When I had answered all his questions, and his curiosity seemed to be fully +satisfied, he sent for me one morning early, and commanded me to sit down at +some distance (an honour which he had never before conferred upon me). He said, +"he had been very seriously considering my whole story, as far as it related +both to myself and my country; that he looked upon us as a sort of animals, to +whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of +reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to +aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had +not given us; that we disarmed ourselves of the few abilities she had bestowed; +had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend +our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions; that, +as to myself, it was manifest I had neither the strength nor agility of a +common Yahoo; that I walked infirmly on my hinder feet; had found out a +contrivance to make my claws of no use or defence, and to remove the hair from +my chin, which was intended as a shelter from the sun and the weather: lastly, +that I could neither run with speed, nor climb trees like my brethren," as he +called them, "the Yahoos in his country. + +"That our institutions of government and law were plainly owing to our gross +defects in reason, and by consequence in virtue; because reason alone is +sufficient to govern a rational creature; which was, therefore, a character we +had no pretence to challenge, even from the account I had given of my own +people; although he manifestly perceived, that, in order to favour them, I had +concealed many particulars, and often said the thing which was not. + +"He was the more confirmed in this opinion, because, he observed, that as I +agreed in every feature of my body with other Yahoos, except where it was to my +real disadvantage in point of strength, speed, and activity, the shortness of +my claws, and some other particulars where nature had no part; so from the +representation I had given him of our lives, our manners, and our actions, he +found as near a resemblance in the disposition of our minds." He said, "the +Yahoos were known to hate one another, more than they did any different species +of animals; and the reason usually assigned was, the odiousness of their own +shapes, which all could see in the rest, but not in themselves. He had +therefore begun to think it not unwise in us to cover our bodies, and by that +invention conceal many of our deformities from each other, which would else be +hardly supportable. But he now found he had been mistaken, and that the +dissensions of those brutes in his country were owing to the same cause with +ours, as I had described them. For if," said he, "you throw among five Yahoos +as much food as would be sufficient for fifty, they will, instead of eating +peaceably, fall together by the ears, each single one impatient to have all to +itself; and therefore a servant was usually employed to stand by while they +were feeding abroad, and those kept at home were tied at a distance from each +other: that if a cow died of age or accident, before a Houyhnhnm could secure +it for his own Yahoos, those in the neighbourhood would come in herds to seize +it, and then would ensue such a battle as I had described, with terrible wounds +made by their claws on both sides, although they seldom were able to kill one +another, for want of such convenient instruments of death as we had invented. +At other times, the like battles have been fought between the Yahoos of several +neighbourhoods, without any visible cause; those of one district watching all +opportunities to surprise the next, before they are prepared. But if they find +their project has miscarried, they return home, and, for want of enemies, +engage in what I call a civil war among themselves. + +"That in some fields of his country there are certain shining stones of several +colours, whereof the Yahoos are violently fond: and when part of these stones +is fixed in the earth, as it sometimes happens, they will dig with their claws +for whole days to get them out; then carry them away, and hide them by heaps in +their kennels; but still looking round with great caution, for fear their +comrades should find out their treasure." My master said, "he could never +discover the reason of this unnatural appetite, or how these stones could be of +any use to a Yahoo; but now he believed it might proceed from the same +principle of avarice which I had ascribed to mankind. That he had once, by way +of experiment, privately removed a heap of these stones from the place where +one of his Yahoos had buried it; whereupon the sordid animal, missing his +treasure, by his loud lamenting brought the whole herd to the place, there +miserably howled, then fell to biting and tearing the rest, began to pine away, +would neither eat, nor sleep, nor work, till he ordered a servant privately to +convey the stones into the same hole, and hide them as before; which, when his +Yahoo had found, he presently recovered his spirits and good humour, but took +good care to remove them to a better hiding place, and has ever since been a +very serviceable brute." + +My master further assured me, which I also observed myself, "that in the fields +where the shining stones abound, the fiercest and most frequent battles are +fought, occasioned by perpetual inroads of the neighbouring Yahoos." + +He said, "it was common, when two Yahoos discovered such a stone in a field, +and were contending which of them should be the proprietor, a third would take +the advantage, and carry it away from them both;" which my master would needs +contend to have some kind of resemblance with our suits at law; wherein I +thought it for our credit not to undeceive him; since the decision he mentioned +was much more equitable than many decrees among us; because the plaintiff and +defendant there lost nothing beside the stone they contended for: whereas our +courts of equity would never have dismissed the cause, while either of them had +any thing left. + +My master, continuing his discourse, said, "there was nothing that rendered the +Yahoos more odious, than their undistinguishing appetite to devour every thing +that came in their way, whether herbs, roots, berries, the corrupted flesh of +animals, or all mingled together: and it was peculiar in their temper, that +they were fonder of what they could get by rapine or stealth, at a greater +distance, than much better food provided for them at home. If their prey held +out, they would eat till they were ready to burst; after which, nature had +pointed out to them a certain root that gave them a general evacuation. + +"There was also another kind of root, very juicy, but somewhat rare and +difficult to be found, which the Yahoos sought for with much eagerness, and +would suck it with great delight; it produced in them the same effects that +wine has upon us. It would make them sometimes hug, and sometimes tear one +another; they would howl, and grin, and chatter, and reel, and tumble, and then +fall asleep in the mud." + +I did indeed observe that the Yahoos were the only animals in this country +subject to any diseases; which, however, were much fewer than horses have among +us, and contracted, not by any ill-treatment they meet with, but by the +nastiness and greediness of that sordid brute. Neither has their language any +more than a general appellation for those maladies, which is borrowed from the +name of the beast, and called hnea-yahoo, or Yahoo's evil; and the cure +prescribed is a mixture of their own dung and urine, forcibly put down the +Yahoo's throat. This I have since often known to have been taken with success, +and do here freely recommend it to my countrymen for the public good, as an +admirable specific against all diseases produced by repletion. + +"As to learning, government, arts, manufactures, and the like," my master +confessed, "he could find little or no resemblance between the Yahoos of that +country and those in ours; for he only meant to observe what parity there was +in our natures. He had heard, indeed, some curious Houyhnhnms observe, that in +most herds there was a sort of ruling Yahoo (as among us there is generally +some leading or principal stag in a park), who was always more deformed in +body, and mischievous in disposition, than any of the rest; that this leader +had usually a favourite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was +to lick his master's feet and posteriors, and drive the female Yahoos to his +kennel; for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of ass's flesh. +This favourite is hated by the whole herd, and therefore, to protect himself, +keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually continues in office till +a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at +the head of all the Yahoos in that district, young and old, male and female, +come in a body, and discharge their excrements upon him from head to foot. But +how far this might be applicable to our courts, and favourites, and ministers +of state, my master said I could best determine." + +I durst make no return to this malicious insinuation, which debased human +understanding below the sagacity of a common hound, who has judgment enough to +distinguish and follow the cry of the ablest dog in the pack, without being +ever mistaken. + +My master told me, "there were some qualities remarkable in the Yahoos, which +he had not observed me to mention, or at least very slightly, in the accounts I +had given of humankind." He said, "those animals, like other brutes, had their +females in common; but in this they differed, that the she Yahoo would admit +the males while she was pregnant; and that the hes would quarrel and fight with +the females, as fiercely as with each other; both which practices were such +degrees of infamous brutality, as no other sensitive creature ever arrived at. + +"Another thing he wondered at in the Yahoos, was their strange disposition to +nastiness and dirt; whereas there appears to be a natural love of cleanliness +in all other animals." As to the two former accusations, I was glad to let them +pass without any reply, because I had not a word to offer upon them in defence +of my species, which otherwise I certainly had done from my own inclinations. +But I could have easily vindicated humankind from the imputation of singularity +upon the last article, if there had been any swine in that country (as +unluckily for me there were not), which, although it may be a sweeter quadruped +than a Yahoo, cannot, I humbly conceive, in justice, pretend to more +cleanliness; and so his honour himself must have owned, if he had seen their +filthy way of feeding, and their custom of wallowing and sleeping in the mud. + +My master likewise mentioned another quality which his servants had discovered +in several Yahoos, and to him was wholly unaccountable. He said, "a fancy would +sometimes take a Yahoo to retire into a corner, to lie down, and howl, and +groan, and spurn away all that came near him, although he were young and fat, +wanted neither food nor water, nor did the servant imagine what could possibly +ail him. And the only remedy they found was, to set him to hard work, after +which he would infallibly come to himself." To this I was silent out of +partiality to my own kind; yet here I could plainly discover the true seeds of +spleen, which only seizes on the lazy, the luxurious, and the rich; who, if +they were forced to undergo the same regimen, I would undertake for the cure. + +His honour had further observed, "that a female Yahoo would often stand behind +a bank or a bush, to gaze on the young males passing by, and then appear, and +hide, using many antic gestures and grimaces, at which time it was observed +that she had a most offensive smell; and when any of the males advanced, would +slowly retire, looking often back, and with a counterfeit show of fear, run off +into some convenient place, where she knew the male would follow her. + +"At other times, if a female stranger came among them, three or four of her own +sex would get about her, and stare, and chatter, and grin, and smell her all +over; and then turn off with gestures, that seemed to express contempt and +disdain." + +Perhaps my master might refine a little in these speculations, which he had +drawn from what he observed himself, or had been told him by others; however, I +could not reflect without some amazement, and much sorrow, that the rudiments +of lewdness, coquetry, censure, and scandal, should have place by instinct in +womankind. + +I expected every moment that my master would accuse the Yahoos of those +unnatural appetites in both sexes, so common among us. But nature, it seems, +has not been so expert a school-mistress; and these politer pleasures are +entirely the productions of art and reason on our side of the globe. + +CHAPTER VIII. + +[The author relates several particulars of the Yahoos. The great virtues of the +Houyhnhnms. The education and exercise of their youth. Their general assembly.] + +As I ought to have understood human nature much better than I supposed it +possible for my master to do, so it was easy to apply the character he gave of +the Yahoos to myself and my countrymen; and I believed I could yet make further +discoveries, from my own observation. I therefore often begged his honour to +let me go among the herds of Yahoos in the neighbourhood; to which he always +very graciously consented, being perfectly convinced that the hatred I bore +these brutes would never suffer me to be corrupted by them; and his honour +ordered one of his servants, a strong sorrel nag, very honest and good-natured, +to be my guard; without whose protection I durst not undertake such adventures. +For I have already told the reader how much I was pestered by these odious +animals, upon my first arrival; and I afterwards failed very narrowly, three or +four times, of falling into their clutches, when I happened to stray at any +distance without my hanger. And I have reason to believe they had some +imagination that I was of their own species, which I often assisted myself by +stripping up my sleeves, and showing my naked arms and breasts in their sight, +when my protector was with me. At which times they would approach as near as +they durst, and imitate my actions after the manner of monkeys, but ever with +great signs of hatred; as a tame jackdaw with cap and stockings is always +persecuted by the wild ones, when he happens to be got among them. + +They are prodigiously nimble from their infancy. However, I once caught a young +male of three years old, and endeavoured, by all marks of tenderness, to make +it quiet; but the little imp fell a squalling, and scratching, and biting with +such violence, that I was forced to let it go; and it was high time, for a +whole troop of old ones came about us at the noise, but finding the cub was +safe (for away it ran), and my sorrel nag being by, they durst not venture near +us. I observed the young animal's flesh to smell very rank, and the stink was +somewhat between a weasel and a fox, but much more disagreeable. I forgot +another circumstance (and perhaps I might have the reader's pardon if it were +wholly omitted), that while I held the odious vermin in my hands, it voided its +filthy excrements of a yellow liquid substance all over my clothes; but by good +fortune there was a small brook hard by, where I washed myself as clean as I +could; although I durst not come into my master's presence until I were +sufficiently aired. + +By what I could discover, the Yahoos appear to be the most unteachable of all +animals: their capacity never reaching higher than to draw or carry burdens. +Yet I am of opinion, this defect arises chiefly from a perverse, restive +disposition; for they are cunning, malicious, treacherous, and revengeful. They +are strong and hardy, but of a cowardly spirit, and, by consequence, insolent, +abject, and cruel. It is observed, that the red haired of both sexes are more +libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom yet they much exceed in strength +and activity. + +The Houyhnhnms keep the Yahoos for present use in huts not far from the house; +but the rest are sent abroad to certain fields, where they dig up roots, eat +several kinds of herbs, and search about for carrion, or sometimes catch +weasels and luhimuhs (a sort of wild rat), which they greedily devour. Nature +has taught them to dig deep holes with their nails on the side of a rising +ground, wherein they lie by themselves; only the kennels of the females are +larger, sufficient to hold two or three cubs. + +They swim from their infancy like frogs, and are able to continue long under +water, where they often take fish, which the females carry home to their young. +And, upon this occasion, I hope the reader will pardon my relating an odd +adventure. + +Being one day abroad with my protector the sorrel nag, and the weather +exceeding hot, I entreated him to let me bathe in a river that was near. He +consented, and I immediately stripped myself stark naked, and went down softly +into the stream. It happened that a young female Yahoo, standing behind a bank, +saw the whole proceeding, and inflamed by desire, as the nag and I conjectured, +came running with all speed, and leaped into the water, within five yards of +the place where I bathed. I was never in my life so terribly frightened. The +nag was grazing at some distance, not suspecting any harm. She embraced me +after a most fulsome manner. I roared as loud as I could, and the nag came +galloping towards me, whereupon she quitted her grasp, with the utmost +reluctancy, and leaped upon the opposite bank, where she stood gazing and +howling all the time I was putting on my clothes. + +This was a matter of diversion to my master and his family, as well as of +mortification to myself. For now I could no longer deny that I was a real Yahoo +in every limb and feature, since the females had a natural propensity to me, as +one of their own species. Neither was the hair of this brute of a red colour +(which might have been some excuse for an appetite a little irregular), but +black as a sloe, and her countenance did not make an appearance altogether so +hideous as the rest of her kind; for I think she could not be above eleven +years old. + +Having lived three years in this country, the reader, I suppose, will expect +that I should, like other travellers, give him some account of the manners and +customs of its inhabitants, which it was indeed my principal study to learn. + +As these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by nature with a general disposition to +all virtues, and have no conceptions or ideas of what is evil in a rational +creature, so their grand maxim is, to cultivate reason, and to be wholly +governed by it. Neither is reason among them a point problematical, as with us, +where men can argue with plausibility on both sides of the question, but +strikes you with immediate conviction; as it must needs do, where it is not +mingled, obscured, or discoloured, by passion and interest. I remember it was +with extreme difficulty that I could bring my master to understand the meaning +of the word opinion, or how a point could be disputable; because reason taught +us to affirm or deny only where we are certain; and beyond our knowledge we +cannot do either. So that controversies, wranglings, disputes, and +positiveness, in false or dubious propositions, are evils unknown among the +Houyhnhnms. In the like manner, when I used to explain to him our several +systems of natural philosophy, he would laugh, "that a creature pretending to +reason, should value itself upon the knowledge of other people's conjectures, +and in things where that knowledge, if it were certain, could be of no use." +Wherein he agreed entirely with the sentiments of Socrates, as Plato delivers +them; which I mention as the highest honour I can do that prince of +philosophers. I have often since reflected, what destruction such doctrine +would make in the libraries of Europe; and how many paths of fame would be then +shut up in the learned world. + +Friendship and benevolence are the two principal virtues among the Houyhnhnms; +and these not confined to particular objects, but universal to the whole race; +for a stranger from the remotest part is equally treated with the nearest +neighbour, and wherever he goes, looks upon himself as at home. They preserve +decency and civility in the highest degrees, but are altogether ignorant of +ceremony. They have no fondness for their colts or foals, but the care they +take in educating them proceeds entirely from the dictates of reason. And I +observed my master to show the same affection to his neighbour's issue, that he +had for his own. They will have it that nature teaches them to love the whole +species, and it is reason only that makes a distinction of persons, where there +is a superior degree of virtue. + +When the matron Houyhnhnms have produced one of each sex, they no longer +accompany with their consorts, except they lose one of their issue by some +casualty, which very seldom happens; but in such a case they meet again; or +when the like accident befalls a person whose wife is past bearing, some other +couple bestow on him one of their own colts, and then go together again until +the mother is pregnant. This caution is necessary, to prevent the country from +being overburdened with numbers. But the race of inferior Houyhnhnms, bred up +to be servants, is not so strictly limited upon this article: these are allowed +to produce three of each sex, to be domestics in the noble families. + +In their marriages, they are exactly careful to choose such colours as will not +make any disagreeable mixture in the breed. Strength is chiefly valued in the +male, and comeliness in the female; not upon the account of love, but to +preserve the race from degenerating; for where a female happens to excel in +strength, a consort is chosen, with regard to comeliness. + +Courtship, love, presents, jointures, settlements have no place in their +thoughts, or terms whereby to express them in their language. The young couple +meet, and are joined, merely because it is the determination of their parents +and friends; it is what they see done every day, and they look upon it as one +of the necessary actions of a reasonable being. But the violation of marriage, +or any other unchastity, was never heard of; and the married pair pass their +lives with the same friendship and mutual benevolence, that they bear to all +others of the same species who come in their way, without jealousy, fondness, +quarrelling, or discontent. + +In educating the youth of both sexes, their method is admirable, and highly +deserves our imitation. These are not suffered to taste a grain of oats, except +upon certain days, till eighteen years old; nor milk, but very rarely; and in +summer they graze two hours in the morning, and as many in the evening, which +their parents likewise observe; but the servants are not allowed above half +that time, and a great part of their grass is brought home, which they eat at +the most convenient hours, when they can be best spared from work. + +Temperance, industry, exercise, and cleanliness, are the lessons equally +enjoined to the young ones of both sexes: and my master thought it monstrous in +us, to give the females a different kind of education from the males, except in +some articles of domestic management; whereby, as he truly observed, one half +of our natives were good for nothing but bringing children into the world; and +to trust the care of our children to such useless animals, he said, was yet a +greater instance of brutality. + +But the Houyhnhnms train up their youth to strength, speed, and hardiness, by +exercising them in running races up and down steep hills, and over hard stony +grounds; and when they are all in a sweat, they are ordered to leap over head +and ears into a pond or river. Four times a year the youth of a certain +district meet to show their proficiency in running and leaping, and other feats +of strength and agility; where the victor is rewarded with a song in his or her +praise. On this festival, the servants drive a herd of Yahoos into the field, +laden with hay, and oats, and milk, for a repast to the Houyhnhnms; after +which, these brutes are immediately driven back again, for fear of being +noisome to the assembly. + +Every fourth year, at the vernal equinox, there is a representative council of +the whole nation, which meets in a plain about twenty miles from our house, and +continues about five or six days. Here they inquire into the state and +condition of the several districts; whether they abound or be deficient in hay +or oats, or cows, or Yahoos; and wherever there is any want (which is but +seldom) it is immediately supplied by unanimous consent and contribution. Here +likewise the regulation of children is settled: as for instance, if a Houyhnhnm +has two males, he changes one of them with another that has two females; and +when a child has been lost by any casualty, where the mother is past breeding, +it is determined what family in the district shall breed another to supply the +loss. + +CHAPTER IX. + +[A grand debate at the general assembly of the Houyhnhnms, and how it was +determined. The learning of the Houyhnhnms. Their buildings. Their manner of +burials. The defectiveness of their language.] + +One of these grand assemblies was held in my time, about three months before my +departure, whither my master went as the representative of our district. In +this council was resumed their old debate, and indeed the only debate that ever +happened in their country; whereof my master, after his return, give me a very +particular account. + +The question to be debated was, "whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from +the face of the earth?" One of the members for the affirmative offered several +arguments of great strength and weight, alleging, "that as the Yahoos were the +most filthy, noisome, and deformed animals which nature ever produced, so they +were the most restive and indocible, mischievous and malicious; they would +privately suck the teats of the Houyhnhnms' cows, kill and devour their cats, +trample down their oats and grass, if they were not continually watched, and +commit a thousand other extravagancies." He took notice of a general tradition, +"that Yahoos had not been always in their country; but that many ages ago, two +of these brutes appeared together upon a mountain; whether produced by the heat +of the sun upon corrupted mud and slime, or from the ooze and froth of the sea, +was never known; that these Yahoos engendered, and their brood, in a short +time, grew so numerous as to overrun and infest the whole nation; that the +Houyhnhnms, to get rid of this evil, made a general hunting, and at last +enclosed the whole herd; and destroying the elder, every Houyhnhnm kept two +young ones in a kennel, and brought them to such a degree of tameness, as an +animal, so savage by nature, can be capable of acquiring, using them for +draught and carriage; that there seemed to be much truth in this tradition, and +that those creatures could not be yinhniamshy (or aborigines of the land), +because of the violent hatred the Houyhnhnms, as well as all other animals, +bore them, which, although their evil disposition sufficiently deserved, could +never have arrived at so high a degree if they had been aborigines, or else +they would have long since been rooted out; that the inhabitants, taking a +fancy to use the service of the Yahoos, had, very imprudently, neglected to +cultivate the breed of asses, which are a comely animal, easily kept, more tame +and orderly, without any offensive smell, strong enough for labour, although +they yield to the other in agility of body, and if their braying be no +agreeable sound, it is far preferable to the horrible howlings of the Yahoos." + +Several others declared their sentiments to the same purpose, when my master +proposed an expedient to the assembly, whereof he had indeed borrowed the hint +from me. "He approved of the tradition mentioned by the honourable member who +spoke before, and affirmed, that the two Yahoos said to be seen first among +them, had been driven thither over the sea; that coming to land, and being +forsaken by their companions, they retired to the mountains, and degenerating +by degrees, became in process of time much more savage than those of their own +species in the country whence these two originals came. The reason of this +assertion was, that he had now in his possession a certain wonderful Yahoo +(meaning myself) which most of them had heard of, and many of them had seen. He +then related to them how he first found me; that my body was all covered with +an artificial composure of the skins and hairs of other animals; that I spoke +in a language of my own, and had thoroughly learned theirs; that I had related +to him the accidents which brought me thither; that when he saw me without my +covering, I was an exact Yahoo in every part, only of a whiter colour, less +hairy, and with shorter claws. He added, how I had endeavoured to persuade him, +that in my own and other countries, the Yahoos acted as the governing, rational +animal, and held the Houyhnhnms in servitude; that he observed in me all the +qualities of a Yahoo, only a little more civilized by some tincture of reason, +which, however, was in a degree as far inferior to the Houyhnhnm race, as the +Yahoos of their country were to me; that, among other things, I mentioned a +custom we had of castrating Houyhnhnms when they were young, in order to render +them tame; that the operation was easy and safe; that it was no shame to learn +wisdom from brutes, as industry is taught by the ant, and building by the +swallow (for so I translate the word lyhannh, although it be a much larger +fowl); that this invention might be practised upon the younger Yahoos here, +which besides rendering them tractable and fitter for use, would in an age put +an end to the whole species, without destroying life; that in the mean time the +Houyhnhnms should be exhorted to cultivate the breed of asses, which, as they +are in all respects more valuable brutes, so they have this advantage, to be +fit for service at five years old, which the others are not till twelve." + +This was all my master thought fit to tell me, at that time, of what passed in +the grand council. But he was pleased to conceal one particular, which related +personally to myself, whereof I soon felt the unhappy effect, as the reader +will know in its proper place, and whence I date all the succeeding misfortunes +of my life. + +The Houyhnhnms have no letters, and consequently their knowledge is all +traditional. But there happening few events of any moment among a people so +well united, naturally disposed to every virtue, wholly governed by reason, and +cut off from all commerce with other nations, the historical part is easily +preserved without burdening their memories. I have already observed that they +are subject to no diseases, and therefore can have no need of physicians. +However, they have excellent medicines, composed of herbs, to cure accidental +bruises and cuts in the pastern or frog of the foot, by sharp stones, as well +as other maims and hurts in the several parts of the body. + +They calculate the year by the revolution of the sun and moon, but use no +subdivisions into weeks. They are well enough acquainted with the motions of +those two luminaries, and understand the nature of eclipses; and this is the +utmost progress of their astronomy. + +In poetry, they must be allowed to excel all other mortals; wherein the +justness of their similes, and the minuteness as well as exactness of their +descriptions, are indeed inimitable. Their verses abound very much in both of +these, and usually contain either some exalted notions of friendship and +benevolence or the praises of those who were victors in races and other bodily +exercises. Their buildings, although very rude and simple, are not +inconvenient, but well contrived to defend them from all injuries of and heat. +They have a kind of tree, which at forty years old loosens in the root, and +falls with the first storm: it grows very straight, and being pointed like +stakes with a sharp stone (for the Houyhnhnms know not the use of iron), they +stick them erect in the ground, about ten inches asunder, and then weave in oat +straw, or sometimes wattles, between them. The roof is made after the same +manner, and so are the doors. + +The Houyhnhnms use the hollow part, between the pastern and the hoof of their +fore-foot, as we do our hands, and this with greater dexterity than I could at +first imagine. I have seen a white mare of our family thread a needle (which I +lent her on purpose) with that joint. They milk their cows, reap their oats, +and do all the work which requires hands, in the same manner. They have a kind +of hard flints, which, by grinding against other stones, they form into +instruments, that serve instead of wedges, axes, and hammers. With tools made +of these flints, they likewise cut their hay, and reap their oats, which there +grow naturally in several fields; the Yahoos draw home the sheaves in +carriages, and the servants tread them in certain covered huts to get out the +grain, which is kept in stores. They make a rude kind of earthen and wooden +vessels, and bake the former in the sun. + +If they can avoid casualties, they die only of old age, and are buried in the +obscurest places that can be found, their friends and relations expressing +neither joy nor grief at their departure; nor does the dying person discover +the least regret that he is leaving the world, any more than if he were upon +returning home from a visit to one of his neighbours. I remember my master +having once made an appointment with a friend and his family to come to his +house, upon some affair of importance: on the day fixed, the mistress and her +two children came very late; she made two excuses, first for her husband, who, +as she said, happened that very morning to shnuwnh. The word is strongly +expressive in their language, but not easily rendered into English; it +signifies, "to retire to his first mother." Her excuse for not coming sooner, +was, that her husband dying late in the morning, she was a good while +consulting her servants about a convenient place where his body should be laid; +and I observed, she behaved herself at our house as cheerfully as the rest. She +died about three months after. + +They live generally to seventy, or seventy-five years, very seldom to +fourscore. Some weeks before their death, they feel a gradual decay; but +without pain. During this time they are much visited by their friends, because +they cannot go abroad with their usual ease and satisfaction. However, about +ten days before their death, which they seldom fail in computing, they return +the visits that have been made them by those who are nearest in the +neighbourhood, being carried in a convenient sledge drawn by Yahoos; which +vehicle they use, not only upon this occasion, but when they grow old, upon +long journeys, or when they are lamed by any accident: and therefore when the +dying Houyhnhnms return those visits, they take a solemn leave of their +friends, as if they were going to some remote part of the country, where they +designed to pass the rest of their lives. + +I know not whether it may be worth observing, that the Houyhnhnms have no word +in their language to express any thing that is evil, except what they borrow +from the deformities or ill qualities of the Yahoos. Thus they denote the folly +of a servant, an omission of a child, a stone that cuts their feet, a +continuance of foul or unseasonable weather, and the like, by adding to each +the epithet of Yahoo. For instance, hhnm Yahoo; whnaholm Yahoo, ynlhmndwihlma +Yahoo, and an ill-contrived house ynholmhnmrohlnw Yahoo. + +I could, with great pleasure, enlarge further upon the manners and virtues of +this excellent people; but intending in a short time to publish a volume by +itself, expressly upon that subject, I refer the reader thither; and, in the +mean time, proceed to relate my own sad catastrophe. + +CHAPTER X. + +[The author's economy, and happy life, among the Houyhnhnms. His great +improvement in virtue by conversing with them. Their conversations. The author +has notice given him by his master, that he must depart from the country. He +falls into a swoon for grief; but submits. He contrives and finishes a canoe by +the help of a fellow-servant, and puts to sea at a venture.] + +I had settled my little economy to my own heart's content. My master had +ordered a room to be made for me, after their manner, about six yards from the +house: the sides and floors of which I plastered with clay, and covered with +rush-mats of my own contriving. I had beaten hemp, which there grows wild, and +made of it a sort of ticking; this I filled with the feathers of several birds +I had taken with springes made of Yahoos' hairs, and were excellent food. I had +worked two chairs with my knife, the sorrel nag helping me in the grosser and +more laborious part. When my clothes were worn to rags, I made myself others +with the skins of rabbits, and of a certain beautiful animal, about the same +size, called nnuhnoh, the skin of which is covered with a fine down. Of these I +also made very tolerable stockings. I soled my shoes with wood, which I cut +from a tree, and fitted to the upper-leather; and when this was worn out, I +supplied it with the skins of Yahoos dried in the sun. I often got honey out of +hollow trees, which I mingled with water, or ate with my bread. No man could +more verify the truth of these two maxims, "That nature is very easily +satisfied;" and, "That necessity is the mother of invention." I enjoyed perfect +health of body, and tranquillity of mind; I did not feel the treachery or +inconstancy of a friend, nor the injuries of a secret or open enemy. I had no +occasion of bribing, flattering, or pimping, to procure the favour of any great +man, or of his minion; I wanted no fence against fraud or oppression: here was +neither physician to destroy my body, nor lawyer to ruin my fortune; no +informer to watch my words and actions, or forge accusations against me for +hire: here were no gibers, censurers, backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, +housebreakers, attorneys, bawds, buffoons, gamesters, politicians, wits, +splenetics, tedious talkers, controvertists, ravishers, murderers, robbers, +virtuosos; no leaders, or followers, of party and faction; no encouragers to +vice, by seducement or examples; no dungeon, axes, gibbets, whipping-posts, or +pillories; no cheating shopkeepers or mechanics; no pride, vanity, or +affectation; no fops, bullies, drunkards, strolling whores, or poxes; no +ranting, lewd, expensive wives; no stupid, proud pedants; no importunate, +overbearing, quarrelsome, noisy, roaring, empty, conceited, swearing +companions; no scoundrels raised from the dust upon the merit of their vices, +or nobility thrown into it on account of their virtues; no lords, fiddlers, +judges, or dancing-masters. + +I had the favour of being admitted to several Houyhnhnms, who came to visit or +dine with my master; where his honour graciously suffered me to wait in the +room, and listen to their discourse. Both he and his company would often +descend to ask me questions, and receive my answers. I had also sometimes the +honour of attending my master in his visits to others. I never presumed to +speak, except in answer to a question; and then I did it with inward regret, +because it was a loss of so much time for improving myself; but I was +infinitely delighted with the station of an humble auditor in such +conversations, where nothing passed but what was useful, expressed in the +fewest and most significant words; where, as I have already said, the greatest +decency was observed, without the least degree of ceremony; where no person +spoke without being pleased himself, and pleasing his companions; where there +was no interruption, tediousness, heat, or difference of sentiments. They have +a notion, that when people are met together, a short silence does much improve +conversation: this I found to be true; for during those little intermissions of +talk, new ideas would arise in their minds, which very much enlivened the +discourse. Their subjects are, generally on friendship and benevolence, on +order and economy; sometimes upon the visible operations of nature, or ancient +traditions; upon the bounds and limits of virtue; upon the unerring rules of +reason, or upon some determinations to be taken at the next great assembly: and +often upon the various excellences of poetry. I may add, without vanity, that +my presence often gave them sufficient matter for discourse, because it +afforded my master an occasion of letting his friends into the history of me +and my country, upon which they were all pleased to descant, in a manner not +very advantageous to humankind: and for that reason I shall not repeat what +they said; only I may be allowed to observe, that his honour, to my great +admiration, appeared to understand the nature of Yahoos much better than +myself. He went through all our vices and follies, and discovered many, which I +had never mentioned to him, by only supposing what qualities a Yahoo of their +country, with a small proportion of reason, might be capable of exerting; and +concluded, with too much probability, "how vile, as well as miserable, such a +creature must be." + +I freely confess, that all the little knowledge I have of any value, was +acquired by the lectures I received from my master, and from hearing the +discourses of him and his friends; to which I should be prouder to listen, than +to dictate to the greatest and wisest assembly in Europe. I admired the +strength, comeliness, and speed of the inhabitants; and such a constellation of +virtues, in such amiable persons, produced in me the highest veneration. At +first, indeed, I did not feel that natural awe, which the Yahoos and all other +animals bear toward them; but it grew upon me by decrees, much sooner than I +imagined, and was mingled with a respectful love and gratitude, that they would +condescend to distinguish me from the rest of my species. + +When I thought of my family, my friends, my countrymen, or the human race in +general, I considered them, as they really were, Yahoos in shape and +disposition, perhaps a little more civilized, and qualified with the gift of +speech; but making no other use of reason, than to improve and multiply those +vices whereof their brethren in this country had only the share that nature +allotted them. When I happened to behold the reflection of my own form in a +lake or fountain, I turned away my face in horror and detestation of myself, +and could better endure the sight of a common Yahoo than of my own person. By +conversing with the Houyhnhnms, and looking upon them with delight, I fell to +imitate their gait and gesture, which is now grown into a habit; and my friends +often tell me, in a blunt way, "that I trot like a horse;" which, however, I +take for a great compliment. Neither shall I disown, that in speaking I am apt +to fall into the voice and manner of the Houyhnhnms, and hear myself ridiculed +on that account, without the least mortification. + +In the midst of all this happiness, and when I looked upon myself to be fully +settled for life, my master sent for me one morning a little earlier than his +usual hour. I observed by his countenance that he was in some perplexity, and +at a loss how to begin what he had to speak. After a short silence, he told me, +"he did not know how I would take what he was going to say: that in the last +general assembly, when the affair of the Yahoos was entered upon, the +representatives had taken offence at his keeping a Yahoo (meaning myself) in +his family, more like a Houyhnhnm than a brute animal; that he was known +frequently to converse with me, as if he could receive some advantage or +pleasure in my company; that such a practice was not agreeable to reason or +nature, or a thing ever heard of before among them; the assembly did therefore +exhort him either to employ me like the rest of my species, or command me to +swim back to the place whence I came: that the first of these expedients was +utterly rejected by all the Houyhnhnms who had ever seen me at his house or +their own; for they alleged, that because I had some rudiments of reason, added +to the natural pravity of those animals, it was to be feared I might be able to +seduce them into the woody and mountainous parts of the country, and bring them +in troops by night to destroy the Houyhnhnms' cattle, as being naturally of the +ravenous kind, and averse from labour." + +My master added, "that he was daily pressed by the Houyhnhnms of the +neighbourhood to have the assembly's exhortation executed, which he could not +put off much longer. He doubted it would be impossible for me to swim to +another country; and therefore wished I would contrive some sort of vehicle, +resembling those I had described to him, that might carry me on the sea; in +which work I should have the assistance of his own servants, as well as those +of his neighbours." He concluded, "that for his own part, he could have been +content to keep me in his service as long as I lived; because he found I had +cured myself of some bad habits and dispositions, by endeavouring, as far as my +inferior nature was capable, to imitate the Houyhnhnms." + +I should here observe to the reader, that a decree of the general assembly in +this country is expressed by the word hnhloayn, which signifies an exhortation, +as near as I can render it; for they have no conception how a rational creature +can be compelled, but only advised, or exhorted; because no person can disobey +reason, without giving up his claim to be a rational creature. + +I was struck with the utmost grief and despair at my master's discourse; and +being unable to support the agonies I was under, I fell into a swoon at his +feet. When I came to myself, he told me "that he concluded I had been dead;" +for these people are subject to no such imbecilities of nature. I answered in a +faint voice, "that death would have been too great a happiness; that although I +could not blame the assembly's exhortation, or the urgency of his friends; yet, +in my weak and corrupt judgment, I thought it might consist with reason to have +been less rigorous; that I could not swim a league, and probably the nearest +land to theirs might be distant above a hundred: that many materials, necessary +for making a small vessel to carry me off, were wholly wanting in this country; +which, however, I would attempt, in obedience and gratitude to his honour, +although I concluded the thing to be impossible, and therefore looked on myself +as already devoted to destruction; that the certain prospect of an unnatural +death was the least of my evils; for, supposing I should escape with life by +some strange adventure, how could I think with temper of passing my days among +Yahoos, and relapsing into my old corruptions, for want of examples to lead and +keep me within the paths of virtue? that I knew too well upon what solid +reasons all the determinations of the wise Houyhnhnms were founded, not to be +shaken by arguments of mine, a miserable Yahoo; and therefore, after presenting +him with my humble thanks for the offer of his servants' assistance in making a +vessel, and desiring a reasonable time for so difficult a work, I told him I +would endeavour to preserve a wretched being; and if ever I returned to +England, was not without hopes of being useful to my own species, by +celebrating the praises of the renowned Houyhnhnms, and proposing their virtues +to the imitation of mankind." + +My master, in a few words, made me a very gracious reply; allowed me the space +of two months to finish my boat; and ordered the sorrel nag, my fellow-servant +(for so, at this distance, I may presume to call him), to follow my +instruction; because I told my master, "that his help would be sufficient, and +I knew he had a tenderness for me." + +In his company, my first business was to go to that part of the coast where my +rebellious crew had ordered me to be set on shore. I got upon a height, and +looking on every side into the sea; fancied I saw a small island toward the +north-east. I took out my pocket glass, and could then clearly distinguish it +above five leagues off, as I computed; but it appeared to the sorrel nag to be +only a blue cloud: for as he had no conception of any country beside his own, +so he could not be as expert in distinguishing remote objects at sea, as we who +so much converse in that element. + +After I had discovered this island, I considered no further; but resolved it +should if possible, be the first place of my banishment, leaving the +consequence to fortune. + +I returned home, and consulting with the sorrel nag, we went into a copse at +some distance, where I with my knife, and he with a sharp flint, fastened very +artificially after their manner, to a wooden handle, cut down several oak +wattles, about the thickness of a walking-staff, and some larger pieces. But I +shall not trouble the reader with a particular description of my own mechanics; +let it suffice to say, that in six weeks time with the help of the sorrel nag, +who performed the parts that required most labour, I finished a sort of Indian +canoe, but much larger, covering it with the skins of Yahoos, well stitched +together with hempen threads of my own making. My sail was likewise composed of +the skins of the same animal; but I made use of the youngest I could get, the +older being too tough and thick; and I likewise provided myself with four +paddles. I laid in a stock of boiled flesh, of rabbits and fowls, and took with +me two vessels, one filled with milk and the other with water. + +I tried my canoe in a large pond, near my master's house, and then corrected in +it what was amiss; stopping all the chinks with Yahoos' tallow, till I found it +staunch, and able to bear me and my freight; and, when it was as complete as I +could possibly make it, I had it drawn on a carriage very gently by Yahoos to +the sea-side, under the conduct of the sorrel nag and another servant. + +When all was ready, and the day came for my departure, I took leave of my +master and lady and the whole family, my eyes flowing with tears, and my heart +quite sunk with grief. But his honour, out of curiosity, and, perhaps, (if I +may speak without vanity,) partly out of kindness, was determined to see me in +my canoe, and got several of his neighbouring friends to accompany him. I was +forced to wait above an hour for the tide; and then observing the wind very +fortunately bearing toward the island to which I intended to steer my course, I +took a second leave of my master: but as I was going to prostrate myself to +kiss his hoof, he did me the honour to raise it gently to my mouth. I am not +ignorant how much I have been censured for mentioning this last particular. +Detractors are pleased to think it improbable, that so illustrious a person +should descend to give so great a mark of distinction to a creature so inferior +as I. Neither have I forgotten how apt some travellers are to boast of +extraordinary favours they have received. But, if these censurers were better +acquainted with the noble and courteous disposition of the Houyhnhnms, they +would soon change their opinion. + +I paid my respects to the rest of the Houyhnhnms in his honour's company; then +getting into my canoe, I pushed off from shore. + +CHAPTER XI. + +[The author's dangerous voyage. He arrives at New Holland, hoping to settle +there. Is wounded with an arrow by one of the natives. Is seized and carried by +force into a Portuguese ship. The great civilities of the captain. The author +arrives at England.] + +I began this desperate voyage on February 15, 1714-15, at nine o'clock in the +morning. The wind was very favourable; however, I made use at first only of my +paddles; but considering I should soon be weary, and that the wind might chop +about, I ventured to set up my little sail; and thus, with the help of the +tide, I went at the rate of a league and a half an hour, as near as I could +guess. My master and his friends continued on the shore till I was almost out +of sight; and I often heard the sorrel nag (who always loved me) crying out, +"Hnuy illa nyha, majah Yahoo;" "Take care of thyself, gentle Yahoo." + +My design was, if possible, to discover some small island uninhabited, yet +sufficient, by my labour, to furnish me with the necessaries of life, which I +would have thought a greater happiness, than to be first minister in the +politest court of Europe; so horrible was the idea I conceived of returning to +live in the society, and under the government of Yahoos. For in such a solitude +as I desired, I could at least enjoy my own thoughts, and reflect with delight +on the virtues of those inimitable Houyhnhnms, without an opportunity of +degenerating into the vices and corruptions of my own species. + +The reader may remember what I related, when my crew conspired against me, and +confined me to my cabin; how I continued there several weeks without knowing +what course we took; and when I was put ashore in the long-boat, how the +sailors told me, with oaths, whether true or false, "that they knew not in what +part of the world we were." However, I did then believe us to be about 10 +degrees southward of the Cape of Good Hope, or about 45 degrees southern +latitude, as I gathered from some general words I overheard among them, being I +supposed to the south-east in their intended voyage to Madagascar. And although +this were little better than conjecture, yet I resolved to steer my course +eastward, hoping to reach the south-west coast of New Holland, and perhaps some +such island as I desired lying westward of it. The wind was full west, and by +six in the evening I computed I had gone eastward at least eighteen leagues; +when I spied a very small island about half a league off, which I soon reached. +It was nothing but a rock, with one creek naturally arched by the force of +tempests. Here I put in my canoe, and climbing a part of the rock, I could +plainly discover land to the east, extending from south to north. I lay all +night in my canoe; and repeating my voyage early in the morning, I arrived in +seven hours to the south-east point of New Holland. This confirmed me in the +opinion I have long entertained, that the maps and charts place this country at +least three degrees more to the east than it really is; which thought I +communicated many years ago to my worthy friend, Mr. Herman Moll, and gave him +my reasons for it, although he has rather chosen to follow other authors. + +I saw no inhabitants in the place where I landed, and being unarmed, I was +afraid of venturing far into the country. I found some shellfish on the shore, +and ate them raw, not daring to kindle a fire, for fear of being discovered by +the natives. I continued three days feeding on oysters and limpets, to save my +own provisions; and I fortunately found a brook of excellent water, which gave +me great relief. + +On the fourth day, venturing out early a little too far, I saw twenty or thirty +natives upon a height not above five hundred yards from me. They were stark +naked, men, women, and children, round a fire, as I could discover by the +smoke. One of them spied me, and gave notice to the rest; five of them advanced +toward me, leaving the women and children at the fire. I made what haste I +could to the shore, and, getting into my canoe, shoved off: the savages, +observing me retreat, ran after me: and before I could get far enough into the +sea, discharged an arrow which wounded me deeply on the inside of my left knee: +I shall carry the mark to my grave. I apprehended the arrow might be poisoned, +and paddling out of the reach of their darts (being a calm day), I made a shift +to suck the wound, and dress it as well as I could. + +I was at a loss what to do, for I durst not return to the same landing-place, +but stood to the north, and was forced to paddle, for the wind, though very +gentle, was against me, blowing north- west. As I was looking about for a +secure landing-place, I saw a sail to the north-north-east, which appearing +every minute more visible, I was in some doubt whether I should wait for them +or not; but at last my detestation of the Yahoo race prevailed: and turning my +canoe, I sailed and paddled together to the south, and got into the same creek +whence I set out in the morning, choosing rather to trust myself among these +barbarians, than live with European Yahoos. I drew up my canoe as close as I +could to the shore, and hid myself behind a stone by the little brook, which, +as I have already said, was excellent water. + +The ship came within half a league of this creek, and sent her long boat with +vessels to take in fresh water (for the place, it seems, was very well known); +but I did not observe it, till the boat was almost on shore; and it was too +late to seek another hiding-place. The seamen at their landing observed my +canoe, and rummaging it all over, easily conjectured that the owner could not +be far off. Four of them, well armed, searched every cranny and lurking-hole, +till at last they found me flat on my face behind the stone. They gazed awhile +in admiration at my strange uncouth dress; my coat made of skins, my +wooden-soled shoes, and my furred stockings; whence, however, they concluded, I +was not a native of the place, who all go naked. One of the seamen, in +Portuguese, bid me rise, and asked who I was. I understood that language very +well, and getting upon my feet, said, "I was a poor Yahoo banished from the +Houyhnhnms, and desired they would please to let me depart." They admired to +hear me answer them in their own tongue, and saw by my complexion I must be a +European; but were at a loss to know what I meant by Yahoos and Houyhnhnms; and +at the same time fell a-laughing at my strange tone in speaking, which +resembled the neighing of a horse. I trembled all the while betwixt fear and +hatred. I again desired leave to depart, and was gently moving to my canoe; but +they laid hold of me, desiring to know, "what country I was of? whence I came?" +with many other questions. I told them "I was born in England, whence I came +about five years ago, and then their country and ours were at peace. I +therefore hoped they would not treat me as an enemy, since I meant them no +harm, but was a poor Yahoo seeking some desolate place where to pass the +remainder of his unfortunate life." + +When they began to talk, I thought I never heard or saw any thing more +unnatural; for it appeared to me as monstrous as if a dog or a cow should speak +in England, or a Yahoo in Houyhnhnmland. The honest Portuguese were equally +amazed at my strange dress, and the odd manner of delivering my words, which, +however, they understood very well. They spoke to me with great humanity, and +said, "they were sure the captain would carry me gratis to Lisbon, whence I +might return to my own country; that two of the seamen would go back to the +ship, inform the captain of what they had seen, and receive his orders; in the +mean time, unless I would give my solemn oath not to fly, they would secure me +by force. I thought it best to comply with their proposal. They were very +curious to know my story, but I gave them very little satisfaction, and they +all conjectured that my misfortunes had impaired my reason. In two hours the +boat, which went laden with vessels of water, returned, with the captain's +command to fetch me on board. I fell on my knees to preserve my liberty; but +all was in vain; and the men, having tied me with cords, heaved me into the +boat, whence I was taken into the ship, and thence into the captain's cabin. + +His name was Pedro de Mendez; he was a very courteous and generous person. He +entreated me to give some account of myself, and desired to know what I would +eat or drink; said, "I should be used as well as himself;" and spoke so many +obliging things, that I wondered to find such civilities from a Yahoo. However, +I remained silent and sullen; I was ready to faint at the very smell of him and +his men. At last I desired something to eat out of my own canoe; but he ordered +me a chicken, and some excellent wine, and then directed that I should be put +to bed in a very clean cabin. I would not undress myself, but lay on the +bed-clothes, and in half an hour stole out, when I thought the crew was at +dinner, and getting to the side of the ship, was going to leap into the sea, +and swim for my life, rather than continue among Yahoos. But one of the seamen +prevented me, and having informed the captain, I was chained to my cabin. + +After dinner, Don Pedro came to me, and desired to know my reason for so +desperate an attempt; assured me, "he only meant to do me all the service he +was able;" and spoke so very movingly, that at last I descended to treat him +like an animal which had some little portion of reason. I gave him a very short +relation of my voyage; of the conspiracy against me by my own men; of the +country where they set me on shore, and of my five years residence there. All +which he looked upon as if it were a dream or a vision; whereat I took great +offence; for I had quite forgot the faculty of lying, so peculiar to Yahoos, in +all countries where they preside, and, consequently, their disposition of +suspecting truth in others of their own species. I asked him, "whether it were +the custom in his country to say the thing which was not?" I assured him, "I +had almost forgot what he meant by falsehood, and if I had lived a thousand +years in Houyhnhnmland, I should never have heard a lie from the meanest +servant; that I was altogether indifferent whether he believed me or not; but, +however, in return for his favours, I would give so much allowance to the +corruption of his nature, as to answer any objection he would please to make, +and then he might easily discover the truth." + +The captain, a wise man, after many endeavours to catch me tripping in some +part of my story, at last began to have a better opinion of my veracity. But he +added, "that since I professed so inviolable an attachment to truth, I must +give him my word and honour to bear him company in this voyage, without +attempting any thing against my life; or else he would continue me a prisoner +till we arrived at Lisbon." I gave him the promise he required; but at the same +time protested, "that I would suffer the greatest hardships, rather than return +to live among Yahoos." + +Our voyage passed without any considerable accident. In gratitude to the +captain, I sometimes sat with him, at his earnest request, and strove to +conceal my antipathy against human kind, although it often broke out; which he +suffered to pass without observation. But the greatest part of the day I +confined myself to my cabin, to avoid seeing any of the crew. The captain had +often entreated me to strip myself of my savage dress, and offered to lend me +the best suit of clothes he had. This I would not be prevailed on to accept, +abhorring to cover myself with any thing that had been on the back of a Yahoo. +I only desired he would lend me two clean shirts, which, having been washed +since he wore them, I believed would not so much defile me. These I changed +every second day, and washed them myself. + +We arrived at Lisbon, Nov. 5, 1715. At our landing, the captain forced me to +cover myself with his cloak, to prevent the rabble from crowding about me. I +was conveyed to his own house; and at my earnest request he led me up to the +highest room backwards. I conjured him "to conceal from all persons what I had +told him of the Houyhnhnms; because the least hint of such a story would not +only draw numbers of people to see me, but probably put me in danger of being +imprisoned, or burnt by the Inquisition." The captain persuaded me to accept a +suit of clothes newly made; but I would not suffer the tailor to take my +measure; however, Don Pedro being almost of my size, they fitted me well +enough. He accoutred me with other necessaries, all new, which I aired for +twenty-four hours before I would use them. + +The captain had no wife, nor above three servants, none of which were suffered +to attend at meals; and his whole deportment was so obliging, added to very +good human understanding, that I really began to tolerate his company. He +gained so far upon me, that I ventured to look out of the back window. By +degrees I was brought into another room, whence I peeped into the street, but +drew my head back in a fright. In a week's time he seduced me down to the door. +I found my terror gradually lessened, but my hatred and contempt seemed to +increase. I was at last bold enough to walk the street in his company, but kept +my nose well stopped with rue, or sometimes with tobacco. + +In ten days, Don Pedro, to whom I had given some account of my domestic +affairs, put it upon me, as a matter of honour and conscience, "that I ought to +return to my native country, and live at home with my wife and children." He +told me, "there was an English ship in the port just ready to sail, and he +would furnish me with all things necessary." It would be tedious to repeat his +arguments, and my contradictions. He said, "it was altogether impossible to +find such a solitary island as I desired to live in; but I might command in my +own house, and pass my time in a manner as recluse as I pleased." + +I complied at last, finding I could not do better. I left Lisbon the 24th day +of November, in an English merchantman, but who was the master I never +inquired. Don Pedro accompanied me to the ship, and lent me twenty pounds. He +took kind leave of me, and embraced me at parting, which I bore as well as I +could. During this last voyage I had no commerce with the master or any of his +men; but, pretending I was sick, kept close in my cabin. On the fifth of +December, 1715, we cast anchor in the Downs, about nine in the morning, and at +three in the afternoon I got safe to my house at Rotherhith.~^ + +My wife and family received me with great surprise and joy, because they +concluded me certainly dead; but I must freely confess the sight of them filled +me only with hatred, disgust, and contempt; and the more, by reflecting on the +near alliance I had to them. For although, since my unfortunate exile from the +Houyhnhnm country, I had compelled myself to tolerate the sight of Yahoos, and +to converse with Don Pedro de Mendez, yet my memory and imagination were +perpetually filled with the virtues and ideas of those exalted Houyhnhnms. And +when I began to consider that, by copulating with one of the Yahoo species I +had become a parent of more, it struck me with the utmost shame, confusion, and +horror. + +As soon as I entered the house, my wife took me in her arms, and kissed me; at +which, having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many +years, I fell into a swoon for almost an hour. At the time I am writing, it is +five years since my last return to England. During the first year, I could not +endure my wife or children in my presence; the very smell of them was +intolerable; much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room. To this +hour they dare not presume to touch my bread, or drink out of the same cup, +neither was I ever able to let one of them take me by the hand. The first money +I laid out was to buy two young stone-horses, which I keep in a good stable; +and next to them, the groom is my greatest favourite, for I feel my spirits +revived by the smell he contracts in the stable. My horses understand me +tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are +strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me and friendship +to each other. + +CHAPTER XII. + +[The author's veracity. His design in publishing this work. His censure of +those travellers who swerve from the truth. The author clears himself from any +sinister ends in writing. An objection answered. The method of planting +colonies. His native country commended. The right of the crown to those +countries described by the author is justified. The difficulty of conquering +them. The author takes his last leave of the reader; proposes his manner of +living for the future; gives good advice, and concludes.] + +Thus, gentle reader, I have given thee a faithful history of my travels for +sixteen years and above seven months: wherein I have not been so studious of +ornament as of truth. I could, perhaps, like others, have astonished thee with +strange improbable tales; but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact, in +the simplest manner and style; because my principal design was to inform, and +not to amuse thee. + +It is easy for us who travel into remote countries, which are seldom visited by +Englishmen or other Europeans, to form descriptions of wonderful animals both +at sea and land. Whereas a traveller's chief aim should be to make men wiser +and better, and to improve their minds by the bad, as well as good, example of +what they deliver concerning foreign places. + +I could heartily wish a law was enacted, that every traveller, before he were +permitted to publish his voyages, should be obliged to make oath before the +Lord High Chancellor, that all he intended to print was absolutely true to the +best of his knowledge; for then the world would no longer be deceived, as it +usually is, while some writers, to make their works pass the better upon the +public, impose the grossest falsities on the unwary reader. I have perused +several books of travels with great delight in my younger days; but having +since gone over most parts of the globe, and been able to contradict many +fabulous accounts from my own observation, it has given me a great disgust +against this part of reading, and some indignation to see the credulity of +mankind so impudently abused. Therefore, since my acquaintance were pleased to +think my poor endeavours might not be unacceptable to my country, I imposed on +myself, as a maxim never to be swerved from, that I would strictly adhere to +truth; neither indeed can I be ever under the least temptation to vary from it, +while I retain in my mind the lectures and example of my noble master and the +other illustrious Houyhnhnms of whom I had so long the honour to be an humble +hearer. + +- Nec si miserum Fortuna Sinonem Finxit, vanum etiam, mendacemque improba +finget. + +I know very well, how little reputation is to be got by writings which require +neither genius nor learning, nor indeed any other talent, except a good memory, +or an exact journal. I know likewise, that writers of travels, like +dictionary-makers, are sunk into oblivion by the weight and bulk of those who +come last, and therefore lie uppermost. And it is highly probable, that such +travellers, who shall hereafter visit the countries described in this work of +mine, may, by detecting my errors (if there be any), and adding many new +discoveries of their own, justle me out of vogue, and stand in my place, making +the world forget that ever I was an author. This indeed would be too great a +mortification, if I wrote for fame: but as my sole intention was the public +good, I cannot be altogether disappointed. For who can read of the virtues I +have mentioned in the glorious Houyhnhnms, without being ashamed of his own +vices, when he considers himself as the reasoning, governing animal of his +country? I shall say nothing of those remote nations where Yahoos preside; +among which the least corrupted are the Brobdingnagians; whose wise maxims in +morality and government it would be our happiness to observe. But I forbear +descanting further, and rather leave the judicious reader to his own remarks +and application. + +I am not a little pleased that this work of mine can possibly meet with no +censurers: for what objections can be made against a writer, who relates only +plain facts, that happened in such distant countries, where we have not the +least interest, with respect either to trade or negotiations? I have carefully +avoided every fault with which common writers of travels are often too justly +charged. Besides, I meddle not the least with any party, but write without +passion, prejudice, or ill-will against any man, or number of men, whatsoever. +I write for the noblest end, to inform and instruct mankind; over whom I may, +without breach of modesty, pretend to some superiority, from the advantages I +received by conversing so long among the most accomplished Houyhnhnms. I write +without any view to profit or praise. I never suffer a word to pass that may +look like reflection, or possibly give the least offence, even to those who are +most ready to take it. So that I hope I may with justice pronounce myself an +author perfectly blameless; against whom the tribes of Answerers, Considerers, +Observers, Reflectors, Detectors, Remarkers, will never be able to find matter +for exercising their talents. + +I confess, it was whispered to me, "that I was bound in duty, as a subject of +England, to have given in a memorial to a secretary of state at my first coming +over; because, whatever lands are discovered by a subject belong to the crown." +But I doubt whether our conquests in the countries I treat of would be as easy +as those of Ferdinando Cortez over the naked Americans. The Lilliputians, I +think, are hardly worth the charge of a fleet and army to reduce them; and I +question whether it might be prudent or safe to attempt the Brobdingnagians; or +whether an English army would be much at their ease with the Flying Island over +their heads. The Houyhnhnms indeed appear not to be so well prepared for war, a +science to which they are perfect strangers, and especially against missive +weapons. However, supposing myself to be a minister of state, I could never +give my advice for invading them. Their prudence, unanimity, unacquaintedness +with fear, and their love of their country, would amply supply all defects in +the military art. Imagine twenty thousand of them breaking into the midst of an +European army, confounding the ranks, overturning the carriages, battering the +warriors' faces into mummy by terrible yerks from their hinder hoofs; for they +would well deserve the character given to Augustus, Recalcitrat undique tutus. +But, instead of proposals for conquering that magnanimous nation, I rather wish +they were in a capacity, or disposition, to send a sufficient number of their +inhabitants for civilizing Europe, by teaching us the first principles of +honour, justice, truth, temperance, public spirit, fortitude, chastity, +friendship, benevolence, and fidelity. The names of all which virtues are still +retained among us in most languages, and are to be met with in modern, as well +as ancient authors; which I am able to assert from my own small reading. + +But I had another reason, which made me less forward to enlarge his majesty's +dominions by my discoveries. To say the truth, I had conceived a few scruples +with relation to the distributive justice of princes upon those occasions. For +instance, a crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither; at +length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and +plunder, they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give +the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they +set up a rotten plank, or a stone, for a memorial; they murder two or three +dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more, by force, for a sample; return +home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title +by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven +out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license +given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of +its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an +expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and +barbarous people! + +But this description, I confess, does by no means affect the British nation, +who may be an example to the whole world for their wisdom, care, and justice in +planting colonies; their liberal endowments for the advancement of religion and +learning; their choice of devout and able pastors to propagate Christianity; +their caution in stocking their provinces with people of sober lives and +conversations from this the mother kingdom; their strict regard to the +distribution of justice, in supplying the civil administration through all +their colonies with officers of the greatest abilities, utter strangers to +corruption; and, to crown all, by sending the most vigilant and virtuous +governors, who have no other views than the happiness of the people over whom +they preside, and the honour of the king their master. + +But as those countries which I have described do not appear to have any desire +of being conquered and enslaved, murdered or driven out by colonies, nor abound +either in gold, silver, sugar, or tobacco, I did humbly conceive, they were by +no means proper objects of our zeal, our valour, or our interest. However, if +those whom it more concerns think fit to be of another opinion, I am ready to +depose, when I shall be lawfully called, that no European did ever visit those +countries before me. I mean, if the inhabitants ought to be believed, unless a +dispute may arise concerning the two Yahoos, said to have been seen many years +ago upon a mountain in Houyhnhnmland. + +But, as to the formality of taking possession in my sovereign's name, it never +came once into my thoughts; and if it had, yet, as my affairs then stood, I +should perhaps, in point of prudence and self-preservation, have put it off to +a better opportunity. + +Having thus answered the only objection that can ever be raised against me as a +traveller, I here take a final leave of all my courteous readers, and return to +enjoy my own speculations in my little garden at Redriff; to apply those +excellent lessons of virtue which I learned among the Houyhnhnms; to instruct +the Yahoos of my own family, is far as I shall find them docible animals; to +behold my figure often in a glass, and thus, if possible, habituate myself by +time to tolerate the sight of a human creature; to lament the brutality to +Houyhnhnms in my own country, but always treat their persons with respect, for +the sake of my noble master, his family, his friends, and the whole Houyhnhnm +race, whom these of ours have the honour to resemble in all their lineaments, +however their intellectuals came to degenerate. + +I began last week to permit my wife to sit at dinner with me, at the farthest +end of a long table; and to answer (but with the utmost brevity) the few +questions I asked her. Yet, the smell of a Yahoo continuing very offensive, I +always keep my nose well stopped with rue, lavender, or tobacco leaves. And, +although it be hard for a man late in life to remove old habits, I am not +altogether out of hopes, in some time, to suffer a neighbour Yahoo in my +company, without the apprehensions I am yet under of his teeth or his claws. + +My reconcilement to the Yahoo kind in general might not be so difficult, if +they would be content with those vices and follies only which nature has +entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a +pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician, a whoremonger, +a physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this +is all according to the due course of things: but when I behold a lump of +deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it +immediately breaks all the measures of my patience; neither shall I be ever +able to comprehend how such an animal, and such a vice, could tally together. +The wise and virtuous Houyhnhnms, who abound in all excellences that can adorn +a rational creature, have no name for this vice in their language, which has no +terms to express any thing that is evil, except those whereby they describe the +detestable qualities of their Yahoos, among which they were not able to +distinguish this of pride, for want of thoroughly understanding human nature, +as it shows itself in other countries where that animal presides. But I, who +had more experience, could plainly observe some rudiments of it among the wild +Yahoos. + +But the Houyhnhnms, who live under the government of reason, are no more proud +of the good qualities they possess, than I should be for not wanting a leg or +an arm; which no man in his wits would boast of, although he must be miserable +without them. I dwell the longer upon this subject from the desire I have to +make the society of an English Yahoo by any means not insupportable; and +therefore I here entreat those who have any tincture of this absurd vice, that +they will not presume to come in my sight. + +^~ A stang is a pole or perch; sixteen feet and a half. + +^~ An act of parliament has been since passed by which some breaches of trust +have been made capital. + +^~ Britannia.--Sir W. Scott. + +^~ London.--Sir W. Scott. + +^~ This is the revised text adopted by Dr. Hawksworth (1766). The above +paragraph in the original editions (1726) takes another form, commencing:- "I +told him that should I happen to live in a kingdom where lots were in vogue," +&c. The names Tribnia and Langdon an not mentioned, and the "close stool" and +its signification do not occur. + +^~ This paragraph is not in the original editions. + +^~ The original editions and Hawksworth's have Rotherhith here, though earlier +in the work, Redriff is said to have been Gulliver's home in England. diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/little_brother.cory_doctorow.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/little_brother.cory_doctorow.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6a0c75d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/little_brother.cory_doctorow.sst @@ -0,0 +1,13410 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Little Brother + +@creator: + :author: Doctorow, Cory |email doctorow@craphound.com + :illustrator: Wilkinson, Richard + :cover: Wordle + +@date: + :published: 2008 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) Cory Doctorow, 2008 + :illustrations: Richard Wilkinson, 2009 + :cover: Wordle & Cory Doctorow + :license: This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means: \\ You are free: \\ * to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work \\ * to Remix - to adapt the work \\ Under the following conditions: \\ * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). \\ * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. \\ * Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. \\ * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link http://craphound.com/littlebrother \\ * Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my permission \\ More info here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ \\ See the end of this file for the complete legalese. [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License] \\ Cover image: Wordle, Attribution United States (CC BY) 3.0 \\ Illustration: Richard Wilkinson, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:civil rights|counterculture|young adult|science fiction|computer hackers|terrorism;democracy + :subject: Novel + :loc: PZ7.D66237 Lit 2008 + +@identifier: + :oclc: 176972381 + :isbn: 9780765319852 + +@notes: + :description: After being interrogated for days by the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco, California, seventeen-year-old Marcus, released into what is now a police state, decides to use his expertise in computer hacking to set things right. + +@links: + { Little Brother home }http://craphound.com/littlebrother + { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Cory_Doctorow_novel) + { @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Little-Brother-Cory-Doctorow/dp/B002IT5OMA + { @ Barnes & Noble}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Little-Brother/Cory-Doctorow/e/9780765319852 + +@make: + :breaks: break=1 + :cover_image: {cover_image_wordle_little_brother.png 494x775 "Little Brother" }image + :home_button_image: {little_brother_doctorow.png }http://craphound.com/littlebrother + :home_button_text: {Little Brother}http://craphound.com/littlebrother; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com + :footer: {Little Brother}http://craphound.com/littlebrother; {Cory Doctorow}http://www.doctorow.com + +:A~ @title @author + +1~cc READ THIS FIRST + +group{ + +This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means: + +You are free: + +_* to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work + +_* to Remix - to adapt the work + +Under the following conditions: + +_* Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). + +_* Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. + +_* Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. + +_* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link http://craphound.com/littlebrother + +_* Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my permission + +More info here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ + +See the end of this file for the complete legalese. + +}group + +1~intro INTRODUCTION + +I wrote Little Brother in a white-hot fury between May 7, 2007 and July 2, +2007: exactly eight weeks from the day I thought it up to the day I finished it +(Alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put up with me clacking out the +final chapter at 5AM in our hotel in Rome, where we were celebrating our +anniversary). I'd always dreamed of having a book just materialize, fully +formed, and come pouring out of my fingertips, no sweat and fuss -- but it +wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd thought it would be. There were days when I +wrote 10,000 words, hunching over my keyboard in airports, on subways, in taxis +-- anywhere I could type. The book was trying to get out of my head, no matter +what, and I missed so much sleep and so many meals that friends started to ask +if I was unwell. + +When my dad was a young university student in the 1960s, he was one of the few +"counterculture" people who thought computers were a good thing. For most young +people, computers represented the de-humanization of society. University +students were reduced to numbers on a punchcard, each bearing the legend "DO +NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE," prompting some of the students to wear +pins that said, "I AM A STUDENT: DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE ME." +Computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the authorities to +regiment people and bend them to their will. + +When I was a 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get more free. The +Berlin Wall was about to come down. Computers -- which had been geeky and weird +a few years before -- were everywhere, and the modem I'd used to connect to +local bulletin board systems was now connecting me to the entire world through +the Internet and commercial online services like GEnie. My lifelong fascination +with activist causes went into overdrive as I saw how the main difficulty in +activism -- organizing -- was getting easier by leaps and bounds (I still +remember the first time I switched from mailing out a newsletter with +hand-written addresses to using a database with mail-merge). In the Soviet +Union, communications tools were being used to bring information -- and +revolution -- to the farthest-flung corners of the largest authoritarian state +the Earth had ever seen. + +But 17 years later, things are very different. The computers I love are being +co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. The National Security +Agency has illegally wiretapped the entire USA and gotten away with it. Car +rental companies and mass transit and traffic authorities are watching where we +go, sending us automated tickets, finking us out to busybodies, cops and bad +guys who gain illicit access to their databases. The Transport Security +Administration maintains a "no-fly" list of people who'd never been convicted +of any crime, but who are nevertheless considered too dangerous to fly. The +list's contents are secret. The rule that makes it enforceable is secret. The +criteria for being added to the list are secret. It has four-year-olds on it. +And US senators. And decorated veterans -- actual war heroes. + +The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer +can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home for them. The +seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every +move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms I had +enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood. + +What's more, kids were clearly being used as guinea-pigs for a new kind of +technological state that all of us were on our way to, a world where taking a +picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museum or even a Starbucks), +or terrorism (in a public place), but where we could be photographed, tracked +and logged hundreds of times a day by every tin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat +and shop-keeper. A world where any measure, including torture, could be +justified just by waving your hands and shouting "Terrorism! 9/11! Terrorism!" +until all dissent fell silent. + +We don't have to go down that road. + +If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, +by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas +provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose +web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them +around. + +If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech -- not censorship +-- then you have a dog in the fight. + +If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tell us +the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the same struggle +that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under the same Bill of +Rights that adults have. + +This book is meant to be part of the conversation about what an information +society means: does it mean total control, or unheard-of liberty? It's not just +a noun, it's a verb, it's something you do. + +2~ DO SOMETHING + +This book is meant to be something you do, not just something you read. The +technology in this book is either real or nearly real. You can build a lot of +it. You can share it and remix it (see THE COPYRIGHT THING, below). You can use +the ideas to spark important discussions with your friends and family. You can +use those ideas to defeat censorship and get onto the free Internet, even if +your government, employer or school doesn't want you to. + +Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs for +building the technology in this book. It's easy and incredibly fun. There's +nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially stuff that makes +you more free: http://www.instructables.com/member/w1n5t0n/ + +Discussions: There's an educator's manual for this book that my publisher, Tor, +has put together that has tons of ideas for classroom, reading group and home +discussions of the ideas in it: +http://www.tor-forge.com/static/Little_Brother_Readers_Guide.pdf + +Defeat censorship: The afterword for this book has lots of resources for +increasing your online freedom, blocking the snoops and evading the censorware +blocks. The more people who know about this stuff, the better. + +Your stories: I'm collecting stories of people who've used technology to get +the upper hand when confronted with abusive authority. I'm going to be +including the best of these in a special afterword to the UK edition (see +below) of the book, and I'll be putting them online as well. Send me your +stories at doctorow@craphound.com, with the subject line "Abuses of Authority". + +2~ GREAT BRITAIN + +I'm a Canadian, and I've lived in lots of places (including San Francisco, the +setting for Little Brother), and now I live in London, England, with my wife +Alice and our little daughter, Poesy. I've lived here (off and on) for five +years now, and though I love it to tiny pieces, there's one thing that's always +bugged me: my books aren't available here. Some stores carried them as special +items, imported from the USA, but it wasn't published by a British publisher. + +That's changed! HarperCollins UK has bought the British rights to this book +(along with my next young adult novel, FOR THE WIN), and they're publishing it +just a few months after the US edition, on November 17, 2008 (the day after I +get back from my honeymoon!). + +UPDATE: November 27, 2008: And it's on shelves now! The HarperCollins edition's +a knockout, too! + +I'm so glad about this, I could bust, honestly. Not just because they're +finally selling my books in my adopted homeland, but because /{I'm raising a +daughter here, dammit}/, and the surveillance and control mania in this country +is starting to scare me bloodless. It seems like the entire police and +governance system in Britain has fallen in love with DNA-swabbing, +fingerprinting and video-recording everyone, on the off chance that someday you +might do something wrong. In early 2008, the head of Scotland Yard seriously +proposed taking DNA from /{five-year-olds}/ who display "offending traits" +because they'll probably grow up to be criminals. The next week, the London +police put up posters asking us all to turn in people who seem to be taking +pictures of the ubiquitous CCTV spy-cameras because anyone who pays too much +attention to the surveillance machine is probably a terrorist. + +America isn't the only country that lost its mind this decade. Britain's right +there in the nuthouse with it, dribbling down its shirt front and pointing its +finger at the invisible bogeymen and screaming until it gets its meds. + +We need to be having this conversation all over the planet. + +Want to get a copy in the UK? Sure thing! +http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/#uk + +2~ OTHER EDITIONS + +My agent, Russell Galen (and his sub-agent Danny Baror) did an amazing job of +pre-selling rights to Little Brother in many languages and formats. Here's the +list as of today (May 4, 2008). I'll be updating it as more editions are sold, +so feel free to grab another copy of this file +(http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download) if there's an edition you're +hoping to see, or see http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/ for links to buy +all the currently shipping editions. + +_* Audiobook from Random House: +http://www.randomhouse.com/audio/littlebrotheraudiobook + +A condition of my deal with Random House is that they're not allowed to release +this on services that use "DRM" (Digital Rights Management) systems intended to +control use and copying. That means that you won't find this book on Audible or +iTunes, because Audible refuses to sell books without DRM (even if the author +and publisher don't want DRM), and iTunes only carries Audible audiobooks. +However, you can buy the MP3 file direct from RandomHouse or many other fine +etailers, or through this widget: +http://www.zipidee.com/zipidAudioPreview.aspx?aid=c5a8e946-fd2c-4b9e-a748-f297bba17de8 + +_* My foreign rights agent, Danny Baror, has presold a number of foreign +editions: + +_* Greece: Pataki + +_* Russia: AST Publishing + +_* France: Universe Poche + +_* Norway: Det Norske Samlaget + +No publication dates yet for these, but I'll keep updating this file as more +information is available. You can also subscribe to my mailing list for more +info. + +2~ THE COPYRIGHT THING + +The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to +the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's +what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that +is too much. + +I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film +studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without +permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. +I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these +companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law +and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that +makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many +of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions +of Little Brother (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for +fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which I could just about +manage. + +I /{hate}/ the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are +expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. +It's just /{stupid}/ to say that an elementary school classroom should have to +talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on +one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their +electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a /{license}/ to do so. +Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a +fine thing. + +I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt +about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered +your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because +someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by +walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said +that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. +When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every +book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away +to friends who /{must}/ read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy +t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life. + +Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority +of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love +them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet +without permission is that they're /{readers}/, they're people who love books. + +People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: +the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all +night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the +record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on +the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a +member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of /{everything}/ that has +to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl +bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band. + +Same with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. +I've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online. I'm a stone used +bookstore junkie, and I go to book fairs for fun. And you know what? It's the +same people at all those places: book fans who do lots of everything that has +to do with books. I buy weird, fugly pirate editions of my favorite books in +China because they're weird and fugly and look great next to the eight or nine +other editions that I paid full-freight for of the same books. I check books +out of the library, google them when I need a quote, carry dozens around on my +phone and hundreds on my laptop, and have (at this writing) more than 10,000 of +them in storage lockers in London, Los Angeles and Toronto. + +If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I +/{would}/. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a +feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these writers and +musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new +feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first +place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the +new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll +force them to reconsider their business-models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, +but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches! + +Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the +history of the world. This is not a bad thing. + +In case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks +makes sense at this time and place: + +Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The +commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away +free ebooks and still make money? + +For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's +obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people +who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard +of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in +science fiction sell half a million copies -- in a world where 175,000 attend +the San Diego Comic Con alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who +"like science fiction" (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and +so on) just don't really buy books. I'm more interested in getting more of that +wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who's in the tent +bought a ticket to be there. + +Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it's in their nature. And many of +those copies have a destination, a person they're intended for, a hand-wrought +transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation +between two people who trust each other enough to share bits. That's the kind +of thing that authors (should) dream of, the proverbial sealing of the deal. By +making my books available for free pass-along, I make it easy for people who +love them to help other people love them. + +What's more, I don't see ebooks as substitute for paper books for most people. +It's not that the screens aren't good enough, either: if you're anything like +me, you already spend every hour you can get in front of the screen, reading +text. But the more computer-literate you are, the less likely you are to be +reading long-form works on those screens -- that's because computer-literate +people do more things with their computers. We run IM and email and we use the +browser in a million diverse ways. We have games running in the background, and +endless opportunities to tinker with our music libraries. The more you do with +your computer, the more likely it is that you'll be interrupted after five to +seven minutes to do something else. That makes the computer extremely poorly +suited to reading long-form works off of, unless you have the iron +self-discipline of a monk. + +The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are +more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, +cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably +read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading +it on paper. + +So ebooks sell print books. Every writer I've heard of who's tried giving away +ebooks to promote paper books has come back to do it again. That's the +commercial case for doing free ebooks. + +Now, onto the artistic case. It's the twenty-first century. Copying stuff is +never, ever going to get any harder than it is today (or if it does, it'll be +because civilization has collapsed, at which point we'll have other problems). +Hard drives aren't going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. +Networks won't get slower or harder to access. If you're not making art with +the intention of having it copied, you're not really making art for the +twenty-first century. There's something charming about making work you don't +want to be copied, in the same way that it's nice to go to a Pioneer Village +and see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his traditional forge. But +it's hardly, you know, /{contemporary}/. I'm a science fiction writer. It's my +job to write about the future (on a good day) or at least the present. Art +that's not supposed to be copied is from the past. + +Finally, let's look at the moral case. Copying stuff is natural. It's how we +learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story, written +when I was six, was an excited re-telling of Star Wars, which I'd just seen in +the theater. Now that the Internet -- the world's most efficient copying +machine -- is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to +play out more and more. There's no way I can stop my readers, and if I tried, +I'd be a hypocrite: when I was 17, I was making mix-tapes, photocopying +stories, and generally copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet +had been around then, I'd have been using it to copy as much as I possibly +could. + +There's no way to stop it, and the people who try end up doing more harm than +piracy ever did. The record industry's ridiculous holy war against file-sharers +(more than 20,000 music fans sued and counting!) exemplifies the absurdity of +trying to get the food-coloring out of the swimming pool. If the choice is +between allowing copying or being a frothing bully lashing out at anything he +can reach, I choose the former. + +2~ DONATIONS AND A WORD TO TEACHERS AND LIBRARIANS + +Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to +send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I'm not +interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. +They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to +audience I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire +to cut them out of the loop. + +But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I +think I've found it. + +Here's the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd love to get +hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but don't have the budget for +it (teachers in the US spend around $1,200 out of pocket each on classroom +supplies that their budgets won't stretch to cover, which is why I sponsor a +classroom at Ivanhoe Elementary in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can +adopt a class yourself here: http://www.adoptaclassroom.org/). + +There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the +free ebooks. + +I'm proposing that we put them together. + +If you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of Little Brother, +email freelittlebrother@gmail.com with your name and the name and address of +your school. It'll be posted to +http://craphound.com/littlebrother/category/donate/ by my fantastic helper, +Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it. + +If you enjoyed the electronic edition of Little Brother and you want to donate +something to say thanks, go to http://craphound.com/littlebrother/donate/ and +find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or +your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then +email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other +personal info first!) to freelittlebrother@gmail.com so that Olga can mark that +copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly acknowledged for your +generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous, otherwise we'll thank you +on the donate page. + +I have no idea if this will end up with hundreds, dozens or just a few copies +going out -- but I have high hopes! + +1~dedication DEDICATION + +For Alice, who makes me whole + +1~quotes QUOTES + +group{ + +"A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion, as necessary and dangerous as file +sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane." + +*{Scott Westerfeld}*, author of UGLIES and EXTRAS + +}group + +group{ + +"I can talk about Little Brother in terms of its bravura political speculation +or its brilliant uses of technology -- each of which make this book a must-read +-- but, at the end of it all, I'm haunted by the universality of Marcus's +rite-of-passage and struggle, an experience any teen today is going to grasp: +the moment when you choose what your life will mean and how to achieve it." + +*{Steven C Gould}*, author of JUMPER and REFLEX + +}group + +group{ + +I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year, and +I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and +female, as I can. + +Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't +be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe +technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to +their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. +Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't +know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first +time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It's a +wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much +meaningless. + +*{Neil Gaiman}*, author of ANANSI BOYS + +}group + +group{ + +Little Brother is a scarily realistic adventure about how homeland security +technology could be abused to wrongfully imprison innocent Americans. A teenage +hacker-turned-hero pits himself against the government to fight for his basic +freedoms. This book is action-packed with tales of courage, technology, and +demonstrations of digital disobedience as the technophile's civil protest." + +*{Bunnie Huang}*, author of HACKING THE XBOX + +}group + +group{ + +Cory Doctorow is a fast and furious storyteller who gets all the details of +alternate reality gaming right, while offering a startling, new vision of how +these games might play out in the high-stakes context of a terrorist attack. +Little Brother is a brilliant novel with a bold argument: hackers and gamers +might just be our country's best hope for the future. + +*{Jane McGonical}*, Designer, I Love Bees + +}group + +group{ + + +The right book at the right time from the right author -- and, not entirely +coincidentally, Cory Doctorow's best novel yet. + +*{John Scalzi}*, author of OLD MAN'S WAR + +}group + +group{ + +It's about growing up in the near future where things have kept going on the +way they've been going, and it's about hacking as a habit of mind, but mostly +it's about growing up and changing and looking at the world and asking what you +can do about that. The teenage voice is pitch-perfect. I couldn't put it down, +and I loved it. + +*{Jo Walton}*, author of FARTHING + +}group + +group{ + +A worthy younger sibling to Orwell's 1984, Cory Doctorow's LITTLE BROTHER is +lively, precocious, and most importantly, a little scary. + +*{Brian K Vaughn}*, author of Y: THE LAST MAN + +}group + +group{ + +"Little Brother" sounds an optimistic warning. It extrapolates from current +events to remind us of the ever-growing threats to liberty. But it also notes +that liberty ultimately resides in our individual attitudes and actions. In our +increasingly authoritarian world, I especially hope that teenagers and young +adults will read it -- and then persuade their peers, parents and teachers to +follow suit. + +*{Dan Gillmor}*, author of WE, THE MEDIA + +}group + +1~bookstores ABOUT THE BOOKSTORE DEDICATIONS + +Every chapter of this file has been dedicated to a different bookstore, and in +each case, it's a store that I love, a store that's helped me discover books +that opened my mind, a store that's helped my career along. The stores didn't +pay me anything for this -- I haven't even told them about it -- but it seems +like the right thing to do. After all, I'm hoping that you'll read this ebook +and decide to buy the paper book, so it only makes sense to suggest a few +places you can pick it up! + +1~ Chapter 1 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada.~{ +BakkaPhoenix Books: http://www.bakkaphoenixbooks.com/ 697 Queen Street West, +Toronto ON Canada M6J1E6, +1 416 963 9993 }~ Bakka is the oldest science +fiction bookstore in the world, and it made me the mutant I am today. I +wandered in for the first time around the age of 10 and asked for some +recommendations. Tanya Huff (yes, _{the}_ Tanya Huff, but she wasn't a famous +writer back then!) took me back into the used section and pressed a copy of H. +Beam Piper's "Little Fuzzy" into my hands, and changed my life forever. By the +time I was 18, I was working at Bakka -- I took over from Tanya when she +retired to write full time -- and I learned life-long lessons about how and why +people buy books. I think every writer should work at a bookstore (and plenty +of writers have worked at Bakka over the years! For the 30th anniversary of the +store, they put together an anthology of stories by Bakka writers that included +work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara +Tallan --and me!)] }/ + +I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Mission district, +and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world. My name is +Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. +Pronounced "Winston." + +/{Not}/ pronounced "Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn" -- unless you're a +clueless disciplinary officer who's far enough behind the curve that you still +call the Internet "the information superhighway." + +I know just such a clueless person, and his name is Fred Benson, one of three +vice-principals at Cesar Chavez. He's a sucking chest wound of a human being. +But if you're going to have a jailer, better a clueless one than one who's +really on the ball. + +"Marcus Yallow," he said over the PA one Friday morning. The PA isn't very good +to begin with, and when you combine that with Benson's habitual mumble, you get +something that sounds more like someone struggling to digest a bad burrito than +a school announcement. But human beings are good at picking their names out of +audio confusion -- it's a survival trait. + +I grabbed my bag and folded my laptop three-quarters shut -- I didn't want to +blow my downloads -- and got ready for the inevitable. + +"Report to the administration office immediately." + +My social studies teacher, Ms Galvez, rolled her eyes at me and I rolled my +eyes back at her. The Man was always coming down on me, just because I go +through school firewalls like wet kleenex, spoof the gait-recognition software, +and nuke the snitch chips they track us with. Galvez is a good type, anyway, +never holds that against me (especially when I'm helping get with her webmail +so she can talk to her brother who's stationed in Iraq). + +My boy Darryl gave me a smack on the ass as I walked past. I've known Darryl +since we were still in diapers and escaping from play-school, and I've been +getting him into and out of trouble the whole time. I raised my arms over my +head like a prizefighter and made my exit from Social Studies and began the +perp-walk to the office. + +I was halfway there when my phone went. That was another no-no -- phones are +muy prohibido at Chavez High -- but why should that stop me? I ducked into the +toilet and shut myself in the middle stall (the furthest stall is always +grossest because so many people head straight for it, hoping to escape the +smell and the squick -- the smart money and good hygiene is down the middle). I +checked the phone -- my home PC had sent it an email to tell it that there was +something new up on Harajuku Fun Madness, which happens to be the best game +ever invented. + +I grinned. Spending Fridays at school was teh suck anyway, and I was glad of +the excuse to make my escape. + +I ambled the rest of the way to Benson's office and tossed him a wave as I +sailed through the door. + +"If it isn't Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn," he said. Fredrick Benson -- +Social Security number 545-03-2343, date of birth August 15 1962, mother's +maiden name Di Bona, hometown Petaluma -- is a lot taller than me. I'm a runty +5'8", while he stands 6'7", and his college basketball days are far enough +behind him that his chest muscles have turned into saggy man-boobs that were +painfully obvious through his freebie dot-com polo-shirts. He always looks like +he's about to slam-dunk your ass, and he's really into raising his voice for +dramatic effect. Both these start to lose their efficacy with repeated +application. + +"Sorry, nope," I said. "I never heard of this R2D2 character of yours." + +"W1n5t0n," he said, spelling it out again. He gave me a hairy eyeball and +waited for me to wilt. Of course it was my handle, and had been for years. It +was the identity I used when I was posting on message-boards where I was making +my contributions to the field of applied security research. You know, like +sneaking out of school and disabling the minder-tracer on my phone. But he +didn't know that this was my handle. Only a small number of people did, and I +trusted them all to the end of the earth. + +"Um, not ringing any bells," I said. I'd done some pretty cool stuff around +school using that handle -- I was very proud of my work on snitch-tag killers +-- and if he could link the two identities, I'd be in trouble. No one at school +ever called me w1n5t0n or even Winston. Not even my pals. It was Marcus or +nothing. + +Benson settled down behind his desk and tapped his class-ring nervously on his +blotter. He did this whenever things started to go bad for him. Poker players +call stuff like this a "tell" -- something that let you know what was going on +in the other guy's head. I knew Benson's tells backwards and forwards. + +"Marcus, I hope you realize how serious this is." + +"I will just as soon as you explain what this is, sir." I always say "sir" to +authority figures when I'm messing with them. It's my own tell. + +He shook his head at me and looked down, another tell. Any second now, he was +going to start shouting at me. "Listen, kiddo! It's time you came to grips with +the fact that we know about what you've been doing, and that we're not going to +be lenient about it. You're going to be lucky if you're not expelled before +this meeting is through. Do you want to graduate?" + +"Mr Benson, you still haven't explained what the problem is --" + +He slammed his hand down on the desk and then pointed his finger at me. "The +/{problem}/, Mr Yallow, is that you've been engaged in criminal conspiracy to +subvert this school's security system, and you have supplied security +countermeasures to your fellow students. You know that we expelled Graciella +Uriarte last week for using one of your devices." Uriarte had gotten a bad rap. +She'd bought a radio-jammer from a head-shop near the 16th Street BART station +and it had set off the countermeasures in the school hallway. Not my doing, but +I felt for her. + +"And you think I'm involved in that?" + +"We have reliable intelligence indicating that you are w1n5t0n" -- again, he +spelled it out, and I began to wonder if he hadn't figured out that the 1 was +an I and the 5 was an S. "We know that this w1n5t0n character is responsible +for the theft of last year's standardized tests." That actually hadn't been me, +but it was a sweet hack, and it was kind of flattering to hear it attributed to +me. "And therefore liable for several years in prison unless you cooperate with +me." + +"You have 'reliable intelligence'? I'd like to see it." + +He glowered at me. "Your attitude isn't going to help you." + +"If there's evidence, sir, I think you should call the police and turn it over +to them. It sounds like this is a very serious matter, and I wouldn't want to +stand in the way of a proper investigation by the duly constituted +authorities." + +"You want me to call the police." + +"And my parents, I think. That would be for the best." + +We stared at each other across the desk. He'd clearly expected me to fold the +second he dropped the bomb on me. I don't fold. I have a trick for staring down +people like Benson. I look slightly to the left of their heads, and think about +the lyrics to old Irish folk songs, the kinds with three hundred verses. It +makes me look perfectly composed and unworried. + +/{And the wing was on the bird and the bird was on the egg and the egg was in +the nest and the nest was on the leaf and the leaf was on the twig and the twig +was on the branch and the branch was on the limb and the limb was in the tree +and the tree was in the bog -- the bog down in the valley-oh! High-ho the +rattlin' bog, the bog down in the valley-oh --}/ + +"You can return to class now," he said. "I'll call on you once the police are +ready to speak to you." + +"Are you going to call them now?" + +"The procedure for calling in the police is complicated. I'd hoped that we +could settle this fairly and quickly, but since you insist --" + +"I can wait while you call them is all," I said. "I don't mind." + +He tapped his ring again and I braced for the blast. + +"/{Go!}/" he yelled. "Get the hell out of my office, you miserable little --" + +I got out, keeping my expression neutral. He wasn't going to call the cops. If +he'd had enough evidence to go to the police with, he would have called them in +the first place. He hated my guts. I figured he'd heard some unverified gossip +and hoped to spook me into confirming it. + +I moved down the corridor lightly and sprightly, keeping my gait even and +measured for the gait-recognition cameras. These had been installed only a year +before, and I loved them for their sheer idiocy. Beforehand, we'd had +face-recognition cameras covering nearly every public space in school, but a +court ruled that was unconstitutional. So Benson and a lot of other paranoid +school administrators had spent our textbook dollars on these idiot cameras +that were supposed to be able to tell one person's walk from another. Yeah, +right. + +I got back to class and sat down again, Ms Galvez warmly welcoming me back. I +unpacked the school's standard-issue machine and got back into classroom mode. +The SchoolBooks were the snitchiest technology of them all, logging every +keystroke, watching all the network traffic for suspicious keywords, counting +every click, keeping track of every fleeting thought you put out over the net. +We'd gotten them in my junior year, and it only took a couple months for the +shininess to wear off. Once people figured out that these "free" laptops worked +for the man -- and showed a never-ending parade of obnoxious ads to boot -- +they suddenly started to feel very heavy and burdensome. + +Cracking my SchoolBook had been easy. The crack was online within a month of +the machine showing up, and there was nothing to it -- just download a DVD +image, burn it, stick it in the SchoolBook, and boot it while holding down a +bunch of different keys at the same time. The DVD did the rest, installing a +whole bunch of hidden programs on the machine, programs that would stay hidden +even when the Board of Ed did its daily remote integrity checks of the +machines. Every now and again I had to get an update for the software to get +around the Board's latest tests, but it was a small price to pay to get a +little control over the box. + +I fired up IMParanoid, the secret instant messenger that I used when I wanted +to have an off-the-record discussion right in the middle of class. Darryl was +already logged in. + +> The game's afoot! Something big is going down with Harajuku Fun Madness, +dude. You in? + +> No. Freaking. Way. If I get caught ditching a third time, I'm expelled. Man, +you know that. We'll go after school. + +> You've got lunch and then study-hall, right? That's two hours. Plenty of time +to run down this clue and get back before anyone misses us. I'll get the whole +team out. + +Harajuku Fun Madness is the best game ever made. I know I already said that, +but it bears repeating. It's an ARG, an Alternate Reality Game, and the story +goes that a gang of Japanese fashion-teens discovered a miraculous healing gem +at the temple in Harajuku, which is basically where cool Japanese teenagers +invented every major subculture for the past ten years. They're being hunted by +evil monks, the Yakuza (AKA the Japanese mafia), aliens, tax-inspectors, +parents, and a rogue artificial intelligence. They slip the players coded +messages that we have to decode and use to track down clues that lead to more +coded messages and more clues. + +Imagine the best afternoon you've ever spent prowling the streets of a city, +checking out all the weird people, funny hand-bills, street-maniacs, and funky +shops. Now add a scavenger hunt to that, one that requires you to research +crazy old films and songs and teen culture from around the world and across +time and space. And it's a competition, with the winning team of four taking a +grand prize of ten days in Tokyo, chilling on Harajuku bridge, geeking out in +Akihabara, and taking home all the Astro Boy merchandise you can eat. Except +that he's called "Atom Boy" in Japan. + +That's Harajuku Fun Madness, and once you've solved a puzzle or two, you'll +never look back. + +> No man, just no. NO. Don't even ask. + +> I need you D. You're the best I've got. I swear I'll get us in and out +without anyone knowing it. You know I can do that, right? + +> I know you can do it + +> So you're in? + +> Hell no + +> Come on, Darryl. You're not going to your deathbed wishing you'd spent more +study periods sitting in school + +> I'm not going to go to my deathbed wishing I'd spent more time playing ARGs +either + +> Yeah but don't you think you might go to your death-bed wishing you'd spent +more time with Vanessa Pak? + +Van was part of my team. She went to a private girl's school in the East Bay, +but I knew she'd ditch to come out and run the mission with me. Darryl has had +a crush on her literally for years -- even before puberty endowed her with many +lavish gifts. Darryl had fallen in love with her mind. Sad, really. + +> You suck + +> You're coming? + +He looked at me and shook his head. Then he nodded. I winked at him and set to +work getting in touch with the rest of my team. + +# + +I wasn't always into ARGing. I have a dark secret: I used to be a LARPer. +LARPing is Live Action Role Playing, and it's just about what it sounds like: +running around in costume, talking in a funny accent, pretending to be a +super-spy or a vampire or a medieval knight. It's like Capture the Flag in +monster-drag, with a bit of Drama Club thrown in, and the best games were the +ones we played in Scout Camps out of town in Sonoma or down on the Peninsula. +Those three-day epics could get pretty hairy, with all-day hikes, epic battles +with foam-and-bamboo swords, casting spells by throwing beanbags and shouting +"Fireball!" and so on. Good fun, if a little goofy. Not nearly as geeky as +talking about what your elf planned on doing as you sat around a table loaded +with Diet Coke cans and painted miniatures, and more physically active than +going into a mouse-coma in front of a massively multiplayer game at home. + +The thing that got me into trouble were the mini-games in the hotels. Whenever +a science fiction convention came to town, some LARPer would convince them to +let us run a couple of six-hour mini-games at the con, piggybacking on their +rental of the space. Having a bunch of enthusiastic kids running around in +costume lent color to the event, and we got to have a ball among people even +more socially deviant than us. + +The problem with hotels is that they have a lot of non-gamers in them, too -- +and not just sci-fi people. Normal people. From states that begin and end with +vowels. On holidays. + +And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game. + +Let's just leave it at that, OK? + +# + +Class ended in ten minutes, and that didn't leave me with much time to prepare. +The first order of business were those pesky gait-recognition cameras. Like I +said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled +unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these +gait-cams are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them. + +"Gait" is a fancy word for the way you walk. People are pretty good at spotting +gaits -- next time you're on a camping trip, check out the bobbing of the +flashlight as a distant friend approaches you. Chances are you can identify him +just from the movement of the light, the characteristic way it bobs up and down +that tells our monkey brains that this is a person approaching us. + +Gait recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolate you +in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to a +database to see if it knows who you are. It's a biometric identifier, like +fingerprints or retina-scans, but it's got a lot more "collisions" than either +of those. A biometric "collision" is when a measurement matches more than one +person. Only you have your fingerprint, but you share your gait with plenty +other people. + +Not exactly, of course. Your personal, inch-by-inch walk is yours and yours +alone. The problem is your inch-by-inch walk changes based on how tired you +are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled your ankle playing +basketball, and whether you've changed your shoes lately. So the system kind of +fuzzes-out your profile, looking for people who walk kind of like you. + +There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What's more, it's easy not +to walk kind of like you -- just take one shoe off. Of course, you'll always +walk like you-with-one-shoe-off in that case, so the cameras will eventually +figure out that it's still you. Which is why I prefer to inject a little +randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition: I put a handful of gravel into +each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two steps are the same. Plus you get a +great reflexology foot massage in the process (I kid. Reflexology is about as +scientifically useful as gait-recognition). + +The cameras used to set off an alert every time someone they didn't recognize +stepped onto campus. + +This did /{not}/ work. + +The alarm went off every ten minutes. When the mailman came by. When a parent +dropped in. When the grounds-people went to work fixing up the basketball +court. When a student showed up wearing new shoes. + +So now it just tries to keep track of who's where and when. If someone leaves +by the school-gates during classes, their gait is checked to see if it +kinda-sorta matches any student gait and if it does, whoop-whoop-whoop, ring +the alarm! + +Chavez High is ringed with gravel walkways. I like to keep a couple handsful of +rocks in my shoulder-bag, just in case. I silently passed Darryl ten or fifteen +pointy little bastards and we both loaded our shoes. + +Class was about to finish up -- and I realized that I still hadn't checked the +Harajuku Fun Madness site to see where the next clue was! I'd been a little +hyper-focused on the escape, and hadn't bothered to figure out where we were +escaping /{to}/. + +I turned to my SchoolBook and hit the keyboard. The web-browser we used was +supplied with the machine. It was a locked-down spyware version of Internet +Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of 40 used +voluntarily. + +I had a copy of Firefox on the USB drive built into my watch, but that wasn't +enough -- the SchoolBook ran Windows Vista4Schools, an antique operating system +designed to give school administrators the illusion that they controlled the +programs their students could run. + +But Vista4Schools is its own worst enemy. There are a lot of programs that +Vista4Schools doesn't want you to be able to shut down -- keyloggers, +censorware -- and these programs run in a special mode that makes them +invisible to the system. You can't quit them because you can't even see they're +there. + +Any program whose name starts with $SYS$ is invisible to the operating system. +it doesn't show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in the process monitor. +So my copy of Firefox was called $SYS$Firefox -- and as I launched it, it +became invisible to Windows, and so invisible to the network's snoopware. + +Now I had an indie browser running, I needed an indie network connection. The +school's network logged every click in and out of the system, which was bad +news if you were planning on surfing over to the Harajuku Fun Madness site for +some extra-curricular fun. + +The answer is something ingenious called TOR -- The Onion Router. An onion +router is an Internet site that takes requests for web-pages and passes them +onto other onion routers, and on to other onion routers, until one of them +finally decides to fetch the page and pass it back through the layers of the +onion until it reaches you. The traffic to the onion-routers is encrypted, +which means that the school can't see what you're asking for, and the layers of +the onion don't know who they're working for. There are millions of nodes -- +the program was set up by the US Office of Naval Research to help their people +get around the censorware in countries like Syria and China, which means that +it's perfectly designed for operating in the confines of an average American +high school. + +TOR works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty addresses we +aren't allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes change all the time -- +no way could the school keep track of them all. Firefox and TOR together made +me into the invisible man, impervious to Board of Ed snooping, free to check +out the Harajuku FM site and see what was up. + +There it was, a new clue. Like all Harajuku Fun Madness clues, it had a +physical, online and mental component. The online component was a puzzle you +had to solve, one that required you to research the answers to a bunch of +obscure questions. This batch included a bunch of questions on the plots in +dojinshi -- those are comic books drawn by fans of manga, Japanese comics. They +can be as big as the official comics that inspire them, but they're a lot +weirder, with crossover story-lines and sometimes really silly songs and +action. Lots of love stories, of course. Everyone loves to see their favorite +toons hook up. + +I'd have to solve those riddles later, when I got home. They were easiest to +solve with the whole team, downloading tons of dojinshi files and scouring them +for answers to the puzzles. + +I'd just finished scrap-booking all the clues when the bell rang and we began +our escape. I surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of my short boots +-- ankle-high Blundstones from Australia, great for running and climbing, and +the easy slip-on/slip-off laceless design makes them convenient at the +never-ending metal-detectors that are everywhere now. + +We also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that gets easier +every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery -- all the bells and +whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false sense of security. We +surfed the crowd down the hallways, heading for my favorite side-exit. We were +halfway along when Darryl hissed, "Crap! I forgot, I've got a library book in +my bag." + +"You're kidding me," I said, and hauled him into the next bathroom we passed. +Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid -- Radio Frequency +ID tag -- glued into its binding, which makes it possible for the librarians to +check out the books by waving them over a reader, and lets a library shelf tell +you if any of the books on it are out of place. + +But it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was another of +those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools track /{us}/ with +arphids, but they could track /{library books}/, and use the school records to +tell them who was likely to be carrying which library book. + +I had a little Faraday pouch in my bag -- these are little wallets lined with a +mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio energy, silencing arphids. +But the pouches were made for neutralizing ID cards and toll-booth +transponders, not books like -- + +"Introduction to Physics?" I groaned. The book was the size of a dictionary. + +1~ Chapter 2 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com,~{ Amazon: +http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765319853/downandoutint-20 }~ the +largest Internet bookseller in the world. Amazon is _{amazing}_ -- a "store" +where you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically +everything else, from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've elevated +recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to directly +communicate with each other, where they are constantly inventing new and better +ways of connecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me like gold +-- the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first novel! -- +and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy +something from Amazon approximately every _{six days}_). Amazon's in the +process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first +century and I can't think of a better group of people to be facing down that +thorny set of problems.] }/ + +"I'm thinking of majoring in physics when I go to Berkeley," Darryl said. His +dad taught at the University of California at Berkeley, which meant he'd get +free tuition when he went. And there'd never been any question in Darryl's +household about whether he'd go. + +"Fine, but couldn't you research it online?" + +"My dad said I should read it. Besides, I didn't plan on committing any crimes +today." + +"Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different." + +"What are we going to do, Marcus?" + +"Well, I can't hide it, so I'm going to have to nuke it." Killing arphids is a +dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going for a walk around the +shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of lobotomized merchandise that is +missing its invisible bar-code, so the manufacturers have refused to implement +a "kill signal" that you can radio to an arphid to get it to switch off. You +can reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hate doing that to library +books. It's not exactly tearing pages out of a book, but it's still bad, since +a book with a reprogrammed arphid can't be shelved and can't be found. It just +becomes a needle in a haystack. + +That left me with only one option: nuking the thing. Literally. 30 seconds in a +microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the market. And because the +arphid wouldn't answer at all when D checked it back in at the library, they'd +just print a fresh one for it and recode it with the book's catalog info, and +it would end up clean and neat back on its shelf. + +All we needed was a microwave. + +"Give it another two minutes and the teacher's lounge will be empty," I said. + +Darryl grabbed his book at headed for the door. "Forget it, no way. I'm going +to class." + +I snagged his elbow and dragged him back. "Come on, D, easy now. It'll be +fine." + +"The /{teacher's lounge}/? Maybe you weren't listening, Marcus. If I get busted +/{just once more}/, I am /{expelled.}/ You hear that? /{Expelled.}/" + +"You won't get caught," I said. The one place a teacher wouldn't be after this +period was the lounge. "We'll go in the back way." The lounge had a little +kitchenette off to one side, with its own entrance for teachers who just wanted +to pop in and get a cup of joe. The microwave -- which always reeked of popcorn +and spilled soup -- was right in there, on top of the miniature fridge. + +Darryl groaned. I thought fast. "Look, the bell's /{already rung}/. if you go +to study hall now, you'll get a late-slip. Better not to show at all at this +point. I can infiltrate and exfiltrate any room on this campus, D. You've seen +me do it. I'll keep you safe, bro." + +He groaned again. That was one of Darryl's tells: once he starts groaning, he's +ready to give in. + +"Let's roll," I said, and we took off. + +It was flawless. We skirted the classrooms, took the back stairs into the +basement, and came up the front stairs right in front of the teachers' lounge. +Not a sound came from the door, and I quietly turned the knob and dragged +Darryl in before silently closing the door. + +The book just barely fit in the microwave, which was looking even less sanitary +than it had the last time I'd popped in here to use it. I conscientiously +wrapped it in paper towels before I set it down. "Man, teachers are /{pigs}/," +I hissed. Darryl, white faced and tense, said nothing. + +The arphid died in a shower of sparks, which was really quite lovely (though +not nearly as pretty as the effect you get when you nuke a frozen grape, which +has to be seen to be believed). + +Now, to exfiltrate the campus in perfect anonymity and make our escape. + +Darryl opened the door and began to move out, me on his heels. A second later, +he was standing on my toes, elbows jammed into my chest, as he tried to +back-pedal into the closet-sized kitchen we'd just left. + +"Get back," he whispered urgently. "Quick -- it's Charles!" + +Charles Walker and I don't get along. We're in the same grade, and we've known +each other as long as I've known Darryl, but that's where the resemblance ends. +Charles has always been big for his age, and now that he's playing football and +on the juice, he's even bigger. He's got anger management problems -- I lost a +milk-tooth to him in the third grade, and he's managed to keep from getting in +trouble over them by becoming the most active snitch in school. + +It's a bad combination, a bully who also snitches, taking great pleasure in +going to the teachers with whatever infractions he's found. Benson /{loved}/ +Charles. Charles liked to let on that he had some kind of unspecified bladder +problem, which gave him a ready-made excuse to prowl the hallways at Chavez, +looking for people to fink on. + +The last time Charles had caught some dirt on me, it had ended with me giving +up LARPing. I had no intention of being caught by him again. + +"What's he doing?" + +"He's coming this way is what he's doing," Darryl said. He was shaking. + +"OK," I said. "OK, time for emergency countermeasures." I got my phone out. I'd +planned this well in advance. Charles would never get me again. I emailed my +server at home, and it got into motion. + +A few seconds later, Charles's phone spazzed out spectacularly. I'd had tens of +thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messages sent to it, causing +every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep on going off. The attack was +accomplished by means of a botnet, and for that I felt bad, but it was in the +service of a good cause. + +Botnets are where infected computers spend their afterlives. When you get a +worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channel on IRC -- the +Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster -- the guy who deployed +the worm -- that the computers are there ready to do his bidding. Botnets are +supremely powerful, since they can comprise thousands, even hundreds of +thousands of computers, scattered all over the Internet, connected to juicy +high-speed connections and running on fast home PCs. Those PCs normally +function on behalf of their owners, but when the botmaster calls them, they +rise like zombies to do his bidding. + +There are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiring an hour +or two on a botnet has crashed. Mostly these things work for spammers as cheap, +distributed spambots, filling your mailbox with come-ons for boner-pills or +with new viruses that can infect you and recruit your machine to join the +botnet. + +I'd just rented 10 seconds' time on three thousand PCs and had each of them +send a text message or voice-over-IP call to Charles's phone, whose number I'd +extracted from a sticky note on Benson's desk during one fateful office-visit. + +Needless to say, Charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. First the +SMSes filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking on the +routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer and log all +those incoming calls' bogus return numbers (did you know that it's /{really +easy}/ to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are about fifty ways of +doing it -- just google "spoof caller id"). + +Charles stared at it dumbfounded, and jabbed at it furiously, his thick +eyebrows knotting and wiggling as he struggled with the demons that had +possessed his most personal of devices. The plan was working so far, but he +wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing next -- he was supposed to go +find some place to sit down and try to figure out how to get his phone back. +Darryl shook me by the shoulder, and I pulled my eye away from the crack in the +door. + +"What's he doing?" Darryl whispered. + +"I totaled his phone, but he's just staring at it now instead of moving on." It +wasn't going to be easy to reboot that thing. Once the memory was totally +filled, it would have a hard time loading the code it needed to delete the +bogus messages -- and there was no bulk-erase for texts on his phone, so he'd +have to manually delete all of the thousands of messages. + +Darryl shoved me back and stuck his eye up to the door. A moment later, his +shoulders started to shake. I got scared, thinking he was panicking, but when +he pulled back, I saw that he was laughing so hard that tears were streaming +down his cheeks. + +"Galvez just totally busted him for being in the halls during class /{and}/ for +having his phone out -- you should have seen her tear into him. She was really +enjoying it." + +We shook hands solemnly and snuck back out of the corridor, down the stairs, +around the back, out the door, past the fence and out into the glorious +sunlight of afternoon in the Mission. Valencia Street had never looked so good. +I checked my watch and yelped. + +"Let's move! The rest of the gang is meeting us at the cable-cars in twenty +minutes!" + +# + +Van spotted us first. She was blending in with a group of Korean tourists, +which is one of her favorite ways of camouflaging herself when she's ditching +school. Ever since the truancy moblog went live, our world is full of nosy +shopkeepers and pecksniffs who take it upon themselves to snap our piccies and +put them on the net where they can be perused by school administrators. + +She came out of the crowd and bounded toward us. Darryl has had a thing for Van +since forever, and she's sweet enough to pretend she doesn't know it. She gave +me a hug and then moved onto Darryl, giving him a quick sisterly kiss on the +cheek that made him go red to the tops of his ears. + +The two of them made a funny pair: Darryl is a little on the heavy side, though +he wears it well, and he's got a kind of pink complexion that goes red in the +cheeks whenever he runs or gets excited. He's been able to grow a beard since +we were 14, but thankfully he started shaving after a brief period known to our +gang as "the Lincoln years." And he's tall. Very, very tall. Like basketball +player tall. + +Meanwhile, Van is half a head shorter than me, and skinny, with straight black +hair that she wears in crazy, elaborate braids that she researches on the net. +She's got pretty coppery skin and dark eyes, and she loves big glass rings the +size of radishes, which click and clack together when she dances. + +"Where's Jolu?" she said. + +"How are you, Van?" Darryl asked in a choked voice. He always ran a step behind +the conversation when it came to Van. + +"I'm great, D. How's your every little thing?" Oh, she was a bad, bad person. +Darryl nearly fainted. + +Jolu saved him from social disgrace by showing up just then, in an oversize +leather baseball jacket, sharp sneakers, and a meshback cap advertising our +favorite Mexican masked wrestler, El Santo Junior. Jolu is Jose Luis Torrez, +the completing member of our foursome. He went to a super-strict Catholic +school in the Outer Richmond, so it wasn't easy for him to get out. But he +always did: no one exfiltrated like our Jolu. He liked his jacket because it +hung down low -- which was pretty stylish in parts of the city -- and covered +up all his Catholic school crap, which was like a bulls-eye for nosy jerks with +the truancy moblog bookmarked on their phones. + +"Who's ready to go?" I asked, once we'd all said hello. I pulled out my phone +and showed them the map I'd downloaded to it on the BART. "Near as I can work +out, we wanna go up to the Nikko again, then one block past it to O'Farrell, +then left up toward Van Ness. Somewhere in there we should find the wireless +signal." + +Van made a face. "That's a nasty part of the Tenderloin." I couldn't argue with +her. That part of San Francisco is one of the weird bits -- you go in through +the Hilton's front entrance and it's all touristy stuff like the cable-car +turnaround and family restaurants. Go through to the other side and you're in +the 'Loin, where every tracked out transvestite hooker, hard-case pimp, hissing +drug dealer and cracked up homeless person in town was concentrated. What they +bought and sold, none of us were old enough to be a part of (though there were +plenty of hookers our age plying their trade in the 'Loin.) + +"Look on the bright side," I said. "The only time you want to go up around +there is broad daylight. None of the other players are going to go near it +until tomorrow at the earliest. This is what we in the ARG business call a +/{monster head start.}/" + +Jolu grinned at me. "You make it sound like a good thing," he said. + +"Beats eating uni," I said. + +"We going to talk or we going to win?" Van said. After me, she was hands-down +the most hardcore player in our group. She took winning very, very seriously. + +We struck out, four good friends, on our way to decode a clue, win the game -- +and lose everything we cared about, forever. + +# + +The physical component of today's clue was a set of GPS coordinates -- there +were coordinates for all the major cities where Harajuku Fun Madness was played +-- where we'd find a WiFi access-point's signal. That signal was being +deliberately jammed by another, nearby WiFi point that was hidden so that it +couldn't be spotted by conventional wifinders, little key-fobs that told you +when you were within range of someone's open access-point, which you could use +for free. + +We'd have to track down the location of the "hidden" access point by measuring +the strength of the "visible" one, finding the spot where it was most +mysteriously weakest. There we'd find another clue -- last time it had been in +the special of the day at Anzu, the swanky sushi restaurant in the Nikko hotel +in the Tenderloin. The Nikko was owned by Japan Airlines, one of Harajuku Fun +Madness's sponsors, and the staff had all made a big fuss over us when we +finally tracked down the clue. They'd given us bowls of miso soup and made us +try uni, which is sushi made from sea urchin, with the texture of very runny +cheese and a smell like very runny dog-droppings. But it tasted /{really}/ +good. Or so Darryl told me. I wasn't going to eat that stuff. + +I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone's wifinder about three blocks up +O'Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy "Asian Massage Parlor" +with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. The network's name was +HarajukuFM, so we knew we had the right spot. + +"If it's in there, I'm not going," Darryl said. + +"You all got your wifinders?" I said. + +Darryl and Van had phones with built-in wifinders, while Jolu, being too cool +to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separate little +directional fob. + +"OK, fan out and see what we see. You're looking for a sharp drop off in the +signal that gets worse the more you move along it." + +I took a step backward and ended up standing on someone's toes. A female voice +said "oof" and I spun around, worried that some crack-ho was going to stab me +for breaking her heels. + +Instead, I found myself face to face with another kid my age. She had a shock +of bright pink hair and a sharp, rodent-like face, with big sunglasses that +were practically air-force goggles. She was dressed in striped tights beneath a +black granny dress, with lots of little Japanese decorer toys safety pinned to +it -- anime characters, old world leaders, emblems from foreign soda-pop. + +She held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew. + +"Cheese," she said. "You're on candid snitch-cam." + +"No way," I said. "You wouldn't --" + +"I will," she said. "I will send this photo to truant watch in thirty seconds +unless you four back off from this clue and let me and my friends here run it +down. You can come back in one hour and it'll be all yours. I think that's more +than fair." + +I looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb -- one with +blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. "Who are you supposed to be, +the Popsicle Squad?" + +"We're the team that's going to kick your team's ass at Harajuku Fun Madness," +she said. "And I'm the one who's /{right this second}/ about to upload your +photo and get you in /{so much trouble}/ --" + +Behind me I felt Van start forward. Her all-girls school was notorious for its +brawls, and I was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick's block off. + +Then the world changed forever. + +We felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet that every +Californian knows instinctively -- /{earthquake}/. My first inclination, as +always, was to get away: "when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream +and shout." But the fact was, we were already in the safest place we could be, +not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward the middle of the +road where bits of falling cornice could brain us. + +Earthquakes are eerily quiet -- at first, anyway -- but this wasn't quiet. This +was loud, an incredible roaring sound that was louder than anything I'd ever +heard before. The sound was so punishing it drove me to my knees, and I wasn't +the only one. Darryl shook my arm and pointed over the buildings and we saw it +then: a huge black cloud rising from the northeast, from the direction of the +Bay. + +There was another rumble, and the cloud of smoke spread out, that spreading +black shape we'd all grown up seeing in movies. Someone had just blown up +something, in a big way. + +There were more rumbles and more tremors. Heads appeared at windows up and down +the street. We all looked at the mushroom cloud in silence. + +Then the sirens started. + +I'd heard sirens like these before -- they test the civil defense sirens at +noon on Tuesdays. But I'd only heard them go off unscheduled in old war movies +and video games, the kind where someone is bombing someone else from above. Air +raid sirens. The wooooooo sound made it all less real. + +"Report to shelters immediately." It was like the voice of God, coming from all +places at once. There were speakers on some of the electric poles, something +I'd never noticed before, and they'd all switched on at once. + +"Report to shelters immediately." Shelters? We looked at each other in +confusion. What shelters? The cloud was rising steadily, spreading out. Was it +nuclear? Were we breathing in our last breaths? + +The girl with the pink hair grabbed her friends and they tore ass downhill, +back toward the BART station and the foot of the hills. + +"REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY." There was screaming now, and a lot of running +around. Tourists -- you can always spot the tourists, they're the ones who +think CALIFORNIA = WARM and spend their San Francisco holidays freezing in +shorts and t-shirts -- scattered in every direction. + +"We should go!" Darryl hollered in my ear, just barely audible over the +shrieking of the sirens, which had been joined by traditional police sirens. A +dozen SFPD cruisers screamed past us. + +"REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY." + +"Down to the BART station," I hollered. My friends nodded. We closed ranks and +began to move quickly downhill. + +1~ Chapter 3 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Borderlands Books,~{ Borderland Books: +http://www.borderlands-books.com/ 866 Valencia Ave, San Francisco CA USA 94110 ++1 888 893 4008 }~ San Francisco's magnificent independent science fiction +bookstore. Borderlands is basically located across the street from the +fictional Cesar Chavez High depicted in Little Brother, and it's not just +notorious for its brilliant events, signings, book clubs and such, but also for +its amazing hairless Egyptian cat, Ripley, who likes to perch like a buzzing +gargoyle on the computer at the front of the store. Borderlands is about the +friendliest bookstore you could ask for, filled with comfy places to sit and +read, and staffed by incredibly knowledgeable clerks who know everything there +is to know about science fiction. Even better, they've always been willing to +take orders for my book (by net or phone) and hold them for me to sign when I +drop into the store, then they ship them within the US for free!] }/ + +We passed a lot of people in the road on the way to the Powell Street BART. +They were running or walking, white-faced and silent or shouting and panicked. +Homeless people cowered in doorways and watched it all, while a tall black +tranny hooker shouted at two mustached young men about something. + +The closer we got to the BART, the worse the press of bodies became. By the +time we reached the stairway down into the station, it was a mob-scene, a huge +brawl of people trying to crowd their way down a narrow staircase. I had my +face crushed up against someone's back, and someone else was pressed into my +back. + +Darryl was still beside me -- he was big enough that he was hard to shove, and +Jolu was right behind him, kind of hanging on to his waist. I spied Vanessa a +few yards away, trapped by more people. + +"Screw you!" I heard Van yell behind me. "Pervert! Get your hands off of me!" + +I strained around against the crowd and saw Van looking with disgust at an +older guy in a nice suit who was kind of smirking at her. She was digging in +her purse and I knew what she was digging for. + +"Don't mace him!" I shouted over the din. "You'll get us all too." + +At the mention of the word mace, the guy looked scared and kind of melted back, +though the crowd kept him moving forward. Up ahead, I saw someone, a +middle-aged lady in a hippie dress, falter and fall. She screamed as she went +down, and I saw her thrashing to get up, but she couldn't, the crowd's pressure +was too strong. As I neared her, I bent to help her up, and was nearly knocked +over her. I ended up stepping on her stomach as the crowd pushed me past her, +but by then I don't think she was feeling anything. + +I was as scared as I'd ever been. There was screaming everywhere now, and more +bodies on the floor, and the press from behind was as relentless as a +bulldozer. It was all I could do to keep on my feet. + +We were in the open concourse where the turnstiles were. It was hardly any +better here -- the enclosed space sent the voices around us echoing back in a +roar that made my head ring, and the smell and feeling of all those bodies made +me feel a claustrophobia I'd never known I was prone to. + +People were still cramming down the stairs, and more were squeezing past the +turnstiles and down the escalators onto the platforms, but it was clear to me +that this wasn't going to have a happy ending. + +"Want to take our chances up top?" I said to Darryl. + +"Yes, hell yes," he said. "This is vicious." + +I looked to Vanessa -- there was no way she'd hear me. I managed to get my +phone out and I texted her. + +> We're getting out of here + +I saw her feel the vibe from her phone, then look down at it and then back at +me and nod vigorously. Darryl, meanwhile, had clued Jolu in. + +"/{What's the plan?}/ Darryl shouted in my ear. + +"We're going to have to go back!" I shouted back, pointing at the remorseless +crush of bodies. + +"It's impossible!" he said. + +"It's just going to get more impossible the longer we wait!" + +He shrugged. Van worked her way over to me and grabbed hold of my wrist. I took +Darryl and Darryl took Jolu by the other hand and we pushed out. + +It wasn't easy. We moved about three inches a minute at first, then slowed down +even more when we reached the stairway. The people we passed were none too +happy about us shoving them out of the way, either. A couple people swore at us +and there was a guy who looked like he'd have punched me if he'd been able to +get his arms loose. We passed three more crushed people beneath us, but there +was no way I could have helped them. By that point, I wasn't even thinking of +helping anyone. All I could think of was finding the spaces in front of us to +move into, of Darryl's mighty straining on my wrist, of my death-grip on Van +behind me. + +We popped free like Champagne corks an eternity later, blinking in the grey +smoky light. The air raid sirens were still blaring, and the sound of emergency +vehicles' sirens as they tore down Market Street was even louder. There was +almost no one on the streets anymore -- just the people trying hopelessly to +get underground. A lot of them were crying. I spotted a bunch of empty benches +-- usually staked out by skanky winos -- and pointed toward them. + +We moved for them, the sirens and the smoke making us duck and hunch our +shoulders. We got as far as the benches before Darryl fell forward. + +We all yelled and Vanessa grabbed him and turned him over. The side of his +shirt was stained red, and the stain was spreading. She tugged his shirt up and +revealed a long, deep cut in his pudgy side. + +"Someone freaking /{stabbed}/ him in the crowd," Jolu said, his hands clenching +into fists. "Christ, that's vicious." + +Darryl groaned and looked at us, then down at his side, then he groaned and his +head went back again. + +Vanessa took off her jean jacket and then pulled off the cotton hoodie she was +wearing underneath it. She wadded it up and pressed it to Darryl's side. "Take +his head," she said to me. "Keep it elevated." To Jolu she said, "Get his feet +up -- roll up your coat or something." Jolu moved quickly. Vanessa's mother is +a nurse and she'd had first aid training every summer at camp. She loved to +watch people in movies get their first aid wrong and make fun of them. I was so +glad to have her with us. + +We sat there for a long time, holding the hoodie to Darryl's side. He kept +insisting that he was fine and that we should let him up, and Van kept telling +him to shut up and lie still before she kicked his ass. + +"What about calling 911?" Jolu said. + +I felt like an idiot. I whipped my phone out and punched 911. The sound I got +wasn't even a busy signal -- it was like a whimper of pain from the phone +system. You don't get sounds like that unless there's three million people all +dialing the same number at once. Who needs botnets when you've got terrorists? + +"What about Wikipedia?" Jolu said. + +"No phone, no data," I said. + +"What about them?" Darryl said, and pointed at the street. I looked where he +was pointing, thinking I'd see a cop or an paramedic, but there was no one +there. + +"It's OK buddy, you just rest," I said. + +"No, you idiot, what about /{them}/, the cops in the cars? There!" + +He was right. Every five seconds, a cop car, an ambulance or a firetruck zoomed +past. They could get us some help. I was such an idiot. + +"Come on, then," I said, "let's get you where they can see you and flag one +down." + +Vanessa didn't like it, but I figured a cop wasn't going to stop for a kid +waving his hat in the street, not that day. They just might stop if they saw +Darryl bleeding there, though. I argued briefly with her and Darryl settled it +by lurching to his feet and dragging himself down toward Market Street. + +The first vehicle that screamed past -- an ambulance -- didn't even slow down. +Neither did the cop car that went past, nor the firetruck, nor the next three +cop-cars. Darryl wasn't in good shape -- he was white-faced and panting. Van's +sweater was soaked in blood. + +I was sick of cars driving right past me. The next time a car appeared down +Market Street, I stepped right out into the road, waving my arms over my head, +shouting "/{STOP}/." The car slewed to a stop and only then did I notice that +it wasn't a cop car, ambulance or fire-engine. + +It was a military-looking Jeep, like an armored Hummer, only it didn't have any +military insignia on it. The car skidded to a stop just in front of me, and I +jumped back and lost my balance and ended up on the road. I felt the doors open +near me, and then saw a confusion of booted feet moving close by. I looked up +and saw a bunch of military-looking guys in coveralls, holding big, bulky +rifles and wearing hooded gas masks with tinted face-plates. + +I barely had time to register them before those rifles were pointed at me. I'd +never looked down the barrel of a gun before, but everything you've heard about +the experience is true. You freeze where you are, time stops, and your heart +thunders in your ears. I opened my mouth, then shut it, then, very slowly, I +held my hands up in front of me. + +The faceless, eyeless armed man above me kept his gun very level. I didn't even +breathe. Van was screaming something and Jolu was shouting and I looked at them +for a second and that was when someone put a coarse sack over my head and +cinched it tight around my windpipe, so quick and so fiercely I barely had time +to gasp before it was locked on me. I was pushed roughly but dispassionately +onto my stomach and something went twice around my wrists and then tightened up +as well, feeling like baling wire and biting cruelly. I cried out and my own +voice was muffled by the hood. + +I was in total darkness now and I strained my ears to hear what was going on +with my friends. I heard them shouting through the muffling canvas of the bag, +and then I was being impersonally hauled to my feet by my wrists, my arms +wrenched up behind my back, my shoulders screaming. + +I stumbled some, then a hand pushed my head down and I was inside the Hummer. +More bodies were roughly shoved in beside me. + +"Guys?" I shouted, and earned a hard thump on my head for my trouble. I heard +Jolu respond, then felt the thump he was dealt, too. My head rang like a gong. + +"Hey," I said to the soldiers. "Hey, listen! We're just high school students. I +wanted to flag you down because my friend was bleeding. Someone stabbed him." I +had no idea how much of this was making it through the muffling bag. I kept +talking. "Listen -- this is some kind of misunderstanding. We've got to get my +friend to a hospital --" + +Someone went upside my head again. It felt like they used a baton or something +-- it was harder than anyone had ever hit me in the head before. My eyes swam +and watered and I literally couldn't breathe through the pain. A moment later, +I caught my breath, but I didn't say anything. I'd learned my lesson. + +Who were these clowns? They weren't wearing insignia. Maybe they were +terrorists! I'd never really believed in terrorists before -- I mean, I knew +that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they +didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions of ways that the +world could kill me -- starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his +way down Valencia -- that were infinitely more likely and immediate than +terrorists. Terrorists killed a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and +accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them always struck me as about as +useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning. + +Sitting in the back of that Hummer, my head in a hood, my hands lashed behind +my back, lurching back and forth while the bruises swelled up on my head, +terrorism suddenly felt a lot riskier. + +The car rocked back and forth and tipped uphill. I gathered we were headed over +Nob Hill, and from the angle, it seemed we were taking one of the steeper +routes -- I guessed Powell Street. + +Now we were descending just as steeply. If my mental map was right, we were +heading down to Fisherman's Wharf. You could get on a boat there, get away. +That fit with the terrorism hypothesis. Why the hell would terrorists kidnap a +bunch of high school students? + +We rocked to a stop still on a downslope. The engine died and then the doors +swung open. Someone dragged me by my arms out onto the road, then shoved me, +stumbling, down a paved road. A few seconds later, I tripped over a steel +staircase, bashing my shins. The hands behind me gave me another shove. I went +up the stairs cautiously, not able to use my hands. I got up the third step and +reached for the fourth, but it wasn't there. I nearly fell again, but new hands +grabbed me from in front and dragged me down a steel floor and then forced me +to my knees and locked my hands to something behind me. + +More movement, and the sense of bodies being shackled in alongside of me. +Groans and muffled sounds. Laughter. Then a long, timeless eternity in the +muffled gloom, breathing my own breath, hearing my own breath in my ears. + +# + +I actually managed a kind of sleep there, kneeling with the circulation cut off +to my legs, my head in canvas twilight. My body had squirted a year's supply of +adrenalin into my bloodstream in the space of 30 minutes, and while that stuff +can give you the strength to lift cars off your loved ones and leap over tall +buildings, the payback's always a bitch. + +I woke up to someone pulling the hood off my head. They were neither rough nor +careful -- just...impersonal. Like someone at McDonald's putting together +burgers. + +The light in the room was so bright I had to squeeze my eyes shut, but slowly I +was able to open them to slits, then cracks, then all the way and look around. + +We were all in the back of a truck, a big 16-wheeler. I could see the +wheel-wells at regular intervals down the length. But the back of this truck +had been turned into some kind of mobile command-post/jail. Steel desks lined +the walls with banks of slick flat-panel displays climbing above them on +articulated arms that let them be repositioned in a halo around the operators. +Each desk had a gorgeous office-chair in front of it, festooned with +user-interface knobs for adjusting every millimeter of the sitting surface, as +well as height, pitch and yaw. + +Then there was the jail part -- at the front of the truck, furthest away from +the doors, there were steel rails bolted into the sides of the vehicle, and +attached to these steel rails were the prisoners. + +I spotted Van and Jolu right away. Darryl might have been in the remaining +dozen shackled up back here, but it was impossible to say -- many of them were +slumped over and blocking my view. It stank of sweat and fear back there. + +Vanessa looked at me and bit her lip. She was scared. So was I. So was Jolu, +his eyes rolling crazily in their sockets, the whites showing. I was scared. +What's more, I had to piss like a /{race-horse.}/ + +I looked around for our captors. I'd avoided looking at them up until now, the +same way you don't look into the dark of a closet where your mind has conjured +up a boogey-man. You don't want to know if you're right. + +But I had to get a better look at these jerks who'd kidnapped us. If they were +terrorists, I wanted to know. I didn't know what a terrorist looked like, +though TV shows had done their best to convince me that they were brown Arabs +with big beards and knit caps and loose cotton dresses that hung down to their +ankles. + +Not so our captors. They could have been half-time-show cheerleaders on the +Super Bowl. They looked /{American}/ in a way I couldn't exactly define. Good +jaw-lines, short, neat haircuts that weren't quite military. They came in white +and brown, male and female, and smiled freely at one another as they sat down +at the other end of the truck, joking and drinking coffees out of go-cups. +These weren't Ay-rabs from Afghanistan: they looked like tourists from +Nebraska. + +I stared at one, a young white woman with brown hair who barely looked older +than me, kind of cute in a scary office-power-suit way. If you stare at someone +long enough, they'll eventually look back at you. She did, and her face slammed +into a totally different configuration, dispassionate, even robotic. The smile +vanished in an instant. + +"Hey," I said. "Look, I don't understand what's going on here, but I really +need to take a leak, you know?" + +She looked right through me as if she hadn't heard. + +"I'm serious, if I don't get to a can soon, I'm going to have an ugly accident. +It's going to get pretty smelly back here, you know?" + +She turned to her colleagues, a little huddle of three of them, and they held a +low conversation I couldn't hear over the fans from the computers. + +She turned back to me. "Hold it for another ten minutes, then you'll each get a +piss-call." + +"I don't think I've got another ten minutes in me," I said, letting a little +more urgency than I was really feeling creep into my voice. "Seriously, lady, +it's now or never." + +She shook her head and looked at me like I was some kind of pathetic loser. She +and her friends conferred some more, then another one came forward. He was +older, in his early thirties, and pretty big across the shoulders, like he +worked out. He looked like he was Chinese or Korean -- even Van can't tell the +difference sometimes -- but with that bearing that said /{American}/ in a way I +couldn't put my finger on. + +He pulled his sports-coat aside to let me see the hardware strapped there: I +recognized a pistol, a tazer and a can of either mace or pepper-spray before he +let it fall again. + +"No trouble," he said. + +"None," I agreed. + +He touched something at his belt and the shackles behind me let go, my arms +dropping suddenly behind me. It was like he was wearing Batman's utility belt +-- wireless remotes for shackles! I guessed it made sense, though: you wouldn't +want to lean over your prisoners with all that deadly hardware at their +eye-level -- they might grab your gun with their teeth and pull the trigger +with their tongues or something. + +My hands were still lashed together behind me by the plastic strapping, and now +that I wasn't supported by the shackles, I found that my legs had turned into +lumps of cork while I was stuck in one position. Long story short, I basically +fell onto my face and kicked my legs weakly as they went pins-and-needles, +trying to get them under me so I could rock up to my feet. + +The guy jerked me to my feet and I clown-walked to the very back of the truck, +to a little boxed-in porta-john there. I tried to spot Darryl on the way back, +but he could have been any of the five or six slumped people. Or none of them. + +"In you go," the guy said. + +I jerked my wrists. "Take these off, please?" My fingers felt like purple +sausages from the hours of bondage in the plastic cuffs. + +The guy didn't move. + +"Look," I said, trying not to sound sarcastic or angry (it wasn't easy). "Look. +You either cut my wrists free or you're going to have to aim for me. A toilet +visit is not a hands-free experience." Someone in the truck sniggered. The guy +didn't like me, I could tell from the way his jaw muscles ground around. Man, +these people were wired tight. + +He reached down to his belt and came up with a very nice set of multi-pliers. +He flicked out a wicked-looking knife and sliced through the plastic cuffs and +my hands were my own again. + +"Thanks," I said. + +He shoved me into the bathroom. My hands were useless, like lumps of clay on +the ends of my wrists. As I wiggled my fingers limply, they tingled, then the +tingling turned to a burning feeling that almost made me cry out. I put the +seat down, dropped my pants and sat down. I didn't trust myself to stay on my +feet. + +As my bladder cut loose, so did my eyes. I wept, crying silently and rocking +back and forth while the tears and snot ran down my face. It was all I could do +to keep from sobbing -- I covered my mouth and held the sounds in. I didn't +want to give them the satisfaction. + +Finally, I was peed out and cried out and the guy was pounding on the door. I +cleaned my face as best as I could with wads of toilet paper, stuck it all down +the john and flushed, then looked around for a sink but only found a +pump-bottle of heavy-duty hand-sanitizer covered in small-print lists of the +bio-agents it worked on. I rubbed some into my hands and stepped out of the +john. + +"What were you doing in there?" the guy said. + +"Using the facilities," I said. He turned me around and grabbed my hands and I +felt a new pair of plastic cuffs go around them. My wrists had swollen since +the last pair had come off and the new ones bit cruelly into my tender skin, +but I refused to give him the satisfaction of crying out. + +He shackled me back to my spot and grabbed the next person down, who, I saw +now, was Jolu, his face puffy and an ugly bruise on his cheek. + +"Are you OK?" I asked him, and my friend with the utility belt abruptly put his +hand on my forehead and shoved hard, bouncing the back of my head off the +truck's metal wall with a sound like a clock striking one. "No talking," he +said as I struggled to refocus my eyes. + +I didn't like these people. I decided right then that they would pay a price +for all this. + +One by one, all the prisoners went to the can, and came back, and when they +were done, my guard went back to his friends and had another cup of coffee -- +they were drinking out of a big cardboard urn of Starbucks, I saw -- and they +had an indistinct conversation that involved a fair bit of laughter. + +Then the door at the back of the truck opened and there was fresh air, not +smoky the way it had been before, but tinged with ozone. In the slice of +outdoors I saw before the door closed, I caught that it was dark out, and +raining, with one of those San Francisco drizzles that's part mist. + +The man who came in was wearing a military uniform. A US military uniform. He +saluted the people in the truck and they saluted him back and that's when I +knew that I wasn't a prisoner of some terrorists -- I was a prisoner of the +United States of America. + +# + +They set up a little screen at the end of the truck and then came for us one at +a time, unshackling us and leading us to the back of the truck. As close as I +could work it -- counting seconds off in my head, one hippopotami, two +hippopotami -- the interviews lasted about seven minutes each. My head throbbed +with dehydration and caffeine withdrawal. + +I was third, brought back by the woman with the severe haircut. Up close, she +looked tired, with bags under her eyes and grim lines at the corners of her +mouth. + +"Thanks," I said, automatically, as she unlocked me with a remote and then +dragged me to my feet. I hated myself for the automatic politeness, but it had +been drilled into me. + +She didn't twitch a muscle. I went ahead of her to the back of the truck and +behind the screen. There was a single folding chair and I sat in it. Two of +them -- Severe Haircut woman and utility belt man -- looked at me from their +ergonomic super-chairs. + +They had a little table between them with the contents of my wallet and +backpack spread out on it. + +"Hello, Marcus," Severe Haircut woman said. "We have some questions for you." + +"Am I under arrest?" I asked. This wasn't an idle question. If you're not under +arrest, there are limits on what the cops can and can't do to you. For +starters, they can't hold you forever without arresting you, giving you a phone +call, and letting you talk to a lawyer. And hoo-boy, was I ever going to talk +to a lawyer. + +"What's this for?" she said, holding up my phone. The screen was showing the +error message you got if you kept trying to get into its data without giving +the right password. It was a bit of a rude message -- an animated hand giving a +certain universally recognized gesture -- because I liked to customize my gear. + +"Am I under arrest?" I repeated. They can't make you answer any questions if +you're not under arrest, and when you ask if you're under arrest, they have to +answer you. It's the rules. + +"You're being detained by the Department of Homeland Security," the woman +snapped. + +"Am I under arrest?" + +"You're going to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now." She didn't +say, "or else," but it was implied. + +"I would like to contact an attorney," I said. "I would like to know what I've +been charged with. I would like to see some form of identification from both of +you." + +The two agents exchanged looks. + +"I think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation," Severe +Haircut woman said. "I think you should do that right now. We found a number of +suspicious devices on your person. We found you and your confederates near the +site of the worst terrorist attack this country has ever seen. Put those two +facts together and things don't look very good for you, Marcus. You can +cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry. Now, what is this for?" + +"You think I'm a terrorist? I'm seventeen years old!" + +"Just the right age -- Al Qaeda loves recruiting impressionable, idealistic +kids. We googled you, you know. You've posted a lot of very ugly stuff on the +public Internet." + +"I would like to speak to an attorney," I said. + +Severe haircut lady looked at me like I was a bug. "You're under the mistaken +impression that you've been picked up by the police for a crime. You need to +get past that. You are being detained as a potential enemy combatant by the +government of the United States. If I were you, I'd be thinking very hard about +how to convince us that you are not an enemy combatant. Very hard. Because +there are dark holes that enemy combatants can disappear into, very dark deep +holes, holes where you can just vanish. Forever. Are you listening to me young +man? I want you to unlock this phone and then decrypt the files in its memory. +I want you to account for yourself: why were you out on the street? What do you +know about the attack on this city?" + +"I'm not going to unlock my phone for you," I said, indignant. My phone's +memory had all kinds of private stuff on it: photos, emails, little hacks and +mods I'd installed. "That's private stuff." + +"What have you got to hide?" + +"I've got the right to my privacy," I said. "And I want to speak to an +attorney." + +"This is your last chance, kid. Honest people don't have anything to hide." + +"I want to speak to an attorney." My parents would pay for it. All the FAQs on +getting arrested were clear on this point. Just keep asking to see an attorney, +no matter what they say or do. There's no good that comes of talking to the +cops without your lawyer present. These two said they weren't cops, but if this +wasn't an arrest, what was it? + +In hindsight, maybe I should have unlocked my phone for them. + +1~ Chapter 4 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Barnes and Noble,~{ Barnes and Noble, +nationwide: +http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Little-Brother/Cory-Doctorow/e/9780765319852/?itm=6 +}~ a US national chain of bookstores. As America's mom-and-pop bookstores were +vanishing, Barnes and Noble started to build these gigantic temples to reading +all across the land. Stocking tens of thousands of titles (the mall bookstores +and grocery-store spinner racks had stocked a small fraction of that) and +keeping long hours that were convenient to families, working people and others +potential readers, the B&N stores kept the careers of many writers afloat, +stocking titles that smaller stores couldn't possibly afford to keep on their +limited shelves. B&N has always had strong community outreach programs, and +I've done some of my best-attended, best-organized signings at B&N stores, +including the great events at the (sadly departed) B&N in Union Square, New +York, where the mega-signing after the Nebula Awards took place, and the B&N in +Chicago that hosted the event after the Nebs a few years later. Best of all is +that B&N's "geeky" buyers really Get It when it comes to science fiction, +comics and manga, games and similar titles. They're passionate and +knowledgeable about the field and it shows in the excellent selection on +display at the stores.] }/ + +They re-shackled and re-hooded me and left me there. A long time later, the +truck started to move, rolling downhill, and then I was hauled back to my feet. +I immediately fell over. My legs were so asleep they felt like blocks of ice, +all except my knees, which were swollen and tender from all the hours of +kneeling. + +Hands grabbed my shoulders and feet and I was picked up like a sack of +potatoes. There were indistinct voices around me. Someone crying. Someone +cursing. + +I was carried a short distance, then set down and re-shackled to another +railing. My knees wouldn't support me anymore and I pitched forward, ending up +twisted on the ground like a pretzel, straining against the chains holding my +wrists. + +Then we were moving again, and this time, it wasn't like driving in a truck. +The floor beneath me rocked gently and vibrated with heavy diesel engines and I +realized I was on a ship! My stomach turned to ice. I was being taken off +America's shores to somewhere /{else}/, and who the hell knew where that was? +I'd been scared before, but this thought /{terrified}/ me, left me paralyzed +and wordless with fear. I realized that I might never see my parents again and +I actually tasted a little vomit burn up my throat. The bag over my head closed +in on me and I could barely breathe, something that was compounded by the weird +position I was twisted into. + +But mercifully we weren't on the water for very long. It felt like an hour, but +I know now that it was a mere fifteen minutes, and then I felt us docking, felt +footsteps on the decking around me and felt other prisoners being unshackled +and carried or led away. When they came for me, I tried to stand again, but +couldn't, and they carried me again, impersonally, roughly. + +When they took the hood off again, I was in a cell. + +The cell was old and crumbled, and smelled of sea air. There was one window +high up, and rusted bars guarded it. It was still dark outside. There was a +blanket on the floor and a little metal toilet without a seat, set into the +wall. The guard who took off my hood grinned at me and closed the solid steel +door behind him. + +I gently massaged my legs, hissing as the blood came back into them and into my +hands. Eventually I was able to stand, and then to pace. I heard other people +talking, crying, shouting. I did some shouting too: "Jolu! Darryl! Vanessa!" +Other voices on the cell-block took up the cry, shouting out names, too, +shouting out obscenities. The nearest voices sounded like drunks losing their +minds on a street-corner. Maybe I sounded like that too. + +Guards shouted at us to be quiet and that just made everyone yell louder. +Eventually we were all howling, screaming our heads off, screaming our throats +raw. Why not? What did we have to lose? + +# + +The next time they came to question me, I was filthy and tired, thirsty and +hungry. Severe haircut lady was in the new questioning party, as were three big +guys who moved me around like a cut of meat. One was black, the other two were +white, though one might have been hispanic. They all carried guns. It was like +a Benneton's ad crossed with a game of Counter-Strike. + +They'd taken me from my cell and chained my wrists and ankles together. I paid +attention to my surroundings as we went. I heard water outside and thought that +maybe we were on Alcatraz -- it was a prison, after all, even if it had been a +tourist attraction for generations, the place where you went to see where Al +Capone and his gangster contemporaries did their time. But I'd been to Alcatraz +on a school trip. It was old and rusted, medieval. This place felt like it +dated back to World War Two, not colonial times. + +There were bar-codes laser-printed on stickers and placed on each of the +cell-doors, and numbers, but other than that, there was no way to tell who or +what might be behind them. + +The interrogation room was modern, with fluorescent lights, ergonomic chairs -- +not for me, though, I got a folding plastic garden-chair -- and a big wooden +board-room table. A mirror lined one wall, just like in the cop shows, and I +figured someone or other must be watching from behind it. Severe haircut lady +and her friends helped themselves to coffees from an urn on a side-table (I +could have torn her throat out with my teeth and taken her coffee just then), +and then set a styrofoam cup of water down next to me -- without unlocking my +wrists from behind my back, so I couldn't reach it. Hardy har har. + +"Hello, Marcus," Severe Haircut woman said. "How's your 'tude doing today?" + +I didn't say anything. + +"This isn't as bad as it gets you know," she said. "This is as /{good}/ as it +gets from now on. Even once you tell us what we want to know, even if that +convinces us that you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, you're a +marked man now. We'll be watching you everywhere you go and everything you do. +You've acted like you've got something to hide, and we don't like that." + +It's pathetic, but all my brain could think about was that phrase, "convince us +that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time." This was the worst thing +that had ever happened to me. I had never, ever felt this bad or this scared +before. Those words, "wrong place at the wrong time," those six words, they +were like a lifeline dangling before me as I thrashed to stay on the surface. + +"Hello, Marcus?" she snapped her fingers in front of my face. "Over here, +Marcus." There was a little smile on her face and I hated myself for letting +her see my fear. "Marcus, it can be a lot worse than this. This isn't the worst +place we can put you, not by a damned sight." She reached down below the table +and came out with a briefcase, which she snapped open. From it, she withdrew my +phone, my arphid sniper/cloner, my wifinder, and my memory keys. She set them +down on the table one after the other. + +"Here's what we want from you. You unlock the phone for us today. If you do +that, you'll get outdoor and bathing privileges. You'll get a shower and you'll +be allowed to walk around in the exercise yard. Tomorrow, we'll bring you back +and ask you to decrypt the data on these memory sticks. Do that, and you'll get +to eat in the mess hall. The day after, we're going to want your email +passwords, and that will get you library privileges." + +The word "no" was on my lips, like a burp trying to come up, but it wouldn't +come. "Why?" is what came out instead. + +"We want to be sure that you're what you seem to be. This is about your +security, Marcus. Say you're innocent. You might be, though why an innocent man +would act like he's got so much to hide is beyond me. But say you are: you +could have been on that bridge when it blew. Your parents could have been. Your +friends. Don't you want us to catch the people who attacked your home?" + +It's funny, but when she was talking about my getting "privileges" it scared me +into submission. I felt like I'd done /{something}/ to end up where I was, like +maybe it was partially my fault, like I could do something to change it. + +But as soon as she switched to this BS about "safety" and "security," my spine +came back. "Lady," I said, "you're talking about attacking my home, but as far +as I can tell, you're the only one who's attacked me lately. I thought I lived +in a country with a constitution. I thought I lived in a country where I had +/{rights}/. You're talking about defending my freedom by tearing up the Bill of +Rights." + +A flicker of annoyance passed over her face, then went away. "So melodramatic, +Marcus. No one's attacked you. You've been detained by your country's +government while we seek details on the worst terrorist attack ever perpetrated +on our nation's soil. You have it within your power to help us fight this war +on our nation's enemies. You want to preserve the Bill of Rights? Help us stop +bad people from blowing up your city. Now, you have exactly thirty seconds to +unlock that phone before I send you back to your cell. We have lots of other +people to interview today." + +She looked at her watch. I rattled my wrists, rattled the chains that kept me +from reaching around and unlocking the phone. Yes, I was going to do it. She'd +told me what my path was to freedom -- to the world, to my parents -- and that +had given me hope. Now she'd threatened to send me away, to take me off that +path, and my hope had crashed and all I could think of was how to get back on +it. + +So I rattled my wrists, wanting to get to my phone and unlock it for her, and +she just looked at me coldly, checking her watch. + +"The password," I said, finally understanding what she wanted of me. She wanted +me to say it out loud, here, where she could record it, where her pals could +hear it. She didn't want me to just unlock the phone. She wanted me to submit +to her. To put her in charge of me. To give up every secret, all my privacy. +"The password," I said again, and then I told her the password. God help me, I +submitted to her will. + +She smiled a little prim smile, which had to be her ice-queen equivalent of a +touchdown dance, and the guards led me away. As the door closed, I saw her bend +down over the phone and key the password in. + +I wish I could say that I'd anticipated this possibility in advance and created +a fake password that unlocked a completely innocuous partition on my phone, but +I wasn't nearly that paranoid/clever. + +You might be wondering at this point what dark secrets I had locked away on my +phone and memory sticks and email. I'm just a kid, after all. + +The truth is that I had everything to hide, and nothing. Between my phone and +my memory sticks, you could get a pretty good idea of who my friends were, what +I thought of them, all the goofy things we'd done. You could read the +transcripts of the electronic arguments we'd carried out and the electronic +reconciliations we'd arrived at. + +You see, I don't delete stuff. Why would I? Storage is cheap, and you never +know when you're going to want to go back to that stuff. Especially the stupid +stuff. You know that feeling you get sometimes where you're sitting on the +subway and there's no one to talk to and you suddenly remember some bitter +fight you had, some terrible thing you said? Well, it's usually never as bad as +you remember. Being able to go back and see it again is a great way to remind +yourself that you're not as horrible a person as you think you are. Darryl and +I have gotten over more fights that way than I can count. + +And even that's not it. I know my phone is private. I know my memory sticks are +private. That's because of cryptography -- message scrambling. The math behind +crypto is good and solid, and you and me get access to the same crypto that +banks and the National Security Agency use. There's only one kind of crypto +that anyone uses: crypto that's public, open and can be deployed by anyone. +That's how you know it works. + +There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life +that's /{yours}/, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity +or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to +squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of +them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate +some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of +Times Square, and you'd be buck naked? + +Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body -- and how many of us +can say that? -- you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us +would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded. + +It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something +/{private}/. It's about your life belonging to you. + +They were taking that from me, piece by piece. As I walked back to my cell, +that feeling of deserving it came back to me. I'd broken a lot of rules all my +life and I'd gotten away with it, by and large. Maybe this was justice. Maybe +this was my past coming back to me. After all, I had been where I was because +I'd snuck out of school. + +I got my shower. I got to walk around the yard. There was a patch of sky +overhead, and it smelled like the Bay Area, but beyond that, I had no clue +where I was being held. No other prisoners were visible during my exercise +period, and I got pretty bored with walking in circles. I strained my ears for +any sound that might help me understand what this place was, but all I heard +was the occasional vehicle, some distant conversations, a plane landing +somewhere nearby. + +They brought me back to my cell and fed me, a half a pepperoni pie from Goat +Hill Pizza, which I knew well, up on Potrero Hill. The carton with its familiar +graphic and 415 phone number was a reminder that only a day before, I'd been a +free man in a free country and that now I was a prisoner. I worried constantly +about Darryl and fretted about my other friends. Maybe they'd been more +cooperative and had been released. Maybe they'd told my parents and they were +frantically calling around. + +Maybe not. + +The cell was fantastically spare, empty as my soul. I fantasized that the wall +opposite my bunk was a screen, that I could be hacking right now, opening the +cell-door. I fantasized about my workbench and the projects there -- the old +cans I was turning into a ghetto surround-sound rig, the aerial photography +kite-cam I was building, my homebrew laptop. + +I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to go home and have my friends and my +school and my parents and my life back. I wanted to be able to go where I +wanted to go, not be stuck pacing and pacing and pacing. + +# + +They took my passwords for my USB keys next. Those held some interesting +messages I'd downloaded from one online discussion group or another, some chat +transcripts, things where people had helped me out with some of the knowledge I +needed to do the things I did. There was nothing on there you couldn't find +with Google, of course, but I didn't think that would count in my favor. + +I got exercise again that afternoon, and this time there were others in the +yard when I got there, four other guys and two women, of all ages and racial +backgrounds. I guess lots of people were doing things to earn their +"privileges." + +They gave me half an hour, and I tried to make conversation with the most +normal-seeming of the other prisoners, a black guy about my age with a short +afro. But when I introduced myself and stuck my hand out, he cut his eyes +toward the cameras mounted ominously in the corners of the yard and kept +walking without ever changing his facial expression. + +But then, just before they called my name and brought me back into the +building, the door opened and out came -- Vanessa! I'd never been more glad to +see a friendly face. She looked tired and grumpy, but not hurt, and when she +saw me, she shouted my name and ran to me. We hugged each other hard and I +realized I was shaking. Then I realized she was shaking, too. + +"Are you OK?" she said, holding me at arms' length. + +"I'm OK," I said. "They told me they'd let me go if I gave them my passwords." + +"They keep asking me questions about you and Darryl." + +There was a voice blaring over the loudspeaker, shouting at us to stop talking, +to walk, but we ignored it. + +"Answer them," I said, instantly. "Anything they ask, answer them. If it'll get +you out." + +"How are Darryl and Jolu?" + +"I haven't seen them." + +The door banged open and four big guards boiled out. Two took me and two took +Vanessa. They forced me to the ground and turned my head away from Vanessa, +though I heard her getting the same treatment. Plastic cuffs went around my +wrists and then I was yanked to my feet and brought back to my cell. + +No dinner came that night. No breakfast came the next morning. No one came and +brought me to the interrogation room to extract more of my secrets. The plastic +cuffs didn't come off, and my shoulders burned, then ached, then went numb, +then burned again. I lost all feeling in my hands. + +I had to pee. I couldn't undo my pants. I really, really had to pee. + +I pissed myself. + +They came for me after that, once the hot piss had cooled and gone clammy, +making my already filthy jeans stick to my legs. They came for me and walked me +down the long hall lined with doors, each door with its own bar code, each bar +code a prisoner like me. They walked me down the corridor and brought me to the +interrogation room and it was like a different planet when I entered there, a +world where things were normal, where everything didn't reek of urine. I felt +so dirty and ashamed, and all those feelings of deserving what I got came back +to me. + +Severe haircut lady was already sitting. She was perfect: coifed and with just +a little makeup. I smelled her hair stuff. She wrinkled her nose at me. I felt +the shame rise in me. + +"Well, you've been a very naughty boy, haven't you? Aren't you a filthy thing?" + +Shame. I looked down at the table. I couldn't bear to look up. I wanted to tell +her my email password and get gone. + +"What did you and your friend talk about in the yard?" + +I barked a laugh at the table. "I told her to answer your questions. I told her +to cooperate." + +"So do you give the orders?" + +I felt the blood sing in my ears. "Oh come on," I said. "We play a /{game}/ +together, it's called Harajuku Fun Madness. I'm the /{team captain}/. We're not +terrorists, we're high school students. I don't give her orders. I told her +that we needed to be /{honest}/ with you so that we could clear up any +suspicion and get out of here." + +She didn't say anything for a moment. + +"How is Darryl?" I said. + +"Who?" + +"Darryl. You picked us up together. My friend. Someone had stabbed him in the +Powell Street BART. That's why we were up on the surface. To get him help." + +"I'm sure he's fine, then," she said. + +My stomach knotted and I almost threw up. "You don't /{know}/? You haven't got +him here?" + +"Who we have here and who we don't have here is not something we're going to +discuss with you, ever. That's not something you're going to know. Marcus, +you've seen what happens when you don't cooperate with us. You've seen what +happens when you disobey our orders. You've been a little cooperative, and it's +gotten you almost to the point where you might go free again. If you want to +make that possibility into a reality, you'll stick to answering my questions." + +I didn't say anything. + +"You're learning, that's good. Now, your email passwords, please." + +I was ready for this. I gave them everything: server address, login, password. +This didn't matter. I didn't keep any email on my server. I downloaded it all +and kept it on my laptop at home, which downloaded and deleted my mail from the +server every sixty seconds. They wouldn't get anything out of my mail -- it got +cleared off the server and stored on my laptop at home. + +Back to the cell, but they cut loose my hands and they gave me a shower and a +pair of orange prison pants to wear. They were too big for me and hung down low +on my hips, like a Mexican gang-kid in the Mission. That's where the +baggy-pants-down-your-ass look comes from you know that? From prison. I tell +you what, it's less fun when it's not a fashion statement. + +They took away my jeans, and I spent another day in the cell. The walls were +scratched cement over a steel grid. You could tell, because the steel was +rusting in the salt air, and the grid shone through the green paint in +red-orange. My parents were out that window, somewhere. + +They came for me again the next day. + +"We've been reading your mail for a day now. We changed the password so that +your home computer couldn't fetch it." + +Well, of course they had. I would have done the same, now that I thought of it. + +"We have enough on you now to put you away for a very long time, Marcus. Your +possession of these articles --" she gestured at all my little gizmos -- "and +the data we recovered from your phone and memory sticks, as well as the +subversive material we'd no doubt find if we raided your house and took your +computer. It's enough to put you away until you're an old man. Do you +understand that?" + +I didn't believe it for a second. There's no way a judge would say that all +this stuff constituted any kind of real crime. It was free speech, it was +technological tinkering. It wasn't a crime. + +But who said that these people would ever put me in front of a judge. + +"We know where you live, we know who your friends are. We know how you operate +and how you think." + +It dawned on me then. They were about to let me go. The room seemed to +brighten. I heard myself breathing, short little breaths. + +"We just want to know one thing: what was the delivery mechanism for the bombs +on the bridge?" + +I stopped breathing. The room darkened again. + +"What?" + +"There were ten charges on the bridge, all along its length. They weren't in +car-trunks. They'd been placed there. Who placed them there, and how did they +get there?" + +"What?" I said it again. + +"This is your last chance, Marcus," she said. She looked sad. "You were doing +so well until now. Tell us this and you can go home. You can get a lawyer and +defend yourself in a court of law. There are doubtless extenuating +circumstances that you can use to explain your actions. Just tell us this +thing, and you're gone." + +"I don't know what you're talking about!" I was crying and I didn't even care. +Sobbing, blubbering. "I have /{no idea what you're talking about}/!" + +She shook her head. "Marcus, please. Let us help you. By now you know that we +always get what we're after." + +There was a gibbering sound in the back of my mind. They were /{insane}/. I +pulled myself together, working hard to stop the tears. "Listen, lady, this is +nuts. You've been into my stuff, you've seen it all. I'm a seventeen year old +high school student, not a terrorist! You can't seriously think --" + +"Marcus, haven't you figured out that we're serious yet?" She shook her head. +"You get pretty good grades. I thought you'd be smarter than that." She made a +flicking gesture and the guards picked me up by the armpits. + +Back in my cell, a hundred little speeches occurred to me. The French call this +"esprit d'escalier" -- the spirit of the staircase, the snappy rebuttals that +come to you after you leave the room and slink down the stairs. In my mind, I +stood and delivered, telling her that I was a citizen who loved my freedom, +which made me the patriot and made her the traitor. In my mind, I shamed her +for turning my country into an armed camp. In my mind, I was eloquent and +brilliant and reduced her to tears. + +But you know what? None of those fine words came back to me when they pulled me +out the next day. All I could think of was freedom. My parents. + +"Hello, Marcus," she said. "How are you feeling?" + +I looked down at the table. She had a neat pile of documents in front of her, +and her ubiquitous go-cup of Starbucks beside her. I found it comforting +somehow, a reminder that there was a real world out there somewhere, beyond the +walls. + +"We're through investigating you, for now." She let that hang there. Maybe it +meant that she was letting me go. Maybe it meant that she was going to throw me +in a pit and forget that I existed. + +"And?" I said finally. + +"And I want you to impress on you again that we are very serious about this. +Our country has experienced the worst attack ever committed on its soil. How +many 9/11s do you want us to suffer before you're willing to cooperate? The +details of our investigation are secret. We won't stop at anything in our +efforts to bring the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to justice. Do you +understand that?" + +"Yes," I mumbled. + +"We are going to send you home today, but you are a marked man. You have not +been found to be above suspicion -- we're only releasing you because we're done +questioning you for now. But from now on, you /{belong}/ to us. We will be +watching you. We'll be waiting for you to make a misstep. Do you understand +that we can watch you closely, all the time?" + +"Yes," I mumbled. + +"Good. You will never speak of what happened here to anyone, ever. This is a +matter of national security. Do you know that the death penalty still holds for +treason in time of war?" + +"Yes," I mumbled. + +"Good boy," she purred. "We have some papers here for you to sign." She pushed +the stack of papers across the table to me. Little post-its with SIGN HERE +printed on them had been stuck throughout them. A guard undid my cuffs. + +I paged through the papers and my eyes watered and my head swam. I couldn't +make sense of them. I tried to decipher the legalese. It seemed that I was +signing a declaration that I had been voluntarily held and submitted to +voluntary questioning, of my own free will. + +"What happens if I don't sign this?" I said. + +She snatched the papers back and made that flicking gesture again. The guards +jerked me to my feet. + +"Wait!" I cried. "Please! I'll sign them!" They dragged me to the door. All I +could see was that door, all I could think of was it closing behind me. + +I lost it. I wept. I begged to be allowed to sign the papers. To be so close to +freedom and have it snatched away, it made me ready to do anything. I can't +count the number of times I've heard someone say, "Oh, I'd rather die than do +something-or-other" -- I've said it myself now and again. But that was the +first time I understood what it really meant. I would have rather died than go +back to my cell. + +I begged as they took me out into the corridor. I told them I'd sign anything. + +She called out to the guards and they stopped. They brought me back. They sat +me down. One of them put the pen in my hand. + +Of course, I signed, and signed and signed. + +# + +My jeans and t-shirt were back in my cell, laundered and folded. They smelled +of detergent. I put them on and washed my face and sat on my cot and stared at +the wall. They'd taken everything from me. First my privacy, then my dignity. +I'd been ready to sign anything. I would have signed a confession that said I'd +assassinated Abraham Lincoln. + +I tried to cry, but it was like my eyes were dry, out of tears. + +They got me again. A guard approached me with a hood, like the hood I'd been +put in when they picked us up, whenever that was, days ago, weeks ago. + +The hood went over my head and cinched tight at my neck. I was in total +darkness and the air was stifling and stale. I was raised to my feet and walked +down corridors, up stairs, on gravel. Up a gangplank. On a ship's steel deck. +My hands were chained behind me, to a railing. I knelt on the deck and listened +to the thrum of the diesel engines. + +The ship moved. A hint of salt air made its way into the hood. It was drizzling +and my clothes were heavy with water. I was outside, even if my head was in a +bag. I was outside, in the world, moments from my freedom. + +They came for me and led me off the boat and over uneven ground. Up three metal +stairs. My wrists were unshackled. My hood was removed. + +I was back in the truck. Severe haircut woman was there, at the little desk +she'd sat at before. She had a ziploc bag with her, and inside it were my phone +and other little devices, my wallet and the change from my pockets. She handed +them to me wordlessly. + +I filled my pockets. It felt so weird to have everything back in its familiar +place, to be wearing my familiar clothes. Outside the truck's back door, I +heard the familiar sounds of my familiar city. + +A guard passed me my backpack. The woman extended her hand to me. I just looked +at it. She put it down and gave me a wry smile. Then she mimed zipping up her +lips and pointed to me, and opened the door. + +It was daylight outside, gray and drizzling. I was looking down an alley toward +cars and trucks and bikes zipping down the road. I stood transfixed on the +truck's top step, staring at freedom. + +My knees shook. I knew now that they were playing with me again. In a moment, +the guards would grab me and drag me back inside, the bag would go over my head +again, and I would be back on the boat and sent off to the prison again, to the +endless, unanswerable questions. I barely held myself back from stuffing my +fist in my mouth. + +Then I forced myself to go down one stair. Another stair. The last stair. My +sneakers crunched down on the crap on the alley's floor, broken glass, a +needle, gravel. I took a step. Another. I reached the mouth of the alley and +stepped onto the sidewalk. + +No one grabbed me. + +I was free. + +Then strong arms threw themselves around me. I nearly cried. + +1~ Chapter 5 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Secret Headquarters in Los Angeles,~{ +Secret Headquarters: http://www.thesecretheadquarters.com/ 3817 W. Sunset +Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90026 +1 323 666 2228 }~ my drop-dead all-time +favorite comic store in the world. It's small and selective about what it +stocks, and every time I walk in, I walk out with three or four collections I'd +never heard of under my arm. It's like the owners, Dave and David, have the +uncanny ability to predict exactly what I'm looking for, and they lay it out +for me seconds before I walk into the store. I discovered about three quarters +of my favorite comics by wandering into SHQ, grabbing something interesting, +sinking into one of the comfy chairs, and finding myself transported to another +world. When my second story-collection, OVERCLOCKED, came out, they worked with +local illustrator Martin Cenreda to do a free mini-comic based on Printcrime, +the first story in the book. I left LA about a year ago, and of all the things +I miss about it, Secret Headquarters is right at the top of the list.] }/ + +But it was Van, and she /{was}/ crying, and hugging me so hard I couldn't +breathe. I didn't care. I hugged her back, my face buried in her hair. + +"You're OK!" she said. + +"I'm OK," I managed. + +She finally let go of me and another set of arms wrapped themselves around me. +It was Jolu! They were both there. He whispered, "You're safe, bro," in my ear +and hugged me even tighter than Vanessa had. + +When he let go, I looked around. "Where's Darryl?" I asked. + +They both looked at each other. "Maybe he's still in the truck," Jolu said. + +We turned and looked at the truck at the alley's end. It was a nondescript +white 18-wheeler. Someone had already brought the little folding staircase +inside. The rear lights glowed red, and the truck rolled backwards towards us, +emitting a steady eep, eep, eep. + +"Wait!" I shouted as it accelerated towards us. "Wait! What about Darryl?" The +truck drew closer. I kept shouting. "What about Darryl?" + +Jolu and Vanessa each had me by an arm and were dragging me away. I struggled +against them, shouting. The truck pulled out of the alley's mouth and reversed +into the street and pointed itself downhill and drove away. I tried to run +after it, but Van and Jolu wouldn't let me go. + +I sat down on the sidewalk and put my arms around my knees and cried. I cried +and cried and cried, loud sobs of the sort I hadn't done since I was a little +kid. They wouldn't stop coming. I couldn't stop shaking. + +Vanessa and Jolu got me to my feet and moved me a little ways up the street. +There was a Muni bus stop with a bench and they sat me on it. They were both +crying too, and we held each other for a while, and I knew we were crying for +Darryl, whom none of us ever expected to see again. + +# + +We were north of Chinatown, at the part where it starts to become North Beach, +a neighborhood with a bunch of neon strip clubs and the legendary City Lights +counterculture bookstore, where the Beat poetry movement had been founded back +in the 1950s. + +I knew this part of town well. My parents' favorite Italian restaurant was here +and they liked to take me here for big plates of linguine and huge Italian +ice-cream mountains with candied figs and lethal little espressos afterward. + +Now it was a different place, a place where I was tasting freedom for the first +time in what seemed like an eternity. + +We checked our pockets and found enough money to get a table at one of the +Italian restaurants, out on the sidewalk, under an awning. The pretty waitress +lighted a gas-heater with a barbeque lighter, took our orders and went inside. +The sensation of giving orders, of controlling my destiny, was the most amazing +thing I'd ever felt. + +"How long were we in there?" I asked. + +"Six days," Vanessa said. + +"I got five," Jolu said. + +"I didn't count." + +"What did they do to you?" Vanessa said. I didn't want to talk about it, but +they were both looking at me. Once I started, I couldn't stop. I told them +everything, even when I'd been forced to piss myself, and they took it all in +silently. I paused when the waitress delivered our sodas and waited until she +got out of earshot, then finished. In the telling, it receded into the +distance. By the end of it, I couldn't tell if I was embroidering the truth or +if I was making it all seem /{less}/ bad. My memories swam like little fish +that I snatched at, and sometimes they wriggled out of my grasp. + +Jolu shook his head. "They were hard on you, dude," he said. He told us about +his stay there. They'd questioned him, mostly about me, and he'd kept on +telling them the truth, sticking to a plain telling of the facts about that day +and about our friendship. They had gotten him to repeat it over and over again, +but they hadn't played games with his head the way they had with me. He'd eaten +his meals in a mess-hall with a bunch of other people, and been given time in a +TV room where they were shown last year's blockbusters on video. + +Vanessa's story was only slightly different. After she'd gotten them angry by +talking to me, they'd taken away her clothes and made her wear a set of orange +prison overalls. She'd been left in her cell for two days without contact, +though she'd been fed regularly. But mostly it was the same as Jolu: the same +questions, repeated again and again. + +"They really hated you," Jolu said. "Really had it in for you. Why?" + +I couldn't imagine why. Then I remembered. + +/{You can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry.}/ + +"It was because I wouldn't unlock my phone for them, that first night. That's +why they singled me out." I couldn't believe it, but there was no other +explanation. It had been sheer vindictiveness. My mind reeled at the thought. +They had done all that as a mere punishment for defying their authority. + +I had been scared. Now I was angry. "Those bastards," I said, softly. "They did +it to get back at me for mouthing off." + +Jolu swore and then Vanessa cut loose in Korean, something she only did when +she was really, really angry. + +"I'm going to get them," I whispered, staring at my soda. "I'm going to get +them." + +Jolu shook his head. "You can't, you know. You can't fight back against that." + +# + +None of us much wanted to talk about revenge then. Instead, we talked about +what we would do next. We had to go home. Our phones' batteries were dead and +it had been years since this neighborhood had any payphones. We just needed to +go home. I even thought about taking a taxi, but there wasn't enough money +between us to make that possible. + +So we walked. On the corner, we pumped some quarters into a San Francisco +Chronicle newspaper box and stopped to read the front section. It had been five +days since the bombs went off, but it was still all over the front cover. + +Severe haircut woman had talked about "the bridge" blowing up, and I'd just +assumed that she was talking about the Golden Gate bridge, but I was wrong. The +terrorists had blown up the /{Bay bridge}/. + +"Why the hell would they blow up the Bay Bridge?" I said. "The Golden Gate is +the one on all the postcards." Even if you've never been to San Francisco, +chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like: it's that big orange +suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from the old military base called +the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesy wine-country towns are with +their scented candle shops and art galleries. It's picturesque as hell, and +it's practically the symbol for the state of California. If you go to the +Disneyland California Adventure park, there's a replica of it just past the +gates, with a monorail running over it. + +So naturally I assumed that if you were going to blow up a bridge in San +Francisco, that's the one you'd blow. + +"They probably got scared off by all the cameras and stuff," Jolu said. "The +National Guard's always checking cars at both ends and there's all those +suicide fences and junk all along it." People have been jumping off the Golden +Gate since it opened in 1937 -- they stopped counting after the thousandth +suicide in 1995. + +"Yeah," Vanessa said. "Plus the Bay Bridge actually goes somewhere." The Bay +Bridge goes from downtown San Francisco to Oakland and thence to Berkeley, the +East Bay townships that are home to many of the people who live and work in +town. It's one of the only parts of the Bay Area where a normal person can +afford a house big enough to really stretch out in, and there's also the +university and a bunch of light industry over there. The BART goes under the +Bay and connects the two cities, too, but it's the Bay Bridge that sees most of +the traffic. The Golden Gate was a nice bridge if you were a tourist or a rich +retiree living out in wine country, but it was mostly ornamental. The Bay +Bridge is -- was -- San Francisco's work-horse bridge. + +I thought about it for a minute. "You guys are right," I said. "But I don't +think that's all of it. We keep acting like terrorists attack landmarks because +they hate landmarks. Terrorists don't hate landmarks or bridges or airplanes. +They just want to screw stuff up and make people scared. To make terror. So of +course they went after the Bay Bridge after the Golden Gate got all those +cameras -- after airplanes got all metal-detectored and X-rayed." I thought +about it some more, staring blankly at the cars rolling down the street, at the +people walking down the sidewalks, at the city all around me. "Terrorists don't +hate airplanes or bridges. They love terror." It was so obvious I couldn't +believe I'd never thought of it before. I guess that being treated like a +terrorist for a few days was enough to clarify my thinking. + +The other two were staring at me. "I'm right, aren't I? All this crap, all the +X-rays and ID checks, they're all useless, aren't they?" + +They nodded slowly. + +"Worse than useless," I said, my voice going up and cracking. "Because they +ended up with us in prison, with Darryl --" I hadn't thought of Darryl since we +sat down and now it came back to me, my friend, missing, disappeared. I stopped +talking and ground my jaws together. + +"We have to tell our parents," Jolu said. + +"We should get a lawyer," Vanessa said. + +I thought of telling my story. Of telling the world what had become of me. Of +the videos that would no doubt come out, of me weeping, reduced to a groveling +animal. + +"We can't tell them anything," I said, without thinking. + +"What do you mean?" Van said. + +"We can't tell them anything," I repeated. "You heard her. If we talk, they'll +come back for us. They'll do to us what they did to Darryl." + +"You're joking," Jolu said. "You want us to --" + +"I want us to fight back," I said. "I want to stay free so that I can do that. +If we go out there and blab, they'll just say that we're kids, making it up. We +don't even know where we were held! No one will believe us. Then, one day, +they'll come for us. + +"I'm telling my parents that I was in one of those camps on the other side of +the Bay. I came over to meet you guys there and we got stranded, and just got +loose today. They said in the papers that people were still wandering home from +them." + +"I can't do that," Vanessa said. "After what they did to you, how can you even +think of doing that?" + +"It happened to /{me}/, that's the point. This is me and them, now. I'll beat +them, I'll get Darryl. I'm not going to take this lying down. But once our +parents are involved, that's it for us. No one will believe us and no one will +care. If we do it my way, people will care." + +"What's your way?" Jolu said. "What's your plan?" + +"I don't know yet," I admitted. "Give me until tomorrow morning, give me that, +at least." I knew that once they'd kept it a secret for a day, it would have to +be a secret forever. Our parents would be even more skeptical if we suddenly +"remembered" that we'd been held in a secret prison instead of taken care of in +a refugee camp. + +Van and Jolu looked at each other. + +"I'm just asking for a chance," I said. "We'll work out the story on the way, +get it straight. Give me one day, just one day." + +The other two nodded glumly and we set off downhill again, heading back towards +home. I lived on Potrero Hill, Vanessa lived in the North Mission and Jolu +lived in Noe Valley -- three wildly different neighborhoods just a few minutes' +walk from one another. + +We turned onto Market Street and stopped dead. The street was barricaded at +every corner, the cross-streets reduced to a single lane, and parked down the +whole length of Market Street were big, nondescript 18-wheelers like the one +that had carried us, hooded, away from the ship's docks and to Chinatown. + +Each one had three steel steps leading down from the back and they buzzed with +activity as soldiers, people in suits, and cops went in and out of them. The +suits wore little badges on their lapels and the soldiers scanned them as they +went in and out -- wireless authorization badges. As we walked past one, I got +a look at it, and saw the familiar logo: Department of Homeland Security. The +soldier saw me staring and stared back hard, glaring at me. + +I got the message and moved on. I peeled away from the gang at Van Ness. We +clung to each other and cried and promised to call each other. + +The walk back to Potrero Hill has an easy route and a hard route, the latter +taking you over some of the steepest hills in the city, the kind of thing that +you see car chases on in action movies, with cars catching air as they soar +over the zenith. I always take the hard way home. It's all residential streets, +and the old Victorian houses they call "painted ladies" for their gaudy, +elaborate paint-jobs, and front gardens with scented flowers and tall grasses. +Housecats stare at you from hedges, and there are hardly any homeless. + +It was so quiet on those streets that it made me wish I'd taken the /{other}/ +route, through the Mission, which is... /{raucous}/ is probably the best word +for it. Loud and vibrant. Lots of rowdy drunks and angry crack-heads and +unconscious junkies, and also lots of families with strollers, old ladies +gossiping on stoops, lowriders with boom-cars going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa down +the streets. There were hipsters and mopey emo art-students and even a couple +old-school punk-rockers, old guys with pot bellies bulging out beneath their +Dead Kennedys shirts. Also drag queens, angry gang kids, graffiti artists and +bewildered gentrifiers trying not to get killed while their real-estate +investments matured. + +I went up Goat Hill and walked past Goat Hill Pizza, which made me think of the +jail I'd been held in, and I had to sit down on the bench out front of the +restaurant until my shakes passed. Then I noticed the truck up the hill from +me, a nondescript 18-wheeler with three metal steps coming down from the back +end. I got up and got moving. I felt the eyes watching me from all directions. + +I hurried the rest of the way home. I didn't look at the painted ladies or the +gardens or the housecats. I kept my eyes down. + +Both my parents' cars were in the driveway, even though it was the middle of +the day. Of course. Dad works in the East Bay, so he'd be stuck at home while +they worked on the bridge. Mom -- well, who knew why Mom was home. + +They were home for me. + +Even before I'd finished unlocking the door it had been jerked out of my hand +and flung wide. There were both of my parents, looking gray and haggard, +bug-eyed and staring at me. We stood there in frozen tableau for a moment, then +they both rushed forward and dragged me into the house, nearly tripping me up. +They were both talking so loud and fast all I could hear was a wordless, +roaring gabble and they both hugged me and cried and I cried too and we just +stood there like that in the little foyer, crying and making almost-words until +we ran out of steam and went into the kitchen. + +I did what I always did when I came home: got myself a glass of water from the +filter in the fridge and dug a couple cookies out of the "biscuit barrel" that +mom's sister had sent us from England. The normalcy of this made my heart stop +hammering, my heart catching up with my brain, and soon we were all sitting at +the table. + +"Where have you been?" they both said, more or less in unison. + +I had given this some thought on the way home. "I got trapped," I said. "In +Oakland. I was there with some friends, doing a project, and we were all +quarantined." + +"For five days?" + +"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. It was really bad." I'd read about the quarantines in +the Chronicle and I cribbed shamelessly from the quotes they'd published. +"Yeah. Everyone who got caught in the cloud. They thought we had been attacked +with some kind of super-bug and they packed us into shipping containers in the +docklands, like sardines. It was really hot and sticky. Not much food, either." + +"Christ," Dad said, his fists balling up on the table. Dad teaches in Berkeley +three days a week, working with a few grad students in the library science +program. The rest of the time he consults for clients in city and down the +Peninsula, third-wave dotcoms that are doing various things with archives. He's +a mild-mannered librarian by profession, but he'd been a real radical in the +sixties and wrestled a little in high school. I'd seen him get crazy angry now +and again -- I'd even made him that angry now and again -- and he could +seriously lose it when he was Hulking out. He once threw a swing-set from Ikea +across my granddad's whole lawn when it fell apart for the fiftieth time while +he was assembling it. + +"Barbarians," Mom said. She's been living in America since she was a teenager, +but she still comes over all British when she encounters American cops, +health-care, airport security or homelessness. Then the word is "barbarians," +and her accent comes back strong. We'd been to London twice to see her family +and I can't say as it felt any more civilized than San Francisco, just more +cramped. + +"But they let us go, and ferried us over today." I was improvising now. + +"Are you hurt?" Mom said. "Hungry?" + +"Sleepy?" + +"Yeah, a little of all that. Also Dopey, Doc, Sneezy and Bashful." We had a +family tradition of Seven Dwarfs jokes. They both smiled a little, but their +eyes were still wet. I felt really bad for them. They must have been out of +their minds with worry. I was glad for a chance to change the subject. "I'd +totally love to eat." + +"I'll order a pizza from Goat Hill," Dad said. + +"No, not that," I said. They both looked at me like I'd sprouted antennae. I +normally have a thing about Goat Hill Pizza -- as in, I can normally eat it +like a goldfish eats his food, gobbling until it either runs out or I pop. I +tried to smile. "I just don't feel like pizza," I said, lamely. "Let's order +some curry, OK?" Thank heaven that San Francisco is take-out central. + +Mom went to the drawer of take-out menus (more normalcy, feeling like a drink +of water on a dry, sore throat) and riffled through them. We spent a couple of +distracting minutes going through the menu from the halal Pakistani place on +Valencia. I settled on a mixed tandoori grill and creamed spinach with farmer's +cheese, a salted mango lassi (much better than it sounds) and little fried +pastries in sugar syrup. + +Once the food was ordered, the questions started again. They'd heard from +Van's, Jolu's and Darryl's families (of course) and had tried to report us +missing. The police were taking names, but there were so many "displaced +persons" that they weren't going to open files on anyone unless they were still +missing after seven days. + +Meanwhile, millions of have-you-seen sites had popped up on the net. A couple +of the sites were old MySpace clones that had run out of money and saw a new +lease on life from all the attention. After all, some venture capitalists had +missing family in the Bay Area. Maybe if they were recovered, the site would +attract some new investment. I grabbed dad's laptop and looked through them. +They were plastered with advertising, of course, and pictures of missing +people, mostly grad photos, wedding pictures and that sort of thing. It was +pretty ghoulish. + +I found my pic and saw that it was linked to Van's, Jolu's, and Darryl's. There +was a little form for marking people found and another one for writing up notes +about other missing people. I filled in the fields for me and Jolu and Van, and +left Darryl blank. + +"You forgot Darryl," Dad said. He didn't like Darryl much -- once he'd figured +out that a couple inches were missing out of one of the bottles in his liquor +cabinet, and to my enduring shame I'd blamed it on Darryl. In truth, of course, +it had been both of us, just fooling around, trying out vodka-and-Cokes during +an all-night gaming session. + +"He wasn't with us," I said. The lie tasted bitter in my mouth. + +"Oh my God," my mom said. She squeezed her hands together. "We just assumed +when you came home that you'd all been together." + +"No," I said, the lie growing. "No, he was supposed to meet us but we never met +up. He's probably just stuck over in Berkeley. He was going to take the BART +over." + +Mom made a whimpering sound. Dad shook his head and closed his eyes. "Don't you +know about the BART?" he said. + +I shook my head. I could see where this was going. I felt like the ground was +rushing up to me. + +"They blew it up," Dad said. "The bastards blew it up at the same time as the +bridge." + +That hadn't been on the front page of the Chronicle, but then, a BART blowout +under the water wouldn't be nearly as picturesque as the images of the bridge +hanging in tatters and pieces over the Bay. The BART tunnel from the +Embarcadero in San Francisco to the West Oakland station was submerged. + +I went back to Dad's computer and surfed the headlines. No one was sure, but +the body count was in the thousands. Between the cars that plummeted 191 feet +to the sea and the people drowned in the trains, the deaths were mounting. One +reporter claimed to have interviewed an "identity counterfeiter" who'd helped +"dozens" of people walk away from their old lives by simply vanishing after the +attacks, getting new ID made up, and slipping away from bad marriages, bad +debts and bad lives. + +Dad actually got tears in his eyes, and Mom was openly crying. They each hugged +me again, patting me with their hands as if to assure themselves that I was +really there. They kept telling me they loved me. I told them I loved them too. + +We had a weepy dinner and Mom and Dad had each had a couple glasses of wine, +which was a lot for them. I told them that I was getting sleepy, which was +true, and mooched up to my room. I wasn't going to bed, though. I needed to get +online and find out what was going on. I needed to talk to Jolu and Vanessa. I +needed to get working on finding Darryl. + +I crept up to my room and opened the door. I hadn't seen my old bed in what +felt like a thousand years. I lay down on it and reached over to my bedstand to +grab my laptop. I must have not plugged it in all the way -- the electrical +adapter needed to be jiggled just right -- so it had slowly discharged while I +was away. I plugged it back in and gave it a minute or two to charge up before +trying to power it up again. I used the time to get undressed and throw my +clothes in the trash -- I never wanted to see them again -- and put on a clean +pair of boxers and a fresh t-shirt. The fresh-laundered clothes, straight out +of my drawers, felt so familiar and comfortable, like getting hugged by my +parents. + +I powered up my laptop and punched a bunch of pillows into place behind me at +the top of the bed. I scooched back and opened my computer's lid and settled it +onto my thighs. It was still booting, and man, those icons creeping across the +screen looked /{good}/. It came all the way up and then it started giving me +more low-power warnings. I checked the power-cable again and wiggled it and +they went away. The power-jack was really flaking out. + +In fact, it was so bad that I couldn't actually get anything done. Every time I +took my hand off the power-cable it lost contact and the computer started to +complain about its battery. I took a closer look at it. + +The whole case of my computer was slightly misaligned, the seam split in an +angular gape that started narrow and widened toward the back. + +Sometimes you look at a piece of equipment and discover something like this and +you wonder, "Was it always like that?" Maybe you just never noticed. + +But with my laptop, that wasn't possible. You see, I built it. After the Board +of Ed issued us all with SchoolBooks, there was no way my parents were going to +buy me a computer of my own, even though technically the SchoolBook didn't +belong to me, and I wasn't supposed to install software on it or mod it. + +I had some money saved -- odd jobs, Christmases and birthdays, a little bit of +judicious ebaying. Put it all together and I had enough money to buy a totally +crappy, five-year-old machine. + +So Darryl and I built one instead. You can buy laptop cases just like you can +buy cases for desktop PCs, though they're a little more specialized than plain +old PCs. I'd built a couple PCs with Darryl over the years, scavenging parts +from Craigslist and garage sales and ordering stuff from cheap cheap Taiwanese +vendors we found on the net. I figured that building a laptop would be the best +way to get the power I wanted at the price I could afford. + +To build your own laptop, you start by ordering a "barebook" -- a machine with +just a little hardware in it and all the right slots. The good news was, once I +was done, I had a machine that was a whole pound lighter than the Dell I'd had +my eye on, ran faster, and cost a third of what I would have paid Dell. The bad +news was that assembling a laptop is like building one of those ships in a +bottle. It's all finicky work with tweezers and magnifying glasses, trying to +get everything to fit in that little case. Unlike a full-sized PC -- which is +mostly air -- every cubic millimeter of space in a laptop is spoken for. Every +time I thought I had it, I'd go to screw the thing back together and find that +something was keeping the case from closing all the way, and it'd be back to +the drawing board. + +So I knew /{exactly}/ how the seam on my laptop was supposed to look when the +thing was closed, and it was /{not}/ supposed to look like this. + +I kept jiggling the power-adapter, but it was hopeless. There was no way I was +going to get the thing to boot without taking it apart. I groaned and put it +beside the bed. I'd deal with it in the morning. + +# + +That was the theory, anyway. Two hours later, I was still staring at the +ceiling, playing back movies in my head of what they'd done to me, what I +should have done, all regrets and /{esprit d'escalier.}/ + +I rolled out of bed. It had gone midnight and I'd heard my parents hit the sack +at eleven. I grabbed the laptop and cleared some space on my desk and clipped +the little LED lamps to the temples of my magnifying glasses and pulled out a +set of little precision screwdrivers. A minute later, I had the case open and +the keyboard removed and I was staring at the guts of my laptop. I got a can of +compressed air and blew out the dust that the fan had sucked in and looked +things over. + +Something wasn't right. I couldn't put my finger on it, but then it had been +months since I'd had the lid off this thing. Luckily, the third time I'd had to +open it up and struggle to close it again, I'd gotten smart: I'd taken a photo +of the guts with everything in place. I hadn't been totally smart: at first, +I'd just left that pic on my hard drive, and naturally I couldn't get to it +when I had the laptop in parts. But then I'd printed it out and stuck it in my +messy drawer of papers, the dead-tree graveyard where I kept all the warranty +cards and pin-out diagrams. I shuffled them -- they seemed messier than I +remembered -- and brought out my photo. I set it down next to the computer and +kind of unfocused my eyes, trying to find things that looked out of place. + +Then I spotted it. The ribbon cable that connected the keyboard to the +logic-board wasn't connected right. That was a weird one. There was no torque +on that part, nothing to dislodge it in the course of normal operations. I +tried to press it back down again and discovered that the plug wasn't just +badly mounted -- there was something between it and the board. I tweezed it out +and shone my light on it. + +There was something new in my keyboard. It was a little chunk of hardware, only +a sixteenth of an inch thick, with no markings. The keyboard was plugged into +it, and it was plugged into the board. It other words, it was perfectly +situated to capture all the keystrokes I made while I typed on my machine. + +It was a bug. + +My heart thudded in my ears. It was dark and quiet in the house, but it wasn't +a comforting dark. There were eyes out there, eyes and ears, and they were +watching me. Surveilling me. The surveillance I faced at school had followed me +home, but this time, it wasn't just the Board of Education looking over my +shoulder: the Department of Homeland Security had joined them. + +I almost took the bug out. Then I figured that who ever put it there would know +that it was gone. I left it in. It made me sick to do it. + +I looked around for more tampering. I couldn't find any, but did that mean +there hadn't been any? Someone had broken into my room and planted this device +-- had disassembled my laptop and reassembled it. There were lots of other ways +to wiretap a computer. I could never find them all. + +I put the machine together with numb fingers. This time, the case wouldn't snap +shut just right, but the power-cable stayed in. I booted it up and set my +fingers on the keyboard, thinking that I would run some diagnostics and see +what was what. + +But I couldn't do it. + +Hell, maybe my room was wiretapped. Maybe there was a camera spying on me now. + +I'd been feeling paranoid when I got home. Now I was nearly out of my skin. It +felt like I was back in jail, back in the interrogation room, stalked by +entities who had me utterly in their power. It made me want to cry. + +Only one thing for it. + +I went into the bathroom and took off the toilet-paper roll and replaced it +with a fresh one. Luckily, it was almost empty already. I unrolled the rest of +the paper and dug through my parts box until I found a little plastic envelope +full of ultra-bright white LEDs I'd scavenged out of a dead bike-lamp. I +punched their leads through the cardboard tube carefully, using a pin to make +the holes, then got out some wire and connected them all in series with little +metal clips. I twisted the wires into the leads for a nine-volt battery and +connected the battery. Now I had a tube ringed with ultra-bright, directional +LEDs, and I could hold it up to my eye and look through it. + +I'd built one of these last year as a science fair project and had been thrown +out of the fair once I showed that there were hidden cameras in half the +classrooms at Chavez High. Pinhead video-cameras cost less than a good +restaurant dinner these days, so they're showing up everywhere. Sneaky store +clerks put them in changing rooms or tanning salons and get pervy with the +hidden footage they get from their customers -- sometimes they just put it on +the net. Knowing how to turn a toilet-paper roll and three bucks' worth of +parts into a camera-detector is just good sense. + +This is the simplest way to catch a spy-cam. They have tiny lenses, but they +reflect light like the dickens. It works best in a dim room: stare through the +tube and slowly scan all the walls and other places someone might have put a +camera until you see the glint of a reflection. If the reflection stays still +as you move around, that's a lens. + +There wasn't a camera in my room -- not one I could detect, anyway. There might +have been audio bugs, of course. Or better cameras. Or nothing at all. Can you +blame me for feeling paranoid? + +I loved that laptop. I called it the Salmagundi, which means anything made out +of spare parts. + +Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep +relationship with it. Now, though, I felt like I didn't want to ever touch it +again. I wanted to throw it out the window. Who knew what they'd done to it? +Who knew how it had been tapped? + +I put it in a drawer with the lid shut and looked at the ceiling. It was late +and I should be in bed. There was no way I was going to sleep now, though. I +was tapped. Everyone might be tapped. The world had changed forever. + +"I'll find a way to get them," I said. It was a vow, I knew it when I heard it, +though I'd never made a vow before. + +I couldn't sleep after that. And besides, I had an idea. + +Somewhere in my closet was a shrink-wrapped box containing one still-sealed, +mint-in-package Xbox Universal. Every Xbox has been sold way below cost -- +Microsoft makes most of its money charging games companies money for the right +to put out Xbox games -- but the Universal was the first Xbox that Microsoft +decided to give away entirely for free. + +Last Christmas season, there'd been poor losers on every corner dressed as +warriors from the Halo series, handing out bags of these game-machines as fast +as they could. I guess it worked -- everyone says they sold a whole butt-load +of games. Naturally, there were countermeasures to make sure you only played +games from companies that had bought licenses from Microsoft to make them. + +Hackers blow through those countermeasures. The Xbox was cracked by a kid from +MIT who wrote a best-selling book about it, and then the 360 went down, and +then the short-lived Xbox Portable (which we all called the "luggable" -- it +weighed three pounds!) succumbed. The Universal was supposed to be totally +bulletproof. The high school kids who broke it were Brazilian Linux hackers who +lived in a /{favela}/ -- a kind of squatter's slum. + +Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor. + +Once the Brazilians published their crack, we all went nuts on it. Soon there +were dozens of alternate operating systems for the Xbox Universal. My favorite +was ParanoidXbox, a flavor of Paranoid Linux. Paranoid Linux is an operating +system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it +was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything +it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a +bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that +you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one +character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in +questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred +characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge +haystack. + +I'd burned a ParanoidXbox DVD when they first appeared, but I'd never gotten +around to unpacking the Xbox in my closet, finding a TV to hook it up to and so +on. My room is crowded enough as it is without letting Microsoft crashware eat +up valuable workspace. + +Tonight, I'd make the sacrifice. It took about twenty minutes to get up and +running. Not having a TV was the hardest part, but eventually I remembered that +I had a little overhead LCD projector that had standard TV RCA connectors on +the back. I connected it to the Xbox and shone it on the back of my door and +got ParanoidLinux installed. + +Now I was up and running, and ParanoidLinux was looking for other Xbox +Universals to talk to. Every Xbox Universal comes with built-in wireless for +multiplayer gaming. You can connect to your neighbors on the wireless link and +to the Internet, if you have a wireless Internet connection. I found three +different sets of neighbors in range. Two of them had their Xbox Universals +also connected to the Internet. ParanoidXbox loved that configuration: it could +siphon off some of my neighbors' Internet connections and use them to get +online through the gaming network. The neighbors would never miss the packets: +they were paying for flat-rate Internet connections, and they weren't exactly +doing a lot of surfing at 2AM. + +The best part of all this is how it made me /{feel}/: in control. My technology +was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn't spying on me. This is +why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and +privacy. + +My brain was really going now, running like 60. There were lots of reasons to +run ParanoidXbox -- the best one was that anyone could write games for it. +Already there was a port of MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, so you +could play practically any game that had ever been written, all the way back to +Pong -- games for the Apple ][+ and games for the Colecovision, games for the +NES and the Dreamcast, and so on. + +Even better were all the cool multiplayer games being built specifically for +ParanoidXbox -- totally free hobbyist games that anyone could run. When you +combined it all, you had a free console full of free games that could get you +free Internet access. + +And the best part -- as far as I was concerned -- was that ParanoidXbox was +/{paranoid}/. Every bit that went over the air was scrambled to within an inch +of its life. You could wiretap it all you wanted, but you'd never figure out +who was talking, what they were talking about, or who they were talking to. +Anonymous web, email and IM. Just what I needed. + +All I had to do now was convince everyone I knew to use it too. + +1~ Chapter 6 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Powell's Books,~{ Powell's Books: +http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=9780765319852 1005 W Burnside, +Portland, OR 97209 USA +1 800 878 7323 }~ the legendary "City of Books" in +Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest bookstore in the world, an endless, +multi-storey universe of papery smells and towering shelves. They stock new and +used books on the same shelves -- something I've always loved -- and every time +I've stopped in, they've had a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been +incredibly gracious about asking me to sign the store-stock. The clerks are +friendly, the stock is fabulous, and there's even a Powell's at the Portland +airport, making it just about the best airport bookstore in the world for my +money! }/ + +Believe it or not, my parents made me go to school the next day. I'd only +fallen into feverish sleep at three in the morning, but at seven the next day, +my Dad was standing at the foot of my bed, threatening to drag me out by the +ankles. I managed to get up -- something had died in my mouth after painting my +eyelids shut -- and into the shower. + +I let my mom force a piece of toast and a banana into me, wishing fervently +that my parents would let me drink coffee at home. I could sneak one on the way +to school, but watching them sip down their black gold while I was drag-assing +around the house, getting dressed and putting my books in my bag -- it was +awful. + +I've walked to school a thousand times, but today it was different. I went up +and over the hills to get down into the Mission, and everywhere there were +trucks. I saw new sensors and traffic cameras installed at many of the +stop-signs. Someone had a lot of surveillance gear lying around, waiting to be +installed at the first opportunity. The attack on the Bay Bridge had been just +what they needed. + +It all made the city seem more subdued, like being inside an elevator, +embarrassed by the close scrutiny of your neighbors and the ubiquitous cameras. + +The Turkish coffee shop on 24th Street fixed me up good with a go-cup of +Turkish coffee. Basically, Turkish coffee is mud, pretending to be coffee. It's +thick enough to stand a spoon up in, and it has way more caffeine than the +kiddee-pops like Red Bull. Take it from someone who's read the Wikipedia entry: +this is how the Ottoman Empire was won: maddened horsemen fueled by lethal +jet-black coffee-mud. + +I pulled out my debit card to pay and he made a face. "No more debit," he said. + +"Huh? Why not?" I'd paid for my coffee habit on my card for years at the +Turk's. He used to hassle me all the time, telling me I was too young to drink +the stuff, and he still refused to serve me at all during school hours, +convinced that I was skipping class. But over the years, the Turk and me have +developed a kind of gruff understanding. + +He shook his head sadly. "You wouldn't understand. Go to school, kid." + +There's no surer way to make me want to understand than to tell me I won't. I +wheedled him, demanding that he tell me. He looked like he was going to throw +me out, but when I asked him if he thought I wasn't good enough to shop there, +he opened up. + +"The security," he said, looking around his little shop with its tubs of dried +beans and seeds, its shelves of Turkish groceries. "The government. They +monitor it all now, it was in the papers. PATRIOT Act II, the Congress passed +it yesterday. Now they can monitor every time you use your card. I say no. I +say my shop will not help them spy on my customers." + +My jaw dropped. + +"You think it's no big deal maybe? What is the problem with government knowing +when you buy coffee? Because it's one way they know where you are, where you +been. Why you think I left Turkey? Where you have government always spying on +the people, is no good. I move here twenty years ago for freedom -- I no help +them take freedom away." + +"You're going to lose so many sales," I blurted. I wanted to tell him he was a +hero and shake his hand, but that was what came out. "Everyone uses debit +cards." + +"Maybe not so much anymore. Maybe my customers come here because they know I +love freedom too. I am making sign for window. Maybe other stores do the same. +I hear the ACLU will sue them for this." + +"You've got all my business from now on," I said. I meant it. I reached into my +pocket. "Um, I don't have any cash, though." + +He pursed his lips and nodded. "Many peoples say the same thing. Is OK. You +give today's money to the ACLU." + +In two minutes, the Turk and I had exchanged more words than we had in all the +time I'd been coming to his shop. I had no idea he had all these passions. I +just thought of him as my friendly neighborhood caffeine dealer. Now I shook +his hand and when I left his store, I felt like he and I had joined a team. A +secret team. + +# + +I'd missed two days of school but it seemed like I hadn't missed much class. +They'd shut the school on one of those days while the city scrambled to +recover. The next day had been devoted, it seemed, to mourning those missing +and presumed dead. The newspapers published biographies of the lost, personal +memorials. The Web was filled with these capsule obituaries, thousands of them. + +Embarrassingly, I was one of those people. I stepped into the schoolyard, not +knowing this, and then there was a shout and a moment later there were a +hundred people around me, pounding me on the back, shaking my hand. A couple +girls I didn't even know kissed me, and they were more than friendly kisses. I +felt like a rock star. + +My teachers were only a little more subdued. Ms Galvez cried as much as my +mother had and hugged me three times before she let me go to my desk and sit +down. There was something new at the front of the classroom. A camera. Ms +Galvez caught me staring at it and handed me a permission slip on smeary +Xeroxed school letterhead. + +The Board of the San Francisco Unified School District had held an emergency +session over the weekend and unanimously voted to ask the parents of every kid +in the city for permission to put closed circuit television cameras in every +classroom and corridor. The law said they couldn't force us to go to school +with cameras all over the place, but it didn't say anything about us +/{volunteering}/ to give up our Constitutional rights. The letter said that the +Board were sure that they would get complete compliance from the City's +parents, but that they would make arrangements to teach those kids' whose +parents objected in a separate set of "unprotected" classrooms. + +Why did we have cameras in our classrooms now? Terrorists. Of course. Because +by blowing up a bridge, terrorists had indicated that schools were next. +Somehow that was the conclusion that the Board had reached anyway. + +I read this note three times and then I stuck my hand up. + +"Yes, Marcus?" + +"Ms Galvez, about this note?" + +"Yes, Marcus." + +"Isn't the point of terrorism to make us afraid? That's why it's called +/{terror}/ism, right?" + +"I suppose so." The class was staring at me. I wasn't the best student in +school, but I did like a good in-class debate. They were waiting to hear what +I'd say next. + +"So aren't we doing what the terrorists want from us? Don't they win if we act +all afraid and put cameras in the classrooms and all of that?" + +There was some nervous tittering. One of the others put his hand up. It was +Charles. Ms Galvez called on him. + +"Putting cameras in makes us safe, which makes us less afraid." + +"Safe from what?" I said, without waiting to be called on. + +"Terrorism," Charles said. The others were nodding their heads. + +"How do they do that? If a suicide bomber rushed in here and blew us all up --" + +"Ms Galvez, Marcus is violating school policy. We're not supposed to make jokes +about terrorist attacks --" + +"Who's making jokes?" + +"Thank you, both of you," Ms Galvez said. She looked really unhappy. I felt +kind of bad for hijacking her class. "I think that this is a really interesting +discussion, but I'd like to hold it over for a future class. I think that these +issues may be too emotional for us to have a discussion about them today. Now, +let's get back to the suffragists, shall we?" + +So we spent the rest of the hour talking about suffragists and the new lobbying +strategies they'd devised for getting four women into every congresscritter's +office to lean on him and let him know what it would mean for his political +future if he kept on denying women the vote. It was normally the kind of thing +I really liked -- little guys making the big and powerful be honest. But today +I couldn't concentrate. It must have been Darryl's absence. We both liked +Social Studies and we would have had our SchoolBooks out and an IM session up +seconds after sitting down, a back-channel for talking about the lesson. + +I'd burned twenty ParanoidXbox discs the night before and I had them all in my +bag. I handed them out to people I knew were really, really into gaming. They'd +all gotten an Xbox Universal or two the year before, but most of them had +stopped using them. The games were really expensive and not a lot of fun. I +took them aside between periods, at lunch and study hall, and sang the praises +of the ParanoidXbox games to the sky. Free and fun -- addictive social games +with lots of cool people playing them from all over the world. + +Giving away one thing to sell another is what they call a "razor blade +business" -- companies like Gillette give you free razor-blade handles and then +stiff you by charging you a small fortune for the blades. Printer cartridges +are the worst for that -- the most expensive Champagne in the world is cheap +when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of a penny a gallon to make +wholesale. + +Razor-blade businesses depend on you not being able to get the "blades" from +someone else. After all, if Gillette can make nine bucks on a ten-dollar +replacement blade, why not start a competitor that makes only four bucks +selling an identical blade: an 80 percent profit margin is the kind of thing +that makes your average business-guy go all drooly and round-eyed. + +So razor-blade companies like Microsoft pour a lot of effort into making it +hard and/or illegal to compete with them on the blades. In Microsoft's case, +every Xbox has had countermeasures to keep you from running software that was +released by people who didn't pay the Microsoft blood-money for the right to +sell Xbox programs. + +The people I met didn't think much about this stuff. They perked up when I told +them that the games were unmonitored. These days, any online game you play is +filled with all kinds of unsavory sorts. First there are the pervs who try to +get you to come out to some remote location so they can go all weird and +Silence of the Lambs on you. Then there are the cops, who are pretending to be +gullible kids so they can bust the pervs. Worst of all, though, are the +monitors who spend all their time spying on our discussions and snitching on us +for violating their Terms of Service, which say, no flirting, no cussing, and +no "clear or masked language which insultingly refers to any aspect of sexual +orientation or sexuality." + +I'm no 24/7 horn-dog, but I'm a seventeen year old boy. Sex does come up in +conversation every now and again. But God help you if it came up in chat while +you were gaming. It was a real buzz-kill. No one monitored the ParanoidXbox +games, because they weren't run by a company: they were just games that hackers +had written for the hell of it. + +So these game-kids loved the story. They took the discs greedily, and promised +to burn copies for all of their friends -- after all, games are most fun when +you're playing them with your buddies. + +When I got home, I read that a group of parents were suing the school board +over the surveillance cameras in the classrooms, but that they'd already lost +their bid to get a preliminary injunction against them. + +# + +I don't know who came up with the name Xnet, but it stuck. You'd hear people +talking about it on the Muni. Van called me up to ask me if I'd heard of it and +I nearly choked once I figured out what she was talking about: the discs I'd +started distributing last week had been sneakernetted and copied all the way to +Oakland in the space of two weeks. It made me look over my shoulder -- like I'd +broken a rule and now the DHS would come and take me away forever. + +They'd been hard weeks. The BART had completely abandoned cash fares now, +switching them for arphid "contactless" cards that you waved at the turnstiles +to go through. They were cool and convenient, but every time I used one, I +thought about how I was being tracked. Someone on Xnet posted a link to an +Electronic Frontier Foundation white paper on the ways that these things could +be used to track people, and the paper had tiny stories about little groups of +people that had protested at the BART stations. + +I used the Xnet for almost everything now. I'd set up a fake email address +through the Pirate Party, a Swedish political party that hated Internet +surveillance and promised to keep their mail accounts a secret from everyone, +even the cops. I accessed it strictly via Xnet, hopping from one neighbor's +Internet connection to the next, staying anonymous -- I hoped -- all the way to +Sweden. I wasn't using w1n5ton anymore. If Benson could figure it out, anyone +could. My new handle, come up with on the spur of the moment, was M1k3y, and I +got a /{lot}/ of email from people who heard in chat rooms and message boards +that I could help them troubleshoot their Xnet configurations and connections. + +I missed Harajuku Fun Madness. The company had suspended the game indefinitely. +They said that for "security reasons" they didn't think it would be a good idea +to hide things and then send people off to find them. What if someone thought +it was a bomb? What if someone put a bomb in the same spot? + +What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! +Fight the menace of lightning! + +I kept on using my laptop, though I got a skin-crawly feeling when I used it. +Whoever had wiretapped it would wonder why I didn't use it. I figured I'd just +do some random surfing with it every day, a little less each day, so that +anyone watching would see me slowly changing my habits, not doing a sudden +reversal. Mostly I read those creepy obits -- all those thousands of my friends +and neighbors dead at the bottom of the Bay. + +Truth be told, I /{was}/ doing less and less homework every day. I had business +elsewhere. I burned new stacks of ParanoidXbox every day, fifty or sixty, and +took them around the city to people I'd heard were willing to burn sixty of +their own and hand them out to their friends. + +I wasn't too worried about getting caught doing this, because I had good crypto +on my side. Crypto is cryptography, or "secret writing," and it's been around +since Roman times (literally: Augustus Caesar was a big fan and liked to invent +his own codes, some of which we use today for scrambling joke punchlines in +email). + +Crypto is math. Hard math. I'm not going to try to explain it in detail because +I don't have the math to really get my head around it, either -- look it up on +Wikipedia if you really want. + +But here's the Cliff's Notes version: Some kinds of mathematical functions are +really easy to do in one direction and really hard to do in the other +direction. It's easy to multiply two big prime numbers together and make a +giant number. It's really, really hard to take any given giant number and +figure out which primes multiply together to give you that number. + +That means that if you can come up with a way of scrambling something based on +multiplying large primes, unscrambling it without knowing those primes will be +hard. Wicked hard. Like, a trillion years of all the computers ever invented +working 24/7 won't be able to do it. + +There are four parts to any crypto message: the original message, called the +"cleartext." The scrambled message, called the "ciphertext." The scrambling +system, called the "cipher." And finally there's the key: secret stuff you feed +into the cipher along with the cleartext to make ciphertext. + +It used to be that crypto people tried to keep all of this a secret. Every +agency and government had its own ciphers /{and}/ its own keys. The Nazis and +the Allies didn't want the other guys to know how they scrambled their +messages, let alone the keys that they could use to descramble them. That +sounds like a good idea, right? + +Wrong. + +The first time anyone told me about all this prime factoring stuff, I +immediately said, "No way, that's BS. I mean, /{sure}/ it's hard to do this +prime factorization stuff, whatever you say it is. But it used to be impossible +to fly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytes of +storage. Someone /{must}/ have invented a way of descrambling the messages." I +had visions of a hollow mountain full of National Security Agency +mathematicians reading every email in the world and snickering. + +In fact, that's pretty much what happened during World War II. That's the +reason that life isn't more like Castle Wolfenstein, where I've spent many days +hunting Nazis. + +The thing is, ciphers are hard to keep secret. There's a lot of math that goes +into one, and if they're widely used, then everyone who uses them has to keep +them a secret too, and if someone changes sides, you have to find a new cipher. + +The Nazi cipher was called Enigma, and they used a little mechanical computer +called an Enigma Machine to scramble and unscramble the messages they got. +Every sub and boat and station needed one of these, so it was inevitable that +eventually the Allies would get their hands on one. + +When they did, they cracked it. That work was led by my personal all-time hero, +a guy named Alan Turing, who pretty much invented computers as we know them +today. Unfortunately for him, he was gay, so after the war ended, the stupid +British government forced him to get shot up with hormones to "cure" his +homosexuality and he killed himself. Darryl gave me a biography of Turing for +my 14th birthday -- wrapped in twenty layers of paper and in a recycled +Batmobile toy, he was like that with presents -- and I've been a Turing junkie +ever since. + +Now the Allies had the Enigma Machine, and they could intercept lots of Nazi +radio-messages, which shouldn't have been that big a deal, since every captain +had his own secret key. Since the Allies didn't have the keys, having the +machine shouldn't have helped. + +Here's where secrecy hurts crypto. The Enigma cipher was flawed. Once Turing +looked hard at it, he figured out that the Nazi cryptographers had made a +mathematical mistake. By getting his hands on an Enigma Machine, Turing could +figure out how to crack /{any}/ Nazi message, no matter what key it used. + +That cost the Nazis the war. I mean, don't get me wrong. That's good news. Take +it from a Castle Wolfenstein veteran. You wouldn't want the Nazis running the +country. + +After the war, cryptographers spent a lot of time thinking about this. The +problem had been that Turing was smarter than the guy who thought up Enigma. +Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you +coming up with a way of breaking it. + +And the more they thought about it, the more they realized that /{anyone}/ can +come up with a security system that he can't figure out how to break. But /{no +one}/ can figure out what a smarter person might do. + +You have to publish a cipher to know that it works. You have to tell /{as many +people as possible}/ how it works, so that they can thwack on it with +everything they have, testing its security. The longer you go without anyone +finding a flaw, the more secure you are. + +Which is how it stands today. If you want to be safe, you don't use crypto that +some genius thought of last week. You use the stuff that people have been using +for as long as possible without anyone figuring out how to break them. Whether +you're a bank, a terrorist, a government or a teenager, you use the same +ciphers. + +If you tried to use your own cipher, there'd be the chance that someone out +there had found a flaw you missed and was doing a Turing on your butt, +deciphering all your "secret" messages and chuckling at your dumb gossip, +financial transactions and military secrets. + +So I knew that crypto would keep me safe from eavesdroppers, but I wasn't ready +to deal with histograms. + +# + +I got off the BART and waved my card over the turnstile as I headed up to the +24th Street station. As usual, there were lots of weirdos hanging out in the +station, drunks and Jesus freaks and intense Mexican men staring at the ground +and a few gang kids. I looked straight past them as I hit the stairs and jogged +up to the surface. My bag was empty now, no longer bulging with the +ParanoidXbox discs I'd been distributing, and it made my shoulders feel light +and put a spring in my step as I came up the street. The preachers were at work +still, exhorting in Spanish and English about Jesus and so on. + +The counterfeit sunglass sellers were gone, but they'd been replaced by guys +selling robot dogs that barked the national anthem and would lift their legs if +you showed them a picture of Osama bin Laden. There was probably some cool +stuff going on in their little brains and I made a mental note to pick a couple +of them up and take them apart later. Face-recognition was pretty new in toys, +having only recently made the leap from the military to casinos trying to find +cheats, to law enforcement. + +I started down 24th Street toward Potrero Hill and home, rolling my shoulders +and smelling the burrito smells wafting out of the restaurants and thinking +about dinner. + +I don't know why I happened to glance back over my shoulder, but I did. Maybe +it was a little bit of subconscious sixth-sense stuff. I knew I was being +followed. + +They were two beefy white guys with little mustaches that made me think of +either cops or the gay bikers who rode up and down the Castro, but gay guys +usually had better haircuts. They had on windbreakers the color of old cement +and blue-jeans, with their waistbands concealed. I thought of all the things a +cop might wear on his waistband, of the utility-belt that DHS guy in the truck +had worn. Both guys were wearing Bluetooth headsets. + +I kept walking, my heart thumping in my chest. I'd been expecting this since I +started. I'd been expecting the DHS to figure out what I was doing. I took +every precaution, but Severe-Haircut woman had told me that she'd be watching +me. She'd told me I was a marked man. I realized that I'd been waiting to get +picked up and taken back to jail. Why not? Why should Darryl be in jail and not +me? What did I have going for me? I hadn't even had the guts to tell my parents +-- or his -- what had really happened to us. + +I quickened my steps and took a mental inventory. I didn't have anything +incriminating in my bag. Not too incriminating, anyway. My SchoolBook was +running the crack that let me IM and stuff, but half the people in school had +that. I'd changed the way I encrypted the stuff on my phone -- now I /{did}/ +have a fake partition that I could turn back into cleartext with one password, +but all the good stuff was hidden, and needed another password to open up. That +hidden section looked just like random junk -- when you encrypt data, it +becomes indistinguishable from random noise -- and they'd never even know it +was there. + +There were no discs in my bag. My laptop was free of incriminating evidence. Of +course, if they thought to look hard at my Xbox, it was game over. So to speak. + +I stopped where I was standing. I'd done as good a job as I could of covering +myself. It was time to face my fate. I stepped into the nearest burrito joint +and ordered one with carnitas -- shredded pork -- and extra salsa. Might as +well go down with a full stomach. I got a bucket of horchata, too, an ice-cold +rice drink that's like watery, semi-sweet rice-pudding (better than it sounds). + +I sat down to eat, and a profound calm fell over me. I was about to go to jail +for my "crimes," or I wasn't. My freedom since they'd taken me in had been just +a temporary holiday. My country was not my friend anymore: we were now on +different sides and I'd known I could never win. + +The two guys came into the restaurant as I was finishing the burrito and going +up to order some churros -- deep-fried dough with cinnamon sugar -- for +dessert. I guess they'd been waiting outside and got tired of my dawdling. + +They stood behind me at the counter, boxing me in. I took my churro from the +pretty granny and paid her, taking a couple of quick bites of the dough before +I turned around. I wanted to eat at least a little of my dessert. It might be +the last dessert I got for a long, long time. + +Then I turned around. They were both so close I could see the zit on the cheek +of the one on the left, the little booger up the nose of the other. + +"'Scuse me," I said, trying to push past them. The one with the booger moved to +block me. + +"Sir," he said, "can you step over here with us?" He gestured toward the +restaurant's door. + +"Sorry, I'm eating," I said and moved again. This time he put his hand on my +chest. He was breathing fast through his nose, making the booger wiggle. I +think I was breathing hard too, but it was hard to tell over the hammering of +my heart. + +The other one flipped down a flap on the front of his windbreaker to reveal a +SFPD insignia. "Police," he said. "Please come with us." + +"Let me just get my stuff," I said. + +"We'll take care of that," he said. The booger one stepped right up close to +me, his foot on the inside of mine. You do that in some martial arts, too. It +lets you feel if the other guy is shifting his weight, getting ready to move. + +I wasn't going to run, though. I knew I couldn't outrun fate. + +1~ Chapter 7 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to New York City's Books of Wonder,~{ Books of +Wonder http://www.booksofwonder.com/ 18 West 18th St, New York, NY 10011 USA +1 +212 989 3270 }~ the oldest and largest kids' bookstore in Manhattan. They're +located just a few blocks away from Tor Books' offices in the Flatiron Building +and every time I drop in to meet with the Tor people, I always sneak away to +Books of Wonder to peruse their stock of new, used and rare kids' books. I'm a +heavy collector of rare editions of Alice in Wonderland, and Books of Wonder +never fails to excite me with some beautiful, limited-edition Alice. They have +tons of events for kids and one of the most inviting atmospheres I've ever +experienced at a bookstore.] }/ + +They took me outside and around the corner, to a waiting unmarked police car. +It wasn't like anyone in that neighborhood would have had a hard time figuring +out that it was a cop-car, though. Only police drive big Crown Victorias now +that gas had hit seven bucks a gallon. What's more, only cops could double-park +in the middle of Van Ness street without getting towed by the schools of +predatory tow-operators that circled endlessly, ready to enforce San +Francisco's incomprehensible parking regulations and collect a bounty for +kidnapping your car. + +Booger blew his nose. I was sitting in the back seat, and so was he. His +partner was sitting in the front, typing with one finger on an ancient, +ruggedized laptop that looked like Fred Flintstone had been its original owner. + +Booger looked closely at my ID again. "We just want to ask you a few routine +questions." + +"Can I see your badges?" I said. These guys were clearly cops, but it couldn't +hurt to let them know I knew my rights. + +Booger flashed his badge at me too fast for me to get a good look at it, but +Zit in the front seat gave me a long look at his. I got their division number +and memorized the four-digit badge number. It was easy: 1337 is also the way +hackers write "leet," or "elite." + +They were both being very polite and neither of them was trying to intimidate +me the way that the DHS had done when I was in their custody. + +"Am I under arrest?" + +"You've been momentarily detained so that we can ensure your safety and the +general public safety," Booger said. + +He passed my driver's license up to Zit, who pecked it slowly into his +computer. I saw him make a typo and almost corrected him, but figured it was +better to just keep my mouth shut. + +"Is there anything you want to tell me, Marcus? Do they call you Marc?" + +"Marcus is fine," I said. Booger looked like he might be a nice guy. Except for +the part about kidnapping me into his car, of course. + +"Marcus. Anything you want to tell me?" + +"Like what? Am I under arrest?" + +"You're not under arrest right now," Booger said. "Would you like to be?" + +"No," I said. + +"Good. We've been watching you since you left the BART. Your Fast Pass says +that you've been riding to a lot of strange places at a lot of funny hours." + +I felt something let go inside my chest. This wasn't about the Xnet at all, +then, not really. They'd been watching my subway use and wanted to know why it +had been so freaky lately. How totally stupid. + +"So you guys follow everyone who comes out of the BART station with a funny +ride-history? You must be busy." + +"Not everyone, Marcus. We get an alert when anyone with an uncommon ride +profile comes out and that helps us assess whether we want to investigate. In +your case, we came along because we wanted to know why a smart-looking kid like +you had such a funny ride profile?" + +Now that I knew I wasn't about to go to jail, I was getting pissed. These guys +had no business spying on me -- Christ, the BART had no business /{helping}/ +them to spy on me. Where the hell did my subway pass get off on finking me out +for having a "nonstandard ride pattern?" + +"I think I'd like to be arrested now," I said. + +Booger sat back and raised his eyebrow at me. + +"Really? On what charge?" + +"Oh, you mean riding public transit in a nonstandard way isn't a crime?" + +Zit closed his eyes and scrubbed them with his thumbs. + +Booger sighed a put-upon sigh. "Look, Marcus, we're on your side here. We use +this system to catch bad guys. To catch terrorists and drug dealers. Maybe +you're a drug dealer yourself. Pretty good way to get around the city, a Fast +Pass. Anonymous." + +"What's wrong with anonymous? It was good enough for Thomas Jefferson. And by +the way, am I under arrest?" + +"Let's take him home," Zit said. "We can talk to his parents." + +"I think that's a great idea," I said. "I'm sure my parents will be anxious to +hear how their tax dollars are being spent --" + +I'd pushed it too far. Booger had been reaching for the door handle but now he +whirled on me, all Hulked out and throbbing veins. "Why don't you shut up right +now, while it's still an option? After everything that's happened in the past +two weeks, it wouldn't kill you to cooperate with us. You know what, maybe we +/{should}/ arrest you. You can spend a day or two in jail while your lawyer +looks for you. A lot can happen in that time. A /{lot}/. How'd you like that?" + +I didn't say anything. I'd been giddy and angry. Now I was scared witless. + +"I'm sorry," I managed, hating myself again for saying it. + +Booger got in the front seat and Zit put the car in gear, cruising up 24th +Street and over Potrero Hill. They had my address from my ID. + +Mom answered the door after they rang the bell, leaving the chain on. She +peeked around it, saw me and said, "Marcus? Who are these men?" + +"Police," Booger said. He showed her his badge, letting her get a good look at +it -- not whipping it away the way he had with me. "Can we come in?" + +Mom closed the door and took the chain off and let them in. They brought me in +and Mom gave the three of us one of her looks. + +"What's this about?" + +Booger pointed at me. "We wanted to ask your son some routine questions about +his movements, but he declined to answer them. We felt it might be best to +bring him here." + +"Is he under arrest?" Mom's accent was coming on strong. Good old Mom. + +"Are you a United States citizen, ma'am?" Zit said. + +She gave him a look that could have stripped paint. "I shore am, hyuck," she +said, in a broad southern accent. "Am /{I}/ under arrest?" + +The two cops exchanged a look. + +Zit took the fore. "We seem to have gotten off to a bad start. We identified +your son as someone with a nonstandard public transit usage pattern, as part of +a new pro-active enforcement program. When we spot people whose travels are +unusual, or that match a suspicious profile, we investigate further." + +"Wait," Mom said. "How do you know how my son uses the Muni?" + +"The Fast Pass," he said. "It tracks voyages." + +"I see," Mom said, folding her arms. Folding her arms was a bad sign. It was +bad enough she hadn't offered them a cup of tea -- in Mom-land, that was +practically like making them shout through the mail-slot -- but once she folded +her arms, it was not going to end well for them. At that moment, I wanted to go +and buy her a big bunch of flowers. + +"Marcus here declined to tell us why his movements had been what they were." + +"Are you saying you think my son is a terrorist because of how he rides the +bus?" + +"Terrorists aren't the only bad guys we catch this way," Zit said. "Drug +dealers. Gang kids. Even shoplifters smart enough to hit a different +neighborhood with every run." + +"You think my son is a drug dealer?" + +"We're not saying that --" Zit began. Mom clapped her hands at him to shut him +up. + +"Marcus, please pass me your backpack." + +I did. + +Mom unzipped it and looked through it, turning her back to us first. + +"Officers, I can now affirm that there are no narcotics, explosives, or +shoplifted gewgaws in my son's bag. I think we're done here. I would like your +badge numbers before you go, please." + +Booger sneered at her. "Lady, the ACLU is suing three hundred cops on the SFPD, +you're going to have to get in line." + +# + +Mom made me a cup of tea and then chewed me out for eating dinner when I knew +that she'd been making falafel. Dad came home while we were still at the table +and Mom and I took turns telling him the story. He shook his head. + +"Lillian, they were just doing their jobs." He was still wearing the blue +blazer and khakis he wore on the days that he was consulting in Silicon Valley. +"The world isn't the same place it was last week." + +Mom set down her teacup. "Drew, you're being ridiculous. Your son is not a +terrorist. His use of the public transit system is not cause for a police +investigation." + +Dad took off his blazer. "We do this all the time at my work. It's how +computers can be used to find all kinds of errors, anomalies and outcomes. You +ask the computer to create a profile of an average record in a database and +then ask it to find out which records in the database are furthest away from +average. It's part of something called Bayesian analysis and it's been around +for centuries now. Without it, we couldn't do spam-filtering --" + +"So you're saying that you think the police should suck as hard as my spam +filter?" I said. + +Dad never got angry at me for arguing with him, but tonight I could see the +strain was running high in him. Still, I couldn't resist. My own father, taking +the police's side! + +"I'm saying that it's perfectly reasonable for the police to conduct their +investigations by starting with data-mining, and then following it up with +leg-work where a human being actually intervenes to see why the abnormality +exists. I don't think that a computer should be telling the police whom to +arrest, just helping them sort through the haystack to find a needle." + +"But by taking in all that data from the transit system, they're /{creating the +haystack}/," I said. "That's a gigantic mountain of data and there's almost +nothing worth looking at there, from the police's point of view. It's a total +waste." + +"I understand that you don't like that this system caused you some +inconvenience, Marcus. But you of all people should appreciate the gravity of +the situation. There was no harm done, was there? They even gave you a ride +home." + +/{They threatened to send me to jail,}/ I thought, but I could see there was no +point in saying it. + +"Besides, you still haven't told us where the blazing hells you've been to +create such an unusual traffic pattern." + +That brought me up short. + +"I thought you relied on my judgment, that you didn't want to spy on me." He'd +said this often enough. "Do you really want me to account for every trip I've +ever taken?" + +# + +I hooked up my Xbox as soon as I got to my room. I'd bolted the projector to +the ceiling so that it could shine on the wall over my bed (I'd had to take +down my awesome mural of punk rock handbills I'd taken down off telephone poles +and glued to big sheets of white paper). + +I powered up the Xbox and watched as it came onto the screen. I was going to +email Van and Jolu to tell them about the hassles with the cops, but as I put +my fingers to the keyboard, I stopped again. + +A feeling crept over me, one not unlike the feeling I'd had when I realized +that they'd turned poor old Salmagundi into a traitor. This time, it was the +feeling that my beloved Xnet might be broadcasting the location of every one of +its users to the DHS. + +It was what Dad had said: /{You ask the computer to create a profile of an +average record in a database and then ask it to find out which records in the +database are furthest away from average.}/ + +The Xnet was secure because its users weren't directly connected to the +Internet. They hopped from Xbox to Xbox until they found one that was connected +to the Internet, then they injected their material as undecipherable, encrypted +data. No one could tell which of the Internet's packets were Xnet and which +ones were just plain old banking and e-commerce and other encrypted +communication. You couldn't find out who was tying the Xnet, let alone who was +using the Xnet. + +But what about Dad's "Bayesian statistics?" I'd played with Bayesian math +before. Darryl and I once tried to write our own better spam filter and when +you filter spam, you need Bayesian math. Thomas Bayes was an 18th century +British mathematician that no one cared about until a couple hundred years +after he died, when computer scientists realized that his technique for +statistically analyzing mountains of data would be super-useful for the modern +world's info-Himalayas. + +Here's some of how Bayesian stats work. Say you've got a bunch of spam. You +take every word that's in the spam and count how many times it appears. This is +called a "word frequency histogram" and it tells you what the probability is +that any bag of words is likely to be spam. Now, take a ton of email that's not +spam -- in the biz, they call that "ham" -- and do the same. + +Wait until a new email arrives and count the words that appear in it. Then use +the word-frequency histogram in the candidate message to calculate the +probability that it belongs in the "spam" pile or the "ham" pile. If it turns +out to be spam, you adjust the "spam" histogram accordingly. There are lots of +ways to refine the technique -- looking at words in pairs, throwing away old +data -- but this is how it works at core. It's one of those great, simple ideas +that seems obvious after you hear about it. + +It's got lots of applications -- you can ask a computer to count the lines in a +picture and see if it's more like a "dog" line-frequency histogram or a "cat" +line-frequency histogram. It can find porn, bank fraud, and flamewars. Useful +stuff. + +And it was bad news for the Xnet. Say you had the whole Internet wiretapped -- +which, of course, the DHS has. You can't tell who's passing Xnet packets by +looking at the contents of those packets, thanks to crypto. + +What you /{can}/ do is find out who is sending way, way more encrypted traffic +out than everyone else. For a normal Internet surfer, a session online is +probably about 95 percent cleartext, five percent ciphertext. If someone is +sending out 95 percent ciphertext, maybe you could dispatch the computer-savvy +equivalents of Booger and Zit to ask them if they're terrorist drug-dealer Xnet +users. + +This happens all the time in China. Some smart dissident will get the idea of +getting around the Great Firewall of China, which is used to censor the whole +country's Internet connection, by using an encrypted connection to a computer +in some other country. Now, the Party there can't tell what the dissident is +surfing: maybe it's porn, or bomb-making instructions, or dirty letters from +his girlfriend in the Philippines, or political material, or good news about +Scientology. They don't have to know. All they have to know is that this guy +gets way more encrypted traffic than his neighbors. At that point, they send +him to a forced labor camp just to set an example so that everyone can see what +happens to smart-asses. + +So far, I was willing to bet that the Xnet was under the DHS's radar, but it +wouldn't be the case forever. And after tonight, I wasn't sure that I was in +any better shape than a Chinese dissident. I was putting all the people who +signed onto the Xnet in jeopardy. The law didn't care if you were actually +doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for +being statistically abnormal. And I couldn't even stop it -- now that the Xnet +was running, it had a life of its own. + +I was going to have to fix it some other way. + +I wished I could talk to Jolu about this. He worked at an Internet Service +Provider called Pigspleen Net that had hired him when he was twelve, and he +knew way more about the net than I did. If anyone knew how to keep our butts +out of jail, it would be him. + +Luckily, Van and Jolu and I were planning to meet for coffee the next night at +our favorite place in the Mission after school. Officially, it was our weekly +Harajuku Fun Madness team meeting, but with the game canceled and Darryl gone, +it was pretty much just a weekly weep-fest, supplemented by about six +phone-calls and IMs a day that went, "Are you OK? Did it really happen?" It +would be good to have something else to talk about. + +# + +"You're out of your mind," Vanessa said. "Are you actually, totally, really, +for-real crazy or what?" + +She had shown up in her girl's school uniform because she'd been stuck going +the long way home, all the way down to the San Mateo bridge then back up into +the city, on a shuttle-bus service that her school was operating. She hated +being seen in public in her gear, which was totally Sailor Moon -- a pleated +skirt and a tunic and knee-socks. She'd been in a bad mood ever since she +turned up at the cafe, which was full of older, cooler, mopey emo art students +who snickered into their lattes when she turned up. + +"What do you want me to do, Van?" I said. I was getting exasperated myself. +School was unbearable now that the game wasn't on, now that Darryl was missing. +All day long, in my classes, I consoled myself with the thought of seeing my +team, what was left of it. Now we were fighting. + +"I want you to stop putting yourself at risk, M1k3y." The hairs on the back of +my neck stood up. Sure, we always used our team handles at team meetings, but +now that my handle was also associated with my Xnet use, it scared me to hear +it said aloud in a public place. + +"Don't use that name in public anymore," I snapped. + +Van shook her head. "That's just what I'm talking about. You could end up going +to jail for this, Marcus, and not just you. Lots of people. After what happened +to Darryl --" + +"I'm doing this for Darryl!" Art students swiveled to look at us and I lowered +my voice. "I'm doing this because the alternative is to let them get away with +it all." + +"You think you're going to stop them? You're out of your mind. They're the +government." + +"It's still our country," I said. "We still have the right to do this." + +Van looked like she was going to cry. She took a couple of deep breaths and +stood up. "I can't do it, I'm sorry. I can't watch you do this. It's like +watching a car-wreck in slow motion. You're going to destroy yourself, and I +love you too much to watch it happen." + +She bent down and gave me a fierce hug and a hard kiss on the cheek that caught +the edge of my mouth. "Take care of yourself, Marcus," she said. My mouth +burned where her lips had pressed it. She gave Jolu the same treatment, but +square on the cheek. Then she left. + +Jolu and I stared at each other after she'd gone. + +I put my face in my hands. "Dammit," I said, finally. + +Jolu patted me on the back and ordered me another latte. "It'll be OK," he +said. + +"You'd think Van, of all people, would understand." Half of Van's family lived +in North Korea. Her parents never forgot that they had all those people living +under a crazy dictator, not able to escape to America, the way her parents had. + +Jolu shrugged. "Maybe that's why she's so freaked out. Because she knows how +dangerous it can get." + +I knew what he was talking about. Two of Van's uncles had gone to jail and had +never reappeared. + +"Yeah," I said. + +"So how come you weren't on Xnet last night?" + +I was grateful for the distraction. I explained it all to him, the Bayesian +stuff and my fear that we couldn't go on using Xnet the way we had been without +getting nabbed. He listened thoughtfully. + +"I see what you're saying. The problem is that if there's too much crypto in +someone's Internet connection, they'll stand out as unusual. But if you don't +encrypt, you'll make it easy for the bad guys to wiretap you." + +"Yeah," I said. "I've been trying to figure it out all day. Maybe we could slow +the connection down, spread it out over more peoples' accounts --" + +"Won't work," he said. "To get it slow enough to vanish into the noise, you'd +have to basically shut down the network, which isn't an option." + +"You're right," I said. "But what else can we do?" + +"What if we changed the definition of normal?" + +And that was why Jolu got hired to work at Pigspleen when he was 12. Give him a +problem with two bad solutions and he'd figure out a third totally different +solution based on throwing away all your assumptions. I nodded vigorously. "Go +on, tell me." + +"What if the average San Francisco Internet user had a /{lot}/ more crypto in +his average day on the Internet? If we could change the split so it's more like +fifty-fifty cleartext to ciphertext, then the users that supply the Xnet would +just look like normal." + +"But how do we do that? People just don't care enough about their privacy to +surf the net through an encrypted link. They don't see why it matters if +eavesdroppers know what they're googling for." + +"Yeah, but web-pages are small amounts of traffic. If we got people to +routinely download a few giant encrypted files every day, that would create as +much ciphertext as thousands of web-pages." + +"You're talking about indienet," I said. + +"You got it," he said. + +indienet -- all lower case, always -- was the thing that made Pigspleen Net +into one of the most successful independent ISPs in the world. Back when the +major record labels started suing their fans for downloading their music, a lot +of the independent labels and their artists were aghast. How can you make money +by suing your customers? + +Pigspleen's founder had the answer: she opened up a deal for any act that +wanted to work with their fans instead of fighting them. Give Pigspleen a +license to distribute your music to its customers and it would give you a share +of the subscription fees based on how popular your music was. For an indie +artist, the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity: no one even cares enough +about your tunes to steal 'em. + +It worked. Hundreds of independent acts and labels signed up with Pigspleen, +and the more music there was, the more fans switched to getting their Internet +service from Pigspleen, and the more money there was for the artists. Inside of +a year, the ISP had a hundred thousand new customers and now it had a million +-- more than half the broadband connections in the city. + +"An overhaul of the indienet code has been on my plate for months now," Jolu +said. "The original programs were written really fast and dirty and they could +be made a lot more efficient with a little work. But I just haven't had the +time. One of the high-marked to-do items has been to encrypt the connections, +just because Trudy likes it that way." Trudy Doo was the founder of Pigspleen. +She was an old time San Francisco punk legend, the singer/front-woman of the +anarcho-feminist band Speedwhores, and she was crazy about privacy. I could +totally believe that she'd want her music service encrypted on general +principles. + +"Will it be hard? I mean, how long would it take?" + +"Well, there's tons of crypto code for free online, of course," Jolu said. He +was doing the thing he did when he was digging into a meaty code problem -- +getting that faraway look, drumming his palms on the table, making the coffee +slosh into the saucers. I wanted to laugh -- everything might be destroyed and +crap and scary, but Jolu would write that code. + +"Can I help?" + +He looked at me. "What, you don't think I can manage it?" + +"What?" + +"I mean, you did this whole Xnet thing without even telling me. Without talking +to me. I kind of thought that you didn't need my help with this stuff." + +I was brought up short. "What?" I said again. Jolu was looking really steamed +now. It was clear that this had been eating him for a long time. "Jolu --" + +He looked at me and I could see that he was furious. How had I missed this? +God, I was such an idiot sometimes. "Look dude, it's not a big deal --" by +which he clearly meant that it was a really big deal "-- it's just that you +know, you never even /{asked}/. I hate the DHS. Darryl was my friend too. I +could have really helped with it." + +I wanted to stick my head between my knees. "Listen Jolu, that was really +stupid of me. I did it at like two in the morning. I was just crazy when it was +happening. I --" I couldn't explain it. Yeah, he was right, and that was the +problem. It had been two in the morning but I could have talked to Jolu about +it the next day or the next. I hadn't because I'd known what he'd say -- that +it was an ugly hack, that I needed to think it through better. Jolu was always +figuring out how to turn my 2 AM ideas into real code, but the stuff that he +came out with was always a little different from what I'd come up with. I'd +wanted the project for myself. I'd gotten totally into being M1k3y. + +"I'm sorry," I said at last. "I'm really, really sorry. You're totally right. I +just got freaked out and did something stupid. I really need your help. I can't +make this work without you." + +"You mean it?" + +"Of course I mean it," I said. "You're the best coder I know. You're a +goddamned genius, Jolu. I would be honored if you'd help me with this." + +He drummed his fingers some more. "It's just -- You know. You're the leader. +Van's the smart one. Darryl was... He was your second-in-command, the guy who +had it all organized, who watched the details. Being the programmer, that was +/{my}/ thing. It felt like you were saying you didn't need me." + +"Oh man, I am such an idiot. Jolu, you're the best-qualified person I know to +do this. I'm really, really, really --" + +"All right, already. Stop. Fine. I believe you. We're all really screwed up +right now. So yeah, of course you can help. We can probably even pay you -- +I've got a little budget for contract programmers." + +"Really?" No one had ever paid me for writing code. + +"Sure. You're probably good enough to be worth it." He grinned and slugged me +in the shoulder. Jolu's really easy-going most of the time, which is why he'd +freaked me out so much. + +I paid for the coffees and we went out. I called my parents and let them know +what I was doing. Jolu's mom insisted on making us sandwiches. We locked +ourselves in his room with his computer and the code for indienet and we +embarked on one of the great all-time marathon programming sessions. Once +Jolu's family went to bed around 11:30, we were able to kidnap the +coffee-machine up to his room and go IV with our magic coffee bean supply. + +If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in +the whole world. When you program a computer, it does /{exactly}/ what you tell +it to do. It's like designing a machine -- any machine, like a car, like a +faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door -- using math and instructions. It's +awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe. + +A computer is the most complicated machine you'll ever use. It's made of +billions of micro-miniaturized transistors that can be configured to run any +program you can imagine. But when you sit down at the keyboard and write a line +of code, those transistors do what you tell them to. + +Most of us will never build a car. Pretty much none of us will ever create an +aviation system. Design a building. Lay out a city. + +Those are complicated machines, those things, and they're off-limits to the +likes of you and me. But a computer is like, ten times more complicated, and it +will dance to any tune you play. You can learn to write simple code in an +afternoon. Start with a language like Python, which was written to give +non-programmers an easier way to make the machine dance to their tune. Even if +you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers +can control you or they can lighten your work -- if you want to be in charge of +your machines, you have to learn to write code. + +We wrote a lot of code that night. + +1~ Chapter 8 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Borders,~{ Borders worldwide +http://www.bordersstores.com/locator/locator.jsp }~ the global bookselling +giant that you can find in cities all over the world -- I'll never forget +walking into the gigantic Borders on Orchard Road in Singapore and discovering +a shelf loaded with my novels! For many years, the Borders in Oxford Street in +London hosted Pat Cadigan's monthly science fiction evenings, where local and +visiting authors would read their work, speak about science fiction and meet +their fans. When I'm in a strange city (which happens a lot) and I need a great +book for my next flight, there always seems to be a Borders brimming with great +choices -- I'm especially partial to the Borders on Union Square in San +Francisco.] }/ + +I wasn't the only one who got screwed up by the histograms. There are lots of +people who have abnormal traffic patterns, abnormal usage patterns. Abnormal is +so common, it's practically normal. + +The Xnet was full of these stories, and so were the newspapers and the TV news. +Husbands were caught cheating on their wives; wives were caught cheating on +their husbands, kids were caught sneaking out with illicit girlfriends and +boyfriends. A kid who hadn't told his parents he had AIDS got caught going to +the clinic for his drugs. + +Those were the people with something to hide -- not guilty people, but people +with secrets. There were even more people with nothing to hide at all, but who +nevertheless resented being picked up, and questioned. Imagine if someone +locked you in the back of a police car and demanded that you prove that you're +/{not}/ a terrorist. + +It wasn't just public transit. Most drivers in the Bay Area have a FasTrak pass +clipped to their sun-visors. This is a little radio-based "wallet" that pays +your tolls for you when you cross the bridges, saving you the hassle of sitting +in a line for hours at the toll-plazas. They'd tripled the cost of using cash +to get across the bridge (though they always fudged this, saying that FasTrak +was cheaper, not that anonymous cash was more expensive). Whatever holdouts +were left afterward disappeared after the number of cash-lanes was reduced to +just one per bridge-head, so that the cash lines were even longer. + +So if you're a local, or if you're driving a rental car from a local agency, +you've got a FasTrak. It turns out that toll-plazas aren't the only place that +your FasTrak gets read, though. The DHS had put FasTrak readers all over town +-- when you drove past them, they logged the time and your ID number, building +an ever-more perfect picture of who went where, when, in a database that was +augmented by "speeding cameras," "red light cameras" and all the other +license-plate cameras that had popped up like mushrooms. + +No one had given it much thought. And now that people were paying attention, we +were all starting to notice little things, like the fact that the FasTrak +doesn't have an off-switch. + +So if you drove a car, you were just as likely to be pulled over by an SFPD +cruiser that wanted to know why you were taking so many trips to the Home Depot +lately, and what was that midnight drive up to Sonoma last week about? + +The little demonstrations around town on the weekend were growing. Fifty +thousand people marched down Market Street after a week of this monitoring. I +couldn't care less. The people who'd occupied my city didn't care what the +natives wanted. They were a conquering army. They knew how we felt about that. + +One morning I came down to breakfast just in time to hear Dad tell Mom that the +two biggest taxi companies were going to give a "discount" to people who used +special cards to pay their fares, supposedly to make drivers safer by reducing +the amount of cash they carried. I wondered what would happen to the +information about who took which cabs where. + +I realized how close I'd come. The new indienet client had been pushed out as +an automatic update just as this stuff started to get bad, and Jolu told me +that 80 percent of the traffic he saw at Pigspleen was now encrypted. The Xnet +just might have been saved. + +Dad was driving me nuts, though. + +"You're being paranoid, Marcus," he told me over breakfast one day as I told +him about the guys I'd seen the cops shaking down on BART the day before. + +"Dad, it's ridiculous. They're not catching any terrorists, are they? It's just +making people scared." + +"They may not have caught any terrorists yet, but they're sure getting a lot of +scumbags off the streets. Look at the drug dealers -- it says they've put +dozens of them away since this all started. Remember when those druggies robbed +you? If we don't bust their dealers, it'll only get worse." I'd been mugged the +year before. They'd been pretty civilized about it. One skinny guy who smelled +bad told me he had a gun, the other one asked me for my wallet. They even let +me keep my ID, though they got my debit card and Fast Pass. It had still scared +me witless and left me paranoid and checking my shoulder for weeks. + +"But most of the people they hold up aren't doing anything wrong, Dad," I said. +This was getting to me. My own father! "It's crazy. For every guilty person +they catch, they have to punish thousands of innocent people. That's just not +good." + +"Innocent? Guys cheating on their wives? Drug dealers? You're defending them, +but what about all the people who died? If you don't have anything to hide --" + +"So you wouldn't mind if they pulled /{you}/ over?" My dad's histograms had +proven to be depressingly normal so far. + +"I'd consider it my duty," he said. "I'd be proud. It would make me feel +safer." + +Easy for him to say. + +# + +Vanessa didn't like me talking about this stuff, but she was too smart about it +for me to stay away from the subject for long. We'd get together all the time, +and talk about the weather and school and stuff, and then, somehow, I'd be back +on this subject. Vanessa was cool when it happened -- she didn't Hulk out on me +again -- but I could see it upset her. + +Still. + +"So my dad says, 'I'd consider it my duty.' Can you freaking /{believe}/ it? I +mean, God! I almost told him then about going to jail, asking him if he thought +that was our 'duty'!" + +We were sitting in the grass in Dolores Park after school, watching the dogs +chase frisbees. + +Van had stopped at home and changed into an old t-shirt for one of her favorite +Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibidão -- the forbidden guy from Rio. +She'd gotten the shirt at a live show we'd all gone to two years before, +sneaking out for a grand adventure down at the Cow Palace, and she'd sprouted +an inch or two since, so it was tight and rode up her tummy, showing her flat +little belly button. + +She lay back in the weak sun with her eyes closed behind her shades, her toes +wiggling in her flip-flops. I'd known Van since forever, and when I thought of +her, I usually saw the little kid I'd known with hundreds of jangly bracelets +made out of sliced-up soda cans, who played the piano and couldn't dance to +save her life. Sitting out there in Dolores Park, I suddenly saw her as she +was. + +She was totally h4wt -- that is to say, hot. It was like looking at that +picture of a vase and noticing that it was also two faces. I could see that Van +was just Van, but I could also see that she was hella pretty, something I'd +never noticed. + +Of course, Darryl had known it all along, and don't think that I wasn't bummed +out anew when I realized this. + +"You can't tell your dad, you know," she said. "You'd put us all at risk." Her +eyes were closed and her chest was rising up and down with her breath, which +was distracting in a really embarrassing way. + +"Yeah," I said, glumly. "But the problem is that I know he's just totally full +of it. If you pulled my dad over and made him prove he wasn't a +child-molesting, drug-dealing terrorist, he'd go berserk. Totally +off-the-rails. He hates being put on hold when he calls about his credit-card +bill. Being locked in the back of a car and questioned for an hour would give +him an aneurism." + +"They only get away with it because the normals feel smug compared to the +abnormals. If everyone was getting pulled over, it'd be a disaster. No one +would ever get anywhere, they'd all be waiting to get questioned by the cops. +Total gridlock." + +Woah. + +"Van, you are a total genius," I said. + +"Tell me about it," she said. She had a lazy smile and she looked at me through +half-lidded eyes, almost romantic. + +"Seriously. We can do this. We can mess up the profiles easily. Getting people +pulled over is easy." + +She sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. I felt a little +flip in my stomach, thinking that she was really impressed with me. + +"It's the arphid cloners," I said. "They're totally easy to make. Just flash +the firmware on a ten-dollar Radio Shack reader/writer and you're done. What we +do is go around and randomly swap the tags on people, overwriting their Fast +Passes and FasTraks with other people's codes. That'll make /{everyone}/ skew +all weird and screwy, and make everyone look guilty. Then: total gridlock." + +Van pursed her lips and lowered her shades and I realized she was so angry she +couldn't speak. + +"Good bye, Marcus," she said, and got to her feet. Before I knew it, she was +walking away so fast she was practically running. + +"Van!" I called, getting to my feet and chasing after her. "Van! Wait!" + +She picked up speed, making me run to catch up with her. + +"Van, what the hell," I said, catching her arm. She jerked it away so hard I +punched myself in the face. + +"You're psycho, Marcus. You're going to put all your little Xnet buddies in +danger for their lives, and on top of it, you're going to turn the whole city +into terrorism suspects. Can't you stop before you hurt these people?" + +I opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "Van, /{I'm}/ not the problem, +/{they}/ are. I'm not arresting people, jailing them, making them disappear. +The Department of Homeland Security are the ones doing that. I'm fighting back +to make them stop." + +"How, by making it worse?" + +"Maybe it has to get worse to get better, Van. Isn't that what you were saying? +If everyone was getting pulled over --" + +"That's not what I meant. I didn't mean you should get everyone arrested. If +you want to protest, join the protest movement. Do something positive. Didn't +you learn /{anything}/ from Darryl? /{Anything?}/" + +"You're damned right I did," I said, losing my cool. "I learned that they can't +be trusted. That if you're not fighting them, you're helping them. That they'll +turn the country into a prison if we let them. What did you learn, Van? To be +scared all the time, to sit tight and keep your head down and hope you don't +get noticed? You think it's going to get better? If we don't do anything, this +is as /{good as it's going to get}/. It will only get worse and worse from now +on. You want to help Darryl? Help me bring them down!" + +There it was again. My vow. Not to get Darryl free, but to bring down the +entire DHS. That was crazy, even I knew it. But it was what I planned to do. No +question about it. + +Van shoved me hard with both hands. She was strong from school athletics -- +fencing, lacrosse, field hockey, all the girls-school sports -- and I ended up +on my ass on the disgusting San Francisco sidewalk. She took off and I didn't +follow. + +# + +> The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they +fail. + +That was the first line of my first blog post on Open Revolt, my Xnet site. I +was writing as M1k3y, and I was ready to go to war. + +> Maybe all the automatic screening is supposed to catch terrorists. Maybe it +will catch a terrorist sooner or later. The problem is that it catches /{us}/ +too, even though we're not doing anything wrong. + +> The more people it catches, the more brittle it gets. If it catches too many +people, it dies. + +> Get the idea? + +I pasted in my HOWTO for building a arphid cloner, and some tips for getting +close enough to people to read and write their tags. I put my own cloner in the +pocket of my vintage black leather motocross jacket with the armored pockets +and left for school. I managed to clone six tags between home and Chavez High. + +It was war they wanted. It was war they'd get. + +# + +If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism +detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called "the +paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy. + +Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people +gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. +I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the +subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to +a million people. + +One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test +will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even +though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong. + +What's one percent of one million? + +1,000,000/100 = 10,000 + +One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, +you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't +identify /{one}/ person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify /{10,000}/ +people as having it. + +Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent /{inaccuracy}/. + +That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really +rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking +for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil +is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the +pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single /{atom}/ in your +screen. For that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less +at the tip. + +This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to +terrorism: + +Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there +might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 += 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent. + +That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift +through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, +or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time. + +In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify +two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are +terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two +hundred thousand innocent people. + +Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere /{close}/ to 99 percent accurate. +More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes. + +What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself +up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events -- a person +is a terrorist -- with inaccurate systems. + +Is it any wonder we were able to make such a mess? + +# + +I stepped out the front door whistling on a Tuesday morning one week into the +Operation False Positive. I was rockin' out to some new music I'd downloaded +from the Xnet the night before -- lots of people sent M1k3y little digital +gifts to say thank you for giving them hope. + +I turned onto 23d Street and carefully took the narrow stone steps cut into the +side of the hill. As I descended, I passed Mr Wiener Dog. I don't know Mr +Wiener Dog's real name, but I see him nearly every day, walking his three +panting wiener dogs up the staircase to the little parkette. Squeezing past +them all on the stairs is pretty much impossible and I always end up tangled in +a leash, knocked into someone's front garden, or perched on the bumper of one +of the cars parked next to the curb. + +Mr Wiener Dog is clearly Someone Important, because he has a fancy watch and +always wears a nice suit. I had mentally assumed that he worked down in the +financial district. + +Today as I brushed up against him, I triggered my arphid cloner, which was +already loaded in the pocket of my leather jacket. The cloner sucked down the +numbers off his credit-cards and his car-keys, his passport and the +hundred-dollar bills in his wallet. + +Even as it was doing that, it was flashing some of them with new numbers, taken +from other people I'd brushed against. It was like switching the license-plates +on a bunch of cars, but invisible and instantaneous. I smiled apologetically at +Mr Wiener Dog and continued down the stairs. I stopped at three of the cars +long enough to swap their FasTrak tags with numbers taken off of all the cars +I'd gone past the day before. + +You might think I was being a little aggro here, but I was cautious and +conservative compared to a lot of the Xnetters. A couple girls in the Chemical +Engineering program at UC Berkeley had figured out how to make a harmless +substance out of kitchen products that would trip an explosive sniffer. They'd +had a merry time sprinkling it on their profs' briefcases and jackets, then +hiding out and watching the same profs try to get into the auditoriums and +libraries on campus, only to get flying-tackled by the new security squads that +had sprung up everywhere. + +Other people wanted to figure out how to dust envelopes with substances that +would test positive for anthrax, but everyone else thought they were out of +their minds. Luckily, it didn't seem like they'd be able to figure it out. + +I passed by San Francisco General Hospital and nodded with satisfaction as I +saw the huge lines at the front doors. They had a police checkpoint too, of +course, and there were enough Xnetters working as interns and cafeteria workers +and whatnot there that everyone's badges had been snarled up and swapped +around. I'd read the security checks had tacked an hour onto everyone's work +day, and the unions were threatening to walk out unless the hospital did +something about it. + +A few blocks later, I saw an even longer line for the BART. Cops were walking +up and down the line pointing people out and calling them aside for +questioning, bag-searches and pat-downs. They kept getting sued for doing this, +but it didn't seem to be slowing them down. + +I got to school a little ahead of time and decided to walk down to 22nd Street +to get a coffee -- and I passed a police checkpoint where they were pulling +over cars for secondary inspection. + +School was no less wild -- the security guards on the metal detectors were also +wanding our school IDs and pulling out students with odd movements for +questioning. Needless to say, we all had pretty weird movements. Needless to +say, classes were starting an hour or more later. + +Classes were crazy. I don't think anyone was able to concentrate. I overheard +two teachers talking about how long it had taken them to get home from work the +day before, and planning to sneak out early that day. + +It was all I could do to keep from laughing. The paradox of the false positive +strikes again! + +Sure enough, they let us out of class early and I headed home the long way, +circling through the Mission to see the havoc. Long lines of cars. BART +stations lined up around the blocks. People swearing at ATMs that wouldn't +dispense their money because they'd had their accounts frozen for suspicious +activity (that's the danger of wiring your checking account straight into your +FasTrak and Fast Pass!). + +I got home and made myself a sandwich and logged into the Xnet. It had been a +good day. People from all over town were crowing about their successes. We'd +brought the city of San Francisco to a standstill. The news-reports confirmed +it -- they were calling it the DHS gone haywire, blaming it all on the fake-ass +"security" that was supposed to be protecting us from terrorism. The Business +section of the San Francisco Chronicle gave its whole front page to an estimate +of the economic cost of the DHS security resulting from missed work hours, +meetings and so on. According to the Chronicle's economist, a week of this crap +would cost the city more than the Bay Bridge bombing had. + +Mwa-ha-ha-ha. + +The best part: Dad got home that night late. Very late. Three /{hours}/ late. +Why? Because he'd been pulled over, searched, questioned. Then it happened +/{again}/. Twice. + +Twice! + +1~ Chapter 9 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Compass Books/Books Inc,~{ Compass +Books/Books Inc: +http://www.booksinc.net/NASApp/store/Product;jsessionid=abcF-ch09-pbU6m7ZRrLr?s=showproduct&isbn=0765319853 +}~ the oldest independent bookstore in the western USA. They've got stores up +and down California, in San Francisco, Burlingame, Mountain View and Palo Alto, +but coolest of all is that they run a killer bookstore in the middle of +Disneyland's Downtown Disney in Anaheim. I'm a stone Disney park freak (see my +first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom if you don't believe it), and +every time I've lived in California, I've bought myself an annual Disneyland +pass, and on practically every visit, I drop by Compass Books in Downtown +Disney. They stock a brilliant selection of unauthorized (and even critical) +books about Disney, as well as a great variety of kids books and science +fiction, and the cafe next door makes a mean cappuccino.] }/ + +He was so angry I thought he was going to pop. You know I said I'd only seen +him lose his cool rarely? That night, he lost it more than he ever had. + +"You wouldn't believe it. This cop, he was like eighteen years old and he kept +saying, 'But sir, why were you in Berkeley yesterday if your client is in +Mountain View?' I kept explaining to him that I teach at Berkeley and then he'd +say, 'I thought you were a consultant,' and we'd start over again. It was like +some kind of sitcom where the cops have been taken over by the stupidity ray. + +"What's worse was he kept insisting that I'd been in Berkeley today as well, +and I kept saying no, I hadn't been, and he said I had been. Then he showed me +my FasTrak billing and it said I'd driven the San Mateo bridge three times that +day! + +"That's not all," he said, and drew in a breath that let me know he was really +steamed. "They had information about where I'd been, places that /{didn't have +a toll plaza}/. They'd been polling my pass just on the street, at random. And +it was /{wrong}/! Holy crap, I mean, they're spying on us all and they're not +even competent!" + +I'd drifted down into the kitchen as he railed there, and now I was watching +him from the doorway. Mom met my eye and we both raised our eyebrows as if to +say, /{Who's going to say 'I told you so' to him?}/ I nodded at her. She could +use her spousular powers to nullify his rage in a way that was out of my reach +as a mere filial unit. + +"Drew," she said, and grabbed him by the arm to make him stop stalking back and +forth in the kitchen, waving his arms like a street-preacher. + +"What?" he snapped. + +"I think you owe Marcus an apology." She kept her voice even and level. Dad and +I are the spazzes in the household -- Mom's a total rock. + +Dad looked at me. His eyes narrowed as he thought for a minute. "All right," he +said at last. "You're right. I was talking about competent surveillance. These +guys were total amateurs. I'm sorry, son," he said. "You were right. That was +ridiculous." He stuck his hand out and shook my hand, then gave me a firm, +unexpected hug. + +"God, what are we doing to this country, Marcus? Your generation deserves to +inherit something better than this." When he let me go, I could see the deep +wrinkles in his face, lines I'd never noticed. + +I went back up to my room and played some Xnet games. There was a good +multiplayer thing, a clockwork pirate game where you had to quest every day or +two to wind up your whole crew's mainsprings before you could go plundering and +pillaging again. It was the kind of game I hated but couldn't stop playing: +lots of repetitive quests that weren't all that satisfying to complete, a +little bit of player-versus-player combat (scrapping to see who would captain +the ship) and not that many cool puzzles that you had to figure out. Mostly, +playing this kind of game made me homesick for Harajuku Fun Madness, which +balanced out running around in the real world, figuring out online puzzles, and +strategizing with your team. + +But today it was just what I needed. Mindless entertainment. + +My poor dad. + +I'd done that to him. He'd been happy before, confident that his tax dollars +were being spent to keep him safe. I'd destroyed that confidence. It was false +confidence, of course, but it had kept him going. Seeing him now, miserable and +broken, I wondered if it was better to be clear-eyed and hopeless or to live in +a fool's paradise. That shame -- the shame I'd felt since I gave up my +passwords, since they'd broken me -- returned, leaving me listless and wanting +to just get away from myself. + +My character was a swabbie on the pirate ship /{Zombie Charger}/, and he'd +wound down while I'd been offline. I had to IM all the other players on my ship +until I found one willing to wind me up. That kept me occupied. I liked it, +actually. There was something magic about a total stranger doing you a favor. +And since it was the Xnet, I knew that all the strangers were friends, in some +sense. + +> Where u located? + +The character who wound me up was called Lizanator, and it was female, though +that didn't mean that it was a girl. Guys had some weird affinity for playing +female characters. + +> San Francisco + +I said. + +> No stupe, where you located in San Fran? + +> Why, you a pervert? + +That usually shut down that line of conversation. Of course every gamespace was +full of pedos and pervs, and cops pretending to be pedo- and perv-bait (though +I sure hoped there weren't any cops on the Xnet!). An accusation like that was +enough to change the subject nine out of ten times. + +> Mission? Potrero Hill? Noe? East Bay? + +> Just wind me up k thx? + +She stopped winding. + +> You scared? + +> Safe -- why do you care? + +> Just curious + +I was getting a bad vibe off her. She was clearly more than just curious. Call +it paranoia. I logged off and shut down my Xbox. + +# + +Dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, "It looks like it's +going to get better, at least." He handed me a copy of the /{Chronicle}/ open +to the third page. + +> A Department of Homeland Security spokesman has confirmed that the San +Francisco office has requested a 300 percent budget and personnel increase from +DC + +What? + +> Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for Northern +California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press conference +yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the Bay Area prompted +the request. "We are tracking a spike in underground chatter and activity and +believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturing false security alerts to +undermine our efforts." + +My eyes crossed. No freaking way. + +> "These false alarms are potentially 'radar chaff' intended to disguise real +attacks. The only effective way of combatting them is to step up staffing and +analyst levels so that we can fully investigate every lead." + +> Sutherland noted the delays experienced all over the city were "unfortunate" +and committed to eliminating them. + +I had a vision of the city with four or five times as many DHS enforcers, +brought in to make up for my own stupid ideas. Van was right. The more I fought +them, the worse it was going to get. + +Dad pointed at the paper. "These guys may be fools, but they're methodical +fools. They'll just keep throwing resources at this problem until they solve +it. It's tractable, you know. Mining all the data in the city, following up on +every lead. They'll catch the terrorists." + +I lost it. "Dad! Are you /{listening to yourself}/? They're talking about +investigating practically every person in the city of San Francisco!" + +"Yeah," he said, "that's right. They'll catch every alimony cheat, every dope +dealer, every dirt-bag and every terrorist. You just wait. This could be the +best thing that ever happened to this country." + +"Tell me you're joking," I said. "I beg you. You think that that's what they +intended when they wrote the Constitution? What about the Bill of Rights?" + +"The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He was awesomely +serene, convinced of his rightness. "The right to freedom of association is +fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to +figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?" + +"Because it's an invasion of my privacy!" I said. + +"What's the big deal? Would you rather have privacy or terrorists?" + +Agh. I hated arguing with my dad like this. I needed a coffee. "Dad, come on. +Taking away our privacy isn't catching terrorists: it's just inconveniencing +normal people." + +"How do you know it's not catching terrorists?" + +"Where are the terrorists they've caught?" + +"I'm sure we'll see arrests in good time. You just wait." + +"Dad, what the hell has happened to you since last night? You were ready to go +nuclear on the cops for pulling you over --" + +"Don't use that tone with me, Marcus. What's happened since last night is that +I've had the chance to think it over and to read /{this}/." He rattled his +paper. "The reason they caught me is that the bad guys are actively jamming +them. They need to adjust their techniques to overcome the jamming. But they'll +get there. Meanwhile the occasional road stop is a small price to pay. This +isn't the time to be playing lawyer about the Bill of Rights. This is the time +to make some sacrifices to keep our city safe." + +I couldn't finish my toast. I put the plate in the dishwasher and left for +school. I had to get out of there. + +# + +The Xnetters weren't happy about the stepped up police surveillance, but they +weren't going to take it lying down. Someone called a phone-in show on KQED and +told them that the police were wasting their time, that we could monkeywrench +the system faster than they could untangle it. The recording was a top Xnet +download that night. + +"This is California Live and we're talking to an anonymous caller at a payphone +in San Francisco. He has his own information about the slowdowns we've been +facing around town this week. Caller, you're on the air." + +"Yeah, yo, this is just the beginning, you know? I mean, like, we're just +getting started. Let them hire a billion pigs and put a checkpoint on every +corner. We'll jam them all! And like, all this crap about terrorists? We're not +terrorists! Give me a break, I mean, really! We're jamming up the system +because we hate the Homeland Security, and because we love our city. +Terrorists? I can't even spell jihad. Peace out." + +He sounded like an idiot. Not just the incoherent words, but also his gloating +tone. He sounded like a kid who was indecently proud of himself. He /{was}/ a +kid who was indecently proud of himself. + +The Xnet flamed out over this. Lots of people thought he was an idiot for +calling in, while others thought he was a hero. I worried that there was +probably a camera aimed at the payphone he'd used. Or an arphid reader that +might have sniffed his Fast Pass. I hoped he'd had the smarts to wipe his +fingerprints off the quarter, keep his hood up, and leave all his arphids at +home. But I doubted it. I wondered if he'd get a knock on the door sometime +soon. + +The way I knew when something big had happened on Xnet was that I'd suddenly +get a million emails from people who wanted M1k3y to know about the latest +haps. It was just as I was reading about Mr Can't-Spell-Jihad that my mailbox +went crazy. Everyone had a message for me -- a link to a livejournal on the +Xnet -- one of the many anonymous blogs that were based on the Freenet document +publishing system that was also used by Chinese democracy advocates. + +> Close call + +> We were jamming at the Embarcadero tonite and goofing around giving everyone +a new car key or door key or Fast Pass or FasTrak, tossing around a little fake +gunpowder. There were cops everywhere but we were smarter than them; we're +there pretty much every night and we never get caught. + +> So we got caught tonight. It was a stupid mistake we got sloppy we got +busted. It was an undercover who caught my pal and then got the rest of us. +They'd been watching the crowd for a long time and they had one of those trucks +nearby and they took four of us in but missed the rest. + +> The truck was JAMMED like a can of sardines with every kind of person, old +young black white rich poor all suspects, and there were two cops trying to ask +us questions and the undercovers kept bringing in more of us. Most people were +trying to get to the front of the line to get through questioning so we kept on +moving back and it was like hours in there and really hot and it was getting +more crowded not less. + +> At like 8PM they changed shifts and two new cops came in and bawled out the +two cops who were there all like wtf? aren't you doing anything here. They had +a real fight and then the two old cops left and the new cops sat down at their +desks and whispered to each other for a while. + +> Then one cop stood up and started shouting EVERYONE JUST GO HOME JESUS CHRIST +WE'VE GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN BOTHER YOU WITH MORE QUESTIONS IF YOU'VE +DONE SOMETHING WRONG JUST DON'T DO IT AGAIN AND LET THIS BE A WARNING TO YOU +ALL. + +> A bunch of the suits got really pissed which was HILARIOUS because I mean ten +minutes before they were buggin about being held there and now they were wicked +pissed about being let go, like make up your minds! + +> We split fast though and got out and came home to write this. There are +undercovers everywhere, believe. If you're jamming, be open-eyed and get ready +to run when problems happen. If you get caught try to wait it out they're so +busy they'll maybe just let you go. + +> We made them that busy! All those people in that truck were there because +we'd jammed them. So jam on! + +I felt like I was going to throw up. Those four people -- kids I'd never met -- +they nearly went away forever because of something I'd started. + +Because of something I'd told them to do. I was no better than a terrorist. + +# + +The DHS got their budget requisition approved. The President went on TV with +the Governor to tell us that no price was too high for security. We had to +watch it the next day in school at assembly. My Dad cheered. He'd hated the +President since the day he was elected, saying he wasn't any better than the +last guy and the last guy had been a complete disaster, but now all he could do +was talk about how decisive and dynamic the new guy was. + +"You have to take it easy on your father," Mom said to me one night after I got +home from school. She'd been working from home as much as possible. Mom's a +freelance relocation specialist who helps British people get settled in in San +Francisco. The UK High Commission pays her to answer emails from mystified +British people across the country who are totally confused by how freaky we +Americans are. She explains Americans for a living, and she said that these +days it was better to do that from home, where she didn't have to actually see +any Americans or talk to them. + +I don't have any illusions about Britain. America may be willing to trash its +Constitution every time some Jihadist looks cross-eyed at us, but as I learned +in my ninth-grade Social Studies independent project, the Brits don't even +/{have}/ a Constitution. They've got laws there that would curl the hair on +your toes: they can put you in jail for an entire year if they're really sure +that you're a terrorist but don't have enough evidence to prove it. Now, how +sure can they be if they don't have enough evidence to prove it? How'd they get +that sure? Did they see you committing terrorist acts in a really vivid dream? + +And the surveillance in Britain makes America look like amateur hour. The +average Londoner is photographed 500 times a day, just walking around the +streets. Every license plate is photographed at every corner in the country. +Everyone from the banks to the public transit company is enthusiastic about +tracking you and snitching on you if they think you're remotely suspicious. + +But Mom didn't see it that way. She'd left Britain halfway through high school +and she'd never felt at home here, no matter that she'd married a boy from +Petaluma and raised a son here. To her, this was always the land of barbarians, +and Britain would always be home. + +"Mom, he's just wrong. You of all people should know that. Everything that +makes this country great is being flushed down the toilet and he's going along +with it. Have you noticed that they haven't /{caught any terrorists}/? Dad's +all like, 'We need to be safe,' but he needs to know that most of us don't feel +safe. We feel endangered all the time." + +"I know this all, Marcus. Believe me, I'm not fan of what's been happening to +this country. But your father is --" She broke off. "When you didn't come home +after the attacks, he thought --" + +She got up and made herself a cup of tea, something she did whenever she was +uncomfortable or disconcerted. + +"Marcus," she said. "Marcus, we thought you were dead. Do you understand that? +We were mourning you for days. We were imagining you blown to bits, at the +bottom of the ocean. Dead because some bastard decided to kill hundreds of +strangers to make some point." + +That sank in slowly. I mean, I understood that they'd been worried. Lots of +people died in the bombings -- four thousand was the present estimate -- and +practically everyone knew someone who didn't come home that day. There were two +people from my school who had disappeared. + +"Your father was ready to kill someone. Anyone. He was out of his mind. You've +never seen him like this. I've never seen him like it either. He was out of his +mind. He'd just sit at this table and curse and curse and curse. Vile words, +words I'd never heard him say. One day -- the third day -- someone called and +he was sure it was you, but it was a wrong number and he threw the phone so +hard it disintegrated into thousands of pieces." I'd wondered about the new +kitchen phone. + +"Something broke in your father. He loves you. We both love you. You are the +most important thing in our lives. I don't think you realize that. Do you +remember when you were ten, when I went home to London for all that time? Do +you remember?" + +I nodded silently. + +"We were ready to get a divorce, Marcus. Oh, it doesn't matter why anymore. It +was just a bad patch, the kind of thing that happens when people who love each +other stop paying attention for a few years. He came and got me and convinced +me to come back for you. We couldn't bear the thought of doing that to you. We +fell in love again for you. We're together today because of you." + +I had a lump in my throat. I'd never known this. No one had ever told me. + +"So your father is having a hard time right now. He's not in his right mind. +It's going to take some time before he comes back to us, before he's the man I +love again. We need to understand him until then." + +She gave me a long hug, and I noticed how thin her arms had gotten, how saggy +the skin on her neck was. I always thought of my mother as young, pale, +rosy-cheeked and cheerful, peering shrewdly through her metal-rim glasses. Now +she looked a little like an old woman. I had done that to her. The terrorists +had done that to her. The Department of Homeland Security had done that to her. +In a weird way, we were all on the same side, and Mom and Dad and all those +people we'd spoofed were on the other side. + +# + +I couldn't sleep that night. Mom's words kept running through my head. Dad had +been tense and quiet at dinner and we'd barely spoken, because I didn't trust +myself not to say the wrong thing and because he was all wound up over the +latest news, that Al Qaeda was definitely responsible for the bombing. Six +different terrorist groups had claimed responsibility for the attack, but only +Al Qaeda's Internet video disclosed information that the DHS said they hadn't +disclosed to anyone. + +I lay in bed and listened to a late-night call-in radio show. The topic was sex +problems, with this gay guy who I normally loved to listen to, he would give +people such raw advice, but good advice, and he was really funny and campy. + +Tonight I couldn't laugh. Most of the callers wanted to ask what to do about +the fact that they were having a hard time getting busy with their partners +ever since the attack. Even on sex-talk radio, I couldn't get away from the +topic. + +I switched the radio off and heard a purring engine on the street below. + +My bedroom is in the top floor of our house, one of the painted ladies. I have +a sloping attic ceiling and windows on both sides -- one overlooks the whole +Mission, the other looks out into the street in front of our place. There were +often cars cruising at all hours of the night, but there was something +different about this engine noise. + +I went to the street-window and pulled up my blinds. Down on the street below +me was a white, unmarked van whose roof was festooned with radio antennas, more +antennas than I'd ever seen on a car. It was cruising very slowly down the +street, a little dish on top spinning around and around. + +As I watched, the van stopped and one of the back doors popped open. A guy in a +DHS uniform -- I could spot one from a hundred yards now -- stepped out into +the street. He had some kind of handheld device, and its blue glow lit his +face. He paced back and forth, first scouting my neighbors, making notes on his +device, then heading for me. There was something familiar in the way he walked, +looking down -- + +He was using a wifinder! The DHS was scouting for Xnet nodes. I let go of the +blinds and dove across my room for my Xbox. I'd left it up while I downloaded +some cool animations one of the Xnetters had made of the President's +no-price-too-high speech. I yanked the plug out of the wall, then scurried back +to the window and cracked the blind a fraction of an inch. + +The guy was looking down into his wifinder again, walking back and forth in +front of our house. A moment later, he got back into his van and drove away. + +I got out my camera and took as many pictures as I could of the van and its +antennas. Then I opened them in a free image-editor called The GIMP and edited +out everything from the photo except the van, erasing my street and anything +that might identify me. + +I posted them to Xnet and wrote down everything I could about the vans. These +guys were definitely looking for the Xnet, I could tell. + +Now I really couldn't sleep. + +Nothing for it but to play wind-up pirates. There'd be lots of players even at +this hour. The real name for wind-up pirates was Clockwork Plunder, and it was +a hobbyist project that had been created by teenaged death-metal freaks from +Finland. It was totally free to play, and offered just as much fun as any of +the $15/month services like Ender's Universe and Middle Earth Quest and +Discworld Dungeons. + +I logged back in and there I was, still on the deck of the Zombie Charger, +waiting for someone to wind me up. I hated this part of the game. + +> Hey you + +I typed to a passing pirate. + +> Wind me up? + +He paused and looked at me. + +> y should i? + +> We're on the same team. Plus you get experience points. + +What a jerk. + +> Where are you located? + +> San Francisco + +This was starting to feel familiar. + +> Where in San Francisco? + +I logged out. There was something weird going on in the game. I jumped onto the +livejournals and began to crawl from blog to blog. I got through half a dozen +before I found something that froze my blood. + +Livejournallers love quizzes. What kind of hobbit are you? Are you a great +lover? What planet are you most like? Which character from some movie are you? +What's your emotional type? They fill them in and their friends fill them in +and everyone compares their results. Harmless fun. + +But the quiz that had taken over the blogs of the Xnet that night was what +scared me, because it was anything but harmless: + +* What's your sex + +* What grade are you in? + +* What school do you go to? + +* Where in the city do you live? + +The quizzes plotted the results on a map with colored pushpins for schools and +neighborhoods, and made lame recommendations for places to buy pizza and stuff. + +But look at those questions. Think about my answers: + +* Male + +* 12 + +* Chavez High + +* Potrero Hill + +There were only two people in my whole school who matched that profile. Most +schools it would be the same. If you wanted to figure out who the Xnetters +were, you could use these quizzes to find them all. + +That was bad enough, but what was worse was what it implied: someone from the +DHS was using the Xnet to get at us. The Xnet was compromised by the DHS. + +We had spies in our midst. + +# + +I'd given Xnet discs to hundreds of people, and they'd done the same. I knew +the people I gave the discs to pretty well. Some of them I knew very well. I've +lived in the same house all my life and I've made hundreds and hundreds of +friends over the years, from people who went to daycare with me to people I +played soccer with, people who LARPed with me, people I met clubbing, people I +knew from school. My ARG team were my closest friends, but there were plenty of +people I knew and trusted enough to hand an Xnet disc to. + +I needed them now. + +I woke Jolu up by ringing his cell phone and hanging up after the first ring, +three times in a row. A minute later, he was up on Xnet and we were able to +have a secure chat. I pointed him to my blog-post on the radio vans and he came +back a minute later all freaked out. + +> You sure they're looking for us? + +In response I sent him to the quiz. + +> OMG we're doomed + +> No it's not that bad but we need to figure out who we can trust + +> How? + +> That's what I wanted to ask you -- how many people can you totally vouch for +like trust them to the ends of the earth? + +> Um 20 or 30 or so + +> I want to get a bunch of really trustworthy people together and do a +key-exchange web of trust thing + +Web of trust is one of those cool crypto things that I'd read about but never +tried. It was a nearly foolproof way to make sure that you could talk to the +people you trusted, but that no one else could listen in. The problem is that +it requires you to physically meet with the people in the web at least once, +just to get started. + +> I get it sure. That's not bad. But how you going to get everyone together for +the key-signing? + +> That's what I wanted to ask you about -- how can we do it without getting +busted? + +Jolu typed some words and erased them, typed more and erased them. + +> Darryl would know + +I typed. + +> God, this was the stuff he was great at. + +Jolu didn't type anything. Then, + +> How about a party? + +he typed. + +> How about if we all get together somewhere like we're teenagers having a +party and that way we'll have a ready-made excuse if anyone shows up asking us +what we're doing there? + +> That would totally work! You're a genius, Jolu. + +> I know it. And you're going to love this: I know just where to do it, too + +> Where? + +> Sutro baths! + +1~ Chapter 10 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Anderson's Bookshops,~{ Anderson's +Bookshops +http://www.andersonsbookshop.com/search.php?qkey2=doctorow+little+brother&sid=5156&imageField.x=0&imageField.y=0 +123 West Jefferson, Naperville, IL 60540 USA +1 630 355 2665 }~ Chicago's +legendary kids' bookstore. Anderson's is an old, old family-run business, which +started out as an old-timey drug-store selling some books on the side. Today, +it's a booming, multi-location kids' book empire, with some incredibly +innovative bookselling practices that get books and kids together in really +exciting ways. The best of these is the store's mobile book-fairs, in which +they ship huge, rolling bookcases, already stocked with excellent kids' books, +direct to schools on trucks -- voila, instant book-fair!] }/ + +What would you do if you found out you had a spy in your midst? You could +denounce him, put him up against the wall and take him out. But then you might +end up with another spy in your midst, and the new spy would be more careful +than the last one and maybe not get caught quite so readily. + +Here's a better idea: start intercepting the spy's communications and feed him +and his masters misinformation. Say his masters instruct him to gather +information on your movements. Let him follow you around and take all the notes +he wants, but steam open the envelopes that he sends back to HQ and replace his +account of your movements with a fictitious one. If you want, you can make him +seem erratic and unreliable so they get rid of him. You can manufacture crises +that might make one side or the other reveal the identities of other spies. In +short, you own them. + +This is called the man-in-the-middle attack and if you think about it, it's +pretty scary. Someone who man-in-the-middles your communications can trick you +in any of a thousand ways. + +Of course, there's a great way to get around the man-in-the-middle attack: use +crypto. With crypto, it doesn't matter if the enemy can see your messages, +because he can't decipher them, change them, and re-send them. That's one of +the main reasons to use crypto. + +But remember: for crypto to work, you need to have keys for the people you want +to talk to. You and your partner need to share a secret or two, some keys that +you can use to encrypt and decrypt your messages so that men-in-the-middle get +locked out. + +That's where the idea of public keys comes in. This is a little hairy, but it's +so unbelievably elegant too. + +In public key crypto, each user gets two keys. They're long strings of +mathematical gibberish, and they have an almost magic property. Whatever you +scramble with one key, the other will unlock, and vice-versa. What's more, +they're the /{only}/ keys that can do this -- if you can unscramble a message +with one key, you /{know}/ it was scrambled with the other (and vice-versa). + +So you take either one of these keys (it doesn't matter which one) and you just +/{publish}/ it. You make it a total /{non-secret}/. You want anyone in the +world to know what it is. For obvious reasons, they call this your "public +key." + +The other key, you hide in the darkest reaches of your mind. You protect it +with your life. You never let anyone ever know what it is. That's called your +"private key." (Duh.) + +Now say you're a spy and you want to talk with your bosses. Their public key is +known by everyone. Your public key is known by everyone. No one knows your +private key but you. No one knows their private key but them. + +You want to send them a message. First, you encrypt it with your private key. +You could just send that message along, and it would work pretty well, since +they would know when the message arrived that it came from you. How? Because if +they can decrypt it with your public key, it can /{only}/ have been encrypted +with your private key. This is the equivalent of putting your seal or signature +on the bottom of a message. It says, "I wrote this, and no one else. No one +could have tampered with it or changed it." + +Unfortunately, this won't actually keep your message a /{secret}/. That's +because your public key is really well known (it has to be, or you'll be +limited to sending messages to those few people who have your public key). +Anyone who intercepts the message can read it. They can't change it and make it +seem like it came from you, but if you don't want people to know what you're +saying, you need a better solution. + +So instead of just encrypting the message with your private key, you /{also}/ +encrypt it with your boss's public key. Now it's been locked twice. The first +lock -- the boss's public key -- only comes off when combined with your boss's +private key. The second lock -- your private key -- only comes off with your +public key. When your bosses receive the message, they unlock it with both keys +and now they know for sure that: a) you wrote it and b) that only they can read +it. + +It's very cool. The day I discovered it, Darryl and I immediately exchanged +keys and spent months cackling and rubbing our hands as we exchanged our +military-grade secret messages about where to meet after school and whether Van +would ever notice him. + +But if you want to understand security, you need to consider the most paranoid +possibilities. Like, what if I tricked you into thinking that /{my}/ public key +was your boss's public key? You'd encrypt the message with your private key and +my public key. I'd decrypt it, read it, re-encrypt it with your boss's /{real}/ +public key and send it on. As far as your boss knows, no one but you could have +written the message and no one but him could have read it. + +And I get to sit in the middle, like a fat spider in a web, and all your +secrets belong to me. + +Now, the easiest way to fix this is to really widely advertise your public key. +If it's /{really}/ easy for anyone to know what your real key is, +man-in-the-middle gets harder and harder. But you know what? Making things +well-known is just as hard as keeping them secret. Think about it -- how many +billions of dollars are spent on shampoo ads and other crap, just to make sure +that as many people know about something that some advertiser wants them to +know? + +There's a cheaper way of fixing man-in-the-middle: the web of trust. Say that +before you leave HQ, you and your bosses sit down over coffee and actually tell +each other your keys. No more man-in-the-middle! You're absolutely certain +whose keys you have, because they were put into your own hands. + +So far, so good. But there's a natural limit to this: how many people can you +physically meet with and swap keys? How many hours in the day do you want to +devote to the equivalent of writing your own phone book? How many of those +people are willing to devote that kind of time to you? + +Thinking about this like a phonebook helps. The world was once a place with a +lot of phonebooks, and when you needed a number, you could look it up in the +book. But for many of the numbers that you wanted to refer to on a given day, +you would either know it by heart, or you'd be able to ask someone else. Even +today, when I'm out with my cell-phone, I'll ask Jolu or Darryl if they have a +number I'm looking for. It's faster and easier than looking it up online and +they're more reliable, too. If Jolu has a number, I trust him, so I trust the +number, too. That's called "transitive trust" -- trust that moves across the +web of our relationships. + +A web of trust is a bigger version of this. Say I meet Jolu and get his key. I +can put it on my "keyring" -- a list of keys that I've signed with my private +key. That means you can unlock it with my public key and know for sure that me +-- or someone with my key, anyway -- says that "this key belongs to this guy." + +So I hand you my keyring and provided that you trust me to have actually met +and verified all the keys on it, you can take it and add it to your keyring. +Now, you meet someone else and you hand the whole ring to him. Bigger and +bigger the ring grows, and provided that you trust the next guy in the chain, +and he trusts the next guy in his chain and so on, you're pretty secure. + +Which brings me to keysigning parties. These are /{exactly}/ what they sound +like: a party where everyone gets together and signs everyone else's keys. +Darryl and I, when we traded keys, that was kind of a mini-keysigning party, +one with only two sad and geeky attendees. But with more people, you create the +seed of the web of trust, and the web can expand from there. As everyone on +your keyring goes out into the world and meets more people, they can add more +and more names to the ring. You don't have to meet the new people, just trust +that the signed key you get from the people in your web is valid. + +So that's why web of trust and parties go together like peanut butter and +chocolate. + +# + +"Just tell them it's a super-private party, invitational only," I said. "Tell +them not to bring anyone along or they won't be admitted." + +Jolu looked at me over his coffee. "You're joking, right? You tell people that, +and they'll bring /{extra}/ friends." + +"Argh," I said. I spent a night a week at Jolu's these days, keeping the code +up to date on indienet. Pigspleen actually paid me a non-zero sum of money to +do this, which was really weird. I never thought I'd be paid to write code. + +"So what do we do? We only want people we really trust there, and we don't want +to mention why until we've got everyone's keys and can send them messages in +secret." + +Jolu debugged and I watched over his shoulder. This used to be called "extreme +programming," which was a little embarrassing. Now we just call it +"programming." Two people are much better at spotting bugs than one. As the +cliche goes, "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." + +We were working our way through the bug reports and getting ready to push out +the new rev. It all auto-updated in the background, so our users didn't really +need to do anything, they just woke up once a week or so with a better program. +It was pretty freaky to know that the code I wrote would be used by hundreds of +thousands of people, /{tomorrow}/! + +"What do we do? Man, I don't know. I think we just have to live with it." + +I thought back to our Harajuku Fun Madness days. There were lots of social +challenges involving large groups of people as part of that game. + +"OK, you're right. But let's at least try to keep this secret. Tell them that +they can bring a maximum of one person, and it has to be someone they've known +personally for a minimum of five years." + +Jolu looked up from the screen. "Hey," he said. "Hey, that would totally work. +I can really see it. I mean, if you told me not to bring anyone, I'd be all, +'Who the hell does he think he is?' But when you put it that way, it sounds +like some awesome 007 stuff." + +I found a bug. We drank some coffee. I went home and played a little Clockwork +Plunder, trying not to think about key-winders with nosy questions, and slept +like a baby. + +# + +Sutro baths are San Francisco's authentic fake Roman ruins. When it opened in +1896, it was the largest indoor bathing house in the world, a huge Victorian +glass solarium filled with pools and tubs and even an early water slide. It +went downhill by the fifties, and the owners torched it for the insurance in +1966. All that's left is a labyrinth of weathered stone set into the sere +cliff-face at Ocean Beach. It looks for all the world like a Roman ruin, +crumbled and mysterious, and just beyond them is a set of caves that let out +into the sea. In rough tides, the waves rush through the caves and over the +ruins -- they've even been known to suck in and drown the occasional tourist. + +Ocean Beach is way out past Golden Gate park, a stark cliff lined with +expensive, doomed houses, plunging down to a narrow beach studded with +jellyfish and brave (insane) surfers. There's a giant white rock that juts out +of the shallows off the shore. That's called Seal Rock, and it used to be the +place where the sea lions congregated until they were relocated to the more +tourist-friendly environs of Fisherman's Wharf. + +After dark, there's hardly anyone out there. It gets very cold, with a salt +spray that'll soak you to your bones if you let it. The rocks are sharp and +there's broken glass and the occasional junkie needle. + +It is an awesome place for a party. + +Bringing along the tarpaulins and chemical glove-warmers was my idea. Jolu +figured out where to get the beer -- his older brother, Javier, had a buddy who +actually operated a whole underage drinking service: pay him enough and he'd +back up to your secluded party spot with ice-chests and as many brews as you +wanted. I blew a bunch of my indienet programming money, and the guy showed up +right on time: 8PM, a good hour after sunset, and lugged the six foam +ice-chests out of his pickup truck and down into the ruins of the baths. He +even brought a spare chest for the empties. + +"You kids play safe now," he said, tipping his cowboy hat. He was a fat Samoan +guy with a huge smile, and a scary tank-top that you could see his armpit- and +belly- and shoulder-hair escaping from. I peeled twenties off my roll and +handed them to him -- his markup was 150 percent. Not a bad racket. + +He looked at my roll. "You know, I could just take that from you," he said, +still smiling. "I'm a criminal, after all." + +I put my roll in my pocket and looked him levelly in the eye. I'd been stupid +to show him what I was carrying, but I knew that there were times when you +should just stand your ground. + +"I'm just messing with you," he said, at last. "But you be careful with that +money. Don't go showing it around." + +"Thanks," I said. "Homeland Security'll get my back though." + +His smile got even bigger. "Ha! They're not even real five-oh. Those +peckerwoods don't know nothin'." + +I looked over at his truck. Prominently displayed in his windscreen was a +FasTrak. I wondered how long it would be until he got busted. + +"You got girls coming tonight? That why you got all the beer?" + +I smiled and waved at him as though he was walking back to his truck, which he +should have been doing. He eventually got the hint and drove away. His smile +never faltered. + +Jolu helped me hide the coolers in the rubble, working with little white LED +torches on headbands. Once the coolers were in place, we threw little white LED +keychains into each one, so it would glow when you took the styrofoam lids off, +making it easier to see what you were doing. + +It was a moonless night and overcast, and the distant streetlights barely +illuminated us. I knew we'd stand out like blazes on an infrared scope, but +there was no chance that we'd be able to get a bunch of people together without +being observed. I'd settle for being dismissed as a little drunken beach-party. + +I don't really drink much. There's been beer and pot and ecstasy at the parties +I've been going to since I was 14, but I hated smoking (though I'm quite +partial to a hash brownie every now and again), ecstasy took too long -- who's +got a whole weekend to get high and come down -- and beer, well, it was all +right, but I didn't see what the big deal was. My favorite was big, elaborate +cocktails, the kind of thing served in a ceramic volcano, with six layers, on +fire, and a plastic monkey on the rim, but that was mostly for the theater of +it all. + +I actually like being drunk. I just don't like being hungover, and boy, do I +ever get hungover. Though again, that might have to do with the kind of drinks +that come in a ceramic volcano. + +But you can't throw a party without putting a case or two of beer on ice. It's +expected. It loosens things up. People do stupid things after too many beers, +but it's not like my friends are the kind of people who have cars. And people +do stupid things no matter what -- beer or grass or whatever are all incidental +to that central fact. + +Jolu and I each cracked beers -- Anchor Steam for him, a Bud Lite for me -- and +clinked the bottles together, sitting down on a rock. + +"You told them 9PM?" + +"Yeah," he said. + +"Me too." + +We drank in silence. The Bud Lite was the least alcoholic thing in the +ice-chest. I'd need a clear head later. + +"You ever get scared?" I said, finally. + +He turned to me. "No man, I don't get scared. I'm always scared. I've been +scared since the minute the explosions happened. I'm so scared sometimes, I +don't want to get out of bed." + +"Then why do you do it?" + +He smiled. "About that," he said. "Maybe I won't, not for much longer. I mean, +it's been great helping you. Great. Really excellent. I don't know when I've +done anything so important. But Marcus, bro, I have to say. . ." He trailed +off. + +"What?" I said, though I knew what was coming next. + +"I can't do it forever," he said at last. "Maybe not even for another month. I +think I'm through. It's too much risk. The DHS, you can't go to war on them. +It's crazy. Really actually crazy." + +"You sound like Van," I said. My voice was much more bitter than I'd intended. + +"I'm not criticizing you, man. I think it's great that you've got the bravery +to do this all the time. But I haven't got it. I can't live my life in +perpetual terror." + +"What are you saying?" + +"I'm saying I'm out. I'm going to be one of those people who acts like it's all +OK, like it'll all go back to normal some day. I'm going to use the Internet +like I always did, and only use the Xnet to play games. I'm going to get out is +what I'm saying. I won't be a part of your plans anymore." + +I didn't say anything. + +"I know that's leaving you on your own. I don't want that, believe me. I'd much +rather you give up with me. You can't declare war on the government of the USA. +It's not a fight you're going to win. Watching you try is like watching a bird +fly into a window again and again." + +He wanted me to say something. What /{I}/ wanted to say was, /{Jesus Jolu, +thanks so very much for abandoning me! Do you forget what it was like when they +took us away? Do you forget what the country used to be like before they took +it over?}/ But that's not what he wanted me to say. What he wanted me to say +was: + +"I understand, Jolu. I respect your choice." + +He drank the rest of his bottle and pulled out another one and twisted off the +cap. + +"There's something else," he said. + +"What?" + +"I wasn't going to mention it, but I want you to understand why I have to do +this." + +"Jesus, Jolu, /{what}/?" + +"I hate to say it, but you're /{white}/. I'm not. White people get caught with +cocaine and do a little rehab time. Brown people get caught with crack and go +to prison for twenty years. White people see cops on the street and feel safer. +Brown people see cops on the street and wonder if they're about to get +searched. The way the DHS is treating you? The law in this country has always +been like that for us." + +It was so unfair. I didn't ask to be white. I didn't think I was being braver +just because I'm white. But I knew what Jolu was saying. If the cops stopped +someone in the Mission and asked to see some ID, chances were that person +wasn't white. Whatever risk I ran, Jolu ran more. Whatever penalty I'd pay, +Jolu would pay more. + +"I don't know what to say," I said. + +"You don't have to say anything," he said. "I just wanted you to know, so you +could understand." + +I could see people walking down the side trail toward us. They were friends of +Jolu's, two Mexican guys and a girl I knew from around, short and geeky, always +wearing cute black Buddy Holly glasses that made her look like the outcast +art-student in a teen movie who comes back as the big success. + +Jolu introduced me and gave them beers. The girl didn't take one, but instead +produced a small silver flask of vodka from her purse and offered me a drink. I +took a swallow -- warm vodka must be an acquired taste -- and complimented her +on the flask, which was embossed with a repeating motif of Parappa the Rapper +characters. + +"It's Japanese," she said as I played another LED keyring over it. "They have +all these great booze-toys based on kids' games. Totally twisted." + +I introduced myself and she introduced herself. "Ange," she said, and shook my +hand with hers -- dry, warm, with short nails. Jolu introduced me to his pals, +whom he'd known since computer camp in the fourth grade. More people showed up +-- five, then ten, then twenty. It was a seriously big group now. + +We'd told people to arrive by 9:30 sharp, and we gave it until 9:45 to see who +all would show up. About three quarters were Jolu's friends. I'd invited all +the people I really trusted. Either I was more discriminating than Jolu or less +popular. Now that he'd told me he was quitting, it made me think that he was +less discriminating. I was really pissed at him, but trying not to let it show +by concentrating on socializing with other people. But he wasn't stupid. He +knew what was going on. I could see that he was really bummed. Good. + +"OK," I said, climbing up on a ruin, "OK, hey, hello?" A few people nearby paid +attention to me, but the ones in the back kept on chatting. I put my arms in +the air like a referee, but it was too dark. Eventually I hit on the idea of +turning my LED keychain on and pointing it at each of the talkers in turn, then +at me. Gradually, the crowd fell quiet. + +I welcomed them and thanked them all for coming, then asked them to close in so +I could explain why we were there. I could tell they were into the secrecy of +it all, intrigued and a little warmed up by the beer. + +"So here it is. You all use the Xnet. It's no coincidence that the Xnet was +created right after the DHS took over the city. The people who did that are an +organization devoted to personal liberty, who created the network to keep us +safe from DHS spooks and enforcers." Jolu and I had worked this out in advance. +We weren't going to cop to being behind it all, not to anyone. It was way too +risky. Instead, we'd put it out that we were merely lieutenants in "M1k3y"'s +army, acting to organize the local resistance. + +"The Xnet isn't pure," I said. "It can be used by the other side just as +readily as by us. We know that there are DHS spies who use it now. They use +social engineering hacks to try to get us to reveal ourselves so that they can +bust us. If the Xnet is going to succeed, we need to figure out how to keep +them from spying on us. We need a network within the network." + +I paused and let this sink in. Jolu had suggested that this might be a little +heavy -- learning that you're about to be brought into a revolutionary cell. + +"Now, I'm not here to ask you to do anything active. You don't have to go out +jamming or anything. You've been brought here because we know you're cool, we +know you're trustworthy. It's that trustworthiness I want to get you to +contribute tonight. Some of you will already be familiar with the web of trust +and keysigning parties, but for the rest of you, I'll run it down quickly --" +Which I did. + +"Now what I want from you tonight is to meet the people here and figure out how +much you can trust them. We're going to help you generate key-pairs and share +them with each other." + +This part was tricky. Asking people to bring their own laptops wouldn't have +worked out, but we still needed to do something hella complicated that wouldn't +exactly work with paper and pencil. + +I held up a laptop Jolu and I had rebuilt the night before, from the ground up. +"I trust this machine. Every component in it was laid by our own hands. It's +running a fresh out-of-the-box version of ParanoidLinux, booted off of the DVD. +If there's a trustworthy computer left anywhere in the world, this might well +be it. + +"I've got a key-generator loaded here. You come up here and give it some random +input -- mash the keys, wiggle the mouse -- and it will use that as the seed to +create a random public- and private key for you, which it will display on the +screen. You can take a picture of the private key with your phone, and hit any +key to make it go away forever -- it's not stored on the disk at all. Then it +will show you your public key. At that point, you call over all the people here +you trust and who trust you, and /{they}/ take a picture of the screen with you +standing next to it, so they know whose key it is. + +"When you get home, you have to convert the photos to keys. This is going to be +a lot of work, I'm afraid, but you'll only have to do it once. You have to be +super-careful about typing these in -- one mistake and you're screwed. Luckily, +we've got a way to tell if you've got it right: beneath the key will be a much +shorter number, called the 'fingerprint'. Once you've typed in the key, you can +generate a fingerprint from it and compare it to the fingerprint, and if they +match, you've got it right." + +They all boggled at me. OK, so I'd asked them to do something pretty weird, +it's true, but still. + + +1~ Chapter 11 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to the University Bookstore~{ The University +Bookstore +http://www4.bookstore.washington.edu/_trade/ShowTitleUBS.taf?ActionArg=Title&ISBN=9780765319852 +4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105 USA +1 800 335 READ }~ at the +University of Washington, whose science fiction section rivals many specialty +stores, thanks to the sharp-eyed, dedicated science fiction buyer, Duane +Wilkins. Duane's a real science fiction fan -- I first met him at the World +Science Fiction Convention in Toronto in 2003 -- and it shows in the eclectic +and informed choices on display at the store. One great predictor of a great +bookstore is the quality of the "shelf review" -- the little bits of cardboard +stuck to the shelves with (generally hand-lettered) staff-reviews extolling the +virtues of books you might otherwise miss. The staff at the University +Bookstore have clearly benefited from Duane's tutelage, as the shelf reviews at +the University Bookstore are second to none.] }/ + +Jolu stood up. + +"This is where it starts, guys. This is how we know which side you're on. You +might not be willing to take to the streets and get busted for your beliefs, +but if you /{have}/ beliefs, this will let us know it. This will create the web +of trust that tells us who's in and who's out. If we're ever going to get our +country back, we need to do this. We need to do something like this." + +Someone in the audience -- it was Ange -- had a hand up, holding a beer bottle. + +"So call me stupid but I don't understand this at all. Why do you want us to do +this?" + +Jolu looked at me, and I looked back at him. It had all seemed so obvious when +we were organizing it. "The Xnet isn't just a way to play free games. It's the +last open communications network in America. It's the last way to communicate +without being snooped on by the DHS. For it to work we need to know that the +person we're talking to isn't a snoop. That means that we need to know that the +people we're sending messages to are the people we think they are. + +"That's where you come in. You're all here because we trust you. I mean, really +trust you. Trust you with our lives." + +Some of the people groaned. It sounded melodramatic and stupid. + +I got back to my feet. + +"When the bombs went off," I said, then something welled up in my chest, +something painful. "When the bombs went off, there were four of us caught up by +Market Street. For whatever reason, the DHS decided that made us suspicious. +They put bags over our heads, put us on a ship and interrogated us for days. +They humiliated us. Played games with our minds. Then they let us go. + +"All except one person. My best friend. He was with us when they picked us up. +He'd been hurt and he needed medical care. He never came out again. They say +they never saw him. They say that if we ever tell anyone about this, they'll +arrest us and make us disappear. + +"Forever." + +I was shaking. The shame. The goddamned shame. Jolu had the light on me. + +"Oh Christ," I said. "You people are the first ones I've told. If this story +gets around, you can bet they'll know who leaked it. You can bet they'll come +knocking on my door." I took some more deep breaths. "That's why I volunteered +on the Xnet. That's why my life, from now on, is about fighting the DHS. With +every breath. Every day. Until we're free again. Any one of you could put me in +jail now, if you wanted to." + +Ange put her hand up again. "We're not going to rat on you," she said. "No way. +I know pretty much everyone here and I can promise you that. I don't know how +to know who to trust, but I know who /{not}/ to trust: old people. Our parents. +Grownups. When they think of someone being spied on, they think of someone +/{else}/, a bad guy. When they think of someone being caught and sent to a +secret prison, it's someone /{else}/ -- someone brown, someone young, someone +foreign. + +"They forget what it's like to be our age. To be the object of suspicion /{all +the time}/! How many times have you gotten on the bus and had every person on +it give you a look like you'd been gargling turds and skinning puppies? + +"What's worse, they're turning into adults younger and younger out there. Back +in the day, they used to say 'Never trust anyone over 30.' I say, 'Don't trust +any bastard over 25!'" + +That got a laugh, and she laughed too. She was pretty, in a weird, horsey way, +with a long face and a long jaw. "I'm not really kidding, you know? I mean, +think about it. Who elected these ass-clowns? Who let them invade our city? Who +voted to put the cameras in our classrooms and follow us around with creepy +spyware chips in our transit passes and cars? It wasn't a 16-year-old. We may +be dumb, we may be young, but we're not scum." + +"I want that on a t-shirt," I said. + +"It would be a good one," she said. We smiled at each other. + +"Where do I go to get my keys?" she said, and pulled out her phone. + +"We'll do it over there, in the secluded spot by the caves. I'll take you in +there and set you up, then you do your thing and take the machine around to +your friends to get photos of your public key so they can sign it when they get +home." + +I raised my voice. "Oh! One more thing! Jesus, I can't believe I forgot this. +/{Delete those photos once you've typed in the keys}/! The last thing we want +is a Flickr stream full of pictures of all of us conspiring together." + +There was some good-natured, nervous chuckling, then Jolu turned out the light +and in the sudden darkness I could see nothing. Gradually, my eyes adjusted and +I set off for the cave. Someone was walking behind me. Ange. I turned and +smiled at her, and she smiled back, luminous teeth in the dark. + +"Thanks for that," I said. "You were great." + +"You mean what you said about the bag on your head and everything?" + +"I meant it," I said. "It happened. I never told anyone, but it happened." I +thought about it for a moment. "You know, with all the time that went by since, +without saying anything, it started to feel like a bad dream. It was real +though." I stopped and climbed up into the cave. "I'm glad I finally told +people. Any longer and I might have started to doubt my own sanity." + +I set up the laptop on a dry bit of rock and booted it from the DVD with her +watching. "I'm going to reboot it for every person. This is a standard +ParanoidLinux disc, though I guess you'd have to take my word for it." + +"Hell," she said. "This is all about trust, right?" + +"Yeah," I said. "Trust." + +I retreated some distance as she ran the key-generator, listening to her typing +and mousing to create randomness, listening to the crash of the surf, listening +to the party noises from over where the beer was. + +She stepped out of the cave, carrying the laptop. On it, in huge white luminous +letters, were her public key and her fingerprint and email address. She held +the screen up beside her face and waited while I got my phone out. + +"Cheese," she said. I snapped her pic and dropped the camera back in my pocket. +She wandered off to the revelers and let them each get pics of her and the +screen. It was festive. Fun. She really had a lot of charisma -- you didn't +want to laugh at her, you just wanted to laugh /{with}/ her. And hell, it +/{was}/ funny! We were declaring a secret war on the secret police. Who the +hell did we think we were? + +So it went, through the next hour or so, everyone taking pictures and making +keys. I got to meet everyone there. I knew a lot of them -- some were my +invitees -- and the others were friends of my pals or my pals' pals. We should +all be buddies. We were, by the time the night was out. They were all good +people. + +Once everyone was done, Jolu went to make a key, and then turned away, giving +me a sheepish grin. I was past my anger with him, though. He was doing what he +had to do. I knew that no matter what he said, he'd always be there for me. And +we'd been through the DHS jail together. Van too. No matter what, that would +bind us together forever. + +I did my key and did the perp-walk around the gang, letting everyone snap a +pic. Then I climbed up on the high spot I'd spoken from earlier and called for +everyone's attention. + +"So a lot of you have noted that there's a vital flaw in this procedure: what +if this laptop can't be trusted? What if it's secretly recording our +instructions? What if it's spying on us? What if Jose-Luis and I can't be +trusted?" + +More good-natured chuckles. A little warmer than before, more beery. + +"I mean it," I said. "If we were on the wrong side, this could get all of us -- +all of /{you}/ -- into a heap of trouble. Jail, maybe." + +The chuckles turned more nervous. + +"So that's why I'm going to do this," I said, and picked up a hammer I'd +brought from my Dad's toolkit. I set the laptop down beside me on the rock and +swung the hammer, Jolu following the swing with his keychain light. Crash -- +I'd always dreamt of killing a laptop with a hammer, and here I was doing it. +It felt pornographically good. And bad. + +Smash! The screen-panel fell off, shattered into millions of pieces, exposing +the keyboard. I kept hitting it, until the keyboard fell off, exposing the +motherboard and the hard-drive. Crash! I aimed square for the hard-drive, +hitting it with everything I had. It took three blows before the case split, +exposing the fragile media inside. I kept hitting it until there was nothing +bigger than a cigarette lighter, then I put it all in a garbage bag. The crowd +was cheering wildly -- loud enough that I actually got worried that someone far +above us might hear over the surf and call the law. + +"All right!" I called. "Now, if you'd like to accompany me, I'm going to march +this down to the sea and soak it in salt water for ten minutes." + +I didn't have any takers at first, but then Ange came forward and took my arm +in her warm hand and said, "That was beautiful," in my ear and we marched down +to the sea together. + +It was perfectly dark by the sea, and treacherous, even with our keychain +lights. Slippery, sharp rocks that were difficult enough to walk on even +without trying to balance six pounds of smashed electronics in a plastic bag. I +slipped once and thought I was going to cut myself up, but she caught me with a +surprisingly strong grip and kept me upright. I was pulled in right close to +her, close enough to smell her perfume, which smelled like new cars. I love +that smell. + +"Thanks," I managed, looking into the big eyes that were further magnified by +her mannish, black-rimmed glasses. I couldn't tell what color they were in the +dark, but I guessed something dark, based on her dark hair and olive +complexion. She looked Mediterranean, maybe Greek or Spanish or Italian. + +I crouched down and dipped the bag in the sea, letting it fill with salt water. +I managed to slip a little and soak my shoe, and I swore and she laughed. We'd +hardly said a word since we lit out for the ocean. There was something magical +in our wordless silence. + +At that point, I had kissed a total of three girls in my life, not counting +that moment when I went back to school and got a hero's welcome. That's not a +gigantic number, but it's not a minuscule one, either. I have reasonable girl +radar, and I think I could have kissed her. She wasn't h4wt in the traditional +sense, but there's something about a girl and a night and a beach, plus she was +smart and passionate and committed. + +But I didn't kiss her, or take her hand. Instead we had a moment that I can +only describe as spiritual. The surf, the night, the sea and the rocks, and our +breathing. The moment stretched. I sighed. This had been quite a ride. I had a +lot of typing to do tonight, putting all those keys into my keychain, signing +them and publishing the signed keys. Starting the web of trust. + +She sighed too. + +"Let's go," I said. + +"Yeah," she said. + +Back we went. It was a good night, that night. + +# + +Jolu waited after for his brother's friend to come by and pick up his coolers. +I walked with everyone else up the road to the nearest Muni stop and got on +board. Of course, none of us was using an issued Muni pass. By that point, +Xnetters habitually cloned someone else's Muni pass three or four times a day, +assuming a new identity for every ride. + +It was hard to stay cool on the bus. We were all a little drunk, and looking at +our faces under the bright bus lights was kind of hilarious. We got pretty loud +and the driver used his intercom to tell us to keep it down twice, then told us +to shut up right now or he'd call the cops. + +That set us to giggling again and we disembarked in a mass before he did call +the cops. We were in North Beach now, and there were lots of buses, taxis, the +BART at Market Street, neon-lit clubs and cafes to pull apart our grouping, so +we drifted away. + +I got home and fired up my Xbox and started typing in keys from my phone's +screen. It was dull, hypnotic work. I was a little drunk, and it lulled me into +a half-sleep. + +I was about ready to nod off when a new IM window popped up. + +> herro! + +I didn't recognize the handle -- spexgril -- but I had an idea who might be +behind it. + +> hi + +I typed, cautiously. + +> it's me, from tonight + +Then she paste-bombed a block of crypto. I'd already entered her public key +into my keychain, so I told the IM client to try decrypting the code with the +key. + +> it's me, from tonight + +It was her! + +> Fancy meeting you here + +I typed, then encrypted it to my public key and mailed it off. + +> It was great meeting you + +I typed. + +> You too. I don't meet too many smart guys who are also cute and also socially +aware. Good god, man, you don't give a girl much of a chance. + +My heart hammered in my chest. + +> Hello? Tap tap? This thing on? I wasn't born here folks, but I'm sure dying +here. Don't forget to tip your waitresses, they work hard. I'm here all week. + +I laughed aloud. + +> I'm here, I'm here. Laughing too hard to type is all + +> Well at least my IM comedy-fu is still mighty + +Um. + +> It was really great to meet you too + +> Yeah, it usually is. Where are you taking me? + +> Taking you? + +> On our next adventure? + +> I didn't really have anything planned + +> Oki -- then I'll take YOU. Saturday. Dolores Park. Illegal open air concert. +Be there or be a dodecahedron + +> Wait what? + +> Don't you even read Xnet? It's all over the place. You ever hear of the +Speedwhores? + +I nearly choked. That was Trudy Doo's band -- as in Trudy Doo, the woman who +had paid me and Jolu to update the indienet code. + +> Yeah I've heard of them + +> They're putting on a huge show and they've got like fifty bands signed to +play the bill, going to set up on the tennis courts and bring out their own amp +trucks and rock out all night + +I felt like I'd been living under a rock. How had I missed that? There was an +anarchist bookstore on Valencia that I sometimes passed on the way to school +that had a poster of an old revolutionary named Emma Goldman with the caption +"If I can't dance, I don't want to be a part of your revolution." I'd been +spending all my energies on figuring out how to use the Xnet to organize +dedicated fighters so they could jam the DHS, but this was so much cooler. A +big concert -- I had no idea how to do one of those, but I was glad someone +did. + +And now that I thought of it, I was damned proud that they were using the Xnet +to do it. + +# + +The next day I was a zombie. Ange and I had chatted -- flirted -- until 4AM. +Lucky for me, it was a Saturday and I was able to sleep in, but between the +hangover and the sleep-dep, I could barely put two thoughts together. + +By lunchtime, I managed to get up and get my ass out onto the streets. I +staggered down toward the Turk's to buy my coffee -- these days, if I was +alone, I always bought my coffee there, like the Turk and I were part of a +secret club. + +On the way, I passed a lot of fresh graffiti. I liked Mission graffiti; a lot +of the times, it came in huge, luscious murals, or sarcastic art-student +stencils. I liked that the Mission's taggers kept right on going, under the +nose of the DHS. Another kind of Xnet, I supposed -- they must have all kinds +of ways of knowing what was going on, where to get paint, what cameras worked. +Some of the cameras had been spray-painted over, I noticed. + +Maybe they used Xnet! + +Painted in ten-foot-high letters on the side of an auto-yard's fence were the +drippy words: DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25. + +I stopped. Had someone left my "party" last night and come here with a can of +paint? A lot of those people lived in the neighborhood. + +I got my coffee and had a little wander around town. I kept thinking I should +be calling someone, seeing if they wanted to get a movie or something. That's +how it used to be on a lazy Saturday like this. But who was I going to call? +Van wasn't talking to me, I didn't think I was ready to talk to Jolu, and +Darryl -- + +Well, I couldn't call Darryl. + +I got my coffee and went home and did a little searching around on the Xnet's +blogs. These anonablogs were untraceable to any author -- unless that author +was stupid enough to put her name on it -- and there were a lot of them. Most +of them were apolitical, but a lot of them weren't. They talked about schools +and the unfairness there. They talked about the cops. Tagging. + +Turned out there'd been plans for the concert in the park for weeks. It had +hopped from blog to blog, turning into a full-blown movement without my +noticing. And the concert was called Don't Trust Anyone Over 25. + +Well, that explained where Ange got it. It was a good slogan. + +# + +Monday morning, I decided I wanted to check out that anarchist bookstore again, +see about getting one of those Emma Goldman posters. I needed the reminder. + +I detoured down to 16th and Mission on my way to school, then up to Valencia +and across. The store was shut, but I got the hours off the door and made sure +they still had that poster up. + +As I walked down Valencia, I was amazed to see how much of the DON'T TRUST +ANYONE OVER 25 stuff there was. Half the shops had DON'T TRUST merch in the +windows: lunchboxes, babydoll tees, pencil-boxes, trucker hats. The hipster +stores have been getting faster and faster, of course. As new memes sweep the +net in the course of a day or two, stores have gotten better at putting merch +in the windows to match. Some funny little youtube of a guy launching himself +with jet-packs made of carbonated water would land in your inbox on Monday and +by Tuesday you'd be able to buy t-shirts with stills from the video on it. + +But it was amazing to see something make the leap from Xnet to the head shops. +Distressed designer jeans with the slogan written in careful high school +ball-point ink. Embroidered patches. + +Good news travels fast. + +It was written on the black-board when I got to Ms Galvez's Social Studies +class. We all sat at our desks, smiling at it. It seemed to smile back. There +was something profoundly cheering about the idea that we could all trust each +other, that the enemy could be identified. I knew it wasn't entirely true, but +it wasn't entirely false either. + +Ms Galvez came in and patted her hair and set down her SchoolBook on her desk +and powered it up. She picked up her chalk and turned around to face the board. +We all laughed. Good-naturedly, but we laughed. + +She turned around and was laughing too. "Inflation has hit the nation's +slogan-writers, it seems. How many of you know where this phrase comes from?" + +We looked at each other. "Hippies?" someone said, and we laughed. Hippies are +all over San Francisco, both the old stoner kinds with giant skanky beards and +tie-dyes, and the new kind, who are more into dress-up and maybe playing +hacky-sack than protesting anything. + +"Well, yes, hippies. But when we think of hippies these days, we just think of +the clothes and the music. Clothes and music were incidental to the main part +of what made that era, the sixties, important. + +"You've heard about the civil rights movement to end segregation, white and +black kids like you riding buses into the South to sign up black voters and +protest against official state racism. California was one of the main places +where the civil rights leaders came from. We've always been a little more +political than the rest of the country, and this is also a part of the country +where black people have been able to get the same union factory jobs as white +people, so they were a little better off than their cousins in the southland. + +"The students at Berkeley sent a steady stream of freedom riders south, and +they recruited them from information tables on campus, at Bancroft and +Telegraph Avenue. You've probably seen that there are still tables there to +this day. + +"Well, the campus tried to shut them down. The president of the university +banned political organizing on campus, but the civil rights kids wouldn't stop. +The police tried to arrest a guy who was handing out literature from one of +these tables, and they put him in a van, but 3,000 students surrounded the van +and refused to let it budge. They wouldn't let them take this kid to jail. They +stood on top of the van and gave speeches about the First Amendment and Free +Speech. + +"That galvanized the Free Speech Movement. That was the start of the hippies, +but it was also where more radical student movements came from. Black power +groups like the Black Panthers -- and later gay rights groups like the Pink +Panthers, too. Radical women's groups, even 'lesbian separatists' who wanted to +abolish men altogether! And the Yippies. Anyone ever hear of the Yippies?" + +"Didn't they levitate the Pentagon?" I said. I'd once seen a documentary about +this. + +She laughed. "I forgot about that, but yes, that was them! Yippies were like +very political hippies, but they weren't serious the way we think of politics +these days. They were very playful. Pranksters. They threw money into the New +York Stock Exchange. They circled the Pentagon with hundreds of protestors and +said a magic spell that was supposed to levitate it. They invented a fictional +kind of LSD that you could spray onto people with squirt-guns and shot each +other with it and pretended to be stoned. They were funny and they made great +TV -- one Yippie, a clown called Wavy Gravy, used to get hundreds of protestors +to dress up like Santa Claus so that the cameras would show police officers +arresting and dragging away Santa on the news that night -- and they mobilized +a lot of people. + +"Their big moment was the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where they +called for demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War. Thousands of +demonstrators poured into Chicago, slept in the parks, and picketed every day. +They had lots of bizarre stunts that year, like running a pig called Pigasus +for the presidential nomination. The police and the demonstrators fought in the +streets -- they'd done that many times before, but the Chicago cops didn't have +the smarts to leave the reporters alone. They beat up the reporters, and the +reporters retaliated by finally showing what really went on at these +demonstrations, so the whole country watched their kids being really savagely +beaten down by the Chicago police. They called it a 'police riot.' + +"The Yippies loved to say, 'Never trust anyone over 30.' They meant that people +who were born before a certain time, when America had been fighting enemies +like the Nazis, could never understand what it meant to love your country +enough to refuse to fight the Vietnamese. They thought that by the time you hit +30, your attitudes would be frozen and you couldn't ever understand why the +kids of the day were taken to the streets, dropping out, freaking out. + +"San Francisco was ground zero for this. Revolutionary armies were founded +here. Some of them blew up buildings or robbed banks for their cause. A lot of +those kids grew up to be more or less normal, while others ended up in jail. +Some of the university dropouts did amazing things -- for example, Steve Jobs +and Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple Computers and invented the PC." + +I was really getting into this. I knew a little of it, but I'd never heard it +told like this. Or maybe it had never mattered as much as it did now. Suddenly, +those lame, solemn, grown-up street demonstrations didn't seem so lame after +all. Maybe there was room for that kind of action in the Xnet movement. + +I put my hand up. "Did they win? Did the Yippies win?" + +She gave me a long look, like she was thinking it over. No one said a word. We +all wanted to hear the answer. + +"They didn't lose," she said. "They kind of imploded a little. Some of them +went to jail for drugs or other things. Some of them changed their tunes and +became yuppies and went on the lecture circuit telling everyone how stupid +they'd been, talking about how good greed was and how dumb they'd been. + +"But they did change the world. The war in Vietnam ended, and the kind of +conformity and unquestioning obedience that people had called patriotism went +out of style in a big way. Black rights, women's rights and gay rights came a +long way. Chicano rights, rights for disabled people, the whole tradition of +civil liberties was created or strengthened by these people. Today's protest +movement is the direct descendant of those struggles." + +"I can't believe you're talking about them like this," Charles said. He was +leaning so far in his seat he was half standing, and his sharp, skinny face had +gone red. He had wet, large eyes and big lips, and when he got excited he +looked a little like a fish. + +Ms Galvez stiffened a little, then said, "Go on, Charles." + +"You've just described terrorists. Actual terrorists. They blew up buildings, +you said. They tried to destroy the stock exchange. They beat up cops, and +stopped cops from arresting people who were breaking the law. They attacked +us!" + +Ms Galvez nodded slowly. I could tell she was trying to figure out how to +handle Charles, who really seemed like he was ready to pop. "Charles raises a +good point. The Yippies weren't foreign agents, they were American citizens. +When you say 'They attacked us,' you need to figure out who 'they' and 'us' +are. When it's your fellow countrymen --" + +"Crap!" he shouted. He was on his feet now. "We were at war then. These guys +were giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It's easy to tell who's us and who's +them: if you support America, you're us. If you support the people who are +shooting at Americans, you're /{them}/." + +"Does anyone else want to comment on this?" + +Several hands shot up. Ms Galvez called on them. Some people pointed out that +the reason that the Vietnamese were shooting at Americans is that the Americans +had flown to Vietnam and started running around the jungle with guns. Others +thought that Charles had a point, that people shouldn't be allowed to do +illegal things. + +Everyone had a good debate except Charles, who just shouted at people, +interrupting them when they tried to get their points out. Ms Galvez tried to +get him to wait for his turn a couple times, but he wasn't having any of it. + +I was looking something up on my SchoolBook, something I knew I'd read. + +I found it. I stood up. Ms Galvez looked expectantly at me. The other people +followed her gaze and went quiet. Even Charles looked at me after a while, his +big wet eyes burning with hatred for me. + +"I wanted to read something," I said. "It's short. 'Governments are instituted +among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that +whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the +right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, +laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such +form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.'" + +1~ Chapter 12 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Forbidden Planet,~{ Forbidden Planet, UK, +Dublin and New York City: http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk }~ the British chain +of science fiction and fantasy books, comics, toys and videos. Forbidden Planet +has stores up and down the UK, and also sports outposts in Manhattan and +Dublin, Ireland. It's dangerous to set foot in a Forbidden Planet -- rarely do +I escape with my wallet intact. Forbidden Planet really leads the pack in +bringing the gigantic audience for TV and movie science fiction into contact +with science fiction books -- something that's absolutely critical to the +future of the field.] }/ + +Ms Galvez's smile was wide. + +"Does anyone know what that comes from?" + +A bunch of people chorused, "The Declaration of Independence." + +I nodded. + +"Why did you read that to us, Marcus?" + +"Because it seems to me that the founders of this country said that governments +should only last for so long as we believe that they're working for us, and if +we stop believing in them, we should overthrow them. That's what it says, +right?" + +Charles shook his head. "That was hundreds of years ago!" he said. "Things are +different now!" + +"What's different?" + +"Well, for one thing, we don't have a king anymore. They were talking about a +government that existed because some old jerk's great-great-great-grandfather +believed that God put him in charge and killed everyone who disagreed with him. +We have a democratically elected government --" + +"I didn't vote for them," I said. + +"So that gives you the right to blow up a building?" + +"What? Who said anything about blowing up a building? The Yippies and hippies +and all those people believed that the government no longer listened to them -- +look at the way people who tried to sign up voters in the South were treated! +They were beaten up, arrested --" + +"Some of them were killed," Ms Galvez said. She held up her hands and waited +for Charles and me to sit down. "We're almost out of time for today, but I want +to commend you all on one of the most interesting classes I've ever taught. +This has been an excellent discussion and I've learned much from you all. I +hope you've learned from each other, too. Thank you all for your contributions. + +"I have an extra-credit assignment for those of you who want a little +challenge. I'd like you to write up a paper comparing the political response to +the anti-war and civil rights movements in the Bay Area to the present day +civil rights responses to the War on Terror. Three pages minimum, but take as +long as you'd like. I'm interested to see what you come up with." + +The bell rang a moment later and everyone filed out of the class. I hung back +and waited for Ms Galvez to notice me. + +"Yes, Marcus?" + +"That was amazing," I said. "I never knew all that stuff about the sixties." + +"The seventies, too. This place has always been an exciting place to live in +politically charged times. I really liked your reference to the Declaration -- +that was very clever." + +"Thanks," I said. "It just came to me. I never really appreciated what those +words all meant before today." + +"Well, those are the words every teacher loves to hear, Marcus," she said, and +shook my hand. "I can't wait to read your paper." + +# + +I bought the Emma Goldman poster on the way home and stuck it up over my desk, +tacked over a vintage black-light poster. I also bought a NEVER TRUST t-shirt +that had a photoshop of Grover and Elmo kicking the grownups Gordon and Susan +off Sesame Street. It made me laugh. I later found out that there had already +been about six photoshop contests for the slogan online in places like Fark and +Worth1000 and B3ta and there were hundreds of ready-made pics floating around +to go on whatever merch someone churned out. + +Mom raised an eyebrow at the shirt, and Dad shook his head and lectured me +about not looking for trouble. I felt a little vindicated by his reaction. + +Ange found me online again and we IM-flirted until late at night again. The +white van with the antennas came back and I switched off my Xbox until it had +passed. We'd all gotten used to doing that. + +Ange was really excited by this party. It looked like it was going to be +monster. There were so many bands signed up they were talking about setting up +a B-stage for the secondary acts. + +> How'd they get a permit to blast sound all night in that park? There's houses +all around there + +> Per-mit? What is "per-mit"? Tell me more of your hu-man per-mit. + +> Woah, it's illegal? + +> Um, hello? /{You're}/ worried about breaking the law? + +> Fair point + +> LOL + +I felt a little premonition of nervousness though. I mean, I was taking this +perfectly awesome girl out on a date that weekend -- well, she was taking me, +technically -- to an illegal rave being held in the middle of a busy +neighborhood. + +It was bound to be interesting at least. + +# + +Interesting. + +People started to drift into Dolores Park through the long Saturday afternoon, +showing up among the ultimate frisbee players and the dog-walkers. Some of them +played frisbee or walked dogs. It wasn't really clear how the concert was going +to work, but there were a lot of cops and undercovers hanging around. You could +tell the undercovers because, like Zit and Booger, they had Castro haircuts and +Nebraska physiques: tubby guys with short hair and untidy mustaches. They +drifted around, looking awkward and uncomfortable in their giant shorts and +loose-fitting shirts that no-doubt hung down to cover the chandelier of gear +hung around their midriffs. + +Dolores Park is pretty and sunny, with palm trees, tennis courts, and lots of +hills and regular trees to run around on, or hang out on. Homeless people sleep +there at night, but that's true everywhere in San Francisco. + +I met Ange down the street, at the anarchist bookstore. That had been my +suggestion. In hindsight, it was a totally transparent move to seem cool and +edgy to this girl, but at the time I would have sworn that I picked it because +it was a convenient place to meet up. She was reading a book called /{Up +Against the Wall Motherf_____r}/ when I got there. + +"Nice," I said. "You kiss your mother with that mouth?" + +"Your mama don't complain," she said. "Actually, it's a history of a group of +people like the Yippies, but from New York. They all used that word as their +last names, like 'Ben M-F.' The idea was to have a group out there, making +news, but with a totally unprintable name. Just to screw around with the +news-media. Pretty funny, really." She put the book back on the shelf and now I +wondered if I should hug her. People in California hug to say hello and goodbye +all the time. Except when they don't. And sometimes they kiss on the cheek. +It's all very confusing. + +She settled it for me by grabbing me in a hug and tugging my head down to her, +kissing me hard on the cheek, then blowing a fart on my neck. I laughed and +pushed her away. + +"You want a burrito?" I asked. + +"Is that a question or a statement of the obvious?" + +"Neither. It's an order." + +I bought some funny stickers that said THIS PHONE IS TAPPED which were the +right size to put on the receivers on the pay phones that still lined the +streets of the Mission, it being the kind of neighborhood where you got people +who couldn't necessarily afford a cellphone. + +We walked out into the night air. I told Ange about the scene at the park when +I left. + +"I bet they have a hundred of those trucks parked around the block," she said. +"The better to bust you with." + +"Um." I looked around. "I sort of hoped that you would say something like, 'Aw, +there's no chance they'll do anything about it.'" + +"I don't think that's really the idea. The idea is to put a lot of civilians in +a position where the cops have to decide, are we going to treat these ordinary +people like terrorists? It's a little like the jamming, but with music instead +of gadgets. You jam, right?" + +Sometimes I forget that all my friends don't know that Marcus and M1k3y are the +same person. "Yeah, a little," I said. + +"This is like jamming with a bunch of awesome bands." + +"I see." + +Mission burritos are an institution. They are cheap, giant and delicious. +Imagine a tube the size of a bazooka shell, filled with spicy grilled meat, +guacamole, salsa, tomatoes, refried beans, rice, onions and cilantro. It has +the same relationship to Taco Bell that a Lamborghini has to a Hot Wheels car. + +There are about two hundred Mission burrito joints. They're all heroically +ugly, with uncomfortable seats, minimal decor -- faded Mexican tourist office +posters and electrified framed Jesus and Mary holograms -- and loud mariachi +music. The thing that distinguishes them, mostly, is what kind of exotic meat +they fill their wares with. The really authentic places have brains and tongue, +which I never order, but it's nice to know it's there. + +The place we went to had both brains and tongue, which we didn't order. I got +carne asada and she got shredded chicken and we each got a big cup of horchata. + +As soon as we sat down, she unrolled her burrito and took a little bottle out +of her purse. It was a little stainless-steel aerosol canister that looked for +all the world like a pepper-spray self-defense unit. She aimed it at her +burrito's exposed guts and misted them with a fine red oily spray. I caught a +whiff of it and my throat closed and my eyes watered. + +"What the hell are you doing to that poor, defenseless burrito?" + +She gave me a wicked smile. "I'm a spicy food addict," she said. "This is +capsaicin oil in a mister." + +"Capsaicin --" + +"Yeah, the stuff in pepper spray. This is like pepper spray but slightly more +dilute. And way more delicious. Think of it as Spicy Cajun Visine if it helps." + +My eyes burned just thinking of it. + +"You're kidding," I said. "You are so not going to eat that." + +Her eyebrows shot up. "That sounds like a challenge, sonny. You just watch me." + +She rolled the burrito up as carefully as a stoner rolling up a joint, tucking +the ends in, then re-wrapping it in tinfoil. She peeled off one end and brought +it up to her mouth, poised with it just before her lips. + +Right up to the time she bit into it, I couldn't believe that she was going to +do it. I mean, that was basically an anti-personnel weapon she'd just slathered +on her dinner. + +She bit into it. Chewed. Swallowed. Gave every impression of having a delicious +dinner. + +"Want a bite?" she said, innocently. + +"Yeah," I said. I like spicy food. I always order the curries with four chilies +next to them on the menu at the Pakistani places. + +I peeled back more foil and took a big bite. + +Big mistake. + +You know that feeling you get when you take a big bite of horseradish or wasabi +or whatever, and it feels like your sinuses are closing at the same time as +your windpipe, filling your head with trapped, nuclear-hot air that tries to +batter its way out through your watering eyes and nostrils? That feeling like +steam is about to pour out of your ears like a cartoon character? + +This was a lot worse. + +This was like putting your hand on a hot stove, only it's not your hand, it's +the entire inside of your head, and your esophagus all the way down to your +stomach. My entire body sprang out in a sweat and I choked and choked. + +Wordlessly, she passed me my horchata and I managed to get the straw into my +mouth and suck hard on it, gulping down half of it in one go. + +"So there's a scale, the Scoville scale, that we chili-fanciers use to talk +about how spicy a pepper is. Pure capsaicin is about 15 million Scovilles. +Tabasco is about 50,000. Pepper spray is a healthy three million. This stuff is +a puny 200,000, about as hot as a mild Scotch Bonnet Pepper. I worked up to it +in about a year. Some of the real hardcore can get up to a million or so, +twenty times hotter than Tabasco. That's pretty freaking hot. At Scoville +temperatures like that, your brain gets totally awash in endorphins. It's a +better body-stone than hash. And it's good for you." + +I was getting my sinuses back now, able to breathe without gasping. + +"Of course, you get a ferocious ring of fire when you go to the john," she +said, winking at me. + +Yowch. + +"You are insane," I said. + +"Fine talk from a man whose hobby is building and smashing laptops," she said. + +"Touche," I said and touched my forehead. + +"Want some?" She held out her mister. + +"Pass," I said, quickly enough that we both laughed. + +When we left the restaurant and headed for Dolores park, she put her arm around +my waist and I found that she was just the right height for me to put my arm +around her shoulders. That was new. I'd never been a tall guy, and the girls +I'd dated had all been my height -- teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which +is a cruel trick of nature. It was nice. It felt nice. + +We turned the corner on 20th Street and walked up toward Dolores. Before we'd +taken a single step, we could feel the buzz. It was like the hum of a million +bees. There were lots of people streaming toward the park, and when I looked +toward it, I saw that it was about a hundred times more crowded than it had +been when I went to meet Ange. + +That sight made my blood run hot. It was a beautiful cool night and we were +about to party, really party, party like there was no tomorrow. "Eat drink and +be merry, for tomorrow we die." + +Without saying anything we both broke into a trot. There were lots of cops, +with tense faces, but what the hell were they going to do? There were a /{lot}/ +of people in the park. I'm not so good at counting crowds. The papers later +quoted organizers as saying there were 20,000 people; the cops said 5,000. +Maybe that means there were 12,500. + +Whatever. It was more people than I'd ever stood among, as part of an +unscheduled, unsanctioned, /{illegal}/ event. + +We were among them in an instant. I can't swear to it, but I don't think there +was anyone over 25 in that press of bodies. Everyone was smiling. Some young +kids were there, 10 or 12, and that made me feel better. No one would do +anything too stupid with kids that little in the crowd. No one wanted to see +little kids get hurt. This was just going to be a glorious spring night of +celebration. + +I figured the thing to do was push in towards the tennis courts. We threaded +our way through the crowd, and to stay together we took each other's hands. +Only staying together didn't require us to intertwine fingers. That was +strictly for pleasure. It was very pleasurable. + +The bands were all inside the tennis courts, with their guitars and mixers and +keyboards and even a drum kit. Later, on Xnet, I found a Flickr stream of them +smuggling all this stuff in, piece by piece, in gym bags and under their coats. +Along with it all were huge speakers, the kind you see in automotive supply +places, and among them, a stack of...car batteries. I laughed. Genius! That was +how they were going to power their stacks. From where I stood, I could see that +they were cells from a hybrid car, a Prius. Someone had gutted an eco-mobile to +power the night's entertainment. The batteries continued outside the courts, +stacked up against the fence, tethered to the main stack by wires threaded +through the chain-link. I counted -- 200 batteries! Christ! Those things +weighed a ton, too. + +There's no way they organized this without email and wikis and mailing lists. +And there's no way people this smart would have done that on the public +Internet. This had all taken place on the Xnet, I'd bet my boots on it. + +We just kind of bounced around in the crowd for a while as the bands tuned up +and conferred with one another. I saw Trudy Doo from a distance, in the tennis +courts. She looked like she was in a cage, like a pro wrestler. She was wearing +a torn wife-beater and her hair was in long, fluorescent pink dreads down to +her waist. She was wearing army camouflage pants and giant gothy boots with +steel over-toes. As I watched, she picked up a heavy motorcycle jacket, worn as +a catcher's mitt, and put it on like armor. It probably was armor, I realized. + +I tried to wave to her, to impress Ange I guess, but she didn't see me and I +kind of looked like a spazz so I stopped. The energy in the crowd was amazing. +You hear people talk about "vibes" and "energy" for big groups of people, but +until you've experienced it, you probably think it's just a figure of speech. + +It's not. It's the smiles, infectious and big as watermelons, on every face. +Everyone bopping a little to an unheard rhythm, shoulders rocking. Rolling +walks. Jokes and laughs. The tone of every voice tight and excited, like a +firework about to go off. And you can't help but be a part of it. Because you +are. + +By the time the bands kicked off, I was utterly stoned on crowd-vibe. The +opening act was some kind of Serbian turbo-folk, which I couldn't figure out +how to dance to. I know how to dance to exactly two kinds of music: trance +(shuffle around and let the music move you) and punk (bash around and mosh +until you get hurt or exhausted or both). The next act was Oakland hip-hoppers, +backed by a thrash metal band, which is better than it sounds. Then some +bubble-gum pop. Then Speedwhores took the stage, and Trudy Doo stepped up to +the mic. + +"My name is Trudy Doo and you're an idiot if you trust me. I'm thirty two and +it's too late for me. I'm lost. I'm stuck in the old way of thinking. I still +take my freedom for granted and let other people take it away from me. You're +the first generation to grow up in Gulag America, and you know what your +freedom is worth to the last goddamned cent!" + +The crowd roared. She was playing fast little skittery nervous chords on her +guitar and her bass player, a huge fat girl with a dykey haircut and even +bigger boots and a smile you could open beer bottles with was laying it down +fast and hard already. I wanted to bounce. I bounced. Ange bounced with me. We +were sweating freely in the evening, which reeked of perspiration and pot +smoke. Warm bodies crushed in on all sides of us. They bounced too. + +"Don't trust anyone over 25!" she shouted. + +We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring. + +"Don't trust anyone over 25!" + +"/{Don't trust anyone over 25!}/" + +"Don't trust anyone over 25!" + +"/{Don't trust anyone over 25!}/" + +"Don't trust anyone over 25!" + +"/{Don't trust anyone over 25!}/" + +She banged some hard chords on her guitar and the other guitarist, a little +pixie of a girl whose face bristled with piercings, jammed in, going +wheedle-dee-wheedle-dee-dee up high, past the twelfth fret. + +"It's our goddamned city! It's our goddamned country. No terrorist can take it +from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win! +Take it back! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know +that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to +victory! *Take it back!" + +"TAKE IT BACK!" we roared. She jammed down hard on her guitar. We roared the +note back and then it got really really LOUD. + +# + +I danced until I was so tired I couldn't dance another step. Ange danced +alongside of me. Technically, we were rubbing our sweaty bodies against each +other for several hours, but believe it or not, I totally wasn't being a +horn-dog about it. We were dancing, lost in the godbeat and the thrash and the +screaming -- TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK! + +When I couldn't dance anymore, I grabbed her hand and she squeezed mine like I +was keeping her from falling off a building. She dragged me toward the edge of +the crowd, where it got thinner and cooler. Out there, on the edge of Dolores +Park, we were in the cool air and the sweat on our bodies went instantly icy. +We shivered and she threw her arms around my waist. "Warm me," she commanded. I +didn't need a hint. I hugged her back. Her heart was an echo of the fast beats +from the stage -- breakbeats now, fast and furious and wordless. + +She smelled of sweat, a sharp tang that smelled great. I knew I smelled of +sweat too. My nose was pointed into the top of her head, and her face was right +at my collarbone. She moved her hands to my neck and tugged. + +"Get down here, I didn't bring a stepladder," is what she said and I tried to +smile, but it's hard to smile when you're kissing. + +Like I said, I'd kissed three girls in my life. Two of them had never kissed +anyone before. One had been dating since she was 12. She had issues. + +None of them kissed like Ange. She made her whole mouth soft, like the inside +of a ripe piece of fruit, and she didn't jam her tongue in my mouth, but slid +it in there, and sucked my lips into her mouth at the same time, so it was like +my mouth and hers were merging. I heard myself moan and I grabbed her and +squeezed her harder. + +Slowly, gently, we lowered ourselves to the grass. We lay on our sides and +clutched each other, kissing and kissing. The world disappeared so there was +only the kiss. + +My hands found her butt, her waist. The edge of her t-shirt. Her warm tummy, +her soft navel. They inched higher. She moaned too. + +"Not here," she said. "Let's move over there." She pointed across the street at +the big white church that gives Mission Dolores Park and the Mission its name. +Holding hands, moving quickly, we crossed to the church. It had big pillars in +front of it. She put my back up against one of them and pulled my face down to +hers again. My hands went quickly and boldly back to her shirt. I slipped them +up her front. + +"It undoes in the back," she whispered into my mouth. I had a boner that could +cut glass. I moved my hands around to her back, which was strong and broad, and +found the hook with my fingers, which were trembling. I fumbled for a while, +thinking of all those jokes about how bad guys are at undoing bras. I was bad +at it. Then the hook sprang free. She gasped into my mouth. I slipped my hands +around, feeling the wetness of her armpits -- which was sexy and not at all +gross for some reason -- and then brushed the sides of her breasts. + +That's when the sirens started. + +They were louder than anything I'd ever heard. A sound like a physical +sensation, like something blowing you off your feet. A sound as loud as your +ears could process, and then louder. + +"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY," a voice said, like God rattling in my skull. + +"THIS IS AN ILLEGAL GATHERING. DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY." + +The band had stopped playing. The noise of the crowd across the street changed. +It got scared. Angry. + +I heard a click as the PA system of car-speakers and car-batteries in the +tennis courts powered up. + +"TAKE IT BACK!" + +It was a defiant yell, like a sound shouted into the surf or screamed off a +cliff. + +"TAKE IT BACK!" + +The crowd /{growled}/, a sound that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand +up. + +"/{TAKE IT BACK}/!" they chanted. "TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK TAKE IT BACK!" + +The police moved in in lines, carrying plastic shields, wearing Darth Vader +helmets that covered their faces. Each one had a black truncheon and infra-red +goggles. They looked like soldiers out of some futuristic war movie. They took +a step forward in unison and every one of them banged his truncheon on his +shield, a cracking noise like the earth splitting. Another step, another crack. +They were all around the park and closing in now. + +"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY," the voice of God said again. There were helicopters +overhead now. No floodlights, though. The infrared goggles, right. Of course. +They'd have infrared scopes in the sky, too. I pulled Ange back against the +doorway of the church, tucking us back from the cops and the choppers. + +"TAKE IT BACK!" the PA roared. It was Trudy Doo's rebel yell and I heard her +guitar thrash out some chords, then her drummer playing, then that big deep +bass. + +"TAKE IT BACK!" the crowd answered, and they boiled out of the park at the +police lines. + +I've never been in a war, but now I think I know what it must be like. What it +must be like when scared kids charge across a field at an opposing force, +knowing what's coming, running anyway, screaming, hollering. + +"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY," the voice of God said. It was coming from trucks parked +all around the park, trucks that had swung into place in the last few seconds. + +That's when the mist fell. It came out of the choppers, and we just caught the +edge of it. It made the top of my head feel like it was going to come off. It +made my sinuses feel like they were being punctured with ice-picks. It made my +eyes swell and water, and my throat close. + +Pepper spray. Not 200 thousand Scovilles. A million and a half. They'd gassed +the crowd. + +I didn't see what happened next, but I heard it, over the sound of both me and +Ange choking and holding each other. First the choking, retching sounds. The +guitar and drums and bass crashed to a halt. Then coughing. + +Then screaming. + +The screaming went on for a long time. When I could see again, the cops had +their scopes up on their foreheads and the choppers were flooding Dolores Park +with so much light it looked like daylight. Everyone was looking at the Park, +which was good news, because when the lights went up like that, we were totally +visible. + +"What do we do?" Ange said. Her voice was tight, scared. I didn't trust myself +to speak for a moment. I swallowed a few times. + +"We walk away," I said. "That's all we can do. Walk away. Like we were just +passing by. Down to Dolores and turn left and up towards 16th Street. Like +we're just passing by. Like this is none of our business." + +"That'll never work," she said. + +"It's all I've got." + +"You don't think we should try to run for it?" + +"No," I said. "If we run, they'll chase us. Maybe if we walk, they'll figure we +haven't done anything and let us alone. They have a lot of arrests to make. +They'll be busy for a long time." + +The park was rolling with bodies, people and adults clawing at their faces and +gasping. The cops dragged them by the armpits, then lashed their wrists with +plastic cuffs and tossed them into the trucks like rag-dolls. + +"OK?" I said. + +"OK," she said. + +And that's just what we did. Walked, holding hands, quickly and business-like, +like two people wanting to avoid whatever trouble someone else was making. The +kind of walk you adopt when you want to pretend you can't see a panhandler, or +don't want to get involved in a street-fight. + +It worked. + +We reached the corner and turned and kept going. Neither of us dared to speak +for two blocks. Then I let out a gasp of air I hadn't know I'd been holding in. + +We came to 16th Street and turned down toward Mission Street. Normally that's a +pretty scary neighborhood at 2AM on a Saturday night. That night it was a +relief -- same old druggies and hookers and dealers and drunks. No cops with +truncheons, no gas. + +"Um," I said as we breathed in the night air. "Coffee?" + +"Home," she said. "I think home for now. Coffee later." + +"Yeah," I agreed. She lived up in Hayes Valley. I spotted a taxi rolling by and +I hailed it. That was a small miracle -- there are hardly any cabs when you +need them in San Francisco. + +"Have you got cabfare home?" + +"Yeah," she said. The cab-driver looked at us through his window. I opened the +back door so he wouldn't take off. + +"Good night," I said. + +She put her hands behind my head and pulled my face toward her. She kissed me +hard on the mouth, nothing sexual in it, but somehow more intimate for that. + +"Good night," she whispered in my ear, and slipped into the taxi. + +Head swimming, eyes running, a burning shame for having left all those Xnetters +to the tender mercies of the DHS and the SFPD, I set off for home. + +# + +Monday morning, Fred Benson was standing behind Ms Galvez's desk. + +"Ms Galvez will no longer be teaching this class," he said, once we'd taken our +seats. He had a self-satisfied note that I recognized immediately. On a hunch, +I checked out Charles. He was smiling like it was his birthday and he'd been +given the best present in the world. + +I put my hand up. + +"Why not?" + +"It's Board policy not to discuss employee matters with anyone except the +employee and the disciplinary committee," he said, without even bothering to +hide how much he enjoyed saying it. + +"We'll be beginning a new unit today, on national security. Your SchoolBooks +have the new texts. Please open them and turn to the first screen." + +The opening screen was emblazoned with a DHS logo and the title: WHAT EVERY +AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT HOMELAND SECURITY. + +I wanted to throw my SchoolBook on the floor. + +# + +I'd made arrangements to meet Ange at a cafe in her neighborhood after school. +I jumped on the BART and found myself sitting behind two guys in suits. They +were looking at the San Francisco Chronicle, which featured a full-page +post-mortem on the "youth riot" in Mission Dolores Park. They were tutting and +clucking over it. Then one said to the other, "It's like they're brainwashed or +something. Christ, were we ever that stupid?" + +I got up and moved to another seat. + +1~ Chapter 13 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Books-A-Million,~{ Books-A-Million +http://www.booksamillion.com/ncom/books?&isbn=0765319853 }~ a chain of gigantic +bookstores spread across the USA. I first encountered Books-A-Million while +staying at a hotel in Terre Haute, Indiana (I was giving a speech at the Rose +Hulman Institute of Technology later that day). The store was next to my hotel +and I really needed some reading material -- I'd been on the road for a solid +month and I'd read everything in my suitcase, and I had another five cities to +go before I headed home. As I stared intently at the shelves, a clerk asked me +if I needed any help. Now, I've worked at bookstores before, and a +knowledgeable clerk is worth her weight in gold, so I said sure, and started to +describe my tastes, naming authors I'd enjoyed. The clerk smiled and said, +"I've got just the book for you," and proceeded to take down a copy of my first +novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I busted out laughing, introduced +myself, and had an absolutely lovely chat about science fiction that almost +made me late to give my speech!] }/ + +"They're total whores," Ange said, spitting the word out. "In fact, that's an +insult to hardworking whores everywhere. They're, they're /{profiteers.}/" + +We were looking at a stack of newspapers we'd picked up and brought to the +cafe. They all contained "reporting" on the party in Dolores Park and to a one, +they made it sound like a drunken, druggy orgy of kids who'd attacked the cops. +/{USA Today}/ described the cost of the "riot" and included the cost of washing +away the pepper-spray residue from the gas-bombing, the rash of asthma attacks +that clogged the city's emergency rooms, and the cost of processing the eight +hundred arrested "rioters." + +No one was telling our side. + +"Well, the Xnet got it right, anyway," I said. I'd saved a bunch of the blogs +and videos and photostreams to my phone and I showed them to her. They were +first-hand accounts from people who'd been gassed, and beaten up. The video +showed us all dancing, having fun, showed the peaceful political speeches and +the chant of "Take It Back" and Trudy Doo talking about us being the only +generation that could believe in fighting for our freedoms. + +"We need to make people know about this," she said. + +"Yeah," I said, glumly. "That's a nice theory." + +"Well, why do you think the press doesn't ever publish our side?" + +"You said it, they're whores." + +"Yeah, but whores do it for the money. They could sell more papers and +commercials if they had a controversy. All they have now is a crime -- +controversy is much bigger." + +"OK, point taken. So why don't they do it? Well, reporters can barely search +regular blogs, let alone keep track of the Xnet. It's not as if that's a real +adult-friendly place to be." + +"Yeah," she said. "Well, we can fix that, right?" + +"Huh?" + +"Write it all up. Put it in one place, with all the links. A single place where +you can go that's intended for the press to find it and get the whole picture. +Link it to the HOWTOs for Xnet. Internet users can get to the Xnet, provided +they don't care about the DHS finding out what they've been surfing." + +"You think it'll work?" + +"Well, even if it doesn't, it's something positive to do." + +"Why would they listen to us, anyway?" + +"Who wouldn't listen to M1k3y?" + +I put down my coffee. I picked up my phone and slipped it into my pocket. I +stood up, turned on my heel, and walked out of the cafe. I picked a direction +at random and kept going. My face felt tight, the blood gone into my stomach, +which churned. + +/{They know who you are,}/ I thought. /{They know who M1k3y is.}/ That was it. +If Ange had figured it out, the DHS had too. I was doomed. I had known that +since they let me go from the DHS truck, that someday they'd come and arrest me +and put me away forever, send me to wherever Darryl had gone. + +It was all over. + +She nearly tackled me as I reached Market Street. She was out of breath and +looked furious. + +"What the /{hell}/ is your problem, mister?" + +I shook her off and kept walking. It was all over. + +She grabbed me again. "Stop it, Marcus, you're scaring me. Come on, talk to +me." + +I stopped and looked at her. She blurred before my eyes. I couldn't focus on +anything. I had a mad desire to jump into the path of a Muni trolley as it tore +past us, down the middle of the road. Better to die than to go back. + +"Marcus!" She did something I'd only seen people do in the movies. She slapped +me, a hard crack across the face. "Talk to me, dammit!" + +I looked at her and put my hand to my face, which was stinging hard. + +"No one is supposed to know who I am," I said. "I can't put it any more simply. +If you know, it's all over. Once other people know, it's all over." + +"Oh god, I'm sorry. Look, I only know because, well, because I blackmailed +Jolu. After the party I stalked you a little, trying to figure out if you were +the nice guy you seemed to be or a secret axe-murderer. I've known Jolu for a +long time and when I asked him about you, he gushed like you were the Second +Coming or something, but I could hear that there was something he wasn't +telling me. I've known Jolu for a long time. He dated my older sister at +computer camp when he was a kid. I have some really good dirt on him. I told +him I'd go public with it if he didn't tell me." + +"So he told you." + +"No," she said. "He told me to go to hell. Then I told him something about me. +Something I'd never told anyone else." + +"What?" + +She looked at me. Looked around. Looked back at me. "OK. I won't swear you to +secrecy because what's the point? Either I can trust you or I can't. + +"Last year, I --" she broke off. "Last year, I stole the standardized tests and +published them on the net. It was just a lark. I happened to be walking past +the principal's office and I saw them in his safe, and the door was hanging +open. I ducked into his office -- there were six sets of copies and I just put +one into my bag and took off again. When I got home, I scanned them all and put +them up on a Pirate Party server in Denmark." + +"That was /{you}/?" I said. + +She blushed. "Um. Yeah." + +"Holy crap!" I said. It had been huge news. The Board of Education said that +its No Child Left Behind tests had cost tens of millions of dollars to produce +and that they'd have to spend it all over again now that they'd had the leak. +They called it "edu-terrorism." The news had speculated endlessly about the +political motivations of the leaker, wondering if it was a teacher's protest, +or a student, or a thief, or a disgruntled government contractor. + +"That was YOU?" + +"It was me," she said. + +"And you told Jolu this --" + +"Because I wanted him to be sure that I would keep the secret. If he knew +/{my}/ secret, then he'd have something he could use to put me in jail if I +opened my trap. Give a little, get a little. Quid pro quo, like in Silence of +the Lambs." + +"And he told you." + +"No," she said. "He didn't." + +"But --" + +"Then I told him how into you I was. How I was planning to totally make an +idiot of myself and throw myself at you. /{Then}/ he told me." + +I couldn't think of anything to say then. I looked down at my toes. She grabbed +my hands and squeezed them. + +"I'm sorry I squeezed it out of him. It was your decision to tell me, if you +were going to tell me at all. I had no business --" + +"No," I said. Now that I knew how she'd found out, I was starting to calm down. +"No, it's good you know. /{You}/." + +"Me," she said. "Li'l ol' me." + +"OK, I can live with this. But there's one other thing." + +"What?" + +"There's no way to say this without sounding like a jerk, so I'll just say it. +People who date each other -- or whatever it is we're doing now -- they split +up. When they split up, they get angry at each other. Sometimes even hate each +other. It's really cold to think about that happening between us, but you know, +we've got to think about it." + +"I solemnly promise that there is nothing you could ever do to me that would +cause me to betray your secret. Nothing. Screw a dozen cheerleaders in my bed +while my mother watches. Make me listen to Britney Spears. Rip off my laptop, +smash it with hammers and soak it in sea-water. I promise. Nothing. Ever." + +I whooshed out some air. + +"Um," I said. + +"Now would be a good time to kiss me," she said, and turned her face up. + +# + +M1k3y's next big project on the Xnet was putting together the ultimate roundup +of reports of the DON'T TRUST party at Dolores Park. I put together the +biggest, most bad-ass site I could, with sections showing the action by +location, by time, by category -- police violence, dancing, aftermath, singing. +I uploaded the whole concert. + +It was pretty much all I worked on for the rest of the night. And the next +night. And the next. + +My mailbox overflowed with suggestions from people. They sent me dumps off +their phones and their pocket-cameras. Then I got an email from a name I +recognized -- Dr Eeevil (three "e"s), one of the prime maintainers of +ParanoidLinux. + +> M1k3y + +> I have been watching your Xnet experiment with great interest. Here in +Germany, we have much experience with what happens with a government that gets +out of control. + +> One thing you should know is that every camera has a unique "noise signature" +that can be used to later connect a picture with a camera. That means that the +photos you're republishing on your site could potentially be used to identify +the photographers, should they later be picked up for something else. + +> Luckily, it's not hard to strip out the signatures, if you care to. There's a +utility on the ParanoidLinux distro you're using that does this -- it's called +photonomous, and you'll find it in /usr/bin. Just read the man pages for +documentation. It's simple though. + +> Good luck with what you're doing. Don't get caught. Stay free. Stay paranoid. + +> Dr Eeevil + +I de-fingerprintized all the photos I'd posted and put them back up, along with +a note explaining what Dr Eeevil had told me, warning everyone else to do the +same. We all had the same basic ParanoidXbox install, so we could all anonymize +our pictures. There wasn't anything I could do about the photos that had +already been downloaded and cached, but from now on we'd be smarter. + +That was all the thought I gave the matter that night, until I got down to +breakfast the next morning and Mom had the radio on, playing the NPR morning +news. + +"Arabic news agency Al-Jazeera is running pictures, video and first-hand +accounts of last weekend's youth riot in Mission Dolores park," the announcer +said as I was drinking a glass of orange juice. I managed not to spray it +across the room, but I /{did}/ choke a little. + +"Al-Jazeera reporters claim that these accounts were published on the so-called +'Xnet,' a clandestine network used by students and Al-Quaeda sympathizers in +the Bay Area. This network's existence has long been rumored, but today marks +its first mainstream mention." + +Mom shook her head. "Just what we need," she said. "As if the police weren't +bad enough. Kids running around, pretending to be guerrillas and giving them +the excuse to really crack down." + +"The Xnet weblogs have carried hundreds of reports and multimedia files from +young people who attended the riot and allege that they were gathered +peacefully until the police attacked /{them}/. Here is one of those accounts. + +"'All we were doing was dancing. I brought my little brother. Bands played and +we talked about freedom, about how we were losing it to these jerks who say +they hate terrorists but who attack us though we're not terrorists we're +Americans. I think they hate freedom, not us. + +"We danced and the bands played and it was all fun and good and then the cops +started shouting at us to disperse. We all shouted take it back! Meaning take +America back. The cops gassed us with pepper spray. My little brother is +twelve. He missed three days of school. My stupid parents say it was my fault. +How about the police? We pay them and they're supposed to protect us but they +gassed us for no good reason, gassed us like they gas enemy soldiers.' + +"Similar accounts, including audio and video, can be found on Al-Jazeera's +website and on the Xnet. You can find directions for accessing this Xnet on +NPR's homepage." + +Dad came down. + +"Do you use the Xnet?" he said. He looked intensely at my face. I felt myself +squirm. + +"It's for video-games," I said. "That's what most people use it for. It's just +a wireless network. It's what everyone did with those free Xboxes they gave +away last year." + +He glowered at me. "Games? Marcus, you don't realize it, but you're providing +cover for people who plan on attacking and destroying this country. I don't +want to see you using this Xnet. Not anymore. Do I make myself clear?" + +I wanted to argue. Hell, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders. But I didn't. +I looked away. I said, "Sure, Dad." I went to school. + +# + +At first I was relieved when I discovered that they weren't going to leave Mr +Benson in charge of my social studies class. But the woman they found to +replace him was my worst nightmare. + +She was young, just about 28 or 29, and pretty, in a wholesome kind of way. She +was blonde and spoke with a soft southern accent when she introduced herself to +us as Mrs Andersen. That set off alarm bells right away. I didn't know /{any}/ +women under the age of sixty that called themselves "Mrs." + +But I was prepared to overlook it. She was young, pretty, she sounded nice. She +would be OK. + +She wasn't OK. + +"Under what circumstances should the federal government be prepared to suspend +the Bill of Rights?" she said, turning to the blackboard and writing down a row +of numbers, one through ten. + +"Never," I said, not waiting to be called on. This was easy. "Constitutional +rights are absolute." + +"That's not a very sophisticated view." She looked at her seating-plan. +"Marcus. For example, say a policeman conducts an improper search -- he goes +beyond the stuff specified in his warrant. He discovers compelling evidence +that a bad guy killed your father. It's the only evidence that exists. Should +the bad guy go free?" + +I knew the answer to this, but I couldn't really explain it. "Yes," I said, +finally. "But the police shouldn't conduct improper searches --" + +"Wrong," she said. "The proper response to police misconduct is disciplinary +action against the police, not punishing all of society for one cop's mistake." +She wrote "Criminal guilt" under point one on the board. + +"Other ways in which the Bill of Rights can be superseded?" + +Charles put his hand up. "Shouting fire in a crowded theater?" + +"Very good --" she consulted the seating plan -- "Charles. There are many +instances in which the First Amendment is not absolute. Let's list some more of +those." + +Charles put his hand up again. "Endangering a law enforcement officer." + +"Yes, disclosing the identity of an undercover policeman or intelligence +officer. Very good." She wrote it down. "Others?" + +"National security," Charles said, not waiting for her to call on him again. +"Libel. Obscenity. Corruption of minors. Child porn. Bomb-making recipes." Mrs +Andersen wrote these down fast, but stopped at child porn. "Child porn is just +a form of obscenity." + +I was feeling sick. This was not what I'd learned or believed about my country. +I put my hand up. + +"Yes, Marcus?" + +"I don't get it. You're making it sound like the Bill of Rights is optional. +It's the Constitution. We're supposed to follow it absolutely." + +"That's a common oversimplification," she said, giving me a fake smile. "But +the fact of the matter is that the framers of the Constitution intended it to +be a living document that was revised over time. They understood that the +Republic wouldn't be able to last forever if the government of the day couldn't +govern according to the needs of the day. They never intended the Constitution +to be looked on like religious doctrine. After all, they came here fleeing +religious doctrine." + +I shook my head. "What? No. They were merchants and artisans who were loyal to +the King until he instituted policies that were against their interests and +enforced them brutally. The religious refugees were way earlier." + +"Some of the Framers were descended from religious refugees," she said. + +"And the Bill of Rights isn't supposed to be something you pick and choose +from. What the Framers hated was tyranny. That's what the Bill of Rights is +supposed to prevent. They were a revolutionary army and they wanted a set of +principles that everyone could agree to. Life, liberty and the pursuit of +happiness. The right of people to throw off their oppressors." + +"Yes, yes," she said, waving at me. "They believed in the right of people to +get rid of their Kings, but --" Charles was grinning and when she said that, he +smiled even wider. + +"They set out the Bill of Rights because they thought that having absolute +rights was better than the risk that someone would take them away. Like the +First Amendment: it's supposed to protect us by preventing the government from +creating two kinds of speech, allowed speech and criminal speech. They didn't +want to face the risk that some jerk would decide that the things that he found +unpleasant were illegal." + +She turned and wrote, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" on it. + +"We're getting a little ahead of the lesson, but you seem like an advanced +group." The others laughed at this, nervously. + +"The role of government is to secure for citizens the rights of life, liberty +and the pursuit of happiness. In that order. It's like a filter. If the +government wants to do something that makes us a little unhappy, or takes away +some of our liberty, it's OK, providing they're doing it to save our lives. +That's why the cops can lock you up if they think you're a danger to yourself +or others. You lose your liberty and happiness to protect life. If you've got +life, you might get liberty and happiness later." + +Some of the others had their hands up. "Doesn't that mean that they can do +anything they want, if they say it's to stop someone from hurting us in the +future?" + +"Yeah," another kid said. "This sounds like you're saying that national +security is more important than the Constitution." + +I was so proud of my fellow students then. I said, "How can you protect freedom +by suspending the Bill of Rights?" + +She shook her head at us like we were being very stupid. "The 'revolutionary' +founding fathers /{shot traitors}/ and spies. They didn't believe in absolute +freedom, not when it threatened the Republic. Now you take these Xnet people +--" + +I tried hard not to stiffen. + +"-- these so-called jammers who were on the news this morning. After this city +was attacked by people who've declared war on this country, they set about +sabotaging the security measures set up to catch the bad guys and prevent them +from doing it again. They did this by endangering and inconveniencing their +fellow citizens --" + +"They did it to show that our rights were being taken away in the name of +protecting them!" I said. OK, I shouted. God, she had me so steamed. "They did +it because the government was treating /{everyone}/ like a suspected +terrorist." + +"So they wanted to prove that they shouldn't be treated like terrorists," +Charles shouted back, "so they acted like terrorists? So they committed +terrorism?" + +I boiled. + +"Oh for Christ's sake. Committed terrorism? They showed that universal +surveillance was more dangerous than terrorism. Look at what happened in the +park last weekend. Those people were dancing and listening to music. How is +/{that}/ terrorism?" + +The teacher crossed the room and stood before me, looming over me until I shut +up. "Marcus, you seem to think that nothing has changed in this country. You +need to understand that the bombing of the Bay Bridge changed everything. +Thousands of our friends and relatives lie dead at the bottom of the Bay. This +is a time for national unity in the face of the violent insult our country has +suffered --" + +I stood up. I'd had enough of this "everything has changed" crapola. "National +unity? The whole point of America is that we're the country where dissent is +welcome. We're a country of dissidents and fighters and university dropouts and +free speech people." + +I thought of Ms Galvez's last lesson and the thousands of Berkeley students +who'd surrounded the police-van when they tried to arrest a guy for +distributing civil rights literature. No one tried to stop those trucks when +they drove away with all the people who'd been dancing in the park. I didn't +try. I was running away. + +Maybe everything /{had}/ changed. + +"I believe you know where Mr Benson's office is," she said to me. "You are to +present yourself to him immediately. I will /{not}/ have my classes disrupted +by disrespectful behavior. For someone who claims to love freedom of speech, +you're certainly willing to shout down anyone who disagrees with you." + +I picked up my SchoolBook and my bag and stormed out. The door had a gas-lift, +so it was impossible to slam, or I would have slammed it. + +I went fast to Mr Benson's office. Cameras filmed me as I went. My gait was +recorded. The arphids in my student ID broadcast my identity to sensors in the +hallway. It was like being in jail. + +"Close the door, Marcus," Mr Benson said. He turned his screen around so that I +could see the video feed from the social studies classroom. He'd been watching. + +"What do you have to say for yourself?" + +"That wasn't teaching, it was /{propaganda}/. She told us that the Constitution +didn't matter!" + +"No, she said it wasn't religious doctrine. And you attacked her like some kind +of fundamentalist, proving her point. Marcus, you of all people should +understand that everything changed when the bridge was bombed. Your friend +Darryl --" + +"Don't you say a goddamned word about him," I said, the anger bubbling over. +"You're not fit to talk about him. Yeah, I understand that everything's +different now. We used to be a free country. Now we're not." + +"Marcus, do you know what 'zero-tolerance' means?" + +I backed down. He could expel me for "threatening behavior." It was supposed to +be used against gang kids who tried to intimidate their teachers. But of course +he wouldn't have any compunctions about using it on me. + +"Yes," I said. "I know what it means." + +"I think you owe me an apology," he said. + +I looked at him. He was barely suppressing his sadistic smile. A part of me +wanted to grovel. It wanted to beg for his forgiveness for all my shame. I +tamped that part down and decided that I would rather get kicked out than +apologize. + +"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the +consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes +destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish +it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, +and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to +effect their safety and happiness." I remembered it word for word. + +He shook his head. "Remembering things isn't the same as understanding them, +sonny." He bent over his computer and made some clicks. His printer purred. He +handed me a sheet of warm Board letterhead that said I'd been suspended for two +weeks. + +"I'll email your parents now. If you are still on school property in thirty +minutes, you'll be arrested for trespassing." + +I looked at him. + +"You don't want to declare war on me in my own school," he said. "You can't win +that war. GO!" + +I left. + +1~ Chapter 14 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in San +Diego, California.~{ Mysterious Galaxy +http://mysteriousgalaxy.booksense.com/NASApp/store/Product?s=showproduct&isbn=9780765319852 +7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 San Diego, CA USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747 +}~ The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to sign books every time I've +been in San Diego for a conference or to teach (the Clarion Writers' Workshop +is based at UC San Diego in nearby La Jolla, CA), and every time I show up, +they pack the house. This is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans +who know that they'll always be able to get great recommendations and great +ideas at the store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion down +to the store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book and I've +never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.] }/ + +The Xnet wasn't much fun in the middle of the school-day, when all the people +who used it were in school. I had the piece of paper folded in the back pocket +of my jeans, and I threw it on the kitchen table when I got home. I sat down in +the living room and switched on the TV. I never watched it, but I knew that my +parents did. The TV and the radio and the newspapers were where they got all +their ideas about the world. + +The news was terrible. There were so many reasons to be scared. American +soldiers were dying all over the world. Not just soldiers, either. National +guardsmen, who thought they were signing up to help rescue people from +hurricanes, stationed overseas for years and years of a long and endless war. + +I flipped around the 24-hour news networks, one after another, a parade of +officials telling us why we should be scared. A parade of photos of bombs going +off around the world. + +I kept flipping and found myself looking at a familiar face. It was the guy who +had come into the truck and spoken to Severe-Haircut woman when I was chained +up in the back. Wearing a military uniform. The caption identified him as Major +General Graeme Sutherland, Regional Commander, DHS. + +"I hold in my hands actual literature on offer at the so-called concert in +Dolores Park last weekend." He held up a stack of pamphlets. There'd been lots +of pamphleteers there, I remembered. Wherever you got a group of people in San +Francisco, you got pamphlets. + +"I want you to look at these for a moment. Let me read you their titles. +WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED: A CITIZEN'S GUIDE TO OVERTHROWING THE +STATE. Here's one, DID THE SEPTEMBER 11TH BOMBINGS REALLY HAPPEN? And another, +HOW TO USE THEIR SECURITY AGAINST THEM. This literature shows us the true +purpose of the illegal gathering on Saturday night. This wasn't merely an +unsafe gathering of thousands of people without proper precaution, or even +toilets. It was a recruiting rally for the enemy. It was an attempt to corrupt +children into embracing the idea that America shouldn't protect herself. + +"Take this slogan, DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25. What better way to ensure that +no considered, balanced, adult discussion is ever injected into your +pro-terrorist message than to exclude adults, limiting your group to +impressionable young people? + +"When police came on the scene, they found a recruitment rally for America's +enemies in progress. The gathering had already disrupted the nights of hundreds +of residents in the area, none of whom had been consulted in the planning of +this all night rave party. + +"They ordered these people to disperse -- that much is visible on all the video +-- and when the revelers turned to attack them, egged on by the musicians on +stage, the police subdued them using non-lethal crowd control techniques. + +"The arrestees were ring-leaders and provocateurs who had led the thousands of +impressionistic young people there to charge the police lines. 827 of them were +taken into custody. Many of these people had prior offenses. More than 100 of +them had outstanding warrants. They are still in custody. + +"Ladies and gentlemen, America is fighting a war on many fronts, but nowhere is +she in more grave danger than she is here, at home. Whether we are being +attacked by terrorists or those who sympathize with them." + +A reporter held up a hand and said, "General Sutherland, surely you're not +saying that these children were terrorist sympathizers for attending a party in +a park?" + +"Of course not. But when young people are brought under the influence of our +country's enemies, it's easy for them to end up over their heads. Terrorists +would love to recruit a fifth column to fight the war on the home front for +them. If these were my children, I'd be gravely concerned." + +Another reporter chimed in. "Surely this is just an open air concert, General? +They were hardly drilling with rifles." + +The General produced a stack of photos and began to hold them up. "These are +pictures that officers took with infra-red cameras before moving in." He held +them next to his face and paged through them one at a time. They showed people +dancing really rough, some people getting crushed or stepped on. Then they +moved into sex stuff by the trees, a girl with three guys, two guys necking +together. "There were children as young as ten years old at this event. A +deadly cocktail of drugs, propaganda and music resulted in dozens of injuries. +It's a wonder there weren't any deaths." + +I switched the TV off. They made it look like it had been a riot. If my parents +thought I'd been there, they'd have strapped me to my bed for a month and only +let me out afterward wearing a tracking collar. + +Speaking of which, they were going to be /{pissed}/ when they found out I'd +been suspended. + +# + +They didn't take it well. Dad wanted to ground me, but Mom and I talked him out +of it. + +"You know that vice-principal has had it in for Marcus for years," Mom said. +"The last time we met him you cursed him for an hour afterward. I think the +word 'asshole' was mentioned repeatedly." + +Dad shook his head. "Disrupting a class to argue against the Department of +Homeland Security --" + +"It's a social studies class, Dad," I said. I was beyond caring anymore, but I +felt like if Mom was going to stick up for me, I should help her out. "We were +talking about the DHS. Isn't debate supposed to be healthy?" + +"Look, son," he said. He'd taking to calling me "son" a lot. It made me feel +like he'd stopped thinking of me as a person and switched to thinking of me as +a kind of half-formed larva that needed to be guided out of adolescence. I +hated it. "You're going to have to learn to live with the fact that we live in +a different world today. You have every right to speak your mind of course, but +you have to be prepared for the consequences of doing so. You have to face the +fact that there are people who are hurting, who aren't going to want to argue +the finer points of Constitutional law when their lives are at stake. We're in +a lifeboat now, and once you're in the lifeboat, no one wants to hear about how +mean the captain is being." + +I barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes. + +"I've been assigned two weeks of independent study, writing one paper for each +of my subjects, using the city for my background -- a history paper, a social +studies paper, an English paper, a physics paper. It beats sitting around at +home watching television." + +Dad looked hard at me, like he suspected I was up to something, then nodded. I +said goodnight to them and went up to my room. I fired up my Xbox and opened a +word-processor and started to brainstorm ideas for my papers. Why not? It +really was better than sitting around at home. + +# + +I ended up IMing with Ange for quite a while that night. She was sympathetic +about everything and told me she'd help me with my papers if I wanted to meet +her after school the next night. I knew where her school was -- she went to the +same school as Van -- and it was all the way over in the East Bay, where I +hadn't visited since the bombs went. + +I was really excited at the prospect of seeing her again. Every night since the +party, I'd gone to bed thinking of two things: the sight of the crowd charging +the police lines and the feeling of the side of her breast under her shirt as +we leaned against the pillar. She was amazing. I'd never been with a girl +as...aggressive as her before. It had always been me putting the moves on and +them pushing me away. I got the feeling that Ange was as much of a horn-dog as +I was. It was a tantalizing notion. + +I slept soundly that night, with exciting dreams of me and Ange and what we +might do if we found ourselves in a secluded spot somewhere. + +The next day, I set out to work on my papers. San Francisco is a good place to +write about. History? Sure, it's there, from the Gold Rush to the WWII +shipyards, the Japanese internment camps, the invention of the PC. Physics? The +Exploratorium has the coolest exhibits of any museum I've ever been to. I took +a perverse satisfaction in the exhibits on soil liquefaction during big quakes. +English? Jack London, Beat Poets, science fiction writers like Pat Murphy and +Rudy Rucker. Social studies? The Free Speech Movement, Cesar Chavez, gay +rights, feminism, anti-war movement... + +I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter +about the world around me. I could do that just by walking around the city. I +decided I'd do an English paper about the Beats first. City Lights books had a +great library in an upstairs room where Alan Ginsberg and his buddies had +created their radical druggy poetry. The one we'd read in English class was +/{Howl}/ and I would never forget the opening lines, they gave me shivers down +my back: + +I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical +naked, + +dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, + +angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry +dynamo in the machinery of night... + +I liked the way he ran those words all together, "starving hysterical naked." I +knew how that felt. And "best minds of my generation" made me think hard too. +It made me remember the park and the police and the gas falling. They busted +Ginsberg for obscenity over Howl -- all about a line about gay sex that would +hardly have caused us to blink an eye today. It made me happy somehow, knowing +that we'd made some progress. That things had been even more restrictive than +this before. + +I lost myself in the library, reading these beautiful old editions of the +books. I got lost in Jack Kerouac's /{On the Road}/, a novel I'd been meaning +to read for a long time, and a clerk who came up to check on me nodded +approvingly and found me a cheap edition that he sold me for six bucks. + +I walked into Chinatown and had dim sum buns and noodles with hot-sauce that I +had previously considered to be pretty hot, but which would never seem anything +like hot ever again, not now that I'd had an Ange special. + +As the day wore on toward the afternoon, I got on the BART and switched to a +San Mateo bridge shuttle bus to bring me around to the East Bay. I read my copy +of /{On the Road}/ and dug the scenery whizzing past. /{On the Road}/ is a +semi-autobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, a druggy, hard-drinking writer +who goes hitchhiking around America, working crummy jobs, howling through the +streets at night, meeting people and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos, +con-men, muggers, scumbags and angels. There's not really a plot -- Kerouac +supposedly wrote it in three weeks on a long roll of paper, stoned out of his +mind -- only a bunch of amazing things, one thing happening after another. He +makes friends with self-destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who get him +involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still it works out, +if you know what I mean. + +There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it being read +aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and +wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the central valley on the way to +LA, one of those places with a gas station and a diner, and just walk out into +the fields and meet people and see stuff and do stuff. + +It was a long bus ride and I must have dozed off a little -- staying up late +IMing with Ange was hard on my sleep-schedule, since Mom still expected me down +for breakfast. I woke up and changed buses and before long, I was at Ange's +school. + +She came bounding out of the gates in her uniform -- I'd never seen her in it +before, it was kind of cute in a weird way, and reminded me of Van in her +uniform. She gave me a long hug and a hard kiss on the cheek. + +"Hello you!" she said. + +"Hiya!" + +"Whatcha reading?" + +I'd been waiting for this. I'd marked the passage with a finger. "Listen: 'They +danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been +doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me +are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, +desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a +commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles +exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue +centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"'" + +She took the book and read the passage again for herself. "Wow, dingledodies! I +love it! Is it all like this?" + +I told her about the parts I'd read, walking slowly down the sidewalk back +toward the bus-stop. Once we turned the corner, she put her arm around my waist +and I slung mine around her shoulder. Walking down the street with a girl -- my +girlfriend? Sure, why not? -- talking about this cool book. It was heaven. Made +me forget my troubles for a little while. + +"Marcus?" + +I turned around. It was Van. In my subconscious I'd expected this. I knew +because my conscious mind wasn't remotely surprised. It wasn't a big school, +and they all got out at the same time. I hadn't spoken to Van in weeks, and +those weeks felt like months. We used to talk every day. + +"Hey, Van," I said. I suppressed the urge to take my arm off of Ange's +shoulders. Van seemed surprised, but not angry, more ashen, shaken. She looked +closely at the two of us. + +"Angela?" + +"Hey, Vanessa," Ange said. + +"What are you doing here?" + +"I came out to get Ange," I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. I was +suddenly embarrassed to be seen with another girl. + +"Oh," Van said. "Well, it was nice to see you." + +"Nice to see you too, Vanessa," Ange said, swinging me around, marching me back +toward the bus-stop. + +"You know her?" Ange said. + +"Yeah, since forever." + +"Was she your girlfriend?" + +"What? No! No way! We were just friends." + +"You /{were}/ friends?" + +I felt like Van was walking right behind us, listening in, though at the pace +we were walking, she would have to be jogging to keep up. I resisted the +temptation to look over my shoulder for as long as possible, then I did. There +were lots of girls from the school behind us, but no Van. + +"She was with me and Jose-Luis and Darryl when we were arrested. We used to ARG +together. The four of us, we were kind of best friends." + +"And what happened?" + +I dropped my voice. "She didn't like the Xnet," I said. "She thought we would +get into trouble. That I'd get other people into trouble." + +"And that's why you stopped being friends?" + +"We just drifted apart." + +We walked a few steps. "You weren't, you know, boyfriend/girlfriend friends?" + +"No!" I said. My face was hot. I felt like I sounded like I was lying, even +though I was telling the truth. + +Ange jerked us to a halt and studied my face. + +"Were you?" + +"No! Seriously! Just friends. Darryl and her -- well, not quite, but Darryl was +so into her. There was no way --" + +"But if Darryl hadn't been into her, you would have, huh?" + +"No, Ange, no. Please, just believe me and let it go. Vanessa was a good friend +and we're not anymore, and that upsets me, but I was never into her that way, +all right? + +She slumped a little. "OK, OK. I'm sorry. I don't really get along with her is +all. We've never gotten along in all the years we've known each other." + +Oh ho, I thought. This would be how it came to be that Jolu knew her for so +long and I never met her; she had some kind of thing with Van and he didn't +want to bring her around. + +She gave me a long hug and we kissed, and a bunch of girls passed us going +/{woooo}/ and we straightened up and headed for the bus-stop. Ahead of us +walked Van, who must have gone past while we were kissing. I felt like a +complete jerk. + +Of course, she was at the stop and on the bus and we didn't say a word to each +other, and I tried to make conversation with Ange all the way, but it was +awkward. + +The plan was to stop for a coffee and head to Ange's place to hang out and +"study," i.e. take turns on her Xbox looking at the Xnet. Ange's mom got home +late on Tuesdays, which was her night for yoga class and dinner with her girls, +and Ange's sister was going out with her boyfriend, so we'd have the place to +ourselves. I'd been having pervy thoughts about it ever since we'd made the +plan. + +We got to her place and went straight to her room and shut the door. Her room +was kind of a disaster, covered with layers of clothes and notebooks and parts +of PCs that would dig into your stocking feet like caltrops. Her desk was worse +than the floor, piled high with books and comics, so we ended up sitting on her +bed, which was OK by me. + +The awkwardness from seeing Van had gone away somewhat and we got her Xbox up +and running. It was in the center of a nest of wires, some going to a wireless +antenna she'd hacked into it and stuck to the window so she could tune in the +neighbors' WiFi. Some went to a couple of old laptop screens she'd turned into +standalone monitors, balanced on stands and bristling with exposed electronics. +The screens were on both bedside tables, which was an excellent setup for +watching movies or IMing from bed -- she could turn the monitors sidewise and +lie on her side and they'd be right-side-up, no matter which side she lay on. + +We both knew what we were really there for, sitting side by side propped +against the bedside table. I was trembling a little and super-conscious of the +warmth of her leg and shoulder against mine, but I needed to go through the +motions of logging into Xnet and seeing what email I'd gotten and so on. + +There was an email from a kid who liked to send in funny phone-cam videos of +the DHS being really crazy -- the last one had been of them disassembling a +baby's stroller after a bomb-sniffing dog had shown an interest in it, taking +it apart with screwdrivers right on the street in the Marina while all these +rich people walked past, staring at them and marveling at how weird it was. + +I'd linked to the video and it had been downloaded like crazy. He'd hosted it +on the Internet Archive's Alexandria mirror in Egypt, where they'd host +anything for free so long as you'd put it under the Creative Commons license, +which let anyone remix it and share it. The US archive -- which was down in the +Presidio, only a few minutes away -- had been forced to take down all those +videos in the name of national security, but the Alexandria archive had split +away into its own organization and was hosting anything that embarrassed the +USA. + +This kid -- his handle was Kameraspie -- had sent me an even better video this +time around. It was at the doorway to City Hall in Civic Center, a huge wedding +cake of a building covered with statues in little archways and gilt leaves and +trim. The DHS had a secure perimeter around the building, and Kameraspie's +video showed a great shot of their checkpoint as a guy in an officer's uniform +approached and showed his ID and put his briefcase on the X-ray belt. + +It was all OK until one of the DHS people saw something he didn't like on the +X-ray. He questioned the General, who rolled his eyes and said something +inaudible (the video had been shot from across the street, apparently with a +homemade concealed zoom lens, so the audio was mostly of people walking past +and traffic noises). + +The General and the DHS guys got into an argument, and the longer they argued, +the more DHS guys gathered around them. Finally, the General shook his head +angrily and waved his finger at the DHS guy's chest and picked up his briefcase +and started to walk away. The DHS guys shouted at him, but he didn't slow. His +body language really said, "I am totally, utterly pissed." + +Then it happened. The DHS guys ran after the general. Kameraspie slowed the +video down here, so we could see, in frame-by-frame slo-mo, the general +half-turning, his face all like, "No freaking way are you about to tackle me," +then changing to horror as three of the giant DHS guards slammed into him, +knocking him sideways, then catching him at the middle, like a career-ending +football tackle. The general -- middle aged, steely grey hair, lined and +dignified face -- went down like a sack of potatoes and bounced twice, his face +slamming off the sidewalk and blood starting out of his nose. + +The DHS hog-tied the general, strapping him at ankles and wrists. The general +was shouting now, really shouting, his face purpling under the blood streaming +from his nose. Legs swished by in the tight zoom. Passing pedestrians looked at +this guy in his uniform, getting tied up, and you could see from his face that +this was the worst part, this was the ritual humiliation, the removal of +dignity. The clip ended. + +"Oh my dear sweet Buddha," I said looking at the screen as it faded to black, +starting the video again. I nudged Ange and showed her the clip. She watched +wordless, jaw hanging down to her chest. + +"Post that," she said. "Post that post that post that post that!" + +I posted it. I could barely type as I wrote it up, describing what I'd seen, +adding a note to see if anyone could identify the military man in the video, if +anyone knew anything about this. + +I hit publish. + +We watched the video. We watched it again. + +My email pinged. + +> I totally recognize that dude -- you can find his bio on Wikipedia. He's +General Claude Geist. He commanded the joint UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti. + +I checked the bio. There was a picture of the general at a press conference, +and notes about his role in the difficult Haiti mission. It was clearly the +same guy. + +I updated the post. + +Theoretically, this was Ange's and my chance to make out, but that wasn't what +we ended up doing. We crawled the Xnet blogs, looking for more accounts of the +DHS searching people, tackling people, invading them. This was a familiar task, +the same thing I'd done with all the footage and accounts from the riots in the +park. I started a new category on my blog for this, AbusesOfAuthority, and +filed them away. Ange kept coming up with new search terms for me to try and by +the time her mom got home, my new category had seventy posts, headlined by +General Geist's City Hall takedown. + +# + +I worked on my Beat paper all the next day at home, reading the Kerouac and +surfing the Xnet. I was planning on meeting Ange at school, but I totally +wimped out at the thought of seeing Van again, so I texted her an excuse about +working on the paper. + +There were all kinds of great suggestions for AbusesOfAuthority coming in; +hundreds of little and big ones, pictures and audio. The meme was spreading. + +It spread. The next morning there were even more. Someone started a new blog +called AbusesOfAuthority that collected hundreds more. The pile grew. We +competed to find the juiciest stories, the craziest pictures. + +The deal with my parents was that I'd eat breakfast with them every morning and +talk about the projects I was doing. They liked that I was reading Kerouac. It +had been a favorite book of both of theirs and it turned out there was already +a copy on the bookcase in my parents' room. My dad brought it down and I +flipped through it. There were passages marked up with pen, dog-eared pages, +notes in the margin. My dad had really loved this book. + +It made me remember a better time, when my Dad and I had been able to talk for +five minutes without shouting at each other about terrorism, and we had a great +breakfast talking about the way that the novel was plotted, all the crazy +adventures. + +But the next morning at breakfast they were both glued to the radio. + +"Abuses of Authority -- it's the latest craze on San Francisco's notorious +Xnet, and it's captured the world's attention. Called A-oh-A, the movement is +composed of 'Little Brothers' who watch back against the Department of Homeland +Security's anti-terrorism measures, documenting the failures and excesses. The +rallying cry is a popular viral video clip of a General Claude Geist, a retired +three-star general, being tackled by DHS officers on the sidewalk in front of +City Hall. Geist hasn't made a statement on the incident, but commentary from +young people who are upset with their own treatment has been fast and furious. + +"Most notable has been the global attention the movement has received. Stills +from the Geist video have appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Korea, +Great Britain, Germany, Egypt and Japan, and broadcasters around the world have +aired the clip on prime-time news. The issue came to a head last night, when +the British Broadcasting Corporation's National News Evening program ran a +special report on the fact that no American broadcaster or news agency has +covered this story. Commenters on the BBC's website noted that BBC America's +version of the news did not carry the report." + +They brought on a couple of interviews: British media watchdogs, a Swedish +Pirate Party kid who made jeering remarks about America's corrupt press, a +retired American newscaster living in Tokyo, then they aired a short clip from +Al-Jazeera, comparing the American press record and the record of the national +news-media in Syria. + +I felt like my parents were staring at me, that they knew what I was doing. But +when I cleared away my dishes, I saw that they were looking at each other. + +Dad was holding his coffee cup so hard his hands were shaking. Mom was looking +at him. + +"They're trying to discredit us," Dad said finally. "They're trying to sabotage +the efforts to keep us safe." + +I opened my mouth, but my mom caught my eye and shook her head. Instead I went +up to my room and worked on my Kerouac paper. Once I'd heard the door slam +twice, I fired up my Xbox and got online. + +> Hello M1k3y. This is Colin Brown. I'm a producer with the Canadian +Broadcasting Corporation's news programme The National. We're doing a story on +Xnet and have sent a reporter to San Francisco to cover it from there. Would +you be interested in doing an interview to discuss your group and its actions? + +I stared at the screen. Jesus. They wanted to /{interview}/ me about "my +group"? + +> Um thanks no. I'm all about privacy. And it's not "my group." But thanks for +doing the story! + +A minute later, another email. + +> We can mask you and ensure your anonymity. You know that the Department of +Homeland Security will be happy to provide their own spokesperson. I'm +interested in getting your side. + +I filed the email. He was right, but I'd be crazy to do this. For all I knew, +he /{was}/ the DHS. + +I picked up more Kerouac. Another email came in. Same request, different +news-agency: KQED wanted to meet me and record a radio interview. A station in +Brazil. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Deutsche Welle. All day, the +press requests came in. All day, I politely turned them down. + +I didn't get much Kerouac read that day. + +# + +"Hold a press-conference," is what Ange said, as we sat in the cafe near her +place that evening. I wasn't keen on going out to her school anymore, getting +stuck on a bus with Van again. + +"What? Are you crazy?" + +"Do it in Clockwork Plunder. Just pick a trading post where there's no PvP +allowed and name a time. You can login from here." + +PvP is player-versus-player combat. Parts of Clockwork Plunder were neutral +ground, which meant that we could theoretically bring in a ton of noob +reporters without worrying about gamers killing them in the middle of the +press-conference. + +"I don't know anything about press conferences." + +"Oh, just google it. I'm sure someone's written an article on holding a +successful one. I mean, if the President can manage it, I'm sure you can. He +looks like he can barely tie his shoes without help." + +We ordered more coffee. + +"You are a very smart woman," I said. + +"And I'm beautiful," she said. + +"That too," I said. + +1~ Chapter 15 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo,~{ Chapters/Indigo: +http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Little-Brother-Cory-Doctorow/9780765319852-item.html +}~ the national Canadian megachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent +science fiction bookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto and +I knew that something big was going on right away, because two of our smartest, +best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they'd been hired to run the +science fiction section. From the start, Chapters raised the bar on what a big +corporate bookstore could be, extending its hours, adding a friendly cafe and +lots of seating, installing in-store self-service terminals and stocking the +most amazing variety of titles.] }/ + +I blogged the press-conference even before I'd sent out the invitations to the +press. I could tell that all these writers wanted to make me into a leader or a +general or a supreme guerrilla commandant, and I figured one way of solving +that would be to have a bunch of Xnetters running around answering questions +too. + +Then I emailed the press. The responses ranged from puzzled to enthusiastic -- +only the Fox reporter was "outraged" that I had the gall to ask her to play a +game in order to appear on her TV show. The rest of them seemed to think that +it would make a pretty cool story, though plenty of them wanted lots of tech +support for signing onto the game + +I picked 8PM, after dinner. Mom had been bugging me about all the evenings I'd +been spending out of the house until I finally spilled the beans about Ange, +whereupon she came over all misty and kept looking at me like, +my-little-boy's-growing-up. She wanted to meet Ange, and I used that as +leverage, promising to bring her over the next night if I could "go to the +movies" with Ange tonight. + +Ange's mom and sister were out again -- they weren't real stay-at-homes -- +which left me and Ange alone in her room with her Xbox and mine. I unplugged +one of her bedside screens and attached my Xbox to it so that we could both +login at once. + +Both Xboxes were idle, logged into Clockwork Plunder. I was pacing. + +"It's going to be fine," she said. She glanced at her screen. "Patcheye Pete's +Market has 600 players in it now!" We'd picked Patcheye Pete's because it was +the market closest to the village square where new players spawned. If the +reporters weren't already Clockwork Plunder players -- ha! -- then that's where +they'd show up. In my blog post I'd asked people generally to hang out on the +route between Patcheye Pete's and the spawn-gate and direct anyone who looked +like a disoriented reporter over to Pete's. + +"What the hell am I going to tell them?" + +"You just answer their questions -- and if you don't like a question, ignore +it. Someone else can answer it. It'll be fine." + +"This is insane." + +"This is perfect, Marcus. If you want to really screw the DHS, you have to +embarrass them. It's not like you're going to be able to out-shoot them. Your +only weapon is your ability to make them look like morons." + +I flopped on the bed and she pulled my head into her lap and stroked my hair. +I'd been playing around with different haircuts before the bombing, dying it +all kinds of funny colors, but since I'd gotten out of jail I couldn't be +bothered. It had gotten long and stupid and shaggy and I'd gone into the +bathroom and grabbed my clippers and buzzed it down to half an inch all around, +which took zero effort to take care of and helped me to be invisible when I was +out jamming and cloning arphids. + +I opened my eyes and stared into her big brown eyes behind her glasses. They +were round and liquid and expressive. She could make them bug out when she +wanted to make me laugh, or make them soft and sad, or lazy and sleepy in a way +that made me melt into a puddle of horniness. + +That's what she was doing right now. + +I sat up slowly and hugged her. She hugged me back. We kissed. She was an +amazing kisser. I know I've already said that, but it bears repeating. We +kissed a lot, but for one reason or another we always stopped before it got too +heavy. + +Now I wanted to go farther. I found the hem of her t-shirt and tugged. She put +her hands over her head and pulled back a few inches. I knew that she'd do +that. I'd known since the night in the park. Maybe that's why we hadn't gone +farther -- I knew I couldn't rely on her to back off, which scared me a little. + +But I wasn't scared then. The impending press-conference, the fights with my +parents, the international attention, the sense that there was a movement that +was careening around the city like a wild pinball -- it made my skin tingle and +my blood sing. + +And she was beautiful, and smart, and clever and funny, and I was falling in +love with her. + +Her shirt slid off, her arching her back to help me get it over her shoulders. +She reached behind her and did something and her bra fell away. I stared +goggle-eyed, motionless and breathless, and then she grabbed /{my}/ shirt and +pulled it over my head, grabbing me and pulling my bare chest to hers. + +We rolled on the bed and touched each other and ground our bodies together and +groaned. She kissed all over my chest and I did the same to her. I couldn't +breathe, I couldn't think, I could only move and kiss and lick and touch. + +We dared each other to go forward. I undid her jeans. She undid mine. I lowered +her zipper, she did mine, and tugged my jeans off. I tugged off hers. A moment +later we were both naked, except for my socks, which I peeled off with my toes. + +It was then that I caught sight of the bedside clock, which had long ago rolled +onto the floor and lay there, glowing up at us. + +"Crap!" I yelped. "It starts in two minutes!" I couldn't freaking believe that +I was about to stop what I was about to stop doing, when I was about to stop +doing it. I mean, if you'd asked me, "Marcus, you are about to get laid for the +firstest time EVAR, will you stop if I let off this nuclear bomb in the same +room as you?" the answer would have been a resounding and unequivocal /{NO}/. + +And yet we stopped for this. + +She grabbed me and pulled my face to hers and kissed me until I thought I would +pass out, then we both grabbed our clothes and more or less dressed, grabbing +our keyboards and mice and heading for Patcheye Pete's. + +# + +You could easily tell who the press were: they were the noobs who played their +characters like staggering drunks, weaving back and forth and up and down, +trying to get the hang of it all, occasionally hitting the wrong key and +offering strangers all or part of their inventory, or giving them accidental +hugs and kicks. + +The Xnetters were easy to spot, too: we all played Clockwork Plunder whenever +we had some spare time (or didn't feel like doing our homework), and we had +pretty tricked-out characters with cool weapons and booby-traps on the keys +sticking out of our backs that would cream anyone who tried to snatch them and +leave us to wind down. + +When I appeared, a system status message displayed M1K3Y HAS ENTERED PATCHEYE +PETE'S -- WELCOME SWABBIE WE OFFER FAIR TRADE FOR FINE BOOTY. All the players +on the screen froze, then they crowded around me. The chat exploded. I thought +about turning on my voice-paging and grabbing a headset, but seeing how many +people were trying to talk at once, I realized how confusing that would be. +Text was much easier to follow and they couldn't misquote me (heh heh). + +I'd scouted the location before with Ange -- it was great campaigning with her, +since we could both keep each other wound up. There was a high-spot on a pile +of boxes of salt-rations that I could stand on and be seen from anywhere in the +market. + +> Good evening and thank you all for coming. My name is M1k3y and I'm not the +leader of anything. All around you are Xnetters who have as much to say about +why we're here as I do. I use the Xnet because I believe in freedom and the +Constitution of the United States of America. I use Xnet because the DHS has +turned my city into a police-state where we're all suspected terrorists. I use +Xnet because I think you can't defend freedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights. +I learned about the Constitution in a California school and I was raised to +love my country for its freedom. If I have a philosophy, it is this: + +> Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the +consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes +destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish +it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, +and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to +effect their safety and happiness. + +> I didn't write that, but I believe it. The DHS does not govern with my +consent. + +> Thank you + +I'd written this the day before, bouncing drafts back and forth with Ange. +Pasting it in only took a second, though it took everyone in the game a moment +to read it. A lot of the Xnetters cheered, big showy pirate "Hurrah"s with +raised sabers and pet parrots squawking and flying overhead. + +Gradually, the journalists digested it too. The chat was running past fast, so +fast you could barely read it, lots of Xnetters saying things like "Right on" +and "America, love it or leave it" and "DHS go home" and "America out of San +Francisco," all slogans that had been big on the Xnet blogosphere. + +> M1k3y, this is Priya Rajneesh from the BBC. You say you're not the leader of +any movement, but do you believe there is a movement? Is it called the Xnet? + +Lots of answers. Some people said there wasn't a movement, some said there was +and lots of people had ideas about what it was called: Xnet, Little Brothers, +Little Sisters, and my personal favorite, the United States of America. + +They were really cooking. I let them go, thinking of what I could say. Once I +had it, I typed, + +> I think that kind of answers your question, doesn't it? There may be one or +more movements and they may be called Xnet or not. + +> M1k3y, I'm Doug Christensen from the Washington Internet Daily. What do you +think the DHS should be doing to prevent another attack on San Francisco, if +what they're doing isn't successful. + +More chatter. Lots of people said that the terrorists and the government were +the same -- either literally, or just meaning that they were equally bad. Some +said the government knew how to catch terrorists but preferred not to because +"war presidents" got re-elected. + +> I don't know + +I typed finally. + +> I really don't. I ask myself this question a lot because I don't want to get +blown up and I don't want my city to get blown up. Here's what I've figured +out, though: if it's the DHS's job to keep us safe, they're failing. All the +crap they've done, none of it would stop the bridge from being blown up again. +Tracing us around the city? Taking away our freedom? Making us suspicious of +each other, turning us against each other? Calling dissenters traitors? The +point of terrorism is to terrify us. The DHS terrifies me. + +> I don't have any say in what the terrorists do to me, but if this is a free +country then I should be able to at least say what my own cops do to me. I +should be able to keep them from terrorizing me. + +> I know that's not a good answer. Sorry. + +> What do you mean when you say that the DHS wouldn't stop terrorists? How do +you know? + +> Who are you? + +> I'm with the Sydney Morning Herald. + +> I'm 17 years old. I'm not a straight-A student or anything. Even so, I +figured out how to make an Internet that they can't wiretap. I figured out how +to jam their person-tracking technology. I can turn innocent people into +suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. I could get metal +onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. I figured this stuff out by looking at +the web and by thinking about it. If I can do it, terrorists can do it. They +told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. Do you feel safe? + +> In Australia? Why yes I do + +The pirates all laughed. + +More journalists asked questions. Some were sympathetic, some were hostile. +When I got tired, I handed my keyboard to Ange and let her be M1k3y for a +while. It didn't really feel like M1k3y and me were the same person anymore +anyway. M1k3y was the kind of kid who talked to international journalists and +inspired a movement. Marcus got suspended from school and fought with his dad +and wondered if he was good enough for his kick-ass girlfriend. + +By 11PM I'd had enough. Besides, my parents would be expecting me home soon. I +logged out of the game and so did Ange and we lay there for a moment. I took +her hand and she squeezed hard. We hugged. + +She kissed my neck and murmured something. + +"What?" + +"I said I love you," she said. "What, you want me to send you a telegram?" + +"Wow," I said. + +"You're that surprised, huh?" + +"No. Um. It's just -- I was going to say that to you." + +"Sure you were," she said, and bit the tip of my nose. + +"It's just that I've never said it before," I said. "So I was working up to +it." + +"You still haven't said it, you know. Don't think I haven't noticed. We girls +pick upon these things." + +"I love you, Ange Carvelli," I said. + +"I love you too, Marcus Yallow." + +We kissed and nuzzled and I started to breathe hard and so did she. That's when +her mom knocked on the door. + +"Angela," she said, "I think it's time your friend went home, don't you?" + +"Yes, mother," she said, and mimed swinging an axe. As I put my socks and shoes +on, she muttered, "They'll say, that Angela, she was such a good girl, who +would have thought it, all the time she was in the back yard, helping her +mother out by sharpening that hatchet." + +I laughed. "You don't know how easy you have it. There is /{no way}/ my folks +would leave us alone in my bedroom until 11 o'clock." + +"11:45," she said, checking her clock. + +"Crap!" I yelped and tied my shoes. + +"Go," she said, "run and be free! Look both ways before crossing the road! +Write if you get work! Don't even stop for a hug! If you're not out of here by +the count of ten, there's going to be /{trouble}/, mister. One. Two. Three." + +I shut her up by leaping onto the bed, landing on her and kissing her until she +stopped trying to count. Satisfied with my victory, I pounded down the stairs, +my Xbox under my arm. + +Her mom was at the foot of the stairs. We'd only met a couple times. She looked +like an older, taller version of Ange -- Ange said her father was the short one +-- with contacts instead of glasses. She seemed to have tentatively classed me +as a good guy, and I appreciated it. + +"Good night, Mrs Carvelli," I said. + +"Good night, Mr Yallow," she said. It was one of our little rituals, ever since +I'd called her Mrs Carvelli when we first met. + +I found myself standing awkwardly by the door. + +"Yes?" she said. + +"Um," I said. "Thanks for having me over." + +"You're always welcome in our home, young man," she said. + +"And thanks for Ange," I said finally, hating how lame it sounded. But she +smiled broadly and gave me a brief hug. + +"You're very welcome," she said. + +The whole bus ride home, I thought over the press-conference, thought about +Ange naked and writhing with me on her bed, thought about her mother smiling +and showing me the door. + +My mom was waiting up for me. She asked me about the movie and I gave her the +response I'd worked out in advance, cribbing from the review it had gotten in +the /{Bay Guardian}/. + +As I fell asleep, the press-conference came back. I was really proud of it. It +had been so cool, to have all these big-shot journos show up in the game, to +have them listen to me and to have them listen to all the people who believed +in the same things as me. I dropped off with a smile on my lips. + +# + +I should have known better. + +XNET LEADER: I COULD GET METAL ONTO AN AIRPLANE + +DHS DOESN'T HAVE MY CONSENT TO GOVERN + +XNET KIDS: USA OUT OF SAN FRANCISCO + +Those were the /{good}/ headlines. Everyone sent me the articles to blog, but +it was the last thing I wanted to do. + +I'd blown it, somehow. The press had come to my press-conference and concluded +that we were terrorists or terrorist dupes. The worst was the reporter on Fox +News, who had apparently shown up anyway, and who devoted a ten-minute +commentary to us, talking about our "criminal treason." Her killer line, +repeated on every news-outlet I found, was: + +"They say they don't have a name. I've got one for them. Let's call these +spoiled children Cal-Quaeda. They do the terrorists' work on the home front. +When -- not if, but when -- California gets attacked again, these brats will be +as much to blame as the House of Saud." + +Leaders of the anti-war movement denounced us as fringe elements. One guy went +on TV to say that he believed we had been fabricated by the DHS to discredit +them. + +The DHS had their own press-conference announcing that they would double the +security in San Francisco. They held up an arphid cloner they'd found somewhere +and demonstrated it in action, using it to stage a car-theft, and warned +everyone to be on their alert for young people behaving suspiciously, +especially those whose hands were out of sight. + +They weren't kidding. I finished my Kerouac paper and started in on a paper +about the Summer of Love, the summer of 1967 when the anti-war movement and the +hippies converged on San Francisco. The guys who founded Ben and Jerry's -- old +hippies themselves -- had founded a hippie museum in the Haight, and there were +other archives and exhibits to see around town. + +But it wasn't easy getting around. By the end of the week, I was getting +frisked an average of four times a day. Cops checked my ID and questioned me +about why I was out in the street, carefully eyeballing the letter from Chavez +saying that I was suspended. + +I got lucky. No one arrested me. But the rest of the Xnet weren't so lucky. +Every night the DHS announced more arrests, "ringleaders" and "operatives" of +Xnet, people I didn't know and had never heard of, paraded on TV along with the +arphid sniffers and other devices that had been in their pockets. They +announced that the people were "naming names," compromising the "Xnet network" +and that more arrests were expected soon. The name "M1k3y" was often heard. + +Dad loved this. He and I watched the news together, him gloating, me shrinking +away, quietly freaking out. "You should see the stuff they're going to use on +these kids," Dad said. "I've seen it in action. They'll get a couple of these +kids and check out their friends lists on IM and the speed-dials on their +phones, look for names that come up over and over, look for patterns, bringing +in more kids. They're going to unravel them like an old sweater." + +I canceled Ange's dinner at our place and started spending even more time +there. Ange's little sister Tina started to call me "the house-guest," as in +"is the house-guest eating dinner with me tonight?" I liked Tina. All she cared +about was going out and partying and meeting guys, but she was funny and +utterly devoted to Ange. One night as we were doing the dishes, she dried her +hands and said, conversationally, "You know, you seem like a nice guy, Marcus. +My sister's just crazy about you and I like you too. But I have to tell you +something: if you break her heart, I will track you down and pull your scrotum +over your head. It's not a pretty sight." + +I assured her that I would sooner pull my own scrotum over my head than break +Ange's heart and she nodded. "So long as we're clear on that." + +"Your sister is a nut," I said as we lay on Ange's bed again, looking at Xnet +blogs. That is pretty much all we did: fool around and read Xnet. + +"Did she use the scrotum line on you? I hate it when she does that. She just +loves the word 'scrotum,' you know. It's nothing personal." + +I kissed her. We read some more. + +"Listen to this," she said. "Police project four to six /{hundred}/ arrests +this weekend in what they say will be the largest coordinated raid on Xnet +dissidents to date." + +I felt like throwing up. + +"We've got to stop this," I said. "You know there are people who are doing +/{more}/ jamming to show that they're not intimidated? Isn't that just +/{crazy?}/" + +"I think it's brave," she said. "We can't let them scare us into submission." + +"What? No, Ange, no. We can't let hundreds of people go to /{jail}/. You +haven't been there. I have. It's worse than you think. It's worse than you can +imagine." + +"I have a pretty fertile imagination," she said. + +"Stop it, OK? Be serious for a second. I won't do this. I won't send those +people to jail. If I do, I'm the guy that Van thinks I am." + +"Marcus, I'm being serious. You think that these people don't know they could +go to jail? They believe in the cause. You believe in it too. Give them the +credit to know what they're getting into. It's not up to you to decide what +risks they can or can't take." + +"It's my responsibility because if I tell them to stop, they'll stop." + +"I thought you weren't the leader?" + +"I'm not, of course I'm not. But I can't help it if they look to me for +guidance. And so long as they do, I have a responsibility to help them stay +safe. You see that, right?" + +"All I see is you getting ready to cut and run at the first sign of trouble. I +think you're afraid they're going to figure out who /{you}/ are. I think you're +afraid for /{you}/." + +"That's not fair," I said, sitting up, pulling away from her. + +"Really? Who's the guy who nearly had a heart attack when he thought that his +secret identity was out?" + +"That was different," I said. "This isn't about me. You know it isn't. Why are +you being like this?" + +"Why are /{you}/ like this?" she said. "Why aren't /{you}/ willing to be the +guy who was brave enough to get all this started?" + +"This isn't brave, it's suicide." + +"Cheap teenage melodrama, M1k3y." + +"Don't call me that!" + +"What, 'M1k3y'? Why not, /{M1k3y}/?" + +I put my shoes on. I picked up my bag. I walked home. + +# + +> Why I'm not jamming + +> I won't tell anyone else what to do, because I'm not anyone's leader, no +matter what Fox News thinks. + +> But I am going to tell you what /{I}/ plan on doing. If you think that's the +right thing to do, maybe you'll do it too. + +> I'm not jamming. Not this week. Maybe not next. It's not because I'm scared. +It's because I'm smart enough to know that I'm better free than in prison. They +figured out how to stop our tactic, so we need to come up with a new tactic. I +don't care what the tactic is, but I want it to work. It's /{stupid}/ to get +arrested. It's only jamming if you get away with it. + +> There's another reason not to jam. If you get caught, they might use you to +catch your friends, and their friends, and their friends. They might bust your +friends even if they're not on Xnet, because the DHS is like a maddened bull +and they don't exactly worry if they've got the right guy. + +> I'm not telling you what to do. + +> But the DHS is dumb and we're smart. Jamming proves that they can't fight +terrorism because it proves that they can't even stop a bunch of kids. If you +get caught, it makes them look like they're smarter than us. + +> THEY AREN'T SMARTER THAN US! We are smarter than them. Let's be smart. Let's +figure out how to jam them, no matter how many goons they put on the streets of +our city. + +I posted it. I went to bed. + +I missed Ange. + +# + +Ange and I didn't speak for the next four days, including the weekend, and then +it was time to go back to school. I'd almost called her a million times, +written a thousand unsent emails and IMs. + +Now I was back in Social Studies class, and Mrs Andersen greeted me with +voluble, sarcastic courtesy, asking me sweetly how my "holiday" had been. I sat +down and mumbled nothing. I could hear Charles snicker. + +She taught us a class on Manifest Destiny, the idea that the Americans were +destined to take over the whole world (or at least that's how she made it seem) +and seemed to be trying to provoke me into saying something so she could throw +me out. + +I felt the eyes of the class on me, and it reminded me of M1k3y and the people +who looked up to him. I was sick of being looked up to. I missed Ange. + +I got through the rest of the day without anything making any kind of mark on +me. I don't think I said eight words. + +Finally it was over and I hit the doors, heading for the gates and the stupid +Mission and my pointless house. + +I was barely out the gate when someone crashed into me. He was a young homeless +guy, maybe my age, maybe a little older. He wore a long, greasy overcoat, a +pair of baggy jeans, and rotting sneakers that looked like they'd been through +a wood-chipper. His long hair hung over his face, and he had a pubic beard that +straggled down his throat into the collar of a no-color knit sweater. + +I took this all in as we lay next to each other on the sidewalk, people passing +us and giving us weird looks. It seemed that he'd crashed into me while +hurrying down Valencia, bent over with the burden of a split backpack that lay +beside him on the pavement, covered in tight geometric doodles in magic-marker. + +He got to his knees and rocked back and forth, like he was drunk or had hit his +head. + +"Sorry buddy," he said. "Didn't see you. You hurt?" + +I sat up too. Nothing felt hurt. + +"Um. No, it's OK." + +He stood up and smiled. His teeth were shockingly white and straight, like an +ad for an orthodontic clinic. He held his hand out to me and his grip was +strong and firm. + +"I'm really sorry." His voice was also clear and intelligent. I'd expected him +to sound like the drunks who talked to themselves as they roamed the Mission +late at night, but he sounded like a knowledgeable bookstore clerk. + +"It's no problem," I said. + +He stuck out his hand again. + +"Zeb," he said. + +"Marcus," I said. + +"A pleasure, Marcus," he said. "Hope to run into you again sometime!" + +Laughing, he picked up his backpack, turned on his heel and hurried away. + +# + +I walked the rest of the way home in a bemused fug. Mom was at the kitchen +table and we had a little chat about nothing at all, the way we used to do, +before everything changed. + +I took the stairs up to my room and flopped down in my chair. For once, I +didn't want to login to the Xnet. I'd checked in that morning before school to +discover that my note had created a gigantic controversy among people who +agreed with me and people who were righteously pissed that I was telling them +to back off from their beloved sport. + +I had three thousand projects I'd been in the middle of when it had all +started. I was building a pinhole camera out of legos, I'd been playing with +aerial kite photography using an old digital camera with a trigger hacked out +of silly putty that was stretched out at launch and slowly snapped back to its +original shape, triggering the shutter at regular intervals. I had a vacuum +tube amp I'd been building into an ancient, rusted, dented olive-oil tin that +looked like an archaeological find -- once it was done, I'd planned to build in +a dock for my phone and a set of 5.1 surround-sound speakers out of tuna-fish +cans. + +I looked over my workbench and finally picked up the pinhole camera. +Methodically snapping legos together was just about my speed. + +I took off my watch and the chunky silver two-finger ring that showed a monkey +and a ninja squaring off to fight and dropped them into the little box I used +for all the crap I load into my pockets and around my neck before stepping out +for the day: phone, wallet, keys, wifinder, change, batteries, retractable +cables... I dumped it all out into the box, and found myself holding something +I didn't remember putting in there in the first place. + +It was a piece of paper, grey and soft as flannel, furry at the edges where it +had been torn away from some larger piece of paper. It was covered in the +tiniest, most careful handwriting I'd ever seen. I unfolded it and held it up. +The writing covered both sides, running down from the top left corner of one +side to a crabbed signature at the bottom right corner of the other side. + +The signature read, simply: ZEB. + +I picked it up and started to read. + +> Dear Marcus + +> You don't know me but I know you. For the past three months, since the Bay +Bridge was blown up, I have been imprisoned on Treasure Island. I was in the +yard on the day you talked to that Asian girl and got tackled. You were brave. +Good on you. + +> I had a burst appendix the day afterward and ended up in the infirmary. In +the next bed was a guy named Darryl. We were both in recovery for a long time +and by the time we got well, we were too much of an embarrassment to them to +let go. + +> So they decided we must really be guilty. They questioned us every day. +You've been through their questioning, I know. Imagine it for months. Darryl +and I ended up cell-mates. We knew we were bugged, so we only talked about +inconsequentialities. But at night, when we were in our cots, we would softly +tap out messages to each other in Morse code (I knew my HAM radio days would +come in useful sometime). + +> At first, their questions to us were just the same crap as ever, who did it, +how'd they do it. But after a little while, they switched to asking us about +the Xnet. Of course, we'd never heard of it. That didn't stop them asking. + +> Darryl told me that they brought him arphid cloners, Xboxes, all kinds of +technology and demanded that he tell them who used them, where they learned to +mod them. Darryl told me about your games and the things you learned. + +> Especially: The DHS asked us about our friends. Who did we know? What were +they like? Did they have political feelings? Had they been in trouble at +school? With the law? + +> We call the prison Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It's been a week since I got out and I +don't think that anyone knows that their sons and daughters are imprisoned in +the middle of the Bay. At night we could hear people laughing and partying on +the mainland. + +> I got out last week. I won't tell you how, in case this falls into the wrong +hands. Maybe others will take my route. + +> Darryl told me how to find you and made me promise to tell you what I knew +when I got back. Now that I've done that I'm out of here like last year. One +way or another, I'm leaving this country. Screw America. + +> Stay strong. They're scared of you. Kick them for me. Don't get caught. + +> Zeb + +There were tears in my eyes as I finished the note. I had a disposable lighter +somewhere on my desk that I sometimes used to melt the insulation off of wires, +and I dug it out and held it to the note. I knew I owed it to Zeb to destroy it +and make sure no one else ever saw it, in case it might lead them back to him, +wherever he was going. + +I held the flame and the note, but I couldn't do it. + +Darryl. + +With all the crap with the Xnet and Ange and the DHS, I'd almost forgotten he +existed. He'd become a ghost, like an old friend who'd moved away or gone on an +exchange program. All that time, they'd been questioning him, demanding that he +rat me out, explain the Xnet, the jammers. He'd been on Treasure Island, the +abandoned military base that was halfway along the demolished span of the Bay +Bridge. He'd been so close I could have swam to him. + +I put the lighter down and re-read the note. By the time it was done, I was +weeping, sobbing. It all came back to me, the lady with the severe haircut and +the questions she'd asked and the reek of piss and the stiffness of my pants as +the urine dried them into coarse canvas. + +"Marcus?" + +My door was ajar and my mother was standing in it, watching me with a worried +look. How long had she been there? + +I armed the tears away from my face and snorted up the snot. "Mom," I said. +"Hi." + +She came into my room and hugged me. "What is it? Do you need to talk?" + +The note lay on the table. + +"Is that from your girlfriend? Is everything all right?" + +She'd given me an out. I could just blame it all on problems with Ange and +she'd leave my room and leave me alone. I opened my mouth to do just that, and +then this came out: + +"I was in jail. After the bridge blew. I was in jail for that whole time." + +The sobs that came then didn't sound like my voice. They sounded like an animal +noise, maybe a donkey or some kind of big cat noise in the night. I sobbed so +my throat burned and ached with it, so my chest heaved. + +Mom took me in her arms, the way she used to when I was a little boy, and she +stroked my hair, and she murmured in my ear, and rocked me, and gradually, +slowly, the sobs dissipated. + +I took a deep breath and Mom got me a glass of water. I sat on the edge of my +bed and she sat in my desk chair and I told her everything. + +Everything. + +Well, most of it. + +1~ Chapter 16 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to San Francisco's Booksmith,~{ Booksmith +http://thebooksmith.booksense.com 1644 Haight St. San Francisco CA 94117 USA +1 +415 863 8688 }~ ensconced in the storied Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, just a +few doors down from the Ben and Jerry's at the exact corner of Haight and +Ashbury. The Booksmith folks really know how to run an author event -- when I +lived in San Francisco, I used to go down all the time to hear incredible +writers speak (William Gibson was unforgettable). They also produce little +baseball-card-style trading cards for each author -- I have two from my own +appearances there.] }/ + +At first Mom looked shocked, then outraged, and finally she gave up altogether +and just let her jaw hang open as I took her through the interrogation, pissing +myself, the bag over my head, Darryl. I showed her the note. + +"Why --?" + +In that single syllable, every recrimination I'd dealt myself in the night, +every moment that I'd lacked the bravery to tell the world what it was really +about, why I was really fighting, what had really inspired the Xnet. + +I sucked in a breath. + +"They told me I'd go to jail if I talked about it. Not just for a few days. +Forever. I was -- I was scared." + +Mom sat with me for a long time, not saying anything. Then, "What about +Darryl's father?" + +She might as well have stuck a knitting needle in my chest. Darryl's father. He +must have assumed that Darryl was dead, long dead. + +And wasn't he? After the DHS has held you illegally for three months, would +they ever let you go? + +But Zeb got out. Maybe Darryl would get out. Maybe me and the Xnet could help +get Darryl out. + +"I haven't told him," I said. + +Now Mom was crying. She didn't cry easily. It was a British thing. It made her +little hiccoughing sobs much worse to hear. + +"You will tell him," she managed. "You will." + +"I will." + +"But first we have to tell your father." + +# + +Dad no longer had any regular time when he came home. Between his consulting +clients -- who had lots of work now that the DHS was shopping for data-mining +startups on the peninsula -- and the long commute to Berkeley, he might get +home any time between 6PM and midnight. + +Tonight Mom called him and told him he was coming home /{right now}/. He said +something and she just repeated it: /{right now}/. + +When he got there, we had arranged ourselves in the living room with the note +between us on the coffee table. + +It was easier to tell, the second time. The secret was getting lighter. I +didn't embellish, I didn't hide anything. I came clean. + +I'd heard of coming clean before but I'd never understood what it meant until I +did it. Holding in the secret had dirtied me, soiled my spirit. It had made me +afraid and ashamed. It had made me into all the things that Ange said I was. + +Dad sat stiff as a ramrod the whole time, his face carved of stone. When I +handed him the note, he read it twice and then set it down carefully. + +He shook his head and stood up and headed for the front door. + +"Where are you going?" Mom asked, alarmed. + +"I need a walk," was all he managed to gasp, his voice breaking. + +We stared awkwardly at each other, Mom and me, and waited for him to come home. +I tried to imagine what was going on in his head. He'd been such a different +man after the bombings and I knew from Mom that what had changed him were the +days of thinking I was dead. He'd come to believe that the terrorists had +nearly killed his son and it had made him crazy. + +Crazy enough to do whatever the DHS asked, to line up like a good little sheep +and let them control him, drive him. + +Now he knew that it was the DHS that had imprisoned me, the DHS that had taken +San Francisco's children hostage in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It made perfect sense, +now that I thought of it. Of course it had been Treasure Island where I'd been +kept. Where else was a ten-minute boat-ride from San Francisco? + +When Dad came back, he looked angrier than he ever had in his life. + +"You should have told me!" he roared. + +Mom interposed herself between him and me. "You're blaming the wrong person," +she said. "It wasn't Marcus who did the kidnapping and the intimidation." + +He shook his head and stamped. "I'm not blaming Marcus. I know /{exactly}/ +who's to blame. Me. Me and the stupid DHS. Get your shoes on, grab your coats." + +"Where are we going?" + +"To see Darryl's father. Then we're going to Barbara Stratford's place." + +# + +I knew the name Barbara Stratford from somewhere, but I couldn't remember +where. I thought that maybe she was an old friend of my parents, but I couldn't +exactly place her. + +Meantime, I was headed for Darryl's father's place. I'd never really felt +comfortable around the old man, who'd been a Navy radio operator and ran his +household like a tight ship. He'd taught Darryl Morse code when he was a kid, +which I'd always thought was cool. It was one of the ways I knew that I could +trust Zeb's letter. But for every cool thing like Morse code, Darryl's father +had some crazy military discipline that seemed to be for its own sake, like +insisting on hospital corners on the beds and shaving twice a day. It drove +Darryl up the wall. + +Darryl's mother hadn't liked it much either, and had taken off back to her +family in Minnesota when Darryl was ten -- Darryl spent his summers and +Christmases there. + +I was sitting in the back of the car, and I could see the back of Dad's head as +he drove. The muscles in his neck were tense and kept jumping around as he +ground his jaws. + +Mom kept her hand on his arm, but no one was around to comfort me. If only I +could call Ange. Or Jolu. Or Van. Maybe I would when the day was done. + +"He must have buried his son in his mind," Dad said, as we whipped up through +the hairpin curves leading up Twin Peaks to the little cottage that Darryl and +his father shared. The fog was on Twin Peaks, the way it often was at night in +San Francisco, making the headlamps reflect back on us. Each time we swung +around a corner, I saw the valleys of the city laid out below us, bowls of +twinkling lights that shifted in the mist. + +"Is this the one?" + +"Yes," I said. "This is it." I hadn't been to Darryl's in months, but I'd spent +enough time here over the years to recognize it right off. + +The three of us stood around the car for a long moment, waiting to see who +would go and ring the doorbell. To my surprise, it was me. + +I rang it and we all waited in held-breath silence for a minute. I rang it +again. Darryl's father's car was in the driveway, and we'd seen a light burning +in the living room. I was about to ring a third time when the door opened. + +"Marcus?" Darryl's father wasn't anything like I remembered him. Unshaven, in a +housecoat and bare feet, with long toenails and red eyes. He'd gained weight, +and a soft extra chin wobbled beneath the firm military jaw. His thin hair was +wispy and disordered. + +"Mr Glover," I said. My parents crowded into the door behind me. + +"Hello, Ron," my mother said. + +"Ron," my father said. + +"You too? What's going on?" + +"Can we come in?" + +# + +His living room looked like one of those news-segments they show about +abandoned kids who spend a month locked in before they're rescued by the +neighbors: frozen meal boxes, empty beer cans and juice bottles, moldy cereal +bowls and piles of newspapers. There was a reek of cat piss and litter crunched +underneath our feet. Even without the cat piss, the smell was incredible, like +a bus-station toilet. + +The couch was made up with a grimy sheet and a couple of greasy pillows and the +cushions had a dented, much-slept-upon look. + +We all stood there for a long silent moment, embarrassment overwhelming every +other emotion. Darryl's father looked like he wanted to die. + +Slowly, he moved aside the sheets from the sofa and cleared the stacked, greasy +food-trays off of a couple of the chairs, carrying them into the kitchen, and, +from the sound of it, tossing them on the floor. + +We sat gingerly in the places he'd cleared, and then he came back and sat down +too. + +"I'm sorry," he said vaguely. "I don't really have any coffee to offer you. I'm +having more groceries delivered tomorrow so I'm running low --" + +"Ron," my father said. "Listen to us. We have something to tell you, and it's +not going to be easy to hear." + +He sat like a statue as I talked. He glanced down at the note, read it without +seeming to understand it, then read it again. He handed it back to me. + +He was trembling. + +"He's --" + +"Darryl is alive," I said. "Darryl is alive and being held prisoner on Treasure +Island." + +He stuffed his fist in his mouth and made a horrible groaning sound. + +"We have a friend," my father said. "She writes for the /{Bay Guardian}/. An +investigative reporter." + +That's where I knew the name from. The free weekly /{Guardian}/ often lost its +reporters to bigger daily papers and the Internet, but Barbara Stratford had +been there forever. I had a dim memory of having dinner with her when I was a +kid. + +"We're going there now," my mother said. "Will you come with us, Ron? Will you +tell her Darryl's story?" + +He put his face in his hands and breathed deeply. Dad tried to put his hand on +his shoulders, but Mr Glover shook it off violently. + +"I need to clean myself up," he said. "Give me a minute." + +Mr Glover came back downstairs a changed man. He'd shaved and gelled his hair +back, and had put on a crisp military dress uniform with a row of campaign +ribbons on the breast. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and kind of +gestured at it. + +"I don't have much clean stuff that's presentable at the moment. And this +seemed appropriate. You know, if she wanted to take pictures." + +He and Dad rode up front and I got in the back, behind him. Up close, he +smelled a little of beer, like it was coming through his pores. + +# + +It was midnight by the time we rolled into Barbara Stratford's driveway. She +lived out of town, down in Mountain View, and as we sped down the 101, none of +us said a word. The high-tech buildings alongside the highway streamed past us. + +This was a different Bay Area to the one I lived in, more like the suburban +America I sometimes saw on TV. Lots of freeways and subdivisions of identical +houses, towns where there weren't any homeless people pushing shopping carts +down the sidewalk -- there weren't even sidewalks! + +Mom had phoned Barbara Stratford while we were waiting for Mr Glover to come +downstairs. The journalist had been sleeping, but Mom had been so wound up she +forgot to be all British and embarrassed about waking her up. Instead, she just +told her, tensely, that she had something to talk about and that it had to be +in person. + +When we rolled up to Barbara Stratford's house, my first thought was of the +Brady Bunch place -- a low ranch house with a brick baffle in front of it and a +neat, perfectly square lawn. There was a kind of abstract tile pattern on the +baffle, and an old-fashioned UHF TV antenna rising from behind it. We wandered +around to the entrance and saw that there were lights on inside already. + +The writer opened the door before we had a chance to ring the bell. She was +about my parents' age, a tall thin woman with a hawk-like nose and shrewd eyes +with a lot of laugh-lines. She was wearing a pair of jeans that were hip enough +to be seen at one of the boutiques on Valencia Street, and a loose Indian +cotton blouse that hung down to her thighs. She had small round glasses that +flashed in her hallway light. + +She smiled a tight little smile at us. + +"You brought the whole clan, I see," she said. + +Mom nodded. "You'll understand why in a minute," she said. Mr Glover stepped +from behind Dad. + +"And you called in the Navy?" + +"All in good time." + +We were introduced one at a time to her. She had a firm handshake and long +fingers. + +Her place was furnished in Japanese minimalist style, just a few precisely +proportioned, low pieces of furniture, large clay pots of bamboo that brushed +the ceiling, and what looked like a large, rusted piece of a diesel engine +perched on top of a polished marble plinth. I decided I liked it. The floors +were old wood, sanded and stained, but not filled, so you could see cracks and +pits underneath the varnish. I /{really}/ liked that, especially as I walked +over it in my stocking feet. + +"I have coffee on," she said. "Who wants some?" + +We all put up our hands. I glared defiantly at my parents. + +"Right," she said. + +She disappeared into another room and came back a moment later bearing a rough +bamboo tray with a half-gallon thermos jug and six cups of precise design but +with rough, sloppy decorations. I liked those too. + +"Now," she said, once she'd poured and served. "It's very good to see you all +again. Marcus, I think the last time I saw you, you were maybe seven years old. +As I recall, you were very excited about your new video games, which you showed +me." + +I didn't remember it at all, but that sounded like what I'd been into at seven. +I guessed it was my Sega Dreamcast. + +She produced a tape-recorder and a yellow pad and a pen, and twirled the pen. +"I'm here to listen to whatever you tell me, and I can promise you that I'll +take it all in confidence. But I can't promise that I'll do anything with it, +or that it's going to get published." The way she said it made me realize that +my Mom had called in a pretty big favor getting this lady out of bed, friend or +no friend. It must be kind of a pain in the ass to be a big-shot investigative +reporter. There were probably a million people who would have liked her to take +up their cause. + +Mom nodded at me. Even though I'd told the story three times that night, I +found myself tongue-tied. This was different from telling my parents. Different +from telling Darryl's father. This -- this would start a new move in the game. + +I started slowly, and watched Barbara take notes. I drank a whole cup of coffee +just explaining what ARGing was and how I got out of school to play. Mom and +Dad and Mr Glover all listened intently to this part. I poured myself another +cup and drank it on the way to explaining how we were taken in. By the time I'd +run through the whole story, I'd drained the pot and I needed a piss like a +race-horse. + +Her bathroom was just as stark as the living-room, with a brown, organic soap +that smelled like clean mud. I came back in and found the adults quietly +watching me. + +Mr Glover told his story next. He didn't have anything to say about what had +happened, but he explained that he was a veteran and that his son was a good +kid. He talked about what it felt like to believe that his son had died, about +how his ex-wife had had a collapse when she found out and ended up in a +hospital. He cried a little, unashamed, the tears streaming down his lined face +and darkening the collar of his dress-uniform. + +When it was all done, Barbara went into a different room and came back with a +bottle of Irish whiskey. "It's a Bushmills 15 year old rum-cask aged blend," +she said, setting down four small cups. None for me. "It hasn't been sold in +ten years. I think this is probably an appropriate time to break it out." + +She poured them each a small glass of the liquor, then raised hers and sipped +at it, draining half the glass. The rest of the adults followed suit. They +drank again, and finished the glasses. She poured them new shots. + +"All right," she said. "Here's what I can tell you right now. I believe you. +Not just because I know you, Lillian. The story sounds right, and it ties in +with other rumors I've heard. But I'm not going to be able to just take your +word for it. I'm going to have to investigate every aspect of this, and every +element of your lives and stories. I need to know if there's anything you're +not telling me, anything that could be used to discredit you after this comes +to light. I need everything. It could take weeks before I'm ready to publish. + +"You also need to think about your safety and this Darryl's safety. If he's +really an 'un-person' then bringing pressure to bear on the DHS could cause +them to move him somewhere much further away. Think Syria. They could also do +something much worse." She let that hang in the air. I knew she meant that they +might kill him. + +"I'm going to take this letter and scan it now. I want pictures of the two of +you, now and later -- we can send out a photographer, but I want to document +this as thoroughly as I can tonight, too." + +I went with her into her office to do the scan. I'd expected a stylish, +low-powered computer that fit in with her decor, but instead, her +spare-bedroom/office was crammed with top-of-the-line PCs, big flat-panel +monitors, and a scanner big enough to lay a whole sheet of newsprint on. She +was fast with it all, too. I noted with some approval that she was running +ParanoidLinux. This lady took her job seriously. + +The computers' fans set up an effective white-noise shield, but even so, I +closed the door and moved in close to her. + +"Um, Barbara?" + +"Yes?" + +"About what you said, about what might be used to discredit me?" + +"Yes?" + +"What I tell you, you can't be forced to tell anyone else, right?" + +"In theory. Let me put it this way. I've gone to jail twice rather than rat out +a source." + +"OK, OK. Good. Wow. Jail. Wow. OK." I took a deep breath. "You've heard of +Xnet? Of M1k3y?" + +"Yes?" + +"I'm M1k3y." + +"Oh," she said. She worked the scanner and flipped the note over to get the +reverse. She was scanning at some unbelievable resolution, 10,000 dots per inch +or higher, and on-screen it was like the output of an electron-tunneling +microscope. + +"Well, that does put a different complexion on this." + +"Yeah," I said. "I guess it does." + +"Your parents don't know." + +"Nope. And I don't know if I want them to." + +"That's something you're going to have to work out. I need to think about this. +Can you come by my office? I'd like to talk to you about what this means, +exactly." + +"Do you have an Xbox Universal? I could bring over an installer." + +"Yes, I'm sure that can be arranged. When you come by, tell the receptionist +that you're Mr Brown, to see me. They know what that means. No note will be +taken of you coming, and all the security camera footage for the day will be +automatically scrubbed and the cameras deactivated until you leave." + +"Wow," I said. "You think like I do." + +She smiled and socked me in the shoulder. "Kiddo, I've been at this game for a +hell of a long time. So far, I've managed to spend more time free than behind +bars. Paranoia is my friend." + +# + +I was like a zombie the next day in school. I'd totaled about three hours of +sleep, and even three cups of the Turk's caffeine mud failed to jump-start my +brain. The problem with caffeine is that it's too easy to get acclimated to it, +so you have to take higher and higher doses just to get above normal. + +I'd spent the night thinking over what I had to do. It was like running though +a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, every one leading to the same dead +end. When I went to Barbara, it would be over for me. That was the outcome, no +matter how I thought about it. + +By the time the school day was over, all I wanted was to go home and crawl into +bed. But I had an appointment at the /{Bay Guardian}/, down on the waterfront. +I kept my eyes on my feet as I wobbled out the gate, and as I turned into 24th +Street, another pair of feet fell into step with me. I recognized the shoes and +stopped. + +"Ange?" + +She looked like I felt. Sleep-deprived and raccoon-eyed, with sad brackets in +the corners of her mouth. + +"Hi there," she said. "Surprise. I gave myself French Leave from school. I +couldn't concentrate anyway." + +"Um," I said. + +"Shut up and give me a hug, you idiot." + +I did. It felt good. Better than good. It felt like I'd amputated part of +myself and it had been reattached. + +"I love you, Marcus Yallow." + +"I love you, Angela Carvelli." + +"OK," she said breaking it off. "I liked your post about why you're not +jamming. I can respect it. What have you done about finding a way to jam them +without getting caught?" + +"I'm on my way to meet an investigative journalist who's going to publish a +story about how I got sent to jail, how I started Xnet, and how Darryl is being +illegally held by the DHS at a secret prison on Treasure Island." + +"Oh." She looked around for a moment. "Couldn't you think of anything, you +know, ambitious?" + +"Want to come?" + +"I am coming, yes. And I would like you to explain this in detail if you don't +mind." + +After all the re-tellings, this one, told as we walked to Potrero Avenue and +down to 15th Street, was the easiest. She held my hand and squeezed it often. + +We took the stairs up to the /{Bay Guardian}/'s offices two at a time. My heart +was pounding. I got to the reception desk and told the bored girl behind it, +"I'm here to see Barbara Stratford. My name is Mr Green." + +"I think you mean Mr Brown?" + +"Yeah," I said, and blushed. "Mr Brown." + +She did something at her computer, then said, "Have a seat. Barbara will be out +in a minute. Can I get you anything?" + +"Coffee," we both said in unison. Another reason to love Ange: we were addicted +to the same drug. + +The receptionist -- a pretty latina woman only a few years older than us, +dressed in Gap styles so old they were actually kind of hipster-retro -- nodded +and stepped out and came back with a couple of cups bearing the newspaper's +masthead. + +We sipped in silence, watching visitors and reporters come and go. Finally, +Barbara came to get us. She was wearing practically the same thing as the night +before. It suited her. She quirked an eyebrow at me when she saw that I'd +brought a date. + +"Hello," I said. "Um, this is --" + +"Ms Brown," Ange said, extending a hand. Oh, yeah, right, our identities were +supposed to be a secret. "I work with Mr Green." She elbowed me lightly. + +"Let's go then," Barbara said, and led us back to a board-room with long glass +walls with their blinds drawn shut. She set down a tray of Whole Foods organic +Oreo clones, a digital recorder, and another yellow pad. + +"Do you want to record this too?" she asked. + +Hadn't actually thought of that. I could see why it would be useful if I wanted +to dispute what Barbara printed, though. Still, if I couldn't trust her to do +right by me, I was doomed anyway. + +"No, that's OK," I said. + +"Right, let's go. Young lady, my name is Barbara Stratford and I'm an +investigative reporter. I gather you know why I'm here, and I'm curious to know +why you're here." + +"I work with Marcus on the Xnet," she said. "Do you need to know my name?" + +"Not right now, I don't," Barbara said. "You can be anonymous if you'd like. +Marcus, I asked you to tell me this story because I need to know how it plays +with the story you told me about your friend Darryl and the note you showed me. +I can see how it would be a good adjunct; I could pitch this as the origin of +the Xnet. 'They made an enemy they'll never forget,' that sort of thing. But to +be honest, I'd rather not have to tell that story if I don't have to. + +"I'd rather have a nice clean tale about the secret prison on our doorstep, +without having to argue about whether the prisoners there are the sort of +people likely to walk out the doors and establish an underground movement bent +on destabilizing the federal government. I'm sure you can understand that." + +I did. If the Xnet was part of the story, some people would say, see, they need +to put guys like that in jail or they'll start a riot. + +"This is your show," I said. "I think you need to tell the world about Darryl. +When you do that, it's going to tell the DHS that I've gone public and they're +going to go after me. Maybe they'll figure out then that I'm involved with the +Xnet. Maybe they'll connect me to M1k3y. I guess what I'm saying is, once you +publish about Darryl, it's all over for me no matter what. I've made my peace +with that." + +"As good be hanged for a sheep as a lamb," she said. "Right. Well, that's +settled. I want the two of you to tell me everything you can about the founding +and operation of the Xnet, and then I want a demonstration. What do you use it +for? Who else uses it? How did it spread? Who wrote the software? Everything." + +"This'll take a while," Ange said. + +"I've got a while," Barbara said. She drank some coffee and ate a fake Oreo. +"This could be the most important story of the War on Terror. This could be the +story that topples the government. When you have a story like this, you take it +very carefully." + +1~ Chapter 17 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Waterstone's,~{ Waterstones +http://www.waterstones.com }~ the national UK bookselling chain. Waterstone's +is a chain of stores, but each one has the feel of a great independent store, +with tons of personality, great stock (especially audiobooks!), and +knowledgeable staff.] }/ + +So we told her. I found it really fun, actually. Teaching people how to use +technology is always exciting. It's so cool to watch people figure out how the +technology around them can be used to make their lives better. Ange was great +too -- we made an excellent team. We'd trade off explaining how it all worked. +Barbara was pretty good at this stuff to begin with, of course. + +It turned out that she'd covered the crypto wars, the period in the early +nineties when civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation +fought for the right of Americans to use strong crypto. I dimly knew about that +period, but Barbara explained it in a way that made me get goose-pimples. + +It's unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government classed +crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export or use it on +national security grounds. Get that? We used to have illegal /{math}/ in this +country. + +The National Security Agency were the real movers behind the ban. They had a +crypto standard that they said was strong enough for bankers and their +customers to use, but not so strong that the mafia would be able to keep its +books secret from them. The standard, DES-56, was said to be practically +unbreakable. Then one of EFF's millionaire co-founders built a $250,000 DES-56 +cracker that could break the cipher in two hours. + +Still the NSA argued that it should be able to keep American citizens from +possessing secrets it couldn't pry into. Then EFF dealt its death-blow. In +1995, they represented a Berkeley mathematics grad student called Dan Bernstein +in court. Bernstein had written a crypto tutorial that contained computer code +that could be used to make a cipher stronger than DES-56. Millions of times +stronger. As far as the NSA was concerned, that made his article into a weapon, +and therefore unpublishable. + +Well, it may be hard to get a judge to understand crypto and what it means, but +it turned out that the average Appeals Court judge isn't real enthusiastic +about telling grad students what kind of articles they're allowed to write. The +crypto wars ended with a victory for the good guys when the 9th Circuit +Appellate Division Court ruled that code was a form of expression protected +under the First Amendment -- "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom +of speech." If you've ever bought something on the Internet, or sent a secret +message, or checked your bank-balance, you used crypto that EFF legalized. Good +thing, too: the NSA just isn't that smart. Anything they know how to crack, you +can be sure that terrorists and mobsters can get around too. + +Barbara had been one of the reporters who'd made her reputation from covering +the issue. She'd cut her teeth covering the tail end of the civil rights +movement in San Francisco, and she recognized the similarity between the fight +for the Constitution in the real world and the fight in cyberspace. + +So she got it. I don't think I could have explained this stuff to my parents, +but with Barbara it was easy. She asked smart questions about our cryptographic +protocols and security procedures, sometimes asking stuff I didn't know the +answer to -- sometimes pointing out potential breaks in our procedure. + +We plugged in the Xbox and got it online. There were four open WiFi nodes +visible from the board room and I told it to change between them at random +intervals. She got this too -- once you were actually plugged into the Xnet, it +was just like being on the Internet, only some stuff was a little slower, and +it was all anonymous and unsniffable. + +"So now what?" I said as we wound down. I'd talked myself dry and I had a +terrible acid feeling from the coffee. Besides, Ange kept squeezing my hand +under the table in a way that made me want to break away and find somewhere +private to finish making up for our first fight. + +"Now I do journalism. You go away and I research all the things you've told me +and try to confirm them to the extent that I can. I'll let you see what I'm +going to publish and I'll let you know when it's going to go live. I'd prefer +that you /{not}/ talk about this with anyone else now, because I want the scoop +and because I want to make sure that I get the story before it goes all muddy +from press speculation and DHS spin. + +"I /{will}/ have to call the DHS for comment before I go to press, but I'll do +that in a way that protects you to whatever extent possible. I'll also be sure +to let you know before that happens. + +"One thing I need to be clear on: this isn't your story anymore. It's mine. You +were very generous to give it to me and I'll try to repay the gift, but you +don't get the right to edit anything out, to change it, or to stop me. This is +now in motion and it won't stop. Do you understand that?" + +I hadn't thought about it in those terms but once she said it, it was obvious. +It meant that I had launched and I wouldn't be able to recall the rocket. It +was going to fall where it was aimed, or it would go off course, but it was in +the air and couldn't be changed now. Sometime in the near future, I would stop +being Marcus -- I would be a public figure. I'd be the guy who blew the whistle +on the DHS. + +I'd be a dead man walking. + +I guess Ange was thinking along the same lines, because she'd gone a color +between white and green. + +"Let's get out of here," she said. + +# + +Ange's mom and sister were out again, which made it easy to decide where we +were going for the evening. It was past supper time, but my parents had known +that I was meeting with Barbara and wouldn't give me any grief if I came home +late. + +When we got to Ange's, I had no urge to plug in my Xbox. I had had all the Xnet +I could handle for one day. All I could think about was Ange, Ange, Ange. +Living without Ange. Knowing Ange was angry with me. Ange never going to talk +to me again. Ange never going to kiss me again. + +She'd been thinking the same. I could see it in her eyes as we shut the door to +her bedroom and looked at each other. I was hungry for her, like you'd hunger +for dinner after not eating for days. Like you'd thirst for a glass of water +after playing soccer for three hours straight. + +Like none of that. It was more. It was something I'd never felt before. I +wanted to eat her whole, devour her. + +Up until now, she'd been the sexual one in our relationship. I'd let her set +and control the pace. It was amazingly erotic to have /{her}/ grab /{me}/ and +take off my shirt, drag my face to hers. + +But tonight I couldn't hold back. I wouldn't hold back. + +The door clicked shut and I reached for the hem of her t-shirt and yanked, +barely giving her time to lift her arms as I pulled it over her head. I tore my +own shirt over my head, listening to the cotton crackle as the stitches came +loose. + +Her eyes were shining, her mouth open, her breathing fast and shallow. Mine was +too, my breath and my heart and my blood all roaring in my ears. + +I took off the rest of our clothes with equal zest, throwing them into the +piles of dirty and clean laundry on the floor. There were books and papers all +over the bed and I swept them aside. We landed on the unmade bedclothes a +second later, arms around one another, squeezing like we would pull ourselves +right through one another. She moaned into my mouth and I made the sound back, +and I felt her voice buzz in my vocal chords, a feeling more intimate than +anything I'd ever felt before. + +She broke away and reached for the bedstand. She yanked open the drawer and +threw a white pharmacy bag on the bed before me. I looked inside. Condoms. +Trojans. One dozen spermicidal. Still sealed. I smiled at her and she smiled +back and I opened the box. + +# + +I'd thought about what it would be like for years. A hundred times a day I'd +imagined it. Some days, I'd thought of practically nothing else. + +It was nothing like I expected. Parts of it were better. Parts of it were lots +worse. While it was going on, it felt like an eternity. Afterwards, it seemed +to be over in the blink of an eye. + +Afterwards, I felt the same. But I also felt different. Something had changed +between us. + +It was weird. We were both shy as we put our clothes on and puttered around the +room, looking away, not meeting each other's eyes. I wrapped the condom in a +kleenex from a box beside the bed and took it into the bathroom and wound it +with toilet paper and stuck it deep into the trash-can. + +When I came back in, Ange was sitting up in bed and playing with her Xbox. I +sat down carefully beside her and took her hand. She turned to face me and +smiled. We were both worn out, trembly. + +"Thanks," I said. + +She didn't say anything. She turned her face to me. She was grinning hugely, +but fat tears were rolling down her cheeks. + +I hugged her and she grabbed tightly onto me. "You're a good man, Marcus +Yallow," she whispered. "Thank you." + +I didn't know what to say, but I squeezed her back. Finally, we parted. She +wasn't crying any more, but she was still smiling. + +She pointed at my Xbox, on the floor beside the bed. I took the hint. I picked +it up and plugged it in and logged in. + +Same old same old. Lots of email. The new posts on the blogs I read streamed +in. Spam. God did I get a lot of spam. My Swedish mailbox was repeatedly +"joe-jobbed" -- used as the return address for spams sent to hundreds of +millions of Internet accounts, so that all the bounces and angry messages came +back to me. I didn't know who was behind it. Maybe the DHS trying to overwhelm +my mailbox. Maybe it was just people pranking. The Pirate Party had pretty good +filters, though, and they gave anyone who wanted it 500 gigabytes of email +storage, so I wasn't likely to be drowned any time soon. + +I filtered it all out, hammering on the delete key. I had a separate mailbox +for stuff that came in encrypted to my public key, since that was likely to be +Xnet-related and possibly sensitive. Spammers hadn't figured out that using +public keys would make their junk mail more plausible yet, so for now this +worked well. + +There were a couple dozen encrypted messages from people in the web of trust. I +skimmed them -- links to videos and pics of new abuses from the DHS, horror +stories about near-escapes, rants about stuff I'd blogged. The usual. + +Then I came to one that was only encrypted to my public key. That meant that no +one else could read it, but I had no idea who had written it. It said it came +from Masha, which could either be a handle or a name -- I couldn't tell which. + +> M1k3y + +> You don't know me, but I know you. + +> I was arrested the day that the bridge blew. They questioned me. They decided +I was innocent. They offered me a job: help them hunt down the terrorists who'd +killed my neighbors. + +> It sounded like a good deal at the time. Little did I realize that my actual +job would turn out to be spying on kids who resented their city being turned +into a police state. + +> I infiltrated Xnet on the day it launched. I am in your web of trust. If I +wanted to spill my identity, I could send you email from an address you'd +trust. Three addresses, actually. I'm totally inside your network as only +another 17-year-old can be. Some of the email you've gotten has been carefully +chosen misinformation from me and my handlers. + +> They don't know who you are, but they're coming close. They continue to turn +people, to compromise them. They mine the social network sites and use threats +to turn kids into informants. There are hundreds of people working for the DHS +on Xnet right now. I have their names, handles and keys. Private and public. + +> Within days of the Xnet launch, we went to work on exploiting ParanoidLinux. +The exploits so far have been small and insubstantial, but a break is +inevitable. Once we have a zero-day break, you're dead. + +> I think it's safe to say that if my handlers knew that I was typing this, my +ass would be stuck in Gitmo-by-the-Bay until I was an old woman. + +> Even if they don't break ParanoidLinux, there are poisoned ParanoidXbox +distros floating around. They don't match the checksums, but how many people +look at the checksums? Besides me and you? Plenty of kids are already dead, +though they don't know it. + +> All that remains is for my handlers to figure out the best time to bust you +to make the biggest impact in the media. That time will be sooner, not later. +Believe. + +> You're probably wondering why I'm telling you this. + +> I am too. + +> Here's where I come from. I signed up to fight terrorists. Instead, I'm +spying on Americans who believe things that the DHS doesn't like. Not people +who plan on blowing up bridges, but protestors. I can't do it anymore. + +> But neither can you, whether or not you know it. Like I say, it's only a +matter of time until you're in chains on Treasure Island. That's not if, that's +when. + +> So I'm through here. Down in Los Angeles, there are some people. They say +they can keep me safe if I want to get out. + +> I want to get out. + +> I will take you with me, if you want to come. Better to be a fighter than a +martyr. If you come with me, we can figure out how to win together. I'm as +smart as you. Believe. + +> What do you say? + +> Here's my public key. + +> Masha + +# + +When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. + +Ever hear that rhyme? It's not good advice, but at least it's easy to follow. I +leapt off the bed and paced back and forth. My heart thudded and my blood sang +in a cruel parody of the way I'd felt when we got home. This wasn't sexual +excitement, it was raw terror. + +"What?" Ange said. "What?" + +I pointed at the screen on my side of the bed. She rolled over and grabbed my +keyboard and scribed on the touchpad with her fingertip. She read in silence. + +I paced. + +"This has to be lies," she said. "The DHS is playing games with your head." + +I looked at her. She was biting her lip. She didn't look like she believed it. + +"You think?" + +"Sure. They can't beat you, so they're coming after you using Xnet." + +"Yeah." + +I sat back down on the bed. I was breathing fast again. + +"Chill out," she said. "It's just head-games. Here." + +She never took my keyboard from me before, but now there was a new intimacy +between us. She hit reply and typed, + +> Nice try. + +She was writing as M1k3y now, too. We were together in a way that was different +from before. + +"Go ahead and sign it. We'll see what she says." + +I didn't know if that was the best idea, but I didn't have any better ones. I +signed it and encrypted it with my private key and the public key Masha had +provided. + +The reply was instant. + +> I thought you'd say something like that. + +> Here's a hack you haven't thought of. I can anonymously tunnel video over +DNS. Here are some links to clips you might want to look at before you decide +I'm full of it. These people are all recording each other, all the time, as +insurance against a back-stab. It's pretty easy to snoop off them as they snoop +on each other. + +> Masha + +Attached was source-code for a little program that appeared to do exactly what +Masha claimed: pull video over the Domain Name Service protocol. + +Let me back up a moment here and explain something. At the end of the day, +every Internet protocol is just a sequence of text sent back and forth in a +prescribed order. It's kind of like getting a truck and putting a car in it, +then putting a motorcycle in the car's trunk, then attaching a bicycle to the +back of the motorcycle, then hanging a pair of Rollerblades on the back of the +bike. Except that then, if you want, you can attach the truck to the +Rollerblades. + +For example, take Simple Mail Transport Protocol, or SMTP, which is used for +sending email. + +Here's a sample conversation between me and my mail server, sending a message +to myself: + +> HELO littlebrother.com.se + +250 mail.pirateparty.org.se Hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to meet you + +> MAIL FROM:m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se + +250 2.1.0 m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se... Sender ok + +> RCPT TO:m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se + +250 2.1.5 m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se... Recipient ok + +> DATA + +354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself + +> When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout + +> . + +250 2.0.0 k5SMW0xQ006174 Message accepted for delivery + +QUIT + +221 2.0.0 mail.pirateparty.org.se closing connection + +Connection closed by foreign host. + +This conversation's grammar was defined in 1982 by Jon Postel, one of the +Internet's heroic forefathers, who used to literally run the most important +servers on the net under his desk at the University of Southern California, +back in the paleolithic era. + +Now, imagine that you hooked up a mail-server to an IM session. You could send +an IM to the server that said "HELO littlebrother.com.se" and it would reply +with "250 mail.pirateparty.org.se Hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to +meet you." In other words, you could have the same conversation over IM as you +do over SMTP. With the right tweaks, the whole mail-server business could take +place inside of a chat. Or a web-session. Or anything else. + +This is called "tunneling." You put the SMTP inside a chat "tunnel." You could +then put the chat back into an SMTP tunnel if you wanted to be really weird, +tunneling the tunnel in another tunnel. + +In fact, every Internet protocol is susceptible to this process. It's cool, +because it means that if you're on a network with only Web access, you can +tunnel your mail over it. You can tunnel your favorite P2P over it. You can +even tunnel Xnet -- which itself is a tunnel for dozens of protocols -- over +it. + +Domain Name Service is an interesting and ancient Internet protocol, dating +back to 1983. It's the way that your computer converts a computer's name -- +like pirateparty.org.se -- to the IP number that computers actually use to talk +to each other over the net, like 204.11.50.136. It generally works like magic, +even though it's got millions of moving parts -- every ISP runs a DNS server, +as do most governments and lots of private operators. These DNS boxes all talk +to each other all the time, making and filling requests to each other so no +matter how obscure the name is you feed to your computer, it will be able to +turn it into a number. + +Before DNS, there was the HOSTS file. Believe it or not, this was a single +document that listed the name and address of /{every single computer}/ +connected to the Internet. Every computer had a copy of it. This file was +eventually too big to move around, so DNS was invented, and ran on a server +that used to live under Jon Postel's desk. If the cleaners knocked out the +plug, the entire Internet lost its ability to find itself. Seriously. + +The thing about DNS today is that it's everywhere. Every network has a DNS +server living on it, and all of those servers are configured to talk to each +other and to random people all over the Internet. + +What Masha had done was figure out a way to tunnel a video-streaming system +over DNS. She was breaking up the video into billions of pieces and hiding each +of them in a normal message to a DNS server. By running her code, I was able to +pull the video from all those DNS servers, all over the Internet, at incredible +speed. It must have looked bizarre on the network histograms, like I was +looking up the address of every computer in the world. + +But it had two advantages I appreciated at once: I was able to get the video +with blinding speed -- as soon as I clicked the first link, I started to +receive full-screen pictures, without any jitter or stuttering -- and I had no +idea where it was hosted. It was totally anonymous. + +At first I didn't even clock the content of the video. I was totally floored by +the cleverness of this hack. Streaming video from DNS? That was so smart and +weird, it was practically /{perverted}/. + +Gradually, what I was seeing began to sink in. + +It was a board-room table in a small room with a mirror down one wall. I knew +that room. I'd sat in that room, while Severe-Haircut woman had made me speak +my password aloud. There were five comfortable chairs around the table, each +with a comfortable person, all in DHS uniform. I recognized Major General +Graeme Sutherland, the DHS Bay Area commander, along with Severe Haircut. The +others were new to me. They all watched a video screen at the end of the table, +on which there was an infinitely more familiar face. + +Kurt Rooney was known nationally as the President's chief strategist, the man +who returned the party for its third term, and who was steaming towards a +fourth. They called him "Ruthless" and I'd seen a news report once about how +tight a rein he kept his staffers on, calling them, IMing them, watching their +every motion, controlling every step. He was old, with a lined face and pale +gray eyes and a flat nose with broad, flared nostrils and thin lips, a man who +looked like he was smelling something bad all the time. + +He was the man on the screen. He was talking, and everyone else was focused on +his screen, everyone taking notes as fast as they could type, trying to look +smart. + +"-- say that they're angry with authority, but we need to show the country that +it's terrorists, not the government, that they need to blame. Do you understand +me? The nation does not love that city. As far as they're concerned, it is a +Sodom and Gomorrah of fags and atheists who deserve to rot in hell. The only +reason the country cares what they think in San Francisco is that they had the +good fortune to have been blown to hell by some Islamic terrorists. + +"These Xnet children are getting to the point where they might start to be +useful to us. The more radical they get, the more the rest of the nation +understands that there are threats everywhere." + +His audience finished typing. + +"We can control that, I think," Severe Haircut Lady said. "Our people in the +Xnet have built up a lot of influence. The Manchurian Bloggers are running as +many as fifty blogs each, flooding the chat channels, linking to each other, +mostly just taking the party line set by this M1k3y. But they've already shown +that they can provoke radical action, even when M1k3y is putting the brakes +on." + +Major General Sutherland nodded. "We have been planning to leave them +underground until about a month before the midterms." I guessed that meant the +mid-term elections, not my exams. "That's per the original plan. But it sounds +like --" + +"We've got another plan for the midterms," Rooney said. "Need-to-know, of +course, but you should all probably not plan on traveling for the month before. +Cut the Xnet loose now, as soon as you can. So long as they're moderates, +they're a liability. Keep them radical." + +The video cut off. + +Ange and I sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the screen. Ange reached out +and started the video again. We watched it. It was worse the second time. + +I tossed the keyboard aside and got up. + +"I am /{so sick}/ of being scared," I said. "Let's take this to Barbara and +have her publish it all. Put it all on the net. Let them take me away. At least +I'll know what's going to happen then. At least then I'll have a little +/{certainty}/ in my life." + +Ange grabbed me and hugged me, soothed me. "I know baby, I know. It's all +terrible. But you're focusing on the bad stuff and ignoring the good stuff. +You've created a movement. You've outflanked the jerks in the White House, the +crooks in DHS uniforms. You've put yourself in a position where you could be +responsible for blowing the lid off of the entire rotten DHS thing. + +"Sure they're out to get you. Course they are. Have you ever doubted it for a +moment? I always figured they were. But Marcus, /{they don't know who you +are}/. Think about that. All those people, money, guns and spies, and you, a +seventeen year old high school kid -- you're still beating them. They don't +know about Barbara. They don't know about Zeb. You've jammed them in the +streets of San Francisco and humiliated them before the world. So stop moping, +all right? You're winning." + +"They're coming for me, though. You see that. They're going to put me in jail +forever. Not even jail. I'll just disappear, like Darryl. Maybe worse. Maybe +Syria. Why leave me in San Francisco? I'm a liability as long as I'm in the +USA." + +She sat down on the bed with me. + +"Yeah," she said. "That." + +"That." + +"Well, you know what you have to do, right?" + +"What?" She looked pointedly at my keyboard. I could see the tears rolling down +her cheeks. "No! You're out of your mind. You think I'm going to run off with +some nut off the Internet? Some spy?" + +"You got a better idea?" + +I kicked a pile of her laundry into the air. "Whatever. Fine. I'll talk to her +some more." + +"You talk to her," Ange said. "You tell her you and your girlfriend are getting +out." + +"What?" + +"Shut up, dickhead. You think you're in danger? I'm in just as much danger, +Marcus. It's called guilt by association. When you go, I go." She had her jaw +thrust out at a mutinous angle. "You and I -- we're together now. You have to +understand that." + +We sat down on the bed together. + +"Unless you don't want me," she said, finally, in a small voice. + +"You're kidding me, right?" + +"Do I look like I'm kidding?" + +"There's no way I would voluntarily go without you, Ange. I could never have +asked you to come, but I'm ecstatic that you offered." + +She smiled and tossed me my keyboard. + +"Email this Masha creature. Let's see what this chick can do for us." + +I emailed her, encrypting the message, waiting for a reply. Ange nuzzled me a +little and I kissed her and we necked. Something about the danger and the pact +to go together -- it made me forget the awkwardness of having sex, made me +freaking horny as hell. + +We were half naked again when Masha's email arrived. + +> Two of you? Jesus, like it won't be hard enough already. + +> I don't get to leave except to do field intelligence after a big Xnet hit. +You get me? The handlers watch my every move, but I go off the leash when +something big happens with Xnetters. I get sent into the field then. + +> You do something big. I get sent to it. I get us both out. All three of us, +if you insist. + +> Make it fast, though. I can't send you a lot of email, understand? They watch +me. They're closing in on you. You don't have a lot of time. Weeks? Maybe just +days. + +> I need you to get me out. That's why I'm doing this, in case you're +wondering. I can't escape on my own. I need a big Xnet distraction. That's your +department. Don't fail me, M1k3y, or we're both dead. Your girlie too. + +> Masha + +My phone rang, making us both jump. It was my mom wanting to know when I was +coming home. I told her I was on my way. She didn't mention Barbara. We'd +agreed that we wouldn't talk about any of this stuff on the phone. That was my +dad's idea. He could be as paranoid as me. + +"I have to go," I said. + +"Our parents will be --" + +"I know," I said. "I saw what happened to my parents when they thought I was +dead. Knowing that I'm a fugitive isn't going to be much better. But they'd +rather I be a fugitive than a prisoner. That's what I think. Anyway, once we +disappear, Barbara can publish without worrying about getting us into trouble." + +We kissed at the door of her room. Not one of the hot, sloppy numbers we +usually did when parting ways. A sweet kiss this time. A slow kiss. A goodbye +kind of kiss. + +# + +BART rides are introspective. When the train rocks back and forth and you try +not to make eye contact with the other riders and you try not to read the ads +for plastic surgery, bail bondsmen and AIDS testing, when you try to ignore the +graffiti and not look too closely at the stuff in the carpeting. That's when +your mind starts to really churn and churn. + +You rock back and forth and your mind goes over all the things you've +overlooked, plays back all the movies of your life where you're no hero, where +you're a chump or a sucker. + +Your brain comes up with theories like this one: + +/{If the DHS wanted to catch M1k3y, what better way than to lure him into the +open, panic him into leading some kind of big, public Xnet event? Wouldn't that +be worth the chance of a compromising video leaking?}/ + +Your brain comes up with stuff like that even when the train ride only lasts +two or three stops. When you get off, and you start moving, the blood gets +running and sometimes your brain helps you out again. + +Sometimes your brain gives you solutions in addition to problems. + +1~ Chapter 18 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Vancouver's multilingual Sophia Books,~{ +Sophia Books http://www.sophiabooks.com/ 450 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC +Canada V6B1L1 +1 604 684 0484 }~ a diverse and exciting store filled with the +best of the strange and exciting pop culture worlds of many lands. Sophia was +around the corner from my hotel when I went to Van to give a talk at Simon +Fraser University, and the Sophia folks emailed me in advance to ask me to drop +in and sign their stock while I was in the neighborhood. When I got there, I +discovered a treasure-trove of never-before-seen works in a dizzying array of +languages, from graphic novels to thick academic treatises, presided over by +good-natured (even slapstick) staff who so palpably enjoyed their jobs that it +spread to every customer who stepped through the door.] }/ + +There was a time when my favorite thing in the world was putting on a cape and +hanging out in hotels, pretending to be an invisible vampire whom everyone +stared at. + +It's complicated, and not nearly as weird as it sounds. The Live Action Role +Playing scene combines the best aspects of D&D with drama club with going to +sci-fi cons. + +I understand that this might not make it sound as appealing to you as it was to +me when I was 14. + +The best games were the ones at the Scout Camps out of town: a hundred +teenagers, boys and girls, fighting the Friday night traffic, swapping stories, +playing handheld games, showing off for hours. Then debarking to stand in the +grass before a group of older men and women in bad-ass, home-made armor, dented +and scarred, like armor must have been in the old days, not like it's portrayed +in the movies, but like a soldier's uniform after a month in the bush. + +These people were nominally paid to run the games, but you didn't get the job +unless you were the kind of person who'd do it for free. They'd have already +divided us into teams based on the questionnaires we'd filled in beforehand, +and we'd get our team assignments then, like being called up for baseball +sides. + +Then you'd get your briefing packages. These were like the briefings the spies +get in the movies: here's your identity, here's your mission, here's the +secrets you know about the group. + +From there, it was time for dinner: roaring fires, meat popping on spits, tofu +sizzling on skillets (it's northern California, a vegetarian option is not +optional), and a style of eating and drinking that can only be described as +quaffing. + +Already, the keen kids would be getting into character. My first game, I was a +wizard. I had a bag of beanbags that represented spells -- when I threw one, I +would shout the name of the spell I was casting -- fireball, magic missile, +cone of light -- and the player or "monster" I threw it at would keel over if I +connected. Or not -- sometimes we had to call in a ref to mediate, but for the +most part, we were all pretty good about playing fair. No one liked a dice +lawyer. + +By bedtime, we were all in character. At 14, I wasn't super-sure what a wizard +was supposed to sound like, but I could take my cues from the movies and +novels. I spoke in slow, measured tones, keeping my face composed in a suitably +mystical expression, and thinking mystical thoughts. + +The mission was complicated, retrieving a sacred relic that had been stolen by +an ogre who was bent on subjugating the people of the land to his will. It +didn't really matter a whole lot. What mattered was that I had a private +mission, to capture a certain kind of imp to serve as my familiar, and that I +had a secret nemesis, another player on the team who had taken part in a raid +that killed my family when I was a boy, a player who didn't know that I'd come +back, bent on revenge. Somewhere, of course, there was another player with a +similar grudge against me, so that even as I was enjoying the camaraderie of +the team, I'd always have to keep an eye open for a knife in the back, poison +in the food. + +For the next two days, we played it out. There were parts of the weekend that +were like hide-and-seek, some that were like wilderness survival exercises, +some that were like solving crossword puzzles. The game-masters had done a +great job. And you really got to be friends with the other people on the +mission. Darryl was the target of my first murder, and I put my back into it, +even though he was my pal. Nice guy. Shame I'd have to kill him. + +I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a band of +orcs, playing rock-papers-scissors with each orc to determine who would prevail +in combat. This is a lot more exciting than it sounds. + +It was like summer camp for drama geeks. We talked until late at night in +tents, looked at the stars, jumped in the river when we got hot, slapped away +mosquitos. Became best friends, or lifelong enemies. + +I don't know why Charles's parents sent him LARPing. He wasn't the kind of kid +who really enjoyed that kind of thing. He was more the pulling-wings-off-flies +type. Oh, maybe not. But he just was not into being in costume in the woods. He +spent the whole time mooching around, sneering at everyone and everything, +trying to convince us all that we weren't having the good time we all felt like +we were having. You've no doubt found that kind of person before, the kind of +person who is compelled to ensure that everyone else has a rotten time. + +The other thing about Charles was that he couldn't get the hang of simulated +combat. Once you start running around the woods and playing these elaborate, +semi-military games, it's easy to get totally adrenalized to the point where +you're ready to tear out someone's throat. This is not a good state to be in +when you're carrying a prop sword, club, pike or other utensil. This is why no +one is ever allowed to hit anyone, under any circumstances, in these games. +Instead, when you get close enough to someone to fight, you play a quick couple +rounds of rock-paper-scissors, with modifiers based on your experience, +armaments, and condition. The referees mediate disputes. It's quite civilized, +and a little weird. You go running after someone through the woods, catch up +with him, bare your teeth, and sit down to play a little roshambo. But it works +-- and it keeps everything safe and fun. + +Charles couldn't really get the hang of this. I think he was perfectly capable +of understanding that the rule was no contact, but he was simultaneously +capable of deciding that the rule didn't matter, and that he wasn't going to +abide by it. The refs called him on it a bunch of times over the weekend, and +he kept on promising to stick by it, and kept on going back. He was one of the +bigger kids there already, and he was fond of "accidentally" tackling you at +the end of a chase. Not fun when you get tackled into the rocky forest floor. + +I had just mightily smote Darryl in a little clearing where he'd been +treasure-hunting, and we were having a little laugh over my extreme sneakiness. +He was going to go monstering -- killed players could switch to playing +monsters, which meant that the longer the game wore on, the more monsters there +were coming after you, meaning that everyone got to keep on playing and the +game's battles just got more and more epic. + +That was when Charles came out of the woods behind me and tackled me, throwing +me to the ground so hard that I couldn't breathe for a moment. "Gotcha!" he +yelled. I only knew him slightly before this, and I'd never thought much of +him, but now I was ready for murder. I climbed slowly to my feet and looked at +him, his chest heaving, grinning. "You're so dead," he said. "I totally got +you." + +I smiled and something felt wrong and sore in my face. I touched my upper lip. +It was bloody. My nose was bleeding and my lip was split, cut on a root I'd +face-planted into when he tackled me. + +I wiped the blood on my pants-leg and smiled. I made like I thought that it was +all in fun. I laughed a little. I moved towards him. + +Charles wasn't fooled. He was already backing away, trying to fade into the +woods. Darryl moved to flank him. I took the other flank. Abruptly, he turned +and ran. Darryl's foot hooked his ankle and sent him sprawling. We rushed him, +just in time to hear a ref's whistle. + +The ref hadn't seen Charles foul me, but he'd seen Charles's play that weekend. +He sent Charles back to the camp entrance and told him he was out of the game. +Charles complained mightily, but to our satisfaction, the ref wasn't having any +of it. Once Charles had gone, he gave /{us}/ both a lecture, too, telling us +that our retaliation was no more justified than Charles's attack. + +It was OK. That night, once the games had ended, we all got hot showers in the +scout dorms. Darryl and I stole Charles's clothes and towel. We tied them in +knots and dropped them in the urinal. A lot of the boys were happy to +contribute to the effort of soaking them. Charles had been very enthusiastic +about his tackles. + +I wish I could have watched him when he got out of his shower and discovered +his clothes. It's a hard decision: do you run naked across the camp, or pick +apart the tight, piss-soaked knots in your clothes and then put them on? + +He chose nudity. I probably would have chosen the same. We lined up along the +route from the showers to the shed where the packs were stored and applauded +him. I was at the front of the line, leading the applause. + +# + +The Scout Camp weekends only came three or four times a year, which left Darryl +and me -- and lots of other LARPers -- with a serious LARP deficiency in our +lives. + +Luckily, there were the Wretched Daylight games in the city hotels. Wretched +Daylight is another LARP, rival vampire clans and vampire hunters, and it's got +its own quirky rules. Players get cards to help them resolve combat skirmishes, +so each skirmish involves playing a little hand of a strategic card game. +Vampires can become invisible by cloaking themselves, crossing their arms over +their chests, and all the other players have to pretend they don't see them, +continuing on with their conversations about their plans and so on. The true +test of a good player is whether you're honest enough to go on spilling your +secrets in front of an "invisible" rival without acting as though he was in the +room. + +There were a couple of big Wretched Daylight games every month. The organizers +of the games had a good relationship with the city's hotels and they let it be +known that they'd take ten unbooked rooms on Friday night and fill them with +players who'd run around the hotel, playing low-key Wretched Daylight in the +corridors, around the pool, and so on, eating at the hotel restaurant and +paying for the hotel WiFi. They'd close the booking on Friday afternoon, email +us, and we'd go straight from school to whichever hotel it was, bringing our +knapsacks, sleeping six or eight to a room for the weekend, living on +junk-food, playing until three AM. It was good, safe fun that our parents could +get behind. + +The organizers were a well-known literacy charity that ran kids' writing +workshops, drama workshops and so on. They had been running the games for ten +years without incident. Everything was strictly booze- and drug-free, to keep +the organizers from getting busted on some kind of corruption of minors rap. +We'd draw between ten and a hundred players, depending on the weekend, and for +the cost of a couple movies, you could have two and a half days' worth of solid +fun. + +One day, though, they lucked into a block of rooms at the Monaco, a hotel in +the Tenderloin that catered to arty older tourists, the kind of place where +every room came with a goldfish bowl, where the lobby was full of beautiful old +people in fine clothes, showing off their plastic surgery results. + +Normally, the mundanes -- our word for non-players -- just ignored us, figuring +that we were skylarking kids. But that weekend there happened to be an editor +for an Italian travel magazine staying, and he took an interest in things. He +cornered me as I skulked in the lobby, hoping to spot the clan-master of my +rivals and swoop in on him and draw his blood. I was standing against the wall +with my arms folded over my chest, being invisible, when he came up to me and +asked me, in accented English, what me and my friends were doing in the hotel +that weekend? + +I tried to brush him off, but he wouldn't be put off. So I figured I'd just +make something up and he'd go away. + +I didn't imagine that he'd print it. I really didn't imagine that it would get +picked up by the American press. + +"We're here because our prince has died, and so we've had to come in search of +a new ruler." + +"A prince?" + +"Yes," I said, getting into it. "We're the Old People. We came to America in +the 16th Century and have had our own royal family in the wilds of Pennsylvania +ever since. We live simply in the woods. We don't use modern technology. But +the prince was the last of the line and he died last week. Some terrible +wasting disease took him. The young men of my clan have left to find the +descendants of his great-uncle, who went away to join the modern people in the +time of my grandfather. He is said to have multiplied, and we will find the +last of his bloodline and bring them back to their rightful home." + +I read a lot of fantasy novels. This kind of thing came easily to me. + +"We found a woman who knew of these descendants. She told us one was staying in +this hotel, and we've come to find him. But we've been tracked here by a rival +clan who would keep us from bringing home our prince, to keep us weak and easy +to dominate. Thus it is vital we keep to ourselves. We do not talk to the New +People when we can help it. Talking to you now causes me great discomfort." + +He was watching me shrewdly. I had uncrossed my arms, which meant that I was +now "visible" to rival vampires, one of whom had been slowly sneaking up on us. +At the last moment, I turned and saw her, arms spread, hissing at us, vamping +it up in high style. + +I threw my arms wide and hissed back at her, then pelted through the lobby, +hopping over a leather sofa and deking around a potted plant, making her chase +me. I'd scouted an escape route down through the stairwell to the basement +health-club and I took it, shaking her off. + +I didn't see him again that weekend, but I /{did}/ relate the story to some of +my fellow LARPers, who embroidered the tale and found lots of opportunities to +tell it over the weekend. + +The Italian magazine had a staffer who'd done her master's degree on Amish +anti-technology communities in rural Pennsylvania, and she thought we sounded +awfully interesting. Based on the notes and taped interviews of her boss from +his trip to San Francisco, she wrote a fascinating, heart-wrenching article +about these weird, juvenile cultists who were crisscrossing America in search +of their "prince." Hell, people will print anything these days. + +But the thing was, stories like that get picked up and republished. First it +was Italian bloggers, then a few American bloggers. People across the country +reported "sightings" of the Old People, though whether they were making it up, +or whether others were playing the same game, I didn't know. + +It worked its way up the media food-chain all the way to the /{New York +Times}/, who, unfortunately, have an unhealthy appetite for fact-checking. The +reporter they put on the story eventually tracked it down to the Monaco Hotel, +who put them in touch with the LARP organizers, who laughingly spilled the +whole story. + +Well, at that point, LARPing got a lot less cool. We became known as the +nation's foremost hoaxers, as weird, pathological liars. The press who we'd +inadvertently tricked into covering the story of the Old People were now +interested in redeeming themselves by reporting on how unbelievably weird we +LARPers were, and that was when Charles let everyone in school know that Darryl +and I were the biggest LARPing weenies in the city. + +That was not a good season. Some of the gang didn't mind, but we did. The +teasing was merciless. Charles led it. I'd find plastic fangs in my bag, and +kids I passed in the hall would go "bleh, bleh" like a cartoon vampire, or +they'd talk with fake Transylvanian accents when I was around. + +We switched to ARGing pretty soon afterwards. It was more fun in some ways, and +it was a lot less weird. Every now and again, though, I missed my cape and +those weekends in the hotel. + +# + +The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come +back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid +thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time +I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, +a hit-parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind. + +As I tried to concentrate on Masha and my impending doom, the Old People +incident kept coming back to haunt me. There'd been a similar, sick, sinking +doomed feeling then, as more and more press outlets picked up the story, as the +likelihood increased of someone figuring out that it had been me who'd sprung +the story on the stupid Italian editor in the designer jeans with crooked +seams, the starched collarless shirt, and the oversized metal-rimmed glasses. + +There's an alternative to dwelling on your mistakes. You can learn from them. + +It's a good theory, anyway. Maybe the reason your subconscious dredges up all +these miserable ghosts is that they need to get closure before they can rest +peacefully in humiliation afterlife. My subconscious kept visiting me with +ghosts in the hopes that I would do something to let them rest in peace. + +All the way home, I turned over this memory and the thought of what I would do +about "Masha," in case she was playing me. I needed some insurance. + +And by the time I reached my house -- to be swept up into melancholy hugs from +Mom and Dad -- I had it. + +# + +The trick was to time this so that it happened fast enough that the DHS +couldn't prepare for it, but with a long enough lead time that the Xnet would +have time to turn out in force. + +The trick was to stage this so that there were too many present to arrest us +all, but to put it somewhere that the press could see it and the grownups, so +the DHS wouldn't just gas us again. + +The trick was to come up with something with the media friendliness of the +levitation of the Pentagon. The trick was to stage something that we could +rally around, like 3,000 Berkeley students refusing to let one of their number +be taken away in a police van. + +The trick was to put the press there, ready to say what the police did, the way +they had in 1968 in Chicago. + +It was going to be some trick. + +I cut out of school an hour early the next day, using my customary techniques +for getting out, not caring if it would trigger some kind of new DHS checker +that would result in my parents getting a note. + +One way or another, my parents' last problem after tomorrow would be whether I +was in trouble at school. + +I met Ange at her place. She'd had to cut out of school even earlier, but she'd +just made a big deal out of her cramps and pretended she was going to keel over +and they sent her home. + +We started to spread the word on Xnet. We sent it in email to trusted friends, +and IMmed it to our buddy lists. We roamed the decks and towns of Clockwork +Plunder and told our team-mates. Giving everyone enough information to get them +to show up but not so much as to tip our hand to the DHS was tricky, but I +thought I had just the right balance: + +> VAMPMOB TOMORROW + +> If you're a goth, dress to impress. If you're not a goth, find a goth and +borrow some clothes. Think vampire. + +> The game starts at 8:00AM sharp. SHARP. Be there and ready to be divided into +teams. The game lasts 30 minutes, so you'll have plenty of time to get to +school afterward. + +> Location will be revealed tomorrow. Email your public key to +m1k3y@littlebrother.pirateparty.org.se and check your messages at 7AM for the +update. If that's too early for you, stay up all night. That's what we're going +to do. + +> This is the most fun you will have all year, guaranteed. + +> Believe. + +> M1k3y + +Then I sent a short message to Masha. + +> Tomorrow + +> M1k3y + +A minute later, she emailed back: + +> I thought so. VampMob, huh? You work fast. Wear a red hat. Travel light. + +# + +What do you bring along when you go fugitive? I'd carried enough heavy packs +around enough scout camps to know that every ounce you add cuts into your +shoulders with all the crushing force of gravity with every step you take -- +it's not just one ounce, it's one ounce that you carry for a million steps. +It's a ton. + +"Right," Ange said. "Smart. And you never take more than three days' worth of +clothes, either. You can rinse stuff out in the sink. Better to have a spot on +your t-shirt than a suitcase that's too big and heavy to stash under a +plane-seat." + +She'd pulled out a ballistic nylon courier bag that went across her chest, +between her breasts -- something that made me get a little sweaty -- and slung +diagonally across her back. It was roomy inside, and she'd set it down on the +bed. Now she was piling clothes next to it. + +"I figure that three t-shirts, a pair of pants, a pair of shorts, three changes +of underwear, three pairs of socks and a sweater will do it." + +She dumped out her gym bag and picked out her toiletries. "I'll have to +remember to stick my toothbrush in tomorrow morning before I head down to Civic +Center." + +Watching her pack was impressive. She was ruthless about it all. It was also +freaky -- it made me realize that the next day, I was going to go away. Maybe +for a long time. Maybe forever. + +"Do I bring my Xbox?" she asked. "I've got a ton of stuff on the hard-drive, +notes and sketches and email. I wouldn't want it to fall into the wrong hands." + +"It's all encrypted," I said. "That's standard with ParanoidXbox. But leave the +Xbox behind, there'll be plenty of them in LA. Just create a Pirate Party +account and email an image of your hard-drive to yourself. I'm going to do the +same when I get home." + +She did so, and queued up the email. It was going to take a couple hours for +all the data to squeeze through her neighbor's WiFi network and wing its way to +Sweden. + +Then she closed the flap on the bag and tightened the compression straps. She +had something the size of a soccer-ball slung over her back now, and I stared +admiringly at it. She could walk down the street with that under her shoulder +and no one would look twice -- she looked like she was on her way to school. + +"One more thing," she said, and went to her bedside table and took out the +condoms. She took the strips of rubbers out of the box and opened the bag and +stuck them inside, then gave me a slap on the ass. + +"Now what?" I said. + +"Now we go to your place and do your stuff. It's time I met your parents, no?" + +She left the bag amid the piles of clothes and junk all over the floor. She was +ready to turn her back on all of it, walk away, just to be with me. Just to +support the cause. It made me feel brave, too. + +# + +Mom was already home when I got there. She had her laptop open on the kitchen +table and was answering email while talking into a headset connected to it, +helping some poor Yorkshireman and his family acclimate to living in Louisiana. + +I came through the door and Ange followed, grinning like mad, but holding my +hand so tight I could feel the bones grinding together. I didn't know what she +was so worried about. It wasn't like she was going to end up spending a lot of +time hanging around with my parents after this, even if it went badly. + +Mom hung up on the Yorkshireman when we got in. + +"Hello, Marcus," she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. "And who is this?" + +"Mom, meet Ange. Ange, this is my Mom, Lillian." Mom stood up and gave Ange a +hug. + +"It's very good to meet you, darling," she said, looking her over from top to +bottom. Ange looked pretty acceptable, I think. She dressed well, and low-key, +and you could tell how smart she was just by looking at her. + +"A pleasure to meet you, Mrs Yallow," she said. She sounded very confident and +self-assured. Much better than I had when I'd met her mom. + +"It's Lillian, love," she said. She was taking in every detail. "Are you +staying for dinner?" + +"I'd love that," she said. + +"Do you eat meat?" Mom's pretty acclimated to living in California. + +"I eat anything that doesn't eat me first," she said. + +"She's a hot-sauce junkie," I said. "You could serve her old tires and she'd +eat 'em if she could smother them in salsa." + +Ange socked me gently in the shoulder. + +"I was going to order Thai," Mom said. "I'll add a couple of their five-chili +dishes to the order." + +Ange thanked her politely and Mom bustled around the kitchen, getting us +glasses of juice and a plate of biscuits and asking three times if we wanted +any tea. I squirmed a little. + +"Thanks, Mom," I said. "We're going to go upstairs for a while." + +Mom's eyes narrowed for a second, then she smiled again. "Of course," she said. +"Your father will be home in an hour, we'll eat then." + +I had my vampire stuff all stashed in the back of my closet. I let Ange sort +through it while I went through my clothes. I was only going as far as LA. They +had stores there, all the clothing I could need. I just needed to get together +three or four favorite tees and a favorite pair of jeans, a tube of deodorant, +a roll of dental floss. + +"Money!" I said. + +"Yeah," she said. "I was going to clean out my bank account on the way home at +an ATM. I've got maybe five hundred saved up." + +"Really?" + +"What am I going to spend it on?" she said. "Ever since the Xnet, I haven't had +to even pay any service charges." + +"I think I've got three hundred or so." + +"Well, there you go. Grab it on the way to Civic Center in the morning." + +I had a big book-bag I used when I was hauling lots of gear around town. It was +less conspicuous than my camping pack. Ange went through my piles mercilessly +and culled them down to her favorites. + +Once it was packed and under my bed, we both sat down. + +"We're going to have to get up really early tomorrow," she said. + +"Yeah, big day." + +The plan was to get messages out with a bunch of fake VampMob locations +tomorrow, sending people out to secluded spots within a few minutes' walk of +Civic Center. We'd cut out a spray-paint stencil that just said VAMPMOB CIVIC +CENTER -> -> that we would spray-paint at those spots around 5AM. That would +keep the DHS from locking down the Civic Center before we got there. I had the +mailbot ready to send out the messages at 7AM -- I'd just leave my Xbox running +when I went out. + +"How long. . ." She trailed off. + +"That's what I've been wondering, too," I said. "It could be a long time, I +suppose. But who knows? With Barbara's article coming out --" I'd queued an +email to her for the next morning, too -- "and all, maybe we'll be heroes in +two weeks." + +"Maybe," she said and sighed. + +I put my arm around her. Her shoulders were shaking. + +"I'm terrified," I said. "I think that it would be crazy not to be terrified." + +"Yeah," she said. "Yeah." + +Mom called us to dinner. Dad shook Ange's hand. He looked unshaved and worried, +the way he had since we'd gone to see Barbara, but on meeting Ange, a little of +the old Dad came back. She kissed him on the cheek and he insisted that she +call him Drew. + +Dinner was actually really good. The ice broke when Ange took out her hot-sauce +mister and treated her plate, and explained about Scoville units. Dad tried a +forkful of her food and went reeling into the kitchen to drink a gallon of +milk. Believe it or not, Mom still tried it after that and gave every +impression of loving it. Mom, it turned out, was an undiscovered spicy food +prodigy, a natural. + +Before she left, Ange pressed the hot-sauce mister on Mom. "I have a spare at +home," she said. I'd watched her pack it in her backpack. "You seem like the +kind of woman who should have one of these." + +1~ Chapter 19 + +/{ [This chapter is dedicated to the MIT Press Bookshop,~{ MIT Press Bookstore +http://web.mit.edu/bookstore/www/ Building E38, 77 Massachusetts Ave., +Cambridge, MA USA 02139-4307 +1 617 253 5249 }~ a store I've visited on every +single trip to Boston over the past ten years. MIT, of course, is one of the +legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the campus bookstore lives +up to the incredible expectations I had when I first set foot in it. In +addition to the wonderful titles published by the MIT press, the bookshop is a +tour through the most exciting high-tech publications in the world, from hacker +zines like 2600 to fat academic anthologies on video-game design. This is one +of those stores where I have to ask them to ship my purchases home because they +don't fit in my suitcase.] }/ + +Here's the email that went out at 7AM the next day, while Ange and I were +spray-painting VAMP-MOB CIVIC CENTER -> -> at strategic locations around town. + +> RULES FOR VAMPMOB + +> You are part of a clan of daylight vampires. You've discovered the secret of +surviving the terrible light of the sun. The secret was cannibalism: the blood +of another vampire can give you the strength to walk among the living. + +> You need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay in the +game. If one minute goes by without a bite, you're out. Once you're out, turn +your shirt around backwards and go referee -- watch two or three vamps to see +if they're getting their bites in. + +> To bite another vamp, you have to say "Bite!" five times before they do. So +you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact, and shout "bite bite bite bite bite!" +and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles to dust. + +> You and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team. They are your +clan. You derive no nourishment from their blood. + +> You can "go invisible" by standing still and folding your arms over your +chest. You can't bite invisible vamps, and they can't bite you. + +> This game is played on the honor system. The point is to have fun and get +your vamp on, not to win. + +> There is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winners begin to +emerge. The game-masters will start a whisper campaign among the players when +the time comes. Spread the whisper as quickly as you can and watch for the +sign. + +> M1k3y + +> bite bite bite bite bite! + +We'd hoped that a hundred people would be willing to play VampMob. We'd sent +out about two hundred invites each. But when I sat bolt upright at 4AM and +grabbed my Xbox, there were /{400}/ replies there. Four /{hundred}/. + +I fed the addresses to the bot and stole out of the house. I descended the +stairs, listening to my father snore and my mom rolling over in their bed. I +locked the door behind me. + +At 4:15 AM, Potrero Hill was as quiet as the countryside. There were some +distant traffic rumbles, and once, a car crawled past me. I stopped at an ATM +and drew out $320 in twenties, rolled them up and put a rubber-band around +them, and stuck the roll in a zip-up pocket low on the thigh of my vampire +pants. + +I was wearing my cape again, and a ruffled shirt, and tuxedo pants that had +been modded to have enough pockets to carry all my little bits and pieces. I +had on pointed boots with silver-skull buckles, and I'd teased my hair into a +black dandelion clock around my head. Ange was bringing the white makeup and +had promised to do my eyeliner and black nail-polish. Why the hell not? When +was the next time I was going to get to play dressup like this? + +Ange met me in front of her house. She had her backpack on too, and fishnet +tights, a ruffled gothic lolita maid's dress, white face-paint, elaborate +kabuki eye-makeup, and her fingers and throat dripped with silver jewelry. + +"You look /{great}/!" we said to each other in unison, then laughed quietly and +stole off through the streets, spray-paint cans in our pockets. + +# + +As I surveyed Civic Center, I thought about what it would look like once 400 +VampMobbers converged on it. I expected them in ten minutes, out front of City +Hall. Already the big plaza teemed with commuters who neatly sidestepped the +homeless people begging there. + +I've always hated Civic Center. It's a collection of huge wedding-cake +buildings: court houses, museums, and civic buildings like City Hall. The +sidewalks are wide, the buildings are white. In the tourist guides to San +Francisco, they manage to photograph it so that it looks like Epcot Center, +futuristic and austere. + +But on the ground, it's grimy and gross. Homeless people sleep on all the +benches. The district is empty by 6PM except for drunks and druggies, because +with only one kind of building there, there's no legit reason for people to +hang around after the sun goes down. It's more like a mall than a neighborhood, +and the only businesses there are bail-bondsmen and liquor stores, places that +cater to the families of crooks on trial and the bums who make it their +nighttime home. + +I really came to understand all of this when I read an interview with an +amazing old urban planner, a woman called Jane Jacobs who was the first person +to really nail why it was wrong to slice cities up with freeways, stick all the +poor people in housing projects, and use zoning laws to tightly control who got +to do what where. + +Jacobs explained that real cities are organic and they have a lot of variety -- +rich and poor, white and brown, Anglo and Mex, retail and residential and even +industrial. A neighborhood like that has all kinds of people passing through it +at all hours of the day or night, so you get businesses that cater to every +need, you get people around all the time, acting like eyes on the street. + +You've encountered this before. You go walking around some older part of some +city and you find that it's full of the coolest looking stores, guys in suits +and people in fashion-rags, upscale restaurants and funky cafes, a little movie +theater maybe, houses with elaborate paint-jobs. Sure, there might be a +Starbucks too, but there's also a neat-looking fruit market and a florist who +appears to be three hundred years old as she snips carefully at the flowers in +her windows. It's the opposite of a planned space, like a mall. It feels like a +wild garden or even a woods: like it /{grew}/. + +You couldn't get any further from that than Civic Center. I read an interview +with Jacobs where she talked about the great old neighborhood they knocked down +to build it. It had been just that kind of neighborhood, the kind of place that +happened without permission or rhyme or reason. + +Jacobs said that she predicted that within a few years, Civic Center would be +one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, a ghost-town at night, a place that +sustained a thin crop of weedy booze shops and flea-pit motels. In the +interview, she didn't seem very glad to have been vindicated; she sounded like +she was talking about a dead friend when she described what Civic Center had +become. + +Now it was rush hour and Civic Center was as busy as it could be. The Civic +Center BART also serves as the major station for Muni trolley lines, and if you +need to switch from one to another, that's where you do it. At 8AM, there were +thousands of people coming up the stairs, going down the stairs, getting into +and out of taxis and on and off buses. They got squeezed by DHS checkpoints by +the different civic buildings, and routed around aggressive panhandlers. They +all smelled like their shampoos and colognes, fresh out of the shower and +armored in their work suits, swinging laptop bags and briefcases. At 8AM, Civic +Center was business central. + +And here came the vamps. A couple dozen coming down Van Ness, a couple dozen +coming up Market. More coming from the other side of Market. More coming up +from Van Ness. They slipped around the side of the buildings, wearing the white +face-paint and the black eyeliner, black clothes, leather jackets, huge stompy +boots. Fishnet fingerless gloves. + +They began to fill up the plaza. A few of the business people gave them passing +glances and then looked away, not wanting to let these weirdos into their +personal realities as they thought about whatever crap they were about to wade +through for another eight hours. The vamps milled around, not sure when the +game was on. They pooled together in large groups, like an oil spill in +reverse, all this black gathering in one place. A lot of them sported old-timey +hats, bowlers and toppers. Many of the girls were in full-on elegant gothic +lolita maid costumes with huge platforms. + +I tried to estimate the numbers. 200. Then, five minutes later, it was 300. +400. They were still streaming in. The vamps had brought friends. + +Someone grabbed my ass. I spun around and saw Ange, laughing so hard she had to +hold her thighs, bent double. + +"Look at them all, man, look at them all!" she gasped. The square was twice as +crowded as it had been a few minutes ago. I had no idea how many Xnetters there +were, but easily 1000 of them had just showed up to my little party. Christ. + +The DHS and SFPD cops were starting to mill around, talking into their radios +and clustering together. I heard a far-away siren. + +"All right," I said, shaking Ange by the arm. "All right, let's /{go}/." + +We both slipped off into the crowd and as soon as we encountered our first +vamp, we both said, loudly, "Bite bite bite bite bite!" My victim was a stunned +-- but cute -- girl with spider-webs drawn on her hands and smudged mascara +running down her cheeks. She said, "Crap," and moved away, acknowledging that +I'd gotten her. + +The call of "bite bite bite bite bite" had scrambled the other nearby vamps. +Some of them were attacking each other, others were moving for cover, hiding +out. I had my victim for the minute, so I skulked away, using mundanes for +cover. All around me, the cry of "bite bite bite bite bite!" and shouts and +laughs and curses. + +The sound spread like a virus through the crowd. All the vamps knew the game +was on now, and the ones who were clustered together were dropping like flies. +They laughed and cussed and moved away, clueing the still-in vamps that the +game was on. And more vamps were arriving by the second. + +8:16. It was time to bag another vamp. I crouched low and moved through the +legs of the straights as they headed for the BART stairs. They jerked back with +surprise and swerved to avoid me. I had my eyes laser-locked on a set of black +platform boots with steel dragons over the toes, and so I wasn't expecting it +when I came face to face with another vamp, a guy of about 15 or 16, hair +gelled straight back and wearing a PVC Marilyn Manson jacket draped with +necklaces of fake tusks carved with intricate symbols. + +"Bite bite bite --" he began, when one of the mundanes tripped over him and +they both went sprawling. I leapt over to him and shouted "bite bite bite bite +bite!" before he could untangle himself again. + +More vamps were arriving. The suits were really freaking out. The game +overflowed the sidewalk and moved into Van Ness, spreading up toward Market +Street. Drivers honked, the trolleys made angry /{ding}/s. I heard more sirens, +but now traffic was snarled in every direction. + +It was freaking /{glorious}/. + +BITE BITE BITE BITE BITE! + +The sound came from all around me. There were so many vamps there, playing so +furiously, it was like a roar. I risked standing up and looking around and +found that I was right in the middle of a giant crowd of vamps that went as far +as I could see in every direction. + +BITE BITE BITE BITE BITE! + +This was even better than the concert in Dolores Park. That had been angry and +rockin', but this was -- well, it was just /{fun}/. It was like going back to +the playground, to the epic games of tag we'd play on lunch breaks when the sun +was out, hundreds of people chasing each other around. The adults and the cars +just made it more fun, more funny. + +That's what it was: it was /{funny}/. We were all laughing now. + +But the cops were really mobilizing now. I heard helicopters. Any second now, +it would be over. Time for the endgame. + +I grabbed a vamp. + +"Endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you've been gassed. Pass +it on. What did I just say?" + +The vamp was a girl, tiny, so short I thought she was really young, but she +must have been 17 or 18 from her face and the smile. "Oh, that's wicked," she +said. + +"What did I say?" + +"Endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you've been gassed. Pass +it on. What did I just say?" + +"Right," I said. "Pass it on." + +She melted into the crowd. I grabbed another vamp. I passed it on. He went off +to pass it on. + +Somewhere in the crowd, I knew Ange was doing this too. Somewhere in the crowd, +there might be infiltrators, fake Xnetters, but what could they do with this +knowledge? It's not like the cops had a choice. They were going to order us to +disperse. That was guaranteed. + +I had to get to Ange. The plan was to meet at the Founder's Statue in the +Plaza, but reaching it was going to be hard. The crowd wasn't moving anymore, +it was /{surging}/, like the mob had in the way down to the BART station on the +day the bombs went off. I struggled to make my way through it just as the PA +underneath the helicopter switched on. + +"THIS IS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. YOU ARE ORDERED TO DISPERSE +IMMEDIATELY." + +Around me, hundreds of vamps fell to the ground, clutching their throats, +clawing at their eyes, gasping for breath. It was easy to fake being gassed, +we'd all had plenty of time to study the footage of the partiers in Mission +Dolores Park going down under the pepper-spray clouds. + +"DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY." + +I fell to the ground, protecting my pack, reaching around to the red baseball +hat folded into the waistband of my pants. I jammed it on my head and then +grabbed my throat and made horrendous retching noises. + +The only ones still standing were the mundanes, the salarymen who'd been just +trying to get to their jobs. I looked around as best as I could at them as I +choked and gasped. + +"THIS IS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. YOU ARE ORDERED TO DISPERSE +IMMEDIATELY. DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY." The voice of god made my bowels ache. I +felt it in my molars and in my femurs and my spine. + +The salarymen were scared. They were moving as fast as they could, but in no +particular direction. The helicopters seemed to be directly overhead no matter +where you stood. The cops were wading into the crowd now, and they'd put on +their helmets. Some had shields. Some had gas masks. I gasped harder. + +Then the salarymen were running. I probably would have run too. I watched a guy +whip a $500 jacket off and wrap it around his face before heading south toward +Mission, only to trip up and go sprawling. His curses joined the choking +sounds. + +This wasn't supposed to happen -- the choking was just supposed to freak people +out and get them confused, not panic them into a stampede. + +There were screams now, screams I recognized all too well from the night in the +park. That was the sound of people who were scared spitless, running into each +other as they tried like hell to get away. + +And then the air-raid sirens began. + +I hadn't heard that sound since the bombs went off, but I would never forget +it. It sliced through me and went straight into my balls, turning my legs into +jelly on the way. It made me want to run away in a panic. I got to my feet, red +cap on my head, thinking of only one thing: Ange. Ange and the Founders' +Statue. + +Everyone was on their feet now, running in all directions, screaming. I pushed +people out of my way, holding onto my pack and my hat, heading for Founders' +Statue. Masha was looking for me, I was looking for Ange. Ange was out there. + +I pushed and cursed. Elbowed someone. Someone came down on my foot so hard I +felt something go /{crunch}/ and I shoved him so he went down. He tried to get +up and someone stepped on him. I shoved and pushed. + +Then I reached out my arm to shove someone else and strong hands grabbed my +wrist and my elbow in one fluid motion and brought my arm back around behind my +back. It felt like my shoulder was about to wrench out of its socket, and I +instantly doubled over, hollering, a sound that was barely audible over the din +of the crowd, the thrum of the choppers, the wail of the sirens. + +I was brought back upright by the strong hands behind me, which steered me like +a marionette. The hold was so perfect I couldn't even think of squirming. I +couldn't think of the noise or the helicopter or Ange. All I could think of was +moving the way that the person who had me wanted me to move. I was brought +around so that I was face-to-face with the person. + +It was a girl whose face was sharp and rodent-like, half-hidden by a giant pair +of sunglasses. Over the sunglasses, a mop of bright pink hair, spiked out in +all directions. + +"You!" I said. I knew her. She'd taken a picture of me and threatened to rat me +out to truant watch. That had been five minutes before the alarms started. +She'd been the one, ruthless and cunning. We'd both run from that spot in the +Tenderloin as the klaxon sounded behind us, and we'd both been picked up by the +cops. I'd been hostile and they'd decided that I was an enemy. + +She -- Masha -- became their ally. + +"Hello, M1k3y," she hissed in my ear, close as a lover. A shiver went up my +back. She let go of my arm and I shook it out. + +"Christ," I said. "You!" + +"Yes, me," she said. "The gas is gonna come down in about two minutes. Let's +haul ass." + +"Ange -- my girlfriend -- is by the Founders' Statue." + +Masha looked over the crowd. "No chance," she said. "We try to make it there, +we're doomed. The gas is coming down in two minutes, in case you missed it the +first time." + +I stopped moving. "I don't go without Ange," I said. + +She shrugged. "Suit yourself," she shouted in my ear. "Your funeral." + +She began to push through the crowd, moving away, north, toward downtown. I +continued to push for the Founders' Statue. A second later, my arm was back in +the terrible lock and I was being swung around and propelled forward. + +"You know too much, jerk-off," she said. "You've seen my face. You're coming +with me." + +I screamed at her, struggled till it felt like my arm would break, but she was +pushing me forward. My sore foot was agony with every step, my shoulder felt +like it would break. + +With her using me as a battering ram, we made good progress through the crowd. +The whine of the helicopters changed and she gave me a harder push. "RUN!" she +yelled. "Here comes the gas!" + +The crowd noise changed, too. The choking sounds and scream sounds got much, +much louder. I'd heard that pitch of sound before. We were back in the park. +The gas was raining down. I held my breath and /{ran}/. + +We cleared the crowd and she let go of my arm. I shook it out. I limped as fast +as I could up the sidewalk as the crowd thinned and thinned. We were heading +towards a group of DHS cops with riot shields and helmets and masks. As we drew +near them, they moved to block us, but Masha held up a badge and they melted +away like she was Obi Wan Kenobi, saying "These aren't the droids you're +looking for." + +"You goddamned /{bitch}/," I said as we sped up Market Street. "We have to go +back for Ange." + +She pursed her lips and shook her head. "I feel for you, buddy. I haven't seen +my boyfriend in months. He probably thinks I'm dead. Fortunes of war. We go +back for your Ange, we're dead. If we push on, we have a chance. So long as we +have a chance, she has a chance. Those kids aren't all going to Gitmo. They'll +probably take a few hundred in for questioning and send the rest home." + +We were moving up Market Street now, past the strip joints where the little +encampments of bums and junkies sat, stinking like open toilets. Masha guided +me to a little alcove in the shut door of one of the strip places. She stripped +off her jacket and turned it inside out -- the lining was a muted stripe +pattern, and with the jacket's seams reversed, it hung differently. She +produced a wool hat from her pocket and pulled it over her hair, letting it +form a jaunty, off-center peak. Then she took out some make-up remover wipes +and went to work on her face and fingernails. In a minute, she was a different +woman. + +"Wardrobe change," she said. "Now you. Lose the shoes, lose the jacket, lose +the hat." I could see her point. The cops would be looking very carefully at +anyone who looked like they'd been a part of the VampMob. I ditched the hat +entirely -- I'd never liked ball caps. Then I jammed the jacket into my pack +and got out a long-sleeved tee with a picture of Rosa Luxembourg on it and +pulled it over my black tee. I let Masha wipe my makeup off and clean my nails +and a minute later, I was clean. + +"Switch off your phone," she said. "You carrying any arphids?" + +I had my student card, my ATM card, my Fast Pass. They all went into a silvered +bag she held out, which I recognized as a radio-proof Faraday pouch. But as she +put them in her pocket, I realized I'd just turned my ID over to her. If she +was on the other side... + +The magnitude of what had just happened began to sink in. In my mind, I'd +pictured having Ange with me at this point. Ange would make it two against one. +Ange would help me see if there was something amiss. If Masha wasn't all she +said she was. + +"Put these pebbles in your shoes before you put them on --" + +"It's OK. I sprained my foot. No gait recognition program will spot me now." + +She nodded once, one pro to another, and slung her pack. I picked up mine and +we moved. The total time for the changeover was less than a minute. We looked +and walked like two different people. + +She looked at her watch and shook her head. "Come on," she said. "We have to +make our rendezvous. Don't think of running, either. You've got two choices +now. Me, or jail. They'll be analyzing the footage from that mob for days, but +once they're done, every face in it will go in a database. Our departure will +be noted. We are both wanted criminals now." + +# + +She got us off Market Street on the next block, swinging back into the +Tenderloin. I knew this neighborhood. This was where we'd gone hunting for an +open WiFi access-point back on the day, playing Harajuku Fun Madness. + +"Where are we going?" I said. + +"We're about to catch a ride," she said. "Shut up and let me concentrate." + +We moved fast, and sweat streamed down my face from under my hair, coursed down +my back and slid down the crack of my ass and my thighs. My foot was /{really}/ +hurting and I was seeing the streets of San Francisco race by, maybe for the +last time, ever. + +It didn't help that we were ploughing straight uphill, moving for the zone +where the seedy Tenderloin gives way to the nosebleed real-estate values of Nob +Hill. My breath came in ragged gasps. She moved us mostly up narrow alleys, +using the big streets just to get from one alley to the next. + +We were just stepping into one such alley, Sabin Place, when someone fell in +behind us and said, "Freeze right there." It was full of evil mirth. We stopped +and turned around. + +At the mouth of the alley stood Charles, wearing a halfhearted VampMob outfit +of black t-shirt and jeans and white face-paint. "Hello, Marcus," he said. "You +going somewhere?" He smiled a huge, wet grin. "Who's your girlfriend?" + +"What do you want, Charles?" + +"Well, I've been hanging out on that traitorous Xnet ever since I spotted you +giving out DVDs at school. When I heard about your VampMob, I thought I'd go +along and hang around the edges, just to see if you showed up and what you did. +You know what I saw?" + +I said nothing. He had his phone in his hand, pointed at us. Recording. Maybe +ready to dial 911. Beside me, Masha had gone still as a board. + +"I saw you /{leading}/ the damned thing. And I /{recorded}/ it, Marcus. So now +I'm going to call the cops and we're going to wait right here for them. And +then you're going to go to pound-you-in-the-ass prison, for a long, long time." + +Masha stepped forward. + +"Stop right there, chickie," he said. "I saw you get him away. I saw it all --" + +She took another step forward and snatched the phone out of his hand, reaching +behind her with her other hand and bringing it out holding a wallet open. + +"DHS, dick-head," she said. "I'm DHS. I've been running this twerp back to his +masters to see where he went. I /{was}/ doing that. Now you've blown it. We +have a name for that. We call it 'Obstruction of National Security.' You're +about to hear that phrase a lot more often." + +Charles took a step backward, his hands held up in front of him. He'd gone even +paler under his makeup. "What? No! I mean -- I didn't know! I was trying to +/{help}/!" + +"The last thing we need is a bunch of high school Junior G-men 'helping' buddy. +You can tell it to the judge." + +He moved back again, but Masha was fast. She grabbed his wrist and twisted him +into the same judo hold she'd had me in back at Civic Center. Her hand dipped +back to her pockets and came out holding a strip of plastic, a handcuff strip, +which she quickly wound around his wrists. + +That was the last thing I saw as I took off running. + +# + +I made it as far as the other end of the alley before she caught up with me, +tackling me from behind and sending me sprawling. I couldn't move very fast, +not with my hurt foot and the weight of my pack. I went down in a hard +face-plant and skidded, grinding my cheek into the grimy asphalt. + +"Jesus," she said. "You're a goddamned idiot. You didn't /{believe}/ that, did +you?" + +My heart thudded in my chest. She was on top of me and slowly she let me up. + +"Do I need to cuff you, Marcus?" + +I got to my feet. I hurt all over. I wanted to die. + +"Come on," she said. "It's not far now." + +# + +'It' turned out to be a moving van on a Nob Hill side-street, a sixteen-wheeler +the size of one of the ubiquitous DHS trucks that still turned up on San +Francisco's street corners, bristling with antennas. + +This one, though, said "Three Guys and a Truck Moving" on the side, and the +three guys were very much in evidence, trekking in and out of a tall apartment +building with a green awning. They were carrying crated furniture, neatly +labeled boxes, loading them one at a time onto the truck and carefully packing +them there. + +She walked us around the block once, apparently unsatisfied with something, +then, on the next pass, she made eye-contact with the man who was watching the +van, an older black guy with a kidney-belt and heavy gloves. He had a kind face +and he smiled at us as she led us quickly, casually up the truck's three stairs +and into its depth. "Under the big table," he said. "We left you some space +there." + +The truck was more than half full, but there was a narrow corridor around a +huge table with a quilted blanket thrown over it and bubble-wrap wound around +its legs. + +Masha pulled me under the table. It was stuffy and still and dusty under there, +and I suppressed a sneeze as we scrunched in among the boxes. The space was so +tight that we were on top of each other. I didn't think that Ange would have +fit in there. + +"Bitch," I said, looking at Masha. + +"Shut up. You should be licking my boots thanking me. You would have ended up +in jail in a week, two tops. Not Gitmo-by-the-Bay. Syria, maybe. I think that's +where they sent the ones they really wanted to disappear." + +I put my head on my knees and tried to breathe deeply. + +"Why would you do something so stupid as declaring war on the DHS anyway?" + +I told her. I told her about being busted and I told her about Darryl. + +She patted her pockets and came up with a phone. It was Charles's. "Wrong +phone." She came up with another phone. She turned it on and the glow from its +screen filled our little fort. After fiddling for a second, she showed it to +me. + +It was the picture she'd snapped of us, just before the bombs blew. It was the +picture of Jolu and Van and me and -- + +Darryl. + +I was holding in my hand proof that Darryl had been with us minutes before we'd +all gone into DHS custody. Proof that he'd been alive and well and in our +company. + +"You need to give me a copy of this," I said. "I need it." + +"When we get to LA," she said, snatching the phone back. "Once you've been +briefed on how to be a fugitive without getting both our asses caught and +shipped to Syria. I don't want you getting rescue ideas about this guy. He's +safe enough where he is -- for now." + +I thought about trying to take it from her by force, but she'd already +demonstrated her physical skill. She must have been a black-belt or something. + +We sat there in the dark, listening to the three guys load the truck with box +after box, tying things down, grunting with the effort of it. I tried to sleep, +but couldn't. Masha had no such problem. She snored. + +There was still light shining through the narrow, obstructed corridor that led +to the fresh air outside. I stared at it, through the gloom, and thought of +Ange. + +My Ange. Her hair brushing her shoulders as she turned her head from side to +side, laughing at something I'd done. Her face when I'd seen her last, falling +down in the crowd at VampMob. All those people at VampMob, like the people in +the park, down and writhing, the DHS moving in with truncheons. The ones who +disappeared. + +Darryl. Stuck on Treasure Island, his side stitched up, taken out of his cell +for endless rounds of questioning about the terrorists. + +Darryl's father, ruined and boozy, unshaven. Washed up and in his uniform, "for +the photos." Weeping like a little boy. + +My own father, and the way that he had been changed by my disappearance to +Treasure Island. He'd been just as broken as Darryl's father, but in his own +way. And his face, when I told him where I'd been. + +That was when I knew that I couldn't run. + +That was when I knew that I had to stay and fight. + +# + +Masha's breathing was deep and regular, but when I reached with glacial +slowness into her pocket for her phone, she snuffled a little and shifted. I +froze and didn't even breathe for a full two minutes, counting one hippopotami, +two hippopotami. + +Slowly, her breath deepened again. I tugged the phone free of her jacket-pocket +one millimeter at a time, my fingers and arm trembling with the effort of +moving so slowly. + +Then I had it, a little candy-bar shaped thing. + +I turned to head for the light, when I had a flash of memory: Charles, holding +out his phone, waggling it at us, taunting us. It had been a candy-bar-shaped +phone, silver, plastered in the logos of a dozen companies that had subsidized +the cost of the handset through the phone company. It was the kind of phone +where you had to listen to a commercial every time you made a call. + +It was too dim to see the phone clearly in the truck, but I could feel it. Were +those company decals on its sides? Yes? Yes. I had just stolen /{Charles's}/ +phone from Masha. + +I turned back around slowly, slowly, and slowly, slowly, /{slowly}/, I reached +back into her pocket. /{Her}/ phone was bigger and bulkier, with a better +camera and who knew what else? + +I'd been through this once before -- that made it a little easier. Millimeter +by millimeter again, I teased it free of her pocket, stopping twice when she +snuffled and twitched. + +I had the phone free of her pocket and I was beginning to back away when her +hand shot out, fast as a snake, and grabbed my wrist, hard, fingertips grinding +away at the small, tender bones below my hand. + +I gasped and stared into Masha's wide-open, staring eyes. + +"You are such an idiot," she said, conversationally, taking the phone from me, +punching at its keypad with her other hand. "How did you plan on unlocking this +again?" + +I swallowed. I felt bones grind against each other in my wrist. I bit my lip to +keep from crying out. + +She continued to punch away with her other hand. "Is this what you thought +you'd get away with?" She showed me the picture of all of us, Darryl and Jolu, +Van and me. "This picture?" + +I didn't say anything. My wrist felt like it would shatter. + +"Maybe I should just delete it, take temptation out of your way." Her free hand +moved some more. Her phone asked her if she was sure and she had to look at it +to find the right button. + +That's when I moved. I had Charles's phone in my other hand still, and I +brought it down on her crushing hand as hard as I could, banging my knuckles on +the table overhead. I hit her hand so hard the phone shattered and she yelped +and her hand went slack. I was still moving, reaching for her other hand, for +her now-unlocked phone with her thumb still poised over the OK key. Her fingers +spasmed on the empty air as I snatched the phone out of her hand. + +I moved down the narrow corridor on hands and knees, heading for the light. I +felt her hands slap at my feet and ankles twice, and I had to shove aside some +of the boxes that had walled us in like a Pharaoh in a tomb. A few of them fell +down behind me, and I heard Masha grunt again. + +The rolling truck door was open a crack and I dove for it, slithering out under +it. The steps had been removed and I found myself hanging over the road, +sliding headfirst into it, clanging my head off the blacktop with a thump that +rang my ears like a gong. I scrambled to my feet, holding the bumper, and +desperately dragged down on the door-handle, slamming it shut. Masha screamed +inside -- I must have caught her fingertips. I felt like throwing up, but I +didn't. + +I padlocked the truck instead. + +1~ Chapter 20 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to The Tattered Cover,~{ The Tattered Cover +http://www.tatteredcover.com/NASApp/store/Product?s=showproduct&isbn=9780765319852 +1628 16th St., Denver, CO USA 80202 +1 303 436 1070 }~ Denver's legendary +independent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover quite by accident: +Alice and I had just landed in Denver, coming in from London, and it was early +and cold and we needed coffee. We drove in aimless rental-car circles, and +that's when I spotted it, the Tattered Cover's sign. Something about it tingled +in my hindbrain -- I knew I'd heard of this place. We pulled in (got a coffee) +and stepped into the store -- a wonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks, +and miles and miles of bookshelves.] }/ + +None of the three guys were around at the moment, so I took off. My head hurt +so much I thought I must be bleeding, but my hands came away dry. My twisted +ankle had frozen up in the truck so that I ran like a broken marionette, and I +stopped only once, to cancel the photo-deletion on Masha's phone. I turned off +its radio -- both to save battery and to keep it from being used to track me -- +and set the sleep timer to two hours, the longest setting available. I tried to +set it to not require a password to wake from sleep, but that required a +password itself. I was just going to have to tap the keypad at least once every +two hours until I could figure out how to get the photo off of the phone. I +would need a charger, then. + +I didn't have a plan. I needed one. I needed to sit down, to get online -- to +figure out what I was going to do next. I was sick of letting other people do +my planning for me. I didn't want to be acting because of what Masha did, or +because of the DHS, or because of my dad. Or because of Ange? Well, maybe I'd +act because of Ange. That would be just fine, in fact. + +I'd just been slipping downhill, taking alleys when I could, merging with the +Tenderloin crowds. I didn't have any destination in mind. Every few minutes, I +put my hand in my pocket and nudged one of the keys on Masha's phone to keep it +from going asleep. It made an awkward bulge, unfolded there in my jacket. + +I stopped and leaned against a building. My ankle was killing me. Where was I, +anyway? + +O'Farrell, at Hyde Street. In front of a dodgy "Asian Massage Parlor." My +traitorous feet had taken me right back to the beginning -- taken me back to +where the photo on Masha's phone had been taken, seconds before the Bay Bridge +blew, before my life changed forever. + +I wanted to sit down on the sidewalk and bawl, but that wouldn't solve my +problems. I had to call Barbara Stratford, tell her what had happened. Show her +the photo of Darryl. + +What was I thinking? I had to show her the video, the one that Masha had sent +me -- the one where the President's Chief of Staff gloated at the attacks on +San Francisco and admitted that he knew when and where the next attacks would +happen and that he wouldn't stop them because they'd help his man get +re-elected. + +That was a plan, then: get in touch with Barbara, give her the documents, and +get them into print. The VampMob had to have really freaked people out, made +them think that we really were a bunch of terrorists. Of course, when I'd been +planning it, I had been thinking of how good a distraction it would be, not how +it would look to some NASCAR Dad in Nebraska. + +I'd call Barbara, and I'd do it smart, from a payphone, putting my hood up so +that the inevitable CCTV wouldn't get a photo of me. I dug a quarter out of my +pocket and polished it on my shirt-tail, getting the fingerprints off it. + +I headed downhill, down and down to the BART station and the payphones there. I +made it to the trolley-car stop when I spotted the cover of the week's /{Bay +Guardian}/, stacked in a high pile next to a homeless black guy who smiled at +me. "Go ahead and read the cover, it's free -- it'll cost you fifty cents to +look inside, though." + +The headline was set in the biggest type I'd seen since 9/11: + +INSIDE GITMO-BY-THE-BAY + +Beneath it, in slightly smaller type: + +"How the DHS has kept our children and friends in secret prisons on our +doorstep. + +"By Barbara Stratford, Special to the Bay Guardian" + +The newspaper seller shook his head. "Can you believe that?" he said. "Right +here in San Francisco. Man, the government /{sucks}/." + +Theoretically, the /{Guardian}/ was free, but this guy appeared to have +cornered the local market for copies of it. I had a quarter in my hand. I +dropped it into his cup and fished for another one. I didn't bother polishing +the fingerprints off of it this time. + +"We're told that the world changed forever when the Bay Bridge was blown up by +parties unknown. Thousands of our friends and neighbors died on that day. +Almost none of them have been recovered; their remains are presumed to be +resting in the city's harbor. + +"But an extraordinary story told to this reporter by a young man who was +arrested by the DHS minutes after the explosion suggests that our own +government has illegally held many of those thought dead on Treasure Island, +which had been evacuated and declared off-limits to civilians shortly after the +bombing..." + +I sat down on a bench -- the same bench, I noted with a prickly +hair-up-the-neck feeling, where we'd rested Darryl after escaping from the BART +station -- and read the article all the way through. It took a huge effort not +to burst into tears right there. Barbara had found some photos of me and Darryl +goofing around together and they ran alongside the text. The photos were maybe +a year old, but I looked so much /{younger}/ in them, like I was 10 or 11. I'd +done a lot of growing up in the past couple months. + +The piece was beautifully written. I kept feeling outraged on behalf of the +poor kids she was writing about, then remembering that she was writing about +/{me}/. Zeb's note was there, his crabbed handwriting reproduced in large, a +half-sheet of the newspaper. Barbara had dug up more info on other kids who +were missing and presumed dead, a long list, and asked how many had been stuck +there on the island, just a few miles from their parents' doorsteps. + +I dug another quarter out of my pocket, then changed my mind. What was the +chance that Barbara's phone wasn't tapped? There was no way I was going to be +able to call her now, not directly. I needed some intermediary to get in touch +with her and get her to meet me somewhere south. So much for plans. + +What I really, really needed was the Xnet. + +How the hell was I going to get online? My phone's wifinder was blinking like +crazy -- there was wireless all around me, but I didn't have an Xbox and a TV +and a ParanoidXbox DVD to boot from. WiFi, WiFi everywhere... + +That's when I spotted them. Two kids, about my age, moving among the crowd at +the top of the stairs down into the BART. + +What caught my eye was the way they were moving, kind of clumsy, nudging up +against the commuters and the tourists. Each had a hand in his pocket, and +whenever they met one another's eye, they snickered. They couldn't have been +more obvious jammers, but the crowd was oblivious to them. Being down in that +neighborhood, you expect to be dodging homeless people and crazies, so you +don't make eye contact, don't look around at all if you can help it. + +I sidled up to one. He seemed really young, but he couldn't have been any +younger than me. + +"Hey," I said. "Hey, can you guys come over here for a second?" + +He pretended not to hear me. He looked right through me, the way you would a +homeless person. + +"Come on," I said. "I don't have a lot of time." I grabbed his shoulder and +hissed in his ear. "The cops are after me. I'm from Xnet." + +He looked scared now, like he wanted to run away, and his friend was moving +toward us. "I'm serious," I said. "Just hear me out." + +His friend came over. He was taller, and beefy -- like Darryl. "Hey," he said. +"Something wrong?" + +His friend whispered in his ear. The two of them looked like they were going to +bolt. + +I grabbed my copy of the /{Bay Guardian}/ from under my arm and rattled it in +front of them. "Just turn to page 5, OK?" + +They did. They looked at the headline. The photo. Me. + +"Oh, dude," the first one said. "We are /{so}/ not worthy." He grinned at me +like crazy, and the beefier one slapped me on the back. + +"No /{way}/ --" he said. "You're M --" + +I put a hand over his mouth. "Come over here, OK?" + +I brought them back to my bench. I noticed that there was something old and +brown staining the sidewalk underneath it. Darryl's blood? It made my skin +pucker up. We sat down. + +"I'm Marcus," I said, swallowing hard as I gave my real name to these two who +already knew me as M1k3y. I was blowing my cover, but the /{Bay Guardian}/ had +already made the connection for me. + +"Nate," the small one said. "Liam," the bigger one said. "Dude, it is /{such}/ +an honor to meet you. You're like our all-time hero --" + +"Don't say that," I said. "Don't say that. You two are like a flashing +advertisement that says, 'I am jamming, please put my ass in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. +You couldn't be more obvious." + +Liam looked like he might cry. + +"Don't worry, you didn't get busted. I'll give you some tips, later." He +brightened up again. What was becoming weirdly clear was that these two really +/{did}/ idolize M1k3y, and that they'd do anything I said. They were grinning +like idiots. It made me uncomfortable, sick to my stomach. + +"Listen, I need to get on Xnet, now, without going home or anywhere near home. +Do you two live near here?" + +"I do," Nate said. "Up at the top of California Street. It's a bit of a walk -- +steep hills." I'd just walked all the way down them. Masha was somewhere up +there. But still, it was better than I had any right to expect. + +"Let's go," I said. + +# + +Nate loaned me his baseball hat and traded jackets with me. I didn't have to +worry about gait-recognition, not with my ankle throbbing the way it was -- I +limped like an extra in a cowboy movie. + +Nate lived in a huge four-bedroom apartment at the top of Nob Hill. The +building had a doorman, in a red overcoat with gold brocade, and he touched his +cap and called Nate, "Mr Nate" and welcomed us all there. The place was +spotless and smelled of furniture polish. I tried not to gawp at what must have +been a couple million bucks' worth of condo. + +"My dad," he explained. "He was an investment banker. Lots of life insurance. +He died when I was 14 and we got it all. They'd been divorced for years, but he +left my mom as beneficiary." + +From the floor-to-ceiling window, you could see a stunning view of the other +side of Nob Hill, all the way down to Fisherman's Wharf, to the ugly stub of +the Bay Bridge, the crowd of cranes and trucks. Through the mist, I could just +make out Treasure Island. Looking down all that way, it gave me a crazy urge to +jump. + +I got online with his Xbox and a huge plasma screen in the living room. He +showed me how many open WiFi networks were visible from his high vantage point +-- twenty, thirty of them. This was a good spot to be an Xnetter. + +There was a /{lot}/ of email in my M1k3y account. 20,000 new messages since +Ange and I had left her place that morning. Lots of it was from the press, +asking for followup interviews, but most of it was from the Xnetters, people +who'd seen the /{Guardian}/ story and wanted to tell me that they'd do anything +to help me, anything I needed. + +That did it. Tears started to roll down my cheeks. + +Nate and Liam exchanged glances. I tried to stop, but it was no good. I was +sobbing now. Nate went to an oak book-case on one wall and swung a bar out of +one of its shelves, revealing gleaming rows of bottles. He poured me a shot of +something golden brown and brought it to me. + +"Rare Irish whiskey," he said. "Mom's favorite." + +It tasted like fire, like gold. I sipped at it, trying not to choke. I didn't +really like hard liquor, but this was different. I took several deep breaths. + +"Thanks, Nate," I said. He looked like I'd just pinned a medal on him. He was a +good kid. + +"All right," I said, and picked up the keyboard. The two boys watched in +fascination as I paged through my mail on the gigantic screen. + +What I was looking for, first and foremost, was email from Ange. There was a +chance that she'd just gotten away. There was always that chance. + +I was an idiot to even hope. There was nothing from her. I started going +through the mail as fast as I could, picking apart the press requests, the fan +mail, the hate mail, the spam... + +And that's when I found it: a letter from Zeb. + +"It wasn't nice to wake up this morning and find the letter that I thought you +would destroy in the pages of the newspaper. Not nice at all. Made me feel -- +hunted. + +"But I've come to understand why you did it. I don't know if I can approve of +your tactics, but it's easy to see that your motives were sound. + +"If you're reading this, that means that there's a good chance you've gone +underground. It's not easy. I've been learning that. I've been learning a lot +more. + +"I can help you. I should do that for you. You're doing what you can for me. +(Even if you're not doing it with my permission.) + +"Reply if you get this, if you're on the run and alone. Or reply if you're in +custody, being run by our friends on Gitmo, looking for a way to make the pain +stop. If they've got you, you'll do what they tell you. I know that. I'll take +that risk. + +"For you, M1k3y." + +"Wooooah," Liam breathed. "Duuuuude." I wanted to smack him. I turned to say +something awful and cutting to him, but he was staring at me with eyes as big +as saucers, looking like he wanted to drop to his knees and worship me. + +"Can I just say," Nate said, "can I just say that it is the biggest honor of my +entire life to help you? Can I just say that?" + +I was blushing now. There was nothing for it. These two were totally +star-struck, even though I wasn't any kind of star, not in my own mind at +least. + +"Can you guys --" I swallowed. "Can I have some privacy here?" + +They slunk out of the room like bad puppies and I felt like a tool. I typed +fast. + +"I got away, Zeb. And I'm on the run. I need all the help I can get. I want to +end this now." I remembered to take Masha's phone out of my pocket and tickle +it to keep it from going to sleep. + +They let me use the shower, gave me a change of clothes, a new backpack with +half their earthquake kit in it -- energy bars, medicine, hot and cold packs, +and an old sleeping-bag. They even slipped a spare Xbox Universal already +loaded with ParanoidXbox on it into there. That was a nice touch. I had to draw +the line at a flaregun. + +I kept on checking my email to see if Zeb had replied. I answered the fan mail. +I answered the mail from the press. I deleted the hate mail. I was +half-expecting to see something from Masha, but chances were she was halfway to +LA by now, her fingers hurt, and in no position to type. I tickled her phone +again. + +They encouraged me to take a nap and for a brief, shameful moment, I got all +paranoid like maybe these guys were thinking of turning me in once I was +asleep. Which was idiotic -- they could have turned me in just as easily when I +was awake. I just couldn't compute the fact that they thought /{so much}/ of +me. I had known, intellectually, that there were people who would follow M1k3y. +I'd met some of those people that morning, shouting BITE BITE BITE and vamping +it up at Civic Center. But these two were more personal. They were just nice, +goofy guys, they coulda been any of my friends back in the days before the +Xnet, just two pals who palled around having teenage adventures. They'd +volunteered to join an army, my army. I had a responsibility to them. Left to +themselves, they'd get caught, it was only a matter of time. They were too +trusting. + +"Guys, listen to me for a second. I have something serious I need to talk to +you about." + +They almost stood at attention. It would have been funny if it wasn't so scary. + +"Here's the thing. Now that you've helped me, it's really dangerous. If you get +caught, I'll get caught. They'll get anything you know out of you --" I held up +my hand to forestall their protests. "No, stop. You haven't been through it. +Everyone talks. Everyone breaks. If you're ever caught, you tell them +everything, right away, as fast as you can, as much as you can. They'll get it +all eventually anyway. That's how they work. + +"But you won't get caught, and here's why: you're not jammers anymore. You are +retired from active duty. You're a --" I fished in my memory for vocabulary +words culled from spy thrillers -- "you're a sleeper cell. Stand down. Go back +to being normal kids. One way or another, I'm going to break this thing, break +it wide open, end it. Or it will get me, finally, do me in. If you don't hear +from me within 72 hours, assume that they got me. Do whatever you want then. +But for the next three days -- and forever, if I do what I'm trying to do -- +stand down. Will you promise me that?" + +They promised with all solemnity. I let them talk me into napping, but made +them swear to rouse me once an hour. I'd have to tickle Masha's phone and I +wanted to know as soon as Zeb got back in touch with me. + +# + +The rendezvous was on a BART car, which made me nervous. They're full of +cameras. But Zeb knew what he was doing. He had me meet him in the last car of +a certain train departing from Powell Street Station, at a time when that car +was filled with the press of bodies. He sidled up to me in the crowd, and the +good commuters of San Francisco cleared a space for him, the hollow that always +surrounds homeless people. + +"Nice to see you again," he muttered, facing into the doorway. Looking into the +dark glass, I could see that there was no one close enough to eavesdrop -- not +without some kind of high-efficiency mic rig, and if they knew enough to show +up here with one of those, we were dead anyway. + +"You too, brother," I said. "I'm -- I'm sorry, you know?" + +"Shut up. Don't be sorry. You were braver than I am. Are you ready to go +underground now? Ready to disappear?" + +"About that." + +"Yes?" + +"That's not the plan." + +"Oh," he said. + +"Listen, OK? I have -- I have pictures, video. Stuff that really /{proves}/ +something." I reached into my pocket and tickled Masha's phone. I'd bought a +charger for it in Union Square on the way down, and had stopped and plugged it +in at a cafe for long enough to get the battery up to four out of five bars. "I +need to get it to Barbara Stratford, the woman from the /{Guardian}/. But +they're going to be watching her -- watching to see if I show up." + +"You don't think that they'll be watching for me, too? If your plan involves me +going within a mile of that woman's home or office --" + +"I want you to get Van to come and meet me. Did Darryl ever tell you about Van? +The girl --" + +"He told me. Yes, he told me. You don't think they'll be watching her? All of +you who were arrested?" + +"I think they will. I don't think they'll be watching her as hard. And Van has +totally clean hands. She never cooperated with any of my --" I swallowed. "With +my projects. So they might be a little more relaxed about her. If she calls the +Bay Guardian to make an appointment to explain why I'm just full of crap, maybe +they'll let her keep it." + +He stared at the door for a long time. + +"You know what happens when they catch us again." It wasn't a question. + +I nodded. + +"Are you sure? Some of the people that were on Treasure Island with us got +taken away in helicopters. They got taken /{offshore}/. There are countries +where America can outsource its torture. Countries where you will rot forever. +Countries where you wish they would just get it over with, have you dig a +trench and then shoot you in the back of the head as you stand over it." + +I swallowed and nodded. + +"Is it worth the risk? We can go underground for a long, long time here. +Someday we might get our country back. We can wait it out." + +I shook my head. "You can't get anything done by doing nothing. It's our +/{country}/. They've taken it from us. The terrorists who attack us are still +free -- but /{we're not}/. I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my +whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you +have to take for yourself." + +# + +That afternoon, Van left school as usual, sitting in the back of the bus with a +tight knot of her friends, laughing and joking the way she always did. The +other riders on the bus took special note of her, she was so loud, and besides, +she was wearing that stupid, giant floppy hat, something that looked like a +piece out of a school play about Renaissance sword fighters. At one point they +all huddled together, then turned away to look out the back of the bus, +pointing and giggling. The girl who wore the hat now was the same height as +Van, and from behind, it could be her. + +No one paid any attention to the mousy little Asian girl who got off a few +stops before the BART. She was dressed in a plain old school uniform, and +looking down shyly as she stepped off. Besides, at that moment, the loud Korean +girl let out a whoop and her friends followed along, laughing so loudly that +even the bus driver slowed down, twisted in his seat and gave them a dirty +look. + +Van hurried away down the street with her head down, her hair tied back and +dropped down the collar of her out-of-style bubble jacket. She had slipped +lifts into her shoes that made her two wobbly, awkward inches taller, and had +taken her contacts out and put on her least-favored glasses, with huge lenses +that took up half her face. Although I'd been waiting in the bus-shelter for +her and knew when to expect her, I hardly recognized her. I got up and walked +along behind her, across the street, trailing by half a block. + +The people who passed me looked away as quickly as possible. I looked like a +homeless kid, with a grubby cardboard sign, street-grimy overcoat, huge, +overstuffed knapsack with duct-tape over its rips. No one wants to look at a +street-kid, because if you meet his eye, he might ask you for some spare +change. I'd walked around Oakland all afternoon and the only person who'd +spoken to me was a Jehovah's Witness and a Scientologist, both trying to +convert me. It felt gross, like being hit on by a pervert. + +Van followed the directions I'd written down carefully. Zeb had passed them to +her the same way he'd given me the note outside school -- bumping into her as +she waited for the bus, apologizing profusely. I'd written the note plainly and +simply, just laying it out for her: I know you don't approve. I understand. But +this is it, this is the most important favor I've ever asked of you. Please. +Please. + +She'd come. I knew she would. We had a lot of history, Van and I. She didn't +like what had happened to the world, either. Besides, an evil, chuckling voice +in my head had pointed out, she was under suspicion now that Barbara's article +was out. + +We walked like that for six or seven blocks, looking at who was near us, what +cars went past. Zeb told me about five-person trails, where five different +undercovers traded off duties following you, making it nearly impossible to +spot them. You had to go somewhere totally desolate, where anyone at all would +stand out like a sore thumb. + +The overpass for the 880 was just a few blocks from the Coliseum BART station, +and even with all the circling Van did, it didn't take long to reach it. The +noise from overhead was nearly deafening. No one else was around, not that I +could tell. I'd visited the site before I suggested it to Van in the note, +taking care to check for places where someone could hide. There weren't any. + +Once she stopped at the appointed place, I moved quickly to catch up to her. +She blinked owlishly at me from behind her glasses. + +"Marcus," she breathed, and tears swam in her eyes. I found that I was crying +too. I'd make a really rotten fugitive. Too sentimental. + +She hugged me so hard I couldn't breathe. I hugged her back even harder. + +Then she kissed me. + +Not on the cheek, not like a sister. Full on the lips, a hot, wet, steamy kiss +that seemed to go on forever. I was so overcome with emotion -- + +No, that's bull. I knew exactly what I was doing. I kissed her back. + +Then I stopped and pulled away, nearly shoved her away. "Van," I gasped. + +"Oops," she said. + +"Van," I said again. + +"Sorry," she said. "I --" + +Something occurred to me just then, something I guess I should have seen a +long, long time before. + +"You /{like}/ me, don't you?" + +She nodded miserably. "For years," she said. + +Oh, God. Darryl, all these years, so in love with her, and the whole time she +was looking at me, secretly wanting me. And then I ended up with Ange. Ange +said that she'd always fought with Van. And I was running around, getting into +so much trouble. + +"Van," I said. "Van, I'm so sorry." + +"Forget it," she said, looking away. "I know it can't be. I just wanted to do +that once, just in case I never --" She bit down on the words. + +"Van, I need you to do something for me. Something important. I need you to +meet with the journalist from the Bay Guardian, Barbara Stratford, the one who +wrote the article. I need you to give her something." I explained about Masha's +phone, told her about the video that Masha had sent me. + +"What good will this do, Marcus? What's the point?" + +"Van, you were right, at least partly. We can't fix the world by putting other +people at risk. I need to solve the problem by telling what I know. I should +have done that from the start. Should have walked straight out of their custody +and to Darryl's father's house and told him what I knew. Now, though, I have +evidence. This stuff -- it could change the world. This is my last hope. The +only hope for getting Darryl out, for getting a life that I don't spend +underground, hiding from the cops. And you're the only person I can trust to do +this." + +"Why me?" + +"You're kidding, right? Look at how well you handled getting here. You're a +pro. You're the best at this of any of us. You're the only one I can trust. +That's why you." + +"Why not your friend Angie?" She said the name without any inflection at all, +like it was a block of cement. + +I looked down. "I thought you knew. They arrested her. She's in Gitmo -- on +Treasure Island. She's been there for days now." I had been trying not to think +about this, not to think about what might be happening to her. Now I couldn't +stop myself and I started to sob. I felt a pain in my stomach, like I'd been +kicked, and I pushed my hands into my middle to hold myself in. I folded there, +and the next thing I knew, I was on my side in the rubble under the freeway, +holding myself and crying. + +Van knelt down by my side. "Give me the phone," she said, her voice an angry +hiss. I fished it out of my pocket and passed it to her. + +Embarrassed, I stopped crying and sat up. I knew that snot was running down my +face. Van was giving me a look of pure revulsion. "You need to keep it from +going to sleep," I said. "I have a charger here." I rummaged in my pack. I +hadn't slept all the way through the night since I acquired it. I set the +phone's alarm to go off every 90 minutes and wake me up so that I could keep it +from going to sleep. "Don't fold it shut, either." + +"And the video?" + +"That's harder," I said. "I emailed a copy to myself, but I can't get onto the +Xnet anymore." In a pinch, I could have gone back to Nate and Liam and used +their Xbox again, but I didn't want to risk it. "Look, I'm going to give you my +login and password for the Pirate Party's mail-server. You'll have to use Tor +to access it -- Homeland Security is bound to be scanning for people logging +into p-party mail." + +"Your login and password," she said, looking a little surprised. + +"I trust you, Van. I know I can trust you." + +She shook her head. "You /{never}/ give out your passwords, Marcus." + +"I don't think it matters anymore. Either you succeed or I -- or it's the end +of Marcus Yallow. Maybe I'll get a new identity, but I don't think so. I think +they'll catch me. I guess I've known all along that they'd catch me, some day." + +She looked at me, furious now. "What a waste. What was it all for, anyway?" + +Of all the things she could have said, nothing could have hurt me more. It was +like another kick in the stomach. What a waste, all of it, futile. Darryl and +Ange, gone. I might never see my family again. And still, Homeland Security had +my city and my country caught in a massive, irrational shrieking freak-out +where anything could be done in the name of stopping terrorism. + +Van looked like she was waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to +say to that. She left me there. + +# + +Zeb had a pizza for me when I got back "home" -- to the tent under a freeway +overpass in the Mission that he'd staked out for the night. He had a pup tent, +military surplus, stenciled with SAN FRANCISCO LOCAL HOMELESS COORDINATING +BOARD. + +The pizza was a Dominos, cold and clabbered, but delicious for all that. "You +like pineapple on your pizza?" + +Zeb smiled condescendingly at me. "Freegans can't be choosy," he said. + +"Freegans?" + +"Like vegans, but we only eat free food." + +"Free food?" + +He grinned again. "You know -- /{free}/ food. From the free food store?" + +"You stole this?" + +"No, dummy. It's from the other store. The little one out behind the store? +Made of blue steel? Kind of funky smelling?" + +"You got this out of the garbage?" + +He flung his head back and cackled. "Yes indeedy. You should /{see}/ your face. +Dude, it's OK. It's not like it was rotten. It was fresh -- just a screwed up +order. They threw it out in the box. They sprinkle rat poison over everything +at closing-time, but if you get there quick, you're OK. You should see what +grocery stores throw out! Wait until breakfast. I'm going to make you a fruit +salad you won't believe. As soon as one strawberry in the box goes a little +green and fuzzy, the whole thing is out --" + +I tuned him out. The pizza was fine. It wasn't as if sitting in the dumpster +would infect it or something. If it was gross, that was only because it came +from Domino's -- the worst pizza in town. I'd never liked their food, and I'd +given it up altogether when I found out that they bankrolled a bunch of +ultra-crazy politicians who thought that global warming and evolution were +satanic plots. + +It was hard to shake the feeling of grossness, though. + +But there /{was}/ another way to look at it. Zeb had showed me a secret, +something I hadn't anticipated: there was a whole hidden world out there, a way +of getting by without participating in the system. + +"Freegans, huh?" + +"Yogurt, too," he said, nodding vigorously. "For the fruit salad. They throw it +out the day after the best-before date, but it's not as if it goes green at +midnight. It's yogurt, I mean, it's basically just rotten milk to begin with." + +I swallowed. The pizza tasted funny. Rat poison. Spoiled yogurt. Furry +strawberries. This would take some getting used to. + +I ate another bite. Actually, Domino's pizza sucked a little less when you got +it for free. + +Liam's sleeping bag was warm and welcoming after a long, emotionally exhausting +day. Van would have made contact with Barbara by now. She'd have the video and +the picture. I'd call her in the morning and find out what she thought I should +do next. I'd have to come in once she published, to back it all up. + +I thought about that as I closed my eyes, thought about what it would be like +to turn myself in, the cameras all rolling, following the infamous M1k3y into +one of those big, columnated buildings in Civic Center. + +The sound of the cars screaming by overhead turned into a kind of ocean sound +as I drifted away. There were other tents nearby, homeless people. I'd met a +few of them that afternoon, before it got dark and we all retreated to huddle +near our own tents. They were all older than me, rough looking and gruff. None +of them looked crazy or violent, though. Just like people who'd had bad luck, +or made bad decisions, or both. + +I must have fallen asleep, because I don't remember anything else until a +bright light was shined into my face, so bright it was blinding. + +"That's him," said a voice behind the light. + +"Bag him," said another voice, one I'd heard before, one I'd heard over and +over again in my dreams, lecturing to me, demanding my passwords. +Severe-haircut-woman. + +The bag went over my head quickly and was cinched so tight at the throat that I +choked and threw up my freegan pizza. As I spasmed and choked, hard hands bound +my wrists, then my ankles. I was rolled onto a stretcher and hoisted, then +carried into a vehicle, up a couple of clanging metal steps. They dropped me +into a padded floor. There was no sound at all in the back of the vehicle once +they closed the doors. The padding deadened everything except my own choking. + +"Well, hello again," she said. I felt the van rock as she crawled in with me. I +was still choking, trying to gasp in a breath. Vomit filled my mouth and +trickled down my windpipe. + +"We won't let you die," she said. "If you stop breathing, we'll make sure you +start again. So don't worry about it." + +I choked harder. I sipped at air. Some was getting through. Deep, wracking +coughs shook my chest and back, dislodging some more of the puke. More breath. + +"See?" she said. "Not so bad. Welcome home, M1k3y. We've got somewhere very +special to take you." + +I relaxed onto my back, feeling the van rock. The smell of used pizza was +overwhelming at first, but as with all strong stimuli, my brain gradually grew +accustomed to it, filtered it out until it was just a faint aroma. The rocking +of the van was almost comforting. + +That's when it happened. An incredible, deep calm that swept over me like I was +lying on the beach and the ocean had swept in and lifted me as gently as a +parent, held me aloft and swept me out onto a warm sea under a warm sun. After +everything that had happened, I was caught, but it didn't matter. I had gotten +the information to Barbara. I had organized the Xnet. I had won. And if I +hadn't won, I had done everything I could have done. More than I ever thought I +could do. I took a mental inventory as I rode, thinking of everything that I +had accomplished, that /{we}/ had accomplished. The city, the country, the +world was full of people who wouldn't live the way DHS wanted us to live. We'd +fight forever. They couldn't jail us all. + +I sighed and smiled. + +She'd been talking all along, I realized. I'd been so far into my happy place +that she'd just gone away. + +"-- smart kid like you. You'd think that you'd know better than to mess with +us. We've had an eye on you since the day you walked out. We would have caught +you even if you hadn't gone crying to your lesbo journalist traitor. I just +don't get it -- we had an understanding, you and me..." + +We rumbled over a metal plate, the van's shocks rocking, and then the rocking +changed. We were on water. Heading to Treasure Island. Hey, Ange was there. +Darryl, too. Maybe. + +# + +The hood didn't come off until I was in my cell. They didn't bother with the +cuffs at my wrists and ankles, just rolled me off the stretcher and onto the +floor. It was dark, but by the moonlight from the single, tiny, high window, I +could see that the mattress had been taken off the cot. The room contained me, +a toilet, a bed-frame, and a sink, and nothing else. + +I closed my eyes and let the ocean lift me. I floated away. Somewhere, far +below me, was my body. I could tell what would happen next. I was being left to +piss myself. Again. I knew what that was like. I'd pissed myself before. It +smelled bad. It itched. It was humiliating, like being a baby. + +But I'd survived it. + +I laughed. The sound was weird, and it drew me back into my body, back to the +present. I laughed and laughed. I'd had the worst that they could throw at me, +and I'd survived it, and I'd /{beaten them}/, beaten them for months, showed +them up as chumps and despots. I'd /{won}/. + +I let my bladder cut loose. It was sore and full anyway, and no time like the +present. + +The ocean swept me away. + +# + +When morning came, two efficient, impersonal guards cut the bindings off of my +wrists and ankles. I still couldn't walk -- when I stood, my legs gave way like +a stringless marionette's. Too much time in one position. The guards pulled my +arms over their shoulders and half-dragged/half-carried me down the familiar +corridor. The bar codes on the doors were curling up and dangling now, attacked +by the salt air. + +I got an idea. "Ange!" I yelled. "Darryl!" I yelled. My guards yanked me along +faster, clearly disturbed but not sure what to do about it. "Guys, it's me, +Marcus! Stay free!" + +Behind one of the doors, someone sobbed. Someone else cried out in what sounded +like Arabic. Then it was cacophony, a thousand different shouting voices. + +They brought me to a new room. It was an old shower-room, with the shower-heads +still present in the mould tiles. + +"Hello, M1k3y," Severe Haircut said. "You seem to have had an eventful +morning." She wrinkled her nose pointedly. + +"I pissed myself," I said, cheerfully. "You should try it." + +"Maybe we should give you a bath, then," she said. She nodded, and my guards +carried me to another stretcher. This one had restraining straps running its +length. They dropped me onto it and it was ice-cold and soaked through. Before +I knew it, they had the straps across my shoulders, hips and ankles. A minute +later, three more straps were tied down. A man's hands grabbed the railings by +my head and released some catches, and a moment later I was tilted down, my +head below my feet. + +"Let's start with something simple," she said. I craned my head to see her. She +had turned to a desk with an Xbox on it, connected to an expensive-looking +flat-panel TV. "I'd like you to tell me your login and password for your Pirate +Party email, please?" + +I closed my eyes and let the ocean carry me off the beach. + +"Do you know what waterboarding is, M1k3y?" Her voice reeled me in. "You get +strapped down like this, and we pour water over your head, up your nose and +down your mouth. You can't suppress the gag reflex. They call it a simulated +execution, and from what I can tell from this side of the room, that's a fair +assessment. You won't be able to fight the feeling that you're dying." + +I tried to go away. I'd heard of waterboarding. This was it, real torture. And +this was just the beginning. + +I couldn't go away. The ocean didn't sweep in and lift me. There was a +tightness in my chest, my eyelids fluttered. I could feel clammy piss on my +legs and clammy sweat in my hair. My skin itched from the dried puke. + +She swam into view above me. "Let's start with the login," she said. + +I closed my eyes, squeezed them shut. + +"Give him a drink," she said. + +I heard people moving. I took a deep breath and held it. + +The water started as a trickle, a ladleful of water gently poured over my chin, +my lips. Up my upturned nostrils. It went back into my throat, starting to +choke me, but I wouldn't cough, wouldn't gasp and suck it into my lungs. I held +onto my breath and squeezed my eyes harder. + +There was a commotion from outside the room, a sound of chaotic boots stamping, +angry, outraged shouts. The dipper was emptied into my face. + +I heard her mutter something to someone in the room, then to me she said, "Just +the login, Marcus. It's a simple request. What could I do with your login, +anyway?" + +This time, it was a bucket of water, all at once, a flood that didn't stop, it +must have been gigantic. I couldn't help it. I gasped and aspirated the water +into my lungs, coughed and took more water in. I knew they wouldn't kill me, +but I couldn't convince my body of that. In every fiber of my being, I knew I +was going to die. I couldn't even cry -- the water was still pouring over me. + +Then it stopped. I coughed and coughed and coughed, but at the angle I was at, +the water I coughed up dribbled back into my nose and burned down my sinuses. + +The coughs were so deep they hurt, hurt my ribs and my hips as I twisted +against them. I hated how my body was betraying me, how my mind couldn't +control my body, but there was nothing for it. + +Finally, the coughing subsided enough for me to take in what was going on +around me. People were shouting and it sounded like someone was scuffling, +wrestling. I opened my eyes and blinked into the bright light, then craned my +neck, still coughing a little. + +The room had a lot more people in it than it had had when we started. Most of +them seemed to be wearing body armor, helmets, and smoked-plastic visors. They +were shouting at the Treasure Island guards, who were shouting back, necks +corded with veins. + +"Stand down!" one of the body-armors said. "Stand down and put your hands in +the air. You are under arrest!" + +Severe haircut woman was talking on her phone. One of the body armors noticed +her and he moved swiftly to her and batted her phone away with a gloved hand. +Everyone fell silent as it sailed through the air in an arc that spanned the +small room, clattering to the ground in a shower of parts. + +The silence broke and the body-armors moved into the room. Two grabbed each of +my torturers. I almost managed a smile at the look on Severe Haircut's face +when two men grabbed her by the shoulders, turned her around, and yanked a set +of plastic handcuffs around her wrists. + +One of the body-armors moved forward from the doorway. He had a video camera on +his shoulder, a serious rig with blinding white light. He got the whole room, +circling me twice while he got me. I found myself staying perfectly still, as +though I was sitting for a portrait. + +It was ridiculous. + +"Do you think you could get me off of this thing?" I managed to get it all out +with only a little choking. + +Two more body armors moved up to me, one a woman, and began to unstrap me. They +flipped their visors up and smiled at me. They had red crosses on their +shoulders and helmets. + +Beneath the red crosses was another insignia: CHP. California Highway Patrol. +They were State Troopers. + +I started to ask what they were doing there, and that's when I saw Barbara +Stratford. She'd evidently been held back in the corridor, but now she came in +pushing and shoving. "There you are," she said, kneeling beside me and grabbing +me in the longest, hardest hug of my life. + +That's when I knew it -- Guantanamo by the Bay was in the hands of its enemies. +I was saved. + +1~ Chapter 21 + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Pages Books in Toronto, Canada.~{ Pages +Books http://pagesbooks.ca/ 256 Queen St W, Toronto, ON M5V 1Z8 Canada +1 416 +598 1447 }~ Long a fixture on the bleedingly trendy Queen Street West strip, +Pages is located over the road from CityTV and just a few doors down from the +old Bakka store where I worked. We at Bakka loved having Pages down the street +from us: what we were to science fiction, they were to everything else: +hand-picked material representing the stuff you'd never find elsewhere, the +stuff you didn't know you were looking for until you saw it there. Pages also +has one of the best news-stands I've ever seen, row on row of incredible +magazines and zines from all over the world.] }/ + +They left me and Barbara alone in the room then, and I used the working shower +head to rinse off -- I was suddenly embarrassed to be covered in piss and barf. +When I finished, Barbara was in tears. + +"Your parents --" she began. + +I felt like I might throw up again. God, my poor folks. What they must have +gone through. + +"Are they here?" + +"No," she said. "It's complicated," she said. + +"What?" + +"You're still under arrest, Marcus. Everyone here is. They can't just sweep in +and throw open the doors. Everyone here is going to have to be processed +through the criminal justice system. It could take, well, it could take +months." + +"I'm going to have to stay here for /{months}/?" + +She grabbed my hands. "No, I think we're going to be able to get you arraigned +and released on bail pretty fast. But pretty fast is a relative term. I +wouldn't expect anything to happen today. And it's not going to be like those +people had it. It will be humane. There will be real food. No interrogations. +Visits from your family. + +"Just because the DHS is out, it doesn't mean that you get to just walk out of +here. What's happened here is that we're getting rid of the bizarro-world +version of the justice system they'd instituted and replacing it with the old +system. The system with judges, open trials and lawyers. + +"So we can try to get you transferred to a juvie facility on the mainland, but +Marcus, those places can be really rough. Really, really rough. This might be +the best place for you until we get you bailed out." + +Bailed out. Of course. I was a criminal -- I hadn't been charged yet, but there +were bound to be plenty of charges they could think of. It was practically +illegal just to think impure thoughts about the government. + +She gave my hands another squeeze. "It sucks, but this is how it has to be. The +point is, it's /{over}/. The Governor has thrown the DHS out of the State, +dismantled every checkpoint. The Attorney General has issued warrants for any +law-enforcement officers involved in 'stress interrogations' and secret +imprisonments. They'll go to jail, Marcus, and it's because of what you did." + +I was numb. I heard the words, but they hardly made sense. Somehow, it was +over, but it wasn't over. + +"Look," she said. "We probably have an hour or two before this all settles +down, before they come back and put you away again. What do you want to do? +Walk on the beach? Get a meal? These people had an incredible staff room -- we +raided it on the way in. Gourmet all the way." + +At last a question I could answer. "I want to find Ange. I want to find +Darryl." + +# + +I tried to use a computer I found to look up their cell-numbers, but it wanted +a password, so we were reduced to walking the corridors, calling out their +names. Behind the cell-doors, prisoners screamed back at us, or cried, or +begged us to let them go. They didn't understand what had just happened, +couldn't see their former guards being herded onto the docks in plastic +handcuffs, taken away by California state SWAT teams. + +"Ange!" I called over the din, "Ange Carvelli! Darryl Glover! It's Marcus!" + +We'd walked the whole length of the cell-block and they hadn't answered. I felt +like crying. They'd been shipped overseas -- they were in Syria or worse. I'd +never see them again. + +I sat down and leaned against the corridor wall and put my face in my hands. I +saw Severe Haircut Woman's face, saw her smirk as she asked me for my login. +She had done this. She would go to jail for it, but that wasn't enough. I +thought that when I saw her again, I might kill her. She deserved it. + +"Come on," Barbara said, "Come on, Marcus. Don't give up. There's more around +here, come on." + +She was right. All the doors we'd passed in the cellblock were old, rusting +things that dated back to when the base was first built. But at the very end of +the corridor, sagging open, was a new high-security door as thick as a +dictionary. We pulled it open and ventured into the dark corridor within. + +There were four more cell-doors here, doors without bar codes. Each had a small +electronic keypad mounted on it. + +"Darryl?" I said. "Ange?" + +"Marcus?" + +It was Ange, calling out from behind the furthest door. Ange, my Ange, my +angel. + +"Ange!" I cried. "It's me, it's me!" + +"Oh God, Marcus," she choked out, and then it was all sobs. + +I pounded on the other doors. "Darryl! Darryl, are you here?" + +"I'm here." The voice was very small, and very hoarse. "I'm here. I'm very, +very sorry. Please. I'm very sorry." + +He sounded... broken. Shattered. + +"It's me, D," I said, leaning on his door. "It's Marcus. It's over -- they +arrested the guards. They kicked the Department of Homeland Security out. We're +getting trials, open trials. And we get to testify against /{them}/." + +"I'm sorry," he said. "Please, I'm so sorry." + +The California patrolmen came to the door then. They still had their camera +rolling. "Ms Stratford?" one said. He had his faceplate up and he looked like +any other cop, not like my savior. Like someone come to lock me up. + +"Captain Sanchez," she said. "We've located two of the prisoners of interest +here. I'd like to see them released and inspect them for myself." + +"Ma'am, we don't have access codes for those doors yet," he said. + +She held up her hand. "That wasn't the arrangement. I was to have complete +access to this facility. That came direct from the Governor, sir. We aren't +budging until you open these cells." Her face was perfectly smooth, without a +single hint of give or flex. She meant it. + +The Captain looked like he needed sleep. He grimaced. "I'll see what I can do," +he said. + +# + +They did manage to open the cells, finally, about half an hour later. It took +three tries, but they eventually got the right codes entered, matching them to +the arphids on the ID badges they'd taken off the guards they'd arrested. + +They got into Ange's cell first. She was dressed in a hospital gown, open at +the back, and her cell was even more bare than mine had been -- just padding +all over, no sink or bed, no light. She emerged blinking into the corridor and +the police camera was on her, its bright lights in her face. Barbara stepped +protectively between us and it. Ange stepped tentatively out of her cell, +shuffling a little. There was something wrong with her eyes, with her face. She +was crying, but that wasn't it. + +"They drugged me," she said. "When I wouldn't stop screaming for a lawyer." + +That's when I hugged her. She sagged against me, but she squeezed back, too. +She smelled stale and sweaty, and I smelled no better. I never wanted to let +go. + +That's when they opened Darryl's cell. + +He had shredded his paper hospital gown. He was curled up, naked, in the back +of the cell, shielding himself from the camera and our stares. I ran to him. + +"D," I whispered in his ear. "D, it's me. It's Marcus. It's over. The guards +have been arrested. We're going to get bail, we're going home." + +He trembled and squeezed his eyes shut. "I'm sorry," he whispered, and turned +his face away. + +They took me away then, a cop in body-armor and Barbara, took me back to my +cell and locked the door, and that's where I spent the night. + +# + +I don't remember much about the trip to the courthouse. They had me chained to +five other prisoners, all of whom had been in for a lot longer than me. One +only spoke Arabic -- he was an old man, and he trembled. The others were all +young. I was the only white one. Once we had been gathered on the deck of the +ferry, I saw that nearly everyone on Treasure Island had been one shade of +brown or another. + +I had only been inside for one night, but it was too long. There was a light +drizzle coming down, normally the sort of thing that would make me hunch my +shoulders and look down, but today I joined everyone else in craning my head +back at the infinite gray sky, reveling in the stinging wet as we raced across +the bay to the ferry-docks. + +They took us away in buses. The shackles made climbing into the buses awkward, +and it took a long time for everyone to load. No one cared. When we weren't +struggling to solve the geometry problem of six people, one chain, narrow +bus-aisle, we were just looking around at the city around us, up the hill at +the buildings. + +All I could think of was finding Darryl and Ange, but neither were in evidence. +It was a big crowd and we weren't allowed to move freely through it. The state +troopers who handled us were gentle enough, but they were still big, armored +and armed. I kept thinking I saw Darryl in the crowd, but it was always someone +else with that same beaten, hunched look that he'd had in his cell. He wasn't +the only broken one. + +At the courthouse, they marched us into interview rooms in our shackle group. +An ACLU lawyer took our information and asked us a few questions -- when she +got to me, she smiled and greeted me by name -- and then led us into the +courtroom before the judge. He wore an actual robe, and seemed to be in a good +mood. + +The deal seemed to be that anyone who had a family member to post bail could go +free, and everyone else got sent to prison. The ACLU lawyer did a lot of +talking to the judge, asking for a few more hours while the prisoners' families +were rounded up and brought to the court-house. The judge was pretty good about +it, but when I realized that some of these people had been locked up since the +bridge blew, taken for dead by their families, without trial, subjected to +interrogation, isolation, torture -- I wanted to just break the chains myself +and set everyone free. + +When I was brought before the judge, he looked down at me and took off his +glasses. He looked tired. The ACLU lawyer looked tired. The bailiffs looked +tired. Behind me, I could hear a sudden buzz of conversation as my name was +called by the bailiff. The judge rapped his gavel once, without looking away +from me. He scrubbed at his eyes. + +"Mr Yallow," he said, "the prosecution has identified you as a flight risk. I +think they have a point. You certainly have more, shall we say, /{history}/, +than the other people here. I am tempted to hold you over for trial, no matter +how much bail your parents are prepared to post." + +My lawyer started to say something, but the judge silenced her with a look. He +scrubbed at his eyes. + +"Do you have anything to say?" + +"I had the chance to run," I said. "Last week. Someone offered to take me away, +get me out of town, help me build a new identity. Instead I stole her phone, +escaped from our truck, and ran away. I turned over her phone -- which had +evidence about my friend, Darryl Glover, on it -- to a journalist and hid out +here, in town." + +"You stole a phone?" + +"I decided that I couldn't run. That I had to face justice -- that my freedom +wasn't worth anything if I was a wanted man, or if the city was still under the +DHS. If my friends were still locked up. That freedom for me wasn't as +important as a free country." + +"But you did steal a phone." + +I nodded. "I did. I plan on giving it back, if I ever find the young woman in +question." + +"Well, thank you for that speech, Mr Yallow. You are a very well spoken young +man." He glared at the prosecutor. "Some would say a very brave man, too. There +was a certain video on the news this morning. It suggested that you had some +legitimate reason to evade the authorities. In light of that, and of your +little speech here, I will grant bail, but I will also ask the prosecutor to +add a charge of Misdemeanor Petty Theft to the count, as regards the matter of +the phone. For this, I expect another $50,000 in bail." + +He banged his gavel again, and my lawyer gave my hand a squeeze. + +He looked down at me again and re-seated his glasses. He had dandruff, there on +the shoulders of his robe. A little more rained down as his glasses touched his +wiry, curly hair. + +"You can go now, young man. Stay out of trouble." + +# + +I turned to go and someone tackled me. It was Dad. He literally lifted me off +my feet, hugging me so hard my ribs creaked. He hugged me the way I remembered +him hugging me when I was a little boy, when he'd spin me around and around in +hilarious, vomitous games of airplane that ended with him tossing me in the air +and catching me and squeezing me like that, so hard it almost hurt. + +A set of softer hands pried me gently out of his arms. Mom. She held me at +arm's length for a moment, searching my face for something, not saying +anything, tears streaming down her face. She smiled and it turned into a sob +and then she was holding me too, and Dad's arm encircled us both. + +When they let go, I managed to finally say something. "Darryl?" + +"His father met me somewhere else. He's in the hospital." + +"When can I see him?" + +"It's our next stop," Dad said. He was grim. "He doesn't --" He stopped. "They +say he'll be OK," he said. His voice was choked. + +"How about Ange?" + +"Her mother took her home. She wanted to wait here for you, but..." + +I understood. I felt full of understanding now, for how all the families of all +the people who'd been locked away must feel. The courtroom was full of tears +and hugs, and even the bailiffs couldn't stop it. + +"Let's go see Darryl," I said. "And let me borrow your phone?" + +I called Ange on the way to the hospital where they were keeping Darryl -- San +Francisco General, just down the street from us -- and arranged to see her +after dinner. She talked in a hurried whisper. Her mom wasn't sure whether to +punish her or not, but Ange didn't want to tempt fate. + +There were two state troopers in the corridor where Darryl was being held. They +were holding off a legion of reporters who stood on tiptoe to see around them +and get pictures. The flashes popped in our eyes like strobes, and I shook my +head to clear it. My parents had brought me clean clothes and I'd changed in +the back seat, but I still felt gross, even after scrubbing myself in the +court-house bathrooms. + +Some of the reporters called my name. Oh yeah, that's right, I was famous now. +The state troopers gave me a look, too -- either they'd recognized my face or +my name when the reporters called it out. + +Darryl's father met us at the door of his hospital room, speaking in a whisper +too low for the reporters to hear. He was in civvies, the jeans and sweater I +normally thought of him wearing, but he had his service ribbons pinned to his +breast. + +"He's sleeping," he said. "He woke up a little while ago and he started crying. +He couldn't stop. They gave him something to help him sleep." + +He led us in, and there was Darryl, his hair clean and combed, sleeping with +his mouth open. There was white stuff at the corners of his mouth. He had a +semi-private room, and in the other bed there was an older Arab-looking guy, in +his 40s. I realized it was the guy I'd been chained to on the way off of +Treasure Island. We exchanged embarrassed waves. + +Then I turned back to Darryl. I took his hand. His nails had been chewed to the +quick. He'd been a nail-biter when he was a kid, but he'd kicked the habit when +we got to high school. I think Van talked him out of it, telling him how gross +it was for him to have his fingers in his mouth all the time. + +I heard my parents and Darryl's dad take a step away, drawing the curtains +around us. I put my face down next to his on the pillow. He had a straggly, +patchy beard that reminded me of Zeb. + +"Hey, D," I said. "You made it. You're going to be OK." + +He snored a little. I almost said, "I love you," a phrase I'd only said to one +non-family-member ever, a phrase that was weird to say to another guy. In the +end, I just gave his hand another squeeze. Poor Darryl. + +1~epilogue Epilogue + +_1 /{ [This chapter is dedicated to Hudson Booksellers,~{ Hudson Booksellers +http://www.hudsongroup.com/HudsonBooksellers_s.html }~ the booksellers that are +in practically every airport in the USA. Most of the Hudson stands have just a +few titles (though those are often surprisingly diverse), but the big ones, +like the one in the AA terminal at Chicago's O'Hare, are as good as any +neighborhood store. It takes something special to bring a personal touch to an +airport, and Hudson's has saved my mind on more than one long Chicago layover.] +}/ + +Barbara called me at the office on July 4th weekend. I wasn't the only one +who'd come into work on the holiday weekend, but I was the only one whose +excuse was that my day-release program wouldn't let me leave town. + +In the end, they convicted me of stealing Masha's phone. Can you believe that? +The prosecution had done a deal with my lawyer to drop all charges related to +"Electronic terrorism" and "inciting riots" in exchange for my pleading guilty +to the misdemeanor petty theft charge. I got three months in a day-release +program with a half-way house for juvenile offenders in the Mission. I slept at +the halfway house, sharing a dorm with a bunch of actual criminals, gang kids +and druggie kids, a couple of real nuts. During the day, I was "free" to go out +and work at my "job." + +"Marcus, they're letting her go," she said. + +"Who?" + +"Johnstone, Carrie Johnstone," she said. "The closed military tribunal cleared +her of any wrongdoing. The file is sealed. She's being returned to active duty. +They're sending her to Iraq." + +Carrie Johnstone was Severe Haircut Woman's name. It came out in the +preliminary hearings at the California Superior Court, but that was just about +all that came out. She wouldn't say a word about who she took orders from, what +she'd done, who had been imprisoned and why. She just sat, perfectly silent, +day after day, in the courthouse. + +The Feds, meanwhile, had blustered and shouted about the Governor's +"unilateral, illegal" shut-down of the Treasure Island facility, and the +Mayor's eviction of fed cops from San Francisco. A lot of those cops had ended +up in state prisons, along with the guards from Gitmo-by-the-Bay. + +Then, one day, there was no statement from the White House, nothing from the +state capitol. And the next day, there was a dry, tense press-conference held +jointly on the steps of the Governor's mansion, where the head of the DHS and +the governor announced their "understanding." + +The DHS would hold a closed, military tribunal to investigate "possible errors +in judgment" committed after the attack on the Bay Bridge. The tribunal would +use every tool at its disposal to ensure that criminal acts were properly +punished. In return, control over DHS operations in California would go through +the State Senate, which would have the power to shut down, inspect, or +re-prioritize all homeland security in the state. + +The roar of the reporters had been deafening and Barbara had gotten the first +question in. "Mr Governor, with all due respect: we have incontrovertible video +evidence that Marcus Yallow, a citizen of this state, native born, was +subjected to a simulated execution by DHS officers, apparently acting on orders +from the White House. Is the State really willing to abandon any pretense of +justice for its citizens in the face of illegal, barbaric /{torture}/?" Her +voice trembled, but didn't crack. + +The Governor spread his hands. "The military tribunals will accomplish justice. +If Mr Yallow -- or any other person who has cause to fault the Department of +Homeland Security -- wants further justice, he is, of course, entitled to sue +for such damages as may be owing to him from the federal government." + +That's what I was doing. Over twenty thousand civil lawsuits were filed against +the DHS in the week after the Governor's announcement. Mine was being handled +by the ACLU, and they'd filed motions to get at the results of the closed +military tribunals. So far, the courts were pretty sympathetic to this. + +But I hadn't expected this. + +"She got off totally Scot-free?" + +"The press release doesn't say much. 'After a thorough examination of the +events in San Francisco and in the special anti-terror detention center on +Treasure Island, it is the finding of this tribunal that Ms Johnstone's actions +do not warrant further discipline.' There's that word, 'further' -- like +they've already punished her." + +I snorted. I'd dreamed of Carrie Johnstone nearly every night since I was +released from Gitmo-by-the-Bay. I'd seen her face looming over mine, that +little snarly smile as she told the man to give me a "drink." + +"Marcus --" Barbara said, but I cut her off. + +"It's fine. It's fine. I'm going to do a video about this. Get it out over the +weekend. Mondays are big days for viral video. Everyone'll be coming back from +the holiday weekend, looking for something funny to forward around school or +the office." + +I saw a shrink twice a week as part of my deal at the halfway house. Once I'd +gotten over seeing that as some kind of punishment, it had been good. He'd +helped me focus on doing constructive things when I was upset, instead of +letting it eat me up. The videos helped. + +"I have to go," I said, swallowing hard to keep the emotion out of my voice. + +"Take care of yourself, Marcus," Barbara said. + +Ange hugged me from behind as I hung up the phone. "I just read about it +online," she said. She read a million newsfeeds, pulling them with a headline +reader that sucked up stories as fast as they ended up on the wire. She was our +official blogger, and she was good at it, snipping out the interesting stories +and throwing them online like a short order cook turning around breakfast +orders. + +I turned around in her arms so that I was hugging her from in front. Truth be +told, we hadn't gotten a lot of work done that day. I wasn't allowed to be out +of the halfway house after dinner time, and she couldn't visit me there. We saw +each other around the office, but there were usually a lot of other people +around, which kind of put a crimp in our cuddling. Being alone in the office +for a day was too much temptation. It was hot and sultry, too, which meant we +were both in tank-tops and shorts, a lot of skin-to-skin contact as we worked +next to each other. + +"I'm going to make a video," I said. "I want to release it today." + +"Good," she said. "Let's do it." + +Ange read the press-release. I did a little monologue, synched over that famous +footage of me on the water-board, eyes wild in the harsh light of the camera, +tears streaming down my face, hair matted and flecked with barf. + +"This is me. I am on a waterboard. I am being tortured in a simulated +execution. The torture is supervised by a woman called Carrie Johnstone. She +works for the government. You might remember her from this video." + +I cut in the video of Johnstone and Kurt Rooney. "That's Johnstone and +Secretary of State Kurt Rooney, the president's chief strategist." + +/{"The nation does not love that city. As far as they're concerned, it is a +Sodom and Gomorrah of fags and atheists who deserve to rot in hell. The only +reason the country cares what they think in San Francisco is that they had the +good fortune to have been blown to hell by some Islamic terrorists."}/ + +"He's talking about the city where I live. At last count, 4,215 of my neighbors +were killed on the day he's talking about. But some of them may not have been +killed. Some of them disappeared into the same prison where I was tortured. +Some mothers and fathers, children and lovers, brothers and sisters will never +see their loved ones again -- because they were secretly imprisoned in an +illegal jail right here in the San Francisco Bay. They were shipped overseas. +The records were meticulous, but Carrie Johnstone has the encryption keys." I +cut back to Carrie Johnstone, the footage of her sitting at the board table +with Rooney, laughing. + +I cut in the footage of Johnstone being arrested. "When they arrested her, I +thought we'd get justice. All the people she broke and disappeared. But the +president --" I cut to a still of him laughing and playing golf on one of his +many holidays "-- and his Chief Strategist --" now a still of Rooney shaking +hands with an infamous terrorist leader who used to be on "our side" "-- +intervened. They sent her to a secret military tribunal and now that tribunal +has cleared her. Somehow, they saw nothing wrong with all of this." + +I cut in a photomontage of the hundreds of shots of prisoners in their cells +that Barbara had published on the Bay Guardian's site the day we were released. +"We elected these people. We pay their salaries. They're supposed to be on our +side. They're supposed to defend our freedoms. But these people --" a series of +shots of Johnstone and the others who'd been sent to the tribunal "-- betrayed +our trust. The election is four months away. That's a lot of time. Enough for +you to go out and find five of your neighbors -- five people who've given up on +voting because their choice is 'none of the above.' + +"Talk to your neighbors. Make them promise to vote. Make them promise to take +the country back from the torturers and thugs. The people who laughed at my +friends as they lay fresh in their graves at the bottom of the harbor. Make +them promise to talk to their neighbors. + +"Most of us choose none of the above. It's not working. You have to choose -- +choose freedom. + +"My name is Marcus Yallow. I was tortured by my country, but I still love it +here. I'm seventeen years old. I want to grow up in a free country. I want to +live in a free country." + +I faded out to the logo of the website. Ange had built it, with help from Jolu, +who got us all the free hosting we could ever need on Pigspleen. + +The office was an interesting place. Technically we were called Coalition of +Voters for a Free America, but everyone called us the Xnetters. The +organization -- a charitable nonprofit -- had been co-founded by Barbara and +some of her lawyer friends right after the liberation of Treasure Island. The +funding was kicked off by some tech millionaires who couldn't believe that a +bunch of hacker kids had kicked the DHS's ass. Sometimes, they'd ask us to go +down the peninsula to Sand Hill Road, where all the venture capitalists were, +and give a little presentation on Xnet technology. There were about a zillion +startups who were trying to make a buck on the Xnet. + +Whatever -- I didn't have to have anything to do with it, and I got a desk and +an office with a storefront, right there on Valencia Street, where we gave away +ParanoidXbox CDs and held workshops on building better WiFi antennas. A +surprising number of average people dropped in to make personal donations, both +of hardware (you can run ParanoidLinux on just about anything, not just Xbox +Universals) and cash money. They loved us. + +The big plan was to launch our own ARG in September, just in time for the +election, and to really tie it in with signing up voters and getting them to +the polls. Only 42 percent of Americans showed up at the polls for the last +election -- nonvoters had a huge majority. I kept trying to get Darryl and Van +to one of our planning sessions, but they kept on declining. They were spending +a lot of time together, and Van insisted that it was totally nonromantic. +Darryl wouldn't talk to me much at all, though he sent me long emails about +just about everything that wasn't about Van or terrorism or prison. + +Ange squeezed my hand. "God, I hate that woman," she said. + +I nodded. "Just one more rotten thing this country's done to Iraq," I said. "If +they sent her to my town, I'd probably become a terrorist." + +"You did become a terrorist when they sent her to your town." + +"So I did," I said. + +"Are you going to Ms Galvez's hearing on Monday?" + +"Totally." I'd introduced Ange to Ms Galvez a couple weeks before, when my old +teacher invited me over for dinner. The teacher's union had gotten a hearing +for her before the board of the Unified School District to argue for getting +her old job back. They said that Fred Benson was coming out of (early) +retirement to testify against her. I was looking forward to seeing her again. + +"Do you want to go get a burrito?" + +"Totally." + +"Let me get my hot-sauce," she said. + +I checked my email one more time -- my PirateParty email, which still got a +dribble of messages from old Xnetters who hadn't found my Coalition of Voters +address yet. + +The latest message was from a throwaway email address from one of the new +Brazilian anonymizers. + +> Found her, thanks. You didn't tell me she was so h4wt. + +"Who's /{that}/ from?" + +I laughed. "Zeb," I said. "Remember Zeb? I gave him Masha's email address. I +figured, if they're both underground, might as well introduce them to one +another." + +"He thinks Masha is /{cute}/?" + +"Give the guy a break, he's clearly had his mind warped by circumstances." + +"And you?" + +"Me?" + +"Yeah -- was your mind warped by circumstances?" + +I held Ange out at arm's length and looked her up and down and up and down. I +held her cheeks and stared through her thick-framed glasses into her big, +mischievous tilted eyes. I ran my fingers through her hair. + +"Ange, I've never thought more clearly in my whole life." + +She kissed me then, and I kissed her back, and it was some time before we went +out for that burrito. + +1~afterword_1 Afterword by Bruce Schneier + +I'm a security technologist. My job is making people secure. + +I think about security systems and how to break them. Then, how to make them +more secure. Computer security systems. Surveillance systems. Airplane security +systems and voting machines and RFID chips and everything else. + +Cory invited me into the last few pages of his book because he wanted me to +tell you that security is fun. It's incredibly fun. It's cat and mouse, who can +outsmart whom, hunter versus hunted fun. I think it's the most fun job you can +possibly have. If you thought it was fun to read about Marcus outsmarting the +gait-recognition cameras with rocks in his shoes, think of how much more fun it +would be if you were the first person in the world to think of that. + +Working in security means knowing a lot about technology. It might mean knowing +about computers and networks, or cameras and how they work, or the chemistry of +bomb detection. But really, security is a mindset. It's a way of thinking. +Marcus is a great example of that way of thinking. He's always looking for ways +a security system fails. I'll bet he couldn't walk into a store without +figuring out a way to shoplift. Not that he'd do it -- there's a difference +between knowing how to defeat a security system and actually defeating it -- +but he'd know he could. + +It's how security people think. We're constantly looking at security systems +and how to get around them; we can't help it. + +This kind of thinking is important no matter what side of security you're on. +If you've been hired to build a shoplift-proof store, you'd better know how to +shoplift. If you're designing a camera system that detects individual gaits, +you'd better plan for people putting rocks in their shoes. Because if you +don't, you're not going to design anything good. + +So when you're wandering through your day, take a moment to look at the +security systems around you. Look at the cameras in the stores you shop at. (Do +they prevent crime, or just move it next door?) See how a restaurant operates. +(If you pay after you eat, why don't more people just leave without paying?) +Pay attention at airport security. (How could you get a weapon onto an +airplane?) Watch what the teller does at a bank. (Bank security is designed to +prevent tellers from stealing just as much as it is to prevent you from +stealing.) Stare at an anthill. (Insects are all about security.) Read the +Constitution, and notice all the ways it provides people with security against +government. Look at traffic lights and door locks and all the security systems +on television and in the movies. Figure out how they work, what threats they +protect against and what threats they don't, how they fail, and how they can be +exploited. + +Spend enough time doing this, and you'll find yourself thinking differently +about the world. You'll start noticing that many of the security systems out +there don't actually do what they claim to, and that much of our national +security is a waste of money. You'll understand privacy as essential to +security, not in opposition. You'll stop worrying about things other people +worry about, and start worrying about things other people don't even think +about. + +Sometimes you'll notice something about security that no one has ever thought +about before. And maybe you'll figure out a new way to break a security system. + +It was only a few years ago that someone invented phishing. + +I'm frequently amazed how easy it is to break some pretty big-name security +systems. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the big one is that it's +impossible to prove that something is secure. All you can do is try to break it +-- if you fail, you know that it's secure enough to keep /{you}/ out, but what +about someone who's smarter than you? Anyone can design a security system so +strong he himself can't break it. + +Think about that for a second, because it's not obvious. No one is qualified to +analyze their own security designs, because the designer and the analyzer will +be the same person, with the same limits. Someone else has to analyze the +security, because it has to be secure against things the designers didn't think +of. + +This means that all of us have to analyze the security that other people +design. And surprisingly often, one of us breaks it. Marcus's exploits aren't +far-fetched; that kind of thing happens all the time. Go onto the net and look +up "bump key" or "Bic pen Kryptonite lock"; you'll find a couple of really +interesting stories about seemingly strong security defeated by pretty basic +technology. + +And when that happens, be sure to publish it on the Internet somewhere. Secrecy +and security aren't the same, even though it may seem that way. Only bad +security relies on secrecy; good security works even if all the details of it +are public. + +And publishing vulnerabilities forces security designers to design better +security, and makes us all better consumers of security. If you buy a +Kryptonite bike lock and it can be defeated with a Bic pen, you're not getting +very good security for your money. And, likewise, if a bunch of smart kids can +defeat the DHS's antiterrorist technologies, then it's not going to do a very +good job against real terrorists. + +Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security +in the bargain is even stupider. + +So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of +them. + +Bruce Schneier http://www.schneier.com + +1~afterword_2 Afterword by Andrew "bunnie" Huang, Xbox Hacker + +Hackers are explorers, digital pioneers. It's in a hacker's nature to question +conventions and be tempted by intricate problems. Any complex system is sport +for a hacker; a side effect of this is the hacker's natural affinity for +problems involving security. Society is a large and complex system, and is +certainly not off limits to a little hacking. As a result, hackers are often +stereotyped as iconoclasts and social misfits, people who defy social norms for +the sake of defiance. When I hacked the Xbox in 2002 while at MIT, I wasn’t +doing it to rebel or to cause harm; I was just following a natural impulse, the +same impulse that leads to fixing a broken iPod or exploring the roofs and +tunnels at MIT.    Unfortunately, the combination of not complying with social +norms and knowing “threatening” things like how to read the arphid on your +credit card or how to pick locks causes some people to fear hackers. However, +the motivations of a hacker are typically as simple as “I’m an engineer because +I like to design things.” People often ask me, “Why did you hack the Xbox +security system?” And my answer is simple: First, I own the things that I buy. +If someone can tell me what I can and can’t run on my hardware, then I don’t +own it. Second, because it’s there. It’s a system of sufficient complexity to +make good sport. It was a great diversion from the late nights working on my +PhD.   I was lucky. The fact that I was a graduate student at MIT when I +hacked the Xbox legitimized the activity in the eyes of the right people. +However, the right to hack shouldn’t only be extended to academics. I got my +start on hacking when I was just a boy in elementary school, taking apart every +electronic appliance I could get my hands on, much to my parents’ chagrin. My +reading collection included books on model rocketry, artillery, nuclear +weaponry and explosives manufacture -- books that I borrowed from my school +library (I think the Cold War influenced the reading selection in public +schools). I also played with my fair share of ad-hoc fireworks and roamed the +open construction sites of houses being raised in my Midwestern neighborhood. +While not the wisest of things to do, these were important experiences in my +coming of age and I grew up to be a free thinker because of the social +tolerance and trust of my community.   Current events have not been so kind to +aspiring hackers. Little Brother shows how we can get from where we are today +to a world where social tolerance for new and different thoughts dies +altogether. A recent event highlights exactly how close we are to crossing the +line into the world of Little Brother. I had the fortune of reading an early +draft of Little Brother back in November 2006. Fast forward two months to the +end of January 2007, when Boston police found suspected explosive devices and +shut down the city for a day. These devices turned out to be nothing more than +circuit boards with flashing LEDs, promoting a show for the Cartoon Network. +The artists who placed this urban graffiti were taken in as suspected +terrorists and ultimately charged with felony; the network producers had to +shell out a $2 million settlement, and the head of the Cartoon Network resigned +over the fallout.  + +Have the terrorists already won? Have we given in to fear, such that artists, +hobbyists, hackers, iconoclasts, or perhaps an unassuming group of kids playing +Harajuku Fun Madness, could be so trivially implicated as terrorists? + +There is a term for this dysfunction -- it is called an autoimmune disease, +where an organism's defense system goes into overdrive so much that it fails to +recognize itself and attacks its own cells. Ultimately, the organism +self-destructs. Right now, America is on the verge of going into anaphylactic +shock over its own freedoms, and we need to inoculate ourselves against this. +Technology is no cure for this paranoia; in fact, it may enhance the paranoia: +it turns us into prisoners of our own device. Coercing millions of people to +strip off their outer garments and walk barefoot through metal detectors every +day is no solution either. It only serves to remind the population every day +that they have a reason to be afraid, while in practice providing only a flimsy +barrier to a determined adversary. + +The truth is that we can't count on someone else to make us feel free, and +M1k3y won’t come and save us the day our freedoms are lost to paranoia. That's +because M1k3y is in you and in me--Little Brother is a reminder that no matter +how unpredictable the future may be, we don't win freedom through security +systems, cryptography, interrogations and spot searches. We win freedom by +having the courage and the conviction to live every day freely and to act as a +free society, no matter how great the threats are on the horizon. + +Be like M1k3y: step out the door and dare to be free. + +1~bibliogrphy Bibliography + +No writer creates from scratch -- we all engage in what Isaac Newton called +"standing on the shoulders of giants." We borrow, plunder and remix the art and +culture created by those around us and by our literary forebears. + +If you liked this book and want to learn more, there are plenty of sources to +turn to, online and at your local library or bookstore. + +Hacking is a great subject. All science relies on telling other people what +you've done so that they can verify it, learn from it, and improve on it, and +hacking is all about that process, so there's plenty published on the subject. + +Start with Andrew "Bunnie" Huang's "Hacking the Xbox," (No Starch Press, 2003) +a wonderful book that tells the story of how Bunnie, then a student at MIT, +reverse-engineered the Xbox's anti-tampering mechanisms and opened the way for +all the subsequent cool hacks for the platform. In telling the story, Bunnie +has also created a kind of Bible for reverse engineering and hardware hacking. + +Bruce Schneier's "Secrets and Lies" (Wiley, 2000) and "Beyond Fear" +(Copernicus, 2003) are the definitive lay-person's texts on understanding +security and thinking critically about it, while his "Applied Cryptography" +(Wiley, 1995) remains the authoritative source for understanding crypto. Bruce +maintains an excellent blog and mailing list at schneier.com/blog. Crypto and +security are the realm of the talented amateur, and the "cypherpunk" movement +is full of kids, home-makers, parents, lawyers, and every other stripe of +person, hammering away on security protocols and ciphers. + +There are several great magazines devoted to this subject, but the two best +ones are 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, which is full of pseudonymous, boasting +accounts of hacks accomplished, and O'Reilly's MAKE magazine, which features +solid HOWTOs for making your own hardware projects at home. + +The online world overflows with material on this subject, of course. Ed Felten +and Alex J Halderman's Freedom to Tinker (www.freedom-to-tinker.com) is a blog +maintained by two fantastic Princeton engineering profs who write lucidly about +security, wiretapping, anti-copying technology and crypto. + +Don't miss Natalie Jeremijenko's "Feral Robotics" at UC San Diego +(xdesign.ucsd.edu/feralrobots/). Natalie and her students rewire toy robot dogs +from Toys R Us and turn them into bad-ass toxic-waste detectors. They unleash +them on public parks where big corporations have dumped their waste and +demonstrate in media-friendly fashion how toxic the ground is. + +Like many of the hacks in this book, the tunneling-over-DNS stuff is real. Dan +Kaminsky, a tunneling expert of the first water, published details in 2004 +(www.doxpara.com/bo2004.ppt). + +The guru of "citizen journalism" is Dan Gillmor, who is presently running +Center for Citizen Media at Harvard and UC Berkeley -- he also wrote a hell of +a book on the subject, "We, the Media" (O'Reilly, 2004). + +If you want to learn more about hacking arphids, start with Annalee Newitz's +Wired Magazine article "The RFID Hacking Underground" +(www.wirednews.com/wired/archive/14.05/rfid.html). Adam Greenfield's +"Everyware" (New Riders Press, 2006) is a chilling look at the dangers of a +world of arphids. + +Neal Gershenfeld's Fab Lab at MIT (fab.cba.mit.edu) is hacking out the world's +first real, cheap "3D printers" that can pump out any object you can dream of. +This is documented in Gershenfeld's excellent book on the subject, "Fab" (Basic +Books, 2005). + +Bruce Sterling's "Shaping Things" (MIT Press, 2005) shows how arphids and fabs +could be used to force companies to build products that don't poison the world. + +Speaking of Bruce Sterling, he wrote the first great book on hackers and the +law, "The Hacker Crackdown" (Bantam, 1993), which is also the first book +published by a major publisher that was released on the Internet at the same +time (copies abound; see stuff.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html for one). It was +reading this book that turned me on to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, +where I was privileged to work for four years. + +The Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) is a charitable membership +organization with a student rate. They spend the money that private individuals +give them to keep the Internet safe for personal liberty, free speech, due +process, and the rest of the Bill of Rights. They're the Internet's most +effective freedom fighters, and you can join the struggle just by signing up +for their mailing list and writing to your elected officials when they're +considering selling you out in the name of fighting terrorism, piracy, the +mafia, or whatever bogeyman has caught their attention today. EFF also helps +maintain TOR, The Onion Router, which is a real technology you can use /{right +now}/ to get out of your government, school or library's censoring firewall +(tor.eff.org). + +EFF has a huge, deep website with amazing information aimed at a general +audience, as do the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org), Public Knowledge +(publicknowledge.org), FreeCulture (freeculture.org), Creative Commons +(creativecommons.org) -- all of which also are worthy of your support. +FreeCulture is an international student movement that actively recruits kids to +found their own local chapters at their high schools and universities. It's a +great way to get involved and make a difference. + +A lot of websites chronicle the fight for cyberliberties, but few go at it with +the verve of Slashdot, "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters" (slashdot.org). + +And of course, you /{have to}/ visit Wikipedia, the collaborative, net-authored +encyclopedia that anyone can edit, with more than 1,000,000 entries in English +alone. Wikipedia covers hacking and counterculture in astonishing depth and +with amazing, up-to-the-nanosecond currency. One caution: you can't just look +at the entries in Wikipedia. It's really important to look at the "History" and +"Discussion" links at the top of every Wikipedia page to see how the current +version of the truth was arrived at, get an appreciation for the competing +points-of-view there, and decide for yourself whom you trust. + +If you want to get at some /{real}/ forbidden knowledge, have a skim around +Cryptome (cryptome.org), the world's most amazing archive of secret, suppressed +and liberated information. Cryptome's brave publishers collect material that's +been pried out of the state by Freedom of Information Act requests or leaked by +whistle-blowers and publishes it. + +The best fictional account of the history of crypto is, hands-down, Neal +Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (Avon, 2002). Stephenson tells the story of Alan +Turing and the Nazi Enigma Machine, turning it into a gripping war-novel that +you won't be able to put down. + +The Pirate Party mentioned in Little Brother is real and thriving in Sweden +(www.piratpartiet.se), Denmark, the USA and France at the time of this writing +(July, 2006). They're a little out-there, but a movement takes all kinds. + +Speaking of out-there, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies did indeed try to levitate +the Pentagon, throw money into the stock exchange, and work with a group called +the Up Against the Wall Motherf_____ers. Abbie Hoffman's classic book on +ripping off the system, "Steal This Book," is back in print (Four Walls Eight +Windows, 2002) and it's also online as a collaborative wiki for people who want +to try to update it (stealthiswiki.nine9pages.com). + +Hoffman's autobiography, "Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture" (also in print +from Four Walls Eight Windows) is one of my favorite memoirs ever, even if it +is highly fictionalized. Hoffman was an incredible storyteller and had great +activist instincts. If you want to know how he really lived his life, though, +try Larry Sloman's "Steal This Dream" (Doubleday, 1998). + +More counterculture fun: Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" can be had in practically +any used bookstore for a buck or two. Allan Ginsberg's "HOWL" is online in many +places, and you can hear him read it if you search for the MP3 at archive.org. +For bonus points, track down the album "Tenderness Junction" by the Fugs, which +includes the audio of Allan Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman's levitation ceremony at +the Pentagon. + +This book couldn't have been written if not for George Orwell's magnificent, +world-changing "1984," the best novel ever published on how societies go wrong. +I read this book when I was 12 and have read it 30 or 40 times since, and every +time, I get something new out of it. Orwell was a master of storytelling and +was clearly sick over the totalitarian state that emerged in the Soviet Union. +1984 holds up today as a genuinely frightening work of science fiction, and it +is one of the novels that literally changed the world. Today, "Orwellian" is +synonymous with a state of ubiquitous surveillance, doublethink, and torture. + +Many novelists have tackled parts of the story in Little Brother. Daniel +Pinkwater's towering comic masterpiece, "Alan Mendelsohn: The Boy From Mars" +(presently in print as part of the omnibus "5 Novels," Farrar, Straus and +Giroux, 1997) is a book that every geek needs to read. If you've ever felt like +an outcast for being too smart or weird, READ THIS BOOK. It changed my life. + +On a more contemporary front, there's Scott Westerfeld's "So Yesterday" +(Razorbill, 2004), which follows the adventures of cool hunters and +counterculture jammers. Scott and his wife Justine Larbalestier were my partial +inspiration to write a book for young adults -- as was Kathe Koja. Thanks, +guys. + +1~acknowledgements Acknowledgments + +This book owes a tremendous debt to many writers, friends, mentors, and heroes +who made it possible. + +For the hackers and cypherpunks: Bunnie Huang, Seth Schoen, Ed Felten, Alex +Halderman, Gweeds, Natalie Jeremijenko, Emmanuel Goldstein, Aaron Swartz + +For the heroes: Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Larry Lessig, +Shari Steele, Cindy Cohn, Fred von Lohmann, Jamie Boyle, George Orwell, Abbie +Hoffman, Joe Trippi, Bruce Schneier, Ross Dowson, Harry Kopyto, Tim O'Reilly + +For the writers: Bruce Sterling, Kathe Koja, Scott Westerfeld, Justine +Larbalestier, Pat York, Annalee Newitz, Dan Gillmor, Daniel Pinkwater, Kevin +Pouslen, Wendy Grossman, Jay Lake, Ben Rosenbaum + +For the friends: Fiona Romeo, Quinn Norton, Danny O'Brien, Jon Gilbert, danah +boyd, Zak Hanna, Emily Hurson, Grad Conn, John Henson, Amanda Foubister, Xeni +Jardin, Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, John Battelle, Karl Levesque, Kate +Miles, Neil and Tara-Lee Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, Ken Snider + +For the mentors: Judy Merril, Roz and Gord Doctorow, Harriet Wolff, Jim Kelly, +Damon Knight, Scott Edelman + +Thank you all for giving me the tools to think and write about these ideas. + +1~cc_a_nc_sa Creative Commons + +!_ Creative Commons Legal Code + +!_ Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported + +CREATIVE COMMONS CORPORATION IS NOT A LAW FIRM AND DOES NOT PROVIDE LEGAL +SERVICES. 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Raymond. + :license: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Open Publication License, version 2.0. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;programming;software:open source software;open source software:development + +@identifier: + :oclc: 45835582 + +@notes: + :abstract: I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of the surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral" model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software. + +@links: + { The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Source }http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ + { @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar + { CatB @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Networks-Production-Transforms-Markets/dp/0596001088/ + { CatB @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0596001088 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:C; break=1 + :home_button_text: {The Cathedral and the Bazaar}http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/; {Eric S. Raymond}http://www.catb.org/~esr/ + :footer: {The Cathedral and the Bazaar}http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/; {Eric S. Raymond}http://www.catb.org/~esr/ + +:A~ @title @author + +1~ The Cathedral and the Bazaar + +Linux is subversive. Who would have thought even five years ago (1991) that a +world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time +hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected +only by the tenuous strands of the Internet? + +Certainly not I. By the time Linux swam onto my radar screen in early 1993, I +had already been involved in Unix and open-source development for ten years. I +was one of the first GNU contributors in the mid-1980s. I had released a good +deal of open-source software onto the net, developing or co-developing several +programs (nethack, Emacs's VC and GUD modes, xlife, and others) that are still +in wide use today. I thought I knew how it was done. + +Linux overturned much of what I thought I knew. I had been preaching the Unix +gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for +years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which +a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most +important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs +programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by +individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with +no beta to be released before its time. + +Linus Torvalds's style of development—release early and often, delegate +everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise. No +quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to +resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly +symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who'd take submissions from anyone) out +of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a +succession of miracles. + +The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a +distinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard not just at +individual projects, but also at trying to understand why the Linux world not +only didn't fly apart in confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength +at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders. + +By mid-1996 I thought I was beginning to understand. Chance handed me a perfect +way to test my theory, in the form of an open-source project that I could +consciously try to run in the bazaar style. So I did—and it was a significant +success. + +This is the story of that project. I'll use it to propose some aphorisms about +effective open-source development. Not all of these are things I first learned +in the Linux world, but we'll see how the Linux world gives them particular +point. If I'm correct, they'll help you understand exactly what it is that +makes the Linux community such a fountain of good software—and, perhaps, they +will help you become more productive yourself. + +1~ The Mail Must Get Through + +Since 1993 I'd been running the technical side of a small free-access Internet +service provider called Chester County InterLink (CCIL) in West Chester, +Pennsylvania. I co-founded CCIL and wrote our unique multiuser bulletin-board +software—you can check it out by telnetting to locke.ccil.org. Today it +supports almost three thousand users on thirty lines. The job allowed me +24-hour-a-day access to the net through CCIL's 56K line—in fact, the job +practically demanded it! + +I had gotten quite used to instant Internet email. I found having to +periodically telnet over to locke to check my mail annoying. What I wanted was +for my mail to be delivered on snark (my home system) so that I would be +notified when it arrived and could handle it using all my local tools. + +The Internet's native mail forwarding protocol, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer +Protocol), wouldn't suit, because it works best when machines are connected +full-time, while my personal machine isn't always on the Internet, and doesn't +have a static IP address. What I needed was a program that would reach out over +my intermittent dialup connection and pull across my mail to be delivered +locally. I knew such things existed, and that most of them used a simple +application protocol called POP (Post Office Protocol). POP is now widely +supported by most common mail clients, but at the time, it wasn't built in to +the mail reader I was using. + +I needed a POP3 client. So I went out on the Internet and found one. Actually, +I found three or four. I used one of them for a while, but it was missing what +seemed an obvious feature, the ability to hack the addresses on fetched mail so +replies would work properly. + +The problem was this: suppose someone named `joe' on locke sent me mail. If I +fetched the mail to snark and then tried to reply to it, my mailer would +cheerfully try to ship it to a nonexistent `joe' on snark. Hand-editing reply +addresses to tack on <@ccil.org> quickly got to be a serious pain. + +This was clearly something the computer ought to be doing for me. But none of +the existing POP clients knew how! And this brings us to the first lesson: + +_1 1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal +itch. + +Perhaps this should have been obvious (it's long been proverbial that +"Necessity is the mother of invention") but too often software developers spend +their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love. But +not in the Linux world—which may explain why the average quality of software +originated in the Linux community is so high. + +So, did I immediately launch into a furious whirl of coding up a brand-new POP3 +client to compete with the existing ones? Not on your life! I looked carefully +at the POP utilities I had in hand, asking myself "Which one is closest to what +I want?" Because: + +_1 2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and +reuse). + +While I don't claim to be a great programmer, I try to imitate one. An +important trait of the great ones is constructive laziness. They know that you +get an A not for effort but for results, and that it's almost always easier to +start from a good partial solution than from nothing at all. + +Linus Torvalds, for example, didn't actually try to write Linux from scratch. +Instead, he started by reusing code and ideas from Minix, a tiny Unix-like +operating system for PC clones. Eventually all the Minix code went away or was +completely rewritten—but while it was there, it provided scaffolding for the +infant that would eventually become Linux. + +In the same spirit, I went looking for an existing POP utility that was +reasonably well coded, to use as a development base. + +The source-sharing tradition of the Unix world has always been friendly to code +reuse (this is why the GNU project chose Unix as a base OS, in spite of serious +reservations about the OS itself). The Linux world has taken this tradition +nearly to its technological limit; it has terabytes of open sources generally +available. So spending time looking for some else's almost-good-enough is more +likely to give you good results in the Linux world than anywhere else. + +And it did for me. With those I'd found earlier, my second search made up a +total of nine candidates—fetchpop, PopTart, get-mail, gwpop, pimp, pop-perl, +popc, popmail and upop. The one I first settled on was `fetchpop' by Seung-Hong +Oh. I put my header-rewrite feature in it, and made various other improvements +which the author accepted into his 1.9 release. + +A few weeks later, though, I stumbled across the code for popclient by Carl +Harris, and found I had a problem. Though fetchpop had some good original ideas +in it (such as its background-daemon mode), it could only handle POP3 and was +rather amateurishly coded (Seung-Hong was at that time a bright but +inexperienced programmer, and both traits showed). Carl's code was better, +quite professional and solid, but his program lacked several important and +rather tricky-to-implement fetchpop features (including those I'd coded +myself). + +Stay or switch? If I switched, I'd be throwing away the coding I'd already done +in exchange for a better development base. + +A practical motive to switch was the presence of multiple-protocol support. +POP3 is the most commonly used of the post-office server protocols, but not the +only one. Fetchpop and the other competition didn't do POP2, RPOP, or APOP, and +I was already having vague thoughts of perhaps adding IMAP (Internet Message +Access Protocol, the most recently designed and most powerful post-office +protocol) just for fun. + +But I had a more theoretical reason to think switching might be as good an idea +as well, something I learned long before Linux. + +_1 3. "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, The Mythical +Man-Month, Chapter 11) + +Or, to put it another way, you often don't really understand the problem until +after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know +enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over +at least once [JB]. + +Well (I told myself) the changes to fetchpop had been my first try. So I +switched. + +After I sent my first set of popclient patches to Carl Harris on 25 June 1996, +I found out that he had basically lost interest in popclient some time before. +The code was a bit dusty, with minor bugs hanging out. I had many changes to +make, and we quickly agreed that the logical thing for me to do was take over +the program. + +Without my actually noticing, the project had escalated. No longer was I just +contemplating minor patches to an existing POP client. I took on maintaining an +entire one, and there were ideas bubbling in my head that I knew would probably +lead to major changes. + +In a software culture that encourages code-sharing, this is a natural way for a +project to evolve. I was acting out this principle: + +_1 4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you. + +But Carl Harris's attitude was even more important. He understood that + +_1 5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it +off to a competent successor. + +Without ever having to discuss it, Carl and I knew we had a common goal of +having the best solution out there. The only question for either of us was +whether I could establish that I was a safe pair of hands. Once I did that, he +acted with grace and dispatch. I hope I will do as well when it comes my turn. + +1~ The Importance of Having Users + +And so I inherited popclient. Just as importantly, I inherited popclient's user +base. Users are wonderful things to have, and not just because they demonstrate +that you're serving a need, that you've done something right. Properly +cultivated, they can become co-developers. + +Another strength of the Unix tradition, one that Linux pushes to a happy +extreme, is that a lot of users are hackers too. Because source code is +available, they can be effective hackers. This can be tremendously useful for +shortening debugging time. Given a bit of encouragement, your users will +diagnose problems, suggest fixes, and help improve the code far more quickly +than you could unaided. + +_1 6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid +code improvement and effective debugging. + +The power of this effect is easy to underestimate. In fact, pretty well all of +us in the open-source world drastically underestimated how well it would scale +up with number of users and against system complexity, until Linus Torvalds +showed us differently. + +In fact, I think Linus's cleverest and most consequential hack was not the +construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux +development model. When I expressed this opinion in his presence once, he +smiled and quietly repeated something he has often said: "I'm basically a very +lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do." Lazy +like a fox. Or, as Robert Heinlein famously wrote of one of his characters, too +lazy to fail. + +In retrospect, one precedent for the methods and success of Linux can be seen +in the development of the GNU Emacs Lisp library and Lisp code archives. In +contrast to the cathedral-building style of the Emacs C core and most other GNU +tools, the evolution of the Lisp code pool was fluid and very user-driven. +Ideas and prototype modes were often rewritten three or four times before +reaching a stable final form. And loosely-coupled collaborations enabled by the +Internet, a la Linux, were frequent. + +Indeed, my own most successful single hack previous to fetchmail was probably +Emacs VC (version control) mode, a Linux-like collaboration by email with three +other people, only one of whom (Richard Stallman, the author of Emacs and +founder of the Free Software Foundation) I have met to this day. It was a +front-end for SCCS, RCS and later CVS from within Emacs that offered +"one-touch" version control operations. It evolved from a tiny, crude sccs.el +mode somebody else had written. And the development of VC succeeded because, +unlike Emacs itself, Emacs Lisp code could go through release/test/improve +generations very quickly. + +The Emacs story is not unique. There have been other software products with a +two-level architecture and a two-tier user community that combined a +cathedral-mode core and a bazaar-mode toolbox. One such is MATLAB, a commercial +data-analysis and visualization tool. Users of MATLAB and other products with a +similar structure invariably report that the action, the ferment, the +innovation mostly takes place in the open part of the tool where a large and +varied community can tinker with it. + +1~ Release Early, Release Often + +Early and frequent releases are a critical part of the Linux development model. +Most developers (including me) used to believe this was bad policy for larger +than trivial projects, because early versions are almost by definition buggy +versions and you don't want to wear out the patience of your users. + +This belief reinforced the general commitment to a cathedral-building style of +development. If the overriding objective was for users to see as few bugs as +possible, why then you'd only release a version every six months (or less +often), and work like a dog on debugging between releases. The Emacs C core was +developed this way. The Lisp library, in effect, was not—because there were +active Lisp archives outside the FSF's control, where you could go to find new +and development code versions independently of Emacs's release cycle [QR]. + +The most important of these, the Ohio State Emacs Lisp archive, anticipated the +spirit and many of the features of today's big Linux archives. But few of us +really thought very hard about what we were doing, or about what the very +existence of that archive suggested about problems in the FSF's +cathedral-building development model. I made one serious attempt around 1992 to +get a lot of the Ohio code formally merged into the official Emacs Lisp +library. I ran into political trouble and was largely unsuccessful. + +But by a year later, as Linux became widely visible, it was clear that +something different and much healthier was going on there. Linus's open +development policy was the very opposite of cathedral-building. Linux's +Internet archives were burgeoning, multiple distributions were being floated. +And all of this was driven by an unheard-of frequency of core system releases. + +Linus was treating his users as co-developers in the most effective possible +way: + +_1 7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers. + +Linus's innovation wasn't so much in doing quick-turnaround releases +incorporating lots of user feedback (something like this had been Unix-world +tradition for a long time), but in scaling it up to a level of intensity that +matched the complexity of what he was developing. In those early times (around +1991) it wasn't unknown for him to release a new kernel more than once a day! +Because he cultivated his base of co-developers and leveraged the Internet for +collaboration harder than anyone else, this worked. + +But how did it work? And was it something I could duplicate, or did it rely on +some unique genius of Linus Torvalds? + +I didn't think so. Granted, Linus is a damn fine hacker. How many of us could +engineer an entire production-quality operating system kernel from scratch? But +Linux didn't represent any awesome conceptual leap forward. Linus is not (or at +least, not yet) an innovative genius of design in the way that, say, Richard +Stallman or James Gosling (of NeWS and Java) are. Rather, Linus seems to me to +be a genius of engineering and implementation, with a sixth sense for avoiding +bugs and development dead-ends and a true knack for finding the minimum-effort +path from point A to point B. Indeed, the whole design of Linux breathes this +quality and mirrors Linus's essentially conservative and simplifying design +approach. + +So, if rapid releases and leveraging the Internet medium to the hilt were not +accidents but integral parts of Linus's engineering-genius insight into the +minimum-effort path, what was he maximizing? What was he cranking out of the +machinery? + +Put that way, the question answers itself. Linus was keeping his hacker/users +constantly stimulated and rewarded—stimulated by the prospect of having an +ego-satisfying piece of the action, rewarded by the sight of constant (even +daily) improvement in their work. + +Linus was directly aiming to maximize the number of person-hours thrown at +debugging and development, even at the possible cost of instability in the code +and user-base burnout if any serious bug proved intractable. Linus was behaving +as though he believed something like this: + +_1 8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every +problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. + +Or, less formally, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." I dub this: +"Linus's Law". + +My original formulation was that every problem "will be transparent to +somebody". Linus demurred that the person who understands and fixes the problem +is not necessarily or even usually the person who first characterizes it. +"Somebody finds the problem," he says, "and somebody else understands it. And +I'll go on record as saying that finding it is the bigger challenge." That +correction is important; we'll see how in the next section, when we examine the +practice of debugging in more detail. But the key point is that both parts of +the process (finding and fixing) tend to happen rapidly. + +In Linus's Law, I think, lies the core difference underlying the +cathedral-builder and bazaar styles. In the cathedral-builder view of +programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep +phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence +that you've winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the +inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect. + +In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally +shallow phenomena—or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quickly when +exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. +Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a +beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out +the door. + +And that's it. That's enough. If "Linus's Law" is false, then any system as +complex as the Linux kernel, being hacked over by as many hands as the that +kernel was, should at some point have collapsed under the weight of unforseen +bad interactions and undiscovered "deep" bugs. If it's true, on the other hand, +it is sufficient to explain Linux's relative lack of bugginess and its +continuous uptimes spanning months or even years. + +Maybe it shouldn't have been such a surprise, at that. Sociologists years ago +discovered that the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally +ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion +of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers. They called this the Delphi +effect. It appears that what Linus has shown is that this applies even to +debugging an operating system—that the Delphi effect can tame development +complexity even at the complexity level of an OS kernel. [CV] + +One special feature of the Linux situation that clearly helps along the Delphi +effect is the fact that the contributors for any given project are +self-selected. An early respondent pointed out that contributions are received +not from a random sample, but from people who are interested enough to use the +software, learn about how it works, attempt to find solutions to problems they +encounter, and actually produce an apparently reasonable fix. Anyone who passes +all these filters is highly likely to have something useful to contribute. + +Linus's Law can be rephrased as "Debugging is parallelizable". Although +debugging requires debuggers to communicate with some coordinating developer, +it doesn't require significant coordination between debuggers. Thus it doesn't +fall prey to the same quadratic complexity and management costs that make +adding developers problematic. + +In practice, the theoretical loss of efficiency due to duplication of work by +debuggers almost never seems to be an issue in the Linux world. One effect of a +"release early and often" policy is to minimize such duplication by propagating +fed-back fixes quickly [JH]. + +Brooks (the author of The Mythical Man-Month) even made an off-hand observation +related to this: "The total cost of maintaining a widely used program is +typically 40 percent or more of the cost of developing it. Surprisingly this +cost is strongly affected by the number of users. More users find more bugs." +[emphasis added]. + +More users find more bugs because adding more users adds more different ways of +stressing the program. This effect is amplified when the users are +co-developers. Each one approaches the task of bug characterization with a +slightly different perceptual set and analytical toolkit, a different angle on +the problem. The "Delphi effect" seems to work precisely because of this +variation. In the specific context of debugging, the variation also tends to +reduce duplication of effort. + +So adding more beta-testers may not reduce the complexity of the current +"deepest" bug from the developer's point of view, but it increases the +probability that someone's toolkit will be matched to the problem in such a way +that the bug is shallow to that person. + +Linus coppers his bets, too. In case there are serious bugs, Linux kernel +version are numbered in such a way that potential users can make a choice +either to run the last version designated "stable" or to ride the cutting edge +and risk bugs in order to get new features. This tactic is not yet +systematically imitated by most Linux hackers, but perhaps it should be; the +fact that either choice is available makes both more attractive. [HBS] + +1~ How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity + +It's one thing to observe in the large that the bazaar style greatly +accelerates debugging and code evolution. It's another to understand exactly +how and why it does so at the micro-level of day-to-day developer and tester +behavior. In this section (written three years after the original paper, using +insights by developers who read it and re-examined their own behavior) we'll +take a hard look at the actual mechanisms. Non-technically inclined readers can +safely skip to the next section. + +One key to understanding is to realize exactly why it is that the kind of bug +report non–source-aware users normally turn in tends not to be very useful. +Non–source-aware users tend to report only surface symptoms; they take their +environment for granted, so they (a) omit critical background data, and (b) +seldom include a reliable recipe for reproducing the bug. + +The underlying problem here is a mismatch between the tester's and the +developer's mental models of the program; the tester, on the outside looking +in, and the developer on the inside looking out. In closed-source development +they're both stuck in these roles, and tend to talk past each other and find +each other deeply frustrating. + +Open-source development breaks this bind, making it far easier for tester and +developer to develop a shared representation grounded in the actual source code +and to communicate effectively about it. Practically, there is a huge +difference in leverage for the developer between the kind of bug report that +just reports externally-visible symptoms and the kind that hooks directly to +the developer's source-code–based mental representation of the program. + +Most bugs, most of the time, are easily nailed given even an incomplete but +suggestive characterization of their error conditions at source-code level. +When someone among your beta-testers can point out, "there's a boundary problem +in line nnn", or even just "under conditions X, Y, and Z, this variable rolls +over", a quick look at the offending code often suffices to pin down the exact +mode of failure and generate a fix. + +Thus, source-code awareness by both parties greatly enhances both good +communication and the synergy between what a beta-tester reports and what the +core developer(s) know. In turn, this means that the core developers' time +tends to be well conserved, even with many collaborators. + +Another characteristic of the open-source method that conserves developer time +is the communication structure of typical open-source projects. Above I used +the term "core developer"; this reflects a distinction between the project core +(typically quite small; a single core developer is common, and one to three is +typical) and the project halo of beta-testers and available contributors (which +often numbers in the hundreds). + +The fundamental problem that traditional software-development organization +addresses is Brook's Law: "Adding more programmers to a late project makes it +later." More generally, Brooks's Law predicts that the complexity and +communication costs of a project rise with the square of the number of +developers, while work done only rises linearly. + +Brooks's Law is founded on experience that bugs tend strongly to cluster at the +interfaces between code written by different people, and that +communications/coordination overhead on a project tends to rise with the number +of interfaces between human beings. Thus, problems scale with the number of +communications paths between developers, which scales as the square of the +humber of developers (more precisely, according to the formula N*(N - 1)/2 +where N is the number of developers). + +The Brooks's Law analysis (and the resulting fear of large numbers in +development groups) rests on a hidden assummption: that the communications +structure of the project is necessarily a complete graph, that everybody talks +to everybody else. But on open-source projects, the halo developers work on +what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other +very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and +only within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead. [SU] + +There are are still more reasons that source-code–level bug reporting tends to +be very efficient. They center around the fact that a single error can often +have multiple possible symptoms, manifesting differently depending on details +of the user's usage pattern and environment. Such errors tend to be exactly the +sort of complex and subtle bugs (such as dynamic-memory-management errors or +nondeterministic interrupt-window artifacts) that are hardest to reproduce at +will or to pin down by static analysis, and which do the most to create +long-term problems in software. + +A tester who sends in a tentative source-code–level characterization of such a +multi-symptom bug (e.g. "It looks to me like there's a window in the signal +handling near line 1250" or "Where are you zeroing that buffer?") may give a +developer, otherwise too close to the code to see it, the critical clue to a +half-dozen disparate symptoms. In cases like this, it may be hard or even +impossible to know which externally-visible misbehaviour was caused by +precisely which bug—but with frequent releases, it's unnecessary to know. Other +collaborators will be likely to find out quickly whether their bug has been +fixed or not. In many cases, source-level bug reports will cause misbehaviours +to drop out without ever having been attributed to any specific fix. + +Complex multi-symptom errors also tend to have multiple trace paths from +surface symptoms back to the actual bug. Which of the trace paths a given +developer or tester can chase may depend on subtleties of that person's +environment, and may well change in a not obviously deterministic way over +time. In effect, each developer and tester samples a semi-random set of the +program's state space when looking for the etiology of a symptom. The more +subtle and complex the bug, the less likely that skill will be able to +guarantee the relevance of that sample. + +For simple and easily reproducible bugs, then, the accent will be on the "semi" +rather than the "random"; debugging skill and intimacy with the code and its +architecture will matter a lot. But for complex bugs, the accent will be on the +"random". Under these circumstances many people running traces will be much +more effective than a few people running traces sequentially—even if the few +have a much higher average skill level. + +This effect will be greatly amplified if the difficulty of following trace +paths from different surface symptoms back to a bug varies significantly in a +way that can't be predicted by looking at the symptoms. A single developer +sampling those paths sequentially will be as likely to pick a difficult trace +path on the first try as an easy one. On the other hand, suppose many people +are trying trace paths in parallel while doing rapid releases. Then it is +likely one of them will find the easiest path immediately, and nail the bug in +a much shorter time. The project maintainer will see that, ship a new release, +and the other people running traces on the same bug will be able to stop before +having spent too much time on their more difficult traces [RJ]. + +1~ When Is a Rose Not a Rose? + +Having studied Linus's behavior and formed a theory about why it was +successful, I made a conscious decision to test this theory on my new +(admittedly much less complex and ambitious) project. + +But the first thing I did was reorganize and simplify popclient a lot. Carl +Harris's implementation was very sound, but exhibited a kind of unnecessary +complexity common to many C programmers. He treated the code as central and the +data structures as support for the code. As a result, the code was beautiful +but the data structure design ad-hoc and rather ugly (at least by the high +standards of this veteran LISP hacker). + +I had another purpose for rewriting besides improving the code and the data +structure design, however. That was to evolve it into something I understood +completely. It's no fun to be responsible for fixing bugs in a program you +don't understand. + +For the first month or so, then, I was simply following out the implications of +Carl's basic design. The first serious change I made was to add IMAP support. I +did this by reorganizing the protocol machines into a generic driver and three +method tables (for POP2, POP3, and IMAP). This and the previous changes +illustrate a general principle that's good for programmers to keep in mind, +especially in languages like C that don't naturally do dynamic typing: + +_1 9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way +around. + +Brooks, Chapter 9: "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall +continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your +flowchart; it'll be obvious." Allowing for thirty years of +terminological/cultural shift, it's the same point. + +At this point (early September 1996, about six weeks from zero) I started +thinking that a name change might be in order—after all, it wasn't just a POP +client any more. But I hesitated, because there was as yet nothing genuinely +new in the design. My version of popclient had yet to develop an identity of +its own. + +That changed, radically, when popclient learned how to forward fetched mail to +the SMTP port. I'll get to that in a moment. But first: I said earlier that I'd +decided to use this project to test my theory about what Linus Torvalds had +done right. How (you may well ask) did I do that? In these ways: + +_* I released early and often (almost never less often than every ten days; +during periods of intense development, once a day). + +_* I grew my beta list by adding to it everyone who contacted me about +fetchmail. + +_* I sent chatty announcements to the beta list whenever I released, +encouraging people to participate. + +_* And I listened to my beta-testers, polling them about design decisions and +stroking them whenever they sent in patches and feedback. + +The payoff from these simple measures was immediate. From the beginning of the +project, I got bug reports of a quality most developers would kill for, often +with good fixes attached. I got thoughtful criticism, I got fan mail, I got +intelligent feature suggestions. Which leads to: + +_1 10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable +resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource. + +One interesting measure of fetchmail's success is the sheer size of the project +beta list, fetchmail-friends. At the time of latest revision of this paper +(November 2000) it has 287 members and is adding two or three a week. + +Actually, when I revised in late May 1997 I found the list was beginning to +lose members from its high of close to 300 for an interesting reason. Several +people have asked me to unsubscribe them because fetchmail is working so well +for them that they no longer need to see the list traffic! Perhaps this is part +of the normal life-cycle of a mature bazaar-style project. + +1~ Popclient becomes Fetchmail + +The real turning point in the project was when Harry Hochheiser sent me his +scratch code for forwarding mail to the client machine's SMTP port. I realized +almost immediately that a reliable implementation of this feature would make +all the other mail delivery modes next to obsolete. + +For many weeks I had been tweaking fetchmail rather incrementally while feeling +like the interface design was serviceable but grubby—inelegant and with too +many exiguous options hanging out all over. The options to dump fetched mail to +a mailbox file or standard output particularly bothered me, but I couldn't +figure out why. + +(If you don't care about the technicalia of Internet mail, the next two +paragraphs can be safely skipped.) + +What I saw when I thought about SMTP forwarding was that popclient had been +trying to do too many things. It had been designed to be both a mail transport +agent (MTA) and a local delivery agent (MDA). With SMTP forwarding, it could +get out of the MDA business and be a pure MTA, handing off mail to other +programs for local delivery just as sendmail does. + +Why mess with all the complexity of configuring a mail delivery agent or +setting up lock-and-append on a mailbox when port 25 is almost guaranteed to be +there on any platform with TCP/IP support in the first place? Especially when +this means retrieved mail is guaranteed to look like normal sender-initiated +SMTP mail, which is really what we want anyway. + +(Back to a higher level....) + +Even if you didn't follow the preceding technical jargon, there are several +important lessons here. First, this SMTP-forwarding concept was the biggest +single payoff I got from consciously trying to emulate Linus's methods. A user +gave me this terrific idea—all I had to do was understand the implications. + +_1 11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from +your users. Sometimes the latter is better. + +Interestingly enough, you will quickly find that if you are completely and +self-deprecatingly truthful about how much you owe other people, the world at +large will treat you as though you did every bit of the invention yourself and +are just being becomingly modest about your innate genius. We can all see how +well this worked for Linus! + +(When I gave my talk at the first Perl Conference in August 1997, hacker +extraordinaire Larry Wall was in the front row. As I got to the last line above +he called out, religious-revival style, "Tell it, tell it, brother!". The whole +audience laughed, because they knew this had worked for the inventor of Perl, +too.) + +After a very few weeks of running the project in the same spirit, I began to +get similar praise not just from my users but from other people to whom the +word leaked out. I stashed away some of that email; I'll look at it again +sometime if I ever start wondering whether my life has been worthwhile :-). + +But there are two more fundamental, non-political lessons here that are general +to all kinds of design. + +_1 12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing +that your concept of the problem was wrong. + +I had been trying to solve the wrong problem by continuing to develop popclient +as a combined MTA/MDA with all kinds of funky local delivery modes. Fetchmail's +design needed to be rethought from the ground up as a pure MTA, a part of the +normal SMTP-speaking Internet mail path. + +When you hit a wall in development—when you find yourself hard put to think +past the next patch—it's often time to ask not whether you've got the right +answer, but whether you're asking the right question. Perhaps the problem needs +to be reframed. + +Well, I had reframed my problem. Clearly, the right thing to do was (1) hack +SMTP forwarding support into the generic driver, (2) make it the default mode, +and (3) eventually throw out all the other delivery modes, especially the +deliver-to-file and deliver-to-standard-output options. + +I hesitated over step 3 for some time, fearing to upset long-time popclient +users dependent on the alternate delivery mechanisms. In theory, they could +immediately switch to .forward files or their non-sendmail equivalents to get +the same effects. In practice the transition might have been messy. + +But when I did it, the benefits proved huge. The cruftiest parts of the driver +code vanished. Configuration got radically simpler—no more grovelling around +for the system MDA and user's mailbox, no more worries about whether the +underlying OS supports file locking. + +Also, the only way to lose mail vanished. If you specified delivery to a file +and the disk got full, your mail got lost. This can't happen with SMTP +forwarding because your SMTP listener won't return OK unless the message can be +delivered or at least spooled for later delivery. + +Also, performance improved (though not so you'd notice it in a single run). +Another not insignificant benefit of this change was that the manual page got a +lot simpler. + +Later, I had to bring delivery via a user-specified local MDA back in order to +allow handling of some obscure situations involving dynamic SLIP. But I found a +much simpler way to do it. + +The moral? Don't hesitate to throw away superannuated features when you can do +it without loss of effectiveness. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (who was an aviator +and aircraft designer when he wasn't authoring classic children's books) said: + +_1 13. "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to +add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away." + +When your code is getting both better and simpler, that is when you know it's +right. And in the process, the fetchmail design acquired an identity of its +own, different from the ancestral popclient. + +It was time for the name change. The new design looked much more like a dual of +sendmail than the old popclient had; both are MTAs, but where sendmail pushes +then delivers, the new popclient pulls then delivers. So, two months off the +blocks, I renamed it fetchmail. + +There is a more general lesson in this story about how SMTP delivery came to +fetchmail. It is not only debugging that is parallelizable; development and (to +a perhaps surprising extent) exploration of design space is, too. When your +development mode is rapidly iterative, development and enhancement may become +special cases of debugging—fixing `bugs of omission' in the original +capabilities or concept of the software. + +Even at a higher level of design, it can be very valuable to have lots of +co-developers random-walking through the design space near your product. +Consider the way a puddle of water finds a drain, or better yet how ants find +food: exploration essentially by diffusion, followed by exploitation mediated +by a scalable communication mechanism. This works very well; as with Harry +Hochheiser and me, one of your outriders may well find a huge win nearby that +you were just a little too close-focused to see. + +1~ Fetchmail Grows Up + +There I was with a neat and innovative design, code that I knew worked well +because I used it every day, and a burgeoning beta list. It gradually dawned on +me that I was no longer engaged in a trivial personal hack that might happen to +be useful to few other people. I had my hands on a program that every hacker +with a Unix box and a SLIP/PPP mail connection really needs. + +With the SMTP forwarding feature, it pulled far enough in front of the +competition to potentially become a "category killer", one of those classic +programs that fills its niche so competently that the alternatives are not just +discarded but almost forgotten. + +I think you can't really aim or plan for a result like this. You have to get +pulled into it by design ideas so powerful that afterward the results just seem +inevitable, natural, even foreordained. The only way to try for ideas like that +is by having lots of ideas—or by having the engineering judgment to take other +peoples' good ideas beyond where the originators thought they could go. + +Andy Tanenbaum had the original idea to build a simple native Unix for IBM PCs, +for use as a teaching tool (he called it Minix). Linus Torvalds pushed the +Minix concept further than Andrew probably thought it could go—and it grew into +something wonderful. In the same way (though on a smaller scale), I took some +ideas by Carl Harris and Harry Hochheiser and pushed them hard. Neither of us +was `original' in the romantic way people think is genius. But then, most +science and engineering and software development isn't done by original genius, +hacker mythology to the contrary. + +The results were pretty heady stuff all the same—in fact, just the kind of +success every hacker lives for! And they meant I would have to set my standards +even higher. To make fetchmail as good as I now saw it could be, I'd have to +write not just for my own needs, but also include and support features +necessary to others but outside my orbit. And do that while keeping the program +simple and robust. + +The first and overwhelmingly most important feature I wrote after realizing +this was multidrop support—the ability to fetch mail from mailboxes that had +accumulated all mail for a group of users, and then route each piece of mail to +its individual recipients. + +I decided to add the multidrop support partly because some users were clamoring +for it, but mostly because I thought it would shake bugs out of the single-drop +code by forcing me to deal with addressing in full generality. And so it +proved. Getting RFC 822 address parsing right took me a remarkably long time, +not because any individual piece of it is hard but because it involved a pile +of interdependent and fussy details. + +But multidrop addressing turned out to be an excellent design decision as well. +Here's how I knew: + +_1 14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool +lends itself to uses you never expected. + +The unexpected use for multidrop fetchmail is to run mailing lists with the +list kept, and alias expansion done, on the client side of the Internet +connection. This means someone running a personal machine through an ISP +account can manage a mailing list without continuing access to the ISP's alias +files. + +Another important change demanded by my beta-testers was support for 8-bit MIME +(Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) operation. This was pretty easy to do, +because I had been careful to keep the code 8-bit clean (that is, to not press +the 8th bit, unused in the ASCII character set, into service to carry +information within the program). Not because I anticipated the demand for this +feature, but rather in obedience to another rule: + +_1 15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the +data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the +recipient forces you to! + +Had I not obeyed this rule, 8-bit MIME support would have been difficult and +buggy. As it was, all I had to do is read the MIME standard (RFC 1652) and add +a trivial bit of header-generation logic. + +Some European users bugged me into adding an option to limit the number of +messages retrieved per session (so they can control costs from their expensive +phone networks). I resisted this for a long time, and I'm still not entirely +happy about it. But if you're writing for the world, you have to listen to your +customers—this doesn't change just because they're not paying you in money. + +1~ A Few More Lessons from Fetchmail + +Before we go back to general software-engineering issues, there are a couple +more specific lessons from the fetchmail experience to ponder. Nontechnical +readers can safely skip this section. + +The rc (control) file syntax includes optional `noise' keywords that are +entirely ignored by the parser. The English-like syntax they allow is +considerably more readable than the traditional terse keyword-value pairs you +get when you strip them all out. + +These started out as a late-night experiment when I noticed how much the rc +file declarations were beginning to resemble an imperative minilanguage. (This +is also why I changed the original popclient "server" keyword to "poll"). + +It seemed to me that trying to make that imperative minilanguage more like +English might make it easier to use. Now, although I'm a convinced partisan of +the "make it a language" school of design as exemplified by Emacs and HTML and +many database engines, I am not normally a big fan of "English-like" syntaxes. + +Traditionally programmers have tended to favor control syntaxes that are very +precise and compact and have no redundancy at all. This is a cultural legacy +from when computing resources were expensive, so parsing stages had to be as +cheap and simple as possible. English, with about 50% redundancy, looked like a +very inappropriate model then. + +This is not my reason for normally avoiding English-like syntaxes; I mention it +here only to demolish it. With cheap cycles and core, terseness should not be +an end in itself. Nowadays it's more important for a language to be convenient +for humans than to be cheap for the computer. + +There remain, however, good reasons to be wary. One is the complexity cost of +the parsing stage—you don't want to raise that to the point where it's a +significant source of bugs and user confusion in itself. Another is that trying +to make a language syntax English-like often demands that the "English" it +speaks be bent seriously out of shape, so much so that the superficial +resemblance to natural language is as confusing as a traditional syntax would +have been. (You see this bad effect in a lot of so-called "fourth generation" +and commercial database-query languages.) + +The fetchmail control syntax seems to avoid these problems because the language +domain is extremely restricted. It's nowhere near a general-purpose language; +the things it says simply are not very complicated, so there's little potential +for confusion in moving mentally between a tiny subset of English and the +actual control language. I think there may be a broader lesson here: + +_1 16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can +be your friend. + +Another lesson is about security by obscurity. Some fetchmail users asked me to +change the software to store passwords encrypted in the rc file, so snoopers +wouldn't be able to casually see them. + +I didn't do it, because this doesn't actually add protection. Anyone who's +acquired permissions to read your rc file will be able to run fetchmail as you +anyway—and if it's your password they're after, they'd be able to rip the +necessary decoder out of the fetchmail code itself to get it. + +All .fetchmailrc password encryption would have done is give a false sense of +security to people who don't think very hard. The general rule here is: + +_1 17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of +pseudo-secrets. + +1~ Necessary Preconditions for the Bazaar Style + +Early reviewers and test audiences for this essay consistently raised questions +about the preconditions for successful bazaar-style development, including both +the qualifications of the project leader and the state of code at the time one +goes public and starts to try to build a co-developer community. + +It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style [IN]. +One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to +originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn't try it. I didn't either. Your +nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to +play with. + +When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a +plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can +be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do +is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved +into something really neat in the foreseeable future. + +Linux and fetchmail both went public with strong, attractive basic designs. +Many people thinking about the bazaar model as I have presented it have +correctly considered this critical, then jumped from that to the conclusion +that a high degree of design intuition and cleverness in the project leader is +indispensable. + +But Linus got his design from Unix. I got mine initially from the ancestral +popclient (though it would later change a great deal, much more proportionately +speaking than has Linux). So does the leader/coordinator for a bazaar-style +effort really have to have exceptional design talent, or can he get by through +leveraging the design talent of others? + +I think it is not critical that the coordinator be able to originate designs of +exceptional brilliance, but it is absolutely critical that the coordinator be +able to recognize good design ideas from others. + +Both the Linux and fetchmail projects show evidence of this. Linus, while not +(as previously discussed) a spectacularly original designer, has displayed a +powerful knack for recognizing good design and integrating it into the Linux +kernel. And I have already described how the single most powerful design idea +in fetchmail (SMTP forwarding) came from somebody else. + +Early audiences of this essay complimented me by suggesting that I am prone to +undervalue design originality in bazaar projects because I have a lot of it +myself, and therefore take it for granted. There may be some truth to this; +design (as opposed to coding or debugging) is certainly my strongest skill. + +But the problem with being clever and original in software design is that it +gets to be a habit—you start reflexively making things cute and complicated +when you should be keeping them robust and simple. I have had projects crash on +me because I made this mistake, but I managed to avoid this with fetchmail. + +So I believe the fetchmail project succeeded partly because I restrained my +tendency to be clever; this argues (at least) against design originality being +essential for successful bazaar projects. And consider Linux. Suppose Linus +Torvalds had been trying to pull off fundamental innovations in operating +system design during the development; does it seem at all likely that the +resulting kernel would be as stable and successful as what we have? + +A certain base level of design and coding skill is required, of course, but I +expect almost anybody seriously thinking of launching a bazaar effort will +already be above that minimum. The open-source community's internal market in +reputation exerts subtle pressure on people not to launch development efforts +they're not competent to follow through on. So far this seems to have worked +pretty well. + +There is another kind of skill not normally associated with software +development which I think is as important as design cleverness to bazaar +projects—and it may be more important. A bazaar project coordinator or leader +must have good people and communications skills. + +This should be obvious. In order to build a development community, you need to +attract people, interest them in what you're doing, and keep them happy about +the amount of work they're doing. Technical sizzle will go a long way towards +accomplishing this, but it's far from the whole story. The personality you +project matters, too. + +It is not a coincidence that Linus is a nice guy who makes people like him and +want to help him. It's not a coincidence that I'm an energetic extrovert who +enjoys working a crowd and has some of the delivery and instincts of a stand-up +comic. To make the bazaar model work, it helps enormously if you have at least +a little skill at charming people. + +1~ The Social Context of Open-Source Software + +It is truly written: the best hacks start out as personal solutions to the +author's everyday problems, and spread because the problem turns out to be +typical for a large class of users. This takes us back to the matter of rule 1, +restated in a perhaps more useful way: + +_1 18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is +interesting to you. + +So it was with Carl Harris and the ancestral popclient, and so with me and +fetchmail. But this has been understood for a long time. The interesting point, +the point that the histories of Linux and fetchmail seem to demand we focus on, +is the next stage—the evolution of software in the presence of a large and +active community of users and co-developers. + +In The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks observed that programmer time is not +fungible; adding developers to a late software project makes it later. As we've +seen previously, he argued that the complexity and communication costs of a +project rise with the square of the number of developers, while work done only +rises linearly. Brooks's Law has been widely regarded as a truism. But we've +examined in this essay an number of ways in which the process of open-source +development falsifies the assumptionms behind it—and, empirically, if Brooks's +Law were the whole picture Linux would be impossible. + +Gerald Weinberg's classic The Psychology of Computer Programming supplied what, +in hindsight, we can see as a vital correction to Brooks. In his discussion of +"egoless programming", Weinberg observed that in shops where developers are not +territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and +potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than +elsewhere. (Recently, Kent Beck's `extreme programming' technique of deploying +coders in pairs looking over one anothers' shoulders might be seen as an +attempt to force this effect.) + +Weinberg's choice of terminology has perhaps prevented his analysis from +gaining the acceptance it deserved—one has to smile at the thought of +describing Internet hackers as "egoless". But I think his argument looks more +compelling today than ever. + +The bazaar method, by harnessing the full power of the "egoless programming" +effect, strongly mitigates the effect of Brooks's Law. The principle behind +Brooks's Law is not repealed, but given a large developer population and cheap +communications its effects can be swamped by competing nonlinearities that are +not otherwise visible. This resembles the relationship between Newtonian and +Einsteinian physics—the older system is still valid at low energies, but if you +push mass and velocity high enough you get surprises like nuclear explosions or +Linux. + +The history of Unix should have prepared us for what we're learning from Linux +(and what I've verified experimentally on a smaller scale by deliberately +copying Linus's methods [EGCS]). That is, while coding remains an essentially +solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention +and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her +own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows +how to create an open, evolutionary context in which feedback exploring the +design space, code contributions, bug-spotting, and other improvements come +from from hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people. + +But the traditional Unix world was prevented from pushing this approach to the +ultimate by several factors. One was the legal contraints of various licenses, +trade secrets, and commercial interests. Another (in hindsight) was that the +Internet wasn't yet good enough. + +Before cheap Internet, there were some geographically compact communities where +the culture encouraged Weinberg's "egoless" programming, and a developer could +easily attract a lot of skilled kibitzers and co-developers. Bell Labs, the MIT +AI and LCS labs, UC Berkeley—these became the home of innovations that are +legendary and still potent. + +Linux was the first project for which a conscious and successful effort to use +the entire world as its talent pool was made. I don't think it's a coincidence +that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide +Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993–1994 that +saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in +the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new +rules that pervasive Internet access made possible. + +While cheap Internet was a necessary condition for the Linux model to evolve, I +think it was not by itself a sufficient condition. Another vital factor was the +development of a leadership style and set of cooperative customs that could +allow developers to attract co-developers and get maximum leverage out of the +medium. + +But what is this leadership style and what are these customs? They cannot be +based on power relationships—and even if they could be, leadership by coercion +would not produce the results we see. Weinberg quotes the autobiography of the +19th-century Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyvich Kropotkin's Memoirs of a +Revolutionist to good effect on this subject: + +_1 Having been brought up in a serf-owner's family, I entered active life, like +all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of +commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing and the like. But when, at an early +stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with [free] men, and +when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to +appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and +discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former +works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life +is concerned, and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of +many converging wills. + +The "severe effort of many converging wills" is precisely what a project like +Linux requires—and the "principle of command" is effectively impossible to +apply among volunteers in the anarchist's paradise we call the Internet. To +operate and compete effectively, hackers who want to lead collaborative +projects have to learn how to recruit and energize effective communities of +interest in the mode vaguely suggested by Kropotkin's "principle of +understanding". They must learn to use Linus's Law.[SP] + +Earlier I referred to the "Delphi effect" as a possible explanation for Linus's +Law. But more powerful analogies to adaptive systems in biology and economics +also irresistably suggest themselves. The Linux world behaves in many respects +like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to +maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous +order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could +have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the "principle of +understanding". + +The "utility function" Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically +economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation +among other hackers. (One may call their motivation "altruistic", but this +ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the +altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one +other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike +hackerdom has long explicitly recognized "egoboo" (ego-boosting, or the +enhancement of one's reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind +volunteer activity. + +Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in +which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the +project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of +Kropotkin's "principle of shared understanding". This quasi-economic view of +the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied. + +We may view Linus's method as a way to create an efficient market in +"egoboo"—to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible +to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the +fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can +be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more +consciously and systematically than he. + +Many people (especially those who politically distrust free markets) would +expect a culture of self-directed egoists to be fragmented, territorial, +wasteful, secretive, and hostile. But this expectation is clearly falsified by +(to give just one example) the stunning variety, quality, and depth of Linux +documentation. It is a hallowed given that programmers hate documenting; how is +it, then, that Linux hackers generate so much documentation? Evidently Linux's +free market in egoboo works better to produce virtuous, other-directed behavior +than the massively-funded documentation shops of commercial software producers. + +Both the fetchmail and Linux kernel projects show that by properly rewarding +the egos of many other hackers, a strong developer/coordinator can use the +Internet to capture the benefits of having lots of co-developers without having +a project collapse into a chaotic mess. So to Brooks's Law I counter-propose +the following: + +_1 19: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at +least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many +heads are inevitably better than one. + +I think the future of open-source software will increasingly belong to people +who know how to play Linus's game, people who leave behind the cathedral and +embrace the bazaar. This is not to say that individual vision and brilliance +will no longer matter; rather, I think that the cutting edge of open-source +software will belong to people who start from individual vision and brilliance, +then amplify it through the effective construction of voluntary communities of +interest. + +Perhaps this is not only the future of open-source software. No closed-source +developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on +a problem. Very few could afford even to hire the more than 200 (1999: 600, +2000: 800) people who have contributed to fetchmail! + +Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation +is morally right or software "hoarding" is morally wrong (assuming you believe +the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because the closed-source +world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that +can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem. + +1~ On Management and the Maginot Line + +The original Cathedral and Bazaar paper of 1997 ended with the vision +above—that of happy networked hordes of programmer/anarchists outcompeting and +overwhelming the hierarchical world of conventional closed software. + +A good many skeptics weren't convinced, however; and the questions they raise +deserve a fair engagement. Most of the objections to the bazaar argument come +down to the claim that its proponents have underestimated the +productivity-multiplying effect of conventional management. + +Traditionally-minded software-development managers often object that the +casualness with which project groups form and change and dissolve in the +open-source world negates a significant part of the apparent advantage of +numbers that the open-source community has over any single closed-source +developer. They would observe that in software development it is really +sustained effort over time and the degree to which customers can expect +continuing investment in the product that matters, not just how many people +have thrown a bone in the pot and left it to simmer. + +There is something to this argument, to be sure; in fact, I have developed the +idea that expected future service value is the key to the economics of software +production in the essay The Magic Cauldron. + +But this argument also has a major hidden problem; its implicit assumption that +open-source development cannot deliver such sustained effort. In fact, there +have been open-source projects that maintained a coherent direction and an +effective maintainer community over quite long periods of time without the +kinds of incentive structures or institutional controls that conventional +management finds essential. The development of the GNU Emacs editor is an +extreme and instructive example; it has absorbed the efforts of hundreds of +contributors over 15 years into a unified architectural vision, despite high +turnover and the fact that only one person (its author) has been continuously +active during all that time. No closed-source editor has ever matched this +longevity record. + +This suggests a reason for questioning the advantages of conventionally-managed +software development that is independent of the rest of the arguments over +cathedral vs. bazaar mode. If it's possible for GNU Emacs to express a +consistent architectural vision over 15 years, or for an operating system like +Linux to do the same over 8 years of rapidly changing hardware and platform +technology; and if (as is indeed the case) there have been many +well-architected open-source projects of more than 5 years duration -- then we +are entitled to wonder what, if anything, the tremendous overhead of +conventionally-managed development is actually buying us. + +Whatever it is certainly doesn't include reliable execution by deadline, or on +budget, or to all features of the specification; it's a rare `managed' project +that meets even one of these goals, let alone all three. It also does not +appear to be ability to adapt to changes in technology and economic context +during the project lifetime, either; the open-source community has proven far +more effective on that score (as one can readily verify, for example, by +comparing the 30-year history of the Internet with the short half-lives of +proprietary networking technologies—or the cost of the 16-bit to 32-bit +transition in Microsoft Windows with the nearly effortless upward migration of +Linux during the same period, not only along the Intel line of development but +to more than a dozen other hardware platforms, including the 64-bit Alpha as +well). + +One thing many people think the traditional mode buys you is somebody to hold +legally liable and potentially recover compensation from if the project goes +wrong. But this is an illusion; most software licenses are written to disclaim +even warranty of merchantability, let alone performance—and cases of successful +recovery for software nonperformance are vanishingly rare. Even if they were +common, feeling comforted by having somebody to sue would be missing the point. +You didn't want to be in a lawsuit; you wanted working software. + +So what is all that management overhead buying? + +In order to understand that, we need to understand what software development +managers believe they do. A woman I know who seems to be very good at this job +says software project management has five functions: + +_* To define goals and keep everybody pointed in the same direction + +_* To monitor and make sure crucial details don't get skipped + +_* To motivate people to do boring but necessary drudgework + +_* To organize the deployment of people for best productivity + +_* To marshal resources needed to sustain the project + +Apparently worthy goals, all of these; but under the open-source model, and in +its surrounding social context, they can begin to seem strangely irrelevant. +We'll take them in reverse order. + +My friend reports that a lot of resource marshalling is basically defensive; +once you have your people and machines and office space, you have to defend +them from peer managers competing for the same resources, and from higher-ups +trying to allocate the most efficient use of a limited pool. + +But open-source developers are volunteers, self-selected for both interest and +ability to contribute to the projects they work on (and this remains generally +true even when they are being paid a salary to hack open source.) The volunteer +ethos tends to take care of the `attack' side of resource-marshalling +automatically; people bring their own resources to the table. And there is +little or no need for a manager to `play defense' in the conventional sense. + +Anyway, in a world of cheap PCs and fast Internet links, we find pretty +consistently that the only really limiting resource is skilled attention. +Open-source projects, when they founder, essentially never do so for want of +machines or links or office space; they die only when the developers themselves +lose interest. + +That being the case, it's doubly important that open-source hackers organize +themselves for maximum productivity by self-selection—and the social milieu +selects ruthlessly for competence. My friend, familiar with both the +open-source world and large closed projects, believes that open source has been +successful partly because its culture only accepts the most talented 5% or so +of the programming population. She spends most of her time organizing the +deployment of the other 95%, and has thus observed first-hand the well-known +variance of a factor of one hundred in productivity between the most able +programmers and the merely competent. + +The size of that variance has always raised an awkward question: would +individual projects, and the field as a whole, be better off without more than +50% of the least able in it? Thoughtful managers have understood for a long +time that if conventional software management's only function were to convert +the least able from a net loss to a marginal win, the game might not be worth +the candle. + +The success of the open-source community sharpens this question considerably, +by providing hard evidence that it is often cheaper and more effective to +recruit self-selected volunteers from the Internet than it is to manage +buildings full of people who would rather be doing something else. + +Which brings us neatly to the question of motivation. An equivalent and +often-heard way to state my friend's point is that traditional development +management is a necessary compensation for poorly motivated programmers who +would not otherwise turn out good work. + +This answer usually travels with a claim that the open-source community can +only be relied on only to do work that is `sexy' or technically sweet; anything +else will be left undone (or done only poorly) unless it's churned out by +money-motivated cubicle peons with managers cracking whips over them. I address +the psychological and social reasons for being skeptical of this claim in +Homesteading the Noosphere. For present purposes, however, I think it's more +interesting to point out the implications of accepting it as true. + +If the conventional, closed-source, heavily-managed style of software +development is really defended only by a sort of Maginot Line of problems +conducive to boredom, then it's going to remain viable in each individual +application area for only so long as nobody finds those problems really +interesting and nobody else finds any way to route around them. Because the +moment there is open-source competition for a `boring' piece of software, +customers are going to know that it was finally tackled by someone who chose +that problem to solve because of a fascination with the problem itself—which, +in software as in other kinds of creative work, is a far more effective +motivator than money alone. + +Having a conventional management structure solely in order to motivate, then, +is probably good tactics but bad strategy; a short-term win, but in the longer +term a surer loss. + +So far, conventional development management looks like a bad bet now against +open source on two points (resource marshalling, organization), and like it's +living on borrowed time with respect to a third (motivation). And the poor +beleaguered conventional manager is not going to get any succour from the +monitoring issue; the strongest argument the open-source community has is that +decentralized peer review trumps all the conventional methods for trying to +ensure that details don't get slipped. + +Can we save defining goals as a justification for the overhead of conventional +software project management? Perhaps; but to do so, we'll need good reason to +believe that management committees and corporate roadmaps are more successful +at defining worthy and widely shared goals than the project leaders and tribal +elders who fill the analogous role in the open-source world. + +That is on the face of it a pretty hard case to make. And it's not so much the +open-source side of the balance (the longevity of Emacs, or Linus Torvalds's +ability to mobilize hordes of developers with talk of "world domination") that +makes it tough. Rather, it's the demonstrated awfulness of conventional +mechanisms for defining the goals of software projects. + +One of the best-known folk theorems of software engineering is that 60% to 75% +of conventional software projects either are never completed or are rejected by +their intended users. If that range is anywhere near true (and I've never met a +manager of any experience who disputes it) then more projects than not are +being aimed at goals that are either (a) not realistically attainable, or (b) +just plain wrong. + +This, more than any other problem, is the reason that in today's software +engineering world the very phrase "management committee" is likely to send +chills down the hearer's spine—even (or perhaps especially) if the hearer is a +manager. The days when only programmers griped about this pattern are long +past; Dilbert cartoons hang over executives' desks now. + +Our reply, then, to the traditional software development manager, is simple—if +the open-source community has really underestimated the value of conventional +management, why do so many of you display contempt for your own process? + +Once again the example of the open-source community sharpens this question +considerably—because we have fun doing what we do. Our creative play has been +racking up technical, market-share, and mind-share successes at an astounding +rate. We're proving not only that we can do better software, but that joy is an +asset. + +Two and a half years after the first version of this essay, the most radical +thought I can offer to close with is no longer a vision of an +open-source–dominated software world; that, after all, looks plausible to a lot +of sober people in suits these days. + +Rather, I want to suggest what may be a wider lesson about software, (and +probably about every kind of creative or professional work). Human beings +generally take pleasure in a task when it falls in a sort of optimal-challenge +zone; not so easy as to be boring, not too hard to achieve. A happy programmer +is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals +and stressful process friction. Enjoyment predicts efficiency. + +Relating to your own work process with fear and loathing (even in the +displaced, ironic way suggested by hanging up Dilbert cartoons) should +therefore be regarded in itself as a sign that the process has failed. Joy, +humor, and playfulness are indeed assets; it was not mainly for the +alliteration that I wrote of "happy hordes" above, and it is no mere joke that +the Linux mascot is a cuddly, neotenous penguin. + +It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's +success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode +of creative work. + +1~ Epilog: Netscape Embraces the Bazaar + +It's a strange feeling to realize you're helping make history.... + +On January 22 1998, approximately seven months after I first published The +Cathedral and the Bazaar, Netscape Communications, Inc. announced plans to give +away the source for Netscape Communicator. I had had no clue this was going to +happen before the day of the announcement. + +Eric Hahn, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Netscape, +emailed me shortly afterwards as follows: "On behalf of everyone at Netscape, I +want to thank you for helping us get to this point in the first place. Your +thinking and writings were fundamental inspirations to our decision." + +The following week I flew out to Silicon Valley at Netscape's invitation for a +day-long strategy conference (on 4 Feb 1998) with some of their top executives +and technical people. We designed Netscape's source-release strategy and +license together. + +A few days later I wrote the following: + +_1 Netscape is about to provide us with a large-scale, real-world test of the +bazaar model in the commercial world. The open-source culture now faces a +danger; if Netscape's execution doesn't work, the open-source concept may be so +discredited that the commercial world won't touch it again for another decade. + +_1 On the other hand, this is also a spectacular opportunity. Initial reaction +to the move on Wall Street and elsewhere has been cautiously positive. We're +being given a chance to prove ourselves, too. If Netscape regains substantial +market share through this move, it just may set off a long-overdue revolution +in the software industry. + +_1 The next year should be a very instructive and interesting time. + +And indeed it was. As I write in mid-2000, the development of what was later +named Mozilla has been only a qualified success. It achieved Netscape's +original goal, which was to deny Microsoft a monopoly lock on the browser +market. It has also achieved some dramatic successes (notably the release of +the next-generation Gecko rendering engine). + +However, it has not yet garnered the massive development effort from outside +Netscape that the Mozilla founders had originally hoped for. The problem here +seems to be that for a long time the Mozilla distribution actually broke one of +the basic rules of the bazaar model; it didn't ship with something potential +contributors could easily run and see working. (Until more than a year after +release, building Mozilla from source required a license for the proprietary +Motif library.) + +Most negatively (from the point of view of the outside world) the Mozilla group +didn't ship a production-quality browser for two and a half years after the +project launch—and in 1999 one of the project's principals caused a bit of a +sensation by resigning, complaining of poor management and missed +opportunities. "Open source," he correctly observed, "is not magic pixie dust." + +And indeed it is not. The long-term prognosis for Mozilla looks dramatically +better now (in November 2000) than it did at the time of Jamie Zawinski's +resignation letter—in the last few weeks the nightly releases have finally +passed the critical threshold to production usability. But Jamie was right to +point out that going open will not necessarily save an existing project that +suffers from ill-defined goals or spaghetti code or any of the software +engineering's other chronic ills. Mozilla has managed to provide an example +simultaneously of how open source can succeed and how it could fail. + +In the mean time, however, the open-source idea has scored successes and found +backers elsewhere. Since the Netscape release we've seen a tremendous explosion +of interest in the open-source development model, a trend both driven by and +driving the continuing success of the Linux operating system. The trend Mozilla +touched off is continuing at an accelerating rate. + +% Thyrsus Enterprises + +% http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ + +% This is version 3.0 + +% $Date: 2008/12/10 18:25:30 $ +% Revision History +% Revision 1.57 11 September 2000 esr +% New major section ``How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity". +% Revision 1.52 28 August 2000 esr +% MATLAB is a reinforcing parallel to Emacs. Corbatoó & Vyssotsky got it in 1965. +% Revision 1.51 24 August 2000 esr +% First DocBook version. Minor updates to Fall 2000 on the time-sensitive material. +% Revision 1.49 5 May 2000 esr +% Added the HBS note on deadlines and scheduling. +% Revision 1.51 31 August 1999 esr +% This the version that O'Reilly printed in the first edition of the book. +% Revision 1.45 8 August 1999 esr +% Added the endnotes on the Snafu Principle, (pre)historical examples of bazaar development, and originality in the bazaar. +% Revision 1.44 29 July 1999 esr +% Added the ``On Management and the Maginot Line" section, some insights about the usefulness of bazaars for exploring design space, and substantially improved the Epilog. +% Revision 1.40 20 Nov 1998 esr +% Added a correction of Brooks based on the Halloween Documents. +% Revision 1.39 28 July 1998 esr +% I removed Paul Eggert's 'graph on GPL vs. bazaar in response to cogent aguments from RMS on +% Revision 1.31 February 10 1998 esr +% Added ``Epilog: Netscape Embraces the Bazaar!" +% Revision 1.29 February 9 1998 esr +% Changed ``free software" to ``open source". +% Revision 1.27 18 November 1997 esr +% Added the Perl Conference anecdote. +% Revision 1.20 7 July 1997 esr +% Added the bibliography. +% Revision 1.16 21 May 1997 esr + +% First official presentation at the Linux Kongress. + diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/the_public_domain.james_boyle.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/the_public_domain.james_boyle.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d88b98c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/the_public_domain.james_boyle.sst @@ -0,0 +1,12468 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: The Public Domain + :subtitle: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind + +@creator: + :author: Boyle, James + +@date: + :published: 2008 + +@rights: + :copyright: 2008, James Boyle + :license: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA) 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;public domain;intellectual property:public domain + +@links: + {The Public Domain}http://www.thepublicdomain.org/ + {James Boyle}http://james-boyle.com/ + +@make: + :headings: none; none; none; none; + :num_top: 1 + :breaks: new=:C; break=1 + :home_button_text: {The Public Domain}http://www.thepublicdomain.org/; {James Boyle}http://james-boyle.com/ + :footer: {The Public Domain}http://www.thepublicdomain.org/; {James Boyle}http://james-boyle.com/ + +:A~ @title @author + +1~ Acknowledgments + +The ideas for this book come from the theoretical and practical work I have been doing for the last ten years. None of that work has been done alone. As a result, the list of people to whom I am indebted makes Oscar night acknowledgments look haiku-terse by comparison. Here I can mention only a few. I beg pardon for the inevitable omissions. First and foremost, my family has tolerated my eccentricities and fixations and moderated them with gentle and deserved mockery. “Want that insignia torn off your car, Dad? Then it would be in the public domain, right?” + +My colleagues at Duke are one of the main influences on my work. I am lucky +enough to work in the only “Center for the Study of the Public Domain” in the +academic world. I owe the biggest debt of gratitude to my colleague Jennifer +Jenkins, who directs the Center and who has influenced every chapter in this +book. David Lange brought me to Duke. His work on the public domain has always +been an inspiration to mine. Arti Rai’s remarkable theoretical and empirical +studies have helped me to understand everything from software patents to +synthetic biology. Jerry Reichman has supplied energy, insight, and a spirited +and cosmopolitan focus on the multiple ways in which property can be protected. +Jed Purdy and Neil Siegel commented on drafts and provided crucial insights on +the construction of my argument. Catherine Fisk, Jim Salzman, Stuart Benjamin, +Jonathan Wiener, Mitu Gulati, Jeff Powell, Chris Schroeder, and many, many +others helped out—sometimes without knowing it, but often at the cost of the +scarcest of all resources: time. Amidst a brilliant group of research +assistants, Jordi Weinstock and David Silverstein stood out. Jordi showed a +dogged ability to track down obscure 1950s songs that was almost scary. +Additional thanks go to Jennifer Ma, Tolu Adewale, Paulina Orchard, and Emily +Sauter. Balfour Smith, the coordinator of our Center, shepherded the manuscript +through its many drafts with skill and erudition. + +Duke is the most interdisciplinary university I have ever encountered and so +the obligations flow beyond the law school. Professor Anthony Kelley, a +brilliant composer, not only educated me in composition and the history of +musical borrowing but co-taught a class on musical borrowing that dramatically +influenced Chapter 6. Colleagues in the business school—particularly Jim Anton, +a great economic modeler and greater volleyball partner, and Wes Cohen, a +leading empiricist—all left their marks. Dr. Robert Cook-Deegan, leader of +Duke’s Center for Public Genomics, and my wife Lauren Dame, associate director +of the Genome Ethics, Law and Policy Center, provided crucial support to my +work with the sciences in general and synthetic biology in particular. I was +also inspired and informed by colleagues and students in computer science, +English, history, and political science. + +But the work I am describing here is—as the last chapter suggests—something +that goes far beyond the boundaries of one institution. A large group of +intellectual property scholars have influenced my ideas. Most importantly, +Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler have each given far more than they received +from me in the “sharing economy” of scholarship. If the ideas I describe here +have a future, it is because of the astounding leadership Larry has provided +and the insights into “the wealth of networks” that Yochai brings. Jessica +Litman, Pam Samuelson, Michael Carroll, Julie Cohen, Peggy Radin, Carol Rose, +Rebecca Eisenberg, Mark Lemley, Terry Fisher, Justin Hughes, Neil Netanel, +Wendy Gordon, David Nimmer, Tyler Ochoa, Tim Wu, and many others have all +taught me things I needed to know. Jessica in particular caught and corrected +(some of ) my many errors, while Pam encouraged me to think about the +definition of the public domain in ways that have been vital to this book. +Michael suggested valuable edits—though I did not always listen. Historical +work by Carla Hesse, Martha Woodmansee, and Mark Rose has been central to my +analysis, which also could not have existed but for work on the governance of +the commons by Elinor Ostrom, Charlotte Hess, and Carol Rose. Kembrew McLeod +and Siva Vaidhyanathan inspired my work on music and sampling. Peter Jaszi was +named in my last book as the person who most influenced it. That influence +remains. + +Beyond the academy, my main debt is to the board members and staff of Creative +Commons, Science Commons, and ccLearn. Creative Commons, on whose board I am +proud to have served, is the brainchild of Larry Lessig and Hal Abelson; +Science Commons and ccLearn are divisions of Creative Commons that I helped to +set up which concentrate on the sciences and on education, respectively. The +practical experience of building a “creative commons” with private tools—of +allowing creative collaboration with people you have never met—has shaped this +book far beyond the chapter devoted to it. Hal Abelson, Michael Carroll, and +Eric Saltzman were on the midwife team for the birth of those organizations and +became close friends in the process. Since the entire Creative Commons staff +has made it routine to do seven impossible things before breakfast, it is hard +to single out any one individual—but without Glenn Brown at Creative Commons +and John Wilbanks at Science Commons, neither organization would exist today. +Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and another Creative Commons board member, +also provided key insights. Finally, but for the leadership of Laurie Racine +neither Creative Commons nor our Center at Duke would be where they are today, +and thus many of the experiments I describe in this book would not have +happened. + +The intellectual property bar is a fascinating, brilliant, and engagingly +eccentric group of lawyers. I owe debts to many of its members. Whitney +Broussard told me the dirty secrets of the music industry. Daphne Keller—a +former student and later a colleague—helped in more ways than I can count. + +A number of scientists and computer scientists made me see things I otherwise +would not have—Drew Endy and Randy Ruttenberg in synthetic biology, Nobel +laureates Sir John Sulston and Harold Varmus in genomics and biology more +generally, Paul Ginsparg in astrophysics, and Harlan Onsrud in geospatial data. +Paul Uhlir’s work at the National Academy of Sciences introduced me to many of +these issues. The work of Richard Stallman, the creator of the free software +movement, remains an inspiration even though he profoundly disagrees with my +nomenclature here—and with much else besides. + +Activists, civil rights lawyers, bloggers, and librarians have actually done +much of the hard work of building the movement I describe at the end of this +book. Jamie Love has touched, sparked, or masterminded almost every benign +development I write about here, and novelist Cory Doctorow has either blogged +it or influenced it. I have worked particularly closely with Manon Ress, Fred +von Lohmann, Cindy Cohn, Jason Schultz, and Gigi Sohn. John Howkins and +Gilberto Gil have provided considerable leadership internationally. But there +are many, many others. The entire community of librarians deserves our thanks +for standing up for free public access to knowledge for over two hundred years. +Librarians are my heroes. They should be yours, too. + +Some of the work contained here has been published in other forms elsewhere. +Portions of Chapters 2 and 3 appeared as “The Second Enclosure Movement and the +Construction of the Public Domain”;~{James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure +Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain,” Law and Contemporary +Problems 66 (Winter–Spring 2003): 33–74.}~ Chapter 7 shares little textually +but much in terms of inspiration with an article I co-wrote for PLoS Biology +with Arti Rai, “Synthetic Biology: Caught between Property Rights, the Public +Domain, and the Commons.”~{Arti Rai and James Boyle, “Synthetic Biology: Caught +between Property Rights, the Public Domain, and the Commons,” PLoS Biology 5 +(2007): 389–393, available at +http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050058&ct=1. +}~ For several years now I have been a columnist for the Financial Times’s “New +Economy Policy Forum.” Portions of Chapter 5 and Chapter 9 had their origins in +columns written for that forum. Chapter 10 has its roots both in my article “A +Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?”~{James Boyle, +“A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?” Duke Law +Journal 47 (1997): 87–116, available at +http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/cite.php?47+Duke+L.+J.+87. }~ and in the +symposium, Cultural Environmentalism @ 10,~{“Cultural Environmentalism @ 10,” +Law and Contemporary Problems 70 (Spring 2007): 1–210, available at +http://www.law.duke.edu/ce10. }~ that Larry Lessig kindly organized for the +tenth anniversary of that article. + +Finally, I need to thank the institutions who have supported this study. The +Rockefeller Center in Bellagio provided an inspiring beginning. The Ford, +Rockefeller, MacArthur, and Hewlett Foundations have generously supported my +work, as have Duke Law School’s research grants and Bost Fellowships. My work +on synthetic biology and the human genome was supported in part by a CEER grant +from the National Human Genome Research Institute and the Department of Energy +(P50 HG003391-02). In addition, my thanks go out to the anonymous donor whose +generous donation allowed us to found the Center for the Study of the Public +Domain, and to Bob Young and Laurie Racine, whose work made the Center +possible. Yale University Press were supportive and critical in all the right +places. I would like to thank them for agreeing to release this work under a +Creative Commons license. What could be more appropriate to the book’s theme? + +I could go on and on. But I will not. This flurry of names and areas of +knowledge signifies more than just the deep thanks of a dilettante. It +signifies the emergence of an area of concern, the coming together of very +different groups around a shared problem—an imbalance in the rules that define +property in the information age. It is that problem, its history, philosophy, +and politics that I try to sketch out in the pages ahead. + + + +1~ Preface: Comprised of at Least Jelly? + +Each person has a different breaking point. For one of my students it was +United States Patent number 6,004,596 for a “Sealed Crustless Sandwich.” In the +curiously mangled form of English that patent law produces, it was described +this way: + +_1 A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an +outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central +filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an +upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and +upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower +fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for +sealing the fillings there between. The upper and lower fillings are preferably +comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least +jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and +through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.~{U.S. Patent No. +6,004,596 (filed Dec. 21, 1999), available at +http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm (search “6,004,596”). As is +required, the patent refers extensively to the “prior art”—in this case prior +art in sealing sandwiches. It also refers to the classic scientific reference +work “50 Great Sandwiches by Carole Handslip 81–84, 86, 95, 1994.” Is this +patent ridiculous? Yes, clearly so. But not so ridiculous that its eventual +owner, Smucker’s, refrained from sending out cease and desist letters to +competing sandwich manufacturers, and, when one of those competitors +successfully requested the Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine the patent, +from appealing the resulting rejection all the way through the Board of Patent +Appeals and Interferences to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The +judges there were less than sympathetic at oral argument. “Judge Arthur Gajarsa +noted that his wife often squeezes together the sides of their child’s peanut +butter and jelly sandwiches to keep the filling from oozing out. ‘I’m afraid +she might be infringing on your patent!’ he said.” The court found that the PTO +got it right the second time around and agreed with the Board of Patent Appeals +in rejecting the patent. Portfolio Media, “Peanut Butter and Jelly Case Reaches +Federal Circuit,” IPLaw360 (April 7, 2005), available at +http://www.iplawbulletin.com. For the Board of Patent Appeals’s learned +discussion of whether the patent was anticipated by such devices as the +“Tartmaster,” complete with disputes over expert testimony on the subjects of +cutting, crimping, and “leaking outwardly” and painstaking inquiries about what +would seem obvious to a “person having ordinary skill in the art of sandwich +making,” see http://des.uspto.gov/Foia/ReterivePdf?system=BPAI&flNm=fd031754 +and http://des.uspto.gov/Foia/ReterivePdf?system=BPAI&flNm=fd031775. One could +conclude from this case that the system works (eventually). Or one could ask +who cares about silly patents like this—even if they are used in an attempt to +undermine competition? The larger point, however, is that an initial process of +examination that finds a crimped peanut butter and jelly sandwich is “novel and +nonobvious” is hardly going to do better when more complex technologies are at +stake. I take that point up in Chapter 2 with reference to Thomas Jefferson’s +discussion of patents and in Chapter 7 on synthetic biology. For a more general +discussion of the flaws of the patent system see Adam B. Jaffe and Josh Lerner, +Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System Is Endangering +Innovation, and Progress and What To Do About It (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton +University Press, 2004).}~ + +“But why does this upset you?” I asked; “you’ve seen much worse than this.” And +he had. There are patents on human genes, on auctions, on algorithms.~{These +types of patents are discussed in Chapter 7.}~ The U.S. Olympic Committee has +an expansive right akin to a trademark over the word “Olympic” and will not +permit gay activists to hold a “Gay Olympic Games.” The Supreme Court sees no +First Amendment problem with this.~{San Francisco Arts & Athletics, Inc., et +al. v. United States Olympic Committee, 483 U.S. 522 (1987). See also James +Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the +Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), +145–148.}~ Margaret Mitchell’s estate famously tried to use copyright to +prevent Gone With the Wind from being told from a slave’s point of +view.~{SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co., 268 F.3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001).}~ +The copyright over the words you are now reading will not expire until seventy +years after my death; the men die young in my family, but still you will allow +me to hope that this might put it close to the year 2100. Congress periodically +considers legislative proposals that would allow the ownership of facts.~{See +Samuel E. Trosow, “Sui Generis Database Legislation: A Critical Analysis,” Yale +Journal of Law & Technology 7 (2005): 534–642; Miriam Bitton, “Trends in +Protection for Informational Works under Copyright Law during the 19th and 20th +Centuries,” Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review 13 (2006): +115–176.}~ The Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives content providers a whole +array of legally protected digital fences to enclose their work.~{The Digital +Millennium Copyright Act is discussed at length in Chapter 5. “Digital fences” +include password protection, encryption, and forms of digital rights +management.}~ In some cases it effectively removes the privilege of fair use. +Each day brings some new Internet horror story about the excesses of +intellectual property. Some of them are even true. The list goes on and on. (By +the end of this book, I hope to have convinced you that this matters.) With all +of this going on, this enclosure movement of the mind, this locking up of +symbols and themes and facts and genes and ideas (and eventually people), why +get excited about the patenting of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? “I just +thought that there were limits,” he said; “some things should be sacred.” + +This book is an attempt to tell the story of the battles over intellectual +property, the range wars of the information age. I want to convince you that +intellectual property is important, that it is something that any informed +citizen needs to know a little about, in the same way that any informed citizen +needs to know at least something about the environment, or civil rights, or the +way the economy works. I will try my best to be fair, to explain the issues and +give both sides of the argument. Still, you should know that this is more than +mere description. In the pages that follow, I try to show that current +intellectual property policy is overwhelmingly and tragically bad in ways that +everyone, and not just lawyers or economists, should care about. We are making +bad decisions that will have a negative effect on our culture, our kids’ +schools, and our communications networks; on free speech, medicine, and +scientific research. We are wasting some of the promise of the Internet, +running the risk of ruining an amazing system of scientific innovation, carving +out an intellectual property exemption to the First Amendment. I do not write +this as an enemy of intellectual property, a dot-communist ready to end all +property rights; in fact, I am a fan. It is precisely because I am a fan that I +am so alarmed about the direction we are taking. + +Still, the message of this book is neither doom nor gloom. None of these +decisions is irrevocable. The worst ones can still be avoided altogether, and +there are powerful counterweights in both law and culture to the negative +trends I describe here. There are lots of reasons for optimism. I will get to +most of these later, but one bears mentioning now. Contrary to what everyone +has told you, the subject of intellectual property is both accessible and +interesting; what people can understand, they can change—or pressure their +legislators to change. + +I stress this point because I want to challenge a kind of willed ignorance. +Every news story refers to intellectual property as “arcane,” “technical,” or +“abstruse” in the same way as they referred to former attorney general Alberto +Gonzales as “controversial.” It is a verbal tic and it serves to reinforce the +idea that this is something about which popular debate is impossible. But it is +also wrong. The central issues of intellectual property are not technical, +abstruse, or arcane. To be sure, the rules of intellectual property law can be +as complex as a tax code (though they should not be). But at the heart of +intellectual property law are a set of ideas that a ten-year-old can understand +perfectly well. (While writing this book, I checked this on a ten-year-old I +then happened to have around the house.) You do not need to be a scientist or +an economist or a lawyer to understand it. The stuff is also a lot of fun to +think about. I live in constant wonder that they pay me to do so. + +Should you be able to tell the story of Gone With the Wind from a slave’s point +of view even if the author does not want you to? Should the Dallas Cowboys be +able to stop the release of Debbie Does Dallas, a cheesy porno flick, in which +the title character brings great dishonor to a uniform similar to that worn by +the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders? (After all, the audience might end up +associating the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders with . . . well, commodified +sexuality.)~{Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Inc. v. Pussycat Cinema, Ltd. , 604 +F.2d 200 (2nd Cir. 1979).}~ + +Should the U.S. Commerce Department be able to patent the genes of a Guyami +Indian woman who shows an unusual resistance to leukemia?~{“In the forests of +Panama lives a Guyami Indian woman who is unusually resistant to a virus that +causes leukemia. She was discovered by scientific ‘gene hunters,’ engaged in +seeking out native peoples whose lives and cultures are threatened with +extinction. Though they provided basic medical care, the hunters did not set +out to preserve the people, only their genes—which can be kept in cultures of +‘immortalized’ cells grown in the laboratory. In 1993, the U.S. Department of +Commerce tried to patent the Guyami woman’s genes—and only abandoned the +attempt in the face of furious protest from representatives of indigenous +peoples.” Tom Wilkie, “Whose Gene Is It Anyway?” Independent (London, November +19, 1995), 75.}~ What would it mean to patent someone’s genes, anyway? +Forbidding scientific research on the gene without the patent holder’s consent? +Forbidding human reproduction? Can religions secure copyrights over their +scriptures? Even the ones they claim to have been dictated by gods or aliens? +Even if American copyright law requires “an author,” presumably a human +one?~{See Christina Rhee, “Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra,” Berkeley Technology +Law Journal 13 (1998): 69–81.}~ Can they use those copyrights to discipline +heretics or critics who insist on quoting the scripture in full? + +Should anyone own the protocols—the agreed-upon common technical standards—that +make the Internet possible? Does reading a Web page count as “copying” it?~{See +James Boyle, “Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person’s Guide,” +Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 10 (1996): 83–94.}~ Should that question +depend on technical “facts” (for example, how long the page stays in your +browser’s cache) or should it depend on some choice that we want to make about +the extent of the copyright holder’s rights? + +These questions may be hard, because the underlying moral and political and +economic issues need to be thought through. They may be weird; alien scriptural +dictation might qualify there. They surely aren’t uninteresting, although I +admit to a certain prejudice on that point. And some of them, like the design +of our telecommunications networks, or the patenting of human genes, or the +relationship between copyright and free speech, are not merely interesting, +they are important. It seems like a bad idea to leave them to a few lawyers and +lobbyists simply because you are told they are “technical.” + +So the first goal of the book is to introduce you to intellectual property, to +explain why it matters, why it is the legal form of the information age. The +second goal is to persuade you that our intellectual property policy is going +the wrong way; two roads are diverging and we are on the one that doesn’t lead +to Rome. + +The third goal is harder to explain. We have a simple word for, and an +intuitive understanding of, the complex reality of “property.” Admittedly, +lawyers think about property differently from the way lay-people do; this is +only one of the strange mental changes that law school brings. But everyone in +our society has a richly textured understanding of “mine” and “thine,” of +rights of exclusion, of division of rights over the same property (for example, +between tenant and landlord), of transfer of rights in part or in whole (for +example, rental or sale). But what about the opposite of property—property’s +antonym, property’s outside? What is it? Is it just stuff that is not worth +owning—abandoned junk? Stuff that is not yet owned—such as a seashell on a +public beach, about to be taken home? Or stuff that cannot be owned—a human +being, for example? Or stuff that is collectively owned—would that be the radio +spectrum or a public park? Or stuff that is owned by no one, such as the deep +seabed or the moon? Property’s outside, whether it is “the public domain” or +“the commons,” turns out to be harder to grasp than its inside. + +To the extent that we think about property’s outside, it tends to have a +negative connotation; we want to get stuff out of the lost-and-found office and +back into circulation as property. We talk of “the tragedy of the +commons,”~{Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): +1243–1248.}~ meaning that unowned or collectively owned resources will be +managed poorly; the common pasture will be overgrazed by the villagers’ sheep +because no one has an incentive to hold back. + +When the subject is intellectual property, this gap in our knowledge turns out +to be important because our intellectual property system depends on a balance +between what is property and what is not. For a set of reasons that I will +explain later, “the opposite of property” is a concept that is much more +important when we come to the world of ideas, information, expression, and +invention. We want a lot of material to be in the public domain, material that +can be spread without property rights. “The general rule of law is, that the +noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and +ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to +common use.”~{International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215, 250 +(1918) (Brandeis, J., dissenting); Yochai Benkler, “Free as the Air to Common +Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain,” New York +University Law Review 74 (1999): 354–446.}~ Our art, our culture, our science +depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual +property. The third goal of this book is to explore property’s outside, +property’s various antonyms, and to show how we are undervaluing the public +domain and the information commons at the very moment in history when we need +them most. Academic articles and clever legal briefs cannot solve this problem +alone. + +Instead, I argue that precisely because we are in the information age, we need +a movement—akin to the environmental movement—to preserve the public domain. +The explosion of industrial technologies that threatened the environment also +taught us to recognize its value. The explosion of information technologies has +precipitated an intellectual land grab; it must also teach us about both the +existence and the value of the public domain. This enlightenment does not +happen by itself. The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently, +to see that there was such a thing as “the environment” rather than just my +pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information +environment. + +We have to “invent” the public domain before we can save it. + +A word about style. I am trying to write about complicated issues, some of +which have been neglected by academic scholarship, while others have been +catalogued in detail. I want to advance the field, to piece together the story +of the second enclosure movement, to tell you something new about the balance +between property and its opposite. But I want to do so in a way that is +readable. For those in my profession, being readable is a dangerous goal. You +have never heard true condescension until you have heard academics pronounce +the word “popularizer.” They say it as Isadora Duncan might have said “dowdy.” +To be honest, I share their concern. All too often, clarity is achieved by +leaving out the key qualification necessary to the argument, the sualso include +a short guide to further reading. I have used citations sparingly, but more +widely than an author of a popular book normally does, so that the scholarly +audience can trace out my reasoning. But the core of the argument is in the +text. + +The second balance I have struggled to hit is that between breadth and depth. +The central thesis of the book is that the line between intellectual property +and the public domain is important in every area of culture, science, and +technology. As a result, it ranges widely in subject matter. Yet readers come +with different backgrounds, interests, and bodies of knowledge. As a result, +the structure of the book is designed to facilitate self-selection based on +interest. The first three chapters and the conclusion provide the theoretical +basis. Each chapter builds on those themes, but is also designed to be largely +freestanding. The readers who thrill to the idea that there might be +constitutional challenges to the regulation of digital speech by copyright law +may wallow in those arguments to their hearts’ content. Others may quickly +grasp the gist and head on for the story of how Ray Charles’s voice ended up in +a mashup attacking President Bush, or the discussion of genetically engineered +bacteria that take photographs and are themselves the subject of intellectual +property rights. To those readers who nevertheless conclude that I have failed +to balance correctly between precision and clarity, or breadth and depth, I +offer my apologies. I fear you may be right. It was not for want of trying. + +1~ Chapter 1: Why Intellectual Property? + +Imagine yourself starting a society from scratch. Perhaps you fought a +revolution, or perhaps you led a party of adventurers into some empty land, +conveniently free of indigenous peoples. Now your task is to make the society +work. You have a preference for democracy and liberty and you want a vibrant +culture: a culture with a little chunk of everything, one that offers hundreds +of ways to live and thousands of ideals of beauty. You don’t want everything to +be high culture; you want beer and skittles and trashy delights as well as +brilliant news reporting, avant-garde theater, and shocking sculpture. You can +see a role for highbrow, state-supported media or publicly financed artworks, +but your initial working assumption is that the final arbiter of culture should +be the people who watch, read, and listen to it, and who remake it every day. +And even if you are dubious about the way popular choice gets formed, you +prefer it to some government funding body or coterie of art mavens. + +At the same time as you are developing your culture, you want a flourishing +economy—and not just in literature or film. You want innovation and invention. +You want drugs that cure terrible diseases, and designs for more fuel-efficient +stoves, and useful little doodads, like mousetraps, or Post-it notes, or +solar-powered backscratchers. To be exact, you want lots of innovation but you +do not know exactly what innovation or even what types of innovation you want. + +Given scarce time and resources, should we try to improve typewriters or render +them obsolete with word processors, or develop functional voice recognition +software, or just concentrate on making solar-powered backscratchers? Who knew +that they needed Post-it notes or surgical stents or specialized rice planters +until those things were actually developed? How do you make priorities when the +priorities include things you cannot rationally value because you do not have +them yet? How do you decide what to fund and when to fund it, what desires to +trade off against each other? + +The society you have founded normally relies on market signals to allocate +resources. If a lot of people want petunias for their gardens, and are willing +to pay handsomely for them, then some farmer who was formerly growing soybeans +or gourds will devote a field to petunias instead. He will compete with the +other petunia sellers to sell them to you. Voila! We do not need a state +planner to consult the vegetable five-year plan and decree “Petunias for the +People!” Instead, the decision about how to deploy society’s productive +resources is being made “automatically,” cybernetically even, by rational +individuals responding to price signals. And in a competitive market, you will +get your petunias at very close to the cost of growing them and bringing them +to market. Consumer desires are satisfied and productive resources are +allocated efficiently. It’s a tour de force. + +Of course, there are problems. The market measures the value of a good by +whether people have the ability and willingness to pay for it, so the whims of +the rich may be more “valuable” than the needs of the destitute. We may spend +more on pet psychiatry for the traumatized poodles on East 71st Street than on +developing a cure for sleeping sickness, because the emotional wellbeing of the +pets of the wealthy is “worth more” than the lives of the tropical world’s +poor. But for a lot of products, in a lot of areas, the market works—and that +is a fact not to be taken for granted. + +Why not use this mechanism to meet your cultural and innovation needs? If +people need Madame Bovary or The New York Times or a new kind of antibiotic, +surely the market will provide it? Apparently not. You have brought economists +with you into your brave new world—perhaps out of nostalgia, or because a lot +of packing got done at the last minute. The economists shake their heads.~{As +the suggested further reading indicates, this light-hearted account of the +economic basis of intellectual property conceals considerable complexity. On +the other hand, the core argument is presented here—and a compelling argument +it is.}~ The petunia farmer is selling something that is “a rivalrous good.” If +I have the petunia, you can’t have it. What’s more, petunias are “excludable.” +The farmer only gives you petunias when you pay for them. It is these factors +that make the petunia market work. What about Madame Bovary, or the antibiotic, +or The New York Times? Well, it depends. If books have to be copied out by +hand, then Madame Bovary is just like the petunia. But if thousands of copies +of Madame Bovary can be printed on a printing press, or photocopied, or +downloaded from www.flaubertsparrot.com, then the book becomes something that +is nonrival; once Madame Bovary is written, it can satisfy many readers with +little additional effort or cost. Indeed, depending on the technologies of +reproduction, it may be very hard to exclude people from Madame Bovary. + +Imagine a Napster for French literature; everyone could have Madame Bovary and +only the first purchaser would have to pay for it. Because of these “nonrival” +and “nonexcludable” characteristics, Flaubert’s publisher would have a more +difficult time coming up with a business plan than the petunia farmer. The same +is true for the drug company that invests millions in screening and testing +various drug candidates and ends up with a new antibiotic that is both safe and +effective, but which can be copied for pennies. Who will invest the money, +knowing that any product can be undercut by copies that don’t have to pay the +research costs? How are authors and publishers and drug manufacturers to make +money? And if they can’t make money, how are we to induce people to be authors +or to be the investors who put money into the publishing or pharmaceutical +business? + +It is important to pause at this point and inquire how closely reality hews to +the economic story of “nonexcludable” and “nonrival” public goods. It turns out +that the reality is much more complex. First, there may be motivations for +creation that do not depend on the market mechanism. People sometimes create +because they seek fame, or out of altruism, or because an inherent creative +force will not let them do otherwise. Where those motivations operate, we may +not need a financial incentive to create. Thus the “problem” of cheap copying +in fact becomes a virtue. Second, the same technologies that make copying +cheaper may also lower the costs of advertising and distribution, cutting down +on the need to finance expensive distribution chains. Third, even in situations +that do require incentives for creativity and for distribution, it may be that +being “first to market” with an innovation provides the innovator with enough +of a head start on the competition to support the innovation.~{See Jack +Hirshleifer, “The Private and Social Value of Information and the Reward to +Inventive Activity,” American Economic Review 61 (1971): 561–574.}~ Fourth, +while some aspects of the innovation may truly be nonrival, other aspects may +not. Software is nonrival and hard to exclude people from, but it is easy to +exclude your customers from the help line or technical support. The CD may be +copied cheaply; the concert is easy to police. The innovator may even be +advantaged by being able to trade on the likely effects of her innovation. If I +know I have developed the digital camera, I may sell the conventional film +company’s shares short. Guarantees of authenticity, quality, and ease of use +may attract purchasers even if unauthorized copying is theoretically cheaper. + +In other words, the economic model of pure public goods will track our reality +well in some areas and poorly in others—and the argument for state intervention +to fix the problems of public goods will therefore wax and wane +correspondingly. In the case of drug patents, for example, it is very strong. +For lots of low-level business innovation, however, we believe that adequate +incentives are provided by being first to market, and so we see no need to give +monopoly power to the first business to come up with a new business plan—at +least we did not until some disastrous patent law decisions discussed later in +this book. Nor does a lowering of copying costs hurt every industry equally. +Digital copies of music were a threat to the traditional music business, but +digital copies of books? I am skeptical. This book will be freely and legally +available online to all who wish to copy it. Both the publisher and I believe +that this will increase rather than decrease sales. + +Ignore these inconvenient complicating factors for a moment. Assume that +wherever things are cheap to copy and hard to exclude others from, we have a +potential collapse of the market. That book, that drug, that film will simply +not be produced in the first place—unless the state steps in somehow to change +the equation. This is the standard argument for intellectual property rights. +And a very good argument it is. In order to solve the potentially +“market-breaking” problem of goods that are expensive to make and cheap to +copy, we will use what my colleague Jerry Reichman calls the “market-making” +device of intellectual property. The state will create a right to exclude +others from the invention or the expression and confer it on the inventor or +the author. The most familiar rights of this kind are copyrights and patents. +(Trademarks present some special issues, which I will address a little later.) +Having been given the ability to forbid people to copy your invention or your +novel, you can make them pay for the privilege of getting access. You have been +put back in the position of the petunia farmer. + +Pause for a moment and think of what a brilliant social innovation this is—at +least potentially. Focus not on the incentives alone, but on the +decentralization of information processing and decision making that a market +offers. Instead of having ministries of art that define the appropriate culture +to be produced this year, or turning the entire path of national innovation +policy over to the government, intellectual property decentralizes the choices +about what creative and innovative paths to pursue while retaining the +possibility that people will actually get paid for their innovation and +creative expression. + +The promise of copyright is this: if you are a radical environmentalist who +wants to alert the world to the danger posed by climate change, or a passionate +advocate of homeschooling, or a cartoonist with a uniquely twisted view of +life, or a musician who can make a slack key guitar do very strange things, or +a person who likes to take amazingly saccharine pictures of puppies and put +them on greeting cards—maybe you can quit your day job and actually make a +living from your expressive powers. If the market works, if the middlemen and +distributors are smart enough, competitive enough, and willing to take a chance +on expression that competes with their in-house talent, if you can make it +somehow into the public consciousness, then you can be paid for allowing the +world to copy, distribute, and perform your stuff. You risk your time and your +effort and your passion and, if the market likes it, you will be rewarded. (At +the very least, the giant producers of culture will be able to assemble vast +teams of animators and musicians and software gurus and meld their labors into +a videotape that will successfully anesthetize your children for two hours; no +small accomplishment, let me tell you, and one for which people will certainly +pay.) + +More importantly, if the system works, the choices about the content of our +culture—the mix of earnest essays and saccharine greeting cards and scantily +clad singers and poetic renditions of Norse myths—will be decentralized to the +people who actually read, or listen to, or watch the stuff. This is our +cultural policy and it is driven, in part, by copyright. + +The promise of patent is this: we have a multitude of human needs and a +multitude of individuals and firms who might be able to satisfy those needs +through innovation. Patent law offers us a decentralized system that, in +principle, will allow individuals and firms to pick the problem that they wish +to solve. Inventors and entrepreneurs can risk their time and their capital +and, if they produce a solution that finds favor in the marketplace, will be +able to reap the return provided by the legal right to exclude—by the legal +monopoly over the resulting invention. The market hints at some unmet need—for +drugs that might reduce obesity or cure multiple sclerosis, or for Post-it +notes or windshield wipers that come on intermittently in light rain—and the +innovator and her investors make a bet that they can meet that need. (Not all +of these technologies will be patentable—only those that are novel and +“nonobvious,” something that goes beyond what any skilled person in the +relevant field would have done.) + +In return for the legal monopoly, patent holders must describe the technology +well enough to allow anyone to replicate it once the patent term ends. Thus +patent law allows us to avert two dangers: the danger that the innovation will +languish because the inventor has no way to recover her investment of time and +capital, and the danger that the inventor will turn to secrecy instead, hiding +the details of her innovation behind black box technologies and restrictive +contracts, so that society never gets the knowledge embedded in it. (This is a +real danger. The medieval guilds often relied on secrecy to maintain the +commercial advantage conveyed by their special skills, thus slowing progress +down and sometimes simply stopping it. We still don’t know how they made +Stradivarius violins sound so good. Patents, by contrast, keep the knowledge +public, at least in theory;~{Unfortunately, the reality turns out to be less +rosy. James Bessen, “Patents and the Diffusion of Technical Information,” +Economics Letters 86 (2005): 122: “[S]urvey evidence suggests that firms do not +place much value on the disclosed information. Moreover, those firms that do +read patents do not use them primarily as a source of information on +technology. Instead, they use them for other purposes, such as keeping track of +competitors or checking for infringement. There are, in fact, sound theoretical +reasons why the disclosed information may not be very valuable. [Fritz] Machlup +and [Edith] Penrose report that the argument about diffusion is an old one, +popular since the mid-19th century. They also point out that, at least through +the 1950s, economists have been skeptical about this argument. The problem, +also recognized in the mid-19th century, is that ‘only unconcealable inventions +are patented,’ so patents reveal little that could not be otherwise learned. On +the other hand, ‘concealable inventions remain concealed.’ ” [Citations +omitted.]}~ you must describe it to own it.) And again, decisions about the +direction of innovation have been largely, though not entirely, decentralized +to the people who actually might use the products and services that result. +This is our innovation policy and it is increasingly driven by patent. + +What about the legal protection of trademarks, the little words or symbols or +product shapes that identify products for us? Why do we have trademark law, +this “homestead law for the English language”?~{Felix S. Cohen, “Transcendental +Nonsense and the Functional Approach,” Columbia Law Review 35 (1935): 817.}~ +Why not simply allow anyone to use any name or attractive symbol that they want +on their products, even if someone else used it first? A trademark gives me a +limited right to exclude other people from using my mark, or brand name, or +product shape, just as copyright and patent law give me a limited right to +exclude other people from my original expression or my novel invention. Why +create such a right and back it with the force of law? + +According to the economists, the answer is that trademark law does two things. +It saves consumers time. We have good reason to believe that a soap that says +“Ivory” or a tub of ice cream that says “Häagen-Dazs” will be made by the same +manufacturer that made the last batch of Ivory soap or Häagen-Dazs ice cream. +If we liked the good before and we see the symbol again, we know what we are +getting. I can work out what kind of soap, ice cream, or car I like, and then +just look for the appropriate sign rather than investigating the product all +over again each time I buy. That would be wasteful and economists hate waste. +At the same time, trademarks fulfill a second function: they are supposed to +give manufacturers an incentive to make good products—or at least to make +products of consistent quality or price—to build up a good brand name and +invest in consistency of its key features, knowing that no other firm can take +their name or symbol. (Why produce a high-quality product, or a reliable cheap +product, and build a big market share if a free rider could wait until people +liked the product and then just produce an imitation with the same name but of +lower quality?) The promise of trademark is that quality and commercial +information flow regulate themselves, with rational consumers judging among +goods of consistent quality produced by manufacturers with an interest in +building up long-term reputation. + +So there we have the idealized vision of intellectual property. It is not +merely supposed to produce incentives for innovation by rewarding creators, +though that is vital. Intellectual property is also supposed to create a +feedback mechanism that dictates the contours of information and innovation +production. It is not an overstatement to say that intellectual property rights +are designed to shape our information marketplace. Copyright law is supposed to +give us a self-regulating cultural policy in which the right to exclude others +from one’s original expression fuels a vibrant public sphere indirectly driven +by popular demand. At its best, it is supposed to allow a decentralized and +iconoclastic cultural ferment in which independent artists, musicians, and +writers can take their unique visions, histories, poems, or songs to the +world—and make a living doing so if their work finds favor. Patent law is +supposed to give us a self-regulating innovation policy in which the right to +exclude others from novel and useful inventions creates a cybernetic and +responsive innovation marketplace. The allocation of social resources to +particular types of innovation is driven by guesses about what the market +wants. Trademark law is supposed to give us a self-regulating commercial +information policy in which the right to exclude others from one’s trade name, +symbol, or slogan produces a market for consumer information in which firms +have incentives to establish quality brand names and consumers can rely on the +meaning and the stability of the logos that surround them. Ivory soap will +always mean Ivory soap and Coke will mean Coke, at least until the owners of +those marks decide to change the nature of their products. + +Some readers will find my use of the term “intellectual property” mistaken and +offensive. They will argue, and I agree, that the use of the term “property” +can cause people mistakenly to conflate these rights with those to physical +property. (I outline that process and its negative consequences in the next +chapter.) They will argue, and again I agree, that there are big differences +between the three fields I have described. Should we not just list the specific +rights about which we are speaking—copyright, patent, or trademark? Both of +these concerns are real and well-founded, but I respectfully disagree with the +conclusion that we should give up the term “intellectual property.” + +First, as I have tried to show above, while there are considerable differences +between the three fields I discussed, there is also a core similarity—the +attempt to use a legally created privilege to solve a potential “public goods +problem.” That similarity can enlighten as well as confuse. Yes, copyright +looks very different from patent, just as a whale looks very different from a +mouse. But we do not condemn the scientist who notes that they are both +“mammals”—a socially constructed category—so long as he has a reason for +focusing on that commonality. Second, the language of intellectual property +exists. It has political reality in the world. Sometimes the language confuses +and misleads. There are two possible reactions to such a reality. One can +reject it and insist on a different and “purified” nomenclature, or one can +attempt to point out the misperceptions and confusions using the very language +in which they are embedded. I do not reject the first tactic. It can be useful. +Here, though, I have embraced the second. + +I have provided the idealized story of intellectual property. But is it true? +Did the law really develop that way? Does it work that way now? Does this story +still apply in the world of the Internet and the Human Genome Project? If you +believed the idealized story, would you know what kind of intellectual property +laws to write? The answer to all of these questions is “not exactly.” + +Like most social institutions, intellectual property has an altogether messier +and more interesting history than this sanitized version of its functioning +would suggest. The precursors of copyright law served to force the +identification of the author, so that he could be punished if he proved to be a +heretic or a revolutionary. The Statute of Anne—the first true copyright +statute—was produced partly because of publishers’ fights with booksellers; the +authorial right grew as an afterthought.~{For contrasting views of the sequence +of events, see John Feather, “Publishers and Politicians: The Remaking of the +Law of Copyright in Britain 1775–1842,” pt. 2, “The Rights of Authors,” +Publishing History 25 (1989): 45–72; Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The +Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).}~ +The history of patents includes a wealth of attempts to reward friends of the +government and restrict or control dangerous technologies. Trademark law has +shuttled uneasily between being a free-floating way to police competition so as +to prohibit actions that courts thought were “unfair” and an absolute property +right over an individual word or symbol. + +But does intellectual property work this way now, promoting the ideal of +progress, a transparent marketplace, easy and cheap access to information, +decentralized and iconoclastic cultural production, self-correcting innovation +policy? Often it does, but distressingly often it does the reverse. The rights +that were supposed to be limited in time and scope to the minimum monopoly +necessary to ensure production become instead a kind of perpetual corporate +welfare—restraining the next generation of creators instead of encouraging +them. The system that was supposed to harness the genius of both the market and +democracy sometimes subverts both. Worse, it does so inefficiently, locking up +vast swaths of culture in order to confer a benefit on a tiny minority of +works. But this is too abstract. A single instance from copyright law will +serve as a concrete example of what is at stake here. Later in the book I will +give other examples. + +2~ You’ll Get My Library of Congress When . . . + +Go to the Library of Congress catalogue. It is online at +http://catalog.loc.gov/. This is an astounding repository of material—not just +books and periodicals, but pictures, films, and music. The vast majority of +this material, perhaps as much as 95 percent in the case of books, is +commercially unavailable.~{Tim O’Reilly points out that there are 32 million +titles in the Online Computer Library Center’s “WorldCat” catalogue—this is a +reasonable proxy for the number of books in U.S. libraries. Nielsen’s Bookscan +shows that 1.2 million books sold at least one copy in 2005. This yields a +ratio of books commercially available to books ever published of about 4 +percent. But of those 1.2 million books, many are in the public domain—think of +Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Melville, Kipling. Thus the percentage of books +that are under copyright and commercially available may actually be +considerably lower than 4 percent. See +http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/11/oops_only_4_of_titles_are_bein.html. +For a lucid account of the statistics in the context of the Google Book Search +Project, see +http://lessig.org/blog/2006/01/google_book_search_the_argumen.html. }~ The +process happens comparatively quickly. Estimates suggest that a mere +twentyeight years after publication 85 percent of the works are no longer being +commercially produced. (We know that when U.S. copyright required renewal after +twenty-eight years, about 85 percent of all copyright holders did not bother to +renew. This is a reasonable, if rough, guide to commercial viability.)~{See +Barbara Ringer, “Study Number 31: Renewal of Copyright,” reprinted in U.S. +Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and +Copyrights, Copyright Law Revision, 86th Cong., 1st Sess., Committee Print +(1960), 187. See also HR Rep. 94-1476 (1976), 136; William M. Landes and +Richard A. Posner, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law +(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 210–212.}~ + +Yet because the copyright term is now so long, in many cases extending well +over a century, most of twentieth-century culture is still under +copyright—copyrighted but unavailable. Much of this, in other words, is lost +culture. No one is reprinting the books, screening the films, or playing the +songs. No one is allowed to. In fact, we may not even know who holds the +copyright. Companies have gone out of business. Records are incomplete or +absent. In some cases, it is even more complicated. A film, for example, might +have one copyright over the sound track, another over the movie footage, and +another over the script. You get the idea. These works—which are commercially +unavailable and also have no identifiable copyright holder—are called “orphan +works.” They make up a huge percentage of our great libraries’ holdings. For +example, scholars estimate that the majority of our film holdings are orphan +works.~{Details of the orphan works problem can be found in the proposals +presented to the copyright office by the Center for the Study of the Public +Domain; Orphan Works: Analysis and Proposal: Submission to the Copyright +Office—March 2005, available at +http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/pdf/cspdproposal.pdf, and Access to Orphan Films: +Submission to the Copyright Office—March 2005, available at +http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/pdf/cspdorphanfilm.pdf. Two recent bills, in the +Senate and House, respectively, attempt to address the orphan works problems. +The Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008, S 2913, 110th Cong. (2008), would +add a new section to the Copyright Act limiting remedies for infringement of +orphan works and requiring the establishment of a database of pictorial, +graphic, and sculptural works. The House bill, The Orphan Works Act of 2008, HR +5889, 110th Cong. (2008), is similar but not identical. While these bills are a +good start, the eventual remedy will need to be more sweeping.}~ For books, the +estimates are similar. Not only are these works unavailable commercially, there +is simply no way to find and contact the person who could agree to give +permission to digitize the work or make it available in a new form. + +Take a conservative set of numbers. Subtract from our totals the works that are +clearly in the public domain. In the United States, that is generally work +produced before 1923. That material, at least, we can use freely. Subtract, +too, the works that are still available from the copyright holder. There we can +gain access if we are willing to pay. Yet this still leaves a huge proportion +of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture commercially unavailable but +under copyright. In the case of books, the number is over 95 percent, as I said +before; with films and music, it is harder to tell, but the percentages are +still tragically high. A substantial proportion of that total is made up of +orphan works. They cannot be reprinted or digitized even if we were willing to +pay the owner to do so. And then comes the Internet. Right now, you can search +for those books or films or songs and have the location of the work instantly +displayed, as well as a few details about it. And if you live in Washington, +D.C., or near some other great library, you can go to a reading room, and if +the work can be found and has not been checked out, and has not deteriorated, +you can read the books (though you probably will not be able to arrange to see +the movies unless you are an accredited film scholar). + +I was searching the Library of Congress catalogue online one night, tracking +down a seventy-year-old book about politics and markets, when my son came in to +watch me. He was about eight years old at the time but already a child of the +Internet age. He asked what I was doing and I explained that I was printing out +the details of the book so that I could try to find it in my own university +library. “Why don’t you read it online?” he said, reaching over my shoulder and +double-clicking on the title, frowning when that merely led to another +information page: “How do you get to read the actual book?” I smiled at the +assumption that all the works of literature were not merely in the Library of +Congress, but actually on the Net: available to anyone with an Internet +connection anywhere in the world—so that you could not merely search for, but +also read or print, some large slice of the Library’s holdings. Imagine what +that would be like. Imagine the little underlined blue hyperlink from each +title—to my son it made perfect sense. The book’s title was in the catalogue. +When you clicked the link, surely you would get to read it. That is what +happened in his experience when one clicked a link. Why not here? It was an old +book, after all, no longer in print. Imagine being able to read the books, hear +the music, or watch the films—or at least the ones that the Library of Congress +thought it worthwhile to digitize. Of course, that is ridiculous. + +I tried to explain this to my son. I showed him that there were some works that +could be seen online. I took him to the online photograph library, meaning to +show him the wealth of amazing historical photographs. Instead, I found myself +brooding over the lengthy listing of legal restrictions on the images and the +explanation that reproduction of protected items may require the written +permission of the copyright owners and that, in many cases, only indistinct and +tiny thumbnail images are displayed to those searching from outside the Library +of Congress “because of potential rights considerations.” The same was true of +the scratchy folk songs from the twenties or the early film holdings. The +material was in the Library, of course—remarkable collections in some cases, +carefully preserved, and sometimes even digitized at public expense. Yet only a +tiny fraction of it is available online. (There is a fascinating set of +Edison’s early films, for example.) + +Most of the material available online comes from so long ago that the copyright +could not possibly still be in force. But since copyright lasts for seventy +years after the death of the author (or ninety-five years if it was a corporate +“work for hire”), that could be a very, very long time indeed. Long enough, in +fact, to keep off limits almost the whole history of moving pictures and the +entire history of recorded music. Long enough to lock up almost all of +twentieth-century culture. + +But is that not what copyright is supposed to do? To grant the right to +restrict access, so as to allow authors to charge for the privilege of +obtaining it? Yes, indeed. And this is a very good idea. But as I argue in this +book, the goal of the system ought to be to give the monopoly only for as long +as necessary to provide an incentive. After that, we should let the work fall +into the public domain where all of us can use it, transform it, adapt it, +build on it, republish it as we wish. For most works, the owners expect to make +all the money they are going to recoup from the work with five or ten years of +exclusive rights. The rest of the copyright term is of little use to them +except as a kind of lottery ticket in case the work proves to be a +one-in-a-million perennial favorite. The one-in-a-million lottery winner will +benefit, of course, if his ticket comes up. And if the ticket is “free,” who +would not take it? But the ticket is not free to the public. They pay higher +prices for the works still being commercially exploited and, frequently, the +price of complete unavailability for the works that are not. + +Think of a one-in-a-million perennial favorite—Harry Potter, say. Long after J. +K. Rowling is dust, we will all be forbidden from making derivative works, or +publishing cheap editions or large-type versions, or simply reproducing it for +pleasure. I am a great admirer of Ms. Rowling’s work, but my guess is that +little extra incentive was provided by the thought that her copyright will +endure seventy rather than merely fifty years after her death. Some large costs +are being imposed here, for a small benefit. And the costs fall even more +heavily on all the other works, which are available nowhere but in some +moldering library stacks. To put it another way, if copyright owners had to +purchase each additional five years of term separately, the same way we buy +warranties on our appliances, the economically rational ones would mainly +settle for a fairly short period. + +Of course, there are some works that are still being exploited commercially +long after their publication date. Obviously the owners of these works would +not want them freely available online. This seems reasonable enough, though +even with those works the copyright should expire eventually. But remember, in +the Library of Congress’s vast, wonderful pudding of songs and pictures and +films and books and magazines and newspapers, there is perhaps a handful of +raisins’ worth of works that anyone is making any money from, and the vast +majority of those come from the last ten years. If one goes back twenty years, +perhaps a raisin. Fifty years? A slight raisiny aroma. We restrict access to +the whole pudding in order to give the owners of the raisin slivers their due. +But this pudding is almost all of twentieth-century culture, and we are +restricting access to it when almost of all of it could be available. + +If you do not know much about copyright, you might think that I am +exaggerating. After all, if no one has any financial interest in the works or +we do not even know who owns the copyright, surely a library would be free to +put those works online? Doesn’t “no harm, no foul” apply in the world of +copyright? In a word, no. Copyright is what lawyers call a “strict liability” +system. This means that it is generally not a legal excuse to say that you did +not believe you were violating copyright, or that you did so by accident, or in +the belief that no one would care, and that your actions benefited the public. +Innocence and mistake do not absolve you, though they might reduce the +penalties imposed. Since it is so difficult to know exactly who owns the +copyright (or copyrights) on a work, many libraries simply will not reproduce +the material or make it available online until they can be sure the copyright +has expired—which may mean waiting for over a century. They cannot afford to +take the risk. + +What is wrong with this picture? Copyright has done its job and encouraged the +creation of the work. But now it acts as a fence, keeping us out and +restricting access to the work to those who have the time and resources to +trudge through the stacks of the nation’s archives. In some cases, as with +film, it may simply make the work completely unavailable. + +So far I have been talking as though copyright were the only reason the +material is not freely available online. But of course, this is not true. +Digitizing costs money (though less every year) and there is a lot of rubbish +out there, stuff no one would ever want to make available digitally (though it +must be noted that one man’s rubbish is another man’s delight). But that still +leaves vast amounts of material that we would want, and be willing to pay, to +have digitized. Remember also that if the material were legally free, anyone +could get in on the act of digitizing it and putting it up. Google’s +much-heralded effort to scan the books in major libraries is just the kind of +thing I mean. But Google is being sued for violating copyright—even though it +allows any author to “opt out” of its system, and even though under the Google +system you cannot click to get the book if it is still under copyright, merely +a snippet a few sentences long from the book. + +If you are shaking your head as you read this, saying that no one would bother +digitizing most of the material in the archives, look at the Internet and ask +yourself where the information came from the last time you did a search. Was it +an official and prestigious institution? A university or a museum or a +government? Sometimes those are our sources of information, of course. But do +you not find the majority of the information you need by wandering off into a +strange click-trail of sites, amateur and professional, commercial and not, +hobbyist and entrepreneur, all self-organized by internal referrals and search +engine algorithms? Even if Google did not undertake the task of digitization, +there would be hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of others who would—not with +Google’s resources, to be sure. In the process, they would create something +quite remarkable. + +The most satisfying proofs are existence proofs. A platypus is an existence +proof that mammals can lay eggs. The Internet is an existence proof of the +remarkable information processing power of a decentralized network of +hobbyists, amateurs, universities, businesses, volunteer groups, professionals, +and retired experts and who knows what else. It is a network that produces +useful information and services. Frequently, it does so at no cost to the user +and without anyone guiding it. Imagine that energy, that decentralized and +idiosyncratically dispersed pattern of interests, turned loose on the cultural +artifacts of the twentieth century. Then imagine it coupled to the efforts of +the great state archives and private museums who themselves would be free to do +the same thing. Think of the people who would work on Buster Keaton, or the +literary classics of the 1930s, or the films of the Second World War, or +footage on the daily lives of African-Americans during segregation, or the +music of the Great Depression, or theremin recordings, or the best of +vaudeville. Imagine your Google search in such a world. Imagine that Library of +Congress. One science fiction writer has taken a stab. His character utters the +immortal line, “Man, you’ll get my Library of Congress when you pry my cold +dead fingers off it!”~{Bruce Sterling, Heavy Weather (New York: Bantam, 1994): +73.}~ + +Familiar with the effect of this kind of train of thought on his father, my son +had long since wandered off in search of a basketball game to watch. But I have +to admit his question was something of an epiphany for me: Where do you click +to get the actual book? + +The response I get from a lot of people is that this vision of the Library of +Congress is communism, pure and simple. Such people view Google’s attempt to +digitize books as simple theft. Surely it will destroy the incentives necessary +to produce the next beach novel, the next academic monograph, the next teen +band CD, the next hundred-million-dollar movie? But this mistakes my +suggestion. Imagine a very conservative system. First, let us make people +demonstrate that they want a copyright, by the arduous step of actually writing +the word copyright or the little © on the work. (At the moment, everyone gets a +copyright as soon as the work is written down or otherwise fixed, whether they +want one or not.) But how long a copyright? We know that the majority of works +are only valuable for five or ten years. Let us give copyright owners more than +double that, say twenty-eight years of exclusive rights. If prior experience is +any guide, 85 percent of works will be allowed to enter the public domain after +that period. If that isn’t generous enough, let us say that the small +proportion of owners who still find value in their copyright at the end of +twenty-eight years can extend their copyright for another twenty-eight years. +Works that are not renewed fall immediately into the public domain. If you +check the register after twenty-eight years and the work has not been renewed, +it is in the public domain. Works that are renewed get the extra time. + +Now this is a conservative suggestion, too conservative in my view, though +still better than what we have now. Is it feasible? It would be hard to argue +that it is not. This pretty much was the law in the United States until 1978. +(My system is a little simpler, but the broad strokes are the same.) Since that +point, in two broad stages, we have moved away from this system at the very +moment in history when the Internet made it a particularly stupid idea to do +so. + +How have we changed the system? We have given copyrights to the creator of any +original work as soon as it is fixed, so that you, reader, are the author of +thousands of copyrighted works. Almost everything up on the Internet is +copyrighted, even if its creators do not know that and would prefer it to be in +the public domain. Imagine that you want to make a documentary and use a film +clip that a student filmmaker has put up on his home page. Perhaps you want to +adapt the nifty graphics that a high school teacher in Hawaii created to teach +her calculus class, thinking that, with a few changes, you could use the +material for your state’s K-12 physics program. Perhaps you are a collage +artist who wishes to incorporate images that amateur artists have put online. +None of the works are marked by a copyright symbol. Certainly they are up on +the Internet, but does that mean that they are available for reprinting, +adaptation, or incorporation in a new work? + +In each of these cases, you simply do not know whether what you are doing is +legal or not. Of course, you can take the risk, though that becomes less +advisable if you want to share your work with others. Each broadening of the +circle of sharing increases the value to society but also the legal danger to +you. What if you want to put the course materials on the Net, or publish the +anthology, or display the movie? Perhaps you can try to persuade your publisher +or employer or distributor to take the risk. Perhaps you can track down the +authors of every piece you wish to use and puzzle through the way to get a +legal release from them stating that they give you permission to use the work +they did not even know they had copyright over. Or you can give up. Whatever +happens, you waste time and effort in trying to figure out a way of getting +around a system that is designed around neither your needs nor the needs of +many of the people whose work you want to use. + +Apart from doing away with the need to indicate that you want your works to be +copyrighted, we have lengthened the copyright term. We did this without any +credible evidence that it was necessary to encourage innovation. We have +extended the terms of living and even of dead authors over works that have +already been created. (It is hard to argue that this was a necessary incentive, +what with the works already existing and the authors often being dead.) We have +done away with the need to renew the right. Everyone gets the term of life plus +seventy years, or ninety-five years for corporate “works for hire.” All +protected by a “strict liability” system with scary penalties. And, as I said +before, we have made all those choices just when the Internet makes their costs +particularly tragic. + +In sum, we have forgone the Library of Congress I described without even +apparently realizing we were doing so. We have locked up most of +twentieth-century culture and done it in a particularly inefficient and +senseless way, creating vast costs in order to convey proportionally tiny +benefits. (And all without much complaint from those who normally object to +inefficient government subsidy programs.) Worst of all, we have turned the +system on its head. Copyright, intended to be the servant of creativity, a +means of promoting access to information, is becoming an obstacle to both. + +That, then, is one example of the stakes of the debate over intellectual +property policy. Unfortunately, the problem of copyright terms is just one +example, one instance of a larger pattern. As I will try to show, this pattern +is repeated again and again in patents, in trademarks, and elsewhere in +copyright law. This is not an isolated “glitch.” It is a complicated but +relentless tendency that has led to a hypertrophy of intellectual property +rights and an assault on the public domain. In fact, in many cases, the reality +is even worse: there appears to be a complete ignorance about the value of the +public domain. Property’s opposite, its outside, is getting short shrift. + +To paraphrase a song from my youth, “how did we get here?” Where should we turn +to understand the role of intellectual property in the era of the Internet and +the decoding of the human genome? We could turn to the cutting edge of +technology or to economics or information theory. But none of those would be as +useful a starting place as a letter that was written about two hundred years +ago, using a high-tech quill pen, about a subject far from the digital world. + +2~ Chapter 1: Further Reading + +This chapter argues that at least one goal we have in an intellectual property +system is the attempt to solve various “public goods problems.” (Subsequent +chapters defend that view historically and normatively, discuss the ideas of +moral right and natural right, the tradition of the droits d’auteur, and the +similarities and dissimilarities between the arguments for tangible and +intellectual property rights. Further reading on those issues can be found in +the relevant chapter.) + +The single best starting point for someone who wishes to understand an economic +perspective on intellectual property is William M. Landes and Richard A. +Posner, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law (Cambridge, Mass.: +Belknap Press, 2003). The story laid out in this chapter is one largely (but +not entirely) focused on the idea of intellectual property rights offered as +incentives—the carrot that induces the author to write, the inventor to +research, the investor to fund that research, and the corporation to develop +attractive and stable brand names that convey reliable information to +consumers. This is conventionally known as the ex ante perspective. But as the +chapter also hints, intellectual property rights, like property rights in +general, have a role after the innovation has occurred—facilitating its +efficient exploitation, allowing inventors to disclose their inventions to +prospective licensees without thereby losing control of them, and providing a +state-constructed, neatly tied bundle of entitlements that can be efficiently +traded in the market. Readers interested in these perspectives will benefit +from looking at these articles: Edmund Kitch, “The Nature and Function of the +Patent System,” Journal of Law and Economics 20 (1977): 265–290; Paul J. Heald, +“A Transaction Costs Theory of Patent Law,” Ohio State Law Journal 66 (2005): +473–509; and Robert Merges, “A Transactional View of Property Rights,” Berkeley +Technology Law Journal 20 (2005): 1477–1520. Of course, just as the incentives +account of intellectual property has its skeptics, so these ex post theories +attract skepticism from those who believe that, in practice, the rights will +not be clear and well-delineated but vague and potentially overlapping, that +the licensing markets will find themselves entangled in “patent thickets” from +which the participants can escape only at great cost or by ignoring the law +altogether. It is worth comparing Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, +“Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research,” Science +280 (1998): 698–701, with John Walsh, Ashish Arora, and Wesley Cohen, “Effects +of Research Tool Patents and Licensing on Biomedical Innovation,” in Patents in +the Knowledge-Based Economy (Washington D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003), +285–340. There is a nice irony to imagining that the necessary mechanism of the +efficient market is “ignore the property rights when they are inconvenient.” + +The skeptics argue that the alternative to a deeply commodified world of +invention and innovation, with hundreds of thousands of licensing markets, is a +rich information and innovation commons, from which all can draw freely, +supporting a thin and well-defined layer of intellectual property rights close +to the ultimate commercially viable innovation. The rhetorical structure of the +debate—replete with paradox and inversion—is laid out in James Boyle, “Cruel, +Mean, or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and Digital +Intellectual Property,” Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000): 2007–2039. For some of +the difficulties in the attempt to arrive at a coherent economic theory of +intellectual property, see James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and +the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard +University Press, 1996), 35–46. Finally, while I urge that at the outset we +must care about the actual effects and economic incentives provided by +intellectual property rights, I am by no means asserting that we should stop +there. Indeed to do so would dramatically impoverish our view of the world. +James Boyle, “Enclosing the Genome: What Squabbles over Genetic Patents Could +Teach Us,” in Perspectives on Properties of the Human Genome Project, ed. F. +Scott Kieff (San Diego, Calif.: Elsevier Academic Press, 2003), 97, 107–109. + +In other words, as all this suggests, this chapter is only an introduction to a +rich and complex debate. + +1~ Chapter 2: Thomas Jefferson Writes a Letter + +On August 13, 1813, Thomas Jefferson took up his pen to write to Isaac +McPherson.~{Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson (August 13, 1813), +in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, D.C.: +The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1907), vol. +XIII, 326–338 (hereinafter Letter to McPherson), available at +http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjser1.html (follow +“May 1, 1812” hyperlink, then navigate to image 1057).}~ It was a quiet week in +Jefferson’s correspondence. He wrote a letter to Madison about the appointment +of a tax assessor, attempted to procure a government position for an +acquaintance, produced a fascinating and lengthy series of comments on a new +“Rudiments of English Grammar,” discussed the orthography of nouns ending in +“y,” accepted the necessary delay in the publication of a study on the anatomy +of mammoth bones, completed a brief biography of Governor Lewis, and, in +general, confined himself narrowly in subject matter.~{For example, attempting +to procure a former stable master a position (letter from Thomas Jefferson to +Samuel H. Smith [August 15, 1813], available at +http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjser1.html [follow +“May 1, 1812” hyperlink, then navigate to image 1070]), comments on “Rudiments +of English Grammar” (letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Waldo [August 16, +1813], in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. XIII, 338–347), orthography of the +plurals of nouns ending in “y” (letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Wilson +[August 17, 1813], Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. XIII, 347–348), accepting +the necessary delay in the publication of a study on the anatomy of mammoth +bones (letter from Thomas Jefferson to Caspar Wistar [August 17, 1813], +available at +http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjser1.html [follow +“May 1, 1812” hyperlink, then navigate to image 1095]), and discussing the +Lewis biography (excerpt of a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Paul Allen +[August 18, 1813], Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related +Documents 1783–1854, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, +1962), 586). \\ It is easy, in fact, reading this prodigious outpouring of +knowledge and enthusiasm, to forget the other side of Jefferson and the social +system that gave him the leisure to write these letters. Just a few weeks +before he wrote to McPherson, he wrote a letter to Jeremiah Goodman about a +slave called Hercules who had been imprisoned as a runaway. \\ “The folly he +has committed certainly justifies further punishment, and he goes in +expectation of receiving it. . . .” Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Jeremiah A. +Goodman (July 26, 1813), in Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, ed. Edwin Morris +Betts (Charlottesville, Va.: American Philosophical Society, 1999), 36. While +leaving the matter up to Goodman, Jefferson argues for leniency and for +refraining from further punishment. In that sense, it is a humane letter. But +this is one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, full of glorious +principles—unalienable rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of +happiness—enunciated in the context of indignation at relatively mild colonial +policies of taxation and legislation. How could a man who thought that taxing +tea was tyranny, and that all men had an unalienable right to liberty, believe +that it was “folly” justifying “further punishment” for a slave to run away? +Reading the letter—a curiously intimate, almost voyeuristic act—one finds +oneself saying “What was he thinking?”}~ But on the 13th of August, Jefferson’s +mind was on intellectual property, and most specifically, patents. + +Jefferson’s writing is, as usual, apparently effortless. Some find his +penmanship a little hard to decipher. To me, used to plowing through the +frenzied chicken tracks that law students produce during exams, it seems +perfectly clear. If handwriting truly showed the architecture of the soul, then +Jefferson’s would conjure up Monticello or the University of Virginia. There +are a few revisions and interlineations, a couple of words squeezed in with a +caret at the bottom of the line, but for the most part the lines of handwriting +simply roll on and on—“the fugitive fermentation of an individual +brain,”~{Letter to McPherson, 333.}~ to quote a phrase from the letter, caught +in vellum and ink, though that brain has been dust for more than a century and +a half. I love libraries. I love the mushroom smell of gently rotting paper, +the flaky crackle of manuscripts, and the surprise of matching style of +handwriting with style of thought. Today, though, I am viewing his letter over +the Internet on a computer screen. (You can too. The details are [in the +footnotes].) + +I think Jefferson would have been fascinated by the Internet. After all, this +was the man whose library became the Library of Congress,~{See Letter from +Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Baldwin (April 14, 1802), in Writings of Thomas +Jefferson, vol. XIX, 128–129.}~ who exemplifies the notion of the brilliant +dabbler in a hundred fields, whose own book collection was clearly a vital and +much consulted part of his daily existence, and whose vision of politics +celebrates the power of an informed citizenry. Admittedly, the massive +conflicts between Jefferson’s announced principles and his actions on the issue +of slavery have led some, though not me, to doubt that there is any sincerity +or moral instruction to be found in his words.~{See Paul Finkelman, Slavery and +the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 2nd ed. (Armonk, N.Y.: +M. E. Sharpe, 2001), ix; Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally +Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University Press of +Virginia, 1997) 1, 40–43, 60–61, 222.}~ But even those who find him a sham can +hardly fail to see the continual and obvious joy he felt about knowledge and +its spread. + +In the letter to Isaac McPherson, a letter that has become very famous in the +world of the digerati,~{Letter to McPherson, 336, quoted in John Perry Barlow, +“Economy of Ideas,” Wired (March 1994): 84. For a careful scholarly explanation +of the antimonopolist origins of eighteenth-century ideas such as Jefferson’s, +see Tyler T. Ochoa and Mark Rose, “The Anti-Monopoly Origins of the Patent and +Copyright Clause,” Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. 49 (2002): +675–706. One scholar has offered a thoughtful critique that suggests +Jefferson’s views were not, in fact, representative either of the times or of +the attitudes of the other framers toward intellectual property. See Adam +Mossoff, “Who Cares What Thomas Jefferson Thought about Patents? Reevaluating +the Patent ‘Privilege’ in Historical Context,” Cornell Law Review 92 (2007): +953–1012.}~ this joy becomes manifest. The initial subject of the +correspondence seems far from the online world. McPherson wrote to Jefferson +about “elevators, conveyers and Hopper-boys.” Specifically, he wanted to know +Jefferson’s opinion of a patent that had been issued to Mr. Oliver Evans. +Jefferson devotes a paragraph to a recent retrospective extension of patent +rights (he disapproves) and then turns to Evans’s elevators. + +Patents then, as now, were only supposed to be given for inventions that were +novel, nonobvious, and useful. Jefferson had considerable doubt whether Evans’s +device, essentially a revolving string of buckets used to move grain, actually +counted as “an invention.” “The question then whether such a string of buckets +was invented first by Oliver Evans, is a mere question of fact in mathematical +history. Now, turning to such books only as I happen to possess, I find +abundant proof that this simple machinery has been in use from time +immemorial.” Jefferson cites from his library example after example of +references to the “Persian wheel”—a string of buckets to move water. The +display of scholarship is effortless and without artifice. If the device +existed to move water, he declares, Mr. Evans can hardly patent it to move +grain. “If one person invents a knife convenient for pointing our pens, another +cannot have a patent right for the same knife to point our pencils. A compass +was invented for navigating the sea; another could not have a patent right for +using it to survey land.”~{Letter to McPherson, 328.}~ + +So far as we can tell, this was the only part of the letter that interested +McPherson. Later correspondence indicates that he had a pamphlet printed +questioning the patent.~{Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Thomas Cooper +(February 10, 1814), in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson +(New York: Library of America, 1984), 1321.}~ But while it is impressive to see +Jefferson’s easy command of historical evidence or his grasp of the importance +of limiting the subject matter, scope, and duration of patents, these qualities +alone would not have given the letter the fame it now has. It is when Jefferson +turns to the idea of intellectual property itself that the letter becomes more +than a historical curiosity. In a couple of pages, quickly jotted down on a +humid August day in 1813, he frames the issue as well as anyone has since. + +He starts by dismissing the idea “that inventors have a natural and exclusive +right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable +to their heirs.” In lines that will sound strange to those who assume that the +framers of the Constitution were property absolutists, Jefferson argues that +“stable ownership” of even tangible property is “a gift of social law.” +Intellectual property, then, has still less of a claim to some permanent, +absolute, and natural status. + +_1 [W]hile it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is +derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an +hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously +considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate +property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, +whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, +is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes +the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of +social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious +then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of +natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.~{Letter to +McPherson, 333.}~ + +Jefferson’s point here may seem obscure to us. We are not used to starting +every argument from first principles. But it is in fact quite simple. It is +society that creates property rights that go beyond mere occupancy. It does so +for several reasons—reasons of both practicality and natural justice. +(Elsewhere in his writings, Jefferson expands on this point at greater length.) +One of those reasons has to do with the difficulty, perhaps even the +impossibility, of two different people having full and unfettered ownership of +the same piece of property simultaneously. Another linked reason comes from the +practicality of excluding others from our property, so that we can exploit it +secure from the plunder or sloth of others. The economists you encountered in +Chapter 1 have, with their usual linguistic felicity, coined the terms +“rivalrous” and “excludable” to describe these characteristics. + +With rivalrous property, one person’s use precludes another’s. If I drink the +milk, you cannot. Excludable property is, logically enough, property from which +others can easily be excluded or kept out. But ideas seem to have neither of +these characteristics. + +_1 If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of +exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, +which an individual may exclusively possess as he keeps it to himself; but the +moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and +the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is +that no one possess the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He +who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening +mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. +That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the +moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to +have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, +like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any +point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, +incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in +nature, be a subject of property.~{Ibid., 333–334.}~ + +Those who quote the passage sometimes stop here, which is a shame, because it +leaves the impression that Jefferson was unequivocally against intellectual +property rights. But that would be a considerable overstatement. When he says +that inventions can never be the subject of property, he means a permanent and +exclusive property right which, as a matter of natural right, no just +government could abridge. However, inventions could be covered by temporary +state-created monopolies instituted for the common good. In the lines +immediately following the popularly quoted excerpt, Jefferson goes on: + +_1 Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from +[inventions], as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce +utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience +of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a +fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only +country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the +exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a +great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other +nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than +advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse +monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful +devices.~{Ibid.}~ + +Jefferson’s message was a skeptical recognition that intellectual property +rights might be necessary, a careful explanation that they should not be +treated as natural rights, and a warning of the monopolistic dangers that they +pose. He immediately goes on to say something else, something that is, if +anything, more true in the world of patents on Internet business methods and +gene sequences than it was in the world of “conveyers and Hopper-boys.” + +_1 Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, +but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line +between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an +exclusive patent, and those which are not.~{Ibid., 335.}~ + +So Jefferson gives us a classic set of cautions, cautions that we should be +required to repeat, as police officers repeat the Miranda Warning to a suspect. +In this case, they should be repeated before we rush off into the world of +intellectual property policy rather than before we talk to the police without +our lawyers present. + +2~ The Jefferson Warning + +Like the Miranda Warning, the Jefferson Warning has a number of important +parts. + +_* First, the stuff we cover with intellectual property rights has certain +vital differences from the stuff we cover with tangible property rights. Partly +because of those differences, Jefferson, like most of his successors in the +United States, does not see intellectual property as a claim of natural right +based on expended labor. Instead it is a temporary state-created monopoly given +to encourage further innovation. + +_* Second, there is no “entitlement” to have an intellectual property right. +Such rights may or may not be given as a matter of social “will and +convenience” without “claim or complaint from any body.” + +_* Third, intellectual property rights are not and should not be permanent; in +fact they should be tightly limited in time and should not last a day longer +than necessary to encourage the innovation in the first place. + +_* Fourth, a linked point, they have considerable monopolistic dangers—they may +well produce more “embarrassment than advantage.” In fact, since intellectual +property rights potentially restrain the benevolent tendency of “ideas . . . +[to] freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual +instruction of man,” they may in some cases actually hinder rather than +encourage innovation. + +_* Fifth, deciding whether to have an intellectual property system is only the +first choice in a long series.~{See ibid., 333–335.}~ Even if one believes that +intellectual property is a good idea, which I firmly do, one will still have +the hard job of saying which types of innovation or information are “worth to +the public the embarrassment” of an exclusive right, and of drawing the limits +of that right. This line-drawing task turns out to be very difficult. Without +the cautions that Jefferson gave us it is impossible to do it well. + +Jefferson’s message was famously echoed and amplified thirty years later in +Britain by Thomas Babington Macaulay.~{Readers interested in learning more +about this fascinating man could begin with George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and +Letters of Lord Macaulay, London ed. (Longmans, 1876).}~ Macaulay’s speeches to +the House of Commons in 1841 on the subject of copyright term extension still +express better than anything else the position that intellectual property +rights are necessary evils which must be carefully circumscribed by law. In +order for the supply of valuable books to be maintained, authors “must be +remunerated for their literary labour. And there are only two ways in which +they can be remunerated. One of those ways is patronage; the other is +copyright.” Patronage is rejected out of hand. “I can conceive no system more +fatal to the integrity and independence of literary men than one under which +they should be taught to look for their daily bread to the favour of ministers +and nobles.”~{Thomas Babington Macaulay, speech delivered in the House of +Commons (February 5, 1841), in The Life and Works of Lord Macaulay: Complete in +Ten Volumes, Edinburgh ed. (Longmans, 1897), vol. VIII, 198 (hereinafter +Macaulay Speech).}~ + +_1 We have, then, only one resource left. We must betake ourselves to +copyright, be the inconveniences of copyright what they may. Those +inconveniences, in truth, are neither few nor small. Copyright is monopoly, and +produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to +monopoly. . . . I believe, Sir, that I may safely take it for granted that the +effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and +to make them bad. And I may with equal safety challenge my honorable friend to +find out any distinction between copyright and other privileges of the same +kind; any reason why a monopoly of books should produce an effect directly the +reverse of that which was produced by the East India Company’s monopoly of tea, +or by Lord Essex’s monopoly of sweet wines. Thus, then, stands the case. It is +good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of +remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of +the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day +longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.~{Ibid., 199.}~ + +Notice that it is the monopolistic quality of intellectual property that really +disturbs Macaulay. His was a generation of thinkers for whom the negative +effect of monopolies of any kind (and state-granted monopolies in particular) +was axiomatic. He becomes almost contemptuous when one of the supporters of +copyright extension declared that it was merely “a theory” that monopoly makes +things expensive. Macaulay agrees, tongue in cheek. “It is a theory in the same +sense in which it is a theory, that day and night follow each other, that lead +is heavier than water, that bread nourishes, that arsenic poisons, that alcohol +intoxicates.”~{Ibid., 198–199.}~ + +These words from Jefferson and Macaulay encapsulate an eighteenth- and +nineteenth-century free-trade skepticism about intellectual property, a +skepticism that is widely, but not universally, believed to have played an +important role in shaping the history of intellectual property in both the +United States and the United Kingdom. Certainly the U.S. Supreme Court has +offered support for that position,~{Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1, 7–11 +(1966).}~ and, with one significant recent exception,~{Adam Mossoff, “Who Cares +What Thomas Jefferson Thought about Patents? Reevaluating the Patent +‘Privilege’ in Historical Context,” Cornell Law Review 92 (2007): 953–1012. In +a thoughtful, carefully reasoned, and provocative article, Professor Mossoff +argues that Jefferson’s views have been misused by the courts and legal +historians, and that if we understand the use of the word “privilege” in +historical context, we see that the “patent privilege” was influenced by a +philosophy of natural rights as well as the antimonopolist utilitarianism +described here. I both agree and disagree. \\ Professor Mossoff’s central +point—that the word “privilege” was not understood by eighteenth-century +audiences as the antonym of “right”—is surely correct. To lay great stress on +the linguistic point that the patent right is “merely” a “privilege” is to rest +one’s argument on a weak reed. But this is not the only argument. One could +also believe that intellectual property rights have vital conceptual and +practical differences with property rights over tangible objects or land, that +the framers of the Constitution who were most involved in the intellectual +property clause were deeply opposed to the confusion involved in conflating the +two, and that they looked upon this confusion particularly harshly because of +an intense concern about state monopolies. One can still disagree with this +assessment, of course; one can interpret Madison’s words this way or that, or +interpret subsequent patent decisions as deep statements of principle or +commonplace rhetorical flourishes. Still it seems to me a much stronger +argument than the one based on the privilege–right distinction. I am not sure +Professor Mossoff would disagree. \\ Professor Mossoff is also correct to point +out that a “legal privilege” did sometimes mean to an eighteenth-century reader +something that the state was duty-bound to grant. There was, in fact, a wide +range of sources from which an eighteenth-century lawyer could derive a state +obligation to grant a privilege. Eighteenth-century legal talk was a normative +bouillabaisse—a rich stew of natural right, common law, utility, and +progress—often thrown together without regard to their differences. Some +lawyers and judges thought the common law embodied natural rights, others that +it represented the dictates of “progress” and “utility,” and others, more +confusingly still, seemed to adopt all of those views at once. \\ Nevertheless, +I would agree that some eighteenth-century writers saw claims of common-law +right beneath the assertion of some “privileges” and that a smaller number of +those assumed common-law right and natural right to be equivalent, and thus saw +a strong state obligation to grant a particular privilege based on natural +right, wherever that privilege had been recognized by English or U.S. common +law. But here is where I part company with Professor Mossoff. \\ First, I do +not believe that the most important architects of the intellectual property +clause shared that view when it came to patents and copyrights. Jefferson, of +course, was not one of those who believed the state was so bound. “Society may +give an exclusive right to the profits arising from [inventions], as an +encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or +may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without +claim or complaint from any body” (Letter to McPherson, 334, emphasis added). +More importantly, Jefferson’s thinking about patents was infused by a deeply +utilitarian, antimonopolist tinge. So, I would argue, was Madison’s. \\ The +quotations from Madison which I give later show clearly, to me at least, that +Madison shared Jefferson’s deeply utilitarian attitude toward patent and +copyright law. I think there is very good reason to believe that this attitude +was dominant among the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers whose writings were so +influential to the framers. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that +the American Revolution was violently against the world of monopoly and +corruption that was the supposed target of the English Statute of Monopolies +(itself hardly a natural rights document). Yes, those thinkers might fall back +into talking about how hard an inventor had worked or construing a patent +expansively. Yes, they might think that within the boundaries of settled law, +it would be unjust to deny one inventor a patent when the general scheme of +patent law had already been laid down. But that did not and does not negate the +antimonopolist and, for that matter, utilitarian roots of the Constitution’s +intellectual property clause. \\ Second, while I agree that there were strands +of natural right thinking and a labor theory of value in the U.S. intellectual +property system, and that they continue to this day—indeed, these were the very +views that the Feist decision discussed in Chapter 9 repudiated, as late as +1991—I think it is easy to make too much of that fact. Is this signal or noise? +There are conceptual reasons to think it is the latter. Later in this chapter I +discuss the evolution of the droits d’auteur tradition in France. Here, at the +supposed heart of the natural rights tradition, we find thinkers driven +inexorably to consider the question of limits. How far does the supposed +natural right extend—in time, in space, in subject matter? It is at that moment +that the utilitarian focus and the fear of monopoly represented by Jefferson +and Madison—and, for that matter, Locke and Condorcet—become so important. \\ +Professor Mossoff is correct to criticize the focus on the word “privilege,” +and also correct that the ideas of natural right and the labor theory of value +always color attitudes toward intellectual property claims. But it would be an +equal and opposite mistake to ignore two points. First, intellectual property +rights are profoundly different from physical property rights over land in ways +that should definitively shape policy choices. Second, partly because of those +differences, and because of the influence of free-trade Scottish Enlightenment +thought on the American Revolution in particular, there was a powerful +antimonopolist and free-trade sentiment behind the copyright and patent clause. +Simply read the clause. Congress is given the power “to promote the Progress of +Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors +the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Does this +really read like the work of a group of believers in natural right? On the +contrary, it reads like a limited grant of power to achieve a particular +utilitarian goal. That sentiment—nicely encapsulated in but by no means limited +to the words of Jefferson—is still a good starting place for an understanding +of intellectual property.}~ historians of intellectual property have +agreed.~{See, e.g., Ochoa and Rose, “Anti-Monopoly Origins,” and Edward C. +Walterscheid, The Nature of the Intellectual Property Clause: A Study in +Historical Perspective (Buffalo, N.Y.: W. S. Hein, 2002). Ochoa, Rose, and +Walterscheid stress the antimonopolist concerns that animated some of those who +were most active in the debates about intellectual property. They also point +out the influence of the English Statute of Monopolies of 1623, which attacked +monopolies in general, while making an exception for periods of legal +exclusivity for a limited time granted over “sole Working or Making of any +Manner of new Manufacture within this Realm, to the first true Inventor or +Inventors of such Manufactures which others at the time of the Making of such +Letters Patents Grants did not use, so they be not contrary to the Law, nor +mischievous to the State, by Raising of the Prices of Commodities at home, or +Hurt by Trade, or generally inconvenient.”}~ Jefferson himself had believed +that the Constitution should have definite limits on both the term and the +scope of intellectual property rights.~{For example, in a letter to Madison +commenting on the draft of the Constitution: “I like it, as far as it goes; but +I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations +and additions would have pleased me: . . . Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed +to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in +the arts, for a term not exceeding . . . years, but for no longer term, and no +other purpose.” Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (August 28, +1789), in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 7, 450–451.}~ James Madison +stressed the costs of any intellectual property right and the need to limit its +term and to allow the government to end the monopoly by compulsory purchase if +necessary.~{“Monopolies tho’ in certain cases useful ought to be granted with +caution, and guarded with strictness against abuse. The Constitution of the +U.S. has limited them to two cases—the authors of Books, and of useful +inventions, in both which they are considered as a compensation for a benefit +actually gained to the community as a purchase of property which the owner +might otherwise withhold from public use. There can be no just objection to a +temporary monopoly in these cases: but it ought to be temporary because under +that limitation a sufficient recompence and encouragement may be given. The +limitation is particularly proper in the case of inventions, because they grow +so much out of preceding ones that there is the less merit in the authors; and +because, for the same reason, the discovery might be expected in a short time +from other hands. . . . Monopolies have been granted in other Countries, and by +some of the States in this, on another principle, that of supporting some +useful undertaking, until experience and success should render the monopoly +unnecessary, and lead to a salutary competition . . . But grants of this sort +can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all; the danger being very +great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly, will be +overbalanced by the evil effect of the precedent; and it being not impossible +that the monopoly itself in its original operation, may produce more evil than +good. In all cases of monopoly, not excepting those in favor of authors and +inventors, it would be well to reserve to the State, a right to extinguish the +monopoly by paying a specified and reasonable sum. . . . Perpetual monopolies +of every sort are forbidden not only by the Genius of free Governments, but by +the imperfection of human foresight.” James Madison, “Monopolies, Perpetuities, +Corporations, Ecclesiastical Endowments” (1819), in “Aspects of Monopoly One +Hundred Years Ago,” Harper’s Magazine, ed. Galliard Hunt, 128 (1914), 489–490; +also in “Madison’s ‘Detatched Memoranda,’ ” ed. Elizabeth Fleet, William & Mary +Quarterly, 3rd series, 3 no. 4 (1946): 551–552, available at +http://www.constitution.org/jm/18191213_monopolies.htm.}~ Adam Smith expressed +similar views. Monopolies that carry on long after they were needed to +encourage some socially beneficial activity, he said, tax every other citizen +“very absurdly in two different ways: first, by the high price of goods, which, +in the case of a free trade, they could buy much cheaper; and, secondly, by +their total exclusion from a branch of business which it might be both +convenient and profitable for many of them to carry on.”~{Adam Smith, The +Wealth of Nations, pt. 3, Of the Expenses of Public Works and Public +Institutions, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1880), 2:339: “When a +company of merchants undertake, at their own risk and expense, to establish a +new trade with some remote and barbarous nation, it may not be unreasonable to +incorporate them into a joint-stock company, and to grant them, in case of +their success, a monopoly of the trade for a certain number of years. It is the +easiest and most natural way in which the state can recompense them for +hazarding a dangerous and expensive experiment, of which the public is +afterwards to reap the benefit. A temporary monopoly of this kind may be +vindicated, upon the same principles upon which a like monopoly of a new +machine is granted to its inventor, and that of a new book to its author. But +upon the expiration of the term, the monopoly ought certainly to determine; the +forts and garrisons, if it was found necessary to establish any, to be taken +into the hands of government, their value to be paid to the company, and the +trade to be laid open to all the subjects of the state. By a perpetual +monopoly, all the other subjects of the state are taxed very absurdly in two +different ways: first, by the high price of goods, which, in the case of a free +trade, they could buy much cheaper; and, secondly, by their total exclusion +from a branch of business which it might be both convenient and profitable for +many of them to carry on.”}~ + +It is important to note, though, that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century +writers I have quoted were not against intellectual property. All of +them—Jefferson, Madison, Smith, and Macaulay—could see good reason why +intellectual property rights should be granted. They simply insisted on +weighing the costs and benefits of a new right, each expansion of scope, each +lengthening of the copyright term. Here is Macaulay again, waxing eloquently +sarcastic about the costs and benefits of extending the copyright term so that +it would last many years after the author’s death: + +_1 I will take an example. Dr. Johnson died fifty-six years ago. If the law +were what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it, somebody would +now have the monopoly of Dr. Johnson’s works. Who that somebody would be it is +impossible to say; but we may venture to guess. I guess, then, that it would +have been some bookseller, who was the assign of another bookseller, who was +the grandson of a third bookseller, who had bought the copyright from Black +Frank, the Doctor’s servant and residuary legatee, in 1785 or 1786. Now, would +the knowledge that this copyright would exist in 1841 have been a source of +gratification to Johnson? Would it have stimulated his exertions? Would it have +once drawn him out of his bed before noon? Would it have once cheered him under +a fit of the spleen? Would it have induced him to give us one more allegory, +one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal? I firmly believe not. I +firmly believe that a hundred years ago, when he was writing our debates for +the Gentleman’s Magazine, he would very much rather have had twopence to buy a +plate of shin of beef at a cook’s shop underground.~{Macaulay Speech, +200–201.}~ + +Again, I am struck by how seamlessly Macaulay coupled beautiful, evocative +writing and careful, analytic argument. Admittedly, he was remarkable even in +his own time, but it is hard to imagine a contemporary speechwriter, let alone +a politician, coming up with Dr. Johnson “cheered . . . under a fit of the +spleen” or buying a “plate of shin of beef at a cook’s shop underground.” +Almost as hard as it is to imagine any of them engaging in Jefferson’s +correspondence about mammoth bones, orthography, and the practicalities of the +nautical torpedo. But I digress. + +Macaulay is not against using a lengthened copyright term to give an extra +reward to writers, even if this would dramatically raise the price of books. +What he objects to is dramatically raising the price of books written by +long-dead authors in a way that benefits the authors hardly at all. + +_1 Considered as a reward to him, the difference between a twenty years’ and a +sixty years’ term of posthumous copyright would have been nothing or next to +nothing. But is the difference nothing to us? I can buy Rasselas for sixpence; +I might have had to give five shillings for it. I can buy the Dictionary, the +entire genuine Dictionary, for two guineas, perhaps for less; I might have had +to give five or six guineas for it. Do I grudge this to a man like Dr. Johnson? +Not at all. Show me that the prospect of this boon roused him to any vigorous +effort, or sustained his spirits under depressing circumstances, and I am quite +willing to pay the price of such an object, heavy as that price is. But what I +do complain of is that my circumstances are to be worse, and Johnson’s none the +better; that I am to give five pounds for what to him was not worth a +farthing.~{Ibid., 201.}~ + +Though Macaulay won the debate over copyright term extension, it is worth +noting here that his opponents triumphed in the end. As I pointed out in the +last chapter, the copyright term in most of Europe and in the United States now +lasts for the life of the author and an additional seventy years afterward, ten +years more than the proposal which made Macaulay so indignant. In the United +States, corporate owners of “works-for-hire” get ninety-five years.~{17 U.S.C. +§ 304 (1998).}~ The Supreme Court recently heard a constitutional challenge to +the law which expanded the term of copyrights by twenty years to reach this +remarkable length.~{Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003).}~ (Full +disclosure: I helped prepare an amicus brief in that case.)~{See Brief for Hal +Roach Studios and Michael Agee as Amici Curiae Supporting Petitioners, Eldred +v. Ashcroft.}~ This law, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, also +extended existing copyrights over works which had already been created.~{Sonny +Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Pub. L. No. 105-298, 112 Stat. 2827 +(1998).}~ As I observed earlier, this is particularly remarkable if the idea is +to give an incentive to create. Obviously the authors of existing works were +given sufficient incentive to create; we know that because they did. Why do we +need to give the people who now hold their copyrights another twenty years of +monopoly? This is all cost and no benefit. Macaulay would have been furious. + +When the Supreme Court heard the case, it was presented with a remarkable +friend-of-the-court brief from seventeen economists, several of them Nobel +laureates.~{Brief of George A. Akerlof, Kenneth J. Arrow, Timothy F. Bresnahan, +James M. Buchanan, Ronald H. Coase, Linda R. Cohen, Milton Friedman, Jerry R. +Green, Robert W. Hahn, Thomas W. Hazlett, C. Scott Hemphill, Robert E. Litan, +Roger G. Noll, Richard Schmalensee, Steven Shavell, Hal R. Varian, and Richard +J. Zeckhauser as Amici Curiae In Support of Petitioners, Eldred v. Ashcroft, +available at +http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvashcroft/supct/amici/economists.pdf. +}~ The economists made exactly Macaulay’s argument, though in less graceful +language. They pointed out that copyright extension imposed enormous costs on +the public and yet conveyed tiny advantages, if any, to the creator. Such an +extension, particularly over works that had already been written, hardly fit +the limits of Congress’s power under the Constitution “to promote the Progress +of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and +Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and +Discoveries.”~{U.S. Constitution, art. I, § 8, cl. 8. }~ Macaulay doubted that +these enormously long terms would encourage the living. Surely they would do +little to encourage the dead, while imposing considerable costs of access on +the living? Thus they could hardly be said to “promote the progress” of +knowledge as the Constitution requires. The Court was unmoved by this and other +arguments. It upheld the law. I will return to its decision at the end of the +book. + +The intellectual property skeptics had other concerns. Macaulay was +particularly worried about the power that went with a transferable and +inheritable monopoly. It is not only that the effect of monopoly is “to make +articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad.” Macaulay also +pointed out that those who controlled the monopoly, particularly after the +death of the original author, might be given too great a control over our +collective culture. Censorious heirs or purchasers of the copyright might +prevent the reprinting of a great work because they disagreed with its +morals.~{“These are strong cases. I have shown you that, if the law had been +what you are now going to make it, the finest prose work of fiction in the +language, the finest biographical work in the language, would very probably +have been suppressed. But I have stated my case weakly. The books which I have +mentioned are singularly inoffensive books, books not touching on any of those +questions which drive even wise men beyond the bounds of wisdom. There are +books of a very different kind, books which are the rallying points of great +political and religious parties. What is likely to happen if the copyright of +one of these books should by descent or transfer come into the possession of +some hostile zealot?” Macaulay Speech, 199, 206. }~ We might lose the works of +Found them distasteful and used the power of the copyright to suppress them. +This is no mere fantasy, Macaulay tells us. After praising the novels of Samuel +Richardson in terms that, to modern eyes, seem a little fervid (“No writings, +those of Shakespeare excepted, show more profound knowledge of the human +heart”), Macaulay recounts the story of Richardson’s grandson, “a clergyman in +the city of London.” Though a “most upright and excellent man,” the grandson +“had conceived a strong prejudice against works of fiction,” “thought all +novel-reading not only frivolous but sinful,” and “had never thought it right +to read one of his grandfather’s books.”~{Ibid., 205.}~ Extended copyright +terms might hand over the copyright to such a man. The public would lose, not +because they had to pay exorbitant prices that denied some access to the work, +but because the work would be altogether suppressed. Richardson’s +novels—Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and so on—are now the preserve of the +classroom rather than the drawing room, so this might not seem like much of a +loss. But Macaulay’s next example is not so easy to dismiss. + +_1 One of the most instructive, interesting, and delightful books in our +language is Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Now it is well known that Boswell’s +eldest son considered this book, considered the whole relation of Boswell to +Johnson, as a blot in the escutcheon of the family. He thought, not perhaps +altogether without reason, that his father had exhibited himself in a ludicrous +and degrading light. And thus he became so sore and irritable that at last he +could not bear to hear the Life of Johnson mentioned. Suppose that the law had +been what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it. Suppose that the +copyright of Boswell’s Life of Johnson had belonged, as it well might, during +sixty years, to Boswell’s eldest son. What would have been the consequence? An +unadulterated copy of the finest biographical work in the world would have been +as scarce as the first edition of Camden’s Britannia.~{Ibid., 206.}~ + +From more recent examples we can see that outright suppression is not the only +thing to fear. The authors’ heirs, or the corporations which have purchased +their rights, may keep policing the boundaries of the work long after the +original author is dead. In 2001, Alice Randall published The Wind Done Gone. +As its title might indicate, The Wind Done Gone was a 220-page “critique of and +reaction to” the world of Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.~{Margaret +Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (New York: Macmillan, 1936).}~ Most crucially, +perhaps, it was a version of Gone With the Wind told from the slaves’ point of +view. Suddenly the actions of Rhett (“R”), Scarlett (“Other”), and an obviously +gay Ashley (“Dreamy Gentleman”) come into new perspective through the eyes of +Scarlett’s “mulatto” half-sister. Mitchell’s estate wanted to prevent +publication of the book. At first they were successful.~{SunTrust Bank v. +Houghton Mifflin Co. , 136 F. Supp. 2d 1357 (N.D.Ga. 2001). For thoughtful +commentary see Jed Rubenfeld, “The Freedom of Imagination: Copyright’s +Constitutionality,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2002): 1–60. Robert S. Boynton +provides a beautifully readable account of copyright’s restrictions in “The +Tyranny of Copyright?” The New York Times Magazine (January 25, 2004): 40–45, +available at +http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25COPYRIGHT.html?ex=1390366800&en=9eb265b1f26e8b14&ei=5007∂ner=USERLAND. +}~ As Yochai Benkler puts it, + +_1 Alice Randall, an African American woman, was ordered by a government +official not to publish her criticism of the romanticization of the Old South, +at least not in the words she wanted to use. The official was not one of the +many in Congress and the Administration who share the romantic view of the +Confederacy. It was a federal judge in Atlanta who told Randall that she could +not write her critique in the words she wanted to use—a judge enforcing +copyright law.~{Yochai Benkler, “Through the Looking Glass: Alice and +Constitutional Foundations of the Public Domain,” Law and Contemporary Problems +66 (Winter–Spring 2003): 173.}~ + +“They killed Miss Scarlett!” the astonished trial judge said after reading +Randall’s book. My colleague Jennifer Jenkins, one of the lawyers in the case, +recounts that the judge saw the case in relentlessly physical terms, seeing the +parody as a “bulldozer” and Gone With the Wind as a walled country estate into +which the bulldozer had violently trespassed. He was consequently unimpressed +with the claim that this “bulldozer” was protected by the First Amendment. +Eventually, the court of appeals overturned the district court’s +judgment.~{SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co. , 268 F.3d 1257 (11th Cir. +2001).}~ Fifty-two years after Margaret Mitchell’s death, it was a hotly +debated point how much leeway co others to comment upon, critique, embellish +upon, and parody the cultural icon she had conjured up. + +2~ A Natural Right? + +To some people, my argument so far—and Jefferson’s and Macaulay’s—will seem to +miss the point. They see intellectual property rights not as an incentive, a +method of encouraging the production and distribution of innovation, but as a +natural or moral right. My book is mine because I wrote it, not because society +or the law gives me some period of exclusivity over allowing the copying of its +contents. My invention is mine because it came from my brain, not because the +law declares a twenty-year monopoly over its production or distribution. My +logo is mine because I worked hard on it, not because the state grants me a +trademark in order to lower search costs and prevent consumer confusion. One +answer is simply to say “In the United States, the framers of the Constitution, +the legislature, and the courts have chosen to arrange things otherwise. In +copyright, patent, and trademark law—despite occasional deviations—they have +embraced the utilitarian view instead.” + +Broadly speaking, that answer is correct.~{See note 19 of this chapter for a +discussion of the most recent and thoughtful challenge to this claim.}~ It also +holds, to a lesser extent, in Britain. Even in the droits d’auteur countries, +which have a markedly different copyright law regime, it largely holds for +their patent and trademark law systems, and utilitarian strands suffuse even +“the sacred rights of authors.” So, on a national level, we have rejected or +dramatically limited the natural rights view, and on an international level, we +have rejected it in “industrial property”—patent and trademark—and modified it +in copyright. + +I think this answer is correct and important, but we have an obligation to go +further. Partly that is because intuitions about ownership coming naturally +with labor or discovery continue to influence the law. Partly it is because +those moral intuitions are important and appealing. Partly it is because we +might wish to modify or criticize our current system. Using the views of the +framers, or current law, to preempt discussion is unsatisfactory—even though +those views are of particular importance for the legal policy decisions we face +in the short run, the issues on which much of my argument is concentrated. + +There are varying stated grounds for natural or moral rights in intellectual +creations. Some people may think the book is mine because I worked on it—a +Lockean conception where I mix my sweat with these words and receive a property +right in the process. + +For all its attractions, there are considerable difficulties with such a view. +Even within the world of tangible property, Locke’s theory is more complicated +than a simple equation of labor with property right. Jefferson’s account of +property is actually closer to Locke’s than many would realize. When Jefferson +points out the difficulty in justifying a natural right even in an acre of +land, let alone a book, his premises are not radically different from Locke’s. +The same is true when Jefferson says that “[s]table ownership is the gift of +social law, and is given late in the progress of society.” Even if natural +right does create the ground for the property claim, it is “social law” that +shapes its contours and guarantees its stability. Jefferson, of course, thought +that was particularly true for intellectual property rights. In that context, +he felt the natural rights argument was much weaker and the need for socially +defined purposive contours and limitations stronger. + +Locke’s own views on what we would think of as copyright are hard to determine. +We do know that he had a strong antipathy to monopolies—particularly those +affecting expression. He believed, for example, that giving publishers +monopolies over great public domain books caused a disastrous fall in quality. +Instead, he argued, such books should be open for all to compete to produce the +best edition. Of course, he was writing in the context of monopolistic printing +privileges—to which he was strongly opposed—rather than of individual authorial +rights. Yet he went further and suggested that even for contemporary works, +after a particular time in print—say fifty years—books could be printed by +anyone. + +_1 I demand whether, if another act for printing should be made, it be not +reasonable that nobody should have any peculiar right in any book which has +been in print fifty years, but any one as well as another might have liberty to +print it: for by such titles as these, which lie dormant, and hinder others, +many good books come quite to be lost.~{Lord King, The Life of John Locke with +Extracts from His Correspondence, Journals and Common-Place Books vol. 1 +(London: Henry Colburn, 1830), 379–380.}~ + +This sounds like a strongly utilitarian argument, rather than one based on +labor and natural right. Of course, we are not bound by what Locke or Jefferson +thought. Still it is striking to see the turn to a utilitarian conception from +both of them. + +The Lockean tradition is not the only one, of course. Others believe that the +property right stems from the unique personality of each individual—the +configurations of your individual genius made manifest in the lines of your +sonnet. (Some limit the natural right to literary and expressive work; can a +mousetrap or a drug molecule express the riddle and wonder of the human +spirit?) Whatever their moral basis or their ambit, the common ground between +these positions is the belief in a rationale for intellectual property rights +beyond the utilitarian concerns of Jefferson or Macaulay. + +The norms embodied in the moral rights or natural rights tradition are deeply +attractive—at least to me. Many of us feel a special connection to our +expressive creations—even the humble ones such as a term paper or a birthday +poem. It is one of the reasons that the central moral rights in the French +droits d’auteur, or author’s rights, tradition resonate so strongly with us. +The entitlement of an author to be correctly attributed, to have some control +over the integrity of his work, seems important regardless of its utilitarian +functions. + +Yet even as we find this claim attractive, we become aware of the need to find +limiting principles to it. It gives us pause to think that Margaret Mitchell or +her heirs could forbid someone parodying her work. Are there no free-speech +limitations? When other forms of authorship, such as computer programs, are +brought into copyright’s domain, does the power of the moral right decrease, +while the need to limit its scope intensifies? + +Then there is the question of length. How long is a natural right in expression +or invention supposed to last? It seems absurd to imagine that Shakespeare’s or +Mozart’s heirs, or those who had bought their copyrights, would still be +controlling the performance, reproduction, and interpretation of their works +hundreds of years after their death. If the rights are truly formed for a +nonutilitarian purpose, after all, why should they expire? The person who first +acquires property rights in land by work or conquest passes those rights down +to heirs and buyers with the chain of transmission reaching to the present day. +Should copyright follow suit? Even in France, the home of the strongest form of +the droits d’auteur and of the “moral rights” tradition, the answer to this +question was in the negative. + +We owe a large part of the literary moral rights tradition to the immediate +aftermath of the French Revolution. In France before the Revolution, as in +England before the Statute of Anne, the first true copyright legislation, the +regulation of publishing was through a set of “privileges” given to printers, +not rights given to authors. Publishers would have a guild-enforced monopoly +over certain titles. Their right was against competing publishers printing the +list of titles over which they had the privilege. The Revolution abolished +these privileges and, at first, put nothing in their place. On the other hand, +as Carla Hesse’s fascinating work reveals, there was intermittent interference +by the Prefecture of Police with those who copied most flagrantly. One such +publisher was sternly instructed by the police in these terms: + +_1 [A]ccording to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, liberty means only the +freedom to do what does not harm others; and that it harms others to +appropriate the work of an author, because it is an infringement of the sacred +right of property; and that such an enterprise, if it were to remain +unpunished, would deprive citizens of the instruction they await from +celebrated authors like M. Bernardin de St. Pierre, because no author would +want to consecrate his labors to the instruction of his age if piracy were ever +authorized.~{Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris, ser. AA, carton 200, +feuilles 182–183, “Procès-verbal de police, section de St. Geneviève, 23–24 +octobre 1791.” Quoted in Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in +Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (Berkeley: University of California Press, +1991), 91.}~ + +Note the interesting mixture of the language of the “sacred rights of property” +and the strong utilitarian justification which cites effects on future literary +production and the “instruction” of citizens. + +More expansive conceptions of the rights of authors and, particularly, of +publishers were also offered. Even before the Revolution, publishers had been +making the arguments that their privileges were a form of property rights and +had the very good sense to hire the young Diderot to make those arguments. +Hesse quotes his words: + +_1 What form of wealth could belong to a man, if not a work of the mind, . . . +if not his own thoughts, . . . the most precious part of himself, that will +never perish, that will immortalize him? What comparison could there be between +a man, the very substance of man, his soul, and a field, a tree, a vine, that +nature has offered in the beginning equally to all, and that an individual has +only appropriated through cultivating it?~{Quoted in Hesse, Publishing and +Cultural Politics, 100.}~ + +Diderot’s theme is that authors’ rights should actually be stronger than other +property rights for two reasons. First, they relate to the very essence of the +person, the most “precious part of himself.” Second, they are the only property +rights over something that has been added to the existing store of wealth +rather than taken from it. Authorial property, unlike property in land, adds to +the common store rather than detracting from it. Locke believed that a just +assertion of property rights must leave “enough and as good” for others in the +society. What could better satisfy this condition than a property right over a +novel that did not exist before I wrote it? One hundred years later Victor Hugo +echoed the same thoughts in a speech to the Conseil d’Etat and pointed out at +the same time that literary property rights could potentially “reconcile” +troublesome authors to society and state. + +_1 You feel the importance and necessity of defending property today. Well, +begin by recognising the first and most sacred of all properties, the one which +is neither a transmission nor an acquisition but a creation, namely literary +property . . . reconcile the artists with society by means of property.~{Victor +Hugo, speech to the Conseil d’Etat, September 30, 1849, quoted in Bernard +Edelman, Ownership of the Image: Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law (London: +Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 41.}~ Diderot wanted perpetual copyrights for +authors and, agreeably to his employers, a correspondingly perpetual printing +privilege. If the author’s heirs could not be traced, the copyright would +devolve to the current publisher. + +But as Hesse points out, there was another view of literary property—a much +more skeptical one put forward best by Condorcet. This view is also an +influential part of the heritage of the droits d’auteur, even if it is +downplayed in its contemporary rhetoric. Condorcet began by framing the +question of literary property as one of political liberty. “Does a man have the +right to forbid another man to write the same words that he himself wrote +first? That is the question to resolve.”~{Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A. +Condorcet O’Connor and M. F. Arago, vol. 11 (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1847), +308, available at http://books.google.com/books?id—ZoGAAAAQAAJ. }~ Like +Jefferson, Condorcet is utterly unconvinced that property rights in a book can +be compared to those in a field or a piece of furniture which can be occupied +or used by only one man. The type of property is “based on the nature of the +thing.” He concluded, again in language strikingly similar to Jefferson’s and +Macaulay’s, that literary property was not a real property right but a +privilege, and one which must be assessed on a utilitarian basis in terms of +its contribution to enlightenment.~{Ibid., 308–309: “En effet, on sent qu’il ne +peut y avoir aucun rapport entre la propriété d’un ouvrage et celle d’un champ, +qui ne peut être cultivé que par un homme; d’un meuble qui ne peut servir qu’à +un homme, et dont, par conséquent, la propriété exclusive est fondée sur la +nature de la chose. Ainsi ce n’est point ici une propriété dérivée de l’ordre +naturel, et défendue par la force sociale; c’est une propriété fondée par la +société même. Ce n’est pas un véritable droit, c’est un privilége, comme ces +jouissances exclusives de tout ce qui peut être enlevé au possesseur unique +sans violence.”}~ + +_1 Any privilege therefore imposes a hindrance on freedom, placing a +restriction on the rights of other citizens; As such it is not only harmful to +the rights of others who want to copy, but the rights of all those who want +copies, and that which increases the price is an injustice. Does the public +interest require tother words, are [literary] privileges needed and useful or +harmful to the progress of enlightenment?~{Ibid., 309: “Tout privilége est donc +une gêne imposée à la liberté, une restriction mise aux droits des autres +citoyens; dans ce genre il est nuisible non-seulement aux droits des autres qui +veulent copier, mais aux droits de tous ceux qui veulent avoir des copies, et +pour qui ce qui en augmente le prix est une injustice. L’intérêt public +exige-t-il que les hommes fassent ce sacrifice? Telle est la question qu’il +faut examiner; en d’autres termes, les priviléges sont-ils nécessaires, utiles +ou nuisibles au progrès des lumières?”}~ + +Condorcet’s conclusion was that they were not necessary and that they could be +harmful. “The books that most furthered the progress of enlightenment, the +Encyclopédie, the works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, have not enjoyed +the benefits of a privilege.” Instead he seemed to favor a combination of +“subscriptions” to authors with a trademark-like protection which allowed an +author to identify a particular edition of his work as the genuine one, but +which also allowed competing editions to circulate freely. In such a market, he +believed that the price of the competing editions would fall to “natural” +levels—today we would call it marginal cost—but the original author would still +be able to charge a modest premium for the edition he authorized or certified +because readers would prefer it as both more accurate and more authentic. One +possible analogy is to the history of the fashion industry in the United +States. It operates largely without design protection but relies heavily on the +trademarks accorded to favored designers and brands. There are “knockoffs” of +Armani or Balenciaga, but the wealthy still pay an enormous premium for the +real thing. + +Condorcet also insisted that whatever protection was accorded to literary works +must not extend to the ideas within them. It is the truths within books that +make them “useful”—a word that does not have the same luminance and importance +for us today as it did for the philosophers of the Enlightenment or the French +Revolution. He argued that any privilege given the author could not extend to +“preventing another man from exhibiting the same truths, in perfectly the same +order, from the same evidence” or from extending those arguments and developing +their consequences. In a line that Hesse rightly highlights, he declares that +any privileges do not extend over facts or ideas. “Ce n’est pas pour les +choses, les idées; c’est pour les mots, pour le nom de l’auteur.” + +In sum, Condorcet favors a limited privilege, circumscribed by an inquiry into +its effects in promoting progress and enlightenment. The privilege only applies +to expression and to “the author’s name,” rather than to facts and ideas. This +is very much within the tradition of Jefferson and Macaulay. + +Hesse argues, correctly I think, that two warring ideas shaped—or are at least +useful ways of understanding—the development of the droits d’auteur tradition. +On one side were Diderot and the publishers promoting an expansive and +perpetual natural authorial right, which nevertheless was supposed to vest +suspiciously easily in publishers. On the other was Condorcet, looking +skeptically at authorial privileges as merely one type of state interference +with free markets and the free circulation of books and ideas. In place of +Diderot’s perpetual natural right, Condorcet sketched out a regime that +encourages production and distribution by granting the minimum rights necessary +for progress. + +Different as they are, these two sides share a common ground. They both focus, +though for different reasons, on “expression”—the imprimatur of the author’s +unique human spirit on the ideas and facts that he or she transmits. It is this +“original expression” that modern copyright and the modern droits d’auteur +actually cover. In today’s copyright law, the facts and ideas in an author’s +work proceed immediately into the public domain. In other work, I have argued +that by confining the property right tightly to the “original expression” +stemming from the unique personality of an individual author the law seems to +accomplish a number of things simultaneously. It provides + +_1 a conceptual basis for partial, limited property rights, without completely +collapsing the notion of property into the idea of a temporary, limited, +utilitarian state grant, revocable at will. [At the same time it offers] a +moral and philosophical justification for fencing in the commons, giving the +author property in something built from the resources of the public +domain—language, culture, genre, scientific community, or what have you. If one +makes originality of spirit the assumed feature of authorship and the +touchstone for property rights, one can see the author as creating something +entirely new—not recombining the resources of the commons.~{James Boyle, +Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information +Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 55–57.}~ + +That is an account of the romantic theory of authorship in the context of +contemporary Anglo-American copyright law. But when one looks at the history of +the French droits d’auteur tradition, it is striking how well those words +describe that system as well. When the French legislature finally produced a +law of authors’ rights it turned out, in Hesse’s words, to reflect “an +epistemologically impure and unstable legal synthesis that combined an +instrumentalist notion of the public good with a theory of authorship based on +natural rights.” + +_1 Although it drew on a Diderotist rhetoric of the sanctity of individual +creativity as an inviolable right, it did not rigorously respect the +conclusions Diderot drew from this position. In contrast to the privilège +d’auteur of 1777, the law did not recognize the author’s claim beyond his +lifetime but consecrated the notion, advanced first by Pierre Manuel to defend +his edition of Mirabeau, that the only true heir to an author’s work was the +nation as a whole. This notion of a public domain, of democratic access to a +common cultural inheritance on which no particular claim could be made, bore +the traces not of Diderot, but of Condorcet’s faith that truths were given in +nature and, although mediated through individual minds, belonged ultimately to +all. Progress in human understanding depended not on private knowledge claims, +but on free and equal access to enlightenment. An author’s property rights were +conceived as recompense for his service as an agent of enlightenment through +publication of his ideas. The law of 1793 accomplished this task of synthesis +through political negotiation rather than philosophical reasoning—that is, by +refashioning the political identity of the author in the first few years of the +Revolution from a privileged creature of the absolutist police state into a +servant of public enlightenment.~{Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics, +121–122. As Hesse points out, this legal legerdemain also produced an +interesting transformation in the status of the great authors of the French +tradition. “If the Old Regime first accorded Voltaire, Rousseau, or Mirabeau +the possibility of legal status as privileged authors with perpetual private +lineages for their texts, the Revolution relocated these figures in the public +domain, the legal parallel to the civic rituals that unearthed them from +private gravesites and reposed their bodily remains in the public temple of the +Pantheon.” Ibid., 123. One of the central features of the debates described in +this book is a starkly different set of characterizations of the public domain. +Is it a communist repossession of the sacred rights of authors? The noble +common store of knowledge from which all future creators can build? The +worthless remainder of material that is no longer worth protecting?}~ + +Hesse argues that this instability would continue through the revolutionary +period. I agree; indeed I would argue that it does so to the present day. Why? +The answer is simple. The moral rights view simply proved too much. Without a +limiting principle—of time, or scope, or effect—it seemed to presage a +perpetual and expansive control of expressive creations, and perhaps of +inventions. Our intuition that this is a bad idea comes from our intuitive +understanding that “Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of +other novels. All of this was much clearer before the assimilation of +literature to private enterprise.”~{Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four +Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 96–97.}~ + +This is the flip side of the arguments that Diderot and later Hugo put forward. +Perhaps the romantic author does not create out of thin air. Perhaps he or she +is deeply embedded in a literary, musical, cultural, or scientific tradition +that would not flourish if treated as a set of permanently walled private +plots. Even within the droits d’auteur tradition, we see a recognition that the +continuing progress of enlightenment and the sacred genius of authors might +both require a certain level of freedom in knowledge inputs and a certain level +of control over knowledge outputs. We see also the recognition that these two +requirements are in fundamental tension. When it comes to reconciling that +tension we must turn in part to utilitarian effects. In short, we should pay +attention to Jefferson and Macaulay and Condorcet, not just because their +thoughts shaped the legal and philosophical traditions in which we now +work—though that is particularly true in the case of the United States—but +because they were right, or at least more right than the alternative. + +Of course, we could build a culture around a notion of natural, absolute, and +permanent rights to invention and expression. It is not a world many of us +would want to live in. There are exceptions of course. In a recent New York +Times op-ed, Mark Helprin—author of Winter’s Tale—argued that intellectual +property should become perpetual.~{Mark Helprin, “A Great Idea Lives Forever. +Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” New York Times editorial (May 20, 2007), A12.}~ After +all, rights in real estate or personal property do not expire—though their +owners might. Why is it that copyrights should “only” last for a lifetime plus +seventy additional years, or patents for a mere twenty? Mr. Helprin expresses +respect for the genius of the framers, but is unmoved by their firm command +that rights be granted only for “limited times.” He concludes that it was a +misunderstanding. Jefferson did not realize that while ideas cannot be owned, +their expression can. What’s more, the framers were misled by their rustic +times. “No one except perhaps Hamilton or Franklin might have imagined that +services and intellectual property would become primary fields of endeavor and +the chief engines of the economy. Now they are, and it is no more rational to +deny them equal status than it would have been to confiscate farms, ropewalks +and other forms of property in the 18th century.” Poor Jefferson. How lucky we +are to have Mr. Helprin to remedy the consequences of his lack of vision. + +Or perhaps not. Think of the way that Jefferson traced the origins of the +mechanical arts used in the elevators and hopper-boys all the way back to +ancient Persia. (In Mr. Helprin’s utopia, presumably, a royalty stream would +run to Cyrus the Great’s engineers.) Jefferson’s point was that for the process +of invention to work, we need to confine narrowly the time and scope of the +state-provided monopoly, otherwise further inventions would become impossible. +Each process or part of a new invention would risk infringing a myriad of prior +patents on its subcomponents. Innovation would strangle in a thicket of +conflicting monopolies with their roots vanishing back in time. Presumably the +title of Mr. Helprin’s excellent novel would require clearance from +Shakespeare’s heirs. + +Of course, one could construct a more modest Lockean idea of intellectual +property~{The two most influential and brilliant examples are Justin Hughes, +“The Philosophy of Intellectual Property,” Georgetown Law Journal 77 (1988): +287–366, and Wendy J. Gordon, “A Property Right in Self-Expression: Equality +and Individualism in the Natural Law of Intellectual Property,” Yale Law +Journal 102 (1993): 1533–1610. Both of these articles attempt not to use Locke +as the basis for a world of absolute right, but instead to focus on the Locke +whose world of private property coexisted with a commons—albeit one much +diminished after the invention of money. If one goes far enough into the +Lockean conception—fine-tuning “enough and as good” so as to allow for a +vigorous commons, and the claims of labor so as to take account of the +importance of the embedded contributions of culture and science—then the +differences between the Jeffersonian view and the Lockean view start to recede +in significance. Academics have found the Lockean view attractive, noting, +correctly, that Locke is commonly brandished as a rhetorical emblem for +property schemes that he himself would have scorned. Yet when one looks at the +actual world of intellectual property policy discourse, and the difficulty of +enunciating even the simple Jeffersonian antimonopolist ideas I lay out here, +it is hard to imagine the nuanced Lockean view flourishing. Consider this +comment of Jeremy Waldron’s and ask yourself—is this result more likely from +within the Jeffersonian or the Lockean view? \\ Our tendency of course is to +focus on authors when we think about intellectual property. Many of us are +authors ourselves: reading a case about copyright we can empathize readily with +a plaintiff’s feeling for the effort he has put in, his need to control his +work, and his natural desire to reap the fruits of his own labor. In this +Essay, however, I shall look at the way we think about actual, potential and +putative infringers of copyright, those whose freedom is or might be +constrained by others’ ownership of songs, plays, words, images and stories. +Clearly our concept of the author and this concept of the copier are two sides +of the same coin. If we think of an author as having a natural right to profit +from his work, then we will think of the copier as some sort of thief; whereas +if we think of the author as beneficiary of a statutory monopoly, it may be +easier to see the copier as an embodiment of free enterprise values. These are +the connections I want to discuss, and my argument will be that we cannot begin +to unravel the conundrums of moral justification in this area unless we are +willing to approach the matter even-handedly from both sides of the question. +\\ After a magisterial study of justifications for the existing world of +intellectual property, Waldron concludes, “[t]he fact is, however, that whether +or not we speak of a burden of proof, an institution like intellectual property +is not self-justifying; we owe a justification to anyone who finds that he can +move less freely than he would in the absence of the institution. So although +the people whose perspective I have taken—the copiers—may be denigrated as +unoriginal plagiarists or thieves of others’ work, still they are the ones who +feel the immediate impact of our intellectual property laws. It affects what +they may do, how they may speak, and how they may earn a living. Of course +nothing is settled by saying that it is their interests that are particularly +at stake; if the tables were turned, we should want to highlight the +perspective of the authors. But as things stand, the would-be copiers are the +ones to whom a justification of intellectual property is owed.” See Jeremy +Waldron, “From Authors to Copiers: Individual Rights and Social Values in +Intellectual Property,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 68 (1993): 841, 842, 887. That +justification seems more plausibly and practically to come from the perspective +I sketch out here. See also William Fisher, “Theories of Intellectual +Property,” in New Essays in the Legal and Political Theory of Property, ed. +Stephen R. Munzer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 168–200.} +—building on the notion of “enough and as good” left over for others and +drawing the limits tightly enough to avoid the worst of Mr. Helprin’s excesses. +But as one attempts to do this systematically, the power of the Jeffersonian +vision becomes all the more apparent—at least as a starting place. + +The Jefferson Warning will play an important role in this book. But my +arguments here have implications far beyond Jefferson’s time, country, or +constitutional tradition. In the last analysis, I hope to convince you of the +importance of the Jefferson Warning or the views of Macaulay not because they +are famous authorities and revered thinkers or because they framed +constitutions or debated legislation. I wish to convince you that their views +are important because they encapsulate neatly an important series of truths +about intellectual property. We should listen to the Jefferson Warning not +because it is prestigious but because of its insight. As the Diderot-Condorcet +debates point out, the questions on which Jefferson and Macaulay focused do not +disappear merely because one embraces a philosophy of moral rights—if anything, +they become more pressing, particularly when one comes to define the limits of +intellectual property in scope and time. I ask that those readers who remain +leery of the Jeffersonian focus concentrate on that last issue. In an era when +we have been expanding intellectual property rights relentlessly, it is a +crucial one. If the Jefferson Warning produces in my unconvinced reader even a +slight queasiness about the likely effects of such a process of expansion, it +will have done its job—though in fact the tradition it represented was much +richer than a simple utilitarian series of cautions. + +2~ A Tradition of Skeptical Minimalism + +Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual property debates went beyond +Macaulay’s antimonopolist focus on price, access, quality, and control of the +nation’s literary heritage. While Macaulay is the best-remembered English +skeptic from the 1840s, there were other, more radical skeptics who saw +copyright primarily as a “tax on literacy” or a “tax on knowledge,” identical +in its effects to the newspaper stamp taxes.~{Catherine Seville, Literary +Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England: The Framing of the 1842 Copyright +Act (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 46–48.}~ This was a time +when mass literacy and mass education were the hotly debated corollaries to the +enlargement of the franchise. The radical reformers looked with hostility on +anything that seemed likely to raise the cost of reading and thus continue to +restrict political and social debate to the wealthier classes. Macaulay worried +about a world in which “a copy of Clarissa would . . . [be] as rare as an Aldus +or a Caxton.”~{Macaulay Speech, 256.}~ His more radical colleagues saw +copyright—to use our ugly jargon rather than theirs—as one of the many ways in +which state communications policy is set and the communicative landscape tilted +to favor the rich and powerful.~{This point is made today by a number of +authors. See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production +Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), +available at http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf; Neil +Weinstock Netanel, “Locating Copyright Within the First Amendment Skein,” +Stanford Law Review 54 (2001): 1–86; Netanel, “Copyright and a Democratic Civil +Society,” Yale Law Journal 106 (1996): 283–388; David McGowan, “Why the First +Amendment Cannot Dictate Copyright Policy,” available at +http://lawreview.law.pitt.edu/issues/65/65.2/McGowan.pdf [Ed. note: originally +published as: David McGowan, “First Amendment & Copyright Policy,” available at +http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=460280; the new link is to +the final published version of the article]; Randal Picker, “Copyright as Entry +Policy: The Case of Digital Distribution,” Antitrust Bulletin 47 (2002): 423, +424.}~ Macaulay worried about the effects of monopoly on literature and +culture. All of them worried about the effects of copyright on democracy, on +speech, on education. In the world of the Internet, these skeptics too have +their contemporary equivalents. + +Patent law also attracted its share of attacks in the mid-nineteenth century. A +fusillade of criticism, often delivered by economists and cast in the language +of free trade, portrayed the patent system as actively harmful. + +_1 At the annual meeting of the Kongress deutscher Volkswirthe held in Dresden, +September 1863, the following resolution was adopted “by an overwhelming +majority”: “Considering that patents hinder rather than further the progress of +invention; that they hamper the prompt general utilization of useful +inventions; that on balance they cause more harm than benefit to the inventors +themselves and, thus, are a highly deceptive form of compensation; the Congress +of German Economists resolves: that patents of invention are injurious to +common welfare.”~{Quoted in Fritz Machlup and Edith Penrose, “The Patent +Controversy in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 10, no. 1 +(1950): 4, n8.}~ + +In the Netherlands, the patent system was actually abolished in 1869 as a +result of such criticisms. Observers in a number of other countries, including +Britain, concluded that their national patent systems were doomed. Various +proposals were made to replace patents, with state-provided prizes or bounties +to particularly useful inventions being the most popular.~{Ironically, +contemporary economists are rediscovering the attractions of patent +alternatives. A paper by Steven Shavell and Tanguy Van Ypersele is particularly +interesting in this regard: “Rewards versus Intellectual Property Rights,” NBER +Working Paper series, no. 6956, available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w6956. +}~ + +These snippets are hardly sufficient to constitute any kind of survey of +critical reactions to intellectual property systems, but I believe that +nevertheless they give us some sense of typical debates. What do these debates +tell us? From the early days of intellectual property as we know it now, the +main objections raised against it were framed in the language of free trade and +“anti-monopoly.” In the United States, the founding generation of intellectuals +had been nurtured on the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment and the +history of the struggle against royal monopolies. They saw the arguments in +favor of intellectual property but warned again and again of the need to +circumscribe both its term and its scope. This is the point at the heart of +Jefferson’s letter. This is why he insisted that we understand the policy +implications of the differences between tangible property and ideas, which +“like fire” are “expansible over all space, without lessening their density in +any point.” + +What were the concerns of these early critics? They worried about intellectual +property producing artificial scarcity, high prices, and low quality. They +insisted that the benefits of each incremental expansion of intellectual +property be weighed against its costs. Think of Macaulay discussing Johnson’s +preference for a shin of beef rather than another slice of postmortem copyright +protection. They worried about its justice; given that we all learn from and +build on the past, do we have a right to carve out our own incremental +innovations and protect them by intellectual property rights?~{“Governor Thomas +was so pleased with the construction of this stove . . . that he offered to +give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I +declined it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, +viz.: That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we +should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and +this we should do freely and generously.” Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, in +The Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. John Bigelow, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. +Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 237–238.}~ Price aside, they also worried that +intellectual property (especially with a lengthy term) might give too much +control to a single individual or corporation over some vital aspect of science +and culture. In more muted fashion, they discussed the possible effects that +intellectual property might have on future innovation. The most radical among +them worried about intellectual property’s effects on political debate, +education, and even control of the communications infrastructure, though they +did not use that particular phrase. But the overwhelming theme was the +promotion of free trade and a corresponding opposition to monopolies. Now if we +were to stop here and simply require that today’s policy makers, legislators, +and judges recite the Jefferson Warning before they rush off to make new +intellectual property rules for the Internet and the genome, we would have +accomplished a great deal. National and international policy makers are keen to +set the “rules of the road for the digital age.” If they would momentarily +pause their excited millenarian burbling and read the points scratched out with +a quill pen in 1813, or delivered (without PowerPoint support) on the floor of +the House of Commons in the 1840s, we would be better off. Everyone is +beginning to understand that in the world of the twenty-first century the rules +of intellectual property are both vital and contentious. How good it would be +then if our debate on intellectual property policy were as vigorous and as +informed as the debates of the nineteenth century. (Though we might hope it +would also be more democratic.) + +And yet . . . there is much that is missing from the skepticism of the +eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and much that remains unclear. Look at the +structure of these comments; they are framed as criticisms of intellectual +property rather than defenses of the public domain or the commons, terms that +simply do not appear in the debates. There is no real discussion of the world +of intellectual property’s outside, its opposite. Most of these critics take as +their goal the prevention or limitation of an “artificial” monopoly; without +this monopoly our goal is to have a world of—what? The assumption is that we +will return to a norm of freedom, but of what kind? Free trade in expression +and innovation, as opposed to monopoly? Free access to expression and +innovation, as opposed to access for pay? Or free access to innovation and +expression in the sense of not being subject to the right of another person to +pick and choose who is given access, even if all have to pay some flat fee? Or +is it common ownership and control that we seek, including the communal right +to forbid certain kinds of uses of the shared resource? The eighteenth- and +nineteenth-century critics brushed over these points; but to be fair, we +continue to do so today. The opposite of property, or perhaps we should say the +opposites of property, are much more obscure to us than property itself. + +For the most part, the antimonopolist view of intellectual property makes a +simple case. Monopolies are bad. Have as few as possible and make them as +narrow and as short as possible. This is a fine principle, but it falls short +of an affirmative explanation and defense of the role of the public domain or +the commons in enabling creativity, culture, and science. That is a shame +because just as intellectual property is different from tangible property, so +too is its opposite, its outside. + +What are those opposites? The two major terms in use are “the public domain” +and “the commons.” Both are used in multiple ways—probably a good thing. The +public domain is material that is not covered by intellectual property rights. +Material might be in the public domain because it was never capable of being +owned. Examples would be the English language or the formulae of Newtonian +physics. Alternatively, something might be in the public domain because rights +have expired. The works of Shakespeare or the patents over powered flight are +examples. + +Some definitions of the public domain are more granular. They focus not only on +complete works but on the reserved spaces of freedom inside intellectual +property. The public domain would include the privilege to excerpt short +quotations in a review. This vision is messier, but more instructive. If one +uses a spatial metaphor, the absolutist vision is a tessellated map. Areas of +private property are neatly delineated from areas of the public domain. +Mozart’s plot sits next to that of Britney Spears; one public, the other +private. In the granular view, the map is more complex. Ms. Spears’ plot is cut +through with rights to make fair use, as well as with limitations on ownership +of standard themes. Instead of the simple tiled map, the granular vision has +private plots with public roads running through them. + +In popular discussion, we tend to use the absolutist view of both property and +the public domain. Lawyers prefer the more complex view of property and are +coming slowly to have a similarly complex view of the public domain. That is +the definition I will be using. + +The term “commons” is generally used to denote a resource over which some group +has access and use rights—albeit perhaps under certain conditions. It is used +in even more ways than the term “public domain.” The first axis along which +definitions of the term “commons” vary is the size of the group that has access +rights. Some would say it is a commons only if the whole society has access. +That is the view I will take here. + +The other difference between public domain and commons is the extent of +restrictions on use. Material in the public domain is free of property rights. +You may do with it what you wish. A commons can be restrictive. For example, +some open source software makes your freedom to modify the software contingent +on the condition that your contributions, too, will be freely open to others. I +will discuss this type of commons in Chapter 8. + +So these are working definitions of public domain and commons. But why should +we care? Because the public domain is the basis for our art, our science, and +our self-understanding. It is the raw material from which we make new +inventions and create new cultural works. Why is it so important? Let us start +with the dry reasons. + +Information and innovation are largely nonrival and nonexcludable goods. This +is Jefferson’s point, though expressed in less graceful language. It has some +interesting corollaries. Information is hard to value until you have it, but +once you have it, how can you dispossess yourself of it? The apple can be taken +back by the merchant if you decide not to buy. The facts or the formulae +cannot. The moment when you might have decided to pay or not to pay is already +over. The great economist Kenneth Arrow formalized this insight about +information economics,~{Kenneth Arrow, “Economic Welfare and the Allocation of +Resources for Invention,” in National Bureau of Economic Research, The Rate and +Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors (Princeton, N.J.: +Princeton University Press, 1962), 609–626.}~ and it profoundly shapes +intellectual property policy. (To a large extent, for example, the requirement +of “patent disclosure” attempts to solve this problem. I can read all about +your mousetrap but I am still forbidden from using it. I can decide whether or +not to license your design at that point.) But for all the material in the +public domain, where no intellectual property right is necessary, this point is +solved elegantly by having the information be “free as the air to common use.” +All of us can use the same store of information, innovation, and free culture. +It will be available at its cost of reproduction—close to zero—and we can all +build upon it without interfering with each other. Think of the English +language, basic business methods, tables of logarithms, the Pythagorean +theorem, Shakespeare’s insights about human nature, the periodic table, Ohm’s +law, the sonnet form, the musical scale. + +Would you have paid to purchase access to each of these? I might tell you that +English was a superior communication tool—a really good command language for +your cognitive operating system. There could be levels of access with +corresponding prices. Would you pay to get access to “English Professional +Edition”? We can certainly imagine such a way of organizing languages. (To some +extent, scribal conventions operated this way. The languages of the professions +still do. One paid for access to “law French” in the common law courts of +England. One pays for an interpreter of contemporary legal jargon in today’s +legal system. But even there the language is free to the autodidact.) We can +imagine language, scientific knowledge, basic algebra, the tonic scale, or the +classics of four-hundred-year-old literature all being available only as +property. Those who had the highest “value for use” would purchase them. Those +who did not value them highly—whether because they could not know what could be +built with them until they had done so or because they did not have the +money—would not. What would this world, this culture, this science, this market +look like? + +It would probably be very inefficient, the economists tell us. Perfect +information is a defining feature of the perfect market. The more commodified +and restricted our access to information, the less efficient the operation of +the market, the more poorly it allocates resources in our society. (The +permanent and in some sense insoluble tension between the need to provide +incentives to generate information, thus raising its cost, and the need to have +access to perfect information for efficiency is the central feature of our +intellectual property policy.)~{Sanford J. Grossman and Joseph E. Stiglitz, “On +the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets,” American Economic +Review 70 (1980), 393–408; Boyle, Shamans, 35–42.}~ When we commodify too much +we actually undermine creativity, since we are raising the price of the inputs +for future creations—which might themselves be covered by intellectual property +rights. But “inefficient” is too bloodless a way to describe this world. It +would be awful. + +Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our +art all depend more heavily on a public domain of freely available material +than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights. +The public domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff +has been covered by property law. The public domain is the place we quarry the +building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture. Or +at least it has been. + +I deliberately gave easy examples. It is obvious how unnecessary but also how +harmful it would be to extend property rights to language, to facts, to +business methods and scientific algorithms, to the basic structures of music, +to art whose creators are long dead. It is obvious that this would not produce +more innovation, more debate, more art, more democracy. But what about the +places where the value of the public domain is not obvious? + +What if we were actually moving to extend patents to business methods, or +intellectual property rights to unoriginal compilations of facts? What if we +had locked up most of twentieth-century culture without getting a net benefit +in return? What if the basic building blocks of new scientific fields were +being patented long before anything concrete or useful could be built from +them? What if we were littering our electronic communication space with digital +barbed wire and regulating the tiniest fragments of music as if they were stock +certificates? What if we were doing all this in the blithe belief that more +property rights mean more innovation? The story of this book is that we are. + +The Jefferson Warning is important. It is, however, just a warning. While it +would be excellent to print it on pocket cards and hand it to our elected +representatives, that alone will not solve the most pressing problems we face. +In the chapters that follow, I shall try to go further. In Chapter 3, I set the +process of expansion we are engaged in—our “second enclosure movement”—in +perspective by comparing it to the original enclosures of the grassy commons of +old England. In Chapter 4, I jump from the world of the fifteenth or nineteenth +century to the world of the twenty-first, from elevators and grain hoppers to +video recorders, the Internet, and file-sharing services. I use the story of +several key legal disputes to illustrate a broader history—the history of +intellectual property’s struggle with communications technologies that allow +people to copy more cheaply. Strangely enough, the Jefferson Warning will be +crucial in understanding the debate over copyright online and, in particular, +in understanding the fear that drives our current policy making, a fear I refer +to as the Internet Threat. + +2~ Chapter 2: Further Reading + +In this chapter I offered a snapshot of the historical debate over copyright, +patent and—to a lesser extent—trademark law. The argument is partly a matter of +intellectual history: a claim about what various individuals and groups +actually believed about intellectual property rights, and the way those beliefs +shaped the policies they supported and the legal structures they created. But +it is also a normative argument—a claim that this vision of intellectual +property is better than the more “physicalist” and “absolutist” alternatives I +described or, at the very least, that it is an important corrective to our +current excesses. This dual character complicates the task of providing a guide +to further reading: books could be written on either portion alone. + +My own understanding of the history of “intellectual property”—itself a +relatively recently invented and contentious category—has been profoundly +influenced by more scholars than I can list here. Edward C. Walterscheid, The +Nature of the Intellectual Property Clause: A Study in Historical Perspective +(Buffalo, N.Y.: W. S. Hein, 2002), gives a magisterial account of the origins +of the U.S. Constitution’s intellectual property clause. Tyler T. Ochoa and +Mark Rose, “The Anti-Monopoly Origins of the Patent and Copyright Clause,” +Journal of the Patent & Trademark Office Society 84 (2002): 909–940, offer a +vision of the history that is closest to the one I put forward here. In +addition, Tyler T. Ochoa, “Origins and Meanings of the Public Domain,” +University of Dayton Law Review 28 (2002): 215–267, provides the same service +for the concept of the public domain. Malla Pollack provides a useful +historical study of the contemporary understanding of the word “progress” at +the time of the American Constitution in Malla Pollack, “The Democratic Public +Domain: Reconnecting the Modern First Amendment and the Original Progress +Clause (a.k.a. Copyright and Patent Clause),” Jurimetrics 45 (2004): 23–40. A +rich and thought-provoking account of the way that ideas of intellectual +property worked themselves out in the context of the corporate workplace can be +found in Catherine Fisk, Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of +Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North +Carolina Press, forthcoming 2009). + +Of course, the history of copyright or of intellectual property cannot be +confined to the two figures I focus on principally here—Jefferson and +Macaulay—nor cannot it be confined to the Anglo-American tradition or to the +debates in which Jefferson and Macaulay were participating. Carla Hesse, +Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (Berkeley: +University of California Press, 1991), is vital reading to understand the +parallels between the Anglo-American and droits d’auteur tradition. It is also +fascinating reading. For studies of the broader intellectual climate, I +recommend Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the +History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Peter Jaszi, +“Toward a Theory of Copyright: The Metamorphoses of ‘Authorship,’ ” Duke Law +Journal 1991, no. 2: 455–502; Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of +Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Lyman Ray +Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt +University Press, 1968). The British debates at the time of Macaulay are +beautifully captured in Catherine Seville, Literary Copyright Reform in Early +Victorian England: The Framing of the 1842 Copyright Act (Cambridge, U.K.: +Cambridge University Press, 1999). (It should be noted that, while sympathetic, +she is less moved than I by Macaulay’s arguments.) + +Any collection of historical works this rich and complex resists summary +description—nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of +these works stress the centrality of the skeptical “antimonopolist” attitudes I +use Jefferson and Macaulay to represent to the history of intellectual +property. This does not mean there is unanimity or anything close to it. In +particular, Adam Mossoff, “Who Cares What Thomas Jefferson Thought about +Patents? Reevaluating the Patent ‘Privilege’ in Historical Context,” Cornell +Law Review 92 (2007): 953–1012, which came to light late in the writing of this +book, offers a thoughtful historical account that criticizes the tendency to +use Jefferson’s views as representative of a dominant strand in American +intellectual property. My agreements and disagreements with Mossoff’s arguments +are discussed fully later in the notes to this chapter. The central point, +however, and the single strongest argument against those who would instead +attempt to construct a more absolutist, physicalist or labor-based theory of +intellectual property, is the problem of limits. Where does one stop? How can +one put a limit on the potentially absolute claim over some intellectual +creation? How can one specify the limits on prior creators that actually give +me ownership over what I create, for I surely have built on the works of +others? How can one circumscribe the negative effects on speech, life, and +culture that the absolutist or maximalist tradition threatens to generate? My +ultimate argument is that the purpose-driven, skeptical, antimonopolistic +tendencies of Jefferson and Macaulay answer those questions far better than any +contending theory, that they represent not merely an intellectual history sadly +neglected in today’s political debates, but a practical solution to the +inevitable question, “where do you draw the line?” + +1~ Chapter 3: The Second Enclosure Movement + +poem{ + +The law locks up the man or woman +Who steals the goose from off the common +But leaves the greater villain loose +Who steals the common from off the goose. +The law demands that we atone +When we take things we do not own +But leaves the lords and ladies fine +Who take things that are yours and mine. +The poor and wretched don’t escape +If they conspire the law to break; +This must be so but they endure +Those who conspire to make the law. +The law locks up the man or woman +Who steals the goose from off the common +And geese will still a common lack +Till they go and steal it back. + +[Anon.]~{Apart from being anonymous, this poem is extremely hard to date. It probably originates in the enclosure controversies of the eighteenth century. However, the earliest reference to it that I have been able to discover is from 1821. Edward Birch was moved to compose some (fairly poor) verses in response when he reported “seeing the following jeu d’esprit in a Handbill posted up in Plaistow, as a ‘CAUTION’ to prevent persons from supporting the intended inclosure of Hainault or Waltham Forest.” He then quotes a version of the poem. Edward Birch, Tickler Magazine 3 (February 1821), 45. In 1860, “Exon,” a staff writer for the journal Notes and Queries, declares that “the animosity excited against the Inclosure Acts and their authors . . . was almost without precedent: though fifty years and more have passed, the subject is still a sore one in many parishes. . . . I remember some years ago, in hunting over an old library discovering a box full of printed squibs, satires and ballads of the time against the acts and those who were supposed to favor them,—the library having belonged to a gentleman who played an active part on the opposition side.” “Exon,” “Ballads Against Inclosures,” Notes and Queries 9, 2nd series (February 1860): 130–131. He reports finding the poem in that box, and quotes a verse from it. The context of the article makes it appear that the poem itself must date from the late eighteenth century. In other sources, the poem is sometimes dated at 1764, and said to be in response to Sir Charles Pratt’s fencing of common land. See, e.g., Dana A. Freiburger, “John Thompson, English Philomath—A Question of Land Surveying and Astronomy,” n. 15, available at http://www.nd.edu/~histast4/exhibits/papers/Freiburger/. This attribution is widespread and may well be true, but I have been able to discover no contemporary source material that sustains it. By the end of the nineteenth century, the poem was being quoted, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with agreement, on both sides of the Atlantic. See Ezra S. Carr, “Aids and Obstacles to Agriculture on the Pacific-Coast,” in The Patrons of Husbandry on the Pacific Coast (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft and Co., 1875), 290–291; Edward P. Cheyney, An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 219.}~ + +}poem + +In fits and starts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, the English +“commons” was “enclosed.”~{Although we refer to it as the enclosure movement, +it was actually a series of enclosures that started in the fifteenth century +and went on, with differing means, ends, and varieties of state involvement, +until the nineteenth. See, e.g., J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in +England, 1450–1850 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977).}~ Enclosure did not +necessarily mean physical fencing, though that could happen. More likely, the +previously common land was simply converted into private property, generally +controlled by a single landholder. + +The poem that begins this chapter is the pithiest condemnation of the process. +It manages in a few lines to criticize double standards, expose the +controversial nature of property rights, and take a slap at the legitimacy of +state power. And it does this all with humor, without jargon, and in rhyming +couplets. Academics should take note. Like most criticisms of the enclosure +movement, the poem depicts a world of rapacious, state-aided “privatization,” a +conversion into private property of something that had formerly been common +property or perhaps had been outside the property system altogether. One kind +of “stealing” is legal, says the poet, because the state changes the law of +property to give the “lords and ladies” a right over an area formerly open to +all. But let a commoner steal something and he is locked up. + +The anonymous author was not alone in feeling indignant. Thomas More (one of +only two saints to write really good political theory) made similar points, +though he used sheep rather than geese in his argument. Writing in the +sixteenth century, he had argued that enclosure was not merely unjust in itself +but harmful in its consequences: a cause of economic inequality, crime, and +social dislocation. In a wonderfully bizarre passage he argues that sheep are a +principal cause of theft. Sheep? Why, yes. + +_1 [Y]our sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, +now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, +and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour +whole fields, houses, and cities. + +Who were these sheep? Bizarre Dolly-like clones? Transgenic killer rams? No. +More meant only that under the economic lure of the wool trade, the “noblemen +and gentlemen” were attempting their own enclosure movement. + +_1 [They] leave no ground for tillage, they enclose all into pastures; they +throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing, but only +the church to be made a sheep-house. . . . Therefore that one covetous and +insatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about +and enclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, +the husbandmen be thrust out of their own.~{Thomas More, Utopia (New York: W. +J. Black, 1947), 32.}~ + +The sheep devour all. The dispossessed “husbandmen” now find themselves without +land or money and turn instead to theft. In More’s vision, it is all very The +Second Enclosure Movement simple. Greed leads to enclosure. Enclosure disrupts +the life of the poor farmer. Disruption leads to crime and violence. + +Writing 400 years later, Karl Polanyi echoes More precisely. He calls the +enclosure movement “a revolution of the rich against the poor” and goes on to +paint it in the most unflattering light. “The lords and nobles were upsetting +the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of +violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the +poor of their share in the common. . . .”~{Karl Polanyi, The Great +Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon +Press, 1957), 35. Polanyi continues in the same vein. “The fabric of society +was being disrupted. Desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings +testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged, endangering the +defenses of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning +its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from +decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves.” Ibid. See also E. P. +Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: V. Gollancz, 1963), +218.}~ And turning them to “beggars and thieves.” The critics of enclosure saw +other harms too, though they are harder to classify. They bemoaned the +relentless power of market logic to migrate to new areas, disrupting +traditional social relationships and perhaps even views of the self, or the +relationship of human beings to the environment. Fundamentally, they mourned +the loss of a form of life. + +So much for the bad side of the enclosure movement. For many economic +historians, everything I have said up to now is the worst kind of sentimental +bunk, romanticizing a form of life that was neither comfortable nor noble, and +certainly not very egalitarian. The big point about the enclosure movement is +that it worked; this innovation in property systems allowed an unparalleled +expansion of productive possibilities.~{See generally Lord Ernle, English +Farming Past and Present, 6th ed. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961).}~ By +transferring inefficiently managed common land into the hands of a single +owner, enclosure escaped the aptly named “tragedy of the commons.” It gave +incentives for large-scale investment, allowed control over exploitation, and +in general ensured that resources could be put to their most efficient use. +Before the enclosure movement, the feudal lord would not invest in drainage +systems, sheep purchases, or crop rotation that might increase yields from the +common—he knew all too well that the fruits of his labor could be appropriated +by others. The strong private property rights and single-entity control that +were introduced in the enclosure movement avoid the tragedies of overuse and +underinvestment: more grain will be grown, more sheep raised, consumers will +benefit, and fewer people will starve in the long run.~{For an excellent +summary of the views of Hobbes, Locke, and Blackstone on these points, see +Hannibal Travis, “Pirates of the Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian +Copyright and the First Amendment,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 15 (2000): +789–803.}~ + +If the price of this social gain is a greater concentration of economic power, +the introduction of market forces into areas where they previously had not been +so obvious, or the disruption of a modus vivendi with the environment—then, +enclosure’s defenders say, so be it! In their view, the agricultural surplus +produced by enclosure helped to save a society devastated by the mass deaths of +the sixteenth century. Those who weep over the terrible effects of private +property should realize that it literally saves lives. + +Now it is worth noting that while this view was once unchallenged,~{More recent +accounts which argue that enclosure led to productivity gains tend to be more +qualified in their praise. Compare the more positive account given in Ernle, +English Farming, with Michael Turner, “English Open Fields and Enclosures: +Retardation or Productivity Improvements,” Journal of Economic History 46 +(1986): 688: “Enclosure cannot be seen as the automatic open door to this cycle +of agricultural improvement, but the foregoing estimates do suggest that +perhaps it was a door which opened frequently, and with profit.”}~ recent +scholarship has thrown some doubts on the effects of enclosure on agricultural +production.~{Most notably work by Robert C. Allen: “The Efficiency and +Distributional Consequences of Eighteenth Century Enclosures,” The Economic +Journal 92 (1982): 937–953; Enclosure and The Yeoman (New York: Oxford +University Press, 1992). Allen argues that the enclosure movement produced +major distributional consequences, but little observable efficiency gain. The +pie was carved up differently, to the advantage of the landlords, but made no +larger. In contrast, Turner sees enclosure as one possible, though not a +necessary, route to productivity gains (“English Open Fields,” 688). Donald +McCloskey’s work also argues for efficiency gains from enclosure, largely from +the evidence provided by rent increases. Donald N. McCloskey, “The Enclosure of +Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of English +Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): +15–35; “The Prudent Peasant: New Findings on Open Fields,” Journal of Economic +History 51 (1991): 343–355. In Allen’s view, however, the increase in rents was +largely a measure of the way that changes in legal rights altered the +bargaining power of the parties and the cultural context of rent negotiations; +enclosure allowed landlords to capture more of the existing surplus produced by +the land, rather than dramatically expanding it. “[T]he enclosure movement +itself might be regarded as the first state sponsored land reform. Like so many +since, it was justified with efficiency arguments, while its main effect +(according to the data analysed here) was to redistribute income to already +rich landowners.” Allen, “Eighteenth Century Enclosures,” 950–951.}~ Some +scholars argue that the commons was actually better run than the defenders of +enclosure admit.~{The possibility of producing “order without law” and thus +sometimes governing the commons without tragedy has also fascinated scholars of +contemporary land use. Robert C. Ellickson, Order without Law: How Neighbors +Settle Disputes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Elinor +Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective +Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).}~ Thus, while enclosure +did produce the changes in the distribution of wealth that so incensed an +earlier generation of critical historians, they argue that there are +significant questions about whether it led to greater efficiency or innovation. +The pie was carved up differently, but did it get bigger? The debate about +these issues is little known, however, outside the world of economic +historians. “Everyone” knows that a commons is by definition tragic and that +the logic of enclosure is as true today as it was in the fifteenth century. I +will not get involved in this debate. Assume for the sake of argument that +enclosure did indeed produce a surge in agriculture. Assume, in other words, +that converting the commons into private property saved lives. This is the +logic of enclosure. It is a powerful argument, but it is not always right. + +This is all very well, but what does it have to do with intellectual property? +I hope the answer is obvious. The argument of this book is that we are in the +middle of a second enclosure movement. While it sounds grandiloquent to call it +“the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind,” in a very real sense +that is just what it is.~{The analogy to the enclosure movement has been too +succulent to resist. To my knowledge, Ben Kaplan, Pamela Samuelson, Yochai +Benkler, David Lange, Christopher May, David Bollier, and Keith Aoki have all +employed the trope, as I myself have on previous occasions. For a particularly +thoughtful and careful development of the parallel between the two enclosure +movements, see Travis, “Pirates of the Information Infrastructure.”}~ True, the +new state-created property rights may be “intellectual” rather than “real,” but +once again things that were formerly thought of as common property, or as +“uncommodifiable,” or outside the market altogether, are being covered with +new, or newly extended, property rights. + +Take the human genome as an example. Again, the supporters of enclosure have +argued that the state was right to step in and extend the reach of property +rights; that only thus could we guarantee the kind of investment of time, +ingenuity, and capital necessary to produce new drugs and gene therapies.~{See, +e.g., William A. Haseltine, “The Case for Gene Patents,” Technology Review +(September 2000): 59, available at +http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/haseltine0900.asp; cf. Alexander K. +Haas, “The Wellcome Trust’s Disclosures of Gene Sequence Data into the Public +Domain & the Potential for Proprietary Rights in the Human Genome,” Berkeley +Technology Law Journal 16 (2001): 145–164.}~ To the question, “Should there be +patents over human genes?” the supporters of enclosure would answer that +private property saves lives.~{See, e.g., Haseltine, “The Case for Gene +Patents”; Biotechnology Industry Association, “Genentech, Incyte Genomics Tell +House Subcommittee Gene Patents Essential for Medical Progress,” available at +http://www.bio.org/news/newsitem.asp?id=2000_0713_01. }~ The opponents of +enclosure have claimed that the human genome belongs to everyone, that it is +literally the common heritage of humankind, that it should not and perhaps in +some sense cannot be owned, and that the consequences of turning over the human +genome to private property rights will be dreadful, as market logic invades +areas which should be the farthest from the market. In stories about stem cell +and gene sequence patents, critics have mused darkly about the way in which the +state is handing over monopoly power to a few individuals and corporations, +potentially introducing bottlenecks and coordination costs that slow down +innovation.~{See, e.g., Howard Markel, “Patents Could Block the Way to a Cure,” +New York Times (August 24, 2001), A19. For the general background to these +arguments, see Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Patenting the Human Genome,” Emory Law +Journal 39 (1990): 740–744.}~ + +Alongside these accounts of the beneficiaries of the new property scheme run +news stories about those who were not so fortunate, the commoners of the +genetic enclosure. Law students across America read Moore v. Regents of +University of California, a California Supreme Court case deciding that Mr. +Moore had no property interest in the cells derived from his spleen.~{793 P.2d +479, 488–497 (Cal. 1990).}~ The court tells us that giving private property +rights to “sources” would slow the freewheeling practice researchers have of +sharing their cell lines with all and sundry.~{Ibid., 493–494. One imagines +Styrofoam coolers criss-crossing the country by FedEx in an orgy of communistic +flesh-swapping.}~ The doctors whose inventive genius created a billion-dollar +cell line from Mr. Moore’s “naturally occurring raw material,” by contrast, are +granted a patent. Private property rights here, by contrast, are a necessary +incentive to research.~{Ibid., 493.}~ Economists on both sides of the enclosure +debate concentrate on the efficient allocation of rights. Popular discussion, +on the other hand, doubtless demonstrating a reprehensible lack of rigor, +returns again and again to more naturalistic assumptions such as the +essentially “common” quality of the property involved or the idea that one owns +one’s own body.~{I might be suspected of anti-economist irony here. In truth, +neither side’s arguments are fully satisfying. It is easy to agree with Richard +Posner that the language of economics offers a “thin and unsatisfactory +epistemology” through which to understand the world. Richard Posner, The +Problems of Jurisprudence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990): +xiv (quoting Paul Bator, “The Judicial Universe of Judge Richard Posner,” +University of Chicago Law Review 52 (1985): 1161). On the other hand, +explaining what it means to “own one’s own body,” or specifying the +noncommodifiable limits on the market, turns out to be a remarkably tricky +business, as Margaret Jane Radin has shown with great elegance in Contested +Commodities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).}~ + +The genome is not the only area to be partially “enclosed” during this second +enclosure movement. The expansion of intellectual property rights has been +remarkable—from business method patents, to the Digital Millennium Copyright +Act, to trademark “anti-dilution” rulings, to the European Database Protection +Directive.~{Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of +11 March 1996 on the Legal Protection of Databases, 1996 Official Journal of +the European Union (L 77) 20, available at +http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31996L0009:EN:HTML +[Ed. note: originally published as +http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/infosoc/legreg/docs/969ec.html, the link has been +changed].}~ The old limits to intellectual property rights—the antierosion +walls around the public domain—are also under attack. The annual process of +updating my syllabus for a basic intellectual property course provides a nice +snapshot of what is going on. I can wax nostalgic looking back to a +five-year-old text, with its confident list of subject matter that intellectual +property rights could not cover, the privileges that circumscribed the rights +that did exist, and the length of time before a work falls into the public +domain. In each case, the limits have been eaten away. + +2~ How Much of the Intangible Commons Should We Enclose? + +So far I have argued that there are profound similarities between the first +enclosure movement and our contemporary expansion of intellectual property, +which I call the second enclosure movement. Once again, the critics and +proponents of enclosure are locked in battle, hurling at each other +incommensurable claims about innovation, efficiency, traditional values, the +boundaries of the market, the saving of lives, the loss of familiar liberties. +Once again, opposition to enclosure is portrayed as economically illiterate: +the beneficiaries of enclosure telling us that an expansion of property rights +is needed in order to fuel progress. Indeed, the post-Cold War “Washington +consensus” is invoked to claim that the lesson of history itself is that the +only way to get growth and efficiency is through markets; property rights, +surely, are the sine qua non of markets.~{The phrase “Washington consensus” +originated in John Williamson, “What Washington Means by Policy Reform,” in +Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? ed. John Williamson +(Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990). Over time it +has come to be used as shorthand for a neoliberal view of economic policy that +puts its faith in deregulation, privatization, and the creation and defense of +secure property rights as the cure for all ills. (See Joseph Stiglitz, “The +World Bank at the Millennium,” Economic Journal 109 [1999]: 577–597.) It has +thus become linked to the triumphalist neoliberal account of the end of history +and the victory of unregulated markets: see Francis Fukuyama, The End of +History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Neither of these two +results are, to be fair, what its creator intended. See John Williamson, “What +Should the Bank Think about the Washington Consensus?” Institute for +International Economics (July 1999), available at +http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/paper.cfm?ResearchID=351. }~ + +This faith in enclosure is rooted in a correspondingly deep pessimism about the +possibility of managing resources that are either commonly owned or owned by no +one. If all have the right to graze their herds on common land, what incentive +does anyone have to hold back? My attempt to safeguard the future of the +pasture will simply be undercut by others anxious to get theirs while the +getting is good. Soon the pasture will be overgrazed and all our flocks will go +hungry. In a 1968 article, Garrett Hardin came up with the phrase that would +become shorthand for the idea that there were inherent problems with +collectively managed resources: “the tragedy of the commons.”~{Garrett Hardin, +“The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248.}~ The phrase, more +so than the actual arguments in his article, has come to exercise considerable +power over our policies today. Private property—enclosure—is portrayed as the +happy ending for the tragedy of the commons: when policy makers see a resource +that is unowned, they tend to reach reflexively for “the solving idea of +property.” According to this view, enclosure is not a “revolution of the rich +against the poor,” it is a revolution to save the waste of socially vital +resources. To say that some social resource is not owned by an individual, that +it is free as the air to common use, is automatically to conjure up the idea +that it is being wasted. + +But if there are similarities between our two enclosures, there are also +profound dissimilarities; the networked commons of the mind has many different +characteristics from the grassy commons of Old England.~{The differences are +particularly strong in the arguments over “desert”—are these property rights +deserved or are they simply violations of the public trust, privatizations of +the commons? For example, some would say that we never had the same traditional +claims over the genetic commons that the victims of the first enclosure +movement had over theirs; this is more like newly discovered frontier land, or +perhaps even privately drained marshland, than it is like well-known common +land that all have traditionally used. In this case, the enclosers can claim +(though their claims are disputed) that they discovered or perhaps simply made +usable the territory they seek to own. The opponents of gene patenting, on the +other hand, turn more frequently than the farmers of the eighteenth century to +religious and ethical arguments about the sanctity of life and the +incompatibility of property with living systems. These arguments, or the +appeals to free speech that dominate debates over digital intellectual +property, have no precise analogue in debates over hunting or pasturage, though +again there are common themes. For example, we are already seeing nostalgic +laments of the loss of the immemorial rights of Internet users. At the same +time, the old language of property law is turned to this more evanescent +subject matter; a favorite title of mine is I. Trotter Hardy, “The Ancient +Doctrine of Trespass to Web Sites,” 1996, art. 7, Journal of Online Law art. 7, +available at http://www.wm.edu/law/publications/jol/95_96/hardy.html. }~ I want +to concentrate here on two key differences between the intellectual commons and +the commons of the first enclosure movement, differences that should lead us to +question whether this commons is truly tragic and to ask whether stronger +intellectual property rights really are the solution to our problems. These +differences are well known, indeed they are the starting point for most +intellectual property law, a starting point that Jefferson and Macaulay have +already laid out for us. Nevertheless, reflection on them might help to explain +both the problems and the stakes in the current wave of expansion. + +Unlike the earthy commons, the commons of the mind is generally “nonrival.” +Many uses of land are mutually exclusive: if I am using the field for grazing, +it may interfere with your plans to use it for growing crops. By contrast, a +gene sequence, an MP3 file, or an image may be used by multiple parties; my The +Second Enclosure Movement use does not interfere with yours. To simplify a +complicated analysis, this means that the threat of overuse of fields and +fisheries is generally not a problem with the informational or innovational +commons.~{The exceptions to this statement turn out to be fascinating. In the +interest of brevity, however, I will ignore them entirely.}~ Thus, one type of +tragedy of the commons is avoided. + +The concerns in the informational commons have to do with a different kind of +collective action problem: the problem of incentives to create the resource in +the first place. The difficulty comes from the assumption that information +goods are not only nonrival (uses do not interfere with each other), but also +nonexcludable (it is impossible, or at least hard, to stop one unit of the good +from satisfying an infinite number of users at zero marginal cost). Pirates +will copy the song, the mousetrap, the drug formula, the brand. The rest of the +argument is well known. Lacking an ability to exclude, creators will be unable +to charge for their creations; there will be inadequate incentives to create. +Thus, the law must step in and create a limited monopoly called an intellectual +property right. + +How about the argument that the increasing importance of information-intensive +products to the world economy means that protection must increase? Must the +information commons be enclosed because it is now a more important sector of +economic activity?~{Remember, I am talking here about increases in the level of +rights: protecting new subject matter for longer periods of time, criminalizing +certain technologies, making it illegal to cut through digital fences even if +they have the effect of foreclosing previously lawful uses, and so on. Each of +these has the effect of diminishing the public domain in the name of national +economic policy.}~ This was certainly one of the arguments for the first +enclosure movement. For example, during the Napoleonic Wars enclosure was +defended as a necessary method of increasing the efficiency of agricultural +production, now a vital sector of a wartime economy. + +Here we come to another big difference between the commons of the mind and the +earthy commons. As has frequently been pointed out, information products are +often made up of fragments of other information products; your information +output is someone else’s information input.~{James Boyle, Shamans, Software, +and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, +Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 29; William M. Landes and Richard A. +Posner, “Economic Analysis of Copyright Law,” Journal of Legal Studies 18 +(1989): 325; Pamela Samuelson and Suzanne Scotchmer, “The Law & Economics of +Reverse Engineering,” Yale Law Journal 111 (2002): 1575–1664; Jessica Litman, +“The Public Domain,” Emory Law Journal 39 (1990): 1010–1011.}~ These inputs may +be snippets of code, discoveries, prior research, images, genres of work, +cultural references, or databases of single nucleotide polymorphisms—each is +raw material for future innovation. Every increase in protection raises the +cost of, or reduces access to, the raw material from which you might have built +those future products. The balance is a delicate one; one Nobel Prize-winning +economist has claimed that it is actually impossible to strike that balance so +as to produce an informationally efficient market.~{Sanford J. Grossman and +Joseph E. Stiglitz, “On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient +Markets,” American Economic Review 70 (1980): 404.}~ + +Whether or not it is impossible in theory, it is surely a difficult problem in +practice. In other words, even if enclosure of the arable commons always +produced gains (itself a subject of debate), enclosure of the information +commons clearly has the potential to harm innovation as well as to support +it.~{For a more technical account, see James Boyle, “Cruel, Mean, or Lavish? +Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and Digital Intellectual Property,” +Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000): 2007–2039.}~ More property rights, even though +they supposedly offer greater incentives, do not necessarily make for more and +better production and innovation—sometimes just the opposite is true. It may be +that intellectual property rights slow down innovation, by putting multiple +roadblocks in the way of subsequent innovation.~{The most recent example of +this phenomenon is multiple legal roadblocks in bringing GoldenRice™ to market. +For a fascinating study of the various issues involved and the strategies for +working around them, see R. David Kryder, Stanley P. Kowalski, and Anatole F. +Krattiger, “The Intellectual and Technical Property Components of Pro-Vitamin A +Rice (GoldenRice™): A Preliminary Freedom-to-Operate Review,” ISAAA Briefs No. +20 (2000), available at http://www.isaaa.org/Briefs/20/briefs.htm. In assessing +the economic effects of patents, one has to balance the delays and increased +costs caused by the web of property rights against the benefits to society of +the incentives to innovation, the requirement of disclosure, and the eventual +access to the patented subject matter. When the qualification levels for +patents are set too low, the benefits are minuscule and the costs very high—the +web of property rights is particularly tangled, complicating follow-on +innovation, the monopoly goes to “buy” a very low level of inventiveness, and +the disclosure is of little value.}~ Using a nice inversion of the idea of the +tragedy of the commons, Heller and Eisenberg referred to these effects—the +transaction costs caused by myriad property rights over the necessary +components of some subsequent innovation—as “the tragedy of the +anticommons.”~{Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Can Patents Deter +Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research,” Science 280 (1998): +698–701.}~ + +In short, even if the enclosure movement was a complete success, there are +important reasons to believe that the intangible world is less clearly a +candidate for enclosure, that we should pause, study the balance between the +world of the owned and the world of the free, gather evidence. After all, even +in physical space, “common” property such as roads increases the value of the +surrounding private tracts. If there are limits to the virtues of enclosure +even there, how much more so in a world of intangible and nonrival goods, which +develop by drawing on prior creations? Yet the second enclosure movement +proceeds confidently nevertheless—with little argument and less evidence. + +To be sure, there is a danger of overstatement. The very fact that the changes +have been so one-sided makes it hard to resist exaggerating their impact. In +1918, Justice Brandeis confidently claimed that “[t]he general rule of law is, +that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, +conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as +the air to common use.”~{Int’l News Serv. v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215, +250 (1918) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).}~ That baseline—intellectual property +rights are the exception rather than the norm; ideas and facts must always +remain in the public domain—is still supposed to be our starting point.~{Yochai +Benkler, “Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on +Enclosure of the Public Domain,” New York University Law Review 74 (1999): 354, +361, 424.}~ It is, however, under attack. + +Both overtly and covertly, the commons of facts and ideas is being enclosed. +Patents are increasingly stretched to cover “ideas” that twenty years ago all +scholars would have agreed were unpatentable.~{The so-called “business method” +patents, which cover such “inventions” as auctions or accounting methods, are +an obvious example. See, e.g., State St. Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Fin. +Group, Inc. , 149 F.3d 1368, 1373 (Fed. Cir. 1998).}~ Most troubling of all are +the attempts to introduce intellectual property rights over mere compilations +of facts.~{Database Investment and Intellectual Property Antipiracy Act of +1996, HR 3531, 104th Cong. (1996); Collections of Information Antipiracy Act, S +2291, 105th Cong. (1998).}~ If U.S. intellectual property law had an article of +faith, it was that unoriginal compilations of facts would remain in the public +domain, that this availability of the raw material of science and speech was as +important to the next generation of innovation as the intellectual property +rights themselves.~{See, e.g., Feist Publications v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co. , 499 +U.S. 340, 350 (1991): “Copyright treats facts and factual compilations in a +wholly consistent manner. Facts, whether alone or as part of a compilation, are +not original and therefore may not be copyrighted.” To hold otherwise “distorts +basic copyright principles in that it creates a monopoly in public domain +materials without the necessary justification of protecting and encouraging the +creation of ‘writings’ by ‘authors.’ ” Ibid., at 354.}~ The system would hand +out monopolies in inventions and in original expression, while the facts below +(and ideas above) would remain free for all to build upon. But this premise is +being undermined. Some of the challenges are subtle: in patent law, stretched +interpretations of novelty and nonobviousness allow intellectual property +rights to move closer and closer to the underlying data layer; gene sequence +patents come very close to being rights over a particular discovered +arrangement of data—C’s, G’s, A’s, and T’s.~{See Eisenberg, “Patenting the +Human Genome”; Haas, “Wellcome Trust’s Disclosures.”}~ Other challenges are +overt: the European Database Protection Directive did (and various proposed +bills in the United States would) create proprietary rights over compilations +of facts, often without even the carefully framed exceptions of the copyright +scheme, such as the usefully protean category of fair use. + +The older strategy of intellectual property law was a “braided” one: thread a +thin layer of intellectual property rights around a commons of material from +which future creators would draw.~{Those who prefer topographical metaphors +might imagine a quilted pattern of public and private land, with legal rules +specifying that certain areas, beaches say, can never be privately owned, and +accompanying rules giving public rights of way through private land if there is +a danger that access to the commons might otherwise be blocked.}~ Even that +thin layer of intellectual property rights was limited so as to allow access to +the material when that was necessary to further the goals of the system. Fair +use allows for parody, commentary, and criticism, and also for “decompilation” +of computer programs so that Microsoft’s competitors can reverse engineer +Word’s features in order to make sure their program can convert Word files. It +may sound paradoxical, but in a very real sense protection of the commons was +one of the fundamental goals of intellectual property law. + +In the new vision of intellectual property, however, property should be +extended everywhere; more is better. Expanding patentable and copyrightable +subject matter, lengthening the copyright term, giving legal protection to +“digital barbed wire,” even if it is used to prevent fair use: each of these +can be understood as a vote of no confidence in the productive powers of the +commons. We seem to be shifting from Brandeis’s assumption that the “noblest of +human productions are free as the air to common use” to the assumption that any +commons is inefficient, if not tragic. + +The expansion is more than a formal one. It used to be relatively hard to +violate an intellectual property right. The technologies of reproduction or the +activities necessary to infringe were largely, though not entirely, industrial. +Imagine someone walking up to you in 1950, handing you a book or a record or a +movie reel, and saying “Quick! Do something the law of intellectual property +might forbid.” (This, I admit, is a scenario only likely to come to the mind of +a person in my line of work.) You would have been hard-pressed to do so. +Perhaps you could find a balky mimeograph machine, or press a reel-to-reel tape +recorder into use. You might manage a single unauthorized showing of the +movie—though to how many people? But triggering the law of intellectual +property would be genuinely difficult. Like an antitank mine, it would not be +triggered by the footsteps of individuals. It was reserved for bigger game. + +This was no accident. The law of intellectual property placed its triggers at +the point where commercial activity by competitors could undercut the +exploitation of markets by the rights holder. Copying, performance, +distribution—these were things done by other industrial entities who were in +competition with the owner of the rights: other publishers, movie theaters, +distributors, manufacturers. In practice, if not theory, the law was ptal +industry regulation of unfair competition—made by the people in the affected +industries for the people in the affected industries. The latter point is worth +stressing. Congress would, and still does, literally hand over the lawmaking +process to the industries involved, telling them to draft their intra-industry +contract in the form of a law, and then to return to Congress to have it +enacted. The public was not at the table, needless to say, and the assumption +was that to the extent there was a public interest involved in intellectual +property law, it was in making sure that the industries involved got their act +together, so that the flow of new books and drugs and movies would continue. +Members of the public, in other words, were generally thought of as passive +consumers of finished products produced under a form of intra-industry +regulation that rarely implicated any act that an ordinary person would want, +or be able, to engage in. + +In the world of the 1950s, these assumptions make some sense—though we might +still disagree with the definition of the public interest. It was assumed by +many that copyright need not and probably should not regulate private, +noncommercial acts. The person who lends a book to a friend or takes a chapter +into class is very different from the company with a printing press that +chooses to reproduce ten thousand copies and sell them. The photocopier and the +VCR make that distinction fuzzier, and the networked computer threatens to +erase it altogether. + +So how are things different today? If you are a person who routinely uses +computers, the Internet, or digital media, imagine a day when you do not +create—intentionally and unintentionally—hundreds of temporary, evanescent +copies. (If you doubt this, look in the cache of your browser.) Is there a day +when you do not “distribute” or retransmit fragments of articles you have read, +when you do not seek to share with friends some image or tune? Is there a day +when you do not rework for your job, for your class work, or simply for +pastiche or fun, some of the digital material around you? In a networked +society, copying is not only easy, it is a necessary part of transmission, +storage, caching, and, some would claim, even reading.~{See Jessica Litman, +Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (Amherst, +N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001).}~ + +As bioinformatics blurs the line between computer modeling and biological +research, digital production techniques blur the lines between listening, +editing, and remaking. “Rip, mix, and burn,” says the Apple advertisement. It +marks a world in which the old regime of intellectual property, operating +upstream as a form of industrial competition policy, has been replaced. +Intellectual property is now in and on the desktop and is implicated in routine +creative, communicative, and just plain consumptive acts that each of us +performs every day. Suddenly, the triggers of copyright—reproduction, +distribution—can be activated by individual footsteps. + +Of course, we would hope that in your daily actions you scrupulously observed +the rights—all the rights—of the companies that have interests in the texts, +tunes, images of celebrities, trademarks, business method patents, and +fragments of computer code you dealt with. Did you? Can you be sure? I teach +intellectual property, but I admit to some uncertainty. I would not have +imagined that a temporary image of a Web page captured in the cache of my +browser counted as a “copy” for the purposes of copyright law.~{See James +Boyle, “Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person’s Guide,” Harvard +Journal of Law & Technology 10 (1996): 47–112.}~ I would have thought that it +was fair use for a company to photocopy articles in journals it subscribed to, +and paid for, in order to circulate them to its researchers.~{American +Geophysical Union v. Texaco, 37 F.3d 882 (2nd Cir. 1994).}~ If a conservative +Web site reposted news articles from liberal newspapers with critical +commentary, that, too, would have seemed like fair use.~{Los Angeles Times v. +Free Republic, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 5669, 54 U.S.P.Q.2D 1453 (C.D. Cal. +2000).}~ I would have thought that it was beneficial competition, and not a +trespass, for an electronic “aggregator” to gather together auction prices or +airline fares, so as to give consumers more choice.~{eBay, Inc. v. Bidder’s +Edge, Inc. , 100 F. Supp. 2d 1058 (N.D. Cal. 2000).}~ I would not have thought +that a search engine that catalogued and displayed in framed format the digital +graphics found on the Internet would be sued for infringing the copyrights of +the owners of those images.~{Kelly v. Arriba Soft, 336 F.3d 811 (9th Cir. +2003). After initially holding that while thumbnails were fair use, inline +links that displayed pictures were not fair use, the court reversed itself and +found fair use in both instances.}~ I would not have thought that I might be +sued for violating intellectual property law if I tried to compete with a +printer company by making toner cartridges that were compatible with its +printers.~{After a District Court issued a temporary injunction telling Static +Controls that it must cease manufacturing generic toner cartridges that +operated in Lexmark printers—indicating it was likely to be found to be +violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “anti-circumvention” +provisions—the Appeals Court held that such cartridges did not in fact violate +the DMCA. Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc. , 387 +F.3d 522 (6th Cir. 2004).}~ + +The examples go on. I know that the “research exemption” in U.S. patent law is +very tightly limited, but I would have laughed if you had told me that even a +research university was forbidden from doing research unless that research had +no conceivable practical or academic worth—in other words that even in +academia, in a project with no commercial goal, the research exemption only +covered research that was completely pointless.~{Madey v. Duke Univ. , 307 F.3d +1351 (Fed. Cir. 2003), cert. denied, 539 U.S. 958 (2003).}~ Why have an +exemption at all, in that case? I would have told an academic cryptography +researcher that he need not fear legal threats from copyright owners simply for +researching and publishing work on the vulnerabilities of copy protection +schemes.~{“When scientists from Princeton University and Rice University tried +to publish their findings [on the vulnerabilities in a copy protection scheme] +in April 2001, the recording industry claimed that the 1998 Digital Millennium +Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal to discuss or provide technology that +might be used to bypass industry controls limiting how consumers can use music +they have purchased. ‘Studying digital access technologies and publishing the +research for our colleagues are both fundamental to the progress of science and +academic freedom,’ stated Princeton scientist Edward Felten. ‘The recording +industry’s interpretation of the DMCA would make scientific progress on this +important topic illegal.’ . . . \\ “SDMI sponsored the ‘SDMI Public Challenge’ +in September 2000, asking Netizens to try to break their favored watermark +schemes, designed to control consumer access to digital music. When the +scientists’ paper about their successful defeat of the watermarks, including +one developed by a company called Verance, was accepted for publication, Matt +Oppenheim, an officer of both RIAA and SDMI, sent the Princeton professor a +letter threatening legal liability if the scientist published his results.” +“EFF Media Release: Princeton Scientists Sue Over Squelched Research,” +available at +http://w2.eff.org/IP/DMCA/Felten_v_RIAA/20010606_eff_felten_pr.html. After a +First Amendment challenge to the relevant provisions of the DMCA, the threats +were withdrawn.}~ I would not have thought that one could patent the idea of +having an electronic Dutch auction on the Internet, working out the daily +prices of a bundle of mutual funds through simple arithmetic, or buying +something online with one click.~{See, e.g., Robert P. Merges, “As Many as Six +Impossible Patents before Breakfast: Property Rights for Business Concepts and +Patent System Reform,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 615.}~ I +would have assumed that celebrities’ rights to control their images should end +with their deaths, and that courts would agree that those rights were tightly +limited by the First Amendment. Yet, in each of these cases, I would have been +wrong, or at least I might be wrong—enough that a sane person would worry. Not +all of the expansive claims eventually triumphed, of course, but some did. +Guessing which would and which would not was hard even for me, though, as I +said, I teach intellectual property law. You, probably, do not. + +In 1950 none of this would have mattered. Unless you were in some related +business—as a publisher, broadcaster, film distributor, or what have you—it +would have been hard for you to trigger the rules of intellectual property law. +If you were in such a business, you were probably very familiar with the rules +that governed your activities and well represented by corporate counsel who +knew them even better. What’s more, the rules were neither as complex nor as +counterintuitive as they are now. They also did not reach as far. The reach of +the rights has been expanded, and their content made more difficult to +understand, at the exact moment that their practical effect has been +transformed. It is not merely that the triggers of intellectual property law +can easily be set off by individual footsteps. There are now many more triggers +and their trip wires are harder to see. + +From the point of view of the content industries, of course, all this is +foolishness. It is not some undesirable accident that intellectual property has +come to regulate personal, noncommercial activity. It is absolutely necessary. +Think of Napster. When individuals engaging in noncommercial activity have the +ability to threaten the music or film industry’s business plan by engaging in +the very acts that copyright law always regulated—namely reproduction and +distribution—of course it is appropriate for them, and the networks they +“share” on, to be subject to liability. What’s more, to the extent that copying +becomes cheaper and easier, it is necessary for us to strengthen intellectual +property rights. We must meet the greater danger of copying with more expansive +rights, harsher penalties, and expanded protections, some of which may indeed +have the practical effect of reducing rights that citizens thought they had, +such as fair use, low-level noncommercial sharing among personal friends, +resale, and so on. Without an increase in private property rights, in other +words, cheaper copying will eat the heart out of our creative and cultural +industries. I call this claim the Internet Threat. + +2~ Chapter 3: Further Reading + +The endnotes to this chapter supply copious particular references; this page +provides the overview. Those seeking to understand the various methods by which +different aspects of common land were enclosed over a 400 year history in +England should start with J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, +1450–1850 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977). Thomas More, Utopia (New York: +W. J. Black, 1947), provides a harsh criticism of the enclosure movement, one +that is echoed hundreds of years later by Polanyi: Karl Polanyi, The Great +Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon +Press, 1957). Economic historians have generally believed that the enclosure +movement yielded considerable efficiency gains—bringing under centralized +control and management, property that had previously been inefficiently managed +under a regime of common access. When efficiency gains mean higher productivity +so that fewer people starve, this is no small thing. Donald N. McCloskey, “The +Enclosure of Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of +English Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 32 +(1972): 15–35; “The Prudent Peasant: New Findings on Open Fields,” Journal of +Economic History 51 (1991): 343–355. This argument seems plausible, but it has +recently received powerful challenges, for example, that by Robert C. Allen, +Enclosure and the Yeoman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). + +In the twentieth century, the negative effects of open access or common +ownership received an environmental gloss thanks to the work of Garrett Hardin, +“The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248. However, work by +scholars such as Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of +Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, +1990), and Carol Rose, “The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and +Inherently Public Property,” University of Chicago Law Review 53 (1986): +711–781, have introduced considerable nuance to this idea. Some resources may +be more efficiently used if they are held in common. In addition, nonlegal, +customary, and norm-based forms of “regulation” often act to mitigate the +theoretical dangers of overuse or under-investment. + +Beyond the theoretical and historical arguments about the effects of enclosure +on real property lie the question of how well those arguments translate to the +world of the intangible and intellectual. It is that question which this +chapter raises. Christopher May, A Global Political Economy of Intellectual +Property Rights: The New Enclosures? (London: Routledge, 2000) offers a similar +analogy—as do several other articles cited in the text. The key differences +obviously lie in the features of intellectual property identified in the +earlier chapters—its nonrivalrousness and nonexcludability—and on the ways in +which a commons of cultural, scientific, and technical information has been +central to the operation of both liberal democracy and capitalist economy. I +owe the latter point particularly to Richard Nelson, whose work on the +economics of innovation amply repays further study: Richard Nelson, Technology, +Institutions, and Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, +2005). + +1~ Chapter 4: The Internet Threat + +The conventional wisdom is that governments respond slowly to technological +change. In the case of the Internet, nothing could be further from the truth. +In 1994 and 1995, “dot-com” was still a mystical term for many. Most stories +about the Internet dealt with sexual predation rather than possibilities of +extreme wealth. Internet commerce itself was barely an idea, and some of the +most exciting sites on the Web had pictures of coffeepots in university +departments far away. (“See,” one would proudly say to a technological neophyte +friend when introducing him to the wonders of the Net, “the pot is empty and we +can see that live from here! This changes everything!”) It was an innocent +time. Yet the U.S. government was already turning the wheels of intellectual +property policy to respond to the threat (and promise) of the Internet. More +precisely, they were trying to shape the future of the cumbersomely named +“National Information Infrastructure,” the official name for the “information +superhighway” that it was presumed would replace the “immature” technology of +the Net. The government was wrong about that, and about a lot else. + +The blueprint for new intellectual property policy online came from the Patent +and Trademark Office. That office promulgated first a Green Paper and then, +after further hearings, a White Paper, on “Intellectual Property and the +National Information Infrastructure.”~{For the background to these documents +see James Boyle, “Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person’s Guide,” +Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 10 (1996): 47–112; Jessica Litman, Digital +Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (Amherst, N.Y.: +Prometheus Books, 2001).}~ As policy and legal documents these are in one sense +long out of date. Some of their legal arguments were successfully challenged. +Some of their most important proposals were rejected, while many others have +become law. But as a starting point from which to trace the frame of mind that +has come to dominate intellectual property policy online, they are hard to +equal. + +These documents contained proposals that nowadays would be seen as fairly +controversial. Internet service providers were said to be “strictly liable” for +copyright violations committed by their subscribers; that is to say, they were +legally responsible whether or not they knew about the violation or were at +fault in any way. Loading a document into your browser’s transient cache memory +while reading it was said to be making a “copy.” There was more: the beginnings +of what later became the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,~{Pub. L. No. +105-304, 112 Stat. 2860 (1998) (codified as amended in scattered sections of +5,17, 28, and 35 U.S.C.).}~ making it illegal to cut through the digital fences +which content providers put around their products. The attitude toward fair use +was particularly revealing. At one point in the White Paper it was hinted that +fair use might be a relic of the inconveniences of the analog age, to be +discarded now that we could have automated fractional payments for even the +most insignificant use.~{Intellectual Property and the National Information +Infrastructure: The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights +(Washington, D.C.: Information Infrastructure Task Force, 1995), 73 n. 227. +Hereinafter White Paper.}~ (It was noted, however, that some disagreed with +this conclusion.) At another point, fair use was described as a “tax” on rights +holders and a “subsidy” to those who benefited from it, such as educational +institutions.~{White Paper, 84.}~ The White Paper also suggested that while any +potential loss to rights holders caused by the new technology needed to be +countered with new rights and new protections, any potential gain to them +through the new technology was simply theirs. Potential gain did not offset the +need to compensate for potential loss + +So what views of intellectual property were we carrying forward into the +Internet age? Intellectual property is just like other property. Rights are +presumptively absolute. Any limitations on them, such as fair use, are taxes on +property owners, subsidies to the society at large. It sounds like a perfect +time to administer the Jefferson Warning I sketched out in Chapter 2. After +all, Jefferson was specifically warning against each of these errors two +hundred years ago. To find them in a student paper would be +disappointing—irritating, even. But this document was the blueprint for the +intellectual property regime of cyberspace. + +But do these mistakes matter? How important is it that we get the rules of +intellectual property right? To me, a number of my colleagues, some librarians, +and a few software gurus, the White Paper was more than just a bit of bad +policy in a technical field—like a poorly drafted statute about the witnessing +of wills, say. When you set up the property rules in some new space, you +determine much about the history that follows. Property rules have a huge +effect on power relationships and bargaining positions. Think of rules setting +out water rights or the right to drive cattle over homesteaders’ land in the +American West. But they also are part of a larger way of seeing the world; +think of the early-twentieth-century rules treating unions as “conspiracies in +restraint of trade” or the Supreme Court decisions that dispossessed the +American Indians on the theory that they did not comprehend the concept of +property and thus did not “own” the land being taken from them.~{“Congress did +not provide that one class in the community could combine to restrain +interstate trade and another class could not. . . . It provided that ‘every’ +contract, combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade was illegal.” Loewe +v. Lawlor, 208 U.S. 274 (1908); “Indians inhabiting this country were fierce +savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from +the forest. To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the +country a wilderness. . . .” Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 543, 590 (1823).}~ We +were at a comparable point in the history of cyberspace. What was being set up +here was a vision of economy and culture, a frame of mind about how the world +of cultural exchange operates, and eventually a blueprint for our systems of +communication. At this stage, the range of possibilities is extremely wide. A +lot of different choices could be made, but subsequent changes would be harder +and harder as people and companies built their activities around the rules that +had been laid down. This was, in short, a tipping point where it was +particularly important that we make the right decisions. + +Conventional political science told us there were a lot of reasons to fear that +we would not make the right decisions. The political process was going to be +particularly vulnerable to problems of capture by established industries, many +of whom would (rightly) see the Internet as a potential threat to their role as +intermediaries between artists and creators on the one hand and the public on +the other. + +Intellectual property legislation had always been a cozy world in which the +content, publishing, and distribution industries were literally asked to draft +the rules by which they would live. The law was treated as a kind of contract +between the affected industries. Rationally enough, those industries would wish +to use the law not merely to protect their legitimate existing property rights, +but to make challenges to their basic business plans illegal. (Imagine what +would have happened if we had given the lamp-oil sellers the right to define +the rules under which the newfangled electric light companies would operate.) +There would be no easy counterweight to these pressures, as Jessica Litman +points out in a wonderful set of reflections on copyright lawmaking, because +the potential competitors to existing titans were just being born and could +thus be strangled safely in their cradles.~{“As the entertainment and +information markets have gotten more complicated, the copyright law has gotten +longer, more specific, and harder to understand. Neither book publishers nor +libraries have any interest in making the library privilege broad enough so +that it would be useful to users that aren’t libraries, and neither movie +studios nor broadcast stations have any interest in making the broadcaster’s +privilege broad enough to be of some use to say, cable television or satellite +TV, so that doesn’t happen. Negotiated privileges tend to be very specific, and +tend to pose substantial entry barriers to outsiders who can’t be at the +negotiating table because their industries haven’t been invented yet. So +negotiated copyright statutes have tended, throughout the century, to be kind +to the entrenched status quo and hostile to upstart new industries.” Litman, +Digital Copyright, 25.}~ Certainly the public would have little grasp as yet of +what was at stake. + +In any event, when had the public played a role in intellectual property +legislation? That kind of law affected businesses with printing presses or TV +towers, not normal citizens. It did not help that the legislators were largely +both ignorant and distrustful of the technology of the Internet—which was, at +the time, thought to be dominated by foreign hackers, suicidal cults, pirates, +and sleazy pornographers. (Terrorists and Nigerian spammers would be added to +the mix later.) + +Given an area of law that legislators were happy to hand over to the affected +industries and a technology that was both unfamiliar and threatening, the +prospects for legislative insight were poor. Lawmakers were assured by +lobbyists + +# that this was business as usual, that no dramatic changes were being made by +the Green or White papers; or + +# that the technology presented a terrible menace to the American cultural +industries, but that prompt and statesmanlike action would save the day; or + +# that layers of new property rights, new private enforcers of those rights, +and technological control and surveillance measures were all needed in order to +benefit consumers, who would now be able to “purchase culture by the sip rather +than by the glass” in a pervasively monitored digital environment. + +In practice, somewhat confusingly, these three arguments would often be +combined. Legislators’ statements seemed to suggest that this was a routine +Armageddon in which firm, decisive statesmanship was needed to preserve the +digital status quo in a profoundly transformative and proconsumer way. Reading +the congressional debates was likely to give one conceptual whiplash. + +To make things worse, the press was—in 1995, at least—clueless about these +issues. It was not that the newspapers were ignoring the Internet. They were +paying attention—obsessive attention in some cases. But as far as the +mainstream press was concerned, the story line on the Internet was sex: +pornography, online predation, more pornography. The lowbrow press stopped +there. To be fair, the highbrow press was also interested in Internet legal +issues (the regulation of pornography, the regulation of online predation) and +constitutional questions (the First Amendment protection of Internet +pornography). Reporters were also asking questions about the social effect of +the network (including, among other things, the threats posed by pornography +and online predators). + +There were certainly important issues within the areas the press was willing to +focus on, and I do not mean to trivialize them. I worked with a couple of civil +liberties groups in opposing the hapless Communications Decency Act, one of the +most poorly drafted pieces of speech regulation ever to come out of +Congress.~{Communications Decency Act of 1996 (47 U.S.C. §§ 230, 560, 561) +(1996).}~ It was a palpably unconstitutional statute, eventually struck down by +a unanimous Supreme Court.~{Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997).}~ Its proposals +would have burdened the speech of adults while failing to protect the interests +of minors. Reporters loved the topic of the Communications Decency Act. It was +about sex, technology, and the First Amendment. It foreshadowed the future of +online speech regulation. One could write about it while feeling simultaneously +prurient, principled, and prescient: the journalistic trifecta. For law +professors who worked on digital issues, the Communications Decency Act was an +easy topic to get the public to focus on; we had the reporters and editors +calling us, pleading for a quote or an opinion piece. + +Intellectual property was something quite different. It was occasionally +covered in the business pages with the same enthusiasm devoted to changes in +derivatives rules. Presented with the proposals in the Green and White Papers, +the reporters went looking for opinions from the Software Publishers +Association, the Recording Industry Association of America, or the Motion +Picture Association of America. This was not bias or laziness—to whom else +would they go? Who was on the “other side” of these issues? Remember, all of +this occurred before Napster was a gleam in Sean Fanning’s eye. Sean Fanning +was in middle school. Amazon.com was a new company and “Google” was not yet a +verb. + +In this environment, convincing the legislature or the press that fundamental +public choices were implicated in the design of intellectual property rights +for the digital world was about as easy as convincing them that fundamental +public choices were implicated in the rules of tiddlywinks. My own experience +is probably representative. I remember trying to pitch an article on the +subject to a charming but uncomprehending opinion page editor at the Washington +Post. I tried to explain that decisions about property rules would shape the +way we thought about the technology. Would the relatively anonymous and +decentralized characteristics of the Internet that made it such a powerful tool +for global speech and debate come to be seen as a bug rather than a feature, +something to be “fixed” to make the Net safe for protected content? The rules +would also shape the economic interests that drove future policy. Would we try +to build the system around the model of proprietary content dispensed in +tightly controlled chunks? Would fair use be made technologically obsolescent? +Would we undercut the various nontraditional methods of innovation, such as +free software, before they ever managed to establish themselves? What would +become of libraries in the digital world, of the ideal that access to books had +important differences from access to Twinkies? After I concluded this lengthy +and slightly incoherent cri de coeur, there was a long pause; then the editor +said politely, “Are you sure you couldn’t make some of these points about a +free speech issue, like the Communications Decency Act, maybe?” + +I finally placed the piece in the Washington Times,~{James Boyle, +“Overregulating the Internet,” Washington Times (November 14, 1995), A17.}~ +which was best known at the time as the only metropolitan newspaper owned by +the Unification Church, familiarly referred to as the Moonies. This hardly +counted as a direct line to the popular imagination (though the article’s mild +criticisms elicited an extraordinary reaction from the Clinton administration’s +lead official on intellectual property policy—throwing me for several weeks +into a surreal world of secondhand threats, third-party leaks, and a hilarious +back-and-forth in the letters page).~{See James Boyle, “The One Thing +Government Officials Can’t Do Is Threaten Their Critics,” Washington Times +(March 6, 1996), A16.}~ + +Things were not completely one-sided. An unlikely group of critics had formed: +librarians, a few software developers, law professors, some Internet +libertarians. Of particular note was the Digital Future Coalition, which grew +to represent a broad range of interested groups and industries thanks in part +to the prescient analysis and remarkable energy of one of my colleagues, Peter +Jaszi.~{“The DFC was forged in 1995 in response to the release of the Clinton +administration’s White Paper on Intellectual Property and the National +Information Infrastructure. The White Paper recommended significantly altering +existing copyright law to increase the security of ownership rights for +creators of motion pictures, publishers and others in the proprietary +community. Members of the DFC recognized that if the policy proposals +delineated in the White Paper were implemented, educators, businesses, +libraries, consumers and others would be severely restricted in their efforts +to take advantage of the benefits of digital networks.” See +http://www.dfc.org/dfc1/Learning_Center/about.html. }~ Together with Pamela +Samuelson, Jessica Litman, and a number of other distinguished legal scholars, +Peter turned his considerable intellectual talents to explaining why writers, +telecom companies, scientists, manufacturers of consumer electronics, and a +host of other groups should be interested in the rules being debated. There had +been a series of official hearings in which complaints were carefully collected +and just as carefully ignored. This became harder to do as the critics became +more numerous and better organized. Nevertheless, the currents were clearly +running against them. It would be nice to say that this was merely because of +the clubby history of intellectual property legislation, or the difficulty in +getting press attention, or the various issues of industry capture and +collective action problems. Yet this would be to miss a vital element of the +situation. + +Conventional political science showed that there were structural reasons why +the legislative process was likely to succumb to industry capture.~{See the +classic account in Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods +and the Theory of Groups, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, +1971).}~ The reality turned out to be much worse. The real problem was not a +political process dominated by cynical power politics, nor an initial absence +of critical newspaper coverage, though both of those factors contributed. The +real problem was that most of the proponents of the White Paper’s policies +believed their own arguments so deeply and sincerely that they saw any +criticism of those positions as either godless communism or hippy digital +anarchism. (Frequently, in fact, they clung to their arguments even when there +was fairly strong evidence that they would actually be harming themselves by +putting these policies into effect. I will expand on this point later.) More +importantly, they succeeded in getting their story about the threats and +promises of the digital future accepted as the basis for all discussion of +intellectual property policy. It became the organizing set of principles, the +master narrative—call it what you will. + +The heart of the story is beguilingly simple. The Internet makes copying +cheaper and does so on an unparalleled global scale. Therefore we must meet the +greater danger of illicit copying with more expansive rights, harsher +penalties, and expanded protections. True, as I pointed out before, some of +these expansions may indeed have the practical effect of reducing rights that +citizens thought they had, such as fair use, low-level noncommercial sharing +among personal friends, resale, and so on. But without an increase in private +property rights, cheaper copying will eat the heart out of our creative and +cultural industries. I call this story the Internet Threat. It is a powerful +argument and it deserves some explanation. + +Think back for a moment to the first chapter and the difference between Madame +Bovary and the petunia. If the reason for intellectual property rights is the +“nonrival” and “nonexcludable” nature of the goods they protect, then surely +the lowering of copying and transmission costs implies a corresponding need to +increase the strength of intellectual property rights. Imagine a line. At one +end sits a monk painstakingly transcribing Aristotle’s Poetics. In the middle +lies the Gutenberg printing press. Three-quarters of the way along the line is +a photocopying machine. At the far end lies the Internet and the online version +of the human genome. At each stage, copying costs are lowered and goods become +both less rival and less excludable. My MP3 files are available to anyone in +the world running Napster. Songs can be found and copied with ease. The +symbolic end of rivalry comes when I am playing the song in Chapel Hill, North +Carolina, at the very moment that you are both downloading and listening to it +in Kazakhstan—now that is nonrival. + +2~ The Logic of Perfect Control + +My point is that there is a teleology—a theory about how intellectual property +law must develop historically—hidden inside the argument I call the Internet +Threat. The argument, which is touted endlessly by the content industries—and +not without reason—can be reduced to this: The strength of intellectual +property rights must vary inversely with the cost of copying. With high copying +costs, one needs weak intellectual property rights if any at all. To deal with +the monk-copyist, we need no copyright because physical control of the +manuscript is enough. What does it matter if I say I will copy your manuscript, +if I must do it by hand? How will this present a threat to you? There is no +need to create a legal right to exclude others from copying, no need for a +“copy right.” As copying costs fall, however, the need to exclude increases. To +deal with the Gutenberg press, we need the Statute of Anne—the first copyright +statute—and the long evolution of copyright it ushered in. + +But then comes the Internet. To deal with the Internet, we need the Digital +Millennium Copyright Act,~{See note 2 above.}~ the No Electronic Theft +Act,~{Pub. L. No. 105-147, 111 Stat. 2678 (1997) (codified as amended in +scattered sections of 17 and 18 U.S.C.).}~ the Sonny Bono Copyright Term +Extension Act,~{Pub. L. No. 105-298, 112 Stat. 2827 (1998) (codified as amended +in scattered sections of 17 U.S.C.).}~ and perhaps even the Collections of +Information Antipiracy Act.~{S 2291, 105th Cong. (1998).}~ As copying costs +approach zero, intellectual property rights must approach perfect control. We +must strengthen the rights, lengthen the term of the rights, increase the +penalties, and make noncommercial illicit copying a crime. We must move outside +the traditional realm of copyright altogether to regulate the technology around +the copyrighted material. Companies are surrounding their digital materials +with digital fences. We must make it a violation of the law to cut those +digital fences, even if you do so to make a “fair use” of the material on the +other side. We must prohibit the making of things that can be used as +fence-cutters—a prospect that worries researchers on encryption. In the long +run, we must get rid of the troublesome anonymity of the Internet, requiring +each computer to have an individual ID. We must make click-wrap contracts +enforceable, even on third parties, even when you cannot read them before +clicking—so that you never actually buy the software, music, movies, and +e-books you download, merely “license” them for a narrowly defined range of +uses. We must create interlocking software and hardware systems that monitor +and control the material played on those systems—so that songs can be licensed +to particular computers at particular times. Uses that the owners wish to +forbid will actually be impossible, whether they are legal or not. + +In other words, we must make this technology of the Internet, which was hailed +as the great “technology of freedom,” into a technology of control and +surveillance. The possibility of individuals circulating costless perfect +digital copies requires it. It would be facile (if tempting) to say we must +remake the Internet to make it safe for Britney Spears. The “Internet Threat” +argument is that we must remake the Net if we want digital creativity—whether +in music or software or movies or e-texts. And since the strength of the +property rights varies inversely with the cost of copying, costless copying +means that the remade Net must approach perfect control, both in its legal +regime and its technical architecture. + +Like any attractive but misleading argument, the Internet Threat has a lot of +truth. Ask the software company producing expensive, specialized +computer-assisted design programs costing thousands of dollars what happens +when the program is made available on a “warez” site or a peer-to-peer +file-sharing network. The upstart computer game company pinning its hopes and +its capital on a single new game would tell you the same thing. The easy +availability of perfect, costless copies is a danger to all kinds of valuable +cultural and economic production. The story of the Internet Threat is not +wrong, it is simply dramatically incomplete in lots of ways. Here are two of +them. + +2~ Costless Copying Brings Both Costs and Benefits + +The Internet does lower the cost of copying and thus the cost of illicit +copying. Of course, it also lowers the costs of production, distribution, and +advertising, and dramatically increases the size of the potential market. Is +the net result a loss to rights holders such that we need to increase +protection and control in order to maintain a constant level of incentives? A +large, leaky market may actually provide more revenue than a small one over +which one’s control is much stronger. What’s more, the same technologies that +allow for cheap copying also allow for swift and encyclopedic search +engines—the best devices ever invented for detecting illicit copying. What the +Net takes away with one hand, it often gives back with the other. Cheaper +copying does not merely mean loss, it also means opportunity. Before +strengthening intellectual property rights, we would need to know whether the +loss was greater than the gain and whether revised business models and new +distribution mechanisms could avoid the losses while capturing more of the +gains. + +But wait, surely theft is theft? If the new technologies enable more theft of +intellectual property, must we not strengthen the laws in order to deal with +the problem? If some new technology led to a rash of car thefts, we might +increase police resources and prison sentences, perhaps pass new legislation +creating new crimes related to car theft. We would do all of this even if the +technology in question gave car owners significant benefits elsewhere. Theft is +theft, is it not? + +The answer in a word is no. Saying “theft is theft” is exactly the error that +the Jefferson Warning is supposed to guard against. We should not assume that +intellectual property and material property are the same in all regards. The +goal of creating the limited monopoly called an intellectual property right is +to provide the minimum necessary incentive to encourage the desired level of +innovation. Anything extra is deadweight loss. When someone takes your car, +they have the car and you do not. When, because of some new technology, someone +is able to get access to the MP3 file of your new song, they have the file and +so do you. You did not lose the song. What you may have lost is the opportunity +to sell the song to that person or to the people with whom they “share” the +file. We should not be indifferent to this kind of loss; it is a serious +concern. But the fact that a new technology brings economic benefits as well as +economic harm to the creation, distribution, and sale of intellectual property +products means that we should pause before increasing the level of rights, +changing the architecture of our communications networks, creating new crimes, +and so on. + +Remember, many of the things that the content industries were concerned about +on the Internet were already illegal, already subject to suit and prosecution. +The question is not whether the Internet should be an intellectual +property-free zone; it should not be, is not, and never was. The question is +whether, when the content industries come asking for additional or new rights, +for new penalties, for the criminalization of certain types of technology, we +should take into account the gains that the Internet has brought them, as well +as the costs, before we accede to their requests. The answer, of course, is +that we should. Sadly, we did not. This does not mean that all of the content +industries’ attempts to strengthen the law are wrong and unnecessary. It means +that we do not know whether they are or not. + +There is a fairly solid tradition in intellectual property policy of what I +call “20/20 downside” vision. All of the threats posed by any new +technology—the player piano, the jukebox, the photocopier, the VCR, the +Internet—are seen with extraordinary clarity. The opportunities, however, +particularly those which involve changing a business model or restructuring a +market, are dismissed as phantoms. The downside dominates the field, the upside +is invisible. The story of video recorders is the best-known example. When +video recorders—another technology promising cheaper copying—first appeared, +the reaction of movie studios was one of horror. Their business plans relied +upon showing movies in theaters and then licensing them to television stations. +VCRs and Betamaxes fit nowhere in this plan; they were seen merely as copyright +violation devices. Hollywood tried to have them taxed to pay for the losses +that would be caused. Their assumption? Cheaper copying demands stronger +rights. + +Having lost that battle, the movie studios tried to have the manufacturers of +the recording devices found liable for contributory copyright infringement; +liable, in other words, for assisting the copyright violations that could be +carried out by the owners of Sony Betamaxes. This, of course, was exactly the +same legal claim that would be made in the Napster case. In the Sony case, +however, the movie companies lost. The Supreme Court said that recording of TV +programs to “time-shift” them to a more convenient hour was a fair use.~{Sony +Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. , 464 U.S. 417 (1984).}~ The +movie studios’ claims were rejected. + +Freed from the threat of liability, the price of video recorders continued to +fall. They flooded consumers’ houses at a speed unparalleled until the arrival +of the World Wide Web. All these boxes sitting by TVs now cried out for +content, content that was provided by an emerging video rental market. Until +the triumph of DVDs, the videocassette rental market made up more than 50 +percent of the movie industry’s revenues.~{See Tina Balio, Museum of Broadcast +Communications, “Betamax Case,” Encyclopedia of TV (1997), available at +http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/B/htmlB/betamaxcase/betamaxcase.htm (“The +Betamax case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which reversed the appeals +court decision on 17 January 1984. By 1986, VCRs had been installed in fifty +percent of American homes and annual videocassettes sales surpassed the +theatrical box-office.”). The year 1986 was also the peak of the video rental +market: “Video’s high mark, according to studies by A. C. Nielsen Media +Research, was in late 1986, when an estimated 34.3 million households with +VCR’s took home 111.9 million cassettes a month, or an average of 3.26 movies +per household.” Peter M. Nichols, “Movie Rentals Fade, Forcing an Industry to +Change its Focus,” New York Times (May 6, 1990), A1.}~ Were losses caused by +video recorders? To be sure. Some people who might have gone to see a movie in +a theater because the TV schedule was inconvenient could instead record the +show and watch it later. Videos could even be shared with friends and +families—tattered copies of Disney movies recorded from some cable show could +be passed on to siblings whose kids have reached the appropriate age. VCRs were +also used for copying that was clearly illicit—large-scale duplication and sale +of movies by someone other than the rights holder. A cheaper copying technology +definitely caused losses. But it also provided substantial gains, gains that +far outweighed the losses. Ironically, had the movie companies “won” in the +Sony case, they might now be worse off. + +The Sony story provides us with some useful lessons—first, this 20/20 downside +vision is a poor guide to copyright policy. Under its sway, some companies will +invariably equate greater control with profit and cheaper copying with loss. +They will conclude, sometimes rightly, that their very existence is threatened, +and, sometimes wrongly, that the threat is to innovation and culture itself +rather than to their particular way of delivering it. They will turn to the +legislature and the courts for guarantees that they can go on doing business in +the old familiar ways. Normally, the marketplace is supposed to provide +correctives to this kind of myopia. Upstart companies, not bound by the habits +of the last generation, are supposed to move nimbly to harvest the benefits +from the new technology and to outcompete the lumbering dinosaurs. In certain +situations, though, competition will not work: + +_* if the dinosaurs are a cartel strong enough to squelch competition; + +_* if they have enlisted the state to make the threatening technology illegal, +describing it as a predatory encroachment on the “rights” of the old guard +rather than aggressive competition; + +_* if ingrained prejudices are simply so strong that the potential business +benefits take years to become apparent; or + +_* if the market has “locked in” on a dominant standard—a technology or an +operating system, say—to which new market entrants do not have legal access. + +In those situations, markets cannot be counted on to self-correct. +Unfortunately, and this is a key point, intellectual property policy frequently +deals with controversies in which all of these conditions hold true. + +Let me repeat this point, because it is one of the most important ones in this +book. To a political scientist or market analyst, the conditions I have just +described sound like a rarely seen perfect storm of legislative and market +dysfunction. To an intellectual property scholar, they sound like business as +usual. + +In the case of the VCR wars, none of these factors obtained. The state refused +to step in to aid the movie companies by criminalizing the new technology. +There were equally powerful companies on the other side of the issue (the +consumer electronics companies selling VCRs) who saw this new market as a +natural extension of a familiar existing market—audio recorders. There was no +dominant proprietary technological standard controlled by the threatened +industry that could be used to shut down any threats to their business model. +The market was allowed to develop and evolve without premature legal +intervention or proprietary technological lockout. Thus we know in this case +that the movie companies were wrong, that their claims of impending doom from +cheap copies were completely mistaken. The public and, ironically, the industry +itself benefited as a result. But the Sony case is the exception rather than +the rule. That is why it is so important. If competition and change can be +forbidden, we will get relatively few cases that disprove the logic that +cheaper copying must always mean stronger rights. The “natural experiments” +will never be allowed to happen. They will be squelched by those who see only +threat in the technologies that allow cheaper copies and who can persuade +legislators or judges to see the world their way. The story line I describe +here, the Internet Threat, will become the conventional wisdom. In the process, +it will make it much less likely that we will have the evidence needed to +refute it. + +2~ The Holes Matter as Much as the Cheese + +The Sony case is important in another way. The Supreme Court’s decision turned +on the judgment that it was a “fair use” under U.S. copyright law for consumers +to record television programs for time-shifting purposes. Since fair use comes +up numerous times in this book, it is worth pausing for a moment to explain +what it is. + +The content industries like to portray fair use as a narrow and grudging +defense against an otherwise valid case for copyright infringement—as if the +claim were, “Yes, I trespassed on your land, which was wrong, I admit. But I +was starving and looking for food. Please give me a break.” This is simply +inaccurate. True, fair use is asserted as “an affirmative defense”; that is the +way it is brought up in a copyright case. But in U.S. law, fair uses are stated +quite clearly to be limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright +holder—uses that were never within the copyright holder’s power to prohibit. +The defense is not “I trespassed on your land, but I was starving.” It is “I +did not trespass on your land. I walked on the public road that runs through +it, a road you never owned in the first place.” When society hands out the +right to the copyright holder, it carves out certain areas of use and refuses +to hand over control of them. Again, remember the Jefferson Warning. This is +not a presumptively absolute property right. It is a conditional grant of a +limited and temporary monopoly. One cannot start from the presumption that the +rights holder has absolute rights over all possible uses and therefore that any +time a citizen makes use of the work in any way, the rights holder is entitled +to get paid or to claim “piracy” if he does not get paid. Under the sway of the +story line I called the Internet Threat, legislators have lost sight of this +point. So what is “fair use”? When I am asked this question by nonlawyers, I +offer to show them the actual provision in the copyright act. They recoil, +clearly imagining they are about to be shown something the size and complexity +of the tax code. Here is the statutory fair use provision in its entirety: + +_1 #{Sec. 107. - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use}# + +_1 Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a +copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords +or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as +criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for +classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. +In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair +use the factors to be considered shall include— + +_1 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a +commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; + +_1 2. the nature of the copyrighted work; + +_1 3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the +copyrighted work as a whole; and + +_1 4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the +copyrighted work. + +_1 The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair +use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors. + +“But this seems quite sensible,” people often say, as though they had expected +both Byzantine complexity and manifest irrationality. (Perhaps they have had +some experience with legal matters after all.) The ones who think about it a +little longer realize that these factors cannot be mechanically applied. Look +at factor 3, for example. Someone who is making a parody frequently needs to +take large chunks of the parodied work. That is the nature of a parody, after +all. They might then sell the parody, thus also getting into trouble with +factor 1. And what about factor 4? Someone might quote big chunks of my book in +a devastating review that ruined any chance the book had of selling well. Come +to think of it, even a parody might have a negative effect on the “potential +market” for the parodied work. But surely those uses would still be “fair”? (In +both instances, the Supreme Court agrees that they are fair uses.) + +In coming up with these hypothetical problem cases, the copyright novice is +probably closer to having a good understanding of the purpose of fair use than +many people who have studied it for years. In fact, the novice’s questions shed +light on all of the exceptions, limitations, and defenses to proprietary +rights—the holes in the cheese of intellectual property. The scholar’s urge is +to find one theory that explains all the possible applications of the fair use +doctrine, to arrange all of the cases like targets and shoot a single arrow +through all of them. Perhaps fair use is designed to reduce the difficulty of +clearing rights when it would be uneconomical or impossibly complex to do so: +to reduce the paperwork, hassle, delay, ignorance, and aggravation that +economists refer to under the sanguine name of “transaction costs.”~{For +background, see Wendy Gordon, “Fair Use as Market Failure: A Structural and +Economic Analysis of the Betamax Case and Its Predecessors,” Columbia Law +Review 82 (1982): 1600–1657. For accounts that imagine a reduction of fair use +as transaction costs fall, see Edmund W. Kitch, “Can the Internet Shrink Fair +Use?,” Nebraska Law Review 78 (1999): 880–890; Robert P. Merges, “The End of +Friction? Property Rights and the Contract in the ‘Newtonian’ World of On-Line +Commerce,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 12 (1997): 115–136. This argument +has hardly gone unanswered with articles pointing out that it neglects both the +social values of fair use and the actual economics of its operation. See +Jonathan Dowell, “Bytes and Pieces: Fragmented Copies, Licensing, and Fair Use +in A Digital World,” California Law Review 86 (1998): 843–878; Ben Depoorter +and Francesco Parisi, “Fair Use and Copyright Protection: A Price Theory +Explanation,” International Review of Law and Economics 21 (2002): 453–473.}~ +(Though the idea that fair use is about transaction costs hardly explains some +of the types of fair use we care most about—the rights to parody, to criticize, +to reverse engineer.) Or perhaps fair use allows the rights of a transformative +author to be trumped only by a second transformative author, who is building on +the first—the parodist, reviewer, collage artist, or what have you.~{“I believe +the answer to the question of justification turns primarily on whether, and to +what extent, the challenged use is transformative. The use must be productive +and must employ the quoted matter in a different manner or for a different +purpose from the original.” Pierre N. Leval, “Toward a Fair Use Standard,” +Harvard Law Review 103 (1990): 1111.}~ (Then again, photocopying for classroom +use does not sound very “transformative.”) Could fair use be dictated by the +Constitution or by international free speech guarantees? In this view, fair use +provides a safety valve that allows copyright to coexist with the First +Amendment, property rights over speech to coexist with freedom of +expression.~{See Neil Weinstock Netanel, “Locating Copyright Within the First +Amendment Skein,” Stanford Law Review 54 (2001): 1–86; Yochai Benkler, “Free As +the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public +Domain,” New York University Law Review 74 (1999): 354–446; Larry Lessig, +Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture: “Copyright’s First Amendment” (March 1, +2001), in UCLA Law Review 48 (2001): 1057–1074; Melville B. Nimmer, “Does +Copyright Abridge the First Amendment Guaranties of Free Speech and the Press?” +UCLA Law Review 17 (1970): 1180–1204.}~ After all, it is not entirely obvious +how it could be constitutional to forbid me, in the name of a federal law, from +translating Mein Kampf in order to warn of the dangers of fascism or parodying +some piece of art to subversive effect. + +Each of these ideas about fair use has much to recommend it, as do the many +other grand theories that have been offered to explain the puzzle. And therein +lies the problem. + +Intellectual property is a brilliant social invention which presents us with +great benefits but also with a multitude of dangers: + +# the danger that the monopoly is unnecessary to produce the innovation, or +that it is broader or lasts for longer than is necessary to encourage future +production; + +# that overly broad rights will chill speech, criticism, or scientific +progress; + +# that it will restrict access in ways that discourage “follow-on” innovation; + +# that it will lead to industry concentration in a way that hurts consumers or +citizens while being less subject to antitrust regulation precisely because the +monopoly or oligopoly rests on intellectual property rights; + +# that it will establish strong “network effects” which cause the market to tip +over to some inefficient technology; and + +# that it will give the rights holder control over some technology outside the +range of the monopoly but closely linked to it. + +The list of dangers goes on and on, and so does the list of exceptions, +limitations, and restraints designed to prevent them. We restrict the length of +intellectual property rights. (At least, we used to. The framers thought it so +important to do so that they put the need to have a limited term in the +Constitution itself; nevertheless both Congress and the Supreme Court seem to +have given up on that one.) We restrict the scope of intellectual property +rights, so that they cannot cover raw facts or general ideas, only the range of +innovation and expression in between. (At least, we used to. Developments in +database protection, gene patents, and business method patents are clearly +eroding those walls.) As with fair use, we impose limitations on the rights +when we hand them out in the first place. The exclusive right conferred by +copyright does not include the right to prevent criticism, parody, classroom +copying, decompilation of computer programs, and so on. (Though as the next +chapter shows, a number of recent legal changes mean that the practical ability +to exercise fair use rights is seriously threatened.) + +These limitations on intellectual property do not fit a single theory, unless +that theory is “avoiding the multiple and evolving dangers of intellectual +property itself.” Even a single limitation such as fair use clearly responds to +many different concerns about the dangers of intellectual property rights. +Indeed it will evolve to fit new circumstances. When computer programs were +first clearly covered by copyright law, software engineers wondered if this +would cripple the industry. Why? Anyone who wishes to compete with a dominant +program needs to “decompile” it in order to make their program “interoperable,” +or simply better. For example, a new word processing program, no matter how +good, would be dead on arrival unless it could read all the files people had +created with the old, dominant word processing software. But to do this, the +engineers at the upstart company would have to take apart their competitor’s +program. In the process they would have to create temporary copies of the old +program, even though the final product—the hot new software—would be completely +different from the old. Would this be a violation of copyright law? + +In a series of remarkable and far-seeing cases involving such issues, the +courts said no.~{Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc. , 977 F.2d 1510 (9th +Cir. 1992); Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America Inc. , 975 F.2d 832 (Fed. +Cir. 1992).}~ “Decompilation” was fair use. The law of fair use had evolved in +the context of expressive, nonfunctional, stand-alone works such as books, +poems, songs. Now it was being applied to a functional product whose economics +depended strongly on “network effects”—many types of programs are useful only +if they are widely used. Without interoperability, we could never take our +existing documents or spreadsheets or datasets and move to a new program, even +if it was better. One program would not be able to read the files created by +another. It would be as if language itself had been copyrighted. To have said +that the incidental copies created in the process of decompiling software were +actually infringements of copyright would have turned the law on its head +because of a technological accident (you needed temporarily to “copy” the +programs in order to understand how they worked and make yours work with them) +and a legal accident (copyright was now being used to regulate functional +articles of commerce: “machines” made of binary code). The difference between +copying and reading, or copying and understanding, had changed because of the +technology. The context had changed because the law was being stretched to +cover new types of products, whose economics were very different from those of +novels. Rather than let the dominant software companies use copyright to stop +others from making interoperable software, the courts used an escape hatch—fair +use—to prevent that danger and to uphold the basic goal of copyright: +encouraging progress in science and the useful arts. + +This long story is told to make a simple point. The variegated and evolving +limitations on intellectual property are as important as the rights they +constrain, curtail, and define. The holes matter as much as the cheese. + +What does this have to do with the Sony case? In that case, remember, the +Supreme Court had said that copying TV shows in order to time-shift was fair +use. The Court could simply have stopped there. It could have said, “since most +of what consumers do is legal, there can be no claim of contributory or +vicarious infringement. Sony is not contributing to infringement since +consumers are not infringing copyright by copying shows in the first place.” +Interestingly, though this is the heart of the ruling, the court went further. +It quoted some seemingly unrelated patent law doctrine on contributory +infringement: “A finding of contributory infringement does not, of course, +remove the article from the market altogether; it does, however, give the +patentee effective control over the sale of that item. Indeed, a finding of +contributory infringement is normally the functional equivalent of holding that +the disputed article is within the monopoly granted to the patentee.” Clearly, +the Justices were concerned that, by using copyright law, the movie studios +could actually get control of a new technology. + +The fact that the Court expressed this concern through an analogy to patent law +was, at first sight, fairly surprising. Courts do not normally look at +copyrights in quite the same way as they look at patents. For one thing, patent +rights are stronger, though they are harder to obtain and last for a shorter +period of time. For another, while courts often express concern about the +dangers of a patent-driven monopoly over a particular technology, it is strange +to see that concern in the context of copyright law. An unnecessary monopoly +over a plow or a grain elevator may, as Jefferson pointed out, slow +technological development. But a monopoly over Snow White or “Ode on a Grecian +Urn”? We do not normally think of rights over expression (the realm of +copyright) threatening to sweep within their ambit an entire new technological +invention (the realm of patent). + +But in the Sony case, the Supreme Court quite clearly saw that, in a world +where technological developments made copying easier, the idea of contributory +infringement in copyright could be used to suppress or control entire +technologies that seemed, in the logic of 20/20 downside vision, to pose a +threat to the copyright holder. Indeed, in some sense, the logic behind the +Internet Threat—“cheaper copying requires greater control”—demands this result, +though the Sony case antedates the World Wide Web by a considerable time. If it +is cheap copying itself that poses the threat, then the content owners will +increasingly move to gain control over the technologies of cheap copying, using +copyright as their stalking horse. That is why the Sony Court went beyond the +simple ruling on fair use to explain the consequences of the movie companies’ +claim. In a footnote (the place where judges often bury their most trenchant +asides) the Court was almost snide: + +_1 It seems extraordinary to suggest that the Copyright Act confers upon all +copyright owners collectively, much less the two respondents in this case, the +exclusive right to distribute VTR’s [Video Tape Recorders] simply because they +may be used to infringe copyrights. That, however, is the logical implication +of their claim. The request for an injunction below indicates that respondents +seek, in effect, to declare VTR’s contraband. Their suggestion in this Court +that a continuing royalty pursuant to a judicially created compulsory license +would be an acceptable remedy merely indicates that respondents, for their +part, would be willing to license their claimed monopoly interest in VTR’s to +Sony in return for a royalty.~{Sony 464 U.S. at 441 n. 21.}~ + +The real heart of the Sony case is not that “time-shifting” of TV programs is +fair use. It is an altogether deeper principle with implications for all of the +holes in the intellectual property cheese. The Sony Court declared that because +video recorders were capable of substantial noninfringing uses, the +manufacturers of those devices were not guilty of contributory infringement. If +the rights of copyright holders were absolute, if they had the authority to +prohibit any activity that appeared to pose a threat to their current business +model, then it is quite possible that video recorders would have been guilty of +contributory infringement. It is because we have, and need, multiple exceptions +and limitations on intellectual property that the Supreme Court was able to +resist the claim that copyright itself forbids technologies of cheaper copying. +To put it another way, without a robust set of exceptions and limitations on +copyright, the idea that cheaper copying requires greater control will +inexorably drive us toward the position that the technologies of cheaper +reproduction must be put under the governance of copyright holders. + +Thus we have a corollary to the Jefferson Warning—call it the Sony Axiom: +cheaper copying makes the limitations on copyright more rather than less +important. Without those limitations, copyright law will bloat and metastasize +into a claim of monopoly, or at least control, over the very architectures of +our communications technology. And that is exactly where the logic of the +Internet Threat is taking us today. + +2~ From Napster to Grokster + +Seventeen years after the Sony decision, another court had to deal with a suit +by outraged copyright holders against the creators of a technology that allowed +individuals to copy material cheaply and easily. The suit was called A&M +Records v. Napster.~{A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc. , 239 F.3d 1004 (9th +Cir. 2001).}~ Napster was a “peer-to-peer” file sharing system. The files were +not kept on some huge central server. Instead, there was a central +directory—think of a telephone directory—which contained a constantly updated +list of the addresses of individual computers and the files they contained. +Anyone who had the software could query the central registry to find a file’s +location and then establish a direct computer-to-computer connection—anywhere +in the world—with the person who had the file they desired. This decentralized +design meant the system was extremely “robust,” very fast, and of nearly +infinite capacity. Using this technology, tens of millions of people around the +world were “sharing” music, an activity which record companies quite +understandably viewed as simple theft. In fact, it would be hard to think of a +situation that illustrated the Internet Threat better. The case ended up in +front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which hears cases in +an area that includes California and thus has decided a lot of copyright cases +over the years. + +There was an irony here. When the Supreme Court decided the Sony case, it was +on appeal from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Sony, with its rule about +reproductive technologies with substantial noninfringing uses, reversed the +appeals court decision. The Supreme Court was, in effect, telling the Ninth +Circuit that it was wrong, that its ruling would have required the +“extraordinary” (legal shorthand for “stupid”) conclusion that copyright law +gave copyright holders a veto on new technology. In the process, the Supreme +Court told the Ninth Circuit that it also did not understand the law of fair +use, or the freedom that should be given to individuals to make “noncommercial” +private copies. The identities of the judges had changed, but now, seventeen +years later, the same Circuit Court had another high-profile case on exactly +the same issues. In case any of the judges might have missed this irony, it +took David Boies, the lawyer for Napster, about ninety seconds to remind them +in his oral argument. “This court,” he said, adding as if in afterthought, “in +the decision that the Supreme Court ultimately reversed in Sony. . . .”~{A&M +Records v. Napster: C-SPAN Videotape 159534, Part 1 of 1 (October 2, 2000).}~ +To the laypeople in the audience it probably just seemed like another piece of +legal droning. But to the lawyers in the room the message was quite clear. “The +last time you got a case about a major new technology of consumer reproduction, +you really screwed it up. Hope you can do better this time.” The judges’ mouths +quirked—not entirely in pleasure. The point had been registered. + +Think for a moment of the dilemma in which the court had been placed. On the +one hand, you had tens of millions of people “sharing” music files and Napster +was the service that allowed them to do it. If this was not contributory +copyright infringement, what was? On the other hand, Napster seemed to fit very +nicely under the rule announced in the Sony case. + +The argument went like this. Like the VCR, the Napster service had substantial +noninfringing uses. It allowed bands to expose their music to the world through +the “New Artists” program. It made it easy to share music which was no longer +under copyright. These uses clearly do not infringe copyright. There were also +the claims that it permitted “space-shifting” by consumers who already owned +the music or “sampling” of music by listeners as they decided whether or not to +buy. One could argue that space-shifting and sampling were fair use (though in +the end the court disagreed). But since we have two clear noninfringing uses, +the technology obviously does have substantial uses that do not violate +copyright. Thus, Napster cannot be liable as a contributory infringer, just as +Sony could not be liable for the Betamax. Supreme Court precedent covers this +case. The Ninth Circuit is bound by that precedent. All the judges can do, goes +the argument, is to apply the words of the rule laid down in Sony, say that +Napster wins, and move on to the next case. If Congress wants to make services +like Napster illegal, it is going to have to pass a new law. The boundaries of +the Sony rule are clear and Napster fits within them. (Of course, the last +point is subject to argument, but the argument for Napster on this issue was a +good one. Not overwhelming—there were more noninfringing uses in the Sony case +because the normal way consumers used the technology in question was found to +be a fair use—but certainly powerful.) + +A more daring strategy was to suggest that all the copying done over Napster +was fair use, or at least presumptively fair. In Sony, the Supreme Court had +said that the law presumes that noncommercial private copying—such as taping a +show at home for future viewing—is a fair use. This presumption shifts the +burden to the copyright holder to prove that the practice caused harm to them. +Copying on Napster was done by private individuals. No money was exchanged. +Does this mean we must presume it was fair use and require the music companies +and songwriters to show clear evidence of “market harm” if they want to +convince us otherwise? + +It sounds as though proving market harm would be pretty easy. How could +millions of people exchanging hundreds of millions of songs not be causing +harm? But it is more complicated. Remember the Jefferson Warning. We are not +talking about swiping shoes from a shoe store. There one merely has to show the +theft to prove the loss. By contrast, music files are copied without being +“taken” from their owner. The record companies would have to show harm to their +market—the people downloading who do not purchase music because it is available +for free. Those who download, but would not have purchased, do not count. And +we have to balance those who are deterred from purchasing against those who +purchase a whole CD because they are exposed to new music through Napster. One +very interesting empirical study on the subject indicates that the result is a +wash, with hardly any measurable effect on sales; the overall drop in CD +purchases results from larger macroeconomic issues.~{Felix Oberholzer-Gee and +Koleman Strumpf, “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical +Analysis,” Journal of Political Economy 115, no. 1 (2007): 1–42.}~ This study, +however, has been subject to detailed methodological criticism.~{Stan J. +Liebowitz, “How Reliable Is the Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf Paper on +File-Sharing?” available at +http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1014399. }~ Another study +shows a weak effect on sales, though rather woundingly it seems to suggest that +the result is economically efficient—fewer people end up with music they do not +like.~{Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel, “Piracy on the High C’s: Music +Downloading, Sales Displacement, and Social Welfare in a Sample of College +Students,” available at http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/waldfogj/jle_piracy.pdf +[Ed. note: originally published as +http://www.law.upenn.edu/polk/dropbox/waldfogel.pdf, link has changed]. }~ +Other studies, by contrast, support the record company position—suggesting that +illicit file sharing does indeed undercut sales of both CDs and authorized +digital downloads.~{M. Peitz and P. Waelbroeck, “The Effect of Internet Piracy +on Music Sales: Cross-Section Evidence,” Review of Economic Research on +Copyright Issues (December 2004): 71–79, available at +http://www.serci.org/docs_1_2/waelbroeck.pdf. For an excellent general +discussion see Rufus Pollock’s summary of the empirical evidence at +http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/p2p_summary.html. }~ Given the +complexities of the issue, the record companies did not want to engage in a war +of dueling empirical studies. + +So, if Napster’s users were not infringing copyright law in the first place—at +least until the record companies came up with convincing evidence of market +harm—because their copying was noncommercial, then Napster could hardly be +guilty of contributory infringement, could it? There would be no infringement +at all! + +You could see Mr. Boies’s arguments as simple equations between the cases. + +_* Noninfringing uses such as recording public domain films and “time-shifting” +programs are equivalent to noninfringing uses such as the New Artists program +or sharing public domain music (and maybe “space-shifting” one’s own music?); +or + +_* Private noncommercial videotaping is equivalent to private noncommercial +file sharing. Both are presumptively fair uses. + +_* Either way, Sony=Napster and Napster wins. + +Napster did not win, of course, though when the judges handed down their +decision it was clear they had been paying attention to Mr. Boies, at least +enough to make them very wary of tampering with Sony. They claimed that they +were upholding that case, but that Napster could be liable anyway. How? Because +there was enough evidence here to show that the controllers of Napster had +“actual knowledge that specific infringing material is available using its +system, that it could block access to the system by suppliers of the infringing +material, and that it failed to remove the material.” There was indeed evidence +that Napster knew how its system was being used—an embarrassing amount of it, +including early memos saying that users will want anonymity because they are +trading in “pirated music.” Then there were nasty circumstantial details, like +the thousands of infringing songs on the hard drive of one particular Napster +employee—the compliance officer tasked with enforcing the Digital Millennium +Copyright Act! (The recording company lawyers waxed wonderfully sarcastic about +that.) + +But despite the ludicrously dirty hands of Napster as a company, lawyers could +see that the appeals court was making a lot of new law as it struggled to find +a way to uphold Sony while still making Napster liable. The court’s ruling +sounded reasonable and clear, something that would only strike at bad actors +while paying heed to the Sony Axiom and the assurance of safety that the rule +in Sony had provided to technology developers for the previous twenty years. +But hard cases make bad law. In order to accomplish this piece of legal +legerdemain, the court had to alter or reinterpret the law in ways that are +disturbing. + +The first thing the court did was to reject the argument that the “sharing” was +private and noncommercial. As to the idea that it is not private, fair enough. +Sharing one’s music with fifty-four million people does not sound that private, +even if it is done for private ends, in private spaces. What about +noncommercial? Embracing some earlier rulings on the subject, the court said a +use was “commercial” if you got for nothing something for which you would +otherwise have to pay. On the surface this sounds both clever and reasonable—a +way to differentiate home taping from global file sharing—but the argument +quickly begins to unravel. True, the Betamax owners could get TV shows for free +just by watching at the regular time. But they could not get a copy of the show +for free at the moment they wanted to watch it. That was why they taped. One +could even argue that Napster users would have access to most songs over the +radio for free. But lawyers’ quibbling about which way the rule cuts in this +case is not the point. Instead, we need to focus on the change in the +definition of “commercial,” because it illustrates a wider shift. + +Remember, a finding that a use is “noncommercial” makes it more likely that a +court will find it to be legal—to be a fair use. The old test focused mainly on +whether the motive for the copying was to make money. (A different stage of the +inquiry concerned whether there was harm to the copyright holder’s market.) The +Napster court’s test concentrates on whether the person consuming the copy got +something for free. Instead of focusing on the fact that the person making the +copy is not making money out of it—think of a professor making electronic +copies of articles for his students to download—it focuses on the presumptively +dirty hands of those who are “getting something for nothing.” But lots of +copyright law is about “getting something for nothing.” To put it differently, +one central goal of copyright is to limit the monopoly given to the copyright +owner so that he or she cannot force citizens to pay for every single type of +use. The design of the law itself is supposed to facilitate that. When “getting +something for free” comes to equal “commercial” in the analysis of fair use, +things are dangerously out of balance. Think back to Jefferson’s analogy. If I +light my candle at yours, am I getting fire for free, when otherwise I would +have had to pay for matches? Does that make it a “commercial” act? + +Having dismissed the claim that this was noncommercial sharing, the court then +reinterpreted the Sony decision to allow liability when there was “actual +knowledge” of specific copyright violations, an ability to block access by +infringers, and a failure to do so. Neither side was entirely happy with this +ruling, but the record companies believed—rightly—that it would allow them +effectively to shut Napster down. Yet the Napster ruling only postponed the +issue. The next set of file sharing services to be sued after Napster were even +more decentralized peer-to-peer systems; the Napster court’s reinterpretation +of Sony would not be able to reach them. + +The peer-to-peer file sharing service called Grokster is a relatively typical +example. Unlike Napster, Grokster had no central registry. The system was +entirely run by the individual “peer” computers. Because the system was +designed this way, the people who made and distributed the software had no +knowledge of specific infringing files. The users were doing the searching, +indexing, and storing, and Grokster had no ability to control their behavior. +For those reasons, a court of appeals held that Grokster was not liable. As in +Sony, the system had substantial noninfringing uses. Lots of interesting +content was traded on Grokster with the copyright holder’s consent. Other +material was in the public domain. Grokster made money by streaming +advertisements to the users of its software. The movie companies and record +companies saw this as a flagrant, for-profit piracy ring. Grokster’s response +was that like the makers of the VCR, it was simply providing a technology. Its +financial interest was in people using that technology, not in using it for +illicit purposes—though, like the VCR manufacturer, it would profit either way. +The court of appeals agreed. True, the majority of the material traded on +Grokster was illicitly copied, but the court felt that it could not give the +recording or movie companies control over a technology simply because it +allowed for easier copying, even if most of that copying was illegal. As I +tried to point out in the section on the Sony Axiom, that line of thought leads +to copyright holders having a veto over technological development. + +It was at this point that the Supreme Court stepped in. In the case of MGM v. +Grokster,~{MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. , 545 U.S. 913 (2005).}~ the +Supreme Court followed the line of the Napster court, but went even further. +The Court created a new type of contributory copyright infringement—while +apparently denying it was doing so. Grokster and its fellow services were +liable because of three different kinds of evidence that they had “intended” to +induce copyright violation. First, they were trying “to satisfy a known demand +for copyright infringement.” This could be shown by the way that they +advertised themselves as alternatives to the “notorious file-sharing service, +Napster.” Second, the file sharing services did not try to develop filtering +software to identify and eliminate copyrighted content—though this alone would +not have been enough to make them liable. Finally, their advertising-supported +system clearly profited by high-intensity use, which they knew was driven in +the most part by illicit copying. This too would not have been enough by +itself, the Court added, but had to be seen in the context of the whole record +of the case. + +Let me be clear. I wept no tears for Napster, Grokster, and their ilk. I see no +high-minded principle vindicated by middle-class kids getting access to music +they do not want to pay for. It is difficult to take seriously the +sanctimonious preening of those who cast each junior downloader of corporate +rock as a Ché Guevara, fighting heroically to bring about a new creative +landscape in music. (It is almost as hard to take seriously the record industry +executives who moralistically denounce the downloading in the name of the poor, +suffering artists, when they preside over a system of contracts with those same +artists that makes feudal indenture look benign.) The file sharing companies +themselves were also pretty unappealing. Many of the services were bloated with +adware and spyware. True, some of their software engineers started with a +dewy-eyed belief that this was a revolutionary technology that would break the +record companies and usher in a new era of musical creativity. Whether one +agrees or disagrees with them, it is hard—for me at least—to doubt their +sincerity. But even this quality did not last long. For most of the people +involved, the words “stock options” worked their normal, morally debilitating +magic. In internal company correspondence, attacks on the hypocrisy of the +music companies and defenses of a democratic communications structure +imperceptibly gave way to discussions of “customer base,” “user experience,” +and “saleable demographics.” I care little that Napster and Grokster—as +individual companies—lost their specific legal battles. There are few heroes in +this story. But if we had to rely on heroes, nothing would ever get done. + +I do care about the technology behind Napster and Grokster—about the kind of +decentralized system it represents. I also care about the principle I +identified as the Sony Axiom—a principle that goes far beyond music, +peer-to-peer systems, or the Internet as a whole. The Supreme Court’s decision +in Grokster could have been much worse. But it still offers a modest threat +both to that technology and to that axiom. + +What is so great about peer-to-peer systems? We talk about “cheap speech” on +the Internet, but bandwidth is actually expensive. If one is talking about +music or video files, and one wishes to speak to many people in a short period +of time, one vital way to have cheap speech is over peer-to-peer networks. If +many of your viewers or listeners are willing to become broadcasting stations +as they watch, you can cheaply reach a million people in a short period of time +with your video of abuse in Abu Ghraib or your parody of political leaders. You +do not need to rely on a broadcasting station, or even on the continued +existence of entities such as YouTube, which face their own legal worries. By +making your listeners your distributors, you can quickly reach the same number +of ears that the payola-soaked radio waves allow the record companies to reach. + +One need not cheer Grokster. Much of what went on there was indeed illicit. But +there are two key things to understand about peer-to-peer networks. The first +is that they are hard to police. They have multiple nodes. That is why they +work. It means they will have both infringing and noninfringing uses, and the +noninfringing uses will be centrally connected to our deepest values of free +speech and cultural decentralization. + +The second feature of peer-to-peer networks is even more basic. They are +networks and thus subject to the laws of network economics. In short, they only +work well if many people use them. A person who uses a peer-to-peer system that +no one else uses is in the position of the person who owns the only fax machine +in the world. Peer-to-peer networks provide cheap and unregulable audiovisual +or data-heavy “speech” to a mass audience. And if the past is any guide, those +networks will also carry large amounts of illicit material, just as +photocopying machines (and VCRs) are widely used to violate copyright. The +Grokster case makes it harder, but not impossible, to have successful, widely +used peer-to-peer systems that are not themselves illicit. If they are widely +used, there will be infringing content. If you try to police them and filter +them, you will know more about that infringing content and thus might be +liable—that was the point of the Napster case. If you do not, you will be +failing to take precautions. That was the point of the Grokster case. What is a +poor peer-to-peer network to do? Apart from making sure that the last four +letters of your service’s name are not “-ster,” I am hard-pressed to advise +you. + +A decision does not need to make an activity illegal in order to impede it. It +only needs to make it uncertain. Already, for example, the free—and so far as I +could tell, entirely well-meaning—service “bonpoo,” which allowed you to send +large file attachments to many people at once, has shut down all of its +capabilities except photo transfer. That is simply one trivial instance of a +larger harm. Lots of new communications technologies will remain undeveloped +because of the uncertainties left by this ruling. + +My colleague Jennifer Jenkins gave one useful hyperbolic illustration, drawing +on earlier work by the Electronic Frontier Foundation: if one were launching +the iPod today, it is not clear how it would fare under Grokster’s standard. Of +course, there is no danger that the iPod will be challenged. It has become +respectable and the music companies ended up sanctioning it. But how does it +fare if we simply apply the tests laid down in the Grokster case? There is +Apple’s “tainted” advertising campaign, urging users to “Rip, Mix, and Burn.” +Does this not suggest complicity, or even intent? There is the fact that the +iPod does not restrict itself solely to proprietary formats protected by +digital rights management. It also allows uncontrolled MP3 files despite the +fact that this format is “notoriously” used to transfer files against the +wishes of the copyright owner. This, surely, is a “failure to police.” And +finally, there is the fact that it would cost about $10,000 to fill an iPod +with songs downloaded from iTunes. Clearly Apple must be aware that much of the +music that fills iPods is illicitly copied. They are profiting from that fact +to drive demand for the product, just as Grokster was profiting from the +attractions of illicit traffic to drive people to use their service! + +No one is going to sue Apple now, of course. In fact, established players in +the marketplace are probably fairly safe (and have better lawyers). But what if +a product as good as the iPod were being developed now by some upstart company? +What if it were no more and no less likely to be used for infringing purposes? +Would the business plan ever see the light of day? Or would it be quietly +smothered due to legal uncertainty? I have little sympathy for Grokster the +company, but the decision that doomed it is a bad piece of technology policy. + +There is a second reason to dislike the Grokster decision. Despite some of the +angst-ridden announcements made when the decision was handed down, the Supreme +Court has not killed peer-to-peer systems. The concept is far too well +entrenched. But the decision will mean that there are fewer of them that are +widely used, easy to operate, and made by responsible and reputable people you +can trust. This will probably lessen, but not end, illicit copying online. But +that effect comes with a price—it makes our communications architecture a +little bit more tightly controlled, reducing but not removing the availability +of methods of mass distribution that are entirely outside centralized public or +private control. It is another—relatively small—step toward an Internet that is +more like cable TV or iTunes, a one-way flow of approved content. One might +decide that such a price was well worth paying. But where is the limiting +principle or end point of the logic that led to it? + +There is no provision in U.S. statutory copyright law that imposes liability +for contributory or vicarious infringement. None. The patent statute has such a +provision; not the Copyright Act. The courts have simply made the scheme up +themselves. Then they made up limitations—such as Sony—in order to rein it in. +In Grokster, the Supreme Court went further. It made up a new type of +“inducement” liability. Fine. As I have tried to indicate here, the decision is +not as dreadful as it is reputed to be. But so long as there is any unregulated +space in our communications network, some portion of it will have illicitly +copied content on it. The more the system is free of central control, the more +it is open to use by any citizen, the cheaper it gets—all very desirable +characteristics—the more illicit content there will be. That is the premise of +the Internet Threat—the belief that control must rise as copying costs fall. I +have tried here to suggest an alternative interpretation, the Sony Axiom: +without a strong internal set of limitations over copyright, cheaper copying +and the logic of the Internet Threat will always drive us toward giving control +over our communications architecture to the content industries. + +There was one particularly striking moment in the Napster oral argument. The +lawyer for the recording companies was arguing that Napster was illegal. The +judges interrupted, as they often do, and there was a back-and-forth debate +about the likely reach of any ruling that would shut down Napster. “I am not +trying to say the Internet is illegal,” said the lawyer. There was a pause as +everyone weighed those words carefully. + +My response would be “Really? Why not?” The logic of the Internet Threat leads +to the position that a network is either controlled or illegal. The better and +cheaper the network, the tighter the control needed. The Internet itself could +have been designed differently. There could have been more centralized control, +filtering of content, a design based on one-way transmission, closed protocols +that allow users only a limited number of options. Indeed there were such +systems—the national French Minitel system is an example. The Internet +represents the opposite set of choices—freedom from centralized control, +absence of intervention. In a famous article, Saltzer, Reed, and Clark provided +the argument that an “end-to-end” network that is “dumb” and leaves processing +to the “ends”—the smart terminals at either end of the wires—will be stable and +robust.~{J. H. Saltzer, D. P. Reed, and D. D. Clark, “End-to-End Arguments in +System Design,” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (November 1984): 277.}~ +But it will also be remarkably uncontrolled and it will lower global copying +costs close to zero for digital content. It is that principle that has made it +successful. To put it tersely: the logic of the Internet Threat runs in exactly +the opposite direction to the Internet itself. The logic of control is not the +logic of the Net. + +Here is one last thought experiment. Apply the same test I suggested for the +iPod to the Internet itself.~{Technically, this discussion fuses components of +the Internet—its transfer protocols, for example—with aspects of the World Wide +Web, the set of linked hypertext documents assembled on top of it.}~ Imagine +you knew nothing of the Net. (Those of you who are over twenty-five may +actually be able to remember when you knew nothing of the Net.) Imagine that +you are sitting in a room somewhere discussing—perhaps with a group of +government bureaucrats or some policy analysts from the Commerce +Department—whether to develop this particular network. The scientists are +enthusiastic. They talk of robustness and dumb networks with smart terminals. +They talk of TCP/IP and HTML and decentralized systems that run on open +protocols, so that anyone can connect to this network and use it any way they +want to. You, of course, know nothing about the truly astounding outburst of +creativity and communication that would actually flower on such a system, that +would flower precisely because it is so open and no one country or company +controls it or the protocols that run it. You do not know that millions of +people worldwide will assemble the greatest factual reference work the world +has ever seen on this network—often providing their information for free out of +some bizarre love of sharing. You do not know about Amazon.com or Hotornot.com +or the newspapers of the world online, or search engines, automatic page +translation, plug-ins, or browsers. You cannot imagine free or open-source +software being assembled by thousands of programmers worldwide. E-mail is only +a dimly understood phenomenon to you. Teenagers in your world have never heard +of instant messaging—a nostalgic thought. + +As the scientists talk, it becomes clear that they are describing a system +without centralized direction or policing. Imagine that your decision is framed +by the logic of control I have described in this chapter, by the fears that the +content industry has had for at least the last thirty years—by the logic of the +suit they brought in Sony. Imagine, in other words, that we make the up-or-down +decision to develop the Internet based on the values and fears that our +copyright policy now exhibits, and that the content industries have exhibited +for thirty years. There is no way, no way at all, that a network like it would +ever be developed. It would be strangled at birth. You would be told by the +lawyers and policy wonks that it would be a haven for piracy and illegality. +(And it would be, of course—though it would also be much, much more.) You would +be told that the system needed to be designed to be safe for commerce or it +would never attract investment, that it would need to be controlled and +centralized for it to be reliable, that it would need to be monitored to stop +it being a hotbed of crime. With the copyright lawyers in the room, you would +end up designing something that looked like cable TV or Minitel. The Internet +would never get off the ground. + +The Internet is safe now, of course, because it developed so fast that it was a +reality before people had time to be afraid of it. But it should give us pause +that if we had our current guiding set of policy goals in place, our assumption +that cheaper copying means we need greater regulation, we would never have +allowed it to flourish. As Jessica Litman points out, we are increasingly +making our decisions about technology and communications policy inside +copyright law. We are doing so according to the logic of control that I have +sketched out in this chapter. But the logic of control is a partial logic. It +blinds us to certain possibilities, ones that have huge and proven +potential—look at the Internet. + +The law has not been entirely one-sided, however. The Sony case drew a line in +the sand which promised to halt the inevitable drift toward greater and greater +control over communications technology by content owners. It turned out the +heavens did not fall. Indeed, the content companies thrived. Perhaps that line +was drawn in the wrong place; reasonable people can disagree about that. But +Grokster smudges the line without drawing a clear new one. If that new line is +drawn according to the logic of control, what technologies will we never see? +Could they be technologies that would transform our lives as unimaginably as +the Internet has since 1995? + +I have described the story line—the cluster of metaphors and images and +concerns—that pervades our copyright policy. I labeled it “the Internet +Threat.” In the next chapter, I discuss an alternative story line, a different +way of understanding our current policies. The subject of that story line is +the best-known example of contemporary attempts to control the digital world, +the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. + +2~ Chapter 4: Further Reading + +The first book to read on the history of the tension between copying +technologies and the law that regulates them is Paul Goldstein’s effortlessly +erudite Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox, 2nd ed. +(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). Goldstein and I differ +somewhat in our optimism about current regulatory developments but his work is +an indispensable beginning for the inquiry and a pleasure to read. One +fascinating theme in the book is that the intellectual tension between +maximalists and minimalists (or optimists and pessimists as he describes them) +is actually a fundamental part of copyright law’s survival strategy—its +dialectical method of dealing with technological change. If so, in this book I +am struggling gamely to do my part by holding up my side of the dialectic. It +does not seem to be winning much recently. Perhaps copyright’s Hegel is asleep. + +Much of this chapter concerns itself with copyright’s response to the Internet. +No book comes close to laying this out as well as Jessica Litman’s Digital +Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet (Amherst, N.Y.: +Prometheus Books, 2001). Litman is a beautiful essayist and this book is both +accessible and detailed. Those readers who are interested in the history of +that dying technology, the VCR, will find a brilliant account in James Lardner, +Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese & the VCR Wars (New York: Norton, 1987). +One needs only to scan its pages to pick up the eerie foreshadowing of the +Internet Threat. Litman’s article on the Sony case provides a detailed legal +history to back up Ladner’s social history. Jessica Litman, “The Sony Paradox,” +Case Western Reserve Law Review 55 (2005): 917–962. Pamela Samuelson has a fine +article exploring the jurisprudential impact of Sony’s reasoning. Pamela +Samuelson, “The Generativity of Sony v. Universal: The Intellectual Property +Legacy of Justice Stevens,” Fordham Law Review 74 (2006): 1831–1876. + +The scholarly literature on Napster, copyright, and peer-to-peer technologies +generally is both wide and deep. In addition to Litman’s book, some personal +favorites include: Raymond Shih Ray Ku, “The Creative Destruction of Copyright: +Napster and the New Economics of Digital Technology,” University of Chicago Law +Review 69 (2002): 263–324; Mark A. Lemley and R. Anthony Reese, “Reducing +Digital Copyright Infringement Without Restricting Innovation,” Stanford Law +Review 56 (2003–2004): 1345–1434; Jane C. Ginsburg, “Separating the Sony Sheep +From the Grokster Goats: Reckoning the Future Business Plans of +Copyright-Dependent Technology Entrepreneurs,” University of Arizona Law Review +50 (2008): 577–609; Justin Hughes, “On the Logic of Suing One’s Customers and +the Dilemma of Infringement-Based Business Models,” Cardozo Arts and +Entertainment Law Journal 22 (2005): 725–766; Douglas Lichtman and William +Landes, “Indirect Liability for Copyright Infringement: An Economic +Perspective,” Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 16 (2003): 395–410; and +Glynn S. Lunney, Jr., “Fair Use and Market Failure: Sony Revisited,” Boston +University Law Review 82 (2002): 975–1030. + +In addition to these articles, a number have focused specifically on +alternative methods of encouraging cultural production while maximizing +technological and cultural freedom. Two that have profoundly influenced my own +thinking are Neil Weinstock Netanel, “Impose a Noncommercial Use Levy to Allow +Free Peer-to-Peer File Sharing,” Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 17 +(2003): 1–84; and William Fisher, Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the +Future of Entertainment (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). +Fisher, whose presentations and articles reveal a cathedral-like conceptual +structure that would have delighted the Encyclopedists, argues powerfully that +a system of levies on broadband technology, distributed in proportion to the +popularity of the music downloaded could allow us to permit “free” access to +music while still compensating musicians. His responses to the problems of +measurement, gaming of the system, privacy, and so on will not convince +everyone but they represent by far the most systematic treatment of the +subject. + +1~ Chapter 5: The Farmers’ Tale: An Allegory + +Imagine that a bustling group of colonists has just moved into a new area, a +huge, unexplored plain. (Again, assume the native inhabitants have conveniently +disappeared.) Some of the colonists want to farm just as they always did in the +old country. “Good fences make good neighbors” is their motto. Others, inspired +by the wide-open spaces around them, declare that this new land needs new ways. +They want to let their cattle roam as they will; their slogan is “Protect the +open range.” In practice, the eventual result is a mixture of the two regimes. +Fields under cultivation can be walled off but there is a right of passage +through the farmers’ lands for all who want it, so long as no damage is done. +This means travelers do not need to make costly and inefficient detours around +each farm. In the long run, these “public roads” actually increase the value of +the private property through which they pass. They also let the ranchers move +their cattle around from one area of pasture to another. The ranchers become +strong proponents of “public, open highways” (though some people muse darkly +that they do very well out of that rule). Still, most people want open +highways; the system seems to work pretty well, in fact. + +Two new technologies are introduced. First, the automobile is developed. Now +thieves can drive through the farmers’ fields, stop quickly to grab some corn +or a lettuce, and be back on the highway before they can be caught. Of course, +the farmers’ costs have also fallen dramatically; now they have tractors to +work their fields and trucks to take their products to distant markets. The +farmers do not dwell on the benefits of the new technology, however. +Understandably, they focus more on the profits they could reap if they could +get all the advantages of the technology and none of its costs. They demand new +legal protections aimed at producing that result. “What’s good for agriculture +is good for the nation,” they say. But now comes the second technological +shock—the development of barbed wire. The cost of erecting impassable barriers +falls dramatically. The farmers begin to see the possibility of enclosing all +of their land, roads and fields alike. This will help them protect their crops +from pilfering, but it will also allow them to charge people for opening the +gates in their fences—even the gates on public roads. That is a nice extra +revenue stream which will, the farmers say, “help encourage agriculture.” After +all, more fences mean more money for farmers, and more money for farmers means +they can invest in new methods of farming, which will mean everyone is better +off, right? + +What is to be done? Assume that each side presents its case to the legislature. +There are three obvious possibilities: + +First, the legislature can simply tell each side to work it out amongst +themselves. The law will continue to forbid trespass, but we are neither going +to make it a crime to put up a barbed wire fence if it blocks legitimate public +rights of way nor to make it a crime to cut a barbed wire fence, unless the +fence cutter is also a trespasser. The farmers can attempt to enclose land by +putting barbed wire around it. Ranchers and drivers can legally cut those +fences when they are blocking public rights of way. Trespass remains trespass, +nothing more. + +Second, the legislature could heed the ranchers’ fears that barbed wire will +permit the farmers not only to protect their own land, but to rob the public of +its existing rights of way, turning open highways into toll roads. (The +ranchers, of course, are more concerned with the rights of cattle than people, +but most drivers agree with them.) As a result, the state could forbid the +erection of a barbed wire fence where it might block a public right of +way—classing it as a kind of theft, perhaps. + +Third, the legislature could take the farmers’ side. Theorizing that this new +automobile technology presents “a terrible threat to agriculture, because of +rampant crop piracy,” the state could go beyond the existing law of trespass +and make it a crime to cut barbed wire fences wherever you find them (even if +the fences are enclosing public lands as well as private, or blocking public +roads). To back up its command, it could get into the technology regulation +business—making the manufacture or possession of wire cutters illegal. + +The state picks option three. Wire cutting becomes a crime, wire cutters are +classed with lock picks and other “criminals’ tools,” and the people who make +wire cutters are told their business is illegal. A storm of protest arises in +the rural driving community. The wire cutter manufacturers claim that their +products have lots of legitimate uses. All to no avail: the farmers press on. +They have two new demands. Cars should be fitted with mandatory radio beacons +and highways put under constant state surveillance in order to deter crop +theft. In addition, car trunks should be redesigned so they can hold less—just +in case the owner plans to load them up with purloined produce. Civil +libertarians unite with car manufacturers to attack the plan. The farmers +declare that the car manufacturers are only interested in making money from +potential thieves and that the civil libertarians are Nervous Nellies: no one +has anything to fear except the criminals. “What’s good for agriculture is good +for the nation,” they announce again. As the barbed wire gates swing shut +across the highways of the region, the legislature heads back into session. + +2~ Between Paranoia and Reality: The DMCA + +I have argued that confusing intellectual property with physical property is +dangerous. I stand by that argument. Yet analogies to physical property are +powerful. It is inevitable that we attempt to explain new phenomena by +comparing them to material with which we are more familiar. While the content +companies’ tales of “theft” and “piracy” are the most prevalent, they are by no +means the only such analogy one can make. In this chapter I try to prove that +point. + +The Farmers’ Tale is my allegorical attempt to explain the struggle over the +single most controversial piece of intellectual property legislation in recent +years, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.~{Pub. L. No. 105-304, 112 +Stat. 2860 (1998) (codified as amended in scattered sections of 5, 17, 28, and +35 U.S.C.).}~ The DMCA did many things, but for our purposes its crucial +provisions are those forbidding the “circumvention of copyright protection +systems,” the technological measures that copyright holders can use to deny +access to their works or control our behavior once we get access. These +measures include encryption, controls on how many times a file can be copied, +password protection, and so on. Copyright protection systems are, in other +words, the digital equivalent of barbed wire, used to add an additional layer +of “physical” protection to the property owner’s existing legal protection. +But, unlike barbed wire, they can also control what we do once we get access to +the property. + +The rules that forbid circumvention of these systems are logically, if not +elegantly, referred to as the anticircumvention provisions. They are to be +found in Section 1201 of the Copyright Act, an ungainly and lumpily written +portion of the law that was inserted in 1998 as part of the complex set of +amendments collectively referred to as the DMCA. I will explain the +significance of these rules in a moment. My hope is that the analogy to the +Farmers’ Tale will make them a little easier to understand—at least for those +of you for whom talk of digital rights management, anticircumvention +provisions, and network effects is not second nature. + +Notice the differences between this allegory and the “Internet Threat” story +line I described in the last chapter. There are two sets of bad guys in the +Farmers’ Tale. The greedy thieves (who are still thieves in this story—not +heroes) and the greedy farmers who use a genuine if indefinite “threat” posed +by a new technology to mask a power grab. The Internet Threat is the story of +an industry devastated by piracy, in desperate need of help from the state to +protect its legitimate property interests. By contrast, the Farmers’ Tale is +the story of a self-interested attempt not only to protect property but to cut +off recognized rights of public access in a way that will actually make the +whole society worse off. The legitimate role of the state in protecting private +property has been stretched into an attempt to regulate technology so as to +pick winners in the marketplace, enriching the farmers at the expense of +consumers and other businesses. In the long run this will not be good for +business as a whole. A patchwork of private toll roads is an economic +nightmare. + +That is not the most worrying part of the story: the farmers’ proposals are +moving in the direction of regulating still more technology—the mandatory radio +beacons and constantly monitored roads conjure up a police state—and all to +protect a bunch of hysterical vegetable growers whose political clout far +outweighs their actual economic importance. + +Both the Internet Threat and the Farmers’ Tale are, of course, ways to +understand what is currently going on in the intellectual property wars. In the +digital realm, the part of the farmers is played by the content companies, the +recording industry associations, the movie and software trade groups. Pointing +to the threat of digital piracy, they demanded and received extra legal +protection for their copyrighted content. Unlike earlier expansions—longer +copyright terms, more stringent penalties, the shrinking of exceptions and +limitations, expansions in copyrightable subject matter—this was not a +protection of the work itself; it was a protection of the digital fences +wrapped around it, and a regulation of the technology that might threaten those +fences. + +What is the significance of this? The digital revolution makes it easier to +copy copyrighted content. It also makes it easier to protect that content, and +to do so in a more granular and precisely calibrated way. Imagine being able to +sell a paperback book that could only be read by the original purchaser or a +song that could only be listened to by a particular person in a particular +room. Digital rights management technology makes it a lot easier to do these +things. Suddenly the copyright owners have considerable physical control over +their songs, e-books, and software, even after they have sold them. It is as if +the recording industry or the publishers had a representative in your living +room. They can use that control not merely to prevent illicit copying but to +control and limit usage in ways that go far beyond their exclusive rights under +copyright. All of this happens without the law or the state doing anything. +Like barbed wire, this is a technological protection measure. + +Like the farmers, the content companies were not content with their barbed wire +alone. They wanted legally protected barbed wire in addition to their existing +legal rights under copyright. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it +became illegal to circumvent a technical protection measure such as +encryption—the digital barbed wire behind which content companies secrete their +work—even if what you did with the content when you got past the barbed wire +was a fair use; excerpting a fragment of a film for a school presentation, for +example, or making a copy of an encrypted audio file for personal use in +another device. In other words, by using digital barbed wire, the content +companies could prevent citizens from making the “fair uses” the copyright law +allowed. This undermines some of the limitations on their exclusive rights that +the Copyright Act explicitly carves out in Section 107, and thus shifts the +balance of power that the Copyright Act establishes. Cutting barbed wire became +a civil wrong, and perhaps a crime, even if the wire blocked a public road. +Under most circumstances, making wire cutters was also now against the law. + +The ranchers—whose digital equivalents are communications companies and +hardware manufacturers—chafed under these new rules. The most powerful groups +managed to get special dispensations. Internet service providers, for example, +got a qualified immunity from copyright infringement that occurs over their +networks. But ordinary citizens, librarians, and civil libertarians also +complained, and they were not as well represented in the legislature. It is +true that the new rules may help to prevent illicit copying, but they also +strike a blow against the exercise of fair use rights—rights that are important +both to free speech and competition. Even if the content companies were +absolutely right about the threats from digital piracy, this consequence should +make us pause. But critics of the DMCA say that there is little evidence that +the content companies are right. They quote some of the empirical studies I +mentioned in the last chapter, particularly the ones that show no net negative +effect from unauthorized music downloading on CD sales. They claim—and they are +on strong ground here—that even if there are some losses from the new copying +technologies, there are also benefits. Like the farmers, the critics would +argue, the content companies take the benefits of the new technology for +granted, but wish the law to step in to ameliorate the harms it also creates. +And like the farmers, they are not yet satisfied. Their new proposals go even +further—scarily further. Thus runs the critics’ argument. + +The critics of the DMCA conjure up a world in which it will be illegal to lend +each other books or songs, where it will be impossible for us to copy even +small fragments of digital work for criticism or parody, where encryption +research will be severely “chilled,” and where large quantities of the public +domain will be enclosed together with the copyrighted content that the DMCA is +supposed to protect. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Unintended +Consequences” studies give concrete examples.)~{See Electronic Frontiers +Foundation, “Unintended Consequences,” available at +http://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-consequences-seven-years-under-dmca. }~ They +think the DMCA undoes the balance at the heart of copyright law, that it can be +used to entrench existing businesses and their business methods, that it +threatens speech, competition, privacy, and innovation itself. In short, they +think the DMCA is the worst intellectual property law Congress has ever passed +and view the adoption of similar laws around the world with a reaction little +short of horror. + +Those who supported the DMCA disagree, of course, and do so honestly. They see +rampant piracy as a reality and the threat to fair use as some kind of academic +hypothetical rarely encountered in reality. What’s more, many of them do not +think fair use is that important economically or culturally. If markets work +well, users could be made to pay for the rights that fair use gives—but only if +they wanted them. One could buy expensive digital books which one was allowed +to share, quote, or copy for classroom use, and cheaper ones which one had to +keep to oneself. Remember that for many of the people who supported the DMCA, +fair use is something of a “loophole”; certainly not an affirmative right of +the public or a reserved limitation on the original property grant from the +state. (Remember the Sony Axiom from Chapter 4?) They find the analogy of fair +use to a public road ludicrous. This film, or book, or song, is mine; anything +you do with it, or to it, you do at my sufferance. (Remember the Jefferson +Warning from Chapter 2?) + +How has the DMCA worked in reality? Which group’s attitudes were vindicated? +Two case studies may help us to answer these questions. + +2~ Infectious Speech: The DMCA and Freedom of Expression + +Jon Johansen, a 16-year-old Norwegian, was the unwitting catalyst for one of +the most important cases interpreting the DMCA. He and two anonymous helpers +wrote a program called DeCSS. Depending on whom you listen to, DeCSS is +described either as a way of allowing people who use Linux or other open source +operating systems to play DVDs on their computers, or as a tool for piracy that +threatened the entire movie industry and violated the DMCA. + +A little background is in order. When you play a commercial DVD, your actions +are partly controlled by a simple encryption scheme called CSS, or the Content +Scramble System. The DVD Copy Control Association licenses the keys to this +encryption system to the manufacturers of DVD players. Without a key, most DVDs +could not be played. The manufacturer then embeds this key in its hardware +design in such a way that it is easy for your player to decode and play the +movie but hard, at least for a person of average technical competence, to copy +the decoded “stream.” + +Because the DVD Copy Control Association will only license keys to +manufacturers whose DVD players conform exactly to their specifications, the +CSS scheme can also be used to control viewers in other ways. For example, DVD +players are required to have one of six “region codes,” depending on where in +the world they are sold. Region 1 is the United States and Canada. Region 2 is +Japan, Europe, South Africa, the Middle East, and—bizarrely—Greenland. Region 3 +is South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; and so on. The CSS scheme can be used to +restrict a movie to a player with the appropriate region code. If you try to +play a movie coded for region 6 (China) in a DVD player from region 1, it will +not play. This allows filmmakers to distribute different versions of films to +different regions at different times based on sequential release in cinemas, or +simply to distribute DVDs with different prices to different regions without +worrying about whether the cheaper DVDs will “leak” into the more lucrative +markets. CSS and the hardware scheme that unlocks it can also be used to +prevent you from fast-forwarding through the commercials at the beginning of +the movie if the copyright owner does not want you to, or from skipping the FBI +notice. The machine will not do it. In fact, it is deliberately built so that +it cannot do it. + +What we have here is a digital fence that is partly used to prevent copying. +Movie studios are understandably worried about the worldwide circulation of +perfect digital copies of their movies. CSS was supposed to help to prevent +that, or at least make it much harder. But because almost all movies are +encrypted with CSS and access to the keys comes with conditions, CSS also +allows a more fine-grained control over consumers. Manufacturers are not +allowed to make players which can view movies from all region codes or skip +portions of the DVD that the owners do not want you to skip. The licensing body +puts it this way on its Web site: “Q. Under the terms of the CSS licensing +agreement, is it legal for a licensed manufacturer to produce and sell a +product which allows a user to disable any CSS protections? A. No. Such +products are not allowed under the terms of the CSS license. They are +illegal.”~{See DVD Copy Control Association, “Frequently Asked Questions,” +available at http://www.dvdcca.org/faq.html. }~ A technology introduced to +protect intellectual property rights allows control in ways that those rights +alone do not. + +Before the DMCA, the movie companies could have done exactly this. They could +have wrapped their movies in a digital fence. The consumer electronics +companies that wanted to could license a key and be allowed to use a trademark +that indicated that they were approved by the DVD Copy Control Association. But +what if a manufacturer of DVD players felt that American consumers wanted to be +able to play their Japanese anime movies without buying another DVD player to +do so? Or what if they thought people were antsy and did not want to watch the +FBI notice before every film? The manufacturer could have tried to “reverse +engineer” the CSS system, to figure out how it worked. If they succeeded, they +could make a player that was free of the restrictions that the CSS licensing +authority imposed. + +Of course there were some legal limitations even before the DMCA. Our +hypothetical manufacturer could not break into the safe where the CSS code was +being held or bribe an employee to provide it. (That would be a trespass or a +violation of trade secret law.) It could not violate copyright laws over the +various types of software that controlled DVD players. It could not use the +trademarks of any of the entities involved, including any seal of approval +granted by the DVD Copy Control Association. But it could—at least in the +United States—try to reverse engineer the product so as to make a competing +product with features that the customers liked more. It would be no more +illegal than a company making a cheaper generic razor cartridge that fits my +expensive Gillette Mach 3 razor, a generic printer cartridge to replace the +expensive one in my Lexmark printer, or, for that matter, a generic remote +control for my garage door opener. In each case, of course, the original +manufacturer would prefer that I use their products rather than the unlicensed +ones. They can design their product to make it hard to use a generic +replacement or even tell me that my warranty will be void if I use one. But +they cannot say that the unlicensed product is illegal. We are back in option +one of the Farmers’ Tale, before the legislature acted. The farmers can put up +their wire, and even use it to block passage that would be otherwise legal, but +it is not a crime to figure out a way through the fence unless the fence cutter +is also a trespasser. The DMCA, however, might have changed all of that. + +Let us return to Mr. Johansen, the 16-year-old Norwegian. He and his two +anonymous collaborators claimed that they were affected by another limitation +imposed by the CSS licensing body. At that time, there was no way to play DVDs +on a computer running Linux, or any other free or open source operating system. +(I will talk more about free and open source software later.) Let’s say you buy +a laptop. A Sony Vaio running Windows, for example. It has a slot in the side +for DVDs to slide in and software that comes along with it which allows the DVD +reader to decode and play the disk. The people who wrote the software have been +licensed by the DVD Copy Control Association and provided with a CSS key. But +at the time Mr. Johansen set out to create DeCSS, the licensing body had not +licensed keys to any free or open source software developers. Say Mr. Johansen +buys the Sony Vaio, but with the Linux operating system on it instead of +Windows. The computer is the same. The little slot is still there. Writing an +open source program to control the DVD player is trivial. But without the CSS +key, there is no way for the player to decode and play the movie. (The +licensing authority later did license an open source player, perhaps because +they realized its unavailability gave Mr. Johansen a strong defense, perhaps +because they feared an antitrust suit, or perhaps because they just got around +to it.) + +Mr. Johansen and his supporters claimed strenuously that DeCSS was not in fact +an aid to illicit copying. In fact, they argued that CSS was not really +designed to protect DVDs against illicit copying. Commercial DVD “pirates” do +not need to crack the CSS encryption. Quite the contrary: they produce exact +copies of the DVD, CSS encryption and all, and the buyer’s player dutifully +decodes it and plays it. Mr. Johansen claimed that his goals were very +different from those of the pirates. + +_1 The motivation was being able to play DVDs the way we want to. I don’t like +being forced to use a specific operating system or a specific player to watch +movies (or listen to music). Nor do I like being forced to watch commercials. +When your DVD player tells you “This operation is not allowed” when you try to +skip commercials, it becomes pretty clear that DRM really stands for Digital +Restrictions Management.~{Thomas Mennecke, “Slyck.com Interviews Jon Lech +Johansen” (April 4, 2005), available at +http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=733. }~ + +In Mr. Johansen’s view, CSS was simply an attempt to control consumers, an +attempt which should be a valid target for legal reverse engineering. He has a +point. There were indeed other ways to copy DVDs which did not require DeCSS +and which gave you files of more manageable size. CSS was indeed more than a +simple anticopying device. The entire scheme—the keys, the licenses, the +hardware requirements—was designed to give movie studios greater control over +their movies in a number of ways, some of them unrelated to copying. On the +other hand, he overstated the point. One function of CSS was indeed to make it +harder for the average person playing a DVD on a computer to copy the file from +the DVD to her hard disk and give it to a friend. It is very easy for the +average 14-year-old to take a commercial music CD, change the songs into +smaller files in the MP3 format, and share them with a friend. It is not as +easy to do the same thing to a DVD—not impossible, just harder—and CSS is one +of the reasons why. + +Mr. Johansen’s program, DeCSS, was quickly made available worldwide. Mirror +sites provided copies of the program and lists of such locations were easy to +find using standard search tools. One such list was provided by the online site +run by a magazine called 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. The magazine features +everything from pictures of pay phones from around the world to tips on how to +hack into computer or telephone systems. Its publisher is one Eric Corley, who +goes by the name Emmanuel Goldstein—the resistance leader in George Orwell’s +1984. + +In 1999, Universal City Studios brought suit against a number of individuals +for distributing DeCSS. The case was called Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes +et al. Corley was among the defendants. The suit prominently included a claim +that the defendants were violating the DMCA. It was in this case that the DMCA +received its first major legal challenge. + +Depending on the characterization of the facts, the case seems to be about very +different things. It could seem a classic First Amendment fight. (“Plucky +magazine publisher told copyright law forbids him from linking to other sites +on the Internet!”) Or it could seem the very essence of illegal activity. +(“Shadowy site which unashamedly caters to computer ‘hackers’ tries to spread +access to the burglar’s tools of cyberspace!”) + +Of course, most lawsuits involve conflicts over facts. Much of what lawyers do +is put the same facts into different conceptual boxes. But here, merely +describing what Corley does, what hackers are, or what 2600 magazine is all +about involves one in a profound culture clash. The best way to capture the +clash may be to quote from an early entry about Corley in Wikipedia, the +remarkable online encyclopedia. + +The encyclopedia first quotes the description of 2600 magazine from Judge Lewis +A. Kaplan, the federal district court judge who decided the Reimerdes case. + +_1 “2600: The Hacker Quarterly has included articles on such topics as how to +steal an Internet domain name, how to write more secure ASP code, access other +people’s e-mail, secure your Linux box, intercept cellular phone calls, how to +put Linux on an Xbox, how to remove spyware, and break into the computer +systems at Costco stores and Federal Express. One issue contains a guide to the +federal criminal justice system for readers charged with computer hacking. In +addition, 2600 operates a web site located at 2600.com (http://www.2600.com), +which is managed primarily by Mr. Corley and has been in existence since 1995.” + +The Wikipedia article then continues as follows: + +_1 While the judge’s tone is clearly disapproving, others would point out that +bookstores, movies and television channels are filled with material on how to +commit murder . . . and that without the efforts of the hacker community, +however ill-intentioned, computer insecurity would be even more of a problem +than it already is.~{As is often the way, these pages have now been modified on +Wikipedia. At the time of writing, this excerpt can still be found at +http://www.indopedia.org/Eric_Corley.html. }~ + +In fact, Judge Kaplan was not entirely disapproving. He mentions articles in +2600 that cover laudable or innocuous tasks, as well as others about tasks that +most readers would find objectionable and rightly think to be illegal. But the +anonymous volunteer who wrote this version of Corley’s Wikipedia entry clearly +saw the issue differently. Wikipedia does not portray the hacker community as +universally benevolent (“however ill-intentioned”), but that community is also +seen as providing a useful service rather than merely a set of how-to guides +for would-be digital burglars. + +To most people, pointing out vulnerabilities in computer security systems +seemed, at least in 1999, like telling the world that your neighbor has +forgotten to lock his door and all his possessions are there for the taking. +But to the online community, it is by no means so clear. From the perspective +of those who are knowledgeable in the field, there is a moral continuum. There +is clearly legitimate computer security and cryptography research, which +includes attempts to break into computer systems to test their defenses—that is +how one finds out they are secure, after all. Then there are “hackers.” This +term could be used to describe those who merely like to program. Richard +Stallman, for example, the originator of the free software movement, describes +himself thus. But the term could also be used for those who are interested in +security or interoperability—making two systems work together. That was Mr. +Johansen’s declared goal, after all. But some self-described hackers go +further. They believe that exploring and disclosing the weaknesses of +supposedly secure systems is intellectually fulfilling, practically important, +and protected by the First Amendment. They disclaim both moral and legal +responsibility for the consequences of their disclosures. (Or at least the +negative consequences; they frequently take credit for the positive +consequences, such as improved security.) Finally, there are “crackers,” whose +interest in gaining entry to computer systems is malicious or for financial +gain. At what point on this continuum does the activity become legally, or +morally, unacceptable? As the Reimerdes trial went on, it became clear that the +answer the DMCA gave might not be the same as the one given even by undeniably +legitimate computer scientists. + +A large number of legal arguments were involved in the Reimerdes case, but for +our purposes here the most important ones dealt with the relationship between +copyright and the First Amendment. What is that relationship? + +In one obvious sense copyright actually aids free speech. By providing an +incentive to create works, copyright “add[s] the fuel of interest to the fire +of genius,”~{Abraham Lincoln, Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions (April 6, +1858), available at +http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/discoveries.htm. }~ +and thus helps to create the system of decentralized creative production and +distribution I described in Chapter 1. But copyright also restrains speech. At +its base, it allows an individual to call upon the state to prevent someone +from speaking or expressing themselves in a particular way. This may involve a +simple refusal to let the speaker use some text, picture, verse, or story in +their message, or it may involve a refusal to let them transform it in some +way. + +Neither copyright law nor the American Constitution is blind to these dangers. +Copyright has a number of built-in safeguards. The most important of these is +that copyright only covers “original expression”—both the ideas and facts in +this book can be used by anyone without my permission. Thus, goes the theory, +the speaker’s freedom of expression is never truly restrained. The only thing I +am barred from is using your words, your exact plot, your photograph, your +music—not your facts, your ideas, your genre, the events you describe. + +That is not always enough, of course. Sometimes the problem is that the speaker +cannot paraphrase around the restraints posed by copyright. He needs to use the +particular text or image in question to convey his message. The ideas, the +facts, or a mere paraphrase of the expression would not be enough. In cases +like that copyright’s answer is “fair use.” A politician could not prevent +journalists who disagree with him from quoting his autobiography in discussing +his life. If an African-American author wishes to tell the story of Gone With +the Wind from the slaves’ perspective, she may do so in the face of the +copyright holders’ attempts to stop her. Even fair use, though, may not cover +every concern about free expression. Before World War II, Alan Cranston—later a +U.S. Senator—wanted to convince American readers that the version of Hitler’s +Mein Kampf published in the United States was distorted. He believed it to be +slanted toward American sensibilities, downplaying both anti-Semitism and +German expansionism. His solution? To publish his own English translation, +taken direct and uncut from the German edition. He wanted to prove, with +Hitler’s own words, that the United States had a dangerously distorted version +of the German leader. But this is the kind of thing copyright law forbids and +it is not clear that fair use allows. (In the end he did it anyway.)~{See Neil +Weinstock Netanel, “Locating Copyright Within the First Amendment Skein,” +Stanford Law Review 54 (2001): 15 (citing Houghton Mifflin Co. v. Noram Publ’g +Co. , 28 F. Supp. 676 (S.D.N.Y. 1939); Houghton Mifflin Co. v. Stackpole Sons, +Inc. , 104 F.2d 306 (2nd Cir. 1939) (upholding the validity of the U.S. +copyright in Mein Kampf); Anthony O. Miller, “Court Halted Dime Edition of +‘Mein Kampf’: Cranston Tells How Hitler Sued Him and Won,” Los Angeles Times, +February 14, 1988, § 1, 4 (giving Cranston’s version of the case’s underlying +facts)).}~ + +For the moment though, it is enough to realize that copyright law is not immune +from the First Amendment or from free speech concerns more generally. If we do +not notice that most of the time, it is because the internal limitations of +copyright—fair use, the idea-expression distinction, and so on—generally take +care of the First Amendment issue, not because the issue was never there. + +So what First Amendment issues did the DMCA present? Most obviously, the DMCA +gave a new right to copyright owners. By using a few simple technological +measures, they could distribute a work in a particular format and yet, because +of their new intellectual property right, they could make illegal an otherwise +lawful process of gaining access for the purposes of making fair use. Of +course, the First Amendment allows me to make fair use factually impossible. I +can do that without raising any constitutional issues by hiding my manuscript +and never letting you see it or just by using unbreakable encryption on my +digital products. It allows me to use existing conventional property rights to +make fair use illegal. If I own the only copy of the book and it is inside my +house, it would be trespass for you to enter. No First Amendment problem there. +But in passing the DMCA, Congress had created a new intellectual property right +inside copyright law itself, a law aimed directly at expression, that made it +illegal to get access for the purpose of making fair use even when you legally +bought the physical book, or the physical DVD, and now wish to quote it or +parody it. Even that is not the problem. It is that Congress cannot grant the +exclusive rights of copyright without simultaneously accompanying them by the +limitations of fair use.~{The Corley court was uncertain about this point. +(“Preliminarily, we note that the Supreme Court has never held that fair use is +constitutionally required, although some isolated statements in its opinions +might arguably be enlisted for such a requirement.”). Universal City Studios v. +Corley, 273 F.3d 429, 458 (2d Cir. 2001). In my view, both logic and those +“isolated statements” suggest that fair use is required. As I point out later, +when the Supreme Court revisited the matter in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, +537 U.S. 186 (2003), it stressed that it was precisely the internal limitations +such as fair use that made copyright law normally immune to First Amendment +scrutiny. The Court added “when . . . Congress has not altered the traditional +contours of copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is +unnecessary.” Ibid. at 221 (citing Harper & Row, 471 U.S. at 560). Yet that is +exactly what the DMCA does: alters “the traditional contours of copyright +protection” by handing out the exclusive right at the same time as it confers a +legal power to remove the privilege of fair use.}~ Regardless of what physical +constraints and tangible property rights might do to limit my ability to make +fair uses, Congress had now, by law, allowed a copyright owner to distribute a +particular work with the exclusive rights but without some of those +limitations. + +Imagine that Congress had passed the following law instead of the DMCA: “Any +copyright owner can make it illegal to make a fair use of a copyrighted work by +putting a red dot on their books, records, and films before selling them. It +shall be a crime to circumvent the red dot even if, but for the dot, the use +would have been fair.” That would be clearly unconstitutional. It gives +copyright owners a new intellectual property right to “turn off fair use” in +copyrighted works distributed to the mass market. Is the DMCA not the same +thing? + +This was the issue in Reimerdes. True, if I cut through the digital fence on a +DVD in order to excerpt a small portion in a critical documentary, I would not +be violating your copyright, but I would be violating the anticircumvention +provisions. And DeCSS seemed to be a tool for doing what the DMCA forbids. By +providing links to it, Mr. Corley and 2600 were “trafficking” in a technology +that allows others to circumvent a technological protection measure. DeCSS +could, of course, be used for purposes that did not violate copyright—to make +the DVD play on a computer running Linux, for example. It enabled various +noninfringing fair uses. It could also be used to aid illicit copying. But the +alleged violation of the DMCA had nothing to do with that. The alleged +violation of the DMCA was making the digital wire cutters available in the +first place. So one First Amendment problem with the DMCA can be stated quite +simply. It appeared to make it illegal to exercise at least some of the +limitations and exceptions copyright law needs in order to pass First Amendment +scrutiny. Or did it just make it very, very difficult to exercise those rights +legally? I could, after all, make a videotape of the DVD playing on my +television, and use that grainy, blurry image in my documentary criticizing the +filmmaker. The DMCA would not be violated, though my movie might be painful to +watch. + +The other possible First Amendment problem with the DMCA was that in regulating +programs such as DeCSS, the DMCA was actually regulating “speech.” The first +challenge to the DMCA was that, by making tools like DeCSS illegal, the DMCA +took away a constitutionally necessary escape hatch to copyright, thus making +copyright law as a whole violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of +speech. The second challenge was different. The problem was that the program +itself was speech and the DMCA was regulating it illicitly. + +The reasoning went like this. A computer program is a form of expression and +communication. The source code can even be read by human beings. True, it is an +abstract form of communication—like musical notation and mathematical +algorithms. But those are clearly protected by the First Amendment. Congress +could not make Schoenberg’s twelve-tone scale illegal or punish mathematicians +for physics equations that seemed to support a theory of the universe’s origin +other than the creationism that is currently so popular. True, the source code +is a description of a method of doing something, and the code can, if run on a +computer, produce a result—but one could argue that those attributes do not +affect the First Amendment’s protection. Neither a recipe for hash brownies nor +a player piano roll for the Nazi “Horst Wessel” song could constitutionally be +prohibited, even though actually to make the hash brownies would be illegal, +and even though the piano roll is functional (it “makes” the player piano play +the tune). True, most people cannot read computer code, but speech does not +need to be common or accessible to be protected. In fact, the courts have even +held that the choice to communicate in a particular language is +constitutionally protected in some settings. + +On the other hand, software code is undeniably functional. Lots of functional +articles can be said to have some expressive content—a gun, an airbag, a crash +helmet, a set of burglar’s tools, a computer virus. And many actions have +expressive content: a terrorist bombing, for example. Surely these could be +regulated by Congress? To the defendants, DeCSS looked like a physics equation, +a musical score, or a recipe. To the movie studios, DeCSS had all the First +Amendment significance of a crowbar, lock pick, or, for that matter, a car +bombing. The same argument was repeated over the hyperlinks that Corley and +others provided to sites which carried the DeCSS program. Speech or function? +To the defendants, forbidding 2600 to link to these sites was like preventing +the Washington Post from describing the availability of drugs on certain blocks +of 16th Street. To the movie companies, the hyperlinks were the equivalent of +loading potential buyers into a van, taking them down there, and giving them +enough money to make the purchase. + +Which of the two First Amendment arguments is more convincing? That the DMCA is +a congressionally created off-switch for fair use? Or that software code is +speech and the DMCA restricts it? Like a lot of scholars, before Reimerdes went +to trial, I thought that the first argument was by far the more powerful. I +still do. I thought the odds of the court buying the “code is speech” argument +were low. About that I was wrong, though it turned out not to matter. + +A number of the reports noted that after some initial skepticism, Judge Kaplan +had been impressed by the defendants’ expert witnesses, particularly those who +had testified that code was speech. When the ruling came out, this impression +was confirmed. Judge Kaplan agreed that code was a form of speech or +expression. But celebration was premature. Having done so, he disagreed with +the defendants’ claim that it could not be regulated. + +_1 Computer code is expressive. To that extent, it is a matter of First +Amendment concern. But computer code is not purely expressive any more than the +assassination of a political figure is purely a political statement. Code +causes computers to perform desired functions. Its expressive element no more +immunizes its functional aspects from regulation than the expressive motives of +an assassin immunize the assassin’s action. In an era in which the transmission +of computer viruses—which, like DeCSS, are simply computer code and thus to +some degree expressive—can disable systems upon which the nation depends and in +which other computer code also is capable of inflicting other harm, society +must be able to regulate the use and dissemination of code in appropriate +circumstances. The Constitution, after all, is a framework for building a just +and democratic society. It is not a suicide pact.~{See Universal City Studios, +Inc. v. Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d 294, 304–5 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).}~ + +Judge Kaplan is right in saying that there cannot be a bright-line rule +immunizing computer code from regulation merely because it has expressive +elements. The First Amendment does not protect computer viruses. But the +defendants were not arguing that computer code was constitutionally inviolable, +only that any law that regulated it had to be subject to First Amendment +scrutiny. After all, the government makes the description of how to make a +nuclear weapon classified information. That is clearly “speech,” but its +regulation is also constitutional. The First Amendment is not, and never was, +an absolute guarantee of freedom of speech. Instead, the question is whether +the law is within the realm of “the freedom of speech” guarantee, which in turn +depends on what kind of a law it is. Where does it fit in the “levels of +scrutiny” that courts have constructed to discriminate between types of +legislation affecting speech? Is the DMCA a “content-based” regulation, such as +a law forbidding labor picketing but allowing other kinds of demonstrations? +Content-based regulations are given the highest and most demanding level of +scrutiny. Alternatively, is it a “content-neutral” regulation, such as a law +that forbids talking—about any subject—in a library? To Judge Kaplan, the +answer was clear, and grounds for sarcasm. + +_1 The reason that Congress enacted the anti-trafficking provision of the DMCA +had nothing to do with suppressing particular ideas of computer programmers and +everything to do with functionality—with preventing people from circumventing +technological access control measures—just as laws prohibiting the possession +of burglar tools have nothing to do with preventing people from expressing +themselves by accumulating what to them may be attractive assortments of +implements and everything to do with preventing burglaries. + +I agree, though it is worth noting that the burglar tool analogy is a disputed +one. Johansen claimed DeCSS was more like a screwdriver—something with both +licit and illicit uses. + +So the DMCA was content-neutral regulation. That means it still has to pass a +fairly daunting legal threshold. It will only be upheld if “it furthers an +important or substantial governmental interest; if the governmental interest is +unrelated to the suppression of free expression; and if the incidental +restriction on alleged First Amendment freedoms is no greater than is essential +to the furtherance of that interest.”~{Ibid., 329–30 (quoting Turner +Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC, 512 U.S. 622, 662 (1997) (quoting U.S. v. +O’Brien, 391 U.S. 367, 377 (internal quotations omitted)).}~ Judge Kaplan felt +that the DMCA satisfied that standard. I am not so sure. Yes, the governmental +interest in protecting copyright holders’ rights is important. And yes, I must +disagree with some of my friends in the civil liberties world and say that the +government’s interest is unrelated to the suppression of free expression. But +is “the incidental restriction of First Amendment freedoms no greater than is +essential to the furtherance of that interest”? In other words, could the DMCA +have achieved its goals without imposing as great a limitation on the +expression of people like Mr. Johansen and Mr. Corley? + +Congress could have passed many laws less restrictive than the DMCA. It could +have only penalized the use of programs such as DeCSS for an illicit purpose. +If it wished to reach those who create the tools as well as use them, it could +have required proof that the creator intended them to be used for illegal +purposes. Just as we look at the government’s intention in creating the law, we +could make the intent of the software writer critical for the purposes of +assessing whether or not his actions are illegal. If I write a novel detailing +a clever way to kill someone and you use it to carry out a real murder, the +First Amendment does not allow the state to punish me. If I write a manual on +how to be a hit man and sell it to you, it may. First Amendment law is +generally skeptical of statutes that impose “strict liability” without a +requirement of intent. But Judge Kaplan believed that the DMCA made the motives +of Mr. Johansen irrelevant, except insofar as they were relevant to the +narrowly tailored exceptions of the DMCA, such as encryption research. In other +words, even if Mr. Johansen made DeCSS so that he and his friends could watch +DVDs they purchased legally on computers running Linux, they could still be +liable for breaking the DMCA. + +The DMCA’s breadth goes further than its treatment of intent. The statute could +have only made it illegal to provide a program yourself. But Judge Kaplan +interpreted it to prohibit even linking to a site where the program is to be +found. No requirement of intent. No requirement that you actually supply the +infringing program. That is a pretty broad interpretation and one which he +admits restricts expression. How could he conclude that restrictions this broad +were “no greater than essential”? From his rhetoric, the answer is clear. Judge +Kaplan believes the story of the Internet Threat I discussed in Chapter 4. He +sees DeCSS as a poison. In fact, he thinks it is worse than a poison because it +may spread to infect others. It is a disease, a virus. The DMCA is the stern +and harsh quarantine required to control it—a digital public health measure. +His reasoning is worth quoting at length. + +_1 There was a time when copyright infringement could be dealt with quite +adequately by focusing on the infringing act. . . . The copyright holder . . . +usually was able to trace the copies up the chain of distribution, find and +prosecute the infringer, and shut off the infringement at the source. In +principle, the digital world is very different. Once a decryption program like +DeCSS is written, it quickly can be sent all over the world. Every recipient is +capable not only of decrypting and perfectly copying plaintiffs’ copyrighted +DVDs, but also of retransmitting perfect copies of DeCSS and thus enabling +every recipient to do the same. . . . The process potentially is exponential +rather than linear. Indeed, the difference is illustrated by comparison of two +epidemiological models describing the spread of different kinds of disease. In +a common source epidemic, as where members of a population contract a +non-contagious disease from a poisoned well, the disease spreads only by +exposure to the common source. If one eliminates the source, or closes the +contaminated well, the epidemic is stopped. In a propagated outbreak epidemic, +on the other hand, the disease spreads from person to person. Hence, finding +the initial source of infection accomplishes little, as the disease continues +to spread even if the initial source is eliminated.~{Ibid., 331–332.}~ + +This is a very good point, and one that the critics of the DMCA sometimes gloss +over too quickly. The structure of digital replication is indeed different from +the old centralized model of copying and distribution. Instead of tracing all +illicit copies back to a single infringing printing press, we face the fear +that the machinery of piracy can be copied just as fast as the copies it allows +us to make. + +It is here that the defendants lose the battle of the metaphors. Yes, code is +speech, it conveys information. But viruses are codes and they convey +information too. Judge Kaplan explicitly invokes this comparison several times. +Biological viruses are tools for the replication of genetic information. They +subvert their hosts’ cellular programming to make copies of themselves, just as +a computer virus hijacks an infected computer and causes it to send out more +copies of the virus. True, DeCSS requires human intervention to download the +program and use it. Yet from Judge Kaplan’s language it is evident that he sees +the program not as an act of expression but as a virus spreading like wildfire. +Seen this way, the individual “choices” to download or redistribute are simply +the program’s method of spreading itself, like the irritation produced by the +cold virus that encourages sneezes and coughs, thereby transmitting the illness +to others. Just as in an epidemic, the harshest measures are called for. There +is no poisoned well here, no pirate with a printing press we can shut down. +Anyone is potentially an infringer. Individuals cannot be presumed to be +healthy. We cannot give their immune systems, or their motives, the benefit of +the doubt. Instead we must see them as potential carriers. The healthy must be +quarantined as well as the sick. Facing such a danger, Judge Kaplan agrees that +Congress needed to be draconian. We cannot wait for illegal copying. We must +strike preemptively at the technology that might enable it. There is no place +for inquiries into “intent” here; no way that we can restrict liability to +those who actually provide the program. Thus, though “code is speech” and the +DMCA does incidentally restrict expression, Judge Kaplan concludes that its +restraints are no greater than is necessary. + +There are three questions here. The first is whether Congress was right. The +second is whether, in the context of the movie industry, we can see evidence of +the evil it needed to combat. The third question is very different: whether the +DMCA is constitutional. In my opinion, the answer to questions one and two is +no, for the reasons outlined in Chapter 4’s analysis of the Internet Threat. +Yes, cheaper copying can increase the rate of illicit copying, but it also +lowers advertising costs and offers new business models—Netflix, downloads on +demand, viral distribution of trailers, and so on. The technology helps as well +as hurts. It does not help the movie industry as much as it might help the +music industry, which can more easily distribute its products over the +Internet. But the Internet also does not pose as much danger to movies as it +does to music. The movie industry’s doomsaying aside, there is no exact movie +equivalent of Napster and there is unlikely to be one in the near future.~{One +empirical study seems to challenge this assumption, though at modest levels. +Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel, “Piracy on the Silver Screen,” Journal of +Industrial Economics 55 (2007): 379–395. Rob and Waldfogel surveyed college +students—traditionally a population that engages in high levels of downloading +since they have “free” and extremely high speed Internet connections, lots of +leisure time, and low disposable income. Even among this group, the authors +found that total levels of downloading were low—2.1 percent of paid +consumption. The authors also assumed that all unpaid downloading or DVD +burning was equal to piracy—an assumption that is clearly false. The Sony case +makes that clear. In fact, Rob and Waldfogel found a positive relationship +between second time unpaid viewings and future paid viewings; watching the +movie a second time on a downloaded or privately made copy burned from the +airwaves actually was associated with more paid purchases. The authors were +skeptical of any causal link, however. Ibid., 389.}~ + +This is not just because movies are longer and harder to download than songs. +It is because most people only watch a film once. Most people do not want a +library of two thousand films to play again and again. Music is a repeated +experience good in a way that movies simply are not, and that social fact +profoundly affects the likelihood of downloading as opposed to rental. The +transient song on a radio or an Internet stream is not an adequate substitute +for possessing the song permanently—something which costs a lot more. Apart +from kids’ movies, which can be used to induce catatonia in one’s progeny time +and again, and a few classic favorites, most people do not want to own movies. +Watching the film on television or renting it for a night is perfectly +satisfactory. Both of these involve little hassle or cost. The content +industries are fond of saying “you cannot compete with free.” But this is +simply not true. Cheap and easily acquired goods of certified quality compete +very well with free goods of uncertain quality whose acquisition involves some +difficulty. This is one of the main reasons the movie companies were wrong in +the Sony case. + +Thus while Judge Kaplan’s discussion of the looming digital Black Death is +nicely apocalyptic, it does not seem very accurate. How many of your friends +download movies illicitly over the Internet, let alone movies that were ripped +from DVDs? Yes, it can be done. But the actual descriptions of the process in +the Reimerdes case smack more of bathos than terror. + +_1 Although the process is computationally intensive, plaintiffs’ expert +decrypted a store-bought copy of Sleepless in Seattle in 20 to 45 minutes. . . +. The decryption of a CSS-protected DVD is only the beginning of the tale, as +the decrypted file is very large. . . . One solution to this problem, however, +is DivX, a compression utility available on the Internet that is promoted as a +means of compressing decrypted motion picture files to manageable size. . . . +While the compressed sound and graphic files then must be synchronized, a +tedious process that took plaintiffs’ expert between 10 and 20 hours, the task +is entirely feasible. . . . At trial, defendants repeated, as if it were a +mantra, the refrain that plaintiffs, as they stipulated, have no direct +evidence of a specific occasion on which any person decrypted a copyrighted +motion picture with DeCSS and transmitted it over the Internet. But that is +unpersuasive. Plaintiffs’ expert expended very little effort to find someone in +an IRC chat room who exchanged a compressed, decrypted copy of The Matrix, one +of plaintiffs’ copyrighted motion pictures, for a copy of Sleepless in Seattle. +While the simultaneous electronic exchange of the two movies took approximately +six hours, the computers required little operator attention during the interim. + +So the epidemic threat that hangs over the movie industry consists of the +danger that someone will spend fifteen minutes decrypting and ten to twenty +hours tediously synchronizing a movie that is then available for a speedy +six-hour download? + +Admittedly, someone only needs to do the synchronizing once. There are newer +tools that make the task easier. And we could improve the download time. But +even so, would you bother? Faced with the colossal expense and hassle of +renting the same movie at Blockbuster for $3, some consumers might prefer this +process, I suppose. But I would not sell my shares in movie studios quite yet. +In fact, the real threat to movie studios is the large-scale criminal +distribution of illicitly copied DVDs—copied bit for bit from the original. The +distributors of those do not need to use programs like DeCSS. A more distant +threat comes from legal recordings from television made on TiVo’s and +ReplayTVs—where consumers’ actions are legal and CSS is not an issue. So far as +we can tell, there is no measurable effect of illicit digital downloads on +sales or rentals of DVDs. We could go through the process Judge Kaplan +describes, I suppose, just as when the VCR was invented we could have taped +movies from television and swapped them with our friends. But as the movie +studios discovered after the Sony case, most of us would rather just rent the +movie. Because something is possible does not mean it will happen. + +So in my view, Congress generally overestimated the threat posed by the digital +world and underestimated the benefits. In addition, the movie industry is a +weak place to make the case for the necessity of the DMCA. Fine, but that is +not the legal issue here. The constitutionality of the DMCA does not turn on +whether the DMCA was a good idea. That is not the court’s decision to make. The +question is not even whether the particular industry involved is, in reality, +facing much of a threat from digital downloading. The law, after all, exists +for all digital works, not just the ones at issue here. The question is whether +the restriction on speech imposed by the DMCA was “no greater than is +essential.” And that is a harder question. + +I still disagree with Judge Kaplan. A more narrowly tailored statute could have +accomplished the DMCA’s legitimate goals without impinging as greatly on +expression. I think that the rhetoric of the Internet Threat blinded Judge +Kaplan to some important issues and led him to overestimate the danger and thus +the severity of the measures necessary to combat it. Thus, even under the “code +is speech” part of the analysis, I think the DMCA fails First Amendment +scrutiny. But if we are confining ourselves to the expression inherent in the +software itself, I acknowledge that it is a close call. + +Sadly, Judge Kaplan spent much less time on the other First Amendment argument +against the DMCA—that it is unconstitutional because it gives copyright holders +a new intellectual property entitlement, created by Congress under the +Copyright Clause, a legal power to deprive users of a constitutionally required +limitation on copyright’s exclusive rights. In my view, he also framed the +argument wrongly when he did discuss it. To be fair, these problems can partly +be traced to the fact that the defendants spent most of their energy on the +argument that code was expression, paying less attention to everything else. As +Judge Kaplan explained it, the claim was that the DMCA might have the effect of +restricting an alleged fair use right of access to copyrighted material. +Predictably enough, he responded that there was no such right of access. +Copyright holders could always lock up the book or restrict entrance to the +gallery. In any event, while fair use of DVDs might be curtailed, he argued +that most movies are also available on videotape. Even if the film were only +available on DVD, the prospective fair user could write down the words and +quote them, or record the sound from the screen. Finally, Judge Kaplan pointed +out that even if the DMCA might allow a significant erosion of fair use to +develop over time, such a problem was not present here. Those making First +Amendment claims are sometimes allowed by courts to show that, even if the law +as it applied to them were constitutional, it would restrict the First +Amendment rights of others. Judge Kaplan declined to apply that doctrine here. +In effect, he said “come back when there is a problem.” + +On appeal, the case was decided by a panel led by Judge Jon Newman. Here the +fair use argument received more attention but the result was the same: “Come +back when there is a problem.” Significantly, both courts pointed out another +concern. The DMCA could effectively make copyright perpetual because even +though the copyright term would expire, the legally protected encryption would +continue, and tools such as DeCSS, which would have allowed access to the +public domain work, would be illegal.~{Admittedly, section 1201 only affects +works protected under the copyright act, so arguably the legal protection of +the digital fence would expire with the copyright term. But even if the courts +interpreted the statute this way, two problems would remain. First, since the +DMCA prohibited the trafficking in tools which allowed the breaking of the +encryption, the law would have effectively forbidden the production of wire +cutters for gaining access to identically encrypted public domain +works—remember Judge Kaplan’s discussion of the irrelevance of Mr. Johansen’s +motives. Second, it would be trivially easy to add a trivial amount of new +copyrighted material to the work that had fallen into the public domain. Access +to the public domain work would then be prohibited for another period of life +plus seventy years. And so on. The Copyright Office holds hearings on the +question of whether there are any “classes of work” that need exemption from +the DMCA’s provisions. So far, those exemptions have been highly restrictive in +application.}~ This is a major issue because it appears to violate both the +First Amendment and the Copyright Clause’s requirement of a limited time. The +defendants did not spend adequate time on this argument, however, and the +courts again left it for later consideration. + +The court of appeals saw the defendants’ argument in just the same way as Judge +Kaplan had seen it: a claim that there was a fair use right of actual access to +the finest version of every work in every medium, on which the DMCA put a +practical limitation. Such a claim was easy to dismiss. There was no such right +of guaranteed practical access. Copyright owners could restrict the practical +ability to exercise fair use in many ways without the Constitution being +involved. In addition, in a world where copyrighted content is frequently +available in both analog and digital form, the actual effects of the DMCA might +be trivial and were, in any event, constitutionally acceptable. Judge Newman +repeated Judge Kaplan’s point that one could always make fair use of the work +in a way the DMCA did not reach, such as by videotaping a picture of the +screen. + +_1 The fact that the resulting copy will not be as perfect or as manipulable as +a digital copy obtained by having direct access to the DVD movie in its digital +form, provides no basis for a claim of unconstitutional limitation of fair use. +A film critic making fair use of a movie by quoting selected lines of dialogue +has no constitutionally valid claim that the review (in print or on television) +would be technologically superior if the reviewer had not been prevented from +using a movie camera in the theater, nor has an art student a valid +constitutional claim to fair use of a painting by photographing it in a museum. +Fair use has never been held to be a guarantee of access to copyrighted +material in order to copy it by the fair user’s preferred technique or in the +format of the original. + +Once the issue is framed this way, the case has been lost. I would argue that +there are three baseline errors here: a focus on “affirmative rights of access” +as opposed to limits on Congress’s power in handing out exclusive rights over +expression without their constitutionally necessary limitations, a focus on +practical effects of the provisions rather than on formal constitutional +limitations on the copyright system over all classes of works, and a confusion +between intellectual property rights and physical property rights that goes to +the heart of the Jefferson Warning discussed in Chapter 2. The question is not +whether users have a constitutionally protected right of practical access to a +preferred version of a work. The question is whether it violates the First +Amendment for Congress to give to copyright holders an intellectual property +right to exempt their copyrighted works in some formats from fair use and other +provisions that are necessary for copyright law in general to be +constitutional. + +Remember my earlier example. What if Congress amended Section 1201 to say “Any +copyright owner can make it illegal to make a fair use of a copyrighted work by +putting a red dot on their books, records, and films before selling them. It +shall be a crime to circumvent the red dot even if, but for the dot, the use +would have been fair”? This statute, I think, is clearly unconstitutional. It +would be no answer to say that some owners will not use the red dot, and even +for those that do, there will be older, dotless versions still available. It is +irrelevant that I might be able to copy down the crucial lines of the book over +your shoulder while you read it and thus claim that I, personally, had not +circumvented the dot. The unconstitutionality of the statute does not turn on +whether the dots might fall off because of bad adhesive, or whether there are +many secondhand bookstores in the area, in which undotted volumes can be found. +Even if the red dot rule were only to be applied to hardback books, or graphic +novels, or cassette tapes, it would still be unconstitutional. Nor do we have +to wait until the entire marketplace is dominated by red-dotted products before +considering the issue. It is no answer to say that even before the red dot +rule, copyright holders could always have hidden their works, or locked them in +safes, or even negotiated individual contracts with the purchasers that have +the effect of limiting fair use. That way of framing it just misunderstands the +issue on a fundamental level. The claim is not about the happenstance of +practical access or the way that a copyright holder can use physical control of +an object or existing tangible property rights to undercut fair use. + +The point is that Congress violates the First Amendment when, with respect to +any work, it gives me an intellectual property right to prohibit copying and +distribution of an expressive work sold in the marketplace and an additional +legal power to opt out of the limitations contained in Section 107 over that +work. The bundle of rights conveyed by the DMCA does exactly that. It is not +the DMCA alone that we must analyze. The question is whether Congress can give +the exclusive rights contained in Section 106 of the Copyright Act over a +particular class of works (say digital works), if it also gives a new right to +prohibit citizens from gaining access to those works for the purposes of making +a fair use. If Judge Kaplan and Judge Newman are correct, then the DMCA gives +an entirely new intellectual property right (technically, a legal power) to the +copyright holders to do exactly that. To put it the other way around, the DMCA +subtracts from the citizen’s bundle of entitlements under federal copyright +law, the right (technically, lawyers would call it a privilege) to gain access +to a work legally in his possession for the purpose of making a fair use. It is +that rule change that is unconstitutional, I would argue, and the way Judge +Kaplan and Judge Newman frame that issue makes them miss the point. + +Framing is important. The confusions that I have talked about in this book all +make an appearance. It starts with the whole controversy being framed by the +Internet Threat story line from Chapter 4. Because Judge Kaplan is convinced +that every citizen is now a potential infringer, a potentially infectious virus +carrier, he is ill disposed to listen to claims about fair use. Civil liberties +claims do not do very well in epidemics. It is only right for him to defer to +Congress’s perception of the problem and the solution, of course. But he buys +so deeply into the magnitude of the threat, the extent of the potential piracy +pandemic, that it is very hard for him to take seriously the idea that even +here there is a legitimate constitutional fair use claim. + +The Sony Axiom from Chapter 4 is also ignored, or at least undervalued. As I +pointed out there, without a robust set of exceptions and limitations on +copyright, the idea that cheaper copying requires greater control will +inexorably drive us toward the position that the technologies of cheaper +reproduction must be put under the governance of copyright holders. The DMCA +continues that logic; its drafters concluded that the right to get access to +digital works for purposes of making a fair use must be taken from the bundle +of rights possessed by citizens, while the right to enjoin both access and the +technologies of access is added to those of copyright holders. Never mind the +correctness of such a conclusion as a matter of policy. Are there +constitutional limitations on Congress taking such an action? Kaplan and Newman +in effect tell us, “not yet.” + +More important than the perception of the threat is the understanding of what +intellectual property is all about. In Chapter 2, Jefferson warned us that +intellectual property rights are not like physical property rights. In +analyzing the DMCA, where do we turn for analogies? To physical property, +violence, and theft. The cases analyzing the DMCA are full of analogies to +trespass, to breaking and entering, to burglars’ tools, and to safecrackers. +Private property carries a lot of baggage with it, but we know it well—it is +the place we naturally turn for insight. Even I, in order to point out some of +the difficulties with those analogies, had to turn to farmers and barbed wire +and public rights-of-way along highways. There is nothing wrong with analogies. +They help us understand things that are new by comparing them to things we +think we understand better. Analogies are only bad when they ignore the key +difference between the two things being analyzed. That is what happens here. + +Jefferson reminded us that intellectual property rights are clearly artifacts +of state creation, monopolies whose internal limitations in scope, duration, +and so on are just as important as the rights themselves. Jefferson doubts +whether even property rights over land can be understood as natural and +absolute—copyrights and patents, which cover subject matter that can be +infinitely reproduced without diminishing its substance, clearly cannot. They +frequently involve a claim to control purchasers’ behavior with respect to some +aspect of an artifact after it has been sold to them in the marketplace, making +simpleminded analogies to “breaking and entering” inappropriate—the extent of +the property in question is precisely the issue in dispute. (When Johansen was +tried in Norway under the national computer crime law, the court laconically +observed that he had bought the DVDs, and one cannot break into one’s own +property—effectively turning the analogy on its head.) Jefferson starts from +the baseline that monopoly is the exception and freedom is the rule—any +limitations on that freedom have to be justified. That is why he always +discusses the right and the limitations on the right as an inseparable pair. +One cannot discuss them in isolation. + +Kaplan and Newman are fine, thoughtful judges. They do not altogether ignore +those points. But look how the analysis is set up. At several points in the +discussion, there seems to be the assumption that copyright owners have +entitlements to total control as of right and that fair use is a mere lucky +loophole which, because it can be negated by the happenstance of whether one +can get physical access, can hardly have major First Amendment status. They +keep pointing out that physical control and tangible property rights frequently +allow copyright holders to make fair use impracticable. “And so what?” +Jefferson might have responded. This is a classic non sequitur. The question is +whether the Congress has the power to add a new right of access-denial to the +intellectual property monopoly it is constructing, undermining—as to some works +and some fair uses—the balance that the law sets up. The citizen is not +pleading for a new right of access, trumping all physical restraint and +tangible property rights. The citizen is claiming that Congress has no power to +give exclusive rights to restrain copying of digital content while +simultaneously taking away the citizen’s existing right to get access to that +content for the purposes of fair use—at least in those cases where access is +physically possible and violates no other property right, real or intellectual. + +The Constitution does not require the United States to break into President +Nixon’s desk to get me his tapes, buy me a tape recorder, or give me a right to +18.5 minutes on the broadcast airwaves to play them. But if I can get access to +the tapes legally, it does forbid the government from giving President Nixon +the power to put a red dot on those tapes and thus claim an intellectual +property right to stop me playing them on TV or digitizing them to make the +sounds clearer. The restraints imposed by physical happenstance and tangible +property rights are different from those imposed by copyright—a congressionally +created monopoly over expression. We cannot assume because one is +constitutionally acceptable that the others are too. Jefferson understood that, +and his analysis can help us even in a constitutional conflict over a +technology he could hardly have dreamt of. (Though perhaps with Jefferson, this +is a bad bet.) + +The same point comes up in a different way when the court disconnects the fair +use discussion from the exclusive rights discussion. The question is not “Do I +have a constitutionally protected right of physical access to a preferred +version of a movie, so as to make my task easy?” That gets the court caught up +in questions of when a majority of movies will only be available on DVD, or how +poor a substitute the analog version would be, or how many fair uses will +require actually cutting a digital fence. But all of these inquiries miss the +point. The question is “Can Congress hand out the exclusive rights of copyright +over digital works if it does not accompany those rights with the suite of +limitations that the court has repeatedly said “saves” copyright from violating +the First Amendment?” The proportion of digital works to the total number of +works produced in other formats is irrelevant. As to these works, the rule is +unconstitutional. But what about the number or proportion of types of fair uses +affected? That is more relevant but still not dispositive in the way Kaplan and +Newman imagined. True, not every trivial statutory modification of fair use +makes copyright unconstitutional. But this is not a trivial modification: over +an entire class of works, copyright owners are given a legal power to deprive +users of their privilege to gain otherwise lawful access for the purposes of +fair use. If you give the digital filmmaker the exclusive rights of copyright +but forbid the film professor from going through the otherwise lawful process +of parodying or quoting, that rule is unconstitutional, no matter how many +other fair uses are unaffected. If the copyright law were amended to forbid +journalists playing, on a Friday, excerpts of legally acquired red-dotted tapes +made by presidents whose last name begins with N, it would still be +unconstitutional. + +The legal implementation of this conclusion would be simple. It would be +unconstitutional to punish an individual for gaining access in order to make a +fair use. However, if they cut down the digital fence to make illicit copies, +both the cutting and the copying would be illegal. But what about the +prohibition of trafficking in digital wire cutters, technologies such as DeCSS? +There the constitutional question is harder. I would argue that the First +Amendment requires an interpretation of the antitrafficking provisions that +comes closer to the ruling in the Sony case. If Mr. Johansen did indeed make +DeCSS to play DVDs on his Linux computer, and if that were indeed a substantial +noninfringing use, then it cannot be illegal for him to develop the technology. +But I accept that this is a harder line to draw constitutionally. About my +first conclusion, though, I think the argument is both strong and clear. + +Ironically, there is some support for my claim and it comes from an even +higher, if not uniformly more thoughtful, set of judges than Newman and Kaplan. +In the depressing case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Supreme Court upheld +retrospective copyright term extensions against a variety of constitutional +challenges. (Full disclosure: I assisted in the preparation of an amicus curiae +brief in the case.) One of those challenges was based on the First Amendment. +The fairly reasonable claim was that Congress could not retroactively lock up +an entire twenty-year swathe of culture that had already been produced. Such a +law would be all restraint of expression, performance, republication, adaption, +and so on, with no incentive benefits. The Court was unconvinced. But it did +say: + +_1 To the extent such assertions raise First Amendment concerns, copyright’s +built-in free speech safeguards are generally adequate to address them. We +recognize that the D.C. Circuit spoke too broadly when it declared copyrights +“categorically immune from challenges under the First Amendment.” . . . But +when, as in this case, Congress has not altered the traditional contours of +copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is unnecessary.~{Eldred +v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003) at 221 (citing Harper & Row, 471 U.S. at +560).}~ + +The DMCA, of course, does exactly this. As to digital works it alters the +“traditional contours of copyright protection” in a way that affects +“copyright’s built-in free speech safeguards.” That is what the Farmers’ Tale +was all about. Perhaps one day, in a case not involving a Norwegian teenager, a +hacker magazine run by a long-haired editor with an Orwellian nom de plume, and +an obscure technology that is accused of posing apocalyptic threats to the +American film industry, that point will come out more clearly. + +But the issue of speech regulation is only half of the story. Intellectual +property rights over digital technologies affect not only speech, but the +framework of competition and markets as well, as the next example makes clear. + +2~ The Apple of Forbidden Knowledge: The DMCA and Competition + +You could tell it was a bizarre feud by the statement Apple issued, one +strangely at odds with the Californian Zen-chic the company normally projects. +“We are stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a +hacker to break into the iPod, and we are investigating the implications of +their actions under the DMCA and other laws.”~{Rob Pegoraro, “RealPlayer’s +iPod-Compatible Update ‘Stunned’ Apple,” Washington Post (August 8, 2004), +F6.}~ + +What vile thing had RealNetworks done? They had developed a program called +Harmony that would allow iPod owners to buy songs from Real’s Music Store and +play them on their own iPods. That’s it. So why all the outrage? It turns out +that like the story of DeCSS, this little controversy has a lot to teach us +about the landscape of intellectual property disputes, about the mental +topography of the high-tech economy. But where the DeCSS case was a war of +metaphors around the boundaries of freedom of expression, the iPod story is +about ways in which intellectual property marks the limits of competition. + +Apple iPods can be used to store all kinds of material, from word processing +documents to MP3 files. If you want to use these popular digital music players +to download copy-protected music, though, you have only one source: Apple’s +iTunes service, which offers songs at 99 cents a pop in the United States, 79 +pence in the United Kingdom. If you try to download copy-protected material +from any other service, the iPod will refuse to play it. Or at least, that had +been the case until Real managed to make their Harmony service compatible. + +Real’s actions meant that consumers had two sources of copy-protected music for +their iPods. Presumably all the virtues of competition, including improved +variety and lowered prices, would follow. The iPod owners would be happy. But +Apple was not. The first lesson of the story is how strangely people use the +metaphors of tangible property in new-economy disputes. How exactly had Real +“broken into” the iPod? It had not broken into my iPod, which is after all my +iPod. If I want to use Real’s service to download music to my own device, +where’s the breaking and entering? + +What Real had done was make the iPod “interoperable” with another format. If +Boyle’s word processing program can convert Microsoft Word files into Boyle’s +format, allowing Word users to switch programs, am I “breaking into Word”? +Well, Microsoft might think so, but most of us do not. So leaving aside the +legal claim for a moment, where is the ethical foul? + +Apple was saying (and apparently believed) that Real had broken into something +different from my iPod or your iPod. They had broken into the idea of an iPod. +(I imagine a small, platonic white rectangle, presumably imbued with the spirit +of Steve Jobs.) Their true sin was trying to understand the iPod so that they +could make it do things that Apple did not want it to do. As an ethical matter, +does figuring out how things work, in order to compete with the original +manufacturer, count as breaking and entering? In the strange netherworld +between hardware and software, device and product, the answer is often a +morally heartfelt “yes!” I would stress “morally heartfelt.” It is true +manufacturers want to make lots of money and would rather not have competitors. +Bob Young of Red Hat claims “every business person wakes up in the morning and +says ‘how can I become a monopolist?’ ” Beyond that, though, innovators +actually come to believe that they have the moral right to control the uses of +their goods after they are sold. This isn’t your iPod, it’s Apple’s iPod. + +Yet even if they believe this, we don’t have to agree. In the material world, +when a razor manufacturer claims that a generic razor blade maker is “stealing +my customers” by making compatible blades, we simply laugh. The “hacking” there +consists of looking at the razor and manufacturing a blade that will fit. To +say this is somehow immoral seems laughable. Is the conclusion changed when the +information about compatibility is inscribed in binary code and silicon +circuits, rather than the molded plastic of a razor cartridge? What if ensuring +the “fit” between the two products is not a matter of making sure the new +blades snugly connect to the razor but of making sure the software embedded in +my generic product sends the right code to the original product in order to be +recognized? Our moral intuitions are a little less confident here. All kinds of +bad policy can flourish in that area of moral uncertainty. + +This leads us to the law. Surely Apple’s suggestion that the DMCA might +prohibit what Real had done is as baseless as their moral argument? In the +United States, the answer is “probably,” at least if the courts continue in the +direction they are currently taking, but it is a closer call than you would +think. Internationally, the answer is even less certain. That is where the iPod +war provides its second new-economy lesson. Think for a moment about the way +that the law shapes the business choices in this dispute. + +In a competitive market, Apple would choose whether to make the iPod an open +platform, able to work with everyone’s music service, or to try to keep it +closed, hoping to extract more money by using consumers’ loyalty to the +hardware to drive them to the tied music service. If they attempted to keep it +closed, competitors would try to make compatible products, acting like the +manufacturers of generic razor blades or printer cartridges. + +The war would be fought out on the hardware (and software) level, with the +manufacturer of the platform constantly seeking to make the competing products +incompatible, to bad-mouth their quality, and to use fear, uncertainty, and +doubt to stop consumers from switching. (Apple’s actual words were: “When we +update our iPod software from time to time, it is highly likely that Real’s +Harmony technology will cease to work with current and future iPods.”) +Meanwhile the competitors would race to untangle the knots as fast as the +platform manufacturer could tie them. If the consumers got irritated enough +they could give up their sunk costs and switch to another product altogether. + +All of this seems fine, even if it represents the kind of socially wasteful +arms race that led critics of capitalism to prophesy its inevitable doom. +Competition is good and competition will often require interoperability. But +what do we mean by competition? Is it competition if I assassinate your +employees or poison the food in your restaurant? If I trespass on your land in +order to sell a competing product? If I break into your safe to steal your +trade secrets, use my monopoly position in the market to impose resale price +agreements, or violate your patent? It is the law that draws the line between +competition and theft, between virtuous competitive imitation and illicit +“piracy.” + +Sometimes we need to give innovators property rights that allow them to prevent +second-comers from free riding on their efforts. We have to do so because it is +necessary to encourage future innovation. On the other hand, sometimes we not +only allow the second-comer to free ride, we positively encourage it, believing +that this is an integral part of competition and that there are adequate +incentives to encourage innovation without the state stepping in. Intellectual +property policy, indeed a large part of the policy behind all property rights, +is about drawing the line between the two situations. Too far in one direction +and innovation suffers because potential investors realize good ideas will +immediately be copied. Too far in the other direction and monopolies hurt both +competition and future innovation. + +Imagine you are the first person to invest in getting the public to eat +burritos for breakfast, or to place a petrol station at a certain crossroads, +or to clip papers together with a folded bit of wire. In each case we give you +some property rights. The fast-food vendor may own a trademarked phrase or +jingle that the public learns to associate with his product. Since the patent +office issued a patent for the sealed and crimped “peanut butter and jelly” +sandwich I described at the beginning of the book, even a patent is not out of +the question if your disgusting concoction is sufficiently novel and +nonobvious. But we should not allow you to have a patent over all burritos, or +burritos for breakfast, still less over the idea of fast food. As for the paper +clip maker, there might be a trademark over the particular paper clip, but the +idea of folding wire to secure paper stays in the public domain. The owner of +the petrol station gets physical ownership of the land, but cannot stop a +second-comer from setting up shop across the road, even if the first-comer’s +labor, capital, and effort proved that the location is a good one. We +positively encourage follow-on imitation in those cases. + +Now how about the case in point? What does Apple get in the way of property +rights? Think back to my description of the intellectual property system in +Chapter 1. They can get patents over those aspects of the iPod—both hardware +and software—that are sufficiently innovative. Patents are what we use to +protect inventions. They also get a copyright over the various pieces of +software involved. That protects them only against someone who copies their +code, not someone who writes new software to do the same thing. Copyrights are +what we use to protect original expression. They get rights under trademark law +over the name and perhaps parts of the design of the product—maybe the +distinctive look of the iPod—though that is a bit more complex. All of these +rights, plus being the first to break into the market in a big way, the +brilliance of the design, and the tight integration between the hardware and +the service, produce a formidable competitive advantage. The iPod is a very +good product. + +Now if a competitor infringes any of Apple’s rights, for example by making a +literal copy of the code, using their trademark in a way the law does not +allow, or infringing on one of their patents, then Apple can shut them down and +extract hefty damages. Quite right, too. But should they be able to prevent +someone from making an interoperable product, provided they do not violate any +of these existing rights in the process? Laws like the DMCA make that question +more complicated. + +Nowadays, there is software in many, many more products than you would imagine. +Your watch, your phone, your printer, your thermostat, your garage door opener, +your refrigerator, your microwave, your television—the odds are that if you +bought them in the last ten years, they have some software component. In the +1970s the courts and Congress had concluded that software could be copyrighted +as original expression, like a song or a novel, as well as being patented when +it was novel, nonobvious, and useful. Frequently, different aspects of the same +program will be covered by copyright and by patent. But software is a machine +made of words, the machine of the digital age. That fact already causes some +problems for our competition policy. Will the exceptions and limitations +designed to deal with a copyright over a novel work adequately when they are +applied to Microsoft Windows? That issue was already unclear. With the DMCA, we +have added another crucial problem. Where there is copyrighted software there +can be digital fences around it. If the copyright owner can forbid people to +cut these fences to gain access to the software, then it can effectively +enlarge its monopoly, capture tied services, and prohibit generic competition. + +It was just this line of thought that led some other companies to do more than +merely make threatening noises about the DMCA. Lexmark makes printers. But it +also makes lots of money off the replacement ink or toner cartridges for those +printers. In some cases, in fact, that is where printer companies make the +majority of their profits. As a result, they are not exactly keen on generic +replacements. Chamberlain makes garage door opener systems. But they also sell +replacements for the controllers—the little devices that you use to trigger the +door. Lawyers from both of those firms looked at the DMCA and saw a chance to +do something most companies would love to do; to make generic competition +illegal. Lexmark designed their printer program so that it would not accept a +toner cartridge unless it received the correct “checksum” or validation number. +So far, this looks no different from the razor manufacturer trying to make it +difficult to manufacture a compatible replacement blade. Generic competitors +now had to embed chips in their printer cartridges which would produce the +correct code, otherwise they would not work in Lexmark printers. + +Static Control Components is a North Carolina company that manufactures chips +whose main function is to send the correct code to the printer program. With +this chip implanted in them, generic cartridges would work in Lexmark printers. +Lexmark’s response could have been to change their program, rendering the chip +obsolete, just as Apple could change the iTunes software to lock out Real +Music’s Rhapsody. Doing so would have been quite within their rights. Indeed it +is a standard part of the interoperability wars. Instead, Lexmark sued Static +Controls, claiming, among other things, a violation of the DMCA.~{Lexmark, +Int’l v. Static Control Companies, Inc. , 387 F.3d 522 (6th Cir. 2004).}~ Like +Apple in the press release I quoted earlier, Lexmark clearly saw this as a kind +of digital breaking and entering. This was their printer, their printer +program, their market for replacement cartridges. Static was just helping a +bunch of cheats camouflage their generic cartridges as authentic Lexmark +cartridges. Translated into the legal language of the DMCA the claim is a +little different, but still recognizable. Static was “trafficking” in a device +that allowed the “circumvention of a technical protection measure” used to +prevent “access to a copyrighted work”—namely the computer program inside the +printer. That is behavior that the DMCA forbids. + +The garage door company, Chamberlain—who also claimed to be concerned about the +security of their garage doors—made a similar argument. In order to get the +garage door to open, the generic replacement opener had to provide the right +code to the program in the actual motor system. That program is copyrighted. +The code controls “access” to it. Suddenly, the manufacturers of generic +printer cartridges and garage door openers start to look rather like Jon +Johansen. + +Surely the courts did not accept this argument? Bizarrely enough, some of them +did—at least at first. But perhaps it was not so bizarre. The DMCA was indeed a +radical new law. It did shift the boundaries of power between intellectual +property owners and others. And intellectual property rights are always about +restraining competition, defining what is legitimate and what is not—that is +what they do. There was a respectable argument that these devices did in fact +violate the DMCA. In fact, it was respectable enough to convince a federal +judge. The district court judge in the Lexmark case concluded that Lexmark was +likely to win on both the DMCA claim and on a more traditional copyright claim +and issued an injunction against Static Control. In Skylink, the case involving +garage door openers, by contrast, the district court held that the universal +garage door opener did not violate the DMCA. Both cases were appealed and both +appeals courts sided with the generic manufacturers, saying that the DMCA did +not prohibit this kind of access—merely making a computer program work the way +it was supposed to. + +The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) heard the Skylink +appeal. In a remarkably far-reaching decision, the court effectively took many +of the positions that Mr. Corley’s lawyers had argued for in the DeCSS case, +but they did so not to protect speech, but to protect competition. In fact, +they implied that taking Chamberlain’s side in the case would silently overrule +the antitrust statutes. They also interpreted the new right created by the DMCA +so as to add an implicit limitation. In their construction, merely gaining +access is not illegal; only gaining access for the purpose of violating the +copyright holders’ rights violates the statute. The Reimerdes court had been +willing to accept that the new access right allows a copyright holder to +prohibit “fair uses as well as foul.” When Chamberlain made the same argument +as to their garage door opener program, the CAFC was incredulous. + +_1 Such an entitlement [as the one Chamberlain claims] would go far beyond the +idea that the DMCA allows copyright owner to prohibit “fair uses . . . as well +as foul.” Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d at 304. Chamberlain’s proposed +construction would allow copyright owners to prohibit exclusively fair uses +even in the absence of any feared foul use. It would, therefore, allow any +copyright owner, through a combination of contractual terms and technological +measures, to repeal the fair use doctrine with respect to an individual +copyrighted work—or even selected copies of that copyrighted work.~{Chamberlain +Group, Inc. v. Skylink Tech., Inc. , 381 F.3d 1178 (Fed. Cir. 2004). This of +course was exactly the claim that Mr. Corley’s lawyers made, to no avail.}~ + +There are multiple ironies here. The CAFC rarely meets an intellectual property +right it does not like. It has presided over a twenty-year expansion of +American patent law that many scholars find indefensible. But when (for dubious +jurisdictional reasons) it sorties beyond its traditional ambit of patent law, +it is stunned by the potential expansiveness of the DMCA. Then there is the +comparison with the Reimerdes case. How interesting that the First Amendment +and concerns about free expression have comparatively little bite when applied +to the DMCA, but antitrust and concerns about competition require that we +curtail it. After all, the heart of Mr. Johansen’s argument was that he had to +write the DeCSS program in order to play his own DVDs on his own computer—to +get access to his own DVDs, just as the purchaser of a replacement garage door +control is getting access to the program that operates his own garage door. +Indeed, Mr. Johansen’s criticism of CSS was that it allowed the movie +companies, “through a combination of contractual terms and technological +measures, to repeal the fair use doctrine with respect to an individual +copyrighted work.” Mr. Corley echoed those claims. + +Of course, the situations are not identical. The key limitation in Skylink is +that the court saw no threat of “foul use.” The Reimerdes court could see +little else. On the other hand, the rulings are not easily reconciled. The +Skylink court cannot imagine that Congress would want to give the copyright +holder a new “property” right to prevent access unconnected to any underlying +copyright violation. + +_1 As we have seen, Congress chose to create new causes of action for +circumvention and for trafficking in circumvention devices. Congress did not +choose to create new property rights. . . . Were we to interpret Congress’s +words in a way that eliminated all balance and granted copyright owners carte +blanche authority to preclude all use, Congressional intent would remain +unrealized. + +Yet, arguably, that is exactly what the Reimerdes decision does, precisely +because it focuses on enabling access alone, not access for the purpose of +violating one of the rights of the copyright holder. The Reimerdes court saw a +violation of the law just in cutting the wire or making a wire cutter. The +Skylink court focused on whether the person cutting the wire was going to +trespass once the cutting was done. In effect, the two courts disagree on which +of the options offered to the legislature in the Farmers’ Tale was actually +enacted by Congress. Which court is correct? The Skylink decision strikes me as +sensible. It also makes the statute constitutionally much more +defensible—something that the Skylink court does not consider. But in the +process, it has to rewrite the DMCA substantially. One should not presume that +it will be this interpretation that will triumph. + +2~ Summing Up: Exaggerations, Half-Truths, and Bipolar Disorders in Technology +Policy + +Let me return to the question with which I began the chapter. For many critics +of contemporary intellectual property law, the DMCA is the very embodiment of +all that is wrong. (I still cherish a friend’s account of British protesters +outside the American Embassy in London singing “D-M-C-A” to the tune of the +Village People’s “YMCA” and holding up signs calling for the law’s repeal—to +the great confusion of the diplomatic personnel.) The critics conjure up a +digital apocalypse—a world of perfect control achieved through legally backed +digital fences, in which both speech and competition suffer, and where citizens +lose privacy, the privilege of fair use, and the right to criticize popular +culture rather than simply consume it. In their view, the legal disaster is +only exacerbated by bumbling judges who do not understand the technology and +who are easily fooled by the doom-laden rhetoric of the content companies. The +DMCA’s supporters, on the other hand, think criticisms of the DMCA are +overblown, that the dark tales of digital control are either paranoid delusions +or tendentious exaggerations, and that far from being excessive, the DMCA’s +provisions are not sufficient to control an epidemic of illicit copying. More +draconian intervention is needed. As for fair use, as I pointed out before, +many of the DMCA’s supporters do not think fair use is that important +economically or culturally speaking. At best it is a “loophole” that copyright +owners should have the right to close; certainly not an affirmative right of +the public or a reserved limitation on the original property grant from the +state. + +Who is right? Obviously, I disagree profoundly with the DMCA’s supporters. I +wrote this book partly to explain—using Jefferson and Macaulay and the Sony +case—what was wrong with their logic. It would be both convenient and +predictable for me to claim that the DMCA is the intellectual property +incarnation of the Antichrist. But it would not be true. In fact, I would not +even put the DMCA in the top three of bad intellectual property initiatives +worldwide. And many of the fears conjured up about it are indeed overblown. + +Of course, the critics have a point. The DMCA is a very badly drafted law. As I +have tried to show here, its key provisions were probably unnecessary and are, +in my view, unconstitutional. If coupled with a number of other legal +“innovations” favored by the content industry, the DMCA could play a very +destructive role. In general, in fact, the Farmers’ Tale is fairly accurate in +describing both the origins of and the threats posed by the DMCA. Yet the +single largest of those threats—the idea that the DMCA could be used to fence +off large portions of the public domain and to make the fair use provisions of +the Copyright Act essentially irrelevant—is still largely a threat rather than +a reality. In some cases, fair use rights are curtailed. But for most citizens +and for the majority of media, the DMCA has had relatively little effect. +Digital rights management (DRM) certainly exists; indeed it is all around us. +You can see that every time you try to play a DVD bought in another part of the +world, open an Adobe eBook, or copy a song you have downloaded from iTunes. But +so far, the world of legally backed digital rights management has not brought +about the worst of the dystopian consequences that some people, including me, +feared might result. + +In many cases, citizens simply reject digital rights management. They will not +buy products that use it. Attempts to introduce it into music CDs, for example, +have been a resounding failure. In other cases, DRM has not been used in ways +that the critics feared. There are genuine scandals, of course—cryptography +research has been chilled, the DMCA has been turned to anticompetitive ends, +and so on. It is also troubling to see federal judges issuing injunctions not +only against banned material but also against those who link to the banned +material. Somehow the blithe reassurance that this is consistent with the First +Amendment fails to comfort one. But many of the evils prophesied for the DMCA +remain as just that: prophecies. + +There are also entries on the positive side of the ledger. The “safe-harbors” +that the DMCA gave Internet service providers and search services have been a +vital and positive force in the development of the Internet. It may even be +true that in some cases, such as iTunes, the DMCA did what its backers claimed +it would—encourage new provision of digital content by reassuring the record +companies that they could put their music online surrounded by legally backed +digital rights management. (Notably, however, the trend is now going the other +way. Companies are coming to realize that many consumers prefer, and will pay +more for, unprotected MP3 files.) + +Of course, depending on your view of the music industry, that might seem like a +mixed blessing. One might also wonder if the same consumer benefits might have +been produced with a much less restrictive law. But with the exception of a few +important areas—such as cryptography research, where its effects are reported +to be severe—I would have to say that the criticisms focus too much on the +DMCA, to the exclusion of the rest of the intellectual property landscape. Yes, +the DMCA offers enormous potential for abuse, particularly in conjunction with +some other developments in intellectual property that I will discuss later, but +much of the abuse has not yet happened. Yet even if it never did happen, the +DMCA has important lessons to teach us. + +In this section I have tried to show how legal rules—particularly intellectual +property rules—define the boundaries of legitimate competition. We used to +assume that this was principally the function of patent and trademark law, less +so of copyright. Of course, copyright would affect competition in publishing +and in the TV and movie industries, but it hardly seemed central to competition +policy in general. But once courts and legislatures accepted that software is +copyrightable, that assessment changed. The levers and cogs of the machines of +the modern economy are forged out of ones and zeros instead of steel and brass. +In that situation, copyright is central to the competition policy of a +high-tech economy. + +As the Apple case shows, our moral intuitions about competition are going to be +cloudier in the world of digital content and cyberspace. The same is true of +the law. Even in the material world it can be hard to draw the line between the +legitimate and ruthless pursuit of commercial advantage and various forms of +unfair competition, antitrust violations, and so on. But in the immaterial +world, the boundaries are even harder to draw. Is this the digital equivalent +of trespass or legitimate passage on a public road that runs through your +property? As I pointed out earlier, the constant analogies to physical property +are likely to conceal as much as they reveal. Is this virtuous competitive +imitation or illicit copying? We have strong, and by no means coherent, moral +and legal intuitions about the answers to such questions. And our legal +structure often gives us the raw material to make a very good case for both +sides of the argument. + +Into this already troubled situation, with a set of rules designed for original +expression in novels and poems being applied to machines made of computer code, +we add the DMCA and its new rights of uncertain extent. Copyright had a +well-developed set of exceptions to deal with anticompetitive behavior. Where +the existing exceptions did not function, courts tended to turn to fair use as +the universal method for patching the system up—the duct tape of the copyright +system. Without an evolving idea of fair use, copyright would overshoot its +bounds as it was applied to new technologies and new economic conditions. +Indeed that was the point of the Sony Axiom. The DMCA threw this system into +disarray, into a war of competing metaphors. + +The Skylink court sees monopolists being handed carte blanche to abolish the +restraints on their monopolies. Competition policy demands that we construe the +DMCA narrowly. The Reimerdes court sees a virus masquerading as speech, a +digital pandemic that must be stopped at all costs by a draconian program of +electronic public health. Each proceeds to construe the statute around the +reality they have created. It is by no means certain which metaphor will win +the day, still less which resolution will triumph in other countries that have +passed versions of the DMCA. International attitudes toward speech, +competition, and the necessary exceptions in a copyright system vary widely. +Yet backed by the story of the Internet Threat, the content companies are +already saying that we need to go further both nationally and +internationally—introducing more technology mandates, requiring computers to +have hardware that will only play approved copyrighted versions, allowing +content companies to hack into private computers in search of material they +think is theirs, and so on. Remember the suggestion from the beginning of the +chapter, that all cars be assumed to be getaway vehicles for the felonious +filchers of vegetables, and thus that they should be fitted with radio beacons, +have the size of their cargo space reduced, and so on? The Farmers’ Tale +continues to evolve. + +2~ Chapter 5: Further Reading + +This chapter focuses primarily on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act +(“DMCA”), one of the most controversial recent pieces of intellectual property +legislation and the subject of extensive scholarship and commentary. + +3~ The DMCA and DRM + +Once again Jessica Litman’s Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property +on the Internet (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001) is an indispensable +introduction. David Nimmer offered one of the early, and prescient, analyses of +the conceptual problems in the statute. David Nimmer, “A Riff on Fair Use in +the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review +148 (2000): 673–742. His anthology, Copyright: Sacred Text, Technology, and the +DMCA (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2003), is also worthy reading for +those who wish to pursue the legal issues further. Tarleton Gillespie’s book +Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT +Press, 2007), is an accessible but thorough introduction to the economic, +political, and cultural consequences of so-called “digital rights management” +or DRM. Legal scholars have been assiduous in pointing out the problems that +legally backed DRM brings to science, culture, policy, and economic +competition. Pamela Samuelson’s “Intellectual Property and the Digital Economy: +Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to be Revised,” Berkeley Technology +Law Journal 14 (1999): 519–566, is an early critique that proved to be +particularly accurate in its predictions. Jerome Reichman, Graeme Dinwoodie, +and Pamela Samuelson, “A Reverse Notice and Takedown Regime to Enable Public +Interest Uses of Technically Protected Copyrighted Works,” Berkeley Technology +Law Journal 22 (2007): 981–1060, provides a fascinating recent proposal for a +method to solve some of those problems. Dan Burk’s “Anticircumvention Misuse,” +UCLA Law Review 50 (2003): 1095–1140, offers a similar piece of conceptual +judo, looking at the way in which copyright’s traditional concerns with +anticompetitive and predatory misuse of intellectual property rights could be +turned on the new legally backed digital fences of cyberspace. Julie Cohen sets +the debate in the wider perspective of political theory in a way that has been +influential on my own thinking. In “Lochner in Cyberspace: The New Economic +Orthodoxy of ‘Rights Management,’ ” Michigan Law Review 97 (1998): 462–563, and +her subsequent work, she describes the ways in which digital rights management +presents fascinating echoes of the ideology of socially untrammeled property +rights that dominated the first twenty years of the twentieth century in the +United States and was eventually countered with the ideals of the New Deal. +Finally, Jane Ginsburg, “Copyright and Control over New Technologies of +Dissemination,” Columbia Law Review 101 (2001): 1613–1647, provides a more +positive account, arguing that on balance—given the dangers of illicit digital +copying—the DMCA’s benefits outweigh its costs. + +3~ The DMCA and Freedom of Expression + +Those who are interested in the tensions between copyright law and free +expression are the beneficiaries of an explosion of scholarship. I cannot begin +to cite it all here. Melville Nimmer’s article from 1970, “Does Copyright +Abridge the First Amendment Guarantees of Free Speech and Press?” UCLA Law +Review 17 (1970): 1180–1204, is a required starting place though its full +impact was not to be felt for some time. Lawrence Lessig, “Copyright’s First +Amendment,” UCLA Law Review 48 (2001): 1057–1074, provides a lovely reflection +of the impact of Nimmer’s arguments more than 30 years on. Neil Netanel’s book +Copyright’s Paradox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), is the single most +comprehensive work in the field and a fascinating read. Netanel’s arguments, +and those of Yochai Benkler, “Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment +Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain,” New York University Law Review +74 (1999): 354–446, and Jed Rubenfeld, “The Freedom of Imagination: Copyright’s +Constitutionality,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2002): 1–60, have been influential on +my own thinking in many areas. Bernt Hugenholtz has demonstrated that the +concern about a tension between copyright law and freedom of expression is by +no means limited to the United States. P. Bernt Hugenholtz, “Copyright and +Freedom of Expression in Europe” in Expanding the Boundaries of Intellectual +Property: Innovation Policy for the Information Society, ed. Rochelle Dreyfuss, +Diane Zimmerman, and Harry First (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), at +341. (This entire volume is superb, it should be noted.) L. Ray Patterson—an +inspiration to the current generation of copyright scholars—summed up the +intellectual current well when he compared the DMCA to the methods of +censorship imposed by the seventeenth century Licensing Act. L. Ray Patterson, +“The DMCA: A Modern Version of the Licensing Act of 1662,” Journal of +Intellectual Property Law 10 (2002): 33–58. + +Last, but by no means least, is the new book by my brilliant colleagues, David +Lange and H. Jefferson Powell: No Law: Intellectual Property in the Image of an +Absolute First Amendment (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, +forthcoming 2008). No Law offers a fascinating thought experiment: what would a +First Amendment jurisprudence look like that took seriously the premise that +“no law” is allowed to restrict ‘the freedom of speech’ protected by the First +Amendment and then turned its eyes on copyright? It is the answer to the +question “and what exactly does ‘the freedom of speech’ permit?” that is most +intriguing. Interestingly, though Lange and Powell find many copyright +doctrines problematic, they are inclined to view the DMCA more charitably. I +disagree for the reasons given in this chapter. + +1~ Chapter 6: I Got a Mashup + +So far, I have talked about the root ideas of intellectual property. I have +talked about its history, about the way it influences and is influenced by +technology. I have talked about its effects on free speech and on competition. +Until now, however, I have not described the way that it actually affects +culture. This chapter aims to rectify the omission, looking at the way +copyright law handles one specific form of cultural creation—music. It turns +out that some of the problems identified in Chapters 4 and 5 are not simply the +result of a mismatch between old law and new technology, or the difficulties +posed in applying copyright to software, to machines made of words. The same +issues appear at the heart of a much older cultural tradition. + +This is the story of a song and of that song’s history. But it is also a story +about property and race and art, about the way copyright law has shaped, +encouraged, and prohibited music over the last hundred years, about the lines +it draws, the boundaries it sets, and the art it forbids. + +Music is hard for copyright law to handle. If one had to represent the image of +creativity around which copyright law and patent law, respectively, are built, +patent law’s model of creativity would be a pyramid and copyright law’s a +fountain, or even an explosion. + +In patent law, the assumption is that technological development converges. Two +engineers from two different countries tend to produce similar ways of catching +mice or harnessing the power of steam. There are a limited number of good ways +of accomplishing a technical task. In addition, technological progress is +assumed to be incremental. Each development builds on the ones behind it. Based +on this image, patent law makes a series of decisions about what gets covered +by property rights, for how long, how to handle “subsequent improvements,” and +so on. Patent rights last for a short time, not only to lower costs to +consumers, but because we want to build on the technology inventors have +created as soon as possible, without getting their permission. Even during the +patent term, subsequent “improvers” get their own rights and can bargain with +the original patent holder to share the profits. + +Copyright’s assumptions are different. Copyright began with texts, with +creative expression. Here the assumption is (generally) that there are infinite +possibilities, that two writers will not converge on the same words, and that +the next generation of storytellers does not need to take the actual “stuff” +that copyright covers in order to make the next play or novel. (It may be +because of this image that so few policy makers seem to worry that copyright +now lasts for a very long time.) Subsequent “improvements” of copyrighted +material are called derivative works, and without the rights holder’s +permission, they are illegal. Again, the assumption seems to be that you can +just write your own book. Do not claim you need to build on mine. + +Of course, each of these pictures is a caricature. The reality is more complex. +Copyright can make this assumption more easily because it does not cover ideas +or facts—just their expression. “Boy meets girl, falls in love, girl dies” is +not supposed to be owned. The novel Love Story is. It is assumed that I do not +need Erich Segal’s copyrighted expression to write my own love story. Even if +literary creativity does converge around standard genres, plots, and +archetypes, it is assumed that those are in the public domain, leaving future +creators free to build their own work without using material that is subject to +copyright. We could debate the truth of that matter for literature: the +expansion of copyright’s ambit to cover plotlines and characters makes it more +questionable. Certainly many recognized forms of creativity, such as the +pastiche, the collage, the literary biography, and the parody need extensive +access to prior copyrighted work. But regardless of how well we think the image +of individual creativity fits literature, it fits very poorly in music where so +much creativity is recognizably more collective and additive, and where much of +the raw material used by subsequent creators is potentially covered by +copyright. + +So how does the accretive process of musical creativity fare in the modern law +and culture of copyright? How would the great musical traditions of the +twentieth century—jazz, soul, blues, rock—have developed under today’s +copyright regime? Would they have developed at all? How does the law apply to +the new musicians, remixers, and samplers who offer their work on the Internet? +Do the lines it draws fit with our ethics, our traditions of free speech and +commentary, our aesthetic judgments? It would take a shelf of books to answer +such questions definitively. In this chapter, all I can do is suggest some +possibilities—using the history of a single song as my case study. + +% --- + +On August 29th, 2005, a hurricane made landfall in Louisiana. The forecasters +called it “Hurricane Katrina,” quickly shortened to “Katrina” as its story took +over the news. The New Orleans levees failed. Soon the United States and then +most of the world was watching pictures of a flooded New Orleans, seeing +pleading citizens—mainly African-American—and a Keystone Cops response by the +Federal Emergency Management Agency. The stories from New Orleans became more +and more frightening. There were tales not only of natural disaster—drownings, +elderly patients trapped in hospitals—but of a collapse of civilization: +looting, murder and rape, stores being broken into with impunity, rescue +helicopters fired upon, women and children sexually assaulted in the convention +center where many of the refugees huddled. Later, it would turn out that many, +perhaps most, of these reports were untrue, but one would not have guessed that +from the news coverage. + +The television played certain images over and over again. People—again, mainly +African-Americans—were portrayed breaking into stores, pleading from rooftops, +or later, when help still had not arrived, angrily gesturing and shouting +obscenities at the camera. + +As the disaster unfolded in slow motion, celebrities began appearing in +televised appeals to raise money for those who had been affected by the storm. +Kanye West, the hip hop musician, was one of them. Appearing on NBC on +September 2, with the comedian Mike Myers, West started out seeming quietly +upset. Finally, he exploded. + +_1 I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it +says, “They’re looting.” You see a white family, it says, “They’re looking for +food.” And, you know, it’s been five days [waiting for federal help] because +most of the people are black. . . . So anybody out there that wants to do +anything that we can help—with the way America is set up to help the poor, the +black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is +doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help +are at war right now, fighting another way—and they’ve given them permission to +go down and shoot us! + +Myers, who, according to the Washington Post, “looked like a guy who stopped on +the tarmac to tie his shoe and got hit in the back with the 8:30 to LaGuardia,” +filled in with some comments about the possible effect of the storm on the +willingness of Louisiana citizens to live in the area in the future. Then he +turned back to West, who uttered the line that came to epitomize Katrina for +many people around the world, and to infuriate a large number of others. +“George Bush doesn’t care about black people!” Myers, the Post wrote, “now +look[ed] like the 8:30 to LaGuardia turned around and caught him square between +the eyes.”~{Lisa de Moraes, “Kanye West’s Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC,” +Washington Post (September 3, 2005), C1, available at +http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090300165.html. +}~ In truth, he did appear even more stunned than before, something I would not +have thought possible. + +In Houston, Micah Nickerson and Damien Randle were volunteering to help New +Orleans evacuees at the Astrodome and Houston Convention Center during the +weekend of September 3. They, too, were incensed both by the slowness of the +federal response to the disaster and by the portrayal of the evacuees in the +media. But Mr. Nickerson and Mr. Randle were not just volunteers, they were +also a hip-hop duo called “The Legendary K.O.” What better way to express their +outrage than through their art? An article in the New York Times described +their response. + +_1 “When they got to Houston, people were just seeing for the first time how +they were portrayed in the media,” said Damien Randle, 31, a financial adviser +and one half of the Legendary K.O. “It was so upsetting for them to be up on a +roof for two days, with their kids in soiled diapers, and then see themselves +portrayed as looters.” In response, Mr. Randle and his partner, Micah +Nickerson, wrote a rap based on the stories of the people they were helping. On +Sept. 6, Mr. Nickerson sent Mr. Randle an instant message containing a music +file and one verse, recorded on his home computer. Mr. Randle recorded an +additional verse and sent it back, and 15 minutes later it was up on their Web +site: www.k-otix.com.~{John Leland, “Art Born of Outrage in the Internet Age,” +New York Times (September 25, 2005), D3.}~ + +The song was called “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” (also +referred to as “George Bush Doesn’t Like Black People”). Appropriately, given +that Mr. West was the one to come up with the phrase, the song was built around +Mr. West’s “Gold Digger.” Much of the melody was sampled directly from the +recording of that song. Yet the words were very different. Where “Gold Digger” +is about a predatory, sensual, and materialist woman who “take[s] my money when +I’m in need” and is a “triflin’ friend indeed,” The Legendary K.O.’s song is a +lyrical and profane condemnation of the response to Katrina by both the +government and the media. Here is a sample: + +poem{ + +Five days in this motherf__ attic +Can’t use the cellphone I keep getting static +Dying ’cause they lying instead of telling us the truth +Other day the helicopters got my neighbors off the roof +Screwed ’cause they say they coming back for us too +That was three days ago, I don’t see no rescue +See a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do +Since God made the path that I’m trying to walk through +Swam to the store, tryin’ to look for food +Corner store’s kinda flooded so I broke my way through +I got what I could but before I got through +News say the police shot a black man trying to loot +(Who!?) Don’t like black people +George Bush don’t like black people +George Bush don’t like black people + +}poem + +This chapter is the story of that song. “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black +People” is the end (for the moment) of a line of musical borrowing. That +borrowing extends far beyond Kanye West’s song “Gold Digger.” “Gold Digger” is +memorable largely because it in turn borrows from an even older song, a very +famous one written half a century before and hailed by many as the birth of +soul music. It is in the origins of that song that we will start the trail. + +2~ I Got A Woman + +In 1955, Ray Charles Robinson, better known as Ray Charles, released a song +called “I Got a Woman.” It was a defining moment in Charles’s musical +development. Early in his career he had unashamedly modeled himself on Nat King +Cole. + +_1 I knew back then that Nat Cole was bigger than ever. Whites could relate to +him because he dealt with material they understood, and he did so with great +feeling. Funny thing, but during all these years I was imitating Nat Cole, I +never thought twice about it, never felt bad about copying the cat’s licks. To +me it was practically a science. I worked at it, I enjoyed it, I was proud of +it, and I loved doing it. He was a guy everyone admired, and it just made sense +to me, musical and commercial sense, to study his technique. It was something +like when a young lawyer—just out of school—respects an older lawyer. He tries +to get inside his mind, he studies to see how he writes up all his cases, and +he’s going to sound a whole lot like the older man—at least till he figures out +how to get his own shit together. Today I hear some singers who I think sound +like me. Joe Cocker, for instance. Man, I know that cat must sleep with my +records. But I don’t mind. I’m flattered; I understand. After all, I did the +same thing.~{Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story +(Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1978), 86.}~ + +In the early 50s Charles decided that he needed to move away from Cole’s style +and find his own sound, “sink, swim or die.” But as with any musician, “his own +sound” was the product of a number of musical traditions—blues and gospel +particularly. It is out of those traditions that “I Got a Woman” emerged; +indeed it is that combination that causes it to be identified as one of the +birthplaces of soul music. + +According to the overwhelming majority of sources, “I Got a Woman” stems from a +fairly overt piece of musical borrowing—Charles reworded the hymn “Jesus Is All +the World to Me”—sometimes referred to as “My Jesus Is All the World to Me.” + +_1 Musically, soul denotes styles performed by and for black audiences +according to past musical practices reinterpreted and redefined. During its +development, three performers played significant roles in shaping its sound, +messages, and performance practice: Ray Charles, James Brown, and Aretha +Franklin. If one can pinpoint a moment when gospel and blues began to merge +into a secular version of gospel song, it was in 1954 when Ray Charles recorded +“My Jesus Is All the World to Me,” changing its text to “I Got A +Woman.”~{Robert W. Stephens, “Soul: A Historical Reconstruction of Continuity +and Change in Black Popular Music,” The Black Perspective in Music 12, no. 1 +(Spring 1984): 32.}~ + +That story is repeated in the biography on Charles’s Web site. “Charles +reworded the gospel tune ‘Jesus Is All the World to Me’ adding deep church +inflections to the secular rhythms of the nightclubs, and the world was never +the same.”~{Forever Ray, available at +http://www.raycharles.com/the_man_biography.html. }~ Michael Lydon, Charles’s +most impressive biographer, simply reports that “Jesus Is All the World to Me” +is described as the song’s origin in another published source,~{Michael Lydon, +Ray Charles (New York: Routledge, 2004), 419: “Arnold Shaw, in The Rockin’ 50’s +says that ‘I Got a Woman’ is based on Jesus is All the World to Me. Because +Renald Richard left Ray’s band before the song was recorded, he was not at +first properly credited: some record labels list [Ray Charles] alone as the +songwriter. Richard, however, straightened that out with Atlantic, and he has +for many years earned a substantial income from his royalties.”}~ and this +origin is cited repeatedly elsewhere in books, newspaper articles, and +online,~{See Stephens, “Soul,” 32. The standard biographical literature also +repeats the same story: \\ In 1954 an historic recording session with Atlantic +records fused gospel with rhythm-and-blues and established Charles’ “sweet new +style” in American music. One number recorded at that session was destined to +become his first great success. Secularizing the gospel hymn “My Jesus Is All +the World to Me,” Charles employed the 8- and 16-measure forms of gospel music, +in conjunction with the 12-measure form of standard blues. Charles contended +that his invention of soul music resulted from the heightening of the intensity +of the emotion expressed by jazz through the charging of feeling in the +unbridled way of gospel. \\ “Ray Charles,” Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd +ed., vol. 3 (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1998), 469. Popular accounts offer +the same story: \\ This young, blind, black, gravelly-voiced singer brought +together the most engaging aspects of black music into one form and began the +process of synthesis that led to soul and, ultimately, funk a decade later. He +would turn around gospel standards like “My Jesus Is All the World to Me,” +recreating it as “I Got a Woman[.]” \\ Ricky Vincent, Funk: The Music, The +People, and the Rhythm of the One (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996), 121. +See also Joel Hirschhorn, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Songwriting (New York: +Alpha Books, 2004), 108: “I Got a Woman was Ray’s rewrite of ‘My Jesus Is All +the World to Me.’ ” \\ Charles himself was more equivocal about the origins of +the song: \\ So I was lucky. Lucky to have my own band at this point in my +career. Lucky to be able to construct my musical building to my exact +specifications. And lucky in another way: While I was stomping around New +Orleans, I had met a trumpeter named Renolds [sic] Richard who by thus time was +in my band. One day he brought me some words to a song. I dressed them up a +little and put them to music. The tune was called “I Got a Woman,” and it was +another of those spirituals which I refashioned in my own way. I Got a Woman +was my first real smash, much bigger than [“]Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand[.]” +This spiritual-and-blues combination of mine was starting to hit. \\ Charles +and Ritz, Brother Ray, 150.}~ though the most detailed accounts also mention +Renald Richard, Charles’s trumpeter, who is credited with co-writing the +song.~{See Lydon, Ray Charles, 419.}~ + +To secular ears, “Jesus Is All the World to Me” is a plodding piece of music +with a mechanical, up-and-down melodic structure. It conjures up a bored (and +white) church audience, trudging through the verses, a semitone flat, while +thinking about Sunday lunch rather than salvation. It is about as far removed +as one could be from the syncopated beat and amorous subject matter of “I Got a +Woman.” The hymn was the product of Will Lamartine Thompson—a severe-looking +fellow with a faint resemblance to an elderly Doc Holliday—who died in 1909 and +is buried in the same place he was born, East Liverpool, Ohio. But the words +have an earnestness to them that gives life to the otherwise uninspired verse. + +poem{ + +Jesus is all the world to me, my life, my joy, my all; +He is my strength from day to day, without Him I would fall. +When I am sad, to Him I go, no other one can cheer me so; +When I am sad, He makes me glad, He’s my Friend. + +}poem + +Reading those words, one can understand the sincerity that made Mr. Thompson +spurn commercial publishers for his devotional music, instead founding his own +publishing house (also in East Liverpool) to make sure that his hymns reached +the people. I can quote as much of the song as I want without worrying about +legal consequences because the copyright on Mr. Thompson’s lyrics has expired. +So has the copyright over the music. The song was published in 1904. Copyright +had only been extended to musical compositions in 1881. Like all copyrights +back then, copyright over music lasted for only twenty-eight years, with a +possible extension for another fourteen. If Ray Charles did indeed reword it +fifty years later, he was doing nothing illegal. It had been in the public +domain for at least eight years, and probably for twenty. Now maybe Charles’s +genius was to hear in this hymn, or in a syncopated gospel version of this +hymn, the possibility of a fusion of traditions which would itself become a new +tradition—soul. Or perhaps his genius was in knowing a good idea—Richard’s—when +he heard it, and turning that idea into the beginnings of its own musical +genre. + +Soul is a fusion of gospel on the one hand and rhythm and blues on the other. +From gospel, soul takes the call-and-response pattern of preacher and +congregation and the wailing vocals of someone “testifying” to their faith. +From rhythm and blues it takes the choice of instruments, some of the upbeat +tempo, and the distinctly worldly and secular attitude to the (inevitable) +troubles of life. Musicologists delight in parsing the patterns of influence +further; R&B itself had roots in “jump music” and the vocal style of the “blues +shouters” who performed with the big bands. It also has links to jazz. Gospel +reaches back to spirituals and so on. + +As with all music, those musical traditions can be traced back or forward in +time, the net of influence and borrowing widening as one goes in either +direction. In each, one can point to distinctive musical motifs—the chords of +the twelve-bar blues, or the flattened fifth in bebop. But musical traditions +are also defined by performance styles and characteristic sounds: the warm +guitar that came out of the valve amplifiers of early funk, the thrashing (and +poorly miked) drums of ’80s punk, or the tinny piano of honky-tonk. Finally, +styles are often built around “standards”—classic songs of the genre to which +an almost obligatory reference is made. My colleague, the talented composer +Anthony Kelley, uses Henry Louis Gates’s term “signifyin’ ” to describe the +process of showing you are embedded in your musical tradition by referring back +to its classics in your playing. In jazz, for example, one demonstrates one’s +rootedness in the tradition by quoting a standard, but also one’s virtuosity in +being able to trim it into a particular eight-bar solo, beginning and ending on +the right note for the current moment in the chord progression. “I Got Rhythm” +and “Round Midnight” are such songs for jazz. (The chord changes of “I Got +Rhythm” are so standard, they are referred to as “the rhythm changes”—a +standard basis for improvisation.) And to stretch the connections further, as +Kelley points out, the haunting introduction to “Round Midnight” is itself +remarkably similar to Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. + +Through all these layers of musical borrowing and reference, at least in the +twentieth century in the United States, runs the seam of race. When white +musicians “borrowed” from soul to make “blue-eyed soul,” when Elvis took songs +and styles from rhythm and blues and turned them into rockabilly, a process of +racial cleansing went on. Styles were adapted but were cleansed of those +elements thought inappropriate for a larger white audience. Generally, this +involved cutting some of the rawer sensuality, removing racially specific +verbal and musical references, and, for much of the century, cutting the +African-American artists out of the profits in the process. + +There is another irony here. Styles formed by patterns of gleeful borrowing, +formed as part of a musical commons—the blues of the Mississippi Delta, for +example—were eventually commercialized and “frozen” into a particular form by +white artists. Sometimes those styles were covered with intellectual property +rights which denied the ability of the original community to “borrow back.” In +the last thirty or forty years of the century, African-American artists got +into the picture too, understandably embracing with considerable zeal the +commercial opportunities and property rights that had previously been denied to +them. But aside from the issue of racial injustice, one has to consider the +question of sustainability. + +In other work, I have tried to show how a vision of intellectual property +rights built around a notion of the romantic author can sometimes operate as a +one-way valve vis-à-vis traditional and collective creative work.~{James +Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the +Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).}~ There +is a danger that copyright will treat collectively created musical traditions +as unowned raw material, but will then prevent the commercialized versions of +those traditions—now associated with an individual artist—from continuing to +act as the basis for the next cycle of musical adaptation and development. One +wonders whether jazz, blues, R&B, gospel, and soul would even have been +possible as musical styles if, from their inception, they had been covered by +the strong property rights we apply today. That is a question I want to return +to at the end of this chapter. + +Musical styles change over time and so do their techniques of appropriation. +Sometimes musical generations find their successors are engaging in different +types of borrowing than they themselves engaged in. They do not always find it +congenial. It is striking how often musicians condemn a younger generation’s +practice of musical appropriation as theft, while viewing their own musical +development and indebtedness as benign and organic. James Brown attacked the +use of his guitar licks or the drum patterns from his songs by hip-hop +samplers, for example, but celebrated the process of borrowing from gospel +standards and from rhythm and blues that created the “Hardest Working Man in +Show Business”—both the song and the musical persona. To be sure, there are +differences between the two practices. Samplers take a three-second segment off +the actual recording of “Funky Drummer,” manipulate it, and turn it into a +repeating rhythm loop for a hip-hop song. This is a different kind of borrowing +than the adaptation of a chord pattern from a gospel standard to make an R&B +hit. But which way does the difference cut as a matter of ethics, aesthetics, +or law? + +Charles himself came in for considerable criticism for his fusion of gospel +intonations and melodic structures with the nightclub sound of rhythm and +blues, but not because it was viewed as piracy. It was viewed as sacrilegious. + +_1 Charles totally removed himself from the polite music he had made in the +past. There was an unrestrained exuberance to the new Ray Charles, a fierce +earthiness that, while it would not have been unfamiliar to any follower of +gospel music, was almost revolutionary in the world of pop. Big Bill Broonzy +was outraged: “He’s crying, sanctified. He’s mixing the blues with the +spirituals. He should be singing in a church.”~{James Henke, Holly +George-Warren, Anthony Decurtis, and Jim Miller, The Rolling Stone Illustrated +History of Rock and Roll: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists +and Their Music (New York: Random House, 1992), 130.}~ + +Charles disagreed. “You can’t run away from yourself. . . . What you are inside +is what you are inside. I was raised in the church and was around blues and +would hear all these musicians on the jukeboxes and then I would go to revival +meetings on Sunday morning. So I would get both sides of music. A lot of people +at the time thought it was sacrilegious but all I was doing was singing the way +I felt.”~{Great American Country, “Ray Charles Biography,” available at +http://www.gactv.com/gac/ar_artists_a-z/article/0,,GAC_26071_4888297,00.html. +}~ Why the charge of sacrilege? Because beyond the breach of stylistic +barriers, the relationships Charles described did not seem to belong in church. + +“I Got a Woman” tells of a woman, “way over town,” who is good to the +singer—very good, in fact. She gives him money when he is in need, is a “kind +of friend indeed,” even saves her “early morning loving” just for him (and it +is tender loving at that). In the third verse we learn she does not grumble, +fuss, or run in the streets, “knows a woman’s place is right there now in the +home,” and in general is a paragon of femininity. Gender roles aside, it is a +fabulous song, from the elongated “We-e-ell . . .” in Charles’s distinctive +tones, to the momentary hesitation that heightens the tension, all the way +through the driving beat of the main verses and the sense that a gospel choir +would have fit right in on the choruses, testifying ecstatically to the virtues +of Charles’s lady friend. Charles liked women—a lot of women, according to his +biographers—and a lot of women liked him right back. That feeling comes through +very clearly from this song. + +I would like to quote the song lyrics for you, just as I did the words of the +hymn, but that requires a little more thought. Charles’s song was released in +1955. By that time, the copyright term for a musical composition was +twenty-eight years, renewable for another twenty-eight if the author wished. +(Later, the twenty-eight-year second term would be increased to forty-seven +years. Still later, the copyright term would be extended to life plus seventy +years, or ninety-five years for a “work for hire.” Sound recordings themselves +would not be protected by federal law until the early 1970s.) Anyone who wrote +or distributed a song under the “28+28” system was, in effect, saying “this is +a long enough protection for me,” enough incentive to create. Thus, we could +have assumed that “I Got a Woman” would enter the public domain in either 1983 +or, if renewed, 2011. Unfortunately for us, and for a latter-day Ray Charles, +the copyright term has been extended several times since then, and each time it +was also extended retrospectively. Artists, musicians, novelists, and +filmmakers who had created their works on the understanding that they had +twenty-eight or fifty-six or seventy-five years of protection now have +considerably more. This was the point raised in Chapter 1. Most of the culture +of the twentieth century, produced under a perfectly well-functioning system +with much shorter copyright terms, is still locked up and will be for many +years to come. + +In the case of “I Got a Woman,” it is now about fifty years since the song’s +release—the same length of time as between Thompson’s hymn and Charles’s +alleged “rewording.” If the words and music were properly copyrighted at the +time of its publication, and renewed when appropriate, the copyright still has +forty-five years to run. No one will be able to “reword” “I Got a Woman” and +use it to found a new genre, or take substantial portions of its melody, until +the year 2050. The freedoms Ray Charles says he used to create his song are +denied to his successors until nearly a century after the song’s release. (As +we will see in a moment, this put certain constraints on Kanye West.) + +Would it truly be a violation of copyright for me to quote the middle stanza in +a nonfiction book on copyright policy? Not at all. It is a classic “fair use.” +In a moment I will do so. But it is something that the publisher may well fuss +over, because copyright holders are extremely aggressive in asking for payments +for the slightest little segment. Copyright holders in music and song lyrics +are among the most aggressive of the lot. Year after year academics, critics, +and historians pay fairly substantial fees (by our standards) to license tiny +fragments of songs even though their incorporation is almost certainly fair +use. Many of them do not know the law. Others do, but want to avoid the hassle, +the threats, the nasty letters. It is simpler just to pay. + +Unfortunately, these individual actions have a collective impact. One of the +factors used to consider whether something is a fair use is whether or not +there is a market for this particular use of a work. If there is, it is less +likely to be a fair use to quote or incorporate such a fragment. As several +courts have pointed out, there is a powerful element of circularity here. You +claim you have a right to stop me from doing x—quoting two lines of your +three-verse song in an academic book, say. I say you have no such right and it +is a fair use. You say it is not a fair use because it interferes with your +market—the market for selling licenses for two-sentence fragments. But when do +you have such a market? When you have a right to stop me quoting the +two-sentence fragment unless I pay you. Do you have such a right? But that is +exactly what we are trying to decide! Is it a fair use or not? The existence of +the market depends on it not being a fair use for me to quote it without +permission. To say “I would have a market if I could stop you doing it, so it +cannot be a fair use, so I can stop you” is perfectly circular. + +How do we get out of the circle? Often the court will look to customs and +patterns in the world outside. Do people accept this as a market? Do they +traditionally pay such fees? Thus, if a lot of people choose to pay for quotes +that actually should have been fair use, the “market” for short quotes will +begin to emerge. That will, in turn, affect the boundaries of fair use for the +worse. Slowly, fair use will constrict, will atrophy. The hypertrophied +permissions culture starts as myth, but it can become reality. + +In any event, Ray Charles had no need of fair use to make “I Got a Woman” +because the hymn his biography claims it is based on was in the public domain. +But is that the real source? I can hear little resemblance. As I researched the +origins of “I Got a Woman,” I found claims that there was a different source, a +mysterious song by the Bailey Gospel Singers, or the Harold Bailey Gospel +Singers, called “I’ve Got a Savior.”~{“His 1955 smash ‘I’ve Got a Woman,’ for +example, was adapted from a gospel number he’d liked called ‘I’ve Got a +Savior.’ ” Chip Deffaa, Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues (Urbana: +University of Illinois Press, 1996), 161.}~ The Columbia Records gospel +catalogue even provided a catalogue number.~{Columbia Catalog Number CO45097, +available at http://settlet.fateback.com/COL30000.htm. }~ There was such a +song, or so it seemed. But there the research stalled. The exemplary librarians +at Duke University Music Library could find no trace. Catalogues of published +records showed nothing. Inquiries to various music librarian listservs also +produced no answer. There was a man called Harold Bailey, who sang with a group +of gospel singers, but though several Internet postings suggested he was +connected to the song, his biography revealed he would have been only thirteen +at the time. The Library of Congress did not have it. Eventually, Jordi +Weinstock—a great research assistant who demonstrated willingness to pester +anyone in the world who might conceivably have access to the recording—hit +gold. The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the New York +Public Library for the Performing Arts had a copy—a 78 rpm vinyl record by the +Bailey Gospel Singers with “Jesus Is the Searchlight” on the B-side. Our +library was able to obtain a copy on interlibrary loan from the helpful +curator, Don McCormick. + +It sounds like the same song. Not the same words, of course: the introduction +is different and the Bailey Gospel Singers lack the boom-chicky-boom backing of +Charles’s version, but the central melody is almost exactly the same. When the +Bailey Gospel Singers sing “Keeps me up / Keeps me strong / Teach me right / +When I doing wrong / Well, I’ve got a savior / Oh what a savior / yes I have,” +the melody, and even the intonation, parallel Charles singing the equivalent +lines: “She gimme money / when I’m in need / Yeah she’s a kind of / friend +indeed / I’ve got a woman / way over town / who’s good to me.” + +True, some of the lyrical and rhythmic patterns of “I’ve Got a Savior” are +older still. They come from a spiritual called “Ain’t That Good News,” dating +from 1940, which rehearses all the things the singer will have in the Kingdom +of Heaven—a harp, a robe, slippers (!), and, finally, a savior. The author of +“I’ve Got a Savior” was, like all the artists discussed here, taking a great +deal from a prior musical tradition. Nevertheless, Charles’s borrowing is +particularly overt and direct. The term “rewording” is appropriate. So far as I +can see, whether or not he also relied on a fifty-year-old hymn, Ray Charles +appears to have taken both the melody and lyrical pattern of his most famous +hit from a song that was made a mere three or four years earlier. + +Like many 78 rpm records, this one was sold without liner notes. The center of +the record provides the only details. It gives the name of the track and the +band and a single word under the song title, “Ward”—presumably the composer. +“Ward” might be Clara Ward of the Ward Singers, a talented gospel singer and +songwriter who became Aretha Franklin’s mentor and who had her own music +publishing company. + +There is a particular reason to think that she might have written the song: Ray +Charles clearly liked to adapt her music to secular ends. We know that he +“reworked” Ward’s gospel classic “This Little Light of Mine” into “This Little +Girl of Mine.” Ward reportedly was irritated by the practice. So far as we +know, the copying of the music did not annoy her because she viewed it as +theft, but because she viewed it as an offense against gospel music. + +_1 Charles is now starting to get criticism from some gospel music performers +for secularizing gospel music and presenting it in usual R&B venues. Most +adamant in her misgivings is Clara Ward who complains about “This Little Girl +Of Mine” being a reworking of “This Little Light Of Mine” (which it is), as a +slap against the gospel field.~{J. C. Marion, “Ray Charles: The Atlantic +Years,” JammUpp 2 no. 32 (2004): 32, +http://home.earthlink.net/~v1tiger/jammuppvol2.html. }~ + +This stage of Charles’s career is described, rightly, hy and sensual style that +becomes his trademark—his own sound. That is true enough; there had been +nothing quite like this before. Yet it was hardly original creation out of +nothing. Both Charles himself and the musicological literature point out that +“his own sound,” “his style,” is in reality a fusion of two prior genres—rhythm +and blues and gospel. But looking at the actual songs that created soul as a +genre shows us that the fusion goes far beyond merely a stylistic one. Charles +makes some of his most famous songs by taking existing gospel classics and +reworking or simply rewording them. “I’ve Got a Savior” becomes “I Got a +Woman.” “This Little Light of Mine” becomes “This Little Girl of Mine.” + +The connection is striking: two very recent gospel songs, probably by the same +author, from which Charles copies the melody, structure, pattern of verses, +even most of the title—in each case substituting a beloved sensual woman for +the beloved deity. Many others have noticed just how closely Charles based his +songs on gospel tunes, although the prevalence of the story that “I Got a +Woman” is derived from an early-twentieth-century hymn caused most to see only +the second transposition, not the first.~{“If one can pinpoint a moment when +gospel and blues began to merge into a secular version of gospel song, it was +in 1954 when Ray Charles recorded ‘My Jesus Is All the World to Me,’ changing +its text to ‘I Got A Woman.’ The following year, he changed Clara Ward’s ‘This +Little Light of Mine’ to ‘This Little Girl of Mine.’ ” Stephens, “Soul,” 32.}~ +Borrowing from a fifty-year-old hymn and changing it substantially in the +process seems a little different from the repeated process of “search and +replace” musical collage that Charles performed on the contemporary works of +Clara Ward. + +If I am right, Charles’s “merger” of gospel and blues relied on a very direct +process of transposition. The transposition was not just of themes: passion for +woman substituted for passion for God. That is a familiar aspect of +soul.~{Robert Lashley, “Why Ray Charles Matters,” Blogcritics Magazine, +December 17, 2005, http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/12/17/032826.php: \\ +But it was the staggering, nearly byzantine ambition that encompassed Charles’ +musical mind which is the foundation for his art. You can hear it in his first +imprint on the pop music world, 1955’s I Got A Woman. The shuffling big beat +borrows from Louis Jordan’s big band fusion, the backbeat is 2/4 gospel. The +arrangement is lucid, not quite jazz, not quite blues, definitely not rock and +roll but something sophisticated altogether. The emotions are feral, but not +quite the primitiveness of rock and roll. It is the sound of life, a place +where there is an ever flowing river of cool. It, you might ask? Rhythm and +Blues, Ray Charles’ invention. \\ A volcano bubbling under the surface, Ray +spent the mid 50’s crafting timeless songs as if there were cars on an +assembly[.] Start with the blasphemous fusion of Hallelujah I [L]ove Her So and +This Little Girl of Mine, where Ray changes the words from loving god to loving +a woman, yet, in the intensity of his performance, raises the question if he’s +still loving the same thing. \\ The anonymous encyclopedists at Wikipedia +agree: \\ Many of the most prominent soul artists, such as Aretha Franklin, +Marvin Gaye, Wilson Pickett and Al Green, had roots in the church and gospel +music and brought with them much of the vocal styles of artists such as Clara +Ward and Julius Cheeks. Secular songwriters often appropriated gospel songs, +such as the Pilgrim Travelers’ song “I’ve Got A New Home,” which Ray Charles +turned into “Lonely Avenue,” or “Stand By Me,” which Ben E. King and Lieber and +Stoller adapted from a well-known gospel song, or Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get A +Witness,” which reworks traditional gospel catchphrases. In other cases secular +musicians did the opposite, attaching phrases and titles from the gospel +tradition to secular songs to create soul hits such as “Come See About Me” for +the Supremes and “99½ Won’t Do” for Wilson Pickett. \\ “Urban Contemporary +Gospel,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/urban_contemporary_gospel. }~ +It is what allows it to draw so easily from gospel’s fieriness and yet coat the +religion with a distinctly more worldly passion. Sex, sin, and syncopation—what +more could one ask? But Charles’s genius was to take particular songs that had +already proved themselves in the church and on the radio, and to grab large +chunks of the melody and structure. He was not just copying themes, or merging +genres, he was copying the melodies and words from recent songs. + +Was this mere musical plagiarism, then? Should we think less of Ray Charles’s +genius because we find just how closely two of the canonical songs in the +creation of soul were based on the work of his contemporaries? Hardly. “I Got a +Woman” and “This Little Girl of Mine” are simply brilliant. Charles does in +fact span the worlds of the nightclub at 3 a.m. on Sunday morning and the +church later that day, of ecstatic testimony and good old-fashioned sexual +infatuation. But the way he does so is a lot more like welding, or bricolage, +than it is like designing out of nothing or creating anew while distantly +tugged by mysterious musical forces called “themes” or “genres.” Charles takes +bits that have been proven to work and combines them to make something new. +When I tell engineers or software engineers this story, they nod. Of course +that is how creation works. One does not reinvent the wheel, or the method of +debugging, so why should one reinvent the hook, the riff, or the melody? And +yet Charles’s creation does not have the degraded artistic quality that is +associated with “mere” cut-and-paste or collage techniques. The combination is +greater than the sum of its parts. If Charles’s songs do not fit our model of +innovative artistic creativity, perhaps we need to revise the model—at least +for music—rather than devaluing his work. + +When I began this study, it seemed to me that the greatest challenge to +copyright law in dealing with music was preventing rights from “creeping,” +expanding from coverage of a single song or melody to cover essential elements +of genre, style, and theme. In effect, we needed to apply the Jefferson Warning +to music, to defeat the constant tendency to confuse intellectual property with +real property, and to reject the attempts to make the right holder’s control +total. My assumption was that all we needed to do was to keep open the “common +space” of genre and style, and let new artists create their new compositions +out of the material in that commons and gain protection over them. In many +ways, Charles’s work lies at the very core of the stuff copyright wishes to +promote. It is not merely innovative and expressive itself, it also helped form +a whole new genre in which other artists could express themselves. But to +create this work, Charles needed to make use of a lot more than just genres and +styles created by others. He needed their actual songs. If the reactions of +Clara Ward and Big Bill Broonzy are anything to go by, they would not have +given him permission. To them, soul was a stylistic violation, a mingling of +the sacred with the profane. If given a copyright veto over his work, and a +culture that accepts its use, Ward might well have exercised it. Like the +disapproving heirs that Macaulay talked about, she could have denied us a vital +part of the cultural record. Control has a price. + +Did Ray Charles commit copyright infringement? Perhaps. We would have to find +if the songs are substantially similar, once we had excluded standard forms, +public domain elements, and so on. I would say that they are substantially +similar, but was the material used copyright-protected expression? + +The Copyright Office database shows no entry for “I’ve Got a Savior.” This is +not conclusive, but it seems to indicate that no copyright was ever registered +in the work. In fact, it is quite possible that the song was first written +without a copyright notice. Nowadays that omission would be irrelevant. Works +are copyrighted as soon as they are fixed in material form, regardless of +whether any copyright notice is attached. In 1951, however, a notice was +required when the work was published, and if one was not put on the work, it +passed immediately into the public domain. However, later legislation decreed +that the relevant publication was not of the record, but of the notation. If +the record were pressed and sold without a copyright notice, the error could be +corrected. If a lead sheet or a sheet music version of “I’ve Got a Savior” had +been published without notice or registration, it would enter the public +domain. It is possible that this happened. Intellectual property rights simply +played a lesser role in the 1950s music business than they do today, both for +better and for worse. Large areas of creativity operated as copyright-free +zones. Even where copyrights were properly registered, permission fees were not +demanded for tiny samples. While bootlegged recordings or direct note-for-note +copies might well draw legal action, borrowing and transformation were +apparently viewed as a normal part of the creative process. In some cases, +artists simply did not use copyright. They made money from performances. Their +records might receive some kind of protection from state law. These protections +sufficed. + +But the lack of protection also had a less attractive and more racially skewed +side. African-American artists were less likely to have the resources and +knowledge necessary to navigate the system of copyright. For both black and +white artists, whatever rights there were moved quickly away from the actual +creators toward the agents, record companies, and distributors. They still do. +But African-American musicians got an even worse deal than their white +counterparts. True, the copyright system was only an infinitesimal part of that +process. A much larger part was the economic consequences of segregation and +racial apartheid. But copyright was one of the many levers of power that were +more easily pulled by white hands. This is an important point because the need +to end that palpable racial injustice is sometimes used to justify every aspect +of our current highly legalized musical culture. About that conclusion, I am +less convinced. + +In any event, it is possible that the musical composition for “I’ve Got a +Savior” went immediately into the public domain. If that were the case, Ray +Charles could draw on it, could change it, could refine it without permission +or fee. Certainly there is no mention of seeking permission or paying fees in +any of the histories of “I Got a Woman.” Indeed, the only question of rectitude +Charles was focused on was the stylistic one. Was it appropriate to mix gospel +and R&B, devotional music and secular desire? Charles and Richard seemed to see +the process of rewording and adapting as just a standard part of the musician’s +creative process. The only question was whether these two styles were +aesthetically or morally suited, not whether the borrowing itself was illegal +or unethical. So, whether they drew on a hymn that had fallen into the public +domain after the expiration of its copyright term, or a gospel song for which +copyright had never been sought, or whether they simply took a copyrighted song +and did to it something that no one at the time thought was legally +inappropriate, Renald Richard and Ray Charles were able to create “I Got a +Woman” and play a significant role in founding a new musical genre—soul. + +One thing is clear. Much of what Charles and Richard did in creating their song +would be illegal today. Copyright terms are longer. Copyright protection itself +is automatic. Copyright policing is much more aggressive. The musical culture +has changed into one in which every fragment must be licensed and paid for. The +combination is fatal to the particular pattern of borrowing that created these +seminal songs of soul. + +That should give us pause. I return to the ideas of the Jefferson Warning from +Chapter 2 and the Sony Axiom from Chapter 4. Copyright is not an end in itself. +It has a goal: to promote the progress of cultural and scientific creativity. +That goal requires rights that are less than absolute. As Jessica Litman points +out, building in the intellectual space is different from building in the +physical space. We do not normally dismantle old houses to make new ones. This +point is not confined to music. Earlier I quoted Northrop Frye: “Poetry can +only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels. All of this was +much clearer before the assimilation of literature to private +enterprise.”~{Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, +N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 96–97.}~ The question is, how big are +the holes we need to leave in the private rights? How large a commons do we +need to offer to future creators? + +Ray Charles’s creation of “I Got a Woman” is only one case. By itself, it +proves nothing. Yet, if we find that the seminal, genre-creating artworks of +yesteryear would be illegal under the law and culture of today, we have to ask +ourselves “is this really what we want?” What will the music of the future look +like if the Clara Wards and Will Lamartine Thompsons of today can simply refuse +to license on aesthetic grounds or demand payment for every tiny fragment? +Tracing the line further back, it is fascinating to wonder whether gospel, +blues, and jazz would have developed if musical motifs had been jealously +guarded as private property rather than developed as a kind of melodic and +rhythmic commons. Like most counterfactuals, that one has no clear answer, but +there is substantial cause for skepticism. If copyright is supposed to be +promoting innovation and development in culture, is it doing its job? + +2~ An Industry of Gold Diggers + +Fifty years after “I Got a Woman” was written, Kanye West released “Gold +Digger” on the album Late Registration. Mr. West is an interesting figure in +rap. At first he was shunned because his clean-cut looks and preppy clothing +ran against the gangster image that often dominates the music. It is just hard +imagining Mr. West delivering a line like Rakim’s “I used to be a stick-up kid, +so I think of all the devious things I did” with a straight face. (Still less +“Stop smiling, ain’t nothin’ funny, nothing moves but the money.”) Perhaps +partly as a result, his lyrics are oddly bipolar in their views about +exaggerated masculinity and the misogyny that sometimes accompanies it. + +For the song, Mr. West recruited Jamie Foxx, who had played Ray Charles in the +movie Ray. Showing an impressive expanse of oiled chest, Mr. Foxx imitates +Charles’s style and the melody of “I Got a Woman” to provide the lyrical chorus +to “Gold Digger.” “I Got a Woman” anchors West’s song. It provides its melodic +hook. It breaks up the rap with a burst of musical nostalgia. But Mr. West’s +gold digger is very different from Ray Charles’s woman friend. This woman does +not give money when the singer is in need. She takes his money when he is in +need and is a “triflin’ friend indeed.” Mr. Charles had a friend who gave him +tender morning loving. Jamie Foxx sings of a mercenary gold digger who digs on +him. When Mr. West adds the rap verses to the song, we get a perfect caricature +of such a person, uninterested in any man who is broke, dragging around four +kids and an entourage, insisting all of them be entertained at her boyfriend’s +expense, and wielding unfounded paternity suits like a proprietary business +method. Mr. West’s repeated disclaimer “I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger” is +unconvincing, because both the words of the introduction and the implicit +message of the rap tell us she is. We even get the absurd image of a man who is +playing on the winning side in the Super Bowl but driving a Hyundai, so +financially demanding is his girlfriend. At several points the song descends +into ludicrous—and perhaps conscious—self-mockery, as it explores the concerns +of the rich African-American celebrity male. My favorite line is “If you ain’t +no punk, holler ‘We want prenup!!’ ” The audience obliges. It sounds like +assertiveness training for show business millionaires. + +It would be hard to get a feminist role model out of either “I Got a Woman” or +“Gold Digger.” One offers the feminine virtues of modesty and fidelity, but +magically combines them with wantonness where the singer is concerned and an +open checkbook. The other is a parody of the self-assertive economic actor, as +rapacious as any multinational, who uses her sexuality for profit. Put them +together and you have bookends—male fantasy and male nightmare. Was that Mr. +West’s point? Perhaps. The song itself takes several sly turns. The gold digger +dogging Mr. West is used as part of a homily to black women on how to treat +their (noncelebrity) black men. They should stick with their man because his +ambition is going to take him from mopping floors to the fryers, from a Datsun +to a Benz. It seems that Mr. West is getting a little preachy, while slamming +the actual social mobility available to black men. Moving from floor cleaning +to frying chicken is not actually going to provide a Mercedes. But he +immediately undercuts that tone twice, once by acknowledging the boyfriend’s +likely infidelity and again by saying that even if the black woman follows his +homily, “once you get on, he leave yo’ ass for a white girl.” + +Mr. West has a tendency to make sudden turns like this in his lyrics—ironically +upsetting the theme he has just set up. So it is not hard to imagine that he +deliberately used a fragment of Charles’s song, not just because it sounded +good but to contrast the image of the fantasy woman from Charles’s 1950s soul, +who is faithful, sensual, and always willing to offer a loan, with an image +from today’s rap—sexually predatory and emasculating women who are uninterested +in men except as a source of money. Even the retro cover of the single, with +its 1950s-style pinup drawing of a white model, seems to draw the connection. +Did he use Charles’s song precisely because of these clashing cultural +snapshots? Perhaps, or perhaps he just liked the tune. In any event, the +contrast is striking. When it was released, Charles’s song was seen as a +sacrilegious depiction of sensuality and the woman was decried as a harlot. +Compared to the woman in Mr. West’s song, she sounds like a Girl Scout. It is +also a little depressing. Ray Charles was neither an egalitarian metrosexual +nor a Prince Charming where women were concerned—anything but. But as I said +before, you do get a sense that he liked women—however unrealistic or +two-dimensional their portrayal. It is hard to get that sense from “Gold +Digger.” + +Was Mr. West legally required to ask permission—and pay, if necessary—to use a +fragment of “I Got a Woman” for his chorus? The longest single piece of +borrowing occurs in the introduction: twenty-six words and their accompanying +music. “She takes my money, when I’m in need, oh she’s a triflin’ friend +indeed. Oh she’s a gold digger, way over town, who digs on me.” As I pointed +out, the lyrics from Charles’s song present a very different story. “She gimme +money / when I’m in need / Yeah she’s a kind of / friend indeed / I’ve got a +woman / way over town / who’s good to me.” But even if the message is the +opposite, the musical borrowing is direct. It is also extensive. During Mr. +West’s rap, the entire background melody is a loop of Jamie Foxx singing the +Ray Charles-inspired melody in the background. During the song, Mr. Foxx +returns to words that are closer to Charles’s original: “She gimme money, when +I’m in need,” a refrain that is conspicuously at odds with the woman being +described by Mr. West. That eight-bar loop of a Ray Charles melody runs +throughout Kanye West’s song. + +Mr. West is very successful, so the fragment of the song was “cleared”—payment +was made to Charles’s estate. It is fascinating to think of what might have +happened if Charles’s heirs had refused. After all, one could see West’s song +as a crude desecration of Charles’s earlier work, rather than a good-humored +homage. Since this is not a “cover version” of the song—one which does not +change its nature and thus operates under the statutory licensing +scheme—Charles’s heirs would have the right to refuse a licensing request. +Unlike Clara Ward, it is clear that Charles’s heirs have the legal power to say +no, to prevent reuse of which they disapprove. + +Was West legally required to license? Would all this amount to a copyright +violation? It is worth running through the analysis because it gives a +beautiful snapshot of the rules with which current law surrounds musical +creation. + +Today, a song is generally covered by at least two copyrights. One covers the +musical composition—the sheet music and the lyrics—and the other the particular +sound recording of that composition. Just as there are two kinds of copyrights, +so there are at least two kinds of borrowings that copyright might be concerned +with. First, one musical composition might infringe another. Thus, for example, +a court found that George Harrison “subconsciously” based his song “My Sweet +Lord” on the melody of “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons. + +How much does it take to infringe? That is a difficult question. The law’s +standard is “substantial similarity,” but not every kind of similarity counts. +Minimal or de minimis copying of tiny fragments is ignored. Certain styles or +forms have become standards; for example, the basic chord structure of the +twelve-bar blues or the habit of introducing instruments one at a time, from +quietest to loudest. There are only so many notes—and so many ways to rearrange +them; inevitably any song will be similar to some other. Yet that cannot mean +that all songs infringe copyright. Finally, even where there is substantial +similarity of a kind that copyright is concerned with, the second artist may +claim “fair use”—for parody or criticism, say. Copyright law, in other words, +has tried to solve the problem with which I began the chapter. Because much of +musical creativity is organic and collective and additive, because it does use +prior musical expression, some copyright decisions have tried to carve out a +realm of freedom for that creativity, using doctrines with names such as scènes +à faire, merger, and fair use. This is yet another example of judges trying to +achieve the balance that this book is all about—between the realm of the +protected and the public domain—recognizing that it is the balance, not the +property side alone, that allows for new creativity. + +The second type of potential infringement comes when someone uses a fragment of +the earlier recording as part of the later one, actually copying a portion of +the recording itself and using it in a new song. One might imagine the same +rules would be applied—de minimis copying irrelevant, certain standard forms +unprotected, and so on. And one would be wrong. In a case called Bridgeport +Music, which I will discuss in a moment, the Court of Appeals ruled that taking +even two notes of a musical recording counts as potentially actionable copying. +Where recordings are concerned, in other words, there is almost no class of +copying so minimal that the law would ignore it. This is a terrible decision, +at least in my opinion, likely to be rejected by other Circuits and perhaps +even eventually by the Supreme Court. But for the moment, it is a case that +samplers have to deal with. + +How does Kanye West fare under these rules? He may sample from the actual +recording of Mr. Charles’s song. It is hard to tell. He certainly copies +portions of the melody. That means we have to look at the copyright in the +musical composition—the words and the music of “I Got a Woman.” For a copyright +infringement, one needs a valid copyright and evidence of copying, the amount +copied needs to be more than an insignificant fragment, substantial similarity +is required, and the similarity has to be between the new work and the elements +of the original that are actually protected by copyright. Elements taken from +the public domain, standard introductions, musical clichés, and so forth, do +not get included in the calculation of similarity. Finally, the copier can +claim “fair use”—that his borrowing is legally privileged because it is +commentary, criticism, parody, and so on. + +Does Charles, or his record company, have a valid copyright in the musical +composition? One huge problem in copyright law is that it is remarkably hard to +find this out. Even with the best will in the world, it is hard for an artist, +musician, or teacher to know what is covered by copyright and what is not. +Nowadays, all works are copyrighted as soon as they are fixed, but at the time +“I Got a Woman” was written one had to include a copyright notice or the song +went immediately into the public domain. The Copyright Office database shows no +copyright over the words and music of “I Got a Woman.” There are copyrights +over a variety of recordings of the song. If Mr. West is using a fragment of +the recording, these would affect him. But the melody? It is possible that the +underlying musical composition is in the public domain. Finding out whether it +is or is not would probably cost one a lot of money. + +Suppose that Mr. Charles has complied with all the formalities. The words and +music were published with a copyright notice. A copyright registration was +filed and renewed. Does Mr. West infringe this copyright? That is where the +discovery of the Bailey Gospel Singers recording is potentially so important. +Charles only gets a copyright in his original creation. Those elements taken +from the public domain (if “I’ve Got a Savior” was indeed in the public domain) +or from other copyrighted songs do not count. The irony here is that the +elements that Kanye West borrows from Ray Charles are almost exactly the same +ones Ray Charles borrows from the Bailey Gospel Singers. “I’ve got a savior, Oh +what a savior” becomes “I got a woman, way over town” becomes “There’s a Gold +Digger, way over town.” And of course, the music behind those words is even +more similar. When The Legendary K.O. reached for Kanye West’s song in order to +criticize Mr. Bush, they found themselves sampling Jamie Foxx, who was copying +Ray Charles, who was copying the Bailey Gospel Singers, who themselves may have +borrowed their theme from an older spiritual. + +2~ George Bush Doesn’t Care . . . + +poem{ + +Five damn days, five long days +And at the end of the fifth he walking in like “Hey!” +Chilling on his vacation, sitting patiently +Them black folks gotta hope, gotta wait and see +If FEMA really comes through in an emergency +But nobody seem to have a sense of urgency +Now the mayor’s been reduced to crying +I guess Bush said, “N———’s been used to dying!” +He said, “I know it looks bad, just have to wait” +Forgetting folks was too broke to evacuate +N———’s starving and they dying of thirst +I bet he had to go and check on them refineries first +Making a killing off the price of gas +He would have been up in Connecticut twice as fast . . . +After all that we’ve been through nothing’s changed +You can call Red Cross but the fact remains that . . . +George Bush ain’t a gold digger, +but he ain’t f——ing with no broke n———s + +}poem + +“George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People,” The Legendary K.O. + +The song “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” was an immediate +sensation. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded it. Within days two +different video versions had been made, one by Franklin Lopez and another by a +filmmaker called “The Black Lantern.” Both synchronized the lyrics of the song +with news clips of the disaster and unsympathetic footage of President Bush +apparently ignoring what was going on. The effect was both hilarious and +tragic. The videos were even more popular than the song alone. The blogosphere +was fascinated—entries were posted, e-mails circulated to friends with the +usual “you have to see this!” taglines. In fact, the song was so popular that +it received the ultimate recognition of an Internet fad: the New York Times +wrote a story on it, setting the practice in historical context. + +_1 In the 18th century, songwriters responded to current events by writing new +lyrics to existing melodies. “Benjamin Franklin used to write broadside ballads +every time a disaster struck,” said Elijah Wald, a music historian, and sell +the printed lyrics in the street that afternoon. This tradition of responding +culturally to terrible events had almost been forgotten, Mr. Wald said, but in +the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it may be making a comeback, with the obvious +difference that, where Franklin would have sold a few song sheets to his fellow +Philadelphians, the Internet allows artists today to reach the whole +world.~{John Leland, “Art Born of Outrage in the Internet Age,” New York Times +(September 25, 2005), D3.}~ + +Mr. Nickerson’s and Mr. Randle’s song started with Kanye West’s words—taken +from the fundraiser with Mike Myers. “George Bush doesn’t care about black +people.” From there it launched into the song. The background melody comes +almost entirely from a looped, or infinitely repeated, version of the hook that +Kanye West and Jamie Foxx had in turn taken from Ray Charles: “She gimme money, +when I’m in need. I gotta leave.” Against that background, The Legendary K.O. +provide their profane and angry commentary, part of which is excerpted above, +with a chorus of “George Bush don’t like black people,” in case anyone had +missed the point. + +The videos differ in the issues they stress. Franklin Lopez’s movie is, rather +pointedly given its theme, just black and white. He uses ornate captions pages, +reminiscent of silent film from the 1920s, to make political points against the +background of the song and the news footage. As the captions read “Katrina +Rapidly Approaches,” we cut to a shot of the hurricane. “The President Ponders +on What to Do.” We have a shot of Mr. Bush playing golf. “I Think I’ll Ride +This One Out.” Mr. Bush is shown relaxing on a golf cart, juxtaposed against +pictures of African-Americans wading through the floods. The captions add, as +an afterthought, “And Keep Dealing with the Brown People.” (Pictures of +soldiers shooting.) When FEMA’s Michael Brown is shown—at the moment when Bush +said “Brownie, you are doing a hell of a job”—the captions comment mockingly, +“The Horse Judge to the Rescue.” + +Mr. Lopez’s video obviously tries to use The Legendary K.O.’s song to make +larger political arguments about the country. For example, it asserts that “in +2004 Bush diverted most of the funds for the levees to the war in Iraq.” Scenes +reminiscent of a Michael Moore documentary are shown. There are pictures of the +Iraq war, Halliburton signs, and shots of the president with a member of the +Saudi royal family. The captions accuse the president of showing insensitivity +and disdain to racial minorities. One summarizes the general theme: “Since he +was elected president, George Bush’s policies have been less than kind toward +Africans and Hispanics.” Issues ranging from the response to the Darfur +massacres, No Child Left Behind, and the attempted privatization of Social +Security also make their appearance. The video concludes by giving the donation +information for the Red Cross and saying that we are “onto” Bush. A picture of +a Klansman removing his hood is shown, with the image manipulated so that the +face revealed is Mr. Bush’s. + +The Black Lantern’s video is just as angry, and it uses some of the same +footage, but the themes it picks up are different. It starts with a logo that +parodies the FBI copyright warning shown at the beginning of movies: “WARNING: +Artist supports filesharing. Please distribute freely.” That dissolves into a +picture of Kanye West and Mike Myers. West is speaking, somewhat awkwardly as +he goes “off script,” and at first Mr. Myers is nodding, though he starts to +look increasingly worried. West says, “I hate the way they portray us in the +media. You see a black family it says they are looting. You see a white family, +it says they are looking for food.” Finally, West says “George Bush doesn’t +care about black people” and the camera catches Myers’s mute, appalled +reaction. Then the song begins. The film cuts repeatedly between a music video +of Mr. Foxx as he sang the lines for “Gold Digger” and the news coverage of the +debacle in New Orleans. At one point the music pauses and a news anchor says, +“You simply get chills when you look at these people. They are so poor. And so +black.” The song resumes. Here the message is simpler. The media coverage is +biased and governmental attention slowed because of negative racial stereotypes +and lack of concern about black people. + +Some readers will find that this song and these videos capture their own +political perspectives perfectly. They will love the bitterly ironic and +obscene outrage at the government’s failure, the double standards of the press, +and the disproportionate and callously disregarded impact on the poor and +black. Others will find both song and films to be stupid, insulting, and +reductionist—an attempt to find racial prejudice in a situation that, at worst, +was an example of good old-fashioned governmental incompetence. Still others +will find the language just too off-putting to even think about the message. +Whatever your feelings about the content, I urge you to set them aside for a +moment. For better or worse, Mr. Bush just happened to be president at the +moment when the Internet was coming into its own as a method of distributing +digitally remixed political commentary, which itself has recently become +something that amateurs can do for pennies rather than an expensive activity +reserved to professionals. The point is that whatever rules we apply to deal +with “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” will also apply to the next +video that alleges corruption in a Democratic administration or that attacks +the sacred cows of the left rather than the right. How should we think about +this kind of activity, this taking the songs and films and photos of others and +remixing them to express political, satirical, parodic, or simply funny points +of view? + +2~ Sampling + +Let us begin with the music. Unlike the other songs I have discussed here, with +the possible exception of Mr. West’s, “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black +People” makes use of digital samples of the work of others. In other words, +this is not merely about copying the tune or the lyrics. The reason that Mr. +Nickerson and Mr. Randle could make and distribute this song so fast (and so +cheaply) is that they took fragments from the recording of “Gold Digger” and +looped them to form the background to their own rap. That was also part of the +reason for the positive public reaction. Kanye West (and Ray Charles and Clara +Ward) are very talented musicians. West’s song was already all over the +airwaves. The Legendary K.O. capitalized on that, just as Benjamin Franklin +capitalized on the familiarity of the songs he reworded. But where Franklin +could only take the tune, The Legendary K.O. could take the actual ones and +zeros of the digital sound file. + +As I mentioned earlier, there are two types of copyright protection over music. +There is the copyright over the musical composition and, a much more recent +phenomenon, the copyright over the actual recording. This song potentially +infringes both of them. + +Readers who came of age in the 1980s might remember the music of Public Enemy +and N.W.A.—a dense wall of sound on which rap lyrics were overlaid. That wall +of sound was in fact made up of samples, sometimes hundreds of tiny samples in +a single track. Rap and hip-hop musicians proceeded under the assumption that +taking a fragment of someone else’s recording was as acceptable legally (and +aesthetically) as a jazz musician quoting a fragment of another tune during a +solo. In both cases, the use of “quotation” is a defining part of the genre, a +harmless or even complimentary homage. Or so they thought. + +In a 1991 case called Grand Upright, that idea was squashed.~{Grand Upright +Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records, Inc., 780 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1991).}~ +The rap artist Biz Markie had extensively sampled Gilbert O’Sullivan’s song +“Alone Again (Naturally)” for his own song “Alone Again.” The court could have +applied the rules described earlier in this chapter, decided whether or not +this was a large enough usage to make the second song substantially similar to +the original, discussed whether or not it counted as a fair use, whether +Markie’s use was transformative or parodic, whether it was going to have a +negative impact on the market for the original, weighed the issues, and ruled +either way. In doing so, there would have been some nice points to discuss +about whether or not the breadth of fair use depends in part on the practice in +the relevant artistic community, how to understand parodic reference, or the +relevant markets for the work. (Biz Markie’s lawyers had asked for permission +to use the sample, but the Supreme Court has made clear that seeking permission +does not weigh against a defense of fair use.) There were also some tricky +issues about the breadth of legal rights over recordings—the right was of +relatively recent creation and had some interesting limitations. Underlying it +all was a more fundamental question: how do we interpret the rules of copyright +so as to encourage musical creativity? After all, as this chapter has shown, +borrowing and reference are a fundamental part of musical practice. We ought to +think twice before concluding they are illegal. Are we to criminalize jazz? +Condemn Charles Ives? And if not, what is the carefully crafted line we draw +that allows some of those uses but condemns this one? + +Judge Duffy, however, was uninterested in any of these subtleties. + +_1 “Thou shalt not steal” has been an admonition followed since the dawn of +civilization. Unfortunately, in the modern world of business this admonition is +not always followed. Indeed, the defendants in this action for copyright +infringement would have this court believe that stealing is rampant in the +music business and, for that reason, their conduct here should be excused. The +conduct of the defendants herein, however, violates not only the Seventh +Commandment, but also the copyright laws of this country.~{Ibid., 183.}~ + +If this were a law school exam, it would get a “D.” (Maybe a C given grade +inflation.) Duffy makes all of the errors Jefferson warned us against. Tangible +property is the same as intellectual property. Songs are the same as sheep and +the same rules can apply to both. Theft is theft. The prior injunctions of the +framers and the courts notwithstanding, we do not need to think carefully about +the precise boundaries of intellectual property rights or worry that +interpreting them too broadly is as bad as making them too narrow. So far as +Judge Duffy is concerned, the tablets on Mount Sinai were inscribed with an +absolute injunction against digital sampling. (The font must have been small.) +But to say all this is merely to scratch the surface of how regrettable a +decision it is. In the narrowest and most formalistic legal terms it is also +very poor. + +Judge Duffy gives not a single citation to the provisions of the Copyright Act. +He ignores issues of de minimis copying, substantial similarity, fair use, and +the differences between the right over the recording and that over the +composition. In fact, he quotes the Bible more, and more accurately, than he +does Title 17 of the U.S. Code—the Copyright Act. The one mention he makes of +actual copyright law is at the end of the opinion, when he refers the case for +criminal prosecution! When I first read this case, I seriously wondered for a +moment if it were a crude parody of a legal opinion written by someone who had +never been to law school. + +Is the result in this case wrong? Personally, I do not think so. It is +possible, even probable, that a conscientious judge who bothered to read the +law could go through a careful analysis and find that Markie’s use went beyond +de minimis copying, that it was neither creative, parodic, nor short enough to +count as a fair use. The judge might have presumed a negative effect on the +market for Mr. O’Sullivan’s song and thus could have ruled that it was a +copyright infringement. In doing so, the judge would have to give some guidance +to future courts about digital sampling. The most likely guidance would be “the +sample here is so extensive and so unchanged, that this case says little about +the wider musical practice of sampling.” Judge Duffy’s opinion was poor not +because of the result he reached, but because he reached it in an overly broad +and judicially inappropriate way that became a guideline for future cultural +creation. Worse still, the industry listened to him. + +In excellent books on this issue, Kembrew McLeod and Siva Vaidhyanathan each +argue that Grand Upright was a disaster for rap music.~{Kembrew McLeod, Owning +Culture: Authorship, Ownership and Intellectual Property Law (New York: Peter +Lang, 2001), and Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of +Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York: New York +University Press, 2001).}~ The industry’s practice turned full circle almost +overnight. Now every sample, no matter how tiny, had to be “cleared”—licensed +from the owners of the recording. As they tell the story, this “legal” change +caused an aesthetic change. The number of samples in an average song dropped +precipitously. The engaging complexity of the Public Enemy “wall of sound” gave +way to the simplistic thumping beat and unimaginative synthesizer lines of +modern rap. I must admit to sharing McLeod’s and Vaidhyanathan’s musical +prejudices. The causal claim is harder to substantiate, but industry lawyers +and musicians both agree that changes in the industry’s understanding of the +law had a major role in transforming the practice of sampling. + +If we disregard the Jefferson Warning and assume the recording artist has +absolute property rights over his work, then we could ignore the idea that +forcing people to pay for stuff they take might have a negative effect on +future art and culture. Theft is theft. I might be able to make art much more +easily if I did not have to pay for the paint and canvas, but that is not +commonly held to excuse shoplifting from art stores. But if we take the +Jefferson Warning seriously, then intellectual property’s job is to balance the +need to provide incentives for production and distribution with the need to +leave future creators free to build upon the past. Reasonable minds will differ +on where this line is to be drawn, but the process of drawing it is very +different from the process Judge Duffy had in mind. + +For fifteen years, critics of the decision waited for an appeals court to fix +the law in this area. When the case of Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension +Films came up, they thought they had what they wanted. The band NWA had used a +tiny fragment (less than two seconds) consisting of three notes of a guitar +solo from the George Clinton song “Get Off Your Ass and Jam.” The fragment was +an arpeggiated chord, which simply means that you strike the notes of the chord +individually and in sequence. It was, in fact, a pretty standard “deedly” +sound, familiar from many guitar solos. NWA then heavily distorted this +fragment and looped it so that it played in the background of one part of the +song—so faintly that it is almost impossible to hear and completely impossible +to recognize. (With the distortion it sounds like a very faint and distant +police siren.) A company called Bridgeport Music owned the sound recording +copyright over the Clinton song. They sued. NWA’s response was predictable—this +was classic de minimis copying, which the law did not touch. One did not even +have to get to the issue of fair use (though this surely would be one). + +The appeals court did not waste any time attempting to dignify Judge Duffy’s +decision in Grand Upright. + +_1 Although Grand Upright applied a bright-line test in a sampling case, we +have not cited it as precedent for several reasons. First, it is a district +court opinion and as such has no binding precedential value. Second, although +it appears to have involved claims for both sound recording and musical +composition copyright infringement, the trial judge does not distinguish which +he is talking about in his ruling, and appears to be addressing primarily the +musical composition copyright. Third, and perhaps most important, there is no +analysis set forth to indicate how the judge arrived at his ruling, which has +resulted in the case being criticized by commentators.~{Bridgeport Music, Inc. +v. Dimension Films, 410 F.3d 792, 804n16 (6th Cir. 2005).}~ + +They did like one thing about the decision, however: its bright-line rule, +“Thou Shalt Not Steal.” (Lawyers use the term “bright-line rule” to refer to a +rule that is very easy to apply to the facts. A 55 mph speed limit is a +bright-line rule.) The Bridgeport court rejected the idea that sound recording +copyrights and music composition copyrights should be analyzed in the same way. +They wanted to set a clear rule defining how much of a sound recording one +could use without permission. How much? Nothing. To be precise, the court +suggests in a footnote that taking a single note might be acceptable since the +copyright protection only covers a “series.” Anything more, however, is clearly +off limits. + +Though they come to a conclusion that, if anything, is more stringent than +Judge Duffy’s, they do so very differently. In their words, “Get a license or +do not sample.” Effectively, the court concludes that the sound recording +copyright is different enough from the composition copyright that a court could +reasonably conclude that a different analysis is required. The judges are fully +aware that copyright must balance encouraging current creators and leaving raw +material to future creators—the Jefferson Warning holds no novelty for them. +But they conclude that a clear “one-note rule” will do, because if the costs of +licenses are too high, samplers can simply recreate the riff themselves, and +this will tend to keep prices reasonable. + +This is an interesting idea. Why does this not happen more often? Why do +samplers not simply recreate James Brown’s drumbeat from “Funky Drummer,” or +George Clinton’s solo from “Get Off Your Ass and Jam”? Musicians offer lots of +different answers. They do not understand the distinction the court is drawing, +so the market never develops. The samples themselves cannot be replicated, +because the music has all kinds of overtones from the historical equipment used +and even the methods of recording. Fundamentally, though, the answer seems to +be one of authenticity, ironically enough. The original beats have a totemic +significance—like the great standard chord sequences in jazz. One cannot +substitute replicas for James Brown’s funkiness. It just would not be the same. +As Walter Benjamin pointed out long ago in “The Work of Art in the Age of +Mechanical Reproduction,” cheap copying actually increases the demand for +authenticity.~{Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical +Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, +trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 217–42.}~ The +court’s economic analysis—which imagines a world of fungible beats produced for +music as a consumer good—deals poorly with such motivations. + +When the court first released its decision, it was greeted with concern even by +recording industry representatives who might have been expected to favor it, +because it appeared to do away with not only the de minimis limitation on +copyright (some portions are just too small to count as “copying”) but the fair +use provisions as well. The court took the very unusual step of rehearing the +case and amending the opinion, changing it in a number of places and adding a +paragraph that stated that when the case went back to the district court, the +judge there was free to consider the fair use defense. Of course, if one takes +this seriously—and, for the constitutional reasons given in Chapter 5, I agree +that the court has no power to write fair use out of the statute—it undermines +the supposedly clear rule. If the factors of fair use are seriously applied, +how can a three-note excerpt ever fail to be fair use? And if we always have to +do a conventional fair use analysis, then the apparent clarity of the one-note +rule is an illusion. + +The Bridgeport decision is a bad one, I believe. Among other things, it fails +to take seriously the constitutional limitations on copyright—including the +originality requirement and the First Amendment. (A three-note sample is not +original enough to be protected under copyright law, in my view. There are also +more speech-related issues in sampling than the court seems to realize.) The +competitive licensing market the court imagines seems more like economic +fantasy than reality. I think the ruling sets unnecessary barriers on musical +creation and ends up with a rule that is just as blurry as the one it +criticizes. I think the court’s reading of the statute and legislative history +is wrong—though I have not bored you with the full details of that argument. +But I want to be clear that it is a very different kind of bad decision from +Judge Duffy’s. + +The court in Bridgeport does see copyright as a balance. It does understand the +need for future creators to build on the past, but it also shows that a simple +willingness to look upon intellectual property protections in a utilitarian way +does not solve all problems. It certainly does not proceed from Jefferson’s +presumption that intellectual property protections should be interpreted +narrowly. Though it claims to have a “literal” reading of the statute, the real +driving force in the analysis is an unconsummated desire for bright-line rules +and a belief that the market will solve these problems by itself. The court +also suggests that “[i]f this is not what Congress intended or is not what they +would intend now, it is easy enough for the record industry, as they have done +in the past, to go back to Congress for a clarification or change in the law.” +Note the assumption that “the record industry” is the most reliable guide to +Congress’s intentions or that it is the only entity affected by such a rule. +This is truly the image of copyright law as a contract among affected +industries. Of course, digital artists such as The Legendary K.O. hardly fit +within such a model. + +Under the rule in Bridgeport—“Get a license or do not sample”—Mr. Randle and +Mr. Nickerson appear to be breaking the law. They did not get a license and +they most definitely did sample. What about fair use? Under fair use, copyright +allows a very specific (and possibly lengthy) use of another’s material when +the purpose is parody of that prior work itself. The Supreme Court gave parody +a unique status in the Acuff-Rose case. The (extremely profane) rap group 2 +Live Crew had asked for permission to produce a version of Roy Orbison’s +“Pretty Woman.” But where Orbison sang about the pretty woman walking down the +street whom he would like to meet, 2 Live Crew wrote about a “big hairy woman” +(“with hair that ain’t legit, ’cause you look like Cousin It”). They sang about +a “bald headed” woman with a “teeny weeny afro.” They sang about group sex with +both women. Finally, they told a “two timin’ woman,” “now I know the baby ain’t +mine.” Justice Souter showed the characteristic sangfroid of a Supreme Court +justice faced with raunchy rap music. + +_1 While we might not assign a high rank to the parodic element here, we think +it fair to say that 2 Live Crew’s song reasonably could be perceived as +commenting on the original or criticizing it, to some degree. 2 Live Crew +juxtaposes the romantic musings of a man whose fantasy comes true, with +degrading taunts, a bawdy demand for sex, and a sigh of relief from paternal +responsibility. The later words can be taken as a comment on the naiveté of +the original of an earlier day, as a rejection of its sentiment that ignores +the ugliness of street life and the debasement that it signifies. It is this +joinder of reference and ridicule that marks off the author’s choice of parody +from the other types of comment and criticism that traditionally have had a +claim to fair use protection as transformative works.~{Campbell v. Acuff-Rose +Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 583 (1994).}~ [emphasis added] + +Truly, the law can confront and master all cultural forms. The heart of parody +as the Supreme Court described it is that one is taking aim at the original. +Because 2 Live Crew could be seen as directing their song at Orbison’s +original, rather than using Orbison’s song to make some other political or +social point, the court was willing to give it the favorable consideration that +parody receives as a fair use. + +Does “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” fit that model? The +Legendary K.O. were not “taking aim” at “Gold Digger.” True, they quoted West’s +actual words from the television broadcast (also copyrighted). They even used +them as their title. But they were not taking aim at his song. (Ironically, +Kanye West has a better claim that he was taking aim at Ray Charles’s picture +of womanhood, in just the way described in the 2 Live Crew case.) Rather, The +Legendary K.O. were using the sample of the song as the backing to an entirely +different rap that expressed, in familiar and popular musical form, a more +expansive version of his condemnation of both press and president. That does +not end the inquiry. Parody is not the only form of protected criticism or +commentary. But it makes it much harder for them to succeed, particularly in +light of the hostility toward sampling betrayed by both Grand Upright and +Bridgeport. + +The videos made by The Black Lantern and Franklin Lopez present an even more +complex set of questions. On top of the music copyright issues, we also have +fair use claims for the extensive news footage and footage of Mr. Foxx. The +Black Lantern also used some fragments of a popular video by JibJab, which had +a cartoon Bush and Kerry singing dueling parodied versions of Woody Guthrie’s +“This Land.” When JibJab’s video first came out, the Guthrie estate claimed +copyright infringement over the song. Assisted by a number of public interest +legal groups, JibJab claimed fair use. (It eventually came out that the +copyright over the song was no longer valid.) What did Jib- Jab do when The +Black Lantern sampled them in their turn? In a move that both wins the prize +for hypocrisy and serves to sum up the intersection of law and culture I have +been describing, they sent him a cease and desist letter. The video was taken +down for a week and he was eventually forced to remove the segment of their +video from his work. Fair use for me, but not for thee. + +2~ Conclusion + +The Legendary K.O. samples Kanye West, who uses a fragment from Ray Charles, +who may have taken material from Will Lamartine Thompson or, more likely, from +Clara Ward (who herself borrowed from a gospel standard). The chain of +borrowing I describe here has one end in the hymns and spirituals of the early +1900s and the other in the twenty-first century’s chaotic stew of digital +sampling, remix, and mashup. Along the way, we have the synthesis of old and +the invention of new musical genres—often against the wishes of those whose +work is serving as the raw material. One way of viewing this story is that each +of these musicians (except for some imaginary original artist, the musical +source of the Nile) is a plagiarist and a pirate. If they are licensing their +material or getting it from the public domain, then they may not be lawbreakers +but they are still unoriginal slavish imitators. If one’s image of creativity +is that of the romantic, iconoclastic creator who invents the world anew with +each creation, those conclusions seem entirely appropriate. The borrowing here +is rampant. Far from building everything anew, these musicians seem quite +deliberately to base their work on fragments taken from others. + +It is important to remember that copyright does not subscribe completely to the +idea of romantic creation where music is concerned. As I pointed out earlier, +musical genres develop out of other genres: soul from gospel and rhythm and +blues; gospel from spirituals; rhythm and blues from jazz, jump music, and +Delta blues; and so on. When it comes to genres, we can play the game of +musicological “six degrees of separation” all day long. Copyright is supposed +to leave “holes” in its coverage so that the genre is not covered, only the +specific form of creativity within the genre. I mentioned before the need to +keep the lines of genre and form open, to keep them free from private property +rights in order to allow musicians to develop the form by using them as common +property, the “highways” of musical progress. So, for example, the twelve-bar +blues uses the first, fourth, and fifth chords in a scale. That sequence cannot +be owned, unless blues is to become impossible or illegal. Bebop is +characterized by copious use of the flattened fifth—a sound which was jarring +to audiences when it was first introduced and which marked the break with the +more accessible jazz of swing and the big bands. The flattened fifth is not +owned. These characteristic genre-creating sequences or sounds are supposed to +be left in the public domain, though increasingly some scholars—including +me—are coming to believe that we have managed to make the copyright holder’s +control so complete and so granular as to close those common areas and impede +the development of future musical forms. The Bridgeport court might extend its +logic and imagine that the entire musical commons could be licensed, of course. +The presence of other chord sequences would keep the price down! But up to now, +we have not gone that far. In theory at least, copyright is not supposed to +stop the next Ray Charles, the person who wants to fuse two older forms of +music to create a third. + +Yet the chain of borrowing that links The Legendary K.O., Kanye West, Ray +Charles, and the Bailey Gospel Singers is of a different kind. This borrowing +involves taking chunks of prior musicians’ melodies, their words, their lyrical +patterns. This is not just copying the genre. It is copying the lines of the +song within the genre. This is the kind of stuff copyright is supposed to +regulate even when it is working well. And yet, listening to the sequence, it +is hard to deny that at each stage something artistic and innovative, something +remarkable, has been created. In fact, the story of this song is the striking +ability of each set of artists to impose their own sound, temperament, +spirituality, humor, vision of women, or, in the case of The Legendary K.O., +their intense and profane political anger, onto the musical phrases they have +in common. + +The postmodern conclusion here is “there is nothing new under the sun”—that all +creation is re-creation, that there is no such thing as originality, merely +endless imitation. If this is meant to be a comment about how things get +created, at least in music, I think there is some truth to it. But if it is a +claim about aesthetic worth, a denial that there are more and less creative +individuals in the arts, I find it as facile and unconvincing as its romantic +authorial opposite. + +What is fascinating about the artists I describe here is that, while they do +not fit neatly into either the aesthetic ideal of independent creation or the +legal model for how creative expression gets made, they each have a remarkable, +palpable creativity. Each leaves us with something new, even if formed partly +from the fragments of the past. One could describe Ray Charles as the merest +plagiarist—making “search and replace” songs by substituting a woman for the +deity in already-established hits. But if that is our conclusion, it merely +proves that our theories of aesthetics are poorer than the creativity they seek +to describe. So much the worse for the theories. + +As Jefferson pointed out, the lines surrounding intellectual property are hard +to draw—something the Bridgeport court got right. When we draw them, whether +legally or as a matter of aesthetic morality, we do so partly with standard +instances in mind. “Well, that can’t be wrong,” we think to ourselves, and +reason by analogy accordingly. Yet the process of analogy fails us sometimes, +because the types of borrowing change over time. + +Ray Charles was frank about the way he copied the style and licks of Nat King +Cole like an apprentice learning from a lawyer. But he and his estate +assiduously guarded his copyrights against more modern borrowing they found to +be inappropriate. Judge Duffy thunderously denounces Biz Markie. It is harder +to imagine him leveling the same condemnation at Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Ives, +Oscar Peterson, or, for that matter, Beethoven, though all of them made copious +use of the works of others in their own. It is bizarre to imagine a +Bridgeport-like rule being extended to composition copyrights and applied to +music such as jazz. “Get a license or do not solo”? I think not. Does it make +any more sense for sampling? + +If there is a single reason I told the story of these songs it is this: to most +of us, certainly to me, the idea that copyright encourages creativity and +discourages the reuse of material created by others seems reasonable. Of +course, I would want to apply the correctives implied by the Jefferson +Warning—to make sure the rights were as short and as narrow as possible. But at +least when it comes to copying chunks of expression still covered by copyright, +our intuitions are to encourage people to create “their own work,” rather than +to rely on remix. What does that mean in the world of music? As the story I +have told here seems to illustrate, even musicians of unquestioned +“originality,” even those who can make a claim to having created a new musical +genre, sometimes did so by a process rather more like collage than creation out +of nothing, taking chunks of existing work that were proven to work well and +setting them in a new context or frame. + +Imagine Ray Charles trying to create “I Got a Woman” today. Both of his +possible sources would be strongly and automatically protected by copyright. +The industries in which those works were produced would be much more legalistic +and infinitely more litigious. The owners of those copyrights could use them to +stop him from “desecrating their work”—which is literally what he is doing. We +know Clara Ward objected to Charles’s other borrowings from gospel. I cannot +imagine Will Lamartine Thompson or his worthy neighbors in East Liverpool +looking kindly on the sweet “early morning loving” outside of wedlock described +in “I Got a Woman,” still less the use of sacred music to glorify it. And +copyright gives them the power to say no. Remember Macaulay’s description of +how Richardson’s novels might have been censored by a moralistic heir? Even if +the objections were not vetoes, but simple demands for payment, would we get “I +Got a Woman” and “This Little Girl of Mine”? Given the extent of the borrowing +that jump-started this particular genre-bridging effort, would we be likely to +see the birth of soul music? + +Congress assures us that the many increases in copyright protection have been +in the name of encouraging creativity. The music industry says the same thing +when its pettifogging clearance procedures and permission culture are +criticized. But do we really think we are more likely to get a +twenty-first-century Ray Charles, or a fusion of styles to create a new genre, +in the world we have made? Do we really think that the formalist ignorance of +Judge Duffy or the market optimism of the Bridgeport court, in which thick +markets offer fungible sets of samples to be traded like commodities, are good +guides for the future of music? Are we in fact killing musical creativity with +the rules that are supposed to defend it? + +An Internet optimist would tell us that is precisely the point. True, because +of the errors described in the chapter on the Jefferson Warning, and the +mistakes catalogued in the chapters on the Internet Threat and the Farmers’ +Tale, we have dramatically expanded the scope, length, and power of the rights +that are supposed to shape our creative culture. But technology cures all. Look +at The Legendary K.O., The Black Lantern, or Franklin Lopez. They are all +probably breaking the law as it is currently interpreted by the courts. But +their work can be created for pennies and distributed to millions. The +technology allows people to circumvent the law. Admittedly, some of the +copyright holders will police their rights assiduously—think of JibJab’s +newfound dislike of fair use and their power to alter The Black Lantern’s +video. But others either cannot or will not. Kanye West’s representatives in +particular are unlikely to be stupid enough to sue The Legendary K.O. in the +first place. Internet distribution becomes a demimonde in which the rules of +the rest of the society either cannot or will not be enforced. Art gets its +breathing room, not from legal exceptions, but from technological enforcement +difficulties. Finally, as more and more people can create and distribute +digital culture, they are less likely to understand, believe in, or accept +rules that are strongly at variance with their aesthetic and moral assumptions. + +There is a lot to these points. The technology does transform the conditions of +creativity, and sometimes it runs right over the law in the process. Thousands, +even millions, can be reached outside of conventional distribution channels +with work that is technically illegal. And attitudes toward creative propriety +do not track legal rules. When I wrote to Mr. Randle and Mr. Nickerson, I found +that they realized Mr. West probably had a legal right to get their work taken +down, but they felt he would not use it, and they had a very commonsensical +conception of what they ought to be allowed to do. They were not making any +money from this. They were making a political point, drawing attention to a +political and human problem. That made it okay. They would have liked more +formal permission so that they could actually distribute CDs through +conventional for-profit channels, perhaps with some portion of the proceeds +going to disaster relief, but they understood they were unlikely to get it. + +Despite all this, I am uncomfortable with the argument “do not worry, +technology will allow us to evade the rules where they are stupid.” A system +that can only function well through repeated lawbreaking is an unstable and +dangerous one. It breeds a lack of respect for the law in those who should be +its greatest supporters and beneficiaries. It blurs civil disobedience and +plain old lawbreaking. Sitting in on the segregated lunch counter and being +willing to face the consequences is very different from parking in the disabled +space and hoping you can get away with it. It also blurs our judgment of +conduct. Whatever one thinks of them, The Legendary K.O. are doing something +very different than a college student who just does not want to pay for music +and downloads thousands of tracks for free from file sharing networks. + +The problem is not simply one of blurring. Technology-based “freedoms” are not +reliable (though legal ones, too, may fail). In a pinch, the technology may not +save you, as thousands of those same downloaders have found out when sued by +the RIAA and forced to pay thousands of dollars for an activity they thought to +be private and anonymous. The Internet “solution” also leaves certain types of +artistic creation dependent on the vagaries of the current technology, which +may well change, eliminating some of the zone of freedom we currently rely on. +But more worrisome is the fact that this “solution” actually confines certain +types of art to the world of the Internet. + +The video of “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” could be seen by +many, but only if they were wired to the right technological and social +network. (After all, someone has to tell you to watch.) It was a searing +intervention in the national debate on Katrina. But it appeared on no +television station. Like most of the mashups created online, the fact that the +rights could never be cleared keeps it off mass media. Copyright acts as the +barbed wire around mass media outlets. That is a shame, I think. Not because +that video is so good—you may love it or hate it. But because this kind of +artwork has something important to contribute to our national culture. Imagine +a world in which Ray Charles could create “I Got a Woman,” but could only +circulate it to a narrow group of the file-trading digerati because of a +flagrant violation of Clara Ward’s copyright. Do we still get soul? The blues? +Jazz? Or do we just get a precious and insular digital subculture, whose +cultural experiments never reach the mainstream? + +Throughout his life, Charles described an intimate relationship with his +audience, with the public. He described their tastes as a check, as a +corrective; he thought they would actually be “ahead” of the artists. He wanted +to make songs that would be listened to by tens of millions of people. And he +wanted to make art and lots of money. I am all for the person who wants to +create as an “amateur-professional” and distribute outside the chains of +commerce. I have worked with organizations that make it easier to do this. But +I also believe in the power and creativity of commercial culture and political +speech carried on mass media. Ironically, our current copyright system serves +it poorly. + +What is the solution to all of this? The music business runs on compulsory +licenses, a legally granted ability to use music in certain ways without +permission, though with a fee. The system seems to function pretty well. One +solution is to extend that system to the world of mashups and derivative works. +If you merely copy the whole of my work and circulate it on file sharing +networks or on CDs, we apply the current rules and penalties. If, on the other +hand, you make a “derivative” work, mixing your work with mine, then there are +two alternatives. If you stay in the world of nonprofit exchange, you get a +heightened presumption in favor of fair use (perhaps administered through a +quicker and cheaper system of arbitration). If you move into the for-profit +world, then you must pay a flat licensing fee or percentage of profits to the +copyright holder. + +A second solution would be to curtail the hypertrophy of protectionism that +made all this happen in the first place. The copyright term could be shortened +or we could require renewal every twenty-eight years. (There are international +treaties that currently forbid the latter alternative.) We could cut back on +excesses like the Bridgeport decision, create incentives to make the music +industry less legalistically insistent on policing the most atomic level of +creation. We could exempt samples shorter than five seconds from copyright +liability, clarify the boundaries of fair use, and extend it beyond parody to +other genre-smashing forms such as satire and collage. + +There are enormous obstacles to all these proposals. In particular, while +artists fare very poorly under the current clearance culture—paying but not +receiving the benefits of payments—the middlemen who profit from transaction +costs are not keen on abolishing them. Certainly if, as the Bridgeport court +assumed, the recording industry is the party responsible for fine-tuning +copyright law, we are hardly likely to see any reforms that threaten current +modes of doing business. Yet there is a ray of hope. It is getting harder and +harder to pretend that the rules ostensibly designed to encourage creativity +are actually working. At the same time, more and more people are creating and +distributing cultural objects—becoming “subjects” of intellectual property law +in the process, often to their dismay and irritation. It is in that +conjunction—a far cry from the industry contract envisioned by the Bridgeport +court—that hope for the future of copyright law’s treatment of culture might +lie. + +2~ Chapter 6: Further Reading + +Musical borrowing is the subject of the next “graphic novel”—which is to say +comic book—produced by me, Keith Aoki, and Jennifer Jenkins: Theft!: A History +of Music (Durham, N.C.: Center for the Study of the Public Domain, forthcoming +2009). Our earlier effort to make intellectual property accessible to film +makers and mashup artists can be found in Bound By Law (Durham, N.C.: Center +for the Study of the Public Domain, 2006), available in full at +http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics. An expanded edition of Bound By Law will +be published in the Fall of 2008 by Duke University Press. However, neither +graphic novel can provide a sense of the scholarly literature in music, +musicology, law, and biography that enabled me to write this chapter. + +3~ Musical History + +The indispensable guide to music history is J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay +Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 7th ed. (New York: W. +W. Norton, 2006). For those who have access through a university or library the +Grove Music database is the single most comprehensive computer-aided source: +[recenlty moved to] Oxford Music Online, +http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/ [Ed. note: originally published as +http://www.grovemusic.com/index.html; link has changed]. A fascinating book by +Frederic Scherer, Quarter Notes and Bank Notes: The Economics of Music +Composition in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Princeton, N.J.: +Princeton University Press, 2004), explores different incentive systems—such as +patronage or markets enabled by intellectual property rights—and their +respective effect on musical aesthetics and musical production. Scherer is one +of the foremost contemporary economists of innovation. To have him writing +about the practices of court composers and manuscript publishers is completely +fascinating. At the end of the day, he diplomatically refuses to say whether +patronage or market mechanisms produced “better” music but the careful reader +will pick up indications of which way he leans. + +3~ Musical Borrowing + +There is a vast scholarly literature on musical borrowing—indeed the discipline +of musicology takes the study of borrowing, in its largest sense, as one of its +main organizing themes. Beyond a personal tour provided by Professor Anthony +Kelley of Duke University, I found a number of books particularly useful. +Burkholder’s History (J. Peter Burkholder, Donald J. Grout, and Claude V. +Palisca, A History of Western Music, 7th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006)) is +full of examples of borrowing and influence—whether of style, notation, musical +conventions, or melody itself. But it is Burkholder’s book on Charles Ives—that +fertile early-twentieth-century borrower—that was most influential: J. Peter +Burkholder, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing +(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995). Ives’s own thoughts on his +mashup of prior American musical forms can be found in Charles Ives, Memos, ed. +John Kirkpatrick (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 10–25. David Metzer’s +Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge +University Press, 2003), throws light on the way that quotations or borrowings +came to have a particular cultural meaning in different musical traditions. +Honey Meconi’s collection Early Musical Borrowing, ed. Honey Meconi (New York: +Routledge, 2004), discusses—among many other things—the issue of borrowing +between the secular and religious musical traditions, something that helped me +work through that issue in this chapter. Finally, “Musical Borrowing: An +Annotated Bibliography” (http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/borrowing/) provides a +searchable database of articles about musical borrowing. + +3~ Music and Copyright Law + +I was particularly influenced by two books and two articles. The books are +Kembrew McLeod, Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership and Intellectual Property +Law (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), and Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and +Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity +(New York: New York University Press, 2001). McLeod and Vaidhyanathan are the +authors who sounded the alarm about the cultural and aesthetic effects of the +heavy-handed legal regulation of musical borrowing. Together with the work of +Larry Lessig (particularly his writing on the “permissions culture”) Lawrence +Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New +York: Random House, 2001), their scholarship has defined the field. + +The two articles that influenced me the most focus more specifically on the +details of the evolution of music on the one hand and music copyright on the +other. Both of them are by Michael Carroll: “The Struggle for Music Copyright,” +Florida Law Review 57 (2005): 907–961, and “Whose Music Is It Anyway?: How We +Came to View Musical Expression as a Form of Property,” University of +Cincinnati Law Review 72 (2004): 1405–1496. But these two pieces by no means +exhaust the literature. Olufunmilayo Arewa has written memorably on copyright +and musical borrowing in “Copyright on Catfish Row: Musical Borrowing, Porgy & +Bess and Unfair Use,” Rutgers Law Journal 37 (2006): 277–353, and “From J. C. +Bach to Hip Hop: Musical Borrowing, Copyright and Cultural Context,” North +Carolina Law Review 84 (2006): 547–645. I also recommend K. J. Greene, +“Copyright, Culture & Black Music: A Legacy of Unequal Protection,” Hastings +Communications & Entertainment Law Journal 21 (1999): 339–392. There is much, +much more. Finally, Joanna Demers’s recent book Steal This Music: How +Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (Athens: University of +Georgia Press, 2006), provides a more comprehensive coverage than I can hope to +in a single chapter. + +Beyond the scholarly literature, two websites allow you to experiment with +these issues online. The History of Sampling created by Jesse Kriss, +http://jessekriss.com/projects/samplinghistory/, allows you to explore visually +exactly which hip-hop samplers borrowed from which older songs and to trace the +process backwards or forwards. Extremely cool. The Copyright Infringement +Project, sponsored by the UCLA Intellectual Property Project and Columbia Law +School, http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/law/library/caselist.html, is an +extremely useful educational site that gives examples of cases alleging musical +copyright infringement, including the relevant sound files. The older version +of this project confusingly referred to these cases as “plagiarism” +cases—something that judges themselves also frequently do. Plagiarism is the +moral, academic, or professional sin of taking ideas, facts or expression and +passing them off as your own. If I take the central arguments from your book +and completely reword them, or if I present a series of facts you uncovered as +an historian and include them in my own book without attribution, you may +accuse me of plagiarism, though not of copyright infringement. If I take the +words of Shakespeare or Dickens and pass them off as my own, I am committing +plagiarism but certainly not copyright infringement, for even under today’s +rules those works have long since entered the public domain. If I credit T. S. +Eliot but then proceed to reprint the entire of “The Love Song of J. Alfred +Prufrock” without the permission of the copyright holders, I am committing +copyright infringement, but certainly not plagiarism. At best, plagiarism and +copyright infringement overlap to some extent, but each regulates large areas +about which the other is indifferent. We sap the strength of both norm systems +by confusing them. The new incarnation of the project, at UCLA, has removed the +word “plagiarism” from its title. + +3~ The People and the Music + +A brief biography of Will Lamartine Thompson can be found in C. B. Galbreath, +“Song Writers of Ohio (Will Lamartine Thompson),” Ohio Archaeological and +Historical Quarterly 14 (January, 1905): 291–312. Since the copyright has +expired you can read it in full, and see the picture of Thompson, at +http://books.google.com/books?id=3N-WqdvA6T4C&printsec=titlepage#PRA1-PA291,M1. + +The best book on Clara Ward is Willa Ward-Royster, Toni Rose, and Horace +Clarance Boyer, How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World Famous Ward Singers +(Philadelphia, Penn.: Temple University Press, 1997). + +The best biography of Ray Charles is Michael Lydon, Ray Charles: Man and Music +(New York: Routledge, 2004). Charles’s autobiography is also a fascinating +read. Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story +(Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1992). Charles’s website, which contains +useful biographical and discographical information, is at www.raycharles.com. +There is much more, of course, but these resources provide a good starting +place. + +There are several hagiographic biographies of Mr. West, but none worth reading. +Those who have not already been inundated with information through the popular +press could do worse than to start with his rather breathless Wikipedia entry +http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West. + +The main source of information on The Legendary K.O.—a name they now use +intermittently—is their website is www.k-otix.com. (I am grateful to Mr. +Nickerson and Mr. Randle for confirming additional portions of the story by +e-mail.) The song “George Bush Doesn’t Like Black People” is no longer +available on their website, however an audio version of it is currently +available at http://www.ourmedia.org/node/53964. The Black Lantern’s video can +be found at http://www.theblacklantern.com/george.html. Franklin Lopez’s video +can currently be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGRcEXtLpTo. Whether +any of those sites will be available in a year’s time is hard to tell. Those +who plan to listen or view are reminded that the lyrics are ‘explicit.’ + +The songs by Clara Ward, Ray Charles, and Kanye West are widely available +through a variety of commercial outlets, as are several commercial versions of +“Jesus is All the World to Me” by Mr. Thompson. + +I would recommend The Clara Ward Singers, Meetin’ Tonight (Vanguard Records, +1994), compact disc. It includes a version of “Meetin’ Tonight: This Little +Light of Mine” in which the human limits on the ability to sustain a note are +broken repeatedly. Any Ray Charles compilation will feature some of the songs +discussed here. The most economical is probably Ray Charles, I’ve Got a Woman & +Other Hits by Ray Charles (Rhino Flashback Records, 1997), compact disc. It +includes “I Got a Woman” and “This Little Girl of Mine.” Kanye West, Late +Registration (Roc-a-Fella Records, 2005), compact disc, contains the full +version of “Gold Digger.” + +Finally, I would love to be able to play you the full version of the Bailey +Gospel Singers “I Got a Savior” (B-Side: “Jesus is the Searchlight”) (Columbia +Records, 1951), 78 rpm phonograph record. Unfortunately, given the legal +uncertainties I am forbidden from doing so, and I know of no licit way—for free +or for pay—that you can listen to it, short of traveling to the Rodgers and +Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the New York Public Library for the +Performing Arts yourself and asking to hear the original 78. Perhaps that +simple fact is the most elegant encapsulation of my argument here. + +1~ Chapter 7: The Enclosure of Science and Technology: Two Case Studies + +Over the last forty years, much has changed in the way that scientific research +and technological development are organized, funded, and institutionally +arranged. Much has also changed in the type of scientific and technical +material that is covered by intellectual property rights, the ways that +material is covered, the parties who hold the rights, and the state of research +and development at which rights claims are made. Many academics who study both +science’s organizational structure and the intellectual property claims that +surround it are concerned about the results. To say this is not to conjure up a +tragically lost world of pure research science, untainted by property claims or +profit motives. That world never existed and it is probably a good thing too. +Intellectual property rights, and the profit motive more generally, have a +vital and beneficial role in moving innovations from lab bench to bedside, from +computer simulation to actual flight. The question is not whether intellectual +property rights are useful as part of scientific and technological development. +The question is what type of rights they should be, where in the research +process those rights are best deployed, how they should coexist with state +funded basic scientific and technological research, how broad they should be, +how they should deal with new technologies, how long they should last, how they +should treat follow-on innovations. + +I cannot hope here to answer all those questions, though some fascinating +research has begun the process. Instead, as with the music chapter, I will +offer a case study—actually two case studies—that try to illuminate the process +I am describing, to illustrate its pitfalls and its strange and unintended +consequences. + +The two defining technologies of the last thirty years are biotechnology and +the networked computer. Each is both product and platform. Innovations +themselves, they are also constitutive technologies that enable still more +innovations. But at several historical moments in the development of each we +came perilously close to breaking technology with law.~{See, e.g., Pamela +Samuelson, Randall Davis, Mitchell D. Kapor, and J. H. Reichman, “A Manifesto +Concerning the Legal Protection of Computer Programs,” Columbia Law Review 94 +(1994): 2308–2431; Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Can Patents +Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research,” Science 280 (1998): +698–701.}~ Some would say that it was not just a close shave: we actually have +hampered or limited the full potential of technology, slowing down its dynamism +with a host of overbroad software patents, gene patents, and materials transfer +agreements. Others are more optimistic. They think that a series of rapid +improvisations by courts, scientists, programmers, and businesspeople has +largely mitigated any problems caused by the process of legal expansion.~{Wes +Cohen’s empirical studies, for example, suggest that some of the potential +dangers from overbroad gene patents have been offset by widespread lawbreaking +among academic research scientists, who simply ignore patents that get in their +way, and by more flexible licensing practices than the anticommons theorists +had predicted. John P. Walsh, Ashish Arora, and Wesley Cohen, “Effects of +Research Tool Patents and Licensing on Biomedical Innovation,” in Patents in +the Knowledge-Based Economy, ed. W. Cohen and S. A. Merrill (National Research +Council, 2003), 285–340.}~ But if mistakes were made, it is important to know +what they were lest we continue or repeat them. If there were “fixes,” it is +important to know if they can be replicated. + +So were there mistakes? If so, have they been fixed, and how? Drawing on an +article I co-wrote with my brilliant colleague Arti Rai,~{Arti Rai and James +Boyle, “Synthetic Biology: Caught between Property Rights, the Public Domain, +and the Commons,” PLoS Biology 5 (2007): 389–393, available at +http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050058&ct=1. +}~ this chapter suggests some answers to those questions by sketching out some +details of the legal history of those technologies, concluding with a +discussion of a single promising new technology that shares aspects of +both—synthetic biology. The answers are important. Behind the abstract words +“innovation” or “technological development” there are lives saved or lost, +communicative freedoms expanded or contracted, communities enabled or stunted, +wealth generated or not. The subject would benefit from informed, +sophisticated, democratic attention. It is not something you want to leave a +host of lawyers and lobbyists to decide among themselves. + +2~ A Machine that Contains All Other Machines + +Imagine a person staring at an infinite roll of paper tape. On the paper are +symbols in some alphabet or number system. The reader carries out simple, The +Enclosure of Science and Technology operable instructions on the basis of that +data. “Add together the next two digits you are presented with and write down +the answer. If the answer is odd, go to step 2. If the answer is even, go to +step 3.” Now replace the person with a mechanical head that can “read” the +instructions, carry out the desired operations, and write the answer down. The +British mathematician Alan Turing imagined something like this—a little more +complicated, perhaps, but fairly similar. What is it? We have the reading head, +the set of instructions, the data on which the instructions are to be +performed, the record of the result, and some kind of “state table” that tells +the machine where it is in the process. These are the component parts of Turing +machines—or as we know them better, computers. More accurately, Turing machines +are a method of simulating the operation of computers, a metaphor that enables +us to imitate their logical processes. In the words of Wikipedia, “despite +their simplicity—[they] can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer +that could possibly be constructed.” And to give lawyers fits. But that is +getting ahead of ourselves. + +In Greek mythology, Procrustes had a bed to which he fitted its prospective +occupants, whether they liked it or not. The tall were trimmed down. The short +stretched on the rack. Intellectual property lawyers have many similarities to +Procrustes. The technologies that are brought before them are made to fit the +conceptual boxes the law provides, boxes with names such as “copyright” and +“patent.” Occasionally, new conceptual boxes are made, but—for very good +reasons—most of the time we stick with the boxes we have. As with Procrustes, +things do not always fit and the process can be distressing for its subjects. + +It is important to realize that the process of trimming and stretching can be +done well or badly. If it is done really badly, the technology is stunted, +deformed, even destroyed. If it is done well, the law aids the development of +the technology in exactly the happy way described in Chapter 1. What did our +Procrustean legal system do with computers and computer science? + +I will focus on software—the set of instructions the machine is to perform. How +should we think of it? Software is written down by programmers. It is recorded +first in a form readable to humans, or at least geeks. Then, through a series +of transformations, it is turned into the machine code, the ones and zeros that +will operate the computer. But at its root it can be understood through the +metaphor of the simple list of instructions to be carried out in order, just as +with the Turing machine and its infinite tape. + +How should we fit software into the categories of intellectual property? We +have “writing,” fixation in some medium of symbols that can be read by +others—both machine and human. Writing is normally the domain of copyright. Are +computer programs copyrightable? All kinds of problems present themselves. At +least in the United States, copyright covers expression. As I pointed out in a +previous book, at its base is the conception of the romantic author impressing +her uniqueness of spirit on the work at the moment of writing. It is that +expressive choice, not the facts or ideas on which the work is based, that +copyright covers. And it is only original expression that copyright covers. It +does not cover purely functional objects, systems, processes, or methods of +operation. One cannot copyright the coat hanger, the mousetrap, or long +division. One cannot even copyright a “sculpture” if the main function of its +design is to serve as a bicycle rack. Admittedly, one can copyright some +expressive works that serve a practical purpose. A book about how to do +double-entry bookkeeping is copyrightable. Yet copyright covers only the +expressive choices used in selecting the words to explain the method, and the +images to represent it, not the methods it describes or the facts or ideas it +contains. Can copyright cover computer programs? Should we see them as +copyrightable how-to books or as uncopyrightable machines made of words? + +Machines and other functional innovations are normally the domain of patent +rights. One can patent the mousetrap, and then one gets an exclusive right to +the actual mechanically enabled method of catching mice, not just the artistic +flourishes on the blueprint. Patents have more demanding criteria than +copyrights. The invention needs to be novel and have utility, or usefulness; I +cannot get a patent over something that would have been an obvious idea to an +insider in the relevant field of technology, a “person having ordinary skill in +the art,” or PHOSITA, in the jargon of patent lawyers. But once I get my +patent, it gives me a very strong power to exclude others from the +invention—even if they came up with it independently. The right lasts for +twenty years. Follow-on innovators who improve on my idea can get a patent on +that improvement. They can block me from using the improvement. I can block +them from using the original invention. Thus we have an incentive to negotiate +if either of us wants to bring the improved innovation to market. + +So where did software fit? Was it copyrightable writing or patentable +invention? There are two issues here. The first is whether there should be any +intellectual property rights over software at all. The basic case for that +proposition is simple, a classic example of the public goods problem described +in the first chapter. Software costs money to create, but is cheap to copy. +When a youthful The Enclosure of Science and Technology Bill Gates wrote his +1976 letter to the wonderfully named Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer +Calisthenics & Orthodontia, he put the point clearly. + +_1 Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put +3-man years into programming, finding all the bugs, documenting his product and +distribute it for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of +money into hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL +and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software +available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.~{William +Gates III, An Open Letter to Hobbyists, February 3, 1976, quoted in Wallace +Wang, Steal This Computer Book 4.0: What They Won’t Tell You About the Internet +(San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2006), 73.}~ + +He signed the letter “Bill Gates, General Partner, Micro-Soft.” The hyphen +would disappear in time. The philosophy stuck around. + +Though there are quibbles about the facts in Gates’s letter—critics claim he +himself did a lot of free riding on public domain code and government-funded +computer time—his basic point is that software needs to be protected by +(enforceable) property rights if we expect it to be effectively and sustainably +produced. Some software developers disagree. But assuming one concedes the +point for the sake of argument, there is a second question: should software be +covered by copyright or patent, or some unidentified third option? In practice, +software ended up being covered by both schemes, partly because of actions by +Congress, which included several references to software in the Copyright Act, +and partly as a result of decisions by the Copyright Office, the Patent and +Trademark Office, and judges. One could copyright one’s code and also gain a +patent over the “nonobvious,” novel, and useful innovations inside the +software. + +At first, it was the use of copyright that stirred the most concern. As I +explained in the last chapter, copyright seems to be built around an assumption +of diverging innovation—the fountain or explosion of expressive activity. +Different people in different situations who sit down to write a sonnet or a +love story, it is presumed, will produce very different creations rather than +being drawn to a single result. Thus strong rights over the resulting work are +not supposed to inhibit future progress. I can find my own muse, my own path to +immortality. Creative expression is presumed to be largely independent of the +work of prior authors. Raw material is not needed. “Copyright is about +sustaining the conditions of creativity that enable an individual to craft out +of thin air an Appalachian Spring, a Sun Also Rises, a Citizen Kane.”~{Paul +Goldstein, “Copyright,” Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. 38 +(1991): 109–110.}~ + +There are lots of reasons to doubt that this vision of “creation out of +nothing” works very well even in the arts, the traditional domain of copyright +law. The story of Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman” bears ample witness to those +doubts. But whatever its merits or defects in the realm of the arts, the vision +seems completely wrongheaded when it comes to software. Software solutions to +practical problems do converge, and programmers definitely draw upon prior +lines of code. Worse still, as I pointed out earlier, software tends to exhibit +“network effects.” Unlike my choice of novel, my choice of word processing +program is very strongly influenced, perhaps dominated, by the question of what +program other people have chosen to buy. That means that even if a programmer +could find a completely different way to write a word processing program, he +has to be able to make it read the dominant program’s files, and mimic its +features, if he is to attract any customers at all. That hardly sounds like +completely divergent creation. + +Seeing that software failed to fit the Procrustean bed of copyright, many +scholars presumed the process of forcing it into place would be catastrophic. +They believed that, lacking patent’s high standards, copyright’s monopolies +would proliferate widely. Copyright’s treatment of follow-on or “derivative” +works would impede innovation, it was thought. The force of network effects +would allow the copyright holder of whatever software became “the standard” to +extract huge monopoly rents and prevent competing innovation for many years +longer than the patent term. Users of programs would be locked in, unable to +shift their documents, data, or acquired skills to a competing program. Doom +and gloom abounded among copyright scholars, including many who shared Mr. +Gates’s basic premise—that software should be covered by property rights. They +simply believed that these were the wrong property rights to use. + +Copyright did indeed cause problems for software developers, though it is hard +to judge whether those problems outweighed the economic benefits of encouraging +software innovation, production, and distribution. But the negative effects of +copyright were minimized by a remarkably prescient set of actions by courts +and, to a much lesser extent, Congress, so that the worst scenarios did not +come to pass. Courts interpreted the copyright over software very narrowly, so +that it covered little beyond literal infringement. (Remember Jefferson’s point +about the importance of being careful about the scope of a right.) They +developed a complicated test to work out whether one program infringed the +details of another. The details give law students headaches every year, but the +effects were simple. If your software was similar to mine merely because it was +performing the same function, or because I had picked the most efficient way to +perform some task, or even because there was market demand for doing it that +way, then none of those similarities counted for the purposes of infringement. +Nor did material that was taken from the public domain. The result was that +while someone who made literal copies of Windows Vista was clearly infringing +copyright, the person who made a competing program generally would not be. + +In addition, courts interpreted the fair use doctrine to cover +“decompilation”—which is basically taking apart someone else’s program so that +you can understand it and compete with it. As part of the process, the +decompiler had to make a copy of the program. If the law were read literally, +decompilation would hardly seem to be a fair use. The decompiler makes a whole +copy, for a commercial purpose, of a copyrighted work, precisely in order to +cause harm to its market by offering a substitute good. But the courts took a +broader view. The copy was a necessary part of the process of producing a +competing product, rather than a piratical attempt to sell a copy of the same +product. This limitation on copyright provided by fair use was needed in order +to foster the innovation that copyright is supposed to encourage. This is a +nice variation of the Sony Axiom from Chapter 4. + +These rulings and others like them meant that software was protected by +copyright, as Mr. Gates wanted, but that the copyright did not give its owner +the right to prevent functional imitation and competition. Is that enough? +Clearly the network effects are real. Most of us use Windows and most of us use +Microsoft Word, and one very big reason is because everyone else does. +Optimists believe the lure of capturing this huge market will keep potential +competitors hungry and monopolists scared. The lumbering dominant players will +not become complacent about innovation or try to grab every morsel of monopoly +rent, goes the argument. They still have to fear their raptor-like competitors +lurking in the shadows. Perhaps. Or perhaps it also takes the consistent threat +of antitrust enforcement. In any event, whether or not we hit the optimal point +in protecting software with intellectual property rights, those rights +certainly did not destroy the industry. It appeared that, even with convergent +creativity and network effects, software could be crammed into the Procrustean +bed of copyright without killing it off in the process. Indeed, to some, it +seemed to fare very well. They would claim that the easy legal protection +provided by copyright gave a nascent industry just enough protection to +encourage the investment of time, talent, and dollars, while not prohibiting +the next generation of companies from building on the innovations of the past. + +In addition, the interaction between copyright and software has produced some +surprising results. There is a strong argument that it is the fact that +software is copyrightable that has enabled the “commons-based creativity” of +free and open source software. What does commons-based creativity mean? +Basically, it is creativity that builds on an open resource available to all. +An additional component of some definitions is that the results of the +creativity must be fed back into the commons for all to use. Think of English. +You can use English without license or fee, and you can innovate by producing +new words, slang, or phrases without clearance from some Academie Anglaise. +After you coin your term, it is in turn available to me to build upon or to use +in my own sentences, novels, or jokes. And so the cycle continues. As the last +chapter showed, for the entire history of musical creativity until the last +forty years or so, the same had been true of at least a low level of musical +borrowing. At the basic level of musical phrases, themes, snatches of melody, +even chord structures, music was commons-based creativity. Property rights did +not reach down into the atomic structure of music. They stayed at a higher +level—prohibiting reproduction of complete works or copying of substantial and +important chunks. So in some areas of both music and language, we had +commons-based creativity because there were no property rights over the +relevant level. The software commons is different. + +The creators of free and open source software were able to use the fact that +software is copyrighted, and that the right attaches automatically upon +creation and fixation, to set up new, distributed methods of innovation. For +example, free and open source software under the General Public License—such as +Linux—is a “commons” to which all are granted access. Anyone may use the +software without any restrictions. They are guaranteed access to the +human-readable “source code,” rather than just the inscrutable “machine code,” +so that they can understand, tinker, and modify. Modifications can be +distributed so long as the new creation is licensed under the open terms of the +original. This creates a virtuous cycle: each addition builds on the commons +and is returned to it. The copyright over the software was the “hook” that +allowed software engineers to create a license that gave free access and the +right to modify and required future programmers to keep offering those +freedoms. Without the copyright, those features of the license would not have +been enforceable. For example, someone could have modified the open program and +released it without the source code—denying future users the right to +understand and modify easily. To use an analogy beloved of free software +enthusiasts, the hood of the car would be welded shut. Home repair, tinkering, +customization, and redesign become practically impossible. + +Of course, if there were no copyright over software at all, software engineers +would have other freedoms—even if not legally guaranteed open access to source +code. Still, it was hard to deny that the extension of the property regime +had—bizarrely, at first sight—actually enabled the creation of a continuing +open commons. The tempting real estate analogy would be environmentalists using +strong property rights over land to guarantee conservation and open access to a +green space, where, without property rights, the space could be despoiled by +all. But as I have pointed out earlier, while such analogies may help us, the +differences between land and intellectual property demand that they be +scrutinized very carefully. It is hard to overgraze an idea. + +So much for copyright. What about patents? U.S. patent law had drawn a firm +line between patentable invention and unpatentable idea, formula, or algorithm. +The mousetrap could be patented, but not the formula used to calculate the +speed at which it would snap shut. Ideas, algorithms, and formulae were in the +public domain—as were “business methods.” Or so we thought. + +The line between idea or algorithm on the one hand and patentable machine on +the other looks nice and easy. But put that algorithm—that series of steps +capable of being specified in the way described by the Turing machine—onto a +computer, and things begin to look more complex. Say, for example, that +algorithm was the process for converting miles into kilometers and vice versa. +“Take the first number. If it is followed by the word miles, then multiply by +8/5. If it is followed by the word kilometers, multiply by 5/8 . . .” and so +on. In the abstract, this is classic public domain stuff—no more patentable +than E=mc2 or F=ma. What about when those steps are put onto the tape of the +Turing machine, onto a program running on the hard drive of a computer? + +The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (the United States’s leading +patent court) seems to believe that computers can turn unpatentable ideas into +patentable machines. In fact, in this conception, the computer sitting on your +desk becomes multiple patentable machines—a word processing machine, an e-mail +machine, a machine running the program to calculate the tensile strength of +steel. I want to stress that the other bars to patentability remain. My example +of mile-to-kilometer conversion would be patentable subject matter but, we +hope, no patent would be granted because the algorithm is not novel and is +obvious. (Sadly, the Patent and Trademark Office seems determined to undermine +this hope by granting patents on the most mundane and obvious applications.) +But the concern here is not limited to the idea that without a subject matter +bar, too many obvious patents will be granted by an overworked and badly +incentivized patent office. It is that the patent was supposed to be granted at +the very end of a process of investigation and scientific and engineering +innovation. The formulae, algorithms, and scientific discoveries on which the +patented invention was based remained in the public domain for all to use. It +was only when we got to the very end of the process, with a concrete innovation +ready to go to market, that the patent was to be given. Yet the ability to +couple the abstract algorithm with the concept of a Turing machine undermines +this conception. Suddenly the patents are available at the very beginning of +the process, even to people who are merely specifying—in the abstract—the idea +of a computer running a particular series of algorithmic activities. + +The words “by means of a computer” are—in the eyes of the Federal Circuit—an +incantation of magical power, able to transubstantiate the ideas and formulae +of the public domain into private property. And, like the breaking of a minor +taboo that presages a Victorian literary character’s slide into debauchery, +once that first wall protecting the public domain was breached, the court found +it easier and easier to breach still others. If one could turn an algorithm +into a patentable machine simply by adding “by means of a computer,” then one +could turn a business method into something patentable by specifying the +organizational or information technology structure through which the business +method is to be implemented. + +If you still remember the first chapters of this book, you might wonder why we +would want to patent business methods. Intellectual property rights are +supposed to be handed out only when necessary to produce incentives to supply +some public good, incentives that otherwise would be lacking. Yet there are +already plenty of incentives to come up with new business methods. (Greed and +fear are the most obvious.) There is no evidence to suggest that we need a +state-backed monopoly to encourage the development of new business methods. In +fact, we want people to copy the businesses of others, lowering prices as a +result. The process of copying business methods is called “competition” and it +is the basis of a free-market economy. Yet patent law would prohibit it for +twenty years. So why introduce patents? Brushing aside such minor objections +with ease, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit declared business +methods to be patentable. Was this what Jefferson had in mind when he said “I +know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth +to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are +not”? I doubt it. + +It is commonplace for courts to look at the purpose of the law they are +enforcing when seeking to understand what it means. In areas of regulation +which are obviously instrumental—aimed at producing some particular result in +the world—that approach is ubiquitous. In applying the antitrust laws, for +example, courts have given meaning to the relatively vague words of the law by +turning to economic analysis of the likely effects of different rules on +different market structures. + +Patent law is as instrumental a structure as one could imagine. In the United +States, for example, the constitutional authorization to Congress to pass +patent and copyright legislation is very explicit that these rights are to be +made with a purpose in view. Congress has the power “to promote the progress of +science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors +the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” One might +imagine that courts would try to interpret the patent and copyright laws with +that purpose, and the Jefferson Warning about its constraints, firmly in mind. +Yet utilitarian caution about extending monopolies is seldom to be found in the +reasoning of our chief patent court. + +The difference is striking. Jefferson said that the job of those who +administered the patent system was to see if a patent was “worth the +embarrassment to the public” before granting it. The Constitution tells +Congress to make only those patent laws that “promote the progress of science +and useful arts.” One might imagine that this constitutional goal would guide +courts in construing those same laws. Yet neither Jeffersonian ideals nor the +constitutional text seem relevant to our chief patent court when interpreting +statutory subject matter. Anything under the sun made by man is patentable +subject matter, and there’s an end to it. The case that announced the rule on +business methods involved a patent on the process of keeping accounts in a +“hub-and-spoke” mutual fund—which included multiplying all of the stock +holdings of each fund in a family of funds by the respective current share +price to get total fund value and then dividing by the number of mutual fund +shares that each customer actually holds to find the balance in their accounts. +As my son observed, “I couldn’t do that until nearly the end of third +grade!”~{State St. Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Fin. Group, Inc., 149 F.3d +1368, 1373 (Fed. Cir. 1998).}~ + +In theory of course, if the patent is not novel or is obvious, it will still be +refused. The Supreme Court recently held that the Court of Appeals for the +Federal Circuit has made “nonobvious” too easy a standard to meet.~{KSR Int’l +Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) [Ed. note: originally published as +550 U.S. ___ (2007), 127 S. Ct. 1727 (2007); citation updated].}~ It is +unclear, however, whether that judgment will produce concrete effects on actual +practices of patent grants and litigation. The Patent and Trademark Office puts +pressure on examiners to issue patents, and it is very expensive to challenge +those that are granted. Better, where possible, to rule out certain subject +matter in the first place. Tempted in part by its flirtation with the “idea +made machine” in the context of a computer, the Court of Appeals for the +Federal Circuit could not bring itself to do so. Where copyright law evolved to +wall off and minimize the dangers of extending protection over software, patent +law actually extended the idea behind software patents to make patentable any +thought process that might produce a useful result. Once breached, the walls +protecting the public domain in patent law show a disturbing tendency to erode +at an increasing rate. + +To sum up, the conceptual possibilities presented to copyright and patent law +by the idea of a Turing machine were fascinating. Should we extend copyright or +patent to cover the new technology? The answer was “we will extend both!” Yet +the results of the extension were complex and unexpected in ways that we will +have to understand if we want to go beyond the simple but important injunctions +of Jefferson and Macaulay. Who would have predicted that software copyrights +could be used to create a self-perpetuating commons as well as a monopoly over +operating systems, or that judges would talk knowingly of network effects in +curtailing the scope of coverage? Who would have predicted that patents would +be extended not only to basic algorithms implemented by a computer, but to +methods of business themselves (truly a strange return to legalized business +monopolies for a country whose founders viewed them as one of the greatest +evils that could be borne)? + +2~ Synthetic Biology + +If you are a reader of Science, PLoS Biology, or Nature, you will have noticed +some attractive and bizarre photographs recently. A field of bacteria that form +themselves into bull’s-eyes and polka dots. A dim photograph of a woman’s face +“taken” by bacteria that have been programmed to be sensitive to light. You may +also have read about more inspiring, if less photogenic, accomplishments—for +example, the group of scientists who managed to program bacteria to produce +artemesinin, a scarce natural remedy for malaria derived from wormwood. Poking +deeper into these stories, you would have found the phrase “synthetic biology” +repeated again and again, though a precise definition would have eluded you. + +What is “synthetic biology”? For some it is simply that the product or process +involves biological materials not found in nature. Good old-fashioned +biotechnology would qualify. One of the first biotechnology patent cases, +Diamond v. Chakrabarty, involved some bacteria which Dr. Chakrabarty had +engineered to eat oil slicks—not their natural foodstuff.~{Diamond v. +Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980).}~ The Supreme Court noted that the bacteria +were not found in nature and found them to be patentable, though alive. +According to the simplest definition, Dr. Chakrabarty’s process would count as +synthetic biology, though this example antedates the common use of the term by +two decades. For other scientists, it is the completely synthetic quality of +the biology involved that marks the edge of the discipline. The DNA we are +familiar with, for example, has four “base pairs”—A, C, G, and T. Scientists +have developed genetic alphabets that involve twelve base pairs. Not only is +the result not found in nature, but the very language in which it is expressed +is entirely new and artificial. + +I want to focus on a third conception of synthetic biology: the idea of turning +biotechnology from an artisanal process of one-off creations, developed with +customized techniques, to a true engineering discipline, using processes and +parts that are as standardized and as well understood as valves, screws, +capacitors, or resistors. The electrical engineer told to build a circuit does +not go out and invent her own switches or capacitors. She can build a circuit +using off-the-shelf components whose performance is expressed using standard +measurements. This is the dream of one group of synthetic biologists: that +biological engineering truly become engineering, with biological black boxes +that perform all of the standard functions of electrical or mechanical +engineering—measuring flow, reacting to a high signal by giving out a low +signal, or vice versa, starting or terminating a sequence, connecting the +energy of one process to another, and so on. + +Of course an engineer understands the principle behind a ratchet, or a valve, +but he does not have to go through the process of thinking “as part of this +design, I will have to create a thing that lets stuff flow through one way and +not the other.” The valve is the mechanical unit that stands for that thought, +a concept reified in standardized material form which does not need to be taken +apart and parsed each time it is used. By contrast, the synthetic biologists +claim, much of current biotechnological experimentation operates the way a +seventeenth-century artisan did. Think of the gunsmith making beautiful one-off +classics for his aristocratic patrons, without standardized calibers, parts, or +even standard-gauge springs or screws. The process produces the gun, but it +does not use, or produce, standard parts that can also be used by the next +gunsmith. + +Is this portrayal of biology correct? Does it involve some hyping of the new +hot field, some denigration of the older techniques? I would be shocked, +shocked, to find there was hype involved in the scientific or academic +enterprise. But whatever the degree to which the novelty of this process is +being subtly inflated, it is hard to avoid being impressed by the projects that +this group of synthetic biologists has undertaken. The MIT Registry of Standard +Biological Parts, for example, has exactly the goal I have just described. + +_1 The development of well-specified, standard, and interchangeable biological +parts is a critical step towards the design and construction of integrated +biological systems. The MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts supports this +goal by recording and indexing biological parts that are currently being built +and offering synthesis and assembly services to construct new parts, devices, +and systems. . . . In the summer of 2004, the Registry contained about 100 +basic parts such as operators, protein coding regions, and transcriptional +terminators, and devices such as logic gates built from these basic parts. +Today the number of parts has increased to about 700 available parts and 2000 +defined parts. The Registry believes in the idea that a standard biological +part should be well specified and able to be paired with other parts into +subassemblies and whole systems. Once the parameters of these parts are +determined and standardized, simulation and design of genetic systems will +become easier and more reliable. The parts in the Registry are not simply +segments of DNA, they are functional units.~{ +http://parts.mit.edu/registry/index.php/Help:About_the_Registry. }~ + +Using the Registry, a group of MIT scientists organizes an annual contest +called iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition. +Students can draw from the standard parts that the Registry contains, and +perhaps contribute their own creations back to it. What kinds of “genetically +engineered machines” do they build? + +_1 A team of eight undergraduates from the University of Ljubljana in +Slovenia—cheering and leaping onto MIT’s Kresge Auditorium stage in green team +T-shirts—won the grand prize earlier this month at the International +Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition at MIT. The group—which +received an engraved award in the shape of a large aluminum Lego piece—explored +a way to use engineered cells to intercept the body’s excessive response to +infection, which can lead to a fatal condition called sepsis. The goal of the +380 students on 35 university teams from around the world was to build +biological systems the way a contractor would build a house—with a toolkit of +standard parts. iGEM participants spent the summer immersed in the growing +field of synthetic biology, creating simple systems from interchangeable parts +that operate in living cells. Biology, once thought too complicated to be +engineered like a clock, computer or microwave oven, has proven to be open to +manipulation at the genetic level. The new creations are engineered from +snippets of DNA, the molecules that run living cells.~{“Gene Machine: Cells +Engineered to Prevent Sepsis Win Synthetic Biology Competition,” Science Daily +(November 15, 2006), available at +http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061114193826.htm. }~ + +Other iGEM entries have included E. coli bacteria that had been engineered to +smell like wintergreen while they were growing and dividing and like bananas +when they were finished, a biologically engineered detector that would change +color when exposed to unhealthy levels of arsenic in drinking water, a method +of programming mouse stem cells to “differentiate” into more specialized cells +on command, and the mat of picture-taking bacteria I mentioned earlier. + +No matter how laudable the arsenic detector or the experimental technique +dealing with sepsis, or how cool the idea of banana-scented, picture-taking +bacteria, this kind of enterprise will cause some of you to shudder. Professor +Drew Endy, one of the pioneers in this field, believes that part of that +reaction stems from simple novelty. “A lot of people who were scaring folks in +1975 now have Nobel prizes.”~{ http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/igem.html. }~ +But even if inchoate, the concerns that synthetic biology arouses stem from +more than novelty. There is a deep-seated fear that if we see the natural world +of biology as merely another system that we can routinely engineer, we will +have extended our technocratic methods into a realm that was only +intermittently subject to them in a way that threatens both our structure of +self-understanding and our ecosystem. + +To this, the synthetic biologists respond that we are already engineering +nature. In their view, planned, structured, and rationalized genetic +engineering poses fewer dangers than poorly understood interventions to produce +some specific result in comparative ignorance of the processes we are employing +to do so. If the “code” is transparent, subject to review by a peer community, +and based on known parts and structures, each identified by a standard genetic +“barcode,” then the chance of detecting problems and solving them is higher. +And while the dangers are real and not to be minimized, the potential +benefits—the lives saved because the scarce antimalarial drug can now be +manufactured by energetic E. coli or because a cheap test can demonstrate +arsenic contamination in a village well—are not to be minimized either. + +I first became aware of synthetic biology when a number of the scientists +working on the Registry of Standard Biological Parts contacted me and my +colleague Arti Rai. They did not use these exact words, but their question +boiled down to “how does synthetic biology fare in intellectual property’s +categories, and how can we keep the basics of the science open for all to use?” +As you can tell from this book, I find intellectual property +fascinating—lamentably so perhaps. Nevertheless, I was depressed by the idea +that scientists would have to spend their valuable time trying to work out how +to save their discipline from being messed up by the law. Surely it would be +better to have them doing, well, science? + +They have cause for concern. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, +synthetic biology shares characteristics of both software and biotechnology. +Remember the focus on reducing functions to black boxes. Synthetic biologists +are looking for the biological equivalents of switches, valves, and inverters. +The more abstractly these are described, the more they come to resemble simple +algebraic expressions, replete with “if, then” statements and instructions that +resolve to “if x, then y, if not x, then z.” + +If this sounds reminiscent of the discussion of the Turing machine, it should. +When the broad rules for software and business methods were enunciated by the +federal courts, software was already a developed industry. Even though the +rules would have allowed the equivalent of patenting the alphabet, the very +maturity of the field minimized the disruption such patents could cause. Of +course “prior art” was not always written down. Even when it was recorded, it +was sometimes badly handled by the examiners and the courts, partly because +they set a very undemanding standard for “ordinary expertise” in the art. +Nevertheless, there was still a lot of prior experience and it rendered some of +the more basic claims incredible. That is not true in the synthetic biology +field. + +Consider a recent article in Nature, “A universal RNAi-based logic evaluator +that operates in mammalian cells.”~{Keller Rinaudo et al., “A universal +RNAi-based logic evaluator that operates in mammalian cells,” Nature +Biotechnology 25 (2007): 795–801.}~ The scientists describe their task in terms +that should be familiar. “A molecular automaton is an engineered molecular +system coupled to a (bio)molecular environment by ‘flow of incoming messages +and the actions of outgoing messages,’ where the incoming messages are +processed by an ‘intermediate set of elements,’ that is, a computer.” The +article goes on to describe some of the key elements of so-called “Boolean +algebra”—“or,” “and,” “not,” and so on—implemented in living mammalian cells. + +These inscriptions of Boolean algebra in cells and DNA sequences can be +patented. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, for example, owns +patent number 6,774,222: + +_1 This invention relates to novel molecular constructs that act as various +logic elements, i.e., gates and flip-flops. . . . The basic functional unit of +the construct comprises a nucleic acid having at least two protein binding +sites that cannot be simultaneously occupied by their cognate binding protein. +This basic unit can be assembled in any number of formats providing molecular +constructs that act like traditional digital logic elements (flips-flops, +gates, inverters, etc.). + +My colleagues Arti Rai and Sapna Kumar have performed a patent search and found +many more patents of similar breadth.~{Sapna Kumar and Arti Rai, “Synthetic +Biology: The Intellectual Property Puzzle,” Texas Law Review 85 (2007): +1745–1768.}~ + +What is the concern? After all, this is cutting-edge science. These seem like +novel, nonobvious inventions with considerable utility. The concern is that the +change in the rules over patentable subject matter, coupled with the Patent and +Trademark Office’s handling of both software and biotechnology, will come +together so that the patent is not over some particular biological circuit, +but, rather, over Boolean algebra itself as implemented by any biotechnological +means. It would be as if, right at the beginning of the computer age, we had +issued patents over formal logic in software—not over a particular computer +design, but over the idea of a computer or a binary circuit itself. + +“By means of a computer” was the magic phrase that caused the walls around the +public domain of algorithms and ideas to crumble. Will “by means of a +biological circuit” do the same? And—to repeat the key point—unlike computer +science, biotechnology is developing after the hypertrophy of our intellectual +property system. We do not have the immune system provided by the established +practices and norms, the “prior art,” even the community expectations that +protected software from the worst effects of patents over the building blocks +of science. + +Following the example of software, the founders of the MIT Registry of Standard +Biological Parts had the idea of protecting their discipline from overly +expansive intellectual property claims by turning those rights against +themselves. Free and open source software developers have created a “commons” +using the copyright over the code to impose a license on their software, one +that requires subsequent developers to keep the source open and to give +improvements back to the software commons—a virtuous cycle. Could the Registry +of Standard Biological Parts do the same thing? The software commons rests on a +license. But, as I pointed out in the last section, the license depends on an +underlying property right. It is because I have automatic copyright over my +code that I can tell you “use it according to these terms or you will be +violating my copyright.” Is there a copyright over the products of synthetic +biology? To create one we would have to take the extension of copyright that +was required to reach software and stretch it even further. Bill Gates might +argue for intellectual property rights over software using the logic of his +article in Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Will the argument for copyrights over synthetic +biological coding be “I need the property right so I can create a commons”? + +In practice, I think the answer is, and should be, no. Of course, one could +think of this as just another type of coding, making expressive choices in a +code of A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s, just as a programmer does in Java or C++. Yet, +software was already a stretch for copyright law. Synthetic biology strikes me +as a subject matter that the courts, Congress, and the Copyright Office are +unlikely to want to cram into copyright’s already distorted +outlines—particularly given the obvious availability of patent rights. As a +matter of conceptual intuition, I think they will see biological subject matter +as harder to fit into the categories of original expressive writing. On one +level, yes, it is all information, but, on another level, the idea of +programming with gene sequences will probably raise hackles that the idea of +coding inside a programming language never would. As a normative matter, I +think it would be a poor choice to apply copyright to the products of synthetic +biology. Attempting to produce a particular open commons, one might enable the +kind of hundred-year monopolies over functional objects that the critics of +software copyright initially feared. + +If one wishes to keep the basic ideas and techniques of synthetic biology open +for subsequent innovators, there are alternatives to the idea of a synthetic +biology open source license. The Registry of Standard Biological Parts or the +BioBricks Foundation can simply put all their work into the public domain +immediately. (This, indeed, is what they are currently doing.) Such a scheme +lacks one key feature of open source software: the right to force subsequent +innovators to release their code back into the commons. Yet it would make +subsequent patents on the material impossible, because it had already been +published. + +Regardless of the decisions made about the future of synthetic biology, I think +its story—coupled to that of software and biotechnology more generally—presents +us with an important lesson. I started the chapter with the metaphor of +Procrustes’s bed. But in the case of software and biotechnology, both the +bed—the categories of copyright and patent—and its inhabitants—the new +technologies—were stretched. Cracks formed in the boundaries that were supposed +to prevent copyright from being applied to functional articles, to prevent +patents extending to cover ideas, algorithms, and business methods. + +Until this point, though the science would have been strange to Jefferson or +his contemporaries, the underlying issue would have been familiar. The +free-trade, Scottish Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth +centuries would have scoffed at the idea that business methods or algorithms +could be patented, let alone that one could patent the “or,” “if-then,” and +“not” functions of Boolean algebra as implemented by a biological mechanism. +The response, presumably, is to fine tune our patent standards—to patent the +mousetrap and the corkscrew, not the notion of catching mice or opening bottles +by mechanical means. Still less should we allow the patenting of algebra. These +are fine points. Later scholarship has added formulae, data, and historical +analysis to back up Jefferson’s concerns, while never surpassing his prose. As +I said at the beginning of the book, if we were to print out the Jefferson +Warning and slip it into the shirt pocket of every legislator and regulator, +our policy would be remarkably improved. + +But it is here that the story takes a new turn, something that neither +Jefferson nor the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment had thought of, +something that goes beyond their cautions not to confuse intellectual property +with physical property, to keep its boundaries, scope, and term as small as +possible while still encouraging the desired innovation. + +Think of the reaction of the synthetic biologists at MIT. They feared that the +basic building blocks of their new discipline could be locked up, slowing the +progress of science and research by inserting intellectual property rights at +the wrong point in the research cycle. To solve the problem they were led +seriously to consider claiming copyright over the products of synthetic +biology—to fight overly broad patent rights with a privately constructed +copyright commons, to ride the process of legal expansion and turn it to their +own ends. As I pointed out earlier, I think the tactic would not fare well in +this particular case. But it is an example of a new move in the debate over +intellectual property, a new tactic: the attempt to create a privately +constructed commons where the public domain created by the state does not give +you the freedom that you believe creativity needs in order to thrive. It is to +that tactic, and the distributed creativity that it enables, that I will turn +to now. + +2~ Chapter 7: Further Reading + +As the introduction to this chapter suggests, the intersection of intellectual +property law and science and technology has been attracting considerable +attention from scholars recently, some of it dismayed. The difficulty—and this +is why I chose the case-study method for this chapter—is that there are +multiple sets of concerns and they resist easy summary. + +The first set of concerns is that the granting of intellectual property rights +far “upstream”—that is very close to basic science—is impeding the process of +science and technology. In addition, scholars have argued that the sheer volume +of intellectual property claims will produce an anti-commons effect or patent +thicket. Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Can Patents Deter +Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research,” Science 280 (1998): +698–701. The argument here is that the closer one is to basic research the +stronger the case is for leaving the information untouched by property +rights—allowing all to draw on it and develop “downstream” innovations, which +can then be covered by intellectual property rights. In practice, two concerns +are often alluded to: the fact that much of the basic research is state funded +and conducted in nonprofit universities and the belief that the transaction +costs of licensing will inhibit research or concentrate it in a few hands. +Research on genes indicating a propensity to breast cancer is a frequently +cited example of the latter problem. Fabienne Orsi and Benjamin Coriat, “Are +‘Strong Patents’ Beneficial to Innovative Activities? Lessons from the Genetic +Testing for Breast Cancer Controversies,” Industrial and Corporate Change 14 +(2005): 1205–1221. But here, too, anecdote outweighs evidence. Timothy +Caulfield, Robert M. Cook-Deegan, F. Scott Kieff, and John P. Walsh, “Evidence +and Anecdotes: An Analysis of Human Gene Patenting Controversies,” Nature +Biotechnology 24 (2006): 1091–1094. On the other side of this debate is the +argument that having intellectual property rights, even on state-funded +university research, will facilitate commercialization—allowing the commercial +investor to know that it will acquire sufficient rights to exclude others from +the innovation. This is the premise behind “Bayh-Dole,” the act (P.L. 96-517, +Patent and Trademark Act Amendments of 1980; codified in 35 U.S.C. § 200–212 +and implemented by 37 C.F.R. 401) that sets up the framework for technology +transfer from state funded university research. + +To date, the evidence for the anti-commons effect inside academia has been +equivocal, at best. Walsh, Cohen, and Arora found no such effect—but one main +reason for the absence of problems appeared to be that scientists were simply +flouting the law (or were ignorant of it). John P. Walsh, Ashish Arora, and +Wesley M. Cohen, “Effects of Research Tool Patents and Licensing on Biomedical +Innovation,” in Patents in the Knowledge-Based Economy, ed. Wesley M. Cohen and +Stephen A. Merrill (Washington D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003), 285–340. +I would question whether a research system based on massive law-breaking is +sustainable, particularly after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal +Circuit clarified for us that there effectively is no academic research +exemption in U.S. patent law. Madey v. Duke University, 307 F.3d 1351 (Fed. +Cir. 2002). The National Research Council’s committee on the subject found few +problems now but possible cause for concern in the future. Committee on +Intellectual Property Rights in Genomic and Protein Research and Innovation, +National Research Council, Reaping the Benefits of Genomic and Proteomic +Research: Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation, and Public Health +(Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 2005). A study by the American +Academy for the Advancement of Science also reported few problems, though a +closer reading revealed that licensing produced delays in research—some of them +considerable—but did not cause it to be abandoned. The effects were greatest on +industry scientists. American Association for the Advancement of Science, +Directorate for Science and Policy Programs, International Intellectual +Property Experiences: A Report of Four Countries (Washington, D.C.: AAAS, +2007), available at http://sippi.aaas.org/Pubs/SIPPI_Four_Country_Report.pdf. +Fiona Murray and Scott Stern, “Do Formal Intellectual Property Rights Hinder +the Free Flow of Scientific Knowledge? An Empirical Test of the Anti-Commons +Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 63 (2007): 648–687, +found a definite but modest anti-commons effect, restricting further research +and publication on patented materials. Similar concerns have been raised about +access to scientific data. J. H. Reichman and Paul Uhlir, “A Contractually +Reconstructed Research Commons for Scientific Data in a Highly Protectionist +Intellectual Property Environment,” Law and Contemporary Problems 66 (2003): +315–462. + +What about the opposite question? Are we getting benefits from the process of +increasing the use of intellectual property rights in basic university +research? The best study of the effects of the current university technology +transfer process found little definitive evidence of net benefits and some +cause for concern that the traditional role of universities in freely supplying +knowledge is being undermined. David Mowery, Richard Nelson, Bhaven Sampat, and +Arvids Ziedonis, Ivory Tower and Industrial Innovation: University-Industry +Technology Transfer Before and After the Bayh-Dole Act (Palo Alto, Calif.: +Stanford Business Press, 2004). + +Beyond the questions about the effects of upstream intellectual property rights +on basic research lay the much harder questions about the effects of +intellectual property rights on the development of technologies. Here there is +much evidence that decisions about patent scope are vital and, as Robert Merges +and Richard Nelson reveal, that poor decisions can hamper or cripple the +development of disruptive technologies. Robert Merges and Richard R. Nelson, +“On the Complex Economics of Patent Scope,” Columbia Law Review 90 (1990): +839–916; Suzanne Scotchmer, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Cumulative +Research and the Patent Law,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5 (1991): 29–41. +The fear, highlighted in this chapter, is that poor decisions about patent +scope and subject matter can inhibit technological change. On the subject of +that fear, there is much more evidence. James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer, +Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk +(Princeton: N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Adam Jaffe and Josh +Lerner, Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is +Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What To Do About It (Princeton, N.J.: +Princeton University Press, 2004). + +1~ Chapter 8: A Creative Commons + +If you go to the familiar Google search page and click the intimidating link +marked “advanced search,” you come to a page that gives you more fine-grained +control over the framing of your query. Nestled among the choices that allow +you to pick your desired language, or exclude raunchy content, is an option +that says “usage rights.” Click “free to use or share” and then search for +“physics textbook” and you can download a 1,200-page physics textbook, copy it, +or even print it out and hand it to your students. Search for “Down and Out in +the Magic Kingdom” and you will find Cory Doctorow’s fabulous science fiction +novel, online, in full, for free. His other novels are there too—with the +willing connivance of his commercial publisher. Search for “David Byrne, My +Fair Lady” and you will be able to download Byrne’s song and make copies for +your friends. You’ll find songs from Gilberto Gil and the Beastie Boys on the +same page. No need to pay iTunes or worry about breaking the law. + +Go to the “advanced” page on Flickr, the popular photo sharing site, and you +will find a similar choice marked “Creative Commons License.” Check that box +and then search for “Duke Chapel” and you will get a selection of beautiful +photos of the lovely piece of faux Gothic architecture that sits about three +hundred yards from the office where I am writing these words. You can copy +those photos, and 66 million others on different subjects, share them with your +friends, print them for your wall, and, in some cases, even use them +commercially. The same basic tools can be found on a range of specialized +search engines with names like OWL Music Search, BlipTV, SpinExpress, and +OERCommons. Searching those sites, or just sticking with the advanced options +on Google or Yahoo, will get you courses in music theory, moral philosophy, and +C++ programming from famous universities; a full-length movie called Teach by +Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim; and free architectural drawings that +can be used to build low-cost housing. At the Wellcome Library, you will find +two thousand years of medical images that can be shared freely. Searching for +“skeleton” is particularly fun. You can even go to your favorite search engine, +type in the title of this book, find a site that will allow you to download it, +and send the PDF to a hundred friends, warmly anticipating their rapturous +enjoyment. (Better ask them first.) + +All this copying and sharing and printing sounds illegal, but it is not (at +least if you went through the steps I described). And the things you can do +with this content do not stop with simply reproducing it, printing it on paper, +or sending it by e-mail. Much of it can be changed, customized, remixed—you +could rewrite the module of the class and insert your own illustrations, +animate the graphs showing calculus in action, morph the photo into something +new. If you search for a musician with the unpromising name “Brad Sucks,” you +will find a Web site bearing the modest subtitle “A one man band with no fans.” +Brad, it turns out, does not suck and has many fans. What makes him +particularly interesting is that he allows those fans, or anyone else for that +matter, to remix his music and post their creations online. I am particularly +fond of the Matterovermind remix of “Making Me Nervous,” but it may not be to +your taste. Go to a site called ccMixter and you will find that musicians, +famous and obscure, are inviting you to sample and remix their music. Or search +Google for Colin Mutchler and listen to a haunting song called “My Life +Changed.” Mr. Mutchler and a violinist called Cora Beth Bridges whom he had +never met created that song together. He posted a song called “My Life” online, +giving anyone the freedom to add to it, and she did—“My Life.” Changed. + +On December 15, 2002, in San Francisco, a charitable organization called +Creative Commons was launched. (Full disclosure: I have been a proud board +member of Creative Commons since its creation.) Creative Commons was the +brainchild of Larry Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred. All the works I have +just described—and this book itself—are under Creative Commons licenses. The +authors and creators of those works have chosen to share it with the world, +with you, under generous terms, while reserving certain rights for themselves. +They may have allowed you to copy it, but not to alter it—to make derivative +works. Or they may have allowed you to use it as you wish, so long as you do so +noncommercially. Or they may have given you complete freedom, provided only +that you attribute them as the owner of the work. There are a few simple +choices and a limited menu of permutations. + +What makes these licenses unusual is that they can be read by two groups that +normal licenses exclude—human beings (rather than just lawyers) and computers. +The textbooks, photos, films, and songs have a tasteful little emblem on them +marked with a “cc” which, if you click on it, links to a “Commons Deed,” a +simple one-page explanation of the freedoms you have. There are even icons—a +dollar with a slash through it, for example—that make things even clearer. +Better still, the reason the search engines could find this material is that +the licenses also “tell” search engines exactly what freedoms have been given. +Simple “metadata” (a fancy word for tags that computers can read) mark the +material with its particular level of freedoms. This is not digital rights +management. The license will not try to control your computer, install itself +on your hard drive, or break your TV. It is just an expression of the terms +under which the author has chosen to release the work. That means that if you +search Google or Flickr for “works I am free to share, even commercially,” you +know you can go into business selling those textbooks, or printing those photos +on mugs and T-shirts, so long as you give the author attribution. If you search +for “show me works I can build on,” you know you are allowed to make what +copyright lawyers call “derivative works.” + +The idea behind Creative Commons was simple. As I pointed out in the first +chapter, copyright adheres automatically on “fixation.” As soon as you lift the +pen from the paper, click the shutter, or save the file, the work is +copyrighted. No formalities. No need even to use the little symbol ©. Once +copyrighted, the work is protected by the full might of the legal system. And +the legal system’s default setting is that “all rights are reserved” to the +author, which means effectively that anyone but the author is forbidden to +copy, adapt, or publicly perform the work. This might have been a fine rule for +a world in which there were high barriers to publication. The material that was +not published was theoretically under an “all rights reserved” regime, but who +cared? It was practically inaccessible anyway. After the development of the +World Wide Web, all that had changed. Suddenly people and institutions, +millions upon millions of them, were putting content online—blogs, photo sites, +videologs, podcasts, course materials. It was all just up there. + +But what could you do with it? You could read it, or look at it, or play it +presumably—otherwise why had the author put it up? But could you copy it? Put +it on your own site? Include it in a manual used by the whole school district? +E-mail it to someone? Translate it into your own language? Quote beyond the +boundaries of fair use? Adapt for your own purposes? Take the song and use it +for your video? Of course, if you really wanted the work a lot, you could try +to contact the author—not always easy. And one by one, we could all contact +each other and ask for particular types of permissions for use. If the use was +large enough or widespread enough, perhaps we would even think that an +individual contract was necessary. Lawyers could be hired and terms hashed out. + +All this would be fine if the author wished to retain all the rights that +copyright gives and grant them only individually, for pay, with lawyers in the +room. But what about the authors, the millions upon millions of writers, and +photographers and musicians, and filmmakers and bloggers and scholars, who very +much want to share their work? The Cora Beth Bridges of the world are never +going to write individual letters to the Colin Mutchlers of the world asking +for permission to make a derivative work out of “My Life.” The person who +translated my articles into Spanish or Mandarin, or the people who repost them +on their Web sites, or include them in their anthologies might have asked +permission if I had not granted it in advance. I doubt though that I would have +been contacted by the very talented person who took images from a comic book +about fair use that I co-wrote and mashed them up with words from a book by +Larry Lessig, and some really nice music from someone none of us had ever met. +Without some easy way to give permission in advance, and to do so in a way that +human beings and computers, as well as lawyers, can understand, those +collaborations will never happen, though all the parties would be delighted if +they did. These are losses from “failed sharing”—every bit as real as losses +from unauthorized copying, but much less in the public eye. + + +Creative Commons was conceived as a private “hack” to produce a more fine-tuned +copyright structure, to replace “all rights reserved” with “some rights +reserved” for those who wished to do so. It tried to do for culture what the +General Public License had done for software. It made use of the same +technologies that had created the issue: the technologies that made fixation of +expressive content and its distribution to the world something that people, as +well as large concentrations of capital, could do. As a result, it was able to +attract a surprising range of support—Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture +Association of America and Hillary Rosen of the Recording Industry Association +of America, as well as John Perry Barlow of the Grateful Dead, whose attitude +toward intellectual property was distinctly less favorable. Why could they all +agree? These licenses were not a choice forced on anyone. The author was +choosing what to share and under what terms. But that sharing created something +different, something new. It was more than a series of isolated actions. The +result was the creation of a global “commons” of material that was open to all, +provided they adhered to the terms of the licenses. Suddenly it was possible to +think of creating a work entirely out of Creative Commons-licensed +content—text, photos, movies, music. Your coursebook on music theory, or your +documentary on the New York skyline, could combine your own original material +with high-quality text, illustrations, photos, video, and music created by +strangers. One could imagine entire fields—of open educational content or of +open music—in which creators could work without keeping one eye nervously on +legal threats or permissions. + +From one perspective, Creative Commons looks like a simple device for enabling +exercise of authorial control, remarkable only for the extremely large number +of authors making that choice and the simplicity with which they can do so. +From another, it can be seen as re-creating, by private choice and automated +licenses, the world of creativity before law had permeated to the finest, most +atomic level of science and culture—the world of folk music or 1950s jazz, of +jokes and slang and recipes, of Ray Charles’s “rewording” of gospel songs, or +of Isaac Newton describing himself as “standing on the shoulders of giants” +(and not having to pay them royalties). Remember, that is not a world without +intellectual property. The cookbook might be copyrighted even if the recipe was +not. Folk music makes it to the popular scene and is sold as a copyrighted +product. The jazz musician “freezes” a particular version of the improvisation +on a communally shared set of musical motifs, records it, and sometimes even +claims ownership of it. Newton himself was famously touchy about precedence and +attribution, even if not about legal ownership of his ideas. But it is a world +in which creativity and innovation proceed on the basis of an extremely large +“commons” of material into which it was never imagined that property rights +could permeate. + +For many of us, Creative Commons was conceived of as a second-best solution +created by private agreement because the best solution could not be obtained +through public law. The best solution would be a return of the formality +requirement—a requirement that one at least write the words “James Boyle +copyright 2008,” for example, in order to get more than 100 years of legal +protection backed by “strict liability” and federal criminal law. Those who did +not wish to have the legal monopoly could omit the phrase and the work would +pass into the public domain, with a period of time during which the author +could claim copyright retrospectively if the phrase was omitted by accident. +The default position would become freedom and the dead weight losses caused by +giving legal monopolies to those who had not asked for them, and did not want +them, would disappear. To return to the words of Justice Brandeis that I quoted +at the beginning of the book: + +_1 The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, +truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary +communication to others, free as the air to common use. Upon these incorporeal +productions the attribute of property is continued after such communication +only in certain classes of cases where public policy has seemed to demand it. + +Brandeis echoes the Jeffersonian preference for a norm of freedom, with +narrowly constrained exceptions only when necessary. That preference means that +the commons of which I spoke is a relatively large one—property rights are the +exception, not the norm. Of course, many of those who use Creative Commons +licenses might disagree with that policy preference and with every idea in this +book. They may worship the DMCA or just want a way to get their song or their +article out there while retaining some measure of control. That does not +matter. The licenses are agnostic. Like a land trust which has a local +pro-growth industrialist and a local environmentalist on its board, they permit +us to come to a restricted agreement on goals (“make sure this space is +available to the public”) even when underlying ideologies differ. They do this +using those most conservative of tools—property rights and licenses. And yet, +if our vision of property is “sole and despotic dominion,” these licenses have +created something very different—a commons has been made out of private and +exclusive rights. + +My point here is that Creative Commons licenses or the tools of free and open +source software—to which I will turn in a moment—represent something more than +merely a second-best solution to a poorly chosen rule. They represent a visible +example of a type of creativity, of innovation, which has been around for a +very long time, but which has reached new salience on the Internet—distributed +creativity based around a shared commons of material. + +2~ Free and Open Software + +In 2007, Clay Shirky, an incisive commentator on networked culture, gave a +speech which anyone but a Net aficionado might have found simultaneously +romantic and impenetrable. He started by telling the story of a Shinto shrine +that has been painstakingly rebuilt to exactly the same plan many times over +its 1,300-year life—and which was denied certification as a historic building +as a result. Shirky’s point? What was remarkable was not the building. It was a +community that would continue to build and rebuild the thing for more than a +millennium. + +From there, Shirky shifted to a discussion of his attempt to get AT&/T to adopt +the high-level programming language Perl—which is released as free and open +source software under the General Public License. From its initial creation by +Larry Wall in 1987, Perl has been adapted, modified, and developed by an +extraordinary range of talented programmers, becoming more powerful and +flexible in the process. As Shirky recounts the story, when the AT&T +representatives asked “where do you get your support?” Shirky responded, “ ‘we +get our support from a community’—which to them sounded a bit like ‘we get our +Thursdays from a banana.’ ” Shirky concluded the speech thus: + +_1 We have always loved one another. We’re human. It’s something we’re good at. +But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has been +quite limited. With love alone, you can plan a birthday party. Add coordinating +tools and you can write an operating system. In the past, we would do little +things for love, but big things required money. Now we can do big things for +love.~{Clay Shirky, “Supernova Talk: The Internet Runs on Love,” available at +http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/02/supernova-talk-the-internet-runs-on-love.html; +see also Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without +Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).}~ + +There are a few people out there for whom “operating systems” and “love” could +plausibly coexist in a sentence not constructed by an infinite number of +monkeys. For most though, the question is, what could he possibly have meant? + +The arguments in this book so far have taken as a given the incentives and +collective action problems to which intellectual property is a response. Think +of Chapter 1 and the economic explanation of “public goods.” The fact that it +is expensive to do the research to find the right drug, but cheap to +manufacture it once it is identified provides a reason to create a legal right +of exclusion. In those realms where the innovation would not have happened +anyway, the legal right of exclusion gives a power to price above cost, which +in turn gives incentives to creators and distributors. So goes the theory. I +have discussed the extent to which the logic of enclosure works for the commons +of the mind as well as it did for the arable commons, taking into account the +effects of an information society and a global Internet. What I have not done +is asked whether a global network actually transforms some of our assumptions +about how creation happens in a way that reshapes the debate about the need for +incentives, at least in certain areas. This, however, is exactly the question +that needs to be asked. + +For anyone interested in the way that networks can enable new collaborative +methods of production, the free software movement, and the broader but less +political movement that goes under the name of open source software, provide +interesting case studies.~{See Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Linux and the Open +Source Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub., 2001); Peter Wayner, Free +for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans +(New York: HarperBusiness, 2000); Eben Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant: Free +Software and the Death of Copyright,” First Monday 4 (1999), +http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594 +[Ed. note: originally published as +http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_8/index.html, the link has changed].}~ +Open source software is released under a series of licenses, the most important +being the General Public License (GPL). The GPL specifies that anyone may copy +the software, provided the license remains attached and the source code for the +software always remains available.~{Proprietary, or “binary only,” software is +generally released only after the source code has been compiled into +machine-readable object code, a form that is impenetrable to the user. Even if +you were a master programmer, and the provisions of the Copyright Act, the +appropriate licenses, and the DMCA did not forbid you from doing so, you would +be unable to modify commercial proprietary software to customize it for your +needs, remove a bug, or add a feature. Open source programmers say, +disdainfully, that it is like buying a car with the hood welded shut. See, +e.g., Wayner, Free for All, 264.}~ Users may add to or modify the code, may +build on it and incorporate it into their own work, but if they do so, then the +new program created is also covered by the GPL. Some people refer to this as +the “viral” nature of the license; others find the term offensive.~{See Brian +Behlendorf, “Open Source as a Business Strategy,” in Open Sources: Voices from +the Open Source Revolution, ed. Chris DiBona et al. (Sebastopol, Calif.: +O’Reilly, 1999), 149, 163.}~ The point, however, is that the open quality of +the creative enterprise spreads. It is not simply a donation of a program or a +work to the public domain, but a continual accretion in which all gain the +benefits of the program on pain of agreeing to give their additions and +innovations back to the communal project. + +For the whole structure to work without large-scale centralized coordination, +the creation process has to be modular, with units of different sizes and +complexities, each requiring slightly different expertise, all of which can be +added together to make a grand whole. I can work on the sendmail program, you +on the search algorithms. More likely, lots of people try, their efforts are +judged by the community, and the best ones are adopted. Under these conditions, +this curious mix of Kropotkin and Adam Smith, Richard Dawkins and Richard +Stallman, we get distributed production without having to rely on the +proprietary exclusion model. The whole enterprise will be much, much, much +greater than the sum of the parts. + +What’s more, and this is a truly fascinating twist, when the production process +does need more centralized coordination, some governance that guides how the +sticky modular bits are put together, it is at least theoretically possible +that we can come up with the control system in exactly the same way. In this +sense, distributed production is potentially recursive. Governance processes, +too, can be assembled through distributed methods on a global network, by +people with widely varying motivations, skills, and reserve prices.~{One +organization theorist to whom I mentioned the idea said, “Ugh, governance by +food fight.” Anyone who has ever been on an organizational listserv, a global +production process run by people who are long on brains and short on social +skills, knows how accurate that description is. E pur si muove.}~ + +The free and open source software movements have produced software that rivals +or, some claim, exceeds the capabilities of conventional proprietary, +binary-only software.~{See Bruce Brown, “Enterprise-Level Security Made Easy,” +PC Magazine (January 15, 2002), 28; Jim Rapoza, “Open-Source Fever Spreads,” PC +Week (December 13, 1999), 1.}~ Its adoption on the “enterprise level” is +impressive, as is the number and enthusiasm of the various technical testaments +to its strengths. You have almost certainly used open source software or been +its beneficiary. Your favorite Web site or search engine may run on it. If your +browser is Firefox, you use it every day. It powers surprising things around +you—your ATM or your TiVo. The plane you are flying in may be running it. It +just works. + +Governments have taken notice. The United Kingdom, for example, concluded last +year that open source software “will be considered alongside proprietary +software and contracts will be awarded on a value-for-money basis.” The Office +of Government Commerce said open source software is “a viable desktop +alternative for the majority of government users” and “can generate significant +savings. . . . These trials have proved that open source software is now a real +contender alongside proprietary solutions. If commercial companies and other +governments are taking it seriously, then so must we.”~{“UK Government Report +Gives Nod to Open Source,” Desktop Linux (October 28, 2004), available at +http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS5013620917.html. }~ Sweden found open source +software to be in many cases “equivalent to—or better than—commercial products” +and concluded that software procurement “shall evaluate open software as well +as commercial solutions, to provide better competition in the market.”~{ “Cases +of Official Recognition of Free and Open Source Software,” available at +http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/opensource/cases/index_en.htm. +}~ + +What is remarkable is not merely that the software works technically, but that +it is an example of widespread, continued, high-quality innovation. The really +remarkable thing is that it works socially, as a continuing system, sustained +by a network consisting both of volunteers and of individuals employed by +companies such as IBM and Google whose software “output” is nevertheless +released into the commons. + +Here, it seems, we have a classic public good: code that can be copied freely +and sold or redistributed without paying the creator or creators. This sounds +like a tragedy of the commons of the kind that I described in the first three +chapters of the book. Obviously, with a nonrival, nonexcludable good like +software, this method of production cannot be sustained; there are inadequate +incentives to ensure continued production. E pur si muove, as Galileo is +apocryphally supposed to have said in the face of Cardinal Bellarmine’s +certainties: “And yet it moves.”~{ E. Cobham Brewer, The Dictionary of Phrase +and Fable (London: John Cassell, 1894), 1111–1112. }~ Or, as Clay Shirky put +it, “we get our support from a community.” + +For a fair amount of time, most economists looked at open source software and +threw up their hands. From their point of view, “we get our support from a +community” did indeed sound like “we get our Thursdays from a banana.” There is +an old economics joke about the impossibility of finding a twenty-dollar bill +lying on a sidewalk. In an efficient market, the money would already have been +picked up. (Do not wait for a punch line.) When economists looked at open +source software they saw not a single twenty-dollar bill lying implausibly on +the sidewalk, but whole bushels of them. Why would anyone work on a project the +fruits of which could be appropriated by anyone? Since copyright adheres on +fixation—since the computer programmer already has the legal power to exclude +others—why would he or she choose to take the extra step of adopting a license +that undermined that exclusion? Why would anyone choose to allow others to use +and modify the results of their hard work? Why would they care whether the +newcomers, in turn, released their contributions back into the commons? + +The puzzles went beyond the motivations of the people engaging in this +particular form of “distributed creativity.” How could these implausible +contributions be organized? How should we understand this strange form of +organization? It is not a company or a government bureaucracy. What could it +be? To Richard Epstein, the answer was obvious and pointed to a reason the +experiment must inevitably end in failure: + +_1 The open source movement shares many features with a workers’ commune, and +is likely to fail for the same reason: it cannot scale up to meet its own +successes. To see the long-term difficulty, imagine a commune entirely owned by +its original workers who share pro rata in its increases in value. The system +might work well in the early days when the workforce remains fixed. But what +happens when a given worker wants to quit? Does that worker receive in cash or +kind his share of the gain in value during the period of his employment? If +not, then the run-up in value during his period of employment will be gobbled +up by his successor—a recipe for immense resentment. Yet that danger can be +ducked only by creating a capital structure that gives present employees +separable interests in either debt or equity in exchange for their +contributions to the company. But once that is done, then the worker commune is +converted into a traditional company whose shareholders and creditors contain a +large fraction of its present and former employers. The bottom line is that +idealistic communes cannot last for the long haul.~{ Richard Epstein, “Why Open +Source Is Unsustainable,” FT.com (October 21, 2004), available at +http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/78d9812a-2386-11d9-aee5-00000e2511c8.html. }~ + +There are a number of ideas here. First, “idealistic communes cannot last for +the long haul.” The skepticism about the staying power of idealism sounds +plausible today, though there are some relatively prominent counterexamples. +The Catholic Church is also a purportedly idealistic institution. It is based +on canonical texts that are subject to even more heated arguments about textual +interpretation than those which surround the General Public License. It seems +to be surviving the long haul quite well. + +The second reason for doomsaying is provided by the word “commune.” The +problems Epstein describes are real where tangible property and excludable +assets are involved. But is the free and open source community a “commune,” +holding tangible property in common and excluding the rest of us? Must it worry +about how to split up the proceeds if someone leaves because of bad karma? Or +is it a community creating and offering to the world the ability to use, for +free, nonrival goods that all of us can have, use, and reinterpret as we wish? +In that kind of commune, each of us could take all the property the community +had created with us when we left and the commune would still be none the +poorer. Jefferson was not thinking of software when he talked of the person who +lights his taper from mine but does not darken me, but the idea is the same +one. Copying software is not like fighting over who owns the scented candles or +the VW bus. Does the person who wrote the “kernel” of the operating system +resent the person who, much later, writes the code to manage Internet Protocol +addresses on a wireless network? Why should he? Now the program does more cool +stuff. Both of them can use it. What’s to resent? + +How about idealism? There is indeed a broad debate on the reasons that the +system works: Are the motivations those of the gift economy? Is it, as Shirky +says, simply the flowering of an innate love that human beings have always had +for each other and for sharing, now given new strength by the geographic reach +and cooperative techniques the Internet provides? “With love alone, you can +plan a birthday party. Add coordinating tools and you can write an operating +system.” Is this actually a form of potlatch, in which one gains prestige by +the extravagance of the resources one “wastes”? Is open source an implicit +résumé-builder that pays off in other ways? Is it driven by the +species-being, the innate human love of creation that continually drives us to +create new things even when homo economicus would be at home in bed, mumbling +about public goods problems?~{ For a seminal statement, see Moglen, “Anarchism +Triumphant,” 45: “ ‘[I]ncentives’ is merely a metaphor, and as a metaphor to +describe human creative activity it’s pretty crummy. I have said this before, +but the better metaphor arose on the day Michael Faraday first noticed what +happened when he wrapped a coil of wire around a magnet and spun the magnet. +Current flows in such a wire, but we don’t ask what the incentive is for the +electrons to leave home. We say that the current results from an emergent +property of the system, which we call induction. The question we ask is ‘what’s +the resistance of the wire?’ So Moglen’s Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday’s +Law says that if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and +spin the planet, software flows in the network. It’s an emergent property of +connected human minds that they create things for one another’s pleasure and to +conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone. The only question to ask is, +what’s the resistance of the network? Moglen’s Metaphorical Corollary to Ohm’s +Law states that the resistance of the network is directly proportional to the +field strength of the ‘intellectual property’ system. So the right answer to +the econodwarf is, resist the resistance.” }~ + +Yochai Benkler and I would argue that these questions are fun to debate but +ultimately irrelevant.~{Benkler’s reasoning is characteristically elegant, even +formal in its precision, while mine is clunkier. See Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s +Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2002): +369–446.}~ Assume a random distribution of incentive structures in different +people, a global network—transmission, information sharing, and copying costs +that approach zero—and a modular creation process. With these assumptions, it +just does not matter why they do it. In lots of cases, they will do it. One +person works for love of the species, another in the hope of a better job, a +third for the joy of solving puzzles, and a fourth because he has to solve a +particular problem anyway for his own job and loses nothing by making his hack +available for all. Each person has their own reserve price, the point at which +they say, “Now I will turn off Survivor and go and create something.” But on a +global network, there are a lot of people, and with numbers that big and +information overhead that small, even relatively hard projects will attract +motivated and skilled people whose particular reserve price has been crossed. + +More conventionally, many people write free software because they are paid to +do so. Amazingly, IBM now earns more from what it calls “Linux-related +revenues” than it does from traditional patent licensing, and IBM is the +largest patent holder in the world.~{Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: +How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale +University Press, 2006), 46–47.}~ It has decided that the availability of an +open platform, to which many firms and individuals contribute, will actually +allow it to sell more of its services, and, for that matter, its hardware. A +large group of other companies seem to agree. They like the idea of basing +their services, hardware, and added value on a widely adopted “commons.” This +does not seem like a community in decline. + +People used to say that collaborative creation could never produce a quality +product. That has been shown to be false. So now they say that collaborative +creation cannot be sustained because the governance mechanisms will not survive +the success of the project. Professor Epstein conjures up a “central committee” +from which insiders will be unable to cash out—a nice mixture of communist and +capitalist metaphors. All governance systems—including democracies and +corporate boards—have problems. But so far as we can tell, those who are +influential in the free software and open source governance communities (there +is, alas, no “central committee”) feel that they are doing very well indeed. In +the last resort, when they disagree with decisions that are taken, there is +always the possibility of “forking the code,” introducing a change to the +software that not everyone agrees with, and then letting free choice and market +selection converge on the preferred iteration. The free software ecosystem also +exhibits diversity. Systems based on GNU-Linux, for example, have distinct +“flavors” with names like Ubuntu, Debian, and Slackware, each with passionate +adherents and each optimized for a particular concern—beauty, ease of use, +technical manipulability. So far, the tradition of “rough consensus and running +code” seems to be proving itself empirically as a robust governance system. + +Why on earth should we care? People have come up with a surprising way to +create software. So what? There are at least three reasons we might care. +First, it teaches us something about the limitations of conventional economics +and the counterintuitive business methods that thrive on networks. Second, it +might offer a new tool in our attempt to solve a variety of social problems. +Third, and most speculative, it hints at the way that a global communications +network can sometimes help move the line between work and play, professional +and amateur, individual and community creation, rote production and compensated +“hobby.” + +We should pay attention to open source software because it shows us something +about business methods in the digital world—indeed in the entire world of +“information-based” products, which is coming to include biotechnology. The +scale of your network matters. The larger the number of people who use your +operating system, make programs for your type of computer, create new levels +for your game, or use your device, the better off you are. A single fax machine +is a paperweight. Two make up a communications link. Ten million and you have a +ubiquitous communications network into which your “paperweight” is now a hugely +valuable doorway. + +This is the strange characteristic of networked goods. The actions of strangers +dramatically increase or decrease the usefulness of your good. At each stage +the decision of someone else to buy a fax machine increases the value of mine. +If I am eating an apple, I am indifferent about whether you are too. But if I +have a fax machine then my welfare is actually improved by the decisions of +strangers to buy one. The same process works in reverse. Buy a word processing +program that becomes unpopular, get “locked in” to using it, and find yourself +unable to exchange your work easily with others. Networks matter and increasing +the size of the networks continues to add benefits to the individual members. + +What’s true for the users of networks is doubly so for the producers of the +goods that create them. From the perspective of a producer of a good that shows +strong network effects such as a word processing program or an operating +system, the optimal position is to be the company that owns and controls the +dominant product on the market. The ownership and control is probably by means +of intellectual property rights, which are, after all, the type of property +rights one finds on networks. The value of that property depends on those +positive and negative network effects. This is the reason Microsoft is worth so +much money. The immense investment in time, familiarity, legacy documents, and +training that Windows or Word users have provides a strong incentive not to +change products. The fact that other users are similarly constrained makes it +difficult to manage any change. Even if I change word processor formats and go +through the trouble to convert all my documents, I still need to exchange files +with you, who are similarly constrained. From a monopolist’s point of view, the +handcuffs of network effects are indeed golden, though opinions differ about +whether or not this is a cause for antitrust action. + +But if the position that yields the most revenue is that of a monopolist +exercising total control, the second-best position may well be that of a +company contributing to a large and widely used network based on open standards +and, perhaps, open software. The companies that contribute to open source do +not have the ability to exercise monopoly control, the right to extract every +last cent of value from it. But they do have a different advantage; they get +the benefit of all the contributions to the system without having to pay for +them. The person who improves an open source program may not work for IBM or +Red Hat, but those companies benefit from her addition, just as she does from +theirs. The system is designed to continue growing, adding more contributions +back into the commons. The users get the benefit of an ever-enlarging network, +while the openness of the material diminishes the lock-in effects. Lacking the +ability to extract payment for the network good itself—the operating system, +say—the companies that participate typically get paid for providing tied goods +and services, the value of which increases as the network does. + +I write a column for the Financial Times, but I lack the fervor of the true +enthusiast in the “Great Game of Markets.” By themselves, counterintuitive +business methods do not make my antennae tingle. But as Larry Lessig and Yochai +Benkler have argued, this is something more than just another business method. +They point us to the dramatic role that openness—whether in network +architecture, software, or content—has had in the success of the Internet. What +is going on here is actually a remarkable corrective to the simplistic notion +of the tragedy of the commons, a corrective to the Internet Threat storyline +and to the dynamics of the second enclosure movement. This commons creates and +sustains value, and allows firms and individuals to benefit from it, without +depleting the value already created. To appropriate a phrase from Carol Rose, +open source teaches us about the comedy of the commons, a way of arranging +markets and production that we, with our experience rooted in physical property +and its typical characteristics, at first find counterintuitive and bizarre. +Which brings us to the next question for open source. Can we use its techniques +to solve problems beyond the world of software production? + +In the language of computer programmers, the issue here is “does it scale?” Can +we generalize anything from this limited example? How many types of production, +innovation, and research fit into the model I have just described? After all, +for many innovations and inventions one needs hardware, capital investment, and +large-scale, real-world data collection—stuff, in its infinite recalcitrance +and facticity. Maybe the open source model provides a workaround to the +individual incentives problem, but that is not the only problem. And how many +types of innovation or cultural production are as modular as software? Is open +source software a paradigm case of collective innovation that helps us to +understand open source software and not much else? + +Again, I think this is a good question, but it may be the wrong one. My own +guess is that an open source method of production is far more common than we +realize. “Even before the Internet” (as some of my students have taken to +saying portentously), science, law, education, and musical genres all developed +in ways that are markedly similar to the model I have described. The +marketplace of ideas, the continuous roiling development in thought and norms +that our political culture spawns, owes much more to the distributed, +nonproprietary model than it does to the special case of commodified innovation +that we think about in copyright and patent. Not that copyright and patent are +unimportant in the process, but they may well be the exception rather than the +norm. Commons-based production of ideas is hardly unfamiliar, after all. + +In fact, all the mottos of free software development have their counterparts in +the theory of democracy and open society; “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are +shallow” is merely the most obvious example. Karl Popper would have +cheered.~{See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, +1945).}~ The importance of open source software is not that it introduces us to +a wholly new idea. It is that it makes us see clearly a very old idea. With +open source the technology was novel, the production process transparent, and +the result of that process was a “product” which outcompeted other products in +the marketplace. “How can this have happened? What about the tragedy of the +commons?” we asked in puzzlement, coming only slowly to the realization that +other examples of commons-based, nonproprietary production were all around us. + +Still, this does not answer the question of whether the model can scale still +further, whether it can be applied to solve problems in other spheres. To +answer that question we would need to think more about the modularity of other +types of inventions. How much can they be broken down into chunks suitable for +distribution among a widespread community? Which forms of innovation have some +irreducible need for high capital investment in distinctly nonvirtual +components—a particle accelerator or a Phase III drug trial? Again, my guess is +that the increasing migration of the sciences toward data- and processing-rich +models makes much more of innovation and discovery a potential candidate for +the distributed model. Bioinformatics and computational biology, the open +source genomics project,~{See http://www.ensembl.org. }~ the BioBricks +Foundation I mentioned in the last chapter, the possibility of distributed data +scrutiny by lay volunteers~{ See, e.g., NASA’s “Clickworkers” experiment, which +used public volunteers to analyze Mars landing data, available at +http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/top. }~ —all of these offer intriguing glances +into the potential for the future. Finally, of course, the Internet is one big +experiment in, as Benkler puts it, peer-to-peer cultural production.~{ Benkler, +“Coase’s Penguin,” 11. }~ + +If these questions are good ones, why are they also the wrong ones? I have +given my guesses about the future of the distributed model of innovation. My +own utopia has it flourishing alongside a scaled-down, but still powerful, +intellectual property regime. Equally plausible scenarios see it as a dead end +or as the inevitable victor in the war of productive processes. These are all +guesses, however. At the very least, there is some possibility, even hope, that +we could have a world in which much more of intellectual and inventive +production is free. “ ‘Free’ as in ‘free speech,’ ” Richard Stallman says, not +“free as in ‘free beer.’ ”~{ Free Software Foundation, +http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html [Ed. note: originally published at +http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/philosophy/free-sw.html, the link has changed]. }~ +But we could hope that much of it would be both free of centralized control and +low- or no-cost. When the marginal cost of reproduction is zero, the marginal +cost of transmission and storage approaches zero, the process of creation is +additive, and much of the labor doesn’t charge, the world looks a little +different.~{Exhibit A: the Internet—from the software and protocols on which it +runs to the multiple volunteer sources of content and information. }~ This is +at least a possible future, or part of a possible future, and one that we +should not foreclose without thinking twice. Yet that is what we are doing. The +Database Protection Bills and Directives, which extend intellectual property +rights to the layer of facts;~{See, e.g., the Database Investment and +Intellectual Property Antipiracy Act of 1996, HR 3531, 104th Cong. (1996); The +Consumer Access Bill, HR 1858, 106th Cong. § 101(1) (1999); see also Council +Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 11 March 1996 +on the Legal Protection of Databases, 1996 Official Journal of the European +Union, L77 (27.03.1996): 20–28. }~ the efflorescence of software patents;~{ See +generally Julie E. Cohen and Mark A. Lemley, “Patent Scope and Innovation in +the Software Industry,” California Law Review 89 (2001): 1–58; see also Pamela +Samuelson et al., “A Manifesto Concerning the Legal Protection of Computer +Programs,” Columbia Law Review 94 (1994): 2308–2431. }~ the UCITA-led +validation of shrinkwrap licenses that bind third parties;~{ Uniform Computer +Information Transactions Act, available at +http://www.law.upenn.edu/bll/archives/ulc/ucita/2002final.htm. }~ the Digital +Millennium Copyright Act’s anticircumvention provisions~{ 17 U.S.C. § 1201 +(2002). }~ —the point of all of these developments is not merely that they make +the peer-to-peer model difficult, but that in many cases they rule it out +altogether. I will assert this point here, rather than argue for it, but I +think it can be (and has been) demonstrated quite convincingly.~{ This point +has been ably made by Pamela Samuelson, Jessica Litman, Jerry Reichman, Larry +Lessig, and Yochai Benkler, among others. See Pamela Samuelson, “Intellectual +Property and the Digital Economy: Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need +to Be Revised,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 519–566; Jessica +Litman, Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet +(Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001); J. H. Reichman and Paul F. Uhlir, +“Database Protection at the Crossroads: Recent Developments and Their Impact on +Science and Technology,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 793–838; +Lawrence Lessig, “Jail Time in the Digital Age,” New York Times (July 30, +2001), A17; and Yochai Benkler, “Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment +Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain,” New York University Law Review +74 (1999): 354–446. Each has a slightly different focus and emphasis on the +problem, but each has pointed out the impediments now being erected to +distributed, nonproprietary solutions. See also James Boyle, “Cruel, Mean, or +Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and Digital Intellectual +Property,” Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000): 2007–2039. }~ + +The point is, then, that there is a chance that a new (or old, but +under-recognized) method of production could flourish in ways that seem truly +valuable—valuable to free speech, innovation, scientific discovery, the wallets +of consumers, to what William Fisher calls “semiotic democracy,”~{ William W. +Fisher III, “Property and Contract on the Internet,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 73 +(1998): 1217–1218. }~ and, perhaps, valuable to the balance between joyful +creation and drudgery for hire. True, it is only a chance. True, this theory’s +scope of operation and sustainability are uncertain. But why would we want to +foreclose it? That is what the recent expansions of intellectual property +threaten to do. And remember, these expansions were dubious even in a world +where we saw little or no possibility of the distributed production model I +have described, where discussion of network effects had yet to reach the pages +of The New Yorker,~{ See James Boyle, “Missing the Point on Microsoft,” +Salon.com (April 7, 2000), +http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/04/07/greenspan/index.html. }~ and where +our concerns about the excesses of intellectual property were simply the ones +that Jefferson, Madison, and Macaulay gave us so long ago. + +2~ Learning from the Sharing Economy + +Accept for the sake of argument that the free software community actually +works, actually produces high-quality products capable of competing in the +market with proprietary alternatives. Concede for a moment that the adoption of +Creative Commons licenses shows there are millions of creators out there who +want to share their works with others. Many of those creators even want to +allow the world to build on their material. Indeed, let us concede that the +whole history of the Web, from Wikipedia to the obsessive and usefully detailed +sites created on everything from Vikings to shoe polishes, shows a desire to +share one’s knowledge, to build on the work of others one has never met. These +efforts are remarkably varied. Some are ultimately aimed at profit—even if +their results are free. Think of IBM’s open source initiatives or musicians who +release Creative Commons-licensed work in order to get more club gigs. Some are +provided as a volunteer act of benevolence or civic duty, even if they +“compete” with expensive proprietary alternatives. Think of Wikipedia or MIT’s +OpenCourseWare. When the infrastructure for this collaboration does not exist, +it gets assembled—and quickly. Both the GPL and Creative Commons are examples. +Accept all of this. So what? + +Lesson number one comes from the nonprofit activities—everything from Wikipedia +to Web sites created by enthusiasts. People like to create and wish to share. +In many cases they will do so without financial reward. A surprising amount of +useful, creative, or expressive activity is generated without any financial +incentive at all. + +Should this cause us to throw out the economic case for copyrights? No. But it +should lead us to reassess it. As I explained in Chapter 1, copyright provides +an incentive for two distinct activities. First, it offers an incentive to +create the work in the first place. The author of Windows for Dummies or Harry +Potter gets a right to exclude others from copying the work, a right that he or +she can sell in the marketplace. The goal is to offer a financial reason to +devote time to this particular creative activity. It is this incentive that is +most often cited when attempting to persuade policy makers to expand +protection. Second, it offers an incentive to distribute the work—to typeset +and print large quantities of the work and to sell it to bookstores, or to +broadcast it, or put it on movie screens. + +Each medium is economically different, of course. The economics of the feature +film are different from those of the book, the magazine, or the operating +system. Thus, we have never had very good figures on the relative importance of +these incentives. We can only guess at how much of the incentive from copyright +goes to encouraging creation and how much to distribution. Until recently, most +types of distribution demanded higher levels of capital. The industry structure +that resulted often consisted of creators who worked as wage or contract labor +for distributors—either never acquiring copyright in their work in the first +place or immediately transferring that copyright to their employers. Because +distribution was expensive, our experience with material generated for fun or +out of a love of sharing was an essentially private and local one. You might +have a neighbor’s photocopied sheet of baking recipes that worked well at high +altitudes, or of fishing techniques that worked well on a particular lake, a +song that a friend created for a special occasion, or a short story you wrote +for your kids—and then typed up for them to tell to theirs. Financial +incentives were not needed to encourage the creation of the work, but the cost +of distribution dramatically limited its dissemination. + +The single most dramatic thing that the Web has done by lowering the cost of +communication and distribution, at the same moment that other electronic tools +lowered the cost of production, is to make this local and private activity a +global and public one. Someone, somewhere, will have written the guide to +fishing on that lake, baking at that altitude, washing windows, or treating +stings from Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish. Someone will have taken a photo of +the Duke Chapel or explained the history, economics, and chemistry of shoe +polish or distilling. Someone might even have created a great class on music +theory or C++programming. Someone will have written a handy little program +to manage DNS requests on a local network. Bizarrely, at least as far as the +economists were concerned, these people all wanted to share what they had made. +Because of the genius of search engines, and the implicit peer-review function +that those engines deduce from patterns of links to pages, I can find that +material when I need it. + +True, much of the material on the Web is inane or insane, confused, badly +written, tendentious, and inaccurate. (It should be noted that this is hardly a +problem confined to the Web or volunteer-generated material. Personally, I +would not want People magazine or Fox News in a time capsule to represent my +civilization. But some of the material on the Web is clearly worse.) Yes, +Wikipedia is occasionally inaccurate—though in one test in Nature it stacked up +well against the Encyclopedia Britannica, and it is obviously much more +encyclopedic in its coverage. But all of this misses the point. + +Consider how your expectations about information retrieval have changed in the +last fifteen years. We now simply assume that questions about a piece of +architecture, a bit of local history, a recipe, or the true author of a song +can all be answered within seconds. We have forgotten what it is like to be +routinely in ignorance because of the unavailability of some piece of +information. One podcaster I talked to called it being a member of “the +right-click generation”: “When I am walking around and I see a building, I +almost feel as though I ought to be able to ‘right click’ it and have the +architect’s name pop up.” Consider that it now seems normal for a gay Iraqi man +in Baghdad to have a blog that offers hundreds of thousands of readers around +the world a literate and touching account of the American occupation from a +perspective entirely different from that provided by the mainstream press.~{ +See “Salam Pax,” Wikipedia, available at +http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salam_Pax. }~ We think it normal for a person of +moderate resources to be able to speak to the world from a war zone, whether or +not he is affiliated with a newspaper or credentialed by a corporation. + +These examples are not the end of the process. Our methods of sorting, ranking, +and verifying the material generated are still evolving. They may improve even +beyond this point. We are only fifteen years into this particular experiment, +after all. And a huge amount of this material is produced by our fellow +citizens without the profit motive. + +Does this mean that we no longer need copyright or patent protection to +encourage the production and distribution of creative work? No. The fishing +tips are great, but I still might buy a handsomely illustrated guide to take on +the lake with me or, even better, just stay at home and read A River Runs +Through It. The New Yorker, and not a sheaf of printouts from the Web, still +sits on my coffee table, though much of the high-quality content I read comes +to me online, for free, from strangers who are generating it for pleasure, not +profit, or who profit from open sharing, not closed control. The online +blogosphere provides a vital counterpoint to mainstream media, but it exists in +a symbiotic—some would say parasitic—relationship with that media and the +network of professional news gatherers for which it pays. Some of the most +interesting open source production methods actually rely on copyright. Even if +they did not, open source production would not suffice to run our +pharmaceutical industry (though it might help with certain stages of the drug +discovery process). + +Still, just as it would be silly to dismiss the importance of intellectual +property based on our experience of blogs and Wikipedia and open source +software, it would be equally silly to underestimate what the Web has taught +us. The Web has enabled an astonishing flowering of communication and +expression, an astounding democratization of creativity. We have learned just +how strong, and how useful, is the human urge to express, communicate, invent, +and create—provided the barriers to sharing are lowered. These are the very +things that copyright and patent are supposed to encourage. For us to portray +the Web—as the Internet Threat story line does—as predominantly a threat to +creativity is simply perverse. For us to base our policies only on that notion +would be a tragedy. We might end up stultifying one of the greatest explosions +of human creativity the world has ever seen by treating it as an unimportant +marginal case and instead designing our rules around the production processes +of commercial culture in the late twentieth century. + +The shape of our copyright and to a lesser extent our patent system comes from +a world in which almost all large-scale distribution was an expensive, +capital-intensive enterprise. The roles of gatekeeper and financier, producer +and assembler, distributor and advertiser, tended naturally to coalesce into +vertically integrated firms or symbiotic commercial partnerships. Those firms +were presumed to be the proxy for the public interest when it came to +intellectual property policy. Who would know better than they what was needed? +Occasionally, device manufacturers would provide a counterweight—as in the Sony +case—where the defense of a particular “consumer freedom” actually created a +market for a complementary product. Artists and authors might be trotted out as +appealing spokespersons, though the laws that were made only sporadically +reflected their economic and artistic interests. Librarians and educational +institutions had influence at the edges. Most of the time, though, it was the +assemblers and distributors of content whose voices and assumptions about +markets would be heard. + +Out of this pattern of habit and influence, and out of much deeper notions +about authorship and invention that I have explored elsewhere, developed an +ideology, a worldview. Call it maximalism. Its proponents sincerely believed in +it and pursued it even when it did not make economic sense. (Think how lucky +the movie industry is that it lost the Sony + +This process was not—let me stress—was not a simple process of economic +determinism or industry conspiracy. Anyone who claims that is the thesis of +this book simply has not read it. (Reviewers beware.) Let us start with +economic determinism. It was not a situation in which the law mechanistically +recorded the interests of the most economically important industries in the +area. This was the creation of a worldview, not the steely-eyed calculation of +profit and loss. Not only did many of the rules we ended up with make no sense +from the point of view of some of the largest economic players in the +area—think of the device manufacturers, the search engines, and so on—they +frequently made no sense from the perspective of those proposing them. +Attempting to twist the law to make it illegal for technology to interfere with +your old business method is frequently bad for the industry seeking the +protection, as well as for the technology, the market, and the wider society. +Since this worldview makes incumbents systematically blind to profit-making +opportunities that could be secured by greater openness, rather than greater +control, it actually disables them from pursuing some of the most promising +methods by which they could have made money for their shareholders. Again, the +chapter on the Sony decision offers a salutary example. + +Economic determinism does not explain the rules we have. Neither are those +rules simply a result of the manipulation of elected officials by incumbent +industries through crafty campaign contributions and distorted evidence (though +to be sure, there was a lot of that as well). Many of the people who put +forward this worldview—both lobbyists and lobbied—sincerely believe that more +rights will always lead to more innovation, that all property rights are the +same, that we do not need to think about both the input and output sides of the +equation, that cheaper copying techniques automatically require greater +protections, and so on. What of the modest suggestions I put forward here? We +could sum them up thus: do not apply identical assumptions to physical and +intellectual property. Focus on both the inputs to and the outputs of the +creative process; protecting the latter may increase the cost of the former. +Look both at the role of the public domain and the commons of cultural and +scientific material and at the need to provide incentives for creativity and +distribution through exclusive rights. More rights will not automatically +produce more innovation. Indeed, we should confine rights as narrowly as +possible while still providing the desired result. Look at the empirical +evidence before and after increasing the level of protection. Pay attention to +the benefits as well as the costs of the new technologies and the flowering of +creativity they enable. + +To me, these points seem bland, boring, obvious—verging on tautology or pablum. +To many believers in the worldview I have described, they are either +straightforward heresy or a smokescreen for some real, underlying agenda—which +is identified as communism, anarchism, or, somewhat confusingly, both. + +This account smacks of exaggeration, I know. How could things be so one-sided? +The best answer I can give came from a question I was asked at a recent +conference. The questioner pointed out politely that it was unlikely that the +policy-making process would ignore such a fundamental and obvious set of +points—points that I myself observed had been well understood for hundreds of +years. I had used many examples of intellectual property rights being +extended—in length, breadth, scope. Why had I not spoken, he asked, of all the +times over the last fifty years when intellectual property rights had been +weakened, curtailed, shortened? Since human beings were fallible, surely there +were occasions when the length of a copyright or patent term had proved to be +too long, or the scope of a right too large, and the rights had been narrowed +appropriately by legislation. Why did I not cite any of these? The answer is +simple. To the best of my knowledge, there are none. Legislatively, +intellectual property rights have moved only in one direction—outward. (Court +decisions present a more complex picture, as the previous chapter’s discussion +of software copyrights and business method patents shows.) + +What are the odds that the costs of new technologies are always greater than +their benefits as far as intellectual property rights holders are concerned? +This pattern is not a matter of policies carefully crafted around the evidence. +It is the fossil record of fifty years of maximalism. If I lean toward the +other side of the story it is not because I am a foe of intellectual property. +It is because I believe our policies have become fundamentally +unbalanced—unbalanced in ways that actually blind us to what is going on in the +world of creativity. + +We are living through an existence-proof that there are other methods of +generating innovation, expression, and creativity than the proprietary, +exclusionary model of sole control. True, these methods existed before. Yet +they tended to be local or invisible or both. The Internet has shown +conclusively and visibly that—at least in certain sectors—we can have a global +flowering of creativity, innovation, and information sharing in which +intellectual property rights function in a very different way than under the +standard model of proprietary control. In some cases, intellectual property +rights were simply irrelevant—much of the information sharing and indexing on +the Web falls within this category. In some cases they were used to prevent +exclusivity. Think of Creative Commons or the General Public License. In some, +they were actually impediments. Software patents, for example, have a negative +effect on open source software development—one that policy makers are only now +slowly beginning to acknowledge. + +It is important not to overstate how far the sharing economy can get us. It +might help to cut the costs of early-stage drug development, as the Tropical +Disease Initiative attempts to do for neglected diseases. It will not generate +a Phase III drug trial or bring a drug to market. Sharing methods might be used +to generate cult movies such as Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, which was +created using techniques borrowed from open source software and is available +under a Creative Commons license. They will not produce a mammoth blockbuster +like Ben Hur, or Waterworld for that matter—results that will generate mixed +feelings. So there are real limitations to the processes I describe. + +But even acknowledging those limitations, it is fair to say that one of the +most striking events to occur during our lifetimes is the transformation +wrought by the Web, a transformation that is partly driven by the extraordinary +explosion of nonproprietary creativity and sharing across digital networks. The +cultural expectation that a web of expression and information will just be +there—whatever subject we are discussing—is a fundamental one, the one that in +some sense separates us from our children. With this as a background it is both +bizarre and perverse that we choose to concentrate our policy making only on +maintaining the business methods of the last century, only on the story line of +the Internet Threat, only on the dangers that the technology poses to +creativity (and it does pose some) and never on the benefits. + +What would it mean to pay attention to the changes I have described? It would +mean assessing the impact of rules on both proprietary and nonproprietary +production. For example, if the introduction of a broad regime of software +patents would render open source software development more difficult (because +individual contributors cannot afford to do a patent search on every piece of +code they contribute), then this should be reflected as a cost of software +patents, to be balanced against whatever benefits the system brought. A method +for encouraging innovation might, in fact, inhibit one form of it. + +Paying attention to the last ten years means we need to realize that +nonproprietary, distributed production is not the poor relation of traditional +proprietary, hierarchically organized production. This is no hippy lovefest. It +is the business method on which IBM has staked billions of dollars; the method +of cultural production that generates much of the information each of us uses +every day. It is just as deserving of respect and the solicitude of policy +makers as the more familiar methods pursued by the film studios and proprietary +software companies. Losses due to sharing that failed because of artificially +erected legal barriers are every bit as real as losses that come about because +of illicit copying. Yet our attention goes entirely to the latter. + +The main thrust of the argument here is still firmly within the Jeffersonian, +Scottish Enlightenment tradition. Jefferson does not wish to give the patent to +Oliver Evans because he believes the invention will be (and has been) generated +anyway without the granting of an intellectual property right and that there +are sufficient information retrieval methods to have practical access to it. In +this case, the information retrieval method is not Google. It is a polymath +genius combing his library in Monticello for references to Persian irrigation +methods. The “embarrassment” caused by the unnecessary patent is added expense +and bureaucracy in agriculture and impediments to further innovators, not the +undermining of open source software. But it is the same principle of cautious +minimalism, the same belief that much innovation goes on without proprietary +control and that intellectual property rights are the exception, not the rule. +When Benjamin Franklin, a man who surely deserved patents under even the most +stringent set of tests, chooses to forgo them because he has secured so much +benefit from the contributions of others, he expresses Shirky’s norm nicely. + +Indeed, Jefferson’s optimism depends partly on a view of information sharing +that captures beautifully the attitudes of the generation that built the Web. +The letter that I discussed in Chapter 2 was widely cited for precisely this +reason. Remember these lines? + +_1 That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the +moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to +have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, +like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any +point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, +incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. + +What could encapsulate better the process by which information spreads on a +global network? What could more elegantly state the norms of the “information +wants to be free” generation? (Though those who quoted him conveniently omitted +the portions of his analysis where he concedes that there are cases where +intellectual property rights may be necessary and desirable.) + +In some ways, then, the explosion of nonproprietary and, in many cases, +noncommercial creativity and information sharing is simply the vindication of +Jefferson’s comparison of ideas with “fire . . . expansible over all space.” +The Web makes the simile a reality and puts an exclamation point at the end of +the Jefferson Warning. All the more reason to pay attention to it. But the +creative commons I described here goes further. It forces us to reconceptualize +a form of life, a method of production, and a means of social organization that +we used to relegate to the private world of informal sharing and collaboration. +Denied a commons by bad intellectual property rules, we can sometimes build our +own—which may in some ways do even more for us than the zone of free trade, +free thought, and free action that Jefferson wished to protect. + +Does all this mean that the Jefferson Warning is no longer necessary? Can we +mitigate the negative effects of intellectual property expansion through a +series of privately constructed commons? The answers to those questions are, +respectively, “no” and “sometimes.” Think of the story of retrospectively +extended copyright and orphan works. In many cases the problem with our +intellectual property rights is that they create barriers to sharing—without +producing an incentive in return—in ways that can never be solved through +private agreement. Twentieth century culture will largely remain off-limits for +digitization, reproduction, adaptation, and translation. No series of private +contracts or licenses can fix the problem because the relevant parties are not +in the room and might not agree if they were. + +Even when the parties are available and agree to share, the benefits may not +flow to all equally. Beset by a multitude of vague patents of questionable +worth and uncertain scope, large information technology firms routinely create +patent pools. IBM tosses in thousands of patents, so does Hewlett or Dell. Each +agrees not to sue the other. This is great for the established companies; they +can proceed without fear of legal action from the landmine patents that litter +the technological landscape. As far as the participants are concerned, the +patent pool is almost like the public domain—but a privatized public domain, a +park that only residents may enter. But what about the start up company that +does not have the thousands of patents necessary for entry? They are not in as +happy a situation. The patent pool fixes the problem of poor patent quality and +unclear scope—one that Jefferson was worrying about 200 years ago. But it fixes +it only for the dominant firms, hurting competition in the process. + +Attempts to form a commons may also backfire. The coordination problems are +legion. There are difficulties of compatibility in licenses and the process, no +matter how easy, still imposes transaction costs. Nevertheless, with all of +these qualifications, the idea of the privately created commons is an important +addition to the world view that Jefferson provided, a new tool in our attempt +to craft a working system of innovation and culture. No one who looks at the +Web can doubt the power of distributed, and frequently uncompensated, +creativity in constructing remarkable reference works, operating systems, +cultural conversations, even libraries of images and music. Some of that +innovation happens largely outside of the world of intellectual property. Some +of it happens in privately created areas of sharing that use property rights +and open, sometimes even machine-readable, licenses to create a commons on +which others can build. The world of creativity and its methods is wider than +we had thought. That is one of the vital and exciting lessons the Internet +teaches us; unfortunately, the only one our policy makers seem to hear is +“cheaper copying means more piracy.” + +2~ Chapter 8: Further Reading + +3~ Distributed Creativity + +The most remarkable and important book on “distributed creativity” and the +sharing economy is Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social +Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University +Press, 2006). Benkler sets the idea of “peer production” alongside other +mechanisms of market and political governance and offers a series of powerful +normative arguments about why we should prefer that future. Comprehensive +though this book may seem, it is incomplete unless it is read in conjunction +with one of Benkler’s essays: Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and +the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2002): 369–446. In that essay, +Benkler puts forward the vital argument—described in this chapter—about what +collaborative production does to Coase’s theory of the firm. + +Benkler’s work is hardly the only resource however. Other fine works covering +some of the same themes include: Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds +Produce Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Rishab Aiyer +Ghosh, ed., CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy (Cambridge, +Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), which includes an essay by me presenting an earlier +version of the “second enclosure movement” argument. Clay Shirky’s recent book, +Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: +Penguin Press, 2008), is an extremely readable and thoughtful addition to this +body of work—it includes a more developed version of the speech I discuss. Eric +Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), is a +fascinating account of the way that innovation happens in more places than we +have traditionally imagined—particularly in end-user communities. In one sense, +this reinforces a theme of this chapter: that the “peer production” and +“distributed creativity” described here is not something new, merely something +that is given dramatically more salience and reach by the Web. Dan Hunter and +F. Gregory Lastowka’s article, “Amateur-to-Amateur,” William & Mary Law Review +46 (2004): 951–1030, describes some of the difficulties in adapting copyright +law to fit “peer production.” Finally, Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the +Internet—And How to Stop It (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, +2008)—also relevant to Chapter 10—argues that if the democratically attractive +aspects of the Internet are to be saved, it can only be done through enlisting +the collective energy and insight of the Internet’s users. + +3~ Free and Open Source Software + +Free and open source software has been a subject of considerable interest to +commentators. Glyn Moody’s Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution +(Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub., 2001), and Peter Wayner’s Free for All: How +Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans (New York: +HarperBusiness, 2000), both offer readable and accessible histories of the +phenomenon. Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and +Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, revised edition (Sebastopol, +Calif.: O’Reilly, 2001), is a classic philosophy of the movement, written by a +key participant—author of the phrase, famous among geeks, “given enough +eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Steve Weber, in The Success of Open Source +(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), offers a scholarly argument +that the success of free and open source software is not an exception to +economic principles but a vindication of them. I agree, though the emphasis +that Benkler and I put forward is rather different. To get a sense of the +argument that free software (open source software’s normatively charged cousin) +is desirable for its political and moral implications, not just because of its +efficiency or commercial success, one should read the essays of Richard +Stallman, the true father of free software and a fine polemical, but rigorous, +essayist. Richard Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of +Richard M. Stallman, ed. Joshua Gay (Boston: GNU Press, 2002). Another strong +collection of essays can be found in Joseph Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott A. +Hissam, and Karim R. Lakhani, eds., Perspectives on Free and Open Source +Software (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). If you only have time to read a +single essay on the subject it should be Eben Moglen’s “Anarchism Triumphant: +Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” First Monday 4 (1999), available at +http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594 +[Ed. note: originally published as +http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_8/moglen/, the link has changed]. + +3~ Creative Commons + +Creative Commons has only just begun to attract its own chroniclers. Larry +Lessig, its founder, provides a characteristically eloquent account in “The +Creative Commons,” Montana Law Review 65 (2004): 1–14. Michael W. Carroll, a +founding board member, has produced a thought-provoking essay discussing the +more general implications of organizations such as Creative Commons. Michael W. +Carroll, “Creative Commons and the New Intermediaries,” Michigan State Law +Review, 2006, n.1 (Spring): 45–65. Minjeong Kim offers an empirical study of +Creative Commons licenses in “The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in +the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses,” Journal of +Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2007): Article 10, available at +http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/kim.html. However, simply because of the +rapidity of adoption of Creative Commons licenses, the work is already +dramatically out of date. My colleague Jerome Reichman and Paul Uhlir of the +National Academy of Sciences have written a magisterial study of the way in +which tools similar to Creative Commons licenses could be used to lower +transaction costs in the flow of scientific and technical data. J. H. Reichman +and Paul Uhlir, “A Contractually Reconstructed Research Commons for Scientific +Data in a Highly Protectionist Intellectual Property Environment,” Law and +Contemporary Problems 66 (2003): 315–462. Finally, the gifted author, David +Bollier, is reportedly writing a book on Creative Commons entitled Viral +Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (New York: New +Press, forthcoming 2009). + +Niva Elkin-Koren offers a more critical view of Creative Commons in “Exploring +Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit,” in The Future of the +Public Domain—Identifying the Commons in Information Law, ed. P. Bernt +Hugenholtz and Lucie Guibault (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2006). +Elkin-Koren’s argument is that Creative Commons has an unintended negative +effect by leading individuals to think of themselves through the reified +categories of legal subjects and property owners—forcing into a legalized realm +something that should simply be experienced as culture. Elkin-Koren is a +perceptive and influential scholar; some of her early work on bulletin boards +for example, was extremely important in explaining the stakes of regulating the +Internet to a group of judges and policy makers. I also acknowledge the truth +of her theoretical point; in many ways Creative Commons is offered as a second +best solution. But I am unconvinced by the conclusion. Partly, this is because +I think Elkin-Koren’s account of the actual perceptions of license users is +insufficiently grounded in actual evidence. Partly, it is because I think the +legalization—undesirable though it may be in places—has already happened. Now +we must deal with it. Partly, it is because I believe that many of the +activities that the licenses enable—a global commons of free educational +materials, for example—simply cannot be produced any other way in the political +reality we face, and I have a preference for lighting candles rather than +lamenting the darkness. + +1~ Chapter 9: An Evidence-Free Zone + +Perhaps some of the arguments in this book have convinced you. Perhaps it is a +mistake to think of intellectual property in the same way we think of physical +property. Perhaps limitations and exceptions to those rights are as important +as the rights themselves. Perhaps the public domain has a vital and tragically +neglected role to play in innovation and culture. Perhaps relentlessly +expanding property rights will not automatically bring us increased innovation +in science and culture. Perhaps the second enclosure movement is more troubling +than the first. Perhaps it is unwise to extend copyright again and again, and +to do so retrospectively, locking up most of twentieth-century culture in order +to protect the tiny fragment of it that is still commercially available. +Perhaps technological improvements bring both benefits and costs to existing +rights holders—both of which should be considered when setting policy. Perhaps +we need a vigorous set of internal limitations and exceptions within copyright, +or control over content will inevitably become control over the medium of +transmission. Perhaps the Internet should make us think seriously about the +power of nonproprietary and distributed production. + +Saying all this gives us some guidance in how we should think. It points out +certain patterns of error. But its prescriptions are not simple. Precisely +because it is not a rejection of intellectual property rights, but rather a +claim that they only work well through a process of consciously balancing +openness and control, public domain and private right, it still leaves open the +question of where that point of balance is and how to strike it. + +In this chapter I want to offer a suggestion that in any other field would be +stunningly obvious, boring even, but in the funhouse mirror of intellectual +property appears revolutionary. We should make our policy based on empirical +evidence of its likely effects and there should be a formal requirement of +empirical reconsideration of those policies after they have been implemented to +see if they are working. Why is this a good idea? + +Imagine a process of reviewing prescription drugs that goes like this: +representatives from the drug company come to the regulators and argue that +their drug works well and should be approved. They have no evidence of this +beyond a few anecdotes about people who want to take it and perhaps some very +simple models of how the drug might affect the human body. The drug is +approved. No trials, no empirical evidence of any kind, no follow-up. Or +imagine a process of making environmental regulations in which there were no +data, and no attempts to gather data, about the effects of the particular +pollutants being studied. Even the harshest critics of regulation would admit +we generally do better than this. But this is often the way we make +intellectual property policy. + +So how do we decide the ground rules of the information age? Representatives of +interested industries come to regulators and ask for another heaping slice of +monopoly rent in the form of an intellectual property right. They have +doom-laden predictions, they have anecdotes, carefully selected to pluck the +heartstrings of legislators, they have celebrities who testify—often +incoherently, but with palpable charisma—and they have very, very simple +economic models. The basic economic model here is “If you give me a larger +right, I will have a larger incentive to innovate. Thus the bigger the rights, +the more innovation we will get. Right?” + +As I have tried to show here using the words of Jefferson and Macaulay and +examples such as term extension, software copyrights, and garage door openers, +this logic is fallacious. Even without data, the “more is better” idea is +obviously flawed. Copyrighting the alphabet will not produce more books. +Patenting E=mc2 will not yield more scientific innovation. Intellectual +property creates barriers to, as well as incentives toward, innovation. +Jefferson agonized over the issue of when the benefits exceed the costs of a +new right. “I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things +which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and +those which are not.” It is not clear that contemporary policy makers approach +issues with anything like the same sophistication or humility. But it would be +an equal mistake to conclude, as some do, that expansions of intellectual +property are never justified. Extensions of rights can help or hurt, but +without economic evidence beforehand and review afterward, we will never know. +This point should be obvious, banal, even deeply boring, but sadly it is not. + +From Jefferson and Macaulay and Adam Smith, I derived a second point. In the +absence of evidence on either side, the presumption should be against creating +a new, legalized monopoly. The burden of proof should lie on those who claim, +in any particular case, that the state should step in to stop competition, +outlaw copying, proscribe technology, or restrict speech. They have to show us +that the existing protection is not enough. But this presumption is a +second-best solution and the empirical emptiness of the debates frustrating. + +This makes an occasion where there is some evidence a time for celebration. +What we need is a test case in which one country adopts the proposed new +intellectual property right and another similarly situated country does not, +and we can assess how they are both doing after a number of years. + +There is such a case. It is the “database right.” + +2~ Owning Facts? + +Europe adopted a Database Directive in 1996 which gave a high level of +copyright protection to databases and conferred a new “sui generis” database +right even on unoriginal compilations of facts. In the United States, by +contrast, in a 1991 case called Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone +Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), the Supreme Court made it clear that +unoriginal compilations of facts are not copyrightable. + +What does all this mean? Take the phone directory—that was the product at issue +in the Feist case. A white pages directory is a database of names and numbers, +compiled in alphabetical order by name. Does anyone have an intellectual +property right over it? Not the particular dog-eared directory lying next to +your phone. Does the phone company that compiled it own the facts, the numbers +inside that directory? Could they forbid me from copying them, adding others +from surrounding areas, and issuing a competing directory that I believed +consumers would find more valuable? This was an important issue for Feist +because it went to the heart of their business. They issued regional telephone +directories, combining records from multiple phone companies. In this case, all +the other companies in the region agreed to license their data to Feist. Rural +did not, so Feist copied the information, checked as many entries as possible, +adding addresses to some of the listings, and published the combined result. +Rural sued and lost. The Supreme Court declared that mere alphabetical listings +and other unoriginal assemblies of data cannot be copyrighted. + +_1 It may seem unfair that much of the fruit of the compiler’s labor may be +used by others without compensation. As Justice Brennan has correctly observed, +however, this is not “some unforeseen byproduct of a statutory scheme.” It is, +rather, “the essence of copyright,” and a constitutional requirement. The +primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but “to +promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” To this end, copyright +assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others +to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This +principle, known as the idea/expression or fact/expression dichotomy, applies +to all works of authorship. As applied to a factual compilation, assuming the +absence of original written expression, only the compiler’s selection and +arrangement may be protected; the raw facts may be copied at will. This result +is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances +the progress of science and art.~{ Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone +Service Co. , 499 U.S. 340 (1991). }~ + +Feist was not as revolutionary as some critics claimed it to be. Most of the +appeals courts in the United States had long held this to be the case. As the +Court pointed out in the passage above, it is a fundamental tenet of the U.S. +intellectual property system that neither facts nor ideas can be owned. Feist +merely reiterated that point clearly and stressed that it was not just a policy +choice, it was a constitutional requirement—a limit imposed by the +Constitution’s grant of power to Congress to make copyright and patent laws. + +Daily politics cares little for the limitations imposed by constitutions or for +the structural principle the Court describes—that we should leave facts free +for others to build upon. Since 1991, a few database companies have lobbied the +Congress strenuously and continuously to create a special database right over +facts. Interestingly, apart from academics, scientists, and civil libertarians, +many database companies, and even those well-known property haters, the U.S. +Chamber of Commerce, oppose the creation of such a right. They believe that +database providers can adequately protect themselves with contracts or +technical means such as passwords, can rely on providing tied services, and so +on. Moreover, they argue that strong database protection may make it harder to +generate databases in the first place; the facts you need may be locked up. We +need to focus on the inputs as well as the outputs of the process—a point I +have tried to make throughout this book. The pressure to create a new right +continues, however, aided by cries that the United States must “harmonize” with +Europe, where, you will remember, compilations of facts are strongly protected +by intellectual property rights, even if their arrangement is unoriginal. + +So here we have our natural experiment. One major economy rejects such +protection and resists pressure to create a new right. A different major +economic region, at a comparable level of development, institutes the right +with the explicit claim that it will help to produce new databases and make +that segment of the economy more competitive. Presumably government economists +in the United States and the European Union have been hard at work ever since, +seeing if the right actually worked? Well, not exactly. + +Despite the fact that the European Commission has a legal obligation to review +the Database Directive for its effects on competition, it was more than three +years late issuing its report. At first, during the review process, no +attention was paid to the actual evidence of whether the Directive helps or +hurts the European Union, or whether the database industry in the United States +has collapsed or flourished. That is a shame, because the evidence was there +and it was fairly shocking. Yet finally, at the end of the process, the +Commission did turn to the evidence, as I will recount, and came to a +remarkable conclusion—which was promptly stifled for political reasons. But we +are getting ahead of ourselves. + +How do we frame the empirical inquiry? Intellectual property rights allow the +creation of state-backed monopolies, and “the general tendency of monopolies,” +as Macaulay pointed out, is “to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to +make them bad.” Monopolies are an evil, but they must sometimes be accepted +when they are necessary to the production of some good, some particular social +goal. In this case, the “evil” is obviously going to be an increase in the +price of databases and the legal ability to exclude competitors from their +use—that, after all, is the point of granting the new right. This right of +exclusion may then have dynamic effects, hampering the ability of subsequent +innovators to build on what went before. The “good” is that we are supposed to +get lots of new databases, databases that we would not have had but for the +existence of the database right. + +If the database right were working, we would expect positive answers to three +crucial questions. First, has the European database industry’s rate of growth +increased since 1996, while the U.S. database industry has languished? (The +drop-off in the U.S. database industry ought to be particularly severe after +1991 if the proponents of database protection are correct; they argued the +Feist case was a change in current law and a great surprise to the industry.) + +Second, are the principal beneficiaries of the database right in Europe +producing databases they would not have produced otherwise? Obviously, if a +society is handing over a database right for a database that would have been +created anyway, it is overpaying—needlessly increasing prices for consumers and +burdens for competitors. This goes to the design of the right—has it been +crafted too broadly, so that it is not being targeted to those areas where it +is needed to encourage innovation? + +Third, and this one is harder to judge, is the new right promoting innovation +and competition rather than stifling it? For example, if the existence of the +right allowed a one-time surge of newcomers to the market who then use their +rights to discourage new entrants, or if we promoted some increase in databases +but made scientific aggregation of large amounts of data harder overall, then +the database right might actually be stifling the innovation it is designed to +foment. + +Those are the three questions that any review of the Database Directive must +answer. But we have preliminary answers to those three questions and they are +either strongly negative or extremely doubtful. + +Are database rights necessary for a thriving database industry? The answer +appears to be no. In the United States, the database industry has grown more +than twenty-five-fold since 1979 and—contrary to those who paint the Feist case +as a revolution—for that entire period, in most of the United States, it was +clear that unoriginal databases were not covered by copyright. The figures are +even more interesting in the legal database market. The two major proponents of +database protection in the United States are Reed Elsevier, the owner of Lexis, +and Thomson Publishing, the owner of Westlaw. Fascinatingly, both companies +made their key acquisitions in the U.S. legal database market after the Feist +decision, at which point no one could have thought unoriginal databases were +copyrightable. This seems to be some evidence that they believed they could +make money even without a database right. How? In the old-fashioned way: +competing on features, accuracy, tied services, making users pay for entry to +the database, and so on. + +If those companies believed there were profits to be made, they were right. +Jason Gelman, a former Duke student, pointed out in a recent paper that +Thomson’s legal regulatory division had a profit margin of over 26 percent for +the first quarter of 2004. Reed Elsevier’s 2003 profit margin for LexisNexis +was 22.8 percent. Both profit margins were significantly higher than the +company average and both were earned primarily in the $6 billion U.S. legal +database market, a market which is thriving without strong intellectual +property protection over databases. (First rule of thumb for regulators: when +someone with a profit margin over 20 percent asks you for additional monopoly +protection, pause before agreeing.) + +What about Europe? There is some good news for the proponents of database +protection. As Hugenholtz, Maurer, and Onsrud point out in a nice article in +Science magazine, there was a sharp, one-time spike in the number of companies +entering the European database market immediately following the implementation +of the Directive in member states.~{ Stephen M. Maurer, P. Bernt Hugenholtz, +and Harlan J. Onsrud, “Europe’s Database Experiment,” Science 294 (2001): +789–790. }~ Yet their work, and “Across Two Worlds,”~{ Stephen M. Maurer, +“Across Two Worlds: US and European Models of Database Protection,” paper +commissioned by Industry Canada (2001). }~ a fascinating study by Maurer, +suggests that the rate of entry then fell back to levels similar to those +before the directive. Maurer’s analysis shows that the attrition rate was also +very high in some European markets in the period following the passage of the +directive—even with the new right, many companies dropped out. + +At the end of the day, the British database industry—the strongest performer in +Europe—added about two hundred databases in the three years immediately after +the implementation of the directive. In France, there was little net change in +the number of databases and the number of providers fell sharply. In Germany, +the industry added nearly three hundred databases immediately following the +directive—a remarkable surge—about two hundred of which rapidly disappeared. +During the same period, the U.S. industry added about nine hundred databases. +Bottom line? Europe’s industry did get a one-time boost and some of those firms +have stayed in the market; that is a benefit, though a costly one. But database +growth rates have gone back to predirective levels, while the anticompetitive +costs of database protection are now a permanent fixture of the European +landscape. The United States, by contrast, gets a nice steady growth rate in +databases without paying the monopoly cost. (Second rule of thumb for +regulators: Do no harm! Do not create rights without strong evidence that the +incentive effect is worth the anticompetitive cost.) + +Now the second question. Is the Database Directive encouraging the production +of databases we would not have gotten otherwise? Here the evidence is clear and +disturbing. Again, Hugenholtz et al. point out that the majority of cases +brought under the directive have been about databases that would have been +created anyway—telephone numbers, television schedules, concert times. A review +of more recent cases reveals the same pattern. These databases are inevitably +generated by the operation of the business in question and cannot be +independently compiled by a competitor. The database right simply serves to +limit competition in the provision of the information. Recently, the European +Court of Justice implicitly underscored this point in a series of cases +concerning football scores, horse racing results, and so on. Rejecting a +protectionist and one-sided opinion from its Advocate General, the court ruled +that the mere running of a business which generates data does not count as +“substantial investment” sufficient to trigger the database right. It would be +nice to think that this is the beginning of some skepticism about the reach of +the directive. Yet the court provides little discussion of the economic reasons +behind its interpretation; the analysis is merely semantic and definitional, a +sharp contrast to its competition decisions. + +So what kinds of creations are being generated by this bold new right? The +answer is somewhere between bathos and pathos. Here are some of the wonderful +“databases” that people found it worthwhile litigating over: a Web site +consisting of a collection of 259 hyperlinks to “parenting resources,” a +collection of poems, an assortment of advertisements, headings referring to +local news, and charts of popular music. The sad list goes on and on. The +European Commission might ask itself whether these are really the kind of +“databases” that we need a legal monopoly to encourage and that we want to tie +up judicial resources protecting. The point that many more such factual +resources can be found online in the United States without any legalized +database protection also seems worthy of note. At the very least, the evidence +indicates that the right is drawn much too broadly and triggered too easily in +ways that produce litigation but little social benefit. + +Now, in one sense, these lawsuits over trivial collections of hyperlinks and +headlines might be seen as irrelevant. They may indicate we are handing out +rights unnecessarily—did we really need a legal monopoly, and court +involvement, to get someone to compile hyperlinks on a Web page? But it is hard +to see social harm. As with the patents over “sealed crustless” peanut butter +sandwiches or “methods of swinging on a swing,” we may shake our heads at the +stupidity of the system, but if the problems consist only of trivial creations, +at least we are not likely to grieve because some vital piece of information +was locked up. But we should not be so quick to declare such examples +irrelevant. They tend to show that the system for drawing the boundaries of the +right is broken—and that is of general concern, even if the issue at hand is +not. + +Finally, is the database right encouraging scientific innovation or hurting it? +Here the evidence is merely suggestive. Scientists have claimed that the +European database right, together with the perverse failure of European +governments to take advantage of the limited scientific research exceptions +allowed by the directive, have made it much harder to aggregate data, to +replicate studies, and to judge published articles. In fact, academic +scientific bodies have been among the strongest critics of database protection. +But negative evidence, by its nature, is hard to produce; “show me the science +that did not get done!” Certainly, both U.S. science and commerce have +benefited extraordinarily from the openness of U.S. data policy. I will deal +with this issue in the next part of this chapter. + +If the United States does not give intellectual property protection to raw +data, to facts, how is it that the database industry has managed to thrive here +and to do better than in Europe, which has extremely strong protection? The +economists described in Chapter 1 would surely tell us that this is a potential +“public goods” problem. If it is hard to exclude others from the resource—it is +cheap and easy to copy—and if the use of the resource is not “rival”—if I don’t +use up your facts by consulting them—then we ought to see the kind of dystopia +economists predict. What would that consist of? First it might result in +underproduction. Databases with a social value higher than their cost of +creation would not get made because the creator could not get an adequate +return on investment. In some cases it might even lead to the +reverse—overproduction, where each party creates the database for itself. We +get a social overinvestment to produce the resource because there is no legal +right to exclude others from it. If you gave the first creator an intellectual +property right over the data, they could sell to subsequent users at a price +lower than their own cost to create the database. Everyone would win. But the +United States did not give the intellectual property right and yet its database +industry is flourishing. There are lots of commercial database providers and +many different kinds of databases. How can this be? Is the economic model +wrong? + +The answer to that is no, the model is not wrong. It is, however, incomplete +and all too often applied in sweeping ways without acknowledging that its basic +assumptions may not hold in a particular case. That sounds vague. Let me give a +concrete example. Westlaw is one of the two leading legal database providers +and, as I mentioned before, one of the key proponents of creating intellectual +property rights over unoriginal databases. (There is considerable question +whether such a law would be constitutional in the United States, but I will +pass over that argument for the moment.) Westlaw’s “problem” is that much of +the material that it provides to its subscribers is not covered by copyright. +Under Section 105 of the U.S. Copyright Act, works of the federal government +cannot be copyrighted. They pass immediately into the public domain. Thus all +the federal court decisions, from district courts all the way up to the Supreme +Court, all the federal statutes, the infinite complexity of the Federal +Register, all this is free from copyright. This might seem logical for +government-created work, for which the taxpayer has already paid, but as I will +explain in the next section of the chapter, not every country adopts such a +policy. + +West, another Thomson subsidiary that owns Westlaw, publishes the standard case +reporter series. When lawyers or judges refer to a particular opinion, or quote +a passage within an opinion, they will almost always use the page number of the +West edition. After all, if no one else can find the cases or statutes or +paragraphs of an opinion that you are referring to, legal argument is all but +impossible. (This might seem like a great idea to you. I beg to differ.) As +electronic versions of legal materials became more prevalent, West began +getting more competition. Its competitors did two things that West found +unforgivable. First, they frequently copied the text of the cases from West’s +electronic services, or CD-ROMs, rather than retyping them themselves. Since +the cases were works of the federal government, this was perfectly legal +provided the competitors did not include West’s own material, such as summaries +of the cases written by its employees or its key number system for finding +related issues. Second, the competitors would include, within their electronic +editions, the page numbers to West’s editions. Since lawyers need to cite the +precise words or arguments they are referring to, providing the raw opinion +alone would have been all but useless. Because West’s page numbers were one of +the standard ways to cite case opinions, competitors would indicate where the +page breaks on the printed page would have been, just as West did in its own +databases. + +West’s reaction to all of this was exactly like Apple’s reaction in the story I +told in Chapter 5 about the iPod or like Rural’s reaction to the copying of its +phone directory. This was theft! They were freeloading on West’s hard work! +West had mixed its sweat with these cites, and so should be able to exclude +other people from them! Since it could not claim copyright over the cases, West +claimed copyright over the order in which they were arranged, saying that when +its competitors provided its page numbers for citation purposes, they were +infringing that copyright. + +In the end, West lost its legal battles to claim copyright over the arrangement +of the collections of cases and the sequence in which they were presented. The +Court held that, as with the phone directory, the order in which the cases were +arranged lacked the minimum originality required to sustain a copyright +claim.~{ Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing Co. , 158 F.3d 674 (2nd Cir. +1998). }~ At this stage, according to the standard public goods story, West’s +business should have collapsed. Unable to exclude competitors from much of the +raw material of its databases, West would be undercut by competitors. More +importantly, from the point of view of intellectual property policy, its fate +would deter potential investors in other databases—databases that we would lose +without even knowing they could have been possible. Except that is not the way +it turned out. West has continued to thrive. Indeed, its profits have been +quite remarkable. How can this be? + +The West story shows us three ways in which we can leap too quickly from the +abstract claim that some information goods are public goods—nonexcludable and +nonrival—to the claim that this particular information good has those +attributes. The reality is much more complex. Type www.westlaw.com into your +Internet browser. That will take you to the home page of West’s excellent legal +research service. Now, I have a password to that site. You probably do not. +Without a password, you cannot get access to West’s site at all. To the average +consumer, the password acts as a physical or technical barrier, making the good +“excludable”—that is, making it possible to exclude someone from it without +invoking intellectual property rights. But what about competitors? They could +buy access and use that access to download vast quantities of the material that +is unprotected by copyright. Or could they? Again, West can erect a variety of +barriers, ranging from technical limits on how much can be downloaded to +contractual restrictions on what those who purchase its service can do (“No +copying every federal case,” for example). + +Let’s say the competitor somehow manages to get around all this. Let’s say it +somehow avoids copying the material that West does have a copyright over—such +as the headnotes and case synopses. The competitor launches their competing +site at lower prices amidst much fanfare. Do I immediately and faithlessly +desert West for a lower-priced competitor? Not at all. First of all, there are +lots of useful things in the West database that are covered by copyright—law +review articles and certain treatises, for example. The competitor frequently +cannot copy those without coming to the same sort of agreements that West has +with the copyright holders. For much legal research, that secondary material is +as important as the cases. If West has both, and the competitor only one, I +will stick with West. Second, West’s service is very well designed. (It is only +their copyright policies I dislike, not the product.) If a judge cites a law +review article in a case, West will helpfully provide a hyperlink to the +precise section of the article she is referring to. I can click on it and in a +second see what the substance of the argument is. The reverse is true if a law +review article cites a statute or a case. Cases have “flags” on them indicating +whether they have been overruled or cited approvingly in subsequent decisions. +In other words, faced with the competitive pressure of those who would +commoditize their service and provide it at lower cost, West has done what any +smart company would: added features and competed by offering a superior +service. Often it has done so by “tying” its uncopyrightable data structures to +its huge library of copyrighted legal material. + +The company that challenged Westlaw in court was called Hyperlaw. It won +triumphantly. The courts declared that federal cases and the page numbers in +the West volumes were in the public domain. That decision came in 1998 and +Westlaw has lobbied hard since then to reverse it by statute, to create some +version of the Database Directive in the United States. To date, they have +failed. The victor, Hyperlaw, has since gone out of business. Westlaw has not. + +This little story contains a larger truth. It is true that innovation and +information goods will, in general, tend to be less excludable and less rival +than a ham sandwich, say. But, in practice, some of them will be linked or +connected in their social setting to other phenomena that are highly +excludable. The software can easily be copied—but access to the help lines can +be restricted with ease. Audiences cannot easily be excluded from viewing +television broadcasts, but advertisers can easily be excluded from placing +their advertisements in those programs. The noncopyrightable court decisions +are of most use when embedded within a technical system that gives easy access +to other material—some of it copyrighted and all of it protected by technical +measures and contractual restrictions. The music file can be downloaded; the +band’s T-shirt or the experience of the live concert cannot. Does this mean +that we never need an intellectual property right? Not at all. But it does +indicate that we need to be careful when someone claims that “without a new +intellectual property right I am doomed.” + +One final story may drive home the point. When they read Feist v. Rural, law +students often assume that the only reason Feist offered to license the white +pages listings from Rural is because they (mistakenly) thought they were +copyrighted. This is unlikely. Most good copyright lawyers would have told you +at the time of the Feist case that the “sweat of the brow” decisions that gave +copyright protection based on hard work were not good law. Most courts of +appeals had said so. True, there was some legal uncertainty, and that is often +worth paying to avoid. But switch the question around and suppose it is the day +after the Supreme Court decides the Feist case, and Feist is heading off into +another market to try to make a new regional phone directory. Do they now just +take the numbers without paying for them, or do they still try to negotiate a +license? The latter is overwhelmingly likely. Why? Well, for one thing, they +would get a computer-readable version of the names and would not have to retype +or optically scan them. More importantly, the contract could include a right to +immediate updates and new listings. + +The day after the Feist decision, the only thing that had changed in the +telephone directory market was that telephone companies knew for sure, rather +than merely as a probability, that if they refused to license, their +competitors could laboriously copy their old listings without penalty. The +nuclear option was no longer available. Maybe the price demanded would be a +little lower. But there would still be lots of good reasons for Feist to buy +the information, even though it was uncopyrighted. You do not always need an +intellectual property right to make a deal. Of course, that is not the whole +story. Perhaps the incentives provided by other methods are insufficient. But +in the U.S. database industry they do not seem to have been. Quite the +contrary. The studies we have on the European and the American rules on +database rights indicate that the American approach simply works better. + +I was not always opposed to intellectual property rights over data. Indeed, in +a book written before the enactment of the Database Directive, I said that +there was a respectable economic argument that such protection might be +warranted and that we needed research on the issue.~{ James Boyle, Shamans, +Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society +(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). }~ Unfortunately, Europe +got the right without the research. The facts are now in. If the European +Database Directive were a drug, the government would be pulling it from the +market until its efficacy and harmfulness could be reassessed. At the very +least, the Commission needed a detailed empirical review of the directive’s +effects, and needs to adjust the directive’s definitions and fine-tune its +limitations. But there is a second lesson. There is more discussion of the +empirical economic effects of the Database Directive in this chapter than in +the six-hundred-page review of the directive that the European Commission paid +a private company to conduct, and which was the first official document to +consider the issue. + +That seemed to me and to many other academics to be a scandal and we said so as +loudly as we could, pointing out the empirical evidence suggesting that the +directive was not working. Yet if it was a scandal, it was not a surprising +one, because the evidence-free process is altogether typical of the way we make +intellectual property policy. President Bush is not the only one to make +“faith-based” decisions. + +There was, however, a ray of hope. In its official report on the competitive +effects of the Database Directive, the European Commission recently went beyond +reliance on anecdote and industry testimony and did something aescribed the +directive as “a Community creation with no precedent in any international +convention.” Using a methodology similar to the one in this chapter on the +subject, the Commission found that “the economic impact of the ‘sui generis’ +right on database production is unproven. Introduced to stimulate the +production of databases in Europe, the new instrument has had no proven impact +on the production of databases.”~{ First evaluation of Directive 96/9/EC on the +legal protection of databases, DG Internal Market and Services Working Paper +(Brussels, Belgium: Commission of the European Communities, 2005), 5. }~ + +In fact, their study showed that the production of databases had fallen to +pre-directive levels and that the U.S. database industry, which has no such +intellectual property right, was growing faster than the European Union’s. The +gap appears to be widening. This is consistent with the data I had pointed out +in newspaper articles on the subject, but the Commission’s study was more +recent and, if anything, more damning. + +Commission insiders hinted that the study may be part of a larger—and +welcome—transformation in which a more professional and empirical look is being +taken at the competitive effects of intellectual property protection. Could we +be moving away from faith-based policy in which the assumption is that the more +new rights we create, the better off we will be? Perhaps. But unfortunately, +while the report was a dramatic improvement, traces of the Commission’s older +predilection for faith-based policy and voodoo economics still remain. + +The Commission coupled its empirical study of whether the directive had +actually stimulated the production of new databases with another intriguing +kind of empiricism. It sent out a questionnaire to the European database +industry asking if they liked their intellectual property right—a procedure +with all the rigor of setting farm policy by asking French farmers how they +feel about agricultural subsidies. More bizarrely still, the report sometimes +juxtaposed the two studies as if they were of equivalent worth. Perhaps this +method of decision making could be expanded to other areas. We could set +communications policy by conducting psychoanalytic interviews with state +telephone companies—let current incumbents’ opinions determine what is good for +the market as a whole. “What is your emotional relationship with your +monopoly?” “I really like it!” “Do you think it hurts competition?” “Not at +all!” + +There are also a few places where the reasoning in the report left one +scratching one’s head. One goal of the database right was to help close the gap +between the size of the European and U.S. database markets. Even before the +directive, most European countries already gave greater protection than the +United States to compilations of fact. The directive raised the level still +higher. The theory was that this would help build European market share. Of +course, the opposite is also possible. Setting intellectual property rights too +high can actually stunt innovation. In practice, as the Commission’s report +observes, “the ratio of European / U.S. database production, which was nearly +1:2 in 1996, has become 1:3 in 2004.”~{ Ibid., 22. }~ Europe had started with +higher protection and a smaller market. Then it raised its level of protection +and lost even more ground. Yet the report was oddly diffident about the +possibility that the U.S. system actually works better. + +In its conclusion, the report offered a number of possibilities, including +repealing the directive, amending it to limit or remove the “sui generis” right +while leaving the rest of the directive in place, and keeping the system as it +is. The first options are easy to understand. Who would want to keep a system +when it is not increasing database production, or European market share, and, +indeed, might be actively harmful? Why leave things as they are? The report +offers several reasons. + +First, database companies want to keep the directive. (The report delicately +notes that their “endorsement . . . is somewhat at odds with the continued +success of U.S. publishing and database production that thrives without . . . +[such] protection,” but nevertheless appears to be “a political reality.”) +Second, repealing the directive would reopen the debate on what level of +protection is needed. Third, change may be costly. + +Imagine applying these arguments to a drug trial. The patients in the control +group have done better than those given the drug and there is evidence that the +drug might be harmful. But the drug companies like their profits and want to +keep the drug on the market. Though “somewhat at odds” with the evidence, this +is a “political reality.” Getting rid of the drug would reopen the debate on +the search for a cure. Change is costly—true. But what is the purpose of a +review if the status quo is always to be preferred? + +The final result? Faced with what Commission staff members tell me was a tidal +wave of lobbying from publishers, the Commission quietly decided to leave the +directive unchanged, despite the evidence. The result itself is not remarkable. +Industry capture of a regulatory apparatus is hardly a surprise. What is +remarkable is that this is one of the first times any entity engaged in making +intellectual property policy on the international level has even looked +seriously at the empirical evidence of that policy’s effects. + +To be sure, figures are thrown around in hearings. The software industry will +present studies showing, for example, that it has lost billions of dollars +because of illicit copying. It has indeed lost profits relative to what it +could get with all the benefits of cheaper copying and transmission worldwide +and with perfect copyright enforcement as well. (Though the methodology of some +of the studies, which assumes that each copier would have paid full price—is +ridiculous.) But this simply begs the question. A new technology is introduced +that increases the size of your market and decreases your costs dramatically, +but also increases illicit copying. Is this cause for state intervention to +increase your level of rights or the funds going toward enforcement of +copyright law, as opposed to any other law enforcement priority? The question +for empirical analysis, both before and after a policy change, should be “Is +this change necessary in order to maintain incentives for production and +distribution? Will whatever benefits it brings outweigh the costs of static and +dynamic losses—price increases to consumers and impediments to future +innovators?” The content companies might still be able to justify the +extensions of their rights. But they would be doing so in the context of a +rational, evidence-based debate about the real goals of intellectual property, +not on the assumption that they have a natural right to collect all the +economic surplus gained by a reduction in the costs of reproduction and +distribution. + +2~ Does Public Information Want To Be Free? + +The United States has much to learn from Europe about information policy. The +ineffectively scattered U.S. approach to data privacy, for example, produces +random islands of privacy protection in a sea of potential vulnerability. Until +recently, your video rental records were better protected than your medical +records. Europe, by contrast, has tried to establish a holistic framework, a +much more effective approach. But there are places where the lessons should +flow the other way. The first one, I have suggested, is database protection. +The second is a related but separate issue: the legal treatment of publicly +generated data, the huge, and hugely important, flow of information produced by +government-funded activities—from ordnance survey maps and weather data to +state-produced texts, traffic studies, and scientific information. How is this +flow of information distributed? The norm turns out to be very different in the +United States and in Europe. + +In one part of the world, state-produced data flows are frequently viewed as +revenue sources. They are often copyrighted or protected by database rights. +Many of the departments which produce them attempt to make a profit or at least +to recover their entire operating costs through user fees. It is heresy to +suggest that the taxpayer has already paid for the production of this data and +should not have to do so twice. The other part of the world practices a benign +form of information socialism. By law, any text produced by the central +government is free from copyright and passes immediately into the public +domain. The basic norm is that public data flows should be available at the +cost of reproduction alone. + +It is easy to guess which area is which. The United States is surely the +profit- and property-obsessed realm, Europe the place where the state takes +pride in providing data as a public service? No, actually, it is the other way +around. + +Take weather data. The United States makes complete weather data available to +all at the cost of reproduction. If the superb government Web sites and data +feeds are insufficient, for the cost of a box of blank DVDs you can have the +entire history of weather records across the continental United States. +European countries, by contrast, typically claim government copyright over +weather data and often require the payment of substantial fees. Which approach +is better? I have been studying the issue for fifteen years, and if I had to +suggest a single article it would be the magisterial study by Peter Weiss +called “Borders in Cyberspace,” published by the National Academies of +Science.~{ In Open Access and the Public Domain in Digital Data and Information +for Science: Proceedings of an International Symposium (Washington, D.C.: +National Academies Press, 2004), 69–73, available at +http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11030&page=69. }~ Weiss shows that +the U.S. approach generates far more social wealth. True, the information is +initially provided for free, but a thriving private weather industry has sprung +up which takes the publicly funded data as its raw material and then adds value +to it. The U.S. weather risk management industry, for example, is more than ten +times bigger than the European one, employing more people, producing more +valuable products, generating more social wealth. Another study estimates that +Europe invests 9.5 billion Euros in weather data and gets approximately 68 +billion back in economic value—in everything from more efficient farming and +construction decisions to better holiday planning—a sevenfold multiplier. The +United States, by contrast, invests twice as much—19 billion—but gets back a +return of 750 billion Euros, a thirty-nine-fold multiplier. + +Other studies suggest similar patterns elsewhere, in areas ranging from +geospatial data to traffic patterns and agriculture. The “free” information +flow is better at priming the pump of economic activity. + +Some readers may not thrill to this way of looking at things because it smacks +of private corporations getting a “free ride” on the public purse—social wealth +be damned. But the benefits of open data policies go further. Every year the +monsoon season kills hundreds and causes massive property damage in Southeast +Asia. One set of monsoon rains alone killed 660 people in India and left 4.5 +million homeless. Researchers seeking to predict the monsoon sought complete +weather records from the United States and Europe so as to generate a model +based on global weather patterns. The U.S. data was easily and cheaply +available at the cost of reproduction. The researchers could not afford to pay +the price asked by the European weather services, precluding the “ensemble” +analysis they sought to do. Weiss asks rhetorically, “What is the economic and +social harm to over 1 billion people from hampered research?” In the wake of +the outpouring of sympathy for tsunami victims in the same region, this example +seems somehow even more tragic. Will the pattern be repeated with +seismographic, cartographic, and satellite data? One hopes not. + +The European attitude may be changing. Competition policy has already been a +powerful force in pushing countries to rethink their attitudes to government +data. The European Directive on the Reuse of Public Sector Information takes +large strides in the right direction, as do studies by the Organization for +Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and several national +initiatives.~{ Directive 2003/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the +Council of 17 November 2003 on the Re-use of Public Sector Information, +Official Journal of the European Union, L 345 (31.12.2003): 90–96; Public +Sector Modernisation: Open Government, Organization for Economic Co-operation +and Development (2005), available at +http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/1/35/34455306.pdf; The Socioeconomic Effects of +Public Sector Information on Digital Networks: Toward a Better Understanding of +Different Access and Reuse Policies (February 2008 OECD conference), more +information at +http://www.oecd.org/document/48/0,3343,en_2649_201185_40046832_1_1_1_1,00.html; +and the government sites of individual countries in the European Union such as +Ireland (http://www.psi.gov.ie/). }~ Unfortunately, though, most of these +follow the same pattern. An initially strong draft is watered down and the +utterly crucial question of whether data should be provided at the marginal +cost of reproduction is fudged or avoided. This is a shame. Again, if we really +believed in evidence-based policy making, the debate would be very different. + +2~ Breaking the Deal + +What would the debate look like if we took some of the steps I mention here? +Unfortunately there are very few examples of evidence-based policy making, but +the few that do exist are striking. + +In 2006, the government-convened Gowers Review of intellectual property policy +in the United Kingdom considered a number of proposals on changes to copyright +law, including a retrospective extension of sound recording copyright terms.~{ +Andrew Gowers, Gowers Review of Intellectual Property (London: HMSO, 2006), +available at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/pbr06_gowers_report_755.pdf [Ed. +note: originally published at +http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/6/E/pbr06_gowers_report_755.pdf, the link +has changed]. }~ The copyright term for sound recordings in the United Kingdom +is fifty years. (It is longer for compositions.) At the end of the fifty-year +period, the recording enters the public domain. If the composition is also in +the public domain—the great orchestral works of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart, +for example, or the jazz classics of the early twentieth century—then anyone +can copy the recording. This means we could make it freely available in an +online repository for music students throughout Britain—perhaps preparing the +next generation of performers—or republish it in a digitally cleansed and +enhanced edition. If the composition is still under copyright, as with much +popular music, then the composer is still entitled to a licensing fee, but now +any music publisher who pays that fee can reissue the work—introducing +competition and, presumably, bringing down prices of the recording. + +The recording industry, along with successful artists such as Sir Cliff Richard +and Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, wished to extend the fifty-year term to +ninety-five years, or perhaps even longer—the life of the performer, plus +seventy years. This proposal was not just for new recordings, but for the ones +that have already been made. + +Think of the copyright system as offering a deal to artists and record +companies. “We will enlist the force of the state to give you fifty years of +monopoly over your recordings. During that time, you will have the exclusive +right to distribute and reproduce your recording. After that time, it is +available to all, just as you benefited from the availability of public domain +works from your predecessors. Will you make records under these terms?” + +Obviously, fifty years of legalized exclusivity was enough of an incentive to +get them to make the music in the first place. We have the unimpeachable +evidence that they actually did. Now they want to change the terms of the deal +retrospectively. They say this will “harmonize” the law internationally, give +recordings the same treatment as compositions, help struggling musicians, and +give the recording industry some extra money that it might spend on developing +new talent. (Or on Porsches, shareholder dividends, and plastic ducks. If you +give me another forty-five years of monopoly rent, I can spend it as I wish.) + +Change the context and think about how you would react to this if the deal was +presented to you personally. You hired an artist to paint a portrait. You +offered $500. He agreed. You had a deal. He painted the painting. You liked it. +You gave him the money. A few years later he returned. “You owe me another +$450,” he said. + +You both looked at the contract. “But you agreed to paint it for $500 and I +paid you that amount.” He admitted this was true, but pointed out that painters +in other countries sometimes received higher amounts, as did sculptors in our +own country. In fact, he told you, all painters in our country planned to +demand another $450 for each picture they had already painted as well as for +future pictures. This would “harmonize” our prices with other countries, put +painting on the same footing as sculpture, and enable painters to hire more +apprentices. His other argument was that painters often lost money. Only +changing the terms of their deals long after they were struck could keep them +in business. Paying the money was your duty. If you did not pay, it meant that +you did not respect art and private property. + +You would find these arguments absurd. Yet they are the same ones the record +industry used, relying heavily on the confusions against which this book has +warned. Is the record companies’ idea as outrageous as the demands of my +imaginary painter? It is actually worse. + +The majority of sound recordings made more than forty years ago are +commercially unavailable. After fifty years, only a tiny percentage are still +being sold. It is extremely hard to find the copyright holders of the +remainder. They might have died, gone out of business, or simply stopped +caring. Even if the composer can be found, or paid through a collection +society, without the consent of the holder of the copyright over the musical +recording, the work must stay in the library. These are “orphan works”—a +category that probably comprises the majority of twentieth-century cultural +artifacts. + +Yet as I pointed out earlier, without the copyright holder’s permission, it is +illegal to copy or redistribute or perform these works, even if it is done on a +nonprofit basis. The goal of copyright is to encourage the production of, and +public access to, cultural works. It has done its job in encouraging +production. Now it operates as a fence to discourage access. As the years go +by, we continue to lock up 100 percent of our recorded culture from a +particular year in order to benefit an ever-dwindling percentage—the lottery +winners—in a grotesquely inefficient cultural policy. + +Finally, fifty years after they were made, sound recordings enter the public +domain in the United Kingdom (though as I pointed out earlier, licensing fees +would still be due to the composer if the work itself was still under +copyright). Now anyone—individual, company, specialist in public domain +material—could offer the work to the public. But not if the record companies +can persuade the government otherwise. Like my imaginary painter, they want to +change the terms of the deal retrospectively. But at least the painter’s +proposal would not make the vast majority of paintings unavailable just to +benefit a tiny minority of current artists. + +The recording industry’s proposal for retrospective extension was effectively a +tax on the British music-buying public to benefit the copyright holders of a +tiny proportion of sound recordings. The public loses three times. It loses +first when it is forced to continue to pay monopoly prices for older, +commercially available music, rather than getting the benefit of the bargain +British legislators originally offered: fifty years of exclusivity, then the +public domain. The public loses a second time when, as a side effect, it is +denied access to commercially unavailable music; no library or niche publisher +can make the forgotten recordings available again. Finally, the public loses a +third time because allowing retrospective extensions will distort the political +process in the future, leading to an almost inevitable legislative capture by +the tiny minority who find that their work still has commercial value at the +end of the copyright term they were originally granted. As Larry Lessig has +pointed out repeatedly, the time to have the debate about the length of the +copyright term is before we know whose works will survive commercially. + +The whole idea is very silly. But if this is the silly idea we wish to pursue, +then simply increase the income tax proportionately and distribute the benefits +to those record companies and musicians whose music is still commercially +available after fifty years. Require them to put the money into developing new +artists—something the current proposal does not do. Let all the other +recordings pass into the public domain. + +Of course, no government would consider such an idea for a moment. Tax the +public to give a monopoly windfall to those who already hit the jackpot, +because they claim their industry cannot survive without retrospectively +changing the terms of its deals? It is indeed laughable. Yet it is a far better +proposal than the one that was presented to the Gowers Review. + +What happened next was instructive. The Review commissioned an economic study +of the effects of copyright term extension—both prospective and +retrospective—on recorded music from the University of Cambridge’s Centre for +Intellectual Property and Information Law. The resulting document was a model +of its kind.~{ University of Cambridge Centre for Intellectual Property and +Information Law, Review of the Economic Evidence Relating to an Extension of +Copyright in Sound Recordings (2006), available at +http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/gowers_cipilreport.pdf [Ed. note: originally +published at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/B/4/gowers_cipilreport.pdf, +the link has changed]. }~ + +With painstaking care and a real (if sometimes fruitless) attempt to make +economic arguments accessible to ordinary human beings, the study laid out the +costs and benefits of extending the copyright term over sound recordings. It +pointed out that the time to measure the value of a prospective term extension +is at the moment the copyright is granted. Only then does it produce its +incentive effects. The question one must ask is how much value today does it +give an artist or record company to have their copyright extended by a year at +the end of the existing period of protection. Then one must look to see whether +the benefits of the added incentive outweigh the social costs it imposes. To +put it another way, if the state were selling today the rights to have +protection from year fifty to year ninety-five, how much would a rational +copyright holder pay, particularly knowing that there is only a small +likelihood the work will even be commercially available to take advantage of +the extension? Would that amount be greater than the losses imposed on society +by extending the right? + +Obviously, the value of the extension is affected by our “discount rate”—the +annual amount by which we must discount a pound sterling in royalties I will +not receive for fifty-one years in order to find its value now. Unsurprisingly, +one finds that the value of that pound in the future is tiny at the moment when +it matters—today—in the calculation of an artist or distributor making the +decision whether to create. Conservative estimates yield a present value +between 3 percent and 9 percent of the eventual amount. By that analysis, a +pound in fifty years is worth between three and nine pence to you today, while +other estimates have the value falling below one penny. This seems unlikely to +spur much creativity at the margin. Or to put it in the more elegant language +of Macaulay, quoted in Chapter 2: + +_1 I will take an example. Dr. Johnson died fifty-six years ago. If the law +were what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it, somebody would +now have the monopoly of Dr. Johnson’s works. Who that somebody would be it is +impossible to say; but we may venture to guess. I guess, then, that it would +have been some bookseller, who was the assign of another bookseller, who was +the grandson of a third bookseller, who had bought the copyright from Black +Frank, the Doctor’s servant and residuary legatee, in 1785 or 1786. Now, would +the knowledge that this copyright would exist in 1841 have been a source of +gratification to Johnson? Would it have stimulated his exertions? Would it have +once drawn him out of his bed before noon? Would it have once cheered him under +a fit of the spleen? Would it have induced him to give us one more allegory, +one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal? I firmly believe not. I +firmly believe that a hundred years ago, when he was writing our debates for +the Gentleman’s Magazine, he would very much rather have had twopence to buy a +plate of shin of beef at a cook’s shop underground.~{ Ibid., 21–22. }~ + +The art form is different, but the thought of a 1960s Cliff Richard or Ian +Anderson being “cheered under a fit of the spleen” by the prospect of a +copyright extension fifty years hence is truly a lovely one. + +Considering all these factors, as well as the effects on investment in British +versus American music and on the balance of trade, the Cambridge study found +that the extension would cost consumers between 240 and 480 million pounds, far +more than the benefits to performers and recording studios. (In practice, the +report suggested, without changes in the law, most of the benefits would not +have gone to the original recording artist in any case.) It found prospective +extension led to a clear social welfare loss. What of retrospective extension? + +The report considered, and found wanting, arguments that retrospective +extension is necessary to encourage “media migration”—the digitization of +existing works, for example. In fact, most studies have found precisely the +reverse—that public domain works are more available and more frequently adapted +into different media. (Look on Amazon.com for a classic work that is out of +copyright—Moby-Dick, for example—and see how many adaptations and formats are +available.) It also rejected the argument that harmonization alone was enough +to justify extension—retrospective or prospective—pointing out the considerable +actual variation in both term and scope of rights afforded to performers in +different countries. Finally, it warned of the “hidden ‘ratcheting’ effect of +harmonisation which results from the fact that harmonization is almost +invariably upwards.” Its conclusion was simple: + +_1 [R]etrospective term extensions reduce social welfare. Thus, in this case, +it would seem that basic theory alone is sufficient to provide strong, and +unambiguous, guidance for policy-makers. . . . We therefore see no reason to +quarrel with the consensus of the profession on this issue which as summed up +by Akerlof et al. . . . [states] categorically that . . . “[retrospective] +extension provides essentially no incentive to create new works. Once a work is +created, additional compensation to the producer is simply a windfall.”~{ Ibid. +}~ + +The Gowers Review agreed. Its fourth recommendation read simply, “Policy makers +should adopt the principle that the term and scope of protection for IP rights +should not be altered retrospectively.” Perhaps more important, though, was the +simple paragraph at the front of the document captioned “The Approach of the +Review.” It begins thus: “The Review takes an evidence-based approach to its +policy analysis and has supplemented internal analysis by commissioning +external experts to examine the economic impact of changes. . . .” + +Why specify that one was taking an “evidence-based” approach? At first, the +comment seems unnecessary. What other approach would one take? Anecdotal? +Astrological? But there is a framework in which empirical evidence of the +effects of policy simply seems irrelevant—one based on natural right. When the +Review was given to the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and +Sport, that frame of mind was much in evidence: + +_1 The Gowers Review undertook an extensive analysis of the argument for +extending the term. On economic grounds, the Review concluded that there was +little evidence that extension would benefit performers, increase the number of +works created or made available, or provide incentives for creativity; and it +noted a potentially negative effect on the balance of trade. . . . Gowers’s +analysis was thorough and in economic terms may be correct. It gives the +impression, however, of having been conducted entirely on economic grounds. We +strongly believe that copyright represents a moral right of a creator to choose +to retain ownership and control of their own intellectual property. We have not +heard a convincing reason why a composer and his or her heirs should benefit +from a term of copyright which extends for lifetime and beyond, but a performer +should not. . . . Given the strength and importance of the creative industries +in the U.K., it seems extraordinary that the protection of intellectual +property rights should be weaker here than in many other countries whose +creative industries are less successful.~{ House of Commons Select Committee on +Culture, Media and Sport, Fifth Report (2007), available at +http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmcumeds/509/50910.htm. +}~ + +A couple of things are worth noting here. The first is that the Committee is +quite prepared to believe that the effects of term extension would not benefit +performers or provide incentives for creativity, and even to believe that it +would hurt the balance of trade. The second is the curious argument in the last +sentence. Other countries have stronger systems of rights and are less +successful. We should change our regime to be more like them! Obviously the +idea that a country’s creative industries might be less successful because +their systems of rights were stronger does not occur to the Committee for a +moment. Though it proclaims itself to be unaffected by economic thought, it is +in fact deeply influenced by the “more rights equals more innovation” ideology +of maximalism that I have described in these pages. + +Nestling between these two apparently contradictory ideas is a serious argument +that needs to be confronted. Should we ignore evidence—even conclusive +evidence—of negative economic effects, harm to consumers, and consequences for +the availability of culture because we are dealing with an issue of moral +right, almost natural right? Must we extend the rights of the artists who +recorded those songs (or rather the record companies who immediately acquired +their copyrights) because they are simply theirs as a matter of natural +justice? Do performers have a natural right to recorded songs either because +they have labored on them, mixing their sweat with each track, or because +something of their personality is forever stamped into the song? Must we grant +an additional forty-five years of commercial exclusivity, not because of +economic incentive, but because of natural right? + +Most of us feel the pull of this argument. I certainly do. But as I pointed out +in Chapter 2, there are considerable problems with such an idea. First, it runs +against the premises of actual copyright systems. In the United States, for +example, the Constitution resolutely presents the opposite picture. Exclusive +rights are to encourage progress in science and the useful arts. The Supreme +Court has elaborated on this point many times, rejecting both labor-based +“sweat of the brow” theories of copyright and more expansive visions based on a +natural right to the products of one’s genius—whether inventions or novels. +Britain, too, has a history of looking to copyright as a utilitarian +scheme—though with more reference to, and legal protection of, particular +“moral rights” than one finds in the United States. But even in the most +expansive “moral rights” legal systems, even in the early days of debate about +the rights of authors after the French Revolution, it is accepted that there +are temporal limits on these rights. If this is true of authors, it is even +more true of performers, who are not granted the full suite of author’s rights +in moral rights jurisdictions, being exiled to a form of protection called +“neighboring” rights. + +In all of these schemes, there are time limits on the length of the rights (and +frequently different ones for different creators—authors, inventors, +performers, and so on). Once one has accepted that point, the question of how +long they should be is, surely, a matter for empirical and utilitarian +analysis. One cannot credibly say that natural rights or the deep deontological +structure of the universe gives me a right to twenty-eight or fifty-six or +seventy years of exclusivity. The argument must turn instead to a question of +consequences. Which limit is better? Once one asks that question, the Gowers +Review’s economic assessment is overwhelming, as the Select Committee itself +recognized. In the end, the government agreed—noting that a European Union +study had found precisely the same thing. The sound recording right should not +be extended, still less extended retrospectively. The evidence-free zone had +been penetrated. But not for long. As this book went to press, the European +Commission announced its support for an even longer Europe-wide extension of +the sound recording right. The contrary arguments and empirical evidence were +ignored, minimized, explained away. How can this pattern be broken? + +In the next and final chapter, I try to answer that question. I offer a partial +explanation for the cognitive and organizational blindnesses that have brought +us to this point. I argue that we have much to learn from the history, theory, +and organizational practices of the environmental movement. The environmental +movement taught us to see “the environment” for the first time, to recognize +its importance, and to change the way we thought about ecology, property, and +economics in consequence. What we need is an environmentalism of mind, of +culture, of information. In the words of my colleague David Lange, we need to +“recognize the public domain.” And to save it. + +2~ Chapter 9: Further Reading + +3~ Database Rights + +Mark J. Davison, The Legal Protection of Databases (Cambridge: Cambridge +University Press, 2003), provides a fine introduction to the legal, and +legalistic, issues surrounding the legal protection of databases. Precisely +because of the need to focus on those issues, and that audience, the discussion +is internal to the conceptual categories of the various legal systems he +discusses, rather than focusing on the external questions I discuss here. +Insiders will find the discussion indispensable. Outsiders may find it +hermetic. For those readers, an article by Davison and Hugenholtz may be more +accessible. It points out the ways in which the European Court of Justice has +tried to rein in the database right. Mark J. Davison and P. Bernt Hugenholtz, +“Football Fixtures, Horseraces and Spinoffs: The ECJ Domesticates the Database +Right,” European Intellectual Property Review 27, no. 3 (2005): 113–118. + +When it comes to the general intellectual framework for thinking about database +rights, Jerome Reichman and Pamela Samuelson provide the germinal point of +view: J. H. Reichman and Pamela Samuelson, “Intellectual Property Rights in +Data?” Vanderbilt Law Review 50 (1997): 51–166. Frequent readers of Reichman +will be unsurprised that “take and pay” liability rules make an appearance as a +possible solution. Yochai Benkler’s article, “Constitutional Bounds of Database +Protection: The Role of Judicial Review in the Creation and Definition of +Private Rights in Information,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 15 (2000): +535–604, indicates the free expression and self-determination problems +presented by intellectual property rights over facts. By contrast, J. H. +Reichman and Paul F. Uhlir, “Database Protection at the Crossroads: Recent +Developments and Their Impact on Science and Technology,” Berkeley Technology +Law Journal 14 (1999): 793–838, point out their negative effects on science and +technological development. Increasingly, science will depend on the +recombination of multiple databases to solve problems. At first, this will be +done for huge and important projects. But increasingly, it will be done to +solve smaller problems—scientists will seek to mix and mash a variety of data +sources into an interoperable whole in order to solve the scientific problem du +jour. Unfortunately, there are many obstacles to this promising tendency to +harness digital technology to scientific research. Some of them are technical, +some social, some semantic, some legal. One of the legal problems is posed by +the expansion of database rights: the tendency to have intellectual property +rights penetrate down to the most basic, unoriginal, or atomic level of data—a +move that, as I point out in this chapter, is empirically shown to be +counterproductive. Stephen M. Maurer, P. Bernt Hugenholtz, and Harlan J. +Onsrud, “Europe’s Database Experiment,” Science 294 (2001): 789–780. Further +information on the various barriers to data aggregation can be gleaned from the +website of Science Commons (http://www.sciencecommons.org), an organization +with which I am associated. + +3~ Evidence-based Policy + +The move toward evidence-based policy has garnered considerable support in +academia, but, as yet, only a little traction among policy makers. Readers +interested in exploring the issue further can find a series of my Financial +Times’s articles on the subject at http://www.ft.com/techforum. James Bessen +and Michael J. Meurer, Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put +Innovators at Risk (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), is a +sterling example of the way in which we could and should be looking at policy +proposals. That book’s list of references provides a nice overview of recent +work in the field. As the title indicates, Bessen and Meurer do not grade our +current system highly. Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner, Innovation and Its +Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and +Progress, and What To Do About It (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, +2004), offers an earlier, and similar, assessment backed by data rather than +faith. For us to have evidence-based policy, we need actual evidence. Here the +work of empiricists such as my colleague Wes Cohen has proven vital. Much of +this work is comparative in nature—relying on the kind of “natural experiment” +I describe in this chapter. A fine example is provided by Wesley M. Cohen, +Akira Goto, Akiya Nagata, Richard R. Nelson, and John P. Walsh, “R&D +Spillovers, Patents and the Incentives to Innovate in Japan and the United +States,” Research Policy 31 (2002): 1349–67. + +All of this may seem obvious. Where else would intellectual property academics +turn in order to assess the effect of various policy alternatives than to +empirical and comparative data? Yet as the chapter points out, that simple +conclusion has yet to become a standard assumption in the making of policy. The +Gowers Review mentioned in the chapter is a nice example of how things might be +otherwise. Gowers Review of Intellectual Property (London: HMSO, 2006), +available at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/pbr06_gowers_report_755.pdf [Ed. +note: originally published at +http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/6/E/pbr06_gowers_report_755.pdf, link has +changed]. Of course, a turn to evidence is only the beginning. It hardly means +that the evidence will be clear, the points of view harmonious, or the +normative assessments shared. But at least the conversation is beginning from a +rooting in facts rather than faith. + +3~ Publicly Generated Information + +Access to public, or state generated, data is not simply a matter of economic +efficiency. Wouter Hins and Dirk Voorhoof, “Access to State-Held Information as +a Fundamental Right under the European Convention on Human Rights,” European +Constitutional Law Review 3 (2007): 114–126. But in efficiency terms, it does +seem to present some clear benefits. Peter Weiss, “Borders in Cyberspace: +Conflicting Government Information Policies and their Economic Impacts,” in +Open Access and the Public Domain in Digital Data and Information for Science: +Proceedings of an International Symposium (Washington, D.C.: National Academies +Press, 2004), 69–73. The issues of publicly generated information are +particularly pressing in geospatial data—which can be vital for academic +research and economic development. Bastiaan van Loenen and Harlan Onsrud, +“Geographic Data for Academic Research: Assessing Access Policies,” Cartography +and Geographic Information Science 31 (2004): 3–17. It is an issue that is +gaining attention in Europe: “Directive 2003/98/EC of the European Parliament +and of the Council of 17 November 2003 on the Re-use of Public Sector +Information,” Official Journal of the European Union 46 (31.12.2003) 90–96 (L +345). However, there is a long way to go. + +3~ Sound Recording Rights + +A good place to start is the Gowers Review, cited above, and the report +generated by the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, +University of Cambridge, Review of the Economic Evidence Relating to an +Extension of the Term of Copyright in Sound Recordings (2006), available at +http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/gowers_cipilreport.pdf [Ed. note: originally +published at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/B/4/gowers_cipilreport.pdf, +the link has changed]. My own views are close to those put forward by this +excellent article: Natali Helberger, Nicole Dufft, Stef van Gompel, and Bernt +Hugenholtz, “Never Forever: Why Extending the Term of Protection for Sound +Recordings is a Bad Idea,” European Intellectual Property Review 30 (2008): +174–181. + +1~ Chapter 10: An Environmentalism for Information + +Over the last fifteen years, a group of scholars have finally persuaded +economists to believe something noneconomists find obvious: “behavioral +economics” shows that people do not act as economic theory predicts. But hold +your cheers. This is not a vindication of folk wisdom over the pointy-heads. +The deviations from “rational behavior” are not the wonderful cornucopia of +human motivations you might imagine. There are patterns. For example, we are +systematically likely to overestimate chances of loss and underestimate chances +of gain, to rely on simplifying heuristics to frame problems even when those +heuristics are contradicted by the facts. + +Some of the patterns are endearing; the supposedly “irrational” concerns for +distributive equality that persist in all but the economically trained and the +extreme right, for example. But most of them simply involve the mapping of +cognitive bias. We can take advantage of those biases, as those who sell us +ludicrously expensive and irrational warranties on consumer goods do. Or we can +correct for them, like a pilot who is trained to rely on his instruments rather +than his faulty perceptions when flying in heavy cloud. + +This book has introduced you to the wonders and terrors of intellectual +property law—the range wars of the Internet age. There have been discussions of +synthetic biology and musical sampling, digital locks and the hackers who break +them, Jefferson and Macaulay, and the fight over video recorders. Now it is +time to sum up. + +I would argue that the chapters in this book present evidence of another kind +of cognitive bias, one that the behavioral economists have not yet identified. +Call it the openness aversion. Cultural agoraphobia. We are systematically +likely to undervalue the importance, viability, and productive power of open +systems, open networks, and nonproprietary production. + +2~ Cultural Agoraphobia? + +Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have +removed from you all knowledge of the years since then. (For some, this might +be a relief.) + +The first question is a thought experiment I introduced in Chapter 4. You have +to design an international computer network. One group of scientists describes +a system that is fundamentally open: open protocols and open systems so that +anyone could connect to the system and offer information or products to the +world. Another group—scholars, businesspeople, bureaucrats—points out the +problems. Anyone could connect to the system! They could do anything! The +system itself would not limit them to a few approved actions or approved +connections. There would be porn, and piracy, and viruses, and spam. Terrorists +could put up videos glorifying themselves. Your neighbor’s site could compete +with the New York Times or the U.S. government in documenting the war in Iraq. +Better to have a well-managed system in which official approval is required to +put up a site, where only a few selected actions are permitted by the network +protocols, where most of us are merely recipients of information, where spam, +viruses, and piracy (and innovation and participatory culture and anonymous +speech) are impossible. Which network design would you have picked? Remember, +you have no experience of blogs, or mashups, or Google; no experience of the +Web. Just you and your cognitive filters. + +Imagine a form of software which anyone could copy and change, created under a +license which required subsequent programmers to offer their software on the +same terms. Imagine legions of programmers worldwide contributing their +creations back into a “commons.” Is this anarchic-sounding method of production +economically viable? Could it successfully compete with the hierarchically +organized corporations producing proprietary, closed code, controlled by both +law and technology? Be truthful. + +Finally, set yourself the task of producing the greatest reference work the +world has ever seen. You are told that it must cover everything from the best +Thai food in Durham to the annual rice production of Thailand, from the best +places to see blue whales to the history of the Blue Dog Coalition. Would you +create a massive organization of paid experts, each assigned a topic, with +hierarchical layers of editors above them, producing a set of encyclopedic +tomes that are rigorously controlled by copyright and trademark? Or would you +wait for hobbyists, governments, scientists, and volunteer encyclopedists to +produce, and search engines to organize and rank, a cornucopia of information? +I know which way I would have bet in 1991. But I also know that the last time I +consulted an encyclopedia was in 1998. You? + +It is not that openness is always right. It is not. Often we need strong +intellectual property rights, privacy controls, and networks that demand +authentication. Rather, it is that we need a balance between open and closed, +owned and free, and we are systematically likely to get the balance wrong. (How +did you do on the test?) Partly this is because we still don’t understand the +kind of property that lives on networks; most of our experience is with +tangible property. Sandwiches that one hundred people cannot share. Fields that +can be overgrazed if outsiders cannot be excluded. For that kind of property, +control makes more sense. Like astronauts brought up in gravity, our reflexes +are poorly suited for free fall. Jefferson’s words were true even of grain +elevators and hopper-boys. But in our world, the proportion of intangible to +tangible property is much, much higher. The tendency to conflate intellectual +and real property is even more dangerous in a networked world. We need his +words more than he did. + +Each of the questions I asked is related to the World Wide Web. Not the +Internet, the collective name for the whole phenomenon, including the +underlying methods of sending and receiving packets. Some version of the +underlying network has been around for much longer, in one form or another. But +it only attracted popular attention, only revolutionized the world, when on top +of it was built the World Wide Web—the network of protocols and pages and +hyperlinks that is so much a part of our lives and which arose only from Tim +Berners-Lee’s work at CERN in 1991. + +My daughter will graduate from college in the year 2011. (At least, we both +hope so.) She is older than the Web. It will not even have had its twentieth +birthday on her graduation day. By Christmas of 2012, it will be able to drink +legally in the United States. I wrote those sentences, but I find it hard to +believe them myself. A life without the Web is easy to remember and yet hard to +recapture fully. It seems like such a natural part of our world, too fixed to +have been such a recent arrival, as if someone suggested that all the roads and +buildings around you had arrived in the last fifteen years. + +Some of you may find these words inexplicable because you live in a happy, +Thoreau-like bliss, free of any contact with computer networks. If so, I take +my hat off to you. The world of open sky and virtuous sweat, of books and sport +and laughter, is no less dear to me than to you. Having an avatar in a virtual +world holds the same interest as elective dental surgery. I care about the Web +not because I want to live my life there, but because of what it has allowed us +to achieve, what it represents for the potential of open science and culture. +That, I think, is something that Thoreau (and even Emerson for that matter) +might have cared about deeply. Yet, as I suggested earlier in this book, I +seriously doubt that we would create the Web today—at least if policy makers +and market incumbents understood what the technology might become early enough +to stop it. + +I am not postulating some sinister “Breakages, Limited” that stifles +technological innovation. I am merely pointing out the imbalance between our +intuitive perceptions of the virtues and dangers of open and closed systems, an +imbalance I share, quite frankly. + +In place of what we have today, I think we would try, indeed we are trying, to +reinvent a tamer, more controlled Web and to change the nature of the +underlying network on which it operates. (This is a fear I share with those who +have written about it more eloquently than I, particularly Larry Lessig and +Yochai Benkler.) We would restrict openness of access, decrease anonymity, and +limit the number of actions that a network participant could perform. The +benefits would be undeniable. It would cut down on spam, viruses, and illicit +peer-to-peer file sharing. At the same time, it would undercut the iconoclastic +technological, cultural, and political potential that the Web offers, the +ability of a new technology, a new service to build on open networks and open +protocols, without needing approval from regulators or entrenched market +players, or even the owners of the Web pages to which you link. + +Imagine, by contrast, an Internet and a World Wide Web that looked like America +Online, circa 1996, or Compuserve, or the French state network Minitel. True, +your exposure to penis-enhancement techniques, misspelled stock tips, and the +penniless sons of Nigerian oil ministers would be reduced. That sounds pretty +attractive. But the idea that the AOL search engine would be replaced by Yahoo +and then Google, let alone Google Maps? That new forms of instant messaging +would displace Compuserve’s e-mail? That the Chinese dissident would have +access to anonymized Internet services, that you might make phone calls +worldwide for free from your computer, or that a blog like BoingBoing would end +up having more page views than many major newspapers? Forget it. Goodbye to the +radical idea that anyone can link to any page on the network without +permission. A revised network could have the opposite rule and even impose it +by default. + +A tamer network could keep much tighter control over content, particularly +copyrighted content. You might still get the video of the gentlemen doing +strange things with Mentos and soda bottles, though not its viral method of +distribution. But forget about “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” +and all your favorite mashups. Its controlled network of links and its limited +access would never unleash the collective fact-gathering genius the Web has +shown. For a fee, you would have Microsoft Encarta and the Encyclopedia +Britannica online. What about the “right-click universe” of knowledge about the +world gathered by strangers, shared on comparatively open sites worldwide, and +ordered by search engines? What about Wikipedia? I think not. + +The counterfactual I offer is not merely a counterfactual. Yes, we got the Web. +It spread too fast to think of taming it into the more mature, sedate “National +Information Infrastructure” that the Clinton administration imagined. But as +Larry Lessig pointed out years ago, the nature of a network can always be +changed. The war over the control and design of the network, and the networked +computer, is never-ending. As I write these words, the battles are over +“trusted computing” and “Net neutrality.” Trusted computing is a feature built +into the operating system which makes it impossible to run processes that have +not been approved by some outside body and digitally identified. It would +indeed help to safeguard your computer from viruses and other threats and make +it harder to copy material the content owners did not want you to copy (perhaps +even if you had a right to). In the process it would help to lock in the power +of those who had a dominant position in operating systems and popular programs. +(Microsoft is a big supporter.) It would make open source software, which +allows users to modify programs, inherently suspect. It would, in fact, as +Jonathan Zittrain points out, change the nature of the general-purpose +computer, which you can program to do anything, back toward the terminal which +tells you what functions are allowed.~{ Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the +Internet—And How to Stop It (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). }~ +Think of a DVD player. + +The attack on Net neutrality, by contrast, is an attempt by the companies who +own the networks to be allowed to discriminate between favored and disfavored +content, giving the former preferential access. (One wit analogized it to +letting the phone company say, “we will delay your call to Pizza Hut for sixty +seconds, but if you want to be put through to our featured pizza provider +immediately, hit nine now!”) Taken together, these proposals would put the +control of the computer back in the hands of the owners of the content and the +operating system, and control of the network users’ choices in the hands of the +person who sells them their bandwidth. At the same time, our intellectual +property agenda is filled with proposals to create new intellectual property +rights or extend old ones. That is the openness aversion in action. + +Now, perhaps to you, the closed alternatives still sound better. Perhaps you do +not care as much about the kind of technological dynamism, or anonymous speech, +or cultural ferment that thrills the digerati. Perhaps you care more about the +risks posed by the underlying freedom. That is a perfectly reasonable point of +view. After all, openness does present real dangers; the same freedom given to +the innovator, the artist, and the dissident is given to the predator and the +criminal. At each moment in history when we have opened a communications +network, or the franchise, or literacy, reasonable people have worried about +the consequences that might ensue. Would expanded literacy lead to a general +coarsening of the literary imagination? (Sometimes, perhaps. But it would and +did lead to much more besides, to literature and culture of which we could not +have dreamed.) Would an expanded franchise put the control of the state into +the hands of the uneducated? (Yes, unless we had free national educational +systems. “Now we must educate our masters” was the slogan of the educational +reformers after the enlargement of the franchise in Britain in the nineteenth +century. Openness sometimes begets openness.) Would translating the Bible from +Latin into the vernacular open the door to unorthodox and heretical +interpretations, to a congregation straying because they did not need to depend +on a priestly intermediary with privileged access to the text? (Oh, yes +indeed.) Would TV and radio play into the hands of demagogues? (Yes, and help +expose their misdeeds.) + +Openness is not always right. Far from it. But our prior experience seems to be +that we are systematically better at seeing its dangers than its benefits. This +book has been an attempt, in the sphere of intellectual property, to help us +counteract that bias. Like the pilot in the cloud looking at his instruments, +we might learn that we are upside down. But what do we do about it? + +2~ Learning from Environmentalism + +I have argued that our policies are distorted not merely by industry capture or +the power of incumbent firms, but by a series of cultural and economic biases +or presuppositions: the equation of intellectual property to physical property; +the assumption that whenever value is created, an intellectual property right +should follow; the romantic idea of creativity that needs no raw material from +which to build; the habit of considering the threats, but not the benefits, of +new technologies; the notion that more rights will automatically bring more +innovation; the failure to realize that the public domain is a vital +contributor to innovation and culture; and a tendency to see the dangers of +openness, but not its potential benefits.~{ Of course, these are not the only +assumptions, arguments, and metaphors around. Powerful counterweights exist: +the ideas of Jefferson and Macaulay, which I described here, but also others, +more loosely related—the Scottish Enlightenment’s stress on the political and +moral benefits of competition, free commerce, and free labor; deep economic and +political skepticism about monopolies; the strong traditions of open science; +and even liberalism’s abiding focus on free speech and access to information. +If you hear the slogan “information wants to be free,” you may agree or +disagree with the personification. You may find the idea simplistic. But you do +not find it incomprehensible, as you might if someone said “housing wants to be +free” or “food wants to be free.” We view access to information and culture as +vital to successful versions of both capitalism and liberal democracy. We apply +to blockages in information flow or disparities in access to information a +skepticism that does not always apply to other social goods. Our attitudes +toward informational resources are simply different from our attitudes toward +other forms of power, wealth, or advantage. It is one of the reasons that the +Jefferson Warning is so immediately attractive. It is this attitudinal +difference that makes the political terrain on these issues so fascinating. }~ + +One of the most stunning pieces of evidence to our aversion to openness is +that, for the last fifty years, whenever there has been a change in the law, it +has almost always been to expand intellectual property rights. (Remember, this +implies that every significant change in technology, society, or economy +required more rights, never less, nor even the same amount.) We have done all +this almost entirely in the absence of empirical evidence, and without +empirical reconsideration to see if our policies were working. As I pointed out +in the last chapter, intellectual property policy is an “evidence-free zone.” +It runs on faith alone and its faith consists of the cluster of ideas I have +outlined in this book. Whether we call this cluster of ideas maximalism, +cultural agoraphobia, or the openness aversion, it exercises a profound +influence on our intellectual property and communications policy. + +These ideas are not free-floating. They exist within, are influenced by, and in +turn influence, a political economy. The political economy matters and it will +shape any viable response. Even if the costs of getting the policies wrong are +huge and unnecessary—think of the costs of the copyright extensions that lock +up most of twentieth-century culture in order to protect the tiny fraction of +it that is still commercially available—they are spread out over the entire +population, while the benefits accrue to a small group of commercial entities +that deeply and sincerely believe in the maximalist creed. This pattern of +diffuse but large losses and concentrated gains is, as Mancur Olson taught us, +a recipe for political malfunction.~{ Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective +Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard +University Press, 1965) and Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: +Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, Conn.: Yale +University Press, 1982). }~ Yet the problem is even deeper than that—in four +ways. + +First, though intellectual property rules will profoundly shape science, +culture, and the market in the information age, they just seem obscure, +wonkish, hard to get excited about. Certainly, people can get upset about +individual examples—overbroad patents on human genes, copyright lawsuits +against whistleblowers who leak e-mails showing corporate misdeeds that +threaten the integrity of electronic voting, rules that paralyze documentary +filmmakers, or require payment for sampling three notes from a prior song, +extensions of rights that allow patents on auctions or business methods, make +genres such as jazz seem legally problematic, create new rights over facts, or +snarl up foundational technologies. But they see each of these as an isolated +malfunction, not part of a larger social problem or set of attitudes. + +Second, what holds true for issues, also holds true for communities. What links +the person writing open source software, and trying to negotiate a sea of +software patents in the process, to the film archivist trying to stir up +interest in all the wonderful “orphan films”—still under copyright but with no +copyright owner we can find—before they molder away into nitrate dust? When a +university collaborates with Google to digitize books in their collection for +the purposes of search and retrieval, even if only a tiny portion of the text +will be visible for any work still under copyright, does it sense any common +interest with the synthetic biologist trying to create the BioBricks +Foundation, to keep open the foundational elements of a new scientific field? +Both may be sued for their efforts—one connection at least. + +When a developing nation tries to make use of the explicit “flexibilities” +built into international trade agreements so as to make available a life-saving +drug to its population through a process of compulsory licensing and +compensation, it will find itself pilloried as a lawbreaker—though it is not—or +punished through bilateral agreements. Will that process form any common +interest with the high-technology industries in the United States who chafe at +the way that current intellectual property rules enshrine older technologies +and business methods and give them the protection of law? There are some links +between those two situations. Will the parties see those links, or will the +developing world’s negotiators think that the current intellectual property +rules express some monolithic “Western” set of interests? Will the high-tech +companies think this is just an issue of dumb lawyers failing to understand +technology? Each gap in understanding of common interest is a strike against an +effective response. + +Third, an effective political response would actually be easier if our current +rules came merely from the relentless pursuit of corporate self-interest. (Here +I part company with those who believe that self-interest is simply “there”—not +shaped by socially constructed ideas, attitudes, ideologies, or biases.) In +fact, the openness aversion sometimes obscures self-interest as well as the +public interest. Think of the relentless insistence of the movie companies on +making video recorders illegal. Nor does the framework of maximalism help if +our goal is to have all the interested economic actors in the room when policy +is made. For example, by framing issues of communications policy or Internet +regulation as questions of intellectual property, we automatically privilege +one set of interested parties—content owners—over others who also have a large +economic stake in the matter. + +Fourth, and finally, the biggest problem is that even if one could overcome the +problems of political interest, or ideological closed-mindedness, the answers +to many of these questions require balance, thought, and empirical evidence—all +qualities markedly missing in the debate. If the answer were that intellectual +property rights are bad, then forming good policy would be easy. But that is as +silly and one-sided an idea as the maximalist one I have been criticizing here. +Here are three examples: + +# Drug patents do help produce drugs. Jettisoning them is a bad idea—though +experimenting with additional and alternative methods of encouraging medical +innovation is a very good one. + +# I believe copyrights over literary works should be shorter, and that one +should have to renew them after twenty-eight years—something that about 85 +percent of authors and publishers will not do, if prior history is anything to +go by. I think that would give ample incentives to write and distribute books, +and give us a richer, more accessible culture and educational system to boot, a +Library of Congress where you truly can “click to get the book” as my son asked +me to do years ago now. But that does not mean that I wish to abolish +copyright. On the contrary, I think it is an excellent system. + +# All the empirical evidence shows that protecting compilations of facts, as +the European Database Directive does, has been a profound failure as a policy, +imposing costs on consumers without encouraging new database production. But if +the evidence said the opposite, I would support a new database right. + +We need a political debate about intellectual property that recognizes these +trade-offs; that does not impose simplistic, one-sided solutions; that looks to +evidence. We need to understand the delicate and subtle balance between +property and the opposite of property, the role of rights, but also of the +public domain and the commons. Building a theory, let alone a movement, around +such an issue is hard. Doing so when we lack some of the basic theoretical +tools and vocabularies is daunting. We do not even have a robust conception of +the public domain. If they think of it as a legal issue at all, people simply +think of it as whatever is left over after an endless series of rights have +been carved out. Can one build a politics to protect a residue? + +So we have at least four problems: an issue that is perceived as obscure, +affecting scattered groups with little knowledge of each other’s interest, +dominated by an ideology that is genuinely believed by its adherents, in the +place of which we have to make careful, balanced, empirically grounded +suggestions. Assume for a moment the need for a politics of intellectual +property that seeks a solution to these four problems. What might such a +politics look like? + +I have argued that in a number of respects, the politics of intellectual +property and the public domain is at the stage that the American environmental +movement was at in the 1950s. In 1950, there were people who cared strongly +about issues we would now identify as “environmental”—supporters of the park +system and birdwatchers, but also hunters and those who disdained chemical +pesticides in growing their foods. In the world of intellectual property, we +have start-up software engineers, libraries, appropriationist artists, +parodists, biographers, and biotech researchers. In the 50s and 60s, we had +flurries of outrage over particular crises—burning rivers, oil spills, dreadful +smog. In the world of intellectual property, we have the kind of stories I have +tried to tell here. Lacking, however, is a general framework, a perception of +common interest in apparently disparate situations. + +Crudely speaking, the environmental movement was deeply influenced by two basic +analytical frameworks. The first was the idea of ecology: the fragile, complex, +and unpredictable interconnections between living systems. The second was the +idea of welfare economics—the ways in which markets can fail to make activities +internalize their full costs.~{ “The source of the general divergences between +the values of marginal social and marginal private net product that occur under +simple competition is the fact that, in some occupations, a part of the product +of a unit of resources consists of something, which, instead of coming in the +first instance to the person who invests the unit, comes instead, in the first +instance (i.e., prior to sale if sale takes place), as a positive or negative +item, to other people.” Arthur C. Pigou, “Divergences between Marginal Social +Net Product and Marginal Private Net Product,” in The Economics of Welfare +(London: Macmillan, 1932), available at +http://www.econlib.org/Library/NPDBooks/Pigou/pgEW1.html. Ironically, so far as +I can find, Pigou does not use the word “externality.” }~ The combination of +the two ideas yielded a powerful and disturbing conclusion. Markets would +routinely fail to make activities internalize their own costs, particularly +their own environmental costs. This failure would, routinely, disrupt or +destroy fragile ecological systems, with unpredictable, ugly, dangerous, and +possibly irreparable consequences. These two types of analysis pointed to a +general interest in environmental protection and thus helped to build a large +constituency which supported governmental efforts to that end. The duck +hunter’s preservation of wetlands as a species habitat turns out to have wider +functions in the prevention of erosion and the maintenance of water quality. +The decision to burn coal rather than natural gas for power generation may have +impacts on everything from forests to fisheries. The attempt to reduce +greenhouse gases and mitigate the damage from global warming cuts across every +aspect of the economy. + +Of course, it would be silly to think that environmental policy was fueled only +by ideas rather than more immediate desires. As William Ruckelshaus put it, +“With air pollution there was, for example, a desire of the people living in +Denver to see the mountains again. Similarly, the people living in Los Angeles +had a desire to see one another.” Funnily enough, as with intellectual +property, changes in communications technology also played a role. “In our +living rooms in the middle sixties, black and white television went out and +color television came in. We have only begun to understand some of the impacts +of television on our lives, but certainly for the environmental movement it was +a bonanza. A yellow outfall flowing into a blue river does not have anywhere +near the impact on black and white television that it has on color television; +neither does brown smog against a blue sky.”~{ William D. Ruckelshaus, +“Environmental Protection: A Brief History of the Environmental Movement in +America and the Implications Abroad,” Environmental Law 15 (1985): 457. }~ More +importantly perhaps, the technologically fueled deluge of information, whether +from weather satellites or computer models running on supercomputers, provided +some of the evidence that—eventually—started to build a consensus around the +seriousness of global warming. + +Despite the importance of these other factors, the ideas I mentioned—ecology +and welfare economics—were extremely important for the environmental movement. +They helped to provide its agenda, its rhetoric, and the perception of common +interest underneath its coalition politics. Even more interestingly, for my +purposes, those ideas—which began as inaccessible scientific or economic +concepts, far from popular discourse—were brought into the mainstream of +American politics. This did not happen easily or automatically. Popularizing +complicated ideas is hard work. There were popular books, television +discussions, documentaries on Love Canal or the California kelp beds, op-ed +pieces in newspapers, and pontificating experts on TV. Environmental groups +both shocking and staid played their part, through the dramatic theater of a +Greenpeace protest or the tweedy respectability of the Audubon Society. Where +once the idea of “the Environment” (as opposed to “my lake,” say) was seen as a +mere abstraction, something that couldn’t stand against the concrete benefits +brought by a particular piece of development, it came to be an abstraction with +both the force of law and of popular interest behind it. + +To me, this suggests a strategy for the future of the politics of intellectual +property, a way to save our eroding public domain. In both areas, we seem to +have the same recipe for failure in the structure of the decision-making +process. Democratic decisions are made badly when they are primarily made by +and for the benefit of a few stakeholders, whether industrialists or content +providers. This effect is only intensified when the transaction costs of +identifying and resisting the change are high. Think of the costs and benefits +of acid rain-producing power generation or—less serious, but surely similar in +form—the costs and benefits of retrospectively increasing copyright term limits +on works for which the copyright had already expired, pulling them back out of +the public domain. There are obvious benefits to the heirs and assigns of +authors whose copyright has expired in having Congress put the fence back up +around this portion of the intellectual commons. There are clearly some +costs—for example, to education and public debate—in not having multiple, +competing low-cost editions of these works. But these costs are individually +small and have few obvious stakeholders to represent them. + +Yet, as I have tried to argue here, beyond the failures in the decision-making +process, lie failures in the way we think about the issues. The environmental +movement gained much of its persuasive power by pointing out that for +structural reasons we were likely to make bad environmental decisions: a legal +system based on a particular notion of what “private property” entailed and an +engineering or scientific system that treated the world as a simple, linearly +related set of causes and effects. In both of these conceptual systems, the +environment actually disappeared; there was no place for it in the analysis. +Small surprise, then, that we did not preserve it very well. I have argued that +the same is true about the public domain. The confusions against which the +Jefferson Warning cautions, the source-blindness of a model of property rights +centered on an “original author,” and the political blindness to the importance +of the public domain as a whole (not “my lake,” but “the Environment”), all +come together to make the public domain disappear, first in concept and then, +increasingly, as a reality. To end this process we need a cultural +environmentalism, an environmentalism of the mind, and over the last ten years +we have actually begun to build one. + +Cultural environmentalism is an idea, an intellectual and practical movement, +that is intended to be a solution to a set of political and theoretical +problems—an imbalance in the way we make intellectual property policy, a legal +regime that has adapted poorly to the transformation that technology has +produced in the scope of law, and, perhaps most importantly, a set of mental +models, economic nostrums, and property theories that each have a public +domain-shaped hole at their center. + +The comparison I drew between the history of environmentalism and the state of +intellectual property policy had a number of facets. The environmental movement +had “invented” the concept of the environment and used it to tie together a set +of phenomena that would otherwise seem very separate. In doing so, it changed +perceptions of self-interest and helped to form coalitions where none had +existed before—just as earth science built upon research into the fragile +interconnections of ecology and on the Pigouvian analysis of economic +externalities. I argue that we need to make visible the invisible contributions +of the public domain, the “ecosystem services” performed by the +underappreciated but nevertheless vital reservoir of freedom in culture and +science.~{ As always, Jessica Litman provides the clearest and most +down-to-earth example. Commenting on Rebecca Tushnet’s engrossing paper on fan +fiction (Rebecca Tushnet, “Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural +Creativity,” Law and Contemporary Problems 70 (Spring 2007): 135–174), Litman +describes copyright’s “balance between uses copyright owners are entitled to +control and other uses that they simply are not entitled to control.” Jessica +Litman, “Creative Reading,” Law and Contemporary Problems 70 (Spring 2007), +175. That balance, she suggests, is not bug but feature. The spaces of freedom +that exist in the analog world because widespread use is possible without +copying are neither oversights, nor temporarily abandoned mines of monopoly +rent just waiting for a better technological retrieval method. They are +integral parts of the copyright system. }~ And, just as with environmentalism, +we need not only a semantic reorganization, or a set of conceptual and analytic +tools, but a movement of people devoted to bringing a goal to the attention of +their fellow citizens. + +I have tried hard to show that there is something larger going on under the +realpolitik of land grabs by Disney and campaign contributions by the Recording +Industry Association of America. But it would be an equal and opposite mistake +to think that this is just about a dysfunctional discourse of intellectual +property. In this part of the analysis, too, the environmental movement offers +some useful practical reminders. The ideas of ecology and environmental welfare +economics were important, but one cannot merely write A Sand County Almanac and +hope the world will change. Environmentalists piggybacked on existing sources +of conservationist sentiment—love of nature, the national parks movement, +hikers, campers, birdwatchers. They built coalitions between those who might be +affected by environmental changes. They even stretched their political base by +discovering, albeit too slowly, the realities of environmental racism, on the +one hand, and the benefits of market solutions to some environmental problems +on the other. Some of these aspects, at least, could be replicated in the +politics of intellectual property. + +Ten years ago, when I first offered the environmental analogy, I claimed that +intellectual property policy was seen as a contract struck between industry +groups—something technical, esoteric, and largely irrelevant to individual +citizens, except in that they were purchasers of the products that flowed out +of the system. Whether or not that view has ever been tenable, it is not so in +a digital age. Instead, I offered the basic argument laid out here—that we +needed a “politics of intellectual property” modeled on the environmental +movement to create a genuine and informed political debate on intellectual +property policy.~{ James Boyle, “A Politics of Intellectual Property: +Environmentalism for the Net?” Duke Law Journal 47 (1997): 87–116. }~ + +So far, I have concentrated on the theoretical and academic tools such a debate +would need—focusing particularly on property theory and on economic analysis +and its limits. But if there is to be a genuinely democratic politics of +intellectual property, we would need an institutional diversity in the +policymaking debate that was comparable to that of the environmental movement. + +Environmentalism presents us with a remarkable diversity of organizational +forms and missions. We have Greenpeace, the Environmental Legal Defense Fund, +groups of concerned scientists, and the Audubon Society, each with its own +methods, groups of supporters, and sets of issues. Yet we also have local and +pragmatic coalitions to save a particular bit of green space, using the private +tools of covenants and contracts.~{ Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, “Cultural +Environmentalism and the Constructed Commons,” Law and Contemporary Problems 70 +(Spring 2007): 23–50. }~ I think we can see the beginnings of the replication +of that institutional diversity in the world of intangible property. + +Ten years ago, civil society had little to offer in terms of groups that +represented anything other than an industry position on intellectual property, +still less ones that took seriously the preservation of the public domain or +the idea that intellectual property policy was a matter of balance, rather than +simple maximization of rights. There were the librarians and a few academics. +That was about it. This position has changed radically. + +There are academic centers that concentrate on the theoretical issues discussed +in this book—one of them at my university. Thanks in large part to the +leadership of Pamela Samuelson, there are law student clinics that do impact +litigation on issues such as fair use and that represent underserved clients +such as documentarians. But beyond academic work, there are organizations that +have dedicated themselves to advocacy and to litigation around the themes of +preservation of the public domain, defense of limitations and exceptions in +copyright, and the protection of free speech from the effects of intellectual +property regulation of both content and the communications infrastructure. The +Electronic Frontier Foundation did exist ten years ago, but its coverage of +intellectual property issues was only episodic. Its portfolio of litigation and +public education on the subject is now nothing short of remarkable. Public +Knowledge’s valuable lobbying and education is another obvious example. +International organizations with similar aims include the Open Rights Group in +the United Kingdom.~{ See http://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property [Ed. +note: originally published at http://www.eff.org/IP/, the link has changed], +http://www.openrightsgroup.org/, http://www.publicknowledge.org/. }~ + +Organizing has also taken place around particular cases—such as Eldred v. +Ashcroft, the challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.~{ +Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003). Once again, Professor Lessig had the +central role as counsel for petitioners. }~ Activity is not confined to the +world of copyright. The Public Patent Foundation combats “patent creep” by +exposing and challenging bad patents.~{ See http://www.pubpat.org/. }~ It would +be remiss not to mention the international Access to Knowledge, or A2K, +movement, inspired by the work of Jamie Love.~{ See Access to Knowledge, +http://www.cptech.org/a2k/. Some of Mr. Love’s initiatives are discussed at +http://www.cptech.org/jamie/. }~ While its focus is on the kinds of issues +represented by the access-to-medicines movement, it has made the idea of +balance in intellectual property and the protection of the public domain one of +its central components. Mr. Love himself is also the central figure behind the +idea of a Research and Development Treaty which would amend international trade +agreements to make intellectual property merely one of a whole range of +economic methods for stimulating innovation.~{ Tim Hubbard and James Love, “A +New Trade Framework for Global Healthcare R&D,” PLoS Biology 2 (2004): e52. }~ +His work has touched almost every single one of the movements discussed here. + +The Access to Knowledge movement has many institutional variants. The +Development Agenda at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), put +forward by India and Brazil, includes similar themes, as do the Geneva +Declaration and the Adelphi Charter produced by the United Kingdom’s Royal +Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.~{ WIPO +Development Agenda, available at http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/da.html. The +Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property +Organization, available at +http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/futureofwipodeclaration.pdf. In the interest of +full disclosure, I should note that I wrote one of the first manifestos that +formed the basis for earlier drafts of the Declaration. James Boyle, “A +Manifesto on WIPO and the Future of Intellectual Property,” Duke Law & +Technology Review 0009 (2004): 1–12, available at +http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/PDF/2004DLTR0009.pdf. The +Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation, and Intellectual Property, available +at http://www.adelphicharter.org/. The Charter was issued by the British Royal +Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). For +discussion of the Charter see James Boyle, “Protecting the Public Domain,” +Guardian.co.uk (October 14, 2005), available at +http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,9828,1591467,00.html; +“Free Ideas,” The Economist (October 15, 2005), 68. Again, in the interest of +full disclosure, I should note that I advised the RSA on these issues and was +on the steering committee of the group that produced the Charter. }~ History is +full of wordy charters and declarations, of course. By themselves they mean +little. Yet the level of public and media attention paid to them indicates that +intellectual property policy is now of interest beyond a narrow group of +affected industries. To underscore this point, several major foundations have +introduced intellectual property initiatives, something that would have been +inconceivable ten years ago.~{ An example is the MacArthur Foundation Program +on Intellectual Property and the Public Domain: “The General Program . . . was +begun in 2002 as a short-term project to support new models, policy analysis, +and public education designed to bring about balance between public and private +interests concerning intellectual property rights in a digital era.” See +www.macfound.org/grantmaking_guidelines_ippd [Ed. note: originally published as +http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.943331/k.DA6/General_Grantmaking__Intellectual_Property.htm, +the link changed]. The Ford Foundation has a similar initiative. Frédéric +Sultan, “International Intellectual Property Initiative: Ford Foundation +I-Jumelage Resources,” available at +http://www.vecam.org/ijumelage/spip.php?article609. }~ + +Finally, to complete the analogy to the land trust, we have the organizations I +mentioned earlier, such as Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation.~{ +See http://www.creativecommons.org and http://www.fsf.org. }~ The latter group +pioneered within software the attempt to create a licensed “commons” in which +freedoms are guaranteed. The licensed commons replaces the law’s default rules +with choices made by individuals, the effects of which are magnified by +collective action. The end result is a zone of public freedom enabled by +private choice. + +If one looks at these institutions and actors and at the range of issues on +which they focus—from software to drug patents, from reverse engineering to +access to archival records—the obvious question is, how did they overcome the +collective action problem? What ties together a critique of digital locks and +the access-to-medicines movement? Again, I think the answer points to the +usefulness of the environmental analogy. As I pointed out, the invention of the +“environment” trope tied together groups whose interests, considered at a lower +level of abstraction, seemed entirely different—hunters and birdwatchers, +antipollution protesters and conservation biologists. The idea of the +“environment” literally created the self-interest or set of preferences that +ties the movement together. The same is true here. Apparently disparate +interests are linked by ideas of the protection of the public domain and of the +importance of a balance between protection and freedom in cultural and +scientific ecology.~{ This process runs counter to the assumptions of theorists +of collective action problems in a way remarkable enough to have attracted its +own chroniclers. See Amy Kapczynski, “The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and +the New Politics of Intellectual Property,” Yale Law Journal 117 (2008): +804–885. Economists generally assume preferences are simply given, individuals +just have them and they are “exogenous” to the legal system in the sense that +they are unaffected by the allocation of legal rights. The emergence of the +movements and institutions I am describing here paints a different picture. The +“preferences” are socially constructed, created through a collective process of +debate and decision which shifts the level of abstraction upwards; and, as +Kapczynski perceptively notes, they are highly influenced by the legal +categories and rights against which the groups involved initially defined +themselves. }~ + +But even a broad range of initiatives and institutions would not, in and of +themselves, produce results. One must convince people that one’s arguments are +good, one’s institutional innovations necessary, one’s horror stories +disturbing. Environmentalism has managed to win the battle for clarity—to make +its points clearly enough that they ceased to be dismissed as “arcane” or +technical, to overcome neglect by the media, to articulate a set of concerns +that are those of any educated citizen. The other striking phenomenon of the +last ten years is the migration of intellectual property issues off the law +reviews or business pages and onto the front pages and the editorial pages. +Blogs have been particularly influential. Widely read sites such as Slashdot +and BoingBoing have multiple postings on intellectual property issues each day; +some are rants, but others are at a level of sophistication that once would +have been confined to academic discussion.~{ See “News for Nerds: Stuff That +Matters,” http://www.slashdot.org, and “A Directory of Wonderful Things,” +http://www.boingboing.net. }~ Scientists passionately debate the importance of +open access to scholarly journals. Geographers and climatologists fume over +access to geospatial data. The movement has been pronounced enough to generate +its own reaction. The popular comics site “xkcd” has strips critical of the +Digital Millennium Copyright Act,~{ Pub. L. No. 105-304, 112 Stat. 2860 (1998) +(codified as amended in scattered sections of 5, 17, 28, and 35 U.S.C.). }~ but +also a nerdily idyllic picture of a stick figure reclining under a tree and +saying, “Sometimes I just can’t get outraged over copyright law.”~{ For the +former see “Content Protection,” http://xkcd.com/c129.html, and “Digital Rights +Management,” http://xkcd.com/c86.html. For the latter, see “Copyright,” +http://xkcd.com/c14.html. }~ That cartoon now resides on my computer desktop. +(It is under a Creative Commons license, ironically enough.) + +Who can blame the stick figure? Certainly not I. Is it not silly to equate the +protection of the environment with the protection of the public domain? After +all, one is the struggle to save a planetary ecology and the other is just some +silly argument about legal rules and culture and science. I would be the first +to yield primacy to the environmental challenges we are facing. Mass extinction +events are to be avoided, particularly if they involve you personally. Yet my +willingness to minimize the importance of the rules that determine who owns +science and culture goes only so far. + +A better intellectual property system will not save the planet. On the other +hand, one of the most promising sets of tools for building biofuels comes from +synthetic biology. Ask some of the leading scientists in that field why they +devoted their precious time to trying to work out a system that would offer the +valuable incentives that patents provide while leaving a commons of “biobricks” +open to all for future development. I worry about these rules naturally; they +were forced to do so. A better intellectual property system certainly will not +end world hunger. Still it is interesting to read about the lengthy struggles +to clear the multiple, overlapping patents on GoldenRice™—a rice grain +genetically engineered to cure vitamin deficiencies that nearly perished in a +thicket of blurrily overlapping rights.~{ R. David Kryder, Stanley P. Kowalski, +and Anatole F. Krattiger, “The Intellectual and Technical Property Components +of Pro-Vitamin A Rice (GoldenRice™): A Preliminary Freedom-to-Operate Review,” +ISAAA Briefs No. 20 (2000), available at +http://www.isaaa.org/Briefs/20/briefs.htm. }~ + +A better intellectual property system will not cure AIDS or rheumatoid +arthritis or Huntington’s disease or malaria. Certainly not by itself. Patents +have already played a positive role in contributing to treatments for the first +two, though they are unlikely to help much on the latter two; the affected +populations are too few or too poor. But overly broad, or vague, or confusing +patents could (and I believe have) hurt all of those efforts—even those being +pursued out of altruism. Those problems could be mitigated. Reforms that made +possible legal and facilitated distribution of patented medicines in Africa +might save millions of lives. They would cost drug companies little. Africa +makes up 1.6 percent of their global market. Interesting alternative methods +have even been suggested for encouraging investment in treatments for neglected +diseases and diseases of the world’s poor. At the moment, we spend 90 percent +of our research dollars on diseases that affect 10 percent of the global +population. Perhaps this is the best we can do, but would it not be nice to +have a vigorous public debate on the subject? Some possible innovations are +much easier. A simple rule that required the eventual free publication online +of all government-funded health research, under open licenses, rather than its +sequestration behind the paywalls of commercial journals, could help fuel +remarkable innovations in scientific synthesis and computer-aided research +while giving citizens access to the research for which they have already paid. + +Good intellectual property policy will not save our culture. But bad policy may +lock up our cultural heritage unnecessarily, leave it to molder in libraries, +forbid citizens to digitize it, even though the vast majority of it will never +be available publicly and no copyright owner can be found. Would you not prefer +the world in which your children could look at the Library of Congress online +catalogue and click to get the book or film or song that otherwise languished +as an “orphan work”? Good intellectual policy will not necessarily give us +great new music. But the policy we have today would make some of the music we +most cherish illegal, or at least legally questionable. Does that inspire +confidence for the future? As for the World Wide Web, I offer again my thought +experiment from the first part of this chapter. Would we be more likely to +invent it or forbid it today? We are certainly working busily to change the +openness of the general-purpose computer, the neutrality of the network, and +the degree of control that content companies can exert over hardware. + +I do not claim that the issues I have written about here are the most important +problem the world faces. That would be ridiculous. But I do claim that they are +facets of a very important problem and one to which we are paying far too +little attention. + +I would also be the first to admit that these issues are complicated. Even if +we heeded the precepts I have outlined in this book, even if we actually +started to look at intellectual property as an empirical question, even if we +turned to data rather than faith for our assessments, reasonable people would +disagree about much. Some of the most ludicrous recent excesses—huge +retrospective copyright term extensions, database rights, proposed webcasting +treaties, business method patents—do not pass the laugh test, in my view and +that of most scholars. Stopping and then reversing that tide would be valuable, +even transformative, but other issues are a closer call. + +It is also true that we do not have all the tools we need. A lot remains to be +done, both academically and practically. We need better evidence. We need +property theories that give us as rich a conception of property’s outside—of +the public domain and the commons—as we have of property itself. We need to +rethink some of our policies of international harmonization and reconsider what +types of policy actually benefit the developing world. We should explore ways +of compensating artists that are very different from the ones we use now, and +study the use of distributed creativity and open source in new areas of science +and culture. + +Difficulties aside, I have tried here to show that we need a cultural +environmental movement, a politics that enables us first to see and then to +preserve the public domain, to understand its contributions to our art, our +technology, and our culture. Where is that movement now? + +There is cause for both concern and optimism. Concern, because it is still hard +for courts, legislators, policy makers, and citizens to see beyond the word +“property” to the reality underneath. I started this book with the question +from my son about the online catalogue of the Library of Congress: “Where do +you click to get the book?” In 2003 the Supreme Court heard Eldred v. Ashcroft, +the challenge to retrospective copyright term extension. Over two strong +dissents, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the act against both First +Amendment and Copyright Clause challenges. The dead had their copyrights +extended yet again. The widest legal restriction of speech in the history of +the Republic—putting off-limits most twentieth-century books, poems, films, and +songs for another twenty years without a corresponding speech benefit or +incentive—can proceed without significant First Amendment review. Does such a +decision mean the task this book undertakes—to take seriously the contributions +of the public domain to innovation, culture, and speech—is ultimately doomed, +whatever its intellectual merits, to face a hostile or uncomprehending +audience? Admittedly, Eldred focused specifically on two particular +constitutional claims. Still, the attitude of the majority toward the +importance of the public domain—whether in the textual limitations on +Congress’s power or the application of the First Amendment—can hardly be cause +for optimism. And yet . . . The media reaction was remarkable. + +The New York Times was sufficiently unfamiliar with the term “public domain” +that it was not entirely sure whether or not to use the definite article in +front of it. But unfamiliarity did not imply complacency. An editorial declared +that this decision “makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end +of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity. Public domain has been +a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw +freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live +in a time of such fruitful creative ferment.”~{ “The Supreme Court Docket: The +Coming of Copyright Perpetuity,” New York Times editorial (January 16, 2003), +A28. }~ The Washington Post, though more inclined to agree that retrospective +extension might be constitutional, declared the copyright system to be “broken” +in that it “effectively and perpetually protects nearly all material that +anyone would want to cite or use. That’s not what the framers envisioned, and +it’s not in the public interest.”~{ “Free Mickey Mouse,” Washington Post +editorial (January 21, 2003), A16. }~ + +I could not agree more. But as I have tried to show here, the process is not +limited to copyright, or culture, or texts, or the United States. Think of the +stories about business method patents, or synthetic biology, or the regulation +of musical borrowing on the atomic level. Think of the discussion of the +openness aversion that began this chapter. In the middle of the most successful +and exciting experiment in nonproprietary, distributed creativity in the +history of the species, our policy makers can see only the threat from +“piracy.” They act accordingly. Our second enclosure movement is well under +way. The poem with which I began Chapter 3 told us: “And geese will still a +common lack / Till they go and steal it back.” I cannot match the terseness or +the rhyme, but if we assume that the enclosure of the commons of the mind will +bring us prosperity, great science, and vibrant culture, well, we will look +like very silly geese indeed. + +2~ Chapter 10: Further Reading + +Those who are interested in the evolution of the analogy between +environmentalism and the movement to recognize and safeguard the public domain +can start with the editors’ introductions to the Symposium Cultural +Environmentalism @ 10, James Boyle and Lawrence Lessig, eds., Law and +Contemporary Problems 70 (2007) 1–21, available at +http://www.law.duke.edu/ce10. + +The single best chronicle of the Access to Knowledge (“A2K”) movement is Amy +Kapczynski, “The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of +Intellectual Property,” Yale Law Journal 117 (2008): 804–885. Lawrence Lessig’s +work has been a common point of reference: Lawrence Lessig, The Future of +Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, +2001), and Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (New York: Penguin, 2004). Many of the +key political initiatives have come from James Love and the Consumer Project on +Technology. A wealth of material can be found at http://www.cptech.org/a2k/ and +at Knowledge Ecology International, http://www.keionline.org/index.php. The +inaugural edition of the journal Knowledge Ecology Studies presents an informal +discussion of the origins of the idea at +http://www.kestudies.org/ojs/index.php/kes/article/view/29/53. + +For the ways in which the A2K movement has involved both criticism of and +attempts to reform international bodies such as the World Intellectual Property +Organization (“WIPO”) see James Boyle, “A Manifesto on WIPO and the Future of +Intellectual Property,” Duke Law and Technology Review 0009 (2004): 1–12, +available at +http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/PDF/2004DLTR0009.pdf, and +Christopher May, The World Intellectual Property Organization: Resurgence and +the Development Agenda (London: Routledge, 2006). + +The minimalist or antimonopolistic attitude toward intellectual property has a +long history, as this book has tried to show. The specific concern with the +public domain is of more recent origin. The foundational essay was published by +my colleague David Lange, “Recognizing the Public Domain,” Law and Contemporary +Problems 44, no. 4 (1981): 147–178. I would also recommend Collected Papers, +Duke Conference on the Public Domain, ed. James Boyle (Durham, N.C.: Center for +the Study of the Public Domain, 2003), which contains scholarly articles on the +history, constitutional status, scientific importance, musical significance, +property theory, and economic effects of the public domain. The entire volume +can be read online at http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/lcp/indexpd.htm. + +Finally, Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, which has generously +supported the writing of this book has a wide variety of resources—ranging from +scholarly texts to films and comic books—on the subjects of intellectual +property, the public domain and idea of an environmentalism for information. +Those resources can be found at http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd. + + diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..feb7181 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler.sst @@ -0,0 +1,22038 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: The Wealth of Networks + :subtitle: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom + :language: US + +@creator: + :author: Benkler, Yochai + +@date: + :published: 2006-04-03 + :created: 2006-04-03 + :issued: 2006-04-03 + :available: 2006-04-03 + :modified: 2006-04-03 + :valid: 2006-04-03 + +@rights: + :copyright: Copyright (C) 2006 Yochai Benkler. + :license: All rights reserved. Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ The author has made an online version of the book available under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license; it can be accessed through the author's website at http://www.benkler.org. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;networks;Internet;intellectual property:patents|copyright;intellectual property:copyright:creative commons;economics;society;copyright;patents;book:subject:information society|information networks|economics|public policy|society|copyright|patents + +@identifier: + :isbn: 9780300110562 + :oclc: 61881089 + +% :isbn: 0300110561 + +% STRANGE FRUIT By Lewis Allan 1939 (Renewed) by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP) International copyright secured. All rights reserved. All rights outside the United States controlled by Edward B. Marks Music Company. Reprinted by permission. + +% :created: 2006-01-27 + +@links: + { The Wealth of Networks, dedicated wiki }http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page + { Yochai Benkler, wiki }http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page + { @ Wikipedia}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks + { WoN @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Networks-Production-Transforms-Markets/dp/0300110561/ + { WoN @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0300110561 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:B; break=1 + :home_button_image: {won_benkler.png }http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page + :footer: {The Wealth of Networks}http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page; {Yochai Benkler}http://http://www.doctorow.com + +:A~ @title @author + +1~attribution Attribution~# + +!_ For Deb, Noam, and Ari~# + +"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly +the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop +itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make +it a living thing." "Such are the differences among human beings in their +sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them +of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding +diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of +happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which +their nature is capable."~# + +John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)~# + +1~acknowledgments Acknowledgments + +Reading this manuscript was an act of heroic generosity. I owe my gratitude to +those who did and who therefore helped me to avoid at least some of the errors +that I would have made without their assistance. Bruce Ackerman spent countless +hours listening, and reading and challenging both this book and its precursor +bits and pieces since 2001. I owe much of its present conception and form to +his friendship. Jack Balkin not only read the manuscript, but in an act of +great generosity taught it to his seminar, imposed it on the fellows of Yale's +Information Society Project, and then spent hours with me working through the +limitations and pitfalls they found. Marvin Ammori, Ady Barkan, Elazar Barkan, +Becky Bolin, Eszter Hargittai, Niva Elkin Koren, Amy Kapczynski, Eddan Katz, +Zac Katz, Nimrod Koslovski, Orly Lobel, Katherine McDaniel, and Siva +Vaidhyanathan all read the manuscript and provided valuable thoughts and +insights. Michael O'Malley from Yale University Press deserves special thanks +for helping me decide to write the book that I really wanted to write, not +something else, and then stay the course. ,{[pg 10]}, + +This book has been more than a decade in the making. Its roots go back to +1993-1994: long nights of conversations, as only graduate students can have, +with Niva Elkin Koren about democracy in cyberspace; a series of formative +conversations with Mitch Kapor; a couple of madly imaginative sessions with +Charlie Nesson; and a moment of true understanding with Eben Moglen. Equally +central from around that time, but at an angle, were a paper under Terry +Fisher's guidance on nineteenth-century homesteading and the radical +republicans, and a series of classes and papers with Frank Michelman, Duncan +Kennedy, Mort Horwitz, Roberto Unger, and the late David Charny, which led me +to think quite fundamentally about the role of property and economic +organization in the construction of human freedom. It was Frank Michelman who +taught me that the hard trick was to do so as a liberal. + +Since then, I have been fortunate in many and diverse intellectual friendships +and encounters, from people in different fields and foci, who shed light on +various aspects of this project. I met Larry Lessig for (almost) the first time +in 1998. By the end of a two-hour conversation, we had formed a friendship and +intellectual conversation that has been central to my work ever since. He has, +over the past few years, played a pivotal role in changing the public +understanding of control, freedom, and creativity in the digital environment. +Over the course of these years, I spent many hours learning from Jamie Boyle, +Terry Fisher, and Eben Moglen. In different ways and styles, each of them has +had significant influence on my work. There was a moment, sometime between the +conference Boyle organized at Yale in 1999 and the one he organized at Duke in +2001, when a range of people who had been doing similar things, pushing against +the wind with varying degrees of interconnection, seemed to cohere into a +single intellectual movement, centered on the importance of the commons to +information production and creativity generally, and to the digitally networked +environment in particular. In various contexts, both before this period and +since, I have learned much from Julie Cohen, Becky Eisenberg, Bernt Hugenholtz, +David Johnson, David Lange, Jessica Litman, Neil Netanel, Helen Nissenbaum, +Peggy Radin, Arti Rai, David Post, Jerry Reichman, Pam Samuelson, Jon Zittrain, +and Diane Zimmerman. One of the great pleasures of this field is the time I +have been able to spend with technologists, economists, sociologists, and +others who don't quite fit into any of these categories. Many have been very +patient with me and taught me much. In particular, I owe thanks to Sam Bowles, +Dave Clark, Dewayne Hendricks, Richard Jefferson, Natalie Jeremijenko, Tara +Lemmey, Josh Lerner, Andy Lippman, David Reed, Chuck Sabel, Jerry Saltzer, Tim +Shepard, Clay Shirky, and Eric von Hippel. In constitutional law and political +theory, I benefited early and consistently from the insights of Ed Baker, with +whom I spent many hours puzzling through practically every problem of political +theory that I tackle in this book; Chris Eisgruber, Dick Fallon, Larry Kramer, +Burt Neuborne, Larry Sager, and Kathleen Sullivan all helped in constructing +various components of the argument. + +Much of the early work in this project was done at New York University, whose +law school offered me an intellectually engaging and institutionally safe +environment to explore some quite unorthodox views. A friend, visiting when I +gave a brown-bag workshop there in 1998, pointed out that at very few law +schools could I have presented "The Commons as a Neglected Factor of +Information Policy" as an untenured member of the faculty, to a room full of +law and economics scholars, without jeopardizing my career. Mark Geistfeld, in +particular, helped me work though the economics of sharing--as we shared many a +pleasant afternoon on the beach, watching our boys playing in the waves. I +benefited from the generosity of Al Engelberg, who funded the Engelberg Center +on Innovation Law and Policy and through it students and fellows, from whose +work I learned so much; and Arthur Penn, who funded the Information Law +Institute and through it that amazing intellectual moment, the 2000 conference +on "A Free Information Ecology in the Digital Environment," and the series of +workshops that became the Open Spectrum Project. During that period, I was +fortunate enough to have had wonderful students and fellows with whom I worked +in various ways that later informed this book, in particular Gaia Bernstein, +Mike Burstein, John Kuzin, Greg Pomerantz, Steve Snyder, and Alan Toner. +={ institutional ecology of digital environment } + +Since 2001, first as a visitor and now as a member, I have had the remarkable +pleasure of being part of the intellectual community that is Yale Law School. +The book in its present form, structure, and emphasis is a direct reflection of +my immersion in this wonderful community. Practically every single one of my +colleagues has read articles I have written over this period, attended +workshops where I presented my work, provided comments that helped to improve +the articles--and through them, this book, as well. I owe each and every one of +them thanks, not least to Tony Kronman, who made me see that it would be so. To +list them all would be redundant. To list some would inevitably underrepresent +the various contributions they have made. Still, I will try to say a few of the +special thanks, owing much yet to ,{[pg xii]}, those I will not name. Working +out the economics was a precondition of being able to make the core political +claims. Bob Ellickson, Dan Kahan, and Carol Rose all engaged deeply with +questions of reciprocity and commonsbased production, while Jim Whitman kept my +feet to the fire on the relationship to the anthropology of the gift. Ian +Ayres, Ron Daniels during his visit, Al Klevorick, George Priest, Susan +Rose-Ackerman, and Alan Schwartz provided much-needed mixtures of skepticism +and help in constructing the arguments that would allay it. Akhil Amar, Owen +Fiss, Jerry Mashaw, Robert Post, Jed Rubenfeld, Reva Siegal, and Kenji Yoshino +helped me work on the normative and constitutional questions. The turn I took +to focusing on global development as the core aspect of the implications for +justice, as it is in chapter 9, resulted from an invitation from Harold Koh and +Oona Hathaway to speak at their seminar on globalization, and their thoughtful +comments to my paper. The greatest influence on that turn has been Amy +Kapczynski's work as a fellow at Yale, and with her, the students who invited +me to work with them on university licensing policy, in particular, Sam +Chaifetz. + +Oddly enough, I have *{never had the proper context}* in which to give two more +basic thanks. My father, who was swept up in the resistance to British +colonialism and later in Israel's War of Independence, dropped out of high +school. He was left with a passionate intellectual hunger and a voracious +appetite for reading. He died too young to even imagine sitting, as I do today +with my own sons, with the greatest library in human history right there, at +the dinner table, with us. But he would have loved it. Another great debt is to +David Grais, who spent many hours mentoring me in my first law job, bought me +my first copy of Strunk and White, and, for all practical purposes, taught me +how to write in English; as he reads these words, he will be mortified, I fear, +to be associated with a work of authorship as undisciplined as this, with so +many excessively long sentences, replete with dependent clauses and +unnecessarily complex formulations of quite simple ideas. + +Finally, to my best friend and tag-team partner in this tussle we call life, +Deborah Schrag, with whom I have shared nicely more or less everything since we +were barely adults. ,{[pg 1]}, + +1~1 Chapter 1 - Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge + +Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human +development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically +affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who +decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to +understand what can and ought to be done. For more than 150 years, modern +complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information +economy for these basic functions. In the past decade and a half, we have begun +to see a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled +by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, +and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we +make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, +and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passe today to speak of +"the Internet revolution." In some academic circles, it is positively naïve. +But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information +environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how +liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two +centuries. ,{[pg 2]}, +={ access : + human development and justice +2 ; + information economy +55 +} + +A series of changes in the technologies, economic organization, and social +practices of production in this environment has created new opportunities for +how we make and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. These changes +have increased the role of nonmarket and nonproprietary production, both by +individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or +tightly woven collaborations. These newly emerging practices have seen +remarkable success in areas as diverse as software development and +investigative reporting, avant-garde video and multiplayer online games. +Together, they hint at the emergence of a new information environment, one in +which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the +industrial information economy of the twentieth century. This new freedom holds +great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform +for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and +self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information dependent global +economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development +everywhere. + +The rise of greater scope for individual and cooperative nonmarket production +of information and culture, however, threatens the incumbents of the industrial +information economy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we find +ourselves in the midst of a battle over the institutional ecology of the +digital environment. A wide range of laws and institutions-- from broad areas +like telecommunications, copyright, or international trade regulation, to +minutiae like the rules for registering domain names or whether digital +television receivers will be required by law to recognize a particular +code--are being tugged and warped in efforts to tilt the playing field toward +one way of doing things or the other. How these battles turn out over the next +decade or so will likely have a significant effect on how we come to know what +is going on in the world we occupy, and to what extent and in what forms we +will be able--as autonomous individuals, as citizens, and as participants in +cultures and communities--to affect how we and others see the world as it is +and as it might be. + +2~ THE EMERGENCE OF THE NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY +={ information economy : + emergence of +9 ; + networked information economy +52 : + emergence of +9 +} + +The most advanced economies in the world today have made two parallel shifts +that, paradoxically, make possible a significant attenuation of the limitations +that market-based production places on the pursuit of the political ,{[pg 3]}, +values central to liberal societies. The first move, in the making for more +than a century, is to an economy centered on information (financial services, +accounting, software, science) and cultural (films, music) production, and the +manipulation of symbols (from making sneakers to branding them and +manufacturing the cultural significance of the Swoosh). The second is the move +to a communications environment built on cheap processors with high computation +capabilities, interconnected in a pervasive network--the phenomenon we +associate with the Internet. It is this second shift that allows for an +increasing role for nonmarket production in the information and cultural +production sector, organized in a radically more decentralized pattern than was +true of this sector in the twentieth century. The first shift means that these +new patterns of production--nonmarket and radically decentralized--will emerge, +if permitted, at the core, rather than the periphery of the most advanced +economies. It promises to enable social production and exchange to play a much +larger role, alongside property- and marketbased production, than they ever +have in modern democracies. +={ nonmarket information producers +4 ; + physical constraints on information production +2 ; + production of information : + physical constraints on +2 +} + +The first part of this book is dedicated to establishing a number of basic +economic observations. Its overarching claim is that we are seeing the +emergence of a new stage in the information economy, which I call the +"networked information economy." It is displacing the industrial information +economy that typified information production from about the second half of the +nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. What characterizes the +networked information economy is that decentralized individual +action--specifically, new and important cooperative and coordinate action +carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms that do not +depend on proprietary strategies--plays a much greater role than it did, or +could have, in the industrial information economy. The catalyst for this change +is the happenstance of the fabrication technology of computation, and its +ripple effects throughout the technologies of communication and storage. The +declining price of computation, communication, and storage have, as a practical +matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the +hands of a significant fraction of the world's population--on the order of a +billion people around the globe. The core distinguishing feature of +communications, information, and cultural production since the mid-nineteenth +century was that effective communication spanning the ever-larger societies and +geographies that came to make up the relevant political and economic units of +the day required ever-larger investments of physical capital. Large-circulation +mechanical presses, the telegraph ,{[pg 4]}, system, powerful radio and later +television transmitters, cable and satellite, and the mainframe computer became +necessary to make information and communicate it on scales that went beyond the +very local. Wanting to communicate with others was not a sufficient condition +to being able to do so. As a result, information and cultural production took +on, over the course of this period, a more industrial model than the economics +of information itself would have required. The rise of the networked, +computer-mediated communications environment has changed this basic fact. The +material requirements for effective information production and communication +are now owned by numbers of individuals several orders of magnitude larger than +the number of owners of the basic means of information production and exchange +a mere two decades ago. +={ capabilities of individuals : + coordinated effects of individual actions ; + commercial model of communication +1 ; + constraints of information production, physical +1 ; + coordinated effects of individual actions +2 ; + individual capabilities and action : + coordinated effects of individual actions +2 ; + industrial model of communication +1 ; + information production : + physical constraints on +1 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment +1 ; + traditional model of communication +} + +The removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has +made human creativity and the economics of information itself the core +structuring facts in the new networked information economy. These have quite +different characteristics than coal, steel, and manual human labor, which +characterized the industrial economy and structured our basic thinking about +economic production for the past century. They lead to three observations about +the emerging information production system. First, nonproprietary strategies +have always been more important in information production than they were in the +production of steel or automobiles, even when the economics of communication +weighed in favor of industrial models. Education, arts and sciences, political +debate, and theological disputation have always been much more importantly +infused with nonmarket motivations and actors than, say, the automobile +industry. As the material barrier that ultimately nonetheless drove much of our +information environment to be funneled through the proprietary, market-based +strategies is removed, these basic nonmarket, nonproprietary, motivations and +organizational forms should in principle become even more important to the +information production system. + +Second, we have in fact seen the rise of nonmarket production to much greater +importance. Individuals can reach and inform or edify millions around the +world. Such a reach was simply unavailable to diversely motivated individuals +before, unless they funneled their efforts through either market organizations +or philanthropically or state-funded efforts. The fact that every such effort +is available to anyone connected to the network, from anywhere, has led to the +emergence of coordinate effects, where the aggregate effect of individual +action, even when it is not self-consciously cooperative, produces ,{[pg 5]}, +the coordinate effect of a new and rich information environment. One needs only +to run a Google search on any subject of interest to see how the "information +good" that is the response to one's query is produced by the coordinate effects +of the uncoordinated actions of a wide and diverse range of individuals and +organizations acting on a wide range of motivations-- both market and +nonmarket, state-based and nonstate. +={ aggregate effect of individual action } + +Third, and likely most radical, new, and difficult for observers to believe, is +the rise of effective, large-scale cooperative efforts--peer production of +information, knowledge, and culture. These are typified by the emergence of +free and open-source software. We are beginning to see the expansion of this +model not only to our core software platforms, but beyond them into every +domain of information and cultural production--and this book visits these in +many different domains--from peer production of encyclopedias, to news and +commentary, to immersive entertainment. +={ free software +1 ; + open-source software +1 ; + peer production ; + software, open-source +} + +It is easy to miss these changes. They run against the grain of some of our +most basic Economics 101 intuitions, intuitions honed in the industrial economy +at a time when the only serious alternative seen was state Communism--an +alternative almost universally considered unattractive today. The undeniable +economic success of free software has prompted some leading-edge economists to +try to understand why many thousands of loosely networked free software +developers can compete with Microsoft at its own game and produce a massive +operating system--GNU/Linux. That growing literature, consistent with its own +goals, has focused on software and the particulars of the free and open-source +software development communities, although Eric von Hippel's notion of +"user-driven innovation" has begun to expand that focus to thinking about how +individual need and creativity drive innovation at the individual level, and +its diffusion through networks of likeminded individuals. The political +implications of free software have been central to the free software movement +and its founder, Richard Stallman, and were developed provocatively and with +great insight by Eben Moglen. Free software is but one salient example of a +much broader phenomenon. Why can fifty thousand volunteers successfully +coauthor /{Wikipedia}/, the most serious online alternative to the Encyclopedia +Britannica, and then turn around and give it away for free? Why do 4.5 million +volunteers contribute their leftover computer cycles to create the most +powerful supercomputer on Earth, SETI@Home? Without a broadly accepted analytic +model to explain these phenomena, we tend to treat them as curiosities, perhaps +transient fads, possibly of significance in one market segment or another. We +,{[pg 6]}, should try instead to see them for what they are: a new mode of +production emerging in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world-- +those that are the most fully computer networked and for which information +goods and services have come to occupy the highest-valued roles. +={ Moglen, Eben ; + von Hippel, Eric ; + Stallman, Richard +} + +Human beings are, and always have been, diversely motivated beings. We act +instrumentally, but also noninstrumentally. We act for material gain, but also +for psychological well-being and gratification, and for social connectedness. +There is nothing new or earth-shattering about this, except perhaps to some +economists. In the industrial economy in general, and the industrial +information economy as well, most opportunities to make things that were +valuable and important to many people were constrained by the physical capital +requirements of making them. From the steam engine to the assembly line, from +the double-rotary printing press to the communications satellite, the capital +constraints on action were such that simply wanting to do something was rarely +a sufficient condition to enable one to do it. Financing the necessary physical +capital, in turn, oriented the necessarily capital-intensive projects toward a +production and organizational strategy that could justify the investments. In +market economies, that meant orienting toward market production. In state-run +economies, that meant orienting production toward the goals of the state +bureaucracy. In either case, the practical individual freedom to cooperate with +others in making things of value was limited by the extent of the capital +requirements of production. +={ behavior : + motivation to produce +2 ; + capital for production +1 ; + constraints of information production, monetary ; + diversity : + human motivation +1 | motivation to produce +1 ; + human motivation ; + incentives to produce ; + information production capital +1 ; + monetary constraints on information production +2 ; + motivation to produce +1 ; + physical capital for production +2 ; + production capital +2 +} + +In the networked information economy, the physical capital required for +production is broadly distributed throughout society. Personal computers and +network connections are ubiquitous. This does not mean that they cannot be used +for markets, or that individuals cease to seek market opportunities. It does +mean, however, that whenever someone, somewhere, among the billion connected +human beings, and ultimately among all those who will be connected, wants to +make something that requires human creativity, a computer, and a network +connection, he or she can do so--alone, or in cooperation with others. He or +she already has the capital capacity necessary to do so; if not alone, then at +least in cooperation with other individuals acting for complementary reasons. +The result is that a good deal more that human beings value can now be done by +individuals, who interact with each other socially, as human beings and as +social beings, rather than as market actors through the price system. +Sometimes, under conditions I specify in some detail, these nonmarket +collaborations can be better at motivating effort and can allow creative people +to work on information projects more ,{[pg 7]}, efficiently than would +traditional market mechanisms and corporations. The result is a flourishing +nonmarket sector of information, knowledge, and cultural production, based in +the networked environment, and applied to anything that the many individuals +connected to it can imagine. Its outputs, in turn, are not treated as exclusive +property. They are instead subject to an increasingly robust ethic of open +sharing, open for all others to build on, extend, and make their own. + +Because the presence and importance of nonmarket production has become so +counterintuitive to people living in market-based economies at the end of the +twentieth century, part I of this volume is fairly detailed and technical; +overcoming what we intuitively "know" requires disciplined analysis. Readers +who are not inclined toward economic analysis should at least read the +introduction to part I, the segments entitled "When Information Production +Meets the Computer Network" and "Diversity of Strategies in our Current +Production System" in chapter 2, and the case studies in chapter 3. These +should provide enough of an intuitive feel for what I mean by the diversity of +production strategies for information and the emergence of nonmarket individual +and cooperative production, to serve as the basis for the more normatively +oriented parts of the book. Readers who are genuinely skeptical of the +possibility that nonmarket production is sustainable and effective, and in many +cases is an efficient strategy for information, knowledge, and cultural +production, should take the time to read part I in its entirety. The emergence +of precisely this possibility and practice lies at the very heart of my claims +about the ways in which liberal commitments are translated into lived +experiences in the networked environment, and forms the factual foundation of +the political-theoretical and the institutional-legal discussion that occupies +the remainder of the book. + +2~ NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY AND LIBERAL, DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES +={ democratic societies +15 ; + information economy : + democracy and liberalism +15 ; + liberal societies +15 ; + networked information economy : + democracy and liberalism +15 +} + +How we make information, how we get it, how we speak to others, and how others +speak to us are core components of the shape of freedom in any society. Part II +of this book provides a detailed look at how the changes in the technological, +economic, and social affordances of the networked information environment +affect a series of core commitments of a wide range of liberal democracies. The +basic claim is that the diversity of ways of organizing information production +and use opens a range of possibilities for pursuing % ,{[pg 8]}, the core +political values of liberal societies--individual freedom, a more genuinely +participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice. These +values provide the vectors of political morality along which the shape and +dimensions of any liberal society can be plotted. Because their practical +policy implications are often contradictory, rather than complementary, the +pursuit of each places certain limits on how we pursue the others, leading +different liberal societies to respect them in different patterns. How much a +society constrains the democratic decision-making powers of the majority in +favor of individual freedom, or to what extent it pursues social justice, have +always been attributes that define the political contours and nature of that +society. But the economics of industrial production, and our pursuit of +productivity and growth, have imposed a limit on how we can pursue any mix of +arrangements to implement our commitments to freedom and justice. Singapore is +commonly trotted out as an extreme example of the trade-off of freedom for +welfare, but all democracies with advanced capitalist economies have made some +such trade-off. Predictions of how well we will be able to feed ourselves are +always an important consideration in thinking about whether, for example, to +democratize wheat production or make it more egalitarian. Efforts to push +workplace democracy have also often foundered on the shoals--real or +imagined--of these limits, as have many plans for redistribution in the name of +social justice. Market-based, proprietary production has often seemed simply +too productive to tinker with. The emergence of the networked information +economy promises to expand the horizons of the feasible in political +imagination. Different liberal polities can pursue different mixtures of +respect for different liberal commitments. However, the overarching constraint +represented by the seeming necessity of the industrial model of information and +cultural production has significantly shifted as an effective constraint on the +pursuit of liberal commitments. + +3~ Enhanced Autonomy +={ autonomy +3 ; + individual autonomy +2 ; + democratic societies : + autonomy +3 ; + liberal societies : + autonomy +3 +} + +The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of +individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more +for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose +commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their +relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of +social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of +individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market +sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I +,{[pg 9]}, describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical +freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced +experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and +community. +={ institutional ecology of digital environment +1 ; + loose affiliations +1 ; + networked public sphere : + loose affiliations +1 ; + norms (social) : + loose affiliations +1 ; + peer production : + loose affiliations ; + public sphere : + loose affiliations +1 ; + regulation by social norms : + loose affiliations +1 ; + scope of loose relations +1 ; + social relations and norms : + loose affiliations +1 +} + +I begin, therefore, with an analysis of the effects of networked information +economy on individual autonomy. First, individuals can do more for themselves +independently of the permission or cooperation of others. They can create their +own expressions, and they can seek out the information they need, with +substantially less dependence on the commercial mass media of the twentieth +century. Second, and no less importantly, individuals can do more in loose +affiliation with others, rather than requiring stable, long-term relations, +like coworker relations or participation in formal organizations, to underwrite +effective cooperation. Very few individuals living in the industrial +information economy could, in any realistic sense, decide to build a new +Library of Alexandria of global reach, or to start an encyclopedia. As +collaboration among far-flung individuals becomes more common, the idea of +doing things that require cooperation with others becomes much more attainable, +and the range of projects individuals can choose as their own therefore +qualitatively increases. The very fluidity and low commitment required of any +given cooperative relationship increases the range and diversity of cooperative +relations people can enter, and therefore of collaborative projects they can +conceive of as open to them. + +These ways in which autonomy is enhanced require a fairly substantive and rich +conception of autonomy as a practical lived experience, rather than the formal +conception preferred by many who think of autonomy as a philosophical concept. +But even from a narrower perspective, which spans a broader range of +conceptions of autonomy, at a minimum we can say that individuals are less +susceptible to manipulation by a legally defined class of others--the owners of +communications infrastructure and media. The networked information economy +provides varied alternative platforms for communication, so that it moderates +the power of the traditional mass-media model, where ownership of the means of +communication enables an owner to select what others view, and thereby to +affect their perceptions of what they can and cannot do. Moreover, the +diversity of perspectives on the way the world is and the way it could be for +any given individual is qualitatively increased. This gives individuals a +significantly greater role in authoring their own lives, by enabling them to +perceive a broader range of possibilities, and by providing them a richer +baseline against which to measure the choices they in fact make. +={ commercial model of communication ; + industrial model of communication ; + traditional model of communication +} + +% ,{[pg 10]}, + +3~ Democracy: The Networked Public Sphere +={ democratic societies : + public sphere, shift from mass media +4 +} + +The second major implication of the networked information economy is the shift +it enables from the mass-mediated public sphere to a networked public sphere. +This shift is also based on the increasing freedom individuals enjoy to +participate in creating information and knowledge, and the possibilities it +presents for a new public sphere to emerge alongside the commercial, mass-media +markets. The idea that the Internet democratizes is hardly new. It has been a +staple of writing about the Internet since the early 1990s. The relatively +simple first-generation claims about the liberating effects of the Internet, +summarized in the U.S. Supreme Court's celebration of its potential to make +everyone a pamphleteer, came under a variety of criticisms and attacks over the +course of the past half decade or so. Here, I offer a detailed analysis of how +the emergence of a networked information economy in particular, as an +alternative to mass media, improves the political public sphere. The +first-generation critique of the democratizing effect of the Internet was based +on various implications of the problem of information overload, or the Babel +objection. According to the Babel objection, when everyone can speak, no one +can be heard, and we devolve either to a cacophony or to the reemergence of +money as the distinguishing factor between statements that are heard and those +that wallow in obscurity. The second-generation critique was that the Internet +is not as decentralized as we thought in the 1990s. The emerging patterns of +Internet use show that very few sites capture an exceedingly large amount of +attention, and millions of sites go unnoticed. In this world, the Babel +objection is perhaps avoided, but only at the expense of the very promise of +the Internet as a democratic medium. +={ centralization of communications : + decentralization +3 ; + decentralization of communications +3 ; + democratic societies : + shift from mass-media communications model +3 ; + Babel objection ; + commercial model of communication : + shift away from +2 ; + industrial model of communication : + shift away from +3 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + shift away from +3 ; + liberal societies : + public sphere, shift from mass media +3 ; + networked public sphere +3 ; + public sphere +3 ; + traditional model of communication : + shift away from +3 ; + information overload and Babel objection +} + +In chapters 6 and 7, I offer a detailed and updated analysis of this, perhaps +the best-known and most contentious claim about the Internet's liberalizing +effects. First, it is important to understand that any consideration of the +democratizing effects of the Internet must measure its effects as compared to +the commercial, mass-media-based public sphere, not as compared to an idealized +utopia that we embraced a decade ago of how the Internet might be. Commercial +mass media that have dominated the public spheres of all modern democracies +have been studied extensively. They have been shown in extensive literature to +exhibit a series of failures as platforms for public discourse. First, they +provide a relatively limited intake basin--that is, too many observations and +concerns of too many people in complex modern ,{[pg 11]}, societies are left +unobserved and unattended to by the small cadre of commercial journalists +charged with perceiving the range of issues of public concern in any given +society. Second, particularly where the market is concentrated, they give their +owners inordinate power to shape opinion and information. This power they can +either use themselves or sell to the highest bidder. And third, whenever the +owners of commercial media choose not to exercise their power in this way, they +then tend to program toward the inane and soothing, rather than toward that +which will be politically engaging, and they tend to oversimplify complex +public discussions. On the background of these limitations of the mass media, I +suggest that the networked public sphere enables many more individuals to +communicate their observations and their viewpoints to many others, and to do +so in a way that cannot be controlled by media owners and is not as easily +corruptible by money as were the mass media. + +The empirical and theoretical literature about network topology and use +provides answers to all the major critiques of the claim that the Internet +improves the structure of the public sphere. In particular, I show how a wide +range of mechanisms--starting from the simple mailing list, through static Web +pages, the emergence of writable Web capabilities, and mobility--are being +embedded in a social system for the collection of politically salient +information, observations, and comments, and provide a platform for discourse. +These platforms solve some of the basic limitations of the commercial, +concentrated mass media as the core platform of the public sphere in +contemporary complex democracies. They enable anyone, anywhere, to go through +his or her practical life, observing the social environment through new +eyes--the eyes of someone who could actually inject a thought, a criticism, or +a concern into the public debate. Individuals become less passive, and thus +more engaged observers of social spaces that could potentially become subjects +for political conversation; they become more engaged participants in the +debates about their observations. The various formats of the networked public +sphere provide anyone with an outlet to speak, to inquire, to investigate, +without need to access the resources of a major media organization. We are +seeing the emergence of new, decentralized approaches to fulfilling the +watchdog function and to engaging in political debate and organization. These +are being undertaken in a distinctly nonmarket form, in ways that would have +been much more difficult to pursue effectively, as a standard part of the +construction of the public sphere, before the networked information +environment. Working through detailed examples, I try ,{[pg 12]}, to render the +optimism about the democratic advantages of the networked public sphere a fully +specified argument. + +The networked public sphere has also begun to respond to the information +overload problem, but without re-creating the power of mass media at the points +of filtering and accreditation. There are two core elements to these +developments: First, we are beginning to see the emergence of nonmarket, +peer-produced alternative sources of filtration and accreditation in place of +the market-based alternatives. Relevance and accreditation are themselves +information goods, just like software or an encyclopedia. What we are seeing on +the network is that filtering for both relevance and accreditation has become +the object of widespread practices of mutual pointing, of peer review, of +pointing to original sources of claims, and its complement, the social practice +that those who have some ability to evaluate the claims in fact do comment on +them. The second element is a contingent but empirically confirmed observation +of how users actually use the network. As a descriptive matter, information +flow in the network is much more ordered than a simple random walk in the +cacophony of information flow would suggest, and significantly less centralized +than the mass media environment was. Some sites are much more visible and +widely read than others. This is true both when one looks at the Web as a +whole, and when one looks at smaller clusters of similar sites or users who +tend to cluster. Most commentators who have looked at this pattern have +interpreted it as a reemergence of mass media--the dominance of the few visible +sites. But a full consideration of the various elements of the network topology +literature supports a very different interpretation, in which order emerges in +the networked environment without re-creating the failures of the +mass-media-dominated public sphere. Sites cluster around communities of +interest: Australian fire brigades tend to link to other Australian fire +brigades, conservative political blogs (Web logs or online journals) in the +United States to other conservative political blogs in the United States, and +to a lesser but still significant extent, to liberal political blogs. In each +of these clusters, the pattern of some high visibility nodes continues, but as +the clusters become small enough, many more of the sites are moderately linked +to each other in the cluster. Through this pattern, the network seems to be +forming into an attention backbone. "Local" clusters--communities of +interest--can provide initial vetting and "peer-review-like" qualities to +individual contributions made within an interest cluster. Observations that are +seen as significant within a community ,{[pg 13]}, of interest make their way +to the relatively visible sites in that cluster, from where they become visible +to people in larger ("regional") clusters. This continues until an observation +makes its way to the "superstar" sites that hundreds of thousands of people +might read and use. This path is complemented by the practice of relatively +easy commenting and posting directly to many of the superstar sites, which +creates shortcuts to wide attention. It is fairly simple to grasp intuitively +why these patterns might emerge. Users tend to treat other people's choices +about what to link to and to read as good indicators of what is worthwhile for +them. They are not slavish in this, though; they apply some judgment of their +own as to whether certain types of users--say, political junkies of a +particular stripe, or fans of a specific television program--are the best +predictors of what will be interesting for them. The result is that attention +in the networked environment is more dependent on being interesting to an +engaged group of people than it is in the mass-media environment, where +moderate interest to large numbers of weakly engaged viewers is preferable. +Because of the redundancy of clusters and links, and because many clusters are +based on mutual interest, not on capital investment, it is more difficult to +buy attention on the Internet than it is in mass media outlets, and harder +still to use money to squelch an opposing view. These characteristics save the +networked environment from the Babel objection without reintroducing excessive +power in any single party or small cluster of them, and without causing a +resurgence in the role of money as a precondition to the ability to speak +publicly. +={ accreditation : + as public good ; + Babel objection ; + clusters in network topology ; + information overload and Babel objection ; + filtering : + as public good ; + information flow ; + local clusters in network topology ; + regional clusters in network topology ; + relevance filtering : + as public good +} + +3~ Justice and Human Development +={ access : + human development and justice +3 ; + democratic societies : + justice and human development +3 ; + human development and justice +3 ; + justice and human development +3 ; + liberal societies : + justice and human development +} + +Information, knowledge, and information-rich goods and tools play a significant +role in economic opportunity and human development. While the networked +information economy cannot solve global hunger and disease, its emergence does +open reasonably well-defined new avenues for addressing and constructing some +of the basic requirements of justice and human development. Because the outputs +of the networked information economy are usually nonproprietary, it provides +free access to a set of the basic instrumentalities of economic opportunity and +the basic outputs of the information economy. From a liberal perspective +concerned with justice, at a minimum, these outputs become more readily +available as "finished goods" to those who are least well off. More +importantly, the availability of free information resources makes participating +in the economy less dependent on ,{[pg 14]}, surmounting access barriers to +financing and social-transactional networks that made working out of poverty +difficult in industrial economies. These resources and tools thus improve +equality of opportunity. + +From a more substantive and global perspective focused on human development, +the freedom to use basic resources and capabilities allows improved +participation in the production of information and information-dependent +components of human development. First, and currently most advanced, the +emergence of a broad range of free software utilities makes it easier for poor +and middle-income countries to obtain core software capabilities. More +importantly, free software enables the emergence of local capabilities to +provide software services, both for national uses and as a basis for +participating in a global software services industry, without need to rely on +permission from multinational software companies. Scientific publication is +beginning to use commons-based strategies to publish important sources of +information in a way that makes the outputs freely available in poorer +countries. More ambitiously, we begin to see in agricultural research a +combined effort of public, nonprofit, and open-source-like efforts being +developed and applied to problems of agricultural innovation. The ultimate +purpose is to develop a set of basic capabilities that would allow +collaboration among farmers and scientists, in both poor countries and around +the globe, to develop better, more nutritious crops to improve food security +throughout the poorer regions of the world. Equally ambitious, but less +operationally advanced, we are beginning to see early efforts to translate this +system of innovation to health-related products. +={ free software : + human development and justice ; + innovation : + human development +1 ; + open-source software : + human development and justice ; + software, open-source : + human development and justice +} + +All these efforts are aimed at solving one of the most glaring problems of +poverty and poor human development in the global information economy: Even as +opulence increases in the wealthier economies--as information and innovation +offer longer and healthier lives that are enriched by better access to +information, knowledge, and culture--in many places, life expectancy is +decreasing, morbidity is increasing, and illiteracy remains rampant. Some, +although by no means all, of this global injustice is due to the fact that we +have come to rely ever-more exclusively on proprietary business models of the +industrial economy to provide some of the most basic information components of +human development. As the networked information economy develops new ways of +producing information, whose outputs are not treated as proprietary and +exclusive but can be made available freely to everyone, it offers modest but +meaningful opportunities for improving human development everywhere. We are +seeing early signs of the emergence of an innovation ,{[pg 15]}, ecosystem made +of public funding, traditional nonprofits, and the newly emerging sector of +peer production that is making it possible to advance human development through +cooperative efforts in both rich countries and poor. + +3~ A Critical Culture and Networked Social Relations + +The networked information economy also allows for the emergence of a more +critical and self-reflective culture. In the past decade, a number of legal +scholars--Niva Elkin Koren, Terry Fisher, Larry Lessig, and Jack Balkin-- have +begun to examine how the Internet democratizes culture. Following this work and +rooted in the deliberative strand of democratic theory, I suggest that the +networked information environment offers us a more attractive cultural +production system in two distinct ways: (1) it makes culture more transparent, +and (2) it makes culture more malleable. Together, these mean that we are +seeing the emergence of a new folk culture--a practice that has been largely +suppressed in the industrial era of cultural production--where many more of us +participate actively in making cultural moves and finding meaning in the world +around us. These practices make their practitioners better "readers" of their +own culture and more self-reflective and critical of the culture they occupy, +thereby enabling them to become more self-reflective participants in +conversations within that culture. This also allows individuals much greater +freedom to participate in tugging and pulling at the cultural creations of +others, "glomming on" to them, as Balkin puts it, and making the culture they +occupy more their own than was possible with mass-media culture. In these +senses, we can say that culture is becoming more democratic: self-reflective +and participatory. +={ Balkin, Jack ; + communities : + critical culture and self-reflection +1 ; + critical culture and self-reflection +1 ; + culture : + criticality of (self-reflection) +1 ; + democratic societies : + critical culture and social relations +1 ; + Fisher, William (Terry) ; + Koren, Niva Elkin ; + Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) ; + self-organization : + See clusters in network topology self-reflection +1 ; + liberal societies : + critical culture and social relations +} + +Throughout much of this book, I underscore the increased capabilities of +individuals as the core driving social force behind the networked information +economy. This heightened individual capacity has raised concerns by many that +the Internet further fragments community, continuing the long trend of +industrialization. A substantial body of empirical literature suggests, +however, that we are in fact using the Internet largely at the expense of +television, and that this exchange is a good one from the perspective of social +ties. We use the Internet to keep in touch with family and intimate friends, +both geographically proximate and distant. To the extent we do see a shift in +social ties, it is because, in addition to strengthening our strong bonds, we +are also increasing the range and diversity of weaker connections. Following +,{[pg 16]}, Manuel Castells and Barry Wellman, I suggest that we have become +more adept at filling some of the same emotional and context-generating +functions that have traditionally been associated with the importance of +community with a network of overlapping social ties that are limited in +duration or intensity. +={ attention fragmentation ; + Castells, Manuel ; + fragmentation of communication ; + norms (social) : + fragmentation of communication ; + regulation by social norms : + fragmentation of communication ; + social relations and norms : + fragmentation of communication ; + communities : + fragmentation of ; + diversity : + fragmentation of communication ; + Castells, Manuel +} + +2~ FOUR METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTS +={ information economy : + methodological choices +14 ; + networked environmental policy : + See policy ; + networked information economy : + methodological choices +14 +} + +There are four methodological choices represented by the thesis that I have +outlined up to this point, and therefore in this book as a whole, which require +explication and defense. The first is that I assign a very significant role to +technology. The second is that I offer an explanation centered on social +relations, but operating in the domain of economics, rather than sociology. The +third and fourth are more internal to liberal political theory. The third is +that I am offering a liberal political theory, but taking a path that has +usually been resisted in that literature--considering economic structure and +the limits of the market and its supporting institutions from the perspective +of freedom, rather than accepting the market as it is, and defending or +criticizing adjustments through the lens of distributive justice. Fourth, my +approach heavily emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations. Much of +the discussion revolves around the choice between markets and nonmarket social +behavior. In much of it, the state plays no role, or is perceived as playing a +primarily negative role, in a way that is alien to the progressive branches of +liberal political thought. In this, it seems more of a libertarian or an +anarchistic thesis than a liberal one. I do not completely discount the state, +as I will explain. But I do suggest that what is special about our moment is +the rising efficacy of individuals and loose, nonmarket affiliations as agents +of political economy. Just like the market, the state will have to adjust to +this new emerging modality of human action. Liberal political theory must first +recognize and understand it before it can begin to renegotiate its agenda for +the liberal state, progressive or otherwise. +={ capabilities of individuals : + technology and human affairs +5 ; + human affairs, technology and +5 ; + individual capabilities and action : + technology and human affairs +5 +} + +3~ The Role of Technology in Human Affairs +={ technology : + role of +2 +} + +The first methodological choice concerns how one should treat the role of +technology in the development of human affairs. The kind of technological +determinism that typified Lewis Mumford, or, specifically in the area of +communications, Marshall McLuhan, is widely perceived in academia today ,{[pg +17]}, as being too deterministic, though perhaps not so in popular culture. The +contemporary effort to offer more nuanced, institution-based, and +politicalchoice-based explanations is perhaps best typified by Paul Starr's +recent and excellent work on the creation of the media. While these +contemporary efforts are indeed powerful, one should not confuse a work like +Elizabeth Eisenstein's carefully argued and detailed The Printing Press as an +Agent of Change, with McLuhan's determinism. Assuming that technologies are +just tools that happen, more or less, to be there, and are employed in any +given society in a pattern that depends only on what that society and culture +makes of them is too constrained. A society that has no wheel and no writing +has certain limits on what it can do. Barry Wellman has imported into sociology +a term borrowed from engineering--affordances.~{ Barry Wellman et al., "The +Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism," JCMC 8, no. 3 +(April 2003). }~ Langdon Winner called these the "political properties" of +technologies.~{ Langdon Winner, ed., "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" in The Whale +and The Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: +University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19-39. }~ An earlier version of this idea +is Harold Innis's concept of "the bias of communications."~{ Harold Innis, The +Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). Innis too +is often lumped with McLuhan and Walter Ong as a technological determinist. His +work was, however, one of a political economist, and he emphasized the +relationship between technology and economic and social organization, much more +than the deterministic operation of technology on human cognition and +capability. }~ In Internet law and policy debates this approach has become +widely adopted through the influential work of Lawrence Lessig, who +characterized it as "code is law."~{ Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of +Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999). }~ +={ deregulation : + See policy determinism, technological +1 ; + Eisenstein, Elizabeth ; + McLuhan, Marshall ; + Mumford, Lewis ; + Winner, Langdon ; + Wellman, Barry ; + Starr, Paul +} + +The idea is simple to explain, and distinct from a naïve determinism. Different +technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or +harder to perform. All other things being equal, things that are easier to do +are more likely to be done, and things that are harder to do are less likely to +be done. All other things are never equal. That is why technological +determinism in the strict sense--if you have technology "t," you should expect +social structure or relation "s" to emerge--is false. Ocean navigation had a +different adoption and use when introduced in states whose land empire +ambitions were effectively countered by strong neighbors--like Spain and +Portugal--than in nations that were focused on building a vast inland empire, +like China. Print had different effects on literacy in countries where religion +encouraged individual reading--like Prussia, Scotland, England, and New +England--than where religion discouraged individual, unmediated interaction +with texts, like France and Spain. This form of understanding the role of +technology is adopted here. Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, +technology sets some parameters of individual and social action. It can make +some actions, relationships, organizations, and institutions easier to pursue, +and others harder. In a challenging environment--be the challenges natural or +human--it can make some behaviors obsolete by increasing the efficacy of +directly competitive strategies. However, within the realm of the +feasible--uses not rendered impossible by the adoption or rejection of a +technology--different patterns of adoption and use ,{[pg 18]}, can result in +very different social relations that emerge around a technology. Unless these +patterns are in competition, or unless even in competition they are not +catastrophically less effective at meeting the challenges, different societies +can persist with different patterns of use over long periods. It is the +feasibility of long-term sustainability of different patterns of use that makes +this book relevant to policy, not purely to theory. The same technologies of +networked computers can be adopted in very different patterns. There is no +guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements +in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible. That is a +choice we face as a society. The way we develop will, in significant measure, +depend on choices we make in the next decade or so. + +3~ The Role of Economic Analysis and Methodological Individualism +={ individualist methodologies +1 ; + economic analysis, role of +1 +} + +It should be emphasized, as the second point, that this book has a descriptive +methodology that is distinctly individualist and economic in orientation, which +is hardly the only way to approach this problem. Manuel Castells's magisterial +treatment of the networked society~{ Manuel Castells, The Rise of Networked +Society (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). }~ locates its +central characteristic in the shift from groups and hierarchies to networks as +social and organizational models--looser, flexible arrangements of human +affairs. Castells develops this theory as he describes a wide range of changes, +from transportation networks to globalization and industrialization. In his +work, the Internet fits into this trend, enabling better coordination and +cooperation in these sorts of loosely affiliated networks. My own emphasis is +on the specific relative roles of market and nonmarket sectors, and how that +change anchors the radical decentralization that he too observes, as a matter +of sociological observation. I place at the core of the shift the technical and +economic characteristics of computer networks and information. These provide +the pivot for the shift toward radical decentralization of production. They +underlie the shift from an information environment dominated by proprietary, +market-oriented action, to a world in which nonproprietary, nonmarket +transactional frameworks play a large role alongside market production. This +newly emerging, nonproprietary sector affects to a substantial degree the +entire information environment in which individuals and societies live their +lives. If there is one lesson we can learn from globalization and the +ever-increasing reach of the market, it is that the logic of the market exerts +enormous pressure on existing social structures. If we are indeed seeing the +emergence of a substantial component of nonmarket production at the very ,{[pg +19]}, core of our economic engine--the production and exchange of information, +and through it of information-based goods, tools, services, and capabilities-- +then this change suggests a genuine limit on the extent of the market. Such a +limit, growing from within the very market that it limits, in its most advanced +loci, would represent a genuine shift in direction for what appeared to be the +ever-increasing global reach of the market economy and society in the past half +century. +={ Castells, Manuel ; + methodological individualism ; + nonmarket information producers : + role of +} + +3~ Economic Structure in Liberal Political Theory +={ economics in liberal political theory +2 ; + liberal political theory +2 +} + +The third point has to do with the role of economic structure in liberal +political theory. My analysis in this regard is practical and human centric. By +this, I mean to say two things: First, I am concerned with human beings, with +individuals as the bearers of moral claims regarding the structure of the +political and economic systems they inhabit. Within the liberal tradition, the +position I take is humanistic and general, as opposed to political and +particular. It is concerned first and foremost with the claims of human beings +as human beings, rather than with the requirements of democracy or the +entitlements of citizenship or membership in a legitimate or meaningfully +self-governed political community. There are diverse ways of respecting the +basic claims of human freedom, dignity, and well-being. Different liberal +polities do so with different mixes of constitutional and policy practices. The +rise of global information economic structures and relationships affects human +beings everywhere. In some places, it complements democratic traditions. In +others, it destabilizes constraints on liberty. An understanding of how we can +think of this moment in terms of human freedom and development must transcend +the particular traditions, both liberal and illiberal, of any single nation. +The actual practice of freedom that we see emerging from the networked +environment allows people to reach across national or social boundaries, across +space and political division. It allows people to solve problems together in +new associations that are outside the boundaries of formal, legal-political +association. In this fluid social economic environment, the individual's claims +provide a moral anchor for considering the structures of power and opportunity, +of freedom and well-being. Furthermore, while it is often convenient and widely +accepted to treat organizations or communities as legal entities, as "persons," +they are not moral agents. Their role in an analysis of freedom and justice is +derivative from their role--both enabling and constraining--as structuring +context in which human beings, ,{[pg 20]}, the actual moral agents of political +economy, find themselves. In this regard, my positions here are decidedly +"liberal," as opposed to either communitarian or critical. +={ dignity ; + well-being ; + freedom ; + communities : + as persons +1 +} + +Second, I am concerned with actual human beings in actual historical settings, +not with representations of human beings abstracted from their settings. These +commitments mean that freedom and justice for historically situated individuals +are measured from a first-person, practical perspective. No constraints on +individual freedom and no sources of inequality are categorically exempt from +review, nor are any considered privileged under this view. Neither economy nor +cultural heritage is given independent moral weight. A person whose life and +relations are fully regimented by external forces is unfree, no matter whether +the source of regimentation can be understood as market-based, authoritarian, +or traditional community values. This does not entail a radical anarchism or +libertarianism. Organizations, communities, and other external structures are +pervasively necessary for human beings to flourish and to act freely and +effectively. This does mean, however, that I think of these structures only +from the perspective of their effects on human beings. Their value is purely +derivative from their importance to the actual human beings that inhabit them +and are structured--for better or worse--by them. As a practical matter, this +places concern with market structure and economic organization much closer to +the core of questions of freedom than liberal theory usually is willing to do. +Liberals have tended to leave the basic structure of property and markets +either to libertarians--who, like Friedrich Hayek, accepted its present +contours as "natural," and a core constituent element of freedom--or to +Marxists and neo-Marxists. I treat property and markets as just one domain of +human action, with affordances and limitations. Their presence enhances freedom +along some dimensions, but their institutional requirements can become sources +of constraint when they squelch freedom of action in nonmarket contexts. +Calibrating the reach of the market, then, becomes central not only to the +shape of justice or welfare in a society, but also to freedom. +={ autonomy +5 ; + capabilities of individuals +5 ; + democratic societies : + individual capabilities in +5 ; + individual autonomy : + individual capabilities in +5 ; + individual capabilities and action +5 ; + Hayek, Friedrich +} + +3~ Whither the State? +={ government : + role of +4 ; + state, role of +4 +} + +The fourth and last point emerges in various places throughout this book, but +deserves explicit note here. What I find new and interesting about the +networked information economy is the rise of individual practical capabilities, +and the role that these new capabilities play in increasing the relative +salience of nonproprietary, often nonmarket individual and social behavior. +,{[pg 21]}, + +In my discussion of autonomy and democracy, of justice and a critical culture, +I emphasize the rise of individual and cooperative private action and the +relative decrease in the dominance of market-based and proprietary action. +Where in all this is the state? For the most part, as you will see particularly +in chapter 11, the state in both the United States and Europe has played a role +in supporting the market-based industrial incumbents of the twentieth-century +information production system at the expense of the individuals who make up the +emerging networked information economy. Most state interventions have been in +the form of either captured legislation catering to incumbents, or, at best, +well-intentioned but wrongheaded efforts to optimize the institutional ecology +for outdated modes of information and cultural production. In the traditional +mapping of political theory, a position such as the one I present here--that +freedom and justice can and should best be achieved by a combination of market +action and private, voluntary (not to say charitable) nonmarket action, and +that the state is a relatively suspect actor--is libertarian. Perhaps, given +that I subject to similar criticism rules styled by their proponents as +"property"--like "intellectual property" or "spectrum property rights"--it is +anarchist, focused on the role of mutual aid and highly skeptical of the state. +(It is quite fashionable nowadays to be libertarian, as it has been for a few +decades, and more fashionable to be anarchist than it has been in a century.) + +The more modest truth is that my position is not rooted in a theoretical +skepticism about the state, but in a practical diagnosis of opportunities, +barriers, and strategies for achieving improvements in human freedom and +development given the actual conditions of technology, economy, and politics. I +have no objection in principle to an effective, liberal state pursuing one of a +range of liberal projects and commitments. Here and there throughout this book +you will encounter instances where I suggest that the state could play +constructive roles, if it stopped listening to incumbents for long enough to +realize this. These include, for example, municipal funding of neutral +broadband networks, state funding of basic research, and possible strategic +regulatory interventions to negate monopoly control over essential resources in +the digital environment. However, the necessity for the state's affirmative +role is muted because of my diagnosis of the particular trajectory of markets, +on the one hand, and individual and social action, on the other hand, in the +digitally networked information environment. The particular economics of +computation and communications; the particular economics of information, +knowledge, and cultural production; and the relative role of ,{[pg 22]}, +information in contemporary, advanced economies have coalesced to make +nonmarket individual and social action the most important domain of action in +the furtherance of the core liberal commitments. Given these particular +characteristics, there is more freedom to be found through opening up +institutional spaces for voluntary individual and cooperative action than there +is in intentional public action through the state. Nevertheless, I offer no +particular reasons to resist many of the roles traditionally played by the +liberal state. I offer no reason to think that, for example, education should +stop being primarily a state-funded, public activity and a core responsibility +of the liberal state, or that public health should not be so. I have every +reason to think that the rise of nonmarket production enhances, rather than +decreases, the justifiability of state funding for basic science and research, +as the spillover effects of publicly funded information production can now be +much greater and more effectively disseminated and used to enhance the general +welfare. +={ social action +1 } + +The important new fact about the networked environment, however, is the +efficacy and centrality of individual and collective social action. In most +domains, freedom of action for individuals, alone and in loose cooperation with +others, can achieve much of the liberal desiderata I consider throughout this +book. From a global perspective, enabling individuals to act in this way also +extends the benefits of liberalization across borders, increasing the +capacities of individuals in nonliberal states to grab greater freedom than +those who control their political systems would like. By contrast, as long as +states in the most advanced market-based economies continue to try to optimize +their institutional frameworks to support the incumbents of the industrial +information economy, they tend to threaten rather than support liberal +commitments. Once the networked information economy has stabilized and we come +to understand the relative importance of voluntary private action outside of +markets, the state can begin to adjust its policies to facilitate nonmarket +action and to take advantage of its outputs to improve its own support for core +liberal commitments. +={ collaborative authorship : + See also peer production collective social action +} + +2~ THE STAKES OF IT ALL: THE BATTLE OVER THE INSTITUTIONAL ECOLOGY OF THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT +={ commercial model of communication +9 ; + industrial model of communication +9 ; + information economy : + institutional ecology +9 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment +9 ; + networked information economy : + institutional ecology +9 ; + proprietary rights +9 ; + traditional model of communication +9 +} + +No benevolent historical force will inexorably lead this technologicaleconomic +moment to develop toward an open, diverse, liberal equilibrium. ,{[pg 23]}, If +the transformation I describe as possible occurs, it will lead to substantial +redistribution of power and money from the twentieth-century industrial +producers of information, culture, and communications--like Hollywood, the +recording industry, and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the +telecommunications services giants--to a combination of widely diffuse +populations around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools +that make this population better able to produce its own information +environment rather than buying it ready-made. None of the industrial giants of +yore are taking this reallocation lying down. The technology will not overcome +their resistance through an insurmountable progressive impulse. The +reorganization of production and the advances it can bring in freedom and +justice will emerge, therefore, only as a result of social and political action +aimed at protecting the new social patterns from the incumbents' assaults. It +is precisely to develop an understanding of what is at stake and why it is +worth fighting for that I write this book. I offer no reassurances, however, +that any of this will in fact come to pass. + +The battle over the relative salience of the proprietary, industrial models of +information production and exchange and the emerging networked information +economy is being carried out in the domain of the institutional ecology of the +digital environment. In a wide range of contexts, a similar set of +institutional questions is being contested: To what extent will resources +necessary for information production and exchange be governed as a commons, +free for all to use and biased in their availability in favor of none? To what +extent will these resources be entirely proprietary, and available only to +those functioning within the market or within traditional forms of wellfunded +nonmarket action like the state and organized philanthropy? We see this battle +played out at all layers of the information environment: the physical devices +and network channels necessary to communicate; the existing information and +cultural resources out of which new statements must be made; and the logical +resources--the software and standards--necessary to translate what human beings +want to say to each other into signals that machines can process and transmit. +Its central question is whether there will, or will not, be a core common +infrastructure that is governed as a commons and therefore available to anyone +who wishes to participate in the networked information environment outside of +the market-based, proprietary framework. +={ property ownership +5 ; + commons +} + +This is not to say that property is in some sense inherently bad. Property, +together with contract, is the core institutional component of markets, and +,{[pg 24]}, a core institutional element of liberal societies. It is what +enables sellers to extract prices from buyers, and buyers to know that when +they pay, they will be secure in their ability to use what they bought. It +underlies our capacity to plan actions that require use of resources that, +without exclusivity, would be unavailable for us to use. But property also +constrains action. The rules of property are circumscribed and intended to +elicit a particular datum--willingness and ability to pay for exclusive control +over a resource. They constrain what one person or another can do with regard +to a resource; that is, use it in some ways but not others, reveal or hide +information with regard to it, and so forth. These constraints are necessary so +that people must transact with each other through markets, rather than through +force or social networks, but they do so at the expense of constraining action +outside of the market to the extent that it depends on access to these +resources. +={ constrains of information production, physical +2 ; + physical constraints on information production +2 +} + +Commons are another core institutional component of freedom of action in free +societies, but they are structured to enable action that is not based on +exclusive control over the resources necessary for action. For example, I can +plan an outdoor party with some degree of certainty by renting a private garden +or beach, through the property system. Alternatively, I can plan to meet my +friends on a public beach or at Sheep's Meadow in Central Park. I can buy an +easement from my neighbor to reach a nearby river, or I can walk around her +property using the public road that makes up our transportation commons. Each +institutional framework--property and commons--allows for a certain freedom of +action and a certain degree of predictability of access to resources. Their +complementary coexistence and relative salience as institutional frameworks for +action determine the relative reach of the market and the domain of nonmarket +action, both individual and social, in the resources they govern and the +activities that depend on access to those resources. Now that material +conditions have enabled the emergence of greater scope for nonmarket action, +the scope and existence of a core common infrastructure that includes the basic +resources necessary to produce and exchange information will shape the degree +to which individuals will be able to act in all the ways that I describe as +central to the emergence of a networked information economy and the freedoms it +makes possible. +={ commons } + +At the physical layer, the transition to broadband has been accompanied by a +more concentrated market structure for physical wires and connections, and less +regulation of the degree to which owners can control the flow of ,{[pg 25]}, +information on their networks. The emergence of open wireless networks, based +on "spectrum commons," counteracts this trend to some extent, as does the +current apparent business practice of broadband owners not to use their +ownership to control the flow of information over their networks. Efforts to +overcome the broadband market concentration through the development of +municipal broadband networks are currently highly contested in legislation and +courts. The single most threatening development at the physical layer has been +an effort driven primarily by Hollywood, over the past few years, to require +the manufacturers of computation devices to design their systems so as to +enforce the copyright claims and permissions imposed by the owners of digital +copyrighted works. Should this effort succeed, the core characteristic of +computers--that they are general-purpose devices whose abilities can be +configured and changed over time by their owners as uses and preferences +change--will be abandoned in favor of machines that can be trusted to perform +according to factory specifications, irrespective of what their owners wish. +The primary reason that these laws have not yet passed, and are unlikely to +pass, is that the computer hardware and software, and electronics and +telecommunications industries all understand that such a law would undermine +their innovation and creativity. At the logical layer, we are seeing a +concerted effort, again headed primarily by Hollywood and the recording +industry, to shape the software and standards to make sure that digitally +encoded cultural products can continue to be sold as packaged goods. The +Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the assault on peer-to-peer technologies +are the most obvious in this regard. +={ boradband networks } + +More generally information, knowledge, and culture are being subjected to a +second enclosure movement, as James Boyle has recently explored in depth. The +freedom of action for individuals who wish to produce information, knowledge, +and culture is being systematically curtailed in order to secure the economic +returns demanded by the manufacturers of the industrial information economy. A +rich literature in law has developed in response to this increasing enclosure +over the past twenty years. It started with David Lange's evocative exploration +of the public domain and Pamela Samuelson's prescient critique of the +application of copyright to computer programs and digital materials, and +continued through Jessica Litman's work on the public domain and digital +copyright and Boyle's exploration of the basic romantic assumptions underlying +our emerging "intellectual property" construct and the need for an +environmentalist framework for preserving the public domain. It reached its +most eloquent expression in Lawrence Lessig's arguments ,{[pg 26]}, for the +centrality of free exchange of ideas and information to our most creative +endeavors, and his diagnoses of the destructive effects of the present +enclosure movement. This growing skepticism among legal academics has been +matched by a long-standing skepticism among economists (to which I devote much +discussion in chapter 2). The lack of either analytic or empirical foundation +for the regulatory drive toward ever-stronger proprietary rights has not, +however, resulted in a transformed politics of the regulation of intellectual +production. Only recently have we begun to see a politics of information policy +and "intellectual property" emerge from a combination of popular politics among +computer engineers, college students, and activists concerned with the global +poor; a reorientation of traditional media advocates; and a very gradual +realization by high-technology firms that rules pushed by Hollywood can impede +the growth of computer-based businesses. This political countermovement is tied +to quite basic characteristics of the technology of computer communications, +and to the persistent and growing social practices of sharing--some, like p2p +(peer-to-peer) file sharing, in direct opposition to proprietary claims; +others, increasingly, are instances of the emerging practices of making +information on nonproprietary models and of individuals sharing what they +themselves made in social, rather than market patterns. These economic and +social forces are pushing at each other in opposite directions, and each is +trying to mold the legal environment to better accommodate its requirements. We +still stand at a point where information production could be regulated so that, +for most users, it will be forced back into the industrial model, squelching +the emerging model of individual, radically decentralized, and nonmarket +production and its attendant improvements in freedom and justice. +={ Boyle, James ; + Lange, David ; + Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) ; + Litman, Jessica ; + Samuelson, Pamela ; + policy +2 +} + +Social and economic organization is not infinitely malleable. Neither is it +always equally open to affirmative design. The actual practices of human +interaction with information, knowledge, and culture and with production and +consumption are the consequence of a feedback effect between social practices, +economic organization, technological affordances, and formal constraints on +behavior through law and similar institutional forms. These components of the +constraints and affordances of human behavior tend to adapt dynamically to each +other, so that the tension between the technological affordances, the social +and economic practices, and the law are often not too great. During periods of +stability, these components of the structure within which human beings live are +mostly aligned and mutually reinforce ,{[pg 27]}, each other, but the stability +is subject to shock at any one of these dimensions. Sometimes shock can come in +the form of economic crisis, as it did in the United States during the Great +Depression. Often it can come from an external physical threat to social +institutions, like a war. Sometimes, though probably rarely, it can come from +law, as, some would argue, it came from the desegregation decision in /{Brown +v. Board of Education}/. Sometimes it can come from technology; the +introduction of print was such a perturbation, as was, surely, the steam +engine. The introduction of the highcapacity mechanical presses and telegraph +ushered in the era of mass media. The introduction of radio created a similar +perturbation, which for a brief moment destabilized the mass-media model, but +quickly converged to it. In each case, the period of perturbation offered more +opportunities and greater risks than the periods of relative stability. During +periods of perturbation, more of the ways in which society organizes itself are +up for grabs; more can be renegotiated, as the various other components of +human stability adjust to the changes. To borrow Stephen Jay Gould's term from +evolutionary theory, human societies exist in a series of punctuated +equilibria. The periods of disequilibrium are not necessarily long. A mere +twenty-five years passed between the invention of radio and its adaptation to +the mass-media model. A similar period passed between the introduction of +telephony and its adoption of the monopoly utility form that enabled only +one-to-one limited communications. In each of these periods, various paths +could have been taken. Radio showed us even within the past century how, in +some societies, different paths were in fact taken and then sustained over +decades. After a period of instability, however, the various elements of human +behavioral constraint and affordances settled on a new stable alignment. During +periods of stability, we can probably hope for little more than tinkering at +the edges of the human condition. +={ Gould, Stephen Jay ; + Luther, Martin +} + +This book is offered, then, as a challenge to contemporary liberal democracies. +We are in the midst of a technological, economic, and organizational +transformation that allows us to renegotiate the terms of freedom, justice, and +productivity in the information society. How we shall live in this new +environment will in some significant measure depend on policy choices that we +make over the next decade or so. To be able to understand these choices, to be +able to make them well, we must recognize that they are part of what is +fundamentally a social and political choice--a choice about how to be free, +equal, productive human beings under a new set of technological and ,{[pg 28]}, +economic conditions. As economic policy, allowing yesterday's winners to +dictate the terms of tomorrow's economic competition would be disastrous. As +social policy, missing an opportunity to enrich democracy, freedom, and justice +in our society while maintaining or even enhancing our productivity would be +unforgivable. ,{[pg 29]}, + +:B~ Part One - The Networked Information Economy + +1~p1 Introduction +={ communities : + technology-defined social structure +9 ; + norms (social) : + technology-defined structure +9 ; + regulation by social norms : + technology-defined structure +9 ; + social relations and norms : + technology-defined structure +9 ; + social structure, defined by technology +9 ; + technology : + social structure defined by +9 +} + +For more than 150 years, new communications technologies have tended to +concentrate and commercialize the production and exchange of information, while +extending the geographic and social reach of information distribution networks. +High-volume mechanical presses and the telegraph combined with new business +practices to change newspapers from small-circulation local efforts into mass +media. Newspapers became means of communications intended to reach ever-larger +and more dispersed audiences, and their management required substantial capital +investment. As the size of the audience and its geographic and social +dispersion increased, public discourse developed an increasingly one-way model. +Information and opinion that was widely known and formed the shared basis for +political conversation and broad social relations flowed from ever more +capital-intensive commercial and professional producers to passive, +undifferentiated consumers. It was a model easily adopted and amplified by +radio, television, and later cable and satellite communications. This trend did +not cover all forms of communication and culture. Telephones and personal +interactions, most importantly, ,{[pg 30]}, and small-scale distributions, like +mimeographed handbills, were obvious alternatives. Yet the growth of efficient +transportation and effective large-scale managerial and administrative +structures meant that the sources of effective political and economic power +extended over larger geographic areas and required reaching a larger and more +geographically dispersed population. The economics of long-distance mass +distribution systems necessary to reach this constantly increasing and more +dispersed relevant population were typified by high up-front costs and low +marginal costs of distribution. These cost characteristics drove cultural +production toward delivery to everwider audiences of increasingly high +production-value goods, whose fixed costs could be spread over ever-larger +audiences--like television series, recorded music, and movies. Because of these +economic characteristics, the mass-media model of information and cultural +production and transmission became the dominant form of public communication in +the twentieth century. + +The Internet presents the possibility of a radical reversal of this long trend. +It is the first modern communications medium that expands its reach by +decentralizing the capital structure of production and distribution of +information, culture, and knowledge. Much of the physical capital that embeds +most of the intelligence in the network is widely diffused and owned by end +users. Network routers and servers are not qualitatively different from the +computers that end users own, unlike broadcast stations or cable systems, which +are radically different in economic and technical terms from the televisions +that receive their signals. This basic change in the material conditions of +information and cultural production and distribution have substantial effects +on how we come to know the world we occupy and the alternative courses of +action open to us as individuals and as social actors. Through these effects, +the emerging networked environment structures how we perceive and pursue core +values in modern liberal societies. + +Technology alone does not, however, determine social structure. The +introduction of print in China and Korea did not induce the kind of profound +religious and political reformation that followed the printed Bible and +disputations in Europe. But technology is not irrelevant, either. Luther's were +not the first disputations nailed to a church door. Print, however, made it +practically feasible for more than 300,000 copies of Luther's publications to +be circulated between 1517 and 1520 in a way that earlier disputations could +not have been.~{ Elizabeth Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change +(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). }~ Vernacular reading of the +Bible became a feasible form of religious self-direction only when printing +these Bibles and making them ,{[pg 31]}, available to individual households +became economically feasible, and not when all copyists were either monks or +otherwise dependent on the church. Technology creates feasibility spaces for +social practice. Some things become easier and cheaper, others harder and more +expensive to do or to prevent under different technological conditions. The +interaction between these technological-economic feasibility spaces, and the +social responses to these changes--both in terms of institutional changes, like +law and regulation, and in terms of changing social practices--define the +qualities of a period. The way life is actually lived by people within a given +set of interlocking technological, economic, institutional, and social +practices is what makes a society attractive or unattractive, what renders its +practices laudable or lamentable. + +A particular confluence of technical and economic changes is now altering the +way we produce and exchange information, knowledge, and culture in ways that +could redefine basic practices, first in the most advanced economies, and +eventually around the globe. The potential break from the past 150 years is +masked by the somewhat liberal use of the term "information economy" in various +permutations since the 1970s. The term has been used widely to signify the +dramatic increase in the importance of usable information as a means of +controlling production and the flow of inputs, outputs, and services. While +often evoked as parallel to the "postindustrial" stage, in fact, the +information economy was tightly linked throughout the twentieth century with +controlling the processes of the industrial economy. This is clearest in the +case of accounting firms and financial markets, but is true of the industrial +modalities of organizing cultural production as well. Hollywood, the broadcast +networks, and the recording industry were built around a physical production +model. Once the cultural utterances, the songs or movies, were initially +produced and fixed in some means of storage and transmission, the economics of +production and distribution of these physical goods took over. Making the +initial utterances and the physical goods that embodied them required high +capital investment up front. Making many copies was not much more expensive +than making few copies, and very much cheaper on a per-copy basis. These +industries therefore organized themselves to invest large sums in making a +small number of high production-value cultural "artifacts," which were then +either replicated and stamped onto many low-cost copies of each artifact, or +broadcast or distributed through high-cost systems for low marginal cost +ephemeral consumption on screens and with receivers. This required an effort to +manage demand for those ,{[pg 32]}, products that were in fact recorded and +replicated or distributed, so as to make sure that the producers could sell +many units of a small number of cultural utterances at a low per-unit cost, +rather than few units each of many cultural utterances at higher per-unit +costs. Because of its focus around capital-intensive production and +distribution techniques, this first stage might best be thought of as the +"industrial information economy." +={ information, defined } + +Radical decentralization of intelligence in our communications network and the +centrality of information, knowledge, culture, and ideas to advanced economic +activity are leading to a new stage of the information economy-- the networked +information economy. In this new stage, we can harness many more of the diverse +paths and mechanisms for cultural transmission that were muted by the economies +of scale that led to the rise of the concentrated, controlled form of mass +media, whether commercial or state-run. The most important aspect of the +networked information economy is the possibility it opens for reversing the +control focus of the industrial information economy. In particular, it holds +out the possibility of reversing two trends in cultural production central to +the project of control: concentration and commercialization. + +Two fundamental facts have changed in the economic ecology in which the +industrial information enterprises have arisen. First, the basic output that +has become dominant in the most advanced economies is human meaning and +communication. Second, the basic physical capital necessary to express and +communicate human meaning is the connected personal computer. The core +functionalities of processing, storage, and communications are widely owned +throughout the population of users. Together, these changes destabilize the +industrial stage of the information economy. Both the capacity to make +meaning--to encode and decode humanly meaningful statements-- and the capacity +to communicate one's meaning around the world, are held by, or readily +available to, at least many hundreds of millions of users around the globe. Any +person who has information can connect with any other person who wants it, and +anyone who wants to make it mean something in some context, can do so. The high +capital costs that were a prerequisite to gathering, working, and communicating +information, knowledge, and culture, have now been widely distributed in the +society. The entry barrier they posed no longer offers a condensation point for +the large organizations that once dominated the information environment. +Instead, emerging models of information and cultural production, radically +decentralized and based on ,{[pg 33]}, emergent patterns of cooperation and +sharing, but also of simple coordinate coexistence, are beginning to take on an +ever-larger role in how we produce meaning--information, knowledge, and +culture--in the networked information economy. +={ physical capital for production ; + peer production ; + capital for production ; + constraints of information production, monetary ; + industrial age : + destabilization of ; + information production capital ; + monetary constraints on information production ; + production capital +} + +A Google response to a query, which returns dozens or more sites with answers +to an information question you may have, is an example of coordinate +coexistence producing information. As Jessica Litman demonstrated in Sharing +and Stealing, hundreds of independent producers of information, acting for +reasons ranging from hobby and fun to work and sales, produce information, +independently and at widely varying costs, related to what you were looking +for. They all coexist without knowing of each other, most of them without +thinking or planning on serving you in particular, or even a class of user like +you. Yet the sheer volume and diversity of interests and sources allows their +distributed, unrelated efforts to be coordinated-- through the Google algorithm +in this case, but also through many others-- into a picture that has meaning +and provides the answer to your question. Other, more deeply engaged and +cooperative enterprises are also emerging on the Internet. /{Wikipedia}/, a +multilingual encyclopedia coauthored by fifty thousand volunteers, is one +particularly effective example of many such enterprises. +={ Litman, Jessica } + +The technical conditions of communication and information processing are +enabling the emergence of new social and economic practices of information and +knowledge production. Eisenstein carefully documented how print loosened the +power of the church over information and knowledge production in Europe, and +enabled, particularly in the Protestant North, the emergence of early modern +capitalist enterprises in the form of print shops. These printers were able to +use their market revenues to become independent of the church or the princes, +as copyists never were, and to form the economic and social basis of a liberal, +market-based freedom of thought and communication. Over the past century and a +half, these early printers turned into the commercial mass media: A particular +type of market-based production--concentrated, largely homogenous, and highly +commercialized--that came to dominate our information environment by the end of +the twentieth century. On the background of that dominant role, the possibility +that a radically different form of information production will +emerge--decentralized; socially, no less than commercially, driven; and as +diverse as human thought itself--offers the promise of a deep change in how we +see the world ,{[pg 34]}, around us, how we come to know about it and evaluate +it, and how we are capable of communicating with others about what we know, +believe, and plan. + +This part of the book is dedicated to explaining the technological-economic +transformation that is making these practices possible. Not because economics +drives all; not because technology determines the way society or communication +go; but because it is the technological shock, combined with the economic +sustainability of the emerging social practices, that creates the new set of +social and political opportunities that are the subject of this book. By +working out the economics of these practices, we can understand the economic +parameters within which practical political imagination and fulfillment can +operate in the digitally networked environment. I describe sustained productive +enterprises that take the form of decentralized and nonmarket-based production, +and explain why productivity and growth are consistent with a shift toward such +modes of production. What I describe is not an exercise in pastoral utopianism. +It is not a vision of a return to production in a preindustrial world. It is a +practical possibility that directly results from our economic understanding of +information and culture as objects of production. It flows from fairly standard +economic analysis applied to a very nonstandard economic reality: one in which +all the means of producing and exchanging information and culture are placed in +the hands of hundreds of millions, and eventually billions, of people around +the world, available for them to work with not only when they are functioning +in the market to keep body and soul together, but also, and with equal +efficacy, when they are functioning in society and alone, trying to give +meaning to their lives as individuals and as social beings. ,{[pg 35]}, + +1~2 Chapter 2 - Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation +={ economics of information production and innovation +40 ; + information production economics +40 ; + innovation economics +40 +} + +There are no noncommercial automobile manufacturers. There are no volunteer +steel foundries. You would never choose to have your primary source of bread +depend on voluntary contributions from others. Nevertheless, scientists working +at noncommercial research institutes funded by nonprofit educational +institutions and government grants produce most of our basic science. +Widespread cooperative networks of volunteers write the software and standards +that run most of the Internet and enable what we do with it. Many people turn +to National Public Radio or the BBC as a reliable source of news. What is it +about information that explains this difference? Why do we rely almost +exclusively on markets and commercial firms to produce cars, steel, and wheat, +but much less so for the most critical information our advanced societies +depend on? Is this a historical contingency, or is there something about +information as an object of production that makes nonmarket production +attractive? + +The technical economic answer is that certain characteristics of information +and culture lead us to understand them as "public ,{[pg 36]}, goods," rather +than as "pure private goods" or standard "economic goods." When economists +speak of information, they usually say that it is "nonrival." We consider a +good to be nonrival when its consumption by one person does not make it any +less available for consumption by another. Once such a good is produced, no +more social resources need be invested in creating more of it to satisfy the +next consumer. Apples are rival. If I eat this apple, you cannot eat it. If you +nonetheless want to eat an apple, more resources (trees, labor) need to be +diverted from, say, building chairs, to growing apples, to satisfy you. The +social cost of your consuming the second apple is the cost of not using the +resources needed to grow the second apple (the wood from the tree) in their +next best use. In other words, it is the cost to society of not having the +additional chairs that could have been made from the tree. Information is +nonrival. Once a scientist has established a fact, or once Tolstoy has written +War and Peace, neither the scientist nor Tolstoy need spend a single second on +producing additional War and Peace manuscripts or studies for the +one-hundredth, one-thousandth, or one-millionth user of what they wrote. The +physical paper for the book or journal costs something, but the information +itself need only be created once. Economists call such goods "public" because a +market will not produce them if priced at their marginal cost--zero. In order +to provide Tolstoy or the scientist with income, we regulate publishing: We +pass laws that enable their publishers to prevent competitors from entering the +market. Because no competitors are permitted into the market for copies of War +and Peace, the publishers can price the contents of the book or journal at +above their actual marginal cost of zero. They can then turn some of that +excess revenue over to Tolstoy. Even if these laws are therefore necessary to +create the incentives for publication, the market that develops based on them +will, from the technical economic perspective, systematically be inefficient. +As Kenneth Arrow put it in 1962, "precisely to the extent that [property] is +effective, there is underutilization of the information."~{ The full statement +was: "[A]ny information obtained, say a new method of production, should, from +the welfare point of view, be available free of charge (apart from the costs of +transmitting information). This insures optimal utilization of the information +but of course provides no incentive for investment in research. In a free +enterprise economy, inventive activity is supported by using the invention to +create property rights; precisely to the extent that it is successful, there is +an underutilization of information." Kenneth Arrow, "Economic Welfare and the +Allocation of Resources for Invention," in Rate and Direction of Inventive +Activity: Economic and Social Factors, ed. Richard R. Nelson (Princeton, NJ: +Princeton University Press, 1962), 616-617. }~ Because welfare economics +defines a market as producing a good efficiently only when it is pricing the +good at its marginal cost, a good like information (and culture and knowledge +are, for purposes of economics, forms of information), which can never be sold +both at a positive (greater than zero) price and at its marginal cost, is +fundamentally a candidate for substantial nonmarket production. +={ Arrow, Kenneth ; + efficiency of information regulation +8 ; + inefficiency of information regulation +8 ; + proprietary rights, inefficiency of +8 ; + regulating information, efficiency of +8 ; + information production : + nonrivalry +4 ; + information as nonrival +4 ; + nonrival goods +4 ; + production of information : + nonrivalry +4 ; + public goods vs. nonrival goods +4 +} + +This widely held explanation of the economics of information production has led +to an understanding that markets based on patents or copyrights involve a +trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency. That is, looking ,{[pg 37]}, +at the state of the world on any given day, it is inefficient that people and +firms sell the information they possess. From the perspective of a society's +overall welfare, the most efficient thing would be for those who possess +information to give it away for free--or rather, for the cost of communicating +it and no more. On any given day, enforcing copyright law leads to inefficient +underutilization of copyrighted information. However, looking at the problem of +information production over time, the standard defense of exclusive rights like +copyright expects firms and people not to produce if they know that their +products will be available for anyone to take for free. In order to harness the +efforts of individuals and firms that want to make money, we are willing to +trade off some static inefficiency to achieve dynamic efficiency. That is, we +are willing to have some inefficient lack of access to information every day, +in exchange for getting more people involved in information production over +time. Authors and inventors or, more commonly, companies that contract with +musicians and filmmakers, scientists, and engineers, will invest in research +and create cultural goods because they expect to sell their information +products. Over time, this incentive effect will give us more innovation and +creativity, which will outweigh the inefficiency at any given moment caused by +selling the information at above its marginal cost. This defense of exclusive +rights is limited by the extent to which it correctly describes the motivations +of information producers and the business models open to them to appropriate +the benefits of their investments. If some information producers do not need to +capture the economic benefits of their particular information outputs, or if +some businesses can capture the economic value of their information production +by means other than exclusive control over their products, then the +justification for regulating access by granting copyrights or patents is +weakened. As I will discuss in detail, both of these limits on the standard +defense are in fact the case. + +Nonrivalry, moreover, is not the only quirky characteristic of information +production as an economic phenomenon. The other crucial quirkiness is that +information is both input and output of its own production process. In order to +write today's academic or news article, I need access to yesterday's articles +and reports. In order to write today's novel, movie, or song, I need to use and +rework existing cultural forms, such as story lines and twists. This +characteristic is known to economists as the "on the shoulders of giants" +effect, recalling a statement attributed to Isaac Newton: "If I have seen +farther it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants."~{ Suzanne Scotchmer, +"Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Cumulative Research and the Patent Law," +Journal of Economic Perspectives 5 (1991): 29-41. }~ This second quirkiness +,{[pg 38]}, of information as a production good makes property-like exclusive +rights less appealing as the dominant institutional arrangement for information +and cultural production than it would have been had the sole quirky +characteristic of information been its nonrivalry. The reason is that if any +new information good or innovation builds on existing information, then +strengthening intellectual property rights increases the prices that those who +invest in producing information today must pay to those who did so yesterday, +in addition to increasing the rewards an information producer can get tomorrow. +Given the nonrivalry, those payments made today for yesterday's information are +all inefficiently too high, from today's perspective. They are all above the +marginal cost--zero. Today's users of information are not only today's readers +and consumers. They are also today's producers and tomorrow's innovators. Their +net benefit from a strengthened patent or copyright regime, given not only +increased potential revenues but also the increased costs, may be negative. If +we pass a law that regulates information production too strictly, allowing its +beneficiaries to impose prices that are too high on today's innovators, then we +will have not only too little consumption of information today, but also too +little production of new information for tomorrow. +={ building on existing information +2 ; + existing information, building on +2 ; + information production inputs : + existing information +2 ; + inputs to production : + existing information +2 ; + on the shoulders of giants +2 ; + production inputs : + existing information +2 ; + reuse of information +2 ; + Shirky, Clay : + "shoulders of giants" +2 ; + Newton, Isaac +} + +Perhaps the most amazing document of the consensus among economists today that, +because of the combination of nonrivalry and the "on the shoulders of giants" +effect, excessive expansion of "intellectual property" protection is +economically detrimental, was the economists' brief filed in the Supreme Court +case of /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/.~{ Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003). }~ +The case challenged a law that extended the term of copyright protection from +lasting for the life of the author plus fifty years, to life of the author plus +seventy years, or from seventy-five years to ninety-five years for copyrights +owned by corporations. If information were like land or iron, the ideal length +of property rights would be infinite from the economists' perspective. In this +case, however, where the "property right" was copyright, more than two dozen +leading economists volunteered to sign a brief opposing the law, counting among +their number five Nobel laureates, including that well-known market skeptic, +Milton Friedman. +={ Friedman, Milton } + +The efficiency of regulating information, knowledge, and cultural production +through strong copyright and patent is not only theoretically ambiguous, it +also lacks empirical basis. The empirical work trying to assess the impact of +intellectual property on innovation has focused to date on patents. The +evidence provides little basis to support stronger and increasing exclusive +,{[pg 39]}, rights of the type we saw in the last two and a half decades of the +twentieth century. Practically no studies show a clear-cut benefit to stronger +or longer patents.~{ Adam Jaffe, "The U.S. Patent System in Transition: Policy +Innovation and the Innovation Process," Research Policy 29 (2000): 531. }~ In +perhaps one of the most startling papers on the economics of innovation +published in the past few years, Josh Lerner looked at changes in intellectual +property law in sixty countries over a period of 150 years. He studied close to +three hundred policy changes, and found that, both in developing countries and +in economically advanced countries that already have patent law, patenting both +at home and abroad by domestic firms of the country that made the policy +change, a proxy for their investment in research and development, decreases +slightly when patent law is strengthened!~{ Josh Lerner, "Patent Protection and +Innovation Over 150 Years" (working paper no. 8977, National Bureau of Economic +Research, Cambridge, MA, 2002). }~ The implication is that when a +country--either one that already has a significant patent system, or a +developing nation--increases its patent protection, it slightly decreases the +level of investment in innovation by local firms. Going on intuitions alone, +without understanding the background theory, this seems implausible--why would +inventors or companies innovate less when they get more protection? Once you +understand the interaction of nonrivalry and the "on the shoulders of giants" +effect, the findings are entirely consistent with theory. Increasing patent +protection, both in developing nations that are net importers of existing +technology and science, and in developed nations that already have a degree of +patent protection, and therefore some nontrivial protection for inventors, +increases the costs that current innovators have to pay on existing knowledge +more than it increases their ability to appropriate the value of their own +contributions. When one cuts through the rent-seeking politics of intellectual +property lobbies like the pharmaceutical companies or Hollywood and the +recording industry; when one overcomes the honestly erroneous, but nonetheless +conscience-soothing beliefs of lawyers who defend the copyright and +patent-dependent industries and the judges they later become, the reality of +both theory and empirics in the economics of intellectual property is that both +in theory and as far as empirical evidence shows, there is remarkably little +support in economics for regulating information, knowledge, and cultural +production through the tools of intellectual property law. +={ Lerner, Josh ; + information production, market-based : + without property protections +4 ; + market-based information producers : + without property protections +4 ; + nonexclusion-market production strategies +4 ; + nonmarket information producers +4 +} + +Where does innovation and information production come from, then, if it does +not come as much from intellectual-property-based market actors, as many +generally believe? The answer is that it comes mostly from a mixture of (1) +nonmarket sources--both state and nonstate--and (2) market actors whose +business models do not depend on the regulatory framework of intellectual +property. The former type of producer is the expected answer, ,{[pg 40]}, +within mainstream economics, for a public goods problem like information +production. The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, +and the Defense Department are major sources of funding for research in the +United States, as are government agencies in Europe, at the national and +European level, Japan, and other major industrialized nations. The latter +type--that is, the presence and importance of market-based producers whose +business models do not require and do not depend on intellectual property +protection--is not theoretically predicted by that model, but is entirely +obvious once you begin to think about it. + +Consider a daily newspaper. Normally, we think of newspapers as dependent on +copyrights. In fact, however, that would be a mistake. No daily newspaper would +survive if it depended for its business on waiting until a competitor came out +with an edition, then copied the stories, and reproduced them in a competing +edition. Daily newspapers earn their revenue from a combination of low-priced +newsstand sales or subscriptions together with advertising revenues. Neither of +those is copyright dependent once we understand that consumers will not wait +half a day until the competitor's paper comes out to save a nickel or a quarter +on the price of the newspaper. If all copyright on newspapers were abolished, +the revenues of newspapers would be little affected.~{ At most, a "hot news" +exception on the model of /{International News Service v. Associated Press}/, +248 U.S. 215 (1918), might be required. Even that, however, would only be +applicable to online editions that are for pay. In paper, habits of reading, +accreditation of the original paper, and first-to-market advantages of even a +few hours would be enough. Online, where the first-to-market advantage could +shrink to seconds, "hot news" protection may be worthwhile. However, almost all +papers are available for free and rely solely on advertising. The benefits of +reading a copied version are, at that point, practically insignificant to the +reader. }~ Take, for example, the 2003 annual reports of a few of the leading +newspaper companies in the United States. The New York Times Company receives a +little more than $3 billion a year from advertising and circulation revenues, +and a little more than $200 million a year in revenues from all other sources. +Even if the entire amount of "other sources" were from syndication of stories +and photos--which likely overstates the role of these copyright-dependent +sources--it would account for little more than 6 percent of total revenues. The +net operating revenues for the Gannett Company were more than $5.6 billion in +newspaper advertising and circulation revenue, relative to about $380 million +in all other revenues. As with the New York Times, at most a little more than 6 +percent of revenues could be attributed to copyright-dependent activities. For +Knight Ridder, the 2003 numbers were $2.8 billion and $100 million, +respectively, or a maximum of about 3.5 percent from copyrights. Given these +numbers, it is safe to say that daily newspapers are not a copyright-dependent +industry, although they are clearly a market-based information production +industry. +={ daily newspapers ; + newspapers +} + +As it turns out, repeated survey studies since 1981 have shown that in all +industrial sectors except for very few--most notably pharmaceuticals--firm +managers do not see patents as the most important way they capture the ,{[pg +41]}, benefits of their research and developments.~{ Wesley Cohen, R. Nelson, +and J. Walsh, "Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions +and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not)" (working paper no. 7552, +National Bureau Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2000); Richard Levin et al., +"Appropriating the Returns from Industrial Research and Development"Brookings +Papers on Economic Activity 3 (1987): 783; Mansfield et al., "Imitation Costs +and Patents: An Empirical Study," The Economic Journal 91 (1981): 907. }~ They +rank the advantages that strong research and development gives them in lowering +the cost or improving the quality of manufacture, being the first in the +market, or developing strong marketing relationships as more important than +patents. The term "intellectual property" has high cultural visibility today. +Hollywood, the recording industry, and pharmaceuticals occupy center stage on +the national and international policy agenda for information policy. However, +in the overall mix of our information, knowledge, and cultural production +system, the total weight of these exclusivity-based market actors is +surprisingly small relative to the combination of nonmarket sectors, government +and nonprofit, and market-based actors whose business models do not depend on +proprietary exclusion from their information outputs. + +The upshot of the mainstream economic analysis of information production today +is that the widely held intuition that markets are more or less the best way to +produce goods, that property rights and contracts are efficient ways of +organizing production decisions, and that subsidies distort production +decisions, is only very ambiguously applicable to information. While exclusive +rights-based production can partially solve the problem of how information will +be produced in our society, a comprehensive regulatory system that tries to +mimic property in this area--such as both the United States and the European +Union have tried to implement internally and through international +agreements--simply cannot work perfectly, even in an ideal market posited by +the most abstract economics models. Instead, we find the majority of businesses +in most sectors reporting that they do not rely on intellectual property as a +primary mechanism for appropriating the benefits of their research and +development investments. In addition, we find mainstream economists believing +that there is a substantial role for government funding; that nonprofit +research can be more efficient than for-profit research; and, otherwise, that +nonproprietary production can play an important role in our information +production system. + +2~ THE DIVERSITY OF STRATEGIES IN OUR CURRENT INFORMATION PRODUCTION SYSTEM +={ production of information : + strategies of +11 ; + proprietary rights : + strategies for information production +11 ; + strategies for information production +11 ; + business strategies for information production +11 ; + economics of information production and innovation : + current production strategies +11 ; + information production : + strategies of ; + information production economics : + current production strategies +11 ; + innovation economics : + current production strategies +} + +The actual universe of information production in the economy then, is not as +dependent on property rights and markets in information goods as the last +quarter century's increasing obsession with "intellectual property" might ,{[pg +42]}, suggest. Instead, what we see both from empirical work and theoretical +work is that individuals and firms in the economy produce information using a +wide range of strategies. Some of these strategies indeed rely on exclusive +rights like patents or copyrights, and aim at selling information as a good +into an information market. Many, however, do not. In order to provide some +texture to what these models look like, we can outline a series of ideal-type +"business" strategies for producing information. The point here is not to +provide an exhaustive map of the empirical business literature. It is, instead, +to offer a simple analytic framework within which to understand the mix of +strategies available for firms and individuals to appropriate the benefits of +their investments--of time, money, or both, in activities that result in the +production of information, knowledge, and culture. The differentiating +parameters are simple: cost minimization and benefit maximization. Any of these +strategies could use inputs that are already owned--such as existing lyrics for +a song or a patented invention to improve on--by buying a license from the +owner of the exclusive rights for the existing information. Cost minimization +here refers purely to ideal-type strategies for obtaining as many of the +information inputs as possible at their marginal cost of zero, instead of +buying licenses to inputs at a positive market price. It can be pursued by +using materials from the public domain, by using materials the producer itself +owns, or by sharing/bartering for information inputs owned by others in +exchange for one's own information inputs. Benefits can be obtained either in +reliance on asserting one's exclusive rights, or by following a non-exclusive +strategy, using some other mechanism that improves the position of the +information producer because they invested in producing the information. +Nonexclusive strategies for benefit maximization can be pursued both by market +actors and by nonmarket actors. Table 2.1 maps nine ideal-type strategies +characterized by these components. +={ benefit maximization ; + proprietary rights : + models of +5 ; + capital for production : + cost minimization and benefit maximization ; + constraints of information production, monetary : + cost minimization and benefits maximization ; + cost : + minimizing ; + information production capital : + cost minimization and benefit maximization ; + monetary constraints on information production : + cost minimization and benefit maximization ; + money : + cost minimization and benefit maximization ; + physical capital for production : + cost minimization and benefit maximization ; + production capital : + cost minimization and benefit maximization +} + +The ideal-type strategy that underlies patents and copyrights can be thought of +as the "Romantic Maximizer." It conceives of the information producer as a +single author or inventor laboring creatively--hence romantic--but in +expectation of royalties, rather than immortality, beauty, or truth. An +individual or small start-up firm that sells software it developed to a larger +firm, or an author selling rights to a book or a film typify this model. The +second ideal type that arises within exclusive-rights based industries, +"Mickey," is a larger firm that already owns an inventory of exclusive rights, +some through in-house development, some by buying from Romantic Maximizers. +,{[pg 43]}, +={ Mickey model +3 ; + Romantic Maximizer model +2 +} + +-\\- + +!_ Table 2.1: Ideal-Type Information Production Strategies +={ demand-side effects of information production ; + Joe Einstein model +1 ; + learning networks +1 ; + limited sharing networks +1 ; + Los Alamos model +1 ; + nonmarket information producers : + strategies for information production +1 ; + RCA strategy +1 ; + Scholarly Lawyers model +1 ; + sharing : + limited sharing networks +} + +table{~h c4; 25; 25; 25; 25; + +Cost Minimization/ Benefit Acquisition +Public Domain +Intrafirm +Barter/Sharing + +Rights based exclusion (make money by exercising exclusive rights - licensing or blocking competition) +Romantic Maximizers (authors, composers; sell to publishers; sometimes sell to Mickeys) +Mikey (Disney reuses inventory for derivative works; buy outputs of Romantic Maximizers) +RCA (small number of companies hold blocking patents; they create patent pools to build valuable goods) + +Nonexclusion - Market (make money from information production but not by exercising the exclusive rights) +Scholarly Lawyers (write articles to get clients; other examples include bands that give music out for free as advertisements for touring and charge money for performance; software developers who develop software and make money from customizing it to a particular client, on-site management, advice and training, not from licensing) +Know-How (firms that have cheaper or better production processes because of their research, lower their costs or improve the quality of other goods or services; lawyer offices that build on existing forms) +Learning Networks (share information with similar organizations - make money from early access to information. For example, newspapers join together to create a wire service; firms where engineers and scientists from different firms attend professional societies to diffuse knowledge) + +Nonexclusion - Nonmarket +Joe Einstein (give away information for free in return for status, benefits to reputation, value for the innovation to themselves; wide range of motivations. Includes members of amateur choirs who perform for free, academics who write articles for fame, people who write opeds, contribute to mailing lists; many free software developers and free software generally for most uses) +Los Alamos (share in-house information, rely on in-house inputs to produce valuable public goods used to secure additional government funding and status) +Limited sharing networks (release paper to small number of colleagues to get comments so you can improve it before publication. Make use of time delay to gain relative advantage later on using Joe Einstein strategy. Share one's information on formal condition of reciprocity: like "copyleft" conditions on derivative works for distribution) + +}table + +% ,{[pg 44]}, + +- A defining cost-reduction mechanism for Mickey is that it applies creative +people to work on its own inventory, for which it need not pay above marginal +cost prices in the market. This strategy is the most advantageous in an +environment of very strong exclusive rights protection for a number of reasons. +First, the ability to extract higher rents from the existing inventory of +information goods is greatest for firms that (a) have an inventory and (b) rely +on asserting exclusive rights as their mode of extracting value. Second, the +increased costs of production associated with strong exclusive rights are +cushioned by the ability of such firms to rework their existing inventory, +rather than trying to work with materials from an evershrinking public domain +or paying for every source of inspiration and element of a new composition. The +coarsest version of this strategy might be found if Disney were to produce a +"winter sports" thirty-minute television program by tying together scenes from +existing cartoons, say, one in which Goofy plays hockey followed by a snippet +of Donald Duck ice skating, and so on. More subtle, and representative of the +type of reuse relevant to the analysis here, would be the case where Disney +buys the rights to Winniethe-Pooh, and, after producing an animated version of +stories from the original books, then continues to work with the same +characters and relationships to create a new film, say, +Winnie-the-Pooh--Frankenpooh (or Beauty and the Beast--Enchanted Christmas; or +The Little Mermaid--Stormy the Wild Seahorse). The third exclusive-rights-based +strategy, which I call "RCA," is barter among the owners of inventories. Patent +pools, cross-licensing, and market-sharing agreements among the radio patents +holders in 1920-1921, which I describe in chapter 6, are a perfect example. +RCA, GE, AT&T, and Westinghouse held blocking patents that prevented each other +and anyone else from manufacturing the best radios possible given technology at +that time. The four companies entered an agreement to combine their patents and +divide the radio equipment and services markets, which they used throughout the +1920s to exclude competitors and to capture precisely the postinnovation +monopoly rents sought to be created by patents. +={ RCA strategy } + +Exclusive-rights-based business models, however, represent only a fraction of +our information production system. There are both market-based and nonmarket +models to sustain and organize information production. Together, these account +for a substantial portion of our information output. Indeed, industry surveys +concerned with patents have shown that the vast majority of industrial R&D is +pursued with strategies that do not rely primarily on patents. This does not +mean that most or any of the firms that ,{[pg 45]}, pursue these strategies +possess or seek no exclusive rights in their information products. It simply +means that their production strategy does not depend on asserting these rights +through exclusion. One such cluster of strategies, which I call "Scholarly +Lawyers," relies on demand-side effects of access to the information the +producer distributes. It relies on the fact that sometimes using an information +good that one has produced makes its users seek out a relationship with the +author. The author then charges for the relationship, not for the information. +Doctors or lawyers who publish in trade journals, become known, and get +business as a result are an instance of this strategy. An enormously creative +industry, much of which operates on this model, is software. About two-thirds +of industry revenues in software development come from activities that the +Economic Census describes as: (1) writing, modifying, testing, and supporting +software to meet the needs of a particular customer; (2) planning and designing +computer systems that integrate computer hardware, software, and communication +technologies; (3) on-site management and operation of clients' computer systems +and/or data processing facilities; and (4) other professional and technical +computer-related advice and services, systems consultants, and computer +training. "Software publishing," by contrast, the business model that relies on +sales based on copyright, accounts for a little more than one-third of the +industry's revenues.~{ In the 2002 Economic Census, compare NAICS categories +5415 (computer systems and related services) to NAICS 5112 (software +publishing). Between the 1997 Economic Census and the 2002 census, this ratio +remained stable, at about 36 percent in 1997 and 37 percent in 2002. See 2002 +Economic Census, "Industry Series, Information, Software Publishers, and +Computer Systems, Design and Related Services" (Washington, DC: U.S. Census +Bureau, 2004). }~ Interestingly, this is the model of appropriation that more +than a decade ago, Esther Dyson and John Perry Barlow heralded as the future of +music and musicians. They argued in the early 1990s for more or less free +access to copies of recordings distributed online, which would lead to greater +attendance at live gigs. Revenue from performances, rather than recording, +would pay artists. +={ demand-side effects of information production ; + Scholarly Lawyers model ; + Barlow, John Perry ; + Dyson, Esther ; + nonexclusion-market production strategies +5 +} + +The most common models of industrial R&D outside of pharmaceuticals, however, +depend on supply-side effects of information production. One central reason to +pursue research is its effects on firm-specific advantages, like production +know-how, which permit the firm to produce more efficiently than competitors +and sell better or cheaper competing products. Daily newspapers collectively +fund news agencies, and individually fund reporters, because their ability to +find information and report it is a necessary input into their product--timely +news. As I have already suggested, they do not need copyright to protect their +revenues. Those are protected by the short half-life of dailies. The +investments come in order to be able to play in the market for daily +newspapers. Similarly, the learning curve and knowhow effects in semiconductors +are such that early entry into the market for ,{[pg 46]}, a new chip will give +the first mover significant advantages over competitors. Investment is then +made to capture that position, and the investment is captured by the +quasi-rents available from the first-mover advantage. In some cases, innovation +is necessary in order to be able to produce at the state of the art. Firms +participate in "Learning Networks" to gain the benefits of being at the state +of the art, and sharing their respective improvements. However, they can only +participate if they innovate. If they do not innovate, they lack the in-house +capacity to understand the state of the art and play at it. Their investments +are then recouped not from asserting their exclusive rights, but from the fact +that they sell into one of a set of markets, access into which is protected by +the relatively small number of firms with such absorption capacity, or the +ability to function at the edge of the state of the art. Firms of this sort +might barter their information for access, or simply be part of a small group +of organizations with enough knowledge to exploit the information generated and +informally shared by all participants in these learning networks. They obtain +rents from the concentrated market structure, not from assertion of property +rights.~{ Levin et al., "Appropriating the Returns," 794-796 (secrecy, lead +time, and learningcurve advantages regarded as more effective than patents by +most firms). See also F. M. Scherer, "Learning by Doing and International Trade +in Semiconductors" (faculty research working paper series R94-13, John F. +Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1994), an +empirical study of semiconductor industry suggesting that for industries with +steep learning curves, investment in information production is driven by +advantages of being first down the learning curve rather than the expectation +of legal rights of exclusion. The absorption effect is described in Wesley M. +Cohen and Daniel A. Leventhal, "Innovation and Learning: The Two Faces of R&D," +The Economic Journal 99 (1989): 569-596. The collaboration effect was initially +described in Richard R. Nelson, "The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific +Research," Journal of Political Economy 67 (June 1959): 297-306. The most +extensive work over the past fifteen years, and the source of the term of +learning networks, has been from Woody Powell on knowledge and learning +networks. Identifying the role of markets made concentrated by the limited +ability to use information, rather than through exclusive rights, was made in +F. M. Scherer, "Nordhaus's Theory of Optimal Patent Life: A Geometric +Reinterpretation," American Economic Review 62 (1972): 422-427.}~ +={ Know-How model ; + information production, market-based : + without property protections +4 ; + market-based information producers : + without property protections +4 ; + supply-side effects of information production +1 ; + learning networks +} + +An excellent example of a business strategy based on nonexclusivity is IBM's. +The firm has obtained the largest number of patents every year from 1993 to +2004, amassing in total more than 29,000 patents. IBM has also, however, been +one of the firms most aggressively engaged in adapting its business model to +the emergence of free software. Figure 2.1 shows what happened to the relative +weight of patent royalties, licenses, and sales in IBM's revenues and revenues +that the firm described as coming from "Linuxrelated services." Within a span +of four years, the Linux-related services category moved from accounting for +practically no revenues, to providing double the revenues from all +patent-related sources, of the firm that has been the most patent-productive in +the United States. IBM has described itself as investing more than a billion +dollars in free software developers, hired programmers to help develop the +Linux kernel and other free software; and donated patents to the Free Software +Foundation. What this does for the firm is provide it with a better operating +system for its server business-- making the servers better, faster, more +reliable, and therefore more valuable to consumers. Participating in free +software development has also allowed IBM to develop service relationships with +its customers, building on free software to offer customer-specific solutions. +In other words, IBM has combined both supply-side and demand-side strategies to +adopt a nonproprietary business model that has generated more than $2 billion +yearly of business ,{[pg 47]}, for the firm. Its strategy is, if not symbiotic, +certainly complementary to free software. +={ free software ; + IBM's business strategy ; + open-source software ; + software, open-source +} + +{won_benkler_2_1.png "Figure 2.1: Selected IBM Revenues, 2000-2003" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/ + +I began this chapter with a puzzle--advanced economies rely on nonmarket +organizations for information production much more than they do in other +sectors. The puzzle reflects the fact that alongside the diversity of +market-oriented business models for information production there is a wide +diversity of nonmarket models as well. At a broad level of abstraction, I +designate this diversity of motivations and organizational forms as "Joe +Einstein"--to underscore the breadth of the range of social practices and +practitioners of nonmarket production. These include universities and other +research institutes; government research labs that publicize their work, or +government information agencies like the Census Bureau. They also include +individuals, like academics; authors and artists who play to "immortality" +rather than seek to maximize the revenue from their creation. Eric von Hippel +has for many years documented user innovation in areas ranging from surfboard +design to new mechanisms for pushing electric wiring through insulation +tiles.~{ Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, +2005). }~ The Oratorio Society of New York, whose chorus ,{[pg 48]}, members +are all volunteers, has filled Carnegie Hall every December with a performance +of Handel's Messiah since the theatre's first season in 1891. Political +parties, advocacy groups, and churches are but few of the stable social +organizations that fill our information environment with news and views. For +symmetry purposes in table 2.1, we also see reliance on internal inventories by +some nonmarket organizations, like secret government labs that do not release +their information outputs, but use it to continue to obtain public funding. +This is what I call "Los Alamos." Sharing in limited networks also occurs in +nonmarket relationships, as when academic colleagues circulate a draft to get +comments. In the nonmarket, nonproprietary domain, however, these strategies +were in the past relatively smaller in scope and significance than the simple +act of taking from the public domain and contributing back to it that typifies +most Joe Einstein behaviors. Only since the mid-1980s have we begun to see a +shift from releasing into the public domain to adoption of commons-binding +licensing, like the "copyleft" strategies I describe in chapter 3. What makes +these strategies distinct from Joe Einstein is that they formalize the +requirement of reciprocity, at least for some set of rights shared. +={ Joe Einstein model ; + nonmarket information producers : + strategies for information production +1 ; + von Hippel, Eric ; + Los Alamos model ; + limited sharing networks +1 ; + sharing : + limited sharing networks +} + +My point is not to provide an exhaustive list of all the ways we produce +information. It is simply to offer some texture to the statement that +information, knowledge, and culture are produced in diverse ways in +contemporary society. Doing so allows us to understand the comparatively +limited role that production based purely on exclusive rights--like patents, +copyrights, and similar regulatory constraints on the use and exchange of +information--has played in our information production system to this day. It is +not new or mysterious to suggest that nonmarket production is important to +information production. It is not new or mysterious to suggest that efficiency +increases whenever it is possible to produce information in a way that allows +the producer--whether market actor or not--to appropriate the benefits of +production without actually charging a price for use of the information itself. +Such strategies are legion among both market and nonmarket actors. Recognizing +this raises two distinct questions: First, how does the cluster of mechanisms +that make up intellectual property law affect this mix? Second, how do we +account for the mix of strategies at any given time? Why, for example, did +proprietary, market-based production become so salient in music and movies in +the twentieth century, and what is it about the digitally networked environment +that could change this mix? ,{[pg 49]}, + +2~ THE EFFECTS OF EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS +={ property ownership : + effects of exclusive rights +4 ; + proprietary rights : + effects of +4 ; + proprietary rights, inefficiency of +4 ; + regulating information, efficiency of +4 ; + efficiency of information regulation +4 ; + economics of information production and innovation : + exclusive rights +4 ; + innovation economics : + exclusive rights +4 ; + inefficiency of information regulation +4 ; + information production economics : + exclusive rights +4 ; + innovation economics : + exclusive rights +4 +} + +Once we recognize that there are diverse strategies of appropriation for +information production, we come to see a new source of inefficiency caused by +strong "intellectual property"-type rights. Recall that in the mainstream +analysis, exclusive rights always cause static inefficiency--that is, they +allow producers to charge positive prices for products (information) that have +a zero marginal cost. Exclusive rights have a more ambiguous effect +dynamically. They raise the expected returns from information production, and +thereby are thought to induce investment in information production and +innovation. However, they also increase the costs of information inputs. If +existing innovations are more likely covered by patent, then current producers +will more likely have to pay for innovations or uses that in the past would +have been available freely from the public domain. Whether, overall, any given +regulatory change that increases the scope of exclusive rights improves or +undermines new innovation therefore depends on whether, given the level of +appropriability that preceded it, it increased input costs more or less than it +increased the prospect of being paid for one's outputs. +={ information appropriation strategies +2 ; + appropriation strategies +2 ; + diversity : + appropriation strategies +2 +} + +The diversity of appropriation strategies adds one more kink to this story. +Consider the following very simple hypothetical. Imagine an industry that +produces "infowidgets." There are ten firms in the business. Two of them are +infowidget publishers on the Romantic Maximizer model. They produce infowidgets +as finished goods, and sell them based on patent. Six firms produce infowidgets +on supply-side (Know-How) or demand-side (Scholarly Lawyer) effects: they make +their Realwidgets or Servicewidgets more efficient or desirable to consumers, +respectively. Two firms are nonprofit infowidget producers that exist on a +fixed, philanthropically endowed income. Each firm produces five infowidgets, +for a total market supply of fifty. Now imagine a change in law that increases +exclusivity. Assume that this is a change in law that, absent diversity of +appropriation, would be considered efficient. Say it increases input costs by +10 percent and appropriability by 20 percent, for a net expected gain of 10 +percent. The two infowidget publishers would each see a 10 percent net gain, +and let us assume that this would cause each to increase its efforts by 10 +percent and produce 10 percent more infowidgets. Looking at these two firms +alone, the change in law caused an increase from ten infowidgets to eleven--a +gain for the policy change. Looking at the market as a whole, however, eight +firms see an increase of 10 percent in costs, and no gain in appropriability. +This is because none of these firms ,{[pg 50]}, actually relies on exclusive +rights to appropriate its product's value. If, commensurate with our assumption +for the publishers, we assume that this results in a decline in effort and +productivity of 10 percent for the eight firms, we would see these firms +decline from forty infowidgets to thirty-six, and total market production would +decline from fifty infowidgets to forty-seven. + +Another kind of effect for the change in law may be to persuade some of the +firms to shift strategies or to consolidate. Imagine, for example, that most of +the inputs required by the two publishers were owned by the other infowidget +publisher. If the two firms merged into one Mickey, each could use the outputs +of the other at its marginal cost--zero--instead of at its exclusive-rights +market price. The increase in exclusive rights would then not affect the merged +firm's costs, only the costs of outside firms that would have to buy the merged +firm's outputs from the market. Given this dynamic, strong exclusive rights +drive concentration of inventory owners. We see this very clearly in the +increasing sizes of inventory-based firms like Disney. Moreover, the increased +appropriability in the exclusive-rights market will likely shift some firms at +the margin of the nonproprietary business models to adopt proprietary business +models. This, in turn, will increase the amount of information available only +from proprietary sources. The feedback effect will further accelerate the rise +in information input costs, increasing the gains from shifting to a proprietary +strategy and to consolidating larger inventories with new production. + +Given diverse strategies, the primary unambiguous effect of increasing the +scope and force of exclusive rights is to shape the population of business +strategies. Strong exclusive rights increase the attractiveness of +exclusiverights-based strategies at the expense of nonproprietary strategies, +whether market-based or nonmarket based. They also increase the value and +attraction of consolidation of large inventories of existing information with +new production. + +2~ WHEN INFORMATION PRODUCTION MEETS THE COMPUTER NETWORK +={ economics of information production and innovation : + production of computer networks +7 ; + innovation economics : + production over computer networks +7 ; + information production economics : + production over computer networks +7 +} + +Music in the nineteenth century was largely a relational good. It was something +people did in the physical presence of each other: in the folk way through +hearing, repeating, and improvising; in the middle-class way of buying sheet +music and playing for guests or attending public performances; or in the +upper-class way of hiring musicians. Capital was widely distributed ,{[pg 51]}, +among musicians in the form of instruments, or geographically dispersed in the +hands of performance hall (and drawing room) owners. Market-based production +depended on performance through presence. It provided opportunities for artists +to live and perform locally, or to reach stardom in cultural centers, but +without displacing the local performers. With the introduction of the +phonograph, a new, more passive relationship to played music was made possible +in reliance on the high-capital requirements of recording, copying, and +distributing specific instantiations of recorded music--records. What developed +was a concentrated, commercial industry, based on massive financial investments +in advertising, or preference formation, aimed at getting ever-larger crowds to +want those recordings that the recording executives had chosen. In other words, +the music industry took on a more industrial model of production, and many of +the local venues--from the living room to the local dance hall--came to be +occupied by mechanical recordings rather than amateur and professional local +performances. This model crowded out some, but not all, of the +live-performance-based markets (for example, jazz clubs, piano bars, or +weddings), and created new live-performance markets--the megastar concert tour. +The music industry shifted from a reliance on Scholarly Lawyer and Joe Einstein +models to reliance on Romantic Maximizer and Mickey models. As computers became +more music-capable and digital networks became a ubiquitously available +distribution medium, we saw the emergence of the present conflict over the +regulation of cultural production--the law of copyright--between the +twentieth-century, industrial model recording industry and the emerging amateur +distribution systems coupled, at least according to its supporters, to a +reemergence of decentralized, relation-based markets for professional +performance artists. +={ music industry +1 } + +This stylized story of the music industry typifies the mass media more +generally. Since the introduction of the mechanical press and the telegraph, +followed by the phonograph, film, the high-powered radio transmitter, and +through to the cable plant or satellite, the capital costs of fixing +information and cultural goods in a transmission medium--a high-circulation +newspaper, a record or movie, a radio or television program--have been high and +increasing. The high physical and financial capital costs involved in making a +widely accessible information good and distributing it to the increasingly +larger communities (brought together by better transportation systems and more +interlinked economic and political systems) muted the relative role of +nonmarket production, and emphasized the role of those firms that could ,{[pg +52]}, muster the financial and physical capital necessary to communicate on a +mass scale. Just as these large, industrial-age machine requirements increased +the capital costs involved in information and cultural production, thereby +triggering commercialization and concentration of much of this sector, so too +ubiquitously available cheap processors have dramatically reduced the capital +input costs required to fix information and cultural expressions and +communicate them globally. By doing so, they have rendered feasible a radical +reorganization of our information and cultural production system, away from +heavy reliance on commercial, concentrated business models and toward greater +reliance on nonproprietary appropriation strategies, in particular nonmarket +strategies whose efficacy was dampened throughout the industrial period by the +high capital costs of effective communication. + +Information and cultural production have three primary categories of inputs. +The first is existing information and culture. We already know that existing +information is a nonrival good--that is, its real marginal cost at any given +moment is zero. The second major cost is that of the mechanical means of +sensing our environment, processing it, and communicating new information +goods. This is the high cost that typified the industrial model, and which has +drastically declined in computer networks. The third factor is human +communicative capacity--the creativity, experience, and cultural awareness +necessary to take from the universe of existing information and cultural +resources and turn them into new insights, symbols, or representations +meaningful to others with whom we converse. Given the zero cost of existing +information and the declining cost of communication and processing, human +capacity becomes the primary scarce resource in the networked information +economy. +={ building on existing information ; + existing information, building on ; + reuse of information ; + capabilities of individuals : + human capacity as resource +4 ; + capacity : + human communication +4 ; + communication : + capacity of +4 ; + cost : + capital for production creative capacity +4 ; + human communicative capacity +4 ; + individual capabilities and action : + human capacity as resource ; + information production inputs : + existing information ; + inputs to production : + existing information ; + production inputs : + existing information +} + +Human communicative capacity, however, is an input with radically different +characteristics than those of, say, printing presses or satellites. It is held +by each individual, and cannot be "transferred" from one person to another or +aggregated like so many machines. It is something each of us innately has, +though in divergent quanta and qualities. Individual human capacities, rather +than the capacity to aggregate financial capital, become the economic core of +our information and cultural production. Some of that human capacity is +currently, and will continue to be, traded through markets in creative labor. +However, its liberation from the constraints of physical capital leaves +creative human beings much freer to engage in a wide range of information and +cultural production practices than those they could afford to participate in +when, in addition to creativity, experience, cultural awareness ,{[pg 53]}, and +time, one needed a few million dollars to engage in information production. +From our friendships to our communities we live life and exchange ideas, +insights, and expressions in many more diverse relations than those mediated by +the market. In the physical economy, these relationships were largely relegated +to spaces outside of our economic production system. The promise of the +networked information economy is to bring this rich diversity of social life +smack into the middle of our economy and our productive lives. + +Let's do a little experiment. Imagine that you were performing a Web search +with me. Imagine that we were using Google as our search engine, and that what +we wanted to do was answer the questions of an inquisitive six-year-old about +Viking ships. What would we get, sitting in front of our computers and plugging +in a search request for "Viking Ships"? The first site is Canadian, and +includes a collection of resources, essays, and worksheets. An enterprising +elementary school teacher at the Gander Academy in Newfoundland seems to have +put these together. He has essays on different questions, and links to sites +hosted by a wide range of individuals and organizations, such as a Swedish +museum, individual sites hosted on geocities, and even to a specific picture of +a replica Viking ship, hosted on a commercial site dedicated to selling +nautical replicas. In other words, it is a Joe Einstein site that points to +other sites, which in turn use either Joe Einstein or Scholarly Lawyer +strategies. This multiplicity of sources of information that show up on the +very first site is then replicated as one continues to explore the remaining +links. The second link is to a Norwegian site called "the Viking Network," a +Web ring dedicated to preparing and hosting short essays on Vikings. It +includes brief essays, maps, and external links, such as one to an article in +Scientific American. "To become a member you must produce an Information Sheet +on the Vikings in your local area and send it in electronic format to Viking +Network. Your info-sheet will then be included in the Viking Network web." The +third site is maintained by a Danish commercial photographer, and hosted in +Copenhagen, in a portion dedicated to photographs of archeological finds and +replicas of Danish Viking ships. A retired professor from the University of +Pittsburgh runs the fourth. The fifth is somewhere between a hobby and a +showcase for the services of an individual, independent Web publisher offering +publishing-related services. The sixth and seventh are museums, in Norway and +Virginia, respectively. The eighth is the Web site of a hobbyists' group +dedicated to building Viking Ship replicas. The ninth includes classroom +materials and ,{[pg 54]}, teaching guides made freely available on the Internet +by PBS, the American Public Broadcasting Service. Certainly, if you perform +this search now, as you read this book, the rankings will change from those I +saw when I ran it; but I venture that the mix, the range and diversity of +producers, and the relative salience of nonmarket producers will not change +significantly. + +The difference that the digitally networked environment makes is its capacity +to increase the efficacy, and therefore the importance, of many more, and more +diverse, nonmarket producers falling within the general category of Joe +Einstein. It makes nonmarket strategies--from individual hobbyists to formal, +well-funded nonprofits--vastly more effective than they could be in the +mass-media environment. The economics of this phenomenon are neither mysterious +nor complex. Imagine the grade-school teacher who wishes to put together ten to +twenty pages of materials on Viking ships for schoolchildren. Pre-Internet, he +would need to go to one or more libraries and museums, find books with +pictures, maps, and text, or take his own photographs (assuming he was +permitted by the museums) and write his own texts, combining this research. He +would then need to select portions, clear the copyrights to reprint them, find +a printing house that would set his text and pictures in a press, pay to print +a number of copies, and then distribute them to all children who wanted them. +Clearly, research today is simpler and cheaper. Cutting and pasting pictures +and texts that are digital is cheaper. Depending on where the teacher is +located, it is possible that these initial steps would have been +insurmountable, particularly for a teacher in a poorly endowed community +without easy access to books on the subject, where research would have required +substantial travel. Even once these barriers were surmounted, in the +precomputer, pre-Internet days, turning out materials that looked and felt like +a high quality product, with highresolution pictures and maps, and legible +print required access to capitalintensive facilities. The cost of creating even +one copy of such a product would likely dissuade the teacher from producing the +booklet. At most, he might have produced a mimeographed bibliography, and +perhaps some text reproduced on a photocopier. Now, place the teacher with a +computer and a high-speed Internet connection, at home or in the school +library. The cost of production and distribution of the products of his effort +are trivial. A Web site can be maintained for a few dollars a month. The +computer itself is widely accessible throughout the developed world. It becomes +trivial for a teacher to produce the "booklet"--with more information, +available to anyone in the world, anywhere, at any time, as long as he is +willing to spend ,{[pg 55]}, some of his free time putting together the booklet +rather than watching television or reading a book. +={ nonmarket strategies, effectiveness of +2 ; + technology : + effectiveness of nonmarket strategies +2 +} + +When you multiply these very simple stylized facts by the roughly billion +people who live in societies sufficiently wealthy to allow cheap ubiquitous +Internet access, the breadth and depth of the transformation we are undergoing +begins to become clear. A billion people in advanced economies may have between +two billion and six billion spare hours among them, every day. In order to +harness these billions of hours, it would take the whole workforce of almost +340,000 workers employed by the entire motion picture and recording industries +in the United States put together, assuming each worker worked forty-hour weeks +without taking a single vacation, for between three and eight and a half years! +Beyond the sheer potential quantitative capacity, however one wishes to +discount it to account for different levels of talent, knowledge, and +motivation, a billion volunteers have qualities that make them more likely to +produce what others want to read, see, listen to, or experience. They have +diverse interests--as diverse as human culture itself. Some care about Viking +ships, others about the integrity of voting machines. Some care about obscure +music bands, others share a passion for baking. As Eben Moglen put it, "if you +wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, +software flows in the network. It's an emergent property of connected human +minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their +uneasy sense of being too alone."~{ Eben Moglen, "Anarchism Triumphant: Free +Software and the Death of Copyright," First Monday (1999), +http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_8/moglen/. }~ It is this combination of +a will to create and to communicate with others, and a shared cultural +experience that makes it likely that each of us wants to talk about something +that we believe others will also want to talk about, that makes the billion +potential participants in today's online conversation, and the six billion in +tomorrow's conversation, affirmatively better than the commercial industrial +model. When the economics of industrial production require high up-front costs +and low marginal costs, the producers must focus on creating a few superstars +and making sure that everyone tunes in to listen or watch them. This requires +that they focus on averaging out what consumers are most likely to buy. This +works reasonably well as long as there is no better substitute. As long as it +is expensive to produce music or the evening news, there are indeed few +competitors for top billing, and the star system can function. Once every +person on the planet, or even only every person living in a wealthy economy and +10-20 percent of those living in poorer countries, can easily talk to their +friends and compatriots, the competition becomes tougher. It does not mean that +there is no continued role ,{[pg 56]}, for the mass-produced and mass-marketed +cultural products--be they Britney Spears or the broadcast news. It does, +however, mean that many more "niche markets"--if markets, rather than +conversations, are what they should be called--begin to play an ever-increasing +role in the total mix of our cultural production system. The economics of +production in a digital environment should lead us to expect an increase in the +relative salience of nonmarket production models in the overall mix of our +information production system, and it is efficient for this to happen--more +information will be produced, and much of it will be available for its users at +its marginal cost. +={ diversity : + human communication +1 ; + Moglen, Eben ; + niche markets +} + +The known quirky characteristics of information and knowledge as production +goods have always given nonmarket production a much greater role in this +production system than was common in capitalist economies for tangible goods. +The dramatic decline in the cost of the material means of producing and +exchanging information, knowledge, and culture has substantially decreased the +costs of information expression and exchange, and thereby increased the +relative efficacy of nonmarket production. When these facts are layered over +the fact that information, knowledge, and culture have become the central +high-value-added economic activities of the most advanced economies, we find +ourselves in a new and unfamiliar social and economic condition. Social +behavior that traditionally was relegated to the peripheries of the economy has +become central to the most advanced economies. Nonmarket behavior is becoming +central to producing our information and cultural environment. Sources of +knowledge and cultural edification, through which we come to know and +comprehend the world, to form our opinions about it, and to express ourselves +in communication with others about what we see and believe have shifted from +heavy reliance on commercial, concentrated media, to being produced on a much +more widely distributed model, by many actors who are not driven by the +imperatives of advertising or the sale of entertainment goods. + +2~ STRONG EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT +={ economics of information production and innovation : + exclusive rights +3 ; + information production economics : + exclusive rights +3 ; + innovation economics : + exclusive rights +3 ; + proprietary rights +3 +} + +We now have the basic elements of a clash between incumbent institutions and +emerging social practice. Technologies of information and cultural production +initially led to the increasing salience of commercial, industrialmodel +production in these areas. Over the course of the twentieth century, ,{[pg +57]}, in some of the most culturally visible industries like movies and music, +copyright law coevolved with the industrial model. By the end of the twentieth +century, copyright was longer, broader, and vastly more encompassing than it +had been at the beginning of that century. Other exclusive rights in +information, culture, and the fruits of innovation expanded following a similar +logic. Strong, broad, exclusive rights like these have predictable effects. +They preferentially improve the returns to business models that rely on +exclusive rights, like copyrights and patents, at the expense of information +and cultural production outside the market or in market relationships that do +not depend on exclusive appropriation. They make it more lucrative to +consolidate inventories of existing materials. The businesses that developed +around the material capital required for production fed back into the political +system, which responded by serially optimizing the institutional ecology to fit +the needs of the industrial information economy firms at the expense of other +information producers. + +The networked information economy has upset the apple cart on the technical, +material cost side of information production and exchange. The institutional +ecology, the political framework (the lobbyists, the habits of legislatures), +and the legal culture (the beliefs of judges, the practices of lawyers) have +not changed. They are as they developed over the course of the twentieth +century--centered on optimizing the conditions of those commercial firms that +thrive in the presence of strong exclusive rights in information and culture. +The outcome of the conflict between the industrial information economy and its +emerging networked alternative will determine whether we evolve into a +permission culture, as Lessig warns and projects, or into a society marked by +social practice of nonmarket production and cooperative sharing of information, +knowledge, and culture of the type I describe throughout this book, and which I +argue will improve freedom and justice in liberal societies. Chapter 11 +chronicles many of the arenas in which this basic conflict is played out. +However, for the remainder of this part and part II, the basic economic +understanding I offer here is all that is necessary. + +There are diverse motivations and strategies for organizing information +production. Their relative attractiveness is to some extent dependent on +technology, to some extent on institutional arrangements. The rise that we see +today in the efficacy and scope of nonmarket production, and of the peer +production that I describe and analyze in the following two chapters, are well +within the predictable, given our understanding of the economics of information +production. The social practices of information production ,{[pg 58]}, that +form the basis of much of the normative analysis I offer in part II are +internally sustainable given the material conditions of information production +and exchange in the digitally networked environment. These patterns are +unfamiliar to us. They grate on our intuitions about how production happens. +They grate on the institutional arrangements we developed over the course of +the twentieth century to regulate information and cultural production. But that +is because they arise from a quite basically different set of material +conditions. We must understand these new modes of production. We must learn to +evaluate them and compare their advantages and disadvantages to those of the +industrial information producers. And then we must adjust our institutional +environment to make way for the new social practices made possible by the +networked environment. ,{[pg 59]}, + +1~3 Chapter 3 - Peer Production and Sharing +={ peer production +63 ; + sharing +63 +} + +At the heart of the economic engine, of the world's most advanced economies, we +are beginning to notice a persistent and quite amazing phenomenon. A new model +of production has taken root; one that should not be there, at least according +to our most widely held beliefs about economic behavior. It should not, the +intuitions of the late-twentieth-century American would say, be the case that +thousands of volunteers will come together to collaborate on a complex economic +project. It certainly should not be that these volunteers will beat the largest +and best-financed business enterprises in the world at their own game. And yet, +this is precisely what is happening in the software world. + +Industrial organization literature provides a prominent place for the +transaction costs view of markets and firms, based on insights of Ronald Coase +and Oliver Williamson. On this view, people use markets when the gains from +doing so, net of transaction costs, exceed the gains from doing the same thing +in a managed firm, net of the costs of organizing and managing a firm. Firms +emerge when the opposite is true, and transaction costs can best be reduced by +,{[pg 60]}, bringing an activity into a managed context that requires no +individual transactions to allocate this resource or that effort. The emergence +of free and open-source software, and the phenomenal success of its flagships, +the GNU/ Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, Perl, and many others, +should cause us to take a second look at this dominant paradigm.~{ For an +excellent history of the free software movement and of open-source development, +see Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution (New +York: Perseus Publishing, 2001). }~ Free software projects do not rely on +markets or on managerial hierarchies to organize production. Programmers do not +generally participate in a project because someone who is their boss told them +to, though some do. They do not generally participate in a project because +someone offers them a price to do so, though some participants do focus on +long-term appropriation through money-oriented activities, like consulting or +service contracts. However, the critical mass of participation in projects +cannot be explained by the direct presence of a price or even a future monetary +return. This is particularly true of the all-important, microlevel decisions: +who will work, with what software, on what project. In other words, programmers +participate in free software projects without following the signals generated +by marketbased, firm-based, or hybrid models. In chapter 2 I focused on how the +networked information economy departs from the industrial information economy +by improving the efficacy of nonmarket production generally. Free software +offers a glimpse at a more basic and radical challenge. It suggests that the +networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production: +radically decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary; based on sharing +resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals +who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or +managerial commands. This is what I call "commons-based peer production." +={ Coase, Ronald ; + capital for production : + transaction costs ; + commercial model of communication : + transaction costs ; + constraints of information production, monetary : + transaction cost ; + economics of nonmarket production : + transaction costs ; + industrial model of communication : + transaction costs ; + information production, market-based : + transaction costs ; + information production capital : + transaction costs ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + transaction costs ; + market-based information producers : + transaction costs ; + monetary constraints on information production : + transaction costs ; + nonmarket production, economics of : + transaction costs ; + norms (social) : + transaction costs ; + physical capital for production : + transaction costs ; + production capital : + transaction costs ; + regulation by social norms : + transaction costs ; + social relations and norms : + transaction costs ; + strategies for information production : + transaction costs ; + traditional model of communication : + transaction costs ; + transaction costs ; + Williamson, Oliver ; + commons +3 +} + +"Commons" refers to a particular institutional form of structuring the rights +to access, use, and control resources. It is the opposite of "property" in the +following sense: With property, law determines one particular person who has +the authority to decide how the resource will be used. That person may sell it, +or give it away, more or less as he or she pleases. "More or less" because +property doesn't mean anything goes. We cannot, for example, decide that we +will give our property away to one branch of our family, as long as that branch +has boys, and then if that branch has no boys, decree that the property will +revert to some other branch of the family. That type of provision, once common +in English property law, is now legally void for public policy reasons. There +are many other things we cannot do with our property--like build on wetlands. +However, the core characteristic of property ,{[pg 61]}, as the institutional +foundation of markets is that the allocation of power to decide how a resource +will be used is systematically and drastically asymmetric. That asymmetry +permits the existence of "an owner" who can decide what to do, and with whom. +We know that transactions must be made-- rent, purchase, and so forth--if we +want the resource to be put to some other use. The salient characteristic of +commons, as opposed to property, is that no single person has exclusive control +over the use and disposition of any particular resource in the commons. +Instead, resources governed by commons may be used or disposed of by anyone +among some (more or less well-defined) number of persons, under rules that may +range from "anything goes" to quite crisply articulated formal rules that are +effectively enforced. +={ property ownership : + control over, as asymmetric +2 ; + asymmetric commons +1 +} + +Commons can be divided into four types based on two parameters. The first +parameter is whether they are open to anyone or only to a defined group. The +oceans, the air, and highway systems are clear examples of open commons. +Various traditional pasture arrangements in Swiss villages or irrigation +regions in Spain are now classic examples, described by Eleanor Ostrom, of +limited-access common resources--where access is limited only to members of the +village or association that collectively "owns" some defined pasturelands or +irrigation system.~{ Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of +Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, +1990). }~ As Carol Rose noted, these are better thought of as limited common +property regimes, rather than commons, because they behave as property +vis-a-vis the entire world except members ` of the group who together hold them +in common. The second parameter is whether a commons system is regulated or +unregulated. Practically all well-studied, limited common property regimes are +regulated by more or less elaborate rules--some formal, some +social-conventional--governing the use of the resources. Open commons, on the +other hand, vary widely. Some commons, called open access, are governed by no +rule. Anyone can use resources within these types of commons at will and +without payment. Air is such a resource, with respect to air intake (breathing, +feeding a turbine). However, air is a regulated commons with regard to outtake. +For individual human beings, breathing out is mildly regulated by social +convention--you do not breath too heavily on another human being's face unless +forced to. Air is a more extensively regulated commons for industrial +exhalation--in the shape of pollution controls. The most successful and obvious +regulated commons in contemporary landscapes are the sidewalks, streets, roads, +and highways that cover our land and regulate the material foundation of our +ability to move from one place to the other. In all these cases, however, the +characteristic of commons is that the constraints, if any, are symmetric ,{[pg +62]}, among all users, and cannot be unilaterally controlled by any single +individual. The term "commons-based" is intended to underscore that what is +characteristic of the cooperative enterprises I describe in this chapter is +that they are not built around the asymmetric exclusion typical of property. +Rather, the inputs and outputs of the process are shared, freely or +conditionally, in an institutional form that leaves them equally available for +all to use as they choose at their individual discretion. This latter +characteristic-- that commons leave individuals free to make their own choices +with regard to resources managed as a commons--is at the foundation of the +freedom they make possible. This is a freedom I return to in the discussion of +autonomy. Not all commons-based production efforts qualify as peer production. +Any production strategy that manages its inputs and outputs as commons locates +that production modality outside the proprietary system, in a framework of +social relations. It is the freedom to interact with resources and projects +without seeking anyone's permission that marks commons-based production +generally, and it is also that freedom that underlies the particular +efficiencies of peer production, which I explore in chapter 4. +={ commons : + types of ; + limited-access common resources ; + open commons ; + regulated commons ; + Rose, Carol ; + symmetric commons ; + unregulated commons ; + freedom : + of commons +} + +The term "peer production" characterizes a subset of commons-based production +practices. It refers to production systems that depend on individual action +that is self-selected and decentralized, rather than hierarchically assigned. +"Centralization" is a particular response to the problem of how to make the +behavior of many individual agents cohere into an effective pattern or achieve +an effective result. Its primary attribute is the separation of the locus of +opportunities for action from the authority to choose the action that the agent +will undertake. Government authorities, firm managers, teachers in a classroom, +all occupy a context in which potentially many individual wills could lead to +action, and reduce the number of people whose will is permitted to affect the +actual behavior patterns that the agents will adopt. "Decentralization" +describes conditions under which the actions of many agents cohere and are +effective despite the fact that they do not rely on reducing the number of +people whose will counts to direct effective action. A substantial literature +in the past twenty years, typified, for example, by Charles Sabel's work, has +focused on the ways in which firms have tried to overcome the rigidities of +managerial pyramids by decentralizing learning, planning, and execution of the +firm's functions in the hands of employees or teams. The most pervasive mode of +"decentralization," however, is the ideal market. Each individual agent acts +according to his or her will. Coherence and efficacy emerge because individuals +signal their wishes, and plan ,{[pg 63]}, their behavior not in cooperation +with others, but by coordinating, understanding the will of others and +expressing their own through the price system. +={ centralization of communications : + decentralization ; + decentralization of communications ; + ideal market ; + Sabel, Charles +} + +What we are seeing now is the emergence of more effective collective action +practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the price system or +a managerial structure for coordination. In this, they complement the +increasing salience of uncoordinated nonmarket behavior that we saw in chapter +2. The networked environment not only provides a more effective platform for +action to nonprofit organizations that organize action like firms or to +hobbyists who merely coexist coordinately. It also provides a platform for new +mechanisms for widely dispersed agents to adopt radically decentralized +cooperation strategies other than by using proprietary and contractual claims +to elicit prices or impose managerial commands. This kind of information +production by agents operating on a decentralized, nonproprietary model is not +completely new. Science is built by many people contributing incrementally--not +operating on market signals, not being handed their research marching orders by +a boss--independently deciding what to research, bringing their collaboration +together, and creating science. What we see in the networked information +economy is a dramatic increase in the importance and the centrality of +information produced in this way. + +2~ FREE/OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE +={ free software +7 ; + open-source software +7 ; + software, open-source +7 +} + +The quintessential instance of commons-based peer production has been free +software. Free software, or open source, is an approach to software development +that is based on shared effort on a nonproprietary model. It depends on many +individuals contributing to a common project, with a variety of motivations, +and sharing their respective contributions without any single person or entity +asserting rights to exclude either from the contributed components or from the +resulting whole. In order to avoid having the joint product appropriated by any +single party, participants usually retain copyrights in their contribution, but +license them to anyone--participant or stranger--on a model that combines a +universal license to use the materials with licensing constraints that make it +difficult, if not impossible, for any single contributor or third party to +appropriate the project. This model of licensing is the most important +institutional innovation of the free software movement. Its central instance is +the GNU General Public License, or GPL. ,{[pg 64]}, +={ General Public License (GPL) +4 ; + GPL (General Public License) +4 ; + licensing : + GPL (General Public License) +4 +} + +This requires anyone who modifies software and distributes the modified version +to license it under the same free terms as the original software. While there +have been many arguments about how widely the provisions that prevent +downstream appropriation should be used, the practical adoption patterns have +been dominated by forms of licensing that prevent anyone from exclusively +appropriating the contributions or the joint product. More than 85 percent of +active free software projects include some version of the GPL or similarly +structured license.~{ Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole, "The Scope of Open Source +Licensing" (Harvard NOM working paper no. 02-42, table 1, Cambridge, MA, 2002). +The figure is computed out of the data reported in this paper for the number of +free software development projects that Lerner and Tirole identify as having +"restrictive" or "very restrictive" licenses. }~ + +Free software has played a critical role in the recognition of peer production, +because software is a functional good with measurable qualities. It can be more +or less authoritatively tested against its market-based competitors. And, in +many instances, free software has prevailed. About 70 percent of Web server +software, in particular for critical e-commerce sites, runs on the Apache Web +server--free software.~{ Netcraft, April 2004 Web Server Survey, +http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_ server_survey.html. }~ More than half of +all back-office e-mail functions are run by one free software program or +another. Google, Amazon, and CNN.com, for example, run their Web servers on the +GNU/Linux operating system. They do this, presumably, because they believe this +peerproduced operating system is more reliable than the alternatives, not +because the system is "free." It would be absurd to risk a higher rate of +failure in their core business activities in order to save a few hundred +thousand dollars on licensing fees. Companies like IBM and Hewlett Packard, +consumer electronics manufacturers, as well as military and other +mission-critical government agencies around the world have begun to adopt +business and service strategies that rely and extend free software. They do +this because it allows them to build better equipment, sell better services, or +better fulfill their public role, even though they do not control the software +development process and cannot claim proprietary rights of exclusion in the +products of their contributions. +={ GNU/Linux operating system +3 } + +The story of free software begins in 1984, when Richard Stallman started +working on a project of building a nonproprietary operating system he called +GNU (GNU's Not Unix). Stallman, then at the Massachusetts Institute of +Technology (MIT), operated from political conviction. He wanted a world in +which software enabled people to use information freely, where no one would +have to ask permission to change the software they use to fit their needs or to +share it with a friend for whom it would be helpful. These freedoms to share +and to make your own software were fundamentally incompatible with a model of +production that relies on property rights and markets, he thought, because in +order for there to be a market in uses of ,{[pg 65]}, software, owners must be +able to make the software unavailable to people who need it. These people would +then pay the provider in exchange for access to the software or modification +they need. If anyone can make software or share software they possess with +friends, it becomes very difficult to write software on a business model that +relies on excluding people from software they need unless they pay. As a +practical matter, Stallman started writing software himself, and wrote a good +bit of it. More fundamentally, he adopted a legal technique that started a +snowball rolling. He could not write a whole operating system by himself. +Instead, he released pieces of his code under a license that allowed anyone to +copy, distribute, and modify the software in whatever way they pleased. He +required only that, if the person who modified the software then distributed it +to others, he or she do so under the exact same conditions that he had +distributed his software. In this way, he invited all other programmers to +collaborate with him on this development program, if they wanted to, on the +condition that they be as generous with making their contributions available to +others as he had been with his. Because he retained the copyright to the +software he distributed, he could write this condition into the license that he +attached to the software. This meant that anyone using or distributing the +software as is, without modifying it, would not violate Stallman's license. +They could also modify the software for their own use, and this would not +violate the license. However, if they chose to distribute the modified +software, they would violate Stallman's copyright unless they included a +license identical to his with the software they distributed. This license +became the GNU General Public License, or GPL. The legal jujitsu Stallman +used--asserting his own copyright claims, but only to force all downstream +users who wanted to rely on his contributions to make their own contributions +available to everyone else--came to be known as "copyleft," an ironic twist on +copyright. This legal artifice allowed anyone to contribute to the GNU project +without worrying that one day they would wake up and find that someone had +locked them out of the system they had helped to build. +={ Stallman, Richard +2 ; + copyleft +} + +The next major step came when a person with a more practical, rather than +prophetic, approach to his work began developing one central component of the +operating system--the kernel. Linus Torvalds began to share the early +implementations of his kernel, called Linux, with others, under the GPL. These +others then modified, added, contributed, and shared among themselves these +pieces of the operating system. Building on top of Stallman's foundation, +Torvalds crystallized a model of production that was fundamentally ,{[pg 66]}, +different from those that preceded it. His model was based on voluntary +contributions and ubiquitous, recursive sharing; on small incremental +improvements to a project by widely dispersed people, some of whom contributed +a lot, others a little. Based on our usual assumptions about volunteer projects +and decentralized production processes that have no managers, this was a model +that could not succeed. But it did. +={ Linux operating system ; + Torvalds, Linus +} + +It took almost a decade for the mainstream technology industry to recognize the +value of free or open-source software development and its collaborative +production methodology. As the process expanded and came to encompass more +participants, and produce more of the basic tools of Internet connectivity--Web +server, e-mail server, scripting--more of those who participated sought to +"normalize" it, or, more specifically, to render it apolitical. Free software +is about freedom ("free as in free speech, not free beer" is Stallman's epitaph +for it). "Open-source software" was chosen as a term that would not carry the +political connotations. It was simply a mode of organizing software production +that may be more effective than market-based production. This move to +depoliticize peer production of software led to something of a schism between +the free software movement and the communities of open source software +developers. It is important to understand, however, that from the perspective +of society at large and the historical trajectory of information production +generally the abandonment of political motivation and the importation of free +software into the mainstream have not made it less politically interesting, but +more so. Open source and its wide adoption in the business and bureaucratic +mainstream allowed free software to emerge from the fringes of the software +world and move to the center of the public debate about practical alternatives +to the current way of doing things. +={ collaboration, open-source +1 } + +So what is open-source software development? The best source for a +phenomenology of open-source development continues to be Eric Raymond's +/{Cathedral and Bazaar}/, written in 1998. Imagine that one person, or a small +group of friends, wants a utility. It could be a text editor, photo-retouching +software, or an operating system. The person or small group starts by +developing a part of this project, up to a point where the whole utility--if it +is simple enough--or some important part of it, is functional, though it might +have much room for improvement. At this point, the person makes the program +freely available to others, with its source code--instructions in a +human-readable language that explain how the software does whatever it does +when compiled into a machine-readable language. When others begin ,{[pg 67]}, +to use it, they may find bugs, or related utilities that they want to add +(e.g., the photo-retouching software only increases size and sharpness, and one +of its users wants it to allow changing colors as well). The person who has +found the bug or is interested in how to add functions to the software may or +may not be the best person in the world to actually write the software fix. +Nevertheless, he reports the bug or the new need in an Internet forum of users +of the software. That person, or someone else, then thinks that they have a way +of tweaking the software to fix the bug or add the new utility. They then do +so, just as the first person did, and release a new version of the software +with the fix or the added utility. The result is a collaboration between three +people--the first author, who wrote the initial software; the second person, +who identified a problem or shortcoming; and the third person, who fixed it. +This collaboration is not managed by anyone who organizes the three, but is +instead the outcome of them all reading the same Internet-based forum and using +the same software, which is released under an open, rather than proprietary, +license. This enables some of its users to identify problems and others to fix +these problems without asking anyone's permission and without engaging in any +transactions. +={ Raymond, Eric } + +The most surprising thing that the open source movement has shown, in real +life, is that this simple model can operate on very different scales, from the +small, three-person model I described for simple projects, up to the many +thousands of people involved in writing the Linux kernel and the GNU/ Linux +operating system--an immensely difficult production task. SourceForge, the most +popular hosting-meeting place of such projects, has close to 100,000 registered +projects, and nearly a million registered users. The economics of this +phenomenon are complex. In the larger-scale models, actual organization form is +more diverse than the simple, three-person model. In particular, in some of the +larger projects, most prominently the Linux kernel development process, a +certain kind of meritocratic hierarchy is clearly present. However, it is a +hierarchy that is very different in style, practical implementation, and +organizational role than that of the manager in the firm. I explain this in +chapter 4, as part of the analysis of the organizational forms of peer +production. For now, all we need is a broad outline of how peer-production +projects look, as we turn to observe case studies of kindred production models +in areas outside of software. ,{[pg 68]}, + +2~ PEER PRODUCTION OF INFORMATION, KNOWLEDGE, AND CULTURE GENERALLY + +Free software is, without a doubt, the most visible instance of peer production +at the turn of the twenty-first century. It is by no means, however, the only +instance. Ubiquitous computer communications networks are bringing about a +dramatic change in the scope, scale, and efficacy of peer production throughout +the information and cultural production system. As computers become cheaper and +as network connections become faster, cheaper, and ubiquitous, we are seeing +the phenomenon of peer production of information scale to much larger sizes, +performing more complex tasks than were possible in the past for +nonprofessional production. To make this phenomenon more tangible, I describe a +number of such enterprises, organized to demonstrate the feasibility of this +approach throughout the information production and exchange chain. While it is +possible to break an act of communication into finer-grained subcomponents, +largely we see three distinct functions involved in the process. First, there +is an initial utterance of a humanly meaningful statement. Writing an article +or drawing a picture, whether done by a professional or an amateur, whether +high quality or low, is such an action. Second, there is a separate function of +mapping the initial utterances on a knowledge map. In particular, an utterance +must be understood as "relevant" in some sense, and "credible." Relevance is a +subjective question of mapping an utterance on the conceptual map of a given +user seeking information for a particular purpose defined by that individual. +Credibility is a question of quality by some objective measure that the +individual adopts as appropriate for purposes of evaluating a given utterance. +The distinction between the two is somewhat artificial, however, because very +often the utility of a piece of information will depend on a combined valuation +of its credibility and relevance. I therefore refer to +"relevance/accreditation" as a single function for purposes of this discussion, +keeping in mind that the two are complementary and not entirely separable +functions that an individual requires as part of being able to use utterances +that others have uttered in putting together the user's understanding of the +world. Finally, there is the function of distribution, or how one takes an +utterance produced by one person and distributes it to other people who find it +credible and relevant. In the mass-media world, these functions were often, +though by no means always, integrated. NBC news produced the utterances, gave +them credibility by clearing them on the evening news, and distributed ,{[pg +69]}, them simultaneously. What the Internet is permitting is much greater +disaggregation of these functions. +={ accreditation ; + distribution of information ; + filtering ; + information production inputs +13 ; + inputs to production +13 ; + production inputs +13 ; + relevance filtering +} + +3~ Uttering Content + +NASA Clickworkers was "an experiment to see if public volunteers, each working +for a few minutes here and there can do some routine science analysis that +would normally be done by a scientist or graduate student working for months on +end." Users could mark craters on maps of Mars, classify craters that have +already been marked, or search the Mars landscape for "honeycomb" terrain. The +project was "a pilot study with limited funding, run part-time by one software +engineer, with occasional input from two scientists." In its first six months +of operation, more than 85,000 users visited the site, with many contributing +to the effort, making more than 1.9 million entries (including redundant +entries of the same craters, used to average out errors). An analysis of the +quality of markings showed "that the automaticallycomputed consensus of a large +number of clickworkers is virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a +geologist with years of experience in identifying Mars craters."~{ Clickworkers +Results: Crater Marking Activity, July 3, 2001, http://clickworkers.arc +.nasa.gov/documents/crater-marking.pdf. }~ The tasks performed by clickworkers +(like marking craters) were discrete, each easily performed in a matter of +minutes. As a result, users could choose to work for a few minutes doing a +single iteration or for hours by doing many. An early study of the project +suggested that some clickworkers indeed worked on the project for weeks, but +that 37 percent of the work was done by one-time contributors.~{ /{B. Kanefsky, +N. G. Barlow, and V. C. Gulick}/, Can Distributed Volunteers Accomplish Massive +Data Analysis Tasks? http://www.clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/documents +/abstract.pdf. }~ +={ clickworkers project +2 ; + information production inputs : + NASA Clickworkers project +2 ; + inputs to production : + NASA Clickworkers project +2 ; + NASA Clickworkers +2 ; + production inputs NASA Clickworkers project +2 +} + +The clickworkers project was a particularly clear example of how a complex +professional task that requires a number of highly trained individuals on +full-time salaries can be reorganized so as to be performed by tens of +thousands of volunteers in increments so minute that the tasks could be +performed on a much lower budget. The low budget would be devoted to +coordinating the volunteer effort. However, the raw human capital needed would +be contributed for the fun of it. The professionalism of the original +scientists was replaced by a combination of high modularization of the task. +The organizers broke a large, complex task into small, independent modules. +They built in redundancy and automated averaging out of both errors and +purposeful erroneous markings--like those of an errant art student who thought +it amusing to mark concentric circles on the map. What the NASA scientists +running this experiment had tapped into was a vast pool of fiveminute +increments of human judgment, applied with motivation to participate in a task +unrelated to "making a living." ,{[pg 70]}, + +While clickworkers was a distinct, self-conscious experiment, it suggests +characteristics of distributed production that are, in fact, quite widely +observable. We have already seen in chapter 2, in our little search for Viking +ships, how the Internet can produce encyclopedic or almanac-type information. +The power of the Web to answer such an encyclopedic question comes not from the +fact that one particular site has all the great answers. It is not an +Encyclopedia Britannica. The power comes from the fact that it allows a user +looking for specific information at a given time to collect answers from a +sufficiently large number of contributions. The task of sifting and accrediting +falls to the user, motivated by the need to find an answer to the question +posed. As long as there are tools to lower the cost of that task to a level +acceptable to the user, the Web shall have "produced" the information content +the user was looking for. These are not trivial considerations, but they are +also not intractable. As we shall see, some of the solutions can themselves be +peer produced, and some solutions are emerging as a function of the speed of +computation and communication, which enables more efficient technological +solutions. +={ communities : + critical culture and self-reflection +9 ; + culture : + criticality of (self-reflection) +9 +} + +Encyclopedic and almanac-type information emerges on the Web out of the +coordinate but entirely independent action of millions of users. This type of +information also provides the focus on one of the most successful collaborative +enterprises that has developed in the first five years of the twenty-first +century, /{Wikipedia}/. /{Wikipedia}/ was founded by an Internet entrepreneur, +Jimmy Wales. Wales had earlier tried to organize an encyclopedia named Nupedia, +which was built on a traditional production model, but whose outputs were to be +released freely: its contributors were to be PhDs, using a formal, +peer-reviewed process. That project appears to have failed to generate a +sufficient number of high-quality contributions, but its outputs were used in +/{Wikipedia}/ as the seeds for a radically new form of encyclopedia writing. +Founded in January 2001, /{Wikipedia}/ combines three core characteristics: +First, it uses a collaborative authorship tool, Wiki. This platform enables +anyone, including anonymous passersby, to edit almost any page in the entire +project. It stores all versions, makes changes easily visible, and enables +anyone to revert a document to any prior version as well as to add changes, +small and large. All contributions and changes are rendered transparent by the +software and database. Second, it is a self-conscious effort at creating an +encyclopedia--governed first and foremost by a collective informal undertaking +to strive for a neutral point of view, within the limits of substantial +self-awareness as to the difficulties of such an enterprise. An effort ,{[pg +71]}, to represent sympathetically all views on a subject, rather than to +achieve objectivity, is the core operative characteristic of this effort. +Third, all the content generated by this collaboration is released under the +GNU Free Documentation License, an adaptation of the GNU GPL to texts. The +shift in strategy toward an open, peer-produced model proved enormously +successful. The site saw tremendous growth both in the number of contributors, +including the number of active and very active contributors, and in the number +of articles included in the encyclopedia (table 3.1). Most of the early growth +was in English, but more recently there has been an increase in the number of +articles in many other languages: most notably in German (more than 200,000 +articles), Japanese (more than 120,000 articles), and French (about 100,000), +but also in another five languages that have between 40,000 and 70,000 articles +each, another eleven languages with 10,000 to 40,000 articles each, and +thirty-five languages with between 1,000 and 10,000 articles each. +={ critical culture and self-reflection : + Wikipedia project +8 ; + information production inputs : + Wikipedia project +8 ; + inputs to production : + Wikipedia project +8 ; + production inputs : + Wikipedia project +8 ; + self-organization : + Wikipedia project +8 ; + Wikipedia project +8 +} + +The first systematic study of the quality of /{Wikipedia}/ articles was +published as this book was going to press. The journal Nature compared 42 +science articles from /{Wikipedia}/ to the gold standard of the Encyclopedia +Britannica, and concluded that "the difference in accuracy was not particularly +great."~{ J. Giles, "Special Report: Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head," +Nature, December 14, 2005, available at +http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html. }~ On November 15, +2004, Robert McHenry, a former editor in chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, +published an article criticizing /{Wikipedia}/ as "The Faith-Based +Encyclopedia."~{ http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html. }~ As an +example, McHenry mocked the /{Wikipedia}/ article on Alexander Hamilton. He +noted that Hamilton biographers have a problem fixing his birth year--whether +it is 1755 or 1757. /{Wikipedia}/ glossed over this error, fixing the date at +1755. McHenry then went on to criticize the way the dates were treated +throughout the article, using it as an anchor to his general claim: +/{Wikipedia}/ is unreliable because it is not professionally produced. What +McHenry did not note was that the other major online encyclopedias--like +Columbia or Encarta--similarly failed to deal with the ambiguity surrounding +Hamilton's birth date. Only the Britannica did. However, McHenry's critique +triggered the /{Wikipedia}/ distributed correction mechanism. Within hours of +the publication of McHenry's Web article, the reference was corrected. The +following few days saw intensive cleanup efforts to conform all references in +the biography to the newly corrected version. Within a week or so, +/{Wikipedia}/ had a correct, reasonably clean version. It now stood alone with +the Encyclopedia Britannica as a source of accurate basic encyclopedic +information. In coming to curse it, McHenry found himself blessing +/{Wikipedia}/. He had demonstrated ,{[pg 72]}, precisely the correction +mechanism that makes /{Wikipedia}/, in the long term, a robust model of +reasonably reliable information. +={ McHenry, Robert } + +!_ Table 3.1: Contributors to Wikipedia, January 2001 - June 2005 + +{table~h 24; 12; 12; 12; 12; 12; 12;} + |Jan. 2001|Jan. 2002|Jan. 2003|Jan. 2004|July 2004|June 2006 +Contributors* | 10| 472| 2,188| 9,653| 25,011| 48,721 +Active contributors** | 9| 212| 846| 3,228| 8,442| 16,945 +Very active contributors*** | 0| 31| 190| 692| 1,639| 3,016 +No. of English language articles| 25| 16,000| 101,000| 190,000| 320,000| 630,000 +No. of articles, all languages | 25| 19,000| 138,000| 490,000| 862,000|1,600,000 + +\* Contributed at least ten times; \** at least 5 times in last month; \*\** +more than 100 times in last month. + +- Perhaps the most interesting characteristic about /{Wikipedia}/ is the +selfconscious social-norms-based dedication to objective writing. Unlike some +of the other projects that I describe in this chapter, /{Wikipedia}/ does not +include elaborate software-controlled access and editing capabilities. It is +generally open for anyone to edit the materials, delete another's change, +debate the desirable contents, survey archives for prior changes, and so forth. +It depends on self-conscious use of open discourse, usually aimed at consensus. +While there is the possibility that a user will call for a vote of the +participants on any given definition, such calls can, and usually are, ignored +by the community unless a sufficiently large number of users have decided that +debate has been exhausted. While the system operators and server host-- +Wales--have the practical power to block users who are systematically +disruptive, this power seems to be used rarely. The project relies instead on +social norms to secure the dedication of project participants to objective +writing. So, while not entirely anarchic, the project is nonetheless +substantially more social, human, and intensively discourse- and trust-based +than the other major projects described here. The following fragments from an +early version of the self-described essential characteristics and basic +policies of /{Wikipedia}/ are illustrative: +={ norms (social) +3 ; + regulation by social norms +3 ; + social regulations and norms +3 +} + +_1 First and foremost, the /{Wikipedia}/ project is self-consciously an +encyclopedia-- rather than a dictionary, discussion forum, web portal, etc. +/{Wikipedia}/'s participants ,{[pg 73]}, commonly follow, and enforce, a few +basic policies that seem essential to keeping the project running smoothly and +productively. First, because we have a huge variety of participants of all +ideologies, and from around the world, /{Wikipedia}/ is committed to making its +articles as unbiased as possible. The aim is not to write articles from a +single objective point of view--this is a common misunderstanding of the +policy--but rather, to fairly and sympathetically present all views on an +issue. See "neutral point of view" page for further explanation. ~{ Yochai +Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm," Yale Law +Journal 112 (2001): 369. }~ +={ commercial model of communication : + security-related policy +2 ; + industrial model of communication : + security-related policy +2 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + security-related policy +2 ; + policy : + security-related policy +2 ; + security-related policy : + vandalism on Wikipedia +2 ; + traditional model of communication : + security-related policy +2 ; + vandalism on Wikipedia +2 +} + +The point to see from this quotation is that the participants of /{Wikipedia}/ +are plainly people who like to write. Some of them participate in other +collaborative authorship projects. However, when they enter the common project +of /{Wikipedia}/, they undertake to participate in a particular way--a way that +the group has adopted to make its product be an encyclopedia. On their +interpretation, that means conveying in brief terms the state of the art on the +item, including divergent opinions about it, but not the author's opinion. +Whether that is an attainable goal is a subject of interpretive theory, and is +a question as applicable to a professional encyclopedia as it is to +/{Wikipedia}/. As the project has grown, it has developed more elaborate spaces +for discussing governance and for conflict resolution. It has developed +structures for mediation, and if that fails, arbitration, of disputes about +particular articles. + +The important point is that /{Wikipedia}/ requires not only mechanical +cooperation among people, but a commitment to a particular style of writing and +describing concepts that is far from intuitive or natural to people. It +requires self-discipline. It enforces the behavior it requires primarily +through appeal to the common enterprise that the participants are engaged in, +coupled with a thoroughly transparent platform that faithfully records and +renders all individual interventions in the common project and facilitates +discourse among participants about how their contributions do, or do not, +contribute to this common enterprise. This combination of an explicit statement +of common purpose, transparency, and the ability of participants to identify +each other's actions and counteract them--that is, edit out "bad" or +"faithless" definitions--seems to have succeeded in keeping this community from +devolving into inefficacy or worse. A case study by IBM showed, for example, +that while there were many instances of vandalism on /{Wikipedia}/, including +deletion of entire versions of articles on controversial topics like +"abortion," the ability of users to see what was done and to fix it with a +single click by reverting to a past version meant that acts of vandalism were +,{[pg 74]}, corrected within minutes. Indeed, corrections were so rapid that +vandalism acts and their corrections did not even appear on a mechanically +generated image of the abortion definition as it changed over time.~{ IBM +Collaborative User Experience Research Group, History Flows: Results (2003), +http://www.research.ibm.com/history/results.htm. }~ What is perhaps surprising +is that this success occurs not in a tightly knit community with many social +relations to reinforce the sense of common purpose and the social norms +embodying it, but in a large and geographically dispersed group of otherwise +unrelated participants. It suggests that even in a group of this size, social +norms coupled with a facility to allow any participant to edit out purposeful +or mistaken deviations in contravention of the social norms, and a robust +platform for largely unmediated conversation, keep the group on track. + +A very different cultural form of distributed content production is presented +by the rise of massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) as immersive +entertainment. These fall in the same cultural "time slot" as television shows +and movies of the twentieth century. The interesting thing about these types of +games is that they organize the production of "scripts" very differently from +movies or television shows. In a game like Ultima Online or EverQuest, the role +of the commercial provider is not to tell a finished, highly polished story to +be consumed start to finish by passive consumers. Rather, the role of the game +provider is to build tools with which users collaborate to tell a story. There +have been observations about this approach for years, regarding MUDs +(Multi-User Dungeons) and MOOs (Multi-User Object Oriented games). The point to +understand about MMOGs is that they produce a discrete element of "content" +that was in the past dominated by centralized professional production. The +screenwriter of an immersive entertainment product like a movie is like the +scientist marking Mars craters--a professional producer of a finished good. In +MMOGs, this function is produced by using the appropriate software platform to +allow the story to be written by the many users as they experience it. The +individual contributions of the users/coauthors of the story line are literally +done for fun-- they are playing a game. However, they are spending real +economic goods-- their attention and substantial subscription fees--on a form +of entertainment that uses a platform for active coproduction of a story line +to displace what was once passive reception of a finished, commercially and +professionally manufactured good. +={ communities : + immersive entertainment +1 ; + computer gaming environment +1 ; + entertainment industry : + immersive +1 ; + games, immersive +1 ; + immersive entertainment +1 ; + information production inputs : + immersive entertainment +1 ; + inputs to production : + immersive entertainment +1 ; + massive multiplayer games ; + MMOGs (massive multiplayer online games) ; + production inputs : + immersive entertainment +1 +} + +By 2003, a company called Linden Lab took this concept a major step forward by +building an online game environment called Second Life. Second Life began +almost entirely devoid of content. It was tools all the way down. ,{[pg 75]}, +Within a matter of months, it had thousands of subscribers, inhabiting a +"world" that had thousands of characters, hundreds of thousands of objects, +multiple areas, villages, and "story lines." The individual users themselves +had created more than 99 percent of all objects in the game environment, and +all story lines and substantive frameworks for interaction--such as a +particular village or group of theme-based participants. The interactions in +the game environment involved a good deal of gift giving and a good deal of +trade, but also some very surprising structured behaviors. Some users set up a +university, where lessons were given in both in-game skills and in programming. +Others designed spaceships and engaged in alien abductions (undergoing one +seemed to become a status symbol within the game). At one point, aiming +(successfully) to prevent the company from changing its pricing policy, users +staged a demonstration by making signs and picketing the entry point to the +game; and a "tax revolt" by placing large numbers of "tea crates" around an +in-game reproduction of the Washington Monument. Within months, Second Life had +become an immersive experience, like a movie or book, but one where the +commercial provider offered a platform and tools, while the users wrote the +story lines, rendered the "set," and performed the entire play. +={ Second Life game environment } + +3~ Relevance/Accreditation +={ accreditation +10 ; + filtering +10 ; + relevance filtering +10 +} + +How are we to know that the content produced by widely dispersed individuals is +not sheer gobbledygook? Can relevance and accreditation itself be produced on a +peer-production model? One type of answer is provided by looking at commercial +businesses that successfully break off precisely the "accreditation and +relevance" piece of their product, and rely on peer production to perform that +function. Amazon and Google are probably the two most prominent examples of +this strategy. +={ accreditation : + Amazon +1 ; + Amazon +1 ; + filtering : + Amazon +1 ; + relevance filtering : + Amazon +1 +} + +Amazon uses a mix of mechanisms to get in front of their buyers of books and +other products that the users are likely to purchase. A number of these +mechanisms produce relevance and accreditation by harnessing the users +themselves. At the simplest level, the recommendation "customers who bought +items you recently viewed also bought these items" is a mechanical means of +extracting judgments of relevance and accreditation from the actions of many +individuals, who produce the datum of relevance as byproduct of making their +own purchasing decisions. Amazon also allows users to create topical lists and +track other users as their "friends and favorites." Amazon, like many consumer +sites today, also provides users with the ability ,{[pg 76]}, to rate books +they buy, generating a peer-produced rating by averaging the ratings. More +fundamentally, the core innovation of Google, widely recognized as the most +efficient general search engine during the first half of the 2000s, was to +introduce peer-based judgments of relevance. Like other search engines at the +time, Google used a text-based algorithm to retrieve a given universe of Web +pages initially. Its major innovation was its PageRank algorithm, which +harnesses peer production of ranking in the following way. The engine treats +links from other Web sites pointing to a given Web site as votes of confidence. +Whenever someone who authors a Web site links to someone else's page, that +person has stated quite explicitly that the linked page is worth a visit. +Google's search engine counts these links as distributed votes of confidence in +the quality of the page pointed to. Pages that are heavily linked-to count as +more important votes of confidence. If a highly linked-to site links to a given +page, that vote counts for more than the vote of a site that no one else thinks +is worth visiting. The point to take home from looking at Google and Amazon is +that corporations that have done immensely well at acquiring and retaining +users have harnessed peer production to enable users to find things they want +quickly and efficiently. +={ accreditation : + Google ; + communities : + critical culture and self-reflection +1 ; + culture : + criticality of (self-reflection) +1 ; + filtering : + Google ; + Google ; + relevance filtering : + Google +} + +The most prominent example of a distributed project self-consciously devoted to +peer production of relevance is the Open Directory Project. The site relies on +more than sixty thousand volunteer editors to determine which links should be +included in the directory. Acceptance as a volunteer requires application. +Quality relies on a peer-review process based substantially on seniority as a +volunteer and level of engagement with the site. The site is hosted and +administered by Netscape, which pays for server space and a small number of +employees to administer the site and set up the initial guidelines. Licensing +is free and presumably adds value partly to America Online's (AOL's) and +Netscape's commercial search engine/portal and partly through goodwill. +Volunteers are not affiliated with Netscape and receive no compensation. They +spend time selecting sites for inclusion in the directory (in small increments +of perhaps fifteen minutes per site reviewed), producing the most +comprehensive, highest-quality human-edited directory of the Web--at this point +outshining the directory produced by the company that pioneered human edited +directories of the Web: Yahoo!. +={ accreditation : + Open Directory Project (ODP) ; + critical culture and self-reflection : + Open Directory Project ; + filtering : + Open Directory Project (ODP) ; + ODP (Open Directory Project) ; + Open Directory Project (ODP) ; + relevance filtering : + Open Directory Project (ODP) ; + self-organization : + Open Directory Project +} + +Perhaps the most elaborate platform for peer production of relevance and +accreditation, at multiple layers, is used by Slashdot. Billed as "News for +Nerds," Slashdot has become a leading technology newsletter on the Web, +coproduced by hundreds of thousands of users. Slashdot primarily consists ,{[pg +77]}, of users commenting on initial submissions that cover a variety of +technology-related topics. The submissions are typically a link to an off-site +story, coupled with commentary from the person who submits the piece. Users +follow up the initial submission with comments that often number in the +hundreds. The initial submissions themselves, and more importantly, the +approach to sifting through the comments of users for relevance and +accreditation, provide a rich example of how this function can be performed on +a distributed, peer-production model. +={ accreditation : + Slashdot +6 ; + filtering : + Slashdot +6 ; + relevance filtering : + Slashdot +6 ; + Slashdot +6 +} + +First, it is important to understand that the function of posting a story from +another site onto Slashdot, the first "utterance" in a chain of comments on +Slashdot, is itself an act of relevance production. The person submitting the +story is telling the community of Slashdot users, "here is a story that `News +for Nerds' readers should be interested in." This initial submission of a link +is itself very coarsely filtered by editors who are paid employees of Open +Source Technology Group (OSTG), which runs a number of similar platforms--like +SourceForge, the most important platform for free software developers. OSTG is +a subsidiary of VA Software, a software services company. The FAQ (Frequently +Asked Question) response to, "how do you verify the accuracy of Slashdot +stories?" is revealing: "We don't. You do. If something seems outrageous, we +might look for some corroboration, but as a rule, we regard this as the +responsibility of the submitter and the audience. This is why it's important to +read comments. You might find something that refutes, or supports, the story in +the main." In other words, Slashdot very self-consciously is organized as a +means of facilitating peer production of accreditation; it is at the comments +stage that the story undergoes its most important form of accreditation--peer +review ex-post. +={ OSTG (Open Source Technology Group) } + +Filtering and accreditation of comments on Slashdot offer the most interesting +case study of peer production of these functions. Users submit comments that +are displayed together with the initial submission of a story. Think of the +"content" produced in these comments as a cross between academic peer review of +journal submissions and a peer-produced substitute for television's "talking +heads." It is in the means of accrediting and evaluating these comments that +Slashdot's system provides a comprehensive example of peer production of +relevance and accreditation. Slashdot implements an automated system to select +moderators from the pool of users. Moderators are chosen according to several +criteria; they must be logged in (not anonymous), they must be regular users +(who use the site averagely, not one-time page loaders or compulsive users), +they must have been using ,{[pg 78]}, the site for a while (this defeats people +who try to sign up just to moderate), they must be willing, and they must have +positive "karma." Karma is a number assigned to a user that primarily reflects +whether he or she has posted good or bad comments (according to ratings from +other moderators). If a user meets these criteria, the program assigns the user +moderator status and the user gets five "influence points" to review comments. +The moderator rates a comment of his choice using a drop-down list with words +such as "flamebait" and "informative." A positive word increases the rating of +a comment one point and a negative word decreases the rating a point. Each time +a moderator rates a comment, it costs one influence point, so he or she can +only rate five comments for each moderating period. The period lasts for three +days and if the user does not use the influence points, they expire. The +moderation setup is designed to give many users a small amount of power. This +decreases the effect of users with an ax to grind or with poor judgment. The +site also implements some automated "troll filters," which prevent users from +sabotaging the system. Troll filters stop users from posting more than once +every sixty seconds, prevent identical posts, and will ban a user for +twenty-four hours if he or she has been moderated down several times within a +short time frame. Slashdot then provides users with a "threshold" filter that +allows each user to block lower-quality comments. The scheme uses the numerical +rating of the comment (ranging from 1 to 5). Comments start out at 0 for +anonymous posters, 1 for registered users, and 2 for registered users with good +"karma." As a result, if a user sets his or her filter at 1, the user will not +see any comments from anonymous posters unless the comments' ratings were +increased by a moderator. A user can set his or her filter anywhere from 1 +(viewing all of the comments) to 5 (where only the posts that have been +upgraded by several moderators will show up). +={ karma (Slashdot) ; + norms (social) : + Slashdot mechanisms for +3 ; + regulation by social norms : + Slashdot mechanisms for +3 ; + social relations and norms : + Slashdot mechanisms for +3 ; + troll filters (Slashdot) +} + +Relevance, as distinct from accreditation, is also tied into the Slashdot +scheme because off-topic posts should receive an "off topic" rating by the +moderators and sink below the threshold level (assuming the user has the +threshold set above the minimum). However, the moderation system is limited to +choices that sometimes are not mutually exclusive. For instance, a moderator +may have to choose between "funny" ( 1) and "off topic" ( 1) when a post is +both funny and off topic. As a result, an irrelevant post can increase in +ranking and rise above the threshold level because it is funny or informative. +It is unclear, however, whether this is a limitation on relevance, or indeed +mimics our own normal behavior, say in reading a newspaper or browsing a +library, where we might let our eyes linger longer on a funny or ,{[pg 79]}, +informative tidbit, even after we have ascertained that it is not exactly +relevant to what we were looking for. + +The primary function of moderation is to provide accreditation. If a user sets +a high threshold level, they will only see posts that are considered of high +quality by the moderators. Users also receive accreditation through their +karma. If their posts consistently receive high ratings, their karma will +increase. At a certain karma level, their comments will start off with a rating +of 2, thereby giving them a louder voice in the sense that users with a +threshold of 2 will now see their posts immediately, and fewer upward +moderations are needed to push their comments even higher. Conversely, a user +with bad karma from consistently poorly rated comments can lose accreditation +by having his or her posts initially start off at 0 or 1. In addition to the +mechanized means of selecting moderators and minimizing their power to skew the +accreditation system, Slashdot implements a system of peer-review accreditation +for the moderators themselves. Slashdot accomplishes this "metamoderation" by +making any user that has an account from the first 90 percent of accounts +created on the system eligible to evaluate the moderators. Each eligible user +who opts to perform metamoderation review is provided with ten random moderator +ratings of comments. The user/metamoderator then rates the moderator's rating +as either unfair, fair, or neither. The metamoderation process affects the +karma of the original moderator, which, when lowered sufficiently by cumulative +judgments of unfair ratings, will remove the moderator from the moderation +system. +={ metamoderation (Slashdot) +1 } + +Together, these mechanisms allow for distributed production of both relevance +and accreditation. Because there are many moderators who can moderate any given +comment, and thanks to the mechanisms that explicitly limit the power of any +one moderator to overinfluence the aggregate judgment, the system evens out +differences in evaluation by aggregating judgments. It then allows individual +users to determine what level of accreditation pronounced by this aggregate +system fits their particular time and needs by setting their filter to be more +or less inclusive. By introducing "karma," the system also allows users to +build reputation over time, and to gain greater control over the accreditation +of their own work relative to the power of the critics. Users, moderators, and +metamoderators are all volunteers. + +The primary point to take from the Slashdot example is that the same dynamic +that we saw used for peer production of initial utterances, or content, can be +implemented to produce relevance and accreditation. Rather than using the +full-time effort of professional accreditation experts, the system ,{[pg 80]}, +is designed to permit the aggregation of many small judgments, each of which +entails a trivial effort for the contributor, regarding both relevance and +accreditation of the materials. The software that mediates the communication +among the collaborating peers embeds both the means to facilitate the +participation and a variety of mechanisms designed to defend the common effort +from poor judgment or defection. + +3~ Value-Added Distribution +={ distribution of information +3 } + +Finally, when we speak of information or cultural goods that exist (content has +been produced) and are made usable through some relevance and accreditation +mechanisms, there remains the question of distribution. To some extent, this is +a nonissue on the Internet. Distribution is cheap. All one needs is a server +and large pipes connecting one's server to the world. Nonetheless, this segment +of the publication process has also provided us with important examples of peer +production, including one of its earliest examples--Project Gutenberg. + +Project Gutenberg entails hundreds of volunteers who scan in and correct books +so that they are freely available in digital form. It has amassed more than +13,000 books, and makes the collection available to everyone for free. The vast +majority of the "e-texts" offered are public domain materials. The site itself +presents the e-texts in ASCII format, the lowest technical common denominator, +but does not discourage volunteers from offering the e-texts in markup +languages. It contains a search engine that allows a reader to search for +typical fields such as subject, author, and title. Project Gutenberg volunteers +can select any book that is in the public domain to transform into an e-text. +The volunteer submits a copy of the title page of the book to Michael Hart--who +founded the project--for copyright research. The volunteer is notified to +proceed if the book passes the copyright clearance. The decision on which book +to convert to e-text is left up to the volunteer, subject to copyright +limitations. Typically, a volunteer converts a book to ASCII format using OCR +(optical character recognition) and proofreads it one time in order to screen +it for major errors. He or she then passes the ASCII file to a volunteer +proofreader. This exchange is orchestrated with very little supervision. The +volunteers use a Listserv mailing list and a bulletin board to initiate and +supervise the exchange. In addition, books are labeled with a version number +indicating how many times they have been proofed. The site encourages +volunteers to select a book that has a low number and proof it. The Project +Gutenberg proofing process is simple. ,{[pg 81]}, Proofreaders (aside from the +first pass) are not expected to have access to the book, but merely review the +e-text for self-evident errors. +={ Hart, Michael +1 ; + Project Gutenberg +1 +} + +Distributed Proofreading, a site originally unaffiliated with Project +Gutenberg, is devoted to proofing Project Gutenberg e-texts more efficiently, +by distributing the volunteer proofreading function in smaller and more +information-rich modules. Charles Franks, a computer programmer from Las Vegas, +decided that he had a more efficient way to proofread these etexts. He built an +interface that allowed volunteers to compare scanned images of original texts +with the e-texts available on Project Gutenberg. In the Distributed +Proofreading process, scanned pages are stored on the site, and volunteers are +shown a scanned page and a page of the e-text simultaneously so that they can +compare the e-text to the original page. Because of the fine-grained +modularity, proofreaders can come on the site and proof one or a few pages and +submit them. By contrast, on the Project Gutenberg site, the entire book is +typically exchanged, or at minimum, a chapter. In this fashion, Distributed +Proofreading clears the proofing of tens of thousands of pages every month. +After a couple of years of working independently, Franks joined forces with +Hart. By late 2004, the site had proofread more than five thousand volumes +using this method. +={ Franks, Charles ; + distributed production +} + +3~ Sharing of Processing, Storage, and Communications Platforms +={ allocating excess capacity +15 ; + capacity : + sharing +15 ; + excess capacity, sharing +15 ; + reallocating excess capacity +15 ; + sharing +15 : + excess capacity +15 +} + +All the examples of peer production that we have seen up to this point have +been examples where individuals pool their time, experience, wisdom, and +creativity to form new information, knowledge, and cultural goods. As we look +around the Internet, however, we find that users also cooperate in similar +loosely affiliated groups, without market signals or managerial commands, to +build supercomputers and massive data storage and retrieval systems. In their +radical decentralization and reliance on social relations and motivations, +these sharing practices are similar to peer production of information, +knowledge, and culture. They differ in one important aspect: Users are not +sharing their innate and acquired human capabilities, and, unlike information, +their inputs and outputs are not public goods. The participants are, instead, +sharing material goods that they privately own, mostly personal computers and +their components. They produce economic, not public, goods--computation, +storage, and communications capacity. +={ supercomputers +1 ; + capacity : + processing (computational) +1 ; + computational capacity +1 ; + processing capacity +1 +} + +As of the middle of 2004, the fastest supercomputer in the world was SETI@home. +It ran about 75 percent faster than the supercomputer that ,{[pg 82]}, was then +formally known as "the fastest supercomputer in the world": the IBM Blue +Gene/L. And yet, there was and is no single SETI@home computer. Instead, the +SETI@home project has developed software and a collaboration platform that have +enabled millions of participants to pool their computation resources into a +single powerful computer. Every user who participates in the project must +download a small screen saver. When a user's personal computer is idle, the +screen saver starts up, downloads problems for calculation--in SETI@home, these +are radio astronomy signals to be analyzed for regularities--and calculates the +problem it has downloaded. Once the program calculates a solution, it +automatically sends its results to the main site. The cycle continues for as +long as, and repeats every time that, the computer is idle from its user's +perspective. As of the middle of 2004, the project had harnessed the computers +of 4.5 million users, allowing it to run computations at speeds greater than +those achieved by the fastest supercomputers in the world that private firms, +using full-time engineers, developed for the largest and best-funded government +laboratories in the world. SETI@home is the most prominent, but is only one +among dozens of similarly structured Internet-based distributed computing +platforms. Another, whose structure has been the subject of the most extensive +formal analysis by its creators, is Folding@home. As of mid-2004, Folding@home +had amassed contributions of about 840,000 processors contributed by more than +365,000 users. +={ SETI@home project +2 ; + distributed computing projects +2 ; + Folding@home project +2 ; + home project +2 +} + +SETI@home and Folding@home provide a good basis for describing the fairly +common characteristics of Internet-based distributed computation projects. +First, these are noncommercial projects, engaged in pursuits understood as +scientific, for the general good, seeking to harness contributions of +individuals who wish to contribute to such larger-than-themselves goals. +SETI@home helps in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Folding@home +helps in protein folding research. Fightaids@home is dedicated to running +models that screen compounds for the likelihood that they will provide good +drug candidates to fight HIV/AIDS. Genome@home is dedicated to modeling +artificial genes that would be created to generate useful proteins. Other +sites, like those dedicated to cryptography or mathematics, have a narrower +appeal, and combine "altruistic" with hobby as their basic motivational appeal. +The absence of money is, in any event, typical of the large majority of active +distributed computing projects. Less than one-fifth of these projects mention +money at all. Most of those that do mention money refer to the contributors' +eligibility for a share of a generally available ,{[pg 83]}, prize for solving +a scientific or mathematical challenge, and mix an appeal to hobby and altruism +with the promise of money. Only two of about sixty projects active in 2004 were +built on a pay-per-contribution basis, and these were quite small-scale by +comparison to many of the others. +={ altruism +1 ; + Fightaids@home project ; + Genome@home project +} + +Most of the distributed computing projects provide a series of utilities and +statistics intended to allow contributors to attach meaning to their +contributions in a variety of ways. The projects appear to be eclectic in their +implicit social and psychological theories of the motivations for participation +in the projects. Sites describe the scientific purpose of the models and the +specific scientific output, including posting articles that have used the +calculations. In these components, the project organizers seem to assume some +degree of taste for generalized altruism and the pursuit of meaning in +contributing to a common goal. They also implement a variety of mechanisms to +reinforce the sense of purpose, such as providing aggregate statistics about +the total computations performed by the project as a whole. However, the sites +also seem to assume a healthy dose of what is known in the anthropology of gift +literature as agonistic giving--that is, giving intended to show that the +person giving is greater than or more important than others, who gave less. For +example, most of the sites allow individuals to track their own contributions, +and provide "user of the month"-type rankings. An interesting characteristic of +quite a few of these is the ability to create "teams" of users, who in turn +compete on who has provided more cycles or work units. SETI@home in particular +taps into ready-made nationalisms, by offering country-level statistics. Some +of the team names on Folding@home also suggest other, out-of-project bonding +measures, such as national or ethnic bonds (for example, Overclockers Australia +or Alliance Francophone), technical minority status (for example, Linux or +MacAddict4Life), and organizational affiliation (University of Tennessee or +University of Alabama), as well as shared cultural reference points (Knights +who say Ni!). In addition, the sites offer platforms for simple connectedness +and mutual companionship, by offering user fora to discuss the science and the +social participation involved. It is possible that these sites are shooting in +the dark, as far as motivating sharing is concerned. It also possible, however, +that they have tapped into a valuable insight, which is that people behave +sociably and generously for all sorts of different reasons, and that at least +in this domain, adding reasons to participate--some agonistic, some altruistic, +some reciprocity-seeking--does not have a crowding-out effect. +={ agnostic giving } + +Like distributed computing projects, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks are +,{[pg 84]}, an excellent example of a highly efficient system for storing and +accessing data in a computer network. These networks of sharing are much less +"mysterious," in terms of understanding the human motivation behind +participation. Nevertheless, they provide important lessons about the extent to +which large-scale collaboration among strangers or loosely affiliated users can +provide effective communications platforms. For fairly obvious reasons, we +usually think of peer-to-peer networks, beginning with Napster, as a "problem." +This is because they were initially overwhelmingly used to perform an act that, +by the analysis of almost any legal scholar, was copyright infringement. To a +significant extent, they are still used in this form. There were, and continue +to be, many arguments about whether the acts of the firms that provided +peer-to-peer software were responsible for the violations. However, there has +been little argument that anyone who allows thousands of other users to make +copies of his or her music files is violating copyright-- hence the public +interpretation of the creation of peer-to-peer networks as primarily a problem. +From the narrow perspective of the law of copyright or of the business model of +the recording industry and Hollywood, this may be an appropriate focus. From +the perspective of diagnosing what is happening to our social and economic +structure, the fact that the files traded on these networks were mostly music +in the first few years of this technology's implementation is little more than +a distraction. Let me explain why. +={ file-sharing networks +4 ; + p2p networks +4 ; + peer-to-peer networks +4 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + peer-to-peer networks +4 ; + network topology : + peer-to-peer networks +4 ; + structure of network : + peer-to-peer networks +4 ; + topology, network : + peer-to-peer networks +4 ; + music industry : + peer-to-peer networks and +1 ; + proprietary rights : + peer-to-peer networks and +1 +} + +Imagine for a moment that someone--be it a legislator defining a policy goal or +a businessperson defining a desired service--had stood up in mid1999 and set +the following requirements: "We would like to develop a new music and movie +distribution system. We would like it to store all the music and movies ever +digitized. We would like it to be available from anywhere in the world. We +would like it to be able to serve tens of millions of users at any given +moment." Any person at the time would have predicted that building such a +system would cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars; that running it +would require large standing engineering staffs; that managing it so that users +could find what they wanted and not drown in the sea of content would require +some substantial number of "curators"--DJs and movie buffs--and that it would +take at least five to ten years to build. Instead, the system was built cheaply +by a wide range of actors, starting with Shawn Fanning's idea and +implementation of Napster. Once the idea was out, others perfected the idea +further, eliminating the need for even the one centralized feature that Napster +included--a list of who had what files on which computer that provided the +matchmaking function in the Napster ,{[pg 85]}, network. Since then, under the +pressure of suits from the recording industry and a steady and persistent +demand for peer-to-peer music software, rapid successive generations of +Gnutella, and then the FastTrack clients KaZaa and Morpheus, Overnet and +eDonkey, the improvements of BitTorrent, and many others have enhanced the +reliability, coverage, and speed of the peer-to-peer music distribution +system--all under constant threat of litigation, fines, police searches and +even, in some countries, imprisonment of the developers or users of these +networks. +={ Fanning, Shawn } + +What is truly unique about peer-to-peer networks as a signal of what is to come +is the fact that with ridiculously low financial investment, a few teenagers +and twenty-something-year-olds were able to write software and protocols that +allowed tens of millions of computer users around the world to cooperate in +producing the most efficient and robust file storage and retrieval system in +the world. No major investment was necessary in creating a server farm to store +and make available the vast quantities of data represented by the media files. +The users' computers are themselves the "server farm." No massive investment in +dedicated distribution channels made of high-quality fiber optics was +necessary. The standard Internet connections of users, with some very +intelligent file transfer protocols, sufficed. Architecture oriented toward +enabling users to cooperate with each other in storage, search, retrieval, and +delivery of files was all that was necessary to build a content distribution +network that dwarfed anything that existed before. + +Again, there is nothing mysterious about why users participate in peer-to-peer +networks. They want music; they can get it from these networks for free; so +they participate. The broader point to take from looking at peer-to-peer +file-sharing networks, however, is the sheer effectiveness of large-scale +collaboration among individuals once they possess, under their individual +control, the physical capital necessary to make their cooperation effective. +These systems are not "subsidized," in the sense that they do not pay the full +marginal cost of their service. Remember, music, like all information, is a +nonrival public good whose marginal cost, once produced, is zero. Moreover, +digital files are not "taken" from one place in order to be played in the +other. They are replicated wherever they are wanted, and thereby made more +ubiquitous, not scarce. The only actual social cost involved at the time of the +transmission is the storage capacity, communications capacity, and processing +capacity necessary to store, catalog, search, retrieve, and transfer the +information necessary to replicate the files from where copies reside to where +more copies are desired. As with any nonrival good, if Jane is willing ,{[pg +86]}, to spend the actual social costs involved in replicating the music file +that already exists and that Jack possesses, then it is efficient that she do +so without paying the creator a dime. It may throw a monkey wrench into the +particular way in which our society has chosen to pay musicians and recording +executives. This, as we saw in chapter 2, trades off efficiency for longer-term +incentive effects for the recording industry. However, it is efficient within +the normal meaning of the term in economics in a way that it would not have +been had Jane and Jack used subsidized computers or network connections. +={ information production : + nonrivalry ; + production of information : + nonrivalry ; + networks sharing +} + +As with distributed computing, peer-to-peer file-sharing systems build on the +fact that individual users own vast quantities of excess capacity embedded in +their personal computers. As with distributed computing, peer-to-peer networks +developed architectures that allowed users to share this excess capacity with +each other. By cooperating in these sharing practices, users construct together +systems with capabilities far exceeding those that they could have developed by +themselves, as well as the capabilities that even the best-financed +corporations could provide using techniques that rely on components they fully +owned. The network components owned by any single music delivery service cannot +match the collective storage and retrieval capabilities of the universe of +users' hard drives and network connections. Similarly, the processors arrayed +in the supercomputers find it difficult to compete with the vast computation +resource available on the millions of personal computers connected to the +Internet, and the proprietary software development firms find themselves +competing, and in some areas losing to, the vast pool of programming talent +connected to the Internet in the form of participants in free and open source +software development projects. +={ capacity : + processing (computational) | storage ; + computational capacity ; + data storage capacity ; + information sharing ; + processing capacity ; + storage capacity ; + connectivity +1 +} + +In addition to computation and storage, the last major element of computer +communications networks is connectivity. Here, too, perhaps more dramatically +than in either of the two other functionalities, we have seen the development +of sharing-based techniques. The most direct transfer of the design +characteristics of peer-to-peer networks to communications has been the +successful development of Skype--an Internet telephony utility that allows the +owners of computers to have voice conversations with each other over the +Internet for free, and to dial into the public telephone network for a fee. As +of this writing, Skype is already used by more than two million users at any +given moment in time. They use a FastTrack-like architecture to share their +computing and communications resources to create a global ,{[pg 87]}, telephone +system running on top of the Internet. It was created, and is run by, the +developers of KaZaa. +={ Skype utility } + +Most dramatically, however, we have seen these techniques emerging in wireless +communications. Throughout almost the entire twentieth century, radio +communications used a single engineering approach to allow multiple messages to +be sent wirelessly in a single geographic area. This approach was to transmit +each of the different simultaneous messages by generating separate +electromagnetic waves for each, which differed from each other by the frequency +of oscillation, or wavelength. The receiver could then separate out the +messages by ignoring all electromagnetic energy received at its antenna unless +it oscillated at the frequency of the desired message. This engineering +technique, adopted by Marconi in 1900, formed the basis of our notion of +"spectrum": the range of frequencies at which we know how to generate +electromagnetic waves with sufficient control and predictability that we can +encode and decode information with them, as well as the notion that there are +"channels" of spectrum that are "used" by a communication. For more than half a +century, radio communications regulation was thought necessary because spectrum +was scarce, and unless regulated, everyone would transmit at all frequencies +causing chaos and an inability to send messages. From 1959, when Ronald Coase +first published his critique of this regulatory approach, until the early +1990s, when spectrum auctions began, the terms of the debate over "spectrum +policy," or wireless communications regulation, revolved around whether the +exclusive right to transmit radio signals in a given geographic area should be +granted as a regulatory license or a tradable property right. In the 1990s, +with the introduction of auctions, we began to see the adoption of a primitive +version of a property-based system through "spectrum auctions." By the early +2000s, this system allowed the new "owners" of these exclusive rights to begin +to shift what were initially purely mobile telephony systems to mobile data +communications as well. +={ Coase, Ronald ; + proprietary rights : + wireless networks ; + wireless communications +2 +} + +By this time, however, the century-old engineering assumptions that underlay +the regulation-versus-property conceptualization of the possibilities open for +the institutional framework of wireless communications had been rendered +obsolete by new computation and network technologies.~{ For the full argument, +see Yochai Benkler, "Some Economics of Wireless Communications," Harvard +Journal of Law and Technology 16 (2002): 25; and Yochai Benkler, "Overcoming +Agoraphobia: Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment," +Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 11 (1998): 287. For an excellent overview +of the intellectual history of this debate and a contribution to the +institutional design necessary to make space for this change, see Kevin +Werbach, "Supercommons: Towards a Unified Theory of Wireless Communication," +Texas Law Review 82 (2004): 863. The policy implications of computationally +intensive radios using wide bands were first raised by George Gilder in "The +New Rule of the Wireless," Forbes ASAP, March 29, 1993, and Paul Baran, +"Visions of the 21st Century Communications: Is the Shortage of Radio Spectrum +for Broadband Networks of the Future a Self Made Problem?" (keynote talk +transcript, 8th Annual Conference on Next Generation Networks, Washington, DC, +November 9, 1994). Both statements focused on the potential abundance of +spectrum, and how it renders "spectrum management" obsolete. Eli Noam was the +first to point out that, even if one did not buy the idea that computationally +intensive radios eliminated scarcity, they still rendered spectrum property +rights obsolete, and enabled instead a fluid, dynamic, real-time market in +spectrum clearance rights. See Eli Noam, "Taking the Next Step Beyond Spectrum +Auctions: Open Spectrum Access," Institute of Electrical and Electronics +Engineers Communications Magazine 33, no. 12 (1995): 66-73; later elaborated in +Eli Noam, "Spectrum Auction: Yesterday's Heresy, Today's Orthodoxy, Tomorrow's +Anachronism. Taking the Next Step to Open Spectrum Access," Journal of Law and +Economics 41 (1998): 765, 778-780. The argument that equipment markets based on +a spectrum commons, or free access to frequencies, could replace the role +planned for markets in spectrum property rights with computationally intensive +equipment and sophisticated network sharing protocols, and would likely be more +efficient even assuming that scarcity persists, was made in Benkler, +"Overcoming Agoraphobia." Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +(New York: Basic Books, 1999) and Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The +Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001) +developed a rationale based on the innovation dynamic in support of the +economic value of open wireless networks. David Reed, "Comments for FCC +Spectrum Task Force on Spectrum Policy," filed with the Federal Communications +Commission July 10, 2002, crystallized the technical underpinnings and +limitations of the idea that spectrum can be regarded as property. }~ The +dramatic decline in computation cost and improvements in digital signal +processing, network architecture, and antenna systems had fundamentally changed +the design space of wireless communications systems. Instead of having one +primary parameter with which to separate out messages--the ,{[pg 88]}, +frequency of oscillation of the carrier wave--engineers could now use many +different mechanisms to allow much smarter receivers to separate out the +message they wanted to receive from all other sources of electromagnetic +radiation in the geographic area they occupied. Radio transmitters could now +transmit at the same frequency, simultaneously, without "interfering" with each +other--that is, without confusing the receivers as to which radiation carried +the required message and which did not. Just like automobiles that can share a +commons-based medium--the road--and unlike railroad cars, which must use +dedicated, owned, and managed railroad tracks--these new radios could share +"the spectrum" as a commons. It was no longer necessary, or even efficient, to +pass laws--be they in the form of regulations or of exclusive property-like +rights--that carved up the usable spectrum into exclusively controlled slices. +Instead, large numbers of transceivers, owned and operated by end users, could +be deployed and use equipment-embedded protocols to coordinate their +communications. + +The reasons that owners would share the excess capacity of their new radios are +relatively straightforward in this case. Users want to have wireless +connectivity all the time, to be reachable and immediately available +everywhere. However, they do not actually want to communicate every few +microseconds. They will therefore be willing to purchase and keep turned on +equipment that provides them with such connectivity. Manufacturers, in turn, +will develop and adhere to standards that will improve capacity and +connectivity. As a matter of engineering, what has been called "cooperation +gain"--the improved quality of the system gained when the nodes cooperate--is +the most promising source of capacity scaling for distributed wireless +systems.~{ See Benkler, "Some Economics," 44-47. The term "cooperation gain" +was developed by Reed to describe a somewhat broader concept than "diversity +gain" is in multiuser information theory. }~ Cooperation gain is easy to +understand from day-to-day interactions. When we sit in a lecture and miss a +word or two, we might turn to a neighbor and ask, "Did you hear what she said?" +In radio systems, this kind of cooperation among the antennae (just like the +ears) of neighbors is called antenna diversity, and is the basis for the design +of a number of systems to improve reception. We might stand in a loud crowd +without being able to shout or walk over to the other end of the room, but ask +a friend: "If you see so and so, tell him x"; that friend then bumps into a +friend of so and so and tells that person: "If you see so and so, tell him x"; +and so forth. When we do this, we are using what in radio engineering is called +repeater networks. These kinds of cooperative systems can carry much higher +loads without interference, sharing wide swaths of spectrum, ,{[pg 89]}, in +ways that are more efficient than systems that rely on explicit market +transactions based on property in the right to emit power in discrete +frequencies. The design of such "ad hoc mesh networks"--that is, networks of +radios that can configure themselves into cooperative networks as need arises, +and help each other forward messages and decipher incoming messages over the +din of radio emissions--are the most dynamic area in radio engineering today. +={ cooperation gain ; + network topology : + repeater networks +1 ; + repeater networks +1 ; + structure of network : + repeater network +1 ; + topology, network : + repeater networks +1 ; + ad hoc mesh networks +} + +This technological shift gave rise to the fastest-growing sector in the +wireless communications arena in the first few years of the twenty-first +century-- WiFi and similar unlicensed wireless devices. The economic success of +the equipment market that utilizes the few primitive "spectrum commons" +available in the United States--originally intended for low-power devices like +garage openers and the spurious emissions of microwave ovens--led toward at +first slow, and more recently quite dramatic, change in U.S. wireless policy. +In the past two years alone, what have been called "commons-based" approaches +to wireless communications policy have come to be seen as a legitimate, indeed +a central, component of the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC's) wireless +policy.~{ Spectrum Policy Task Force Report to the Commission (Federal +Communications Commission, Washington, DC, 2002); Michael K. Powell, "Broadband +Migration III: New Directions in Wireless Policy" (Remarks at the Silicon +Flatiron Telecommunications Program, University of Colorado at Boulder, October +30, 2002). }~ We are beginning to see in this space the most prominent example +of a system that was entirely oriented toward regulation aimed at improving the +institutional conditions of marketbased production of wireless transport +capacity sold as a finished good (connectivity minutes), shifting toward +enabling the emergence of a market in shareable goods (smart radios) designed +to provision transport on a sharing model. +={ commons : + wireless communications as +} + +I hope these detailed examples provide a common set of mental pictures of what +peer production looks like. In the next chapter I explain the economics of peer +production of information and the sharing of material resources for +computation, communications, and storage in particular, and of nonmarket, +social production more generally: why it is efficient, how we can explain the +motivations that lead people to participate in these great enterprises of +nonmarket cooperation, and why we see so much more of it online than we do +off-line. The moral and political discussion throughout the remainder of the +book does not, however, depend on your accepting the particular analysis I +offer in chapter 4 to "domesticate" these phenomena within more or less +standard economics. At this point, it is important that the stories have +provided a texture for, and established the plausibility of, ,{[pg 90]}, the +claim that nonmarket production in general and peer production in particular +are phenomena of much wider application than free software, and exist in +important ways throughout the networked information economy. For purposes of +understanding the political implications that occupy most of this book, that is +all that is necessary. ,{[pg 91]}, + +1~4 Chapter 4 - The Economics of Social Production +={ economics of nonmarket production +68 ; + nonmarket production, economics of +68 +} + +The increasing salience of nonmarket production in general, and peer production +in particular, raises three puzzles from an economics perspective. First, why +do people participate? What is their motivation when they work for or +contribute resources to a project for which they are not paid or directly +rewarded? Second, why now, why here? What, if anything, is special about the +digitally networked environment that would lead us to believe that peer +production is here to stay as an important economic phenomenon, as opposed to a +fad that will pass as the medium matures and patterns of behavior settle toward +those more familiar to us from the economy of steel, coal, and temp agencies. +Third, is it efficient to have all these people sharing their computers and +donating their time and creative effort? Moving through the answers to these +questions, it becomes clear that the diverse and complex patterns of behavior +observed on the Internet, from Viking ship hobbyists to the developers of the +GNU/ Linux operating system, are perfectly consistent with much of our +contemporary understanding of human economic behavior. We need to assume no +fundamental change in the nature of humanity; ,{[pg 92]}, we need not declare +the end of economics as we know it. We merely need to see that the material +conditions of production in the networked information economy have changed in +ways that increase the relative salience of social sharing and exchange as a +modality of economic production. That is, behaviors and motivation patterns +familiar to us from social relations generally continue to cohere in their own +patterns. What has changed is that now these patterns of behavior have become +effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest +and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship and +mutual recognition. They have come to play a substantial role as modes of +motivating, informing, and organizing productive behavior at the very core of +the information economy. And it is this increasing role as a modality of +information production that ripples through the rest this book. It is the +feasibility of producing information, knowledge, and culture through social, +rather than market and proprietary relations--through cooperative peer +production and coordinate individual action--that creates the opportunities for +greater autonomous action, a more critical culture, a more discursively engaged +and better informed republic, and perhaps a more equitable global community. +={ behavior : + motivation to produce +11 ; + diversity : + motivation to produce +11 ; + human motivation +11 ; + incentives to produce +11 ; + motivation to produce +11 ; + norms (social) : + motivation within +4 ; + regulation by social norms : + motivation within +4 ; + social relations and norms : + motivation within +4 +} + +2~ MOTIVATION + +Much of economics achieves analytic tractability by adopting a very simple +model of human motivation. The basic assumption is that all human motivations +can be more or less reduced to something like positive and negative +utilities--things people want, and things people want to avoid. These are +capable of being summed, and are usually translatable into a universal medium +of exchange, like money. Adding more of something people want, like money, to +any given interaction will, all things considered, make that interaction more +desirable to rational people. While simplistic, this highly tractable model of +human motivation has enabled policy prescriptions that have proven far more +productive than prescriptions that depended on other models of human +motivation--such as assuming that benign administrators will be motivated to +serve their people, or that individuals will undertake self-sacrifice for the +good of the nation or the commune. + +Of course, this simple model underlying much of contemporary economics is +wrong. At least it is wrong as a universal description of human motivation. If +you leave a fifty-dollar check on the table at the end of a dinner party at a +friend's house, you do not increase the probability that you will ,{[pg 93]}, +be invited again. We live our lives in diverse social frames, and money has a +complex relationship with these--sometimes it adds to the motivation to +participate, sometimes it detracts from it. While this is probably a trivial +observation outside of the field of economics, it is quite radical within that +analytic framework. The present generation's efforts to formalize and engage it +began with the Titmuss-Arrow debate of the early 1970s. In a major work, +Richard Titmuss compared the U.S. and British blood supply systems. The former +was largely commercial at the time, organized by a mix of private for-profit +and nonprofit actors; the latter entirely voluntary and organized by the +National Health Service. Titmuss found that the British system had +higher-quality blood (as measured by the likelihood of recipients contracting +hepatitis from transfusions), less blood waste, and fewer blood shortages at +hospitals. Titmuss also attacked the U.S. system as inequitable, arguing that +the rich exploited the poor and desperate by buying their blood. He concluded +that an altruistic blood procurement system is both more ethical and more +efficient than a market system, and recommended that the market be kept out of +blood donation to protect the "right to give."~{ Richard M. Titmuss, The Gift +Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (New York: Vintage Books, +1971), 94. }~ Titmuss's argument came under immediate attack from economists. +Most relevant for our purposes here, Kenneth Arrow agreed that the differences +in blood quality indicated that the U.S. blood system was flawed, but rejected +Titmuss's central theoretical claim that markets reduce donative activity. +Arrow reported the alternative hypothesis held by "economists typically," that +if some people respond to exhortation/moral incentives (donors), while others +respond to prices and market incentives (sellers), these two groups likely +behave independently--neither responds to the other's incentives. Thus, the +decision to allow or ban markets should have no effect on donative behavior. +Removing a market could, however, remove incentives of the "bad blood" +suppliers to sell blood, thereby improving the overall quality of the blood +supply. Titmuss had not established his hypothesis analytically, Arrow argued, +and its proof or refutation would lie in empirical study.~{ Kenneth J. Arrow, +"Gifts and Exchanges," Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1972): 343. }~ +Theoretical differences aside, the U.S. blood supply system did in fact +transition to an allvolunteer system of social donation since the 1970s. In +surveys since, blood donors have reported that they "enjoy helping" others, +experienced a sense of moral obligation or responsibility, or exhibited +characteristics of reciprocators after they or their relatives received blood. +={ Arrow, Kenneth ; + blood donation ; + Titmuss, Richard +} + +A number of scholars, primarily in psychology and economics, have attempted to +resolve this question both empirically and theoretically. The most systematic +work within economics is that of Swiss economist Bruno Frey ,{[pg 94]}, and +various collaborators, building on the work of psychologist Edward Deci.~{ +Bruno S. Frey, Not Just for Money: An Economic Theory of Personal Motivation +(Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar, 1997); Bruno S. Frey, Inspiring Economics: Human +Motivation in Political Economy (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2001), 52-72. +An excellent survey of this literature is Bruno S. Frey and Reto Jegen, +"Motivation Crowding Theory," Journal of Economic Surveys 15, no. 5 (2001): +589. For a crystallization of the underlying psychological theory, see Edward +L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in +Human Behavior (New York: Plenum, 1985). }~ A simple statement of this model is +that individuals have intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Extrinsic +motivations are imposed on individuals from the outside. They take the form of +either offers of money for, or prices imposed on, behavior, or threats of +punishment or reward from a manager or a judge for complying with, or failing +to comply with, specifically prescribed behavior. Intrinsic motivations are +reasons for action that come from within the person, such as pleasure or +personal satisfaction. Extrinsic motivations are said to "crowd out" intrinsic +motivations because they (a) impair self-determination--that is, people feel +pressured by an external force, and therefore feel overjustified in maintaining +their intrinsic motivation rather than complying with the will of the source of +the extrinsic reward; or (b) impair self-esteem--they cause individuals to feel +that their internal motivation is rejected, not valued, and as a result, their +self-esteem is diminished, causing them to reduce effort. Intuitively, this +model relies on there being a culturally contingent notion of what one "ought" +to do if one is a welladjusted human being and member of a decent society. +Being offered money to do something you know you "ought" to do, and that +self-respecting members of society usually in fact do, implies that the person +offering the money believes that you are not a well-adjusted human being or an +equally respectable member of society. This causes the person offered the money +either to believe the offerer, and thereby lose self-esteem and reduce effort, +or to resent him and resist the offer. A similar causal explanation is +formalized by Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole, who claim that the person +receiving the monetary incentives infers that the person offering the +compensation does not trust the offeree to do the right thing, or to do it well +of their own accord. The offeree's self-confidence and intrinsic motivation to +succeed are reduced to the extent that the offeree believes that the offerer--a +manager or parent, for example--is better situated to judge the offeree's +abilities.~{ Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole, "Self-Confidence and Social +Interactions" (working paper no. 7585, National Bureau of Economic Research, +Cambridge, MA, March 2000). }~ +={ Frey, Bruno +1 ; + Benabou, Ronald ; + Deci, Edward ; + Tirole, Jean ; + extrinsic motivations +3 ; + intrinsic motivations +6 ; + money : + as demotivator +3 ; + price compensation, as demotivator +3 ; + self-determinims, extrinsic motivation and ; + self-esteem, extrinsic motivation and ; + filtering by information provider. See blocked access financial reward, as demotivator +3 +} + +More powerful than the theoretical literature is the substantial empirical +literature--including field and laboratory experiments, econometrics, and +surveys--that has developed since the mid-1990s to test the hypotheses of this +model of human motivation. Across many different settings, researchers have +found substantial evidence that, under some circumstances, adding money for an +activity previously undertaken without price compensation reduces, rather than +increases, the level of activity. The work has covered contexts as diverse as +the willingness of employees to work more or to share their experience and +knowledge with team members, of communities to ,{[pg 95]}, accept locally +undesirable land uses, or of parents to pick up children from day-care centers +punctually.~{ Truman F. Bewley, "A Depressed Labor Market as Explained by +Participants," American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings) 85 (1995): +250, provides survey data about managers' beliefs about the effects of +incentive contracts; Margit Osterloh and Bruno S. Frey, "Motivation, Knowledge +Transfer, and Organizational Form," Organization Science 11 (2000): 538, +provides evidence that employees with tacit knowledge communicate it to +coworkers more efficiently without extrinsic motivations, with the appropriate +social motivations, than when money is offered for "teaching" their knowledge; +Bruno S. Frey and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, "The Cost of Price Incentives: An +Empirical Analysis of Motivation Crowding-Out," American Economic Review 87 +(1997): 746; and Howard Kunreuther and Douslar Easterling, "Are Risk-Benefit +Tradeoffs Possible in Siting Hazardous Facilities?" American Economic Review +(Papers and Proceedings) 80 (1990): 252-286, describe empirical studies where +communities became less willing to accept undesirable public facilities (Not in +My Back Yard or NIMBY) when offered compensation, relative to when the +arguments made were policy based on the common weal; Uri Gneezy and Aldo +Rustichini, "A Fine Is a Price," Journal of Legal Studies 29 (2000): 1, found +that introducing a fine for tardy pickup of kindergarten kids increased, rather +than decreased, the tardiness of parents, and once the sense of social +obligation was lost to the sense that it was "merely" a transaction, the +parents continued to be late at pickup, even after the fine was removed. }~ The +results of this empirical literature strongly suggest that across various +domains some displacement or crowding out can be identified between monetary +rewards and nonmonetary motivations. This does not mean that offering monetary +incentives does not increase extrinsic rewards--it does. Where extrinsic +rewards dominate, this will increase the activity rewarded as usually predicted +in economics. However, the effect on intrinsic motivation, at least sometimes, +operates in the opposite direction. Where intrinsic motivation is an important +factor because pricing and contracting are difficult to achieve, or because the +payment that can be offered is relatively low, the aggregate effect may be +negative. Persuading experienced employees to communicate their tacit knowledge +to the teams they work with is a good example of the type of behavior that is +very hard to specify for efficient pricing, and therefore occurs more +effectively through social motivations for teamwork than through payments. +Negative effects of small payments on participation in work that was otherwise +volunteer-based are an example of low payments recruiting relatively few +people, but making others shift their efforts elsewhere and thereby reducing, +rather than increasing, the total level of volunteering for the job. + +The psychology-based alternative to the "more money for an activity will mean +more of the activity" assumption implicit in most of these new economic models +is complemented by a sociology-based alternative. This comes from one branch of +the social capital literature--the branch that relates back to Mark +Granovetter's 1974 book, Getting a Job, and was initiated as a crossover from +sociology to economics by James Coleman.~{ James S. Coleman, "Social Capital in +the Creation of Human Capital," American Journal of Sociology 94, supplement +(1988): S95, S108. For important early contributions to this literature, see +Mark Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology 78 +(1973): 1360; Mark Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers +(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Yoram BenPorath, "The +F-Connection: Families, Friends and Firms and the Organization of Exchange," +Population and Development Review 6 (1980): 1. }~ This line of literature rests +on the claim that, as Nan Lin puts it, "there are two ultimate (or primitive) +rewards for human beings in a social structure: economic standing and social +standing."~{ Nan Lin, Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action +(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 150-151. }~ These rewards are +understood as instrumental and, in this regard, are highly amenable to +economics. Both economic and social aspects represent "standing"--that is, a +relational measure expressed in terms of one's capacity to mobilize resources. +Some resources can be mobilized by money. Social relations can mobilize others. +For a wide range of reasons-- institutional, cultural, and possibly +technological--some resources are more readily capable of being mobilized by +social relations than by money. If you want to get your nephew a job at a law +firm in the United States today, a friendly relationship with the firm's hiring +partner is more likely to help than passing on an envelope full of cash. If +this theory of social capital is correct, then sometimes you should be willing +to trade off financial rewards for social ,{[pg 96]}, capital. Critically, the +two are not fungible or cumulative. A hiring partner paid in an economy where +monetary bribes for job interviews are standard does not acquire a social +obligation. That same hiring partner in that same culture, who is also a friend +and therefore forgoes payment, however, probably does acquire a social +obligation, tenable for a similar social situation in the future. The magnitude +of the social debt, however, may now be smaller. It is likely measured by the +amount of money saved from not having to pay the price, not by the value of +getting the nephew a job, as it would likely be in an economy where jobs cannot +be had for bribes. There are things and behaviors, then, that simply cannot be +commodified for market exchange, like friendship. Any effort to mix the two, to +pay for one's friendship, would render it something completely +different--perhaps a psychoanalysis session in our culture. There are things +that, even if commodified, can still be used for social exchange, but the +meaning of the social exchange would be diminished. One thinks of borrowing +eggs from a neighbor, or lending a hand to friends who are moving their +furniture to a new apartment. And there are things that, even when commodified, +continue to be available for social exchange with its full force. Consider +gamete donations as an example in contemporary American culture. It is +important to see, though, that there is nothing intrinsic about any given +"thing" or behavior that makes it fall into one or another of these categories. +The categories are culturally contingent and cross-culturally diverse. What +matters for our purposes here, though, is only the realization that for any +given culture, there will be some acts that a person would prefer to perform +not for money, but for social standing, recognition, and probably, ultimately, +instrumental value obtainable only if that person has performed the action +through a social, rather than a market, transaction. +={ Coleman, James ; + Granovetter, Mark ; + Lin, Nan ; + social capital ; + culture : + as motivational context +2 ; + human motivation : + cultural context of +2 ; + incentives to produce : + cultural context +2 ; + motivation to produce : + cultural context +2 +} + +It is not necessary to pin down precisely the correct or most complete theory +of motivation, or the full extent and dimensions of crowding out nonmarket +rewards by the introduction or use of market rewards. All that is required to +outline the framework for analysis is recognition that there is some form of +social and psychological motivation that is neither fungible with money nor +simply cumulative with it. Transacting within the price system may either +increase or decrease the social-psychological rewards (be they intrinsic or +extrinsic, functional or symbolic). The intuition is simple. As I have already +said, leaving a fifty-dollar check on the table after one has finished a +pleasant dinner at a friend's house would not increase the host's ,{[pg 97]}, +social and psychological gains from the evening. Most likely, it would diminish +them sufficiently that one would never again be invited. A bottle of wine or a +bouquet of flowers would, to the contrary, improve the social gains. And if +dinner is not intuitively obvious, think of sex. The point is simple. +Money-oriented motivations are different from socially oriented motivations. +Sometimes they align. Sometimes they collide. Which of the two will be the case +is historically and culturally contingent. The presence of money in sports or +entertainment reduced the social psychological gains from performance in +late-nineteenth-century Victorian England, at least for members of the middle +and upper classes. This is reflected in the long-standing insistence on the +"amateur" status of the Olympics, or the status of "actors" in the Victorian +society. This has changed dramatically more than a century later, where +athletes' and popular entertainers' social standing is practically measured in +the millions of dollars their performances can command. + +The relative relationships of money and social-psychological rewards are, then, +dependent on culture and context. Similar actions may have different meanings +in different social or cultural contexts. Consider three lawyers contemplating +whether to write a paper presenting their opinion--one is a practicing +attorney, the second is a judge, and the third is an academic. For the first, +money and honor are often, though not always, positively correlated. Being able +to command a very high hourly fee for writing the requested paper is a mode of +expressing one's standing in the profession, as well as a means of putting +caviar on the table. Yet, there are modes of acquiring esteem--like writing the +paper as a report for a bar committee-- that are not improved by the presence +of money, and are in fact undermined by it. This latter effect is sharpest for +the judge. If a judge is approached with an offer of money for writing an +opinion, not only is this not a mark of honor, it is a subversion of the social +role and would render corrupt the writing of the opinion. For the judge, the +intrinsic "rewards" for writing the opinion when matched by a payment for the +product would be guilt and shame, and the offer therefore an expression of +disrespect. Finally, if the same paper is requested of the academic, the +presence of money is located somewhere in between the judge and the +practitioner. To a high degree, like the judge, the academic who writes for +money is rendered suspect in her community of scholarship. A paper clearly +funded by a party, whose results support the party's regulatory or litigation +position, is practically worthless as an academic work. In a mirror image of +the practitioner, however, there ,{[pg 98]}, are some forms of money that add +to and reinforce an academic's social psychological rewards--peer-reviewed +grants and prizes most prominent among them. + +Moreover, individuals are not monolithic agents. While it is possible to posit +idealized avaricious money-grubbers, altruistic saints, or social climbers, the +reality of most people is a composite of these all, and one that is not like +any of them. Clearly, some people are more focused on making money, and others +are more generous; some more driven by social standing and esteem, others by a +psychological sense of well-being. The for-profit and nonprofit systems +probably draw people with different tastes for these desiderata. Academic +science and commercial science also probably draw scientists with similar +training but different tastes for types of rewards. However, welladjusted, +healthy individuals are rarely monolithic in their requirements. We would +normally think of someone who chose to ignore and betray friends and family to +obtain either more money or greater social recognition as a fetishist of some +form or another. We spend some of our time making money, some of our time +enjoying it hedonically; some of our time being with and helping family, +friends, and neighbors; some of our time creatively expressing ourselves, +exploring who we are and what we would like to become. Some of us, because of +economic conditions we occupy, or because of our tastes, spend very large +amounts of time trying to make money-- whether to become rich or, more +commonly, just to make ends meet. Others spend more time volunteering, +chatting, or writing. + +For all of us, there comes a time on any given day, week, and month, every year +and in different degrees over our lifetimes, when we choose to act in some way +that is oriented toward fulfilling our social and psychological needs, not our +market-exchangeable needs. It is that part of our lives and our motivational +structure that social production taps, and on which it thrives. There is +nothing mysterious about this. It is evident to any of us who rush home to our +family or to a restaurant or bar with friends at the end of a workday, rather +than staying on for another hour of overtime or to increase our billable hours; +or at least regret it when we cannot. It is evident to any of us who has ever +brought a cup of tea to a sick friend or relative, or received one; to anyone +who has lent a hand moving a friend's belongings; played a game; told a joke, +or enjoyed one told by a friend. What needs to be understood now, however, is +under what conditions these many and diverse social actions can turn into an +important modality of economic production. When can all these acts, distinct +from our desire for ,{[pg 99]}, money and motivated by social and psychological +needs, be mobilized, directed, and made effective in ways that we recognize as +economically valuable? + +2~ SOCIAL PRODUCTION: FEASIBILITY CONDITIONS AND ORGANIZATIONAL FORM +={ capacity : + human communication +13 ; + communication : + feasibility conditions for social production +13 ; + cost : + feasibility conditions for social production +13 ; + feasibility conditions or social production +13 ; + human communicative capacity : + feasibility conditions for social production +13 ; + information production : + feasibility conditions for social production +13 ; + nonmarket information producers : + conditions for production +13 ; + nonmarket production, economics of : + feasibility conditions +13 ; + peer production : + feasibility conditions for social production +13 ; + production of information : + feasibility conditions for social production +13 +} + +The core technologically contingent fact that enables social relations to +become a salient modality of production in the networked information economy is +that all the inputs necessary to effective productive activity are under the +control of individual users. Human creativity, wisdom, and life experience are +all possessed uniquely by individuals. The computer processors, data storage +devices, and communications capacity necessary to make new meaningful +conversational moves from the existing universe of information and stimuli, and +to render and communicate them to others near and far are also under the +control of these same individual users--at least in the advanced economies and +in some portions of the population of developing economies. This does not mean +that all the physical capital necessary to process, store, and communicate +information is under individual user control. That is not necessary. It is, +rather, that the majority of individuals in these societies have the threshold +level of material capacity required to explore the information environment they +occupy, to take from it, and to make their own contributions to it. +={ capabilities of individuals : + as physical capital +1 ; + capital for production : + control of +1 ; + constraints of information production, monetary : + control of +1 ; + individual capabilities and action : + as physical capital +1 ; + information production capital : + control of +1 ; + monetary constraints on information production : + control of +1 ; + physical capital for production : + control of +1 ; + production capital : + control of +1 +} + +There is nothing about computation or communication that naturally or +necessarily enables this fact. It is a felicitous happenstance of the +fabrication technology of computing machines in the last quarter of the +twentieth century, and, it seems, in the reasonably foreseeable future. It is +cheaper to build freestanding computers that enable their owners to use a wide +and dynamically changing range of information applications, and that are cheap +enough that each machine is owned by an individual user or household, than it +is to build massive supercomputers with incredibly high-speed communications to +yet cheaper simple terminals, and to sell information services to individuals +on an on-demand or standardized package model. Natural or contingent, it is +nevertheless a fact of the industrial base of the networked information economy +that individual users--susceptible as they are to acting on diverse +motivations, in diverse relationships, some market-based, some social--possess +and control the physical capital necessary to make effective the human +capacities they uniquely and individually possess. ,{[pg 100]}, + +Now, having the core inputs of information production ubiquitously distributed +in society is a core enabling fact, but it alone cannot assure that social +production will become economically significant. Children and teenagers, +retirees, and very rich individuals can spend most of their lives socializing +or volunteering; most other people cannot. While creative capacity and judgment +are universally distributed in a population, available time and attention are +not, and human creative capacity cannot be fully dedicated to nonmarket, +nonproprietary production all the time. Someone needs to work for money, at +least some of the time, to pay the rent and put food on the table. Personal +computers too are only used for earnings-generating activities some of the +time. In both these resources, there remain large quantities of excess +capacity--time and interest in human beings; processing, storage, and +communications capacity in computers--available to be used for activities whose +rewards are not monetary or monetizable, directly or indirectly. + +For this excess capacity to be harnessed and become effective, the information +production process must effectively integrate widely dispersed contributions, +from many individual human beings and machines. These contributions are diverse +in their quality, quantity, and focus, in their timing and geographic location. +The great success of the Internet generally, and peer-production processes in +particular, has been the adoption of technical and organizational architectures +that have allowed them to pool such diverse efforts effectively. The core +characteristics underlying the success of these enterprises are their +modularity and their capacity to integrate many finegrained contributions. + +"Modularity" is a property of a project that describes the extent to which it +can be broken down into smaller components, or modules, that can be +independently produced before they are assembled into a whole. If modules are +independent, individual contributors can choose what and when to contribute +independently of each other. This maximizes their autonomy and flexibility to +define the nature, extent, and timing of their participation in the project. +Breaking up the maps of Mars involved in the clickworkers project (described in +chapter 3) and rendering them in small segments with a simple marking tool is a +way of modularizing the task of mapping craters. In the SETI@home project (see +chapter 3), the task of scanning radio astronomy signals is broken down into +millions of little computations as a way of modularizing the calculations +involved. + +"Granularity" refers to the size of the modules, in terms of the time and +effort that an individual must invest in producing them. The five minutes ,{[pg +101]}, required for moderating a comment on Slashdot, or for metamoderating a +moderator, is more fine-grained than the hours necessary to participate in +writing a bug fix in an open-source project. More people can participate in the +former than in the latter, independent of the differences in the knowledge +required for participation. The number of people who can, in principle, +participate in a project is therefore inversely related to the size of the +smallest-scale contribution necessary to produce a usable module. The +granularity of the modules therefore sets the smallest possible individual +investment necessary to participate in a project. If this investment is +sufficiently low, then "incentives" for producing that component of a modular +project can be of trivial magnitude. Most importantly for our purposes of +understanding the rising role of nonmarket production, the time can be drawn +from the excess time we normally dedicate to having fun and participating in +social interactions. If the finest-grained contributions are relatively large +and would require a large investment of time and effort, the universe of +potential contributors decreases. A successful large-scale peer-production +project must therefore have a predominate portion of its modules be relatively +fine-grained. +={ diversity : + granularity of participation +3 ; + granularity +3 ; + human motivation : + granularity of participation and +3 ; + incentives to produce : + granularity of participation and +3 ; + motivation to produce +3 ; + granularity of participation and +3 ; + modularity +3 ; + organization structure +7 : + granularity +3 | modularity +3 ; + structure of organizations +7 : + granularity +3 | modularity +3 ; + structured production +7 : + granularity +3 | modularity +3 ; + planned modularization +3 +} + +Perhaps the clearest example of how large-grained modules can make projects +falter is the condition, as of the middle of 2005, of efforts to peer produce +open textbooks. The largest such effort is Wikibooks, a site associated with +/{Wikipedia}/, which has not taken off as did its famous parent project. Very +few texts there have reached maturity to the extent that they could be usable +as a partial textbook, and those few that have were largely written by one +individual with minor contributions by others. Similarly, an ambitious +initiative launched in California in 2004 still had not gone far beyond an +impassioned plea for help by mid-2005. The project that seems most successful +as of 2005 was a South African project, Free High School Science Texts (FHSST), +founded by a physics graduate student, Mark Horner. As of this writing, that +three-year-old project had more or less completed a physics text, and was about +halfway through chemistry and mathematics textbooks. The whole FHSST project +involves a substantially more managed approach than is common in +peer-production efforts, with a core group of dedicated graduate student +administrators recruiting contributors, assigning tasks, and integrating the +contributions. Horner suggests that the basic limiting factor is that in order +to write a high school textbook, the output must comply with state-imposed +guidelines for content and form. To achieve these requirements, the various +modules must cohere to a degree ,{[pg 102]}, much larger than necessary in a +project like /{Wikipedia}/, which can endure high diversity in style and +development without losing its utility. As a result, the individual +contributions have been kept at a high level of abstraction-- an idea or +principle explained at a time. The minimal time commitment required of each +contributor is therefore large, and has led many of those who volunteered +initially to not complete their contributions. In this case, the guideline +requirements constrained the project's granularity, and thereby impeded its +ability to grow and capture the necessary thousands of smallgrained +contributions. With orders of magnitude fewer contributors, each must be much +more highly motivated and available than is necessary in /{Wikipedia}/, +Slashdot, and similar successful projects. +={ FHSST (Free High School Science Texts) ; + Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) ; + Horner, Mark ; + Wikibooks project +} + +It is not necessary, however, that each and every chunk or module be fine +grained. Free software projects in particular have shown us that successful +peer-production projects may also be structured, technically and culturally, in +ways that make it possible for different individuals to contribute vastly +different levels of effort commensurate with their ability, motivation, and +availability. The large free software projects might integrate thousands of +people who are acting primarily for social psychological reasons--because it is +fun or cool; a few hundred young programmers aiming to make a name for +themselves so as to become employable; and dozens of programmers who are paid +to write free software by firms that follow one of the nonproprietary +strategies described in chapter 2. IBM and Red Hat are the quintessential +examples of firms that contribute paid employee time to peer-production +projects in this form. This form of link between a commercial firm and a peer +production community is by no means necessary for a peer-production process to +succeed; it does, however, provide one constructive interface between market- +and nonmarket-motivated behavior, through which actions on the two types of +motivation can reinforce, rather than undermine, each other. +={ free software : + project modularity and granularity ; + open-source software : + project modularity and granularity ; + software, open-source : + project modularity and granularity +} + +The characteristics of planned modularization of a problem are highly visible +and explicit in some peer-production projects--the distributed computing +projects like SETI@home are particularly good examples of this. However, if we +were to step back and look at the entire phenomenon of Web-based publication +from a bird's-eye view, we would see that the architecture of the World Wide +Web, in particular the persistence of personal Web pages and blogs and their +self-contained, technical independence of each other, give the Web as a whole +the characteristics of modularity and variable but fine-grained granularity. +Imagine that you were trying to evaluate ,{[pg 103]}, how, if at all, the Web +is performing the task of media watchdog. Consider one example, which I return +to in chapter 7: The Memory Hole, a Web site created and maintained by Russ +Kick, a freelance author and editor. Kick spent some number of hours preparing +and filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the Defense Department, +seeking photographs of coffins of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq. He +was able to do so over some period, not having to rely on "getting the scoop" +to earn his dinner. At the same time, tens of thousands of other individual Web +publishers and bloggers were similarly spending their time hunting down stories +that moved them, or that they happened to stumble across in their own daily +lives. When Kick eventually got the photographs, he could upload them onto his +Web site, where they were immediately available for anyone to see. Because each +contribution like Kick's can be independently created and stored, because no +single permission point or failure point is present in the architecture of the +Web--it is merely a way of conveniently labeling documents stored independently +by many people who are connected to the Internet and use HTML (hypertext markup +language) and HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol)--as an "information service," +it is highly modular and diversely granular. Each independent contribution +comprises as large or small an investment as its owner-operator chooses to +make. Together, they form a vast almanac, trivia trove, and news and commentary +facility, to name but a few, produced by millions of people at their +leisure--whenever they can or want to, about whatever they want. +={ autonomy : + independence of Web sites ; + democratic societies : + independence of Web sites ; + independence of Web sites ; + individual autonomy : + independence of Web sites ; + Kick, Russ ; + The Memory Hole +} + +The independence of Web sites is what marks their major difference from more +organized peer-production processes, where contributions are marked not by +their independence but by their interdependence. The Web as a whole requires no +formal structure of cooperation. As an "information good" or medium, it emerges +as a pattern out of coordinate coexistence of millions of entirely independent +acts. All it requires is a pattern recognition utility superimposed over the +outputs of these acts--a search engine or directory. Peer-production processes, +to the contrary, do generally require some substantive cooperation among users. +A single rating of an individual comment on Slashdot does not by itself +moderate the comment up or down, neither does an individual marking of a +crater. Spotting a bug in free software, proposing a fix, reviewing the +proposed fix, and integrating it into the software are interdependent acts that +require a level of cooperation. This necessity for cooperation requires +peer-production processes to adopt more engaged strategies for assuring that +everyone who participates is doing so in ,{[pg 104]}, good faith, competently, +and in ways that do not undermine the whole, and weeding out those would-be +participants who are not. +={ Slashdot +1 ; + accreditation : + Slashdot +1 ; + filtering : + Slashdot +1 ; + relevance filtering : + Slashdot +1 ; + peer production : + maintenance of cooperation +1 ; + structured production : + maintenance of cooperation +1 +} + +Cooperation in peer-production processes is usually maintained by some +combination of technical architecture, social norms, legal rules, and a +technically backed hierarchy that is validated by social norms. /{Wikipedia}/ +is the strongest example of a discourse-centric model of cooperation based on +social norms. However, even /{Wikipedia}/ includes, ultimately, a small number +of people with system administrator privileges who can eliminate accounts or +block users in the event that someone is being genuinely obstructionist. This +technical fallback, however, appears only after substantial play has been given +to self-policing by participants, and to informal and quasi-formal +communitybased dispute resolution mechanisms. Slashdot, by contrast, provides a +strong model of a sophisticated technical system intended to assure that no one +can "defect" from the cooperative enterprise of commenting and moderating +comments. It limits behavior enabled by the system to avoid destructive +behavior before it happens, rather than policing it after the fact. The Slash +code does this by technically limiting the power any given person has to +moderate anyone else up or down, and by making every moderator the subject of a +peer review system whose judgments are enforced technically-- that is, when any +given user is described by a sufficiently large number of other users as +unfair, that user automatically loses the technical ability to moderate the +comments of others. The system itself is a free software project, licensed +under the GPL (General Public License)--which is itself the quintessential +example of how law is used to prevent some types of defection from the common +enterprise of peer production of software. The particular type of defection +that the GPL protects against is appropriation of the joint product by any +single individual or firm, the risk of which would make it less attractive for +anyone to contribute to the project to begin with. The GPL assures that, as a +legal matter, no one who contributes to a free software project need worry that +some other contributor will take the project and make it exclusively their own. +The ultimate quality judgments regarding what is incorporated into the "formal" +releases of free software projects provide the clearest example of the extent +to which a meritocratic hierarchy can be used to integrate diverse +contributions into a finished single product. In the case of the Linux kernel +development project (see chapter 3), it was always within the power of Linus +Torvalds, who initiated the project, to decide which contributions should be +included in a new release, and which should not. But it is a funny sort of +hierarchy, whose quirkiness Steve Weber ,{[pg 105]}, well explicates.~{ Steve +Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, +2004). }~ Torvalds's authority is persuasive, not legal or technical, and +certainly not determinative. He can do nothing except persuade others to +prevent them from developing anything they want and add it to their kernel, or +to distribute that alternative version of the kernel. There is nothing he can +do to prevent the entire community of users, or some subsection of it, from +rejecting his judgment about what ought to be included in the kernel. Anyone is +legally free to do as they please. So these projects are based on a hierarchy +of meritocratic respect, on social norms, and, to a great extent, on the mutual +recognition by most players in this game that it is to everybody's advantage to +have someone overlay a peer review system with some leadership. +={ Wikipedia project ; + Torvalds, Linus ; + Weber, Steve ; + General Public License (GPL) : + See also free software ; + GPL (General Public License) : + See Also free software ; + licensing : + GPL (General Public License) +} + +In combination then, three characteristics make possible the emergence of +information production that is not based on exclusive proprietary claims, not +aimed toward sales in a market for either motivation or information, and not +organized around property and contract claims to form firms or market +exchanges. First, the physical machinery necessary to participate in +information and cultural production is almost universally distributed in the +population of the advanced economies. Certainly, personal computers as capital +goods are under the control of numbers of individuals that are orders of +magnitude larger than the number of parties controlling the use of +massproduction-capable printing presses, broadcast transmitters, satellites, or +cable systems, record manufacturing and distribution chains, and film studios +and distribution systems. This means that the physical machinery can be put in +service and deployed in response to any one of the diverse motivations +individual human beings experience. They need not be deployed in order to +maximize returns on the financial capital, because financial capital need not +be mobilized to acquire and put in service any of the large capital goods +typical of the industrial information economy. Second, the primary raw +materials in the information economy, unlike the industrial economy, are public +goods--existing information, knowledge, and culture. Their actual marginal +social cost is zero. Unless regulatory policy makes them purposefully expensive +in order to sustain the proprietary business models, acquiring raw materials +also requires no financial capital outlay. Again, this means that these raw +materials can be deployed for any human motivation. They need not maximize +financial returns. Third, the technical architectures, organizational models, +and social dynamics of information production and exchange on the Internet have +developed so that they allow us to structure the solution to problems--in +particular to information production problems--in ways ,{[pg 106]}, that are +highly modular. This allows many diversely motivated people to act for a wide +range of reasons that, in combination, cohere into new useful information, +knowledge, and cultural goods. These architectures and organizational models +allow both independent creation that coexists and coheres into usable patterns, +and interdependent cooperative enterprises in the form of peer-production +processes. +={ computers ; + hardware ; + personal computers ; + physical machinery and computers +} + +Together, these three characteristics suggest that the patterns of social +production of information that we are observing in the digitally networked +environment are not a fad. They are, rather, a sustainable pattern of human +production given the characteristics of the networked information economy. The +diversity of human motivation is nothing new. We now have a substantial +literature documenting its importance in free and open-source software +development projects, from Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole, Rishab Ghosh, Eric Von +Hippel and Karim Lakhani, and others. Neither is the public goods nature of +information new. What is new are the technological conditions that allow these +facts to provide the ingredients of a much larger role in the networked +information economy for nonmarket, nonproprietary production to emerge. As long +as capitalization and ownership of the physical capital base of this economy +remain widely distributed and as long as regulatory policy does not make +information inputs artificially expensive, individuals will be able to deploy +their own creativity, wisdom, conversational capacities, and connected +computers, both independently and in loose interdependent cooperation with +others, to create a substantial portion of the information environment we +occupy. Moreover, we will be able to do so for whatever reason we +choose--through markets or firms to feed and clothe ourselves, or through +social relations and open communication with others, to give our lives meaning +and context. +={ Lerner, Josh ; + Tirole, Jean ; + Ghosh, Rishab ; + Lakhani, Karim ; + Tirole, Jean,von Hippel, Eric +} + +2~ TRANSACTION COSTS AND EFFICIENCY +={ commercial model of communication : + transaction costs +16 ; + economics of nonmarket production : + transaction costs +16 ; + efficiency of information regulation +16 ; + industrial model of communication : + transaction costs +16 ; + inefficiency of information regulation +16 ; + information production, market-based : + transaction costs +16 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + transaction costs +16 ; + market-based information producers : + transaction costs +16 ; + nonmarket production, economics of : + transaction costs +16 ; + norms (social) : + transaction costs +16 ; + peer production : + sustainability of +16 ; + proprietary rights, inefficiency of +16 ; + regulating information, efficiency of +16 ; + regulation by social norms : + transaction costs +16 ; + social relations and norms : + transaction costs +16 ; + strategies for information production : + transaction costs +16 ; + sustainability of peer production +16 ; + traditional model of communication : + transaction costs +16 ; + transaction costs +16 +} + +For purposes of analyzing the political values that are the concern of most of +this book, all that is necessary is that we accept that peer production in +particular, and nonmarket information production and exchange in general, are +sustainable in the networked information economy. Most of the remainder of the +book seeks to evaluate why, and to what extent, the presence of a substantial +nonmarket, commons-based sector in the information production system is +desirable from the perspective of various aspects of freedom and justice. +Whether this sector is "efficient" within the meaning of the ,{[pg 107]}, word +in welfare economics is beside the point to most of these considerations. Even +a strong commitment to a pragmatic political theory, one that accepts and +incorporates into its consideration the limits imposed by material and economic +reality, need not aim for "efficient" policy in the welfare sense. It is +sufficient that the policy is economically and socially sustainable on its own +bottom--in other words, that it does not require constant subsidization at the +expense of some other area excluded from the analysis. It is nonetheless +worthwhile spending a few pages explaining why, and under what conditions, +commons-based peer production, and social production more generally, are not +only sustainable but actually efficient ways of organizing information +production. + +The efficient allocation of two scarce resources and one public good are at +stake in the choice between social production--whether it is peer production or +independent nonmarket production--and market-based production. Because most of +the outputs of these processes are nonrival goods-- information, knowledge, and +culture--the fact that the social production system releases them freely, +without extracting a price for using them, means that it would, all other +things being equal, be more efficient for information to be produced on a +nonproprietary social model, rather than on a proprietary market model. Indeed, +all other things need not even be equal for this to hold. It is enough that the +net value of the information produced by commons-based social production +processes and released freely for anyone to use as they please is no less than +the total value of information produced through property-based systems minus +the deadweight loss caused by the above-marginal-cost pricing practices that +are the intended result of the intellectual property system. + +The two scarce resources are: first, human creativity, time, and attention; and +second, the computation and communications resources used in information +production and exchange. In both cases, the primary reason to choose among +proprietary and nonproprietary strategies, between marketbased systems--be they +direct market exchange or firm-based hierarchical production--and social +systems, are the comparative transaction costs of each, and the extent to which +these transaction costs either outweigh the benefits of working through each +system, or cause the system to distort the information it generates so as to +systematically misallocate resources. +={ market transactions +3 } + +The first thing to recognize is that markets, firms, and social relations are +three distinct transactional frameworks. Imagine that I am sitting in a room +and need paper for my printer. I could (a) order paper from a store; (b) call +,{[pg 108]}, the storeroom, if I am in a firm or organization that has one, and +ask the clerk to deliver the paper I need; or (c) walk over to a neighbor and +borrow some paper. Choice (a) describes the market transactional framework. The +store knows I need paper immediately because I am willing to pay for it now. +Alternative (b) is an example of the firm as a transactional framework. The +paper is in the storeroom because someone in the organization planned that +someone else would need paper today, with some probability, and ordered enough +to fill that expected need. The clerk in the storeroom gives it to me because +that is his job; again, defined by someone who planned to have someone +available to deliver paper when someone else in the proper channels of +authority says that she needs it. Comparing and improving the efficiency of (a) +and (b), respectively, has been a central project in transaction-costs +organization theory. We might compare, for example, the costs of taking my +call, verifying the credit card information, and sending a delivery truck for +my one batch of paper, to the costs of someone planning for the average needs +of a group of people like me, who occasionally run out of paper, and stocking a +storeroom with enough paper and a clerk to fill our needs in a timely manner. +However, notice that (c) is also an alternative transactional framework. I +could, rather than incurring the costs of transacting through the market with +the local store or of building a firm with sufficient lines of authority to +stock and manage the storeroom, pop over to my neighbor and ask for some paper. +This would make sense even within an existing firm when, for example, I need +two or three pages immediately and do not want to wait for the storeroom clerk +to do his rounds, or more generally, if I am working at home and the costs of +creating "a firm," stocking a storeroom, and paying a clerk are too high for my +neighbors and me. Instead, we develop a set of neighborly social relations, +rather than a firm-based organization, to deal with shortfalls during periods +when it would be too costly to assure a steady flow of paper from the +market--for example, late in the evening, on a weekend, or in a sparsely +populated area. + +The point is not, of course, to reduce all social relations and human decency +to a transaction-costs theory. Too many such straight planks have already been +cut from the crooked timber of humanity to make that exercise useful or +enlightening. The point is that most of economics internally has been ignoring +the social transactional framework as an alternative whose relative efficiency +can be accounted for and considered in much the same way as the relative cost +advantages of simple markets when compared to the hierarchical organizations +that typify much of our economic activity--firms. ,{[pg 109]}, + +A market transaction, in order to be efficient, must be clearly demarcated as +to what it includes, so that it can be priced efficiently. That price must then +be paid in equally crisply delineated currency. Even if a transaction initially +may be declared to involve sale of "an amount reasonably required to produce +the required output," for a "customary" price, at some point what was provided +and what is owed must be crystallized and fixed for a formal exchange. The +crispness is a functional requirement of the price system. It derives from the +precision and formality of the medium of exchange--currency--and the ambition +to provide refined representations of the comparative value of marginal +decisions through denomination in an exchange medium that represents these +incremental value differences. Similarly, managerial hierarchies require a +crisp definition of who should be doing what, when, and how, in order to permit +the planning and coordination process to be effective. +={ crispness of currency exchange +5 ; + cost : + crispness of +5 ; + culture : + social exchange, crispness of +5 ; + money : + crispness of currency exchange +5 ; + creativity, value of +5 ; + defining price +5 ; + information production inputs : + pricing +5 ; + inputs to production : + pricing +5 ; + medium of exchange +5 ; + pricing +5 ; + production inputs : + pricing +5 ; + specificity of price +5 ; + standardizing creativity +5 +} + +Social exchange, on the other hand, does not require the same degree of +crispness at the margin. As Maurice Godelier put it in /{The Enigma of the +Gift}/, "the mark of the gift between close friends and relatives . . . is not +the absence of obligations, it is the absence of `calculation.' "~{ Maurice +Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott (Chicago: University of +Chicago Press, 1999), 5. }~ There are, obviously, elaborate and formally +ritualistic systems of social exchange, in both ancient societies and modern. +There are common-property regimes that monitor and record calls on the common +pool very crisply. However, in many of the common-property regimes, one finds +mechanisms of bounding or fairly allocating access to the common pool that more +coarsely delineate the entitlements, behaviors, and consequences than is +necessary for a proprietary system. In modern market society, where we have +money as a formal medium of precise exchange, and where social relations are +more fluid than in traditional societies, social exchange certainly occurs as a +fuzzier medium. Across many cultures, generosity is understood as imposing a +debt of obligation; but none of the precise amount of value given, the precise +nature of the debt to be repaid, or the date of repayment need necessarily be +specified. Actions enter into a cloud of goodwill or membership, out of which +each agent can understand him- or herself as being entitled to a certain flow +of dependencies or benefits in exchange for continued cooperative behavior. +This may be an ongoing relationship between two people, a small group like a +family or group of friends, and up to a general level of generosity among +strangers that makes for a decent society. The point is that social exchange +does not require defining, for example, "I will lend you my car and help you +move these five boxes on Monday, and in exchange you will feed my ,{[pg 110]}, +fish next July," in the same way that the following would: "I will move five +boxes on Tuesday for $100, six boxes for $120." This does not mean that social +systems are cost free--far from it. They require tremendous investment, +acculturation, and maintenance. This is true in this case every bit as much as +it is true for markets or states. Once functional, however, social exchanges +require less information crispness at the margin. +={ commons : + crispness of social exchange ; + Godelier, Maurice +} + +Both social and market exchange systems require large fixed costs--the setting +up of legal institutions and enforcement systems for markets, and creating +social networks, norms, and institutions for the social exchange. Once these +initial costs have been invested, however, market transactions systematically +require a greater degree of precise information about the content of actions, +goods, and obligations, and more precision of monitoring and enforcement on a +per-transaction basis than do social exchange systems. +={ capital for production : + fixed and initial costs ; + constraints of information production, monetary : + fixed and initial costs ; + information production capital : + fixed and initial costs ; + information sharing : + initial costs ; + monetary constraints on information production : + fixed and initial costs ; + physical capital for production : + fixed and initial costs ; + production capital : + fixed and initial costs ; + fixed costs +} + +This difference between markets and hierarchical organizations, on the one +hand, and peer-production processes based on social relations, on the other, is +particularly acute in the context of human creative labor--one of the central +scarce resources that these systems must allocate in the networked information +economy. The levels and focus of individual effort are notoriously hard to +specify for pricing or managerial commands, considering all aspects of +individual effort and ability--talent, motivation, workload, and focus--as they +change in small increments over the span of an individual's full day, let alone +months. What we see instead is codification of effort types--a garbage +collector, a law professor--that are priced more or less finely. However, we +only need to look at the relative homogeneity of law firm starting salaries as +compared to the high variability of individual ability and motivation levels of +graduating law students to realize that pricing of individual effort can be +quite crude. Similarly, these attributes are also difficult to monitor and +verify over time, though perhaps not quite as difficult as predicting them ex +ante. Pricing therefore continues to be a function of relatively crude +information about the actual variability among people. More importantly, as +aspects of performance that are harder to fully specify in advance or +monitor--like creativity over time given the occurrence of new opportunities to +be creative, or implicit know-how--become a more significant aspect of what is +valuable about an individual's contribution, market mechanisms become more and +more costly to maintain efficiently, and, as a practical matter, simply lose a +lot of information. +={ communication : + pricing ; + cost : + pricing ; + human communicative capacity : + pricing ; + capacity : + human communication +} + +People have different innate capabilities; personal, social, and educational +histories; emotional frameworks; and ongoing lived experiences, which make +,{[pg 111]}, for immensely diverse associations with, idiosyncratic insights +into, and divergent utilization of existing information and cultural inputs at +different times and in different contexts. Human creativity is therefore very +difficult to standardize and specify in the contracts necessary for either +market-cleared or hierarchically organized production. As the weight of human +intellectual effort increases in the overall mix of inputs into a given +production process, an organization model that does not require contractual +specification of the individual effort required to participate in a collective +enterprise, and which allows individuals to self-identify for tasks, will be +better at gathering and utilizing information about who should be doing what +than a system that does require such specification. Some firms try to solve +this problem by utilizing market- and social-relations-oriented hybrids, like +incentive compensation schemes and employee-of-the-month-type social +motivational frameworks. These may be able to improve on firm-only or +market-only approaches. It is unclear, though, how well they can overcome the +core difficulty: that is, that both markets and firm hierarchies require +significant specification of the object of organization and pricing--in this +case, human intellectual input. The point here is qualitative. It is not only, +or even primarily, that more people can participate in production in a +commons-based effort. It is that the widely distributed model of information +production will better identify the best person to produce a specific component +of a project, considering all abilities and availability to work on the +specific module within a specific time frame. With enough uncertainty as to the +value of various productive activities, and enough variability in the quality +of both information inputs and human creative talent vis-a-vis any set of +production ` opportunities, freedom of action for individuals coupled with +continuous communications among the pool of potential producers and consumers +can generate better information about the most valuable productive actions, and +the best human inputs available to engage in these actions at a given time. +Markets and firm incentive schemes are aimed at producing precisely this form +of self-identification. However, the rigidities associated with collecting and +comprehending bids from individuals through these systems (that is, transaction +costs) limit the efficacy of self-identification by comparison to a system in +which, once an individual self-identifies for a task, he or she can then +undertake it without permission, contract, or instruction from another. The +emergence of networked organizations (described and analyzed in the work of +Charles Sabel and others) suggests that firms are in fact trying to overcome +these limitations by developing parallels to the freedom to learn, ,{[pg 112]}, +innovate, and act on these innovations that is intrinsic to peer-production +processes by loosening the managerial bonds, locating more of the conception +and execution of problem solving away from the managerial core of the firm, and +implementing these through social, as well as monetary, motivations. However, +the need to assure that the value created is captured within the organization +limits the extent to which these strategies can be implemented within a single +enterprise, as opposed to their implementation in an open process of social +production. This effect, in turn, is in some sectors attenuated through the use +of what Walter Powell and others have described as learning networks. Engineers +and scientists often create frameworks that allow them to step out of their +organizational affiliations, through conferences or workshops. By reproducing +the social production characteristics of academic exchange, they overcome some +of the information loss caused by the boundary of the firm. While these +organizational strategies attenuate the problem, they also underscore the +degree to which it is widespread and understood by organizations as such. The +fact that the direction of the solutions business organizations choose tends to +shift elements of the production process away from market- or firm-based models +and toward networked social production models is revealing. Now, the +self-identification that is central to the relative information efficiency of +peer production is not always perfect. Some mechanisms used by firms and +markets to codify effort levels and abilities--like formal credentials--are the +result of experience with substantial errors or misstatements by individuals of +their capacities. To succeed, therefore, peer-production systems must also +incorporate mechanisms for smoothing out incorrect self-assessments--as peer +review does in traditional academic research or in the major sites like +/{Wikipedia}/ or Slashdot, or as redundancy and statistical averaging do in the +case of NASA clickworkers. The prevalence of misperceptions that individual +contributors have about their own ability and the cost of eliminating such +errors will be part of the transaction costs associated with this form of +organization. They parallel quality control problems faced by firms and +markets. +={ Sabel, Charles ; + capacity : + transaction costs +5 ; + communication : + transaction costs +5 ; + computational capacity : + transaction costs +5 ; + data storage capacity : + transaction costs +5 ; + information sharing : + transaction costs +5 ; + storage capacity : + transaction costs +26 ; + communities : + critical culture and self-reflection ; + critical culture and self-reflection : + self-identification as transaction cost ; + culture : + criticality of (self-reflection) ; + learning networks ; + self-organization : + self-identification as transaction cost ; + Powell, Walter +} + +The lack of crisp specification of who is giving what to whom, and in exchange +for what, also bears on the comparative transaction costs associated with the +allocation of the second major type of scarce resource in the networked +information economy: the physical resources that make up the networked +information environment--communications, computation, and storage capacity. It +is important to note, however, that these are very different from creativity +and information as inputs: they are private goods, not a ,{[pg 113]}, public +good like information, and they are standardized goods with well-specified +capacities, not heterogeneous and highly uncertain attributes like human +creativity at a given moment and context. Their outputs, unlike information, +are not public goods. The reasons that they are nonetheless subject to +efficient sharing in the networked environment therefore require a different +economic explanation. However, the sharing of these material resources, like +the sharing of human creativity, insight, and attention, nonetheless relies on +both the comparative transaction costs of markets and social relations and the +diversity of human motivation. + +Personal computers, wireless transceivers, and Internet connections are +"shareable goods." The basic intuition behind the concept of shareable goods is +simple. There are goods that are "lumpy": given a state of technology, they can +only be produced in certain discrete bundles that offer discontinuous amounts +of functionality or capacity. In order to have any ability to run a +computation, for example, a consumer must buy a computer processor. These, in +turn, only come in discrete units with a certain speed or capacity. One could +easily imagine a world where computers are very large and their owners sell +computation capacity to consumers "on demand," whenever they needed to run an +application. That is basically the way the mainframe world of the 1960s and +1970s worked. However, the economics of microchip fabrication and of network +connections over the past thirty years, followed by storage technology, have +changed that. For most functions that users need, the price-performance +trade-off favors stand-alone, general-purpose personal computers, owned by +individuals and capable of running locally most applications users want, over +remote facilities capable of selling on-demand computation and storage. So +computation and storage today come in discrete, lumpy units. You can decide to +buy a faster or slower chip, or a larger or smaller hard drive, but once you +buy them, you have the capacity of these machines at your disposal, whether you +need it or not. +={ computers : + as shareable, lumpy goods +2 ; + hardware : + as shareable, lumpy goods +2 ; + lumpy goods +2 ; + personal computers : + as shareable, lumpy goods +2 ; + physical machinery and computers : + as shareable, lumpy goods +2 ; + shareable goods +2 +} + +Lumpy goods can, in turn, be fine-, medium-, or large-grained. A large-grained +good is one that is so expensive it can only be used by aggregating demand for +it. Industrial capital equipment, like a steam engine, is of this type. +Fine-grained goods are of a granularity that allows consumers to buy precisely +as much of the goods needed for the amount of capacity they require. +Medium-grained goods are small enough for an individual to justify buying for +her own use, given their price and her willingness and ability to pay for the +functionality she plans to use. A personal computer is a medium-grained lumpy +good in the advanced economies and among the more well-to-do ,{[pg 114]}, in +poorer countries, but is a large-grained capital good for most people in poor +countries. If, given the price of such a good and the wealth of a society, a +large number of individuals buy and use such medium-grained lumpy goods, that +society will have a large amount of excess capacity "out there," in the hands +of individuals. Because these machines are put into service to serve the needs +of individuals, their excess capacity is available for these individuals to use +as they wish--for their own uses, to sell to others, or to share with others. +It is the combination of the fact that these machines are available at prices +(relative to wealth) that allow users to put them in service based purely on +their value for personal use, and the fact that they have enough capacity to +facilitate additionally the action and fulfill the needs of others, that makes +them "shareable." If they were so expensive that they could only be bought by +pooling the value of a number of users, they would be placed in service either +using some market mechanism to aggregate that demand, or through formal +arrangements of common ownership by all those whose demand was combined to +invest in purchasing the resource. If they were so finely grained in their +capacity that there would be nothing left to share, again, sharing would be +harder to sustain. The fact that they are both relatively inexpensive and have +excess capacity makes them the basis for a stable model of individual ownership +of resources combined with social sharing of that excess capacity. +={ fine-grained goods ; + medium-grained goods ; + large-grained goods ; + diversity : + granularity of participation +1 ; + granularity : + of lumpy goods +1 ; + human motivation : + granularity of participation and +1 ; + incentives to produce : + granularity of participation and +1 ; + motivation to produce : + granularity of participation and +1 ; + organization structure : + granularity +1 ; + structure of organizations : + granularity +1 ; + structured production : + granularity +1 ; + allocating excess capacity +3 ; + capacity : + sharing +3 ; + efficiency of information regulation : + capacity reallocation +3 ; + excess capacity, sharing +3 ; + inefficiency of information regulation : + capacity reallocation +3 ; + proprietary rights, inefficiency of : + capacity reallocation +3 ; + reallocating excess capacity +3 ; + reallocation +3 ; + sharing : + excess capacity +} + +Because social sharing requires less precise specification of the transactional +details with each transaction, it has a distinct advantage over market-based +mechanisms for reallocating the excess capacity of shareable goods, +particularly when they have small quanta of excess capacity relative to the +amount necessary to achieve the desired outcome. For example, imagine that +there are one thousand people in a population of computer owners. Imagine that +each computer is capable of performing one hundred computations per second, and +that each computer owner needs to perform about eighty operations per second. +Every owner, in other words, has twenty operations of excess capacity every +second. Now imagine that the marginal transaction costs of arranging a sale of +these twenty operations--exchanging PayPal (a widely used low-cost +Internet-based payment system) account information, insurance against +nonpayment, specific statement of how much time the computer can be used, and +so forth--cost ten cents more than the marginal transaction costs of sharing +the excess capacity socially. John wants to render a photograph in one second, +which takes two hundred operations per second. Robert wants to model the +folding of proteins, which takes ten thousand ,{[pg 115]}, operations per +second. For John, a sharing system would save fifty cents--assuming he can use +his own computer for half of the two hundred operations he needs. He needs to +transact with five other users to "rent" their excess capacity of twenty +operations each. Robert, on the other hand, needs to transact with five hundred +individual owners in order to use their excess capacity, and for him, using a +sharing system is fifty dollars cheaper. The point of the illustration is +simple. The cost advantage of sharing as a transactional framework relative to +the price system increases linearly with the number of transactions necessary +to acquire the level of resources necessary for an operation. If excess +capacity in a society is very widely distributed in small dollops, and for any +given use of the excess capacity it is necessary to pool the excess capacity of +thousands or even millions of individual users, the transaction-cost advantages +of the sharing system become significant. + +The transaction-cost effect is reinforced by the motivation crowding out +theory. When many discrete chunks of excess capacity need to be pooled, each +distinct contributor cannot be paid a very large amount. Motivation crowding +out theory would predict that when the monetary rewards to an activity are low, +the negative effect of crowding out the social-psychological motivation will +weigh more heavily than any increased incentive that is created by the promise +of a small payment to transfer one's excess capacity. The upshot is that when +the technological state results in excess capacity of physical capital being +widely distributed in small dollops, social sharing can outperform secondary +markets as a mechanism for harnessing that excess capacity. This is so because +of both transaction costs and motivation. Fewer owners will be willing to sell +their excess capacity cheaply than to give it away for free in the right social +context and the transaction costs of selling will be higher than those of +sharing. +={ behavior : + motivation to produce +1 ; + diversity : + motivation to produce +1 ; + human motivation : + crowding out theory ; + incentives to produce : + crowding out theory ; + motivation to produce : + crowding out theory +} + +From an efficiency perspective, then, there are clear reasons to think that +social production systems--both peer production of information, knowledge, and +culture and sharing of material resources--can be more efficient than +market-based systems to motivate and allocate both human creative effort and +the excess computation, storage, and communications capacity that typify the +networked information economy. That does not mean that all of us will move out +of market-based productive relationships all of the time. It does mean that +alongside our market-based behaviors we generate substantial amounts of human +creativity and mechanical capacity. The transaction costs of clearing those +resources through the price system or through ,{[pg 116]}, firms are +substantial, and considerably larger for the marginal transaction than clearing +them through social-sharing mechanisms as a transactional framework. With the +right institutional framework and peer-review or quality-control mechanisms, +and with well-modularized organization of work, social sharing is likely to +identify the best person available for a job and make it feasible for that +person to work on that job using freely available information inputs. +Similarly, social transactional frameworks are likely to be substantially less +expensive than market transactions for pooling large numbers of discrete, small +increments of the excess capacity of the personal computer processors, hard +drives, and network connections that make up the physical capital base of the +networked information economy. In both cases, given that much of what is shared +is excess capacity from the perspective of the contributors, available to them +after they have fulfilled some threshold level of their market-based +consumption requirements, social-sharing systems are likely to tap in to social +psychological motivations that money cannot tap, and, indeed, that the presence +of money in a transactional framework could nullify. Because of these effects, +social sharing and collaboration can provide not only a sustainable alternative +to market-based and firm-based models of provisioning information, knowledge, +culture, and communications, but also an alternative that more efficiently +utilizes the human and physical capital base of the networked information +economy. A society whose institutional ecology permitted social production to +thrive would be more productive under these conditions than a society that +optimized its institutional environment solely for market- and firm-based +production, ignoring its detrimental effects to social production. + +2~ THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL PRODUCTION IN THE DIGITALLY NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT +={ economics of nonmarket production : + emergence in digital networks +18 ; + nonmarket information producers : + emergence of social production +18 ; + nonmarket production, economics of : + emergence in digital networks +18 ; + sharing : + emergence of social production +18 +} + +There is a curious congruence between the anthropologists of the gift and +mainstream economists today. Both treat the gift literature as being about the +periphery, about societies starkly different from modern capitalist societies. +As Godelier puts it, "What a contrast between these types of society, these +social and mental universes, and today's capitalist society where the majority +of social relations are impersonal (involving the individual as citizen and the +state, for instance), and where the exchange of things and services is +conducted for the most part in an anonymous marketplace, leaving little room +for an economy and moral code based on gift-giving."~{ Godelier, The Enigma, +106. }~ And yet, ,{[pg 117]}, sharing is everywhere around us in the advanced +economies. Since the 1980s, we have seen an increasing focus, in a number of +literatures, on production practices that rely heavily on social rather than +price-based or governmental policies. These include, initially, the literature +on social norms and social capital, or trust.~{ In the legal literature, Robert +Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, MA: +Harvard University Press, 1991), is the locus classicus for showing how social +norms can substitute for law. For a bibliography of the social norms literature +outside of law, see Richard H. McAdams, "The Origin, Development, and +Regulation of Norms," Michigan Law Review 96 (1997): 338n1, 339n2. Early +contributions were: Edna Ullman-Margalit, The Emergence of Norms (Oxford: +Clarendon Press, 1977); James Coleman, "Norms as Social Capital," in Economic +Imperialism: The Economic Approach Applied Outside the Field of Economics, ed. +Peter Bernholz and Gerard Radnitsky (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1987), +133-155; Sally E. Merry, "Rethinking Gossip and Scandal," in Toward a Theory of +Social Control, Fundamentals, ed. Donald Black (New York: Academic Press, +1984). }~ Both these lines of literature, however, are statements of the +institutional role of social mechanisms for enabling market exchange and +production. More direct observations of social production and exchange systems +are provided by the literature on social provisioning of public goods-- like +social norm enforcement as a dimension of policing criminality, and the +literature on common property regimes.~{ On policing, see Robert C. Ellickson, +"Controlling Chronic Misconduct in City Spaces: Of Panhandlers, Skid Rows, and +Public-Space Zoning," Yale Law Journal 105 (1996): 1165, 1194-1202; and Dan M. +Kahan, "Between Economics and Sociology: The New Path of Deterrence," Michigan +Law Review 95 (1997): 2477. }~ The former are limited by their focus on public +goods provisioning. The latter are usually limited by their focus on discretely +identifiable types of resources--common pool resources-- that must be managed +as among a group of claimants while retaining a proprietary outer boundary +toward nonmembers. The focus of those who study these phenomena is usually on +relatively small and tightly knit communities, with clear boundaries between +members and nonmembers.~{ An early and broad claim in the name of commons in +resources for communication and transportation, as well as human community +building--like roads, canals, or social-gathering places--is Carol Rose, "The +Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property," +University Chicago Law Review 53 (1986): 711. Condensing around the work of +Elinor Ostrom, a more narrowly defined literature developed over the course of +the 1990s: Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions +for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Another +seminal study was James M. Acheson, The Lobster Gangs of Maine (New Hampshire: +University Press of New England, 1988). A brief intellectual history of the +study of common resource pools and common property regimes can be found in +Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, "Ideas, Artifacts, Facilities, and Content: +Information as a Common-Pool Resource," Law & Contemporary Problems 66 (2003): +111. }~ +={ Godelier, Maurice ; + gifts +1 +} + +These lines of literature point to an emerging understanding of social +production and exchange as an alternative to markets and firms. Social +production is not limited to public goods, to exotic, out-of-the-way places +like surviving medieval Spanish irrigation regions or the shores of Maine's +lobster fishing grounds, or even to the ubiquitous phenomenon of the household. +As SETI@home and Slashdot suggest, it is not necessarily limited to stable +communities of individuals who interact often and know each other, or who +expect to continue to interact personally. Social production of goods and +services, both public and private, is ubiquitous, though unnoticed. It +sometimes substitutes for, and sometimes complements, market and state +production everywhere. It is, to be fanciful, the dark matter of our economic +production universe. + +Consider the way in which the following sentences are intuitively familiar, yet +as a practical matter, describe the provisioning of goods or services that have +well-defined NAICS categories (the categories used by the Economic Census to +categorize economic sectors) whose provisioning through the markets is +accounted for in the Economic Census, but that are commonly provisioned in a +form consistent with the definition of sharing--on a radically distributed +model, without price or command. + +group{ + +NAICS 624410624410 [Babysitting services, child day care] + "John, could you pick up Bobby today when you take Lauren to soccer? +I have a conference call I have to make." ,{[pg 118]}, + "Are you doing homework with Zoe today, or shall I?" + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 484210 [Trucking used household, office, or institutional +furniture and equipment] + "Jane, could you lend a hand moving this table to the dining room?" + "Here, let me hold the elevator door for you, this looks heavy." + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 484122 [Trucking, general freight, long-distance, +less-than-truckload] + "Jack, do you mind if I load my box of books in your trunk so +you can drop it off at my brother's on your way to Boston?" + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 514110 [Traffic reporting services] + "Oh, don't take I-95, it's got horrible construction traffic to +exit 39." + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 711510 [Newspaper columnists, independent (freelance)] + "I don't know about Kerry, he doesn't move me, I think he should be +more aggressive in criticizing Bush on Iraq." + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 621610 [Home health-care services] + "Can you please get me my medicine? I'm too wiped to get up." + "Would you like a cup of tea?" + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 561591 [Tourist information bureaus] + "Excuse me, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?" + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 561321 [Temporary help services] + "I've got a real crunch on the farm, can you come over on Saturday +and lend a hand?" + "This is crazy, I've got to get this document out tonight, could you +lend me a hand with proofing and pulling it all together tonight?" + +}group + +group{ + +NAICS 71 [Arts, entertainment, and recreation] + "Did you hear the one about the Buddhist monk, the Rabbi, and +the Catholic priest...?" + "Roger, bring out your guitar...." + "Anybody up for a game of...?" + +}group + +The litany of examples generalizes through a combination of four dimensions +that require an expansion from the current focus of the literatures related to +social production. First, they relate to production of goods and services, not +only of norms or rules. Social relations provide the very motivations for, and +information relating to, production and exchange, not only the institutional +framework for organizing action, which itself is motivated, informed, and +organized by markets or managerial commands. Second, they relate to all kinds +of goods, not only public goods. In particular, the paradigm cases of free +software development and distributed computing involve labor and shareable +goods--each plainly utilizing private goods as inputs, ,{[pg 119]}, and, in the +case of distributed computing, producing private goods as outputs. Third, at +least some of them relate not only to relations of production within +well-defined communities of individuals who have repeated interactions, but +extend to cover baseline standards of human decency. These enable strangers to +ask one another for the time or for directions, enable drivers to cede the road +to each other, and enable strangers to collaborate on software projects, on +coauthoring an online encyclopedia, or on running simulations of how proteins +fold. Fourth, they may either complement or substitute for market and state +production systems, depending on the social construction of mixed provisioning. +It is hard to measure the weight that social and sharing-based production has +in the economy. Our intuitions about capillary systems would suggest that the +total volume of boxes or books moved or lifted, instructions given, news +relayed, and meals prepared by family, friends, neighbors, and minimally decent +strangers would be very high relative to the amount of substitutable activity +carried on through market exchanges or state provisioning. +={ capabilities of individuals : + as modality of production +5 ; + individual capabilities and action : + as modality of production +5 ; + information production inputs : + individual action as modality +5 ; + inputs to production : + individual action as modality +5 ; + production inputs : + individual action as modality +5 +} + +Why do we, despite the ubiquity of social production, generally ignore it as an +economic phenomenon, and why might we now reconsider its importance? A +threshold requirement for social sharing to be a modality of economic +production, as opposed to one purely of social reproduction, is that +sharing-based action be effective. Efficacy of individual action depends on the +physical capital requirements for action to become materially effective, which, +in turn, depend on technology. Effective action may have very low physical +capital requirements, so that every individual has, by natural capacity, "the +physical capital" necessary for action. Social production or sharing can then +be ubiquitous (though in practice, it may not). Vocal cords to participate in a +sing-along or muscles to lift a box are obvious examples. When the capital +requirements are nontrivial, but the capital good is widely distributed and +available, sharing can similarly be ubiquitous and effective. This is true both +when the shared resource or good is the capacity of the capital good itself--as +in the case of shareable goods--and when some widely distributed human capacity +is made effective through the use of the widely distributed capital goods--as +in the case of human creativity, judgment, experience, and labor shared in +online peer-production processes--in which participants contribute using the +widespread availability of connected computers. When use of larger-scale +physical capital goods is a threshold requirement of effective action, we +should not expect to see widespread reliance on decentralized sharing as a +standard modality of production. Industrial ,{[pg 120]}, mass-manufacture of +automobiles, steel, or plastic toys, for example, is not the sort of thing that +is likely to be produced on a social-sharing basis, because of the capital +constraints. This is not to say that even for large-scale capital projects, +like irrigation systems and dams, social production systems cannot step into +the breach. We have those core examples in the common-property regime +literature, and we have worker-owned firms as examples of mixed systems. +However, those systems tend to replicate the characteristics of firm, state, or +market production--using various combinations of quotas, scrip systems, formal +policing by "professional" officers, or management within worker-owned firms. +By comparison, the "common property" arrangements described among lobster gangs +of Maine or fishing groups in Japan, where capital requirements are much lower, +tend to be more social-relations-based systems, with less formalized or crisp +measurement of contributions to, and calls on, the production system. +={ sharing : + technology dependence of +1 ; + technology : + dependence on, for sharing +1 | enabling social sharing as production modality +4 +} + +To say that sharing is technology dependent is not to deny that it is a +ubiquitous human phenomenon. Sharing is so deeply engrained in so many of our +cultures that it would be difficult to argue that with the "right" (or perhaps +"wrong") technological contingencies, it would simply disappear. My claim, +however, is narrower. It is that the relative economic role of sharing changes +with technology. There are technological conditions that require more or less +capital, in larger or smaller packets, for effective provisioning of goods, +services, and resources the people value. As these conditions change, the +relative scope for social-sharing practices to play a role in production +changes. When goods, services, and resources are widely dispersed, their owners +can choose to engage with each other through social sharing instead of through +markets or a formal, state-based relationship, because individuals have +available to them the resources necessary to engage in such behavior without +recourse to capital markets or the taxation power of the state. If +technological changes make the resources necessary for effective action rare or +expensive, individuals may wish to interact in social relations, but they can +now only do so ineffectively, or in different fields of endeavor that do not +similarly require high capitalization. Large-packet, expensive physical capital +draws the behavior into one or the other of the modalities of production that +can collect the necessary financial capital--through markets or taxation. +Nothing, however, prevents change from happening in the opposite direction. +Goods, services, and resources that, in the industrial stage of the information +economy required large-scale, concentrated capital investment to provision, are +now subject to a changing technological environment ,{[pg 121]}, that can make +sharing a better way of achieving the same results than can states, markets, or +their hybrid, regulated industries. + +Because of changes in the technology of the industrial base of the most +advanced economies, social sharing and exchange is becoming a common modality +of production at their very core--in the information, culture, education, +computation, and communications sectors. Free software, distributed computing, +ad hoc mesh wireless networks, and other forms of peer production offer clear +examples of large-scale, measurably effective sharing practices. The highly +distributed capital structure of contemporary communications and computation +systems is largely responsible for this increased salience of social sharing as +a modality of economic production in that environment. By lowering the capital +costs required for effective individual action, these technologies have allowed +various provisioning problems to be structured in forms amenable to +decentralized production based on social relations, rather than through markets +or hierarchies. + +My claim is not, of course, that we live in a unique moment of humanistic +sharing. It is, rather, that our own moment in history suggests a more general +observation. The technological state of a society, in particular the extent to +which individual agents can engage in efficacious production activities with +material resources under their individual control, affects the opportunities +for, and hence the comparative prevalence and salience of, social, market-- +both price-based and managerial--and state production modalities. The capital +cost of effective economic action in the industrial economy shunted sharing to +its economic peripheries--to households in the advanced economies, and to the +global economic peripheries that have been the subject of the anthropology of +gift or the common-property regime literatures. The emerging restructuring of +capital investment in digital networks--in particular, the phenomenon of +user-capitalized computation and communications capabilities--are at least +partly reversing that effect. Technology does not determine the level of +sharing. It does, however, set threshold constraints on the effective domain of +sharing as a modality of economic production. Within the domain of the +practically feasible, the actual level of sharing practices will be culturally +driven and cross-culturally diverse. + +Most practices of production--social or market-based--are already embedded in a +given technological context. They present no visible "problem" to solve or +policy choice to make. We do not need to be focused consciously on improving +the conditions under which friends lend a hand to each other to move boxes, +make dinner, or take kids to school. We feel no need to ,{[pg 122]}, reconsider +the appropriateness of market-based firms as the primary modality for the +production of automobiles. However, in moments where a field of action is +undergoing a technological transition that changes the opportunities for +sharing as a modality of production, understanding that sharing is a modality +of production becomes more important, as does understanding how it functions as +such. This is so, as we are seeing today, when prior technologies have already +set up market- or state-based production systems that have the law and +policy-making systems already designed to fit their requirements. While the +prior arrangement may have been the most efficient, or even may have been +absolutely necessary for the incumbent production system, its extension under +new technological conditions may undermine, rather than improve, the capacity +of a society to produce and provision the goods, resources, or capacities that +are the object of policy analysis. This is, as I discuss in part III, true of +wireless communications regulation, or "spectrum management," as it is usually +called; of the regulation of information, knowledge, and cultural production, +or "intellectual property," as it is usually now called; and it may be true of +policies for computation and wired communications networks, as distributed +computing and the emerging peer-to-peer architectures suggest. + +2~ THE INTERFACE OF SOCIAL PRODUCTION AND MARKET-BASED BUSINESSES +={ commercial model of communication : + relationship with social producers +6 ; + industrial model of communication : + relationship with social producers +6 ; + information production, market-based : + relationship with social producers +6 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + relationship with social producers +6 ; + market-based information producers : + relationship with social producers +6 ; + nonmarket information producers : + relationship with nonmarket information producers (cont.) market-based businesses +6 ; + peer production : + relationship with market-based business +6 ; + social production, relationship with market-based business +6 ; + traditional model of communication : + relationship with social producers +6 +} + +The rise of social production does not entail a decline in market-based +production. Social production first and foremost harnesses impulses, time, and +resources that, in the industrial information economy, would have been wasted +or used purely for consumption. Its immediate effect is therefore likely to +increase overall productivity in the sectors where it is effective. But that +does not mean that its effect on market-based enterprises is neutral. A newly +effective form of social behavior, coupled with a cultural shift in tastes as +well as the development of new technological and social solution spaces to +problems that were once solved through market-based firms, exercises a +significant force on the shape and conditions of market action. Understanding +the threats that these developments pose to some incumbents explains much of +the political economy of law in this area, which will occupy chapter 11. At the +simplest level, social production in general and peer production in particular +present new sources of competition to incumbents that produce information goods +for which there are now socially produced substitutes. ,{[pg 123]}, Open source +software development, for example, first received mainstream media attention in +1998 due to publication of a leaked internal memorandum from Microsoft, which +came to be known as The Halloween Memo. In it, a Microsoft strategist +identified the open source methodology as the one major potential threat to the +company's dominance over the desktop. As we have seen since, definitively in +the Web server market and gradually in segments of the operating system market, +this prediction proved prescient. Similarly, /{Wikipedia}/ now presents a +source of competition to online encyclopedias like Columbia, Grolier, or +Encarta, and may well come to be seen as an adequate substitute for Britannica +as well. Most publicly visible, peer-to-peer file sharing networks have come to +compete with the recording industry as an alternative music distribution +system, to the point where the longterm existence of that industry is in +question. Some scholars like William Fisher, and artists like Jenny Toomey and +participants in the Future of Music Coalition, are already looking for +alternative ways of securing for artists a living from the music they make. +={ community clusters : + market and nonmarket producers +1 ; + Fisher, William (Terry) ; + Toomey, Jenny ; + The Halloween Memo +} + +The competitive threat from social production, however, is merely a surface +phenomenon. Businesses often face competition or its potential, and this is a +new source, with new economics, which may or may not put some of the incumbents +out of business. But there is nothing new about entrants with new business +models putting slow incumbents out of business. More basic is the change in +opportunity spaces, the relationships of firms to users, and, indeed, the very +nature of the boundary of the firm that those businesses that are already +adapting to the presence and predicted persistence of social production are +exhibiting. Understanding the opportunities social production presents for +businesses begins to outline how a stable social production system can coexist +and develop a mutually reinforcing relationship with market-based organizations +that adapt to and adopt, instead of fight, them. +={ capacity : + opportunities created by social production +4 ; + opportunities created by social production +4 +} + +Consider the example I presented in chapter 2 of IBM's relationship to the free +and open source software development community. IBM, as I explained there, has +shown more than $2 billion a year in "Linux-related revenues." Prior to IBM's +commitment to adapting to what the firm sees as the inevitability of free and +open source software, the company either developed in house or bought from +external vendors the software it needed as part of its hardware business, on +the one hand, and its software services-- customization, enterprise solutions, +and so forth--on the other hand. In each case, the software development follows +a well-recognized supply chain model. Through either an employment contract or +a supply contract the ,{[pg 124]}, company secures a legal right to require +either an employee or a vendor to deliver a given output at a given time. In +reliance on that notion of a supply chain that is fixed or determined by a +contract, the company turns around and promises to its clients that it will +deliver the integrated product or service that includes the contracted-for +component. With free or open source software, that relationship changes. IBM is +effectively relying for its inputs on a loosely defined cloud of people who are +engaged in productive social relations. It is making the judgment that the +probability that a sufficiently good product will emerge out of this cloud is +high enough that it can undertake a contractual obligation to its clients, even +though no one in the cloud is specifically contractually committed to it to +produce the specific inputs the firm needs in the time-frame it needs it. This +apparent shift from a contractually deterministic supply chain to a +probabilistic supply chain is less dramatic, however, than it seems. Even when +contracts are signed with employees or suppliers, they merely provide a +probability that the employee or the supplier will in fact supply in time and +at appropriate quality, given the difficulties of coordination and +implementation. A broad literature in organization theory has developed around +the effort to map the various strategies of collaboration and control intended +to improve the likelihood that the different components of the production +process will deliver what they are supposed to: from early efforts at vertical +integration, to relational contracting, pragmatic collaboration, or Toyota's +fabled flexible specialization. The presence of a formalized enforceable +contract, for outputs in which the supplier can claim and transfer a property +right, may change the probability of the desired outcome, but not the fact that +in entering its own contract with its clients, the company is making a +prediction about the required availability of necessary inputs in time. When +the company turns instead to the cloud of social production for its inputs, it +is making a similar prediction. And, as with more engaged forms of relational +contracting, pragmatic collaborations, or other models of iterated relations +with co-producers, the company may engage with the social process in order to +improve the probability that the required inputs will in fact be produced in +time. In the case of companies like IBM or Red Hat, this means, at least +partly, paying employees to participate in the open source development +projects. But managing this relationship is tricky. The firms must do so +without seeking to, or even seeming to seek to, take over the project; for to +take over the project in order to steer it more "predictably" toward the firm's +needs is to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. For IBM and more recently +Nokia, supporting ,{[pg 125]}, the social processes on which they rely has also +meant contributing hundreds of patents to the Free Software Foundation, or +openly licensing them to the software development community, so as to extend +the protective umbrella created by these patents against suits by competitors. +As the companies that adopt this strategic reorientation become more integrated +into the peer-production process itself, the boundary of the firm becomes more +porous. Participation in the discussions and governance of open source +development projects creates new ambiguity as to where, in relation to what is +"inside" and "outside" of the firm boundary, the social process is. In some +cases, a firm may begin to provide utilities or platforms for the users whose +outputs it then uses in its own products. The Open Source Development Group +(OSDG), for example, provides platforms for Slashdot and SourceForge. In these +cases, the notion that there are discrete "suppliers" and "consumers," and that +each of these is clearly demarcated from the other and outside of the set of +stable relations that form the inside of the firm becomes somewhat attenuated. +={ free software : + as competition to market-based business ; + open-source software : + as competition to market-based business ; + software, open-source : + as competition to market based business ; + IBM's business strategy +1 ; + management, changing relationships of +3 +} + +As firms have begun to experience these newly ambiguous relationships with +individuals and social groups, they have come to wrestle with questions of +leadership and coexistence. Businesses like IBM, or eBay, which uses peer +production as a critical component of its business ecology--the peer reviewed +system of creating trustworthiness, without which person-to-person transactions +among individual strangers at a distance would be impossible-- have to +structure their relationship to the peer-production processes that they +co-exist with in a helpful and non-threatening way. Sometimes, as we saw in the +case of IBM's contributions to the social process, this may mean support +without attempting to assume "leadership" of the project. Sometimes, as when +peer production is integrated more directly into what is otherwise a +commercially created and owned platform--as in the case of eBay--the +relationship is more like that of a peer-production leader than of a commercial +actor. Here, the critical and difficult point for business managers to accept +is that bringing the peer-production community into the newly semi-porous +boundary of the firm--taking those who used to be customers and turning them +into participants in a process of co-production-- changes the relationship of +the firm's managers and its users. Linden Labs, which runs Second Life, learned +this in the context of the tax revolt described in chapter 3. Users cannot be +ordered around like employees. Nor can they be simply advertised-to and +manipulated, or even passively surveyed, like customers. To do that would be to +lose the creative and generative social ,{[pg 126]}, character that makes +integration of peer production into a commercial business model so valuable for +those businesses that adopt it. Instead, managers must be able to identify +patterns that emerge in the community and inspire trust that they are correctly +judging the patterns that are valuable from the perspective of the users, not +only the enterprise, so that the users in fact coalesce around and extend these +patterns. + +The other quite basic change wrought by the emergence of social production, +from the perspective of businesses, is a change in taste. Active users require +and value new and different things than passive consumers did. The industrial +information economy specialized in producing finished goods, like movies or +music, to be consumed passively, and well-behaved appliances, like televisions, +whose use was fully specified at the factory door. The emerging businesses of +the networked information economy are focusing on serving the demand of active +users for platforms and tools that are much more loosely designed, +late-binding--that is, optimized only at the moment of use and not in +advance--variable in their uses, and oriented toward providing users with new, +flexible platforms for relationships. Personal computers, camera phones, audio +and video editing software, and similar utilities are examples of tools whose +value increases for users as they are enabled to explore new ways to be +creative and productively engaged with others. In the network, we are beginning +to see business models emerge to allow people to come together, like MeetUp, +and to share annotations of Web pages they read, like del.icio.us, or +photographs they took, like Flickr. Services like Blogger and Technorati +similarly provide platforms for the new social and cultural practices of +personal journals, or the new modes of expression described in chapters 7 and +8. +={ active vs. passive consumers +1 ; + consumer surplus : + See capacity, sharing consumerism, active vs. passive +1 ; + diversity : + changes in taste ; + participatory culture : + See also culture passive vs. active consumers +1 ; + users as consumers +1 ; + taste, changes in +} + +The overarching point is that social production is reshaping the market +conditions under which businesses operate. To some of the incumbents of the +industrial information economy, the pressure from social production is +experienced as pure threat. It is the clash between these incumbents and the +new practices that was most widely reported in the media in the first five +years of the twenty-first century, and that has driven much of policy making, +legislation, and litigation in this area. But the much more fundamental effect +on the business environment is that social production is changing the +relationship of firms to individuals outside of them, and through this changing +the strategies that firms internally are exploring. It is creating new sources +of inputs, and new tastes and opportunities for outputs. Consumers are changing +into users--more active and productive than the consumers of the ,{[pg 127]}, +industrial information economy. The change is reshaping the relationships +necessary for business success, requiring closer integration of users into the +process of production, both in inputs and outputs. It requires different +leadership talents and foci. By the time of this writing, in 2005, these new +opportunities and adaptations have begun to be seized upon as strategic +advantages by some of the most successful companies working around the Internet +and information technology, and increasingly now around information and +cultural production more generally. Eric von Hippel's work has shown how the +model of user innovation has been integrated into the business model of +innovative firms even in sectors far removed from either the network or from +information production--like designing kite-surfing equipment or mountain +bikes. As businesses begin to do this, the platforms and tools for +collaboration improve, the opportunities and salience of social production +increases, and the political economy begins to shift. And as these firms and +social processes coevolve, the dynamic accommodation they are developing +provides us with an image of what the future stable interface between +market-based businesses and the newly salient social production is likely to +look like. ,{[pg 128]}, ,{[pg 129]}, +={ von Hippel, Eric } + +:B~ Part Two - The Political Economy of Property and Commons + +1~p2 Introduction +={ commons +5 ; + property ownership +5 +} + +How a society produces its information environment goes to the very core of +freedom. Who gets to say what, to whom? What is the state of the world? What +counts as credible information? How will different forms of action affect the +way the world can become? These questions go to the foundations of effective +human action. They determine what individuals understand to be the range of +options open to them, and the range of consequences to their actions. They +determine what is understood to be open for debate in a society, and what is +considered impossible as a collective goal or a collective path for action. +They determine whose views count toward collective action, and whose views are +lost and never introduced into the debate of what we should do as political +entities or social communities. Freedom depends on the information environment +that those individuals and societies occupy. Information underlies the very +possibility of individual self-direction. Information and communication +constitute the practices that enable a community to form a common range of +understandings of what is at stake and what paths are open for the taking. They +are constitutive ,{[pg 130]}, components of both formal and informal mechanisms +for deciding on collective action. Societies that embed the emerging networked +information economy in an institutional ecology that accommodates nonmarket +production, both individual and cooperative, will improve the freedom of their +constituents along all these dimensions. +={ freedom } + +The networked information economy makes individuals better able to do things +for and by themselves, and makes them less susceptible to manipulation by +others than they were in the mass-media culture. In this sense, the emergence +of this new set of technical, economic, social, and institutional relations can +increase the relative role that each individual is able to play in authoring +his or her own life. The networked information economy also promises to provide +a much more robust platform for public debate. It enables citizens to +participate in public conversation continuously and pervasively, not as passive +recipients of "received wisdom" from professional talking heads, but as active +participants in conversations carried out at many levels of political and +social structure. Individuals can find out more about what goes on in the +world, and share it more effectively with others. They can check the claims of +others and produce their own, and they can be heard by others, both those who +are like-minded and opponents. At a more foundational level of collective +understanding, the shift from an industrial to a networked information economy +increases the extent to which individuals can become active participants in +producing their own cultural environment. It opens the possibility of a more +critical and reflective culture. + +Unlike the relationship of information production to freedom, the relationship +between the organization of information production and distributive justice is +not intrinsic. However, the importance of knowledge in contemporary economic +production makes a change in the modality of information production important +to justice as well. The networked information economy can provide opportunities +for global development and for improvements in the justice of distribution of +opportunities and capacities everywhere. Economic opportunity and welfare +today--of an individual, a social group, or a nation--depend on the state of +knowledge and access to opportunities to learn and apply practical knowledge. +Transportation networks, global financial markets, and institutional trade +arrangements have made material resources and outputs capable of flowing more +efficiently from any one corner of the globe to another than they were at any +previous period. Economic welfare and growth now depend more on knowledge and +social ,{[pg 131]}, organization than on natural sources. Knowledge transfer +and social reform, probably more than any other set of changes, can affect the +economic opportunities and material development of different parts of the +global economic system, within economies both advanced and less developed. The +emergence of a substantial nonmarket sector in the networked information +economy offers opportunities for providing better access to knowledge and +information as input from, and better access for information outputs of, +developing and less-developed economies and poorer geographic and social +sectors in the advanced economies. Better access to knowledge and the emergence +of less capital-dependent forms of productive social organization offer the +possibility that the emergence of the networked information economy will open +up opportunities for improvement in economic justice, on scales both global and +local. +={ economic opportunity ; + human welfare ; + welfare +} + +The basic intuition and popular belief that the Internet will bring greater +freedom and global equity has been around since the early 1990s. It has been +the technophile's basic belief, just as the horrors of cyberporn, cybercrime, +or cyberterrorism have been the standard gut-wrenching fears of the +technophobe. The technophilic response is reminiscent of claims made in the +past for electricity, for radio, or for telegraph, expressing what James Carey +described as "the mythos of the electrical sublime." The question this part of +the book explores is whether this claim, given the experience of the past +decade, can be sustained on careful analysis, or whether it is yet another +instance of a long line of technological utopianism. The fact that earlier +utopias were overly optimistic does not mean that these previous technologies +did not in fact alter the conditions of life--material, social, and +intellectual. They did, but they did so differently in different societies, and +in ways that diverged from the social utopias attached to them. Different +nations absorbed and used these technologies differently, diverging in social +and cultural habits, but also in institutional strategies for adoption--some +more state-centric, others more market based; some more controlled, others less +so. Utopian or at least best-case conceptions of the emerging condition are +valuable if they help diagnose the socially and politically significant +attributes of the emerging networked information economy correctly and allow us +to form a normative conception of their significance. At a minimum, with these +in hand, we can begin to design our institutional response to the present +technological perturbation in order to improve the conditions of freedom and +justice over the next few decades. ,{[pg 132]}, +={ Carey, James } + +The chapters in this part focus on major liberal commitments or concerns. +Chapter 5 addresses the question of individual autonomy. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 +address democratic participation: first in the political public sphere and +then, more broadly, in the construction of culture. Chapter 9 deals with +justice and human development. Chapter 10 considers the effects of the +networked information economy on community. ,{[pg 133]}, + +1~5 Chapter 5 - Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information, and Law +={ autonomy +64 ; + individual autonomy +64 +} + +The emergence of the networked information economy has the potential to +increase individual autonomy. First, it increases the range and diversity of +things that individuals can do for and by themselves. It does this by lifting, +for one important domain of life, some of the central material constraints on +what individuals can do that typified the industrial information economy. The +majority of materials, tools, and platforms necessary for effective action in +the information environment are in the hands of most individuals in advanced +economies. Second, the networked information economy provides nonproprietary +alternative sources of communications capacity and information, alongside the +proprietary platforms of mediated communications. This decreases the extent to +which individuals are subject to being acted upon by the owners of the +facilities on which they depend for communications. The construction of +consumers as passive objects of manipulation that typified television culture +has not disappeared overnight, but it is losing its dominance in the +information environment. Third, the networked information environment +qualitatively increases the range and diversity of information ,{[pg 134]}, +available to individuals. It does so by enabling sources commercial and +noncommercial, mainstream and fringe, domestic or foreign, to produce +information and communicate with anyone. This diversity radically changes the +universe of options that individuals can consider as open for them to pursue. +It provides them a richer basis to form critical judgments about how they could +live their lives, and, through this opportunity for critical reflection, why +they should value the life they choose. + +2~ FREEDOM TO DO MORE FOR ONESELF, BY ONESELF, AND WITH OTHERS + +Rory Cejas was a twenty-six-year-old firefighter/paramedic with the Miami Fire +Department in 2003, when he enlisted the help of his brother, wife, and a +friend to make a Star Wars-like fan film. Using a simple camcorder and tripod, +and widely available film and image generation and editing software on his +computer, he made a twenty-minute film he called /{The Jedi Saga}/. The film is +not a parody. It is not social criticism. It is a straightforward effort to +make a movie in the genre of /{Star Wars}/, using the same type of characters +and story lines. In the predigital world, it would have been impossible, as a +practical matter, for Cejas to do this. It would have been an implausible part +of his life plan to cast his wife as a dark femme fatale, or his brother as a +Jedi Knight, so they could battle shoulder-to-shoulder, light sabers drawn, +against a platoon of Imperial clone soldiers. And it would have been impossible +for him to distribute the film he had made to friends and strangers. The +material conditions of cultural production have changed, so that it has now +become part of his feasible set of options. He needs no help from government to +do so. He needs no media access rules that give him access to fancy film +studios. He needs no cable access rules to allow him to distribute his fantasy +to anyone who wants to watch it. The new set of feasible options open to him +includes not only the option passively to sit in the theatre or in front of the +television and watch the images created by George Lucas, but also the option of +trying his hand at making this type of film by himself. +={ Cejas, Rory +1 ; + Jedi Saga, The +1 ; + Lucas, George +1 +} + +/{Jedi Saga}/ will not be a blockbuster. It is not likely to be watched by many +people. Those who do watch it are not likely to enjoy it in the same way that +they enjoyed any of Lucas's films, but that is not its point. When someone like +Cejas makes such a film, he is not displacing what Lucas does. He is changing +what he himself does--from sitting in front of a screen that ,{[pg 135]}, is +painted by another to painting his own screen. Those who watch it will enjoy it +in the same way that friends and family enjoy speaking to each other or singing +together, rather than watching talking heads or listening to Talking Heads. +Television culture, the epitome of the industrial information economy, +structured the role of consumers as highly passive. While media scholars like +John Fiske noted the continuing role of viewers in construing and interpreting +the messages they receive, the role of the consumer in this model is well +defined. The media product is a finished good that they consume, not one that +they make. Nowhere is this clearer than in the movie theatre, where the absence +of light, the enveloping sound, and the size of the screen are all designed to +remove the viewer as agent, leaving only a set of receptors--eyes, +ears--through which to receive the finished good that is the movie. There is +nothing wrong with the movies as one mode of entertainment. The problem +emerges, however, when the movie theatre becomes an apt metaphor for the +relationship the majority of people have with most of the information +environment they occupy. That increasing passivity of television culture came +to be a hallmark of life for most people in the late stages of the industrial +information economy. The couch potato, the eyeball bought and sold by Madison +Avenue, has no part in making the information environment he or she occupies. +={ active vs. passive consumers +1 ; + consumer surplus : + See capacity, sharing consumerism, active vs. passive +1 ; + culture : + of television ; + Fiske, John ; + participatory culture : + See also culture passive vs. active consumers ; + television : + culture of +} + +Perhaps no single entertainment product better symbolizes the shift that the +networked information economy makes possible from television culture than the +massive multiplayer online game. These games are typified by two central +characteristics. First, they offer a persistent game environment. That is, any +action taken or "object" created anywhere in the game world persists over time, +unless and until it is destroyed by some agent in the game; and it exists to +the same extent for all players. Second, the games are effectively massive +collaboration platforms for thousands, tens of thousands--or in the case of +Lineage, the most popular game in South Korea, more than four million--users. +These platforms therefore provide individual players with various contexts in +which to match their wits and skills with other human players. The computer +gaming environment provides a persistent relational database of the actions and +social interactions of players. The first games that became mass phenomena, +like Ultima Online or Everquest, started with an already richly instantiated +context. Designers of these games continue to play a large role in defining the +range of actions and relations feasible for players. The basic medieval themes, +the role of magic and weapons, and the types and ranges of actions that are +possible create much of the context, and ,{[pg 136]}, therefore the types of +relationships pursued. Still, these games leave qualitatively greater room for +individual effort and personal taste in producing the experience, the +relationships, and hence the story line, relative to a television or movie +experience. Second Life, a newer game by Linden Labs, offers us a glimpse into +the next step in this genre of immersive entertainment. Like other massively +multiplayer online games, Second Life is a persistent collaboration platform +for its users. Unlike other games, however, Second Life offers only tools, with +no story line, stock objects, or any cultural or meaning-oriented context +whatsoever. Its users have created 99 percent of the objects in the game +environment. The medieval village was nothing but blank space when they +started. So was the flying vehicle design shop, the futuristic outpost, or the +university, where some of the users are offering courses in basic programming +skills and in-game design. Linden Labs charges a flat monthly subscription fee. +Its employees focus on building tools that enable users to do everything from +basic story concept down to the finest details of their own appearance and of +objects they use in the game world. The in-game human relationships are those +made by the users as they interact with each other in this immersive +entertainment experience. The game's relationship to its users is fundamentally +different from that of the movie or television studio. Movies and television +seek to control the entire experience--rendering the viewer inert, but +satisfied. Second Life sees the users as active makers of the entertainment +environment that they occupy, and seeks to provide them with the tools they +need to be so. The two models assume fundamentally different conceptions of +play. Whereas in front of the television, the consumer is a passive receptacle, +limited to selecting which finished good he or she will consume from a +relatively narrow range of options, in the world of Second Life, the individual +is treated as a fundamentally active, creative human being, capable of building +his or her own fantasies, alone and in affiliation with others. +={ communities : + immersive entertainment ; + computer gaming environment ; + entertainment industry : + immersive ; + games, immersive ; + immersive entertainment ; + massive multiplayer games ; + MMOGs (massive multiplayer online games) ; + Second Life game environment +} + +Second Life and /{Jedi Saga}/ are merely examples, perhaps trivial ones, within +the entertainment domain. They represent a shift in possibilities open both to +human beings in the networked information economy and to the firms that sell +them the tools for becoming active creators and users of their information +environment. They are stark examples because of the centrality of the couch +potato as the image of human action in television culture. Their +characteristics are representative of the shift in the individual's role that +is typical of the networked information economy in general and of peer +production in particular. Linus Torvalds, the original creator of the Linux +kernel ,{[pg 137]}, development community, was, to use Eric Raymond's +characterization, a designer with an itch to scratch. Peer-production projects +often are composed of people who want to do something in the world and turn to +the network to find a community of peers willing to work together to make that +wish a reality. Michael Hart had been working in various contexts for more than +thirty years when he--at first gradually, and more recently with increasing +speed--harnessed the contributions of hundreds of volunteers to Project +Gutenberg in pursuit of his goal to create a globally accessible library of +public domain e-texts. Charles Franks was a computer programmer from Las Vegas +when he decided he had a more efficient way to proofread those e-texts, and +built an interface that allowed volunteers to compare scanned images of +original texts with the e-texts available on Project Gutenberg. After working +independently for a couple of years, he joined forces with Hart. Franks's +facility now clears the volunteer work of more than one thousand proofreaders, +who proof between two hundred and three hundred books a month. Each of the +thousands of volunteers who participate in free software development projects, +in /{Wikipedia}/, in the Open Directory Project, or in any of the many other +peer-production projects, is living some version, as a major or minor part of +their lives, of the possibilities captured by the stories of a Linus Torvalds, +a Michael Hart, or /{The Jedi Saga}/. Each has decided to take advantage of +some combination of technical, organizational, and social conditions within +which we have come to live, and to become an active creator in his or her +world, rather than merely to accept what was already there. The belief that it +is possible to make something valuable happen in the world, and the practice of +actually acting on that belief, represent a qualitative improvement in the +condition of individual freedom. They mark the emergence of new practices of +self-directed agency as a lived experience, going beyond mere formal +permissibility and theoretical possibility. +={ Project Gutenberg ; + Torvalds, Linus ; + Franks, Charles ; + Hart, Michael ; + Raymond, Eric +} + +Our conception of autonomy has not only been forged in the context of the rise +of the democratic, civil rights?respecting state over its major competitors as +a political system. In parallel, we have occupied the context of the increasing +dominance of market-based industrial economy over its competitors. The culture +we have developed over the past century is suffused with images that speak of +the loss of agency imposed by that industrial economy. No cultural image better +captures the way that mass industrial production reduced workers to cogs and +consumers to receptacles than the one-dimensional curves typical of welfare +economics--those that render human beings as mere production and demand +functions. Their cultural, if ,{[pg 138]}, not intellectual, roots are in +Fredrick Taylor's Theory of Scientific Management: the idea of abstracting and +defining all motions and actions of employees in the production process so that +all the knowledge was in the system, while the employees were barely more than +its replaceable parts. Taylorism, ironically, was a vast improvement over the +depredations of the first industrial age, with its sweatshops and child labor. +It nonetheless resolved into the kind of mechanical existence depicted in +Charlie Chaplin's tragic-comic portrait, Modern Times. While the grind of +industrial Taylorism seems far from the core of the advanced economies, shunted +as it is now to poorer economies, the basic sense of alienation and lack of +effective agency persists. Scott Adams's Dilbert comic strip, devoted to the +life of a white-collar employee in a nameless U.S. corporation, thoroughly +alienated from the enterprise, crimped by corporate hierarchy, resisting in all +sorts of ways-- but trapped in a cubicle--powerfully captures this sense for +the industrial information economy in much the same way that Chaplin's Modern +Times did for the industrial economy itself. +={ industrial age : + reduction of individual autonomy +1 ; + Adams, Scott ; + Chaplin, Charlie ; + Taylor, Fredrick +} + +In the industrial economy and its information adjunct, most people live most of +their lives within hierarchical relations of production, and within relatively +tightly scripted possibilities after work, as consumers. It did not necessarily +have to be this way. Michael Piore and Charles Sabel's Second Industrial Divide +and Roberto Mangabeira Unger's False Necessity were central to the emergence of +a "third way" literature that developed in the 1980s and 1990s to explore the +possible alternative paths to production processes that did not depend so +completely on the displacement of individual agency by hierarchical production +systems. The emergence of radically decentralized, nonmarket production +provides a new outlet for the attenuation of the constrained and constraining +roles of employees and consumers. It is not limited to Northern Italian artisan +industries or imagined for emerging economies, but is at the very heart of the +most advanced market economies. Peer production and otherwise decentralized +nonmarket production can alter the producer/consumer relationship with regard +to culture, entertainment, and information. We are seeing the emergence of the +user as a new category of relationship to information production and exchange. +Users are individuals who are sometimes consumers and sometimes producers. They +are substantially more engaged participants, both in defining the terms of +their productive activity and in defining what they consume and how they +consume it. In these two great domains of life--production and consumption, +work and play--the networked information economy promises to enrich individual +,{[pg 139]}, autonomy substantively by creating an environment built less +around control and more around facilitating action. +={ Sabel, Charles ; + Mangabeira Unger, Roberto ; + Piore, Michael +} + +The emergence of radically decentralized nonmarket production in general and of +peer production in particular as feasible forms of action opens new classes of +behaviors to individuals. Individuals can now justifiably believe that they can +in fact do things that they want to do, and build things that they want to +build in the digitally networked environment, and that this pursuit of their +will need not, perhaps even cannot, be frustrated by insurmountable cost or an +alien bureaucracy. Whether their actions are in the domain of political +organization (like the organizers of MoveOn.org), or of education and +professional attainment (as with the case of Jim Cornish, who decided to create +a worldwide center of information on the Vikings from his fifth-grade +schoolroom in Gander, Newfoundland), the networked information environment +opens new domains for productive life that simply were not there before. In +doing so, it has provided us with new ways to imagine our lives as productive +human beings. Writing a free operating system or publishing a free encyclopedia +may have seemed quixotic a mere few years ago, but these are now far from +delusional. Human beings who live in a material and social context that lets +them aspire to such things as possible for them to do, in their own lives, by +themselves and in loose affiliation with others, are human beings who have a +greater realm for their agency. We can live a life more authored by our own +will and imagination than by the material and social conditions in which we +find ourselves. At least we can do so more effectively than we could until the +last decade of the twentieth century. + +This new practical individual freedom, made feasible by the digital +environment, is at the root of the improvements I describe here for political +participation, for justice and human development, for the creation of a more +critical culture, and for the emergence of the networked individual as a more +fluid member of community. In each of these domains, the improvements in the +degree to which these liberal commitments are honored and practiced emerge from +new behaviors made possible and effective by the networked information economy. +These behaviors emerge now precisely because individuals have a greater degree +of freedom to act effectively, unconstrained by a need to ask permission from +anyone. It is this freedom that increases the salience of nonmonetizable +motivations as drivers of production. It is this freedom to seek out whatever +information we wish, to write about it, and to join and leave various projects +and associations with others that underlies ,{[pg 140]}, the new efficiencies +we see in the networked information economy. These behaviors underlie the +cooperative news and commentary production that form the basis of the networked +public sphere, and in turn enable us to look at the world as potential +participants in discourse, rather than as potential viewers only. They are at +the root of making a more transparent and reflective culture. They make +possible the strategies I suggest as feasible avenues to assure equitable +access to opportunities for economic participation and to improve human +development globally. + +Treating these new practical opportunities for action as improvements in +autonomy is not a theoretically unproblematic proposition. For all its +intuitive appeal and centrality, autonomy is a notoriously nebulous concept. In +particular, there are deep divisions within the literature as to whether it is +appropriate to conceive of autonomy in substantive terms--as Gerald Dworkin, +Joseph Raz, and Joel Feinberg most prominently have, and as I have here--or in +formal terms. Formal conceptions of autonomy are committed to assuming that all +people have the capacity for autonomous choice, and do not go further in +attempting to measure the degree of freedom people actually exercise in the +world in which they are in fact constrained by circumstances, both natural and +human. This commitment is not rooted in some stubborn unwillingness to +recognize the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that actually constrain +our choices. Rather, it comes from the sense that only by treating people as +having these capacities and abilities can we accord them adequate respect as +free, rational beings, and avoid sliding into overbearing paternalism. As +Robert Post put it, while autonomy may well be something that needs to be +"achieved" as a descriptive matter, the "structures of social authority" will +be designed differently depending on whether or not individuals are treated as +autonomous. "From the point of view of the designer of the structure, +therefore, the presence or absence of autonomy functions as an axiomatic and +foundational principle."~{ Robert Post, "Meiklejohn's Mistake: Individual +Autonomy and the Reform of Public Discourse," University of Colorado Law Review +64 (1993): 1109, 1130-1132. }~ Autonomy theory that too closely aims to +understand the degree of autonomy people actually exercise under different +institutional arrangements threatens to form the basis of an overbearing +benevolence that would undermine the very possibility of autonomous action. +={ autonomy : + formal conception of +3 ; + formal autonomy theory +3 ; + individual autonomy : + formal conception of +3 ; + Dworkin, Gerard ; + Post, Robert ; + Raz, Joseph ; + Feinberg, Joel +} + +While the fear of an overbearing bureaucracy benevolently guiding us through +life toward becoming more autonomous is justifiable, the formal conception of +autonomy pays a high price in its bluntness as a tool to diagnose the autonomy +implications of policy. Given how we are: situated, ,{[pg 141]}, context-bound, +messy individuals, it would be a high price to pay to lose the ability to +understand how law and policy actually affect whatever capacity we do have to +be the authors of our own life choices in some meaningful sense. We are +individuals who have the capacity to form beliefs and to change them, to form +opinions and plans and defend them--but also to listen to arguments and revise +our beliefs. We experience some decisions as being more free than others; we +mock or lament ourselves when we find ourselves trapped by the machine or the +cubicle, and we do so in terms of a sense of helplessness, a negation of +freedom, not only, or even primarily, in terms of lack of welfare; and we +cherish whatever conditions those are that we experience as "free" precisely +for that freedom, not for other reasons. Certainly, the concerns with an +overbearing state, whether professing benevolence or not, are real and +immediate. No one who lives with the near past of the totalitarianism of the +twentieth century or with contemporary authoritarianism and fundamentalism can +belittle these. But the great evils that the state can impose through formal +law should not cause us to adopt methodological commitments that would limit +our ability to see the many ways in which ordinary life in democratic societies +can nonetheless be more or less free, more or less conducive to individual +self-authorship. + +If we take our question to be one concerned with diagnosing the condition of +freedom of individuals, we must observe the conditions of life from a +first-person, practical perspective--that is, from the perspective of the +person whose autonomy we are considering. If we accept that all individuals are +always constrained by personal circumstances both physical and social, then the +way to think about autonomy of human agents is to inquire into the relative +capacity of individuals to be the authors of their lives within the constraints +of context. From this perspective, whether the sources of constraint are +private actors or public law is irrelevant. What matters is the extent to which +a particular configuration of material, social, and institutional conditions +allows an individual to be the author of his or her life, and to what extent +these conditions allow others to act upon the individual as an object of +manipulation. As a means of diagnosing the conditions of individual freedom in +a given society and context, we must seek to observe the extent to which people +are, in fact, able to plan and pursue a life that can reasonably be described +as a product of their own choices. It allows us to compare different +conditions, and determine that a certain condition allows individuals to do +more for themselves, without asking permission from anyone. In this sense, we +can say that the conditions that enabled Cejas ,{[pg 142]}, to make /{Jedi +Saga}/ are conditions that made him more autonomous than he would have been +without the tools that made that movie possible. It is in this sense that the +increased range of actions we can imagine for ourselves in loose affiliation +with others--like creating a Project Gutenberg--increases our ability to +imagine and pursue life plans that would have been impossible in the recent +past. +={ Cejas, Rory } + +From the perspective of the implications of autonomy for how people act in the +digital environment, and therefore how they are changing the conditions of +freedom and justice along the various dimensions explored in these chapters, +this kind of freedom to act is central. It is a practical freedom sufficient to +sustain the behaviors that underlie the improvements in these other domains. +From an internal perspective of the theory of autonomy, however, this basic +observation that people can do more by themselves, alone or in loose +affiliation with others, is only part of the contribution of the networked +information economy to autonomy, and a part that will only be considered an +improvement by those who conceive of autonomy as a substantive concept. The +implications of the networked information economy for autonomy are, however, +broader, in ways that make them attractive across many conceptions of autonomy. +To make that point, however, we must focus more specifically on law as the +source of constraint, a concern common to both substantive and formal +conceptions of autonomy. As a means of analyzing the implications of law to +autonomy, the perspective offered here requires that we broaden our analysis +beyond laws that directly limit autonomy. We must also look to laws that +structure the conditions of action for individuals living within the ambit of +their effect. In particular, where we have an opportunity to structure a set of +core resources necessary for individuals to perceive the state of the world and +the range of possible actions, and to communicate their intentions to others, +we must consider whether the way we regulate these resources will create +systematic limitations on the capacity of individuals to control their own +lives, and in their susceptibility to manipulation and control by others. Once +we recognize that there cannot be a person who is ideally "free," in the sense +of being unconstrained or uncaused by the decisions of others, we are left to +measure the effects of all sorts of constraints that predictably flow from a +particular legal arrangement, in terms of the effect they have on the relative +role that individuals play in authoring their own lives. ,{[pg 143]}, + +2~ AUTONOMY, PROPERTY, AND COMMONS +={ culture : + security of context +5 ; + freedom : + property and commons +5 ; + norms (social) : + property, commons, and autonomy +5 ; + property ownership : + autonomy and +5 ; + regulation by social norms : + property, commons, and autonomy +5 ; + security of context +5 ; + social relations and norms : + property, commons, and autonomy +5 +} + +The first legal framework whose role is altered by the emergence of the +networked information economy is the property-like regulatory structure of +patents, copyrights, and similar exclusion mechanisms applicable to +information, knowledge, and culture. Property is usually thought in liberal +theory to enhance, rather than constrain, individual freedom, in two quite +distinct ways. First, it provides security of material context--that is, it +allows one to know with some certainty that some set of resources, those that +belong to her, will be available for her to use to execute her plans over time. +This is the core of Kant's theory of property, which relies on a notion of +positive liberty, the freedom to do things successfully based on life plans we +can lay for ourselves. Second, property and markets provide greater freedom of +action for the individual owner as compared both, as Marx diagnosed, to the +feudal arrangements that preceded them, and, as he decidedly did not but Hayek +did, to the models of state ownership and regulation that competed with them +throughout most of the twentieth century. +={ Hayek, Friedrich ; + Kant, Immanuel ; + Marx, Karl +} + +Markets are indeed institutional spaces that enable a substantial degree of +free choice. "Free," however, does not mean "anything goes." If John possesses +a car and Jane possesses a gun, a market will develop only if John is +prohibited from running Jane over and taking her gun, and also if Jane is +prohibited from shooting at John or threatening to shoot him if he does not +give her his car. A market that is more or less efficient will develop only if +many other things are prohibited to, or required of, one or both sides--like +monopolization or disclosure. Markets are, in other words, structured +relationships intended to elicit a particular datum--the comparative +willingness and ability of agents to pay for goods or resources. The most basic +set of constraints that structure behavior in order to enable markets are those +we usually call property. Property is a cluster of background rules that +determine what resources each of us has when we come into relations with +others, and, no less important, what "having" or "lacking" a resource entails +in our relations with these others. These rules impose constraints on who can +do what in the domain of actions that require access to resources that are the +subjects of property law. They are aimed to crystallize asymmetries of power +over resources, which then form the basis for exchanges--I will allow you to do +X, which I am asymmetrically empowered to do (for example, watch television +using this cable system), and you, in turn, will allow me to do Y, which you +are asymmetrically empowered to do (for example, receive payment ,{[pg 144]}, +from your bank account). While a necessary precondition for markets, property +also means that choice in markets is itself not free of constraints, but is +instead constrained in a particular pattern. It makes some people more powerful +with regard to some things, and must constrain the freedom of action of others +in order to achieve this asymmetry.~{ This conception of property was first +introduced and developed systematically by Robert Lee Hale in the 1920s and +1930s, and was more recently integrated with contemporary postmodern critiques +of power by Duncan Kennedy, Sexy Dressing Etc.: Essays on the Power and +Politics of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). +}~ + +Commons are an alternative form of institutional space, where human agents can +act free of the particular constraints required for markets, and where they +have some degree of confidence that the resources they need for their plans +will be available to them. Both freedom of action and security of resource +availability are achieved in very different patterns than they are in +property-based markets. As with markets, commons do not mean that anything +goes. Managing resources as commons does, however, mean that individuals and +groups can use those resources under different types of constraints than those +imposed by property law. These constraints may be social, physical, or +regulatory. They may make individuals more free or less so, in the sense of +permitting a greater or lesser freedom of action to choose among a range of +actions that require access to resources governed by them than would property +rules in the same resources. Whether having a particular type of resource +subject to a commons, rather than a property-based market, enhances freedom of +action and security, or harms them, is a context-specific question. It depends +on how the commons is structured, and how property rights in the resource would +have been structured in the absence of a commons. The public spaces in New York +City, like Central Park, Union Square, or any sidewalk, afford more people +greater freedom than does a private backyard--certainly to all but its owner. +Given the diversity of options that these public spaces make possible as +compared to the social norms that neighbors enforce against each other, they +probably offer more freedom of action than a backyard offers even to its owner +in many loosely urban and suburban communities. Swiss pastures or irrigation +districts of the type that Elinor Ostrom described as classic cases of +long-standing sustainable commons offer their participants security of holdings +at least as stable as any property system, but place substantial traditional +constraints on who can use the resources, how they can use them, and how, if at +all, they can transfer their rights and do something completely different. +These types of commons likely afford their participants less, rather than more, +freedom of action than would have been afforded had they owned the same +resource in a market-alienable property arrangement, although they retain +security in much the same way. Commons, like the air, the sidewalk, the road +and highway, the ,{[pg 145]}, ocean, or the public beach, achieve security on a +very different model. I can rely on the resources so managed in a +probabilistic, rather than deterministic sense. I can plan to meet my friends +for a picnic in the park, not because I own the park and can direct that it be +used for my picnic, but because I know there will be a park, that it is free +for me to use, and that there will be enough space for us to find a corner to +sit in. This is also the sort of security that allows me to plan to leave my +house at some hour, and plan to be at work at some other hour, relying not on +owning the transportation path, but on the availability to me of the roads and +highways on symmetric terms to its availability to everyone else. If we look +more closely, we will see that property and markets also offer only a +probabilistic security of context, whose parameters are different--for example, +the degree of certainty we have as to whether the resource we rely on as our +property will be stolen or damaged, whether it will be sufficient for what we +need, or if we need more, whether it will be available for sale and whether we +will be able to afford it. +={ commons : + autonomy and +2 ; + Ostrom, Elinor +} + +Like property and markets, then, commons provide both freedom of action and +security of context. They do so, however, through the imposition of different +constraints than do property and market rules. In particular, what typifies all +these commons in contradistinction to property is that no actor is empowered by +law to act upon another as an object of his or her will. I can impose +conditions on your behavior when you are walking on my garden path, but I have +no authority to impose on you when you walk down the sidewalk. Whether one or +the other of the two systems, used exclusively, will provide "greater freedom" +in some aggregate sense is not a priori determinable. It will depend on the +technical characteristics of the resource, the precise contours of the rules +of, respectively, the proprietary market and the commons, and the distribution +of wealth in society. Given the diversity of resources and contexts, and the +impossibility of a purely "anything goes" absence of rules for either system, +some mix of the two different institutional frameworks is likely to provide the +greatest diversity of freedom to act in a material context. This diversity, in +turn, enables the greatest freedom to plan action within material contexts, +allowing individuals to trade off the availabilities of, and constraints on, +different resources to forge a context sufficiently provisioned to enable them +to execute their plans, while being sufficiently unregulated to permit them to +do so. Freedom inheres in diversity of constraint, not in the optimality of the +balance of freedom and constraint represented by any single institutional +arrangement. It is the diversity of constraint that allows individuals to plan +to live out different ,{[pg 146]}, portions and aspects of their lives in +different institutional contexts, taking advantage of the different degrees of +freedom and security they make possible. + +In the context of information, knowledge, and culture, because of the +nonrivalry of information and its characteristic as input as well as output of +the production process, the commons provides substantially greater security of +context than it does when material resources, like parks or roadways, are at +stake. Moreover, peer production and the networked information economy provide +an increasingly robust source of new information inputs. This reduces the risk +of lacking resources necessary to create new expressions or find out new +things, and renders more robust the freedom to act without being susceptible to +constraint from someone who holds asymmetrically greater power over the +information resources one needs. As to information, then, we can say with a +high degree of confidence that a more expansive commons improves individual +autonomy, while enclosure of the public domain undermines it. This is less +determinate with communications systems. Because computers and network +connections are rival goods, there is less certainty that a commons will +deliver the required resources. Under present conditions, a mixture of +commons-based and proprietary communications systems is likely to improve +autonomy. If, however, technological and social conditions change so that, for +example, sharing on the model of peer-to-peer networks, distributed +computation, or wireless mesh networks will be able to offer as dependable a +set of communications and computation resources as the Web offers information +and knowledge resources, the relative attractiveness of commons-oriented +communications policies will increase from the perspective of autonomy. +={ autonomy : + information environment, structure of ; + individual autonomy : + information environment, structure of ; + network topology : + autonomy and ; + structure of network : + autonomy and ; + topology, network : + autonomy and +} + +% watch may belong only to next section, if so remove + +2~ AUTONOMY AND THE INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT +={ autonomy : + information environment, structure of +24 ; + individual autonomy : + information environment, structure of +24 ; + network topology : + autonomy and +24 ; + structure of network : + autonomy and +24 ; + topology, network : + autonomy and +24 +} + +The structure of our information environment is constitutive of our autonomy, +not only functionally significant to it. While the capacity to act free of +constraints is most immediately and clearly changed by the networked +information economy, information plays an even more foundational role in our +very capacity to make and pursue life plans that can properly be called our +own. A fundamental requirement of self-direction is the capacity to perceive +the state of the world, to conceive of available options for action, to connect +actions to consequences, to evaluate alternative outcomes, and to ,{[pg 147]}, +decide upon and pursue an action accordingly. Without these, no action, even if +mechanically self-directed in the sense that my brain consciously directs my +body to act, can be understood as autonomous in any normatively interesting +sense. All of the components of decision making prior to action, and those +actions that are themselves communicative moves or require communication as a +precondition to efficacy, are constituted by the information and communications +environment we, as agents, occupy. Conditions that cause failures at any of +these junctures, which place bottlenecks, failures of communication, or provide +opportunities for manipulation by a gatekeeper in the information environment, +create threats to the autonomy of individuals in that environment. The shape of +the information environment, and the distribution of power within it to control +information flows to and from individuals, are, as we have seen, the contingent +product of a combination of technology, economic behavior, social patterns, and +institutional structure or law. + +In 1999, Cisco Systems issued a technical white paper, which described a new +router that the company planned to sell to cable broadband providers. In +describing advantages that these new "policy routers" offer cable providers, +the paper explained that if the provider's users want to subscribe to a service +that "pushes" information to their computer: "You could restrict the incoming +push broadcasts as well as subscribers' outgoing access to the push site to +discourage its use. At the same time, you could promote your own or a partner's +services with full speed features to encourage adoption of your services."~{ +White Paper, "Controlling Your Network, A Must for Cable Operators" (1999), +http:// www.cptech.org/ecom/openaccess/cisco1.html. }~ +={ access : + systematically blocked by policy routers +3 ; + blocked access : + autonomy and +7 | policy routers +3 ; + capacity : + policy routers +3 ; + Cisco policy routers +3 ; + culture : + shaping perceptions of others +7 ; + information flow : + controlling with policy routers +3 ; + information production inputs : + systematically blocked by policy routers +3 ; + inputs to production : + systematically blocked by policy routers +3 ; + manipulating perceptions of others +7 ; + perceptions of others, shaping +7 ; + policy routers +3 ; + production inputs : + systematically blocked by policy routers +3 ; + routers, controlling information flow with +3 ; + shaping perceptions of others +7 +} + +In plain English, the broadband provider could inspect the packets flowing to +and from a customer, and decide which packets would go through faster and more +reliably, and which would slow down or be lost. Its engineering purpose was to +improve quality of service. However, it could readily be used to make it harder +for individual users to receive information that they want to subscribe to, and +easier for them to receive information from sites preferred by the +provider--for example, the provider's own site, or sites of those who pay the +cable operator for using this function to help "encourage" users to adopt their +services. There are no reports of broadband providers using these capabilities +systematically. But occasional events, such as when Canada's second largest +telecommunications company blocked access for all its subscribers and those of +smaller Internet service providers that relied on its network to the website of +the Telecommunications Workers Union in 2005, suggest that the concern is far +from imaginary. ,{[pg 148]}, + +It is fairly clear that the new router increases the capacity of cable +operators to treat their subscribers as objects, and to manipulate their +actions in order to make them act as the provider wills, rather than as they +would have had they had perfect information. It is less obvious whether this is +a violation of, or a decrease in, the autonomy of the users. At one extreme, +imagine the home as a black box with no communications capabilities save +one--the cable broadband connection. Whatever comes through that cable is, for +all practical purposes, "the state of the world," as far as the inhabitants of +that home know. In this extreme situation, the difference between a completely +neutral pipe that carries large amounts of information indiscriminately, and a +pipe finely controlled by the cable operator is a large one, in terms of the +autonomy of the home's inhabitants. If the pipe is indiscriminate, then the +choices of the users determine what they know; decisions based on that +knowledge can be said to be autonomous, at least to the extent that whether +they are or are not autonomous is a function of the state of the agent's +knowledge when forming a decision. If the pipe is finely controlled and +purposefully manipulated by the cable operator, by contrast, then decisions +that individuals make based on the knowledge they acquire through that pipe are +substantially a function of the choices of the controller of the pipe, not of +the users. At the other extreme, if each agent has dozens of alternative +channels of communication to the home, and knows how the information flow of +each one is managed, then the introduction of policy routers into one or some +of those channels has no real implications for the agent's autonomy. While it +may render one or more channels manipulable by their provider, the presence of +alternative, indiscriminate channels, on the one hand, and of competition and +choice among various manipulated channels, on the other hand, attenuates the +extent to which the choices of the provider structure the universe of +information within which the individual agent operates. The provider no longer +can be said to shape the individual's choices, even if it tries to shape the +information environment observable through its channel with the specific intent +of manipulating the actions of users who view the world through its pipe. With +sufficient choice among pipes, and sufficient knowledge about the differences +between pipes, the very choice to use the manipulated pipe can be seen as an +autonomous act. The resulting state of knowledge is self-selected by the user. +Even if that state of knowledge then is partial and future actions constrained +by it, the limited range of options is itself an expression of the user's +autonomy, not a hindrance on it. For example, consider the following: Odysseus +and his men mix different ,{[pg 149]}, forms of freedom and constraint in the +face of the Sirens. Odysseus maintains his capacity to acquire new information +by leaving his ears unplugged, but binds himself to stay on the ship by having +his men tie him to the mast. His men choose the same course at the same time, +but bind themselves to the ship by having Odysseus stop their ears with wax, so +that they do not get the new information--the siren songs--that might change +their minds and cause them not to stay the course. Both are autonomous when +they pass by the Sirens, though both are free only because of their current +incapacity. Odysseus's incapacity to jump into the water and swim to the Sirens +and his men's incapacity to hear the siren songs are a result of their +autonomously chosen past actions. + +The world we live in is neither black box nor cornucopia of well-specified +communications channels. However, characterizing the range of possible +configurations of the communications environment we occupy as lying on a +spectrum from one to the other provides us with a framework for describing the +degree to which actual conditions of a communications environment are conducive +to individual autonomy. More important perhaps, it allows us to characterize +policy and law that affects the communications environment as improving or +undermining individual autonomy. Law can affect the range of channels of +communications available to individuals, as well as the rules under which they +are used. How many communications channels and sources of information can an +individual receive? How many are available for him or her to communicate with +others? Who controls these communications channels? What does control over the +communications channels to an agent entail? What can the controller do, and +what can it not? All of these questions are the subject of various forms of +policy and law. Their implications affect the degree of autonomy possessed by +individuals operating with the institutional-technical-economic framework thus +created. + +There are two primary types of effects that information law can have on +personal autonomy. The first type is concerned with the relative capacity of +some people systematically to constrain the perceptions or shape the +preferences of others. A law that systematically gives some people the power to +control the options perceived by, or the preferences of, others, is a law that +harms autonomy. Government regulation of the press and its propaganda that +attempts to shape its subjects' lives is a special case of this more general +concern. This concern is in some measure quantitative, in the sense that a +greater degree of control to which one is subject is a greater offense to +autonomy. More fundamentally, a law that systematically makes one adult ,{[pg +150]}, susceptible to the control of another offends the autonomy of the +former. Law has created the conditions for one person to act upon another as an +object. This is the nonpragmatic offense to autonomy committed by abortion +regulations upheld in /{Planned Parenthood v. Casey}/ --such as requirements +that women who seek abortions listen to lectures designed to dissuade them. +These were justified by the plurality there, not by the claim that they did not +impinge on a woman's autonomy, but that the state's interest in the potential +life of a child trumps the autonomy of the pregnant woman. +={ information production inputs : + propaganda ; + inputs to production : + propaganda ; + manipulating perceptions of others : + with propaganda ; + perceptions of others, shaping : + with propaganda ; + production inputs : + propaganda ; + propaganda ; + shaping perceptions of others : + with propaganda +} + +The second type of effect that law can have on autonomy is to reduce +significantly the range and variety of options open to people in society +generally, or to certain classes of people. This is different from the concern +with government intervention generally. It is not focused on whether the state +prohibits these options, but only on whether the effect of the law is to remove +options. It is less important whether this effect is through prohibition or +through a set of predictable or observable behavioral adaptations among +individuals and organizations that, as a practical matter, remove these +options. I do not mean to argue for the imposition of restraints, in the name +of autonomy, on any lawmaking that results in a removal of any single option, +irrespective of the quantity and variety of options still open. Much of law +does that. Rather, the autonomy concern is implicated by laws that +systematically and significantly reduce the number, and more important, +impoverish the variety, of options open to people in the society for which the +law is passed. +={ behavior : + number and variety of options +2 ; + diversity : + of behavioral options +2 ; + freedom : + behavioral options +2 ; + number of behavioral options +2 ; + options, behavioral +2 ; + variety of behavioral options +2 +} + +"Number and variety" is intended to suggest two dimensions of effect on the +options open to an individual. The first is quantitative. For an individual to +author her own life, she must have a significant set of options from which to +choose; otherwise, it is the choice set--or whoever, if anyone, made it so--and +not the individual, that is governing her life. This quantitative dimension, +however, does not mean that more choices are always better, from the +individual's perspective. It is sufficient that the individual have some +adequate threshold level of options in order for him or her to exercise +substantive self-authorship, rather than being authored by circumstances. +Beyond that threshold level, additional options may affect one's welfare and +success as an autonomous agent, but they do not so constrain an individual's +choices as to make one not autonomous. Beyond quantitative adequacy, the +options available to an individual must represent meaningfully different paths, +not merely slight variations on a theme. Qualitatively, autonomy requires the +availability of options in whose adoption or rejection the individual ,{[pg +151]}, can practice critical reflection and life choices. In order to sustain +the autonomy of a person born and raised in a culture with a set of socially +embedded conventions about what a good life is, one would want a choice set +that included at least some unconventional, non-mainstream, if you will, +critical options. If all the options one has--even if, in a purely quantitative +sense, they are "adequate"--are conventional or mainstream, then one loses an +important dimension of self-creation. The point is not that to be truly +autonomous one necessarily must be unconventional. Rather, if self-governance +for an individual consists in critical reflection and re-creation by making +choices over the course of his life, then some of the options open must be +different from what he would choose simply by drifting through life, adopting a +life plan for no reason other than that it is accepted by most others. A person +who chooses a conventional life in the presence of the option to live otherwise +makes that conventional life his or her own in a way that a person who lives a +conventional life without knowing about alternatives does not. + +As long as our autonomy analysis of information law is sensitive to these two +effects on information flow to, from, and among individuals and organizations +in the regulated society, it need not conflict with the concerns of those who +adopt the formal conception of autonomy. It calls for no therapeutic agenda to +educate adults in a wide range of options. It calls for no one to sit in front +of educational programs. It merely focuses on two core effects that law can +have through the way it structures the relationships among people with regard +to the information environment they occupy. If a law--passed for any reason +that may or may not be related to autonomy concerns--creates systematic shifts +of power among groups in society, so that some have a greater ability to shape +the perceptions of others with regard to available options, consequences of +action, or the value of preferences, then that law is suspect from an autonomy +perspective. It makes the choices of some people less their own and more +subject to manipulation by those to whom the law gives the power to control +perceptions. Furthermore, a law that systematically and severely limits the +range of options known to individuals is one that imposes a normative price, in +terms of autonomy, for whatever value it is intended to deliver. As long as the +focus of autonomy as an institutional design desideratum is on securing the +best possible information flow to the individual, the designer of the legal +structure need not assume that individuals are not autonomous, or have failures +of autonomy, in order to serve autonomy. All the designer need assume is that +individuals ,{[pg 152]}, will not act in order to optimize the autonomy of +their neighbors. Law then responds by avoiding institutional designs that +facilitate the capacity of some groups of individuals to act on others in ways +that are systematically at the expense of the ability of those others to +control their own lives, and by implementing policies that predictably +diversify the set of options that all individuals are able to see as open to +them. + +Throughout most of the 1990s and currently, communications and information +policy around the globe was guided by a wish to "let the private sector lead," +interpreted in large measure to mean that various property and property-like +regulatory frameworks should be strengthened, while various regulatory +constraints on property-like rights should be eased. The drive toward +proprietary, market-based provisioning of communications and information came +from disillusionment with regulatory systems and state-owned communications +networks. It saw the privatization of national postal, telephone, and telegraph +authorities (PTTs) around the world. Even a country with a long tradition of +state-centric communications policy, like France, privatized much of its +telecommunications systems. In the United States, this model translated into +efforts to shift telecommunications from the regulated monopoly model it +followed throughout most of the twentieth century to a competitive market, and +to shift Internet development from being primarily a government-funded +exercise, as it had been from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, to being purely +private property, market based. This model was declared in the Clinton +administration's 1993 National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action, +which pushed for privatization of Internet deployment and development. It was +the basis of that administration's 1995 White Paper on Intellectual Property, +which mapped the most aggressive agenda ever put forward by any American +administration in favor of perfect enclosure of the public domain; and it was +in those years when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) first +implemented spectrum auctions aimed at more thorough privatization of wireless +communications in the United States. The general push for stronger intellectual +property rights and more marketcentric telecommunications systems also became a +central tenet of international trade regimes, pushing similar policies in +smaller and developing economies. +={ commons : + wireless communications as +3 ; + privatization : + of communications and information systems +3 ; + wireless communications : + privatization vs. commons +3 +} + +The result of the push toward private provisioning and deregulation has led to +the emergence of a near-monopolistic market structure for wired physical +broadband services. By the end of 2003, more than 96 percent of homes and small +offices in the United States that had any kind of "high-speed" ,{[pg 153]}, +Internet services received their service from either their incumbent cable +operator or their incumbent local telephone company. If one focuses on the +subset of these homes and offices that get service that provides more +substantial room for autonomous communicative action--that is, those that have +upstream service at high-speed, enabling them to publish and participate in +online production efforts and not simply to receive information at high +speeds--the picture is even more dismal. Less than 2 percent of homes and small +offices receive their broadband connectivity from someone other than their +cable carrier or incumbent telephone carrier. More than 83 percent of these +users get their access from their cable operator. Moreover, the growth rate in +adoption of cable broadband and local telephone digital subscriber line (DSL) +has been high and positive, whereas the growth rate of the few competing +platforms, like satellite broadband, has been stagnant or shrinking. The +proprietary wired environment is gravitating toward a high-speed connectivity +platform that will be either a lopsided duopoly, or eventually resolve into a +monopoly platform.~{ Data are all based on FCC Report on High Speed Services, +Appendix to Fourth 706 Report NOI (Washington, DC: Federal Communications +Commission, December 2003). }~ These owners are capable, both technically and +legally, of installing the kind of policy routers with which I opened the +discussion of autonomy and information law--routers that would allow them to +speed up some packets and slow down or reject others in ways intended to shape +the universe of information available to users of their networks. +={ broadband networks : + market structure of ; + monopoly : + wired environment as ; + wired communications : + market structure of ; + proprietary rights : + wireless networks +2 +} + +The alternative of building some portions of our telecommunications and +information production and exchange systems as commons was not understood in +the mid-1990s, when the policy that resulted in this market structure for +communications was developed. As we saw in chapter 3, however, wireless +communications technology has progressed to the point where it is now possible +for users to own equipment that cooperates in mesh networks to form a +"last-mile" infrastructure that no one other than the users own. Radio networks +can now be designed so that their capital structure more closely approximates +the Internet and personal computer markets, bringing with it a greater scope +for commons-based peer production of telecommunications infrastructure. +Throughout most of the twentieth century, wireless communications combined +high-cost capital goods (radio transmitters and antennae towers) with cheaper +consumer goods (radio receivers), using regulated proprietary infrastructure, +to deliver a finished good of wireless communications on an industrial model. +Now WiFi is marking the possibility of an inversion of the capital structure of +wireless communication. We see end-user equipment manufacturers like Intel, +Cisco, and others producing ,{[pg 154]}, and selling radio "transceivers" that +are shareable goods. By using ad hoc mesh networking techniques, some early +versions of which are already being deployed, these transceivers allow their +individual owners to cooperate and coprovision their own wireless +communications network, without depending on any cable carrier or other wired +provider as a carrier of last resort. Almost the entire debate around spectrum +policy and the relative merits of markets and commons in wireless policy is +conducted today in terms of efficiency and innovation. A common question these +days is which of the two approaches will lead to greater growth of wireless +communications capacity and will more efficiently allocate the capacity we +already have. I have contributed my fair share of this form of analysis, but +the question that concerns us here is different. We must ask what, if any, are +the implications of the emergence of a feasible, sustainable model of a +commons-based physical infrastructure for the first and last mile of the +communications environment, in terms of individual autonomy? +={ efficiency of information regulation : + wireless communications policy ; + inefficiency of information regulation : + wireless communications policy ; + innovation : + wireless communications policy ; + proprietary rights : + wireless communications policy ; + reallocation : + wireless communications policy +} + +The choice between proprietary and commons-based wireless data networks takes +on new significance in light of the market structure of the wired network, and +the power it gives owners of broadband networks to control the information flow +into the vast majority of homes. Commons-based wireless systems become the +primary legal form of communications capacity that does not systematically +subject its users to manipulation by an infrastructure owner. + +Imagine a world with four agents--A, B, C, and D--connected to each other by a +communications network. Each component, or route, of the network could be owned +or unowned. If all components are unowned, that is, are organized as a commons, +each agent has an equal privilege to use any component of the network to +communicate with any other agent. If all components are owned, the owner of any +network component can deny to any other agent use of that network component to +communicate with anyone else. This translates in the real world into whether or +not there is a "spectrum owner" who "owns" the link between any two users, or +whether the link is simply a consequence of the fact that two users are +communicating with each other in a way that no one has a right to prevent them +from doing. + +In this simple model, if the network is unowned, then for any communication all +that is required is a willing sender and a willing recipient. No third agent +gets a say as to whether any other pair will communicate with each other. Each +agent determines independently of the others whether to ,{[pg 155]}, +participate in a communicative exchange, and communication occurs whenever all +its participants, and only they, agree to communicate with each other. For +example, A can exchange information with B, as long as B consents. The only +person who has a right to prevent A from receiving information from, or sending +information to, B, is B, in the exercise of B's own autonomous choice whether +to change her information environment. Under these conditions, neither A nor B +is subject to control of her information environment by others, except where +such control results from denying her the capacity to control the information +environment of another. If all network components are owned, on the other hand, +then for any communication there must be a willing sender, a willing recipient, +and a willing infrastructure owner. In a pure property regime, infrastructure +owners have a say over whether, and the conditions under which, others in their +society will communicate with each other. It is precisely the power to prevent +others from communicating that makes infrastructure ownership a valuable +enterprise: One can charge for granting one's permission to communicate. For +example, imagine that D owns all lines connecting A to B directly or through D, +and C owns all lines connecting A or B to C. As in the previous scenario, A +wishes to exchange information with B. Now, in addition to B, A must obtain +either C's or D's consent. A now functions under two distinct types of +constraint. The first, as before, is a constraint imposed by B's autonomy: A +cannot change B's information environment (by exchanging information with her) +without B's consent. The second constraint is that A must persuade an owner of +whatever carriage medium connects A to B to permit A and B to communicate. The +communication is not sent to or from C or D. It does not change C's or D's +information environment, and that is not A's intention. C and D's ability to +consent or withhold consent is not based on the autonomy principle. It is +based, instead, on an instrumental calculus: namely, that creating such +property rights in infrastructure will lead to the right incentives for the +deployment of infrastructure necessary for A and B to communicate in the first +place. +={ computers : + infrastructure ownership +1 ; + hardware : + infrastructure ownership +1 ; + permission to communicate +1 ; + personal computers : + infrastructure ownership +1 ; + physical machinery and computers : + infrastructure ownership +1 ; + proprietary rights : + infrastructure ownership +1 ; + information sharing : + infrastructure ownership +} + +Now imagine that D owns the entire infrastructure. If A wants to get +information from B or to communicate to C in order to persuade C to act in a +way that is beneficial to A, A needs D's permission. D may grant or withhold +permission, and may do so either for a fee or upon the imposition of conditions +on the communication. Most significantly, D can choose to prevent anyone from +communicating with anyone else, or to expose each participant to the +communications of only some, but not all, members of ,{[pg 156]}, society. This +characteristic of her ownership gives D the power to shape A's information +environment by selectively exposing A to information in the form of +communications from others. Most commonly, we might see this where D decides +that B will pay more if all infrastructure is devoted to permitting B to +communicate her information to A and C, rather than any of it used to convey +A's statements to C. D might then refuse to carry A's message to C and permit +only B to communicate to A and C. The point is that from A's perspective, A is +dependent upon D's decisions as to what information can be carried on the +infrastructure, among whom, and in what directions. To the extent of that +dependence, A's autonomy is compromised. We might call the requirement that D +can place on A as a precondition to using the infrastructure an "influence +exaction." +={ access : + influence exaction +1 ; + blocked access : + influence exaction +1 ; + culture : + influence exaction +1 ; + influence exaction +1 ; + manipulating perceptions of others : + influence exaction +1 ; + perceptions of others, shaping : + influence exaction +1 ; + shaping perceptions of others : + influence exaction +1 +} + +The magnitude of the negative effect on autonomy, or of the influence exaction, +depends primarily on (a) the degree to which it is hard or easy to get around +D's facility, and (b) the degree of transparency of the exaction. Compare, for +example, Cisco's policy router for cable broadband, which allows the cable +operator to speed up and slow down packets based on its preferences, to +Amazon's brief experiment in 1998-1999 with accepting undisclosed payments from +publishers in exchange for recommending their books. If a cable operator +programs its routers to slow down packets of competitors, or of information +providers that do not pay, this practice places a significant exaction on +users. First, the exaction is entirely nontransparent. There are many reasons +that different sites load at different speeds, or even fail to load altogether. +Users, the vast majority of whom are unaware that the provider could, if it +chose, regulate the flow of information to them, will assume that it is the +target site that is failing, not that their own service provider is +manipulating what they can see. Second, there is no genuine work-around. Cable +broadband covers roughly two-thirds of the home market, in many places without +alternative; and where there is an alternative, there is only one--the +incumbent telephone company. Without one of these noncompetitive infrastructure +owners, the home user has no broadband access to the Internet. In Amazon's +case, the consumer outrage when the practice was revealed focused on the lack +of transparency. Users had little objection to clearly demarcated +advertisement. The resistance was to the nontransparent manipulation of the +recommendation system aimed at causing the consumers to act in ways consistent +with Amazon's goals, rather than their own. In that case, however, there were +alternatives. There are many different places from which to find book reviews +and recommendations, and ,{[pg 157]}, at the time, barnesandnoble.com was +already available as an online bookseller--and had not significantly adopted +similar practices. The exaction was therefore less significant. Moreover, once +the practice was revealed, Amazon publicly renounced it and began to place +advertisements in a clearly recognizable separate category. The lesson was not +lost on others. When Google began at roughly the same time as a search engine, +it broke with the then common practice of selling search-result location. When +the company later introduced advertised links, it designed its interface to +separate out clearly the advertisements from the algorithm-based results, and +to give the latter more prominent placement than the former. This does not +necessarily mean that any search engine that accepts payments for linking is +necessarily bad. A search engine like Overture, which explicitly and publicly +returns results ranked according to which, among the sites retrieved, paid +Overture the most, has its own value for consumers looking for commercial +sites. A transparent, nonmonopolistic option of this sort increases, rather +than decreases, the freedom of users to find the information they want and act +on it. The problem would be with search engines that mix the two strategies and +hide the mix, or with a monopolistic search engine. +={ access : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + blocked access : + policy routers ; + capacity : + policy routers ; + Cisco policy routers : + influence exaction ; + information flow : + controlling with policy routers ; + information production inputs : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + inputs to production : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + policy routers : + influence exaction ; + production inputs : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + routers, controlling information flow with : + influence exaction +} + +Because of the importance of the possibility to work around the owned +infrastructure, the degree of competitiveness of any market in such +infrastructure is important. Before considering the limits of even competitive +markets by comparison to commons, however, it is important to recognize that a +concern with autonomy provides a distinct justification for the policy concern +with media concentration. To understand the effects of concentration, we can +think of freedom from constraint as a dimension of welfare. Just as we have no +reason to think that in a concentrated market, total welfare, let alone +consumer welfare, will be optimal, we also have no reason to think that a +component of welfare--freedom from constraint as a condition to access one's +communicative environment--will be optimal. Moreover, when we use a "welfare" +calculus as a metaphor for the degree of autonomy users have in the system, we +must optimize not total welfare, as we do in economic analysis, but only what +in the metaphorical calculus would count as "consumer surplus." In the domain +of influence and autonomy, only "consumer surplus" counts as autonomy +enhancing. "Producer surplus," the degree of successful imposition of influence +on others as a condition of service, translates in an autonomy calculus into +control exerted by some people (providers) over others (consumers). It reflects +the successful negation of autonomy. The monopoly case therefore presents a new +normative ,{[pg 158]}, dimension of the well-known critiques of media +concentration. Why, however, is this not solely an analysis of media +concentration? Why does a competitive market in infrastructure not solve the +autonomy deficit of property? +={ accreditation : + concentration of mass-media power ; + allocating excess capacity ; + capacity : + sharing ; + community clusters : + communications infrastructure +3 ; + concentration of mass-media power ; + excess capacity, sharing ; + filtering : + concentration of mass-media power ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + concentration of mass-media power ; + human welfare : + freedom from constraint +2 ; + media concentration ; + reallocating excess capacity ; + relevance filtering : + concentration of mass-media power ; + sharing : + excess capacity ; + welfare : + freedom from constraint +2 ; + processors. See computer producer surplus +} + +If we make standard assumptions of perfectly competitive markets and apply them +to our A-B-D example, one would think that the analysis must change. D no +longer has monopoly power. We would presume that the owners of infrastructure +would be driven by competition to allocate infrastructure to uses that users +value most highly. If one owner "charges" a high price in terms of conditions +imposed on users, say to forgo receiving certain kinds of speech uncongenial to +the owner, then the users will go to a competitor who does not impose that +condition. This standard market response is far from morally irrelevant if one +is concerned with autonomy. If, in fact, every individual can choose precisely +the package of influence exactions and the cash-to-influence trade-off under +which he or she is willing to communicate, then the autonomy deficit that I +suggest is created by property rights in communications infrastructure is +minimal. If all possible degrees of freedom from the influence of others are +available to autonomous individuals, then respecting their choices, including +their decisions to subject themselves to the influence of others in exchange +for releasing some funds so they are available for other pursuits, respects +their autonomy. +={ access : + influence exaction +2 ; + blocked access : + influence exaction +1 ; + Cisco policy routers : + influence exaction +2 ; + culture : + influence exaction +2 ; + influence exaction +2 ; + manipulating perceptions of others : + influence exaction +2 ; + perceptions of others, shaping : + influence exaction +2 ; + policy routers : + influence exaction +2 ; + routers, controlling information flow with : + influence exaction +2 ; + shaping perceptions of others : + influence exaction +2 +} + +Actual competition, however, will not eliminate the autonomy deficit of +privately owned communications infrastructure, for familiar reasons. The most +familiar constraint on the "market will solve it" hunch is imposed by +transaction costs--in particular, information-gathering and negotiation costs. +Influence exactions are less easily homogenized than prices expressed in +currency. They will therefore be more expensive to eliminate through +transactions. Some people value certain kinds of information lobbed at them +positively; others negatively. Some people are more immune to suggestion, +others less. The content and context of an exaction will have a large effect on +its efficacy as a device for affecting the choices of the person subject to its +influence, and these could change from communication to communication for the +same person, let alone for different individuals. Both users and providers have +imperfect information about the users' susceptibility to manipulated +information flows; they have imperfect information about the value that each +user would place on being free of particular exactions. Obtaining the +information necessary to provide a good fit for each consumer's preferences +regarding the right influence-to-cash ratio for a given service ,{[pg 159]}, +would be prohibitively expensive. Even if the information were obtained, +negotiating the precise cash-to-influence trade-off would be costly. +Negotiation also may fail because of strategic behavior. The consumer's ideal +outcome is to labor under an exaction that is ineffective. If the consumer can +reduce the price by submitting to constraints on communication that would +affect an average consumer, but will not change her agenda or subvert her +capacity to author her life, she has increased her welfare without compromising +her autonomy. The vendor's ideal outcome, however, is that the influence +exaction be effective--that it succeed in changing the recipient's preferences +or her agenda to fit those of the vendor. The parties, therefore, will hide +their true beliefs about whether a particular condition to using proprietary +infrastructure is of a type that is likely to be effective at influencing the +particular recipient. Under anything less than a hypothetical and practically +unattainable perfect market in communications infrastructure services, users of +a proprietary infrastructure will face a less-than-perfect menu of influence +exactions that they must accept before they can communicate using owned +infrastructure. +={ policy : + property-based +3 ; + privatization : + of communications and information systems +3 +} + +Adopting a regulatory framework under which all physical means of communication +are based on private property rights in the infrastructure will therefore +create a cost for users, in terms of autonomy. This cost is the autonomy +deficit of exclusive reliance on proprietary models. If ownership of +infrastructure is concentrated, or if owners can benefit from exerting +political, personal, cultural, or social influence over others who seek access +to their infrastructure, they will impose conditions on use of the +infrastructure that will satisfy their will to exert influence. If agents other +than owners (advertisers, tobacco companies, the U.S. drug czar) value the +ability to influence users of the infrastructure, then the influence-exaction +component of the price of using the infrastructure will be sold to serve the +interests of these third parties. To the extent that these influence exactions +are effective, a pure private-property regime for infrastructure allows owners +to constrain the autonomy of users. The owners can do this by controlling and +manipulating the users' information environment to shape how they perceive +their life choices in ways that make them more likely to act in a manner that +the owners prefer. + +The traditional progressive or social-democratic response to failures of +property-based markets has been administrative regulation. In the area of +communications, these responses have taken the form of access regulations-- +ranging from common carriage to more limited right-of-reply, fairness ,{[pg +160]}, doctrine-type regulations. Perfect access regulation--in particular, +common-carrier obligations--like a perfectly competitive market, could in +principle alleviate the autonomy deficit of property. Like markets, however, +actual regulation that limits the powers that go with property in +infrastructure suffers from a number of limitations. First, the institutional +details of the common-carriage regime can skew incentives for what types of +communications will be available, and with what degree of freedom. If we +learned one thing from the history of American communications policy in the +twentieth century, it is that regulated entities are adept at shaping their +services, pricing, and business models to take advantage of every weakness in +the common-carriage regulatory system. They are even more adept at influencing +the regulatory process to introduce lucrative weaknesses into the regulatory +system. At present, cable broadband has succeeded in achieving a status almost +entirely exempt from access requirements that might mitigate its power to +control how the platform is used, and broadband over legacy telephone systems +is increasingly winning a parallel status of unregulated semi-monopoly. Second, +the organization that owns the infrastructure retains the same internal +incentives to control content as it would in the absence of common carriage and +will do so to the extent that it can sneak by any imperfections in either the +carriage regulations or their enforcement. Third, as long as the network is +built to run through a central organizational clearinghouse, that center +remains a potential point at which regulators can reassert control or delegate +to owners the power to prevent unwanted speech by purposefully limiting the +scope of the common-carriage requirements. +={ common-carriage regulatory system } + +As a practical matter, then, if all wireless systems are based on property, +just like the wired systems are, then wireless will offer some benefits through +the introduction of some, albeit imperfect, competition. However, it will not +offer the autonomy-enhancing effects that a genuine diversity of constraint can +offer. If, on the other hand, policies currently being experimented with in the +United States do result in the emergence of a robust, sustainable wireless +communications infrastructure, owned and shared by its users and freely +available to all under symmetric technical constraints, it will offer a +genuinely alternative communications platform. It may be as technically good as +the wired platforms for all users and uses, or it may not. Nevertheless, +because of its radically distributed capitalization, and its reliance on +commons rendered sustainable by equipment-embedded technical protocols, rather +than on markets that depend on institutionally created asymmetric power over +communications, a commons-based wireless system will offer an ,{[pg 161]}, +infrastructure that operates under genuinely different institutional +constraints. Such a system can become an infrastructure of first and last +resort for uses that would not fit the constraints of the proprietary market, +or for users who find the price-to-influence exaction bundles offered in the +market too threatening to their autonomy. + +The emerging viability of commons-based strategies for the provisioning of +communications, storage, and computation capacity enables us to take a +practical, real world look at the autonomy deficit of a purely property-based +communications system. As we compare property to commons, we see that property, +by design, introduces a series of legal powers that asymmetrically enable +owners of infrastructure to exert influence over users of their systems. This +asymmetry is necessary for the functioning of markets. Predictably and +systematically, however, it allows one group of actors--owners--to act upon +another group of actors--consumers--as objects of manipulation. No single idiom +in contemporary culture captures this characteristic better than the term "the +market in eyeballs," used to describe the market in advertising slots. Commons, +on the other hand, do not rely on asymmetric constraints. They eliminate points +of asymmetric control over the resources necessary for effective communication, +thereby eliminating the legal bases of the objectification of others. These are +not spaces of perfect freedom from all constraints. However, the constraints +they impose are substantively different from those generated by either the +property system or by an administrative regulatory system. Their introduction +alongside proprietary networks therefore diversifies the constraints under +which individuals operate. By offering alternative transactional frameworks for +alternative information flows, these networks substantially and qualitatively +increase the freedom of individuals to perceive the world through their own +eyes, and to form their own perceptions of what options are open to them and +how they might evaluate alternative courses of action. + +2~ AUTONOMY, MASS MEDIA, AND NONMARKET INFORMATION PRODUCERS + +The autonomy deficit of private communications and information systems is a +result of the formal structure of property as an institutional device and the +role of communications and information systems as basic requirements in the +ability of individuals to formulate purposes and plan actions to fit their +lives. The gains flow directly from the institutional characteristics of ,{[pg +162]}, commons. The emergence of the networked information economy makes one +other important contribution to autonomy. It qualitatively diversifies the +information available to individuals. Information, knowledge, and culture are +now produced by sources that respond to a myriad of motivations, rather than +primarily the motivation to sell into mass markets. Production is organized in +any one of a myriad of productive organizational forms, rather than solely the +for-profit business firm. The supplementation of the profit motive and the +business organization by other motivations and organizational forms--ranging +from individual play to large-scale peer-production projects--provides not only +a discontinuously dramatic increase in the number of available information +sources but, more significantly, an increase in available information sources +that are qualitatively different from others. + +Imagine three storytelling societies: the Reds, the Blues, and the Greens. Each +society follows a set of customs as to how they live and how they tell stories. +Among the Reds and the Blues, everyone is busy all day, and no one tells +stories except in the evening. In the evening, in both of these societies, +everyone gathers in a big tent, and there is one designated storyteller who +sits in front of the audience and tells stories. It is not that no one is +allowed to tell stories elsewhere. However, in these societies, given the time +constraints people face, if anyone were to sit down in the shade in the middle +of the day and start to tell a story, no one else would stop to listen. Among +the Reds, the storyteller is a hereditary position, and he or she alone decides +which stories to tell. Among the Blues, the storyteller is elected every night +by simple majority vote. Every member of the community is eligible to offer +him- or herself as that night's storyteller, and every member is eligible to +vote. Among the Greens, people tell stories all day, and everywhere. Everyone +tells stories. People stop and listen if they wish, sometimes in small groups +of two or three, sometimes in very large groups. Stories in each of these +societies play a very important role in understanding and evaluating the world. +They are the way people describe the world as they know it. They serve as +testing grounds to imagine how the world might be, and as a way to work out +what is good and desirable and what is bad and undesirable. The societies are +isolated from each other and from any other source of information. + +Now consider Ron, Bob, and Gertrude, individual members of the Reds, Blues, and +Greens, respectively. Ron's perception of the options open to him and his +evaluation of these options are largely controlled by the hereditary +storyteller. He can try to contact the storyteller to persuade him to tell +,{[pg 163]}, different stories, but the storyteller is the figure who +determines what stories are told. To the extent that these stories describe the +universe of options Ron knows about, the storyteller defines the options Ron +has. The storyteller's perception of the range of options largely will +determine the size and diversity of the range of options open to Ron. This not +only limits the range of known options significantly, but it also prevents Ron +from choosing to become a storyteller himself. Ron is subjected to the +storyteller's control to the extent that, by selecting which stories to tell +and how to tell them, the storyteller can shape Ron's aspirations and actions. +In other words, both the freedom to be an active producer and the freedom from +the control of another are constrained. Bob's autonomy is constrained not by +the storyteller, but by the majority of voters among the Blues. These voters +select the storyteller, and the way they choose will affect Bob's access to +stories profoundly. If the majority selects only a small group of entertaining, +popular, pleasing, or powerful (in some other dimension, like wealth or +political power) storytellers, then Bob's perception of the range of options +will be only slightly wider than Ron's, if at all. The locus of power to +control Bob's sense of what he can and cannot do has shifted. It is not the +hereditary storyteller, but rather the majority. Bob can participate in +deciding which stories can be told. He can offer himself as a storyteller every +night. He cannot, however, decide to become a storyteller independently of the +choices of a majority of Blues, nor can he decide for himself what stories he +will hear. He is significantly constrained by the preferences of a simple +majority. Gertrude is in a very different position. First, she can decide to +tell a story whenever she wants to, subject only to whether there is any other +Green who wants to listen. She is free to become an active producer except as +constrained by the autonomy of other individual Greens. Second, she can select +from the stories that any other Green wishes to tell, because she and all those +surrounding her can sit in the shade and tell a story. No one person, and no +majority, determines for her whether she can or cannot tell a story. No one can +unilaterally control whose stories Gertrude can listen to. And no one can +determine for her the range and diversity of stories that will be available to +her from any other member of the Greens who wishes to tell a story. + +The difference between the Reds, on the one hand, and the Blues or Greens, on +the other hand, is formal. Among the Reds, only the storyteller may tell the +story as a matter of formal right, and listeners only have a choice of whether +to listen to this story or to no story at all. Among the ,{[pg 164]}, Blues and +the Greens anyone may tell a story as a matter of formal right, and listeners, +as a matter of formal right, may choose from whom they will hear. The +difference between the Reds and the Blues, on the one hand, and the Greens, on +the other hand, is economic. In the former, opportunities for storytelling are +scarce. The social cost is higher, in terms of stories unavailable for hearing, +or of choosing one storyteller over another. The difference between the Blues +and the Greens, then, is not formal, but practical. The high cost of +communication created by the Blues' custom of listening to stories only in the +evening, in a big tent, together with everyone else, makes it practically +necessary to select "a storyteller" who occupies an evening. Since the stories +play a substantive role in individuals' perceptions of how they might live +their lives, that practical difference alters the capacity of individual Blues +and Greens to perceive a wide and diverse set of options, as well as to +exercise control over their perceptions and evaluations of options open for +living their lives and to exercise the freedom themselves to be storytellers. +The range of stories Bob is likely to listen to, and the degree to which he can +choose unilaterally whether he will tell or listen, and to which story, are +closer, as a practical matter, to those of Ron than to those of Gertrude. +Gertrude has many more stories and storytelling settings to choose from, and +many more instances where she can offer her own stories to others in her +society. She, and everyone else in her society, can be exposed to a wider +variety of conceptions of how life can and ought to be lived. This wider +diversity of perceptions gives her greater choice and increases her ability to +compose her own life story out of the more varied materials at her disposal. +She can be more self-authored than either Ron or Bob. This diversity +replicates, in large measure, the range of perceptions of how one might live a +life that can be found among all Greens, precisely because the storytelling +customs make every Green a potential storyteller, a potential source of +information and inspiration about how one might live one's life. +={ diversity +5 } + +All this could sound like a morality tale about how wonderfully the market +maximizes autonomy. The Greens easily could sound like Greenbacks, rather than +like environmentalists staking out public parks as information commons. +However, this is not the case in the industrial information economy, where +media markets have high entry barriers and large economies of scale. It is +costly to start up a television station, not to speak of a network, a +newspaper, a cable company, or a movie distribution system. It is costly to +produce the kind of content delivered over these systems. Once production costs +or the costs of laying a network are incurred, the additional marginal ,{[pg +165]}, cost of making information available to many users, or of adding users +to the network, is much smaller than the initial cost. This is what gives +information and cultural products and communications facilities supply-side +economies of scale and underlies the industrial model of producing them. The +result is that the industrial information economy is better stylized by the +Reds and Blues rather than by the Greens. While there is no formal limitation +on anyone producing and disseminating information products, the economic +realities limit the opportunities for storytelling in the mass-mediated +environment and make storytelling opportunities a scarce good. It is very +costly to tell stories in the mass-mediated environment. Therefore, most +storytellers are commercial entities that seek to sell their stories to the +audience. Given the discussion earlier in this chapter, it is fairly +straightforward to see how the Greens represent greater freedom to choose to +become an active producer of one's own information environment. It is similarly +clear that they make it exceedingly difficult for any single actor to control +the information flow to any other actor. We can now focus on how the story +provides a way of understanding the justification and contours of the third +focus of autonomy-respecting policy: the requirement that government not limit +the quantity and diversity of information available. +={ autonomy : + mass media and +1 ; + capital for production : + production costs as limiting ; + commercial model of communication : + autonomy and +1 ; + constraints of information production, monetary : + production costs as limiting ; + cost : + of production, as limiting ; + individual autonomy : + mass media and +1 ; + industrial model of communication : + autonomy and +1 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + autonomy and +1 ; + monetary constraints on information production : + production costs as limiting ; + money : + cost of production as limiting ; + information production capital : + production costs as limiting ; + physical capital for production : + production costs as limiting ; + production capital : + production costs as limiting ; + traditional model of communication : + autonomy and +1 ; + diversity : + mass-mediated environments +1 +} + +The fact that our mass-mediated environment is mostly commercial makes it more +like the Blues than the Reds. These outlets serve the tastes of the +majority--expressed in some combination of cash payment and attention to +advertising. I do not offer here a full analysis--covered so well by Baker in +Media, Markets, and Democracy--as to why mass-media markets do not reflect the +preferences of their audiences very well. Presented here is a tweak of an older +set of analyses of whether monopoly or competition is better in mass-media +markets to illustrate the relationship between markets, channels, and diversity +of content. In chapter 6, I describe in greater detail the SteinerBeebe model +of diversity and number of channels. For our purposes here, it is enough to +note that this model shows how advertiser-supported media tend to program +lowest-common-denominator programs, intended to "capture the eyeballs" of the +largest possible number of viewers. These media do not seek to identify what +viewers intensely want to watch, but tend to clear programs that are tolerable +enough to viewers so that they do not switch off their television. The presence +or absence of smaller-segment oriented television depends on the shape of +demand in an audience, the number of channels available to serve that audience, +and the ownership structure. The relationship between diversity of content and +diversity of structure or ownership ,{[pg 166]}, is not smooth. It occurs in +leaps. Small increases in the number of outlets continue to serve large +clusters of low-intensity preferences--that is, what people find acceptable. A +new channel that is added will more often try to take a bite out of a large pie +represented by some lowest-commondenominator audience segment than to try to +serve a new niche market. Only after a relatively high threshold number of +outlets are reached do advertiser-supported media have sufficient reason to try +to capture much smaller and higher-intensity preference clusters--what people +are really interested in. The upshot is that if all storytellers in society are +profit maximizing and operate in a market, the number of storytellers and +venues matters tremendously for the diversity of stories told in a society. It +is quite possible to have very active market competition in how well the same +narrow set of stories are told, as opposed to what stories are told, even +though there are many people who would rather hear different stories +altogether, but who are in clusters too small, too poor, or too uncoordinated +to persuade the storytellers to change their stories rather than their props. +={ Baker, Edwin } + +The networked information economy is departing from the industrial information +economy along two dimensions that suggest a radical increase in the number of +storytellers and the qualitative diversity of stories told. At the simplest +level, the cost of a channel is so low that some publication capacity is +becoming available to practically every person in society. Ranging from an +e-mail account, to a few megabytes of hosting capacity to host a subscriber's +Web site, to space on a peer-to-peer distribution network available for any +kind of file (like FreeNet or eDonkey), individuals are now increasingly in +possession of the basic means necessary to have an outlet for their stories. +The number of channels is therefore in the process of jumping from some +infinitesimally small fraction of the population--whether this fraction is +three networks or five hundred channels almost does not matter by +comparison--to a number of channels roughly equal to the number of users. This +dramatic increase in the number of channels is matched by the fact that the low +costs of communications and production enable anyone who wishes to tell a story +to do so, whether or not the story they tell will predictably capture enough of +a paying (or advertising-susceptible) audience to recoup production costs. +Self-expression, religious fervor, hobby, community seeking, political +mobilization, any one of the many and diverse reasons that might drive us to +want to speak to others is now a sufficient reason to enable us to do so in +mediated form to people both distant and close. The basic filter of +marketability has been removed, allowing anything ,{[pg 167]}, that emerges out +of the great diversity of human experience, interest, taste, and expressive +motivation to flow to and from everyone connected to everyone else. Given that +all diversity within the industrial information economy needed to flow through +the marketability filter, the removal of that filter marks a qualitative +increase in the range and diversity of life options, opinions, tastes, and +possible life plans available to users of the networked information economy. + +The image of everyone being equally able to tell stories brings, perhaps more +crisply than any other image, two critical objections to the attractiveness of +the networked information economy: quality and cacophony. The problem of +quality is easily grasped, but is less directly connected to autonomy. Having +many high school plays and pickup basketball games is not the same as having +Hollywood movies or the National Basketball Association (NBA). The problem of +quality understood in these terms, to the extent that the shift from industrial +to networked information production in fact causes it, does not represent a +threat to autonomy as much as a welfare cost of making the autonomy-enhancing +change. More troubling from the perspective of autonomy is the problem of +information overload, which is related to, but distinct from, production +quality. The cornucopia of stories out of which each of us can author our own +will only enhance autonomy if it does not resolve into a cacophony of +meaningless noise. How, one might worry, can a system of information production +enhance the ability of an individual to author his or her life, if it is +impossible to tell whether this or that particular story or piece of +information is credible, or whether it is relevant to the individual's +particular experience? Will individuals spend all their time sifting through +mounds of inane stories and fairy tales, instead of evaluating which life is +best for them based on a small and manageable set of credible and relevant +stories? None of the philosophical accounts of substantive autonomy suggests +that there is a linearly increasing relationship between the number of options +open to an individual--or in this case, perceivable by an individual--and that +person's autonomy. Information overload and decision costs can get in the way +of actually living one's autonomously selected life. + +The quality problem is often raised in public discussions of the Internet, and +takes the form of a question: Where will high-quality information products, +like movies, come from? This form of the objection, while common, is +underspecified normatively and overstated descriptively. First, it is not at +all clear what might be meant by "quality," insofar as it is a characteristic +of ,{[pg 168]}, information, knowledge, and cultural production that is +negatively affected by the shift from an industrial to a networked information +economy. Chapter 2 explains that information has always been produced in +various modalities, not only in market-oriented organizations and certainly not +in proprietary strategies. Political theory is not "better" along any +interesting dimension when written by someone aiming to maximize her own or her +publisher's commercial profits. Most of the commercial, proprietary online +encyclopedias are not better than /{Wikipedia}/ along any clearly observable +dimension. Moreover, many information and cultural goods are produced on a +relational model, rather than a packaged-goods model. The emergence of the +digitally networked environment does not much change their economics or +sustainability. Professional theatre that depends on live performances is an +example, as are musical performances. To the extent, therefore, that the +emergence of substantial scope for nonmarket, distributed production in a +networked information economy places pressure on "quality," it is quality of a +certain kind. The threatened desiderata are those that are uniquely attractive +about industrially produced mass-market products. The high-production-cost +Hollywood movie or television series are the threatened species. Even that +species is not entirely endangered, and the threat varies for different +industries, as explained in some detail in chapter 11. Some movies, +particularly those currently made for video release only, may well, in fact, +recede. However, truly high-production-value movies will continue to have a +business model through release windows other than home video distribution. +Independently, the pressure on advertising-supported television from +multichannel video-- cable and satellite--on the other hand, is pushing for +more low-cost productions like reality TV. That internal development in mass +media, rather than the networked information economy, is already pushing +industrial producers toward low-cost, low-quality productions. Moreover, as a +large section of chapter 7 illustrates, peer production and nonmarket +production are producing desirable public information--news and +commentary--that offer qualities central to democratic discourse. Chapter 8 +discusses how these two forms of production provide a more transparent and +plastic cultural environment--both central to the individual's capacity for +defining his or her goals and options. What emerges in the networked +information environment, therefore, will not be a system for low-quality +amateur mimicry of existing commercial products. What will emerge is space for +much more expression, from diverse sources and of diverse qualities. +Freedom--the freedom to speak, but also to be free from manipulation and to be +cognizant ,{[pg 169]}, of many and diverse options--inheres in this radically +greater diversity of information, knowledge, and culture through which to +understand the world and imagine how one could be. +={ high-production value content } + +Rejecting the notion that there will be an appreciable loss of quality in some +absolute sense does not solve the deeper problem of information overload, or +having too much information to be able to focus or act upon it. Having too much +information with no real way of separating the wheat from the chaff forms what +we might call the Babel objection. Individuals must have access to some +mechanism that sifts through the universe of information, knowledge, and +cultural moves in order to whittle them down to a manageable and usable scope. +The question then becomes whether the networked information economy, given the +human need for filtration, actually improves the information environment of +individuals relative to the industrial information economy. There are three +elements to the answer: First, as a baseline, it is important to recognize the +power that inheres in the editorial function. The extent to which information +overload inhibits autonomy relative to the autonomy of an individual exposed to +a well-edited information flow depends on how much the editor who whittles down +the information flow thereby gains power over the life of the user of the +editorial function, and how he or she uses that power. Second, there is the +question of whether users can select and change their editor freely, or whether +the editorial function is bundled with other communicative functions and sold +by service providers among which users have little choice. Finally, there is +the understanding that filtration and accreditation are themselves information +goods, like any other, and that they too can be produced on a commonsbased, +nonmarket model, and therefore without incurring the autonomy deficit that a +reintroduction of property to solve the Babel objection would impose. +={ accreditation +8 ; + Babel objection +9 ; + filtering +8 ; + information overload and Babel objection +9 ; + relevance filtering +8 +} + +Relevance filtration and accreditation are integral parts of all +communications. A communication must be relevant for a given sender to send to +a given recipient and relevant for the recipient to receive. Accreditation +further filters relevant information for credibility. Decisions of filtration +for purposes of relevance and accreditation are made with reference to the +values of the person filtering the information, not the values of the person +receiving the information. For instance, the editor of a cable network +newsmagazine decides whether a given story is relevant to send out. The owner +of the cable system decides whether it is, in the aggregate, relevant to its +viewers to see that newsmagazine on its system. Only if both so decide, does +each viewer ,{[pg 170]}, get the residual choice of whether to view the story. +Of the three decisions that must coincide to mark the newsmagazine as relevant +to the viewer, only one is under the control of the individual recipient. And, +while the editor's choice might be perceived in some sense as inherent to the +production of the information, the cable operator's choice is purely a function +of its role as proprietor of the infrastructure. The point to focus on is that +the recipient's judgment is dependent on the cable operator's decision as to +whether to release the program. The primary benefit of proprietary systems as +mechanisms of avoiding the problem of information overload or the Babel +objection is precisely the fact that the individual cannot exercise his own +judgment as to all the programs that the cable operator--or other commercial +intermediary between someone who makes a statement and someone who might +receive it--has decided not to release. +={ culture : + shaping perceptions of others +1 ; + manipulating perceptions of others +1 ; + perceptions of others, shaping +1 ; + shaping perceptions of others +1 +} + +As with any flow, control over a necessary passageway or bottleneck in the +course of a communication gives the person controlling that point the power to +direct the entire flow downstream from it. This power enables the provision of +a valuable filtration service, which promises the recipient that he or she will +not spend hours gazing at irrelevant materials. However, filtration only +enhances the autonomy of users if the editor's notions of relevance and quality +resemble those of the sender and the recipient. Imagine a recipient who really +wants to be educated about African politics, but also likes sports. Under +perfect conditions, he would seek out information on African politics most of +the time, with occasional searches for information on sports. The editor, +however, makes her money by selling advertising. For her, the relevant +information is whatever will keep the viewer's attention most closely on the +screen while maintaining a pleasantly acquisitive mood. Given a choice between +transmitting information about famine in Sudan, which she worries will make +viewers feel charitable rather than acquisitive, and transmitting a football +game that has no similar adverse effects, she will prefer the latter. The +general point should be obvious. For purposes of enhancing the autonomy of the +user, the filtering and accreditation function suffers from an agency problem. +To the extent that the values of the editor diverge from those of the user, an +editor who selects relevant information based on her values and plans for the +users does not facilitate user autonomy, but rather imposes her own preferences +regarding what should be relevant to users given her decisions about their life +choices. A parallel effect occurs with accreditation. An editor might choose to +treat as credible a person whose views or manner of presentation draw +audiences, rather than necessary ,{[pg 171]}, the wisest or best-informed of +commentators. The wide range in quality of talking heads on television should +suffice as an example. The Babel objection may give us good reason to pause +before we celebrate the networked information economy, but it does not provide +us with reasons to celebrate the autonomy effects of the industrial information +economy. +={ behavior : + number and variety of options ; + blocked access : + autonomy and +1 ; + diversity : + of behavioral options ; + freedom : + behavioral options ; + options, behavioral ; + variety of behavioral options ; + number of behavioral options +} + +The second component of the response to the Babel objection has to do with the +organization of filtration and accreditation in the industrial information +economy. The cable operator owns its cable system by virtue of capital +investment and (perhaps) expertise in laying cables, hooking up homes, and +selling video services. However, it is control over the pipeline into the home +that gives it the editorial role in the materials that reach the home. Given +the concentrated economics of cable systems, this editorial power is not easy +to replace and is not subject to open competition. The same phenomenon occurs +with other media that are concentrated and where the information production and +distribution functions are integrated with relevance filtration and +accreditation: from one-newspaper towns to broadcasters or cable broadband +service providers. An edited environment that frees the individual to think +about and choose from a small selection of information inputs becomes less +attractive when the editor takes on that role as a result of the ownership of +carriage media, a large printing press, or copyrights in existing content, +rather than as a result of selection by the user as a preferred editor or +filter. The existence of an editor means that there is less information for an +individual to process. It does not mean that the values according to which the +information was pared down are those that the user would have chosen absent the +tied relationship between editing and either proprietary content production or +carriage. +={ accreditation : + as distributed system +1 ; + distributed filtering and accreditation +1 ; + filtering : + as distributed system +1 ; + relevance filtering : + as distributed system +1 +} + +Finally, and most important, just like any other form of information, +knowledge, and culture, relevance and accreditation can be, and are, produced +in a distributed fashion. Instead of relying on the judgment of a record label +and a DJ of a commercial radio station for what music is worth listening to, +users can compare notes as to what they like, and give music to friends whom +they think will like it. This is the virtue of music file-sharing systems as +distribution systems. Moreover, some of the most interesting experiments in +peer production described in chapter 3 are focused on filtration. From the +discussions of /{Wikipedia}/ to the moderation and metamoderation scheme of +Slashdot, and from the sixty thousand volunteers that make up the Open +Directory Project to the PageRank system used by Google, the means of filtering +data are being produced within the networked information ,{[pg 172]}, economy +using peer production and the coordinate patterns of nonproprietary production +more generally. The presence of these filters provides the most important +answer to the Babel objection. The presence of filters that do not depend on +proprietary control, and that do not bundle proprietary content production and +carriage services with filtering, offers a genuinely distinct approach toward +presenting autonomous individuals with a choice among different filters that +reflect genuinely diverse motivations and organizational forms of the +providers. + +Beyond the specific efforts at commons-based accreditation and relevance +filtration, we are beginning to observe empirically that patterns of use of the +Internet and the World Wide Web exhibit a significant degree of order. In +chapter 7, I describe in detail and apply the literature that has explored +network topology to the Babel objection in the context of democracy and the +emerging networked public sphere, but its basic lesson applies here as well. In +brief, the structure of linking on the Internet suggests that, even without +quasi-formal collaborative filtering, the coordinate behavior of many +autonomous individuals settles on an order that permits us to make sense of the +tremendous flow of information that results from universal practical ability to +speak and create. We observe the Web developing an order--with high-visibility +nodes, and clusters of thickly connected "regions" where groups of Web sites +accredit each other by mutual referencing. The high-visibility Web sites +provide points of condensation for informing individual choices, every bit as +much as they form points of condensation for public discourse. The enormous +diversity of topical and context-dependent clustering, whose content is +nonetheless available for anyone to reach from anywhere, provides both a way of +slicing through the information and rendering it comprehensible, and a way of +searching for new sources of information beyond those that one interacts with +as a matter of course. The Babel objection is partly solved, then, by the fact +that people tend to congregate around common choices. We do this not as a +result of purposeful manipulation, but rather because in choosing whether or +not to read something, we probably give some weight to whether or not other +people have chosen to read it. Unless one assumes that individual human beings +are entirely dissimilar from each other, then the fact that many others have +chosen to read something is a reasonable signal that it may be worthwhile for +me to read. This phenomenon is both universal--as we see with the fact that +Google successfully provides useful ranking by aggregating all judgments around +the Web as to the relevance of any given Web site--and recursively ,{[pg 173]}, +present within interest-based and context-based clusters or groups. The +clustering and actual degree distribution in the Web suggests, however, that +people do not simply follow the herd--they will not read whatever a majority +reads. Rather, they will make additional rough judgments about which other +people's preferences are most likely to predict their own, or which topics to +look in. From these very simple rules--other people share something with me in +their tastes, and some sets of other people share more with me than others--we +see the Babel objection solved on a distributed model, without anyone exerting +formal legal control or practical economic power. +={ network topology ; + structure of network ; + topology, network +} + +Why, however, is this not a simple reintroduction of heteronomy, of dependence +on the judgment of others that subjects individuals to their control? The +answer is that, unlike with proprietary filters imposed at bottlenecks or +gateways, attention-distribution patterns emerge from many small-scale, +independent choices where free choice exists. They are not easily manipulable +by anyone. Significantly, the millions of Web sites that do not have high +traffic do not "go out of business." As Clay Shirky puts it, while my thoughts +about the weekend are unlikely to be interesting to three random users, they +may well be interesting, and a basis for conversation, for three of my close +friends. The fact that power law distributions of attention to Web sites result +from random distributions of interests, not from formal or practical +bottlenecks that cannot be worked around, means that whenever an individual +chooses to search based on some mechanism other than the simplest, thinnest +belief that individuals are all equally similar and dissimilar, a different +type of site will emerge as highly visible. Topical sites cluster, +unsurprisingly, around topical preference groups; one site does not account for +all readers irrespective of their interests. We, as individuals, also go +through an iterative process of assigning a likely relevance to the judgments +of others. Through this process, we limit the information overload that would +threaten to swamp our capacity to know; we diversify the sources of information +to which we expose ourselves; and we avoid a stifling dependence on an editor +whose judgments we cannot circumvent. We might spend some of our time using the +most general, "human interest has some overlap" algorithm represented by Google +for some things, but use political common interest, geographic or local +interest, hobbyist, subject matter, or the like, to slice the universe of +potential others with whose judgments we will choose to affiliate for any given +search. By a combination of random searching and purposeful deployment of +social mapping--who is likely to be interested in what is relevant to me +now--we can solve the Babel objection while subjecting ,{[pg 174]}, ourselves +neither to the legal and market power of proprietors of communications +infrastructure or media products nor to the simple judgments of the +undifferentiated herd. These observations have the virtue of being not only +based on rigorous mathematical and empirical studies, as we see in chapter 7, +but also being more consistent with intuitive experience of anyone who has used +the Internet for any decent length of time. We do not degenerate into mindless +meandering through a cacophonous din. We find things we want quite well. We +stumble across things others suggest to us. When we do go on an unplanned walk, +within a very short number of steps we either find something interesting or go +back to looking in ways that are more self-conscious and ordered. +={ Shirky, Clay } + +The core response to the Babel objection is, then, to accept that filtration is +crucial to an autonomous individual. Nonetheless, that acknowledgement does not +suggest that the filtration and accreditation systems that the industrial +information economy has in fact produced, tied to proprietary control over +content production and exchange, are the best means to protect autonomous +individuals from the threat of paralysis due to information overload. Property +in infrastructure and content affords control that can be used to provide +filtration. To that extent, property provides the power for some people to +shape the will-formation processes of others. The adoption of distributed +information-production systems--both structured as cooperative peer-production +enterprises and unstructured coordinate results of individual behavior, like +the clustering of preferences around Web sites--does not mean that filtration +and accreditation lose their importance. It only means that autonomy is better +served when these communicative functions, like others, are available from a +nonproprietary, open model of production alongside the proprietary mechanisms +of filtration. Being autonomous in this context does not mean that we have to +make all the information, read it all, and sift through it all by ourselves. It +means that the combination of institutional and practical constraints on who +can produce information, who can access it, and who can determine what is worth +reading leaves each individual with a substantial role in determining what he +shall read, and whose judgment he shall adhere to in sifting through the +information environment, for what purposes, and under what circumstances. As +always in the case of autonomy for context-bound individuals, the question is +the relative role that individuals play, not some absolute, context-independent +role that could be defined as being the condition of freedom. + +The increasing feasibility of nonmarket, nonproprietary production of +information, ,{[pg 175]}, knowledge, and culture, and of communications and +computation capacity holds the promise of increasing the degree of autonomy for +individuals in the networked information economy. By removing basic capital and +organizational constraints on individual action and effective cooperation, the +networked information economy allows individuals to do more for and by +themselves, and to form associations with others whose help they require in +pursuing their plans. We are beginning to see a shift from the highly +constrained roles of employee and consumer in the industrial economy, to more +flexible, self-authored roles of user and peer participant in cooperative +ventures, at least for some part of life. By providing as commons a set of core +resources necessary for perceiving the state of the world, constructing one's +own perceptions of it and one's own contributions to the information +environment we all occupy, the networked information economy diversifies the +set of constraints under which individuals can view the world and attenuates +the extent to which users are subject to manipulation and control by the owners +of core communications and information systems they rely on. By making it +possible for many more diversely motivated and organized individuals and groups +to communicate with each other, the emerging model of information production +provides individuals with radically different sources and types of stories, out +of which we can work to author our own lives. Information, knowledge, and +culture can now be produced not only by many more people than could do so in +the industrial information economy, but also by individuals and in subjects and +styles that could not pass the filter of marketability in the mass-media +environment. The result is a proliferation of strands of stories and of means +of scanning the universe of potential stories about how the world is and how it +might become, leaving individuals with much greater leeway to choose, and +therefore a much greater role in weaving their own life tapestry. ,{[pg 176]}, + +1~6 Chapter 6 - Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media +={ commercial mass media : + See also traditional model of communication commercial mass media, political freedom and +53 ; + mass media, political freedom and +53 ; + political freedom, mass media and +53 +} + +Modern democracies and mass media have coevolved throughout the twentieth +century. The first modern national republics--the early American Republic, the +French Republic from the Revolution to the Terror, the Dutch Republic, and the +early British parliamentary monarchy--preexisted mass media. They provide us +with some model of the shape of the public sphere in a republic without mass +media, what Jurgen Habermas called the bourgeois public sphere. However, the +expansion of democracies in complex modern societies has largely been a +phenomenon of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries--in particular, the +post-World War II years. During this period, the platform of the public sphere +was dominated by mass media--print, radio, and television. In authoritarian +regimes, these means of mass communication were controlled by the state. In +democracies, they operated either under state ownership, with varying degrees +of independence from the sitting government, or under private ownership +financially dependent on advertising markets. We do not, therefore, have +examples of complex modern democracies whose public sphere is built on a +platform that is widely ,{[pg 177]}, distributed and independent of both +government control and market demands. The Internet as a technology, and the +networked information economy as an organizational and social model of +information and cultural production, promise the emergence of a substantial +alternative platform for the public sphere. The networked public sphere, as it +is currently developing, suggests that it will have no obvious points of +control or exertion of influence--either by fiat or by purchase. It seems to +invert the mass-media model in that it is driven heavily by what dense clusters +of users find intensely interesting and engaging, rather than by what large +swathes of them find mildly interesting on average. And it promises to offer a +platform for engaged citizens to cooperate and provide observations and +opinions, and to serve as a watchdog over society on a peer-production model. +={ democratic societies +1 ; + networked public sphere : + defined +4 ; + public sphere +4 +} + +% ={Habermas, Jurgen} + +The claim that the Internet democratizes is hardly new. "Everyone a +pamphleteer" has been an iconic claim about the Net since the early 1990s. It +is a claim that has been subjected to significant critique. What I offer, +therefore, in this chapter and the next is not a restatement of the basic case, +but a detailed analysis of how the Internet and the emerging networked +information economy provide us with distinct improvements in the structure of +the public sphere over the mass media. I will also explain and discuss the +solutions that have emerged within the networked environment itself to some of +the persistent concerns raised about democracy and the Internet: the problems +of information overload, fragmentation of discourse, and the erosion of the +watchdog function of the media. + +For purposes of considering political freedom, I adopt a very limited +definition of "public sphere." The term is used in reference to the set of +practices that members of a society use to communicate about matters they +understand to be of public concern and that potentially require collective +action or recognition. Moreover, not even all communications about matters of +potential public concern can be said to be part of the public sphere. +Communications within self-contained relationships whose boundaries are defined +independently of the political processes for collective action are "private," +if those communications remain purely internal. Dinner-table conversations, +grumblings at a bridge club, or private letters have that characteristic, if +they occur in a context where they are not later transmitted across the +associational boundaries to others who are not part of the family or the bridge +club. Whether these conversations are, or are not, part of the public sphere +depends on the actual communications practices in a given society. The same +practices can become an initial step in generating public opinion ,{[pg 178]}, +in the public sphere if they are nodes in a network of communications that do +cross associational boundaries. A society with a repressive regime that +controls the society-wide communications facilities nonetheless may have an +active public sphere if social networks and individual mobility are sufficient +to allow opinions expressed within discrete associational settings to spread +throughout a substantial portion of the society and to take on political +meaning for those who discuss them. The public sphere is, then, a +sociologically descriptive category. It is a term for signifying how, if at +all, people in a given society speak to each other in their relationship as +constituents about what their condition is and what they ought or ought not to +do as a political unit. This is a purposefully narrow conception of the public +sphere. It is intended to focus on the effects of the networked environment on +what has traditionally been understood to be political participation in a +republic. I postpone consideration of a broader conception of the public +sphere, and of the political nature of who gets to decide meaning and how +cultural interpretations of the conditions of life and the alternatives open to +a society are created and negotiated in a society until chapter 8. +={ private communications } + +The practices that define the public sphere are structured by an interaction of +culture, organization, institutions, economics, and technical communications +infrastructure. The technical platforms of ink and rag paper, handpresses, and +the idea of a postal service were equally present in the early American +Republic, Britain, and France of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth +centuries. However, the degree of literacy, the social practices of newspaper +reading, the relative social egalitarianism as opposed to elitism, the +practices of political suppression or subsidy, and the extent of the postal +system led to a more egalitarian, open public sphere, shaped as a network of +smaller-scale local clusters in the United States, as opposed to the more +tightly regulated and elitist national and metropolis-centered public spheres +of France and Britain. The technical platforms of mass-circulation print and +radio were equally available in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, in Britain, +and in the United States in the 1930s. Again, however, the vastly different +political and legal structures of the former created an authoritarian public +sphere, while the latter two, both liberal public spheres, differed +significantly in the business organization and economic model of production, +the legal framework and the cultural practices of reading and listening-- +leading to the then still elitist overlay on the public sphere in Britain +relative to a more populist public sphere in the United States. +={ commercial mass media : + as platform for public sphere +3 | structure of +3 ; + commercial model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +3 | structure of mass media +3 ; + industrial model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +3 | structure of mass media +3 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + emerging role of mass media +3 | structure of mass media +3 ; + mass media : + as platform for public sphere +3 | structure of +3 ; + mass media : + commercial platform for public sphere +3 ; + networked public sphere : + mass-media platform for +3 ; + political freedom, mass media and : + commercial platform for public sphere +3 ; + public sphere : + mass media platform for +3 ; + structure of mass media +3 ; + traditional model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +3 | structure of mass media +3 +} + +Mass media structured the public sphere of the twentieth century in all ,{[pg +179]}, advanced modern societies. They combined a particular technical +architecture, a particular economic cost structure, a limited range of +organizational forms, two or three primary institutional models, and a set of +cultural practices typified by consumption of finished media goods. The +structure of the mass media resulted in a relatively controlled public +sphere--although the degree of control was vastly different depending on +whether the institutional model was liberal or authoritarian--with influence +over the debate in the public sphere heavily tilted toward those who controlled +the means of mass communications. The technical architecture was a one-way, +hub-and-spoke structure, with unidirectional links to its ends, running from +the center to the periphery. A very small number of production facilities +produced large amounts of identical copies of statements or communications, +which could then be efficiently sent in identical form to very large numbers of +recipients. There was no return loop to send observations or opinions back from +the edges to the core of the architecture in the same channel and with similar +salience to the communications process, and no means within the massmedia +architecture for communication among the end points about the content of the +exchanges. Communications among the individuals at the ends were shunted to +other media--personal communications or telephones-- which allowed +communications among the ends. However, these edge media were either local or +one-to-one. Their social reach, and hence potential political efficacy, was +many orders of magnitude smaller than that of the mass media. + +The economic structure was typified by high-cost hubs and cheap, ubiquitous, +reception-only systems at the ends. This led to a limited range of +organizational models available for production: those that could collect +sufficient funds to set up a hub. These included: state-owned hubs in most +countries; advertising-supported commercial hubs in some of the liberal states, +most distinctly in the United States; and, particularly for radio and +television, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) model or hybrid models +like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Canada. The role of hybrid +and purely commercial, advertising-supported media increased substantially +around the globe outside the United States in the last two to three decades of +the twentieth century. Over the course of the century, there also emerged +civil-society or philanthropy-supported hubs, like the party presses in Europe, +nonprofit publications like Consumer Reports (later, in the United States), +and, more important, public radio and television. The oneway technical +architecture and the mass-audience organizational model underwrote ,{[pg 180]}, +the development of a relatively passive cultural model of media consumption. +Consumers (or subjects, in authoritarian systems) at the ends of these systems +would treat the communications that filled the public sphere as finished goods. +These were to be treated not as moves in a conversation, but as completed +statements whose addressees were understood to be passive: readers, listeners, +and viewers. + +The Internet's effect on the public sphere is different in different societies, +depending on what salient structuring components of the existing public sphere +its introduction perturbs. In authoritarian countries, it is the absence of a +single or manageably small set of points of control that is placing the +greatest pressure on the capacity of the regimes to control their public +sphere, and thereby to simplify the problem of controlling the actions of the +population. In liberal countries, the effect of the Internet operates through +its implications for economic cost and organizational form. In both cases, +however, the most fundamental and potentially long-standing effect that +Internet communications are having is on the cultural practice of public +communication. The Internet allows individuals to abandon the idea of the +public sphere as primarily constructed of finished statements uttered by a +small set of actors socially understood to be "the media" (whether state owned +or commercial) and separated from society, and to move toward a set of social +practices that see individuals as participating in a debate. Statements in the +public sphere can now be seen as invitations for a conversation, not as +finished goods. Individuals can work their way through their lives, collecting +observations and forming opinions that they understand to be practically +capable of becoming moves in a broader public conversation, rather than merely +the grist for private musings. + +2~ DESIGN CHARACTERISTICS OF A COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM FOR A LIBERAL PUBLIC PLATFORM OR A LIBERAL PUBLIC SPHERE +={ commercial mass media : + design characteristics of liberal public sphere +8 ; + liberal societies : + design of public sphere +8 ; + mass media, political freedom and : + design characteristics of liberal public sphere +8 ; + networked public sphere : + liberal, design characteristics of +8 ; + political freedom, mass media and : + design characteristics of liberal public sphere +8 ; + public sphere : + liberal, design characteristics of +8 +} + +How is private opinion about matters of collective, formal, public action +formed? How is private opinion communicated to others in a form and in channels +that allow it to be converted into a public, political opinion, and a position +worthy of political concern by the formal structures of governance of a +society? How, ultimately, is such a political and public opinion converted into +formal state action? These questions are central to understanding how ,{[pg +181]}, individuals in complex contemporary societies, located at great +distances from each other and possessing completely different endowments of +material, intellectual, social, and formal ties and capabilities, can be +citizens of the same democratic polity rather than merely subjects of a more or +less responsive authority. In the idealized Athenian agora or New England town +hall, the answers are simple and local. All citizens meet in the agora, they +speak in a way that all relevant citizens can hear, they argue with each other, +and ultimately they also constitute the body that votes and converts the +opinion that emerges into a legitimate action of political authority. Of +course, even in those small, locally bounded polities, things were never quite +so simple. Nevertheless, the idealized version does at least give us a set of +functional characteristics that we might seek in a public sphere: a place where +people can come to express and listen to proposals for agenda items--things +that ought to concern us as members of a polity and that have the potential to +become objects of collective action; a place where we can make and gather +statements of fact about the state of our world and about alternative courses +of action; where we can listen to opinions about the relative quality and +merits of those facts and alternative courses of action; and a place where we +can bring our own concerns to the fore and have them evaluated by others. + +Understood in this way, the public sphere describes a social communication +process. Habermas defines the public sphere as "a network for communicating +information and points of view (i.e., opinions expressing affirmative or +negative attitudes)"; which, in the process of communicating this information +and these points of view, filters and synthesizes them "in such a way that they +coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions."~{ Jurgen +Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Contributions to Discourse Theory of Law and +Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). }~ Taken in this descriptive sense, +the public sphere does not relate to a particular form of public discourse that +is normatively attractive from some perspective or another. It defines a +particular set of social practices that are necessary for the functioning of +any complex social system that includes elements of governing human beings. +There are authoritarian public spheres, where communications are regimented and +controlled by the government in order to achieve acquiescence and to mobilize +support, rather than relying solely on force to suppress dissent and +opposition. There are various forms of liberal public spheres, constituted by +differences in the political and communications systems scattered around +liberal democracies throughout the world. The BBC or the state-owned +televisions throughout postwar Western European democracies, for example, +constituted the public spheres in different ,{[pg 182]}, ways than did the +commercial mass media that dominated the American public sphere. As +advertiser-supported mass media have come to occupy a larger role even in +places where they were not dominant before the last quarter of the twentieth +century, the long American experience with this form provides useful insight +globally. +={ Habermas, Jurgen } + +In order to consider the relative advantages and failures of various platforms +for a public sphere, we need to define a minimal set of desiderata that such a +platform must possess. My point is not to define an ideal set of constraints +and affordances of the public sphere that would secure legitimacy or would be +most attractive under one conception of democracy or another. Rather, my +intention is to define a design question: What characteristics of a +communications system and practices are sufficiently basic to be desired by a +wide range of conceptions of democracy? With these in hand, we will be able to +compare the commercial mass media and the emerging alternatives in the +digitally networked environment. + +/{Universal Intake}/. Any system of government committed to the idea that, in +principle, the concerns of all those governed by that system are equally +respected as potential proper subjects for political action and that all those +governed have a say in what government should do requires a public sphere that +can capture the observations of all constituents. These include at least their +observations about the state of the world as they perceive and understand it, +and their opinions of the relative desirability of alternative courses of +action with regard to their perceptions or those of others. It is important not +to confuse "universal intake" with more comprehensive ideas, such as that every +voice must be heard in actual political debates, or that all concerns deserve +debate and answer. Universal intake does not imply these broader requirements. +It is, indeed, the role of filtering and accreditation to whittle down what the +universal intake function drags in and make it into a manageable set of +political discussion topics and interventions. However, the basic requirement +of a public sphere is that it must in principle be susceptible to perceiving +and considering the issues of anyone who believes that their condition is a +matter appropriate for political consideration and collective action. The +extent to which that personal judgment about what the political discourse +should be concerned with actually coincides with what the group as a whole will +consider in the public sphere is a function of the filtering and accreditation +functions. ,{[pg 183]}, +={ information production inputs : + universal intake +1 ; + inputs to production : + universal intake +1 ; + production inputs : + universal intake +1 ; + universal intake +1 +} + +/{Filtering for Potential Political Relevance}/. Not everything that someone +considers to be a proper concern for collective action is perceived as such by +most other participants in the political debate. A public sphere that has some +successful implementation of universal intake must also have a filter to +separate out those matters that are plausibly within the domain of organized +political action and those that are not. What constitutes the range of +plausible political topics is locally contingent, changes over time, and is +itself a contested political question, as was shown most obviously by the +"personal is political" feminist intellectual campaign. While it left "my dad +won't buy me the candy I want" out of the realm of the political, it insisted +on treating "my husband is beating me" as critically relevant in political +debate. An overly restrictive filtering system is likely to impoverish a public +sphere and rob it of its capacity to develop legitimate public opinion. It +tends to exclude views and concerns that are in fact held by a sufficiently +large number of people, or to affect people in sufficiently salient ways that +they turn out, in historical context, to place pressure on the political system +that fails to consider them or provide a legitimate answer, if not a solution. +A system that is too loose tends to fail because it does not allow a sufficient +narrowing of focus to provide the kind of sustained attention and concentration +necessary to consider a matter and develop a range of public opinions on it. +={ filtering +1 ; + relevance filtering +1 +} + +/{Filtering for Accreditation}/. Accreditation is different from relevance, +requires different kinds of judgments, and may be performed in different ways +than basic relevance filtering. A statement like "the president has sold out +space policy to Martians" is different from "my dad won't buy me the candy I +want." It is potentially as relevant as "the president has sold out energy +policy to oil companies." What makes the former a subject for entertainment, +not political debate, is its lack of credibility. Much of the function of +journalistic professional norms is to create and preserve the credibility of +the professional press as a source of accreditation for the public at large. +Parties provide a major vehicle for passing the filters of both relevance and +accreditation. Academia gives its members a source of credibility, whose force +(ideally) varies with the degree to which their statements come out of, and +pertain to, their core roles as creators of knowledge through their +disciplinary constraints. Civil servants in reasonably professional systems can +provide a source of accreditation. Large corporations have come to play such a +role, though with greater ambiguity. The emerging role of nongovernment +organizations ,{[pg 184]}, (NGOs), very often is intended precisely to +preorganize opinion that does not easily pass the relevant public sphere's +filters of relevance and accreditation and provide it with a voice that will. +Note that accreditation of a move in political discourse is very different from +accreditation of a move in, for example, academic discourse, because the +objective of each system is different. In academic discourse, the fact that a +large number of people hold a particular opinion ("the universe was created in +seven days") does not render that opinion credible enough to warrant serious +academic discussion. In political discourse, say, about public school +curricula, the fact that a large number of people hold the same view and are +inclined to have it taught in public schools makes that claim highly relevant +and "credible." In other words, it is credible that this could become a +political opinion that forms a part of public discourse with the potential to +lead to public action. Filters, both for relevance and accreditation, provide a +critical point of control over the debate, and hence are extremely important +design elements. +={ accreditation ; + opinion, public : + synthesis of +} + +/{Synthesis of "Public Opinion."}/ The communications system that offers the +platform for the public sphere must also enable the synthesis of clusters of +individual opinion that are sufficiently close and articulated to form +something more than private opinions held by some number of individuals. How +this is done is tricky, and what counts as "public opinion" may vary among +different theories of democracy. In deliberative conceptions, this might make +requirements of the form of discourse. Civic republicans would focus on open +deliberation among people who see their role as deliberating about the common +good. Habermas would focus on deliberating under conditions that assure the +absence of coercion, while Bruce Ackerman would admit to deliberation only +arguments formulated so as to be neutral as among conceptions of the good. In +pluralist conceptions, like John Rawls's in Political Liberalism, which do not +seek ultimately to arrive at a common understanding but instead seek to +peaceably clear competing positions as to how we ought to act as a polity, this +might mean the synthesis of a position that has sufficient overlap among those +who hold it that they are willing to sign on to a particular form of statement +in order to get the bargaining benefits of scale as an interest group with a +coherent position. That position then comes to the polls and the bargaining +table as one that must be considered, overpowered, or bargained with. In any +event, the platform has to provide some capacity to synthesize the finely +disparate and varied versions of beliefs and positions held by actual +individuals into articulated positions amenable for ,{[pg 185]}, consideration +and adoption in the formal political sphere and by a system of government, and +to render them in ways that make them sufficiently salient in the overall mix +of potential opinions to form a condensation point for collective action. +={ Habermas, Jurgen ; + Ackerman, Bruce ; + clusters in network topology : + synthesis of public opinion ; + accreditation ; + opinion, public : + synthesis of ; + public opinion : + synthesis of ; + synthesis of public opinion ; + Rawls, John +} + +/{Independence from Government Control}/. The core role of the political public +sphere is to provide a platform for converting privately developed +observations, intuitions, and opinions into public opinions that can be brought +to bear in the political system toward determining collective action. One core +output of these communications is instructions to the administration sitting in +government. To the extent that the platform is dependent on that same sitting +government, there is a basic tension between the role of debate in the public +sphere as issuing instructions to the executive and the interests of the +sitting executive to retain its position and its agenda and have it ratified by +the public. This does not mean that the communications system must exclude +government from communicating its positions, explaining them, and advocating +them. However, when it steps into the public sphere, the locus of the formation +and crystallization of public opinion, the sitting administration must act as a +participant in explicit conversation, and not as a platform controller that can +tilt the platform in its direction. +={ government : + independence from control of ; + independence from government control ; + policy : + independence from government control +} + +2~ THE EMERGENCE OF THE COMMERCIAL MASS-MEDIA PLATFORM FOR THE PUBLIC SPHERE +={ commercial model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +1 ; + industrial model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +1 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + emerging role of mass media +1 ; + mass media : + as platform for public sphere +1 ; + mass media, political freedom and : + commercial platform for public sphere +1 ; + networked public sphere : + mass-media platform for +1 ; + political freedom, mass media and : + commercial platform for public sphere +1 ; + public sphere : + mass media platform for +1 ; + traditional model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +1 +} + +Throughout the twentieth century, the mass media have played a fundamental +constitutive role in the construction of the public sphere in liberal +democracies. Over this period, first in the United States and later throughout +the world, the commercial, advertising-supported form of mass media has become +dominant in both print and electronic media. Sometimes, these media have played +a role that has drawn admiration as "the fourth estate." Here, the media are +seen as a critical watchdog over government processes, and as a major platform +for translating the mobilization of social movements into salient, and +ultimately actionable, political statements. These same media, however, have +also drawn mountains of derision for the power they wield, as well as fail to +wield, and for the shallowness of public communication they promote in the +normal course of the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers. Nowhere was +this clearer than in the criticism of the large role that television came to +play in American public culture and its public ,{[pg 186]}, sphere. +Contemporary debates bear the imprint of the three major networks, which in the +early 1980s still accounted for 92 percent of television viewers and were +turned on and watched for hours a day in typical American homes. These inspired +works like Neil Postman's /{Amusing Ourselves to Death or Robert Putnam's +claim, in Bowling Alone}/, that television seemed to be the primary +identifiable discrete cause of the decline of American civic life. +Nevertheless, whether positive or negative, variants of the mass-media model of +communications have been dominant throughout the twentieth century, in both +print and electronic media. The mass-media model has been the dominant model of +communications in both democracies and their authoritarian rivals throughout +the period when democracy established itself, first against monarchies, and +later against communism and fascism. To say that mass media were dominant is +not to say that only technical systems of remote communications form the +platform of the public sphere. As Theda Skocpol and Putnam have each traced in +the context of the American and Italian polities, organizations and +associations of personal civic involvement form an important platform for +public participation. And yet, as both have recorded, these platforms have been +on the decline. So "dominant" does not mean sole, but instead means +overridingly important in the structuring of the public sphere. It is this +dominance, not the very existence, of mass media that is being challenged by +the emergence of the networked public sphere. +={ commercial press +2 ; + newspapers +2 ; + press, commercial +2 ; + print media, commercial +2 ; + radio +13 ; + Postman, Neil ; + television ; + commercial mass media : + as platform for public sphere +1 +} + +The roots of the contemporary industrial structure of mass media presage both +the attractive and unattractive aspects of the media we see today. Pioneered by +the Dutch printers of the seventeenth century, a commercial press that did not +need to rely on government grants and printing contracts, or on the church, +became a source of a constant flow of heterodox literature and political +debate.~{ Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (New +York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Jeremey Popkin, News and Politics in +the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac's Gazzette de Leyde (Ithaca, NY: Cornell +University Press, 1989). }~ However, a commercial press has always also been +sensitive to the conditions of the marketplace--costs, audience, and +competition. In seventeenth-century England, the Stationers' Monopoly provided +its insiders enough market protection from competitors that its members were +more than happy to oblige the Crown with a compliant press in exchange for +monopoly. It was only after the demise of that monopoly that a genuinely +political press appeared in earnest, only to be met by a combination of libel +prosecutions, high stamp taxes, and outright bribery and acquisition by +government.~{ Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of +Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 33-46. }~ These, like the +more direct censorship and sponsorship relationships that typified the +prerevolutionary French press, kept newspapers and gazettes relatively +compliant, and their distribution largely limited to elite audiences. Political +dissent did not form part of a stable and ,{[pg 187]}, independent market-based +business model. As Paul Starr has shown, the evolution of the British colonies +in America was different. While the first century or so of settlement saw few +papers, and those mostly "authorized" gazettes, competition began to increase +over the course of the eighteenth century. The levels of literacy, particularly +in New England, were exceptionally high, the population was relatively +prosperous, and the regulatory constraints that applied in England, including +the Stamp Tax of 1712, did not apply in the colonies. As second and third +newspapers emerged in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, and were +no longer supported by the colonial governments through postal franchises, the +public sphere became more contentious. This was now a public sphere whose +voices were self-supporting, like Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette. The +mobilization of much of this press during the revolutionary era, and the broad +perception that it played an important role in constituting the American +public, allowed the commercial press to continue to play an independent and +critical role after the revolution as well, a fate not shared by the brief +flowering of the press immediately after the French Revolution. A combination +of high literacy and high government tolerance, but also of postal subsidies, +led the new United States to have a number and diversity of newspapers +unequalled anywhere else, with a higher weekly circulation by 1840 in the +17-million-strong United States than in all of Europe with its population then +of 233 million. By 1830, when Tocqueville visited America, he was confronted +with a widespread practice of newspaper reading--not only in towns, but in +farflung farms as well, newspapers that were a primary organizing mechanism for +political association.~{ Starr, Creation of the Media, 48-62, 86-87. }~ +={ Starr, Paul +1 ; + Franklin, Benjamin ; + Tocqueville, Alexis, de ; + de Tocqueville, Alexis ; + large-circulation press +1 +} + +This widespread development of small-circulation, mostly local, competitive +commercial press that carried highly political and associational news and +opinion came under pressure not from government, but from the economies of +scale of the mechanical press, the telegraph, and the ever-expanding political +and economic communities brought together by rail and industrialization. Harold +Innis argued more than half a century ago that the increasing costs of +mechanical presses, coupled with the much-larger circulation they enabled and +the availability of a flow of facts from around the world through telegraph, +reoriented newspapers toward a mass-circulation, relatively low-denominator +advertising medium. These internal economies, as Alfred Chandler and, later, +James Beniger showed in their work, intersected with the vast increase in +industrial output, which in turn required new mechanisms of demand +management--in other words, more sophisticated ,{[pg 188]}, advertising to +generate and channel demand. In the 1830s, the Sun and Herald were published in +New York on large-circulation scales, reducing prices to a penny a copy and +shifting content from mostly politics and business news to new forms of +reporting: petty crimes from the police courts, human-interest stories, and +outright entertainment-value hoaxes.~{ Starr, Creation of the Media, 131-133. +}~ The startup cost of founding such mass-circulation papers rapidly increased +over the second quarter of the nineteenth century, as figure 6.1 illustrates. +James Gordon Bennett founded the Herald in 1835, with an investment of five +hundred dollars, equal to a little more than $10,400 in 2005 dollars. By 1840, +the necessary investment was ten to twenty times greater, between five and ten +thousand dollars, or $106,000?$212,000 in 2005 terms. By 1850, that amount had +again grown tenfold, to $100,000, about $2.38 million in 2005.~{ Starr, +Creation of the Media, 135. }~ In the span of fifteen years, the costs of +starting a newspaper rose from a number that many could conceive of spending +for a wide range of motivations using a mix of organizational forms, to +something that required a more or less industrial business model to recoup a +very substantial financial investment. The new costs reflected mutually +reinforcing increases in organizational cost (because of the +professionalization of the newspaper publishing model) and the introduction of +high-capacity, higher-cost equipment: electric presses (1839); the Hoe +double-cylinder rotary press (1846), which raised output from the five hundred +to one thousand sheets per hour of the early steam presses (up from 250 sheets +for the handpress) to twelve thousand sheets per hour; and eventually William +Bullock's roll-fed rotary press that produced twelve thousand complete +newspapers per hour by 1865. The introduction of telegraph and the emergence of +news agencies--particularly the Associated Press (AP) in the United States and +Reuters in England--completed the basic structure of the commercial printed +press. These characteristics--relatively high cost, professional, advertising +supported, dependent on access to a comparatively small number of news agencies +(which, in the case of the AP, were often used to anticompetitive advantage by +their members until the midtwentieth-century antitrust case)--continued to +typify print media. With the introduction of competition from radio and +television, these effects tended to lead to greater concentration, with a +majority of papers facing no local competition, and an ever-increasing number +of papers coming under the joint ownership of a very small number of news +publishing houses. +={ Beniger, James ; + Chandler, Alfred ; + Titmuss, Richard ; + Bennett, James Gorden ; + Bullock, William +} + +{won_benkler_6_1.png "Figure 6.1: Start-up Costs of a Daily Newspaper, 1835-1850 (in 2005 dollars)" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +% moved image above paragraph instead of at start of page 189 of original text, joined logical paragraph ending page 188 and continued on page 189 after image + +The introduction of radio was the next and only serious potential inflection +point, prior to the emergence of the Internet, at which some portion of the +public sphere could have developed away from the advertiser- ,{[pg 189]}, +supported mass-media model. In most of Europe, radio followed the path of +state-controlled media, with variable degrees of freedom from the executive at +different times and places. Britain developed the BBC, a public organization +funded by government-imposed levies, but granted sufficient operational freedom +to offer a genuine platform for a public sphere, as opposed to a reflection of +the government's voice and agenda. While this model successfully developed what +is perhaps the gold standard of broadcast journalism, it also grew as a largely +elite institution throughout much of the twentieth century. The BBC model of +state-based funding and monopoly with genuine editorial autonomy became the +basis of the broadcast model in a number of former colonies: Canada and +Australia adopted a hybrid model in the 1930s. This included a well-funded +public broadcaster, but did not impose a monopoly in its favor, allowing +commercial broadcasters to grow alongside it. Newly independent former colonies +in the postwar era that became democracies, like India and Israel, adopted the +model with monopoly, levy-based funding, and a degree of editorial +independence. The most currently visible adoption of a hybrid model based on +some state funding but with editorial freedom is Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite +station partly funded by the Emir of Qatar, but apparently free to pursue its +own editorial policy, whose coverage stands in sharp contrast to that of the +state-run broadcasters ,{[pg 190]}, in the region. In none of these BBC-like +places did broadcast diverge from the basic centralized communications model of +the mass media, but it followed a path distinct from the commercial mass media. +Radio, and later television, was a more tightly controlled medium than was the +printed press; its intake, filtering, and synthesis of public discourse were +relatively insulated from the pressure of both markets, which typified the +American model, and politics, which typified the state-owned broadcasters. +These were instead controlled by the professional judgments of their management +and journalists, and showed both the high professionalism that accompanied +freedom along both those dimensions and the class and professional elite +filters that typify those who control the media under that organizational +model. The United States took a different path that eventually replicated, +extended, and enhanced the commercial, advertiser-supported mass-media model +originated in the printed press. This model was to become the template for the +development of similar broadcasters alongside the state-owned and independent +BBC-model channels adopted throughout much of the rest of the world, and of +programming production for newer distribution technologies, like cable and +satellite stations. The birth of radio as a platform for the public sphere in +the United States was on election night in 1920.~{ The following discussion of +the birth of radio is adapted from Yochai Benkler, "Overcoming Agoraphobia: +Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment," Harvard Journal +of Law and Technology 11 (Winter 1997-1998): 287. That article provides the +detailed support for the description. The major secondary works relied on are +Erik Barnouw, A History of Broadcasting in the United States (New York: Oxford +University Press, 1966-1970); Gleason Archer, History of Radio to 1926 (New +York: Arno Press, 1971); and Philip T. Rosen, Modern Stentors: Radio +Broadcasters and the Federal Government, 1920-1934 (Westport, CT: Greenwood +Press, 1980). }~ Two stations broadcast the election returns as their launchpad +for an entirely new medium--wireless broadcast to a wide audience. One was the +Detroit News amateur station, 8MK, a broadcast that was framed and understood +as an internal communication of a technical fraternity--the many amateurs who +had been trained in radio communications for World War I and who then came to +form a substantial and engaged technical community. The other was KDKA +Pittsburgh, launched by Westinghouse as a bid to create demand for radio +receivers of a kind that it had geared up to make during the war. Over the +following four or five years, it was unclear which of these two models of +communication would dominate the new medium. By 1926, however, the industrial +structure that would lead radio to follow the path of commercial, +advertiser-supported, concentrated mass media, dependent on government +licensing and specializing in influencing its own regulatory oversight process +was already in place. +={ BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) ; + monopoly : + radio broadcasting ; + KDKA Pittsburgh ; + radio : + as public sphere platform +} + +Although this development had its roots in the industrial structure of radio +production as it emerged from the first two decades of innovation and +businesses in the twentieth century, it was shaped significantly by +political-regulatory choices during the 1920s. At the turn of the twentieth +century, radio was seen exclusively as a means of wireless telegraphy, +emphasizing ,{[pg 191]}, ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communications. +Although some amateurs experimented with voice programs, broadcast was a mode +of point-to-point communications; entertainment was not seen as its function +until the 1920s. The first decade and a half of radio in the United States saw +rapid innovation and competition, followed by a series of patent suits aimed to +consolidate control over the technology. By 1916, the ideal transmitter based +on technology available at the time required licenses of patents held by +Marconi, AT&T, General Electric (GE), and a few individuals. No licenses were +in fact granted. The industry had reached stalemate. When the United States +joined the war, however, the navy moved quickly to break the stalemate, +effectively creating a compulsory cross-licensing scheme for war production, +and brought in Westinghouse, the other major potential manufacturer of vacuum +tubes alongside GE, as a participant in the industry. The two years following +the war saw intervention by the U.S. government to assure that American radio +industry would not be controlled by British Marconi because of concerns in the +navy that British control over radio would render the United States vulnerable +to the same tactic Britain used against Germany at the start of the +war--cutting off all transoceanic telegraph communications. The navy brokered a +deal in 1919 whereby a new company was created-- the Radio Corporation of +America (RCA)--which bought Marconi's American business. By early 1920, RCA, +GE, and AT&T entered into a patent cross-licensing model that would allow each +to produce for a market segment: RCA would control transoceanic wireless +telegraphy, while GE and AT&T's Western Electric subsidiary would make radio +transmitters and sell them under the RCA brand. This left Westinghouse with +production facilities developed for the war, but shut out of the existing +equipment markets by the patent pool. Launching KDKA Pittsburgh was part of its +response: Westinghouse would create demand for small receivers that it could +manufacture without access to the patents held by the pool. The other part of +its strategy consisted of acquiring patents that, within a few months, enabled +Westinghouse to force its inclusion in the patent pool, redrawing the market +division map to give Westinghouse 40 percent of the receiving equipment market. +The first part of Westinghouse's strategy, adoption of broadcasting to generate +demand for receivers, proved highly successful and in the long run more +important. Within two years, there were receivers in 10 percent of American +homes. Throughout the 1920s, equipment sales were big business. +={ KDKA Pittsburgh +1 ; + AT&T ; + GE (General Electric) ; + licensing : + radio +3 ; + Marconi ; + proprietary rights : + radio patents ; + radio : + patents ; + RCA (Radio Corporation of America) ; + Westinghouse +1 +} + +Radio stations, however, were not dominated by the equipment manufacturers, or +by anyone else for that matter, in the first few years. While the ,{[pg 192]}, +equipment manufacturers did build powerful stations like KDKA Pittsburgh, WJZ +Newark, KYW Chicago (Westinghouse), and WGY Schenectady (GE), they did not sell +advertising, but rather made their money from equipment sales. These stations +did not, in any meaningful sense of the word, dominate the radio sphere in the +first few years of radio, as the networks would indeed come to do within a +decade. In November 1921, the first five licenses were issued by the Department +of Commerce under the new category of "broadcasting" of "news, lectures, +entertainment, etc." Within eight months, the department had issued another 453 +licenses. Many of these went to universities, churches, and unions, as well as +local shops hoping to attract business with their broadcasts. Universities, +seeing radio as a vehicle for broadening their role, began broadcasting +lectures and educational programming. Seventy-four institutes of higher +learning operated stations by the end of 1922. The University of Nebraska +offered two-credit courses whose lectures were transmitted over the air. +Churches, newspapers, and department stores each forayed into this new space, +much as we saw the emergence of Web sites for every organization over the +course of the mid-1990s. Thousands of amateurs were experimenting with +technical and format innovations. While receivers were substantially cheaper +than transmitters, it was still possible to assemble and sell relatively cheap +transmitters, for local communications, at prices sufficiently low that +thousands of individual amateurs could take to the air. At this point in time, +then, it was not yet foreordained that radio would follow the mass-media model, +with a small number of well-funded speakers and hordes of passive listeners. +Within a short period, however, a combination of technology, business +practices, and regulatory decisions did in fact settle on the model, comprised +of a small number of advertiser-supported national networks, that came to +typify the American broadcast system throughout most of the rest of the century +and that became the template for television as well. +={ university-owned-radio } + +Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, played a pivotal role in this +development. Throughout the first few years after the war, Hoover had +positioned himself as the champion of making control over radio a private +market affair, allying himself both with commercial radio interests and with +the amateurs against the navy and the postal service, each of which sought some +form of nationalization of radio similar to what would happen more or less +everywhere else in the world. In 1922, Hoover assembled the first of four +annual radio conferences, representing radio manufacturers, broadcasters, and +some engineers and amateurs. This forum became Hoover's primary ,{[pg 193]}, +stage. Over the next four years, he used its annual meeting to derive policy +recommendations, legitimacy, and cooperation for his regulatory action, all +without a hint of authority under the Radio Act of 1912. Hoover relied heavily +on the rhetoric of public interest and on the support of amateurs to justify +his system of private broadcasting coordinated by the Department of Commerce. +From 1922 on, however, he followed a pattern that would systematically benefit +large commercial broadcasters over small ones; commercial broadcasters over +educational and religious broadcasters; and the one-to-many broadcasts over the +point-to-point, small-scale wireless telephony and telegraphy that the amateurs +were developing. After January 1922, the department inserted a limitation on +amateur licenses, excluding from their coverage the broadcast of "weather +reports, market reports, music, concerts, speeches, news or similar information +or entertainment." This, together with a Department of Commerce order to all +amateurs to stop broadcasting at 360 meters (the wave assigned broadcasting), +effectively limited amateurs to shortwave radiotelephony and telegraphy in a +set of frequencies then thought to be commercially insignificant. In the +summer, the department assigned broadcasters, in addition to 360 meters, +another band, at 400 meters. Licenses in this Class B category were reserved +for transmitters operating at power levels of 500-1,000 watts, who did not use +phonograph records. These limitations on Class B licenses made the newly +created channel a feasible home only to broadcasters who could afford the +much-more-expensive, high-powered transmitters and could arrange for live +broadcasts, rather than simply play phonograph records. The success of this new +frequency was not immediate, because many receivers could not tune out stations +broadcasting at the two frequencies in order to listen to the other. Hoover, +failing to move Congress to amend the radio law to provide him with the power +necessary to regulate broadcasting, relied on the recommendations of the Second +Radio Conference in 1923 as public support for adopting a new regime, and +continued to act without legislative authority. He announced that the broadcast +band would be divided in three: high-powered (500-1,000 watts) stations serving +large areas would have no interference in those large areas, and would not +share frequencies. They would transmit on frequencies between 300 and 545 +meters. Medium-powered stations served smaller areas without interference, and +would operate at assigned channels between 222 and 300 meters. The remaining +low-powered stations would not be eliminated, as the bigger actors wanted, but +would remain at 360 meters, with limited hours of operation and geographic +reach. Many of these lower-powered broadcasters ,{[pg 194]}, were educational +and religious institutions that perceived Hoover's allocation as a preference +for the RCA-GE-AT&T-Westinghouse alliance. Despite his protestations against +commercial broadcasting ("If a speech by the President is to be used as the +meat in a sandwich of two patent medicine advertisements, there will be no +radio left"), Hoover consistently reserved clear channels and issued high-power +licenses to commercial broadcasters. The final policy action based on the radio +conferences came in 1925, when the Department of Commerce stopped issuing +licenses. The result was a secondary market in licenses, in which some +religious and educational stations were bought out by commercial concerns. +These purchases further gravitated radio toward commercial ownership. The +licensing preference for stations that could afford high-powered transmitters, +long hours of operation, and compliance with high technical constraints +continued after the Radio Act of 1927. As a practical matter, it led to +assignment of twenty-one out of the twentyfour clear channel licenses created +by the Federal Radio Commission to the newly created network-affiliated +stations. +={ Hoover, Herbert ; + AT&T +3 ; + proprietary rights : + radio patents +1 ; + radio : + patents +1 ; + advertiser-supported media +3 +} + +Over the course of this period, tensions also began to emerge within the patent +alliance. The phenomenal success of receiver sales tempted Western Electric +into that market. In the meantime, AT&T, almost by mistake, began to challenge +GE, Westinghouse, and RCA in broadcasting as an outgrowth of its attempt to +create a broadcast common-carriage facility. Despite the successes of broadcast +and receiver sales, it was not clear in 1922-1923 how the cost of setting up +and maintaining stations would be paid for. In England, a tax was levied on +radio sets, and its revenue used to fund the BBC. No such proposal was +considered in the United States, but the editor of Radio Broadcast proposed a +national endowed fund, like those that support public libraries and museums, +and in 1924, a committee of New York businessmen solicited public donations to +fund broadcasters (the response was so pitiful that the funds were returned to +their donors). AT&T was the only company to offer a solution. Building on its +telephone service experience, it offered radio telephony to the public for a +fee. Genuine wireless telephony, even mobile telephony, had been the subject of +experimentation since the second decade of radio, but that was not what AT&T +offered. In February 1922, AT&T established WEAF in New York, a broadcast +station over which AT&T was to provide no programming of its own, but instead +would enable the public or program providers to pay on a per-time basis. AT&T +treated this service as a form of wireless telephony so that it would fall, +under the patent alliance agreements of 1920, under the exclusive control of +AT&T. ,{[pg 195]}, +={ radio telephony ; + toll broadcasting +2 ; + broadcasting, radio. See radio broadcasting, toll +2 ; + toll broadcasting +2 +} + +RCA, Westinghouse, and GE could not compete in this area. "Toll broadcasting" +was not a success by its own terms. There was insufficient demand for +communicating with the public to sustain a full schedule that would justify +listeners tuning into the station. As a result, AT&T produced its own +programming. In order to increase the potential audience for its transmissions +while using its advantage in wired facilities, AT&T experimented with remote +transmissions, such as live reports from sports events, and with simultaneous +transmissions of its broadcasts by other stations, connected to its New York +feed by cable. In its effort to launch toll broadcasting, AT&T found itself by +mid-1923 with the first functioning precursor to an advertiser-supported +broadcast network. +={ GE (General Electric) +1 ; + RCA (Radio Corporation of America) +1 ; + Westinghouse +1 +} + +The alliance members now threatened each other: AT&T threatened to enter into +receiver manufacturing and broadcast, and the RCA alliance, with its powerful +stations, threatened to adopt "toll broadcasting," or advertiser-supported +radio. The patent allies submitted their dispute to an arbitrator, who was to +interpret the 1920 agreements, reached at a time of wireless telegraphy, to +divide the spoils of the broadcast world of 1924. In late 1924, the arbitrator +found for RCA-GE-Westinghouse on almost all issues. Capitalizing on RCA's +difficulties with the antitrust authorities and congressional hearings over +aggressive monopolization practices in the receiving set market, however, AT&T +countered that if the 1920 agreements meant what the arbitrator said they +meant, they were a combination in restraint of trade to which AT&T would not +adhere. Bargaining in the shadow of the mutual threats of contract and +antitrust actions, the former allies reached a solution that formed the basis +of future radio broadcasting. AT&T would leave broadcasting. A new company, +owned by RCA, GE, and Westinghouse would be formed, and would purchase AT&T's +stations. The new company would enter into a long-term contract with AT&T to +provide the long-distance communications necessary to set up the broadcast +network that David Sarnoff envisioned as the future of broadcast. This new +entity would, in 1926, become the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). AT&T's +WEAF station would become the center of one of NBC's two networks, and the +division arrived at would thereafter form the basis of the broadcast system in +the United States. +={ monopoly : + radio broadcasting +1 ; + NBC (National Broadcasting Company) ; + Sarnoff, David +} + +By the middle of 1926, then, the institutional and organizational elements that +became the American broadcast system were, to a great extent, in place. The +idea of government monopoly over broadcasting, which became dominant in Great +Britain, Europe, and their former colonies, was forever abandoned. ,{[pg 196]}, +The idea of a private-property regime in spectrum, which had been advocated by +commercial broadcasters to spur investment in broadcast, was rejected on the +backdrop of other battles over conservation of federal resources. The Radio Act +of 1927, passed by Congress in record speed a few months after a court +invalidated Hoover's entire regulatory edifice as lacking legal foundation, +enacted this framework as the basic structure of American broadcast. A +relatively small group of commercial broadcasters and equipment manufacturers +took the lead in broadcast development. A governmental regulatory agency, using +a standard of "the public good," allocated frequency, time, and power +assignments to minimize interference and to resolve conflicts. The public good, +by and large, correlated to the needs of commercial broadcasters and their +listeners. Later, the broadcast networks supplanted the patent alliance as the +primary force to which the Federal Radio Commission paid heed. The early 1930s +still saw battles over the degree of freedom that these networks had to pursue +their own commercial interests, free of regulation (studied in Robert +McChesney's work).~{ Robert Waterman McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, +and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (New +York: Oxford University Press, 1993). }~ By that point, however, the power of +the broadcasters was already too great to be seriously challenged. Interests +like those of the amateurs, whose romantic pioneering mantle still held strong +purchase on the process, educational institutions, and religious organizations +continued to exercise some force on the allocation and management of the +spectrum. However, they were addressed on the periphery of the broadcast +platform, leaving the public sphere to be largely mediated by a tiny number of +commercial entities running a controlled, advertiser-supported platform of mass +media. Following the settlement around radio, there were no more genuine +inflection points in the structure of mass media. Television followed radio, +and was even more concentrated. Cable networks and satellite networks varied to +some extent, but retained the basic advertiser-supported model, oriented toward +luring the widest possible audience to view the advertising that paid for the +programming. +={ mass media : + as platform for public sphere ; + McChesney, Robert ; + Radio Act of 1927 +} + +2~ BASIC CRITIQUES OF MASS MEDIA +={ mass media : + as platform for public sphere +3 ; + commercial mass media : + criticisms +22 ; + commercial mass media : + basic critiques of +22 ; + mass media : + basic critiques of +22 ; + mass media, political freedom and +22 ; + political freedom, mass media and : + criticisms +22 +} + +The cluster of practices that form the mass-media model was highly conducive to +social control in authoritarian countries. The hub-and-spoke technical +architecture and unidirectional endpoint-reception model of these systems made +it very simple to control, by controlling the core--the state-owned television, +radio, and newspapers. The high cost of providing ,{[pg 197]}, high-circulation +statements meant that subversive publications were difficult to make and +communicate across large distances and to large populations of potential +supporters. Samizdat of various forms and channels have existed in most if not +all authoritarian societies, but at great disadvantage relative to public +communication. The passivity of readers, listeners, and viewers coincided +nicely with the role of the authoritarian public sphere--to manage opinion in +order to cause the widest possible willing, or at least quiescent, compliance, +and thereby to limit the need for using actual repressive force. + +In liberal democracies, the same technical and economic cost characteristics +resulted in a very different pattern of communications practices. However, +these practices relied on, and took advantage of, some of the very same basic +architectural and cost characteristics. The practices of commercial mass media +in liberal democracies have been the subject of a vast literature, criticizing +their failures and extolling their virtues as a core platform for the liberal +public sphere. There have been three primary critiques of these media: First, +their intake has been seen as too limited. Too few information collection +points leave too many views entirely unexplored and unrepresented because they +are far from the concerns of the cadre of professional journalists, or cannot +afford to buy their way to public attention. The debates about localism and +diversity of ownership of radio and television stations have been the clearest +policy locus of this critique in the United States. They are based on the +assumption that local and socially diverse ownership of radio stations will +lead to better representation of concerns as they are distributed in society. +Second, concentrated mass media has been criticized as giving the owners too +much power--which they either employ themselves or sell to the highest +bidder--over what is said and how it is evaluated. Third, the +advertising-supported media needs to attract large audiences, leading +programming away from the genuinely politically important, challenging, and +engaging, and toward the titillating or the soothing. This critique has +emphasized the tension between business interests and journalistic ethics, and +the claims that market imperatives and the bottom line lead to shoddy or +cowering reporting; quiescence in majority tastes and positions in order to +maximize audience; spectacle rather than substantive conversation of issues +even when political matters are covered; and an emphasis on entertainment over +news and analysis. +={ access : + large-audience programming | limited by mass media +3 | systematically blocked by policy routers +3 ; + accreditation : + of mass media owners ; + advertiser-supported media : + denominator programming ; + alertness, undermined by commercialism ; + blocked access : + large-audience programming | mass media and +3 | policy routers +3 ; + capacity : + diversity of content in large audience media | policy routers +3 ; + Cisco policy routers +3 ; + commercialism, undermining political concern ; + concentration of mass-media power ; + diversity : + large-audience programming ; + ethic (journalistic) vs. business necessity ; + exercise of programming power ; + filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +1 ; + first-best preferences : + large-audience programming | power of mass media owners ; + information flow : + controlling with policy routers +3 | limited by mass media +3 | large-audience programming ; + information production inputs : + large-audience programming | limited by mass media +3 | systematically blocked by policy routers +3 | universal intake +3 ; + inputs to production : + large-audience programming | limited by mass media +3 | systematically blocked by policy routers +3 | universal intake +3 ; + inertness, political ; + journalism, undermined by commercialism ; + large-audience programming ; + limited intake of mass media +3 ; + lowest-common-denominator programming ; + owners of mass media, power of ; + policy : + independence from government control +1 ; + policy routers +3 ; + political concern, undermined by commercialism ; + power of mass media owners ; + production inputs : + large-audience programming | limited by mass media +3 | systematically blocked by policy routers +3 | universal intake +3 ; + relevance filtering : + power of mass media owners ; + routers, controlling information flow with +3 ; + television : + large-audience programming ; + universal intake +3 +} + +% (index) policy routers mentioned much, locate properly re-check!!! + +Three primary defenses or advantages have also been seen in these media: first +is their independence from government, party, or upper-class largesse, +particularly against the background of the state-owned media in authoritarian +,{[pg 198]}, regimes, and given the high cost of production and communication, +commercial mass media have been seen as necessary to create a public sphere +grounded outside government. Second is the professionalism and large newsrooms +that commercial mass media can afford to support to perform the watchdog +function in complex societies. Because of their market-based revenues, they can +replace universal intake with well-researched observations that citizens would +not otherwise have made, and that are critical to a well-functioning democracy. +Third, their near-universal visibility and independence enable them to identify +important issues percolating in society. They can provide a platform to put +them on the public agenda. They can express, filter, and accredit statements +about these issues, so that they become well-specified subjects and feasible +objects for public debate among informed citizens. That is to say, the limited +number of points to which all are tuned and the limited number of "slots" +available for speaking on these media form the basis for providing the +synthesis required for public opinion and raising the salience of matters of +public concern to the point of potential collective action. In the remainder of +this chapter, I will explain the criticisms of the commercial mass media in +more detail. I then take up in chapter 7 the question of how the Internet in +general, and the rise of nonmarket and cooperative individual production in the +networked information economy in particular, can solve or alleviate those +problems while fulfilling some of the important roles of mass media in +democracies today. +={ government : + independence from control of ; + independence from government control ; + commercial model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +2 ; + industrial model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +2 ; + industrial ecology of digital environment : + emerging role of mass media +2 ; + networked public sphere : + mass-media platform for +2 ; + political freedom, media and : + commercial platform for public sphere +2 ; + producers professionalism, mass media ; + public sphere +2 ; + traditional model of communication : + emerging role of mass media +2 ; + visibility of mass media +} + +% ={commercial mass media:as platform for public sphere} + +3~ Mass Media as a Platform for the Public Sphere +={ commercial mass media : + as platform for public sphere +1 ; + mass media, political freedom and : + commercial platform for public sphere +1 +} + +The structure of mass media as a mode of communications imposes a certain set +of basic characteristics on the kind of public conversation it makes possible. +First, it is always communication from a small number of people, organized into +an even smaller number of distinct outlets, to an audience several orders of +magnitude larger, unlimited in principle in its membership except by the +production capacity of the media itself--which, in the case of print, may mean +the number of copies, and in radio, television, cable, and the like, means +whatever physical-reach constraints, if any, are imposed by the technology and +business organizational arrangements used by these outlets. In large, complex, +modern societies, no one knows everything. The initial function of a platform +for the public sphere is one of intake--taking into the system the observations +and opinions of as many members of society as possible as potential objects of +public concern and consideration. The ,{[pg 199]}, radical difference between +the number of intake points the mass media have and the range and diversity of +human existence in large complex societies assures a large degree of +information loss at the intake stage. Second, the vast difference between the +number of speakers and the number of listeners, and the finished-goods style of +mass-media products, imposes significant constraints on the extent to which +these media can be open to feedback-- that is, to responsive communications +that are tied together as a conversation with multiple reciprocal moves from +both sides of the conversation. Third, the immense and very loosely defined +audience of mass media affects the filtering and synthesis functions of the +mass media as a platform for the public sphere. One of the observations +regarding the content of newspapers in the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth +centuries was the shift they took as their circulation increased--from +party-oriented, based in relatively thick communities of interest and practice, +to fact- and sensation-oriented, with content that made thinner requirements on +their users in order to achieve broader and more weakly defined readership. +Fourth, and finally, because of the high costs of organizing these media, the +functions of intake, sorting for relevance, accrediting, and synthesis are all +combined in the hands of the same media operators, selected initially for their +capacity to pool the capital necessary to communicate the information to wide +audiences. While all these functions are necessary for a usable public sphere, +the correlation of capacity to pool capital resources with capacity to offer +the best possible filtering and synthesis is not obvious. In addition to basic +structural constraints that come from the characteristic of a communications +modality that can properly be called "mass media," there are also critiques +that arise more specifically from the business models that have characterized +the commercial mass media over the course of most of the twentieth century. +Media markets are relatively concentrated, and the most common business model +involves selling the attention of large audiences to commercial advertisers. +={ accreditation : + capacity for, by mass media ; + advertiser-supported media +7 ; + capacity : + mass media limits on ; + clusters in network topology : + synthesis of public opinion ; + feedback and intake limits of mass media ; + filtering : + capacity for by mass media | concentration of mass-media power +7 ; + opinion, public : + synthesis of ; + public opinion : + synthesis of ; + relevance filtering : + capacity for, by mass media | power of mass media owners +7 ; + responsive communications ; + synthesis of public opinion : + See also accreditation +} + +3~ Media Concentration: The Power of Ownership and Money +={ accreditation : + power of mass media owners +6 ; + concentration of mass-media power +6 ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + of mass media owners +6 ; + owners of mass media, power of +6 ; + power of mass media owners +6 +} + +The Sinclair Broadcast Group is one of the largest owners of television +broadcast stations in the United States. The group's 2003 Annual Report proudly +states in its title, "Our Company. Your Message. 26 Million Households"; that +is, roughly one quarter of U.S. households. Sinclair owns and operates or +provides programming and sales to sixty-two stations in the United States, +including multiple local affiliates of NBC, ABC, CBS, and ,{[pg 200]}, Fox. In +April 2004, ABC News's program Nightline dedicated a special program to reading +the names of American service personnel who had been killed in the Iraq War. +The management of Sinclair decided that its seven ABC affiliates would not air +the program, defending its decision because the program "appears to be +motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United +States in Iraq."~{ "Names of U.S. Dead Read on Nightline," Associated Press +Report, May 1, 2004, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4864247/. }~ At the time, the +rising number of American casualties in Iraq was already a major factor in the +2004 presidential election campaign, and both ABC's decision to air the +program, and Sinclair's decision to refuse to carry it could be seen as +interventions by the media in setting the political agenda and contributing to +the public debate. It is difficult to gauge the politics of a commercial +organization, but one rough proxy is political donations. In the case of +Sinclair, 95 percent of the donations made by individuals associated with the +company during the 2004 election cycle went to Republicans, while only 5 +percent went to Democrats.~{ The numbers given here are taken from The Center +for Responsive Politics, http:// www.opensecrets.org/, and are based on +information released by the Federal Elections Commission. }~ Contributions of +Disney, on the other hand, the owner of the ABC network, split about +seventy-thirty in favor of contribution to Democrats. It is difficult to parse +the extent to which political leanings of this sort are personal to the +executives and professional employees who make decisions about programming, and +to what extent these are more organizationally self-interested, depending on +the respective positions of the political parties on the conditions of the +industry's business. In some cases, it is quite obvious that the motives are +political. When one looks, for example, at contributions by Disney's film +division, they are distributed 100 percent in favor of Democrats. This mostly +seems to reflect the large contributions of the Weinstein brothers, who run the +semi-independent studio Miramax, which also distributed Michael Moore's +politically explosive criticism of the Bush administration, Fahrenheit 9/11, in +2004. Sinclair's contributions were aligned with, though more skewed than, +those of the National Association of Broadcasters political action committee, +which were distributed 61 percent to 39 percent in favor of Republicans. Here +the possible motivation is that Republicans have espoused a regulatory agenda +at the Federal Communications Commission that allows broadcasters greater +freedom to consolidate and to operate more as businesses and less as public +trustees. +={ exercise of programming power +5 ; + SBG (Sinclair Broadcast Group) ; + Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG) ; + Moore, Michael +} + +The basic point is not, of course, to trace the particular politics of one +programming decision or another. It is the relative power of those who manage +the mass media when it so dominates public discourse as to shape public +perceptions and public debate. This power can be brought to bear throughout the +components of the platform, from the intake function (what ,{[pg 201]}, facts +about the world are observed) to the filtration and synthesis (the selection of +materials, their presentation, and the selection of who will debate them and in +what format). These are all central to forming the agenda that the public +perceives, choreographing the discussion, the range of opinions perceived and +admitted into the conversation, and through these, ultimately, choreographing +the perceived consensus and the range of permissible debate. One might think of +this as "the Berlusconi effect." Thinking in terms of a particular individual, +known for a personal managerial style, who translated the power of control over +media into his election as prime minister of his country symbolizes well the +concern, but of course does not exhaust the problem, which is both broader and +more subtle than the concern with the possibility that mass media will be owned +by individuals who would exert total control over these media and translate +their control into immediate political power, manufacturing and shaping the +appearance of a public sphere, rather than providing a platform for one. +={ Berlusconi effect } + +The power of the commercial mass media depends on the degree of concentration +in mass-media markets. A million equally watched channels do not exercise +power. Concentration is a common word used to describe the power media exercise +when there are only few outlets, but a tricky one because it implies two very +distinct phenomena. The first is a lack of competition in a market, to a degree +sufficient to allow a firm to exercise power over its pricing. This is the +antitrust sense. The second, very different concern might be called +"mindshare." That is, media is "concentrated" when a small number of media +firms play a large role as the channel from and to a substantial majority of +readers, viewers, and listeners in a given politically relevant social unit. + +If one thinks that commercial firms operating in a market will always "give the +audience what it wants" and that what the audience wants is a fully +representative cross-section of all observations and opinions relevant to +public discourse, then the antitrust sense would be the only one that mattered. +A competitive market would force any market actor simply to reflect the range +of available opinions actually held in the public. Even by this measure, +however, there continue to be debates about how one should define the relevant +market and what one is measuring. The more one includes all potential +nationally available sources of information, newspapers, magazines, television, +radio, satellite, cable, and the like, the less concentrated the market seems. +However, as Eli Noam's recent work on local media concentration has argued, +treating a tiny television station on Long Island as equivalent to ,{[pg 202]}, +WCBS in New York severely underrepresents the power of mass media over their +audience. Noam offered the most comprehensive analysis currently available of +the patterns of concentration where media are actually accessed-- locally, +where people live--from 1984 to 2001-2002. Most media are consumed +locally--because of the cost of national distribution of paper newspapers, and +because of the technical and regulatory constraints on nationwide distribution +of radio and television. Noam computed two measures of market concentration for +each of thirty local markets: the HerfindahlHirschman Index (HHI), a standard +method used by the Department of Justice to measure market concentration for +antitrust purposes; and what he calls a C4 index--that is, the market share of +the top four firms in a market, and C1, the share of the top single firm in the +market. He found that, based on the HHI index, all the local media markets are +highly concentrated. In the standard measure, a market with an index of less +than 1,000 is not concentrated, a market with an index of 1,000-1,800 is +moderately concentrated, and a market with an index of above 1,800 on the HHI +is highly concentrated. Noam found that local radio, which had an index below +1,000 between 1984 and 1992, rose over the course of the following years +substantially. Regulatory restrictions were loosened over the course of the +1990s, resulting by the end of the decade in an HHI index measure of 2,400 for +big cities, and higher for medium-sized and small markets. And yet, radio is +less concentrated than local multichannel television (cable and satellite) with +an HHI of 6,300, local magazines with an HHI of 6,859, and local newspapers +with an HHI of 7,621. The only form of media whose concentration has declined +to less than highly concentrated (HHI 1,714) is local television, as the rise +of new networks and local stations' viability on cable has moved us away from +the three-network world of 1984. It is still the case, however, that the top +four television stations capture 73 percent of the viewers in most markets, and +62 percent in large markets. The most concentrated media in local markets are +newspapers, which, except for the few largest markets, operate on a +one-newspaper town model. C1 concentration has grown in this area to 83 percent +of readership for the leading papers, and an HHI of 7,621. +={ Noam, Eli ; + commercial press ; + HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index) ; + newspapers : + market concentration ; + press, commercial ; + radio : + market concentration ; + television : + market concentration +} + +The degree of concentration in media markets supports the proposition that +owners of media can either exercise power over the programming they provide or +what they write, or sell their power over programming to those who would like +to shape opinions. Even if one were therefore to hold the Pollyannaish view +that market-based media in a competitive market would ,{[pg 203]}, be +constrained by competition to give citizens what they need, as Ed Baker put it, +there is no reason to think the same in these kinds of highly concentrated +markets. As it turns out, a long tradition of scholarship has also developed +the claim that even without such high levels of concentration in the antitrust +sense, advertiser-supported media markets are hardly good mechanisms for +assuring that the contents of the media provide a good reflection of the +information citizens need to know as members of a polity, the range of opinions +and views about what ought to occupy the public, and what solutions are +available to those problems that are perceived and discussed.~{ A careful +catalog of these makes up the first part of C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and +Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). }~ First, we have long +known that advertiser-supported media suffer from more or less well-defined +failures, purely as market mechanisms, at representing the actual distribution +of first-best preferences of audiences. As I describe in more detail in the +next section, whether providers in any market structure, from monopoly to full +competition, will even try to serve firstbest preferences of their audience +turns out to be a function of the distribution of actual first-best and +second-best preferences, and the number of "channels." Second, there is a +systematic analytic problem with defining consumer demand for information. +Perfect information is a precondition to an efficient market, not its output. +In order for consumers to value information or an opinion fully, they must know +it and assimilate it to their own worldview and understanding. However, the +basic problem to be solved by media markets is precisely to select which +information people will value if they in fact come to know it, so it is +impossible to gauge the value of a unit of information before it has been +produced, and hence to base production decisions on actual existing user +preferences. The result is that, even if media markets were perfectly +competitive, a substantial degree of discretion and influence would remain in +the hands of commercial media owners. +={ Baker, Edwin ; + advertiser-supported media : + reflection of consumer preference ; + constraints on behavior : + See autonomy, freedom consumer demand for information ; + demand for information, consumer ; + information, perfect ; + perfect information +} + +The actual cultural practice of mass-media production and consumption is more +complex than either the view of "efficient media markets" across the board or +the general case against media concentration and commercialism. Many of the +relevant companies are public companies, answerable to at least large +institutional shareholders, and made up of managements that need not be +monolithic in their political alignment or judgment as to the desirability of +making political gains as opposed to market share. Unless there is economic or +charismatic leadership of the type of a William Randolph Hearst or a Rupert +Murdoch, organizations usually have complex structures, with varying degrees of +freedom for local editors, reporters, and midlevel managers to tug and pull at +the fabric of programming. Different media companies ,{[pg 204]}, also have +different business models, and aim at different market segments. The New York +Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post do not aim at the same audience +as most daily local newspapers in the United States. They are aimed at elites, +who want to buy newspapers that can credibly claim to embody highly +professional journalism. This requires separation of editorial from business +decisions--at least for some segments of the newspapers that are critical in +attracting those readers. The degree to which the Berlusconi effect in its +full-blown form of individual or self-consciously directed political power +through shaping of the public sphere will apply is not one that can necessarily +be answered as a matter of a priori theoretical framework for all mass media. +Instead, it is a concern, a tendency, whose actual salience in any given public +sphere or set of firms is the product of historical contingency, different from +one country to another and one period to another. It will depend on the +strategies of particular companies and their relative mindshare in a society. +However, it is clear and structurally characteristic of mass media that a +society that depends for its public sphere on a relatively small number of +actors, usually firms, to provide most of the platform of its public sphere, is +setting itself up for, at least, a form of discourse elitism. In other words, +those who are on the inside of the media will be able to exert substantially +greater influence over the agenda, the shape of the conversation, and through +these the outcomes of public discourse, than other individuals or groups in +society. Moreover, for commercial organizations, this power could be sold--and +as a business model, one should expect it to be. The most direct way to sell +influence is explicit political advertising, but just as we see "product +placement" in movies as a form of advertising, we see advertiser influence on +the content of the editorial materials. Part of this influence is directly +substantive and political. Another is the source of the second critique of +commercial mass media. +={ Hearst, William Randolph ; + Murdoch, Rupert ; + Berlusconi effect ; + business decisions vs. editorial decisions ; + editorial filtering : + See relevance filtering editorial vs. business decisions ; + ethic (journalistic) vs. business necessity +10 ; + journalism, undermined by commercialism +10 ; + political concern, undermined by commercialism +10 +} + +3~ Commercialism, Journalism, and Political Inertness +={ access : + large-audience programming +9 ; + advertiser-supported media : + denominator programming +9 ; + alertness, undermined by commercialism +9 ; + blocked access : + large-audience programming ; + capacity : + diversity of content in large-audience media +9 ; + commercialism, undermining political concern +9 ; + diversity : + large-audience programming +9 ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + large-audience programming +9 ; + inertness, political +9 ; + information flow : + large-audience programming +9 ; + information production inputs : + large-audience programming +9 ; + inputs to production : + large-audience programming +9 ; + large-audience programming +9 ; + production inputs : + large-audience programming +9 ; + television : + large-audience programming +9 +} + +The second cluster of concerns about the commercial mass media is the degree to +which their commercialism undermines their will and capacity to provide a +platform for public, politically oriented discourse. The concern is, in this +sense, the opposite of the concern with excessive power. Rather than the fear +that the concentrated mass media will exercise its power to pull opinion in its +owners' interest, the fear is that the commercial interests of these media will +cause them to pull content away from matters of genuine ,{[pg 205]}, political +concern altogether. It is typified in a quote offered by Ben Bagdikian, +attributed to W. R. Nelson, publisher of the Kansas City Star in 1915: +"Newspapers are read at the breakfast table and dinner tables. God's great gift +to man is appetite. Put nothing in the paper that will destroy it."~{ Ben H. +Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 5th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 118. }~ +Examples abound, but the basic analytic structure of the claim is fairly simple +and consists of three distinct components. First, advertiser-supported media +need to achieve the largest audience possible, not the most engaged or +satisfied audience possible. This leads such media to focus on +lowest-common-denominator programming and materials that have broad second-best +appeal, rather than trying to tailor their programming to the true first-best +preferences of well-defined segments of the audience. Second, issues of genuine +public concern and potential political contention are toned down and structured +as a performance between iconic representations of large bodies of opinion, in +order to avoid alienating too much of the audience. This is the reemergence of +spectacle that Habermas identified in The Transformation of the Public Sphere. +The tendency toward lowest-common-denominator programming translates in the +political sphere into a focus on fairly well-defined, iconic views, and to +avoidance of genuinely controversial material, because it is easier to lose an +audience by offending its members than by being only mildly interesting. The +steady structuring of the media as professional, commercial, and one way over +150 years has led to a pattern whereby, when political debate is communicated, +it is mostly communicated as performance. Someone represents a party or widely +known opinion, and is juxtaposed with others who similarly represent +alternative widely known views. These avatars of public opinion then enact a +clash of opinion, orchestrated in order to leave the media neutral and free of +blame, in the eyes of their viewers, for espousing an offensively partisan +view. Third, and finally, this business logic often stands in contradiction to +journalistic ethic. While there are niche markets for high-end journalism and +strong opinion, outlets that serve those markets are specialized. Those that +cater to broader markets need to subject journalistic ethic to business +necessity, emphasizing celebrities or local crime over distant famines or a +careful analysis of economic policy. +={ Habermas, Jurgen ; + Nelson, W. R. ; + lowest-common-denominator programming +8 ; + Bagdikian, Ben ; + communication : + through performance ; + controversy, avoidance of ; + iconic representations of opinion ; + opinion, public : + iconic representations of ; + performance as means of communication ; + public opinion : + iconic representations of +} + +The basic drive behind programming choices in advertising-supported mass media +was explored in the context of the problem of "program diversity" and +competition. It relies on a type of analysis introduced by Peter Steiner in +1952. The basic model argued that advertiser-supported media are sensitive only +to the number of viewers, not the intensity of their satisfaction. This created +an odd situation, where competitors would tend to divide ,{[pg 206]}, among +them the largest market segments, and leave smaller slices of the audience +unserved, whereas a monopolist would serve each market segment, in order of +size, until it ran out of channels. Because it has no incentive to divide all +the viewers who want, for example, sitcoms, among two or more stations, a +monopolist would program a sitcom on one channel, and the next-most-desired +program on the next channel. Two competitors, on the other hand, would both +potentially program sitcoms, if dividing those who prefer sitcoms in half still +yields a larger total audience size than airing the next-most-desired program. +To illustrate this effect with a rather extreme hypothetical example, imagine +that we are in a television market of 10 million viewers. Suppose that the +distribution of preferences in the audience is as follows: 1,000,000 want to +watch sitcoms; 750,000 want sports; 500,000 want local news; 250,000 want +action movies; 9,990 are interested in foreign films; and 9,980 want programs +on gardening. The stark drop-off between action movies and foreign films and +gardening is intended to reflect the fact that the 7.5 million potential +viewers who do not fall into one of the first four clusters are distributed in +hundreds of small clusters, none commanding more than 10,000 viewers. Before we +examine why this extreme assumption is likely correct, let us first see what +happens if it were. Table 6.1 presents the programming choices that would +typify those of competing channels, based on the number of channels competing +and the distribution of preferences in the audience. It reflects the +assumptions that each programmer wants to maximize the number of viewers of its +channel and that the viewers are equally likely to watch one channel as another +if both offer the same type of programming. The numbers in parentheses next to +the programming choice represent the number of viewers the programmer can hope +to attract given these assumptions, not including the probability that some of +the 7.5 million viewers outside the main clusters will also tune in. In this +extreme example, one would need a system with more than 250 channels in order +to start seeing something other than sitcoms, sports, local news, and action +movies. Why, however, is such a distribution likely, or even plausible? The +assumption is not intended to represent an actual distribution of what people +most prefer to watch. Rather, it reflects the notion that many people have best +preferences, fallback preferences, and tolerable options. Their first-best +preferences reflect what they really want to watch, and people are highly +diverse in this dimension. Their fallback and tolerable preferences reflect the +kinds of things they would be willing to watch if nothing else is available, +rather than getting up off the sofa and going to a local cafe or reading a +book. ,{[pg 207]}, +={ steiner, Peter } + +!_ Table 6.1: Distribution of Channels Hypothetical + +table{~h c2; 10; 90 + +No. of channels +Programming Available (in thousands of viewers) + +1 +sitcom (1000) + +2 +sitcom (1000), sports (750) + +3 +sitcom (1000 or 500), sports (750), indifferent between sitcoms and local news (500) + +4 +sitcom (500), sports (750), sitcom (500), local news (500) + +5 +sitcom (500), sports (375), sitcom (500), local news (500), sports (375) + +6 +sitcom (333), sports (375), sitcom (333), local news (500), sports (375), sitcom (333) + +7 +sitcom (333), sports (375), sitcom (333), local news (500), sports (375), sitcom (333), action movies (250) + +8 +sitcom (333), sports (375), sitcom (333), local news (250), sports (375), sitcom (333), action movies (250), local news (250) + +9 +sitcom (250), sports (375), sitcom (250), local news (250), sports (375), sitcom (250), action movies (250), local news (250), sitcom (250) + +*** +*** + +250 +100 channels of sitcom (10); 75 channels of sports (10); 50 channels of local news (10); 25 channels of action movies (10) + +251 +100 channels of sitcom (10); 75 channels of sports (10); 50 channels of local news (10); 25 channels of action movies (10); 1 foreign film channel (9.99) + +252 +100 channels of sitcom (10); 75 channels of sports (10); 50 channels of local news (10); 25 channels of action movies (10); 1 foreign film channel (9.99); 1 gardening channel (9.98) + +}table + +Here represented by sitcoms, sports, and the like, fallback options are more +widely shared, even among people whose first-best preferences differ widely, +because they represent what people will tolerate before switching, a much less +strict requirement than what they really want. This assumption follows Jack +Beebe's refinement of Steiner's model. Beebe established that media monopolists +would show nothing but common-denominator programs and that competition among +broadcasters would begin to serve the smaller preference clusters only if a +large enough number of channels were available. Such a model would explain the +broad cultural sense of Bruce Springsteen's song, "57 Channels (And Nothin' +On)," and why we saw the emergence of channels like Black Entertainment +Television, Univision (Spanish channel in the United States), or The History +Channel only when cable systems significantly expanded channel capacity, as +well as why direct- ,{[pg 208]}, broadcast satellite and, more recently, +digital cable offerings were the first venue for twenty-four-hour-a-day cooking +channels and smaller minority-language channels.~{ Peter O. Steiner, "Program +Patterns and Preferences, and the Workability of Competition in Radio +Broadcasting," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 66 (1952): 194. The major +other contribution in this literature is Jack H. Beebe, "Institutional +Structure and Program Choices in Television Markets," The Quarterly Journal of +Economics 91 (1977): 15. A parallel line of analysis of the relationship +between programming and the market structure of broadcasting began with Michael +Spence and Bruce Owen, "Television Programming, Monopolistic Competition, and +Welfare," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 91 (1977): 103. For an excellent +review of this literature, see Matthew L. Spitzer, "Justifying Minority +Preferences in Broadcasting," South California Law Review 64 (1991): 293, +304-319. }~ +={ Beebe, Jack ; + monopoly : + breadth of programming under +} + +While this work was developed in the context of analyzing media diversity of +offerings, it provides a foundation for understanding the programming choices +of all advertiser-supported mass media, including the press, in domains +relevant to the role they play as a platform for the public sphere. It provides +a framework for understanding, but also limiting, the applicability of the idea +that mass media will put nothing in the newspaper that will destroy the +reader's appetite. Controversial views and genuinely disturbing images, +descriptions, or arguments have a higher likelihood of turning readers, +listeners, and viewers away than entertainment, mildly interesting and amusing +human-interest stories, and a steady flow of basic crime and courtroom dramas, +and similar fare typical of local television newscasts and newspapers. On the +other hand, depending on the number of channels, there are clearly market +segments for people who are "political junkies," or engaged elites, who can +support some small number of outlets aimed at that crowd. The New York Times or +the Wall Street Journal are examples in print, programs like Meet the Press or +Nightline and perhaps channels like CNN and Fox News are examples of the +possibility and limitations of this exception to the general +entertainment-oriented, noncontroversial, and politically inert style of +commercial mass media. The dynamic of programming to the lowest common +denominator can, however, iteratively replicate itself even within relatively +news- and elite-oriented media outlets. Even among news junkies, larger news +outlets must cater relatively to the mainstream of its intended audience. Too +strident a position or too probing an inquiry may slice the market segment to +which they sell too thin. This is likely what leads to the common criticism, +from both the Right and Left, that the same media are too "liberal" and too +"conservative," respectively. By contrast, magazines, whose business model can +support much lower circulation levels, exhibit a substantially greater will for +political engagement and analysis than even the relatively +political-readership-oriented, larger-circulation mass media. By definition, +however, the media that cater to these niche markets serve only a small segment +of the political community. Fox News in the United States appears to be a +powerful counterexample to this trend. It is difficult to pinpoint why. The +channel likely represents a composite of the Berlusconi effect, the high market +segmentation made possible by high-capacity cable ,{[pg 209]}, systems, the +very large market segment of Republicans, and the relatively polarized tone of +American political culture since the early 1990s. + +The mass-media model as a whole, with the same caveat for niche markets, does +not lend itself well to in-depth discussion and dialog. High professionalism +can, to some extent, compensate for the basic structural problem of a medium +built on the model of a small number of producers transmitting to an audience +that is many orders of magnitude larger. The basic problem occurs at the intake +and synthesis stages of communication. However diligent they may be, a small +number of professional reporters, embedded as they are within social segments +that are part of social, economic, and political elites, are a relatively +stunted mechanism for intake. If one seeks to collect the wide range of +individual observations, experiences, and opinions that make up the actual +universe of concerns and opinions of a large public as a basic input into the +public sphere, before filtering, the centralized model of mass media provides a +limited means of capturing those insights. On the back end of the communication +of public discourse, concentrated media of necessity must structure most +"participants" in the debate as passive recipients of finished messages and +images. That is the core characteristic of mass media: Content is produced +prior to transmission in a relatively small number of centers, and when +finished is then transmitted to a mass audience, which consumes it. This is the +basis of the claim of the role of professional journalism to begin with, +separating it from nonprofessional observations of those who consume its +products. The result of this basic structure of the media product is that +discussion and analysis of issues of common concern is an iconic representation +of discussion, a choreographed enactment of public debate. The participants are +selected for the fact that they represent wellunderstood, well-defined +positions among those actually prevalent in a population, the images and +stories are chosen to represent issues, and the public debate that is actually +facilitated (and is supposedly where synthesis of the opinions in public debate +actually happens) is in fact an already presynthesized portrayal of an argument +among avatars of relatively large segments of opinion as perceived by the +journalists and stagers of the debate. In the United States, this translates +into fairly standard formats of "on the left X, on the right Y," or "the +Republicans' position" versus "the Democrats' position." It translates into +"photo-op" moments of publicly enacting an idea, a policy position, or a state +of affairs--whether it is a president landing on an aircraft carrier to +represent security and the successful completion of a ,{[pg 210]}, +controversial war, or a candidate hunting with his buddies to represent a +position on gun control. It is important to recognize that by describing these +characteristics, I am not identifying failures of imagination, thoughtfulness, +or professionalism on the part of media organizations. These are simply +characteristics of a mass-mediated public sphere; modes of communication that +offer the path of least resistance given the characteristics of the production +and distribution process of mass media, particularly commercial mass media. +There are partial exceptions, as there are to the diversity of content or the +emphasis on entertainment value, but these do not reflect what most citizens +read, see, or hear. The phenomenon of talk radio and call-in shows represents a +very different, but certainly not more reflective form. They represent the +pornography and violence of political discourse--a combination of exhibitionism +and voyeurism intended to entertain us with opportunities to act out suppressed +desires and to glimpse what we might be like if we allowed ourselves more +leeway from what it means to be a well-socialized adult. +={ iconic representations of opinion ; + opinion, public : + iconic representations of ; + public opinion : + iconic representations of +} + +The two basic critiques of commercial mass media coalesce on the conflict +between journalistic ethics and the necessities of commercialism. If +professional journalists seek to perform a robust watchdog function, to inform +their readers and viewers, and to provoke and explore in depth, then the +dynamics of both power and lowest-common-denominator appeal push back. +Different organizations, with different degrees of managerial control, +editorial independence, internal organizational culture, and freedom from +competitive pressures, with different intended market segments, will resolve +these tensions differently. A quick reading of the conclusions of some media +scholarship, and more commonly, arguments made in public debates over the +media, would tend to lump "the media" as a single entity, with a single set of +failures. In fact, unsurprisingly, the literature suggests substantial +heterogeneity among organizations and media. Television seems to be the worst +culprit on the dimension of political inertness. Print media, both magazines +and some newspapers, include significant variation in the degree to which they +fit these general models of failure. + +As we turn now to consider the advantages of the introduction of Internet +communications, we shall see how this new model can complement the mass media +and alleviate its worst weaknesses. In particular, the discussion focuses on +the emergence of the networked information economy and the relatively larger +role it makes feasible for nonmarket actors and for radically distributed +production of information and culture. One need not adopt the position ,{[pg +211]}, that the commercial mass media are somehow abusive, evil, +corporate-controlled giants, and that the Internet is the ideal Jeffersonian +republic in order to track a series of genuine improvements represented by what +the new emerging modalities of public communication can do as platforms for the +public sphere. Greater access to means of direct individual communications, to +collaborative speech platforms, and to nonmarket producers more generally can +complement the commercial mass media and contribute to a significantly improved +public sphere. ,{[pg 212]}, + +1~7 Chapter 7 - Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere +={ networked public sphere +108 ; + political freedom, public sphere and +108 ; + public sphere +108 +} + +The fundamental elements of the difference between the networked information +economy and the mass media are network architecture and the cost of becoming a +speaker. The first element is the shift from a hub-and-spoke architecture with +unidirectional links to the end points in the mass media, to distributed +architecture with multidirectional connections among all nodes in the networked +information environment. The second is the practical elimination of +communications costs as a barrier to speaking across associational boundaries. +Together, these characteristics have fundamentally altered the capacity of +individuals, acting alone or with others, to be active participants in the +public sphere as opposed to its passive readers, listeners, or viewers. For +authoritarian countries, this means that it is harder and more costly, though +not perhaps entirely impossible, to both be networked and maintain control over +their public spheres. China seems to be doing too good a job of this in the +middle of the first decade of this century for us to say much more than that it +is harder to maintain control, and therefore that at least in some +authoritarian regimes, control will be looser. In ,{[pg 213]}, liberal +democracies, ubiquitous individual ability to produce information creates the +potential for near-universal intake. It therefore portends significant, though +not inevitable, changes in the structure of the public sphere from the +commercial mass-media environment. These changes raise challenges for +filtering. They underlie some of the critiques of the claims about the +democratizing effect of the Internet that I explore later in this chapter. +Fundamentally, however, they are the roots of possible change. Beginning with +the cost of sending an e-mail to some number of friends or to a mailing list of +people interested in a particular subject, to the cost of setting up a Web site +or a blog, and through to the possibility of maintaining interactive +conversations with large numbers of people through sites like Slashdot, the +cost of being a speaker in a regional, national, or even international +political conversation is several orders of magnitude lower than the cost of +speaking in the mass-mediated environment. This, in turn, leads to several +orders of magnitude more speakers and participants in conversation and, +ultimately, in the public sphere. +={ democratizing effects of Internet +7 ; + Internet : + democratizing effects of +7 +} + +The change is as much qualitative as it is quantitative. The qualitative change +is represented in the experience of being a potential speaker, as opposed to +simply a listener and voter. It relates to the self-perception of individuals +in society and the culture of participation they can adopt. The easy +possibility of communicating effectively into the public sphere allows +individuals to reorient themselves from passive readers and listeners to +potential speakers and participants in a conversation. The way we listen to +what we hear changes because of this; as does, perhaps most fundamentally, the +way we observe and process daily events in our lives. We no longer need to take +these as merely private observations, but as potential subjects for public +communication. This change affects the relative power of the media. It affects +the structure of intake of observations and views. It affects the presentation +of issues and observations for discourse. It affects the way issues are +filtered, for whom and by whom. Finally, it affects the ways in which positions +are crystallized and synthesized, sometimes still by being amplified to the +point that the mass media take them as inputs and convert them into political +positions, but occasionally by direct organization of opinion and action to the +point of reaching a salience that drives the political process directly. + +The basic case for the democratizing effect of the Internet, as seen from the +perspective of the mid-1990s, was articulated in an opinion of the /{U.S. +Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU}/: ,{[pg 214]}, + +_1 The Web is thus comparable, from the readers' viewpoint, to both a vast +library including millions of readily available and indexed publications and a +sprawling mall offering goods and services. From the publishers' point of view, +it constitutes a vast platform from which to address and hear from a world-wide +audience of millions of readers, viewers, researchers, and buyers. Any person +or organization with a computer connected to the Internet can "publish" +information. Publishers include government agencies, educational institutions, +commercial entities, advocacy groups, and individuals. . . . + +_1 Through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become a +town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox. +Through the use of Web pages, mail exploders, and newsgroups, the same +individual can become a pamphleteer. As the District Court found, "the content +on the Internet is as diverse as human thought."~{ /{Reno v. ACLU}/, 521 U.S. +844, 852-853, and 896-897 (1997). }~ + +The observations of what is different and unique about this new medium relative +to those that dominated the twentieth century are already present in the quotes +from the Court. There are two distinct types of effects. The first, as the +Court notes from "the readers' perspective," is the abundance and diversity of +human expression available to anyone, anywhere, in a way that was not feasible +in the mass-mediated environment. The second, and more fundamental, is that +anyone can be a publisher, including individuals, educational institutions, and +nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), alongside the traditional speakers of the +mass-media environment--government and commercial entities. + +Since the end of the 1990s there has been significant criticism of this early +conception of the democratizing effects of the Internet. One line of critique +includes variants of the Babel objection: the concern that information overload +will lead to fragmentation of discourse, polarization, and the loss of +political community. A different and descriptively contradictory line of +critique suggests that the Internet is, in fact, exhibiting concentration: Both +infrastructure and, more fundamentally, patterns of attention are much less +distributed than we thought. As a consequence, the Internet diverges from the +mass media much less than we thought in the 1990s and significantly less than +we might hope. + +I begin the chapter by offering a menu of the core technologies and usage +patterns that can be said, as of the middle of the first decade of the +twentyfirst century, to represent the core Internet-based technologies of +democratic discourse. I then use two case studies to describe the social and +economic practices through which these tools are implemented to construct the +public ,{[pg 215]}, sphere, and how these practices differ quite radically from +the mass-media model. On the background of these stories, we are then able to +consider the critiques that have been leveled against the claim that the +Internet democratizes. Close examination of the application of networked +information economy to the production of the public sphere suggests that the +emerging networked public sphere offers significant improvements over one +dominated by commercial mass media. Throughout the discussion, it is important +to keep in mind that the relevant comparison is always between the public +sphere that we in fact had throughout the twentieth century, the one dominated +by mass media, that is the baseline for comparison, not the utopian image of +the "everyone a pamphleteer" that animated the hopes of the 1990s for Internet +democracy. Departures from the naïve utopia are not signs that the Internet +does not democratize, after all. They are merely signs that the medium and its +analysis are maturing. + +2~ BASIC TOOLS OF NETWORKED COMMUNICATION +={ communication diversity : + See diversity communication tools +8 ; + Internet : + technologies of +8 ; + networked public sphere : + basic communication tools +8 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + basic communication tools +8 ; + public sphere : + basic communication tools +8 ; + technology +8 +} + +Analyzing the effect of the networked information environment on public +discourse by cataloging the currently popular tools for communication is, to +some extent, self-defeating. These will undoubtedly be supplanted by new ones. +Analyzing this effect without having a sense of what these tools are or how +they are being used is, on the other hand, impossible. This leaves us with the +need to catalog what is, while trying to abstract from what is being used to +what relationships of information and communication are emerging, and from +these to transpose to a theory of the networked information economy as a new +platform for the public sphere. + +E-mail is the most popular application on the Net. It is cheap and trivially +easy to use. Basic e-mail, as currently used, is not ideal for public +communications. While it provides a cheap and efficient means of communicating +with large numbers of individuals who are not part of one's basic set of social +associations, the presence of large amounts of commercial spam and the amount +of mail flowing in and out of mailboxes make indiscriminate e-mail +distributions a relatively poor mechanism for being heard. E-mails to smaller +groups, preselected by the sender for having some interest in a subject or +relationship to the sender, do, however, provide a rudimentary mechanism for +communicating observations, ideas, and opinions to a significant circle, on an +ad hoc basis. Mailing lists are more stable and self-selecting, and ,{[pg +216]}, therefore more significant as a basic tool for the networked public +sphere. Some mailing lists are moderated or edited, and run by one or a small +number of editors. Others are not edited in any significant way. What separates +mailing lists from most Web-based uses is the fact that they push the +information on them into the mailbox of subscribers. Because of their attention +limits, individuals restrict their subscriptions, so posting on a mailing list +tends to be done by and for people who have self-selected as having a +heightened degree of common interest, substantive or contextual. It therefore +enhances the degree to which one is heard by those already interested in a +topic. It is not a communications model of one-to-many, or few-to-many as +broadcast is to an open, undefined class of audience members. Instead, it +allows one, or a few, or even a limited large group to communicate to a large +but limited group, where the limit is self-selection as being interested or +even immersed in a subject. +={ discussion lists (electronic) ; + distribution lists (electronic) ; + e-mail ; + mailing lists (electronic) ; + Web +4 +} + +The World Wide Web is the other major platform for tools that individuals use +to communicate in the networked public sphere. It enables a wide range of +applications, from basic static Web pages, to, more recently, blogs and various +social-software-mediated platforms for large-scale conversations of the type +described in chapter 3--like Slashdot. Static Web pages are the individual's +basic "broadcast" medium. They allow any individual or organization to present +basic texts, sounds, and images pertaining to their position. They allow small +NGOs to have a worldwide presence and visibility. They allow individuals to +offer thoughts and commentaries. They allow the creation of a vast, searchable +database of information, observations, and opinions, available at low cost for +anyone, both to read and write into. This does not yet mean that all these +statements are heard by the relevant others to whom they are addressed. +Substantial analysis is devoted to that problem, but first let us complete the +catalog of tools and information flow structures. +={ blogs +3 ; + static Web pages +1 ; + writable Web +3 +} + +One Web-based tool and an emerging cultural practice around it that extends the +basic characteristics of Web sites as media for the political public sphere are +Web logs, or blogs. Blogs are a tool and an approach to using the Web that +extends the use of Web pages in two significant ways. Technically, blogs are +part of a broader category of innovations that make the web "writable." That +is, they make Web pages easily capable of modification through a simple +interface. They can be modified from anywhere with a networked computer, and +the results of writing onto the Web page are immediately available to anyone +who accesses the blog to read. This technical change resulted in two +divergences from the cultural practice of Web sites ,{[pg 217]}, in the 1990s. +First, they allowed the evolution of a journal-style Web page, where individual +short posts are added to the Web site in short or large intervals. As practice +has developed over the past few years, these posts are usually archived +chronologically. For many users, this means that blogs have become a form of +personal journal, updated daily or so, for their own use and perhaps for the +use of a very small group of friends. What is significant about this +characteristic from the perspective of the construction of the public sphere is +that blogs enable individuals to write to their Web pages in journalism +time--that is, hourly, daily, weekly--whereas Web page culture that preceded it +tended to be slower moving: less an equivalent of reportage than of the essay. +Today, one certainly finds individuals using blog software to maintain what are +essentially static Web pages, to which they add essays or content occasionally, +and Web sites that do not use blogging technology but are updated daily. The +public sphere function is based on the content and cadence--that is, the use +practice--not the technical platform. + +The second critical innovation of the writable Web in general and of blogs in +particular was the fact that in addition to the owner, readers/users could +write to the blog. Blogging software allows the person who runs a blog to +permit some, all, or none of the readers to post comments to the blog, with or +without retaining power to edit or moderate the posts that go on, and those +that do not. The result is therefore not only that many more people write +finished statements and disseminate them widely, but also that the end product +is a weighted conversation, rather than a finished good. It is a conversation +because of the common practice of allowing and posting comments, as well as +comments to these comments. Blog writers--bloggers-- often post their own +responses in the comment section or address comments in the primary section. +Blog-based conversation is weighted, because the culture and technical +affordances of blogging give the owner of the blog greater weight in deciding +who gets to post or comment and who gets to decide these questions. Different +blogs use these capabilities differently; some opt for broader intake and +discussion on the board, others for a more tightly edited blog. In all these +cases, however, the communications model or information-flow structure that +blogs facilitate is a weighted conversation that takes the form of one or a +group of primary contributors/authors, together with some larger number, often +many, secondary contributors, communicating to an unlimited number of many +readers. + +The writable Web also encompasses another set of practices that are distinct, +but that are often pooled in the literature together with blogs. These ,{[pg +218]}, are the various larger-scale, collaborative-content production systems +available on the Web, of the type described in chapter 3. Two basic +characteristics make sites like Slashdot or /{Wikipedia}/ different from blogs. +First, they are intended for, and used by, very large groups, rather than +intended to facilitate a conversation weighted toward one or a small number of +primary speakers. Unlike blogs, they are not media for individual or small +group expression with a conversation feature. They are intrinsically group +communication media. They therefore incorporate social software solutions to +avoid deterioration into chaos--peer review, structured posting privileges, +reputation systems, and so on. Second, in the case of Wikis, the conversation +platform is anchored by a common text. From the perspective of facilitating the +synthesis of positions and opinions, the presence of collaborative authorship +of texts offers an additional degree of viscosity to the conversation, so that +views "stick" to each other, must jostle for space, and accommodate each other. +In the process, the output is more easily recognizable as a collective output +and a salient opinion or observation than where the form of the conversation is +more free-flowing exchange of competing views. +={ collaborative authorship } + +Common to all these Web-based tools--both static and dynamic, individual and +cooperative--are linking, quotation, and presentation. It is at the very core +of the hypertext markup language (HTML) to make referencing easy. And it is at +the very core of a radically distributed network to allow materials to be +archived by whoever wants to archive them, and then to be accessible to whoever +has the reference. Around these easy capabilities, the cultural practice has +emerged to reference through links for easy transition from your own page or +post to the one you are referring to--whether as inspiration or in +disagreement. This culture is fundamentally different from the mass-media +culture, where sending a five-hundred-page report to millions of users is hard +and expensive. In the mass media, therefore, instead of allowing readers to +read the report alongside its review, all that is offered is the professional +review in the context of a culture that trusts the reviewer. On the Web, +linking to original materials and references is considered a core +characteristic of communication. The culture is oriented toward "see for +yourself." Confidence in an observation comes from a combination of the +reputation of the speaker as it has emerged over time, reading underlying +sources you believe you have some competence to evaluate for yourself, and +knowing that for any given referenced claim or source, there is some group of +people out there, unaffiliated with the reviewer or speaker, who will have +access to the source and the means for making their disagreement with the ,{[pg +219]}, speaker's views known. Linking and "see for yourself" represent a +radically different and more participatory model of accreditation than typified +the mass media. +={ hyperlinking on the Web ; + linking on the Web ; + network topology : + quoting on Web ; + quoting on Web ; + referencing on the Web ; + structure of network : + quoting on Web ; + topology, network : + quoting on Web ; + Web : + quoting from other sites ; + wireless communications : + quoting from other sites +} + +Another dimension that is less well developed in the United States than it is +in Europe and East Asia is mobility, or the spatial and temporal ubiquity of +basic tools for observing and commenting on the world we inhabit. Dan Gillmor +is clearly right to include these basic characteristics in his book We the +Media, adding to the core tools of what he describes as a transformation in +journalism, short message service (SMS), and mobile connected cameras to +mailing lists, Web logs, Wikis, and other tools. The United States has remained +mostly a PC-based networked system, whereas in Europe and Asia, there has been +more substantial growth in handheld devices, primarily mobile phones. In these +domains, SMS--the "e-mail" of mobile phones--and camera phones have become +critical sources of information, in real time. In some poor countries, where +cell phone minutes remain very (even prohibitively) expensive for many users +and where landlines may not exist, text messaging is becoming a central and +ubiquitous communication tool. What these suggest to us is a transition, as the +capabilities of both systems converge, to widespread availability of the +ability to register and communicate observations in text, audio, and video, +wherever we are and whenever we wish. Drazen Pantic tells of how listeners of +Internet-based Radio B-92 in Belgrade reported events in their neighborhoods +after the broadcast station had been shut down by the Milosevic regime. Howard +Rheingold describes in Smart Mobs how citizens of the Philippines used SMS to +organize real-time movements and action to overthrow their government. In a +complex modern society, where things that matter can happen anywhere and at any +time, the capacities of people armed with the means of recording, rendering, +and communicating their observations change their relationship to the events +that surround them. Whatever one sees and hears can be treated as input into +public debate in ways that were impossible when capturing, rendering, and +communicating were facilities reserved to a handful of organizations and a few +thousands of their employees. +={ Gilmore, Dan ; + Pantic, Drazen ; + Rheingold, Howard ; + mobile phones ; + text messaging +} + +2~ NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY MEETS THE PUBLIC SPHERE +={ information economy : + effects on public sphere +21 ; + networked information economy : + effects on public sphere +21 +} + +The networked public sphere is not made of tools, but of social production +practices that these tools enable. The primary effect of the Internet on the +,{[pg 220]}, public sphere in liberal societies relies on the information and +cultural production activity of emerging nonmarket actors: individuals working +alone and cooperatively with others, more formal associations like NGOs, and +their feedback effect on the mainstream media itself. These enable the +networked public sphere to moderate the two major concerns with commercial mass +media as a platform for the public sphere: (1) the excessive power it gives its +owners, and (2) its tendency, when owners do not dedicate their media to exert +power, to foster an inert polity. More fundamentally, the social practices of +information and discourse allow a very large number of actors to see themselves +as potential contributors to public discourse and as potential actors in +political arenas, rather than mostly passive recipients of mediated information +who occasionally can vote their preferences. In this section, I offer two +detailed stories that highlight different aspects of the effects of the +networked information economy on the construction of the public sphere. The +first story focuses on how the networked public sphere allows individuals to +monitor and disrupt the use of mass-media power, as well as organize for +political action. The second emphasizes in particular how the networked public +sphere allows individuals and groups of intense political engagement to report, +comment, and generally play the role traditionally assigned to the press in +observing, analyzing, and creating political salience for matters of public +interest. The case studies provide a context both for seeing how the networked +public sphere responds to the core failings of the commercial, +mass-media-dominated public sphere and for considering the critiques of the +Internet as a platform for a liberal public sphere. + +Our first story concerns Sinclair Broadcasting and the 2004 U.S. presidential +election. It highlights the opportunities that mass-media owners have to exert +power over the public sphere, the variability within the media itself in how +this power is used, and, most significant for our purposes here, the potential +corrective effect of the networked information environment. At its core, it +suggests that the existence of radically decentralized outlets for individuals +and groups can provide a check on the excessive power that media owners were +able to exercise in the industrial information economy. +={ blogs : + Sinclair Broadcasting case study +6 ; + boycott of Sinclair Broadcasting +6 ; + SBG (Sinclair Broadcast Group) +6 ; + Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG) +6 +} + +Sinclair, which owns major television stations in a number of what were +considered the most competitive and important states in the 2004 election-- +including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowa--informed its staff and stations +that it planned to preempt the normal schedule of its sixty-two stations to air +a documentary called Stolen Honor: The Wounds That Never Heal, as a news +program, a week and a half before the elections.~{ Elizabeth Jensen, "Sinclair +Fires Journalist After Critical Comments," Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2004. +}~ The documentary ,{[pg 221]}, was reported to be a strident attack on +Democratic candidate John Kerry's Vietnam War service. One reporter in +Sinclair's Washington bureau, who objected to the program and described it as +"blatant political propaganda," was promptly fired.~{ Jensen, "Sinclair Fires +Journalist"; Sheridan Lyons, "Fired Reporter Tells Why He Spoke Out," Baltimore +Sun, October 29, 2004. }~ The fact that Sinclair owns stations reaching one +quarter of U.S. households, that it used its ownership to preempt local +broadcast schedules, and that it fired a reporter who objected to its decision, +make this a classic "Berlusconi effect" story, coupled with a poster-child case +against media concentration and the ownership of more than a small number of +outlets by any single owner. The story of Sinclair's plans broke on Saturday, +October 9, 2004, in the Los Angeles Times. Over the weekend, "official" +responses were beginning to emerge in the Democratic Party. The Kerry campaign +raised questions about whether the program violated election laws as an +undeclared "in-kind" contribution to the Bush campaign. By Tuesday, October 12, +the Democratic National Committee announced that it was filing a complaint with +the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), while seventeen Democratic senators +wrote a letter to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), +demanding that the commission investigate whether Sinclair was abusing the +public trust in the airwaves. Neither the FEC nor the FCC, however, acted or +intervened throughout the episode. +={ accreditation : + concentration of mass-media power +5 | power of mass media owners +5 ; + Berlusconi effect +5 ; + capacity : + networked public sphere reaction +5 ; + commercial mass media : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + concentration of mass-media power : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + culture : + shaping perceptions of others +5 ; + exercise of programming power : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + filtering : + corrective effects of network environment ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + concentration of mass-media power +5 | power of mass media owners +5 ; + information production inputs : + propaganda +5 ; + inputs to production : + propaganda +5 ; + manipulating perceptions of others : + with propaganda +5 ; + mass media : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + media concentration : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + owners of mass media, power of : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + perceptions of others, shaping : + with propaganda +5 ; + power of mass media owners : + corrective effects of network environment +5 ; + production inputs : + propaganda +5 ; + propaganda : + Stolen Honor documentary +5 ; + relevance filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +5 | power of mass media owners +5 ; + shaping perceptions of others : + with propaganda +5 ; + Stolen Honor documentary +5 +} + +Alongside these standard avenues of response in the traditional public sphere +of commercial mass media, their regulators, and established parties, a very +different kind of response was brewing on the Net, in the blogosphere. On the +morning of October 9, 2004, the Los Angeles Times story was blogged on a number +of political blogs--Josh Marshall on talkingpointsmemo. com, Chris Bower on +MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas on dailyKos.com. By midday that Saturday, +October 9, two efforts aimed at organizing opposition to Sinclair were posted +in the dailyKos and MyDD. A "boycottSinclair" site was set up by one +individual, and was pointed to by these blogs. Chris Bowers on MyDD provided a +complete list of Sinclair stations and urged people to call the stations and +threaten to picket and boycott. By Sunday, October 10, the dailyKos posted a +list of national advertisers with Sinclair, urging readers to call them. On +Monday, October 11, MyDD linked to that list, while another blog, +theleftcoaster.com, posted a variety of action agenda items, from picketing +affiliates of Sinclair to suggesting that readers oppose Sinclair license +renewals, providing a link to the FCC site explaining the basic renewal process +and listing public-interest organizations to work with. That same day, another +individual, Nick Davis, started a Web site, ,{[pg 222]}, BoycottSBG.com, on +which he posted the basic idea that a concerted boycott of local advertisers +was the way to go, while another site, stopsinclair.org, began pushing for a +petition. In the meantime, TalkingPoints published a letter from Reed Hundt, +former chairman of the FCC, to Sinclair, and continued finding tidbits about +the film and its maker. Later on Monday, TalkingPoints posted a letter from a +reader who suggested that stockholders of Sinclair could bring a derivative +action. By 5:00 a.m. on the dawn of Tuesday, October 12, however, TalkingPoints +began pointing toward Davis's database on BoycottSBG.com. By 10:00 that +morning, Marshall posted on TalkingPoints a letter from an anonymous reader, +which began by saying: "I've worked in the media business for 30 years and I +guarantee you that sales is what these local TV stations are all about. They +don't care about license renewal or overwhelming public outrage. They care +about sales only, so only local advertisers can affect their decisions." This +reader then outlined a plan for how to watch and list all local advertisers, +and then write to the sales managers--not general managers--of the local +stations and tell them which advertisers you are going to call, and then call +those. By 1:00 p.m. Marshall posted a story of his own experience with this +strategy. He used Davis's database to identify an Ohio affiliate's local +advertisers. He tried to call the sales manager of the station, but could not +get through. He then called the advertisers. The post is a "how to" instruction +manual, including admonitions to remember that the advertisers know nothing of +this, the story must be explained, and accusatory tones avoided, and so on. +Marshall then began to post letters from readers who explained with whom they +had talked--a particular sales manager, for example--and who were then referred +to national headquarters. He continued to emphasize that advertisers were the +right addressees. By 5:00 p.m. that same Tuesday, Marshall was reporting more +readers writing in about experiences, and continued to steer his readers to +sites that helped them to identify their local affiliate's sales manager and +their advertisers.~{ The various posts are archived and can be read, +chronologically, at http:// +www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_10.php. }~ +={ Bower, Chris ; + dailyKos.com site ; + Davis, Nick +1 ; + Marshall, Josh ; + Moulitas, Markos ; + MyDD.com site ; + TalkingPoints site ; + BoycottSBG.com site +1 ; + Hundt, Reed +} + +By the morning of Wednesday, October 13, the boycott database already included +eight hundred advertisers, and was providing sample letters for users to send +to advertisers. Later that day, BoycottSBG reported that some participants in +the boycott had received reply e-mails telling them that their unsolicited +e-mail constituted illegal spam. Davis explained that the CANSPAM Act, the +relevant federal statute, applied only to commercial spam, and pointed users to +a law firm site that provided an overview of CANSPAM. By October 14, the +boycott effort was clearly bearing fruit. Davis ,{[pg 223]}, reported that +Sinclair affiliates were threatening advertisers who cancelled advertisements +with legal action, and called for volunteer lawyers to help respond. Within a +brief period, he collected more than a dozen volunteers to help the +advertisers. Later that day, another blogger at grassroots nation.com had set +up a utility that allowed users to send an e-mail to all advertisers in the +BoycottSBG database. By the morning of Friday, October 15, Davis was reporting +more than fifty advertisers pulling ads, and three or four mainstream media +reports had picked up the boycott story and reported on it. That day, an +analyst at Lehman Brothers issued a research report that downgraded the +expected twelve-month outlook for the price of Sinclair stock, citing concerns +about loss of advertiser revenue and risk of tighter regulation. Mainstream +news reports over the weekend and the following week systematically placed that +report in context of local advertisers pulling their ads from Sinclair. On +Monday, October 18, the company's stock price dropped by 8 percent (while the +S&P 500 rose by about half a percent). The following morning, the stock dropped +a further 6 percent, before beginning to climb back, as Sinclair announced that +it would not show Stolen Honor, but would provide a balanced program with only +portions of the documentary and one that would include arguments on the other +side. On that day, the company's stock price had reached its lowest point in +three years. The day after the announced change in programming decision, the +share price bounced back to where it had been on October 15. There were +obviously multiple reasons for the stock price losses, and Sinclair stock had +been losing ground for many months prior to these events. Nonetheless, as +figure 7.1 demonstrates, the market responded quite sluggishly to the +announcements of regulatory and political action by the Democratic +establishment earlier in the week of October 12, by comparison to the +precipitous decline and dramatic bounce-back surrounding the market projections +that referred to advertising loss. While this does not prove that the +Weborganized, blog-driven and -facilitated boycott was the determining factor, +as compared to fears of formal regulatory action, the timing strongly suggests +that the efficacy of the boycott played a very significant role. + +The first lesson of the Sinclair Stolen Honor story is about commercial mass +media themselves. The potential for the exercise of inordinate power by media +owners is not an imaginary concern. Here was a publicly traded firm whose +managers supported a political party and who planned to use their corporate +control over stations reaching one quarter of U.S. households, many in swing +states, to put a distinctly political message in front of this large audience. +,{[pg 224]}, + +{won_benkler_7_1.png "Figure 7.1: Sinclair Stock, October 8?November 5, 2004" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +- We also learn, however, that in the absence of monopoly, such decisions do +not determine what everyone sees or hears, and that other mass-media outlets +will criticize each other under these conditions. This criticism alone, +however, cannot stop a determined media owner from trying to exert its +influence in the public sphere, and if placed as Sinclair was, in locations +with significant political weight, such intervention could have substantial +influence. Second, we learn that the new, network-based media can exert a +significant counterforce. They offer a completely new and much more widely open +intake basin for insight and commentary. The speed with which individuals were +able to set up sites to stake out a position, to collect and make available +information relevant to a specific matter of public concern, and to provide a +platform for others to exchange views about the appropriate political strategy +and tactics was completely different from anything that the economics and +organizational structure of mass media make feasible. The third lesson is about +the internal dynamics of the networked public sphere. Filtering and synthesis +occurred through discussion, trial, and error. Multiple proposals for action +surfaced, and the practice of linking allowed most anyone interested who +connected to one of the nodes in the network to follow ,{[pg 225]}, quotations +and references to get a sense of the broad range of proposals. Different people +could coalesce on different modes of action--150,000 signed the petition on +stopsinclair.org, while others began to work on the boycott. Setting up the +mechanism was trivial, both technically and as a matter of cost--something a +single committed individual could choose to do. Pointing and adoption provided +the filtering, and feedback about the efficacy, again distributed through a +system of cross-references, allowed for testing and accreditation of this +course of action. High-visibility sites, like Talkingpointsmemo or the +dailyKos, offered transmissions hubs that disseminated information about the +various efforts and provided a platform for interest-group-wide tactical +discussions. It remains ambiguous to what extent these dispersed loci of public +debate still needed mass-media exposure to achieve broad political salience. +BoycottSBG.com received more than three hundred thousand unique visitors during +its first week of operations, and more than one million page views. It +successfully coordinated a campaign that resulted in real effects on +advertisers in a large number of geographically dispersed media markets. In +this case, at least, mainstream media reports on these efforts were few, and +the most immediate "transmission mechanism" of their effect was the analyst's +report from Lehman, not the media. It is harder to judge the extent to which +those few mainstream media reports that did appear featured in the decision of +the analyst to credit the success of the boycott efforts. The fact that +mainstream media outlets may have played a role in increasing the salience of +the boycott does not, however, take away from the basic role played by these +new mechanisms of bringing information and experience to bear on a broad public +conversation combined with a mechanism to organize political action across many +different locations and social contexts. +={ BoycottSBG.com site } + +Our second story focuses not on the new reactive capacity of the networked +public sphere, but on its generative capacity. In this capacity, it begins to +outline the qualitative change in the role of individuals as potential +investigators and commentators, as active participants in defining the agenda +and debating action in the public sphere. This story is about Diebold Election +Systems (one of the leading manufacturers of electronic voting machines and a +subsidiary of one of the foremost ATM manufacturers in the world, with more +than $2 billion a year in revenue), and the way that public criticism of its +voting machines developed. It provides a series of observations about how the +networked information economy operates, and how it allows large numbers of +people to participate in a peer-production enterprise of ,{[pg 226]}, news +gathering, analysis, and distribution, applied to a quite unsettling set of +claims. While the context of the story is a debate over electronic voting, that +is not what makes it pertinent to democracy. The debate could have centered on +any corporate and government practice that had highly unsettling implications, +was difficult to investigate and parse, and was largely ignored by mainstream +media. The point is that the networked public sphere did engage, and did +successfully turn something that was not a matter of serious public discussion +to a public discussion that led to public action. +={ capacity : + networked public sphere generation +12 ; + Diebold Election Systems +12 ; + electronic voting machines (case study) +12 ; + information production : + networked public sphere capacity for +12 ; + networked public sphere : + Diebold Election Systems case study +12 ; + peer production : + electronic voting machines (case study) +12 ; + policy : + Diebold Election Systems case study +12 ; + production of information : + networked public sphere capacity for +12 ; + public sphere : + Diebold Election Systems case study +12 ; + voting, electronic +12 +} + +Electronic voting machines were first used to a substantial degree in the +United States in the November 2002 elections. Prior to, and immediately +following that election, there was sparse mass-media coverage of electronic +voting machines. The emphasis was mostly on the newness, occasional slips, and +the availability of technical support staff to help at polls. An Atlanta +Journal-Constitution story, entitled "Georgia Puts Trust in Electronic Voting, +Critics Fret about Absence of Paper Trails,"~{ Duane D. Stanford, Atlanta +Journal-Constitution, October 31, 2002, 1A. }~ is not atypical of coverage at +the time, which generally reported criticism by computer engineers, but +conveyed an overall soothing message about the efficacy of the machines and +about efforts by officials and companies to make sure that all would be well. +The New York Times report of the Georgia effort did not even mention the +critics.~{ Katherine Q. Seelye, "The 2002 Campaign: The States; Georgia About +to Plunge into Touch-Screen Voting," New York Times, October 30, 2002, A22. }~ +The Washington Post reported on the fears of failure with the newness of the +machines, but emphasized the extensive efforts that the manufacturer, Diebold, +was making to train election officials and to have hundreds of technicians +available to respond to failure.~{ Edward Walsh, "Election Day to Be Test of +Voting Process," Washington Post, November 4, 2002, A1. }~ After the election, +the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the touch-screen machines were a +hit, burying in the text any references to machines that highlighted the wrong +candidates or the long lines at the booths, while the Washington Post +highlighted long lines in one Maryland county, but smooth operation elsewhere. +Later, the Post reported a University of Maryland study that surveyed users and +stated that quite a few needed help from election officials, compromising voter +privacy.~{ Washington Post, December 12, 2002. }~ Given the centrality of +voting mechanisms for democracy, the deep concerns that voting irregularities +determined the 2000 presidential elections, and the sense that voting machines +would be a solution to the "hanging chads" problem (the imperfectly punctured +paper ballots that came to symbolize the Florida fiasco during that election), +mass-media reports were remarkably devoid of any serious inquiry into how +secure and accurate voting machines were, and included a high quotient of +soothing comments from election officials who bought the machines and +executives of the manufacturers who sold them. No mass-media outlet sought to +go ,{[pg 227]}, behind the claims of the manufacturers about their machines, to +inquire into their security or the integrity of their tallying and transmission +mechanisms against vote tampering. No doubt doing so would have been difficult. +These systems were protected as trade secrets. State governments charged with +certifying the systems were bound to treat what access they had to the inner +workings as confidential. Analyzing these systems requires high degrees of +expertise in computer security. Getting around these barriers is difficult. +However, it turned out to be feasible for a collection of volunteers in various +settings and contexts on the Net. + +In late January 2003, Bev Harris, an activist focused on electronic voting +machines, was doing research on Diebold, which has provided more than 75,000 +voting machines in the United States and produced many of the machines used in +Brazil's purely electronic voting system. Harris had set up a whistle-blower +site as part of a Web site she ran at the time, blackboxvoting.com. Apparently +working from a tip, Harris found out about an openly available site where +Diebold stored more than forty thousand files about how its system works. These +included specifications for, and the actual code of, Diebold's machines and +vote-tallying system. In early February 2003, Harris published two initial +journalistic accounts on an online journal in New Zealand, Scoop.com--whose +business model includes providing an unedited platform for commentators who +wish to use it as a platform to publish their materials. She also set up a +space on her Web site for technically literate users to comment on the files +she had retrieved. In early July of that year, she published an analysis of the +results of the discussions on her site, which pointed out how access to the +Diebold open site could have been used to affect the 2002 election results in +Georgia (where there had been a tightly contested Senate race). In an editorial +attached to the publication, entitled "Bigger than Watergate," the editors of +Scoop claimed that what Harris had found was nothing short of a mechanism for +capturing the U.S. elections process. They then inserted a number of lines that +go to the very heart of how the networked information economy can use peer +production to play the role of watchdog: +={ Harris, Bev } + +_1 We can now reveal for the first time the location of a complete online copy +of the original data set. As we anticipate attempts to prevent the distribution +of this information we encourage supporters of democracy to make copies of +these files and to make them available on websites and file sharing networks: +http:// users.actrix.co.nz/dolly/. As many of the files are zip password +protected you may need some assistance in opening them, we have found that the +utility available at ,{[pg 228]}, the following URL works well: +http://www.lostpassword.com. Finally some of the zip files are partially +damaged, but these too can be read by using the utility at: +http://www.zip-repair.com/. At this stage in this inquiry we do not believe +that we have come even remotely close to investigating all aspects of this +data; i.e., there is no reason to believe that the security flaws discovered so +far are the only ones. Therefore we expect many more discoveries to be made. We +want the assistance of the online computing community in this enterprise and we +encourage you to file your findings at the forum HERE [providing link to +forum]. + +A number of characteristics of this call to arms would have been simply +infeasible in the mass-media environment. They represent a genuinely different +mind-set about how news and analysis are produced and how censorship and power +are circumvented. First, the ubiquity of storage and communications capacity +means that public discourse can rely on "see for yourself" rather than on +"trust me." The first move, then, is to make the raw materials available for +all to see. Second, the editors anticipated that the company would try to +suppress the information. Their response was not to use a counterweight of the +economic and public muscle of a big media corporation to protect use of the +materials. Instead, it was widespread distribution of information--about where +the files could be found, and about where tools to crack the passwords and +repair bad files could be found-- matched with a call for action: get these +files, copy them, and store them in many places so they cannot be squelched. +Third, the editors did not rely on large sums of money flowing from being a big +media organization to hire experts and interns to scour the files. Instead, +they posed a challenge to whoever was interested--there are more scoops to be +found, this is important for democracy, good hunting!! Finally, they offered a +platform for integration of the insights on their own forum. This short +paragraph outlines a mechanism for radically distributed storage, distribution, +analysis, and reporting on the Diebold files. + +As the story unfolded over the next few months, this basic model of peer +production of investigation, reportage, analysis, and communication indeed +worked. It resulted in the decertification of some of Diebold's systems in +California, and contributed to a shift in the requirements of a number of +states, which now require voting machines to produce a paper trail for recount +purposes. The first analysis of the Diebold system based on the files Harris +originally found was performed by a group of computer scientists at the +Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University and released ,{[pg +229]}, as a working paper in late July 2003. The Hopkins Report, or Rubin +Report as it was also named after one of its authors, Aviel Rubin, presented +deep criticism of the Diebold system and its vulnerabilities on many +dimensions. The academic credibility of its authors required a focused response +from Diebold. The company published a line-by-line response. Other computer +scientists joined in the debate. They showed the limitations and advantages of +the Hopkins Report, but also where the Diebold response was adequate and where +it provided implicit admission of the presence of a number of the +vulnerabilities identified in the report. The report and comments to it sparked +two other major reports, commissioned by Maryland in the fall of 2003 and later +in January 2004, as part of that state's efforts to decide whether to adopt +electronic voting machines. Both studies found a wide range of flaws in the +systems they examined and required modifications (see figure 7.2). +={ Harris, Bev +1 ; + Rubin, Aviel ; + Hopkins Report +} + +Meanwhile, trouble was brewing elsewhere for Diebold. In early August 2003, +someone provided Wired magazine with a very large cache containing thousands of +internal e-mails of Diebold. Wired reported that the e-mails were obtained by a +hacker, emphasizing this as another example of the laxity of Diebold's +security. However, the magazine provided neither an analysis of the e-mails nor +access to them. Bev Harris, the activist who had originally found the Diebold +materials, on the other hand, received the same cache, and posted the e-mails +and memos on her site. Diebold's response was to threaten litigation. Claiming +copyright in the e-mails, the company demanded from Harris, her Internet +service provider, and a number of other sites where the materials had been +posted, that the e-mails be removed. The e-mails were removed from these sites, +but the strategy of widely distributed replication of data and its storage in +many different topological and organizationally diverse settings made Diebold's +efforts ultimately futile. The protagonists from this point on were college +students. First, two students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and +quickly students in a number of other universities in the United States, began +storing the e-mails and scouring them for evidence of impropriety. In October +2003, Diebold proceeded to write to the universities whose students were +hosting the materials. The company invoked provisions of the Digital Millennium +Copyright Act that require Web-hosting companies to remove infringing materials +when copyright owners notify them of the presence of these materials on their +sites. The universities obliged, and required the students to remove the +materials from their sites. The students, however, did not disappear quietly +into the ,{[pg 230]}, night. + +{won_benkler_7_2.png "Figure 7.2: Analysis of the Diebold Source Code Materials" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +- On October 21, 2003, they launched a multipronged campaign of what they +described as "electronic civil disobedience." First, they kept moving the files +from one student to another's machine, encouraging students around the country +to resist the efforts to eliminate the material. Second, they injected the +materials into FreeNet, the anticensorship peer-to-peer publication network, +and into other peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, like eDonkey and BitTorrent. +Third, supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the primary +civil-rights organizations concerned with Internet freedom, the students +brought suit against Diebold, seeking a judicial declaration that their posting +of the materials was privileged. They won both the insurgent campaign and the +formal one. As a practical matter, the materials remained publicly available +throughout this period. As a matter of law, the litigation went badly enough +for Diebold that the company issued a letter promising not to sue the students. +The court nonetheless awarded the students damages and attorneys' fees because +it found that Diebold had "knowingly and materially misrepresented" that the +publication of the e-mail archive was a copyright violation in its letters to +the Internet service providers.~{ /{Online Policy Group v. Diebold}/, Inc., 337 +F. Supp. 2d 1195 (2004). }~ ,{[pg 231]}, + +Central from the perspective of understanding the dynamics of the networked +public sphere is not, however, the court case--it was resolved almost a year +later, after most of the important events had already unfolded--but the +efficacy of the students' continued persistent publication in the teeth of the +cease-and-desist letters and the willingness of the universities to comply. The +strategy of replicating the files everywhere made it impracticable to keep the +documents from the public eye. And the public eye, in turn, scrutinized. Among +the things that began to surface as users read the files were internal e-mails +recognizing problems with the voting system, with the security of the FTP site +from which Harris had originally obtained the specifications of the voting +systems, and e-mail that indicated that the machines implemented in California +had been "patched" or updated after their certification. That is, the machines +actually being deployed in California were at least somewhat different from the +machines that had been tested and certified by the state. This turned out to +have been a critical find. +={ Harris, Bev } + +California had a Voting Systems Panel within the office of the secretary of +state that reviewed and certified voting machines. On November 3, 2003, two +weeks after the students launched their electronic disobedience campaign, the +agenda of the panel's meeting was to include a discussion of proposed +modifications to one of Diebold's voting systems. Instead of discussing the +agenda item, however, one of the panel members made a motion to table the item +until the secretary of state had an opportunity to investigate, because "It has +come to our attention that some very disconcerting information regarding this +item [sic] and we are informed that this company, Diebold, may have installed +uncertified software in at least one county before it was certified."~{ +California Secretary of State Voting Systems Panel, Meeting Minutes, November +3, 2003, http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/vsp_min_110303.pdf. }~ The source of +the information is left unclear in the minutes. A later report in Wired cited +an unnamed source in the secretary of state's office as saying that somebody +within the company had provided this information. The timing and context, +however, suggest that it was the revelation and discussion of the e-mail +memoranda online that played that role. Two of the members of the public who +spoke on the record mention information from within the company. One +specifically mentions the information gleaned from company e-mails. In the next +committee meeting, on December 16, 2003, one member of the public who was in +attendance specifically referred to the e-mails on the Internet, referencing in +particular a January e-mail about upgrades and changes to the certified +systems. By that December meeting, the independent investigation by the +secretary of state had found systematic discrepancies between the systems +actually installed ,{[pg 232]}, and those tested and certified by the state. +The following few months saw more studies, answers, debates, and the eventual +decertification of many of the Diebold machines installed in California (see +figures 7.3a and 7.3b). + +The structure of public inquiry, debate, and collective action exemplified by +this story is fundamentally different from the structure of public inquiry and +debate in the mass-media-dominated public sphere of the twentieth century. The +initial investigation and analysis was done by a committed activist, operating +on a low budget and with no financing from a media company. The output of this +initial inquiry was not a respectable analysis by a major player in the public +debate. It was access to raw materials and initial observations about them, +available to start a conversation. Analysis then emerged from a widely +distributed process undertaken by Internet users of many different types and +abilities. In this case, it included academics studying electronic voting +systems, activists, computer systems practitioners, and mobilized students. +When the pressure from a well-financed corporation mounted, it was not the +prestige and money of a Washington Post or a New York Times that protected the +integrity of the information and its availability for public scrutiny. It was +the radically distributed cooperative efforts of students and peer-to-peer +network users around the Internet. These efforts were, in turn, nested in other +communities of cooperative production--like the free software community that +developed some of the applications used to disseminate the e-mails after +Swarthmore removed them from the students' own site. There was no single +orchestrating power--neither party nor professional commercial media outlet. +There was instead a series of uncoordinated but mutually reinforcing actions by +individuals in different settings and contexts, operating under diverse +organizational restrictions and affordances, to expose, analyze, and distribute +criticism and evidence for it. The networked public sphere here does not rely +on advertising or capturing large audiences to focus its efforts. What became +salient for the public agenda and shaped public discussion was what intensely +engaged active participants, rather than what kept the moderate attention of +large groups of passive viewers. Instead of the lowest-common-denominator focus +typical of commercial mass media, each individual and group can--and, indeed, +most likely will--focus precisely on what is most intensely interesting to its +participants. Instead of iconic representation built on the scarcity of time +slots and space on the air or on the page, we see the emergence of a "see for +yourself" culture. Access to underlying documents and statements, and to ,{[pg +233]}, the direct expression of the opinions of others, becomes a central part +of the medium. + +{won_benkler_7_3a.png "Figure 7.3a: Diebold Internal E-mails Discovery and Distribution" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +2~ CRITIQUES OF THE CLAIMS THAT THE INTERNET HAS DEMOCRATIZING EFFECTS +={ democratizing effects of Internet : + critiques of claims of +12 ; + Internet : + democratizing effect of +12 ; + networked public sphere : + critiques that Internet democratizes +12 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + critiques that Internet democratizes +12 ; + public sphere : + critiques that Internet democratizes +12 +} + +It is common today to think of the 1990s, out of which came the Supreme Court's +opinion in /{Reno v. ACLU}/, as a time of naïve optimism about the Internet, +expressing in political optimism the same enthusiasm that drove the stock +market bubble, with the same degree of justifiability. An ideal liberal public +sphere did not, in fact, burst into being from the Internet, fully grown like +Athena from the forehead of Zeus. The detailed criticisms of the early claims +about the democratizing effects of the Internet can be characterized as +variants of five basic claims: + +{won_benkler_7_3a.png "Figure 7.3b: Internal E-mails Translated to Political and Judicial Action" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +1. /{Information overload.}/ A basic problem created when everyone can speak is +that there will be too many statements, or too much information. Too ,{[pg +234]}, many observations and too many points of view make the problem of +sifting through them extremely difficult, leading to an unmanageable din. This +overall concern, a variant of the Babel objection, underlies three more +specific arguments: that money will end up dominating anyway, that there will +be fragmentation of discourse, and that fragmentation of discourse will lead to +its polarization. +={ Babel objection ; + information overload and Babel objection +} + +/{Money will end up dominating anyway.}/ A point originally raised by Eli Noam +is that in this explosively large universe, getting attention will be as +difficult as getting your initial message out in the mass-media context, if not +more so. The same means that dominated the capacity to speak in the mass-media +environment--money--will dominate the capacity to be heard on the Internet, +even if it no longer controls the capacity to speak. +={ money : + as dominant factor +} + +/{Fragmentation of attention and discourse.}/ A point raised most explicitly by +Cass Sunstein in Republic.com is that the ubiquity of information and the +absence of the mass media as condensation points will impoverish public +discourse by fragmenting it. There will be no public sphere. ,{[pg 235]}, +Individuals will view the world through millions of personally customized +windows that will offer no common ground for political discourse or action, +except among groups of highly similar individuals who customize their windows +to see similar things. +={ Sunstein, Cass +1 ; + attention fragmentation ; + communities : + fragmentation of ; + diversity : + fragmentation of communication ; + fragmentation of communication ; + norms (social) : + fragmentation of communication ; + regulation by social norms : + fragmentation of communication ; + social relations and norms : + fragmentation of communication +} + +/{Polarization.}/ A descriptively related but analytically distinct critique of +Sunstein's was that the fragmentation would lead to polarization. When +information and opinions are shared only within groups of likeminded +participants, he argued, they tend to reinforce each other's views and beliefs +without engaging with alternative views or seeing the concerns and critiques of +others. This makes each view more extreme in its own direction and increases +the distance between positions taken by opposing camps. +={ polarization } + +2. /{Centralization of the Internet.}/ A second-generation criticism of the +democratizing effects of the Internet is that it turns out, in fact, not to be +as egalitarian or distributed as the 1990s conception had suggested. First, +there is concentration in the pipelines and basic tools of communications. +Second, and more intractable to policy, even in an open network, a high degree +of attention is concentrated on a few top sites--a tiny number of sites are +read by the vast majority of readers, while many sites are never visited by +anyone. In this context, the Internet is replicating the massmedia model, +perhaps adding a few channels, but not genuinely changing anything structural. +={ accreditation : + concentration of mass-media power +1 ; + centralization of communications ; + concentration of mass-media power +1 ; + filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +1 ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + concentration of mass-media power ; + Internet : + centralization of ; + media concentration ; + relevance filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +} + +Note that the concern with information overload is in direct tension with the +second-generation concerns. To the extent that the concerns about Internet +concentration are correct, they suggest that the information overload is not a +deep problem. Sadly, from the perspective of democracy, it turns out that +according to the concentration concern, there are few speakers to which most +people listen, just as in the mass-media environment. While this means that the +supposed benefits of the networked public sphere are illusory, it also means +that the information overload concerns about what happens when there is no +central set of speakers to whom most people listen are solved in much the same +way that the mass-media model deals with the factual diversity of information, +opinion, and observations in large societies--by consigning them to public +oblivion. The response to both sets of concerns will therefore require combined +consideration of a series of questions: To what extent are the claims of +concentration correct? How do they solve the information overload ,{[pg 236]}, +problem? To what extent does the observed concentration replicate the +mass-media model? +={ Babel objection ; + information overload and Babel objection +} + +3. /{Centrality of commercial mass media to the Fourth Estate function.}/ The +importance of the press to the political process is nothing new. It earned the +press the nickname "the Fourth Estate" (a reference to the three estates that +made up the prerevolutionary French Estates-General, the clergy, nobility, and +townsmen), which has been in use for at least a hundred and fifty years. In +American free speech theory, the press is often described as fulfilling "the +watchdog function," deriving from the notion that the public representatives +must be watched over to assure they do the public's business faithfully. In the +context of the Internet, the concern, most clearly articulated by Neil Netanel, +has been that in the modern complex societies in which we live, commercial mass +media are critical for preserving the watchdog function of the media. Big, +sophisticated, well-funded government and corporate market actors have enormous +resources at their disposal to act as they please and to avoid scrutiny and +democratic control. Only similarly big, powerful, independently funded media +organizations, whose basic market roles are to observe and criticize other +large organizations, can match these established elite organizational actors. +Individuals and collections of volunteers talking to each other may be nice, +but they cannot seriously replace well-funded, economically and politically +powerful media. +={ Netanel, Neil ; + filtering : + watchdog functionality ; + networked public sphere : + watchdog functionality ; + peer production : + watchdog functionality ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + watchdog functionality ; + public sphere : + watchdog functionality ; + relevance filtering : + watchdog functionality ; + watchdog functionality +} + +4. /{Authoritarian countries can use filtering and monitoring to squelch +Internet use.}/ A distinct set of claims and their critiques have to do with +the effects of the Internet on authoritarian countries. The critique is leveled +at a basic belief supposedly, and perhaps actually, held by some +cyberlibertarians, that with enough access to Internet tools freedom will burst +out everywhere. The argument is that China, more than any other country, shows +that it is possible to allow a population access to the Internet-- it is now +home to the second-largest national population of Internet users--and still +control that use quite substantially. +={ authoritarian control ; + blocked access : + authoritarian control ; + filtering : + by authoritarian countries ; + government : + authoritarian control ; + monitoring, authoritarian ; + relevance filtering : + by authoritarian countries +} + +5. /{Digital divide.}/ While the Internet may increase the circle of +participants in the public sphere, access to its tools is skewed in favor of +those who already are well-off in society--in terms of wealth, race, and +skills. I do not respond to this critique in this chapter. First, in the United +States, this is less stark today than it was in the late 1990s. Computers and +Internet connections are becoming cheaper and more widely available in public +libraries and schools. As they become more central to life, they ,{[pg 237]}, +seem to be reaching higher penetration rates, and growth rates among +underrepresented groups are higher than the growth rate among the highly +represented groups. The digital divide with regard to basic access within +advanced economies is important as long as it persists, but seems to be a +transitional problem. Moreover, it is important to recall that the +democratizing effects of the Internet must be compared to democracy in the +context of mass media, not in the context of an idealized utopia. Computer +literacy and skills, while far from universal, are much more widely distributed +than the skills and instruments of mass-media production. Second, I devote +chapter 9 to the question of how and why the emergence specifically of +nonmarket production provides new avenues for substantial improvements in +equality of access to various desiderata that the market distributes unevenly, +both within advanced economies and globally, where the maldistribution is much +more acute. While the digital divide critique can therefore temper our +enthusiasm for how radical the change represented by the networked information +economy may be in terms of democracy, the networked information economy is +itself an avenue for alleviating maldistribution. +={ digital divide ; + human welfare : + digital divide ; + welfare : + digital divide +} + +The remainder of this chapter is devoted to responding to these critiques, +providing a defense of the claim that the Internet can contribute to a more +attractive liberal public sphere. As we work through these objections, we can +develop a better understanding of how the networked information economy +responds to or overcomes the particular systematic failures of mass media as +platforms for the public sphere. Throughout this analysis, it is comparison of +the attractiveness of the networked public sphere to that baseline--the +mass-media-dominated public sphere--not comparison to a nonexistent ideal +public sphere or to the utopia of "everyone a pamphleteer," that should matter +most to our assessment of its democratic promise. + +2~ IS THE INTERNET TOO CHAOTIC, TOO CONCENTRATED, OR NEITHER? +={ accreditation : + concentration of mass-media power +7 ; + Babel objection +7 ; + centralization of communications +7 ; + channels, transmission : + See transport channel policy chaotic, Internet as +7 ; + concentration of mass-media power +7 ; + filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +7 ; + filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +7 ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + concentration of mass-media power +7 ; + information overload and Babel objection +7 ; + Internet : + centralization of +7 ; + media concentration +7 ; + networked public sphere : + Internet as concentrated vs. chaotic +7 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + Internet as concentrated vs. chaotic +7 ; + public sphere : + Internet as concentrated vs. chaotic +7 ; + relevance filtering : + concentration of mass-media power +7 +} + +The first-generation critique of the claims that the Internet democratizes +focused heavily on three variants of the information overload or Babel +objection. The basic descriptive proposition that animated the Supreme Court in +/{Reno v. ACLU}/ was taken as more or less descriptively accurate: Everyone +would be equally able to speak on the Internet. However, this basic observation +,{[pg 238]}, was then followed by a descriptive or normative explanation of why +this development was a threat to democracy, or at least not much of a boon. The +basic problem that is diagnosed by this line of critique is the problem of +attention. When everyone can speak, the central point of failure becomes the +capacity to be heard--who listens to whom, and how that question is decided. +Speaking in a medium that no one will actually hear with any reasonable +likelihood may be psychologically satisfying, but it is not a move in a +political conversation. Noam's prediction was, therefore, that there would be a +reconcentration of attention: money would reemerge in this environment as a +major determinant of the capacity to be heard, certainly no less, and perhaps +even more so, than it was in the mass-media environment.~{ Eli Noam, "Will the +Internet Be Bad for Democracy?" (November 2001), http:// +www.citi.columbia.edu/elinoam/articles/int_bad_dem.htm. }~ Sunstein's theory +was different. He accepted Nicholas Negroponte's prediction that people would +be reading "The Daily Me," that is, that each of us would create highly +customized windows on the information environment that would be narrowly +tailored to our unique combination of interests. From this assumption about how +people would be informed, he spun out two distinct but related critiques. The +first was that discourse would be fragmented. With no six o'clock news to tell +us what is on the public agenda, there would be no public agenda, just a +fragmented multiplicity of private agendas that never coalesce into a platform +for political discussion. The second was that, in a fragmented discourse, +individuals would cluster into groups of self-reinforcing, self-referential +discussion groups. These types of groups, he argued from social scientific +evidence, tend to render their participants' views more extreme and less +amenable to the conversation across political divides necessary to achieve +reasoned democratic decisions. +={ Negroponte, Nicholas ; + Noam, Eli +1 ; + attention fragmentation +1 ; + communities : + fragmentation of +1 ; + diversity : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + norms (social) : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + regulation by social norms : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + social relations and norms : + fragmentation of communication +1 +} + +Extensive empirical and theoretical studies of actual use patterns of the +Internet over the past five to eight years has given rise to a +second-generation critique of the claim that the Internet democratizes. +According to this critique, attention is much more concentrated on the Internet +than we thought a few years ago: a tiny number of sites are highly linked, the +vast majority of "speakers" are not heard, and the democratic potential of the +Internet is lost. If correct, these claims suggest that Internet use patterns +solve the problem of discourse fragmentation that Sunstein was worried about. +Rather than each user reading a customized and completely different +"newspaper," the vast majority of users turn out to see the same sites. In a +network with a small number of highly visible sites that practically everyone +reads, the discourse fragmentation problem is resolved. Because they are seen +by most people, the polarization problem too is solved--the highly visible +sites are ,{[pg 239]}, not small-group interactions with homogeneous +viewpoints. While resolving Sunstein's concerns, this pattern is certainly +consistent with Noam's prediction that money would have to be paid to reach +visibility, effectively replicating the mass-media model. While centralization +would resolve the Babel objection, it would do so only at the expense of losing +much of the democratic promise of the Net. + +Therefore, we now turn to the question: Is the Internet in fact too chaotic or +too concentrated to yield a more attractive democratic discourse than the mass +media did? I suggest that neither is the case. At the risk of appearing a +chimera of Goldilocks and Pangloss, I argue instead that the observed use of +the network exhibits an order that is not too concentrated and not too chaotic, +but rather, if not "just right," at least structures a networked public sphere +more attractive than the mass-media-dominated public sphere. + +There are two very distinct types of claims about Internet centralization. The +first, and earlier, has the familiar ring of media concentration. It is the +simpler of the two, and is tractable to policy. The second, concerned with the +emergent patterns of attention and linking on an otherwise open network, is +more difficult to explain and intractable to policy. I suggest, however, that +it actually stabilizes and structures democratic discourse, providing a better +answer to the fears of information overload than either the mass media or any +efforts to regulate attention to matters of public concern. + +The media-concentration type argument has been central to arguments about the +necessity of open access to broadband platforms, made most forcefully over the +past few years by Lawrence Lessig. The argument is that the basic +instrumentalities of Internet communications are subject to concentrated +markets. This market concentration in basic access becomes a potential point of +concentration of the power to influence the discourse made possible by access. +Eli Noam's recent work provides the most comprehensive study currently +available of the degree of market concentration in media industries. It offers +a bleak picture.~{ Eli Noam, "The Internet Still Wide, Open, and Competitive?" +Paper presented at The Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, September +2003, http:// www.tprc.org/papers/2003/200/noam_TPRC2003.pdf. }~ Noam looked at +markets in basic infrastructure components of the Internet: Internet backbones, +Internet service providers (ISPs), broadband providers, portals, search +engines, browser software, media player software, and Internet telephony. +Aggregating across all these sectors, he found that the Internet sector defined +in terms of these components was, throughout most of the period from 1984 to +2002, concentrated according to traditional antitrust measures. Between 1992 +and 1998, however, this sector was "highly concentrated" by the Justice +Department's measure of market concentration for antitrust purposes. Moreover, +the power ,{[pg 240]}, of the top ten firms in each of these markets, and in +aggregate for firms that had large market segments in a number of these +markets, shows that an ever-smaller number of firms were capturing about 25 +percent of the revenues in the Internet sector. A cruder, but consistent +finding is the FCC's, showing that 96 percent of homes and small offices get +their broadband access either from their incumbent cable operator or their +incumbent local telephone carrier.~{ Federal Communications Commission, Report +on High Speed Services, December 2003. }~ It is important to recognize that +these findings are suggesting potential points of failure for the networked +information economy. They are not a critique of the democratic potential of the +networked public sphere, but rather show us how we could fail to develop it by +following the wrong policies. +={ Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) ; + access : + broadband services, concentration of +1 ; + broadband networks : + concentration in access services +1 ; + concentration in broadband access services +1 +} + +The risk of concentration in broadband access services is that a small number +of firms, sufficiently small to have economic power in the antitrust sense, +will control the markets for the basic instrumentalities of Internet +communications. Recall, however, that the low cost of computers and the +open-ended architecture of the Internet protocol itself are the core enabling +facts that have allowed us to transition from the mass-media model to the +networked information model. As long as these basic instrumentalities are open +and neutral as among uses, and are relatively cheap, the basic economics of +nonmarket production described in part I should not change. Under competitive +conditions, as technology makes computation and communications cheaper, a +well-functioning market should ensure that outcome. Under oligopolistic +conditions, however, there is a threat that the network will become too +expensive to be neutral as among market and nonmarket production. If basic +upstream network connections, server space, and up-to-date reading and writing +utilities become so expensive that one needs to adopt a commercial model to +sustain them, then the basic economic characteristic that typifies the +networked information economy--the relatively large role of nonproprietary, +nonmarket production--will have been reversed. However, the risk is not focused +solely or even primarily on explicit pricing. One of the primary remaining +scarce resources in the networked environment is user time and attention. As +chapter 5 explained, owners of communications facilities can extract value from +their users in ways that are more subtle than increasing price. In particular, +they can make some sites and statements easier to reach and see--more +prominently displayed on the screen, faster to load--and sell that relative +ease to those who are willing to pay.~{ See Eszter Hargittai, "The Changing +Online Landscape: From Free-For-All to Commercial Gatekeeping," +http://www.eszter.com/research/pubs/hargittai-onlinelandscape.pdf. }~ In that +environment, nonmarket sites are systematically disadvantaged irrespective of +the quality of their content. ,{[pg 241]}, + +The critique of concentration in this form therefore does not undermine the +claim that the networked information economy, if permitted to flourish, will +improve the democratic public sphere. It underscores the threat of excessive +monopoly in infrastructure to the sustainability of the networked public +sphere. The combination of observations regarding market concentration and an +understanding of the importance of a networked public sphere to democratic +societies suggests that a policy intervention is possible and desirable. +Chapter 11 explains why the relevant intervention is to permit substantial +segments of the core common infrastructure--the basic physical transport layer +of wireless or fiber and the software and standards that run communications--to +be produced and provisioned by users and managed as a commons. + +2~ ON POWER LAW DISTRIBUTIONS, NETWORK TOPOLOGY, AND BEING HEARD +={ concentration of Web attention +29 ; + distribution of information : + power law distribution of site connections +29 ; + hyperlinking on the Web : + power law distribution of site connections +29 ; + Internet : + power law distribution of site connections +29 ; + linking on the Web : + power law distribution of site connections +29 ; + network topology : + power law distribution of site connections +29 ; + networked public sphere : + topology and connectivity of +29 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + topology and connectivity of +29 ; + power law distribution of Web connections +29 ; + public sphere : + topology and connectivity of +29 ; + referencing on the Web : + power law distribution of Web site connections +29 ; + structure of network : + power law distribution of Web site connections +29 ; + topology, network : + power law distribution of Web site connections +29 ; + Web : + power law distribution of Web site connections +29 ; + wireless communications : + power law distribution of Web site connections +29 +} + +A much more intractable challenge to the claim that the networked information +economy will democratize the public sphere emerges from observations of a set +or phenomena that characterize the Internet, the Web, the blogosphere, and, +indeed, most growing networks. In order to extract information out of the +universe of statements and communications made possible by the Internet, users +are freely adopting practices that lead to the emergence of a new hierarchy. +Rather than succumb to the "information overload" problem, users are solving it +by congregating in a small number of sites. This conclusion is based on a new +but growing literature on the likelihood that a Web page will be linked to by +others. The distribution of that probability turns out to be highly skew. That +is, there is a tiny probability that any given Web site will be linked to by a +huge number of people, and a very large probability that for a given Web site +only one other site, or even no site, will link to it. This fact is true of +large numbers of very different networks described in physics, biology, and +social science, as well as in communications networks. If true in this pure +form about Web usage, this phenomenon presents a serious theoretical and +empirical challenge to the claim that Internet communications of the sorts we +have seen here meaningfully decentralize democratic discourse. It is not a +problem that is tractable to policy. We cannot as a practical matter force +people to read different things than what they choose to read; nor should we +wish to. If users avoid information overload by focusing on a small subset of +sites in an otherwise ,{[pg 242]}, open network that allows them to read more +or less whatever they want and whatever anyone has written, policy +interventions aimed to force a different pattern would be hard to justify from +the perspective of liberal democratic theory. + +The sustained study of the distribution of links on the Internet and the Web is +relatively new--only a few years old. There is significant theoretical work in +a field of mathematics called graph theory, or network topology, on power law +distributions in networks, on skew distributions that are not pure power law, +and on the mathematically related small-worlds phenomenon in networks. The +basic intuition is that, if indeed a tiny minority of sites gets a large number +of links, and the vast majority gets few or no links, it will be very difficult +to be seen unless you are on the highly visible site. Attention patterns make +the open network replicate mass media. While explaining this literature over +the next few pages, I show that what is in fact emerging is very different +from, and more attractive than, the mass-media-dominated public sphere. + +While the Internet, the Web, and the blogosphere are indeed exhibiting much +greater order than the freewheeling, "everyone a pamphleteer" image would +suggest, this structure does not replicate a mass-media model. We are seeing a +newly shaped information environment, where indeed few are read by many, but +clusters of moderately read sites provide platforms for vastly greater numbers +of speakers than were heard in the mass-media environment. Filtering, +accreditation, synthesis, and salience are created through a system of peer +review by information affinity groups, topical or interest based. These groups +filter the observations and opinions of an enormous range of people, and +transmit those that pass local peer review to broader groups and ultimately to +the polity more broadly, without recourse to market-based points of control +over the information flow. Intense interest and engagement by small groups that +share common concerns, rather than lowest-commondenominator interest in wide +groups that are largely alienated from each other, is what draws attention to +statements and makes them more visible. This makes the emerging networked +public sphere more responsive to intensely held concerns of a much wider swath +of the population than the mass media were capable of seeing, and creates a +communications process that is more resistant to corruption by money. + +In what way, first, is attention concentrated on the Net? We are used to seeing +probability distributions that describe social phenomena following a Gaussian +distribution: where the mean and the median are the same and the ,{[pg 243]}, +probabilities fall off symmetrically as we describe events that are farther +from the median. This is the famous Bell Curve. Some phenomena, however, +observed initially in Pareto's work on income distribution and Zipf 's on the +probability of the use of English words in text and in city populations, +exhibit completely different probability distributions. These distributions +have very long "tails"--that is, they are characterized by a very small number +of very high-yield events (like the number of words that have an enormously +high probability of appearing in a randomly chosen sentence, like "the" or +"to") and a very large number of events that have a very low probability of +appearing (like the probability that the word "probability" or "blogosphere" +will appear in a randomly chosen sentence). To grasp intuitively how +unintuitive such distributions are to us, we could think of radio humorist +Garrison Keillor's description of the fictitious Lake Wobegon, where "all the +children are above average." That statement is amusing because we assume +intelligence follows a normal distribution. If intelligence were distributed +according to a power law, most children there would actually be below +average--the median is well below the mean in such distributions (see figure +7.4). Later work by Herbert Simon in the 1950s, and by Derek de Solla Price in +the 1960s, on cumulative advantage in scientific citations~{ Derek de Solla +Price, "Networks of Scientific Papers," Science 149 (1965): 510; Herbert Simon, +"On a Class of Skew Distribution Function," Biometrica 42 (1955): 425-440, +reprinted in Herbert Simon, Models of Man Social and Rational: Mathematical +Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting (New York: Garland, +1957). }~ presaged an emergence at the end of the 1990s of intense interest in +power law characterizations of degree distributions, or the number of +connections any point in a network has to other points, in many kinds of +networks--from networks of neurons and axons, to social networks and +communications and information networks. +={ de Solla Price, Derek ; + Solla Price, Derek (de Solla Price) ; + Keillor, Garrison ; + Pareto, Vilfredo ; + Simon, Herbert ; + Zipf, George +} + +{won_benkler_7_4.png "Figure 7.4: Illustration of How Normal Distribution and Power Law Distribution Would Differ in Describing How Many Web Sites Have Few or Many Links Pointing at Them" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +% image moved above paragraph from start of original books page 244 + +The Internet and the World Wide Web offered a testable setting, where +large-scale investigation could be done automatically by studying link +structure (who is linked-in to and by whom, who links out and to whom, how +these are related, and so on), and where the practical applications of better +understanding were easily articulated--such as the design of better search +engines. In 1999, Albert-László Barabasi and Reka Albert published a paper in +/{Science}/ showing that a variety of networked phenomena have a predictable +topology: The distribution of links into and out of nodes on the network +follows a power law. There is a very low probability that any vertex, or node, +in the network will be very highly connected to many others, and a very large +probability that a very large number of nodes will be connected only very +loosely, or perhaps not at all. Intuitively, a lot of Web sites link to +information that is located on Yahoo!, while very few link to any randomly +selected individual's Web site. Barabasi and Albert hypothesized a mechanism +,{[pg 244]}, for this distribution to evolve, which they called "preferential +attachment." That is, new nodes prefer to attach to already well-attached +nodes. Any network that grows through the addition of new nodes, and in which +nodes preferentially attach to nodes that are already well attached, will +eventually exhibit this distribution.~{ Albert-Laszio Barabasi and Reka Albert, +"Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks," Science 286 (1999): 509. }~ In other +words, the rich get richer. At the same time, two computer scientists, Lada +Adamic and Bernardo Huberman, published a study in Nature that identified the +presence of power law distributions in the number of Web pages in a given site. +They hypothesized not that new nodes preferentially attach to old ones, but +that each site has an intrinsically different growth rate, and that new sites +are formed at an exponential rate.~{ Bernardo Huberman and Lada Adamic, "Growth +Dynamics of the World Wide Web," Nature 401 (1999): 131. }~ The intrinsically +different growth rates could be interpreted as quality, interest, or perhaps +investment of money in site development and marketing. They showed that on +these assumptions, a power law distribution would emerge. Since the publication +of these articles we have seen an explosion of theoretical and empirical +literature on graph theory, or the structure and growth of networks, and +particularly on link structure in the World Wide Web. It has consistently shown +that the number of links into and out of Web sites follows power laws and that +the exponent (the exponential ,{[pg 245]}, factor that determines that the +drop-off between the most linked-to site and the second most linked-to site, +and the third, and so on, will be so dramatically rapid, and how rapid it is) +for inlinks is roughly 2.1 and for outlinks 2.7. +={ Albert, Reka ; + Barabasi, Albert-László +1 ; + Huberman, Bernardo ; + Adamic, Lada ; + growth rates of Web sites +} + +If one assumes that most people read things by either following links, or by +using a search engine, like Google, that heavily relies on counting inlinks to +rank its results, then it is likely that the number of visitors to a Web page, +and more recently, the number of readers of blogs, will follow a similarly +highly skew distribution. The implication for democracy that comes most +immediately to mind is dismal. While, as the Supreme Court noted with +enthusiasm, on the Internet everyone can be a pamphleteer or have their own +soapbox, the Internet does not, in fact, allow individuals to be heard in ways +that are substantially more effective than standing on a soapbox in a city +square. Many Web pages and blogs will simply go unread, and will not contribute +to a more engaged polity. This argument was most clearly made in Barabasi's +popularization of his field, Linked: "The most intriguing result of our +Web-mapping project was the complete absence of democracy, fairness, and +egalitarian values on the Web. We learned that the topology of the Web prevents +us from seeing anything but a mere handful of the billion documents out +there."~{ Albert-Laszio Barabasi, Linked, How Everything Is Connected to +Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life (New +York: Penguin, 2003), 56-57. One unpublished quantitative study showed +specifically that the skewness holds for political Web sites related to various +hot-button political issues in the United States--like abortion, gun control, +or the death penalty. A small fraction of the Web sites discussing these issues +account for the large majority of links into them. Matthew Hindman, Kostas +Tsioutsiouliklis, and Judy Johnson, " `Googelarchy': How a Few Heavily Linked +Sites Dominate Politics on the Web," July 28, 2003, +http://www.scholar.google.com/url?sa U&q +http://www.princeton.edu/~mhindman/googlearchy-hindman.pdf. }~ + +The stories offered in this chapter and throughout this book present a puzzle +for this interpretation of the power law distribution of links in the network +as re-creating a concentrated medium. The success of Nick Davis's site, +BoycottSBG, would be a genuine fluke. The probability that such a site could be +established on a Monday, and by Friday of the same week would have had three +hundred thousand unique visitors and would have orchestrated a successful +campaign, is so small as to be negligible. The probability that a completely +different site, StopSinclair.org, of equally network-obscure origins, would be +established on the very same day and also successfully catch the attention of +enough readers to collect 150,000 signatures on a petition to protest +Sinclair's broadcast, rather than wallowing undetected in the mass of +self-published angry commentary, is practically insignificant. And yet, +intuitively, it seems unsurprising that a large population of individuals who +are politically mobilized on the same side of the political map and share a +political goal in the public sphere--using a network that makes it trivially +simple to set up new points of information and coordination, tell each other +about them, and reach and use them from anywhere--would, in fact, inform each +other and gather to participate in a political demonstration. We saw ,{[pg +246]}, that the boycott technique that Davis had designed his Web site to +facilitate was discussed on TalkingPoints--a site near the top of the power law +distribution of political blogs--but that it was a proposal by an anonymous +individual who claimed to know what makes local affiliates tick, not of +TalkingPoints author Josh Marshall. By midweek, after initially stoking the +fires of support for Davis's boycott, Marshall had stepped back, and Davis's +site became the clearing point for reports, tactical conversations, and +mobilization. Davis not only was visible, but rather than being drowned out by +the high-powered transmitter, TalkingPoints, his relationship with the +high-visibility site was part of his success. This story alone cannot, of +course, "refute" the power law distribution of network links, nor is it offered +as a refutation. It does, however, provide a context for looking more closely +at the emerging understanding of the topology of the Web, and how it relates to +the fears of concentration of the Internet, and the problems of information +overload, discourse fragmentation, and the degree to which money will come to +dominate such an unstructured and wide-open environment. It suggests a more +complex story than simply "the rich get richer" and "you might speak, but no +one will hear you." In this case, the topology of the network allowed rapid +emergence of a position, its filtering and synthesis, and its rise to salience. +Network topology helped facilitate all these components of the public sphere, +rather than undermined them. We can go back to the mathematical and computer +science literature to begin to see why. +={ Davis, Nick ; + Marshall, Josh +} + +Within two months of the publication of Barabasi and Albert's article, Adamic +and Huberman had published a letter arguing that, if Barabasi and Albert were +right about preferential attachment, then older sites should systematically be +among those that are at the high end of the distribution, while new ones will +wallow in obscurity. The older sites are already attached, so newer sites would +preferentially attach to the older sites. This, in turn, would make them even +more attractive when a new crop of Web sites emerged and had to decide which +sites to link to. In fact, however, Adamic and Huberman showed that there is no +such empirical correlation among Web sites. They argued that their +mechanism--that nodes have intrinsic growth rates that are different--better +describes the data. In their response, Barabasi and Albert showed that on their +data set, the older nodes are actually more connected in a way that follows a +power law, but only on average--that is to say, the average number of +connections of a class of older nodes related to the average number of links to +a younger class of nodes follows a power law. This argued that their basic +model was sound, but ,{[pg 247]}, required that they modify their equations to +include something similar to what Huberman and Adamic had proposed--an +intrinsic growth factor for each node, as well as the preferential connection +of new nodes to established nodes.~{ Lada Adamic and Bernardo Huberman, "Power +Law Distribution of the World Wide Web," Science 287 (2000): 2115. }~ This +modification is important because it means that not every new node is doomed to +be unread relative to the old ones, only that on average they are much less +likely to be read. It makes room for rapidly growing new nodes, but does not +theorize what might determine the rate of growth. It is possible, for example, +that money could determine growth rates: In order to be seen, new sites or +statements would have to spend money to gain visibility and salience. As the +BoycottSBG and Diebold stories suggest, however, as does the Lott story +described later in this chapter, there are other ways of achieving immediate +salience. In the case of BoycottSBG, it was providing a solution that resonated +with the political beliefs of many people and was useful to them for their +expression and mobilization. Moreover, the continued presence of preferential +attachment suggests that noncommercial Web sites that are already highly +connected because of the time they were introduced (like the Electronic +Frontier Foundation), because of their internal attractiveness to large +communities (like Slashdot), or because of their salience to the immediate +interests of users (like BoycottSBG), will have persistent visibility even in +the face of large infusions of money by commercial sites. Developments in +network topology theory and its relationship to the structure of the +empirically mapped real Internet offer a map of the networked information +environment that is indeed quite different from the naïve model of "everyone a +pamphleteer." To the limited extent that these findings have been interpreted +for political meaning, they have been seen as a disappointment--the real world, +as it turns out, does not measure up to anything like that utopia. However, +that is the wrong baseline. There never has been a complex, large modern +democracy in which everyone could speak and be heard by everyone else. The +correct baseline is the one-way structure of the commercial mass media. The +normatively relevant descriptive questions are whether the networked public +sphere provides broader intake, participatory filtering, and relatively +incorruptible platforms for creating public salience. I suggest that it does. +Four characteristics of network topology structure the Web and the blogosphere +in an ordered, but nonetheless meaningfully participatory form. First, at a +microlevel, sites cluster--in particular, topically and interest-related sites +link much more heavily to each other than to other sites. Second, at a +macrolevel, the Web and the blogosphere have ,{[pg 248]}, giant, strongly +connected cores--"areas" where 20-30 percent of all sites are highly and +redundantly interlinked; that is, tens or hundreds of millions of sites, rather +than ten, fifty, or even five hundred television stations. That pattern repeats +itself in smaller subclusters as well. Third, as the clusters get small enough, +the obscurity of sites participating in the cluster diminishes, while the +visibility of the superstars remains high, forming a filtering and transmission +backbone for universal intake and local filtering. Fourth and finally, the Web +exhibits "small-world" phenomena, making most Web sites reachable through +shallow paths from most other Web sites. I will explain each of these below, as +well as how they interact to form a reasonably attractive image of the +networked public sphere. +={ Albert, Reka ; + Barabasi, Albert-László ; + Adamic, Lada +1 ; + Huberman, Bernardo ; + growth rates of Web sites ; + obscurity of some Web sites ; + older Web sites, obscurity of ; + clusters in network topology +7 ; + organizational clustering +7 ; + social clustering +7 ; + topical clustering +7 +} + +First, links are not smoothly distributed throughout the network. Sites cluster +into densely linked "regions" or communities of interest. Computer scientists +have looked at clustering from the perspective of what topical or other +correlated characteristics describe these relatively high-density +interconnected regions of nodes. What they found was perhaps entirely +predictable from an intuitive perspective of the network users, but important +as we try to understand the structure of information flow on the Web. Web sites +cluster into topical and social/organizational clusters. Early work done in the +IBM Almaden Research Center on how link structure could be used as a search +technique showed that by mapping densely interlinked sites without looking at +content, one could find communities of interest that identify very fine-grained +topical connections, such as Australian fire brigades or Turkish students in +the United States.~{ Ravi Kumar et al., "Trawling the Web for Emerging +Cyber-Communities," WWW8/ Computer Networks 31, nos. 11-16 (1999): 1481-1493. +}~ A later study out of the NEC Research Institute more formally defined the +interlinking that would identify a "community" as one in which the nodes were +more densely connected to each other than they were to nodes outside the +cluster by some amount. The study also showed that topically connected sites +meet this definition. For instance, sites related to molecular biology +clustered with each other--in the sense of being more interlinked with each +other than with off-topic sites--as did sites about physics and black holes.~{ +Gary W. Flake et al., "Self-Organization and Identification of Web +Communities," IEEE Computer 35, no. 3 (2002): 66-71. Another paper that showed +significant internal citations within topics was Soumen Chakrabati et al., "The +Structure of Broad Topics on the Web," WWW2002, Honolulu, HI, May 7-11, 2002. +}~ Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance recently showed that liberal political blogs +and conservative political blogs densely interlink with each other, mostly +pointing within each political leaning but with about 15 percent of links +posted by the most visible sites also linking across the political divide.~{ +Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance, "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 +Election: Divided They Blog," March 1, 2005, +http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/2005/ AdamicGlanceBlogWWW.pdf. }~ Physicists +analyze clustering as the property of transitivity in networks: the increased +probability that if node A is connected to node B, and node B is connected to +node C, that node A also will be connected to node C, forming a triangle. +Newman has shown that ,{[pg 249]}, the clustering coefficient of a network that +exhibits power law distribution of connections or degrees--that is, its +tendency to cluster--is related to the exponent of the distribution. At low +exponents, below 2.333, the clustering coefficient becomes high. This explains +analytically the empirically observed high level of clustering on the Web, +whose exponent for inlinks has been empirically shown to be 2.1.~{ M.E.J. +Newman, "The Structure and Function of Complex Networks," Society for +Industrial and Applied Mathematics Review 45, section 4.2.2 (2003): 167-256; S. +N. Dorogovstev and J.F.F. Mendes, Evolution of Networks: From Biological Nets +to the Internet and WWW (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). }~ +={ Glance, Natalie } + +Second, at a macrolevel and in smaller subclusters, the power law distribution +does not resolve into everyone being connected in a mass-media model +relationship to a small number of major "backbone" sites. As early as 1999, +Broder and others showed that a very large number of sites occupy what has been +called a giant, strongly connected core.~{ This structure was first described +by Andrei Broder et al., "Graph Structure of the Web," paper presented at www9 +conference (1999), http://www.almaden.ibm.com/ +webfountain/resources/GraphStructureintheWeb.pdf. It has since been further +studied, refined, and substantiated in various studies. }~ That is, nodes +within this core are heavily linked and interlinked, with multiple redundant +paths among them. Empirically, as of 2001, this structure was comprised of +about 28 percent of nodes. At the same time, about 22 percent of nodes had +links into the core, but were not linked to from it--these may have been new +sites, or relatively lower-interest sites. The same proportion of sites was +linked-to from the core, but did not link back to it--these might have been +ultimate depositories of documents, or internal organizational sites. Finally, +roughly the same proportion of sites occupied "tendrils" or "tubes" that cannot +reach, or be reached from, the core. Tendrils can be reached from the group of +sites that link into the strongly connected core or can reach into the group +that can be connected to from the core. Tubes connect the inlinking sites to +the outlinked sites without going through the core. About 10 percent of sites +are entirely isolated. This structure has been called a "bow tie"--with a large +core and equally sized in- and outflows to and from that core (see figure 7.5). +={ Broder, Andrei ; + backbone Web sites +2 ; + bow tie structure of Web +2 ; + clusters in network topology : + bow tie structure of Web +2 ; + core Web sites +2 ; + Internet : + strongly connected Web sites +2 ; + network topology : + strongly connected Web sites +2 ; + power law distribution of Web connections : + strongly connected Web sites +2 ; + strongly connected Web sites +2 ; + structure of network : + strongly connected Web sites +2 ; + tendrils (Web topology) +2 ; + core Web sites +2 ; + topology, network : + strongly connected Web sites +2 ; + tubes (Web topology) +2 ; + Web : + backbone sites +2 ; + wireless communications : + backbone sites +2 +} + +{won_benkler_7_5.png "Figure 7.5: Bow Tie Structure of the Web" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +% image moved above paragraph from start of original book page 250 + +One way of interpreting this structure as counterdemocratic is to say: This +means that half of all Web sites are not reachable from the other half--the +"IN," "tendrils," and disconnected portions cannot be reached from any of the +sites in SCC and OUT. This is indeed disappointing from the "everyone a +pamphleteer" perspective. On the other hand, one could say that half of all Web +pages, the SCC and OUT components, are reachable from IN and SCC. That is, +hundreds of millions of pages are reachable from hundreds of millions of +potential entry points. This represents a very different intake function and +freedom to speak in a way that is potentially accessible to others than a +five-hundred-channel, mass-media model. More significant yet, Dill and others +showed that the bow tie structure appears not only at the level of the Web as a +whole, but repeats itself within clusters. That is, the Web ,{[pg 250]}, +appears to show characteristics of self-similarity, up to a point--links within +clusters also follow a power law distribution and cluster, and have a bow tie +structure of similar proportions to that of the overall Web. Tying the two +points about clustering and the presence of a strongly connected core, Dill and +his coauthors showed that what they called "thematically unified clusters," +such as geographically or content-related groupings of Web sites, themselves +exhibit these strongly connected cores that provided a thematically defined +navigational backbone to the Web. It is not that one or two major sites were +connected to by all thematically related sites; rather, as at the network +level, on the order of 25-30 percent were highly interlinked, and another 25 +percent were reachable from within the strongly connected core.~{ Dill et al., +"Self-Similarity in the Web" (San Jose, CA: IBM Almaden Research Center, 2001); +S. N. Dorogovstev and J.F.F. Mendes, Evolution of Networks. }~ Moreover, when +the data was pared down to treat only the home page, rather than each Web page +within a single site as a distinct "node" (that is, everything that came under +www.foo.com was treated as one node, as opposed to the usual method where +www.foo.com, www.foo.com/nonsuch, and www.foo.com/somethingelse are each +treated as a separate node), fully 82 percent of the nodes were in the strongly +connected core, and an additional 13 percent were reachable from the SCC as the +OUT group. +={ Dill, Stephen } + +Third, another finding of Web topology and critical adjustment to the ,{[pg +251]}, basic Barabasi and Albert model is that when the topically or +organizationally related clusters become small enough--on the order of hundreds +or even low thousands of Web pages--they no longer follow a pure power law +distribution. Instead, they follow a distribution that still has a very long +tail-- these smaller clusters still have a few genuine "superstars"--but the +body of the distribution is substantially more moderate: beyond the few +superstars, the shape of the link distribution looks a little more like a +normal distribution. Instead of continuing to drop off exponentially, many +sites exhibit a moderate degree of connectivity. Figure 7.6 illustrates how a +hypothetical distribution of this sort would differ both from the normal and +power law distributions illustrated in figure 7.4. David Pennock and others, in +their paper describing these empirical findings, hypothesized a uniform +component added to the purely exponential original Barabasi and Albert model. +This uniform component could be random (as they modeled it), but might also +stand for quality of materials, or level of interest in the site by +participants in the smaller cluster. At large numbers of nodes, the exponent +dominates the uniform component, accounting for the pure power law distribution +when looking at the Web as a whole, or even at broadly defined topics. In +smaller clusters of sites, however, the uniform component begins to exert a +stronger pull on the distribution. The exponent keeps the long tail intact, but +the uniform component accounts for a much more moderate body. Many sites will +have dozens, or even hundreds of links. The Pennock paper looked at sites whose +number was reduced by looking only at sites of certain +organizations--universities or public companies. Chakrabarti and others later +confirmed this finding for topical clusters as well. That is, when they looked +at small clusters of topically related sites, the distribution of links still +has a long tail for a small number of highly connected sites in every topic, +but the body of the distribution diverges from a power law distribution, and +represents a substantial proportion of sites that are moderately linked.~{ +Soumen Chakrabarti et al., "The Structure of Broad Topics on the Web," WWW2002, +Honolulu, HI, May 7-11, 2002. }~ Even more specifically, Daniel Drezner and +Henry Farrell reported that the Pennock modification better describes +distribution of links specifically to and among political blogs.~{ Daniel W. +Drezner and Henry Farrell, "The Power and Politics of Blogs" (July 2004), +http://www.danieldrezner.com/research/blogpaperfinal.pdf. }~ +={ Albert, Reka ; + Chakrabarti, Soumen ; + Drezner, Daniel ; + Farrell, Henry ; + Pennock, David ; + Barabasi, Albert-László ; + power law distribution of Web connections : + uniform component of moderate connectivity ; + structure of network : + moderately linked sites ; + topology, network : + moderately linked sites ; + network topology : + moderately linked sites ; + obscurity of some Web sites +1 +} + +{won_benkler_7_6.png "Figure 7.6: Illustration of a Skew Distribution That Does Not Follow a Power Law" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +% image moved above paragraph from start of original book page 252 + +These findings are critical to the interpretation of the distribution of links +as it relates to human attention and communication. There is a big difference +between a situation where no one is looking at any of the sites on the low end +of the distribution, because everyone is looking only at the superstars, and a +situation where dozens or hundreds of sites at the low end are looking at each +other, as well as at the superstars. The former leaves all but the very ,{[pg +252]}, few languishing in obscurity, with no one to look at them. The latter, +as explained in more detail below, offers a mechanism for topically related and +interest-based clusters to form a peer-reviewed system of filtering, +accreditation, and salience generation. It gives the long tail on the low end +of the distribution heft (and quite a bit of wag). + +The fourth and last piece of mapping the network as a platform for the public +sphere is called the "small-worlds effect." Based on Stanley Milgram's +sociological experiment and on mathematical models later proposed by Duncan +Watts and Steven Strogatz, both theoretical and empirical work has shown that +the number of links that must be traversed from any point in the network to any +other point is relatively small.~{ D. J. Watts and S. H. Strogatz, "Collective +Dynamics of `Small World' Networks," Nature 393 (1998): 440-442; D. J. Watts, +Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks Between Order and Randomness (Princeton, +NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). }~ Fairly shallow "walks"-- that is, +clicking through three or four layers of links--allow a user to cover a large +portion of the Web. +={ Milgram, Stanley ; + Strogatz, Steven ; + Watts, Duncan ; + blogs : + small-worlds effects ; + small-worlds effect +3 +} + +What is true of the Web as a whole turns out to be true of the blogosphere as +well, and even of the specifically political blogosphere. Early 2003 saw +increasing conversations in the blogosphere about the emergence of an "Alist," +a number of highly visible blogs that were beginning to seem more like mass +media than like blogs. In two blog-based studies, Clay Shirky and then Jason +Kottke published widely read explanations of how the blogosphere ,{[pg 253]}, +was simply exhibiting the power law characteristics common on the Web.~{ Clay +Shirky, "Power Law, Weblogs, and Inequality" (February 8, 2003), http:// +www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.htm; Jason Kottke, "Weblogs and Power +Laws" (February 9, 2003), http://www.kottke.org/03/02/weblogs-and-power-laws. +}~ The emergence in 2003 of discussions of this sort in the blogosphere is, it +turns out, hardly surprising. In a time-sensitive study also published in 2003, +Kumar and others provided an analysis of the network topology of the +blogosphere. They found that it was very similar to that of the Web as a +whole--both at the macro- and microlevels. Interestingly, they found that the +strongly connected core only developed after a certain threshold, in terms of +total number of nodes, had been reached, and that it began to develop +extensively only in 2001, reached about 20 percent of all blogs in 2002, and +continued to grow rapidly. They also showed that what they called the +"community" structure--the degree of clustering or mutual pointing within +groups--was high, an order of magnitude more than a random graph with a similar +power law exponent would have generated. Moreover, the degree to which a +cluster is active or inactive, highly connected or not, changes over time. In +addition to time-insensitive superstars, there are also flare-ups of +connectivity for sites depending on the activity and relevance of their +community of interest. This latter observation is consistent with what we saw +happen for BoycottSBG.com. Kumar and his collaborators explained these +phenomena by the not-too-surprising claim that bloggers link to each other +based on topicality--that is, their judgment of the quality and relevance of +the materials--not only on the basis of how well connected they are already.~{ +Ravi Kumar et al., "On the Bursty Evolution of Blogspace," Proceedings of +WWW2003, May 20-24, 2003, http://www2003.org/cdrom/papers/refereed/p477/ +p477-kumar/p477-kumar.htm. }~ +={ Kottke, Jason ; + Kumar, Ravi ; + Shirky, Clay ; + clusters in network topology +5 ; + network topology : + emergent ordered structure +5 ; + structure of network : + emergent ordered structure +5 ; + topology, network : + emergent ordered structure +5 +} + +This body of literature on network topology suggests a model for how order has +emerged on the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the blogosphere. The networked +public sphere allows hundreds of millions of people to publish whatever and +whenever they please without disintegrating into an unusable cacophony, as the +first-generation critics argued, and it filters and focuses attention without +re-creating the highly concentrated model of the mass media that concerned the +second-generation critique. We now know that the network at all its various +layers follows a degree of order, where some sites are vastly more visible than +most. This order is loose enough, however, and exhibits a sufficient number of +redundant paths from an enormous number of sites to another enormous number, +that the effect is fundamentally different from the small number of commercial +professional editors of the mass media. + +Individuals and individual organizations cluster around topical, +organizational, or other common features. At a sufficiently fine-grained degree +of clustering, a substantial proportion of the clustered sites are moderately +connected, ,{[pg 254]}, and each can therefore be a point of intake that will +effectively transmit observations or opinions within and among the users of +that topical or interest-based cluster. Because even in small clusters the +distribution of links still has a long tail, these smaller clusters still +include high-visibility nodes. These relatively high-visibility nodes can serve +as points of transfer to larger clusters, acting as an attention backbone that +transmits information among clusters. Subclusters within a general +category--such as liberal and conservative blogs clustering within the broader +cluster of political blogs-- are also interlinked, though less densely than +within-cluster connectivity. The higher level or larger clusters again exhibit +a similar feature, where higher visibility nodes can serve as clearinghouses +and connectivity points among clusters and across the Web. These are all highly +connected with redundant links within a giant, strongly connected +core--comprising more than a quarter of the nodes in any given level of +cluster. The small-worlds phenomenon means that individual users who travel a +small number of different links from similar starting points within a cluster +cover large portions of the Web and can find diverse sites. By then linking to +them on their own Web sites, or giving them to others by e-mail or blog post, +sites provide multiple redundant paths open to many users to and from most +statements on the Web. High-visibility nodes amplify and focus on given +statements, and in this regard, have greater power in the information +environment they occupy. However, there is sufficient redundancy of paths +through high-visibility nodes that no single node or small collection of nodes +can control the flow of information in the core and around the Web. This is +true both at the level of the cluster and at the level of the Web as a whole. + +The result is an ordered system of intake, filtering, and synthesis that can in +theory emerge in networks generally, and empirically has been shown to have +emerged on the Web. It does not depend on single points of control. It avoids +the generation of a din through which no voice can be heard, as the fears of +fragmentation predicted. And, while money may be useful in achieving +visibility, the structure of the Web means that money is neither necessary nor +sufficient to grab attention--because the networked information economy, unlike +its industrial predecessor, does not offer simple points of dissemination and +control for purchasing assured attention. What the network topology literature +allows us to do, then, is to offer a richer, more detailed, and empirically +supported picture of how the network can be a platform for the public sphere +that is structured in a fundamentally different way than the mass-media model. +The problem is approached ,{[pg 255]}, through a self-organizing principle, +beginning with communities of interest on smallish scales, practices of mutual +pointing, and the fact that, with freedom to choose what to see and who to link +to, with some codependence among the choices of individuals as to whom to link, +highly connected points emerge even at small scales, and continue to be +replicated with everlarger visibility as the clusters grow. Without forming or +requiring a formal hierarchy, and without creating single points of control, +each cluster generates a set of sites that offer points of initial filtering, +in ways that are still congruent with the judgments of participants in the +highly connected small cluster. The process is replicated at larger and more +general clusters, to the point where positions that have been synthesized +"locally" and "regionally" can reach Web-wide visibility and salience. It turns +out that we are not intellectual lemmings. We do not use the freedom that the +network has made possible to plunge into the abyss of incoherent babble. +Instead, through iterative processes of cooperative filtering and +"transmission" through the high visibility nodes, the low-end thin tail turns +out to be a peer-produced filter and transmission medium for a vastly larger +number of speakers than was imaginable in the mass-media model. + +The effects of the topology of the network are reinforced by the cultural forms +of linking, e-mail lists, and the writable Web. The network topology literature +treats every page or site as a node. The emergence of the writable Web, +however, allows each node to itself become a cluster of users and posters who, +collectively, gain salience as a node. Slashdot is "a node" in the network as a +whole, one that is highly linked and visible. Slashdot itself, however, is a +highly distributed system for peer production of observations and opinions +about matters that people who care about information technology and +communications ought to care about. Some of the most visible blogs, like the +dailyKos, are cooperative blogs with a number of authors. More important, the +major blogs receive input--through posts or e-mails-- from their users. Recall, +for example, that the original discussion of a Sinclair boycott that would +focus on local advertisers arrived on TalkingPoints through an e-mail comment +from a reader. Talkingpoints regularly solicits and incorporates input from and +research by its users. The cultural practice of writing to highly visible blogs +with far greater ease than writing a letter to the editor and with looser +constraints on what gets posted makes these nodes themselves platforms for the +expression, filtering, and synthesis of observations and opinions. Moreover, as +Drezner and Farrell have shown, blogs have developed cultural practices of +mutual citation--when one blogger ,{[pg 256]}, finds a source by reading +another, the practice is to link to the original blog, not only directly to the +underlying source. Jack Balkin has argued that the culture of linking more +generally and the "see for yourself" culture also significantly militate +against fragmentation of discourse, because users link to materials they are +commenting on, even in disagreement. +={ Drezner, Daniel ; + Farrell, Henry ; + Balkin, Jack ; + attention fragmentation +1 ; + communities : + fragmentation of +1 ; + diversity : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + norms (social) : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + regulation by social norms : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + social relations and norms : + fragmentation of communication +1 +} + +Our understanding of the emerging structure of the networked information +environment, then, provides the basis for a response to the family of +criticisms of the first generation claims that the Internet democratizes. +Recall that these criticisms, rooted in the problem of information overload, or +the Babel objection, revolved around three claims. The first claim was that the +Internet would result in a fragmentation of public discourse. The clustering of +topically related sites, such as politically oriented sites, and of communities +of interest, the emergence of high-visibility sites that the majority of sites +link to, and the practices of mutual linking show quantitatively and +qualitatively what Internet users likely experience intuitively. While there is +enormous diversity on the Internet, there are also mechanisms and practices +that generate a common set of themes, concerns, and public knowledge around +which a public sphere can emerge. Any given site is likely to be within a very +small number of clicks away from a site that is visible from a very large +number of other sites, and these form a backbone of common materials, +observations, and concerns. All the findings of power law distribution of +linking, clustering, and the presence of a strongly connected core, as well as +the linking culture and "see for yourself," oppose the fragmentation +prediction. Users self-organize to filter the universe of information that is +generated in the network. This self-organization includes a number of highly +salient sites that provide a core of common social and cultural experiences and +knowledge that can provide the basis for a common public sphere, rather than a +fragmented one. + +The second claim was that fragmentation would cause polarization. Because +like-minded people would talk only to each other, they would tend to amplify +their differences and adopt more extreme versions of their positions. Given +that the evidence demonstrates there is no fragmentation, in the sense of a +lack of a common discourse, it would be surprising to find higher polarization +because of the Internet. Moreover, as Balkin argued, the fact that the Internet +allows widely dispersed people with extreme views to find each other and talk +is not a failure for the liberal public sphere, though it may present new +challenges for the liberal state in constraining extreme action. Only +polarization of discourse in society as a whole can properly be ,{[pg 257]}, +considered a challenge to the attractiveness of the networked public sphere. +However, the practices of linking, "see for yourself," or quotation of the +position one is criticizing, and the widespread practice of examining and +criticizing the assumptions and assertions of one's interlocutors actually +point the other way, militating against polarization. A potential +counterargument, however, was created by the most extensive recent study of the +political blogosphere. In that study, Adamic and Glance showed that only about +10 percent of the links on any randomly selected political blog linked to a +site across the ideological divide. The number increased for the "A-list" +political blogs, which linked across the political divide about 15 percent of +the time. The picture that emerges is one of distinct "liberal" and +"conservative" spheres of conversation, with very dense links within, and more +sparse links between them. On one interpretation, then, although there are +salient sites that provide a common subject matter for discourse, actual +conversations occur in distinct and separate spheres--exactly the kind of +setting that Sunstein argued would lead to polarization. Two of the study's +findings, however, suggest a different interpretation. The first was that there +was still a substantial amount of cross-divide linking. One out of every six or +seven links in the top sites on each side of the divide linked to the other +side in roughly equal proportions (although conservatives tended to link +slightly more overall--both internally and across the divide). The second was, +that in an effort to see whether the more closely interlinked conservative +sites therefore showed greater convergence "on message," Adamic and Glance +found that greater interlinking did not correlate with less diversity in +external (outside of the blogosphere) reference points.~{ Both of these +findings are consistent with even more recent work by Hargittai, E., J. Gallo +and S. Zehnder, "Mapping the Political Blogosphere: An Analysis of LargeScale +Online Political Discussions," 2005. Poster presented at the International +Communication Association meetings, New York. }~ Together, these findings +suggest a different interpretation. Each cluster of more or less like-minded +blogs tended to read each other and quote each other much more than they did +the other side. This operated not so much as an echo chamber as a forum for +working out of observations and interpretations internally, among likeminded +people. Many of these initial statements or inquiries die because the community +finds them uninteresting or fruitless. Some reach greater salience, and are +distributed through the high-visibility sites throughout the community of +interest. Issues that in this form reached political salience became topics of +conversation and commentary across the divide. This is certainly consistent +with both the BoycottSBG and Diebold stories, where we saw a significant early +working out of strategies and observations before the criticism reached genuine +political salience. There would have been no point for opponents to link to and +criticize early ideas kicked around within the community, ,{[pg 258]}, like +opposing Sinclair station renewal applications. Only after a few days, when the +boycott was crystallizing, would opponents have reason to point out the boycott +effort and discuss it. This interpretation also well characterizes the way in +which the Trent Lott story described later in this chapter began percolating on +the liberal side of the blogosphere, but then migrated over to the +center-right. +={ Adamic, Lada ; + Lott, Trent ; + Glance, Natalie ; + polarization +} + +The third claim was that money would reemerge as the primary source of power +brokerage because of the difficulty of getting attention on the Net. +Descriptively, it shares a prediction with the second-generation claims: +Namely, that the Internet will centralize discourse. It differs in the +mechanism of concentration: it will not be the result of an emergent property +of large-scale networks, but rather of an old, tried-and-true way of capturing +the political arena--money. But the peer-production model of filtering and +discussion suggests that the networked public sphere will be substantially less +corruptible by money. In the interpretation that I propose, filtering for the +network as a whole is done as a form of nested peer-review decisions, beginning +with the speaker's closest information affinity group. Consistent with what we +have been seeing in more structured peer-production projects like +/{Wikipedia}/, Slashdot, or free software, communities of interest use +clustering and mutual pointing to peer produce the basic filtering mechanism +necessary for the public sphere to be effective and avoid being drowned in the +din of the crowd. The nested structure of the Web, whereby subclusters form +relatively dense higher-level clusters, which then again combine into even +higher-level clusters, and in each case, have a number of high-end salient +sites, allows for the statements that pass these filters to become globally +salient in the relevant public sphere. This structure, which describes the +analytic and empirical work on the Web as a whole, fits remarkably well as a +description of the dynamics we saw in looking more closely at the success of +the boycott on Sinclair, as well as the successful campaign to investigate and +challenge Diebold's voting machines. +={ centralization of communications +4 ; + money : + centralization of communications +4 ; + filtering +4 ; + relevance filtering +4 +} + +The peer-produced structure of the attention backbone suggests that money is +neither necessary nor sufficient to attract attention in the networked public +sphere (although nothing suggests that money has become irrelevant to political +attention given the continued importance of mass media). It renders less +surprising Howard Dean's strong campaign for the Democratic presidential +primaries in 2003 and the much more stable success of MoveOn.org since the late +1990s. These suggest that attention on the network has more to do with +mobilizing the judgments, links, and cooperation ,{[pg 259]}, of large bodies +of small-scale contributors than with applying large sums of money. There is no +obvious broadcast station that one can buy in order to assure salience. There +are, of course, the highly visible sites, and they do offer a mechanism of +getting your message to large numbers of people. However, the degree of engaged +readership, interlinking, and clustering suggests that, in fact, being exposed +to a certain message in one or a small number of highly visible places accounts +for only a small part of the range of "reading" that gets done. More +significantly, it suggests that reading, as opposed to having a conversation, +is only part of what people do in the networked environment. In the networked +public sphere, receiving information or getting out a finished message are only +parts, and not necessarily the most important parts, of democratic discourse. +The central desideratum of a political campaign that is rooted in the Internet +is the capacity to engage users to the point that they become effective +participants in a conversation and an effort; one that they have a genuine +stake in and that is linked to a larger, society-wide debate. This engagement +is not easily purchased, nor is it captured by the concept of a well-educated +public that receives all the information it needs to be an informed citizenry. +Instead, it is precisely the varied modes of participation in small-, medium-, +and large-scale conversations, with varied but sustained degrees of efficacy, +that make the public sphere of the networked environment different, and more +attractive, than was the mass-media-based public sphere. +={ Dean, Howard ; + Web : + backbone sites +1 ; + wireless communications : + backbone sites +1 ; + access : + large-audience programming +1 ; + capacity : + diversity of content in large-audience media +1 ; + diversity : + large-audience programming +1 ; + first-best preferences, mass media and : + large-audience programming +1 ; + information flow : + large-audience programming +1 ; + information production inputs : + large-audience programming +1 ; + inputs to production : + large-audience programming +1 ; + large-audience programming : + susceptibility of networked public sphere +1 ; + lowest-common-denominator programming +1 ; + production inputs : + large-audience programming ; + television : + large-audience programming +1 +} + +The networked public sphere is not only more resistant to control by money, but +it is also less susceptible to the lowest-common-denominator orientation that +the pursuit of money often leads mass media to adopt. Because communication in +peer-produced media starts from an intrinsic motivation--writing or commenting +about what one cares about--it begins with the opposite of lowest common +denominator. It begins with what irks you, the contributing peer, individually, +the most. This is, in the political world, analogous to Eric Raymond's claim +that every free or open-source software project begins with programmers with an +itch to scratch--something directly relevant to their lives and needs that they +want to fix. The networked information economy, which makes it possible for +individuals alone and in cooperation with others to scour the universe of +politically relevant events, to point to them, and to comment and argue about +them, follows a similar logic. This is why one freelance writer with lefty +leanings, Russ Kick, is able to maintain a Web site, The Memory Hole, with +documents that he gets by filing Freedom of Information Act requests. In April +,{[pg 260]}, 2004, Kick was the first to obtain the U.S. military's photographs +of the coffins of personnel killed in Iraq being flown home. No mainstream news +organization had done so, but many published the photographs almost immediately +after Kick had obtained them. Like free software, like Davis and the bloggers +who participated in the debates over the Sinclair boycott, or the students who +published the Diebold e-mails, the decision of what to publish does not start +from a manager's or editor's judgment of what would be relevant and interesting +to many people without being overly upsetting to too many others. It starts +with the question: What do I care about most now? +={ Raymond, Eric ; + Davis, Nick ; + Kick, Russ ; + advertiser-supported media : + lowest-common-denominator programming ; + blocked access : + large-audience programming +} + +To conclude, we need to consider the attractiveness of the networked public +sphere not from the perspective of the mid-1990s utopianism, but from the +perspective of how it compares to the actual media that have dominated the +public sphere in all modern democracies. The networked public sphere provides +an effective nonmarket alternative for intake, filtering, and synthesis outside +the market-based mass media. This nonmarket alternative can attenuate the +influence over the public sphere that can be achieved through control over, or +purchase of control over, the mass media. It offers a substantially broader +capture basin for intake of observations and opinions generated by anyone with +a stake in the polity, anywhere. It appears to have developed a structure that +allows for this enormous capture basin to be filtered, synthesized, and made +part of a polity-wide discourse. This nested structure of clusters of +communities of interest, typified by steadily increasing visibility of +superstar nodes, allows for both the filtering and salience to climb up the +hierarchy of clusters, but offers sufficient redundant paths and interlinking +to avoid the creation of a small set of points of control where power can be +either directly exercised or bought. + +There is, in this story, an enormous degree of contingency and factual +specificity. That is, my claims on behalf of the networked information economy +as a platform for the public sphere are not based on general claims about human +nature, the meaning of liberal discourse, context-independent efficiency, or +the benevolent nature of the technology we happen to have stumbled across at +the end of the twentieth century. They are instead based on, and depend on the +continued accuracy of, a description of the economics of fabrication of +computers and network connections, and a description of the dynamics of linking +in a network of connected nodes. As such, my claim is not that the Internet +inherently liberates. I do not claim that commonsbased production of +information, knowledge, and culture will win out by ,{[pg 261]}, some +irresistible progressive force. That is what makes the study of the political +economy of information, knowledge, and culture in the networked environment +directly relevant to policy. The literature on network topology suggests that, +as long as there are widely distributed capabilities to publish, link, and +advise others about what to read and link to, networks enable intrinsic +processes that allow substantial ordering of the information. The pattern of +information flow in such a network is more resistant to the application of +control or influence than was the mass-media model. But things can change. +Google could become so powerful on the desktop, in the e-mail utility, and on +the Web, that it will effectively become a supernode that will indeed raise the +prospect of a reemergence of a mass-media model. Then the politics of search +engines, as Lucas Introna and Helen Nissenbaum called it, become central. The +zeal to curb peer-to-peer file sharing of movies and music could lead to a +substantial redesign of computing equipment and networks, to a degree that +would make it harder for end users to exchange information of their own making. +Understanding what we will lose if such changes indeed warp the topology of the +network, and through it the basic structure of the networked public sphere, is +precisely the object of this book as a whole. For now, though, let us say that +the networked information economy as it has developed to this date has a +capacity to take in, filter, and synthesize observations and opinions from a +population that is orders of magnitude larger than the population that was +capable of being captured by the mass media. It has done so without re-creating +identifiable and reliable points of control and manipulation that would +replicate the core limitation of the mass-media model of the public sphere--its +susceptibility to the exertion of control by its regulators, owners, or those +who pay them. +={ Introna, Lucas ; + Nissenbaum, Helen +} + +2~ WHO WILL PLAY THE WATCHDOG FUNCTION? +={ filtering : + watchdog functionality +5 ; + networked public sphere : + watchdog functionality +5 ; + peer production : + watchdog functionality +5 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + watchdog functionality +5 ; + public sphere : + watchdog functionality +5 ; + relevance filtering : + watchdog functionality +5 ; + watchdog functionality +5 +} + +A distinct critique leveled at the networked public sphere as a platform for +democratic politics is the concern for who will fill the role of watchdog. Neil +Netanel made this argument most clearly. His concern was that, perhaps freedom +of expression for all is a good thing, and perhaps we could even overcome +information overflow problems, but we live in a complex world with powerful +actors. Government and corporate power is large, and individuals, no matter how +good their tools, cannot be a serious alternative to a well-funded, independent +press that can pay investigative reporters, defend lawsuits, and generally act +like the New York Times and the Washington Post ,{[pg 262]}, when they +published the Pentagon Papers in the teeth of the Nixon administration's +resistance, providing some of the most damning evidence against the planning +and continued prosecution of the war in Vietnam. Netanel is cognizant of the +tensions between the need to capture large audiences and sell advertising, on +the one hand, and the role of watchdog, on the other. He nonetheless emphasizes +that the networked public sphere cannot investigate as deeply or create the +public salience that the mass media can. These limitations make commercial mass +media, for all their limitations, necessary for a liberal public sphere. +={ Netanel, Neil } + +This diagnosis of the potential of the networked public sphere underrepresents +its productive capacity. The Diebold story provides in narrative form a +detailed response to each of the concerns. The problem of voting machines has +all the characteristics of an important, hard subject. It stirs deep fears that +democracy is being stolen, and is therefore highly unsettling. It involves a +difficult set of technical judgments about the functioning of voting machines. +It required exposure and analysis of corporate-owned materials in the teeth of +litigation threats and efforts to suppress and discredit the criticism. At each +juncture in the process, the participants in the critique turned iteratively to +peer production and radically distributed methods of investigation, analysis, +distribution, and resistance to suppression: the initial observations of the +whistle-blower or the hacker; the materials made available on a "see for +yourself" and "come analyze this and share your insights" model; the +distribution by students; and the fallback option when their server was shut +down of replication around the network. At each stage, a peer-production +solution was interposed in place of where a well-funded, high-end mass-media +outlet would have traditionally applied funding in expectation of sales of +copy. And it was only after the networked public sphere developed the analysis +and debate that the mass media caught on, and then only gingerly. +={ Diebold Election Systems ; + electronic voting machines (case study) ; + networked public sphere : + Diebold Election Systems case study ; + policy : + Diebold Election Systems case study ; + public sphere : + Diebold Election Systems case study ; + voting, electronic +} + +The Diebold case was not an aberration, but merely a particularly rich case +study of a much broader phenomenon, most extensively described in Dan Gilmore's +We the Media. The basic production modalities that typify the networked +information economy are now being applied to the problem of producing +politically relevant information. In 2005, the most visible example of +application of the networked information economy--both in its peer-production +dimension and more generally by combining a wide range of nonproprietary +production models--to the watchdog function of the media is the political +blogosphere. The founding myth of the blogosphere's ,{[pg 263]}, journalistic +potency was built on the back of then Senate majority leader Trent Lott. In +2002, Lott had the indiscretion of saying, at the onehundredth-birthday party +of Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, that if Thurmond had won his Dixiecrat +presidential campaign, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these +years." Thurmond had run on a segregationist campaign, splitting from the +Democratic Party in opposition to Harry Truman's early civil rights efforts, as +the post?World War II winds began blowing toward the eventual demise of formal, +legal racial segregation in the United States. Few positions are taken to be +more self-evident in the national public morality of early twenty-first-century +America than that formal, state-imposed, racial discrimination is an +abomination. And yet, the first few days after the birthday party at which Lott +made his statement saw almost no reporting on the statement. ABC News and the +Washington Post made small mention of it, but most media outlets reported +merely on a congenial salute and farewell celebration of the Senate's oldest +and longestserving member. Things were different in the blogosphere. At first +liberal blogs, and within three days conservative bloggers as well, began to +excavate past racist statements by Lott, and to beat the drums calling for his +censure or removal as Senate leader. Within about a week, the story surfaced in +the mainstream media, became a major embarrassment, and led to Lott's +resignation as Senate majority leader about a week later. A careful case study +of this event leaves it unclear why the mainstream media initially ignored the +story.~{ Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Case Program: " `Big Media' +Meets `Bloggers': Coverage of Trent Lott's Remarks at Strom Thurmond's Birthday +Party," http:// +www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/Research_Publications/Case_Studies/1731_0.pdf.}~ +It may have been that the largely social event drew the wrong sort of +reporters. It may have been that reporters and editors who depend on major +Washington, D.C., players were reluctant to challenge Lott. Perhaps they +thought it rude to emphasize this indiscretion, or too upsetting to us all to +think of just how close to the surface thoughts that we deem abominable can +lurk. There is little disagreement that the day after the party, the story was +picked up and discussed by Marshall on TalkingPoints, as well as by another +liberal blogger, Atrios, who apparently got it from a post on Slate's +"Chatterbox," which picked it up from ABC News's own The Note, a news summary +made available on the television network's Web site. While the mass media +largely ignored the story, and the two or three mainstream reporters who tried +to write about it were getting little traction, bloggers were collecting more +stories about prior instances where Lott's actions tended to suggest support +for racist causes. Marshall, for example, found that Lott had filed a 1981 +amicus curiae brief in support of Bob Jones University's effort to retain its +tax-exempt status. The U.S. government had rescinded ,{[pg 264]}, that status +because the university practiced racial discrimination--such as prohibiting +interracial dating. By Monday of the following week, four days after the +remarks, conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit, Andrew +Sullivan, and others were calling for Lott's resignation. It is possible that, +absent the blogosphere, the story would still have flared up. There were two or +so mainstream reporters still looking into the story. Jesse Jackson had come +out within four days of the comment and said Lott should resign as majority +leader. Eventually, when the mass media did enter the fray, its coverage +clearly dominated the public agenda and its reporters uncovered materials that +helped speed Lott's exit. However, given the short news cycle, the lack of +initial interest by the media, and the large time lag between the event itself +and when the media actually took the subject up, it seems likely that without +the intervention of the blogosphere, the story would have died. What happened +instead is that the cluster of political blogs--starting on the Left but then +moving across the Left-Right divide--took up the subject, investigated, wrote +opinions, collected links and public interest, and eventually captured enough +attention to make the comments a matter of public importance. Free from the +need to appear neutral and not to offend readers, and free from the need to +keep close working relationships with news subjects, bloggers were able to +identify something that grated on their sensibilities, talk about it, dig +deeper, and eventually generate a substantial intervention into the public +sphere. That intervention still had to pass through the mass media, for we +still live in a communications environment heavily based on those media. +However, the new source of insight, debate, and eventual condensation of +effective public opinion came from within the networked information +environment. +={ Gilmore, Dan ; + Atrios (blogger Duncan Black) ; + Lott, Trent ; + Marshall, Josh ; + Thurmond, Strom ; + Jackson, Jesse ; + Reynolds, Glenn ; + blogs : + watchdog functionality +} + +The point is not to respond to the argument with a litany of anecdotes. The +point is that the argument about the commercial media's role as watchdog turns +out to be a familiar argument--it is the same argument that was made about +software and supercomputers, encyclopedias and immersive entertainment scripts. +The answer, too, is by now familiar. Just as the World Wide Web can offer a +platform for the emergence of an enormous and effective almanac, just as free +software can produce excellent software and peer production can produce a good +encyclopedia, so too can peer production produce the public watchdog function. +In doing so, clearly the unorganized collection of Internet users lacks some of +the basic tools of the mass media: dedicated full-time reporters; contacts with +politicians who need media to survive, and therefore cannot always afford to +stonewall questions; or ,{[pg 265]}, public visibility and credibility to back +their assertions. However, networkbased peer production also avoids the +inherent conflicts between investigative reporting and the bottom line--its +cost, its risk of litigation, its risk of withdrawal of advertising from +alienated corporate subjects, and its risk of alienating readers. Building on +the wide variation and diversity of knowledge, time, availability, insight, and +experience, as well as the vast communications and information resources on +hand for almost anyone in advanced economies, we are seeing that the watchdog +function too is being peer produced in the networked information economy. + +Note that while my focus in this chapter has been mostly the organization of +public discourse, both the Sinclair and the Diebold case studies also identify +characteristics of distributed political action. We see collective action +emerging from the convergence of independent individual actions, with no +hierarchical control like that of a political party or an organized campaign. +There may be some coordination and condensation points--like BoycottSBG.com or +blackboxvoting.org. Like other integration platforms in peer-production +systems, these condensation points provide a critical function. They do not, +however, control the process. One manifestation of distributed coordination for +political action is something Howard Rheingold has called "smart mobs"--large +collections of individuals who are able to coordinate real-world action through +widely distributed information and communications technology. He tells of the +"People Power II" revolution in Manila in 2001, where demonstrations to oust +then president Estrada were coordinated spontaneously through extensive text +messaging.~{ Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, The Next Social Revolution +(Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002). }~ Few images in the early +twentyfirst century can convey this phenomenon more vividly than the +demonstrations around the world on February 15, 2003. Between six and ten +million protesters were reported to have gone to the streets of major cities in +about sixty countries in opposition to the American-led invasion of Iraq. There +had been no major media campaign leading up to the demonstrations-- though +there was much media attention to them later. There had been no organizing +committee. Instead, there was a network of roughly concordant actions, none +controlling the other, all loosely discussing what ought to be done and when. +MoveOn.org in the United States provides an example of a coordination platform +for a network of politically mobilized activities. It builds on e-mail and +Web-based media to communicate opportunities for political action to those +likely to be willing and able to take it. Radically distributed, network-based +solutions to the problems of political mobilization rely on the same +characteristics as networked information production ,{[pg 266]}, more +generally: extensive communications leading to concordant and cooperative +patterns of behavior without the introduction of hierarchy or the interposition +of payment. +={ Rheingold, Howard } + +2~ USING NETWORKED COMMUNICATION TO WORK AROUND AUTHORITARIAN CONTROL +={ authoritarian control : + working around +7 ; + blocked access : + authoritarian control +7 ; + communication : + authoritarian control, working around +7 ; + government : + authoritarian control +7 | working around authorities +7 ; + Internet : + authoritarian control over +7 ; + monopoly : + authoritarian control +7 ; + networked public sphere : + authoritarian control, working around +7 ; + policy : + authoritarian control +7 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + authoritarian control, working around +7 ; + public sphere : + authoritarian control, working around +7 +} + +The Internet and the networked public sphere offer a different set of potential +benefits, and suffer a different set of threats, as a platform for liberation +in authoritarian countries. State-controlled mass-media models are highly +conducive to authoritarian control. Because they usually rely on a small number +of technical and organizational points of control, mass media offer a +relatively easy target for capture and control by governments. Successful +control of such universally visible media then becomes an important tool of +information manipulation, which, in turn, eases the problem of controlling the +population. Not surprisingly, capture of the national television and radio +stations is invariably an early target of coups and revolutions. The highly +distributed networked architecture of the Internet makes it harder to control +communications in this way. + +The case of Radio B92 in Yugoslavia offers an example. B92 was founded in 1989, +as an independent radio station. Over the course of the 1990s, it developed a +significant independent newsroom broadcast over the station itself, and +syndicated through thirty affiliated independent stations. B92 was banned twice +after the NATO bombing of Belgrade, in an effort by the Milosevic regime to +control information about the war. In each case, however, the station continued +to produce programming, and distributed it over the Internet from a server +based in Amsterdam. The point is a simple one. Shutting down a broadcast +station is simple. There is one transmitter with one antenna, and police can +find and hold it. It is much harder to shut down all connections from all +reporters to a server and from the server back into the country wherever a +computer exists. +={ B92 radio ; + Radio B92 +} + +This is not to say that the Internet will of necessity in the long term lead +all authoritarian regimes to collapse. One option open to such regimes is +simply to resist Internet use. In 2003, Burma, or Myanmar, had 28,000 Internet +users out of a population of more than 42 million, or one in fifteen hundred, +as compared, for example, to 6 million out of 65 million in neighboring +Thailand, or roughly one in eleven. Most countries are not, however, willing to +forgo the benefits of connectivity to maintain their control. Iran's ,{[pg +267]}, population of 69 million includes 4.3 million Internet users, while +China has about 80 million users, second only to the United States in absolute +terms, out of a population of 1.3 billion. That is, both China and Iran have a +density of Internet users of about one in sixteen.~{ Data taken from CIA World +Fact Book (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2004). }~ Burma's +negligible level of Internet availability is a compound effect of low gross +domestic product (GDP) per capita and government policies. Some countries with +similar GDP levels still have levels of Internet users in the population that +are two orders of magnitude higher: Cameroon (1 Internet user for every 27 +residents), Moldova (1 in 30), and Mongolia (1 in 55). Even very large poor +countries have several times more users per population than Myanmar: like +Pakistan (1 in 100), Mauritania (1 in 300), and Bangladesh (1 in 580). Lawrence +Solum and Minn Chung outline how Myanmar achieves its high degree of control +and low degree of use.~{ Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung, "The Layers Principle: +Internet Architecture and the Law" (working paper no. 55, University of San +Diego School of Law, Public Law and Legal Theory, June 2003). }~ Myanmar has +only one Internet service provider (ISP), owned by the government. The +government must authorize anyone who wants to use the Internet or create a Web +page within the country. Some of the licensees, like foreign businesses, are +apparently permitted and enabled only to send e-mail, while using the Web is +limited to security officials who monitor it. With this level of draconian +regulation, Myanmar can avoid the liberating effects of the Internet +altogether, at the cost of losing all its economic benefits. Few regimes are +willing to pay that price. +={ Solum, Lawrence +1 ; + Chung, Minn +1 +} + +Introducing Internet communications into a society does not, however, +immediately and automatically mean that an open, liberal public sphere emerges. +The Internet is technically harder to control than mass media. It increases the +cost and decreases the efficacy of information control. However, a regime +willing and able to spend enough money and engineering power, and to limit its +population's access to the Internet sufficiently, can have substantial success +in controlling the flow of information into and out of its country. Solum and +Chung describe in detail one of the most extensive and successful of these +efforts, the one that has been conducted by China-- home to the second-largest +population of Internet users in the world, whose policies controlled use of the +Internet by two out of every fifteen Internet users in the world in 2003. In +China, the government holds a monopoly over all Internet connections going into +and out of the country. It either provides or licenses the four national +backbones that carry traffic throughout China and connect it to the global +network. ISPs that hang off these backbones are licensed, and must provide +information about the location and workings of their facilities, as well as +comply with a code of conduct. Individual ,{[pg 268]}, users must register and +provide information about their machines, and the many Internet cafes are +required to install filtering software that will filter out subversive sites. +There have been crackdowns on Internet cafes to enforce these requirements. +This set of regulations has replicated one aspect of the mass-medium model for +the Internet--it has created a potential point of concentration or +centralization of information flow that would make it easier to control +Internet use. The highly distributed production capabilities of the networked +information economy, however, as opposed merely to the distributed carriage +capability of the Internet, mean that more must be done at this bottleneck to +squelch the flow of information and opinion than would have to be done with +mass media. That "more" in China has consisted of an effort to employ automatic +filters--some at the level of the cybercafe or the local ISP, some at the level +of the national backbone networks. The variability of these loci and their +effects is reflected in partial efficacy and variable performance for these +mechanisms. The most extensive study of the efficacy of these strategies for +controlling information flows over the Internet to China was conducted by +Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman. From servers within China, they sampled +about two hundred thousand Web sites and found that about fifty thousand were +unavailable at least once, and close to nineteen thousand were unavailable on +two distinct occasions. The blocking patterns seemed to follow mass-media +logic--BBC News was consistently unavailable, as CNN and other major news sites +often were; the U.S. court system official site was unavailable. However, Web +sites that provided similar information--like those that offered access to all +court cases but were outside the official system--were available. The core Web +sites of human rights organizations or of Taiwan and Tibet-related +organizations were blocked, and about sixty of the top one hundred results for +"Tibet" on Google were blocked. What is also apparent from their study, +however, and confirmed by Amnesty International's reports on Internet +censorship in China, is that while censorship is significant, it is only +partially effective.~{ Amnesty International, People's Republic of China, State +Control of the Internet in China (2002). }~ The Amnesty report noted that +Chinese users were able to use a variety of techniques to avoid the filtering, +such as the use of proxy servers, but even Zittrain and Edelman, apparently +testing for filtering as experienced by unsophisticated or compliant Internet +users in China, could access many sites that would, on their face, seem +potentially destabilizing. +={ Edelman, Ben ; + Zittrain, Jonathan ; + censorship +2 ; + centralization of communication : + authoritarian filtering +1 +} + +This level of censorship may indeed be effective enough for a government +negotiating economic and trade expansion with political stability and control. +It suggests, however, limits of the ability of even a highly dedicated ,{[pg +269]}, government to control the capacity of Internet communications to route +around censorship and to make it much easier for determined users to find +information they care about, and to disseminate their own information to +others. Iran's experience, with a similar level of Internet penetration, +emphasizes the difficulty of maintaining control of Internet publication.~{ A +synthesis of news-based accounts is Babak Rahimi, "Cyberdissent: The Internet +in Revolutionary Iran," Middle East Review of International Affairs 7, no. 3 +(2003). }~ Iran's network emerged from 1993 onward from the university system, +quite rapidly complemented by commercial ISPs. Because deployment and use of +the Internet preceded its regulation by the government, its architecture is +less amenable to centralized filtering and control than China's. Internet +access through university accounts and cybercafes appears to be substantial, +and until the past three or four years, had operated free of the crackdowns and +prison terms suffered by opposition print publications and reporters. The +conservative branches of the regime seem to have taken a greater interest in +suppressing Internet communications since the publication of imprisoned +Ayatollah Montazeri's critique of the foundations of the Islamic state on the +Web in December 2000. While the original Web site, montazeri.com, seems to have +been eliminated, the site persists as montazeri.ws, using a Western Samoan +domain name, as do a number of other Iranian publications. There are now dozens +of chat rooms, blogs, and Web sites, and e-mail also seems to be playing an +increasing role in the education and organization of an opposition. While the +conservative branches of the Iranian state have been clamping down on these +forms, and some bloggers and Web site operators have found themselves subject +to the same mistreatment as journalists, the efficacy of these efforts to shut +down opposition seems to be limited and uneven. +={ chat rooms +1 } + +Media other than static Web sites present substantially deeper problems for +regimes like those of China and Iran. Scanning the text of e-mail messages of +millions of users who can encrypt their communications with widely available +tools creates a much more complex problem. Ephemeral media like chat rooms and +writable Web tools allow the content of an Internet communication or Web site +to be changed easily and dynamically, so that blocking sites becomes harder, +while coordinating moves to new sites to route around blocking becomes easier. +At one degree of complexity deeper, the widely distributed architecture of the +Net also allows users to build censorship-resistant networks by pooling their +own resources. The pioneering example of this approach is Freenet, initially +developed in 1999-2000 by Ian Clarke, an Irish programmer fresh out of a degree +in computer science and artificial intelligence at Edinburgh University. Now a +broader free-software project, Freenet ,{[pg 270]}, is a peer-to-peer +application specifically designed to be censorship resistant. Unlike the more +famous peer-to-peer network developed at the time--Napster--Freenet was not +intended to store music files on the hard drives of users. Instead, it stores +bits and pieces of publications, and then uses sophisticated algorithms to +deliver the documents to whoever seeks them, in encrypted form. This design +trades off easy availability for a series of security measures that prevent +even the owners of the hard drives on which the data resides--or government +agents that search their computers--from knowing what is on their hard drive or +from controlling it. As a practical matter, if someone in a country that +prohibits certain content but enables Internet connections wants to publish +content--say, a Web site or blog--safely, they can inject it into the Freenet +system. The content will be encrypted and divided into little bits and pieces +that are stored in many different hard drives of participants in the network. +No single computer will have all the information, and shutting down any given +computer will not make the information unavailable. It will continue to be +accessible to anyone running the Freenet client. Freenet indeed appears to be +used in China, although the precise scope is hard to determine, as the network +is intended to mask the identity and location of both readers and publishers in +this system. The point to focus on is not the specifics of Freenet, but the +feasibility of constructing user-based censorship-resistant storage and +retrieval systems that would be practically impossible for a national +censorship system to identify and block subversive content. +={ Clarke, Ian ; + Freenet +} + +To conclude, in authoritarian countries, the introduction of Internet +communications makes it harder and more costly for governments to control the +public sphere. If these governments are willing to forgo the benefits of +Internet connectivity, they can avoid this problem. If they are not, they find +themselves with less control over the public sphere. There are, obviously, +other means of more direct repression. However, control over the mass media +was, throughout most of the twentieth century, a core tool of repressive +governments. It allowed them to manipulate what the masses of their populations +knew and believed, and thus limited the portion of the population that the +government needed to physically repress to a small and often geographically +localized group. The efficacy of these techniques of repression is blunted by +adoption of the Internet and the emergence of a networked information economy. +Low-cost communications, distributed technical and organizational structure, +and ubiquitous presence of dynamic authorship ,{[pg 271]}, tools make control +over the public sphere difficult, and practically never perfect. + +2~ TOWARD A NETWORKED PUBLIC SPHERE +={ future : + public sphere +3 ; + networked public sphere : + future of +3 ; + political freedom, public sphere and : + future of +3 ; + public sphere : + future of +3 +} + +The first generation of statements that the Internet democratizes was correct +but imprecise. The Internet does restructure public discourse in ways that give +individuals a greater say in their governance than the mass media made +possible. The Internet does provide avenues of discourse around the bottlenecks +of older media, whether these are held by authoritarian governments or by media +owners. But the mechanisms for this change are more complex than those +articulated in the past. And these more complex mechanisms respond to the basic +critiques that have been raised against the notion that the Internet enhances +democracy. + +Part of what has changed with the Internet is technical infrastructure. Network +communications do not offer themselves up as easily for single points of +control as did the mass media. While it is possible for authoritarian regimes +to try to retain bottlenecks in the Internet, the cost is higher and the +efficacy lower than in mass-media-dominated systems. While this does not mean +that introduction of the Internet will automatically result in global +democratization, it does make the work of authoritarian regimes harder. In +liberal democracies, the primary effect of the Internet runs through the +emergence of the networked information economy. We are seeing the emergence to +much greater significance of nonmarket, individual, and cooperative +peerproduction efforts to produce universal intake of observations and opinions +about the state of the world and what might and ought to be done about it. We +are seeing the emergence of filtering, accreditation, and synthesis mechanisms +as part of network behavior. These rely on clustering of communities of +interest and association and highlighting of certain sites, but offer +tremendous redundancy of paths for expression and accreditation. These +practices leave no single point of failure for discourse: no single point where +observations can be squelched or attention commanded--by fiat or with the +application of money. Because of these emerging systems, the networked +information economy is solving the information overload and discourse +fragmentation concerns without reintroducing the distortions of the mass-media +model. Peer production, both long-term and organized, as in the case of +Slashdot, and ad hoc and dynamically formed, as in the case of blogging or +,{[pg 272]}, the Sinclair or Diebold cases, is providing some of the most +important functionalities of the media. These efforts provide a watchdog, a +source of salient observations regarding matters of public concern, and a +platform for discussing the alternatives open to a polity. + +In the networked information environment, everyone is free to observe, report, +question, and debate, not only in principle, but in actual capability. They can +do this, if not through their own widely read blog, then through a cycle of +mailing lists, collective Web-based media like Slashdot, comments on blogs, or +even merely through e-mails to friends who, in turn, have meaningful visibility +in a smallish-scale cluster of sites or lists. We are witnessing a fundamental +change in how individuals can interact with their democracy and experience +their role as citizens. Ideal citizens need not be seen purely as trying to +inform themselves about what others have found, so that they can vote +intelligently. They need not be limited to reading the opinions of opinion +makers and judging them in private conversations. They are no longer +constrained to occupy the role of mere readers, viewers, and listeners. They +can be, instead, participants in a conversation. Practices that begin to take +advantage of these new capabilities shift the locus of content creation from +the few professional journalists trolling society for issues and observations, +to the people who make up that society. They begin to free the public agenda +setting from dependence on the judgments of managers, whose job it is to assure +that the maximum number of readers, viewers, and listeners are sold in the +market for eyeballs. The agenda thus can be rooted in the life and experience +of individual participants in society--in their observations, experiences, and +obsessions. The network allows all citizens to change their relationship to the +public sphere. They no longer need be consumers and passive spectators. They +can become creators and primary subjects. It is in this sense that the Internet +democratizes. ,{[pg 273]}, + +1~8 Chapter 8 - Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical +={ culture +51 } + +poem{ + +Gone with the Wind + +There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. +Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the +last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and +of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream +remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind. + +--MGM (1939) film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's novel (1936) + +}poem + +poem{ + +Strange Fruit + +Southern trees bear strange fruit, +Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, +Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, +Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. + +Pastoral scene of the gallant south, +The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, +Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, +Then the sudden smell of burning flesh. + +Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck, +For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, +For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, +Here is a strange and bitter crop. + +--Billie Holiday (1939) + from lyrics by Abel Meeropol (1937) + +}poem +={ Holiday, Billie } + +% issue with poem, index tag is placed at end not beginning + +% ,{[pg 274]}, + +In 1939, Gone with the Wind reaped seven Oscars, while Billie Holiday's song +reached number 16 on the charts, even though Columbia Records refused to +release it: Holiday had to record it with a small company that was run out of a +storefront in midtown Manhattan. On the eve of the second reconstruction era, +which was to overhaul the legal framework of race relations over the two +decades beginning with the desegregation of the armed forces in the late 1940s +and culminating with the civil rights acts passed between 1964-1968, the two +sides of the debate over desegregation and the legacy of slavery were minting +new icons through which to express their most basic beliefs about the South and +its peculiar institutions. As the following three decades unfolded and the +South was gradually forced to change its ways, the cultural domain continued to +work out the meaning of race relations in the United States and the history of +slavery. The actual slogging of regulation of discrimination, implementation of +desegregation and later affirmative action, and the more local politics of +hiring and firing were punctuated throughout this period by salient iconic +retellings of the stories of race relations in the United States, from Guess +Who's Coming to Dinner? to Roots. The point of this chapter, however, is not to +discuss race relations, but to understand culture and cultural production in +terms of political theory. Gone with the Wind and Strange Fruit or Guess Who's +Coming to Dinner? offer us intuitively accessible instances of a much broader +and more basic characteristic of human understanding and social relations. +Culture, shared meaning, and symbols are how we construct our views of life +across a wide range of domains--personal, political, and social. How culture is +produced is therefore an essential ingredient in structuring how freedom and +justice are perceived, conceived, and pursued. In the twentieth century, +Hollywood and the recording industry came to play a very large role in this +domain. The networked information economy now seems poised to attenuate that +role in favor of a more participatory and transparent cultural production +system. + +Cultural freedom occupies a position that relates to both political freedom and +individual autonomy, but is synonymous with neither. The root of its importance +is that none of us exist outside of culture. As individuals and as political +actors, we understand the world we occupy, evaluate it, and act in it from +within a set of understandings and frames of meaning and reference that we +share with others. What institutions and decisions are considered "legitimate" +and worthy of compliance or participation; what courses of ,{[pg 275]}, action +are attractive; what forms of interaction with others are considered +appropriate--these are all understandings negotiated from within a set of +shared frames of meaning. How those frames of meaning are shaped and by whom +become central components of the structure of freedom for those individuals and +societies that inhabit it and are inhabited by it. They define the public +sphere in a much broader sense than we considered in the prior chapters. + +The networked information economy makes it possible to reshape both the "who" +and the "how" of cultural production relative to cultural production in the +twentieth century. It adds to the centralized, market-oriented production +system a new framework of radically decentralized individual and cooperative +nonmarket production. It thereby affects the ability of individuals and groups +to participate in the production of the cultural tools and frameworks of human +understanding and discourse. It affects the way we, as individuals and members +of social and political clusters, interact with culture, and through it with +each other. It makes culture more transparent to its inhabitants. It makes the +process of cultural production more participatory, in the sense that more of +those who live within a culture can actively participate in its creation. We +are seeing the possibility of an emergence of a new popular culture, produced +on the folk-culture model and inhabited actively, rather than passively +consumed by the masses. Through these twin characteristics--transparency and +participation--the networked information economy also creates greater space for +critical evaluation of cultural materials and tools. The practice of producing +culture makes us all more sophisticated readers, viewers, and listeners, as +well as more engaged makers. + +Throughout the twentieth century, the making of widely shared images and +symbols was a concentrated practice that went through the filters of Hollywood +and the recording industry. The radically declining costs of manipulating video +and still images, audio, and text have, however, made culturally embedded +criticism and broad participation in the making of meaning much more feasible +than in the past. Anyone with a personal computer can cut and mix files, make +their own files, and publish them to a global audience. This is not to say that +cultural bricolage, playfulness, and criticism did not exist before. One can go +to the avant-garde movement, but equally well to African-Brazilian culture or +to Our Lady of Guadalupe to find them. Even with regard to television, that +most passive of electronic media, John Fiske argued under the rubric of +"semiotic democracy" that viewers engage ,{[pg 276]}, in creative play and +meaning making around the TV shows they watch. However, the technical +characteristics of digital information technology, the economics of networked +information production, and the social practices of networked discourse +qualitatively change the role individuals can play in cultural production. +={ Fiske, John } + +The practical capacity individuals and noncommercial actors have to use and +manipulate cultural artifacts today, playfully or critically, far outstrips +anything possible in television, film, or recorded music, as these were +organized throughout the twentieth century. The diversity of cultural moves and +statements that results from these new opportunities for creativity vastly +increases the range of cultural elements accessible to any individual. Our +ability, therefore, to navigate the cultural environment and make it our own, +both through creation and through active selection and attention, has increased +to the point of making a qualitative difference. In the academic law +literature, Niva Elkin Koren wrote early about the potential democratization of +"meaning making processes," William Fisher about "semiotic democracy," and Jack +Balkin about a "democratic culture." Lessig has explored the generative +capacity of the freedom to create culture, its contribution to creativity +itself. These efforts revolve around the idea that there is something +normatively attractive, from the perspective of "democracy" as a liberal value, +about the fact that anyone, using widely available equipment, can take from the +existing cultural universe more or less whatever they want, cut it, paste it, +mix it, and make it their own--equally well expressing their adoration as their +disgust, their embrace of certain images as their rejection of them. +={ Balkin, Jack ; + Fisher, William (Terry) ; + Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) +} + +Building on this work, this chapter seeks to do three things: First, I claim +that the modalities of cultural production and exchange are a proper subject +for normative evaluation within a broad range of liberal political theory. +Culture is a social-psychological-cognitive fact of human existence. Ignoring +it, as rights-based and utilitarian versions of liberalism tend to do, disables +political theory from commenting on central characteristics of a society and +its institutional frameworks. Analyzing the attractiveness of any given +political institutional system without considering how it affects cultural +production, and through it the production of the basic frames of meaning +through which individual and collective self-determination functions, leaves a +large hole in our analysis. Liberal political theory needs a theory of culture +and agency that is viscous enough to matter normatively, but loose enough to +give its core foci--the individual and the political system--room to be +effective ,{[pg 277]}, independently, not as a mere expression or extension of +culture. Second, I argue that cultural production in the form of the networked +information economy offers individuals a greater participatory role in making +the culture they occupy, and makes this culture more transparent to its +inhabitants. This descriptive part occupies much of the chapter. Third, I +suggest the relatively straightforward conclusion of the prior two +observations. From the perspective of liberal political theory, the kind of +open, participatory, transparent folk culture that is emerging in the networked +environment is normatively more attractive than was the industrial cultural +production system typified by Hollywood and the recording industry. + +A nine-year-old girl searching Google for Barbie will quite quickly find links +to AdiosBarbie.com, to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), and to other, +similarly critical sites interspersed among those dedicated to selling and +playing with the doll. The contested nature of the doll becomes publicly and +everywhere apparent, liberated from the confines of feminist-criticism symposia +and undergraduate courses. This simple Web search represents both of the core +contributions of the networked information economy. First, from the perspective +of the searching girl, it represents a new transparency of cultural symbols. +Second, from the perspective of the participants in AdiosBarbie or the BLO, the +girl's use of their site completes their own quest to participate in making the +cultural meaning of Barbie. The networked information environment provides an +outlet for contrary expression and a medium for shaking what we accept as +cultural baseline assumptions. Its radically decentralized production modes +provide greater freedom to participate effectively in defining the cultural +symbols of our day. These characteristics make the networked environment +attractive from the perspectives of both personal freedom of expression and an +engaged and self-aware political discourse. +={ Barbie (doll), culture of } + +We cannot, however, take for granted that the technological capacity to +participate in the cultural conversation, to mix and make our own, will +translate into the freedom to do so. The practices of cultural and +countercultural creation are at the very core of the battle over the +institutional ecology of the digital environment. The tension is perhaps not +new or unique to the Internet, but its salience is now greater. The makers of +the 1970s comic strip Air Pirates already found their comics confiscated when +they portrayed Mickey and Minnie and Donald and Daisy in various compromising +countercultural postures. Now, the ever-increasing scope and expanse ,{[pg +278]}, of copyright law and associated regulatory mechanisms, on the one hand, +and of individual and collective nonmarket creativity, on the other hand, have +heightened the conflict between cultural freedom and the regulatory framework +on which the industrial cultural production system depends. As Lessig, Jessica +Litman, and Siva Vaidhyanathan have each portrayed elegantly and in detail, the +copyright industries have on many dimensions persuaded both Congress and courts +that individual, nonmarket creativity using the cultural outputs of the +industrial information economy is to be prohibited. As we stand today, freedom +to play with the cultural environment is nonetheless preserved in the teeth of +the legal constraints, because of the high costs of enforcement, on the one +hand, and the ubiquity and low cost of the means to engage in creative cultural +bricolage, on the other hand. These social, institutional, and technical facts +still leave us with quite a bit of unauthorized creative expression. These +facts, however, are contingent and fragile. Chapter 11 outlines in some detail +the long trend toward the creation of ever-stronger legal regulation of +cultural production, and in particular, the enclosure movement that began in +the 1970s and gained steam in the mid-1990s. A series of seemingly discrete +regulatory moves threatens the emerging networked folk culture. Ranging from +judicial interpretations of copyright law to efforts to regulate the hardware +and software of the networked environment, we are seeing a series of efforts to +restrict nonmarket use of twentieth-century cultural materials in order to +preserve the business models of Hollywood and the recording industry. These +regulatory efforts threaten the freedom to participate in twenty-first-century +cultural production, because current creation requires taking and mixing the +twentieth-century cultural materials that make up who we are as culturally +embedded beings. Here, however, I focus on explaining how cultural +participation maps onto the project of liberal political theory, and why the +emerging cultural practices should be seen as attractive within that normative +framework. I leave development of the policy implications to part III. +={ Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) ; + Litman, Jessica ; + Vaidhyanathan, Silva ; + copyright issues ; + proprietary rights : + cultural environment and +} + +2~ CULTURAL FREEDOM IN LIBERAL POLITICAL THEORY +={ liberal political theory : + cultural freedom +12 +} + +Utilitarian and rights-based liberal political theories have an awkward +relationship to culture. Both major strains of liberal theory make a certain +set of assumptions about the autonomous individuals with which they are +concerned. Individuals are assumed to be rational and knowledgeable, at least +,{[pg 279]}, about what is good for them. They are conceived of as possessing a +capacity for reason and a set of preferences prior to engagement with others. +Political theory then proceeds to concern itself with political structures that +respect the autonomy of individuals with such characteristics. In the political +domain, this conception of the individual is easiest to see in pluralist +theories, which require institutions for collective decision making that clear +what are treated as already-formed preferences of individuals or voluntary +groupings. + +Culture represents a mysterious category for these types of liberal political +theories. It is difficult to specify how it functions in terms readily amenable +to a conception of individuals whose rationality and preferences for their own +good are treated as though they preexist and are independent of society. A +concept of culture requires some commonly held meaning among these individuals. +Even the simplest intuitive conception of what culture might mean would treat +this common frame of meaning as the result of social processes that preexist +any individual, and partially structure what it is that individuals bring to +the table as they negotiate their lives together, in society or in a polity. +Inhabiting a culture is a precondition to any interpretation of what is at +stake in any communicative exchange among individuals. A partly subconscious, +lifelong dynamic social process of becoming and changing as a cultural being is +difficult to fold into a collective decision-making model that focuses on +designing a discursive platform for individuated discrete participants who are +the bearers of political will. It is easier to model respect for an +individual's will when one adopts a view of that will as independent, stable, +and purely internally generated. It is harder to do so when one conceives of +that individual will as already in some unspecified degree rooted in exchange +with others about what an individual is to value and prefer. + +Culture has, of course, been incorporated into political theory as a central +part of the critique of liberalism. The politics of culture have been a staple +of critical theory since Marx first wrote that "Religion . . . is the opium of +the people" and that "to call on them to give up their illusions about their +condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions."~{ +Karl Marx, "Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's +Philosophy of Right," Deutsch-Franzosicher Jahrbucher (1844). }~ The twentieth +century saw a wide array of critique, from cultural Marxism to +poststructuralism and postmodernism. However, much of mainstream liberal +political theory has chosen to ignore, rather than respond and adapt to, these +critiques. In Political Liberalism, for example, Rawls acknowledges "the fact" +of reasonable pluralism--of groups that persistently and reasonably hold +competing comprehensive doctrines--and aims for political pluralism as a mode +of managing the irreconcilable differences. This leaves the formation ,{[pg +280]}, of the comprehensive doctrine and the systems of belief within which it +is rendered "reasonable" a black box to liberal theory. This may be an adequate +strategy for analyzing the structure of formal political institutions at the +broadest level of abstraction. However, it disables liberal political theory +from dealing with more fine-grained questions of policy that act within the +black box. +={ Marx, Karl ; + Rawls, John ; + culture : + freedom of +9 ; + economics in liberal political theory : + cultural freedom +9 ; + freedom : + cultural +9 +} + +As a practical matter, treating culture as a black box disables a political +theory as a mechanism for diagnosing the actual conditions of life in a society +in terms of its own political values. It does so in precisely the same way that +a formal conception of autonomy disables those who hold it from diagnosing the +conditions of autonomy in practical life. Imagine for a moment that we had +received a revelation that a crude version of Antonio Gramsci's hegemony theory +was perfectly correct as a matter of descriptive sociology. Ruling classes do, +in fact, consciously and successfully manipulate the culture in order to make +the oppressed classes compliant. It would be difficult, then, to continue to +justify holding a position about political institutions, or autonomy, that +treated the question of how culture, generally, or even the narrow subset of +reasonably held comprehensive doctrines like religion, are made, as a black +box. It would be difficult to defend respect for autonomous choices as respect +for an individual's will, if an objective observer could point to a social +process, external to the individual and acting upon him or her, as the cause of +the individual holding that will. It would be difficult to focus one's +political design imperatives on public processes that allow people to express +their beliefs and preferences, argue about them, and ultimately vote on them, +if it is descriptively correct that those beliefs and preferences are +themselves the product of manipulation of some groups by others. +={ Gramsci, Antonio +1 ; + autonomy : + culture and +2 ; + individual autonomy : + culture and +2 +} + +The point is not, of course, that Gramsci was descriptively right or that any +of the broad range of critical theories of culture is correct as a descriptive +matter. It is that liberal theories that ignore culture are rendered incapable +of answering some questions that arise in the real world and have real +implications for individuals and polities. There is a range of sociological, +psychological, or linguistic descriptions that could characterize the culture +of a society as more or less in accord with the concern of liberalism with +individual and collective self-determination. Some such descriptive theory of +culture can provide us with enough purchase on the role of culture to diagnose +the attractiveness of a cultural production system from a politicaltheory +perspective. It does not require that liberal theory abandon individuals ,{[pg +281]}, as the bearers of the claims of political morality. It does not require +that liberal political theory refocus on culture as opposed to formal political +institutions. It does require, however, that liberal theory at least be able to +diagnose different conditions in the practical cultural life of a society as +more or less attractive from the perspective of liberal political theory. + +The efforts of deliberative liberal theories to account for culture offer the +most obvious source of such an insight. These political theories have worked to +develop a conception of culture and its relationship to liberalism precisely +because at a minimum, they require mutual intelligibility across individuals, +which cannot adequately be explained without some conception of culture. In +Jurgen Habermas's work, culture plays the role of a basis for mutual +intelligibility. As the basis for "interpersonal intelligibility," we see +culture playing such a role in the work of Bruce Ackerman, who speaks of +acculturation as the necessary condition to liberal dialogue. "Cultural +coherence" is something he sees children requiring as a precondition to +becoming liberal citizens: it allows them to "Talk" and defend their claims in +terms without which there can be no liberal conversation.~{ Bruce A. Ackerman, +Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale +University Press, 1980), 333-335, 141-146. }~ Michael Walzer argues that, "in +matters of morality, argument is simply the appeal to common meanings."~{ +Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New +York: Basic Books, 1983), 29. }~ Will Kymlicka claims that for individual +autonomy, "freedom involves making choices amongst various options, and our +societal culture not only provides these options, but makes them meaningful to +us." A societal culture, in turn, is a "shared vocabulary of tradition and +convention" that is "embodied in social life[,] institutionally embodied--in +schools, media, economy, government, etc."~{ Will Kymlicka, Multicultural +Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, +1995), 76, 83. }~ Common meanings in all these frameworks must mean more than +simple comprehension of the words of another. It provides a common baseline, +which is not itself at that moment the subject of conversation or inquiry, but +forms the background on which conversation and inquiry take place. Habermas's +definition of lifeworld as "background knowledge," for example, is a crisp +rendering of culture in this role: +={ Habermas, Jurgen +1 ; + Ackerman, Bruce ; + Kymlicka, Will ; + Walzer, Michael +} + +_1 the lifeworld embraces us as an unmediated certainty, out of whose immediate +proximity we live and speak. This all-penetrating, yet latent and unnoticed +presence of the background of communicative action can be described as a more +intense, yet deficient, form of knowledge and ability. To begin with, we make +use of this knowledge involuntarily, without reflectively knowing that we +possess it at all. What enables background knowledge to acquire absolute +certainty in this way, and even augments its epistemic quality from a +subjective standpoint, is precisely the property that robs it of a constitutive +feature of knowledge: we make use of ,{[pg 282]}, such knowledge without the +awareness that it could be false. Insofar as all knowledge is fallible and is +known to be such, background knowledge does not represent knowledge at all, in +a strict sense. As background knowledge, it lacks the possibility of being +challenged, that is, of being raised to the level of criticizable validity +claims. One can do this only by converting it from a resource into a topic of +discussion, at which point--just when it is thematized--it no longer functions +as a lifeworld background but rather disintegrates in its background +modality.~{ Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Contributions to a +Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 22-23. +}~ + +In other words, our understanding of meaning--how we are, how others are, what +ought to be--are in some significant portion unexamined assumptions that we +share with others, and to which we appeal as we engage in communication with +them. This does not mean that culture is a version of false consciousness. It +does not mean that background knowledge cannot be examined rationally or +otherwise undermines the very possibility or coherence of a liberal individual +or polity. It does mean, however, that at any given time, in any given context, +there will be some set of historically contingent beliefs, attitudes, and +social and psychological conditions that will in the normal course remain +unexamined, and form the unexamined foundation of conversation. Culture is +revisable through critical examination, at which point it ceases to be "common +knowledge" and becomes a contested assumption. Nevertheless, some body of +unexamined common knowledge is necessary for us to have an intelligible +conversation that does not constantly go around in circles, challenging the +assumptions on whichever conversational move is made. + +Culture, in this framework, is not destiny. It does not predetermine who we +are, or what we can become or do, nor is it a fixed artifact. It is the product +of a dynamic process of engagement among those who make up a culture. It is a +frame of meaning from within which we must inevitably function and speak to +each other, and whose terms, constraints, and affordances we always negotiate. +There is no point outside of culture from which to do otherwise. An old Yiddish +folktale tells of a naïve rabbi who, for safekeeping, put a ten-ruble note +inside his copy of the Torah, at the page of the commandment, "thou shalt not +steal." That same night, a thief stole into the rabbi's home, took the +ten-ruble note, and left a five-ruble note in its place, at the page of the +commandment, "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." The rabbi and the thief +share a common cultural framework (as do we, across the cultural divide), +through which their various actions can be understood; indeed, without which +their actions would be unintelligible. ,{[pg 283]}, The story offers a theory +of culture, power, and freedom that is more congenial to liberal political +theory than critical theories, and yet provides a conception of the role of +culture in human relations that provides enough friction, or viscosity, to +allow meaning making in culture to play a role in the core concerns of liberal +political theory. Their actions are part strategic and part communicative--that +is to say, to some extent they seek to force an outcome, and to some extent +they seek to engage the other in a conversation in order to achieve a commonly +accepted outcome. The rabbi places the ten-ruble note in the Bible in order to +impress upon the putative thief that he should leave the money where it is. He +cannot exert force on the thief by locking the money up in a safe because he +does not own one. Instead, he calls upon a shared understanding and a claim of +authority within the governed society to persuade the thief. The thief, to the +contrary, could have physically taken the ten-ruble note without replacing it, +but he does not. He engages the rabbi in the same conversation. In part, he +justifies his claim to five rubles. In part, he resists the authority of the +rabbi--not by rejecting the culture that renders the rabbi a privileged expert, +but by playing the game of Talmudic disputation. There is a price, though, for +participating in the conversation. The thief must leave the five-ruble note; he +cannot take the whole amount. + +In this story, culture is open to interpretation and manipulation, but not +infinitely so. Some moves may be valid within a cultural framework and alter +it; others simply will not. The practical force of culture, on the other hand, +is not brute force. It cannot force an outcome, but it can exert a real pull on +the range of behaviors that people will seriously consider undertaking, both as +individuals and as polities. The storyteller relies on the listener's cultural +understanding about the limits of argument, or communicative action. The story +exploits the open texture of culture, and the listener's shared cultural belief +that stealing is an act of force, not a claim of justice; that those who engage +in it do not conceive of themselves as engaged in legitimate defensible acts. +The rabbi was naïve to begin with, but the thief 's disputation is inconsistent +with our sense of the nature of the act of stealing in exactly the same way +that the rabbi's was, but inversely. The thief, the rabbi, and the storyteller +participate in making, and altering, the meaning of the commandments. + +Culture changes through the actions of individuals in the cultural context. +Beliefs, claims, communicative moves that have one meaning before an +intervention ,{[pg 284]}, may begin to shift in their meaning as a result of +other moves, made by other participants in the same cultural milieu. One need +not adopt any given fully fledged meme theory of culture--like Richard +Dawkins's, or Balkin's political adaptation of it as a theory of ideology--to +accept that culture is created through communication among human beings, that +it exerts some force on what they can say to each other and how it will be +received, and that the parameters of a culture as a platform for making meaning +in interaction among human beings change over time with use. How cultural moves +are made, by whom, and with what degree of perfect replication or subtle (and +not so subtle) change, become important elements in determining the rate and +direction of cultural change. These changes, over time, alter the platform +individuals must use to make sense of the world they occupy, and for +participants in conversation to be able to make intelligible communications to +each other about the world they share and where it can and ought to go. Culture +so understood is a social fact about particular sets of human beings in +historical context. As a social fact, it constrains and facilitates the +development, expression, and questioning of beliefs and positions. Whether and +how Darwinism should be taught in public schools, for example, is a live +political question in vast regions of the United States, and is played out as a +debate over whether evolution is "merely a theory." Whether racial segregation +should be practiced in these schools is no longer a viable or even conceivable +political agenda. The difference between Darwinism and the undesirability of +racial segregation is not that one is scientifically true and the other is not. +The difference is that the former is not part of the "common knowledge" of a +large section of society, whereas the latter is, in a way that no longer +requires proof by detailed sociological and psychological studies of the type +cited by the Supreme Court in support of its holding, in /{Brown v. Board of +Education}/, that segregation in education was inherently unequal. +={ Balkin, Jack ; + Dawkins, Richard ; + capabilities of individuals : + cultural shift ; + individual capabilities and action : + cultural shift +} + +If culture is indeed part of how we form a shared sense of unexamined common +knowledge, it plays a significant role in framing the meaning of the state of +the world, the availability and desirability of choices, and the organization +of discourse. The question of how culture is framed (and through it, meaning +and the baseline conversational moves) then becomes germane to a liberal +political theory. Between the Scylla of a fixed culture (with hierarchical, +concentrated power to control its development and interpretation) and the +Charybdis of a perfectly open culture (where nothing ,{[pg 285]}, is fixed and +everything is up for grabs, offering no anchor for meaning and mutual +intelligibility), there is a wide range of practical social and economic +arrangements around the production and use of culture. In evaluating the +attractiveness of various arrangements from the perspective of liberal theory, +we come to an already familiar trade-off, and an already familiar answer. As in +the case of autonomy and political discourse, a greater ability of individuals +to participate in the creation of the cultural meaning of the world they occupy +is attractive from the perspective of the liberal commitments to individual +freedom and democratic participation. As in both areas that we have already +considered, a Babel objection appears: Too much freedom to challenge and remake +our own cultural environment will lead to a lack of shared meaning. As in those +two cases, however, the fears of too active a community of meaning making are +likely exaggerated. Loosening the dominant power of Hollywood and television +over contemporary culture is likely to represent an incremental improvement, +from the perspective of liberal political commitments. It will lead to a +greater transparency of culture, and therefore a greater capacity for critical +reflection, and it will provide more opportunities for participating in the +creation of culture, for interpolating individual glosses on it, and for +creating shared variations on common themes. + +2~ THE TRANSPARENCY OF INTERNET CULTURE +={ culture : + transparency of +12 ; + Internet : + transparency of culture +12 ; + networked public sphere : + transparency of Internet culture +12 ; + public sphere : + transparency of Internet culture +12 ; + transparency of Internet culture +12 +} + +If you run a search for "Barbie" on three separate search engines--Google, +Overture, and Yahoo!--you will get quite different results. Table 8.1 lists +these results in the order in which they appear on each search engine. Overture +is a search engine that sells placement to the parties who are being searched. +Hits on this search engine are therefore ranked based on whoever paid Overture +the most in order to be placed highly in response to a query. On this list, +none of the top ten results represent anything other than sales-related Barbie +sites. Critical sites begin to appear only around the twentyfifth result, +presumably after all paying clients have been served. Google, as we already +know, uses a radically decentralized mechanism for assigning relevance. It +counts how many sites on the Web have linked to a particular site that has the +search term in it, and ranks the search results by placing a site with a high +number of incoming links above a site with a low number of incoming links. In +effect, each Web site publisher "votes" for a site's ,{[pg 286]}, ,{[pg 287]}, +relevance by linking to it, and Google aggregates these votes and renders them +on their results page as higher ranking. The little girl who searches for +Barbie on Google will encounter a culturally contested figure. The same girl, +searching on Overture, will encounter a commodity toy. In each case, the +underlying efforts of Mattel, the producer of Barbie, have not changed. What is +different is that in an environment where relevance is measured in nonmarket +action--placing a link to a Web site because you deem it relevant to whatever +you are doing with your Web site--as opposed to in dollars, Barbie has become a +more transparent cultural object. It is easier for the little girl to see that +the doll is not only a toy, not only a symbol of beauty and glamour, but also a +symbol of how norms of female beauty in our society can be oppressive to women +and girls. The transparency does not force the girl to choose one meaning of +Barbie or another. It does, however, render transparent that Barbie can have +multiple meanings and that choosing meanings is a matter of political concern +for some set of people who coinhabit this culture. Yahoo! occupies something of +a middle ground--its algorithm does link to two of the critical sites among the +top ten, and within the top twenty, identifies most of the sites that appear on +Google's top ten that are not related to sales or promotion. +={ Barbie (doll), culture of +4 } + +-\\- + +% table moved after paragraph + +!_ Table 8.1: Results for "Barbie" - Google versus Overture and Yahoo! + +table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33; + +Google +Overture +Yahoo! + +Barbie.com (Mattel's site) +Barbie at Amazon.com +Barbie.com + +AdiosBarbie.com: A Body Image for Every Body (site created by women critical of Barbie's projected body image) +Barbie on Sale at KBToys +Barbie Collector + +Barbie Bazar magazine (Barbie collectible news and Information) +Target.com: Barbies +My Scene.com + +If You Were a Barbie, Which Messed Up Version Would You Be? +Barbie: Best prices and selection (bizrate.com) +EverythingGirl.com + +Visible Barbie Project (macabre images of Barbie sliced as though in a science project) +Barbies, New and Pre-owned at NetDoll +Barbie History (fan-type history, mostly when various dolls were released) + +Barbie: The Image of Us All (1995 undergraduate paper about Barbie's cultural history) +Barbies - compare prices (nextag.com) +Mattel, Inc. + +Audigraph.free.fr (Barbie and Ken sex animation) +Barbie Toys (complete line of Barbie electronics online) +Spatula Jackson's Barbies (picutes of Barbie as various counter-cultural images) + +Suicide bomber Barbie (Barbie with explosives strapped to waist) +Barbie Party supplies +Barbie! (fan site) + +Barbies (Barbie dressed and painted as counter-cultural images) +Barbie and her accessories online +The Distorted Barbie + +}table + +A similar phenomenon repeats itself in the context of explicit efforts to +define Barbie--encyclopedias. There are, as of this writing, six +generalinterest online encyclopedias that are reasonably accessible on the +Internet-- that is to say, can be found with reasonable ease by looking at +major search engines, sites that focus on education and parenting, and similar +techniques. Five are commercial, and one is a quintessential commons-based +peerproduction project-- /{Wikipedia}/. Of the five commercial encyclopedias, +only one is available at no charge, the Columbia Encyclopedia, which is +packaged in two primary forms--as encyclopedia.com and as part of +Bartleby.com.~{ Encyclopedia.com is a part of Highbeam Research, Inc., which +combines free and pay research services. Bartleby provides searching and access +to many reference and highculture works at no charge, combining it with +advertising, a book store, and many links to Amazon.com or to the publishers +for purchasing the printed versions of the materials. }~ The other +four--Britannica, Microsoft's Encarta, the World Book, and Grolier's Online +Encyclopedia--charge various subscription rates that range around fifty to +sixty dollars a year. The Columbia Encyclopedia includes no reference to +Barbie, the doll. The World Book has no "Barbie" entry, but does include a +reference to Barbie as part of a fairly substantial article on "Dolls." The +only information that is given is that the doll was introduced in 1959, that +she has a large wardrobe, and in a different place, that darkskinned Barbies +were introduced in the 1980s. The article concludes with a guide of about three +hundred words to good doll-collecting practices. Microsoft's ,{[pg 288]}, +Encarta also includes Barbie in the article on "Doll," but provides a brief +separate definition as well, which replicates the World Book information in +slightly different form: 1959, large wardrobe, and introduction of dark-skinned +Barbies. The online photograph available with the definition is of a +brown-skinned, black-haired Barbie. Grolier's Online's major generalpurpose +encyclopedia, Americana, also has no entry for Barbie, but makes reference to +the doll as part of the article on dolls. Barbie is described as a +revolutionary new doll, made to resemble a teenage fashion model as part of a +trend to realism in dolls. Grolier's Online does, however, include a more +specialized American Studies encyclopedia that has an article on Barbie. That +article heavily emphasizes the number of dolls sold and their value, provides +some description of the chronological history of the doll, and makes opaque +references to Barbie's physique and her emphasis on consumption. While the +encyclopedia includes bibliographic references to critical works about Barbie, +the textual references to cultural critique or problems she raises are very +slight and quite oblique. +={ Wikipedia project : + Barbie doll content +2 +} + +Only two encyclopedias focus explicitly on Barbie's cultural meaning: +Britannica and /{Wikipedia}/. The Britannica entry was written by M. G. Lord, a +professional journalist who authored a book entitled Forever Barbie: The +Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. It is a tightly written piece that +underscores the critique of Barbie, both on body dimensions and its +relationship to the body image of girls, and excessive consumerism. It also, +however, makes clear the fact that Barbie was the first doll to give girls a +play image that was not focused on nurturing and family roles, but was an +independent, professional adult: playing roles such as airline pilot, +astronaut, or presidential candidate. The article also provides brief +references to the role of Barbie in a global market economy--its manufacture +outside the United States, despite its marketing as an American cultural icon, +and its manufacturer's early adoption of direct-to-children marketing. +/{Wikipedia}/ provides more or less all the information provided in the +Britannica definition, including a reference to Lord's own book, and adds +substantially more material from within Barbie lore itself and a detailed time +line of the doll's history. It has a strong emphasis on the body image +controversy, and emphasizes both the critique that Barbie encourages girls to +focus on shallow consumption of fashion accessories, and that she represents an +unattainable lifestyle for most girls who play with her. The very first version +of the definition, posted January 3, 2003, included only a brief reference to a +change in Barbie's waistline as a result of efforts by parents and anorexia +groups ,{[pg 289]}, concerned with the doll's impact on girls' nutrition. This +remained the only reference to the critique of Barbie until December 15, 2003, +when a user who was not logged in introduced a fairly roughly written section +that emphasized both the body image concerns and the consumerism concerns with +Barbie. During the same day, a number of regular contributors (that is, users +with log-in names and their own talk pages) edited the new section and improved +its language and flow, but kept the basic concepts intact. Three weeks later, +on January 5, 2004, another regular user rewrote the section, reorganized the +paragraphs so that the critique of Barbie's emphasis on high consumption was +separated from the emphasis on Barbie's body dimensions, and also separated and +clarified the qualifying claims that Barbie's independence and professional +outfits may have had positive effects on girls' perception of possible life +plans. This contributor also introduced a reference to the fact that the term +"Barbie" is often used to denote a shallow or silly girl or woman. After that, +with a change three weeks later from describing Barbie as available for most of +her life only as "white Anglo-Saxon (and probably protestant)" to "white woman +of apparently European descent" this part of the definition stabilized. As this +description aims to make clear, /{Wikipedia}/ makes the history of the +evolution of the article entirely transparent. The software platform allows any +reader to look at prior versions of the definition, to compare specific +versions, and to read the "talk" pages-- the pages where the participants +discuss their definition and their thoughts about it. + +The relative emphasis of Google and /{Wikipedia}/, on the one hand, and +Overture, Yahoo!, and the commercial encyclopedias other than Britannica, on +the other hand, is emblematic of a basic difference between markets and social +conversations with regard to culture. If we focus on the role of culture as +"common knowledge" or background knowledge, its relationship to the market--at +least for theoretical economists--is exogenous. It can be taken as given and +treated as "taste." In more practical business environments, culture is indeed +a source of taste and demand, but it is not taken as exogenous. Culture, +symbolism, and meaning, as they are tied with marketbased goods, become a major +focus of advertising and of demand management. No one who has been exposed to +the advertising campaigns of Coca-Cola, Nike, or Apple Computers, as well as +practically to any one of a broad range of advertising campaigns over the past +few decades, can fail to see that these are not primarily a communication about +the material characteristics or qualities of the products or services sold by +the advertisers. ,{[pg 290]}, + +They are about meaning. These campaigns try to invest the act of buying their +products or services with a cultural meaning that they cultivate, manipulate, +and try to generalize in the practices of the society in which they are +advertising, precisely in order to shape taste. They offer an opportunity to +generate rents, because the consumer has to have this company's shoe rather +than that one, because that particular shoe makes the customer this kind of +person rather than that kind--cool rather than stuffy, sophisticated rather +than common. Neither the theoretical economists nor the marketing executives +have any interest in rendering culture transparent or writable. Whether one +treats culture as exogenous or as a domain for limiting the elasticity of +demand for one's particular product, there is no impetus to make it easier for +consumers to see through the cultural symbols, debate their significance, or +make them their own. If there is business reason to do anything about culture, +it is to try to shape the cultural meaning of an object or practice, in order +to shape the demand for it, while keeping the role of culture hidden and +assuring control over the careful cultural choreography of the symbols attached +to the company. Indeed, in 1995, the U.S. Congress enacted a new kind of +trademark law, the Federal Antidilution Act, which for the first time +disconnects trademark protection from protecting consumers from confusion by +knockoffs. The Antidilution Act of 1995 gives the owner of any famous mark--and +only famous marks--protection from any use that dilutes the meaning that the +brand owner has attached to its own mark. It can be entirely clear to consumers +that a particular use does not come from the owner of the brand, and still, the +owner has a right to prevent this use. While there is some constitutional +free-speech protection for criticism, there is also a basic change in the +understanding of trademark law-- from a consumer protection law intended to +assure that consumers can rely on the consistency of goods marked in a certain +way, to a property right in controlling the meaning of symbols a company has +successfully cultivated so that they are, in fact, famous. This legal change +marks a major shift in the understanding of the role of law in assigning +control for cultural meaning generated by market actors. +={ Antidilutation Act of 1995 ; + branding : + trademark dilutation ; + dilutation of trademarks ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + trademark dilutation ; + proprietary rights : + trademark dilutation ; + trademark dilutation ; + information production, market-based : + cultural change, transparency of +4 ; + market-based information producers : + cultural change, transparency of +4 ; + nonmarket information producers : + cultural change, transparency of +4 +} + +Unlike market production of culture, meaning making as a social, nonmarket +practice has no similar systematic reason to accept meaning as it comes. +Certainly, some social relations do. When girls play with dolls, collect them, +or exhibit them, they are rarely engaged in reflection on the meaning of the +dolls, just as fans of Scarlett O'Hara, of which a brief Internet search +suggests there are many, are not usually engaged in critique of Gone with the +,{[pg 291]}, Wind as much as in replication and adoption of its romantic +themes. Plainly, however, some conversations we have with each other are about +who we are, how we came to be who we are, and whether we view the answers we +find to these questions as attractive or not. In other words, some social +interactions do have room for examining culture as well as inhabiting it, for +considering background knowledge for what it is, rather than taking it as a +given input into the shape of demand or using it as a medium for managing +meaning and demand. People often engage in conversations with each other +precisely to understand themselves in the world, their relationship to others, +and what makes them like and unlike those others. One major domain in which +this formation of self- and group identity occurs is the adoption or rejection +of, and inquiry into, cultural symbols and sources of meaning that will make a +group cohere or splinter; that will make people like or unlike each other. + +The distinction I draw here between market-based and nonmarket-based activities +is purposefully overstated to clarify the basic structural differences between +these two modes of organizing communications and the degree of transparency of +culture they foster. As even the very simple story of how Barbie is defined in +Internet communications demonstrates, practices are not usually as cleanly +divided. Like the role of the elite newspapers in providing political coverage, +discussed in chapter 6, some market-based efforts do provide transparency; +indeed, their very market rationale pushes them to engage in a systematic +effort to provide transparency. Google's strategy from the start has been to +assume that what individuals are interested in is a reflection of what other +individuals--who are interested in roughly the same area, but spend more time +on it, that is, Web page authors--think is worthwhile. The company built its +business model around rendering transparent what people and organizations that +make their information available freely consider relevant. Occasionally, Google +has had to deal with "search engine optimizers," who have advised companies on +how to game its search engine to achieve a high ranking. Google has fought +these optimizers; sometimes by outright blocking access to traffic that +originates with them. In these cases, we see a technical competition between +firms--the optimizers--whose interest is in capturing attention based on the +interests of those who pay them, and a firm, Google, whose strategic choice is +to render the distributed judgments of relevance on the Web more or less +faithfully. There, the market incentive actually drives Google's investment +affirmatively toward transparency. However, the market decision must be +strategic, not tactical, for this ,{[pg 292]}, to be the case. Fear of +litigation has, for example, caused Google to bury links that threatened it +with liability. The most prominent of these cases occurred when the Church of +Scientology threatened to sue Google over presenting links to www.xenu.net, a +site dedicated to criticizing scientology. Google initially removed the link. +However, its strategic interest was brought to the fore by widespread criticism +of its decision on the Internet, and the firm relented. A search for +"Scientology" as of this writing reveals a wide range of sites, many critical +of scientology, and xenu.net is the second link. A search for "scientology +Google" will reveal many stories, not quite flattering either to Google or to +the Church of Scientology, as the top links. We see similar diversity among the +encyclopedias. Britannica offered as clear a presentation of the controversy +over Barbie as /{Wikipedia}/. Britannica has built its reputation and business +model on delivery of the knowledge and opinions of those in positions to claim +authority in the name of high culture professional competence, and delivering +that perspective to those who buy the encyclopedia precisely to gain access to +that kind of knowledge base, judgment, and formal credibility. In both cases, +the long-term business model of the companies calls for reflecting the views +and insights of agents who are not themselves thoroughly within the +market--whether they are academics who write articles for Britannica, or the +many and diverse Web page owners on the Internet. In both cases, these business +models lead to a much more transparent cultural representation than what +Hollywood or Madison Avenue produce. Just as not all market-based organizations +render culture opaque, not all nonmarket or social-relations-based +conversations aim to explore and expose cultural assumptions. Social +conversations can indeed be among the most highly deferential to cultural +assumptions, and can repress critique more effectively and completely than +market-based conversations. Whether in communities of unquestioning religious +devotion or those that enforce strict egalitarian political correctness, we +commonly see, in societies both traditional and contemporary, significant +social pressures against challenging background cultural assumptions within +social conversations. We have, for example, always had more cultural +experimentation and fermentation in cities, where social ties are looser and +communities can exercise less social control over questioning minds and +conversation. Ubiquitous Internet communications expand something of the +freedom of city parks and streets, but also the freedom of cafes and +bars--commercial platforms for social inter? action--so that it is available +everywhere. + +The claim I make here, as elsewhere throughout this book, is not that ,{[pg +293]}, nonmarket production will, in fact, generally displace market +production, or that such displacement is necessary to achieve the improvement +in the degree of participation in cultural production and legibility. My claim +is that the emergence of a substantial nonmarket alternative path for cultural +conversation increases the degrees of freedom available to individuals and +groups to engage in cultural production and exchange, and that doing so +increases the transparency of culture to its inhabitants. It is a claim tied to +the particular technological moment and its particular locus of occurrence--our +networked communications environment. It is based on the fact that it is +displacing the particular industrial form of information and cultural +production of the twentieth century, with its heavy emphasis on consumption in +mass markets. In this context, the emergence of a substantial sector of +nonmarket production, and of peer production, or the emergence of individuals +acting cooperatively as a major new source of defining widely transmissible +statements and conversations about the meaning of the culture we share, makes +culture substantially more transparent and available for reflection, and +therefore for revision. +={ communities : + critical culture and self-reflection +1 ; + critical culture and self-reflection +1 ; + culture : + criticality of (self-reflection) +1 ; + self-organization : + See clusters in network topology self-reflection +1 +} + +Two other dimensions are made very clear by the /{Wikipedia}/ example. The +first is the degree of self-consciousness that is feasible with open, +conversation-based definition of culture that is itself rendered more +transparent. The second is the degree to which the culture is writable, the +degree to which individuals can participate in mixing and matching and making +their own emphases, for themselves and for others, on the existing set of +symbols. Fisher, for example, has used the term "semiotic democracy" to +describe the potential embodied in the emerging openness of Internet culture to +participation by users. The term originates from Fiske's Television Culture as +a counterpoint to the claim that television was actually a purely one-way +medium that only enacted culture on viewers. Instead, Fiske claimed that +viewers resist these meanings, put them in their own contexts, use them in +various ways, and subvert them to make their own meaning. However, much of this +resistance is unstated, some of it unself-conscious. There are the acts of +reception and interpretation, or of using images and sentences in different +contexts of life than those depicted in the television program; but these acts +are local, enacted within small-scale local cultures, and are not the result of +a self-conscious conversation among users of the culture about its limits, its +meanings, and its subversions. One of the phenomena we are beginning to observe +on the Internet is an emerging culture of conversation about culture, which is +both self-conscious and informed by linking or quoting from specific ,{[pg +294]}, reference points. The /{Wikipedia}/ development of the definition of +Barbie, its history, and the availability of a talk page alongside it for +discussion about the definition, are an extreme version of self-conscious +discussion about culture. The basic tools enabled by the Internet--cutting, +pasting, rendering, annotating, and commenting--make active utilization and +conscious discussion of cultural symbols and artifacts easier to create, +sustain, and read more generally. +={ Fisher, William (Terry) ; + Fiske, John +} + +The flexibility with which cultural artifacts--meaning-carrying objects-- can +be rendered, preserved, and surrounded by different context and discussion +makes it easy for anyone, anywhere, to make a self-conscious statement about +culture. They enable what Balkin has called "glomming on"-- taking that which +is common cultural representation and reworking it into your own move in a +cultural conversation.~{ Jack Balkin, "Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A +Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society," New York +University Law Review 79 (2004): 1. }~ The low cost of storage, and the +ubiquitous possibility of connecting from any connection location to any +storage space make any such statement persistent and available to others. The +ease of commenting, linking, and writing to other locations of statements, in +turn, increases the possibility of response and counterresponse. These +conversations can then be found by others, and at least read if not contributed +to. In other words, as with other, purposeful peer-produced projects like +/{Wikipedia}/, the basic characteristics of the Internet in general and the +World Wide Web in particular have made it possible for anyone, anywhere, for +any reason to begin to contribute to an accretion of conversation about +well-defined cultural objects or about cultural trends and characteristics +generally. These conversations can persist across time and exist across +distance, and are available for both active participation and passive reading +by many people in many places. The result is, as we are already seeing it, the +emergence of widely accessible, self-conscious conversation about the meaning +of contemporary culture by those who inhabit it. This "writability" is also the +second characteristic that the /{Wikipedia}/ definition process makes very +clear, and the second major change brought about by the networked information +economy in the digital environment. +={ Balkin, Jack } + +2~ THE PLASTICITY OF INTERNET CULTURE: THE FUTURE OF HIGH-PRODUCTION-VALUE FOLK CULTURE +={ high-production value content +2 ; + Internet : + plasticity of culture +2 ; + plasticity of Internet culture +2 +} + +I have already described the phenomena of blogs, of individually created movies +like /{The Jedi Saga}/, and of Second Life, the game platform where ,{[pg +295]}, users have made all the story lines and all the objects, while the +commercial provider created the tools and hosts the platform for their +collective storytelling. We are seeing the broad emergence of business models +that are aimed precisely at providing users with the tools to write, compose, +film, and mix existing materials, and to publish, play, render, and distribute +what we have made to others, everywhere. Blogger, for example, provides simple +tools for online publication of written materials. Apple Computer offers a +product called GarageBand, that lets users compose and play their own music. It +includes a large library of prerecorded building blocks--different instruments, +riffs, loops--and an interface that allows the user to mix, match, record and +add their own, and produce their own musical composition and play it. +Video-editing utilities, coupled with the easy malleability of digital video, +enable people to make films--whether about their own lives or, as in the case +of /{The Jedi Saga}/, of fantasies. The emerging phenomenon of Machinima--short +movies that are made using game platforms--underscores how digital platforms +can also become tools for creation in unintended ways. Creators use the 3-D +rendering capabilities of an existing game, but use the game to stage a movie +scene or video presentation, which they record as it is played out. This +recording is then distributed on the Internet as a standalone short film. While +many of these are still crude, the basic possibilities they present as modes of +making movies is significant. Needless to say, not everyone is Mozart. Not +everyone is even a reasonably talented musician, author, or filmmaker. Much of +what can be and is done is not wildly creative, and much of it takes the form +of Balkin's "glomming on": That is, users take existing popular culture, or +otherwise professionally created culture, and perform it, sometimes with an +effort toward fidelity to the professionals, but often with their own twists, +making it their own in an immediate and unmediated way. However, just as +learning how to read music and play an instrument can make one a +better-informed listener, so too a ubiquitous practice of making cultural +artifacts of all forms enables individuals in society to be better readers, +listeners, and viewers of professionally produced culture, as well as +contributors of our own statements into this mix of collective culture. +={ Balkin, Jack ; + commercial culture, production of +1 ; + information production, market-based : + mass popular culture +1 ; + market-based information producers : + mass popular culture +1 ; + market-based information producers : + mass popular culture +1 ; + popular culture, commercial production of +1 +} + +People have always created their own culture. Popular music did not begin with +Elvis. There has always been a folk culture--of music, storytelling, and +theater. What happened over the course of the twentieth century in advanced +economies, and to a lesser extent but still substantially around the globe, is +the displacement of folk culture by commercially produced mass popular ,{[pg +296]}, culture. The role of the individuals and communities vis-a-vis cultural +arti` facts changed, from coproducers and replicators to passive consumers. The +time frame where elders might tell stories, children might put on a show for +the adults, or those gathered might sing songs came to be occupied by +background music, from the radio or phonograph, or by television. We came to +assume a certain level of "production values"--quality of sound and image, +quality of rendering and staging--that are unattainable with our crude means +and our relatively untrained voices or use of instruments. Not only time for +local popular creation was displaced, therefore, but also a sense of what +counted as engaging, delightful articulation of culture. In a now-classic +article from 1937, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," +Walter Benjamin authored one of the only instances of critical theory that took +an optimistic view of the emergence of popular culture in the twentieth century +as a potentially liberating turn. Benjamin's core claim was that with +mechanical replication of art, the "aura" that used to attach to single works +of art is dissipated. Benjamin saw this aura of unique works of art as +reinforcing a distance between the masses and the representations of culture, +reinforcing the perception of their weakness and distance from truly great +things. He saw in mechanical reproducibility the possibility of bringing copies +down to earth, to the hands of the masses, and reversing the sense of distance +and relative weakness of the mass culture. What Benjamin did not yet see were +the ways in which mechanical reproduction would insert a different kind of +barrier between many dispersed individuals and the capacity to make culture. +The barrier of production costs, production values, and the star system that +came along with them, replaced the iconic role of the unique work of art with +new, but equally high barriers to participation in making culture. It is +precisely those barriers that the capabilities provided by digital media begin +to erode. It is becoming feasible for users to cut and paste, "glom on," to +existing cultural materials; to implement their intuitions, tastes, and +expressions through media that render them with newly acceptable degrees of +technical quality, and to distribute them among others, both near and far. As +Hollywood begins to use more computer-generated special effects, but more +important, whole films--2004 alone saw major releases like Shrek 2, The +Incredibles, and Polar Express--and as the quality of widely available +image-generation software and hardware improves, the production value gap +between individual users or collections of users and the +commercial-professional studios will decrease. As this book is completed in +early 2005, nothing makes clearer the value of retelling basic stories through +,{[pg 297]}, the prism of contemporary witty criticism of prevailing culture +than do Shrek 2 and The Incredibles, and, equally, nothing exposes the limits +of purely technical, movie-star-centered quality than the lifelessness of Polar +Express. As online games like Second Life provide users with new tools and +platforms to tell and retell their own stories, or their own versions of +well-trodden paths, as digital multimedia tools do the same for individuals +outside of the collaborative storytelling platforms, we can begin to see a +reemergence of folk stories and songs as widespread cultural practices. And as +network connections become ubiquitous, and search engines and filters improve, +we can begin to see this folk culture emerging to play a substantially greater +role in the production of our cultural environment. +={ Walter, Benjamin } + +2~ A PARTICIPATORY CULTURE: TOWARD POLICY +={ control of public sphere : + See mass media controlling culture +5 ; + culture : + participatory, policies for +5 | shaping perceptions of others +5 ; + future : + participatory culture +5 ; + information production inputs : + propaganda +5 ; + inputs to production : + propaganda +5 ; + manipulating perceptions of others : + with propaganda +5 ; + participatory culture +5 ; + perceptions of others, shaping : + with propaganda +5 ; + policy : + participatory culture +5 ; + production inputs : + propaganda +5 ; + propaganda : + manipulating culture +5 ; + shaping perceptions of others : + with propaganda +5 +} + +Culture is too broad a concept to suggest an all-encompassing theory centered +around technology in general or the Internet in particular. My focus is +therefore much narrower, along two dimensions. First, I am concerned with +thinking about the role of culture to human interactions that can be understood +in terms of basic liberal political commitments--that is to say, a concern for +the degree of freedom individuals have to form and pursue a life plan, and the +degree of participation they can exercise in debating and determining +collective action. Second, my claim is focused on the relative attractiveness +of the twentieth-century industrial model of cultural production and what +appears to be emerging as the networked model in the early twenty-first +century, rather than on the relationship of the latter to some theoretically +defined ideal culture. +={ culture : + freedom of +1 ; + economics in liberal political theory : + cultural freedom +1 ; + freedom : + cultural +1 ; + liberal political theory : + cultural freedom +1 +} + +A liberal political theory cannot wish away the role of culture in structuring +human events. We engage in wide ranges of social practices of making and +exchanging symbols that are concerned with how our life is and how it might be, +with which paths are valuable for us as individuals to pursue and which are +not, and with what objectives we as collective communities-- from the local to +the global--ought to pursue. This unstructured, ubiquitous conversation is +centrally concerned with things that a liberal political system speaks to, but +it is not amenable to anything like an institutionalized process that could +render its results "legitimate." Culture operates as a set of background +assumptions and common knowledge that structure our understanding of the state +of the world and the range of possible actions and outcomes open to us +individually and collectively. It constrains the range of conversational ,{[pg +298]}, moves open to us to consider what we are doing and how we might act +differently. In these regards, it is a source of power in the critical-theory +sense--a source that exerts real limits on what we can do and how we can be. As +a source of power, it is not a natural force that stands apart from human +endeavor and is therefore a fact that is not itself amenable to political +evaluation. As we see well in the efforts of parents and teachers, advertising +agencies and propaganda departments, culture is manipulable, manageable, and a +direct locus of intentional action aimed precisely at harnessing its force as a +way of controlling the lives of those who inhabit it. At the same time, +however, culture is not the barrel of a gun or the chains of a dungeon. There +are limits on the degree to which culture can actually control those who +inhabit it. Those degrees depend to a great extent on the relative difficulty +or ease of seeing through culture, of talking about it with others, and of +seeing other alternatives or other ways of symbolizing the possible and the +desirable. + +Understanding that culture is a matter of political concern even within a +liberal framework does not, however, translate into an agenda of intervention +in the cultural sphere as an extension of legitimate political decision making. +Cultural discourse is systematically not amenable to formal regulation, +management, or direction from the political system. First, participation in +cultural discourse is intimately tied to individual self-expression, and its +regulation would therefore require levels of intrusion in individual autonomy +that would render any benefits in terms of a participatory political system +Pyrrhic indeed. Second, culture is much more intricately woven into the fabric +of everyday life than political processes and debates. It is language-- the +basic framework within which we can comprehend anything, and through which we +do so everywhere. To regulate culture is to regulate our very comprehension of +the world we occupy. Third, therefore, culture infuses our thoughts at a wide +range of levels of consciousness. Regulating culture, or intervening in its +creation and direction, would entail self-conscious action to affect citizens +at a subconscious or weakly conscious level. Fourth, and finally, there is no +Archimedean point outside of culture on which to stand and decide--let us pour +a little bit more of this kind of image or that, so that we achieve a better +consciousness, one that better fits even our most just and legitimately +arrived-at political determinations. + +A systematic commitment to avoid direct intervention in cultural exchange does +not leave us with nothing to do or say about culture, and about law or policy +as it relates to it. What we have is the capacity and need ,{[pg 299]}, to +observe a cultural production and exchange system and to assure that it is as +unconstraining and free from manipulation as possible. We must diagnose what +makes a culture more or less opaque to its inhabitants; what makes it more or +less liable to be strictly constraining of the conversations that rely on it; +and what makes the possibility of many and diverse sources and forms of +cultural intervention more or less likely. On the background of this project, I +suggest that the emergence of Internet culture is an attractive development +from the perspective of liberal political theory. This is so both because of +the technical characteristics of digital objects and computer network +communications, and because of the emerging industrial structure of the +networked information economy--typified by the increased salience of nonmarket +production in general and of individual production, alone or in concert with +others, in particular. The openness of digital networks allows for a much wider +range of perspectives on any particular symbol or range of symbols to be +visible for anyone, everywhere. The cross section of views that makes it easy +to see that Barbie is a contested symbol makes it possible more generally to +observe very different cultural forms and perspectives for any individual. This +transparency of background unstated assumptions and common knowledge is the +beginning of self-reflection and the capacity to break out of given molds. +Greater transparency is also a necessary element in, and a consequence of, +collaborative action, as various participants either explicitly, or through +negotiating the divergence of their nonexplicit different perspectives, come to +a clearer statement of their assumptions, so that these move from the +background to the fore, and become more amenable to examination and revision. +The plasticity of digital objects, in turn, improves the degree to which +individuals can begin to produce a new folk culture, one that already builds on +the twentieth-century culture that was highly unavailable for folk retelling +and re-creation. This plasticity, and the practices of writing your own +culture, then feed back into the transparency, both because the practice of +making one's own music, movie, or essay makes one a more self-conscious user of +the cultural artifacts of others, and because in retelling anew known stories, +we again come to see what the originals were about and how they do, or do not, +fit our own sense of how things are and how they ought to be. There is emerging +a broad practice of learning by doing that makes the entire society more +effective readers and writers of their own culture. +={ Internet : + plasticity of culture ; + plasticity of Internet culture +} + +By comparison to the highly choreographed cultural production system of the +industrial information economy, the emergence of a new folk culture ,{[pg +300]}, and of a wider practice of active personal engagement in the telling and +retelling of basic cultural themes and emerging concerns and attachments offers +new avenues for freedom. It makes culture more participatory, and renders it +more legible to all its inhabitants. The basic structuring force of culture is +not eliminated, of course. The notion of floating monads disconnected from a +culture is illusory. Indeed, it is undesirable. However, the framework that +culture offers us, the language that makes it possible for us to make +statements and incorporate the statements of others in the daily social +conversation that pervades life, is one that is more amenable to our own +remaking. We become more sophisticated users of this framework, more +self-conscious about it, and have a greater capacity to recognize, challenge, +and change that which we find oppressive, and to articulate, exchange, and +adopt that which we find enabling. As chapter 11 makes clear, however, the +tension between the industrial model of cultural production and the networked +information economy is nowhere more pronounced than in the question of the +degree to which the new folk culture of the twenty-first century will be +permitted to build upon the outputs of the twentieth-century industrial model. +In this battle, the stakes are high. One cannot make new culture ex nihilo. We +are as we are today, as cultural beings, occupying a set of common symbols and +stories that are heavily based on the outputs of that industrial period. If we +are to make this culture our own, render it legible, and make it into a new +platform for our needs and conversations today, we must find a way to cut, +paste, and remix present culture. And it is precisely this freedom that most +directly challenges the laws written for the twentieth-century technology, +economy, and cultural practice. ,{[pg 301]}, + +1~9 Chapter 9 - Justice and Development +={ human development and justice +91 ; + justice and human development +91 +} + +How will the emergence of a substantial sector of nonmarket, commons-based +production in the information economy affect questions of distribution and +human well-being? The pessimistic answer is, very little. Hunger, disease, and +deeply rooted racial, ethnic, or class stratification will not be solved by a +more decentralized, nonproprietary information production system. Without clean +water, basic literacy, moderately well-functioning governments, and universal +practical adoption of the commitment to treat all human beings as fundamentally +deserving of equal regard, the fancy Internet-based society will have little +effect on the billions living in poverty or deprivation, either in the rich +world, or, more urgently and deeply, in poor and middle-income economies. There +is enough truth in this pessimistic answer to require us to tread lightly in +embracing the belief that the shift to a networked information economy can +indeed have meaningful effects in the domain of justice and human development. + +Despite the caution required in overstating the role that the networked +information economy can play in solving issues of justice, ,{[pg 302]}, it is +important to recognize that information, knowledge, and culture are core inputs +into human welfare. Agricultural knowledge and biological innovation are +central to food security. Medical innovation and access to its fruits are +central to living a long and healthy life. Literacy and education are central +to individual growth, to democratic self-governance, and to economic +capabilities. Economic growth itself is critically dependent on innovation and +information. For all these reasons, information policy has become a critical +element of development policy and the question of how societies attain and +distribute human welfare and well-being. Access to knowledge has become central +to human development. The emergence of the networked information economy offers +definable opportunities for improvement in the normative domain of justice, as +it does for freedom, by comparison to what was achievable in the industrial +information economy. +={ commercial model of communication : + barriers to justice +1 ; + industrial model of communication : + barriers to justice +1 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + barriers to justice +1 ; + traditional model of communication : + barriers to justice +1 ; + policy : + proprietary rights vs. justice +2 ; + proprietary rights : + justice vs. +2 +} + +We can analyze the implications of the emergence of the networked information +economy for justice or equality within two quite different frames. The first is +liberal, and concerned primarily with some form of equality of opportunity. The +second is social-democratic, or development oriented, and focused on universal +provision of a substantial set of elements of human well-being. The +availability of information from nonmarket sources and the range of +opportunities to act within a nonproprietary production environment improve +distribution in both these frameworks, but in different ways. Despite the +differences, within both frameworks the effect crystallizes into one of +access--access to opportunities for one's own action, and access to the outputs +and inputs of the information economy. The industrial economy creates cost +barriers and transactional-institutional barriers to both these domains. The +networked information economy reduces both types of barriers, or creates +alternative paths around them. It thereby equalizes, to some extent, both the +opportunities to participate as an economic actor and the practical capacity to +partake of the fruits of the increasingly information-based global economy. + +The opportunities that the network information economy offers, however, often +run counter to the central policy drive of both the United States and the +European Union in the international trade and intellectual property systems. +These two major powers have systematically pushed for ever-stronger proprietary +protection and increasing reliance on strong patents, copyrights, and similar +exclusive rights as the core information policy for growth and development. +Chapter 2 explains why such a policy is suspect from a purely economic +perspective concerned with optimizing innovation. ,{[pg 303]}, A system that +relies too heavily on proprietary approaches to information production is not, +however, merely inefficient. It is unjust. Proprietary rights are designed to +elicit signals of people's willingness and ability to pay. In the presence of +extreme distribution differences like those that characterize the global +economy, the market is a poor measure of comparative welfare. A system that +signals what innovations are most desirable and rations access to these +innovations based on ability, as well as willingness, to pay, overrepresents +welfare gains of the wealthy and underrepresents welfare gains of the poor. +Twenty thousand American teenagers can simply afford, and will be willing to +pay, much more for acne medication than the more than a million Africans who +die of malaria every year can afford to pay for a vaccine. A system that relies +too heavily on proprietary models for managing information production and +exchange is unjust because it is geared toward serving small welfare increases +for people who can pay a lot for incremental improvements in welfare, and +against providing large welfare increases for people who cannot pay for what +they need. + +2~ LIBERAL THEORIES OF JUSTICE AND THE NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY +={ human development and justice : + liberal theories of +7 ; + human welfare : + liberal theories of justice +7 ; + information economy : + justice, liberal theories of +7 ; + justice and human development : + liberal theories of +7 ; + liberal societies : + theories of justice +7 ; + welfare : + liberal theories of justice +7 | see also justice and human development +} + +Liberal theories of justice can be categorized according to how they +characterize the sources of inequality in terms of luck, responsibility, and +structure. By luck, I mean reasons for the poverty of an individual that are +beyond his or her control, and that are part of that individual's lot in life +unaffected by his or her choices or actions. By responsibility, I mean causes +for the poverty of an individual that can be traced back to his or her actions +or choices. By structure, I mean causes for the inequality of an individual +that are beyond his or her control, but are traceable to institutions, economic +organizations, or social relations that form a society's transactional +framework and constrain the behavior of the individual or undermine the +efficacy of his or her efforts at self-help. +={ background knowledge : + see culture bad luck, justice and +2 ; + DSL : + see broadband networks dumb luck, justice and +2 ; + luck, justice and +2 ; + misfortune, justice and +2 ; + organization structure : + justice and +2 ; + structure of organizations : + justice and +2 +} + +We can think of John Rawls's /{Theory of Justice}/ as based on a notion that +the poorest people are the poorest because of dumb luck. His proposal for a +systematic way of defending and limiting redistribution is the "difference +principle." A society should organize its redistribution efforts in order to +make those who are least well-off as well-off as they can be. The theory of +desert is that, because any of us could in principle be the victim of this dumb +luck, we would all have agreed, if none of us had known where we ,{[pg 304]}, +would be on the distribution of bad luck, to minimize our exposure to really +horrendous conditions. The practical implication is that while we might be +bound to sacrifice some productivity to achieve redistribution, we cannot +sacrifice too much. If we did that, we would most likely be hurting, rather +than helping, the weakest and poorest. Libertarian theories of justice, most +prominently represented by Robert Nozick's entitlement theory, on the other +hand, tend to ignore bad luck or impoverishing structure. They focus solely on +whether the particular holdings of a particular person at any given moment are +unjustly obtained. If they are not, they may not justly be taken from the +person who holds them. Explicitly, these theories ignore the poor. As a +practical matter and by implication, they treat responsibility as the source of +the success of the wealthy, and by negation, the plight of the poorest--leading +them to be highly resistant to claims of redistribution. +={ Rawls, John +1 ; + Nozick, Robert ; + redistribution theory +1 +} + +The basic observation that an individual's economic condition is a function of +his or her own actions does not necessarily resolve into a blanket rejection of +redistribution, as we see in the work of other liberals. Ronald Dworkin's work +on inequality offers a critique of Rawls's, in that it tries to include a +component of responsibility alongside recognition of the role of luck. In his +framework, if (1) resources were justly distributed and (2) bad luck in initial +endowment were compensated through some insurance scheme, then poverty that +resulted from bad choices, not bad luck, would not deserve help through +redistribution. While Rawls's theory ignores personal responsibility, and in +this regard, is less attractive from the perspective of a liberal theory that +respects individual autonomy, it has the advantage of offering a much clearer +metric for a just system. One can measure the welfare of the poorest under +different redistribution rules in market economies. One can then see how much +redistribution is too much, in the sense that welfare is reduced to the point +that the poorest are actually worse off than they would be under a +less-egalitarian system. You could compare the Soviet Union, West Germany, and +the United States of the late 1960s?early 1970s, and draw conclusions. +Dworkin's insurance scheme would require too fine an ability to measure the +expected incapacitating effect of various low endowments--from wealth to +intelligence to health--in a market economy, and to calibrate wealth endowments +to equalize them, to offer a measuring rod for policy. It does, however, have +the merit of distinguishing--for purposes of judging desert to benefit from +society's redistribution efforts--between a child of privilege who fell into +poverty through bad investments coupled with sloth and a person born into a +poor family with severe mental ,{[pg 305]}, defects. Bruce Ackerman's Social +Justice and the Liberal State also provides a mechanism of differentiating the +deserving from the undeserving, but adds policy tractability by including the +dimension of structure to luck and responsibility. In addition to the dumb luck +of how wealthy your parents are when you are born and what genetic endowment +you are born with, there are also questions of the education system you grow up +with and the transactional framework through which you live your life--which +opportunities it affords, and which it cuts off or burdens. His proposals +therefore seek to provide basic remedies for those failures, to the extent that +they can, in fact, be remedied. One such proposal is Anne Alstott and +Ackerman's idea of a government-funded personal endowment at birth, coupled +with the freedom to squander it and suffer the consequential reduction in +welfare.~{ Anne Alstott and Bruce Ackerman, The Stakeholder Society (New Haven, +CT: Yale University Press, 1999). }~ He also emphasizes a more open and +egalitarian transactional framework that would allow anyone access to +opportunities to transact with others, rather than depending on, for example, +unequal access to social links as a precondition to productive behavior. +={ Dworkin, Ronald ; + Ackerman, Bruce +3 ; + Alstott, Anne ; + capabilities of individuals : + economic condition and ; + entertainment industry : + see also music industry entitlement theory ; + individual capabilities and action : + economic condition and ; + policy : + liberal theories of justice and +3 +} + +The networked information economy improves justice from the perspective of +every single one of these theories of justice. Imagine a good that improves the +welfare of its users--it could be software, or an encyclopedia, or a product +review. Now imagine a policy choice that could make production of that good on +a nonmarket, peer-production basis too expensive to perform, or make it easy +for an owner of an input to exclude competitors-- both market-based and +social-production based. For example, a government might decide to: recognize +patents on software interfaces, so that it would be very expensive to buy the +right to make your software work with someone else's; impose threshold formal +education requirements on the authors of any encyclopedia available for +school-age children to read, or impose very strict copyright requirements on +using information contained in other sources (as opposed to only prohibiting +copying their language) and impose high penalties for small omissions; or give +the putative subjects of reviews very strong rights to charge for the privilege +of reviewing a product--such as by expanding trademark rights to refer to the +product, or prohibiting a reviewer to take apart a product without permission. +The details do not matter. I offer them only to provide a sense of the +commonplace kinds of choices that governments could make that would, as a +practical matter, differentially burden nonmarket producers, whether nonprofit +organizations or informal peer-production collaborations. Let us call a rule +set that is looser from the perspective of access to existing information +resources Rule Set A, and a rule ,{[pg 306]}, set that imposes higher costs on +access to information inputs Rule Set B. As explained in chapter 2, it is quite +likely that adopting B would depress information production and innovation, +even if it were intended to increase the production of information by, for +example, strengthening copyright or patent. This is because the added +incentives for some producers who produce with the aim of capturing the rents +created by copyright or patents must be weighed against their costs. These +include (a) the higher costs even for those producers and (b) the higher costs +for all producers who do not rely on exclusive rights at all, but instead use +either a nonproprietary market model--like service--or a nonmarket model, like +nonprofits and individual authors, and that do not benefit in any way from the +increased appropriation. However, let us make here a much weaker +assumption--that an increase in the rules of exclusion will not affect overall +production. Let us assume that there will be exactly enough increased +production by producers who rely on a proprietary model to offset the losses of +production in the nonproprietary sectors. + +It is easy to see why a policy shift from A to B would be regressive from the +perspective of theories like Rawls's or Ackerman's. Under Rule A, let us say +that in this state of affairs, State A, there are five online encyclopedias. +One of them is peer produced and freely available for anyone to use. Rule B is +passed. In the new State B, there are still five encyclopedias. It has become +too expensive to maintain the free encyclopedia, however, and more profitable +to run commercial online encyclopedias. A new commercial encyclopedia has +entered the market in competition with the four commercial encyclopedias that +existed in State A, and the free encyclopedia folded. From the perspective of +the difference principle, we can assume that the change has resulted in a +stable overall welfare in the Kaldor-Hicks sense. (That is, overall welfare has +increased enough so that, even though some people may be worse off, those who +have been made better off are sufficiently better off that they could, in +principle, compensate everyone who is worse off enough to make everyone either +better off or no worse off than they were before.) There are still five +encyclopedias. However, now they all charge a subscription fee. The poorest +members of society are worse off, even if we posit that total social welfare +has remained unchanged. In State A, they had access for free to an +encyclopedia. They could use the information (or the software utility, if the +example were software) without having to give up any other sources of welfare. +In State B, they must choose between the same amount ,{[pg 307]}, of +encyclopedia usage as they had before, and less of some other source of +welfare, or the same welfare from other sources, and no encyclopedia. If we +assume, contrary to theory and empirical evidence from the innovation economics +literature, that the move to State B systematically and predictably improves +the incentives and investments of the commercial producers, that would still by +itself not justify the policy shift from the perspective of the difference +principle. One would have to sustain a much stricter claim: that the marginal +improvement in the quality of the encyclopedias, and a decline in price from +the added market competition that was not felt by the commercial producers when +they were competing with the free, peer-produced version, would still make the +poorest better off, even though they now must pay for any level of encyclopedia +access, than they were when they had four commercial competitors with their +prior levels of investment operating in a competitive landscape of four +commercial and one free encyclopedia. +={ Rawls, John } + +From the perspective of Ackerman's theory of justice, the advantages of the +networked information economy are clearer yet. Ackerman characterizes some of +the basic prerequisites for participating in a market economy as access to a +transactional framework, to basic information, and to an adequate educational +endowment. To the extent that any of the basic utilities required to +participate in an information economy at all are available without sensitivity +to price--that is, free to anyone--they are made available in a form that is +substantially insulated from the happenstance of initial wealth endowments. In +this sense at least, the development of a networked information economy +overcomes some of the structural components of continued poverty--lack of +access to information about market opportunities for production and cheaper +consumption, about the quality of goods, or lack of communications capacity to +people or places where one can act productively. While Dworkin's theory does +not provide a similarly clear locus for mapping the effect of the networked +information economy on justice, there is some advantage, and no loss, from this +perspective, in having more of the information economy function on a nonmarket +basis. As long as one recognizes bad luck as a partial reason for poverty, then +having information resources available for free use is one mechanism of +moderating the effects of bad luck in endowment, and lowers the need to +compensate for those effects insofar as they translate to lack of access to +information resources. This added access results from voluntary communication +by the producers and a respect for their willingness to communicate what they +produced freely. ,{[pg 308]}, While the benefits flow to individuals +irrespective of whether their present state is due to luck or irresponsibility, +it does not involve a forced redistribution from responsible individuals to +irresponsible individuals. +={ Dworkin, Ronald } + +From the perspective of liberal theories of justice, then, the emergence of the +networked information economy is an unqualified improvement. Except under +restrictive assumptions inconsistent with what we know as a matter of both +theory and empirics about the economics of innovation and information +production, the emergence of a substantial sector of information production and +exchange that is based on social transactional frameworks, rather than on a +proprietary exclusion business model, improves distribution in society. Its +outputs are available freely to anyone, as basic inputs into their own +actions--whether market-based or nonmarket-based. The facilities it produces +improve the prospects of all who are connected to the Internet-- whether they +are seeking to use it as consumers or as producers. It softens some of the +effects of resource inequality. It offers platforms for greater equality of +opportunity to participate in market- and nonmarket-based enterprises. This +characteristic is explored in much greater detail in the next segment of this +chapter, but it is important to emphasize here that equality of opportunity to +act in the face of unequal endowment is central to all liberal theories of +justice. As a practical matter, these characteristics of the networked +information economy make the widespread availability of Internet access a more +salient objective of redistribution policy. They make policy debates, which are +mostly discussed in today's political sphere in terms of innovation and growth, +and sometimes in terms of freedom, also a matter of liberal justice. + +2~ COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR HUMAN WELFARE AND DEVELOPMENT +={ commons : + human welfare and development +4 ; + democratic societies : + social-democratic theories of justice +4 ; + global development +4 ; + human development and justice +4 ; + human welfare : + commons-based strategies +4 ; + justice and human development : + commons-based strategies +4 ; + social-democratic theories of justice +4 ; + welfare : + commons-based strategies +4 +} + +There is a long social-democratic tradition of focusing not on theoretical +conditions of equality in a liberal society, but on the actual well-being of +human beings in a society. This conception of justice shares with liberal +theories the acceptance of market economy as a fundamental component of free +societies. However, its emphasis is not equality of opportunity or even some +level of social insurance that still allows the slothful to fall, but on +assuring a basic degree of well-being to everyone in society. Particularly in +the European social democracies, the ambition has been to make that basic level +quite high, but the basic framework of even American Social Security-- ,{[pg +309]}, unless it is fundamentally changed in the coming years--has this +characteristic. The literature on global poverty and its alleviation was +initially independent of this concern, but as global communications and +awareness increased, and as the conditions of life in most advanced market +economies for most people improved, the lines between the concerns with +domestic conditions and global poverty blurred. We have seen an increasing +merging of the concerns into a concern for basic human well-being everywhere. +It is represented in no individual's work more clearly than in that of Amartya +Sen, who has focused on the centrality of development everywhere to the +definition not only of justice, but of freedom as well. + +The emerging salience of global development as the core concern of distributive +justice is largely based on the sheer magnitude of the problems faced by much +of the world's population.~{ Numbers are all taken from the 2004 Human +Development Report (New York: UN Development Programme, 2004). }~ In the +world's largest democracy, 80 percent of the population--slightly more people +than the entire population of the United States and the expanded European Union +combined-- lives on less than two dollars a day, 39 percent of adults are +illiterate, and 47 percent of children under the age of five are underweight +for their age. In Africa's wealthiest democracy, a child at birth has a 45 +percent probability of dying before he or she reaches the age of forty. India +and South Africa are far from being the worst-off countries. The scope of +destitution around the globe exerts a moral pull on any acceptable discussion +of justice. Intuitively, these problems seem too fundamental to be seriously +affected by the networked information economy--what has /{Wikipedia}/ got to do +with the 49 percent of the population of Congo that lacks sustainable access to +improved water sources? It is, indeed, important not to be overexuberant about +the importance of information and communications policy in the context of +global human development. But it is also important not to ignore the centrality +of information to most of our more-advanced strategies for producing core +components of welfare and development. To see this, we can begin by looking at +the components of the Human Development Index (HDI). +={ HDI (Human Development Index) +2 ; + Human Development Index (HDI) +2 ; + Human Development Report +} + +The Human Development Report was initiated in 1990 as an effort to measure a +broad set of components of what makes a life livable, and, ultimately, +attractive. It was developed in contradistinction to indicators centered on +economic output, like gross domestic product (GDP) or economic growth alone, in +order to provide a more refined sense of what aspects of a nation's economy and +society make it more or less livable. It allows a more nuanced approach toward +improving the conditions of life everywhere. As ,{[pg 310]}, Sen pointed out, +the people of China, Kerala in India, and Sri Lanka lead much longer and +healthier lives than other countries, like Brazil or South Africa, which have a +higher per capita income.~{ Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: +Knopf, 1999), 46-47. }~ The Human Development Report measures a wide range of +outcomes and characteristics of life. The major composite index it tracks is +the Human Development Index. The HDI tries to capture the capacity of people to +live long and healthy lives, to be knowledgeable, and to have material +resources sufficient to provide a decent standard of living. It does so by +combining three major components: life expectancy at birth, adult literacy and +school enrollment, and GDP per capita. As Figure 9.1 illustrates, in the global +information economy, each and every one of these measures is significantly, +though not solely, a function of access to information, knowledge, and +information-embedded goods and services. Life expectancy is affected by +adequate nutrition and access to lifesaving medicines. Biotechnological +innovation for agriculture, along with agronomic innovation in cultivation +techniques and other, lower-tech modes of innovation, account for a high +portion of improvements in the capacity of societies to feed themselves and in +the availability of nutritious foods. Medicines depend on pharmaceutical +research and access to its products, and health care depends on research and +publication for the development and dissemination of information about +best-care practices. Education is also heavily dependent, not surprisingly, on +access to materials and facilities for teaching. This includes access to basic +textbooks, libraries, computation and communications systems, and the presence +of local academic centers. Finally, economic growth has been understood for +more than half a century to be centrally driven by innovation. This is +particularly true of latecomers, who can improve their own condition most +rapidly by adopting best practices and advanced technology developed elsewhere, +and then adapting to local conditions and adding their own from the new +technological platform achieved in this way. All three of these components are, +then, substantially affected by access to, and use of, information and +knowledge. The basic premise of the claim that the emergence of the networked +information economy can provide significant benefits to human development is +that the manner in which we produce new information--and equally important, the +institutional framework we use to manage the stock of existing information and +knowledge around the world--can have significant impact on human development. +,{[pg 311]}, + +{won_benkler_9_1.png "Figure 9.1: HDI and Information" }http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu + +2~ INFORMATION-EMBEDDED GOODS AND TOOLS, INFORMATION, AND KNOWLEDGE +={ human welfare : + information-based advantages +7 ; + welfare : + information-based advantages +7 +} + +One can usefully idealize three types of information-based advantages that developed economies have, and that would need to be available to developing and less-developed economies if one's goal were the improvement in conditions in those economies and the opportunities for innovation in them. These include information-embedded material resources--consumption goods and production tools--information, and knowledge. +={ goods, information-embedded +2 ; + information-embedded goods +2 ; + proprietary rights : + information-embedded goods and tools +2 +} + +/{Information-Embedded Goods}/. These are goods that are not themselves +information, but that are better, more plentiful, or cheaper because of some +technological advance embedded in them or associated with their production. +Pharmaceuticals and agricultural goods are the most obvious examples in the +areas of health and food security, respectively. While there are other +constraints on access to innovative products in these areas--regulatory and +political in nature--a perennial barrier is cost. And a perennial barrier to +competition that could reduce the cost is the presence of exclusive rights, +,{[pg 312]}, mostly in the form of patents, but also in the form of +internationally recognized breeders' rights and regulatory data exclusivity. In +the areas of computation and communication, hardware and software are the +primary domains of concern. With hardware, there have been some efforts toward +developing cheaper equipment--like the simputer and the Jhai computer efforts +to develop inexpensive computers. Because of the relatively commoditized state +of most components of these systems, however, marginal cost, rather than +exclusive rights, has been the primary barrier to access. The solution, if one +has emerged, has been aggregation of demand--a networked computer for a +village, rather than an individual. For software, the initial solution was +piracy. More recently, we have seen an increased use of free software instead. +The former cannot genuinely be described as a "solution," and is being +eliminated gradually by trade policy efforts. The latter--adoption of free +software to obtain state-of-the-art software--forms the primary template for +the class of commons-based solutions to development that I explore in this +chapter. + +/{Information-Embedded Tools}/. One level deeper than the actual useful +material things one would need to enhance welfare are tools necessary for +innovation itself. In the areas of agricultural biotechnology and medicines, +these include enabling technologies for advanced research, as well as access to +materials and existing compounds for experimentation. Access to these is +perhaps the most widely understood to present problems in the patent system of +the developed world, as much as it is for the developing world--an awareness +that has mostly crystallized under Michael Heller's felicitous phrase +"anti-commons," or Carl Shapiro's "patent thicket." The intuition, whose +analytic basis is explained in chapter 2, is that innovation is encumbered more +than it is encouraged when basic tools for innovation are proprietary, where +the property system gives owners of these tools proprietary rights to control +innovation that relies on their tools, and where any given new innovation +requires the consent of, and payment to, many such owners. This problem is not +unique to the developing world. Nonetheless, because of the relatively small +dollar value of the market for medicines that treat diseases that affect only +poorer countries or of crop varieties optimized for those countries, the cost +hurdle weighs more heavily on the public or nonprofit efforts to achieve food +security and health in poor and middle-income countries. These nonmarket-based +research efforts into diseases and crops of concern purely to these areas are +not constructed to appropriate gains from ,{[pg 313]}, exclusive rights to +research tools, but only bear their costs on downstream innovation. +={ Heller, Michael ; + Shapiro, Carl ; + information-embedded tools ; + tools, information-embedded +} + +/{Information}/. The distinction between information and knowledge is a tricky +one. I use "information" here colloquially, to refer to raw data, scientific +reports of the output of scientific discovery, news, and factual reports. I use +"knowledge" to refer to the set of cultural practices and capacities necessary +for processing the information into either new statements in the information +exchange, or more important in our context, for practical use of the +information in appropriate ways to produce more desirable actions or outcomes +from action. Three types of information that are clearly important for purposes +of development are scientific publications, scientific and economic data, and +news and factual reports. Scientific publication has seen a tremendous cost +escalation, widely perceived to have reached crisis proportions even by the +terms of the best-endowed university libraries in the wealthiest countries. +Over the course of the 1990s, some estimates saw a 260 percent increase in the +prices of scientific publications, and libraries were reported choosing between +journal subscription and monograph purchases.~{ Carol Tenopir and Donald W. +King, Towards Electronic Journals: Realities for Scientists, Librarians, and +Publishers (Washington, DC: Special Libraries Association, 2000), 273. }~ In +response to this crisis, and in reliance on what were perceived to be the +publication costreduction opportunities for Internet publication, some +scientists--led by Nobel laureate and then head of the National Institutes of +Health Harold Varmus--began to agitate for a scientist-based publication +system.~{ Harold Varmus, E-Biomed: A Proposal for Electronic Publications in +the Biomedical Sciences (Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, 1999). }~ +The debates were, and continue to be, heated in this area. However, currently +we are beginning to see the emergence of scientist-run and -driven publication +systems that distribute their papers for free online, either within a +traditional peer-review system like the Public Library of Science (PLoS), or +within tightly knit disciplines like theoretical physics, with only +post-publication peer review and revision, as in the case of the Los Alamos +Archive, or ArXiv.org. Together with free software and peer production on the +Internet, the PLoS and ArXiv.org models offer insights into the basic shape of +the class of commons-based, nonproprietary production solutions to problems of +information production and exchange unhampered by intellectual property. +={ Varmus, Harold ; + access : + to raw data +1 ; + economic data, access to +1 ; + information, defined +1 ; + public-domain data +1 ; + raw data +1 ; + scientific data, access to +1 ; + scientific publication ; + public sphere relationships : + see social relations and norms publication, scientific +} + +Scientific and economic data present a parallel conceptual problem, but in a +different legal setting. In the case of both types of data, much of it is +produced by government agencies. In the United States, however, raw data is in +the public domain, and while initial access may require payment of the cost of +distribution, reworking of the data as a tool in information production ,{[pg +314]}, and innovation--and its redistribution by those who acquired access +initially--is considered to be in the public domain. In Europe, this has not +been the case since the 1996 Database Directive, which created a propertylike +right in raw data in an effort to improve the standing of European database +producers. Efforts to pass similar legislation in the United States have been +mounted and stalled in practically every Congress since the mid1990s. These +laws continue to be introduced, driven by the lobby of the largest owners of +nongovernment databases, and irrespective of the fact that for almost a decade, +Europe's database industry has grown only slowly in the presence of a right, +while the U.S. database industry has flourished without an exclusive rights +regime. + +News, market reports, and other factual reporting seem to have escaped the +problems of barriers to access. Here it is most likely that the +value-appropriation model simply does not depend on exclusive rights. Market +data is generated as a by-product of the market function itself. Tiny time +delays are sufficient to generate a paying subscriber base, while leaving the +price trends necessary for, say, farmers to decide at what prices to sell their +grain in the local market, freely available.~{ C. K. Prahald, The Fortune at +the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Upper Saddle +River, NJ: Wharton School of Publishing, 2005), 319-357, Section 4, "The ITC +e-Choupal Story." }~ As I suggested in chapter 2, the advertising-supported +press has never been copyright dependent, but has instead depended on timely +updating of news to capture attention, and then attach that attention to +advertising. This has not changed, but the speed of the update cycle has +increased and, more important, distribution has become global, so that +obtaining most information is now trivial to anyone with access to an Internet +connection. While this continues to raise issues with deployment of +communications hardware and the knowledge of how to use it, these issues can +be, and are being, approached through aggregation of demand in either public or +private forms. These types of information do not themselves appear to exhibit +significant barriers to access once network connectivity is provided. +={ factual reporting, access to ; + market reports, access to ; + news (as data) +} + +/{Knowledge}/. In this context, I refer mostly to two types of concern. The +first is the possibility of the transfer of implicit knowledge, which resists +codification into what would here be treated as "information"--for example, +training manuals. The primary mechanism for transfer of knowledge of this type +is learning by doing, and knowledge transfer of this form cannot happen except +through opportunities for local practice of the knowledge. The second type of +knowledge transfer of concern here is formal instruction in an education +context (as compared with dissemination of codified outputs for self- ,{[pg +315]}, teaching). Here, there is a genuine limit on the capacity of the +networked information economy to improve access to knowledge. Individual, +face-to-face instruction does not scale across participants, time, and +distance. However, some components of education, at all levels, are nonetheless +susceptible to improvement with the increase in nonmarket and radically +decentralized production processes. The MIT Open Courseware initiative is +instructive as to how the universities of advanced economies can attempt to +make at least their teaching materials and manuals freely available to teachers +throughout the world, thereby leaving the pedagogy in local hands but providing +more of the basic inputs into the teaching process on a global scale. More +important perhaps is the possibility that teachers and educators can +collaborate, both locally and globally, on an open platform model like +/{Wikipedia}/, to coauthor learning objects, teaching modules, and, more +ambitiously, textbooks that could then be widely accessed by local teachers +={ Open Courseware Initiative (MIT) ; + educational instruction ; + formal instruction ; + implicit knowledge, transfer of ; + knowledge, defined ; + transfer of knowledge +} + +2~ INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION OF HDI-RELATED INFORMATION INDUSTRIES +={ industrial model of communication : + information industries +2 ; + information industries +2 +} + +The production of information and knowledge is very different from the +production of steel or automobiles. Chapter 2 explains in some detail that +information production has always included substantial reliance on nonmarket +actors and on nonmarket, nonproprietary settings as core modalities of +production. In software, for example, we saw that Mickey and romantic +maximizer-type producers, who rely on exclusive rights directly, have accounted +for a stable 36-37 percent of market-based revenues for software developers, +while the remainder was focused on both supply-side and demand-side +improvements in the capacity to offer software services. This number actually +overstates the importance of software publishing, because it does not at all +count free software development except when it is monetized by an IBM or a Red +Hat, leaving tremendous value unaccounted for. A very large portion of the +investments and research in any of the information production fields important +to human development occur within the category that I have broadly described as +"Joe Einstein." These include both those places formally designated for the +pursuit of information and knowledge in themselves, like universities, and +those that operate in the social sphere, but produce information and knowledge +as a more or less central part of their existence--like churches or political +parties. Moreover, individuals acting as social beings have played a central +role in our information ,{[pg 316]}, production and exchange system. In order +to provide a more sector-specific analysis of how commons-based, as opposed to +proprietary, strategies can contribute to development, I offer here a more +detailed breakdown specifically of software, scientific publication, +agriculture, and biomedical innovation than is provided in chapter 2. +={ Joe Einstein model ; + commons +1 +} + +Table 9.1 presents a higher-resolution statement of the major actors in these +fields, within both the market and the nonmarket sectors, from which we can +then begin to analyze the path toward, and the sustainability of, more +significant commons-based production of the necessities of human development. +Table 9.1 identifies the relative role of each of the types of main actors in +information and knowledge production across the major sectors relevant to +contemporary policy debates. It is most important to extract from this table +the diversity of business models and roles not only in each industry, but also +among industries. This diversity means that different types of actors can have +different relative roles: nonprofits as opposed to individuals, universities as +opposed to government, or nonproprietary market actors--that is, market actors +whose business model is service based or otherwise does not depend on exclusive +appropriation of information--as compared to nonmarket actors. The following +segments look at each of these sectors more specifically, and describe the ways +in which commons-based strategies are already, or could be, used to improve the +access to information, knowledge, and the information-embedded goods and tools +for human development. However, even a cursory look at the table shows that the +current production landscape of software is particularly well suited to having +a greater role for commonsbased production. For example, exclusive proprietary +producers account for only one-third of software-related revenues, even within +the market. The remainder is covered by various services and relationships that +are compatible with nonproprietary treatment of the software itself. +Individuals and nonprofit associations also have played a very large role, and +continue to do so, not only in free software development, but in the +development of standards as well. As we look at each sector, we see that they +differ in their incumbent industrial landscape, and these differences mean that +each sector may be more or less amenable to commons-based strategies, and, even +if in principle amenable, may present harder or easier transition problems. +,{[pg 317]}, + +!_ Table 9.1: Map of Players and Roles in Major Relevant Sectors + +table{~h c7; 14; 14; 14; 14; 14; 14; 14; + +Actor Sector +Government +Universities, Libraries, etc. +IP-Based Industry +Non-IP-Based Industry +NGOs/ Nonprofits +Individuals + +Software +Research funding, defense, procurement +Basic research and design; components "incubate" much else +Software publishing (1/3 annual revenue) +Software services, customization (2/3 annual revenue) +FSF; Apache; W3C; IETF +Free/ opensource software + +Scientific publication +Research funding +University presses; salaries; promotions and tenure +Elsevier Science; professional associations +Biomed Central +PLoS; ArXiv +Working papers; Web-based self-publishing + +Agricultural Biotech +Grants and government labs +Basic research; tech transfer (50%) +Big Pharma; Biotech (50%) +Generics +One-World Health +None + +}table + +2~ TOWARD ADOPTING COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPMENT +={ commons, production through +15 : + see peer production commons-based research +15 ; + development, commons-based +15 ; + human development and justice : + commons-based research +15 ; + human welfare : + commons-based research +15 ; + justice and human development : + commons-based research ; + policy : + commons-based research ; + proprietary rights : + commons-based research +15 | global welfare and research +4 ; + research, commons-based +15 ; + welfare : + commons-based research +15 ; + trade policy +4 +} + +The mainstream understanding of intellectual property by its dominant +policy-making institutions--the Patent Office and U.S. trade representative in +the United States, the Commission in the European Union, and the World +Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and Trade-Related Aspects of +Intellectual Property (TRIPS) systems internationally--is that strong +protection is good, and stronger protection is better. In development and trade +policy, this translates into a belief that the primary mechanism for knowledge +transfer and development in a global information economy is for ,{[pg 318]}, +all nations, developing as well as developed, to ratchet up their intellectual +property law standards to fit the most protective regimes adopted in the United +States and Europe. As a practical political matter, the congruence between the +United States and the European Union in this area means that this basic +understanding is expressed in the international trade system, in the World +Trade Organization (WTO) and its TRIPS agreement, and in international +intellectual property treaties, through the WIPO. The next few segments present +an alternative view. Intellectual property as an institution is substantially +more ambiguous in its effects on information production than the steady drive +toward expansive rights would suggest. The full argument is in chapter 2. + +Intellectual property is particularly harmful to net information importers. In +our present world trade system, these are the poor and middle-income nations. +Like all users of information protected by exclusive rights, these nations are +required by strong intellectual property rights to pay more than the marginal +cost of the information at the time that they buy it. In the standard argument, +this is intended to give producers incentives to create information that users +want. Given the relative poverty of these countries, however, practically none +of the intellectual-property-dependent producers develop products specifically +with returns from poor or even middle-income markets in mind. The +pharmaceutical industry receives about 5 percent of its global revenues from +low- and middle-income countries. That is why we have so little investment in +drugs for diseases that affect only those parts of the world. It is why most +agricultural research that has focused on agriculture in poorer areas of the +world has been public sector and nonprofit. Under these conditions, the +above-marginal-cost prices paid in these poorer countries are purely regressive +redistribution. The information, knowledge, and information-embedded goods paid +for would have been developed in expectation of rich world rents alone. The +prospects of rents from poorer countries do not affect their development. They +do not affect either the rate or the direction of research and development. +They simply place some of the rents that pay for technology development in the +rich countries on consumers in poor and middle-income countries. The morality +of this redistribution from the world's poor to the world's rich has never been +confronted or defended in the European or American public spheres. It simply +goes unnoticed. When crises in access to information-embedded goods do +appear--such as in the AIDS/HIV access to medicines crisis--these are seldom +tied to our ,{[pg 319]}, basic institutional choice. In our trade policies, +Americans and Europeans push for ever-stronger protection. We thereby +systematically benefit those who own much of the stock of usable human +knowledge. We do so at the direct expense of those who need access to knowledge +in order to feed themselves and heal their sick. +={ HIV/AIDS +1 ; + property ownership : + trade policy +1 +} + +The practical politics of the international intellectual property and trade +regime make it very difficult to reverse the trend toward ever-increasing +exclusive property protections. The economic returns to exclusive proprietary +rights in information are highly concentrated in the hands of those who own +such rights. The costs are widely diffuse in the populations of both the +developing and developed world. The basic inefficiency of excessive property +protection is difficult to understand bycomparison to the intuitive, but +mistaken, Economics 101 belief that property is good, more property is better, +and intellectual property must be the same. The result is that pressures on the +governmentsthat represent exporters of intellectual property rights +permissions--in particular, the United States and the European Union--come in +this area mostly from the owners, and they continuously push for everstronger +rights. Monopoly is a good thing to have if you can get it. Its value for rent +extraction isno less valuable for a database or patent-based company than it is +for the dictator's nephew in a banana republic. However, its value to these +supplicants does not make it any more efficient or desirable. The political +landscape is, however, gradually beginning to change. Since the turn of the +twenty-first century, and particularly in the wake of the urgency with which +the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa has infused the debate over access to medicines, +there has been a growing public interest advocacy movementfocused on the +intellectual property trade regime. This movement is, however, confronted with +a highly playable system. A victory for developing world access in one round in +the TRIPS context always leaves other places to construct mechanisms for +exclusivity. Bilateral trade negotiations are one domain that is beginning to +play an important role. In these, the United States or the European Union can +force a rice- or cotton-exporting country to concede a commitment to strong +intellectual property protection in exchange for favorable treatment for their +core export. The intellectual property exporting nations can then go to WIPO, +and push for new treaties based on the emerging international practice of +bilateral agreements. This, in turn, would cycle back and be generalized and +enforced through the trade regimes. Another approach is for the exporting +nations to change their own ,{[pg 320]}, laws, and then drive higher standards +elsewhere in the name of "harmonization." Because the international trade and +intellectual property system is highly "playable" and manipulable in these +ways, systematic resistance to the expansion of intellectual property laws is +difficult. +={ efficiency of information regulation : + property protections ; + inefficiency of information regulation : + property protections ; + proprietary rights, inefficiency of : + property protections ; + reallocation : + property protections +} + +The promise of the commons-based strategies explored in the remainder of this +chapter is that they can be implemented without changes in law-- either +national or international. They are paths that the emerging networked +information economy has opened to individuals, nonprofits, and publicsector +organizations that want to help in improving human development in the poorer +regions of the world to take action on their own. As with decentralized speech +for democratic discourse, and collaborative production by individuals of the +information environment they occupy as autonomous agents, here too we begin to +see that self-help and cooperative action outside the proprietary system offer +an opportunity for those who wish to pursue it. In this case, it is an +opportunity to achieve a more just distribution of the world's resources and a +set of meaningful improvements in human development. Some of these solutions +are "commons-based," in the sense that they rely on free access to existing +information that is in the commons, and they facilitate further use and +development of that information and those information-embedded goods and tools +by releasing their information outputs openly, and managing them as a commons, +rather than as property. Some of the solutions are specifically peer-production +solutions. We see this most clearly in software, and to some extent in the more +radical proposals for scientific publication. I will also explore here the +viability of peerproduction efforts in agricultural and biomedical innovation, +although in those fields, commons-based approaches grafted onto traditional +publicsector and nonprofit organizations at present hold the more clearly +articulated alternatives. + +3~ Software +={ free software : + commons-based welfare development +3 ; + open-source software : + commons-based welfare development +3 ; + software : + commons-based welfare development +3 ; + software, open-source : + commons-based welfare development +3 +} + +The software industry offers a baseline case because of the proven large scope +for peer production in free software. As in other information-intensive +industries, government funding and research have played an enormously important +role, and university research provides much of the basic science. However, the +relative role of individuals, nonprofits, and nonproprietary market producers +is larger in software than in the other sectors. First, twothirds of revenues +derived from software in the United States are from services ,{[pg 321]}, and +do not depend on proprietary exclusion. Like IBM's "Linux-related services" +category, for which the company claimed more than two billion dollars of +revenue for 2003, these services do not depend on exclusion from the software, +but on charging for service relationships.~{ For the sources of numbers for the +software industry, see chapter 2 in this volume. IBM numbers, in particular, +are identified in figure 2.1. }~ Second, some of the most basic elements of the +software environment--like standards and protocols--are developed in nonprofit +associations, like the Internet Engineering Taskforce or the World Wide Web +Consortium. Third, the role of individuals engaged in peer production--the free +and open-source software development communities--is very large. Together, +these make for an organizational ecology highly conducive to nonproprietary +production, whose outputs can be freely usable around the globe. The other +sectors have some degree of similar components, and commons-based strategies +for development can focus on filling in the missing components and on +leveraging nonproprietary components already in place. + +In the context of development, free software has the potential to play two +distinct and significant roles. The first is offering low-cost access to +highperforming software for developing nations. The second is creating the +potential for participation in software markets based on human ability, even +without access to a stock of exclusive rights in existing software. At present, +there is a movement in both developing and the most advanced economies to +increase reliance on free software. In the United States, the Presidential +Technology Advisory Commission advised the president in 2000 to increase use of +free software in mission-critical applications, arguing the high quality and +dependability of such systems. To the extent that quality, reliability, and +ease of self-customization are consistently better with certain free software +products, they are attractive to developing-country governments for the same +reasons that they are to the governments of developed countries. In the context +of developing nations, the primary additional arguments that have been made +include cost, transparency, freedom from reliance on a single foreign source +(read, Microsoft), and the potential of local software programmers to learn the +program, acquire skills, and therefore easily enter the global market with +services and applications for free software.~{ These arguments were set out +most clearly and early in a public exchange of letters between Representative +Villanueva Nunez in Peru and Microsoft's representatives in that country. The +exchange can be found on the Web site of the Open Source Initiative, +http://www.opensource.org/docs/peru_and_ms.php. }~ The question of cost, +despite the confusion that often arises from the word "free," is not obvious. +It depends to some extent on the last hope--that local software developers will +become skilled in the free software platforms. The cost of software to any +enterprise includes the extent, cost, and efficacy with which the software can +be maintained, upgraded, and fixed when errors occur. Free ,{[pg 322]}, +software may or may not involve an up-front charge. Even if it does not, that +does not make it cost-free. However, free software enables an open market in +free software servicing, which in turn improves and lowers the cost of +servicing the software over time. More important, because the software is open +for all to see and because developer communities are often multinational, local +developers can come, learn the software, and become relatively low-cost +software service providers for their own government. This, in turn, helps +realize the low-cost promise over and above the licensing fees avoided. Other +arguments in favor of government procurement of free software focus on the +value of transparency of software used for public purposes. The basic thrust of +these arguments is that free software makes it possible for constituents to +monitor the behavior of machines used in governments, to make sure that they +are designed to do what they are publicly reported to do. The most significant +manifestation of this sentiment in the United States is the +hitherto-unsuccessful, but fairly persistent effort to require states to +utilize voting machines that use free software, or at a minimum, to use +software whose source code is open for public inspection. This is a +consideration that, if valid, is equally suitable for developing nations. The +concern with independence from a single foreign provider, in the case of +operating systems, is again not purely a developing-nation concern. Just as the +United States required American Marconi to transfer its assets to an American +company, RCA, so that it would not be dependent for a critical infrastructure +on a foreign provider, other countries may have similar concerns about +Microsoft. Again, to the extent that this is a valid concern, it is so for rich +nations as much as it is for poor, with the exceptions of the European Union +and Japan, which likely do have bargaining power with Microsoft to a degree +that smaller markets do not. +={ services, software +1 ; + transparency of free software +} + +The last and quite distinct potential gain is the possibility of creating a +context and an anchor for a free software development sector based on service. +This was cited as the primary reason behind Brazil's significant push to use +free software in government departments and in telecenters that the federal +government is setting up to provide Internet service access to some of its +poorer and more remote areas. Software services represent a very large +industry. In the United States, software services are an industry roughly twice +the size of the movie and video industry. Software developers from low- and +middle-income countries can participate in the growing free software segment of +this market by using their skills alone. Unlike with service for the +proprietary domain, they need not buy licenses to learn and practice the ,{[pg +323]}, services. Moreover, if Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and other major +developing countries were to rely heavily on free software, then the "internal +market," within the developing world, for free software?related services would +become very substantial. Building public-sector demand for these services would +be one place to start. Moreover, because free software development is a global +phenomenon, free software developers who learn their skills within the +developing world would be able to export those skills elsewhere. Just as +India's call centers leverage the country's colonial past with its resulting +broad availability of English speakers, so too countries like Brazil can +leverage their active free software development community to provide software +services for free software platforms anywhere in the developed and developing +worlds. With free software, the developing-world providers can compete as +equals. They do not need access to permissions to operate. Their relationships +need not replicate the "outsourcing" model so common in proprietary industries, +where permission to work on a project is the point of control over the ability +to do so. There will still be branding issues that undoubtedly will affect +access to developed markets. However, there will be no baseline constraints of +minimal capital necessary to enter the market and try to develop a reputation +for reliability. As a development strategy, then, utilization of free software +achieves transfer of information-embedded goods for free or at low cost. It +also transfers information about the nature of the product and its +operation--the source code. Finally, it enables transfer, at least potentially, +of opportunities for learning by doing and of opportunities for participating +in the global market. These would depend on knowledge of a free software +platform that anyone is free to learn, rather than on access to financial +capital or intellectual property inventories as preconditions to effective +participation. + +3~ Scientific Publication +={ public sphere relationships +6 : + see social relations and norms publication, scientific +6 ; + scientific publication : + commons-based welfare development +6 +} + +Scientific publication is a second sector where a nonproprietary strategy can +be implemented readily and is already developing to supplant the proprietary +model. Here, the existing market structure is quite odd in a way that likely +makes it unstable. Authoring and peer review, the two core value-creating +activities, are done by scientists who perform neither task in expectation of +royalties or payment. The model of most publications, however, is highly +proprietary. A small number of business organizations, like Elsevier Science, +control most of the publications. Alongside them, professional associations of +scientists also publish their major journals using a proprietary model. ,{[pg +324]}, Universities, whose scientists need access to the papers, incur +substantial cost burdens to pay for the publications as a basic input into +their own new work. While the effects of this odd system are heavily felt in +universities in rich countries, the burden of subscription rates that go into +the thousands of dollars per title make access to up-to-date scientific +research prohibitive for universities and scientists working in poorer +economies. Nonproprietary solutions are already beginning to emerge in this +space. They fall into two large clusters. +={ authoring of scientific publications +2 ; + peer review of scientific publications +2 ; + proprietary rights : + scientific publication +2 +} + +The first cluster is closer to the traditional peer-review publication model. +It uses Internet communications to streamline the editorial and peer-review +system, but still depends on a small, salaried editorial staff. Instead of +relying on subscription payments, it relies on other forms of payments that do +not require charging a price for the outputs. In the case of the purely +nonprofit Public Library of Science (PLoS), the sources of revenue combine +author's payments for publication, philanthropic support, and university +memberships. In the case of the for-profit BioMed Central, based in the United +Kingdom, it is a combination of author payments, university memberships, and a +variety of customized derivative products like subscription-based literature +reviews and customized electronic update services. Author payments--fees +authors must pay to have their work published--are built into the cost of +scientific research and included in grant applications. In other words, they +are intended to be publicly funded. Indeed, in 2005, the National Institutes of +Health (NIH), the major funding agency for biomedical science in the United +States, announced a requirement that all NIH-funded research be made freely +available on the Web within twelve months of publication. Both PLoS and BioMed +Central have waiver processes for scientists who cannot pay the publication +fees. The articles on both systems are available immediately for free on the +Internet. The model exists. It works internally and is sustainable as such. +What is left in determining the overall weight that these open-access journals +will have in the landscape of scientific publication is the relatively +conservative nature of universities themselves. The established journals, like +Science or Nature, still carry substantially more prestige than the new +journals. As long as this is the case, and as long as hiring and promotion +decisions continue to be based on the prestige of the journal in which a +scientist's work is published, the ability of the new journals to replace the +traditional ones will be curtailed. Some of the established journals, however, +are operated by professional associations of scientists. There is an internal +tension between the interests of the associations in securing ,{[pg 325]}, +their revenue and the growing interest of scientists in open-access +publication. Combined with the apparent economic sustainability of the +open-access journals, it seems that some of these established journals will +likely shift over to the open-access model. At a minimum, policy interventions +like those proposed by the NIH will force traditional publications to adapt +their business model by making access free after a few months. The point here, +however, is not to predict the overall likely success of open-access journals. +It is to combine them with what we have seen happening in software as another +example of a reorganization of the components of the industrial structure of an +information production system. Individual scientists, government funding +agencies, nonprofits and foundations, and nonproprietary commercial business +models can create the same good--scientific publication--but without the cost +barrier that the old model imposed on access to its fruits. Such a +reorientation would significantly improve the access of universities and +physicians in developing nations to the most advanced scientific publication. +={ BioMed Central ; + NIH (National Institutes of Health) ; + PLoS (Public Library of Science) ; + Public Library of Science (PLoS) +} + +The second approach to scientific publication parallels more closely free +software development and peer production. This is typified by ArXiv and the +emerging practices of self-archiving or self-publishing. ArXiv.org is an online +repository of working papers in physics, mathematics, and computer science. It +started out focusing on physics, and that is where it has become the sine qua +non of publication in some subdisciplines. The archive does not perform review +except for technical format compliance. Quality control is maintained by +postpublication review and commentary, as well as by hosting updated versions +of the papers with explanations (provided by authors) of the changes. It is +likely that the reason ArXiv.org has become so successful in physics is the +very small and highly specialized nature of the discipline. The universe of +potential readers is small, and their capacity to distinguish good arguments +from bad is high. Reputation effects of poor publications are likely immediate. +={ ArXiv.org +1 ; + archiving of scientific publications +1 ; + self-archiving of scientific publications +1 +} + +While ArXiv offers a single repository, a much broader approach has been the +developing practice of self-archiving. Academics post their completed work on +their own Web sites and make it available freely. The primary limitation of +this mechanism is the absence of an easy, single location where one can search +for papers on a topic of concern. And yet we are already seeing the emergence +of tagging standards and protocols that allow anyone to search the universe of +self-archived materials. Once completed, such a development process would in +principle render archiving by single points of reference unnecessary. The +University of Michigan Digital Library Production ,{[pg 326]}, Service, for +example, has developed a protocol called OAIster (pronounced like oyster, with +the tagline "find the pearls"), which combines the acronym of Open Archives +Initiative with the "ster" ending made popular in reference to peer-to-peer +distribution technologies since Napster (AIMster, Grokster, Friendster, and the +like). The basic impulse of the Open Archives Initiative is to develop a +sufficiently refined set of meta-data tags that would allow anyone who archives +their materials with OAI-compliant tagging to be searched easily, quickly, and +accurately on the Web. In that case, a general Web search becomes a targeted +academic search in a "database" of scientific publications. However, the +database is actually a network of self-created, small personal databases that +comply with a common tagging and search standard. Again, my point here is not +to explore the details of one or another of these approaches. If scientists and +other academics adopt this approach of self-archiving coupled with standardized +interfaces for global, welldelimited searches, the problem of lack of access to +academic publication because of their high-cost publication will be eliminated. +={ OAIster protocol ; + Open Archives Initiative +} + +Other types of documents, for example, primary- and secondary-education +textbooks, are in a much more rudimentary stage of the development of +peer-production models. First, it should be recognized that responses to +illiteracy and low educational completion in the poorer areas of the world are +largely a result of lack of schoolteachers, physical infrastructure for +classrooms, demand for children's schooling among parents who are themselves +illiterate, and lack of effectively enforced compulsory education policy. The +cost of textbooks contributes only a portion of the problem of cost. The +opportunity cost of children's labor is probably the largest factor. +Nonetheless, outdated materials and poor quality of teaching materials are +often cited as one limit on the educational achievement of those who do attend +school. The costs of books, school fees, uniforms, and stationery can amount to +20? 30 percent of a family's income.~{ A good regional study of the extent and +details of educational deprivation is Mahbub ul Haq and Khadija ul Haq, Human +Development in South Asia 1998: The Education Challenge (Islamabad, Pakistan: +Human Development Center). }~ The component of the problem contributed by the +teaching materials may be alleviated by innovative approaches to textbook and +education materials authoring. Chapter 4 already discussed some textbook +initiatives. The most successful commons-based textbook authoring project, +which is also the most relevant from the perspective of development, is the +South African project, Free High School Science Texts (FHSST). The FHSST +initiative is more narrowly focused than the broader efforts of Wikibooks or +the California initiative, more managed, and more successful. Nonetheless, in +three years of substantial effort by a group of dedicated volunteers who +administer the project, its product is one physics ,{[pg 327]}, high school +text, and advanced drafts of two other science texts. The main constraint on +the efficacy of collaborative textbook authoring is that compliance +requirements imposed by education ministries tend to require a great degree of +coherence, which constrains the degree of modularity that these text-authoring +projects adopt. The relatively large-grained contributions required limit the +number of contributors, slowing the process. The future of these efforts is +therefore likely to be determined by the extent to which their designers are +able to find ways to make finer-grained modules without losing the coherence +required for primary- and secondary-education texts. Texts at the +post-secondary level likely present less of a problem, because of the greater +freedom instructors have to select texts. This allows an initiative like MIT's +Open Courseware Initiative to succeed. That initiative provides syllabi, +lecture notes, problem sets, etc. from over 1,100 courses. The basic creators +of the materials are paid academics who produce these materials for one of +their core professional roles: teaching college- and graduate-level courses. +The content is, by and large, a "side-effect" of teaching. What is left to be +done is to integrate, create easy interfaces and search capabilities, and so +forth. The university funds these functions through its own resources and +dedicated grant funding. In the context of MIT, then, these functions are +performed on a traditional model--a large, well-funded nonprofit provides an +important public good through the application of full-time staff aimed at +non-wealth-maximizing goals. The critical point here was the radical departure +of MIT from the emerging culture of the 1980s and 1990s in American academia. +When other universities were thinking of "distance education" in terms of +selling access to taped lectures and materials so as to raise new revenue, MIT +thought of what its basic mandate to advance knowledge and educate students in +a networked environment entailed. The answer was to give anyone, anywhere, +access to the teaching materials of some of the best minds in the world. As an +intervention in the ecology of free knowledge and information and an act of +leadership among universities, the MIT initiative was therefore a major event. +As a model for organizational innovation in the domain of information +production generally and the creation of educational resources in particular, +it was less significant. +={ FHSST (Free High School Science Texts) ; + Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) ; + teaching materials ; + textbooks ; + educational instruction ; + MIT's Open Courseware Initiative ; + Open Courseware Initiative (MIT) +} + +Software and academic publication, then, offer the two most advanced examples +of commons-based strategies employed in a sector whose outputs are important to +development, in ways that improve access to basic information, knowledge, and +information-embedded tools. Building on these basic cases, we can begin to see +how similar strategies can be employed to ,{[pg 328]}, create a substantial set +of commons-based solutions that could improve the distribution of information +germane to human development. + +2~ COMMONS-BASED RESEARCH FOR FOOD AND MEDICINES +={ commons, production through +24 : + see peer production commons-based research | food and agricultural innovation +24 ; + development, commons-based : + food and agricultural innovation +24 ; + global development : + food and agricultural innovation +24 ; + research, commons-based : + food and agricultural innovation +24 +} + +While computation and access to existing scientific research are important in +the development of any nation, they still operate at a remove from the most +basic needs of the world poor. On its face, it is far from obvious how the +emergence of the networked information economy can grow rice to feed millions +of malnourished children or deliver drugs to millions of HIV/AIDS patients. On +closer observation, however, a tremendous proportion of the way modern +societies grow food and develop medicines is based on scientific research and +technical innovation. We have seen how the functions of mass media can be +fulfilled by nonproprietary models of news and commentary. We have seen the +potential of free and open source software and open-access publications to +replace and redress some of the failures of proprietary software and scientific +publication, respectively. These cases suggest that the basic choice between a +system that depends on exclusive rights and business models that use exclusion +to appropriate research outputs and a system that weaves together various +actors--public and private, organized and individual--in a nonproprietary +social network of innovation, has important implications for the direction of +innovation and for access to its products. Public attention has focused mostly +on the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa and the lack of access to existing drugs +because of their high costs. However, that crisis is merely the tip of the +iceberg. It is the most visible to many because of the presence of the disease +in rich countries and its cultural and political salience in the United States +and Europe. The exclusive rights system is a poor institutional mechanism for +serving the needs of those who are worst off around the globe. Its weaknesses +pervade the problems of food security and agricultural research aimed at +increasing the supply of nourishing food throughout the developing world, and +of access to medicines in general, and to medicines for developing-world +diseases in particular. Each of these areas has seen a similar shift in +national and international policy toward greater reliance on exclusive rights, +most important of which are patents. Each area has also begun to see the +emergence of commons-based models to alleviate the problems of patents. +However, they differ from each other still. Agriculture offers more immediate +opportunities for improvement ,{[pg 329]}, because of the relatively larger +role of public research--national, international, and academic--and of the long +practices of farmer innovation in seed associations and local and regional +frameworks. I explore it first in some detail, as it offers a template for what +could be a path for development in medical research as well. +={ HIV/AIDS ; + folk culture : + see culture food, commons-research based on +} + +2~ Food Security: Commons-Based Agricultural Innovation +={ agricultural innovation, commons-based +22 ; + food security, commons-based research on +22 ; + innovation : + agricultural, commons-based +22 +} + +Agricultural innovation over the past century has led to a vast increase in +crop yields. Since the 1960s, innovation aimed at increasing yields and +improving quality has been the centerpiece of efforts to secure the supply of +food to the world's poor, to avoid famine and eliminate chronic malnutrition. +These efforts have produced substantial increases in the production of food and +decreases in its cost, but their benefits have varied widely in different +regions of the world. Now, increases in productivity are not alone a sufficient +condition to prevent famine. Sen's observations that democracies have no +famines--that is, that good government and accountability will force public +efforts to prevent famine--are widely accepted today. The contributions of the +networked information economy to democratic participation and transparency are +discussed in chapters 6-8, and to the extent that those chapters correctly +characterize the changes in political discourse, should help alleviate human +poverty through their effects on democracy. However, the cost and quality of +food available to accountable governments of poor countries, or to +international aid organizations or nongovernment organizations (NGOs) that step +in to try to alleviate the misery caused by ineffective or malicious +governments, affect how much can be done to avoid not only catastrophic famine, +but also chronic malnutrition. Improvements in agriculture make it possible for +anyone addressing food security to perform better than they could have if food +production had lower yields, of less nutritious food, at higher prices. Despite +its potential benefits, however, agricultural innovation has been subject to an +unusual degree of sustained skepticism aimed at the very project of organized +scientific and scientifically based innovation. Criticism combines +biological-ecological concerns with social and economic concerns. Nowhere is +this criticism more strident, or more successful at moving policy, than in +current European resistance to genetically modified (GM) foods. The emergence +of commons-based production strategies can go some way toward allaying the +biological-ecological fears by locating much of the innovation at the local +level. Its primary benefit, however, ,{[pg 330]}, is likely to be in offering a +path for agricultural and biological innovation that is sustainable and low +cost, and that need not result in appropriation of the food production chain by +a small number of multinational businesses, as many critics fear. + +Scientific plant improvement in the United States dates back to the +establishment of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the land-grant +universities, and later the state agricultural experiment stations during the +Civil War and in the decades that followed. Public-sector investment dominated +agricultural research at the time, and with the rediscovery of Mendel's work in +1900, took a turn toward systematic selective breeding. Through crop +improvement associations, seed certification programs, and open-release +policies allowing anyone to breed and sell the certified new seeds, farmers +were provided access to the fruits of public research in a reasonably efficient +and open market. The development of hybrid corn through this system was the +first major modern success that vastly increased agricultural yields. It +reshaped our understanding not only of agriculture, but also more generally of +the value of innovation, by comparison to efficiency, to growth. Yields in the +United States doubled between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s, and by the +mid-1980s, cornfields had a yield six times greater than they had fifty years +before. Beginning in the early 1960s, with funding from the Rockefeller and +Ford foundations, and continuing over the following forty years, agricultural +research designed to increase the supply of agricultural production and lower +its cost became a central component of international and national policies +aimed at securing the supply of food to the world's poor populations, avoiding +famines and, ultimately, eliminating chronic malnutrition. The International +Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines was the first such institute, +founded in the 1960s, followed by the International Center for Wheat and Maize +Improvement (CIM-MYT) in Mexico (1966), and the two institutes for tropical +agriculture in Colombia and Nigeria (1967). Together, these became the +foundation for the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research +(CGIAR), which now includes sixteen centers. Over the same period, National +Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) also were created around the world, +focusing on research specific to local agroecological conditions. Research in +these centers preceded the biotechnology revolution, and used various +experimental breeding techniques to obtain high-yielding plants: for example, +plants with shorter growing seasons, or more adapted to intensive fertilizer +use. These efforts later introduced varieties ,{[pg 331]}, that were resistant +to local pests, diseases, and to various harsh environmental conditions. + +The "Green Revolution," as the introduction of these new, +scientificresearch-based varieties has been called, indeed resulted in +substantial increases in yields, initially in rice and wheat, in Asia and Latin +America. The term "Green Revolution" is often limited to describing these +changes in those regions in the 1960s and 1970s. A recent study shows, however, +that the growth in yields has continued throughout the last forty years, and +has, with varying degrees, occurred around the world.~{ Robert Evenson and D. +Gollin, eds., Crop Variety Improvement and Its Effect on Productivity: The +Impact of International Agricultural Research (New York: CABI Pub., 2002); +results summarized in Robert Evenson and D. Gollin, "Assessing the Impact of +the Green Revolution, 1960-2000," Science 300 (May 2003): 758-762. }~ More than +eight thousand modern varieties of rice, wheat, maize, other major cereals, and +root and protein crops have been released over the course of this period by +more than four hundred public breeding programs. One of the most interesting +finds of this study was that fewer than 1 percent of these modern varieties had +any crosses with public or private breeding programs in the developed world, +and that private-sector contributions in general were limited to hybrid maize, +sorghum, and millet. The effort, in other words, was almost entirely public +sector, and almost entirely based in the developing world, with complementary +efforts of the international and national programs. Yields in Asia increased +sevenfold from 1961 to 2000, and fivefold in Latin America, the Middle +East/North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. More than 60 percent of the growth +in Asia and Latin America occurred in the 1960s?1980s, while the primary growth +in Sub-Saharan Africa began in the 1980s. In Latin America, most of the +early-stage increases in yields came from increasing cultivated areas ( 40 +percent), and from other changes in cultivation-- increased use of fertilizer, +mechanization, and irrigation. About 15 percent of the growth in the early +period was attributable to the use of modern varieties. In the latter twenty +years, however, more than 40 percent of the total increase in yields was +attributable to the use of new varieties. In Asia in the early period, about 19 +percent of the increase came from modern varieties, but almost the entire rest +of the increase came from increased use of fertilizer, mechanization, and +irrigation, not from increased cultivated areas. It is trivial to see why +changes of this sort would elicit both environmental and a socialeconomic +critique of the industrialization of farm work. Again, though, in the latter +twenty years, 46 percent of the increase in yields is attributable to the use +of modern varieties. Modern varieties played a significantly less prominent +role in the Green Revolution of the Middle East and Africa, contributing 5-6 +percent of the growth in yields. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, ,{[pg +332]}, early efforts to introduce varieties from Asia and Latin America failed, +and local developments only began to be adopted in the 1980s. In the latter +twenty-year period, however, the Middle East and North Africa did see a +substantial role for modern varieties--accounting for close to 40 percent of a +more than doubling of yields. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the overwhelming majority +of the tripling of yields came from increasing area of cultivation, and about +16 percent came from modern varieties. Over the past forty years, then, +research-based improvements in plants have come to play a larger role in +increasing agricultural yields in the developing world. Their success was, +however, more limited in the complex and very difficult environments of +SubSaharan Africa. Much of the benefit has to do with local independence, as +opposed to heavier dependence on food imports. Evenson and Gollin, for example, +conservatively estimate that higher prices and a greater reliance on imports in +the developing world in the absence of the Green Revolution would have resulted +in 13-14 percent lower caloric intake in the developing world, and in a 6-8 +percent higher proportion of malnourished children. While these numbers may not +seem eye-popping, for populations already living on marginal nutrition, they +represent significant differences in quality of life and in physical and mental +development for millions of children and adults. +={ Green Revolution +5 } + +The agricultural research that went into much of the Green Revolution did not +involve biotechnology--that is, manipulation of plant varieties at the genetic +level through recombinant DNA techniques. Rather, it occurred at the level of +experimental breeding. In the developed world, however, much of the research +over the past twenty-five years has been focused on the use of biotechnology to +achieve more targeted results than breeding can, has been more heavily based on +private-sector investment, and has resulted in more private-sector ownership +over the innovations. The promise of biotechnology, and particularly of +genetically engineered or modified foods, has been that they could provide +significant improvements in yields as well as in health effects, quality of the +foods grown, and environmental effects. Plants engineered to be pest resistant +could decrease the need to use pesticides, resulting in environmental benefits +and health benefits to farmers. Plants engineered for ever-higher yields +without increasing tilled acreage could limit the pressure for deforestation. +Plants could be engineered to carry specific nutritional supplements, like +golden rice with beta-carotene, so as to introduce necessarily nutritional +requirements into subsistence diets. Beyond the hypothetically optimistic +possibilities, there is little question that genetic engineering has already +produced crops that lower the cost of production ,{[pg 333]}, for farmers by +increasing herbicide and pest tolerance. As of 2002, more than 50 percent of +the world's soybean acreage was covered with genetically modified (GM) +soybeans, and 20 percent with cotton. Twenty-seven percent of acreage covered +with GM crops is in the developing world. This number will grow significantly +now that Brazil has decided to permit the introduction of GM crops, given its +growing agricultural role, and now that India, as the world's largest cotton +producer, has approved the use of Bt cotton--a GM form of cotton that improves +its resistance to a common pest. There are, then, substantial advantages to +farmers, at least, and widespread adoption of GM crops both in the developed +world outside of Europe and in the developing world. +={ biotechnology +7 ; + genetically modified (GM) foods +7 ; + GM (genetically modified) foods +7 +} + +This largely benign story of increasing yields, resistance, and quality has not +been without critics, to put it mildly. The criticism predates biotechnology +and the development of transgenic varieties. Its roots are in criticism of +experimental breeding programs of the American agricultural sectors and the +Green Revolution. However, the greatest public visibility and political success +of these criticisms has been in the context of GM foods. The critique brings +together odd intellectual and political bedfellows, because it includes five +distinct components: social and economic critique of the industrialization of +agriculture, environmental and health effects, consumer preference for +"natural" or artisan production of foodstuffs, and, perhaps to a more limited +extent, protectionism of domestic farm sectors. + +Perhaps the oldest component of the critique is the social-economic critique. +One arm of the critique focuses on how mechanization, increased use of +chemicals, and ultimately the use of nonreproducing proprietary seed led to +incorporation of the agricultural sector into the capitalist form of +production. In the United States, even with its large "family farm" sector, +purchased inputs now greatly exceed nonpurchased inputs, production is highly +capital intensive, and large-scale production accounts for the majority of land +tilled and the majority of revenue captured from farming.~{ Jack R. +Kloppenburg, Jr., First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology +1492-2000 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), table +2.2. }~ In 2003, 56 percent of farms had sales of less than $10,000 a year. +Roughly 85 percent of farms had less than $100,000 in sales.~{ USDA National +Agriculture Statistics Survey (2004), http://www.usda.gov/ +nass/aggraphs/fncht3.htm. }~ These farms account for only 42 percent of the +farmland. By comparison, 3.4 percent of farms have sales of more than $500,000 +a year, and account for more than 21 percent of land. In the aggregate, the 7.5 +percent of farms with sales over $250,000 account for 37 percent of land +cultivated. Of all principal owners of farms in the United States in 2002, 42.5 +percent reported something other than farming as their principal occupation, +and many reported spending two hundred or ,{[pg 334]}, more days off-farm, or +even no work days at all on the farm. The growth of large-scale "agribusiness," +that is, mechanized, rationalized industrial-scale production of agricultural +products, and more important, of agricultural inputs, is seen as replacing the +family farm and the small-scale, self-sufficient farm, and bringing farm labor +into the capitalist mode of production. As scientific development of seeds and +chemical applications increases, the seed as input becomes separated from the +grain as output, making farmers dependent on the purchase of industrially +produced seed. This further removes farmwork from traditional modes of +self-sufficiency and craftlike production to an industrial mode. This basic +dynamic is repeated in the critique of the Green Revolution, with the added +overlay that the industrial producers of seed are seen to be multinational +corporations, and the industrialization of agriculture is seen as creating +dependencies in the periphery on the industrial-scientific core of the global +economy. + +The social-economic critique has been enmeshed, as a political matter, with +environmental, health, and consumer-oriented critiques as well. The +environmental critiques focus on describing the products of science as +monocultures, which, lacking the genetic diversity of locally used varieties, +are more susceptible to catastrophic failure. Critics also fear contamination +of existing varieties, unpredictable interactions with pests, and negative +effects on indigenous species. The health effects concern focused initially on +how breeding for yield may have decreased nutritional content, and in the more +recent GM food debates, the concern that genetically altered foods will have +some unanticipated negative health reactions that would only become apparent +many years from now. The consumer concerns have to do with quality and an +aesthetic attraction to artisan-mode agricultural products and aversion to +eating industrial outputs. These social-economic and +environmental-health-consumer concerns tend also to be aligned with +protectionist lobbies, not only for economic purposes, but also reflecting a +strong cultural attachment to the farming landscape and human ecology, +particularly in Europe. +={ environmental criticism of GM foods +1 ; + health effects of GM foods +1 +} + +This combination of social-economic and postcolonial critique, +environmentalism, public-health concerns, consumer advocacy, and farm-sector +protectionism against the relatively industrialized American agricultural +sector reached a height of success in the 1999 five-year ban imposed by the +European Union on all GM food sales. A recent study of a governmental Science +Review Board in the United Kingdom, however, found that there was no ,{[pg +335]}, evidence for any of the environmental or health critiques of GM foods.~{ +First Report of the GM Science Review Panel, An Open Review of the Science +Relevant to GM Crops and Food Based on the Interests and Concerns of the +Public, United Kingdom, July 2003. }~ Indeed, as Peter Pringle masterfully +chronicled in Food, Inc., both sides of the political debate could be described +as having buffed their cases significantly. The successes and potential +benefits have undoubtedly been overstated by enamored scientists and avaricious +vendors. There is little doubt, too, that the near-hysterical pitch at which +the failures and risks of GM foods have been trumpeted has little science to +back it, and the debate has degenerated to a state that makes reasoned, +evidence-based consideration difficult. In Europe in general, however, there is +wide acceptance of what is called a "precautionary principle." One way of +putting it is that absence of evidence of harm is not evidence of absence of +harm, and caution counsels against adoption of the new and at least +theoretically dangerous. It was this precautionary principle rather than +evidence of harm that was at the base of the European ban. This ban has +recently been lifted, in the wake of a WTO trade dispute with the United States +and other major producers who challenged the ban as a trade barrier. However, +the European Union retained strict labeling requirements. This battle among +wealthy countries, between the conservative "Fortress Europe" mentality and the +growing reliance of American agriculture on biotechnological innovation, would +have little moral valence if it did not affect funding for, and availability +of, biotechnological research for the populations of the developing world. +Partly as a consequence of the strong European resistance to GM foods, the +international agricultural research centers that led the way in the development +of the Green Revolution varieties, and that released their developments freely +for anyone to sell and use without proprietary constraint, were slow to develop +capacity in genetic engineering and biotechnological research more generally. +Rather than the public national and international efforts leading the way, a +study of GM use in developing nations concluded that practically all GM acreage +is sown with seed obtained in the finished form from a developed-world +supplier, for a price premium or technology licensing fee.~{ Robert E. Evenson, +"GMOs: Prospects for Productivity Increases in Developing Countries," Journal +of Agricultural and Food Industrial Organization 2 (2004): article 2. }~ The +seed, and its improvements, is proprietary to the vendor in this model. It is +not supplied in a form or with the rights to further improve locally and +independently. Because of the critique of innovation in agriculture as part of +the process of globalization and industrialization, of environmental +degradation, and of consumer exploitation, the political forces that would have +been most likely to support public-sector investment in agricultural innovation +are in opposition to such investments. The result has not been retardation of +biotechnological innovation ,{[pg 336]}, in agriculture, but its increasing +privatization: primarily in the United States and now increasingly in Latin +America, whose role in global agricultural production is growing. +={ Pringle, Peter ; + privatization : + agricultural biotechnologies +2 ; + proprietary rights : + agricultural biotechnologies +2 ; + technology : + agricultural +16 +} + +Private-sector investment, in turn, operates within a system of patents and +other breeders' exclusive rights, whose general theoretical limitations are +discussed in chapter 2. In agriculture, this has two distinct but mutually +reinforcing implications. The first is that, while private-sector innovation +has indeed accounted for most genetically engineered crops in the developing +world, research aimed at improving agricultural production in the neediest +places has not been significantly pursued by the major private-sector firms. A +sector based on expectation of sales of products embedding its patents will not +focus its research where human welfare will be most enhanced. It will focus +where human welfare can best be expressed in monetary terms. The poor are +systematically underserved by such a system. It is intended to elicit +investments in research in directions that investors believe will result in +outputs that serve the needs of those with the highest willingness and ability +to pay for their outputs. The second is that even where the products of +innovation can, as a matter of biological characteristics, be taken as inputs +into local research and development--by farmers or by national agricultural +research systems--the international system of patents and plant breeders' +rights enforcement makes it illegal to do so without a license. This again +retards the ability of poor countries and their farmers and research institutes +to conduct research into local adaptations of improved crops. + +The central question raised by the increasing privatization of agricultural +biotechnology over the past twenty years is: What can be done to employ +commons-based strategies to provide a foundation for research that will be +focused on the food security of developing world populations? Is there a way of +managing innovation in this sector so that it will not be heavily weighted in +favor of populations with a higher ability to pay, and so that its outputs +allow farmers and national research efforts to improve and adapt to highly +variable local agroecological environments? The continued presence of the +public-sector research infrastructure--including the international and national +research centers, universities, and NGOs dedicated to the problem of food +security--and the potential of harnessing individual farmers and scientists to +cooperative development of open biological innovation for agriculture suggest +that commons-based paths for development in the area of food security and +agricultural innovation are indeed feasible. + +First, some of the largest and most rapidly developing nations that still ,{[pg +337]}, have large poor populations--most prominently, China, India, and +Brazil-- can achieve significant advances through their own national +agricultural research systems. Their research can, in turn, provide a platform +for further innovation and adaptation by projects in poorer national systems, +as well as in nongovernmental public and peer-production efforts. In this +regard, China seems to be leading the way. The first rice genome to be +sequenced was japonica, apparently sequenced in 2000 by scientists at Monsanto, +but not published. The second, an independent and published sequence of +japonica, was sequenced by scientists at Syngenta, and published as the first +published rice genome sequence in Science in April 2002. To protect its +proprietary interests, Syngenta entered a special agreement with Science, which +permitted the authors not to deposit the genomic information into the public +Genbank maintained by the National Institutes of Health in the United States.~{ +Elliot Marshall, "A Deal for the Rice Genome," Science 296 (April 2002): 34. }~ +Depositing the information in GenBank makes it immediately available for other +scientists to work with freely. All the major scientific publications require +that such information be deposited and made publicly available as a standard +condition of publication, but Science waved this requirement for the Syngenta +japonica sequence. The same issue of Science, however, carried a similar +publication, the sequence of Oryza sativa L.ssp. indica, the most widely +cultivated subspecies in China. This was sequenced by a public Chinese effort, +and its outputs were immediately deposited in GenBank. The simultaneous +publication of the rice genome by a major private firm and a Chinese public +effort was the first public exposure to the enormous advances that China's +public sector has made in agricultural biotechnology, and its focus first and +foremost on improving Chinese agriculture. While its investments are still an +order of magnitude smaller than those of public and private sectors in the +developed countries, China has been reported as the source of more than half of +all expenditures in the developing world.~{ Jikun Huang et al., "Plant +Biotechnology in China," Science 295 (2002): 674. }~ China's longest experience +with GM agriculture is with Bt cotton, which was introduced in 1997. By 2000, +20 percent of China's cotton acreage was sown to Bt cotton. One study showed +that the average acreage of a farm was less than 0.5 hectare of cotton, and the +trait that was most valuable to them was Bt cotton's reduced pesticide needs. +Those who adopted Bt cotton used less pesticide, reducing labor for pest +control and the pesticide cost per kilogram of cotton produced. This allowed an +average cost savings of 28 percent. Another effect suggested by survey +data--which, if confirmed over time, would be very important as a matter of +public health, but also to the political economy of the agricultural +biotechnology debate--is that farmers ,{[pg 338]}, who do not use Bt cotton are +four times as likely to report symptoms of a degree of toxic exposure following +application of pesticides than farmers who did adopt Bt cotton.~{ Huang et al., +"Plant Biotechnology." }~ The point is not, of course, to sing the praises of +GM cotton or the Chinese research system. China's efforts offer an example of +how the larger national research systems can provide an anchor for agricultural +research, providing solutions both for their own populations, and, by making +the products of their research publicly and freely available, offer a +foundation for the work of others. +={ Bt cotton ; + Chinese agricultural research ; + Syngenta +} + +Alongside the national efforts in developing nations, there are two major paths +for commons-based research and development in agriculture that could serve the +developing world more generally. The first is based on existing research +institutes and programs cooperating to build a commons-based system, cleared of +the barriers of patents and breeders' rights, outside and alongside the +proprietary system. The second is based on the kind of loose affiliation of +university scientists, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals that we +saw play such a significant role in the development of free and open-source +software. The most promising current efforts in the former vein are the PIPRA +(Public Intellectual Property for Agriculture) coalition of public-sector +universities in the United States, and, if it delivers on its theoretical +promises, the Generation Challenge Program led by CGIAR (the Consultative Group +on International Agricultural Research). The most promising model of the +latter, and probably the most ambitious commons-based project for biological +innovation currently contemplated, is BIOS (Biological Innovation for an Open +Society). +={ PIPRA (Public Intellectual Property for Agriculture) +6 ; + collaborative authorship : + among universities +6 ; + communication : + university alliances +6 ; + proprietary rights : + university alliances +6 ; + university alliances +6 ; + licensing : + agricultural biotechnologies +10 ; + proprietary rights : + agricultural biotechnologies +10 +} + +PIPRA is a collaboration effort among public-sector universities and +agricultural research institutes in the United States, aimed at managing their +rights portfolio in a way that will give their own and other researchers +freedom to operate in an institutional ecology increasingly populated by +patents and other rights that make work difficult. The basic thesis and +underlying problem that led to PIPRA's founding were expressed in an article in +Science coauthored by fourteen university presidents.~{ Richard Atkinson et +al., "Public Sector Collaboration for Agricultural IP Management," Science 301 +(2003): 174. }~ They underscored the centrality of public-sector, land-grant +university-based research to American agriculture, and the shift over the last +twenty-five years toward increased use of intellectual property rules to cover +basic discoveries and tools necessary for agricultural innovation. These +strategies have been adopted by both commercial firms and, increasingly, by +public-sector universities as the primary mechanism for technology transfer +from the scientific institute to the commercializing firms. The problem they +saw was that in agricultural research, ,{[pg 339]}, innovation was incremental. +It relies on access to existing germplasm and crop varieties that, with each +generation of innovation, brought with them an ever-increasing set of +intellectual property claims that had to be licensed in order to obtain +permission to innovate further. The universities decided to use the power that +ownership over roughly 24 percent of the patents in agricultural biotechnology +innovations provides them as a lever with which to unravel the patent thickets +and to reduce the barriers to research that they increasingly found themselves +dealing with. The main story, one might say the "founding myth" of PIPRA, was +the story of golden rice. Golden rice is a variety of rice that was engineered +to provide dietary vitamin A. It was developed with the hope that it could +introduce vitamin A supplement to populations in which vitamin A deficiency +causes roughly 500,000 cases of blindness a year and contributes to more than 2 +million deaths a year. However, when it came to translating the research into +deliverable plants, the developers encountered more than seventy patents in a +number of countries and six materials transfer agreements that restricted the +work and delayed it substantially. PIPRA was launched as an effort of +public-sector universities to cooperate in achieving two core goals that would +respond to this type of barrier--preserving the right to pursue applications to +subsistence crops and other developing-world-related crops, and preserving +their own freedom to operate vis-a-vis each other's patent portfolios. +={ golden rice } + +The basic insight of PIPRA, which can serve as a model for university alliances +in the context of the development of medicines as well as agriculture, is that +universities are not profit-seeking enterprises, and university scientists are +not primarily driven by a profit motive. In a system that offers opportunities +for academic and business tracks for people with similar basic skills, academia +tends to attract those who are more driven by nonmonetary motivations. While +universities have invested a good deal of time and money since the Bayh-Dole +Act of 1980 permitted and indeed encouraged them to patent innovations +developed with public funding, patent and other exclusive-rights-based revenues +have not generally emerged as an important part of the revenue scheme of +universities. As table 9.2 shows, except for one or two outliers, patent +revenues have been all but negligible in university budgets.~{ This table is a +slightly expanded version of one originally published in Yochai Benkler, +"Commons Based Strategies and the Problems of Patents," Science 305 (2004): +1110. }~ This fact makes it fiscally feasible for universities to use their +patent portfolios to maximize the global social benefit of their research, +rather than trying to maximize patent revenue. In particular, universities can +aim to include provisions in their technology licensing agreements that are +aimed at the dual goals of (a) delivering products embedding their innovations +,{[pg 340]}, to developing nations at reasonable prices and (b) providing +researchers and plant breeders the freedom to operate that would allow them to +research, develop, and ultimately produce crops that would improve food +security in the developing world. + +% end of paragraph which occurs on page 341 apended above table + +!_ Table 9.2: Selected University Gross Revenues and Patent Licensing Revenues + +table{~h c6; 28; 14; 14; 14; 14; 14; + +. +Total Revenues (millions) +Licensing & Royalties (mil.) +Licensing & Royalties (% of total) +Gov. Grants & Contracts (mil.) +Gov. Grants & Contracts (% of total) + +All universities +$227,000 +$1270 +0.56% +$31,430 +13.85% + +University of Columbia +$2,074 +$178.4 $100-120a +8.6% 4.9-5.9% +$532 +25.65% + +University of California +$14,166 +$81.3 $55(net)b +0.57% 0.39% +$2372 +16.74% + +Stanford University +$3,475 +$43.3 $36.8c +1.25% 1.06% +$860 +24.75% + +Florida State +$2,646 +$35.6 +1.35% +$238 +8.99% + +University of Wisconsin Madison +$1,696 +$32 +1.89% +$417.4 +24.61% + +University of Minnesota +$1,237 +$38.7 +3.12% +$323.5 +26.15% + +Harvard +$2,473 +$47.9 +1.94% +$416 $548.7d +16.82% 22.19% + +Cal Tech +$531 +$26.7e $15.7f +5.02% 2.95% +$268 +50.47% + +}table + +Sources: Aggregate revenues: U.S. Dept. of Education, National Center for +Education Statistics, Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2001, and +Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2001 (2003), Table F; Association of +University Technology Management, Annual Survey Summary FY 2002 (AUTM 2003), +Table S-12. Individual institutions: publicly available annual reports of each +university and/or its technology transfer office for FY 2003. + +group{ + +Notes: + +a. Large ambiguity results because technology transfer office reports increased +revenues for yearend 2003 as $178M without reporting expenses; University +Annual Report reports licensing revenue with all "revenue from other +educational and research activities," and reports a 10 percent decline in this +category, "reflecting an anticipated decline in royalty and license income" +from the $133M for the previous year-end, 2002. The table reflects an assumed +net contribution to university revenues between $100-120M (the entire decline +in the category due to royalty/royalties decreased proportionately with the +category). + +b. University of California Annual Report of the Office of Technology Transfer +is more transparent than most in providing expenses--both net legal expenses +and tech transfer direct operating expenses, which allows a clear separation of +net revenues from technology transfer activities. + +c. Minus direct expenses, not including expenses for unlicensed inventions. + +d. Federal- and nonfederal-sponsored research. + +e. Almost half of this amount is in income from a single Initial Public +Offering, and therefore does not represent a recurring source of licensing +revenue. + +f. Technology transfer gross revenue minus the one-time event of an initial +public offering of LiquidMetal Technologies. + +}group + +% ,{[pg 341]}, + +While PIPRA shows an avenue for collaboration among universities in the public +interest, it is an avenue that does not specifically rely on, or benefit in +great measure from, the information networks or the networked information +economy. It continues to rely on the traditional model of publicly funded +research. More explicit in its effort to leverage the cost savings made +possible by networked information systems is the Generation Challenge Program +(GCP). The GCP is an effort to bring the CGIAR into the biotechnology sphere, +carefully, given the political resistance to genetically modified foods, and +quickly, given the already relatively late start that the international +research centers have had in this area. Its stated emphasis is on building an +architecture of innovation, or network of research relationships, that will +provide low-cost techniques for the basic contemporary technologies of +agricultural research. The program has five primary foci, but the basic thrust +is to generate improvements both in basic genomics science and in breeding and +farmer education, in both cases for developing world agriculture. One early +focus would be on building a communications system that allows participating +institutions and scientists to move information efficiently and utilize +computational resources to pursue research. There are hundreds of thousands of +samples of germplasm, from "landrace" (that is, locally agriculturally +developed) and wild varieties to modern varieties, located in databases around +the world in international, national, and academic institutions. There are +tremendous high-capacity computation resources in some of the most advanced +research institutes, but not in many of the national and international +programs. One of the major goals articulated for the GCP is to develop +Web-based interfaces to share these data and computational resources. Another +is to provide a platform for sharing new questions and directions of research +among participants. The work in this network will, in turn, rely on materials +that have proprietary interests attached to them, and will produce outputs that +could have proprietary interests attached to them as well. Just like the +universities, the GCP institutes (national, international, and nonprofit) are +looking for an approach aimed to secure open access to research materials and +tools and to provide humanitarian access to its products, particularly for +subsistence crop development and use. As of this writing, however, the GCP is +still in a formative stage, more an aspiration than ,{[pg 342]}, a working +model. Whether it will succeed in overcoming the political constraints placed +on the CGIAR as well as the relative latecomer status of the international +public efforts to this area of work remains to be seen. But the elements of the +GCP certainly exhibit an understanding of the possibilities presented by +commons-based networked collaboration, and an ambition to both build upon them +and contribute to their development. +={ CGIAR's GCP program ; + GCP (Generation Challenge Program) ; + Generation Challenge Program (GCP) +} + +The most ambitious effort to create a commons-based framework for biological +innovation in this field is BIOS. BIOS is an initiative of CAMBIA (Center for +the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture), a nonprofit +agricultural research institute based in Australia, which was founded and is +directed by Richard Jefferson, a pioneer in plant biotechnology. BIOS is based +on the observation that much of contemporary agricultural research depends on +access to tools and enabling technologies-- such as mechanisms to identify +genes or for transferring them into target plants. When these tools are +appropriated by a small number of firms and available only as part of +capital-intensive production techniques, they cannot serve as the basis for +innovation at the local level or for research organized on nonproprietary +models. One of the core insights driving the BIOS initiative is the recognition +that when a subset of necessary tools is available in the public domain, but +other critical tools are not, the owners of those tools appropriate the full +benefits of public domain innovation without at the same time changing the +basic structural barriers to use of the proprietary technology. To overcome +these problems, the BIOS initiative includes both a strong informatics +component and a fairly ambitious "copyleft"-like model (similar to the GPL +described in chapter 3) of licensing CAMBIA's basic tools and those of other +members of the BIOS initiative. The informatics component builds on a patent +database that has been developed by CAMBIA for a number of years, and whose +ambition is to provide as complete as possible a dataset of who owns what +tools, what the contours of ownership are, and by implication, who needs to be +negotiated with and where research paths might emerge that are not yet +appropriated and therefore may be open to unrestricted innovation. +={ Jefferson, Richard ; + BIOS initiative +2 ; + CAMBIA research institute +2 ; + copyleft +1 +} + +The licensing or pooling component is more proactive, and is likely the most +significant of the project. BIOS is setting up a licensing and pooling +arrangement, "primed" by CAMBIA's own significant innovations in tools, which +are licensed to all of the initiative's participants on a free model, with +grant-back provisions that perform an openness-binding function similar to +copyleft.~{ Wim Broothaertz et al., "Gene Transfer to Plants by Diverse Species +of Bacteria," Nature 433 (2005): 629. }~ In coarse terms, this means that +anyone who builds upon the ,{[pg 343]}, contributions of others must contribute +improvements back to the other participants. One aspect of this model is that +it does not assume that all research comes from academic institutions or from +traditional governmentfunded, nongovernmental, or intergovernmental research +institutes. It tries to create a framework that, like the open-source +development community, engages commercial and noncommercial, public and +private, organized and individual participants into a cooperative research +network. The platform for this collaboration is "BioForge," styled after +Sourceforge, one of the major free and open-source software development +platforms. The commitment to engage many different innovators is most clearly +seen in the efforts of BIOS to include major international commercial providers +and local potential commercial breeders alongside the more likely targets of a +commons-based initiative. Central to this move is the belief that in +agricultural science, the basic tools can, although this may be hard, be +separated from specific applications or products. All actors, including the +commercial ones, therefore have an interest in the open and efficient +development of tools, leaving competition and profit making for the market in +applications. At the other end of the spectrum, BIOS's focus on making tools +freely available is built on the proposition that innovation for food security +involves more than biotechnology alone. It involves environmental management, +locale-specific adaptations, and social and economic adoption in forms that are +locally and internally sustainable, as opposed to dependent on a constant +inflow of commoditized seed and other inputs. The range of participants is, +then, much wider than envisioned by PIPRA or the GCP. It ranges from +multinational corporations through academic scientists, to farmers and local +associations, pooling their efforts in a communications platform and +institutional model that is very similar to the way in which the GNU/Linux +operating system has been developed. As of this writing, the BIOS project is +still in its early infancy, and cannot be evaluated by its outputs. However, +its structure offers the crispest example of the extent to which the +peer-production model in particular, and commons-based production more +generally, can be transposed into other areas of innovation at the very heart +of what makes for human development--the ability to feed oneself adequately. +={ BioForge } + +PIPRA and the BIOS initiative are the most salient examples of, and the most +significant first steps in the development of commons-based strategies to +achieve food security. Their vitality and necessity challenge the conventional +wisdom that ever-increasing intellectual property rights are necessary to +secure greater investment in research, or that the adoption of proprietary +,{[pg 344]}, rights is benign. Increasing appropriation of basic tools and +enabling technologies creates barriers to entry for innovators--public-sector, +nonprofit organizations, and the local farmers themselves--concerned with +feeding those who cannot signal with their dollars that they are in need. The +emergence of commons-based techniques--particularly, of an open innovation +platform that can incorporate farmers and local agronomists from around the +world into the development and feedback process through networked collaboration +platforms--promises the most likely avenue to achieve research oriented toward +increased food security in the developing world. It promises a mechanism of +development that will not increase the relative weight and control of a small +number of commercial firms that specialize in agricultural production. It will +instead release the products of innovation into a selfbinding commons--one that +is institutionally designed to defend itself against appropriation. It promises +an iterative collaboration platform that would be able to collect environmental +and local feedback in the way that a free software development project collects +bug reports--through a continuous process of networked conversation among the +user-innovators themselves. In combination with public investments from +national governments in the developing world, from the developed world, and +from more traditional international research centers, agricultural research for +food security may be on a path of development toward constructing a sustainable +commons-based innovation ecology alongside the proprietary system. Whether it +follows this path will be partly a function of the engagement of the actors +themselves, but partly a function of the extent to which the international +intellectual property/trade system will refrain from raising obstacles to the +emergence of these commons-based efforts. + +3~ Access to Medicines: Commons-Based Strategies for Biomedical Research +={ access : + to medicine +14 ; + biomedical research, commons-based +14 ; + commons, production through : + see peer production commons-based research | medical and pharmaceutical innovation +14 ; + development, commons-based : + medical and pharmaceutical innovation +14 ; + drugs, commons-based research on +14 ; + global development : + medical and pharmaceutical innovation +14 ; + medicines, commons-based research on +14 ; + pharmaceuticals, commons-based research on +14 ; + research, commons-based : + medical and pharmaceutical innovation +14 +} + +Nothing has played a more important role in exposing the systematic problems +that the international trade and patent system presents for human development +than access to medicines for HIV/AIDS. This is so for a number of reasons. +First, HIV/AIDS has reached pandemic proportions. One quarter of all deaths +from infectious and parasitic diseases in 2002 were caused by AIDS, accounting +for almost 5 percent of all deaths in the world that year.~{ These numbers and +others in this paragraph are taken from the 2004 WHO World Health Report, Annex +Table 2. }~ Second, it is a new condition, unknown to medicine a mere +twenty-five years ago, is communicable, and in principle is of a +type--infectious diseases--that we have come to see modern medicine as capable +of solving. ,{[pg 345]}, This makes it different from much bigger killers--like +the many cancers and forms of heart disease--which account for about nine times +as many deaths globally. Third, it has a significant presence in the advanced +economies. Because it was perceived there as a disease primarily affecting the +gay community, it had a strong and well-defined political lobby and high +cultural salience. Fourth, and finally, there have indeed been enormous +advances in the development of medicines for HIV/AIDS. Mortality for patients +who are treated is therefore much lower than for those who are not. These +treatments are new, under patent, and enormously expensive. As a result, +death-- as opposed to chronic illness--has become overwhelmingly a consequence +of poverty. More than 75 percent of deaths caused by AIDS in 2002 were in +Africa. HIV/AIDS drugs offer a vivid example of an instance where drugs exist +for a disease but cannot be afforded in the poorest countries. They represent, +however, only a part, and perhaps the smaller part, of the limitations that a +patent-based drug development system presents for providing medicines to the +poor. No less important is the absence of a market pull for drugs aimed at +diseases that are solely or primarily developing-world diseases--like drugs for +tropical diseases, or the still-elusive malaria vaccine. +={ HIV/AIDS } + +To the extent that the United States and Europe are creating a global +innovation system that relies on patents and market incentives as its primary +driver of research and innovation, these wealthy democracies are, of necessity, +choosing to neglect diseases that disproportionately affect the poor. There is +nothing evil about a pharmaceutical company that is responsible to its +shareholders deciding to invest where it expects to reap profit. It is not +immoral for a firm to invest its research funds in finding a drug to treat +acne, which might affect 20 million teenagers in the United States, rather than +a drug that will cure African sleeping sickness, which affects 66 million +Africans and kills about fifty thousand every year. If there is immorality to +be found, it is in the legal and policy system that relies heavily on the +patent system to induce drug discovery and development, and does not adequately +fund and organize biomedical research to solve the problems that cannot be +solved by relying solely on market pull. However, the politics of public +response to patents for drugs are similar in structure to those that have to do +with agricultural biotechnology exclusive rights. There is a very strong +patentbased industry--much stronger than in any other patent-sensitive area. +The rents from strong patents are enormous, and a rational monopolist will pay +up to the value of its rents to maintain and improve its monopoly. The primary +potential political push-back in the pharmaceutical area, which does ,{[pg +346]}, not exist in the agricultural innovation area, is that the exorbitant +costs of drugs developed under this system is hurting even the well-endowed +purses of developed-world populations. The policy battles in the United States +and throughout the developed world around drug cost containment may yet result +in a sufficient loosening of the patent constraints to deliver positive side +effects for the developing world. However, they may also work in the opposite +direction. The unwillingness of the wealthy populations in the developed world +to pay high rents for drugs retards the most immediate path to lower-cost drugs +in the developing world--simple subsidy of below-cost sales in poor countries +cross-subsidized by above-cost rents in wealthy countries. +={ commercial model of communication : + medical innovation and ; + industrial model of communication : + medical innovation and ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + medical innovation and ; + monopoly : + medical research and innovation ; + policy : + pharmaceutical innovation ; + proprietary rights : + medical and pharmaceutical innovation ; + traditional model of communication : + medical innovation and +} + +The industrial structure of biomedical research and pharmaceutical development +is different from that of agricultural science in ways that still leave a +substantial potential role for commons-based strategies. However, these would +be differently organized and aligned than in agriculture. First, while +governments play an enormous role in funding basic biomedical science, there +are no real equivalents of the national and international agricultural research +institutes. In other words, there are few public-sector laboratories that +actually produce finished drugs for delivery in the developing world, on the +model of the International Rice Research Institute or one of the national +agricultural research systems. On the other hand, there is a thriving generics +industry, based in both advanced and developing economies, that stands ready to +produce drugs once these are researched. The primary constraint on harnessing +its capacity for low-cost drug production and delivery for poorer nations is +the international intellectual property system. The other major difference is +that, unlike with software, scientific publication, or farmers in agriculture, +there is no existing framework for individuals to participate in research and +development on drugs and treatments. The primary potential source of +nongovernmental investment of effort and thought into biomedical research and +development are universities as institutions and scientists, if they choose to +organize themselves into effective peer-production communities. + +Universities and scientists have two complementary paths open to them to pursue +commons-based strategies to provide improved research on the relatively +neglected diseases of the poor and improved access to existing drugs that are +available in the developed world but unaffordable in the developing. The first +involves leveraging existing university patent portfolios--much as the +universities allied in PIPRA are exploring and as CAMBIA is doing more ,{[pg +347]}, aggressively. The second involves work in an entirely new +model--constructing collaboration platforms to allow scientists to engage in +peer production, cross-cutting the traditional grant-funded lab, and aiming +toward research into diseases that do not exercise a market pull on the +biomedical research system in the advanced economies. +={ collaborative authorship : + among universities +5 ; + communication : + university alliances +5 ; + information production, market-based : + universities as +3 ; + market-based information producers : + universities as +3 ; + nonmarket information producers : + universities as +3 ; + sharing : + university patents +5 ; + university alliances +5 +} + +/{Leveraging University Patents}/. In February 2001, the humanitarian +organization Doctors Without Borders (also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, +or MSF) asked Yale University, which held the key South African patent on +stavudine--one of the drugs then most commonly used in combination +therapies--for permission to use generic versions in a pilot AIDS treatment +program. At the time, the licensed version of the drug, sold by +Bristol-MyersSquibb (BMS), cost $1,600 per patient per year. A generic version, +manufactured in India, was available for $47 per patient per year. At that +point in history, thirty-nine drug manufacturers were suing the South African +government to strike down a law permitting importation of generics in a health +crisis, and no drug company had yet made concessions on pricing in developing +nations. Within weeks of receiving MSF's request, Yale negotiated with BMS to +secure the sale of stavudine for fifty-five dollars a year in South Africa. +Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and other universities have, in +the years since, entered into similar ad hoc agreements with regard to +developing-world applications or distribution of drugs that depend on their +patented technologies. These successes provide a template for a much broader +realignment of how universities use their patent portfolios to alleviate the +problems of access to medicines in developing nations. +={ Doctors Without Borders ; + Medecins Sans Frontieres ; + MSF (Medecins San Frontieres) +} + +We have already seen in table 9.2 that while universities own a substantial and +increasing number of patents, they do not fiscally depend in any significant +way on patent revenue. These play a very small part in the overall scheme of +revenues. This makes it practical for universities to reconsider how they use +their patents and to reorient toward using them to maximize their beneficial +effects on equitable access to pharmaceuticals developed in the advanced +economies. Two distinct moves are necessary to harness publicly funded +university research toward building an information commons that is easily +accessible for global redistribution. The first is internal to the university +process itself. The second has to do with the interface between the university +and patent-dependent and similar exclusive-rights-dependent market actors. + +Universities are internally conflicted about their public and market goals. +,{[pg 348]}, Dating back to the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, universities have +increased their patenting practices for the products of publicly funded +research. Technology transfer offices that have been set up to facilitate this +practice are, in many cases, measured by the number of patent applications, +grants, and dollars they bring in to the university. These metrics for +measuring the success of these offices tend to make them function, and +understand their role, in a way that is parallel to exclusive-rights-dependent +market actors, instead of as public-sector, publicly funded, and publicly +minded institutions. A technology transfer officer who has successfully +provided a royalty-free license to a nonprofit concerned with developing +nations has no obvious metric in which to record and report the magnitude of +her success (saving X millions of lives or displacing Y misery), unlike her +colleague who can readily report X millions of dollars from a market-oriented +license, or even merely Y dozens of patents filed. Universities must consider +more explicitly their special role in the global information and knowledge +production system. If they recommit to a role focused on serving the +improvement of the lot of humanity, rather than maximization of their revenue +stream, they should adapt their patenting and licensing practices +appropriately. In particular, it will be important following such a +rededication to redefine the role of technology transfer offices in terms of +lives saved, quality-of-life measures improved, or similar substantive measures +that reflect the mission of university research, rather than the present +metrics borrowed from the very different world of patent-dependent market +production. While the internal process is culturally and politically difficult, +it is not, in fact, analytically or technically complex. Universities have, for +a very long time, seen themselves primarily as dedicated to the advancement of +knowledge and human welfare through basic research, reasoned inquiry, and +education. The long-standing social traditions of science have always stood +apart from market incentives and orientations. The problem is therefore one of +reawakening slightly dormant cultural norms and understandings, rather than +creating new ones in the teeth of long-standing contrary traditions. The +problem should be substantially simpler than, say, persuading companies that +traditionally thought of their innovation in terms of patents granted or +royalties claimed, as some technology industry participants have, to adopt free +software strategies. +={ distribution of information : + university-based innovation +2 +} + +If universities do make the change, then the more complex problem will remain: +designing an institutional interface between universities and the +pharmaceutical industry that will provide sustainable significant benefits for +developing-world distribution of drugs and for research opportunities into +,{[pg 349]}, developing-world diseases. As we already saw in the context of +agriculture, patents create two discrete kinds of barriers: The first is on +distribution, because of the monopoly pricing power they purposefully confer on +their owners. The second is on research that requires access to tools, enabling +technologies, data, and materials generated by the developed-world research +process, and that could be useful to research on developing-world diseases. +Universities working alone will not provide access to drugs. While universities +perform more than half of the basic scientific research in the United States, +this effort means that more than 93 percent of university research expenditures +go to basic and applied science, leaving less than 7 percent for +development--the final research necessary to convert a scientific project into +a usable product.~{ National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resource +Statistics, Special Report: National Patterns of Research and Development +Resources: 2003 NSF 05-308 (Arlington, VA: NSF, 2005), table 1. }~ Universities +therefore cannot simply release their own patents and expect treatments based +on their technologies to become accessible. Instead, a change is necessary in +licensing practices that takes an approach similar to a synthesis of the +general public license (GPL), of BIOS's licensing approach, and PIPRA. + +Universities working together can cooperate to include in their licenses +provisions that would secure freedom to operate for anyone conducting research +into developing-world diseases or production for distribution in poorer +nations. The institutional details of such a licensing regime are relatively +complex and arcane, but efforts are, in fact, under way to develop such +licenses and to have them adopted by universities.~{ The detailed analysis can +be found in Amy Kapzcynzki et al., "Addressing Global Health Inequities: An +Open Licensing Paradigm for Public Sector Inventions," Berkeley Journal of Law +and Technology (Spring 2005). 24. See Jean Lanjouw, "A New Global Patent Regime +for Diseases: U.S. and International Legal Issues," Harvard Journal of Law & +Technology 16 (2002). 25. S. Maurer, A. Sali, and A. Rai, "Finding Cures for +Tropical Disease: Is Open Source the Answer?" Public Library of Science: +Medicine 1, no. 3 (December 2004): e56. }~ What is important here, for +understanding the potential, is the basic idea and framework. In exchange for +access to the university's patents, the pharmaceutical licensees will agree not +to assert any of their own rights in drugs that require a university license +against generics manufacturers who make generic versions of those drugs purely +for distribution in low- and middle-income countries. An Indian or American +generics manufacturer could produce patented drugs that relied on university +patents and were licensed under this kind of an equitable-access license, as +long as it distributed its products solely in poor countries. A government or +nonprofit research institute operating in South Africa could work with patented +research tools without concern that doing so would violate the patents. +However, neither could then import the products of their production or research +into the developed world without violating the patents of both the university +and the drug company. The licenses would create a mechanism for redistribution +of drug products and research tools from the developed economies to the +developing. It would do so without requiring the kind of regulatory changes +advocated by others, such as ,{[pg 350]}, Jean Lanjouw, who have advocated +policy changes aimed similarly to achieve differential pricing in the +developing and developed worlds.24 Because this redistribution could be +achieved by universities acting through licensing, instead of through changes +in law, it offers a more feasible political path for achieving the desired +result. Such action by universities would, of course, not solve all the +problems of access to medicines. First, not all health-related products are +based on university research. Second, patents do not account for all, or +perhaps even most, of the reason that patients in poor nations are not treated. +A lack of delivery infrastructure, public-health monitoring and care, and +stable conditions to implement disease-control policy likely weigh more +heavily. Nonetheless, there are successful and stable government and nonprofit +programs that could treat hundreds of thousands or millions of patients more +than they do now, if the cost of drugs were lower. Achieving improved access +for those patients seems a goal worthy of pursuit, even if it is no magic +bullet to solve all the illnesses of poverty. + +/{Nonprofit Research}/. Even a successful campaign to change the licensing +practices of universities in order to achieve inexpensive access to the +products of pharmaceutical research would leave the problem of research into +diseases that affect primarily the poor. This is because, unless universities +themselves undertake the development process, the patent-based pharmaceuticals +have no reason to. The "simple" answer to this problem is more funding from the +public sector or foundations for both basic research and development. This +avenue has made some progress, and some foundations--particularly, in recent +years, the Gates Foundation--have invested enormous amounts of money in +searching for cures and improving basic public-health conditions of disease in +Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. It has received a particularly +interesting boost since 2000, with the founding of the Institute for One World +Health, a nonprofit pharmaceutical dedicated to research and development +specifically into developing-world diseases. The basic model of One World +Health begins by taking contributions of drug leads that are deemed +unprofitable by the pharmaceutical industry--from both universities and +pharmaceutical companies. The firms have no reason not to contribute their +patents on leads purely for purposes they do not intend to pursue. The group +then relies on foundation and public-sector funding to perform synthesis, +preclinical and clinical trials, in collaboration with research centers in the +United States, India, Bangladesh, and Thailand, and when the time comes around +for manufacturing, the institute collaborates with manufacturers ,{[pg 351]}, +in developing nations to produce low-cost instances of the drugs, and with +government and NGO public-health providers to organize distribution. This model +is new, and has not yet had enough time to mature and provide measurable +success. However, it is promising. +={ Institute for One World Health ; + One World Health ; + nonprofit medical research +} + +/{Peer Production of Drug Research and Development}/. Scientists, +scientists-intraining, and to some extent, nonscientists can complement +university licensing practices and formally organized nonprofit efforts as a +third component of the ecology of commons-based producers. The initial response +to the notion that peer production can be used for drug development is that the +process is too complex, expensive, and time consuming to succumb to +commons-based strategies. This may, at the end of the day, prove true. However, +this was also thought of complex software projects or of supercomputing, until +free software and distributed computing projects like SETI@Home and +Folding@Home came along and proved them wrong. The basic point is to see how +distributed nonmarket efforts are organized, and to see how the scientific +production process can be broken up to fit a peer-production model. +={ allocating excess capacity +2 ; + capacity : + sharing +2 ; + excess capacity, sharing +2 ; + sharing : + excess capacity +2 ; + peer production : + drug research and development ; + reallocating excess capacity +2 +} + +First, anything that can be done through computer modeling or data analysis +can, in principle, be done on a peer-production basis. Increasing portions of +biomedical research are done today through modeling, computer simulation, and +data analysis of the large and growing databases, including a wide range of +genetic, chemical, and biological information. As more of the process of drug +discovery of potential leads can be done by modeling and computational +analysis, more can be organized for peer production. The relevant model here is +open bioinformatics. Bioinformatics generally is the practice of pursuing +solutions to biological questions using mathematics and information technology. +Open bioinformatics is a movement within bioinformatics aimed at developing the +tools in an open-source model, and in providing access to the tools and the +outputs on a free and open basis. Projects like these include the Ensmbl Genome +Browser, operated by the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Sanger +Centre, or the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), both of +which use computer databases to provide access to data and to run various +searches on combinations, patterns, and so forth, in the data. In both cases, +access to the data and the value-adding functionalities are free. The software +too is developed on a free software model. These, in turn, are complemented by +database policies like those of the International HapMap Project, an effort to +map ,{[pg 352]}, common variations in the human genome, whose participants have +committed to releasing all the data they collect freely into the public domain. +The economics of this portion of research into drugs are very similar to the +economics of software and computation. The models are just software. Some +models will be able to run on the ever-more-powerful basic machines that the +scientists themselves use. However, anything that requires serious computation +could be modeled for distributed computing. This would allow projects to +harness volunteer computation resources, like Folding@Home, Genome@Home, or +FightAIDS@Home--sites that already harness the computing power of hundreds of +thousands of users to attack biomedical science questions. This stage of the +process is the one that most directly can be translated into a peer-production +model, and, in fact, there have been proposals, such as the Tropical Disease +Initiative proposed by Maurer, Sali, and Rai.~{ 25 }~ +={ bioinfomatics ; + HapMap Project ; + International HapMap Project +} + +Second, and more complex, is the problem of building wet-lab science on a +peer-production basis. Some efforts would have to focus on the basic science. +Some might be at the phase of optimization and chemical synthesis. Some, even +more ambitiously, would be at the stage of preclinical animal trials and even +clinical trials. The wet lab seems to present an insurmountable obstacle for a +serious role for peer production in biomedical science. Nevertheless, it is not +clear that it is actually any more so than it might have seemed for the +development of an operating system, or a supercomputer, before these were +achieved. Laboratories have two immensely valuable resources that may be +capable of being harnessed to peer production. Most important by far are +postdoctoral fellows. These are the same characters who populate so many free +software projects, only geeks of a different feather. They are at a similar +life stage. They have the same hectic, overworked lives, and yet the same +capacity to work one more hour on something else, something interesting, +exciting, or career enhancing, like a special grant announced by the +government. The other resources that have overcapacity might be thought of as +petri dishes, or if that sounds too quaint and oldfashioned, polymerase chain +reaction (PCR) machines or electrophoresis equipment. The point is simple. +Laboratory funding currently is silo-based. Each lab is usually funded to have +all the equipment it needs for run-ofthe-mill work, except for very large +machines operated on time-share principles. Those machines that are redundantly +provisioned in laboratories have downtime. That downtime coupled with a +postdoctoral fellow in the lab is an experiment waiting to happen. If a group +that is seeking to start a project ,{[pg 353]}, defines discrete modules of a +common experiment, and provides a communications platform to allow people to +download project modules, perform them, and upload results, it would be +possible to harness the overcapacity that exists in laboratories. In principle, +although this is a harder empirical question, the same could be done for other +widely available laboratory materials and even animals for preclinical trials +on the model of, "brother, can you spare a mouse?" One fascinating proposal and +early experiment at the University of Indiana-Purdue University Indianapolis +was suggested by William Scott, a chemistry professor. Scott proposed +developing simple, lowcost kits for training undergraduate students in chemical +synthesis, but which would use targets and molecules identified by +computational biology as potential treatments for developing-world diseases as +their output. With enough redundancy across different classrooms and +institutions around the world, the results could be verified while screening +and synthesizing a significant number of potential drugs. The undergraduate +educational experience could actually contribute to new experiments, as opposed +simply to synthesizing outputs that are not really needed by anyone. Clinical +trials provide yet another level of complexity, because the problem of +delivering consistent drug formulations for testing to physicians and patients +stretches the imagination. One option would be that research centers in +countries affected by the diseases in question could pick up the work at this +point, and create and conduct clinical trials. These too could be coordinated +across regions and countries among the clinicians administering the tests, so +that accruing patients and obtaining sufficient information could be achieved +more rapidly and at lower cost. As in the case of One World Health, production +and regulatory approval, from this stage on, could be taken up by the generics +manufacturers. In order to prevent the outputs from being appropriated at this +stage, every stage in the process would require a public-domain-binding license +that would prevent a manufacturer from taking the outputs and, by making small +changes, patenting the ultimate drug. +={ Scott, William ; + laboratories, peer-produced +1 ; + wet-lab science, peer production of +1 ; + clinical trials, peer-produced +} + +This proposal about medicine is, at this stage, the most imaginary among the +commons-based strategies for development suggested here. However, it is +analytically consistent with them, and, in principle, should be attainable. In +combination with the more traditional commons-based approaches, university +research, and the nonprofit world, peer production could contribute to an +innovation ecology that could overcome the systematic inability of a purely +patent-based system to register and respond to the health needs of the world's +poor. ,{[pg 354]}, + +3~ COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPMENT: CONCLUSION +={ commons, production through : + see peer production commons-based research +4 ; + development, commons-based +4 ; + proprietary rights : + global welfare and research +4 ; + research, commons-based +4 ; + trade policy +4 +} + +Welfare, development, and growth outside of the core economies heavily depend +on the transfer of information-embedded goods and tools, information, and +knowledge from the technologically advanced economies to the developing and +less-developed economies and societies around the globe. These are important +partly as finished usable components of welfare. Perhaps more important, +however, they are necessary as tools and platforms on which innovation, +research, and development can be pursued by local actors in the developing +world itself--from the free software developers of Brazil to the agricultural +scientists and farmers of Southeast Asia. The primary obstacles to diffusion of +these desiderata in the required direction are the institutional framework of +intellectual property and trade and the political power of the patent-dependent +business models in the information-exporting economies. This is not because the +proprietors of information goods and tools are evil. It is because their +fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder value, and the less-developed and +developing economies have little money. As rational maximizers with a legal +monopoly, the patent holders restrict output and sell at higher rates. This is +not a bug in the institutional system we call "intellectual property." It is a +known feature that has known undesirable side effects of inefficiently +restricting access to the products of innovation. In the context of vast +disparities in wealth across the globe, however, this known feature does not +merely lead to less than theoretically optimal use of the information. It leads +to predictable increase of morbidity and mortality and to higher barriers to +development. + +The rise of the networked information economy provides a new framework for +thinking about how to work around the barriers that the international +intellectual property regime places on development. Public-sector and other +nonprofit institutions that have traditionally played an important role in +development can do so with a greater degree of efficacy. Moreover, the +emergence of peer production provides a model for new solutions to some of the +problems of access to information and knowledge. In software and +communications, these are directly available. In scientific information and +some educational materials, we are beginning to see adaptations of these models +to support core elements of development and learning. In food security and +health, the translation process may be more difficult. In agriculture, we are +seeing more immediate progress in the development of a woven ,{[pg 355]}, +fabric of public-sector, academic, nonprofit, and individual innovation and +learning to pursue biological innovation outside of the markets based on +patents and breeders' rights. In medicine, we are still at a very early stage +of organizational experiments and institutional proposals. The barriers to +implementation are significant. However, there is growing awareness of the +human cost of relying solely on the patent-based production system, and of the +potential of commons-based strategies to alleviate these failures. + +Ideally, perhaps, the most direct way to arrive at a better system for +harnessing innovation to development would pass through a new international +politics of development, which would result in a better-designed international +system of trade and innovation policy. There is in fact a global movement of +NGOs and developing nations pursuing this goal. It is possible, however, that +the politics of international trade are sufficiently bent to the purposes of +incumbent industrial information economy proprietors and the governments that +support them as a matter of industrial policy that the political path of formal +institutional reform will fail. Certainly, the history of the TRIPS agreement +and, more recently, efforts to pass new expansive treaties through the WIPO +suggest this. However, one of the lessons we learn as we look at the networked +information economy is that the work of governments through international +treaties is not the final word on innovation and its diffusion across +boundaries of wealth. The emergence of social sharing as a substantial mode of +production in the networked environment offers an alternative route for +individuals and nonprofit entities to take a much more substantial role in +delivering actual desired outcomes independent of the formal system. +Commons-based and peer production efforts may not be a cure-all. However, as we +have seen in the software world, these strategies can make a big contribution +to quite fundamental aspects of human welfare and development. And this is +where freedom and justice coincide. +={ global development +1 } + +The practical freedom of individuals to act and associate freely--free from the +constraints of proprietary endowment, free from the constraints of formal +relations of contract or stable organizations--allows individual action in ad +hoc, informal association to emerge as a new global mover. It frees the ability +of people to act in response to all their motivations. In doing so, it offers a +new path, alongside those of the market and formal governmental investment in +public welfare, for achieving definable and significant improvements in human +development throughout the world. ,{[pg 356]}, + +1~10 Chapter 10 - Social Ties: Networking Together +={ norms (social) +38 ; + regulation by social norms +38 ; + social relations and norms +38 +} + +Increased practical individual autonomy has been central to my claims +throughout this book. It underlies the efficiency and sustainability of +nonproprietary production in the networked information economy. It underlies +the improvements I describe in both freedom and justice. Many have raised +concerns that this new freedom will fray social ties and fragment social +relations. On this view, the new freedom is one of detached monads, a freedom +to live arid, lonely lives free of the many constraining attachments that make +us grounded, well-adjusted human beings. Bolstered by early sociological +studies, this perspective was one of two diametrically opposed views that +typified the way the Internet's effect on community, or close social relations, +was portrayed in the 1990s. The other view, popular among the digerati, was +that "virtual communities" would come to represent a new form of human communal +existence, providing new scope for building a shared experience of human +interaction. Within a few short years, however, empirical research suggests +that while neither view had it completely right, it was the ,{[pg 357]}, +dystopian view that got it especially wrong. The effects of the Internet on +social relations are obviously complex. It is likely too soon to tell which +social practices this new mode of communication will ultimately settle on. The +most recent research, however, suggests that the Internet has some fairly +well-defined effects on human community and intimate social relations. These +effects mark neither breakdown nor transcendence, but they do represent an +improvement over the world of television and telephone along most dimensions of +normative concern with social relations. +={ communities : + virtual +9 ; + virtual communities +9 : + see also social relations and norms +} + +We are seeing two effects: first, and most robustly, we see a thickening of +preexisting relations with friends, family, and neighbors, particularly with +those who were not easily reachable in the pre-Internet-mediated environment. +Parents, for example, use instant messages to communicate with their children +who are in college. Friends who have moved away from each other are keeping in +touch more than they did before they had e-mail, because email does not require +them to coordinate a time to talk or to pay longdistance rates. However, this +thickening of contacts seems to occur alongside a loosening of the hierarchical +aspects of these relationships, as individuals weave their own web of +supporting peer relations into the fabric of what might otherwise be stifling +familial relationships. Second, we are beginning to see the emergence of +greater scope for limited-purpose, loose relationships. These may not fit the +ideal model of "virtual communities." They certainly do not fit a deep +conception of "community" as a person's primary source of emotional context and +support. They are nonetheless effective and meaningful to their participants. +It appears that, as the digitally networked environment begins to displace mass +media and telephones, its salient communications characteristics provide new +dimensions to thicken existing social relations, while also providing new +capabilities for looser and more fluid, but still meaningful social networks. A +central aspect of this positive improvement in loose ties has been the +technical-organizational shift from an information environment dominated by +commercial mass media on a oneto-many model, which does not foster group +interaction among viewers, to an information environment that both technically +and as a matter of social practice enables user-centric, group-based active +cooperation platforms of the kind that typify the networked information +economy. This is not to say that the Internet necessarily effects all people, +all social groups, and networks identically. The effects on different people in +different settings and networks will likely vary, certainly in their magnitude. +My purpose here, however, is ,{[pg 358]}, to respond to the concern that +enhanced individual capabilities entail social fragmentation and alienation. +The available data do not support that claim as a description of a broad social +effect. +={ communication : + thickening of preexisting relations ; + displacement of real-world interaction ; + family relations, strengthening of ; + loose affiliations ; + neighborhood relations, strengthening of ; + networked public sphere : + loose affiliations ; + norms (social) : + loose affiliations | thickening of preexisting relations ; + peer production : + loose affiliations ; + preexisting relations, thickening of ; + public sphere : + loose affiliations ; + regulation by social norms : + loose affiliations | thickening of preexisting relations ; + scope of loose relationships ; + social relations and norms : + loose affiliations | thickening of preexisting relations ; + supplantation of real-world interaction ; + thickening of preexisting relations +} + +2~ FROM "VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES" TO FEAR OF DISINTEGRATION + +Angst about the fragmentation of organic deep social ties, the gemeinschaft +community, the family, is hardly a creature of the Internet. In some form or +another, the fear that cities, industrialization, rapid transportation, mass +communications, and other accoutrements of modern industrial society are +leading to alienation, breakdown of the family, and the disruption of community +has been a fixed element of sociology since at least the mid-nineteenth +century. Its mirror image--the search for real or imagined, more or less +idealized community, "grounded" in preindustrial pastoral memory or +postindustrial utopia--was often not far behind. Unsurprisingly, this patterned +opposition of fear and yearning was replayed in the context of the Internet, as +the transformative effect of this new medium made it a new focal point for both +strands of thought. + +In the case of the Internet, the optimists preceded the pessimists. In his +now-classic The Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold put it most succinctly in +1993: +={ Rheingold, Howard +2 } + +_1 My direct observations of online behavior around the world over the past ten +years have led me to conclude that whenever CMC [computer mediated +communications] technology becomes available to people anywhere, they +inevitably build virtual communities with it, just as microorganisms inevitably +create colonies. I suspect that one of the explanations for this phenomenon is +the hunger for community that grows in the breasts of people around the world +as more and more informal public spaces disappear from our real lives. I also +suspect that these new media attract colonies of enthusiasts because CMC +enables people to do things with each other in new ways, and to do altogether +new kinds of things-- just as telegraphs, telephones, and televisions did. + +/{The Virtual Community}/ was grounded on Rheingold's own experience in the +WELL (Whole Earth `Lectronic Link). The WELL was one the earliest +well-developed instances of large-scale social interaction among people who +started out as strangers but came to see themselves as a community. Its members +eventually began to organize meetings in real space to strengthen ,{[pg 359]}, +the bonds, while mostly continuing their interaction through computermediated +communications. Note the structure of Rheingold's claim in this early passage. +There is a hunger for community, no longer satisfied by the declining +availability of physical spaces for human connection. There is a newly +available medium that allows people to connect despite their physical distance. +This new opportunity inevitably and automatically brings people to use its +affordances--the behaviors it makes possible--to fulfill their need for human +connection. Over and above this, the new medium offers new ways of +communicating and new ways of doing things together, thereby enhancing what was +previously possible. Others followed Rheingold over the course of the 1990s in +many and various ways. The basic structure of the claim about the potential of +cyberspace to forge a new domain for human connection, one that overcomes the +limitations that industrial mass-mediated society places on community, was oft +repeated. The basic observation that the Internet permits the emergence of new +relationships that play a significant role in their participants' lives and are +anchored in online communications continues to be made. As discussed below, +however, much of the research suggests that the new online relationships +develop in addition to, rather than instead of, physical face-to-face human +interaction in community and family--which turns out to be alive and well. +={ WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) } + +It was not long before a very different set of claims emerged about the +Internet. Rather than a solution to the problems that industrial society +creates for family and society, the Internet was seen as increasing alienation +by absorbing its users. It made them unavailable to spend time with their +families. It immersed them in diversions from the real world with its real +relationships. In a social-relations version of the Babel objection, it was +seen as narrowing the set of shared cultural experiences to such an extent that +people, for lack of a common sitcom or news show to talk about, become +increasingly alienated from each other. One strand of this type of criticism +questioned the value of online relationships themselves as plausible +replacements for real-world human connection. Sherry Turkle, the most important +early explorer of virtual identity, characterized this concern as: "is it +really sensible to suggest that the way to revitalize community is to sit alone +in our rooms, typing at our networked computers and filling our lives with +virtual friends?"~{ Sherry Turkle, "Virtuality and Its Discontents, Searching +for Community in Cyberspace," The American Prospect 7, no. 24 (1996); Sherry +Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: +Simon & Schuster, 1995). }~ Instead of investing themselves with real +relationships, risking real exposure and connection, people engage in +limited-purpose, lowintensity relationships. If it doesn't work out, they can +always sign off, and no harm done. ,{[pg 360]}, +={ alienation +2 ; + depression +2 ; + friendships, virtual +2 ; + isolation +2 ; + loneliness +2 +} + +Another strand of criticism focused less on the thinness, not to say vacuity, +of online relations, and more on sheer time. According to this argument, the +time and effort spent on the Net came at the expense of time spent with family +and friends. Prominent and oft cited in this vein were two early studies. The +first, entitled Internet Paradox, was led by Robert Kraut.~{ Robert Kraut et +al., "Internet Paradox, A Social Technology that Reduces Social Involvement and +Psychological Well Being," American Psychologist 53 (1998): 1017? 1031. }~ It +was the first longitudinal study of a substantial number of users--169 users in +the first year or two of their Internet use. Kraut and his collaborators found +a slight, but statistically significant, correlation between increases in +Internet use and (a) decreases in family communication, (b) decreases in the +size of social circle, both near and far, and (c) an increase in depression and +loneliness. The researchers hypothesized that use of the Internet replaces +strong ties with weak ties. They ideal-typed these communications as exchanging +knitting tips with participants in a knitting Listserv, or jokes with someone +you would meet on a tourist information site. These trivialities, they thought, +came to fill time that, in the absence of the Internet, would be spent with +people with whom one has stronger ties. From a communications theory +perspective, this causal explanation was more sophisticated than the more +widely claimed assimilation of the Internet and television--that a computer +monitor is simply one more screen to take away from the time one has to talk to +real human beings.~{ A fairly typical statement of this view, quoted in a study +commissioned by the Kellogg Foundation, was: "TV or other media, such as +computers, are no longer a kind of `electronic hearth,' where a family will +gather around and make decisions or have discussions. My position, based on our +most recent studies, is that most media in the home are working against +bringing families together." Christopher Lee et al., "Evaluating Information +and Communications Technology: Perspective for a Balanced Approach," Report to +the Kellogg Foundation (December 17, 2001), http:// +www.si.umich.edu/pne/kellogg/013.html. }~ It recognized that using the Internet +is fundamentally different from watching TV. It allows users to communicate +with each other, rather than, like television, encouraging passive reception in +a kind of "parallel play." Using a distinction between strong ties and weak +ties, introduced by Mark Granovetter in what later became the social capital +literature, these researchers suggested that the kind of human contact that was +built around online interactions was thinner and less meaningful, so that the +time spent on these relationships, on balance, weakened one's stock of social +relations. +={ Granovetter, Mark ; + Kraut, Robert ; + contact, online vs. physical +1 ; + human contact, online vs. physical +1 ; + physical contact, diminishment of +1 ; + value of online contact ; + vacuity of online relations ; + thinness of online relations ; + weak ties of online relations ; + television : + Internet use vs. +1 ; + social capital +1 +} + +A second, more sensationalist release of a study followed two years later. In +2000, the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society's +"preliminary report" on Internet and society, more of a press release than a +report, emphasized the finding that "the more hours people use the Internet, +the less time they spend with real human beings."~{ Norman H. Nie and Lutz +Ebring, "Internet and Society, A Preliminary Report," Stanford Institute for +the Quantitative Study of Society, February 17, 2000, 15 (Press Release), +http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/bctf/Stanford_Report.pdf. }~ The actual results were +somewhat less stark than the widely reported press release. As among all +Internet users, only slightly more than 8 percent reported spending less time +with family; 6 percent reported spending more time with family, and 86 percent +spent about the same amount of time. Similarly, 9 percent reported spending +less time with friends, 4 percent spent more time, and 87 percent spent the +,{[pg 361]}, same amount of time.~{ Ibid., 42-43, tables CH-WFAM, CH-WFRN. }~ +The press release probably should not have read, "social isolation increases," +but instead, "Internet seems to have indeterminate, but in any event small, +effects on our interaction with family and friends"--hardly the stuff of +front-page news coverage.~{ See John Markoff and A. Newer, "Lonelier Crowd +Emerges in Internet Study," New York Times, February 16, 2000, section A, page +1, column 1. }~ The strongest result supporting the "isolation" thesis in that +study was that 27 percent of respondents who were heavy Internet users reported +spending less time on the phone with friends and family. The study did not ask +whether they used email instead of the phone to keep in touch with these family +and friends, and whether they thought they had more or less of a connection +with these friends and family as a result. Instead, as the author reported in +his press release, "E-mail is a way to stay in touch, but you can't share +coffee or beer with somebody on e-mail, or give them a hug" (as opposed, one +supposes, to the common practice of phone hugs).~{ Nie and Ebring, "Internet +and Society," 19. }~ As Amitai Etzioni noted in his biting critique of that +study, the truly significant findings were that Internet users spent less time +watching television and shopping. Forty-seven percent of those surveyed said +that they watched less television than they used to, and that number reached 65 +percent for heavy users and 27 percent for light users. Only 3 percent of those +surveyed said they watched more TV. Nineteen percent of all respondents and 25 +percent of those who used the Internet more than five hours a week said they +shopped less in stores, while only 3 percent said they shopped more in stores. +The study did not explore how people were using the time they freed by watching +less television and shopping less in physical stores. It did not ask whether +they used any of this newfound time to increase and strengthen their social and +kin ties.~{ Amitai Etzioni, "Debating the Societal Effects of the Internet: +Connecting with the World," Public Perspective 11 (May/June 2000): 42, also +available at http:// www.gwu.edu/ ccps/etzioni/A273.html. }~ + +2~ A MORE POSITIVE PICTURE EMERGES OVER TIME +={ social capital +13 } + +The concerns represented by these early studies of the effects of Internet use +on community and family seem to fall into two basic bins. The first is that +sustained, more or less intimate human relations are critical to +well-functioning human beings as a matter of psychological need. The claims +that Internet use is associated with greater loneliness and depression map well +onto the fears that human connection ground into a thin gruel of electronic +bits simply will not give people the kind of human connectedness they need as +social beings. The second bin of concerns falls largely within the "social +capital" literature, and, like that literature itself, can be divided largely +into two main subcategories. The first, following James Coleman and Mark +Granovetter, focuses on the ,{[pg 362]}, economic function of social ties and +the ways in which people who have social capital can be materially better off +than people who lack it. The second, exemplified by Robert Putnam's work, +focuses on the political aspects of engaged societies, and on the ways in which +communities with high social capital--defined as social relations with people +in local, stable, face-to-face interactions--will lead to better results in +terms of political participation and the provisioning of local public goods, +like education and community policing. For this literature, the shape of social +ties, their relative strength, and who is connected to whom become more +prominent features. +={ Coleman, James ; + Granovetter, Mark ; + Putnum, Robert +} + +There are, roughly speaking, two types of responses to these concerns. The +first is empirical. In order for these concerns to be valid as applied to +increasing use of Internet communications, it must be the case that Internet +communications, with all of their inadequacies, come to supplant real-world +human interactions, rather than simply to supplement them. Unless Internet +connections actually displace direct, unmediated, human contact, there is no +basis to think that using the Internet will lead to a decline in those +nourishing connections we need psychologically, or in the useful connections we +make socially, that are based on direct human contact with friends, family, and +neighbors. The second response is theoretical. It challenges the notion that +the socially embedded individual is a fixed entity with unchanging needs that +are, or are not, fulfilled by changing social conditions and relations. +Instead, it suggests that the "nature" of individuals changes over time, based +on actual social practices and expectations. In this case, we are seeing a +shift from individuals who depend on social relations that are dominated by +locally embedded, thick, unmediated, given, and stable relations, into +networked individuals--who are more dependent on their own combination of +strong and weak ties, who switch networks, cross boundaries, and weave their +own web of more or less instrumental, relatively fluid relationships. Manuel +Castells calls this the "networked society,"~{ Manuel Castells, The Rise of +Networked Society 2d ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000). }~ +Barry Wellman, "networked individualism."~{ Barry Wellman et al., "The Social +Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism," Journal of Computer +Mediated Communication 8, no. 3 (April 2003). }~ To simplify vastly, it is not +that people cease to depend on others and their context for both psychological +and social wellbeing and efficacy. It is that the kinds of connections that we +come to rely on for these basic human needs change over time. Comparisons of +current practices to the old ways of achieving the desiderata of community, and +fears regarding the loss of community, are more a form of nostalgia than a +diagnosis of present social malaise. ,{[pg 363]}, +={ Castells, Manuel ; + Wellman, Barry ; + displacement of real-world interaction +5 ; + family relations, strengthening of +5 ; + loose affiliations ; + neighborhood relations, strengthening of +5 ; + networked public sphere : + loose affiliations ; + norms (social) : + loose affiliations ; + peer production : + loose affiliations ; + public sphere : + loose affiliations ; + regulation by social norms : + loose affiliations ; + social relations and norms : + loose affiliations ; + supplantation of real-world interaction +5 ; + thickening of preexisting relations +5 +} + +3~ Users Increase Their Connections with Preexisting Relations +={ e-mail : + thickening of preexisting relations +4 ; + social capital : + thickening of preexisting relations +4 +} + +The most basic response to the concerns over the decline of community and its +implications for both the psychological and the social capital strands is the +empirical one. Relations with one's local geographic community and with one's +intimate friends and family do not seem to be substantially affected by +Internet use. To the extent that these relationships are affected, the effect +is positive. Kraut and his collaborators continued their study, for example, +and followed up with their study subjects for an additional three years. They +found that the negative effects they had reported in the first year or two +dissipated over the total period of observation.~{ Robert Kraut et al., +"Internet Paradox Revisited," Journal of Social Issues 58, no. 1 (2002): 49. }~ +Their basic hypothesis that the Internet probably strengthened weak ties, +however, is consistent with other research and theoretical work. One of the +earliest systematic studies of high-speed Internet access and its effects on +communities in this vein was by Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman.~{ Keith +Hampton and Barry Wellman, "Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports +Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb," City & Community 2, no. 4 +(December 2003): 277. }~ They studied the aptly named Toronto suburb Netville, +where homes had high-speed wiring years before broadband access began to be +adopted widely in North America. One of their most powerful findings was that +people who were connected recognized three times as many of their neighbors by +name and regularly talked with twice as many as those who were not wired. On +the other hand, however, stronger ties--indicated by actually visiting +neighbors, as opposed to just knowing their name or stopping to say good +morning--were associated with how long a person had lived in the neighborhood, +not with whether or not they were wired. In other words, weak ties of the sort +of knowing another's name or stopping to chat with them were significantly +strengthened by Internet connection, even within a geographic neighborhood. +Stronger ties were not. Using applications like a local e-mail list and +personal e-mails, wired residents communicated with others in their +neighborhood much more often than did nonwired residents. Moreover, wired +residents recognized the names of people in a wider radius from their homes, +while nonwired residents tended to know only people within their block, or even +a few homes on each side. However, again, stronger social ties, like visiting +and talking face-to-face, tended to be concentrated among physically proximate +neighbors. Other studies also observed this increase of weak ties in a +neighborhood with individuals who are more geographically distant than one's +own immediate street or block.~{ Gustavo S. Mesch and Yael Levanon, "Community +Networking and Locally-Based Social Ties in Two Suburban Localities," City & +Community 2, no. 4 (December 2003): 335. }~ Perhaps the most visible aspect of +the social capital implications of a well-wired geographic community was the +finding that ,{[pg 364]}, +={ Hampton, Keith ; + Kraut, Robert ; + Wellman, Barry ; + weak ties of online relations +} + +wired neighbors began to sit on their front porches, instead of in their +backyard, thereby providing live social reinforcement of community through +daily brief greetings, as well as creating a socially enforced community +policing mechanism. + +We now have quite a bit of social science research on the side of a number of +factual propositions.~{ Useful surveys include: Paul DiMaggio et al., "Social +Implications of the Internet," Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 307-336; +Robyn B. Driskell and Larry Lyon, "Are Virtual Communities True Communities? +Examining the Environments and Elements of Community," City & Community 1, no. +4 (December 2002): 349; James E. Katz and Ronald E. Rice, Social Consequences +of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, Interaction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, +2002). }~ Human beings, whether connected to the Internet or not, continue to +communicate preferentially with people who are geographically proximate than +with those who are distant.~{ Barry Wellman, "Computer Networks as Social +Networks," Science 293, issue 5537 (September 2001): 2031. }~ Nevertheless, +people who are connected to the Internet communicate more with people who are +geographically distant without decreasing the number of local connections. +While the total number of connections continues to be greatest with proximate +family members, friends, coworkers, and neighbors, the Internet's greatest +effect is in improving the ability of individuals to add to these proximate +relationships new and better-connected relationships with people who are +geographically distant. This includes keeping more in touch with friends and +relatives who live far away, and creating new weak-tie relationships around +communities of interest and practice. To the extent that survey data are +reliable, the most comprehensive and updated surveys support these +observations. It now seems clear that Internet users "buy" their time to use +the Internet by watching less television, and that the more Internet experience +they have, the less they watch TV. People who use the Internet claim to have +increased the number of people they stay in touch with, while mostly reporting +no effect on time they spend with their family.~{ Jeffery I. Cole et al., "The +UCLA Internet Report: Surveying the Digital Future, Year Three" (UCLA Center +for Communication Policy, January 2003), 33, 55, 62, http:// +www.ccp.ucla.edu/pdf/UCLA-Internet-Report-Year-Three.pdf. }~ +={ television : + Internet use vs. +} + +Connections with family and friends seemed to be thickened by the new channels +of communication, rather than supplanted by them. Emblematic of this were +recent results of a survey conducted by the Pew project on "Internet and +American Life" on Holidays Online. Almost half of respondents surveyed reported +using e-mail to organize holiday activities with family (48 percent) and +friends (46 percent), 27 percent reported sending or receiving holiday +greetings, and while a third described themselves as shopping online in order +to save money, 51 percent said they went online to find an unusual or +hard-to-find gift. In other words, half of those who used the Internet for +holiday shopping did so in order to personalize their gift further, rather than +simply to take advantage of the most obvious use of e-commerce--price +comparison and time savings. Further support for this position is offered in +another Pew study, entitled "Internet and Daily Life." In that survey, the two +most common uses--both of which respondents claimed they did more of because of +the Net than they otherwise would have--were connecting ,{[pg 365]}, with +family and friends and looking up information.~{ Pew Internet and Daily Life +Project (August 11, 2004), report available at http:// +www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/131/report_display.asp. }~ Further evidence that the +Internet is used to strengthen and service preexisting relations, rather than +create new ones, is the fact that 79 percent of those who use the Internet at +all do so to communicate with friends and family, while only 26 percent use the +Internet to meet new people or to arrange dates. Another point of evidence is +the use of instant messaging (IM). IM is a synchronous communications medium +that requires its users to set time aside to respond and provides information +to those who wish to communicate with an individual about whether that person +is or is not available at any given moment. Because it is so demanding, IM is +preferentially useful for communicating with individuals with whom one already +has a preexisting relationship. This preferential use for strengthening +preexisting relations is also indicated by the fact that two-thirds of IM users +report using IM with no more than five others, while only one in ten users +reports instant messaging with more than ten people. A recent Pew study of +instant messaging shows that 53 million adults--42 percent of Internet users in +the United States--trade IM messages. Forty percent use IM to contact +coworkers, one-third family, and 21 percent use it to communicate equally with +both. Men and women IM in equal proportions, but women IM more than men do, +averaging 433 minutes per month as compared to 366 minutes, respectively, and +households with children IM more than households without children. +={ Pew studies ; + instant messaging ; + text messaging +} + +These studies are surveys and local case studies. They cannot offer a knockdown +argument about how "we"--everyone, everywhere--are using the Internet. The same +technology likely has different effects when it is introduced into cultures +that differ from each other in their pre-Internet baseline.~{ See Barry +Wellman, "The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism," +Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 8, no. 3 (April 2003); Gustavo S. +Mesch and Yael Levanon, "Community Networking and Locally-Based Social Ties in +Two Suburban Localities, City & Community 2, no. 4 (December 2003): 335. }~ +Despite these cautions, these studies do offer the best evidence we have about +Internet use patterns. As best we can tell from contemporary social science, +Internet use increases the contact that people have with others who +traditionally have been seen as forming a person's "community": family, +friends, and neighbors. Moreover, the Internet is also used as a platform for +forging new relationships, in addition to those that are preexisting. These +relationships are more limited in nature than ties to friends and family. They +are detached from spatial constraints, and even time synchronicity; they are +usually interest or practice based, and therefore play a more limited role in +people's lives than the more demanding and encompassing relationships with +family or intimate friends. Each discrete connection or cluster of connections +that forms a social network, or a network of social relations, plays some role, +but not a definitive one, in each participant's life. There is little +disagreement ,{[pg 366]}, among researchers that these kinds of weak ties or +limited-liability social relationships are easier to create on the Internet, +and that we see some increase in their prevalence among Internet users. The +primary disagreement is interpretive--in other words, is it, on balance, a good +thing that we have multiple, overlapping, limited emotional liability +relationships, or does it, in fact, undermine our socially embedded being? + +2~ Networked Individuals +={ loose affiliations +4 ; + networked public sphere : + loose affiliations +4 ; + norms (social) : + loose affiliations +4 | working with social expectations +4 ; + peer production : + loose affiliations +4 ; + public sphere : + loose affiliations +4 ; + regulation by social norms : + loose affiliations +4 | working with social expectations +4 ; + social capital : + networked society +4 ; + social relations and norms : + loose affiliations +4 | working with social expectations +4 +} + +The interpretive argument about the normative value of the increase in weak +ties is colored by the empirical finding that the time spent on the Internet in +these limited relationships does not come at the expense of the number of +communications with preexisting, real-world relationships. Given our current +state of sociological knowledge, the normative question cannot be whether +online relations are a reasonable replacement for real-world friendship. +Instead, it must be how we understand the effect of the interaction between an +increasingly thickened network of communications with preexisting relations and +the casting of a broader net that captures many more, and more varied, +relations. What is emerging in the work of sociologists is a framework that +sees the networked society or the networked individual as entailing an +abundance of social connections and more effectively deployed attention. The +concern with the decline of community conceives of a scarcity of forms of +stable, nurturing, embedding relations, which are mostly fixed over the life of +an individual and depend on long-standing and interdependent relations in +stable groups, often with hierarchical relations. What we now see emerging is a +diversity of forms of attachment and an abundance of connections that enable +individuals to attain discrete components of the package of desiderata that +"community" has come to stand for in sociology. As Wellman puts it: +"Communities and societies have been changing towards networked societies where +boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse others, linkages +switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies are flatter and more +recursive. . . . Their work and community networks are diffuse, sparsely knit, +with vague, overlapping, social and spatial boundaries."~{ Barry Wellman, "The +Social Affordances of the Internet." }~ In this context, the range and +diversity of network connections beyond the traditional family, friends, stable +coworkers, or village becomes a source of dynamic stability, rather than +tension and disconnect. +={ Wellman, Barry } + +The emergence of networked individuals is not, however, a mere overlay, +"floating" on top of thickened preexisting social relations without touching +them except to add more relations. The interpolation of new networked ,{[pg +367]}, connections, and the individual's role in weaving those for him- or +herself, allows individuals to reorganize their social relations in ways that +fit them better. They can use their network connections to loosen social bonds +that are too hierarchical and stifling, while filling in the gaps where their +realworld relations seem lacking. Nowhere is this interpolation clearer than in +Mizuko Ito's work on the use of mobile phones, primarily for text messaging and +e-mail, among Japanese teenagers.~{ A review of Ito's own work and that of +other scholars of Japanese techno-youth culture is Mizuko Ito, "Mobile Phones, +Japanese Youth, and the Re-Placement of Social Contact," forthcoming in Mobile +Communications: Re-negotiation of the Social Sphere, ed., Rich Ling and P. +Pedersen (New York: Springer, 2005). }~ Japanese urban teenagers generally live +in tighter physical quarters than their American or European counterparts, and +within quite strict social structures of hierarchy and respect. Ito and others +have documented how these teenagers use mobile phones--primarily as platforms +for text messages--that is, as a mobile cross between email and instant +messaging and more recently images, to loosen the constraints under which they +live. They text at home and in the classroom, making connections to meet in the +city and be together, and otherwise succeed in constructing a network of time- +and space-bending emotional connections with their friends, without--and this +is the critical observation--breaking the social molds they otherwise occupy. +They continue to spend time in their home, with their family. They continue to +show respect and play the role of child at home and at school. However, they +interpolate that role and those relations with a sub-rosa network of +connections that fulfill otherwise suppressed emotional needs and ties. +={ text messaging ; + mobile phones +} + +The phenomenon is not limited to youths, but is applicable more generally to +the capacity of users to rely on their networked connections to escape or +moderate some of the more constraining effects of their stable social +connections. In the United States, a now iconic case--mostly described in terms +of privacy--was that of U.S. Navy sailor Timothy McVeigh (not the Oklahoma +bomber). McVeigh was discharged from the navy when his superiors found out that +he was gay by accessing his AOL (America Online) account. The case was +primarily considered in terms of McVeigh's e-mail account privacy. It settled +for an undisclosed sum, and McVeigh retired from the navy with benefits. +However, what is important for us here is not the "individual rights" category +under which the case was fought, but the practice that it revealed. Here was an +eighteen-year veteran of the navy who used the space-time breaking +possibilities of networked communications to loosen one of the most +constraining attributes imaginable of the hierarchical framework that he +nonetheless chose to be part of--the U.S. Navy. It would be odd to think that +the navy did not provide McVeigh with a sense of identity and camaraderie that +closely knit communities provide their ,{[pg 368]}, members. Yet at the same +time, it also stifled his ability to live one of the most basic of all human +ties--his sexual identity. He used the network and its potential for anonymous +and pseudonymous existence to coexist between these two social structures. +={ McVeigh, Timothy (sailor) } + +% book index reference to Shirky, Clay on page 368, not found + +At the other end of the spectrum of social ties, we see new platforms emerging +to generate the kinds of bridging relations that were so central to the +identification of "weak ties" in social capital literature. Weak ties are +described in the social capital literature as allowing people to transmit +information across social networks about available opportunities and resources, +as well as provide at least a limited form of vouching for others--as one +introduces a friend to a friend of a friend. What we are seeing on the Net is +an increase in the platforms developed to allow people to create these kinds of +weak ties based on an interest or practice. Perhaps clearest of these is +Meetup.com. Meetup is a Web site that allows users to search for others who +share an interest and who are locally available to meet face-to-face. The +search results show users what meetings are occurring within their requested +area and interest. The groups then meet periodically, and those who sign up for +them also are able to provide a profile and photo of themselves, to facilitate +and sustain the real-world group meetings. The power of this platform is that +it is not intended as a replacement for real-space meetings. It is intended as +a replacement for the happenstance of social networks as they transmit +information about opportunities for interest- and practice-based social +relations. The vouching function, on the other hand, seems to have more mixed +efficacy, as Dana Boyd's ethnography of Friendster suggests.~{ Dana M. Boyd, +"Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking," Conference on Human +Factors and Computing Systems (CHI 2004) (Vienna: ACM, April 24-29, 2004). }~ +Friendster was started as a dating Web site. It was built on the assumption +that dating a friend of a friend of a friend is safer and more likely to be +successful than dating someone based on a similar profile, located on a general +dating site like match.com--in other words, that vouching as friends provides +valuable information. As Boyd shows, however, the attempt of Friendster to +articulate and render transparent the social networks of its users met with +less than perfect success. The platform only permits users to designate +friend/not friend, without the finer granularity enabled by a face-toface +conversation about someone, where one can answer or anticipate the question, +"just how well do you know this person?" with a variety of means, from tone to +express reservations. On Friendster, it seems that people cast broader +networks, and for fear of offending or alienating others, include many more +"friendsters" than they actually have "friends." The result is a weak platform +for mapping general connections, rather than a genuine articulation ,{[pg +369]}, of vouching through social networks. Nonetheless, it does provide a +visible rendering of at least the thinnest of weak ties, and strengthens their +effect in this regard. It enables very weak ties to perform some of the roles +of real-world weak social ties. +={ Boyd, Dana ; + bridging social relationships ; + Friendster ; + Meetup.com site ; + vouching for others, network of +} + +2~ THE INTERNET AS A PLATFORM FOR HUMAN CONNECTION +={ Internet : + as platform for human connection +4 ; + norms (social) : + Internet as platform for +4 ; + regulation by social norms : + Internet as platform for +4 ; + social relations and norms : + Internet as platform for +4 +} + +Communication is constitutive of social relations. We cannot have relationships +except by communicating with others. Different communications media differ from +each other--in who gets to speak to whom and in what can be said. These +differences structure the social relations that rely on these various modes of +communication so that they differ from each other in significant ways. +Technological determinism is not required to accept this. Some aspects of the +difference are purely technical. Script allows text and more or less crude +images to be transmitted at a distance, but not voice, touch, smell, or taste. +To the extent that there are human emotions, modes of submission and exertion +of authority, irony, love or affection, or information that is easily encoded +and conveyed in face-to-face communications but not in script, script-based +communications are a poor substitute for presence. A long and romantic +tradition of love letters and poems notwithstanding, there is a certain +thinness to that mode in the hands of all but the most gifted writers relative +to the fleshiness of unmediated love. Some aspects of the difference among +media of communication are not necessarily technical, but are rather culturally +or organizationally embedded. Television can transmit text. However, text +distribution is not television's relative advantage in a sociocultural +environment that already has mass-circulation print media, and in a technical +context where the resolution of television images is relatively low. As a +matter of cultural and business practice, therefore, from its inception, +television emphasized moving images and sound, not text transmission. Radio +could have been deployed as short-range, point-to-point personal communications +systems, giving us a nation of walkie-talkies. However, as chapter 6 described, +doing so would have required a very different set of regulatory and business +decisions between 1919 and 1927. Communications media take on certain social +roles, structures of control, and emphases of style that combine their +technical capacities and limits with the sociocultural business context into +which they were introduced, and through which they developed. The result is a +cluster of use characteristics that define how a ,{[pg 370]}, given medium is +used within a given society, in a given historical context. They make media +differ from each other, providing platforms with very different capacities and +emphases for their users. +={ radio : + as platform for human connection +1 ; + text distribution as platform for human connection +1 ; + written communications as platform for human connection +1 +} + +As a technical and organizational matter, the Internet allows for a radically +more diverse suite of communications models than any of the twentiethcentury +systems permitted. It allows for textual, aural, and visual communications. It +permits spatial and temporal asynchronicity, as in the case of email or Web +pages, but also enables temporal synchronicity--as in the case of IM, online +game environments, or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). It can even be used +for subchannel communications within a spatially synchronous context, such as +in a meeting where people pass electronic notes to each other by e-mail or IM. +Because it is still highly textual, it requires more direct attention than +radio, but like print, it is highly multiplexable-- both between uses of the +Internet and other media, and among Internet uses themselves. Similar to print +media, you can pick your head up from the paper, make a comment, and get back +to reading. Much more richly, one can be on a voice over IP conversation and +e-mail at the same time, or read news interlaced with receiving and responding +to e-mail. It offers oneto-one, one-to-few, few-to-few, one-to-many, and +many-to-many communications capabilities, more diverse in this regard than any +medium for social communication that preceded it, including--on the dimensions +of distance, asynchronicity, and many-to-many capabilities--even that richest +of media: face-to-face communications. + +Because of its technical flexibility and the "business model" of Internet +service providers as primarily carriers, the Internet lends itself to being +used for a wide range of social relations. Nothing in "the nature of the +technology" requires that it be the basis of rich social relations, rather than +becoming, as some predicted in the early 1990s, a "celestial jukebox" for the +mass distribution of prepackaged content to passive end points. In +contradistinction to the dominant remote communications technologies of the +twentieth century, however, the Internet offers some new easy ways to +communicate that foster both of the types of social communication that the +social science literature seems to be observing. Namely, it makes it easy to +increase the number of communications with preexisting friends and family, and +increases communication with geographically distant or more loosely affiliated +others. Print, radio, television, film, and sound recording all operated +largely on a one-to-many model. They did not, given the economics of production +and transmission, provide a usable means of remote communication for +individuals ,{[pg 371]}, at the edges of these communication media. Television, +film, sound recording, and print industries were simply too expensive, and +their business organization was too focused on selling broadcast-model +communications, to support significant individual communication. When cassette +tapes were introduced, we might have seen people recording a tape instead of +writing a letter to friends or family. However, this was relatively cumbersome, +low quality, and time consuming. Telephones were the primary means of +communications used by individuals, and they indeed became the primary form of +mediated personal social communications. However, telephone conversations +require synchronicity, which means that they can only be used for socializing +purposes when both parties have time. They were also only usable throughout +this period for serial, one-to-one conversations. Moreover, for most of the +twentieth century, a long-distance call was a very expensive proposition for +most nonbusiness users, and outside of the United States, local calls too +carried nontrivial time-sensitive prices in most places. Telephones were +therefore a reasonable medium for social relations with preexisting friends and +family. However, their utility dropped off radically with the cost of +communication, which was at a minimum associated with geographic distance. In +all these dimensions, the Internet makes it easier and cheaper to communicate +with family and friends, at close proximity or over great distances, through +the barriers of busy schedules and differing time zones. Moreover, because of +the relatively low-impact nature of these communications, the Internet allows +people to experiment with looser relations more readily. In other words, the +Internet does not make us more social beings. It simply offers more degrees of +freedom for each of us to design our own communications space than were +available in the past. It could have been that we would have used that design +flexibility to re-create the massmedia model. But to predict that it would be +used in this fashion requires a cramped view of human desire and connectedness. +It was much more likely that, given the freedom to design our own +communications environment flexibly and to tailor it to our own individual +needs dynamically over time, we would create a system that lets us strengthen +the ties that are most important to us. It was perhaps less predictable, but +unsurprising after the fact, that this freedom would also be used to explore a +wider range of relations than simply consuming finished media goods. +={ telephone, as platform for human connection } + +There is an appropriate wariness in contemporary academic commentary about +falling into the trap of "the mythos of the electrical sublime" by adopting a +form of Internet utopianism.~{ James W. Carrey, Communication as Culture: +Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). }~ It is important, +however, not to ,{[pg 372]}, let this caution blind us to the facts about +Internet use, and the technical, business, and cultural capabilities that the +Internet makes feasible. The cluster of technologies of computation and +communications that characterize the Internet today are, in fact, used in +functionally different ways, and make for several different media of +communication than we had in the twentieth century. The single technical +platform might best be understood to enable several different "media"--in the +sense of clusters of technical-socialeconomic practices of communication--and +the number of these enabled media is growing. Instant messaging came many years +after e-mail, and a few years after Web pages. Blogging one's daily journal on +LiveJournal so that a group of intimates can check in on one's life as it +unfolds was not a medium that was available to users until even more recently. +The Internet is still providing its users with new ways to communicate with +each other, and these represent a genuinely wide range of new capabilities. It +is therefore unsurprising that connected social beings, such as we are, will +take advantage of these new capabilities to form connections that were +practically infeasible in the past. This is not media determinism. This is not +millenarian utopianism. It is a simple observation. People do what they can, +not what they cannot. In the daily humdrum of their lives, individuals do more +of what is easier to do than what requires great exertion. When a new medium +makes it easy for people to do new things, they may well, in fact, do them. And +when these new things are systematically more user-centric, dialogic, flexible +in terms of the temporal and spatial synchronicity they require or enable, and +multiplexable, people will communicate with each other in ways and amounts that +they could not before. + +2~ THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE +={ behavior : + enforced with social software +4 ; + blogs : + as social software +4 ; + collaborative authorship : + social software +4 ; + norms (social) : + enforced norms with software +4 | software for, emergence of +4 ; + regulation by social norms : + enforced norms with software +4 | software for, emergence of +4 ; + social relations and norms : + enforced norms with software +4 | software for, emergence of +4 ; + social software +4 ; + software : + social +4 ; + technology : + social software +4 ; + Wikis as social software +4 +} + +The design of the Internet itself is agnostic as among the social structures +and relations it enables. At its technical core is a commitment to push all the +detailed instantiations of human communications to the edges of the network--to +the applications that run on the computers of users. This technical agnosticism +leads to a social agnosticism. The possibility of large-scale sharing and +cooperation practices, of medium-scale platforms for collaboration and +discussion, and of small-scale, one-to-one communications has led to the +development of a wide range of software designs and applications to facilitate +different types of communications. The World Wide Web was used initially as a +global broadcast medium available to anyone and everyone, ,{[pg 373]}, +everywhere. In e-mail, we see a medium available for one-to-one, few-tofew, +one-to-many and, to a lesser extent, many-to-many use. One of the more +interesting phenomena of the past few years is the emergence of what is +beginning to be called "social software." As a new design space, it is +concerned with groups that are, as defined by Clay Shirky, who first +articulated the concept, "Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, +where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be +supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at +least in a single group." The definition of the term is somewhat amorphous, but +the basic concept is software whose design characteristic is that it treats +genuine social phenomena as different from one-to-one or one-to-many +communications. It seeks to build one's expectations about the social +interactions that the software will facilitate into the design of the platform. +The design imperative was most clearly articulated by Shirky when he wrote that +from the perspective of the software designer, the user of social software is +the group, not the individual.~{ Clay Shirky, "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy," +published first in Networks, Economics and Culture mailing list July 1, 2003. +}~ +={ Shirky, Clay } + +A simple example will help to illustrate. Take any given site that uses a +collaborative authorship tool, like the Wiki that is the basis of /{Wikipedia}/ +and many other cooperative authorship exercises. From the perspective of an +individual user, the ease of posting a comment on the Wiki, and the ease of +erasing one's own comments from it, would be important characteristics: The +fewer registration and sign-in procedures, the better. Not so from the +perspective of the group. The group requires some "stickiness" to make the +group as a group, and the project as a project, avoid the rending forces of +individualism and self-reference. So, for example, design components that +require registration for posting, or give users different rights to post and +erase comments over time, depending on whether they are logged in or not, or +depending on a record of their past cooperative or uncooperative behavior, are +a burden for the individual user. However, that is precisely their point. They +are intended to give those users with a greater stake in the common enterprise +a slight, or sometimes large, edge in maintaining the group's cohesion. +Similarly, erasing past comments may be useful for the individual, for example, +if they were silly or untempered. Keeping the comments there is, however, +useful to the group--as a source of experience about the individual or part of +the group's collective memory about mistakes made in the past that should not +be repeated by someone else. Again, the needs of the group as a group often +differ from those of the individual participant. Thinking of the platform as +social software entails designing it with characteristics ,{[pg 374]}, that +have a certain social-science or psychological model of the interactions of a +group, and building the platform's affordances in order to enhance the +survivability and efficacy of the group, even if it sometimes comes at the +expense of the individual user's ease of use or comfort. + +This emergence of social software--like blogs with opportunities to comment, +Wikis, as well as social-norm-mediated Listservs or uses of the "cc" line in +e-mail--underscores the nondeterministic nature of the claim about the +relationship between the Internet and social relations. The Internet makes +possible all sorts of human communications that were not technically feasible +before its widespread adoption. Within this wide range of newly feasible +communications patterns, we are beginning to see the emergence of different +types of relationships--some positive, some, like spam (unsolicited commercial +e-mail), decidedly negative. In seeking to predict and diagnose the +relationship between the increasing use of Internet communications and the +shape of social relations, we see that the newly emerging constructive social +possibilities are leading to new design challenges. These, in turn, are finding +engineers and enthusiasts willing and able to design for them. The genuinely +new capability--connecting among few and many at a distance in a dialogic, +recursive form--is leading to the emergence of new design problems. These +problems come from the fact that the new social settings come with their own +social dynamics, but without long-standing structures of mediation and +constructive ordering. Hence the early infamy of the tendency of Usenet and +Listservs discussions to deteriorate into destructive flame wars. As social +habits of using these kinds of media mature, so that users already know that +letting loose on a list will likely result in a flame war and will kill the +conversation, and as designers understand that social dynamics--including both +those that allow people to form and sustain groups and those that rend them +apart with equal if not greater force--we are seeing the coevolution of social +norms and platform designs that are intended to give play to the former, and +mediate or moderate the latter. These platforms are less likely to matter for +sustaining the group in preexisting relations--as among friends or family. The +structuring of those relationships is dominated by social norms. However, they +do offer a new form and a stabilizing context for the newly emerging diverse +set of social relations--at a distance, across interests and contexts--that +typify both peer production and many forms of social interaction aimed purely +at social reproduction. +={ peer production : + as platform for human connection +1 +} + +The peer-production processes that are described in primarily economic ,{[pg +375]}, terms in chapter 3--like free software development, /{Wikipedia}/, or +the Open Directory Project--represent one cluster of important instances of +this new form of social relations. They offer a type of relationship that is +nonhierarchical and organized in a radically decentralized pattern. Their +social valence is given by some combination of the shared experience of joint +creativity they enable, as well as their efficacy--their ability to give their +users a sense of common purpose and mutual support in achieving it. Individuals +adopt projects and purposes they consider worth pursuing. Through these +projects they find others, with whom they initially share only a general sense +of human connectedness and common practical interest, but with whom they then +interact in ways that allow the relationship to thicken over time. Nowhere is +this process clearer than on the community pages of /{Wikipedia}/. Because of +the limited degree to which that platform uses technical means to constrain +destructive behavior, the common enterprise has developed practices of +user-to-user communication, multiuser mediation, and userappointed mediation to +resolve disputes and disagreements. Through their involvement in these, users +increase their participation, their familiarity with other participants--at +least in this limited role as coauthors--and their practices of mutual +engagement with these others. In this way, peer production offers a new +platform for human connection, bringing together otherwise unconnected +individuals and replacing common background or geographic proximity with a +sense of well-defined purpose and the successful common pursuit of this purpose +as the condensation point for human connection. Individuals who are connected +to each other in a peer-production community may or may not be bowling alone +when they are off-line, but they are certainly playing together online. + +2~ THE INTERNET AND HUMAN COMMUNITY +={ communities : + human and Internet, together +2 ; + human community, coexisting with Internet +2 ; + Internet : + coexisting with human community +2 ; + norms (social) : + Internet and human coexistence +2 ; + regulation by social norms : + Internet and human coexistence +2 ; + social relations and norms : + Internet and human coexistence +2 +} + +This chapter began with a basic question. While the networked information +economy may enhance the autonomy of individuals, does it not also facilitate +the breakdown of community? The answer offered here has been partly empirical +and partly conceptual. + +Empirically, it seems that the Internet is allowing us to eat our cake and have +it too, apparently keeping our (social) figure by cutting down on the social +equivalent of deep-fried dough--television. That is, we communicate more, +rather than less, with the core constituents of our organic communities--our +family and our friends--and we seem, in some places, also to ,{[pg 376]}, be +communicating more with our neighbors. We also communicate more with loosely +affiliated others, who are geographically remote, and who may share only +relatively small slivers of overlapping interests, or for only short periods of +life. The proliferation of potential connections creates the social parallel to +the Babel objection in the context of autonomy--with all these possible links, +will any of them be meaningful? The answer is largely that we do, in fact, +employ very strong filtering on our Internet-based social connections in one +obvious dimension: We continue to use the newly feasible lines of communication +primarily to thicken and strengthen connections with preexisting +relationships--family and friends. The clearest indication of this is the +parsimony with which most people use instant messaging. The other mechanism we +seem to be using to avoid drowning in the noise of potential chitchat with +ever-changing strangers is that we tend to find networks of connections that +have some stickiness from our perspective. This stickiness could be the +efficacy of a cluster of connections in pursuit of a goal one cares about, as +in the case of the newly emerging peer-production enterprises. It could be the +ways in which the internal social interaction has combined social norms with +platform design to offer relatively stable relations with others who share +common interests. Users do not amble around in a social equivalent of Brownian +motion. They tend to cluster in new social relations, albeit looser and for +more limited purposes than the traditional pillars of community. +={ networked public sphere : + see also social relations and norms networked society +1 +} + +The conceptual answer has been that the image of "community" that seeks a +facsimile of a distant pastoral village is simply the wrong image of how we +interact as social beings. We are a networked society now--networked +individuals connected with each other in a mesh of loosely knit, overlapping, +flat connections. This does not leave us in a state of anomie. We are +welladjusted, networked individuals; well-adjusted socially in ways that those +who seek community would value, but in new and different ways. In a substantial +departure from the range of feasible communications channels available in the +twentieth century, the Internet has begun to offer us new ways of connecting to +each other in groups small and large. As we have come to take advantage of +these new capabilities, we see social norms and software coevolving to offer +new, more stable, and richer contexts for forging new relationships beyond +those that in the past have been the focus of our social lives. These do not +displace the older relations. They do not mark a fundamental shift in human +nature into selfless, community-conscious characters. We continue to be complex +beings, radically individual and self-interested ,{[pg 377]}, at the same time +that we are entwined with others who form the context out of which we take +meaning, and in which we live our lives. However, we now have new scope for +interaction with others. We have new opportunities for building sustained +limited-purpose relations, weak and intermediate-strength ties that have +significant roles in providing us with context, with a source of defining part +of our identity, with potential sources for support, and with human +companionship. That does not mean that these new relationships will come to +displace the centrality of our more immediate relationships. They will, +however, offer increasingly attractive supplements as we seek new and diverse +ways to embed ourselves in relation to others, to gain efficacy in weaker ties, +and to interpolate different social networks in combinations that provide us +both stability of context and a greater degree of freedom from the hierarchical +and constraining aspects of some of our social relations. ,{[pg 378]}, ,{[pg +379]}, + +:B~ Part Three - Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation + +1~p3 Introduction + +Part I of this book offers a descriptive, progressive account of emerging +patterns of nonmarket individual and cooperative social behavior, and an +analysis of why these patterns are internally sustainable and increase +information economy productivity. Part II combines descriptive and normative +analysis to claim that these emerging practices offer defined improvements in +autonomy, democratic discourse, cultural creation, and justice. I have noted +periodically, however, that the descriptions of emerging social practices and +the analysis of their potential by no means imply that these changes will +necessarily become stable or provide the benefits I ascribe them. They are not +a deterministic consequence of the adoption of networked computers as core +tools of information production and exchange. There is no inevitable historical +force that drives the technological-economic moment toward an open, diverse, +liberal equilibrium. If the transformation I describe actually generalizes and +stabilizes, it could lead to substantial redistribution of power and money. The +twentieth-century industrial producers of information, culture, and +communications--like Hollywood, the recording industry, ,{[pg 380]}, and some +of the telecommunications giants--stand to lose much. The winners would be a +combination of the widely diffuse population of individuals around the globe +and the firms or other toolmakers and platform providers who supply these newly +capable individuals with the context for participating in the networked +information economy. None of the industrial giants of yore are taking this +threat lying down. Technology will not overcome their resistance through an +insurmountable progressive impulse of history. The reorganization of production +and the advances it can bring in freedom and justice will emerge only as a +result of social practices and political actions that successfully resist +efforts to regulate the emergence of the networked information economy in order +to minimize its impact on the incumbents. + +Since the middle of the 1990s, we have seen intensifying battles over the +institutional ecology within which the industrial mode of information +production and the newly emerging networked modes compete. Partly, this has +been a battle over telecommunications infrastructure regulation. Most +important, however, this has meant a battle over "intellectual property" +protection, very broadly defined. Building upon and extending a +twenty-five-year trend of expansion of copyrights, patents, and similar +exclusive rights, the last half-decade of the twentieth century saw expansion +of institutional mechanisms for exerting exclusive control in multiple +dimensions. The term of copyright was lengthened. Patent rights were extended +to cover software and business methods. Trademarks were extended by the +Antidilution Act of 1995 to cover entirely new values, which became the basis +for liability in the early domain-name trademark disputes. Most important, we +saw a move to create new legal tools with which information vendors could +hermetically seal access to their materials to an extent never before possible. +The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibited the creation and use of +technologies that would allow users to get at materials whose owners control +through encryption. It prohibited even technologies that users can employ to +use the materials in ways that the owners have no right to prevent. Today we +are seeing efforts to further extend similar technological regulations-- down +to the level of regulating hardware to make sure that it complies with design +specifications created by the copyright industries. At other layers of the +communications environment, we see efforts to expand software patents, to +control the architecture of personal computing devices, and to create +ever-stronger property rights in physical infrastructure--be it the telephone +lines, cable plant, or wireless frequencies. Together, these legislative and +judicial ,{[pg 381]}, acts have formed what many have been calling a second +enclosure movement: A concerted effort to shape the institutional ecology in +order to help proprietary models of information production at the expense of +burdening nonmarket, nonproprietary production.~{ For a review of the +literature and a substantial contribution to it, see James Boyle, "The Second +Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain," Law and +Contemporary Problems 66 (Winter-Spring 2003): 33-74. }~ The new enclosure +movement is not driven purely by avarice and rent seeking--though it has much +of that too. Some of its components are based in well-meaning judicial and +regulatory choices that represent a particular conception of innovation and its +relationship to exclusive rights. That conception, focused on mass-mediatype +content, movies, and music, and on pharmaceutical-style innovation systems, is +highly solicitous of the exclusive rights that are the bread and butter of +those culturally salient formats. It is also suspicious of, and detrimental to, +the forms of nonmarket, commons-based production emerging in the networked +information economy. +={ Antidilutation Act of 1995 ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ; + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) ; + proprietary rights : + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) | enclosure movement +1 ; + commercial model of communication : + enclosure movement +1 ; + enclosure movement +1 ; + industrial model of communication : + enclosure movement +1 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + enclosure movement +1 ; + policy : + enclosure movement +1 ; + traditional model of communication : + enclosure movement +1 +} + +% extra ref to antidilutation act added + +This new enclosure movement has been the subject of sustained and diverse +academic critique since the mid-1980s.~{ Early versions in the legal literature +of the skepticism regarding the growth of exclusive rights were Ralph Brown's +work on trademarks, Benjamin Kaplan's caution over the gathering storm that +would become the Copyright Act of 1976, and Stephen Breyer's work questioning +the economic necessity of copyright in many industries. Until, and including +the 1980s, these remained, for the most part, rare voices--joined in the 1980s +by David Lange's poetic exhortation for the public domain; Pamela Samuelson's +systematic critique of the application of copyright to computer programs, long +before anyone was paying attention; Jessica Litman's early work on the +political economy of copyright legislation and the systematic refusal to +recognize the public domain as such; and William Fisher's theoretical +exploration of fair use. The 1990s saw a significant growth of academic +questioning of enclosure: Samuelson continued to press the question of +copyright in software and digital materials; Litman added a steady stream of +prescient observations as to where the digital copyright was going and how it +was going wrong; Peter Jaszi attacked the notion of the romantic author; Ray +Patterson developed a user-centric view of copyright; Diane Zimmerman +revitalized the debate over the conflict between copyright and the first +amendment; James Boyle introduced erudite criticism of the theoretical +coherence of the relentless drive to propertization; Niva Elkin Koren explored +copyright and democracy; Keith Aoki questioned trademark, patents, and global +trade systems; Julie Cohen early explored technical protection systems and +privacy; and Eben Moglen began mercilessly to apply the insights of free +software to hack at the foundations of intellectual property apologia. Rebecca +Eisenberg, and more recently, Arti Rai, questioned the wisdom of patents on +research tools to biomedical innovation. In this decade, William Fisher, Larry +Lessig, Litman, and Siva Vaidhyanathan have each described the various forms +that the enclosure movement has taken and exposed its many limitations. Lessig +and Vaidhyanathan, in particular, have begun to explore the relations between +the institutional battles and the freedom in the networked environment. }~ The +core of this rich critique has been that the cases and statutes of the past +decade or so have upset the traditional balance, in copyrights in particular, +between seeking to create incentives through the grant of exclusive rights and +assuring access to information through the judicious limitation of these rights +and the privileging of various uses. I do not seek to replicate that work here, +or to offer a comprehensive listing of all the regulatory moves that have +increased the scope of proprietary rights in digital communications networks. +Instead, I offer a way of framing these various changes as moves in a +large-scale battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment. +By "institutional ecology," I mean to say that institutions matter to behavior, +but in ways that are more complex than usually considered in economic models. +They interact with the technological state, the cultural conceptions of +behaviors, and with incumbent and emerging social practices that may be +motivated not only by self-maximizing behavior, but also by a range of other +social and psychological motivations. In this complex ecology, +institutions--most prominently, law--affect these other parameters, and are, in +turn, affected by them. Institutions coevolve with technology and with social +and market behavior. This coevolution leads to periods of relative stability, +punctuated by periods of disequilibrium, which may be caused by external shocks +or internally generated phase shifts. During these moments, the various +parameters will be out of step, and will pull and tug at the pattern of +behavior, at the technology, and at the institutional forms of the behavior. +After the tugging and pulling has shaped the various parameters in ways that +are more consistent ,{[pg 382]}, with each other, we should expect to see +periods of relative stability and coherence. + +Chapter 11 is devoted to an overview of the range of discrete policy areas that +are shaping the institutional ecology of digital networks, in which +proprietary, market-based models of information production compete with those +that are individual, social, and peer produced. In almost all contexts, when +presented with a policy choice, advanced economies have chosen to regulate +information production and exchange in ways that make it easier to pursue a +proprietary, exclusion-based model of production of entertainment goods at the +expense of commons- and service-based models of information production and +exchange. This has been true irrespective of the political party in power in +the United States, or the cultural differences in the salience of market +orientation between Europe and the United States. However, the technological +trajectory, the social practices, and the cultural understanding are often +working at cross-purposes with the regulatory impulse. The equilibrium on which +these conflicting forces settle will shape, to a large extent, the way in which +information, knowledge, and culture are produced and used over the coming few +decades. Chapter 12 concludes the book with an overview of what we have seen +about the political economy of information and what we might therefore +understand to be at stake in the policy choices that liberal democracies and +advanced economies will be making in the coming years. ,{[pg 383]}, + +1~11 Chapter 11 - The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment +={ commercial model of communication +133 ; + industrial model of communication +133 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment +133 ; + policy +133 ; + traditional model of communication +133 +} + +The decade straddling the turn of the twenty-first century has seen high levels +of legislative and policy activity in the domains of information and +communications. Between 1995 and 1998, the United States completely overhauled +its telecommunications law for the first time in sixty years, departed +drastically from decades of practice on wireless regulation, revolutionized the +scope and focus of trademark law, lengthened the term of copyright, +criminalized individual user infringement, and created new para-copyright +powers for rights holders that were so complex that the 1998 Digital Millennium +Copyright Act (DMCA) that enacted them was longer than the entire Copyright +Act. Europe covered similar ground on telecommunications, and added a new +exclusive right in raw facts in databases. Both the United States and the +European Union drove for internationalization of the norms they adopted, +through the new World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties and, +more important, though the inclusion of intellectual property concerns in the +international trade regime. In the seven years since then, legal battles have +raged over the meaning of these changes, as well ,{[pg 384]}, as over efforts +to extend them in other directions. From telecommunications law to copyrights, +from domain name assignment to trespass to server, we have seen a broad range +of distinct regulatory moves surrounding the question of control over the basic +resources needed to create, encode, transmit, and receive information, +knowledge, and culture in the digital environment. As we telescope up from the +details of sundry regulatory skirmishes, we begin to see a broad pattern of +conflict over the way that access to these core resources will be controlled. + +Much of the formal regulatory drive has been to increase the degree to which +private, commercial parties can gain and assert exclusivity in core resources +necessary for information production and exchange. At the physical layer, the +shift to broadband Internet has been accompanied by less competitive pressure +and greater legal freedom for providers to exclude competitors from, and shape +the use of, their networks. That freedom from both legal and market constraints +on exercising control has been complemented by increasing pressures from +copyright industries to require that providers exercise greater control over +the information flows in their networks in order to enforce copyrights. At the +logical layer, anticircumvention provisions and the efforts to squelch +peer-to-peer sharing have created institutional pressures on software and +protocols to offer a more controlled and controllable environment. At the +content layer, we have seen a steady series of institutional changes aimed at +tightening exclusivity. +={ content layer of institutional ecology +1 ; + layers of institutional ecology +1 : + content layer +1 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology ; + physical capital for production +1 ; + policy layers +1 +} + +At each of these layers, however, we have also seen countervailing forces. At +the physical layer, the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) move to +permit the development of wireless devices capable of self-configuring as +user-owned networks offers an important avenue for a commons-based last mile. +The open standards used for personal computer design have provided an open +platform. The concerted resistance against efforts to require computers to be +designed so they can more reliably enforce copyrights against their users has, +to this point, prevented extension of the DMCA approach to hardware design. At +the logical layer, the continued centrality of open standard-setting processes +and the emergence of free software as a primary modality of producing +mission-critical software provide significant resistance to efforts to enclose +the logical layer. At the content layer, where law has been perhaps most +systematically one-sided in its efforts to enclose, the cultural movements and +the technical affordances that form the foundation of the transformation +described throughout this book stand as the most significant barrier to +enclosure. ,{[pg 385]}, + +It is difficult to tell how much is really at stake, from the long-term +perspective, in all these legal battles. From one point of view, law would have +to achieve a great deal in order to replicate the twentieth-century model of +industrial information economy in the new technical-social context. It would +have to curtail some of the most fundamental technical characteristics of +computer networks and extinguish some of our most fundamental human motivations +and practices of sharing and cooperation. It would have to shift the market +away from developing ever-cheaper general-purpose computers whose value to +users is precisely their on-the-fly configurability over time, toward more +controllable and predictable devices. It would have to squelch the emerging +technologies in wireless, storage, and computation that are permitting users to +share their excess resources ever more efficiently. It would have to dampen the +influence of free software, and prevent people, young and old, from doing the +age-old human thing: saying to each other, "here, why don't you take this, +you'll like it," with things they can trivially part with and share socially. +It is far from obvious that law can, in fact, achieve such basic changes. From +another viewpoint, there may be no need to completely squelch all these things. +Lessig called this the principle of bovinity: a small number of rules, +consistently applied, suffice to control a herd of large animals. There is no +need to assure that all people in all contexts continue to behave as couch +potatoes for the true scope of the networked information economy to be +constrained. It is enough that the core enabling technologies and the core +cultural practices are confined to small groups-- some teenagers, some +countercultural activists. There have been places like the East Village or the +Left Bank throughout the period of the industrial information economy. For the +gains in autonomy, democracy, justice, and a critical culture that are +described in part II to materialize, the practices of nonmarket information +production, individually free creation, and cooperative peer production must +become more than fringe practices. They must become a part of life for +substantial portions of the networked population. The battle over the +institutional ecology of the digitally networked environment is waged precisely +over how many individual users will continue to participate in making the +networked information environment, and how much of the population of consumers +will continue to sit on the couch and passively receive the finished goods of +industrial information producers. ,{[pg 386]}, +={ Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) } + +2~ INSTITUTIONAL ECOLOGY AND PATH DEPENDENCE +={ commercial model of communication : + path dependency +5 ; + industrial model of communication : + path dependency +5 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + path dependency +5 ; + policy : + path dependency +5 ; + traditional model of communication : + path dependency +5 +} + +The century-old pragmatist turn in American legal thought has led to the +development of a large and rich literature about the relationship of law to +society and economy. It has both Right and Left versions, and has disciplinary +roots in history, economics, sociology, psychology, and critical theory. +Explanations are many: some simple, some complex; some analytically tractable, +many not. I do not make a substantive contribution to that debate here, but +rather build on some of its strains to suggest that the process is complex, and +particularly, that the relationship of law to social relations is one of +punctuated equilibrium--there are periods of stability followed by periods of +upheaval, and then adaptation and stabilization anew, until the next cycle. +Hopefully, the preceding ten chapters have provided sufficient reason to think +that we are going through a moment of social-economic transformation today, +rooted in a technological shock to our basic modes of information, knowledge, +and cultural production. Most of this chapter offers a sufficient description +of the legislative and judicial battles of the past few years to make the case +that we are in the midst of a significant perturbation of some sort. I suggest +that the heightened activity is, in fact, a battle, in the domain of law and +policy, over the shape of the social settlement that will emerge around the +digital computation and communications revolution. + +The basic claim is made up of fairly simple components. First, law affects +human behavior on a micromotivational level and on a +macro-social-organizational level. This is in contradistinction to, on the one +hand, the classical Marxist claim that law is epiphenomenal, and, on the other +hand, the increasingly rare simple economic models that ignore transaction +costs and institutional barriers and simply assume that people will act in +order to maximize their welfare, irrespective of institutional arrangements. +Second, the causal relationship between law and human behavior is complex. +Simple deterministic models of the form "if law X, then behavior Y" have been +used as assumptions, but these are widely understood as, and criticized for +being, oversimplifications for methodological purposes. Laws do affect human +behavior by changing the payoffs to regulated actions directly. However, they +also shape social norms with regard to behaviors, psychological attitudes +toward various behaviors, the cultural understanding of actions, and the +politics of claims about behaviors and practices. These effects are not all +linearly additive. Some push back and nullify the law, some amplify its ,{[pg +387]}, effects; it is not always predictable which of these any legal change +will be. Decreasing the length of a "Walk" signal to assure that pedestrians +are not hit by cars may trigger wider adoption of jaywalking as a norm, +affecting ultimate behavior in exactly the opposite direction of what was +intended. This change may, in turn, affect enforcement regarding jaywalking, or +the length of the signals set for cars, because the risks involved in different +signal lengths change as actual expected behavior changes, which again may feed +back on driving and walking practices. Third, and as part of the complexity of +the causal relation, the effects of law differ in different material, social, +and cultural contexts. The same law introduced in different societies or at +different times will have different effects. It may enable and disable a +different set of practices, and trigger a different cascade of feedback and +countereffects. This is because human beings are diverse in their motivational +structure and their cultural frames of meaning for behavior, for law, or for +outcomes. Fourth, the process of lawmaking is not exogenous to the effects of +law on social relations and human behavior. One can look at positive political +theory or at the history of social movements to see that the shape of law +itself is contested in society because it makes (through its complex causal +mechanisms) some behaviors less attractive, valuable, or permissible, and +others more so. The "winners" and the "losers" battle each other to tweak the +institutional playing field to fit their needs. As a consequence of these, +there is relatively widespread acceptance that there is path dependence in +institutions and social organization. That is, the actual organization of human +affairs and legal systems is not converging through a process of either Marxist +determinism or its neoclassical economics mirror image, "the most efficient +institutions win out in the end." Different societies will differ in initial +conditions and their historically contingent first moves in response to similar +perturbations, and variances will emerge in their actual practices and +institutional arrangements that persist over time--irrespective of their +relative inefficiency or injustice. + +The term "institutional ecology" refers to this context-dependent, causally +complex, feedback-ridden, path-dependent process. An example of this +interaction in the area of communications practices is the description in +chapter 6 of how the introduction of radio was received and embedded in +different legal and economic systems early in the twentieth century. A series +of organizational and institutional choices converged in all nations on a +broadcast model, but the American broadcast model, the BBC model, and the +state-run monopoly radio models created very different journalistic styles, +,{[pg 388]}, consumption expectations and styles, and funding mechanisms in +these various systems. These differences, rooted in a series of choices made +during a short period in the 1920s, persisted for decades in each of the +respective systems. Paul Starr has argued in The Creation of the Media that +basic institutional choices--from postage pricing to freedom of the +press--interacted with cultural practices and political culture to underwrite +substantial differences in the print media of the United States, Britain, and +much of the European continent in the late eighteenth and throughout much of +the nineteenth centuries.~{ Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political +Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004). }~ Again, the +basic institutional and cultural practices were put in place around the time of +the American Revolution, and were later overlaid with the introduction of +mass-circulation presses and the telegraph in the mid-1800s. Ithiel de Sola +Pool's Technologies of Freedom describes the battle between newspapers and +telegraph operators in the United States and Britain over control of +telegraphed news flows. In Britain, this resulted in the nationalization of +telegraph and the continued dominance of London and The Times. In the United +States, it resolved into the pooling model of the Associated Press, based on +private lines for news delivery and sharing-- the prototype for newspaper +chains and later network-television models of mass media.~{ Ithiel de +Sola-Pool, Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983), +91-100. }~ The possibility of multiple stable equilibria alongside each other +evoked by the stories of radio and print media is a common characteristic to +both ecological models and analytically tractable models of path dependency. +Both methodological approaches depend on feedback effects and therefore suggest +that for any given path divergence, there is a point in time where early +actions that trigger feedbacks can cause large and sustained differences over +time. +={ Pool, Ithiel de Sola ; + Starr, Paul ; + radio ; + patents : + see proprietary rights path dependency +} + +Systems that exhibit path dependencies are characterized by periods of relative +pliability followed by periods of relative stability. Institutions and social +practices coevolve through a series of adaptations--feedback effects from the +institutional system to social, cultural, and psychological frameworks; +responses into the institutional system; and success and failure of various +behavioral patterns and belief systems--until a society reaches a stage of +relative stability. It can then be shaken out of that stability by external +shocks--like Admiral Perry's arrival in Japan--or internal buildup of pressure +to a point of phase transition, as in the case of slavery in the United States. +Of course, not all shocks can so neatly be categorized as external or +internal--as in the case of the Depression and the New Deal. To say that there +are periods of stability is not to say that in such periods, everything is just +dandy for everyone. It is only to say that the political, social, economic +,{[pg 389]}, settlement is too widely comfortable for, accepted or acquiesced +in, by too many agents who in that society have the power to change practices +for institutional change to have substantial effects on the range of lived +human practices. + +The first two parts of this book explained why the introduction of digital +computer-communications networks presents a perturbation of transformative +potential for the basic model of information production and exchange in modern +complex societies. They focused on the technological, economic, and social +patterns that are emerging, and how they differ from the industrial information +economy that preceded them. This chapter offers a fairly detailed map of how +law and policy are being tugged and pulled in response to these changes. +Digital computers and networked communications as a broad category will not be +rolled back by these laws. Instead, we are seeing a battle--often but not +always self-conscious--over the precise shape of these technologies. More +important, we are observing a series of efforts to shape the social and +economic practices as they develop to take advantage of these new technologies. + +2~ A FRAMEWORK FOR MAPPING THE INSTITUTIONAL ECOLOGY +={ commercial model of communication : + mapping, framework for +13 ; + industrial model of communication : + mapping, framework for +13 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + mapping, framework for +13 ; + layers of institutional ecology +13 ; + policy : + mapping institutional ecology +13 ; + policy layers +13 ; + traditional model of communication : + mapping, framework for +13 +} + +Two specific examples will illustrate the various levels at which law can +operate to shape the use of information and its production and exchange. The +first example builds on the story from chapter 7 of how embarrassing internal +e-mails from Diebold, the electronic voting machine maker, were exposed by +investigative journalism conducted on a nonmarket and peerproduction model. +After students at Swarthmore College posted the files, Diebold made a demand +under the DMCA that the college remove the materials or face suit for +contributory copyright infringement. The students were therefore forced to +remove the materials. However, in order keep the materials available, the +students asked students at other institutions to mirror the files, and injected +them into the eDonkey, BitTorrent, and FreeNet filesharing and publication +networks. Ultimately, a court held that the unauthorized publication of files +that were not intended for sale and carried such high public value was a fair +use. This meant that the underlying publication of the files was not itself a +violation, and therefore the Internet service provider was not liable for +providing a conduit. However, the case was decided on September 30, 2004--long +after the information would have been relevant ,{[pg 390]}, to the voting +equipment certification process in California. What kept the information +available for public review was not the ultimate vindication of the students' +publication. It was the fact that the materials were kept in the public sphere +even under threat of litigation. Recall also that at least some of the earlier +set of Diebold files that were uncovered by the activist who had started the +whole process in early 2003 were zipped, or perhaps encrypted in some form. +Scoop, the Web site that published the revelation of the initial files, +published--along with its challenge to the Internet community to scour the +files and find holes in the system--links to locations in which utilities +necessary for reading the files could be found. +={ Diebold Election Systems +3 ; + electronic voting machines (case study) +3 ; + networked public sphere : + Diebold Election Systems case study +3 ; + policy : + Diebold Election Systems case study +3 ; + public sphere : + Diebold Election Systems case study +3 ; + voting, electronic +3 +} + +There are four primary potential points of failure in this story that could +have conspired to prevent the revelation of the Diebold files, or at least to +suppress the peer-produced journalistic mode that made them available. First, +if the service provider--the college, in this case--had been a sole provider +with no alternative physical transmission systems, its decision to block the +materials under threat of suit would have prevented publication of the +materials throughout the relevant period. Second, the existence of peer-to-peer +networks that overlay the physical networks and were used to distribute the +materials made expunging them from the Internet practically impossible. There +was no single point of storage that could be locked down. This made the +prospect of threatening other universities futile. Third, those of the original +files that were not in plain text were readable with software utilities that +were freely available on the Internet, and to which Scoop pointed its readers. +This made the files readable to many more critical eyes than they otherwise +would have been. Fourth, and finally, the fact that access to the raw +materials--the e-mails--was ultimately found to be privileged under the +fair-use doctrine in copyright law allowed all the acts that had been performed +in the preceding period under a shadow of legal liability to proceed in the +light of legality. + +The second example does not involve litigation, but highlights more of the +levers open to legal manipulation. In the weeks preceding the American-led +invasion of Iraq, a Swedish video artist produced an audio version of Diana +Ross and Lionel Richie's love ballad, "Endless Love," lip-synched to news +footage of U.S. president George Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair. By +carefully synchronizing the lip movements from the various news clips, the +video produced the effect of Bush "singing" Richie's part, and Blair "singing" +Ross's, serenading each other with an eternal love ballad. No legal action with +regard to the release of this short video has been reported. However, ,{[pg +391]}, the story adds two components not available in the context of the +Diebold files context. First, it highlights that quotation from video and music +requires actual copying of the digital file. Unlike text, you cannot simply +transcribe the images or the sound. This means that access to the unencrypted +bits is more important than in the case of text. Second, it is not at all clear +that using the entire song, unmodified, is a "fair use." While it is true that +the Swedish video is unlikely to cut into the market for the original song, +there is nothing in the video that is a parody either of the song itself or of +the news footage. The video uses "found materials," that is, materials produced +by others, to mix them in a way that is surprising, creative, and creates a +genuinely new statement. However, its use of the song is much more complete +than the minimalist uses of digital sampling in recorded music, where using a +mere two-second, three-note riff from another's song has been found to be a +violation unless done with a negotiated license.~{ /{Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. +Dimension Films}/, 2004 U.S. App. LEXIS 26877. }~ + +Combined, the two stories suggest that we can map the resources necessary for a +creative communication, whether produced on a market model or a nonmarket +model, as including a number of discrete elements. First, there is the universe +of "content" itself: existing information, cultural artifacts and +communications, and knowledge structures. These include the song and video +footage, or the e-mail files, in the two stories. Second, there is the cluster +of machinery that goes into capturing, manipulating, fixing and communicating +the new cultural utterances or communications made of these inputs, mixed with +the creativity, knowledge, information, or communications capacities of the +creator of the new statement or communication. These include the physical +devices--the computers used by the students and the video artist, as well as by +their readers or viewers--and the physical transmission mechanisms used to send +the information or communications from one place to another. In the Diebold +case, the firm tried to use the Internet service provider liability regime of +the DMCA to cut off the machine storage and mechanical communications capacity +provided to the students by the university. However, the "machinery" also +includes the logical components-- the software necessary to capture, read or +listen to, cut, paste, and remake the texts or music; the software and +protocols necessary to store, retrieve, search, and communicate the information +across the Internet. + +As these stories suggest, freedom to create and communicate requires use of +diverse things and relationships--mechanical devices and protocols, +information, cultural materials, and so forth. Because of this diversity of +components ,{[pg 392]}, and relationships, the institutional ecology of +information production and exchange is a complex one. It includes regulatory +and policy elements that affect different industries, draw on various legal +doctrines and traditions, and rely on diverse economic and political theories +and practices. It includes social norms of sharing and consumption of things +conceived of as quite different--bandwidth, computers, and entertainment +materials. To make these cohere into a single problem, for several years I have +been using a very simple, three-layered representation of the basic functions +involved in mediated human communications. These are intended to map how +different institutional components interact to affect the answer to the basic +questions that define the normative characteristics of a communications +system--who gets to say what, to whom, and who decides?~{ Other layer-based +abstractions have been proposed, most effectively by Lawrence Solum and Minn +Chung, The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law, University of +San Diego Public Law Research Paper No. 55. Their model more closely hews to +the OSI layers, and is tailored to being more specifically usable for a +particular legal principle--never regulate at a level lower than you need to. I +seek a higherlevel abstraction whose role is not to serve as a tool to +constrain specific rules, but as a map for understanding the relationships +between diverse institutional elements as they relate to the basic problem of +how information is produced and exchanged in society. }~ + +These are the physical, logical, and content layers. The physical layer refers +to the material things used to connect human beings to each other. These +include the computers, phones, handhelds, wires, wireless links, and the like. +The content layer is the set of humanly meaningful statements that human beings +utter to and with one another. It includes both the actual utterances and the +mechanisms, to the extent that they are based on human communication rather +than mechanical processing, for filtering, accreditation, and interpretation. +The logical layer represents the algorithms, standards, ways of translating +human meaning into something that machines can transmit, store, or compute, and +something that machines process into communications meaningful to human beings. +These include standards, protocols, and software--both general enabling +platforms like operating systems, and more specific applications. A mediated +human communication must use all three layers, and each layer therefore +represents a resource or a pathway that the communication must use or traverse +in order to reach its intended destination. In each and every one of these +layers, we have seen the emergence of technical and practical capabilities for +using that layer on a nonproprietary model that would make access cheaper, less +susceptible to control by any single party or class of parties, or both. In +each and every layer, we have seen significant policy battles over whether +these nonproprietary or open-platform practices will be facilitated or even +permitted. Looking at the aggregate effect, we see that at all these layers, a +series of battles is being fought over the degree to which some minimal set of +basic resources and capabilities necessary to use and participate in +constructing the information environment will be available for use on a +nonproprietary, nonmarket basis. ,{[pg 393]}, +={ content layer of institutional ecology ; + layers of institutional ecology : + content layer | physical layer | see also logical layer of institutional ecology ; + logical layer of institutional ecology ; + physical layer of institutional ecology ; + policy layers : + content layer | physical layer +} + +In each layer, the policy debate is almost always carried out in local, +specific terms. We ask questions like, Will this policy optimize "spectrum +management" in these frequencies, or, Will this decrease the number of CDs +sold? However, the basic, overarching question that we must learn to ask in all +these debates is: Are we leaving enough institutional space for the +socialeconomic practices of networked information production to emerge? The +networked information economy requires access to a core set of +capabilities--existing information and culture, mechanical means to process, +store, and communicate new contributions and mixes, and the logical systems +necessary to connect them to each other. What nonmarket forms of production +need is a core common infrastructure that anyone can use, irrespective of +whether their production model is market-based or not, proprietary or not. In +almost all these dimensions, the current trajectory of +technologicaleconomic-social trends is indeed leading to the emergence of such +a core common infrastructure, and the practices that make up the networked +information economy are taking advantage of open resources. Wireless equipment +manufacturers are producing devices that let users build their own networks, +even if these are now at a primitive stage. The open-innovation ethos of the +programmer and Internet engineering community produce both free software and +proprietary software that rely on open standards for providing an open logical +layer. The emerging practices of free sharing of information, knowledge, and +culture that occupy most of the discussion in this book are producing an +ever-growing stream of freely and openly accessible content resources. The core +common infrastructure appears to be emerging without need for help from a +guiding regulatory hand. This may or may not be a stable pattern. It is +possible that by some happenstance one or two firms, using one or two critical +technologies, will be able to capture and control a bottleneck. At that point, +perhaps regulatory intervention will be required. However, from the beginning +of legal responses to the Internet and up to this writing in the middle of +2005, the primary role of law has been reactive and reactionary. It has +functioned as a point of resistance to the emergence of the networked +information economy. It has been used by incumbents from the industrial +information economies to contain the risks posed by the emerging capabilities +of the networked information environment. What the emerging networked +information economy therefore needs, in almost all cases, is not regulatory +protection, but regulatory abstinence. + +The remainder of this chapter provides a more or less detailed presentation of +the decisions being made at each layer, and how they relate to the freedom +,{[pg 394]}, to create, individually and with others, without having to go +through proprietary, market-based transactional frameworks. Because so many +components are involved, and so much has happened since the mid-1990s, the +discussion is of necessity both long in the aggregate and truncated in each +particular category. To overcome this expositional problem, I have collected +the various institutional changes in table 11.1. For readers interested only in +the overarching claim of this chapter--that is, that there is, in fact, a +battle over the institutional environment, and that many present choices +interact to increase or decrease the availability of basic resources for +information production and exchange--table 11.1 may provide sufficient detail. +For those interested in a case study of the complex relationship between law, +technology, social behavior, and market structure, the discussion of +peer-to-peer networks may be particularly interesting to pursue. + +A quick look at table 11.1 reveals that there is a diverse set of sources of +openness. A few of these are legal. Mostly, they are based on technological and +social practices, including resistance to legal and regulatory drives toward +enclosure. Examples of policy interventions that support an open core common +infrastructure are the FCC's increased permission to deploy open wireless +networks and the various municipal broadband initiatives. The former is a +regulatory intervention, but its form is largely removal of past prohibitions +on an entire engineering approach to building wireless systems. Municipal +efforts to produce open broadband networks are being resisted at the state +legislation level, with statutes that remove the power to provision broadband +from the home rule powers of municipalities. For the most part, the drive for +openness is based on individual and voluntary cooperative action, not law. The +social practices of openness take on a quasi-normative face when practiced in +standard-setting bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or the +World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). However, none of these have the force of law. +Legal devices also support openness when used in voluntaristic models like free +software licensing and Creative Commons?type licensing. However, most often +when law has intervened in its regulatory force, as opposed to its +contractual-enablement force, it has done so almost entirely on the side of +proprietary enclosure. + +Another characteristic of the social-economic-institutional struggle is an +alliance between a large number of commercial actors and the social sharing +culture. We see this in the way that wireless equipment manufacturers are +selling into a market of users of WiFi and similar unlicensed wireless devices. +We see this in the way that personal computer manufacturers are competing ,{[pg +395]}, over decreasing margins by producing the most general-purpose machines +that would be most flexible for their users, rather than machines that would +most effectively implement the interests of Hollywood and the recording +industry. We see this in the way that service and equipment-based firms, like +IBM and Hewlett-Packard (HP), support open-source and free software. The +alliance between the diffuse users and the companies that are adapting their +business models to serve them as users, instead of as passive consumers, +affects the political economy of this institutional battle in favor of +openness. On the other hand, security consciousness in the United States has +led to some efforts to tip the balance in favor of closed proprietary systems, +apparently because these are currently perceived as more secure, or at least +more amenable to government control. While orthogonal in its political origins +to the battle between proprietary and commons-based strategies for information +production, this drive does tilt the field in favor of enclosure, at least at +the time of this writing in 2005. +={ commercial model of communication : + security-related policy ; + industrial model of communication : + security-related policy ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + security-related policy ; + policy : + security-related ; + security-related policy ; + traditional model of communication : + security-related policy +} + +% paragraph end moved above table + +!_ Table 11.1: Overview of the Institutional Ecology +={ content layer of institutional ecology : + recent changes ; + layers of institutional ecology : + content layer ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + recent changes ; + physical layer of institutional ecology : + recent changes ; + policy layers : + content layer +} + +table{~h c3; 33; 33; 33; + +. +Enclosure +Openness + +Physical Transport +Broadband trated by FCC as information service +Open wireless networks + +. +DMCA ISP liability +Municipal broadband initiatives + +. +Municipal broadband barred by states +. + +Physical Devices +CBDPTA: regulatory requirements to implement "trusted systems"; private efforts towards the same goal +Standardization + +. +Operator-controlled mobile phones +Fiercely competitive market in commodity components + +Logical Transmission protocols +Privatized DNS/ICANN +TCP/IP + +. +. +IETF + +. +. +p2p networks + +Logical Software +DMCA anticircumvention; Proprietary OS; Web browser; Software Patents +Free Software + +. +. +W3C + +. +. +P2p software widely used + +. +. +social acceptability of widespread hacking of copy protection + +Content +Copyright expansion: "Right to read"; No de minimis digital sampling; "Fair use" narrowed: effect on potential market "commercial" defined broadly; Criminalization; Term extension +Increasing sharing practices and adoption of sharing licensing practices + +. +Contractual enclosure: UCITA +Musicians distribute music freely + +. +Trademark dilution +Creative Commons; other open publication models + +. +Database protection +Widespread social disdain for copyright + +. +Linking and trespass to chattels +International jurisdictional arbitrage + +. +International "harmonization" and trade enforcement of maximal exclusive rights regimes +Early signs of a global access to knowledge movement combining developing nations with free information ecology advocates, both markets and non-market, raising a challenge to the enclosure movement + +}table + +% ,{[pg 396]}, + +Over the past few years, we have also seen that the global character of the +Internet is a major limit on effective enclosure, when openness is a function +of technical and social practices, and enclosure is a function of law.~{ The +first major treatment of this phenomenon was Michael Froomkin, "The Internet as +a Source of Regulatory Arbitrage" (1996), +http://www.law.miami.edu/froomkin/articles/arbitr.htm. }~ When Napster was shut +down in the United States, for example, KaZaa emerged in the Netherlands, from +where it later moved to Australia. This force is meeting the countervailing +force of international harmonization--a series of bilateral and multilateral +efforts to "harmonize" exclusive rights regimes internationally and efforts to +coordinate international enforcement. It is difficult at this stage to predict +which of these forces will ultimately have the upper hand. It is not too early +to map in which direction each is pushing. And it is therefore not too early to +characterize the normative implications of the success or failure of these +institutional efforts. +={ Internet : + globality of, effects on policy ; + policy : + global Internet and +} + +2~ THE PHYSICAL LAYER +={ physical capital for production +26 : + see also commons and social capital +} + +The physical layer encompasses both transmission channels and devices for +producing and communicating information. In the broadcast and telephone era, +devices were starkly differentiated. Consumers owned dumb terminals. Providers +owned sophisticated networks and equipment: transmitters and switches. +Consumers could therefore consume whatever providers could produce most +efficiently that the providers believed consumers would pay for. Central to the +emergence of the freedom of users in the networked environment is an erosion of +the differentiation between consumer and provider ,{[pg 397]}, equipment. +Consumers came to use general-purpose computers that could do whatever their +owners wanted, instead of special-purpose terminals that could only do what +their vendors designed them to do. These devices were initially connected over +a transmission network--the public phone system-- that was regulated as a +common carrier. Common carriage required the network owners to carry all +communications without differentiating by type or content. The network was +neutral as among communications. The transition to broadband networks, and to a +lesser extent the emergence of Internet services on mobile phones, are +threatening to undermine that neutrality and nudge the network away from its +end-to-end, user-centric model to one designed more like a +five-thousand-channel broadcast model. At the same time, Hollywood and the +recording industry are pressuring the U.S. Congress to impose regulatory +requirements on the design of personal computers so that they can be relied on +not to copy music and movies without permission. In the process, the law seeks +to nudge personal computers away from being purely general-purpose computation +devices toward being devices with factory-defined behaviors vis-a-vis +predicted-use patterns, like glorified ` televisions and CD players. The +emergence of the networked information economy as described in this book +depends on the continued existence of an open transport network connecting +general-purpose computers. It therefore also depends on the failure of the +efforts to restructure the network on the model of proprietary networks +connecting terminals with sufficiently controlled capabilities to be +predictable and well behaved from the perspective of incumbent production +models. + +3~ Transport: Wires and Wireless +={ transport channel policy +16 } + +Recall the Cisco white paper quoted in chapter 5. In it, Cisco touted the value +of its then new router, which would allow a broadband provider to differentiate +streams of information going to and from the home at the packet level. If the +packet came from a competitor, or someone the user wanted to see or hear but +the owner preferred that the user did not, the packet could be slowed down or +dropped. If it came from the owner or an affiliate, it could be speeded up. The +purpose of the router was not to enable evil control over users. It was to +provide better-functioning networks. America Online (AOL), for example, has +been reported as blocking its users from reaching Web sites that have been +advertised in spam e-mails. The theory is that if spammers know their Web site +will be inaccessible to AOL customers, they will stop.~{ Jonathan Krim, "AOL +Blocks Spammers' Web Sites," Washington Post, March 20, 2004, p. A01; also +available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?page name +article&contentId A9449-2004Mar19¬Found true. }~ The ability of service +providers to block sites or packets from ,{[pg 398]}, certain senders and +promote packets from others may indeed be used to improve the network. However, +whether this ability will in fact be used to improve service depends on the +extent to which the interests of all users, and particularly those concerned +with productive uses of the network, are aligned with the interests of the +service providers. Clearly, when in 2005 Telus, Canada's second largest +telecommunications company, blocked access to the Web site of the +Telecommunications Workers Union for all of its own clients and those of +internet service providers that relied on its backbone network, it was not +seeking to improve service for those customers' benefit, but to control a +conversation in which it had an intense interest. When there is a misalignment, +the question is what, if anything, disciplines the service providers' use of +the technological capabilities they possess? One source of discipline would be +a genuinely competitive market. The transition to broadband has, however, +severely constrained the degree of competition in Internet access services. +Another would be regulation: requiring owners to treat all packets equally. +This solution, while simple to describe, remains highly controversial in the +policy world. It has strong supporters and strong opposition from the incumbent +broadband providers, and has, as a practical matter, been rejected for the time +being by the FCC. The third type of solution would be both more radical and +less "interventionist" from the perspective of regulation. It would involve +eliminating contemporary regulatory barriers to the emergence of a user-owned +wireless infrastructure. It would allow users to deploy their own equipment, +share their wireless capacity, and create a "last mile" owned by all users in +common, and controlled by none. This would, in effect, put equipment +manufacturers in competition to construct the "last mile" of broadband +networks, and thereby open up the market in "middle-mile" Internet connection +services. +={ access : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + blocked access : + policy routers ; + capacity : + policy routers ; + Cisco policy routers ; + information flow : + controlling with policy routers ; + information production inputs : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + inputs to production : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + policy routers ; + production inputs : + systematically blocked by policy routers ; + routers, controlling information flow with +} + +Since the early 1990s, when the Clinton administration announced its "Agenda +for Action" for what was then called "the information superhighway," it was the +policy of the United States to "let the private sector lead" in deployment of +the Internet. To a greater or lesser degree, this commitment to private +provisioning was adopted in most other advanced economies in the world. In the +first few years, this meant that investment in the backbone of the Internet was +private, and heavily funded by the stock bubble of the late 1990s. It also +meant that the last distribution bottleneck--the "last mile"--was privately +owned. Until the end of the 1990s, the last mile was made mostly of dial-up +connections over the copper wires of the incumbent local exchange carriers. +This meant that the physical layer was not only ,{[pg 399]}, proprietary, but +that it was, for all practical purposes, monopolistically owned. Why, then, did +the early Internet nonetheless develop into a robust, end-to-end neutral +network? As Lessig showed, this was because the telephone carriers were +regulated as common carriers. They were required to carry all traffic without +discrimination. Whether a bit stream came from Cable News Network (CNN) or from +an individual blog, all streams-- upstream from the user and downstream to the +user--were treated neutrally. + +4~ Broadband Regulation +={ access : + cable providers, regulation of +4 ; + broadband networks : + cable as commons +4 | regulation of +4 ; + cable broadband transport, as commons +4 ; + commons : + cable providers as +4 ; + transport channel policy : + broadband regulation +4 ; + wired communications : + policy on +4 +} + +The end of the 1990s saw the emergence of broadband networks. In the United +States, cable systems, using hybrid fiber-coaxial systems, moved first, and +became the primary providers. The incumbent local telephone carriers have been +playing catch-up ever since, using digital subscriber line (DSL) techniques to +squeeze sufficient speed out of their copper infrastructure to remain +competitive, while slowly rolling out fiber infrastructure closer to the home. +As of 2003, the incumbent cable carriers and the incumbent local telephone +companies accounted for roughly 96 percent of all broadband access to homes and +small offices.~{ FCC Report on High Speed Services, December 2003 (Appendix to +Fourth 706 Report NOI). }~ In 1999-2000, as cable was beginning to move into a +more prominent position, academic critique began to emerge, stating that the +cable broadband architecture could be manipulated to deviate from the neutral, +end-to-end architecture of the Internet. One such paper was written by Jerome +Saltzer, one of the authors of the paper that originally defined the +"end-to-end" design principle of the Internet in 1980, and Lessig and Mark +Lemley wrote another. These papers began to emphasize that cable broadband +providers technically could, and had commercial incentive to, stop treating all +communications neutrally. They could begin to move from a network where almost +all functions are performed by user-owned computers at the ends of the network +to one where more is done by provider equipment at the core. The introduction +of the Cisco policy router was seen as a stark marker of how things could +change. +={ Lemley, Mark ; + Lessig, Lawrence (Larry) ; + Saltzer, Jerome ; + access : + cable providers, regulation of +3 +} + +The following two years saw significant regulatory battles over whether the +cable providers would be required to behave as commons carriers. In particular, +the question was whether they would be required to offer competitors +nondiscriminatory access to their networks, so that these competitors could +compete in Internet services. The theory was that competition would discipline +the incumbents from skewing their networks too far away from what users valued +as an open Internet. The first round of battles occurred at the municipal +level. Local franchising authorities tried to use their power ,{[pg 400]}, over +cable licenses to require cable operators to offer open access to their +competitors if they chose to offer cable broadband. The cable providers +challenged these regulations in courts. The most prominent decision came out of +Portland, Oregon, where the Federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held +that broadband was part information service and part telecommunications +service, but not a cable service. The FCC, not the cable franchising authority, +had power to regulate it.~{ 216 F.3d 871 (9th Cir. 2000). }~ At the same time, +as part of the approval of the AOL-Time Warner merger, the Federal Trade +Commission (FTC) required the new company to give at least three competitors +open access to its broadband facilities, should AOL be offered cable broadband +facilities over Time Warner. + +The AOL-Time Warner merger requirements, along with the Ninth Circuit's finding +that cable broadband included a telecommunications component, seemed to +indicate that cable broadband transport would come to be treated as a common +carrier. This was not to be. In late 2001 and the middle of 2002, the FCC +issued a series of reports that would reach the exact opposite result. Cable +broadband, the commission held, was an information service, not a +telecommunications service. This created an imbalance with the +telecommunications status of broadband over telephone infrastructure, which at +the time was treated as a telecommunications service. The commission dealt with +this imbalance by holding that broadband over telephone infrastructure, like +broadband over cable, was now to be treated as an information service. Adopting +this definition was perhaps admissible as a matter of legal reasoning, but it +certainly was not required by either sound legal reasoning or policy. The FCC's +reasoning effectively took the business model that cable operators had +successfully used to capture two-thirds of the market in broadband--bundling +two discrete functionalities, transport (carrying bits) and higher-level +services (like e-mail and Web hosting)--and treated it as though it described +the intrinsic nature of "broadband cable" as a service. Because that service +included more than just carriage of bits, it could be called an information +service. Of course, it would have been as legally admissible, and more +technically accurate, to do as the Ninth Circuit had done. That is, to say that +cable broadband bundles two distinct services: carriage and information-use +tools. The former is a telecommunications service. In June of 2005, the Supreme +Court in the Brand X case upheld the FCC's authority to make this legally +admissible policy error, upholding as a matter of deference to the expert +agency the Commission's position that cable broadband services should be +treated as information services.~{ /{National Cable and Telecommunications +Association v. Brand X Internet Services}/ (decided June 27, 2005). }~ As a +matter ,{[pg 401]}, of policy, the designation of broadband services as +"information services" more or less locked the FCC into a "no regulation" +approach. As information services, broadband providers obtained the legal power +to "edit" their programming, just like any operator of an information service, +like a Web site. Indeed, this new designation has placed a serious question +mark over whether future efforts to regulate carriage decisions would be +considered constitutional, or would instead be treated as violations of the +carriers' "free speech" rights as a provider of information. Over the course of +the 1990s, there were a number of instances where carriers--particularly cable, +but also telephone companies--were required by law to carry some signals from +competitors. In particular, cable providers were required to carry over-the-air +broadcast television, telephone carriers, in FCC rules called "video dialtone," +were required to offer video on a common carriage basis, and cable providers +that chose to offer broadband were required to make their infrastructure +available to competitors on a common carrier model. In each of these cases, the +carriage requirements were subjected to First Amendment scrutiny by courts. In +the case of cable carriage of broadcast television, the carriage requirements +were only upheld after six years of litigation.~{ /{Turner Broad. Sys. v. +FCC}/, 512 U.S. 622 (1994) and /{Turner Broad. Sys. v. FCC}/, 520 U.S. 180 +(1997). }~ In cases involving video common carriage requirements applied to +telephone companies and cable broadband, lower courts struck down the carriage +requirements as violating the telephone and cable companies' free-speech +rights.~{ /{Chesapeake & Potomac Tel. Co. v. United States}/, 42 F.3d 181 (4th +Cir. 1994); /{Comcast Cablevision of Broward County, Inc. v. Broward County}/, +124 F. Supp. 2d 685, 698 (D. Fla., 2000). }~ To a large extent, then, the FCC's +regulatory definition left the incumbent cable and telephone providers--who +control 96 percent of broadband connections to home and small +offices--unregulated, and potentially constitutionally immune to access +regulation and carriage requirements. +={ carriage requirements of cable providers +1 } + +Since 2003 the cable access debate--over whether competitors should get access +to the transport networks of incumbent broadband carriers--has been replaced +with an effort to seek behavioral regulation in the form of "network +neutrality." This regulatory concept would require broadband providers to treat +all packets equally, without forcing them to open their network up to +competitors or impose any other of the commitments associated with common +carriage. The concept has the backing of some very powerful actors, including +Microsoft, and more recently MCI, which still owns much of the Internet +backbone, though not the last mile. For this reason, if for no other, it +remains as of this writing a viable path for institutional reform that would +balance the basic structural shift of Internet infrastructure from a +commoncarriage to a privately controlled model. Even if successful, the drive +to network neutrality would keep the physical infrastructure a technical +bottleneck, ,{[pg 402]}, owned by a small number of firms facing very limited +competition, with wide legal latitude for using that control to affect the flow +of information over their networks. + +4~ Open Wireless networks +={ broadband networks : + open wireless networks +5 ; + communities : + open wireless networks +5 ; + last mile (wireless) +5 ; + mobile phones : + open wireless networks +5 ; + open wireless networks +5 ; + sharing : + open wireless networks +5 ; + transport channel policy : + open wireless networks +5 ; + wireless communications : + open networks +5 +} + +A more basic and structural opportunity to create an open broadband +infrastructure is, however, emerging in the wireless domain. To see how, we +must first recognize that opportunities to control the broadband infrastructure +in general are not evenly distributed throughout the networked infrastructure. +The long-haul portions of the network have multiple redundant paths with no +clear choke points. The primary choke point over the physical transport of bits +across the Internet is in the last mile of all but the most highly connected +districts. That is, the primary bottleneck is the wire or cable connecting the +home and small office to the network. It is here that cable and local telephone +incumbents control the market. It is here that the high costs of digging +trenches, pulling fiber, and getting wires through and into walls pose a +prohibitive barrier to competition. And it is here, in the last mile, that +unlicensed wireless approaches now offer the greatest promise to deliver a +common physical infrastructure of first and last resort, owned by its users, +shared as a commons, and offering no entity a bottleneck from which to control +who gets to say what to whom. + +As discussed in chapter 6, from the end of World War I and through the +mid-twenties, improvements in the capacity of expensive transmitters and a +series of strategic moves by the owners of the core patents in radio +transmission led to the emergence of the industrial model of radio +communications that typified the twentieth century. Radio came to be dominated +by a small number of professional, commercial networks, based on +high-capital-cost transmitters. These were supported by a regulatory framework +tailored to making the primary model of radio utilization for most Americans +passive reception, with simple receivers, of commercial programming delivered +with high-powered transmitters. This industrial model, which assumed +large-scale capital investment in the core of the network and small-scale +investments at the edges, optimized for receiving what is generated at the +core, imprinted on wireless communications systems both at the level of design +and at the level of regulation. When mobile telephony came along, it replicated +the same model, using relatively cheap handsets oriented toward an +infrastructure-centric deployment of towers. The regulatory model followed +Hoover's initial pattern and perfected it. A government agency strictly +controlled who may ,{[pg 403]}, place a transmitter, where, with what antenna +height, and using what power. The justification was avoidance of interference. +The presence of strict licensing was used as the basic assumption in the +engineering of wireless systems throughout this period. Since 1959, economic +analysis of wireless regulation has criticized this approach, but only on the +basis that it inefficiently regulated the legal right to construct a wireless +system by using strictly regulated spectrum licenses, instead of creating a +market in "spectrum use" rights.~{ The locus classicus of the economists' +critique was Ronald Coase, "The Federal Communications Commission," Journal of +Law and Economics 2 (1959): 1. The best worked-out version of how these +property rights would look remains Arthur S. De Vany et al., "A Property System +for Market Allocation of the Electromagnetic Spectrum: A +Legal-Economic-Engineering Study," Stanford Law Review 21 (1969): 1499. }~ This +critique kept the basic engineering assumptions stable--for radio to be useful, +a high-powered transmitter must be received by simple receivers. Given this +engineering assumption, someone had to control the right to emit energy in any +range of radio frequencies. The economists wanted the controller to be a +property owner with a flexible, transferable right. The regulators wanted it to +be a licensee subject to regulatory oversight and approval by the FCC. +={ capacity : + radio sharing +1 ; + radio +1 ; + sharing : + radio capacity +1 | capacity +1 +} + +As chapter 3 explained, by the time that legislatures in the United States and +around the world had begun to accede to the wisdom of the economists' critique, +it had been rendered obsolete by technology. In particular, it had been +rendered obsolete by the fact that the declining cost of computation and the +increasing sophistication of communications protocols among enduser devices in +a network made possible new, sharing-based solutions to the problem of how to +allow users to communicate without wires. Instead of having a +regulation-determined exclusive right to transmit, which may or may not be +subject to market reallocation, it is possible to have a market in smart radio +equipment owned by individuals. These devices have the technical ability to +share capacity and cooperate in the creation of wireless carriage capacity. +These radios can, for example, cooperate by relaying each other's messages or +temporarily "lending" their antennae to neighbors to help them decipher +messages of senders, without anyone having exclusive use of the spectrum. Just +as PCs can cooperate to create a supercomputer in SETI@Home by sharing their +computation, and a global-scale, peer-to-peer data-storage and retrieval system +by sharing their hard drives, computationally intensive radios can share their +capacity to produce a local wireless broadband infrastructure. Open wireless +networks allow users to install their own wireless device--much like the WiFi +devices that have become popular. These devices then search automatically for +neighbors with similar capabilities, and self-configure into a high-speed +wireless data network. Reaching this goal does not, at this point, require +significant technological innovation. The technology is there, though it does +require substantial engineering ,{[pg 404]}, effort to implement. The economic +incentives to develop such devices are fairly straightforward. Users already +require wireless local networks. They will gain added utility from extending +their range for themselves, which would be coupled with the possibility of +sharing with others to provide significant wide-area network capacity for whose +availability they need not rely on any particular provider. Ultimately, it +would be a way for users to circumvent the monopoly last mile and recapture +some of the rents they currently pay. Equipment manufacturers obviously have an +incentive to try to cut into the rents captured by the broadband +monopoly/oligopoly by offering an equipment-embedded alternative. + +My point here is not to consider the comparative efficiency of a market in +wireless licenses and a market in end-user equipment designed for sharing +channels that no one owns. It is to highlight the implications of the emergence +of a last mile that is owned by no one in particular, and is the product of +cooperation among neighbors in the form of, "I'll carry your bits if you carry +mine." At the simplest level, neighbors could access locally relevant +information directly, over a wide-area network. More significant, the fact that +users in a locality coproduced their own last-mile infrastructure would allow +commercial Internet providers to set up Internet points of presence anywhere +within the "cloud" of the locale. The last mile would be provided not by these +competing Internet service providers, but by the cooperative efforts of the +residents of local neighborhoods. Competitors in providing the "middle +mile"--the connection from the last mile to the Internet cloud-- could emerge, +in a way that they cannot if they must first lay their own last mile all the +way to each home. The users, rather than the middle-mile providers, shall have +paid the capital cost of producing the local transmission system--their own +cooperative radios. The presence of a commons-based, coproduced last mile +alongside the proprietary broadband network eliminates the last mile as a +bottleneck for control over who speaks, with what degree of ease, and with what +types of production values and interactivity. + +The development of open wireless networks, owned by their users and focused on +sophisticated general-purpose devices at their edges also offers a counterpoint +to the emerging trend among mobile telephony providers to offer a relatively +limited and controlled version of the Internet over the phones they sell. Some +wireless providers are simply offering mobile Internet connections throughout +their networks, for laptops. Others, however, are using their networks to allow +customers to use their ever-more-sophisticated phones to surf portions of the +Web. These latter services diverge in their ,{[pg 405]}, styles. Some tend to +be limited, offering only a set of affiliated Web sites rather than genuine +connectivity to the Internet itself with a general-purpose device. Sprint's +"News" offerings, for example, connects users to CNNtoGo, ABCNews.com, and the +like, but will not enable a user to reach the blogosphere to upload a photo of +protesters being manhandled, for example. So while mobility in principle +increases the power of the Web, and text messaging puts e-mail-like +capabilities everywhere, the effect of the implementations of the Web on phones +is more ambiguous. It could be more like a Web-enabled reception device than a +genuinely active node in a multidirectional network. Widespread adoption of +open wireless networks would give mobile phone manufacturers a new option. They +could build into the mobile telephones the ability to tap into open wireless +networks, and use them as general-purpose access points to the Internet. The +extent to which this will be a viable option for the mobile telephone +manufacturers depends on how much the incumbent mobile telephone service +providers, those who purchased their licenses at high-priced auctions, will +resist this move. Most users buy their phones from their providers, not from +general electronic equipment stores. Phones are often tied to specific +providers in ways that users are not able to change for themselves. In these +conditions, it is likely that mobile providers will resist the competition from +free open wireless systems for "data minutes" by refusing to sell dual-purpose +equipment. Worse, they may boycott manufacturers who make mobile phones that +are also general-purpose Web-surfing devices over open wireless networks. How +that conflict will go, and whether users would be willing to carry a separate +small device to enable them to have open Internet access alongside their mobile +phone, will determine the extent to which the benefits of open wireless +networks will be transposed into the mobile domain. Normatively, that outcome +has significant implications. From the perspective of the citizen watchdog +function, ubiquitous availability of capture, rendering, and communication +capabilities are important. From the perspective of personal autonomy as +informed action in context, extending openness to mobile units would provide +significant advantages to allow individuals to construct their own information +environment on the go, as they are confronting decisions and points of action +in their daily lives. + +4~ Municipal Broadband Initiatives +={ broadband networks : + municipal initiatives +2 ; + commons : + municipal broadband initiatives +2 ; + communities : + municipal broadband initiatives +2 ; + municipal broadband initiatives +2 ; + open wireless networks : + municipal broadband initiatives +2 ; + transport channel policy : + municipal broadband initiatives +2 ; + wireless communications : + municipal broadband initiatives +2 +} + +One alternative path for the emergence of basic physical information transport +infrastructure on a nonmarket model is the drive to establish municipal ,{[pg +406]}, systems. These proposed systems would not be commons-based in the sense +that they would not be created by the cooperative actions of individuals +without formal structure. They would be public, like highways, sidewalks, +parks, and sewage systems. Whether they are, or are not, ultimately to perform +as commons would depend on how they would be regulated. In the United States, +given the First Amendment constraints on government preferring some speech to +other speech in public fora, it is likely that municipal systems would be +managed as commons. In this regard, they would have parallel beneficial +characteristics to those of open wireless systems. The basic thesis underlying +municipal broadband initiatives is similar to that which has led some +municipalities to create municipal utilities or transportation hubs. +Connectivity has strong positive externalities. It makes a city's residents +more available for the information economy and the city itself a more +attractive locale for businesses. Most of the efforts have indeed been phrased +in these instrumental terms. The initial drive has been the creation of +municipal fiber-to-the-home networks. The town of Bristol, Virginia, is an +example. It has a population of slightly more than seventeen thousand. Median +household income is 68 percent of the national median. These statistics made it +an unattractive locus for early broadband rollout by incumbent providers. +However, in 2003, Bristol residents had one of the most advanced residential +fiber-to-the-home networks in the country, available for less than forty +dollars a month. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the city had broadband penetration +rivaling many of the top U.S. markets with denser and wealthier populations. +The "miracle" of Bristol is that the residents of the town, fed up with waiting +for the local telephone and cable companies, built their own, municipally owned +network. Theirs has become among the most ambitious and successful of more than +five hundred publicly owned utilities in the United States that offer +high-speed Internet, cable, and telephone services to their residents. Some of +the larger cities--Chicago and Philadelphia, most prominently--are moving as of +this writing in a similar direction. The idea in Chicago is that basic "dark +fiber"--that is, the physical fiber going to the home, but without the +electronics that would determine what kinds of uses the connectivity could be +put to--would be built by the city. Access to use this entirely neutral, +high-capacity platform would then be open to anyone-- commercial and +noncommercial alike. The drive in Philadelphia emphasizes the other, more +recently available avenue--wireless. The quality of WiFi and the widespread +adoption of wireless techniques have moved other municipalities to adopt +wireless or mixed-fiber wireless strategies. Municipalities are ,{[pg 407]}, +proposing to use publicly owned facilities to place wireless points of access +around the town, covering the area in a cloud of connectivity and providing +open Internet access from anywhere in the city. Philadelphia's initiative has +received the widest public attention, although other, smaller cities are closer +to having a wireless cloud over the city already. +={ Bristol, Virginia +1 ; + Philadelphia, wireless initiatives in +1 +} + +The incumbent broadband providers have not taken kindly to the municipal +assault on their monopoly (or oligopoly) profits. When the city of Abilene, +Texas, tried to offer municipal broadband service in the late-1990s, +Southwestern Bell (SBC) persuaded the Texas legislature to pass a law that +prohibited local governments from providing high-speed Internet access. The +town appealed to the FCC and the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. +Both bodies held that when Congress passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and +said that, "no state . . . regulation . . . may prohibit . . . the ability of +any entity to provide . . . telecommunications service," municipalities were +not included in the term "any entity." As the D.C. Circuit put it, "any" might +have some significance "depending on the speaker's tone of voice," but here it +did not really mean "any entity," only some. And states could certainly +regulate the actions of municipalities, which are treated in U.S. law as merely +their subdivisions or organs.~{ /{City of Abilene, Texas v. Federal +Communications Commission}/, 164 F3d 49 (1999). }~ Bristol, Virginia, had to +fight off similar efforts to prohibit its plans through state law before it was +able to roll out its network. In early 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court was +presented with the practice of state preemption of municipal broadband efforts +and chose to leave the municipalities to fend for themselves. A coalition of +Missouri municipalities challenged a Missouri law that, like the Texas law, +prohibited them from stepping in to offer their citizens broadband service. The +Court of the Appeals for the Eighth Circuit agreed with the municipalities. The +1996 Act, after all, was intended precisely to allow anyone to compete with the +incumbents. The section that prohibited states from regulating the ability of +"any entity" to enter the telecommunications service market precisely +anticipated that the local incumbents would use their clout in state +legislatures to thwart the federal policy of introducing competition into the +local loop. Here, the incumbents were doing just that, but the Supreme Court +reversed the Eighth Circuit decision. Without dwelling too much on the wisdom +of allowing citizens of municipalities to decide for themselves whether they +want a municipal system, the court issued an opinion that was technically +defensible in terms of statutory interpretation, but effectively invited the +incumbent broadband providers to put their lobbying efforts into persuading +state legislators to prohibit municipal efforts.~{ /{Nixon v. Missouri +Municipal League}/, 541 U.S. 125 (2004). }~ After ,{[pg 408]}, Philadelphia +rolled out its wireless plan, it was not long before the Pennsylvania +legislature passed a similar law prohibiting municipalities from offering +broadband. While Philadelphia's plan itself was grandfathered, future expansion +from a series of wireless "hot spots" in open area to a genuine municipal +network will likely be challenged under the new state law. Other municipalities +in Pennsylvania are entirely foreclosed from pursuing this option. In this +domain, at least as of 2005, the incumbents seem to have had some substantial +success in containing the emergence of municipal broadband networks as a +significant approach to eliminating the bottleneck in local network +infrastructure. +={ Abilene, Texas } + +3~ Devices +={ computers : + policy on physical devices +7 ; + devices (physical), policy regarding +7 : + see also computers ; + hardware : + policy on physical devices +7 ; + hardware regulations +7 ; + personal computers : + policy on physical devises +7 ; + physical machinery and computers : + policy on physical devices +7 +} + +The second major component of the physical layer of the networked environment +is comprised of the devices people use to compute and communicate. Personal +computers, handhelds, game consoles, and to a lesser extent, but lurking in the +background, televisions, are the primary relevant devices. In the United +States, personal computers are the overwhelmingly dominant mode of +connectivity. In Europe and Japan, mobile handheld devices occupy a much larger +space. Game consoles are beginning to provide an alternative computationally +intensive device, and Web-TV has been a background idea for a while. The +increasing digitization of both over-the-air and cable broadcast makes digital +TV a background presence, if not an immediate alternative avenue, to Internet +communications. None of these devices are constructed by a commons--in the way +that open wireless networks, free software, or peer-produced content can be. +Personal computers, however, are built on open architecture, using highly +standardized commodity components and open interfaces in an enormously +competitive market. As a practical matter, therefore, PCs provide an +open-platform device. Handhelds, game consoles, and digital televisions, on the +other hand, use more or less proprietary architectures and interfaces and are +produced in a less-competitive market-- not because there is no competition +among the manufacturers, but because the distribution chain, through the +service providers, is relatively controlled. The result is that configurations +and features can more readily be customized for personal computers. New uses +can be developed and implemented in the hardware without permission from any +owner of a manufacturing or distribution outlet. As handhelds grow in their +capabilities, and personal computers collapse in size, the two modes of +communicating are bumping into each other's turf. At the moment, there is no +obvious regulatory push to ,{[pg 409]}, nudge one or the other out. Observing +the evolution of these markets therefore has less to do with policy. As we look +at these markets, however, it is important to recognize that the outcome of +this competition is not normatively neutral. The capabilities made possible by +personal computers underlie much of the social and economic activity described +throughout this book. Proprietary handhelds, and even more so, game consoles +and televisions, are, presently at least, platforms that choreograph their use. +They structure their users' capabilities according to design requirements set +by their producers and distributors. A physical layer usable with +general-purpose computers is one that is pliable and open for any number of +uses by individuals, in a way that a physical layer used through more narrowly +scripted devices is not. +={ proprietary rights : + openness of personal computers +1 +} + +The major regulatory threat to the openness of personal computers comes from +efforts to regulate the use of copyrighted materials. This question is explored +in greater depth in the context of discussing the logical layer. Here, I only +note that peer-to-peer networks, and what Fisher has called "promiscuous +copying" on the Internet, have created a perceived threat to the very existence +of the major players in the industrial cultural production system-- Hollywood +and the recording industry. These industries are enormously adept at driving +the regulation of their business environment--the laws of copyright, in +particular. As the threat of copying and sharing of their content by users +increased, these industries have maintained a steady pressure on Congress, the +courts, and the executive to ratchet up the degree to which their rights are +enforced. As we will see in looking at the logical and content layers, these +efforts have been successful in changing the law and pushing for more +aggressive enforcement. They have not, however, succeeded in suppressing +widespread copying. Copying continues, if not entirely unabated, certainly at a +rate that was impossible a mere six years ago. +={ Fisher, William (Terry) ; + entertainment industry : + hardware regulation and +5 +} + +One major dimension of the effort to stop copying has been a drive to regulate +the design of personal computers. Pioneered by Senator Fritz Hollings in +mid-2001, a number of bills were drafted and lobbied for: the first was the +Security Systems Standards and Certification Act; the second, Consumer +Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), was actually +introduced in the Senate in 2002.~{ Bill Number S. 2048, 107th Congress, 2nd +Session. }~ The basic structure of these proposed statutes was that they +required manufacturers to design their computers to be "trusted systems." The +term "trusted," however, had a very odd meaning. The point is that the system, +or computer, can be trusted to perform in certain predictable ways, +irrespective of what its owner wishes. ,{[pg 410]}, +={ Hollings, Fritz +3 ; + CBDPTA (Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act) ; + Security Systems Standards and Certification Act ; + trusted systems, computers as +1 +} + +The impulse is trivial to explain. If you believe that most users are using +their personal computers to copy films and music illegally, then you can think +of these users as untrustworthy. In order to be able to distribute films and +music in the digital environment that is trustworthy, one must disable the +users from behaving as they would choose to. The result is a range of efforts +at producing what has derisively been called "the Fritz chip": legal mandates +that systems be designed so that personal computers cannot run programs that +are not certified properly to the chip. The most successful of these campaigns +was Hollywood's achievement in persuading the FCC to require manufacturers of +all devices capable of receiving digital television signals from the television +set to comply with a particular "trusted system" standard. This "broadcast +flag" regulation was odd in two distinct ways. First, the rule-making documents +show quite clearly that this was a rule driven by Hollywood, not by the +broadcasters. This is unusual because the industries that usually play a +central role in these rule makings are those regulated by the FCC, such as +broadcasters and cable systems. Second, the FCC was not, in fact, regulating +the industries that it normally has jurisdiction to regulate. Instead, the rule +applied to any device that could use digital television signals after they had +already been received in the home. In other words, they were regulating +practically every computer and digital-video-capable consumer electronics +device imaginable. The Court of Appeals ultimately indeed struck down the +regulation as wildly beyond the agency's jurisdiction, but the broadcast flag +nonetheless is the closest that the industrial information economy incumbents +have come to achieving regulatory control over the design of computers. +={ broadcast flag regulation } + +The efforts to regulate hardware to fit the distribution model of Hollywood and +the recording industry pose a significant danger to the networked information +environment. The core design principle of general-purpose computers is that +they are open for varied uses over time, as their owners change their +priorities and preferences. It is this general-purpose character that has +allowed personal computers to take on such varied roles since their adoption in +the 1980s. The purpose of the Fritz chip?style laws is to make computing +devices less flexible. It is to define a range of socially, culturally, and +economically acceptable uses of the machines that are predicted by the +legislature and the industry actors, and to implement factory-defined +capabilities that are not flexible, and do not give end users the freedom to +change the intended use over time and to adapt to changing social and economic +conditions and opportunities. ,{[pg 411]}, + +The political economy of this regulatory effort, and similar drives that have +been more successful in the logical and content layers, is uncharacteristic of +American politics. Personal computers, software, and telecommunications +services are significantly larger industries than Hollywood and the recording +industry. Verizon alone has roughly similar annual revenues to the entire U.S. +movie industry. Each one of the industries that the content industries have +tried to regulate has revenues several times greater than do the movie and +music industries combined. The relative successes of Hollywood and the +recording industry in regulating the logical and content layers, and the +viability of their efforts to pass a Fritz chip law, attest to the remarkable +cultural power of these industries and to their lobbying prowess. The reason is +likely historical. The software and hardware industries in particular have +developed mostly outside of the regulatory arena; only around 2002 did they +begin to understand that what goes on in Washington could really hurt them. The +telecommunications carriers, which are some of the oldest hands at the +regulatory game, have had some success in preventing regulations that would +force them to police their users and limit Internet use. However, the bulk of +their lobbying efforts have been aimed elsewhere. The institutions of higher +education, which have found themselves under attack for not policing their +students' use of peer-to-peer networks, have been entirely ineffective at +presenting their cultural and economic value and the importance of open +Internet access to higher education, as compared to the hypothetical losses of +Hollywood and the recording industry. Despite the past successes of these +entertainment-industry incumbents, two elements suggest that physical device +regulation of the CBDPTA form will not follow the same successful path of +similar legislation at the logical layer, the DMCA of 1998. The first element +is the fact that, unlike in 1998, the technology industries have now realized +that Hollywood is seeking to severely constrain their design space. Industries +with half a trillion dollars a year in revenues tend to have significant pull +in American and international lawmaking bodies, even against industries, like +movies and sound recording, that have high cultural visibility but no more than +seventy-five billion dollars a year in revenues. The second is that in 1998, +there were very few public advocacy organizations operating in the space of +intellectual property and trying to play watchdog and to speak for the +interests of users. By 2004, a number of organizations dedicated to users' +rights in the digital environment emerged to make that conflict clear. The +combination of well-defined business interests with increasing representation +of user interests creates a political landscape ,{[pg 412]}, in which it will +be difficult to pass sweeping laws to limit the flexibility of personal +computers. The most recent iteration of the Fritz chip agenda, the Inducing +Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004 was indeed defeated, for the time being, +by a coalition of high-technology firms and people who would have formerly been +seen as left-of-center media activists. + +Regulation of device design remains at the frontier of the battles over the +institutional ecology of the digital environment. It is precisely ubiquitous +access to basic, general-purpose computers, as opposed to glorified televisions +or telephone handsets, that lies at the very heart of the networked information +economy. And it is therefore precisely ubiquitous access to such basic machines +that is a precondition to the improvements in freedom and justice that we can +see emerging in the digital environment. + +2~ THE LOGICAL LAYER +={ logical layer of institutional ecology +40 } + +At the logical layer, most of the efforts aimed to secure a proprietary model +and a more tightly controlled institutional ecology follow a similar pattern to +the efforts to regulate device design. They come from the needs of the +content-layer businesses--Hollywood and the recording industry, in particular. +Unlike the physical transmission layer, which is historically rooted in a +proprietary but regulated organizational form, most of the logical layer of the +Internet has its roots in open, nonproprietary protocols and standards. The +broad term "logical layer" combines a wide range of quite different +functionalities. The most basic logical components--the basic protocols and +standards for Internet connectivity--have from the beginning of the Internet +been open, unowned, and used in common by all Internet users and applications. +They were developed by computer scientists funded primarily with public money. +The basic Internet Protocol (IP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are +open for all to use. Most of the basic standards for communicating were +developed in the IETF, a loosely defined standardssetting body that works +almost entirely on a meritocratic basis--a body that Michael Froomkin once +suggested is the closest earthly approximation of Habermas's ideal speech +situation. Individual computer engineers contributed irrespective of formal +status or organizational affiliation, and the organization ran on the principle +that Dave Clark termed "rough consensus and running code." The World Wide Web +protocols and authoring conventions HTTP and HTML were created, and over the +course of their lives, shepherded by Tim Berners Lee, who has chosen to +dedicate his efforts to making ,{[pg 413]}, the Web a public good rather than +cashing in on his innovation. The sheer technical necessity of these basic +protocols and the cultural stature of their achievement within the engineering +community have given these open processes and their commonslike institutional +structure a strong gravitational pull on the design of other components of the +logical layer, at least insofar as it relates to the communication side of the +Internet. +={ Clark, Dave ; + Froomkin, Michael ; + Habermas, Jurgen +} + +This basic open model has been in constant tension with the proprietary models +that have come to use and focus on the Internet in the past decade. By the +mid-1990s, the development of graphical-user interfaces to the Web drove +Internet use out of universities and into homes. Commercial actors began to +look for ways to capture the commercial value of the human potential of the +World Wide Web and the Internet, while Hollywood and the recording industry saw +the threat of one giant worldwide copying machine looming large. At the same +time, the Clinton administration's search of "third-way" liberal agenda +manifested in these areas as a commitment to "let the private sector lead" in +deployment of the Internet, and an "intellectual property" policy based on +extreme protectionism for the exclusive-rightsdependent industries aimed, in +the metaphors of that time, to get cars on the information superhighway or help +the Internet become a celestial jukebox. The result was a series of moves +designed to make the institutional ecology of the Internet more conducive to +the proprietary model. + +3~ The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 +={ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) +7 ; + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) +7 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) +7 ; + proprietary rights : + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) +7 +} + +No piece of legislation more clearly represents the battle over the +institutional ecology of the digital environment than the pompously named +Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). The DMCA was the culmination +of more than three years of lobbying and varied efforts, both domestically in +the United States and internationally, over the passage of two WIPO treaties in +1996. The basic worldview behind it, expressed in a 1995 white paper issued by +the Clinton administration, was that in order for the National Information +Infrastructure (NII) to take off, it had to have "content," and that its great +promise was that it could deliver the equivalent of thousands of channels of +entertainment. This would only happen, however, if the NII was made safe for +delivery of digital content without making it easily copied and distributed +without authorization and without payment. The two core recommendations of that +early road map were focused on regulating technology and organizational +responsibility. First, law was to regulate ,{[pg 414]}, the development of +technologies that might defeat any encryption or other mechanisms that the +owners of copyrighted materials would use to prevent use of their works. +Second, Internet service providers were to be held accountable for +infringements made by their users, so that they would have an incentive to +police their systems. Early efforts to pass this agenda in legislation were +resisted, primarily by the large telecommunications service providers. The Baby +Bells--U.S. regional telephone companies that were created from the breakup of +AT&T (Ma Bell) in 1984, when the telecommunications company was split up in +order to introduce a more competitive structure to the telecom industry--also +played a role in partly defeating implementation of this agenda in the +negotiations toward new WIPO treaties in 1996, treaties that ultimately +included a much-muted version of the white paper agenda. Nonetheless, the +following year saw significant lobbying for "implementing legislation" to bring +U.S. law in line with the requirements of the new WIPO treaties. This new +posture placed the emphasis of congressional debates on national industrial +policy and the importance of strong protection to the export activities of the +U.S. content industries. It was enough to tip the balance in favor of passage +of the DMCA. The Internet service provider liability portions bore the marks of +a hard-fought battle. The core concerns of the telecommunications companies +were addressed by creating an explicit exemption for pure carriage of traffic. +Furthermore, providers of more sophisticated services, like Web hosting, were +provided immunity from liability for simple failure to police their system +actively. In exchange, however, service providers were required to respond to +requests by copyright owners by immediately removing materials that the +copyright owners deemed infringing. This was the provision under which Diebold +forced Swarthmore to remove the embarrassing e-mail records from the students' +Web sites. The other, more basic, element of the DMCA was the anticircumvention +regime it put in place. Pamela Samuelson has described the anticircumvention +provisions of the DMCA as the result of a battle between Hollywood and Silicon +Valley. At the time, unlike the telecommunications giants who were born of and +made within the regulatory environment, Silicon Valley did not quite understand +that what happened in Washington, D.C., could affect its business. The Act was +therefore an almost unqualified victory for Hollywood, moderated only by a long +list of weak exemptions for various parties that bothered to show up and lobby +against it. +={ Samuelson, Pamela ; + anticircumvention provisions, DMCA +4 ; + encryption circumvention +3 +} + +The central feature of the DMCA, a long and convoluted piece of legislation, +,{[pg 415]}, is its anticircumvention and antidevice provisions. These +provisions made it illegal to use, develop, or sell technologies that had +certain properties. Copyright owners believed that it would be possible to +build strong encryption into media products distributed on the Internet. If +they did so successfully, the copyright owners could charge for digital +distribution and users would not be able to make unauthorized copies of the +works. If this outcome was achieved, the content industries could simply keep +their traditional business model--selling movies or music as discrete +packages--at lower cost, and with a more refined ability to extract the value +users got from using their materials. The DMCA was intended to make this +possible by outlawing technologies that would allow users to get around, or +circumvent, the protection measures that the owners of copyrighted materials +put in place. At first blush, this proposition sounds entirely reasonable. If +you think of the content of a music file as a home, and of the copy protection +mechanism as its lock, then all the DMCA does is prohibit the making and +distributing of burglary tools. This is indeed how the legislation was +presented by its supporters. From this perspective, even the relatively +draconian consequences spelled out in the DMCA's criminal penalties seem +defensible. +={ antidevice provisions, DMCA } + +There are two distinct problems with this way of presenting what the DMCA does. +First, copyrights are far from coextensive with real property. There are many +uses of existing works that are permissible to all. They are treated in +copyright law like walking on the sidewalk or in a public park is treated in +property law, not like walking across the land of a neighbor. This is true, +most obviously, for older works whose copyright has expired. This is true for +certain kinds of uses of a work, like quoting it for purposes of criticism or +parody. Encryption and other copy-protection techniques are not limited by the +definition of legal rights. They can be used to protect all kinds of digital +files--whether their contents are still covered by copyright or not, and +whether the uses that users wish to make of them are privileged or not. +Circumvention techniques, similarly, can be used to circumvent copyprotection +mechanisms for purposes both legitimate and illegitimate. A barbed wire cutter, +to borrow Boyle's metaphor, could be a burglary tool if the barbed wire is +placed at the property line. However, it could equally be a tool for exercising +your privilege if the private barbed wire has been drawn around public lands or +across a sidewalk or highway. The DMCA prohibited all wire cutters, even though +there were many uses of these technologies that could be used for legal +purposes. Imagine a ten-year-old girl doing her homework on the history of the +Holocaust. She includes in her multimedia paper ,{[pg 416]}, a clip from Steven +Spielberg's film, Schindler's List, in which a little girl in red, the only +color image on an otherwise black-and-white screen, walks through the +pandemonium of a deportation. In her project, the child painstakingly +superimposes her own face over that of the girl in the film for the entire +sequence, frame by frame. She calls the paper, "My Grandmother." There is +little question that most copyright lawyers (not retained by the owner of the +movie) would say that this use would count as a "fair use," and would be +privileged under the Copyright Act. There is also little question that if +Schindler's List was only available in encrypted digital form, a company would +have violated the DMCA if it distributed a product that enabled the girl to get +around the encryption in order to use the snippet she needed, and which by +traditional copyright law she was permitted to use. It is in the face of this +concern about overreaching by those who employ technological protection +measures that Julie Cohen argued for the "right to hack"--to circumvent code +that impedes one's exercise of one's privileged uses. +={ Boyle, James ; + Cohen, Julie ; + Speilberg, Steven +} + +The second problem with the DMCA is that its definitions are broad and +malleable. Simple acts like writing an academic paper on how the encryption +works, or publishing a report on the Web that tells users where they can find +information about how to circumvent a copy-protection mechanism could be +included in the definition of providing a circumvention device. Edward Felten +is a computer scientist at Princeton. As he was preparing to publish an +academic paper on encryption, he received a threatening letter from the +Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), telling him that publication +of the paper constituted a violation of the DMCA. The music industry had spent +substantial sums on developing encryption for digital music distribution. In +order to test the system before it actually entrusted music with this wrapper, +the industry issued a public challenge, inviting cryptographers to try to break +the code. Felten succeeded in doing so, but did not continue to test his +solutions because the industry required that, in order to continue testing, he +sign a nondisclosure agreement. Felten is an academic, not a businessperson. He +works to make knowledge public, not to keep it secret. He refused to sign the +nondisclosure agreement, and prepared to publish his initial findings, which he +had made without entering any nondisclosure agreement. As he did so, he +received the RIAA's threatening letter. In response, he asked a federal +district court to declare that publication of his findings was not a violation +of the DMCA. The RIAA, realizing that trying to silence academic publication of +a criticism of the ,{[pg 417]}, weakness of its approach to encryption was not +the best litigation stance, moved to dismiss the case by promising it would +never bring suit.~{ /{Felten v. Recording Indust. Assoc. of America Inc.}/, No. +CV- 01-2669 (D.N.J. June 26, 2001). }~ +={ Felten, Edward ; + music industry : + DMCA violations ; + RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) +} + +Another case did not end so well for the defendant. It involved a suit by the +eight Hollywood studios against a hacker magazine, 2600. The studios sought an +injunction prohibiting 2600 from making available a program called DeCSS, which +circumvents the copy-protection scheme used to control access to DVDs, named +CSS. CSS prevents copying or any use of DVDs unauthorized by the vendor. DeCSS +was written by a fifteen-year-old Norwegian named Jon Johanson, who claimed +(though the district court discounted his claim) to have written it as part of +an effort to create a DVD player for GNU/Linux-based machines. A copy of DeCSS, +together with a story about it was posted on the 2600 site. The industry +obtained an injunction against 2600, prohibiting not only the posting of DeCSS, +but also its linking to other sites that post the program--that is, telling +users where they can get the program, rather than actually distributing a +circumvention program. That decision may or may not have been correct on the +merits. There are strong arguments in favor of the proposition that making DVDs +compatible with GNU/Linux systems is a fair use. There are strong arguments +that the DMCA goes much farther than it needs to in restricting speech of +software programmers and Web authors, and so is invalid under the First +Amendment. The court rejected these arguments. +={ Johanson, Jon ; + DeCSS program +} + +The point here is not, however, to revisit the legal correctness of that +decision, but to illustrate the effects of the DMCA as an element in the +institutional ecology of the logical layer. The DMCA is intended as a strong +legal barrier to certain technological paths of innovation at the logical layer +of the digital environment. It is intended specifically to preserve the +"thing-" or "goods"-like nature of entertainment products--music and movies, in +particular. As such, it is intended to, and does to some extent, shape the +technological development toward treating information and culture as finished +goods, rather than as the outputs of social and communications processes that +blur the production-consumption distinction. It makes it more difficult for +individuals and nonmarket actors to gain access to digital materials that the +technology, the market, and the social practices, left unregulated, would have +made readily available. It makes practices of cutting and pasting, changing and +annotating existing cultural materials harder to do than the technology would +have made possible. I have argued elsewhere that when Congress self-consciously +makes it harder for individuals to use whatever technology is available to +them, to speak as they please and to whomever ,{[pg 418]}, they please, in the +interest of some public goal (in this case, preservation of Hollywood and the +recording industry for the public good), it must justify its acts under the +First Amendment. However, the important question is not one of U.S. +constitutional law. + +The more general claim, true for any country that decides to enforce a +DMCA-like law, is that prohibiting technologies that allow individuals to make +flexible and creative uses of digital cultural materials burdens the +development of the networked information economy and society. It burdens +individual autonomy, the emergence of the networked public sphere and critical +culture, and some of the paths available for global human development that the +networked information economy makes possible. All these losses will be incurred +in expectation of improvements in creativity, even though it is not at all +clear that doing so would actually improve, even on a simple utilitarian +calculus, the creative production of any given country or region. Passing a +DMCA-type law will not by itself squelch the development of nonmarket and peer +production. Indeed, many of these technological and social-economic +developments emerged and have flourished after the DMCA was already in place. +It does, however, represent a choice to tilt the institutional ecology in favor +of industrial production and distribution of cultural packaged goods, at the +expense of commons-based relations of sharing information, knowledge, and +culture. Twentieth-century cultural materials provide the most immediate and +important source of references and images for contemporary cultural creation. +Given the relatively recent provenance of movies, recorded music, and +photography, much of contemporary culture was created in these media. These +basic materials for the creation of contemporary multimedia culture are, in +turn, encoded in formats that cannot simply be copied by hand, as texts might +be even in the teeth of technical protection measures. The capacity to copy +mechanically is a necessary precondition for the capacity to quote and combine +existing materials of these kinds into new cultural statements and +conversational moves. Preserving the capacity of industrial cultural producers +to maintain a hermetic seal on the use of materials to which they own copyright +can be bought only at the cost of disabling the newly emerging modes of +cultural production from quoting and directly building upon much of the culture +of the last century. + +3~ The Battle over Peer-to-Peer Networks +={ file-sharing networks +15 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology +15 ; + network topology : + peer-to-peer networks +15 ; + p2p networks +15 ; + peer-to-peer networks +15 ; + structure of network : + peer-to-peer networks +15 ; + topology, network : + peer-to-peer networks +15 +} + +The second major institutional battle over the technical and social trajectory +of Internet development has revolved around peer-to-peer (p2p) networks. I +,{[pg 419]}, offer a detailed description of it here, but not because I think +it will be the make-it-or-break-it of the networked information economy. If any +laws have that determinative a power, they are the Fritz chip and DMCA. +However, the peer-to-peer legal battle offers an excellent case study of just +how difficult it is to evaluate the effects of institutional ecology on +technology, economic organization, and social practice. + +Peer-to-peer technologies as a global phenomenon emerged from Napster and its +use by tens of millions of users around the globe for unauthorized sharing of +music files. In the six years since their introduction, p2p networks have +developed robust and impressive technical capabilities. They have been adopted +by more than one hundred million users, and are increasingly applied to uses +well beyond music sharing. These developments have occurred despite a +systematic and aggressive campaign of litigation and criminal enforcement in a +number of national systems against both developers and users. Technically, p2p +networks are algorithms that run on top of the Internet and allow users to +connect directly from one end user's machine to another. In theory, that is how +the whole Internet works--or at least how it worked when there were a small +number of computers attached to it. In practice, most users connect through an +Internet service provider, and most content available for access on the +Internet was available on a server owned and operated by someone distinct from +its users. In the late 1990s, there were rudimentary utilities that allowed one +user to access information stored on the computer of another, but no widely +used utility allowed large numbers of individuals to search each other's hard +drives and share data directly from one user to another. Around 1998-1999, +early Internet music distribution models, like MP3.com, therefore provided a +centralized distribution point for music. This made them highly vulnerable to +legal attack. Shawn Fanning, then eighteen years old, was apparently looking +for ways to do what teenagers always do--share their music with friends--in a +way that would not involve a central point of storing and copying. He developed +Napster--the first major, widely adopted p2p technology. Unlike MP3.com, users +of Napster could connect their computers directly--one person could download a +song stored on the computer of another without mediation. All that the Napster +site itself did, in addition to providing the end-user software, was to provide +a centralized directory of which songs resided on which machine. There is +little disagreement in the literature that it is an infringement under U.S. +copyright law for any given user to allow others to duplicate copyrighted music +from his or her computer to theirs. The centralizing role of Napster ,{[pg +420]}, in facilitating these exchanges, alongside a number of ill-considered +statements by some of its principals, were enough to render the company liable +for contributory copyright infringement. +={ Fanning, Shawn ; + MP3.com ; + Napster +1 : + see also peer-to-peer networks +} + +The genie of p2p technology and the social practice of sharing music, however, +were already out of the bottle. The story of the following few years, to the +extent that one can tell a history of the present and the recent past, offers +two core insights. First, it shows how institutional design can be a +battleground over the conditions of cultural production in the digital +environment. Second, it exposes the limits of the extent to which the +institutional ecology can determine the ultimate structure of behavior at a +moment of significant and rapid technological and social perturbation. +Napster's judicial closure provided no real respite for the recording industry. +As Napster was winding down, Gnutella, a free software alternative, had already +begun to replace it. Gnutella did not depend on any centralized component, not +even to facilitate search. This meant that there was no central provider. There +was no firm against which to bring action. Even if there were, it would be +impossible to "shut down" use of the program. Gnutella was a freestanding +program that individual users could install. Once installed, its users could +connect to anyone else who had installed the program, without passing through +any choke point. There was no central server to shut down. Gnutella had some +technical imperfections, but these were soon overcome by other implementations +of p2p. The most successful improvement over Gnutella was the FastTrack +architecture, now used by Kazaa, Grokster, and other applications, including +some free software applications. It improves on the search capabilities of +Gnutella by designating some users as "supernodes," which store information +about what songs are available in their "neighborhood." This avoids Gnutella's +primary weakness, the relatively high degree of network overhead traffic. The +supernodes operate on an ad hoc basis. They change based on whose computer is +available with enough storage and bandwidth. They too, therefore, provide no +litigation target. Other technologies have developed to speed up or make more +robust the distribution of files, including BitTorrent, eDonkey and its +free-software relative eMule, and many others. Within less than two years of +Napster's closure, more people were using these various platforms to share +files than Napster had users at its height. Some of these new firms found +themselves again under legal assault--both in the United States and abroad. +={ FastTrak architecture ; + Gnutella +} + +As the technologies grew and developed, and as the legal attacks increased, the +basic problem presented by the litigation against technology manufacturers +,{[pg 421]}, became evident. Peer-to-peer techniques can be used for a wide +range of uses, only some of which are illegal. At the simplest level, they can +be used to distribute music that is released by an increasing number of bands +freely. These bands hope to get exposure that they can parley into concert +performances. As recorded music from the 1950s begins to fall into the public +domain in Europe and Australia, golden oldies become another legitimate reason +to use p2p technologies. More important, p2p systems are being adapted to +different kinds of uses. Chapter 7 discusses how FreeNet is being used to +disseminate subversive documents, using the persistence and robustness of p2p +networks to evade detection and suppression by authoritarian regimes. +BitTorrent was initially developed to deal with the large file transfers +required for free software distributions. BitTorrent and eDonkey were both used +by the Swarthmore students when their college shut down their Internet +connection in response to Diebold's letter threatening action under the service +provider liability provisions of the DMCA. The founders of KaZaa have begun to +offer an Internet telephony utility, Skype, which allows users to make phone +calls from one computer to another for free, and from their computer to the +telephone network for a small fee. Skype is a p2p technology. +={ KaZaa +1 ; + Skype utility +} + +In other words, p2p is developing as a general approach toward producing +distributed data storage and retrieval systems, just as open wireless networks +and distributed computing are emerging to take advantage of personal devices to +produce distributed communications and computation systems, respectively. As +the social and technological uses of p2p technologies grow and diversify, the +legal assault on all p2p developers becomes less sustainable-- both as a legal +matter and as a social-technical matter. KaZaa was sued in the Netherlands, and +moved to Australia. It was later subject to actions in Australia, but by that +time, the Dutch courts found the company not to be liable to the music labels. +Grokster, a firm based in the United States, was initially found to have +offered a sufficiently diverse set of capabilities, beyond merely facilitating +copyright infringements, that the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit +refused to find it liable simply for making and distributing its software. The +Supreme Court reversed that holding, however, returning the case to the lower +courts to find, factually, whether Grokster had actual intent to facilitate +illegal copying.~{ /{Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer v. Grokster, Ltd.}/ (decided June 27, +2005). }~ Even if Grokster ultimately loses, the FastTrack network architecture +will not disappear; clients (that is, end user software) will continue to +exist, including free software clients. Perhaps it will be harder to raise +money for businesses located within the United States ,{[pg 422]}, to operate +in this technological space, because the new rule announced by the Supreme +Court in Grokster raises the risk of litigation for innovators in the p2p +space. However, as with encryption regulation in the mid-1990s, it is not clear +that the United States can unilaterally prevent the development of technology +for which there is worldwide demand and with regard to whose development there +is globally accessible talent. +={ Grokster } + +How important more generally are these legal battles to the organization of +cultural production in the networked environment? There are two components to +the answer: The first component considers the likely effect of the legal +battles on the development and adoption of the technology and the social +practice of promiscuous copying. In this domain, law seems unlikely to prevent +the continued development of p2p technologies. It has, however, had two +opposite results. First, it has affected the path of the technological +evolution in a way that is contrary to the industry interests but consistent +with increasing distribution of the core functions of the logical layer. +Second, it seems to have dampened somewhat the social practice of file sharing. +The second component assumes that a range of p2p technologies will continue to +be widely adopted, and that some significant amount of sharing will continue to +be practiced. The question then becomes what effect this will have on the +primary cultural industries that have fought this technology-- movies and +recorded music. Within this new context, music will likely change more +radically than movies, and the primary effect will be on the accreditation +function--how music is recognized and adopted by fans. Film, if it is +substantially affected, will likely be affected largely by a shift in tastes. + +MP3.com was the first major music distribution site shut down by litigation. +From the industry's perspective, it should have represented an entirely +unthreatening business model. Users paid a subscription fee, in exchange for +which they were allowed to download music. There were various quirks and kinks +in this model that made it unattractive to the music industry at the time: the +industry did not control this major site, and therefore had to share the rents +from the music, and more important, there was no effective control over the +music files once downloaded. However, from the perspective of 2005, MP3.com was +a vastly more manageable technology for the sound recording business model than +a free software file-sharing client. MP3.com was a single site, with a +corporate owner that could be (and was) held responsible. It controlled which +user had access to what files--by requiring each user to insert a CD into the +computer to prove that he or she had bought the CD--so that usage could in +principle be monitored and, if ,{[pg 423]}, desired, compensation could be tied +to usage. It did not fundamentally change the social practice of choosing +music. It provided something that was more like a music-on-demand jukebox than +a point of music sharing. As a legal matter, MP3.com's infringement was +centered on the fact that it stored and delivered the music from this central +server instead of from the licensed individual copies. In response to the +shutdown of MP3.com, Napster redesigned the role of the centralized mode, and +left storage in the hands of users, keeping only the directory and search +functions centralized. When Napster was shut down, Gnutella and later FastTrack +further decentralized the system, offering a fully decentralized, ad hoc +reconfigurable cataloging and search function. Because these algorithms +represent architecture and a protocol-based network, not a particular program, +they are usable in many different implementations. This includes free software +programs like MLDonkey--which is a nascent file-sharing system that is aimed to +run simultaneously across most of the popular file-sharing networks, including +FastTrack, BitTorrent, and Overnet, the eDonkey network. These programs are now +written by, and available from, many different jurisdictions. There is no +central point of control over their distribution. There is no central point +through which to measure and charge for their use. They are, from a technical +perspective, much more resilient to litigation attack, and much less friendly +to various possible models of charging for downloads or usage. From a +technological perspective, then, the litigation backfired. It created a network +that is less susceptible to integration into an industrial model of music +distribution based on royalty payments per user or use. +={ MP3.com } + +It is harder to gauge, however, whether the litigation was a success or a +failure from a social-practice point of view. There have been conflicting +reports on the effects of file sharing and the litigation on CD sales. The +recording industry claimed that CD sales were down because of file sharing, but +more independent academic studies suggested that CD sales were not +independently affected by file sharing, as opposed to the general economic +downturn.~{ See Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf, "The Effect of File +Sharing on Record Sales" (working paper), +http://www.unc.edu/cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf. }~ The Pew project +on Internet and American Life user survey data suggests that the litigation +strategy against individual users has dampened the use of file sharing, though +file sharing is still substantially more common among users than paying for +files from the newly emerging payper-download authorized services. In mid-2003, +the Pew study found that 29 percent of Internet users surveyed said they had +downloaded music files, identical to the percentage of users who had downloaded +music in the first quarter of 2001, the heyday of Napster. Twenty-one percent +responded that ,{[pg 424]}, they allow others to download from their +computer.~{ Mary Madden and Amanda Lenhart, "Music Downloading, File-Sharing, +and Copyright" (Pew, July 2003), +http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Copyright_Memo.pdf/. }~ This meant that +somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-five million adults in the United +States alone were sharing music files in mid-2003, when the recording industry +began to sue individual users. Of these, fully two-thirds expressly stated that +they did not care whether the files they downloaded were or were not +copyrighted. By the end of 2003, five months after the industry began to sue +individuals, the number of respondents who admitted to downloading music +dropped by half. During the next few months, these numbers increased slightly +to twenty-three million adults, remaining below the mid-2003 numbers in +absolute terms and more so in terms of percentage of Internet users. Of those +who had at one point downloaded, but had stopped, roughly a third said that the +threat of suit was the reason they had stopped file sharing.~{ Lee Rainie and +Mary Madden, "The State of Music Downloading and File-Sharing Online" (Pew, +April 2004), http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Filesharing_April_ 04.pdf. }~ +During this same period, use of pay online music download services, like +iTunes, rose to about 7 percent of Internet users. Sharing of all kinds of +media files--music, movies, and games--was at 23 percent of adult Internet +users. These numbers do indeed suggest that, in the aggregate, music +downloading is reported somewhat less often than it was in the past. It is hard +to tell how much of this reduction is due to actual behavioral change as +compared to an unwillingness to self-report on behavior that could subject one +to litigation. It is impossible to tell how much of an effect the litigation +has had specifically on sharing by younger people--teenagers and college +students--who make up a large portion of both CD buyers and file sharers. +Nonetheless, the reduction in the total number of self-reported users and the +relatively steady percentage of total Internet users who share files of various +kinds suggest that the litigation does seem to have had a moderating effect on +file sharing as a social practice. It has not, however, prevented file sharing +from continuing to be a major behavioral pattern among one-fifth to one-quarter +of Internet users, and likely a much higher proportion in the most relevant +populations from the perspective of the music and movie industries--teenagers +and young adults. +={ Pew studies } + +From the perspective of understanding the effects of institutional ecology, +then, the still-raging battle over peer-to-peer networks presents an ambiguous +picture. One can speculate with some degree of confidence that, had Napster not +been stopped by litigation, file sharing would have been a much wider social +practice than it is today. The application was extremely easy to use; it +offered a single network for all file-sharing users, thereby offering an +extremely diverse and universal content distribution network; and for a brief +period, it was a cultural icon and a seemingly acceptable social practice. The +,{[pg 425]}, period of regrouping that followed its closure; the imperfect +interfaces of early Gnutella clients; the relative fragmentation of file +sharing into a number of networks, each with a smaller coverage of content than +was present; and the fear of personal litigation risk are likely to have +limited adoption. On the other hand, in the longer run, the technological +developments have created platforms that are less compatible with the +industrial model, and which would be harder to integrate into a stable +settlement for music distribution in the digital environment. +={ entertainment industry : + peer-to-peer networks and +6 +} + +Prediction aside, it is not immediately obvious why peer-to-peer networks +contribute to the kinds of nonmarket production and creativity that I have +focused on as the core of the networked information economy. At first blush, +they seem simply to be mechanisms for fans to get industrially produced +recorded music without paying musicians. This has little to do with +democratization of creativity. To see why p2p networks nonetheless are a part +of the development of a more attractive cultural production system, and how +they can therefore affect the industrial organization of cultural production, +we can look first at music, and then, independently, at movies. The industrial +structure of each is different, and the likely effects of p2p networks are +different in each case. +={ music industry +3 } + +Recorded music began with the phonograph--a packaged good intended primarily +for home consumption. The industry that grew around the ability to stamp and +distribute records divided the revenue structure such that artists have been +paid primarily from live public performances and merchandizing. Very few +musicians, including successful recording artists, make money from recording +royalties. The recording industry takes almost all of the revenues from record +and CD sales, and provides primarily promotion and distribution. It does not +bear the capital cost of the initial musical creation; artists do. With the +declining cost of computation, that cost has become relatively low, often +simply a computer owned by artists themselves, much as they own their +instruments. Because of this industrial structure, peer-to-peer networks are a +genuine threat to displacing the entire recording industry, while leaving +musicians, if not entirely unaffected, relatively insulated from the change and +perhaps mildly better off. Just as the recording industry stamps CDs, promotes +them on radio stations, and places them on distribution chain shelves, p2p +networks produce the physical and informational aspects of a music distribution +system. However, p2p networks do so collaboratively, by sharing the capacity of +their computers, hard drives, and network connections. Filtering and +accreditation, or "promotion," are produced on the ,{[pg 426]}, model that Eben +Moglen called "anarchist distribution." Jane's friends and friends of her +friends are more likely to know exactly what music would make her happy than +are recording executives trying to predict which song to place, on which +station and which shelf, to expose her to exactly the music she is most likely +to buy in a context where she would buy it. Filesharing systems produce +distribution and "promotion" of music in a socialsharing modality. Alongside +peer-produced music reviews, they could entirely supplant the role of the +recording industry. +={ Moglen, Eben } + +Musicians and songwriters seem to be relatively insulated from the effects of +p2p networks, and on balance, are probably affected positively. The most +comprehensive survey data available, from mid-2004, shows that 35 percent of +musicians and songwriters said that free downloads have helped their careers. +Only 5 percent said it has hurt them. Thirty percent said it increased +attendance at concerts, 21 percent that it helped them sell CDs and other +merchandise, and 19 percent that it helped them gain radio playing time. These +results are consistent with what one would expect given the revenue structure +of the industry, although the study did not separate answers out based on +whether the respondent was able to live entirely or primarily on their music, +which represented only 16 percent of the respondents to the survey. In all, it +appears that much of the actual flow of revenue to artists-- from performances +and other sources--is stable. This is likely to remain true even if the CD +market were entirely displaced by peer-to-peer distribution. Musicians will +still be able to play for their dinner, at least not significantly less so than +they can today. Perhaps there will be fewer millionaires. Perhaps fewer +mediocre musicians with attractive physiques will be sold as "geniuses," and +more talented musicians will be heard than otherwise would have, and will as a +result be able to get paying gigs instead of waiting tables or "getting a job." +But it would be silly to think that music, a cultural form without which no +human society has existed, will cease to be in our world if we abandon the +industrial form it took for the blink of a historical eye that was the +twentieth century. Music was not born with the phonograph, nor will it die with +the peer-to-peer network. The terms of the debate, then, are about cultural +policy; perhaps about industrial policy. Will we get the kind of music we want +in this system, whoever "we" are? Will American recording companies continue to +get the export revenue streams they do? Will artists be able to live from +making music? Some of these arguments are serious. Some are but a tempest in a +monopoly-rent teapot. It is clear that a technological change has rendered +obsolete a particular mode of distributing ,{[pg 427]}, information and +culture. Distribution, once the sole domain of market-based firms, now can be +produced by decentralized networks of users, sharing instantiations of music +they deem attractive with others, using equipment they own and generic network +connections. This distribution network, in turn, allows a much more diverse +range of musicians to reach much more finely grained audiences than were +optimal for industrial production and distribution of mechanical instantiations +of music in vinyl or CD formats. The legal battles reflect an effort by an +incumbent industry to preserve its very lucrative business model. The industry +has, to this point, delayed the transition to peer-based distribution, but it +is unclear for how long or to what extent it will be successful in preventing +the gradual transition to userbased distribution. + +The movie industry has a different industrial structure and likely a different +trajectory in its relations to p2p networks. First and foremost, movies began +as a relatively high capital cost experience good. Making a movie, as opposed +to writing a song, was something that required a studio and a large workforce. +It could not be done by a musician with a guitar or a piano. Furthermore, +movies were, throughout most of their history, collective experience goods. +They were a medium for public performance experienced outside of the home, in a +social context. With the introduction of television, it was easy to adapt movie +revenue structure by delaying release of films to television viewing until +after demand for the movie at the theater declined, as well as to develop their +capabilities into a new line of business--television production. However, +theatrical release continued to be the major source of revenue. When video came +along, the movie industry cried murder in the Sony Betamax case, but actually +found it quite easy to work videocassettes into yet another release window, +like television, and another medium, the made-for-video movie. Digital +distribution affects the distribution of cultural artifacts as packaged goods +for home consumption. It does not affect the social experience of going out to +the movies. At most, it could affect the consumption of the twenty-year-old +mode of movie distribution: videos and DVDs. As recently as the year 2000, when +the Hollywood studios were litigating the DeCSS case, they represented to the +court that home video sales were roughly 40 percent of revenue, a number +consistent with other reports.~{ See 111 F.Supp.2d at 310, fns. 69-70; PBS +Frontline report, http://www.pbs.org/ +wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/hollywood/business/windows.html. }~ The remainder, +composed of theatrical release revenues and various television releases, +remains reasonably unthreatened as a set of modes of revenue capture to sustain +the high-production value, high-cost movies that typify Hollywood. Forty +percent is undoubtedly a large chunk, but unlike ,{[pg 428]}, the recording +industry, which began with individually owned recordings, the movie industry +preexisted videocassettes and DVDs, and is likely to outlive them even if p2p +networks were to eliminate that market entirely, which is doubtful. + +The harder and more interesting question is whether cheap high-quality digital +video-capture and editing technologies combined with p2p networks for efficient +distribution could make film a more diverse medium than it is now. The +potential hypothetical promise of p2p networks like BitTorrent is that they +could offer very robust and efficient distribution networks for films outside +the mainstream industry. Unlike garage bands and small-scale music productions, +however, this promise is as yet speculative. We do not invest in public +education for film creation, as we do in the teaching of writing. Most of the +raw materials out of which a culture of digital capture and amateur editing +could develop are themselves under copyright, a subject we return to when +considering the content layer. There are some early efforts, like +atomfilms.com, at short movie distribution. The technological capabilities are +there. It is possible that if films older than thirty or even fifty years were +released into the public domain, they would form the raw material out of which +a new cultural production practice would form. If it did, p2p networks would +likely play an important role in their distribution. However, for now, although +the sound recording and movie industries stand shoulder to shoulder in the +lobbying efforts, their circumstances and likely trajectory in relation to file +sharing are likely quite different. + +The battles over p2p and the DMCA offer some insight into the potential, but +also the limits, of tweaking the institutional ecology. The ambition of the +industrial cultural producers in both cases was significant. They sought to +deploy law to shape emerging technologies and social practices to make sure +that the business model they had adopted for the technologies of film and sound +recording continued to work in the digital environment. Doing so effectively +would require substantial elimination of certain lines of innovation, like +certain kinds of decryption and p2p networks. It would require outlawing +behavior widely adopted by people around the world--social sharing of most +things that they can easily share--which, in the case of music, has been +adopted by tens of millions of people around the world. The belief that all +this could be changed in a globally interconnected network through the use of +law was perhaps naïve. Nonetheless, the legal efforts have had some impact on +social practices and on the ready availability of materials ,{[pg 429]}, for +free use. The DMCA may not have made any single copyright protection mechanism +hold up to the scrutiny of hackers and crackers around the Internet. However, +it has prevented circumvention devices from being integrated into mainstream +platforms, like the Windows operating system or some of the main antivirus +programs, which would have been "natural" places for them to appear in consumer +markets. The p2p litigation did not eliminate the p2p networks, but it does +seem to have successfully dampened the social practice of file sharing. One can +take quite different views of these effects from a policy perspective. However, +it is clear that they are selfconscious efforts to tweak the institutional +ecology of the digital environment in order to dampen the most direct threats +it poses for the twentieth-century industrial model of cultural production. In +the case of the DMCA, this is done at the direct cost of making it +substantially harder for users to make creative use of the existing stock of +audiovisual materials from the twentieth century--materials that are absolutely +central to our cultural selfunderstanding at the beginning of the twenty-first +century. In the case of p2p networks, the cost to nonmarket production is more +indirect, and may vary across different cultural forms. The most important +long-term effect of the pressure that this litigation has put on technology to +develop decentralized search and retrieval systems may, ultimately and +ironically, be to improve the efficiency of radically decentralized cultural +production and distribution, and make decentralized production more, rather +than less, robust to the vicissitudes of institutional ecology. + +3~ The Domain Name System: From Public Trust to the Fetishism of Mnemonics +={ domain name system +5 ; + Internet : + Web addresses +5 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + domain name system +5 ; + Web : + domain name addresses +5 ; + wireless communications : + domain name addresses +5 +} + +Not all battles over the role of property-like arrangements at the logical +layer originate from Hollywood and the recording industry. One of the major +battles outside of the ambit of the copyright industries concerned the +allocation and ownership of domain names. At stake was the degree to which +brand name ownership in the material world could be leveraged into attention on +the Internet. Domain names are alphanumeric mnemonics used to represent actual +Internet addresses of computers connected to the network. While 130.132.51.8 is +hard for human beings to remember, www.yale.edu is easier. The two strings have +identical meaning to any computer connected to the Internet--they refer to a +server that responds to World Wide Web queries for Yale University's main site. +Every computer connected to the Internet has a unique address, either permanent +or assigned by a provider ,{[pg 430]}, for the session. That requires that +someone distribute addresses--both numeric and mnemonic. Until 1992, names and +numbers were assigned on a purely first-come, first-served basis by Jon Postel, +one of the very first developers of the Internet, under U.S. government +contract. Postel also ran a computer, called the root server, to which all +computers would turn to ask the numeric address of letters.mnemonic.edu, so +they could translate what the human operator remembered as the address into one +their machine could use. Postel called this system "the Internet Assigned +Numbers Authority, IANA," whose motto he set as, "Dedicated to preserving the +central coordinating functions of the global Internet for the public good." In +1992, Postel got tired of this coordinating job, and the government contracted +it to a private firm called Network Solutions, Inc., or NSI. As the number of +applications grew, and as the administration sought to make this system pay for +itself, NSI was allowed in 1995 to begin to charge fees for assigning names and +numbers. At about the same time, widespread adoption of a graphical browser +made using the World Wide Web radically simpler and more intuitive to the +uninitiated. These two developments brought together two forces to bear on the +domain name issue--each with a very different origin and intent. The first +force consisted of the engineers who had created and developed the Internet, +led by Postel, who saw the domain name space to be a public trust and resisted +its commercialization by NSI. The second force consisted of trademark owners +and their lawyers, who suddenly realized the potential for using control over +domain names to extend the value of their brand names to a new domain of +trade--e-commerce. These two forces placed the U.S. government under pressure +to do two things: (1) release the monopoly that NSI--a for-profit +corporation--had on the domain name space, and (2) find an efficient means of +allowing trademark owners to control the use of alphanumeric strings used in +their trademarks as domain names. Postel initially tried to "take back the +root" by asking various regional domain name servers to point to his computer, +instead of to the one maintained by NSI in Virginia. This caused uproar in the +government, and Postel was accused of attacking and hijacking the Internet! His +stature and passion, however, placed significant weight on the side of keeping +the naming system as an open public trust. That position came to an abrupt end +with his death in 1996. By late 1996, a self-appointed International Ad Hoc +Committee (IAHC) was formed, with the blessing of the Internet Society (ISOC), +a professional membership society for individuals and organizations involved in +Internet planning. IAHC's membership was about half intellectual property ,{[pg +431]}, lawyers and half engineers. In February 1997, IAHC came out with a +document called the gTLD-MoU (generic top-level domain name memorandum of +understanding). Although the product of a small group, the gTLD-MoU claimed to +speak for "The Internet Community." Although it involved no governments, it was +deposited "for signature" with the International Telecommunications Union +(ITU). Dutifully, some 226 organizations--Internet services companies, +telecommunications providers, consulting firms, and a few chapters of the ISOC +signed on. Section 2 of the gTLD-MoU, announcing its principles, reveals the +driving forces of the project. While it begins with the announcement that the +top-level domain space "is a public resource and is subject to the public +trust," it quickly commits to the principle that "the current and future +Internet name space stakeholders can benefit most from a self-regulatory and +market-oriented approach to Internet domain name registration services." This +results in two policy principles: (1) commercial competition in domain name +registration by releasing the monopoly NSI had, and (2) protecting trademarks +in the alphanumeric strings that make up the second-level domain names. The +final, internationalizing component of the effort--represented by the interests +of the WIPO and ITU bureaucracies--was attained by creating a Council of +Registrars as a Swiss corporation, and creating special relationships with the +ITU and the WIPO. +={ IAHC (International Ad Hock Committee) ; + IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) ; + NSI (Network Solutions. Inc.) +1 ; + Postel, Jon ; + branding : + domain names and +4 ; + gTLD-MoU document ; + proprietary rights : + domain names +4 +} + +None of this institutional edifice could be built without the U.S. government. +In early 1998, the administration responded to this ferment with a green paper, +seeking the creation of a private, nonprofit corporation registered in the +United States to take on management of the domain name issue. By its own terms, +the green paper responded to concerns of the domain name registration monopoly +and of trademark issues in domain names, first and foremost, and to some extent +to increasing clamor from abroad for a voice in Internet governance. Despite a +cool response from the European Union, the U.S. government proceeded to +finalize a white paper and authorize the creation of its preferred model--the +private, nonprofit corporation. Thus was born the Internet Corporation for +Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as a private, nonprofit California +corporation. Over time, it succeeded in large measure in loosening NSI's +monopoly on domain name registration. Its efforts on the trademark side +effectively created a global preemptive property right. Following an invitation +in the U.S. government's white paper for ICANN to study the proper approach to +trademark enforcement in the domain name space, ICANN and WIPO initiated a +process ,{[pg 432]}, that began in July 1998 and ended in April 1999. As +Froomkin describes his experience as a public-interest expert in this process, +the process feigned transparency and open discourse, but was in actuality an +opaque staff-driven drafting effort.~{ A. M. Froomkin, "Semi-Private +International Rulemaking: Lessons Learned from the WIPO Domain Name Process," +http://www.personal.law.miami.edu/froomkin/ articles/TPRC99.pdf. }~ The result +was a very strong global property right available to trademark owners in the +alphanumeric strings that make up domain names. This was supported by binding +arbitration. Because it controlled the root server, ICANN could enforce its +arbitration decisions worldwide. If ICANN decides that, say, the McDonald's +fast-food corporation and not a hypothetical farmer named Old McDonald owned +www.mcdonalds.com, all computers in the world would be referred to the +corporate site, not the personal one. Not entirely satisfied with the degree to +which the ICANNWIPO process protected their trademarks, some of the major +trademark owners lobbied the U.S. Congress to pass an even stricter law. This +law would make it easier for the owners of commercial brand names to obtain +domain names that include their brand, whether or not there was any probability +that users would actually confuse sites like the hypothetical Old McDonald's +with that of the fast-food chain. +={ Froomkin, Michael ; + ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) +} + +The degree to which the increased appropriation of the domain name space is +important is a function of the extent to which the cultural practice of using +human memory to find information will continue to be widespread. The underlying +assumption of the value of trademarked alphanumeric strings as second-level +domain names is that users will approach electronic commerce by typing in +"www.brandname.com" as their standard way of relating to information on the +Net. This is far from obviously the most efficient solution. In physical space, +where collecting comparative information on price, quality, and so on is very +costly, brand names serve an important informational role. In cyberspace, where +software can compare prices, and product-review services that link to vendors +are easy to set up and cheap to implement, the brand name becomes an +encumbrance on good information, not its facilitator. If users are limited, for +instance, to hunting around as to whether information they seek is on +www.brandname.com, www.brand_ name.com, or www.brand.net, name recognition from +the real world becomes a bottleneck to e-commerce. And this is precisely the +reason why owners of established marks sought to assure early adoption of +trademarks in domain names--it assures users that they can, in fact, find their +accustomed products on the Web without having to go through search algorithms +that might expose them to comparison with pesky start-up competitors. As search +engines become better and more tightly integrated into the basic ,{[pg 433]}, +browser functionality, the idea that a user who wants to buy from Delta +Airlines would simply type "www.delta.com," as opposed to plugging "delta +airlines" into an integrated search toolbar and getting the airline as a first +hit becomes quaint. However, quaint inefficient cultural practices can persist. +And if this indeed is one that will persist, then the contours of the property +right matter. As the law has developed over the past few years, ownership of a +trademark that includes a certain alphanumeric string almost always gives the +owner of the trademark a preemptive right in using the letters and numbers +incorporated in that mark as a domain name. + +Domain name disputes have fallen into three main categories. There are cases of +simple arbitrage. Individuals who predicted that having a domain name with the +brand name in it would be valuable, registered such domain names aplenty, and +waited for the flat-footed brand name owners to pay them to hand over the +domain. There is nothing more inefficient about this form of arbitrage than any +other. The arbitrageurs "reserved" commercially valuable names so they could be +auctioned, rather than taken up by someone who might have a non-negotiable +interest in the name--for example, someone whose personal name it was. These +arbitrageurs were nonetheless branded pirates and hijackers, and the consistent +result of all the cases on domain names has been that the corporate owners of +brand names receive the domain names associated with their brands without +having to pay the arbitrageurs. Indeed, the arbitrageurs were subject to damage +judgments. A second kind of case involved bona fide holders of domain names +that made sense for them, but were nonetheless shared with a famous brand name. +One child nicknamed "Pokey" registered "pokey.org," and his battle to keep that +name against a toy manufacturer that sold a toy called "pokey" became a poster +child for this type of case. Results have been more mixed in this case, +depending on how sympathetic the early registrant was. The third type of +case--and in many senses, most important from the perspective of freedom to +participate not merely as a consumer in the networked environment, but as a +producer--involves those who use brand names to draw attention to the fact that +they are attacking the owner of the brand. One well-known example occurred when +Verizon Wireless was launched. The same hacker magazine involved in the DeCSS +case, 2600, purchased the domain name "verizonreallysucks.com" to poke fun at +Verizon. In response to a letter requiring that they give up the domain name, +the magazine purchased the domain name +"VerizonShouldSpendMoreTimeFixingItsNetworkAndLess MoneyOnLawyers.com." These +types of cases have again met with varying ,{[pg 434]}, degrees of sympathy +from courts and arbitrators under the ICANN process, although it is fairly +obvious that using a brand name in order to mock and criticize its owner and +the cultural meaning it tries to attach to its mark is at the very core of fair +use, cultural criticism, and free expression. +={ arbitrage, domain names } + +The point here is not to argue for one type of answer or another in terms of +trademark law, constitutional law, or the logic of ICANN. It is to identify +points of pressure where the drive to create proprietary rights is creating +points of control over the flow of information and the freedom to make meaning +in the networked environment. The domain name issue was seen by many as +momentous when it was new. ICANN has drawn a variety of both yearnings and +fears as a potential source of democratic governance for the Internet or a +platform for U.S. hegemony. I suspect that neither of these will turn out to be +true. The importance of property rights in domain names is directly based on +the search practices of users. Search engines, directories, review sites, and +referrals through links play a large role in enabling users to find information +they are interested in. Control over the domain name space is unlikely to +provide a real bottleneck that will prevent both commercial competitors and +individual speakers from drawing attention to their competition or criticism. +However, the battle is indicative of the efforts to use proprietary rights in a +particular element of the institutional ecology of the logical +layer--trademarks in domain names--to tilt the environment in favor of the +owners of famous brand names, and against individuals, noncommercial actors, +and smaller, less-known competitors. + +3~ The Browser Wars +={ browsers +2 ; + Internet : + Web browsers +2 ; + Internet Explorer browser +2 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + Web browsers +2 ; + Microsoft Corporation : + browser wars +2 ; + Web : + browser wars +2 ; + wireless communications : + browser wars +2 +} + +A much more fundamental battle over the logical layer has occurred in the +browser wars. Here, the "institutional" component is not formal institutions, +like laws or regulations, but technical practice institutions--the standards +for Web site design. Unlike on the network protocol side, the device side of +the logical layer--the software running personal computers--was thoroughly +property-based by the mid-1990s. Microsoft's dominance in desktop operating +systems was well established, and there was strong presence of other software +publishers in consumer applications, pulling the logical layer toward a +proprietary model. In 1995, Microsoft came to perceive the Internet and +particularly the World Wide Web as a threat to its control over the desktop. +The user-side Web browser threatened to make the desktop a more open +environment that would undermine its monopoly. Since that time, the two +pulls--the openness of the nonproprietary network and the closed nature ,{[pg +435]}, of the desktop--have engaged in a fairly energetic tug-of-war over the +digital environment. This push-me-pull-you game is played out both in the +domain of market share, where Microsoft has been immensely successful, and in +the domain of standard setting, where it has been only moderately successful. +In market share, the story is well known and has been well documented in the +Microsoft antitrust litigation. Part of the reason that it is so hard for a new +operating system to compete with Microsoft's is that application developers +write first, and sometimes only, for the already-dominant operating system. A +firm investing millions of dollars in developing a new piece of photo-editing +software will usually choose to write it so that it works with the operating +system that has two hundred million users, not the one that has only fifteen +million users. Microsoft feared that Netscape's browser, dominant in the +mid-1990s, would come to be a universal translator among applications--that +developers could write their applications to run on the browser, and the +browser would handle translation across different operating systems. If that +were to happen, Microsoft's operating system would have to compete on intrinsic +quality. Windows would lose the boost of the felicitous feedback effect, where +more users mean more applications, and this greater number of applications in +turn draws more new users, and so forth. To prevent this eventuality, Microsoft +engaged in a series of practices, ultimately found to have violated the +antitrust laws, aimed at getting a dominant majority of Internet users to adopt +Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE). Illegal or not, these practices succeeded +in making IE the dominant browser, overtaking the original market leader, +Netscape, within a short number of years. By the time the antitrust case was +completed, Netscape had turned browser development over to the open-source +development community, but under licensing conditions sufficiently vague so +that the project generated little early engagement. Only around 2001-2002, did +the Mozilla browser development project get sufficient independence and +security for developers to begin to contribute energetically. It was only in +late 2004, early 2005, that Mozilla Firefox became the first major release of a +free software browser that showed promise of capturing some user-share back +from IE. +={ Netscape and browser wars } + +Microsoft's dominance over the operating system and browser has not, as a +practical matter, resulted in tight control over the information flow and use +on the Internet. This is so for three reasons. First, the TCP/IP protocol is +more fundamental to Internet communications. It allows any application or +content to run across the network, as long as it knows how to translate itself +into very simple packets with standard addressing information. To prevent ,{[pg +436]}, applications from doing this over basic TCP/IP would make the Microsoft +operating system substantially crippling to many applications developers, which +brings us to the second reason. Microsoft's dominance depends to a great extent +on the vastly greater library of applications available to run on Windows. To +make this library possible, Microsoft makes available a wide range of +application program interfaces that developers can use without seeking +Microsoft's permission. As a strategic decision about what enhances its core +dominance, Microsoft may tilt the application development arena in its favor, +but not enough to make it too hard for most applications to be implemented on a +Windows platform. While not nearly as open as a genuinely open-source platform, +Windows is also a far cry from a completely controlled platform, whose owner +seeks to control all applications that are permitted to be developed for, and +all uses that can be made of, its platform. Third, while IE controls much of +the browser market share, Microsoft has not succeeded in dominating the +standards for Web authoring. Web browser standard setting happens on the turf +of the mythic creator of the Web-- Tim Berners Lee. Lee chairs the W3C, a +nonprofit organization that sets the standard ways in which Web pages are +authored so that they have a predictable appearance on the browser's screen. +Microsoft has, over the years, introduced various proprietary extensions that +are not part of the Web standard, and has persuaded many Web authors to +optimize their Web sites to IE. If it succeeds, it will have wrested practical +control over standard setting from the W3C. However, as of this writing, Web +pages generally continue to be authored using mostly standard, open extensions, +and anyone browsing the Internet with a free software browser, like any of the +Mozilla family, will be able to read and interact with most Web sites, +including the major ecommerce sites, without encountering nonstandard +interfaces optimized for IE. At a minimum, these sites are able to query the +browser as to whether or not it is IE, and serve it with either the open +standard or the proprietary standard version accordingly. + +3~ Free Software +={ free software : + policy on +1 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + free software policies +1 ; + open-source software : + policy on +1 ; + software, open-source : + policy on +1 +} + +The role of Mozilla in the browser wars points to the much more substantial and +general role of the free software movement and the open-source development +community as major sources of openness, and as a backstop against appropriation +of the logical layer. In some of the most fundamental uses of the +Internet--Web-server software, Web-scripting software, and e-mail servers--free +or open-source software has a dominant user share. In others, like ,{[pg 437]}, +the operating system, it offers a robust alternative sufficiently significant +to prevent enclosure of an entire component of the logical layer. Because of +its licensing structure and the fact that the technical specifications are open +for inspection and use by anyone, free software offers the most completely +open, commons-based institutional and organizational arrangement for any +resource or capability in the digital environment. Any resource in the logical +layer that is the product of a free software development project is +institutionally designed to be available for nonmarket, nonproprietary +strategies of use. The same openness, however, makes free software resistant to +control. If one tries to implement a constraining implementation of a certain +function--for example, an audio driver that will not allow music to be played +without proper authorization from a copyright holder--the openness of the code +for inspection will allow users to identify what, and how, the software is +constraining. The same institutional framework will allow any developer to +"fix" the problem and change the way the software behaves. This is how free and +open-source software is developed to begin with. One cannot limit access to the +software--for purposes of inspection and modification--to developers whose +behavior can be controlled by contract or property and still have the software +be "open source" or free. As long as free software can provide a fully +implemented alternative to the computing functionalities users want, perfect +enclosure of the logical layer is impossible. This openness is a boon for those +who wish the network to develop in response to a wide range of motivations and +practices. However, it presents a serious problem for anyone who seeks to +constrain the range of uses made of the Internet. And, just as they did in the +context of trusted systems, the incumbent industrial culture +producers--Hollywood and the recording industry-- would, in fact, like to +control how the Internet is used and how software behaves. + +3~ Software Patents +={ innovation : + software patents and +2 ; + proprietary rights : + software patents +2 ; + software : + patents for +2 +} + +Throughout most of its history, software has been protected primarily by +copyright, if at all. Beginning in the early 1980s, and culminating formally in +the late 1990s, the Federal Circuit, the appellate court that oversees the U.S. +patent law, made clear that software was patentable. The result has been that +software has increasingly become the subject of patent rights. There is now +pressure for the European Union to pass a similar reform, and to +internationalize the patentability of software more generally. There are a +variety of policy questions surrounding the advisability of software patents. +Software ,{[pg 438]}, development is a highly incremental process. This means +that patents tend to impose a burden on a substantial amount of future +innovation, and to reward innovation steps whose qualitative improvement over +past contributions may be too small to justify the discontinuity represented by +a patent grant. Moreover, innovation in the software business has flourished +without patents, and there is no obvious reason to implement a new exclusive +right in a market that seems to have been enormously innovative without it. +Most important, software components interact with each other constantly. +Sometimes interoperating with a certain program may be absolutely necessary to +perform a function, not because the software is so good, but because it has +become the standard. The patent then may extend to the very functionality, +whereas a copyright would have extended only to the particular code by which it +was achieved. The primary fear is that patents over standards could become +major bottlenecks. + +From the perspective of the battle over the institutional ecology, free +software and open-source development stand to lose the most from software +patents. A patent holder may charge a firm that develops dependent software in +order to capture rents. However, there is no obvious party to charge for free +software development. Even if the patent owner has a very open licensing +policy--say, licensing the patent nonexclusively to anyone without +discrimination for $10,000--most free software developers will not be able to +play. IBM and Red Hat may pay for licenses, but the individual contributor +hacking away at his or her computer, will not be able to. The basic driver of +free software innovation is easy ubiquitous access to the state of the art, +coupled with diverse motivations and talents brought to bear on a particular +design problem. If working on a problem requires a patent license, and if any +new development must not only write new source code, but also avoid replicating +a broad scope patent or else pay a large fee, then the conditions for free +software development are thoroughly undermined. Free software is responsible +for some of the most basic and widely used innovations and utilities on the +Internet today. Software more generally is heavily populated by service firms +that do not functionally rely on exclusive rights, copyrights, or patents. +Neither free software nor service-based software development need patents, and +both, particularly free and open-source software, stand to be stifled +significantly by widespread software patenting. As seen in the case of the +browser war, in the case of Gnutella, and the much more widely used basic +utilities of the Web--Apache server software, a number of free e-mail servers, +and the Perl scripting language--free and open-source ,{[pg 439]}, software +developers provide central chunks of the logical layer. They do so in a way +that leaves that layer open for anyone to use and build upon. The drive to +increase the degree of exclusivity available for software by adopting patents +over and above copyright threatens the continued vitality of this development +methodology. In particular, it threatens to take certain discrete application +areas that may require access to patented standard elements or protocols out of +the domain of what can be done by free software. As such, it poses a +significant threat to the availability of an open logical layer for at least +some forms of network use. + +2~ THE CONTENT LAYER +={ content layer of institutional ecology +35 ; + layers of institutional ecology : + content layer +35 ; + policy layers : + content layer +35 +} + +The last set of resources necessary for information production and exchange is +the universe of existing information, knowledge, and culture. The battle over +the scope, breadth, extent, and enforcement of copyright, patent, trademarks, +and a variety of exotic rights like trespass to chattels or the right to link +has been the subject of a large legal literature. Instead of covering the +entire range of enclosure efforts of the past decade or more, I offer a set of +brief descriptions of the choices being made in this domain. The intention is +not to criticize or judge the intrinsic logic of any of these legal changes, +but merely to illustrate how all these toggles of institutional ecology are +being set in favor of proprietary strategies, at the expense of nonproprietary +producers. + +3~ Copyright +={ content layer of institutional ecology : + copyright issues +9 : + see also proprietary rights ; + copyright issues +9 ; + proprietary rights : + copyright issues +9 +} + +The first domain in which we have seen a systematic preference for commercial +producers that rely on property over commons-based producers is in copyright. +This preference arises from a combination of expansive interpretations of what +rights include, a niggardly interpretive attitude toward users' privileges, +especially fair use, and increased criminalization. These have made copyright +law significantly more industrial-production friendly than it was in the past +or than it need be from the perspective of optimizing creativity or welfare in +the networked information economy, rather than rent-extraction by incumbents. + +/{Right to Read}/. Jessica Litman early diagnosed an emerging new "right to +read."~{ Jessica Litman, "The Exclusive Right to Read," Cardozo Arts and +Entertainment Law Journal 13 (1994): 29. }~ The basic right of copyright, to +control copying, was never seen to include the right to control who reads an +existing copy, when, and how ,{[pg 440]}, many times. Once a user bought a +copy, he or she could read it many times, lend it to a friend, or leave it on +the park bench or in the library for anyone else to read. This provided a +coarse valve to limit the deadweight loss associated with appropriating a +public good like information. As a happenstance of computer technology, reading +on a screen involves making a temporary copy of a file onto the temporary +memory of the computer. An early decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of +Appeals, MAI Systems, treated RAM (random-access memory) copies of this sort as +"copies" for purposes of copyright.~{ /{MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, +Inc.}/, 991 F.2d 511 (9th Cir. 1993). }~ This position, while weakly defended, +was not later challenged or rejected by other courts. Its result is that every +act of reading on a screen involves "making a copy" within the meaning of the +Copyright Act. As a practical matter, this interpretation expands the formal +rights of copyright holders to cover any and all computer-mediated uses of +their works, because no use can be made with a computer without at least +formally implicating the right to copy. More important than the formal legal +right, however, this universal baseline claim to a right to control even simple +reading of one's copyrighted work marked a change in attitude. Justified later +through various claims--such as the efficiency of private ordering or of price +discrimination--it came to stand for a fairly broad proposition: Owners should +have the right to control all valuable uses of their works. Combined with the +possibility and existence of technical controls on actual use and the DMCA's +prohibition on circumventing those controls, this means that copyright law has +shifted. It existed throughout most of its history as a regulatory provision +that reserved certain uses of works for exclusive control by authors, but left +other, not explicitly constrained uses free. It has now become a law that gives +rights holders the exclusive right to control any computer-mediated use of +their works, and captures in its regulatory scope all uses that were excluded +from control in prior media. +={ Litman, Jessica ; + right to read +} + +/{Fair Use Narrowed}/. Fair use in copyright was always a judicially created +concept with a large degree of uncertainty in its application. This +uncertainty, coupled with a broader interpretation of what counts as a +commercial use, a restrictive judicial view of what counts as fair, and +increased criminalization have narrowed its practical scope. +={ fair use and copyright +2 } + +First, it is important to recognize that the theoretical availability of the +fair-use doctrine does not, as a practical matter, help most productions. This +is due to a combination of two factors: (1) fair-use doctrine is highly fact +specific and uncertain in application, and (2) the Copyright Act provides ,{[pg +441]}, large fixed statutory damages, even if there is no actual damage to the +copyright owner. Lessig demonstrated this effect most clearly by working +through an example of a documentary film.~{ Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How +Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control +Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). }~ A film will not be distributed +without liability insurance. Insurance, in turn, will not be issued without +formal clearance, or permission, from the owner of each copyrighted work, any +portion of which is included in the film, even if the amount used is trivially +small and insignificant to the documentary. A five-second snippet of a +television program that happened to play on a television set in the background +of a sequence captured in documentary film can therefore prevent distribution +of the film, unless the filmmaker can persuade the owner of that program to +grant rights to use the materials. Copyright owners in such television programs +may demand thousands of dollars for even such a minimal and incidental use of +"their" images. This is not because a court would ultimately find that using +the image as is, with the tiny fraction of the television program in the +background, was not covered by fair use. It probably would be a fair use. It is +because insurance companies and distributors would refuse to incur the risk of +litigation. + +Second, in the past few years, even this uncertain scope has been constricted +by expanding the definitions of what counts as interference with a market and +what counts as a commercial use. Consider the Free Republic case. In that case, +a political Web site offered a forum for users to post stories from various +newspapers as grist for a political discussion of their contents or their +slant. The court held that because newspapers may one day sell access to +archived articles, and because some users may read some articles on the Web +forum instead of searching and retrieving them from the newspapers' archive, +the use interfered with a potential market. Moreover, because Free Republic +received donations from users (although it did not require them) and exchanged +advertising arrangements with other political sites, the court treated the site +as a "commercial user," and its use of newspaper articles to facilitate +political discussion of them "a commercial use." These factors enabled the +court to hold that posting an article from a medium--daily newspapers--whose +existence does not depend on copyright, in a way that may one day come to have +an effect on uncertain future revenues, which in any case would be marginal to +the business model of the newspapers, was not a fair use even when done for +purposes of political commentary. + +/{Criminalization}/. Copyright enforcement has also been substantially +criminalized in the past few years. Beginning with the No Electronic Theft Act +,{[pg 442]}, (NET Act) in 1997 and later incorporated into the DMCA, criminal +copyright has recently become much more expansive than it was until a few years +ago. Prior to passage of the NET Act, only commercial pirates--those that +slavishly made thousands of copies of video or audiocassettes and sold them for +profit--would have qualified as criminal violators of copyright. Criminal +liability has now been expanded to cover private copying and free sharing of +copyrighted materials whose cumulative nominal price (irrespective of actual +displaced demand) is quite low. As criminal copyright law is currently written, +many of the tens of millions using p2p networks are felons. It is one thing +when the recording industry labels tens of millions of individuals in a society +"pirates" in a rhetorical effort to conform social norms to its members' +business model. It is quite another when the state brands them felons and fines +or imprisons them. Litman has offered the most plausible explanation of this +phenomenon.~{ Jessica Litman, "Electronic Commerce and Free Speech," Journal of +Ethics and Information Technology 1 (1999): 213. }~ As the network makes +low-cost production and exchange of information and culture easier, the +large-scale commercial producers are faced with a new source of +competition--volunteers, people who provide information and culture for free. +As the universe of people who can threaten the industry has grown to encompass +more or less the entire universe of potential customers, the plausibility of +using civil actions to force individuals to buy rather than share information +goods decreases. Suing all of one's intended customers is not a sustainable +business model. In the interest of maintaining the business model that relies +on control over information goods and their sale as products, the copyright +industry has instead enlisted criminal enforcement by the state to prevent the +emergence of such a system of free exchange. These changes in formal law have, +in what is perhaps a more important development, been coupled with changes in +the Justice Department's enforcement policy, leading to a substantial increase +in the shadow of criminal enforcement in this area.~{ See Department of Justice +Intellectual Property Policy and Programs, +http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/ippolicy.htm. }~ +={ criminalization of copyright infringement ; + No Electrical Theft (NET) Act +} + +/{Term Extension}/. The change in copyright law that received the most +widespread public attention was the extension of copyright term in the Sonny +Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. The statute became cause celebre in +the early 2000s because it was the basis of a major public campaign and +constitutional challenge in the case of /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/.~{ /{Eldred v. +Ashcroft}/, 537 U.S. 186 (2003). }~ The actual marginal burden of this statute +on use of existing materials could be seen as relatively small. The length of +copyright protection was already very long-- seventy-five years for +corporate-owned materials, life of the author plus fifty for materials +initially owned by human authors. The Sonny Bono Copyright ,{[pg 443]}, Term +Extension Act increased these two numbers to ninety-five and life plus seventy, +respectively. The major implication, however, was that the Act showed that +retroactive extension was always available. As materials that were still +valuable in the stocks of Disney, in particular, came close to the public +domain, their lives would be extended indefinitely. The legal challenge to the +statute brought to public light the fact that, as a practical matter, almost +the entire stock of twentieth-century culture and beyond would stay privately +owned, and its copyright would be renewed indefinitely. For video and sound +recordings, this meant that almost the entire universe of materials would never +become part of the public domain; would never be available for free use as +inputs into nonproprietary production. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the +retroactive extension. The inordinately long term of protection in the United +States, initially passed under the pretext of "harmonizing" the length of +protection in the United States and in Europe, is now being used as an excuse +to "harmonize" the length of protection for various kinds of materials--like +sound recordings--that actually have shorter terms of protection in Europe or +other countries, like Australia. At stake in all these battles is the question +of when, if ever, will Errol Flynn's or Mickey Mouse's movies, or Elvis's +music, become part of the public domain? When will these be available for +individual users on the same terms that Shakespeare or Mozart are available? +The implication of Eldred is that they may never join the public domain, unless +the politics of term-extension legislation change. +={ Eldred v. Ashcroft ; + Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 ; + term of copyright +} + +/{No de Minimis Digital Sampling}/. A narrower, but revealing change is the +recent elimination of digital sampling from the universe of ex ante permissible +actions, even when all that is taken is a tiny snippet. The case is recent and +has not been generalized by other courts as of this writing. However, it offers +insight into the mind-set of judges who are confronted with digital +opportunities, and who in good faith continue to see the stakes as involving +purely the organization of a commercial industry, rather than defining the +comparative scope of commercial industry and nonmarket commons-based +creativity. Courts seem blind to the effects of their decisions on the +institutional ecology within which nonproprietary, individual, and social +creation must live. In Bridgeport Music, Inc., the Sixth Circuit was presented +with the following problem: The defendant had created a rap song.~{ +/{Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films}/, 383 F.3d 390 (6th Cir.2004). }~ +In making it, he had digitally copied a two-second guitar riff from a digital +recording of a 1970s song, and then looped and inserted it in various places to +create a completely different musical effect than the original. The district +court ,{[pg 444]}, had decided that the amount borrowed was so small as to make +the borrowing de minimis--too little for the law to be concerned with. The +Court of Appeals, however, decided that it would be too burdensome for courts +to have to decide, on a case-by-case basis, how much was too little for law to +be concerned with. Moreover, it would create too much uncertainty for recording +companies; it is, as the court put it, "cheaper to license than to litigate."~{ +383 F3d 390, 400. }~ The court therefore held that any digital sampling, no +matter how trivial, could be the basis of a copyright suit. Such a bright-line +rule that makes all direct copying of digital bits, no matter how small, an +infringement, makes digital sound recordings legally unavailable for +noncommercial, individually creative mixing. There are now computer programs, +like Garage Band, that allow individual users to cut and mix existing materials +to create their own music. These may not result in great musical compositions. +But they may. That, in any event, is not their point. They allow users to have +a very different relationship to recorded music than merely passively listening +to finished, unalterable musical pieces. By imagining that the only parties +affected by copyright coverage of sampling are recording artists who have +contracts with recording studios and seek to sell CDs, and can therefore afford +to pay licensing fees for every two-second riff they borrow, the court +effectively outlawed an entire model of user creativity. Given how easy it is +to cut, paste, loop, slow down, and speed up short snippets, and how creatively +exhilarating it is for users--young and old--to tinker with creating musical +compositions with instruments they do not know how to play, it is likely that +the opinion has rendered illegal a practice that will continue, at least for +the time being. Whether the social practice will ultimately cause the law to +change or vice versa is more difficult to predict. +={ de minimis digital sampling ; + digital sampling ; + music industry : + digital sampling ; + sampling, digital (music) +} + +3~ Contractual Enclosure: Click-Wrap Licenses and the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) +={ click-wrap licenses +3 ; + context, cultural : + see culture cultural enclosure +3 ; + licensing : + shrink-wrap (contractual enclosure) +3 ; + proprietary rights : + contractual enclosure +3 ; + shrink-wrap licenses +3 ; + UCITA (Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act) +3 +} + +Practically all academic commentators on copyright law--whether critics or +proponents of this provision or that--understand copyright to be a public +policy accommodation between the goal of providing incentives to creators and +the goal of providing efficiently priced access to both users and downstream +creators. Ideally, it takes into consideration the social costs and benefits of +one settlement or another, and seeks to implement an optimal tradeoff. +Beginning in the 1980s, software and other digital goods were sold with +"shrink-wrap licenses." These were licenses to use the software, which +purported ,{[pg 445]}, to apply to mass-market buyers because the buyer would +be deemed to have accepted the contract by opening the packaging of the +software. These practices later transmuted online into click-wrap licenses +familiar to most anyone who has installed software and had to click "I Agree" +once or more before the software would install. Contracts are not bound by the +balance struck in public law. Licensors can demand, and licensees can agree to, +almost any terms. Among the terms most commonly inserted in such licenses that +restrict the rights of users are prohibitions on reverse engineering, and +restrictions on the use of raw data in compilations, even though copyright law +itself does not recognize rights in data. As Mark Lemley showed, most courts +prior to the mid-1990s did not enforce such terms.~{ Mark A. Lemley, +"Intellectual Property and Shrinkwrap Licenses," Southern California Law Review +68 (1995): 1239, 1248-1253. }~ Some courts refused to enforce shrink-wrap +licenses in mass-market transactions by relying on state contract law, finding +an absence of sufficient consent or an unenforceable contract of adhesion. +Others relied on federal preemption, stating that to the extent state contract +law purported to enforce a contract that prohibited fair use or otherwise +protected material in the public domain--like the raw information contained in +a report--it was preempted by federal copyright law that chose to leave this +material in the public domain, freely usable by all. In 1996, in /{ProCD v. +Zeidenberg}/, the Seventh Circuit held otherwise, arguing that private ordering +would be more efficient than a single public determination of what the right +balance was.~{ 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996). }~ +={ Lemley, Mark ; + privatization : + ProCD v. Zeidenberg +} + +The following few years saw substantial academic debate as to the desirability +of contractual opt-outs from the public policy settlement. More important, the +five years that followed saw a concerted effort to introduce a new part to the +Uniform Commercial Code (UCC)--a model commercial law that, though nonbinding, +is almost universally adopted at the state level in the United States, with +some modifications. The proposed new UCC Article 2B was to eliminate the state +law concerns by formally endorsing the use of standard shrink-wrap licenses. +The proposed article generated substantial academic and political heat, +ultimately being dropped by the American Law Institute, one of the main +sponsors of the UCC. A model law did ultimately pass under the name of the +Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), as part of a less +universally adopted model law effort. Only two states adopted the law--Virginia +and Maryland. A number of other states then passed anti-UCITA laws, which gave +their residents a safe harbor from having UCITA applied to their click-wrap +transactions. +={ UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) } + +The reason that ProCD and UCITA generated so much debate was the concern that +click-wrap licenses were operating in an inefficient market, and ,{[pg 446]}, +that they were, as a practical matter, displacing the policy balance +represented by copyright law. Mass-market transactions do not represent a +genuine negotiated agreement, in the individualized case, as to what the +efficient contours of permissions are for the given user and the given +information product. They are, rather, generalized judgments by the vendor as +to what terms are most attractive for it that the market will bear. Unlike +rival economic goods, information goods sold at a positive price in reliance on +copyright are, by definition, priced above marginal cost. The information +itself is nonrival. Its marginal cost is zero. Any transaction priced above the +cost of communication is evidence of some market power in the hands of the +provider, used to price based on value and elasticity of demand, not on +marginal cost. Moreover, the vast majority of users are unlikely to pay close +attention to license details they consider to be boilerplate. This means there +is likely significant information shortfall on the part of consumers as to the +content of the licenses, and the sensitivity of demand to overreaching contract +terms is likely low. This is not because consumers are stupid or slothful, but +because the probability that either they would be able to negotiate out from +under a standard provision, or a court would enforce against them a truly +abusive provision is too low to justify investing in reading and arguing about +contracts for all but their largest purchases. In combination, these +considerations make it difficult to claim as a general matter that privately +set licensing terms would be more efficient than the publicly set background +rules of copyright law.~{ For a more complete technical explanation, see Yochai +Benkler, "An Unhurried View of Private Ordering in Information Transactions," +Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000): 2063. }~ The combination of mass-market +contracts enforced by technical controls over use of digital materials, which +in turn are protected by the DMCA, threatens to displace the statutorily +defined public domain with a privately defined realm of permissible use.~{ +James Boyle, "Cruel, Mean or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination +and Digital Intellectual Property," Vanderbilt Law Review 53 (2000); Julie E. +Cohen, "Copyright and the Jurisprudence of Self-Help," Berkeley Technology Law +Journal 13 (1998): 1089; Niva Elkin-Koren, "Copyright Policy and the Limits of +Freedom of Contract," Berkeley Technology Law Journal 12 (1997): 93. }~ This +privately defined settlement would be arrived at in non-negotiated mass-market +transactions, in the presence of significant information asymmetries between +consumers and vendors, and in the presence of systematic market power of at +least some degree. + +3~ Trademark Dilution +={ branding : + trademark dilutation +4 ; + dilutation of trademarks +4 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + trademark dilutation +4 ; + proprietary rights : + trademark dilutation +4 ; + trademark dilutation +4 +} + +As discussed in chapter 8, the centrality of commercial interaction to social +existence in early-twenty-first-century America means that much of our core +iconography is commercial in origin and owned as a trademark. Mickey, Barbie, +Playboy, or Coke are important signifiers of meaning in contemporary culture. +Using iconography is a central means of creating rich, culturally situated +expressions of one's understanding of the world. Yet, as Boyle ,{[pg 447]}, has +pointed out, now that we treat flag burning as a constitutionally protected +expression, trademark law has made commercial icons the sole remaining +venerable objects in our law. Trademark law permits the owners of culturally +significant images to control their use, to squelch criticism, and to define +exclusively the meaning that the symbols they own carry. +={ Boyle, James } + +Three factors make trademark protection today more of a concern as a source of +enclosure than it might have been in the past. First is the introduction of the +federal Anti-Dilution Act of 1995. Second is the emergence of the brand as the +product, as opposed to a signifier for the product. Third is the substantial +reduction in search and other information costs created by the Net. Together, +these three factors mean that owned symbols are becoming increasingly important +as cultural signifiers, are being enclosed much more extensively than before +precisely as cultural signifiers, and with less justification beyond the fact +that trademarks, like all exclusive rights, are economically valuable to their +owners. +={ Antidilutation Act of 1995 +2 } + +In 1995, Congress passed the first federal Anti-Dilution Act. Though treated as +a trademark protection law, and codifying doctrines that arose in trademark +common law, antidilution is a fundamentally different economic right than +trademark protection. Traditional trademark protection is focused on preventing +consumer confusion. It is intended to assure that consumers can cheaply tell +the difference between one product and another, and to give producers +incentives to create consistent quality products that can be associated with +their trademark. Trademark law traditionally reflected these interests. +Likelihood of consumer confusion was the sine qua non of trademark +infringement. If I wanted to buy a Coca-Cola, I did not want to have to make +sure I was not buying a different dark beverage in a red can called Coca-Gola. +Infringement actions were mostly limited to suits among competitors in similar +relevant markets, where confusion could occur. So, while trademark law +restricted how certain symbols could be used, it was so only as among +competitors, and only as to the commercial, not cultural, meaning of their +trademark. The antidilution law changes the most relevant factors. It is +intended to protect famous brand names, irrespective of a likelihood of +confusion, from being diluted by use by others. The association between a +particular corporation and a symbol is protected for its value to that +corporation, irrespective of the use. It no longer regulates solely competitors +to the benefit of competition. It prohibits many more possible uses of the +symbol than was the case under traditional trademark law. It applies even to +noncommercial users where there is no possibility of confusion. The emergence +,{[pg 448]}, of this antidilution theory of exclusivity is particularly +important as brands have become the product itself, rather than a marker for +the product. Nike and Calvin Klein are examples: The product sold in these +cases is not a better shoe or shirt--the product sold is the brand. And the +brand is associated with a cultural and social meaning that is developed +purposefully by the owner of the brand so that people will want to buy it. This +development explains why dilution has become such a desirable exclusive right +for those who own it. It also explains the cost of denying to anyone the right +to use the symbol, now a signifier of general social meaning, in ways that do +not confuse consumers in the traditional trademark sense, but provide cultural +criticism of the message signified. + +Ironically, the increase in the power of trademark owners to control uses of +their trademark comes at a time when its functional importance as a mechanism +for reducing search costs is declining. Traditional trademark's most important +justification was that it reduced information collection costs and thereby +facilitated welfare-enhancing trade. In the context of the Internet, this +function is significantly less important. General search costs are lower. +Individual items in commerce can provide vastly greater amounts of information +about their contents and quality. Users can use machine processing to search +and sift through this information and to compare views and reviews of specific +items. Trademark has become less, rather than more, functionally important as a +mechanism for dealing with search costs. When we move in the next few years to +individual-item digital marking, such as with RFID (radio frequency +identification) tags, all the relevant information about contents, origin, and +manufacture down to the level of the item, as opposed to the product line, will +be readily available to consumers in real space, by scanning any given item, +even if it is not otherwise marked at all. In this setting, where the +information qualities of trademarks will significantly decline, the +antidilution law nonetheless assures that owners can control the increasingly +important cultural meaning of trademarks. Trademark, including dilution, is +subject to a fair use exception like that of copyright. For the same reasons as +operated in copyright, however, the presence of such a doctrine only +ameliorates, but does not solve, the limits that a broad exclusive right places +on the capacity of nonmarket-oriented creative uses of materials--in this case, +culturally meaningful symbols. ,{[pg 449]}, + +3~ Database Protection +={ database protection +3 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + database protection +3 ; + proprietary rights : + database protection +3 ; + raw data : + database protection +3 +} + +In 1991, in /{Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co.}/, the Supreme +Court held that raw facts in a compilation, or database, were not covered by +the Copyright Act. The constitutional clause that grants Congress the power to +create exclusive rights for authors, the Court held, required that works +protected were original with the author. The creative element of the +compilation--its organization or selectivity, for example, if sufficiently +creative-- could therefore be protected under copyright law. However, the raw +facts compiled could not. Copying data from an existing compilation was +therefore not "piracy"; it was not unfair or unjust; it was purposefully +privileged in order to advance the goals of the constitutional power to make +exclusive grants--the advancement of progress and creative uses of the data.~{ +/{Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc.}/, 499 U.S. +340, 349-350 (1991). }~ A few years later, the European Union passed a Database +Directive, which created a discrete and expansive right in raw data +compilations.~{ Directive No. 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases, +1996 O.J. (L 77) 20. }~ The years since the Court decided Feist have seen +repeated efforts by the larger players in the database publishing industry to +pass similar legislation in the United States that would, as a practical +matter, overturn Feist and create exclusive private rights in the raw data in +compilations. "Harmonization" with Europe has been presented as a major +argument in favor of this law. Because the Feist Court based its decision on +limits to the constitutional power to create exclusive rights in raw +information, efforts to protect database providers mostly revolved around an +unfair competition law, based in the Commerce Clause, rather than on precisely +replicating the European right. In fact, however, the primary draft that has +repeatedly been introduced walks, talks, and looks like a property right. +={ Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co. +1 ; + Database Directive +1 +} + +Sustained and careful work, most prominently by Jerome Reichman and Paul Uhlir, +has shown that the proposed database right is unnecessary and detrimental, +particularly to scientific research.~{ J. H. Reichman and Paul F. Uhlir, +"Database Protection at the Crossroads: Recent Developments and Their Impact on +Science and Technology," Berkeley Technology Law Journal 14 (1999): 793; +Stephen M. Maurer and Suzanne Scotchmer, "Database Protection: Is It Broken and +Should We Fix It?" Science 284 (1999): 1129. }~ Perhaps no example explains +this point better than the "natural experiment" that Boyle has pointed to, and +which the United States and Europe have been running over the past decade or +so. The United States has formally had no exclusive right in data since 1991. +Europe has explicitly had such a right since 1996. One would expect that both +the European Union and the United States would look to the comparative effects +on the industries in both places when the former decides whether to keep its +law, and the latter decides whether to adopt one like it. The evidence is +reasonably consistent and persuasive. Following the Feist decision, the U.S. +database industry continued to grow steadily, without ,{[pg 450]}, a blip. The +"removal" of the property right in data by Feist had no effect on growth. +Europe at the time had a much smaller database industry than did the United +States, as measured by the number of databases and database companies. Maurer, +Hugenholz, and Onsrud showed that, following the introduction of the European +sui generis right, each country saw a one-time spike in the number of databases +and new database companies, but this was followed within a year or two by a +decline to the levels seen before the Directive, which have been fairly +stagnant since the early 1990s.~{ See Stephen M. Maurer, P. Bernt Hugenholtz, +and Harlan J. Onsrud, "Europe's Database Experiment," Science 294 (2001): 789; +Stephen M. Maurer, "Across Two Worlds: Database Protection in the U.S. and +Europe," paper prepared for Industry Canada's Conference on Intellectual +Property and Innovation in the KnowledgeBased Economy, May 23-24 2001. }~ +Another study, more specifically oriented toward the appropriate policy for +government-collected data, compared the practices of Europe--where government +agencies are required to charge what the market will bear for access to data +they collect--and the United States, where the government makes data it +collects freely available at the cost of reproduction, as well as for free on +the Web. That study found that the secondary uses of data, including +commercial- and noncommercial-sector uses--such as, for example, markets in +commercial risk management and meteorological services--contributed vastly more +to the economy of the United States because of secondary uses of freely +accessed government weather data than equivalent market sectors in Europe were +able to contribute to their respective economies.~{ Peter Weiss, "Borders in +Cyberspace: Conflicting Public Sector Information Policies and their Economic +Impacts" (U.S. Dept. of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric +Administration, February 2002). }~ The evidence suggests, then, that the +artificial imposition of rents for proprietary data is suppressing growth in +European market-based commercial services and products that rely on access to +data, relative to the steady growth in the parallel U.S. markets, where no such +right exists. It is trivial to see that a cost structure that suppresses growth +among market-based entities that would at least partially benefit from being +able to charge more for their outputs would have an even more deleterious +effect on nonmarket information production and exchange activities, which are +burdened by the higher costs and gain no benefit from the proprietary rights. +={ Reichman, Jerome ; + Uhlir, Paul +} + +There is, then, mounting evidence that rights in raw data are unnecessary to +create a basis for a robust database industry. Database manufacturers rely on +relational contracts--subscriptions to continuously updated databases-- rather +than on property-like rights. The evidence suggests that, in fact, exclusive +rights are detrimental to various downstream industries that rely on access to +data. Despite these fairly robust observations from a decade of experience, +there continues to be a threat that such a law will pass in the U.S. Congress. +This continued effort to pass such a law underscores two facts. First, much of +the legislation in this area reflects rent seeking, rather than reasoned +policy. Second, the deeply held belief that "more property-like ,{[pg 451]}, +rights will lead to more productivity" is hard to shake, even in the teeth of +both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence to the contrary. + +3~ Linking and Trespass to Chattels: New Forms of Information Exclusivity +={ database protection : + trespass to chattels +4 ; + eBay v. Bidder's Edge +4 ; + hyperlinking on the Web : + as trespass +4 ; + Internet : + linking as trespass +4 ; + linking on the Web : + as trespass +4 ; + network topology : + linking as trespass +4 ; + proprietary rights : + trespass to chattels +4 ; + referencing on the Web : + linking as trespass +4 ; + structure of network : + linking as trespass +4 ; + topology, network : + linking as trespass +4 ; + trespass to chattels +4 ; + Web : + linking as trespass +4 ; + wireless communications : + linking as trespass +4 +} + +Some litigants have turned to state law remedies to protect their data +indirectly, by developing a common-law, trespass-to-server form of action. The +primary instance of this trend is /{eBay v. Bidder's Edge}/, a suit by the +leading auction site against an aggregator site. Aggregators collect +information about what is being auctioned in multiple locations, and make the +information about the items available in one place so that a user can search +eBay and other auction sites simultaneously. The eventual bidding itself is +done on the site that the item's owner chose to make his or her item available, +under the terms required by that site. The court held that the automated +information collection process--running a computer program that automatically +requests information from the server about what is listed on it, called a +spider or a bot--was a "trespass to chattels."~{ /{eBay, Inc. v. Bidder's Edge, +Inc.}/, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13326 (N.D.Cal. 2000). }~ This ancient form of +action, originally intended to apply to actual taking or destruction of goods, +mutated into a prohibition on unlicensed automated searching. The injunction +led to Bidder's Edge closing its doors before the Ninth Circuit had an +opportunity to review the decision. A common-law decision like /{eBay v. +Bidder's Edge}/ creates a common-law exclusive private right in information by +the back door. In principle, the information itself is still free of property +rights. Reading it mechanically--an absolute necessity given the volume of the +information and its storage on magnetic media accessible only by mechanical +means--can, however, be prohibited as "trespass." The practical result would be +equivalent to some aspects of a federal exclusive private right in raw data, +but without the mitigating attributes of any exceptions that would be directly +introduced into legislation. It is still too early to tell whether cases such +as these ultimately will be considered preempted by federal copyright law,~{ +The preemption model could be similar to the model followed by the Second +Circuit in /{NBA v. Motorola}/, 105 F.3d 841 (2d Cir. 1997), which restricted +state misappropriation claims to narrow bounds delimited by federal policy +embedded in the Copyright Act. This might require actual proof that the bots +have stopped service, or threaten the service's very existence. }~ or perhaps +would be limited by first amendment law on the model of /{New York Times v. +Sullivan}/.~{ /{New York Times v. Sullivan}/, 376 U.S. 254, 266 (1964). }~ + +Beyond the roundabout exclusivity in raw data, trespass to chattels presents +one instance of a broader question that is arising in application of both +common-law and statutory provisions. At stake is the legal control over +information about information, like linking and other statements people make +about the availability and valence of some described information. Linking--the +mutual pointing of many documents to each other--is the very ,{[pg 452]}, core +idea of the World Wide Web. In a variety of cases, parties have attempted to +use law to control the linking practices of others. The basic structure of +these cases is that A wants to tell users M and N about information presented +by B. The meaning of a link is, after all, "here you can read information +presented by someone other than me that I deem interesting or relevant to you, +my reader." Someone, usually B, but possibly some other agent C, wants to +control what M and N know or do with regard to the information B is presenting. +B (or C) then sues A to prevent A from linking to the information on B's site. + +The simplest instance of such a case involved a service that Microsoft +offered--sidewalk.com--that provided access to, among other things, information +on events in various cities. If a user wanted a ticket to the event, the +sidewalk site linked that user directly to a page on ticketmaster.com where the +user could buy a ticket. Ticketmaster objected to this practice, preferring +instead that sidewalk.com link to its home page, in order to expose the users +to all the advertising and services Ticketmaster provided, rather than solely +to the specific service sought by the user referred by sidewalk .com. At stake +in these linking cases is who will control the context in which certain +information is presented. If deep linking is prohibited, Ticketmaster will +control the context--the other movies or events available to be seen, their +relative prominence, reviews, and so forth. The right to control linking then +becomes a right to shape the meaning and relevance of one's statements for +others. If the choice between Ticketmaster and Microsoft as controllers of the +context of information may seem of little normative consequence, it is +important to recognize that the right to control linking could easily apply to +a local library, or church, or a neighbor as they participate in peer-producing +relevance and accreditation of the information to which they link. +={ Microsoft Corporation : + sidewalk.com ; + sidewalk.com ; + Ticketmaster +} + +The general point is this: On the Internet, there are a variety of ways that +some people can let others know about information that exists somewhere on the +Web. In doing so, these informers loosen someone else's control over the +described information--be it the government, a third party interested in +limiting access to the information, or the person offering the information. In +a series of instances over the past half decade or more we have seen attempts +by people who control certain information to limit the ability of others to +challenge that control by providing information about the information. These +are not cases in which a person without access to information is seeking +affirmative access from the "owner" of information. These are ,{[pg 453]}, +cases where someone who dislikes what another is saying about particular +information is seeking the aid of law to control what other parties can say to +each other about that information. Understood in these terms, the restrictive +nature of these legal moves in terms of how they burden free speech in general, +and impede the freedom of anyone, anywhere, to provide information, relevance, +and accreditation, becomes clear. The /{eBay v. Bidder's Edge}/ case suggests +one particular additional aspect. While much of the political attention focuses +on formal "intellectual property"?style statutes passed by Congress, in the +past few years we have seen that state law and common-law doctrine are also +being drafted to create areas of exclusivity and boundaries on the free use of +information. These efforts are often less well informed, and because they were +arrived at ad hoc, often without understanding that they are actually forms of +regulating information production and exchange, they include none of the +balancing privileges or limitations of rights that are so common in the formal +statutory frameworks. + +3~ International "Harmonization" +={ global development : + international harmonization +5 ; + harmonization, international +5 ; + international harmonization +5 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + international harmonization +5 ; + policy : + international harmonization +5 ; + proprietary rights : + international harmonization +5 +} + +One theme that has repeatedly appeared in the discussion of databases, the +DMCA, and term extension, is the way in which "harmonization" and +internationalization of exclusive rights are used to ratchet up the degree of +exclusivity afforded rights holders. It is trite to point out that the most +advanced economies in the world today are information and culture exporters. +This is true of both the United States and Europe. Some of the cultural export +industries--most notably Hollywood, the recording industry, some segments of +the software industry, and pharmaceuticals--have business models that rely on +the assertion of exclusive rights in information. Both the United States and +the European Union, therefore, have spent the past decade and a half pushing +for ever-more aggressive and expansive exclusive rights in international +agreements and for harmonization of national laws around the world toward the +highest degrees of protection. Chapter 9 discusses in some detail why this was +not justified as a matter of economic rationality, and why it is deleterious as +a matter of justice. Here, I only note the characteristic of +internationalization and harmonization as a one-way ratchet toward +ever-expanding exclusivity. + +Take a simple provision like the term of copyright protection. In the mid1990s, +Europe was providing for many works (but not all) a term of life of the author +plus seventy years, while the United States provided exclusivity for the life +of the author plus fifty. A central argument for the Sonny Bono ,{[pg 454]}, +Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was to "harmonize" with Europe. In the +debates leading up to the law, one legislator actually argued that if our +software manufacturers had a shorter term of copyright, they would be +disadvantaged relative to the European firms. This argument assumes, of course, +that U.S. software firms could stay competitive in the software business by +introducing nothing new in software for seventy-five years, and that it would +be the loss of revenues from products that had not been sufficiently updated +for seventy-five years to warrant new copyright that would place them at a +disadvantage. The newly extended period created by the Sonny Bono Copyright +Term Extension Act is, however, longer in some cases than the protection +afforded in Europe. Sound recordings, for example, are protected for fifty +years in Europe. The arguments are now flowing in the opposite +direction--harmonization toward the American standard for all kinds of works, +for fear that the recordings of Elvis or the Beatles will fall into the +European public domain within a few paltry years. "Harmonization" is never +invoked to de-escalate exclusivity--for example, as a reason to eliminate the +European database right in order to harmonize with the obviously successful +American model of no protection, or to shorten the length of protection for +sound recordings in the United States. +={ Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 ; + term of copyright +1 ; + trade policy +1 +} + +International agreements also provide a fertile forum for ratcheting up +protection. Lobbies achieve a new right in a given jurisdiction--say an +extension of term, or a requirement to protect technological protection +measures on the model of the DMCA. The host country, usually the United States, +the European Union, or both, then present the new right for treaty approval, as +the United States did in the context of the WIPO treaties in the mid-1990s. +Where this fails, the United States has more recently begun to negotiate +bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) with individual nations. The structure +of negotiation is roughly as follows: The United States will say to Thailand, +or India, or whoever the trading partner is: If you would like preferential +treatment of your core export, say textiles or rice, we would like you to +include this provision or that in your domestic copyright or patent law. Once +this is agreed to in a number of bilateral FTAs, the major IP exporters can +come back to the multilateral negotiations and claim an emerging international +practice, which may provide more exclusivity than their then applicable +domestic law. With changes to international treaties in hand, domestic +resistance to legislation can be overcome, as we saw in the United States when +the WIPO treaties were used to push through Congress the DMCA anticircumvention +provisions that had failed to pass two years ,{[pg 455]}, earlier. Any domestic +efforts to reverse and limit exclusivity then have to overcome substantial +hurdles placed by the international agreements, like the agreement on Trade +Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). The difficulty of amending +international agreements to permit a nation to decrease the degree of +exclusivity it grants copyright or patent holders becomes an important one-way +ratchet, preventing de-escalation. + +3~ Countervailing Forces + +As this very brief overview demonstrates, most of the formal institutional +moves at the content layer are pushing toward greater scope and reach for +exclusive rights in the universe of existing information, knowledge, and +cultural resources. The primary countervailing forces in the content layer are +similar to the primary countervailing forces in the logical layer--that is, +social and cultural push-back against exclusivity. Recall how central free +software and the open, cooperative, nonproprietary standard-setting processes +are to the openness of the logical layer. In the content layer, we are seeing +the emergence of a culture of free creation and sharing developing as a +countervailing force to the increasing exclusivity generated by the public, +formal lawmaking system. The Public Library of Science discussed in chapter 9 +is an initiative of scientists who, frustrated with the extraordinarily high +journal costs for academic journals, have begun to develop systems for +scientific publication whose outputs are immediately and freely available +everywhere. The Creative Commons is an initiative to develop a series of +licenses that allow individuals who create information, knowledge, and culture +to attach simple licenses that define what others may, or may not, do with +their work. The innovation represented by these licenses relative to the +background copyright system is that they make it trivial for people to give +others permission to use their creations. Before their introduction, there were +no widely available legal forms to make it clear to the world that it is free +to use my work, with or without restrictions. More important than the +institutional innovation of Creative Commons is its character as a social +movement. Under the moniker of the "free culture" movement, it aims to +encourage widespread adoption of sharing one's creations with others. What a +mature movement like the free software movement, or nascent movements like the +free culture movement and the scientists' movement for open publication and +open archiving are aimed at is the creation of a legally selfreinforcing domain +of open cultural sharing. They do not negate propertylike rights in +information, knowledge, and culture. Rather, they represent a ,{[pg 456]}, +self-conscious choice by their participants to use copyrights, patents, and +similar rights to create a domain of resources that are free to all for common +use. +={ Creative Commons initiative } + +Alongside these institutionally instantiated moves to create a selfreinforcing +set of common resources, there is a widespread, global culture of ignoring +exclusive rights. It is manifest in the widespread use of file-sharing software +to share copyrighted materials. It is manifest in the widespread acclaim that +those who crack copy-protection mechanisms receive. This culture has developed +a rhetoric of justification that focuses on the overreaching of the copyright +industries and on the ways in which the artists themselves are being exploited +by rights holders. While clearly illegal in the United States, there are places +where courts have sporadically treated participation in these practices as +copying for private use, which is exempted in some countries, including a +number of European countries. In any event the sheer size of this movement and +its apparent refusal to disappear in the face of lawsuits and public debate +present a genuine countervailing pressure against the legal tightening of +exclusivity. As a practical matter, efforts to impose perfect private ordering +and to limit access to the underlying digital bits in movies and songs through +technical means have largely failed under the sustained gaze of the community +of computer scientists and hackers who have shown its flaws time and again. +Moreover, the mechanisms developed in response to a large demand for infringing +file-sharing utilities were the very mechanisms that were later available to +the Swarthmore students to avoid having the Diebold files removed from the +Internet and that are shared by other censorship-resistant publication systems. +The tools that challenge the "entertainment-as-finished-good" business model +are coming into much wider and unquestionably legitimate use. Litigation may +succeed in dampening use of these tools for copying, but also creates a +heightened political awareness of information-production regulation. The same +students involved in the Diebold case, radicalized by the lawsuit, began a +campus "free culture" movement. It is difficult to predict how this new +political awareness will play out in a political arena--the making of +copyrights, patents, and similar exclusive rights--that for decades has +functioned as a technical backwater that could never invoke a major newspaper +editorial, and was therefore largely controlled by the industries whose rents +it secured. ,{[pg 457]}, + +2~ THE PROBLEM OF SECURITY +={ commercial model of communication : + security-related policy +4 ; + free software : + security considerations +4 ; + industrial model of communication : + security-related policy +4 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + security-related policy +4 ; + open-source software : + security considerations +4 ; + policy : + security-related +4 ; + security-related policy +4 ; + software, open-source : + security considerations +4 ; + traditional model of communication : + security-related policy +4 +} + +This book as a whole is dedicated to the emergence of commons-based information +production and its implications for liberal democracies. Of necessity, the +emphasis of this chapter too is on institutional design questions that are +driven by the conflict between the industrial and networked information +economies. Orthogonal to this conflict, but always relevant to it, is the +perennial concern of communications policy with security and crime. Throughout +much of the 1990s, this concern manifested primarily as a conflict over +encryption. The "crypto-wars," as they were called, revolved around the FBI's +efforts to force industry to adopt technology that had a backdoor-- then called +the "Clipper Chip"--that would facilitate wiretapping and investigation. After +retarding encryption adoption in the United States for almost a decade, the +federal government ultimately decided that trying to hobble security in most +American systems (that is, forcing everyone to adopt weaker encryption) in +order to assure that the FBI could better investigate the failures of security +that would inevitably follow use of such weak encryption was a bad idea. The +fact that encryption research and business was moving overseas--giving +criminals alternative sources for obtaining excellent encryption tools while +the U.S. industry fell behind--did not help the FBI's cause. The same impulse +is to some extent at work again, with the added force of the post-9/11 security +mind-set. +={ encryption +1 ; + file-sharing networks : + security considerations +1 +} + +One concern is that open wireless networks are available for criminals to hide +their tracks--the criminal uses someone else's Internet connection using their +unencrypted WiFi access point, and when the authorities successfully track the +Internet address back to the WiFi router, they find an innocent neighbor rather +than the culprit. This concern has led to some proposals that manufacturers of +WiFi routers set their defaults so that, out of the box, the router is +encrypted. Given how "sticky" defaults are in technology products, this would +have enormously deleterious effects on the development of open wireless +networks. Another concern is that free and open-source software reveals its +design to anyone who wants to read it. This makes it easier to find flaws that +could be exploited by attackers and nearly impossible to hide purposefully +designed weaknesses, such as susceptibility to wiretapping. A third is that a +resilient, encrypted, anonymous peer-to-peer network, like FreeNet or some of +the major p2p architectures, offers the criminals or terrorists communications +systems that are, for all practical purposes, beyond the control of law +enforcement and counterterrorism efforts. To the extent ,{[pg 458]}, that they +take this form, security concerns tend to support the agenda of the proprietary +producers. +={ open wireless networks : + security +1 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology : + peer-to-peer networks +1 ; + p2p networks : + security considerations ; + peer-to-peer networks : + security considerations ; + network topology : + peer-to-peer networks ; + structure of network : + peer-to-peer networks ; + topology, network : + peer-to-peer networks +} + +However, security concerns need not support proprietary architectures and +practices. On the wireless front, there is a very wide range of anonymization +techniques available for criminals and terrorists who use the Internet to cover +their tracks. The marginally greater difficulty that shutting off access to +WiFi routers would impose on determined criminals bent on covering their tracks +is unlikely to be worth the loss of an entire approach toward constructing an +additional last-mile loop for local telecommunications. One of the core +concerns of security is the preservation of network capacity as a critical +infrastructure. Another is assuring communications for critical security +personnel. Open wireless networks that are built from ad hoc, self-configuring +mesh networks are the most robust design for a local communications loop +currently available. It is practically impossible to disrupt local +communications in such a network, because these networks are designed so that +each router will automatically look for the next available neighbor with which +to make a network. These systems will self-heal in response to any attack on +communications infrastructure as a function of their basic normal operational +design. They can then be available both for their primary intended critical +missions and for first responders as backup data networks, even when main +systems have been lost--as they were, in fact, lost in downtown Manhattan after +the World Trade Center attack. To imagine that security is enhanced by +eliminating the possibility that such a backup local communications network +will emerge in exchange for forcing criminals to use more anonymizers and proxy +servers instead of a neighbor's WiFi router requires a very narrow view of +security. Similarly, the same ease of study that makes flaws in free software +observable to potential terrorists or criminals makes them available to the +community of developers, who quickly shore up the defenses of the programs. +Over the past decade, security flaws in proprietary programs, which are not +open to inspection by such large numbers of developers and testers, have been +much more common than security breaches in free software. Those who argue that +proprietary software is more secure and allows for better surveillance seem to +be largely rehearsing the thought process that typified the FBI's position in +the Clipper Chip debate. +={ capacity : + securing +} + +More fundamentally, the security concerns represent a lack of ease with the +great freedom enabled by the networked information environment. Some of the +individuals who can now do more alone and in association with others want to do +harm to the United States in particular, and to advanced liberal ,{[pg 459]}, +market-based democracies more generally. Others want to trade Nazi memorabilia +or child pornography. Just as the Internet makes it harder for authoritarian +regimes to control their populations, so too the tremendous openness and +freedom of the networked environment requires new ways of protecting open +societies from destructive individuals and groups. And yet, particularly in +light of the systematic and significant benefits of the networked information +economy and its sharing-based open production practices to the core political +commitments of liberal democracies, preserving security in these societies by +eliminating the technologies that can support improvements in the very freedom +being protected is perverse. Given Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, however, +squelching the emergence of an open networked environment and economy hardly +seems to be the most glaring of self-defeating moves in the war to protect +freedom and human dignity in liberal societies. It is too early to tell whether +the security urge will ultimately weigh in on the side of the industrial +information economy incumbents, or will instead follow the path of the +crypto-wars, and lead security concerns to support the networked information +economy's ability to provide survivable, redundant, and effective critical +infrastructures and information production and exchange capabilities. If the +former, this impulse may well present a formidable obstacle to the emergence of +an open networked information environment. ,{[pg 460]}, + +1~12 Chapter 12 - Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy +={ commercial model of communication : + stakes of information policy +21 ; + industrial model of communication : + stakes of information policy +21 ; + institutional ecology of digital environment : + stakes of information policy +21 ; + policy : + stakes of +21 ; + stakes of information policy +21 ; + traditional model of communication : + stakes of information policy +21 +} + +Complex modern societies have developed in the context of mass media and +industrial information economy. Our theories of growth and innovation assume +that industrial models of innovation are dominant. Our theories about how +effective communications in complex societies are achieved center on +market-based, proprietary models, with a professional commercial core and a +dispersed, relatively passive periphery. Our conceptions of human agency, +collective deliberation, and common culture in these societies are embedded in +the experience and practice of capital-intensive information and cultural +production practices that emphasize proprietary, market-based models and +starkly separate production from consumption. Our institutional frameworks +reflect these conceptual models of information production and exchange, and +have come, over the past few years, to enforce these conceptions as practiced +reality, even when they need not be. +={ proprietary rights : + dominance of, overstated +2 +} + +This book began with four economic observations. First, the baseline conception +that proprietary strategies are dominant in our information production system +is overstated. The education system, ,{[pg 461]}, from kindergarten to doctoral +programs, is thoroughly infused with nonproprietary motivations, social +relations, and organizational forms. The arts and sciences are replete with +voluntarism and actions oriented primarily toward social-psychological +motivations rather than market appropriation. Political and theological +discourses are thoroughly based in nonmarket forms and motivations. Perhaps +most surprisingly, even industrial research and development, while market +oriented, is in most industries not based on proprietary claims of exclusion, +but on improved efficiencies and customer relations that can be captured and +that drive innovation, without need for proprietary strategies of +appropriation. Despite the continued importance of nonproprietary production in +information as a practical matter, the conceptual nuance required to +acknowledge its importance ran against the grain of the increasingly dominant +thesis that property and markets are the roots of all growth and productivity. +Partly as a result of the ideological and military conflict with Communism, +partly as a result of the theoretical elegance of a simple and tractable +solution, policy makers and their advisers came to believe toward the end of +the twentieth century that property in information and innovation was like +property in wristwatches and automobiles. The more clearly you defined and +enforced it, and the closer it was to perfect exclusive rights, the more +production you would get. The rising dominance of this conceptual model +combined with the rent-seeking lobbying of industrialmodel producers to +underwrite a fairly rapid and substantial tipping of the institutional ecology +of innovation and information production in favor of proprietary models. The +U.S. patent system was overhauled in the early 1980s, in ways that strengthened +and broadened the reach and scope of exclusivity. Copyright was vastly expanded +in the mid-1970s, and again in the latter 1990s. Trademark was vastly expanded +in the 1990s. Other associated rights were created and strengthened throughout +these years. +={ cost : + proprietary models +3 ; + efficiency of information regulation +3 ; + inefficiency of information regulation +3 ; + proprietary rights, inefficiency of +3 ; + regulating information, efficiency of +3 +} + +The second economic point is that these expansions of rights operate, as a +practical matter, as a tax on nonproprietary models of production in favor of +the proprietary models. It makes access to information resources more expensive +for all, while improving appropriability only for some. Introducing software +patents, for example, may help some of the participants in the onethird of the +software industry that depends on sales of finished software items. But it +clearly raises the costs without increasing benefits for the twothirds of the +industry that is service based and relational. As a practical matter, the +substantial increases in the scope and reach of exclusive rights have adversely +affected the operating conditions of nonproprietary producers. ,{[pg 462]}, + +Universities have begun to seek patents and pay royalties, impeding the sharing +of information that typified past practice. Businesses that do not actually +rely on asserting patents for their business model have found themselves +amassing large patent portfolios at great expense, simply to fend off the +threat of suit by others who would try to hold them up. Older documentary +films, like Eyes on the Prize, have been hidden from public view for years, +because of the cost and complexity of clearing the rights to every piece of +footage or trademark that happens to have been captured by the camera. New +documentaries require substantially greater funding than would have been +necessary to pay for their creation, because of the costs of clearing newly +expanded rights. + +The third economic observation is that the basic technologies of information +processing, storage, and communication have made nonproprietary models more +attractive and effective than was ever before possible. Ubiquitous low-cost +processors, storage media, and networked connectivity have made it practically +feasible for individuals, alone and in cooperation with others, to create and +exchange information, knowledge, and culture in patterns of social reciprocity, +redistribution, and sharing, rather than proprietary, market-based production. +The basic material capital requirements of information production are now in +the hands of a billion people around the globe who are connected to each other +more or less seamlessly. These material conditions have given individuals a new +practical freedom of action. If a person or group wishes to start an +information-production project for any reason, that group or person need not +raise significant funds to acquire the necessary capital. In the past, the +necessity to obtain funds constrained information producers to find a +market-based model to sustain the investment, or to obtain government funding. +The funding requirements, in turn, subordinated the producers either to the +demands of markets, in particular to mass-market appeal, or to the agendas of +state bureaucracies. The networked information environment has permitted the +emergence to much greater significance of the nonmarket sector, the nonprofit +sector, and, most radically, of individuals. +={ cost : + technologies ; + peer production +2 ; + technology : + costs of +} + +The fourth and final economic observation describes and analyzes the rise of +peer production. This cluster of phenomena, from free and open-source software +to /{Wikipedia}/ and SETI@Home, presents a stark challenge to conventional +thinking about the economics of information production. Indeed, it challenges +the economic understanding of the relative roles of marketbased and nonmarket +production more generally. It is important to see these ,{[pg 463]}, phenomena +not as exceptions, quirks, or ephemeral fads, but as indications of a +fundamental fact about transactional forms and their relationship to the +technological conditions of production. It is a mistake to think that we have +only two basic free transactional forms--property-based markets and +hierarchically organized firms. We have three, and the third is social sharing +and exchange. It is a widespread phenomenon--we live and practice it every day +with our household members, coworkers, and neighbors. We coproduce and exchange +economic goods and services. But we do not count these in the economic census. +Worse, we do not count them in our institutional design. I suggest that the +reason social production has been shunted to the peripheries of the advanced +economies is that the core economic activities of the economies of steel and +coal required large capital investments. These left markets, firms, or +state-run enterprises dominant. As the first stage of the information economy +emerged, existing information and human creativity-- each a "good" with +fundamentally different economic characteristics than coal or steel--became +important inputs. The organization of production nevertheless followed an +industrial model, because information production and exchange itself still +required high capital costs--a mechanical printing press, a broadcast station, +or later, an IBM mainframe. The current networked stage of the information +economy emerged when the barrier of high capital costs was removed. The total +capital cost of communication and creation did not necessarily decline. Capital +investment, however, became widely distributed in small dollops, owned by +individuals connected in a network. We came to a stage where the core economic +activities of the most advanced economies--the production and processing of +information--could be achieved by pooling physical capital owned by widely +dispersed individuals and groups, who have purchased the capital means for +personal, household, and small-business use. Then, human creativity and +existing information were left as the main remaining core inputs. Something new +and radically different started to happen. People began to apply behaviors they +practice in their living rooms or in the elevator--"Here, let me lend you a +hand," or "What did you think of last night's speech?"--to production problems +that had, throughout the twentieth century, been solved on the model of Ford +and General Motors. The rise of peer production is neither mysterious nor +fickle when viewed through this lens. It is as rational and efficient given the +objectives and material conditions of information production at the turn of the +twenty-first century as the assembly line was for the conditions at the turn of +the twentieth. The pooling of human creativity and of ,{[pg 464]}, computation, +communication, and storage enables nonmarket motivations and relations to play +a much larger role in the production of the information environment than it has +been able to for at least decades, perhaps for as long as a century and a half. + +A genuine shift in the way we produce the information environment that we +occupy as individual agents, as citizens, as culturally embedded creatures, and +as social beings goes to the core of our basic liberal commitments. Information +and communications are core elements of autonomy and of public political +discourse and decision making. Communication is the basic unit of social +existence. Culture and knowledge, broadly conceived, form the basic frame of +reference through which we come to understand ourselves and others in the +world. For any liberal political theory--any theory that begins with a focus on +individuals and their freedom to be the authors of their own lives in +connection with others--the basic questions of how individuals and communities +come to know and evaluate are central to the project of characterizing the +normative value of institutional, social, and political systems. Independently, +in the context of an information- and innovation-centric economy, the basic +components of human development also depend on how we produce information and +innovation, and how we disseminate its implementations. The emergence of a +substantial role for nonproprietary production offers discrete strategies to +improve human development around the globe. Productivity in the information +economy can be sustained without the kinds of exclusivity that have made it +difficult for knowledge, information, and their beneficial implementations to +diffuse beyond the circles of the wealthiest nations and social groups. We can +provide a detailed and specific account of why the emergence of nonmarket, +nonproprietary production to a more significant role than it had in the +industrial information economy could offer improvements in the domains of both +freedom and justice, without sacrificing--indeed, while +improving--productivity. +={ autonomy +4 ; + individual autonomy +4 ; + information production ; + production of information +} + +From the perspective of individual autonomy, the emergence of the networked +information economy offers a series of identifiable improvements in how we +perceive the world around us, the extent to which we can affect our perceptions +of the world, the range of actions open to us and their possible outcomes, and +the range of cooperative enterprises we can seek to enter to pursue our +choices. It allows us to do more for and by ourselves. It allows us to form +loose associations with others who are interested in a particular outcome they +share with us, allowing us to provide and explore many more ,{[pg 465]}, +diverse avenues of learning and speaking than we could achieve by ourselves or +in association solely with others who share long-term strong ties. By creating +sources of information and communication facilities that no one owns or +exclusively controls, the networked information economy removes some of the +most basic opportunities for manipulation of those who depend on information +and communication by the owners of the basic means of communications and the +producers of the core cultural forms. It does not eliminate the possibility +that one person will try to act upon another as object. But it removes the +structural constraints that make it impossible to communicate at all without +being subject to such action by others. +={ networked public sphere +2 : + see also social relations and norms networked society +} + +From the perspective of democratic discourse and a participatory republic, the +networked information economy offers a genuine reorganization of the public +sphere. Except in the very early stages of a small number of today's +democracies, modern democracies have largely developed in the context of mass +media as the core of their public spheres. A systematic and broad literature +has explored the basic limitations of commercial mass media as the core of the +public sphere, as well as it advantages. The emergence of a networked public +sphere is attenuating, or even solving, the most basic failings of the +mass-mediated public sphere. It attenuates the power of the commercial +mass-media owners and those who can pay them. It provides an avenue for +substantially more diverse and politically mobilized communication than was +feasible in a commercial mass media with a small number of speakers and a vast +number of passive recipients. The views of many more individuals and +communities can be heard. Perhaps most interestingly, the phenomenon of peer +production is now finding its way into the public sphere. It is allowing +loosely affiliated individuals across the network to fulfill some of the basic +and central functions of the mass media. We are seeing the rise of nonmarket, +distributed, and collaborative investigative journalism, critical commentary, +and platforms for political mobilization and organization. We are seeing the +rise of collaborative filtering and accreditation, which allows individuals +engaged in public discourse to be their own source of deciding whom to trust +and whose words to question. +={ diversity : + fragmentation of communication +2 ; + public sphere +1 +} + +A common critique of claims that the Internet improves democracy and autonomy +is centered on information overload and fragmentation. What we have seen +emerging in the networked environment is a combination of selfconscious +peer-production efforts and emergent properties of large systems of human +beings that have avoided this unhappy fate. We have seen the adoption of a +number of practices that have made for a reasonably navigable ,{[pg 466]}, and +coherent information environment without re-creating the mass-media model. +There are organized nonmarket projects for producing filtering and +accreditation, ranging from the Open Directory Project to mailing lists to +like-minded people, like MoveOn.org. There is a widespread cultural practice of +mutual pointing and linking; a culture of "Here, see for yourself, I think this +is interesting." The basic model of observing the judgments of others as to +what is interesting and valuable, coupled with exercising one's own judgment +about who shares one's interests and whose judgment seems to be sound has +created a pattern of linking and usage of the Web and the Internet that is +substantially more ordered than a cacophonous free-for-all, and less +hierarchically organized and controlled by few than was the massmedia +environment. It turns out that we are not intellectual lemmings. Given freedom +to participate in making our own information environment, we neither descend +into Babel, nor do we replicate the hierarchies of the mass-mediated public +spheres to avoid it. +={ attention fragmentation +1 ; + Babel objection +1 ; + communities : + fragmentation of +1 ; + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + information overload and Babel objection +1 ; + norms (social) : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + regulation by social norms : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + social relations and norms : + fragmentation of communication +1 ; + culture +1 +} + +The concepts of culture and society occupy more tenuous positions in liberal +theory than autonomy and democracy. As a consequence, mapping the effects of +the changes in information production and exchange on these domains as aspects +of liberal societies is more complex. As to culture, the minimum that we can +say is that the networked information environment is rendering culture more +transparent. We all "occupy" culture; our perceptions, views, and structures of +comprehension are all always embedded in culture. And yet there are degrees to +which this fact can be rendered more or less opaque to us as inhabitants of a +culture. In the networked information environment, as individuals and groups +use their newfound autonomy to engage in personal and collective expression +through existing cultural forms, these forms become more transparent--both +through practice and through critical examination. The mass-media television +culture encouraged passive consumption of polished, finished goods. The +emergence of what might be thought of as a newly invigorated folk +culture--created by and among individuals and groups, rather than by +professionals for passive consumption-- provides both a wider set of cultural +forms and practices and a bettereducated or better-practiced community of +"readers" of culture. From the perspective of a liberal theory unwilling simply +to ignore the fact that culture structures meaning, personal values, and +political conceptions, the emergence of a more transparent and participatory +cultural production system is a clear improvement over the commercial, +professional mass culture of the twentieth century. In the domain of social +relations, the degree of autonomy and the ,{[pg 467]}, loose associations made +possible by the Internet, which play such an important role in the gains for +autonomy, democracy, and a critical culture, have raised substantial concerns +about how the networked environment will contribute to a further erosion of +community and solidarity. As with the Babel objection, however, it appears that +we are not using the Internet further to fragment our social lives. The +Internet is beginning to replace twentieth-century remote media--television and +telephone. The new patterns of use that we are observing as a result of this +partial displacement suggest that much of network use focuses on enhancing and +deepening existing real-world relations, as well as adding new online +relations. Some of the time that used to be devoted to passive reception of +standardized finished goods through a television is now reoriented toward +communicating and making together with others, in both tightly and loosely knit +social relations. Moreover, the basic experience of treating others, including +strangers, as potential partners in cooperation contributes to a thickening of +the sense of possible social bonds beyond merely co-consumers of standardized +products. Peer production can provide a new domain of reasonably thick +connection with remote others. + +The same capabilities to make information and knowledge, to innovate, and to +communicate that lie at the core of the gains in freedom in liberal societies +also underlie the primary advances I suggest are possible in terms of justice +and human development. From the perspective of a liberal conception of justice, +the possibility that more of the basic requirements of human welfare and the +capabilities necessary to be a productive, self-reliant individual are +available outside of the market insulates access to these basic requirements +and capabilities from the happenstance of wealth distribution. From a more +substantive perspective, information and innovation are central components of +all aspects of a rich meaning of human development. Information and innovation +are central to human health--in the production and use of both food and +medicines. They are central to human learning and the development of the +knowledge any individual needs to make life richer. And they are, and have for +more than fifty years been known to be, central to growth of material welfare. +Along all three of these dimensions, the emergence of a substantial sector of +nonmarket production that is not based on exclusivity and does not require +exclusion to feed its own engine contributes to global human development. The +same economic characteristics that make exclusive rights in information a tool +that imposes barriers to access in advanced economies make these rights a form +of tax on technological latecomers. ,{[pg 468]}, What most poor and +middle-income countries lack is not human creativity, but access to the basic +tools of innovation. The cost of the material requirements of innovation and +information production is declining rapidly in many domains, as more can be +done with ever-cheaper computers and communications systems. But exclusive +rights in existing innovation tools and information resources remain a +significant barrier to innovation, education, and the use of +information-embedded tools and goods in low- and middle-income countries. As +new strategies for the production of information and knowledge are making their +outputs available freely for use and continuing innovation by everyone +everywhere, the networked information economy can begin to contribute +significantly to improvements in human development. We already see free +software and free and open Internet standards playing that role in information +technology sectors. We are beginning to see it take form in academic +publishing, raw information, and educational materials, like multilingual +encyclopedias, around the globe. More tentatively, we are beginning to see open +commons-based innovation models and peer production emerge in areas of +agricultural research and bioagricultural innovation, as well as, even more +tentatively, in the area of biomedical research. These are still very early +examples of what can be produced by the networked information economy, and how +it can contribute, even if only to a limited extent, to the capacity of people +around the globe to live a long and healthy, well-educated, and materially +adequate life. +={ human development and justice +1 ; + justice and human development +1 +} + +If the networked information economy is indeed a significant inflection point +for modern societies along all these dimensions, it is so because it upsets the +dominance of proprietary, market-based production in the sphere of the +production of knowledge, information, and culture. This upset is hardly +uncontroversial. It will likely result in significant redistribution of wealth, +and no less importantly, power, from previously dominant firms and business +models to a mixture of individuals and social groups on the one hand, and on +the other hand businesses that reshape their business models to take advantage +of, and build tools an platforms for, the newly productive social relations. As +a practical matter, the major economic and social changes described here are +not deterministically preordained by the internal logic of technological +progress. What we see instead is that the happenstance of the fabrication +technology of computation, in particular, as well as storage and +communications, has created technological conditions conducive to a significant +realignment of our information production and exchange system. The actual +structure of the markets, technologies, and social practices that ,{[pg 469]}, +have been destabilized by the introduction of computer-communications networks +is now the subject of a large-scale and diffuse institutional battle. + +We are seeing significant battles over the organization and legal capabilities +of the physical components of the digitally networked environment. Will all +broadband infrastructures be privately owned? If so, how wide a margin of +control will owners have to prefer some messages over others? Will we, to the +contrary, permit open wireless networks to emerge as an infrastructure of first +and last resort, owned by its users and exclusively controlled by no one? The +drives to greater private ownership in wired infrastructure, and the push by +Hollywood and the recording industry to require digital devices mechanically to +comply with exclusivity-respecting standards are driving the technical and +organizational design toward a closed environment that would be more conducive +to proprietary strategies. Open wireless networks and the present business +model of the large and successful device companies--particularly, personal +computers--to use open standards push in the opposite direction. End-user +equipment companies are mostly focused on making their products as valuable as +possible to their users, and are therefore oriented toward offering +general-purpose platforms that can be deployed by their owners as they choose. +These then become equally available for marketoriented as for social behaviors, +for proprietary consumption as for productive sharing. + +At the logical layer, the ethic of open standards in the technical community, +the emergence of the free software movement and its apolitical cousin, +open-source development practices, on the one hand, and the antiauthoritarian +drives behind encryption hacking and some of the peer-to-peer technologies, on +the other hand, are pushing toward an open logical layer available for all to +use. The efforts of the content industries to make the Internet +manageable--most visibly, the DMCA and the continued dominance of Microsoft +over the desktop, and the willingness of courts and legislatures to try to +stamp out copyright-defeating technologies even when these obviously have +significant benefits to users who have no interest in copying the latest song +in order not to pay for the CD--are the primary sources of institutional +constraint on the freedom to use the logical resources necessary to communicate +in the network. +={ content layer of institutional ecology +2 ; + layers of institutional ecology +2 : + content layer +2 | physical layer +2 ; + logical layer of institutional ecology ; + physical layer of institutional ecology +2 ; + policy layers +2 : + content layer +2 | physical layer +2 +} + +At the content layer--the universe of existing information, knowledge, and +culture--we are observing a fairly systematic trend in law, but a growing +countertrend in society. In law, we see a continual tightening of the control +that the owners of exclusive rights are given. Copyrights are longer, apply +,{[pg 470]}, to more uses, and are interpreted as reaching into every corner of +valuable use. Trademarks are stronger and more aggressive. Patents have +expanded to new domains and are given greater leeway. All these changes are +skewing the institutional ecology in favor of business models and production +practices that are based on exclusive proprietary claims; they are lobbied for +by firms that collect large rents if these laws are expanded, followed, and +enforced. Social trends in the past few years, however, are pushing in the +opposite direction. These are precisely the trends of networked information +economy, of nonmarket production, of an increased ethic of sharing, and an +increased ambition to participate in communities of practice that produce vast +quantities of information, knowledge, and culture for free use, sharing, and +followon creation by others. +={ institutional ecology of digital environment +3 } + +The political and judicial pressures to form an institutional ecology that is +decidedly tilted in favor of proprietary business models are running headon +into the emerging social practices described throughout this book. To flourish, +a networked information economy rich in social production practices requires a +core common infrastructure, a set of resources necessary for information +production and exchange that are open for all to use. This requires physical, +logical, and content resources from which to make new statements, encode them +for communication, and then render and receive them. At present, these +resources are available through a mixture of legal and illegal, planned and +unplanned sources. Some aspects come from the happenstance of the trajectories +of very different industries that have operated under very different regulatory +frameworks: telecommunications, personal computers, software, Internet +connectivity, public- and private-sector information, and cultural publication. +Some come from more or less widespread adoption of practices of questionable +legality or outright illegality. Peer-to-peer file sharing includes many +instances of outright illegality practiced by tens of millions of Internet +users. But simple uses of quotations, clips, and mix-and-match creative +practices that may, or, increasingly, may not, fall into the narrowing category +of fair use are also priming the pump of nonmarket production. At the same +time, we are seeing an ever-more self-conscious adoption of commons-based +practices as a modality of information production and exchange. Free software, +Creative Commons, the Public Library of Science, the new guidelines of the +National Institutes of Health (NIH) on free publication of papers, new open +archiving practices, librarian movements, and many other communities of +practice are developing what was a contingent fact into a self-conscious social +movement. As ,{[pg 471]}, the domain of existing information and culture comes +to be occupied by information and knowledge produced within these free sharing +movements and licensed on the model of open-licensing techniques, the problem +of the conflict with the proprietary domain will recede. Twentieth-century +materials will continue to be a point of friction, but a sufficient quotient of +twentyfirst-century materials seem now to be increasingly available from +sources that are happy to share them with future users and creators. If this +socialcultural trend continues over time, access to content resources will +present an ever-lower barrier to nonmarket production. +={ commercial model of communication ; + industrial model of communication +1 ; + traditional model of communication +1 +} + +The relationship of institutional ecology to social practice is a complex one. +It is hard to predict at this point whether a successful sustained effort on +the part of the industrial information economy producers will succeed in +flipping even more of the institutional toggles in favor of proprietary +production. There is already a more significant social movement than existed in +the 1990s in the United States, in Europe, and around the world that is +resisting current efforts to further enclose the information environment. This +social movement is getting support from large and wealthy industrial players +who have reoriented their business model to become the platforms, toolmakers, +and service providers for and alongside the emerging nonmarket sector. IBM, +Hewlett Packard, and Cisco, for example, might stand shoulder to shoulder with +a nongovernment organization (NGO) like Public Knowledge in an effort to block +legislation that would require personal computers to comply with standards set +by Hollywood for copy protection. When Hollywood sued Grokster, the +file-sharing company, and asked the Supreme Court to expand contributory +liability of the makers of technologies that are used to infringe copyrights, +it found itself arrayed against amicus briefs filed by Intel, the Consumer +Electronics Association, and Verizon, SBC, AT&T, MCI, and Sun Microsystems, +alongside briefs from the Free Software Foundation, and the Consumer Federation +of America, Consumers Union, and Public Knowledge. + +Even if laws that favor enclosure do pass in one, or even many jurisdictions, +it is not entirely clear that law can unilaterally turn back a trend that +combines powerful technological, social, and economic drivers. We have seen +even in the area of peer-to-peer networks, where the arguments of the +incumbents seemed the most morally compelling and where their legal successes +have been the most complete, that stemming the tide of change is +difficult--perhaps impossible. Bits are a part of a flow in the networked +information environment, and trying to legislate that fact away in order to +,{[pg 472]}, preserve a business model that sells particular collections of +bits as discrete, finished goods may simply prove to be impossible. +Nonetheless, legal constraints significantly shape the parameters of what +companies and individuals decide to market and use. It is not hard to imagine +that, were Napster seen as legal, it would have by now encompassed a much +larger portion of the population of Internet users than the number of users who +actually now use file-sharing networks. Whether the same moderate levels of +success in shaping behavior can be replicated in areas where the claims of the +incumbents are much more tenuous, as a matter of both policy and moral +claims--such as in the legal protection of anticircumvention devices or the +contraction of fair use--is an even harder question. The object of a discussion +of the institutional ecology of the networked environment is, in any event, not +prognostication. It is to provide a moral framework within which to understand +the many and diverse policy battles we have seen over the past decade, and +which undoubtedly will continue into the coming decade, that I have written +this book. + +We are in the midst of a quite basic transformation in how we perceive the +world around us, and how we act, alone and in concert with others, to shape our +own understanding of the world we occupy and that of others with whom we share +it. Patterns of social practice, long suppressed as economic activities in the +context of industrial economy, have now emerged to greater importance than they +have had in a century and a half. With them, they bring the possibility of +genuine gains in the very core of liberal commitments, in both advanced +economies and around the globe. The rise of commons-based information +production, of individuals and loose associations producing information in +nonproprietary forms, presents a genuine discontinuity from the industrial +information economy of the twentieth century. It brings with it great promise, +and great uncertainty. We have early intimations as to how market-based +enterprises can adjust to make room for this newly emerging phenomenon--IBM's +adoption of open source, Second Life's adoption of user-created immersive +entertainment, or Open Source Technology Group's development of a platform for +Slashdot. We also have very clear examples of businesses that have decided to +fight the new changes by using every trick in the book, and some, like +injecting corrupt files into peer-to-peer networks, that are decidedly not in +the book. Law and regulation form one important domain in which these battles +over the shape of our emerging information production system are fought. As we +observe these battles; as we participate in them as individuals choosing how to +behave and ,{[pg 473]}, what to believe, as citizens, lobbyists, lawyers, or +activists; as we act out these legal battles as legislators, judges, or treaty +negotiators, it is important that we understand the normative stakes of what we +are doing. + +We have an opportunity to change the way we create and exchange information, +knowledge, and culture. By doing so, we can make the twentyfirst century one +that offers individuals greater autonomy, political communities greater +democracy, and societies greater opportunities for cultural self-reflection and +human connection. We can remove some of the transactional barriers to material +opportunity, and improve the state of human development everywhere. Perhaps +these changes will be the foundation of a true transformation toward more +liberal and egalitarian societies. Perhaps they will merely improve, in +well-defined but smaller ways, human life along each of these dimensions. That +alone is more than enough to justify an embrace of the networked information +economy by anyone who values human welfare, development, and freedom. + +1~blurb Blurb + +_1 "In this book, Benkler establishes himself as the leading intellectual of +the information age. Profoundly rich in its insight and truth, this work will +be the central text for understanding how networks have changed how we +understand the world. No work to date has more carefully or convincingly made +the case for a fundamental change in how we understand the economy of society." +Lawrence Lessig, professor of law, Stanford Law School + +_1 "A lucid, powerful, and optimistic account of a revolution in the making." +Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of /{The Anarchist in the Library}/ + +_1 "This deeply researched book documents the fundamental changes in the ways +in which we produce and share ideas, information, and entertainment. Then, +drawing widely on the literatures of philosophy, economics, and political +theory, it shows why these changes should be welcomed, not resisted. The trends +examined, if allowed to continue, will radically alter our lives - and no other +scholar describes them so clearly or champions them more effectively than +Benkler." William W. Fisher III, Hale and Dorr Professor of Intellectual +Property Law, Harvard University, and directory, Berkman Center for Internet +and Society + +_1 "A magnificent achievement. Yochai Benkler shows us how the Internet enables +new commons-based methods for producing goods, remaking culture, and +participating in public life. /{The Wealth of Networks}/ is an indispensable +guide to the political economy of our digitally networked world." Jack M. +Balkin, professor of law and director of the Information Society Project, Yale +University. + +A dedicated wiki may be found at: +http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page + +Including a pdf: http://www.benkler.org/wonchapters.html + +The author's website is: http://www.benkler.org/ + +The books may be purchased at bookshops, including { Amazon.com +}http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Networks-Production-Transforms-Markets/dp/0300110561/ +or at { Barnes & Noble +}http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0300110561 + +% Not final copy: markup not final, output numbering is therefore subject to change + +% italics need checking + +% hyphenation in markup text needs review, pdf to text transformation not perfect + +% book index can be preserved as book pages have been kept after a fashion, should be added + +% original footnotes do not have meaning in this copy and have been removed diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6aa9951 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/through_the_looking_glass.lewis_carroll.sst @@ -0,0 +1,3779 @@ +% SiSU 4.0.0 + +@title: Through The Looking-Glass + +@creator: Carroll, Lewis + +@date: + :published: 1871 + :created: 1871 + :issued: 1871 + :available: 1871 + :added_to_site: 2004-04-12 + +% 2005-10-30 + +@rights: + :copyright: Lewis Carroll + :license: Public Domain + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:novel;book:novel:fiction:fantasy|children's fiction + +@links: +{ Through the Looking Glass @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Looking-Glass +{ Lewis Carroll @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll + +@make: + :headings: none; none; none; CHAPTER; + :breaks: new=3; break=4 + +:A~ @title @author \\ The Millennium Fulcrum Edition 1.7 [text only] + +CHAPTER I - Looking-Glass house + +One thing was certain, that the WHITE kitten had had nothing to do with it:--it +was the black kitten's fault entirely. For the white kitten had been having its +face washed by the old cat for the last quarter of an hour (and bearing it +pretty well, considering); so you see that it COULDN'T have had any hand in the +mischief. + +The way Dinah washed her children's faces was this: first she held the poor +thing down by its ear with one paw, and then with the other paw she rubbed its +face all over, the wrong way, beginning at the nose: and just now, as I said, +she was hard at work on the white kitten, which was lying quite still and +trying to purr--no doubt feeling that it was all meant for its good. + +But the black kitten had been finished with earlier in the afternoon, and so, +while Alice was sitting curled up in a corner of the great arm-chair, half +talking to herself and half asleep, the kitten had been having a grand game of +romps with the ball of worsted Alice had been trying to wind up, and had been +rolling it up and down till it had all come undone again; and there it was, +spread over the hearth-rug, all knots and tangles, with the kitten running +after its own tail in the middle. + +'Oh, you wicked little thing!' cried Alice, catching up the kitten, and giving +it a little kiss to make it understand that it was in disgrace. 'Really, Dinah +ought to have taught you better manners! You OUGHT, Dinah, you know you ought!' +she added, looking reproachfully at the old cat, and speaking in as cross a +voice as she could manage--and then she scrambled back into the arm-chair, +taking the kitten and the worsted with her, and began winding up the ball +again. But she didn't get on very fast, as she was talking all the time, +sometimes to the kitten, and sometimes to herself. Kitty sat very demurely on +her knee, pretending to watch the progress of the winding, and now and then +putting out one paw and gently touching the ball, as if it would be glad to +help, if it might. + +'Do you know what to-morrow is, Kitty?' Alice began. 'You'd have guessed if +you'd been up in the window with me--only Dinah was making you tidy, so you +couldn't. I was watching the boys getting in sticks for the bonfire--and it +wants plenty of sticks, Kitty! Only it got so cold, and it snowed so, they had +to leave off. Never mind, Kitty, we'll go and see the bonfire to-morrow.' Here +Alice wound two or three turns of the worsted round the kitten's neck, just to +see how it would look: this led to a scramble, in which the ball rolled down +upon the floor, and yards and yards of it got unwound again. + +'Do you know, I was so angry, Kitty,' Alice went on as soon as they were +comfortably settled again, 'when I saw all the mischief you had been doing, I +was very nearly opening the window, and putting you out into the snow! And +you'd have deserved it, you little mischievous darling! What have you got to +say for yourself? Now don't interrupt me!' she went on, holding up one finger. +'I'm going to tell you all your faults. Number one: you squeaked twice while +Dinah was washing your face this morning. Now you can't deny it, Kitty: I heard +you! What's that you say?' (pretending that the kitten was speaking.) 'Her paw +went into your eye? Well, that's YOUR fault, for keeping your eyes open--if +you'd shut them tight up, it wouldn't have happened. Now don't make any more +excuses, but listen! Number two: you pulled Snowdrop away by the tail just as I +had put down the saucer of milk before her! What, you were thirsty, were you? +How do you know she wasn't thirsty too? Now for number three: you unwound every +bit of the worsted while I wasn't looking! + +'That's three faults, Kitty, and you've not been punished for any of them yet. +You know I'm saving up all your punishments for Wednesday week--Suppose they +had saved up all MY punishments!' she went on, talking more to herself than the +kitten. 'What WOULD they do at the end of a year? I should be sent to prison, I +suppose, when the day came. Or--let me see--suppose each punishment was to be +going without a dinner: then, when the miserable day came, I should have to go +without fifty dinners at once! Well, I shouldn't mind THAT much! I'd far rather +go without them than eat them! + +'Do you hear the snow against the window-panes, Kitty? How nice and soft it +sounds! Just as if some one was kissing the window all over outside. I wonder +if the snow LOVES the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then +it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, "Go +to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again." And when they wake up in the +summer, Kitty, they dress themselves all in green, and dance about--whenever +the wind blows--oh, that's very pretty!' cried Alice, dropping the ball of +worsted to clap her hands. 'And I do so WISH it was true! I'm sure the woods +look sleepy in the autumn, when the leaves are getting brown. + +'Kitty, can you play chess? Now, don't smile, my dear, I'm asking it seriously. +Because, when we were playing just now, you watched just as if you understood +it: and when I said "Check!" you purred! Well, it WAS a nice check, Kitty, and +really I might have won, if it hadn't been for that nasty Knight, that came +wiggling down among my pieces. Kitty, dear, let's pretend--' And here I wish I +could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favourite +phrase 'Let's pretend.' She had had quite a long argument with her sister only +the day before --all because Alice had begun with 'Let's pretend we're kings +and queens;' and her sister, who liked being very exact, had argued that they +couldn't, because there were only two of them, and Alice had been reduced at +last to say, 'Well, YOU can be one of them then, and I'LL be all the rest.' And +once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, +'Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyaena, and you're a bone.' + +But this is taking us away from Alice's speech to the kitten. 'Let's pretend +that you're the Red Queen, Kitty! Do you know, I think if you sat up and folded +your arms, you'd look exactly like her. Now do try, there's a dear!' And Alice +got the Red Queen off the table, and set it up before the kitten as a model for +it to imitate: however, the thing didn't succeed, principally, Alice said, +because the kitten wouldn't fold its arms properly. So, to punish it, she held +it up to the Looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was--'and if you're +not good directly,' she added, 'I'll put you through into Looking-glass House. +How would you like THAT?' + +'Now, if you'll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I'll tell you all my +ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there's the room you can see through +the glass--that's just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the +other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair--all but the bit behind +the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see THAT bit! I want so much to know +whether they've a fire in the winter: you never CAN tell, you know, unless our +fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too--but that may be only +pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are +something like our books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that, because +I've held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the +other room. + +'How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they'd +give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn't good to drink--But oh, +Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little PEEP of the +passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide +open: and it's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it +may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could +only get through into Looking- glass House! I'm sure it's got, oh! such +beautiful things in it! Let's pretend there's a way of getting through into it, +somehow, Kitty. Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we +can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be +easy enough to get through--' She was up on the chimney-piece while she said +this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass WAS +beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist. + +In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into +the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there +was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a +real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. 'So I shall +be as warm here as I was in the old room,' thought Alice: 'warmer, in fact, +because there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun +it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can't get at me!' + +Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old +room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was as different +as possible. For instance, the pictures on the wall next the fire seemed to be +all alive, and the very clock on the chimney-piece (you know you can only see +the back of it in the Looking-glass) had got the face of a little old man, and +grinned at her. + +'They don't keep this room so tidy as the other,' Alice thought to herself, as +she noticed several of the chessmen down in the hearth among the cinders: but +in another moment, with a little 'Oh!' of surprise, she was down on her hands +and knees watching them. The chessmen were walking about, two and two! + +'Here are the Red King and the Red Queen,' Alice said (in a whisper, for fear +of frightening them), 'and there are the White King and the White Queen sitting +on the edge of the shovel--and here are two castles walking arm in arm--I don't +think they can hear me,' she went on, as she put her head closer down, 'and I'm +nearly sure they can't see me. I feel somehow as if I were invisible--' + +Here something began squeaking on the table behind Alice, and made her turn her +head just in time to see one of the White Pawns roll over and begin kicking: +she watched it with great curiosity to see what would happen next. + +'It is the voice of my child!' the White Queen cried out as she rushed past the +King, so violently that she knocked him over among the cinders. 'My precious +Lily! My imperial kitten!' and she began scrambling wildly up the side of the +fender. + +'Imperial fiddlestick!' said the King, rubbing his nose, which had been hurt by +the fall. He had a right to be a LITTLE annoyed with the Queen, for he was +covered with ashes from head to foot. + +Alice was very anxious to be of use, and, as the poor little Lily was nearly +screaming herself into a fit, she hastily picked up the Queen and set her on +the table by the side of her noisy little daughter. + +The Queen gasped, and sat down: the rapid journey through the air had quite +taken away her breath and for a minute or two she could do nothing but hug the +little Lily in silence. As soon as she had recovered her breath a little, she +called out to the White King, who was sitting sulkily among the ashes, 'Mind +the volcano!' + +'What volcano?' said the King, looking up anxiously into the fire, as if he +thought that was the most likely place to find one. + +'Blew--me--up,' panted the Queen, who was still a little out of breath. 'Mind +you come up--the regular way--don't get blown up!' + +Alice watched the White King as he slowly struggled up from bar to bar, till at +last she said, 'Why, you'll be hours and hours getting to the table, at that +rate. I'd far better help you, hadn't I?' But the King took no notice of the +question: it was quite clear that he could neither hear her nor see her. + +So Alice picked him up very gently, and lifted him across more slowly than she +had lifted the Queen, that she mightn't take his breath away: but, before she +put him on the table, she thought she might as well dust him a little, he was +so covered with ashes. + +She said afterwards that she had never seen in all her life such a face as the +King made, when he found himself held in the air by an invisible hand, and +being dusted: he was far too much astonished to cry out, but his eyes and his +mouth went on getting larger and larger, and rounder and rounder, till her hand +shook so with laughing that she nearly let him drop upon the floor. + +'Oh! PLEASE don't make such faces, my dear!' she cried out, quite forgetting +that the King couldn't hear her. 'You make me laugh so that I can hardly hold +you! And don't keep your mouth so wide open! All the ashes will get into +it--there, now I think you're tidy enough!' she added, as she smoothed his +hair, and set him upon the table near the Queen. + +The King immediately fell flat on his back, and lay perfectly still: and Alice +was a little alarmed at what she had done, and went round the room to see if +she could find any water to throw over him. However, she could find nothing but +a bottle of ink, and when she got back with it she found he had recovered, and +he and the Queen were talking together in a frightened whisper--so low, that +Alice could hardly hear what they said. + +The King was saying, 'I assure, you my dear, I turned cold to the very ends of +my whiskers!' + +To which the Queen replied, 'You haven't got any whiskers.' + +'The horror of that moment,' the King went on, 'I shall never, NEVER forget!' + +'You will, though,' the Queen said, 'if you don't make a memorandum of it.' + +Alice looked on with great interest as the King took an enormous +memorandum-book out of his pocket, and began writing. A sudden thought struck +her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his +shoulder, and began writing for him. + +The poor King looked puzzled and unhappy, and struggled with the pencil for +some time without saying anything; but Alice was too strong for him, and at +last he panted out, 'My dear! I really MUST get a thinner pencil. I can't +manage this one a bit; it writes all manner of things that I don't intend--' + +'What manner of things?' said the Queen, looking over the book (in which Alice +had put 'THE WHITE KNIGHT IS SLIDING DOWN THE POKER. HE BALANCES VERY BADLY') +'That's not a memorandum of YOUR feelings!' + +There was a book lying near Alice on the table, and while she sat watching the +White King (for she was still a little anxious about him, and had the ink all +ready to throw over him, in case he fainted again), she turned over the leaves, +to find some part that she could read, '--for it's all in some language I don't +know,' she said to herself. + +It was like this. + +poem{ + + YKCOWREBBAJ + + sevot yhtils eht dna ,gillirb sawT' + ebaw eht ni elbmig dna eryg diD + ,sevogorob eht erew ysmim llA + .ebargtuo shtar emom eht dnA + +}poem + +She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. +'Why, it's a Looking-glass book, of course! And if I hold it up to a glass, the +words will all go the right way again.' + +This was the poem that Alice read. + +poem{ + + JABBERWOCKY + + 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves + Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; + All mimsy were the borogoves, + And the mome raths outgrabe. + + 'Beware the Jabberwock, my son! + The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! + Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun + The frumious Bandersnatch!' + + He took his vorpal sword in hand: + Long time the manxome foe he sought-- + So rested he by the Tumtum tree, + And stood awhile in thought. + + And as in uffish thought he stood, + The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, + Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, + And burbled as it came! + + One, two! One, two! And through and through + The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! + He left it dead, and with its head + He went galumphing back. + + 'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? + Come to my arms, my beamish boy! + O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' + He chortled in his joy. + + 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves + Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; + All mimsy were the borogoves, + And the mome raths outgrabe. + +}poem + +'It seems very pretty,' she said when she had finished it, 'but it's RATHER +hard to understand!' (You see she didn't like to confess, ever to herself, that +she couldn't make it out at all.) 'Somehow it seems to fill my head with +ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are! However, SOMEBODY killed +SOMETHING: that's clear, at any rate--' + +'But oh!' thought Alice, suddenly jumping up, 'if I don't make haste I shall +have to go back through the Looking-glass, before I've seen what the rest of +the house is like! Let's have a look at the garden first!' She was out of the +room in a moment, and ran down stairs--or, at least, it wasn't exactly running, +but a new invention of hers for getting down stairs quickly and easily, as +Alice said to herself. She just kept the tips of her fingers on the hand-rail, +and floated gently down without even touching the stairs with her feet; then +she floated on through the hall, and would have gone straight out at the door +in the same way, if she hadn't caught hold of the door-post. She was getting a +little giddy with so much floating in the air, and was rather glad to find +herself walking again in the natural way. + +CHAPTER II - The Garden of Live Flowers + +'I should see the garden far better,' said Alice to herself, 'if I could get to +the top of that hill: and here's a path that leads straight to it--at least, +no, it doesn't do that--' (after going a few yards along the path, and turning +several sharp corners), 'but I suppose it will at last. But how curiously it +twists! It's more like a corkscrew than a path! Well, THIS turn goes to the +hill, I suppose--no, it doesn't! This goes straight back to the house! Well +then, I'll try it the other way.' + +And so she did: wandering up and down, and trying turn after turn, but always +coming back to the house, do what she would. Indeed, once, when she turned a +corner rather more quickly than usual, she ran against it before she could stop +herself. + +'It's no use talking about it,' Alice said, looking up at the house and +pretending it was arguing with her. 'I'm NOT going in again yet. I know I +should have to get through the Looking-glass again--back into the old room--and +there'd be an end of all my adventures!' + +So, resolutely turning her back upon the house, she set out once more down the +path, determined to keep straight on till she got to the hill. For a few +minutes all went on well, and she was just saying, 'I really SHALL do it this +time--' when the path gave a sudden twist and shook itself (as she described it +afterwards), and the next moment she found herself actually walking in at the +door. + +'Oh, it's too bad!' she cried. 'I never saw such a house for getting in the +way! Never!' + +However, there was the hill full in sight, so there was nothing to be done but +start again. This time she came upon a large flower-bed, with a border of +daisies, and a willow-tree growing in the middle. + +'O Tiger-lily,' said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving +gracefully about in the wind, 'I WISH you could talk!' + +'We CAN talk,' said the Tiger-lily: 'when there's anybody worth talking to.' + +Alice was so astonished that she could not speak for a minute: it quite seemed +to take her breath away. At length, as the Tiger-lily only went on waving +about, she spoke again, in a timid voice--almost in a whisper. 'And can ALL the +flowers talk?' + +'As well as YOU can,' said the Tiger-lily. 'And a great deal louder.' + +'It isn't manners for us to begin, you know,' said the Rose, 'and I really was +wondering when you'd speak! Said I to myself, "Her face has got SOME sense in +it, though it's not a clever one!" Still, you're the right colour, and that +goes a long way.' + +'I don't care about the colour,' the Tiger-lily remarked. 'If only her petals +curled up a little more, she'd be all right.' + +Alice didn't like being criticised, so she began asking questions. 'Aren't you +sometimes frightened at being planted out here, with nobody to take care of +you?' + +'There's the tree in the middle,' said the Rose: 'what else is it good for?' + +'But what could it do, if any danger came?' Alice asked. + +'It says "Bough-wough!"' cried a Daisy: 'that's why its branches are called +boughs!' + +'Didn't you know THAT?' cried another Daisy, and here they all began shouting +together, till the air seemed quite full of little shrill voices. 'Silence, +every one of you!' cried the Tiger- lily, waving itself passionately from side +to side, and trembling with excitement. 'They know I can't get at them!' it +panted, bending its quivering head towards Alice, 'or they wouldn't dare to do +it!' + +'Never mind!' Alice said in a soothing tone, and stooping down to the daisies, +who were just beginning again, she whispered, 'If you don't hold your tongues, +I'll pick you!' + +There was silence in a moment, and several of the pink daisies turned white. + +'That's right!' said the Tiger-lily. 'The daisies are worst of all. When one +speaks, they all begin together, and it's enough to make one wither to hear the +way they go on!' + +'How is it you can all talk so nicely?' Alice said, hoping to get it into a +better temper by a compliment. 'I've been in many gardens before, but none of +the flowers could talk.' + +'Put your hand down, and feel the ground,' said the Tiger-lily. 'Then you'll +know why.' + +Alice did so. 'It's very hard,' she said, 'but I don't see what that has to do +with it.' + +'In most gardens,' the Tiger-lily said, 'they make the beds too soft--so that +the flowers are always asleep.' + +This sounded a very good reason, and Alice was quite pleased to know it. 'I +never thought of that before!' she said. + +'It's MY opinion that you never think AT ALL,' the Rose said in a rather severe +tone. + +'I never saw anybody that looked stupider,' a Violet said, so suddenly, that +Alice quite jumped; for it hadn't spoken before. + +'Hold YOUR tongue!' cried the Tiger-lily. 'As if YOU ever saw anybody! You keep +your head under the leaves, and snore away there, till you know no more what's +going on in the world, than if you were a bud!' + +'Are there any more people in the garden besides me?' Alice said, not choosing +to notice the Rose's last remark. + +'There's one other flower in the garden that can move about like you,' said the +Rose. 'I wonder how you do it--' ('You're always wondering,' said the +Tiger-lily), 'but she's more bushy than you are.' + +'Is she like me?' Alice asked eagerly, for the thought crossed her mind, +'There's another little girl in the garden, somewhere!' + +'Well, she has the same awkward shape as you,' the Rose said, 'but she's +redder--and her petals are shorter, I think.' + +'Her petals are done up close, almost like a dahlia,' the Tiger-lily +interrupted: 'not tumbled about anyhow, like yours.' + +'But that's not YOUR fault,' the Rose added kindly: 'you're beginning to fade, +you know--and then one can't help one's petals getting a little untidy.' + +Alice didn't like this idea at all: so, to change the subject, she asked 'Does +she ever come out here?' + +'I daresay you'll see her soon,' said the Rose. 'She's one of the thorny kind.' + +'Where does she wear the thorns?' Alice asked with some curiosity. + +'Why all round her head, of course,' the Rose replied. 'I was wondering YOU +hadn't got some too. I thought it was the regular rule.' + +'She's coming!' cried the Larkspur. 'I hear her footstep, thump, thump, thump, +along the gravel-walk!' + +Alice looked round eagerly, and found that it was the Red Queen. 'She's grown a +good deal!' was her first remark. She had indeed: when Alice first found her in +the ashes, she had been only three inches high--and here she was, half a head +taller than Alice herself! + +'It's the fresh air that does it,' said the Rose: 'wonderfully fine air it is, +out here.' + +'I think I'll go and meet her,' said Alice, for, though the flowers were +interesting enough, she felt that it would be far grander to have a talk with a +real Queen. + +'You can't possibly do that,' said the Rose: '_I_ should advise you to walk the +other way.' + +This sounded nonsense to Alice, so she said nothing, but set off at once +towards the Red Queen. To her surprise, she lost sight of her in a moment, and +found herself walking in at the front-door again. + +A little provoked, she drew back, and after looking everywhere for the queen +(whom she spied out at last, a long way off), she thought she would try the +plan, this time, of walking in the opposite direction. + +It succeeded beautifully. She had not been walking a minute before she found +herself face to face with the Red Queen, and full in sight of the hill she had +been so long aiming at. + +'Where do you come from?' said the Red Queen. 'And where are you going? Look +up, speak nicely, and don't twiddle your fingers all the time.' + +Alice attended to all these directions, and explained, as well as she could, +that she had lost her way. + +'I don't know what you mean by YOUR way,' said the Queen: 'all the ways about +here belong to ME--but why did you come out here at all?' she added in a kinder +tone. 'Curtsey while you're thinking what to say, it saves time.' + +Alice wondered a little at this, but she was too much in awe of the Queen to +disbelieve it. 'I'll try it when I go home,' she thought to herself, 'the next +time I'm a little late for dinner.' + +'It's time for you to answer now,' the Queen said, looking at her watch: 'open +your mouth a LITTLE wider when you speak, and always say "your Majesty."' + +'I only wanted to see what the garden was like, your Majesty--' + +'That's right,' said the Queen, patting her on the head, which Alice didn't +like at all, 'though, when you say "garden,"--I'VE seen gardens, compared with +which this would be a wilderness.' + +Alice didn't dare to argue the point, but went on: '--and I thought I'd try and +find my way to the top of that hill--' + +'When you say "hill,"' the Queen interrupted, '_I_ could show you hills, in +comparison with which you'd call that a valley.' + +'No, I shouldn't,' said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at last: 'a +hill CAN'T be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense--' + +The Red Queen shook her head, 'You may call it "nonsense" if you like,' she +said, 'but I'VE heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible +as a dictionary!' + +Alice curtseyed again, as she was afraid from the Queen's tone that she was a +LITTLE offended: and they walked on in silence till they got to the top of the +little hill. + +For some minutes Alice stood without speaking, looking out in all directions +over the country--and a most curious country it was. There were a number of +tiny little brooks running straight across it from side to side, and the ground +between was divided up into squares by a number of little green hedges, that +reached from brook to brook. + +'I declare it's marked out just like a large chessboard!' Alice said at last. +'There ought to be some men moving about somewhere --and so there are!' She +added in a tone of delight, and her heart began to beat quick with excitement +as she went on. 'It's a great huge game of chess that's being played--all over +the world--if this IS the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is! How I +WISH I was one of them! I wouldn't mind being a Pawn, if only I might +join--though of course I should LIKE to be a Queen, best.' + +She glanced rather shyly at the real Queen as she said this, but her companion +only smiled pleasantly, and said, 'That's easily managed. You can be the White +Queen's Pawn, if you like, as Lily's too young to play; and you're in the +Second Square to begin with: when you get to the Eighth Square you'll be a +Queen --' Just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run. + +Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was +that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and +the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and +still the Queen kept crying 'Faster! Faster!' but Alice felt she COULD NOT go +faster, though she had not breath left to say so. + +The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things +round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they +never seemed to pass anything. 'I wonder if all the things move along with us?' +thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she +cried, 'Faster! Don't try to talk!' + +Not that Alice had any idea of doing THAT. She felt as if she would never be +able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen +cried 'Faster! Faster!' and dragged her along. 'Are we nearly there?' Alice +managed to pant out at last. + +'Nearly there!' the Queen repeated. 'Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! +Faster!' And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in +Alice's ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied. + +'Now! Now!' cried the Queen. 'Faster! Faster!' And they went so fast that at +last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their +feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, +and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy. + +The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, 'You may rest a +little now.' + +Alice looked round her in great surprise. 'Why, I do believe we've been under +this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!' + +'Of course it is,' said the Queen, 'what would you have it?' + +'Well, in OUR country,' said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally +get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been +doing.' + +'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the +running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere +else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!' + +'I'd rather not try, please!' said Alice. 'I'm quite content to stay here--only +I AM so hot and thirsty!' + +'I know what YOU'D like!' the Queen said good-naturedly, taking a little box +out of her pocket. 'Have a biscuit?' + +Alice thought it would not be civil to say 'No,' though it wasn't at all what +she wanted. So she took it, and ate it as well as she could: and it was VERY +dry; and she thought she had never been so nearly choked in all her life. + +'While you're refreshing yourself,' said the Queen, 'I'll just take the +measurements.' And she took a ribbon out of her pocket, marked in inches, and +began measuring the ground, and sticking little pegs in here and there. + +'At the end of two yards,' she said, putting in a peg to mark the distance, 'I +shall give you your directions--have another biscuit?' + +'No, thank you,' said Alice: 'one's QUITE enough!' + +'Thirst quenched, I hope?' said the Queen. + +Alice did not know what to say to this, but luckily the Queen did not wait for +an answer, but went on. 'At the end of THREE yards I shall repeat them--for +fear of your forgetting them. At the end of FOUR, I shall say good-bye. And at +the end of FIVE, I shall go!' + +She had got all the pegs put in by this time, and Alice looked on with great +interest as she returned to the tree, and then began slowly walking down the +row. + +At the two-yard peg she faced round, and said, 'A pawn goes two squares in its +first move, you know. So you'll go VERY quickly through the Third Square--by +railway, I should think--and you'll find yourself in the Fourth Square in no +time. Well, THAT square belongs to Tweedledum and Tweedledee--the Fifth is +mostly water--the Sixth belongs to Humpty Dumpty--But you make no remark?' + +'I--I didn't know I had to make one--just then,' Alice faltered out. + +'You SHOULD have said, "It's extremely kind of you to tell me all +this"--however, we'll suppose it said--the Seventh Square is all +forest--however, one of the Knights will show you the way--and in the Eighth +Square we shall be Queens together, and it's all feasting and fun!' Alice got +up and curtseyed, and sat down again. + +At the next peg the Queen turned again, and this time she said, 'Speak in +French when you can't think of the English for a thing --turn out your toes as +you walk--and remember who you are!' She did not wait for Alice to curtsey this +time, but walked on quickly to the next peg, where she turned for a moment to +say 'good-bye,' and then hurried on to the last. + +How it happened, Alice never knew, but exactly as she came to the last peg, she +was gone. Whether she vanished into the air, or whether she ran quickly into +the wood ('and she CAN run very fast!' thought Alice), there was no way of +guessing, but she was gone, and Alice began to remember that she was a Pawn, +and that it would soon be time for her to move. + +CHAPTER III - Looking-Glass Insects + +Of course the first thing to do was to make a grand survey of the country she +was going to travel through. 'It's something very like learning geography,' +thought Alice, as she stood on tiptoe in hopes of being able to see a little +further. 'Principal rivers-- there ARE none. Principal mountains--I'm on the +only one, but I don't think it's got any name. Principal towns--why, what ARE +those creatures, making honey down there? They can't be bees-- nobody ever saw +bees a mile off, you know--' and for some time she stood silent, watching one +of them that was bustling about among the flowers, poking its proboscis into +them, 'just as if it was a regular bee,' thought Alice. + +However, this was anything but a regular bee: in fact it was an elephant--as +Alice soon found out, though the idea quite took her breath away at first. 'And +what enormous flowers they must be!' was her next idea. 'Something like +cottages with the roofs taken off, and stalks put to them--and what quantities +of honey they must make! I think I'll go down and--no, I won't JUST yet,' she +went on, checking herself just as she was beginning to run down the hill, and +trying to find some excuse for turning shy so suddenly. 'It'll never do to go +down among them without a good long branch to brush them away--and what fun +it'll be when they ask me how I like my walk. I shall say-- "Oh, I like it well +enough--"' (here came the favourite little toss of the head), '"only it was so +dusty and hot, and the elephants did tease so!"' + +'I think I'll go down the other way,' she said after a pause: 'and perhaps I +may visit the elephants later on. Besides, I do so want to get into the Third +Square!' + +So with this excuse she ran down the hill and jumped over the first of the six +little brooks. + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +'Tickets, please!' said the Guard, putting his head in at the window. In a +moment everybody was holding out a ticket: they were about the same size as the +people, and quite seemed to fill the carriage. + +'Now then! Show your ticket, child!' the Guard went on, looking angrily at +Alice. And a great many voices all said together ('like the chorus of a song,' +thought Alice), 'Don't keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is worth a +thousand pounds a minute!' + +'I'm afraid I haven't got one,' Alice said in a frightened tone: 'there wasn't +a ticket-office where I came from.' And again the chorus of voices went on. +'There wasn't room for one where she came from. The land there is worth a +thousand pounds an inch!' + +'Don't make excuses,' said the Guard: 'you should have bought one from the +engine-driver.' And once more the chorus of voices went on with 'The man that +drives the engine. Why, the smoke alone is worth a thousand pounds a puff!' + +Alice thought to herself, 'Then there's no use in speaking.' The voices didn't +join in this time, as she hadn't spoken, but to her great surprise, they all +THOUGHT in chorus (I hope you understand what THINKING IN CHORUS means--for I +must confess that _I_ don't), 'Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a +thousand pounds a word!' + +'I shall dream about a thousand pounds tonight, I know I shall!' thought Alice. + +All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then +through a microscope, and then through an opera- glass. At last he said, +'You're travelling the wrong way,' and shut up the window and went away. + +'So young a child,' said the gentleman sitting opposite to her (he was dressed +in white paper), 'ought to know which way she's going, even if she doesn't know +her own name!' + +A Goat, that was sitting next to the gentleman in white, shut his eyes and said +in a loud voice, 'She ought to know her way to the ticket-office, even if she +doesn't know her alphabet!' + +There was a Beetle sitting next to the Goat (it was a very queer carriage-full +of passengers altogether), and, as the rule seemed to be that they should all +speak in turn, HE went on with 'She'll have to go back from here as luggage!' + +Alice couldn't see who was sitting beyond the Beetle, but a hoarse voice spoke +next. 'Change engines--' it said, and was obliged to leave off. + +'It sounds like a horse,' Alice thought to herself. And an extremely small +voice, close to her ear, said, 'You might make a joke on that--something about +"horse" and "hoarse," you know.' + +Then a very gentle voice in the distance said, 'She must be labelled "Lass, +with care," you know--' + +And after that other voices went on ('What a number of people there are in the +carriage!' thought Alice), saying, 'She must go by post, as she's got a head on +her--' 'She must be sent as a message by the telegraph--' 'She must draw the +train herself the rest of the way--' and so on. + +But the gentleman dressed in white paper leaned forwards and whispered in her +ear, 'Never mind what they all say, my dear, but take a return-ticket every +time the train stops.' + +'Indeed I shan't!' Alice said rather impatiently. 'I don't belong to this +railway journey at all--I was in a wood just now --and I wish I could get back +there.' + +'You might make a joke on THAT,' said the little voice close to her ear: +'something about "you WOULD if you could," you know.' + +'Don't tease so,' said Alice, looking about in vain to see where the voice came +from; 'if you're so anxious to have a joke made, why don't you make one +yourself?' + +The little voice sighed deeply: it was VERY unhappy, evidently, and Alice would +have said something pitying to comfort it, 'If it would only sigh like other +people!' she thought. But this was such a wonderfully small sigh, that she +wouldn't have heard it at all, if it hadn't come QUITE close to her ear. The +consequence of this was that it tickled her ear very much, and quite took off +her thoughts from the unhappiness of the poor little creature. + +'I know you are a friend,' the little voice went on; 'a dear friend, and an old +friend. And you won't hurt me, though I AM an insect.' + +'What kind of insect?' Alice inquired a little anxiously. What she really +wanted to know was, whether it could sting or not, but she thought this +wouldn't be quite a civil question to ask. + +'What, then you don't--' the little voice began, when it was drowned by a +shrill scream from the engine, and everybody jumped up in alarm, Alice among +the rest. + +The Horse, who had put his head out of the window, quietly drew it in and said, +'It's only a brook we have to jump over.' Everybody seemed satisfied with this, +though Alice felt a little nervous at the idea of trains jumping at all. +'However, it'll take us into the Fourth Square, that's some comfort!' she said +to herself. In another moment she felt the carriage rise straight up into the +air, and in her fright she caught at the thing nearest to her hand, which +happened to be the Goat's beard. + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +But the beard seemed to melt away as she touched it, and she found herself +sitting quietly under a tree--while the Gnat (for that was the insect she had +been talking to) was balancing itself on a twig just over her head, and fanning +her with its wings. + +It certainly was a VERY large Gnat: 'about the size of a chicken,' Alice +thought. Still, she couldn't feel nervous with it, after they had been talking +together so long. + +'--then you don't like all insects?' the Gnat went on, as quietly as if nothing +had happened. + +'I like them when they can talk,' Alice said. 'None of them ever talk, where +_{I}_ come from.' + +'What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where YOU come from?' the Gnat +inquired. + +'I don't REJOICE in insects at all,' Alice explained, 'because I'm rather +afraid of them--at least the large kinds. But I can tell you the names of some +of them.' + +'Of course they answer to their names?' the Gnat remarked carelessly. + +'I never knew them do it.' + +'What's the use of their having names,' the Gnat said, 'if they won't answer to +them?' + +'No use to THEM,' said Alice; 'but it's useful to the people who name them, I +suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?' + +'I can't say,' the Gnat replied. 'Further on, in the wood down there, they've +got no names--however, go on with your list of insects: you're wasting time.' + +'Well, there's the Horse-fly,' Alice began, counting off the names on her +fingers. + +'All right,' said the Gnat: 'half way up that bush, you'll see a +Rocking-horse-fly, if you look. It's made entirely of wood, and gets about by +swinging itself from branch to branch.' + +'What does it live on?' Alice asked, with great curiosity. + +'Sap and sawdust,' said the Gnat. 'Go on with the list.' + +Alice looked up at the Rocking-horse-fly with great interest, and made up her +mind that it must have been just repainted, it looked so bright and sticky; and +then she went on. + +'And there's the Dragon-fly.' + +'Look on the branch above your head,' said the Gnat, 'and there you'll find a +snap-dragon-fly. Its body is made of plum-pudding, its wings of holly-leaves, +and its head is a raisin burning in brandy.' + +'And what does it live on?' + +'Frumenty and mince pie,' the Gnat replied; 'and it makes its nest in a +Christmas box.' + +'And then there's the Butterfly,' Alice went on, after she had taken a good +look at the insect with its head on fire, and had thought to herself, 'I wonder +if that's the reason insects are so fond of flying into candles--because they +want to turn into Snap-dragon-flies!' + +'Crawling at your feet,' said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in some +alarm), 'you may observe a Bread-and-Butterfly. Its wings are thin slices of +Bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.' + +'And what does IT live on?' + +'Weak tea with cream in it.' + +A new difficulty came into Alice's head. 'Supposing it couldn't find any?' she +suggested. + +'Then it would die, of course.' + +'But that must happen very often,' Alice remarked thoughtfully. + +'It always happens,' said the Gnat. + +After this, Alice was silent for a minute or two, pondering. The Gnat amused +itself meanwhile by humming round and round her head: at last it settled again +and remarked, 'I suppose you don't want to lose your name?' + +'No, indeed,' Alice said, a little anxiously. + +'And yet I don't know,' the Gnat went on in a careless tone: 'only think how +convenient it would be if you could manage to go home without it! For instance, +if the governess wanted to call you to your lessons, she would call out "come +here--," and there she would have to leave off, because there wouldn't be any +name for her to call, and of course you wouldn't have to go, you know.' + +'That would never do, I'm sure,' said Alice: 'the governess would never think +of excusing me lessons for that. If she couldn't remember my name, she'd call +me "Miss!" as the servants do.' + +'Well, if she said "Miss," and didn't say anything more,' the Gnat remarked, +'of course you'd miss your lessons. That's a joke. I wish YOU had made it.' + +'Why do you wish _{I}_ had made it?' Alice asked. 'It's a very bad one.' + +But the Gnat only sighed deeply, while two large tears came rolling down its +cheeks. + +'You shouldn't make jokes,' Alice said, 'if it makes you so unhappy.' + +Then came another of those melancholy little sighs, and this time the poor Gnat +really seemed to have sighed itself away, for, when Alice looked up, there was +nothing whatever to be seen on the twig, and, as she was getting quite chilly +with sitting still so long, she got up and walked on. + +She very soon came to an open field, with a wood on the other side of it: it +looked much darker than the last wood, and Alice felt a LITTLE timid about +going into it. However, on second thoughts, she made up her mind to go on: 'for +I certainly won't go BACK,' she thought to herself, and this was the only way +to the Eighth Square. + +'This must be the wood,' she said thoughtfully to herself, 'where things have +no names. I wonder what'll become of MY name when I go in? I shouldn't like to +lose it at all--because they'd have to give me another, and it would be almost +certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be trying to find the +creature that had got my old name! That's just like the advertisements, you +know, when people lose dogs--"ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF 'DASH:' HAD ON A BRASS +COLLAR"--just fancy calling everything you met "Alice," till one of them +answered! Only they wouldn't answer at all, if they were wise.' + +She was rambling on in this way when she reached the wood: it looked very cool +and shady. 'Well, at any rate it's a great comfort,' she said as she stepped +under the trees, 'after being so hot, to get into the--into WHAT?' she went on, +rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. 'I mean to get under +the--under the--under THIS, you know!' putting her hand on the trunk of the +tree. 'What DOES it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name--why, +to be sure it hasn't!' + +She stood silent for a minute, thinking: then she suddenly began again. 'Then +it really HAS happened, after all! And now, who am I? I WILL remember, if I +can! I'm determined to do it!' But being determined didn't help much, and all +she could say, after a great deal of puzzling, was, 'L, I KNOW it begins with +L!' + +Just then a Fawn came wandering by: it looked at Alice with its large gentle +eyes, but didn't seem at all frightened. 'Here then! Here then!' Alice said, as +she held out her hand and tried to stroke it; but it only started back a +little, and then stood looking at her again. + +'What do you call yourself?' the Fawn said at last. Such a soft sweet voice it +had! + +'I wish I knew!' thought poor Alice. She answered, rather sadly, 'Nothing, just +now.' + +'Think again,' it said: 'that won't do.' + +Alice thought, but nothing came of it. 'Please, would you tell me what YOU call +yourself?' she said timidly. 'I think that might help a little.' + +'I'll tell you, if you'll move a little further on,' the Fawn said. 'I can't +remember here.' + +So they walked on together though the wood, Alice with her arms clasped +lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open +field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself +free from Alice's arms. 'I'm a Fawn!' it cried out in a voice of delight, 'and, +dear me! you're a human child!' A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful +brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed. + +Alice stood looking after it, almost ready to cry with vexation at having lost +her dear little fellow-traveller so suddenly. 'However, I know my name now.' +she said, 'that's SOME comfort. Alice--Alice--I won't forget it again. And now, +which of these finger-posts ought I to follow, I wonder?' + +It was not a very difficult question to answer, as there was only one road +through the wood, and the two finger-posts both pointed along it. 'I'll settle +it,' Alice said to herself, 'when the road divides and they point different +ways.' + +But this did not seem likely to happen. She went on and on, a long way, but +wherever the road divided there were sure to be two finger-posts pointing the +same way, one marked 'TO TWEEDLEDUM'S HOUSE' and the other 'TO THE HOUSE OF +TWEEDLEDEE.' + +'I do believe,' said Alice at last, 'that they live in the same house! I wonder +I never thought of that before--But I can't stay there long. I'll just call and +say "how d'you do?" and ask them the way out of the wood. If I could only get +to the Eighth Square before it gets dark!' So she wandered on, talking to +herself as she went, till, on turning a sharp corner, she came upon two fat +little men, so suddenly that she could not help starting back, but in another +moment she recovered herself, feeling sure that they must be. + +CHAPTER IV - Tweedledum and Tweedledee + +They were standing under a tree, each with an arm round the other's neck, and +Alice knew which was which in a moment, because one of them had 'DUM' +embroidered on his collar, and the other 'DEE.' 'I suppose they've each got +"TWEEDLE" round at the back of the collar,' she said to herself. + +They stood so still that she quite forgot they were alive, and she was just +looking round to see if the word "TWEEDLE" was written at the back of each +collar, when she was startled by a voice coming from the one marked 'DUM.' + +'If you think we're wax-works,' he said, 'you ought to pay, you know. Wax-works +weren't made to be looked at for nothing, nohow!' + +'Contrariwise,' added the one marked 'DEE,' 'if you think we're alive, you +ought to speak.' + +'I'm sure I'm very sorry,' was all Alice could say; for the words of the old +song kept ringing through her head like the ticking of a clock, and she could +hardly help saying them out loud:-- + +poem{ + + 'Tweedledum and Tweedledee + Agreed to have a battle; + For Tweedledum said Tweedledee + Had spoiled his nice new rattle. + + Just then flew down a monstrous crow, + As black as a tar-barrel; + Which frightened both the heroes so, + They quite forgot their quarrel.' + +}poem + +'I know what you're thinking about,' said Tweedledum: 'but it isn't so, nohow.' + +'Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it +were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.' + +'I was thinking,' Alice said very politely, 'which is the best way out of this +wood: it's getting so dark. Would you tell me, please?' + +But the little men only looked at each other and grinned. + +They looked so exactly like a couple of great schoolboys, that Alice couldn't +help pointing her finger at Tweedledum, and saying 'First Boy!' + +'Nohow!' Tweedledum cried out briskly, and shut his mouth up again with a snap. + +'Next Boy!' said Alice, passing on to Tweedledee, though she felt quite certain +he would only shout out 'Contrariwise!' and so he did. + +'You've been wrong!' cried Tweedledum. 'The first thing in a visit is to say +"How d'ye do?" and shake hands!' And here the two brothers gave each other a +hug, and then they held out the two hands that were free, to shake hands with +her. + +Alice did not like shaking hands with either of them first, for fear of hurting +the other one's feelings; so, as the best way out of the difficulty, she took +hold of both hands at once: the next moment they were dancing round in a ring. +This seemed quite natural (she remembered afterwards), and she was not even +surprised to hear music playing: it seemed to come from the tree under which +they were dancing, and it was done (as well as she could make it out) by the +branches rubbing one across the other, like fiddles and fiddle-sticks. + +'But it certainly WAS funny,' (Alice said afterwards, when she was telling her +sister the history of all this,) 'to find myself singing "HERE WE GO ROUND THE +MULBERRY BUSH." I don't know when I began it, but somehow I felt as if I'd been +singing it a long long time!' + +The other two dancers were fat, and very soon out of breath. 'Four times round +is enough for one dance,' Tweedledum panted out, and they left off dancing as +suddenly as they had begun: the music stopped at the same moment. + +Then they let go of Alice's hands, and stood looking at her for a minute: there +was a rather awkward pause, as Alice didn't know how to begin a conversation +with people she had just been dancing with. 'It would never do to say "How d'ye +do?" NOW,' she said to herself: 'we seem to have got beyond that, somehow!' + +'I hope you're not much tired?' she said at last. + +'Nohow. And thank you VERY much for asking,' said Tweedledum. + +'So much obliged!' added Tweedledee. 'You like poetry?' + +'Ye-es, pretty well--SOME poetry,' Alice said doubtfully. 'Would you tell me +which road leads out of the wood?' + +'What shall I repeat to her?' said Tweedledee, looking round at Tweedledum with +great solemn eyes, and not noticing Alice's question. + +'"THE WALRUS AND THE CARPENTER" is the longest,' Tweedledum replied, giving his +brother an affectionate hug. + +Tweedledee began instantly: + +'The sun was shining--' + +Here Alice ventured to interrupt him. 'If it's VERY long,' she said, as +politely as she could, 'would you please tell me first which road--' + +Tweedledee smiled gently, and began again: + +poem{ + + 'The sun was shining on the sea, + Shining with all his might: + He did his very best to make + The billows smooth and bright-- + And this was odd, because it was + The middle of the night. + + The moon was shining sulkily, + Because she thought the sun + Had got no business to be there + After the day was done-- + "It's very rude of him," she said, + "To come and spoil the fun!" + + The sea was wet as wet could be, + The sands were dry as dry. + You could not see a cloud, because + No cloud was in the sky: + No birds were flying over head-- + There were no birds to fly. + + The Walrus and the Carpenter + Were walking close at hand; + They wept like anything to see + Such quantities of sand: + "If this were only cleared away," + They said, "it WOULD be grand!" + + "If seven maids with seven mops + Swept it for half a year, + Do you suppose," the Walrus said, + "That they could get it clear?" + "I doubt it," said the Carpenter, + And shed a bitter tear. + + "O Oysters, come and walk with us!" + The Walrus did beseech. + "A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, + Along the briny beach: + We cannot do with more than four, + To give a hand to each." + + The eldest Oyster looked at him. + But never a word he said: + The eldest Oyster winked his eye, + And shook his heavy head-- + Meaning to say he did not choose + To leave the oyster-bed. + + But four young oysters hurried up, + All eager for the treat: + Their coats were brushed, their faces washed, + Their shoes were clean and neat-- + And this was odd, because, you know, + They hadn't any feet. + + Four other Oysters followed them, + And yet another four; + And thick and fast they came at last, + And more, and more, and more-- + All hopping through the frothy waves, + And scrambling to the shore. + + The Walrus and the Carpenter + Walked on a mile or so, + And then they rested on a rock + Conveniently low: + And all the little Oysters stood + And waited in a row. + + "The time has come," the Walrus said, + "To talk of many things: + Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- + Of cabbages--and kings-- + And why the sea is boiling hot-- + And whether pigs have wings." + + "But wait a bit," the Oysters cried, + "Before we have our chat; + For some of us are out of breath, + And all of us are fat!" + "No hurry!" said the Carpenter. + They thanked him much for that. + + "A loaf of bread," the Walrus said, + "Is what we chiefly need: + Pepper and vinegar besides + Are very good indeed-- + Now if you're ready Oysters dear, + We can begin to feed." + + "But not on us!" the Oysters cried, + Turning a little blue, + "After such kindness, that would be + A dismal thing to do!" + "The night is fine," the Walrus said + "Do you admire the view? + + "It was so kind of you to come! + And you are very nice!" + The Carpenter said nothing but + "Cut us another slice: + I wish you were not quite so deaf-- + I've had to ask you twice!" + + "It seems a shame," the Walrus said, + "To play them such a trick, + After we've brought them out so far, + And made them trot so quick!" + The Carpenter said nothing but + "The butter's spread too thick!" + + "I weep for you," the Walrus said. + "I deeply sympathize." + With sobs and tears he sorted out + Those of the largest size. + Holding his pocket handkerchief + Before his streaming eyes. + + "O Oysters," said the Carpenter. + "You've had a pleasant run! + Shall we be trotting home again?" + But answer came there none-- + And that was scarcely odd, because + They'd eaten every one.' + +}poem + +'I like the Walrus best,' said Alice: 'because you see he was a LITTLE sorry +for the poor oysters.' + +'He ate more than the Carpenter, though,' said Tweedledee. 'You see he held his +handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn't count how many he took: +contrariwise.' + +'That was mean!' Alice said indignantly. 'Then I like the Carpenter best--if he +didn't eat so many as the Walrus.' + +'But he ate as many as he could get,' said Tweedledum. + +This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, 'Well! They were BOTH very +unpleasant characters--' Here she checked herself in some alarm, at hearing +something that sounded to her like the puffing of a large steam-engine in the +wood near them, though she feared it was more likely to be a wild beast. 'Are +there any lions or tigers about here?' she asked timidly. + +'It's only the Red King snoring,' said Tweedledee. + +'Come and look at him!' the brothers cried, and they each took one of Alice's +hands, and led her up to where the King was sleeping. + +'Isn't he a LOVELY sight?' said Tweedledum. + +Alice couldn't say honestly that he was. He had a tall red night-cap on, with a +tassel, and he was lying crumpled up into a sort of untidy heap, and snoring +loud--'fit to snore his head off!' as Tweedledum remarked. + +'I'm afraid he'll catch cold with lying on the damp grass,' said Alice, who was +a very thoughtful little girl. + +'He's dreaming now,' said Tweedledee: 'and what do you think he's dreaming +about?' + +Alice said 'Nobody can guess that.' + +'Why, about YOU!' Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. 'And +if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?' + +'Where I am now, of course,' said Alice. + +'Not you!' Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. 'You'd be nowhere. Why, you're +only a sort of thing in his dream!' + +'If that there King was to wake,' added Tweedledum, 'you'd go out--bang!--just +like a candle!' + +'I shouldn't!' Alice exclaimed indignantly. 'Besides, if I'M only a sort of +thing in his dream, what are YOU, I should like to know?' + +'Ditto' said Tweedledum. + +'Ditto, ditto' cried Tweedledee. + +He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn't help saying, 'Hush! You'll be +waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise.' + +'Well, it no use YOUR talking about waking him,' said Tweedledum, 'when you're +only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real.' + +'I AM real!' said Alice and began to cry. + +'You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying,' Tweedledee remarked: +'there's nothing to cry about.' + +'If I wasn't real,' Alice said--half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed +so ridiculous--'I shouldn't be able to cry.' + +'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?' Tweedledum interrupted in a +tone of great contempt. + +'I know they're talking nonsense,' Alice thought to herself: 'and it's foolish +to cry about it.' So she brushed away her tears, and went on as cheerfully as +she could. 'At any rate I'd better be getting out of the wood, for really it's +coming on very dark. Do you think it's going to rain?' + +Tweedledum spread a large umbrella over himself and his brother, and looked up +into it. 'No, I don't think it is,' he said: 'at least--not under HERE. Nohow.' + +'But it may rain OUTSIDE?' + +'It may--if it chooses,' said Tweedledee: 'we've no objection. Contrariwise.' + +'Selfish things!' thought Alice, and she was just going to say 'Good-night' and +leave them, when Tweedledum sprang out from under the umbrella and seized her +by the wrist. + +'Do you see THAT?' he said, in a voice choking with passion, and his eyes grew +large and yellow all in a moment, as he pointed with a trembling finger at a +small white thing lying under the tree. + +'It's only a rattle,' Alice said, after a careful examination of the little +white thing. 'Not a rattleSNAKE, you know,' she added hastily, thinking that he +was frightened: 'only an old rattle--quite old and broken.' + +'I knew it was!' cried Tweedledum, beginning to stamp about wildly and tear his +hair. 'It's spoilt, of course!' Here he looked at Tweedledee, who immediately +sat down on the ground, and tried to hide himself under the umbrella. + +Alice laid her hand upon his arm, and said in a soothing tone, 'You needn't be +so angry about an old rattle.' + +'But it isn't old!' Tweedledum cried, in a greater fury than ever. 'It's new, I +tell you--I bought it yesterday--my nice new RATTLE!' and his voice rose to a +perfect scream. + +All this time Tweedledee was trying his best to fold up the umbrella, with +himself in it: which was such an extraordinary thing to do, that it quite took +off Alice's attention from the angry brother. But he couldn't quite succeed, +and it ended in his rolling over, bundled up in the umbrella, with only his +head out: and there he lay, opening and shutting his mouth and his large +eyes--'looking more like a fish than anything else,' Alice thought. + +'Of course you agree to have a battle?' Tweedledum said in a calmer tone. + +'I suppose so,' the other sulkily replied, as he crawled out of the umbrella: +'only SHE must help us to dress up, you know.' + +So the two brothers went off hand-in-hand into the wood, and returned in a +minute with their arms full of things--such as bolsters, blankets, hearth-rugs, +table-cloths, dish-covers and coal-scuttles. 'I hope you're a good hand at +pinning and tying strings?' Tweedledum remarked. 'Every one of these things has +got to go on, somehow or other.' + +Alice said afterwards she had never seen such a fuss made about anything in all +her life--the way those two bustled about-- and the quantity of things they put +on--and the trouble they gave her in tying strings and fastening +buttons--'Really they'll be more like bundles of old clothes than anything +else, by the time they're ready!' she said to herself, as she arranged a +bolster round the neck of Tweedledee, 'to keep his head from being cut off,' as +he said. + +'You know,' he added very gravely, 'it's one of the most serious things that +can possibly happen to one in a battle--to get one's head cut off.' + +Alice laughed aloud: but she managed to turn it into a cough, for fear of +hurting his feelings. + +'Do I look very pale?' said Tweedledum, coming up to have his helmet tied on. +(He CALLED it a helmet, though it certainly looked much more like a saucepan.) + +'Well--yes--a LITTLE,' Alice replied gently. + +'I'm very brave generally,' he went on in a low voice: 'only to-day I happen to +have a headache.' + +'And I'VE got a toothache!' said Tweedledee, who had overheard the remark. 'I'm +far worse off than you!' + +'Then you'd better not fight to-day,' said Alice, thinking it a good +opportunity to make peace. + +'We MUST have a bit of a fight, but I don't care about going on long,' said +Tweedledum. 'What's the time now?' + +Tweedledee looked at his watch, and said 'Half-past four.' + +'Let's fight till six, and then have dinner,' said Tweedledum. + +'Very well,' the other said, rather sadly: 'and SHE can watch us--only you'd +better not come VERY close,' he added: 'I generally hit everything I can +see--when I get really excited.' + +'And _{I}_ hit everything within reach,' cried Tweedledum, 'whether I can see +it or not!' + +Alice laughed. 'You must hit the TREES pretty often, I should think,' she said. + +Tweedledum looked round him with a satisfied smile. 'I don't suppose,' he said, +'there'll be a tree left standing, for ever so far round, by the time we've +finished!' + +'And all about a rattle!' said Alice, still hoping to make them a LITTLE +ashamed of fighting for such a trifle. + +'I shouldn't have minded it so much,' said Tweedledum, 'if it hadn't been a new +one.' + +'I wish the monstrous crow would come!' thought Alice. + +'There's only one sword, you know,' Tweedledum said to his brother: 'but you +can have the umbrella--it's quite as sharp. Only we must begin quick. It's +getting as dark as it can.' + +'And darker,' said Tweedledee. + +It was getting dark so suddenly that Alice thought there must be a thunderstorm +coming on. 'What a thick black cloud that is!' she said. 'And how fast it +comes! Why, I do believe it's got wings!' + +'It's the crow!' Tweedledum cried out in a shrill voice of alarm: and the two +brothers took to their heels and were out of sight in a moment. + +Alice ran a little way into the wood, and stopped under a large tree. 'It can +never get at me HERE,' she thought: 'it's far too large to squeeze itself in +among the trees. But I wish it wouldn't flap its wings so--it makes quite a +hurricane in the wood-- here's somebody's shawl being blown away!' + +CHAPTER V - Wool and Water + +She caught the shawl as she spoke, and looked about for the owner: in another +moment the White Queen came running wildly through the wood, with both arms +stretched out wide, as if she were flying, and Alice very civilly went to meet +her with the shawl. + +'I'm very glad I happened to be in the way,' Alice said, as she helped her to +put on her shawl again. + +The White Queen only looked at her in a helpless frightened sort of way, and +kept repeating something in a whisper to herself that sounded like +'bread-and-butter, bread-and-butter,' and Alice felt that if there was to be +any conversation at all, she must manage it herself. So she began rather +timidly: 'Am I addressing the White Queen?' + +'Well, yes, if you call that a-dressing,' The Queen said. 'It isn't MY notion +of the thing, at all.' + +Alice thought it would never do to have an argument at the very beginning of +their conversation, so she smiled and said, 'If your Majesty will only tell me +the right way to begin, I'll do it as well as I can.' + +'But I don't want it done at all!' groaned the poor Queen. 'I've been +a-dressing myself for the last two hours.' + +It would have been all the better, as it seemed to Alice, if she had got some +one else to dress her, she was so dreadfully untidy. 'Every single thing's +crooked,' Alice thought to herself, 'and she's all over pins!--may I put your +shawl straight for you?' she added aloud. + +'I don't know what's the matter with it!' the Queen said, in a melancholy +voice. 'It's out of temper, I think. I've pinned it here, and I've pinned it +there, but there's no pleasing it!' + +'It CAN'T go straight, you know, if you pin it all on one side,' Alice said, as +she gently put it right for her; 'and, dear me, what a state your hair is in!' + +'The brush has got entangled in it!' the Queen said with a sigh. 'And I lost +the comb yesterday.' + +Alice carefully released the brush, and did her best to get the hair into +order. 'Come, you look rather better now!' she said, after altering most of the +pins. 'But really you should have a lady's maid!' + +'I'm sure I'll take you with pleasure!' the Queen said. 'Twopence a week, and +jam every other day.' + +Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said, 'I don't want you to hire ME--and I +don't care for jam.' + +'It's very good jam,' said the Queen. + +'Well, I don't want any TO-DAY, at any rate.' + +'You couldn't have it if you DID want it,' the Queen said. 'The rule is, jam +to-morrow and jam yesterday--but never jam to-day.' + +'It MUST come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected. + +'No, it can't,' said the Queen. 'It's jam every OTHER day: to-day isn't any +OTHER day, you know.' + +'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!' + +'That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: 'it always +makes one a little giddy at first--' + +'Living backwards!' Alice repeated in great astonishment. 'I never heard of +such a thing!' + +'--but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways.' + +'I'm sure MINE only works one way,' Alice remarked. 'I can't remember things +before they happen.' + +'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked. + +'What sort of things do YOU remember best?' Alice ventured to ask. + +'Oh, things that happened the week after next,' the Queen replied in a careless +tone. 'For instance, now,' she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster +[band-aid] on her finger as she spoke, 'there's the King's Messenger. He's in +prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn't even begin till next +Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.' + +'Suppose he never commits the crime?' said Alice. + +'That would be all the better, wouldn't it?' the Queen said, as she bound the +plaster round her finger with a bit of ribbon. + +Alice felt there was no denying THAT. 'Of course it would be all the better,' +she said: 'but it wouldn't be all the better his being punished.' + +'You're wrong THERE, at any rate,' said the Queen: 'were YOU ever punished?' + +'Only for faults,' said Alice. + +'And you were all the better for it, I know!' the Queen said triumphantly. + +'Yes, but then I HAD done the things I was punished for,' said Alice: 'that +makes all the difference.' + +'But if you HADN'T done them,' the Queen said, 'that would have been better +still; better, and better, and better!' Her voice went higher with each +'better,' till it got quite to a squeak at last. + +Alice was just beginning to say 'There's a mistake somewhere--,' when the Queen +began screaming so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished. 'Oh, oh, +oh!' shouted the Queen, shaking her hand about as if she wanted to shake it +off. 'My finger's bleeding! Oh, oh, oh, oh!' + +Her screams were so exactly like the whistle of a steam-engine, that Alice had +to hold both her hands over her ears. + +'What IS the matter?' she said, as soon as there was a chance of making herself +heard. 'Have you pricked your finger?' + +'I haven't pricked it YET,' the Queen said, 'but I soon shall-- oh, oh, oh!' + +'When do you expect to do it?' Alice asked, feeling very much inclined to +laugh. + +'When I fasten my shawl again,' the poor Queen groaned out: 'the brooch will +come undone directly. Oh, oh!' As she said the words the brooch flew open, and +the Queen clutched wildly at it, and tried to clasp it again. + +'Take care!' cried Alice. 'You're holding it all crooked!' And she caught at +the brooch; but it was too late: the pin had slipped, and the Queen had pricked +her finger. + +'That accounts for the bleeding, you see,' she said to Alice with a smile. 'Now +you understand the way things happen here.' + +'But why don't you scream now?' Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put +over her ears again. + +'Why, I've done all the screaming already,' said the Queen. 'What would be the +good of having it all over again?' + +By this time it was getting light. 'The crow must have flown away, I think,' +said Alice: 'I'm so glad it's gone. I thought it was the night coming on.' + +'I wish _{I}_ could manage to be glad!' the Queen said. 'Only I never can +remember the rule. You must be very happy, living in this wood, and being glad +whenever you like!' + +'Only it is so VERY lonely here!' Alice said in a melancholy voice; and at the +thought of her loneliness two large tears came rolling down her cheeks. + +'Oh, don't go on like that!' cried the poor Queen, wringing her hands in +despair. 'Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've +come to-day. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry!' + +Alice could not help laughing at this, even in the midst of her tears. 'Can YOU +keep from crying by considering things?' she asked. + +'That's the way it's done,' the Queen said with great decision: 'nobody can do +two things at once, you know. Let's consider your age to begin with--how old +are you?' + +'I'm seven and a half exactly.' + +'You needn't say "exactually,"' the Queen remarked: 'I can believe it without +that. Now I'll give YOU something to believe. I'm just one hundred and one, +five months and a day.' + +'I can't believe THAT!' said Alice. + +'Can't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone. 'Try again: draw a long breath, +and shut your eyes.' + +Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said: 'one CAN'T believe impossible +things.' + +'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your +age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as +many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!' + +The brooch had come undone as she spoke, and a sudden gust of wind blew the +Queen's shawl across a little brook. The Queen spread out her arms again, and +went flying after it, and this time she succeeded in catching it for herself. +'I've got it!' she cried in a triumphant tone. 'Now you shall see me pin it on +again, all by myself!' + +'Then I hope your finger is better now?' Alice said very politely, as she +crossed the little brook after the Queen. + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +'Oh, much better!' cried the Queen, her voice rising to a squeak as she went +on. 'Much be-etter! Be-etter! Be-e-e-etter! Be-e-ehh!' The last word ended in a +long bleat, so like a sheep that Alice quite started. + +She looked at the Queen, who seemed to have suddenly wrapped herself up in +wool. Alice rubbed her eyes, and looked again. She couldn't make out what had +happened at all. Was she in a shop? And was that really--was it really a SHEEP +that was sitting on the other side of the counter? Rub as she could, she could +make nothing more of it: she was in a little dark shop, leaning with her elbows +on the counter, and opposite to her was an old Sheep, sitting in an arm-chair +knitting, and every now and then leaving off to look at her through a great +pair of spectacles. + +'What is it you want to buy?' the Sheep said at last, looking up for a moment +from her knitting. + +'I don't QUITE know yet,' Alice said, very gently. 'I should like to look all +round me first, if I might.' + +'You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like,' said the Sheep: +'but you can't look ALL round you--unless you've got eyes at the back of your +head.' + +But these, as it happened, Alice had NOT got: so she contented herself with +turning round, looking at the shelves as she came to them. + +The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things-- but the oddest +part of it all was, that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out +exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty: though +the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold. + +'Things flow about so here!' she said at last in a plaintive tone, after she +had spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large bright thing, that looked +sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a work-box, and was always in the +shelf next above the one she was looking at. 'And this one is the most +provoking of all--but I'll tell you what--' she added, as a sudden thought +struck her, 'I'll follow it up to the very top shelf of all. It'll puzzle it to +go through the ceiling, I expect!' + +But even this plan failed: the 'thing' went through the ceiling as quietly as +possible, as if it were quite used to it. + +'Are you a child or a teetotum?' the Sheep said, as she took up another pair of +needles. 'You'll make me giddy soon, if you go on turning round like that.' She +was now working with fourteen pairs at once, and Alice couldn't help looking at +her in great astonishment. + +'How CAN she knit with so many?' the puzzled child thought to herself. 'She +gets more and more like a porcupine every minute!' + +'Can you row?' the Sheep asked, handing her a pair of knitting- needles as she +spoke. + +'Yes, a little--but not on land--and not with needles--' Alice was beginning to +say, when suddenly the needles turned into oars in her hands, and she found +they were in a little boat, gliding along between banks: so there was nothing +for it but to do her best. + +'Feather!' cried the Sheep, as she took up another pair of needles. + +This didn't sound like a remark that needed any answer, so Alice said nothing, +but pulled away. There was something very queer about the water, she thought, +as every now and then the oars got fast in it, and would hardly come out again. + +'Feather! Feather!' the Sheep cried again, taking more needles. 'You'll be +catching a crab directly.' + +'A dear little crab!' thought Alice. 'I should like that.' + +'Didn't you hear me say "Feather"?' the Sheep cried angrily, taking up quite a +bunch of needles. + +'Indeed I did,' said Alice: 'you've said it very often--and very loud. Please, +where ARE the crabs?' + +'In the water, of course!' said the Sheep, sticking some of the needles into +her hair, as her hands were full. 'Feather, I say!' + +'WHY do you say "feather" so often?' Alice asked at last, rather vexed. 'I'm +not a bird!' + +'You are,' said the Sheep: 'you're a little goose.' + +This offended Alice a little, so there was no more conversation for a minute or +two, while the boat glided gently on, sometimes among beds of weeds (which made +the oars stick fast in the water, worse then ever), and sometimes under trees, +but always with the same tall river-banks frowning over their heads. + +'Oh, please! There are some scented rushes!' Alice cried in a sudden transport +of delight. 'There really are--and SUCH beauties!' + +'You needn't say "please" to ME about 'em,' the Sheep said, without looking up +from her knitting: 'I didn't put 'em there, and I'm not going to take 'em +away.' + +'No, but I meant--please, may we wait and pick some?' Alice pleaded. 'If you +don't mind stopping the boat for a minute.' + +'How am _I_ to stop it?' said the Sheep. 'If you leave off rowing, it'll stop +of itself.' + +So the boat was left to drift down the stream as it would, till it glided +gently in among the waving rushes. And then the little sleeves were carefully +rolled up, and the little arms were plunged in elbow-deep to get the rushes a +good long way down before breaking them off--and for a while Alice forgot all +about the Sheep and the knitting, as she bent over the side of the boat, with +just the ends of her tangled hair dipping into the water--while with bright +eager eyes she caught at one bunch after another of the darling scented rushes. + +'I only hope the boat won't tipple over!' she said to herself. 'Oh, WHAT a +lovely one! Only I couldn't quite reach it.' 'And it certainly DID seem a +little provoking ('almost as if it happened on purpose,' she thought) that, +though she managed to pick plenty of beautiful rushes as the boat glided by, +there was always a more lovely one that she couldn't reach. + +'The prettiest are always further!' she said at last, with a sigh at the +obstinacy of the rushes in growing so far off, as, with flushed cheeks and +dripping hair and hands, she scrambled back into her place, and began to +arrange her new-found treasures. + +What mattered it to her just then that the rushes had begun to fade, and to +lose all their scent and beauty, from the very moment that she picked them? +Even real scented rushes, you know, last only a very little while--and these, +being dream-rushes, melted away almost like snow, as they lay in heaps at her +feet-- but Alice hardly noticed this, there were so many other curious things +to think about. + +They hadn't gone much farther before the blade of one of the oars got fast in +the water and WOULDN'T come out again (so Alice explained it afterwards), and +the consequence was that the handle of it caught her under the chin, and, in +spite of a series of little shrieks of 'Oh, oh, oh!' from poor Alice, it swept +her straight off the seat, and down among the heap of rushes. + +However, she wasn't hurt, and was soon up again: the Sheep went on with her +knitting all the while, just as if nothing had happened. 'That was a nice crab +you caught!' she remarked, as Alice got back into her place, very much relieved +to find herself still in the boat. + +'Was it? I didn't see it,' Said Alice, peeping cautiously over the side of the +boat into the dark water. 'I wish it hadn't let go--I should so like to see a +little crab to take home with me!' But the Sheep only laughed scornfully, and +went on with her knitting. + +'Are there many crabs here?' said Alice. + +'Crabs, and all sorts of things,' said the Sheep: 'plenty of choice, only make +up your mind. Now, what DO you want to buy?' + +'To buy!' Alice echoed in a tone that was half astonished and half +frightened--for the oars, and the boat, and the river, had vanished all in a +moment, and she was back again in the little dark shop. + +'I should like to buy an egg, please,' she said timidly. 'How do you sell +them?' + +'Fivepence farthing for one--Twopence for two,' the Sheep replied. + +'Then two are cheaper than one?' Alice said in a surprised tone, taking out her +purse. + +'Only you MUST eat them both, if you buy two,' said the Sheep. + +'Then I'll have ONE, please,' said Alice, as she put the money down on the +counter. For she thought to herself, 'They mightn't be at all nice, you know.' + +The Sheep took the money, and put it away in a box: then she said 'I never put +things into people's hands--that would never do--you must get it for yourself.' +And so saying, she went off to the other end of the shop, and set the egg +upright on a shelf. + +'I wonder WHY it wouldn't do?' thought Alice, as she groped her way among the +tables and chairs, for the shop was very dark towards the end. 'The egg seems +to get further away the more I walk towards it. Let me see, is this a chair? +Why, it's got branches, I declare! How very odd to find trees growing here! And +actually here's a little brook! Well, this is the very queerest shop I ever +saw!' + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +So she went on, wondering more and more at every step, as everything turned +into a tree the moment she came up to it, and she quite expected the egg to do +the same. + +CHAPTER VI - Humpty Dumpty + +However, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when she +had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and +mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was HUMPTY +DUMPTY himself. 'It can't be anybody else!' she said to herself. 'I'm as +certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face.' + +It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous face. +Humpty Dumpty was sitting with his legs crossed, like a Turk, on the top of a +high wall--such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his +balance--and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the opposite direction, and he +didn't take the least notice of her, she thought he must be a stuffed figure +after all. + +'And how exactly like an egg he is!' she said aloud, standing with her hands +ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall. + +'It's VERY provoking,' Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away +from Alice as he spoke, 'to be called an egg-- VERY!' + +'I said you LOOKED like an egg, Sir,' Alice gently explained. 'And some eggs +are very pretty, you know' she added, hoping to turn her remark into a sort of +a compliment. + +'Some people,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking away from her as usual, 'have no +more sense than a baby!' + +Alice didn't know what to say to this: it wasn't at all like conversation, she +thought, as he never said anything to HER; in fact, his last remark was +evidently addressed to a tree--so she stood and softly repeated to herself:-- + +poem{ + + 'Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall: + Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. + All the King's horses and all the King's men + Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty in his place again.' + +}poem + +'That last line is much too long for the poetry,' she added, almost out loud, +forgetting that Humpty Dumpty would hear her. + +'Don't stand there chattering to yourself like that,' Humpty Dumpty said, +looking at her for the first time, 'but tell me your name and your business.' + +'My NAME is Alice, but--' + +'It's a stupid enough name!' Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. 'What does +it mean?' + +'MUST a name mean something?' Alice asked doubtfully. + +'Of course it must,' Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: 'MY name means the +shape I am--and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you +might be any shape, almost.' + +'Why do you sit out here all alone?' said Alice, not wishing to begin an +argument. + +'Why, because there's nobody with me!' cried Humpty Dumpty. 'Did you think I +didn't know the answer to THAT? Ask another.' + +'Don't you think you'd be safer down on the ground?' Alice went on, not with +any idea of making another riddle, but simply in her good-natured anxiety for +the queer creature. 'That wall is so VERY narrow!' + +'What tremendously easy riddles you ask!' Humpty Dumpty growled out. 'Of course +I don't think so! Why, if ever I DID fall off-- which there's no chance of--but +IF I did--' Here he pursed his lips and looked so solemn and grand that Alice +could hardly help laughing. 'IF I did fall,' he went on, 'THE KING HAS PROMISED +ME--WITH HIS VERY OWN MOUTH--to--to--' + +'To send all his horses and all his men,' Alice interrupted, rather unwisely. + +'Now I declare that's too bad!' Humpty Dumpty cried, breaking into a sudden +passion. 'You've been listening at doors--and behind trees-- and down +chimneys--or you couldn't have known it!' + +'I haven't, indeed!' Alice said very gently. 'It's in a book.' + +'Ah, well! They may write such things in a BOOK,' Humpty Dumpty said in a +calmer tone. 'That's what you call a History of England, that is. Now, take a +good look at me! I'm one that has spoken to a King, _{I}_ am: mayhap you'll +never see such another: and to show you I'm not proud, you may shake hands with +me!' And he grinned almost from ear to ear, as he leant forwards (and as nearly +as possible fell off the wall in doing so) and offered Alice his hand. She +watched him a little anxiously as she took it. 'If he smiled much more, the +ends of his mouth might meet behind,' she thought: 'and then I don't know what +would happen to his head! I'm afraid it would come off!' + +'Yes, all his horses and all his men,' Humpty Dumpty went on. 'They'd pick me +up again in a minute, THEY would! However, this conversation is going on a +little too fast: let's go back to the last remark but one.' + +'I'm afraid I can't quite remember it,' Alice said very politely. + +'In that case we start fresh,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'and it's my turn to choose +a subject--' ('He talks about it just as if it was a game!' thought Alice.) 'So +here's a question for you. How old did you say you were?' + +Alice made a short calculation, and said 'Seven years and six months.' + +'Wrong!' Humpty Dumpty exclaimed triumphantly. 'You never said a word like it!' + +'I though you meant "How old ARE you?"' Alice explained. + +'If I'd meant that, I'd have said it,' said Humpty Dumpty. + +Alice didn't want to begin another argument, so she said nothing. + +'Seven years and six months!' Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. 'An +uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you'd asked MY advice, I'd have said "Leave +off at seven"--but it's too late now.' + +'I never ask advice about growing,' Alice said indignantly. + +'Too proud?' the other inquired. + +Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. 'I mean,' she said, 'that +one can't help growing older.' + +'ONE can't, perhaps,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'but TWO can. With proper assistance, +you might have left off at seven.' + +'What a beautiful belt you've got on!' Alice suddenly remarked. + +(They had had quite enough of the subject of age, she thought: and if they +really were to take turns in choosing subjects, it was her turn now.) 'At +least,' she corrected herself on second thoughts, 'a beautiful cravat, I should +have said--no, a belt, I mean--I beg your pardon!' she added in dismay, for +Humpty Dumpty looked thoroughly offended, and she began to wish she hadn't +chosen that subject. 'If I only knew,' she thought to herself, 'which was neck +and which was waist!' + +Evidently Humpty Dumpty was very angry, though he said nothing for a minute or +two. When he DID speak again, it was in a deep growl. + +'It is a--MOST--PROVOKING--thing,' he said at last, 'when a person doesn't know +a cravat from a belt!' + +'I know it's very ignorant of me,' Alice said, in so humble a tone that Humpty +Dumpty relented. + +'It's a cravat, child, and a beautiful one, as you say. It's a present from the +White King and Queen. There now!' + +'Is it really?' said Alice, quite pleased to find that she HAD chosen a good +subject, after all. + +'They gave it me,' Humpty Dumpty continued thoughtfully, as he crossed one knee +over the other and clasped his hands round it, 'they gave it me--for an +un-birthday present.' + +'I beg your pardon?' Alice said with a puzzled air. + +'I'm not offended,' said Humpty Dumpty. + +'I mean, what IS an un-birthday present?' + +'A present given when it isn't your birthday, of course.' + +Alice considered a little. 'I like birthday presents best,' she said at last. + +'You don't know what you're talking about!' cried Humpty Dumpty. 'How many days +are there in a year?' + +'Three hundred and sixty-five,' said Alice. + +'And how many birthdays have you?' + +'One.' + +'And if you take one from three hundred and sixty-five, what remains?' + +'Three hundred and sixty-four, of course.' + +Humpty Dumpty looked doubtful. 'I'd rather see that done on paper,' he said. + +Alice couldn't help smiling as she took out her memorandum- book, and worked +the sum for him: + +code{ + + 365 + 1 + ___ + + 364 + ___ + +}code + +Humpty Dumpty took the book, and looked at it carefully. 'That seems to be done +right--' he began. + +'You're holding it upside down!' Alice interrupted. + +'To be sure I was!' Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for him. +'I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that SEEMS to be done +right--though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now--and that +shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get +un-birthday presents--' + +'Certainly,' said Alice. + +'And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!' + +'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said. + +Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't-- till I tell you. I +meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"' + +'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected. + +'When _{I}_ use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it +means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.' + +'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many +different things.' + +'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master-- that's all.' + +Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty +began again. 'They've a temper, some of them-- particularly verbs, they're the +proudest--adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs--however, _{I}_ +can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what _{I}_ say!' + +'Would you tell me, please,' said Alice 'what that means?' + +'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much +pleased. 'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, +and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I +suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.' + +'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone. + +'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always +pay it extra.' + +'Oh!' said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark. + +'Ah, you should see 'em come round me of a Saturday night,' Humpty Dumpty went +on, wagging his head gravely from side to side: 'for to get their wages, you +know.' + +(Alice didn't venture to ask what he paid them with; and so you see I can't +tell YOU.) + +'You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,' said Alice. 'Would you kindly +tell me the meaning of the poem called "Jabberwocky"?' + +'Let's hear it,' said Humpty Dumpty. 'I can explain all the poems that were +ever invented--and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.' + +This sounded very hopeful, so Alice repeated the first verse: + +poem{ + + 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves + Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; + All mimsy were the borogoves, + And the mome raths outgrabe. + +}poem + +'That's enough to begin with,' Humpty Dumpty interrupted: 'there are plenty of +hard words there. "BRILLIG" means four o'clock in the afternoon--the time when +you begin BROILING things for dinner.' + +'That'll do very well,' said Alice: 'and "SLITHY"?' + +'Well, "SLITHY" means "lithe and slimy." "Lithe" is the same as "active." You +see it's like a portmanteau--there are two meanings packed up into one word.' + +'I see it now,' Alice remarked thoughtfully: 'and what are "TOVES"?' + +'Well, "TOVES" are something like badgers--they're something like lizards--and +they're something like corkscrews.' + +'They must be very curious looking creatures.' + +'They are that,' said Humpty Dumpty: 'also they make their nests under +sun-dials--also they live on cheese.' + +'And what's the "GYRE" and to "GIMBLE"?' + +'To "GYRE" is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To "GIMBLE" is to make +holes like a gimlet.' + +'And "THE WABE" is the grass-plot round a sun-dial, I suppose?' said Alice, +surprised at her own ingenuity. + +'Of course it is. It's called "WABE," you know, because it goes a long way +before it, and a long way behind it--' + +'And a long way beyond it on each side,' Alice added. + +'Exactly so. Well, then, "MIMSY" is "flimsy and miserable" (there's another +portmanteau for you). And a "BOROGOVE" is a thin shabby-looking bird with its +feathers sticking out all round-- something like a live mop.' + +'And then "MOME RATHS"?' said Alice. 'I'm afraid I'm giving you a great deal of +trouble.' + +'Well, a "RATH" is a sort of green pig: but "MOME" I'm not certain about. I +think it's short for "from home"--meaning that they'd lost their way, you +know.' + +'And what does "OUTGRABE" mean?' + +'Well, "OUTGRABING" is something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind +of sneeze in the middle: however, you'll hear it done, maybe--down in the wood +yonder--and when you've once heard it you'll be QUITE content. Who's been +repeating all that hard stuff to you?' + +'I read it in a book,' said Alice. 'But I had some poetry repeated to me, much +easier than that, by--Tweedledee, I think it was.' + +'As to poetry, you know,' said Humpty Dumpty, stretching out one of his great +hands, '_I_ can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes to that--' + +'Oh, it needn't come to that!' Alice hastily said, hoping to keep him from +beginning. + +'The piece I'm going to repeat,' he went on without noticing her remark, 'was +written entirely for your amusement.' + +Alice felt that in that case she really OUGHT to listen to it, so she sat down, +and said 'Thank you' rather sadly. + +poem{ + + 'In winter, when the fields are white, + I sing this song for your delight-- + +}poem + +only I don't sing it,' he added, as an explanation. + +'I see you don't,' said Alice. + +'If you can SEE whether I'm singing or not, you've sharper eyes than most.' +Humpty Dumpty remarked severely. Alice was silent. + +poem{ + + 'In spring, when woods are getting green, + I'll try and tell you what I mean.' + +}poem + +'Thank you very much,' said Alice. + +poem{ + + 'In summer, when the days are long, + Perhaps you'll understand the song: + In autumn, when the leaves are brown, + Take pen and ink, and write it down.' + +}poem + +'I will, if I can remember it so long,' said Alice. + +'You needn't go on making remarks like that,' Humpty Dumpty said: 'they're not +sensible, and they put me out.' + +poem{ + + 'I sent a message to the fish: + I told them "This is what I wish." + + The little fishes of the sea, + They sent an answer back to me. + + The little fishes' answer was + "We cannot do it, Sir, because--"' + +}poem + +'I'm afraid I don't quite understand,' said Alice. + +'It gets easier further on,' Humpty Dumpty replied. + +poem{ + + 'I sent to them again to say + "It will be better to obey." + + The fishes answered with a grin, + "Why, what a temper you are in!" + + I told them once, I told them twice: + They would not listen to advice. + + I took a kettle large and new, + Fit for the deed I had to do. + + My heart went hop, my heart went thump; + I filled the kettle at the pump. + + Then some one came to me and said, + "The little fishes are in bed." + + I said to him, I said it plain, + "Then you must wake them up again." + + I said it very loud and clear; + I went and shouted in his ear.' + +}poem + +Humpty Dumpty raised his voice almost to a scream as he repeated this verse, +and Alice thought with a shudder, 'I wouldn't have been the messenger for +ANYTHING!' + +poem{ + + 'But he was very stiff and proud; + He said "You needn't shout so loud!" + + And he was very proud and stiff; + He said "I'd go and wake them, if--" + + I took a corkscrew from the shelf: + I went to wake them up myself. + + And when I found the door was locked, + I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked. + + And when I found the door was shut, + I tried to turn the handle, but--' + +}poem + +There was a long pause. + +'Is that all?' Alice timidly asked. + +'That's all,' said Humpty Dumpty. 'Good-bye.' + +This was rather sudden, Alice thought: but, after such a VERY strong hint that +she ought to be going, she felt that it would hardly be civil to stay. So she +got up, and held out her hand. 'Good-bye, till we meet again!' she said as +cheerfully as she could. + +'I shouldn't know you again if we DID meet,' Humpty Dumpty replied in a +discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake; 'you're so exactly +like other people.' + +'The face is what one goes by, generally,' Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone. + +'That's just what I complain of,' said Humpty Dumpty. 'Your face is the same as +everybody has--the two eyes, so--' (marking their places in the air with this +thumb) 'nose in the middle, mouth under. It's always the same. Now if you had +the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance--or the mouth at the +top--that would be SOME help.' + +'It wouldn't look nice,' Alice objected. But Humpty Dumpty only shut his eyes +and said 'Wait till you've tried.' + +Alice waited a minute to see if he would speak again, but as he never opened +his eyes or took any further notice of her, she said 'Good-bye!' once more, +and, getting no answer to this, she quietly walked away: but she couldn't help +saying to herself as she went, 'Of all the unsatisfactory--' (she repeated this +aloud, as it was a great comfort to have such a long word to say) 'of all the +unsatisfactory people I EVER met--' She never finished the sentence, for at +this moment a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end. + +CHAPTER VII - The Lion and the Unicorn + +The next moment soldiers came running through the wood, at first in twos and +threes, then ten or twenty together, and at last in such crowds that they +seemed to fill the whole forest. Alice got behind a tree, for fear of being run +over, and watched them go by. + +She thought that in all her life she had never seen soldiers so uncertain on +their feet: they were always tripping over something or other, and whenever one +went down, several more always fell over him, so that the ground was soon +covered with little heaps of men. + +Then came the horses. Having four feet, these managed rather better than the +foot-soldiers: but even THEY stumbled now and then; and it seemed to be a +regular rule that, whenever a horse stumbled the rider fell off instantly. The +confusion got worse every moment, and Alice was very glad to get out of the +wood into an open place, where she found the White King seated on the ground, +busily writing in his memorandum-book. + +'I've sent them all!' the King cried in a tone of delight, on seeing Alice. +'Did you happen to meet any soldiers, my dear, as you came through the wood?' + +'Yes, I did,' said Alice: 'several thousand, I should think.' + +'Four thousand two hundred and seven, that's the exact number,' the King said, +referring to his book. 'I couldn't send all the horses, you know, because two +of them are wanted in the game. And I haven't sent the two Messengers, either. +They're both gone to the town. Just look along the road, and tell me if you can +see either of them.' + +'I see nobody on the road,' said Alice. + +'I only wish _{I}_ had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be +able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it's as much as _{I}_ can +do to see real people, by this light!' + +All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, +shading her eyes with one hand. 'I see somebody now!' she exclaimed at last. +'But he's coming very slowly--and what curious attitudes he goes into!' (For +the messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came +along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.) + +'Not at all,' said the King. 'He's an Anglo-Saxon Messenger-- and those are +Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He only does them when he's happy. His name is Haigha.' +(He pronounced it so as to rhyme with 'mayor.') + +'I love my love with an H,' Alice couldn't help beginning, 'because he is +Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous. I fed him with--with--with +Ham-sandwiches and Hay. His name is Haigha, and he lives--' + +'He lives on the Hill,' the King remarked simply, without the least idea that +he was joining in the game, while Alice was still hesitating for the name of a +town beginning with H. 'The other Messenger's called Hatta. I must have TWO, +you know--to come and go. One to come, and one to go.' + +'I beg your pardon?' said Alice. + +'It isn't respectable to beg,' said the King. + +'I only meant that I didn't understand,' said Alice. 'Why one to come and one +to go?' + +'Didn't I tell you?' the King repeated impatiently. 'I must have Two--to fetch +and carry. One to fetch, and one to carry.' + +At this moment the Messenger arrived: he was far too much out of breath to say +a word, and could only wave his hands about, and make the most fearful faces at +the poor King. + +'This young lady loves you with an H,' the King said, introducing Alice in the +hope of turning off the Messenger's attention from himself--but it was no +use--the Anglo-Saxon attitudes only got more extraordinary every moment, while +the great eyes rolled wildly from side to side. + +'You alarm me!' said the King. 'I feel faint--Give me a ham sandwich!' + +On which the Messenger, to Alice's great amusement, opened a bag that hung +round his neck, and handed a sandwich to the King, who devoured it greedily. + +'Another sandwich!' said the King. + +'There's nothing but hay left now,' the Messenger said, peeping into the bag. + +'Hay, then,' the King murmured in a faint whisper. + +Alice was glad to see that it revived him a good deal. 'There's nothing like +eating hay when you're faint,' he remarked to her, as he munched away. + +'I should think throwing cold water over you would be better,' Alice suggested: +'or some sal-volatile.' + +'I didn't say there was nothing BETTER,' the King replied. 'I said there was +nothing LIKE it.' Which Alice did not venture to deny. + +'Who did you pass on the road?' the King went on, holding out his hand to the +Messenger for some more hay. + +'Nobody,' said the Messenger. + +'Quite right,' said the King: 'this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody +walks slower than you.' + +'I do my best,' the Messenger said in a sulky tone. 'I'm sure nobody walks much +faster than I do!' + +'He can't do that,' said the King, 'or else he'd have been here first. However, +now you've got your breath, you may tell us what's happened in the town.' + +'I'll whisper it,' said the Messenger, putting his hands to his mouth in the +shape of a trumpet, and stooping so as to get close to the King's ear. Alice +was sorry for this, as she wanted to hear the news too. However, instead of +whispering, he simply shouted at the top of his voice 'They're at it again!' + +'Do you call THAT a whisper?' cried the poor King, jumping up and shaking +himself. 'If you do such a thing again, I'll have you buttered! It went through +and through my head like an earthquake!' + +'It would have to be a very tiny earthquake!' thought Alice. 'Who are at it +again?' she ventured to ask. + +'Why the Lion and the Unicorn, of course,' said the King. + +'Fighting for the crown?' + +'Yes, to be sure,' said the King: 'and the best of the joke is, that it's MY +crown all the while! Let's run and see them.' And they trotted off, Alice +repeating to herself, as she ran, the words of the old song:-- + +poem{ + + 'The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown: + The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town. + Some gave them white bread, some gave them brown; + Some gave them plum-cake and drummed them out of town.' + +}poem + +'Does--the one--that wins--get the crown?' she asked, as well as she could, for +the run was putting her quite out of breath. + +'Dear me, no!' said the King. 'What an idea!' + +'Would you--be good enough,' Alice panted out, after running a little further, +'to stop a minute--just to get--one's breath again?' + +'I'm GOOD enough,' the King said, 'only I'm not strong enough. You see, a +minute goes by so fearfully quick. You might as well try to stop a +Bandersnatch!' + +Alice had no more breath for talking, so they trotted on in silence, till they +came in sight of a great crowd, in the middle of which the Lion and Unicorn +were fighting. They were in such a cloud of dust, that at first Alice could not +make out which was which: but she soon managed to distinguish the Unicorn by +his horn. + +They placed themselves close to where Hatta, the other messenger, was standing +watching the fight, with a cup of tea in one hand and a piece of +bread-and-butter in the other. + +'He's only just out of prison, and he hadn't finished his tea when he was sent +in,' Haigha whispered to Alice: 'and they only give them oyster-shells in +there--so you see he's very hungry and thirsty. How are you, dear child?' he +went on, putting his arm affectionately round Hatta's neck. + +Hatta looked round and nodded, and went on with his bread and butter. + +'Were you happy in prison, dear child?' said Haigha. + +Hatta looked round once more, and this time a tear or two trickled down his +cheek: but not a word would he say. + +'Speak, can't you!' Haigha cried impatiently. But Hatta only munched away, and +drank some more tea. + +'Speak, won't you!' cried the King. 'How are they getting on with the fight?' + +Hatta made a desperate effort, and swallowed a large piece of bread-and-butter. +'They're getting on very well,' he said in a choking voice: 'each of them has +been down about eighty-seven times.' + +'Then I suppose they'll soon bring the white bread and the brown?' Alice +ventured to remark. + +'It's waiting for 'em now,' said Hatta: 'this is a bit of it as I'm eating.' + +There was a pause in the fight just then, and the Lion and the Unicorn sat +down, panting, while the King called out 'Ten minutes allowed for +refreshments!' Haigha and Hatta set to work at once, carrying rough trays of +white and brown bread. Alice took a piece to taste, but it was VERY dry. + +'I don't think they'll fight any more to-day,' the King said to Hatta: 'go and +order the drums to begin.' And Hatta went bounding away like a grasshopper. + +For a minute or two Alice stood silent, watching him. Suddenly she brightened +up. 'Look, look!' she cried, pointing eagerly. 'There's the White Queen running +across the country! She came flying out of the wood over yonder--How fast those +Queens CAN run!' + +'There's some enemy after her, no doubt,' the King said, without even looking +round. 'That wood's full of them.' + +'But aren't you going to run and help her?' Alice asked, very much surprised at +his taking it so quietly. + +'No use, no use!' said the King. 'She runs so fearfully quick. You might as +well try to catch a Bandersnatch! But I'll make a memorandum about her, if you +like--She's a dear good creature,' he repeated softly to himself, as he opened +his memorandum-book. 'Do you spell "creature" with a double "e"?' + +At this moment the Unicorn sauntered by them, with his hands in his pockets. 'I +had the best of it this time?' he said to the King, just glancing at him as he +passed. + +'A little--a little,' the King replied, rather nervously. 'You shouldn't have +run him through with your horn, you know.' + +'It didn't hurt him,' the Unicorn said carelessly, and he was going on, when +his eye happened to fall upon Alice: he turned round rather instantly, and +stood for some time looking at her with an air of the deepest disgust. + +'What--is--this?' he said at last. + +'This is a child!' Haigha replied eagerly, coming in front of Alice to +introduce her, and spreading out both his hands towards her in an Anglo-Saxon +attitude. 'We only found it to-day. It's as large as life, and twice as +natural!' + +'I always thought they were fabulous monsters!' said the Unicorn. 'Is it +alive?' + +'It can talk,' said Haigha, solemnly. + +The Unicorn looked dreamily at Alice, and said 'Talk, child.' + +Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: 'Do you +know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too! I never saw one +alive before!' + +'Well, now that we HAVE seen each other,' said the Unicorn, 'if you'll believe +in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?' + +'Yes, if you like,' said Alice. + +'Come, fetch out the plum-cake, old man!' the Unicorn went on, turning from her +to the King. 'None of your brown bread for me!' + +'Certainly--certainly!' the King muttered, and beckoned to Haigha. 'Open the +bag!' he whispered. 'Quick! Not that one-- that's full of hay!' + +Haigha took a large cake out of the bag, and gave it to Alice to hold, while he +got out a dish and carving-knife. How they all came out of it Alice couldn't +guess. It was just like a conjuring-trick, she thought. + +The Lion had joined them while this was going on: he looked very tired and +sleepy, and his eyes were half shut. 'What's this!' he said, blinking lazily at +Alice, and speaking in a deep hollow tone that sounded like the tolling of a +great bell. + +'Ah, what IS it, now?' the Unicorn cried eagerly. 'You'll never guess! _{I}_ +couldn't.' + +The Lion looked at Alice wearily. 'Are you animal--vegetable --or mineral?' he +said, yawning at every other word. + +'It's a fabulous monster!' the Unicorn cried out, before Alice could reply. + +'Then hand round the plum-cake, Monster,' the Lion said, lying down and putting +his chin on this paws. 'And sit down, both of you,' (to the King and the +Unicorn): 'fair play with the cake, you know!' + +The King was evidently very uncomfortable at having to sit down between the two +great creatures; but there was no other place for him. + +'What a fight we might have for the crown, NOW!' the Unicorn said, looking +slyly up at the crown, which the poor King was nearly shaking off his head, he +trembled so much. + +'I should win easy,' said the Lion. + +'I'm not so sure of that,' said the Unicorn. + +'Why, I beat you all round the town, you chicken!' the Lion replied angrily, +half getting up as he spoke. + +Here the King interrupted, to prevent the quarrel going on: he was very +nervous, and his voice quite quivered. 'All round the town?' he said. 'That's a +good long way. Did you go by the old bridge, or the market-place? You get the +best view by the old bridge.' + +'I'm sure I don't know,' the Lion growled out as he lay down again. 'There was +too much dust to see anything. What a time the Monster is, cutting up that +cake!' + +Alice had seated herself on the bank of a little brook, with the great dish on +her knees, and was sawing away diligently with the knife. 'It's very +provoking!' she said, in reply to the Lion (she was getting quite used to being +called 'the Monster'). 'I've cut several slices already, but they always join +on again!' + +'You don't know how to manage Looking-glass cakes,' the Unicorn remarked. 'Hand +it round first, and cut it afterwards.' + +This sounded nonsense, but Alice very obediently got up, and carried the dish +round, and the cake divided itself into three pieces as she did so. 'NOW cut it +up,' said the Lion, as she returned to her place with the empty dish. + +'I say, this isn't fair!' cried the Unicorn, as Alice sat with the knife in her +hand, very much puzzled how to begin. 'The Monster has given the Lion twice as +much as me!' + +'She's kept none for herself, anyhow,' said the Lion. 'Do you like plum-cake, +Monster?' + +But before Alice could answer him, the drums began. + +Where the noise came from, she couldn't make out: the air seemed full of it, +and it rang through and through her head till she felt quite deafened. She +started to her feet and sprang across the little brook in her terror, + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +and had just time to see the Lion and the Unicorn rise to their feet, with +angry looks at being interrupted in their feast, before she dropped to her +knees, and put her hands over her ears, vainly trying to shut out the dreadful +uproar. + +'If THAT doesn't "drum them out of town,"' she thought to herself, 'nothing +ever will!' + +CHAPTER VIII - 'It's my own Invention' + +After a while the noise seemed gradually to die away, till all was dead +silence, and Alice lifted up her head in some alarm. There was no one to be +seen, and her first thought was that she must have been dreaming about the Lion +and the Unicorn and those queer Anglo-Saxon Messengers. However, there was the +great dish still lying at her feet, on which she had tried to cut the plum- +cake, 'So I wasn't dreaming, after all,' she said to herself, 'unless--unless +we're all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it's MY dream, and not the Red +King's! I don't like belonging to another person's dream,' she went on in a +rather complaining tone: 'I've a great mind to go and wake him, and see what +happens!' + +At this moment her thoughts were interrupted by a loud shouting of 'Ahoy! Ahoy! +Check!' and a Knight dressed in crimson armour came galloping down upon her, +brandishing a great club. Just as he reached her, the horse stopped suddenly: +'You're my prisoner!' the Knight cried, as he tumbled off his horse. + +Startled as she was, Alice was more frightened for him than for herself at the +moment, and watched him with some anxiety as he mounted again. As soon as he +was comfortably in the saddle, he began once more 'You're my--' but here +another voice broke in 'Ahoy! Ahoy! Check!' and Alice looked round in some +surprise for the new enemy. + +This time it was a White Knight. He drew up at Alice's side, and tumbled off +his horse just as the Red Knight had done: then he got on again, and the two +Knights sat and looked at each other for some time without speaking. Alice +looked from one to the other in some bewilderment. + +'She's MY prisoner, you know!' the Red Knight said at last. + +'Yes, but then _I_ came and rescued her!' the White Knight replied. + +'Well, we must fight for her, then,' said the Red Knight, as he took up his +helmet (which hung from the saddle, and was something the shape of a horse's +head), and put it on. + +'You will observe the Rules of Battle, of course?' the White Knight remarked, +putting on his helmet too. + +'I always do,' said the Red Knight, and they began banging away at each other +with such fury that Alice got behind a tree to be out of the way of the blows. + +'I wonder, now, what the Rules of Battle are,' she said to herself, as she +watched the fight, timidly peeping out from her hiding-place: 'one Rule seems +to be, that if one Knight hits the other, he knocks him off his horse, and if +he misses, he tumbles off himself--and another Rule seems to be that they hold +their clubs with their arms, as if they were Punch and Judy--What a noise they +make when they tumble! Just like a whole set of fire- irons falling into the +fender! And how quiet the horses are! They let them get on and off them just as +if they were tables!' + +Another Rule of Battle, that Alice had not noticed, seemed to be that they +always fell on their heads, and the battle ended with their both falling off in +this way, side by side: when they got up again, they shook hands, and then the +Red Knight mounted and galloped off. + +'It was a glorious victory, wasn't it?' said the White Knight, as he came up +panting. + +'I don't know,' Alice said doubtfully. 'I don't want to be anybody's prisoner. +I want to be a Queen.' + +'So you will, when you've crossed the next brook,' said the White Knight. 'I'll +see you safe to the end of the wood--and then I must go back, you know. That's +the end of my move.' + +'Thank you very much,' said Alice. 'May I help you off with your helmet?' It +was evidently more than he could manage by himself; however, she managed to +shake him out of it at last. + +'Now one can breathe more easily,' said the Knight, putting back his shaggy +hair with both hands, and turning his gentle face and large mild eyes to Alice. +She thought she had never seen such a strange-looking soldier in all her life. + +He was dressed in tin armour, which seemed to fit him very badly, and he had a +queer-shaped little deal box fastened across his shoulder, upside-down, and +with the lid hanging open. Alice looked at it with great curiosity. + +'I see you're admiring my little box.' the Knight said in a friendly tone. +'It's my own invention--to keep clothes and sandwiches in. You see I carry it +upside-down, so that the rain can't get in.' + +'But the things can get OUT,' Alice gently remarked. 'Do you know the lid's +open?' + +'I didn't know it,' the Knight said, a shade of vexation passing over his face. +'Then all the things must have fallen out! And the box is no use without them.' +He unfastened it as he spoke, and was just going to throw it into the bushes, +when a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and he hung it carefully on a tree. +'Can you guess why I did that?' he said to Alice. + +Alice shook her head. + +'In hopes some bees may make a nest in it--then I should get the honey.' + +'But you've got a bee-hive--or something like one--fastened to the saddle,' +said Alice. + +'Yes, it's a very good bee-hive,' the Knight said in a discontented tone, 'one +of the best kind. But not a single bee has come near it yet. And the other +thing is a mouse-trap. I suppose the mice keep the bees out--or the bees keep +the mice out, I don't know which.' + +'I was wondering what the mouse-trap was for,' said Alice. 'It isn't very +likely there would be any mice on the horse's back.' + +'Not very likely, perhaps,' said the Knight: 'but if they DO come, I don't +choose to have them running all about.' + +'You see,' he went on after a pause, 'it's as well to be provided for +EVERYTHING. That's the reason the horse has all those anklets round his feet.' + +'But what are they for?' Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity. + +'To guard against the bites of sharks,' the Knight replied. 'It's an invention +of my own. And now help me on. I'll go with you to the end of the wood--What's +the dish for?' + +'It's meant for plum-cake,' said Alice. + +'We'd better take it with us,' the Knight said. 'It'll come in handy if we find +any plum-cake. Help me to get it into this bag.' + +This took a very long time to manage, though Alice held the bag open very +carefully, because the Knight was so VERY awkward in putting in the dish: the +first two or three times that he tried he fell in himself instead. 'It's rather +a tight fit, you see,' he said, as they got it in a last; 'There are so many +candlesticks in the bag.' And he hung it to the saddle, which was already +loaded with bunches of carrots, and fire-irons, and many other things. + +'I hope you've got your hair well fastened on?' he continued, as they set off. + +'Only in the usual way,' Alice said, smiling. + +'That's hardly enough,' he said, anxiously. 'You see the wind is so VERY strong +here. It's as strong as soup.' + +'Have you invented a plan for keeping the hair from being blown off?' Alice +enquired. + +'Not yet,' said the Knight. 'But I've got a plan for keeping it from FALLING +off.' + +'I should like to hear it, very much.' + +'First you take an upright stick,' said the Knight. 'Then you make your hair +creep up it, like a fruit-tree. Now the reason hair falls off is because it +hangs DOWN--things never fall UPWARDS, you know. It's a plan of my own +invention. You may try it if you like.' + +It didn't sound a comfortable plan, Alice thought, and for a few minutes she +walked on in silence, puzzling over the idea, and every now and then stopping +to help the poor Knight, who certainly was NOT a good rider. + +Whenever the horse stopped (which it did very often), he fell off in front; and +whenever it went on again (which it generally did rather suddenly), he fell off +behind. Otherwise he kept on pretty well, except that he had a habit of now and +then falling off sideways; and as he generally did this on the side on which +Alice was walking, she soon found that it was the best plan not to walk QUITE +close to the horse. + +'I'm afraid you've not had much practice in riding,' she ventured to say, as +she was helping him up from his fifth tumble. + +The Knight looked very much surprised, and a little offended at the remark. +'What makes you say that?' he asked, as he scrambled back into the saddle, +keeping hold of Alice's hair with one hand, to save himself from falling over +on the other side. + +'Because people don't fall off quite so often, when they've had much practice.' + +'I've had plenty of practice,' the Knight said very gravely: 'plenty of +practice!' + +Alice could think of nothing better to say than 'Indeed?' but she said it as +heartily as she could. They went on a little way in silence after this, the +Knight with his eyes shut, muttering to himself, and Alice watching anxiously +for the next tumble. + +'The great art of riding,' the Knight suddenly began in a loud voice, waving +his right arm as he spoke, 'is to keep--' Here the sentence ended as suddenly +as it had begun, as the Knight fell heavily on the top of his head exactly in +the path where Alice was walking. She was quite frightened this time, and said +in an anxious tone, as she picked him up, 'I hope no bones are broken?' + +'None to speak of,' the Knight said, as if he didn't mind breaking two or three +of them. 'The great art of riding, as I was saying, is--to keep your balance +properly. Like this, you know--' + +He let go the bridle, and stretched out both his arms to show Alice what he +meant, and this time he fell flat on his back, right under the horse's feet. + +'Plenty of practice!' he went on repeating, all the time that Alice was getting +him on his feet again. 'Plenty of practice!' + +'It's too ridiculous!' cried Alice, losing all her patience this time. 'You +ought to have a wooden horse on wheels, that you ought!' + +'Does that kind go smoothly?' the Knight asked in a tone of great interest, +clasping his arms round the horse's neck as he spoke, just in time to save +himself from tumbling off again. + +'Much more smoothly than a live horse,' Alice said, with a little scream of +laughter, in spite of all she could do to prevent it. + +'I'll get one,' the Knight said thoughtfully to himself. 'One or two--several.' + +There was a short silence after this, and then the Knight went on again. 'I'm a +great hand at inventing things. Now, I daresay you noticed, that last time you +picked me up, that I was looking rather thoughtful?' + +'You WERE a little grave,' said Alice. + +'Well, just then I was inventing a new way of getting over a gate--would you +like to hear it?' + +'Very much indeed,' Alice said politely. + +'I'll tell you how I came to think of it,' said the Knight. 'You see, I said to +myself, "The only difficulty is with the feet: the HEAD is high enough +already." Now, first I put my head on the top of the gate--then I stand on my +head--then the feet are high enough, you see--then I'm over, you see.' + +'Yes, I suppose you'd be over when that was done,' Alice said thoughtfully: +'but don't you think it would be rather hard?' + +'I haven't tried it yet,' the Knight said, gravely: 'so I can't tell for +certain--but I'm afraid it WOULD be a little hard.' + +He looked so vexed at the idea, that Alice changed the subject hastily. 'What a +curious helmet you've got!' she said cheerfully. 'Is that your invention too?' + +The Knight looked down proudly at his helmet, which hung from the saddle. +'Yes,' he said, 'but I've invented a better one than that--like a sugar loaf. +When I used to wear it, if I fell off the horse, it always touched the ground +directly. So I had a VERY little way to fall, you see--But there WAS the danger +of falling INTO it, to be sure. That happened to me once--and the worst of it +was, before I could get out again, the other White Knight came and put it on. +He thought it was his own helmet.' + +The knight looked so solemn about it that Alice did not dare to laugh. 'I'm +afraid you must have hurt him,' she said in a trembling voice, 'being on the +top of his head.' + +'I had to kick him, of course,' the Knight said, very seriously. 'And then he +took the helmet off again--but it took hours and hours to get me out. I was as +fast as--as lightning, you know.' + +'But that's a different kind of fastness,' Alice objected. + +The Knight shook his head. 'It was all kinds of fastness with me, I can assure +you!' he said. He raised his hands in some excitement as he said this, and +instantly rolled out of the saddle, and fell headlong into a deep ditch. + +Alice ran to the side of the ditch to look for him. She was rather startled by +the fall, as for some time he had kept on very well, and she was afraid that he +really WAS hurt this time. However, though she could see nothing but the soles +of his feet, she was much relieved to hear that he was talking on in his usual +tone. 'All kinds of fastness,' he repeated: 'but it was careless of him to put +another man's helmet on--with the man in it, too.' + +'How CAN you go on talking so quietly, head downwards?' Alice asked, as she +dragged him out by the feet, and laid him in a heap on the bank. + +The Knight looked surprised at the question. 'What does it matter where my body +happens to be?' he said. 'My mind goes on working all the same. In fact, the +more head downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things.' + +'Now the cleverest thing of the sort that I ever did,' he went on after a +pause, 'was inventing a new pudding during the meat- course.' + +'In time to have it cooked for the next course?' said Alice. 'Well, not the +NEXT course,' the Knight said in a slow thoughtful tone: 'no, certainly not the +next COURSE.' + +'Then it would have to be the next day. I suppose you wouldn't have two +pudding-courses in one dinner?' + +'Well, not the NEXT day,' the Knight repeated as before: 'not the next DAY. In +fact,' he went on, holding his head down, and his voice getting lower and +lower, 'I don't believe that pudding ever WAS cooked! In fact, I don't believe +that pudding ever WILL be cooked! And yet it was a very clever pudding to +invent.' + +'What did you mean it to be made of?' Alice asked, hoping to cheer him up, for +the poor Knight seemed quite low-spirited about it. + +'It began with blotting paper,' the Knight answered with a groan. + +'That wouldn't be very nice, I'm afraid--' + +'Not very nice ALONE,' he interrupted, quite eagerly: 'but you've no idea what +a difference it makes mixing it with other things--such as gunpowder and +sealing-wax. And here I must leave you.' They had just come to the end of the +wood. + +Alice could only look puzzled: she was thinking of the pudding. + +'You are sad,' the Knight said in an anxious tone: 'let me sing you a song to +comfort you.' + +'Is it very long?' Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that +day. + +'It's long,' said the Knight, 'but very, VERY beautiful. Everybody that hears +me sing it--either it brings the TEARS into their eyes, or else--' + +'Or else what?' said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause. + +'Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called "HADDOCKS' +EYES."' + +'Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel +interested. + +'No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little vexed. 'That's +what the name is CALLED. The name really IS "THE AGED AGED MAN."' + +'Then I ought to have said "That's what the SONG is called"?' Alice corrected +herself. + +'No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The SONG is called "WAYS AND +MEANS": but that's only what it's CALLED, you know!' + +'Well, what IS the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this time completely +bewildered. + +'I was coming to that,' the Knight said. 'The song really IS "A-SITTING ON A +GATE": and the tune's my own invention.' + +So saying, he stopped his horse and let the reins fall on its neck: then, +slowly beating time with one hand, and with a faint smile lighting up his +gentle foolish face, as if he enjoyed the music of his song, he began. + +Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The +Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years +afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only +yesterday--the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight--the setting sun +gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that +quite dazzled her--the horse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose +on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet--and the black shadows of the +forest behind--all this she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading +her eyes, she leant against a tree, watching the strange pair, and listening, +in a half dream, to the melancholy music of the song. + +'But the tune ISN'T his own invention,' she said to herself: 'it's "I GIVE THEE +ALL, I CAN NO MORE."' She stood and listened very attentively, but no tears +came into her eyes. + +poem{ + + 'I'll tell thee everything I can; + There's little to relate. + I saw an aged aged man, + A-sitting on a gate. + "Who are you, aged man?" I said, + "and how is it you live?" + And his answer trickled through my head + Like water through a sieve. + + He said "I look for butterflies + That sleep among the wheat: + I make them into mutton-pies, + And sell them in the street. + I sell them unto men," he said, + "Who sail on stormy seas; + And that's the way I get my bread-- + A trifle, if you please." + + But I was thinking of a plan + To dye one's whiskers green, + And always use so large a fan + That they could not be seen. + So, having no reply to give + To what the old man said, + I cried, "Come, tell me how you live!" + And thumped him on the head. + + His accents mild took up the tale: + He said "I go my ways, + And when I find a mountain-rill, + I set it in a blaze; + And thence they make a stuff they call + Rolands' Macassar Oil-- + Yet twopence-halfpenny is all + They give me for my toil." + + But I was thinking of a way + To feed oneself on batter, + And so go on from day to day + Getting a little fatter. + I shook him well from side to side, + Until his face was blue: + "Come, tell me how you live," I cried, + "And what it is you do!" + + He said "I hunt for haddocks' eyes + Among the heather bright, + And work them into waistcoat-buttons + In the silent night. + And these I do not sell for gold + Or coin of silvery shine + But for a copper halfpenny, + And that will purchase nine. + + "I sometimes dig for buttered rolls, + Or set limed twigs for crabs; + I sometimes search the grassy knolls + For wheels of Hansom-cabs. + And that's the way" (he gave a wink) + "By which I get my wealth-- + And very gladly will I drink + Your Honour's noble health." + + I heard him then, for I had just + Completed my design + To keep the Menai bridge from rust + By boiling it in wine. + I thanked him much for telling me + The way he got his wealth, + But chiefly for his wish that he + Might drink my noble health. + + And now, if e'er by chance I put + My fingers into glue + Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot + Into a left-hand shoe, + Or if I drop upon my toe + A very heavy weight, + I weep, for it reminds me so, + Of that old man I used to know-- + + Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow, + Whose hair was whiter than the snow, + Whose face was very like a crow, + With eyes, like cinders, all aglow, + Who seemed distracted with his woe, + Who rocked his body to and fro, + And muttered mumblingly and low, + As if his mouth were full of dough, + Who snorted like a buffalo-- + That summer evening, long ago, + A-sitting on a gate.' + +}poem + +As the Knight sang the last words of the ballad, he gathered up the reins, and +turned his horse's head along the road by which they had come. 'You've only a +few yards to go,' he said, 'down the hill and over that little brook, and then +you'll be a Queen-- But you'll stay and see me off first?' he added as Alice +turned with an eager look in the direction to which he pointed. 'I shan't be +long. You'll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the +road? I think it'll encourage me, you see.' + +'Of course I'll wait,' said Alice: 'and thank you very much for coming so +far--and for the song--I liked it very much.' + +'I hope so,' the Knight said doubtfully: 'but you didn't cry so much as I +thought you would.' + +So they shook hands, and then the Knight rode slowly away into the forest. 'It +won't take long to see him OFF, I expect,' Alice said to herself, as she stood +watching him. 'There he goes! Right on his head as usual! However, he gets on +again pretty easily--that comes of having so many things hung round the +horse--' So she went on talking to herself, as she watched the horse walking +leisurely along the road, and the Knight tumbling off, first on one side and +then on the other. After the fourth or fifth tumble he reached the turn, and +then she waved her handkerchief to him, and waited till he was out of sight. + +'I hope it encouraged him,' she said, as she turned to run down the hill: 'and +now for the last brook, and to be a Queen! How grand it sounds!' A very few +steps brought her to the edge of the brook. 'The Eighth Square at last!' she +cried as she bounded across, + +poem{ + +* * * * ~# + + * * * ~# + +* * * * ~# + +}poem + +and threw herself down to rest on a lawn as soft as moss, with little +flower-beds dotted about it here and there. 'Oh, how glad I am to get here! And +what IS this on my head?' she exclaimed in a tone of dismay, as she put her +hands up to something very heavy, and fitted tight all round her head. + +'But how CAN it have got there without my knowing it?' she said to herself, as +she lifted it off, and set it on her lap to make out what it could possibly be. + +It was a golden crown. + +CHAPTER IX - Queen Alice + +'Well, this IS grand!' said Alice. 'I never expected I should be a Queen so +soon--and I'll tell you what it is, your majesty,' she went on in a severe tone +(she was always rather fond of scolding herself), 'it'll never do for you to be +lolling about on the grass like that! Queens have to be dignified, you know!' + +So she got up and walked about--rather stiffly just at first, as she was afraid +that the crown might come off: but she comforted herself with the thought that +there was nobody to see her, 'and if I really am a Queen,' she said as she sat +down again, 'I shall be able to manage it quite well in time.' + +Everything was happening so oddly that she didn't feel a bit surprised at +finding the Red Queen and the White Queen sitting close to her, one on each +side: she would have liked very much to ask them how they came there, but she +feared it would not be quite civil. However, there would be no harm, she +thought, in asking if the game was over. 'Please, would you tell me--' she +began, looking timidly at the Red Queen. + +'Speak when you're spoken to!' The Queen sharply interrupted her. + +'But if everybody obeyed that rule,' said Alice, who was always ready for a +little argument, 'and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other +person always waited for YOU to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything, +so that--' + +'Ridiculous!' cried the Queen. 'Why, don't you see, child--' here she broke off +with a frown, and, after thinking for a minute, suddenly changed the subject of +the conversation. 'What do you mean by "If you really are a Queen"? What right +have you to call yourself so? You can't be a Queen, you know, till you've +passed the proper examination. And the sooner we begin it, the better.' + +'I only said "if"!' poor Alice pleaded in a piteous tone. + +The two Queens looked at each other, and the Red Queen remarked, with a little +shudder, 'She SAYS she only said "if"--' + +'But she said a great deal more than that!' the White Queen moaned, wringing +her hands. 'Oh, ever so much more than that!' + +'So you did, you know,' the Red Queen said to Alice. 'Always speak the +truth--think before you speak--and write it down afterwards.' + +'I'm sure I didn't mean--' Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen interrupted +her impatiently. + +'That's just what I complain of! You SHOULD have meant! What do you suppose is +the use of child without any meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning--and +a child's more important than a joke, I hope. You couldn't deny that, even if +you tried with both hands.' + +'I don't deny things with my HANDS,' Alice objected. + +'Nobody said you did,' said the Red Queen. 'I said you couldn't if you tried.' + +'She's in that state of mind,' said the White Queen, 'that she wants to deny +SOMETHING--only she doesn't know what to deny!' + +'A nasty, vicious temper,' the Red Queen remarked; and then there was an +uncomfortable silence for a minute or two. + +The Red Queen broke the silence by saying to the White Queen, 'I invite you to +Alice's dinner-party this afternoon.' + +The White Queen smiled feebly, and said 'And I invite YOU.' + +'I didn't know I was to have a party at all,' said Alice; 'but if there is to +be one, I think _{I}_ ought to invite the guests.' + +'We gave you the opportunity of doing it,' the Red Queen remarked: 'but I +daresay you've not had many lessons in manners yet?' + +'Manners are not taught in lessons,' said Alice. 'Lessons teach you to do sums, +and things of that sort.' + +'And you do Addition?' the White Queen asked. 'What's one and one and one and +one and one and one and one and one and one and one?' + +'I don't know,' said Alice. 'I lost count.' + +'She can't do Addition,' the Red Queen interrupted. 'Can you do Subtraction? +Take nine from eight.' + +'Nine from eight I can't, you know,' Alice replied very readily: 'but--' + +'She can't do Subtraction,' said the White Queen. 'Can you do Division? Divide +a loaf by a knife--what's the answer to that?' + +'I suppose--' Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen answered for her. +'Bread-and-butter, of course. Try another Subtraction sum. Take a bone from a +dog: what remains?' + +Alice considered. 'The bone wouldn't remain, of course, if I took it--and the +dog wouldn't remain; it would come to bite me --and I'm sure I shouldn't +remain!' + +'Then you think nothing would remain?' said the Red Queen. + +'I think that's the answer.' + +'Wrong, as usual,' said the Red Queen: 'the dog's temper would remain.' + +'But I don't see how--' + +'Why, look here!' the Red Queen cried. 'The dog would lose its temper, wouldn't +it?' + +'Perhaps it would,' Alice replied cautiously. + +'Then if the dog went away, its temper would remain!' the Queen exclaimed +triumphantly. + +Alice said, as gravely as she could, 'They might go different ways.' But she +couldn't help thinking to herself, 'What dreadful nonsense we ARE talking!' + +'She can't do sums a BIT!' the Queens said together, with great emphasis. + +'Can YOU do sums?' Alice said, turning suddenly on the White Queen, for she +didn't like being found fault with so much. + +The Queen gasped and shut her eyes. 'I can do Addition, if you give me +time--but I can do Subtraction, under ANY circumstances!' + +'Of course you know your A B C?' said the Red Queen. + +'To be sure I do.' said Alice. + +'So do I,' the White Queen whispered: 'we'll often say it over together, dear. +And I'll tell you a secret--I can read words of one letter! Isn't THAT grand! +However, don't be discouraged. You'll come to it in time.' + +Here the Red Queen began again. 'Can you answer useful questions?' she said. +'How is bread made?' + +'I know THAT!' Alice cried eagerly. 'You take some flour--' + +'Where do you pick the flower?' the White Queen asked. 'In a garden, or in the +hedges?' + +'Well, it isn't PICKED at all,' Alice explained: 'it's GROUND--' + +'How many acres of ground?' said the White Queen. 'You mustn't leave out so +many things.' + +'Fan her head!' the Red Queen anxiously interrupted. 'She'll be feverish after +so much thinking.' So they set to work and fanned her with bunches of leaves, +till she had to beg them to leave off, it blew her hair about so. + +'She's all right again now,' said the Red Queen. 'Do you know Languages? What's +the French for fiddle-de-dee?' + +'Fiddle-de-dee's not English,' Alice replied gravely. + +'Who ever said it was?' said the Red Queen. + +Alice thought she saw a way out of the difficulty this time. 'If you'll tell me +what language "fiddle-de-dee" is, I'll tell you the French for it!' she +exclaimed triumphantly. + +But the Red Queen drew herself up rather stiffly, and said 'Queens never make +bargains.' + +'I wish Queens never asked questions,' Alice thought to herself. + +'Don't let us quarrel,' the White Queen said in an anxious tone. 'What is the +cause of lightning?' + +'The cause of lightning,' Alice said very decidedly, for she felt quite certain +about this, 'is the thunder--no, no!' she hastily corrected herself. 'I meant +the other way.' + +'It's too late to correct it,' said the Red Queen: 'when you've once said a +thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.' + +'Which reminds me--' the White Queen said, looking down and nervously clasping +and unclasping her hands, 'we had SUCH a thunderstorm last Tuesday--I mean one +of the last set of Tuesdays, you know.' + +Alice was puzzled. 'In OUR country,' she remarked, 'there's only one day at a +time.' + +The Red Queen said, 'That's a poor thin way of doing things. Now HERE, we +mostly have days and nights two or three at a time, and sometimes in the winter +we take as many as five nights together--for warmth, you know.' + +'Are five nights warmer than one night, then?' Alice ventured to ask. + +'Five times as warm, of course.' + +'But they should be five times as COLD, by the same rule--' + +'Just so!' cried the Red Queen. 'Five times as warm, AND five times as +cold--just as I'm five times as rich as you are, AND five times as clever!' + +Alice sighed and gave it up. 'It's exactly like a riddle with no answer!' she +thought. + +'Humpty Dumpty saw it too,' the White Queen went on in a low voice, more as if +she were talking to herself. 'He came to the door with a corkscrew in his +hand--' + +'What did he want?' said the Red Queen. + +'He said he WOULD come in,' the White Queen went on, 'because he was looking +for a hippopotamus. Now, as it happened, there wasn't such a thing in the +house, that morning.' + +'Is there generally?' Alice asked in an astonished tone. + +'Well, only on Thursdays,' said the Queen. + +'I know what he came for,' said Alice: 'he wanted to punish the fish, +because--' + +Here the White Queen began again. 'It was SUCH a thunderstorm, you can't +think!' ('She NEVER could, you know,' said the Red Queen.) 'And part of the +roof came off, and ever so much thunder got in--and it went rolling round the +room in great lumps--and knocking over the tables and things--till I was so +frightened, I couldn't remember my own name!' + +Alice thought to herself, 'I never should TRY to remember my name in the middle +of an accident! Where would be the use of it?' but she did not say this aloud, +for fear of hurting the poor Queen's feeling. + +'Your Majesty must excuse her,' the Red Queen said to Alice, taking one of the +White Queen's hands in her own, and gently stroking it: 'she means well, but +she can't help saying foolish things, as a general rule.' + +The White Queen looked timidly at Alice, who felt she OUGHT to say something +kind, but really couldn't think of anything at the moment. + +'She never was really well brought up,' the Red Queen went on: 'but it's +amazing how good-tempered she is! Pat her on the head, and see how pleased +she'll be!' But this was more than Alice had courage to do. + +'A little kindness--and putting her hair in papers--would do wonders with +her--' + +The White Queen gave a deep sigh, and laid her head on Alice's shoulder. 'I AM +so sleepy?' she moaned. + +'She's tired, poor thing!' said the Red Queen. 'Smooth her hair --lend her your +nightcap--and sing her a soothing lullaby.' + +'I haven't got a nightcap with me,' said Alice, as she tried to obey the first +direction: 'and I don't know any soothing lullabies.' + +'I must do it myself, then,' said the Red Queen, and she began: + +poem{ + + 'Hush-a-by lady, in Alice's lap! + Till the feast's ready, we've time for a nap: + When the feast's over, we'll go to the ball-- + Red Queen, and White Queen, and Alice, and all! + +}poem + +'And now you know the words,' she added, as she put her head down on Alice's +other shoulder, 'just sing it through to ME. I'm getting sleepy, too.' In +another moment both Queens were fast asleep, and snoring loud. + +'What AM I to do?' exclaimed Alice, looking about in great perplexity, as first +one round head, and then the other, rolled down from her shoulder, and lay like +a heavy lump in her lap. 'I don't think it EVER happened before, that any one +had to take care of two Queens asleep at once! No, not in all the History of +England--it couldn't, you know, because there never was more than one Queen at +a time. Do wake up, you heavy things!' she went on in an impatient tone; but +there was no answer but a gentle snoring. + +The snoring got more distinct every minute, and sounded more like a tune: at +last she could even make out the words, and she listened so eagerly that, when +the two great heads vanished from her lap, she hardly missed them. + +She was standing before an arched doorway over which were the words QUEEN ALICE +in large letters, and on each side of the arch there was a bell-handle; one was +marked 'Visitors' Bell,' and the other 'Servants' Bell.' + +'I'll wait till the song's over,' thought Alice, 'and then I'll +ring--the--WHICH bell must I ring?' she went on, very much puzzled by the +names. 'I'm not a visitor, and I'm not a servant. There OUGHT to be one marked +"Queen," you know--' + +Just then the door opened a little way, and a creature with a long beak put its +head out for a moment and said 'No admittance till the week after next!' and +shut the door again with a bang. + +Alice knocked and rang in vain for a long time, but at last, a very old Frog, +who was sitting under a tree, got up and hobbled slowly towards her: he was +dressed in bright yellow, and had enormous boots on. + +'What is it, now?' the Frog said in a deep hoarse whisper. + +Alice turned round, ready to find fault with anybody. 'Where's the servant +whose business it is to answer the door?' she began angrily. + +'Which door?' said the Frog. + +Alice almost stamped with irritation at the slow drawl in which he spoke. 'THIS +door, of course!' + +The Frog looked at the door with his large dull eyes for a minute: then he went +nearer and rubbed it with his thumb, as if he were trying whether the paint +would come off; then he looked at Alice. + +'To answer the door?' he said. 'What's it been asking of?' He was so hoarse +that Alice could scarcely hear him. + +'I don't know what you mean,' she said. + +'I talks English, doesn't I?' the Frog went on. 'Or are you deaf? What did it +ask you?' + +'Nothing!' Alice said impatiently. 'I've been knocking at it!' + +'Shouldn't do that--shouldn't do that--' the Frog muttered. 'Vexes it, you +know.' Then he went up and gave the door a kick with one of his great feet. +'You let IT alone,' he panted out, as he hobbled back to his tree, 'and it'll +let YOU alone, you know.' + +At this moment the door was flung open, and a shrill voice was heard singing: + +poem{ + + 'To the Looking-Glass world it was Alice that said, + "I've a sceptre in hand, I've a crown on my head; + Let the Looking-Glass creatures, whatever they be, + Come and dine with the Red Queen, the White Queen, and me."' + +}poem + +And hundreds of voices joined in the chorus: + +poem{ + + 'Then fill up the glasses as quick as you can, + And sprinkle the table with buttons and bran: + Put cats in the coffee, and mice in the tea-- + And welcome Queen Alice with thirty-times-three!' + +}poem + +Then followed a confused noise of cheering, and Alice thought to herself, +'Thirty times three makes ninety. I wonder if any one's counting?' In a minute +there was silence again, and the same shrill voice sang another verse; + +poem{ + + '"O Looking-Glass creatures," quothe Alice, "draw near! + 'Tis an honour to see me, a favour to hear: + 'Tis a privilege high to have dinner and tea + Along with the Red Queen, the White Queen, and me!"' + +}poem + +Then came the chorus again:-- + +poem{ + + 'Then fill up the glasses with treacle and ink, + Or anything else that is pleasant to drink: + Mix sand with the cider, and wool with the wine-- + And welcome Queen Alice with ninety-times-nine!' + +}poem + +'Ninety times nine!' Alice repeated in despair, 'Oh, that'll never be done! I'd +better go in at once--' and there was a dead silence the moment she appeared. + +Alice glanced nervously along the table, as she walked up the large hall, and +noticed that there were about fifty guests, of all kinds: some were animals, +some birds, and there were even a few flowers among them. 'I'm glad they've +come without waiting to be asked,' she thought: 'I should never have known who +were the right people to invite!' + +There were three chairs at the head of the table; the Red and White Queens had +already taken two of them, but the middle one was empty. Alice sat down in it, +rather uncomfortable in the silence, and longing for some one to speak. + +At last the Red Queen began. 'You've missed the soup and fish,' she said. 'Put +on the joint!' And the waiters set a leg of mutton before Alice, who looked at +it rather anxiously, as she had never had to carve a joint before. + +'You look a little shy; let me introduce you to that leg of mutton,' said the +Red Queen. 'Alice--Mutton; Mutton--Alice.' The leg of mutton got up in the dish +and made a little bow to Alice; and Alice returned the bow, not knowing whether +to be frightened or amused. + +'May I give you a slice?' she said, taking up the knife and fork, and looking +from one Queen to the other. + +'Certainly not,' the Red Queen said, very decidedly: 'it isn't etiquette to cut +any one you've been introduced to. Remove the joint!' And the waiters carried +it off, and brought a large plum-pudding in its place. + +'I won't be introduced to the pudding, please,' Alice said rather hastily, 'or +we shall get no dinner at all. May I give you some?' + +But the Red Queen looked sulky, and growled 'Pudding--Alice; Alice--Pudding. +Remove the pudding!' and the waiters took it away so quickly that Alice +couldn't return its bow. + +However, she didn't see why the Red Queen should be the only one to give +orders, so, as an experiment, she called out 'Waiter! Bring back the pudding!' +and there it was again in a moment like a conjuring-trick. It was so large that +she couldn't help feeling a LITTLE shy with it, as she had been with the +mutton; however, she conquered her shyness by a great effort and cut a slice +and handed it to the Red Queen. + +'What impertinence!' said the Pudding. 'I wonder how you'd like it, if I were +to cut a slice out of YOU, you creature!' + +It spoke in a thick, suety sort of voice, and Alice hadn't a word to say in +reply: she could only sit and look at it and gasp. + +'Make a remark,' said the Red Queen: 'it's ridiculous to leave all the +conversation to the pudding!' + +'Do you know, I've had such a quantity of poetry repeated to me to-day,' Alice +began, a little frightened at finding that, the moment she opened her lips, +there was dead silence, and all eyes were fixed upon her; 'and it's a very +curious thing, I think-- every poem was about fishes in some way. Do you know +why they're so fond of fishes, all about here?' + +She spoke to the Red Queen, whose answer was a little wide of the mark. 'As to +fishes,' she said, very slowly and solemnly, putting her mouth close to Alice's +ear, 'her White Majesty knows a lovely riddle--all in poetry--all about fishes. +Shall she repeat it?' + +'Her Red Majesty's very kind to mention it,' the White Queen murmured into +Alice's other ear, in a voice like the cooing of a pigeon. 'It would be SUCH a +treat! May I?' + +'Please do,' Alice said very politely. + +The White Queen laughed with delight, and stroked Alice's cheek. Then she +began: + +poem{ + + '"First, the fish must be caught." + That is easy: a baby, I think, could have caught it. + "Next, the fish must be bought." + That is easy: a penny, I think, would have bought it. + + "Now cook me the fish!" + That is easy, and will not take more than a minute. + "Let it lie in a dish!" + That is easy, because it already is in it. + + "Bring it here! Let me sup!" + It is easy to set such a dish on the table. + "Take the dish-cover up!" + Ah, THAT is so hard that I fear I'm unable! + + For it holds it like glue-- + Holds the lid to the dish, while it lies in the middle: + Which is easiest to do, + Un-dish-cover the fish, or dishcover the riddle?' + +}poem + +'Take a minute to think about it, and then guess,' said the Red Queen. +'Meanwhile, we'll drink your health--Queen Alice's health!' she screamed at the +top of her voice, and all the guests began drinking it directly, and very +queerly they managed it: some of them put their glasses upon their heads like +extinguishers, and drank all that trickled down their faces--others upset the +decanters, and drank the wine as it ran off the edges of the table--and three +of them (who looked like kangaroos) scrambled into the dish of roast mutton, +and began eagerly lapping up the gravy, 'just like pigs in a trough!' thought +Alice. + +'You ought to return thanks in a neat speech,' the Red Queen said, frowning at +Alice as she spoke. + +'We must support you, you know,' the White Queen whispered, as Alice got up to +do it, very obediently, but a little frightened. + +'Thank you very much,' she whispered in reply, 'but I can do quite well +without.' + +'That wouldn't be at all the thing,' the Red Queen said very decidedly: so +Alice tried to submit to it with a good grace. + +('And they DID push so!' she said afterwards, when she was telling her sister +the history of the feast. 'You would have thought they wanted to squeeze me +flat!') + +In fact it was rather difficult for her to keep in her place while she made her +speech: the two Queens pushed her so, one on each side, that they nearly lifted +her up into the air: 'I rise to return thanks--' Alice began: and she really +DID rise as she spoke, several inches; but she got hold of the edge of the +table, and managed to pull herself down again. + +'Take care of yourself!' screamed the White Queen, seizing Alice's hair with +both her hands. 'Something's going to happen!' + +And then (as Alice afterwards described it) all sorts of things happened in a +moment. The candles all grew up to the ceiling, looking something like a bed of +rushes with fireworks at the top. As to the bottles, they each took a pair of +plates, which they hastily fitted on as wings, and so, with forks for legs, +went fluttering about in all directions: 'and very like birds they look,' Alice +thought to herself, as well as she could in the dreadful confusion that was +beginning. + +At this moment she heard a hoarse laugh at her side, and turned to see what was +the matter with the White Queen; but, instead of the Queen, there was the leg +of mutton sitting in the chair. 'Here I am!' cried a voice from the soup +tureen, and Alice turned again, just in time to see the Queen's broad +good-natured face grinning at her for a moment over the edge of the tureen, +before she disappeared into the soup. + +There was not a moment to be lost. Already several of the guests were lying +down in the dishes, and the soup ladle was walking up the table towards Alice's +chair, and beckoning to her impatiently to get out of its way. + +'I can't stand this any longer!' she cried as she jumped up and seized the +table-cloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and +candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor. + +'And as for YOU,' she went on, turning fiercely upon the Red Queen, whom she +considered as the cause of all the mischief--but the Queen was no longer at her +side--she had suddenly dwindled down to the size of a little doll, and was now +on the table, merrily running round and round after her own shawl, which was +trailing behind her. + +At any other time, Alice would have felt surprised at this, but she was far too +much excited to be surprised at anything NOW. 'As for YOU,' she repeated, +catching hold of the little creature in the very act of jumping over a bottle +which had just lighted upon the table, 'I'll shake you into a kitten, that I +will!' + +CHAPTER X - Shaking + +She took her off the table as she spoke, and shook her backwards and forwards +with all her might. + +The Red Queen made no resistance whatever; only her face grew very small, and +her eyes got large and green: and still, as Alice went on shaking her, she kept +on growing shorter--and fatter--and softer--and rounder--and-- + +CHAPTER XI - Waking + +--and it really WAS a kitten, after all. + +CHAPTER XII - Which Dreamed it? + +'Your majesty shouldn't purr so loud,' Alice said, rubbing her eyes, and +addressing the kitten, respectfully, yet with some severity. 'You woke me out +of oh! such a nice dream! And you've been along with me, Kitty--all through the +Looking-Glass world. Did you know it, dear?' + +It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) +that, whatever you say to them, they ALWAYS purr. 'If they would only purr for +"yes" and mew for "no," or any rule of that sort,' she had said, 'so that one +could keep up a conversation! But how CAN you talk with a person if they always +say the same thing?' + +On this occasion the kitten only purred: and it was impossible to guess whether +it meant 'yes' or 'no.' + +So Alice hunted among the chessmen on the table till she had found the Red +Queen: then she went down on her knees on the hearth-rug, and put the kitten +and the Queen to look at each other. 'Now, Kitty!' she cried, clapping her +hands triumphantly. 'Confess that was what you turned into!' + +('But it wouldn't look at it,' she said, when she was explaining the thing +afterwards to her sister: 'it turned away its head, and pretended not to see +it: but it looked a LITTLE ashamed of itself, so I think it MUST have been the +Red Queen.') + +'Sit up a little more stiffly, dear!' Alice cried with a merry laugh. 'And +curtsey while you're thinking what to--what to purr. It saves time, remember!' +And she caught it up and gave it one little kiss, 'just in honour of having +been a Red Queen.' + +'Snowdrop, my pet!' she went on, looking over her shoulder at the White Kitten, +which was still patiently undergoing its toilet, 'when WILL Dinah have finished +with your White Majesty, I wonder? That must be the reason you were so untidy +in my dream-- Dinah! do you know that you're scrubbing a White Queen? Really, +it's most disrespectful of you! + +'And what did DINAH turn to, I wonder?' she prattled on, as she settled +comfortably down, with one elbow in the rug, and her chin in her hand, to watch +the kittens. 'Tell me, Dinah, did you turn to Humpty Dumpty? I THINK you +did--however, you'd better not mention it to your friends just yet, for I'm not +sure. + +'By the way, Kitty, if only you'd been really with me in my dream, there was +one thing you WOULD have enjoyed--I had such a quantity of poetry said to me, +all about fishes! To-morrow morning you shall have a real treat. All the time +you're eating your breakfast, I'll repeat "The Walrus and the Carpenter" to +you; and then you can make believe it's oysters, dear! + +'Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious +question, my dear, and you should NOT go on licking your paw like that--as if +Dinah hadn't washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it MUST have been either +me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course--but then I was part of +his dream, too! WAS it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you +ought to know--Oh, Kitty, DO help to settle it! I'm sure your paw can wait!' +But the provoking kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn't +heard the question. + +Which do YOU think it was? + +poem{ + + A boat beneath a sunny sky, + Lingering onward dreamily + In an evening of July-- + + Children three that nestle near, + Eager eye and willing ear, + Pleased a simple tale to hear-- + + Long has paled that sunny sky: + Echoes fade and memories die. + Autumn frosts have slain July. + + Still she haunts me, phantomwise, + Alice moving under skies + Never seen by waking eyes. + + Children yet, the tale to hear, + Eager eye and willing ear, + Lovingly shall nestle near. + + In a Wonderland they lie, + Dreaming as the days go by, + Dreaming as the summers die: + + Ever drifting down the stream-- + Lingering in the golden gleam-- + Life, what is it but a dream? + +}poem + +THE END diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b46dca5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/two_bits.christopher_kelty.sst @@ -0,0 +1,15596 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Two Bits + :subtitle: The Cultural Significance of Free Software + +@creator: + :author: Kelty, Christopher M. + +@date: + :published: 2008 + +@rights: + :copyright: © 2008 Duke University Press \\ Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ \\ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland \\ Typeset in Charis (an Open Source font) by Achorn International \\ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data and republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed pages of this book. + :license: Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or by mail from Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, Calif. 94305, U.S.A. "NonCommercial" as defined in this license specifically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if sale does not result in a profit by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or NGO. \\ Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), which provided funds to help support the electronic interface of this book. \\ Two Bits is accessible on the Web at twobits.net. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;open source software:social aspects;software:development:geeks;anthropology:geeks;book:subject:anthropology|information society|geeks;society;programming;society:information society; + +@identifier: + :oclc: 183914703 + +% :isbn: 978082234264-9 + +@links: + { Two Bits home page }http://twobits.net/ + { Christopher M. Kelty }http://kelty.org/ + { Two Bits @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Two-Bits-Cultural-Significance-Software/dp/0822342642 + { Two Bits @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Two-Bits/Christopher-M-Kelty/e/9780822342649 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:C; break=1 + :italics: /Two Bits/i + :home_button_text: {Two Bits}http://twobits.net; {Christopher M. Kelty}http://kelty.org/ + :footer: {Two Bits}http://twobits.net; {Christopher M. Kelty}http://kelty.org/ +%:home_button_image: {2bits.png }http://twobits.net + +:A~ @title @author + +1~dedication Dedication + +To my parents, Anne and Ted + +1~preface Preface + +This is a book about Free Software, also known as Open Source Software, and is +meant for anyone who wants to understand the cultural significance of Free +Software. Two Bits explains how Free Software works and how it emerged in +tandem with the Internet as both a technical and a social form. Understanding +Free Software in detail is the best way to understand many contentious and +confusing changes related to the Internet, to "commons," to software, and to +networks. Whether you think first of e-mail, Napster, Wikipedia, MySpace, or +Flickr; whether you think of the proliferation of databases, identity thieves, +and privacy concerns; whether you think of traditional knowledge, patents on +genes, the death of scholarly publishing, or compulsory licensing of AIDS +medicine; whether you think of MoveOn.org or net neutrality or YouTube—the +issues raised by these phenomena can be better understood by looking carefully +at the emergence of Free Software. ,{[PAGE x]}, + +Why? Because it is in Free Software and its history that the issues raised—from +intellectual property and piracy to online political advocacy and "social" +software—were first figured out and confronted. Free Software’s roots stretch +back to the 1970s and crisscross the histories of the personal computer and the +Internet, the peaks and troughs of the information-technology and software +industries, the transformation of intellectual property law, the innovation of +organizations and "virtual" collaboration, and the rise of networked social +movements. Free Software does not explain why these various changes have +occurred, but rather how individuals and groups are responding: by creating new +things, new practices, and new forms of life. It is these practices and forms +of life—not the software itself—that are most significant, and they have in +turn served as templates that others can use and transform: practices of +sharing source code, conceptualizing openness, writing copyright (and copyleft) +licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing for all of the above. +There are explanations aplenty for why things are the way they are: it’s +globalization, it’s the network society, it’s an ideology of transparency, it’s +the virtualization of work, it’s the new flat earth, it’s Empire. We are +drowning in the why, both popular and scholarly, but starving for the how. + +Understanding how Free Software works is not just an academic pursuit but an +experience that transforms the lives and work of participants involved. Over +the last decade, in fieldwork with software programmers, lawyers, +entrepreneurs, artists, activists, and other geeks I have repeatedly observed +that understanding how Free Software works results in a revelation. People—even +(or, perhaps, especially) those who do not consider themselves programmers, +hackers, geeks, or technophiles—come out of the experience with something like +religion, because Free Software is all about the practices, not about the +ideologies and goals that swirl on its surface. Free Software and its creators +and users are not, as a group, antimarket or anticommercial; they are not, as a +group, anti-intellectual property or antigovernment; they are not, as a group, +pro- or anti- anything. In fact, they are not really a group at all: not a +corporation or an organization; not an NGO or a government agency; not a +professional society or an informal horde of hackers; not a movement or a +research project. + +Free Software is, however, public; it is about making things public. This fact +is key to comprehending its cultural significance, its ,{[PAGE xi]}, appeal, +and its proliferation. Free Software is public in a particular way: it is a +self-determining, collective, politically independent mode of creating very +complex technical objects that are made publicly and freely available to +everyone—a "commons," in common parlance. It is a practice of working through +the promises of equality, fairness, justice, reason, and argument in a domain +of technically complex software and networks, and in a context of powerful, +lopsided laws about intellectual property. The fact that something public in +this grand sense emerges out of practices so seemingly arcane is why the first +urge of many converts is to ask: how can Free Software be "ported" to other +aspects of life, such as movies, music, science or medicine, civil society, and +education? It is this proselytizing urge and the ease with which the practices +are spread that make up the cultural significance of Free Software. For better +or for worse, we may all be using Free Software before we know it. + +1~ Acknowledgements + +Anthropology is dependent on strangers who become friends and +colleagues—strangers who contribute the very essence of the work. In my case, +these strangers are also hyperaware of issues of credit, reputation, +acknowledgment, reuse, and modification of ideas and things. Therefore, the +list is extensive and detailed. + +Sean Doyle and Adrian Gropper opened the doors to this project, providing +unparalleled insight, hospitality, challenge, and curiosity. Axel Roch +introduced me to Volker Grassmuck, and to much else. Volker Grassmuck +introduced me to Berlin’s Free Software world and invited me to participate in +the Wizards of OS conferences. Udhay Shankar introduced me to almost everyone I +know, sometimes after the fact. Shiv Sastry helped me find lodging in Bangalore +at his Aunt Anasuya Sastry’s house, which is called "Silicon Valley" and which +was truly a lovely place to stay. Bharath Chari and Ram Sundaram let me haunt +their office and cat-5 cables ,{[PAGE xiv]}, during one of the more turbulent +periods of their careers. Glenn Otis Brown visited, drank, talked, invited, +challenged, entertained, chided, encouraged, drove, was driven, and gave and +received advice. Ross Reedstrom welcomed me to the Rice Linux Users’ Group and +to Connexions. Brent Hendricks did yeoman’s work, suffering my questions and +intrusions. Geneva Henry, Jenn Drummond, Chuck Bearden, Kathy Fletcher, +Manpreet Kaur, Mark Husband, Max Starkenberg, Elvena Mayo, Joey King, and Joel +Thierstein have been welcoming and enthusiastic at every meeting. Sid Burris +has challenged and respected my work, which has been an honor. Rich Baraniuk +listens to everything I say, for better or for worse; he is a magnificent +collaborator and friend. + +James Boyle has been constantly supportive, for what feels like very little +return on investment. Very few people get to read and critique and help reshape +the argument and structure of a book, and to appear in it as well. Mario +Biagioli helped me see the intricate strategy described in chapter 6. Stefan +Helmreich read early drafts and transformed my thinking about networks. Manuel +DeLanda explained the term assemblage to me. James Faubion corrected my +thinking in chapter 2, helped me immeasurably with the Protestants, and has +been an exquisitely supportive colleague and department chair. Mazyar Lotfalian +and Melissa Cefkin provided their apartment and library, in which I wrote large +parts of chapter 1. Matt Price and Michelle Murphy have listened patiently to +me construct and reconstruct versions of this book for at least six years. Tom +and Elizabeth Landecker provided hospitality and stunningly beautiful +surroundings in which to rewrite parts of the book. Lisa Gitelman read +carefully and helped explain issues about documentation and versioning that I +discuss in chapter 4. Matt Ratto read and commented on chapters 4-7, convinced +me to drop a useless distinction, and to clarify the conclusion to chapter 7. +Shay David provided strategic insights about openness from his own work and +pushed me to explain the point of recursive publics more clearly. Biella +Coleman has been a constant interlocutor on the issues in this book—her +contributions are too deep, too various, and too thorough to detail. Her own +work on Free Software and hackers has been a constant sounding board and guide, +and it has been a pleasure to work together on our respective texts. Kim Fortun +helped me figure it all out. ,{[PAGE xv]}, + +George Marcus hired me into a fantastic anthropology department and has had +immense faith in this project throughout its lifetime. Paul Rabinow, Stephen +Collier, and Andrew Lakoff have provided an extremely valuable setting—the +Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory—within which the +arguments of this book developed in ways they could not have as a solitary +project. Joe Dumit has encouraged and prodded and questioned and brainstormed +and guided and inspired. Michael Fischer is the best mentor and advisor ever. +He has read everything, has written much that precedes and shapes this work, +and has been an unwavering supporter and friend throughout. + +Tish Stringer, Michael Powell, Valerie Olson, Ala Alazzeh, Lina Dib, Angela +Rivas, Anthony Potoczniak, Ayla Samli, Ebru Kayaalp, Michael Kriz, Erkan Saka, +Elise McCarthy, Elitza Ranova, Amanda Randall, Kris Peterson, Laura Jones, +Nahal Naficy, Andrea Frolic, and Casey O’Donnell make my job rock. Scott +McGill, Sarah Ellenzweig, Stephen Collier, Carl Pearson, Dan Wallach, Tracy +Volz, Rich Doyle, Ussama Makdisi, Elora Shehabbudin, Michael Morrow, Taryn +Kinney, Gregory Kaplan, Jane Greenberg, Hajime Nakatani, Kirsten Ostherr, +Henning Schmidgen, Jason Danziger, Kayte Young, Nicholas King, Jennifer +Fishman, Paul Drueke, Roberta Bivins, Sherri Roush, Stefan Timmermans, Laura +Lark, and Susann Wilkinson either made Houston a wonderful place to be or +provided an opportunity to escape it. I am especially happy that Thom Chivens +has done both and more. + +The Center for the Study of Cultures provided me with a Faculty Fellowship in +the fall of 2003, which allowed me to accomplish much of the work in +conceptualizing the book. The Harvard History of Science Department and the MIT +Program in History, Anthropology, and Social Studies of Science and Technology +hosted me in the spring of 2005, allowing me to write most of chapters 7, 8, +and 9. Rice University has been extremely generous in all respects, and a +wonderful place to work. I’m most grateful for a junior sabbatical that gave me +the chance to complete much of this book. John Hoffman graciously and +generously allowed the use of the domain name twobits.net, in support of Free +Software. Ken Wissoker, Courtney Berger, and the anonymous reviewers for Duke +University Press have made this a much, much better book than when I started. +,{[PAGE xvi]}, + +My parents, Ted and Anne, and my brother, Kevin, have always been supportive +and loving; though they claim to have no idea what I do, I nonetheless owe my +small success to their constant support. Hannah Landecker has read and reread +and rewritten every part of this work; she has made it and me better, and I +love her dearly for it. Last, but not least, my new project, Ida Jane Kelty +Landecker, is much cuter and smarter and funnier than Two Bits, and I love her +for distracting me from it. + +1~introduction Introduction + +Introduction + +Around 1998 Free Software emerged from a happily subterranean and obscure +existence stretching back roughly twenty years. At the very pinnacle of the +dotcom boom, Free Software suddenly populated the pages of mainstream business +journals, entered the strategy and planning discussions of executives, +confounded the radar of political leaders and regulators around the globe, and +permeated the consciousness of a generation of technophile teenagers growing up +in the 1990s wondering how people ever lived without e-mail. Free Software +appeared to be something shocking, something that economic history suggested +could never exist: a practice of creating software—good software—that was +privately owned, but freely and publicly accessible. Free Software, as its +ambiguous moniker suggests, is both free from constraints and free of charge. +Such characteristics seem to violate economic logic and the principles of +private ownership and individual autonomy, yet there are tens of ,{[pg 2]}, +millions of people creating this software and hundreds of millions more using +it. Why? Why now? And most important: how? +={ Free Software +3 } + +Free Software is a set of practices for the distributed collaborative creation +of software source code that is then made openly and freely available through a +clever, unconventional use of copyright law.~{ A Note on Terminology: There is +still debate about how to refer to Free Software, which is also known as Open +Source Software. The scholarly community has adopted either FOSS or FLOSS (or +F/LOSS): the former stands for the Anglo-American Free and Open Source +Software; the latter stands for the continental Free, Libre and Open Source +Software. Two Bits sticks to the simple term Free Software to refer to all of +these things, except where it is specifically necessary to differentiate two or +more names, or to specify people or events so named. The reason is primarily +aesthetic and political, but Free Software is also the older term, as well as +the one that includes issues of moral and social order. I explain in chapter 3 +why there are two terms. }~ But it is much more: Free Software exemplifies a +considerable reorientation of knowledge and power in contemporary society—a +reorientation of power with respect to the creation, dissemination, and +authorization of knowledge in the era of the Internet. This book is about the +cultural significance of Free Software, and by cultural I mean much more than +the exotic behavioral or sartorial traits of software programmers, fascinating +though they be. By culture, I mean an ongoing experimental system, a space of +modification and modulation, of figuring out and testing; culture is an +experiment that is hard to keep an eye on, one that changes quickly and +sometimes starkly. Culture as an experimental system crosses economies and +governments, networked social spheres, and the infrastructure of knowledge and +power within which our world functions today—or fails to. Free Software, as a +cultural practice, weaves together a surprising range of places, objects, and +people; it contains patterns, thresholds, and repetitions that are not simple +or immediately obvious, either to the geeks who make Free Software or to those +who want to understand it. It is my goal in this book to reveal some of those +complex patterns and thresholds, both historically and anthropologically, and +to explain not just what Free Software is but also how it has emerged in the +recent past and will continue to change in the near future.~{ 2 Michael M. J. +Fischer, "Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems." }~ +={ culture : + as experimental system ; + Free Software : + open source vs. +2 | as experimental system ; + Geeks +1 ; + Open Source : + Free Software vs. +2 ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +1 +} + +The significance of Free Software extends far beyond the arcane and detailed +technical practices of software programmers and "geeks" (as I refer to them +herein). Since about 1998, the practices and ideas of Free Software have +extended into new realms of life and creativity: from software to music and +film to science, engineering, and education; from national politics of +intellectual property to global debates about civil society; from UNIX to Mac +OS X and Windows; from medical records and databases to international disease +monitoring and synthetic biology; from Open Source to open access. Free +Software is no longer only about software—it exemplifies a more general +reorientation of power and knowledge. +={ Open access +2 } + +The terms Free Software and Open Source don’t quite capture the extent of this +reorientation or their own cultural significance. They ,{[pg 3]}, refer, quite +narrowly, to the practice of creating software—an activity many people consider +to be quite far from their experience. However, creating Free Software is more +than that: it includes a unique combination of more familiar practices that +range from creating and policing intellectual property to arguing about the +meaning of "openness" to organizing and coordinating people and machines across +locales and time zones. Taken together, these practices make Free Software +distinct, significant, and meaningful both to those who create it and to those +who take the time to understand how it comes into being. + +In order to analyze and illustrate the more general cultural significance of +Free Software and its consequences, I introduce the concept of a "recursive +public." A recursive public is a /{public that is vitally concerned with the +material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, +practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a +collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of +speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing +alternatives.}/ Free Software is one instance of this concept, both as it has +emerged in the recent past and as it undergoes transformation and +differentiation in the near future. There are other instances, including those +that emerge from the practices of Free Software, such as Creative Commons, the +Connexions project, and the Open Access movement in science. These latter +instances may or may not be Free Software, or even "software" projects per se, +but they are connected through the same practices, and what makes them +significant is that they may also be "recursive publics" in the sense I explore +in this book. Recursive publics, and publics generally, differ from interest +groups, corporations, unions, professions, churches, and other forms of +organization because of their focus on the radical technological modifiability +of their own terms of existence. In any public there inevitably arises a moment +when the question of how things are said, who controls the means of +communication, or whether each and everyone is being properly heard becomes an +issue. A legitimate public sphere is one that gives outsiders a way in: they +may or may not be heard, but they do not have to appeal to any authority +(inside or outside the organization) in order to have a voice.~{ So, for +instance, when a professional society founded on charters and ideals for +membership and qualification speaks as a public, it represents its members, as +when the American Medical Association argues for or against changes to +Medicare. However, if a new group—say, of nurses—seeks not only to participate +in this discussion—which may be possible, even welcomed—but to change the +structure of representation in order to give themselves status equal to +doctors, this change is impossible, for it goes against the very aims and +principles of the society. Indeed, the nurses will be urged to form their own +society, not to join that of the doctors, a proposition which gives the lie to +the existing structures of power. By contrast, a public is an entity that is +less controlled and hence more agonistic, such that nurses might join, speak, +and insist on changing the terms of debate, just as patients, scientists, or +homeless people might. Their success, however, depends entirely on the force +with which their actions transform the focus and terms of the public. Concepts +of the public sphere have been roundly critiqued in the last twenty years for +presuming that such "equality of access" is sufficient to achieve +representation, when in fact other contextual factors (race, class, sex) +inherently weight the representative power of different participants. But these +are two different and overlapping problems: one cannot solve the problem of +pernicious, invisible forms of inequality unless one first solves the problem +of ensuring a certain kind of structural publicity. It is precisely the focus +on maintaining publicity for a recursive public, over against massive and +powerful corporate and governmental attempts to restrict it, that I locate as +the central struggle of Free Software. Gender certainly influences who gets +heard within Free Software, for example, but it is a mistake to focus on this +inequality at the expense of the larger, more threatening form of political +failure that Free Software addresses. And I think there are plenty of +geeks—man, woman and animal—who share this sentiment. }~ Such publics are not +inherently modifiable, but are made so—and maintained—through the practices of +participants. It is possible for Free Software as we know it to cease to be +public, or to become just one more settled ,{[pg 4]}, form of power, but my +focus is on the recent past and near future of something that is (for the time +being) public in a radical and novel way. +={ Connexions project ; + Creative Commons ; + public +6 ; + recursive public : + definition of +} + +The concept of a recursive public is not meant to apply to any and every +instance of a public—it is not a replacement for the concept of a "public +sphere"—but is intended rather to give readers a specific and detailed sense of +the non-obvious, but persistent threads that form the warp and weft of Free +Software and to analyze similar and related projects that continue to emerge +from it as novel and unprecedented forms of publicity and political action. + +At first glance, the thread tying these projects together seems to be the +Internet. And indeed, the history and cultural significance of Free Software +has been intricately mixed up with that of the Internet over the last thirty +years. The Internet is a unique platform—an environment or an +infrastructure—for Free Software. But the Internet looks the way it does +because of Free Software. Free Software and the Internet are related like +figure and ground or like system and environment; neither are stable or +unchanging in and of themselves, and there are a number of practical, +technical, and historical places where the two are essentially +indistinguishable. The Internet is not itself a recursive public, but it is +something vitally important to that public, something about which such publics +care deeply and act to preserve. Throughout this book, I will return to these +three phenomena: the Internet, a heterogeneous and diverse, though singular, +infrastructure of technologies and uses; Free Software, a very specific set of +technical, legal, and social practices that now require the Internet; and +recursive publics, an analytic concept intended to clarify the relation of the +first two. +={ Internet +12 : + relation to Free Software ; + Free Software : + relation to Internet ; + public sphere : + theories of +} + +Both the Internet and Free Software are historically specific, that is, not +just any old new media or information technology. But the Internet is many, +many specific things to many, many specific people. As one reviewer of an early +manuscript version of this book noted, "For most people, the Internet is porn, +stock quotes, Al Jazeera clips of executions, Skype, seeing pictures of the +grandkids, porn, never having to buy another encyclopedia, MySpace, e-mail, +online housing listings, Amazon, Googling potential romantic interests, etc. +etc." It is impossible to explain all of these things; the meaning and +significance of the proliferation of digital pornography is a very different +concern than that of the fall of the print encyclopedia ,{[pg 5]}, and the rise +of Wikipedia. Yet certain underlying practices relate these diverse phenomena +to one another and help explain why they have occurred at this time and in this +technical, legal, and social context. By looking carefully at Free Software and +its modulations, I suggest, one can come to a better understanding of the +changes affecting pornography, Wikipedia, stock quotes, and many other +wonderful and terrifying things.~{ Wikipedia is perhaps the most widely known +and generally familiar example of what this book is about. Even though it is +not identified as such, it is in fact a Free Software project and a +"modulation" of Free Software as I describe it here. The non-technically +inclined reader might keep Wikipedia in mind as an example with which to follow +the argument of this book. I will return to it explicitly in part 3. However, +for better or for worse, there will be no discussion of pornography. }~ +={ Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia) } + +Two Bits has three parts. Part I of this book introduces the reader to the +concept of recursive publics by exploring the lives, works, and discussions of +an international community of geeks brought together by their shared interest +in the Internet. Chapter 1 asks, in an ethnographic voice, "Why do geeks +associate with one another?" The answer—told via the story of Napster in 2000 +and the standards process at the heart of the Internet—is that they are making +a recursive public. Chapter 2 explores the words and attitudes of geeks more +closely, focusing on the strange stories they tell (about the Protestant +Reformation, about their practical everyday polymathy, about progress and +enlightenment), stories that make sense of contemporary political economy in +sometimes surprising ways. Central to part I is an explication of the ways in +which geeks argue about technology but also argue with and through it, by +building, modifying, and maintaining the very software, networks, and legal +tools within which and by which they associate with one another. It is meant to +give the reader a kind of visceral sense of why certain arrangements of +technology, organization, and law—specifically that of the Internet and Free +Software—are so vitally important to these geeks. +={ geeks ; + Napster ; + technology : + as argument +} + +Part II takes a step back from ethnographic engagement to ask, "What is Free +Software and why has it emerged at this point in history?" Part II is a +historically detailed portrait of the emergence of Free Software beginning in +1998-99 and stretching back in time as far as the late 1950s; it recapitulates +part I by examining Free Software as an exemplar of a recursive public. The +five chapters in part II tell a coherent historical story, but each is focused +on a separate component of Free Software. The stories in these chapters help +distinguish the figure of Free Software from the ground of the Internet. The +diversity of technical practices, economic concerns, information technologies, +and legal and organizational practices is huge, and these five chapters +distinguish and describe the specific practices in their historical contexts +and settings: practices of ,{[pg 6]}, proselytizing and arguing, of sharing, +porting, and forking source code, of conceptualizing openness and open systems, +of creating Free Software copyright, and of coordinating people and source +code. +={ copyright +1 } + +Part III returns to ethnographic engagement, analyzing two related projects +inspired by Free Software which modulate one or more of the five components +discussed in part II, that is, which take the practices as developed in Free +Software and experiment with making something new and different. The two +projects are Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright +licenses, and Connexions, a project to develop an online scholarly textbook +commons. By tracing the modulations of practices in detail, I ask, "Are these +projects still Free Software?" and "Are these projects still recursive +publics?" The answer to the first questions reveals how Free Software’s +flexible practices are influencing specific forms of practice far from software +programming, while the answer to the second question helps explain how Free +Software, Creative Commons, Connexions, and projects like them are all related, +strategic responses to the reorientation of power and knowledge. The conclusion +raises a series of questions intended to help scholars looking at related +phenomena. +={ Connexions project ; + Creative Commons ; + Practices : + five components of Free Software +} + +!_ Recursive Publics and the Reorientation of Power and Knowledge +={ public +3 ; + legitimacy : + circulation of knowledge and +8 ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +14 +} + +Governance and control of the creation and dissemination of knowledge have +changed considerably in the context of the Internet over the last thirty years. +Nearly all kinds of media are easier to produce, publish, circulate, modify, +mash-up, remix, or reuse. The number of such creations, circulations, and +borrowings has exploded, and the tools of knowledge creation and +circulation—software and networks—have also become more and more pervasively +available. The results have also been explosive and include anxieties about +validity, quality, ownership and control, moral panics galore, and new concerns +about the shape and legitimacy of global "intellectual property" systems. All +of these concerns amount to a reorientation of knowledge and power that is +incomplete and emergent, and whose implications reach directly into the heart +of the legitimacy, certainty, reliability and especially the finality and +temporality of ,{[pg 7]}, the knowledge and infrastructures we collectively +create. It is a reorientation at once more specific and more general than the +grand diagnostic claims of an "information" or "network" society, or the rise +of knowledge work or knowledge-based economies; it is more specific because it +concerns precise and detailed technical and legal practices, more general +because it is a cultural reorientation, not only an economic or legal one. +={ information society } + +Free Software exemplifies this reorientation; it is not simply a technical +pursuit but also the creation of a "public," a collective that asserts itself +as a check on other constituted forms of power—like states, the church, and +corporations—but which remains independent of these domains of power.~{ +Although the term public clearly suggests private as its opposite, Free +Software is not anticommercial. A very large amount of money, both real and +notional, is involved in the creation of Free Software. The term recursive +,{[PAGE 313]}, market could also be used, in order to emphasize the +importance (especially during the 1990s) of the economic features of the +practice. The point is not to test whether Free Software is a "public" or a +"market," but to construct a concept adequate to the practices that constitute +it. }~ Free Software is a response to this reorientation that has resulted in a +novel form of democratic political action, a means by which publics can be +created and maintained in forms not at all familiar to us from the past. Free +Software is a public of a particular kind: a recursive public. Recursive +publics are publics concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and +maintain the infrastructure that allows them to come into being in the first +place and which, in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and +the identities of the participants as creative and autonomous individuals. In +the cases explored herein, that specific infrastructure includes the creation +of the Internet itself, as well as its associated tools and structures, such as +Usenet, e-mail, the World Wide Web (www), UNIX and UNIX-derived operating +systems, protocols, standards, and standards processes. For the last thirty +years, the Internet has been the subject of a contest in which Free Software +has been both a central combatant and an important architect. +={ recursive public : + definition of +35 ; + technology : + politics of +} + +By calling Free Software a recursive public, I am doing two things: first, I am +drawing attention to the democratic and political significance of Free Software +and the Internet; and second, I am suggesting that our current understanding +(both academic and colloquial) of what counts as a self-governing public, or +even as "the public," is radically inadequate to understanding the contemporary +reorientation of knowledge and power. The first case is easy to make: it is +obvious that there is something political about Free Software, but most casual +observers assume, erroneously, that it is simply an ideological stance and that +it is anti-intellectual property or technolibertarian. I hope to show how geeks +do not start with ideologies, but instead come to them through their +involvement in the ,{[pg 8]}, practices of creating Free Software and its +derivatives. To be sure, there are ideologues aplenty, but there are far more +people who start out thinking of themselves as libertarians or liberators, but +who become something quite different through their participation in Free +Software. + +The second case is more complex: why another contribution to the debate about +the public and public spheres? There are two reasons I have found it necessary +to invent, and to attempt to make precise, the concept of a recursive public: +the first is to signal the need to include within the spectrum of political +activity the creation, modification, and maintenance of software, networks, and +legal documents. Coding, hacking, patching, sharing, compiling, and modifying +of software are forms of political action that now routinely accompany familiar +political forms of expression like free speech, assembly, petition, and a free +press. Such activities are expressive in ways that conventional political +theory and social science do not recognize: they can both express and +"implement" ideas about the social and moral order of society. Software and +networks can express ideas in the conventional written sense as well as create +(express) infrastructures that allow ideas to circulate in novel and unexpected +ways. At an analytic level, the concept of a recursive public is a way of +insisting on the importance to public debate of the unruly technical +materiality of a political order, not just the embodied discourse (however +material) about that order. Throughout this book, I raise the question of how +Free Software and the Internet are themselves a public, as well as what that +public actually makes, builds, and maintains. +={ public sphere : + recursive public vs. ; + technology : + as argument +} + +The second reason I use the concept of a recursive public is that conventional +publics have been described as "self-grounding," as constituted only through +discourse in the conventional sense of speech, writing, and assembly.~{ See, +for example, Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 67-74. }~ Recursive publics +are "recursive" not only because of the "self-grounding" of commitments and +identities but also because they are concerned with the depth or strata of this +self-grounding: the layers of technical and legal infrastructure which are +necessary for, say, the Internet to exist as the infrastructure of a public. +Every act of self-grounding that constitutes a public relies in turn on the +existence of a medium or ground through which communication is possible—whether +face-to-face speech, epistolary communication, or net-based assembly—and +recursive publics relentlessly question the status of these media, suggesting +,{[pg 9]}, that they, too, must be independent for a public to be authentic. At +each of these layers, technical and legal and organizational decisions can +affect whether or not the infrastructure will allow, or even ensure, the +continued existence of the recursive publics that are concerned with it. +Recursive publics’ independence from power is not absolute; it is provisional +and structured in response to the historically constituted layering of power +and control within the infrastructures of computing and communication. +={ recursive public : + layers of +1 +} + +For instance, a very important aspect of the contemporary Internet, and one +that has been fiercely disputed (recently under the banner of "net +neutrality"), is its singularity: there is only one Internet. This was not an +inevitable or a technically determined outcome, but the result of a contest in +which a series of decisions were made about layers ranging from the very basic +physical configuration of the Internet (packet-switched networks and routing +systems indifferent to data types), to the standards and protocols that make it +work (e.g., TCP/IP or DNS), to the applications that run on it (e-mail, www, +ssh). The outcome of these decisions has been to privilege the singularity of +the Internet and to champion its standardization, rather than to promote its +fragmentation into multiple incompatible networks. These same kinds of +decisions are routinely discussed, weighed, and programmed in the activity of +various Free Software projects, as well as its derivatives. They are, I claim, +decisions embedded in imaginations of order that are simultaneously moral and +technical. +={ Internet : + singularity of ; + Net neutrality +} + +By contrast, governments, corporations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), +and other institutions have plenty of reasons—profit, security, control—to seek +to fragment the Internet. But it is the check on this power provided by +recursive publics and especially the practices that now make up Free Software +that has kept the Internet whole to date. It is a check on power that is by no +means absolute, but is nonetheless rigorously and technically concerned with +its legitimacy and independence not only from state-based forms of power and +control, but from corporate, commercial, and nongovernmental power as well. To +the extent that the Internet is public and extensible (including the capability +of creating private subnetworks), it is because of the practices discussed +herein and their culmination in a recursive public. + +Recursive publics respond to governance by directly engaging in, maintaining, +and often modifying the infrastructure they seek, as a ,{[pg 10]}, public, to +inhabit and extend—and not only by offering opinions or protesting decisions, +as conventional publics do (in most theories of the public sphere). Recursive +publics seek to create what might be understood, enigmatically, as a constantly +"self-leveling" level playing field. And it is in the attempt to make the +playing field self-leveling that they confront and resist forms of power and +control that seek to level it to the advantage of one or another large +constituency: state, government, corporation, profession. It is important to +understand that geeks do not simply want to level the playing field to their +advantage—they have no affinity or identity as such. Instead, they wish to +devise ways to give the playing field a certain kind of agency, effected +through the agency of many different humans, but checked by its technical and +legal structure and openness. Geeks do not wish to compete qua capitalists or +entrepreneurs unless they can assure themselves that (qua public actors) that +they can compete fairly. It is an ethic of justice shot through with an +aesthetic of technical elegance and legal cleverness. +={ affinity (of geeks) +1 ; + public sphere : + recursive public vs. +1 ; + modifiability +6 +} + +The fact that recursive publics respond in this way—through direct engagement +and modification—is a key aspect of the reorientation of power and knowledge +that Free Software exemplifies. They are reconstituting the relationship +between liberty and knowledge in a technically and historically specific +context. Geeks create and modify and argue about licenses and source code and +protocols and standards and revision control and ideologies of freedom and +pragmatism not simply because these things are inherently or universally +important, but because they concern the relationship of governance to the +freedom of expression and nature of consent. Source code and copyright +licenses, revision control and mailing lists are the pamphlets, coffeehouses, +and salons of the twenty-first century: Tischgesellschaften become +Schreibtischgesellschaften.~{ Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the +Public Sphere, esp. 27-43. }~ +={ technology : + as argument +} + +The "reorientation of power and knowledge" has two key aspects that are part of +the concept of recursive publics: availability and modifiability (or +adaptability). Availability is a broad, diffuse, and familiar issue. It +includes things like transparency, open governance or transparent organization, +secrecy and freedom of information, and open access in science. Availability +includes the business-school theories of "disintermediation" and "transparency +and accountability" and the spread of "audit culture" and so-called neoliberal +regimes of governance; it is just as often the subject of suspicion as it is a +kind of moral mandate, as in the case of open ,{[pg 11]}, access to scientific +results and publications.~{ Critiques of the demand for availability and the +putatively inherent superiority of transparency include Coombe and Herman, +"Rhetorical Virtues" and "Your Second Life?"; Christen, "Gone Digital"; and +Anderson and Bowery, "The Imaginary Politics of Access to Knowledge." }~ All of +these issues are certainly touched on in detailed and practical ways in the +creation of Free Software. Debates about the mode of availability of +information made possible in the era of the Internet range from digital-rights +management and copy protection, to national security and corporate espionage, +to scientific progress and open societies. +={ adaptability ; + modifiability +4 ; + availability : + open systems and +4 +} + +However, it is modifiability that is the most fascinating, and unnerving, +aspect of the reorientation of power and knowledge. Modifiability includes the +ability not only to access—that is, to reuse in the trivial sense of using +something without restrictions—but to transform it for use in new contexts, to +different ends, or in order to participate directly in its improvement and to +redistribute or recirculate those improvements within the same infrastructures +while securing the same rights for everyone else. In fact, the core practice of +Free Software is the practice of reuse and modification of software source +code. Reuse and modification are also the key ideas that projects modeled on +Free Software (such as Connexions and Creative Commons) see as their goal. +Creative Commons has as its motto "Culture always builds on the past," and they +intend that to mean "through legal appropriation and modification." Connexions, +which allows authors to create online bits and pieces of textbooks explicitly +encourages authors to reuse work by other people, to modify it, and to make it +their own. Modifiability therefore raises a very specific and important +question about finality. When is something (software, a film, music, culture) +finished? How long does it remain finished? Who decides? Or more generally, +what does its temporality look like, and how does that temporality restructure +political relationships? Such issues are generally familiar only to historians +and literary scholars who understand the transformation of canons, the +interplay of imitation and originality, and the theoretical questions raised, +for instance, in textual scholarship. But the contemporary meaning of +modification includes both a vast increase in the speed and scope of +modifiability and a certain automation of the practice that was unfamiliar +before the advent of sophisticated, distributed forms of software. +={ Connexions project ; + Creative Commons ; + finality +2 ; + modifiability : + implications for finality +2 ; + practices +3 +} + +Modifiability is an oft-claimed advantage of Free Software. It can be updated, +modified, extended, or changed to deal with other changing environments: new +hardware, new operating systems, unforeseen technologies, or new laws and +practices. At an infrastructural level, such modifiability makes sense: it is a +response to ,{[pg 12]}, and an alternative to technocratic forms of planning. +It is a way of planning in the ability to plan out; an effort to continuously +secure the ability to deal with surprise and unexpected outcomes; a way of +making flexible, modifiable infrastructures like the Internet as safe as +permanent, inflexible ones like roads and bridges. +={ planning +1 } + +But what is the cultural significance of modifiability? What does it mean to +plan in modifiability to culture, to music, to education and science? At a +clerical level, such a question is obvious whenever a scholar cannot recover a +document written in WordPerfect 2.0 or on a disk for which there are no longer +disk drives, or when a library archive considers saving both the media and the +machines that read that media. Modifiability is an imperative for building +infrastructures that can last longer. However, it is not only a solution to a +clerical problem: it creates new possibilities and new problems for +long-settled practices like publication, or the goals and structure of +intellectual-property systems, or the definition of the finality, lifetime, +monumentality, and especially, the identity of a work. Long-settled, seemingly +unassailable practices—like the authority of published books or the power of +governments to control information—are suddenly confounded and denaturalized by +the techniques of modifiability. + +Over the last ten to fifteen years, as the Internet has spread exponentially +and insinuated itself into the most intimate practices of all kinds of people, +the issues of availability and modifiability and the reorientation of knowledge +and power they signify have become commonplace. As this has happened, the +significance and practices associated with Free Software have also spread—and +been modulated in the process. These practices provide a material and +meaningful starting point for an array of recursive publics who play with, +modulate, and transform them as they debate and build new ways to share, +create, license, and control their respective productions. They do not all +share the same goals, immediate or long-term, but by engaging in the technical, +legal, and social practices pioneered in Free Software, they do in fact share a +"social imaginary" that defines a particular relationship between technology, +organs of governance (whether state, corporate, or nongovernmental), and the +Internet. Scientists in a lab or musicians in a band; scholars creating a +textbook or social movements contemplating modes of organization and protest; +government bureaucrats issuing data or journalists investigating corruption; +corporations that manage ,{[pg 13]}, personal data or co-ops that monitor +community development—all these groups and others may find themselves adopting, +modulating, rejecting, or refining the practices that have made up Free +Software in the recent past and will do so in the near future. +={ social imaginary } + +!_ Experiment and Modulation +={ cultural significance +1 ; + Free Software : + as experimental system +14 +} + +What exactly is Free Software? This question is, perhaps surprisingly, an +incredibly common one in geek life. Debates about definition and discussions +and denunciations are ubiquitous. As an anthropologist, I have routinely +participated in such discussions and debates, and it is through my immediate +participation that Two Bits opens. In part I I tell stories about geeks, +stories that are meant to give the reader that classic anthropological sense of +being thrown into another world. The stories reveal several general aspects of +what geeks talk about and how they do so, without getting into what Free +Software is in detail. I start in this way because my project started this way. +I did not initially intend to study Free Software, but it was impossible to +ignore its emergence and manifest centrality to geeks. The debates about the +definition of Free Software that I participated in online and in the field +eventually led me away from studying geeks per se and turned me toward the +central research concern of this book: what is the cultural significance of +Free Software? + +In part II what I offer is not a definition of Free Software, but a history of +how it came to be. The story begins in 1998, with an important announcement by +Netscape that it would give away the source code to its main product, Netscape +Navigator, and works backward from this announcement into the stories of the +UNIX operating system, "open systems," copyright law, the Internet, and tools +for coordinating people and code. Together, these five stories constitute a +description of how Free Software works as a practice. As a cultural analysis, +these stories highlight just how experimental the practices are, and how +individuals keep track of and modulate the practices along the way. +={ Netscape +1 ; + Netscape Navigator (application) ; + openness +3 ; + Open Systems +} + +Netscape’s decision came at an important point in the life of Free Software. It +was at just this moment that Free Software was becoming aware of itself as a +coherent movement and not just a diverse amalgamation of projects, tools, or +practices. Ironically, this ,{[pg 14]}, recognition also betokened a split: +certain parties started to insist that the movement be called "Open Source" +software instead, to highlight the practical over the ideological commitments +of the movement. The proposal itself unleashed an enormous public discussion +about what defined Free Software (or Open Source). This enigmatic event, in +which a movement became aware of itself at the same time that it began to +question its mission, is the subject of chapter 3. I use the term movement to +designate one of the five core components of Free Software: the practices of +argument and disagreement about the meaning of Free Software. Through these +practices of discussion and critique, the other four practices start to come +into relief, and participants in both Free Software and Open Source come to +realize something surprising: for all the ideological distinctions at the level +of discourse, they are doing exactly the same thing at the level of practice. +The affect-laden histrionics with which geeks argue about the definition of +what makes Free Software free or Open Source open can be matched only by the +sober specificity of the detailed practices they share. +={ movement (component of Free Software) ; + Free Software : + open source vs. ; + Open Source : + Free Software vs. ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) +} + +The second component of Free Software is just such a mundane activity: sharing +source code (chapter 4). It is an essential and fundamentally routine practice, +but one with a history that reveals the goals of software portability, the +interactions of commercial and academic software development, and the +centrality of source code (and not only of abstract concepts) in pedagogical +settings. The details of "sharing" source code also form the story of the rise +and proliferation of the UNIX operating system and its myriad derivatives. + +The third component, conceptualizing openness (chapter 5), is about the +specific technical and "moral" meanings of openness, especially as it emerged +in the 1980s in the computer industry’s debates over "open systems." These +debates concerned the creation of a particular infrastructure, including both +technical standards and protocols (a standard UNIX and protocols for networks), +and an ideal market infrastructure that would allow open systems to flourish. +Chapter 5 is the story of the failure to achieve a market infrastructure for +open systems, in part due to a significant blind spot: the role of intellectual +property. +={ Open Systems } + +The fourth component, applying copyright (and copyleft) licenses (chapter 6), +involves the problem of intellectual property as it faced programmers and geeks +in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this ,{[pg 15]}, chapter I detail the +story of the first Free Software license—the GNU General Public License +(GPL)—which emerged out of a controversy around a very famous piece of software +called EMACS. The controversy is coincident with changing laws (in 1976 and +1980) and changing practices in the software industry—a general drift from +trade secret to copyright protection—and it is also a story about the vaunted +"hacker ethic" that reveals it in its native practical setting, rather than as +a rarefied list of rules. +={ hacker ethic } + +The fifth component, the practice of coordination and collaboration (chapter +7), is the most talked about: the idea of tens or hundreds of thousands of +people volunteering their time to contribute to the creation of complex +software. In this chapter I show how novel forms of coordination developed in +the 1990s and how they worked in the canonical cases of Apache and Linux; I +also highlight how coordination facilitates the commitment to adaptability (or +modifiability) over against planning and hierarchy, and how this commitment +resolves the tension between individual virtuosity and the need for collective +control. +={ adaptability ; + Apache (Free Software project) ; + coordination (component of Free Software) ; + Linux (Free Software project) +} + +Taken together, these five components make up Free Software—but they are not a +definition. Within each of these five practices, many similar and dissimilar +activities might reasonably be included. The point of such a redescription of +the practices of Free Software is to conceptualize them as a kind of collective +technical experimental system. Within each component are a range of differences +in practice, from conventional to experimental. At the center, so to speak, are +the most common and accepted versions of a practice; at the edges are more +unusual or controversial versions. Together, the components make up an +experimental system whose infrastructure is the Internet and whose "hypotheses" +concern the reorientation of knowledge and power. +={ experiment, collective technical +2 } + +For example, one can hardly have Free Software without source code, but it need +not be written in C (though the vast majority of it is); it can be written in +Java or perl or TeX. However, if one stretches the meaning of source code to +include music (sheet music as source and performance as binary), what happens? +Is this still Free Software? What happens when both the sheet and the +performance are "born digital"? Or, to take a different example, Free Software +requires Free Software licenses, but the terms of these licenses are often +changed and often heatedly discussed and vigilantly policed by geeks. What +degree of change removes a license ,{[pg 16]}, from the realm of Free Software +and why? How much flexibility is allowed? +={ TeX ; + perl (programming language) +} + +Conceived this way, Free Software is a system of thresholds, not of +classification; the excitement that participants and observers sense comes from +the modulation (experimentation) of each of these practices and the subsequent +discovery of where the thresholds are. Many, many people have written their own +"Free Software" copyright licenses, but only some of them remain within the +threshold of the practice as defined by the system. Modulations happen whenever +someone learns how some component of Free Software works and asks, "Can I try +these practices out in some other domain?" +={ modulation : + of Free Software +4 ; + Free Software : + modulations of +} + +The reality of constant modulation means that these five practices do not +define Free Software once and for all; they define it with respect to its +constitution in the contemporary. It is a set of practices defined "around the +point" 1998-99, an intensive coordinate space that allows one to explore Free +Software’s components prospectively and retrospectively: into the near future +and the recent past. Free Software is a machine for charting the (re)emergence +of a problematic of power and knowledge as it is filtered through the technical +realities of the Internet and the political and economic configuration of the +contemporary. Each of these practices has its own temporality of development +and emergence, but they have recently come together into this full house called +either Free Software or Open Source.~{ This description of Free Software could +also be called an "assemblage." The most recent source for this is Rabinow, +Anthropos Today. The language of thresholds and intensities is most clearly +developed by Manuel DeLanda in A Thousand Years of Non-linear History and in +Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. The term problematization, from +Rabinow (which he channels from Foucault), is a synonym for the phrase +"reorientation of knowledge and power" as I use it here. }~ + +Viewing Free Software as an experimental system has a strategic purpose in Two +Bits. It sets the stage for part III, wherein I ask what kinds of modulations +might no longer qualify as Free Software per se, but still qualify as recursive +publics. It was around 2000 that talk of "commons" began to percolate out of +discussions about Free Software: commons in educational materials, commons in +biodiversity materials, commons in music, text, and video, commons in medical +data, commons in scientific results and data.~{ See Kelty, "Culture’s Open +Sources." }~ On the one hand, it was continuous with interest in creating +"digital archives" or "online collections" or "digital libraries"; on the other +hand, it was a conjugation of the digital collection with the problems and +practices of intellectual property. The very term commons—at once a new name +and a theoretical object of investigation—was meant to suggest something more +than simply a collection, whether of ,{[pg 17]}, digital objects or anything +else; it was meant to signal the public interest, collective management, and +legal status of the collection.~{ The genealogy of the term commons has a +number of sources. An obvious source is Garrett Hardin’s famous 1968 article +"The Tragedy of the Commons." James Boyle has done more than anyone to specify +the term, especially during a 2001 conference on the public domain, which +included the inspired guest-list juxtaposition of the appropriation-happy +musical collective Negativland and the dame of "commons" studies, Elinor +Ostrom, whose book Governing the Commons has served as a certain inspiration +for thinking about commons versus public domains. Boyle, for his part, has +ceaselessly pushed the "environmental" metaphor of speaking for the public +domain as environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s spoke for the environment +(see Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public +Domain" and "A Politics of Intellectual Property"). The term commons is useful +in this context precisely because it distinguishes the "public domain" as an +imagined object of pure public transaction and coordination, as opposed to a +"commons," which can consist of privately owned things/spaces that are managed +in such a fashion that they effectively function like a "public domain" is +imagined to (see Boyle, "The Public Domain"; Hess and Ostrom, Understanding +Knowledge as a Commons). }~ +={ commons +2 } + +In part III, I look in detail at two "commons" understood as modulations of the +component practices of Free Software. Rather than treating commons projects +simply as metaphorical or inspirational uses of Free Software, I treat them as +modulations, which allows me to remain directly connected to the changing +practices involved. The goal of part III is to understand how commons projects +like Connexions and Creative Commons breach the thresholds of these practices +and yet maintain something of the same orientation. What changes, for instance, +have made it possible to imagine new forms of free content, free culture, open +source music, or a science commons? What happens as new communities of people +adopt and modulate the five component practices? Do they also become recursive +publics, concerned with the maintenance and expansion of the infrastructures +that allow them to come into being in the first place? Are they concerned with +the implications of availability and modifiability that continue to unfold, +continue to be figured out, in the realms of education, music, film, science, +and writing? +={ Connexions project +1 ; + Creative Commons +1 ; + figuring out +1 ; + modifiability +1 +} + +The answers in part III make clear that, so far, these concerns are alive and +well in the modulations of Free Software: Creative Commons and Connexions each +struggle to come to terms with new ways of creating, sharing, and reusing +content in the contemporary legal environment, with the Internet as +infrastructure. Chapters 8 and 9 provide a detailed analysis of a technical and +legal experiment: a modulation that begins with source code, but quickly +requires modulations in licensing arrangements and forms of coordination. It is +here that Two Bits provides the most detailed story of figuring out set against +the background of the reorientation of knowledge and power. This story is, in +particular, one of reuse, of modifiability and the problems that emerge in the +attempt to build it into the everyday practices of pedagogical writing and +cultural production of myriad forms. Doing so leads the actors involved +directly to the question of the existence and ontology of norms: norms of +scholarly production, borrowing, reuse, citation, reputation, and ownership. +These last chapters open up questions about the stability of modern knowledge, +not as an archival or a legal problem, but as a social and normative one; they +raise questions about the invention and control of norms, and the forms of life +that may emerge from these ,{[pg 18]}, practices. Recursive publics come to +exist where it is clear that such invention and control need to be widely +shared, openly examined, and carefully monitored. +={ norms : + existence of +} + +!_ Three Ways of Looking at Two Bits + +Two Bits makes three kinds of scholarly contributions: empirical, +methodological, and theoretical. Because it is based largely on fieldwork +(which includes historical and archival work), these three contributions are +often mixed up with each other. Fieldwork, especially in cultural and social +anthropology in the last thirty years, has come to be understood less and less +as one particular tool in a methodological toolbox, and more and more as +distinctive mode of epistemological encounter.~{ Marcus and Fischer, +Anthropology as Cultural Critique; Marcus and Clifford, Writing Culture; +Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice; Marcus, +Ethnography through Thick and Thin; Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of +Reason and Anthropos Today. }~ The questions I began with emerged out of +science and technology studies, but they might end up making sense to a variety +of fields, ranging from legal studies to computer science. + +Empirically speaking, the actors in my stories are figuring something out, +something unfamiliar, troubling, imprecise, and occasionally shocking to +everyone involved at different times and to differing extents.~{ The language +of "figuring out" has its immediate source in the work of Kim Fortun, "Figuring +Out Ethnography." Fortun’s work refines two other sources, the work of Bruno +Latour in Science in Action and that of Hans-Jorg Rheinberger in Towards +History of Epistemic Things. Latour describes the difference between "science +made" and "science in the making" and how the careful analysis of new objects +can reveal how they come to be. Rheinberger extends this approach through +analysis of the detailed practices involved in figuring out a new object or a +new process—practices which participants cannot quite name or explain in +precise terms until after the fact. }~ There are two kinds of figuring-out +stories: the contemporary ones in which I have been an active participant +(those of Connexions and Creative Commons), and the historical ones conducted +through "archival" research and rereading of certain kinds of texts, +discussions, and analyses-at-the-time (those of UNIX, EMACS, Linux, Apache, and +Open Systems). Some are stories of technical figuring out, but most are stories +of figuring out a problem that appears to have emerged. Some of these stories +involve callow and earnest actors, some involve scheming and strategy, but in +all of them the figuring out is presented "in the making" and not as something +that can be conveniently narrated as obvious and uncontested with the benefit +of hindsight. Throughout this book, I tell stories that illustrate what geeks +are like in some respects, but, more important, that show them in the midst of +figuring things out—a practice that can happen both in discussion and in the +course of designing, planning, executing, writing, debugging, hacking, and +fixing. +={ Connexions project ; + Creative Commons ; + figuring out +1 +} + +There are also myriad ways in which geeks narrate their own actions to +themselves and others, as they figure things out. Indeed, ,{[pg 19]}, there is +no crisis of representing the other here: geeks are vocal, loud, persistent, +and loquacious. The superalterns can speak for themselves. However, such +representations should not necessarily be taken as evidence that geeks provide +adequate analytic or critical explanations of their own actions. Some of the +available writing provides excellent description, but distracting analysis. +Eric Raymond’s work is an example of such a combination.~{ Raymond, The +Cathedral and the Bazaar. }~ Over the course of my fieldwork, Raymond’s work +has always been present as an excellent guide to the practices and questions +that plague geeks—much like a classic "principal informant" in anthropology. +And yet his analyses, which many geeks subscribe to, are distracting. They are +fanciful, occasionally enjoyable and enlightening—but they are not about the +cultural significance of Free Software. As such I am less interested in +treating geeks as natives to be explained and more interested in arguing with +them: the people in Two Bits are a sine qua non of the ethnography, but they +are not the objects of its analysis.~{ The literature on "virtual communities," +"online communities," the culture of hackers and geeks, or the social study of +information technology offers important background information, although it is +not the subject of this book. A comprehensive review of work in anthropology +and related disciplines is Wilson and Peterson, "The Anthropology of Online +Communities." Other touchstones are Miller and Slater, The Internet; Carla +Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy; Hine, Virtual +Ethnography; Kling, Computerization and Controversy; Star, The Cultures of +Computing; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society; Boczkowski, Digitizing +the News. Most social-science work in information technology has dealt with +questions of inequality and the so-called digital divide, an excellent overview +being DiMaggio et al., "From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use." Beyond +works in anthropology and science studies, a number of works from various other +disciplines have recently taken up similar themes, especially Adrian MacKenzie, +Cutting Code; Galloway, Protocol; Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom; and Liu, +Laws of Cool. By contrast, if social-science studies of information technology +are set against a background of historical and ethnographic studies of +"figuring out" problems of specific information technologies, software, or +networks, then the literature is sparse. Examples of anthropology and science +studies of figuring out include Barry, Political Machines; Hayden, When Nature +Goes Public; and Fortun, Advocating Bhopal. Matt Ratto has also portrayed this +activity in Free Software in his dissertation, "The Pressure of Openness." }~ +={ ethnography +1 ; + geeks : + self-representation ; + Raymond, Eric Steven +1 ; + Cathedral and the Bazaar +} + +Because the stories I tell here are in fact recent by the standards of +historical scholarship, there is not much by way of comparison in terms of the +empirical material. I rely on a number of books and articles on the history of +the early Internet, especially Janet Abbate’s scholarship and the single +historical work on UNIX, Peter Salus’s A Quarter Century of Unix.~{ In addition +to Abbate and Salus, see Norberg and O’Neill, Transforming Computer Technology; +Naughton, A Brief History of the Future; Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late; +Waldrop, The Dream Machine; Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1. For a classic +autodocumentation of one aspect of the Internet, see Hauben and Hauben, +Netizens. }~ There are also a couple of excellent journalistic works, such as +Glyn Moody’s Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution (which, +like Two Bits, relies heavily on the novel accessibility of detailed +discussions carried out on public mailing lists). Similarly, the scholarship on +Free Software and its history is just starting to establish itself around a +coherent set of questions.~{ Kelty, "Culture’s Open Sources"; Coleman, "The +Social Construction of Freedom"; Ratto, "The Pressure of Openness"; Joseph +Feller et al., Perspectives ,{[pg 315]}, on Free and Open Source Software; see +also http://freesoftware.mit.edu/, organized by Karim Lakhani, which is a large +collection of work on Free Software projects. Early work in this area derived +both from the writings of practitioners such as Raymond and from business and +management scholars who noticed in Free Software a remarkable, surprising set +of seeming contradictions. The best of these works to date is Steven Weber, The +Success of Open Source. Weber’s conclusions are similar to those presented +here, and he has a kind of cryptoethnographic familiarity (that he does not +explicitly avow) with the actors and practices. Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of +Networks extends and generalizes some of Weber’s argument. }~ +={ Moody, Glyn ; + Salus, Peter +} + +Methodologically, Two Bits provides an example of how to study distributed +phenomena ethnographically. Free Software and the Internet are objects that do +not have a single geographic site at which they can be studied. Hence, this +work is multisited in the simple sense of having multiple sites at which these +objects were investigated: Boston, Bangalore, Berlin, Houston. It was conducted +among particular people, projects, and companies and at conferences and online +gatherings too numerous to list, but it has not been a study of a single Free +Software project distributed around the globe. In all of these places and +projects the geeks I worked with were randomly and loosely affiliated people +with diverse lives and histories. Some ,{[pg 20]}, identified as Free Software +hackers, but most did not. Some had never met each other in real life, and some +had. They represented multiple corporations and institutions, and came from +diverse nations, but they nonetheless shared a certain set of ideas and idioms +that made it possible for me to travel from Boston to Berlin to Bangalore and +pick up an ongoing conversation with different people, in very different +places, without missing a beat. +={ Berlin ; + distributed phenomena, ethnography of +6 +} + +The study of distributed phenomena does not necessarily imply the detailed, +local study of each instance of a phenomenon, nor does it necessitate visiting +every relevant geographical site—indeed, such a project is not only extremely +difficult, but confuses map and territory. As Max Weber put it, "It is not the +‘actual’ inter-connection of ‘things’ but the conceptual inter-connection of +problems that define the scope of the various sciences."~{ Max Weber, +"Objectivity in the Social Sciences and Social Policy," 68. }~ The decisions +about where to go, whom to study, and how to think about Free Software are +arbitrary in the precise sense that because the phenomena are so widely +distributed, it is possible to make any given node into a source of rich and +detailed knowledge about the distributed phenomena itself, not only about the +local site. Thus, for instance, the Connexions project would probably have +remained largely unknown to me had I not taken a job in Houston, but it +nevertheless possesses precise, identifiable connections to the other sites and +sets of people that I have studied, and is therefore recognizable as part of +this distributed phenomena, rather than some other. I was actively looking for +something like Connexions in order to ask questions about what was becoming of +Free Software and how it was transforming. Had there been no Connexions in my +back yard, another similar field site would have served instead. +={ Weber, Max } + +It is in this sense that the ethnographic object of this study is not geeks and +not any particular project or place or set of people, but Free Software and the +Internet. Even more precisely, the ethnographic object of this study is +"recursive publics"—except that this concept is also the work of the +ethnography, not its preliminary object. I could not have identified "recursive +publics" as the object of the ethnography at the outset, and this is nice proof +that ethnographic work is a particular kind of epistemological encounter, an +encounter that requires considerable conceptual work during and after the +material labor of fieldwork, and throughout the material labor of writing and +rewriting, in order to make sense of and reorient it into a question that will +have looked deliberate and ,{[pg 21]}, answerable in hindsight. Ethnography of +this sort requires a long-term commitment and an ability to see past the +obvious surface of rapid transformation to a more obscure and slower +temporality of cultural significance, yet still pose questions and refine +debates about the near future.~{ Despite what might sound like a "shoot first, +ask questions later" approach, the design of this project was in fact conducted +according to specific methodologies. The most salient is actor-network theory: +Latour, Science in Action; Law, "Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering"; +Callon, "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation"; Latour, Pandora’s Hope; +Latour, Re-assembling the Social; Callon, Laws of the Markets; Law and Hassard, +Actor Network Theory and After. Ironically, there have been no actor-network +studies of networks, which is to say, of particular information and +communication technologies such as the Internet. The confusion of the word +network (as an analytical and methodological term) with that of network (as a +particular configuration of wires, waves, software, and chips, or of people, +roads, and buses, or of databases, names, and diseases) means that it is +necessary to always distinguish this-network-here from any-network-whatsoever. +My approach shares much with the ontological questions raised in works such as +Law, Aircraft Stories; Mol, The Body Multiple; Cussins, "Ontological +Choreography"; Charis Thompson, Making Parents; and Dumit, Picturing +Personhood. }~ Historically speaking, the chapters of part II can be understood +as a contribution to a history of scientific infrastructure—or perhaps to an +understanding of large-scale, collective experimentation.~{ I understand a +concern with scientific infrastructure to begin with Steve Shapin and Simon +Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air Pump, but the genealogy is no doubt more +complex. It includes Shapin, The Social History of Truth; Biagioli, Galileo, +Courtier; Galison, How Experiments End and Image and Logic; Daston, Biographies +of Scientific Objects; Johns, The Nature of the Book. A whole range of works +explore the issue of scientific tools and infrastructure: Kohler, Lords of the +Fly; Rheinberger, Towards a History of Epistemic Things; Landecker, Culturing +Life; Keating and Cambrosio, Biomedical Platforms. Bruno Latour’s "What Rules +of Method for the New Socio-scientific Experiments" provides one example of +where science studies might go with these questions. Important texts on the +subject of technical infrastructures include Walsh and Bayma, "Computer +Networks and Scientific Work"; Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out; Edwards, +The ,{[pg 316]}, Closed World; Misa, Brey, and Feenberg, Modernity and +Technology; Star and Ruhleder, "Steps Towards an Ecology of Infrastructure." }~ +The Internet and Free Software are each an important practical transformation +that will have effects on the practice of science and a kind of complex +technical practice for which there are few existing models of study. +={ Actor Network Theory ; + Internet +1 +} + +A methodological note about the peculiarity of my subject is also in order. The +Attentive Reader will note that there are very few fragments of conventional +ethnographic material (i.e., interviews or notes) transcribed herein. Where +they do appear, they tend to be "publicly available"—which is to say, +accessible via the Internet—and are cited as such, with as much detail as +necessary to allow the reader to recover them. Conventional wisdom in both +anthropology and history has it that what makes a study interesting, in part, +is the work a researcher has put into gathering that which is not already +available, that is, primary sources as opposed to secondary sources. In some +cases I provide that primary access (specifically in chapters 2, 8, and 9), but +in many others it is now literally impossible: nearly everything is archived. +Discussions, fights, collaborations, talks, papers, software, articles, news +stories, history, old software, old software manuals, reminiscences, notes, and +drawings—it is all saved by someone, somewhere, and, more important, often made +instantly available by those who collect it. The range of conversations and +interactions that count as private (either in the sense of disappearing from +written memory or of being accessible only to the parties involved) has shrunk +demonstrably since about 1981. +={ ethnographic data : + availability of +5 +} + +Such obsessive archiving means that ethnographic research is stratified in +time. Questions that would otherwise have required "being there" are much +easier to research after the fact, and this is most evident in my +reconstruction from sources on USENET and mailing lists in chapters 1, 6, and +7. The overwhelming availability of quasi-archival materials is something I +refer to, in a play on the EMACS text editor, as "self-documenting history." +That is to say, one of the activities that geeks love to participate in, and +encourage, is the creation, analysis, and archiving of their own roles in the +,{[pg 22]}, development of the Internet. No matter how obscure or arcane, it +seems most geeks have a well-developed sense of possibility—their contribution +could turn out to have been transformative, important, originary. What geeks +may lack in social adroitness, they make up for in archival hubris. + +Finally, the theoretical contribution of Two Bits consists of a refinement of +debates about publics, public spheres, and social imaginaries that appear +troubled in the context of the Internet and Free Software. Terminology such as +virtual community, online community, cyberspace, network society, or +information society are generally not theoretical constructs, but ways of +designating a subgenre of disciplinary research having to do with electronic +networks. The need for a more precise analysis of the kinds of association that +take place on and through information technology is clear; the first step is to +make precise which information technologies and which specific practices make a +difference. +={ public sphere : + theories of +3 ; + social imaginary +2 ; + information society : + see also public sphere +} + +There is a relatively large and growing literature on the Internet as a public +sphere, but such literature is generally less concerned with refining the +concept through research and more concerned with pronouncing whether or not the +Internet fits Habermas’s definition of the bourgeois public sphere, a +definition primarily conceived to account for the eighteenth century in +Britain, not the twenty-first-century Internet.~{ Dreyfus, On the Internet; +Dean, "Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere." }~ The facts of technical and human +life, as they unfold through the Internet and around the practices of Free +Software, are not easy to cram into Habermas’s definition. The goal of Two Bits +is not to do so, but to offer conceptual clarity based in ethnographic +fieldwork. +={ Habermas, Jürgen +2 } + +The key texts for understanding the concept of recursive publics are the works +of Habermas, Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries, and Michael Warner’s +The Letters of the Republic and Publics and Counterpublics. Secondary texts +that refine these notions are John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems and +Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Here it is not the public sphere per se +that is the center of analysis, but the "ideas of modern moral and social +order" and the terminology of "modern social imaginaries."~{ In addition, see +Lippmann, The Phantom Public; Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere; Latour +and Weibel, Making Things Public. The debate about social imaginaries begins +alternately with Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities or with Cornelius +Castoriadis’s The Imaginary Institution of Society; see also Chatterjee, "A +Response to Taylor’s ‘Modes of Civil Society’"; Gaonkar, "Toward New +Imaginaries"; Charles Taylor, "Modes of Civil Society" and Sources of the Self. +}~ I find these concepts to be useful as starting points for a very specific +reason: to distinguish the meaning of moral order from the meaning of moral and +technical order that I explore with respect to geeks. I do not seek to test the +concept of social imaginary here, but to build something on top of it. ,{[pg +23]}, +={ Arendt, Hannah ; + Taylor, Charles +} + +If recursive public is a useful concept, it is because it helps elaborate the +general question of the "reorientation of knowledge and power." In particular +it is meant to bring into relief the ways in which the Internet and Free +Software are related to the political economy of modern society through the +creation not only of new knowledge, but of new infrastructures for circulating, +maintaining, and modifying it. Just as Warner’s book The Letters of the +Republic was concerned with the emergence of the discourse of republicanism and +the simultaneous development of an American republic of letters, or as +Habermas’s analysis was concerned with the relationship of the bourgeois public +sphere to the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, this book asks +a similar series of questions: how are the emergent practices of recursive +publics related to emerging relations of political and technical life in a +world that submits to the Internet and its forms of circulation? Is there still +a role for a republic of letters, much less a species of public that can +seriously claim independence and autonomy from other constituted forms of +power? Are Habermas’s pessimistic critiques of the bankruptcy of the public +sphere in the twentieth century equally applicable to the structures of the +twenty-first century? Or is it possible that recursive publics represent a +reemergence of strong, authentic publics in a world shot through with cynicism +and suspicion about mass media, verifiable knowledge, and enlightenment +rationality? [PAGE 24: BLANK] + +:B~ Part I the internet + +1~part1 [the internet] -# + +_1 The concept of the state, like most concepts which are introduced by "The," +is both too rigid and too tied up with controversies to be of ready use. It is +a concept which can be approached by a flank movement more easily than by a +frontal attack. The moment we utter the words "The State" a score of +intellectual ghosts rise to obscure our vision. Without our intention and +without our notice, the notion of "The State" draws us imperceptibly into a +consideration of the logical relationship of various ideas to one another, and +away from the facts of human activity. It is better, if possible, to start from +the latter and see if we are not led thereby into an idea of something which +will turn out to implicate the marks and signs which characterize political +behavior. +={ Dewey, John } + +- john dewey, /{The Public and Its Problems}/ + +1~ 1. Geeks and Recursive Publics +={ recursive public +12 ; + geeks +6 +} + +% Geek entry added here as seems implied as relevant to section + +Since about 1997, I have been living with geeks online and off. I have been +drawn from Boston to Bangalore to Berlin to Houston to Palo Alto, from +conferences and workshops to launch parties, pubs, and Internet Relay Chats +(IRCs). All along the way in my research questions of commitment and practice, +of ideology and imagination have arisen, even as the exact nature of the +connections between these people and ideas remained obscure to me: what binds +geeks together? As my fieldwork pulled me from a Boston start-up company that +worked with radiological images to media labs in Berlin to young +entrepreneurial elites in Bangalore, my logistical question eventually +developed into an analytical concept: geeks are bound together as a recursive +public. +={ Berlin +2 ; + Internet +5 +} + +How did I come to understand geeks as a public constituted around the technical +and moral ideas of order that allow them to associate with one another? Through +this question, one can start to understand the larger narrative of Two Bits: +that of Free Software ,{[pg 28]}, as an exemplary instance of a recursive +public and as a set of practices that allow such publics to expand and spread. +In this chapter I describe, ethnographically, the diverse, dispersed, and as an +exemplary instance of a recursive public and as a set of practices that allow +such publics to expand and spread. In this chapter I describe, +ethnographically, the diverse, dispersed, and novel forms of entanglements that +bind geeks together, and I construct the concept of a recursive public in order +to explain these entanglements. +={ ethnography +1 ; + moral and technical order +3 +} + +A recursive public is a public that is constituted by a shared concern for +maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a +public. Geeks find affinity with one another because they share an abiding +moral imagination of the technical infrastructure, the Internet, that has +allowed them to develop and maintain this affinity in the first place. I +elaborate the concept of recursive public (which is not a term used by geeks) +in relation to theories of ideology, publics, and public spheres and social +imaginaries. I illustrate the concept through ethnographic stories and examples +that highlight geeks’ imaginations of the technical and moral order of the +Internet. These stories include those of the fate of Amicas, a Boston-based +healthcare start-up, between 1997 and 2003, of my participation with new media +academics and activists in Berlin in 1999-2001, and of the activities of a +group of largely Bangalore-based information technology (IT) professionals on +and offline, especially concerning the events surrounding the peer-topeer file +sharing application Napster in 2000-2001. +={ affinity (of geeks) +3 ; + Napster +2 +} + +The phrase "moral and technical order" signals both technology—principally +software, hardware, networks, and protocols—and an imagination of the proper +order of collective political and commercial action, that is, how economy and +society should be ordered collectively. Recursive publics are just as concerned +with the moral order of markets as they are with that of commons; they are not +anticommercial or antigovernment. They exist independent of, and as a check on, +constituted forms of power, which include markets and corporations. Unlike +other concepts of a public or of a public sphere, "recursive public" captures +the fact that geeks’ principal mode of associating and acting is through the +medium of the Internet, and it is through this medium that a recursive public +can come into being in the first place. The Internet is not itself a public +sphere, a public, or a recursive public, but a complex, heterogeneous +infrastructure that constitutes and constrains geeks’ everyday practical +commitments, their ability to "become public" or to compose a common world. As +such, their participation qua recursive publics structures their identity as +creative and autonomous ,{[pg 29]}, individuals. The fact that the geeks +described here have been brought together by mailing lists and e-mail, +bulletin-board services and Web sites, books and modems, air travel and +academia, and cross-talking and cross-posting in ways that were not possible +before the Internet is at the core of their own reasoning about why they +associate with each other. They are the builders and imaginers of this space, +and the space is what allows them to build and imagine it. + +Why recursive? I call such publics recursive for two reasons: first, in order +to signal that this kind of public includes the activities of making, +maintaining, and modifying software and networks, as well as the more +conventional discourse that is thereby enabled; and second, in order to suggest +the recursive "depth" of the public, the series of technical and legal +layers—from applications to protocols to the physical infrastructures of waves +and wires—that are the subject of this making, maintaining, and modifying. The +first of these characteristics is evident in the fact that geeks use technology +as a kind of argument, for a specific kind of order: they argue about +technology, but they also argue through it. They express ideas, but they also +express infrastructures through which ideas can be expressed (and circulated) +in new ways. The second of these characteristics—regarding layers—is reflected +in the ability of geeks to immediately see connections between, for example, +Napster (a user application) and TCP/IP (a network protocol) and to draw out +implications for both of them. By connecting these layers, Napster comes to +represent the Internet in miniature. The question of where these layers stop +(hardware? laws and regulations? physical constants? etc.) circumscribes the +limits of the imagination of technical and moral order shared by geeks. +={ recursive public : + layers of ; + technology : + as argument +} + +Above all, "recursive public" is a concept—not a thing. It is intended to make +distinctions, allow comparison, highlight salient features, and relate two +diverse kinds of things (the Internet and Free Software) in a particular +historical context of changing relations of power and knowledge. The stories in +this chapter (and throughout the book) give some sense of how geeks interact +and what they do technically and legally, but the concept of a recursive public +provides a way of explaining why geeks (or people involved in Free Software or +its derivatives) associate with one another, as well as a way of testing +whether other similar cases of contemporary, technologically mediated affinity +are similarly structured. ,{[pg 30]}, + +!_ Recursion +={ recursion, definition of +5 } + + +_1 Recursion (or "recursive") is a mathematical concept, one which is a +standard feature of any education in computer programming. The definition from +the Oxford English Dictionary reads: "2. a. Involving or being a repeated +procedure such that the required result at each step except the last is given +in terms of the result(s) of the next step, until after a finite number of +steps a terminus is reached with an outright evaluation of the result." It +should be distinguished from simple iteration or repetition. Recursion is +always subject to a limit and is more like a process of repeated deferral, +until the last step in the process, at which point all the deferred steps are +calculated and the result given. + +_1 Recursion is powerful in programming because it allows for the definition of +procedures in terms of themselves—something that seems at first +counterintuitive. So, for example, + +group{ + + ; + otherwise return n times factorial of n-1; + (defun (factorial n) ; This is the name of the function and its input n. + (if (=n 1) ; This is the final limit, or recursive depth + 1 ; if n=1, then return 1 + (* n (factorial (- n 1))))) + ; + call the procedure from within itself, and + ; + calculate the next step of the result before + ; + giving an answer.1 + +}group +={ Abelson, Hal } + +_1 In Two Bits a recursive public is one whose existence (which consists solely +in address through discourse) is only possible through discursive and technical +reference to the means of creating this public. Recursiveness is always +contingent on a limit which determines the depth of a recursive procedure. So, +for instance, a Free Software project may depend on some other kind of software +or operating system, which may in turn depend on particular open protocols or a +particular process, which in turn depend on certain kinds of hardware that +implement them. The "depth" of recursion is determined by the openness +necessary for the project itself. +={ recursive public : + layers of +} + +_1 James Boyle has also noted the recursive nature, in particular, of Free +Software: "What’s more, and this is a truly fascinating twist, when the +production process does need more centralized coordination, some governance +that guides how the sticky modular bits are put together, it is at least +theoretically possible that we can come up with the control system in exactly +the same way. In this sense, distributed production is potentially recursive."2 +={ Boyle, James } + +_1 1. Abelson and Sussman, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer +Programs, 30. + +_1 2. Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public +Domain," 46. ,{[pg 31]}, + +2~ From the Facts of Human Activity + +Boston, May 2003. Starbucks. Sean and Adrian are on their way to pick me up for +dinner. I’ve already had too much coffee, so I sit at the window reading the +paper. Eventually Adrian calls to find out where I am, I tell him, and he +promises to show up in fifteen minutes. I get bored and go outside to wait, +watch the traffic go by. More or less right on time (only post-dotcom is Adrian +ever on time), Sean’s new blue VW Beetle rolls into view. Adrian jumps out of +the passenger seat and into the back, and I get in. Sean has been driving for a +little over a year. He seems confident, cautious, but meanders through the +streets of Cambridge. We are destined for Winchester, a township on the Charles +River, in order to go to an Indian restaurant that one of Sean’s friends has +recommended. When I ask how they are doing, they say, "Good, good." Adrian +offers, "Well, Sean’s better than he has been in two years." "Really?" I say, +impressed. +={ Doyle, Sean +6 ; + Gropper, Adrian +6 +} + +Sean says, "Well, happier than at least the last year. I, well, let me put it +this way: forgive me father for I have sinned, I still have unclean thoughts +about some of the upper management in the company, I occasionally think they +are not doing things in the best interest of the company, and I see them as +self-serving and sometimes wish them ill." In this rolling blue confessional +Sean describes some of the people who I am familiar with whom he now tries very +hard not to think about. I look at him and say, "Ten Hail Marys and ten Our +Fathers, and you will be absolved, my child." Turning to Adrian, I ask, "And +what about you?" Adrian continues the joke: "I, too, have sinned. I have +reached the point where I can see absolutely nothing good coming of this +company but that I can keep my investments in it long enough to pay for my +children’s college tuition." I say, "You, my son, I cannot help." Sean says, +"Well, funny thing about tainted money . . . there just taint enough of it." + +I am awestruck. When I met Sean and Adrian, in 1997, their start-up company, +Amicas, was full of spit, with five employees working out of Adrian’s living +room and big plans to revolutionize the medical-imaging world. They had +connived to get Massachusetts General Hospital to install their rudimentary +system and let it compete with the big corporate sloths that normally stalked +back offices: General Electric, Agfa, Siemens. It was these behemoths, +according to Sean and Adrian, that were bilking hospitals ,{[pg 32]}, and +healthcare providers with promises of cure-all technologies and horribly +designed "silos," "legacy systems," and other closed-system monsters of +corporate IT harkening back to the days of IBM mainframes. These beasts +obviously did not belong to the gleaming future of Internet-enabled +scalability. By June of 2000, Amicas had hired new "professional" management, +moved to Watertown, and grown to about a hundred employees. They had achieved +their goal of creating an alternative Picture Archiving and Communication +System (PACS) for use in hospital radiology departments and based on Internet +standards. +={ Amicas (corporation) +9 ; + standards : + Internet ; + proprietary systems : + closed +} + +At that point, in the spring of 2000, Sean could still cheerfully introduce me +to his new boss—the same man he would come to hate, inasmuch as Sean hates +anyone. But by 2002 he was frustrated by the extraordinary variety of +corner-cutting and, more particularly, by the complacency with which management +ignored his recommendations and released software that was almost certainly +going to fail later, if not sooner. Sean, who is sort of permanently callow +about things corporate, could find no other explanation than that the new +management was evil. + +But by 2003 the company had succeeded, having grown to more than 200 employees +and established steady revenue and a stable presence throughout the healthcare +world. Both Sean and Adrian were made rich—not wildly rich, but rich enough—by +its success. In the process, however, it also morphed into exactly what Sean +and Adrian had created it in order to fight: a slothlike corporate purveyor of +promises and broken software. Promises Adrian had made and software Sean had +built. The failure of Amicas to transform healthcare was a failure too complex +and technical for most of America to understand, but it rested atop the success +of Amicas in terms more readily comprehensible: a growing company making +profit. Adrian and Sean had started the company not to make money, but in order +to fix a broken healthcare system; yet the system stayed broken while they made +money. + +In the rolling confessional, Sean and Adrian did in fact see me, however +jokingly, as a kind of redeemer, a priest (albeit of an order with no flock) +whose judgment of the affairs past was essential to their narration of their +venture as a success, a failure, or as an unsatisfying and complicated mixture +of both. I thought about this strange moment of confession, of the combination +of recognition and denial, of Adrian’s new objectification of the company as an +,{[pg 33]}, investment opportunity, and of Sean’s continuing struggle to make +his life and his work harmonize in order to produce good in the world. Only the +promise of the next project, the next mission (and the ostensible reason for +our dinner meeting) could possibly have mitigated the emotional disaster that +their enterprise might otherwise be. Sean’s and Adrian’s endless, arcane fervor +for the promise of new technologies did not cease, even given the quotidian +calamities these technologies leave in their wake. Their faith was strong, and +continuously tested. + +Adrian’s and Sean’s passion was not for money—though money was a powerful +drug—it was for the Internet: for the ways in which the Internet could replace +the existing infrastructure of hospitals and healthcare providers, deliver on +old promises of telemedicine and teleradiology, and, above all, level a playing +field systematically distorted and angled by corporate and government +institutions that sought secrecy and private control, and stymied progress. In +healthcare, as Adrian repeatedly explained to me, this skewed playing field was +not only unfair but malicious and irresponsible. It was costing lives. It +slowed the creation and deployment of technologies and solutions that could +lower costs and thus provide more healthcare for more people. The Internet was +not part of the problem; it was part of the solution to the problems that ailed +1990s healthcare. + +At the end of our car trip, at the Indian restaurant in Winchester, I learned +about their next scheme, a project called MedCommons, which would build on the +ideals of Free Software and give individuals a way to securely control and +manage their own healthcare data. The rhetoric of commons and the promise of +the Internet as an infrastructure dominated our conversation, but the realities +of funding and the question of whether MedCommons could be pursued without +starting another company remained unsettled. I tried to imagine what form a +future confession might take. +={ commons ; + MedCommons +2 +} + +2~ Geeks and Their Internets +={ geeks +8 ; + Internet : + geeks and +8 +} + +Sean and Adrian are geeks. They are entrepreneurs and idealists in different +ways, a sometimes paradoxical combination. They are certainly ,{[pg 34]}, +obsessed with technology, but especially with the Internet, and they clearly +distinguish themselves from others who are obsessed with technology of just any +sort. They aren’t quite representative—they do not stand in for all geeks—but +the way they think about the Internet and its possibilities might be. Among the +rich story of their successes and failures, one might glimpse the outlines of a +question: where do their sympathies lie? Who are they with? Who do they +recognize as being like them? What might draw them together with other geeks if +not a corporation, a nation, a language, or a cause? What binds these two geeks +to any others? +={ affinity (of geeks) ; + entrepreneurialism +4 +} + +Sean worked for the Federal Reserve in the 1980s, where he was introduced to +UNIX, C programming, EMACS, Usenet, Free Software, and the Free Software +Foundation. But he was not a Free Software hacker; indeed, he resisted my +attempts to call him a hacker at all. Nevertheless, he started a series of +projects and companies with Adrian that drew on the repertoire of practices and +ideas familiar from Free Software, including their MedCommons project, which +was based more or less explicitly in the ideals of Free Software. Adrian has a +degree in medicine and in engineering, and is a serial entrepreneur, with +Amicas being his biggest success—and throughout the last ten years has attended +all manner of conferences and meetings devoted to Free Software, Open Source, +open standards, and so on, almost always as the lone representative from +healthcare. Both graduated from the MIT (Sean in economics, Adrian in +engineering), one of the more heated cauldrons of the Internet and the storied +home of hackerdom, but neither were MIT hackers, nor even computer-science +majors. +={ Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +% open standards + +Their goals in creating a start-up rested on their understanding of the +Internet as an infrastructure: as a standardized infrastructure with certain +extremely powerful properties, not the least of which was its flexibility. Sean +and Adrian talked endlessly about open systems, open standards, and the need +for the Internet to remain open and standardized. Adrian spoke in general terms +about how it would revolutionize healthcare; Sean spoke in specific terms about +how it structured the way Amicas’s software was being designed and written. +Both participated in standards committees and in the online and offline +discussions that are tantamount to policymaking in the Internet world. The +company they created was a "virtual" company, that is, built on tools that +depended on the Internet and allowed employees to manage and work from a +variety of locations, though not without frustration, of course: Sean waited +years for broadband access in his home, and the hospitals they served ,{[pg +35]}, hemmed themselves in with virtual private networks, intranets, and +security firewalls that betrayed the promises of openness that Sean and Adrian +heralded. +={ infrastructure } + +The Internet was not the object of their work and lives, but it did represent +in detail a kind of moral or social order embodied in a technical system and +available to everyone to use as a platform whereby they might compete to +improve and innovate in any realm. To be sure, although not all Internet +entrepreneurs of the 1990s saw the Internet in the same way, Sean and Adrian +were hardly alone in their vision. Something about the particular way in which +they understood the Internet as representing a moral order—simultaneously a +network, a market, a public, and a technology—was shared by a large group of +people, those who I now refer to simply as geeks. + +The term geek is meant to be inclusive and to index the problematic of a +recursive public. Other terms may be equally useful, but perhaps semantically +overdetermined, most notably hacker, which regardless of its definitional +range, tends to connote someone subversive and/or criminal and to exclude +geek-sympathetic entrepreneurs and lawyers and activists.~{ For the canonical +story, see Levy, Hackers. Hack referred to (and still does) a clever use of +technology, usually unintended by the maker, to achieve some task in an elegant +manner. The term has been successfully redefined by the mass media to refer to +computer users who break into and commit criminal acts on corporate or +government or personal computers connected to a network. Many self-identified +hackers insist that the criminal element be referred to as crackers (see, in +particular, the entries on "Hackers," "Geeks" and "Crackers" in The Jargon +File, http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/, also published as Raymond, The New +Hackers’ Dictionary). On the subject of definitions and the cultural and +ethical characteristics of hackers, see Coleman, "The Social Construction of +Freedom," chap. 2. }~ Geek is meant to signal, like the public in "recursive +public," that geeks stand outside power, at least in some aspects, and that +they are not capitalists or technocrats, even if they start businesses or work +in government or industry.~{ One example of the usage of geek is in Star, The +Cultures of Computing. Various denunciations (e.g., Barbrook and Cameron, "The +California Ideology"; Borsook, Technolibertarianism) tend to focus on +journalistic accounts of an ideology that has little to do with what hackers, +geeks, and entrepreneurs actually make. A more relevant categorical distinction +than that between hackers and geeks is that between geeks and technocrats; in +the case of technocrats, the "anthropology of technocracy" is proposed as the +study of the limits of technical rationality, in particular the forms through +which "planning" creates "gaps in the form that serve as ‘targets of +intervention’" (Riles, "Real Time," 393). Riles’s "technocrats" are certainly +not the "geeks" I portray here (or at least, if they are, it is only in their +frustrating day jobs). Geeks do have libertarian, specifically Hayekian or +Feyerabendian leanings, but are more likely to see technical failures not as +failures of planning, but as bugs, inefficiencies, or occasionally as the +products of human hubris or stupidity that is born of a faith in planning. }~ +Geek is meant to signal a mode of thinking and working, not an identity; it is +a mode or quality that allows people to find each other, for reasons other than +the fact that they share an office, a degree, a language, or a nation. +={ geeks : + hackers vs. +3 ; + hackers +3 +} + +Until the mid-1990s, hacker, geek, and computer nerd designated a very specific +type: programmers and lurkers on relatively underground networks, usually +college students, computer scientists, and "amateurs" or "hobbyists." A classic +mock self-diagnostic called the Geek Code, by Robert Hayden, accurately and +humorously detailed the various ways in which one could be a geek in 1996—UNIX/ +Linux skills, love/hate of Star Trek, particular eating and clothing habits—but +as Hayden himself points out, the geeks of the early 1990s exist no longer. The +elite subcultural, relatively homogenous group it once was has been overrun: +"The Internet of 1996 was still a wild untamed virgin paradise of geeks and +eggheads unpopulated by script kiddies, and the denizens of AOL. When things +changed, I seriously lost my way. I mean, all the ‘geek’ that was the Internet +,{[pg 36]}, was gone and replaced by Xfiles buzzwords and politicians passing +laws about a technology they refused to comprehend."~{ See The Geek Code, +http://www.geekcode.com/. }~ +={ Hayden, Robert +2 } + +For the purists like Hayden, geeks were there first, and they understood +something, lived in a way, that simply cannot be comprehended by "script +kiddies" (i.e., teenagers who perform the hacking equivalent of spray painting +or cow tipping), crackers, or AOL users, all of whom are despised by +Hayden-style geeks as unskilled users who parade around the Internet as if they +own it. While certainly elitist, Hayden captures the distinction between those +who are legitimately allowed to call themselves geeks (or hackers) and those +who aren’t, a distinction that is often formulated recursively, of course: "You +are a hacker when another hacker calls you a hacker." + +However, since the explosive growth of the Internet, geek has become more +common a designation, and my use of the term thus suggests a role that is +larger than programmer/hacker, but not as large as "all Internet users." +Despite Hayden’s frustration, geeks are still bound together as an elite and +can be easily distinguished from "AOL users." Some of the people I discuss +would not call themselves geeks, and some would. Not all are engineers or +programmers: I have met businessmen, lawyers, activists, bloggers, +gastroenterologists, anthropologists, lesbians, schizophrenics, scientists, +poets, people suffering from malaria, sea captains, drug dealers, and people +who keep lemurs, many of whom refer to themselves as geeks, some of the time.~{ +Geeks are also identified often by the playfulness and agility with which they +manipulate these labels and characterizations. See Michael M. J. Fischer, +"Worlding Cyberspace" for an example. }~ There are also lawyers, politicians, +sociologists, and economists who may not refer to themselves as geeks, but who +care about the Internet just as other geeks do. By contrast "users" of the +Internet, even those who use it eighteen out of twenty-four hours in a day to +ship goods and play games, are not necessarily geeks by this characterization. + +2~ Operating Systems and Social Systems + +Berlin, November 1999. I am in a very hip club in Mitte called WMF. It’s about +eight o’clock—five hours too early for me to be a hipster, but the context is +extremely cool. WMF is in a hard-to-find, abandoned building in the former +East; it is partially converted, filled with a mixture of new and old +furnishings, video projectors, speakers, makeshift bars, and dance-floor +lighting. A crowd of around fifty people lingers amid smoke and Beck’s beer +bottles, ,{[pg 37]}, sitting on stools and chairs and sofas and the floor. We +are listening to an academic read a paper about Claude Shannon, the MIT +engineer credited with the creation of information theory. The author is +smoking and reading in German while the audience politely listens. He speaks +for about seventy minutes. There are questions and some perfunctory discussion. +As the crowd breaks up, I find myself, in halting German that quickly converts +to English, having a series of animated conversations about the GNU General +Public License, the Debian Linux Distribution, open standards in net radio, and +a variety of things for which Claude Shannon is the perfect ghostly +technopaterfamilias, even if his seventy-minute invocation has clashed heavily +with the surroundings. +={ Berlin +2 ; + Shannon, Claude +} + +Despite my lame German, I still manage to jump deeply into issues that seem +extremely familiar: Internet standards and open systems and licensing issues +and namespaces and patent law and so on. These are not businesspeople, this is +not a start-up company. As I would eventually learn, there was even a certain +disdain for die Krawattenfaktor, the suit-and-tie factor, at these occasional, +hybrid events hosted by Mikro e.V., a nonprofit collective of journalists, +academics, activists, artists, and others interested in new media, the +Internet, and related issues. Mikro’s constituency included people from +Germany, Holland, Austria, and points eastward. They took some pride in +describing Berlin as "the farthest East the West gets" and arranged for a group +photo in which, facing West, they stood behind the statue of Marx and Lenin, +who face East and look eternally at the iconic East German radio tower +(Funkturm) in Alexanderplatz. Mikro’s members are resolutely activist and see +the issues around the Internet-as-infrastructure not in terms of its potential +for business opportunities, but in urgently political and unrepentantly +aesthetic terms—terms that are nonetheless similar to those of Sean and Adrian, +from whom I learned the language that allows me to mingle with the Mikro crowd +at WMF. I am now a geek. +={ Mikro e.V. +1 ; + Open Systems ; + standards : + Internet +} + +Before long, I am talking with Volker Grassmuck, founding member of Mikro and +organizer of the successful "Wizards of OS" conference, held earlier in the +year, which had the very intriguing subtitle "Operating Systems and Social +Systems." Grassmuck is inviting me to participate in a planning session for the +next WOS, held at the Chaos Computer Congress, a hacker gathering that occurs +each year in December in Berlin. In the following months I will meet a huge +number of people who seem, uncharacteristically for artists ,{[pg 38]}, and +activists, strangely obsessed with configuring their Linux distributions or +hacking the http protocol or attending German Parliament hearings on copyright +reform. The political lives of these folks have indeed mixed up operating +systems and social systems in ways that are more than metaphorical. +={ Grassmuck, Volker } + +2~ The Idea of Order at the Keyboard + +If intuition can lead one from geek to geek, from start-up to nightclub, and +across countries, languages, and professional orientations, it can only be due +to a shared set of ideas of how things fit together in the world. These ideas +might be "cultural" in the traditional sense of finding expression among a +community of people who share backgrounds, homes, nations, languages, idioms, +ethnos, norms, or other designators of belonging and co-presence. But because +the Internet—like colonialism, satellite broadcasting, and air travel, among +other things—crosses all these lines with abandon that the shared idea of order +is better understood as part of a public, or public sphere, a vast republic of +letters and media and ideas circulating in and through our thoughts and papers +and letters and conversations, at a planetary scope and scale. +={ culture ; + public +15 ; + public sphere : + theories of +15 ; + social imaginary +15 ; + Internet : + idea of order and +1 +} + +% index could have been more precise, matches book + +"Public sphere" is an odd kind of thing, however. It is at once a +concept—intended to make sense of a space that is not the here and now, but one +made up of writings, ideas, and discussions—and a set of ideas that people have +about themselves and their own participation in such a space. I must be able to +imagine myself speaking and being spoken to in such a space and to imagine a +great number of other people also doing so according to unwritten rules we +share. I don’t need a complete theory, and I don’t need to call it a public +sphere, but I must somehow share an idea of order with all those other people +who also imagine themselves participating in and subjecting themselves to that +order. In fact, if the public sphere exists as more than just a theory, then it +has no other basis than just such a shared imagination of order, an imagination +which provides a guide against which to make judgments and a map for changing +or achieving that order. Without such a shared imagination, a public sphere is +otherwise nothing more than a cacophony of voices and information, nothing more +than a stream of data, structured and formatted by and for machines, whether +paper or electronic. ,{[pg 39]}, + +Charles Taylor, building on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Michael Warner, +suggests that the public sphere (both idea and thing) that emerged in the +eighteenth century was created through practices of communication and +association that reflected a moral order in which the public stands outside +power and guides or checks its operation through shared discourse and +enlightened discussion. Contrary to the experience of bodies coming together +into a common space (Taylor calls them "topical spaces," such as conversation, +ritual, assembly), the crucial component is that the public sphere "transcends +such topical spaces. We might say that it knits a plurality of spaces into one +larger space of non-assembly. The same public discussion is deemed to pass +through our debate today, and someone else’s earnest conversation tomorrow, and +the newspaper interview Thursday and so on. . . . The public sphere that +emerges in the eighteenth century is a meta-topical common space."~{ Taylor, +Modern Social Imaginaries, 86. }~ +={ Habermas, Jürgen ; + Taylor, Charles +3 ; + Warner, Michael +} + +Because of this, Taylor refers to his version of a public as a "social +imaginary," a way of capturing a phenomena that wavers between having concrete +existence "out there" and imagined rational existence "in here." There are a +handful of other such imagined spaces—the economy, the self-governing people, +civil society—and in Taylor’s philosophical history they are related to each +through the "ideas of moral and social order" that have developed in the West +and around the world.~{ On the subject of imagined communities and the role of +information technologies in imagined networks, see Green, Harvey, and Knox, +"Scales of Place and Networks"; and Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire. }~ +={ social imaginary : + ideology vs. +3 +} + +Taylor’s social imaginary is intended to do something specific: to resist the +"spectre of idealism," the distinction between ideas and practices, between +"ideologies" and the so-called material world as "rival causal agents." Taylor +suggests, "Because human practices are the kind of thing that makes sense, +certain ideas are internal to them; one cannot distinguish the two in order to +ask the question Which causes which?"~{ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 32. +}~ Even if materialist explanations of cause are satisfying, as they often are, +Taylor suggests that they are so "at the cost of being implausible as a +universal principle," and he offers instead an analysis of the rise of the +modern imaginaries of moral order.~{ Ibid., 33-48. Taylor’s history of the +transition from feudal nobility to civil society to the rise of republican +democracies (however incomplete) is comparable to Foucault’s history of the +birth of biopolitics, in La naissance de la biopolitique, as an attempt to +historicize governance with respect to its theories and systems, as well as +within the material forms it takes. }~ +={ ideology +6 } + +The concept of recursive public, like that of Taylor’s public sphere, is +understood here as a kind of social imaginary. The primary reason is to bypass +the dichotomy between ideas and material practice. Because the creation of +software, networks, and legal documents are precisely the kinds of activities +that trouble this distinction—they are at once ideas and things that have +material effects in the ,{[pg 40]}, world, both expressive and performative—it +is extremely difficult to identify the properly material materiality (source +code? computer chips? semiconductor manufacturing plants?). This is the first +of the reasons why a recursive public is to be distinguished from the classic +formulae of the public sphere, that is, that it requires a kind of imagination +that includes the writing and publishing and speaking and arguing we are +familiar with, as well as the making of new kinds of software infrastructures +for the circulation, archiving, movement, and modifiability of our +enunciations. + +The concept of a social imaginary also avoids the conundrums created by the +concept of "ideology" and its distinction from material practice. Ideology in +its technical usage has been slowly and surely overwhelmed by its pejorative +meaning: "The ideological is never one’s own position; it is always the stance +of someone else, always their ideology."~{ Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and +Utopia, 2. }~ If one were to attempt an explanation of any particular ideology +in nonpejorative terms, there is seemingly nothing that might rescue the +explanation from itself becoming ideological. + +The problem is an old one. Clifford Geertz noted it in "Ideology as a Cultural +System," as did Karl Mannheim before him in Ideology and Utopia: it is the +difficulty of employing a non-evaluative concept of ideology.~{ Geertz, +"Ideology as a Cultural System"; Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. Both, of +course, also signal the origin of the scientific use of the term proximately +with Karl Marx’s "German Ideology" and more distantly in the Enlightenment +writings of Destutt de Tracy. }~ Of all the versions of struggle over the +concept of a scientific or objective sociology, it is the claim of exploring +ideology objectively that most rankles. As Geertz put it, "Men do not care to +have beliefs to which they attach great moral significance examined +dispassionately, no matter for how pure a purpose; and if they are themselves +highly ideologized, they may find it simply impossible to believe that a +disinterested approach to critical matters of social and political conviction +can be other than a scholastic sham."~{ Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural +System," 195. }~ +={ Geertz, Clifford +3 ; + Mannheim, Karl +1 +} + +Mannheim offered one response: a version of epistemological relativism in which +the analysis of ideology included the ideological position of the analyst. +Geertz offered another: a science of "symbolic action" based in Kenneth Burke’s +work and drawing on a host of philosophers and literary critics.~{ Ibid., +208-13. }~ Neither the concept of ideology, nor the methods of cultural +anthropology have been the same since. "Ideology" has become one of the most +widely deployed (some might say, most diffuse) tools of critique, where +critique is understood as the analysis of cultural patterns given in language +and symbolic structures, for the purposes of bringing ,{[pg 41]}, to light +systems of hegemony, domination, authority, resistance, and/or +misrecognition.~{ The depth and the extent of this issue is obviously huge. +Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia is an excellent analysis to the +problem of ideology prior to 1975. Terry Eagleton’s books The Ideology of the +Aesthetic and Ideology: An Introduction are Marxist explorations that include +discussions of hegemony and resistance in the context of artistic and literary +theory in the 1980s. Slavoj Žižek creates a Lacanian-inspired algebraic system +of analysis that combines Marxism and psychoanalysis in novel ways (see Žižek, +Mapping Ideology). There is even an attempt to replace the concept of ideology +with a metaphor of "software" and "memes" (see Balkin, Cultural Software). The +core of the issue of ideology as a practice (and the vicissitudes of +materialism that trouble it) are also at the heart of works by Pierre Bourdieu +and his followers (on the relationship of ideology and hegemony, see Laclau and +Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy). In anthropology, see Comaroff and +Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. }~ However, the practices +of critique are just as (if not more) likely to be turned on critical scholars +themselves, to show how the processes of analysis, hidden assumptions, latent +functions of the university, or other unrecognized features the material, +non-ideological real world cause the analyst to fall into an ideological trap. + +The concept of ideology takes a turn toward "social imaginary" in Paul +Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, where he proposes ideological and +utopian thought as two components of "social and cultural imagination." +Ricoeur’s overview divides approaches to the concept of ideology into three +basic types—the distorting, the integrating, and the legitimating—according to +how actors deal with reality through (symbolic) imagination. Does the +imagination distort reality, integrate it, or legitimate it vis-à-vis the +state? Ricoeur defends the second, Geertzian flavor: ideologies integrate the +symbolic structure of the world into a meaningful whole, and "only because the +structure of social life is already symbolic can it be distorted."~{ Ricoeur, +Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 10. }~ +={ social imaginary : + ideology vs. +6 ; + Ricoeur, Paul +1 +} + +For Ricoeur, the very substance of life begins in the interpretation of +reality, and therefore ideologies (as well as utopias—and perhaps conspiracies) +could well be treated as systems that integrate those interpretations into the +meaningful wholes of political life. Ricoeur’s analysis of the integration of +reality though social imagination, however, does not explicitly address how +imagination functions: what exactly is the nature of this symbolic action or +interpretation, or imagination? Can one know it from the outside, and does it +resist the distinction between ideology and material practice? Both Ricoeur and +Geertz harbor hope that ideology can be made scientific, that the integration +of reality through symbolic action requires only the development of concepts +adequate to the job. + +Re-enter Charles Taylor. In Modern Social Imaginaries the concept of social +imaginary is distinctive in that it attempts to capture the specific +integrative imaginations of modern moral and social order. Taylor stresses that +they are imaginations—not necessarily theories—of modern moral and social +order: "By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the +intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality +in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways in ,{[pg 42]}, which +people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how +things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally +met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these +expectations."~{ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. }~ Social imaginaries +develop historically and result in both new institutions and new +subjectivities; the concepts of public, market, and civil society (among +others) are located in the imaginative faculties of actors who recognize the +shared, common existence of these ideas, even if they differ on the details, +and the practices of those actors reflect a commitment to working out these +shared concepts. +={ Taylor, Charles +3 } + +Social imaginaries are an extension of "background" in the philosophical sense: +"a wider grasp of our whole predicament."~{ Ibid., 25. }~ The example Taylor +uses is that of marching in a demonstration: the action is in our imaginative +repertory and has a meaning that cannot be reduced to the local context: "We +know how to assemble, pick up banners and march. . . . [W]e understand the +ritual. . . . [T]he immediate sense of what we are doing, getting the message +to our government and our fellow citizens that the cuts must stop, say, makes +sense in a wider context, in which we see ourselves standing in a continuing +relation with others, in which it is appropriate to address them in this +manner."~{ Ibid., 26-27. }~ But we also stand "internationally" and "in +history" against a background of stories, images, legends, symbols, and +theories. "The background that makes sense of any given act is wide and deep. +It doesn’t include everything in our world, but the relevant sense-giving +features can’t be circumscribed. . . . [It] draws on our whole world, that is, +our sense of our whole predicament in time and space, among others and in +history."~{ Ibid., 28. }~ + +The social imaginary is not simply the norms that structure our actions; it is +also a sense of what makes norms achievable or "realizable," as Taylor says. +This is the idea of a "moral order," one that we expect to exist, and if it +doesn’t, one that provides a plan for achieving it. For Taylor, there is such a +thing as a "modern idea of order," which includes, among other things, ideas of +what it means to be an individual, ideas of how individual passions and desires +are related to collective association, and, most important, ideas about living +in time together (he stresses a radically secular conception of time—secular in +a sense that means more than simply "outside religion"). He by no means insists +that this is the only such definition of modernity (the door is wide open to +understanding alternative modernities), but that the modern idea of moral order +is ,{[pg 43]}, one that dominates and structures a very wide array of +institutions and individuals around the world. + +The "modern idea of moral order" is a good place to return to the question of +geeks and their recursive publics. Are the ideas of order shared by geeks +different from those Taylor outlines? Do geeks like Sean and Adrian, or +activists in Berlin, possess a distinctive social imaginary? Or do they +(despite their planetary dispersal) participate in this common modern idea of +moral order? Do the stories and narratives, the tools and technologies, the +theories and imaginations they follow and build on have something distinctive +about them? Sean’s and Adrian’s commitment to transforming healthcare seems to +be, for instance, motivated by a notion of moral order in which the means of +allocation of healthcare might become more just, but it is also shot through +with technical ideas about the role of standards, the Internet, and the +problems with current technical solutions; so while they may seem to be simply +advocating for better healthcare, they do so through a technical language and +practice that are probably quite alien to policymakers, upper management, and +healthcare advocacy groups that might otherwise be in complete sympathy. +={ Berlin ; + Doyle, Sean ; + Gropper, Adrian ; + moral and technical order +1 +} + +The affinity of geeks for each other is processed through and by ideas of order +that are both moral and technical—ideas of order that do indeed mix up +"operating systems and social systems." These systems include the technical +means (the infrastructure) through which geeks meet, assemble, collaborate, and +plan, as well as how they talk and think about those activities. The +infrastructure—the Internet—allows for a remarkably wide and diverse array of +people to encounter and engage with each other. That is to say, the idea of +order shared by geeks is shared because they are geeks, because they "get it," +because the Internet’s structure and software have taken a particular form +through which geeks come to understand the moral order that gives the fabric of +their political lives warp and weft. +={ affinity (of geeks) } + +2~ Internet Silk Road +={ Bangalore +7 ; + Internet : + India and +7 +} + +Bangalore, March 2000. I am at another bar, this time on one of Bangalore’s +trendiest streets. The bar is called Purple Haze, and I have been taken there, +the day after my arrival, by Udhay Shankar ,{[pg 44]}, N. Inside it is dark and +smoky, purple, filled with men between eighteen and thirty, and decorated with +posters of Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Jim Morrison (Udhay: "I hate that +band"), Led Zeppelin, and a somewhat out of place Frank Zappa (Udhay: "One of +my political and musical heroes"). All of the men, it appears, are singing +along with the music, which is almost without exception heavy metal. +={ Shakar, Udhay +6 ; + music +1 +} + +I engage in some stilted conversation with Udhay and his cousin Kirti about the +difference between Karnatic music and rock-androll, which seems to boil down to +the following: Karnatic music decreases metabolism and heart rate, leading to a +relaxed state of mind; rock music does the opposite. Given my aim of focusing +on the Internet and questions of openness, I have already decided not to pay +attention to this talk of music. In retrospect, I understand this to have been +a grave methodological error: I underestimated the extent to which the subject +of music has been one of the primary routes into precisely the questions about +the "reorientation of knowledge and power" I was interested in. Over the course +of the evening and the following days, Udhay introduced me, as promised, to a +range of people he either knew or worked with in some capacity. Almost all of +the people I met appeared to sincerely love heavy-metal music. + +I met Udhay Shankar N. in 1999 through a newsletter, distributed via e-mail, +called Tasty Bits from the Technology Front. It was one of a handful of sources +I watched closely while in Berlin, looking for such connections to geek +culture. The newsletter described a start-up company in Bangalore, one that was +devoted to creating a gateway between the Internet and mobile phones, and which +was, according to the newsletter, an entirely Indian operation, though +presumably with U.S. venture funds. I wanted to find a company to compare to +Amicas: a start-up, run by geeks, with a similar approach to the Internet, but +halfway around the world and in a "culture" that might be presumed to occupy a +very different kind of moral order. Udhay invited me to visit and promised to +introduce me to everyone he knew. He described himself as a "random networker"; +he was not really a programmer or a designer or a Free Software geek, despite +his extensive knowledge of software, devices, operating systems, and so on, +including Free and Open Source Software. Neither was he a businessman, but +rather described himself as the guy who "translates between the suits and the +techs." ,{[pg 45]}, +={ Berlin ; + Amicas (corporation) +2 ; + culture +} + +Udhay "collects interesting people," and it was primarily through his zest for +collecting that I met all the people I did. I met cosmopolitan activists and +elite lawyers and venture capitalists and engineers and cousins and brothers +and sisters of engineers. I met advertising executives and airline flight +attendants and consultants in Bombay. I met journalists and +gastroenterologists, computer-science professors and musicians, and one mother +of a robot scientist in Bangalore. Among them were Muslims, Hindus, Jains, +Jews, Parsis, and Christians, but most of them considered themselves more +secular and scientific than religious. Many were self-educated, or like their +U.S. counterparts, had dropped out of university at some point, but continued +to teach themselves about computers and networks. Some were graduates or +employees of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, an institution that +was among the most important for Indian geeks (as Stanford University is to +Silicon Valley, many would say). Among the geeks to whom Udhay introduced me, +there were only two commonalities: the geeks were, for the most part, male, and +they all loved heavy-metal music.~{ The question of gender plagues the topic of +computer culture. The gendering of hackers and geeks and the more general +exclusion of women in computing have been widely observed by academics. I can +do no more here than direct readers to the increasingly large and sophisticated +literature on the topic. See especially Light, "When Computers Were Women"; +Turkle, The Second Self and Life on the Screen. With respect to Free Software, +see Nafus, Krieger, Leach, "Patches Don’t Have Gender." More generally, see +Kirkup et al., The Gendered Cyborg; Downey, The Machine in Me; Faulkner, +"Dualisms, Hierarchies and Gender in Engineering"; Grint and Gill, The +Gender-Technology Relation; Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature; Herring, "Gender +and Democracy in Computer-Mediated Communication"; Kendall, "‘Oh No! I’m a +NERD!’"; Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse; Green and Adam, Virtual +Gender; P. Hopkins, Sex/Machine; Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology and +"Reflections on Gender and Technology Studies"; and Fiona Wilson, "Can’t +Compute, Won’t Compute." Also see the novels and stories of Ellen Ullman, +including Close to the Machine and The Bug: A Novel. }~ +={ Gender ; + Religion +1 +} + +While I was in Bangalore, I was invited to join a mailing list run by Udhay +called Silk-list, an irregular, unmoderated list devoted to "intelligent +conversation." The list has no particular focus: long, meandering conversations +about Indian politics, religion, economics, and history erupt regularly; topics +range from food to science fiction to movie reviews to discussions on Kashmir, +Harry Potter, the singularity, or nanotechnology. Udhay started Silk-list in +1997 with Bharath Chari and Ram Sundaram, and the recipients have included +hundreds of people around the world, some very well-known ones, programmers, +lawyers, a Bombay advertising executive, science-fiction authors, +entrepreneurs, one member of the start-up Amicas, at least two transhumanists, +one (diagnosed) schizophrenic, and myself. Active participants usually numbered +about ten to fifteen, while many more lurked in the background. +={ Chari, Bharath ; + Silk-list (mailing list) +5 ; + Sundaram, Ram +} + +% silk index marking not identical to book page numbering + +Silk-list is an excellent index of the relationship between the network of +people in Bangalore and their connection to a worldwide community on the +Internet—a fascinating story of the power of heterogeneously connected networks +and media. Udhay explained that in the early 1990s he first participated in and +then taught himself to configure and run a modem-based networking system known +as a Bulletin Board Service (BBS) in Bangalore. In 1994 he heard about a book +by Howard Rheingold called The Virtual ,{[pg 46]}, Community, which was his +first introduction to the Internet. A couple of years later when he finally had +access to the Internet, he immediately e-mailed John Perry Barlow, whose work +he knew from Wired magazine, to ask for Rheingold’s e-mail address in order to +connect with him. Rheingold and Barlow exist, in some ways, at the center of a +certain kind of geek world: Rheingold’s books are widely read popular accounts +of the social and community aspects of new technologies that have often had +considerable impact internationally; Barlow helped found the Electronic +Frontier Foundation and is responsible for popularizing the phrase "information +wants to be free."~{ Originally coined by Steward Brand, the phrase was widely +cited after it appeared in Barlow’s 1994 article "The Economy of Ideas." }~ +Both men had a profound influence on Udhay and ultimately provided him with the +ideas central to running an online community. A series of other connections of +similar sorts—some personal, some precipitated out of other media and other +channels, some entirely random—are what make up the membership of Silk-list.~{ +On the genesis of "virtual communities" and the role of Steward Brand, see +Turner, "Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy." }~ +={ Rheingold, Howard ; + Barlow, John Perry ; + Wired (magazine) +} + +Like many similar communities of "digerati" during and after the dot.com boom, +Silk-list constituted itself more or less organically around people who "got +it," that is, people who claimed to understand the Internet, its transformative +potential, and who had the technical skills to participate in its expansion. +Silk-list was not the only list of its kind. Others such as the Tasty Bits +newsletter, the FoRK (Friends of Rohit Khare) mailing list (both based in +Boston), and the Nettime and Syndicate mailing lists (both based in the +Netherlands) ostensibly had different reasons for existence, but many had the +same subscribers and overlapping communities of geeks. Subscription was open to +anyone, and occasionally someone would stumble on the list and join in, but +most were either invited by members or friends of friends, or they were +connected by virtue of cross-posting from any number of other mailing lists to +which members were subscribed. + +2~ /pub +={ Internet : + public spheres and +25 ; + Silk-list (mailing list) : + as a public +12 +} + +Silk-list is public in many senses of the word. Practically speaking, one need +not be invited to join, and the material that passes through the list is +publicly archived and can be found easily on the Internet. Udhay does his best +to encourage everyone to speak and to participate, and to discourage forms of +discourse that he thinks ,{[pg 47]}, might silence participants into lurking. +Silk-list is not a government, corporate, or nongovernmental list, but is +constituted only through the activity of geeks finding each other and speaking +to each other on this list (which can happen in all manner of ways: through +work, through school, through conferences, through fame, through random +association, etc.). Recall Charles Taylor’s distinction between a topical and a +metatopical space. Silk-list is not a conventionally topical space: at no point +do all of its members meet face-to-face (though there are regular meet-ups in +cities around the world), and they are not all online at the same time (though +the volume and tempo of messages often reflect who is online "speaking" to each +other at any given moment). It is a topical space, however, if one considers it +from the perspective of the machine: the list of names on the mailing list are +all assembled together in a database, or in a file, on the server that manages +the mailing list. It is a stretch to call this an "assembly," however, because +it assembles only the avatars of the mailing-list readers, many of whom +probably ignore or delete most of the messages. +={ Taylor, Charles +2 } + +Silk-list is certainly, on the other hand, a "metatopical" public. It "knits +together" a variety of topical spaces: my discussion with friends in Houston, +and other members’ discussions with people around the world, as well as the +sources of multiple discussions like newspaper and magazine articles, films, +events, and so on that are reported and discussed online. But Silk-list is not +"The" public—it is far from being the only forum in which the public sphere is +knitted together. Many, many such lists exist. + +In Publics and Counterpublics Michael Warner offers a further distinction. +"The" public is a social imaginary, one operative in the terms laid out by +Taylor: as a kind of vision of order evidenced through stories, images, +narratives, and so on that constitute the imagination of what it means to be +part of the public, as well as plans necessary for creating the public, if +necessary. Warner distinguishes, however, between a concrete, embodied +audience, like that at a play, a demonstration, or a riot (a topical public in +Taylor’s terms), and an audience brought into being by discourse and its +circulation, an audience that is not metatopical so much as it is a public that +is concrete in a different way; it is concrete not in the face-to-face +temporality of the speech act, but in the sense of calling a public into being +through an address that has a different temporality. It is a public that is +concrete in a media-specific ,{[pg 48]}, manner: it depends on the structures +of creation, circulation, use, performance, and reuse of particular kinds of +discourse, particular objects or instances of discourse. +={ public : + self-grounding of +4 ; + social imaginary +4 ; + Warner, Michael +4 +} + +% check public self grounding of marker + +Warner’s distinction has a number of implications. The first, as Warner is +careful to note, is that the existence of particular media is not sufficient +for a public to come into existence. Just because a book is printed does not +mean that a public exists; it requires also that the public take corresponding +action, that is, that they read it. To be part of a particular public is to +choose to pay attention to those who choose to address those who choose to pay +attention . . . and so on. Or as Warner puts it, "The circularity is essential +to the phenomenon. A public might be real and efficacious, but its reality lies +in just this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being +in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence."~{ Warner, +"Publics and Counterpublics," 51. }~ + +This "autotelic" feature of a public is crucial if one is to understand the +function of a public as standing outside of power. It simply cannot be +organized by the state, by a corporation, or by any other social totality if it +is to have the legitimacy of an independently functioning public. As Warner +puts it, "A public organizes itself independently of state institutions, law, +formal frameworks of citizenship, or preexisting institutions such as the +church. If it were not possible to think of the public as organized +independently of the state or other frameworks, the public could not be +sovereign with respect to the state. . . . Speaking, writing, and thinking +involve us—actively and immediately—in a public, and thus in the being of the +sovereign."~{ Ibid., 51-52. See also Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 69. }~ +={ public : + autotelic and independent +1 +} + +% ={Public:autotelic and independent+6} ?? + +Warner’s description makes no claim that any public or even The Public actually +takes this form in the present: it is a description of a social imaginary or a +"faith" that allows individuals to make sense of their actions according to a +modern idea of social order. As Warner (and Habermas before him) suggests, the +existence of such autonomous publics—and certainly the idea of "public +opinion"— does not always conform to this idea of order. Often such publics +turn out to have been controlled all along by states, corporations, capitalism, +and other forms of social totality that determine the nature of discourse in +insidious ways. A public whose participants have no faith that it is autotelic +and autonomous is little more than a charade meant to assuage opposition to +authority, to transform ,{[pg 49]}, political power and equality into the +negotiation between unequal parties. + +Is Silk-list a public? More important, is it a sovereign one? Warner’s +distinction between different media-specific forms of assembly is crucial to +answering this question. If one wants to know whether a mailing list on the +Internet is more or less likely to be a sovereign public than a book-reading +public or the nightly-news-hearing one, then one needs to approach it from the +specificity of the form of discourse. This specificity not only includes +whether the form is text or video and audio, or whether the text is ASCII or +Unicode, or the video PAL or NTSC, but it also includes the means of creation, +circulation, and reuse of that discourse as well. + +The on-demand, Internet-mediated book, by contrast, will have a much different +temporality of circulation: it might languish in obscurity due to lack of +marketing or reputable authority, or it might get mentioned somewhere like the +New York Times and suddenly become a sensation. For such a book, copyright law +(in the form of a copyleft license) might allow a much wider range of uses and +reuses, but it will restrict certain forms of commercialization of the text. +The two publics might therefore end up looking quite different, overlapping, to +be sure, but varying in terms of their control ,{[pg 50]}, and the terms of +admittance. What is at stake is the power of one or the other such public to +appear as an independent and sovereign entity—free from suspect constraints and +control—whose function is to argue with other constituted forms of power. +={ copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) ; + publication +1 +} + +The conventionally published book may well satisfy all the criteria of being a +public, at least in the colloquial sense of making a set of ideas and a +discourse widely available and expecting to influence, or receive a response +from, constituted forms of sovereign power. However, it is only the latter +"on-demand" scheme for publishing that satisfies the criteria of being a +recursive public. The differences in this example offer a crude indication of +why the Internet is so crucially important to geeks, so important that it draws +them together, in its defense, as an infrastructure that enables the creation +of publics that are thought to be autonomous, independent, and autotelic. Geeks +share an idea of moral and technical order when it comes to the Internet; not +only this, but they share a commitment to maintaining that order because it is +what allows them to associate as a recursive public in the first place. They +discover, or rediscover, through their association, the power and possibility +of occupying the position of independent public—one not controlled by states, +corporations, or other organizations, but open (they claim) through and +through—and develop a desire to defend it from encroachment, destruction, or +refeudalization (to use Habermas’s term for the fragmentation of the public +sphere). +={ Habermas, Jürgen ; + moral and technical order +2 ; + public : + autotelic and independent +2 +} + +The recursive public is thus not only the book and the discourse around the +book. It is not even "content" expanded to include all kinds of media. It is +also the technical structure of the Internet as well: its software, its +protocols and standards, its applications and software, its legal status and +the licenses and regulations that govern it. This captures both of the reasons +why recursive publics are distinctive: (1) they include not only the discourses +of a public, but the ability to make, maintain, and manipulate the +infrastructures of those discourses as well; and (2) they are "layered" and +include both discourses and infrastructures, to a specific technical extent +(i.e., not all the way down). The meaning of which layers are important +develops more or less immediately from direct engagement with the medium. In +the following example, for instance, Napster represents the potential of the +Internet in miniature—as an application—but it also connects immediately to +concerns about the core protocols that govern the Internet and the process of +standardization ,{[pg 51]}, that governs the development of these protocols: +hence recursion through the layers of an infrastructure. +={ Napster ; + recursive public : + layers of ; + Standards : + Internet +} + +These two aspects of the recursive public also relate to a concern about the +fragmentation or refeudalization of the public sphere: there is only one +Internet. Its singularity is not technically determined or by any means +necessary, but it is what makes the Internet so valuable to geeks. It is a +contest, the goal of which is to maintain the Internet as an infrastructure for +autonomous and autotelic publics to emerge as part of The Public, understood as +part of an imaginary of moral and technical order: operating systems and social +systems. +={ Internet : + singularity of +} + +2~ From Napster to the Internet +={ Napster +21 } + +On 27 July 2000 Eugen Leitl cross-posted to Silk-list a message with the +subject line "Prelude to the Singularity." The message’s original author, Jeff +Bone (not at the time a member of Silk-list), had posted the "op-ed piece" +initially to the FoRK mailing list as a response to the Recording Industry +Association of America’s (RIAA) actions against Napster. The RIAA had just +succeeded in getting U.S. district judge Marilyn Hall Patel, Ninth Circuit +Court of Appeals, to issue an injunction to Napster to stop downloads of +copyrighted music. Bone’s op-ed said, +={ Bone, Jeff +26 ; + Internet : + singularity of ; + Leitl, Eugene ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) +1 +} + +_1 Popular folklore has it that the Internet was designed with decentralized +routing protocols in order to withstand a nuclear attack. That is, the Internet +"senses damage" and "routes around it." It has been said that, on the ’Net, +censorship is perceived as damage and is subsequently routed around. The RIAA, +in a sense, has cast itself in a censor’s role. Consequently, the music +industry will be perceived as damage—and it will be routed around. There is no +doubt that this will happen, and that technology will evolve more quickly than +businesses and social institutions can; there are numerous highly-visible +projects already underway that attempt to create technology that is +invulnerable to legal challenges of various kinds. Julian Morrison, the +originator of a project (called Fling) to build a fully anonymous/untraceable +suite of network protocols, expresses this particularly eloquently.~{ The rest +of this message can be found in the Silk-list archives at +http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2869 (accessed 18 August 2006). +The reference to "Fling" is to a project now available at +http://fling.sourceforge.net/ (accessed 18 August 2006). The full archives of +Silk-list can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/ and the full +archives of the FoRK list can be found at +http://www.xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork/. }~ +={ censorship } + +Bone’s message is replete with details that illustrate the meaning and value of +the Internet to geeks, and that help clarify the concept ,{[pg 52]}, of a +recursive public. While it is only one message, it nonetheless condenses and +expresses a variety of stories, images, folklore, and technical details that I +elaborate herein. +={ recursive public : + layers of +2 | examples of +28 +} + +The Napster shutdown in 2000 soured music fans and geeks alike, and it didn’t +really help the record labels who perpetrated it either. For many geeks, +Napster represented the Internet in miniature, an innovation that both +demonstrated something on a scope and scale never seen before, and that also +connected people around something they cared deeply about—their shared interest +in music. Napster raised interesting questions about its own success: Was it +successful because it allowed people to develop new musical interests on a +scope and scale they had never experienced before? Or was it successful because +it gave people with already existing musical interests a way to share music on +a scope and scale they had never experienced before? That is to say, was it an +innovation in marketing or in distribution? The music industry experienced it +as the latter and hence as direct competition with their own means of +distribution. Many music fans experienced it as the former, what Cory Doctorow +nicely labeled "risk-free grazing," meaning the ability to try out an almost +unimaginable diversity of music before choosing what to invest one’s interests +(and money) in. To a large extent, Napster was therefore a recapitulation of +what the Internet already meant to geeks. + +Bone’s message, the event of the Napster shutdown, and the various responses to +it nicely illustrate the two key aspects of the recursive public: first, the +way in which geeks argue not only about rights and ideas (e.g., is it legal to +share music?) but also about the infrastructures that allow such arguing and +sharing; second, the "layers" of a recursive public are evidenced in the +immediate connection of Napster (an application familiar to millions) to the +"decentralized routing protocols" (TCP/IP, DNS, and others) that made it +possible for Napster to work the way it did. +={ Domain Name System (DNS) } + +Bone’s message contains four interrelated points. The first concerns the +concept of autonomous technical progress. The title "Prelude to the +Singularity" refers to a 1993 article by Vernor Vinge about the notion of a +"singularity," a point in time when the speed of autonomous technological +development outstrips the human capacity to control it.~{ Vinge, "The Coming +Technological Singularity." }~ The notion of singularity has the status of a +kind of colloquial "law" similar to Moore’s Law or Metcalfe’s Law, as well as +signaling links to a more general literature with roots in ,{[pg 53]}, +libertarian or classically liberal ideas of social order ranging from John +Locke and John Stuart Mill to Ayn Rand and David Brin.~{ Moore’s Law—named for +Gordon Moore, former head of Intel—states that the speed and capacity of +computer central processing units (CPUs) doubles every eighteen months, which +it has done since roughly 1970. Metcalfe’s Law—named for Robert Metcalfe, +inventor of Ethernet—states that the utility of a network equals the square of +the number of users, suggesting that the number of things one can do with a +network increases exponentially as members are added linearly. }~ +={ liberalism, classical ; + Metcalfe's Law ; + Moore's Law ; + singularity ; + transhumanism ; + Locke, John ; + Mill, John Stuart ; + Rand, Ayn ; + Brin, David ; + Vinge, Vernor +} + +Bone’s affinity for transhumanist stories of evolutionary theory, economic +theory, and rapid innovation sets the stage for the rest of his message. The +crucial rhetorical gambit here is the appeal to inevitability (as in the +emphatic "there is no doubt that this will happen"): Bone establishes that he +is speaking to an audience that is accustomed to hearing about the +inevitability of technical progress and the impossibility of legal maneuvering +to change it, but his audience may not necessarily agree with these +assumptions. Geeks occupy a spectrum from "polymath" to "transhumanist," a +spectrum that includes their understandings of technological progress and its +relation to human intervention. Bone’s message clearly lands on the far +transhumanist side. + +A second point concerns censorship and the locus of power: according to Bone, +power does not primarily reside with the government or the church, but comes +instead from the private sector, in this case the coalition of corporations +represented by the RIAA. The significance of this has to do with the fact that +a "public" is expected to be its own sovereign entity, distinct from church, +state, or corporation, and while censorship by the church or the state is a +familiar form of aggression against publics, censorship by corporations (or +consortia representing them), as it strikes Bone and others, is a novel +development. Whether the blocking of file-sharing can legitimately be called +censorship is also controversial, and many Silk-list respondents found the +accusation of censorship untenable. +={ censorship +1 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) +1 +} + +Proving Bone’s contention, over the course of the subsequent years and court +cases, the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have been +given considerably more police authority than even many federal +agencies—especially with regard to policing networks themselves (an issue +which, given its technical abstruseness, has rarely been mentioned in the +mainstream mass media). Both organizations have not only sought to prosecute +filesharers but have been granted rights to obtain information from Internet +Service Providers about customer activities and have consistently sought the +right to secretly disable (hack into, disable, or destroy) private computers +suspected of illegal activity. Even if these practices may not be defined as +censorship per se, they are nonetheless fine examples of the issues that most +exercise geeks: the use of legal means by a few (in this case, private +corporations) to ,{[pg 54]}, suppress or transform technologies in wide use by +the many. They also index the problems of monopoly, antitrust, and technical +control that are not obvious and often find expression, for example, in +allegories of reformation and the control of the music-sharing laity by papal +authorities. +={ antitrust ; + monopoly ; + Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ; + protestant Reformation : + as usable past +} + +Third, Bone’s message can itself be understood in terms of the reorientation of +knowledge and power. Although what it means to call his message an "op-ed" +piece may seem obvious, Bone’s message was not published anywhere in any +conventional sense. It doesn’t appear to have been widely cited or linked to. +However, for one day at least, it was a heated discussion topic on three +mailing lists, including Silk-list. "Publication" in this instance is a +different kind of event than getting an op-ed in the New York Times. +={ publication +2 } + +The material on Silk-list rests somewhere between private conversation (in a +public place, perhaps) and published opinion. No editor made a decision to +"publish" the message—Bone just clicked "send." However, as with any print +publication, his piece was theoretically accessible by anyone, and what’s more, +a potentially huge number of copies may be archived in many different places +(the computers of all the participants, the server that hosts the list, the +Yahoo! Groups servers that archive it, Google’s search databases, etc.). Bone’s +message exemplifies the recursive nature of the recursive public: it is a +public statement about the openness of the Internet, and it is an example of +the new forms of publicness it makes possible through its openness. +={ Internet +9 } + +% Internet +9 is not in original index + +The constraints on who speaks in a public sphere (such as the power of printers +and publishers, the requirements of licensing, or issues of cost and +accessibility) are much looser in the Internet era than in any previous one. +The Internet gives a previously unknown Jeff Bone the power to dash off a +manifesto without so much as a second thought. On the other hand, the ease of +distribution belies the difficulty of actually being heard: the multitudes of +other Jeff Bones make it much harder to get an audience. In terms of publics, +Bone’s message can constitute a public in the same sense that a New York Times +op-ed can, but its impact and meaning will be different. His message is openly +and freely available for as long as there are geeks and laws and machines that +maintain it, but the New York Times piece will have more authority, will be +less accessible, and, most important, will not be available to just anyone. +Geeks imagine a space where anyone can speak with similar reach and staying +,{[pg 55]}, power—even if that does not automatically imply authority—and they +imagine that it should remain open at all costs. Bone is therefore interested +precisely in a technical infrastructure that ensures his right to speak about +that infrastructure and offer critique and guidance concerning it. + +The ability to create and to maintain such a recursive public, however, raises +the fourth and most substantial point that Bone’s message makes clear. The leap +to speaking about the "decentralized routing protocols" represents clearly the +shared moral and technical order of geeks, derived in this case from the +specific details of the Internet. Bone’s post begins with a series of +statements that are part of the common repertoire of technical stories and +images among geeks. Bone begins by making reference to the "folklore" of the +Internet, in which routing protocols are commonly believed to have been created +to withstand a nuclear attack. In calling it folklore he suggests that this is +not a precise description of the Internet, but an image that captures its +design goals. Bone collapses it into a more recent bit of folklore: "The +Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it."~{ This quotation +from the 1990s is attributed to Electronic Frontier Foundation’s founder and +"cyber-libertarian" John Gilmore. Whether there ,{[pg 319]}, is any truth to +this widespread belief expressed in the statement is not clear. On the one +hand, the protocol to which this folklore refers—the general system of "message +switching" and, later, "packet switching" invented by Paul Baran at RAND +Corporation—does seem to lend itself to robustness (on this history, see +Abbate, Inventing the Internet). However, it is not clear that nuclear threats +were the only reason such robustness was a design goal; simply to ensure +communication in a distributed network was necessary in itself. Nonetheless, +the story has great currency as a myth of the nature and structure of the +Internet. Paul Edwards suggests that both stories are true ("Infrastructure and +Modernity," 216-20, 225n13). }~ Both bits of folklore are widely circulated and +cited; they encapsulate one of the core intellectual ideas about the +architecture of the Internet, that is, its open and distributed +interconnectivity. There is certainly a specific technical backdrop for this +suggestion: the TCP/IP "internetting" protocols were designed to link up +multiple networks without making them sacrifice their autonomy and control. +However, Bone uses this technical argument more in the manner of a social +imaginary than of a theory, that is, as a way of thinking about the technical +(and moral) order of the Internet, of what the Internet is supposed to be like. +={ censorship +5 ; + moral and technical order ; + Gilmore, John +1 ; + Internet : + folklore and ; + libertarianism +1 ; + protocols : + TCP/IP ; + social imaginary +10 ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) ; + folklore of Internet : + see also usable pasts +} + +In the early 1990s this version of the technical order of the Internet was part +of a vibrant libertarian dogma asserting that the Internet simply could not be +governed by any land-based sovereign and that it was fundamentally a place of +liberty and freedom. This was the central message of people such as John Perry +Barlow, John Gilmore, Howard Rheingold, Esther Dyson, and a host of others who +populated both the pre-1993 Internet (that is, before the World Wide Web became +widely available) and the pages of magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000—the +same group of people, incidentally, whose ideas were visible and meaningful to +Udhay Shankar and his friends in India even prior to Internet access there, not +to mention to Sean and Adrian in Boston, and artists and activists in ,{[pg +56]}, Europe, all of whom often reacted more strongly against this libertarian +aesthetic. +={ Barlow, John Perry ; + Doyle, Sean ; + Dyson, Esther ; + Rheingold, Howard ; + Shakar, Udhay ; + Wired (magazine) +} + +For Jeff Bone (and a great many geeks), the folkloric notion that "the net +treats censorship as damage" is a very powerful one: it suggests that +censorship is impossible because there is no central point of control. A +related and oft-cited sentiment is that "trying to take something off of the +Internet is like trying to take pee out of a pool." This is perceived by geeks +as a virtue, not a drawback, of the Internet. + +For Jeff Bone (and a great many geeks), the folkloric notion that "the net +treats censorship as damage" is a very powerful one: it suggests that +censorship is impossible because there is no central point of control. A +related and oft-cited sentiment is that "trying to take something off of the +Internet is like trying to take pee out of a pool." This is perceived by geeks +as a virtue, not a drawback, of the Internet. + +On the other side of the spectrum, however, this view of the unregulatable +nature of the Internet has been roundly criticized, most prominently by +Lawrence Lessig, who is otherwise often in sympathy with geek culture. Lessig +suggests that just because the Internet has a particular structure does not +mean that it must always be that way.~{ Lessig, Code and Other Laws of +Cyberspace. See also Gillespie, "Engineering a Principle" on the related +history of the "end to end" design principle. }~ His argument has two prongs: +first, that the Internet is structured the way it is because it is made of code +that people write, and thus it could have been and will be otherwise, given +that there are changes and innovations occurring all the time; second, that the +particular structure of the Internet therefore governs or regulates behavior in +particular ways: Code is Law. So while it may be true that no one can make the +Internet "closed" by passing a law, it is also true that the Internet could +become closed if the technology were to be altered for that purpose, a process +that may well be nudged and guided by laws, regulations, and norms. +={ norms ; + Lessig, Lawrence +2 ; + recursive public : + layers of +2 ; + regulation : + Internet +} + +Lessig’s critique is actually at the heart of Bone’s concern, and the concern +of recursive publics generally: the Internet is a contest and one that needs to +be repeatedly and constantly replayed in order to maintain it as the legitimate +infrastructure through which geeks associate with one another. Geeks argue in +detail about what distinguishes technical factors from legal or social ones. +Openness on the Internet is complexly intertwined with issues of availability, +price, legal restriction, usability, elegance of design, censorship, trade +secrecy, and so on. ,{[pg 57]}, + +However, even where openness is presented as a natural tendency for technology +(in oft-made analogies with reproductive fitness and biodiversity, for +example), it is only a partial claim in that it represents only one of the +"layers" of a recursive public. For instance, when Bone suggests that the net +is "invulnerable to legal attack" because "technology will evolve more quickly +than businesses and social institutions can," he is not only referring to the +fact that the Internet’s novel technical configuration has few central points +of control, which makes it difficult for a single institution to control it, +but also talking about the distributed, loosely connected networks of people +who have the right to write and rewrite software and deal regularly with the +underlying protocols of the Internet—in other words, of geeks themselves. + +Many geeks, perhaps including Bone, discover the nature of this order by coming +to understand how the Internet works—how it works technically, but also who +created it and how. Some have come to this understanding through participation +in Free Software (an exemplary "recursive public"), others through stories and +technologies and projects and histories that illuminate the process of +creating, growing, and evolving the Internet. The story of the process by which +the Internet is standardized is perhaps the most well known: it is the story of +the Internet Engineering Task Force and its Requests for Comments system. +={ Request for Comments (RFC) } + +2~ Requests for Comments +={ Internet +9 ; + Request for Comments (RFC) +7 +} + +For many geeks, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its Requests for +Comments (RFC) system exemplify key features of the moral and technical order +they share, the "stories and practices" that make up a social imaginary, +according to Charles Taylor. The IETF is a longstanding association of Internet +engineers who try to help disseminate some of the core standards of the +Internet through ,{[pg 58]}, the RFC process. Membership is open to +individuals, and the association has very little real control over the +structure or growth of the Internet—only over the key process of Internet +standardization. Its standards rarely have the kind of political legitimacy +that one associates with international treaties and the standards bodies of +Geneva, but they are nonetheless de facto legitimate. The RFC process is an +unusual standards process that allows modifications to existing technologies to +be made before the standard is finalized. Together Internet standards and the +RFC process form the background of the Napster debate and of Jeff Bone’s claims +about "internet routing protocols." +={ Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) +8 ; + moral and technical order +1 ; + Napster +8 ; + standards : + Internet +6 ; + standards processes +2 ; + Taylor, Charles +} + +A famous bit of Internet-governance folklore expresses succinctly the +combination of moral and technical order that geeks share (attributed to IETF +member David Clark): "We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in +rough consensus and running code."~{ This is constantly repeated on the +Internet and attributed to David Clark, but no one really knows where or when +he stated it. It appears in a 1997 interview of David Clark by Jonathan +Zittrain, the transcript of which is available at +http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/jzfallsem//trans/clark/ (accessed 18 August 2006). +}~ This quote emphasizes the necessity of arguing with and through technology, +the first aspect of a recursive public; the only argument that convinces is +working code. If it works, then it can be implemented; if it is implemented, it +will "route around" the legal damage done by the RIAA. The notion of "running +code" is central to an understanding of the relationship between argumentby- +technology and argument-by-talk for geeks. Very commonly, the response by geeks +to people who argued about Napster that summer—and the courts’ decisions +regarding it—was to dismiss their complaints as mere talk. Many suggested that +if Napster were shut down, thousands more programs like it would spring up in +its wake. As one mailing-list participant, Ashish "Hash" Gulhati, put it, "It +is precisely these totally unenforceable and mindless judicial decisions that +will start to look like self-satisfied wanking when there’s code out there +which will make the laws worth less than the paper they’re written on. When it +comes to fighting this shit in a way that counts, everything that isn’t code is +just talk."~{ Ashish "Hash" Gulhati, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 9 +September 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/3125. }~ +={ Clark, David ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) ; + Gulhati, Ashish ; + recursive public : + layers of +3 +} + +Such powerful rhetoric often collapses the process itself, for someone has to +write the code. It can even be somewhat paradoxical: there is a need to talk +forcefully about the need for less talk and more code, as demonstrated by Eugen +Leitl when I objected that Silk-listers were "just talking": "Of course we +should talk. Did my last post consist of some kickass Python code adding +sore-missed functionality to Mojonation? Nope. Just more meta-level waffle +about the importance of waffling less, coding more. I lack the ,{[pg 59]}, +proper mental equipment upstairs for being a good coder, hence I attempt to +corrupt young impressionable innocents into contributing to the cause. +Unashamedly so. So sue me."~{ Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 9 +September 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/3127. Python is +a programming language. Mojonation was a very promising peer-to-peer +application in 2000 that has since ceased to exist. }~ +={ Leitl, Eugene ; + programming +1 +} + +Eugen’s flippancy reveals a recognition that there is a political component to +coding, even if, in the end, talk disappears and only code remains. Though +Eugen and others might like to adopt a rhetoric that suggests "it will just +happen," in practice none of them really act that way. Rather, the activities +of coding, writing software, or improving and diversifying the software that +exists are not inevitable or automatic but have specific characteristics. They +require time and "the proper mental equipment." The inevitability they refer to +consists not in some fantasy of machine intelligence, but in a social imaginary +shared by many people in loosely connected networks who spend all their free +time building, downloading, hacking, testing, installing, patching, coding, +arguing, blogging, and proselytizing—in short, creating a recursive public +enabled by the Internet. + +Jeff Bone’s op-ed piece, which is typically enthusiastic about the +inevitability of new technologies, still takes time to reference one of +thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of projects as worthy of attention and +support, a project called Fling, which is an attempt to rewrite the core +protocols of the Internet.~{ In particular, this project focuses on the +Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the +Domain Name System (DNS). The first two have remained largely stable over the +last thirty years, but the DNS system has been highly politicized (see Mueller, +Ruling the Root). }~ The goal of the project is to write a software +implementation of these protocols with the explicit goal of making them +"anonymous, untraceable, and untappable." Fling is not a corporation, a +start-up, or a university research project (though some such projects are); it +is only a Web site. The core protocols of the Internet, contained in the RFCs, +are little more than documents describing how computers should interact with +each other. They are standards, but of an unusual kind.~{ On Internet +standards, see Schmidt and Werle, Coordinating Technology; Abbate and Kahin, +Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure. }~ Bone’s leap from a +discussion about Napster to one about the core protocols of the Internet is not +unusual. It represents the second aspect of a recursive public: the importance +of understanding the Internet as a set of "layers," each enabling the next and +each requiring an openness that both prevents central control and leads to +maximum creativity. +={ protocols : + TCP/IP +1 ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) +} + +% ={Domain Name System (DNS);Napster} ={Napster;Standards;Standards processes} + +RFCs have developed from an informal system of memos into a formal +standardization process over the life of the Internet, as the IETF and the +Internet Society (ISOC) have become more bureaucratic entities. The process of +writing and maintaining these documents is particular to the Internet, +precisely because the Internet ,{[pg 60]}, is the kind of network experiment +that facilitates the sharing of resources across administratively bounded +networks. It is a process that has allowed all the experimenters to both share +the network and to propose changes to it, in a common space. RFCs are primarily +suggestions, not demands. They are "public domain" documents and thus available +to everyone with access to the Internet. As David Clark’s reference to +"consensus and running code" demonstrates, the essential component of setting +Internet standards is a good, working implementation of the protocols. Someone +must write software that behaves in the ways specified by the RFC, which is, +after all, only a document, not a piece of software. Different implementations +of, for example, the TCP/IP protocol or the File Transfer Protocol (ftp) depend +initially on individuals, groups, and/or corporations building them into an +operating-system kernel or a piece of user software and subsequently on the +existence of a large number of people using the same operating system or +application. +={ Internet Society (ISOC) ; + Clark, David ; + standards processes +2 +} + +In many cases, subsequent to an implementation that has been disseminated and +adopted, the RFCs have been amended to reflect these working implementations +and to ordain them as standards. So the current standards are actually +bootstrapped, through a process of writing RFCs, followed by a process of +creating implementations that adhere loosely to the rules in the RFC, then +observing the progress of implementations, and then rewriting RFCs so that the +process begins all over again. The fact that geeks can have a discussion via +e-mail depends on the very existence of both an RFC to define the e-mail +protocol and implementations of software to send the e-mails. + +This standardization process essentially inverts the process of planning. +Instead of planning a system, which is then standardized, refined, and finally +built according to specification, the RFC process allows plans to be proposed, +implemented, refined, reproposed, rebuilt, and so on until they are adopted by +users and become the standard approved of by the IETF. The implication for most +geeks is that this process is permanently and fundamentally open: changes to it +can be proposed, implemented, and adopted without end, and the better a +technology becomes, the more difficult it becomes to improve on it, and +therefore the less reason there is to subvert it or reinvent it. +Counterexamples, in which a standard emerges but no one adopts it, are also +plentiful, and they suggest that the standardization process extends beyond the +proposal-implementation-proposal-standard ,{[pg 61]}, circle to include the +problem of actually convincing users to switch from one working technology to a +better one. However, such failures of adoption are also seen as a kind of +confirmation of the quality or ease of use of the current solution, and they +are all the more likely to be resisted when some organization or political +entity tries to force users to switch to the new standard—something the IETF +has refrained from doing for the most part. +={ planning } + +2~ Conclusion: Recursive Public +={ public +7 } + +Napster was a familiar and widely discussed instance of the "reorientation of +power and knowledge" (or in this case, power and music) wrought by the Internet +and the practices of geeks. Napster was not, however, a recursive public or a +Free Software project, but a dot-com-inspired business plan in which +proprietary software was given away for free in the hopes that revenue would +flow from the stock market, from advertising, or from enhanced versions of the +software. Therefore, geeks did not defend Napster as much as they experienced +its legal restriction as a wake-up call: the Internet enables Napster and will +enable many other things, but laws, corporations, lobbyists, money, and +governments can destroy all of it. +={ music ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +} + +I started this chapter by asking what draws geeks together: what constitutes +the chain that binds geeks like Sean and Adrian to hipsters in Berlin and to +entrepreneurs and programmers in Bangalore? What constitutes their affinity if +it is not any of the conventional candidates like culture, nation, corporation, +or language? A colloquial answer might be that it is simply the Internet that +brings them together: cyberspace, virtual communities, online culture. But this +doesn’t answer the question of why? Because they can? Because Community Is +Good? If mere association is the goal, why not AOL or a vast private network +provided by Microsoft? +={ affinity (of geeks) +2 ; + Berlin ; + Doyle, Sean +} + +My answer, by contrast, is that geeks’ affinity with one another is structured +by shared moral and technical understandings of order. They are a public, an +independent public that has the ability to build, maintain, and modify itself, +that is not restricted to the activities of speaking, writing, arguing, or +protesting. Recursive publics form through their experience with the Internet +precisely because the Internet is the kind of thing they can inhabit and +transform. Two ,{[pg 62]}, things make recursive publics distinctive: the +ability to include the practice of creating this infrastructure as part of the +activity of being public or contesting control; and the ability to "recurse" +through the layers of that infrastructure, maintaining its publicness at each +level without making it into an unchanging, static, unmodifiable thing. +={ moral and technical order ; + Infrastructure +4 +} + +The affinity constituted by a recursive public, through the medium of the +Internet, creates geeks who understand clearly what association through the +Internet means. This affinity structures their imagination of what the Internet +is and enables: creation, distribution, modification of knowledge, music, +science, software. The infrastructure—this-infrastructure-here, the +Internet—must be understood as part of this imaginary (in addition to being a +pulsating tangle of computers, wires, waves, and electrons). +={ music } + +The Internet is not the only medium for such association. A corporation, for +example, is also based on a shared imaginary of the economy, of how markets, +exchanges, and business cycles are supposed to work; it is the creation of a +concrete set of relations and practices, one that is generally inflexible—even +in this age of socalled flexible capitalism—because it requires a commitment of +time, humans, and capital. Even in fast capitalism one needs to rent office +space, buy toilet paper, install payroll software, and so on. + +The Internet is not the only medium for such association. A corporation, for +example, is also based on a shared imaginary of the economy, of how markets, +exchanges, and business cycles are supposed to work; it is the creation of a +concrete set of relations and practices, one that is generally inflexible—even +in this age of socalled flexible capitalism—because it requires a commitment of +time, humans, and capital. Even in fast capitalism one needs to rent office +space, buy toilet paper, install payroll software, and so on. + +The urgency evidenced in the case of Napster (and repeated in numerous other +instances, such as the debate over net neutrality) is linked to a moral idea of +order in which there is a shared imaginary,{[pg 63]}, of The Public, and not +only a vast multiplicity of competing publics. It is an urgency linked directly +to the fact that the Internet provides geeks with a platform, an environment, +an infrastructure through which they not only associate, but create, and do so +in a manner that is widely felt to be autonomous, autotelic, and independent of +at least the most conventional forms of power: states and +corporations—independent enough, in fact, that both states and corporations can +make widespread use of this infrastructure (can become geeks themselves) +without necessarily endangering its independence. +={ Napster ; + moral and technical order +} + +% ={Public:autotelic and independent} + +1~ 2. Protestant Reformers, Polymaths, Transhumanists +={ allegory, of Protestant Reformation +54 ; + Protestant Reformation +54 ; + transhumanism +} + +% this Transhumanism ref not in original index + +% [PAGE 64] + +Geeks talk a lot. They don’t talk about recursive publics. They don’t often +talk about imaginations, infrastructures, moral or technical orders. But they +do talk a lot. A great deal of time and typing is necessary to create software +and networks: learning and talking, teaching and arguing, telling stories and +reading polemics, reflecting on the world in and about the infrastructure one +inhabits. In this chapter I linger on the stories geeks tell, and especially on +stories and reflections that mark out contemporary problems of knowledge and +power—stories about grand issues like progress, enlightenment, liberty, and +freedom. +={ moral and technical order ; + enlightenment +3 ; + Geeks +6 ; + Progress +3 +} + +Issues of enlightenment, progress, and freedom are quite obviously still part +of a "social imaginary," especially imaginations of the relationship of +knowledge and enlightenment to freedom and autonomy so clearly at stake in the +notion of a public or public ,{[pg 65]}, sphere. And while the example of Free +Software illuminates how issues of enlightenment, progress, and freedom are +proposed, contested, and implemented in and through software and networks, this +chapter contains stories that are better understood as "usable pasts"—less +technical and more accessible narratives that make sense of the contemporary +world by reflecting on the past and its difference from today. +={ social imaginary ; + usable pasts +2 +} + +Usable pasts is a more charitable term for what might be called modern myths +among geeks: stories that the tellers know to be a combination of fact and +fiction. They are told not in order to remember the past, but in order to make +sense of the present and of the future. They make sense of practices that are +not questioned in the doing, but which are not easily understood in available +intellectual or colloquial terms. The first set of stories I relate are those +about the Protestant Reformation: allegories that make use of Catholic and +Protestant churches, laity, clergy, high priests, and reformation-era images of +control and liberation. It might be surprising that geeks turn to the past (and +especially to religious allegory) in order to make sense of the present, but +the reason is quite simple: there are no "ready-to-narrate" stories that make +sense of the practices of geeks today. Precisely because geeks are "figuring +out" things that are not clear or obvious, they are of necessity bereft of +effective ways of talking about it. The Protestant Reformation makes for good +allegory because it separates power from control; it draws on stories of +catechism and ritual, alphabets, pamphlets and liturgies, indulgences and +self-help in order to give geeks a way to make sense of the distinction between +power and control, and how it relates to the technical and political economy +they occupy. The contemporary relationship among states, corporations, small +businesses, and geeks is not captured by familiar oppositions like +commercial/noncommercial, for/against private property, or +capitalist/socialist—it is a relationship of reform and conversion, not +revolution or overthrow. +={ figuring out } + +Usable pasts are stories, but they are stories that reflect specific attitudes +and specific ways of thinking about the relationship between past, present, and +future. Geeks think and talk a lot about time, progress, and change, but their +conclusions and attitudes are by no means uniform. Some geeks are much more +aware of the specific historical circumstances and contexts in which they +operate, others less so. In this chapter I pose a question via Michel ,{[pg +66]}, Foucault’s famous short piece "What Is Enlightenment?" Namely, are geeks +modern? For Foucault, rereading Kant’s eponymous piece from 1784, the problem +of being modern (or of an age being "enlightened") is not one of a period or +epoch that people live through; rather, it involves a subjective relationship, +an attitude. Kant’s explanation of enlightenment does not suggest that it is +itself a universal, but that it occurs through a form of reflection on what +difference the changes of one’s immediate historical past make to one’s +understanding of the supposed universals of a much longer history—that is, one +must ask why it is necessary to think the way one does today about problems +that have been confronted in ages past. For Foucault, such reflections must be +rooted in the "historically unique forms in which the generalities of our +relations . . . have been problematized."~{ Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment," +319. }~ Thus, I want to ask of geeks, how do they connect the historically +unique problems they confront—from the Internet to Napster to intellectual +property to sharing and reusing source code—to the generalities of relations in +which they narrate them as problems of liberty, knowledge, power, and +enlightenment? Or, as Foucault puts it, are they modern in this sense? Do they +"despise the present" or not? +={ Foucault, Michel ; + geeks : + as moderns ; + intellectual property ; + Kant, Immanuel ; + Napster +} + +The attitudes that geeks take in responding to these questions fall along a +spectrum that I have identified as ranging from "polymaths" to +"transhumanists." These monikers are drawn from real discussions with geeks, +but they don’t designate a kind of person. They are "subroutines," perhaps, +called from within a larger program of moral and technical imaginations of +order. It is possible for the same person to be a polymath at work and a +transhumanist at home, but generally speaking they are conflicting and opposite +mantles. In polymath routines, technology is an intervention into a +complicated, historically unique field of people, customs, organizations, other +technologies, and laws; in transhumanist routines, technology is seen as an +inevitable force—a product of human action, but not of human design—that is +impossible to control or resist through legal or customary means. +={ intervention, technology as ; + moral and technical order ; + transhumanism +} + +2~ Protestant Reformation + +Geeks love allegories about the Protestant Reformation; they relish stories of +Luther and Calvin, of popery and iconoclasm, of reformation ,{[pg 67]}, over +revolution. Allegories of Protestant revolt allow geeks to make sense of the +relationship between the state (the monarchy), large corporations (the Catholic +Church), the small start-ups, individual programmers, and adepts among whom +they spend most of their time (Protestant reformers), and the laity (known as +"lusers" and "sheeple"). It gives them a way to assert that they prefer +reformation (to save capitalism from the capitalists) over revolution. +Obviously, not all geeks tell stories of "religious wars" and the Protestant +Reformation, but these images reappear often enough in conversations that most +geeks will more or less instantly recognize them as a way of making sense of +modern corporate, state, and political power in the arena of information +technology: the figures of Pope, the Catholic Church, the Vatican, the monarchs +of various nations, the laity, the rebel adepts like Luther and Calvin, as well +as models of sectarianism, iconoclasm ("In the beginning was the Command +Line"), politicoreligious power, and arcane theological argumentation.~{ +Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line. }~ The allegories that +unfold provide geeks a way to make sense of a similarly complex modern +situation in which it is not the Church and the State that struggle, but the +Corporation and the State; and what geeks struggle over are not matters of +church doctrine and organization, but matters of information technology and its +organization as intellectual property and economic motor. I stress here that +this is not an analogy that I myself am making (though I happily make use of +it), but is one that is in wide circulation among the geeks I study. To the +historian or religious critic, it may seem incomplete, or absurd, or bizarre, +but it still serves a specific function, and this is why I highlight it as one +component of the practical and technical ideas of order that geeks share. +={ Intellectual property ; + Luther, Martin +15 ; + reformation vs. revolution ; + religious wars +5 +} + +% this "intellectual property" reference not in original index + +At the first level are allegories of "religious war" or "holy war" (and +increasingly, of "jihads"). Such stories reveal a certain cynicism: they +describe a technical war of details between two pieces of software that +accomplish the same thing through different means, so devotion to one or the +other is seen as a kind of arbitrary theological commitment, at once reliant on +a pure rationality and requiring aesthetic or political judgment. Such stories +imply that two technologies are equally good and equally bad and that one’s +choice of sect is thus an entirely nonrational one based in the vicissitudes of +background and belief. Some people are zealous proselytizers of a technology, +some are not. As one Usenet message explains: "Religious ‘wars’ have tended to +occur over theological and doctrinal ,{[pg 68]}, technicalities of one sort or +another. The parallels between that and the computing technicalities that +result in ‘computing wars’ are pretty strong."~{ Message-ID: { +tht55.221960$701.2930569@news4.giganews.com. +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=tht55.221960$701.2930569@news4.giganews.com +}~ + +Perhaps the most familiar and famous of these wars is that between Apple and +Microsoft (formerly between Apple and IBM), a conflict that is often played out +in dramatic and broad strokes that imply fundamental differences, when in fact +the differences are extremely slight.~{ The Apple-Microsoft conflict was given +memorable expression by Umberto Eco in a widely read piece that compared the +Apple user interface ,{[pg 320]}, to Catholicism and the PC user interface to +Protestantism ("La bustina di Minerva," Espresso, 30 September 1994, back +page). }~ Geeks are also familiar with a wealth of less well-known "holy wars": +EMACS versus vi; KDE versus Gnome; Linux versus BSD; Oracle versus all other +databases.~{ One entry on Wikipedia differentiates religious wars from +run-of-the-mill "flame wars" as follows: "Whereas a flame war is usually a +particular spate of flaming against a non-flamy background, a holy war is a +drawn-out disagreement that may last years or even span careers" ("Flaming +[Internet]," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_war [accessed 16 January +2006]). }~ + +Often the language of the Reformation creeps playfully into otherwise serious +attempts to make aesthetic judgments about technology, as in this analysis of +the programming language tcl/tk: +={ programming languages +2 } + +_1 It’s also not clear that the primary design criterion in tcl, perl, or +Visual BASIC was visual beauty—nor, probably, should it have been. Ousterhout +said people will vote with their feet. This is important. While the High +Priests in their Ivory Towers design pristine languages of stark beauty and +balanced perfection for their own appreciation, the rest of the mundane world +will in blind and contented ignorance go plodding along using nasty little +languages like those enumerated above. These poor sots will be getting a great +deal of work done, putting bread on the table for their kids, and getting home +at night to share it with them. The difference is that the priests will shake +their fingers at the laity, and the laity won’t care, because they’ll be in bed +asleep.~{ Message-ID: { 369tva$8l0@csnews.cs.colorado.edu. +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=369tva$8l0@csnews.cs.colorado.edu }~ + +In this instance, the "religious war" concerns the difference between academic +programming languages and regular programmers made equivalent to a distinction +between the insularity of the Catholic Church and the self-help of a protestant +laity: the heroes (such as tcl/tk, perl, and python—all Free Software) are the +"nasty little languages" of the laity; the High Priests design (presumably) +Algol, LISP, and other "academic" languages. +={ perl (programming language) ; + python (programming language) ; + tcl/tk (programming language) +} + +At a second level, however, the allegory makes precise use of Protestant +Reformation details. For example, in a discussion about the various fights over +the Gnu C Compiler (gcc), a central component of the various UNIX operating +systems, Christopher Browne posted this counter-reformation allegory to a +Usenet group. +={ GNU C Compiler (gcc) +6 ; + UNIX operating system +} + +_1 The EGCS project was started around two years ago when G++ (and GCC) +development got pretty "stuck." EGCS sought to integrate together ,{[pg 69]}, a +number of the groups of patches that people were making to the GCC "family." In +effect, there had been a "Protestant Reformation," with split-offs of: + +_2 a) The GNU FORTRAN Denomination; + +_2 b) The Pentium Tuning Sect; + +_2 c) The IBM Haifa Instruction Scheduler Denomination; + +_2 d) The C++ Standard Acolytes. + +_1 These groups had been unable to integrate their efforts (for various +reasons) with the Catholic Version, GCC 2.8. The Ecumenical GNU Compiler +Society sought to draw these groups back into the Catholic flock. The project +was fairly successful; GCC 2.8 was succeeded by GCC 2.9, which was not a direct +upgrade from 2.8, but rather the results of the EGCS project. EGCS is now +GCC.~{ Message-ID: { c1dz4.145472$mb.2669517@news6.giganews.com. +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=c1dz4.145472$mb.2669517@news6.giganews.com +It should be noted, in case the reader is unsure how serious this is, that EGCS +stood for Extended GNU Compiler System, not Ecumenical GNU Compiler Society. }~ + +In addition to the obvious pleasure with which they deploy the sectarian +aspects of the Protestant Reformation, geeks also allow themselves to see their +struggles as those of Luther-like adepts, confronted by powerful worldly +institutions that are distinct but intertwined: the Catholic Church and +absolutist monarchs. Sometimes these comparisons are meant to mock theological +argument; sometimes they are more straightforwardly hagiographic. For instance, +a 1998 article in Salon compares Martin Luther and Linus Torvalds (originator +of the Linux kernel). +={ Linux (Free Software project) ; + Torvalds, Linus +1 +} + +_1 In Luther’s Day, the Roman Catholic Church had a near-monopoly on the +cultural, intellectual and spiritual life of Europe. But the principal source +text informing that life—the Bible—was off limits to ordinary people. . . . +Linus Torvalds is an information-age reformer cut from the same cloth. Like +Luther, his journey began while studying for ordination into the modern +priesthood of computer scientists at the University of Helsinki—far from the +seats of power in Redmond and Silicon Valley. Also like Luther, he had a +divine, slightly nutty idea to remove the intervening bureaucracies and put +ordinary folks in a direct relationship to a higher power—in this case, their +computers. Dissolving the programmer-user distinction, he encouraged ordinary +people to participate in the development of their computing environment. And +just as Luther sought to make the entire sacramental shebang—the wine, the +bread and the translated Word—available to the hoi polloi, Linus seeks to +revoke the developer’s proprietary access to the OS, insisting that the full +operating system source code be delivered—without cost—to every ordinary Joe at +the desktop.~{ "Martin Luther, Meet Linus Torvalds," Salon, 12 November 1998, +http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/11/12feature.html (accessed 5 +February 2005). }~ ,{[pg 70]}, + +Adepts with strong convictions—monks and priests whose initiation and mastery +are evident—make the allegory work. Other uses of Christian iconography are +less, so to speak, faithful to the sources. Another prominent personality, +Richard Stallman, of the Free Software Foundation, is prone to dressing as his +alter-ego, St. IGNUcius, patron saint of the church of EMACS—a church with no +god, but intense devotion to a baroque text-processing program of undeniable, +nigh-miraculous power.~{ See http://www.stallman.org/saint.html (accessed 5 +February 2005) and http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/religion/ (accessed 5 +February 2005). On EMACS, see chapter 6. }~ +={ EMACS (text editor) ; + Stallman, Richard +} + +Often the appeal of Reformation-era rhetoric comes from a kind of indictment of +the present: despite all this high tech, super-fabulous computronic +wonderfulness, we are no less feudal, no less violent, no less arbitrary and +undemocratic; which is to say, geeks have progressed, have seen the light and +the way, but the rest of society—and especially management and marketing—have +not. In this sense, Reformation allegories are stories of how "things never +change." + +But the most compelling use of the Protestant Reformation as usable past comes +in the more detailed understandings geeks have of the political economy of +information technology. The allegorization of the Catholic Church with +Microsoft, for instance, is a frequent component, as in this brief message +regarding start-up key combinations in the Be operating system: "These secret +handshakes are intended to reinforce a cabalistic high priesthood and should +not have been disclosed to the laity. Forget you ever saw this post and go by +[sic] something from Microsoft."~{ Message-ID: +6ms27l$6e1@bgtnsc01.worldnet.att.net. In one very humorous case the comparison +is literalized "Microsoft acquires Catholic Church" (Message-ID: +gaijin-870804300-dragonwing@sec.lia.net). }~ +={ Microsoft : + as Catholic Church +1 ; + usable pasts +} + +More generally, large corporations like IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft are made to +stand in for Catholicism, while bureaucratic congresses and parliaments with +their lobbyists take on the role of absolutist monarchs and their cronies. +Geeks can then see themselves as fighting to uphold Christianity (true +capitalism) against the church (corporations) and to be reforming a way of life +that is corrupted by church and monarchs, instead of overthrowing through +revolution a system they believe to be flawed. There is a historically and +technically specific component of this political economy in which it is in the +interest of corporations like IBM and Microsoft to keep users "locked as +securely to Big Blue as an manacled wretch in a medieval dungeon."~{ Paul +Fusco, "The Gospel According to Joy," New York Times, 27 March 1988, Sunday +Magazine, 28. }~ +={ International Business Machines (IBM) } + +Such stories appeal because they bypass the language of modern American +politics (liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican) in which there are only +two sides to any issue. They also bypass an ,{[pg 71]}, argument between +capitalism and socialism, in which if you are not pro-capitalism you must be a +communist. They are stories that allow the more pragmatist of the geeks to +engage in intervention and reformation, rather than revolution. Though I’ve +rarely heard it articulated so bluntly, the allegory often implies that one +must "save capitalism from the capitalists," a sentiment that implies at least +some kind of human control over capitalism. +={ control, relationship to power ; + power, relationship to control ; + Reformation vs. revolution +} + +In fact, the allegorical use of the Reformation and the church generates all +kinds of clever comparisons. A typical description of such comparisons might go +like this: the Catholic Church stands in for large, publicly traded +corporations, especially those controlling large amounts of intellectual +property (the granting of which might roughly be equated with the ceremonies of +communion and confession) for which they depend on the assistance and support +of national governments. Naturally, it is the storied excesses of the +church—indulgences, liturgical complexity, ritualistic ceremony, and +corruption—which make for easy allegory. Modern corporations can be figured as +a small, elite papal body with theologians (executives and their lawyers, +boards of directors and their lawyers), who command a much larger clergy +(employees), who serve a laity (consumers) largely imagined to be sinful +(underspending on music and movies—indeed, even "stealing" them) and thus in +need of elaborate and ritualistic cleansing (advertising and lawsuits) by the +church. Access to grace (the American Dream) is mediated only by the church and +is given form through the holy acts of shopping and home improvement. The +executives preach messages of damnation to the government, messages most +government officials are all too willing to hear: do not tamper with our market +share, do not affect our pricing, do not limit our ability to expand these +markets. The executives also offer unaccountable promises of salvation in the +guise of deregulation and the American version of "reform"—the demolition of +state and national social services. Government officials in turn have developed +their own "divine right of kings," which justifies certain forms of +manipulation (once called "elections") of succession. Indulgences are sold left +and right by lobbyists or industry associations, and the decrees of the papacy +evidence little but full disconnection from the miserable everyday existence of +the flock. + +In fact, it is remarkable how easy such comparisons become the more details of +the political economy of information one learns. But ,{[pg 72]}, allegories of +the Reformation and clerical power can lead easily to cynicism, which should +perhaps be read in this instance as evidence of political disenfranchisement, +rather than a lapse in faith. And yet the usable pasts of these +reformation-minded modern monks and priests crop up regularly not only because +they provide relief from technical chatter but because they explain a +political, technical, legal situation that does not have ready-to-narrate +stories. Geeks live in a world finely controlled by corporate organizations, +mass media, marketing departments, and lobbyists, yet they share a profound +distrust of government regulation—they need another set of just-so stories to +make sense of it. The standard unusable pasts of the freeing of markets, the +inevitability of capitalism and democracy, or more lately, the necessity of +security don’t do justice to their experience. + +Allegories of Reformation are stories that make sense of the political economy +of information. But they also have a more precise use: to make sense of the +distinction between power and control. Because geeks are "closer to the +machine" than the rest of the laity, one might reasonably expect them to be the +ones in power. This is clearly not the case, however, and it is the +frustrations and mysteries by which states, corporations, and individuals +manipulate technical details in order to shift power that often earns the +deepest ire of geeks. Control, therefore, includes the detailed methods and +actual practices by which corporations, government agencies, or individuals +attempt to manipulate people (or enroll them to manipulate themselves and +others) into making technical choices that serve power, rather than +rationality, liberty, elegance, or any other geekly concern. +={ control, relationship to power } + +Consider the subject of evil. During my conversations with Sean Doyle in the +late 1990s, as well as with a number of other geeks, the term evil was +regularly used to refer to some kind of design or technical problem. I asked +Sean what he meant. +={ Doyle, Sean +6 ; + evil +6 +} + +!_ SD: +[Evil is] just a term I use to say that something’s wrong, but usually it means +something is wrong on purpose, there was agency behind it. I can’t remember +[the example you gave] but I think it may have been some GE equipment, where it +has this default where it likes to send things in its own private format rather +than in DICOM [the radiology industry standard for digital images], if you give +it a choice. I don’t know why they would have done something like that, ,{[pg +73]}, it doesn’t solve any backward compatibility problem, it’s really just an +exclusionary sort of thing. So I guess there’s Evil like that. . . . + +!_ CK: +one of the other examples that you had . . . was something with Internet +Explorer 3.0? +={ Microsoft : + Internet Explorer +} + +!_ SD: +Yes, oh yes, there are so many things with IE3 that are completely Evil. Like +here’s one of them: in the http protocol there’s a thing called the "user agent +field" where a browser announces to the server who it is. If you look at IE, it +announces that it is Mozilla, which is the [code-name for] Netscape. Why did +they do this? Well because a lot of the web servers were sending out certain +code that said, if it were Mozilla they would serve the stuff down, [if not] +they would send out something very simple or stupid that would look very ugly. +But it turned out that [IE3, or maybe IE2] didn’t support things when it first +came out. Like, I don’t think they supported tables, and later on, their +versions of Javascript were so different that there was no way it was +compatible—it just added tremendous complexity. It was just a way of pissing on +the Internet and saying there’s no law that says we have to follow these +Internet standards. We can do as we damn well please, and we’re so big that you +can’t stop us. So I view it as Evil in that way. I mean they obviously have the +talent to do it. They obviously have the resources to do it. They’ve obviously +done the work, it’s just that they’ll have this little twitch where they won’t +support a certain MIME type or they’ll support some things differently than +others. +={ Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) ; + Mozilla ; + standards : + Internet +} + +!_ CK: +But these kinds of incompatibility issues can happen as a result of a lack of +communication or coordination, which might involve agency at some level, right? + +!_ SD: +Well, I think of that more as Stupidity than Evil [laughter]. No, Evil is when +there is an opportunity to do something, and an understanding that there is an +opportunity to, and resources and all that—and then you do something just to +spite the other person. You know I’m sure it’s like in messy divorces, where +you would rather sell the property at half its value rather than have it go to +the other person. + +Sean relates control to power by casting the decisions of a large corporation +in a moral light. Although the specific allegory of the Protestant Reformation +does not operate here, the details do. Microsoft’s decision to manipulate +Internet Explorer’s behavior stems not from a lack of technical sophistication, +nor is it an "accident" of ,{[pg 74]}, complexity, according to Sean, but is a +deliberate assertion of economic and political power to corrupt the very +details by which software has been created and standardized and is expected to +function. The clear goal of this activity is conversion, the expansion of +Microsoft’s flock through a detailed control of the beliefs and practices +(browsers and functionality) of computer users. Calling Microsoft "Evil" in +this way has much the same meaning as questioning the Catholic Church’s use of +ritual, ceremony, literacy, and history—the details of the "implementation" of +religion, so to speak. +={ Microsoft : + as Catholic Church +9 | Internet Explorer ; + power, relationship to control : + see also reorientation of power and knowledge +} + +Or, in the terms of the Protestant Reformation itself, the practices of +conversion as well as those of liberation, learning, and self-help are central +to the story. It is not an accident that many historians of the Reformation +themselves draw attention to the promises of liberation through reformation +"information technologies."~{ See, for example, Matheson, The Imaginative World +of the Reformation. There is rigorous debate about the relation of print, +religion, and capitalism: one locus classicus is Eisenstein’s The Printing +Press as an Agent of Change, which was inspired by McLuhan, The Gutenberg +Galaxy. See also Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England and +The Christian’s ABCs; Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent, chaps. +1-3. }~ Colloquial (and often academic) assertions that the printing press was +technologically necessary or sufficient to bring the Reformation about appear +constantly as a parable of this new age of information. Often the printing +press is the only "technological" cause considered, but scholars of the real, +historical Reformation also pay close attention to the fact of widespread +literacy, to circulating devotional pamphlets, catechisms, and theological +tracts, as well as to the range of transformations of political and legal +relationships that occurred simultaneously with the introduction of the +printing press. + +✠  © + +One final way to demonstrate the effectiveness of these allegories—their +ability to work on the minds of geeks—is to demonstrate how they have started +to work on me, to demonstrate how much of a geek I have become—a form of +participant allegorization, so to speak. The longer one considers the problems +that make up the contemporary political economy of information technology that +geeks inhabit, the more likely it is that these allegories will start to +present themselves almost automatically—as, for instance, when I read The Story +of A, a delightful book having nothing to do with geeks, a book about literacy +in early America. The author, Patricia Crain, explains that the Christ’s cross +(see above) was often used in the creation of hornbooks or battledores, small +leather-backed paddles inscribed with the Lord’s Prayer and the alphabet, which +were used ,{[pg 75]}, to teach children their ABCs from as early as the +fifteenth century until as late as the nineteenth: "In its early print +manifestations, the pedagogical alphabet is headed not by the letter A but by +the ‘Christ’s Cross’: ✠. . . . Because the alphabet is associated with Catholic +Iconography, as if the two sets of signs were really part of one semiological +system, one of the struggles of the Reformation would be to wrest the alphabet +away from the Catholic Church."~{ Crain, The Story of A, 16-17. }~ +={ Crain, Patricia +1 } + +Here, allegorically, the Catholic Church’s control of the alphabet (like +Microsoft’s programming of Internet Explorer to blur public standards for the +Internet) is not simply ideological; it is not just a fantasy of origin or +ownership planted in the fallow mental soil of believers, but in fact a very +specific, very nonsubjective, and very media-specific normative tool of +control. Crain explains further: "Today ✠ represents the imprimatur of the +Catholic Church on copyright pages. In its connection to the early modern +alphabet as well, this cross carries an imprimatur or licensing effect. This +‘let it be printed,’ however, is directed not to the artisan printer but to the +mind and memory of the young scholar. . . . Like modern copyright, the cross +authorizes the existence of the alphabet and associates the letters with sacred +authorship, especially since another long-lived function of ✠ in liturgical +missals is to mark gospel passages. The symbol both conveys information and +generates ritual behavior."~{ Ibid., 20-21. }~ +={ Copyright +2 ; + Microsoft : + Internet Explorer ; + authorship ; + standards : + Internet +} + +% Internet Standards added + +The © today carries as much if not more power, both ideologically and legally, +as the cross of the Catholic church. It is the very symbol of authorship, even +though in origin and in function it governs only ownership and rights. Magical +thinking about copyright abounds, but one important function of the symbol ©, +if not its legal implications, is to achieve the same thing as the Christ’s +cross: to associate in the mind of the reader the ownership of a particular +text (or in this case, piece of software) with a particular organization or +person. Furthermore, even though the symbol is an artifact of national and +international law, it creates an association not between a text and the state +or government, but between a text and particular corporations, publishers, +printers, or authors. + +Like the Christ’s cross, the copyright symbol carries both a licensing effect +(exclusive, limited or nonexclusive) and an imprimatur on the minds of people: +"let it be imprinted in memory" that this is the work of such and such an +author and that this is the property of such and such a corporation. +={ intellectual property } + +% ,{[pg 76]}, + +Without the allegory of the Protestant Reformation, the only available +narrative for such evil—whether it be the behavior of Microsoft or of some +other corporation—is that corporations are "competing in the marketplace +according to the rules of capitalism" and thus when geeks decry such behavior, +it’s just sour grapes. If corporations are not breaking any laws, why shouldn’t +they be allowed to achieve control in this manner? In this narrative there is +no room for a moral evaluation of competition—anything goes, it would seem. +Claiming for Microsoft that it is simply playing by the rules of capitalism +puts everyone else into either the competitor box or the noncompetitor box (the +state and other noncompetitive organizations). Using the allegory of the +Protestant Reformation, on the other hand, gives geeks a way to make sense of +an unequal distribution among competing powers—between large and small +corporations, and between market power and the details of control. It provides +an alternate imagination against which to judge the technically and legally +specific actions that corporations and individuals take, and to imagine forms +of justified action in return. +={ evil +1 } + +Without such an allegory, geeks who oppose Microsoft are generally forced into +the position of being anticapitalist or are forced to adopt the stance that all +standards should be publicly generated and controlled, a position few wish to +take. Indeed, many geeks would prefer a different kind of imaginary +altogether—a recursive public, perhaps. Instead of an infrastructure subject to +unequal distributions of power and shot through with "evil" distortions of +technical control, there is, as geeks see it, the possibility for a +"self-leveling" level playing field, an autotelic system of rules, both +technical and legal, by which all participants are expected to compete equally. +Even if it remains an imaginary, the allegory of the Protestant Reformation +makes sense of (gives order to) the political economy of the contemporary +information-technology world and allows geeks to conceive of their interests +and actions according to a narrative of reformation, rather than one of +revolution or submission. In the Reformation the interpretation or truth of +Christian teaching was not primarily in question: it was not a doctrinal +revolution, but a bureaucratic one. Likewise, geeks do not question the +rightness of networks, software, or protocols and standards, nor are they +against capitalism or intellectual property, but they do wish to maintain a +space for critique and the moral evaluation of contemporary capitalism and +competition. +={ intellectual property ; + infrastructure +4 ; + public ; + recursive public ; + standards : + Internet +} + +% ,{[pg 77]}, + +2~ Polymaths and Transhumanists +={ Polymaths : + transhumanists vs. +55 ; + Transhumanism : + polymaths vs. +55 +} + +Usable pasts articulate the conjunction of "operating systems and social +systems," giving narrative form to imaginations of moral and technical order. +To say that there are no ready-to-narrate stories about contemporary political +economy means only that the standard colloquial explanations of the state of +the modern world do not do justice to the kinds of moral and technical +imaginations of order that geeks possess by virtue of their practices. Geeks +live in, and build, one kind of world—a world of software, networks, and +infrastructures—but they are often confronted with stories and explanations +that simply don’t match up with their experience, whether in newspapers and on +television, or among nongeek friends. To many geeks, proselytization seems an +obvious route: why not help friends and neighbors to understand the hidden +world of networks and software, since, they are quite certain, it will come to +structure their lives as well? +={ moral and technical order ; + usable pasts +} + +Geeks gather through the Internet and, like a self-governing people, possess +nascent ideas of independence, contract, and constitution by which they wish to +govern themselves and resist governance by others.~{ At a populist level, this +was captured by John Perry Barlow’s "Declaration of Independence of the +Internet," http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. }~ Conventional +political philosophies like libertarianism, anarchism, and (neo)liberalism only +partially capture these social imaginaries precisely because they make no +reference to the operating systems, software, and networks within which geeks +live, work, and in turn seek to build and extend. + +Geeks live in specific ways in time and space. They are not just users of +technology, or a "network society," or a "virtual community," but embodied and +imagining actors whose affinity for one another is enabled in new ways by the +tools and technologies they have such deep affective connections to. They live +in this-network-here, a historically unique form grounded in particular social, +moral, national, and historical specificities which nonetheless relates to +generalities such as progress, technology, infrastructure, and liberty. Geeks +are by no means of one mind about such generalities though, and they often have +highly developed means of thinking about them. +={ affinity (of geeks) ; + progress +} + +Foucault’s article "What Is Enlightenment?" captures part of this problematic. +For Foucault, Kant’s understanding of modernity was an attempt to rethink the +relationship between the passage of historical time and the subjective +relationship that individuals have toward it. +={ enlightenment +3 ; + Foucault, Michel +3 ; + Kant, Immanuel +1 ; + modernity +2 +} + +% ,{[pg 78]}, + +_1 Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity +as an attitude rather than as a period of history. And by "attitude," I mean a +mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain +people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and +behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and +presents itself as a task. No doubt a bit like what the Greeks called an ethos. +And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the "modern era" from the +"premodern" or "postmodern," I think it would be more useful to try to find out +how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself +struggling with attitudes of "countermodernity."~{ Foucault, "What Is +Enlightenment," 309-10. }~ + +In thinking through how geeks understand the present, the past, and the future, +I pose the question of whether they are "modern" in this sense. Foucault makes +use of Baudelaire as his foil for explaining in what the attitude of modernity +consists: "For [Baudelaire,] being modern . . . consists in recapturing +something eternal that is not beyond the present, or behind it, but within +it."~{ Ibid., 310. }~ He suggests that Baudelaire’s understanding of modernity +is "an attitude that makes it possible to grasp the ‘heroic’ aspect of the +present moment . . . the will to ‘heroize’ the present."~{ Ibid., 310. }~ +Heroic here means something like redescribing the seemingly fleeting events of +the present in terms that conjure forth the universal or eternal character that +animates them. In Foucault’s channeling of Baudelaire such an attitude is +incommensurable with one that sees in the passage of the present into the +future some version of autonomous progress (whether absolute spirit or decadent +degeneration), and the tag he uses for this is "you have no right to despise +the present." To be modern is to confront the present as a problem that can be +transformed by human action, not as an inevitable outcome of processes beyond +the scope of individual or collective human control, that is, "attitudes of +counter-modernity." When geeks tell stories of the past to make sense of the +future, it is often precisely in order to "heroize" the present in this +sense—but not all geeks do so. Within the spectrum from polymath to +transhumanist, there are attitudes of both modernity and countermodernity. +={ geeks : + as moderns +} + +% ={Progress} + +The questions I raise here are also those of politics in a classical sense: Are +the geeks I discuss bound by an attitude toward the present that concerns such +things as the relationship of the public to the private and the social (à la +Hannah Arendt), the relationship ,{[pg 79]}, of economics to liberty (à la John +Stuart Mill and John Dewey), or the possibilities for rational organization of +society through the application of scientific knowledge (à la Friedrich Hayek +or Foucault)? Are geeks "enlightened"? Are they Enlightenment rationalists? +What might this mean so long after the Enlightenment and its vigorous, +wide-ranging critiques? How is their enlightenment related to the technical and +infrastructural commitments they have made? Or, to put it differently, what +makes enlightenment newly necessary now, in the milieu of the Internet, Free +Software, and recursive publics? What kinds of relationships become apparent +when one asks how these geeks relate their own conscious appreciation of the +history and politics of their time to their everyday practices and commitments? +Do geeks despise the present? +={ Dewey, John ; + Mill, John Stuart ; + Hayek, Friedrich ; + time : + technical progress and +} + +Polymaths and transhumanists speak differently about concepts like technology, +infrastructure, networks, and software, and they have different ideas about +their temporality and relationship to progress and liberty. Some geeks see +technology as one kind of intervention into a constituted field of +organizations, money, politics, and people. Some see it as an autonomous force +made up of humans and impersonal forces of evolution and complexity. Different +geeks speak about the role of technology and its relationship to the present +and future in different ways, and how they understand this relationship is +related to their own rich understandings of the complex technical and political +environment they live and work in. + +!_ Polymaths +Polymathy is "avowed dilettantism," not extreme intelligence. It results from a +curiosity that seems to grip a remarkable number of people who spend their time +on the Internet and from the basic necessity of being able to evaluate and +incorporate sometimes quite disparate fields of knowledge in order to build +workable software. Polymathy inevitably emerges in the context of large +software and networking projects; it is a creature of constraints, a process +bootstrapped by the complex sediment of technologies, businesses, people, +money, and plans. It might also be posed in the negative: bad software design +is often the result of not enough avowed dilettantism. Polymaths must know a +very large and wide range of things in order to intervene in an existing +distribution of machines, people, practices, and places. They must have a +detailed sense of the present, and the project of the present, in order to +imagine how the future might be different. +={ software development +3 } + +% ,{[pg 80]}, + +My favorite polymath is Sean Doyle. Sean built the first versions of a piece of +software that forms the centerpiece of the radiological-image-management +company Amicas. In order to build it Sean learned the following: Java, to +program it; the mathematics of wavelets, to encode the images; the workflow of +hospital radiologists and the manner in which they make diagnoses from images, +to make the interface usable; several incompatible databases and the SQL +database language, to build the archive and repository; and manual after manual +of technical standards, the largest and most frightening of which was the +Digital Imaging and Communication (DICOM) standard for radiological images. +Sean also read Science and Nature regularly, looking for inspiration about +interface design; he read books and articles about imaging very small things +(mosquito knees), very large things (galaxies and interstellar dust), very old +things (fossils), and very pretty things (butterfly-wing patterns as a function +of developmental pathways). Sean also introduced me to Tibetan food, to Jan +Svankmeyer films, to Open Source Software, to cladistics and paleoherpetology, +to Disney’s scorched-earth policy with respect to culture, and to many other +awesome things. +={ Amicas (corporation) +17 ; + Doyle, Sean +3 ; + programming +3 ; + standards +} + +Sean is clearly an unusual character, but not that unusual. Over the years I +have met many people with a similar range and depth of knowledge (though rarely +with Sean’s humility, which does set him apart). Polymathy is an occupational +hazard for geeks. There is no sense in which a good programmer, software +architect, or information architect simply specializes in code. Specialization +is seen not as an end in itself, but rather as a kind of technical prerequisite +before other work—the real work—can be accomplished. The real work is the +design, the process of inserting usable software into a completely unfamiliar +amalgamation of people, organizations, machines, and practices. Design is hard +work, whereas the technical stuff—like choosing the right language or adhering +to a standard or finding a ready-made piece of code to plug in somewhere—is +not. +={ design +2 } + +It is possible for Internet geeks and software architects to think this way in +part due to the fact that so many of the technical issues they face are both +extremely well defined and very easy to address with a quick search and +download. It is easy to be an avowed dilettante in the age of mailing lists, +newsgroups, and online scientific publishing. I myself have learned whole +swaths of technical practices in this manner, but I have designed no technology +of note. ,{[pg 81]}, + +Sean’s partner in Amicas, Adrian Gropper, also fits the bill of polymath, +though he is not a programmer. Adrian, a physician and a graduate of MIT’s +engineering program, might be called a "high-functioning polymath." He scans +the horizon of technical and scientific accomplishments, looking for ways to +incorporate them into his vision of medical technology qua intervention. Sean +mockingly calls these "delusions," but both agree that Amicas would be nowhere +without them. Adrian and Sean exemplify how the meanings of technology, +intervention, design, and infrastructure are understood by polymaths as a +particular form of pragmatic intervention, a progress achieved through +deliberate, piecemeal re-formation of existing systems. As Adrian comments: +={ entrepreneurialism +8 ; + Gropper, Adrian +8 ; + intervention, technology as +42 +} + +_1 I firmly believe that in the long run the only way you can save money and +improve healthcare is to add technology. I believe that more strongly than I +believe, for instance, that if people invent better pesticides they’ll be able +to grow more rice, and it’s for the universal good of the world to be able to +support more people. I have some doubt as to whether I support people doing +genetic engineering of crops and pesticides as being "to the good." But I do, +however, believe that healthcare is different in that in the long run you can +impact both the cost and quality of healthcare by adding technology. And you +can call that a religious belief if you want, it’s not rational. But I guess +what I’m willing to say is that traditional healthcare that’s not +technology-based has pretty much run out of steam.~{ Adrian Gropper, interview +by author, 28 November 1998. }~ +={ healthcare : + information technology in +7 ; + religion +} + +In this conversation, the "technological" is restricted to the novel things +that can make healthcare less costly (i.e., cost-reducing, not cost-cutting), +ease suffering, or extend life. Certain kinds of technological intervention are +either superfluous or even pointless, and Adrian can’t quite identify this +"class"—it isn’t "technology" in general, but it includes some kinds of things +that are technological. What is more important is that technology does not +solve anything by itself; it does not obviate the political problems of +healthcare rationing: "Now, however, you get this other problem, which is that +the way that healthcare is rationed is through the fear of pain, financial pain +to some extent, but physical pain; so if you have a technology that, for +instance, makes it relatively painless to fix . . . I guess, bluntly put, it’s +cheaper to let people die in most cases, and that’s just undeniable. So what I +find interesting in all of this, is that most people who are dealing with the +politics of healthcare ,{[pg 82]}, resource management don’t want to have this +discussion, nobody wants to talk about this, the doctors don’t want to talk +about it, because it’s too depressing to talk about the value of. . . . And +they don’t really have a mandate to talk about technology."~{ Adrian Gropper, +interview by author, 28 November 1998. }~ + +Adrian’s self-defined role in this arena is as a nonpracticing physician who is +also an engineer and an entrepreneur—hence, his polymathy has emerged from his +attempts to translate between doctors, engineers, and businesspeople. His goal +is twofold: first, create technologies that save money and improve the +allocation of healthcare (and the great dream of telemedicine concerns +precisely this goal: the reallocation of the most valuable asset, individuals +and their expertise); second, to raise the level of discussion in the +business-cum-medical world about the role of technology in managing healthcare +resources. Polymathy is essential, since Adrian’s twofold mission requires +understanding the language and lives of at least three distinct groups who work +elbow-to-elbow in healthcare: engineers and software architects; doctors and +nurses; and businessmen. +={ healthcare : + allocation of +5 +} + +Technology has two different meanings according to Adrian’s two goals: in the +first case technology refers to the intervention by means of new technologies +(from software, to materials, to electronics, to pharmaceuticals) in specific +healthcare situations wherein high costs or limited access to care can be +affected. Sometimes technology is allocated, sometimes it does the allocating. +Adrian’s goal is to match his knowledge of state-of-the-art technology—in +particular, Internet technology—with a specific healthcare situation and +thereby effect a reorganization of practices, people, tools, and information. +The tool Amicas created was distinguished by its clever use of compression, +Internet standards, and cheap storage media to compete with much larger, more +expensive, much more entrenched "legacy" and "turnkey" systems. Whether Amicas +invented something "new" is less interesting than the nature of this +intervention into an existing milieu. This intervention is what Adrian calls +"technology." For Amicas, the relevant technology—the important +intervention—was the Internet, which Amicas conceived as a tool for changing +the nature of the way healthcare was organized. Their goal was to replace the +infrastructure of the hospital radiology department (and potentially the other +departments as well) with the Internet. Amicas was able to confront and reform +the practices of powerful, entrenched entities, from the administration of +large ,{[pg 83]}, hospitals to their corporate bedfellows, like HBOC, Agfa, +Siemens, and GE. +={ technology : + meanings of +7 +} + +With regard to raising the level of discussion, however, technology refers to a +kind of political-rhetorical argument: technology does not save the world (nor +does it destroy it); it only saves lives—and it does this only when one makes +particular decisions about its allocation. Or, put differently, the means is +technology, but the ends are still where the action is at. Thus, the hype +surrounding information technology in healthcare is horrifying to Adrian: +promises precede technologies, and the promises suggest that the means can +replace the ends. Large corporations that promise "technology," but offer no +real hard interventions (Adrian’s first meaning of technology) that can be +concretely demonstrated to reduce costs or improve allocation are simply a +waste of resources. Such companies are doubly frustrating because they use +"technology" as a blinder that allows people to not think about the hard +problems (the ends) of allocation, equity, management, and organization; that +is, they treat "technology" (the means) as if it were a solution as such. + +Adrian routinely analyzes the rhetorical and practical uses of technology in +healthcare with this kind of subtlety; clearly, such subtlety of thought is +rare, and it sets Adrian apart as someone who understands that intervention +into, and reform of, modern organizations and styles of thought has to happen +through reformation—through the clever use of technology by people who +understand it intimately—not through revolution. Reformation through technical +innovation is opposed here to control through the consolidation of money and +power. +={ reformation vs. revolution } + +In my observations, Adrian always made a point of making the technology—the +software tools and picture-archiving system—easily accessible, easily +demonstrable to customers. When talking to hospital purchasers, he often said +something like "I can show you the software, and I can tell you the price, and +I can demonstrate the problem it will solve." In contrast, however, an array of +enormous corporations with salesmen and women (usually called consultants) were +probably saying something more like "Your hospital needs more technology, our +corporation is big and stable—give us this much money and we will solve your +problem." For Adrian, the decision to "hold hands," as he put it, with the +comfortably large corporation was irrational if the hospital could instead +purchase a specific technology that did a specific thing, for a real price. +,{[pg 84]}, + +Adrian’s reflections on technology are also reflections on the nature of +progress. Progress is limited intervention structured by goals that are not set +by the technology itself, even if entrepreneurial activity is specifically +focused on finding new uses and new ideas for new technologies. But discussions +about healthcare allocation—which Adrian sees as a problem amenable to certain +kinds of technical solutions—are instead structured as if technology did not +matter to the nature of the ends. It is a point Adrian resists: "I firmly +believe that in the long run the only way you can save money and improve +healthcare is to add technology." + +Sean is similarly frustrated by the homogenization of the concept of +technology, especially when it is used to suggest, for instance, that hospitals +"lag behind" other industries with regard to computerization, a complaint +usually made in order to either instigate investment or explain failures. Sean +first objects to such a homogenous notion of "technological." +={ Doyle, Sean +5 ; + Technology : + lag +2 ; + time : + technical progress and +2 ; + lag, technological +2 +} + +_1 I actually have no idea what that means, that it’s lagging behind. Because +certainly in many ways in terms of image processing or some very high-tech +things it’s probably way ahead. And if that means what’s on people’s desktops, +ever since 19-maybe-84 or so when I arrived at MGH [Massachusetts General +Hospital] there’s been a computer on pretty much everyone’s desktop. . . . It +seems like most hospitals that I have been to seem to have a serious commitment +to networks and automation, etcetera. . . . I don’t know about a lot of +manufacturing industries—they might have computer consoles there, but it’s a +different sort of animal. Farms probably lag really far behind, I won’t even +talk about amusement parks. In some sense, hospitals are very complicated +little communities, and so to say that this thing as a whole is lagging behind +doesn’t make much sense.~{ Sean Doyle, interview by author, 30 March 1999. }~ + +He also objects to the notion that such a lag results in failures caused by +technology, rather than by something like incompetence or bad management. In +fact, it might be fair to say that, for the polymath, sometimes technology +actually dissolves. Its boundaries are not easily drawn, nor are its uses, nor +are its purported "unintended consequences." On one side there are rules, +regulations, protocols, standards, norms, and forms of behavior; on the other +there are organizational structures, business plans and logic, human skills, +and other machines. This complex milieu requires reform from within: it cannot +be replaced wholesale; it cannot leap-frog ,{[pg 85]}, other industries in +terms of computerization, as intervention is always local and strategic; and it +involves a more complex relationship to the project of the present than simply +"lagging behind" or "leaping ahead." + +Polymathy—inasmuch as it is a polymathy of the lived experience of the +necessity for multiple expertise to suit a situation—turns people into +pragmatists. Technology is never simply a solution to a problem, but always +part of a series of factors. The polymath, unlike the technophobe, can see when +technology matters and when it doesn’t. The polymath has a very this-worldly +approach to technology: there is neither mystery nor promise, only human +ingenuity and error. In this manner, polymaths might better be described as +Feyerabendians than as pragmatists (and, indeed, Sean turned out to be an avid +reader of Feyerabend). The polymath feels there is no single method by which +technology works its magic: it is highly dependent on rules, on patterned +actions, and on the observation of contingent and contextual factors. +Intervention into this already instituted field of people, machines, tools, +desires, and beliefs requires a kind of scientific-technical genius, but it is +hardly single, or even autonomous. This version of pragmatism is, as Feyerabend +sometimes refers to it, simply a kind of awareness: of standards, of rules, of +history, of possibility.~{ Feyerabend, Against Method, 215-25. }~ The polymath +thus does not allow himself or herself to despise the present, but insists on +both reflecting on it and intervening in it. +={ Feyerabend, Paul +1 ; + pragmatism +} + +Sean and Adrian are avowedly scientific and technical people; like Feyerabend, +they assume that their interlocutors believe in good science and the benefits +of progress. They have little patience for Luddites, for new-agers, for +religious intolerance, or for any other non-Enlightenment-derived attitude. +They do not despise the present, because they have a well-developed sense of +how provisional the conventions of modern technology and business are. Very +little is sacred, and rules, when they exist, are fragile. Breaking them +pointlessly is immodest, but innovation is often itself seen as a way of +transforming a set of accepted rules or practices to other ends. Progress is +limited intervention.~{ One of the ways Adrian discusses innovation is via the +argument of the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s The +Innovator’s Dilemma. It describes "sustaining vs. disruptive" technologies as +less an issue of how technologies work or what they are made of, and more an +issue of how their success and performance are measured. See Adrian Gropper, +"The Internet as a Disruptive Technology," Imaging Economics, December 2001, +http://www.imagingeconomics.com/library/200112-10.asp (accessed 19 September +2006). }~ +={ enlightenment +1 } + +How ironic, and troubling, then, to realize that Sean’s and Adrian’s company +would eventually become the kind of thing they started Amicas in order to +reform. Outside of the limited intervention, certain kinds of momentum seem +irresistible: the demand for investment and funding rounds, the need for +"professional management," ,{[pg 86]}, and the inertia of already streamlined +and highly conservative purchasing practices in healthcare. For Sean and +Adrian, Amicas became a failure in its success. Nonetheless, they remain +resolutely modern polymaths: they do not despise the present. As described in +Kant’s "What Is Enlightenment?" the duty of the citizen is broken into public +and private: on the one hand, a duty to carry out the responsibilities of an +office; on the other, a duty to offer criticism where criticism is due, as a +"scholar" in a reading public. Sean’s and Adrian’s endeavor, in the form of a +private start-up company, might well be understood as the expression of the +scholar’s duty to offer criticism, through the creation of a particular kind of +technical critique of an existing (and by their assessment) ethically suspect +healthcare system. The mixture of private capital, public institutions, +citizenship, and technology, however, is something Kant could not have +known—and Sean and Adrian’s technical pursuits must be understood as something +more: a kind of modern civic duty, in the service of liberty and responding to +the particularities of contemporary technical life.~{ On kinds of civic duty, +see Fortun and Fortun, "Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in +Contemporary U.S. Toxicology." }~ +={ Kant, Immanuel } + +!_ Transhumanists +Polymathy is born of practical and pragmatic engagement with specific +situations, and in some ways is demanded by such exigencies. Opposite +polymathy, however, and leaning more toward a concern with the whole, with +totality and the universal, are attitudes that I refer to by the label +transhumanism, which concerns the mode of belief in the Timeline of Technical +Progress.~{ There is, in fact, a very specific group of people called +transhumanists, about whom I will say very little. I invoke the label here +because I think certain aspects of transhumanism are present across the +spectrum of engineers, scientists, and geeks. }~ +={ time : + technical progress and +20 ; + futurology +20 +} + +Transhumanism, the movement and the philosophy, focuses on the power of +technology to transcend the limitations of the human body as currently evolved. +Subscribers believe—but already this is the wrong word—in the possibility of +downloading consciousness onto silicon, of cryobiological suspension, of the +near emergence of strong artificial intelligence and of various other forms of +technical augmentation of the human body for the purposes of achieving +immortality—or at least, much more life.~{ See the World Transhumanist +Association, http://transhumanism.org/ (accessed 1 December 2003) or the +Extropy Institute, http://www.extropy.org/ (accessed 1 December 2003). See also +Doyle, Wetwares, and Battaglia, "For Those Who Are Not Afraid of the Future," +for a sidelong glance. }~ +={ artificial intelligence +6 } + +Various groups could be reasonably included under this label. There are the +most ardent purveyors of the vision, the Extropians; there are a broad class of +people who call themselves transhumanists; there is a French-Canadian subclass, +the Raelians, who are more an alien-worshiping cult than a strictly scientific +one and are bitterly denounced by the first two; there are also the variety of +cosmologists and engineers who do not formally consider themselves ,{[pg 87]}, +transhumanist, but whose beliefs participate in some way or another: Stephen +Hawking, Frank Tipler and John Barrow (famous for their anthropic cosmological +principle), Hans Moravic, Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and down the line through +those who embrace the cognitive sciences, the philosophy of artificial +intelligence, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and so forth. +={ Extropians ; + Raelians +} + +Historically speaking, the line of descent is diffuse. Teilhard de Chardin is +broadly influential, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not (depending on the +amount of mysticism allowed). A more generally recognized starting point is +Julian Huxley’s article "Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine.~{ Huxley, +New Bottles for New Wine, 13-18. }~ Huxley’s transhumanism, like Teilhard’s, +has a strange whiff of Nietzsche about it, though it tends much more strongly +in the direction of the evolutionary emergence of the superman than in the more +properly moral sense Nietzsche gave it. After Huxley, the notion of +transhumanism is too easily identified with eugenics, and it has become one of +a series of midcentury subcultural currents which finds expression largely in +small, non-mainstream places, from the libertarians to Esalen.~{ The computer +scientist Bill Joy wrote a long piece in Wired warning of the outcomes of +research conducted without ethical safeguards and the dangers of eugenics in +the past, "Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us," Wired 8.4 [April 2000], +http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html (accessed 27 June 2005). }~ +={ Huxley, Julian ; + Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre ; + transhumanism : + Julian Huxley and +} + +For many observers, transhumanists are a lunatic fringe, bounded on either side +by alien abductees and Ayn Rand-spouting objectivists. However, like so much of +the fringe, it merely represents in crystalline form attitudes that seem to +permeate discussions more broadly, whether as beliefs professed or as beliefs +attributed. Transhumanism, while probably anathema to most people, actually +reveals a very specific attitude toward technical innovation, technical +intervention, and political life that is widespread among technically adept +individuals. It is a belief that has everything to do also with the timeline of +progress and the role of technology in it. +={ progress +5 } + +The transhumanist understanding of technological progress can best be +understood through the sometimes serious and sometimes playful concept of the +"singularity," popularized by the science-fiction writer and mathematician +Vernor Vinge.~{ Vinge, "The Coming Technological Singularity." }~ The +"singularity" is the point at which the speed of technical progress is faster +than human comprehension of that progress (and, by implication, than human +control over the course). It is a kind of cave-man parable, perhaps most +beautifully rendered by Stanley Kubrik’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (in +particular, in the jump-cut early in the film that turns a hurled bone into a +spinning space station, recapitulating the remarkable adventure of technology +in two short seconds of an otherwise seemingly endless film). +={ singularity +9 ; + transhumanism : + singularity and +4 ; + time : + singularity and +4 ; + Vinge, Vernor +} + +% ,{[pg 88]}, + +{ 2bits_02_01-100.png }image ~[* Illustration © 2005 Ray Kurzweil. Modifications © 2007 by C. Kelty. Original work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PPTCountdowntoSingularityLog.jpg. ]~ + +In figure 1, on the left hand of the timeline, there is history, or rather, +there is a string of technological inventions (by which is implied that +previous inventions set the stage for later ones) spaced such that they produce +a logarithmic curve that can look very much like the doomsday population curves +that started to appear in the 1960s. Each invention is associated with a name +or sometimes a nation. Beyond the edge of the graph to the right side is the +future: history changes here from a series of inventions to an autonomous +self-inventing technology associated not with individual inventors but with a +complex system of evolutionary adaptation that includes technological as well +as biological forms. It is a future in which "humans" are no longer necessary +to the progress of science and technology: technology-as-extension-of-humans on +the left, a Borg-like autonomous technical intelligence on the right. The +fundamental ,{[pg 89]}, operation in constructing the "singularity" is the +"reasoned extrapolation" familiar to the "hard science fiction" writer or the +futurist. One takes present technology as the initial condition for future +possibilities and extrapolates based on the (haphazardly handled) evidence of +past technical speed-up and change. + +The position of the observer is always a bit uncertain, since he or she is +naturally projected at the highest (or lowest, depending on your orientation) +point of this curve, but one implication is clear: that the function or +necessity of human reflection on the present will disappear at the same time +that humans do, rendering enlightenment a quaint, but necessary, step on the +route to superrational, transhuman immortality. + +Strangely, the notion that technical progress has acceleration seems to precede +any sense of what the velocity of progress might mean in the first instance; +technology is presumed to exist in absolute time—from the Big Bang to the heat +death of the universe—and not in any relationship with human life or +consciousness. The singularity is always described from the point of view of a +god who is not God. The fact of technological speed-up is generally treated as +the most obvious thing in the world, reinforced by the constant refrain in the +media of the incredible pace of change in contemporary society. + +Why is the singularity important? Because it always implies that the absolute +fact of technical acceleration—this knowing glance into the future—should order +the kinds of interventions that occur in the present. It is not mute waiting or +eschatological certainty that governs this attitude; rather, it is a mode of +historical consciousness that privileges the inevitability of technological +progress over the inevitability of human power. Only by looking into the future +can one manipulate the present in a way that will be widely meaningful, an +attitude that could be expressed as something like "Those who do not learn from +the future are condemned to suffer in it." Since it is a philosophy based on +the success of human rationality and ingenuity, rationality and ingenuity are +still clearly essential in the future. They lead, however, to a kind of +posthuman state of constant technological becoming which is inconceivable to +the individual human mind—and can only be comprehended by a transcendental +intelligence that is not God. + +Such is a fair description of some strands of transhumanism, and the reason I +highlight them is to characterize the kinds of attitudes ,{[pg 90]}, toward +technology-as-intervention and the ideas of moral and technical order that +geeks can evince. On the far side of polymathy, geeks are too close to the +machine to see a big picture or to think about imponderable philosophical +issues; on the transhuman side, by contrast, one is constantly reassessing the +arcane details of everyday technical change with respect to a vision of the +whole—a vision of the evolution of technology and its relationship to the +humans that (for the time being) must create and attempt to channel it. +={ moral and technical order } + +My favorite transhumanist is Eugen Leitl (who is, in fact, an authentic +transhumanist and has been vice-chair of the World Transhumanist Association). +Eugen is Russian-born, lives in Munich, and once worked in a cryobiology +research lab. He is well versed in chemistry, nanotechnology, +artificial-intelligence (AI) research, computational- and network-complexity +research, artificial organs, cryobiology, materials engineering, and science +fiction. He writes, for example, +={ artificial intelligence ; + Leitl, Eugene +8 +} + +_1 If you consider AI handcoded by humans, yes. However, given considerable +computational resources (~cubic meter of computronium), and using suitable +start population, you can coevolve machine intelligence on a time scale of much +less than a year. After it achieves about a human level, it is potentially +capable of entering an autofeedback loop. Given that even autoassembly-grade +computronium is capable of running a human-grade intellect in a volume ranging +from a sugar cube to an orange at a speed ranging from 10^4 . . . 10^6 it is +easy to see that the autofeedback loop has explosive dynamics. + +_1 (I hope above is intelligible, I’ve been exposed to weird memes for far too +long).~{ Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 16 May 2000, +http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2410. }~ + +Eugen is also a polymath (and an autodidact to boot), but in the conventional +sense. Eugen’s polymathy is an avocational necessity: transhumanists need to +keep up with all advances in technology and science in order to better assess +what kinds of human-augmenting or human-obsolescing technologies are out there. +It is not for work in this world that the transhumanist expands his or her +knowledge, nor quite for the next, but for a "this world" yet to arrive. + +Eugen and I were introduced during the Napster debates of 2001, which seemed at +the time to be a knock-down, drag-out conflagration, but Eugen has been +involved in so many online flame wars that he probably experienced it as a mere +blip in an otherwise constant struggle with less-evolved intelligences like +mine. Nonetheless, ,{[pg 91]}, it was one of the more clarifying examples of +how geeks think, and think differently, about technology, infrastructure, +networks, and software. Transhumanism has no truck with old-fashioned humanism. +={ Napster } + +group{ + + > >From: Ramu Narayan . . . + > >I don’t like the + > >notion of technology as an unstoppable force with a will of its own that + > >has nothing to do with the needs of real people. + +}group + +_1 [Eugen Leitl:] Emergent large-scale behaviour is nothing new. How do you +intend to control individual behaviour of a large population of only partially +rational agents? They don’t come with too many convenient behaviour-modifying +hooks (pheromones as in social insects, but notice menarche-synch in females +sharing quarters), and for a good reason. The few hooks we have (mob, war, +politics, religion) have been notoriously abused, already. Analogous to +apoptosis, metaindividuals may function using processes deletorious[sic] to its +components (us).~{ Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 7 August +2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2932. }~ +={ gender } + +Eugen’s understanding of what "technological progress" means is sufficiently +complex to confound most of his interlocutors. For one surprising thing, it is +not exactly inevitable. The manner in which Leitl argues with people is usually +a kind of machine-gun prattle of coevolutionary, game-theoretic, cryptographic +sorites. Eugen piles on the scientific and transhumanist reasoning, and his +interlocutors slowly peel away from the discussion. But it isn’t craziness, +hype, or half-digested popular science—Eugen generally knows his stuff—it just +fits together in a way that almost no one else can quite grasp. Eugen sees the +large-scale adoption and proliferation of technologies (particularly +self-replicating molecular devices and evolutionary software algorithms) as a +danger that transcends all possibility of control at the individual or state +level. Billions of individual decisions do not "average" into one will, but +instead produce complex dynamics and hang perilously on initial conditions. In +discussing the possibility of the singularity, Eugen suggests, "It could +literally be a science-fair project [that causes the singularity]." If Francis +Bacon’s understanding of the relation between Man and Nature was that of master +and possessor, Eugen’s is its radicalization: Man is a powerful but ultimately +arbitrary force in the progress of Life-Intelligence. Man is fully incorporated +into Nature in this story, ,{[pg 92]}, so much so that he dissolves into it. +Eugen writes, when "life crosses over into this petri dish which is getting +readied, things will become a lot more lively. . . . I hope we’ll make it." +={ progress +7 ; + time : + initial conditions and +1 ; + geeks : + as moderns +3 +} + +% check "geeks as moderns, problem pinpointing + +For Eugen, the arguments about technology that the polymaths involve themselves +in couldn’t be more parochial. They are important only insofar as they will set +the "initial conditions" for the grand coevolutionary adventure of technology +ahead of us. For the transhumanist, technology does not dissolve. Instead, it +is the solution within which humans are dissolved. Suffering, allocation, +decision making—all these are inessential to the ultimate outcome of +technological progress; they are worldly affairs, even if they concern life and +death, and as such, they can be either denounced or supported, but only with +respect to fine-tuning the acceleration toward the singularity. For the +transhumanist, one can’t fight the inevitability of technical evolution, but +one certainly can contribute to it. Technical progress is thus both law-like +and subject to intelligent manipulation; technical progress is inevitable, but +only because of the power of massively parallel human curiosity. +={ technology : + as argument +1 ; + usable pasts +6 +} + +% check on usable pasts, appears in conclusion + +Considered as one of the modes of thought present in this-worldly political +discussion, the transhumanist (like the polymath) turns technology into a +rhetorical argument. Technology is the more powerful political argument because +"it works." It is pointless to argue "about" technology, but not pointless to +argue through and with it. It is pointless to talk about whether stopping +technology is good or bad, because someone will simply build a technology that +will invalidate your argument. + +There is still a role for technical invention, but it is strongly distinguished +from political, legal, cultural, or social interventions. For most +transhumanists, there is no rhetoric here, no sophistry, just the pure truth of +"it works": the pure, undeniable, unstoppable, and undeconstructable reality of +technology. For the transhumanist attitude, the reality of "working code" has a +reality that other assertions about the world do not. Extreme transhumanism +replaces the life-world with the world of the computer, where bad (ethically +bad) ideas won’t compile. Less-staunch versions of transhumanism simply allow +the confusion to operate opportunistically: the progress of technology is +unquestionable (omniscient), and only its effects on humans are worth +investigating. + +The pure transhumanist, then, is a countermodern. The transhumanist despises +the present for its intolerably slow descent into the ,{[pg 93]}, future of +immortality and superhuman self-improvement, and fears destruction because of +too much turbulent (and ignorant) human resistance. One need have no individual +conception of the present, no reflection on or synthetic understanding of it. +One only need contribute to it correctly. One might even go so far as to +suggest that forms of reflection on the present that do not contribute to +technical progress endanger the very future of life-intelligence. Curiosity and +technical innovation are not historical features of Western science, but +natural features of a human animal that has created its own conditions for +development. Thus, the transhumanists’ historical consciousness consists +largely of a timeline that makes ordered sense of our place on the progress +toward the Singularity. + +The moral of the story is not just that technology determines history, however. +Transhumanism is a radically antihumanist position in which human agency or +will—if it even exists—is not ontologically distinct from the agency of +machines and animals and life itself. Even if it is necessary to organize, do +things, make choices, participate, build, hack, innovate, this does not amount +to a belief in the ability of humans to control their destiny, individually or +collectively. In the end, the transhumanist cannot quite pinpoint exactly what +part of this story is inevitable—except perhaps the story itself. Technology +does not develop without millions of distributed humans contributing to it; +humans cannot evolve without the explicit human adoption of life-altering and +identity-altering technologies; evolution cannot become inevitable without the +manipulation of environments and struggles for fitness. As in the dilemma of +Calvinism (wherein one cannot know if one is saved by one’s good works), the +transhumanist must still create technology according to the particular and +parochial demands of the day, but this by no means determines the eventual +outcome of technological progress. It is a sentiment well articulated by Adam +Ferguson and highlighted repeatedly by Friederich Hayek with respect to human +society: "the result of human action, but not the execution of any human +design."~{ Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1:20. }~ +={ Calvinism ; + Hayek, Friedrich +} + +2~ Conclusion + +To many observers, geeks exhibit a perhaps bewildering mix of liberalism, +libertarianism, anarchism, idealism, and pragmatism, ,{[pg 94]}, yet tend to +fall firmly into one or another constituted political category (liberal, +conservative, socialist, capitalist, neoliberal, etc.). By showing how geeks +make use of the Protestant Reformation as a usable past and how they occupy a +spectrum of beliefs about progress, liberty, and intervention, I hope to resist +this urge to classify. Geeks are an interesting case precisely because they are +involved in the creation of new things that change the meaning of our +constituted political categories. Their politics are mixed up and combined with +the technical details of the Internet, Free Software, and the various and +sundry organizations, laws, people, and practices that they deal with on a +regular basis: operating systems and social systems. But such mixing does not +make Geeks merely technoliberals or technoconservatives. Rather, it reveals how +they think through the specific, historically unique situation of the Internet +to the general problems of knowledge and power, liberty and enlightenment, +progress and intervention. +={ allegory, of Protestant Reformation ; + geeks +1 +} + +Geeks are not a kind of person: geeks are geeks only insofar as they come +together in new, technically mediated forms of their own creation and in ways +that are not easy to identify (not language, not culture, not markets, not +nations, not telephone books or databases). While their affinity is very +clearly constituted through the Internet, the Internet is not the only reason +for that affinity. It is this collective affinity that I refer to as a +recursive public. Because it is impossible to understand this affinity by +trying to identify particular types of people, it is necessary to turn to +historically specific sets of practices that form the substance of their +affinity. Free Software is an exemplary case—perhaps the exemplar—of a +recursive public. To understand Free Software through its changing practices +not only gives better access to the life-world of the geek but also reveals how +the structure of a recursive public comes into being and manages to persist and +transform, how it can become a powerful form of life that extends its +affinities beyond technophile geeks into the realms of ordinary life. +={ affinity (of geeks) } + +:B~ Part II free software + +1~ 3. The Movement +={ Free Software +55 } + +Part II of Two Bits describes what Free Software is and where it came from, +with each of its five chapters detailing the historical narrative of a +particular kind of practice: creating a movement, sharing source code, +conceptualizing openness or open systems, writing copyright (and copyleft) +licenses, and coordinating collaborations. Taken together, the stories describe +Free Software. The stories have their endpoint (or starting point, +genealogically speaking) in the years 1998-99, when Free Software burst onto +the scene: on the cover of Forbes magazine, as part of the dotcom boom, and in +the boardrooms of venture-capital firms and corporations like IBM and Netscape. +While the chapters that make up part II can be read discretely to understand +the practices that are the sine qua non of Free Software, they can also be read +continuously, as a meandering story of the history of software and networks +stretching from the late 1950s to the present. +={ Free Software : + as experimental system +1 ; + movement (component of Free Software) +3 ; + practices : + five components of Free Software +} + +% ,{[pg 98]}, + +Rather than define what makes Free Software free or Open Source open, Two Bits +treats the five practices as parts of a collective technical experimental +system: each component has its own history, development, and temporality, but +they come together as a package and emerge as a recognizable thing around +1998-99. As with any experimental system, changing the components changes the +operation and outcomes of the whole. Free Software so conceived is a kind of +experimental system: its practices can be adopted, adapted, and modulated in +new contexts and new places, but it is one whose rules are collectively +determined and frequently modified. It is possible to see in each of the five +practices where choices about how to do Free Software reached, or surpassed, +certain limits, but nonetheless remained part of a system whose identity +finally firmed up in the period 1998-99 and after. +={ experiment, collective technical } + +The first of these practices—the making of Free Software into a movement—is +both the most immediately obvious and the most difficult to grasp. By the term +movement I refer to the practice, among geeks, of arguing about and discussing +the structure and meaning of Free Software: what it consists of, what it is +for, and whether or not it is a movement. Some geeks call Free Software a +movement, and some don’t; some talk about the ideology and goals of Free +Software, and some don’t; some call it Free Software, while others call it Open +Source. Amid all this argument, however, Free Software geeks recognize that +they are all doing the same thing: the practice of creating a movement is the +practice of talking about the meaning and necessity of the other four +practices. It was in 1998-99 that geeks came to recognize that they were all +doing the same thing and, almost immediately, to argue about why.~{ For +instance, Richard Stallman writes, "The Free Software movement and the Open +Source movement are like two political camps within the free software +community. Radical groups in the 1960s developed a reputation for factionalism: +organizations split because of disagreements on details of strategy, and then +treated each other as enemies. Or at least, such is the ,{[pg 322]}, image +people have of them, whether or not it was true. The relationship between the +Free Software movement and the Open Source movement is just the opposite of +that picture. We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on +the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific +projects. We don’t think of the Open Source movement as an enemy. The enemy is +proprietary software" ("Why ‘Free Software’ Is Better than ‘Open Source,’" +GNU’s Not Unix! http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html +[accessed 9 July 2006]). By contrast, the Open Source Initiative characterizes +the relationship as follows: "How is ‘open source’ related to ‘free software’? +The Open Source Initiative is a marketing program for free software. It’s a +pitch for ‘free software’ because it works, not because it’s the only right +thing to do. We’re selling freedom on its merits" +(http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.php [accessed 9 July 2006]). There are +a large number of definitions of Free Software: canonical definitions include +Richard Stallman’s writings on the Free Software Foundation’s Web site, +www.fsf.org, including the "Free Software Definition" and "Confusing Words and +Phrases that Are Worth Avoiding." From the Open Source side there is the "Open +Source Definition" (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/). Unaffiliated +definitions can be found at www.freedomdefined.org. }~ + +One way to understand the movement is through the story of Netscape and the +Mozilla Web browser (now known as Firefox). Not only does this story provide +some context for the stories of geeks presented in part I—and I move here from +direct participant observation to historical and archival research on a +phenomenon that was occurring at roughly the same time—but it also contains all +the elements necessary to understand Free Software. It is full of discussion +and argument about the practices that make up Free Software: sharing source +code, conceiving of openness, writing licenses, and coordinating +collaborations. +={ Firefox ; + Netscape +26 ; + Netscape Navigator (application) +26 +} + +% ,{[pg 99]}, + +2~ Forking Free Software, 1997-2000 + +Free Software forked in 1998 when the term Open Source suddenly appeared (a +term previously used only by the CIA to refer to unclassified sources of +intelligence). The two terms resulted in two separate kinds of narratives: the +first, regarding Free Software, stretched back into the 1980s, promoting +software freedom and resistance to proprietary software "hoarding," as Richard +Stallman, the head of the Free Software Foundation, refers to it; the second, +regarding Open Source, was associated with the dotcom boom and the evangelism +of the libertarian pro-business hacker Eric Raymond, who focused on the +economic value and cost savings that Open Source Software represented, +including the pragmatic (and polymathic) approach that governed the everyday +use of Free Software in some of the largest online start-ups (Amazon, Yahoo!, +HotWired, and others all "promoted" Free Software by using it to run their +shops). +={ Free Software : + open source vs. +1 ; + Free Software Foundation +1 ; + Open Source : + Free Software vs. ; + Raymond, Eric Steven ; + Stallman, Richard +1 +} + +A critical point in the emergence of Free Software occurred in 1998-99: new +names, new narratives, but also new wealth and new stakes. "Open Source" was +premised on dotcom promises of cost-cutting and "disintermediation" and various +other schemes to make money on it (Cygnus Solutions, an early Free Software +company, playfully tagged itself as "Making Free Software More Affordable"). VA +Linux, for instance, which sold personal-computer systems pre-installed with +Open Source operating systems, had the largest single initial public offering +(IPO) of the stock-market bubble, seeing a 700 percent share-price increase in +one day. "Free Software" by contrast fanned kindling flames of worry over +intellectual-property expansionism and hitched itself to a nascent legal +resistance to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono +Copyright Term Extension Act. Prior to 1998, Free Software referred either to +the Free Software Foundation (and the watchful, micromanaging eye of Stallman) +or to one of thousands of different commercial, avocational, or +university-research projects, processes, licenses, and ideologies that had a +variety of names: sourceware, freeware, shareware, open software, public domain +software, and so on. The term Open Source, by contrast, sought to encompass +them all in one movement. +={ Cygnus Solutions (corporation) ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ; + intellectual property ; + VA Linux (corporation) +} + +The event that precipitated this attempted semantic coup d’état was the release +of the source code for Netscape’s Communicator ,{[pg 100]}, Web browser. It’s +tough to overestimate the importance of Netscape to the fortunes of Free +Software. Netscape is justly famous for its 1995 IPO and its decision to offer +its core product, Netscape Navigator, for free (meaning a compiled, binary +version could be downloaded and installed "for zero dollars"). But Netscape is +far more famous among geeks for giving away something else, in 1998: the source +code to Netscape Communicator (née Navigator). Giving away the Navigator +application endeared Netscape to customers and confused investors. Giving away +the Communicator source code in 1998 endeared Netscape to geeks and confused +investors; it was ignored by customers. +={ geeks +3 } + +Netscape is important from a number of perspectives. Businesspeople and +investors knew Netscape as the pet project of the successful businessman Jim +Clarke, who had founded the specialty computer manufacturer, Silicon Graphics +Incorporated (SGI). To computer scientists and engineers, especially in the +small university town of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, Netscape was known as the +highest bidder for the WWW team at the National Center for Supercomputing +Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. That team—Marc Andreessen, +Rob McCool, Eric Bina, Jon Mittelhauser, Aleks Totic, and Chris Houck—had +created Mosaic, the first and most fondly remembered "graphical browser" for +surfing the World Wide Web. Netscape was thus first known as Mosaic +Communications Corporation and switched its name only after legal threats from +NCSA and a rival firm, Spyglass. Among geeks, Netscape was known as home to a +number of Free Software hackers and advocates, most notably Jamie Zawinski, who +had rather flamboyantly broken rank with the Free Software Foundation by +forking the GNU EMACS code to create what was first known as Lucid Emacs and +later as XEmacs. Zawinski would go on to lead the newly free Netscape browser +project, now known as Mozilla. +={ Andreessen, Marc +3 ; + McCool, Rob ; + Mosaic (web browser) +3 ; + Mozilla +23 ; + National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA) +3 ; + Zawinski, Jamie +5 +} + +Meanwhile, most regular computer users remember Netscape both as an emblem of +the dotcom boom’s venture-fed insanity and as yet another of Microsoft’s +victims. Although Netscape exploded onto the scene in 1995, offering a +feature-rich browser that was an alternative to the bare-bones Mosaic browser, +it soon began to lose ground to Microsoft, which relatively quickly adopted the +strategy of giving away its browser, Internet Explorer, as if it were part of +the Windows operating system; this was a practice that the U.S. Department of +Justice eventually found to be in violation of ,{[pg 101]}, antitrust laws and +for which Microsoft was convicted, but never punished. +={ Justice, Department of ; + Microsoft : + Internet Explorer +1 +} + +The nature of Netscape’s decision to release the source code differs based on +which perspective it is seen from. It could appear to be a business plan +modeled on the original success: give away your product and make money in the +stock market. It could appear to be a strategic, last-gasp effort to outcompete +Microsoft. It could also appear, and did appear to many geeks, to be an attempt +to regain some of that "hacker-cred" it once had acquired by poaching the NCSA +team, or even to be an attempt to "do the right thing" by making one of the +world’s most useful tools into Free Software. But why would Netscape reach such +a conclusion? By what reasoning would such a decision seem to be correct? The +reasons for Netscape’s decision to "free the source" recapitulate the five core +practices of Free Software—and provided key momentum for the new movement. + +!_ Sharing Source Code +Netscape’s decision to share its source code could only seem surprising in the +context of the widespread practice of keeping source code secret; secrecy was a +practice followed largely in order to prevent competitors from copying a +program and competing with it, but also as a means to control the market +itself. The World Wide Web that Andreessen’s team at NCSA had cut their teeth +on was itself designed to be "platform independent" and accessible by any +device on the network. In practice, however, this meant that someone needed to +create "browsers" for each different computer or device. Mosaic was initially +created for UNIX, using the Motif library of the X11 Window System—in short, a +very specific kind of access. Netscape, by contrast, prided itself on "porting" +Netscape Navigator to nearly all available computer architectures. Indeed, by +1997, plans were under way to create a version of the browser—written in Java, +the programming language created by Sun Microsystems to "write once, run +anywhere"—that would be completely platform independent. +={ secrecy +6 ; + Sun Microsystems ; + World Wide Web (www) +} + +The Java-based Navigator (called Javagator, of course) created a problem, +however, with respect to the practice of keeping source code secret. Whenever a +program in Java was run, it created a set of "bytecodes" that were easy to +reverse-engineer because they had to be transmitted from the server to the +machine that ran the program and were thus visible to anyone who might know how +and where to look. Netscape engineers flirted with the idea of deliberately +,{[pg 102]}, obfuscating these bytecodes to deter competitors from copying +them. How can one compete, the logic goes, if anyone can copy your program and +make their own ersatz version? + +Zawinski, among others, suggested that this was a bad idea: why not just share +the source code and get people to help make it better? As a longtime +participant in Free Software, Zawinski understood the potential benefits of +receiving help from a huge pool of potential contributors. He urged his peers +at Netscape to see the light. However, although he told them stories and showed +them successes, he could never make the case that this was an intelligent +business plan, only that it was an efficient software-engineering plan. From +the perspective of management and investors, such a move seemed tantamount to +simply giving away the intellectual property of the company itself. +={ intellectual property } + +Frank Hecker, a sales manager, made the link between the developers and +management: "It was obvious to [developers] why it was important. It wasn’t +really clear from a senior management level why releasing the source code could +be of use because nobody ever made the business case."~{ Moody, Rebel Code, +193. }~ Hecker penned a document called "Netscape Source Code as Netscape +Product" and circulated it to various people, including Andreessen and Netscape +CEO Jim Barksdale. As the title suggests, the business case was that the source +code could also be a product, and in the context of Netscape, whose business +model was "give it away and make it up on the stock market," such a proposal +seemed less insane than it otherwise might have: "When Netscape first made +Navigator available for unrestricted download over the Internet, many saw this +as flying in the face of conventional wisdom for the commercial software +business, and questioned how we could possibly make money ‘giving our software +away.’ Now of course this strategy is seen in retrospect as a successful +innovation that was a key factor in Netscape’s rapid growth, and rare is the +software company today that does not emulate our strategy in one way or +another. Among other things, this provokes the following question: What if we +were to repeat this scenario, only this time with source code?"~{ Frank Hecker, +quoted in Hamerly and Paquin, "Freeing the Source," 198. }~ +={ Hecker, Frank +1 } + +Under the influence of Hecker, Zawinski, and CTO Eric Hahn (who had also +written various internal "heresy documents" suggesting similar approaches), +Netscape eventually made the decision to share their source code with the +outside world, a decision that resulted in a famous January 1998 press release +describing the aims ,{[pg 103]}, and benefits of doing so. The decision, at +that particular point in Netscape’s life, and in the midst of the dotcom boom, +was certainly momentous, but it did not lead either to a financial windfall or +to a suddenly superior product.~{ See Moody, Rebel Code, chap. 11, for a more +detailed version of the story. }~ +={ Hahn, Eric } + +!_ Conceptualizing Open Systems +Releasing the source code was, in a way, an attempt to regain the trust of the +people who had first imagined the www. Tim Berners-Lee, the initial architect +of the www, was always adamant that the protocol and all its implementations +should be freely available (meaning either "in the public domain" or "released +as Free Software"). Indeed, Berners-Lee had done just that with his first +bare-bones implementations of the www, proudly declaring them to be in the +public domain. +={ Berners-Lee, Tim +1 ; + Open Systems +2 ; + public domain ; + World Wide Web (www) +} + +Over the course of the 1990s, the "browser wars" caused both Netscape and +Microsoft to stray far from this vision: each had implemented its own +extensions and "features" to the browsers and servers, extensions not present +in the protocol that Berners-Lee had created or in the subsequent standards +created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Included in the implementations +were various kinds of "evil" that could make browsers fail to work on certain +operating systems or with certain kinds of servers. The "browser wars" repeated +an open-systems battle from the 1980s, one in which the attempt to standardize +a network operating system (UNIX) was stymied by competition and secrecy, at +the same time that consortiums devoted to "openness" were forming in order to +try to prevent the spread of evil. Despite the fact that both Microsoft and +Netscape were members of the W3C, the noncompatibility of their browsers +clearly represented the manipulation of the standards process in the name of +competitive advantage. +={ evil ; + Microsoft ; + World Wide Web consortium (w3c) ; + standards : + ownership of +} + +Releasing the source code for Communicator was thus widely seen as perhaps the +only way to bypass the poisoned well of competitively tangled, nonstandard +browser implementations. An Open Source browser could be made to comply with +the standards—if not by the immediate members involved with its creation, then +by creating a "fork" of the program that was standards compliant—because of the +rights of redistribution associated with an Open Source license. Open Source +would be the solution to an open-systems problem that had never been solved +because it had never confronted the issue of intellectual property directly. +Free Software, by contrast, had a well-developed solution in the GNU General +Public License, ,{[pg 104]}, also known as copyleft license, that would allow +the software to remain free and revive hope for maintaining open standards. +={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) +4 ; + General Public License (GPL) +3 ; + intellectual property +} + +!_ Writing Licenses +Herein lies the rub, however: Netscape was immediately embroiled in controversy +among Free Software hackers because it chose to write its own bespoke licenses +for distributing the source code. Rather than rely on one of the existing +licenses, such as the GNU GPL or the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) or MIT +licenses, they created their own: the Netscape Public License (NPL) and the +Mozilla Public License. The immediate concerns of Netscape had to do with their +existing network of contracts and agreements with other, third-party +developers—both those who had in the past contributed parts of the existing +source code that Netscape might not have the rights to redistribute as Free +Software, and those who were expecting in the future to buy and redistribute a +commercial version. Existing Free Software licenses were either too permissive, +giving to third parties rights that Netscape itself might not have, or too +restrictive, binding Netscape to make source code freely available (the GPL) +when it had already signed contracts with buyers of the nonfree code. +={ BSD License ; + Mozilla Public License (MPL) +2 ; + Netscape Public License (NPL) +} + +It was a complex and specific business situation—a network of existing +contracts and licensed code—that created the need for Netscape to write its own +license. The NPL thus contained a clause that allowed Netscape special +permission to relicense any particular contribution to the source code as a +proprietary product in order to appease its third-party contracts; it +essentially gave Netscape special rights that no other licensee would have. +While this did not necessarily undermine the Free Software licenses—and it was +certainly Netscape’s prerogative—it was contrary to the spirit of Free +Software: it broke the "recursive public" into two halves. In order to appease +Free Software geeks, Netscape wrote one license for existing code (the NPL) and +a different license for new contributions: the Mozilla Public License. +={ recursive public } + +Neither Stallman nor any other Free Software hacker was entirely happy with +this situation. Stallman pointed out three flaws: "One flaw sends a bad +philosophical message, another puts the free software community in a weak +position, while the third creates a major practical problem within the free +software community. Two of the flaws apply to the Mozilla Public License as +well." He urged people ,{[pg 105]}, not to use the NPL. Similarly, Bruce Perens +suggested, "Many companies have adopted a variation of the MPL [sic] for their +own programs. This is unfortunate, because the NPL was designed for the +specific business situation that Netscape was in at the time it was written, +and is not necessarily appropriate for others to use. It should remain the +license of Netscape and Mozilla, and others should use the GPL or the BSD or X +licenses."~{ Bruce Perens, "The Open Source Definition," 184. }~ +={ BSD License ; + Stallman, Richard ; + Perens, Bruce +} + +Arguments about the fine details of licenses may seem scholastic, but the +decision had a huge impact on the structure of the new product. As Steven Weber +has pointed out, the choice of license tracks the organization of a product and +can determine who and what kinds of contributions can be made to a project.~{ +Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source. }~ It is not an idle choice; every +new license is scrutinized with the same intensity or denounced with the same +urgency. +={ Weber, Steven } + +!_ Coordinating Collaborations +One of the selling points of Free Software, and especially of its marketing as +Open Source, is that it leverages the work of thousands or hundreds of +thousands of volunteer contributors across the Internet. Such a claim almost +inevitably leads to spurious talk of "self-organizing" systems and emergent +properties of distributed collaboration. The Netscape press release promised to +"harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet by +incorporating their best enhancements," and it quoted CEO Jim Barksdale as +saying, "By giving away the source code for future versions, we can ignite the +creative energies of the entire Net community and fuel unprecedented levels of +innovation in the browser market."~{ "Netscape Announces Plans to Make +Next-Generation Communicator Source Code Available Free on the Net," Netscape +press release, 22 January 1998, +http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html (accessed 25 Sept 2007). +}~ But as anyone who has ever tried to start or run a Free Software project +knows, it never works out that way. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) +6 } + +Software engineering is a notoriously hard problem.~{ On the history of +software development methodologies, see Mahoney, "The Histories of +Computing(s)" and "The Roots of Software Engineering." }~ The halls of the +software industry are lined with the warning corpses of dead software +methodologies. Developing software in the dotcom boom was no different, except +that the speed of release cycles and the velocity of funding (the "burn rate") +was faster than ever before. Netscape’s in-house development methodologies were +designed to meet these pressures, and as many who work in this field will +attest, that method is some version of a semistructured, deadline-driven, +caffeine- and smart-drink-fueled race to "ship."~{ Especially good descriptions +of what this cycle is like can be found in Ullman, Close to the Machine and The +Bug. }~ +={ software development +2 } + +Releasing the Mozilla code, therefore, required a system of coordination that +would differ from the normal practice of in-house ,{[pg 106]}, software +development by paid programmers. It needed to incorporate the contributions of +outsiders—developers who didn’t work for Netscape. It also needed to entice +people to contribute, since that was the bargain on which the decision to free +the source was based, and to allow them to track their contributions, so they +could verify that their contributions were included or rejected for legitimate +reasons. In short, if any magical Open Source self-organization were to take +place, it would require a thoroughly transparent, Internet-based coordination +system. + +% no reference here to firefox or netscape, rather to mozilla + +At the outset, this meant practical things: obtaining the domain name +mozilla.org; setting up (and in turn releasing the source code for) the +version-control system (the Free Software standard cvs), the version-control +interface (Bonsai), the "build system" that managed and displayed the various +trees and (broken) branches of a complex software project (Tinderbox), and a +bug-reporting system for tracking bugs submitted by users and developers +(Bugzilla). It required an organizational system within the Mozilla project, in +which paid developers would be assigned to check submissions from inside and +outside, and maintainers or editors would be designated to look at and verify +that these contributions should be used. +={ bugs ; + Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) ; + software tools +} + +In the end, the release of the Mozilla source code was both a success and a +failure. Its success was long in coming: by 2004, the Firefox Web browser, +based on Mozilla, had started to creep up the charts of most popular browsers, +and it has become one of the most visible and widely used Free Software +applications. The failure, however, was more immediate: Mozilla failed to reap +the massive benefits for Netscape that the 1995 give-away of Netscape Navigator +had. Zawinski, in a public letter of resignation in April 1999 (one year after +the release), expressed this sense of failure. He attributed Netscape’s decline +after 1996 to the fact that it had "stopped innovating" and become too large to +be creative, and described the decision to free the Mozilla source code as a +return to this innovation: "[The announcement] was a beacon of hope to me. . . +. [I]t was so crazy, it just might work. I took my cue and ran with it, +registering the domain that night, designing the structure of the organization, +writing the first version of the web site, and, along with my co-conspirators, +explaining to room after room of Netscape employees and managers how free +software worked, and what we had to do to make it work."~{ Jamie Zawinski, +"resignation and postmortem," 31 March 1999, +http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html. }~ For Zawinski, the decision was both a +chance for Netscape to return to its glory and an opportunity ,{[pg 107]}, to +prove the power of Free Software: "I saw it as a chance for the code to +actually prosper. By making it not be a Netscape project, but rather, be a +public project to which Netscape was merely a contributor, the fact that +Netscape was no longer capable of building products wouldn’t matter: the +outsiders would show Netscape how it’s done. By putting control of the web +browser into the hands of anyone who cared to step up to the task, we would +ensure that those people would keep it going, out of their own +self-interest."~{ Ibid. }~ +={ Zawinski, Jamie +3 ; + Firefox +1 : + see also Netscape Navigator ; + Netscape Navigator +1 +} + +% netscape navigator index link added + +But this promise didn’t come true—or, at least, it didn’t come true at the +speed that Zawinski and others in the software world were used to. Zawinski +offered various reasons: the project was primarily made up of Netscape +employees and thus still appeared to be a Netscape thing; it was too large a +project for outsiders to dive into and make small changes to; the code was too +"crufty," that is, too complicated, overwritten, and unclean. Perhaps most +important, though, the source code was not actually working: "We never +distributed the source code to a working web browser, more importantly, to the +web browser that people were actually using."~{ Ibid. }~ + +Netscape failed to entice. As Zawinski put it, "If someone were running a web +browser, then stopped, added a simple new command to the source, recompiled, +and had that same web browser plus their addition, they would be motivated to +do this again, and possibly to tackle even larger projects."~{ Ibid. }~ For +Zawinski, the failure to "ship" a working browser was the biggest failure, and +he took pains to suggest that this failure was not an indictment of Free +Software as such: "Let me assure you that whatever problems the Mozilla project +is having are not because open source doesn’t work. Open source does work, but +it is most definitely not a panacea. If there’s a cautionary tale here, it is +that you can’t take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of +‘open source,’ and have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The +issues aren’t that simple."~{ Ibid. }~ + +!_ Fomenting Movements +The period from 1 April 1998, when the Mozilla source code was first released, +to 1 April 1999, when Zawinski announced its failure, couldn’t have been a +headier, more exciting time for participants in Free Software. Netscape’s +decision to release the source code was a tremendous opportunity for geeks +involved in Free Software. It came in the midst of the rollicking dotcom +bubble. It also came in the midst of the widespread adoption of ,{[pg 108]}, +key Free Software tools: the Linux operating system for servers, the Apache Web +server for Web pages, the perl and python scripting languages for building +quick Internet applications, and a number of other lower-level tools like Bind +(an implementation of the DNS protocol) or sendmail for e-mail. +={ movement (component of Free Software) +24 ; + Apache (Free Software project) ; + Domain Name System (DNS) ; + Linux (Free Software project) +} + +Perhaps most important, Netscape’s decision came in a period of fevered and +intense self-reflection among people who had been involved in Free Software in +some way, stretching back to the mid-1980s. Eric Raymond’s article "The +Cathedral and The Bazaar," delivered at the Linux Kongress in 1997 and the +O’Reilly Perl Conference the same year, had started a buzz among Free Software +hackers. It was cited by Frank Hecker and Eric Hahn at Netscape as one of the +sources for their thinking about the decision to free Mozilla; Raymond and +Bruce Perens had both been asked to consult with Netscape on Free Software +strategy. In April of the same year Tim O’Reilly, a publisher of handbooks for +Free Software, organized a conference called the Freeware Summit. +={ Freeware summit +5 ; + Hahn, Eric ; + Hecker, Frank ; + O’Reilly, Tim ; + O’Reilly Press +1 ; + Perens, Bruce ; + perl (programming language) ; + Raymond, Eric Steven ; + Cathedral and the Bazaar +} + +The Freeware Summit’s very name indicated some of the concern about definition +and direction. Stallman, despite his obvious centrality, but also because of +it, was not invited to the Freeware Summit, and the Free Software Foundation +was not held up as the core philosophical guide of this event. Rather, +according to the press release distributed after the meeting, "The meeting’s +purpose was to facilitate a high-level discussion of the successes and +challenges facing the developers. While this type of software has often been +called ‘freeware’ or ‘free software’ in the past, the developers agreed that +commercial development of the software is part of the picture, and that the +terms ‘open source’ or ‘sourceware’ best describe the development method they +support."~{ "Open Source Pioneers Meet in Historic Summit," press release, 14 +April 1998, O’Reilly Press, http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/796. }~ +={ Open Source : + "Open Source Definition" +1 ; + Stallman, Richard ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +It was at this summit that Raymond’s suggestion of "Open Source" as an +alternative name was first publicly debated.~{ See Hamerly and Paquin, "Freeing +the Source." The story is elegantly related in Moody, Rebel Code, 182-204. +Raymond gives Christine Petersen of the Foresight Institute credit for the term +open source. }~ Shortly thereafter, Raymond and Perens created the Open Source +Initiative and penned "The Open Source Definition." All of this self-reflection +was intended to capitalize on the waves of attention being directed at Free +Software in the wake of Netscape’s announcement. +={ Open Source Initiative ; + Raymond, Eric Steven +} + +The motivations for these changes came from a variety of sources—ranging from a +desire to be included in the dotcom boom to a powerful (ideological) resistance +to being ideological. Linus Torvalds loudly proclaimed that the reason to do +Free Software was because it was "fun"; others insisted that it made better +business ,{[pg 109]}, sense or that the stability of infrastructures like the +Internet depended on a robust ability to improve them from any direction. But +none of them questioned how Free Software got done or proposed to change it. +={ Torvalds, Linus } + +Raymond’s paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" quickly became the most widely +told story of how Open Source works and why it is important; it emphasizes the +centrality of novel forms of coordination over the role of novel copyright +licenses or practices of sharing source code. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" +reports Raymond’s experiments with Free Software (the bazaar model) and +reflects on the difference between it and methodologies adopted by industry +(the cathedral model). The paper does not truck with talk of freedom and has no +denunciations of software hoarding à la Stallman. Significantly, it also has no +discussion of issues of licensing. Being a hacker, however, Raymond did give +his paper a "revision-history," which proudly displays revision 1.29, 9 +February 1998: "Changed ‘free software’ to ‘open source.’"~{ From Raymond, The +Cathedral and the Bazaar. The changelog is available online only: +http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/. }~ +={ Stallman, Richard +3 ; + Raymond, Eric Steven +3 ; + Cathedral and the Bazaar +3 ; + Software development +7 +} + +Raymond was determined to reject the philosophy of liberty that Stallman and +the Free Software Foundation represented, but not in order to create a +political movement of his own. Rather, Raymond (and the others at the Freeware +Summit) sought to cash in on the rising tide of the Internet economy by turning +the creation of Free Software into something that made more sense to investors, +venture capitalists, and the stock-buying public. To Raymond, Stallman and the +Free Software Foundation represented not freedom or liberty, but a kind of +dogmatic, impossible communism. As Raymond was a committed libertarian, one +might expect his core beliefs in the necessity of strong property rights to +conflict with the strange communalism of Free Software—and, indeed, his +rhetoric was focused on pragmatic, business-minded, profit-driven, and +market-oriented uses of Free Software. For Raymond, the essentially interesting +component of Free Software was not its enhancement of human liberty, but the +innovation in software production that it represented (the "development +model"). It was clear that Free Software achieved something amazing through a +clever inversion of strong property rights, an inversion which could be +expected to bring massive revenue in some other form, either through +cost-cutting or, Netscape-style, through the stock market. +={ Free Software Foundation ; + intellectual property +1 ; + libertarianism +} + +Raymond wanted the business world and the mainstream industry to recognize Free +Software’s potential, but he felt that Stallman’s ,{[pg 110]}, rhetoric was +getting in the way. Stallman’s insistence, for example, on calling corporate +intellectual-property protection of software "hoarding" was doing more damage +than good in terms of Free Software’s acceptance among businesses, as a +practice, if not exactly a product. + +Raymond’s papers channeled the frustration of an entire generation of Free +Software hackers who may or may not have shared Stallman’s dogmatic +philosophical stance, but who nonetheless wanted to participate in the creation +of Free Software. Raymond’s paper, the Netscape announcement, and the Freeware +Summit all played into a palpable anxiety: that in the midst of the single +largest creation of paper wealth in U.S. history, those being enriched through +Free Software and the Internet were not those who built it, who maintained it, +or who got it. +={ hackers +4 ; + Netscape +1 +} + +The Internet giveaway was a conflict of propriety: hackers and geeks who had +built the software that made it work, under the sign of making it free for all, +were seeing that software generate untold wealth for people who had not built +it (and furthermore, who had no intention of keeping it free for all). +Underlying the creation of wealth was a commitment to a kind of permanent +technical freedom—a moral order—not shared by those who were reaping the most +profit. This anxiety regarding the expropriation of work (even if it had been a +labor of love) was ramified by Netscape’s announcement. +={ moral and technical order } + +All through 1998 and 1999, buzz around Open Source built. Little-known +companies such as Red Hat, VA Linux, Cygnus, Slackware, and SuSe, which had +been providing Free Software support and services to customers, suddenly +entered media and business consciousness. Articles in the mainstream press +circulated throughout the spring and summer of 1998, often attempting to make +sense of the name change and whether it meant a corresponding change in +practice. A front-cover article in Forbes, which featured photos of Stallman, +Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, and Torvalds (figure 2), was noncommittal, +cycling between Free Software, Open Source, and Freeware.~{ Josh McHugh, "For +the Love of Hacking," Forbes, 10 August 1998, 94-100. }~ +={ Behlendorf, Brian +2 ; + Cygnus Solutions (corporation) ; + dotcom era +4 ; + Red Hat (corporation) ; + VA Linux (corporation) +3 ; + Wall, Larry ; + Stallman, Richard +2 ; + Torvalds, Linus +} + +{ 2bits_03_02-100.png }image ~[* "Peace, Love and Software," cover of Forbes, 10 August 1998. Used with permission of Forbes and Nathaniel Welch. ]~ + +By early 1999, O’Reilly Press published Open Sources: Voices from the Open +Source Revolution, a hastily written but widely read book. It included a number +of articles—this time including one by Stallman—that cobbled together the first +widely available public history of Free Software, both the practice and the +technologies ,{[pg 111]}, involved. Kirk McKusick’s article detailed the +history of important technologies like the BSD version of UNIX, while an +article by Brian Behlendorf, of Apache, detailed the practical challenges of +running Free Software projects. Raymond provided a history of hackers and a +self-aggrandizing article about his own importance in creating the movement, +while Stallman’s contribution told his own version of the rise of Free +Software. +={ Apache (Free Software project) ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) ; + Open Sources ; + O’Reilly Press ; + Raymond, Eric Steven +1 ; + Raymond, Eric Steven +1 ; + usable pasts +} + +By December 1999, the buzz had reached a fever pitch. When VA Linux, a +legitimate company which actually made something real—computers with Linux +installed on them—went public, its shares’ value gained 700 percent in one day +and was the single ,{[pg 112]}, most valuable initial public offering of the +era. VA Linux took the unconventional step of allowing contributors to the +Linux kernel to buy into the stock before the IPO, thus bringing at least a +partial set of these contributors into the mainstream Ponzi scheme of the +Internet dotcom economy. Those who managed to sell their stock ended up +benefiting from the boom, whether or not their contributions to Free Software +truly merited it. In a roundabout way, Raymond, O’Reilly, Perens, and others +behind the name change had achieved recognition for the central role of Free +Software in the success of the Internet—and now its true name could be known: +Open Source. +={ Linux (Free Software project) ; + Open Source : + Free Software vs. +11 +} + +Yet nothing much changed in terms of the way things actually got done. Sharing +source code, conceiving openness, writing licenses, coordinating projects—all +these continued as before with no significant differences between those +flashing the heroic mantle of freedom and those donning the pragmatic tunic of +methodology. Now, however, stories proliferated; definitions, distinctions, +details, and detractions filled the ether of the Internet, ranging from the +philosophical commitments of Free Software to the parables of science as the +"original open source" software. Free Software proponents refined their message +concerning rights, while Open Source advocates refined their claims of +political agnosticism or nonideological commitments to "fun." All these stories +served to create movements, to evangelize and advocate and, as Eugen Leitl +would say, to "corrupt young minds" and convert them to the cause. The fact +that there are different narratives for identical practices is an advantageous +fact: regardless of why people think they are doing what they are doing, they +are all nonetheless contributing to the same mysterious thing. +={ Leitl, Eugene } + +2~ A Movement? + +To most onlookers, Free Software and Open Source seem to be overwhelmed with +frenzied argument; the flame wars and disputes, online and off, seem to +dominate everything. To attend a conference where geeks—especially high-profile +geeks like Raymond, Stallman, and Torvalds—are present, one might suspect that +the very detailed practices of Free Software are overseen by the brow-beating, +histrionic antics of a few charismatic leaders and that ideological commitments +result in divergent, incompatible, and affect-laden ,{[pg 113]}, opposition +which must of necessity take specific and incompatible forms. Strangely, this +is far from the case: all this sound and fury doesn’t much change what people +do, even if it is a requirement of apprenticeship. It truly is all over but for +the shouting. +={ Raymond, Eric Steven ; + Stallman, Richard ; + Torvalds, Linus ; + Free Software : + open source vs. +8 ; + practices +4 +} + +According to most of the scholarly literature, the function of a movement is to +narrate the shared goals and to recruit new members. But is this what happens +in Free Software or Open Source?~{ On social movements—the closest analog, +developed long ago—see Gerlach and Hine, People, Power, Change, and Freeman and +Johnson, Waves of Protest. However, the Free Software and Open Source Movements +do not have "causes" of the kind that conventional movements do, other than the +perpetuation of Free and Open Source Software (see Coleman, "Political +Agnosticism"; Chan, "Coding Free Software"). Similarly, there is no single +development methodology that would cover only Open Source. Advocates of Open +Source are all too willing to exclude those individuals or organizations who +follow the same "development methodology" but do not use a Free Software +license—such as Microsoft’s oft-mocked "shared-source" program. The list of +licenses approved by both the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source +Initiative is substantially the same. Further, the Debian Free Software +Guidelines and the "Open Source Definition" are almost identical (compare +http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html with +http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ [both accessed 30 June 2006]). }~ To begin +with, movement is an awkward word; not all participants would define their +participation this way. Richard Stallman suggests that Free Software is social +movement, while Open Source is a development methodology. Similarly some Open +Source proponents see it as a pragmatic methodology and Free Software as a +dogmatic philosophy. While there are specific entities like the Free Software +Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, they do not comprise all Free +Software or Open Source. Free Software and Open Source are neither corporations +nor organizations nor consortia (for there are no organizations to consort); +they are neither national, subnational, nor international; they are not +"collectives" because no membership is required or assumed—indeed to hear +someone assert "I belong" to Free Software or Open Source would sound absurd to +anyone who does. Neither are they shady bands of hackers, crackers, or thieves +meeting in the dead of night, which is to say that they are not an "informal" +organization, because there is no formal equivalent to mimic or annul. Nor are +they quite a crowd, for a crowd can attract participants who have no idea what +the goal of the crowd is; also, crowds are temporary, while movements extend +over time. It may be that movement is the best term of the lot, but unlike +social movements, whose organization and momentum are fueled by shared causes +or broken by ideological dispute, Free Software and Open Source share practices +first, and ideologies second. It is this fact that is the strongest +confirmation that they are a recursive public, a form of public that is as +concerned with the material practical means of becoming public as it is with +any given public debate. +={ affinity (of geeks) +1 ; + movement (component of Free Software) : + function of +3 ; + social movement, theories of ; + Software development +1 +} + +The movement, as a practice of argument and discussion, is thus centered around +core agreements about the other four kinds of practices. The discussion and +argument have a specific function: to tie together divergent practices +according to a wide consensus which tries to capture the why of Free Software. +Why is it different from normal software development? Why is it necessary? Why +now? ,{[pg 114]}, Why do people do it? Why do people use it? Can it be +preserved and enhanced? None of these questions address the how: how should +source code circulate? How should a license be written? Who should be in +charge? All of these "hows" change slowly and experimentally through the +careful modulation of the practices, but the "whys" are turbulent and often +distracting. Nonetheless, people engaged in Free Software—users, developers, +supporters, and observers—could hardly remain silent on this point, despite the +frequent demand to just "shut up and show me the code." "Figuring out" Free +Software also requires a practice of reflecting on what is central to it and +what is outside of it. +={ figuring out +2 } + +The movement, as a practice of discussion and argument, is made up of stories. +It is a practice of storytelling: affect- and intellect-laden lore that orients +existing participants toward a particular problem, contests other histories, +parries attacks from outside, and draws in new recruits.~{ It is, in the terms +of Actor Network Theory, a process of "enrollment" in which participants find +ways to rhetorically align—and to disalign—their interests. It does not +constitute the substance of their interest, however. See Latour, Science in +Action; Callon, "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation." }~ This includes +proselytism and evangelism (and the usable pasts of protestant reformations, +singularities, rebellion and iconoclasm are often salient here), whether for +the reform of intellectual-property law or for the adoption of Linux in the +trenches of corporate America. It includes both heartfelt allegiance in the +name of social justice as well as political agnosticism stripped of all +ideology.~{ Coleman, "Political Agnosticism." }~ Every time Free Software is +introduced to someone, discussed in the media, analyzed in a scholarly work, or +installed in a workplace, a story of either Free Software or Open Source is +used to explain its purpose, its momentum, and its temporality. At the extremes +are the prophets and proselytes themselves: Eric Raymond describes Open Source +as an evolutionarily necessary outcome of the natural tendency of human +societies toward economies of abundance, while Richard Stallman describes it as +a defense of the fundamental freedoms of creativity and speech, using a variety +of philosophical theories of liberty, justice, and the defense of freedom.~{ +See, respectively, Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Williams, Free as +in Freedom. }~ Even scholarly analyses must begin with a potted history drawn +from the self-narration of geeks who make or advocate free software.~{ For +example, Castells, The Internet Galaxy, and Weber, The Success of Open Source +both tell versions of the same story of origins and development. }~ Indeed, as +a methodological aside, one reason it is so easy to track such stories and +narratives is because geeks like to tell and, more important, like to archive +such stories—to create Web pages, definitions, encyclopedia entries, +dictionaries, and mini-histories and to save every scrap of correspondence, +every fight, and every resolution related to their activities. This "archival +hubris" yields a very peculiar and specific kind of fieldsite: one in which a +kind ,{[pg 115]}, of "as-it-happens" ethnographic observation is possible not +only through "being there" in the moment but also by being there in the +massive, proliferating archives of moments past. Understanding the movement as +a changing entity requires constantly glancing back at its future promises and +the conditions of their making. +={ Actor Network Theory ; + allegory, of Protestant Reformation ; + ethnography +1 ; + geeks : + self-representation +1 ; + practices : + "archival hubris" | stories as ; + Raymond, Eric Steven ; + Stallman, Richard +} + +Stories of the movement are also stories of a recursive public. The fact that +movement isn’t quite the right word is evidence of a kind of grasping, a +figuring out of why these practices make sense to all these geeks, in this +place and time; it is a practice that is not so different from my own +ethnographic engagement with it. Note that both Free Software and Open Source +tell stories of movement(s): they are not divided by a commercial-noncommercial +line, even if they are divided by ill-defined and hazy notions of their +ultimate goals. The problem of a recursive public (or, in an alternate +language, a recursive market) as a social imaginary of moral and technical +order is common to both of them as part of their practices. Thus, stories about +"the movement" are detailed stories about the technical and moral order that +geeks inhabit, and they are bound up with the functions and fates of the +Internet. Often these stories are themselves practices of inclusion and +exclusion (e.g., "this license is not a Free Software license" or "that +software is not an open system"); sometimes the stories are normative +definitions about how Free Software should look. But they are, always, stories +that reveal the shared moral and technical imaginations that make up Free +Software as a recursive public. +={ moral and technical order ; + recursive public ; + social imaginary } + +2~ Conclusion + +Before 1998, there was no movement. There was the Free Software Foundation, +with its peculiar goals, and a very wide array of other projects, people, +software, and ideas. Then, all of a sudden, in the heat of the dotcom boom, +Free Software was a movement. Suddenly, it was a problem, a danger, a job, a +calling, a dogma, a solution, a philosophy, a liberation, a methodology, a +business plan, a success, and an alternative. Suddenly, it was Open Source or +Free Software, and it became necessary to choose sides. After 1998, debates +about definition exploded; denunciations and manifestos and journalistic +hagiography proliferated. Ironically, the creation of two names allowed people +to identify one thing, for ,{[pg 116]}, these two names referred to identical +practices, licenses, tools, and organizations. Free Software and Open Source +shared everything "material," but differed vocally and at great length with +respect to ideology. Stallman was denounced as a kook, a communist, an +idealist, and a dogmatic holding back the successful adoption of Open Source by +business; Raymond and users of "open source" were charged with selling out the +ideals of freedom and autonomy, with the dilution of the principles and the +promise of Free Software, as well as with being stooges of capitalist +domination. Meanwhile, both groups proceeded to create objects—principally +software—using tools that they agreed on, concepts of openness that they agreed +on, licenses that they agreed on, and organizational schemes that they agreed +on. Yet never was there fiercer debate about the definition of Free Software. +={ Raymond, Eric Steven ; + Stallman, Richard ; + usable pasts +} + +On the one hand, the Free Software Foundation privileges the liberty and +creativity of individual geeks, geeks engaged in practices of self-fashioning +through the creation of software. It gives precedence to the liberal claim that +without freedom of expression, individuals are robbed of their ability to +self-determine. On the other hand, Open Source privileges organizations and +processes, that is, geeks who are engaged in building businesses, nonprofit +organizations, or governmental and public organizations of some form or +another. It gives precedence to the pragmatist (or polymathic) view that +getting things done requires flexible principles and negotiation, and that the +public practice of building and running things should be separate from the +private practice of ethical and political beliefs. Both narratives give geeks +ways of making sense of a practice that they share in almost all of its +details; both narratives give geeks a way to understand how Free Software or +Open Source Software is different from the mainstream, proprietary software +development that dominates their horizons. The narratives turn the haphazard +participation and sharing that existed before 1998 into meaningful, +goal-directed practices in the present, turning a class-in-itself into a +class-for-itself, to use a terminology for the most part unwelcome among geeks. +={ geeks } + +If two radically opposed ideologies can support people engaged in identical +practices, then it seems obvious that the real space of politics and +contestation is at the level of these practices and their emergence. These +practices emerge as a response to a reorientation of power and knowledge, a +reorientation somewhat impervious to ,{[pg 117]}, conventional narratives of +freedom and liberty, or to pragmatic claims of methodological necessity or +market-driven innovation. Were these conventional narratives sufficient, the +practices would be merely bureaucratic affairs, rather than the radical +transformations they are. +={ reorientation of power and knowledge } + +1~ 4. Sharing Source Code + +% ,{[pg 118]}, + +Free Software would be nothing without shared source code. The idea is built +into the very name "Open Source," and it is a requirement of all Free Software +licenses that source code be open to view, not "welded shut." Perhaps +ironically, source code is the most material of the five components of Free +Software; it is both an expressive medium, like writing or speech, and a tool +that performs concrete actions. It is a mnemonic that translates between the +illegible electron-speed doings of our machines and our lingering ability to +partially understand and control them as human agents. Many Free Software +programmers and advocates suggest that "information wants to be free" and that +sharing is a natural condition of human life, but I argue something contrary: +sharing produces its own kind of moral and technical order, that is, +"information makes people want freedom" and how they want it is related to how +that information is created and circulated. In this chapter I explore the ,{[pg +119]}, twisted and contingent history of how source code and its sharing have +come to take the technical, legal, and pedagogical forms they have today, and +how the norms of sharing have come to seem so natural to geeks. +={ moral and technical order ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) +50 ; + pedagogy : + operating systems and +2 +} + +Source code is essential to Free Software because of the historically specific +ways in which it has come to be shared, "ported," and "forked." Nothing about +the nature of source code requires that it be shared, either by corporations +for whom secrecy and jealous protection are the norm or by academics and geeks +for whom source code is usually only one expression, or implementation, of a +greater idea worth sharing. However, in the last thirty years, norms of sharing +source code—technical, legal, and pedagogical norms—have developed into a +seemingly natural practice. They emerged through attempts to make software into +a product, such as IBM’s 1968 "unbundling" of software and hardware, through +attempts to define and control it legally through trade secret, copyright, and +patent law, and through attempts to teach engineers how to understand and to +create more software. +={ implementation of software ; + Secrecy +7 ; + unbundling ; + Intellectual property ; + International Business Machines (IBM) +} + +The story of the norms of sharing source code is, not by accident, also the +history of the UNIX operating system.~{ "Sharing" source code is not the only +kind of sharing among geeks (e.g., informal sharing to communicate ideas), and +UNIX is not the only ,{[pg 324]}, shared software. Other examples that exhibit +this kind of proliferation (e.g., the LISP programming language, the TeX +text-formatting system) are as ubiquitous as UNIX today. The inverse of my +argument here is that selling produces a different kind of order: many products +that existed in much larger numbers than UNIX have since disappeared because +they were never ported or forked; they are now part of dead-computer museums +and collections, if they have survived at all. }~ The UNIX operating system is +a monstrous academic-corporate hybrid, an experiment in portability and sharing +whose impact is widely and reverently acknowledged by geeks, but +underappreciated more generally. The story of UNIX demonstrates the details of +how source code has come to be shared, technically, legally, and pedagogically. +In technical terms UNIX and the programming language C in which it was written +demonstrated several key ideas in operating-systems theory and practice, and +they led to the widespread "porting" of UNIX to virtually every kind of +hardware available in the 1970s, all around the world. In legal terms UNIX’s +owner, AT&T, licensed it widely and liberally, in both binary and source-code +form; the legal definition of UNIX as a product, however, was not the same as +the technical definition of UNIX as an evolving experiment in portable +operating systems—a tension that has continued throughout its lifetime. In +pedagogical terms UNIX became the very paradigm of an "operating system" and +was thereby ported not only in the technical sense from one machine to another, +but from machines to minds, as computer-science students learning the meaning +of "operating system" studied the details of the quasi-legally shared UNIX +source code.~{ The story of UNIX has not been told, and yet it has been told +hundreds of thousands of times. Every hacker, programmer, computer scientist, +and geek tells a version of UNIX history—a usable past. Thus, the sources for +this chapter include these stories, heard and recorded throughout my fieldwork, +but also easily accessible in academic work on Free Software, which +enthusiastically participates in this potted-history retailing. See, for +example, Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source; Castells, The Internet +Galaxy; Himanen, The Hacker Ethic; Benkler, The Wealth of Networks. To date +there is but one detailed history of UNIX—A Quarter Century of UNIX, by Peter +Salus—which I rely on extensively. Matt Ratto’s dissertation, "The Pressure of +Openness," also contains an excellent analytic history of the events told in +this chapter. }~ +={ operating systems, history of +40 ; + programming languages +46 ; + UNIX operating system +3 ; + AT&T +2 ; + C (programming language) ; + programming +11 +} + +% ,{[pg 120]}, + +The proliferation of UNIX was also a hybrid commercial-academic undertaking: it +was neither a "public domain" object shared solely among academics, nor was it +a conventional commercial product. Proliferation occurred through novel forms +of academic sharing as well as through licensing schemes constrained by the +peculiar status of AT&T, a regulated monopoly forbidden to enter the computer +and software industry before 1984. Thus proliferation was not mere replication: +it was not the sale of copies of UNIX, but a complex web of shared and +re-shared chunks of source code, and the reimplementation of an elegant and +simple conceptual scheme. As UNIX proliferated, it was stabilized in multiple +ways: by academics seeking to keep it whole and self-compatible through +contributions of source code; by lawyers at AT&T seeking to define boundaries +that mapped onto laws, licenses, versions, and regulations; and by professors +seeking to define it as an exemplar of the core concepts of operating-system +theory. In all these ways, UNIX was a kind of primal recursive public, drawing +together people for whom the meaning of their affiliation was the use, +modification, and stabilization of UNIX. +={ public domain ; + recursive public : + precursors of ; + monopoly ; + proliferation of software +1 +} + +The obverse of proliferation is differentiation: forking. UNIX is admired for +its integrity as a conceptual thing and despised (or marveled at) for its truly +tangled genealogical tree of ports and forks: new versions of UNIX, some based +directly on the source code, some not, some licensed directly from AT&T, some +sublicensed or completely independent. +={ differentiation of software } + +Forking, like random mutation, has had both good and bad effects; on the one +hand, it ultimately created versions of UNIX that were not compatible with +themselves (a kind of autoimmune response), but it also allowed the merger of +UNIX and the Arpanet, creating a situation wherein UNIX operating systems came +to be not only the paradigm of operating systems but also the paradigm of +networked computers, through its intersection with the development of the +TCP/IP protocols that are at the core of the Internet.~{ The intersection of +UNIX and TCP/IP occurred around 1980 and led to the famous switch from the +Network Control Protocol (NCP) to the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet +Protocol that occurred on 1 January 1983 (see Salus, Casting the Net). }~ By +the mid-1980s, UNIX was a kind of obligatory passage point for anyone +interested in networking, operating systems, the Internet, and especially, +modes of creating, sharing, and modifying source code—so much so that UNIX has +become known among geeks not just as an operating system but as a philosophy, +an answer to a very old question in new garb: how shall we live, among a new +world of machines, software, and networks? +={ Arpanet (network) ; + protocols : + distinguished from standards and implementation ; + Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) : + TCP/IP ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) ; + UNIX operating system : + relationship to Arpanet ; + UNIX philosophy +} + +% ,{[pg 121]}, + +2~ Before Source + +In the early days of computing machinery, there was no such thing as source +code. Alan Turing purportedly liked to talk to the machine in binary. Grace +Hopper, who invented an early compiler, worked as close to the Harvard Mark I +as she could get: flipping switches and plugging and unplugging relays that +made up the "code" of what the machine would do. Such mechanical and meticulous +work hardly merits the terms reading and writing; there were no GOTO +statements, no line numbers, only calculations that had to be translated from +the pseudo-mathematical writing of engineers and human computers to a physical +or mechanical configuration.~{ Light, "When Computers Were Women"; Grier, When +Computers Were Human. }~ Writing and reading source code and programming +languages was a long, slow development that became relatively widespread only +by the mid-1970s. So-called higher-level languages began to appear in the late +1950s: FORTRAN, COBOL, Algol, and the "compilers" which allowed for programs +written in them to be transformed into the illegible mechanical and valvular +representations of the machine. It was in this era that the terms source +language and target language emerged to designate the activity of translating +higher to lower level languages.~{ There is a large and growing scholarly +history of software: Wexelblat, History of Programming Languages and Bergin and +Gibson, History of Programming Languages 2 are collected papers by historians +and participants. Key works in history include Campbell-Kelly, From Airline +Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog; Akera and Nebeker, From 0 to 1; Hashagen, +Keil-Slawik, and Norberg, History of Computing—Software Issues; Donald A. +MacKenzie, Mechanizing Proof. Michael Mahoney has written by far the most about +the early history of software; his relevant works include "The Roots of +Software Engineering," "The Structures of Computation," "In Our Own Image," and +"Finding a History for Software Engineering." On UNIX in particular, there is +shockingly little historical work. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray +devote a mere two pages in their general history Computer. As early as 1978, +Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were reflecting on the "history" of UNIX in +"The UNIX Time-Sharing System: A Retrospective." Ritchie maintains a Web site +that contains a valuable collection of early documents and his own +reminiscences (http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/ ,{[pg 325]}, ). Mahoney has +also conducted interviews with the main participants in the development of UNIX +at Bell Labs. These interviews have not been published anywhere, but are drawn +on as background in this chapter (interviews are in Mahoney’s personal files). +}~ +={ FORTRAN (programming language) ; + Hopper, Grace ; + Turing, Alan +2 ; + translation of source code +5 ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + before Software +5 ; + source code : + translation of +5 +} + +There is a certain irony about the computer, not often noted: the unrivaled +power of the computer, if the ubiquitous claims are believed, rests on its +general programmability; it can be made to do any calculation, in principle. +The so-called universal Turing machine provides the mathematical proof.~{ +Turing, "On Computable Numbers." See also Davis, Engines of Logic, for a basic +explanation. }~ Despite the abstract power of such certainty, however, we do +not live in the world of The Computer—we live in a world of computers. The +hardware systems that manufacturers created from the 1950s onward were so +specific and idiosyncratic that it was inconceivable that one might write a +program for one machine and then simply run it on another. "Programming" became +a bespoke practice, tailored to each new machine, and while programmers of a +particular machine may well have shared programs with each other, they would +not have seen much point in sharing with users of a different machine. +Likewise, computer scientists shared mathematical descriptions of algorithms +and ideas for automation with as much enthusiasm as corporations jealously +guarded theirs, but this sharing, or secrecy, did not extend to the sharing of +the program itself. The need to "rewrite" a program for each machine was not +just a historical accident, but ,{[pg 122]}, was determined by the needs of +designers and engineers and the vicissitudes of the market for such expensive +machines.~{ Sharing programs makes sense in this period only in terms of user +groups such as SHARE (IBM) and USE (DEC). These groups were indeed sharing +source code and sharing programs they had written (see Akera, "Volunteerism and +the Fruits of Collaboration"), but they were constituted around specific +machines and manufacturers; brand loyalty and customization were familiar +pursuits, but sharing source code across dissimilar computers was not. }~ + +In the good old days of computers-the-size-of-rooms, the languages that humans +used to program computers were mnemonics; they did not exist in the computer, +but on a piece of paper or a specially designed code sheet. The code sheet gave +humans who were not Alan Turing a way to keep track of, to share with other +humans, and to think systematically about the invisible light-speed +calculations of a complicated device. Such mnemonics needed to be "coded" on +punch cards or tape; if engineers conferred, they conferred over sheets of +paper that matched up with wires, relays, and switches—or, later, printouts of +the various machine-specific codes that represented program and data. + +With the introduction of programming languages, the distinction between a +"source" language and a "target" language entered the practice: source +languages were "translated" into the illegible target language of the machine. +Such higher-level source languages were still mnemonics of sorts—they were +certainly easier for humans to read and write, mostly on yellowing tablets of +paper or special code sheets—but they were also structured enough that a source +language could be input into a computer and translated into a target language +which the designers of the hardware had specified. Inputting commands and cards +and source code required a series of actions specific to each machine: a +particular card reader or, later, a keypunch with a particular "editor" for +entering the commands. Properly input and translated source code provided the +machine with an assembled binary program that would, in fact, run (calculate, +operate, control). It was a separation, an abstraction that allowed for a +certain division of labor between the ingenious human authors and the fast and +mechanical translating machines. +={ text editors +1 } + +Even after the invention of programming languages, programming "on" a +computer—sitting at a glowing screen and hacking through the night—was still a +long time in coming. For example, only by about 1969 was it possible to sit at +a keyboard, write source code, instruct the computer to compile it, then run +the program—all without leaving the keyboard—an activity that was all but +unimaginable in the early days of "batch processing."~{ See Waldrop, The Dream +Machine, 142-47. }~ Very few programmers worked in such a fashion before the +mid-1970s, when text editors that allowed programmers to see the text on a +screen rather ,{[pg 123]}, than on a piece of paper started to proliferate.~{ A +large number of editors were created in the 1970s; Richard Stallman’s EMACS and +Bill Joy’s vi remain the most well known. Douglas Engelbart is somewhat too +handsomely credited with the creation of the interactive computer, but the work +of Butler Lampson and Peter Deutsch in Berkeley, as well as that of the Multics +team, Ken Thompson, and others on early on-screen editors is surely more +substantial in terms of the fundamental ideas and problems of manipulating text +files on a screen. This story is largely undocumented, save for in the +computer-science literature itself. On Engelbart, see Bardini, Bootstrapping. +}~ We are, by now, so familiar with the image of the man or woman sitting at a +screen interacting with this device that it is nearly impossible to imagine how +such a seemingly obvious practice was achieved in the first place—through the +slow accumulation of the tools and techniques for working on a new kind of +writing—and how that practice exploded into a Babel of languages and machines +that betrayed the promise of the general-purpose computing machine. +={ proliferation of software +2 ; + source code : + batch processing ; + standards : + programming languages +3 +} + +The proliferation of different machines with different architectures drove a +desire, among academics especially, for the standardization of programming +languages, not so much because any single language was better than another, but +because it seemed necessary to most engineers and computer users to share an +emerging corpus of algorithms, solutions, and techniques of all kinds, +necessary to avoid reinventing the wheel with each new machine. Algol, a +streamlined language suited to algorithmic and algebraic representations, +emerged in the early 1960s as a candidate for international standardization. +Other languages competed on different strengths: FORTRAN and COBOL for general +business use; LISP for symbolic processing. At the same time, the desire for a +standard "higher-level" language necessitated a bestiary of translating +programs: compilers, parsers, lexical analyzers, and other tools designed to +transform the higher-level (human-readable) language into a machine-specific +lower-level language, that is, machine language, assembly language, and +ultimately the mystical zeroes and ones that course through our machines. The +idea of a standard language and the necessity of devising specific tools for +translation are the origin of the problem of portability: the ability to move +software—not just good ideas, but actual programs, written in a standard +language—from one machine to another. +={ COBOL (programming language) ; + FORTRAN (programming language) ; + LISP (programming language) ; + portability, of operating systems +8 +} + +A standard source language was seen as a way to counteract the proliferation of +different machines with subtly different architectures. Portable source code +would allow programmers to imagine their programs as ships, stopping in at +ports of call, docking on different platforms, but remaining essentially mobile +and unchanged by these port-calls. Portable source code became the Esperanto of +humans who had wrought their own Babel of tribal hardware machines. +={ source code +7 } + +Meanwhile, for the computer industry in the 1960s, portable source code was +largely a moot point. Software and hardware were ,{[pg 124]}, two sides of +single, extremely expensive coin—no one, except engineers, cared what language +the code was in, so long as it performed the task at hand for the customer. +Each new machine needed to be different, faster, and, at first, bigger, and +then smaller, than the last. The urge to differentiate machines from each other +was not driven by academic experiment or aesthetic purity, but by a demand for +marketability, competitive advantage, and the transformation of machines and +software into products. Each machine had to do something really well, and it +needed to be developed in secret, in order to beat out the designs and +innovations of competitors. In the 1950s and 1960s the software was a core +component of this marketable object; it was not something that in itself was +differentiated or separately distributed—until IBM’s famous decision in 1968 to +"unbundle" software and hardware. +={ unbundling +2 } + +Before the 1970s, employees of a computer corporation wrote software in-house. +The machine was the product, and the software was just an extra line-item on +the invoice. IBM was not the first to conceive of software as an independent +product with its own market, however. Two companies, Informatics and Applied +Data Research, had explored the possibilities of a separate market in +software.~{ See Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the +Hedgehog. }~ Informatics, in particular, developed the first commercially +successful software product, a business-management system called Mark IV, which +in 1967 cost $30,000. Informatics’ president Walter Bauer "later recalled that +potential buyers were ‘astounded’ by the price of Mark IV. In a world +accustomed to free software the price of $30,000 was indeed high."~{ Ibid., +107. }~ +={ Applied Data Research (corporation) ; + Informatics (corporation) +} + +IBM’s unbundling decision marked a watershed, the point at which "portable" +source code became a conceivable idea, if not a practical reality, to many in +the industry.~{ Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, 203-5. }~ Rather than +providing a complete package of hardware and software, IBM decided to +differentiate its products: to sell software and hardware separately to +consumers.~{ Ultimately, the Department of Justice case against IBM used +bundling as evidence of monopolistic behavior, in addition to claims about the +creation of so-called Plug Compatible Machines, devices that were +reverse-engineered by meticulously constructing both the mechanical interface +and the software that would communicate with IBM mainframes. See Franklin M. +Fischer, Folded, Spindled, and Mutilated; Brock, The Second Information +Revolution. }~ But portability was not simply a technical issue; it was a +political-economic one as well. IBM’s decision was driven both by its desire to +create IBM software that ran on all IBM machines (a central goal of the famous +OS/360 project overseen and diagnosed by Frederick Brooks) and as response to +an antitrust suit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice.~{ The story of this +project and the lessons Brooks learned are the subject of one of the most +famous software-development handbooks, The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick +Brooks. }~ The antitrust suit included as part of its claims the suggestion +that the close tying of software and hardware represented a form of +monopolistic behavior, and it prompted IBM to consider strategies to "unbundle" +its product. +={ antitrust ; + Brooks, Frederick ; + Justice, Department of ; + monopoly +} + +% ,{[pg 125]}, + +Portability in the business world meant something specific, however. Even if +software could be made portable at a technical level—transferable between two +different IBM machines—this was certainly no guarantee that it would be +portable between customers. One company’s accounting program, for example, may +not suit another’s practices. Portability was therefore hindered both by the +diversity of machine architectures and by the diversity of business practices +and organization. IBM and other manufacturers therefore saw no benefit to +standardizing source code, as it could only provide an advantage to +competitors.~{ The computer industry has always relied heavily on trade secret, +much less so on patent and copyright. Trade secret also produces its own form +of order, access, and circulation, which was carried over into the early +software industry as well. See Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine for a classic +account of secrecy and competition in the computer industry. }~ + +Portability was thus not simply a technical problem—the problem of running one +program on multiple architectures—but also a kind of political-economic +problem. The meaning of product was not always the same as the meaning of +hardware or software, but was usually some combination of the two. At that +early stage, the outlines of a contest over the meaning of portable or +shareable source code are visible, both in the technical challenges of creating +high-level languages and in the political-economic challenges that corporations +faced in creating distinctive proprietary products. + +2~ The UNIX Time-Sharing System +={ UNIX operating system : + history of +18 +} + +Set against this backdrop, the invention, success, and proliferation of the +UNIX operating system seems quite monstrous, an aberration of both academic and +commercial practice that should have failed in both realms, instead of becoming +the most widely used portable operating system in history and the very paradigm +of an "operating system" in general. The story of UNIX demonstrates how +portability became a reality and how the particular practice of sharing UNIX +source code became a kind of de facto standard in its wake. + +UNIX was first written in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell +Telephone Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. UNIX was the dénouement of the MIT +project Multics, which Bell Labs had funded in part and to which Ken Thompson +had been assigned. Multics was one of the earliest complete time-sharing +operating systems, a demonstration platform for a number of early innovations +in time-sharing (multiple simultaneous users on one computer).~{ On time +sharing, see Lee et al., "Project MAC." Multics makes an appearance in nearly +all histories of computing, the best resource by far being Tom van Vleck’s Web +site http://www.multicians.org/. }~ By 1968, Bell Labs had pulled its +support—including Ken Thompson—from the project and placed him back in Murray +Hill, where he and ,{[pg 126]}, Dennis Ritchie were stuck without a machine, +without any money, and without a project. They were specialists in operating +systems, languages, and machine architecture in a research group that had no +funding or mandate to pursue these areas. Through the creative use of some +discarded equipment, and in relative isolation from the rest of the lab, +Thompson and Ritchie created, in the space of about two years, a complete +operating system, a programming language called C, and a host of tools that are +still in extremely wide use today. The name UNIX (briefly, UNICS) was, among +other things, a puerile pun: a castrated Multics. +={ C (programming language) ; + Multics +1 ; + Ritchie, Dennis +19 ; + Thompson, Ken +16 +} + +The absence of an economic or corporate mandate for Thompson’s and Ritchie’s +creativity and labor was not unusual for Bell Labs; researchers were free to +work on just about anything, so long as it possessed some kind of vague +relation to the interests of AT&T. However, the lack of funding for a more +powerful machine did restrict the kind of work Thompson and Ritchie could +accomplish. In particular, it influenced the design of the system, which was +oriented toward a super-slim control unit (a kernel) that governed the basic +operation of the machine and an expandable suite of small, independent tools, +each of which did one thing well and which could be strung together to +accomplish more complex and powerful tasks.~{ Some widely admired technical +innovations (many of which were borrowed from Multics) include: the +hierarchical file system, the command shell for interacting with the system; +the decision to treat everything, including external devices, as the same kind +of entity (a file), the "pipe" operator which allowed the output of one tool to +be "piped" as input to another tool, facilitating the easy creation of complex +tasks from simple tools. }~ With the help of Joseph Ossana, Douglas McIlroy, +and others, Thompson and Ritchie eventually managed to agitate for a new +PDP-11/20 based not on the technical merits of the UNIX operating system +itself, but on its potential applications, in particular, those of the +text-preparation group, who were interested in developing tools for formatting, +typesetting, and printing, primarily for the purpose of creating patent +applications, which was, for Bell Labs, and for AT&T more generally, obviously +a laudable goal.~{ Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX, 33-37. }~ +={ AT&T +14 ; + McIlroy, Douglas +} + +UNIX was unique for many technical reasons, but also for a specific economic +reason: it was never quite academic and never quite commercial. Martin +Campbell-Kelly notes that UNIX was a "non-proprietary operating system of major +significance."~{ Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the +Hedgehog, 143. }~ Kelly’s use of "non-proprietary" is not surprising, but it is +incorrect. Although business-speak regularly opposed open to proprietary +throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (and UNIX was definitely the former), +Kelly’s slip marks clearly the confusion between software ownership and +software distribution that permeates both popular and academic understandings. +UNIX was indeed proprietary—it was copyrighted and wholly owned by Bell Labs +and in turn by Western Electric ,{[pg 127]}, and AT&T—but it was not exactly +commercialized or marketed by them. Instead, AT&T allowed individuals and +corporations to install UNIX and to create UNIX-like derivatives for very low +licensing fees. Until about 1982, UNIX was licensed to academics very widely +for a very small sum: usually royalty-free with a minimal service charge (from +about $150 to $800).~{ Ritchie’s Web site contains a copy of a 1974 license +(http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/licenses.html) and a series of ads that +exemplify the uneasy positioning of UNIX as a commercial product +(http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/unixad.html). According to Don Libes and +Sandy Ressler, "The original licenses were source licenses. . . . [C]ommercial +institutions paid fees on the order of $20,000. If you owned more than one +machine, you had to buy binary licenses for every additional machine [i.e., you +were not allowed to copy the source and install it] you wanted to install UNIX +on. They were fairly pricey at $8000, considering you couldn’t resell them. On +the other hand, educational institutions could buy source licenses for several +hundred dollars—just enough to cover Bell Labs’ administrative overhead and the +cost of the tapes" (Life with UNIX, 20-21). }~ The conditions of this license +allowed researchers to do what they liked with the software so long as they +kept it secret: they could not distribute or use it outside of their university +labs (or use it to create any commercial product or process), nor publish any +part of it. As a result, throughout the 1970s UNIX was developed both by +Thompson and Ritchie inside Bell Labs and by users around the world in a +relatively informal manner. Bell Labs followed such a liberal policy both +because it was one of a small handful of industry-academic research and +development centers and because AT&T was a government monopoly that provided +phone service to the country and was therefore forbidden to directly enter the +computer software market.~{ According to Salus, this licensing practice was +also a direct result of Judge Thomas Meaney’s 1956 antitrust consent decree +which required AT&T to reveal and to license its patents for nominal fees (A +Quarter Century of UNIX, 56); see also Brock, The Second Information +Revolution, 116-20. }~ +={ AT&T : + Bell Laboratories +13 ; + licensing, of UNIX +6 ; + proprietary systems : + open vs. ; + monopoly +} + +Being on the border of business and academia meant that UNIX was, on the one +hand, shielded from the demands of management and markets, allowing it to +achieve the conceptual integrity that made it so appealing to designers and +academics. On the other, it also meant that AT&T treated it as a potential +product in the emerging software industry, which included new legal questions +from a changing intellectual-property regime, novel forms of marketing and +distribution, and new methods of developing, supporting, and distributing +software. + +Despite this borderline status, UNIX was a phenomenal success. The reasons why +UNIX was so popular are manifold; it was widely admired aesthetically, for its +size, and for its clever design and tools. But the fact that it spread so +widely and quickly is testament also to the existing community of eager +computer scientists and engineers (and a few amateurs) onto which it was +bootstrapped, users for whom a powerful, flexible, low-cost, modifiable, and +fast operating system was a revelation of sorts. It was an obvious alternative +to the complex, poorly documented, buggy operating systems that routinely +shipped standard with the machines that universities and research organizations +purchased. "It worked," in other words. + +A key feature of the popularity of UNIX was the inclusion of the source code. +When Bell Labs licensed UNIX, they usually provided a tape that contained the +documentation (i.e., documentation that ,{[pg 128]}, was part of the system, +not a paper technical manual external to it), a binary version of the software, +and the source code for the software. The practice of distributing the source +code encouraged people to maintain it, extend it, document it—and to contribute +those changes to Thompson and Ritchie as well. By doing so, users developed an +interest in maintaining and supporting the project precisely because it gave +them an opportunity and the tools to use their computer creatively and +flexibly. Such a globally distributed community of users organized primarily by +their interest in maintaining an operating system is a precursor to the +recursive public, albeit confined to the world of computer scientists and +researchers with access to still relatively expensive machines. As such, UNIX +was not only a widely shared piece of quasi-commercial software (i.e., +distributed in some form other than through a price-based retail market), but +also the first to systematically include the source code as part of that +distribution as well, thus appealing more to academics and engineers.~{ Even in +computer science, source code was rarely formally shared, and more likely +presented in the form of theorems and proofs, or in various idealized +higher-level languages such as Donald Knuth’s MIX language for presenting +algorithms (Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming). Snippets of actual source +code are much more likely to be found in printed form in handbooks, manuals, +how-to guides, and other professional publications aimed at training +programmers. }~ +={ recursive public : + precursors of +} + +Throughout the 1970s, the low licensing fees, the inclusion of the source code, +and its conceptual integrity meant that UNIX was ported to a remarkable number +of other machines. In many ways, academics found it just as appealing, if not +more, to be involved in the creation and improvement of a cutting-edge system +by licensing and porting the software themselves, rather than by having it +provided to them, without the source code, by a company. Peter Salus, for +instance, suggests that people experienced the lack of support from Bell Labs +as a kind of spur to develop and share their own fixes. The means by which +source code was shared, and the norms and practices of sharing, porting, +forking, and modifying source code were developed in this period as part of the +development of UNIX itself—the technical design of the system facilitates and +in some cases mirrors the norms and practices of sharing that developed: +operating systems and social systems.~{ The simultaneous development of the +operating system and the norms for creating, sharing, documenting, and +extending it are often referred to as the "UNIX philosophy." It includes the +central idea that one should build on the ideas (software) of others (see +Gancarz, The Unix Philosophy and Linux and the UNIX Philosophy). See also +Raymond, The Art of UNIX Programming. }~ +={ Salus, Peter +6 } + +2~ Sharing UNIX + +Over the course of 1974-77 the spread and porting of UNIX was phenomenal for an +operating system that had no formal system of distribution and no official +support from the company that owned it, and that evolved in a piecemeal way +through the contributions ,{[pg 129]}, of people from around the world. By +1975, a user’s group had developed: USENIX.~{ Bell Labs threatened the nascent +UNIX NEWS newsletter with trademark infringement, so "USENIX" was a concession +that harkened back to the original USE users’ group for DEC machines, but +avoided explicitly using the name UNIX. Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 9. +}~ UNIX had spread to Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan, and a number of new +tools and applications were being both independently circulated and, +significantly, included in the frequent releases by Bell Labs itself. All +during this time, AT&T’s licensing department sought to find a balance between +allowing this circulation and innovation to continue, and attempting to +maintain trade-secret status for the software. UNIX was, by 1980, without a +doubt the most widely and deeply understood trade secret in computing history. +={ Free Software : + passim ; + software tools +2 ; + trade secret law ; + Usenix (user group) +} + +The manner in which the circulation of and contribution to UNIX occurred is not +well documented, but it includes both technical and pedagogical forms of +sharing. On the technical side, distribution took a number of forms, both in +resistance to AT&T’s attempts to control it and facilitated by its unusually +liberal licensing of the software. On the pedagogical side, UNIX quickly became +a paradigmatic object for computer-science students precisely because it was a +working operating system that included the source code and that was simple +enough to explore in a semester or two. +={ sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + pedagogical aspects +} + +In A Quarter Century of UNIX Salus provides a couple of key stories (from Ken +Thompson and Lou Katz) about how exactly the technical sharing of UNIX worked, +how sharing, porting, and forking can be distinguished, and how it was neither +strictly legal nor deliberately illegal in this context. First, from Ken +Thompson: "The first thing to realize is that the outside world ran on releases +of UNIX (V4, V5, V6, V7) but we did not. Our view was a continuum. V5 was what +we had at some point in time and was probably out of date simply by the +activity required to put it in shape to export. After V6, I was preparing to go +to Berkeley to teach for a year. I was putting together a system to take. Since +it was almost a release, I made a diff with V6 [a tape containing only the +differences between the last release and the one Ken was taking with him]. On +the way to Berkeley I stopped by Urbana-Champaign to keep an eye on Greg +Chesson. . . . I left the diff tape there and I told him that I wouldn’t mind +if it got around."~{ Salus, A Quarter Century of Unix, 138. }~ +={ diff (software tool) +2 ; + Katz, Lou +3 ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + legal aspects +4 | technical aspects +5 +} + +The need for a magnetic tape to "get around" marks the difference between the +1970s and the present: the distribution of software involved both the material +transport of media and the digital copying of information. The desire to +distribute bug fixes (the "diff " tape) resonates with the future emergence of +Free Software: the ,{[pg 130]}, fact that others had fixed problems and +contributed them back to Thompson and Ritchie produced an obligation to see +that the fixes were shared as widely as possible, so that they in turn might be +ported to new machines. Bell Labs, on the other hand, would have seen this +through the lens of software development, requiring a new release, contract +renegotiation, and a new license fee for a new version. Thompson’s notion of a +"continuum," rather than a series of releases also marks the difference between +the idea of an evolving common set of objects stewarded by multiple people in +far-flung locales and the idea of a shrink-wrapped "productized" software +package that was gaining ascendance as an economic commodity at the same time. +When Thompson says "the outside world," he is referring not only to people +outside of Bell Labs but to the way the world was seen from within Bell Labs by +the lawyers and marketers who would create a new version. For the lawyers, the +circulation of source code was a problem because it needed to be stabilized, +not so much for commercial reasons as for legal ones—one license for one piece +of software. Distributing updates, fixes, and especially new tools and +additions written by people who were not employed by Bell Labs scrambled the +legal clarity even while it strengthened the technical quality. Lou Katz makes +this explicit. + +_1 A large number of bug fixes was collected, and rather than issue them one at +a time, a collection tape ("the 50 fixes") was put together by Ken [the same +"diff tape," presumably]. Some of the fixes were quite important, though I +don’t remember any in particular. I suspect that a significant fraction of the +fixes were actually done by non-Bell people. Ken tried to send it out, but the +lawyers kept stalling and stalling and stalling. Finally, in complete disgust, +someone "found a tape on Mountain Avenue" [the location of Bell Labs] which had +the fixes. When the lawyers found out about it, they called every licensee and +threatened them with dire consequences if they didn’t destroy the tape, after +trying to find out how they got the tape. I would guess that no one would +actually tell them how they came by the tape (I didn’t).~{ Ibid., emphasis +added. }~ + +Distributing the fixes involved not just a power struggle between the engineers +and management, but was in fact clearly motivated by the fact that, as Katz +says, "a significant fraction of the fixes were done by non-Bell people." This +meant two things: first, that there was an obvious incentive to return the +updated system to these ,{[pg 131]}, people and to others; second, that it was +not obvious that AT&T actually owned or could claim rights over these fixes—or, +if they did, they needed to cover their legal tracks, which perhaps in part +explains the stalling and threatening of the lawyers, who may have been buying +time to make a "legal" version, with the proper permissions. + +The struggle should be seen not as one between the rebel forces of UNIX +development and the evil empire of lawyers and managers, but as a struggle +between two modes of stabilizing the object known as UNIX. For the lawyers, +stability implied finding ways to make UNIX look like a product that would meet +the existing legal framework and the peculiar demands of being a regulated +monopoly unable to freely compete with other computer manufacturers; the +ownership of bits and pieces, ideas and contributions had to be strictly +accountable. For the programmers, stability came through redistributing the +most up-to-date operating system and sharing all innovations with all users so +that new innovations might also be portable. The lawyers saw urgency in making +UNIX legally stable; the engineers saw urgency in making UNIX technically +stable and compatible with itself, that is, to prevent the forking of UNIX, the +death knell for portability. The tension between achieving legal stability of +the object and promoting its technical portability and stability is one that +has repeated throughout the life of UNIX and its derivatives—and that has +ramifications in other areas as well. +={ ontology : + of UNIX operating system +2 +} + +The identity and boundaries of UNIX were thus intricately formed through its +sharing and distribution. Sharing produced its own form of moral and technical +order. Troubling questions emerged immediately: were the versions that had been +fixed, extended, and expanded still UNIX, and hence still under the control of +AT&T? Or were the differences great enough that something else (not-UNIX) was +emerging? If a tape full of fixes, contributed by non-Bell employees, was +circulated to people who had licensed UNIX, and those fixes changed the system, +was it still UNIX? Was it still UNIX in a legal sense or in a technical sense +or both? While these questions might seem relatively scholastic, the history of +the development of UNIX suggests something far more interesting: just about +every possible modification has been made, legally and technically, but the +concept of UNIX has remained remarkably stable. +={ moral and technical order } + +% ,{[pg 132]}, + +2~ Porting UNIX + +Technical portability accounts for only part of UNIX’s success. As a +pedagogical resource, UNIX quickly became an indispensable tool for academics +around the world. As it was installed and improved, it was taught and learned. +The fact that UNIX spread first to university computer-science departments, and +not to businesses, government, or nongovernmental organizations, meant that it +also became part of the core pedagogical practice of a generation of +programmers and computer scientists; over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, +UNIX came to exemplify the very concept of an operating system, especially +time-shared, multi-user operating systems. Two stories describe the porting of +UNIX from machines to minds and illustrate the practice as it developed and how +it intersected with the technical and legal attempts to stabilize UNIX as an +object: the story of John Lions’s Commentary on Unix 6th Edition and the story +of Andrew Tanenbaum’s Minix. +={ Lions, John +10 ; + Tanenbaum, Andrew +1 ; + UNIX philosophy +1 +} + +The development of a pedagogical UNIX lent a new stability to the concept of +UNIX as opposed to its stability as a body of source code or as a legal entity. +The porting of UNIX was so successful that even in cases where a ported version +of UNIX shares none of the same source code as the original, it is still +considered UNIX. The monstrous and promiscuous nature of UNIX is most clear in +the stories of Lions and Tanenbaum, especially when contrasted with the +commercial, legal, and technical integrity of something like Microsoft Windows, +which generally exists in only a small number of forms (NT, ME, XP, 95, 98, +etc.), possessing carefully controlled source code, immured in legal +protection, and distributed only through sales and service packs to customers +or personal-computer manufacturers. While Windows is much more widely used than +UNIX, it is far from having become a paradigmatic pedagogical object; its +integrity is predominantly legal, not technical or pedagogical. Or, in +pedagogical terms, Windows is to fish as UNIX is to fishing lessons. +={ Microsoft : + Windows operating system ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + pedagogical aspects +9 ; + UNIX operating system : + Windows operating system vs. +} + +Lions’s Commentary is also known as "the most photocopied document in computer +science." Lions was a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of New +South Wales in the early 1970s; after reading the first paper by Ritchie and +Thompson on UNIX, he convinced his colleagues to purchase a license from +AT&T.~{ Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, "The Unix Operating System," Bell +Systems Technical Journal (1974). }~ Lions, like many researchers, was +impressed by the quality of the system, and he was, like all of the UNIX users +of that period, intimately ,{[pg 133]}, familiar with the UNIX source code—a +necessity in order to install, run, or repair it. Lions began using the system +to teach his classes on operating systems, and in the course of doing so he +produced a textbook of sorts, which consisted of the entire source code of UNIX +version 6 (V6), along with elaborate, line-by-line commentary and explanation. +The value of this textbook can hardly be underestimated. Access to machines and +software that could be used to understand how a real system worked was very +limited: "Real computers with real operating systems were locked up in machine +rooms and committed to processing twenty four hours a day. UNIX changed +that."~{ Greg Rose, quoted in Lions, Commentary, n.p. }~ Berny Goodheart, in an +appreciation of Lions’s Commentary, reiterated this sense of the practical +usefulness of the source code and commentary: "It is important to understand +the significance of John’s work at that time: for students studying computer +science in the 1970s, complex issues such as process scheduling, security, +synchronization, file systems and other concepts were beyond normal +comprehension and were extremely difficult to teach—there simply wasn’t +anything available with enough accessibility for students to use as a case +study. Instead a student’s discipline in computer science was earned by +punching holes in cards, collecting fan-fold paper printouts, and so on. +Basically, a computer operating system in that era was considered to be a huge +chunk of inaccessible proprietary code."~{ Lions, Commentary, n.p. }~ +={ intellectual property +3 } + +Lions’s commentary was a unique document in the world of computer science, +containing a kind of key to learning about a central component of the computer, +one that very few people would have had access to in the 1970s. It shows how +UNIX was ported not only to machines (which were scarce) but also to the minds +of young researchers and student programmers (which were plentiful). Several +generations of both academic computer scientists and students who went on to +work for computer or software corporations were trained on photocopies of UNIX +source code, with a whiff of toner and illicit circulation: a distributed +operating system in the textual sense. + +Unfortunately, Commentary was also legally restricted in its distribution. AT&T +and Western Electric, in hopes that they could maintain trade-secret status for +UNIX, allowed only very limited circulation of the book. At first, Lions was +given permission to distribute single copies only to people who already +possessed a license for UNIX V6; later Bell Labs itself would distribute +Commentary ,{[pg 134]}, briefly, but only to licensed users, and not for sale, +distribution, or copying. Nonetheless, nearly everyone seems to have possessed +a dog-eared, nth-generation copy. Peter Reintjes writes, "We soon came into +possession of what looked like a fifth generation photocopy and someone who +shall remain nameless spent all night in the copier room spawning a sixth, an +act expressly forbidden by a carefully worded disclaimer on the first page. +Four remarkable things were happening at the same time. One, we had discovered +the first piece of software that would inspire rather than annoy us; two, we +had acquired what amounted to a literary criticism of that computer software; +three, we were making the single most significant advancement of our education +in computer science by actually reading an entire operating system; and four, +we were breaking the law."~{ Ibid. }~ +={ trade secret law +1 } + +Thus, these generations of computer-science students and academics shared a +secret—a trade secret become open secret. Every student who learned the +essentials of the UNIX operating system from a photocopy of Lions’s commentary, +also learned about AT&T’s attempt to control its legal distribution on the +front cover of their textbook. The parallel development of photocopying has a +nice resonance here; together with home cassette taping of music and the +introduction of the video-cassette recorder, photocopying helped drive the +changes to copyright law adopted in 1976. +={ copyright : + changes in 1976 +} + +Thirty years later, and long after the source code in it had been completely +replaced, Lions’s Commentary is still widely admired by geeks. Even though Free +Software has come full circle in providing students with an actual operating +system that can be legally studied, taught, copied, and implemented, the kind +of "literary criticism" that Lions’s work represents is still extremely rare; +even reading obsolete code with clear commentary is one of the few ways to +truly understand the design elements and clever implementations that made the +UNIX operating system so different from its predecessors and even many of its +successors, few, if any of which have been so successfully ported to the minds +of so many students. +={ design +2 } + +Lions’s Commentary contributed to the creation of a worldwide community of +people whose connection to each other was formed by a body of source code, both +in its implemented form and in its textual, photocopied form. This nascent +recursive public not only understood itself as belonging to a technical elite +which was constituted by its creation, understanding, and promotion of a +particular ,{[pg 135]}, technical tool, but also recognized itself as "breaking +the law," a community constituted in opposition to forms of power that governed +the circulation, distribution, modification, and creation of the very tools +they were learning to make as part of their vocation. The material connection +shared around the world by UNIX-loving geeks to their source code is not a mere +technical experience, but a social and legal one as well. +={ recursive public +6 } + +Lions was not the only researcher to recognize that teaching the source code +was the swiftest route to comprehension. The other story of the circulation of +source code concerns Andrew Tanenbaum, a well-respected computer scientist and +an author of standard textbooks on computer architecture, operating systems, +and networking.~{ Tanenbaum’s two most famous textbooks are Operating Systems +and Computer Networks, which have seen three and four editions respectively. }~ +In the 1970s Tanenbaum had also used UNIX as a teaching tool in classes at the +Vrije Universiteit, in Amsterdam. Because the source code was distributed with +the binary code, he could have his students explore directly the +implementations of the system, and he often used the source code and the Lions +book in his classes. But, according to his Operating Systems: Design and +Implementation (1987), "When AT&T released Version 7 [ca. 1979], it began to +realize that UNIX was a valuable commercial product, so it issued Version 7 +with a license that prohibited the source code from being studied in courses, +in order to avoid endangering its status as a trade secret. Many universities +complied by simply dropping the study of UNIX, and teaching only theory" (13). +For Tanenbaum, this was an unacceptable alternative—but so, apparently, was +continuing to break the law by teaching UNIX in his courses. And so he +proceeded to create a completely new UNIX-like operating system that used not a +single line of AT&T source code. He called his creation Minix. It was a +stripped-down version intended to run on personal computers (IBM PCs), and to +be distributed along with the textbook Operating Systems, published by Prentice +Hall.~{ Tanenbaum was not the only person to follow this route. The other +acknowledged giant in the computer-science textbook world, Douglas Comer, +created Xinu and Xinu-PC (UNIX spelled backwards) in Operating Systems Design +in 1984. }~ +={ Minix (operating system) +2 ; + Tanenbaum, Andrew : + Minix and +5 ; + textbooks : + on operating systems and networks +1 ; + UNIX operating system : + as commercial product +} + +Minix became as widely used in the 1980s as a teaching tool as Lions’s source +code had been in the 1970s. According to Tanenbaum, the Usenet group +comp.os.minix had reached 40,000 members by the late 1980s, and he was +receiving constant suggestions for changes and improvements to the operating +system. His own commitment to teaching meant that he incorporated few of these +suggestions, an effort to keep the system simple enough to be printed in a +textbook and understood by undergraduates. Minix ,{[pg 136]}, was freely +available as source code, and it was a fully functioning operating system, even +a potential alternative to UNIX that would run on a personal computer. Here was +a clear example of the conceptual integrity of UNIX being communicated to +another generation of computer-science students: Tanenbaum’s textbook is not +called "UNIX Operating Systems"—it is called Operating Systems. The clear +implication is that UNIX represented the clearest example of the principles +that should guide the creation of any operating system: it was, for all intents +and purposes, state of the art even twenty years after it was first conceived. +={ ontology : + of UNIX operating system +} + +Minix was not commercial software, but nor was it Free Software. It was +copyrighted and controlled by Tanenbaum’s publisher, Prentice Hall. Because it +used no AT&T source code, Minix was also legally independent, a legal object of +its own. The fact that it was intended to be legally distinct from, yet +conceptually true to UNIX is a clear indication of the kinds of tensions that +govern the creation and sharing of source code. The ironic apotheosis of Minix +as the pedagogical gold standard for studying UNIX came in 1991-92, when a +young Linus Torvalds created a "fork" of Minix, also rewritten from scratch, +that would go on to become the paradigmatic piece of Free Software: Linux. +Tanenbaum’s purpose for Minix was that it remain a pedagogically useful +operating system—small, concise, and illustrative—whereas Torvalds wanted to +extend and expand his version of Minix to take full advantage of the kinds of +hardware being produced in the 1990s. Both, however, were committed to +source-code visibility and sharing as the swiftest route to complete +comprehension of operating-systems principles. +={ Linux (Free Software project) : + origins in Minix +} + +2~ Forking UNIX +={ forking +13 } + +Tanenbaum’s need to produce Minix was driven by a desire to share the source +code of UNIX with students, a desire AT&T was manifestly uncomfortable with and +which threatened the trade-secret status of their property. The fact that Minix +might be called a fork of UNIX is a key aspect of the political economy of +operating systems and social systems. Forking generally refers to the creation +of new, modified source code from an original base of source code, resulting in +two distinct programs with the same parent. Whereas the modification of an +engine results only in a modified engine, the ,{[pg 137]}, modification of +source code implies differentiation and reproduction, because of the ease with +which it can be copied. +={ Minix (operating system) +1 ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) +15 ; + trade secret law +1 +} + +How could Minix—a complete rewrite—still be considered the same object? +Considered solely from the perspective of trade-secret law, the two objects +were distinct, though from the perspective of copyright there was perhaps a +case for infringement, although AT&T did not rely on copyright as much as on +trade secret. From a technical perspective, the functions and processes that +the software accomplishes are the same, but the means by which they are coded +to do so are different. And from a pedagogical standpoint, the two are +identical—they exemplify certain core features of an operating system +(file-system structure, memory paging, process management)—all the rest is +optimization, or bells and whistles. Understanding the nature of forking +requires also that UNIX be understood from a social perspective, that is, from +the perspective of an operating system created and modified by user-developers +around the world according to particular and partial demands. It forms the +basis for the emergence of a robust recursive public. + +One of the more important instances of the forking of UNIX’s perambulatory +source code and the developing community of UNIX co-developers is the story of +the Berkeley Software Distribution and its incorporation of the TCP/IP +protocols. In 1975 Ken Thompson took a sabbatical in his hometown of Berkeley, +California, where he helped members of the computer-science department with +their installations of UNIX, arriving with V6 and the "50 bug fixes" diff tape. +Ken had begun work on a compiler for the Pascal programming language that would +run on UNIX, and this work was taken up by two young graduate students: Bill +Joy and Chuck Hartley. (Joy would later co-found Sun Microsystems, one of the +most successful UNIX-based workstation companies in the history of the +industry.) +={ diff (software tool) ; + Joy, Bill +9 ; + Sun Microsystems ; + Thompson, Ken +1 ; + Pascal (programming language) +2 ; + protocols : + distinguished from standards and implementation ; + Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) : + TCP/IP +6 ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) : + included in BSD +6 +} + +Joy, above nearly all others, enthusiastically participated in the informal +distribution of source code. With a popular and well-built Pascal system, and a +new text editor called ex (later vi), he created the Berkeley Software +Distribution (BSD), a set of tools that could be used in combination with the +UNIX operating system. They were extensions to the original UNIX operating +system, but not a complete, rewritten version that might replace it. By all +accounts, Joy served as a kind of one-man software-distribution house, making +tapes and posting them, taking orders and cashing checks—all in ,{[pg 138]}, +addition to creating software.~{ McKusick, "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix," 32. +}~ UNIX users around the world soon learned of this valuable set of extensions +to the system, and before long, many were differentiating between AT&T UNIX and +BSD UNIX. +={ AT&T : + version of UNIX +1 ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) +9 ; + differentiation of software ; + text editors +1 ; + UNIX operating system : + relationship to Arpanet +7 ; + vi (text editor) +1 +} + +According to Don Libes, Bell Labs allowed Berkeley to distribute its extensions +to UNIX so long as the recipients also had a license from Bell Labs for the +original UNIX (an arrangement similar to the one that governed Lions’s +Commentary).~{ Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 16-17. }~ From about 1976 +until about 1981, BSD slowly became an independent distribution—indeed, a +complete version of UNIX—well-known for the vi editor and the Pascal compiler, +but also for the addition of virtual memory and its implementation on DEC’s VAX +machines.~{ A recent court case between the Utah-based SCO—the current owner of +the legal rights to the original UNIX source code—and IBM raised yet again the +question of how much of the original UNIX source code exists in the BSD +distribution. SCO alleges that IBM (and Linus Torvalds) inserted SCO-owned UNIX +source code into the Linux kernel. However, the incredibly circuitous route of +the "original" source code makes these claims hard to ferret out: it was +developed at Bell Labs, licensed to multiple universities, used as a basis for +BSD, sold to an earlier version of the company SCO (then known as the Santa +Cruz Operation), which created a version called Xenix in cooperation with +Microsoft. See the diagram by Eric Lévénez at http://www.levenez.com/unix/. For +more detail on this case, see www.groklaw.com. }~ It should be clear that the +unusual quasi-commercial status of AT&T’s UNIX allowed for this situation in a +way that a fully commercial computer corporation would never have allowed. +Consider, for instance, the fact that many UNIX users—students at a university, +for instance—could not essentially know whether they were using an AT&T product +or something called BSD UNIX created at Berkeley. The operating system +functioned in the same way and, except for the presence of copyright notices +that occasionally flashed on the screen, did not make any show of asserting its +brand identity (that would come later, in the 1980s). Whereas a commercial +computer manufacturer would have allowed something like BSD only if it were +incorporated into and distributed as a single, marketable, and identifiable +product with a clever name, AT&T turned something of a blind eye to the +proliferation and spread of AT&T UNIX and the result were forks in the project: +distinct bodies of source code, each an instance of something called UNIX. + +As BSD developed, it gained different kinds of functionality than the UNIX from +which it was spawned. The most significant development was the inclusion of +code that allowed it to connect computers to the Arpanet, using the TCP/IP +protocols designed by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. The TCP/IP protocols were a +key feature of the Arpanet, overseen by the Information Processing and +Techniques Office (IPTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency +(DARPA) from its inception in 1967 until about 1977. The goal of the protocols +was to allow different networks, each with its own machines and administrative +boundaries, to be connected to each other.~{ See Vinton G. Cerf and Robert +Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection." For the history, see +Abbate, Inventing the Internet; Norberg and O’Neill, A History of the +Information Techniques Processing Office. Also see chapters 1 and 5 herein for +more detail on the role of these protocols and the RFC process. }~ Although +there is a common heritage—in the form of J. C. R. Licklider—which ties the +imagination of the time-sharing operating ,{[pg 139]}, system to the creation +of the "galactic network," the Arpanet initially developed completely +independent of UNIX.~{ Waldrop, The Dream Machine, chaps. 5 and 6. }~ As a +time-sharing operating system, UNIX was meant to allow the sharing of resources +on a single computer, whether mainframe or minicomputer, but it was not +initially intended to be connected to a network of other computers running +UNIX, as is the case today.~{ The exception being a not unimportant tool called +Unix to Unix Copy Protocol, or uucp, which was widely used to transmit data by +phone and formed the bases for the creation of the Usenet. See Hauben and +Hauben, Netizens. }~ The goal of Arpanet, by contrast, was explicitly to +achieve the sharing of resources located on diverse machines across diverse +networks. +={ Arpanet (network) +7 ; + Cerf, Vinton ; + Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) +7 ; + Kahn, Robert ; + Licklider, J. C. R. +} + +To achieve the benefits of TCP/IP, the resources needed to be implemented in +all of the different operating systems that were connected to the +Arpanet—whatever operating system and machine happened to be in use at each of +the nodes. However, by 1977, the original machines used on the network were +outdated and increasingly difficult to maintain and, according to Kirk +McKusick, the greatest expense was that of porting the old protocol software to +new machines. Hence, IPTO decided to pursue in part a strategy of achieving +coordination at the operating-system level, and they chose UNIX as one of the +core platforms on which to standardize. In short, they had seen the light of +portability. In about 1978 IPTO granted a contract to Bolt, Beranek, and Newman +(BBN), one of the original Arpanet contractors, to integrate the TCP/IP +protocols into the UNIX operating system. +={ Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) } + +But then something odd happened, according to Salus: "An initial prototype was +done by BBN and given to Berkeley. Bill [Joy] immediately started hacking on it +because it would only run an Ethernet at about 56K/sec utilizing 100% of the +CPU on a 750. . . . Bill lobotomized the code and increased its performance to +on the order of 700KB/sec. This caused some consternation with BBN when they +came in with their ‘finished’ version, and Bill wouldn’t accept it. There were +battles for years after, about which version would be in the system. The +Berkeley version ultimately won."~{ Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX, 161. }~ +={ Salus, Peter } + +Although it is not clear, it appears BBN intended to give Joy the code in order +to include it in his BSD version of UNIX for distribution, and that Joy and +collaborators intended to cooperate with Rob Gurwitz of BBN on a final +implementation, but Berkeley insisted on "improving" the code to make it +perform more to their needs, and BBN apparently dissented from this.~{ TCP/IP +Digest 1.6 (11 November 1981) contains Joy’s explanation of Berkeley’s +intentions (Message-ID: { anews.aucbvax.5236 +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=anews.aucbvax.5236 ). }~ One result of +this scuffle between BSD and BBN was a genuine fork: two bodies of code that +did the same thing, competing with each other to become the standard UNIX +implementation of TCP/IP. Here, then, was a ,{[pg 140]}, case of sharing source +code that led to the creation of different versions of software—sharing without +collaboration. Some sites used the BBN code, some used the Berkeley code. + +Forking, however, does not imply permanent divergence, and the continual +improvement, porting, and sharing of software can have odd consequences when +forks occur. On the one hand, there are particular pieces of source code: they +must be identifiable and exact, and prepended with a copyright notice, as was +the case of the Berkeley code, which was famously and vigorously policed by the +University of California regents, who allowed for a very liberal distribution +of BSD code on the condition that the copyright notice was retained. On the +other hand, there are particular named collections of code that work together +(e.g., UNIX™, or DARPA-approved UNIX, or later, Certified Open Source [sm]) and +are often identified by a trademark symbol intended, legally speaking, to +differentiate products, not to assert ownership of particular instances of a +product. +={ BSD License +2 ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) ; + intellectual property +2 ; + trademark law +} + +The odd consequence is this: Bill Joy’s specific TCP/IP code was incorporated +not only into BSD UNIX, but also into other versions of UNIX, including the +UNIX distributed by AT&T (which had originally licensed UNIX to Berkeley) with +the Berkeley copyright notice removed. This bizarre, tangled bank of licenses +and code resulted in a famous suit and countersuit between AT&T and Berkeley, +in which the intricacies of this situation were sorted out.~{ See Andrew +Leonard, "BSD Unix: Power to the People, from the Code," Salon, 16 May 2000, +http://archive.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/. }~ An +innocent bystander, expecting UNIX to be a single thing, might be surprised to +find that it takes different forms for reasons that are all but impossible to +identify, but the cause of which is clear: different versions of sharing in +conflict with one another; different moral and technical imaginations of order +that result in complex entanglements of value and code. +={ moral and technical order +5 } + +The BSD fork of UNIX (and the subfork of TCP/IP) was only one of many to come. +By the early 1980s, a proliferation of UNIX forks had emerged and would be +followed shortly by a very robust commercialization. At the same time, the +circulation of source code started to slow, as corporations began to compete by +adding features and creating hardware specifically designed to run UNIX (such +as the Sun Sparc workstation and the Solaris operating system, the result of +Joy’s commercialization of BSD in the 1980s). The question of how to make all +of these versions work together eventually became the subject of the +open-systems discussions that would dominate the workstation and networking +sectors of the computer ,{[pg 141]}, market from the early 1980s to 1993, when +the dual success of Windows NT and the arrival of the Internet into public +consciousness changed the fortunes of the UNIX industry. +={ Microsoft : + Windows operating system ; + Solaris (operating system) ; + Sparc (computer workstation) +} + +A second, and more important, effect of the struggle between BBN and BSD was +simply the widespread adoption of the TCP/IP protocols. An estimated 98 percent +of computer-science departments in the United States and many such departments +around the world incorporated the TCP/IP protocols into their UNIX systems and +gained instant access to Arpanet.~{ Norberg and O’Neill, A History of the +Information Techniques Processing Office, 184-85. They cite Comer, +Internetworking with TCP/IP, 6 for the figure. }~ The fact that this occurred +when it did is important: a few years later, during the era of the +commercialization of UNIX, these protocols might very well not have been widely +implemented (or more likely implemented in incompatible, nonstandard forms) by +manufacturers, whereas before 1983, university computer scientists saw every +benefit in doing so if it meant they could easily connect to the largest single +computer network on the planet. The large, already functioning, relatively +standard implementation of TCP/IP on UNIX (and the ability to look at the +source code) gave these protocols a tremendous advantage in terms of their +survival and success as the basis of a global and singular network. + +2~ Conclusion + +The UNIX operating system is not just a technical achievement; it is the +creation of a set of norms for sharing source code in an unusual environment: +quasi-commercial, quasi-academic, networked, and planetwide. Sharing UNIX +source code has taken three basic forms: porting source code (transferring it +from one machine to another); teaching source code, or "porting" it to students +in a pedagogical setting where the use of an actual working operating system +vastly facilitates the teaching of theory and concepts; and forking source code +(modifying the existing source code to do something new or different). This +play of proliferation and differentiation is essential to the remarkably stable +identity of UNIX, but that identity exists in multiple forms: technical (as a +functioning, self-compatible operating system), legal (as a +license-circumscribed version subject to intellectual property and commercial +law), and pedagogical (as a conceptual exemplar, the paradigm of an operating +system). Source code shared in this manner is essentially unlike any other kind +of ,{[pg 142]}, source code in the world of computers, whether academic or +commercial. It raises troubling questions about standardization, about control +and audit, and about legitimacy that haunts not only UNIX but the Internet and +its various "open" protocols as well. +={ differentiation of software +1 ; + ontology : + of UNIX operating system +1 ; + pedagogy : + operating systems and +1 ; + proliferation of software +1 ; + openness (component of Free Software) ; + standards processes +} + +Sharing source code in Free Software looks the way it does today because of +UNIX. But UNIX looks the way it does not because of the inventive genius of +Thompson and Ritchie, or the marketing and management brilliance of AT&T, but +because sharing produces its own kind of order: operating systems and social +systems. The fact that geeks are wont to speak of "the UNIX philosophy" means +that UNIX is not just an operating system but a way of organizing the complex +relations of life and work through technical means; a way of charting and +breaching the boundaries between the academic, the aesthetic, and the +commercial; a way of implementing ideas of a moral and technical order. What’s +more, as source code comes to include more and more of the activities of +everyday communication and creation—as it comes to replace writing and +supplement thinking—the genealogy of its portability and the history of its +forking will illuminate the kinds of order emerging in practices and +technologies far removed from operating systems—but tied intimately to the UNIX +philosophy. +={ Ritchie, Dennis ; + Thompson, Ken ; + UNIX philosophy +} + +1~ 5. Conceiving Open Systems +={ Open Systems +99 ; + openness (component of Free Software) +28 +} + +% ,{[pg 143]}, + +_1 The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.~{ +Quoted in Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 67, and also in Critchley and +Batty, Open Systems, 17. I first heard it in an interview with Sean Doyle in +1998. }~ +={ standards +2 } + +Openness is an unruly concept. While free tends toward ambiguity (free as in +speech, or free as in beer?), open tends toward obfuscation. Everyone claims to +be open, everyone has something to share, everyone agrees that being open is +the obvious thing to do—after all, openness is the other half of "open +source"—but for all its obviousness, being "open" is perhaps the most complex +component of Free Software. It is never quite clear whether being open is a +means or an end. Worse, the opposite of open in this case (specifically, "open +systems") is not closed, but "proprietary"—signaling the complicated +imbrication of the technical, the legal, and the commercial. +={ proprietary systems : + open vs. +2 +} + +In this chapter I tell the story of the contest over the meaning of "open +systems" from 1980 to 1993, a contest to create a simultaneously moral and +technical infrastructure within the computer ,{[pg 144]}, industry.~{ Moral in +this usage signals the "moral and social order" I explored through the concept +of social imaginaries in chapter 1. Or, in the Scottish Enlightenment sense of +Adam Smith, it points to the right organization and relations of exchange among +humans. }~ The infrastructure in question includes technical components—the +UNIX operating system and the TCP/IP protocols of the Internet as open +systems—but it also includes "moral" components, including the demand for +structures of fair and open competition, antimonopoly and open markets, and +open-standards processes for high-tech networked computers and software in the +1980s.~{ There is, of course, a relatively robust discourse of open systems in +biology, sociology, systems theory, and cybernetics; however, that meaning of +open systems is more or less completely distinct from what openness and open +systems came to mean in the computer industry in the period book-ended by the +arrivals of the personal computer and the explosion of the Internet (ca. +1980-93). One relevant overlap between these two meanings can be found in the +work of Carl Hewitt at the MIT Media Lab and in the interest in "agorics" taken +by K. Eric Drexler, Bernardo Huberman, and Mark S. Miller. See Huberman, The +Ecology of Computation. }~ By moral, I mean imaginations of the proper order of +collective political and commercial action; referring to much more than simply +how individuals should act, moral signifies a vision of how economy and society +should be ordered collectively. +={ infrastructure ; + moral and technical order +3 ; + monopoly +1 ; +} + +The open-systems story is also a story of the blind spot of open systems—in +that blind spot is intellectual property. The story reveals a tension between +incompatible moral-technical orders: on the one hand, the promise of multiple +manufacturers and corporations creating interoperable components and selling +them in an open, heterogeneous market; on the other, an intellectual-property +system that encouraged jealous guarding and secrecy, and granted monopoly +status to source code, designs, and ideas in order to differentiate products +and promote competition. The tension proved irresolvable: without shared source +code, for instance, interoperable operating systems are impossible. Without +interoperable operating systems, internetworking and portable applications are +impossible. Without portable applications that can run on any system, open +markets are impossible. Without open markets, monopoly power reigns. +={ intellectual property ; + interoperability +21 ; + openness (component of Free Software) : + intellectual property and +} + +Standardization was at the heart of the contest, but by whom and by what means +was never resolved. The dream of open systems, pursued in an entirely +unregulated industry, resulted in a complicated experiment in novel forms of +standardization and cooperation. The creation of a "standard" operating system +based on UNIX is the story of a failure, a kind of "figuring out" gone haywire, +which resulted in huge consortia of computer manufacturers attempting to work +together and compete with each other at the same time. Meanwhile, the +successful creation of a "standard" networking protocol—known as the Open +Systems Interconnection Reference Model (OSI)—is a story of failure that hides +a larger success; OSI was eclipsed in the same period by the rapid and ad hoc +adoption of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which +used a radically different standardization process and which succeeded for a +number of surprising reasons, allowing the Internet ,{[pg 145]}, to take the +form it did in the 1990s and ultimately exemplifying the moral-technical +imaginary of a recursive public—and one at the heart of the practices of Free +Software. +={ figuring out ; + Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) : + as reference model ; + Openness (component of Free Software) : + standardization and ; + protocols : + Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) | TCP/IP ; + standards organizations ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) +} + +The conceiving of openness, which is the central plot of these two stories, has +become an essential component of the contemporary practice and power of Free +Software. These early battles created a kind of widespread readiness for Free +Software in the 1990s, a recognition of Free Software as a removal of open +systems’ blind spot, as much as an exploitation of its power. The geek ideal of +openness and a moral-technical order (the one that made Napster so significant +an event) was forged in the era of open systems; without this concrete +historical conception of how to maintain openness in technical and moral terms, +the recursive public of geeks would be just another hierarchical closed +organization—a corporation manqué—and not an independent public serving as a +check on the kinds of destructive power that dominated the open-systems +contest. +={ Napster } + +2~ Hopelessly Plural + +Big iron, silos, legacy systems, turnkey systems, dinosaurs, mainframes: with +the benefit of hindsight, the computer industry of the 1960s to the 1980s +appears to be backward and closed, to have literally painted itself into a +corner, as an early Intel advertisement suggests (figure 3). Contemporary +observers who show disgust and impatience with the form that computers took in +this era are without fail supporters of open systems and opponents of +proprietary systems that "lock in" customers to specific vendors and create +artificial demands for support, integration, and management of resources. Open +systems (were it allowed to flourish) would solve all these problems. +={ Intel (corporation) +2 ; + proprietary systems : + lock-in and ; + mainframes +4 +} + +Given the promise of a "general-purpose computer," it should seem ironic at +best that open systems needed to be created. But the general-purpose computer +never came into being. We do not live in the world of The Computer, but in a +world of computers: myriad, incompatible, specific machines. The design of +specialized machines (or "architectures") was, and still is, key to a +competitive industry in computers. It required CPUs and components and +associated software that could be clearly qualified and marketed ,{[pg 146]}, +,{[pg 147]}, as distinct products: the DEC PDP-11 or the IBM 360 or the CDC +6600. On the Fordist model of automobile production, the computer industry’s +mission was to render desired functions (scientific calculation, bookkeeping, +reservations management) in a large box with a button on it (or a very large +number of buttons on increasingly smaller boxes). Despite the theoretical +possibility, such computers were not designed to do anything, but, rather, to +do specific kinds of calculations exceedingly well. They were objects +customized to particular markets. +={ Digital Equipment Corporation (corporation) +1 ; + International Business Machines (IBM) +1 +} + +{ 2bits_05_03-100.png }image ~[* Open systems is the solution to painting yourself into a corner. Intel advertisement, Wall Street Journal, 30 May 1984. ]~ + +% image placed under paragraph + +The marketing strategy was therefore extremely stable from about 1955 to about +1980: identify customers with computing needs, build a computer to serve them, +provide them with all of the equipment, software, support, or peripherals they +need to do the job—and charge a large amount. Organizationally speaking, it was +an industry dominated by "IBM and the seven dwarfs": Hewlett-Packard, +Honeywell, Control Data, General Electric, NCR, RCA, Univac, and Burroughs, +with a few upstarts like DEC in the wings. + +By the 1980s, however, a certain inversion had happened. Computers had become +smaller and faster; there were more and more of them, and it was becoming +increasingly clear to the "big iron" manufacturers that what was most valuable +to users was the information they generated, not the machines that did the +generating. Such a realization, so the story goes, leads to a demand for +interchangeability, interoperability, information sharing, and networking. It +also presents the nightmarish problems of conversion between a bewildering, +heterogeneous, and rapidly growing array of hardware, software, protocols, and +systems. As one conference paper on the subject of evaluating open systems put +it, "At some point a large enterprise will look around and see a huge amount of +equipment and software that will not work together. Most importantly, the +information stored on these diverse platforms is not being shared, leading to +unnecessary duplication and lost profit."~{ Keves, "Open Systems Formal +Evaluation Process," 87. }~ +={ microcomputers +2 } + +Open systems emerged in the 1980s as the name of the solution to this problem: +an approach to the design of systems that, if all participants were to adopt +it, would lead to widely interoperable, integrated machines that could send, +store, process, and receive the user’s information. In marketing and +public-relations terms, it would provide "seamless integration." +={ standards : + as form of competition +1 +} + +In theory, open systems was simply a question of standards adoption. For +instance, if all the manufacturers of UNIX systems could ,{[pg 148]}, be +convinced to adopt the same basic standard for the operating system, then +seamless integration would naturally follow as all the various applications +could be written once to run on any variant UNIX system, regardless of which +company made it. In reality, such a standard was far from obvious, difficult to +create, and even more difficult to enforce. As such, the meaning of open +systems was "hopelessly plural," and the term came to mean an incredibly +diverse array of things. + +"Openness" is precisely the kind of concept that wavers between end and means. +Is openness good in itself, or is openness a means to achieve something +else—and if so what? Who wants to achieve openness, and for what purpose? Is +openness a goal? Or is it a means by which a different goal—say, +"interoperability" or "integration"—is achieved? Whose goals are these, and who +sets them? Are the goals of corporations different from or at odds with the +goals of university researchers or government officials? Are there large +central visions to which the activities of all are ultimately subordinate? +={ openness (component of Free Software) : + goals of +} + +Between 1980 and 1993, no person or company or computer industry consortium +explicitly set openness as the goal that organizations, corporations, or +programmers should aim at, but, by the same token, hardly anyone dissented from +the demand for openness. As such, it appears clearly as a kind of cultural +imperative, reflecting a longstanding social imaginary with roots in liberal +democratic notions, versions of a free market and ideals of the free exchange +of knowledge, but confronting changed technical conditions that bring the moral +ideas of order into relief, and into question. +={ social imaginary } + +In the 1980s everyone seemed to want some kind of openness, whether among +manufacturers or customers, from General Motors to the armed forces.~{ General +Motors stirred strong interest in open systems by creating, in 1985, its +Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP), which was built on UNIX. At the time, +General Motors was the second-largest purchaser of computer equipment after the +government. The Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force also adopted and +required POSIX-compliant UNIX systems early on. }~ The debates, both rhetorical +and technical, about the meaning of open systems have produced a slough of +writings, largely directed at corporate IT managers and CIOs. For instance, +Terry A. Critchley and K. C. Batty, the authors of Open Systems: The Reality +(1993), claim to have collected over a hundred definitions of open systems. The +definitions stress different aspects—from interoperability of heterogeneous +machines, to compatibility of different applications, to portability of +operating systems, to legitimate standards with open-interface +definitions—including those that privilege ideologies of a free market, as does +Bill Gates’s definition: "There’s nothing more open than the PC market. . . . +[U]sers can choose the latest and greatest software." The range ,{[pg 149]}, of +meanings was huge and oriented along multiple axes: what, to whom, how, and so +on. Open systems could mean that source code was open to view or that only the +specifications or interfaces were; it could mean "available to certain third +parties" or "available to everyone, including competitors"; it could mean +self-publishing, well-defined interfaces and application programming interfaces +(APIs), or it could mean sticking to standards set by governments and +professional societies. To cynics, it simply meant that the marketing +department liked the word open and used it a lot. +={ General Motors (GM) } + +One part of the definition, however, was both consistent and extremely +important: the opposite of an "open system" was not a "closed system" but a +"proprietary system." In industries other than networking and computing the +word proprietary will most likely have a positive valence, as in "our exclusive +proprietary technology." But in the context of computers and networks such a +usage became anathema in the 1980s and 1990s; what customers reportedly wanted +was a system that worked nicely with other systems, and that system had to be +by definition open since no single company could provide all of the possible +needs of a modern business or government agency. And even if it could, it +shouldn’t be allowed to. For instance, "In the beginning was the word and the +word was ‘proprietary.’ IBM showed the way, purveying machines that existed in +splendid isolation. They could not be operated using programs written for any +other computer; they could not communicate with the machines of competitors. If +your company started out buying computers of various sizes from the +International Business Machines Corporation because it was the biggest and +best, you soon found yourself locked as securely to Big Blue as a manacled +wretch in a medieval dungeon. When an IBM rival unveiled a technologically +advanced product, you could only sigh; it might be years before the new +technology showed up in the IBM line."~{ Paul Fusco, "The Gospel According to +Joy," New York Times, 27 March 1988, Sunday Magazine, 28. }~ +={ Joy, Bill +1 ; + Openness (component of Free Software) : + proprietary vs. +2 ; + openness (component of Free Software) : + definition of +7 +} + +With the exception of IBM (and to some extent its closest competitors: +Hewlett-Packard, Burroughs, and Unisys), computer corporations in the 1980s +sought to distance themselves from such "medieval" proprietary solutions (such +talk also echoes that of usable pasts of the Protestant Reformation often used +by geeks). New firms like Sun and Apollo deliberately berated the IBM model. +Bill Joy reportedly called one of IBM’s new releases in the 1980s a "grazing +dinosaur ‘with a truck outside pumping its bodily fluids through it.’"~{ +"Dinosaur" entry, The Jargon File, http://catb.org/jargon/html/D/dinosaur.html. +}~ +={ allegory, of Protestant Reformation ; + Protestant Reformation ; + usable pasts +} + +% ,{[pg 150]}, + +Open systems was never a simple solution though: all that complexity in +hardware, software, components, and peripherals could only be solved by pushing +hard for standards—even for a single standard. Or, to put it differently, +during the 1980s, everyone agreed that open systems was a great idea, but no +one agreed on which open systems. As one of the anonymous speakers in Open +Systems: The Reality puts it, "It took me a long time to understand what (the +industry) meant by open vs. proprietary, but I finally figured it out. From the +perspective of any one supplier, open meant ‘our products.’ Proprietary meant +‘everyone else’s products.’"~{ Crichtley and Batty, Open Systems, 10. }~ +={ openness (component of Free Software) : + closure vs. +8 ; + Open Systems : + intellectual property and +8 +} + +For most supporters of open systems, the opposition between open and +proprietary had a certain moral force: it indicated that corporations providing +the latter were dangerously close to being evil, immoral, perhaps even criminal +monopolists. Adrian Gropper and Sean Doyle, the principals in Amicas, an +Internet teleradiology company, for instance, routinely referred to the large +proprietary healthcare-information systems they confronted in these terms: open +systems are the way of light, not dark. Although there are no doubt arguments +for closed systems—security, privacy, robustness, control—the demand for +interoperability does not mean that such closure will be sacrificed.~{ An +excellent counterpoint here is Paul Edwards’s The Closed World, which clearly +demonstrates the appeal of a thoroughly and hierarchically controlled system +such as the Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) of the Department of +Defense against the emergence of more "green world" models of openness. }~ +Closure was also a choice. That is, open systems was an issue of sovereignty, +involving the right, in a moral sense, of a customer to control a technical +order hemmed in by firm standards that allowed customers to combine a number of +different pieces of hardware and software purchased in an open market and to +control the configuration themselves—not enforced openness, but the right to +decide oneself on whether and how to be open or closed. +={ Amicas (corporation) ; + Doyle, Sean ; + Evil ; + Gropper, Adrian ; + moral and technical order +1 ; + Monopoly +} + +The open-systems idea of moral order conflicts, however, with an idea of moral +order represented by intellectual property: the right, encoded in law, to +assert ownership over and control particular bits of source code, software, and +hardware. The call for and the market in open systems were never imagined as +being opposed to intellectual property as such, even if the opposition between +open and proprietary seemed to indicate a kind of subterranean recognition of +the role of intellectual property. The issue was never explicitly broached. Of +the hundred definitions in Open Systems, only one definition comes close to +including legal issues: "Speaker at Interop ’90 (paraphrased and maybe +apocryphal): ‘If you ask to gain access to a technology and the response you +get back is a price list, then ,{[pg 151]}, that technology is "open." If what +you get back is a letter from a lawyer, then it’s not "open."’"~{ Crichtley and +Batty, Open Systems, 13. }~ +={ intellectual property +6 } + +Openness here is not equated with freedom to copy and modify, but with the +freedom to buy access to any aspect of a system without signing a contract, a +nondisclosure agreement, or any other legal document besides a check. The +ground rules of competition are unchallenged: the existing system of +intellectual property—a system that was expanded and strengthened in this +period—was a sine qua non of competition. +={ standards : + as form of competition +1 +} + +Openness understood in this manner means an open market in which it is possible +to buy standardized things which are neither obscure nor secret, but can be +examined and judged—a "commodity" market, where products have functions, where +quality is comparable and forms the basis for vigorous competition. What this +notion implies is freedom from monopoly control by corporations over products, +a freedom that is nearly impossible to maintain when the entire industry is +structured around the monopoly control of intellectual property through trade +secret, patent, or copyright. The blind spot hides the contradiction between an +industry imagined on the model of manufacturing distinct and tangible products, +and the reality of an industry that wavers somewhere between service and +product, dealing in intangible intellectual property whose boundaries and +identity are in fact defined by how they are exchanged, circulated, and shared, +as in the case of the proliferation and differentiation of the UNIX operating +system. +={ monopoly +3 ; + standards +4 +} + +There was no disagreement about the necessity of intellectual property in the +computer industry of the 1980s, and there was no perceived contradiction in the +demands for openness. Indeed, openness could only make sense if it were built +on top of a stable system of intellectual property that allowed competitors to +maintain clear definitions of the boundaries of their products. But the +creation of interoperable components seemed to demand a relaxation of the +secrecy and guardedness necessary to "protect" intellectual property. Indeed, +for some observers, the problem of openness created the opportunity for the +worst kinds of cynical logic, as in this example from Regis McKenna’s Who’s +Afraid of Big Blue? +={ McKenna, Regis +1 } + +_1 Users want open environments, so the vendors had better comply. In fact, it +is a good idea to support new standards early. That way, you can help control +the development of standards. Moreover, you can ,{[pg 152]}, take credit for +driving the standard. Supporting standards is a way to demonstrate that you’re +on the side of users. On the other hand, companies cannot compete on the basis +of standards alone. Companies that live by standards can die by standards. +Other companies, adhering to the same standards, could win on the basis of +superior manufacturing technology. If companies do nothing but adhere to +standards, then all computers will become commodities, and nobody will be able +to make any money. Thus, companies must keep something proprietary, something +to differentiate their products.~{ McKenna, Who’s Afraid of Big Blue? 178, +emphasis added. McKenna goes on to suggest that computer companies can +differentiate themselves by adding services, better interfaces, or higher +reliability—ironically similar to arguments that the Open Source Initiative +would make ten years later. }~ + +By such an account, open systems would be tantamount to economic regression, a +state of pure competition on the basis of manufacturing superiority, and not on +the basis of the competitive advantage granted by the monopoly of intellectual +property, the clear hallmark of a high-tech industry.~{ Richard Stallman, +echoing the image of medieval manacled wretches, characterized the blind spot +thus: "Unix does not give the user any more legal freedom than Windows does. +What they mean by ‘open systems’ is that you can mix and match components, so +you can decide to have, say, a Sun chain on your right leg and some other +company’s chain on your left leg, and maybe some third company’s chain on your +right arm, and this is supposed to be better than having to choose to have Sun +chains on all your limbs, or Microsoft chains on all your limbs. You know, I +don’t care whose chains are on each limb. What I want is not to be chained by +anyone" ("Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, +MacArthur-certified Genius," interview by Michael Gross, Cambridge, Mass., +1999, 5, http://www.mgross.com/MoreThgsChng/interviews/stallman1.html). }~ It +was an irresolvable tension between the desire for a cooperative, market-based +infrastructure and the structure of an intellectual-property system ill-suited +to the technical realities within which companies and customers operated—a +tension revealing the reorientation of knowledge and power with respect to +creation, dissemination, and modification of knowledge. +={ modifiability +1 ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +} + +From the perspective of intellectual property, ideas, designs, and source code +are everything—if a company were to release the source code, and allow other +vendors to build on it, then what exactly would they be left to sell? Open +systems did not mean anything like free, open-source, or public-domain +computing. But the fact that competition required some form of collaboration +was obvious as well: standard software and network systems were needed; +standard markets were needed; standard norms of innovation within the +constraints of standards were needed. In short, the challenge was not just the +creation of competitive products but the creation of a standard infrastructure, +dealing with the technical questions of availability, modifiability, and +reusability of components, and the moral questions of the proper organization +of competition and collaboration across diverse domains: engineers, academics, +the computer industry, and the industries it computerized. What follows is the +story of how UNIX entered the open-systems fray, a story in which the tension +between the conceiving of openness and the demands of intellectual property is +revealed. +={ availability : + open systems and ; + collaboration : + competition vs. ; + modifiability ; + Source code +2 +} + +% ,{[pg 153]}, + +2~ Open Systems One: Operating Systems +={ UNIX operating system : + history of +37 | Open Systems and +37 | standardization and +37 +} + +In 1980 UNIX was by all accounts the most obvious choice for a standard +operating system for a reason that seemed simple at the outset: it ran on more +than one kind of hardware. It had been installed on DEC machines and IBM +machines and Intel processors and Motorola processors—a fact exciting to many +professional programmers, university computer scientists, and system +administrators, many of whom also considered UNIX to be the best designed of +the available operating systems. + +There was a problem, however (there always is): UNIX belonged to AT&T, and AT&T +had licensed it to multiple manufacturers over the years, in addition to +allowing the source code to circulate more or less with abandon throughout the +world and to be ported to a wide variety of different machine architectures. +Such proliferation, albeit haphazard, was a dream come true: a single, +interoperable operating system running on all kinds of hardware. Unfortunately, +proliferation would also undo that dream, because it meant that as the markets +for workstations and operating systems heated up, the existing versions of UNIX +hardened into distinct and incompatible versions with different features and +interfaces. By the mid 1980s, there were multiple competing efforts to +standardize UNIX, an endeavour that eventually went haywire, resulting in the +so-called UNIX wars, in which "gangs" of vendors (some on both sides of the +battle) teamed up to promote competing standards. The story of how this +happened is instructive, for it is a story that has been reiterated several +times in the computer industry.~{ A similar story can be told about the +emergence, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, of manufacturers of +"plug-compatible" devices, peripherals that plugged into IBM machines (see +Takahashi, "The Rise and Fall of the Plug Compatible Manufacturers"). +Similarly, in the 1990s the story of browser compatibility and the World Wide +Web Consortium (W3C) standards is another recapitulation. }~ +={ standards : + as form of competition +7 +} + +As a hybrid commercial-academic system, UNIX never entered the market as a +single thing. It was licensed in various ways to different people, both +academic and commercial, and contained additions and tools and other features +that may or may not have originated at (or been returned to) Bell Labs. By the +early 1980s, the Berkeley Software Distribution was in fact competing with the +AT&T version, even though BSD was a sublicensee—and it was not the only one. By +the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of corporations had licensed UNIX from +AT&T for use on new machines. Microsoft licensed it (and called it Xenix, +rather than licensing the name UNIX as well) to be installed on Intel-based +machines. IBM, Unisys, Amdahl, Sun, DEC, and Hewlett-Packard all followed suit +and ,{[pg 154]}, created their own versions and names: HP-UX, A/UX, AIX, +Ultrix, and so on. Given the ground rules of trade secrecy and intellectual +property, each of these licensed versions needed to be made legally distinct—if +they were to compete with each other. Even if "UNIX" remained conceptually pure +in an academic or pedagogical sense, every manufacturer would nonetheless have +to tweak, to extend, to optimize in order to differentiate. After all, "if +companies do nothing but adhere to standards, then all computers will become +commodities, and nobody will be able to make any money."~{ McKenna, Who’s +Afraid of Big Blue? 178. }~ +={ AT&T : + version of UNIX ; + portability, of operating systems +4 ; + UNIX wars ; + workstations +} + +It was thus unlikely that any of these corporations would contribute the +changes they made to UNIX back into a common pool, and certainly not back to +AT&T which subsequent to the 1984 divestiture finally released their own +commercial version of UNIX, called UNIX System V. Very quickly, the promising +"open" UNIX of the 1970s became a slough of alternative operating systems, each +incompatible with the next thanks to the addition of market-differentiating +features and hardware-specific tweaks. According to Pamela Gray, "By the +mid-1980s, there were more than 100 versions in active use" centered around the +three market leaders, AT&T’s System V, Microsoft/SCO Xenix, and the BSD.~{ +Pamela Gray, Open Systems. }~ By 1984, the differences in systems had become +significant—as in the case of the BSD additions of the TCP/IP protocols, the vi +editor, and the Pascal compiler—and created not only differentiation in terms +of quality but also incompatibility at both the software and networking levels. +={ AT&T : + divestiture in 1984 ; + Open Systems : + operating systems and +32 +} + +Different systems of course had different user communities, based on who was +the customer of whom. Eric Raymond suggests that in the mid-1980s, independent +hackers, programmers, and computer scientists largely followed the fortunes of +BSD: "The divide was roughly between longhairs and shorthairs; programmers and +technical people tended to line up with Berkeley and BSD, more +business-oriented types with AT&T and System V. The longhairs, repeating a +theme from Unix’s early days ten years before, liked to see themselves as +rebels against a corporate empire; one of the small companies put out a poster +showing an X-wing-like space fighter marked "BSD" speeding away from a huge +AT&T ‘death star’ logo left broken and in flames."~{ Eric Raymond, "Origins and +History of Unix, 1969-1995," The Art of UNIX Programming, +http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch02s01.html#id2880014. }~ +={ Raymond, Eric Steven ; + UNIX operating system : + allegiance to versions of +1 +} + +So even though UNIX had become the standard operating system of choice for +time-sharing, multi-user, high-performance computers by the mid-1980s, there +was no such thing as UNIX. Competitors ,{[pg 155]}, in the UNIX market could +hardly expect the owner of the system, AT&T, to standardize it and compete with +them at the same time, and the rest of the systems were in some legal sense +still derivations from the original AT&T system. Indeed, in its licensing +pamphlets, AT&T even insisted that UNIX was not a noun, but an adjective, as in +"the UNIX system."~{ Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 22. Also noted in +Tanenbaum, "The UNIX Marketplace in 1987," 419. }~ +={ UNIX operating system : + as part of speech +} + +The dawning realization that the proliferation of systems was not only +spreading UNIX around the world but also spreading it thin and breaking it +apart led to a series of increasingly startling and high-profile attempts to +"standardize" UNIX. Given that the three major branches (BSD, which would +become the industry darling as Sun’s Solaris operating system; Microsoft, and +later SCO Xenix; and AT&T’s System V) all emerged from the same AT&T and +Berkeley work done largely by Thompson, Ritchie, and Joy, one would think that +standardization would be a snap. It was anything but. +={ SCO (corporation) ; + Solaris (operating system) +} + +2~ Figuring Out Goes Haywire +={ figuring out +1 } + +Figuring out the moral and technical order of open systems went haywire around +1986-88, when there were no fewer than four competing international standards, +represented by huge consortia of computer manufacturers (many of whom belonged +to multiple consortia): POSIX, the X/Open consortium, the Open Software +Foundation, and UNIX International. The blind spot of open systems had much to +do with this crazy outcome: academics, industry, and government could not find +ways to agree on standardization. One goal of standardization was to afford +customers choice; another was to allow competition unconstrained by +"artificial" means. A standard body of source code was impossible; a standard +"interface definition" was open to too much interpretation; government and +academic standards were too complex and expensive; no particular corporation’s +standard could be trusted (because they could not be trusted to reveal it in +advance of their own innovations); and worst of all, customers kept buying, and +vendors kept shipping, and the world was increasingly filled with diversity, +not standardization. +={ moral and technical order ; + Open Software Foundation (OSF) ; + POSIX (standard) ; + standards : + interface definition as +6 ; + X/Open Consortium ; + UNIX International +} + +UNIX proliferated quickly because of porting, leading to multiple instances of +an operating system with substantially similar source code shared by academics +and licensed by AT&T. But it differentiated ,{[pg 156]}, just as quickly +because of forking, as particular features were added to different ports. Some +features were reincorporated into the "main" branch—the one Thompson and +Ritchie worked on—but the bulk of these mutations spread in a haphazard way, +shared through users directly or implemented in newly formed commercial +versions. Some features were just that, features, but others could extend the +system in ways that might make an application possible on one version, but not +on another. +={ differentiation of software +1 ; + proliferation of software +1 +} + +The proliferation and differentiation of UNIX, the operating system, had +peculiar effects on the emerging market for UNIX, the product: technical issues +entailed design and organizational issues. The original UNIX looked the way it +did because of the very peculiar structure of the organization that created and +sustained UNIX: Bell Labs and the worldwide community of users and developers. +The newly formed competitors, conceiving of UNIX as a product distinct from the +original UNIX, adopted it precisely because of its portability and because of +the promise of open systems as an alternative to "big iron" mainframes. But as +UNIX was funneled into existing corporations with their own design and +organizational structures, it started to become incompatible with itself, and +the desire for competition in open systems necessitated efforts at UNIX +standardization. +={ standards organizations +26 } + +The first step in the standardization of open systems and UNIX was the creation +of what was called an "interface definition," a standard that enumerated the +minimum set of functions that any version of UNIX should support at the +interface level, meaning that any programmer who wrote an application could +expect to interact with any version of UNIX on any machine in the same way and +get the same response from the machine (regardless of the specific +implementation of the operating system or the source code that was used). +Interface definitions, and extensions to them, were ideally to be published and +freely available. + +The interface definition was a standard that emphasized portability, not at the +source-code or operating-system level, but at the application level, allowing +applications built on any version of UNIX to be installed and run on any other. +The push for such a standard came first from a UNIX user group founded in 1980 +by Bob Marsh and called, after the convention of file hierarchies in the UNIX +interface, "/usr/group" (later renamed Uniforum). The 1984 /usr/group standard +defined a set of system calls, which, however, "was ,{[pg 157]}, immediately +ignored and, for all practical purposes, useless."~{ Libes and Ressler, Life +with UNIX, 67. }~ It seemed the field was changing too fast and UNIX +proliferating and innovating too widely for such a standard to work. +={ user groups +1 : + /usr/group +4 +} + +The /usr/group standard nevertheless provided a starting point for more +traditional standards organizations—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics +Engineers (IEEE) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)—to take +on the task. Both institutions took the /usr/group standard as a basis for what +would be called IEEE P1003 Portable Operating System Interface for Computer +Environments (POSIX). Over the next three years, from 1984 to 1987, POSIX would +work diligently at providing a standard interface definition for UNIX. +={ American National Standards Institute (ANSI) +1 ; + Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) +3 ; + POSIX (standard) +1 +} + +Alongside this development, the AT&T version of UNIX became the basis for a +different standard, the System V Interface Definition (SVID), which attempted +to standardize a set of functions similar but not identical to the /usr/group +and POSIX standards. Thus emerged two competing definitions for a standard +interface to a system that was rapidly proliferating into hundreds of tiny +operating-system fiefdoms.~{ A case might be made that a third definition, the +ANSI standard for the C programming language, also covered similar ground, +which of course it would have had to in order to allow applications written on +one ,{[pg 330]}, operating system to be compiled and run on another (see Gray, +Open Systems, 55-58; Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 70-75). }~ The danger +of AT&T setting the standard was not lost on any of the competing +manufacturers. Even if they created a thoroughly open standard-interface +definition, AT&T’s version of UNIX would be the first to implement it, and they +would continually have privileged knowledge of any changes: if they sought to +change the implementation, they could change the standard; if they received +demands that the standard be changed, they could change their implementation +before releasing the new standard. +={ standards : + as form of competition +24 | implementation ; + System V Interface Definition (SVID) +} + +In response to this threat, a third entrant into the standards race emerged: +X/Open, which comprised a variety of European computer manufacturers (including +AT&T!) and sought to develop a standard that encompassed both SVID and POSIX. +The X/Open initiative grew out of European concern about the dominance of IBM +and originally included Bull, Ericsson, ICL, Nixdorf, Olivetti, Philips, and +Siemens. In keeping with a certain 1980s taste for the integration of European +economic activity vis-à-vis the United States and Japan, these manufacturers +banded together both to distribute a unified UNIX operating system in Europe +(based initially on the BSD and Sun versions of UNIX) and to attempt to +standardize it at the same time. +={ Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) ; + X/Open Consortium +20 ; + International Business Machines (IBM) +2 +} + +X/Open represented a subtle transformation of standardization efforts and of +the organizational definition of open systems. While ,{[pg 158]}, the +/usr/group standard was developed by individuals who used UNIX, and the POSIX +standard by an acknowledged professional society (IEEE), the X/Open group was a +collective of computer corporations that had banded together to fund an +independent entity to help further the cause of a standard UNIX. This +paradoxical situation—of a need to share a standard among all the competitors +and the need to keep the details of that standardized product secret to +maintain an advantage—was one that many manufacturers, especially the Europeans +with their long experience of IBM’s monopoly, understood as mutually +destructive. Hence, the solution was to engage in a kind of organizational +innovation, to create a new form of metacorporate structure that could +strategically position itself as at least temporarily interested in +collaboration with other firms, rather than in competition. Thus did stories +and promises of open systems wend their way from the details of technical +design to those of organizational design to the moral order of competition and +collaboration, power and strategy. "Standards" became products that +corporations sought to "sell" to their own industry through the intermediary of +the consortium. +={ collaboration : + competition vs. +22 ; + monopoly +} + +In 1985 and 1986 the disarrayed state of UNIX was also frustrating to the major +U.S. manufacturers, especially to Sun Microsystems, which had been founded on +the creation of a market for UNIX-based "workstations," high-powered networked +computers that could compete with mainframes and personal computers at the same +time. Founded by Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla, and Andreas Bechtolsheim, Sun had very +quickly become an extraordinarily successful computer company. The business +pages and magazines were keen to understand whether workstations were viable +competitors to PCs, in particular to those of IBM and Microsoft, and the de +facto standard DOS operating system, for which a variety of extremely +successful business-, personal-, and home-computer applications were written. +={ Joy, Bill ; + Microsoft ; + Sun Microsystems +9 ; + workstations +3 +} + +Sun seized on the anxiety around open systems, as is evident in the ad it ran +during the summer of 1987 (figure 4). The ad plays subtly on two anxieties: the +first is directed at the consumer and suggests that only with Sun can one +actually achieve interoperability among all of one business’ computers, much +less across a network or industry; the second is more subtle and plays to fears +within the computer industry itself, the anxiety that Sun might merge with one +,{[pg 159]}, of the big corporations, AT&T or Unisys, and corner the market in +open systems by producing the de facto standard. +={ interoperability ; + mergers +2 ; + Unisys +2 +} + +{ 2bits_05_04-100.png }image ~[* 4a and 4b. Open systems anxiety around mergers and compatibility. Sun Microsystems advertisement, Wall Street Journal, 9 July 1987. ]~ + +In fact, in October 1987 Sun announced that it had made a deal with AT&T. AT&T +would distribute a workstation based on Sun’s SPARC line of workstations and +would acquire 20 percent of Sun.~{ "AT&T Deal with Sun Seen," New York Times, +19 October 1987, D8. }~ As part of this announcement, Sun and AT&T made clear +that they intended to merge two of the dominant versions of UNIX on the market: +AT&T’s System V and the BSD-derived Solaris. This move clearly frightened the +rest of the manufacturers interested in UNIX and open systems, as it suggested +a kind of super-power alignment that would restructure (and potentially +dominate) the market. A 1988 article in the New York Times quotes an industry +analyst who characterizes the merger as "a matter of concern at the highest +levels of every major computer company in the United States, and possibly the +world," and it suggests that competing manufacturers "also fear that AT&T will +gradually make Unix a proprietary product, usable only on AT&T or Sun +machines."~{ Thomas C. Hayesdallas, "AT&T’s Unix Is a Hit at Last, and Other +Companies Are Wary," New York Times, 24 February 1988, D8. }~ The industry +anxiety was great enough that in March Unisys (a computer manufacturer, +formerly Burroughs-Sperry) announced that it would work with AT&T and Sun to +bring UNIX to its mainframes and to make its ,{[pg 160]}, business applications +run on UNIX. Such a move was tantamount to Unisys admitting that there would be +no future in proprietary high-end computing—the business on which it had +hitherto built its reputation—unless it could be part of the consortium that +could own the standard.~{ "Unisys Obtains Pacts for Unix Capabilities," New +York Times, 10 March 1988, D4. }~ +={ AT&T +7 ; + Solaris (operating system) +} + +In response to this perceived collusion a group of U.S. and European companies +banded together to form another rival organization—one that partially +overlapped with X/Open but now included IBM—this one called the Open Software +Foundation. A nonprofit corporation, the foundation included IBM, Digital +Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, Bull, Nixdorf, Siemens, and Apollo Computer (Sun’s +most direct competitor in the workstation market). Their goal was explicitly to +create a "competing standard" for UNIX that would be available on the hardware +they manufactured (and based, according to some newspaper reports, on IBM’s +AIX, which was to be called OSF/1). AT&T appeared at first to support the +foundation, suggesting that if the Open Software Foundation could come up with +a standard, then AT&T would make System V compatible with it. Thus, 1988 was +the summer of open love. Every major computer manufacturer in the world was now +part of some consortium or another, and some were part of two—each promoting a +separate standard. +={ X/Open Consortium } + +Of all the corporations, Sun did the most to brand itself as the originator of +the open-systems concept. They made very broad claims for the success of +open-systems standardization, as for instance in an ad from August 1988 (figure +5), which stated in part: +={ openness (component of Free Software) : + proprietary vs. +} + +_1 But what’s more, those sales confirm a broad acceptance of the whole idea +behind Sun. + +_1 The Open Systems idea. Systems based on standards so universally accepted +that they allow combinations of hardware and software from literally thousands +of independent vendors. . . . So for the first time, you’re no longer locked +into the company who made your computers. Even if it’s us. + +The ad goes on to suggest that "in a free market, the best products win out," +even as Sun played both sides of every standardization battle, cooperating with +both AT&T and with the Open Software Foundation. But by October of that year, +it was clear to Sun that ,{[pg 161]}, ,{[pg 162]}, the idea hadn’t really +become "so universal" just yet. In that month AT&T and Sun banded together with +seventeen other manufacturers and formed a rival consortium: Unix +International, a coalition of the willing that would back the AT&T UNIX System +V version as the one true open standard. In a full-page advertisement from +Halloween of 1988 (figure 6), run simultaneously in the New York Times, the +Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, the rhetoric of achieved success +remained, but now instead of "the Open Systems idea," it was "your demand for +UNIX System V-based solutions that ushered in the era of open architecture." +Instead of a standard for all open systems, it was a war of all against all, a +war to assure customers that they had made, not the right choice of hardware or +software, but the right choice of standard. +={ UNIX International +3 ; + UNIX wars +3 +} + +{ 2bits_05_05-100.png }image ~[* It pays to be open: Sun’s version of profitable and successful open systems. Sun Microsystems advertisement, New York Times, 2 August 1988. ]~ + +% image placed after paragraph + +The proliferation of standards and standards consortia is often referred to as +the UNIX wars of the late 1980s, but the creation of such consortia did not +indicate clearly drawn lines. Another metaphor that seems to have been very +popular in the press at the time was that of "gang" warfare (no doubt helped +along by the creation of another industry consortia informally called the Gang +of Nine, which were involved in a dispute over whether MicroChannel or EISA +buses should be installed in PCs). The idea of a number of companies forming +gangs to fight with each other, Bloods-and-Crips style—or perhaps more +Jets-and-Sharks style, minus the singing—was no doubt an appealing metaphor at +the height of Los Angeles’s very real and high-profile gang warfare. But as one +article in the New York Times pointed out, these were strange gangs: "Since +‘openness’ and ‘cooperation’ are the buzzwords behind these alliances, the gang +often asks its enemy to join. Often the enemy does so, either so that it will +not seem to be opposed to openness or to keep tabs on the group. IBM was +invited to join the corporation for Open Systems, even though the clear if +unstated motive of the group was to dilute IBM’s influence in the market. AT&T +negotiated to join the Open Software Foundation, but the talks collapsed +recently. Some companies find it completely consistent to be members of rival +gangs. . . . About 10 companies are members of both the Open Software +Foundation and its archrival Unix International."~{ Andrew Pollack, "Computer +Gangs Stake Out Turf," New York Times, 13 December 1988, D1. See also Evelyn +Richards, "Computer Firms Get a Taste of ‘Gang Warfare,’" Washington Post, 11 +December 1988, K1; Brit Hume, "IBM, Once the Bully on the Block, Faces a Tough +New PC Gang," Washington Post, 3 October 1988, E24. }~ +={ openness (component of Free Software) : + standardization and +} + +{ 2bits_05_06-100.png }image ~[* The UNIX Wars, Halloween 1988. UNIX International advertisement, Wall Street Journal and New York Times, 31 October 1988. ]~ + +% image placed above paragraph + +The proliferation of these consortia can be understood in various ways. One +could argue that they emerged at a time—during the Reagan administration—when +antitrust policing had diminished to ,{[pg 163]}, ,{[pg 164]}, the point where +computer corporations did not see such collusion as a risky activity vis-à-vis +antitrust policing. One could also argue that these consortia represented a +recognition that the focus on hardware control (the meaning of proprietary) had +been replaced with a focus on the control of the "open standard" by one or +several manufacturers, that is, that competition was no longer based on +superior products, but on "owning the standard." It is significant that the +industry consortia quickly overwhelmed national efforts, such as the IEEE POSIX +standard, in the media, an indication that no one was looking to government or +nonprofits, or to university professional societies, to settle the dispute by +declaring a standard, but rather to industry itself to hammer out a standard, +de facto or otherwise. Yet another way to understand the emergence of these +consortia is as a kind of mutual policing of the market, a kind of paranoid +strategy of showing each other just enough to make sure that no one would +leapfrog ahead and kill the existing, fragile competition. +={ antitrust +2 ; + standards : + ownership of ; + Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) +} + +What this proliferation of UNIX standards and consortia most clearly +represents, however, is the blind spot of open systems: the difficulty of +having collaboration and competition at the same time in the context of +intellectual-property rules that incompletely capture the specific and unusual +characteristics of software. For participants in this market, the structure of +intellectual property was unassailable—without it, most participants assumed, +innovation would cease and incentives disappear. Despite the fact that secrecy +haunted the industry, its customers sought both openness and compatibility. +These conflicting demands proved irresolvable. +={ secrecy } + +2~ Denouement + +Ironically, the UNIX wars ended not with the emergence of a winner, but with +the reassertion of proprietary computing: Microsoft Windows and Windows NT. +Rather than open systems emerging victorious, ushering in the era of seamless +integration of diverse components, the reverse occurred: Microsoft managed to +grab a huge share of computer markets, both desktop and high-performance, by +leveraging its brand, the ubiquity of DOS, and application-software developers’ +dependence on the "Wintel" monster (Windows plus Intel chips). Microsoft +triumphed, largely for the same reasons the open-systems dream failed: the +legal structure of intellectual ,{[pg 165]}, property favored a strong +corporate monopoly on a single, branded product over a weak array of "open" and +competing components. There was no large gain to investors, or to corporations, +from an industry of nice guys sharing the source code and making the components +work together. Microsoft, on the other hand, had decided to do so internal to +itself; it did not necessarily need to form consortia or standardize its +operating systems, if it could leverage its dominance in the market to spread +the operating system far and wide. It was, as standards observers like to say, +the triumph of de facto standardization over de jure. It was a return to the +manacled wretches of IBM’s monopoly—but with a new dungeon master. +={ Intel (corporation) ; + Microsoft : + Windows operating system ; + Openness (component of Free Software) : + proprietary vs. ; + monopoly ; + openness (component of Free Software) +10 +} + +The denouement of the UNIX standards story was swift: AT&T sold its UNIX System +Labs (including all of the original source and rights) to Novell in 1993, who +sold it in turn to SCO two years later. Novell sold (or transferred) the +trademark name UNIX™ to the X/Open group, which continued to fight for +standardization, including a single universal UNIX specification. In 1996 +X/Open and the Open Software Foundation merged to form the Open Group.~{ "What +Is Unix?" The Unix System, +http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html. }~ The Open Group +eventually joined forces with IEEE to turn POSIX into a single UNIX +specification in 2001. They continue to push the original vision of open +systems, though they carefully avoid using the name or concept, referring +instead to the trademarked mouthful "Boundaryless Information Flow" and +employing an updated and newly inscrutable rhetoric: "Boundaryless Information +Flow, a shorthand representation of ‘access to integrated information to +support business process improvements’ represents a desired state of an +enterprise’s infrastructure and is specific to the business needs of the +organization."~{ "About the Open Group," The Open Group, +http://www.opengroup.org/overview/vision-mission.htm. }~ +={ AT&T ; + Novell ; + SCO (corporation) +} + +The Open Group, as well as many other participants in the history of open +systems, recognize the emergence of "open source" as a return to the now one +true path of boundaryless information flow. Eric Raymond, of course, sees +continuity and renewal (not least of which in his own participation in the Open +Source movement) and in his Art of UNIX Programming says, "The Open Source +movement is building on this stable foundation and is creating a resurgence of +enthusiasm for the UNIX philosophy. In many ways Open Source can be seen as the +true delivery of Open Systems that will ensure it continues to go from strength +to strength."~{ "What Is Unix?" The Unix System, +http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html. }~ +={ Open Source } + +This continuity, of course, deliberately disavows the centrality of the legal +component, just as Raymond and the Open Source ,{[pg 166]}, Initiative had in +1998. The distinction between a robust market in UNIX operating systems and a +standard UNIX-based infrastructure on which other markets and other activities +can take place still remains unclear to even those closest to the money and +machines. It does not yet exist, and may well never come to. +={ infrastructure +1 } + +The growth of Free Software in the 1980s and 1990s depended on openness as a +concept and component that was figured out during the UNIX wars. It was during +these wars that the Free Software Foundation (and other groups, in different +ways) began to recognize the centrality of the issue of intellectual property +to the goal of creating an infrastructure for the successful creation of open +systems.~{ Larry McVoy was an early voice, within Sun, arguing for solving the +open-systems problem by turning to Free Software. Larry McVoy, "The Sourceware +Operating System Proposal," 9 November 1993, +http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html. }~ The GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) +project in particular, but also the X Windows system at MIT, the Remote +Procedure Call and Network File System (NFS) systems created by Sun, and tools +like sendmail and BIND were each in their own way experiments with alternative +licensing arrangements and were circulating widely on a variety of the UNIX +versions in the late 1980s. Thus, the experience of open systems, while +technically a failure as far as UNIX was concerned, was nonetheless a profound +learning experience for an entire generation of engineers, hackers, geeks, and +entrepreneurs. Just as the UNIX operating system had a pedagogic life of its +own, inculcating itself into the minds of engineers as the paradigm of an +operating system, open systems had much the same effect, realizing an inchoate +philosophy of openness, interconnection, compatibility, interoperability—in +short, availability and modifiability—that was in conflict with +intellectual-property structures as they existed. To put it in Freudian terms: +the neurosis of open systems wasn’t cured, but the structure of its +impossibility had become much clearer to everyone. UNIX, the operating system, +did not disappear at all—but UNIX, the market, did. +={ modifiability +5 ; + availability : + open systems and +5 ; + Free software : + components of ; + GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) ; + interoperability ; + modifiability +4 ; + pedagogy : + operating systems and ; + X Windows +} + +2~ Open Systems Two: Networks +={ Open Systems : + networks and +28 +} + +The struggle to standardize UNIX as a platform for open systems was not the +only open-systems struggle; alongside the UNIX wars, another "religious war" +was raging. The attempt to standardize networks—in particular, protocols for +the inter-networking of multiple, diverse, and autonomous networks of +computers—was also a key aspect of the open-systems story of the 1980s.~{ The +distinction between a protocol, an implementation and a standard is important: +Protocols are descriptions of the precise terms by which two computers can +communicate (i.e., a dictionary and a handbook for communicating). An +implementation is the creation of software that uses a protocol (i.e., actually +does the communicating; thus two implementations using the same protocol should +be able to share data. A standard defines which protocol should be used by +which computers, for what purposes. It may or may not define the protocol, but +will set limits on changes to that protocol. }~ The war ,{[pg 167]}, between +the TCP/IP and OSI was also a story of failure and surprising success: the +story of a successful standard with international approval (the OSI protocols) +eclipsed by the experimental, military-funded TCP/IP, which exemplified an +alternative and unusual standards process. The moral-technical orders expressed +by OSI and TCP/IP are, like that of UNIX, on the border between government, +university, and industry; they represent conflicting social imaginaries in +which power and legitimacy are organized differently and, as a result, +expressed differently in the technology. +={ moral and technical order ; + Networks : + protools for +3 ; + Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) : + as reference model +27 ; + protocols : + Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) +27 | TCP/IP ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) +27 ; + religious wars +3 ; + social imaginary ; + standards processes +3 +} + +OSI and TCP/IP started with different goals: OSI was intended to satisfy +everyone, to be the complete and comprehensive model against which all +competing implementations would be validated; TCP/IP, by contrast, emphasized +the easy and robust interconnection of diverse networks. TCP/IP is a protocol +developed by bootstrapping between standard and implementation, a mode +exemplified by the Requests for Comments system that developed alongside them +as part of the Arpanet project. OSI was a "model" or reference standard +developed by internationally respected standards organizations. +={ Arpanet (network) +18 ; + Request for Comments (RFC) +} + +In the mid-1980s OSI was en route to being adopted internationally, but by 1993 +it had been almost completely eclipsed by TCP/IP. The success of TCP/IP is +significant for three reasons: (1) availability—TCP/IP was itself available via +the network and development open to anyone, whereas OSI was a bureaucratically +confined and expensive standard and participation was confined to state and +corporate representatives, organized through ISO in Geneva; (2) +modifiability—TCP/IP could be copied from an existing implementation (such as +the BSD version of UNIX) and improved, whereas OSI was a complex standard that +had few existing implementations available to copy; and (3) serendipity—new +uses that took advantage of availability and modifiability sprouted, including +the "killer app" that was the World Wide Web, which was built to function on +existing TCP/IP-based networks, convincing many manufacturers to implement that +protocol instead of, or in addition to, OSI. +={ World Wide Web (www) } + +The success of TCP/IP over OSI was also significant because of the difference +in the standardization processes that it exemplified. The OSI standard (like +all official international standards) is conceived and published as an aid to +industrial growth: it was imagined according to the ground rules of +intellectual property and as an attempt to facilitate the expansion of markets +in networking. ,{[pg 168]}, OSI would be a "vendor-neutral" standard: vendors +would create their own, secret implementations that could be validated by OSI +and thereby be expected to interoperate with other OSI-validated systems. By +stark contrast, the TCP/IP protocols were not published (in any conventional +sense), nor were the implementations validated by a legitimate +international-standards organization; instead, the protocols are themselves +represented by implementations that allow connection to the network itself +(where the TCP/IP protocols and implementations are themselves made available). +The fact that one can only join the network if one possesses or makes an +implementation of the protocol is generally seen as the ultimate in validation: +it works.~{ The advantages of such an unplanned and unpredictable network have +come to be identified in hindsight as a design principle. See Gillespie, +"Engineering a Principle" for an excellent analysis of the history of "end to +end" or "stupid" networks. }~ In this sense, the struggle between TCP/IP and +OSI is indicative of a very familiar twentieth-century struggle over the role +and extent of government planning and regulation (versus entrepreneurial +activity and individual freedom), perhaps best represented by the twin figures +of Friedrich Hayek and Maynard Keynes. In this story, it is Hayek’s aversion to +planning and the subsequent privileging of spontaneous order that eventually +triumphs, not Keynes’s paternalistic view of the government as a neutral body +that absorbs or encourages the swings of the market. +={ Hayek, Friedrich ; + Keynes, John Maynard ; + standards : + validation of +} + +2~ Bootstrapping Networks + +The "religious war" between TCP/IP and OSI occurred in the context of intense +competition among computer manufacturers and during a period of vibrant +experimentation with computer networks worldwide. As with most developments in +computing, IBM was one of the first manufacturers to introduce a networking +system for its machines in the early 1970s: the System Network Architecture +(SNA). DEC followed suit with Digital Network Architecture (DECnet or DNA), as +did Univac with Distributed Communications Architecture (DCA), Burroughs with +Burroughs Network Architecture (BNA), and others. These architectures were, +like the proprietary operating systems of the same era, considered closed +networks, networks that interconnected a centrally planned and specified number +of machines of the same type or made by the same manufacturer. The goal of such +networks was to make connections internal to a firm, even if that involved +geographically widespread systems (e.g., from branch to headquarters). Networks +were also to be products. +={ Digital Equipment Corporation (corporation) : + DECNet ; + Networks : + as products | varieties of +4 +} + +The 1970s and 1980s saw extraordinarily vibrant experimentation with academic, +military, and commercial networks. Robert Metcalfe had developed Ethernet at +Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s, and IBM later created a similar technology called +"token ring." In the 1980s the military discovered that the Arpanet was being +used predominantly by computer scientists and not just for military +applications, and decided to break it into MILNET and CSNET.~{ William Broad, +"Global Network Split as Safeguard," New York Times, 5 October 1983, A13. }~ +Bulletin Board Services, which connected PCs to each other via modems to +download files, appeared in the late 1970s. Out of this grew Tom Jennings’s +very successful experiment called FidoNet.~{ See the incomparable BBS: The +Documentary, DVD, directed by Jason Scott (Boston: Bovine Ignition Systems, +2005), http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/. }~ In the 1980s an existing social +network of university faculty on the East Coast of the United States started a +relatively successful network called BITNET (Because It’s There Network) in the +mid-1980s.~{ Grier and Campbell, "A Social History of Bitnet and Listserv +1985-1991." }~ The Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (uucp), which initially enabled +the Usenet, was developed in the late 1970s and widely used until the mid-1980s +to connect UNIX computers together. In 1984 the NSF began a program to fund +research in networking and created the first large backbones for NSFNet, +successor to the CSNET and Arpanet.~{ On Usenet, see Hauben and Hauben, +Netizens. See also Pfaffenberger, "‘A Standing Wave in the Web of Our +Communications.’" }~ +={ Sparc (computer workstation) ; + Unix to Unix copy protocol (uucp) ; + Usenet ; + Xerox PARC +} + +In the 1970s telecommunications companies and spin-off start-ups experimented +widely with what were called "videotex" systems, of which the most widely +implemented and well-known is Minitel in France.~{ Schmidt and Werle, +Coordinating Technology, chap. 7. }~ Such systems were designed for consumer +users and often provided many of the now widespread services available on the +Internet in a kind of embryonic form (from comparison shopping for cars, to +directory services, to pornography).~{ See, for example, Martin, Viewdata and +the Information Society. }~ By the late 1970s, videotex systems were in the +process of being standardized by the Commité Consultative de Information, +Technologie et Télécommunications (CCITT) at the International +Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva. These standards efforts would +eventually be combined with work of the International Organization for +Standardization (ISO) on OSI, which had originated from work done at +Honeywell.~{ There is little information on the development of open systems; +there is, however, a brief note from William Stallings, author of perhaps the +most widely used textbook on networking, at "The Origins of OSI," +http://williamstallings.com/Extras/OSI.html. }~ +={ Commité Consultative de Information, Technologie et Télécommunications (CCITT) ; + International Telecommunications Union (ITU) +6 ; + Internet : + early development +5 ; + International Organization for Standardization (ISO) +4 ; + regulation : + telecommunications +3 ; + telecommunications industry +5 +} + +One important feature united almost all of these experiments: the networks of +the computer manufacturers were generally piggybacked, or bootstrapped, onto +existing telecommunications infrastructures built by state-run or regulated +monopoly telecommunications firms. This situation inevitably spelled grief, for +telecommunications providers are highly regulated entities, while the computer +industry has been almost totally unregulated from its ,{[pg 170]}, inception. +Since an increasingly core part of the computer industry’s business involved +transporting signals through telecommunications systems without being regulated +to do so, the telecommunications industry naturally felt themselves at a +disadvantage.~{ Brock, The Second Information Revolution is a good introductory +source for this conflict, at least in its policy outlines. The Federal +Communications Commission issued two decisions (known as "Computer 1" and +"Computer 2") that attempted to deal with this conflict by trying to define +what counted as voice communication and what as data. }~ Telecommunications +companies were not slow to respond to the need for data communications, but +their ability to experiment with products and practices outside the scope of +telephony and telegraphy was often hindered by concerns about antitrust and +monopoly.~{ Brock, The Second Information Revolution, chap. 10. }~ The +unregulated computer industry, by contrast, saw the tentativeness of the +telecommunications industry (or national PTTs) as either bureaucratic inertia +or desperate attempts to maintain control and power over existing +networks—though no computer manufacturer relished the idea of building their +own physical network when so many already existed. +={ antitrust } + +TCP/IP and OSI have become emblematic of the split between the worlds of +telecommunications and computing; the metaphors of religious wars or of blood +feuds and cold wars were common.~{ Drake, "The Internet Religious War." }~ A +particularly arch account from this period is Carl Malamud’s Exploring the +Internet: A Technical Travelogue, which documents Malamud’s (physical) visits +to Internet sites around the globe, discussions (and beer) with networking +researchers on technical details of the networks they have created, and his own +typically geeky, occasionally offensive takes on cultural difference.~{ +Malamud, Exploring the Internet; see also Michael M. J. Fischer, "Worlding +Cyberspace." }~ A subtheme of the story is the religious war between Geneva (in +particular the ITU) and the Internet: Malamud tells the story of asking the ITU +to release its 19,000-page "blue book" of standards on the Internet, to +facilitate its adoption and spread. +={ Malmud, Carl +1 ; + standards processes +4 +} + +The resistance of the ITU and Malamud’s heroic if quixotic attempts are a +parable of the moral-technical imaginaries of openness—and indeed, his story +draws specifically on the usable past of Giordano Bruno.~{ The usable past of +Giordano Bruno is invoked by Malamud to signal the heretical nature of his own +commitment to openly publishing standards that ISO was opposed to releasing. +Bruno’s fate at the hands of the Roman Inquisition hinged in some part on his +acceptance of the Copernican cosmology, so he has been, like Galileo, a natural +figure for revolutionary claims during the 1990s. }~ The "bruno" project +demonstrates the gulf that exists between two models of legitimacy—those of ISO +and the ITU—in which standards represent the legal and legitimate consensus of +a regulated industry, approved by member nations, paid for and enforced by +governments, and implemented and adhered to by corporations. +={ Bruno, Giordano ; + Usable pasts ; + International Organization for Standardization (ISO) +3 +} + +Opposite ISO is the ad hoc, experimental style of Arpanet and Internet +researchers, in which standards are freely available and implementations +represent the mode of achieving consensus, rather than the outcome of the +consensus. In reality, such a rhetorical ,{[pg 171]}, opposition is far from +absolute: many ISO standards are used on the Internet, and ISO remains a +powerful, legitimate standards organization. But the clash of established +(telecommunications) and emergent (computer-networking) industries is an +important context for understanding the struggle between OSI and TCP/IP. + +The need for standard networking protocols is unquestioned: interoperability is +the bread and butter of a network. Nonetheless, the goals of the OSI and the +TCP/IP protocols differed in important ways, with profound implications for the +shape of that interoperability. OSI’s goals were completeness, control, and +comprehensiveness. OSI grew out of the telecommunications industry, which had a +long history of confronting the vicissitudes of linking up networks and +facilitating communication around the world, a problem that required a strong +process of consensus and negotiation among large, powerful, government-run +entities, as well as among smaller manufacturers and providers. OSI’s feet were +firmly planted in the international standardization organizations like OSI and +the ITU (an organization as old as telecommunications itself, dating to the +1860s). +={ interoperability +12 } + +Even if they were oft-mocked as slow, bureaucratic, or cumbersome, the +processes of ISO and ITU—based in consensus, international agreement, and +thorough technical specification—are processes of unquestioned legitimacy. The +representatives of nations and corporations who attend ISO and ITU standards +discussions, and who design, write, and vote on these standards, are usually +not bureaucrats, but engineers and managers directly concerned with the needs +of their constituency. The consensus-oriented process means that ISO and ITU +standards attempt to satisfy all members’ goals, and as such they tend to be +very large, complex, and highly specific documents. They are generally sold to +corporations and others who need to use them, rather than made freely +available, a fact that until recently reflected their legitimacy, rather than +lack thereof. + +TCP/IP, on the other hand, emerged from very different conditions.~{ Abbate, +Inventing the Internet; Salus, Casting the Net; Galloway, Protocol; and Brock, +The Second Information Revolution. For practitioner histories, see Kahn et al., +"The Evolution of the Internet as a Global Information System"; Clark, "The +Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols." }~ These protocols were +part of a Department of Defense-funded experimental research project: Arpanet. +The initial Arpanet protocols (the Network Control Protocol, or NCP) were +insufficient, and TCP/IP was an experiment in interconnecting two different +"packet-switched networks": the ground-line-based Arpanet network and a +radio-wave network called Packet Radio.~{ Kahn et al., "The Evolution of the +Internet as a Global Information System," 134-140; Abbate, Inventing the +Internet, 114-36. }~ The ,{[pg 172]}, problem facing the designers was not how +to accommodate everyone, but merely how to solve a specific problem: +interconnecting two technically diverse networks, each with autonomous +administrative boundaries, but forcing neither of them to give up the system or +the autonomy. +={ Defense, Department of +11 ; + Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) +1 ; + packet-switching +1 +} + +Until the mid-1980s, the TCP/IP protocols were resolutely research-oriented, +and not the object of mainstream commercial interest. Their development +reflected a core set of goals shared by researchers and ultimately promoted by +the central funding agency, the Department of Defense. The TCP/IP protocols are +often referred to as enabling packet-switched networks, but this is only +partially correct; the real innovation of this set of protocols was a design +for an "inter-network," a system that would interconnect several diverse and +autonomous networks (packet-switched or circuit-switched), without requiring +them to be transformed, redesigned, or standardized—in short, by requiring only +standardization of the intercommunication between networks, not standardization +of the network itself. In the first paper describing the protocol Robert Kahn +and Vint Cerf motivated the need for TCP/IP thus: "Even though many different +and complex problems must be solved in the design of an individual +packet-switching network, these problems are manifestly compounded when +dissimilar networks are interconnected. Issues arise which may have no direct +counterpart in an individual network and which strongly influence the way in +which Internetwork communication can take place."~{ Kahn and Cerf, "A Protocol +for Packet Network Intercommunication," 637. }~ +={ Cerf, Vinton +2 ; + Kahn, Robert ; + TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) : + goals of +2 +} + +The explicit goal of TCP/IP was thus to share computer resources, not +necessarily to connect two individuals or firms together, or to create a +competitive market in networks or networking software. Sharing between +different kinds of networks implied allowing the different networks to develop +autonomously (as their creators and maintainers saw best), but without +sacrificing the ability to continue sharing. Years later, David Clark, chief +Internet engineer for several years in the 1980s, gave a much more explicit +explanation of the goals that led to the TCP/IP protocols. In particular, he +suggested that the main overarching goal was not just to share resources but +"to develop an effective technique for multiplexed utilization of existing +interconnected networks," and he more explicitly stated the issue of control +that faced the designers: "Networks represent administrative boundaries of +control, and it was an ambition of this project to come to grips with the +problem of integrating a number ,{[pg 173]}, of separately administrated +entities into a common utility."~{ Clark, "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA +Internet Protocols," 54-55. }~ By placing the goal of expandability first, the +TCP/IP protocols were designed with a specific kind of simplicity in mind: the +test of the protocols’ success was simply the ability to connect. +={ Clark, David } + +By setting different goals, TCP/IP and OSI thus differed in terms of technical +details; but they also differed in terms of their context and legitimacy, one +being a product of international-standards bodies, the other of military-funded +research experiments. The technical and organizational differences imply +different processes for standardization, and it is the peculiar nature of the +so-called Requests for Comments (RFC) process that gave TCP/IP one of its most +distinctive features. The RFC system is widely recognized as a unique and +serendipitous outcome of the research process of Arpanet.~{ RFCs are archived +in many places, but the official site is RFC Editor, +http://www.rfc-editor.org/. }~ In a thirty-year retrospective (published, +naturally, as an RFC: RFC 2555), Vint Cerf says, "Hiding in the history of the +RFCs is the history of human institutions for achieving cooperative work." He +goes on to describe their evolution over the years: "When the RFCs were first +produced, they had an almost 19th century character to them—letters exchanged +in public debating the merits of various design choices for protocols in the +ARPANET. As email and bulletin boards emerged from the fertile fabric of the +network, the far-flung participants in this historic dialog began to make +increasing use of the online medium to carry out the discussion—reducing the +need for documenting the debate in the RFCs and, in some respects, leaving +historians somewhat impoverished in the process. RFCs slowly became conclusions +rather than debates."~{ RFC Editor, RFC 2555, 6. }~ +={ standards processes ; + Request for Comments (RFC) +2 +} + +Increasingly, they also became part of a system of discussion and +implementation in which participants created working software as part of an +experiment in developing the standard, after which there was more discussion, +then perhaps more implementation, and finally, a standard. The RFC process was +a way to condense the process of standardization and validation into +implementation; which is to say, the proof of open systems was in the +successful connection of diverse networks, and the creation of a standard +became a kind of ex post facto rubber-stamping of this demonstration. Any +further improvement of the standard hinged on an improvement on the standard +implementation because the standards that resulted were freely and widely +available: "A user could request an RFC by email from his host computer and +have it automatically delivered to his mailbox. . . . RFCs were also shared +freely with official standards ,{[pg 174]}, bodies, manufacturers and vendors, +other working groups, and universities. None of the RFCs were ever restricted +or classified. This was no mean feat when you consider that they were being +funded by DoD during the height of the Cold War."~{ Ibid., 11. }~ +={ Software : + implementation of ; + standards : + implementation +9 | validation of ; + Secrecy +1 +} + +The OSI protocols were not nearly so freely available. The ironic reversal—the +transparency of a military-research program versus the opacity of a +Geneva-based international-standards organization—goes a long way toward +explaining the reasons why geeks might find the story of TCP/IP’s success to be +so appealing. It is not that geeks are secretly militaristic, but that they +delight in such surprising reversals, especially when those reversals exemplify +the kind of ad hoc, clever solution to problems of coordination that the RFC +process does. The RFC process is not the only alternative to a +consensus-oriented model of standardization pioneered in the international +organizations of Geneva, but it is a specific response to a reorientation of +power and knowledge that was perhaps more "intuitively obvious" to the creators +of Arpanet and the Internet, with its unusual design goals and context, than it +would have been to the purveyors of telecommunications systems with over a +hundred years of experience in connecting people in very specific and +established ways. +={ geeks ; + reorientation of power and knowledge ; + standards organizations +} + +2~ Success as Failure + +By 1985, OSI was an official standard, one with widespread acceptance by +engineers, by the government and military (the "GOSIP" standard), and by a +number of manufacturers, the most significant of which was General Motors, with +its Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP). In textbooks and handbooks of the +late 1980s and early 1990s, OSI was routinely referred to as the inevitable +standard—which is to say, it had widespread legitimacy as the standard that +everyone should be implementing—but few implementations existed. Many of the +textbooks on networking from the late 1980s, especially those slanted toward a +theoretical introduction, give elaborate detail of the OSI reference model—a +generation of students in networking was no doubt trained to understand the +world in terms of OSI—but the ambivalence continued. Indeed, the most enduring +legacy of the creation of the OSI protocols is not the protocols themselves +(some of which, like ASN.1, are still ,{[pg 175]}, widely used today), but the +pedagogical model: the "7 layer stack" that is as ubiquitous in networking +classes and textbooks as UNIX is in operating-systems classes.~{ This can be +clearly seen, for instance, by comparing the various editions of the main +computer-networking textbooks: cf. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 1st ed. +(1981), 2d ed. (1988), 3d ed. (1996), and 4th ed. (2003); Stallings, Data and +Computer Communications, 1st ed. (1985), 2d ed. (1991), ,{[pg 332]}, 3d ed. +(1994), 4th ed. (1997), and 5th ed. (2004); and Comer, Internetworking with +TCP/IP (four editions between 1991 and 1999). }~ +={ General Motors (GM) } + +But in the late 1980s, the ambivalence turned to confusion. With OSI widely +recognized as the standard, TCP/IP began to show up in more and more actually +existing systems. For example, in Computer Network Architectures and Protocols, +Carl Sunshine says, "Now in the late 1980s, much of the battling seems over. +CCITT and ISO have aligned their efforts, and the research community seems +largely to have resigned itself to OSI." But immediately afterward he adds: "It +is ironic that while a consensus has developed that OSI is indeed inevitable, +the TCP/IP protocol suite has achieved widespread deployment, and now serves as +a de facto interoperability standard. . . . It appears that the vendors were +unable to bring OSI products to market quickly enough to satisfy the demand for +interoperable systems, and TCP/IP were there to fill the need."~{ Sunshine, +Computer Network Architectures and Protocols, 5. }~ +={ Commité Consultative de Information, Technologie et Télécommunications (CCITT) ; + pedagogy : + network protocols and +} + +The more implementations that appeared, the less secure the legitimate standard +seemed to be. By many accounts the OSI specifications were difficult to +implement, and the yearly networking-industry "Interop" conferences became a +regular locale for the religious war between TCP/IP and OSI. The success of +TCP/IP over OSI reflects the reorientation of knowledge and power to which Free +Software is also a response. The reasons for the success are no doubt complex, +but the significance of the success of TCP/IP illustrates three issues: +availability, modifiability, and serendipity. + +!_ Availability +The TCP/IP standards themselves were free to anyone and available over TCP/IP +networks, exemplifying one of the aspects of a recursive public: that the only +test of participation in a TCP/IP-based internetwork is the fact that one +possesses or has created a device that implements TCP/IP. Access to the network +is contingent on the interoperability of the networks. The standards were not +"published" in a conventional sense, but made available through the network +itself, without any explicit intellectual property restrictions, and without +any fees or restrictions on who could access them. By contrast, ISO standards +are generally not circulated freely, but sold for relatively high prices, as a +source of revenue, and under the general theory that only legitimate +corporations or government agencies would need access to them. +={ availability : + open systems and +1 ; + recursive public +3 +} + +% ,{[pg 176]}, + +Related to the availability of the standards is the fact that the standards +process that governed TCP/IP was itself open to anyone, whether corporate, +military or academic. The structure of governance of the Internet Engineering +Task Force (the IETF) and the Internet Society (ISOC) allowed for anyone with +the means available to attend the "working group" meetings that would decide on +the standards that would be approved. Certainly this does not mean that the +engineers and defense contractors responsible actively sought out corporate +stakeholders or imagined the system to be "public" in any dramatic fashion; +however, compared to the system in place at most standards bodies (in which +members are usually required to be the representatives of corporations or +governments), the IETF allowed individuals to participate qua individuals.~{ +The structure of the IETF, the Internet Architecture Board, and the ISOC is +detailed in Comer, Internetworking with TCP/IP, 8-13; also in Schmidt and +Werle, Coordinating Technology, 53-58. }~ +={ Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ; + Internet Society (ISOC) +} + +!_ Modifiability +Implementations of TCP/IP were widely available, bootstrapped from machine to +machine along with the UNIX operating system and other tools (e.g., the +implementation of TCP/IP in BSD 4.2, the BSD version of UNIX), generally +including the source code. An existing implementation is a much more expressive +and usable object than a specification for an implementation, and though ISO +generally prepares reference implementations for such standards, in the case of +OSI there were many fewer implementations to work with or build on. Because +multiple implementations of TCP/IP already existed, it was easy to validate: +did your (modified) implementation work with the other existing +implementations? By contrast, OSI would provide independent validation, but the +in situ validation through connection to other OSI networks was much harder to +achieve, there being too few of them, or access being restricted. It is far +easier to build on an existing implementation and to improve on it piecemeal, +or even to rewrite it completely, using its faults as a template (so to speak), +than it is to create an implementation based solely on a standard. The +existence of the TCP/IP protocols in BSD 4.2 not only meant that people who +installed that operating system could connect to the Internet easily, at a time +when it was by no means standard to be able to do so, but it also meant that +manufacturers or tinkerers could examine the implementation in BSD 4.2 as the +basis for a modified, or entirely new, implementation. +={ modifiability ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) ; + standards : + validation of +} + +!_ Serendipity +Perhaps most significant, the appearance of widespread and popular applications +that were dependent on TCP/IP ,{[pg 177]}, gave those protocols an inertia that +OSI, with relatively few such applications, did not have. The most important of +these by far was the World Wide Web (the http protocol, the HTML mark-up +language, and implementations of both servers, such as libwww, and clients, +such as Mosaic and Netscape). The basic components of the Web were made to work +on top of the TCP/IP networks, like other services that had already been +designed (ftp, telnet, gopher, archie, etc.); thus, Tim Berners-Lee, who +co-invented the World Wide Web, could also rely on the availability and +openness of previous work for his own protocols. In addition, Berners-Lee and +CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) dedicated their work to +the public domain more or less immediately, essentially allowing anyone to do +anything they wished with the system they had cobbled together.~{ Message-ID: { +673c43e160cia758@sluvca.slu.edu. +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=673c43e160cia758@sluvca.slu.edu See also +Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web. }~ From the perspective of the tension between +TCP/IP and OSI, the World Wide Web was thus what engineers call a "killer app," +because its existence actually drove individuals and corporations to make +decisions (in favor of TCP/IP) that it might not have made otherwise. +={ Berners-Lee, Tim ; + Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) ; + Mosaic (web browser) ; + Netscape Navigator (application) ; + World Wide Web (www) +} + +2~ Conclusion + +Openness and open systems are key to understanding the practices of Free +Software: the open-systems battles of the 1980s set the context for Free +Software, leaving in their wake a partially articulated infrastructure of +operating systems, networks, and markets that resulted from figuring out open +systems. The failure to create a standard UNIX operating system opened the door +for Microsoft Windows NT, but it also set the stage for the emergence of the +Linux-operating-system kernel to emerge and spread. The success of the TCP/IP +protocols forced multiple competing networking schemes into a single +standard—and a singular entity, the Internet—which carried with it a set of +built-in goals that mirror the moral-technical order of Free Software. +={ Linux (Free Software project) ; + moral and technical order +} + +This "infrastructure" is at once technical (protocols and standards and +implementations) and moral (expressing ideas about the proper order and +organization of commercial efforts to provide high-tech software, networks, and +computing power). As with the invention of UNIX, the opposition +commercial-noncommercial (or its doppelgangers public-private, +profit-nonprofit, capitalist-socialist, etc.) ,{[pg 178]}, doesn’t capture the +context. Constraints on the ability to collaborate, compete, or withdraw are in +the making here through the technical and moral imaginations of the actors +involved: from the corporate behemoths like IBM to (onetime) startups like Sun +to the independent academics and amateurs and geeks with stakes in the new +high-tech world of networks and software. +={ geeks } + +The creation of a UNIX market failed. The creation of a legitimate +international networking standard failed. But they were local failures only. +They opened the doors to new forms of commercial practice (exemplified by +Netscape and the dotcom boom) and new kinds of politicotechnical fractiousness +(ICANN, IPv6, and "net neutrality"). But the blind spot of open +systems—intellectual property—at the heart of these failures also provided the +impetus for some geeks, entrepreneurs, and lawyers to start figuring out the +legal and economic aspects of Free Software, and it initiated a vibrant +experimentation with copyright licensing and with forms of innovative +coordination and collaboration built on top of the rapidly spreading protocols +of the Internet. +={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) } + +1~ 6. Writing Copyright Licenses +={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) +110 ; + General Public License (GPL) +110 ; + Stallman, Richard +110 ; + intellectual property +110 +} + +% ,{[pg 179]}, + +_1 To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to +deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. - Preamble to the +GNU General Public License + +The use of novel, unconventional copyright licenses is, without a doubt, the +most widely recognized and exquisitely refined component of Free Software. The +GNU General Public License (GPL), written initially by Richard Stallman, is +often referred to as a beautiful, clever, powerful "hack" of +intellectual-property law—when it isn’t being denounced as a viral, infectious +object threatening the very fabric of economy and society. The very fact that +something so boring, so arcane, and so legalistic as a copyright license can +become an object of both devotional reverence and bilious scorn means there is +much more than fine print at stake. ,{[pg 180]}, + +By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were hundreds of different +Free Software licenses, each with subtle legal and technical differences, and +an enormous legal literature to explain their details, motivation, and +impact.~{ The legal literature on Free Software expands constantly and quickly, +and it addresses a variety of different legal issues. Two excellent starting +points are Vetter, "The Collaborative Integrity of Open-Source Software" and +"‘Infectious’ Open Source Software." }~ Free Software licenses differ from +conventional copyright licenses on software because they usually restrict only +the terms of distribution, while so-called End User License Agreements (EULAs) +that accompany most proprietary software restrict what users can do with the +software. Ethnographically speaking, licenses show up everywhere in the field, +and contemporary hackers are some of the most legally sophisticated non-lawyers +in the world. Indeed, apprenticeship in the world of hacking is now impossible, +as Gabriella Coleman has shown, without a long, deep study of +intellectual-property law.~{ Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom." }~ +={ Coleman, Gabriella ; + End User License Agreements (EULAs) +} + +But how did it come to be this way? As with the example of sharing UNIX source +code, Free Software licenses are often explained as a reaction to expanding +intellectual-property laws and resistance to rapacious corporations. The text +of the GPL itself begins deep in such assumptions: "The licenses for most +software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it."~{ "The +GNU General Public Licence, Version 2.0," +http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html. }~ But even if +corporations are rapacious, sharing and modifying software are by no means +natural human activities. The ideas of sharing and of common property and its +relation to freedom must always be produced through specific practices of +sharing, before being defended. The GPL is a precise example of how geeks fit +together the practices of sharing and modifying software with the moral and +technical orders—the social imaginaries—of freedom and autonomy. It is at once +an exquisitely precise legal document and the expression of an idea of how +software should be made available, shareable, and modifiable. +={ practices ; + social imaginary ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) +} + +In this chapter I tell the story of the creation of the GPL, the first Free +Software license, during a controversy over EMACS, a very widely used and +respected piece of software; the controversy concerned the reuse of bits of +copyrighted source code in a version of EMACS ported to UNIX. There are two +reasons to retell this story carefully. The first is simply to articulate the +details of the origin of the Free Software license itself, as a central +component of Free Software, details that should be understood in the context of +changing copyright law and the UNIX and open-systems struggles of the 1980s. +Second, although the story of the GPL is also an oft-told story of the "hacker +ethic," the GPL is not an "expression" of this ,{[pg 181]}, ethic, as if the +ethic were genotype to a legal phenotype. Opposite the familiar story of +ethics, I explain how the GPL was "figured out" in the controversy over EMACS, +how it was formed in response to a complicated state of affairs, both legal and +technical, and in a medium new to all the participants: the online mailing +lists and discussion lists of Usenet and Arpanet.~{ All existing accounts of +the hacker ethic come from two sources: from Stallman himself and from the +colorful and compelling chapter about Stallman in Steven Levy’s Hackers. Both +acknowledge a prehistory to the ethic. Levy draws it back in time to the MIT +Tech Model Railroad Club of the 1950s, while Stallman is more likely to +describe it as reaching back to the scientific revolution or earlier. The +stories of early hackerdom at MIT are avowedly Edenic, and in them hackers live +in a world of uncontested freedom and collegial competition—something like a +writer’s commune without the alcohol or the brawling. There are stories about a +printer whose software needed fixing but was only available under a +nondisclosure agreement; about a requirement to use passwords (Stallman +refused, chose as his password, and hacked the system to encourage +others to do the same); about a programming war between different LISP +machines; and about the replacement of the Incompatible Time-Sharing System +with DEC’s TOPS-20 ("Twenex") operating system. These stories are oft-told +usable pasts, but they are not representative. Commercial constraints have +always been part of academic life in computer science and engineering: hardware +and software were of necessity purchased from commercial manufacturers and +often controlled by them, even if they offered "academic" or "educational" +licenses. }~ +={ EMACS (text editor) +105 ; + Hacker ethic +1 ; + Open Systems ; + Usenet ; + Arpanet (network) ; + hackers : + hacks and +7 ; + ethnographic data : + availability of | mailing lists and +1 +} + +The story of the creation of the GNU General Public License ultimately affirms +the hacker ethic, not as a story of the ethical hacker genius, but as a +historically specific event with a duration and a context, as something that +emerges in response to the reorientation of knowledge and power, and through +the active modulation of existing practices among both human and nonhuman +actors. While hackers themselves might understand the hacker ethic as an +unchanging set of moral norms, their practices belie this belief and +demonstrate how ethics and norms can emerge suddenly and sharply, undergo +repeated transformations, and bifurcate into ideologically distinct camps (Free +Software vs. Open Source), even as the practices remain stable relative to +them. The hacker ethic does not descend from the heights of philosophy like the +categorical imperative—hackers have no Kant, nor do they want one. Rather, as +Manuel Delanda has suggested, the philosophy of Free Software is the fact of +Free Software itself, its practices and its things. If there is a hacker ethic, +it is Free Software itself, it is the recursive public itself, which is much +more than a list of norms.~{ Delanda, "Open Source." }~ By understanding it in +this way, it becomes possible to track the proliferation and differentiation of +the hacker ethic into new and surprising realms, instead of assuming its static +universal persistence as a mere procedure that hackers execute. +={ Delanda, Manuel ; + practices : + five components of Free Software +2 ; + Kant, Immanuel ; + recursive public ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +} + +2~ Free Software Licenses, Once More with Feeling + +In lecturing on liberalism in 1935, John Dewey said the following of Jeremy +Bentham: "He was, we might say, the first great muck-raker in the field of law +. . . but he was more than that, whenever he saw a defect, he proposed a +remedy. He was an inventor in law and administration, as much so as any +contemporary in mechanical production."~{ Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action. +}~ Dewey’s point was that the liberal reforms attributed to Bentham came not so +much from his theories as from his direct involvement in administrative and +legal reform—his experimentation. ,{[pg 182]}, Whether or not Bentham’s +influence is best understood this way, it nonetheless captures an important +component of liberal reform in Europe and America that is also a key component +in the story of Free Software: that the route to achieving change is through +direct experiment with the system of law and administration. +={ Bentham, Jeremy +1 ; + Dewey, John ; + experimentation : + administrative reform as +1 ; + figuring out +} + +A similar story might be told of Richard Stallman, hacker hero and founder of +the Free Software Foundation, creator of (among many other things) the GNU C +Compiler and GNU EMACS, two of the most widely used and tested Free Software +tools in the world. Stallman is routinely abused for holding what many perceive +to be "dogmatic" or "intractable" ideological positions about freedom and the +right of individuals to do what they please with software. While it is no doubt +quite true that his speeches and writings clearly betray a certain fervor and +fanaticism, it would be a mistake to assume that his speeches, ideas, or +belligerent demands concerning word choice constitute the real substance of his +reform. In fact, it is the software he has created and the licenses he has +written and rewritten which are the key to his Bentham-like inventiveness. +Unlike Bentham, however, Stallman is not a creator of law and administrative +structure, but a hacker. +={ GNU C Compiler (gcc) } + +Stallman’s GNU General Public License "hacks" the federal copyright law, as is +often pointed out. It does this by taking advantage of the very strong rights +granted by federal law to actually loosen the restrictions normally associated +with ownership. Because the statutes grant owners strong powers to create +restrictions, Stallman’s GPL contains the restriction that anybody can use the +licensed material, for any purpose, so long as they subsequently offer the same +restriction. Hacks (after which hackers are named) are clever solutions to +problems or shortcomings in technology. Hacks are work-arounds, clever, +shortest-path solutions that take advantage of characteristics of the system +that may or may not have been obvious to the people who designed it. Hacks +range from purely utilitarian to mischievously pointless, but they always +depend on an existing system or tool through which they achieve their point. To +call Free Software a hack is to point out that it would be nothing without the +existence of intellectual-property law: it relies on the structure of U.S. +copyright law (USC§17) in order to subvert it. Free Software licenses are, in a +sense, immanent to copyright laws—there is nothing illegal or even legally +arcane about what they accomplish—but there is nonetheless a kind of lingering +sense ,{[pg 183]}, that this particular use of copyright was not how the law +was intended to function. +={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + as hack of copyright law +1 ; + Copyright +1 +} + +Like all software since the 1980 copyright amendments, Free Software is +copyrightable—and what’s more, automatically copyrighted as it is written +(there is no longer any requirement to register). Copyright law grants the +author (or the employer of the author) a number of strong rights over the +dispensation of what has been written: rights to copy, distribute, and change +the work.~{ Copyright Act of 1976, Pub. L. No. 94-553, 90 Stat. 2541, enacted +19 October 1976; and Copyright Amendments, Pub. L. No. 96-517, 94 Stat. 3015, +3028 (amending §101 and §117, title 17, United States Code, regarding computer +programs), enacted 12 December 1980. All amendments since 1976 are listed at +http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92preface.html. }~ Free Software’s hack is to +immediately make use of these rights in order to abrogate the rights the +programmer has been given, thus granting all subsequent licensees rights to +copy, distribute, modify, and use the copyrighted software. Some licenses, like +the GPL, add the further restriction that every licensee must offer the same +terms to any subsequent licensee, others make no such restriction on subsequent +uses. Thus, while statutory law suggests that individuals need strong rights +and grants them, Free Software licenses effectively annul them in favor of +other activities, such as sharing, porting, and forking software. It is for +this reason that they have earned the name "copyleft."~{ The history of the +copyright and software is discussed in Litman, Digital Copyright; Cohen et al., +Copyright in a Global Information Economy; and Merges, Menell, and Lemley, +Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age. }~ +={ Copyright : + changes in 1976 | rights granted by +} + +This is a convenient ex post facto description, however. Neither Stallman nor +anyone else started out with the intention of hacking copyright law. The hack +of the Free Software licenses was a response to a complicated controversy over +a very important invention, a tool that in turn enabled an invention called +EMACS. The story of the controversy is well-known among hackers and geeks, but +not often told, and not in any rich detail, outside of these small circles.~{ +See Wayner, Free for All; Moody, Rebel Code; and Williams, Free as in Freedom. +Although this story could be told simply by interviewing Stallman and James +Gosling, both of whom are still alive and active in the software world, I have +chosen to tell it through a detailed analysis of the Usenet and Arpanet +archives of the controversy. The trade-off is between a kind of incomplete, +fly-on-the-wall access to a moment in history and the likely revisionist +retellings of those who lived through it. All of the messages referenced here +are cited by their "Message-ID," which should allow anyone interested to access +the original messages through Google Groups (http://groups.google.com). }~ + +2~ EMACS, the Extensible, Customizable, Self-documenting, Real-time Display Editor +={ text editors +13 ; + EMACS (text editor) : + modularity and extensibility of +7 +} + +EMACS is a text editor; it is also something like a religion. As one of the two +most famous text editors, it is frequently lauded by its devoted users and +attacked by detractors who prefer its competitor (Bill Joy’s vi, also created +in the late 1970s). EMACS is more than just a tool for writing text; for many +programmers, it was (and still is) the principal interface to the operating +system. For instance, it allows a programmer not only to write a program but +also to debug it, to compile it, to run it, and to e-mail it to another user, +,{[pg 184]}, all from within the same interface. What’s more, it allows users +to quickly and easily write extensions to EMACS itself, extensions that +automate frequent tasks and in turn become core features of the software. It +can do almost anything, but it can also frustrate almost anyone. The name +itself is taken from its much admired extensibility: EMACS stands for "editing +macros" because it allows programmers to quickly record a series of commands +and bundle them into a macro that can be called with a simple key combination. +In fact, it was one of the first editors (if not the first) to take advantage +of keys like ctrl and meta, as in the now ubiquitous ctrl-S familiar to users +of non-free word processors like Microsoft Word™. +={ Joy, Bill ; + vi (text editor) +} + +Appreciate the innovation represented by EMACS: before the UNIX-dominated +minicomputer era, there were very few programs for directly manipulating text +on a display. To conceive of source code as independent of a program running on +a machine meant first conceiving of it as typed, printed, or hand-scrawled code +which programmers would scrutinize in its more tangible, paper-based form. +Editors that allowed programmers to display the code in front of them on a +screen, to manipulate it directly, and to save changes to those files were an +innovation of the mid- to late 1960s and were not widespread until the +mid-1970s (and this only for bleeding-edge academics and computer +corporations). Along with a few early editors, such as QED (originally created +by Butler Lampson and Peter Deutsch, and rewritten for UNIX by Ken Thompson), +one of the most famous of these was TECO (text editor and corrector), written +by Dan Murphy for DEC’s PDP-1 computer in 1962-63. Over the years, TECO was +transformed (ported and extended) to a wide variety of machines, including +machines at Berkeley and MIT, and to other DEC hardware and operating systems. +By the early 1970s, there was a version of TECO running on the Incompatible +Time-sharing System (ITS), the system in use at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence +(AI) Lab, and it formed the basis for EMACS. (Thus, EMACS was itself conceived +of as a series of macros for a separate editor: Editing MACroS for TECO.) +={ Artificial Intelligence Lab (AI Lab), at MIT +10 ; + QED (text editor) ; + TECO (text editor and programming language) +1 +} + +Like all projects on ITS at the AI Lab, many people contributed to the +extension and maintenance of EMACS (including Guy Steele, Dave Moon, Richard +Greenblatt, and Charles Frankston), but there is a clear recognition that +Stallman made it what it was. The earliest AI Lab memo on EMACS, by Eugene +Ciccarelli, says: "Finally, of all the people who have contributed to the +development of EMACS, ,{[pg 185]}, and the TECO behind it, special mention and +appreciation go to Richard M. Stallman. He not only gave TECO the power and +generality it has, but brought together the good ideas of many different +Teco-function packages, added a tremendous amount of new ideas and environment, +and created EMACS. Personally one of the joys of my avocational life has been +writing Teco/EMACS functions; what makes this fun and not painful is the rich +set of tools to work with, all but a few of which have an ‘RMS’ chiseled +somewhere on them."~{ Eugene Ciccarelli, "An Introduction to the EMACS Editor," +MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 447, 1978, 2. }~ + +At this point, in 1978, EMACS lived largely on ITS, but its reputation soon +spread, and it was ported to DEC’s TOPS-20 (Twenex) operating system and +rewritten for Multics and the MIT’s LISP machine, on which it was called EINE +(Eine Is Not EMACS), and which was followed by ZWEI (Zwei Was Eine Initially). +={ Multics ; + proliferation of software +1 +} + +The proliferation of EMACS was both pleasing and frustrating to Stallman, since +it meant that the work fragmented into different projects, each of them +EMACS-like, rather than building on one core project, and in a 1981 report he +said, "The proliferation of such superficial facsimiles of EMACS has an +unfortunate confusing effect: their users, not knowing that they are using an +imitation of EMACS and never having seen EMACS itself, are led to believe they +are enjoying all the advantages of EMACS. Since any real-time display editor is +a tremendous improvement over what they probably had before, they believe this +readily. To prevent such confusion, we urge everyone to refer to a +nonextensible imitation of EMACS as an ‘ersatz EMACS.’ "~{ Richard Stallman, +"EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor," MIT +Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 519a, 26 March 1981, 19. +Also published as Richard M. Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable +Self-documenting Display Editor," Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA +Symposium on Text Manipulation, 8-10 June (ACM, 1981), 147-56. }~ +={ EMACS (text editor) : + ersatz versions +} + +Thus, while EMACS in its specific form on ITS was a creation of Stallman, the +idea of EMACS or of any "real-time display editor" was proliferating in +different forms and on different machines. The porting of EMACS, like the +porting of UNIX, was facilitated by both its conceptual design integrity and +its widespread availability. +={ design +1 } + +The phrase "nonextensible imitation" captures the combination of design +philosophy and moral philosophy that EMACS represented. Extensibility was not +just a useful feature for the individual computer user; it was a way to make +the improvements of each new user easily available equally to all by providing +a standard way for users to add extensions and to learn how to use new +extensions that were added (the "self-documenting" feature of the system). The +program had a conceptual integrity that was compromised when it was copied +imperfectly. EMACS has a modular, extensible design ,{[pg 186]}, that by its +very nature invites users to contribute to it, to extend it, and to make it +perform all manner of tasks—to literally copy and modify it, instead of +imitating it. For Stallman, this was not only a fantastic design for a text +editor, but an expression of the way he had always done things in the +small-scale setting of the AI Lab. The story of Stallman’s moral commitments +stresses his resistance to secrecy in software production, and EMACS is, both +in its design and in Stallman’s distribution of it an example of this +resistance. +={ modifiability : + EMACS and +12 ; + moral and technical order +7 ; + Secrecy +} + +Not everyone shared Stallman’s sense of communal order, however. In order to +facilitate the extension of EMACS through sharing, Stallman started something +he called the "EMACS commune." At the end of the 1981 report—"EMACS: The +Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor," dated 26 March—he +explained the terms of distribution for EMACS: "It is distributed on a basis of +communal sharing, which means that all improvements must be given back to me to +be incorporated and distributed. Those who are interested should contact me. +Further information about how EMACS works is available in the same way."~{ +Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display +Editor," MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 519a, 26 March +1981, 24. }~ +={ EMACS commune +19 } + +In another report, intended as a user’s manual for EMACS, Stallman gave more +detailed and slightly more colorful instructions: + +_1 EMACS does not cost anything; instead, you are joining the EMACS +software-sharing commune. The conditions of membership are that you must send +back any improvements you make to EMACS, including any libraries you write, and +that you must not redistribute the system except exactly as you got it, +complete. (You can also distribute your customizations, separately.) Please do +not attempt to get a copy of EMACS, for yourself or anyone else, by dumping it +off of your local system. It is almost certain to be incomplete or +inconsistent. It is pathetic to hear from sites that received incomplete copies +lacking the sources [source code], asking me years later whether sources are +available. (All sources are distributed, and should be on line at every site so +that users can read them and copy code from them). If you wish to give away a +copy of EMACS, copy a distribution tape from MIT, or mail me a tape and get a +new one.~{ Richard M. Stallman, "EMACS Manual for ITS Users," MIT Artificial +Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 554, 22 October 1981, 163. }~ + +Because EMACS was so widely admired and respected, Stallman had a certain +amount of power over this commune. If it had been an obscure, nonextensible +tool, useful for a single purpose, no one would have heeded such demands, but +because EMACS was by nature the kind of tool that was both useful for all kinds +of tasks and ,{[pg 187]}, customizable for specific ones, Stallman was not the +only person who benefited from this communal arrangement. Two disparate sites +may well have needed the same macro extension, and therefore many could easily +see the social benefit in returning extensions for inclusion, as well as in +becoming a kind of co-developer of such a powerful system. As a result, the +demands of the EMACS commune, while unusual and autocratic, were of obvious +value to the flock. In terms of the concept of recursive public, EMACS was +itself the tool through which it was possible for users to extend EMACS, the +medium of their affinity; users had a natural incentive to share their +contributions so that all might receive the maximum benefit. +={ affinity (of geeks) ; + recursive public +} + +The terms of the EMACS distribution agreement were not quite legally binding; +nothing compelled participation except Stallman’s reputation, his hectoring, or +a user’s desire to reciprocate. On the one hand, Stallman had not yet chosen +to, or been forced to, understand the details of the legal system, and so the +EMACS commune was the next best thing. On the other hand, the state of +intellectual-property law was in great flux at the time, and it was not clear +to anyone, whether corporate or academic, exactly what kind of legal +arrangements would be legitimate (the 1976 changes to copyright law were some +of the most drastic in seventy years, and a 1980 amendment made software +copyrightable, but no court cases had yet tested these changes). Stallman’s +"agreement" was a set of informal rules that expressed the general sense of +mutual aid that was a feature of both the design of the system and Stallman’s +own experience at the AI Lab. It was an expression of the way Stallman expected +others to behave, and his attempts to punish or shame people amounted to +informal enforcement of these expectations. The small scale of the community +worked in Stallman’s favor. +={ Copyright : + changes in 1976 | changes in 1980 +} + +At its small scale, Stallman’s commune was confronting many of the same issues +that haunted the open-systems debates emerging at the same time, issues of +interoperability, source-code sharing, standardization, portability, and +forking. In particular, Stallman was acutely aware of the blind spot of open +systems: the conflict of moral-technical orders represented by intellectual +property. While UNIX vendors left intellectual-property rules unchallenged and +simply assumed that they were the essential ground rules of debate, Stallman +made them the substance of his experiment and, like Bentham, became something +of a legal muckraker as a result. +={ Open Systems } + +% ,{[pg 188]}, + +Stallman’s communal model could not completely prevent the porting and forking +of software. Despite Stallman’s request that imitators refer to their versions +of EMACS as ersatz EMACS, few did. In the absence of legal threats over a +trademarked term there was not much to stop people from calling their ports and +forks EMACS, a problem of success not unlike that of Kleenex or Xerox. Few +people took the core ideas of EMACS, implemented them in an imitation, and then +called it something else (EINE and ZWEI were exceptions). In the case of UNIX +the proliferation of forked versions of the software did not render them any +less UNIX, even when AT&T insisted on ownership of the trademarked name. But as +time went on, EMACS was ported, forked, rewritten, copied, or imitated on +different operating systems and different computer architectures in +universities and corporations around the world; within five or six years, many +versions of EMACS were in wide use. It was this situation of successful +adoption that would provide the context for the controversy that occurred +between 1983 and 1985. +={ EMACS (text editor) : + ersatz versions +6 | controversy about +43 +} + +2~ The Controversy + +In brief the controversy was this: in 1983 James Gosling decided to sell his +version of EMACS—a version written in C for UNIX called GOSMACS—to a commercial +software vendor called Unipress. GOSMACS, the second most famous implementation +of EMACS (after Stallman’s itself ), was written when Gosling was a graduate +student at Carnegie Mellon University. For years, Gosling had distributed +GOSMACS by himself and had run a mailing list on Usenet, on which he answered +queries and discussed extensions. Gosling had explicitly asked people not to +redistribute the program, but to come back to him (or send interested parties +to him directly) for new versions, making GOSMACS more of a benevolent +dictatorship than a commune. Gosling maintained his authority, but graciously +accepted revisions and bug-fixes and extensions from users, incorporating them +into new releases. Stallman’s system, by contrast, allowed users to distribute +their extensions themselves, as well as have them included in the "official" +EMACS. By 1983, Gosling had decided he was unable to effectively maintain and +support GOSMACS—a task he considered the proper role of a corporation. +={ Gosling, James +64 ; + GOSMACS (version of EMACS) +41 ; + Unipress +41 +} + +% ,{[pg 189]}, + +For Stallman, Gosling’s decision to sell GOSMACS to Unipress was "software +sabotage." Even though Gosling had been substantially responsible for writing +GOSMACS, Stallman felt somewhat proprietorial toward this ersatz version—or, at +the very least, was irked that no noncommercial UNIX version of EMACS existed. +So Stallman wrote one himself (as part of a project he announced around the +same time, called GNU [GNU’s Not UNIX], to create a complete non-AT&T version +of UNIX). He called his version GNU EMACS and released it under the same EMACS +commune terms. The crux of the debate hinged on the fact that Stallman used, +albeit ostensibly with permission, a small piece of Gosling’s code in his new +version of EMACS, a fact that led numerous people, including the new commercial +suppliers of EMACS, to cry foul. Recriminations and legal threats ensued and +the controversy was eventually resolved when Stallman rewrote the offending +code, thus creating an entirely "Gosling-free" version that went on to become +the standard UNIX version of EMACS. +={ GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) +40 ; + EMACS (text editor) : + ersatz versions +} + +The story raises several questions with respect to the changing legal context. +In particular, it raises questions about the difference between "law on the +books" and "law in action," that is, the difference between the actions of +hackers and commercial entities, advised by lawyers and legally minded friends, +and the text and interpretation of statutes as they are written by legislators +and interpreted by courts and lawyers. The legal issues span trade secret, +patent, and trademark, but copyright is especially significant. Three issues +were undecided at the time: the copyrightability of software, the definition of +what counts as software and what doesn’t, and the meaning of copyright +infringement. While the controversy did not resolve any of these issues (the +first two would be resolved by Congress and the courts, the third remains +somewhat murky), it did clarify the legal issues for Stallman sufficiently that +he could leave behind the informal EMACS commune and create the first version +of a Free Software license, the GNU General Public License, which first started +appearing in 1985. +={ Copyright : + software and copyrightability | legal definition of software and +70 | infringement and software +70 ; + software : + copyrightability of +70 ; + trademark law ; + trade secret law +} + +Gosling’s decision to sell GOSMACS, announced in April of 1983, played into a +growing EMACS debate being carried out on the GOSMACS mailing list, a Usenet +group called net.emacs. Since net.emacs was forwarded to the Arpanet via a +gateway maintained by John Gilmore at Sun Microsystems, a fairly large +community ,{[pg 190]}, of EMACS users were privy to Gosling’s announcement. +Prior to his declaration, there had been quite a bit of discussion regarding +different versions of EMACS, including an already "commercial" version called +CCA EMACS, written by Steve Zimmerman, of Computer Corporation of America +(CCA).~{ Back in January of 1983, Steve Zimmerman had announced that the +company he worked for, CCA, had created a commercial version of EMACS called +CCA EMACS (Message-ID: { 385@yetti.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=385@yetti.uucp ). Zimmerman had not +written this version entirely, but had taken a version written by Warren +Montgomery at Bell Labs (written for UNIX on PDP-11s) and created the version +that was being used by programmers at CCA. Zimmerman had apparently distributed +it by ftp at first, but when CCA determined that it might be worth something, +they decided to exploit it commercially, rather than letting Zimmerman +distribute it "freely." By Zimmerman’s own ,{[pg 334]}, account, this whole +procedure required ensuring that there was nothing left of the original code by +Warren Montgomery that Bell Labs owned (Message-ID: { 730@masscomp.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=730@masscomp.uucp ). }~ Some readers +wanted comparisons between CCA EMACS and GOSMACS; others objected that it was +improper to discuss a commercial version on the list: was such activity +legitimate, or should it be carried out as part of the commercial company’s +support activities? Gosling’s announcement was therefore a surprise, since it +was already perceived to be the "noncommercial" version. +={ net.emacs (mailing list) +38 ; + Computer Corporation of America (CCA) +60 ; + Zimmerman, Steve +60 +} + +group{ + +Date: Tue Apr 12 04:51:12 1983 + +Subject: EMACS goes commercial + + The version of EMACS that I wrote is now available commercially through a company called Unipress. . . . They will be doing development, maintenance and will be producing a real manual. EMACS will be available on many machines (it already runs on VAXen under Unix and VMS, SUNs, codatas, and Microsoft Xenix). Along with this, I regret to say that I will no longer be distributing it. + + This is a hard step to take, but I feel that it is necessary. I can no longer look after it properly, there are too many demands on my time. EMACS has grown to be completely unmanageable. Its popularity has made it impossible to distribute free: just the task of writing tapes and stuffing them into envelopes is more than I can handle. + + The alternative of abandoning it to the public domain is unacceptable. Too many other programs have been destroyed that way. + + Please support these folks. The effort that they can afford to put into looking after EMACS is directly related to the support they get. Their prices are reasonable. + +James.~{ Message-ID for Gosling: { bnews.sri-arpa.865. }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bnews.sri-arpa.865 }~ + +}group +={ Microsoft : + Xenix (version of UNIX) ; + public domain : + meaning in EMACS controversy +59 +} + +The message is worth paying careful attention to: Gosling’s work of +distributing the tapes had become "unmanageable," and the work of maintenance, +upkeep, and porting (making it available on multiple architectures) is +something he clearly believes should be done by a commercial enterprise. +Gosling, it is clear, did not understand his effort in creating and maintaining +EMACS to have emerged from a communal sharing of bits of code—even if he had +done a Sisyphean amount of work to incorporate all the changes and suggestions +his users had made—but he did long have a commitment ,{[pg 191]}, to +distributing it for free, a commitment that resulted in many people +contributing bits and pieces to GOSMACS. + +"Free," however, did not mean "public domain," as is clear from his statement +that "abandoning it" to the public domain would destroy the program. The +distinction is an important one that was, and continues to be, lost on many +sophisticated members of net.emacs. Here, free means without charge, but +Gosling had no intention of letting that word suggest that he was not the +author, owner, maintainer, distributor, and sole beneficiary of whatever value +GOSMACS had. Public domain, by contrast, implied giving up all these rights.~{ +The thread starting at Message-ID: { 969@sdcsvax.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=969@sdcsvax.uucp contains one example of +a discussion over the difference between public-domain and commercial software. +}~ His decision to sell GOSMACS to Unipress was a decision to transfer these +rights to a company that would then charge for all the labor he had previously +provided for no charge (for "free"). Such a distinction was not clear to +everyone; many people considered the fact that GOSMACS was free to imply that +it was in the public domain.~{ In particular, a thread discussing this in +detail starts at Message-ID: { 172@encore.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=172@encore.uucp and includes Message-ID: +{ 137@osu-eddie.UUCP }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=137@osu-eddie.UUCP, +Message-ID: { 1127@godot.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1127@godot.uucp, Message-ID: { +148@osu-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=148@osu-eddie.uucp. }~ +Not least of these was Richard Stallman, who referred to Gosling’s act as +"software sabotage" and urged people to avoid using the "semi-ersatz" Unipress +version.~{ Message-ID: bnews.sri-arpa.988. }~ +={ Public domain : + contrasted with free +12 +} + +To Stallman, the advancing commercialization of EMACS, both by CCA and by +Unipress, was a frustrating state of affairs. The commercialization of CCA had +been of little concern so long as GOSMACS remained free, but with Gosling’s +announcement, there was no longer a UNIX version of EMACS available. To +Stallman, however, "free" meant something more than either "public domain" or +"for no cost." The EMACS commune was designed to keep EMACS alive and growing +as well as to provide it for free—it was an image of community stewardship, a +community that had included Gosling until April 1983. + +The disappearance of a UNIX version of EMACS, as well as the sudden commercial +interest in making UNIX into a marketable operating system, fed into Stallman’s +nascent plan to create a completely new, noncommercial, non-AT&T UNIX operating +system that he would give away free to anyone who could use it. He announced +his intention on 27 September 1983:~{ Message-ID: { 771@mit-eddie.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=771@mit-eddie.uucp, announced on +net.unix-wizards and net.usoft. }~ +={ GNU Manifesto +7 } + +group{ + +Free Unix! + + Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed. + +}group + +% ,{[pg 192]}, + +His justifications were simple. + +group{ + +Why I Must Write GNU + + I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. + + So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.~{ Message-ID: { 771@mit-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=771@mit-eddie.uucp. }~ + +}group + +At that point, it is clear, there was no "free software license." There was the +word free, but not the term public domain. There was the "golden rule," and +there was a resistance to nondisclosure and license arrangements in general, +but certainly no articulated conception of copyleft of Free Software as a +legally distinct entity. And yet Stallman hardly intended to "abandon it" to +the public domain, as Gosling suggested. Instead, Stallman likely intended to +require the same EMACS commune rules to apply to Free Software, rules that he +would be able to control largely by overseeing (in a nonlegal sense) who was +sent or sold what and by demanding (in the form of messages attached to the +software) that any modifications or improvements come in the form of donations. +It was during the period 1983-85 that the EMACS commune morphed into the GPL, +as Stallman began adding copyrights and appending messages that made explicit +what people could do with the software.~{ Various other people seem to have +conceived of a similar scheme around the same time (if the Usenet archives are +any guide), including Guido Van Rossum (who would later become famous for the +creation of the Python scripting language). The following is from Message-ID: +5568@mcvax.uucp: \\ /* This software is copyright (c) Mathematical Centre, +Amsterdam, \\ * 1983. \\ * Permission is granted to use and copy this software, +but not for * profit, \\ * and provided that these same conditions are imposed +on any person \\ * receiving or using the software. \\ */ }~ +={ EMACS commune } + +The GNU project initially received little attention, however; scattered +messages to net.unix-wizards over the course of 1983-84 periodically ask about +the status and how to contact them, often in the context of discussions of AT&T +UNIX licensing practices that were unfolding as UNIX was divested and began to +market its own version of UNIX.~{ For example, Message-ID: { 6818@brl-tgr.arpa +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6818@brl-tgr.arpa. }~ Stallman’s original +plan for GNU was to start with the core operating system, the kernel, but his +extensive work on EMACS and the sudden need for a free EMACS for UNIX led him +to start with a UNIX version of EMACS. In 1984 and into 1985, he and others +began work on a UNIX version of GNU EMACS. The two commercial versions of UNIX +EMACS (CCA EMACS and Unipress EMACS) continued to circulate and improve in +parallel. DEC users meanwhile used the original free version created by +Stallman. And, as often happens, life went on: Zimmerman left CCA in August +,{[pg 193]}, 1984, and Gosling moved to Sun, neither of them remaining closely +involved in the software they had created, but leaving the new owners to do so. +={ AT&T ; + Digital Equipment Corporation (corporation) +1 ; + Sun Microsystems +1 +} + +By March 1985, Stallman had a complete version (version 15) of GNU EMACS +running on the BSD 4.2 version of UNIX (the version Bill Joy had helped create +and had taken with him to form the core of Sun’s version of UNIX), running on +DEC’s VAX computers. Stallman announced this software in a characteristically +flamboyant manner, publishing in the computer programmers’ monthly magazine Dr. +Dobbs an article entitled "The GNU Manifesto."~{ Stallman, "The GNU Manifesto." +Available at GNU’s Not Unix!, http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html. }~ +={ Joy, Bill } + +Stallman’s announcement that a free version of UNIX EMACS was available caused +some concern among commercial distributors. The main such concern was that GNU +EMACS 15.34 contained code marked "Copyright (c) James Gosling," code used to +make EMACS display on screen.~{ The main file of the controversy was called +display.c. A version that was modified by Chris Torek appears in net.sources, +Message-ID: { 424@umcp-cs.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=424@umcp-cs.uucp. A separate example of a +piece of code written by Gosling bears a note that claims he had declared it +public domain, but did not "include the infamous Stallman anti-copyright +clause" (Message-ID: { 78@tove.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=78@tove.uucp ). }~ The "discovery" (not +so difficult, since Stallman always distributed the source code along with the +binary) that this code had been reused by Stallman led to extensive discussion +among EMACS users of issues such as the mechanics of copyright, the nature of +infringement, the definition of software, the meaning of public domain, the +difference between patent, copyright, and trade secret, and the mechanics of +permission and its granting—in short, a discussion that would be repeatedly +recapitulated in nearly every software and intellectual property controversy in +the future. +={ Copyright infringement : + EMACS controversy and ; + EMACS (text editor) : + legal status of +48 ; + rumor on Usenet +7 ; + Usenet : + rumor on +7 +} + +The story of the controversy reveals the structure of rumor on the Usenet to be +a bit like the child’s game of Chinese Whispers, except that the translations +are all archived. GNU EMACS 15.34 was released in March 1985. Between March and +early June there was no mention of its legal status, but around June 3 messages +on the subject began to proliferate. The earliest mention of the issue appeared +not on net.emacs, but on fa.info-vax—a newsgroup devoted to discussions of VAX +computer systems ("fa" stands for "from Arpanet")—and it included a dialogue, +between Ron Natalie and Marty Sasaki, labeled "GNU EMACS: How Public Domain?": +"FOO, don’t expect that GNU EMACS is really in the public domain. UNIPRESS +seems rather annoyed that there are large portions of it that are marked +copyright James Gosling."~{ Message-ID: { 7773@ucbvax.arpa. +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=7773@ucbvax.arpa }~ This message was +reprinted on 4 June 1985 on net.emacs, with the addendum: "RMS’s work is based +on a version of Gosling code that existed before Unipress got it. Gosling had +put that code into the public domain. Any ,{[pg 194]}, work taking off from the +early Gosling code is therefore also public domain."~{ Message-ID: { +11400007@inmet.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=11400007@inmet.uucp. +}~ + +The addendum was then followed by an extensive reply from Zimmerman, whose CCA +EMACS had been based on Warren Montgomery’s Bell Labs EMACS but rewritten to +avoid reusing the code, which may account for why his understanding of the +issue seems to have been both deep and troubling for him. +={ Montgomery, Warren } + +_1 This is completely contrary to Gosling’s public statements. Before he made +his arrangements with Unipress, Gosling’s policy was that he would send a free +copy of his EMACS to anyone who asked, but he did not (publicly, at least) give +anyone else permission to make copies. Once Unipress started selling Gosling’s +EMACS, Gosling stopped distributing free copies and still did not grant anyone +else permission to make them; instead, he suggested that people buy EMACS from +Unipress. All versions of Gosling’s EMACS distributed by him carry his +copyright notice, and therefore none of them are in the public domain. Removing +copyright notices without the author’s permission is, of course, illegal. Now, +a quick check of my GNU EMACS sources shows that sure enough, a number of files +have Gosling’s copyright notice in them. What this all means is that unless RMS +got written permission from Gosling to distribute his code, all copies of GNU +EMACS constitute violations of the copyright law. All those people making such +copies, including those people who allow them to be copied off their machines, +could each be liable for large sums of money. I think that RMS had better tell +us if he has Gosling’s written permission to make these copies. If so, why has +he not stated this earlier (preferably in the distribution itself ) and thereby +cleared up a potentially major point of confusion? If not, why has he gone +ahead and made many, many people liable for criminal prosecution by +recommending that they distribute this code without even warning them of their +liability? (People who distribute this code would be liable even if they claim +that they didn’t see Gosling’s notices; the fact that the notices are there is +sufficient. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse.") +={ AT&T : + version of EMACS ; + Copyright infringement : + permissions and +45 +} + +_1 Now, I have nothing against free software; it’s a free country and people +can do what they want. It’s just that people who do distribute free software +had better be sure that they have the legal right to do so, or be prepared to +face the consequences. (Jun 9, 1985).~{ Message-ID: { 717@masscomp.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=717@masscomp.uucp. }~ + +Stallman replied the next day. ,{[pg 195]}, + +_1 Nobody has any reason to be afraid to use or distribute GNU EMACS. It is +well known that I do not believe any software is anyone’s property. However, +for the GNU project, I decided it was necessary to obey the law. I have refused +to look at code I did not have permission to distribute. About 5% of GNU EMACS +is close to (though quite a bit changed from) an old version of Gosling EMACS. +I am distributing it for Fen Labalme, who received permission from Gosling to +distribute it. It is therefore legal for me to do so. To be scrupulously legal, +I put statements at the front of the files concerned, describing this +situation. +={ Labalme, Fen +8 } + +_1 I don’t see anything I should warn people about—except that Zimmerman is +going to try to browbeat them.~{ Message-ID: { 4421@mit-eddie.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4421@mit-eddie.uucp. }~ + +Stallman’s original defense for using Gosling’s code was that he had permission +to do so. According to him, Fen Labalme had received written permission—whether +to make use of or to redistribute is not clear—the display code that was +included in GNU EMACS 15.34. According to Stallman, versions of Labalme’s +version of Gosling’s version of EMACS were in use in various places (including +at Labalme’s employer, Megatest), and Stallman and Labalme considered this a +legally defensible position.~{ Message-ID: { 4486@mit-eddie.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4486@mit-eddie.uucp. Stallman also +recounts this version of events in "RMS Lecture at KTH (Sweden)," 30 October +1986, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html. }~ +={ AT&T : + version of EMACS +} + +Over the next two weeks, a slew of messages attempted to pick apart and +understand the issues of copyright, ownership, distribution, and authorship. +Gosling wrote to clarify that GOSMACS had never been in the public domain, but +that "unfortunately, two moves have left my records in a shambles," and he is +therefore silent on the question of whether he granted permission.~{ +Message-ID: { 2334@sun.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2334@sun.uucp. }~ Gosling’s claim could +well be strategic: giving permission, had he done so, might have angered +Unipress, which expected exclusive control over the version he had sold; by the +same token, he may well have approved of Stallman’s re-creation, but not have +wanted to affirm this in any legally actionable way. Meanwhile, Zimmerman +relayed an anonymous message suggesting that some lawyers somewhere found the +"third hand redistribution" argument was legally "all wet."~{ Message-ID: { +732@masscomp.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=732@masscomp.uucp. }~ +={ authorship ; + intellectual property : + strategy and +17 +} + +Stallman’s biggest concern was not so much the legality of his own actions as +the possibility that people would choose not to use the software because of +legal threats (even if such threats were issued only as rumors by former +employees of companies that distributed software they had written). Stallman +wanted users not only ,{[pg 196]}, to feel safe using his software but to adopt +his view that software exists to be shared and improved and that anything that +hinders this is a loss for everyone, which necessitates an EMACS commune. +={ Copyright infringement : + legal threats and ; + EMACS commune +1 +} + +Stallman’s legal grounds for using Gosling’s code may or may not have been +sound. Zimmerman did his best throughout to explain in detail what kind of +permission Stallman and Labalme would have needed, drawing on his own +experience with the CCA lawyers and AT&T Bell Labs, all the while berating +Stallman for not creating the display code himself. Meanwhile, Unipress posted +an official message that said, "UniPress wants to inform the community that +portions of the GNU EMACS program are most definitely not public domain, and +that use and/or distribution of the GNU EMACS program is not necessarily +proper."~{ Message-ID: { 103@unipress.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=103@unipress.uucp. }~ The admittedly +vague tone of the message left most people wondering what that meant—and +whether Unipress intended to sue anyone. Strategically speaking, the company +may have wished to maintain good will among hackers and readers of net.emacs, +an audience likely composed of many potential customers. Furthermore, if +Gosling had given permission to Stallman, then Unipress would themselves have +been on uncertain legal ground, unable to firmly and definitively threaten +users of GNU EMACS with legal action. In either case, the question of whether +or not permission was needed was not in question—only the question of whether +it had been granted.~{ With the benefit of hindsight, the position that +software could be in the public domain also seems legally uncertain, given that +the 1976 changes to USC§17 abolished the requirement to register and, by the +same token, to render uncertain the status of code contributed to Gosling and +incorporated into GOSMACS. }~ +={ AT&T : + version of EMACS ; + Copyright infringement : + EMACS controversy and +18 +} + +However, a more complicated legal issue also arose as a result, one concerning +the status of code contributed to Gosling by others. Fen Labalme wrote a +message to net.emacs, which, although it did not clarify the legal status of +Gosling’s code (Labalme was also unable to find his "permission" from Gosling), +did raise a related issue: the fact that he and others had made significant +contributions to GOSMACS, which Gosling had incorporated into his version, then +sold to Unipress without their permission: "As one of the ‘others’ who helped +to bring EMACS [GOSMACS] up to speed, I was distressed when Jim sold the editor +to UniPress. This seemed to be a direct violation of the trust that I and +others had placed in Jim as we sent him our improvements, modifications, and +bug fixes. I am especially bothered by the general mercenary attitude +surrounding EMACS which has taken over from the once proud ‘hacker’ ethic—EMACS +is a tool that can make all of our lives better. Let’s help it to grow!"~{ +Message-ID: { 18@megatest }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=18@megatest. +Note here the use of "once proud hacker ethic," which seems to confirm the +perpetual feeling that the ethic has been compromised. }~ +={ Hacker ethic +2 } + +% ,{[pg 197]}, + +Labalme’s implication, though he may not even have realized this himself, is +that Gosling may have infringed on the rights of others in selling the code to +Unipress, as a separate message from Joaquim Martillo makes clear: "The +differences between current version of Unipress EMACS and Gnu EMACS display.c +(a 19 page module) is about 80%. For all the modules which Fen LeBalme [sic] +gave RMS permission to use, the differences are similar. Unipress is not even +using the disputed software anymore! Now, these modules contain code people +like Chris Torek and others contributed when Gosling’s emacs was in the public +domain. I must wonder whether these people would have contributed had they +known their freely-given code was going to become part of someone’s product."~{ +Message-ID: { 287@mit-athena.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=287@mit-athena.uucp. }~ + +Indeed, the general irony of this complicated situation was certainly not as +evident as it might have been given the emotional tone of the debates: Stallman +was using code from Gosling based on permission Gosling had given to Labalme, +but Labalme had written code for Gosling which Gosling had commercialized +without telling Labalme—conceivably, but not likely, the same code. +Furthermore, all of them were creating software that had been originally +conceived in large part by Stallman (but based on ideas and work on TECO, an +editor written twenty years before EMACS), who was now busy rewriting the very +software Gosling had rewritten for UNIX. The "once proud hacker ethic" that +Labalme mentions would thus amount not so much to an explicit belief in sharing +so much as a fast-and-loose practice of making contributions and fixes without +documenting them, giving oral permission to use and reuse, and "losing" records +that may or may not have existed—hardly a noble enterprise. +={ TECO (text editor and programming language) } + +But by 27 June 1985, all of the legal discussion was rendered moot when +Stallman announced that he would completely rewrite the display code in EMACS. + +_1 I have decided to replace the Gosling code in GNU EMACS, even though I still +believe Fen and I have permission to distribute that code, in order to keep +people’s confidence in the GNU project. + +_1 I came to this decision when I found, this night, that I saw how to rewrite +the parts that had seemed hard. I expect to have the job done by the weekend.~{ +Message-ID: { 4559@mit-eddie.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4559@mit-eddie.uucp. }~ + +On 5 July, Stallman sent out a message that said: ,{[pg 198]}, + +_1 Celebrate our independence from Unipress! + +_1 EMACS version 16, 100% Gosling-free, is now being tested at several places. +It appears to work solidly on Vaxes, but some other machines have not been +tested yet.~{ Message-ID: { 4605@mit-eddie.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4605@mit-eddie.uucp. }~ + +The fact that it only took one week to create the code is a testament to +Stallman’s widely recognized skills in creating great software—it doesn’t +appear to have indicated any (legal) threat or urgency. Indeed, even though +Unipress seems also to have been concerned about their own reputation, and +despite the implication made by Stallman that they had forced this issue to +happen, they took a month to respond. At that point, the Unipress employee Mike +Gallaher wrote to insist, somewhat after the fact, that Unipress had no +intention of suing anyone—as long as they were using the Gosling-free EMACS +version 16 and higher. + +_1 UniPress has no quarrel with the Gnu project. It bothers me that people seem +to think we are trying to hinder it. In fact, we hardly did or said much at +all, except to point out that the Gnumacs code had James Gosling’s copyright in +it. We have not done anything to keep anyone from using Gnumacs, nor do we +intend to now that it is "Gosling-free" (version 16.56). + +_1 You can consider this to be an official statement from UniPress: There is +nothing in Gnumacs version 16.56 that could possibly cause UniPress to get +upset. If you were afraid to use Gnumacs because you thought we would hassle +you, don’t be, on the basis of version 16.56.~{ Message-ID: { 104@unipress.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=104@unipress.uucp. }~ + +Both Stallman and Unipress received various attacks and defenses from observers +of the controversy. Many people pointed out that Stallman should get credit for +"inventing" EMACS and that the issue of him infringing on his own invention was +therefore ironic. Others proclaimed the innocence and moral character of +Unipress, which, it was claimed, was providing more of a service (support for +EMACS) than the program itself. +={ Copyright infringement : + infringement on own invention +} + +Some readers interpreted the fact that Stallman had rewritten the display code, +whether under pressure from Unipress or not, as confirmation of the ideas +expressed in "The GNU Manifesto," namely, that commercial software stifles +innovation. According to this logic, precisely because Stallman was forced to +rewrite the code, rather than build on something that he himself assumed he had +permission ,{[pg 199]}, to do, there was no innovation, only fear-induced +caution.~{ Joaquim Martillo, Message-ID: { 287@mit-athena.uucpp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=287@mit-athena.uucpp : + "Trying to forbid RMS from using discarded code so that he must spend time +to reinvent the wheel supports his contention that ‘software hoarders’ are +slowing down progress in computer science." }~ On the other hand, latent within +this discussion is a deep sense of propriety about what people had created; +many people, not only Stallman and Gosling and Zimmerman, had contributed to +making EMACS what it was, and most had done so under the assumption, legally +correct or not, that it would not be taken away from them or, worse, that +others might profit by it. +={ GNU Manifesto } + +Gosling’s sale of EMACS is thus of a different order from his participation in +the common stewardship of EMACS. The distinction between creating software and +maintaining it is a commercial fiction driven in large part by the structure of +intellectual property. It mirrors the experience of open systems. Maintaining +software can mean improving it, and improving it can mean incorporating the +original work and ideas of others. To do so by the rules of a changing +intellectual-property structure forces different choices than to do so +according to an informal hacker ethic or an experimental "commune." One +programmer’s minor improvement is another programmer’s original contribution. +={ software development : + creating vs. maintaining +} + +2~ The Context of Copyright + +The EMACS controversy occurred in a period just after some of the largest +changes to U.S. intellectual-property law in seventy years. Two aspects of this +context are worth emphasizing: (1) practices and knowledge about the law change +slowly and do not immediately reflect the change in either the law or the +strategies of actors; (2) U.S. law creates a structural form of uncertainty in +which the interplay between legislation and case law is never entirely certain. +In the former aspect, programmers who grew up in the 1970s saw a commercial +practice entirely dominated by trade secret and patent protection, and very +rarely by copyright; thus, the shift to widespread use of copyright law +(facilitated by the 1976 and 1980 changes to the law) to protect software was a +shift in thinking that only slowly dawned on many participants, even the most +legally astute, since it was a general shift in strategy as well as a statutory +change. In the latter aspect, the 1976 and 1980 changes to the copyright law +contained a number of uncertainties that would take over a decade to be worked +out in case law, issues such as the copyrightability of software, the +definition of software, and the meaning ,{[pg 200]}, of infringement in +software copyright, to say nothing of the impact of the codification of fair +use and the removal of the requirement to register (issues that arguably went +unnoticed until the turn of the millennium). Both aspects set the stage for the +EMACS controversy and Stallman’s creation of the GPL. +={ patents on software +1 ; + practices : + opposed to legal changes +2 ; + Trade secret law +6 ; + uncertainty, in the law +20 ; + copyright infringement ; + Copyright : + changes in 1976 +20 | changes in 1980 +20 | requirement to register : + software and copyrightability +3 ; + fair use +1 ; + software : + registration of copyright +} + +Legally speaking, the EMACS controversy was about copyright, permission, and +the meanings of a public domain and the reuse of software (and, though never +explicitly mentioned, fair use). Software patenting and trade-secret law are +not directly concerned, but they nonetheless form a background to the +controversy. Many of the participants expressed a legal and conventional +orthodoxy that software was not patentable, that is, that algorithms, ideas, or +fundamental equations fell outside the scope of patent, even though the 1981 +case Diamond v. Diehr is generally seen as the first strong support by the +courts for forcing the United States Patent and Trademark Office to grant +patents on software.~{ Diamond V. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981), the Supreme Court +decision, forced the patent office to grant patents on software. Interestingly, +software patents had been granted much earlier, but went either uncontested or +unenforced. An excellent example is patent 3,568,156, held by Ken Thompson, on +regular expression pattern matching, granted in 1971. }~ Software, this +orthodoxy went, was better protected by trade-secret law (a state-by-state law, +not a federal statute), which provided protection for any intellectual property +that an owner reasonably tried to maintain as a secret. The trade-secret status +of UNIX, for example, meant that all the educational licensees who were given +the source code of UNIX had agreed to keep it secret, even though it was +manifestly circulating the world over; one could therefore run afoul of +trade-secret rules if one looked at the source code (e.g., signed a +nondisclosure license or was shown the code by an employee) and then +implemented something similar. +={ source code +1 } + +By contrast, copyright law was rarely deployed in matters of software +production. The first copyright registration of software occurred in 1964, but +the desirability of relying on copyright over trade secret was uncertain well +into the 1970s.~{ Calvin Mooers, in his 1975 article "Computer Software and +Copyright," suggests that the IBM unbundling decision opened the doors to +thinking about copyright protection. }~ Some corporations, like IBM, routinely +marked all source code with a copyright symbol. Others asserted it only on the +binaries they distributed or in the license agreements. The case of software on +the UNIX operating system and its derivatives is particularly haphazard, and +the existence of copyright notices by the authors varies widely. An informal +survey by Barry Gold singled out only James Gosling, Walter Tichy (author of +rcs), and the RAND Corporation as having adequately labeled source code with +copyright notices.~{ Message-ID: { 933@sdcrdcf.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=933@sdcrdcf.uucp. }~ Gosling was also the +first to register EMACS as copyrighted software in 1983, ,{[pg 201]}, while +Stallman registered GNU EMACS just after version 15.34 was released in May +1985.~{ Gosling’s EMACS 264 (Stallman copied EMACS 84) is registered with the +Library of Congress, as is GNU EMACS 15.34. Gosling’s EMACS Library of Congress +registration number is TX-3-407-458, registered in 1992. Stallman’s +registration number is TX-1-575-302, registered in May 1985. The listed dates +are uncertain, however, since there are periodic re-registrations and updates. +}~ + +The uncertainty of the change from reliance on trade secret to reliance on +copyright is clear in some of the statements made by Stallman around the reuse +of Gosling’s code. Since neither Stallman nor Gosling sought to keep the +program secret in any form—either by licensing it or by requiring users to keep +it secret—there could be no claims of trade-secret status on either program. +Nonetheless, there was frequent concern about whether one had seen any code +(especially code from a UNIX operating system, which is covered by trade +secret) and whether code that someone else had seen, rewritten, or distributed +publicly was therefore "in the public domain."~{ This is particularly confusing +in the case of "dbx." Message-ID: { 4437@mit-eddie.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4437@mit-eddie.uucp, Message-ID: { +6238@shasta.arpa }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6238@shasta.arpa, and +Message-ID: { 730@masscomp.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=730@masscomp.uucp. }~ But, at the same +time, Stallman was concerned that rewriting Gosling’s display code would be too +difficult: "Any display code would have a considerable resemblance to that +display code, just by virtue of doing the same job. Without any clear idea of +exactly how much difference there would have to be to reassure you users, I +cannot tell whether the rewrite would accomplish that. The law is not any +guidance here. . . . Writing display code that is significantly different is +not easy."~{ Message-ID: { 4489@mit-eddie.uucp +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4489@mit-eddie.uucp. }~ +={ trade secret law : + relationship to public domain +3 +} + +Stallman’s strategy for rewriting software, including his plan for the GNU +operating system, also involved "not looking at" anyone else’s code, so as to +ensure that no trade-secret violations would occur. Although it was clear that +Gosling’s code was not a trade secret, it was also not obvious that it was "in +the public domain," an assumption that might be made about other kinds of +software protected by trade secret. Under trade-secret rules, Gosling’s public +distribution of GOSMACS appears to give the green light for its reuse, but +under copyright law, a law of strict liability, any unauthorized use is a +violation, regardless of how public the software may have been.~{ A standard +practice well into the 1980s, and even later, was the creation of so-called +clean-room versions of software, in which new programmers and designers who had +not seen the offending code were hired to ,{[pg 336]}, re-implement it in order +to avoid the appearance of trade-secret violation. Copyright law is a strict +liability law, meaning that ignorance does not absolve the infringer, so the +practice of "clean-room engineering" seems not to have been as successful in +the case of copyright, as the meaning of infringement remains murky. }~ + +The fact of trade-secret protection was nonetheless an important aspect of the +EMACS controversy: the version of EMACS that Warren Montgomery had created at +Bell Labs (and on which Zimmerman’s CCA version would be based) was the subject +of trade-secret protection by AT&T, by virtue of being distributed with UNIX +and under a nondisclosure agreement. AT&T was at the time still a year away +from divestiture and thus unable to engage in commercial exploitation of the +software. When CCA sought to commercialize ,{[pg 202]}, the version of UNIX +Zimmerman had based on Montgomery’s, it was necessary to remove any AT&T code +in order to avoid violating their trade-secret status. CCA in turn distributed +their EMACS as either binary or as source (the former costing about $1,000, the +latter as much as $7,000) and relied on copyright rather than trade-secret +protection to prevent unauthorized uses of their software.~{ Message-ID: { +730@masscomp.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=730@masscomp.uucp. AT&T +was less concerned about copyright infringement than they were about the status +of their trade secrets. Zimmerman quotes a statement (from Message-ID: { +108@emacs.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=108@emacs.uucp ) that he +claims indicates this: "Beginning with CCA EMACS version 162.36z, CCA EMACS no +longer contained any of the code from Mr. Montgomery’s EMACS, or any methods or +concepts which would be known only by programmers familiar with BTL [Bell Labs] +EMACS of any version." The statement did not mention copyright, but implied +that CCA EMACS did not contain any AT&T trade secrets, thus preserving their +software’s trade-secret status. The fact that EMACS was a conceptual design—a +particular kind of interface, a LISP interpreter, and extensibility—that was +very widely imitated had no apparent bearing on the legal status of these +secrets. }~ +={ AT&T : + divestiture in ; + Computer Corporation of America (CCA) ; + Montgomery, Warren ; + Zimmerman, Steve +} + +The uncertainty over copyright was thus in part a reflection of a changing +strategy in the computer-software industry, a kind of uneven development in +which copyright slowly and haphazardly came to replace trade secret as the main +form of intellectual-property protection. This switch had consequences for how +noncommercial programmers, researchers, and amateurs might interpret their own +work, as well as for the companies whose lawyers were struggling with the same +issues. Of course, copyright and trade-secret protection are not mutually +exclusive, but they structure the need for secrecy in different ways, and they +make different claims on issues like similarity, reuse, and modification. +={ intellectual property : + strategy and +1 ; + modifiability ; + secrecy +} + +The 1976 changes to copyright law were therefore extremely significant in +setting out a new set of boundaries and possibilities for intellectual-property +arguments, arguments that created a different kind of uncertainty from that of +a changing commercial strategy: a structural uncertainty created by the need +for a case law to develop around the statutory changes implemented by Congress. + +The Copyright Act of 1976 introduced a number of changes that had been some ten +years in the making, largely organized around new technologies like photocopier +machines, home audiotaping, and the new videocassette recorders. It codified +fair-use rights, it removed the requirement to register, and it expanded the +scope of copyrightable materials considerably. It did not, however, explicitly +address software, an oversight that frustrated many in the computer industry, +in particular the young software industry. Pursuant to this oversight, the +National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyright (CONTU) was charged +with making suggestions for changes to the law with respect to software. It was +therefore only in 1980 that Congress implemented these changes, adding software +to title 17 of the U.S. copyright statute as something that could be considered +copyrightable by law.~{ CONTU Final Report, +http://digital-law-online.info/CONTU/contu1.html (accessed 8 December 2006). }~ +={ CONTU report } + +The 1980 amendment to the copyright law answered one of three lingering +questions about the copyrightability of software: the simple question of +whether it was copyrightable material at all. Congress ,{[pg 203]}, answered +yes. It did not, however, designate what constituted "software." During the +1980s, a series of court cases helped specify what counted as software, +including source code, object code (binaries), screen display and output, look +and feel, and microcode and firmware.~{ The cases that determine the meaning of +the 1976 and 1980 amendments begin around 1986: Whelan Associates, Inc. v. +Jaslow Dental Laboratory, Inc., et al., U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, 4 +August 1986, 797 F.2d 1222, 230 USPQ 481, affirming that "structure (or +sequence or organization)" of software is copyrightable, not only the literal +software code; Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc., U.S. +Second Circuit Court of Appeals, 22 June 1992, 982 F.2d 693, 23 USPQ 2d 1241, +arguing that the structure test in Whelan was not sufficient to determine +infringement and thus proposing a three-part "abstraction-filiation-comparison" +test; Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp, U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of +Appeals, 1994, 35 F.3d 1435, finding that the "desktop metaphor" used in +Macintosh and Windows was not identical and thus did not constitute +infringement; Lotus Development Corporation v. Borland International, Inc. +(94-2003), 1996, 513 U.S. 233, finding that the "look and feel" of a menu +interface was not copyrightable. }~ The final question, which the courts are +still faced with adjudicating, concerns how much similarity constitutes an +infringement in each of these cases. The implications of the codification of +fair use and the requirement to register continue to unfold even into the +present. +={ fair use ; + intellectual property +20 ; + source code : + legal definition and +5 ; + Software : + legal definition of source code and +5 | registration of copyright +1 +} + +The EMACS controversy confronts all three of these questions. Stallman’s +initial creation of EMACS was accomplished under conditions in which it was +unclear whether copyright would apply (i.e., before 1980). Stallman, of course, +did not attempt to copyright the earliest versions of EMACS, but the 1976 +amendments removed the requirement to register, thus rendering everything +written after 1978 automatically copyrighted. Registration represented only an +additional effort to assert ownership in cases of suspected infringement. + +Throughout this period, the question of whether software was copyrightable—or +copyrighted—was being answered differently in different cases: AT&T was relying +on trade-secret status; Gosling, Unipress, and CCA negotiated over copyrighted +material; and Stallman was experimenting with his "commune." Although the +uncertainty was answered statutorily by the 1980 amendment, not everyone +instantly grasped this new fact or changed practices based on it. There is +ample evidence throughout the Usenet archive that the 1976 changes were poorly +understood, especially by comparison with the legal sophistication of hackers +in the 1990s and 2000s. Although the law changed in 1980, practices changed +more slowly, and justifications crystallized in the context of experiments like +that of GNU EMACS. +={ trade secret law ; + Usenet +} + +Further, a tension emerged between the meaning of source code and the meaning +of software. On the one hand was the question of whether the source code or the +binary code was copyrightable, and on the other was the question of defining +the boundaries of software in a context wherein all software relies on other +software in order to run at all. For instance, EMACS was originally built on +top of TECO, which was referred to both as an editor and as a programming +language; even seemingly obvious distinctions (e.g., application vs. +programming language) were not necessarily always clear. ,{[pg 204]}, If EMACS +was an application written in TECO qua programming language, then it would seem +that EMACS should have its own copyright, distinct from any other program +written in TECO. But if EMACS was an extension or modification of TECO qua +editor, then it would seem that EMACS was a derivative work and would require +the explicit permission of the copyright holder. +={ TECO (text editor and programming language) } + +Further, each version of EMACS, in order to be EMACS, needed a LISP interpreter +in order to make the extensible interface similar across all versions. But not +all versions used the same LISP interpreter. Gosling’s used an interpreter +called MOCKLISP (mlisp in the trademarked Unipress version), for instance. The +question of whether the LISP interpreter was a core component of the software +or an "environment" needed in order to extend the application was thus also +uncertain and unspecified in the law. While both might be treated as software +suitable for copyright protection, both might also be understood as necessary +components out of which copyrightable software would be built.~{ The +relationship between the definition of source and target befuddles software law +to this day, one of the most colorful examples being the DeCSS case. See +Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom," chap. 1: Gallery of CSS +Descramblers, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/gallery/. }~ +={ LISP (programming language) : + interpreter in EMACS ; + Unipress +} + +What’s more, both the 1976 and 1980 amendments are silent on the copyright +status of source code vs. binary code. While all the versions of EMACS were +distributed in binary, Stallman and Gosling both included the source to allow +users to modify it and extend it, but they differed on the proper form of +redistribution. The threshold between modifying software for oneself and +copyright infringement was not yet clear, and it hung on the meaning of +redistribution. Changing the software for use on a single computer might be +necessary to get it to run, but by the early days of the Arpanet, innocently +placing that code in a public directory on one computer could look like mass +distribution.~{ An interesting addendum here is that the manual for EMACS was +also released at around the same time as EMACS 16 and was available ,{[pg +337]}, as a TeX file. Stallman also attempted to deal with the paper document +in the same fashion (see Message-ID: 4734@mit-eddie.uucp, 19 July 1985), and +this would much later become a different and trickier issue that would result +in the GNU Free Documentation License. }~ +={ copyright infringement : + redistribution of software as ; + redistribution of software +4 +} + +Finally, the question of what constitutes infringement was at the heart of this +controversy and was not resolved by law or by legal adjudication, but simply by +rewriting the code to avoid the question. Stallman’s use of Gosling’s code, his +claim of third-hand permission, the presence or absence of written permission, +the sale of GOSMACS to Unipress when it most likely contained code not written +by Gosling but copyrighted in his name—all of these issues complicated the +question of infringement to the point where Stallman’s only feasible option for +continuing to create software was to avoid using anyone else’s code at all. +Indeed, Stallman’s decision to use Gosling’s code (which he claims to have +changed in significant portions) might have come to nothing if he had +unethically ,{[pg 205]}, and illegally chosen not to include the copyright +notice at all (under the theory that the code was original to Stallman, or an +imitation, rather than a portion of Gosling’s work). Indeed, Chris Torek +received Gosling’s permission to remove Gosling’s name and copyright from the +version of display.c he had heavily modified, but he chose not to omit them: +"The only reason I didn’t do so is that I feel that he should certainly be +credited as the inspiration (at the very least) for the code."~{ Message-ID: { +659@umcp-cs.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=659@umcp-cs.uucp. }~ +Likewise, Stallman was most likely concerned to obey the law and to give credit +where credit was due, and therefore left the copyright notice attached—a clear +case of blurred meanings of authorship and ownership. +={ GOSMACS (version of EMACS) ; + authorship : + ownership vs. ; + Torek, Chris +} + +In short, the interplay between new statutes and their settlement in court or +in practice was a structural uncertainty that set novel constraints on the +meaning of copyright, and especially on the norms and forms of permission and +reuse. GNU EMACS 15.34 was the safest option—a completely new version that +performed the same tasks, but in a different manner, using different algorithms +and code. + +Even as it resolved the controversy, however, GNU EMACS posed new problems for +Stallman: how would the EMACS commune survive if it wasn’t clear whether one +could legally use another person’s code, even if freely contributed? Was +Gosling’s action in selling work by others to Unipress legitimate? Would +Stallman be able to enforce its opposite, namely, prevent people from +commercializing EMACS code they contributed to him? How would Stallman avoid +the future possibility of his own volunteers and contributors later asserting +that he had infringed on their copyright? +={ copyright infringement : + legal threats and +2 +} + +By 1986, Stallman was sending out a letter that recorded the formal transfer of +copyright to the Free Software Foundation (which he had founded in late 1985), +with equal rights to nonexclusive use of the software.~{ Message-ID: { +8605202356.aa12789@ucbvax.berkeley.edu +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=8605202356.aa12789@ucbvax.berkeley.edu. +}~ While such a demand for the expropriation of copyright might seem contrary +to the aims of the GNU project, in the context of the unfolding copyright law +and the GOSMACS controversy it made perfect sense. Having been accused himself +of not having proper permission to use someone else’s copyrighted material in +his free version of GNU EMACS, Stallman took steps to forestall such an event +in the future. +={ copyright : + transfer of ; + Free Software Foundation +8 +} + +The interplay between technical and legal issues and "ethical" concerns was +reflected in the practical issues of fear, intimidation, and common-sense +(mis)understandings of intellectual-property ,{[pg 206]}, law. Zimmerman’s +veiled threats of legal liability were directed not only at Stallman but at +anyone who was using the program Stallman had written; breaking the law was, +for Zimmerman, an ethical lapse, not a problem of uncertainty and change. +Whether or not such an interpretation of the law was correct, it did reveal the +mechanisms whereby a low level of detailed knowledge about the law—and a law in +flux, at that (not to mention the litigious reputation of the U.S. legal system +worldwide)—often seemed to justify a sense that buying software was simply a +less risky option than acquiring it for free. Businesses, not customers, it was +assumed, would be liable for such infringements. By the same token, the sudden +concern of software programmers (rather than lawyers) with the detailed +mechanics of copyright law meant that a very large number of people found +themselves asserting common-sense notions, only to be involved in a flame war +over what the copyright law "actually says." +={ Zimmerman, Steve } + +Such discussion has continued and grown exponentially over the last twenty +years, to the point that Free Software hackers are now nearly as deeply +educated about intellectual property law as they are about software code.~{ See +Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom," chap. 6, on the Debian New +Maintainer Process, for an example of how induction into a Free Software +project stresses the legal as much as the technical, if not more. }~ Far from +representing the triumph of the hacker ethic, the GNU General Public License +represents the concrete, tangible outcome of a relatively wide-ranging cultural +conversation hemmed in by changing laws, court decisions, practices both +commercial and academic, and experiments with the limits and forms of new media +and new technology. +={ experimentation ; + hacker ethic +9 ; + hackers +} + +2~ Conclusion + +The rest of the story is quickly told: Stallman resigned from the AI Lab at MIT +and started the Free Software Foundation in 1985; he created a raft of new +tools, but ultimately no full UNIX operating system, and issued General Public +License 1.0 in 1989. In 1990 he was awarded a MacArthur "genius grant." During +the 1990s, he was involved in various high-profile battles among a new +generation of hackers; those controversies included the debate around Linus +Torvalds’s creation of Linux (which Stallman insisted be referred to as +GNU/Linux), the forking of EMACS into Xemacs, and Stallman’s own participation +in—and exclusion from—conferences and events devoted to Free Software. ,{[pg +207]}, +={ artificial Intelligence Lab (AI Lab), at MIT +6 ; + Linux (Free Software project) ; + Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) +6 ; + Torvalds, Linus +} + +Between 1986 and 1990, the Free Software Foundation and its software became +extremely well known among geeks. Much of this had to do with the wealth of +software that they produced and distributed via Usenet and Arpanet. And as the +software circulated and was refined, so were the new legal constraints and the +process of teaching users to understand what they could and could not do with +the software—and why it was not in the public domain. +={ Arpanet (network) ; + geeks ; + Usenet +} + +Each time a new piece of software was released, it was accompanied by one or +more text files which explained what its legal status was. At first, there was +a file called DISTRIB, which contained an explanation of the rights the new +owner had to modify and redistribute the software.~{ For example, Message-ID: { +5745@ucbvax.arpa }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=5745@ucbvax.arpa. }~ +DISTRIB referenced a file called COPYING, which contained the "GNU EMACS +copying permission notice," also known as the GNU EMACS GPL. The first of these +licenses listed the copyright holder as Richard Stallman (in 1985), but by 1986 +all licenses referred to the Free Software Foundation as the copyright holder. +={ General Public License (GPL) : + development of +2 +} + +As the Free Software Foundation released other pieces of software, the license +was renamed—GNU CC GPL, a GNU Bison GPL, a GNU GDB GPL, and so on, all of which +were essentially the same terms—in a file called COPYING, which was meant to be +distributed along with the software. In 1988, after the software and the +licenses had become considerably more widely available, Stallman made a few +changes to the license that relaxed some of the terms and specified others.~{ +See Message-ID: { 8803031948.aa01085@venus.berkeley.edu +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=8803031948.aa01085@venus.berkeley.edu. }~ +This new version would become the GNU GPL 1.0. By the time Free Software +emerged into the public consciousness in the late 1990s, the GPL had reached +version 2.0, and the Free Software Foundation had its own legal staff. + +The creation of the GPL and the Free Software Foundation are often understood +as expressions of the hacker ethic, or of Stallman’s ideological commitment to +freedom. But the story of EMACS and the complex technical and legal details +that structure it illustrate how the GPL is more than just a hack: it was a +novel, privately ordered legal "commune." It was a space thoroughly independent +of, but insinuated into the existing bedrock of rules and practices of the +world of corporate and university software, and carved out of the slippery, +changing substance of intellectual-property statutes. At a time when the giants +of the software industry were fighting to create a different kind of +openness—one that preserved and would even strengthen existing relations of +intellectual property—this ,{[pg 208]}, hack was a radical alternative that +emphasized the sovereignty not of a national or corporate status quo, but of +self-fashioning individuals who sought to opt out of that national-corporate +unity. The creation of the GNU GPL was not a return to a golden age of +small-scale communities freed from the dominating structures of bureaucratic +modernity, but the creation of something new out of those structures. It relied +on and emphasized, not their destruction, but their stability—at least until +they are no longer necessary. +={ Open Systems } + +The significance of the GPL is due to its embedding within and emergence from +the legal and technical infrastructure. Such a practice of situated reworking +is what gives Free Software—and perhaps all forms of engineering and creative +practice—its warp and weft. Stallman’s decision to resign from the AI Lab and +start the Free Software Foundation is a good example; it allowed Stallman no +only to devote energy to Free Software but also to formally differentiate the +organizations, to forestall at least the potential threat that MIT (which still +provided him with office space, equipment, and network connection) might decide +to claim ownership over his work. One might think that the hacker ethic and the +image of self-determining free individuals would demand the total absence of +organizations, but it requires instead their proliferation and modulation. +Stallman himself was never so purely free: he relied on the largesse of MIT’s +AI Lab, without which he would have had no office, no computer, no connection +to the network, and indeed, for a while, no home. +={ infrastructure ; + proliferation of software +} + +The Free Software Foundation represents a recognition on his part that +individual and communal independence would come at the price of a legally and +bureaucratically recognizable entity, set apart from MIT and responsible only +to itself. The Free Software Foundation took a classic form: a nonprofit +organization with a hierarchy. But by the early 1990s, a new set of experiments +would begin that questioned the look of such an entity. The stories of Linux +and Apache reveal how these ventures both depended on the work of the Free +Software Foundation and departed from the hierarchical tradition it +represented, in order to innovate new similarly embedded sociotechnical forms +of coordination. +={ Free Software Foundation : + Linux and Apache vs. +1 +} + +The EMACS text editor is still widely used, in version 22.1 as of 2007, and +ported to just about every conceivable operating system. The controversy with +Unipress has faded into the distance, as newer and more intense controversies +have faced Stallman and Free Software, ,{[pg 209]}, but the GPL has become the +most widely used and most finely scrutinized of the legal licenses. More +important, the EMACS controversy was by no means the only one to have erupted +in the lives of software programmers; indeed, it has become virtually a rite of +passage for young geeks to be involved in such debates, because it is the only +way in which the technical details and the legal details that confront geeks +can be explored in the requisite detail. Not all such arguments end in the +complete rewriting of source code, and today many of them concern the attempt +to convince or evangelize for the release of source code under a Free Software +license. The EMACS controversy was in some ways a primal scene—a traumatic one, +for sure—that determined the outcome of many subsequent fights by giving form +to the Free Software license and its uses. + +1~ 7. Coordinating Collaborations +={ coordination (component of Free Software) +3 } + +% ,{[pg 210]}, + +The final component of Free Software is coordination. For many participants and +observers, this is the central innovation and essential significance of Open +Source: the possibility of enticing potentially huge numbers of volunteers to +work freely on a software project, leveraging the law of large numbers, "peer +production," "gift economies," and "self-organizing social economies."~{ +Research on coordination in Free Software forms the central core of recent +academic work. Two of the most widely read pieces, Yochai Benkler’s "Coase’s +Penguin" and Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source, are directed at classic +research questions about collective action. Rishab Ghosh’s "Cooking Pot +Markets" and Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar set many of the terms +of debate. Josh Lerner’s and Jean Tirole’s "Some Simple Economics of Open +Source" was an early contribution. Other important works on the subject are +Feller et al., Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software; Tuomi, Networks +of Innovation; Von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation. }~ Coordination in Free +Software is of a distinct kind that emerged in the 1990s, directly out of the +issues of sharing source code, conceiving open systems, and writing copyright +licenses—all necessary precursors to the practices of coordination. The stories +surrounding these issues find continuation in those of the Linux +operating-system kernel, of the Apache Web server, and of Source Code +Management tools (SCMs); together these stories reveal how coordination worked +and what it looked like in the 1990s. +={ Free Software : + open source vs. ; + Open Source : + Free Software vs. ; + peer production ; + practices : + five components of Free Software +2 ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) +} + +Coordination is important because it collapses and resolves the distinction +between technical and social forms into a meaningful ,{[pg 211]}, whole for +participants. On the one hand, there is the coordination and management of +people; on the other, there is the coordination of source code, patches, fixes, +bug reports, versions, and distributions—but together there is a meaningful +technosocial practice of managing, decision-making, and accounting that leads +to the collaborative production of complex software and networks. Such +coordination would be unexceptional, essentially mimicking long-familiar +corporate practices of engineering, except for one key fact: it has no goals. +Coordination in Free Software privileges adaptability over planning. This +involves more than simply allowing any kind of modification; the structure of +Free Software coordination actually gives precedence to a generalized openness +to change, rather than to the following of shared plans, goals, or ideals +dictated or controlled by a hierarchy of individuals.~{ On the distinction +between adaptability and adaptation, see Federico Iannacci, "The Linux Managing +Model," http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/iannacci2.pdf. Matt Ratto +characterizes the activity of Linux-kernel developers as a "culture of +re-working" and a "design for re-design," and captures the exquisite details of +such a practice both in coding and in the discussion between developers, an +activity he dubs the "pressure of openness" that "results as a contradiction +between the need to maintain productive collaborative activity and the +simultaneous need to remain open to new development directions" ("The Pressure +of Openness," 112-38). }~ +={ adaptability : + planning vs. +1 | as a form of critique +1 | adaptation vs. ; + coordination (component of Free Software) : + individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +2 ; + critique, Free Software as +1 ; + goals, lack of in Free Software +1 ; + hackers : + curiosity and virtuosity of +1 ; + hierarchy, in coordination +5 ; + planning +1 +} + +Adaptability does not mean randomness or anarchy, however; it is a very +specific way of resolving the tension between the individual curiosity and +virtuosity of hackers, and the collective coordination necessary to create and +use complex software and networks. No man is an island, but no archipelago is a +nation, so to speak. Adaptability preserves the "joy" and "fun" of programming +without sacrificing the careful engineering of a stable product. Linux and +Apache should be understood as the results of this kind of coordination: +experiments with adaptability that have worked, to the surprise of many who +have insisted that complexity requires planning and hierarchy. Goals and +planning are the province of governance—the practice of goal-setting, +orientation, and definition of control—but adaptability is the province of +critique, and this is why Free Software is a recursive public: it stands +outside power and offers powerful criticism in the form of working +alternatives. It is not the domain of the new—after all Linux is just a rewrite +of UNIX—but the domain of critical and responsive public direction of a +collective undertaking. +={ Linux (Free Software project) +8 ; + novelty, of Free Software ; + recursive public +1 +} + +Linux and Apache are more than pieces of software; they are organizations of an +unfamiliar kind. My claim that they are "recursive publics" is useful insofar +as it gives a name to a practice that is neither corporate nor academic, +neither profit nor nonprofit, neither governmental nor nongovernmental. The +concept of recursive public includes, within the spectrum of political +activity, the creation, modification, and maintenance of software, networks, +and legal documents. While a "public" in most theories is a body of ,{[pg +212]}, people and a discourse that give expressive form to some concern, +"recursive public" is meant to suggest that geeks not only give expressive form +to some set of concerns (e.g., that software should be free or that +intellectual property rights are too expansive) but also give concrete +infrastructural form to the means of expression itself. Linux and Apache are +tools for creating networks by which expression of new kinds can be guaranteed +and by which further infrastructural experimentation can be pursued. For geeks, +hacking and programming are variants of free speech and freedom of assembly. +={ public sphere : + theories of ; + Apache (Free Software project) +4 ; + experimentation ; + infrastructure +} + +2~ From UNIX to Minix to Linux +={ Minix (operating system) +1 ; + Tanenbaum, Andrew +27 +} + +Linux and Apache are the two paradigmatic cases of Free Software in the 1990s, +both for hackers and for scholars of Free Software. Linux is a UNIX-like +operating-system kernel, bootstrapped out of the Minix operating system created +by Andrew Tanenbaum.~{ Linux is often called an operating system, which +Stallman objects to on the theory that a kernel is only one part of an +operating system. Stallman suggests that it be called GNU/Linux to reflect the +use of GNU operating-system tools in combination with the Linux kernel. This +not-so-subtle ploy to take credit for Linux reveals the complexity of the +distinctions. The kernel is at the heart of hundreds of different +"distributions"—such as Debian, Red Hat, SuSe, and Ubuntu Linux—all of which +also use GNU tools, but ,{[pg 338]}, which are often collections of software +larger than just an operating system. Everyone involved seems to have an +intuitive sense of what an operating system is (thanks to the pedagogical +success of UNIX), but few can draw any firm lines around the object itself. }~ +Apache is the continuation of the original National Center for Supercomputing +Applications (NCSA) project to create a Web server (Rob McCool’s original +program, called httpd), bootstrapped out of a distributed collection of people +who were using and improving that software. +={ McCool, Rob ; + httpd ; + modulation : + of Free Software ; + National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA) ; + Apache (Free Software project) +3 +} + +Linux and Apache are both experiments in coordination. Both projects evolved +decision-making systems through experiment: a voting system in Apache’s case +and a structured hierarchy of decision-makers, with Linus Torvalds as +benevolent dictator, in Linux’s case. Both projects also explored novel +technical tools for coordination, especially Source Code Management (SCM) tools +such as Concurrent Versioning System (cvs). Both are also cited as exemplars of +how "fun," "joy," or interest determine individual participation and of how it +is possible to maintain and encourage that participation and mutual aid instead +of narrowing the focus or eliminating possible routes for participation. +={ Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) ; + experimentation +1 ; + fun, and development of Linux ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) ; + Torvalds, Linus +3 +} + +Beyond these specific experiments, the stories of Linux and Apache are detailed +here because both projects were actively central to the construction and +expansion of the Internet of the 1990s by allowing a massive number of both +corporate and noncorporate sites to cheaply install and run servers on the +Internet. Were Linux and Apache nothing more than hobbyist projects with a few +thousand ,{[pg 213]}, interested tinkerers, rather than the core technical +components of an emerging planetary network, they would probably not represent +the same kind of revolutionary transformation ultimately branded a "movement" +in 1998-99. +={ movement (component of Free Software) } + +Linus Torvalds’s creation of the Linux kernel is often cited as the first +instance of the real "Open Source" development model, and it has quickly become +the most studied of the Free Software projects.~{ Eric Raymond directed +attention primarily to Linux in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Many other +projects preceded Torvalds’s kernel, however, including the tools that form the +core of both UNIX and the Internet: Paul Vixie’s implementation of the Domain +Name System (DNS) known as BIND; Eric Allman’s sendmail for routing e-mail; the +scripting languages perl (created by Larry Wall), python (Guido von Rossum), +and tcl/tk (John Ousterhout); the X Windows research project at MIT; and the +derivatives of the original BSD UNIX, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. On the development +model of FreeBSD, see Jorgensen, "Putting It All in the Trunk" and "Incremental +and Decentralized Integration in FreeBSD." The story of the genesis of Linux is +very nicely told in Moody, Rebel Code, and Williams, Free as in Freedom; there +are also a number of papers—available through Free/Opensource Research +Community, http://freesoftware.mit.edu/—that analyze the development dynamics +of the Linux kernel. See especially Ratto, "Embedded Technical Expression" and +"The Pressure of Openness." I have conducted much of my analysis of Linux by +reading the Linux Kernel Mailing List archives, http://lkml.org. There are also +annotated summaries of the Linux Kernel Mailing List discussions at +http://kerneltraffic.org. }~ Following its appearance in late 1991, Linux grew +quickly from a small, barely working kernel to a fully functional replacement +for the various commercial UNIX systems that had resulted from the UNIX wars of +the 1980s. It has become versatile enough to be used on desktop PCs with very +little memory and small CPUs, as well as in "clusters" that allow for massively +parallel computing power. +={ perl (programming language) ; + python (programming language) ; + tcl/tk (programming language) +} + +When Torvalds started, he was blessed with an eager audience of hackers keen on +seeing a UNIX system run on desktop computers and a personal style of +encouragement that produced enormous positive feedback. Torvalds is often given +credit for creating, through his "management style," a "new generation" of Free +Software—a younger generation than that of Stallman and Raymond. Linus and +Linux are not in fact the causes of this change, but the results of being at +the right place at the right time and joining together a number of existing +components. Indeed, the title of Torvalds’s semi-autobiographical reflection on +Linux—Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary—captures some of +the character of its genesis. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) +9 ; + hackers +1 ; + Raymond, Eric Steven ; + Stallman, Richard ; + Torvalds, Linus : + autobiography of ; + UNIX operating system +} + +The "fun" referred to in the title reflects the privileging of adaptability +over planning. Projects, tools, people, and code that were fun were those that +were not dictated by existing rules and ideas. Fun, for geeks, was associated +with the sudden availability, especially for university students and amateur +hackers, of a rapidly expanding underground world of networks and +software—Usenet and the Internet especially, but also university-specific +networks, online environments and games, and tools for navigating information +of all kinds. Much of this activity occurred without the benefit of any +explicit theorization, with the possible exception of the discourse of +"community" (given print expression by Howard Rheingold in 1993 and present in +nascent form in the pages of Wired and Mondo 2000) that took place through much +of the 1990s.~{ Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community. On the prehistory of +this period and the cultural location of some key aspects, see Turner, From +Counterculture to Cyberculture. }~ The late 1980s and early 1990s gave rise to +vast experimentation with the collaborative possibilities of the Internet as a +medium. Particularly attractive was ,{[pg 214]}, that this medium was built +using freely available tools, and the tools themselves were open to +modification and creative reuse. It was a style that reflected the +quasi-academic and quasi-commercial environment, of which the UNIX operating +system was an exemplar— not pure research divorced from commercial context, nor +entirely the domain of commercial rapacity and intellectual property. +={ adaptability : + planning vs. ; + Internet : + early development +1 | relation to Free Software +1 ; + Rheingold, Howard ; + rumor on Usenet +8 ; + Usenet : + rumor on +8 +} + +Fun included the creation of mailing lists by the spread of software such as +list-serv and majordomo; the collaborative maintenance and policing of Usenet; +and the creation of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and MUD Object Orienteds (MOOs), +both of which gave game players and Internet geeks a way to co-create software +environments and discover many of the problems of management and policing that +thereby emerged.~{ Julian Dibbell’s "A Rape in Cyberspace" and Sherry Turkle’s +Life on the Screen are two classic examples of the detailed forms of life and +collaborative ethical creation that preoccupied denizens of these worlds. }~ It +also included the increasing array of "information services" that were built on +top of the Internet, like archie, gopher, Veronica, WAIS, ftp, IRC—all of which +were necessary to access the growing information wealth of the underground +community lurking on the Internet. The meaning and practice of coordination in +all of these projects was up for grabs: some were organized strictly as +university research projects (gopher), while others were more fluid and open to +participation and even control by contributing members (MOOs and MUDs). +Licensing issues were explicit in some, unclear in some, and completely ignored +in others. Some projects had autocratic leaders, while others experimented with +everything from representative democracy to anarchism. +={ anarchism ; + communities ; + Multi-User Dungeons (MUDS) +} + +During this period (roughly 1987 to 1993), the Free Software Foundation +attained a mythic cult status—primarily among UNIX and EMACS users. Part of +this status was due to the superiority of the tools Stallman and his +collaborators had already created: the GNU C Compiler (gcc), GNU EMACS, the GNU +Debugger (gdb), GNU Bison, and loads of smaller utilities that replaced the +original AT&T UNIX versions. The GNU GPL had also acquired a life of its own by +this time, having reached maturity as a license and become the de facto choice +for those committed to Free Software and the Free Software Foundation. By 1991, +however, the rumors of the imminent appearance of Stallman’s replacement UNIX +operating system had started to sound empty—it had been six years since his +public announcement of his intention. Most hackers were skeptical of Stallman’s +operating-system project, even if they acknowledged the success of all the +other tools necessary to create a full-fledged operating system, and Stallman +himself was stymied by the development ,{[pg 215]}, of one particular +component: the kernel itself, called GNU Hurd. +={ EMACS (text editor) ; + Free Software Foundation : + cult status of +9 ; + General Public License (GPL) ; + GNU C Compiler (gcc) ; + GNU Hurd (kernel) +} + +% cult status of + +Linus Torvalds’s project was not initially imagined as a contribution to the +Free Software Foundation: it was a Helsinki university student’s late-night +project in learning the ins and outs of the relatively new Intel 386/486 +microprocessor. Torvalds, along with tens of thousands of other +computer-science students, was being schooled in UNIX through the pedagogy of +Andrew Tanenbaum’s Minix, Douglas Comer’s Xinu-PC, and a handful of other such +teaching versions designed to run on IBM PCs. Along with the classroom pedagogy +in the 1980s came the inevitable connection to, lurking on, and posting to the +Usenet and Arpanet mailing lists devoted to technical (and nontechnical) topics +of all sorts.~{ The yearly influx of students to the Usenet and Arpanet in +September earned that month the title "the longest month," due to the need to +train new users in use and etiquette on the newsgroups. Later in the 1990s, +when AOL allowed subscribers access to the Usenet hierarchy, it became known as +"eternal September." See "September that Never Ended," Jargon File, +http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html. }~ Torvalds +was subscribed, naturally, to comp.os.minix, the newsgroup for users of Minix. +={ Arpanet (network) ; + Linux (Free Software project) : + origins in Minix +19 ; + Minix (operating systems) +19 ; + pedagogy : + operating systems and +1 ; + Tanenbaum, Andrew : + Minix and +} + +The fact of Linus Torvalds’s pedagogical embedding in the world of UNIX, Minix, +the Free Software Foundation, and the Usenet should not be underestimated, as +it often is in hagiographical accounts of the Linux operating system. Without +this relatively robust moral-technical order or infrastructure within which it +was possible to be at the right place at the right time, Torvalds’s late-night +dorm-room project would have amounted to little more than that—but the pieces +were all in place for his modest goals to be transformed into something much +more significant. +={ infrastructure ; + moral and technical order +} + +Consider his announcement on 25 August 1991: + +_1 Hello everybody out there using minix—I’m doing a (free) operating system +(just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. +This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any +feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat +(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other +things). I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to +work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and +I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are +welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-) + +_1 Linus . . . + +_1 PS. Yes—it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is +NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support +anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.~{ Message-ID: { +1991aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1991aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi. +}~ + +% ,{[pg 216]}, + +Torvalds’s announcement is telling as to where his project fit into the +existing context: "just a hobby," not "big and professional like gnu" (a +comment that suggests the stature that Stallman and the Free Software +Foundation had achieved, especially since they were in reality anything but +"big and professional"). The announcement was posted to the Minix list and thus +was essentially directed at Minix users; but Torvalds also makes a point of +insisting that the system would be free of cost, and his postscript furthermore +indicates that it would be free of Minix code, just as Minix had been free of +AT&T code. +={ AT&T ; + coordination (component of Free Software) : + of Linux vs. Minix +12 +} + +Torvalds also mentions that he has ported "bash" and "gcc," software created +and distributed by the Free Software Foundation and tools essential for +interacting with the computer and compiling new versions of the kernel. +Torvalds’s decision to use these utilities, rather than write his own, reflects +both the boundaries of his project (an operating-system kernel) and his +satisfaction with the availability and reusability of software licensed under +the GPL. +={ GNU C Compiler (gcc) ; + modifiability +2 +} + +So the system is based on Minix, just as Minix had been based on +UNIX—piggy-backed or bootstrapped, rather than rewritten in an entirely +different fashion, that is, rather than becoming a different kind of operating +system. And yet there are clearly concerns about the need to create something +that is not Minix, rather than simply extending or "debugging" Minix. This +concern is key to understanding what happened to Linux in 1991. +={ debugging +5 } + +Tanenbaum’s Minix, since its inception in 1984, was always intended to allow +students to see and change the source code of Minix in order to learn how an +operating system worked, but it was not Free Software. It was copyrighted and +owned by Prentice Hall, which distributed the textbooks. Tanenbaum made the +case—similar to Gosling’s case for Unipress—that Prentice Hall was distributing +the system far wider than if it were available only on the Internet: "A point +which I don’t think everyone appreciates is that making something available by +FTP is not necessarily the way to provide the widest distribution. The Internet +is still a highly elite group. Most computer users are NOT on it. . . . MINIX +is also widely used in Eastern Europe, Japan, Israel, South America, etc. Most +of these people would never have gotten it if there hadn’t been a company +selling it."~{ Message-ID: { 12595@star.cs.vu.nl +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=12595@star.cs.vu.nl. }~ +={ Tanenbaum, Andrew : + Minix and +9 ; + File Transfer Protocol (ftp) ; + Prentice Hall +1 ; + textbooks : + on operating systems and networks +1 +} + +% larger index range provided for tanenbaum + +By all accounts, Prentice Hall was not restrictive in its sublicensing of the +operating system, if people wanted to create an "enhanced" ,{[pg 217]}, version +of Minix. Similarly, Tanenbaum’s frequent presence on comp.os.minix testified +to his commitment to sharing his knowledge about the system with anyone who +wanted it—not just paying customers. Nonetheless, Torvalds’s pointed use of the +word free and his decision not to reuse any of the code is a clear indication +of his desire to build a system completely unencumbered by restrictions, based +perhaps on a kind of intuitive folkloric sense of the dangers associated with +cases like that of EMACS.~{ Indeed, initially, Torvalds’s terms of distribution +for Linux were more restrictive than the GPL, including limitations on +distributing it for a fee or for handling costs. Torvalds eventually loosened +the restrictions and switched to the GPL in February 1992. Torvalds’s release +notes for Linux 0.12 say, "The Linux copyright will change: I’ve had a couple +of requests ,{[pg 339]}, to make it compatible with the GNU copyleft, removing +the ‘you may not distribute it for money’ condition. I agree. I propose that +the copyright be changed so that it conforms to GNU—pending approval of the +persons who have helped write code. I assume this is going to be no problem for +anybody: If you have grievances (‘I wrote that code assuming the copyright +would stay the same’) mail me. Otherwise The GNU copyleft takes effect as of +the first of February. If you do not know the gist of the GNU copyright—read +it" +(http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.12). +}~ +={ comp.os.minix } + +The most significant aspect of Torvalds’s initial message, however, is his +request: "I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any +suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them." Torvalds’s +announcement and the subsequent interest it generated clearly reveal the issues +of coordination and organization that would come to be a feature of Linux. The +reason Torvalds had so many eager contributors to Linux, from the very start, +was because he enthusiastically took them off of Tanenbaum’s hands. + +2~ Design and Adaptability +={ adaptability : + planning vs. +18 +} + +Tanenbaum’s role in the story of Linux is usually that of the straw man—a +crotchety old computer-science professor who opposes the revolutionary young +Torvalds. Tanenbaum did have a certain revolutionary reputation himself, since +Minix was used in classrooms around the world and could be installed on IBM PCs +(something no other commercial UNIX vendors had achieved), but he was also a +natural target for people like Torvalds: the tenured professor espousing the +textbook version of an operating system. So, despite the fact that a very large +number of people were using or knew of Minix as a UNIX operating system +(estimates of comp.os.minix subscribers were at 40,000), Tanenbaum was +emphatically not interested in collaboration or collaborative debugging, +especially if debugging also meant creating extensions and adding features that +would make the system bigger and harder to use as a stripped-down tool for +teaching. For Tanenbaum, this point was central: "I’ve been repeatedly offered +virtual memory, paging, symbolic links, window systems, and all manner of +features. I have usually declined because I am still trying to keep the system +simple enough for students to understand. You can put all this stuff in your +version, but I won’t ,{[pg 218]}, put it in mine. I think it is this point +which irks the people who say ‘MINIX is not free,’ not the $60."~{ Message-ID: +{ 12667@star.cs.vu.nl +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=12667@star.cs.vu.nl. }~ +={ pedagogy : + Minix and +3 ; + comp.os.minix +} + +So while Tanenbaum was in sympathy with the Free Software Foundation’s goals +(insofar as he clearly wanted people to be able to use, update, enhance, and +learn from software), he was not in sympathy with the idea of having 40,000 +strangers make his software "better." Or, to put it differently, the goals of +Minix remained those of a researcher and a textbook author: to be useful in +classrooms and cheap enough to be widely available and usable on the largest +number of cheap computers. +={ Minix (operating system) : + goals of +4 ; + Free Software Foundation +1 +} + +By contrast, Torvalds’s "fun" project had no goals. Being a cocky +nineteen-year-old student with little better to do (no textbooks to write, no +students, grants, research projects, or committee meetings), Torvalds was keen +to accept all the ready-made help he could find to make his project better. And +with 40,000 Minix users, he had a more or less instant set of contributors. +Stallman’s audience for EMACS in the early 1980s, by contrast, was limited to +about a hundred distinct computers, which may have translated into thousands, +but certainly not tens of thousands of users. Tanenbaum’s work in creating a +generation of students who not only understood the internals of an operating +system but, more specifically, understood the internals of the UNIX operating +system created a huge pool of competent and eager UNIX hackers. It was the work +of porting UNIX not only to various machines but to a generation of minds as +well that set the stage for this event—and this is an essential, though often +overlooked component of the success of Linux. +={ EMACS (text editor) : + number of users ; + Stallman,Richard ; + fun, and development of Linux +1 +} + +Many accounts of the Linux story focus on the fight between Torvalds and +Tanenbaum, a fight carried out on comp.os.minix with the subject line "Linux is +obsolete."~{ Message-ID: { 12595@star.cs.vu.nl +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=12595@star.cs.vu.nl. Key parts of the +controversy were reprinted in Dibona et al. Open Sources. }~ Tanenbaum argued +that Torvalds was reinventing the wheel, writing an operating system that, as +far as the state of the art was concerned, was now obsolete. Torvalds, by +contrast, asserted that it was better to make something quick and dirty that +worked, invite contributions, and worry about making it state of the art later. +Far from illustrating some kind of outmoded conservatism on Tanenbaum’s part, +the debate highlights the distinction between forms of coordination and the +meanings of collaboration. For Tanenbaum, the goals of Minix were either +pedagogical or academic: to teach operating-system essentials or to explore new +possibilities in operating-system design. By this model, Linux could do +neither; it couldn’t be used in the classroom because ,{[pg 219]}, it would +quickly become too complex and feature-laden to teach, and it wasn’t pushing +the boundaries of research because it was an out-of-date operating system. +Torvalds, by contrast, had no goals. What drove his progress was a commitment +to fun and to a largely inarticulate notion of what interested him and others, +defined at the outset almost entirely against Minix and other free operating +systems, like FreeBSD. In this sense, it could only emerge out of the +context—which set the constraints on its design—of UNIX, open systems, Minix, +GNU, and BSD. +={ comp.os.minix : + "Linux is obsolete" debate on ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) : + FreeBSD ; + FreeBSD +} + +Both Tanenbaum and Torvalds operated under a model of coordination in which one +person was ultimately responsible for the entire project: Tanenbaum oversaw +Minix and ensured that it remained true to its goals of serving a pedagogical +audience; Torvalds would oversee Linux, but he would incorporate as many +different features as users wanted or could contribute. Very quickly—with a +pool of 40,000 potential contributors—Torvalds would be in the same position +Tanenbaum was in, that is, forced to make decisions about the goals of Linux +and about which enhancements would go into it and which would not. What makes +the story of Linux so interesting to observers is that it appears that Torvalds +made no decision: he accepted almost everything. + +Tanenbaum’s goals and plans for Minix were clear and autocratically formed. +Control, hierarchy, and restriction are after all appropriate in the classroom. +But Torvalds wanted to do more. He wanted to go on learning and to try out +alternatives, and with Minix as the only widely available way to do so, his +decision to part ways starts to make sense; clearly he was not alone in his +desire to explore and extend what he had learned. Nonetheless, Torvalds faced +the problem of coordinating a new project and making similar decisions about +its direction. On this point, Linux has been the subject of much reflection by +both insiders and outsiders. Despite images of Linux as either an anarchic +bazaar or an autocratic dictatorship, the reality is more subtle: it includes a +hierarchy of contributors, maintainers, and "trusted lieutenants" and a +sophisticated, informal, and intuitive sense of "good taste" gained through +reading and incorporating the work of co-developers. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) : + individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +10 ; + hierarchy, in coordination +10 +} + +While it was possible for Torvalds to remain in charge as an individual for the +first few years of Linux (1991-95, roughly), he eventually began to delegate +some of that control to people who would make decisions about different +subcomponents of the kernel. ,{[pg 220]}, It was thus possible to incorporate +more of the "patches" (pieces of code) contributed by volunteers, by +distributing some of the work of evaluating them to people other than Torvalds. +This informal hierarchy slowly developed into a formal one, as Steven Weber +points out: "The final de facto ‘grant’ of authority came when Torvalds began +publicly to reroute relevant submissions to the lieutenants. In 1996 the +decision structure became more formal with an explicit differentiation between +‘credited developers’ and ‘maintainers.’ . . . If this sounds very much like a +hierarchical decision structure, that is because it is one—albeit one in which +participation is strictly voluntary."~{ Steven Weber, The Success of Open +Source, 164. }~ +={ patches (software) +3 ; + Weber, Steven ; + Linux (Free Software project) : + process of decision making +4 +} + +Almost all of the decisions made by Torvalds and lieutenants were of a single +kind: whether or not to incorporate a piece of code submitted by a volunteer. +Each such decision was technically complex: insert the code, recompile the +kernel, test to see if it works or if it produces any bugs, decide whether it +is worth keeping, issue a new version with a log of the changes that were made. +Although the various official leaders were given the authority to make such +changes, coordination was still technically informal. Since they were all +working on the same complex technical object, one person (Torvalds) ultimately +needed to verify a final version, containing all the subparts, in order to make +sure that it worked without breaking. + +Such decisions had very little to do with any kind of design goals or plans, +only with whether the submitted patch "worked," a term that reflects at once +technical, aesthetic, legal, and design criteria that are not explicitly +recorded anywhere in the project—hence, the privileging of adaptability over +planning. At no point were the patches assigned or solicited, although Torvalds +is justly famous for encouraging people to work on particular problems, but +only if they wanted to. As a result, the system morphed in subtle, unexpected +ways, diverging from its original, supposedly backwards "monolithic" design and +into a novel configuration that reflected the interests of the volunteers and +the implicit criteria of the leaders. +={ design ; + Linux (Free Software project) : + planning vs. adaptability in +9 +} + +By 1995-96, Torvalds and lieutenants faced considerable challenges with regard +to hierarchy and decision-making, as the project had grown in size and +complexity. The first widely remembered response to the ongoing crisis of +benevolent dictatorship in Linux was the creation of "loadable kernel modules," +conceived as a way to release some of the constant pressure to decide which +patches would be incorporated into the kernel. The decision to modularize ,{[pg +221]}, Linux was simultaneously technical and social: the software-code base +would be rewritten to allow for external loadable modules to be inserted "on +the fly," rather than all being compiled into one large binary chunk; at the +same time, it meant that the responsibility to ensure that the modules worked +devolved from Torvalds to the creator of the module. The decision repudiated +Torvalds’s early opposition to Tanenbaum in the "monolithic vs. microkernel" +debate by inviting contributors to separate core from peripheral functions of +an operating system (though the Linux kernel remains monolithic compared to +classic microkernels). It also allowed for a significant proliferation of new +ideas and related projects. It both contracted and distributed the hierarchy; +now Linus was in charge of a tighter project, but more people could work with +him according to structured technical and social rules of responsibility. +={ modifiability : + modularity in software +1 +} + +Creating loadable modules changed the look of Linux, but not because of any +planning or design decisions set out in advance. The choice is an example of +the privileged adaptability of the Linux, resolving the tension between the +curiosity and virtuosity of individual contributors to the project and the need +for hierarchical control in order to manage complexity. The commitment to +adaptability dissolves the distinction between the technical means of +coordination and the social means of management. It is about producing a +meaningful whole by which both people and code can be coordinated—an +achievement vigorously defended by kernel hackers. +={ design : + evolution, and +7 +} + +The adaptable organization and structure of Linux is often described in +evolutionary terms, as something without teleological purpose, but responding +to an environment. Indeed, Torvalds himself has a weakness for this kind of +explanation. + +_1 Let’s just be honest, and admit that it [Linux] wasn’t designed. + +_1 Sure, there’s design too—the design of UNIX made a scaffolding for the +system, and more importantly it made it easier for people to communicate +because people had a mental model for what the system was like, which means +that it’s much easier to discuss changes. + +_1 But that’s like saying that you know that you’re going to build a car with +four wheels and headlights—it’s true, but the real bitch is in the details. + +_1 And I know better than most that what I envisioned 10 years ago has nothing +in common with what Linux is today. There was certainly no premeditated design +there.~{ Quoted in Zack Brown, "Kernel Traffic #146 for 17Dec2001," Kernel +Traffic, http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt20011217_146.html; also +quoted in Federico Iannacci, "The Linux Managing Model," +http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/iannacci2.pdf. }~ + +% ,{[pg 222]}, + +Adaptability does not answer the questions of intelligent design. Why, for +example, does a car have four wheels and two headlights? Often these +discussions are polarized: either technical objects are designed, or they are +the result of random mutations. What this opposition overlooks is the fact that +design and the coordination of collaboration go hand in hand; one reveals the +limits and possibilities of the other. Linux represents a particular example of +such a problematic—one that has become the paradigmatic case of Free +Software—but there have been many others, including UNIX, for which the +engineers created a system that reflected the distributed collaboration of +users around the world even as the lawyers tried to make it conform to legal +rules about licensing and practical concerns about bookkeeping and support. + +Because it privileges adaptability over planning, Linux is a recursive public: +operating systems and social systems. It privileges openness to new directions, +at every level. It privileges the right to propose changes by actually creating +them and trying to convince others to use and incorporate them. It privileges +the right to fork the software into new and different kinds of systems. Given +what it privileges, Linux ends up evolving differently than do systems whose +life and design are constrained by corporate organization, or by strict +engineering design principles, or by legal or marketing definitions of +products—in short, by clear goals. What makes this distinction between the +goal-oriented design principle and the principle of adaptability important is +its relationship to politics. Goals and planning are the subject of negotiation +and consensus, or of autocratic decision-making; adaptability is the province +of critique. It should be remembered that Linux is by no means an attempt to +create something radically new; it is a rewrite of a UNIX operating system, as +Torvalds points out, but one that through adaptation can end up becoming +something new. +={ critique, Free Software as ; + ontology : + of linux ; + recursive public +} + +2~ Patch and Vote +={ Apache (Free Software project) +28 ; + patches (software) : + voting in software development and +28 ; + software development : + patch and vote method +28 +} + +The Apache Web server and the Apache Group (now called the Apache Software +Foundation) provide a second illuminating example of the how and why of +coordination in Free Software of the 1990s. As with the case of Linux, the +development of the Apache project illustrates how adaptability is privileged +over planning ,{[pg 223]}, and, in particular, how this privileging is intended +to resolve the tensions between individual curiosity and virtuosity and +collective control and decision-making. It is also the story of the progressive +evolution of coordination, the simultaneously technical and social mechanisms +of coordinating people and code, patches and votes. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) : + individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +3 +} + +The Apache project emerged out of a group of users of the original httpd +(HyperText Transmission Protocol Daemon) Web server created by Rob McCool at +NCSA, based on the work of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web project at CERN. +Berners-Lee had written a specification for the World Wide Web that included +the mark-up language HTML, the transmission protocol http, and a set of +libraries that implemented the code known as libwww, which he had dedicated to +the public domain.~{ Message-ID: { 673c43e160C1a758@sluvca.slu.edu +}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=673c43e160C1a758@sluvca.slu.edu. See +also, Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web. }~ +={ Berners-Lee, Tim ; + httpd +22 ; + Hypertext Transfer Mark-up Language (HTML) ; + Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) ; + McCool, Rob +3 ; + World Wide Web (www) +2 +} + +The NCSA, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, picked up both www +projects, subsequently creating both the first widely used browser, Mosaic, +directed by Marc Andreessen, and httpd. Httpd was public domain up until +version 1.3. Development slowed when McCool was lured to Netscape, along with +the team that created Mosaic. By early 1994, when the World Wide Web had +started to spread, many individuals and groups ran Web servers that used httpd; +some of them had created extensions and fixed bugs. They ranged from university +researchers to corporations like Wired Ventures, which launched the online +version of its magazine (HotWired.com) in 1994. Most users communicated +primarily through Usenet, on the comp.infosystems.www.* newsgroups, sharing +experiences, instructions, and updates in the same manner as other software +projects stretching back to the beginning of the Usenet and Arpanet newsgroups. +={ Andreessen, Marc ; + Arpanet (network) ; + Mosaic (web browser) ; + National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA) +2 ; + Rumor on Usenet ; + Usenet : + rumor on ; + User groups ; + Wired (magazine) : + HotWired (online version of Wired) +1 +} + +When NCSA failed to respond to most of the fixes and extensions being proposed, +a group of several of the most active users of httpd began to communicate via a +mailing list called new-httpd in 1995. The list was maintained by Brian +Behlendorf, the webmaster for HotWired, on a server he maintained called +hyperreal; its participants were those who had debugged httpd, created +extensions, or added functionality. The list was the primary means of +association and communication for a diverse group of people from various +locations around the world. During the next year, participants hashed out +issues related to coordination, to the identity of and the processes involved +in patching the "new" httpd, version 1.3.~{ The original Apache Group included +Brian Behlendorf, Roy T. Fielding, Rob Harthill, David Robinson, Cliff +Skolnick, Randy Terbush, Robert S. Thau, Andrew Wilson, Eric Hagberg, Frank +Peters, and Nicolas Pioch. The mailing list new-httpd eventually became the +Apache developers list. The archives are available at +http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/httpd-dev/ and cited hereafter as +"Apache developer mailing list," followed by sender, subject, date, and time. +}~ ,{[pg 224]}, +={ Behlendorf, Brian : + as head of Apache +24 ; + new httpd (mailing list) +24 +} + +Patching a piece of software is a peculiar activity, akin to debugging, but +more like a form of ex post facto design. Patching covers the spectrum of +changes that can be made: from fixing security holes and bugs that prevent the +software from compiling to feature and performance enhancements. A great number +of the patches that initially drew this group together grew out of needs that +each individual member had in making a Web server function. These patches were +not due to any design or planning decisions by NCSA, McCool, or the assembled +group, but most were useful enough that everyone gained from using them, +because they fixed problems that everyone would or could encounter. As a +result, the need for a coordinated new-httpd release was key to the group’s +work. This new version of NCSA httpd had no name initially, but apache was a +persistent candidate; the somewhat apocryphal origin of the name is that it was +"a patchy webserver."~{ For another version of the story, see Moody, Rebel +Code, 127-28. The official story honors the Apache Indian tribes for "superior +skills in warfare strategy and inexhaustible endurance." Evidence of the +concern of the original members over the use of the name is clearly visible in +the archives of the Apache project. See esp. Apache developer mailing list, +Robert S. Thau, Subject: The political correctness question . . . , 22 April +1995, 21:06 EDT. }~ +={ bugs ; + debugging : + patching vs. ; + patches (software) : + debugging vs. ; + coordination (component of Free Software) +50 ; + software development : + Apache project +17 +} + +At the outset, in February and March 1995, the pace of work of the various +members of new-httpd differed a great deal, but was in general extremely rapid. +Even before there was an official release of a new httpd, process issues +started to confront the group, as Roy Fielding later explained: "Apache began +with a conscious attempt to solve the process issues first, before development +even started, because it was clear from the very beginning that a +geographically distributed set of volunteers, without any traditional +organizational ties, would require a unique development process in order to +make decisions."~{ Mockus, Fielding, and Herbsleb, "Two Case Studies of Open +Source Software Development," 3. }~ + +The need for process arose more or less organically, as the group developed +mechanisms for managing the various patches: assigning them IDs, testing them, +and incorporating them "by hand" into the main source-code base. As this +happened, members of the list would occasionally find themselves lost, confused +by the process or the efficiency of other members, as in this message from +Andrew Wilson concerning Cliff Skolnick’s management of the list of bugs: +={ Wilson, Andrew +2 ; + Skolnick, Cliff +} + +_1 Cliff, can you concentrate on getting an uptodate copy of the +bug/improvement list please. I’ve already lost track of just what the heck is +meant to be going on. Also what’s the status of this pre-pre-pre release Apache +stuff. It’s either a pre or it isn’t surely? AND is the pre-pre-etc thing the +same as the thing Cliff is meant to be working on? + +_1 Just what the fsck is going on anyway? Ay, ay ay! Andrew Wilson.~{ Apache +developer mailing list, Andrew Wilson, Subject: Re: httpd patch B5 updated, 14 +March 1995, 21:49 GMT. }~ ,{[pg 225]}, + +To which Rob Harthill replied, "It is getting messy. I still think we should +all implement one patch at a time together. At the rate (and hours) some are +working we can probably manage a couple of patches a day. . . . If this is +acceptable to the rest of the group, I think we should order the patches, and +start a systematic processes of discussion, implementations and testing."~{ +Apache developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: Re: httpd patch B5 +updated, 14 March 1995, 15:10 MST. }~ +={ Harthill, Rob +12 } + +Some members found the pace of work exciting, while others appealed for slowing +or stopping in order to take stock. Cliff Skolnick created a system for +managing the patches and proposed that list-members vote in order to determine +which patches be included.~{ Apache developer mailing list, Cliff Skolnick, +Subject: Process (please read), 15 March 1995, 3:11 PST; and Subject: Patch +file format, 15 March 1995, 3:40 PST. }~ Rob Harthill voted first. +={ Skolnick, Cliff } + +group{ + + Here are my votes for the current patch list shown at http://www.hyperreal.com/httpd/patchgen/list.cgi + + I’ll use a vote of + + -1 have a problem with it + + 0 haven’t tested it yet (failed to understand it or whatever) + + +1 tried it, liked it, have no problem with it. + + [Here Harthill provides a list of votes on each patch.] + + If this voting scheme makes sense, lets use it to filter out the stuff we’re happy with. A "-1" vote should veto any patch. There seems to be about 6 or 7 of us actively commenting on patches, so I’d suggest that once a patch gets a vote of +4 (with no vetos), we can add it to an alpha.~{ Apache developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: patch list vote, 15 March 1995, 13:21:24 MST. }~ + +}group + +Harthill’s votes immediately instigated discussion about various patches, +further voting, and discussion about the process (i.e., how many votes or +vetoes were needed), all mixed together in a flurry of e-mail messages. The +voting process was far from perfect, but it did allow some consensus on what +"apache" would be, that is, which patches would be incorporated into an +"official" (though not very public) release: Apache 0.2 on 18 March.~{ Apache +developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: apache-0.2 on hyperreal, 18 +March 1995, 18:46 MST. }~ Without a voting system, the group of contributors +could have gone on applying patches individually, each in his own context, +fixing the problems that ailed each user, but ignoring those that were +irrelevant or unnecessary in that context. With a voting process, however, a +convergence on a tested and approved new-httpd could emerge. As the process was +refined, members sought a volunteer to take votes, to open and close the voting +once a week, and to build a new version of Apache when the voting was done. +(Andrew Wilson was the first volunteer, to which Cliff Skolnick replied, "I +guess the first vote is ,{[pg 226]}, voting Andrew as the vote taker :-).")~{ +Apache developer mailing list, Cliff Skolnick, Subject: Re: patch list vote, 21 +March 1995, 2:47 PST. }~ The patch-and-vote process that emerged in the early +stages of Apache was not entirely novel; many contributors noted that the +FreeBSD project used a similar process, and some suggested the need for a +"patch coordinator" and others worried that "using patches gets very ugly, very +quickly."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Paul Richards, Subject: Re: vote +counting, 21 March 1995, 22:24 GMT. }~ +={ Wilson, Andrew ; + Skolnick, Cliff ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) : + FreeBSD ; + FreeBSD +} + +The significance of the patch-and-vote system was that it clearly represented +the tension between the virtuosity of individual developers and a group process +aimed at creating and maintaining a common piece of software. It was a way of +balancing the ability of each separate individual’s expertise against a common +desire to ship and promote a stable, bug-free, public-domain Web server. As Roy +Fielding and others would describe it in hindsight, this tension was part of +Apache’s advantage. + +_1 Although the Apache Group makes decisions as a whole, all of the actual work +of the project is done by individuals. The group does not write code, design +solutions, document products, or provide support to our customers; individual +people do that. The group provides an environment for collaboration and an +excellent trial-by-fire for ideas and code, but the creative energy needed to +solve a particular problem, redesign a piece of the system, or fix a given bug +is almost always contributed by individual volunteers working on their own, for +their own purposes, and not at the behest of the group. Competitors mistakenly +assume Apache will be unable to take on new or unusual tasks because of the +perception that we act as a group rather than follow a single leader. What they +fail to see is that, by remaining open to new contributors, the group has an +unlimited supply of innovative ideas, and it is the individuals who chose to +pursue their own ideas who are the real driving force for innovation.~{ Roy T. +Fielding, "Shared Leadership in the Apache Project." }~ +={ Apache (Free Software project) : + individual vs. group innovation +1 +} + +Although openness is widely touted as the key to the innovations of Apache, the +claim is somewhat disingenuous: patches are just that, patches. Any large-scale +changes to the code could not be accomplished by applying patches, especially +if each patch must be subjected to a relatively harsh vote to be included. The +only way to make sweeping changes—especially changes that require iteration and +testing to get right—is to engage in separate "branches" of a project or to +differentiate between internal and external releases—in short, to fork the +project temporarily in hopes that it would soon rejoin its stable parent. +Apache encountered this problem very early on with the "Shambhala" rewrite of +httpd by Robert Thau. ,{[pg 227]}, +={ Shambhala +6 ; + Thau, Robert +6 ; + differentiation of software : + in Apache +6 | see also forking and sharing source code +6 ; + forking : + in Apache +6 +} + +Shambhala was never quite official: Thau called it his "noodling" server, or a +"garage" project. It started as his attempt to rewrite httpd as a server which +could handle and process multiple requests at the same time. As an experiment, +it was entirely his own project, which he occasionally referred to on the +new-httpd list: "Still hacking Shambhala, and laying low until it works well +enough to talk about."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Robert S. Thau, +Subject: Re: 0.7.2b, 7 June 1995, 17:27 EDT. }~ By mid-June of 1995, he had a +working version that he announced, quite modestly, to the list as "a garage +project to explore some possible new directions I thought *might* be useful for +the group to pursue."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Robert S. Thau, Subject: +My Garage Project, 12 June 1995, 21:14 GMT. }~ Another list member, Randy +Terbush, tried it out and gave it rave reviews, and by the end of June there +were two users exclaiming its virtues. But since it hadn’t ever really been +officially identified as a fork, or an alternate development pathway, this led +Rob Harthill to ask: "So what’s the situation regarding Shambhala and Apache, +are those of you who have switched to it giving up on Apache and this project? +If so, do you need a separate list to discuss Shambhala?"~{ Apache developer +mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: Re: Shambhala, 30 June 1995, 9:44 MDT. }~ +={ Terbush, Randy } + +Harthill had assumed that the NCSA code-base was "tried and tested" and that +Shambhala represented a split, a fork: "The question is, should we all go in +one direction, continue as things stand or Shambahla [sic] goes off on its +own?"~{ Apache developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: Re: Shambhala, 30 +June 1995, 14:50 MDT. }~ His query drew out the miscommunication in detail: +that Thau had planned it as a "drop-in" replacement for the NCSA httpd, and +that his intentions were to make it the core of the Apache server, if he could +get it to work. Harthill, who had spent no small amount of time working hard at +patching the existing server code, was not pleased, and made the core issues +explicit. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) : + individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +4 +} + +_1 Maybe it was rst’s [Robert Thau’s] choice of phrases, such as "garage +project" and it having a different name, maybe I didn’t read his mailings +thoroughly enough, maybe they weren’t explicit enough, whatever. . . . It’s a +shame that nobody using Shambhala (who must have realized what was going on) +didn’t raise these issues weeks ago. I can only presume that rst was too modest +to push Shambhala, or at least discussion of it, onto us more vigourously. I +remember saying words to the effect of "this is what I plan to do, stop me if +you think this isn’t a good idea." Why the hell didn’t anyone say something? . +. . [D]id others get the same impression about rst’s work as I did? Come on +people, if you want to be part of this group, collaborate!~{ Apache developer +mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: Re: Shambhala, 30 June 1995, 16:48 GMT. }~ +,{[pg 228]}, +={ collaboration : + different meanings of +2 +} + +Harthill’s injunction to collaborate seems surprising in the context of a +mailing list and project created to facilitate collaboration, but the +injunction is specific: collaborate by making plans and sharing goals. Implicit +in his words is the tension between a project with clear plans and goals, an +overarching design to which everyone contributes, as opposed to a group +platform without clear goals that provides individuals with a setting to try +out alternatives. Implicit in his words is the spectrum between debugging an +existing piece of software with a stable identity and rewriting the fundamental +aspects of it to make it something new. The meaning of collaboration bifurcates +here: on the one hand, the privileging of the autonomous work of individuals +which is submitted to a group peer review and then incorporated; on the other, +the privileging of a set of shared goals to which the actions and labor of +individuals is subordinated.~{ Gabriella Coleman captures this nicely in her +discussion of the tension between the individual virtuosity of the hacker and +the corporate populism of groups like Apache or, in her example, the Debian +distribution of Linux. See Coleman, The Social Construction of Freedom. }~ +={ debugging : + patching vs. +2 ; + goals, lack of in Free Software +2 +} + +Indeed, the very design of Shambhala reflects the former approach of +privileging individual work: like UNIX and EMACS before it, Shambhala was +designed as a modular system, one that could "make some of that process [the +patch-and-vote process] obsolete, by allowing stuff which is not universally +applicable (e.g., database back-ends), controversial, or just half-baked, to be +shipped anyway as optional modules."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Robert S. +Thau, Subject: Re: Shambhala, 1 July 1995, 14:42 EDT. }~ Such a design +separates the core platform from the individual experiments that are conducted +on it, rather than creating a design that is modular in the hierarchical sense +of each contributor working on an assigned section of a project. Undoubtedly, +the core platform requires coordination, but extensions and modifications can +happen without needing to transform the whole project.~{ A slightly different +explanation of the role of modularity is discussed in Steven Weber, The Success +of Open Source, 173-75. }~ Shambhala represents a certain triumph of the "shut +up and show me the code" aesthetic: Thau’s "modesty" is instead a recognition +that he should be quiet until it "works well enough to talk about," whereas +Harthill’s response is frustration that no one has talked about what Thau was +planning to do before it was even attempted. The consequence was that +Harthill’s work seemed to be in vain, replaced by the work of a more virtuosic +hacker’s demonstration of a superior direction. +={ modifiability : + modularity in software +} + +In the case of Apache one can see how coordination in Free Software is not just +an afterthought or a necessary feature of distributed work, but is in fact at +the core of software production itself, governing the norms and forms of life +that determine what will count as good software, how it will progress with +respect to a context and ,{[pg 229]}, background, and how people will be +expected to interact around the topic of design decisions. The privileging of +adaptability brings with it a choice in the mode of collaboration: it resolves +the tension between the agonistic competitive creation of software, such as +Robert Thau’s creation of Shambhala, and the need for collective coordination +of complexity, such as Harthill’s plea for collaboration to reduce duplicated +or unnecessary work. + +2~ Check Out and Commit +={ Linux (Free Software project) : + Source Code Management tools and +21 ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) +21 +} + +The technical and social forms that Linux and Apache take are enabled by the +tools they build and use, from bug-tracking tools and mailing lists to the Web +servers and kernels themselves. One such tool plays a very special role in the +emergence of these organizations: Source Code Management systems (SCMs). SCMs +are tools for coordinating people and code; they allow multiple people in +dispersed locales to work simultaneously on the same object, the same source +code, without the need for a central coordinating overseer and without the risk +of stepping on each other’s toes. The history of SCMs—especially in the case of +Linux—also illustrates the recursive-depth problem: namely, is Free Software +still free if it is created with non-free tools? +={ Source Code Management tools (SCMs) : + definition of +1 ; + recursive public : + layers of +} + +SCM tools, like the Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) and Subversion, have +become extremely common tools for Free Software programmers; indeed, it is rare +to find a project, even a project conducted by only one individual, which does +not make use of these tools. Their basic function is to allow two or more +programmers to work on the same files at the same time and to provide feedback +on where their edits conflict. When the number of programmers grows large, an +SCM can become a tool for managing complexity. It keeps track of who has +"checked out" files; it enables users to lock files if they want to ensure that +no one else makes changes at the same time; it can keep track of and display +the conflicting changes made by two users to the same file; it can be used to +create "internal" forks or "branches" that may be incompatible with each other, +but still allows programmers to try out new things and, if all goes well, merge +the branches into the trunk later on. In sophisticated forms it can be used to +"animate" successive changes to a piece of code, in order to visualize its +evolution. ,{[pg 230]}, +={ Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) : + see also Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) +} + +Beyond mere coordination functions, SCMs are also used as a form of +distribution; generally SCMs allow anyone to check out the code, but restrict +those who can check in or "commit" the code. The result is that users can get +instant access to the most up-to-date version of a piece of software, and +programmers can differentiate between stable releases, which have few bugs, and +"unstable" or experimental versions that are under construction and will need +the help of users willing to test and debug the latest versions. SCM tools +automate certain aspects of coordination, not only reducing the labor involved +but opening up new possibilities for coordination. +={ bugs ; + software tools +1 ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) : + as tool for distribution +1 +} + +The genealogy of SCMs can be seen in the example of Ken Thompson’s creation of +a diff tape, which he used to distribute changes that had been contributed to +UNIX. Where Thompson saw UNIX as a spectrum of changes and the legal department +at Bell Labs saw a series of versions, SCM tools combine these two approaches +by minutely managing the revisions, assigning each change (each diff) a new +version number, and storing the history of all of those changes so that +software changes might be precisely undone in order to discover which changes +cause problems. Written by Douglas McIlroy, "diff" is itself a piece of +software, one of the famed small UNIX tools that do one thing well. The program +diff compares two files, line by line, and prints out the differences between +them in a structured format (showing a series of lines with codes that indicate +changes, additions, or removals). Given two versions of a text, one could run +diff to find the differences and make the appropriate changes to synchronize +them, a task that is otherwise tedious and, given the exactitude of source +code, prone to human error. A useful side-effect of diff (when combined with an +editor like ed or EMACS) is that when someone makes a set of changes to a file +and runs diff on both the original and the changed file, the output (i.e., the +changes only) can be used to reconstruct the original file from the changed +file. Diff thus allows for a clever, space-saving way to save all the changes +ever made to a file, rather than retaining full copies of every new version, +one saves only the changes. Ergo, version control. diff—and programs like +it—became the basis for managing the complexity of large numbers of programmers +working on the same text at the same time. +={ McIlroy, Douglas ; + AT&T : + Bell Laboratories ; + diff (software tool) : + history of +2 ; + Thompson, Ken +} + +One of the first attempts to formalize version control was Walter Tichy’s +Revision Control System (RCS), from 1985.~{ Tichy, "RCS." }~ RCS kept track of +the changes to different files using diff and allowed programmers ,{[pg 231]}, +to see all of the changes that had been made to that file. RCS, however, could +not really tell the difference between the work of one programmer and another. +All changes were equal, in that sense, and any questions that might arise about +why a change was made could remain unanswered. +={ RCS (software tool) +1 : + see also Source Code Management tools +} + +In order to add sophistication to RCS, Dick Grune, at the Vrije Universiteit, +Amsterdam, began writing scripts that used RCS as a multi-user, +Internet-accessible version-control system, a system that eventually became the +Concurrent Versioning System. cvs allowed multiple users to check out a copy, +make changes, and then commit those changes, and it would check for and either +prevent or flag conflicting changes. Ultimately, cvs became most useful when +programmers could use it remotely to check out source code from anywhere on the +Internet. It allowed people to work at different speeds, different times, and +in different places, without needing a central person in charge of checking and +comparing the changes. cvs created a form of decentralized version control for +very-large-scale collaboration; developers could work offline on software, and +always on the most updated version, yet still be working on the same object. +={ Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) : + history of +1 ; + Grune, Dick +} + +Both the Apache project and the Linux kernel project use SCMs. In the case of +Apache the original patch-and-vote system quickly began to strain the patience, +time, and energy of participants as the number of contributors and patches +began to grow. From the very beginning of the project, the contributor Paul +Richards had urged the group to make use of cvs. He had extensive experience +with the system in the Free-BSD project and was convinced that it provided a +superior alternative to the patch-and-vote system. Few other contributors had +much experience with it, however, so it wasn’t until over a year after Richards +began his admonitions that cvs was eventually adopted. However, cvs is not a +simple replacement for a patch-and-vote system; it necessitates a different +kind of organization. Richards recognized the trade-off. The patch-and-vote +system created a very high level of quality assurance and peer review of the +patches that people submitted, while the cvs system allowed individuals to make +more changes that might not meet the same level of quality assurance. The cvs +system allowed branches—stable, testing, experimental—with different levels of +quality assurance, while the patch-and-vote system was inherently directed at +one final and stable version. As the case of Shambhala ,{[pg 232]}, exhibited, +under the patch-and-vote system experimental versions would remain unofficial +garage projects, rather than serve as official branches with people responsible +for committing changes. +={ Richards, Paul ; + Shambhala : + see also Apache ; + Apache (Free Software project) +1 ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) : + FreeBSD ; + FreeBSD ; + Linux (Free Software project) ; + software development : + patch and vote method ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) : + right to "commit" change +1 +} + +While SCMs are in general good for managing conflicting changes, they can do so +only up to a point. To allow anyone to commit a change, however, could result +in a chaotic mess, just as difficult to disentangle as it would be without an +SCM. In practice, therefore, most projects designate a handful of people as +having the right to "commit" changes. The Apache project retained its voting +scheme, for instance, but it became a way of voting for "committers" instead +for patches themselves. Trusted committers—those with the mysterious "good +taste," or technical intuition—became the core members of the group. + +The Linux kernel has also struggled with various issues surrounding SCMs and +the management of responsibility they imply. The story of the so-called VGER +tree and the creation of a new SCM called Bitkeeper is exemplary in this +respect.~{ See Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source, 117-19; Moody, Rebel +Code, 172-78. See also Shaikh and Cornford, "Version Management Tools." }~ By +1997, Linux developers had begun to use cvs to manage changes to the source +code, though not without resistance. Torvalds was still in charge of the +changes to the official stable tree, but as other "lieutenants" came on board, +the complexity of the changes to the kernel grew. One such lieutenant was Dave +Miller, who maintained a "mirror" of the stable Linux kernel tree, the VGER +tree, on a server at Rutgers. In September 1998 a fight broke out among Linux +kernel developers over two related issues: one, the fact that Torvalds was +failing to incorporate (patch) contributions that had been forwarded to him by +various people, including his lieutenants; and two, as a result, the VGER cvs +repository was no longer in synch with the stable tree maintained by Torvalds. +Two different versions of Linux threatened to emerge. +={ Miller, Dave ; + Source Code Management tools (SCMs) : + see also Bitkeeper ; + Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) : + Linux and ; + Linux (Free Software project) : + VGER tree and +2 ; + Bitkeeper (Source Code Management software) +12 ; + Torvalds, Linus : + in bitkeeper controversy +12 +} + +A great deal of yelling ensued, as nicely captured in Moody’s Rebel Code, +culminating in the famous phrase, uttered by Larry McVoy: "Linus does not +scale." The meaning of this phrase is that the ability of Linux to grow into an +ever larger project with increasing complexity, one which can handle myriad +uses and functions (to "scale" up), is constrained by the fact that there is +only one Linus Torvalds. By all accounts, Linus was and is excellent at what he +does—but there is only one Linus. The danger of this situation is the danger of +a fork. A fork would mean one or more new versions would proliferate under new +leadership, a situation much like ,{[pg 233]}, the spread of UNIX. Both the +licenses and the SCMs are designed to facilitate this, but only as a last +resort. Forking also implies dilution and confusion—competing versions of the +same thing and potentially unmanageable incompatibilities. +={ McVoy, Larry +11 ; + Moody, Glyn ; + forking : + in Linux +1 +} + +The fork never happened, however, but only because Linus went on vacation, +returning renewed and ready to continue and to be more responsive. But the +crisis had been real, and it drove developers into considering new modes of +coordination. Larry McVoy offered to create a new form of SCM, one that would +allow a much more flexible response to the problem that the VGER tree +represented. However, his proposed solution, called Bitkeeper, would create far +more controversy than the one that precipitated it. + +McVoy was well-known in geek circles before Linux. In the late stages of the +open-systems era, as an employee of Sun, he had penned an important document +called "The Sourceware Operating System Proposal." It was an internal Sun +Microsystems document that argued for the company to make its version of UNIX +freely available. It was a last-ditch effort to save the dream of open systems. +It was also the first such proposition within a company to "go open source," +much like the documents that would urge Netscape to Open Source its software in +1998. Despite this early commitment, McVoy chose not to create Bitkeeper as a +Free Software project, but to make it quasi-proprietary, a decision that raised +a very central question in ideological terms: can one, or should one, create +Free Software using non-free tools? +={ Free Software : + nonfree tools and +9 ; + Sun Microsystems +} + +On one side of this controversy, naturally, was Richard Stallman and those +sharing his vision of Free Software. On the other were pragmatists like +Torvalds claiming no goals and no commitment to "ideology"—only a commitment to +"fun." The tension laid bare the way in which recursive publics negotiate and +modulate the core components of Free Software from within. Torvalds made a very +strong and vocal statement concerning this issue, responding to Stallman’s +criticisms about the use of non-free software to create Free Software: "Quite +frankly, I don’t _want_ people using Linux for ideological reasons. I think +ideology sucks. This world would be a much better place if people had less +ideology, and a whole lot more ‘I do this because it’s FUN and because others +might find it useful, not because I got religion.’"~{ Linus Torvalds, "Re: +[PATCH] Remove Bitkeeper Documentation from Linux Tree," 20 April 2002, +http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0204.2/1018.html. Quoted in +Shaikh and Cornford, "Version Management Tools." }~ +={ coordination (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +8 ; + Fun, and development of Linux ; + Stallman, Richard +} + +Torvalds emphasizes pragmatism in terms of coordination: the right tool for the +job is the right tool for the job. In terms of licenses, ,{[pg 234]}, however, +such pragmatism does not play, and Torvalds has always been strongly committed +to the GPL, refusing to let non-GPL software into the kernel. This strategic +pragmatism is in fact a recognition of where experimental changes might be +proposed, and where practices are settled. The GPL was a stable document, +sharing source code widely was a stable practice, but coordinating a project +using SCMs was, during this period, still in flux, and thus Bitkeeper was a +tool well worth using so long as it remained suitable to Linux development. +Torvalds was experimenting with the meaning of coordination: could a non-free +tool be used to create Free Software? +={ General Public License (GPL) : + passim +} + +McVoy, on the other hand, was on thin ice. He was experimenting with the +meaning of Free Software licenses. He created three separate licenses for +Bitkeeper in an attempt to play both sides: a commercial license for paying +customers, a license for people who sell Bitkeeper, and a license for "free +users." The free-user license allowed Linux developers to use the software for +free—though it required them to use the latest version—and prohibited them from +working on a competing project at the same time. McVoy’s attempt to have his +cake and eat it, too, created enormous tension in the developer community, a +tension that built from 2002, when Torvalds began using Bitkeeper in earnest, +to 2005, when he announced he would stop. + +The tension came from two sources: the first was debates among developers +addressing the moral question of using non-free software to create Free +Software. The moral question, as ever, was also a technical one, as the second +source of tension, the license restrictions, would reveal. + +The developer Andrew Trigdell, well known for his work on a project called +Samba and his reverse engineering of a Microsoft networking protocol, began a +project to reverse engineer Bitkeeper by looking at the metadata it produced in +the course of being used for the Linux project. By doing so, he crossed a line +set up by McVoy’s experimental licensing arrangement: the "free as long as you +don’t copy me" license. Lawyers advised Trigdell to stay silent on the topic +while Torvalds publicly berated him for "willful destruction" and a moral lapse +of character in trying to reverse engineer Bitkeeper. Bruce Perens defended +Trigdell and censured Torvalds for his seemingly contradictory ethics.~{ Andrew +Orlowski, "‘Cool it, Linus’—Bruce Perens," Register, 15 April 2005, +http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/15/perens_on_torvalds/page2.html. }~ McVoy +never sued Trigdell, and Bitkeeper has limped along as a commercial project, +because, ,{[pg 235]}, much like the EMACS controversy of 1985, the Bitkeeper +controversy of 2005 ended with Torvalds simply deciding to create his own SCM, +called git. +={ Perens, Bruce ; + Trigdell, Andrew ; + reverse engineering ; + EMACS (text editor) : + controversy about +} + +The story of the VGER tree and Bitkeeper illustrate common tensions within +recursive publics, specifically, the depth of the meaning of free. On the one +hand, there is Linux itself, an exemplary Free Software project made freely +available; on the other hand, however, there is the ability to contribute to +this process, a process that is potentially constrained by the use of +Bitkeeper. So long as the function of Bitkeeper is completely +circumscribed—that is, completely planned—there can be no problem. However, the +moment one user sees a way to change or improve the process, and not just the +kernel itself, then the restrictions and constraints of Bitkeeper can come into +play. While it is not clear that Bitkeeper actually prevented anything, it is +also clear that developers clearly recognized it as a potential drag on a +generalized commitment to adaptability. Or to put it in terms of recursive +publics, only one layer is properly open, that of the kernel itself; the layer +beneath it, the process of its construction, is not free in the same sense. It +is ironic that Torvalds—otherwise the spokesperson for antiplanning and +adaptability—willingly adopted this form of constraint, but not at all +surprising that it was collectively rejected. +={ adaptability : + as a form of critique +3 ; + critique, Free Software as +3 ; + recursive public : + layers of +1 +} + +The Bitkeeper controversy can be understood as a kind of experiment, a +modulation on the one hand of the kinds of acceptable licenses (by McVoy) and +on the other of acceptable forms of coordination (Torvalds’s decision to use +Bitkeeper). The experiment was a failure, but a productive one, as it +identified one kind of non-free software that is not safe to use in Free +Software development: the SCM that coordinates the people and the code they +contribute. In terms of recursive publics the experiment identified the proper +depth of recursion. Although it might be possible to create Free Software using +some kinds of non-free tools, SCMs are not among them; both the software +created and the software used to create it need to be free.~{ Similar debates +have regularly appeared around the use of non-free compilers, non-free +debuggers, non-free development environments, and so forth. There are, however, +a large number of people who write and promote Free Software that runs on +proprietary operating systems like Macintosh and Windows, as well as a +distinction between tools and formats. So, ,{[pg 341]}, for instance, using +Adobe Photoshop to create icons is fine so long as they are in standard open +formats like PNG or JPG, and not proprietary forms such as GIF or photoshop. }~ + +The Bitkeeper controversy illustrates again that adaptability is not about +radical invention, but about critique and response. Whereas controlled design +and hierarchical planning represent the domain of governance—control through +goal-setting and orientation of a collective or a project—adaptability +privileges politics, properly speaking, the ability to critique existing design +and to ,{[pg 236]}, propose alternatives without restriction. The tension +between goal-setting and adaptability is also part of the dominant ideology of +intellectual property. According to this ideology, IP laws promote invention of +new products and ideas, but restrict the re-use or transformation of existing +ones; defining where novelty begins is a core test of the law. McVoy made this +tension explicit in his justifications for Bitkeeper: "Richard [Stallman] might +want to consider the fact that developing new software is extremely expensive. +He’s very proud of the collection of free software, but that’s a collection of +re-implementations, but no profoundly new ideas or products. . . . What if the +free software model simply can’t support the costs of developing new ideas?"~{ +Quoted in Jeremy Andrews, "Interview: Larry McVoy," Kernel Trap, 28 May 2002, +http://Kerneltrap.org/node/222. }~ +={ novelty, of Free Software +1 } + +Novelty, both in the case of Linux and in intellectual property law more +generally, is directly related to the interplay of social and technical +coordination: goal direction vs. adaptability. The ideal of adaptability +promoted by Torvalds suggests a radical alternative to the dominant ideology of +creation embedded in contemporary intellectual-property systems. If Linux is +"new," it is new through adaptation and the coordination of large numbers of +creative contributors who challenge the "design" of an operating system from +the bottom up, not from the top down. By contrast, McVoy represents a moral +imagination of design in which it is impossible to achieve novelty without +extremely expensive investment in top-down, goal-directed, unpolitical +design—and it is this activity that the intellectual-property system is +designed to reward. Both are engaged, however, in an experiment; both are +engaged in "figuring out" what the limits of Free Software are. +={ figuring out ; + moral and technical order +} + +2~ Coordination Is Design + +Many popular accounts of Free Software skip quickly over the details of its +mechanism to suggest that it is somehow inevitable or obvious that Free +Software should work—a self-organizing, emergent system that manages complexity +through distributed contributions by hundreds of thousands of people. In The +Success of Open Source Steven Weber points out that when people refer to Open +Source as a self-organizing system, they usually mean something more like "I +don’t understand how it works."~{ Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source, +132. }~ ,{[pg 237]}, +={ Weber, Steven } + +Eric Raymond, for instance, suggests that Free Software is essentially the +emergent, self-organizing result of "collaborative debugging": "Given enough +eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."~{ Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. }~ +The phrase implies that the core success of Free Software is the distributed, +isolated, labor of debugging, and that design and planning happen elsewhere +(when a developer "scratches an itch" or responds to a personal need). On the +surface, such a distinction seems quite obvious: designing is designing, and +debugging is removing bugs from software, and presto!—Free Software. At the +extreme end, it is an understanding by which only individual geniuses are +capable of planning and design, and if the initial conditions are properly set, +then collective wisdom will fill in the details. +={ Raymond, Eric Steven ; + adaptability : + planning vs. +5 ; + bugs +5 ; + debugging : + patching vs. +5 +} + +However, the actual practice and meaning of collective or collaborative +debugging is incredibly elastic. Sometimes debugging means fixing an error; +sometimes it means making the software do something different or new. (A common +joke, often made at Microsoft’s expense, captures some of this elasticity: +whenever something doesn’t seem to work right, one says, "That’s a feature, not +a bug.") Some programmers see a design decision as a stupid mistake and take +action to correct it, whereas others simply learn to use the software as +designed. Debugging can mean something as simple as reading someone else’s code +and helping them understand why it does not work; it can mean finding bugs in +someone else’s software; it can mean reliably reproducing bugs; it can mean +pinpointing the cause of the bug in the source code; it can mean changing the +source to eliminate the bug; or it can, at the limit, mean changing or even +re-creating the software to make it do something different or better.~{ +Gabriella Coleman, in "The Social Construction of Freedom," provides an +excellent example of a programmer’s frustration with font-lock in EMACS, +something that falls in between a bug and a feature. The programmer’s +frustration is directed at the stupidity of the design (and implied designers), +but his solution is not a fix, but a work-around—and it illustrates how +debugging does not always imply collaboration. }~ For academics, debugging can +be a way to build a career: "Find bug. Write paper. Fix bug. Write paper. +Repeat."~{ Dan Wallach, interview, 3 October 2003. }~ For commercial software +vendors, by contrast, debugging is part of a battery of tests intended to +streamline a product. +={ Microsoft } + +Coordination in Free Software is about adaptability over planning. It is a way +of resolving the tension between individual virtuosity in creation and the +social benefit in shared labor. If all software were created, maintained, and +distributed only by individuals, coordination would be superfluous, and +software would indeed be part of the domain of poetry. But even the +paradigmatic cases of virtuosic creation—EMACS by Richard Stallman, UNIX by Ken +Thompson and Dennis Ritchie—clearly represent the need for creative forms ,{[pg +238]}, of coordination and the fundamental practice of reusing, reworking, +rewriting, and imitation. UNIX was not created de novo, but was an attempt to +streamline and rewrite Multics, itself a system that evolved out of Project MAC +and the early mists of time-sharing and computer hacking.~{ Mitchell Waldrop’s +The Dream Machine details the family history well. }~ EMACS was a reworking of +the TECO editor. Both examples are useful for understanding the evolution of +modes of coordination and the spectrum of design and debugging. +={ Ritchie, Dennis +2 ; + Adaptability : + planning vs. +5 ; + coordination (component of Free Software) : + individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +1 ; + Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) +1 ; + modifiability +3 ; + planning +2 ; + UNIX operating system : + development of +1 +} + +UNIX was initially ported and shared through mixed academic and commercial +means, through the active participation of computer scientists who both +received updates and contributed fixes back to Thompson and Ritchie. No formal +system existed to manage this process. When Thompson speaks of his +understanding of UNIX as a "spectrum" and not as a series of releases (V1, V2, +etc.), the implication is that work on UNIX was continuous, both within Bell +Labs and among its widespread users. Thompson’s use of the diff tape +encapsulates the core problem of coordination: how to collect and redistribute +the changes made to the system by its users. +={ AT&T : + Bell Laboratories +1 ; + diff (software tool) +} + +Similarly, Bill Joy’s distribution of BSD and James Gosling’s distribution of +GOSMACS were both ad hoc, noncorporate experiments in "releasing early and +often." These distribution schemes had a purpose (beyond satisfying demand for +the software). The frequent distribution of patches, fixes, and extensions +eased the pain of debugging software and satisfied users’ demands for new +features and extensions (by allowing them to do both themselves). Had Thompson +and Ritchie followed the conventional corporate model of software production, +they would have been held responsible for thoroughly debugging and testing the +software they distributed, and AT&T or Bell Labs would have been responsible +for coming up with all innovations and extensions as well, based on marketing +and product research. Such an approach would have sacrificed adaptability in +favor of planning. But Thompson’s and Ritchie’s model was different: both the +extension and the debugging of software became shared responsibilities of the +users and the developers. Stallman’s creation of EMACS followed a similar +pattern; since EMACS was by design extensible and intended to satisfy myriad +unforeseen needs, the responsibility rested on the users to address those +needs, and sharing their extensions and fixes had obvious social benefit. +={ Gosling, James ; + Joy, Bill ; + GOSMACS (version of EMACS) +} + +The ability to see development of software as a spectrum implies more than just +continuous work on a product; it means seeing the ,{[pg 239]}, product itself +as something fluid, built out of previous ideas and products and transforming, +differentiating into new ones. Debugging, from this perspective, is not +separate from design. Both are part of a spectrum of changes and improvements +whose goals and direction are governed by the users and developers themselves, +and the patterns of coordination they adopt. It is in the space between +debugging and design that Free Software finds its niche. +={ software development : + as spectrum +} + +2~ Conclusion: Experiments and Modulations +={ experimentation +2 } + +% experimentation index link added + +Coordination is a key component of Free Software, and is frequently identified +as the central component. Free Software is the result of a complicated story of +experimentation and construction, and the forms that coordination takes in Free +Software are specific outcomes of this longer story. Apache and Linux are both +experiments—not scientific experiments per se but collective social experiments +in which there are complex technologies and legal tools, systems of +coordination and governance, and moral and technical orders already present. + +Free Software is an experimental system, a practice that changes with the +results of new experiments. The privileging of adaptability makes it a peculiar +kind of experiment, however, one not directed by goals, plans, or hierarchical +control, but more like what John Dewey suggested throughout his work: the +experimental praxis of science extended to the social organization of +governance in the service of improving the conditions of freedom. What gives +this experimentation significance is the centrality of Free Software—and +specifically of Linux and Apache—to the experimental expansion of the Internet. +As an infrastructure or a milieu, the Internet is changing the conditions of +social organization, changing the relationship of knowledge to power, and +changing the orientation of collective life toward governance. Free Software +is, arguably, the best example of an attempt to make this transformation +public, to ensure that it uses the advantages of adaptability as critique to +counter the power of planning as control. Free Software, as a recursive public, +proceeds by proposing and providing alternatives. It is a bit like Kant’s +version of enlightenment: insofar as geeks speak (or hack) as scholars, in a +public realm, they have a right to propose criticisms and changes of any sort; +as soon as they relinquish ,{[pg 240]}, that commitment, they become private +employees or servants of the sovereign, bound by conscience and power to carry +out the duties of their given office. The constitution of a public realm is not +a universal activity, however, but a historically specific one: Free Software +confronts the specific contemporary technical and legal infrastructure by which +it is possible to propose criticisms and offer alternatives. What results is a +recursive public filled not only with individuals who govern their own actions +but also with code and concepts and licenses and forms of coordination that +turn these actions into viable, concrete technical forms of life useful to +inhabitants of the present. +={ Dewey, John ; + Kant, Immanuel ; + critique, Free Software as ; + geeks : + as moderns ; + reorientation of power and knowledge ; + recursive public +} + +:B~ Part III modulations + +1~part_iii [Part III] -# + +_1 The question cannot be answered by argument. Experimental method means +experiment, and the question can be answered only by trying, by organized +effort. The reasons for making the trial are not abstract or recondite. They +are found in the confusion, uncertainty and conflict that mark the modern +world. . . . The task is to go on, and not backward, until the method of +intelligence and experimental control is the rule in social relations and +social direction. - john dewey, Liberalism and Social Action +={ Dewey, John ; + experimentation +} + +1~ 8. "If We Succeed, We Will Disappear" + +% ,{[pg 243]}, + +In early 2002, after years of reading and learning about Open Source and Free +Software, I finally had a chance to have dinner with famed libertarian, +gun-toting, Open Source-founding impresario Eric Raymond, author of The +Cathedral and the Bazaar and other amateur anthropological musings on the +subject of Free Software. He had come to Houston, to Rice University, to give a +talk at the behest of the Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI). +Visions of a mortal confrontation between two anthropologists-manqué filled my +head. I imagined explaining point by point why his references to +self-organization and evolutionary psychology were misguided, and how the long +tradition of economic anthropology contradicted basically everything he had to +say about gift-exchange. Alas, two things conspired against this epic, if +bathetic, showdown. +={ Raymond, Eric Steven +4 ; + Cathedral and the Bazaar ; + Free Software : + anthropology and +1 ; + Rice University +3 +} + +% cath baz, left out quotation marks for current index sort + +First, there was the fact that (as so often happens in meetings among geeks) +there was only one woman present at dinner; she was ,{[pg 244]}, young, perhaps +unmarried, but not a student—an interested female hacker. Raymond seated +himself beside this woman, turned toward her, and with a few one-minute-long +exceptions proceeded to lavish her with all of his available attention. The +second reason was that I was seated next to Richard Baraniuk and Brent +Hendricks. All at once, Raymond looked like the past of Free Software, arguing +the same arguments, using the same rhetoric of his online publications, while +Baraniuk and Hendricks looked like its future, posing questions about the +transformation—the modulation—of Free Software into something surprising and +new. +={ Baraniuk, Richard +36 ; + gender ; + Hendricks, Brent +36 ; + modulation : + of Free Software ; + participant observation +} + +Baraniuk, a professor of electrical engineering and a specialist in digital +signal processing, and Hendricks, an accomplished programmer, had started a +project called Connexions, an "open content repository of educational +materials." Far more interesting to me than Raymond’s amateur philosophizing +was this extant project to extend the ideas of Free Software to the creation of +educational materials—textbooks, in particular. +={ Connexions project +7 ; + Digital signal processing (DSP) ; + textbooks +} + +Rich and Brent were, by the looks of it, equally excited to be seated next to +me, perhaps because I was answering their questions, whereas Raymond was not, +or perhaps because I was a new hire at Rice University, which meant we could +talk seriously about collaboration. Rich and Brent (and Jan Odegard, who, as +director of CITI, had organized the dinner) were keen to know what I could add +to help them understand the "social" aspects of what they wanted to do with +Connexions, and I, in return, was equally eager to learn how they +conceptualized their Free Software-like project: what had they kept the same +and what had they changed in their own experiment? Whatever they meant by +"social" (and sometimes it meant ethical, sometimes legal, sometimes cultural, +and so on), they were clear that there were domains of expertise in which they +felt comfortable (programming, project management, teaching, and a particular +kind of research in computer science and electrical engineering) and domains in +which they did not (the "norms" of academic life outside their disciplines, +intellectual-property law, "culture"). Although I tried to explain the nature +of my own expertise in social theory, philosophy, history, and ethnographic +research, the academic distinctions were far less important than the fact that +I could ask detailed and pointed questions about the project, questions that +indicated to them that I must have some kind of stake in the domains that they +needed filled—in particular, ,{[pg 245]}, around the question of whether +Connexions was the same thing as Free Software, and what the implications of +that might be. +={ culture } + +Raymond courted and chattered on, then left, the event of his talk and dinner +of fading significance, but over the following weeks, as I caught up with Brent +and Rich, I became (surprisingly quickly) part of their novel experiment. + +2~ After Free Software + +My nonmeeting with Raymond is an allegory of sorts: an allegory of what comes +after Free Software. The excitement around that table was not so much about +Free Software or Open Source, but about a certain possibility, a kind of +genotypic urge of which Free Software seemed a fossil phenotype and Connexions +a live one. Rich and Brent were people in the midst of figuring something out. +They were engaged in modulating the practices of Free Software. By modulation I +mean exploring in detail the concrete practices—the how—of Free Software in +order to ask what can be changed, and what cannot, in order to maintain +something (openness?) that no one can quite put his finger on. What drew me +immediately to Connexions was that it was related to Free Software, not +metaphorically or ideologically, but concretely, practically, and +experimentally, a relationship that was more about emergence out of than it was +about the reproduction of forms. But the opposition between emergence and +reproduction immediately poses a question, not unlike that of the identity of +species in evolution: if Free Software is no longer software, what exactly is +it? +={ experimentation +1 : + see also modulations ; + modulation : + practices of +4 ; + practices : + five components of Free Software +} + +In part III I confront this question directly. Indeed, it was this question +that necessitated part II, the analytic decomposition of the practices and +histories of Free Software. In order to answer the question "Is Connexions Free +Software?" (or vice versa) it was necessary to rethink Free Software as itself +a collective, technical experiment, rather than as an expression of any +ideology or culture. To answer yes, or no, however, merely begs the question +"What is Free Software?" What is the cultural significance of these practices? +The concept of a recursive public is meant to reveal in part the significance +of both Free Software and emergent projects like Connexions; it is meant to +help chart when these emergent projects branch off absolutely (cease to be +public) and when they do not, by ,{[pg 246]}, focusing on how they modulate the +five components that give Free Software its contemporary identity. +={ cultural significance ; + recursive public +3 ; + Free Software : + components of +1 +} + +Connexions modulates all of the components except that of the movement (there +is, as of yet, no real "Free Textbook" movement, but the "Open Access" movement +is a close second cousin).~{ In January 2005, when I first wrote this analysis, +this was true. By April 2006, the Hewlett Foundation had convened the Open +Educational Resources "movement" as something that would transform the +production and circulation of textbooks like those created by Connexions. +Indeed, in Rich Baraniuk’s report for Hewlett, the first paragraph reads: "A +grassroots movement is on the verge of sweeping through the academic world. The +open education movement is based on a set of intuitions that are shared by a +remarkably wide range of academics: that knowledge should be free and open to +use and re-use; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people +should receive credit and kudos for contributing to education and research; and +that concepts and ideas are linked in unusual and surprising ways and not the +simple linear forms that textbooks present. Open education promises to +fundamentally change the way authors, instructors, and students interact +worldwide" (Baraniuk and King, "Connexions"). (In a nice confirmation of just +how embedded participation can become in anthropology, Baraniuk cribbed the +second sentence from something I had written two years earlier as part of a +description of what I thought Connexions hoped to achieve.) The "movement" as +such still does not quite exist, but the momentum for it is clearly part of the +actions that Hewlett hopes to achieve. }~ Perhaps the most complex modulation +concerns coordination—changes to the practice of coordination and collaboration +in academic-textbook creation in particular, and more generally to the nature +of collaboration and coordination of knowledge in science and scholarship +generally. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) ; + movement (component of Free Software) +2 +} + +Connexions emerged out of Free Software, and not, as one might expect, out of +education, textbook writing, distance education, or any of those areas that are +topically connected to pedagogy. That is to say, the people involved did not +come to their project by attempting to deal with a problem salient to education +and teaching as much as they did so through the problems raised by Free +Software and the question of how those problems apply to university textbooks. +Similarly, a second project, Creative Commons, also emerged out of a direct +engagement with and exploration of Free Software, and not out of any legal +movement or scholarly commitment to the critique of intellectual-property law +or, more important, out of any desire to transform the entertainment industry. +Both projects are resolutely committed to experimenting with the given +practices of Free Software—to testing their limits and changing them where they +can—and this is what makes them vibrant, risky, and potentially illuminating as +cases of a recursive public. +={ affinity (of geeks) ; + commons +1 ; + Creative Commons +1 ; + pedagogy ; + recursive public : + examples of +1 +} + +While both initiatives are concerned with conventional subject areas +(educational materials and cultural productions), they enter the fray +orthogonally, armed with anxiety about the social and moral order in which they +live, and an urge to transform it by modulating Free Software. This binds such +projects across substantive domains, in that they are forced to be +oppositional, not because they want to be (the movement comes last), but +because they enter the domains of education and the culture industry as +outsiders. They are in many ways intuitively troubled by the existing state of +affairs, and their organizations, tools, legal licenses, and movements are seen +as alternative imaginations of social order, especially concerning creative +freedom and the continued existence of a commons of scholarly knowledge. To the +extent that these projects ,{[pg 247]}, remain in an orthogonal relationship, +they are making a recursive public appear—something the textbook industry and +the entertainment industry are, by contrast, not at all interested in doing, +for obvious financial and political reasons. +={ moral and technical order } + +2~ Stories of Connexion +={ Connexions project : + history and genesis of +26 +} + +I’m at dinner again. This time, a windowless hotel conference room in the +basement maybe, or perhaps high up in the air. Lawyers, academics, activists, +policy experts, and foundation people are semi-excitedly working their way +through the hotel’s steam-table fare. I’m trying to tell a story to the +assembled group—a story that I have heard Rich Baraniuk tell a hundred +times—but I’m screwing it up. Rich always gets enthusiastic stares of wonder, +light-bulbs going off everywhere, a subvocalized "Aha!" or a vigorous nod. I, +on the other hand, am clearly making it too complicated. Faces and foreheads +are squirmed up into lines of failed comprehension, people stare at the +gravy-sodden food they’re soldiering through, weighing the option of taking +another bite against listening to me complicate an already complicated world. I +wouldn’t be doing this, except that Rich is on a plane, or in a taxi, delayed +by snow or engineers or perhaps at an eponymous hotel in another city. +Meanwhile, our co-organizer Laurie Racine, has somehow convinced herself that I +have the childlike enthusiasm necessary to channel Rich. I’m flattered, but +unconvinced. After about twenty minutes, so is she, and as I try to answer a +question, she stops me and interjects, "Rich really needs to be here. He should +really be telling this story." + +Miraculously, he shows up and, before he can even say hello, is conscripted +into telling his story properly. I sigh in relief and pray that I’ve not done +any irreparable damage and that I can go back to my role as straight man. I can +let the superaltern speak for himself. The downside of participant observation +is being asked to participate in what one had hoped first of all to observe. I +do know the story—I have heard it a hundred times. But somehow what I hear, +ears tuned to academic questions and marveling at some of the stranger claims +he makes, somehow this is not the ear for enlightenment that his practiced and +boyish charm delivers to those hearing it for the first time; it is instead an +ear tuned to questions ,{[pg 248]}, of why: why this project? Why now? And +even, somewhat convolutedly, why are people so fascinated when he tells the +story? How could I tell it like Rich? + +Rich is an engineer, in particular, a specialist in Digital Signal Processing +(DSP). DSP is the science of signals. It is in everything, says Rich: your cell +phones, your cars, your CD players, all those devices. It is a mathematical +discipline, but it is also an intensely practical one, and it’s connected to +all kinds of neighboring fields of knowledge. It is the kind of discipline that +can connect calculus, bioinformatics, physics, and music. The statistical and +analytical techniques come from all sorts of research and end up in all kinds +of interesting devices. So Rich often finds himself trying to teach students to +make these kinds of connections—to understand that a Fourier transform is not +just another chapter in calculus but a tool for manipulating signals, whether +in bioinformatics or in music. +={ Digital signal processing (DSP) } + +Around 1998 or 1999, Rich decided that it was time for him to write a textbook +on DSP, and he went to the dean of engineering, Sidney Burris, to tell him +about the idea. Burris, who is also a DSP man and longtime member of the Rice +University community, said something like, "Rich, why don’t you do something +useful?" By which he meant: there are a hundred DSP textbooks out there, so why +do you want to write the hundred and first? Burris encouraged Rich to do +something bigger, something ambitious enough to put Rice on the map. I mention +this because it is important to note that even a university like Rice, with a +faculty and graduate students on par with the major engineering universities of +the country, perceives that it gets no respect. Burris was, and remains, an +inveterate supporter of Connexions, precisely because it might put Rice "in the +history books" for having invented something truly novel. +={ Burris, C. Sidney ; + Connexions project : + textbooks and +4 ; + Rice University +} + +At about the same time as his idea for a textbook, Rich’s research group was +switching over to Linux, and Rich was first learning about Open Source and the +emergence of a fully free operating system created entirely by volunteers. It +isn’t clear what Rich’s aha! moment was, other than simply when he came to an +understanding that such a thing as Linux was actually possible. Nonetheless, at +some point, Rich had the idea that his textbook could be an Open Source +textbook, that is, a textbook created not just by him, but by DSP researchers +all over the world, and made available to everyone to make use of and modify +and improve as they saw fit, just like Linux. Together with Brent Hendricks, +Yan David Erlich, ,{[pg 249]}, and Ross Reedstrom, all of whom, as geeks, had a +deep familiarity with the history and practices of Free and Open Source +Software, Rich started to conceptualize a system; they started to think about +modulations of different components of Free and Open Source Software. The idea +of a Free Software textbook repository slowly took shape. +={ Linux (Free Software project) ; + Open Source : + inspiration for Connexions +27 ; + Reedstrom, Ross +} + +Thus, Connexions: an "open content repository of high-quality educational +materials." These "textbooks" very quickly evolved into something else: +"modules" of content, something that has never been sharply defined, but which +corresponds more or less to a small chunk of teachable information, like two or +three pages in a textbook. Such modules are much easier to conceive of in +sciences like mathematics or biology, in which textbooks are often +multiauthored collections, finely divided into short chapters with diagrams, +exercises, theorems, or programs. Modules lend themselves much less well to a +model of humanities or social-science scholarship based in reading texts, +discussion, critique, and comparison—and this bias is a clear reflection of +what Brent, Ross, and Rich knew best in terms of teaching and writing. Indeed, +the project’s frequent recourse to the image of an assembly-line model of +knowledge production often confirms the worst fears of humanists and educators +when they first encounter Connexions. The image suggests that knowledge comes +in prepackaged and colorfully branded tidbits for the delectation of +undergrads, rather than characterizing knowledge as a state of being or as a +process. +={ Connexions project : + model of learning in | modules in +1 +} + +The factory image (figure 7) is a bit misleading. Rich’s and Brent’s +imaginations are in fact much broader, which shows whenever they demo the +project, or give a talk, or chat at a party about it. Part of my failure to +communicate excitement when I tell the story of Connexions is that I skip the +examples, which is where Rich starts: what if, he says, you are a student +taking Calculus 101 and, at the same time, Intro to Signals and Systems—no one +is going to explain to you how Fourier transforms form a bridge, or connection, +between them. "Our brains aren’t organized in linear, chapter-by-chapter ways," +Rich always says, "so why are our textbooks?" How can we give students a way to +see the connection between statistics and genetics, between architecture and +biology, between intellectual-property law and chemical engineering? Rich is +always looking for new examples: a music class for kids that uses information +from physics, or vice versa, for instance. Rich’s great hope is that the ,{[pg +250]}, ,{[pg 251]}, more modules there are in the Connexions commons, the more +fantastic and fascinating might be the possibilities for such novel—and +natural—connections. +={ Connexions project : + as "factory of knowledge" +3 +} + +% image placed after end of paragraph + +{ 2bits_08_07-100.png }image ~[* The Connexions textbook as a factory. Illustration by Jenn Drummond, Ross Reedstrom, Max Starkenberg, and others, 1999-2004. Used with permission. ]~ + +Free Software—and, in particular, Open Source in the guise of "self-organizing" +distributed systems of coordination—provide a particular promise of meeting the +challenges of teaching and learning that Rich thinks we face. Rich’s commitment +is not to a certain kind of pedagogical practice, but to the "social" or +"community" benefits of thousands of people working "together" on a textbook. +Indeed, Connexions did not emerge out of education or educational technology; +it was not aligned with any particular theory of learning (though Rich +eventually developed a rhetoric of linked, networked, connected knowledge—hence +the name Connexions—that he uses often to sell the project). There is no school +of education at Rice, nor a particular constituency for such a project +(teacher-training programs, say, or administrative requirements for online +education). What makes Rich’s sell even harder is that the project emerged at +about the same time as the high-profile failure of dotcom bubble-fueled schemes +to expand university education into online education, distance education, and +other systems of expanding the paying student body without actually inviting +them onto campus. The largest of these failed experiments by far was the +project at Columbia, which had reached the stage of implementation at the time +the bubble burst in 2000.~{ See Chris Beam, "Fathom.com Shuts Down as Columbia +Withdraws," Columbia Spectator, 27 January 2003, +http://www.columbiaspectator.com/. Also see David Noble’s widely read critique, +"Digital Diploma Mills." }~ +={ Connexions project : + relationship to education +2 ; + distance learning +2 +} + +Thus, Rich styled Connexions as more than just a factory of knowledge—it would +be a community or culture developing richly associative and novel kinds of +textbooks—and as much more than just distance education. Indeed, Connexions was +not the only such project busy differentiating itself from the perceived +dangers of distance education. In April 2001 MIT had announced that it would +make the content of all of its courses available for free online in a project +strategically called OpenCourseWare (OCW). Such news could only bring attention +to MIT, which explicitly positioned the announcement as a kind of final death +blow to the idea of distance education, by saying that what students pay +$35,000 and up for per year is not "knowledge"—which is free—but the experience +of being at MIT. The announcement created pure profit from the perspective of +MIT’s reputation as a generator and disseminator of scientific knowledge, but +the project did not emerge directly out of an interest in mimicking the success +of Open Source. That angle was ,{[pg 252]}, provided ultimately by the +computer-science professor Hal Abelson, whose deep understanding of the history +and growth of Free Software came from his direct involvement in it as a +long-standing member of the computer-science community at MIT. OCW emerged most +proximately from the strange result of a committee report, commissioned by the +provost, on how MIT should position itself in the "distance/e-learning" field. +The surprising response: don’t do it, give the content away and add value to +the campus teaching and research experience instead.~{ "Provost Announces +Formation of Council on Educational Technology," MIT Tech Talk, 29 September +1999, http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/council-0929.html. }~ +={ Abelson, Hal ; + Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) : + open courseware and +2 ; + Open CourseWare (OCW) +2 ; + Connexions project : + Open CourseWare +2 +} + +OCW, Connexions, and distance learning, therefore, while all ostensibly +interested in combining education with the networks and software, emerged out +of different demands and different places. While the profit-driven demand of +distance learning fueled many attempts around the country, it stalled in the +case of OCW, largely because the final MIT Council on Educational Technology +report that recommended OCW was issued at the same time as the first plunge in +the stock market (April 2000). Such issues were not a core factor in the +development of Connexions, which is not to say that the problems of funding and +sustainability have not always been important concerns, only that genesis of +the project was not at the administrative level or due to concerns about +distance education. For Rich, Brent, and Ross the core commitment was to +openness and to the success of Open Source as an experiment with massive, +distributed, Internet-based, collaborative production of software—their +commitment to this has been, from the beginning, completely and adamantly +unwavering. Neverthless, the project has involved modulations of the core +features of Free Software. Such modulations depend, to a certain extent, on +being a project that emerges out of the ideas and practices of Free Software, +rather than, as in the case of OCW, one founded as a result of conflicting +goals (profit and academic freedom) and resulting in a strategic use of public +relations to increase the symbolic power of the university over its fiscal +growth. +={ Reedstrom, Ross } + +% what of ich and brent? ross in index at this location + +When Rich recounts the story of Connexions, though, he doesn’t mention any of +this background. Instead, like a good storyteller, he waits for the questions +to pose themselves and lets his demonstration answer them. Usually someone +asks, "How is Connexions different from OCW?" And, every time, Rich says +something similar: Connexions is about "communities," about changing the way +scholars collaborate and create knowledge, whereas OCW is simply ,{[pg 253]}, +an attempt to transfer existing courses to a Web format in order to make the +content of those courses widely available. Connexions is a radical experiment +in the collaborative creation of educational materials, one that builds on the +insights of Open Source and that actually encompasses the OCW project. In +retrospective terms, it is clear that OCW was interested only in modulating the +meaning of source code and the legal license, whereas Connexions seeks also to +modulate the practice of coordination, with respect to academic textbooks. +={ communities ; + coordination (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + modulation : + practices of +3 ; + practices : + five components of Free Software +3 ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +3 +} + +Rich’s story of the origin of Connexions usually segues into a demonstration of +the system, in which he outlines the various technical, legal, and educational +concepts that distinguish it. Connexions uses a standardized document format, +the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML), and a Creative Commons copyright license +on every module; the Creative Commons license allows people not only to copy +and distribute the information but to modify it and even to use it for +commercial gain (an issue that causes repeated discussion among the team +members). The material ranges from detailed explanations of DSP concepts +(naturally) to K-12 music education (the most popular set of modules). Some +contributors have added entire courses; others have created a few modules here +and there. Contributors can set up workgroups to manage the creation of +modules, and they can invite other users to join. Connexions uses a +version-control system so that all of the changes are recorded; thus, if a +module used in one class is changed, the person using it for another class can +continue to use the older version if they wish. The number of detailed and +clever solutions embodied in the system never ceases to thoroughly impress +anyone who takes the time to look at it. +={ Connexions project : + model of learning +2 ; + copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +2 +} + +But what always animates people is the idea of random and flexible connection, +the idea that a textbook author might be able to build on the work of hundreds +of others who have already contributed, to create new classes, new modules, and +creative connections between them, or surprising juxtapositions—from the +biologist teaching a class on bioinformatics who needs to remind students of +certain parts of calculus without requiring a whole course; to the architect +who wants a studio to study biological form, not necessarily in order to do +experiments in biology, but to understand buildings differently; to the music +teacher who wants students to understand just enough physics to get the +concepts of pitch and ,{[pg 254]}, timbre; to or the physicist who needs a +concrete example for the explanation of waves and oscillation. + +The idea of such radical recombinations is shocking for some (more often for +humanities and social-science scholars, rather than scientists or engineers, +for reasons that clearly have to do with an ideology of authentic and +individualized creative ability). The questions that result—regarding +copyright, plagiarism, control, unauthorized use, misuse, misconstrual, +misreading, defamation, and so on—generally emerge with surprising force and +speed. If Rich were trying to sell a version of "distance learning," skepticism +and suspicion would quickly overwhelm the project; but as it is, Connexions +inverts almost all of the expectations people have developed about textbooks, +classroom practice, collaboration, and copyright. More often than not people +leave the discussion converted—no doubt helped along by Rich’s storytelling +gift. + +2~ Modulations: From Free Software to Connexions +={ modulation : + practices of +10 ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +10 +} + +Connexions surprises people for some of the same reasons as Free Software +surprises people, emerging, as it does, directly out of the same practices and +the same components. Free Software provides a template made up of the five +components: shared source code, a concept of openness, copyleft licenses, forms +of coordination, and a movement or ideology. Connexions starts with the idea of +modulating a shared "source code," one that is not software, but educational +textbook modules that academics will share, port, and fork. The experiment that +results has implications for the other four components as well. The +implications lead to new questions, new constraints, and new ideas. +={ copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + communities ; + coordination (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + practices : + five components of Free Software ; + Connexions project : + as Free Software project +3 +} + +% added index + +The modulation of source code introduces a specific and potentially confusing +difference from Free Software projects: Connexions is both a conventional Free +Software project and an unconventional experiment based on Free Software. There +is, of course, plenty of normal source code, that is, a number of software +components that need to be combined in order to allow the creation of digital +documents (the modules) and to display, store, transmit, archive, and measure +the creation of modules. The creation and management of this software is +expected to function more or less like all Free Software projects: it is +licensed using Free Software licenses, it is ,{[pg 255]}, built on open +standards of various kinds, and it is set up to take contributions from other +users and developers. The software system for managing modules is itself built +on a variety of other Free Software components (and a commitment to using only +Free Software). Connexions has created various components, which are either +released like conventional Free Software or contributed to another Free +Software project. The economy of contribution and release is a complex one; +issues of support and maintenance, as well as of reputation and recognition, +figure into each decision. Others are invited to contribute, just as they are +invited to contribute to any Free Software project.~{ The software consists of +a collection of different Open Source Software cobbled together to provide the +basic platform (the Zope and Plone content-management frameworks, the +PostGresQL database, the python programming language, and the cvs +version-control software). }~ +={ openness (component of Free Software) +2 : + modulations of +4 +} + +At the same time, there is "content," the ubiquitous term for digital creations +that are not software. The creation of content modules, on the other hand +(which the software system makes technically possible), is intended to function +like a Free Software project, in which, for instance, a group of engineering +professors might get together to collaborate on pieces of a textbook on DSP. +The Connexions project does not encompass or initiate such collaborations, but, +rather, proceeds from the assumption that such activity is already happening +and that Connexions can provide a kind of alternative platform—an alternative +infrastructure even—which textbook-writing academics can make use of instead of +the current infrastructure of publishing. The current infrastructure and +technical model of textbook writing, this implies, is one that both prevents +people from taking advantage of the Open Source model of collaborative +development and makes academic work "non-free." The shared objects of content +are not source code that can be compiled, like source code in C, but documents +marked up with XML and filled with "educational" content, then "displayed" +either on paper or onscreen. +={ content +5 ; + infrastructure : + of publishing +3 ; + textbooks : + model in Connexions +3 +} + +The modulated meaning of source code creates all kinds of new +questions—specifically with respect to the other four components. In terms of +openness, for instance, Connexions modulates this component very little; most +of the actors involved are devoted to the ideals of open systems and open +standards, insofar as it is a Free Software project of a conventional type. It +builds on UNIX (Linux) and the Internet, and the project leaders maintain a +nearly fanatical devotion to openness at every level: applications, programming +languages, standards, protocols, mark-up languages, interface tools. Every +place where there is an open (as opposed to a ,{[pg 256]}, proprietary) +solution—that choice trumps all others (with one noteworthy exception).~{ The +most significant exception has been the issue of tools for authoring content in +XML. For most of the life of the Connexions project, the XML mark-up language +has been well-defined and clear, but there has been no way to write a module in +XML, short of directly writing the text and the tags in a text editor. For all +but a very small number of possible users, this feels too much like +programming, and they experience it as too frustrating to be worth it. The +solution (albeit temporary) was to encourage users to make use of a proprietary +XML editor (like a word processor, but capable of creating XML content). +Indeed, the Connexions project’s devotion to openness was tested by one of the +most important decisions its participants made: to pursue the creation of an +Open Source XML text editor in order to provide access to completely open tools +for creating completely open content. }~ James Boyle recently stated it well: +"Wherever possible, design the system to run with open content, on open +protocols, to be potentially available to the largest possible number of users, +and to accept the widest possible range of experimental modifications from +users who can themselves determine the development of the technology."~{ Boyle, +"Mertonianism Unbound," 14. }~ +={ Boyle, James ; + enlightenment ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +6 ; + modifiability +4 ; + openness (component of Free Software) : + proprietary vs. +4 | sustainability vs. +4 +} + +With respect to content, the devotion to openness is nearly identical, because +conventional textbook publishers "lock in" customers (students) through the +creation of new editions and useless "enhanced" content, which jacks up prices +and makes it difficult for educators to customize their own courses. "Openness" +in this sense trades on the same reasoning as it did in the 1980s: the most +important aspect of the project is the information people create, and any +proprietary system locks up content and prevents people from taking it +elsewhere or using it in a different context. + +Indeed, so firm is the commitment to openness that Rich and Brent often say +something like, "If we are successful, we will disappear." They do not want to +become a famous online textbook publisher; they want to become a famous +publishing infrastructure. Being radically open means that any other competitor +can use your system—but it means they are using your system, and this is the +goal. Being open means not only sharing the "source code" (content and +modules), but devising ways to ensure the perpetual openness of that content, +that is, to create a recursive public devoted to the maintenance and +modifiability of the medium or infrastructure by which it communicates. +Openness trumps "sustainability" (i.e., the self-perpetuation of the financial +feasibility of a particular organization), and where it fails to, the +commitment to openness has been compromised. + +The commitment to openness and the modulation of the meaning of source code +thus create implications for the meaning of Free Software licenses: do such +licenses cover this kind of content? Are new licenses necessary? What should +they look like? Connexions was by no means the first project to stimulate +questions about the applicability of Free Software licenses to texts and +documents. In the case of EMACS and the GPL, for example, Richard Stallman had +faced the problem of licensing the manual at the same time as the source code +for the editor. Indeed, such issues would ultimately result in a GNU Free +Documentation License intended narrowly to ,{[pg 257]}, cover software manuals. +Stallman, due to his concern, had clashed during the 1990s with Tim O’Reilly, +publisher and head of O’Reilly Press, which had long produced books and manuals +for Free Software programs. O’Reilly argued that the principles reflected in +Free Software licenses should not be applied to instructional books, because +such books provided a service, a way for more people to learn how to use Free +Software, and in turn created a larger audience. Stallman argued the opposite: +manuals, just like the software they served, needed to be freely modifiable to +remain useful. +={ Stallman, Richard ; + EMACS (text editor) ; + Free Documentation License (FDL) +1 ; + General Public License (GPL) : + passim ; + Free Documentation License (FDL) +1 ; + Software manuals +} + +By the late 1990s, after Free Software and Open Source had been splashed across +the headlines of the mainstream media, a number of attempts to create licenses +modeled on Free Software, but applicable to other things, were under way. One +of the earliest and most general was the Open Content License, written by the +educational-technology researcher David Wiley. Wiley’s license was intended for +use on any kind of content. Content could include text, digital photos, movies, +music, and so on. Such a license raises new issues. For example, can one +designate some parts of a text as "invariant" in order to prevent them from +being changed, while allowing other parts of the text to be changed (the model +eventually adopted by the GNU Free Documentation License)? What might the +relationship between the "original" and the modified version be? Can one expect +the original author to simply incorporate suggested changes? What kinds of +forking are possible? Where do the "moral rights" of an author come into play +(regarding the "integrity" of a work)? +={ Wiley, Davis ; + authorship : + moral rights of ; + Open content licenses +} + +At the same time, the modulation of source code to include academic textbooks +has extremely complex implications for the meaning and context of coordination: +scholars do not write textbooks like programmers write code, so should they +coordinate in the same ways? Coordination of a textbook or a course in +Connexions requires novel experiments in textbook writing. Does it lend itself +to academic styles of work, and in which disciplines, for what kinds of +projects? In order to cash in on the promise of distributed, collaborative +creation, it would be necessary to find ways to coordinate scholars. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +} + +So, when Rich and Brent recognized in me, at dinner, someone who might know how +to think about these issues, they were acknowledging that the experiment they +had started had created a certain turbulence in their understanding of Free +Software and, ,{[pg 258]}, in turn, a need to examine the kinds of legal, +cultural, and social practices that would be at stake.~{ The movement is the +component that remains unmodulated: there is no "free textbook" movement +associated with Connexions, even though many of the same arguments that lead to +a split between Free Software and Open Source occur here: the question of +whether the term free is confusing, for example, or the role of for-profit +publishers or textbook companies. In the end, most (though not all) of the +Connexions staff and many of its users are content to treat it as a useful tool +for composing novel kinds of digital educational material—not as a movement for +the liberation of educational content. }~ + +2~ Modulations: From Connexions to Creative Commons + +I’m standing in a parking lot in 100 degree heat and 90 percent humidity. It is +spring in Houston. I am looking for my car, and I cannot find it. James Boyle, +author of Shamans, Software, and Spleens and distinguished professor of law at +Duke University, is standing near me, staring at me, wearing a wool suit, +sweating and watching me search for my car under the blazing sun. His look says +simply, "If I don’t disembowel you with my Palm Pilot stylus, I am going to +relish telling this humiliating story to your friends at every opportunity I +can." Boyle is a patient man, with the kind of arch Scottish humor that can +make you feel like his best friend, even as his stories of the folly of man +unfold with perfect comic pitch and turn out to be about you. Having laughed my +way through many an uproarious tale of the foibles of my fellow creatures, I am +aware that I have just taken a seat among them in Boyle’s theater of human +weakness. I repeatedly press the panic button on my key chain, in the hopes +that I am near enough to my car that it will erupt in a frenzy of honking and +flashing that will end the humiliation. +={ Boyle, James +3 ; + Connexions project : + connection to Creative Commons +2 ; + Creative Commons +26 : + connection to Connexions +2 +} + +The day had started well. Boyle had folded himself into my Volkswagen (he is +tall), and we had driven to campus, parked the car in what no doubt felt like a +memorable space at 9 A.M., and happily gone to the scheduled meeting—only to +find that it had been mistakenly scheduled for the following day. Not my fault, +though now, certainly, my problem. The ostensible purpose of Boyle’s visit was +to meet the Connexions team and learn about what they were doing. Boyle had +proposed the visit himself, as he was planning to pass through Houston anyway. +I had intended to pester him with questions about the politics and +possibilities of licensing the content in Connexions and with comparisons to +MIT’s OCW and other such commons projects that Boyle knew of. + +Instead of attending the meeting, I took him back to my office, where I learned +more about why he was interested in Connexions. Boyle’s interest was not +entirely altruistic (nor was it designed to spend valuable quarter hours +standing in a scorched parking lot as I looked for my subcompact car). What +interested Boyle was finding ,{[pg 259]}, a constituency of potential users for +Creative Commons, the nonprofit organization he was establishing with Larry +Lessig, Hal Abelson, Michael Carroll, Eric Eldred, and others—largely because +he recognized the need for a ready constituency in order to make Creative +Commons work. The constituency was needed both to give the project legitimacy +and to allow its founders to understand what exactly was needed, legally +speaking, for the creation of a whole new set of Free Software-like licenses. +={ Abelson, Hal +2 ; + Eldred, Eric +3 ; + Lessig, Lawrence +24 +} + +Creative Commons, as an organization and as a movement, had been building for +several years. In some ways, Creative Commons represented a simple modulation +of the Free Software license: a broadening of the license’s concept to cover +other types of content. But the impetus behind it was not simply a desire to +copy and extend Free Software. Rather, all of the people involved in Creative +Commons were those who had been troubling issues of intellectual property, +information technology, and notions of commons, public domains, and freedom of +information for many years. Boyle had made his name with a book on the +construction of the information society by its legal (especially intellectual +property) structures. Eldred was a publisher of public-domain works and the +lead plaintiff in a court case that went to the Supreme Court in 2002 to +determine whether the recent extension of copyright term limits was +constitutional. Abelson was a computer scientist with an active interest in +issues of privacy, freedom, and law "on the electronic frontier." And Larry +Lessig was originally interested in constitutional law, a clerk for Judge +Richard Posner, and a self-styled cyberlaw scholar, who was, during the 1990s, +a driving force for the explosion of interest in cyberlaw, much of it carried +out at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. +={ Berkman Center for Internet and Society +1 ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + Creative Commons : + origin and history of +4 +} + +With the exception of Abelson—who, in addition to being a famous computer +scientist, worked for years in the same building that Richard Stallman camped +out in and chaired the committee that wrote the report recommending OCW—none of +the members of Creative Commons cut their teeth on Free Software projects (they +were lawyers and activists, primarily) and yet the emergence of Open Source +into the public limelight in 1998 was an event that made more or less instant +and intuitive sense to all of them. During this time, Lessig and members of the +Berkman Center began an "open law" project designed to mimic the Internet-based +collaboration of the Open Source project among lawyers who might want to ,{[pg +260]}, contribute to the Eldred case. Creative Commons was thus built as much +on a commitment to a notion of collaborative creation—the use of the Internet +especially—but more generally on the ability of individuals to work together to +create new things, and especially to coordinate the creation of these things by +the use of novel licensing agreements. + +Creative Commons provided more than licenses, though. It was part of a social +imaginary of a moral and technical order that extended beyond software to +include creation of all kinds; notions of technical and moral freedom to make +use of one’s own "culture" became more and more prominent as Larry Lessig +became more and more involved in struggles with the entertainment industry over +the "control of culture." But for Lessig, Creative Commons was a fall-back +option; the direct route to a transformation of the legal structure of +intellectual property was through the Eldred case, a case that built huge +momentum throughout 2001 and 2002, was granted cert by the Supreme Court, and +was heard in October of 2002. One of the things that made the case remarkable +was the series of strange bedfellows it produced; among the economists and +lawyers supporting the repeal of the 1998 "Sonny Bono" Copyright Term Extension +Act were the arch free-marketeers and Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, +James Buchanan, Kenneth Arrow, Ronald Coase, and George Akerlof. As Boyle +pointed out in print, conservatives and liberals and libertarians all have +reasons to be in favor of scaling back copyright expansion.~{ Boyle, +"Conservatives and Intellectual Property." }~ Lessig and his team lost the +case, and the Supreme Court essentially affirmed Congress’s interpretation of +the Constitution that "for limited times" meant only that the time period be +limited, not that it be short. +={ moral and technical order ; + social imaginary +} + +Creative Commons was thus a back-door approach: if the laws could not be +changed, then people should be given the tools they needed to work around those +laws. Understanding how Creative Commons was conceived requires seeing it as a +modulation of both the notion of "source code" and the modulation of "copyright +licenses." But the modulations take place in that context of a changing legal +system that was so unfamiliar to Stallman and his EMACS users, a legal system +responding to new forms of software, networks, and devices. For instance, the +changes to the Copyright Act of 1976 created an unintended effect that Creative +Commons would ultimately seize on. By eliminating the requirement to register +copyrighted works (essentially granting copyright as soon as the ,{[pg 261]}, +work is "fixed in a tangible medium"), the copyright law created a situation +wherein there was no explicit way in which a work could be intentionally placed +in the public domain. Practically speaking an author could declare that a work +was in the public domain, but legally speaking the risk would be borne entirely +by the person who sought to make use of that work: to copy it, transform it, +sell it, and so on. With the explosion of interest in the Internet, the problem +ramified exponentially; it became impossible to know whether someone who had +placed a text, an image, a song, or a video online intended for others to make +use of it—even if the author explicitly declared it "in the public domain." +Creative Commons licenses were thus conceived and rhetorically positioned as +tools for making explicit exactly what uses could be made of a specific work. +They protected the rights of people who sought to make use of "culture" (i.e., +materials and ideas and works they had not authored), an approach that Lessig +often summed up by saying, "Culture always builds on the past." +={ copyright : + requirement to register ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + Creative Commons : + activism of +1 ; + public domain +4 +} + +The background to and context of the emergence of Creative Commons was of +course much more complicated and fraught. Concerns ranged from the plights of +university libraries with regard to high-priced journals, to the problem of +documentary filmmakers unable to afford, or even find the owners of, rights to +use images or snippets in films, to the high-profile fights over online music +trading, Napster, and the RIAA. Over the course of four years, Lessig and the +other founders of Creative Commons would address all of these issues in books, +in countless talks and presentations and conferences around the world, online +and off, among audiences ranging from software developers to entrepreneurs to +musicians to bloggers to scientists. +={ Napster ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) +} + +Often, the argument for Creative Commons draws heavily on the concept of +culture besieged by the content industries. A story which Lessig enjoys +telling—one that I heard on several occasions when I saw him speak at +conferences—was that of Mickey Mouse. An interesting, quasi-conspiratorial +feature of the twentieth-century expansion of intellectual-property law is that +term limits seem to have been extended right around the time Mickey Mouse was +about to become public property. True or not, the point Lessig likes to make is +that the Mouse is not the de novo creation of the mind of Walt Disney that +intellectual-property law likes to pretend it is, but built on the past of +culture, in particular, on Steamboat Willie, ,{[pg 262]}, Charlie Chaplin, +Krazy Kat, and other such characters, some as inspiration, some as explicit +material. The greatness in Disney’s creation comes not from the mind of Disney, +but from the culture from which it emerged. Lessig will often illustrate this +in videos and images interspersed with black-typewriter-font-bestrewn slides +and a machine-gun style that makes you think he’s either a beat-poet manqué or +running for office, or maybe both. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + style of presentations +1 ; + Disney, Walt ; + Mickey Mouse +} + +Other examples of intellectual-property issues fill the books and talks of +Creative Commons advocates, stories of blocked innovation, stifled creativity, +and—the scariest point of all (at least for economist-lawyers)—inefficiency due +to over-expansive intellectual-property laws and overzealous corporate +lawyer-hordes.~{ Lessig’s output has been prodigious. His books include Code +and Other Laws of Cyber Space, The Future of Ideas, Free Culture, and Code: +Version 2.0. He has also written a large number of articles and is an active +blogger (http://www.lessig.org/blog/). }~ Lessig often preaches to the +converted (at venues like South by Southwest Interactive and the O’Reilly Open +Source conferences), and the audiences are always outraged at the state of +affairs and eager to learn what they can do. Often, getting involved in the +Creative Commons is the answer. Indeed, within a couple of years, Creative +Commons quickly became more of a movement (a modulation of the Free/Open Source +movement) than an experiment in writing licenses. + +On that hot May day in 2002, however, Creative Commons was still under +development. Later in the day, Boyle did get a chance to meet with the +Connexions project team members. The Connexions team had already realized that +in pursuing an experimental project in which Free Software was used as a +template they created a need for new kinds of licenses. They had already +approached the Rice University legal counsel, who, though well-meaning, were +not grounded at all in a deep understanding of Free Software and were thus +naturally suspicious of it. Boyle’s presence and his detailed questions about +the project were like a revelation—a revelation that there were already people +out there thinking about the very problem the Connexions team faced and that +the team would not need to solve the problem themselves or make the Rice +University legal counsel write new open-content licenses. What Boyle offered +was the possibility for Connexions, as well as for myself as intermediary, to +be involved in the detailed planning and license writing that was under way at +Creative Commons. At the same time, it gave Creative Commons an extremely +willing "early-adopter" for the license, and one from an important corner of +the world: scholarly research and teaching.~{ There were few such projects +under way, though there were many in the planning stages. Within a year, the +Public Library of Science had launched itself, spearheaded by Harold Varmus, +the former director of the National Institutes of Health. At the time, however, +the only other large scholarly project was the MIT Open Course Ware project, +which, although it had already agreed to use Creative Commons licenses, had +demanded a peculiar one-off license. }~ My task, after recovering from the +,{[pg 263]}, shame of being unable to find my car, was to organize a workshop +in August at which members of Creative Commons, Connexions, MIT’s OCW, and any +other such projects would be invited to talk about license issues. +={ Boyle, James ; + Connexions project : + connection to Creative Commons +2 | Open CourseWare +2 ; + Creative Commons : + connection to Connexions +2 ; + Rice University : + legal counsel of ; + Open CourseWare (OCW) +2 +} + +2~ Participant Figuring Out +={ figuring out +15 } + +The workshop I organized in August 2002 was intended to allow Creative Commons, +Connexions, and MIT’s OCW project to try to articulate what each might want +from the other. It was clear what Creative Commons wanted: to convince as many +people as possible to use their licenses. But what Connexions and OCW might +have wanted, from each other as well as from Creative Commons, was less clear. +Given the different goals and trajectories of the two projects, their needs for +the licenses differed in substantial ways—enough so that the very idea of using +the same license was, at least temporarily, rendered impossible by MIT. While +OCW was primarily concerned about obtaining permissions to place existing +copyrighted work on the Web, Connexions was more concerned about ensuring that +new work remain available and modifiable. +={ moral and technical order +1 } + +In retrospect, this workshop clarified the novel questions and problems that +emerged from the process of modulating the components of Free Software for +different domains, different kinds of content, and different practices of +collaboration and sharing. Since then, my own involvement in this activity has +been aimed at resolving some of these issues in accordance with an imagination +of openness, an imagination of social order, that I had learned from my long +experience with geeks, and not from my putative expertise as an anthropologist +or a science-studies scholar. The fiction that I had at first adopted—that I +was bringing scholarly knowledge to the table—became harder and harder to +maintain the more I realized that it was my understanding of Free Software, +gained through ongoing years of ethnographic apprenticeship, that was driving +my involvement. +={ geeks ; + social imaginary +1 +} + +Indeed, the research I describe here was just barely undertaken as a research +project. I could not have conceived of it as a fundable activity in advance of +discovering it; I could not have imagined the course of events in any of the +necessary detail to write a proper proposal for research. Instead, it was an +outgrowth of thinking and ,{[pg 264]}, participating that was already under +way, participation that was driven largely by intuition and a feeling for the +problem represented by Free Software. I wanted to help figure something out. I +wanted to see how "figuring out" happens. While I could have organized a +fundable research project in which I picked a mature Free Software project, +articulated a number of questions, and spent time answering them among this +group, such a project would not have answered the questions I was trying to +form at the time: what is happening to Free Software as it spreads beyond the +world of hackers and software? How is it being modulated? What kinds of limits +are breached when software is no longer the central component? What other +domains of thought and practice were or are "readied" to receive and understand +Free Software and its implications?~{ The fact that I organized a workshop to +which I invited "informants" and to which I subsequently refer as research +might strike some, both in anthropology and outside it, as wrong. But it is +precisely the kind of occasion I would argue has become central to the +problematics of method in cultural anthropology today. On this subject, see +Holmes and Marcus, "Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization." +Such strategic and seemingly ad hoc participation does not exclude one from +attempting to later disentangle oneself from such participation, in order to +comment on the value and significance, and especially to offer critique. Such +is the attempt to achieve objectivity in social science, an objectivity that +goes beyond the basic notions of bias and observer-effect so common in the +social sciences. "Objectivity" in a broader social sense includes the +observation of the conceptual linkages that both precede such a workshop +(constituted the need for it to happen) and follow on it, independent of any +particular meeting. The complexity of mobilizing objectivity in discussions of +the value and significance of social or economic phenomena was well articulated +a century ago by Max Weber, and problems of method in the sense raised by him +seem to me to be no less fraught today. See Max Weber, "Objectivity in the +Social Sciences." }~ +={ modifiability +6 ; + modulation : + practices of +2 +} + +My experience—my participant-observation—with Creative Commons was therefore +primarily done as an intermediary between the Connexions project (and, by +implication, similar projects under way elsewhere) and Creative Commons with +respect to the writing of licenses. In many ways this detailed, specific +practice was the most challenging and illuminating aspect of my participation, +but in retrospect it was something of a red herring. It was not only the +modulation of the meaning of source code and of legal licenses that +differentiated these projects, but, more important, the meaning of +collaboration, reuse, coordination, and the cultural practice of sharing and +building on knowledge that posed the trickiest of the problems. + +My contact at Creative Commons was not James Boyle or Larry Lessig, but Glenn +Otis Brown, the executive director of that organization (as of summer 2002). I +first met Glenn over the phone, as I tried to explain to him what Connexions +was about and why he should join us in Houston in August to discuss licensing +issues related to scholarly material. Convincing him to come to Texas was an +easier sell than explaining Connexions (given my penchant for complicating it +unnecessarily), as Glenn was an Austin native who had been educated at the +University of Texas before heading off to Harvard Law School and its corrupting +influence at the hands of Lessig, Charlie Nesson, and John Perry Barlow. +={ Barlow, John Perry ; + Brown, Glen Otis +10 ; + Nesson, Charlie +} + +Glenn galvanized the project. With his background as a lawyer, and especially +his keen interest in intellectual-property law, and his long-standing love of +music of all kinds Glenn lent incredible enthusiasm to his work. Prior to +joining Creative Commons, he had ,{[pg 265]}, clerked for the Hon. Stanley +Marcus on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in Miami, where he worked on +the so-called Wind Done Gone case.~{ Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin Co., U.S. +Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, 2001, 252 F. 3d 1165. }~ His participation +in the workshop was an experiment of his own; he was working on a story that he +would tell countless times and which would become one of the core examples of +the kind of practice Creative Commons wanted to encourage. + +A New York Times story describes how the band the White Stripes had allowed +Steven McDonald, the bassist from Redd Kross, to lay a bass track onto the +songs that made up the album White Blood Cells. In a line that would eventually +become a kind of mantra for Creative Commons, the article stated: "Mr. McDonald +began putting these copyrighted songs online without permission from the White +Stripes or their record label; during the project, he bumped into Jack White, +who gave him spoken assent to continue. It can be that easy when you skip the +intermediaries."~{ Neil Strauss, "An Uninvited Bassist Takes to the Internet," +New York Times, 25 August 2002, sec. 2, 23. }~ The ease with which these two +rockers could collaborate to create a modified work (called, of course, Redd +Blood Cells) without entering a studio, or, more salient, a law firm, was +emblematic of the notion that "culture builds on the past" and that it need not +be difficult to do so. +={ Redd, Kross ; + White Stripes +1 +} + +Glenn told the story with obvious and animated enthusiasm, ending with the +assertion that the White Stripes didn’t have to give up all their rights to do +this, but they didn’t have to keep them all either; instead of "All Rights +Reserved," he suggested, they could say "Some Rights Reserved." The story not +only manages to capture the message and aims of Creative Commons, but is also a +nice indication of the kind of dual role that Glenn played, first as a lawyer, +and second as a kind of marketing genius and message man. The possibility of +there being more than a handful of people like Glenn around was not lost on +anyone, and his ability to switch between the language of law and that of +nonprofit populist marketing was phenomenal.~{ Indeed, in a more +self-reflective moment, Glenn once excitedly wrote to me to explain that what +he was doing was "code-switching" and that he thought that geeks who constantly +involved themselves in technology, law, music, gaming, and so on would be prime +case studies for a code-switching study by anthropologists. }~ +={ Creative Commons : + marketing of +} + +At the workshop, participants had a chance to hash out a number of different +issues related to the creation of licenses that would be appropriate to +scholarly content: questions of attribution and commercial use, modification +and warranty; differences between federal copyright law concerning licenses and +state law concerning commercial contracts. The starting point for most people +was Free Software, but this was not the only starting point. There were at +least two other broad threads that fed into the discussion and into the general +understanding of the state of affairs facing projects like ,{[pg 266]}, +Connexions or OCW. The first thread was that of digital libraries, hypertext, +human-computer interaction research, and educational technology. These +disciplines and projects often make common reference to two pioneers, Douglas +Englebart and Theodore Nelson, and more proximately to things like Apple’s +HyperCard program and a variety of experiments in personal academic computing. +The debates and history that lead up to the possibility of Connexions are +complex and detailed, but they generally lack attention to legal detail. With +the exception of a handful of people in library and information science who +have made "digital" copyright into a subspecialty, few such projects, over the +last twenty-five years, have made the effort to understand, much less +incorporate, issues of intellectual property into their purview. +={ attribution : + copyright licenses and ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + commercial use and | derivative uses and ; + Connexions project : + relationship to hypertext +} + +The other thread combines a number of more scholarly interests that come out of +the disciplines of economics and legal theory: institutional economics, +critical legal realism, law and economics—these are the scholastic +designations. Boyle and Lessig, for example, are both academics; Boyle does not +practice law, and Lessig has tried few cases. Nonetheless, they are both +inheritors of a legal and philosophical pragmatism in which value is measured +by the transformation of policy and politics, not by the mere extension or +specification of conceptual issues. Although both have penned a large number of +complicated theoretical articles (and Boyle is well known in several academic +fields for his book Shamans, Software, and Spleens and his work on authorship +and the law), neither, I suspect, would ever sacrifice the chance to make a set +of concrete changes in legal or political practice given the choice. This point +was driven home for me in a conversation I had with Boyle and others at dinner +on the night of the launch of Creative Commons, in December 2002. During that +conversation, Boyle said something to the effect of, "We actually made +something; we didn’t just sit around writing articles and talking about the +dangers that face us—we made something." He was referring as much to the +organization as to the legal licenses they had created, and in this sense Boyle +qualifies very much as a polymathic geek whose understanding of technology is +that it is an intervention into an already constituted state of affairs, one +that demonstrates its value by being created and installed, not by being +assessed in the court of scholarly opinions. ,{[pg 267]}, +={ Boyle, James +2 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + law and economics and +2 ; + institutional economics +2 ; + intervention, technology as ; + polymaths ; + technology : + as argument +3 +} + +Similarly, Lessig’s approach to writing and speaking is unabashedly aimed at +transforming the way people approach intellectual-property law and, even more +generally, the way they understand the relationship between their rights and +their culture.~{ See Kelty, "Punt to Culture." }~ Lessig’s approach, at a +scholarly level, is steeped in the teachings of law and economics (although, as +he has playfully pointed out, a "second" Chicago school) but is focused more on +the understanding and manipulation of norms and customs ("culture") than on law +narrowly conceived.~{ Lessig, "The New Chicago School." }~ + +Informing both thinkers is a somewhat heterodox economic consensus drawn +primarily from institutional economics, which is routinely used to make policy +arguments about the efficacy or efficiency of the intellectual-property system. +Both are also informed by an emerging consensus on treating the public domain +in the same manner in which environmentalists treated the environment in the +1960s.~{ Hence, Boyle’s "Second Enclosure Movement" and "copyright conservancy" +concepts (see Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement"; Bollier, Silent Theft). +Perhaps the most sophisticated and compelling expression of the +institutional-economics approach to understanding Free Software is the work of +Yochai Benkler, especially "Sharing Nicely" and "Coase’s Penguin." See also +Benkler, Wealth of Networks. }~ These approaches begin with long-standing +academic and policy concerns about the status and nature of "public goods," not +directly with the problem of Free Software or the Internet. In some ways, the +concern with public goods, commons, the public domain, and collective action +are part of the same "reorientation of power and knowledge" I identify +throughout Two Bits: namely, the legitimation of the media of knowledge +creation, communication, and circulation. Most scholars of institutional +economics and public policy are, however, just as surprised and bewildered by +the fact of Free Software as the rest of the world has been, and they have +sought to square the existing understanding of public goods and collective +action with this new phenomenon.~{ Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source is +exemplary. }~ +={ public domain : + environmentalism and ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +} + +All of these threads form the weft of the experiment to modulate the components +of Free Software to create different licenses that cover a broader range of +objects and that deal with people and organizations that are not software +developers. Rather than attempt to carry on arguments at the level of theory, +however, my aim in participating was to see how and what was argued in practice +by the people constructing these experiments, to observe what constraints, +arguments, surprises, or bafflements emerged in the course of thinking through +the creation of both new licenses and a new form of authorship of scholarly +material. Like those who study "science in action" or the distinction between +"law on the books" and "law in action," I sought to observe the realities of a +practice ,{[pg 268]}, heavily determined by textual and epistemological +frameworks of various sorts.~{ Carrington and King, "Law and the Wisconsin +Idea." }~ +={ modulation : + of Free Software ; + experimentation +1 ; + participant observation +1 +} + +In my years with Connexions I eventually came to see it as something in between +a natural experiment and a thought experiment: it was conducted in the open, +and it invited participation from working scholars and teachers (a natural +experiment, in that it was not a closed, scholarly endeavor aimed at +establishing specific results, but an essentially unbounded, functioning system +that people could and would come to depend on), and yet it proceeded by making +a series of strategic guesses (a thought experiment) about three related +things: (1) what it is (and will be) possible to do technically; (2) what it is +(and will be) possible to do legally; and (3) what scholars and educators have +done and now do in the normal course of their activities. + +At the same time, this experiment gave shape to certain legal questions that I +channeled in the direction of Creative Commons, issues that ranged from +technical questions about the structure of digital documents, requirements of +attribution, and URLs to questions about moral rights, rights of disavowal, and +the meaning of "modification." The story of the interplay between Connexions +and Creative Commons was, for me, a lesson in a particular mode of legal +thinking which has been described in more scholarly terms as the difference +between the Roman or, more proximately, the Napoleonic tradition of legal +rationalism and the Anglo-American common-law tradition.~{ In particular, Glenn +Brown suggested Oliver Wendell Holmes as a kind of origin point both for +critical legal realism and for law and economics, a kind of filter through +which lawyers get both their Nietzsche ,{[pg 344]}, and their liberalism (see +Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Path of the Law"). Glenn’s opinion was that what he +called "punting to culture" (by which he meant writing minimalist laws which +allow social custom to fill in the details) descended more or less directly +from the kind of legal reasoning embodied in Holmes: "Note that [Holmes] is +probably best known in legal circles for arguing that questions of morality be +removed from legal analysis and left to the field of ethics. this is what makes +him the godfather of both the posners of the world, and the crits, and the +strange hybrids like lessig" (Glenn Brown, personal communication, 11 August +2003). }~ It was a practical experience of what exactly the difference is +between legal code and software code, with respect to how those two things can +be made flexible or responsive. + +1~ 9. Reuse, Modification, and the Nonexistence of Norms +={ norms +12 } + +% ,{[pg 269]}, + +The Connexions project was an experiment in modulating the practices of Free +Software. It was not inspired by so much as it was based on a kind of template +drawn from the experience of people who had some experience with Free Software, +including myself. But how exactly do such templates get used? What is traced +and what is changed? In terms of the cultural significance of Free Software, +what are the implications of these changes? Do they maintain the orientation of +a recursive public, or are they attempts to apply Free Software for other +private concerns? And if they are successful, what are the implications for the +domains they affect: education, scholarship, scientific knowledge, and cultural +production? What effects do these changes have on the norms of work and the +meaning and shape of knowledge in these domains? ,{[pg 270]}, +={ recursive public +2 ; + cultural significance +} + +In this chapter I explore in ethnographic detail how the modulations of Free +Software undertaken by Connexions and Creative Commons are related to the +problems of reuse, modification, and the norms of scholarly production. I +present these two projects as responses to the contemporary reorientation of +knowledge and power; they are recursive publics just as Free Software is, but +they expand the domain of practice in new directions, that is, into the +scholarly world of textbooks and research and into the legal domains of +cultural production more generally. +={ reorientation of power and knowledge +2 } + +In the course of "figuring out" what they are doing, these two projects +encounter a surprising phenomenon: the changing meaning of the finality of a +scholarly or creative work. Finality is not certainty. While certainty is a +problematic that is well and often studied in the philosophy of science and in +science studies, finality is less so. What makes a work stay a work? What makes +a fact stay a fact? How does something, certain or not, achieve stability and +identity? Such finality, the very paradigm of which is the published book, +implies stability. But Connexions and Creative Commons, through their +experiments with Free Software, confront the problem of how to stabilize a work +in an unstable context: that of shareable source code, an open Internet, +copyleft licenses, and new forms of coordination and collaboration.~{ +Actor-network theory comes closest to dealing with such "ontological" issues +as, for example, airplanes in John Law’s Aircraft Stories, the disease +atheroscleroris in Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple, or in vitro fertilization +in Charis Thompson’s Making Parents. The focus here on finality is closely +related, but aims at revealing the temporal characteristics of highly +modifiable kinds of knowledge-objects, like textbooks or databases, as in +Geoffrey Bowker’s Memory Practices in the Sciences. }~ The meaning of finality +will have important effects on the ability to constitute a politics around any +given work, whether a work of art or a work of scholarship and science. The +actors in Creative Commons and Connexions realize this, and they therefore form +yet another instance of a recursive public, precisely because they seek ways to +define the meaning of finality publicly and openly—and to make modifiability an +irreversible aspect of the process of stabilizing knowledge. +={ Actor Network Theory ; + figuring out ; + finality +57 : + certainty and stability vs. ; + modifiability : + implications for finality +40 +} + +The modulations of Free Software performed by Connexions and Creative Commons +reveal two significant issues. The first is the troublesome matter of the +meaning of reuse, as in the reuse of concepts, ideas, writings, articles, +papers, books, and so on for the creation of new objects of knowledge. Just as +software source code can be shared, ported, and forked to create new versions +with new functions, and just as software and people can be coordinated in new +ways using the Internet, so too can scholarly and scientific content. I explore +the implications of this comparison in this chapter. The central gambit of both +Connexions and Creative Commons (and much of scientific practice generally) is +that new work builds on ,{[pg 271]}, previous work. In the sciences the notion +that science is cumulative is not at issue, but exactly how scientific +knowledge accumulates is far from clear. Even if "standing on the shoulders of +giants" can be revealed to hide machinations, secret dealings, and +Machiavellian maneuvering of the most craven sort, the very concept of +cumulative knowledge is sound. Building a fact, a result, a machine, or a +theory out of other, previous works—this kind of reuse as progress is not in +question. But the actual material practice of writing, publication, and the +reuse of other results and works is something that, until very recently, has +been hidden from view, or has been so naturalized that the norms of practice +are nearly invisible to practitioners themselves. +={ norms : + existence of +1 ; + publication : + transformation by Internet +39 ; + participant observation +1 +} + +This raises the other central concern of this chapter: that of the existence or +nonexistence of norms. For an anthropologist to query whether or not norms +exist might seem to theorize oneself out of a job; one definition of +anthropology is, after all, the making explicit of cultural norms. But the turn +to "practices" in anthropology and science studies has in part been a turn away +from "norms" in their classic sociological and specifically Mertonian fashion. +Robert Merton’s suggestion that science has been governed by +norms—disinterestedness, communalism, organized skepticism, objectivity—has +been repeatedly and roundly criticized by a generation of scholars in the +sociology of scientific knowledge who note that even if such norms are asserted +by actors, they are often subverted in the doing.~{ Merton, "The Normative +Structure of Science." }~ But a striking thing has happened recently; those +Mertonian norms of science have in fact become the more or less explicit goals +in practice of scientists, engineers, and geeks in the wake of Free Software. +If Mertonian norms do not exist, then they are being invented. This, of course, +raises novel questions: can one create norms? What exactly would this mean? How +are norms different from culture or from legal and technical constraints? Both +Connexions and Creative Commons explicitly pose this question and search for +ways to identify, change, or work with norms as they understand them, in the +context of reuse. +={ Goals, lack of in Free Software : + norms as ; + Merton, Robert : + Mertonian norms +} + +2~ Whiteboards: What Was Publication? + +More than once, I have found myself in a room with Rich Baraniuk and Brent +Hendricks and any number of other employees of the ,{[pg 272]}, Connexions +project, staring at a whiteboard on which a number of issues and notes have +been scrawled. Usually, the notes have a kind of palimpsestic quality, on +account of the array of previous conversations that are already there, +rewritten in tiny precise script in a corner, or just barely erased beneath our +discussion. These conversations are often precipitated by a series of questions +that Brent, Ross Reedstrom, and the development team have encountered as they +build and refine the system. They are never simple questions. A visitor staring +at the whiteboard might catch a glimpse of the peculiar madness that afflicts +the project: a mixture of legal terms, technical terms, and terms like +scholarly culture or DSP communities. I’m consulted whenever this mixture of +terms starts to worry the developers in terms of legality, culture, or the +relationship between the two. I’m generally put in the position of speaking +either as a lawyer (which, legally speaking, I am not supposed to do) or as an +anthropologist (which I do mainly by virtue of holding a position in an +anthropology department). Rarely are the things I say met with assent: Brent +and Ross, like most hackers, are insanely well versed in the details of +intellectual-property law, and they routinely correct me when I make bold but +not-quite-true assertions about it. Nonetheless, they rarely feel well versed +enough to make decisions about legal issues on their own, and often I have been +called—on again as a thoughtful sounding board, and off again as intermediary +with Creative Commons. +={ Baraniuk, Richard ; + Hendricks, Brent ; + Reedstrom, Ross ; + Digital signal processing (DSP) +} + +This process, I have come to realize, is about figuring something out. It is +not just a question of solving technical problems to which I might have some +specific domain knowledge. Figuring out is modulation; it is template-work. +When Free Software functions as a template for projects like Connexions, it +does so literally, by allowing us to trace a known form of practice (Free +Software) onto a less well known, seemingly chaotic background and to see where +the forms match up and where they do not. One very good way to understand what +this means in a particular case—that is, to see more clearly the modulations +that Connexions has performed—is to consider the practice and institution of +scholarly publication through the template of Free Software. +={ Free Software : + modulations of +} + +Consider the ways scholars have understood the meaning and significance of +print and publication in the past, prior to the Internet and the contemporary +reorientation of knowledge and power. The list of ambitious historians and +theorists of the relationship ,{[pg 273]}, of media to knowledge is long: +Lucien Febvre, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Jack Goody, Roger Chartier, +Friedrich Kittler, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Adrian Johns, to name a few.~{ See +Johns, The Nature of the Book; Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of +Change; McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media; Febvre and +Martin, The Coming of the Book; Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue; +Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France and The Order of +Books; Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. +}~ With the exception of Johns, however, the history of publication does not +start with the conventional, legal, and formal practices of publication so much +as it does with the material practices and structure of the media themselves, +which is to say the mechanics and technology of the printed book.~{ There is +less communication between the theorists and historians of copyright and +authorship and those of the book; the former are also rich in analyses, such as +Jaszi and Woodmansee, The Construction of Authorship; Mark Rose, Authors and +Owners; St. Amour, The Copywrights; Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs. +}~ Ong’s theories of literacy and orality, Kittler’s re-theorization of the +structure of media evolution, Goody’s anthropology of the media of accounting +and writing—all are focused on the tangible media as the dependent variable of +change. By contrast, Johns’s The Nature of the Book uncovers the contours of +the massive endeavor involved in making the book a reliable and robust form for +the circulation of knowledge in the seventeenth century and after. +={ Goody, Jack ; + Eisenstein, Elizabeth +1 ; + Johns, Adrian +3 ; + Kittler, Friedrich ; + Ong, Walter ; + reorientation of power and knowledge ; + printing press +2 +} + +Prior to Johns’s work, arguments about the relationship of print and power fell +primarily into two camps: one could overestimate the role of print and the +printing press by suggesting that the "fixity" of a text and the creation of +multiple copies led automatically to the spread of ideas and the rise of +enlightenment. Alternately, one could underestimate the role of the book by +suggesting that it was merely a transparent media form with no more or less +effect on the circulation or evaluation of ideas than manuscripts or +television. Johns notes in particular the influence of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s +scholarship on the printing press (and Bruno Latour’s dependence on this in +turn), which very strongly identified the characteristics of the printed work +with the cultural changes seen to follow, including the success of the +scientific revolution and the experimental method.~{ Eisenstein, The Printing +Press as an Agent of Change. Eisenstein’s work makes direct reference to +McLuhan’s thesis in The Gutenberg Galaxy, and Latour relies on these works and +others in "Drawing Things Together." }~ For example, Eisenstein argued that +fixity—the fact that a set of printed books can be exact copies of each +other—implied various transformations in knowledge. Johns, however, is at pains +to show just how unreliable texts are often perceived to be. From which sources +do they come? Are they legitimate? Do they have the backing or support of +scholars or the crown? In short, fixity can imply sound knowledge only if there +is a system of evaluation already in place. Johns suggests a reversal of this +now common-sense notion: "We may consider fixity not as an inherent quality, +but as a transitive one. . . . We may adopt the principle that fixity exists +only inasmuch as it is recognized and acted upon by people—and not otherwise. +The consequence of this change in perspective is that print culture itself is +immediately laid open to analysis. It becomes ,{[pg 274]}, a result of manifold +representations, practices and conflicts, rather than just the manifold cause +with which we are often presented. In contrast to talk of a ‘print logic’ +imposed on humanity, this approach allows us to recover the construction of +different print cultures in particular historical circumstances."~{ Johns, The +Nature of the Book, 19-20. }~ +={ Latour, Bruno ; + enlightenment ; + fixity +7 +} + +Johns’s work focuses on the elaborate and difficult cultural, social, and +economic work involved, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in +transforming the European book into the kind of authority it is taken to be +across the globe today. The creation and standardization not just of books but +of a publishing infrastructure involved the kind of careful social engineering, +reputation management, and skills of distinction, exclusion, and consensus that +science studies has effectively explored in science and engineering. Hence, +Johns focuses on "print-in-the-making" and the relationship of the print +culture of that period to the reliability of knowledge. Instead of making broad +claims for the transformation of knowledge by print (eerily similar in many +respects to the broad claims made for the Internet), Johns explores the clash +of representations and practices necessary to create the sense, in the +twentieth century, that there really is or was only one print culture. +={ infrastructure : + of publishing +} + +The problem of publication that Connexions confronts is thus not simply caused +by the invention or spread of the Internet, much less that of Free Software. +Rather, it is a confrontation with the problems of producing stability and +finality under very different technical, legal, and social conditions—a problem +more complex even than the "different print cultures in particular historical +circumstances" that Johns speaks of in regard to the book. Connexions faces two +challenges: that of figuring out the difference that today introduces with +respect to yesterday, and that of creating or modifying an infrastructure in +order to satisfy the demands of a properly authoritative knowledge. Connexions +textbooks of necessity look different from conventional textbooks; they consist +of digital documents, or "modules," that are strung together and made available +through the Web, under a Creative Commons license that allows for free use, +reuse, and modification. This version of "publication" clearly has implications +for the meaning of authorship, ownership, stewardship, editing, validation, +collaboration, and verification. +={ authorship ; + Connexions project : + textbooks and +15 ; + Connexions project : + meaning of publication +15 ; + publication : + as notional event +1 +} + +The conventional appearance of a book—in bookstores, through mail-order, in +book clubs, libraries, or universities—was an event that signified, as the name +suggests, its official public appearance ,{[pg 275]}, in the world. Prior to +this event, the text circulated only privately, which is to say only among the +relatively small network of people who could make copies of it or who were +involved in its writing, editing, proofreading, reviewing, typesetting, and so +on. With the Internet, the same text can be made instantly available at each of +these stages to just as many or more potential readers. It effectively turns +the event of publication into a notional event—the click of a button—rather +than a highly organized, material event. Although it is clear that the practice +of publication has become denaturalized or destabilized by the appearance of +new information technologies, this hardly implies that the work of stabilizing +the meaning of publication—and producing authoritative knowledge as a +result—has ceased. The tricky part comes in understanding how Free Software is +used as a template by which the authority of publication in the Gutenberg +Galaxy is being transformed into the authority of publication in the Turing +Universe. +={ Connexions project : + stages of producing a document in +} + +2~ Publication in Connexions + +In the case of Connexions there are roughly three stages to the creation of +content. The first, temporally speaking, is whatever happens before Connexions +is involved, that is, the familiar practices of what I would call composition, +rather than simply writing. Some project must be already under way, perhaps +started under the constraints of and in the era of the book, perhaps conceived +as a digital textbook or an online textbook, but still, as of yet, written on +paper or saved in a Word document or in LaTeX, on a scholar’s desktop. It could +be an individual project, as in the case of Rich’s initial plan to write a DSP +textbook, or it could be a large collaborative project to write a textbook. +={ LaTeX (typesetting language) ; + Connexions project : + stages of producing a document in +3 +} + +The second stage is the one in which the document or set of documents is +translated ("Connexified") into the mark-up system used by Connexions. +Connexions uses the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML), in particular a subset +of tags that are appropriate to textbooks. These "semantic" tags (e.g., ) +refer only to the meaning of the text they enclose, not to the "presentation" +or syntactic look of what they enclose; they give the document the necessary +structure it needs to be transformed in a number of creative ways. Because XML +is related only to content, and not to ,{[pg 276]}, presentation (it is +sometimes referred to as "agnostic"), the same document in Connexions can be +automatically made to look a number of different ways, as an onscreen +presentation in a browser, as a pdf document, or as an on-demand published work +that can be printed out as a book, complete with continuous page numbering, +footnotes (instead of links), front and back matter, and an index. Therein lies +much of Connexions’s technical wizardry. +={ Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) +1 } + +During the second stage, that of being marked up in XML, the document is not +quite public, although it is on the Internet; it is in what is called a +workgroup, where only those people with access to the particular workgroup (and +those have been invited to collaborate) can see the document. It is only when +the document is finished, ready to be distributed, that it will enter the +third, "published" stage—the stage at which anyone on the Internet can ask for +the XML document and the software will display it, using style sheets or +software converters, as an HTML page, a pdf document for printing, or as a +section of a larger course. However, publication does not here signify +finality; indeed, one of the core advantages of Connexions is that the document +is rendered less stable than the book-object it mimics: it can be updated, +changed, corrected, deleted, copied, and so on, all without any of the +rigmarole associated with changing a published book or article. Indeed, the +very powerful notion of fixity theorized by McLuhan and Eisenstein is rendered +moot here. The fact that a document has been printed (and printed as a book) no +longer means that all copies will be the same; indeed, it may well change from +hour to hour, depending on how many people contribute (as in the case of Free +Software, which can go through revisions and updates as fast, or faster, than +one can download and install new versions). With Wikipedia entries that are +extremely politicized or active, for example, a "final" text is impossible, +although the dynamics of revision and counter-revision do suggest outlines for +the emergence of some kinds of stability. But Connexions differs from Wikipedia +with respect to this finality as well, because of the insertion of the second +stage, during which a self-defined group of people can work on a nonpublic text +before committing changes that a public can see. +={ Eisenstein, Elizabeth ; + McLuhan, Marshall ; + Hypertext Transfer Mark-up Language (HTML) ; + Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia) +1 ; + finality : + in Wikipedia and Connexions +1 +} + +It should be clear, given the example of Connexions, or any similar project +such as Wikipedia, that the changing meaning of "publication" in the era of the +Internet has significant implications, both practical (they affect the way +people can both write and publish ,{[pg 277]}, their works) and legal (they fit +uneasily into the categories established for previous media). The tangibility +of a textbook is quite obviously transformed by these changes, but so too is +the cultural significance of the practice of writing a textbook. And if +textbooks are written differently, using new forms of collaboration and +allowing novel kinds of transformation, then the validation, certification, and +structure of authority of textbooks also change, inviting new forms of open and +democratic participation in writing, teaching, and learning. No longer are all +of the settled practices of authorship, collaboration, and publication +configured around the same institutional and temporal scheme (e.g., the book +and its publishing infrastructure). In a colloquial sense, this is obvious, for +instance, to any musician today: recording and releasing a song to potentially +millions of listeners is now technically possible for anyone, but how that fact +changes the cultural significance of music creation is not yet clear. For most +musicians, creating music hasn’t changed much with the introduction of digital +tools, since new recording and composition technologies largely mimic the +recording practices that preceded them (for example, a program like Garage Band +literally looks like a four-track recorder on the screen). Similarly, much of +the practice of digital publication has been concerned with recreating +something that looks like traditional publication.~{ On this subject, cf. Pablo +Boczkowski’s study of the digitization of newspapers, Digitizing the News. }~ +={ music : + production +} + +Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Connexions team spent a great deal of time at the +outset of the project creating a pdf-document-creation system that would +essentially mimic the creation of a conventional textbook, with the push of a +button.~{ Conventional here is actually quite historically proximate: the +system creates a pdf document by translating the XML document into a LaTeX +document, then into a pdf document. LaTeX has been, for some twenty years, a +standard text-formatting and typesetting language used by some ,{[pg 345]}, +sectors of the publishing industry (notably mathematics, engineering, and +computer science). Were it not for the existence of this standard from which to +bootstrap, the Connexions project would have faced a considerably more +difficult challenge, but much of the infrastructure of publishing has already +been partially transformed into a computer-mediated and -controlled system +whose final output is a printed book. Later in Connexions’s lifetime, the group +coordinated with an Internet-publishing startup called Qoop.com to take the +final step and make Connexions courses available as print-on-demand, +cloth-bound textbooks, complete with ISBNs and back-cover blurbs. }~ But even +this process causes a subtle transformation: the concept of "edition" becomes +much harder to track. While a conventional textbook is a stable entity that +goes through a series of printings and editions, each of which is marked on its +publication page, a Connexions document can go through as many versions as an +author wants to make changes, all the while without necessarily changing +editions. In this respect, the modulation of the concept of source code +translates the practices of updating and "versioning" into the realm of +textbook writing. Recall the cases ranging from the "continuum" of UNIX +versions discussed by Ken Thompson to the complex struggles over version +control in the Linux and Apache projects. In the case of writing source code, +exactitude demands that the change of even a single character be tracked and +labeled as a version change, whereas a ,{[pg 278]}, conventional-textbook +spelling correction or errata issuance would hardly create the need for a new +edition. +={ Apache (Free Software project) ; + editions, print vs. electronic +3 : + see also versions ; + Linux (Free Software project) ; + UNIX operating system : + allegiance to versions of +} + +In the Connexions repository all changes to a text are tracked and noted, but +the identity of the module does not change. "Editions" have thus become +"versions," whereas a substantially revised or changed module might require not +reissuance but a forking of that module to create one with a new identity. +Editions in publishing are not a feature of the medium per se; they are +necessitated by the temporal and spatial practices of publication as an event, +though this process is obviously made visible only in the book itself. In the +same way, versioning is now used to manage a process, but it results in a very +different configuration of the medium and the material available in that +medium. Connexions traces the template of software production (sharing, +porting, and forking and the norms and forms of coordination in Free Software) +directly onto older forms of publication. Where the practices match, no change +occurs, and where they don’t, it is the reorientation of knowledge and power +and the emergence of recursive publics that serves as a guide to the +development of the system. +={ reorientation of power and knowledge +4 } + +Legally speaking, the change from editions to versions and forks raises +troubling questions about the boundaries and status of a copyrighted work. It +is a peculiar feature of copyright law that it needs to be updated regularly +each time the media change, in order to bring certain old practices into line +with new possibilities. Scattered throughout the copyright statutes is evidence +of old new media: gramophones, jukeboxes, cable TV, photocopiers, peer-to-peer +file-sharing programs, and so on. Each new form of communication shifts the +assumptions of past media enough that they require a reevaluation of the +putative underlying balance of the constitutional mandate that gives (U.S.) +intellectual-property law its inertia. Each new device needs to be understood +in terms of creation, storage, distribution, production, consumption, and +tangibility, in order to assess the dangers it poses to the rights of inventors +and artists. +={ copyright : + specificity of media and +1 +} + +Because copyright law "hard codes" the particular media into the statutes, +copyright law is comfortable with, for example, book editions or musical +recordings. But in Connexions, new questions arise: how much change constitutes +a new work, and thus demands a new copyright license? If a licensee receives +one copy of a work, to which versions will he or she retain rights after +changes? Because ,{[pg 279]}, of the complexity of the software involved, there +are also questions that the law simply cannot deal with (just as it had not +been able to do in the late 1970s with respect to the definition of software): +is the XML document equivalent to the viewable document, or must the style +sheet also be included? Where does the "content" begin and the "software" end? +Until the statutes either incorporate these new technologies or are changed to +govern a more general process, rather than a particular medium, these questions +will continue to emerge as part of the practice of writing. +={ Connexions project : + line between content and software +} + +This denaturalization of the notion of "publication" is responsible for much of +the surprise and concern that greets Connexions and projects like it. Often, +when I have shown the system to scholars, they have displayed boredom mixed +with fear and frustration: "It can never replace the book." On the one hand, +Connexions has made an enormous effort to make its output look as much like +conventional books as possible; on the other hand, the anxiety evinced is +justified, because what Connexions seeks to replace is not the book, which is +merely ink and paper, but the entire publishing process. The fact that it is +not replacing the book per se, but the entire process whereby manuscripts are +made into stable and tangible objects called books is too overwhelming for most +scholars to contemplate—especially scholars who have already mastered the +existing process of book writing and creation. The fact that the legal system +is built to safeguard something prior to and not fully continuous with the +practice of Connexions only adds to the concern that such a transformation is +immodest and risky, that it endangers a practice with centuries of stability +behind it. Connexions, however, is not the cause of destabilization; rather, it +is a response to or recognition of a problem. It is not a new problem, but one +that periodically reemerges: a reorientation of knowledge and power that +includes questions of enlightenment and rationality, democracy and +self-governance, liberal values and problems of the authority and validation of +knowledge. The salient moments of correlation are not the invention of the +printing press and the Internet, but the struggle to make published books into +a source of authoritative knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries +and the struggle to find ways to do the same with the Internet today.~{ See +Johns, The Nature of the Book; Warner, The Letters of the Republic. }~ +={ printing press } + +Connexions is, in many ways, understood by its practitioners to be both a +response to the changing relations of knowledge and power, ,{[pg 280]}, one +that reaffirms the fundamental values of academic freedom and the circulation +of knowledge, and also an experiment with, even a radicalization of, the ideals +of both Free Software and Mertonian science. The transformation of the meaning +of publication implies a fundamental shift in the status, in the finality of +knowledge. It seeks to make of knowledge (knowledge in print, not in minds) +something living and constantly changing, as opposed to something static and +final. The fact that publication no longer signifies finality—that is, no +longer signifies a state of fixity that is assumed in theory (and frequently in +practice) to account for a text’s reliability—has implications for how the text +is used, reused, interpreted, valued, and trusted.~{ On fixity, see +Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change which cites McLuhan’s The +Gutenberg Galaxy. The stability of texts is also questioned routinely by +textual scholars, especially those who work with manuscripts and complicated +varoria (for an excellent introduction, see Bornstein and Williams, +Palimpsest). Michel Foucault’s "What Is an Author?" addresses a related but +orthogonal problematic and is unconcerned with the relatively sober facts of a +changing medium. }~ Whereas the traditional form of the book is the same across +all printed versions or else follows an explicit practice of appearing in +editions (complete with new prefaces and forewords), a Connexions document +might very well look different from week to week or year to year.~{ A salient +and recent point of comparison can be found in the form of Lawrence Lessig’s +"second edition" of his book Code, which is titled Code: Version 2.0 (version +is used in the title, but edition is used in the text). The first book was +published in 1999 ("ancient history in Internet time"), and Lessig convinced +the publisher to make it available as a wiki, a collaborative Web site which +can be directly edited by anyone with access. The wiki was edited and updated +by hordes of geeks, then "closed" and reedited into a second edition with a new +preface. It is a particularly tightly controlled example of collaboration; +although the wiki and the book were freely available, the modification and +transformation of them did not amount to a simple free-for-all. Instead, Lessig +leveraged his own authority, his authorial voice, and the power of Basic Books +to create something that looks very much like a traditional second edition, +although it was created by processes unimaginable ten years ago. }~ While a +textbook might also change significantly to reflect the changing state of +knowledge in a given field, it is an explicit goal of Connexions to allow this +to happen "in real time," which is to say, to allow educators to update +textbooks as fast as they do scientific knowledge.~{ The most familiar +comparison is Wikipedia, which was started after Connexions, but grew far more +quickly and dynamically, largely due to the ease of use of the system (a bone +of some contention among the Connexions team). Wikipedia has come under assault +primarily for being unreliable. The suspicion and fear that surround Wikipedia +are similar to those that face Connexions, but in the case of Wikipedia +entries, the commitment to openness is stubbornly meritocratic: any article can +be edited by anyone at anytime, and it matters not how firmly one is identified +as an expert by rank, title, degree, or experience—a twelve year old’s +knowledge of the Peloponnesian War is given the same access and status as an +eighty-year-old classicist’s. Articles are not owned by individuals, and ,{[pg +346]}, all work is pseudonymous and difficult to track. The range of quality is +therefore great, and the mainstream press has focused largely on whether +Wikipedia is more or less reliable than conventional encyclopedias, not on the +process of knowledge production. See, for instance, George Johnson, "The +Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts," New York Times, 3 +January 2006, Late Edition—Final, F2; Robert McHenry, "The Faith-based +Encyclopedia," TCS Daily, 15 November 2004, +http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html. }~ +={ Merton, Robert : + Mertonian norms ; + Connexions project : + roles in ; + finality : + fixity vs. ; + fixity +} + +These implications are not lost on the Connexions team, but neither are they +understood as goals or as having simple solutions. There is a certain immodest, +perhaps even reckless, enthusiasm surrounding these implications, an enthusiasm +that can take both polymath and transhumanist forms. For instance, the +destabilization of the contemporary textbook-publishing system that Connexions +represents is (according to Rich) a more accurate way to represent the +connections between concepts than a linear textbook format. Connexions thus +represents a use of technology as an intervention into an existing context of +practice. The fact that Connexions could also render the reliability or +trustworthiness of scholarly knowledge unstable is sometimes discussed as an +inevitable outcome of technical change—something that the world at large, not +Connexions, must learn to deal with. +={ intervention, technology as ; + polymaths ; + transhumanism +} + +To put it differently, the "goal" of Connexions was never to destroy +publishing, but it has been structured by the same kind of imaginations of +moral and technical order that pervade Free Software and the construction of +the Internet. In this sense Rich, Brent, and others are geeks in the same sense +as Free Software geeks: they ,{[pg 281]}, share a recursive public devoted to +achieving a moral and technical order in which openness and modifiability are +core values ("If we are successful, we will disappear"). The implication is +that the existing model and infrastructure for the publication of textbooks is +of a different moral and technical order, and thus that Connexions needs to +innovate not only the technology (the source code or the openness of the +system) or the legal arrangements (licenses) but also the very norms and forms +of textbook writing itself (coordination and, eventually, a movement). If +publication once implied the appearance of reliable, final texts—even if the +knowledge therein could be routinely contested by writing more texts and +reviews and critiques—Connexions implies the denaturalization of not knowledge +per se, but of the process whereby that knowledge is stabilized and rendered +reliable, trustworthy. +={ Hendricks, Brent ; + geeks ; + communities : + norms and +1 ; + recursive public +} + +A keyword for the transformation of textbook writing is community, as in the +tagline of the Connexions project: "Sharing Knowledge and Building +Communities." Building implies that such communities do not yet exist and that +the technology will enable them; however, Connexions began with the assumption +that there exist standard academic practices and norms of creating teaching +materials. As a result, Connexions both enables these practices and norms, by +facilitating a digital version of the textbook, and intervenes in them, by +creating a different process for creating a textbook. Communities are both +assumed and desired. Sometimes they are real (a group of DSP engineers, +networked around Rich and others who work in his subspecialty), and sometimes +they are imagined (as when in the process of grant writing we claim that the +most important component of the success of the project is the "seeding" of +scholarly communities). Communities, furthermore, are not audiences or +consumers, and sometimes not even students or learners. They are imagined to be +active, creative producers and users of teaching materials, whether for +teaching or for the further creation of such materials. The structure of the +community has little to do with issues of governance, solidarity, or pedagogy, +and much more to do with a set of relationships that might obtain with respect +to the creation of teaching materials—a community of collaborative production +or collaborative debugging, as in the modulation of forms of coordination, +modulated to include the activity of creating teaching materials. ,{[pg 282]}, +={ norms : + academic ; + coordination (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + Digital signal processing (DSP) +} + +2~ Agency and Structure in Connexions +={ Authorship +29 ; + Connexions project : + roles in +29 ; + Roles, in Connexions +29 +} + +One of the most animated whiteboard conversations I remember having with Brent +and Ross concerned difference between the possible "roles" that a Connexions +user might occupy and the implications this could have for both the technical +features of the system and the social norms that Connexions attempts to +maintain and replicate. Most software systems are content to designate only +"users," a generic name-and-password account that can be given a set of +permissions (and which has behind it a long and robust tradition in +computer-operating-system and security research). Users are users, even if they +may have access to different programs and files. What Connexions needed was a +way to designate that the same person might have two different exogenous roles: +a user might be the author, but not the owner of the content, and vice versa. +For instance, perhaps Rice University maintains the copyright for a work, but +the author is credited for its creation. Such a situation—known, in legal +terms, as "work for hire"—is routine in some universities and most +corporations. So while the author is generally given the freedom and authority +to create and modify the text as he or she sees fit, the university asserts +copyright ownership in order to retain the right to commercially exploit the +work. Such a situation is far from settled and is, of course, politically +fraught, but the Connexions system, in order to be useful at all to anyone, +needed to accommodate this fact. Taking an oppositional political stand would +render the system useless in too many cases or cause it to become precisely the +kind of authorless, creditless system as Wikipedia—a route not desired by many +academics. In a perfectly open world all Connexions modules might each have +identical authors and owners, but pragmatism demands that the two roles be kept +separate. +={ Hendricks, Brent +14 ; + copyright : + works for hire ; + credit +5 ; + users, status in Connexions ; + Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia) +} + +Furthermore, there are many people involved every day in the creation of +academic work who are neither the author nor the owner: graduate students and +undergraduates, research scientists, technicians, and others in the grand, +contested, complex academic ecology. In some disciplines, all contributors may +get authorship credit and some of them may even share ownership, but often many +of those who do the work get mentioned only in acknowledgments, or not at all. +Again, although the impulse of the creators of Connexions might be to level the +playing field and allow only one kind of user, the fact of the matter is that +academics simply would not use ,{[pg 283]}, such a system.~{ Again, a +comparison with Wikipedia is apposite. Wikipedia is, morally speaking, and +especially in the persona of its chief editor, Jimbo Wales, totally devoted to +merit-based equality, with users getting no special designation beyond the +amount and perceived quality of the material they contribute. Degrees or +special positions of employment are anathema. It is a quintessentially +American, anti-intellectual-fueled, Horatio Alger-style approach in which the +slate is wiped clean and contributors are given a chance to prove themselves +independent of background. Connexions, by contrast, draws specifically from the +ranks of intellectuals or academics and seeks to replace the infrastructure of +publishing. Wikipedia is interested only in creating a better encyclopedia. In +this respect, it is transhumanist in character, attributing its distinctiveness +and success to the advances in technology (the Internet, wiki, broadband +connections, Google). Connexions on the other hand is more polymathic, devoted +to intervening into the already complexly constituted organizational practice +of scholarship and academia. }~ The need for a role such as "maintainer" (which +might also include "editor"), which was different from author or owner, thus +also presented itself. +={ Connexions project : + roles in +} + +As Brent, Ross, and I stared at the whiteboard, the discovery of the need for +multiple exogenous roles hit all of us in a kind of slow-motion shockwave. It +was not simply that the content needed to have different labels attached to it +to keep track of these people in a database—something deeper was at work: the +law and the practice of authorship actually dictated, to a certain extent, what +the software itself should look like. All of sudden, the questions were +preformatted, so to speak, by the law and by certain kinds of practices that +had been normalized and thus were nearly invisible: who should have permission +to change what? Who will have permission to add or drop authors? Who will be +allowed to make what changes, and who will have the legal right to do so and +who the moral or customary right? What implications follow from the choices the +designers make and the choices we present to authors or maintainers? +={ permission +9 } + +The Creative Commons licenses were key to revealing many of these questions. +The licenses were in themselves modulations of Free Software licenses, but +created with people like artists, musicians, scholars, and filmmakers in mind. +Without them, the content in Connexions would be unlicensed, perhaps intended +to be in the public domain, but ultimately governed by copyright statutes that +provided no clear answers to any of these questions, as those statutes were +designed to deal with older media and a different publication process. Using +the Creative Commons licenses, on the other hand, meant that the situation of +the content in Connexions became well-defined enough, in a legal sense, to be +used as a constraint in defining the structure of the software system. The +license itself provided the map of the territory by setting parameters for +things such as distribution, modification, attribution, and even display, +reading, or copying. +={ attribution : + copyright licensing and +3 ; + Creative Commons +2 ; + public domain : + Creative Commons licenses and +2 +} + +For instance, when the author and owner are different, it is not at all obvious +who should be given credit. Authors, especially academic authors, expect to be +given credit (which is often all they get) for an article or a textbook they +have written, yet universities often retain ownership of those textbooks, and +ownership would seem to imply a legal right to be identified as both owner and +author (e.g., Forrester Research reports or UNESCO reports, which hide the +,{[pg 284]}, identity of authors). In the absence of any licenses, such a +scenario has no obvious solution or depends entirely on the specific context. +However, the Creative Commons licenses specified the meaning of attribution and +the requirement to maintain the copyright notice, thus outlining a procedure +that gave the Connexions designers fixed constraints against which to measure +how they would implement their system. +={ authorship : + ownership vs. +3 +} + +A positive result of such constraints is that they allow for a kind of +institutional flexibility that would not otherwise be possible. Whether a +university insists on expropriating copyright or allows scholars to keep their +copyrights, both can use Connexions. Connexions is more "open" than traditional +textbook publishing because it allows a greater number of heterogeneous +contributors to participate, but it is also more "open" than something like +Wikipedia, which is ideologically committed to a single definition of +authorship and ownership (anonymous, reciprocally licensed collaborative +creation by authors who are also the owners of their work). While Wikipedia +makes such an ideological commitment, it cannot be used by institutions that +have made the decision to operate as expropriators of content, or even in cases +wherein authors willingly allow someone else to take credit. If authors and +owners must be identical, then either the author is identified as the owner, +which is illegal in some cases, or the owner is identified as the author, a +situation no academic is willing to submit to. + +The need for multiple roles also revealed other peculiar and troubling +problems, such as the issue of giving an "identity" to long-dead authors whose +works are out of copyright. So, for instance, a piece by A. E. Housman was +included as a module for a class, and while it is clear that Housman is the +author, the work is no longer under copyright, so Housman is no longer the +copyright holder (nor is the society which published it in 1921). Yet +Connexions requires that a copyright be attached to each module to allow it to +be licensed openly. This particular case, of a dead author, necessitated two +interesting interventions. Someone has to actually create an account for +Housman and also issue the work as an "edition" or derivative under a new +copyright. In this case, the two other authors are Scott McGill and Christopher +Kelty. A curious question arose in this context: should we be listed both as +authors and owners (and maintainers), or only as owners and maintainers? And if +someone uses the module in a new context (as they have the right to do, ,{[pg +285]}, under the license), will they be required to give attribution only to +Housman, or also to McGill and Kelty as well? What rights to ownership do +McGill and Kelty have over the digital version of the public-domain text by +Housman?~{ An even more technical feature concerned the issue of the order of +authorship. The designers at first decided to allow Connexions to simply +display the authors in alphabetical order, a practice adopted by some +disciplines, like computer science. However, in the case of the Housman example +this resulted in what looked like a module authored principally by me, and only +secondarily by A. E. Housman. And without the ability to explicitly designate +order of authorship, many disciplines had no way to express their conventions +along these lines. As a result, the system was redesigned to allow users to +designate the order of authorship as well. }~ +={ Housman, A. E. ; + McGill, Scott ; + public domain : + literary texts in +} + +The discussion of roles circulated fluidly across concepts like law (and legal +licenses), norms, community, and identity. Brent and Ross and others involved +had developed sophisticated imaginations of how Connexions would fit into the +existing ecology of academia, constrained all the while by both standard goals, +like usability and efficiency, and by novel legal licenses and concerns about +the changing practices of authors and scholars. The question, for instance, of +how a module can be used (technically, legally) is often confused with, or +difficult to disentangle from, how a module should be used (technically, +legally, or, more generally, "socially"—with usage shaped by the community who +uses it). In order to make sense of this, Connexions programmers and +participants like myself are prone to using the language of custom and norm, +and the figure of community, as in "the customary norms of a scholarly +community." +={ communities : + norms and +} + +2~ From Law and Technology to Norm +={ communities : + norms and +20 +} + +The meaning of publication in Connexions and the questions about roles and +their proper legal status emerged from the core concern with reuse, which is +the primary modulation of Free Software that Connexions carries out: the +modulation of the meaning of source code to include textbook writing. What +makes source code such a central component of Free Software is the manner in +which it is shared and transformed, not the technical features of any +particular language or program. So the modulation of source code to include +textbooks is not just an attempt to make textbooks exact, algorithmic, or +digital, but an experiment in sharing textbook writing in a similar fashion. +={ coordination (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +9 ; + sharing source code (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + modifiability +3 +} + +This modulation also affects the other components: it creates a demand for +openness in textbook creation and circulation; it demands new kinds of +copyright licenses (the Creative Commons licenses); and it affects the meaning +of coordination among scholars, ranging from explicit forms of collaboration +and co-creation to the entire spectrum of uses and reuses that scholars +normally make of their ,{[pg 286]}, peers’ works. It is this modulation of +coordination that leads to the second core concern of Connexions: that of the +existence of "norms" of scholarly creation, use, reuse, publication, and +circulation. +={ copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + modulations of | derivative uses and +7 ; + openness (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + norms : + coordination and +} + +Since software programmers and engineers are prone to thinking about things in +concrete, practical, and detailed ways, discussions of creation, use, and +circulation are rarely conducted at the level of philosophical abstraction. +They are carried out on whiteboards, using diagrams. +={ figuring out +3 } + +The whiteboard diagram transcribed in figure 8 was precipitated by a fairly +precise question: "When is the reuse of something in a module (or of an entire +module) governed by ‘academic norms’ and when is it subject to the legal +constraints of the licenses?" For someone to quote a piece of text from one +module in another is considered normal practice and thus shouldn’t involve +concerns about legal rights and duties to fork the module (create a new +modified version, perhaps containing only the section cited, which is something +legal licenses explicitly allow). But what if someone borrows, say, all of the +equations in a module about information theory and uses them to illustrate a +very different point in a different module. Does he or she have either a normal +or a legal right to do so? Should the equations be cited? What should that +citation look like? What if the equations are particularly hard to mark-up in +the MathML language and therefore represent a significant investment in time on +the part of the original author? Should the law govern this activity, or should +norms? +={ forking : + in Connexions +16 ; + norms : + academic +5 +} + +{ 2bits_09_08-100.png }image ~[* Whiteboard diagram: the cascade of reuse in Connexions. Conception by Ross Reedstrom, Brent Hendricks, and Christopher Kelty. Transcribed in the author’s fieldnotes, 2003. ]~ + +There is a natural tendency among geeks to answer these questions solely with +respect to the law; it is, after all, highly codified and seemingly +authoritative on such issues. However, there is often no need to engage the +law, because of the presumed consensus ("academic norms") about how to proceed, +even if those norms conflict with the law. But these norms are nowhere +codified, and this makes geeks (and, increasingly, academics themselves) +uneasy. As in the case of a requirement of attribution, the constraints of a +written license are perceived to be much more stable and reliable than those of +culture, precisely because culture is what remains contested and contestable. +So the idea of creating a new "version" of a text is easier to understand when +it is clearly circumscribed as a legally defined "derivative work." The +Connexions software was therefore implemented in such a way that the legal +right to create a derived work (to fork a module) could be done with the press +of ,{[pg 287]}, a button: a distinct module is automatically created, and it +retains the name of the original author and the original owner, but now also +includes the new author’s name as author and maintainer. That new author can +proceed to make any number of changes. +={ attribution : + copyright licenses and +} + +But is forking always necessary? What if the derivative work contains only a +few spelling corrections and slightly updated information? Why not change the +existing module (where such changes would be more akin to issuing a new +edition), rather than create a legally defined derivative work? Why not simply +suggest the changes to the original author? Why not collaborate? While a legal +license gives people the right to do all of these things without ever +consulting the person who licensed it, there may well be occasions ,{[pg 288]}, +when it makes much more sense to ignore those rights in favor of other norms. +The answers to these questions depend a great deal on the kind and the intent +of the reuse. A refined version of the whiteboard diagram, depicted in figure +9, attempts to capture the various kinds of reuse and their intersection with +laws, norms, and technologies. +={ collaboration : + forking vs. +3 ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + forking and +} + +{ 2bits_09_09-100.png }image ~[* Whiteboard diagram transformed: forms of reuse in Connexions. Conception by Christopher Kelty, 2004. ]~ + +The center of the diagram contains a list of different kinds of imaginable +reuses, arrayed from least interventionist at the top to most interventionist +at the bottom, and it implies that as the intended transformations become more +drastic, the likelihood of collaboration with the original author decreases. +The arrow on the left indicates the legal path from cultural norms to protected +fair uses; the arrow on the right indicates the technical path from built-in +legal constraints based on the licenses to software tools that make +collaboration (according to presumed scholarly norms) easier than the +alternative (exercising the legal right to make a derivative work). With the +benefit of hindsight, it seems that the arrows on either side should actually +be a circle that connect laws, technologies, and norms in a chain of influence +and constraint, since it is clear in retrospect that the norms of authorial +practice have actually changed (or at least have been made explicit) based on +the existence of licenses and the types of tools available (such as blogs and +Wikipedia). +={ experimentation +1 ; + Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia) +} + +The diagram can best be understood as a way of representing, to Connexions +itself (and its funders), the experiment under way with the components of Free +Software. By modulating source code to include the writing of scholarly +textbooks, Connexions made visible the need for new copyright licenses +appropriate to this content; by making the system Internet-based and relying on +open standards such as XML and Open Source components, Connexions also +modulated the concept of openness to include textbook publication; and by +making the system possible as an open repository of freely licensed textbook +modules, Connexions made visible the changed conditions of coordination, not +just between two collaborating authors, but within the entire system of +publication, citation, use, reuse, borrowing, building on, plagiarizing, +copying, emulating, and so on. Such changes to coordination may or may not take +hold. For many scholars, they pose an immodest challenge to a working system +that has developed over centuries, but for others they represent the removal of +arbitrary constraints that prevent ,{[pg 289]}, novel and innovative forms of +knowledge creation and association rendered possible in the last thirty to +forty years (and especially in the last ten). For some, these modulations might +form the basis for a final modulation—a Free Textbooks movement—but as yet no +such movement exists. +={ Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) ; + movement (component of Free Software) : + modulations of +2 +} + +In the case of shared software source code, one of the principal reasons for +sharing it was to reuse it: to build on it, to link to it, to employ it in ways +that made building more complex objects into an easier task. The very design +philosophy of UNIX well articulates the necessity of modularity and reuse, and +the idea is no less powerful in other areas, such as textbooks. But just as the +reuse of software is not simply a feature of software’s technical +characteristics, the idea of "reusing" scholarly materials implies all kinds of +questions that are not simply questions of recombining texts. The ability to +share source code—and the ability to create complex software based on +it—requires modulations of both the legal meaning of software, as in the case +of EMACS, and the organizational form, as in the ,{[pg 290]}, emergence of Free +Software projects other than the Free Software Foundation (the Linux kernel, +Perl, Apache, etc.). +={ Free Software Foundation +1 ; + textbooks : + model in Connexions +1 +} + +In the case of textbook reuse (but only after Free Software), the technical and +the legal problems that Connexions addresses are relatively well specified: +what software to use, whether to use XML, the need for an excellent user +interface, and so on. However, the organizational, cultural, or practical +meaning of reuse is not yet entirely clear (a point made by figures 8 and 9). +In many ways, the recognition that there are cultural norms among academics +mirrors the (re)discovery of norms and ethics among Free Software hackers.~{ I +refer here to Eric Raymond’s "discovery" that hackers possess unstated norms +that govern what they do, in addition to the legal licenses and technical +practices they engage in (see Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere"). For a +critique and background on hacker ethics and norms, see Coleman, "The Social +Construction of Freedom." }~ But the label "cultural norms" is a mere catch-all +for a problem that is probably better understood as a mixture of concrete +technical, organizational, and legal questions and as more or less abstract +social imaginaries through which a particular kind of material order is +understood and pursued—the creation of a recursive public. How do programmers, +lawyers, engineers, and Free Software advocates (and anthropologists) "figure +out" how norms work? How do they figure out ways to operationalize or make use +of them? How do they figure out how to change them? How do they figure out how +to create new norms? They do so through the modulations of existing practices, +guided by imaginaries of moral and technical order. Connexions does not tend +toward becoming Free Software, but it does tend toward becoming a recursive +public with respect to textbooks, education, and the publication of pedagogical +techniques and knowledge. The problematic of creating an independent, +autonomous public is thus the subterranean ground of both Free Software and +Connexions. +={ figuring out ; + norms : + cultural | practices and technology vs. +8 ; + practices : + norms vs. +8 ; + recursive public ; + public : + autotelic and independent : + see also recursive public +} + +To some extent, then, the matter of reuse raises a host of questions about the +borders and boundaries in and of academia. Brent, Ross, and I assumed at the +outset that communities have both borders and norms, and that the two are +related. But, as it turns out, this is not a safe assumption. At neither the +technical nor the legal level is the use of the software restricted to +academics—indeed, there is no feasible way to do that and still offer it on the +Internet—nor does anyone involved wish it to be so restricted. However, there +is an implicit sense that the people who will contribute content will primarily +be academics and educators (just as Free Software participants are expected, +but not required to be programmers). As figure 9 makes clear, there may well be +tremendous variation in the kinds of reuse that people wish to make, even +within academia. ,{[pg 291]}, Scholars in the humanities, for instance, are +loath to even imagine others creating derivative works with articles they have +written and can envision their work being used only in the conventional manner +of being read, cited, and critiqued. Scholars in engineering, biology, or +computer science, on the other hand, may well take pleasure in the idea or act +of reuse, if it is adequately understood to be a "scientific result" or a +suitably stable concept on which to build.~{ Bruno Latour’s Science in Action +makes a strong case for the centrality of "black boxes" in science and +engineering for precisely this reason. }~ Reuse can have a range of different +meanings depending not only on whether it is used by scholars or academics, but +within that heterogeneous group itself. +={ Hendricks, Brent ; + Reedstrom, Ross ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + derivative uses and +} + +The Connexions software does not, however, enforce disciplinary differences. If +anything it makes very strong and troubling claims that knowledge is knowledge +and that disciplinary constraints are arbitrary. Thus, for instance, if a +biologist wishes to transform a literary scholar’s article on Darwin’s tropes +to make it reflect current evolutionary theory, he or she could do so; it is +entirely possible, both legally and technically. The literary scholar could +react in a number of ways, including outrage that the biologist has misread or +misunderstood the work or pleasure in seeing the work refined. Connexions +adheres rigorously to its ideas of openness in this regard; it neither +encourages nor censures such behavior. +={ modifiability : + relation of different disciplines to +} + +By contrast, as figure 9 suggests, the relationship between these two scholars +can be governed either by the legal specification of rights contained in the +licenses (a privately ordered legal regime dependent on a national-cum-global +statutory regime) or by the customary means of collaboration enabled, perhaps +enhanced, by software tools. The former is the domain of the state, the legal +profession, and a moral and technical order that, for lack of a better word, +might be called modernity. The latter, however, is the domain of the cultural, +the informal, the practical, the interpersonal; it is the domain of ethics +(prior to its modernization, perhaps) and of tradition. +={ modernity : + tradition and +1 ; + moral and technical order +} + +If figure 9 is a recapitulation of modernity and tradition (what better role +for an anthropologist to play!), then the presumptive boundaries around +"communities" define which groups possess which norms. But the very design of +Connexions—its technical and legal exactitude—immediately brings a potentially +huge variety of traditions into conflict with one another. Can the biologist +and the literary scholar be expected to occupy the same universe of norms? Does +the fact of being academics, employees of a university, ,{[pg 292]}, or readers +of Darwin ensure this sharing of norms? How are the boundaries policed and the +norms communicated and reinforced? +={ norms +4 : + existence of +4 +} + +The problem of reuse therefore raises a much broader and more complex question: +do norms actually exist? In particular, do they exist independent of the +particular technical, legal, or organizational practice in which groups of +people exist—outside the coordinated infrastructure of scholarship and science? +And if Connexions raises this question, can the same question not also be asked +of the elaborate system of professions, disciplines, and organizations that +coordinate the scholarship of different communities? Are these norms, or are +they "technical" and "legal" practices? What difference does formalization +make? What difference does bureaucratization make?~{ I should note, in my +defense, that my efforts to get my informants to read Max Weber, Ferdinand +Tönnies, Henry Maine, or Emile Durkheim ,{[pg 347]}, proved far less successful +than my creation of nice Adobe Illustrator diagrams that made explicit the +reemergence of issues addressed a century ago. It was not for lack of trying, +however. }~ + +The question can also be posed this way: should norms be understood as +historically changing constructs or as natural features of human behavior +(regular patterns, or conventions, which emerge inevitably wherever human +beings interact). Are they a feature of changing institutions, laws, and +technologies, or do they form and persist in the same way wherever people +congregate? Are norms features of a "calculative agency," as Michael Callon +puts it, or are they features of the evolved human mind, as Marc Hauser +argues?~{ Callon, The Laws of the Markets; Hauser, Moral Minds. }~ +={ norms +4 : + evolution and +2 +} + +The answer that my informants give, in practice, concerning the mode of +existence of cultural norms is neither. On the one hand, in the Connexions +project the question of the mode of existence of academic norms is unanswered; +the basic assumption is that certain actions are captured and constrained +neither by legal constraints nor technical barriers, and that it takes people +who know or study "communities" (i.e., nonlegal and nontechnical constraints) +to figure out what those actions may be. On some days, the project is modestly +understood to enable academics to do what they do faster and better, but +without fundamentally changing anything about the practice, institutions, or +legal relations; on other days, however, it is a radically transformative +project, changing how people think about creating scholarly work, a project +that requires educating people and potentially "changing the culture" of +scholarly work, including its technology, its legal relations, and its +practices. +={ norms : + cultural +1 +} + +In stark contrast (despite the very large degree of simpatico), the principal +members of Creative Commons answer the question of the existence of norms quite +differently than do those in Connexions: ,{[pg 293]}, they assert that norms +not only change but are manipulated and/or channeled by the modulation of +technical and legal practices (this is the novel version of law and economics +that Creative Commons is founded on). Such an assertion leaves very little for +norms or for culture; there may be a deep evolutionary role for rule following +or for choosing socially sanctioned behavior over socially unacceptable +behavior, but the real action happens in the legal and technical domains. In +Creative Commons the question of the existence of norms is answered firmly in +the phrase coined by Glenn Brown: "punt to culture." For Creative Commons, +norms are a prelegal and pretechnical substrate upon which the licenses they +create operate. Norms must exist for the strategy employed in the licenses to +make sense—as the following story illustrates. +={ Brown, Glen Otis ; + norms : + channeling by legal means +} + +2~ On the Nonexistence of Norms in the Culture of No Culture +={ culture : + punting to +24 +} + +More than once, I have found myself on the telephone with Glenn Brown, staring +at notes, a diagram, or some inscrutable collection of legalese. Usually, the +conversations wander from fine legal points to music and Texas politics to +Glenn’s travels around the globe. They are often precipitated by some previous +conversation and by Glenn’s need to remind himself (and me) what we are in the +middle of creating. Or destroying. His are never simple questions. While the +Connexions project started with a repository of scholarly content in need of a +license, Creative Commons started with licenses in need of particular kinds of +content. But both projects required participants to delve into the details of +both licenses and the structure of digital content, which qualified me, for +both projects, as the intermediary who could help explore these intersections. +My phone conversations with Glenn, then, were much like the whiteboard +conversations at Connexions: filled with a mix of technical and legal +terminology, and conducted largely in order to give Glenn the sense that he had +cross-checked his plans with someone presumed to know better. I can’t count the +number of times I have hung up the phone or left the conference room wondering, +"Have I just sanctioned something mad?" Yet rarely have I felt that my +interventions served to do more than confirm suspicions or derail already +unstable arguments. ,{[pg 294]}, +={ Brown, Glen Otis +23 } + +In one particular conversation—the "punt to culture" conversation—I found +myself bewildered by a sudden understanding of the process of writing legal +licenses and of the particular assumptions about human behavior that need to be +present in order to imagine creating these licenses or ensuring that they will +be beneficial to the people who will use them. + +These discussions (which often included other lawyers) happened in a kind of +hypothetical space of legal imagination, a space highly structured by legal +concepts, statutes, and precedents, and one extraordinarily carefully attuned +to the fine details of semantics. A core aspect of operating within this +imagination is the distinction between law as an abstract semantic entity and +law as a practical fact that people may or may not deal with. To be sure, not +all lawyers operate this way, but the warrant for thinking this way comes from +no less eminent an authority than Oliver Wendell Holmes, for whom the "Path of +Law" was always from practice to abstract rule, and not the reverse.~{ Oliver +Wendell Holmes, "The Path of Law." }~ The opposition is unstable, but I +highlight it here because it was frequently used as a strategy for constructing +precise legal language. The ability to imagine the difference between an +abstract rule designating legality and a rule encountered in practice was a +first step toward seeing how the language of the rule should be constructed. +={ Holmes, Oliver Wendell } + +I helped write, read, and think about the first of the Creative Commons +licenses, and it was through this experience that I came to understand how the +crafting of legal language works, and in particular how the mode of existence +of cultural or social norms relates to the crafting of legal language. Creative +Commons licenses are not a familiar legal entity, however. They are modulations +of the Free Software license, but they differ in important ways. +={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + Creative Commons version +20 ; + Creative Commons : + writing of licenses +20 ; + participant observation : + writing copyright licenses as +20 +} + +The Creative Commons licenses allow authors to grant the use of their work in +about a dozen different ways—that is, the license itself comes in versions. One +can, for instance, require attribution, prohibit commercial exploitation, allow +derivative or modified works to be made and circulated, or some combination of +all these. These different combinations actually create different licenses, +each of which grants intellectual-property rights under slightly different +conditions. For example, say Marshall Sahlins decides to write a paper about +how the Internet is cultural; he copyrights the paper ("© 2004 Marshall +Sahlins"), he requires that any use of it or any copies of it maintain the +copyright notice and the attribution of ,{[pg 295]}, authorship (these can be +different), and he furthermore allows for commercial use of the paper. It would +then be legal for a publishing house to take the paper off Sahlins’s +Linux-based Web server and publish it in a collection without having to ask +permission, as long as the paper remains unchanged and he is clearly and +unambiguously listed as author of the paper. The publishing house would not get +any rights to the work, and Sahlins would not get any royalties. If he had +specified noncommercial use, the publisher would instead have needed to contact +him and arrange for a separate license (Creative Commons licenses are +nonexclusive), under which he could demand some share of revenue and his name +on the cover of the book.~{ In December 2006 Creative Commons announced a set +of licenses that facilitate the "follow up" licensing of a work, especially one +initially issued under a noncommercial license. }~ But say he was, instead, a +young scholar seeking only peer recognition and approbation—then royalties +would be secondary to maximum circulation. Creative Commons allows authors to +assert, as its members put it, "some rights reserved" or even "no rights +reserved." +={ intellectual property : + strategy and +16 ; + Sahlins, Marshall +2 ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) : + derivative uses and +2 | disavowal clause in +6 ; + attribution : + dissavowal of +6 ; + credit +6 : + see also attribution +} + +But what if Sahlins had chosen a license that allowed modification of his work. +This would mean that I, Christopher Kelty, whether in agreement with or in +objection to his work, could download the paper, rewrite large sections of it, +add in my own baroque and idiosyncratic scholarship, and write a section that +purports to debunk (or, what could amount to the same, augment) Sahlins’s +arguments. I would then be legally entitled to re-release the paper as "© 2004 +Marshall Sahlins, with modifications © 2007 Christopher Kelty," so long as +Sahlins is identified as the author of the paper. The nature or extent of the +modifications is not legally restricted, but both the original and the modified +version would be legally attributed to Sahlins (even though he would own only +the first paper). + +In the course of a number of e-mails, chat sessions, and phone conversations +with Glenn, I raised this example and proposed that the licenses needed a way +to account for it, since it seemed to me entirely possible that were I to +produce a modified work that so distorted Sahlins’s original argument that he +did not want to be associated with the modified paper, then he should have the +right also to repudiate his identification as author. Sahlins should, legally +speaking, be able to ask me to remove his name from all subsequent versions of +my misrepresentation, thus clearing his good name and providing me the freedom +to continue sullying mine into obscurity. After hashing it out with the +expensive Palo Alto legal firm that was officially drafting the licenses, we +came up with text that said: ,{[pg 296]}, "If You create a Derivative Work, +upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from +the Derivative Work any reference to such Licensor or the Original Author, as +requested." +={ norms : + academic +5 +} + +The bulk of our discussion centered around the need for the phrase, "to the +extent practicable." Glenn asked me, "How is the original author supposed to +monitor all the possible uses of her name? How will she enforce this clause? +Isn’t it going to be difficult to remove the name from every copy?" Glenn was +imagining a situation of strict adherence, one in which the presence of the +name on the paper was the same as the reputation of the individual, regardless +of who actually read it. On this theory, until all traces of the author’s name +were expunged from each of these teratomata circulating in the world, there +could be no peace, and no rest for the wronged. + +I paused, then gave the kind of sigh meant to imply that I had come to my +hard-won understandings of culture through arduous dissertation research: "It +probably won’t need to be strictly enforced in all cases—only in the +significant ones. Scholars tend to respond to each other only in very +circumscribed cases, by writing letters to the editor or by sending responses +or rebuttals to the journal that published the work. It takes a lot of work to +really police a reputation, and it differs from discipline to discipline. +Sometimes, drastic action might be needed, usually not. There is so much misuse +and abuse of people’s arguments and work going on all the time that people only +react when they are directly confronted with serious abuses. And even so, it is +only in cases of negative criticism or misuse that people need respond. When a +scholar uses someone’s work approvingly, but incorrectly, it is usually +considered petulant (at best) to correct them publicly." + +"In short," I said, leaning back in my chair and acting the part of expert, +"it’s like, you know, c’mon—it isn’t all law, there are a bunch of, you know, +informal rules of civility and stuff that govern that sort of thing." + +Then Glenn said., "Oh, okay, well that’s when we punt to culture." + +When I heard this phrase, I leaned too far back and fell over, joyfully +stunned. Glenn had managed to capture what no amount of fieldwork, with however +many subjects, could have. Some combination of American football, a twist of +Hobbes or Holmes, and a lived understanding of what exactly these copyright +licenses are ,{[pg 297]}, meant to achieve gave this phrase a luminosity I +usually associate only with Balinese cock-fights. It encapsulated, almost as a +slogan, a very precise explanation of what Creative Commons had undertaken. It +was not a theory Glenn proposed with this phrase, but a strategy in which a +particular, if vague, theory of culture played a role. +={ culture : + Creative Commons version of +12 +} + +For those unfamiliar, a bit of background on U.S. football may help. When two +teams square off on the football field, the offensive team gets four attempts, +called "downs," to move the ball either ten yards forward or into the end zone +for a score. The first three downs usually involve one of two strategies: run +or pass, run or pass. On the fourth down, however, the offensive team must +either "go for it" (run or pass), kick a field goal (if close enough to the end +zone), or "punt" the ball to the other team. Punting is a somewhat +disappointing option, because it means giving up possession of the ball to the +other team, but it has the advantage of putting the other team as far back on +the playing field as possible, thus decreasing its likelihood of scoring. + +To "punt to culture," then, suggests that copyright licenses try three times to +legally restrict what a user or consumer of a work can make of it. By using the +existing federal intellectual-property laws and the rules of license and +contract writing, copyright licenses articulate to people what they can and +cannot do with that work according to law. While the licenses do not (they +cannot) force people, in any tangible sense, to do one thing or another, they +can use the language of law and contract to warn people, and perhaps obliquely, +to threaten them. If the licenses end up silent on a point—if there is no +"score," to continue the analogy—then it’s time to punt to culture. Rather than +make more law, or call in the police, the license strategy relies on culture to +fill in the gaps with people’s own understandings of what is right and wrong, +beyond the law. It operationalizes a theory of culture, a theory that +emphasizes the sovereignty of nonstate customs and the diversity of systems of +cultural norms. Creative Commons would prefer that its licenses remain legally +minimalist. It would much prefer to assume—indeed, the licenses implicitly +require—the robust, powerful existence of this multifarious, +hetero-physiognomic, and formidable opponent to the law with neither uniform +nor mascot, hunched at the far end of the field, preparing to, so to speak, +clean law’s clock. ,{[pg 298]}, +={ norms : + cultural +} + +Creative Commons’s "culture" thus seems to be a somewhat vague mixture of many +familiar theories. Culture is an unspecified but finely articulated set of +given, evolved, designed, informal, practiced, habitual, local, social, civil, +or historical norms that are expected to govern the behavior of individuals in +the absence of a state, a court, a king, or a police force, at one of any +number of scales. It is not monolithic (indeed, my self-assured explanation +concerned only the norms of "academia"), but assumes a diversity beyond +enumeration. It employs elements of relativism—any culture should be able to +trump the legal rules. It is not a hereditary biological theory, but one that +assumes historical contingency and arbitrary structures. +={ norms : + channeling by legal means +6 +} + +Certainly, whatever culture is, it is separate from law. Law is, to borrow +Sharon Traweek’s famous phrase, "a culture of no culture" in this sense. It is +not the cultural and normative practices of legal scholars, judges, lawyers, +legislators, and lobbyists that determine what laws will look like, but their +careful, expert, noncultural ratiocination. In this sense, punting to culture +implies that laws are the result of human design, whereas culture is the result +of human action, but not of human design. Law is systematic and tractable; +culture may have a deep structure, but it is intractable to human design. It +can, however, be channeled and tracked, nudged or guided, by law. +={ Traweek, Sharon ; + culture : + law vs. +3 +} + +Thus, Lawrence Lessig, one of the founders of Creative Commons has written +extensively about the "regulation of social meaning," using cases such as those +involving the use or nonuse of seatbelts or whether or not to allow smoking in +public places. The decision not to wear a seatbelt, for instance, may have much +more to do with the contextual meaning of putting on a seatbelt (don’t you +trust the cab driver?) than with either the existence of the seatbelt (or +automatic seatbelts, for that matter) or with laws demanding their use. +According to Lessig, the best law can do in the face of custom is to change the +meaning of wearing the seatbelt: to give the refusal a dishonorable rather than +an honorable meaning. Creative Commons licenses are based on a similar +assumption: the law is relatively powerless in the face of entrenched academic +or artistic customs, and so the best the licenses can do is channel the meaning +of sharing and reuse, of copyright control or infringement. As Glenn explained +in the context of a discussion about a license that would allow music sampling. +,{[pg 299]}, +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + law and economics and ; + meaning, regulation through law ; + music +3 ; + sampling, musical +3 +} + +_1 We anticipate that the phrase "as appropriate to the medium, genre, and +market niche" might prompt some anxiety, as it leaves things relatively +undefined. But there’s more method here than you might expect: The definition +of "sampling" or "collage" varies across different media. Rather than try to +define all possible scenarios (including ones that haven’t happened yet)—which +would have the effect of restricting the types of re-uses to a limited set—we +took the more laissez faire approach. + +_1 This sort of deference to community values—think of it as "punting to +culture"—is very common in everyday business and contract law. The idea is that +when lawyers have trouble defining the specialized terms of certain +subcultures, they should get out of the way and let those subcultures work them +out. It’s probably not a surprise Creative Commons likes this sort of notion a +lot.~{ Message from the cc-sampling mailing list, Glenn Brown, Subject: +BACKGROUND: "AS APPROPRIATE TO THE MEDIUM, GENRE, AND MARKET NICHE," 23 May +2003, http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-sampling/2003-May/000004.html. }~ + +As in the case of reuse in Connexions, sampling in the music world can imply a +number of different, perhaps overlapping, customary meanings of what is +acceptable and what is not. For Connexions, the trick was to differentiate the +cases wherein collaboration should be encouraged from the cases wherein the +legal right to "sample"—to fork or to create a derived work—was the appropriate +course of action. For Creative Commons, the very structure of the licenses +attempts to capture this distinction as such and to allow for individuals to +make determinations about the meaning of sampling themselves.~{ Sampling offers +a particularly clear example of how Creative Commons differs from the existing +practice and infrastructure of music creation and intellectual-property law. +The music industry has actually long recognized the fact of sampling as +something musicians do and has attempted to deal with it by making it an +explicit economic practice; the music industry thus encourages sampling by +facilitating the sale between labels and artists of rights to make a sample. +Record companies will negotiate prices, lengths, quality, and quantity of +sampling and settle on a price. \\ This practice is set opposite the +assumption, also codified in law, that the public has a right to a fair use of +copyrighted material without payment or permission. Sampling a piece of music +might seem to fall into this category of use, except that one of the tests of +fair use is that the use not impact any existing market for such uses, and the +fact that the music industry has effectively created a market for the buying +and selling of samples means that sampling now routinely falls outside the fair +uses codified in the statute, thus removing sampling from the domain of fair +use. Creative Commons licenses, on the other hand, say that owners should be +able to designate their material as "sample-able," to give permission ahead of +time, and by this practice to encourage others to do the same. They give an +"honorable" meaning to the practice of sampling for free, rather than the +dishonorable one created by the industry. It thus becomes a war over the +meaning of norms, in the law-and-economics language of Creative Commons and its +founders. }~ + +At stake, then, is the construction of both technologies and legal licenses +that, as Brent and Rich would assert, "make it easy for users to do the right +thing." The "right thing," however, is precisely what goes unstated: the moral +and technical order that guides the design of both licenses and tools. +Connexions users are given tools that facilitate citation, acknowledgment, +attribution, and certain kinds of reuse instead of tools that privilege +anonymity or facilitate proliferation or encourage nonreciprocal +collaborations. By the same token, Creative Commons licenses, while legally +binding, are created with the aim of changing norms: they promote attribution +and citation; they promote fair use and clearly designated uses; they are +written to give users flexibility to decide what kinds of things should be +allowed and what kinds shouldn’t. Without a doubt, the "right thing" is right +for some people and not for others—and it is thus political. But the criteria +for what is right are not ,{[pg 300]}, merely political; the criteria are what +constitute the affinity of these geeks in the first place, what makes them a +recursive public. They see in these instruments the possibility for the +creation of authentic publics whose role is to stand outside power, outside +markets, and to participate in sovereignty, and through this participation to +produce liberty without sacrificing stability. +={ Baraniuk, Richard ; + Hendricks, Brent ; + affinity (of geeks) ; + fair use ; + moral and technical order ; + recursive public +} + +2~ Conclusion + +What happens when geeks modulate the practices that make up Free Software? What +is the intuition or the cultural significance of Free Software that makes +people want to emulate and modulate it? Creative Commons and Connexions +modulate the practices of Free Software and extend them in new ways. They +change the meaning of shared source code to include shared nonsoftware, and +they try to apply the practices of license writing, coordination, and openness +to new domains. At one level, such an activity is fascinating simply because of +what it reveals: in the case of Connexions, it reveals the problem of +determining the finality of a work. How should the authority, stability, and +reliability of knowledge be assessed when work can be rendered permanently +modifiable? It is an activity that reveals the complexity of the system of +authorization and evaluation that has been built in the past. + +The intuition that Connexions and Creative Commons draw from Free Software is +an intuition about the authority of knowledge, about a reorientation of +knowledge and power that demands a response. That response needs to be +technical and legal, to be sure, but it also needs to be public—a response that +defines the meaning of finality publicly and openly and makes modifiability an +irreversible aspect of the process of stabilizing knowledge. Such a commitment +is incompatible with the provision of stable knowledge by unaccountable private +parties, whether individuals or corporations or governments, or by technical +fiat. There must always remain the possibility that someone can question, +change, reuse, and modify according to their needs. + +1~conclusion Conclusion + +% ,{[pg 301]}, + +2~ The Cultural Consequences of Free Software + +Free Software is changing. In all aspects it looks very different from when I +started, and in many ways the Free Software described herein is not the Free +Software readers will encounter if they turn to the Internet to find it. But +how could it be otherwise? If the argument I make in Two Bits is at all +correct, then modulation must constantly be occurring, for experimentation +never seeks its own conclusion. A question remains, though: in changing, does +Free Software and its kin preserve the imagination of moral and technical order +that created it? Is the recursive public something that survives, orders, or +makes sense of these changes? Does Free Software exist for more than its own +sake? +={ modulation : + of Free Software +5 ; + moral and technical order +} + +In Two Bits I have explored not only the history of Free Software but also the +question of where such future changes will have come ,{[pg 302]}, from. I argue +for seeing continuity in certain practices of everyday life precisely because +the Internet and Free Software pervade everyday life to a remarkable, and +growing, degree. Every day, from here to there, new projects and ideas and +tools and goals emerge everywhere out of the practices that I trace through +Free Software: Connexions and Creative Commons, open access, Open Source +synthetic biology, free culture, access to knowledge (a2k), open cola, open +movies, science commons, open business, Open Source yoga, Open Source +democracy, open educational resources, the One Laptop Per Child project, to say +nothing of the proliferation of wiki-everything or the "peer production" of +scientific data or consumer services—all new responses to a widely felt +reorientation of knowledge and power.~{ See http://cnx.org, +http://www.creativecommons.org, +http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm, http://www.biobricks.org, +http://www.freebeer.org, http://freeculture.org, http://www.cptech.org/a2k, +,{[pg 348]}, http://www.colawp.com/colas/400/cola467_recipe.html, +http://www.elephantsdream.org, http://www.sciencecommons.org, +http://www.plos.org, http://www.openbusiness.cc, http://www.yogaunity.org, +http://osdproject.com, http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/oer/, and +http://olpc.com. }~ How is one to know the difference between all these things? +How is one to understand the cultural significance and consequence of them? Can +one distinguish between projects that promote a form of public sphere that can +direct the actions of our society versus those that favor corporate, +individual, or hierarchical control over decision making? +={ practices +2 : + five components of Free Software +2 ; + public +5 : + see also recursive public +5 ; + reorientation of power and knowledge +19 +} + +Often the first response to such emerging projects is to focus on the promises +and ideology of the people involved. On the one hand, claiming to be open or +free or public or democratic is something nearly everyone does (including +unlikely candidates such as the defense intelligence agencies of the United +States), and one should therefore be suspicious and critical of all such +claims.~{ See Clive Thompson, "Open Source Spying," New York Times Magazine, 3 +December 2006, 54. }~ While such arguments and ideological claims are +important, it would be a grave mistake to focus only on these statements. The +"movement"—the ideological, critical, or promissory aspect—is just one +component of Free Software and, indeed, the one that has come last, after the +other practices were figured out and made legible, replicable, and modifiable. +On the other hand, it is easy for geeks and Free Software advocates to denounce +emerging projects, to say, "But that isn’t really Open Source or Free +Software." And while it may be tempting to fix the definition of Free Software +once and for all in order to ensure a clear dividing line between the true sons +and the carpetbaggers, to do so would reduce Free Software to mere repetition +without difference, would sacrifice its most powerful and distinctive +attribute: its responsive, emergent, public character. + +But what questions should one ask? Where should scholars or curious onlookers +focus their attention in order to see whether or not a recursive public is at +work? Many of these questions are simple, ,{[pg 303]}, practical ones: are +software and networks involved at any level? Do the participants claim to +understand Free Software or Open Source, either in their details or as an +inspiration? Is intellectual-property law a key problem? Are participants +trying to coordinate each other through the Internet, and are they trying to +take advantage of voluntary, self-directed contributions of some kind? More +specifically, are participants modulating one of these practices? Are they +thinking about something in terms of source code, or source and binary? Are +they changing or creating new forms of licenses, contracts, or privately +ordered legal arrangements? Are they experimenting with forms of coordinating +the voluntary actions of large numbers of unevenly distributed people? Are the +people who are contributing aware of or actively pursuing questions of +ideology, distinction, movement, or opposition? Are these practices recognized +as something that creates the possibility for affinity, rather than simply +arcane "technical" practices that are too complex to understand or appreciate? +={ affinity (of geeks) +2 } + +In the last few years, talk of "social software" or "Web 2.0" has dominated the +circuit of geek and entrepreneur conferences and discussions: Wikipedia, +MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube, for example. For instance, there are scores and +scores of "social" music sites, with collaborative rating, music sharing, music +discovery, and so forth. Many of these directly use or take inspiration from +Free Software. For all of them, intellectual property is a central and +dominating concern. Key to their novelty is the leveraging and coordinating of +massive numbers of people along restricted lines (i.e., music preferences that +guide music discovery). Some even advocate or lobby for free(er) access to +digital music. But they are not (yet) what I would identify as recursive +publics: most of them are commercial entities whose structure and technical +specifications are closely guarded and not open to modification. While some +such entities may deal in freely licensed content (for instance, Creative +Commons-licensed music), few are interested in allowing strangers to +participate in, modulate, or modify the system as such; they are interested in +allowing users to become consumers in more and more sophisticated ways, and not +necessarily in facilitating a public culture of music. They want information +and knowledge to be free, to be sure, but not necessarily the infrastructure +that makes that information available and knowledge possible. Such entities +lack the "recursive" commitment. ,{[pg 304]}, +={ music : + recursive public and +} + +By contrast, some corners of the open-access movement are more likely to meet +this criteria. As the appellation suggests, participants see it as a movement, +not a corporate or state entity, a movement founded on practices of copyleft +and the modulation of Free Software licensing ideas. The use of scientific data +and the tools for making sense of open access are very often at the heart of +controversy in science (a point often reiterated by science and technology +studies), and so there is often an argument about not only the availability of +data but its reuse, modification, and modulation as well. Projects like the +BioBricks Foundation (biobricks.org) and new organizations like the Public +Library of Science (plos.org) are committed to both availability and certain +forms of collective modification. The commitment to becoming a recursive +public, however, raises unprecedented issues about the nature of quality, +reliability, and finality of scientific data and results—questions that will +reverberate throughout the sciences as a result. +={ movement (component of Free Software) : + modulations of ; + open access : + recursive public and +} + +Farther afield, questions of "traditional heritage" claims, the compulsory +licensing of pharmaceuticals, or new forms of "crowdsourcing" in labor markets +are also open to analysis in the terms I offer in Two Bits.~{ See especially +Christen, "Tracking Properness" and "Gone Digital"; Brown, Who Owns Native +Culture? and "Heritage as Property." Crowdsourcing fits into other novel forms +of labor arrangements, ranging from conventional outsourcing and off-shoring to +newer forms of bodyshopping and "virtual migration" (see Aneesh, Virtual +Migration; Xiang, "Global Bodyshopping" ). }~ Virtual worlds like Second Life, +"a 3D digital world imagined, created, and owned by its residents," are +increasingly laboratories for precisely the kinds of questions raised here: +such worlds are far less virtual than most people realize, and the experiments +conducted there far more likely to migrate into the so-called real world before +we know it—including both economic and democratic experiments.~{ Golub, +"Copyright and Taboo"; Dibbell, Play Money. }~ How far will Second Life go in +facilitating a recursive public sphere? Can it survive both as a corporation +and as a "world"? And of course, there is the question of the "blogosphere" as +a public sphere, as a space of opinion and discussion that is radically open to +the voices of massive numbers of people. Blogging gives the lie to conventional +journalism’s self-image as the public sphere, but it is by no means immune to +the same kinds of problematic dynamics and polarizations, no more +"rational-critical" than FOX News, and yet . . . +={ blogosphere, as recursive public ; + Second Life, as recursive public +} + +Such examples should indicate the degree to which Two Bits is focused on a much +longer time span than simply the last couple of years and on much broader +issues of political legitimacy and cultural change. Rather than offer immediate +policy prescriptions or seek to change the way people think about an issue, I +have approached ,{[pg 305]}, Two Bits as a work of history and anthropology, +making it less immediately applicable in the hopes that it is more lastingly +usable. The stories I have told reach back at least forty years, if not longer. +While it is clear that the Internet as most people know it is only ten to +fifteen years old, it has been "in preparation" since at least the late 1950s. +Students in my classes—especially hip geeks deep in Free Software +apprenticeship—are bewildered to learn that the arguments and usable pasts they +are rehearsing are refinements and riffs on stories that are as old or older +than their parents. This deeper stability is where the cultural significance of +Free Software lies: what difference does Free Software today introduce with +respect to knowledge and power yesterday? +={ cultural significance ; + legitimacy, circulation of knowledge and +6 +} + +Free Software is a response to a problem, in much the same way that the Royal +Society in the sixteenth century, the emergence of a publishing industry in the +eighteenth century, and the institutions of the public sphere in the eighteenth +and nineteenth centuries were responses. They responded to the collective +challenge of creating regimes of governance that required—and +encouraged—reliable empirical knowledge as a basis for their political +legitimacy. Such political legitimacy is not an eternal or theoretical problem; +it is a problem of constant real-world practice in creating the infrastructures +by which individuals come to inhabit and understand their own governance, +whether by states, corporations, or machines. If power seeks consent of the +governed—and especially the consent of the democratic, self-governing kind that +has become the global dominant ideal since the seventeenth century—it must also +seek to ensure the stability and reliability of the knowledge on which that +consent is propped. +={ public sphere : + recursive public vs. +4 : + see also public, recursive public +4 +} + +Debates about the nature and history of publics and public spheres have served +as one of the main arenas for this kind of questioning, but, as I hope I have +shown here, it is a question not only of public spheres but of practices, +technologies, laws, and movements, of going concerns which undergo modulation +and experimentation in accord with a social imagination of order both moral and +technical. "Recursive public" as a concept is not meant to replace that of +public sphere. I intend neither for actors nor really for many scholars to find +it generally applicable. I would not want to see it suddenly discovered +everywhere, but principally in tracking the transformation, proliferation, and +differentiation of Free Software and its derivatives. ,{[pg 306]}, +={ social imaginary } + +Several threads from the three parts of Two Bits can now be tied together. The +detailed descriptions of Free Software and its modulations should make clear +that (1) the reason the Internet looks the way it does is due to the work of +figuring out Free Software, both before and after it was recognized as such; +(2) neither the Internet nor the computer is the cause of a reorientation of +knowledge and power, but both are tools that render possible modulations of +settled practices, modulations that reveal a much older problem regarding the +legitimacy of the means of circulation and production of knowledge; (3) Free +Software is not an ethical stance, but a practical response to the revelation +of these older problems; and (4) the best way to understand this response is to +see it as a kind of public sphere, a recursive public that is specific to the +technical and moral imaginations of order in the contemporary world of geeks. +={ figuring out } + +It is possible now to return to the practical and political meaning of the +"singularity" of the Internet, that is, to the fact that there is only one +Internet. This does not mean that there are no other networks, but only that +the Internet is a singular entity and not an instance of a general type. How is +it that the Internet is open in the same way to everyone, whether an individual +or a corporate or a national entity? How has it become extensible (and, by +extension, defensible) by and to everyone, regardless of their identity, +locale, context, or degree of power? +={ Internet : + singularity of +7 +} + +The singularity of the Internet is both an ontological and an epistemological +fact; it is a feature of the Internet’s technical configurations and modes of +ordering the actions of humans and machines by protocols and software. But it +is also a feature of the technical and moral imaginations of the people who +build, manage, inhabit, and expand the Internet. Ontologically, the creation +and dissemination of standardized protocols, and novel standard-setting +processes are at the heart of the story. In the case of the Internet, +differences in standards-setting processes are revealed clearly in the form of +the famous Request for Comments system of creating, distributing, and modifying +Internet protocols. The RFC system, just as much as the Geneva-based +International Organization for Standards, reveal the fault lines of +international legitimacy in complex societies dependent on networks, software, +and other high-tech forms of knowledge production, organization, and +governance. The legitimacy of standards has massive significance for the +abilities of individual actors to participate in their own recursive publics, +whether they ,{[pg 307]}, be publics that address software and networks or +those that address education and development. But like the relationship between +"law on the books" and "law in action," standards depend on the coordinated +action and order of human practices. +={ International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ; + Request for Comments (RFC) ; + standards processes +1 ; + standards +1 +} + +What’s more, the seemingly obvious line between a legitimate standard and a +marketable product based on these standards causes nothing but trouble. The +case of open systems in the 1980s high-end computer industry demonstrates how +the logic of standardization is not at all clearly distinguished from the logic +of the market. The open-systems battles resulted in novel forms of +cooperation-within-competition that sought both standardization and competitive +advantage at the same time. Open systems was an attempt to achieve a kind of +"singularity," not only for a network but for a market infrastructure as well. +Open systems sought ways to reform technologies and markets in tandem. What it +ignored was the legal structure of intellectual property. The failure of open +systems reveals the centrality of the moral and technical order of intellectual +property—to both technology and markets—and shows how a reliance on this +imagination of order literally renders impossible the standardization of +singular market infrastructure. By contrast, the success of the Internet as a +market infrastructure and as a singular entity comes in part because of the +recognition of the limitations of the intellectual-property system—and Free +Software in the 1990s was the main experimental arena for trying out +alternatives. +={ collaboration : + competition vs. ; + intellectual property +3 ; + moral and technical order +5 ; + Open Systems +3 +} + +The singularity of the Internet rests in turn on a counterintuitive +multiplicity: the multiplicity of the UNIX operating system and its thousands +of versions and imitations and reimplementations. UNIX is a great example of +how novel, unexpected kinds of order can emerge from high-tech practices. UNIX +is neither an academic (gift) nor a market phenomenon; it is a hybrid model of +sharing that emerged from a very unusual technical and legal context. UNIX +demonstrates how structured practices of sharing produce their own kind of +order. Contrary to the current scholarly consensus that Free Software and its +derivatives are a kind of "shadow economy" (a "sharing" economy, a "peer +production" economy, a "noncommercial" economy), UNIX was never entirely +outside of the mainstream market. The meanings of sharing, distribution, and +profitability are related to the specific technical, legal, and organizational +context. Because AT&T was prevented from commercializing UNIX, because UNIX +users were keen to expand and ,{[pg 308]}, adapt it for their own uses, and +because its developers were keen to encourage and assist in such adaptations, +UNIX proliferated and differentiated in ways that few commercial products could +have. But it was never "free" in any sense. Rather, in combination with open +systems, it set the stage for what "free" could come to mean in the 1980s and +1990s. It was a nascent recursive public, confronting the technical and legal +challenges that would come to define the practices of Free Software. To suggest +that it represents some kind of "outside" to a functioning economic market +based in money is to misperceive how transformative of markets UNIX and the +Internet (and Free Software) have been. They have initiated an imagination of +moral and technical order that is not at all opposed to ideologies of +market-based governance. Indeed, if anything, what UNIX and Free Software +represent is an imagination of how to change an entire market-based governance +structure—not just specific markets in things—to include a form of public +sphere, a check on the power of existing authority. +={ AT&T ; + peer production ; + UNIX operating system : + allegiance to versions of ; + proliferation of software +} + +UNIX and Open Systems should thus be seen as early stages of a collective +technical experiment in transforming our imaginations of order, especially of +the moral order of publics, markets, and self-governing peoples. The +continuities and the gradualness of the change are more apparent in these +events than any sudden rupture or discontinuity that the "invention of the +Internet" or the passing of new intellectual-property laws might suggest. The +"reorientation of knowledge and power" is more dance than earthquake; it is +stratified in time, complex in its movements, and takes an experimental form +whose concrete traces are the networks, infrastructures, machines, laws, and +standards left in the wake of the experiments. +={ availability : + reorientation of power knowledge and +5 ; + experiment, collective technical +3 ; + infrastructure +} + +Availability, reusability, and modifiability are at the heart of this +reorientation. The experiments of UNIX and open systems would have come to +nothing if they had not also prompted a concurrent experimentation with +intellectual-property law, of which the copyleft license is the central and key +variable. Richard Stallman’s creation of GNU EMACS and the controversy over +propriety that it engendered was in many ways an attempt to deal with exactly +the same problem that UNIX vendors and open-systems advocates faced: how to +build extensibility into the software market—except that Stallman never saw it +as a market. For him, software was and is part of the human itself, +constitutive of our very freedom and, hence, inalienable. Extending software, +through collective mutual ,{[pg 309]}, aid, is thus tantamount to vitality, +progress, and self-actualization. But even for those who insist on seeing +software as mere product, the problem of extensibility remains. +Standardization, standards processes, and market entry all appear as political +problems as soon as extensibility is denied—and thus the legal solution +represented by copyleft appears as an option, even though it raises new and +troubling questions about the nature of competition and profitability. +={ Stallman, Richard ; + EMACS (text editor) : + controversy about ; + modifiability +4 ; + Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) +} + +New questions about competition and profitability have emerged from the massive +proliferation of hybrid commercial and academic forms, forms that bring with +them different traditions of sharing, credit, reputation, control, creation, +and dissemination of knowledge and products that require it. The new economic +demands on the university—all too easily labeled neoliberalization or +corporatization—mirror changing demands on industry that it come to look more +like universities, that is, that it give away more, circulate more, and +cooperate more. The development of UNIX, in its details, is a symptom of these +changes, and the success of Free Software is an unambiguous witness to them. +={ credit : + see also attribution +} + +The proliferation of hybrid commercial-academic forms in an era of +modifiability and reusability, among the debris of standards, standards +processes, and new experiments in intellectual property, results in a playing +field with a thousand different games, all of which revolve around renewed +experimentation with coordination, collaboration, adaptability, design, +evolution, gaming, playing, worlds, and worlding. These games are indicative of +the triumph of the American love of entrepreneurialism and experimentalism; +they relinquish the ideals of planning and hierarchy almost absolutely in favor +of a kind of embedded, technically and legally complex anarchism. It is here +that the idea of a public reemerges: the ambivalence between relinquishing +control absolutely and absolute distrust of government by the few. A powerful +public is a response, and a solution, so long as it remains fundamentally +independent of control by the few. Hence, a commitment, widespread and growing, +to a recursive public, an attempt to maintain and extend the kinds of +independent, authentic, autotelic public spheres that people encounter when +they come to an understanding of how Free Software and the Internet have +evolved. +={ anarchism ; + entrepreneurialism +} + +The open-access movement, and examples like Connexions, are attempts at +maintaining such publics. Some are conceived as bulwarks ,{[pg 310]}, against +encroaching corporatization, while others see themselves as novel and +innovative, but most share some of the practices hashed out in the evolution of +Free Software and the Internet. In terms of scholarly publishing and open +access, the movement has reignited discussions of ethics, norms, and method. +The Mertonian ideals are in place once more, this time less as facts of +scientific method than as goals. The problem of stabilizing collective +knowledge has moved from being an inherent feature of science to being a +problem that needs our attention. The reorientation of knowledge and power and +the proliferation of hybrid commercial-academic entities in an era of massive +dependence on scientific knowledge and information leads to a question about +the stabilization of that knowledge. +={ Merton, Robert : + Mertonian norms +} + +Understanding how Free Software works and how it has developed along with the +Internet and certain practices of legal and cultural critique may be essential +to understanding the reliable foundation of knowledge production and +circulation on which we still seek to ground legitimate forms of governance. +Without Free Software, the only response to the continuing forms of excess we +associate with illegitimate, unaccountable, unjust forms of governance might +just be mute cynicism. With it, we are in possession of a range of practical +tools, structured responses and clever ways of working through our complexity +toward the promises of a shared imagination of legitimate and just governance. +There is no doubt room for critique—and many scholars will demand it—but +scholarly critique will have to learn how to sit, easily or uneasily, with Free +Software as critique. Free Software can also exclude, just as any public or +public sphere can, but this is not, I think, cause for resistance, but cause +for joining. The alternative would be to create no new rules, no new practices, +no new procedures—that is, to have what we already have. Free Software does not +belong to geeks, and it is not the only form of becoming public, but it is one +that will have a profound structuring effect on any forms that follow. + +:B~ Bibliography + +1~bibliography Bibliography + +% ,{[pg 349]}, + +Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. 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London: Verso, 1994. + +:B~ Acknowledgement + +1~acknowledgement Acknowledgment + +% ,{[pg 379]}, + +Parts of this book have been published elsewhere. A much earlier version of +chapter 1 was published as "Geeks, Social Imaginaries and Recursive Publics," +Cultural Anthropology 20.2 (summer 2005); chapter 6 as "The EMACS Controversy," +in Mario Biagioli, Martha Woodmansee, and Peter Jaszi, eds., Contexts of +Invention (forthcoming); and parts of chapter 9 as "Punt to Culture," +Anthropological Quarterly 77.3. + +:B~ Library of Congress + +1~loc Library of Congress Catalog + +% ,{[pg 380]}, + +group{ + +christopher m. kelty +is an assistant professor of anthropology +at Rice University. + +Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data +Kelty, Christopher M. + +Two bits : + the cultural significance of free software / Christopher M. Kelty. p. cm. --(Experimental futures) +Includes bibliographical references and index. +ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-4242-7 (cloth : + alk. paper) +ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-4264-9 (pbk. : + alk. paper) +1. Information society. 2. Open source software—Social aspects. I. Title. +HM851K45 2008 +303.48'33—dc22 2007049447 + +}group + +% errata? text uses Leitl, Eugen index uses Leitl, Eugene diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/un_contracts_international_sale_of_goods_convention_1980.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/un_contracts_international_sale_of_goods_convention_1980.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ba7604a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/un_contracts_international_sale_of_goods_convention_1980.sst @@ -0,0 +1,1374 @@ +% SiSU 2.0 + +@title: United Nations Convention On Contracts For The International Sale Of Goods, 1980 (CISG) + +@creator: + :author: United Nations + :url: http://www.un.org/ + +@original: + :source: UNCITRAL, United Nations + +@date: + :published: 1980 + +@classify: + :subject: UNCITRAL, United Nations, sale of goods + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:convention;law:international:uniform law|sales law|CISG;CISG + :keywords: UNCITRAL, United Nations, sale of goods + +@make: + :headings: PART; Chapter; Section; Article; + :breaks: new=:A,:B; break=:C + +:A~ United Nations Convention On Contracts For The International Sale Of Goods, 1980 (CISG) + +1~pre [Preamble]-# + +THE STATES PARTIES TO THIS CONVENTION, + +BEARING IN MIND the broad objectives in the resolutions adopted by the sixth +special session of the General Assembly of the United Nations on the +establishment of a New International Economic Order, + +CONSIDERING that the development of international trade on the basis of +equality and mutual benefit is an important element in promoting friendly +relations among States, + +BEING OF THE OPINION that the adoption of uniform rules which govern contracts +for the international sale of goods and take into account the different social, +economic and legal systems would contribute to the removal of legal barriers in +international trade and promote the development of international trade, + +HAVE DECREED as follows: + +PART I - Sphere of Application and General Provisions + +Chapter I - Sphere of Application + +Article 1 + +(1) This Convention applies to contracts of sale of goods between parties whose +places of business are in different States: + +(a) when the States are Contracting States; or + +(b) when the rules of private international law lead to the application of the +law of a Contracting State. + +(2) The fact that the parties have their places of business in different States +is to be disregarded whenever this fact does not appear either from the +contract or from any dealings between, or from information disclosed by, the +parties at any time before or at the conclusion of the contract. + +(3) Neither the nationality of the parties nor the civil or commercial +character of the parties or of the contract is to be taken into consideration +in determining the application of this Convention. + +Article 2 + +This Convention does not apply to sales: + +(a) of goods bought for personal, family or household use, unless the seller, +at any time before or at the conclusion of the contract, neither knew nor ought +to have known that the goods were bought for any such use; + +(b) by auction; + +(c) on execution or otherwise by authority of law; + +(d) of stocks, shares, investment securities, negotiable instruments or money; + +(e) of ships, vessels, hovercraft or aircraft; + +(f) of electricity. + +Article 3 + +(1) Contracts for the supply of goods to be manufactured or produced are to be +considered sales unless the party who orders the goods undertakes to supply a +substantial part of the materials necessary for such manufacture or production. + +(2) This Convention does not apply to contracts in which the preponderant part +of the obligations of the party who furnishes the goods consists in the supply +of labour or other services. + +Article 4 + +This Convention governs only the formation of the contract of sale and the +rights and obligations of the seller and the buyer arising from such a +contract. In particular, except as otherwise expressly provided in this +Convention, it is not concerned with: + +(a) the validity of the contract or of any of its provisions or of any usage; + +(b) the effect which the contract may have on the property in the goods sold. + +Article 5 + +This Convention does not apply to the liability of the seller for death or +personal injury caused by the goods to any person. + +Article 6 + +The parties may exclude the application of this Convention or, subject to +article 12, derogate from or vary the effect of any of its provisions. + +Chapter II - General Provisions + +Article 7 + +(1) In the interpretation of this Convention, regard is to be had to its +international character and to the need to promote uniformity in its +application and the observance of good faith in international trade. + +(2) Questions concerning matters governed by this Convention which are not +expressly settled in it are to be settled in conformity with the general +principles on which it is based or, in the absence of such principles, in +conformity with the law applicable by virtue of the rules of private +international law. + +Article 8 + +(1) For the purposes of this Convention statements made by and other conduct of +a party are to be interpreted according to his intent where the other party +knew or could not have been unaware what that intent was. + +(2) If the preceding paragraph is not applicable, statements made by and other +conduct of a party are to be interpreted according to the understanding that a +reasonable person of the same kind as the other party would have had in the +same circumstances. + +(3) In determining the intent of a party or the understanding a reasonable +person would have had, due consideration is to be given to all relevant +circumstances of the case including the negotiations, any practices which the +parties have established between themselves, usages and any subsequent conduct +of the parties. + +Article 9 + +(1) The parties are bound by any usage to which they have agreed and by any +practices which they have established between themselves. + +(2) The parties are considered, unless otherwise agreed, to have impliedly made +applicable to their contract or its formation a usage of which the parties knew +or ought to have known and which in international trade is widely known to, and +regularly observed by, parties to contracts of the type involved in the +particular trade concerned. + +Article 10 + +For the purposes of this Convention: + +(a) if a party has more than one place of business, the place of business is +that which has the closest relationship to the contract and its performance, +having regard to the circumstances known to or contemplated by the parties at +any time before or at the conclusion of the contract; + +(b) if a party does not have a place of business, reference is to be made to +his habitual residence. + +Article 11 + +A contract of sale need not be concluded in or evidenced by writing and is not +subject to any other requirement as to form. It may be proved by any means, +including witnesses. + +Article 12 + +Any provision of article 11, article 29 or Part II of this Convention that +allows a contract of sale or its modification or termination by agreement or +any offer, acceptance or other indication of intention to be made in any form +other than in writing does not apply where any party has his place of business +in a Contracting State which has made a declaration under article 96 of this +Convention. The parties may not derogate from or vary the effect or this +article. + +Article 13 + +For the purposes of this Convention "writing" includes telegram and telex. + +PART II - Formation of the Contract + +Article 14 + +(1) A proposal for concluding a contract addressed to one or more specific +persons constitutes an offer if it is sufficiently definite and indicates the +intention of the offeror to be bound in case of acceptance. A proposal is +sufficiently definite if it indicates the goods and expressly or implicitly +fixes or makes provision for determining the quantity and the price. + +(2) A proposal other than one addressed to one or more specific persons is to +be considered merely as an invitation to make offers, unless the contrary is +clearly indicated by the person making the proposal. + +Article 15 + +(1) An offer becomes effective when it reaches the offeree. + +(2) An offer, even if it is irrevocable, may be withdrawn if the withdrawal +reaches the offeree before or at the same time as the offer. + +Article 16 + +(1) Until a contract is concluded an offer may be revoked if the revocation +reaches the offeree before he has dispatched an acceptance. + +(2) However, an offer cannot be revoked: + +(a) if it indicates, whether by stating a fixed time for acceptance or +otherwise, that it is irrevocable; or + +(b) if it was reasonable for the offeree to rely on the offer as being +irrevocable and the offeree has acted in reliance on the offer. + +Article 17 + +An offer, even if it is irrevocable, is terminated when a rejection reaches the +offeror. + +Article 18 + +(1) A statement made by or other conduct of the offeree indicating assent to an +offer is an acceptance. Silence or inactivity does not in itself amount to +acceptance. + +(2) An acceptance of an offer becomes effective at the moment the indication of +assent reaches the offeror. An acceptance is not effective if the indication of +assent does not reach the offeror within the time he has fixed or, if no time +is fixed, within a reasonable time, due account being taken of the +circumstances of the transaction, including the rapidity of the means of +communication employed by the offeror. An oral offer must be accepted +immediately unless the circumstances indicate otherwise. + +(3) However, if, by virtue of the offer or as a result of practices which the +parties have established between themselves or of usage, the offeree may +indicate assent by performing an act, such as one relating to the dispatch of +the goods or payment of the price, without notice to the offeror, the +acceptance is effective at the moment the act is performed, provided that the +act is performed within the period of time laid down in the preceding +paragraph. + +Article 19 + +(1) A reply to an offer which purports to be an acceptance but contains +additions, limitations or other modifications is a rejection of the offer and +constitutes a counter-offer. + +(2) However, a reply to an offer which purports to be an acceptance but +contains additional or different terms which do not materially alter the terms +of the offer constitutes an acceptance, unless the offeror, without undue +delay, objects orally to the discrepancy or dispatches a notice to that effect. +If he does not so object, the terms of the contract are the terms of the offer +with the modifications contained in the acceptance. + +(3) Additional or different terms relating, among other things, to the price, +payment, quality and quantity of the goods, place and time of delivery, extent +of one party's liability to the other or the settlement of disputes are +considered to alter the terms of the offer materially. + +Article 20 + +(1) A period of time for acceptance fixed by the offeror in a telegram or a +letter begins to run from the moment the telegram is handed in for dispatch or +from the date shown on the letter or, if no such date is shown, from the date +shown on the envelope. A period of time for acceptance fixed by the offeror by +telephone, telex or other means of instantaneous communication, begins to run +from the moment that the offer reaches the offeree. + +(2) Official holidays or non-business days occurring during the period for +acceptance are included in calculating the period. However, if a notice of +acceptance cannot be delivered at the address of the offeror on the last day of +the period because that day falls on an official holiday or a non-business day +at the place of business of the offeror, the period is extended until the first +business day which follows. + +Article 21 + +(1) A late acceptance is nevertheless effective as an acceptance if without +delay the offeror orally so informs the offeree or dispatches a notice to that +effect. + +(2) If a letter or other writing containing a late acceptance shows that it has +been sent in such circumstances that if its transmission had been normal it +would have reached the offeror in due time, the late acceptance is effective as +an acceptance unless, without delay, the offeror orally informs the offeree +that he considers his offer as having lapsed or dispatches a notice to that +effect. + +Article 22 + +An acceptance may be withdrawn if the withdrawal reaches the offeror before or +at the same time as the acceptance would have become effective. + +Article 23 + +A contract is concluded at the moment when an acceptance of an offer becomes +effective in accordance with the provisions of this Convention. + +Article 24 + +For the purposes of this Part of the Convention, an offer, declaration of +acceptance or any other indication of intention "reaches" the addressee when it +is made orally to him or delivered by any other means to him personally, to his +place of business or mailing address or, if he does not have a place of +business or mailing address, to his habitual residence. + +PART III - Sale of Goods + +Chapter I - General Provisions + +Article 25 + +A breach of contract committed by one of the parties is fundamental if it +results in such detriment to the other party as substantially to deprive him of +what he is entitled to expect under the contract, unless the party in breach +did not foresee and a reasonable person of the same kind in the same +circumstances would not have foreseen such a result. + +Article 26 + +A declaration of avoidance of the contract is effective only if made by notice +to the other party. + +Article 27 + +Unless otherwise expressly provided in this Part of the Convention, if any +notice, request or other communication is given or made by a party in +accordance with this Part and by means appropriate in the circumstances, a +delay or error in the transmission of the communication or its failure to +arrive does not deprive that party of the right to rely on the communication. + +Article 28 + +If, in accordance with the provisions of this Convention, one party is entitled +to require performance of any obligation by the other party, a court is not +bound to enter a judgement for specific performance unless the court would do +so under its own law in respect of similar contracts of sale not governed by +this Convention. + +Article 29 + +(1) A contract may be modified or terminated by the mere agreement of the +parties. + +(2) A contract in writing which contains a provision requiring any modification +or termination by agreement to be in writing may not be otherwise modified or +terminated by agreement. However, a party may be precluded by his conduct from +asserting such a provision to the extent that the other party has relied on +that conduct. + +Chapter II - Obligations of the Seller + +Article 30 + +The seller must deliver the goods, hand over any documents relating to them and +transfer the property in the goods, as required by the contract and this +Convention. + +Section I - Delivery of the goods and handing over of documents + +Article 31 + +If the seller is not bound to deliver the goods at any other particular place, +his obligation to deliver consists: + +(a) if the contract of sale involves carriage of the goods - in handing the +goods over to the first carrier for transmission to the buyer; + +(b) if, in cases not within the preceding subparagraph, the contract related to +specific goods, or unidentified goods to be drawn from a specific stock or to +be manufactured or produced, and at the time of the conclusion of the contract +the parties knew that the goods were at, or were to be manufactured or produced +at, a particular place - in placing the goods at the buyer's disposal at that +place; + +(c) in other cases - in placing the goods at the buyer's disposal at the place +where the seller had his place of business at the time of the conclusion of the +contract. + +Article 32 + +(1) If the seller, in accordance with the contract or this Convention, hands +the goods over to a carrier and if the goods are not clearly identified to the +contract by markings on the goods, by shipping documents or otherwise, the +seller must give the buyer notice of the consignment specifying the goods. + +(2) If the seller is bound to arrange for carriage of the goods, he must make +such contracts as are necessary for carriage to the place fixed by means of +transportation appropriate in the circumstances and according to the usual +terms for such transportation. + +(3) If the seller is not bound to effect insurance in respect of the carriage +of the goods, he must, at the buyer's request, provide him with all available +information necessary to enable him to effect such insurance. + +Article 33 + +The seller must deliver the goods: + +(a) if a date is fixed by or determinable from the contract, on that date; + +(b) if a period of time is fixed by or determinable from the contract, at any +time within that period unless circumstances indicate that the buyer is to +choose a date; or + +(c) in any other case, within a reasonable time after the conclusion of the +contract. + +Article 34 + +If the seller is bound to hand over documents relating to the goods, he must +hand them over at the time and place and in the form required by the contract. +If the seller has handed over documents before that time, he may, up to that +time, cure any lack of conformity in the documents, if the exercise of this +right does not cause the buyer unreasonable inconvenience or unreasonable +expense. However, the buyer retains any right to claim damages as provided for +in this Convention. + +Section II - Conformity of the goods and third party claims + +Article 35 + +(1) The seller must deliver goods which are of the quantity, quality and +description required by the contract and which are contained or packaged in the +manner required by the contract. + +(2) Except where the parties have agreed otherwise, the goods do not conform +with the contract unless they: + +(a) are fit for the purposes for which goods of the same description would +ordinarily be used; + +(b) are fit for any particular purpose expressly or impliedly made known to the +seller at the time of the conclusion of the contract, except where the +circumstances show that the buyer did not rely, or that it was unreasonable for +him to rely, on the seller's skill and judgement; + +(c) possess the qualities of goods which the seller has held out to the buyer +as a sample or model; + +(d) are contained or packaged in the manner usual for such goods or, where +there is no such manner, in a manner adequate to preserve and protect the +goods. + +(3) The seller is not liable under subparagraphs (a) to (d) of the preceding +paragraph for any lack of conformity of the goods if at the time of the +conclusion of the contract the buyer knew or could not have been unaware of +such lack of conformity. + +Article 36 + +(1) The seller is liable in accordance with the contract and this Convention +for any lack of conformity which exists at the time when the risk passes to the +buyer, even though the lack of conformity becomes apparent only after that +time. + +(2) The seller is also liable for any lack of conformity which occurs after the +time indicated in the preceding paragraph and which is due to a breach of any +of his obligations, including a breach of any guarantee that for a period of +time the goods will remain fit for their ordinary purpose or for some +particular purpose or will retain specified qualities or characteristics. + +Article 37 + +If the seller has delivered goods before the date for delivery, he may, up to +that date, deliver any missing part or make up any deficiency in the quantity +of the goods delivered, or deliver goods in replacement of any non-conforming +goods delivered or remedy any lack of conformity in the goods delivered, +provided that the exercise of this right does not cause the buyer unreasonable +inconvenience or unreasonable expense. However, the buyer retains any right to +claim damages as provided for in this Convention. + +Article 38 + +(1) The buyer must examine the goods, or cause them to be examined, within as +short a period as is practicable in the circumstances. + +(2) If the contract involves carriage of the goods, examination may be deferred +until after the goods have arrived at their destination. + +(3) If the goods are redirected in transit or redispatched by the buyer without +a reasonable opportunity for examination by him and at the time of the +conclusion of the contract the seller knew or ought to have known of the +possibility of such redirection or redispatch, examination may be deferred +until after the goods have arrived at the new destination. + +Article 39 + +(1) The buyer loses the right to rely on a lack of conformity of the goods if +he does not give notice to the seller specifying the nature of the lack of +conformity within a reasonable time after he has discovered it or ought to have +discovered it. + +(2) In any event, the buyer loses the right to rely on a lack of conformity of +the goods if he does not give the seller notice thereof at the latest within a +period of two years from the date on which the goods were actually handed over +to the buyer, unless this time-limit is inconsistent with a contractual period +of guarantee. + +Article 40 + +The seller is not entitled to rely on the provisions of articles 38 and 39 if +the lack of conformity relates to facts of which he knew or could not have been +unaware and which he did not disclose to the buyer. + +Article 41 + +The seller must deliver goods which are free from any right or claim of a third +party, unless the buyer agreed to take the goods subject to that right or +claim. However, if such right or claim is based on industrial property or other +intellectual property, the seller's obligation is governed by article 42. + +Article 42 + +(1) The seller must deliver goods which are free from any right or claim of a +third party based on industrial property or other intellectual property, of +which at the time of the conclusion of the contract the seller knew or could +not have been unaware, provided that the right or claim is based on industrial +property or other intellectual property: + +(a) under the law of the State where the goods will be resold or otherwise +used, if it was contemplated by the parties at the time of the conclusion of +the contract that the goods would be resold or otherwise used in that State; or + +(b) in any other case, under the law of the State where the buyer has his place +of business. + +(2) The obligation of the seller under the preceding paragraph does not extend +to cases where: + +(a) at the time of the conclusion of the contract the buyer knew or could not +have been unaware of the right or claim; or + +(b) the right or claim results from the seller's compliance with technical +drawings, designs, formulae or other such specifications furnished by the +buyer. + +Article 43 + +(1) The buyer loses the right to rely on the provisions of article 41 or +article 42 if he does not give notice to the seller specifying the nature of +the right or claim of the third party within a reasonable time after he has +become aware or ought to have become aware of the right or claim. + +(2) The seller is not entitled to rely on the provisions of the preceding +paragraph if he knew of the right or claim of the third party and the nature of +it. + +Article 44 + +Notwithstanding the provisions of paragraph (1) of article 39 and paragraph (1) +of article 43, the buyer may reduce the price in accordance with article 50 or +claim damages, except for loss of profit, if he has a reasonable excuse for his +failure to give the required notice. + +Section III - Remedies for breach of contract by the seller + +Article 45 + +(1) If the seller fails to perform any of his obligations under the contract or +this Convention, the buyer may: + +(a) exercise the rights provided in articles 46 to 52; + +(b) claim damages as provided in articles 74 to 77. + +(2) The buyer is not deprived of any right he may have to claim damages by +exercising his right to other remedies. + +(3) No period of grace may be granted to the seller by a court or arbitral +tribunal when the buyer resorts to a remedy for breach of contract. + +Article 46 + +(1) The buyer may require performance by the seller of his obligations unless +the buyer has resorted to a remedy which is inconsistent with this requirement. + +(2) If the goods do not conform with the contract, the buyer may require +delivery of substitute goods only if the lack of conformity constitutes a +fundamental breach of contract and a request for substitute goods is made +either in conjunction with notice given under article 39 or within a reasonable +time thereafter. + +(3) If the goods do not conform with the contract, the buyer may require the +seller to remedy the lack of conformity by repair, unless this is unreasonable +having regard to all the circumstances. A request for repair must be made +either in conjunction with notice given under article 39 or within a reasonable +time thereafter. + +Article 47 + +(1) The buyer may fix an additional period of time of reasonable length for +performance by the seller of his obligations. + +(2) Unless the buyer has received notice from the seller that he will not +perform within the period so fixed, the buyer may not, during that period, +resort to any remedy for breach of contract. However, the buyer is not deprived +thereby of any right he may have to claim damages for delay in performance. + +Article 48 + +(1) Subject to article 49, the seller may, even after the date for delivery, +remedy at his own expense any failure to perform his obligations, if he can do +so without unreasonable delay and without causing the buyer unreasonable +inconvenience or uncertainty of reimbursement by the seller of expenses +advanced by the buyer. However, the buyer retains any right to claim damages as +provided for in this Convention. + +(2) If the seller requests the buyer to make known whether he will accept +performance and the buyer does not comply with the request within a reasonable +time, the seller may perform within the time indicated in his request. The +buyer may not, during that period of time, resort to any remedy which is +inconsistent with performance by the seller. + +(3) A notice by the seller that he will perform within a specified period of +time is assumed to include a request, under the preceding paragraph, that the +buyer make known his decision. + +(4) A request or notice by the seller under paragraph (2) or (3) of this +article is not effective unless received by the buyer. + +Article 49 + +(1) The buyer may declare the contract avoided: + +(a) if the failure by the seller to perform any of his obligations under the +contract or this Convention amounts to a fundamental breach of contract; or + +(b) in case of non-delivery, if the seller does not deliver the goods within +the additional period of time fixed by the buyer in accordance with paragraph +(1) of article 47 or declares that he will not deliver within the period so +fixed. + +(2) However, in cases where the seller has delivered the goods, the buyer loses +the right to declare the contract avoided unless he does so: + +(a) in respect of late delivery, within a reasonable time after he has become +aware that delivery has been made; + +(b) in respect of any breach other than late delivery, within a reasonable +time: + +(i) after he knew or ought to have known of the breach; + +(ii) after the expiration of any additional period of time fixed by the buyer +in accordance with paragraph (1) of article 47, or after the seller has +declared that he will not perform his obligations within such an additional +period; or + +(iii) after the expiration of any additional period of time indicated by the +seller in accordance with paragraph (2) of article 48, or after the buyer has +declared that he will not accept performance. + +Article 50 + +If the goods do not conform with the contract and whether or not the price has +already been paid, the buyer may reduce the price in the same proportion as the +value that the goods actually delivered had at the time of the delivery bears +to the value that conforming goods would have had at that time. However, if the +seller remedies any failure to perform his obligations in accordance with +article 37 or article 48 or if the buyer refuses to accept performance by the +seller in accordance with those articles, the buyer may not reduce the price. + +Article 51 + +(1) If the seller delivers only a part of the goods or if only a part of the +goods delivered is in conformity with the contract, articles 46 to 50 apply in +respect of the part which is missing or which does not conform. + +(2) The buyer may declare the contract avoided in its entirety only if the +failure to make delivery completely or in conformity with the contract amounts +to a fundamental breach of the contract. + +Article 52 + +(1) If the seller delivers the goods before the date fixed, the buyer may take +delivery or refuse to take delivery. + +(2) If the seller delivers a quantity of goods greater than that provided for +in the contract, the buyer may take delivery or refuse to take delivery of the +excess quantity. If the buyer takes delivery of all or part of the excess +quantity, he must pay for it at the contract rate. + +Chapter III - Obligations of the Buyer + +Article 53 + +The buyer must pay the price for the goods and take delivery of them as +required by the contract and this Convention. + +Section I - Payment of the price + +Article 54 + +The buyer's obligation to pay the price includes taking such steps and +complying with such formalities as may be required under the contract or any +laws and regulations to enable payment to be made. + +Article 55 + +Where a contract has been validly concluded but does not expressly or +implicitly fix or make provision for determining the price, the parties are +considered, in the absence of any indication to the contrary, to have impliedly +made reference to the price generally charged at the time of the conclusion of +the contract for such goods sold under comparable circumstances in the trade +concerned. + +Article 56 + +If the price is fixed according to the weight of the goods, in case of doubt it +is to be determined by the net weight. + +Article 57 + +(1) If the buyer is not bound to pay the price at any other particular place, +he must pay it to the seller: + +(a) at the seller's place of business; or + +(b) if the payment is to be made against the handing over of the goods or of +documents, at the place where the handing over takes place. + +(2) The seller must bear any increases in the expenses incidental to payment +which is caused by a change in his place of business subsequent to the +conclusion of the contract. + +Article 58 + +(1) If the buyer is not bound to pay the price at any other specific time, he +must pay it when the seller places either the goods or documents controlling +their disposition at the buyer's disposal in accordance with the contract and +this Convention. The seller may make such payment a condition for handing over +the goods or documents. + +(2) If the contract involves carriage of the goods, the seller may dispatch the +goods on terms whereby the goods, or documents controlling their disposition, +will not be handed over to the buyer except against payment of the price. + +(3) The buyer is not bound to pay the price until he has had an opportunity to +examine the goods, unless the procedures for delivery or payment agreed upon by +the parties are inconsistent with his having such an opportunity. + +Article 59 + +The buyer must pay the price on the date fixed by or determinable from the +contract and this Convention without the need for any request or compliance +with any formality on the part of the seller. + +Section II - Taking delivery + +Article 60 + +The buyer's obligation to take delivery consists: + +(a) in doing all the acts which could reasonably be expected of him in order to +enable the seller to make delivery; and + +(b) in taking over the goods. + +Section III - Remedies for breach of contract by the buyer + +Article 61 + +(1) If the buyer fails to perform any of his obligations under the contract or +this Convention, the seller may: + +(a) exercise the rights provided in articles 62 to 65; + +(b) claim damages as provided in articles 74 to 77. + +(2) The seller is not deprived of any right he may have to claim damages by +exercising his right to other remedies. + +(3) No period of grace may be granted to the buyer by a court or arbitral +tribunal when the seller resorts to a remedy for breach of contract. + +Article 62 + +The seller may require the buyer to pay the price, take delivery or perform his +other obligations, unless the seller has resorted to a remedy which is +inconsistent with this requirement. + +Article 63 + +(1) The seller may fix an additional period of time of reasonable length for +performance by the buyer of his obligations. + +(2) Unless the seller has received notice from the buyer that he will not +perform within the period so fixed, the seller may not, during that period, +resort to any remedy for breach of contract. However, the seller is not +deprived thereby of any right he may have to claim damages for delay in +performance. + +Article 64 + +(1) The seller may declare the contract avoided: + +(a) if the failure by the buyer to perform any of his obligations under the +contract or this Convention amounts to a fundamental breach of contract; or + +(b) if the buyer does not, within the additional period of time fixed by the +seller in accordance with paragraph (1) of article 63, perform his obligation +to pay the price or take delivery of the goods, or if he declares that he will +not do so within the period so fixed. + +(2) However, in cases where the buyer has paid the price, the seller loses the +right to declare the contract avoided unless he does so: + +(a) in respect of late performance by the buyer, before the seller has become +aware that performance has been rendered; or + +(b) in respect of any breach other than late performance by the buyer, within a +reasonable time: + +(i) after the seller knew or ought to have known of the breach; or + +(ii) after the expiration of any additional period of time fixed by the seller +in accordance with paragraph (1) or article 63, or after the buyer has declared +that he will not perform his obligations within such an additional period. + +Article 65 + +(1) If under the contract the buyer is to specify the form, measurement or +other features of the goods and he fails to make such specification either on +the date agreed upon or within a reasonable time after receipt of a request +from the seller, the seller may, without prejudice to any other rights he may +have, make the specification himself in accordance with the requirements of the +buyer that may be known to him. + +(2) If the seller makes the specification himself, he must inform the buyer of +the details thereof and must fix a reasonable time within which the buyer may +make a different specification. If, after receipt of such a communication, the +buyer fails to do so within the time so fixed, the specification made by the +seller is binding. + +Chapter IV - Passing of Risk + +Article 66 + +Loss of or damage to the goods after the risk has passed to the buyer does not +discharge him from his obligation to pay the price, unless the loss or damage +is due to an act or omission of the seller. + +Article 67 + +(1) If the contract of sale involves carriage of the goods and the seller is +not bound to hand them over at a particular place, the risk passes to the buyer +when the goods are handed over to the first carrier for transmission to the +buyer in accordance with the contract of sale. If the seller is bound to hand +the goods over to a carrier at a particular place, the risk does not pass to +the buyer until the goods are handed over to the carrier at that place. The +fact that the seller is authorized to retain documents controlling the +disposition of the goods does not affect the passage of the risk. + +(2) Nevertheless, the risk does not pass to the buyer until the goods are +clearly identified to the contract, whether by markings on the goods, by +shipping documents, by notice given to the buyer or otherwise. + +Article 68 + +The risk in respect of goods sold in transit passes to the buyer from the time +of the conclusion of the contract. However, if the circumstances so indicate, +the risk is assumed by the buyer from the time the goods were handed over to +the carrier who issued the documents embodying the contract of carriage. +Nevertheless, if at the time of the conclusion of the contract of sale the +seller knew or ought to have known that the goods had been lost or damaged and +did not disclose this to the buyer, the loss or damage is at the risk of the +seller. + +Article 69 + +(1) In cases not within articles 67 and 68, the risk passes to the buyer when +he takes over the goods or, if he does not do so in due time, from the time +when the goods are placed at his disposal and he commits a breach of contract +by failing to take delivery. + +(2) However, if the buyer is bound to take over the goods at a place other than +a place of business of the seller, the risk passes when delivery is due and the +buyer is aware of the fact that the goods are placed at his disposal at that +place. + +(3) If the contract relates to goods not then identified, the goods are +considered not to be placed at the disposal of the buyer until they are clearly +identified to the contract. + +Article 70 + +If the seller has committed a fundamental breach of contract, articles 67, 68 +and 69 do not impair the remedies available to the buyer on account of the +breach. + +Chapter V - Provisions Common to the Obligations of the Seller and of the Buyer + +Section I - Anticipatory breach and instalment contracts + +Article 71 + +(1) A party may suspend the performance of his obligations if, after the +conclusion of the contract, it becomes apparent that the other party will not +perform a substantial part of his obligations as a result of: + +(a) a serious deficiency in his ability to perform or in his creditworthiness; +or + +(b) his conduct in preparing to perform or in performing the contract. + +(2) If the seller has already dispatched the goods before the grounds described +in the preceding paragraph become evident, he may prevent the handing over of +the goods to the buyer even though the buyer holds a document which entitles +him to obtain them. The present paragraph relates only to the rights in the +goods as between the buyer and the seller. + +(3) A party suspending performance, whether before or after dispatch of the +goods, must immediately give notice of the suspension to the other party and +must continue with performance if the other party provides adequate assurance +of his performance. + +Article 72 + +(1) If prior to the date for performance of the contract it is clear that one +of the parties will commit a fundamental breach of contract, the other party +may declare the contract avoided. + +(2) If time allows, the party intending to declare the contract avoided must +give reasonable notice to the other party in order to permit him to provide +adequate assurance of his performance. + +(3) The requirements of the preceding paragraph do not apply if the other party +has declared that he will not perform his obligations. + +Article 73 + +(1) In the case of a contract for delivery of goods by instalments, if the +failure of one party to perform any of his obligations in respect of any +instalment constitutes a fundamental breach of contract with respect to that +instalment, the other party may declare the contract avoided with respect to +that instalment. + +(2) If one party's failure to perform any of his obligations in respect of any +instalment gives the other party good grounds to conclude that a fundamental +breach of contract will occur with respect to future instalments, he may +declare the contract avoided for the future, provided that he does so within a +reasonable time. + +(3) A buyer who declares the contract avoided in respect of any delivery may, +at the same time, declare it avoided in respect of deliveries already made or +of future deliveries if, by reason of their interdependence, those deliveries +could not be used for the purpose contemplated by the parties at the time of +the conclusion of the contract. + +Section II - Damages + +Article 74 + +Damages for breach of contract by one party consist of a sum equal to the loss, +including loss of profit, suffered by the other party as a consequence of the +breach. Such damages may not exceed the loss which the party in breach foresaw +or ought to have foreseen at the time of the conclusion of the contract, in the +light of the facts and matters of which he then knew or ought to have known, as +a possible consequence of the breach of contract. + +Article 75 + +If the contract is avoided and if, in a reasonable manner and within a +reasonable time after avoidance, the buyer has bought goods in replacement or +the seller has resold the goods, the party claiming damages may recover the +difference between the contract price and the price in the substitute +transaction as well as any further damages recoverable under article 74. + +Article 76 + +(1) If the contract is avoided and there is a current price for the goods, the +party claiming damages may, if he has not made a purchase or resale under +article 75, recover the difference between the price fixed by the contract and +the current price at the time of avoidance as well as any further damages +recoverable under article 74. If, however, the party claiming damages has +avoided the contract after taking over the goods, the current price at the time +of such taking over shall be applied instead of the current price at the time +of avoidance. + +(2) For the purposes of the preceding paragraph, the current price is the price +prevailing at the place where delivery of the goods should have been made or, +if there is no current price at that place, the price at such other place as +serves as a reasonable substitute, making due allowance for differences in the +cost of transporting the goods. + +Article 77 + +A party who relies on a breach of contract must take such measures as are +reasonable in the circumstances to mitigate the loss, including loss of profit, +resulting from the breach. If he fails to take such measures, the party in +breach may claim a reduction in the damages in the amount by which the loss +should have been mitigated. + +Section III - Interest + +Article 78 + +If a party fails to pay the price or any other sum that is in arrears, the +other party is entitled to interest on it, without prejudice to any claim for +damages recoverable under article 74. + +Section IV - Exemptions + +Article 79 + +(1) A party is not liable for a failure to perform any of his obligations if he +proves that the failure was due to an impediment beyond his control and that he +could not reasonably be expected to have taken the impediment into account at +the time of the conclusion of the contract or to have avoided or overcome it or +its consequences. + +(2) If the party's failure is due to the failure by a third person whom he has +engaged to perform the whole or a part of the contract, that party is exempt +from liability only if: + +(a) he is exempt under the preceding paragraph; and + +(b) the person whom he has so engaged would be so exempt if the provisions of +that paragraph were applied to him. + +(3) The exemption provided by this article has effect for the period during +which the impediment exists. + +(4) The party who fails to perform must give notice to the other party of the +impediment and its effect on his ability to perform. If the notice is not +received by the other party within a reasonable time after the party who fails +to perform knew or ought to have known of the impediment, he is liable for +damages resulting from such non-receipt. + +(5) Nothing in this article prevents either party from exercising any right +other than to claim damages under this Convention. + +Article 80 + +A party may not rely on a failure of the other party to perform, to the extent +that such failure was caused by the first party's act or omission. + +Section V - Effects of avoidance + +Article 81 + +(1) Avoidance of the contract releases both parties from their obligations +under it, subject to any damages which may be due. Avoidance does not affect +any provision of the contract for the settlement of disputes or any other +provision of the contract governing the rights and obligations of the parties +consequent upon the avoidance of the contract. + +(2) A party who has performed the contract either wholly or in part may claim +restitution from the other party of whatever the first party has supplied or +paid under the contract. If both parties are bound to make restitution, they +must do so concurrently. + +Article 82 + +(1) The buyer loses the right to declare the contract avoided or to require the +seller to deliver substitute goods if it is impossible for him to make +restitution of the goods substantially in the condition in which he received +them. + +(2) The preceding paragraph does not apply: + +(a) if the impossibility of making restitution of the goods or of making +restitution of the goods substantially in the condition in which the buyer +received them is not due to his act or omission; + +(b) if the goods or part of the goods have perished or deteriorated as a result +of the examination provided for in article 38; or + +(c) if the goods or part of the goods have been sold in the normal course of +business or have been consumed or transformed by the buyer in the course normal +use before he discovered or ought to have discovered the lack of conformity. + +Article 83 + +A buyer who has lost the right to declare the contract avoided or to require +the seller to deliver substitute goods in accordance with article 82 retains +all other remedies under the contract and this Convention. + +Article 84 + +(1) If the seller is bound to refund the price, he must also pay interest on +it, from the date on which the price was paid. + +(2) The buyer must account to the seller for all benefits which he has derived +from the goods or part of them: + +(a) if he must make restitution of the goods or part of them; or + +(b) if it is impossible for him to make restitution of all or part of the goods +or to make restitution of all or part of the goods substantially in the +condition in which he received them, but he has nevertheless declared the +contract avoided or required the seller to deliver substitute goods. + +Section VI - Preservation of the goods + +Article 85 + +If the buyer is in delay in taking delivery of the goods or, where payment of +the price and delivery of the goods are to be made concurrently, if he fails to +pay the price, and the seller is either in possession of the goods or otherwise +able to control their disposition, the seller must take such steps as are +reasonable in the circumstances to preserve them. He is entitled to retain them +until he has been reimbursed his reasonable expenses by the buyer. + +Article 86 + +(1) If the buyer has received the goods and intends to exercise any right under +the contract or this Convention to reject them, he must take such steps to +preserve them as are reasonable in the circumstances. He is entitled to retain +them until he has been reimbursed his reasonable expenses by the seller. + +(2) If goods dispatched to the buyer have been placed at his disposal at their +destination and he exercises the right to reject them, he must take possession +of them on behalf of the seller, provided that this can be done without payment +of the price and without unreasonable inconvenience or unreasonable expense. +This provision does not apply if the seller or a person authorized to take +charge of the goods on his behalf is present at the destination. If the buyer +takes possession of the goods under this paragraph, his rights and obligations +are governed by the preceding paragraph. + +Article 87 + +A party who is bound to take steps to preserve the goods may deposit them in a +warehouse of a third person at the expense of the other party provided that the +expense incurred is not unreasonable. + +Article 88 + +(1) A party who is bound to preserve the goods in accordance with article 85 or +86 may sell them by any appropriate means if there has been an unreasonable +delay by the other party in taking possession of the goods or in taking them +back or in paying the price or the cost of preservation, provided that +reasonable notice of the intention to sell has been given to the other party. + +(2) If the goods are subject to rapid deterioration or their preservation would +involve unreasonable expense, a party who is bound to preserve the goods in +accordance with article 85 or 86 must take reasonable measures to sell them. To +the extent possible he must give notice to the other party of his intention to +sell. + +(3) A party selling the goods has the right to retain out of the proceeds of +sale an amount equal to the reasonable expenses of preserving the goods and of +selling them. He must account to the other party for the balance. + +PART IV - Final Provisions + +Article 89 + +The Secretary-General of the United Nations is hereby designated as the +depositary for this Convention. + +Article 90 + +This Convention does not prevail over any international agreement which has +already been or may be entered into and which contains provisions concerning +the matters governed by this Convention, provided that the parties have their +places of business in States parties to such agreement. + +Article 91 + +(1) This Convention is open for signature at the concluding meeting of the +United Nations Conference on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and +will remain open for signature by all States at the Headquarters of the United +Nations, New York until 30 September 1981. + +(2) This Convention is subject to ratification, acceptance or approval by the +signatory States. + +(3) This Convention is open for accession by all States which are not signatory +States as from the date it is open for signature. + +(4) Instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval and accession are to be +deposited with the Secretary-General of the United Nations. + +Article 92 + +(1) A Contracting State may declare at the time of signature, ratification, +acceptance, approval or accession that it will not be bound by Part II of this +Convention or that it will not be bound by Part III of this Convention. + +(2) A Contracting State which makes a declaration in accordance with the +preceding paragraph in respect of Part II or Part III of this Convention is not +to be considered a Contracting State within paragraph (1) of article 1 of this +Convention in respect of matters governed by the Part to which the declaration +applies. + +Article 93 + +(1) If a Contracting State has two or more territorial units in which, +according to its constitution, different systems of law are applicable in +relation to the matters dealt with in this Convention, it may, at the time of +signature, ratification, acceptance, approval or accession, declare that this +Convention is to extend to all its territorial units or only to one or more of +them, and may amend its declaration by submitting another declaration at any +time. + +(2) These declarations are to be notified to the depositary and are to state +expressly the territorial units to which the Convention extends. + +(3) If, by virtue of a declaration under this article, this Convention extends +to one or more but not all of the territorial units of a Contracting State, and +if the place of business of a party is located in that State, this place of +business, for the purposes of this Convention, is considered not to be in a +Contracting State, unless it is in a territorial unit to which the Convention +extends. + +(4) If a Contracting State makes no declaration under paragraph (1) of this +article, the Convention is to extend to all territorial units of that State. + +Article 94 + +(1) Two or more Contracting States which have the same or closely related legal +rules on matters governed by this Convention may at any time declare that the +Convention is not to apply to contracts of sale or to their formation where the +parties have their places of business in those States. Such declarations may be +made jointly or by reciprocal unilateral declarations. + +(2) A Contracting State which has the same or closely related legal rules on +matters governed by this Convention as one or more non-Contracting States may +at any time declare that the Convention is not to apply to contracts of sale or +to their formation where the parties have their places of business in those +States. + +(3) If a State which is the object of a declaration under the preceding +paragraph subsequently becomes a Contracting State, the declaration made will, +as from the date on which the Convention enters into force in respect of the +new Contracting State, have the effect of a declaration made under paragraph +(1), provided that the new Contracting State joins in such declaration or makes +a reciprocal unilateral declaration. + +Article 95 + +Any State may declare at the time of the deposit of its instrument of +ratification, acceptance, approval or accession that it will not be bound by +subparagraph (1)(b) of article 1 of this Convention. + +Article 96 + +A Contracting State whose legislation requires contracts of sale to be +concluded in or evidenced by writing may at any time make a declaration in +accordance with article 12 that any provision of article 11, article 29, or +Part II of this Convention, that allows a contract of sale or its modification +or termination by agreement or any offer, acceptance, or other indication of +intention to be made in any form other than in writing, does not apply where +any party has his place of business in that State. + +Article 97 + +(1) Declarations made under this Convention at the time of signature are +subject to confirmation upon ratification, acceptance or approval. + +(2) Declarations and confirmations of declarations are to be in writing and be +formally notified to the depositary. + +(3) A declaration takes effect simultaneously with the entry into force of this +Convention in respect of the State concerned. However, a declaration of which +the depositary receives formal notification after such entry into force takes +effect on the first day of the month following the expiration of six months +after the date of its receipt by the depositary. Reciprocal unilateral +declarations under article 94 take effect on the first day of the month +following the expiration of six months after the receipt of the latest +declaration by the depositary. + +(4) Any State which makes a declaration under this Convention may withdraw it +at any time by a formal notification in writing addressed to the depositary. +Such withdrawal is to take effect on the first day of the month following the +expiration of six months after the date of the receipt of the notification by +the depositary. + +(5) A withdrawal of a declaration made under article 94 renders inoperative, as +from the date on which the withdrawal takes effect, any reciprocal declaration +made by another State under that article. + +Article 98 + +No reservations are permitted except those expressly authorized in this +Convention. + +Article 99 + +(1) This Convention enters into force, subject to the provisions of paragraph +(6) of this article, on the first day of the month following the expiration of +twelve months after the date of deposit of the tenth instrument of +ratification, acceptance, approval or accession, including an instrument which +contains a declaration made under article 92. + +(2) When a State ratifies, accepts, approves or accedes to this Convention +after the deposit of the tenth instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval +or accession, this Convention, with the exception of the Part excluded, enters +into force in respect of that State, subject to the provisions of paragraph (6) +of this article, on the first day of the month following the expiration of +twelve months after the date of the deposit of its instrument of ratification, +acceptance, approval or accession. + +(3) A State which ratifies, accepts, approves or accedes to this Convention and +is a party to either or both the Convention relating to a Uniform Law on the +Formation of Contracts for the International Sale of Goods done at The Hague on +1 July 1964 (1964 Hague Formation Convention) and the Convention relating to a +Uniform Law on the International Sale of Goods done at The Hague on 1 July 1964 +(1964 Hague Sales Convention) shall at the same time denounce, as the case may +be, either or both the 1964 Hague Sales Convention and the 1964 Hague Formation +Convention by notifying the Government of the Netherlands to that effect. + +(4) A State party to the 1964 Hague Sales Convention which ratifies, accepts, +approves or accedes to the present Convention and declares or has declared +under article 52 that it will not be bound by Part II of this Convention shall +at the time of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession denounce the +1964 Hague Sales Convention by notifying the Government of the Netherlands to +that effect. + +(5) A State party to the 1964 Hague Formation Convention which ratifies, +accepts, approves or accedes to the present Convention and declares or has +declared under article 92 that it will not be bound by Part III of this +Convention shall at the time of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession +denounce the 1964 Hague Formation Convention by notifying the Government of the +Netherlands to that effect. + +(6) For the purpose of this article, ratifications, acceptances, approvals and +accessions in respect of this Convention by States parties to the 1964 Hague +Formation Convention or to the 1964 Hague Sales Convention shall not be +effective until such denunciations as may be required on the part of those +States in respect of the latter two Conventions have themselves become +effective. The depositary of this Convention shall consult with the Government +of the Netherlands, as the depositary of the 1964 Conventions, so as to ensure +necessary co-ordination in this respect. + +Article 100 + +(1) This Convention applies to the formation of a contract only when the +proposal for concluding the contract is made on or after the date when the +Convention enters into force in respect of the Contracting States referred to +in subparagraph (1)(a) or the Contracting State referred to in subparagraph +(1)(b) of article 1. + +(2) This Convention applies only to contracts concluded on or after the date +when the Convention enters into force in respect of the Contracting States +referred to in subparagraph (1)(a) or the Contracting State referred to in +subparagraph (1)(b) of article 1. + +Article 101 + +(1) A Contracting State may denounce this Convention, or Part II or Part III of +the Convention, by a formal notification in writing addressed to the +depositary. + +(2) The denunciation takes effect on the first day of the month following the +expiration of twelve months after the notification is received by the +depositary. Where a longer period for the denunciation to take effect is +specified in the notification, the denunciation takes effect upon the +expiration of such longer period after the notification is received by the +depositary. + +:B~ [Post Provisions]-# + +1~post [Post Clauses (If any: Signed; Witnessed; Done; Authentic Texts; & +Deposited Clauses)]-# + +DONE at Vienna, this day of eleventh day of April, one thousand nine hundred +and eighty, in a single original, of which the Arabic, Chinese, English, +French, Russian and Spanish texts are equally authentic. + +IN WITNESS WHEREOF the undersigned plenipotentiaries, being duly authorized by +their respective Governments, have signed this Convention. diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/en/viral_spiral.david_bollier.sst b/data/samples/wrapped/en/viral_spiral.david_bollier.sst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..916c51c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/en/viral_spiral.david_bollier.sst @@ -0,0 +1,14127 @@ +% SiSU 4.0 + +@title: Viral Spiral + :subtitle: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own + :language: US + +@creator: + :author: Bollier, David + +@date: + :published: 2008 + +@rights: + :copyright: © 2008 by David Bollier All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher. The author has made an online version of the book available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. It can be accessed at http://www.viralspiral.cc and http://www.onthecommons.org. Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013. Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2008 Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York ISBN 978-1-59558-396-3 (hc.) CIP data available The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large, commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry. The New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain, and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable. www.thenewpress.com A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org. + :license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. + +@classify: + :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;networks;Internet:social aspects|copyright|intellectual property;intellectual property:patents|public domain;intellectual property:copyright:creative commons;society:information society;copyright:creative commons|public domain|licenses;patents;book:subject:information society|information networks|society|copyright|creative commons|patents|culture;open source software:social aspects;software:free software|GPL|open source;license:GPL;programming;democracy;democratization;creative commons;public domain:copyright law (U.S.);free culture;culture + +@identifier: + :oclc: 227016731 + +@links: + { Viral Spiral }http://viralspiral.cc/ + { David Bollier }http://www.bollier.org/ + { David Bollier @ Wikipedia }http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bollier + { Viral Spiral @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Viral-Spiral-Commoners-Digital-Republic/dp/1595583963 + { Viral Spiral @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=1595583963 + +@make: + :breaks: new=:B,C; break=1 + :texpdf_font: Liberation Sans + :home_button_text: {Viral Spiral}http://viralspiral.cc/; {David Bollier}http://www.bollier.org/ + :footer: {Viral Spiral}http://viralspiral.cc/; {David Bollier}http://www.bollier.org/ + +:A~ @title @author + +1~attribution Attribution~# + +To Norman Lear, dear friend and intrepid explorer of the frontiers of +democratic practice -# + +1~acknowledgments ACKNOWLEDGMENTS + +In this book, as with any book, dozens of barely visible means of support +conspired to help me. It has been hard work, but any author with sufficient +honesty and self-awareness realizes the extent to which he or she is a lens +that refracts the experiences, insights, and writings of others. It is a +pleasure to pay tribute to those who have been helpful to me. + +I am grateful to Larry Lessig, a singular visionary in developing the commons +as a new paradigm, for helping to make this book possible. He submitted to +several interviews, facilitated my research within the Creative Commons +community, and, despite our shared involvements in various projects over the +years, scrupulously respected my independence. It is also a pleasure to thank +the Rockefeller Foundation for generously helping to cover my research, +reporting, and travel expenses. + +I interviewed or consulted with more than one hundred people in the course of +writing this book. I want to thank each of them for carving out some time to +speak with me and openly sharing their thoughts. The Creative Commons and +iCommons staff were particularly helpful in making time for me, pointing me +toward useful documents and Web sites and sharing their expertise. I must +single out Glenn Otis Brown, Mia Garlick, Joichi Ito, Heather Ford, Tomislav +Medak, Ronaldo Lemos, and Hal Abelson for their special assistance. + +Since writing a book resembles parachuting into a forest and then trying to +find one’s way out, I was pleased to have many friends who recommended some +useful paths to follow. After reading some or all of my manuscript, the +following friends and colleagues offered many invaluable suggestions and +criticisms: Charles Schweik, Elliot E. Maxwell, John Seely Brown, Emily Levine, +Peter Suber, Julie Ristau, Jay Walljasper, Jonathan Rowe, Kathryn Milun, Laurie +Racine, and Gigi Sohn. It hardly requires saying that none of these astute +readers bears any responsibility for the choices that I ultimately made. + +For the past seven years, the Tomales Bay Institute, recently renamed On the +Commons, has nurtured my thinking and commitment to the commons. (On the +Commons has no formal affiliation to the Creative Commons world, but it +enthusiastically shares its commitments to the commons.) I am grateful to my +colleagues Peter Barnes, Harriet Barlow, and Julie Ristau for their unflagging +support of my book over the past three years, even when it impinged on my other +responsibilities. + +In the early stages of this book, Elaine Pagels was unusually generous in +offering her help, and my conversations with Nick Bromell helped pry loose some +important insights used in my conclusion. Cherry Alvarado was of extraordinary +help to me as she transcribed scores of interviews with unfailing good humor +and precision. I also wish to thank Andrew Ryder for resourceful assistance in +the early stages of my research. + +I have dedicated this book to my dear friend and mentor Norman Lear. The zeal, +imagination, and grace that he brings to the simple imperatives of citizenship +have been more instructive and inspirational than he perhaps realizes. He has +also been of incalculable support to me in my headstrong explorations of the +commons. + +Finally, at the end of the day, when I emerge from my writer’s lair or return +from yet another research and reporting trip, it is Ellen and my sons Sam and +Tom who indulge my absences, mental and physical, and reacquaint me with the +things that matter most. I could not wish for more. David Bollier Amherst, +Massachusetts May 1, 2008 + +1~introduction INTRODUCTION + +It started with that great leap forward in human history the Internet, which +gave rise to free software in the 1980s and then the World Wide Web in the +early 1990s. The shockingly open Internet, fortified by these tools, began +empowering a brash new culture of rank amateurs — you and me. And this began to +reverse the fierce tide of twentieth-century media. Ordinary people went +online, if only to escape the incessant blare of television and radio, the +intrusive ads and the narrow spectrum of expression. People started to discover +their own voices . . . and their own capabilities . . . and one another. +={ free software +2 } + +As the commoners began to take charge of their lives, they discovered anew that +traditional markets, governments, and laws were often not serving their needs +very well. And so some pioneers had the audacity to invent an infrastructure to +host new alternatives: free and open-source software. Private licenses to +enable sharing and bypass the oppressive complications of copyright law. A +crazy quilt of Web applications. And new types of companies that thrive on +servicing social communities on open platforms. + +At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the commoners began to make some +headway. More people were shifting their attention away from commercial media +to homegrown genres — listservs, Web sites, chat rooms, instant messaging, and +later, blogs, podcasts, and wikis. A swirling mass of artists, legal scholars, +techies, activists, and even scientists and businesses began to create their +own online commons. They self-organized themselves into a loosely coordinated +movement dedicated to “free culture.” + +The viral spiral was under way. + +Viral spiral? /{Viral}/, a term borrowed from medical science, refers to the +way in which new ideas and innovations on the Internet can proliferate with +astonishing speed. A video clip, a blog post, an advertisement released on the +Internet tumbles into other people’s consciousness in unexpected ways and +becomes the raw feedstock for new creativity and culture. This is one reason +the Internet is so powerful — it virally propagates creativity. A novel idea +that is openly released in the networked environment can often find its way to +a distant person or improbable project that can really benefit from it. This +recombinative capacity — efficiently coordinated through search engines, Web +logs, informal social networks, and other means— radically accelerates the +process of innovation. It enlivens democratic culture by hosting egalitarian +encounters among strangers and voluntary associations of citizens. Alexis de +Tocqueville would be proud. + +The /{spiral}/ of /{viral spiral}/ refers to the way in which the innovation of +one Internet cohort rapidly becomes a platform used by later generations to +build their own follow-on innovations. It is a corkscrew paradigm of change: +/{viral}/ networking feeds an upward /{spiral}/ of innovation. The cutting-edge +thread achieves one twist of change, positioning a later thread to leverage +another twist, which leverages yet another. Place these spirals in the context +of an open Internet, where they can sweep across vast domains of life and +catalyze new principles of order and social practice, and you begin to get a +sense of the transformative power of viral spirals. + +The term /{viral spiral}/ is apt, additionally, because it suggests a process +of change that is anything but clean, direct, and mechanical. In the networked +environment, there is rarely a direct cause-andeffect. Things happen in messy, +irregular, indeterminate, serendipitous ways. Life on the Internet does not +take place on a stable Cartesian grid — orderly, timeless, universal — but on a +constantly pulsating, dynamic, and labyrinthine /{web}/ of finely +interconnected threads radiating through countless nodes. Here the context is +as rich and generative as any individual, /{Viral spiral}/ calls attention to +the holistic and historical dynamics of life on the Web, which has a very +different metaphysical feel than the world of twentieth-century media. + +The viral spiral began with free software (code that is free to use, not code +at no cost) and later produced the Web. Once these open platforms had +sufficiently matured, tech wizards realized that software’s great promise is +not as a stand-alone tool on PCs, but as a social platform for Web-based +sharing and collaboration. The commoners could then begin to imagine: How might +these tools be used to overcome the arbitrary and confusing limitations of +copyright law? One answer, the Creative Commons (CC) licenses, a free set of +public licenses for sharing content, helped mitigate the legal risks of sharing +of works under copyright law. This innovation, in turn, helped unleash a +massive wave of follow-on innovations. +={ free software ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses +} + +Web 2.0 applications flourished, many of them relying upon sharing made legal +through CC licenses. By avoiding the costly overhead of centralized production +and marketing, and tapping into the social vitality of a commons, Web 2.0 +platforms have enabled ordinary people to share photos (Flickr), favorite +browser bookmarks (del.icio.us), favorite news stories (Digg, Reddit), and +homemade videos (YouTube). They let people access user-created archives +(Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Ourmedia.org), collaborate in news gathering +(OhmyNews, Assignment Zero), participate in immersive communities (Second +Life), and build open-business models (Magnatune, Revver, Jamendo). +={ web 2.0 : + applications +} + +This book seeks to trace the long arc of change wrought by a kaleidoscopic +swarm of commoners besieged by oppressive copyright laws, empowered by digital +technologies, and possessed of a vision for a more open, democratic society. +Their movement has been fired by the rhetoric of freedom and actualized by +digital technologies connected by the Internet. These systems have made it +extremely cheap and easy for ordinary people to copy and share things, and to +collaborate and organize. They have democratized creativity on a global scale, +challenging the legitimacy and power of all sorts of centralized, hierarchical +institutions. + +This larger story has rarely been told in its larger scope. It is at base a +story of visionary individuals determined to protect the shared code, content, +and social community that they have collectively generated. Richard Stallman +pioneered the development of free software; Lawrence Lessig waged challenges +against excessive copyright protection and led the development of the Creative +Commons licenses; citizen-archivist Eric Eldred fought to preserve his online +body of public-domain literature and the community that grew up around it. +These are simply the better-known leaders of a movement that has attracted +thousands of commoners who are building legally defensible commons into which +to pour their creative energies and live their lives. +={ free software ; + commoners : + concept of +5 ; + commons : + concept of +1 +} + +The commons — a hazy concept to many people — is a new paradigm for creating +value and organizing a community of shared interest. It is a vehicle by which +new sorts of self-organized publics can gather together and exercise new types +of citizenship. The commons can even serve as a viable alternative to markets +that have grown stodgy, manipulative, and coercive. A commons arises whenever a +given community decides that it wishes to manage a resource in a collective +manner, with special regard for equitable access, use, and sustainability. The +commons is a means by which individuals can band together with like-minded +souls and express a sovereignty of their own. + +Self-styled commoners can now be found in dozens of nations around the world. +They are locally rooted but internationally aware citizens of the Internet. +They don’t just tolerate diversity (ethnic, cultural, aesthetic, intellectual), +they celebrate it. Although commoners may have their personal affinities — free +software, open-access publishing, remix music, or countless others — they tend +to see themselves as part of a larger movement. They share an enthusiasm for +innovation and change that burbles up from the bottom, and are known to roll +their eyes at the thick-headedness of the mainstream media, which always seem +to be a few steps behind. +={ free software } + +If there is an element of self-congratulatory elitism at times, it stems from +the freedom of commoners to negotiate their own rules and the pleasure of +outmaneuvering conventional institutions. The commoners know how to plug into +the specialized Web sites and practitioner communities that can provide +just-in-time, highly specialized expertise. As Herbert Simon, the +computer-oriented social scientist, once put it, “The meaning of ‘knowing’ +today has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being +able to find and use it.” ~{Cited by John Seely Brown, former chief scientist, +Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, at Open Educational Resources conference, +Houston, Texas, March 29, 2007.}~ Commoners realize that this other way of +being, outside hierarchical institutions, in the open space where viral spirals +of innovation are free to materialize, is an important source of their +insurgent power. +={ Herbert, Simon } + +It is perilous to generalize about a movement that has so many disparate parts +pushing and pulling and innovating in so many different directions at once. Yet +it is safe to say that the commoners— a digital embodiment of /{e pluribus +unum}/ — share a common goal. They wish to transcend the limitations of +copyright law in order to build their own online communities. It’s not as if +the commoners are necessarily hostile to copyright law, markets, or centralized +institutions. Indeed, many of them work for large corporations and +universities; many rely on copyright to earn a livelihood; many are +entrepreneurs. +={ commoners : + goal +} + +Yet the people who are inventing new commons have some deeper aspirations and +allegiances. They glimpse the liberating potential of the Internet, and they +worry about the totalizing inclinations of large corporations and the state, +especially their tendency to standardize and coerce behavior. They object as +well to processes that are not transparent. They dislike the impediments to +direct access and participation, the limitations of credentialed expertise and +arbitrary curbs on people’s freedom. + +One of the first major gatherings of international commoners occurred in June +2006, when several hundred people from fifty nations converged on Rio de +Janeiro, Brazil, for the iCommons Summit. The people of this multinational, +eclectic vanguard blend the sophistication of the establishment in matters of +power and politics with the bravado and playfulness of Beat poets. There were +indie musicians who can deconstruct the terms of a record company licensing +agreement with Talmudic precision. There were Web designers who understand the +political implications of arcane rules made by the World Wide Web Consortium, a +technical standards body. The lawyers and law professors who discourse about +Section 114 of the Copyright Act are likely to groove on the remix career of +Danger Mouse and the appropriationist antics of Negativland, a sound-collage +band. James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, two law scholars at Duke Law School, +even published a superhero comic book, /{Down by Law!}/, which demystifies the +vagaries of the “fair use doctrine” through a filmmaker character resembling +video game heroine Lara Croft.~{Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins, +/{Down by Law!}/ at http://www.duke.edu/cspd/comics. }~ (Fair use is a +provision of copyright law that makes it legal to excerpt portions of a +copyrighted work for noncommercial, educational, and personal purposes.) +={ commoners : + gatherings of +} + +2~ The Rise of Socially Created Value +={ socially created value +5 } + +The salience of electronic commerce has, at times, obscured an important fact — +that the commons is one of the most potent forces driving innovation in our +time. Individuals working with one another via social networks are a growing +force in our economy and society. This phenomenon has many manifestations, and +goes by many names — “peer production,” “social production,” “smart mobs,” the +“wisdom of crowds,” “crowdsourcing,” and “the commons.”~{“Social production” +and “peer production” are associated with the work of Yale law professor Yochai +Benkler, especially in his 2006 book, /{The Wealth of Networks}/. “Smart mobs” +is a coinage of Howard Rheingold, author of a 2003 book by the same +name.“Crowdsourcing” is the name of a blog run by Jeff Howe and the title of a +June 2006 /{Wired}/ article on the topic.“Wisdom of crowds” is a term coined by +James Surowiecki and used as the title of his 2004 book.}~ The basic point is +that /{socially created value}/ is increasingly competing with conventional +markets, as GNU/Linux has famously shown. Through an open, accessible commons, +one can efficiently tap into the “wisdom of the crowd,” nurture +experimentation, accelerate innovation, and foster new forms of democratic +practice. +={ commons : + sources of new ideas, as +1 +} + +This is why so many ordinary people — without necessarily having degrees, +institutional affiliations, or wealth — are embarking upon projects that, in +big and small ways, are building a new order of culture and commerce. It is an +emerging universe of economic, social, and cultural activity animated by +self-directed amateurs, citizens, artists, entrepreneurs, and irregulars. + +Hugh McGuire, a Montreal-based writer and Web designer, is one. In 2005, he +started LibriVox, a digital library of free public-domain audio books that are +read and recorded by volunteers. More than ten thousand people a day visit the +Web site to download audio files of Twain, Kafka, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and +others, in nearly a dozen languages.~{ http://www.librivox.org. }~ The Faulkes +Telescope Project in Australia lets high school students connect with other +students, and with professional astronomers, to scan the skies with robotic, +online telescopes.~{ http://faulkes-telescope.com. }~ In a similar type of +learning commons, the Bugscope project in the United States enables students to +operate a scanning electronic microscope in real time, using a simple Web +browser on a classroom computer connected to the Internet.~{ +http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu. }~ +={ Bugscope ; + LibriVox ; + McGuire, Hugh ; + Faulkes Telescope Project +} + +Thousands of individual authors, musicians, and filmmakers are using Web tools +and Creative Commons licenses to transform markets for creative works — or, +more accurately, to blend the market and commons into integrated hybrids. A +nonprofit humanitarian group dedicated to doing reconstructive surgery for +children in poor countries, Interplast, produced an Oscar-winning film, /{A +Story of Healing}/, in 1997. Ten years later, it released the film under a +Creative Commons license as a way to publicize Interplast’s work while +retaining ownership of the film: a benefit for both film buffs and +Interplast.~{ http://www.interplast.org and +http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/2007/04/%E2%80%9Ca-story-of-healing%E2%80%9D-becomes-first-acad +emy-award%C2%AE-winning-film-released-under-a-creative-commons-li cense. }~ +={ Interplast } + +Scoopt, a Glasgow, Scotland–based photography agency, acts as a broker to help +bloggers and amateurs sell newsworthy photos and videos to the commercial +media.~{ http://www.scoopt.com. }~ The Boston band Two Ton Shoe released its +music on the Web for free to market its concerts. Out of the blue, a South +Korean record label called one day to say it loved the band and could it come +over to Seoul, all expenses paid, to perform four concerts? Each one sold +out.~{ http://www.twotonshoe.com/news.html. }~ Boing Boing blogger and +cyber-activist Cory Doctorow released his 2003 science-fiction novel, /{Down +and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, under a CC license, reaping a whirlwind of +worldwide exposure.~{ See Doctorow’s preface to the second release of the book, +February 12, 2004, Tor Books. See also his blog Craphound.com, September 9, +2006, at http://www.craphound.com/?=p=1681. }~ +={ Doctorow, Cory ; + Scoopt +} + +2~ The Commoners Build a Digital Republic of Their Own +={ commons : + achievement of +11 +} + +The profusion of commons on the Internet may appear to be a spontaneous and +natural development. In fact, it is a hard-won achievement. An infrastructure +of software, legal rights, practical expertise, and social ethics had to be +imagined, built, and defended. In a sense, the commoners had to invent +themselves as commoners. They had to learn to recognize their own distinct +interests — in how to control their creative works, how to organize their +communities, and how to engage with market players without being co-opted. They +have, in fact, invented a new sort of democratic polity within the edifice of +the conventional nation-state. + +The commoners differ from most of their corporate brethren in their enthusiasm +for sharing. They prefer to freely distribute their writing, music, and videos. +As a general rule, they don’t like to encase their work in airtight bubbles of +property rights reinforced by technological locks. They envision cyberspace +more as a peaceable, sociable kingdom than as a take-no-prisoners market. They +honor the individual while respecting community norms. They are enthusiastic +about sharing while respecting the utility of markets. Idealistic yet +pragmatic, they share a commitment to open platforms, social cooperation, and +elemental human freedoms. +={ commoners : + sharing by +1 +} + +It is all very well to spout such lofty goals. But how to actualize them? That +is the story that the following pages recount. It has been the work of a +generation, some visionary leaders, and countless individuals to articulate a +loosely shared vision, build the infrastructure, and develop the social +practices and norms. This project has not been animated by a grand political +ideology, but rather is the result of countless initiatives, grand and +incremental, of an extended global family of hackers, lawyers, bloggers, +artists, and other supporters of free culture. +={ commons : + political implications of +3 +} + +And yet, despite its focus on culture and its aversion to conventional +politics, the growth of this movement is starting to have political +implications. In an influential 2003 essay, James F. Moore announced the +arrival of “an emerging second superpower.”~{ James F. Moore, “The Second +Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head,” March 31, 2003, available at +http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html. }~ It was not +a nation, but the coalescence of people from around the world who were +asserting common values, and forming new public identities, via online +networks. The people of this emerging “superpower,” Moore said, are concerned +with improving the environment, public health, human rights, and social +development. He cited as early examples the international campaign to ban land +mines and the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. +The power and legitimacy of this “second superpower” do not derive from the +constitutional framework of a nation-state, but from its ability to capture and +project people’s everyday feelings, social values, and creativity onto the +world stage. Never in history has the individual had such cheap, unfettered +access to global audiences, big and small. +={ Moore, James } + +The awakening superpower described in /{Viral Spiral}/ is not a conventional +political or ideological movement that focuses on legislation and a clutch of +“issues.” While commoners do not dismiss these activities as unimportant, most +are focused on the freedom of their peer communities to create, communicate, +and share. When defending these freedoms requires wading into conventional +politics and law, they are prepared to go there. But otherwise, the commoners +are more intent on building a kind of parallel social order, inscribed within +the regnant political economy but animated by their own values. Even now, the +political/cultural sensibilities of this order are only vaguely understood by +governments, politicians, and corporate leaders. The idea of “freedom without +anarchy, control without government, consensus without power” — as Lawrence +Lessig put it in 1999~{ Lawrence Lessig, /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/ +(New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 4. }~ —is just too counterintuitive for the +conventionally minded to take seriously. +={ commoners : + sharing by +1 ; + Lessig, Lawrence +2 +} + +Very early on, the commoners identified copyright law as a major impediment to +their vision of a “sharing economy.” It is not that they revile copyright law +as such; indeed, many commoners defend the importance of copyright law to +creative endeavor. The problem, they insist, is that large corporations with +vast inventories of copyrighted works — film studios, record labels, book +publishers, software companies — have used their political power unfairly to +extend the scope and term of copyright privileges. A limited monopoly granted +by the U.S. Constitution has morphed into an expansive, near-perpetual +monopoly, enforced by intrusive technologies and draconian penalties. +={ copyright law : + sharing economy vs. +3 +} + +The resulting curbs on citizen freedom, as large entertainment and media +corporations gain legal privileges at the expense of the public, is a +complicated issue that I return to in chapter 2. But it is worth noting briefly +why copyright law has been particularly harmful to the commons in the digital +age. When Congress enacted a major revision of U.S. copyright law in 1976, it +eliminated a longstanding requirement that works had to be formally registered +in order to receive copyright protection.~{ The effect of the elimination of +formal registration in copyright law is cogently discussed by Lessig in /{Free +Culture}/ (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 170–73, and pp. 248–53. }~ Under the +new law, /{everything}/ became automatically copyrighted upon creation. This +meant that all information and artistic work created after 1978 (when the law +took effect) has been born into an invisible envelope of property rights. It +sounds appealing to eliminate bureaucratic formalities like registration. But +the shift to automatic copyright has meant that every digital scribble is born +with a © branded on its side. /{Culture = private property}/. +={ Copyright Act (1976) ; + copyright law : + automatic +1 | revision of (1976) +1 | and property rights +1 ; + property rights, and copyright law +} + +The various industries that rely on copyrights have welcomed this development +because it helps them portray their ownership rights as all-encompassing. They +can cast the public’s right to use works without permission or payment — +traditionally guaranteed under the fair use doctrine and the public domain — as +exceptions to the general rule of absolute property rights. “What could be +wrong with enclosing works in ever-stronger packages of property rights?” the +music and film industries argue. “That’s how new economic wealth is created.” +The media oligopolies that control most of television, film, music, and news +gathering naturally want to protect their commercial content. It is the fruit +of a vast system of fixed investment — equipment, high-priced stars, lawyers, +distribution channels, advertising, etc. — and copyright law is an important +tool for protecting that value. + +The Internet has profoundly disrupted this model of market production, however. +The Internet is a distributed media system of low-cost capital (your personal +computer) strung together with inexpensive transmission and software. Instead +of being run by a centralized corporation that relies upon professionals and +experts above all else, the Internet is a noncommercial infrastructure that +empowers amateurs, citizens, and ordinary individuals in all their quirky, +authentic variety. The mass media have long regarded people as a commodifiable +audience to be sold to advertisers in tidy demographic units. +={ Internet : + empowerment by +2 +} + +Now, thanks to the Internet, “the people formerly known as the audience” (in +Jay Rosen’s wonderful phrase) are morphing into a differentiated organism of +flesh-and-blood, idiosyncratic individuals, as if awakening from a spell. Newly +empowered to speak as they wish, in their own distinctive, personal voices to a +global public of whoever cares to listen, people are creating their own +transnational tribes. They are reclaiming culture from the tyranny of +mass-media economics and national boundaries. In Lessig’s words, Internet users +are overthrowing the “read only” culture that characterized the “weirdly +totalitarian” communications of the twentieth century. In its place they are +installing the “read/write” culture that invites everyone to be a creator, as +well as a consumer and sharer, of culture.~{ Lawrence Lessig, “The Read-Write +Society,” delivered at the Wizards of OS4 conference in Berlin, Germany, on +September 5, 2006. Available at +http://www.wizards-of-os.org/programm/panels/authorship_amp_culture/keynote_the_read_write_society/the_read_write_society.html. +}~ A new online citizenry is arising, one that regards its socially negotiated +rules and norms as at least as legitimate as those established by conventional +law. +={ Rosen, Jay } + +Two profoundly incommensurate media systems are locked in a struggle for +survival or supremacy, depending upon your perspective or, perhaps, mutual +accommodation. For the moment, we live in a confusing interregnum — a +transition that pits the dwindling power and often desperate strategies of +Centralized Media against the callow, experimental vigor of Internet-based +media. This much is clear, however: a world organized around centralized +control, strict intellectual property rights, and hierarchies of credentialed +experts is under siege. A radically different order of society based on open +access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and +easy sharing is ascendant. Or to put it more precisely, we are stumbling into a +strange hybrid order that combines both worlds — mass media and online networks +— on terms that have yet to be negotiated. + +2~ The Rise of the Commoners +={ commoners : + rise of +21 +} + +But who shall do the negotiating? Who will set forth a compelling alternative +to centralized media, and build it? That task has fallen to a loosely +coordinated global federation of digital tribes — the free software and +open-source hackers, the Wikipedians, the bloggers and citizen-journalists, the +remix musicians and filmmakers, the avant-garde artists and political +dissidents, the educators and scientists, and many others. It is a spontaneous +folk-tech conspiracy that belongs to everyone and no one. + +As we will see in chapter 1, Richard Stallman, the legendary hacker, played an +indispensable first-mover role by creating a sovereign domain from which to +negotiate with commercial players: free software. The software commons and +later digital commons inspired by it owe an incalculable debt to Stallman’s +ingenious legal innovation, the General Public License, or GPL, launched in +1989. The GPL is a license for authorizing anyone to use a copyrighted software +program so long as any copies or derivative versions are also made available on +the same terms. This fairly simple license enables programmers to contribute +code to a common pool without fear that someone might privatize and destroy the +commons. +={ General Public License (GPL) } + +As the computer revolution continued through the 1980s and the Internet went +wide in the 1990s, the antisocial, antidemocratic implications of copyright law +in networked spaces became more evident. As we will see in chapter 2, a growing +community of progressive legal scholars blew the whistle on some nasty +developments in copyright law that were shrinking the public’s fair use rights +and the public domain. Scholars such as James Boyle, Pamela Samuelson, Jessica +Litman, Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, and Peter Jaszi +provided invaluable legal analyses about the imperiled democratic polity of +cyberspace. +={ Lessig, Lawrence +2 } + +By the late 1990s, this legal scholarship was in full flower, Internet usage +was soaring, and the free software movement produced its first significant free +operating system, GNU/Linux. The commoners were ready to take practical action. +Lessig, then a professor at Harvard Law School, engineered a major +constitutional test case, /{Eldred v. Reno}/ (later /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/), to +try to strike down a twentyyear extension of copyright terms — a case that +reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002. At the same time, Lessig and a number +of his colleagues, including MIT computer scientist Hal Abelson, Duke law +professor James Boyle, and Villanova law professor Michael W. Carroll, came +together to explore innovative ways to protect the public domain. It was a rare +moment in history in which an ad hoc salon of brilliant, civic-minded thinkers +from diverse fields of endeavor found one another, gave themselves the freedom +to dream big thoughts, and embarked upon practical plans to make them real. +={ GNU/Linux ; + Linux : + see also GNU/Linux ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft +} + +The immediate upshot of their legal and techno ingenuity, as we will see in +chapters 3 and 4, was the drafting of the Creative Commons licenses and the +organization that would promote them. The purpose of these free, standardized +public licenses was, and is, to get beyond the binary choice imposed by +copyright law. Why must a work be considered either a chunk of privately owned +property or a kind of nonproperty completely open to anyone without constraint +(“in the public domain”)? The CC licenses overcome this stifling either/or +logic by articulating a new middle ground of ownership that sanctions sharing +and collaboration under specified terms. To stress its difference from +copyright law, which declares “All Rights Reserved,” the Creative Commons +licenses bear the tagline “Some Rights Reserved.” +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses +2 : + copyright law, and +2 ; + Copyright law : + CC licenses +2 +} + +Like free software, the CC licenses paradoxically rely upon copyright law to +legally protect the commons. The licenses use the rights of ownership granted +by copyright law not to exclude others, but to invite them to share. The +licenses recognize authors’ interests in owning and controlling their work — +but they also recognize that new creativity owes many social and +intergenerational debts. Creativity is not something that emanates solely from +the mind of the “romantic author,” as copyright mythology has it; it also +derives from artistic communities and previous generations of authors and +artists. The CC licenses provide a legal means to allow works to circulate so +that people can create something new. /{Share, reuse, and remix, legally}/, as +Creative Commons puts it. + +After the licenses were introduced in December 2002, they proliferated +throughout the Internet and dozens of nations as if by spontaneous combustion. +It turns out that the licenses have been more than a legal fix for the +limitations of copyright law. They are a powerful form of social signaling. The +licenses have proven to be a flag for commoners to advertise their identities +as members of a culturally insurgent sharing economy — an aesthetic/political +underground, one might say. Attaching the CC logo to one’s blog, video, MP3 +file, or laptop case became a way to proclaim one’s support for free culture. +Suddenly, all sorts of participatory projects could be seen as elements of a +larger movement. By 2007, authors had applied one or more of six CC licenses to +90 million works, by one conservative estimate, or more than 220 million works +by another estimate. Collectively, CC-licensed works constitute a class of +cultural works that are “born free” to be legally shared and reused with few +impediments. + +A great deal of the Creative Commons story revolves around its founder, the +cerebral yet passionate Larry Lessig, a constitutional law professor at Harvard +in the mid-1990s until a move to Stanford Law School in 2000. As a scholar with +a sophisticated grasp of digital technologies, Lessig was one of the first to +recognize that as computers became the infrastructure for society, software +code was acquiring the force of law. His 1999 classic, /{Code and Other Laws of +Cyberspace}/, is renowned for offering a deep theoretical framework for +understanding how politics, law, technology, and social norms shape the +character of cyberspace — and in turn, any society. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +} + +In popularizing this message, it didn’t hurt that Lessig, an experienced +classroom lecturer, is a poised and spellbinding performer. On the tech and +copyright circuit, in fact, he has become something of a rock star. With his +expansive forehead and wire glasses, Lessig looks every bit the professor he +is. Yet in his signature black jeans and sport jacket, delivering punchy +one-liners punctuated by arresting visuals projected on a big screen behind +him, Lessig makes a powerful impression. He’s a geek-chic techie, intellectual, +legal activist, and showman all rolled into one. + +From the beginning, Lessig and his colleagues wondered, How far can the sharing +ethic be engineered? Just how far can the idea of free culture extend? As it +turns out, quite far. At first, of course, the free culture project was applied +mostly to Web-based text and music. But as we see in chapters 5 through 12, the +technologies and ethic of free culture have rapidly taken root in many creative +sectors of society — video, music, books, science, education — and even +business and international arts and culture. + +!{/{Remix culture.}/}! Thanks to digital technologies, musicians can sample +verbatim snippets of other musicians’ work in their own works, producing +“remixes” that blend sounds from a number of copyrighted songs. It’s all +patently illegal, of course, unless you’re wealthy enough to pay for the rights +to use a sample. But that hasn’t stopped artists. +={ music : + remixes +2 ; + remix works +2 +} + +In fact, the underground remix scene has become so robust that even established +artists feel obliged to engage with it to bolster their street cred. With a +wink and a nudge from record labels, major rap stars like Jay-Z and Eminem have +released instrumental tracks of their records in the hope and expectation that +remix /{auteurs}/ will recycle the tracks. Record labels have quietly relied on +mixtapes— personalized compilations of tracks — to gain exposure and +credibility.~{ See, e.g., Joanna Demers, /{Steal This Music: How Intellectual +Property Law Affects Musical Creativity}/ (Athens: University of Georgia Press, +2006); Kelefa Sanneh, “Mixtapes Mix in Marketing,” New York Times, July 20, +2006. }~ To help an illegal social art go legit, many artists are using +Creative Commons licenses and public-domain sound clips to build a legal body +of remix works. + +In the video world, too, the remix impulse has found expression in its own form +of derivative creativity, the mashup. From underground remakes of /{Star Wars}/ +films to parodies of celebrities, citizenamateurs are taking original video +clips and mixing them with other images, pop music tracks, and their own +narrations. When Alaska senator Ted Stevens compared the Internet to a “series +of tubes,” video clips of his rambling speech were mashed up and set to a +techno dance beat. Beyond this playful subculture, serious filmmakers are using +CC licenses on their works to develop innovative distribution systems that +attract large audiences and earn money. Machinima animations — a filmmaking +technique that uses computer game action sequences, shot with in-game cameras +and then edited together — are pioneering a new market niche, in part through +their free distribution under a CC license. +={ Machinima animations ; + Stevens, Ted +} + +!{/{Open business.}/}! One of the most surprising recent developments has been +the rise of “open business” models. Unlike traditional businesses that depend +upon proprietary technology or content, a new breed of businesses see lucrative +opportunities in exploiting open, participatory networks. The pioneer in this +strategy was IBM, which in 2000 embraced GNU/Linux, the open-source computer +operating system, as the centerpiece of its service and consulting business.~{ +Steve Lohr, “IBM to Give Free Access to 500 Patents, /{New York Times}/, July +11, 2005. See also Steven Weber, /{The Success of Open Source Software}/ +(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 202–3. See also Pamela +Samuelson, “IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source,” /{Communications of the +ACM}/ 49, no. 21 (October 2006). }~ Dozens of small, Internet-based companies +are now exploiting open networks to build more flexible, sustainable +enterprises. +={ GNU/Linux : + IBM, and ; + IBM : + GNU/Linux, and ; + open business models +1 +} + +The key insight about many open-platform businesses is that they no longer look +to copyright or patent law as tools to assert market control. Their goal is not +to exclude others, but to amass large communities. Open businesses understand +that exclusive property rights can stifle the value creation that comes with +mass participation, and so they strive to find ways to “honor the commons” +while making money in socially acceptable forms of advertising, subscriptions, +or consulting services. The brave new economics of “peer production” is +enabling forward-thinking businesses to use social collaboration among +thousands, or even millions, of people to create social communities that are +the foundation for significant profits. /{BusinessWeek}/ heralded this +development in a major cover story in 2005, “The Power of Us,” and called +sharing “the net’s next disruption.”~{ Robert D. Hof, “The Power of Us: Mass +Collaboration on the Internet Is Shaking Up Business,” /{BusinessWeek}/, June +20, 2005, pp. 73–82. }~ + +!{/{Science}/}! as a commons. The world of scientific research has long +depended on open sharing and collaboration. But increasingly, copyrights, +patents, and university rules are limiting the flow of scientific knowledge. +The resulting gridlock of rights in knowledge is impeding new discoveries and +innovation. Because of copyright restrictions and software incompatibilities, +scientists studying genetics, proteins, and marine biology often cannot access +databases containing vital research. Or they cannot easily share physical +samples of lab samples. When the maker of Golden Rice, a vitamin-enhanced +bioengineered rice, tried to distribute its seeds to millions of people in poor +countries, it first had to get permissions from seventy patent holders and +obtain six Material Transfer Agreements (which govern the sharing of biomedical +research substances).~{ Interview with John Wilbanks, “Science Commons Makes +Sharing Easier,” /{Open Access Now}/, December 20, 2004, available at +http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/archive/?page=features&issue=23. }~ +={ Wilbanks, John +1 ; + Science Commons : + CC Commons spinoff, and +1 +} + +The problem of acquiring, organizing, and sharing scientific knowledge is +becoming more acute, paradoxically enough, as more scientific disciplines +become dependent on computers and the networked sharing of data. To help deal +with some of these issues, the Creative Commons in 2005 launched a new project +known as the Science Commons to try to redesign the information infrastructure +for scientific research. The basic idea is to “break down barriers to sharing +that are hindering innovation in the sciences,” says John Wilbanks, executive +director of Science Commons. Working with the National Academy of Sciences and +other research bodies, Wilbanks is collaborating with astronomers, +archaeologists, microbiologists, and medical researchers to develop better ways +to make vast scientific literatures more computer-friendly, and databases +technically compatible, so that they can be searched, organized, and used more +effectively. + +!{/{Open education and learning.}/}! A new class of knowledge commons is poised +to join free and open-source software, the Creative Commons and Wikipedia as a +coherent social movement. The new groundswell goes by the awkward name “Open +Educational Resources,” or OER.~{ See, e.g., Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely +Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, “A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) +Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New Opportunities,” February 2007, +available at http://www.oerderves.org/?p=23. }~ One of the earlier pioneers of +the movement was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which has put +virtually all of its course materials on the Web, for free, through its +OpenCourseWare initiative. The practice has now spread to scores of colleges +and universities around the world, and inspired a broader set of OER +initiatives: digital repositories for articles, reports, and data; open-access +scholarly journals that bypass expensive commercial publishers; and +collaborative Web sites for developing teaching materials. There are wikis for +students and scholars working together, sites to share multimedia +presentations, and much more. +={ education : + OER movement +1 ; + pen Educational Resources (OER) movement +1 ; + Wikipedia : + social movement, as +1 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + social movement, as +1 +} + +The OER movement has particular importance for people who want to learn but +don’t have the money or resources — scholars in developing countries, students +struggling to pay for their educations, people in remote or rural locations, +people with specialized learning needs. OER is based on the proposition that it +will not only be cheaper or perhaps free if teachers and students can share +their materials through the Web, it will also enable more effective types of +learning. So the OER movement is dedicated to making learning tools cheaper and +more accessible. The revolutionary idea behind OER is to transform traditional +education — teachers imparting information to passive students — into a more +learnerdriven process facilitated by teachers. Self-directed, socially driven +learning supplants formal, hierarchical modes of teaching. + +!{/{The international sharing economy.}/}! Shortly after the first CC licenses +were released in 2002, dozens of exceptionally capable volunteers — from Japan, +Finland, Brazil, South Africa, and other countries — came knocking on the door +of CC. How can we adapt the American CC licenses to our respective national +legal systems? they asked. This unexpected turn prompted the Creative Commons +to inaugurate Creative Commons International, based in Berlin, Germany, to +supervise the complicated task of “porting” the U.S. licenses to other legal +jurisdictions. To date, CC affiliates in fortyseven nations have adapted the +U.S. licenses to their legal systems, and another seventeen have porting +projects under way. +={ Creative Commons International +1 } + +The volunteers include avant-garde artists in Croatia, free software +programmers in the Netherlands, South Korean judges, Italian law professors, +South African musicians, Malaysian citizenjournalists, Bulgarian filmmakers, +and Taiwanese songwriters. The passionate international licensing movement has +even been embraced by the Brazilian government, which has proclaimed itself the +first Free Culture Nation. As usage of the licenses spreads, they are +effectively becoming the default international legal structure of the sharing +economy. + +2~ A New Type of Emergent Democracy? + +Peter Suber, a leading champion of open-access scholarly publishing, once +explained to me why a disparate, rambunctious crowd of commoners spread around +the globe might wish to work together to do something about their plight. +“People are taking back their culture,” Peter said. “People who have not been +served by the current law have quietly endured it until they saw that they +didn’t have to.”~{ Interview with Peter Suber, June 28, 2006. }~ The Creative +Commons has become both a symbol and a tool for people to reclaim creativity +and culture from the mass-media leviathans. The licenses and the organization +have become instruments to advance a participatory, sharing economy and +culture. +={ Suber, Peter } + +How far can it go? Will it significantly affect conventional politics and +government? Can it bring market forces and social needs into a more positive +alignment? + +This book is about the struggle to imagine this new world and push it as far as +it can go. It is, in one sense, a history, but “history” suggests that the +story is over and done. The truth is that the commons movement is tremendously +robust and expansive right now. The early history about free software, the +public domain, and the Creative Commons is simply a necessary foundation for +understanding the propulsive logic of what is happening. + +The story told in these pages is not entirely new; it has been told in +fragments and through the restless lens of journalism. But it has not been told +in its larger conceptual and historical sweep. That’s partly because most of +its players are usually seen in isolation from one another, and not put in the +context of the larger open-platform revolution. It’s also because the free +culture movement, nothwithstanding its vigor, is generally eclipsed by the +bigmoney corporate developments that are ostensibly more important. But that is +precisely the problem: conventional economics does not understand the actual +significance of open platforms and the commons. We need to understand what the +online commons represent: a powerful sociotechnological paradigm that is +reordering some basic dynamics of creative practice, culture, politics, and +everyday life. + +I am no bystander in this story, it must be said, but a commoner who has +grappled with the quandaries of copyright law and the public domain for nearly +twenty years. In 2001, after co-founding Public Knowledge, a Washington +advocacy group to defend the public’s stake in copyright and Internet policies, +I went on to write books on the market enclosure of myriad commons and on the +absurd expansions of copyright and trademark law. Over the course of this work, +I discovered how a commons analysis can help us understand the digital +revolution. It can help us see that it is not just about technological +innovation, but about social and legal innovations. Reading Elinor Ostrom and +Yochai Benkler, in particular — two leading theorists of the commons — I came +to realize that social communities, and not just markets, must be recognized as +powerful vehicles for creating value. I realized that many basic assumptions +about property rights, as embedded in copyright law and neoclassical economics, +fail to take account of the generative power of online communities. +={ Public Knowledge } + +How then shall we create the commons and protect it? That question lies at the +core of this book and the history of the commoners in cyberspace. I am mostly +interested in exploring how the Creative Commons has galvanized a variety of +interrelated crusades to build a digital republic of, by, and for the +commoners. One reason why a small licensing project has grown into a powerful +global brand is that, at a time of mass-media dominance and political +stalemate, free culture offers an idealistic alternative vision. Something you +can do. A movement in which everyone can play some useful role. The free +culture movement stands for reclaiming culture by making it yourself and for +reviving democracy by starting in your own digital backyard. CC stands for +personal authenticity and diversity in a world of stale, mass-marketed product. +It stands for good fun and the joys of sharing. + +Put the CC logo on your blog or music CD or video, and you too can belong to a +movement that slyly sticks it to Big Media without getting into an ugly brawl. +Don’t get mad, the CC community seems to whisper. Just affiliate with a growing +virtual nation of creative renegades. Transcend a rigged game by migrating to a +commons of your own making. Build therefore your own world, in the manner of +Henry David Thoreau — then imagine its embrace by many others. Imagine it +radiating into conventional politics with a refreshing ethic of open +accountability and earned rewards, a contempt for coercive business practices +and governmental abuses, and an insistence upon transparency, participation, +and the consent of the governed. You may be an entrepreneur who just wants to +build a profitable business, or a scientist who just wants to find better ways +to research Huntington’s disease. The commons has some solutions in these +areas, too. This big-tent movement is unabashedly ecumenical. + +This is the vision now exploding around the world anyway. The recurring +question in its earliest days, and now, remains — How can we build it out? +/{Can}/ it be built out? And how far? For the commoners, just asking the +question is halfway to answering it. + +:B~ PART I + +:C~ Harbingers of the Sharing Economy + +1~intro_i [Intro] -# + +The rise of the sharing economy had its roots among the renegades living on the +periphery of mainstream culture. At the time, they were largely invisible to +one another. They had few ways of making common cause and no shared language +for even naming the forces that troubled them. It was the 1990s, after all, a +time of alluring mercantile fantasies about the limitless possibilities of the +laissez-faire “information superhighway.” Even for those who could pierce the +mystifications, the new technologies were so new, powerful, and perplexing that +it was difficult to understand their full implications. + +The renegades, while sharing a vision of technological progress, were disturbed +by many on-the-ground realities. A small network of hackers, for example, was +enraged to learn that software was becoming a closed, proprietary product. +Companies could prohibit interested individuals from tinkering with their own, +legally purchased software. On both creative and political grounds, this +development was odious to Richard Stallman, a brilliant programmer who soon +hatched a dream of building a protected kingdom of “free software,” the subject +of chapter 1. +={ software : + proprietary ; + Stallman, Richard +} + +Meanwhile, a loose community of legal scholars and tech activists was becoming +alarmed by the antisocial, anti-democratic tendencies of copyright law and +digital technology. Scholars such as Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, and Hal +Abelson began to realize that copyright law and software code were acquiring +unsuspected powers to redesign our political and social order. They also began +to understand the ways in which the public domain is not a wasteland, as +conventional minds had long supposed, but a highly generative zone of culture. +This intellectual journey is described in chapter 2. +={ Abelson, Hal ; + Boyle, James ; + Lessig, Lawrence +1 +} + +Finally, it was becoming painfully apparent to yet another amorphous band of +renegades — artists, musicians, writers, scientists, educators, citizens — that +copyright law and technological controls were artificially restricting their +creative freedoms. With scant public attention, the music, film, and publishing +industries were using their clout to protect their archaic business models at +the expense of innovation and the commons. This onslaught ultimately provoked +one exemplary commoner, Eric Eldred, to team up with legal scholar Lawrence +Lessig to mount an unprecedented constitutional challenge to copyright law, the +focus of chapter 3. + +None of these surges of innovative dissent was well funded or particularly +promising. For the most part, they were improvisational experiments undertaken +by public-spirited individuals determined to vindicate their visions for a +better society. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that while many +of these initiatives were only partially successful, each was indispensable to +the larger, later task of imagining and building a digital republic to secure +basic human freedoms, the subject of Part II. + +1~ 1 IN THE BEGINNING WAS FREE SOFTWARE +={ Stallman, Richard +34 ; + General Public License (GPL) +1 +} + +/{Richard Stallman's mythic struggle to protect the commons of code set the +viral spiral in motion.}/ + +The struggle to imagine and invent the software commons, which later set in +motion a viral spiral now known as free culture, began with Richard Stallman, a +brilliant, eccentric MIT computer programmer. Stallman’s history as a hacker +and legal innovator has by now become the stuff of legend. As one of the first +people to confront the deep tensions between proprietary control and the public +domain in software development, Stallman has achieved that rare pinnacle in the +high-tech world, the status of celebrity geek. Besides his programming prowess, +he is renowned for devising the GNU General Public License, more commonly known +as the GPL, an ingenious legal mechanism to protect shared software code. +={ free culture +33 } + +Stallman — or RMS, as he likes to be called — has become an iconic figure in +the history of free culture in part because he showed courageous leadership in +protecting the commons well before anyone else realized that there was even a +serious problem. He was a lone voice in the wilderness for at least ten years +before the Internet became a mass medium, and so has earned enormous +credibility as a leader on matters of free culture. He has also been reviled by +some as an autocratic zealot with bad manners and strident rhetoric. + +It is perhaps fitting that Stallman could be mistaken for an Old Testament +prophet. He is a shaggy, intense, and fiercely stubborn guy. On his Web site, +visitors can find a gag photo of him posed as Saint IGNUcius, with his hand +raised in mock genuflection and his head encircled by a gold aureole (held in +place by two admiring acoyltes). He has been known to deliver lectures +barefoot, sleep on the couch in a borrowed office for weeks at a time, and +excoriate admirers for using taboo phrases like “intellectual property” and +“copyright protection.” Stallman explains that “intellectual property” +incorrectly conflates three distinct bodies of law — copyright, patent, and +trademark — and emphasizes individual property rights over public rights. +“Copyright protection” is misleading, he says, because it implies a positive, +necessary act of /{defending}/ something rather than an acquisitive, aggressive +act of a monopolist. Stallman considers /{content}/ to be a disparaging word, +better replaced by “works of authorship.” He has even made a list of fourteen +words that he urges people to avoid because of their politically misleading +valences.~{ Joshua Gray, editor, /{Free Software Free Society: Selected Essays +of Richard M. Stallman}/ (Boston: GNU Press, 2002), pp. 190–91. }~ +={ authorship ; + intellectual property +} + +Even though Stallman frequently speaks to august academic and scientific +gatherings, and meets with the heads of state in developing countries, he +resembles a defiant hippie, Yet for his visionary role in developing free +software and the free software philosophy, Stallman is treated as if he were a +head of state . . . which, in a way, he is. His story has irresistible +mythological resonances — the hero’s journey through hardship and scorn, later +vindicated by triumph and acclaim. But for many, including his most ardent +admirers, Stallman’s stubborn idealism can also be supremely maddening. +={ free software } + +His first encounter with the creeping ethic of proprietary control, in the late +1970s, is an oft-told part of his story. The Xerox Corporation had donated an +experimental laser printer to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, where +Stallman was then a graduate student. The printer was constantly jamming, +causing frustration and wasting everyone’s time. Stallman wanted to devise a +software fix but he discovered that the source code was proprietary. Determined +to find out who was responsible and force them to fix it, he tracked down a +computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who had supposedly written the +code — but the professor refused to help him; he had signed a nondisclosure +agreement with Xerox prohibiting him from sharing the code. +={ Xerox Corporation +1 ; + software : + proprietary +1 +} + +Stallman considered Xerox’s lockup of code a profound moral offense that +violated the integrity of the hacker community. (Among practitioners, +/{hacker}/ is a term of respect for an ingenious, resourceful programmer, not +an accusation of criminality.) Not only did it prevent people from fixing their +own equipment and software, the nondisclosure agreement flouted the Golden +Rule. It prohibited sharing with one’s neighbor. The proprietary ethic was not +just immoral, by Stallman’s lights, but a barrier to developing great software. +={ hackers : + use of term +} + +By the late 1970s, he had developed a breakthrough text editor, Emacs, in +collaboration with a large community of programmers. “Everybody and his brother +was writing his own collection of redefined screen-editor commands, a command +for everything he typically liked to do,” Stallman wrote. “People would pass +them around and improve them, making them more powerful and more general. The +collections of redefinitions gradually became system programs in their own +right.”~{ Sam Williams, /{Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for +Free Software}/ (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates 2002), pp. 76–88. }~ +Emacs was one of the first software projects to demonstrate the feasibility of +large-scale software collaboration and the deep well of innovative ideas that +it could yield. Emacs enabled programmers to add new features with great ease, +and to constantly upgrade and customize the program with the latest +improvements. The Emacs experiment demonstrated that /{sharing}/ and +/{interoperability}/ are vital principles for a flourishing online commons. +={ Emacs +2 ; + Stallman, Richard : + Emacs, and +2 +} + +Two problems quickly emerged, however. If people did not communicate their +innovations back to the group, divergent streams of incompatible code would +produce a Tower of Babel effect. Second, if the code and its derivations were +not shared with everyone, the usefulness of the program would slowly decline. +The flow of innovation would dissipate. + +To solve these problems, Stallman invented a user contract that he called the +“Emacs Commune.” It declared to all users that Emacs was “distributed on a +basis of communal sharing, which means that all improvements must be given back +to me to be incorporated and distributed.” He enforced the provisions of the +contract with an iron hand. As Stallman biographer Sam Williams writes, when +the administrators for the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science instituted a new +password system — which Stallman considered an antisocial power grab — he +“initiated a software ‘strike,’ refusing to send lab members the latest version +of Emacs until they rejected the security system on the lab’s computers. The +move did little to improve Stallman’s growing reputation as an extremist, but +it got the point across: commune members were expected to speak up for basic +hacker values.” +={ Williams, Sam } + +Stallman was groping for a way to sustain the hacker ethic of community and +sharing in the face of new types of top-down control. Some programmers were +beginning to install code that would turn off access to a program unless money +was paid. Others were copyrighting programs that had been developed by the +community of programmers. Bill Gates, as an undergraduate at Harvard in the +late 1970s, was nearly expelled for using publicly funded labs to create +commercial software. He was forced to put his code into the public domain, +whereupon he left the university to found an obscure Albuquerque company called +Micro-Soft. +={ authorship : + community access ; + Gates, Bill ; + hackers : + use of term +5 +} + +Software was simply becoming too lucrative for it to remain a shared resource — +an attitude that enraged Stallman. He was determined to preserve the integrity +of what we would now call the software commons. It was an immense challenge +because copyright law makes no provisions for community ownership of creative +work beyond “joint authorship” among named individuals. Stallman wanted to +devise a way to ensure that all the talent and innovation created by commoners +would /{stay}/ in the commons. The idea that an outsider — a university +administrator, software entrepreneur, or large company — could intrude upon a +hacker community and take its work was an appalling injustice to Stallman. +={ authorship : + joint ; + copyright law : + community authorship vs. ; + commons : + copyright law vs. +} + +Yet this was precisely what was happening to the hacker community at MIT’s AI +Lab in the early 1980s. It was slowly disintegrating as one programmer after +another trooped off to join commercial software ventures; the software itself +was becoming annexed into the marketplace. Software for personal computers, +which was just then appearing on the market, was sold as a proprietary product. +This meant that the source code — the deep design architecture of the program +that operated everything — was inaccessible.~{ Steven Levy, /{Hackers: Heroes +of the Computer Revolution}/ (New York: Delta, 1993), pp. 425, 427. }~ Perhaps +most disturbing to Stallman at the time was that the leading mainframe +operating system, Unix, was locking up its source code. Unix had been developed +by AT&T with generous federal funding, and had been generally available for +free within academic computing circles. At the time, most mainframe software +was given away to encourage buyers to purchase the computer hardware. But when +the Department of Justice broke up AT&T in 1984 to spur competition, it also +enabled AT&T to enter other lines of business. Naturally, the company was eager +to maximize its profits, so in 1985 it began to charge a licensing fee for +Unix. +={ AT&T ; + Unix ; + software : + source code for +} + +Stallman grieved at the disintegration of the hacker community at the AI Lab as +closed software programs inexorably became the norm. As he wrote at the time: + +_1 The people remaining at the lab were the professors, students, and +non-hacker researchers, who did not know how to maintain the system, or the +hardware, or want to know. Machines began to break and never be fixed; +sometimes they just got thrown out. Needed changes in software could not be +made. The non-hackers reacted to this by turning to commercial systems, +bringing with them fascism and license agreements. I used to wander through the +lab, through the rooms so empty at night where they used to be full, and think, +“Oh my poor AI lab! You are dying and I can’t save you.” + +Stallman compared himself to Ishi, “the last survivor of a dead [Native +American] culture. And I don’t really belong in the world anymore. And in some +ways I feel I ought to be dead.” + +Stallman decided to leave MIT — why stay? — but with a brash plan: to develop a +free software operating system that would be compatible with Unix. It would be +his brave, determined effort to preserve the hacker ethic. He dubbed his +initiative the GNU Project, with “GNU” standing for “GNU’s Not Unix” — a +recursive hacker’s pun. He also started, in 1985, the Free Software Foundation +to help develop GNU software projects and distribute them for free to anyone. +(The foundation now occupies a fifth-floor office on a narrow commercial street +in downtown Boston.) +={ Unix ; + free software ; + Free Software Foundation ; + GNU Project +3 ; + Stallman, Richard : + free software, and | GNU Project, and +3 +} + +The Emacs Commune experience had taught Stallman about the limits of informal +social norms in protecting the software commons. It also revealed the +difficulties of being the central coordinator of all code changes. This time, +in developing a set of software programs for his GNU Project, Stallman came up +with a better idea — a legally enforceable license. The goal was to ensure that +people could have free access to all derivative works and share and reuse +software. The licensing rights were based on the rights of ownership conferred +by copyright law. +={ Emacs ; + Stallman, Richard : + Emacs, and ; + authorship : + community access ; + copyright law : + community authorship vs. +2 | licensing rights +2 +} + +Stallman called his license the GNU General Public License, or GPL. He +puckishly referred to it as “copyleft,” and illustrated it with a reverse +copyright symbol (a backward c in a circle). Just as programmers pride +themselves on coming up with ingenious hacks to solve a software problem, so +the GPL is regarded as a world-class hack around copyright law. Copyright law +has no provisions for protecting works developed by a large community of +creators. Nor does it offer a way to prevent works from being made proprietary. +Indeed, that’s the point of copyright law — to create private property rights. +={ software : + proprietary ; + copyright law : + property rights, and ; + General Public License (GPL) +14 ; + property rights, and copyright law ; + Stallman, Richard : + GPL, and +14 +} + +The GPL bypasses these structural limitations of copyright law by carving out a +new zone of collective ownership. A work licensed under the GPL permits users +to run any program, copy it, modify it, and distribute it in any modified form. +The only limitation is that any derivative work must also be licensed under the +GPL. This provision of the GPL means that the license is /{automatically}/ +applied to any derivative work, and to any derivative of a derivative, and so +on — hence its viral nature.~[* Stallman told me he considers it “a common +calumny to compare the GNU GPL to a virus. That is not only insulting (I have a +virus infection in my throat right now and it is no fun), it is also +inaccurate, because the GPL does not spread like a virus. It spreads like a +spider plant: if you cut off a piece and plant it over here, it grows over +here.]~ The GPL ensures that the value created by a given group of commoners +shall stay within the commons. To guarantee the viral power of the license, +users of GPL’d works cannot modify the licensing terms. No one has to pay to +use a GPL’d work — but as a condition for using it, people are legally obliged +to license any derivative versions under the GPL. In this way, a GPL’d work is +born and forever protected as “shareable.” +={ collective ownership ; + General Public License (GPL) : + viral nature of ; + software : + user freedoms ; + Stallman, Richard : + freedom, and +} + +Version 1.0 of the GPL was first published in 1989. It was significant, writes +Sam Williams, because it “demonstrated the intellectual similarity between +legal code and software code. Implicit within the GPL’s preamble was a profound +message: instead of viewing copyright law with suspicion, hackers should view +it as yet another system begging to be hacked.”~{ Williams, /{Free as in +Freedom}/, p. 127. }~ The GPL also served to articulate, as a matter of law, +the value of collaborative work. A universe of code that might previously have +been regarded as part of the “public domain” — subject to free and unrestricted +access — could now be seen in a subtly different light. +={ authorship : + community access ; + Williams, Sam ; + public domain : + GPL, and +} + + +A GPL’d work is not part of the public domain, because the public domain has no +rules constraining how a work may be used. Works in the public domain are open +to anyone. The GPL is similar, but with one very important restriction: no +private appropriation is allowed. Any follow-on uses must remain free for +others to use (a provision that some property rights libertarians regard as +“coercive”). Works in the public domain, by contrast, are vulnerable to +privatization because someone need only add a smidgen of “originality” to the +work and she would own a copyright in the resulting work. A GPL’d work and its +derivatives stay free forever — because anyone who tries to privatize a GPL’d +work is infringing on the license. + +For Stallman, the GPL became the symbol and tool for enacting his distinct +political vision of “freedom.” The license rests on four kinds of freedoms for +users of software (which he lists using computer protocols): +={ software : + user freedoms +4 ; + Stallman, Richard : + freedom, and +5 +} + +_1 Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose; + +_1 Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and to adapt it to +your needs. (Access to the source code is a precondition for this); +={ authorship : + community access +} + +_1 Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor; +and + +_1 Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements +to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (Access to the source code +is a precondition for this.) +={ authorship : + community access +} + +Stallman has become an evangelist for the idea of freedom embodied in all the +GNU programs. He refuses to use any software programs that are not “free,” and +he has refused to allow his appearances to be Webcast if the software being +used was not “free.” “If I am to be an honest advocate for free software,” said +Stallman, “I can hardly go around giving speeches, then put pressure on people +to use nonfree software. I’d be undermining my own cause. And if I don’t show +that I take my principles seriously, I can’t expect anybody else to take them +seriously.”~{ Stallman at MIT forum, “Copyright and Globalization in the Age of +Computer Networks,” April 19, 2001, available at +http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/forums/copyright/transcript.html. }~ +={ Stallman, Richard : + free software, and +2 +} + +Stallman has no problems with people making money off software. He just wants +to guarantee that a person can legally use, copy, modify, and distribute the +source code. There is thus an important distinction between software that is +commercial (possibly free) and software that is proprietary (never free). +Stallman tries to explain the distinction in a catchphrase that has become +something of a mantra in free software circles: /{“free as in ‘free speech,’ +not as in ‘free beer.’”}/ The point is that code must be freely accessible, not +that it should be free of charge. (This is why “freeware” is not the same as +free software. Freeware may be free of charge, but it does not necessarily make +its source code accessible.) +={ freeware vs. free software ; + software : + proprietary | source code for +} + +Eben Moglen, a professor of law at Columbia University and general counsel for +the Free Software Foundation since 1994, calls the provisions of the GPL +“elegant and simple. They respond to the proposition that when the marginal +cost of goods is zero, any nonzero cost of barbed wire is too high. That’s a +fact about the twentyfirst century, and everybody had better get used to it. +Yet as you know, there are enormous cultural enterprises profoundly committed +to the proposition that more and more barbed wire is necessary. And their basic +strategy is to get that barbed wire paid for by the public everywhere.”~{ Eben +Moglen, “Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture,” +June 29, 2003, available at +http://emoglen.law/columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.html. }~ +={ Moglen, Eben ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +The GPL truly was something new under the sun: a legally enforceable tool to +vouchsafe a commons of software code. The license is based on copyright law yet +it cleverly turns copyright law against itself, limiting its reach and carving +out a legally protected zone to build and protect the public domain. In the +larger scheme of things, the GPL was an outgrowth of the “gift economy” ethic +that has governed academic life for centuries and computer science for decades. +What made the GPL different from these (abridgeable) social norms was its legal +enforceability. +={ gift economy ; + Internet : + gift economy of +1 ; + General Public License (GPL) : + legal enforceability of +} + +The GPL might well have remained an interesting but arcane curiosity of the +software world but for two related developments: the rise of the Internet in +the 1990s and software’s growing role as core infrastructure in modern society. +As the computer and Internet revolutions have transformed countless aspects of +daily life, it has become evident that software is not just another product. +Its design architecture is seminally important to our civic freedoms and +democratic culture. Or as Lawrence Lessig famously put it in his 1999 book +/{Code}/, “code is law.” Software can affect how a business can function, how +information is organized and presented, and how individuals can think, connect +with one another, and collaborate. Code invisibly structures people’s +relationships, and thus serves as a kind of digital constitutional order. As an +economic force, software has become as critical as steel or transportation in +previous eras: a building block for the basic activities of the economy, +businesses, households, and personal life. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ; + code : + as law ; + free culture : + Internet, of the +2 ; + law : + code as ; + Internet : + rise of ; + software : + core infrastructure, as +} + +Stallman’s atavistic zeal to preserve the hacker community, embodied in the +GPL, did not immediately inspire others. In fact, most of the tech world was +focused on how to convert software into a marketable product. Initially, the +GPL functioned like a spore lying dormant, waiting until a more hospitable +climate could activate its full potential. Outside of the tech world, few +people knew about the GPL, or cared.~[* The GPL is not the only software +license around, of course, although it was, and remains, the most demanding in +terms of protecting the commons of code. Other popular open-source licenses +include the MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses, but each of these permit, but do not +require, that the source code of derivative works also be freely available. The +GPL, however, became the license used for Linux, a quirk of history that has +had far-reaching implications.]~ And even most techies were oblivious to the +political implications of free software. +={ hackers : + community of +} + +Working under the banner of the Free Software Foundation, Stallman continued +through the 1980s and 1990s to write a wide number of programs needed to build +a completely free operating system. But just as Lennon’s music was better after +finding McCartney, Stallman’s free software needed to find Linus Torvalds’s +kernel for a Unix-like operating system. (A kernel is the core element of an +operating system that controls how the various applications and utilities that +comprise the system will run.) +={ Free Software Foundation ; + Torvalds, Linus +1 ; + Unix +1 +} + +In 1991, Torvalds was a twenty-one-year-old computer science student at the +University of Helsinki, in Finland. Frustrated by the expense and complexity of +Unix, and its inability to work on personal computers, Torvalds set out to +build a Unix-like operating system on his IBM AT, which had a 33-megahertz +processor and four megabytes of memory. Torvalds released a primitive version +of his program to an online newsgroup and was astonished when a hundred hackers +responded within a few months to offer suggestions and additions. Over the next +few years, hundreds of additional programmers joined the project, which he +named “Linux” by combining his first name, “Linus,” with “Unix.” The first +official release of his program came in 1994.~{ One useful history of Torvalds +and Linux is Glyn Moody, /{Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source +Revolution}/ (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001). }~ +={ hackers : + community of +3 ; + Linux : + development of +7 +} + +The Linux kernel, when combined with the GNU programs developed by Stallman and +his free software colleagues, constituted a complete computer operating system +— an astonishing and unexpected achievement. Even wizened computer scientists +could hardly believe that something as complex as an operating system could be +developed by thousands of strangers dispersed around the globe, cooperating via +the Internet. Everyone assumed that a software program had to be organized by a +fairly small group of leaders actively supervising the work of subordinates +through a hierarchical authority system — that is, by a single corporation. Yet +here was a virtual community of hackers, with no payroll or corporate +structure, coming together in a loose, voluntary, quasi-egalitarian way, led by +leaders who had earned the trust and respect of some highly talented +programmers. + +The real innovation of Linux, writes Eric S. Raymond, a leading analyst of the +technology, was “not technical, but sociological”: +={ Linux : + sociological effect of +1 +} + +_1 Linux was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers +coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was maintained not by rigid +standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every +week and getting feedback from hundreds of users within days, creating a sort +of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers. To the +amazement of almost everyone, this worked quite well.~{ Eric S. Raymond, “A +Brief History of Hackerdom,” +http://www.catb.org/~est/writings/cathedral-bazaar/hacker-history/ar01s06.html. +}~ + +The Free Software Foundation had a nominal project to develop a kernel, but it +was not progressing very quickly. The Linux kernel, while primitive, “was +running and ready for experimentation,” writes Steven Weber in his book /{The +Success of Open Source}/: “Its crude functionality was interesting enough to +make people believe that it could, with work, evolve into something important. +That promise was critical and drove the broader development process from early +on.”~{ Steven Weber, /{The Success of Open Source}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard +University Press, 2004), p. 100. }~ +={ Weber, Steven : + The Success of Open Source ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +There were other powerful forces driving the development of Linux. Throughout +the 1990s, Microsoft continued to leverage its monopoly grip over the operating +system of personal computers, eventually attracting the attention of the U.S. +Department of Justice, which filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company. +Software competitors such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and IBM found +that rallying behind an open-source alternative — one that was legally +protected against being taken private by anyone else— offered a terrific way to +compete against Microsoft. +={ Hewlett-Packard ; + IBM : + open source, and ; + Microsoft : + antitrust lawsuit against | competition against +2 +} + +Meanwhile, the once-free Unix software program was becoming a fragmented mess. +So many different versions of Unix were being sold that users were frustrated +by the proliferation of incompatible proprietary versions. In the words of a +Sun Microsystems executive at the time, users were unhappy with the +“duplication of effort around different implementations, leading to high +prices; poor compatibility; and worst of all, slower development as each +separate Unix vendor had to solve the same kinds of problems independently. +Unix has become stagnant. . . .”~{ Williams, /{Free as in Freedom}/, p. 100.}~ +={ Unix +1 ; + Sun Microsystems +} + +Given these problems, there was great appeal in a Unix-like operating system +with freely available source code. Linux helped address the fragmentation of +Unix implementations and the difficulties of competing against the Microsoft +monopoly. Knowing that Linux was GPL’d, hackers, academics, and software +companies could all contribute to its development without fear that someone +might take it private, squander their contributions, or use it in hostile ways. +A commons of software code offered a highly pragmatic solution to a market +dysfunction. +={ General Public License (GPL) : + Linux, and ; + GNU/Linux +5 ; + Linux : + GPL, and +} + +Stallman’s GNU Project and Torvalds’s Linux software were clearly synergistic, +but they represented very different styles. The GNU Project was a slower, more +centrally run project compared to the “release early and often” developmental +approach used by the Linux community. In addition, Stallman and Torvalds had +temperamental and leadership differences. Stallman has tended to be more +overbearing and directive than Torvalds, who does not bring a political +analysis to the table and is said to be more tolerant of diverse talents.~{ +Torvalds included a brief essay, “Linux kernel management style,” dated October +10, 2004, in the files of the Linux source code, with the annotation, “Wisdom +passed down the ages on clay tablets.” It was included as an epilogue in the +book /{Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source}/, by Henrik Ingo, and is +available at http://www.openlife.cc/node/43. }~ +={ Torvalds, Linus ; + GNU Project ; + Stallman, Richard : + GNU Project, and +} + +So despite their natural affinities, the Free Software Community and the Linux +community never found their way to a grand merger. Stallman has applauded +Linux’s success, but he has also resented the eclipse of GNU programs used in +the operating system by the Linux name. This prompted Stallman to rechristen +the program “GNU/Linux,” a formulation that many people now choose to honor. + +Yet many hackers, annoyed at Stallman’s political crusades and crusty personal +style, committed their own linguistic raid by renaming “free software” as “open +source software,” with a twist. As GNU/Linux became more widely used in the +1990s, and more corporations began to seriously consider using it, the word +/{free}/ in “free software” was increasingly seen as a problem. The “free as in +free speech, not as in free beer” slogan never quite dispelled popular +misconceptions about the intended sense of the word /{free}/. Corporate +information technology (IT) managers were highly wary about putting +mission-critical corporate systems in the hands of software that could be had +for /{free}/. Imagine telling the boss that you put the company’s fate in the +hands of a program you downloaded from the Internet for free! +={ free software : + open source software, as +6 ; + software : + open source +6 ; + free software : + uses of term +6 +} + +Many corporate executives clearly recognized the practical value of free +software; they just had no interest in joining Stallman’s ideological crusade +or being publicly associated with him. They did not necessarily want to become +champions of the “four freedoms” or the political vision implicit in free +software. They simply wanted code that works well. As Eric Raymond wrote: “It +seemed clear to us in retrospect that the term ‘free software’ had done our +movement tremendous damage over the years. Part of this stemmed from the +well-known ‘free speech/free beer’ ambiguity. Most of it came from something +worse — the strong association of the term ‘free software’ with hostility to +intellectual property rights, communism, and other ideas hardly likely to +endear themselves to an MIS [management information systems] manager.”~{ Eric +S. Raymond, “The Revenge of the Hackers,” in Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark +Stone, eds., /{Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution}/ +(Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates, 1999), p. 212. }~ +={ Stallman, Richard : + free software, and +5 ; + Raymond, Eric S. +} + +One response to this issue was the rebranding of free software as “open-source” +software. A number of leading free software programmers, most notably Bruce +Perens, launched an initiative to set forth a consensus definition of software +that would be called “opensource.” At the time, Perens was deeply involved with +a community of hackers in developing a version of Linux known as the Debian +GNU/Linux distribution. Perens and other leading hackers not only wanted to +shed the off-putting political dimensions of “free software,” they wanted to +help people deal with the confusing proliferation of licenses. A lot of +software claimed to be free, but who could really tell what that meant when the +terms were so complicated and legalistic? +={ Debian GNU/Linux distribution ; + Perens, Bruce +} + +The Open Source Initiative, begun in 1998, helped solve this problem by +enumerating criteria that it considered significant in judging a program to be +“open.”~{ http://www.opensource.org. }~ Its criteria, drawn from the Debian +community, helped standardize and stabilize the definition of open-source +software. Unlike the GPL, permissive software licenses such as BSD and MIT +/{allow}/ a program to be freely copied, modified, and distributed but don’t +/{require}/ it. A programmer can choose to make a proprietary derivative +without violating the license. +={ Open Source Initiative +2 } + +The Open Source Initiative has focused more on the practical, technical merits +of software than on the moral or political concerns that have consumed +Stallman. Free software, as Stallman conceived it, is about building a cohesive +moral community of programmers dedicated to “freedom.” The backers of +open-source software are not necessarily hostile to those ideals but are more +interested in building reliable, marketable software and improving business +performance. As Elliot Maxwell described the free software/open source schism: +={ Maxwell, Elliot +1 } + +_1 [S]upporters of the Open Source Initiative were willing to acknowledge a +role for proprietary software and unwilling to ban any link between open-source +software and proprietary software. Richard Stallman aptly characterized the +differences: “We disagree on the basic principles but agree more or less on the +practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific +projects.”~{ Elliot Maxwell, citing Wikipedia entry on “Open Source Movement,” +in “Open Standards Open Source and Open Innovation,” in /{Innovations: +Technology, Governance, Globalization}/ 1, no. 3 (Summer 2006), p. 134, note +56. }~ + +The philosophical rift between free software and open-source software amounts +to a “friendly schism,” a set of divergent approaches that has been bridged in +some respects by language.~{ Richard Stallman has outlined his problems with +the “open source” definition of software development in an essay, “Why ‘Open +Source’ Misses the Point of Free Software,” +http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-thepoint.html. }~ Observers +often use the acronym FOSS to refer to both free software and open-source +software, or sometimes FLOSS — the L stands for the French word /{libre}/, +which avoids the double meaning of the English word /{free}/. Whatever term is +used, free and open-source software has become a critical tool for making +online marketplaces more competitive, and for creating open, accessible spaces +for experimentation. In his classic essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric +Raymond explains how the licenses help elicit important noneconomic, personal +energies: +={ FOSS/FLOSS +3 ; + free software : + FOSS/FLOSS +3 ; + Raymond, Eric S. +1 ; + Linux : + sociological effect of +1 +} + + +_1 The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a +collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the +process produces a selfcorrecting spontaneous order more elaborate and +efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. . . . The +utility function Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but +is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other +hackers.~{ Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” available at +http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html. +}~ + +It turns out that an accessible collaborative process, FOSS, can elicit +passions and creativity that entrenched markets often cannot. In this respect, +FOSS is more than a type of freely usable software; it reunites two vectors of +human behavior that economists have long considered separate, and points to the +need for new, more integrated theories of economic and social behavior. +={ free software : + economic effects of +1 +} + +FOSS represents a new breed of “social production,” one that draws upon social +energies that neoclassical economists have long discounted or ignored. It +mobilizes the personal passions and moral idealism of individuals, going beyond +the overt economic incentives that economists consider indispensable to wealth +creation. The eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith would be pleased. He +realized, in his 1776 book /{The Wealth of Nations}/, that people are naturally +given to “truck, barter and exchange” — but he also recognized, in his earlier +/{The Theory of Moral Sentiments}/, written in 1759, that people are motivated +by deep impulses of human sympathy and morality. Neoclassical economists have +long segregated these as two divergent classes of human behavior, regarding +altruism and social sympathies as subordinate to the rational, +utility-maximizing, selfserving behavior. FOSS embodies a new synthesis — and a +challenge to economists to rethink their crude model of human behavior, /{Homo +economicus}/. Free software may have started as mere software, but it has +become an existence proof that individual and collective goals, and the +marketplace and the commons, are not such distinct arenas.~{ I am grateful to +Nicholas Gruen for this insight, taken from his essay “Geeks Bearing Gifts: +Open Source Software and Its Enemies,” in /{Policy}/ 21, no. 2 (Winter 2005), +pp. 39–48. }~ They are tightly intertwined, but in ways we do not fully +understand. This is a golden thread that will reappear in later chapters. +={ Smith, Adam : + The Theory of Moral Sentiments ; + social production +6 +} + +Red Hat, a company founded in 1993 by Robert Young, was the first to recognize +the potential of selling a custom version (or “distribution”) of GNU/Linux as a +branded product, along with technical support. A few years later, IBM became +one of the first large corporations to recognize the social realities of +GNU/Linux and its larger strategic and competitive implications in the +networked environment. In 1998 IBM presciently saw that the new software +development ecosystem was becoming far too variegated and robust for any single +company to dominate. It understood that its proprietary mainframe software +could not dominate the burgeoning, diversified Internet-driven marketplace, and +so the company adopted the open-source Apache Web server program in its new +line of WebSphere business software. +={ Red Hat ; + Young, Robert ; + GNU/Linux : + IBM, and +1 | Red Hat, and ; + IBM : + GNU/Linux, and +1 ; + Apache Web server ; + open source software : + functions of +2 +} + +It was a daring move that began to bring the corporate and open-source worlds +closer together. Two years later, in 2000, IBM announced that it would spend $1 +billion to help develop GNU/Linux for its customer base. IBM shrewdly realized +that its customers wanted to slash costs, overcome system incompatibilities, +and avoid expensive technology “lock-ins” to single vendors. GNU/Linux filled +this need well. IBM also realized that GNU/Linux could help it compete against +Microsoft. By assigning its property rights to the commons, IBM could eliminate +expensive property rights litigation, entice other companies to help it improve +the code (they could be confident that IBM could not take the code private), +and unleash a worldwide torrent of creative energy focused on GNU/Linux. Way +ahead of the curve, IBM decided to reposition itself for the emerging networked +marketplace by making money through tech service and support, rather than +through proprietary software alone.~{ Andrew Leonard, “How Big Blue Fell for +Linux,” Salon.com, September 12, 2000, available at +http://www.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/09/12/chapter_7_part_one.print.html. The +competitive logic behind IBM’s moves are explored in Pamela Samuelson, “IBM’s +Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source,” /{Communications of the ACM}/ 49, no. 21 +(October 2006), and Robert P. Merges, “A New Dynamism in the Public Domain,” +/{University of Chicago Law Review}/ 71, no. 183 (Winter 2004). }~ +={ Microsoft : + competition against +} + +It was not long before other large tech companies realized the benefits of +going open source. Amazon and eBay both saw that they could not affordably +expand their large computer infrastructures without converting to GNU/Linux. +GNU/Linux is now used in everything from Motorola cell phones to NASA +supercomputers to laptop computers. In 2005, /{BusinessWeek}/ magazine wrote, +“Linux may bring about the greatest power shift in the computer industry since +the birth of the PC, because it lets companies replace expensive proprietary +systems with cheap commodity servers.”~{ Steve Hamm, “Linux Inc.,” +/{BusinessWeek}/, January 31, 2005. }~ As many as one-third of the programmers +working on open-source projects are corporate employees, according to a 2002 +survey.~{ Cited by Elliot Maxwell in “Open Standards Open Source and Open +Innovation,” note 80, Berlecon Research, /{Free/Libre Open Source Software: +Survey and Study — Firms’ Open Source Activities: Motivations and Policy +Implications}/, FLOSS Final Report, Part 2, at +www.berlecon.de/studien/downloads/200207FLOSS _Activities.pdf. }~ +={ Amazon ; + eBay +} + +With faster computing speeds and cost savings of 50 percent or more on hardware +and 20 percent on software, GNU/Linux has demonstrated the value proposition of +the commons. Open source demonstrated that it can be cheaper and more +efficacious to collaborate in the production of a shared resource based on +common standards than to strictly buy and own it as private property. +={ commons : + value proposition of ; + value : + creation of +1 : + see also Great Value Shift +} + +But how does open source work without a conventional market apparatus? The past +few years have seen a proliferation of sociological and economic theories about +how open-source communities create value. One formulation, by Rishab Ghosh, +compares free software development to a “cooking pot,” in which you can give a +little to the pot yet take a lot — with no one else being the poorer. “Value” +is not measured economically at the point of transaction, as in a market, but +in the nonmonetary /{flow}/ of value that a project elicits (via volunteers) +and generates (through shared software).~{ Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, “Cooking Pot +Markets and Balanced Value Flows,” in Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, ed., /{CODE: +Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy}/ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, +2005), pp. 153–68. }~ Another important formulation, which we will revisit +later, comes from Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, who has written that +the Internet makes it cheap and easy to access expertise anywhere on the +network, rendering conventional forms of corporate organization costly and +cumbersome for many functions. Communities based on social trust and +reciprocity are capable of mobilizing creativity and commitment in ways that +market incentives often cannot — and this can have profound economic +implications.~{ See, e.g., Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature +of the Firm,” /{Yale Law Journal}/ 112, no. 369 (2002); Benkler, “ ‘Sharing +Nicely’: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of +Economic Production,” Yale Law Journal 114, no. 273 (2004).}~ Benkler’s +analysis helps explain how a global corps of volunteers could create an +operating system that, in many respects, outperforms software created by a +well-paid army of Microsoft employees. +={ Benkler, Yochai : + open networks, on ; + FOSS/FLOSS ; + free software : + FOSS/FLOSS ; + Ghosh, Rishab ; + open source software : + economic implications of | uses of term +4 +} + +A funny thing happened to free and open-source software as it matured. It +became hip. It acquired a cultural cachet that extends well beyond the +cloistered precincts of computing. “Open source” has become a universal +signifier for any activity that is participatory, collaborative, democratic, +and accountable. Innovators within filmmaking, politics, education, biological +research, and drug development, among other fields, have embraced the term to +describe their own attempts to transform hidebound, hierarchical systems into +open, accessible, and distributed meritocracies. Open source has become so much +of a cultural meme — a self-replicating symbol and idea — that when the Bikram +yoga franchise sought to shut down unlicensed uses of its yoga techniques, +dissident yoga teachers organized themselves into a nonprofit that they called +Open Source Yoga Unity. To tweak the supremacy of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, culture +jammers even developed nonproprietary recipes for a cola drink and beer called +“open source cola” and “open source beer.”~{ Open Source Yoga Unity, +http://www.yogaunity.org; open-source cola, +http://alfredo.octavio.net/soft_drink_formula.pdf; open-source beer, Vores OI +(Danish for “Our Beer”), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vores_%C3%981. See also +http://freebeer.org/blog and http://www.project21.ch/freebeer. }~ +={ free software : + uses of term +5 +} + +Stallman’s radical acts of dissent in the 1980s, regarded with bemusement and +incredulity at the time, have become, twenty-five years later, a widely +embraced ideal. Small-/{d}/ democrats everywhere invoke open source to lambaste +closed and corrupt political systems and to express their aspirations for +political transcendence. People invoke open source to express a vision of life +free from overcommercialization and corporate manipulation. The term enables +one to champion bracing democratic ideals without seeming naïve or flaky +because, after all, free software is solid stuff. Moreover, despite its image +as the software of choice for granola-loving hippies, free and open-source +software is entirely compatible with the commercial marketplace. How suspect +can open source be when it has been embraced by the likes of IBM, +Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems? +={ Stallman, Richard : + influence of | free software, and +4 ; + Hewlett-Packard ; + IBM : + open source, and ; + Sun Microsystems +} + +The appeal of “openness” has become so great that it is sometimes difficult to +recognize that /{limits}/ on openness are not only necessary but desirable. The +dark side of openness is the spam that clogs the Internet, the ability to +commit fraud and identity theft, and the opportunities for disturbed adults to +prey sexually upon children. Still, the virtues of an open environment are +undeniable; what is more difficult is negotiating the proper levels of openness +for a given realm of online life. +={ openness : + limitations of +} + +Nearly twenty years after the introduction of the GPL, free software has +expanded phenomenally. It has given rise to countless FOSS software +applications, many of which are major viral hits such as Thunderbird (e-mail), +Firefox (Web browser), Ubuntu (desktop GNU/Linux), and Asterisk (Internet +telephony). FOSS has set in motion, directly or indirectly, some powerful viral +spirals such as the Creative Commons licenses, the iCommons/free culture +movement, the Science Commons project, the open educational resource movement, +and a new breed of open-business ventures, Yet Richard Stallman sees little +connection between these various “open” movements and free software; he regards +“open” projects as too vaguely defined to guarantee that their work is truly +“free” in the free software sense of the term. “Openness and freedom are not +the same thing,” said Stallman, who takes pains to differentiate free software +from open-source software, emphasizing the political freedoms that lie at the +heart of the former.~{ Interview with Richard Stallman, January 21, 2008. }~ +={ FOSS/FLOSS ; + free software : + FOSS/FLOSS | expansion of ; + Stallman, Richard : + influence of | freedom, and +} + +Any revolution is not just about new tools and social practices, however. It is +also about developing new ways of understanding the world. People must begin to +/{see}/ things in a new perspective and /{talk}/ with a new vocabulary. In the +1990s, as Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, and other media giants realized how +disruptive the Internet might be, the public was generally oblivious that it +might have a direct stake in the outcome of Internet and copyright policy +battles. Big Media was flexing its muscles to institute all sorts of +self-serving, protectionist fixes — copy-protection technologies, broader +copyright privileges, one-sided software and Web licenses, and much more — and +most public-interest groups and civic organizations were nowhere to be seen. + +Fortunately, a small but fierce and keenly intelligent corps of progressive +copyright scholars were beginning to discover one another in the 1990s. Just as +the hacker community had had to recognize the enclosure of its commons of +software code, and embrace the GPL and other licenses as defensive remedies, so +progressive copyright scholars and tech activists were grappling with how to +defend against a related set of enclosures, The relentless expansion of +copyright law was eroding huge swaths of the public domain and fair use +doctrine. Tackling this problem required asking a question that few in the +legal or political establishments considered worth anyone’s time — namely, +What’s so valuable about the public domain, anyway? + +1~ 2 THE DISCOVERY OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN +={ public domain +93 } + +/{How a band of irregulars demonstrated that the public domain is enormously +valuable after all.}/ + +For decades, the public domain was regarded as something of a wasteland, a +place where old books, faded posters, loopy music from the early twentieth +century, and boring government reports go to die. It was a dump on the +outskirts of respectable culture. If anything in the public domain had any +value, someone would sell it for money. Or so goes the customary conception of +the public domain. + +Jack Valenti, the longtime head of the Motion Picture Association of America, +once put it this way: “A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible +for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it +becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. Who, then, will +invest the funds to renovate and nourish its future life when no one owns +it?”~{ Jack Valenti, “A Plea for Keeping Alive the U.S. Film Industry’s +Competitive Energy, ” testimony on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of +America to extend the term of copyright protection, Senate Judiciary Committee, +September 20, 1995, at http://instructors.cwrl.utexas.edu/~martin/Valenti.pdf. +}~ (Valenti was arguing that longer copyright terms would give film studios the +incentive to digitize old celluloid films that would otherwise enter the public +domain and physically disintegrate.) +={ Valenti, Jack } + +One of the great, unexplained mysteries of copyright law is how a raffish +beggar grew up to be King Midas. How did a virtually ignored realm of culture — +little studied and undertheorized— become a subject of intense scholarly +interest and great practical importance to commoners and businesses alike? How +did the actual value of the public domain become known? The idea that the +public domain might be valuable in its own right — and therefore be worth +protecting — was a fringe idea in the 1990s and before. So how did a +transformation of legal and cultural meaning occur? +={ public domain : + emergence of +4 | copyright law, and +3 +} + +Unlike Richard Stallman’s crusade to create a sustainable public domain of +code,~[* Free software constitutes a “sustainable public domain” because the +General Public License protects the code and its derivatives from private +appropriation yet otherwise makes the code free for anyone to use. The public +domain, by contrast, is vulnerable to private appropriation in practice if a +company has sufficient market power (e.g., Disney’s appropriation of fairy +tales) or if it uses the public domain to make derivative works and then +copyrights them (e.g., vendors who mix government data with proprietary +enhancements).]~ the discovery of the public domain for cultural works was not +led by a single protagonist or group. It emerged over time through a loose +network of legal scholars, techies, activists, and some businesses, who were +increasingly concerned about worrisome expansions of copyright and patent law. +Slowly, a conversation that was occurring in a variety of academic and tech +communities began to intensify, and then coalesce into a more coherent story. +={ copyright law : + expansion of +} + +Scholarship about copyright law is not exactly gripping stuff. But it has +played an important role in the viral spiral. Before anyone could begin to +imagine how an online commons could be structured and protected, someone needed +to explain how intellectual property law had become “uncontrolled to the point +of recklessness” — as law professor David Lange put it in 1981, well before the +proprietarian explosion of the late 1980s and 1990s. +={ Lange, David ; + copyright law : + scholarship about +} + +Fortunately, a new breed of public-spirited professors was reaching a critical +mass just as the Internet was becoming culturally important. These professors, +collaborating with programmers and activists, were among the first to +understand the ways in which copyright law, historically an arcane backwater of +law, was starting to pose serious threats to democracy-loving citizens and +Internet users. The full complexity of this legal literature over the past +generation cannot be unpacked here, but it is important to understand how +progressive copyright scholarship played a critical role in identifying +dangerous trends in law and technology — and in constructing a new narrative +for what copyright law should be. + +This legal scholarship reconceptualized the public domain— then a vague notion +of nonproperty — and developed it into an affirmative theory. It gave the +public domain sharper definition and empirical grounding. Thinkers like Yochai +Benkler (Harvard Law School), Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law), and James Boyle +(Duke Law) developed bracing new theories that recognize the power of social +communities, and not just the individual, in the creative process. Others, such +as Julie Cohen (Georgetown Law Center) and Pamela Samuelson (Boalt Hall), have +respectively explored the need to develop a new social theory of creative +practice~{ Julie E. Cohen, “Copyright, Commodification and Culture: Locating +the Public Domain,” in Lucie Guibaut and P. Bernt Hugenholtz eds. /{The Future +of the Public Domain: Identifying the Commons in Information Law}/ (The +Netherlands: Kluwer Law International, 2006), pp. 121–66. }~ and the +theoretical challenges of “mapping” the public domain.~{ Pamela Samuelson, +“Challenges in Mapping the Public Domain,” in Guibault and Hugenholtz, eds. +/{The Future of the Public Domain}/, pp. 7–26. }~ All of this thinking, mostly +confined to scholarly workshops, law reviews, and tech journals, served as a +vital platform for imagining the commons in general and the Creative Commons in +particular. +={ Boyle, James ; + Cohen, Julie ; + Lessig, Lawrence ; + Samuelson, Pamela +} + +2~ The Elusive Quest for “Balance” +={ copyright law : + balance of public and private rights +19 | public domain vs. +19 ; + public domain : + copyright law, and +19 +} + +Historically, copyright has been regarded as a “bargain” between the public and +authors. The public gives authors a set of monopoly rights to help them sell +their works and earn rewards for their hard work. In return, the public gets +the marketable output of creators— books, films, music — and certain rights of +free access and use. The primary justification of copyright law is not to +protect the fortunes of authors; it is to promote new creative works and +innovation. By giving authors a property right in their works — and so helping +them to sell those works in the marketplace — copyright law aims to promote the +“progress of human knowledge.” +={ property rights : + copyright law, and ; + copyright law : + property rights, and +} + +That’s the author’s side of the bargain. The public’s stake is to have certain +limited rights to use copyrighted works. Under the “fair use” doctrine (or +“fair dealing” in some countries), people are entitled to excerpt copyrighted +works for noncommercial purposes such as journalism, scholarship, reviews, and +personal use. People are also entitled to resell the physical copies of +copyrighted works such as books and videos. (This right is granted under the +“first sale doctrine,” which enables libraries and DVD rental stores to exist.) +The public also has the right to use copyrighted works for free after the term +of a copyright has expired — that is, after a work has “entered the public +domain.” This general scheme is said to establish a balance in copyright law +between the private rights of authors and the needs of the public and future +authors. +={ copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and | first sale doctrine, and ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and ; + first sale doctrine +} + +This “balance” has been more rhetorical than real, however. For decades, +critics have complained that the public’s side of the copyright bargain is +being abridged. Content industries have steadily expanded their rights under +copyright law at the expense of the public’s modest access rights. + +What is notable about the long history of seeking “balance” in copyright law is +the singular failure of critics to make much headway (until recently) in +redressing the problem. The public’s interests in copyright law — and those of +authors’ — have never been given that much attention or respect. From the +authors of eighteenth-century England, whose formal rights were in practice +controlled by booksellers, to the rhythm-and-blues singers of the 1940s whose +music was exploited for a pittance by record labels, to academics whose +copyrights must often be ceded to commercial journals, authors have generally +gotten the short end of the stick. No surprise here. Business practices and +copyright policy have usually been crafted by the wealthiest, most politically +connected players: book publishers, film studios, record labels, broadcasters, +cable operators, news organizations. The public’s lack of organized political +power was reflected in its lack of a coherent language for even describing its +own interests in copyright law. + +For most of the twentieth century, the forging of copyright law was essentially +an insider contest among various copyright-dependent industries for market +advantage. Congress hosted a process to oversee the squabbling and negotiation, +and nudged the players now and again. This is what happened in the fifteen-year +run-up to congressional enactment of the Copyright Act of 1976, for example. +For the most part, Congress has preferred to ratify the compromises that +industry players hammer out among themselves. The unorganized public has been +treated as an ignorant bystander. +={ Copyright Act (1976) +3 ; + copyright law : + revision of (1976) +3 +} + +Naturally, this has strengthened the hand of commercial interests. Copyright +disputes could be argued within a congenial intellectual framework and closely +managed by a priesthood of lawyer-experts, industry lobbyists, and friendly +politicians. The interests of citizens and consumers, blessedly absent from +most debates, could be safely bracketed as marginal. + +But letting industries negotiate their own solutions has its own problems, as +Professor Jessica Litman has pointed out: “Each time we rely on current +stakeholders to agree on a statutory scheme, they produce a scheme designed to +protect themselves against the rest of us. Its rigidity leads to its breakdown; +the statute’s drafters have incorporated too few general principles to guide +courts in effecting repairs.”~{ Jessica Litman, /{Digital Copyright}/ (Amherst, +NY: Prometheus, 2000), p. 62. }~ By letting the affected industries negotiate a +series of fact specific solutions, each reflecting that moment in history, +Congress has in effect let copyright law become an agglomeration of complex and +irregular political compromises — or, as some might say, a philosophically +incoherent mess. +={ copyright law : + expansion of +8 ; + Litman, Jessica +} + +Perhaps because it is so attentive to its industry benefactors, Congress has +generally regarded the fair use doctrine and the public domain as a sideshow. +Under the Copyright Act of 1976, for example, fair use is set forth only as an +affirmative defense to accusations of copyright infringement, not as an +affirmative right. Moreover, fair use is defined by four general statutory +guidelines, which courts have proceeded to interpret in wildly inconsistent +ways. In real life, Lawrence Lessig has quipped, fair use amounts to “the right +to hire a lawyer.” +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + fair use, on ; + copyright use : + fair use doctrine, and ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +} + +Congress has shown a similarly low regard for the public domain. After +extending the term of copyright law eleven times since 1961, the copyright +monopoly now lasts for an author’s lifetime plus seventy years (ninety-five +years for corporations). For Congress, writes Professor Tyler Ochoa, “allowing +works to enter the public domain was something to be condemned, or at least +only grudgingly tolerated, rather than something to be celebrated.”~{ Tyler +Ochoa, “Origins and Meanings of the Public Domain,” /{Dayton Law Review}/ 28, +no. 215 (2002). }~ Congress’s most hostile act toward the public domain — and +to the public’s rights of access — was the elimination of the registration +requirement for copyright protection.~{ Lawrence Lessig explains the impact of +eliminating the copyright registration requirement in Lessig, /{Free Culture}/ +(New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 222–23. }~ Since 1978, copyright holders have +not had to formally register their works in order to receive protection. Doodle +on a scratch pad, record your guitar strumming, and it’s automatically +copyrighted. +={ copyright law : + automatic +1 ; + Ochoa, Tyler +} + +Sounds great . . . but this provision had especially nasty consequences once +the digital revolution kicked into high gear in the 1990s, because every +digital byte was born, by default, as a form of property. Automatic copyright +protection dramatically reversed the previous default, where most everything +was born in the public domain and was free to use unless registered. Today, +anyone wishing to reuse a work legally has to get permission and possibly pay a +fee. To make matters worse, since there is no longer a central registry of who +owns what copyrighted works, it is often impossible to locate the copyright +holder. Such books, films, and images are known as “orphan works.” +={ copyright law : + "orphan works" +} + +Thirty years ago, the idea of throwing a net of copyright over all information +and culture was not alarming in the least. As Jessica Litman recalled, “When I +started teaching in 1984, we were at what was about to be the crest of a +high-protectionist wave. That is, if you looked at the scholarship being +written then, people were writing about how we should expand copyright +protection, not only to cover useful articles and fashions and semiconductor +chips and computer programs, but also recombinant DNA. The Chicago School of +scholarship was beginning to be quite influential. People were reconceiving +copyright in Chicago Law and Economics terms, and things like fair use were +seen to be ‘free riding.’ ”~{ Interview with Jessica Litman, November 16, 2006. +}~ +={ Litman, Jessica +1 } + +Yet the effects of this protectionist surge, at least for the short term, were +muted for a number of reasons. First, corporate lobbying on copyright issues +was extremely low-key. “I started going to congressional hearings in 1986,” +said Litman, “and no one was there. There were no members of Congress; there +was no press. The witnesses would come and they’d talk, and staffers would take +notes. And that would be it.”~{ Ibid. }~ The big-ticket lobbying — receptions, +slick reports, legislative junkets, private movie screenings with Jack Valenti +— did not really begin to kick in until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when +trade associations for every conceivable faction stepped up their Washington +advocacy. When the Internet’s commercial implications became clear in the +mid-1990s, copyright-dependent industries ratcheted up their campaign +contributions and lobbying to another level entirely. +={ Valenti, Jack } + +The protectionist surge in copyright law in the 1980s was mitigated by two +stalwart public servants: Representative Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, the +chair of the House judiciary subcommittee that oversaw copyright legislation, +and Dorothy Schrader, the longtime general counsel of the U.S. Copyright +Office. Both considered it their job to protect the public from grasping +copyright industries. When Kastenmeier lost his reelection bid in 1990 and +Schrader retired in 1994, the film, music, broadcast, cable, and publishing +industries would henceforth have staunch allies— sometimes their former +lawyer-lobbyists — in key congressional staff positions and copyright policy +jobs. Government officials no longer saw their jobs as protecting consumers +from overbearing, revenuehungry media industries, but as helping copyright +owners chase down and prosecute “pirates.” Copyright law was recast as a form +of industrial policy — a way to retain American jobs and improve the U.S. +balance of trade — not as an instrument that affects social equity, consumer +rights, and democratic values. +={ Kastenmeier, Robert ; + Schrader, Dorothy ; + piracy +} + +Ironically, the mercantilist view of copyright was gaining ground at precisely +the time when the public’s stake in copyright law was growing. An explosion of +consumer electronics in the 1980s was giving the public new reasons to care +about their fair use rights and the public domain. The introduction of the +videocassette recorder, the proliferation of cable television, personal +computers, software and electronics devices, and then the introduction of the +Web in 1993 all invited people to control their own creative and cultural +lives. The new media meant that the baroque encrustations of copyright law that +had accumulated over decades were now starting to interfere with people’s daily +activities. +={ fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +1 ; + copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and +1 | mercantilist view of +2 +} + +Yet rather than negotiate a new copyright bargain to take account of the +public’s needs and interests, copyright industries stepped up their demands on +Congress to ram through even stronger copyright, trademark, and patent +privileges for themselves. Their basic goal was, and generally remains, a more +perfect control over all downstream uses of works. Content industries generally +do not concede that there is any presumptive “free use zone” of culture, +notwithstanding the existence of the fair use doctrine. Works that citizens may +regard as fair-use entitlements industry often regards as chunks of information +that no one has yet figured out how to turn into marketable property. + +Most content industries, then and now, do not see any “imbalance” in copyright +law; they prefer to talk in different terms entirely. They liken copyrighted +works to personal property or real estate, as in “and you wouldn’t steal a CD +or use my house without permission, would you?” A copyrighted work is +analogized to a finite physical object, But the essential point about works in +the digital age is that they can’t be “used up” in the same way that physical +objects can. They are “nondepletable” and “nonrival,” as economists put it. A +digital work can be reproduced and shared for virtually nothing, without +depriving another person of it. +={ property rights : + copyright law, and +1 ; + copyright law : + property rights, and +} + +Nonetheless, a new narrative was being launched — copyrighted works as +property. The idea of copyright law reflecting a policy bargain between the +public and authors/corporations was being supplanted by a new story that casts +copyright as property that is nearly absolute in scope and virtually perpetual +in term. In hindsight, for those scholars who cared enough to see, a +disquieting number of federal court cases were strengthening the hand of +copyright holders at the expense of the public. James Boyle, in a much-cited +essay, called this the “second enclosure movement” — the first one, of course, +being the English enclosure movement of common lands in medieval times and into +the nineteenth century.~{ James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the +Construction of the Public Domain,” /{Law and Contemporary Problems}/ 66 +(Winter–Spring 2003), pp. 33–74, at +http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?66+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+33+ +(WinterSpring+2003). }~ +={ Boyle, James : + enclosure movement, on ; + commons : + enclosure of +1 ; + enclosure movement +1 ; + copyright law : + enclosure movement, and +1 +} + +Enclosure took many forms. Copyright scholar Peter Jaszi recalls, “Sometime in +the mid-1980s, the professoriate started getting worried about software +copyright.”~{ Interview with Peter Jaszi, October 17, 2007. }~ It feared that +copyrights for software would squelch competition and prevent others from using +existing code to innovate. This battle was lost, however. Several years later, +the battle entered round two as copyright scholars and programmers sought to +protect reverse-engineering as fair use. This time, they won.~{ /{Sega +Enterprises v. Accolade}/, 977 F.2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1993). }~ +={ Jaszi, Peter ; + fair use doctrine : + reverse engineering, and ; + software : + copyright of ; + copyright law : + digital age, in +} + +Then, in 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was not fair use for the +/{Nation}/ magazine to excerpt three hundred words from President Ford’s +200,000-word memoir. The /{Nation}/ had acquired a copy of Ford’s book before +its publication and published an article of highlights, including a handful of +quotations. The material, derived from Ford’s official duties as president, was +of obvious value to the democratic process. But by a 6-3 margin the Court held +that the /{Nation}/ had violated Ford’s copyright.~{ /{Harper & Row v. Nation +Enterprises}/, 471 U.S. 539 (1985). }~ The proprietary tilt of copyright law +only intensified in the following years. Companies claimed copyrights for all +sorts of dubious forms of “originality” — the page numbers of federal court +decisions, the names and numbers in telephone directories, and facts compiled +in databases. +={ Ford, Gerald R. ; + Nation (magazine) +} + +2~ The Great Expansion of Intellectual Property +={ intellectual property : + protection of +14 ; + copyright law : + expansion of +14 +} + +These expansions of proprietary control in the 1980s proved to be a prelude to +much more aggressive expansions of copyright, patent, and trademark law in the +1990s. Congress and the courts were granting property rights to all sorts of +things that had previously been considered unowned or unownable. The Supreme +Court had opened this door in 1980 when it recognized the patentability of a +genetically modified bacterium. This led to ethically and economically dubious +patents for genes and life-forms. Then businesses began to win patents for +“business methods” — ideas and theoretical systems — that would otherwise be in +the public domain. Mathematical algorithms, if embedded in software, could now +be owned. Amazon.com’s patent on “one-click shopping” on its Web site became +the symbol of this trend. Boat manufacturers won a special /{sui generis}/ (“in +a class by itself ”) form of protection for the design of boat hulls in 1998. +Celebrities and talent agencies prevailed upon state legislatures to extend the +scope of ownership of celebrity names and likenesses, which had long been +considered in the public domain. +={ Amazon ; + copyright law : + proprietary rights ; + software : + copyright of +1 ; + software : + copyright of +1 ; + property rights : + copyright law, and +} + +Companies developed still other strategies to assert greater proprietary +control over works. Software companies began to rely upon mass-market licenses +— often referred to as “shrink wrap” contracts and “click-through” Web +agreements — to expand their rights at the expense of consumers and the public +domain. Various computer companies sought to enact a model state law that, in +Samuelson’s words, would “give themselves more rights than intellectual +property law would do and avoid the burdens of public interest limitations.”~{ +Samuelson, “Digital Information, Digital Networks, and the Public Domain,” p. +92. }~ Consumers could in effect be forced to surrender their fair use rights, +the right to criticize the product or their right to sue, because of a +“contract” they ostensibly agreed to. +={ Samuelson, Pamela ; + copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +} + +Trademarks, originally designed to help people identify brands and prevent +fraud in the marketplace, acquired a new power in 1995 — the ability to control +public meanings. For years, large corporations had wanted to extend the scope +of their trademark protection to include “dilution” — a fuzzy concept that +would prohibit the use of a trademark without permission, even for legitimate +public commentary or parody, if it “dilutes” the recognized public associations +and meanings of a trademark. For a decade or more, Kastenmeier had prevented +antidilution legislation from moving forward. After Kastenmeier left Congress, +the trademark lobby succeeded in getting Congress to enact the legislation. +This made it much easier for Mattel to threaten people who did parodies of +Barbie dolls. The /{Village Voice}/ could more credibly threaten the /{Cape Cod +Voice}/ for trademark infringement. Wal-Mart could prevent others from using +“its” smiley-face logo (itself taken from the cultural commons).~{ See, e.g., +David Bollier, /{Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture}/ +(New York: Wiley, 2005).}~ +={ Kastenmeier, Robert ; + trademarks : + dilution of +} + +The election of Bill Clinton as president in 1992 gave content industries new +opportunities to expand their copyright privileges. The Clinton administration +launched a major policy effort to build what it called the National Information +Infrastructure (NII), more commonly known as the Information Superhighway. +Today, of course, we call it the Internet. A task force of industry +heavyweights was convened to determine what policies should be adopted to help +build the NII.~{ Jessica Litman has an excellent historical account of the NII +campaign in her book /{Digital Copyright}/ (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000). }~ +Vice President Al Gore cast himself as a visionary futurist and laid out +astonishing scenarios for what the NII could deliver: access to every book in +the Library of Congress, the ability of doctors to share medical information +online, new strides against inequality as everyone goes online. +={ Clinton, Bill ; + Gore, Al ; + Information Superhighway +6 ; + Internet : + rise of +1 ; + National Information Infrastructure (NII) +6 +} + +The NII project was a classic case of incumbent industries trying to protect +their profit centers. Executives and lobbyists associated with broadcasting, +film, and music were being asked how to structure the Information Superhighway. +Predictably, they came up with fantasies of digital television with five +hundred channels, programs to sell products, and self-serving scenarios of even +stronger copyright protection and penalties. Few had any inkling of the +transformative power of open networks or the power of the sharing economy — and +if they did, the possibilities certainly were not appealing to them. + +One part of the NII campaign was a working group on intellectual property +headed by Bruce Lehman, a former congressional staffer, lobbyist for the +software industry, and commissioner of patents and trademarks. The Lehman panel +spent two years developing a sweeping set of copyright policies for the +Information Superhighway. When the panel’s report was released in September +1995, anyone who cared about open culture and democracy was livid. The White +Paper, as it was called, recommended a virtual elimination of fair use rights +in digital content and broader rights over any copyrighted transmissions. It +called for the elimination of first-sale rights for digitally transmitted +documents (which would prevent the sharing of digital files) and endorsed +digital rights management systems for digital works (in order to monitor and +prosecute illegal sharing). The White Paper even sought to reinterpret existing +law so that transient copies in the random-access memory of computers would be +considered illegal unless they had a license — essentially outlawing Web +browsing without a license. With visions of Soviet-style indoctrination, the +document also recommended an ambitious public education program to teach +Americans to properly respect copyright laws. +={ Lehman, Bruce ; + White Paper [on copyright] +4 ; + Clinton administration : + White Paper +4 ; + first sale doctrine ; + copyright : + first sale, and | fair use doctrine, and ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +1 | White Paper vs. +5 +} + +Litman wrote a revealing history of the misbegotten NII project in her book +/{Digital Copyright}/. Her chapter title “Copyright Lawyers Set Out to Colonize +Cyberspace” says it all.~{ Litman, /{Digital Copyright}/, pp. 89–100. }~ +Samuelson alerted the readers of /{Wired}/ about the outrageous proposals of +the White Paper in her devastating January 1996 article “The Copyright Grab.”~{ +Pamela Samuelson, “The Copyright Grab,” /{Wired}/, January 1996. }~ If the NII +proposals are enacted, warned Samuelson, “your traditional user rights to +browse, share or make private noncommercial copies of copyrighted works will be +rescinded. Not only that, your online service provider will be forced to snoop +through your files, ready to cut you off and turn you in if it finds any +unlicensed material there. The White Paper regards digital technology as so +threatening to the future of the publishing industry that the public must be +stripped of all the rights copyright law has long recognized — including the +rights of privacy. Vice President Al Gore has promised that the National +Information Infrastructure will dramatically enhance public access to +information; now we find out that it will be available only on a pay-per-use +basis.”~{ Ibid. }~ +={ Litman, Jessica ; + Samuelson, Pamela ; + Gore, Al +} + +The White Paper was not just an effort by Old Media to domesticate or eliminate +the freedoms emerging on the Information Superhighway; it sought to set the +stage for the internationalization of strict copyright norms, so that +American-style copyright law would prevail around the world. To counter this +effort, American University law professor Peter Jaszi convened a group of law +professors, library organizations, and computer and consumer electronics +makers, who promptly organized themselves as the Digital Future Coalition +(DFC), the first broad-based coalition in support of the public’s stake in +copyright law. +={ Jaszi, Peter ; + Digital Future Coalition (DFC) +1 ; + copyright law : + international +} + +The DFC attacked the White Paper as a copyright-maximalist nightmare and sought +to rally civil liberties groups, Internet service providers, and electronics +manufacturers. With modest industry support, the DFC was largely responsible +for slowing progress on legislation that would have enacted Lehman’s proposals. +As domestic opposition grew, Lehman shrewdly decided to push for a new global +copyright treaty that would embody similar principles. In the end, however, the +World Intellectual Property Organization demurred. +={ Lehman, Bruce ; + World Intellectual Property Organization +} + +By that time, however, the terms of debate had been set, and there was serious +congressional momentum to adopt some variant of the White Paper agenda. The +ultimate result, enacted in October 1998, was the Digital Millennium Copyright +Act (DMCA), the crowning achievement of the copyright-maximalist decade. It +contained dozens of highly specific provisos and qualifications to satisfy +every special pleader. The law in effect authorized companies to eliminate the +public’s fair use rights in digital content by putting a “digital lock” around +the content, however weak. Circumventing the lock, providing the software to do +so, or even telling someone how to do so became a criminal offense. +={ copyright : + fair use doctrine, and +1 ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +1 ; + Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) [1998] +4 ; + copyright law : + DMCA +4 +} + +The DMCA has been roundly denounced by software programmers, music fans, and +Internet users for prohibiting them from making personal copies, fair use +excerpts, and doing reverse engineering on software, even with legally +purchased products. Using digital rights management systems sanctioned by the +DMCA, for example, many CDs and DVDs are now coded with geographic codes that +prevent consumers from operating them on devices on other continents. DVDs may +contain code to prevent them from running on Linux-based computers. Digital +journals may “expire” after a given period of time, wiping out library holdings +unless another payment is made. Digital textbooks may go blank at the end of +the school year, preventing their reuse or resale. + +Critics also argue that the DMCA gives large corporations a powerful legal tool +to thwart competition and interoperability. Some companies programmed garage +door openers and printer cartridges so that the systems would not accept +generic replacements (until a federal court found this behavior +anticompetitive). Naturally, this sort of behavior, which the DMCA facilitates, +lets companies avoid open competition on open platforms with smaller companies +and entrepreneurs. It also gives companies a legal pretext for bullying Web +site owners into taking down copyrighted materials that may in fact be legal to +use. + +In her excellent history of the political run-up to the DMCA, Litman notes, +“There is no overarching vision of the public interest animating the Digital +Millennium Copyright Act. None. Instead, what we have is what a variety of +different private parties were able to extract from each other in the course of +an incredibly complicated four-year multiparty negotiation.”~{ Litman, +/{Digital Copyright}/, pp. 144–45. }~ The DMCA represents a new frontier of +proprietarian control — the sanctioning of technological locks that can +unilaterally override the copyright bargain. Companies asked themselves, Why +rely on copyrights alone when technology can embed even stricter controls into +the very design of products? +={ Litman, Jessica } + +The year 1998 was an especially bad year for the public domain. Besides +enacting the trademark dilution bill and DMCA, the Walt Disney Company and +other large media corporations succeeded in their six-year campaign to enact +the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.~{ See Wikipedia entry for the +Copyright Term Extension Act, at +http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act. See also +/{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), F. 3d 849 (2001). }~ The +legislation, named after the late House legislator and former husband of the +singer Cher, retroactively extended the terms of existing copyrights by twenty +years. As we will see in chapter 3, this law became the improbable catalyst for +a new commons movement. +={ trademarks : + dilution of ; + Walt Disney Company ; + Copyright Term Extension Act +} + +2~ Confronting the Proprietarian Juggernaut +={ copyright law : + property rights, and +13 ; + property rights : + copyright law, and +13 +} + +If there was ever a need for independent scholarship on copyright law and +activism to challenge the new excesses, this was such a time. Fred von Lohmann, +senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, +recalls, “Peggy Radin taught the first cyber-law class at Stanford Law School +in 1995, and I was her research assistant. And at the end of that semester, I +had read everything that had ever been written about the intersection of the +Internet and the law — not just in the legal literature, but in almost all the +literature. It filled about two boxes, and that was it. That was all there +was.”~{ Interview with Fred von Lohmann, March 20, 2006. }~ +={ Lohmann, Fred von ; + Radin, Margaret Jane +} + +In about a dozen years, those two boxes of literature have grown into many +shelves and countless filing cabinets of case law and commentary. Much of the +legal scholarship was the fruit of a new generation of copyright professors who +rose to the challenge of the time. An earlier generation of copyright scholars +— Melville Nimmer, Alan Latman, Paul Goldstein — were highly respected titans, +but they also enjoyed busy consulting practices with the various creative +industries that they wrote about. Protecting the public domain was not their +foremost concern. +={ Goldstein, Paul ; + Latman, Alan ; + Nimmer, Melville +} + +By the 1980s, as law schools become more like graduate schools and less like +professional schools, copyright commentary began to get more scholarly and +independent of the industries it studied. People like Pamela Samuelson, Peter +Jaszi, Jerome H. Reichman, Jessica Litman, L. Ray Patterson, and Wendy Gordon +were among this cohort, who were soon joined in the 1990s by a new wave of +thinkers such as James Boyle, Lawrence Lessig, Julie Cohen, Niva Elkin-Koren, +and Yochai Benkler. Still others, such as Rosemary Coombe and Keith Aoki, +approached copyright issues from cross-cultural and globalization perspectives. +These scholars were frankly hostile to the large copyright industries, and +greatly concerned with how the law was harming democracy, science, culture, and +consumers. +={ Litman, Jessica ; + Samuelson, Pamela ; + Jaszi, Peter ; + Benkler, Yochai ; + Boyle, James ; + Cohen, Julie ; + Coombe, Rosemary ; + Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + Gordon, Wendy ; + Lessig, Lawrence ; + Patterson, L. Ray ; + Reichman, Jerome H. ; + Aoki, Keith +} + +A number of activist voices were also coming forward at this time to challenge +the proprietarian juggernaut. As the Internet became a popular medium, ordinary +people began to realize that the new copyright laws were curtailing their +creative freedoms and free speech rights. The obscure complexities of copyright +law started to become a far more public and political issue. The pioneering +activist organization was the Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF was founded +in 1990 by tech entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, the famed inventor of the Lotus 1-2-3 +spreadsheet in the 1980s; John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and hacker; +and John Gilmore, a leading privacy/cryptography activist and free software +entrepreneur. +={ Barlow, John Perry +4 ; + Gilmore, John ; + Kapor, Mitch ; + Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) +} + +The organization was oriented to hackers and cyberlibertarians, who +increasingly realized that they needed an organized presence to defend citizen +freedoms in cyberspace. (Barlow adapted the term /{cyberspace}/ from +science-fiction writer William Gibson in 1990 and applied it to the +then-unnamed cultural life on the Internet.) Initially, the EFF was concerned +with hacker freedom, individual privacy, and Internet censorship. It later went +through some growing pains as it moved offices, changed directors, and sought +to develop a strategic focus for its advocacy and litigation. In more recent +years, EFF, now based in San Francisco, has become the leading litigator of +copyright, trademark, and Internet free expression issues. It also has more +than ten thousand members and spirited outreach programs to the press and +public. +={ Gibson, William ; + cyberspace : + use of term +} + +John Perry Barlow was an important visionary and populizer of the time. His +March 1994 article “The Economy of Ideas” is one of the most prophetic yet +accessible accounts of how the Internet was changing the economics of +information. He astutely realized that information is not a “product” like most +physical property, but rather a social experience or form of life unto itself. +“Information is a verb, not a noun,” he wrote. “Freed of its containers, +information obviously is not a thing. In fact, it is something that happens in +the field of interaction between minds or objects or other pieces of +information. . . . Sharks are said to die of suffocation if they stop swimming, +and the same is nearly true of information.”~{22. John Perry Barlow, “The +Economy of Ideas,” /{Wired}/, March 1994, at +http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html. }~ + +Instead of the sober polemics of law professors, Barlow — a retired Wyoming +cattle rancher who improbably doubled as a tech intellectual and rock hipster — +spiced his analysis of information with colorful metaphors and poetic +aphorisms. Comparing information to DNA helices, Barlow wrote, “Information +replicates into the cracks of possibility, always seeking new opportunities for +/{Lebensraum}/.” Digital information, he said, “is a continuing process more +like the metaphorphosing tales of prehistory than anything that will fit in +shrink-wrap.” + +Since hyperbole is an occupational reflex among cyberjournalists, Barlow’s +/{Wired}/ piece bore the obligatory subtitle, “Everything you know about +intellectual property is wrong.” Yet reading Barlow more than a decade later +confirms that, posturing aside, he /{was}/ on to the big story of our time: +“Notions of property, value, ownership and the nature of wealth itself are +changing more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians first poked +cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain. Only a very few people are +aware of the enormity of this shift, and fewer of them are lawyers or public +officials.”~{ Ibid. }~ + +With a nod to Professor Samuelson, Barlow was prescient enough to compare the +vulnerability of indigenous peoples to the coming dispossession of Internet +communities: “Western countries may legally appropriate the music, designs and +biomedical lore of aboriginal people without compensation to their tribes of +origins since those tribes are not an ‘author’ or ‘investors.’ But soon most +information will be generated collaboratively by the cyber-tribal +hunter-gatherers of cyberspace. Our arrogant legal dismissal of the rights of +‘primitives’ will soon return to haunt us.” +={ Samuelson, Pamela } + +No account of cyberactivism in the 1990s is complete without mention of James +Love, a feisty advocate with a brilliant strategic mind and an extraordinary +ability to open up broad new policy fronts. For example, Love, as director of +the Ralph Nader–founded Consumer Project on Technology, worked with tech +activist Carl Malamud to force the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to +put its EDGAR database of corporate filings online in 1994, at a time when the +SEC was planning to give the data to private vendors to sell. By prevailing at +the SEC, Love and Malamud set an important precedent that government agencies +should post their information on the Internet for free. A few years later, in +1997, Love convened a conference to assess Microsoft’s troubling monopoly +power, an event that emboldened the Department of Justice to launch its +antitrust lawsuit against the company. Love later played a key role in +persuading an Indian drugmaker to sell generic HIV/AIDS drugs to South Africa, +putting Big Pharma on the defensive for its callous patent and trade policies +and exorbitant drug prices. Love’s timely gambit in 1996 to organize broader +advocacy for the public domain failed, however. He co-founded the Union for the +Public Domain, with a board that included Richard Stallman, but the project +never developed a political following or raised much money. +={ Love, James ; + EDGAR database ; + Malamud, Carl ; + Microsoft : + antitrust lawsuit against +} + +The American Library Association was the largest and bestfunded advocate on +copyright issues in the 1990s, but its collaborations with other Washington +allies tended to be modest, and its grassroots mobilization disappointing. +Libraries are respected in the public mind precisely because they are stable, +apolitical civic institutions — that is, not activists. Despite its valuable +presence on copyright and Internet policy issues, the library lobby was +temperamentally disinclined to get too far ahead of the curve. +={ American Library Association ; + libraries +} + +By the end of the decade, a muscular, dissenting discourse about copyright law +was starting to take shape. On one side was a complicated body of +industry-crafted copyright law that claimed imperial powers to regulate more +and more aspects of daily life — your Web site, your music CDs, your electronic +devices, your computer practices. On the other side were ordinary people who +loved how the Internet and digital devices were empowering them to be creators +and publishers in their own right. They just wanted to indulge their natural +human urge to share, tinker, reuse, and transform culture. +={ copyright law : + expansion of +} + +The dissent of the progressive copyright scholars and activists, though +pungent, was hardly insurrectionist. These critics were reformers, not bomb +throwers. Most objected to the overreaching scope and draconian enforcement of +copyright law, not to its philosophical foundations. They generally argued that +the problem wasn’t copyright law per se, but the misapplication and +overextension of its core principles. + +2~ A New Story About the Public Domain +={ copyright law : + public domain vs. +15 ; + public domain : + copyright law, and +15 | emergence of +21 +} + +One of the most notable outgrowths of all this activity was the development of +a new story about the public domain. Scholars took a range of legal doctrines +that were scattered among the sprawling oeuvre of copyright law and +consolidated them under one banner, /{the public domain}/. The new framing +helped give the public’s rights in cultural works a new moral standing and +intellectual clarity. + +Even though copyright law has existed for three centuries, the term “public +domain” did not surface in a U.S. Supreme Court decision until 1896. The public +domain was first mentioned in U.S. copyright law in 1909, and while it +occasionally merited passing reference or discussion in later decades, the +concept was not the subject of a significant law review article until 1981. +That article was “Recognizing the Public Domain,” by Professor David Lange.~{ +David Lange, “Recognizing the Public Domain,” /{Law and Contemporary Problems}/ +44 (Autumn 1981). }~ “David’s article was an absolutely lovely piece that sunk +without a trace,” recalls Jessica Litman. “When a bunch of us discovered +[Lange’s article] in the late 1980s, it had been neither cited nor excerpted +nor reprinted nor anything — because nobody was looking for a defense of the +public domain. People were looking for arguments for extending copyright +protection. David was ahead of his time.” + +The main reason that the public domain was ignored was that it was generally +regarded as a nullity. “Public domain in the fields of literature, drama, music +and art is the other side of the coin of copyright,” wrote M. William +Krasilovsky in 1967.~{ M. William Krasilovsky, “Observations on the Public +Domain,” /{Bulletin of the Copyright Society}/ 14, no. 205 (1967). }~ “It is +best defined in negative terms.” Edward Samuels wrote that the public domain +“is simply whatever remains after all methods of protection are taken into +account.”~{ Edward Samuels, “The Public Domain in Copyright Law,” /{Journal of +the Copyright Society}/ 41, no. 137 (1993), p. 138. }~ + +Lange himself acknowledged this conventional wisdom when he wrote that the +public domain “amounts to a dark star in the constellation of intellectual +property.” He took issue with this history, however, and insisted upon the +affirmative value of the public domain. Lange dredged up a number of “publicity +rights” cases and commentary to shed light on the problem: Bela Lugosi’s widow +and son claimed that they, not Universal Pictures, should own the rights to the +character Dracula. Representatives of the deceased Marx Brothers sought to stop +a Broadway production spoofing 1930s musicals from using the Marx Brothers’ +characters. DC Comics, owner of a trademark in the Superman character, sued to +prevent a group of Chicago college students from calling their newspaper /{The +Daily Planet}/. And so on. +={ DC Comics ; + Lugosi, Bela ; + Marx Brothers +1 +} + +From such examples, Lange drove home a commonsense lesson about the derivative +nature of creativity: we all depend on others to generate “new” works. Groucho, +Chico, and Harpo Marx couldn’t “invent” their stage personas until, in classic +vaudevillian tradition, they had adapted jokes and shtick from their peers. “In +time,” Groucho wrote in his memoirs, “if [a comedian] was any good, he would +emerge from the routine character he had started with and evolve into a +distinct personality of his own. This has been my experience and also that of +my brothers, and I believe this has been true of most of the other comedians.” + +To which Lange added, “Of course, what Groucho is saying in this passage is +that although he and his brothers began as borrowers they ended as inventors. . +. . It is a central failing in the contemporary intellectual property +literature and case law that that lesson, so widely acknowledged, is so +imperfectly understood.”~{ Lange, “Recognizing the Public Domain,” p. 162. }~ + +In example after example, Lange made the point that “as access to the public +domain is choked, or even closed off altogether, the public loses too: loses +the rich heritage of its culture, the rich presence of new works derived from +that culture, and the rich promise of works to come.” Lange warned that “courts +must dispel” the “impression of insubstantiality” from which the public domain +suffers. Nothing will be resolved, he warned, “until the courts have come to +see the public domain not merely as an unexplored abstraction but as a field of +individual rights as important as any of the new property rights.” + +2~ What Is “Authorship”? +={ authorship +13 ; + copyright law : + authorship, and +13 | originality, and +13 +} + +Besides honoring the public domain, copyright reformers sought to develop a +second, more subversive narrative. They questioned the very idea of individual +“authorship” and “originality,” two central pillars of copyright law, The +standard moral justification for granting authors exclusive rights in their +works is the personal originality that they supposedly show in creating new +works. But can “originality” and “authorship” be so neatly determined? What of +the role of past generations and creative communities in enabling the creation +of new works? Don’t we all, in the words of Isaac Newton, stand on the +shoulders of giants? +={ Newton, Isaac } + +The idea that sharing, collaboration, and adaptation may actually be important +to creativity, and not merely incidental, was a somewhat daring theme in the +early 1990s, if only because it had little recognition in copyright +scholarship. While this line of analysis preceded the Internet, the arrival of +the World Wide Web changed the debate dramatically. Suddenly there was a +powerful, real-life platform for /{collective}/ authorship. Within fifteen +years, sharing and collaboration has become a standard creative practice, as +seen in Wikipedia, remix music, video mashups, machinima films, Google map +mashups, social networking, and much else. +={ orld Wide Web : + collective authorship, and ; + authorship : + collective +} + +Of course, in the early 1990s, the promise of online networks was only dimly +understood. But for Jessica Litman, the tightening noose of proprietary control +had troubling implications for fair use and the ability of people to create and +share culture: “Copyright law was no longer as open and porous as it had been, +so I felt compelled to try to defend the open spaces that nobody was paying +attention to.” Litman published a major article on the public domain in 1990, +instigating a fresh round of interest in it and establishing lines of analysis +that continue to this day.~{ Jessica Litman, “The Public Domain,” /{Emory Law +Journal}/ 39, no. 965 (Fall 1990). }~ +={ Litman, Jessica ; + copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +} + +She made the then-startling claim, for example, that “the very act of +authorship in /{any}/ medium is more akin to translation and recombination than +it is to creating Aphrodite from the foam of the sea. Composers recombine +sounds they have heard before; playwrights base their characters on bits and +pieces drawn from real human beings and other playwrights’ characters. . . . +This is not parasitism; it is the essence of authorship. And, in the absence of +a vigorous public domain, much of it would be illegal.” Litman argued that the +public domain is immensely important because all authors depend upon it for +their raw material, Shrink the public domain and you impoverish the creative +process. + +The problem, said Litman, is that copyright law contains a structural +contradiction that no one wants to acknowledge. The law requires “originality” +in order for a work to be protected — but it cannot truly determine what is +“original.” If authors could assert that their works were entirely original, +and courts conscientiously enforced this notion, copyright law would soon +collapse. Everyone would be claiming property rights in material that had +origins elsewhere. Shakespeare’s estate might claim that Leonard Bernstein’s +/{West Side Story}/ violates its rights in /{Romeo and Juliet}/; Beethoven +would prevent the Bee Gees from using the opening chords of his Fifth Symphony. + +When one person’s copyright claims appear to threaten another person’s ability +to create, the courts have historically invoked the public domain in order to +set limits on the scope of copyright protection. In this backhanded way, the +public domain helps copyright law escape from its own contradictions and +ensures that basic creative elements remain available to all. As Litman +explained: + +_1 Because we have a public domain, we can permit authors to avoid the harsh +light of a genuine search for provenance, and thus maintain the illusion that +their works are indeed their own creations. We can tolerate the grant of +overbroad and overlapping deeds through the expedient assumption that each +author took her raw material from the commons, rather than from the property +named in prior deeds.~{ Litman, “The Public Domain,” p. 1012. }~ + +In effect, copyright law sets up a sleight of hand: it invites authors to +plunder the commons with the assurance that their borrowings will be politely +ignored — but then it declares the resulting work of authorship “original” and +condemns any further follow-on uses as “piracy.” This roughly describes the +early creative strategy of the Walt Disney Company, which built an empire by +rummaging through the public domain of fairy tales and folklore, adding its own +creative flourishes, and then claiming sole ownership in the resulting +characters and stories. +={ authorship +3 ; + Walt Disney Company +} + +As Litman unpacked the realities of “authorship,” she showed how the idea of +“originality” serves as a useful fiction. Any author must draw upon aspects of +culture and recombine them without ever being able to identify the specific +antecedents, she pointed out. Judges, for their part, can never really make a +rigorous factual determination about what is “original” and what is taken from +the public domain. In reality, said Litman, authorship amounts to “a +combination of absorption, astigmatism and amnesia.” The public domain is vague +and shifting precisely because it must constantly disguise the actual limits of +individual “originality.” + +English professor Martha Woodmansee and law professor Peter Jaszi helped expose +many of the half-truths about “authorship” and “originality.” Their 1994 +anthology of essays, /{The Construction of Authorship}/, showed how social +context is an indispensable element of “authorship,” one that copyright law +essentially ignores.~{ Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, eds., /{The +Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature}/ +(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). }~ Thus, even though indigenous +cultures collectively create stories, music, and designs, and folk cultures +generate works in a collaborative fashion, copyright law simply does not +recognize such acts of collective authorship. And so they go unprotected. They +are vulnerable to private appropriation and enclosure, much as Stallman’s +hacker community at MIT saw its commons of code destroyed by enclosure. +={ Jaszi, Peter ; + Woodmansee, Martha ; + commons : + enclosure of ; + enclosure movement +} + +Before the Internet, the collaborative dimensions of creativity were hardly +given much thought. An “author” was self-evidently an individual endowed with +unusual creative skills. As the World Wide Web and digital technologies have +proliferated, however, copyright’s traditional notions of “authorship” and +“originality” have come to seem terribly crude and limited. The individual +creator still matters and deserves protection, of course. But when dozens of +people contribute to a single entry of Wikipedia, or thousands contribute to an +open-source software program, how then shall we determine who is the +“author”?~{ Henry Miller writes: “We carry within us so many entities, so many +voices, that rare indeed is the man who can say he speaks with his own voice. +In the final analysis, is that iota of uniqueness which we boast of as ‘ours’ +really ours? Whatever real or unique contribution we make stems from the same +inscrutable source whence everything derives. We contribute nothing but our +understanding, which is a way of saying — our acceptance.” Miller, /{The Books +in My Life}/ (New York: New Directions), p. 198. }~ By the lights of copyright +law, how shall the value of the public domain, reconstituted as a commons, be +assessed?~{ Rufus Pollock, “The Value of the Public Domain,” report for +Institute for Public Policy Research, London, July 2006, at +http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/value_of_public_domain.ippr.pdf. +}~ +={ World Wide Web : + collective authorship, and ; + creativity : + collaborative +} + +The Bellagio Declaration, the outgrowth of a conference organized by Woodmansee +and Jaszi in 1993, called attention to the sweeping deficiencies of copyright +law as applied. One key point stated, “In general, systems built around the +author paradigm tend to obscure or undervalue the importance of the ‘public +domain,’ the intellectual and cultural commons from which future works will be +constructed. Each intellectual property right, in effect, fences off some +portion of the public domain, making it unavailable to future creators.”~{ See +James Boyle, /{Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the +Information Society}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 192. +}~ +={ Jaszi, Peter ; + Woodmansee, Martha ; + Bellagio Declaration ; + Boyle, James : + Shamans, Software and Spleens, by +1 ; + intellectual property : + public domain vs. +} + +Another fusillade of flaming arrows engulfed the fortress of “authorship” and +“originality” in 1996, when James Boyle published /{Shamans, Software, and +Spleens}/. With sly wit and deep analysis, this landmark book identified many +of the philosophical paradoxes and absurdities of property rights in indigenous +knowledge, software, genes, and human tissue. Boyle deftly exposed the +discourse of IP law as a kind of Möbius strip, a smooth strip of logic that +confusingly turns back on itself. “If a geography metaphor is appropriate at +all,” said Boyle, “the most likely cartographers would be Dali, Magritte and +Escher.”~{ James Boyle, “A Theory of Law and Information: Copyright, Spleens, +Blackmail and Insider Trading,” /{California Law Review}/ 80, no. 1413 (1992), +at http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/law&info.htm. }~ +={ copyright law : + philosophical challenges to +} + +2~ “You Have No Sovereignty Where We Gather” +={ copyright law : + philosophical challenges to +13 +} + +The deconstruction of copyright law over the past twenty years has been a +significant intellectual achievement. It has exposed the copyright law’s +philosophical deficiencies, showed how social practice deviates from it, and +revealed the antisocial effects of expanding copyright protection. Critics knew +that it would be impossible to defend the fledgling cyberculture without first +documenting how copyright law was metastasizing at the expense of free +expression, creative innovation, consumer rights, and market competition. + +But as the millennium drew near, the tech-minded legal community — and +law-minded techies — knew that critiques and carping could only achieve so +much. A winnable confrontation with copyright maximalists was needed. A +compelling counternarrative and a viable long-term political strategy had to be +devised. And then somehow they had to be pushed out to the wider world and made +real. + +That task was made easier by the intensifying cultural squeeze. The +proprietarian lockdown was starting to annoy and anger people in their everyday +use of music, software, DVDs, and the Web. And the property claims were growing +more extreme. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers had +demanded that Girl Scout camps pay a public performance license for singing +around the campfire. Ralph Lauren challenged the U.S. Polo Association for +ownership of the word /{polo}/. McDonald’s succeeded in controlling the +Scottish prefix Mc as applied to restaurants and motels, such as “McVegan” and +“McSleep.”~{ These examples can be found in Bollier, /{Brand Name Bullies}/. }~ +={ Lauren, Ralph } + +The mounting sense of frustration fueled a series of conferences between 1999 +and 2001 that helped crystallize the disparate energies of legal scholarship +into something resembling an intellectual movement. “A number of us [legal +scholars] were still doing our own thing, but we were beginning to get a sense +of something,” recalls Yochai Benkler, “It was no longer Becky Eisenberg +working on DNA sequences and Pamela Samuelson on computer programs and Jamie +Boyle on ‘environmentalism for the ’Net’ and me working on spectrum on First +Amendment issues,” said Benkler. “There was a sense of movement.”~{ Interview +with Yochai Benkler, February 7, 2006.}~ (“Environmentalism for the ’Net” was +an influential piece that Boyle wrote in 1998, calling for the equivalent of an +environmental movement to protect the openness and freedom of the Internet.)~{ +James Boyle, “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the +Net,” /{Duke Law Journal}/ 47, no. 1 (October 1997), pp. 87–116, at +http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/Intprop.htm. }~ +={ Boyle, James +1 ; + Benkler, Yochai +1 ; + Eisenberg, Rebecca ; + Samuelson, Pamela +} + +“The place where things started to get even crisper,” said Benkler, “was a +conference at Yale that Jamie Boyle organized in April 1999, which was already +planned as a movement-building event.” That conference, Private +Censorship/Perfect Choice, looked at the threats to free speech on the Web and +how the public might resist. It took inspiration from John Perry Barlow’s 1996 +manifesto “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” It is worth +quoting at length from Barlow’s lyrical cri de coeur — first published in +/{Wired}/ and widely cited — because it expresses the growing sense of thwarted +idealism among Internet users, and a yearning for greater self-determination +and self-governance among commoners. Barlow wrote: +={ Barlow, John Perry +6 } + +_1 Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I +come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you +of the past to leave us alone, You are not welcome among us, You have no +sovereignty where we gather. + +_1 We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address +you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always +speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally +independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right +to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to +fear. + +_1 Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You +have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you, You do not +know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your +borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public +construction project, You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself +through our collective actions. + +_1 You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you +create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, +or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could +be obtained by any of your impositions. + +_1 You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve, You use this +claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. +Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them +and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This +governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our +world is different. + +As Barlow made clear, the Internet was posing profound new questions — not just +about politics, but about the democratic polity itself. What would be the terms +of moral legitimacy and democratic process in cyberspace? Would the new order +be imposed by a Congress beholden to incumbent industries and their political +action committees, or would it be a new social contract negotiated by the +commoners themselves? In posing such questions, and doing it with such +rhetorical panache, Barlow earned comparisons to Thomas Jefferson. + +The stirrings of a movement were evident in May 2000, when Benkler convened a +small conference of influential intellectual property scholars at New York +University Law School on “A Free Information Ecology.” This was followed in +November 2001 by a large gathering at Duke Law School, the first major +conference ever held on the public domain. It attracted several hundred people +and permanently rescued the public domain from the netherworld of +“nonproperty.” People from diverse corners of legal scholarship, activism, +journalism, and philanthropy found each other and began to reenvision their +work in a larger, shared framework. +={ Benkler, Yochai ; + public domain : + conferences about +1 +} + +Over three decades, copyright scholarship had become more incisive, +impassioned, and focused on the public good — but much of the talk remained +within the rarefied circles of the academy. What to do about the disturbing +enclosures of the cultural commons remained a vexing, open question. The 1990s +saw an eclectic smattering of initiatives, from EFF lawsuits and visionary +manifestos to underfunded advocacy efforts and sporadic acts of hacker mischief +and civil disobedience. All were worthwhile forms of engagement and exploratory +learning. None were terribly transformative. Free software was growing in +popularity in the 1990s, but its relevance to broader copyright struggles and +the Internet was not yet recognized. Congress and the courts remained captive +to the copyright-maximalist worldview. The idea of organizing a +counter-constituency to lay claim to the public domain and forge a new social +contract for cyberspace was a fantasy. Copyright law was just too obscure to +excite the general public and most creators and techies. The commoners were too +scattered and diverse to see themselves as an insurgent force, let alone +imagine they might create a movement. + +1~ 3 WHEN LARRY LESSIG MET ERIC ELDRED + +/{A constitutional test case becomes the seed for a movement.}/ + +Once the value of the public domain became evident, and a few visionaries +realized that the commons needed to be protected somehow, an important +strategic question arose: Which arena would offer the best hope for success — +politics, culture, technology, or law? + +The real answer, of course, was all of the above. Building a new digital +republic would require a wholesale engagement with the politics of effecting +democratic change and the challenges of building a cultural movement. It would +require the invention of a shared technological infrastructure, and the +development of legal tools to secure the commons. All were intertwined. But as +a practical matter, anyone who aspired to stop the mass-media-driven expansions +of copyright law had to choose where to invest his or her energy. In the +mid-1990s, Lawrence Lessig decided that the greatest leverage would come +through law. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + law in contemporary context, and +2 +} + +Lessig, usually referred to as Larry, had the knowledge, talent, and good +timing to conceptualize the politics of digital technologies at a ripe moment, +the late 1990s, when the World Wide Web was exploding and people were +struggling to understand its significance. However, Lessig was not content to +play the sage law professor dispensing expertise at rarefied professional and +scholarly gatherings; he aimed to become a public intellectual and highbrow +activist. Through a punishing schedule of public speaking and a series of +high-profile initiatives starting in 1998 and 1999, Lessig became a roving +demigod-pundit on matters of the Internet, intellectual property, and cultural +freedom. + +In the course of his frequent travels, he had a particularly significant +rendezvous at the Starbucks on Church Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It +was November 1998. A month earlier, Congress had enacted the Sonny Bono +Copyright Extension Act. Lessig was eager to meet with one Eric Eldred, a +retired navy contractor, to see if he would agree to be a plaintiff in the +first federal case to challenge the constitutionality of the copyright clause. +={ Copyright Term Extension Act ; + Eldred, Eric : + Lessig, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred, and +} + +Eldred was a book enthusiast and computer programmer who had reached the end of +his rope. Three years earlier, in 1995, he had launched a simple but brilliant +project: a free online archive of classic American literature. Using his PC and +a server in his home in New Hampshire, Eldred posted the books of Nathaniel +Hawthorne, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and dozens of other great authors +whose works were in the public domain. Eldred figured it would be a great +service to humanity to post the texts on the World Wide Web, which was just +beginning to go mainstream. + +Eldred had previously worked for Apollo Computer and Hewlett-Packard and was +experienced in many aspects of computers and software. In the late 1980s, in +fact, he had developed a system that enabled users to post electronic text +files and then browse and print them on demand. When the World Wide Web +arrived, Eldred was understandably excited. “It seemed to me that there was a +possibility of having a system for electronic books that was similar to what I +had done before. I was interested in experimenting with this to see if it was +possible.”~{ Interview with Eric Eldred, August 1, 2006; Daren Fonda, +“Copyright Crusader,” /{Boston Globe Magazine}/, August 29, 1999, available at +http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/8-29/featurestory1.shtml; and Eric Eldred, +“Battle of the Books: The Ebook vs. the Antibook,” November 15, 1998, at +http://www.eldritchpress.org/battle.html. }~ + +So Eldred set out to build his own archive of public-domain books: “I got books +from the library or wherever, and I learned how to do copyright research and +how to scan books, do OCR [opticalcharacter recognition] and mark them up as +HTML [the programming language used on the Web],” he said. “I just wanted to +make books more accessible to readers.”~{ Interview with Eric Eldred, August 1, +2006. }~ + +Eldred didn’t realize it at the time, but his brave little archive, Eldritch +Press, embodied a dawning cultural archetype — the selfpublished digital work +meant to be freely shared with anyone in the world, via the Internet. Thanks to +the magic of “network effects” — the convenience and value that are generated +as more people join a network — Eldred’s Web site was soon receiving more than +twenty thousand hits a day. A growing community of book lovers came together +through the site. They offered annotations to the online books, comments, and +links to foreign translations and other materials. In 1997, the National +Endowment for the Humanities considered the site so educational and exemplary +that it formally cited Eldritch Press as one of the top twenty humanities sites +on the Web. +={ Eldritch Press +12 ; + Internet : + communication system, as +3 +} + +Although it was only a one-person project, Eldritch Press was not just an +idiosyncratic innovation. The convergence of telecommunications, personal +computers, and software in the 1990s, otherwise known as the Internet, was +facilitating an explosion of new genres of public expression. We are still +grappling with how this new type of media system is different from broadcasting +and other mass media. But we do know this: it invites mass participation +because the system doesn’t require a lot of capital or professional talent to +use. The system favors decentralized interactivity over centralized control and +one-way communication. Ordinary people find it relatively inexpensive and +versatile. Since everyone has roughly the same access and distribution +capacities, the Internet is perhaps the most populist communication platform +and egalitarian marketplace in human history. +={ Internet : + mass participation in +} + +This was not the goal of the computer scientists who invented the Internet, of +course. Working under the auspices of the U.S. military, they were chiefly +concerned with building a communications system that would allow academic +researchers to share computerized information cheaply and easily. The idea was +that intelligence and innovation would arise from the “edges” of a “dumb” +network, and not be controlled by a centralized elite in the manner of +broadcasting or book publishing. The Internet — a network of networks — would +be a platform open to anyone who used a shared set of freely accessible +“protocols,” or standardized code, for computer hardware and software.~[* The +Internet protocols that enable different computers and networks to connect +despite their differences is TCP/IP, which stands for TransmissionControl +Protocol/Internet Protocol. These protocols enabled the commons known as the +Internet to emerge and function, and in turn to host countless other commons +“on top” of it.]~ +={ Internet : + protocols of +1 +} + +What was radically new about the network architecture was its freedom: No +special qualifications or permissions were needed to communicate or “publish.” +No one needed to pay special fees based on usage. Anyone could build her own +innovative software on top of the open protocols, It is a measure of the +system’s power that it has spawned all sorts of innovations that were not +foreseen at the outset: in the 1990s, the World Wide Web, instant messaging, +peer-to-peer file sharing, and Web logs, and, in the 2000s, podcasts, wikis, +social networking software, and countless other applications. The open, shared +protocols of the Internet provided an indispensable communications platform for +each of these innovations to arise. +={ free culture : + Internet, of the ; + Internet : + architecture of +} + +In building his online archive, Eric Eldred was part of this new cultural +cohort of innovators. He not only shared Richard Stallman’s dream — to build an +open, sharing community. He also came to share Stallman’s contempt for the long +arm of copyright law. The problem, in Eldred’s case, was the corporate +privatization of large portions of the public domain. In the 1990s, the Walt +Disney Company was worried that its flagship cartoon character, Mickey Mouse, +would enter the public domain and be freely available for anyone to use. +Mickey, originally copyrighted in 1928, was nearing the end of his +seventy-five-year term of copyright and was due to enter the public domain in +2003. +={ copyright law : + public domain vs. +6 ; + Eldred, Eric : + public domain, and ; + public domain : + copyright law, and +6 | privatization of +2 ; + Stallman, Richard : + influence of ; + Walt Disney Company +} + +Disney led a concerted campaign to extend the term of copyrights by twenty +years. Under the new law, all works copyrighted after January 1, 1923, would be +privately controlled for another twenty years. Corporations would be able to +copyright their works for ninety-five years instead of seventy-five years, and +the works of individual authors would be a private monopoly for the author’s +lifetime plus seventy years. Thousands of works that were expected to enter the +public domain in 1999 and following years would remain under copyright until +2019 and beyond. + +Congress readily enacted this twenty-year giveaway of monopoly rights on a +unanimous vote, and without any public hearings or debate. Disney was the most +visible beneficiary of the law, prompting critics to dub it the Mickey Mouse +Protection Act. But its more significant impact was to deprive Americans of +access to an estimated four hundred thousand cultural works from the 1920s and +1930s. Books by Sherwood Anderson, music by George Gershwin, poems by Robert +Frost, and tens of thousands of other works would remain under private control +for no good reason. The law was the eleventh time in the course of four decades +that Congress had extended the term of copyright protection. American +University law professor Peter Jaszi complained that copyright protection had +become “perpetual on the installment plan.” +={ Copyright Term Extension Act +6 ; + Jaszi, Peter ; + copyright law : + expansion of | purpose of +3 +} + +The law was astonishingly inefficient and inequitable as well. To preserve the +property rights of the 2 percent of works from this period that still had +commercial value, the law also locked up the remaining 98 percent of works +(whose owners are often unknown or unable to be located in order to grant +permissions). Indeed, it was these “orphan works” — works still under copyright +but not commercially available, and with owners who often could not be found — +that represent an important “feedstock” for new creativity. The Sonny Bono Act +showered a windfall worth billions of dollars to the largest entertainment +businesses and authors’ estates. +={ copyright law : + orphan works +} + +At a more basic level, the copyright term extension showed contempt for the +very rationale of copyright law. Copyrights are intended as an inducement to +authors to create works. It is a government grant of monopoly property rights +meant to help authors earn money for producing books, music, film, and other +works. But, as Lessig pointed out, “You can’t incent a dead person. No matter +what we do, Hawthorne will not produce any more works, no matter how much we +pay him.” Jack Valenti replied that longer copyright terms would give Hollywood +the incentive to preserve old films from deteriorating and make them available. + +The copyright term extension act privatized so many of the public domain books +on the Eldritch Press Web site, and so offended Eldred’s sense of justice, that +in November 1998 he decided to close his site in protest. The new law meant +that he would not be able to add any works published since 1923 to his Web site +until 2019. “I can no longer accomplish what I set out to do,” said Eldred.~{ +Ibid. }~ +={ Eldred, Eric : + public domain, and | Lessig, and +3 ; + Lessig, Lawrence +3 : + Eldred, and +3 +} + +As luck had it, Larry Lessig was looking for an Everyman of the Internet. +Lessig, then a thirty-seven-year-old professor at Harvard Law School, was +looking for a suitable plaintiff for his envisioned constitutional test case. +He had initially approached Michael S. Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, +the first producer of free electronic books. At the time, the project had +nearly six thousand public-domain books available online. (It now has twenty +thousand books; about 3 million books are downloaded every month.) Hart was +receptive to the case but had his own ideas about how the case should be +argued. He wanted the legal complaint to include a stirring populist manifesto +railing against rapacious copyright holders. Lessig demurred and went in search +of another plaintiff.~{ Richard Poynder interview with Lawrence Lessig, “The +Basement Interviews: Free Culture,” April 7, 2006, p. 26, available at +http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/basement-interviews.html. See also Steven +Levy, “Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown,” /{Wired}/, October 2002, pp. +140–45, 154–56, available at +http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/lessig.html. Project Gutenberg is at +http://wwwgutenberg.org. }~ +={ Hart, Michael S. ; + Project Gutenberg +} + +After reading about Eldred’s protests in the /{Boston Globe}/, and meeting with +him over coffee, Lessig asked Eldred if he would be willing to be the plaintiff +in his envisioned case. Eldred readily agreed. As a conscientious objector and +draft resister during the Vietnam War, he was ready to go to great lengths to +fight the Sonny Bono Act. “Initially, I volunteered to violate the law if +necessary and get arrested and go to jail,” Eldred said. “But Larry told me +that was not necessary.” A good thing, because under the No Electronic Theft +Act, passed in 1997, Eldred could be charged with a felony. “I could face jail, +fines, seizure of my computer, termination of my Internet service without +notice — and so all the e-books on the Web site could be instantly lost,” he +said. +={ No Electronic Theft Act (1997) } + +It was the beginning of a landmark challenge to the unchecked expansion of +copyright law. The case would turbocharge Lessig’s unusual career and educate +the press and public about copyright law’s impact on democratic culture. Most +significantly, it would, in time, spur the growth of an international free +culture movement. +={ copyright law : + expansion of ; + Eldred, Eric : + copyright law, and +} + +2~ Larry Lessig’s Improbable Journey +={ Lessig, Lawrence +49 } + +Since Lessig looms so large in this story, it is worth pausing to understand +his roots. Raised by culturally conservative, rock-ribbed Republican parents in +central Pennsylvania, Lessig was a bright kid with a deep enthusiasm for +politics. “I grew up a right-wing lunatic Republican,” Lessig told journalist +Steven Levy, noting that he once belonged to the National Teen Age Republicans, +ran a candidate’s unsuccessful campaign for the Pennsylvania state senate, and +attended the 1980 Republican National Convention, which nominated Ronald Reagan +for president. Larry’s father, Jack, was an engineer who once built Minuteman +missile silos in South Dakota (where Lessig was born in 1961), and who later +bought a steelfabrication company in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.~{ Wikipedia +entry, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessig; Levy, “Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme +Showdown.” }~ +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + background of +4 +} + + +Lessig initially thought he would follow in his father’s footsteps, and so he +went to the University of Pennsylvania to earn degrees in economics and +management. Later, studying philosophy at Trinity College in Cambridge, +England, he faced growing doubts about his deep-seated libertarian worldview. +Hitchhiking through Eastern Bloc countries, Lessig gained a new appreciation +for the role of law in guaranteeing freedom and making power accountable. +“There were many times when people in Eastern Europe would tell me stories +about the history of the United States that I had never been taught: things +like the history of how we treated Native Americans; and the history of our +intervention in South America; and the nature of our intervention in South East +Asia,” Lessig told Richard Poynder in 2006. “All of those were stories that we +didn’t tell ourselves in the most accurate and vivid forms.” These experiences, +said Lessig, “opened up a channel of skepticism in my head.”~{ Poynder +interview with Lessig, April 7, 2006. }~ + +Lessig’s sister Leslie once told a reporter that Larry came back from Cambridge +a very different person: “His views of politics, religion, and his career had +totally flipped.”~{ Levy, “Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown.” }~ No longer +aspiring to be a businessman or a philosopher, Lessig set his sights on law and +entered the University of Chicago Law School in 1986. He transferred the next +year to Yale Law School (to be near a girlfriend), groomed himself to be a +constitutional law scholar, and graduated in 1989. + +Although he now considered himself a liberal, Lessig spent the next two years +in the service of two of the law’s most formidable conservatives. He clerked +for circuit court judge Richard Posner in 1988–89, followed by a year clerking +for Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia during the 1990–91 term. His +educational odyssey complete, the thirty-year-old Lessig settled into the life +of a tenured law professor at the University of Chicago Law School. +={ Posner, Richard ; + Scalia, Antonin +} + +One of Lessig’s early scholarly concerns — adjudication — was not exactly a +warm-up for tub-thumping activism. But it did curiously prefigure his later +interest in using law as a tool to effect political change. In a 1993 law +review article, Lessig wondered how courts should interpret the law when public +sentiment and practice have changed. If a judge is going to be true to the +original meaning of a law, Lessig argued, he must make a conscientious +“translation” of the law by taking account of the contemporary context. A new +translation of the law is entirely justified, and should supplant an old +interpretation, Lessig argued, if prevailing social practices and +understandings have changed, The important thing in interpreting law, +therefore, is “fidelity in translation.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Fidelity in +Translation,” /{Texas Law Review}/ 71, no. 1165 (May 1993). }~ +={ law : + social change, and +8 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + law in contemporary context, and +8 +} + +Lessig elaborated on this theme in a 1997 article that spent twenty-seven dense +pages pondering how two different Supreme Courts, separated by nearly a +century, could look to identical words in the Constitution and reach precisely +opposite conclusions.~[* The Erie ruling held that federal common law, +previously recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1842, was +unconstitutional.]~ It is not as if one Court or the other was unprincipled or +wrong, Lessig wrote. Rather, any court must take account of contemporary social +norms and circumstances in “translating” an old law for new times. Lessig +called this dynamic the "/{Erie}/-effect," a reference to the U.S. Supreme +Court’s 1938 ruling in /{Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins}/. The /{Erie}/-effect +is about the emergence of “a kind of contestability about a practice within a +legal institution,” which prompts “a restructuring of that practice to avoid +the rhetorical costs of that contestability.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Erie-Effects +of Volume 110: An Essay on Context in Interpretive Theory,” /{Harvard Law +Review}/ 110, no. 1785 (1997). }~ +={ Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins +1 } + +Lessig described how an /{Erie}/-effect might be exploited to catalyze a +political shift (paraphrased here): /{identify}/ a socially contested law, aim +to /{force}/ the conflicting social practice into the foreground by +/{inflaming}/ conventional discourse, and then /{argue}/ for a change in legal +interpretation in order to relieve the contestability that has been alleged.~{ +Ibid., p. 1809. }~ If the conflict between the law and actual social practice +can be made vivid enough, a court will feel pressure to reinterpret the law. Or +the court will defer to the legislature because the very contestability of the +law makes the issue a political question that is inappropriate for a court to +resolve. One notable instance of the /{Erie}/-effect in our times, Lessig +pointed out, was the successful campaign by feminist law scholar Catherine +MacKinnon to define sexual harassment in the workplace as a form of illegal +discrimination. The point was to transform popular understanding of the issue +and then embody it in law. +={ MacKinnon, Catherine } + +Lessig was not especially focused on tech issues until he ran across Julian +Dibbell’s article “A Rape in Cyberspace,” which appeared in the /{Village +Voice}/ in December 1993.~{ Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil +Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turns a +Database into a Society,” /{Village Voice}/, December 21, 1993, pp. 36–42, +reprinted in Mark Stefik, /{Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors}/ +(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 293–315, Dibbell quote at p. 296. }~ The +piece described the social havoc that ensued in an online space, LambdaMOO, +hosted at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. One pseudonymous character “raped” +another in the virtual space, using cruel words and graphic manipulations. The +incident provoked an uproar among the thousand members of LambdaMOO, and had +real emotional and social consequences. Yet, as Dibbell pointed out, “No bodies +touched. Whatever physical interaction occurred consisted of a mingling of +electronic signals sent from sites spread out between New York City and Sydney, +Australia.” +={ Dibbell, Julian : + "A Rape in Cyberspace" +1 ; + law : + cyberspace, of +3 +} + +For Lessig, the LambdaMOO “rape” had an obvious resonance with Catherine +MacKinnon’s arguments in her 1993 book /{Only Words}/. Does a rape in +cyberspace resemble the harms inflicted on real women through pornography? +Lessig saw intriguing parallels: “I really saw cyberspace as a fantastic +opportunity to get people to think about things without recognizing the +political valences. That’s all I was interested in; it was purely +pedagogical.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, March 20, 2006. }~ +={ MacKinnon, Catherine } + +To explore the issues further, Lessig developed one of the first courses on the +law of cyberspace. He taught it in the spring semester of 1995 at Yale Law +School, where he was a visiting professor, and later at the University of +Chicago and Harvard law schools. During the Yale class, an exchange with a +student, Andrew Shapiro, jarred his thinking in a new direction: “I was +constantly thinking about the way that changing suppositions of constitutional +eras had to be accounted for in the interpretation of the Constitution across +time. Andrew made this point about how there’s an equivalent in the technical +infrastructure [of the Internet] that you have to think about. And then I began +to think about how there were norms and law and infrastructure — and then I +eventually added markets into this — which combine to frame what policymaking +is in any particular context.”~{ Ibid. }~ +={ Shapiro, Andrew } + +This line of analysis became a central theme of Lessig’s startling first book, +/{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/, published in 1999.~{ Lessig, /{Code and +Other Laws of Cyberspace}/ (New York: Basic Books, 1999). }~ /{Code}/ took on +widespread assumptions that the Internet would usher in a new libertarian, +free-market utopia. Cyberlibertarian futurists such as Alvin Toffler, Esther +Dyson, George Gilder, and John Gilmore had routinely invoked cyberspace as a +revolutionary force that would render government, regulation, and social +welfare programs obsolete and unleash the transformative power of free +markets.~{ Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, +“Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” +Progress and Freedom Foundation, August 1994, available at +http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/futureinsights/fil.2magnacarta.html. }~ In the +libertarian scenario, individual freedom can flourish only if government gets +the hell out of the way and lets individuals create, consume, and interact as +they see fit, without any paternalistic or tyrannical constraints. Prosperity +can prevail and scarcity disappear only if meddling bureaucrats and politicians +leave the citizens of the Internet to their own devices. As Louis Rossetto, the +founder and publisher of /{Wired}/, bluntly put it: “The idea that we need to +worry about anyone being ‘left out’ is entirely atavistic to me, a product of +that old economics of scarcity and the 19th century social thinking that grew +out of it.”~{ David Hudson, interview with Louis Rossetto, “What Kind of +Libertarian,” /{Rewired}/ (Macmillan, 1997), p. 255. }~ +={ code : + law, as +4 ; + law : + code as +4 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +4 ; + Dyson, Esther ; + Gilder, George ; + Gilmore, John ; + Rossetto, Louis ; + Toffler, Alvin ; + Internet : + architecture of +2 | freedom of +1 ; + cyberspace : + economic effects of +} + +Lessig was more wary. In /{Code}/, he constructed a sweeping theoretical +framework to show how freedom on the Internet must be actively, deliberately +constructed; it won’t simply happen on its own. Inspired by conversations with +computer programmer Mitch Kapor, who declared that “architecture is politics” +in 1991, Lessig’s book showed how software code was supplanting the regulatory +powers previously enjoyed by sovereign nation-states and governments. The +design of the Internet and software applications was becoming more influential +than conventional sources of policymaking — Congress, the courts, federal +agencies. /{Code is law}/, as Lessig famously put it. +={ Kapor, Mitch } + +What was worrisome, Lessig warned, was how relatively small changes in software +code could alter the “architecture of control” governing the Internet. The +current architecture was not necessarily stable and secure, in other words. +Moreover, any future changes were likely to be animated by private, commercial +forces and not publicly accountable and democratic ones. Lessig illustrated +this point with a disarmingly simple drawing of a dot representing an +individual, whose range of behaviors is affected by four distinct forces: +software architecture, the market, law, and social norms. Each of these factors +conspires to regulate behaviors on the Internet, Lessig argued — and commercial +forces would clearly have the upper hand. + +/{Code}/ was a powerful and sobering rebuttal to libertarian assumptions that +“keeping government out” would safeguard individual freedom. Its analysis +quickly became the default conceptual model for talking about governance on the +Internet. It helped situate many existing policy debates — Internet censorship, +digital privacy, copyright disputes — in a larger political and policy +framework. Although many readers did not share Lessig’s pessimism, /{Code}/ +helped expose an unsettling truth — that a great many legislators, federal +agencies, and courts were largely oblivious to the regulatory power of software +code. They didn’t have a clue about the technical structures or social dynamics +affecting life on the Internet, let alone how existing law would comport with +this alien domain. +={ Internet : + freedom of +} + +/{Code}/ was widely praised and widely read. But it was only one project of +that period that catapulted Lessig to international prominence. In the +mid-1990s, Charles Nesson, a bold-thinking, highflying evidence professor at +Harvard Law School, was organizing the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. +The new project aspired to study “the most difficult and fundamental problems +of the digital age,” and show public-interest leadership in addressing them. +Nesson, who had become modestly famous for his role in the W. R. Grace +litigation chronicled in Jonathan Harr’s /{A Civil Action}/, recruited Lessig +to be the Berkman Center’s marquee star in 1997. It was an irresistibly +prestigious and visible perch. +={ Berkman Center for Internet & Society ; + Nesson, Charles +} + +This was demonstrated within months, when Judge Penfield Jackson tapped Lessig +to be a “special master” in one of the most important antitrust cases in a +generation, /{U.S. v. Microsoft}/.~{ Steven Levy, “The Great Liberator,” +/{Wired}/, October 2002, and Poynder interview with Lessig, April 7, 2006. }~ +Lessig’s assignment was to sift through the welter of technical claims and +counterclaims in the case and produce a report with recommendations to the +court. The government alleged that Microsoft had abused its monopoly power in +its sales of its operating system and Web browser, particularly in “bundling” +the browser with the Windows operating system. +={ Jackson, Penfield ; + Microsoft : + antitrust lawsuit against +1 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Microsoft lawsuit, and +1 +} + +Microsoft soon raised questions about Lessig’s neutrality as a special master. +Among other objections, the company cited his book’s claim that software code +is political and a passage that said Microsoft was “absolutely closed” compared +to an open-standards body. It also dredged up an e-mail in which Lessig +facetiously equated using Micosoft’s Internet Explorer with “selling one’s +soul.” After nearly eight weeks on the job, the Court of Appeals, citing a +technicality, took Lessig off the case, to his enduring disappointment. He has +been deeply frustrated by the implication that he had been removed for bias +(the court made no such finding) and by his abrupt banishment from a plum role +in a landmark case. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +} + +2~ Waging the /{Eldred}/ Case + +Back at the Berkman Center, however, there were plenty of opportunities to +influence the digital future. The center was a hothouse of venturesome ideas +and eccentric visionaries. It was a place where John Perry Barlow could drop by +to talk with Lessig and Berkman co-founder Jonathan Zittrain, one of the early +cyberlaw experts. The center drew upon the ideas of intellectual property guru +William (Terry) Fisher; Charles Nesson, who specialized in launching Big Ideas; +and a self-renewing batch of bright law students eager to make their mark on a +hip and emerging field of law. Richard Stallman at nearby MIT was an occasional +visitor, as was MIT computer scientist Hal Abelson, who combined deep technical +expertise with an appreciation of the social and democratic implications of +digital technologies. It was during this time, in 1998, that Lessig and Abelson +jointly taught The Law of Cyberspace: Social Protocols at Harvard Law School. +The class was an attempt to make sense of some novel legal quandaries exploding +on the Internet, such as computer crime, identity authentication, digital +privacy, and intellectual property. +={ Berkman Center for Internet & Society +5 ; + Nesson, Charles ; + Abelson, Hal : + cyberlaw, and ; + Barlow, John Perry ; + Fisher, William (Terry) ; + Stallman, Richard ; + Zittrain, Jonathan ; + Internet : + legal quandaries arising on ; + law : + cyberspace, of +} + +While nourished by the work of his academic colleagues, Lessig was determined +to come up with ingenious ways to /{do something}/ about the distressing drift +of copyright law. It was important to take the offensive. Notwithstanding the +pessimism of /{Code}/, Lessig’s decidedly optimistic answer was to gin up a +constitutional challenge to copyright law. Many legal experts and even +sympathetic colleagues were skeptical. Peter Jaszi, a leading intellectual law +professor at American University, told a reporter at the time, “It’s not so +much that we thought it was a terrible idea but that it was just unprecedented. +Congress has been extending copyright for 180 years, and this is the first time +someone said it violated the Constitution.”~{ David Streitfeld, “The Cultural +Anarchist vs. the Hollywood Police State,” /{Los Angeles Times Magazine}/, +September 22, 2002, p. 32. }~ Others worried that an adverse ruling could set +back the larger cause of copyright reform. +={ Jaszi, Peter ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ; + law : + social change, and +3 ; + copyright law : + expansion of +} + +In the spirit of the commons, Lessig and his Berkman Center colleagues decided +that the very process for mounting the /{Eldred}/ lawsuit would be different: +“Rather than the secret battles of lawyers going to war, we will argue this +case in the open. This is a case about the commons; we will litigate it in the +commons. Our arguments and strategy will be developed online, in a space called +‘openlaw.org.’ Key briefs will be drafted online, with participants given the +opportunity to criticize the briefs and suggest other arguments. . . . Building +on the model of open source software, we are working from the hypothesis that +an open development process best harnesses the distributed resources of the +Internet community. By using the Internet, we hope to enable the public +interest to speak as loudly as the interests of corporations.”~{ Lawrence +Lessig, “Commons Law,” June 24, 1999, posted on www.intellectu +alcapital.com/issues/issue251/item5505.asp, and Open Law archive at +http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw. }~ +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft +28 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred v. Reno, and +28 | law in contemporary context, and +1 +} + +Emulating the open-source development model was a nice touch, and perhaps +useful; dozens of people around the world registered at the Openlaw site and +posted suggestions. Some of the examples and legal critiques were used in +developing the case, and the model was later used by lawyers in the so-called +DeCSS case, in which a hacker broke the encryption of a DVD. But it turns out +that open, distributed creativity has its limits in the baroque dance of +litigation; it can’t work when secrecy and confidentiality are important, for +example. + +The case, /{Eldred v. Reno}/ — later renamed /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/ when the +Bush II administration took office — was filed in federal district court in +Washington, D.C., on January 11, 1999.~{ /{Eldred v. Reno}/ (later, Eldred v. +Ashcroft), 537 U.S. 186 (2003), affirming 239 F. 3d 372. }~ The complaint +argued that the Copyright Term Extension Act violated Article 1, section 8, +clause 8, of the Constitution, which provides that copyright protection shall +be of limited duration. It also argued that the Term Extension Act violated the +free speech clause of the First Amendment. In some respects, the case could +never have been waged without the foundation of legal scholarship produced in +the 1990s, which rehearsed a great many of the arguments presented to the +Court. In opposition were motion picture studios, the music industry, and book +publishers. They argued that Congress had full authority under the Constitution +to extend copyright terms, as it had done since the beginning of the republic. +={ copyright law : + expansion of ; + Copyright Term Extension Act ; + Copyright Clause, U.S. Constitution +} + +In October 1999, the U.S. District Court brusquely dismissed the case without +even holding a trial. Lessig and his Berkman colleagues were not entirely +surprised, and quickly set about filing an appeal with the U.S. Court of +Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Going beyond the Openlaw +experiment at Berkman, they enlisted the support of several lawyers at Jones, +Day, Reavis & Pogue. On appeal, Lessig was allowed to argue the case personally +to a panel of judges. But once again, in February 2001, the case was dismissed. +Lessig considered it a significant victory that it was a 2-1 ruling, however, +which meant that a further appeal was possible. Lessig was also encouraged that +the dissenter had been the court’s most conservative member, Judge David +Sentelle. Lessig requested that the full circuit court hear the case — a +petition that was also rejected, this time after picking up support from a +liberal dissenter, Judge David Tatel. +={ Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue +4 ; + Sentelle, David ; + Tatel, David +} + +Normally, this would have been the end of the road for a case. Very few appeals +court cases are accepted for review by the U.S. Supreme Court, particularly +when the case has not even been argued at trial and no other courts have passed +judgment on the statute. So it was quite surprising when the Supreme Court, in +February 2002, accepted /{Eldred}/ for review and scheduled oral arguments for +October 2002. +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + Supreme Court, and +11 +} + +At this point, Lessig realized he needed the advice and support of some +experienced Supreme Court litigators. He enlisted help from additional lawyers +at Jones, Day; Alan Morrison of Public Citizen Litigation Group; Kathleen +Sullivan, the dean of Stanford Law School; and Charles Fried, a former +solicitor general under President Reagan. Professor Peter Jaszi and the +students of his law clinic drafted an amicus brief. +={ orrison, Alan ; + Fried, Charles ; + Jaszi, Peter ; + Sullivan, Kathleen +} + +A key concern was how to frame the arguments. Attorney Don Ayer of Jones, Day +repeatedly urged Lessig to stress the dramatic harm that the Bono Act was +inflicting on free speech and free culture. But as Lessig later confessed, “I +hate this view of the law. . . . I was not persuaded that we had to sell our +case like soap.”~{ Lessig, “How I Lost the Big One,” /{Legal Affairs}/, +March/April 2004, available at +http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp. +}~ Lessig was convinced that the only way /{Eldred}/ could prevail at the +Supreme Court would be to win over the conservative justices with a matter of +principle. To Lessig, the harm was obvious; what needed emphasis was how the +Sonny Bono Act violated “originalist” principles of jurisprudence. (Originalist +judges claim to interpret the Constitution based on its “original” meanings in +1791, which includes a belief that Congress has strictly enumerated powers, not +broad legislative discretion.) +={ Ayer, Don ; + law : + originalist principles of +2 +} + +“We tried to make an argument that if you were an originalist— in the way these +conservative judges said they were in many other cases — then you should look +to the original values in the Copyright Clause,” said Lessig. “And we argued +that if you did that then you had to conclude that Congress had wildly +overstepped its constitutional authority, and so the law should be struck +down.”~{ Lessig interview with Richard Poynder, April 7, 2006, p. 25. }~ +Flaunting the harm caused by the copyright term extension struck Lessig as +showy and gratuitous; he considered the harm more or less selfevident. In the +aftermath of a public debate that Lessig once had with Jack Valenti, a +questioner on Slashdot, a hacker Web site, suggested that Lessig would be more +persuasive if he asserted “a clear conception of direct harm . . . than the +secondary harm of the copyright holders getting a really sweet deal.” Lessig +conceded that such a focus “has been a weakness of mine for a long time. In my +way of looking at the world, the point is a matter of principle, not +pragmatics. . . . There are many others who are better at this pragmatism +stuff. To me, it just feels insulting.”~{ “Lawrence Lessig Answers Your +Questions,” Slashdot.org, December 21, 2001, Question 1, “The question of +harm,” posted by “caduguid,” with Lessig response, available at +http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/21/155221. }~ +={ copyright law : + expansion of ; + Copyright Clause, U.S. Constitution ; + Valenti, Jack +} + +And so, despite warnings to the contrary, Lessig’s legal strategy relied on a +call to uphold originalist principles. Having clerked for Justice Scalia and +Judge Posner, Lessig felt that he understood the mind-set and sympathies of the +conservative jurists. “If we get to the Supreme Court,” Lessig told Slashdot +readers in December 2001, “I am certain that we will win. This is not a +left/right issue. The conservatives on the Court will look at the framers’ +Constitution— which requires that copyrights be granted for ‘limited times’ — +and see that the current practice of Congress . . . makes a mockery of the +framers’ plan. And the liberals will look at the effect of these never-ending +copyrights on free speech, and conclude that Congress is not justified in this +regulation of speech. The Supreme Court doesn’t give a hoot about Hollywood; +they will follow the law.”~{ Lessig response to question 11, Slashdot.org, +“Will the extension of copyright continue?” posed by “Artifice_Eternity,” +available at http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/21/155221. }~ +={ Posner, Richard ; + Scalia, Antonin ; + Copyright Clause, U.S. Constitution ; + copyright law : + expansion of +5 ; + Copyright Term Extension Act +5 +} + +Lessig took pride in the fact that thirty-eight amicus briefs were filed on +behalf of /{Eldred}/. They included a wide range of authors, computer and +consumer electronics companies, and organizations devoted to arts, culture, +education, and journalism. Besides the usual suspects like the Free Software +Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge, supporting +briefs were filed by fifteen economists including Kenneth Arrow and Milton +Friedman, Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum, and the Intel Corporation. + +At oral arguments, Lessig immediately confronted a skeptical bench. Justice +Sandra Day O’Connor worried about overturning years of previous copyright term +extensions. Justice William Rehnquist proposed. “You want the right to copy +verbatim other people’s books, don’t you?” And when Justice Anthony Kennedy +invited Lessig to expound upon the great harm that the law was inflicting on +free speech and culture, Lessig declined the opportunity. He instead restated +his core constitutional argument, that copyright terms cannot be perpetual. +“This was a correct answer, but it wasn’t the right answer,” Lessig later +confessed in a candid postmortem of the case. “The right answer was to say that +there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had been written +about it. Kennedy wanted to hear it. And here was where Don Ayer’s advice +should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a miss.”~{ +See +http://www.supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/01-618.pdf. +See also Lessig, “How I Lost the Big One,” and Linda Greenhouse, “Justices Hear +Arguments in Challenge to Copyrights,” /{New York Times}/, October 10, 2002. A +number of Supreme Court opinions in the /{Eldred}/ case can be found at the +Openlaw archive at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvreno. The +/{Loyola Los Angeles Law Review}/ held a symposium on /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/, +available at http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v36-issue1. }~ No justices spoke in +defense of the Sonny Bono Act. +={ Ayer, Don ; + Kennedy, Anthony ; + O’Connor, Sandra Day ; + Rehnquist, William +} + +Yet they had clear reservations about the Supreme Court’s authority to dictate +the length of copyright terms. + +A few months later, on January 15, 2003, the Supreme Court announced its +ruling: a 7-2 defeat for Eldred. The majority opinion, written by Justice Ruth +Bader Ginsburg, did not even raise the “enumerated powers” argument or engage +with originalist philosophy. “We are not at liberty to second-guess +Congressional determinations and policy judgments of this order, however +debatable or arguably unwise they may be,” Ginsburg wrote.~{ 537 U.S. 186 +(1993). See also “Court Majority Says It Won’t Second-Guess Congress,” /{New +York Times}/, January 16, 2007, p. A22. }~ She likewise ignored the idea that +there is a “copyright bargain” between the American people and copyright +holders, which entitles the public to certain rights of access to the public +domain. As for copyright’s impact on free speech, Ginsburg invoked the fair use +doctrine and the “idea/expression dichotomy” (the notion that ideas are freely +available but expression can be copyrighted) as sufficient protections for the +public. She ignored the fact that both doctrines were (and are) under fierce +assault. +={ Ginsburg, Ruth Bader ; + law : + originalist principles of ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and ; + copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and | balance of public and private rights +} + +Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens accepted Lessig’s arguments, and +wrote separate dissents. Breyer — a respected scholar of copyright law since +his famous 1970 essay “The Uneasy Case for Copyright”~{ Stephen Breyer, “The +Uneasy Case for Copyright,” /{Harvard Law Review}/ 84, no. 281 (1970). }~ +—agreed that copyright terms had effectively become perpetual, and that the law +was therefore unconstitutional. Stevens complained that the majority decision +reneged on the copyright bargain and made copyright law “for all intents and +purposes judicially unreviewable.” +={ Breyer, Stephen ; + Stevens, John Paul +} + +In assessing the broad impact of the /{Eldred}/ ruling, copyright scholar Siva +Vaidhyanathan cited law professor Shubha Ghosh’s observation that the +/{Eldred}/ ruling had effectively “deconstitutionalized” copyright law. +/{Eldred}/ pushed copyright law +={ Ghosh, Shubha ; + Vaidhyanathan, Siva +1 +} + +_1 farther into the realm of policy and power battles and away from principles +that have anchored the system for two centuries. That means public interest +advocates and activists must take their battles to the public sphere and the +halls of Congress. We can’t appeal to the Founders’ wishes or republican +ideals. We will have to make pragmatic arguments in clear language about the +effects of excessive copyright on research, teaching, art and journalism. And +we will have to make naked mass power arguments with echoes of “we want our +MP3” and “it takes an industry of billions to hold us back.”~{ Siva +Vaidhyanathan, “After the Copyright Smackdown: What Next?” /{Salon}/, January +17, 2003, at http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/01/17/copyright.print.html. +}~ +={ copyright law : + balance of public and private rights +} + +2~ A Movement Is Born +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + effects of +12 +} + +The /{Eldred}/ case had a paradoxical effect. Early on, Lessig had said, “We +didn’t want to make it a big political cause. We just wanted to make it an +extension of the existing Supreme Court jurisprudence, because we realized that +the only way to win the case was to win the conservatives’ view, and the +conservatives were not likely to be motivated by great attacks on media +concentration.”~{ Interview with Poynder, April 7, 2006, p. 25. }~ The upshot +of the Court’s ruling was to intensify the political battles over copyright +law. While such resistance was already growing, the /{Eldred}/ ruling and the +publicity surrounding it spawned a new generation of “copyfighters.” Lessig had +wanted to protect the commons through law, only to find that the courts were +unwilling to offer any help. Any answers would now have to be pursued through +politics, culture, and technology — and ingenious uses of law where feasible. +How to proceed in this uncharted territory became the next challenge, as we see +in chapter 4. + +After four years of relentless work, Lessig was frustrated and dejected. “I had +failed to convince [the Supreme Court] that the issue was important,” he wrote +in a frank confessional, “and I had failed to recognize that however much I +might hate a system in which the court gets to pick the constitutional values +that it will respect, that is the system we have.”~{ Lessig, “How I Lost the +Big One.” See also Lessig, /{Free Culture}/ (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. +228–48. }~ For a constitutional law scholar, it was a rude awakening: +constitutional originalists could not be taken at their word! Scalia and fellow +justice Clarence Thomas had declined to stand behind their jurisprudential +principles. +={ law : + originalist principles of +1 ; + Scalia, Antonin ; + Thomas, Clarence +} + +Yet Lessig had certainly been correct that /{Eldred}/ would not succeed unless +it convinced the Court’s conservative majority. The fact that the originalist +gambit failed was perhaps the strongest message of all: /{nothing}/ would +convince this Court to rein in the excesses of copyright law. + +Even before the Supreme Court had delivered its ruling, Lessig admitted his +misgivings about the power of law to solve copyright’s failings: “The more I’m +in this battle, the less I believe that constitutional law on its own can solve +the problem. If Americans can’t see the value of freedom without the help of +lawyers, then we don’t deserve freedom.”~{ Lessig response to Question 11, +“Cyberspace Amendment,” posed by “kzinti,” in Slashdot, available at +http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/21/155221. }~ Yet +mobilizing freedom-loving Americans to seek redress from Congress was also +likely to be doomed. Hollywood film studios and record companies had showered +some $16.6 million and $1.8 million, respectively, on federal candidates and +parties in 1998. Legislators know who butters their bread, and the public was +not an organized influence on this issue. No wonder a progressive copyright +reform agenda was going nowhere. +={ Copyright Term Extension Act +1 ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + Supreme Court, and ; + law : + limited power of ; + copyright law : + expansion of +1 +} + +Four years after the /{Eldred}/ ruling, Lessig had some second thoughts about +the “Mickey Mouse” messaging strategy. Opponents of the copyright term +extension, including Lessig, had often flaunted Mickey motifs in their dealings +with the press and railed at the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.” Yet in 2006, +Lessig lamented to one interviewer that “the case got framed as one about +Mickey Mouse. Whereas the reality is, who gives a damn about Mickey Mouse? The +really destructive feature of the Sonny Bono law is the way it locks up culture +that has no continuing commercial value at all. It orphaned culture. So by +focusing on Mickey Mouse, the Court thought this was an issue of whether you +believed in property or not. If, however, we had focused people on all the +culture that is being lost because it is locked up by copyright, we might have +succeeded.”~{ Interview with Poynder, April 7, 2006, pp. 26–27. }~ + +The lasting impact of the /{Eldred}/ case, ironically, may have less to do with +the law than with the cultural movement it engendered. The lawsuit provided a +powerful platform for educating the American people about copyright law. A +subject long regarded as arcane and complicated was now the subject of +prominent articles in the /{New York Times}/, /{Salon}/, computer magazines, +wire services, and countless other publications and Web sites. A cover story +for the /{Los Angeles Times}/'s Sunday magazine explained how the case could +“change the way Hollywood makes money — and the way we experience art.” +/{Wired}/ magazine headlined its profile of Lessig “The Great Liberator.” +Lessig himself barnstormed the country giving dozens of presentations to +librarians, technologists, computer programmers, filmmakers, college students, +and many others. Even Lessig’s adversary at the district court level, Arthur R. +Miller, a Harvard Law School professor, agreed, “The case has sparked a public +discussion that wasn’t happening before.” +={ Miller, Arthur R. } + +Lessig’s orations often provoked the fervor of a revival meeting — and led to +more than a few conversions. This may appear surprising because Lessig, with +his receding hairline and wireframe glasses, strikes an unprepossessing pose. +In the professorial tradition, he can sometimes be didactic and patronizing. +But on the stage, Lessig is stylish, poised, and mesmerizing. His carefully +crafted talks are intellectual but entertaining, sophisticated but plainspoken— +and always simmering with moral passion. He typically uses a customized version +of Keynote, a Macintosh-based program similar to PowerPoint, to punctuate his +dramatic delivery with witty visuals and quick flashes of words. (Experts in +professional presentations have dubbed this style the “Lessig Method,” and +likened it to the Takahashi Method in Japan because slides often use a single +word, short quote, or photo.)~{ Garr Reynolds’s blog on professional +presentation design, “The ‘Lessig Method’ of Presentation,” October 5, 2005, +available at +http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/10/the_lessig_meth.html. +}~ + +More than a sidebar, Lessig’s public speaking has been an important aspect of +his leadership in building a commons movement. His talks have helped some +fairly sequestered constituencies in technical fields — computer programming, +library science, Internet policy, copyright law — understand the larger +political and cultural significance of their work. The results have sometimes +been galvanizing. As one veteran hacker told me in 2006, “There’s a whole +connoisseurship of Lessig talks. He’s a little past his peak right now — but +there was a period where, like when he gave the lecture at OSCON [a conference +of open-source programmers], when he was done, they wanted to start a riot. +People were literally milling around, looking for things to smash. He was +saying to these people who worked on open source, ‘There’s a larger world +context to your work. The government is doing things — and you can stop them!’ +”~{ Interview with Aaron Swartz, October 10, 2006. }~ +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + public speaker, as +} + +Following oral arguments before the Supreme Court, the movement — such as it +was — had a rare gathering of its leaders. Public Knowledge co-hosted a +luncheon for those who had aided the lawsuit. The diners spanned the worlds of +libraries, computers, Internet publishing, public-interest advocacy, and many +other fields. The event was held at Washington’s Sewall-Belmont House, where +the National Woman’s Party once led the fight for women’s suffrage. This +prompted Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, to declare, “We, too, are +building a movement.”~{ Amy Harmon, “Challenge in Copyright Case May Be Just a +Beginning,” /{New York Times}/, October 14, 2002. }~ +={ Sohn, Gigi } + +So after arguing — and losing — before the U.S. Supreme Court, what does a +copyright superstar do for an encore? + +A seed had already been planted at the Starbucks meeting four years earlier. +Eldred recalls telling Lessig, “I think this case is very important, and I +think you’re the right guy for this. But at the same time, I’d like to talk to +you about something else. I really think that we need to start up some sort of +a copyright conservancy, which would be sort of like a nature conservancy. It +would allow people to donate books to the public domain; we could then take +ownership of them. They could maybe have a tax deduction for them, and we could +— instead of having the book privately owned — they would be in the public +domain, maybe before the copyright term expired. We could sort of have an +independent group maintain this conservancy, and allow the books to be put on +the Internet for free.” +={ copyright conservancy ; + Eldred, Eric : + copyright conservancy, and | Lessig, and +1 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred, and +1 ; + Eldred, Eric : + Lessig, and | public domain, and +} + +Eldred remembers that Lessig “was sort of stunned. He didn’t have anything to +say for a little while. We sort of looked at each other, and I think he was +very shocked and surprised that I said that. And he said, ‘I don’t think we can +do it until we’ve done the work on the copyright term extension act suit, but I +promise to do it.’”~{ Interview with Eric Eldred, August 1, 2006. }~ + +:B~ PART II + +:C~ The Rise of Free Culture + +1~intro_ii [Intro] -# + +To the commoners seeking to build a new cultural universe, the failure of the +/{Eldred}/ case in the U.S. Supreme Court was both depressing and liberating. +It confirmed what the legal scholars of the 1990s had long suspected— that both +Congress and the courts were captives to a backward-looking vision of copyright +law. Government was tacitly committed to a world of centralized and commercial +mass media managed by elite gatekeepers. That was not likely to change soon. +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + effects of : + Supreme Court, and +} + +As for helping build a new digital republic with a more open, democratic +character, the Clinton administration made its intentions clear in its infamous +White Paper. It wanted to convert the gift economy of the Internet into a +wall-to-wall marketplace. It wanted to give sellers absolute control over +content and limit the disruptions of innovative newcomers. The government, +acting on behalf of the film, record, and book industries, had no desire to +legitimize or fortify the sharing culture that was fast gaining a hold on the +Internet. Quite the contrary: strengthening the public’s fair use rights, +access to the public domain, and online free speech rights might interfere with +the perceived imperatives of electronic commerce. /{Freedom}/ would therefore +have to be defined as the freedom of consumers to buy what incumbents were +selling, not as a robust civic freedom exercised by a sovereign citizenry. +={ Clinton administration : + White Paper ; + fair use doctrine : + White Paper vs. ; + White Paper [on copyright] ; + gift economy ; + Internet : + gift economy of ; + free culture : + Internet, of the +} + +By the conclusion of /{Eldred}/, in 2003, it was clear that the copyright +dissidents were not just confronting one policy battle or another; they were +confronting an antiquated and entrenched worldview. While Lessig, Eldred, and +the growing band of commoners realized that it was important to pay close +attention to pending legislation and lawsuits, many of them also realized that +the real challenge was to develop a new vision — and then try to actualize it. +={ Eldred, Eric : + copyright law, and +} + +A more affirmative, comprehensive vision was needed to supersede the limited +intellectual parameters of copyright law.Copyright law was a mode of property +discourse, after all, and that discourse simply could not adequately express +the aspirations of hackers, citizen-journalists, librarians, academics, +artists, democrats, and others trying to secure open online spaces for +themselves. The online insurgents acknowledged the great importance of fair use +and the public domain, but they also considered such doctrines to be vestiges +of an archaic, fraying legal order. It was time to salvage what was valuable +from that order, but otherwise instigate a new language, a new aesthetic, a new +legal regime, a new worldview. +={ copyright law : + property rights, and ; + property rights : + copyright law, and +} + +This meant venturing into risky, unknown territory. Law professors accustomed +to working within the comfort of the academy would have to clamber onto public +stages and set forth idealistic, politically inflected scenarios for Internet +culture. Activists accustomed to rhetorical critiques would have to initiate +pragmatic, results-driven projects. Free software hackers would have to invent +new software and digital protocols. Volunteers would need to be enlisted and +organized and funding secured to sustain bare-boned organizational structures. +Wholly new constituencies would have to be imagined and mobilized and brought +together into something resembling a new movement. Part II, The Rise of Free +Culture, describes the building of this foundation from 2000 to 2005. + +1~ 4 INVENTING THE CREATIVE COMMONS + +/{A public-spirited cabal schemes for a way to legalize sharing.}/ + +Larry Lessig remembers his Starbucks conversation with Eric Eldred as a +“crystallizing moment,” a revelation that the stakes in copyright reform were +much higher than he had originally imagined. Both Lessig and Eldred obviously +wanted to win the lawsuit and recognized its importance. But Eldred had made +clear that he didn’t just want to roll back regressive laws; he wanted to +develop an affirmative and sustainable alternative. +={ copyright law : + property rights, and +1 ; + property rights : + copyright law, and +1 ; + Eldred, Eric : + copyright law, and +2 | Lessig, and +16 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred, and +16 +} + +This got Lessig thinking: “So, okay — you get the Supreme Court to strike the +laws down, but you still live in a world where people think that everything is +property and has to be owned. If nobody has a political awareness about why the +judicial response makes sense, then it’s a pretty empty result.”~{ Interview +with Lawrence Lessig, March 20, 2006. }~ Throughout the /{Eldred}/ case, +paradoxically enough, Lessig says he was “skeptical” of the traditional liberal +strategy of seeking redress through the courts. +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + Supreme Court, and +} + + +The turning point for him, Lessig recalled, was in recognizing that Eldred was +not just a plaintiff in a test case but “someone trying to build a movement +around a practice of making things available in a way that took advantage of +the infrastructure of the Net.”~{ Ibid. }~ True, Eldritch Press resembled an +old-style archive of canonical works. Yet Eldred’s goal all along had been to +host an active social community of book lovers, not just provide a repository +for old texts. The Web site’s real importance was in the social activity it +represented — the fact that thousands of participant-readers could come +together around a self-selected amateur eager to build a new type of social +community and information genre. +={ Eldritch Press ; + World Wide Web : + social activity on +7 +} + +Lessig told me that when he recognized Eldred’s Web site as a new type of +social practice, it helped define the challenge: “The question became a very +technical, legal one: How could we instantiate that movement?” Lessig said he +needed to find a way to “disambiguate the social practice.” By that bit of +tech-legalese, he meant, How could the practices and values animating Eldred’s +Web site be articulated in law, denoted on the Web, and thereby be seen for +what they were: a new mode of social practice and cultural freedom? + +It helps to remember that in 1998 and the following years, the legality of +sharing online works and downloading them was highly ambiguous. Prevailing +legal discourse set forth a rather stark, dualistic world: either a work is +copyrighted with “all rights reserved,” or a work is in the public domain, +available to anyone without restriction. The mental categories of the time +offered no room for a “constituency of the reasonable,” in Lessig’s words. +={ copyright law : + public domain vs. ; + public domain : + copyright law, and +} + +Copyright law made nominal provisions for a middle ground in the form of the +fair use doctrine and the public domain. But Lessig realized that fair use was +“just a terrible structure on which to build freedom. There are basically no +bright lines; everything is a constant debate. Of course, we don’t want to +erase or compromise or weaken [these doctrines] in any sense. But it’s very +important to build an infrastructure that doesn’t depend upon four years of +litigation.” Or as Lessig was wont to put it in his impassioned performances on +the stump: “Fuck fair use.”~{ Robert S. Boynton, “Righting Copyright: Fair Use +and Digital Environmentalism,” /{Bookforum}/, February/March 2005, available at +http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=1. }~ +={ copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and +2 ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +2 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + fair use, on +2 +} + +This was a theatrical flourish, of course. Back in Palo Alto, Lessig in 2001 +had launched the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School, which +actively takes on lawsuits seeking to vindicate the public’s fair use rights, +among other things. One notable case was against Stephen Joyce, the grandson of +novelist James Joyce. As executor of the Joyce literary estate, Stephen Joyce +steadfastly prevented dozens of scholars from quoting from the great writer’s +archive of unpublished letters.~{ See, e.g., D. T. Max, “The Injustice +Collector,” /{New Yorker}/, June 19, 2006, pp. 34ff. }~ (After losing a key +court ruling in February 2007, the Joyce estate settled the case on terms +favorable to a scholar who had been denied access to the Joyce papers.) +={ Joyce, Stephen } + +But Lessig’s intemperance toward fair use has more to do with the almost +subliminal void in legal discourse and political culture. There was no way to +talk about the social behaviors exemplified by Eldred’s Web site except through +crabbed, legalistic rules. The only available language, the default vocabulary, +is copyright law and its sanctioned zones of freedom, such as fair use. Lessig +wanted to open up a new, more bracing line of discourse. “We wanted to rename +the social practice,” he said. It sounds embarrassingly grandiose to state it +so bluntly, but in later years it became clear to Lessig and his loose +confederation of colleagues that the real goal was to /{imagine and build a +legal and technical infrastructure of freedom}/. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + freedom, and | law in contemporary context, and +2 +} + +Initially, the goal was more exploratory and improvisational — an earnest +attempt to find leverage points for dealing with the intolerable constraints of +copyright law. Fortunately, there were instructive precedents, most notably +free software, which by 2000, in its opensource guise, was beginning to find +champions among corporate IT managers and the business press. Mainstream +programmers and corporations started to recognize the virtues of GNU/Linux and +opensource software more generally. Moreover, a growing number of people were +internalizing the lessons of Code, that the architecture of software and the +Internet really does matter. +={ free software : + open source software, as ; + GNU/Linux ; + software : + open source ; + Internet : + architecture of +1 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +} + +Even as he sought to prevail in /{Eldred}/, Lessig understood that enduring +solutions could not be conferred by the U.S. Supreme Court; they had to be made +real through people’s everyday habits. The commoners needed to build a new set +of tools to actualize freedom on the Internet, and to develop a new language, a +new epistemology, a new vision, for describing the value proposition of sharing +and collaboration. The big surprise, as we will see in chapter 6, was the +latent social energies poised to support this vision. +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft +7 : + Supreme Court, and ; + Internet : + freedom of ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred v. Reno, and | freedom, and +} + +2~ What If . . . ? + +Shortly after the /{Eldred}/ case was filed in January 1999, a number of +Harvard Law students working with Lessig announced the formation of a new +group, “Copyright’s Commons.”~{ The Copyright’s Commons Web site is now defunct +but can be found at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, at +http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc. }~ Led by Jennifer Love and Ashley Morgan, +Copyright’s Commons published a monthly Web newsletter that provided updates on +the progress of the /{Eldred}/ case and miscellaneous news about the public +domain. +={ Love, Jennifer ; + Morgan, Ashley ; + Copyright’s Commons +3 : + See also Creative Commons ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + Copyright’s Commons, as +3 ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + Copyright’s Commons, and +3 +} + +Copyright’s Commons described itself as “a coalition devoted to promoting the +public availability of literature, art, music, and film.” It was actually a +named plaintiff in the /{Eldred}/ case. + +That spring, Copyright’s Commons announced a new project that it called the +“counter-copyright [cc] campaign.” Billed as “an alternative to the exclusivity +of copyright,” the campaign invited the general public to “show your support +for the public domain by marking your work with a [cc] and a link to the +Copyright’s Commons website. . . . If you place the [cc] icon at the end of +your work, you signal to others that you are allowing them to use, modify, +edit, adapt and redistribute the work that you created.” +={ counter-copyright (cc) campaign } + +The project may have been an imaginative call to arms, but there was no +infrastructure behind it except one Web page, and no background material except +a Web link to the Open Source Initiative. Wendy Seltzer, a Harvard Law student +at the time, recalled that the [cc] symbol produced by Copyright’s Commons “was +supposed to be a public domain dedication, but nobody had yet gone through all +of the thinking about what was actually required to put something into the +public domain, and did this satisfy the ‘affirmative act’ requirements [of the +law]? Part of the germ of the Creative Commons was thinking about what would it +take to make this — the [cc] symbol — an actual, meaningful, legally binding +statement.”~{ Interview with Wendy Seltzer, September 28, 2006. }~ +={ Seltzer, Wendy } + +Lessig, in the meantime, was keeping a frenetic schedule. He was overseeing the +progress of the /{Eldred}/ lawsuit; traveling to give speeches to dozens of +conferences and forums every year; promoting his book Code; and writing a +monthly column in the /{Industry Standard}/ until it went under with the tech +bubble collapse in 2001. The year before, Kathleen Sullivan of Stanford Law +School persuaded Lessig to join its faculty and supervise a new law clinic, the +Center for Internet and Society.~{ Ross Hanig, “Luring Lessig to Stanford Law +School,” /{Recorder}/, October 17, 2001, at http://www.law.com. }~ Along the +way Lessig also got married to Bettina Neuefeind, a human rights lawyer. +={ Sullivan, Kathleen ; + Neuefeind, Bettina ; + Center for Internet and Society ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred v. Reno, and +1 +} + +Work on /{Eldred}/ intensified after the district court dismissed the case in +October 1999. Lessig embarked on a new round of legal strategizing with +colleagues to prepare the appeals court brief, which was submitted in May 2000. +Throughout this period, intellectual property (IP) thinkers and tech activists +— especially those in the Lessig/Cambridge/Stanford axis — were highly attuned +to the gathering storm in copyright and software policy. + +One of the most tumultuous developments was Napster, a homemade file-sharing +software program that had become an international sensation. Released in June +1999, Napster was the creation of hacker Shawn Fanning, then a student at +Northeastern University in Boston. Within a year, the free program had been +downloaded by an estimated 70 million users, drawing fierce denunciations by +the recording industry and Washington officials. Napster used centralized file +directories on the Internet to connect users to music files on thousands of +individual computers. By enabling people to download virtually any recorded +music in existence, for free, it was as if the fabled “cosmic jukebox” had +arrived. Of course, much of the copying was blatantly illegal. Yet consumers +welcomed Napster as one of the few vehicles they had for thumbing their nose at +a reactionary music industry that refused to offer digital downloads. The +Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster in December 1999, +and succeeded in shutting it down in July 2001.~{ Wikipedia entry, at +http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster. }~ +={ Fanning, Shawn ; + Napster +2 ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) +1 +} + +The Napster craze intensified the polarized property discourse that Lessig and +his colleagues were trying to transcend. Napster encouraged an either/or debate +by suggesting that a song is either private property or contraband; there was +no middle ground for fair use or the public domain. While the RIAA and acts +like Metallica and Madonna railed against massive copyright infringements, +defenders of Napster were quick to point out its promotional power. An album +produced by the English rock band Radiohead, for example, was downloaded for +free by millions of people before its release — a fact that many credit with +pushing the album, Kid A, to the top of the Billboard CD sales chart. But such +claims carried little weight against those defending what they considered their +property rights. +={ Radiohead ; + property rights : + copyright law, and +2 ; + copyright law : + property rights, and +2 | public domain vs. +1 ; + public domain : + copyright law, and +1 +} + +The controversy over Napster was clearly influential in shaping the debate over +how to protect the public domain. Berkman Center co-director Jonathan Zittrain +recalls, “If we’re trying to hang the hopes of the community on the right just +to copy stuff, we’re going to lose — and maybe we should. [The issue] is +actually about the right to manipulate the symbols and talismans of our +culture” — what Professor Terry Fisher likes to call “semiotic democracy.”~{ +Interview with Jonathan Zittrain, September 28, 2006. }~ +={ Zittrain, Jonathan ; + Fisher, William (Terry) ; + free culture : + sharing ethic of +1 ; + copyright law : + sharing economy vs. +1 ; + democracy : + semiotic +} + +The problem was that copyright discourse, at least in the hands of the record +and film industries, refused to acknowledge that the sharing and reuse of works +might be necessary, desirable, or legal. The concept did not compute. There was +a conspicuous void in the prevailing terms of debate. So the challenge facing +the Cambridge copyright cabal was really a riddle about epistemology, law, and +culture rolled into one. How could a new type of free culture, independent of +the market, be brought into existence? And how could the creative works of this +imagined culture be made legally “shareable” instead of being automatically +treated as private property? + +This was an unprecedented challenge. When culture was chiefly a set of analog +media — books, records, film — there had been affirmative legal limits on the +scope of copyright. Before 1978, the law regulated only commercial uses of a +work and only works that had been formally registered, which meant that most +works automatically remained in the public domain. Moreover, there was a +natural, physical “friction” preventing copyright holders from over-controlling +how a work could circulate and be used. When words were fixed in books and +sounds embedded in vinyl, people could circulate those objects freely, without +having to ask permission from copyright holders. In the digital world, however, +the physical constraints of analog media disappeared. Copyright holders now +claimed that every digital blip, however transient, constituted a “copyright +event” subject to their unilateral control. In practice, this greatly weakened +the rights a person could enjoy under the fair use doctrine. +={ copyright law : + public domain vs. +3 ; + public domain : + copyright law, and +3 ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and +1 | digital age, in +1 ; + copyright law : + digital age, in +1 | fair use doctrine, and +1 | limits on the scope of +} + +In a sense, the entire legal and cultural framework for free culture needed to +be reimagined so it could function in the digital environment. The terms of +fair use essentially had to be renegotiated — an undertaking that copyright law +had never had to tackle in the past. But how might that be achieved when both +Congress and the courts were beholden to the copyright maximalists’ worldview? + +Such were the kinds of conversations that swirled around the Berkman Center, +Harvard Law School, MIT, and a handful of progressive intellectual property +circles. Such discussions had been going on for years, especially in the +context of free software and public-domain scholarship, but now they were +reaching the lay public. The Napster and /{Eldred}/ cases were vehicles for +educating the press and the public, and Lessig’s book /{Code}/ was becoming +must reading for anyone who cared about Internet governance and digital +culture. +={ Berkman Center for Internet & Society ; + Napster ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +} + +Amid this swirl of copyright controversy, MIT professor Hal Abelson had lunch +with Lessig at the Harvard Faculty Club in July 2000. The two had co-taught a +class on cyberlaw two years earlier and shared many interests in the confluence +of copyright and technology. One topic that day was Eric Eldred’s idea of a +copyright conservancy — a “land trust” for public-domain works. On August 1, +2000, Abelson sent Zittrain an e-mail: +={ Abelson, Hal : + copyright conservancy idea, and +5 | cyberlaw, and +5 ; + Eldred, Eric : + copyright conservancy, and ; + Zittrain, Jonathan ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + effects of ; + copyright conservancy +35 +} + +_1 /{Here’s an idea that we might be able to get going, and where the Berkman +Center could help.}/ + +_1 /{Let’s set up a tax-free, charitable foundation to which artists and record +label companies could donate the copyright for recorded music. I’m thinking of +all the old music for which there isn’t currently an active market.}/ + +_1 /{The foundation would arrange for this stuff to be loaded for free onto the +internet and give the public permission to use it. The artists and record +labels get a tax writeoff. The RIAA and Napster hug and kiss, and everyone goes +home happy.}/ +={ Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) } + +_1 /{What do you think?}/ + +_1 /{Hal}/ + +Zittrain loved the idea, and suggested that it might make a great clinical +project for Harvard Law students that fall. But he wondered if the Copyright +Clearinghouse Center — a licensing and permissions organization for music — +already offered such a service (it didn’t). Lessig proposed that Stanford and +Harvard law schools jointly develop the program. He immediately identified one +glaring problem: it would be difficult to “establish a process for valuing +gifts of copyrighted stuff that would be clearly understood and would be +accepted by the IRS.” +={ Zittrain, Jonathan +1 } + +What ensued was a lengthy and irregular series of e-mail conversations and social encounters through which the idea was chewed over and refined. Lessig acted as the “supernode” among a small group of participants that initially included Zittrain, Eldred, Nesson, and Diane Cabell, a lawyer and administrator at the Berkman Center. Within a month, others were invited into the conversation: Richard Stallman; Duke Law professors James Boyle and Jerome H. Reichman; and documentary film producer Eric Saltzman, who had just become director of the Berkman Center. +={ Berkman Center for Internet & Society ; + Boyle, James : + CC formation, and ; + Cabell, Diane ; + Reichman, Jerome H. ; + Nesson, Charles ; + Saltzman, Eric ; + Stallman, Richard : + Copyright’s Commons, and ; + Eldred, Eric : + copyright conservancy, and +} + +A digital archive for donated and public-domain works had great appeal. Just as +land trusts acted as trustees of donated plots of land, so the Copyright’s +Commons (as Lessig proposed that it be named) would be a “conservancy” for +film, books, music, and other works that were either in the public domain or +donated. Six weeks after Abelson’s original suggestion, Lessig produced a +“Proposal for an Intellectual Property Conservancy” for discussion purposes.~{ +Lawrence Lessig, “Proposal for the Intellectual Property Conservancy,” e-mail +to ipcommons group, November 12, 2000. }~ He now called the concept “an IP +commons” — “the establishment of an intellectual property conservancy to +facilitate the collection and distribution under a GPL-like license of all +forms of intellectual property.” As elaborated by two Harvard Law School +students, Chris Babbitt and Claire Prestel, “The conservancy will attempt to +bridge the gap between authors, corporate copyright holders and public domain +advocates by providing a repository of donated works which we believe will +create a more perfect ‘market’ for intellectual property.”~{ Chris Babbitt and +Claire Prestel, “Memorandum to Michael Carroll, Wilmer Cutler Pickering, ‘IP +Conservancy,’ ” October 24, 2000. }~ +={ belson, Hal : + copyright conservancy idea, and +2 ; + Babbitt, Chris ; + Prestel, Claire ; + Copyright’s Commons +27 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + Copyright’s Commons, as +27 ; + IP Commons +27 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Copyright’s Commons, and +27 +} + +Friendly critiques started arriving immediately. Stallman considered the +proposal a “good idea overall,” but as usual he objected to the words, such as +“intellectual property” and “copyright protection,” which he considered +“propaganda for the other side.”~{ E-mail from Richard Stallman to Lessig, +September 11, 2000. See also http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html. +Stallman suggested calling the project the “Copyright and Patent Conservancy.” +}~ Abelson, a friend and colleague of Stallman’s at MIT, was not finicky about +word choices, but he did believe that software donations should be directed to +the Free Software Foundation, not to the envisioned project. FSF already +existed, for one thing, but in addition, said Abelson, “It may be detrimental +to have people initially associate this [new project] too closely with the FSF. +. . . We need to craft a public position that will unify people. An FSF-style +‘let’s undo the effects of all those evil people licensing software’ is not +what we want here.”~{ E-mail from Hal Abelson to Lessig, September 12, 2000. }~ +Some people suggested attracting people to the conservancy by having “jewels” +such as material from the estates of deceased artists. Another suggested +hosting special licenses, such as the Open Audio License, a license issued by +the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2001 that lets musicians authorize the +copying and reuse of their songs so long as credit is given and derivative +songs can be shared. +={ Stallman, Richard : + Copyright’s Commons, and ; + Abelson, Hal : + Free Software Foundation, and +1 ; + Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +The most difficult issue, said Abelson, was the economics of the project. The +care and maintenance of donations, such as the master version of films, could +be potentially huge expenses. Digitizing donated works could also be expensive. +Finally, there were questions about the economic incentives to potential +donors. Would people really wish to donate works that have significant cash +value? + +Answers to such questions were hardly self-evident, but there were encouraging +signs. After Lessig gave a speech at the University of Michigan in September +2000, a man came up to him and announced, “I’m one of the people who benefited +by the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.” It was Robert Frost, Jr., son of the great +poet. Frost said, “I obviously need to check with my family, but we may be +interested in becoming a contributor to your conservancy.”~{ E-mail from +Lawrence Lessig to ipcommons group, September 8, 2000. }~ If Robert Frost’s +estate could come forward with his literary legacy, perhaps there were others +willing to do the same. +={ Frost, Robert, Jr. ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + public speaker, as ; + Copyright Term Extension Act +} + +When Berkman Center director Eric Saltzman joined the conversation, he raised a +series of difficult questions about the whole idea: +={ Saltzman, Eric +1 } + +_1 Why would a person or corp. donate copyrighted materials? Larry’s draft +implies a benefit to the IP owner — does this mean broader Internet facilitated +use, and not merely a tax deduction? Under what circumstances, if any, does the +Conservancy charge for use of its IP? If a user modifies a story, say, +producing a screenplay, to whom does that screenplay belong? Would a motion +picture based upon that screenplay owe $$ to the Conservancy? If so, how much +(this is the damages phase of the /{Rear Window}/ case)?~{ This case, /{Stewart +v. Abend}/, 100 S. Ct. 1750 (1990), required the copyright owners of Alfred +Hitchcock’s movie /{Rear Window}/ to pay damages to the author of a book upon +which the film was based. Saltzman was concerned that the conservancy would be +liable for any illicit derivative works. See Daniel A. Saunders, “Copyright +Law’s Broken Rear Window: An Appraisal of Damage and Estimate of Repair,” +/{California Law Review}/ 80, no. 1 (January 1992), pp. 179–245. }~ Wouldn’t a +new, hopeful band prefer to allow free use of its song(s) on a commercially +promoted site like MP3.com rather than the Conservancy site? All asking: How to +make the Conservancy into a useful garden, not a well-meaning weed patch of +unwanted, neglected IP?~{ E-mail to ipcommons group, September 18, 2000. }~ + +By early October 2001, some of these questions had been provisionally answered. +For example: Only digital works would be accepted initially. No limitations or +restrictions would be set on the use of donated works. Prospective academic +partners would include the University of California at Berkeley, Duke, Harvard, +MIT, and Stanford. Lessig suggested both Richard Stallman and Jack Valenti as +possible board members. The central goal was to develop a new sort of +noncommercial space in cyberspace for the sharing and reuse of music, visual +art, film, literature, nonfiction, academic work, software, and science.~{ +E-mail from Lawrence Lessig to ipcommons group, November 12, 2000. }~ +={ Valenti, Jack ; + Stallman, Richard : + Copyright’s Commons, and +} + +But many questions still hung in the air. Could the free software ethic really +translate to other creative genres? Would tax incentives elicit donations of +works? Would independent appraisals of donated works be needed? How would the +conservancy search the titles of works and get permissions clearances? + +For all of its brainpower and commitment, Lessig’s rump caucus might not have +gotten far if it had not found a venturesome source of money, the Center for +the Public Domain. The center — originally the Red Hat Center — was a +foundation created by entrepreneur Robert Young in 2000 following a highly +successful initial public offering of Red Hat stock. As the founder of Red Hat, +a commercial vendor of GNU/Linux, Young was eager to repay his debt to the +fledgling public-domain subculture. He also realized, with the foresight of an +Internet entrepreneur, that strengthening the public domain would only enhance +his business prospects over the long term. (It has; Young later founded a +print-on-demand publishing house, Lulu.com, that benefits from the free +circulation of electronic texts, while making money from printing hard copies.) +={ Young, Robert ; + Red Hat ; + GNU/Linux : + Red Hat, and ; + enter for the Public Domain +2 ; + public domain : + Center for Public Domain +2 +} + +The director of the center, Laurie Racine, a former geneticist and business +professor, was skilled at making shrewd strategic grants and “character bets” +in public-domain activism. Because the center was not hobbled by the +bureaucracy or timidity that afflicts many large foundations, it was able to +make swift decisions and bold bets on innovative projects. (I came to work +closely with Racine on a number of projects, including the co-founding of +Public Knowledge, in 2001.) +={ Racine, Laurie +1 } + +Lessig met with Racine in October 2000. On a napkin, he sketched his idea for +expanding copyright for authors. He came away with funding for a meeting at the +Berkman Center and, later, a $100,000 commitment to launch the IP conservancy; +the Center for the Public Domain eventually put up $1 million to get the +project going, well before other funders saw the promise of the idea. Racine +wanted her new center to be associated with “a project that has broad vision, +credibility, range and staying power.” She saw Lessig’s project as having all +of those things.~{ E-mail from Lawrence Lessig to ipcommons group, October 11, +2000, which contained e-mail from Laurie Racine to Lessig, October 25, 2000. }~ +The grant was based more on the concept than a specific plan, however. At the +time it was not entirely clear if the project would own and manage digital +works, host Web services that made things freely available, or provide legal +and software tools — or something else.~{ E-mail from Lawrence Lessig to +ipcommons group, November 12, 2000. }~ There was, nonetheless, a great sense of +mission and urgency to get under way. + +Interestingly, two similar initiatives were also in the early stages of +development. The Knowledge Conservancy, led by David Bearman at Carnegie Mellon +University in Pittsburgh, had a similar model of accepting donations of +materials and making them available online. It focused more on sponsorship +donations and memberships, while Lessig’s group was more oriented toward legal +research and Web hosting of works. Another project, OpenCulture.org, planned to +compensate artists for contributions to the public domain, but apparently it +never took off.~{ http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://Openculture.org. }~ +Lessig and his group were not averse to joining forces with others, but they +were intent on vetting their own business model, such as it was, before joining +anyone else’s venture. +={ Bearman, David ; + OpenCulture.org ; + Knowledge Conservancy +} + +One turning point came in January 2001 after Saltzman had met with several +lawyers at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, a prominent law firm in Washington, +D.C.~{ Contained in e-mail from Christina Ritchie to ipcommons group, December +15, 2000. }~ After conversations with attorneys David Johnson and Michael W. +Carroll, it became clear that a nonprofit trust managing donated material could +face considerable liability if it turned out that the donors did not actually +own the works. To explore this issue, Carroll produced a much-praised legal +memo that raised a red flag: “What if we were fools, and the person who gave us +the rights [to a work] actually never had the rights and suddenly we get sued +for infringement?” asked Carroll.~{ Michael Carroll, “Potential Copyright +Liability and DMCA Safe Harbor Relief for Creative Commons,” appendix to +“Briefing Book for Creative Commons Inaugural Meeting,” May 7, 2001. }~ One +successful lawsuit could sink the whole enterprise. +={ Carroll, Michael W. ; + Johnson, David R. ; + Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering ; + Saltzman, Eric +8 +} + +The project was caught in a conundrum. It wanted to legalize a whole set of +social practices for sharing and reusing creative works — but establishing a +content intermediary for that purpose appeared to be financially prohibitive +under the law. It could be hugely expensive to clear titles and indemnify the +organization and future users against copyright infringement risks. +={ copyright law : + sharing economy vs. +1 +} + +For a few months, various people in Lessig’s orbit suggested complicated +schemes to try to finesse the legal problems. For example, one way that the +conservancy could reduce its liability would be to simply point to the Web +locations of public-domain materials, in the style of Napster’s centralized +index of songs. This would also avoid the nuisance and expense of clearing +titles on thousands of works. Another idea was to create a “three zone system” +of content — Zone A for content that the conservancy owned and licensed; Zone B +for content that was merely hosted at the conservancy site with no copyright +representations; and Zone C, a simple search engine with links to public-domain +content. Each of these zones, in turn, raised a flurry of complicated, +speculative legal issues.~{ E-mail from Eric Saltzman to ipcommons group, +January 19, 2001. }~ +={ Napster ; + Copyright’s Commons : + three zone system of +} + +None of the proposed alternatives got much traction, especially when Saltzman +took a closer look at the realities of tax deductions for donors. Saltzman came +to see that tax breaks would have very little incentive value for most +potential donors, and establishing the cash value of donations would be +difficult in any case. Moreover, if donors were getting little in return for +their donations, they would be wary of signing a form indemnifying the +conservancy against legal liability. On top of all this, Saltzman, like others, +had misgiving about “the idea of the federal treasury contributing public money +[in the form of tax expenditures].” In short, the conservancy approach seemed +plagued with many complicated and perhaps insoluble problems. + +As if to keep the pot boiling, newcomers kept adding new thoughts. Two leading +thinkers about the public domain in science, Paul Uhlir and Jerome H. Reichman, +urged that the group expand its mission to include scientific research and take +an international perspective.~{ E-mail from Paul Uhlir and Jerry Reichman, +January 30, 2001. }~ (Uhlir directs the international scientific and technical +information programs at the National Academy of Sciences/ National Research +Council; Reichman is an intellectual property professor at Duke Law School.) +Both were keenly aware of the dangers to scientific progress if copyright and +patent protection continued to expand. +={ Reichman, Jerome H. ; + Uhlir, Paul ; + copyright law : + expansion of +} + +In January 2001, the caucus reached one point of consensus— that the primary +function of this commons should be “to facilitate free/low-cost public use of +original works.” It also agreed upon a name. Asked to vote on a name from a +list that included IP Commons, Dot-commons, Sui Generous, IP Conservancy, and +Public Works, Saltzman piped up, “May I suggest another name? CREATIVE +COMMONS.” When the final poll results were counted, Creative Commons was the +clear winner with five votes, with one vote apiece for the remaining names. A +later poll pitted “The Constitution’s Commons” against “Creative Commons” (CC) +in a final runoff. The vote tally is lost to history, but we do know which name +prevailed.~{ E-mails from ipcommons listserv to ipcommons group, January 11, +12, 13, 16, 2001. }~ +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + development of +10 | function of +} + +Viewpoints quickly diverged on how a commons ought to be structured and what +metrics of success should be used. Should it seek to maximize the number of +donations or the number of downloads? Should it develop quality holdings in a +given field or provide the widest possible breadth of content? Should it focus +on social interaction and creative reuses of works? Should the focus be on +producers or consumers of intellectual property? Should the organization focus +on individuals or institutions? And how would it be different from other rights +clearance organizations and content archives? The group seemed mired in a great +cloud of uncertainty. + +For the next nine months, the group intensified its debate about how to build +the envisioned conservancy. After law student Dotan Oliar sketched out possible +“business models,” Saltzman persuaded a friend at McKinsey & Company, the +consulting firm, to provide a pro bono assessment.~{ Dotan Oliar, “Memo on +Creative Commons — Towards Formulating a Business Plan,” March 19, 2001. }~ +“The McKinsey folks were very skeptical and, I think, had a hard time fitting +this into their [business] framework,” recalled one student at the meeting, +Chris Babbitt. After the meeting, he was convinced that Creative Commons could +not possibly host a content commons: “It would just be huge amounts of +material, huge costs, and we didn’t have the money for that.” ~{ Interview with +Chris Babbitt, September 14, 2006. }~ +={ Babbitt, Chris +1 ; + McKinsey & Company ; + Oliar, Dotan +} + +Feeling the need to force some concrete decisions, Saltzman and Lessig convened +twenty-eight people for an all-day meeting in Hauser Hall at Harvard Law +School, on May 11, 2001, to hash out plans. “What we’re trying to do here is +/{brand the public domain}/,” Lessig said. A briefing book prepared by Chris +Babbitt posed a pivotal question to the group: Should Creative Commons be +structured as a centralized Web site or as an distributed, open-source +licensing protocol that would allow content to be spread across cyberspace? The +centralized model could be “an eBay for opensource IP” or a more niche-based +commons for out-of-print books, film, or poetry. A mock Web site was actually +prepared to illustrate the scenario. The home page read: “The member sites +listed on the CommonExchange have been certified by Creative Commons to offer +high-quality, non-infringing content on an unrestricted basis. Please feel free +to use and pass these works along to others. We invite you to donate works of +your own to help maintain the digital Commons.”~{ The mock-up can be found at +http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/creativecommons/site.htm. }~ +={ public domain : + branding of +} + +The distributed commons model would resemble the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or +the New York Stock Exchange — “a trusted matchmaker to facilitate the +transaction of securing rights,” according to the briefing book. “Just as +corporations or commodities producers must meet certain criteria before they +are listed on the Exchange, we could condition ‘listing’ in the Commons on +similar criteria, albeit reflecting open source rather than financial +values.”~{ “Briefing Book for Creative Commons Inaugural Meeting,” May 7,2001, +p.10. }~ The virtue of the distributed model was that it would shift costs, +quality control, and digitization to users. Creative Commons would serve mostly +as a credentialing service and facilitator. On the other hand, giving up +control would be fraught with peril — and what if Creative Commons’ intentions +were ignored? + +Several participants remember Lessig, Nesson, and Zittrain pushing for the +distributed model, which seemed a bolder and riskier option. “Larry was the +lead advocate for a distributed commons, where it would be focused on a license +mechanism that we then would release to the world, and we let the world do with +it what it will,” one attendee recalled. “At the time, I think, XML-type +capabilities were just coming around, and Larry was very confident that that +was the direction to go.”~{ Interview with Chris Babbitt, September 14, 2006. +}~ XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a programming language that uses +self-created “tags” that help Internet users aggregate and share digital +content residing on different computer systems. Lessig envisioned XML tags +embedded in any Creative Commons–licensed work, which could then be used to +identify shareable content on the Internet. +={ Nesson, Charles ; + Zittrain, Jonathan ; + XML (Extensible Markup Language) ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses +3 +} + +This perspective carried the day, and the “conservancy” model of the commons +was formally abandoned. CC would serve as a licensing agent. The licenses would +enable authors’ works to be made available online in an easy, low-cost way +without the full restrictions of copyright law. A standardized set of licenses +would overcome the ambiguities of the fair use doctrine without overriding it. +Creators could voluntarily forfeit certain copyright rights in advance— and +signal that choice — so that others could freely reuse, share, and distribute +CC-licensed works. +={ authorship : + Creative Commons, and +2 +} + +Jonathan Zittrain remembers being skeptical at first: “So this whole thing is +just about some tags? It’s about /{licensing}/? How boring.” Upon reflection, +however, he saw the value of CC licensing as a way to create a new default. “As +soon as you realize — ‘Well, wait a minute! It’s just about authors being able +to express their desires!’”~{ Interview with Jonathan Zittrain, September 28, +2006. }~ + +More than a menu of individual choices, the licenses would constitute an +embryonic cultural order — a “constitutional system” to direct how text, +images, and music could circulate in the online world, based on authors’ +individual choices. But the new focus on licenses raised its own set of novel +quandaries. What options should an author be able to choose? What suite of +licenses made sense? While licensing terms may be boring and legalistic, the +architecture could have potentially profound implications for cultural freedom +— which is why the legal minds involved in the licenses spent so much time +arguing seemingly obscure points. +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + function of +} + +However these debates were resolved, everyone agreed that it was time to +incorporate Creative Commons as a nonprofit group, assemble a board, recruit a +chief executive officer, and of course raise more money. The stated goal: “to +expand the shrinking public domain, to strengthen the social values of sharing, +of openness and of advancing knowledge and individual creativity.”~{ Oren +Bracha and Dotan Oliar, “Memo: May 7th Consensus Regarding the Creative Commons +Project,” August 20, 2001, p. 1. }~ +={ public domain : + CC licenses, and +1 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + public domain, and +1 +} + +There was a certain audacity if not unreality to the whole venture. Law +professors don’t go around inventing ambitious public projects to revamp the +social applications of copyright law. They don’t generally muck around with +software, contract law, and artists to build an imagined “sharing economy.” +“There was always this lingering suspicion in the back of my mind,” recalled +Babbitt in 2006, “that it [Creative Commons] would be kind of a rich man’s +folly, and this would just be some little thing — a niche experiment — that +really wouldn’t turn out to have merited the sort of sustained interest of this +high-caliber group of people.”~{ Interview with Chris Babbitt, September 14, +2006. }~ +={ Babbitt, Chris } + +2~ Crafting the Licenses +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses +14 } + +If Creative Commons licenses were going to enable artists to determine future +uses of their works — on less restrictive terms than copyright law — what did +actual artists think of the whole idea? To get a crude baseline of opinion, +Laura Bjorkland, a friend of Lessig’s and manager of a used-book store in +Salem, Massachusetts, conducted an unscientific survey. She asked about a dozen +writers, photographers, painters, filmmakers, and a sculptor if they would be +interested in donating their works to a commons, or using material from one? +Most of them replied, “I’ve never even /{thought}/ of this before. . . .”~{ +Laura Bjorkland, “Regarding Creative Commons: Report from the Creative +Community,” in “Briefing Book for Creative Commons Inaugural Meeting,” May 7, +2001, pp. 16–19. }~ +={ Bjorkland, Laura ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + function of +} + +A classical composer said he “loved the idea of a Nigerian high school chamber +group playing one of my string quartets without paying royalties . . . but I +would not want a film studio or pop song writer using one of my themes on a +commercial project, even if my name’s attached, without royalties.” Some +artists worried about others making money off derivatives of their work. Many +complained that artists earn so little anyway, why should they start giving +away their work? Others were reluctant to see their work altered or used for +violence or pornography. Photographers and visual artists found it “a little +scary” to let their signature style be used by anyone. + +In short, there was no stampede for starting a public-domain conservancy or a +set of licenses. Some worried that the CC licenses would be a “case of +innovation where’s there’s no current demand.” Another person pointed out, more +hopefully, that it could be a case of “changing the market demand with a new +model.”~{ Oren Bracha and Dotan Oliar, “Memo: May 7th Consensus Regarding the +Creative Commons Project,” August 20, 2001, p. 3, note 9. }~ + +The Lessig caucus was clearly struggling with how best to engage with the +networked environment. Napster had demonstrated that, in the dawning Internet +age, creativity would increasingly be born, distributed, and viewed on the Web; +print and mass media would be secondary venues. For a society still deeply +rooted in print and mass media, this was a difficult concept to grasp. But +Michael Carroll, the Washington lawyer who had earlier vetted the conservancy’s +liability issues, shrewdly saw network dynamics as a potentially powerful tool +for building new types of digital commons. In 2001, he had noticed how a bit of +Internet folk art had become an overnight sensation. Mike Collins, an amateur +cartoonist from Elmira, New York, had posted the cartoon below on Taterbrains, +a Web site.~{ +http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/funnypictures/ig/100-Funny-Pictures/Confusing-Florida-Ballot.htm. +}~ The image suddenly rocketed throughout the cyberlandscape. Everyone was +copying it and sharing it with friends. +={ Carroll, Michael W. +4 ; + Collins, Mike +4 ; + Napster +} + +{ vs_db_1.png }http://viralspiral.cc/ + +% group{ +% +% Official Florida Presidential Ballot +% Follow the arrow and Punch the appropriate dot. +% +% Bush Buchanan Gore Nadar +% (c) 2000 Mike Collins, Taterbrains.com +% +% }group + +Carroll observed: + +_1 [Collins] distributed his design initially without a motive to profit from +it. But the scale of distribution surpassed what he imagined, and in a +subsequent interview he expressed some resentment over those who had made money +from T-shirts and other paraphernalia using his design. But he appears to have +taken no actions to enforce his copyright, the notice notwithstanding. +Copyright lawyers would consider the unlicensed distribution of this work +“leakage” — that is, a violation of law but not worth pursuing. + +_1 But if we could take steps to make it cheap, easy and desirable for the Mike +Collinses of the world to stick a CC tag on something like this before sending +it out, “leakage” becomes legal, changing the terms of the debate.~{ E-mail +from Michael Carroll to Molly Van Houweling and Larry Lessig, October 15, 2001. +}~ + +CC tags could make nonproprietary culture the default, reversing the +presumption of copyright law. Everyone agreed with this general approach, but +implementing it was rife with difficult questions. As Saltzman recalled: “What +kind of relationship did we want to encourage between the creator/licensor and +the user? Should it be totally automated? Should it invite some back-and-forth? +Should there be a requirement that licensors provide contact information?”~{ +Interview with Eric Saltzman, April 11, 2006. }~ The General Public License for +software had shown the feasibility of a license for safeguarding a commons of +shared code. Could it work in other creative sectors? It would be critical to +strike the right balance. As law student Chris Babbitt put it, “Too little +protection for the donor’s interests and no one will donate; too little room +for the users to use the work, and the service is useless.”~{ “Briefing Book,” +p. 12. }~ +={ Babbitt, Chris ; + Saltzman, Eric ; + General Public License (GPL) : + legal enforceability of +} + +If there were going to be several licenses, the next question was how many, and +of what sort? There are many different types of creativity, after all. Should +each one have its own set of special licenses? The Berkman conclave agreed that +there should be a publicdomain license enabling creators to grant a +nonexclusive, royaltyfree license on their works, without the viral conditions +of the GPL. As for other licenses, five ideas were put on the table for +consideration: a license authorizing free reuses of a work so long as proper +attribution is given to the author; a license authorizing noncommercial uses; +and a license authorizing free reuses but prohibiting derivative uses. Other +suggestions included a license authorizing academic uses only and a “timed +donations” license, which would allow an artist to revoke a work from the +commons after a stipulated number of years.~{ Ibid. }~ Neither of these two +licenses gained support from the group. + +There were also lots of open questions about how to structure the specific +terms of the licenses. Should they be perpetual? Will the licensor be liable +for “downstream” uses of a work that are deemed an infringement? Will licensors +be required to identify themselves? Should licensors be able to add their own +separate warranties and representations? Crafting the licenses meant going +beyond the abstract rhetoric of the commons. These licenses had to be serious, +operational legal instruments that courts would recognize as valid. + +Another concern was making the new CC licenses compatible with existing +licenses seeking similar goals. MIT had produced the first such license for its +OpenCourseWare initiative, which allows Internet users to use the university’s +curricula and syllabi (see chapter 12). To ensure that CC- and MIT-licensed +content would be compatible, the CC lawyers deliberately wrote a license that +would meet MIT’s needs. Another license, the GNU Free Documentation License +(FDL), was being used on Wikipedia, among other online sites. But the FDL, +originally intended for software documentation materials, was incompatible with +the CC licenses. Stallman refused to alter the FDL, and Wikpedia was already +under way and committed to the FDL. This quirk of history meant that Wikipedia +content and CC-licensed content could not legally be combined. As we will see +in chapter 9, this was the beginning of a rancorous schism in the free culture +world, and the beginning of a heated philosophical/ political debate over which +licenses truly promote “freedom.” +={ ree Documentation License ; + GNU Project : + GNU FDL ; + Stallman, Richard : + GNU Project, and ; + Wikipedia : + GNU FDL, and +} + +As this overview suggests, licensing complexities can quickly soar out of +control and become overwhelming. Yet the very point of the Creative Commons +licenses was to simplify the sharing and reuse of digital material. CC planners +wanted to help ordinary people bypass the layers of mind-numbing legalese that +make copyright law so impenetrable and inaccessible. The Creative Commons was +all about empowering individuals and avoiding lawyers. A proliferation of +licensing choices would only lead to license incompatibilities, a Balkanization +of content on the Internet, and more lawyers. Sharing and interoperability go +together, as Stallman’s early experiences with his Emacs Commune showed. +={ Emacs ; + Stallman, Richard : + Emacs, and +} + +Somehow, therefore, the licenses had to thread three needles at once. They +needed to align (1) the technical dynamics of the Internet with (2) the legal +realities of copyright law and (3) the everyday needs of people. The ingenious +solution was to create licenses on three layers: a “lawyer-readable” license +that could stand up in court, a “human-readable” license that could be +understood by ordinary people, and a “machine-readable” license that could be +recognized by search engines and other software on the Internet. Each “layer” +expressed the same license terms in a different way — an unexpected twist on +Lessig’s concern for “fidelity in translation.” The formal license was called +the “Legal Code” (or “legal source code”); the machine-readable translation of +the license was called “Digital Code”; and the plain-language summary of the +license, with corresponding icons, was the “Commons Deed” (or the “happy +deed”). + +2~ Branding the Public Domain in Code +={ code : + branding the public domain in +8 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + code, and +8 ; + public domain : + branding of +8 +} + +As the lawyers brooded and debated the licensing terms, another complicated +debate was unfolding on the tech side of CC: how to brand the public domain in +software code. If code is law, then it was imperative for Creative Commons to +find some way to represent CC licenses in digital code. Abelson, Lessig, and +others understood that the future of the Internet was likely to include all +sorts of automated, computer-to-computer functions. One of the best ways to +promote a new body of “free content” on the Web, therefore, would be to develop +machine-readable code that could be inserted into any digital artifact using a +Creative Commons license. That way, search engines could more easily identify +CC-licensed works by their terms of use, and help assemble a functionally +accessible oeuvre of digital content that was free to use. +={ code : + law, as ; + law : + code as +1 ; + Abelson, Hal : + CC licensing, and ; + Internet : + freedom of ; + Internet : + future of ; + Lessig, LawrenceCC licenses, and ; + World Wide Web : + free content on +} + +At this time, in 2001, the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, and +others at the World Wide Web Consortium, based at MIT, were trying to +conceptualize the protocols for a new “logical layer” of code on top of the +World Wide Web. They called it the Semantic Web. The idea is to enable people +to identify and retrieve information that is strewn across the Internet but not +readily located through conventional computer searches. Through a software +format known as RDF/XML,~[* RDF, or Resource Description Framework, is a way to +make a statement about content in a digital artifact. XML, or Extensible Markup +Language, is a way to write a specialized document format to send across the +Web, in which certain content can be marked up, or emphasized, so that other +computers can “read” it.]~ digital content could be tagged with +machine-readable statements that would in effect say, “This database contains +information about x and y.” Through Semantic Web protocols and metatags on +content, it would be possible to conduct searches across many types of digital +content — Web pages, databases, software programs, even digital sensors — that +could yield highly specific and useful results. +={ Berners-Lee, Tim ; + Semantic Web +6 ; + World Wide Web : + Semantic Web +6 | protocols for +6 ; + RDF/XML +} + +Unfortunately, progress in developing the Semantic Web has been bogged down in +years of technical disagreement and indifference among the larger Web +community. Some critics argue that the project has stalled because it was being +driven by a small corps of elite software theorists focused on databases, and +not by a wider pool of decentralized Web practitioners. In any case, the +Creative Commons became one of the first test cases of trying to implement +RDF/XML for the Semantic Web.~{ For background, see “The Semantic Web: An +Introduction,” at http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro; Aaron Swartz and James +Hendler, “The Semantic Web: A Network of Content for the Digital City,” at +http://blogspace.com/rdf/SwartzHendler; and John Markoff, “Entrepreneurs See a +Web Guided by Common Sense,” /{New York Times}/, November 12, 2006. }~ The +project was led initially by Lisa Rein, a thirty-three-year-old data modeler +who met Lessig at an O’Reilly open-source software conference. Lessig hired her +as CC’s first technical director in late 2001 to embed the CC legal licenses in +machine-readable formats. +={ Rein, Lisa +2 ; + Swartz, Aaron ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +} + +Writing the XML code was not so difficult, said Rein; the real challenge was +“deciding what needed to be included and how you represent the licenses as +simply as possible.”~{ Interview with Lisa Rein, December 20, 2006. }~ This +required the lawyers and the techies to have intense dialogues about how the +law should be faithfully translated into software code, and vice versa. Once +again, there were complicated problems to sort through: Should there be a +central database of CC-licensed content? How could machine-readable code be +adapted if the legal licenses were later modified? + +Rein got an unexpected assist in the project from programming whiz Aaron +Swartz, who had heard about Creative Commons and volunteered to help write the +RDF/XML code. Swartz was an esteemed member of the RDF core working group at +the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and so was intimately involved in Semantic +Web deliberations. He was also a fifteen-year-old junior high school student +living with his parents in Chicago. “I remember these moments when I was +sitting in the locker room, typing on my laptop, in these [W3C] debates, and +having to close it because the bell rang and I had to get back to class,” +Swartz recalled. At CC, he was given the title of “Volunteer Metadata +Coordinator.” His job was “to design the RDF schema and what the XML documents +would look like, and work that out with my friends at the W3C and get their +approval on things.”~{ Interview with Aaron Swartz, October 10, 2006. }~ For +his troubles, Swartz received an in-kind donation of a laptop computer and +travel expenses, rather than a salary. “At the time, I felt bad,” said Swartz. +“They were a nonprofit doing work I believe in. I didn’t feel I should be +taking their money when I didn’t need it.” With later help from Ben Adida, the +CC team managed to develop an RDF that could attach CC licenses to Web pages. +But since the Semantic Web protocols were still in flux, and not widely used, +the effort amounted to a speculative gamble on future and widespread adoption +of those protocols. +={ RDF/XML +3 ; + Adida, Ben ; + Swartz, Aaron ; + World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ; + Internet : + future of | protocols of +3 +} + +Although inspired by the Semantic Web and by Lessig’s analysis in /{Code}/, the +RDF/XML coding was also provoked by the growing specter of digital rights +management (DRM), the reviled systems used by film and music companies to lock +up their content. The Creative Commons dreamed of developing an “anti-DRM” code +to express the idea, “This content is and shall remain free.” Professor Hal +Abelson remembered that “we even used the phrase, ‘DRM of the public +domain.’”~{ Interview with Hal Abelson, April 14, 2007. }~ The coinage that +Lessig later popularized is “digital rights expression” — metadata that +indicate that a digital object can be shared and reused. There was a passing +fear that CC’s digital rights expression code might infringe on DRM patents; +one company known for its aggressive patent defense raised concerns. But once +it was made clear that the CC’s RDF code amounted to a label, and did not +execute online rights on a person’s computer, the problem disappeared. +={ Abelson, Hal : + digital rights management, and ; + digital rights management (DRM) ; + copyright law : + digital age, in ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace +} + +The machine-readable CC licenses were one of the first major buildouts of RDF +protocols. Swartz ruefully recalled the reaction of his friends at W3C: “I got +the sense that they thought it was sort of a silly project, that they were +thinking about bigger and longer-term things.” Adida, who later replaced Swartz +as the CC representative at the W3C, played a major role in helping develop the +metatags and protocols. +={ Adida, Ben ; + Swartz, Aaron +1 +} + +The RDF/XML coding was part of a larger CC strategy to brand the public domain +via software code. Since RDF code alone is like a nail without a hammer, +Creative Commons decided to develop a specialized search engine so that +Internet users could locate CC-licensed content. Without such a search engine, +Lessig said in April 2002, “there will be no way to demonstrate that we’ve +produced anything useful.”~{ E-mail from Lawrence Lessig to Hal Abelson, April +22, 2002. }~ Swartz, who was not involved in the project, said, “I was +impressed that they did it, because it was probably the biggest programming job +I’d seen them do at the time.” In the meantime, the CC began a series of +overtures to Google and Yahoo in an attempt to get their search engines to +search for CC-licensed content. After years of lukewarm interest, both Google +and Yahoo added CC-search capabilities in 2005. Creative Commons also nurtured +the hope that once enough content contained CC metadata, software developers +would develop new applications to let people browse, use, and distribute +CC-tagged content. +={ Google ; + Yahoo ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +} + +2~ The Action Shifts to Palo Alto +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + evolution of +31 +} + +By the fall of 2001, Creative Commons was still an idea without definition. The +project gained new momentum in September 2001 when Lessig hired a former +student, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, to be the first director of the +organization. Van Houweling, a sophisticated yet plainspoken law scholar with +strong executive skills, had just finished clerking for Supreme Court justice +David Souter. She set about incorporating the Creative Commons, organizing the +board, building a Web site, and hammering out final versions of the licenses. +={ Souter, David ; + Van Houweling, Molly Shaffer +5 +} + +Once a key foundation grant was secured — $1 million from the Center for the +Public Domain — the Creative Commons was incorporated in Massachusetts (home to +many key backers of the project) on December 21, 2001. The first board members +included several legal scholars (Boyle, Carroll, Lessig), a computer scientist +(Abelson), two filmmakers (Saltzman and Davis Guggenheim, a friend of +Lessig’s), and a Web publisher (Eldred). Charged with breathing life into a +fragile idea, Van Houweling settled into a small office on the third floor of +Stanford Law School (before the project was reassigned to basement offices). +={ Abelson, Hal ; + Boyle, James : + CC board, on | CC formation, and ; + Carroll, Michael W. ; + Center for Public Domain ; + public domain : + Center for Public Domain ; + Saltzman, Eric ; + Eldred, Eric : + Creative Commons, and ; + Guggenheim, Davis +} + +In January 2002, Glenn Otis Brown, a lawyer and former student of Lessig’s, was +hired as assistant director. Brown had been a law student at Harvard Law +School, where he had known Van Houweling and taken a constitutional law course +from Lessig. An affable Texan who had flirted with a journalism career, Brown +had just finished a year of clerking for a circuit court judge. He was due to +start a job in New York City the following week when he got a call from Van +Houweling. “She and Larry were starting something to do with copyright at +Stanford,” recalled Brown. “I knew pretty much nothing else about it except it +was a nonprofit and it was going to be a fulltime job. . . . The next thing I +knew, I was moving to California.”~{ Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, June 9, +2006. }~ +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC formation, and +1 +} + +Lessig, Van Houweling, and Brown took the menu of licenses proposed by two +graduate students, Dotan Oliar and Oren Bracha, and sought to refine them and +make them as legally bulletproof as possible.~{ Oren Bracha and Dotan Oliar, +“Memo: Presentation of Two Possible Creative Commons Layer 1 Architectures,” +October 1, 2001. }~ They were torn about the process to adopt. “We didn’t want +to do a collective drafting process with the entire Internet community,” said +Van Houweling. “That didn’t seem practical. And yet we were a little nervous, I +think, about not knowing what our potential user base would want to use.” +Lessig was unfazed. Release of the licenses “isn’t going to be like a movie +premiere,” he told Van Houweling, but more of an evolutionary process. The idea +was to get the licenses in circulation, monitor their progress, and make +changes as necessary.~{ Interview with Molly Van Houweling, March 21, 2006. }~ +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +1 ; + Bracha, Oren ; + Oliar, Dotan ; + Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC licensing, and +} + +Two of the most prestigious law firms in Silicon Valley, Cooley Godward Kronish +and Wilson, Sonsini, offered pro bono legal assistance to the effort. Attorney +John Brockland, an expert in opensource software licenses at Cooley Godward and +a former student of Lessig’s, was the architect of the final licenses, assisted +by Catherine Kirkman, a licensing attorney at Wilson, Sonsini. Brockland +recalled, “One of the drafting challenges was to write something that could be +broadly useful across a wide range of copyrighted works and would not be tied +to particular nuances of the way the copyright statute works.”~{ Interview with +John Brockland, January 5, 2007. }~ Most copyright licenses are drafted for +specific clients and particular circumstances, not for the general public and +all types of copyrighted works. +={ Brockland, John ; + Cooley Godward Kronish ; + Kirkman, Catherine ; + Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati ; + copyright law : + licenses for ; + open source software : + legal implications of +} + +Much of the discussion, said Van Houweling, “revolved around the values that we +wanted to embed in the licenses, and what were the outer limits of those +values?” Ultimately, she said, “we opted for a menu of licenses that was +weighted toward the nonproprietary [content]. . . . We wanted to subsidize a +certain set of choices that are otherwise underserved.”~{ Interview with Molly +Van Houweling, March 21, 2006.}~ The point was to facilitate the rise of a +sharing culture, after all, not to replicate the baroque dysfunctions of +copyright law. +={ copyright law : + purpose of +} + +Since the CC licenses were trying to articulate a new “middle ground” of +voluntary choices for sharing, it had to grapple with all sorts of fine legal +complexities. How exactly should they define a derivative work? What should be +considered a noncommercial reuse of a work? Can you dedicate a work to the +public domain? + +Some artists felt that they ought to be able to prohibit derivative uses of +their works in pornography or hate speech. Hal Abelson adamantly disagreed. If +the licenses had an “offensive uses” clause, as either a standard or optional +term, it would open up a can of worms and put Creative Commons on the side of +censors. That view readily prevailed. +={ Abelson, Hal } + +A primary concern was anticipating how the licenses might be interpreted by the +courts. Wendy Seltzer was worried that the CC licenses might become entangled +with court cases involving the fair use doctrine. She wanted to make sure that +the CC licenses were not seen as limiting or waiving a person’s fair use rights +in any way. Her concern, shared by many others, resulted in an explicit +disclaimer stating that intention. “I’m really glad that we did that,” recalled +Glenn Brown, then the assistant director of CC, “because we ended up pointing +to that over and over and over again — to make clear that this was something +that went above and beyond fair use.”~{ Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, June +9, 2007. }~ +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + fair use, and ; + Seltzer, Wendy ; + fair use doctrine : + CC licenses, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + fair use, and +} + +To ensure that the licenses would be enforceable, the CC lawyers built on the +same legal base as the GPL; the licenses were crafted not as contracts, but as +conditional permissions based on copyright law. A contract requires that the +licensee have the opportunity to accept or reject the terms of an agreement, +which would not be the case here. A conditional permission, by contrast, is the +legal prerogative of a copyright holder. She is simply offering advance +permission to use a CC-licensed work (to share, modify, distribute, etc.) so +long as the specified terms are respected. +={ General Public License (GPL) : + legal enforceability of ; + copyright law : + conditional permission license | enforceability of | CC licenses, and +21 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + copyright law, and +21 | version 1.0 of +21 | enforceability of +} + +Countless lawyerly refinements of a very technical nature were made to the +licenses to ensure that they would be specific as needed, vague enough to be +versatile, and rigorous enough to survive a court’s scrutiny.~{ The lawyers +also wrestled with a host of imponderables that had no obvious answers, such +as: What if people started spoofing the licenses by using them in inappropriate +ways? Should the Creative Commons establish a central registry for CC-licensed +works as a way to ensure the credibility of the project? (After long debate, +the idea was ultimately rejected.) Would the Creative Commons be held liable +for contributory negligence if someone used a CC license on a copyrighted song? +(The CC took its chances.) Would the Creative Commons lose its trademark if it +allowed anyone to use its trademarked logo? (Several lawyers warned that CC +licensing of its trademark could not be properly policed.) Glenn Otis Brown +worried that the board might be sued for facilitating the unauthorized practice +of law. “I don’t know how long I spent calling up different insurance brokers +trying to get a quote,” he recalled. “People had no idea what I was talking +about. We ended up going all the way to Lloyd’s of London to ask them,” said +Brown, laughing. “They wrote back and said, ‘You can’t insure that.’ ” }~ + +The first set of licenses, version 1.0, was completed in the spring of 2002 and +included eleven choices. The six basic licenses, listed here in order of least +restrictive to most restrictive, included: +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + types of +12 +} + +!_ Attribution (BY). +Authorizes free reuses (download, distribution, modifications, commercial uses, +etc.) so long as the author is credited for the original creation. + +!_ ShareAlike (SA). +Authorizes free reuses so long as credit is given and the new work is licensed +under the same terms. + +!_ No Derivatives (ND). +Authorizes free reuses so long as the new work is unchanged and in whole. + +!_ NonCommercial (NC). +Authorizes free reuses so long as they are not commercial in nature. + +!_ NonCommercial ShareAlike (NC-SA). +Requires free reuses so long as the new work is passed along on the identical +terms as the original work (so, for example, works that use a NonCommercial +ShareAlike work will also have to be distributed as NonCommercial ShareAlike +works). + +!_ NonCommercial No Derivatives (NC-ND). +Authorizes free reuses so long as credit is given, no changes are made, the +work is kept intact, and it is not used commercially. This is the most +restrictive CC license. + +Because each of these six basic choices can be combined with other CC licenses, +copyright holders had five additional choices: + +!_ Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA). +Authorizes free reuses so long as the author is credited and the new work is +licensed under the same terms. + +!_ Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC). +Authorizes free reuses so long as the author is credited and the new work is +used for noncommercial purposes. + +!_ Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NCSA). +Authorizes free reuses so long as the author is credited, the new work is used +for noncommercial purposes, and the new work is passed along using this same +license. + +!_ Attribution-No Derivatives (BY-ND). +Authorizes free reuses so long as the author is credited and the new work is +unchanged and in whole. + +!_ Attribution No Derivatives-ShareAlike (BY-ND-SA). +Authorizes free reuses so long as the author is credited, the new work is +unchanged and in whole, and the new work is passed along using this same +license. + +It soon became clear that very few people were choosing any of the five +licenses that did not require attribution of the author (the SA, ND, NC, NC-SA, +and NC-ND licenses). So in May 2004 Creative Commons decided to “retire” those +licenses, leaving the six most commonly used ones today (BY, BY-SA, BY-NC, +BY-NC-SA, BY-ND, and BY-ND-SA). + +Still another choice was offered to copyright holders, a “public domain +dedication,” which is not a license so much as “an overt act of relinquishment +in perpetuity” of any rights in the work. The public domain dedication places +no restrictions whatsoever on subsequent reuses of the work. +={ public domain dedication } + +To the first-time user, the licenses may seem a little daunting.~{ A FAQ at the +Creative Commons Web site answers the most frequent user questions about the +licenses. It is available at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/. }~ The full +implications of using one or another license are not immediately obvious. The +tagline for the licenses, “Some Rights Reserved,” while catchy, was not really +self-explanatory. This became the next big challenge to Creative Commons, as we +see in chapter 6: how to educate creators about a solution when they may not +have realized they even had a problem. + +By December 2002, the three levels of code — legal, digital, and human — had +been coordinated and finalized as version 1.0. The organization was set to go +public, which it did at a splashy coming-out party in San Francisco. The gala +featured appearances by the likes of rapper DJ Spooky (an ardent advocate for +remix culture) and a London multimedia jam group, People Like Us. Lessig +proudly introduced the licenses as “delivering on our vision of promoting the +innovative reuse of all types of intellectual works, unlocking the potential of +sharing and transforming others’ work.”~{ +http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/3476. }~ +={ DJ Spooky ; + People Like Us ; + code : + levels of ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +2 +} + +Perhaps the biggest surprise was a set of video testimonials from both ends of +the copyright spectrum — John Perry Barlow of Electronic Frontier Foundation +and Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America. With +uncharacteristic solemnity, Barlow said: “I personally think there is something +deeply oxymoronic about the term ‘intellectual property.’ But as long as we +have set up a huge matrix of laws and social understandings that traffic in +that assumption, we have to meet the conditions as we have found them and use +what exists to preserve the human patrimony.” The silvermaned Valenti saluted +the “Lessig compact” that is both “respectful of, and supports, copyright” +while allowing people “to give up some of their copyrighted material, or all of +it, and put it on the creative commons for others to view it or hear it.” +“Larry, I hope that my supporting you in this doesn’t ruin your reputation,” +Valenti joked.~{ See http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/cc-barlow-valenti.mov. +}~ +={ Barlow, John Perry ; + Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ; + Valenti, Jack +1 +} + +Many copyfighters were not thrilled to have an arch-adversary like Valenti +praise their efforts at their moment of triumph. Yet that was a deliberate part +of Lessig’s strategy: to assert a politically neutral middle ground from which +to remake the social landscape of creativity. The question raised in some +people’s mind was whether something so politically unassailable could have +significant impact. Still others saw it as a welcome base upon which to build a +new sharing economy. + +The CC launch party can be seen as a watershed moment in the struggle to +protect the public domain. It announced a novel gambit to transcend the +political impasse over copyright reform, a way to address copyright abuses +without getting embroiled in a pitched and unwinnable confrontation. It +legitimized all sorts of activities that had historically been seen as morally +problematic, if not illegal. While building on the idea of the public domain +developed over the preceding twenty years, Creative Commons inaugurated a new +story about the commons, creativity, and the value of sharing. Watching the +rocking party and savoring the hard work completed, Glenn Brown remembers a +friend musing to him, “I wonder if we’ll see another legal hack like this in +our careers.” +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + launch of | public domain, and ; + public domain : + CC licenses, and +} + +1~ 5 NAVIGATING THE GREAT VALUE SHIFT + +/{Amateurs discover new tools for creating value: open networks and +self-organized commons.}/ + +“It was never really clear to me what was going to happen after we launched the +licenses,” recalled Glenn Otis Brown. “Would our work be done?” The intense +push to craft the licenses and release them now over, Brown and his colleagues +were only too happy to ease up in their work. (Van Houweling had left in 2002 +to teach law; she is now at the University of California at Berkeley.) Despite +his enthusiasm for the licenses, Brown had his private doubts about their +future success. “To be honest, I was pretty scared,” he said. “I was worried +they were going to go nowhere, and that I was going to be blamed for that.”~{ +Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, August 10, 2006. }~ +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC licensing, and +1 ; + Van Houweling, Molly Shaffer ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + evolution of +10 +} + +In January 2003, a month after the CC licenses were announced, however, the +project took on a new urgency. The Supreme Court handed down its /{Eldred}/ +ruling, sending a clear signal that the courts were not much interested in +reforming copyright law. Soon after this crushing disappointment, Lessig began +to intensify his focus on the Creative Commons. “The pressure really +increased,” said Brown, “but that’s also when things started to get a lot more +fun. That’s when the staff started working on things /{all the time}/ and we +got a stable, permanent staff, instead of contractors.” +={ Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + Copyright’s Commons, and | Supreme Court, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +9 +} + +What began as a modest licensing experiment began to take on the character of a +permanent campaign. Working from the themes in /{The Future of Ideas}/, Lessig +came to see the Creative Commons as more than a nonprofit custodian of some +free public licenses; it was a champion for a bracing new vision of culture. +This broader orientation meant reaching out to various creative sectors and the +general public with messages that were both practical (“here’s how to use the +licenses”) and idealistic (“you, too, can build a better world”). +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + The Future of Ideas ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + function of +5 | social movement, as +5 +} + +The band of enterprising law scholars and techies who once saw their challenge +as one of bolstering the public domain began to widen their gaze to the vast +world of creativity and democratic culture. Social practice, not theory, became +the animating force in their work. + +This meant reaching out to writers, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, +librarians, academics, and other creators. All faced worrisome threats to their +freedoms in the digital environment, as we saw in chapter 2. Lessig and the +small Creative Commons staff made it their job to speak to these threats, +promote the licenses, and set forth an alternative to the corporate media’s +vision of culture. + +“Our single, overarching aim,” said Lessig in December 2002, “is to build the +public domain, by building projects that expand the range of creative work +available for others to build upon.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons press +release, December 19, 2002; “CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on How It All Began” +[weekly e-mail series], October 12, 2005. }~ In an attempt to credential the +licenses, the Creative Commons touted endorsements by a number of educational +institutions (MIT, Rice University, Stanford Law School), public-spirited tech +enterprises (iBiblio, the Internet Archive, O’Reilly & Associates), and +venturesome musicians (DJ Spooky, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds). +={ DJ Spooky ; + McGuinn, Roger ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + public domain, and ; + public domain : + CC licenses, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + public domain, and +} + +As if by spontaneous replication, people from far-flung corners of the Internet +began to use the licenses on their blogs, their MP3 music files, their +photographs, their books. Week after week, the Creative Commons’s blog +trumpeted the new recruits — the blog for book designers (Foreword), the +database of metadata about music (MusicBrainz), the online storytelling Web +site (Fray), the 2004 presidential campaign of Dennis Kucinich. +={ Kucinich, Dennis } + +But the larger challenge for Creative Commons was finding ways to reach new +constituencies who knew little about technology or copyright law. Why should +they bother to use a CC license? This was a major public education challenge. +Besides appearing at many conferences and cultivating press coverage, Glenn +Brown spent a lot of time developing a Web site that could explain the licenses +clearly. Great pains were taken to develop a precise, intuitive user interface +to help people learn about the licenses and choose the right one for them. +Copyright law was complicated enough; the CC licenses had to be seen as a +simple alternative. +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC licensing, and +1 ; + copyright law : + licenses, and +3 +} + +Advertisers have plenty of trouble communicating the virtues of mouthwash in a +crowded public sphere. Could something as dry and forbidding as copyright law +ever be made lucid and even hip? Although not a trained marketer, Glenn Brown +had a knack for communicating things simply.Working with graphic designer Ryan +Junell and Web designer Matt Haughey, Brown developed a site that combined a +certain institutional authority with contemporary pizzazz. This style was on +abundant display in a series of jaunty and entertaining Flash animations that +explained the rationale for Creative Commons. +={ Haughey, Matt ; + Junell, Ryan +1 +} + +Junell designed the now-familiar CC logo as a deliberate counterpoint to the +copyright logo, ©. “I thought that Creative Commons should have something like +the copyright logo since it deals with the same stuff,” said Junell. “It should +be something really simple and pure.”~{ Interview with Ryan Junell, September +23, 2006. }~ Junell set his sights on making the CC logo a standard, ubiquitous +symbol. He hoped that it would eventually be incorporated into the Unicode, an +international registry for every character in any language used in software, +from % to ∆ to ≠. +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + logo of ; + Unicode +} + +In promoting its licenses, Creative Commons fashioned itself as a neutral, +respectable defender of individual choice. “Our tools are just that — tools,” +said Haughey, who was then developing the CC Web site. “Our model intentionally +depends on copyright holders to take responsibility for how they use those +tools. Or how they don’t use them: If you’re unsure and want to keep your full +copyright, fine. If you choose to allow others to re-use your work, great.”~{ +Matthew Haughey, “Blogging in the Public Domain,” Creative Commons blog post, +February 5, 2003, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3601. }~ While +many CC users were enthusiastically bashing copyright law, Lessig and the CC +staff made it a point to defend the basic principles of copyright law — while +extolling the value of collaborative creativity and sharing under CC licenses. +={ Haughey, Matt } + +Despite praise by the heads of the Motion Picture Association of America and +the Recording Industry Association of America, the licenses nonetheless did +attract critics. Some in the music industry regarded the licenses as a Trojan +horse that would dupe unsuspecting artists. David Israelite, president and CEO +of the National Music Publishers’ Association, told /{Billboard}/, “My concern +is that many who support Creative Commons also support a point of view that +would take away people’s choices about what to do with their own property.”~{ +Susan Butler, “Movement to Share Creative Works Raises Concerns in Music +Circles,” /{Billboard}/, May 28, 2005.}~ /{Billboard}/ went on to cite the +cautionary tale of a songwriter who was being kept alive by his AIDS +medications, thanks to the royalties from a highly successful song. “No one +should let artists give up their rights,” said Andy Fraser of the rock group +Free. Other critics, such as John Dvorak of /{PC Magazine}/, called the CC +licenses “humbug” and accused them of adding “some artificial paperwork and +complexity to the mechanism [of copyright],” while weakening the rights that an +author would otherwise enjoy.~{ John C. Dvorak, “Creative Commons Humbug: This +Scheme Doesn’t Seem to Benefit the Public,” PC Magazine, July 28, 2005. }~ +Still others had cultural scores to settle and criticized “anything advocated +by clever, sleek young lawyers.”~{ Researchers at the Economic Observatory of +the University of Openness, “Commercial Commons,” on the online journal +/{Metamute}/, at http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/Commercial-Commons. }~ +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + critics of ; + sraelite, David ; + Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) ; + Dvorak, John ; + Fraser, Andy +} + +Putting aside such quibbles and prejudices, the CC licenses seemed a benign +enough idea. Given its reliance on copyright law, how could any entertainment +lawyer object? Yet the real significance of the licenses was only appreciated +by those who realized that a Great Value Shift was kicking in. For them, the +licenses were a useful legal tool and cultural flag for building a new sharing +economy. +={ Great Value Shift } + +2~ The Great Value Shift +={ Great Value Shift +9 ; + Inernet : + Great Value Shift, and +9 +} + +In retrospect, the CC licenses could not have been launched at a more +propitious moment. Networked culture was exploding in 2003. Broadband was +rapidly supplanting dial-up Internet access, enabling users to navigate the Web +and share information at much faster speeds. Prices for personal computers were +dropping even as computing speeds and memory capacity were soaring. +Sophisticated new software applications were enabling users to collaborate in +more powerful, user-friendly ways. The infrastructure for sharing was reaching +a flashpoint. + +Put another way, the original promise of the Internet as a gift economy was +coming into its own. Originally built as a platform for efficient sharing among +academic researchers, the Internet by 2003 was being used by some 600 million +people worldwide.~{ Nielsen/Net Ratings estimated 585 million Internet users in +2002; the International Telecommunications Union estimated 665 million. See +http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/proiects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm. +}~ The open framework for sharing was no longer just a plaything of +technophiles and academics; it was now insinuated into most significant corners +of the economy and social life. As it scaled and grew new muscles and limbs, +the Internet began to radically change the ways in which wealth is generated +and allocated. +={ Internet : + gift economy of +1 +} + +I call this the Great Value Shift — a deep structural change in how valuable +things are created for commerce and culture. The shift is not only a +fundamental shift in business strategy and organizational behavior, but in the +very definition of wealth. On the Internet, wealth is not just financial +wealth, nor is it necessarily privately held. Wealth generated through open +platforms is often /{socially created value}/ that is shared, evolving, and +nonmonetized. It hovers in the air, so to speak, accessible to everyone. +={ Internet : + socially created value of +1 ; + value : + creation of +} + +Creative Commons had the good fortune to introduce its licenses just as the +Great Value Shift was picking up momentum. The types of distributed innovation +first seen in free software were now popping up in every imaginable corner of +cyberspace. The social content was not just about listservs and newsgroups, but +instant messaging networks, Web logs, podcasts, wikis, social networking sites, +collaborative archives, online gaming communities, and much else. +={ free software : + Great Value Shift, and +} + +“What we are seeing now,” wrote Yochai Benkler in his book, /{The Wealth of +Networks}/, “is the emergence of more effective collective action practices +that are decentralized but do not rely on either the price system or a +managerial structure for coordination.” Benkler’s preferred term is +“commons-based peer production.” By that, he means systems that are +collaborative and non-proprietary, and based on “sharing resources and outputs +among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each +other.”~{ Yochai Benkler, /{The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production +Transforms Markets and Freedom}/ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), +p. 60. }~ +={ Benkler, Yochai : + The Wealth of Networks +1 ; + commoners : + sharing by ; + commons-based peer production +} + +Informal social relationships, working in the unregimented, free space of open +platforms, were beginning to change economic production and culture. “Behaviors +that were once on the periphery— social motivations, cooperation, friendship, +decency — move to the very core of economic life,” Benkler argued.~{ Benkler at +the iCommons Summit, Dubrovnik, Croatia, June 15, 2007. }~ Money and markets do +not necessarily control the circulation of creativity; increasingly, online +communities — large numbers of people interacting with one another on open +platforms — are the engines that create value. + +The CC licenses were launched at a moment when the new modes of value creation +were just gaining a foothold. + +We do not yet have well-accepted theoretical models for understanding this new +“socioeconomic space”; the online environments are still so new, and much is +still in flux.~{ An excellent overview of these new spaces is Don Tapscott and +Anthony D. Williams, /{Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything}/ +(New York: Portfolio, 2006). }~ But it has not escaped the notice of major +corporations that online social dynamics can result in some radically more +effective models for organizing employees and engaging with customers. A +/{BusinessWeek}/ cover story touted “The Power of Us” in June 2005, profiling +the ways in which companies like Procter & Gamble use mass collaboration for +R&D; Hewlett-Packard had created a virtual stock market among its staff to +gather collective estimates that have improved sales forecasts.~{ Robert D. +Hof, “The Power of Us: Mass Collaboration on the Internet Is Shaking Up +Business,” /{BusinessWeek}/, June 20, 2005, pp. 73–82. }~ The /{Economist}/ has +written about the “fortune of the commons” that can result when there are open +technical standards, and business professors such as Henry Chesbrough have +examined new “open business models.”~{ “The Fortune of the Commons,” Economist, +May 8, 2003; Henry Chesbrough, /{Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New +Innovation Landscape}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2006). }~ +={ Chesbrough, Henry ; + Hewlett-Packard ; + Procter & Gamble +} + +Before looking at the many creative sectors that have adopted the CC licenses — +the focus of chapter 6 — it helps to understand the Great Value Shift that open +networks have catalyzed. In one market after another, open networks have helped +new competitors slash all sorts of business costs while enhancing their +capacity to innovate and respond to changing consumer demand. Open networks +have also given rise to new types of social platforms on the Web, often known +as Web 2.0, which are making it economically attractive to serve niche markets. +This is the so-called Long Tail. Yet even these sweeping changes in market +structure are facing a qualitatively different kind of competition — from the +commons sector. It turns out that informal online communities based on trust, +reciprocity, and shared social norms can perform a great many tasks more +efficiently than markets, and with some measure of social pleasure and fun. +={ Long Tail ; + Web 2.0 : + Great Value Shift, and +} + +2~ The Endangered Economics of Centralized Media +={ Centralized Media +7 ; + media : + See also Centralized Media +} + +The dominant systems of communications in the twentieth century — radio, +broadcast and cable television, recorded music, theatrical film — required +large amounts of centralized capital, corporate management, and professional +control. These media have very different business models and practices, but +they all rely upon centralized control of capital and distribution to large, +fairly undifferentiated audiences. Each depends upon efficiencies derived from +high-volume sales and a limited spectrum of commercial choices. + +Centralized Media also dictate certain economic and social identities for +people. There are “sellers,” who are the prime source of expertise, innovation, +and production, and there are “consumers,” who passively buy, or don’t buy, +what is offered. Sellers mostly determine what choices are offered to buyers, +and they tend to have greater market power and information than consumers. +Interactions between sellers and consumers are mostly brief and transactional; +there is little ongoing conversation or relationship between seller and buyer. + +Much of the strength of the Centralized Media derives from its control of +critical “choke points” of product development and distribution. By controlling +the technical standards for a product, its retail distribution or its brand +identity, a company can maximize its competitive advantages and limit +competition. The high concentration of capital needed to communicate through a +Centralized Media outlet is itself a useful way to limit competition. No +surprise that only large, publicly traded corporations and rich individuals own +and control Centralized Media — and that their messages tend to be overtly +commercial or commercial-friendly. +={ Centralized Media : + choke points of | competition, and +4 +} + +While this paradigm is obviously quite attractive for those investors with a +piece of the action, it also entails some very large costs that are not readily +evident. Companies have to spend a lot on advertising to build a brand identity +that can enhance sales. Their “blockbuster” business model entails large +upfront costs in order to reap large financial returns. Centralized Media +require expensive systems for finding, recruiting, and developing stars; an +elaborate marketing apparatus to find and retain customers; and legal and +technological means to identify and prosecute “piracy” of creative works. +={ Centralized Media : + piracy, and ; + piracy +} + +In a more static environment, this model worked fairly well. But as the +Internet revolution proceeded in the 2000s, distributed media started to +undercut the economic logic of Centralized Media. Your personal computer, +connected to other computers via inexpensive telecommunications and software, +can do things more cheaply. Distributed online media not only avoid the costly +overhead needed by Centralized Media, they can generate dynamic, interactive, +and sociable types of communication: /{user-generated content!}/ While this +amateur content is wildly variable in quality, it does have this virtue: it is +more culturally diverse and authentic than the homogenous, overproduced +programming of Centralized Media. And because distributed media are not +economically driven to amass large, undifferentiated audiences, the content can +be more idiosyncratic, passionate, and, in its own ways, creative. There is no +“fifty-seven channels and nothing on” problem. The problem is how to locate +what you want from among millions of choices. +={ Centralized Media : + Internet vs. ; + Internet : + Centralized Media vs. +} + +For all these reasons — but mostly because of the economics— conventional media +are becoming more vulnerable to the most advanced Internet-based competitors +(Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo) as well as to new types of nonmarket social +production (e.g., Craigslist, Wikipedia, special-interest affinity groups). We +may even be approaching a point at which the historic cost structures and risk +management strategies of major media companies are no longer sustainable. Some +analysts fret about the long-term viability of American newspapers, whose stock +value fell by 42 percent, or $23 billion, between 2005 and 2008. Broadcast and +cable television have similar fears. They worry, correctly, that Internet +venues are siphoning away “eyeballs” by providing more timely and convenient +alternatives. While the amateur videos of YouTube may not have the production +quality of NBC, broadcast and cable television cannot ignore an upstart +platform that in 2006 was attracting more than 100 million video downloads +/{per day}/ and had a market valuation of $1.65 billion when bought by Google +that year. No wonder Cable News Network co-hosted a presidential debate with +YouTube in 2007; it needed to reassert its cultural relevance. +={ Amazon ; + eBay ; + Google ; + Yahoo ; + Craigslist ; + Wikipedia ; + YouTube +} + +Large media companies are struggling to support some huge financial, +administrative, and marketing burdens simply to “tread water” and retain some +measure of their customary market dominance. This helps explain why Centralized +Media are so keenly focused on influencing Congress and the Federal +Communications Commission. They want to lock in competitive advantages through +regulation. (Consider the fierce battles over media ownership rules, spectrum +allocation policies, anticopying technology mandates such as the “broadcast +flag,” new copyright and trademark protections, must-carry rules for cable +operators, and on and on.) Centralized Media’s great interest in securing legal +and regulatory privileges for themselves suggests their relative weakness and +decline. For them, it is easier to chase market advantages through political +interventions than through innovation, superior performance, and price. +={ Centralized Media : + ownership rules for ; + media : + ownership of +3 +} + +2~ The Economic Advantages of Open Media +={ Centralized Media : + Internet vs. +7 ; + Internet : + Centralized Media vs. +7 ; + media : + open +7 +} + +By contrast, a profusion of new ventures are finding that a company can thrive +on the open networks of the Internet. Even a startup without brand recognition +or regulatory preferences can compete on the merits — price, quality, +responsiveness — against entrenched giants. They can leverage user-generated +content and the vast reservoir of value previously known as the public domain. +The success of thousands of new Internet businesses reflects an epochal shift +in the terms of competition — a Great Shift in how value is created. +={ Great Value Shift } + +The most significant shifts in the history of capitalism have come when new +mechanisms lower the costs of managing risk and serving latent market demand. +We are apparently in such a stage of economic transformation today. The genius +of the Renaissance banks and the Dutch insurance and shipping companies, for +example, was to reinvent the structure of markets through new financial and +legal instruments that enabled commercial trust and transparency to work on a +larger scale. The limited liability corporation was also a powerful innovation +for diversifying risk, coordinating people, and deploying capital on a scale +that was previously impossible.~{ I am indebted to my friend John Clippinger +for this insight, as explained in his book /{A Crowd of One: The Future of +Individual Identity}/ (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), chapter 7, +“Transforming Trust: Social Commerce in Renaissance Florence,” pp. 97–114. }~ +={ markets : + restructuring +1 +} + +In like fashion, the Internet is now facilitating some deep shifts in the cost +structures and scale of markets. Innovative online business models are +significantly undercutting the (expensive) cost structures of traditional +Centralized Media, and in the process sometimes creating entirely new sorts of +markets (search engine advertising, discounted travel, specialty niches) and +more open, competitive markets. +={ Internet : + socially created value of +3 +} + +One of the most intriguing developments is a set of “open business models” that +shun closed, proprietary technical standards and content restrictions. Unlike +the classic industrial business models of the twentieth century, the new open +business models make money by aggressively insinuating themselves into open +networks. They are able to identify new trends, mobilize talent, interact with +customers, and develop customized products more rapidly than competitors. They +are also building ingenious new business models “on top of ” social behaviors +of online users. (See chapter 10.) +={ open business models } + +MySpace, for example, hosts a social network of more than 100 million “friends” +(a claim that, even if inflated by inactive user accounts, is indisputably +huge). eBay consolidated the world’s garage sales and flea markets into a more +efficient market by developing Web-based software that “manages” social trust +and reputation and evolves with user interests. Amazon has become a premier +online retail Web site by hosting a platform open to all sorts of online +vendors and spurred by the recommendations and collective purchase records of +buyers. Google devised its famous PageRank search algorithms to aggregate the +Web-surfing “wisdom of the crowd,” making online searches vastly more useful. +={ Amazon : + eBay ; + Google ; + MySpace +} + +The basic point is that open media platforms are significantly reducing +business coordination and communication costs by leveraging people’s natural +social behaviors in ways that conventional businesses simply cannot. Open Web +platforms allow large and diverse groups to organize themselves and their +projects more easily. Individuals have greater self-defined choice and the +capacity to express their own market demand; they need not be constrained by +the choices presented to them in the market. The Internet has opened up gushing +channels of virtual word of mouth, which is a more trusted form of consumer +information than advertising. Those companies with excellent products use +favorable word of mouth to reduce their marketing and distribution costs. +“Smart mobs” can elevate obscure bloggers and Web sites because they regard +them as more trustworthy, expert, and authentic (or entertaining) than those of +Centralized Media. Many conservatives now trust the Drudge Report and Free +Republic more than CBS News, just as many liberals trust DailyKos and +Huffington Post more than CBS News. Indeed, the very genre of “objective +journalism” — an artifact of the economic necessity of appealing to broad, +lowest-commondenominator audiences — is now in jeopardy. +={ Internet : + virtual word of mouth on ; + media : + participatory ; + Centralized Media : + competition, and +3 ; + markets : + restructuring +1 +} + +As people migrate to the Web, advertising revenues for Centralized Media are +eroding further, setting off a scramble to devise new advertising vehicles to +reach fugitive Internet users. It is a chase that cannot be avoided because +that’s where the eyeballs are. Moreover, the value proposition of open networks +is too attractive to ignore. But because that value proposition is so radically +different from conventional media — a company must revamp its organizational +structures, strategies, marketing, etc. —it raises some wrenching choices for +Centralized Media: Should they “go native” and let their products loose on open +networks? Or would that destroy their entrenched business models for television +shows, theatrical films, music CDs, and other content? The vast infrastructure +and business practices of Centralized Media cannot be summarily abandoned, but +neither can they remain economically tenable over the long haul without +significant changes. For now, Centralized Media are attempting an ungainly +straddle of both worlds. +={ Centralized Media : + alternatives vs. +} + +2~ Web 2.0: A New Breed of Participatory Media +={ media : + participatory +17 ; + Centralized Media : + alternatives vs. +17 ; + Web 2.0 : + applications +17 +} + +At the time, Eric Eldred’s Web repository of public-domain books could be seen +as a modest little experiment. In retrospect, it can be seen as a dawning +cultural archetype. It betokened the power of the amateur.~{ Dan Hunter and F. +Gregory Lastowka, “Amateur-to-Amateur,” /{William and Mary Law Review}/ 46, no. +951 (December 2004). }~ While Centralized Media continue to have greater +resources, talent, and political clout, amateurs are finding their voices and +new online venues. A significant cultural emancipation is under way. Creative +expression need no longer cater to corporate gatekeepers and the imperatives of +the mass market. A no-name amateur can produce useful and influential work +without having to go through New York, Los Angeles, London, or Tokyo. The +do-ityourself culture is flourishing and expanding. With little money or +marketing, anyone can launch a viral spiral that, with enough luck and panache, +can sweep across global culture. +={ Eldritch Press } + +It is only now dawning on some media chieftains that the biggest threat to +Centralized Media is not piracy or online competitors, but /{nonmarket +alternatives}/: you, me, and the online friends that we can attract. Hollywood +and record labels might rail against “pirates” and demand stronger copyright +protection, but the real longterm threat to their business models is the +migration of consumer attention to amateur creativity and social communication. +Social production on open networks has become a powerful creative and economic +force in its own right. Ordinary people can now find their own voices and +develop folk cultures of their own that may or may not use the market. +={ piracy ; + Centralized Media : + piracy, and +} + +After the tech bubble of 2000–2001 burst, the surviving techies and +entrepreneurs developed a remarkable range of cheap, versatile software that +took to heart the lessons of free software and open networks. Blogs, wikis, +social networking software, peer-to-peer file-sharing and metadata tools began +to migrate from the tech fringe to the mainstream. There have been many +conceptual frames and buzzwords associated with this new order — “smart mobs” +(Howard Rheingold), “the wisdom of crowds” (James Surowiecki), “wikinomics” +(Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams) — but the catchphrase that has gained +the most currency is “Web 2.0,” a term launched by Tim O’Reilly in a canonical +2003 essay.~{ Tim O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business +Models for the Next Generation of Software,” O’Reilly Media Web site, September +30, 2005, at +http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-isweb-20.html. }~ +={ O’Reilly, Tim ; + Rheingold, Howard ; + Surowiecki, James ; + Tapscott, Don ; + Williams, Anthony D. ; + free software : + economic effects of ; + open source software : + economic implications of +} + +O’Reilly, a prominent publisher of books on open-source software, coined Web +2.0 to describe the fluid social dynamics that occur on open Web platforms — +wikis, blogs, social networking Web sites, and other open, collaborative +platforms — where people have the freedom to share and reuse work. Web 2.0 +amounts to a worldview that celebrates open participation as a way to create +valuable collective resources. It regards open technical protocols and content +as the basis for this process (whether managed as a commons or a business), and +dismisses closed, proprietary regimes as both socially and economically +questionable. In essence, Web 2.0 honors socially created value as the basis +for value creation, which market players may or may not be able to exploit. +={ Web 2.0 : + coining of term +} + +Blogging is more of a social medium than is generally supposed, for example. It +is not just the outburst of some ranter in his pajamas, as the stereotype has +it, but a social medium that connects people in new ways. Most blogs have a +blogroll — a list of admired blogs— which enables the readers of one blog to +identify other bloggers engaged in similar conversations. Permalinks — stable +Web addresses for blog content — enable people to make reliable Web citations +of content, which means that people can coalesce around a shared body of work. +And RSS feeds— “Really Simple Syndication” — allow people to “subscribe” to +individual blogs and Web sites, enabling them to keep abreast of a sprawling +set of communities. +={ blogging +1 ; + permalinks ; + RSS feeds +} + +The rise of blog-tracking companies like Technorati and Alexa has also helped +blogging become a durable social genre. These companies inventory and rank +blogs, and help people discover blogs for virtually any subject of interest — +cocktail mixing, high-energy physics, needlework design. By 2007, there were an +estimated 100 million blogs in existence (although many were inactive or +abandoned), making the blogosphere a powerful cultural force in its own right. +There was also a flood of online “news aggregators” — Web sites that +cherry-pick their own mix of pieces from the wire services, newspapers, Web +sites, blogs, and other online sources. With huge audiences, news aggregators +like the Drudge Report (1.6 million unique monthly visitors) and the Huffington +Post (773,000 visitors) have begun to rival major daily newspapers in reach and +influence. + +Another seminal social innovation has been Wikipedia, a strange and wondrous +cultural eruption. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in January 2001, the +English-language Wikipedia began to gain serious momentum in the months after +the CC licenses were released, and by early 2003 hosted 100,000 articles. (A +“wiki” is a special type of Web site that allows anyone who accesses it to add +or modify its contents.) After two years, Wikipedia had amassed a collection of +400,000 articles and inspired the launch of affiliated Wikipedias in more than +100 languages. In May 2008, +={ Sanger, Larry ; + Wales, Jimmy ; + Wikipedia : + social movement, as +2 +} + +Wikipedia featured 10.2 million articles in 255 languages; 2.3 million of the +articles were in English. By harnessing the energies of tens of thousands of +volunteers to write an infinitely expandable “encyclopedia,” Wikipedia has +become the leading symbol for a radically new way of compiling and editing +knowledge.~{ Wikipedia statistics from +http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About. }~ Remarkably, the Wikimedia +Foundation, the umbrella organization that funds Wikipedia and many sister +projects, had fewer than twenty paid employees in 2008 and a budget of less +than $2 million. + +Wikipedia has also spun off affiliated multilingual, free-content wikis on +various subjects. Wikispecies is compiling an inventory of the world’s species, +Wikiquote is collecting thousands of memorable quotations, the Wikimedia +Commons is providing freely usable media files, and Wikibooks is assembling +open-content textbooks. Wiki software has been adopted by dozens of different +online communities, giving rise to scores of collaborative Web sites such as +Conservapedia (for American political conservatives), Intellipedia (for U.S. +intelligence agencies), Wookieepedia (for Star Wars fans), Wikitravel (for +travelers), and OpenWetWare (for biological researchers). + +In the months following the launch of the CC licenses, peer-topeer (P2P) file +sharing was also expanding rapidly. Long associated with illicit sharing of +copyrighted music, P2P software in fact has many entirely legitimate uses in +science, education, and diverse creative sectors. One of the key attractions of +P2P software is its efficiency. It does not need to route information through +centralized servers; information can be rapidly shared by routing digital files +directly to participants, computer to computer, or by passing it through key +nodes in an on-the-fly manner. Even after the courts shut down Napster in 2002, +a variety of other P2P software applications — Grokster, Lime Wire, KaZaA, +Gnutella, BitTorrent — continued to facilitate online sharing and +collaboration. Some thirty-five companies, including Hollywood studios, are +sufficiently impressed with the efficiencies of P2P that they have licensed +BitTorrent technology to distribute their video content. +={ Napster ; + software : + P2P +} + +Peer-to-peer file sharing has also unleashed radically new types of knowledge +creation: volunteers who join the NASA Clickworkers project to count and +classify craters on Mars, “citizen scientists” who help compile an interactive +database of butterfly and bird sightings, or geneticists from around the world +who submit data to the Human Genome Project and share access to the database. + +Although the tech world and some Internet users had known about various +networking tools for years, the general public was largely in the dark until +the presidential campaign of Vermont governor Howard Dean in 2002 and 2003. At +the time, Dean was considered a long-shot antiwar candidate with little base +and little money. Within a few short months, however, thanks to Dean’s +outspoken style and his campaign’s skillful use of the Internet, he became the +front-runner in a field of twelve candidates. Dean did not use the Internet as +a simple publishing tool, but as a way to stimulate decentralized collaboration +and thereby organize a diverse community of supporters. The campaign was not +just about Dean, but about the participation of 640,000 volunteers who +virtually organized themselves through various online tools. The campaign +became a dynamic conversation between the candidate and voters — and generated +a gusher of more than $50 million, most of it donations of a hundred dollars or +less. So much was raised that Dean famously asked his supporters whether he +should forgo federal matching funds, and instead raise more money from them. +They agreed. The campaign ultimately imploded, of course, after his famous +“Dean’s Scream” speech — itself a complex story — but what is notable is how +the Dean campaign vividly demonstrated the speed and power of viral networks. +={ Dean, Howard ; + Interenet : + political campaigns on +} + +By 2003 many ordinary people knew about the Napster controversy, the record +industry’s scorched-earth litigation tactics against consumers, and the Supreme +Court’s ruling in the /{Eldred}/ case. So people welcomed blogs, wikis, and +other Web 2.0 applications as tools to emancipate themselves culturally. In the +mass media era, people had few tools or sufficient money to speak to the +general public or organize their own communities of interest. But now, using a +lightweight infrastructure of software code and telecommunications, people +could build stable online communities that reflected their own values and +social practices. No permission or payment necessary. No expensive capital +investments. +={ Napster ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft ; + Internet : + socially created value of +4 ; + communities : + online +4 +} + +In many instances, amazingly, virtual communities are performing tasks that +existing markets are not performing as efficiently or with as much social trust +and goodwill. Craigslist, the free want-ad service that has significantly +undercut classified advertising in newspapers, is one of the more stellar +examples. In South Korea, OhmyNews.org uses thirty-six thousand +citizen-journalists to write up to two hundred online stories a day. The +publication is considered the sixth-most influential media outlet in Korea, +based on a national magazine poll. Countless specialty blogs are considered +more expert and timely sources of information and analysis than mainstream +newspapers and magazines. +={ OhmyNews.org ; + Craigslist ; + blogging +} + +Taken together, the new participatory media platforms constitute something new +under the sun — a globally accessible space that is both personal and public, +individual and social. The riot of unfiltered expression that has materialized +on the Internet is often dismissed as stupid, unreliable, and silly; or praised +as brilliant, stylish, and specialized; or simply accepted as idiosyncratic, +irregular, and local. It is all of these things, of course, and that is +precisely the point. +={ Internet : + mass participation in +1 +} + +If print culture honors the ethic of “edit, then publish,” the Internet inverts +it: /{anything}/ can be made public . . . and then it is up to users to become +their own editors. On the Internet, people do not “consume” content, they +become active writers, editors, and critics in their own right. They use search +engines, news aggregators, and favorite bloggers to identify what they want — +or they create their own content, as desired. They are /{participants}/, not +merely informed consumers who choose what some professional editor offers to +them. +={ blogging } + +The Web 2.0 environment was quite hospitable for the spread of the CC licenses. +It enabled people to signal their willingness to share and their enthusiasm for +cool niche fare as opposed to massaudience kitsch.Members of online communities +could confidently share their work on wikis and collaborative Web sites, +knowing that no one could appropriate their content and take it private. +Socially, the licenses let people announce their social identity to others and +build a countercultural ethos of sharing. The ethos became hipper and more +attractive with every new antipiracy measure that Centralized Media instigated. +={ Web 2.0 : + CC licenses, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + Web 2.0 environment, and +} + +% Creative Commons (CC) licenses not separated from Creative Commons (CC) in index, try fix above this point + +2~ Open Networks and the Long Tail +={ open networks +6 } + +While technology and economics have been driving forces in shaping the new +participatory platforms, much of their appeal has been frankly cultural. +Amateur content on the Net may be raw and irregular, but it also tends to be +more interesting and authentic than the highly produced, homogenized fare of +commercial media. Some of it vastly outshines the lowest common denominator of +mass media. Again, the cheap connectivity of the Internet has been key. It has +made it possible for people with incredibly specialized interests to find one +another and organize themselves into niche communities. For closeted +homosexuals in repressive countries or isolated fans of the actor Wallace +Beery, the Internet has enabled them to find one another and mutually feed +their narrow interests. You name it, there are sites for it: the fans of +obscure musicians, the collectors of beer cans, Iranian exiles, kite flyers. +Freed of the economic imperative of attracting huge audiences with broad fare, +niche-driven Internet content is able to connect with people’s personal +passions and interests: a powerful foundation not just for social communities, +but for durable markets. +={ Internet : + communication system, as +1 +} + +This, truly, is one of the more profound effects of networking technologies: +the subversion of the “blockbuster” economics of the mass media. It is becoming +harder and more expensive for film studios and broadcast networks to amass the +huge, cross-demographic audiences that they once could. In the networked +environment, it turns out that a diversified set of niche markets can be +eminently profitable with lower-volume sales. While Centralized Media require a +supply-side “push” of content, the Internet enables a demand-side “pull” of +content by users. This radically reduces transaction costs and enhances the +economic appeal of niche production. It is easier and cheaper for a company (or +single creator) to “pull” niche audiences through word of mouth than it is to +pay for expensive “push” advertising campaigns. Specialty interests and +products that once were dismissed as too marginal or idiosyncratic to be +profitable can now flourish in small but robust “pull markets.”~{ David +Bollier, “When Push Comes to Pull: The New Economy and Culture of Networking +Technology” (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 2006), at +http://www.aspeninstitute.org/atf/cf/%7BDEB6F227-659B-4EC8-8F84-8DF23CA704F5%7D/2005InfoTechText.pdf. +}~ +={ Centralized Media : + Internet vs. ; + Internet : + Centralized Media vs. +} + +The term associated with this phenomenon is the “Long Tail” — the title of a +much-cited article by Chris Anderson in the October 2004 issue of /{Wired}/ +magazine, later expanded into a book. Anderson explained the “grand transition” +now under way: +={ Anderson, Chris +2 ; + Long Tail +3 +} + +_1 For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowestcommon-denominator +fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? +Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts +of poor supply-and-demand matching — a market response to inefficient +distribution. . . . Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough +room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, +DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. +. . .~{ Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” /{Wired}/, October 2004, at +http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html. }~ + +The “Long Tail” refers to the huge potential markets that can be created for +low-volume niche books, CD, DVDs, and other products. More than half of +Amazon’s book sales, for example, come from books that rank below its top +130,000 titles. The implication is that “the market for books that are not even +sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are,” +writes Anderson. “In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big +as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity.” +={ Amazon } + +Unconstrained by the size and tastes of a local customer base or by limited +shelf space, online retailers such as Amazon, Netflix (DVDs), Rhapsody (music), +and iTunes (music) are showing that the Long Tail can be a very attractive +business model. These companies have developed new tools, such as collaborative +filtering software and user recommendations, to drive demand for lesser-known +titles at the far end of the Long Tail. This is just another instance of using +new technologies that leverage people’s natural social dynamics, and in so +doing inventing new types of markets. +={ Amazon } + + +2~ Another Vehicle for Niche Communities: The Commons +={ commons : + niche communities as +13 ; + communities : + commons, and +13 +} + +If the Long Tail is a market vehicle for amassing niche communities, the +commons is the social analogue. A commons does not revolve around money and +market exchange, but around collective participation and shared values. It does +not use property rights and contracts in order to generate value; it uses gift +exchange and moral commitments to build a community of trust and common +purpose. Such communities, it turns out, can generate significant “wealth” — as +Richard Stallman demonstrated with free software. +={ Stallman, Richard : + free software, and ; + free software : + economic effects of +} + +Generically speaking, a commons is a governance regime for managing collective +resources sustainably and equitably. The commons is generally associated with +open fields, forests, and other natural resources that were collectively used +by villagers for their subsistence needs. During the “enclosure movement” in +medieval times and extending through the eighteenth century, British gentry and +entrepreneurs began to privatize the commons and convert its resources into +marketable commodities. Enclosures essentially dispossessed the commoners and +installed a new market regime to manage resources that were previously shared. +The commoners, unable to feed themselves or participate in markets, migrated to +the industrial cities of England to become the wage slaves and beggars who +populate Charles Dickens’s novels. +={ commons : + enclosure of +2 | tragedy of +2 ; + enclosure movement +2 +} + +Although markets tend to be more efficient than commons, they also tend to +focus on that which can be sold and converted into cash. Markets presume that +deserts and the public domain have no value because they have no marketable +output. Markets also presume that a commons cannot be sustained because +inevitably someone will overuse a shared resource — a practice known as “free +riding” —and ruin it. This is the famous “tragedy of the commons” notion +popularized by biologist Garret Hardin in a 1968 essay, which described how a +few farmers will let their sheep overgraze a common pasture and so destroy it. +={ Hardin, Garret ; + free riding ; + markets : + efficiency of +} + +The “tragedy of the commons” metaphor has ossified into a truism of +neoclassical economics. It takes for granted that shared resources cannot be +managed sustainably, and that private property regimes are much better stewards +of resources. This prejudice was powerfully rebutted by political scientist +Elinor Ostrom in her noted 1990 book /{Governing the Commons}/, which marshaled +many empirical examples of natural resource commons that have been managed +responsibly for decades or even hundreds of years. Ostrom’s scholarship has +since given rise to a great deal of academic study of commons, particularly +through the International Association for the Study of the Commons and the +Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. It also +inspired thinking about the commons by law scholars like Yochai Benkler, +Lawrence Lessig, and James Boyle, who saw close parallels with the commons as +they watched corporations use copyright law to enclose culture and information. +={ Benkler, Yochai ; + Boyle, James ; + Ostrom, Elinor, Governing the Commons ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + law in contemporary context, and ; + commons : + types of +2 +} + +Cultural commons differ significantly from natural resource commons in this key +respect: they are not finite, depletable resources like pastures or forests. +Online commons tend to grow in value as more people participate, provided there +is sufficient governance and common technical standards to enable sharing. +Online commons, in short, are less susceptible to the dreaded “tragedy of the +commons” and, indeed, tend to be highly generative of value. Their output does +not get “used up” the way natural resources do. +={ commons : + online +} + +The burden of Lessig’s 2001 book /{The Future of Ideas}/ was to argue that the +Internet constitutes a great, underappreciated commons. It can serve as the +infrastructure for tremendous wealth and innovation if its “layers” — the +hardware, software, and content— remain sufficiently open and usable by all. +The problem, he warned with great prescience, is that policymakers are +generally blind to the value of the commons and markets are too eager to reap +short-term individual gains. They fail to appreciate that too much private +control at any “layer” of the Internet — through proprietary hardware or +software, or excessive copyright or patent protection — can stifle personal +freedom, market competition, and innovation. Lessig wanted to name the book +/{Dot.commons}/, but his publisher rejected it as too obscure. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + The Future of Ideas +} + +One of the key advantages of treating key infrastructure (such as Internet +transmission protocols and computer operating systems) as a commons is that +people have the freedom to modify and improve them, with resulting benefits for +all. Innovation and competition can flourish more readily. At the content +layer, much of the appeal of the commons is the creative freedom, above and +beyond what the market may enable. Precisely because it is a commons, and not a +market, people’s freedoms are not constrained by marketability. A commons is a +noncommercial, nongovernmental space that is free from corporate manipulations +and government meddling. It offers a qualitatively different type of experience +than the marketplace or government power. A commons tends to be more informal, +a place where people know you by name, and where your contributions are known +and welcomed. A commons based on relationships of trust and reciprocity can +undertake actions that a business organization requiring extreme control and +predictable performance cannot. +={ commons : + concept of +1 +} + +Precisely because a commons is open and not organized to maximize profit, its +members are often willing to experiment and innovate; new ideas can emerge from +the periphery. Value is created through a process that honors individual +self-selection for tasks, passionate engagement, serendipitous discovery, +experimental creativity, and peer-based recognition of achievement. The Open +Prosthetics Project, for example, invites anyone to contribute to the design of +a prosthetic limb and/or the specification of limbs that ought to be designed, +even if they don’t know how to do it.~{ http://www.openprosthetics.org. }~ This +has generated such unexpected innovations as limbs specifically adapted for +rock climbers and an arm designed for fishing. Athletes who engage in “extreme +sports” — skiing, biking, surfing — have been a rich source of ideas for new +products, just as software hackers are among the first to come up with +innovative programming ideas. +={ commoners : + sef-selection of ; + commons : + value proposition of +1 ; + value : + creation of +1 +} + +Part of the value proposition of the commons at the content layer is that it +can host a more diverse range of expression — personal, social, and creative — +than the market, in part because it does not have the burden of having to +sustain costly overhead and sell a product. It has other goals — the personal +interests and whims of the commoners — and it can often meet those needs +inexpensively. Yet the commons does in fact generate many marketable +innovations, thanks to its open accessibility, the social relationships it +enables and the free sharing and circulation of work. + +Seeing the success of online commons, Centralized Media have tried to fight +back by embracing elements of user participation. They invite audiences to vote +in polls (/{American Idol}/), publish lists of “most e-mailed” articles (major +newspapers), and direct radio listeners to their Web sites for more information +(National Public Radio). /{Time}/ magazine’s choice for the “Person of the +Year” in 2006 — “You,” the primary driver of Web sites like MySpace and YouTube +— was a landmark moment in media history: with a pinched smile and backhanded +assertion of its cultural authority, Centralized Media formally acknowledged +its most powerful competitor, Decentralized Media! +={ Centralized Media : + competition, and +2 ; + commons : + online ; + Time (magazine) +} + +Yet for all the celebration of “you” as the master of your own fate in +cyberspace, the question that is skirted is whether “you” can indeed retain +control of your stuff in a Centralized Media environment. The point of +conventional business models, after all, is to engineer a proprietary lock-in +of customers through technological dependence, binding contract terms, +frequent-buyer credits, brand loyalty, etc. That’s how companies have +traditionally secured a more durable customer base and preempted competition. + +But the commons is about securing user freedoms, and not necessarily about +prevailing in a market. Web 2.0 may or may not protect both concerns. Like the +commons, Web 2.0 relies upon user-generated content, network effects, and +bottom-up innovation. But Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, at the end of the day, need to +make money. Their sites need to adopt business practices that protect revenue +streams. Facebook is catering to advertisers, not users, when they sift through +masses of users’ personal data in order to sell targeted advertising. MySpace +at one point refused to let its users connect to rival Web sites and outside +software “widgets.”~{ Rachel Rosmarin, “Why MySpace Blinked,” /{Forbes}/, April +24, 2007. }~ In this sense, Web 2.0 media may be “open,” but they are not +necessarily “free,” as in freedom. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs are more likely to +focus on protecting their market advantages than advancing user freedoms. The +two issues may overlap substantially, but they are not identical. +={ commons : + concept of ; + Facebook ; + MySpace ; + Web 2.0 : + purposes of +1 +} + +Science-fiction writer William Gibson once wrote, “The future is already here; +it’s just not well-distributed yet.” That sums up the Great Value Shift circa +2003. The efficiencies and affordances made possible by the Internet were +there. They were enabling all sorts of pioneers to build new business models, +new creative genres, and new online communities — but these innovations were +unevenly distributed. More to the point, their potential was unevenly +perceived, especially in many precincts of Washington officialdom and the +corporate world. The challenge for amateurs venturing onto open platforms was +to validate the new sorts of socially created value enabled by the Internet. +={ Gibson, William ; + Great Value Shift ; + Internet : + Great Value Shift, and +} + +1~ 6 CREATORS TAKE CHARGE + +/{Rip, remix, burn, mashup — legally. The CC licenses facilitate new Internet +genres and business models.}/ + +The first users of CC licenses understood that something different was going +on; a different order was taking shape. More than just a legal tool, the CC +licenses gave the tech vanguard a way to express their inchoate sense that a +new and better world was possible, at least on the Internet. They yearned for a +noncommercial sharing economy with a different moral calculus than mass media +markets, and for markets that are more open, accountable, and respectful of +customers. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + first users of +9 | books, for +19 +} + +The early adopters were unusually informed about the politics of technology, +skeptical of Big Media, and passionate about the artistic freedoms and social +responsibility. They were a locally engaged but globally aware network of tech +sophisticates, avant-garde artists, clued-in bloggers, small-/{d}/ democratic +activists, and the rebellious of spirit: the perfect core group for branding +the Creative Commons and instigating a movement. + +It only made sense that Cory Doctorow — copyfighter, sciencefiction writer, +tech analyst, co-editor of the popular Boing Boing blog — became the first book +author to use a CC license. Doctorow — then a thirty-two-year-old native of +Canada, the son of Trotskyite schoolteachers, the European representative for +the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2002 to 2006 — is a singular character +on the tech/intellectual property/free culture circuit. He can hold forth with +intelligence, wry wit, and bravado on digital rights management, Internet +economics, or the goofy gadgets and pop culture artifacts that he regularly +showcases on Boing Boing. + +In January 2003, a month after the CC licenses were released, Doctorow +published his first novel, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, under an +Attribution, NonCommercial, No Derivative Works license (BY-NC-ND). +Simultaneously, his progressive-minded publisher, Tor Books of New York City, +sold hard copies of the book. “Why am I doing this thing?” Doctorow asked +rhetorically: +={ Doctorow, Cory : + Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom +5 +} + +_1 Well, it’s a long story, but to shorten it up: first-time novelists have a +tough row to hoe. Our publishers don’t have a lot of promotional budget to +throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on +word-of-mouth. I’m not bad at word-of-mouth. I have a blog, Boing Boing +(http://boingboingnet), where I do a /{lot}/ of word-ofmouthing. I compulsively +tell friends and strangers about things I like. And telling people about stuff +is /{way, way}/ easier if I can just send it to ’em. Way easier.~{ Cory +Doctorow, “A Note About This Book,” February 12, 2004, and “A Note About This +Book,” January 9, 2003, in /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, available at +http://www.craphound.com/down. }~ + +A year later, Doctorow announced that his “grand experiment” was a success; in +fact, he said, “my career is turning over like a goddamned locomotive engine.” +More than thirty thousand people had downloaded the book within a day of its +posting. He proceeded to release a collection of short stories and a second +novel under a CC license. He also rereleased /{Down and Out in the Magic +Kingdom}/ under a less restrictive CC license — an Attribution, NonCommercial, +ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA), which allows readers to make their own +translations, radio and film adaptations, sequels, and other remixes of the +novel, so long as they are made available on the same terms.~{ Anna +Weinberg,“Buying the Cow, Though the Milk Is Free: Why Some Publishers are +Digitizing Themselves,” June 24, 2005, /{Book Standard}/, June 24, 2005, +available at +http://www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/news/publisher/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000968186. +}~ + +With some sheepish candor, Doctorow conceded: “I wanted to see if the sky would +fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that maximal +copyright is the only thing that stands between us and penury, and so ingrained +was this lesson in me that even though I had the intellectual intuition that a +‘some rights reserved’ regime would serve me well, I still couldn’t shake the +atavistic fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed.” + +By June 2006, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/ had been downloaded more +than seven hundred thousand times. It had gone through six printings, many +foreign translations, and two competing online audio adaptations made by fans. +“Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it,” Doctorow conceded, +“but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales. +I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treats the free +e-book as a substitute for the printed book — those are the lost sales. But a +much larger minority treats the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed +book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m +ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book +has cost me nothing.”~{ Cory Doctorow, “Giving it Away,” Forbes.com, December +1, 2006, available at +http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tech-media_cz_cd_books06_1201doctorow.html. +}~ In 2008, Doctorow’s marketing strategy of giving away online books to +stimulate sales of physical books paid off in an even bigger way. His novel for +teenagers, /{Little Brother}/, about a youthful hacker who takes on the U.S. +government after it becomes a police state, spent weeks on the /{New York +Times}/ bestseller list for children’s books. + +It is perhaps easier for a sci-fi futurist like Doctorow than a publishing +business to take such a wild leap into the unknown. But that, too, is an +important insight: artists are more likely to lead the way into the sharing +economy than entrenched industries. “I’d rather stake my future on a literature +that people care about enough to steal,” said Doctorow, “than devote my life to +a form that has no home in the dominant medium of the century.” Book lovers and +authors will pioneer the future; corporate publishing will grudgingly follow, +or be left behind. + +Over the past few years, a small but growing number of pioneering authors have +followed Doctorow’s lead and published books under Creative Commons licenses. +While the hard evidence is scarce, many authors who use CC licenses believe +that releasing free electronic versions of their books does not hurt, and +probably helps, the sales of physical copies of their books. Lessig released +his 2004 book, /{Free Culture}/, under an Attribution, NonCommercial license +(BY-NC), and scores of authors and established publishers have since released +books under CC licenses. Among the more notable titles: Yochai Benkler’s /{The +Wealth of Networks}/ (Yale University Press, 2006), Kembrew McLeod’s /{Freedom +of Expression}/ (Doubleday, 2005), Peter Barnes’s /{Capitalism 3.0}/ +(Berrett-Koehler, 2006), and Dan Gillmor’s /{We the Media}/ (O’Reilly Media, +2004). +={ Barnes, Peter : + Capitalism 3.0 ; + Benkler, Yochai : + The Wealth of Networks ; + Gillmor, Dan : + We the Media ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Free Culture ; + McLeod, Kembrew : + Freedom of Expression +} + +In 2006, Paulo Coelho, author of a bestselling book, /{The Alchemist}/, created +a “pirate” blog site that invited readers to use BitTorrent and other +file-sharing networks to download free copies of his books. After he put the +Russian translation of /{The Alchemist}/ online, sales of hardcover copies in +Russia went from around 1,000 a year to 100,000, and then to more than 1 +million. Coelho attributes the success of foreign translations of his book to +their free availability online.~{ Smaran, “Alchemist Author Pirates His Own +Book,” TorrentFreak blog, January 24, 2008, at +http://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-author-pirates-own-books080124. }~ +Experiments such as these were likely influential in the launch of +LegalTorrents, a site for the legal peer-to-peer distribution of CC-licensed +text, audio, video games, and other content. +={ blogging ; + Coelho, Paulo +} + +The CC licenses have been useful, not just for helping individual authors +promote their books, but in fueling open-access scholarly publishing. As we +will see in chapter 11, the CC licenses help scientists put their “royalty-free +literature” on the Internet — a move that enlarges their readership, enhances +their reputations, and still enables them to retain copyrights in their works. + +Free culture publishing models are popping up in many unusual quarters these +days. LibriVox, to take one instance, is a nonprofit digital library of +public-domain audio books that are read and recorded by volunteers.~{ Mia +Garlick, “LibriVox,” Creative Commons blog, December 5, 2006, at +http://creativecommons.org/text/librivox. }~ Since it started in 2005, the +group has recorded more than 150 books by classic authors from Dostoyevsky and +Descartes to Jane Austen and Abraham Lincoln. All of them are free. Most are in +English but many are in German, Spanish, Chinese, and other languages. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Free Culture +1 +} + +Founder Hugh McGuire said the inspiration for LibriVox was a distributed +recording of Lessig’s book /{Free Culture}/ read by bloggers and podcasters, +chapter by chapter. “After listening to that, it took me a while to figure out +how to record things on my computer (which I finally did, thanks to free +software Audacity). Brewster Kahle’s call for ‘Universal Access to all human +knowledge’ was another inspiration, and the free hosting provided by +archive.org and ibiblio.org meant that LibriVox was possible: there was no +worry about bandwidth and storage. So the project was started with an +investment of $0, which continues to be our global budget.” LibriVox’s mission, +said McGuire, is the “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.” +={ Kahle, Brewster ; + LibriVox ; + McGuire, Hugh ; + bloging +} + +Several publishing businesses now revolve around CC licenses. Wikitravel is a +collaborative Web site that amasses content about cities and regions around the +world; content is licensed under the CC Attribution, ShareAlike license +(BY-SA).~{ “Wikitravel Press launches,” Creative Commons blog, August 3, 2007, +at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7596. See also Mia Garlick, +“Wikitravel,” Creative Commons blog, June 20, 2006, at +http://creativecommons.org/text/wikitravel. }~ In 2007, its founder joined with +a travel writer to start Wikitravel Press, which now publishes travel books in +a number of languages. Like the Wikitravel Web pages, the text in the books can +be freely copied and reused. +={ Wikitravel Press } + +Another new business using CC licenses is Lulu, a technology company started by +Robert Young, the founder of the Linux vendor Red Hat and benefactor for the +Center for the Public Domain.Lulu lets individuals publish and distribute their +own books, which can be printed on demand or downloaded. Lulu handles all the +details of the publishing process but lets people control their content and +rights. Hundreds of people have licensed their works under the CC ShareAlike +license and Public Domain Dedication, and under the GNU Project’s Free +Documentation License.~{ Mia Garlick, “Lulu,” Creative Commons blog, May 17, +2006, at http://creativecommons.org/text/lulu. }~ +={ Lulu ; + Red Hat ; + Young, Robert ; + Center for the Public Domain ; + GNU Project : + GNU FDL ; + public domain : + Center for Public Domain +} + +As more of culture and commerce move to the Internet, the question facing the +book industry now is whether the text of a book is more valuable as a physical +object (a codex) or as a digital file (intangible bits that can circulate +freely), or some combination of the two. Kevin Kelly, the former editor of +/{Wired}/ magazine, once explained: “In a regime of superabundant free copies, +copies lose value. They are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, +links, connection and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward +the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, +mark, transfer and engage a work.”~{ Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book!” /{New York +Times Magazine}/, May 14, 2006, p. 43. }~ +={ Kelly, Kevin +1 } + +What this means in practice, Kelly has pointed out, is that books become more +valuable as they become more broadly known and socially circulated — the very +functionalities that the Internet facilitates. If people can discover a book +online and read portions of it, share it with friends, and add annotations and +links to related materials, it makes a book more desirable than a hard-copy +version that is an inert text on a shelf. As Kelly writes: “When books are +digitized, reading becomes a community activity. Bookmarks can be shared with +fellow readers. Marginalia can be broadcast. Bibliographies swapped. You might +get an alert that your friend Carl has annotated a favorite book of yours. A +moment later, his links are yours.”~{ Ibid., p. 45. }~ + +Needless to say, most book publishers and authors’ organizations are not yet +prepared to embrace this newfangled value proposition. It seems way too iffy. A +“sharing” business model would seemingly cannibalize their current revenues and +copyright control with little guarantee of doing better in an open, online +milieu. The bigger problem may be the cultural prejudice that an absolute right +of control over any possible uses of a book is the best way to make money. +={ open business models } + +In general, the publishing trade remains skeptical of the Internet, clueless +about how to harness its marketing power, and strangers to CC licenses. And it +could be years before mainstream publishing accepts some of the +counterintuitive notions that special-interest Internet communities will drive +publishing in the future. In a presentation that caused a stir in the book +industry, futurist Mike Shatzkin said in May 2007 that this is already +happening in general trade publishing: “We’re close to a tipping point, or +maybe we’re past it . . . where Web-based branding will have more credibility +than print, because print, needing more horizontal reach to be viable, won’t +deliver the attention of the real experts and megaphones in each field.”~{ Mike +Shatzkin, “The End of General Trade Publishing Houses: Death or Rebirth in a +Niche-by-Niche World,” presented to the Book Expo America, New York, May 31, +2007, available at http://www.idealog.com/speeches/endoftrade.htm. }~ +={ Shatzkin, Mike } + +2~ DIY Videos and Film +={ Internet : + videos and films on +12 ; + videos and film +12 ; + World Wide Web : + videos and film on +12 +} + +One of the biggest cultural explosions of the past decade has been amateur +video on the Web. The volume of online video has been so great that there are +actually many distinct genres of amateur video: short videos on YouTube, video +mashups, “machinima” (a combination of video and online gaming images), amateur +pornography, and hybrid forms that combine user videos with conventional +broadcast and cable television shows. Just as the Great Value Shift has +empowered musicians, so it is giving video- and filmmakers new powers to +express themselves as they wish, and reach huge audiences via the Internet. +This power represents a potentially major threat to the cultural dominance of +the television and film industries, as reflected in various schemes by the +networks and studios to establish their own online presences. The threat of +do-it-yourself (DIY) video and film is big enough that Viacom alleged that +YouTube’s copyright infringements of Viacom-owned video should entitle Viacom +to $1 billion in damages. The entertainment industry and the Writers Guild of +America endured a long, bitter strike in 2007–2008 precisely because the +projected revenues from Internet video are so large. +={ Great Value Shift ; + Internet : + Great Value Shift, and ; + YouTube +2 ; + Viacom ; + Writers Guild of America +} + +It is too early to know which new video styles will be flash-inthe-pan +novelties and which will ripen into popular, and perhaps lucrative, genres. But +rarely has a culture seen so many diverse experiments in amateur and indie +video expression. One site, Justin.tv, is a free platform for broadcasting and +viewing live video. Some people make round-the-clock “life casts” of their +daily activities; others have used it to broadcast live from Baghdad, showing +war-related events. Yahoo and Reuters have entered into a partnership to host +amateur photojournalism by people using their digital cameras and camera +phones. Machinima video, the product of the underground gaming community, +blends filmmaking with online games to produce computer-generated imagery. As +John Seely Brown describes it, “Basically, you can take Second Life or Worlds +of Warcraft and have a set of avatars run all over the world, that come +together and create their own movie, and then you can ‘YouTube’ the movie.”~{ +Cited in David Bollier, /{The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized +Cocreation of Value as a New Paradigm in Commerce and Culture}/ (Washington, +DC: Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, 2007), p. 27. }~ +={ Brown, John Seely } + +As amateur video and film proliferate, thanks to inexpensive technologies and +Internet access, the CC licenses have obvious value in letting the creator +retain a copyright in the video while inviting its duplication and reuse by +millions of people online. To industry traditionalists locked into binary +options, the free circulation of a work precludes any moneymaking +opportunities. But of course, that is precisely what is now being negotiated: +how to devise ingenious new schemes to make money from freely circulating +video. One option is to own the platform, as YouTube does. But there are also +competitors such as Revver and blip.tv, which have established their own +approaches based on advertising and commercial licensing of works. There are +also schemes that use Internet exposure to drive paying customers into theaters +and advertisers to buy commercial licenses. For some amateurs, DIY video is +simply a way to get noticed and hired by a conventional media company. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + video and film, for +8 +} + +That’s what the Los Angeles–based comedy collective The Lonely Island did to +promote themselves to national attention. They posted their comedy shorts and +songs to their Web site using Creative Commons licenses. Soon other artists +began making remixes of their songs. The remixes in effect served as free +marketing, which caught the attention of the Fox Broadcasting Company, which in +turn hired them to create a comedy pilot TV episode. In the end, Fox did not +pick up the show, but as /{Wired News}/ recounted, “Instead of letting the show +wither on a shelf somewhere, the group posted the full video both cut and +uncut. The edgy, quirky short— Awesometown — spread like wildfire online and +eventually landed all three performers an audition spot for /{Saturday Night +Live}/.”~{ Matt Haughey, “From LA’s Awesometown to New York City’s SNL,” +/{Wired News}/, October 1, 2005. }~ + +Perhaps the most successful example of leveraging free Internet exposure to +reap commercial benefits is the sci-fi parody /{Star Wreck}/. Finnish producer +Samuli Torssonen took seven years to shoot a fulllength movie using a Sony +DVCAM, computer-generated graphics, and a makeshift studio. Some three hundred +people were involved in the project, including some professional actors and +many amateurs. When /{Star Wreck}/ was deliberately posted to the Internet in +2005, tagged with a CC-BY-NC-ND license (Attribution, NonCommercial, No +Derivatives), it was eventually downloaded 5 million times and became the +most-watched Finnish film in history. Fans in Russia, China, and Japan soon +copied the film, which stimulated broader viewer demand and led to commercial +deals to distribute the film. /{Star Wreck}/ became so popular that Universal +Pictures, the American studio, signed a deal in 2006 to distribute DVD versions +of the film. Torssonen says that the film has earned a 20to-1 return on +investment. “I wouldn’t call free distribution stupid, as some people say, but +a success,” he told an audience in 2007.~{ Samuli Torssonen presentation at +iCommons Summit 2007, Dubrovnik, Croatia, June 15, 2007. See also +www.starwreck.com. }~ +={ Star Wreck Studios +1 ; + Torssonen, Samuli +} + +The lesson for Stephen Lee, CEO of Star Wreck Studios, is that “you don’t need +millions to make a quality movie. You need an active, passionate community.” +Lee says the plan for a peer-produced model of “wrecking a movie” is to develop +an Internet collaboration, make the film popular through viral marketing, and +then license it commercially. Star Wreck Studios is now developing a new movie, +/{Iron Sky}/, about a Nazi base on the far side of the moon. +={ Lee, Stephen } + +One of the more daring experiments in film production is being pioneered by the +Blender Institute, a studio for open-content animation and game projects +located in the Amsterdam docklands. Started in August 2007, the Institute +employs fourteen full-time people who are obsessed with improving its +three-dimensional open-source software, the so-called Blender 3D suite. The +software is widely used by a large international user community for modeling, +animation, rendering, editing, and other tasks associated with 3D +computer-generated animation. +={ Blender Institute +2 } + +Ton Roosendaal, who directs the Blender Institute, is trying to demonstrate +that a small studio can develop a virtuous cycle of economically sustainable +creativity using open-source software, Creative Commons licenses, and talented +programmers and artists from around the world. “We give programmers the freedom +to do their best, and what they want to do is improve the technology,” he said. +“The market is too hyper-rational and nailed down and filled with limits,” he +argues, referring to his peers at major animation studios. “Open source is free +of most of these constraints.”~{ Ton Roosendaal remarks at conference, +“Economies of the Commons,” De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics, +Amsterdam, April 10–12, 2008. }~ +={ Roosendaal, Ton } + +In April 2008, the Blender Institute released a ten-minute animated short, +/{Big Buck Bunny}/, which features a kind-hearted, fat white bunny who endures +the abuse of three stone-throwing rodents until they smash a beautiful +butterfly with a rock — at which point the bunny rallies to teach the bullies a +lesson.~{ The film can be downloaded at +http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download. }~ The film uses cutting-edge +computer-generated animation techniques that rival anything produced by Pixar, +the Hollywood studio responsible for /{Toy Story}/, /{Cars}/, and +/{Ratatouille}/. /{Big Buck Bunny}/ is licensed under a CC Attribution license, +which means the digital content can be used by anyone for any purpose so long +as credit is given to the Blender Institute. +={ Big Buck Bunny (animated short) +1 } + +/{Big Buck Bunny}/ was initially distributed to upfront investors as a DVD set +that includes extras such as interviews, outtakes, deleted scenes, and the +entire database used in making the film. Then, to pique wider interest in sales +of the DVD set, priced at thirty-four euros, a trailer was released on the +Internet. This resulted in extensive international press coverage and blog +exposure. Early signs are promising that Blender will be able to continue to +make highquality animation on a fairly modest budget without worries about +illegal downloads or a digital rights management system. The Blender production +model also has the virtue of enabling access to top creative talent and +cutting-edge animation technologies as well as efficient distribution to paying +audiences on a global scale. + +While CC-licensed films are not common, neither are they rare. Davis +Guggenheim, the filmmaker who directed /{An Inconvenient Truth}/, made a short +film, /{Teach}/, to encourage talented people to become teachers. The film was +released in 2006 under a CC BY-NCND license because Guggenheim wanted the film +widely available to the public yet also wanted to preserve the integrity of the +stories told, hence the NoDerivatives provision. A Spanish short film, /{Lo que +tú Quieras Oír}/, became YouTube’s fifth most-viewed video— more than 38 +million views. The film’s viral diffusion may have been helped by the CC +BY-NC-SA (Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike) license, which allows viewers +not only to share the film, but to remix for noncommercial purposes so long as +they use the same license. +={ Guggenheim, Davis ; + YouTube +} + +In Brazil, director Bruno Vianna released his first full-length film, +/{Cafuné}/, under a CC BY-NC-SA license (Attribution, NonCommercial, +ShareAlike) and put it on file-sharing networks at the same time that it was +exhibited in a handful of theaters.~{ Mia Garlick, CC blog, at +http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/6048; see also “Cafuné breaking the +limits for open business models,” iCommons blog, at +http://www.icommons.org/static/2006/11/22/cafune-breakingthe-limits-for-open-business-models. +}~ Each release had different endings; downloaders were invited to remix the +ending as they wished. The film was financed by the government’s culture +ministry as part of a competition for low-budget films, but only about fifty +Brazilian films are released to commercial theaters each year. Vianna saw the +Internet release as a great way to build an audience for his debut film . . . +which is exactly what happened. For some weeks, it made it into the list of +twenty most-watched films in the country. +={ Vianna, Bruno } + +2~ Letting the Music Flow +={ music : + CC licenses for +18 | remixes +18 ; + remix works +18 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + music, for +18 +} + +Media reform activist Harold Feld offers a succinct overview of why creativity +in music — and therefore the business of selling recorded music — has suffered +over the past two decades: +={ Feld, Harold +2 } + +_1 The 1990s saw a number of factors that allowed the major labels to push out +independents and dominate the market with their own outrageously priced and +poorly produced products: consolidation in the music industry, the whole +“studio system” of pumping a few big stars to the exclusion of others, the +consolidation in music outlets from mom-andpop record stores to chains like +Tower Records and retail giants like Wal-Mart that exclude indies and push the +recordings promoted by major labels, and the consolidation of radio — which +further killed indie exposure and allowed the labels to artificially pump their +selected “hits” through payola. All this created a cozy cartel that enjoyed +monopoly profits. +={ music : + music industry +1 +} + +_1 As a result, the major labels, the mainstream retailers, and the radio +broadcasters grew increasingly out of touch with what listeners actually +wanted. But as long as the music cartel controlled what the vast majority of +people got to hear, it didn’t matter . . . The music cartel remained the de +facto only game in town.~{ Harold Feld, “CD Sales Dead? Not for Indies!” blog +post on Public Knowledge Web site, March 27, 2007, at +http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/890. }~ + +Changing the music industry is obviously a major challenge that is not going to +be solved overnight. Still, there is a growing effort led by indie musicians, +small record labels, Internet music entrepreneurs, and advocacy groups such as +the Future of Music Coalition to address these problems. Creative Commons is +clearly sympathetic, but has largely focused on a more modest agenda — enabling +a new universe of shareable music to arise. Its chief tools for this mission, +beyond the CC licenses, are new software platforms for legal music remixes, +online commons that legally share music, and new business models that respect +the interests of both fans and artists. Ultimately, it is hoped that a global +oeuvre of shareable music will emerge. Once this body of music matures, +attracting more artists and fans in a self-sustaining viral spiral, the record +industry may be forced to give up its dreams of perfect control of how music +may circulate and adopt fan-friendly business practices. +={ Future of Music Coalition } + +This, at least, is the theory, as Lessig explains it. He calls it the “BMI +strategy,” a reference to the strategy that broadcasters and musicians used to +fight ASCAP’s monopoly control over radio music in the early 1940s. ASCAP, the +American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, is a nonprofit +organization that collects royalties for musical performances. At the time, +ASCAP required artists to have five hits before it would serve as a collection +agency for them, a rule that privileged the playing of pop music on the radio +at the expense of rhythm and blues, jazz, hillbilly, and ethnic music. Then, +over the course of eight years, ASCAP raised its rates by 450 percent between +1931 and 1939 — at which point, ASCAP then proposed /{doubling}/ its rates for +1940. In protest, many radio stations refused to play ASCAP-licensed music. +They formed a new performance-rights body, BMI, or Broadcast Music, Inc., which +sought to break the ASCAP monopoly by offering free arrangements of +public-domain music to radio stations. They also charged lower rates than ASCAP +for licensing music and offered better contracts for artists.~{ Donald Clarke, +/{The Rise and Fall of Popular Music}/, chapter 11. }~ +={ ASCAP +1 ; + BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) +3 ; + music : + ASCAP+l ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +2 | music, and +2 +} + +“The Internet is today’s broadcasters,” said Lessig in a 2006 speech. “They are +facing the same struggle.”~{ Lessig explained his BMI strategy at a speech, “On +Free, and the Differences Between Culture and Code,” at the 23d Chaos +Communications Conference (23C3) in Berlin, Germany, December 30, 2006; video +can be watched at +http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7661663613180520595&q=23c3. }~ Just as +ASCAP used its monopoly power to control what music could be heard and at what +prices, he said, so today’s media corporations want to leverage their control +over content to gain control of the business models and technologies of digital +environments. When Google bought YouTube, one-third of the purchase price of +$1.65 billion was allegedly a financial reserve to deal with any copyright +litigation, said Lessig. This is how the incumbent media world is trying to +stifle the emergence of free culture. +={ Google ; + YouTube +} + +The same questions that once confronted broadcasters are now facing Internet +innovators, Lessig argues: “How do we free the future from the dead hand of the +past? What do we do to make it so they can’t control how technology evolves?” +With copyright terms lasting so long, it is not really feasible to try to use +public-domain materials to compete with a commercial cartel. Lessig’s answer is +a BMI-inspired solution that uses the CC licenses to create a new body of +“free” works that, over time, can begin to compete with popular works. The +legendary record producer Jerry Wexler recalled how ASCAP marginalized R & B, +country, folk, and ethnic music, but “once the lid was lifted — which happened +when BMI entered the picture — the vacuum was filled by all these archetypal +musics. BMI turned out to be the mechanism that released all those primal +American forms of music that fused and became rock-androll.”~{ From BMI, Inc., +Web site, at http://www.bmi.com/genres/entry/533380. }~ Lessig clearly has +similar ambitions for Creative Commons. +={ Wexler, Jerry } + +For now, the subculture of CC-licensed music remains something of a fringe +movement. It is easy to patronize it as small, amateurish, and quirky. Yet its +very existence stands as a challenge to the music industry by showing the +feasibility of a more artist- and fanfriendly way of distributing music. Is it +visionary to believe that free culture artists will force the major labels to +change — just as BMI forced ASCAP to lower prices — and make them more +competitive and inclusive? +={ ASCAP ; + music : + ASCAP +1 ; + music : + music industry +} + +Creative Commons’s primary task is practical — to help musicians reach +audiences directly and reap more of the financial rewards of their music. So +far, a wide range of indie bands, hip-hop artists, and bohemian +experimentalists of all stripes have used the licenses. One of the most popular +is the Attribution, NonCommercial license, which lets artists share their works +while getting credit and retaining commercial rights. A number of marquee +songwriters and performers — David Byrne, Gilberto Gil, the Beastie Boys, Chuck +D — have also used CC licenses as a gesture of solidarity with free culture +artists and as an enlightened marketing strategy. Inviting people to remix your +songs is a great way to engage your fan base and sell more records. And tagging +your music with a CC license, at least for now, wraps an artist in a mantle of +tech sophistication and artistic integrity. +={ Beastie Boys ; + Byrne, David ; + Chuck D ; + Gil, Gilberto +} + +Guitarist Jake Shapiro was one of the first musicians to show the marketing +potential of unleashing free music on the Internet. In 1995, Shapiro put MP3 +files of music by his band, Two Ton Shoe, on the group’s Web site. Within a few +years, Two Ton Shoe was one of the most-downloaded bands on the Internet, +developing fan bases in Italy, Brazil, Russia, and South Korea. One day Shapiro +received a phone call out of the blue from a South Korean concert promoter. He +wanted to know if the band would fly over to Seoul to perform four concerts. It +turned out that fans in South Korea, where fast broadband connections are the +norm, had discovered Two Ton Shoe through file sharing. A local CD retailer +kept getting requests for the band’s music, which led him to contact a concert +promoter. In August 2005, Shapiro and his buddies arrived in Seoul as +conquering rock stars, selling out all four of their concerts. “The kids who +showed up knew all the words to the songs,” Shapiro recalled. A year later, the +band signed a deal to distribute a double CD to East Asia.~{ Shapiro described +his experiences at the “Identity Mashup Conference,” June 19–21, 2006, hosted +by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, at +http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2006/06/28/id-mashup-2006-day-two-the-commons-open-apis-meshups-and-mashups. +His band’s Web site is at http://www.twotonshoe.com. }~ +={ Shapiro, Jake ; + Two Ton Shoe +} + +While such stories of viral marketing success are not common, neither are they +rare. Lots of bands now promote themselves, and find admiring (paying) fans, by +posting their music, for free, on Web sites and file-sharing sites. Perhaps the +most scrutinized example was Radiohead’s decision to release its album /{In +Rainbows}/ for free online, while inviting fans to pay whatever they wanted. +(The band did not release any numbers, but considered the move a success. They +later released the album through conventional distribution channels as well.)~{ +Jon Pareles, “Pay What You Want for This Article,” /{New York Times}/, December +9, 2007. }~ +={ Radiohead } + +Just as previous generations of fans came together around FM radio or live +performance venues, the Internet is the new gathering place for discovering +interesting, fresh, and authentic talent. The lesson that the record industry +hasn’t quite learned is that music is not just a commodity but a /{social +experience}/ — and social experiences lose their appeal if overly controlled +and commercialized. If the music marketplace does not provide a place for fans +to congregate and share in a somewhat open, unregimented way — if the commodity +ethic overwhelms everything else — the music dies. Or more accurately, it +migrates underground, outside the marketplace, to sustain itself. This is why +so much of the best new music is happening on the fringes of the stagnant +commercial mainstream. +={ music : + social experience, as +4 +} + +It is also why the Creative Commons licenses have acquired such cachet. They +have come to be associated with musicians who honor the integrity of music +making. They symbolize the collective nature of creativity and the importance +of communing freely with one’s fans. Nimrod Lev, a prominent Israeli musician +and supporter of the CC licenses, received considerable press coverage in his +country for a speech that lamented the “cunning arrangement” (in Israeli slang, +/{combina}/) by which the music industry has betrayed people’s love of music, +making it “only a matter of business and commerce.” Said Lev: +={ music : + music industry +1 ; + Lev, Nimrod +2 +} + +_1 The music industry treats its consumer as a consumer of sex, not of love, +the love of music. Just like everything else: a vacuum without values or +meaning. But it is still love that everyone wants and seeks. . . . The music +vendors knew then [a generation ago] what they have forgotten today, namely +that we must have cultural heroes: artists that are not cloned in a manner out +to get our money. There was an added value with a meaning: someone who spoke to +our hearts in difficult moments, and with that someone, we would walk hand in +hand for a while. We had loyalty and love, and it all meant something.~{ Nimrod +Lev, “The Combina Industry,” November 16, 2004, at +http://law.haifa.ac.il/techlaw/new/try/eng/nimrod.htm. }~ + +At the risk of sounding naïve, Lev said he wanted to stand up for the +importance of “authenticity and empathy and my own truth” in making music. It +is a complaint that echoes throughout the artistic community globally. A few +years ago, Patti Smith, the punk rocker renowned for her artistic integrity, +decried the “loss of our cultural voice” as the radio industry consolidated and +as music television became a dominant force. She grieved for the scarcity of +places for her to “feel connected” to a larger musical community of artists and +fans.~{ Patti Smith at a panel at the National Conference for Media Reform, St. +Louis, sponsored by Free Press, May 14, 2005. }~ +={ Smith, Patti } + +The classic example of music as social experience — music as a vehicle for a +community of shared values — is the Grateful Dead. The band famously invited +its fans to record all of its concerts and even provided them with an +authorized “tapers’ section” in which to place their microphones and equipment. +Fans were also allowed to circulate their homemade tapes so long as the music +was shared, and not sold. This had the effect of building a large and committed +fan base, which avidly archived, edited, and traded Grateful Dead cassettes. +One reason that the Dead’s “customer base” has been so lucrative and durable +over several decades is that the fans were not treated as mere customers or +potential pirates, but as a community of shared values. The music belonged to +the fans as much as to the band, even though Deadheads were only too happy to +pay to attend concerts and buy the officially released CDs and t-shirts.~{ A +fascinating collision of the Grateful Dead’s sharing ethic and the copyright +business model occurred in 2005, when the Internet Archive placed a huge cache +of fan recordings online, available for free download. When Grateful Dead +Merchandising objected, Deadheads accused the band’s representatives of +betraying the band’s long-established sharing ethic. Paradoxically, the band’s +merchandisers may also have jeopardized the band’s commercial appeal by +prohibiting the downloads. As music critic Jon Pareles put it, “The Dead had +created an anarchy of trust, going not by statute but by instinct and turning +fans into co-conspirators, spreading their music and buying tickets, T-shirts +and official CDs to show their loyalty. The new approach . . . removes what +could crassly be called brand value from the Dead’s legacy by reducing them to +one more band with products to sell. Will the logic of copyright law be more +profitable, in the end, than the logic of sharing? That’s the Dead’s latest +improvisational experiment.” Jon Pareles, “The Dead’s Gamble: Free Music for +Sale,” /{New York Times}/, December 3, 2005. }~ +={ Grateful Dead +1 } + +While the Grateful Dead may be an outlier case, it exemplifies the sharing +ethic that the Internet is facilitating: the formation of communities of +amateurs that flourish by sharing and celebrating music. Artists can make some +money through CD sales, but much more through performances, merchandising, +endorsements, and sales to films, television, and advertisers. If established +singers and bands are reluctant to make a transition to this new business +model, hungry newcomers are not. + +The Mountain Goats, an indie rock group, authorized the Internet Archive to +host their live shows on the Web because they realized the videos seed market +demand for their music. The group’s front man, John Darnielle, said, “I am +totally in favor of tape trading, and file sharing never did anything wrong by +me. People got into The Mountain Goats after downloading my stuff.”~{ Creative +Commons blog, “Musicians Large and Small on Internet Downloading,” by Matt +Haughey, July 26, 2004. }~ In 2001, two newcomers working out of a basement +produced a cover version of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” which two years later +went to the top of the British pop charts.~{ +http://news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/entertainment/3352667.stm. }~ In a world where +amateur creativity can easily migrate to the commercial mainstream, tagging +works with a NonCommercial CC license is a valuable option. By requiring uses +that fall outside the scope of the license to pay as usual, it can help artists +get visibility while retaining their potential to earn money. A larger +restructuring of the music industry, alas, will take longer to achieve. +={ Darnielle, John ; + Mountain Goats +} + +2~ Music as Remix +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + music, for +18 ; + music : + remixes +18 ; + remix works +18 +} + +If any segment of the music world really understands the social dynamics of +musical creativity, it is hip-hop artists. As Joanna Demers documents in her +book about “transformative appropriation” in music, /{Steal This Music}/, +hip-hop was born as a remix genre in the 1970s and 1980s.~{ Joanna Demers, +/{Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity}/ +(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006). }~ In defiance of copyright law, +which considers unauthorized borrowing as presumptively illegal, hip-hop +artists used turntable scratching and digital sampling to transform existing +songs into something new, which in time grew into a lucrative market segment. +Hip-hop illustrates how the commons and the market need to freely interact, +without undue restrictions, in order for both to flourish. It works because +sampling is not a simple matter of “theft” but a mode of creativity, a way of +carrying on a cultural conversation. Sampling is a way of paying tribute to +musical heroes, mocking rivals, alluding to an historical moment, or simply +experimenting with an arresting sound. When the rap group Run-DMC used +Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” as the basis for a remix, it was not only a salute +to the group’s musical influence and a new turn of the creative wheel, it +revived Aerosmith’s sagging career (or, in economist’s terms, it “created new +value”). +={ Demers, Joanna : + Steal This Music +1 ; + music : + hip-hop +1 +} + +The problem, of course, is that most remix culture (and the value it creates) +is illegal. By the late 1980s, in fact, the freedom of the commons that gave +birth to hip-hop was coming under siege. Musicians and record labels were +routinely invoking copyright law to demand permission and payments for the +tiniest samples of music. Only wealthy artists could afford to clear the rights +of familiar songs, and basement amateurs (who had given rise to the genre in +the first place) were being marginalized. When George Clinton’s group +Funkadelic succeeded in its lawsuit against the rap group N.W.A. for using a +nearly inaudible sample of a three-note, two-second clip from “Get Off Your Ass +and Jam” — the infamous /{Bridgeport v. Dimension Films}/ decision, in 2004 — +it became clear that the commons of hip-hop music was being enclosed.~{ This +story is told by Demers in Steal This Music. The court ruling is /{Bridgeport +v. Dimension Films}/, 383 F. 3d 390 (6th Circ. 2004). }~ Critics like Siva +Vaidhyanathan and Kembrew McLeod believe that the legal crusade against +sampling has significantly harmed the creative vitality of hip-hop. Something +is clearly amiss when the one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2005 — +/{The Grey Album}/, a remix collection by DJ Danger Mouse — cannot be legally +released. /{The Grey Album}/ artfully combined music from the Beatles’s /{White +Album}/ with lyrics from Jay-Z’s /{Black Album}/, resulting in “the most +popular album in rock history that virtually no one paid for,” according to +/{Entertainment Weekly}/.~{ DJ Danger Mouse’s remix received considerable press +attention. A good overview is by Chuck Klosterman, “The DJ Auteur,” /{New York +Times Magazine}/, June 18, 2006, pp. 40–45. }~ +={ Bridgeport v. Dimension Films ; + Clinton, George ; + Funkadelic ; + McLeod, Kembrew ; + Vaidhyanathan, Siva ; + DJ Danger Mouse +} + +The impetus for a solution to the sampling problem started with Negativland, an +irreverent “sound collage” band known as much for its zany culture jamming as +for its anticopyright manifestos. (One of its CDs includes a polemical booklet +about fair use along with a whoopee cushion with a © symbol printed on it.) +Negativland gained notoriety in the 1990s for its protracted legal battle with +the band U2 and Island Records over Negativland’s release of a parody song +called “U2.” Island Records claimed it was an infringement of copyright and +trademark law, among other things. Negativland claimed that no one should be +able to own the letter U and the numeral 2, and cited the fair use doctrine as +protecting its song and title. The case was eventually settled.~{ See +Negativland’s book, /{Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2}/ +(Concord, CA: Seeland, 1995). }~ +={ Negativland +1 } + +As an experienced sampler of music, Negativland and collagist People Like Us +(aka Vicki Bennett) asked Creative Commons if it would develop and offer a +music sampling license. Don Joyce of Negativland explained: +={ Joyce, Don } + +_1 This would be legally acknowledging the now obvious state of modern +audio/visual creativity in which quoting, sampling, direct referencing, copying +and collaging have become a major part of modern inspiration. [A sampling +option would] stop legally suppressing it and start culturally encouraging it — +because it’s here to stay. That’s our idea for encouraging a more democratic +media for all of us, from corporations to the individual.~{ Glenn Otis Brown, +“Mmm . . . Free Samples (Innovation la),” Creative Commons blog, March 11, +2003, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3631. }~ + +With legal help from Cooley Godward Kronish and Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & +Rosati, Creative Commons did just that. During its consultations with the remix +community, Creative Commons learned that Gilberto Gil, the renowned +/{tropicalismo}/ musician and at the time the Brazilian minister of culture, +had been thinking along similar lines, and so it received valuable suggestions +and support from him. +={ Cooley Godward Kronish ; + Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati ; + Gil, Gilberto +} + +In 2005, Creative Commons issued the Sampling license as a way to let people +take pieces of a work for any purpose except advertising.~{ Creative Commons +Web site, at http://creativecommons.org/about/sampling. See also Ethan Smith, +“Can Copyright Be Saved?” /{Wall Street Journal}/, October 20, 2003. }~ It also +prohibited copying and distribution of the entire work.~[* A “Sampling Plus” +license was also issued to allow noncommercial copying and distribution of an +entire work, which means it could be distributed via file-sharing networks. +Finally, a “NonCommercial Sampling Plus” license was devised to let people +sample and transform pieces of a work, and copy and distribute the entire work, +so long as it was for noncommercial purposes.]~ For example, an artist could +take a snippet of music, a clip of film, or a piece of a photograph, and use +the sample in a new creation. Since its release, the Sampling license has been +criticized on philosophical grounds by some commoners who say it does not truly +enhance people’s freedom because it prohibits copying and distribution of the +entire work. This concern reached serious enough proportions that in 2007 +Creative Commons “retired” the license; I’ll revisit this controversy in +chapter 9. + +The CC Sampling license only whetted the imagination of people who wanted to +find new ways to sample, share, and transform music. Neeru Paharia, then the +assistant director of the Creative Commons, came up with the idea of developing +ccMixter, a software platform for remixing music on the Web.~{ See +http://wiki.creativecommons.org/ccMixter. Interview with Mike Linksvayer, +February 7, 2007, and Neeru Paharia, April 13, 2007. }~ Paharia realized one +day that “this whole remixing and sharing ecology is about getting feedback on +who’s using your work and how it’s evolving. That’s almost half the +pleasure.”~{ Interview with Neeru Paharia, April 13, 2007. }~ So the +organization developed a Web site that would allow people to upload music that +could be sampled and remixed. The site has about five thousand registered +users, which is not terribly large, but it is an enthusiastic and active +community of remix artists that acts as a great proof of concept while +promoting the CC licenses. There are other, much larger remix sites on the +Internet, such as Sony’s ACIDplanet, but such sites are faux commons. They +retain ownership in the sounds and remixes that users make, and no derivative +or commercial versions are allowed. +={ Paharia, Neeru } + +One feature of viral spirals is their propensity to call forth a jumble of new +projects and unexpected partners. The CC licenses have done just that for +music. ccMixter has joined with Opsound to offer a joint “sound pool” of clips +licensed under an Attribution ShareAlike license. It also supports Freesound, a +repository of more than twenty thousand CC-licensed samples ranging from +waterfalls to crickets to music.~{ Neeru Paharia, “Opsound’s Sal Randolph,” +Creative Commons blog, October 1, 2005, at +http://creativecommons.org/audio/opsound; Mike Linksvayer, “Freesound,” +Creative Commons blog, October 1, 2005, at +http://creativecommons.org/audio/freesound; Matt Haughey, “Free Online Music +Booms as SoundClick Offers Creative Commons Licenses,” Creative Commons blog, +August 11, 2004. }~ + +Runoff Records, Inc., a record label, discovered a remix artist who teaches +physics and calculus and goes by the name of Minus Kelvin. Runoff heard a +podcast of Kelvin’s CC-licensed music, and signed him up, along with another +ccMixter contributor, to do music for three seasons of the television show +/{America’s Next Top Model}/.~{ Neeru Paharia, “Minus Kelvin Discovered on +ccMixter,” Creative Commons blog, May 17, 2005, at +http://creativecommons.org/weblog/archive/2005/5. }~ A few months later, two +ccMixter fans based in Poland and Holland started an online record label, +DiSfish, that gives 5 percent of all sale proceeds to CC, another 5 percent to +charity, with the remainder split between the label and the artist. All music +on the label is licensed under CC.~{ Cezary Ostrowski from Poland and Marco +Raaphorst from Holland met online at ccMixter and decided to go into business +together. They started an online label called DiSfish. }~ + +The CC licenses are not just the province of daring remix artists and other +experimentalists. Disappointed by its CD sales through traditional channels, +the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra released its performance of Handel’s 1736 +opera, /{Atalanta}/, exclusively through the online record label Magnatune, +using a CC license. Conductor Nicholas McGegan said the Internet “has +potentially given the industry a tremendous shot in the arm,” letting +orchestras reach “new audiences, including ones that are unlikely to hear you +in person.”~{ Mia Garlick, “Classical Music Goes Digital (& CC),” May 3, 2006, +at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5883. }~ A company that specializes +in Catalan music collaborated with the Catalonian government to release two CDs +full of CC-licensed music.~{ The Enderrock Group, a company that specializes in +Catalan music and publishes three popular music magazines, released the two +CDs, /{Música Lliure and Música Lliure II}/, free within the page of its +magazines. See Margot Kaminski, “Enderrock,” Creative Commons Web site, January +17, 2007, at http://creativecommons.org/audio/enderrock. }~ A group of Gamelan +musicians from central Java who perform in North Carolina decided to release +their recordings under a CC license.~{ The group, Gamelan Nyai Saraswait, was +blogged about by Matt Haughey on February 1, 2003, at +http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3599. }~ +={ McGegan, Nicholas } + +Big-name artists have gotten into the licenses as well. DJ Vadim created a +splash when he released all the original solo, individual instrumental, and a +cappella studio tracks of his album /{The Sound Catcher}/ under an Attribution, +NonCommercial license, so that remixers could have at it.~{ Victor Stone, “DJ +Vadim Releases Album Tracks Under CC,” August 20, 2007, at +http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7619. }~ In 2004, /{Wired}/ magazine +released a CD with sixteen tracks by the likes of David Byrne, Gilberto Gil, +and the Beastie Boys. “By contributing a track to /{The Wired CD}/., these +musicians acknowledge that for an art form to thrive, it needs to be open, +fluid and alive,” wrote /{Wired}/. “These artists — and soon, perhaps, many +more like them — would rather have people share their work than steal it.”~{ +Thomas Goetz, “Sample the Future,” /{Wired}/, November 2004, pp. 181–83. }~ +={ Byrne, David ; + Gil, Gilberto +1 ; + DJ Vadim ; + Beastie Boys +} + +Soon thereafter, Byrne and Gil went so far as to host a gala benefit concert +for Creative Commons in New York City. In a fitting fusion of styles, Gil sang +a Brazilian arrangement of Cole Porter’s cowboy song, “Don’t Fence Me In.” The +crowd of 1,500 was high on the transcultural symbolism, said Glenn Brown: +“Musical superstars from North and South, jamming together, building earlier +works into new creations, in real time. Lawyers on the sidelines and in the +audience, where they belong. The big Creative Commons logo smiling overhead.”~{ +Glenn Otis Brown, “WIRED Concert and CD: A Study in Collaboration,” September +24, 2004, available at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4415. }~ The +description captures the CC enterprise to a fault: the fusion of some +clap-your-hands populism and hardheaded legal tools, inflected with an +idealistic call to action to build a better world. +={ Brown, Glenn Otis ; + Porter, Cole +} + +By 2008 the power of open networks had persuaded the major record labels to +abandon digital rights management of music CDs, and more major artists were +beginning to venture forth with their own direct distribution plans, bypassing +the standard record label deals. Prince, Madonna, and others found it more +lucrative to run their own business affairs and deal with concert venues and +merchandisers. In a major experiment that suggests a new business model for +major music acts, Nine Inch Nails released its album /{Ghosts I-IV}/ under a +Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike license, and posted audio files of +the album on its official Web site, inviting free downloads. It did not do +advertising or promotion. Despite the free distribution — or because of it — +the group made money by selling 2,500 copies of an “Ultra-Deluxe Limited +Edition” of the album for $300; the edition sold out in less than three days. +There were also nonlimited sales of a “deluxe edition” for $75 and a $10 CD. +The scheme showed how free access to the music can be used to drive sales for +something that remains scarce, such as a “special edition” CD or a live +performance. One week after the album’s release, the Nine Inch Nails’ Web site +reported that the group had made over $1.6 million from over 750,000 purchase +and download transactions. Considering that an artist generally makes only +$1.60 on the sale of a $15.99 CD, Nine Inch Nails made a great deal more money +from a “free” album distribution than it otherwise would have made through a +standard record deal.~{ See, e.g., Wikipedia entry, “Ghosts I-IV,” at +http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_I-IV. }~ +={ Nine Inch Nails } + +It is too early to know if Lessig’s “BMI strategy” will in fact catalyze a +structural transformation in the entertainment industries. But Lessig +apparently feels that it is the only feasible strategy. As he said in a 2006 +speech, intensified hacking to break systems of proprietary control will not +work; new campaigns to win progressive legislation won’t succeed within the +next twenty years; and litigation is “a long-term losing strategy,” as the +/{Eldred}/ case demonstrated. For Lessig and much of the free culture +community, the long-term project of building one’s own open, commons-friendly +infrastructure is the only enduring solution. +={ BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + effects of ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred v. Reno, and | music, and +1 +} + +In the music industry, the early signs seem to support this approach. When +digital guru Don Tapscott surveyed the events of 2006, he concluded that “the +losers built digital music stores and the winners built vibrant communities +based on music. The losers built walled gardens while the winners built public +squares. The losers were busy guarding their intellectual property while the +winners were busy getting everyone’s attention.” In a penetrating analysis in +2007, music industry blogger Gerd Leonhard wrote: “In music, it’s always been +about interaction, about sharing, about engaging — not Sell-Sell-Sell right +from the start. Stop the sharing and you kill the music business — it’s that +simple. When the fan/user/listener stops engaging with the music, it’s all +over.”~{ Gerd Leonhard, “Open Letter to the Independent Music Industry: Music +2.0 and the Future of Music,” July 1, 2007, at +http://www.gerdleonhard.net/2007/07/gerd-leonhards.html. }~ +={ Leonhard, Gerd ; + Tapscott, Don +} + +Serious change is in the air when the producer/consumer dichotomy is no longer +the only paradigm, and a vast network of ordinary people and talented creators +are becoming active participants in making their own culture. They are sharing +and co-creating. Markets are no longer so separate from social communities; +indeed, the two are blurring into each other. Although we may live in a +complicated interregnum between Centralized Media and distributed media, the +future is likely to favor those creators and businesses who build on open +platforms. As Dan Hunter and F. Gregory Lastowka write: “It is clear that two +parallel spheres of information production exist today. One is a traditional, +copyright-based and profit-driven model that is struggling with technological +change. The second is a newly enabled, decentralized amateur production sphere, +in which individual authors or small groups freely release their work.”~{ Dan +Hunter and F. Gregory Lastowka, “Amateur-to-Amateur,” /{William and Mary Law +Review}/ 46, no. 951 (December 2004), pp. 1029–30. }~ +={ Hunter, Dan +1 ; + Lastowka, F. Gregory +} + +Hunter and Lastowka liken copyright law today to the Roman Empire in decline: +“It is meaningless to ask whether the unitary might of imperial Rome was +preferable to the distributed, messy agglomeration of tribes and states that +eventually emerged after Rome fell. It was not better, just different.” That is +certainly a debatable conclusion, depending upon one’s cultural tastes and +sense of history. But the Rome metaphor does capture the fragmentation and +democratization of creativity that is now under way. And that, in fact, is +something of the point of the CC licenses: to make access and use of culture +more open and egalitarian. For all his commitment to law and the CC licenses, +Lessig ultimately throws his lot in with social practice: “Remember, it’s the +/{activity}/ that the licenses make possible that matters, not the licenses +themselves. The point is to change the existing discourse by growing a new +discourse.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, September 14, 2006. }~ +={ copyright law : + decline of ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + social practice, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +} + +1~ 7 THE MACHINE AND THE MOVEMENT +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + social movement, as +10 +} + +/{An infrastructure of code gives rise to a movement for free culture.}/ + +When the CC licenses were first launched, many regarded them as a boring legal +license that may or may not really matter. The real surprise was how the CC +licenses became a focal object for organizing a movement. As more users began +to adopt the licenses in 2003 and 2004, they ceased being just a set of legal +permissions and became a cool social brand. The CC licenses and logo became +symbols of resistance against the highly controlled, heavily marketed, Big +Brother worldview that Hollywood and the record industry seem to embody. The CC +licenses offered a way to talk about one’s legal and creative rights in the +Internet age, and to cite to a positive alternative — the sharing economy. With +no paid advertising to speak of, the CC logo came to symbolize an ethic and +identity, one that stood for artistic integrity, democratic transparency, and +innovation. + +Glenn Otis Brown recalls how people spontaneously took up the license to +express their anger at the media establishment and their yearning for a more +wholesome alternative: “If you’re frustrated with the way the world works now, +frustrated with the way the media is becoming more democratized but all these +laws aren’t really facilitating that,” said Brown, “you can just cast a little +virtual vote for a different sort of copyright system by putting the ‘Some +Rights Reserved’ tag on your Web page. But also, practically, you can help +create pools of content that people can work with and make it so much easier to +participate.” Without really planning it, the Creative Commons became much more +than a system of free licenses for sharing. It became a symbol for a movement. +Communities of social practice began to organize themselves around the CC +project. +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC licensing, and +3 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + social practice, and +} + +“Inside of the organization, we always talked about how we really had /{two}/ +organizations,” said Brown. “One was Creative Commons, the /{movement}/; and +one was Creative Commons, the /{machine}/.”~{ Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, +June 9, 2006. }~ The machine was about meeting utilitarian needs through +licenses and software; the movement was about motivating people and +transforming culture. Just as the GPL had given rise to the free software +community and a hacker political philosophy (which in turn inspired the +Creative Commons’s organizers), so the CC licenses were spontaneously igniting +different pockets of the culture: Web designers, bloggers, musicians, book +authors, videographers, filmmakers, and amateurs of all stripes. The viral +spiral was proceeding apace. +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC as movement and “machine,”, and +3 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + growth of +3 | “machine”, as +3 ; + General Public License (GPL)free software, and +1 ; + hackers : + political philosophy +} + +The tension between the machine and the movement has been an animating force in +the evolution of the Creative Commons. “You want to have something that’s +actually useful to people,” said Brown, “but you also have to get people +excited about it, and build up your constituency.”~{ Ibid. }~ Some CC +initiatives have had strong symbolic resonances but little practical value, +while other initiatives were quite useful but not very sexy. For example, +embedding CC metadata into software applications and Web services is +complicated and technical — but highly effective in extending the practices of +free culture. On the other hand, the Creative Commons’s release of specialty +licenses for music sampling, developing nations, and a CC version of the +General Public License for software (as discussed below) were discretionary +moves of some utility that were probably more important as gestures of +solidarity to allies. + +This has been a recurrent motif for the organization — pragmatic, +improvisational outreach to distinct constituencies as part of a larger attempt +to build a movement. There has always been a corresponding pull, however, “not +to put ‘the machine’ at risk by incorporating the new licenses into every last +one of our software tools,” said Brown. The integrity of “the machine” +ultimately needs to be respected. + +Even as the machine was getting built, Lessig was taking steps to stoke up a +movement. In 2004, Lessig published his third book in five years, /{Free +Culture}/. The book described, as the subtitle put it, “how big media uses +technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity.” Lessig’s +earlier books, /{Code}/ and /{The Future of Ideas}/, had critiqued the alarming +trends in copyright law, explained the importance of the commons, and set forth +a philosophical rationale for what became the CC licenses. Now /{Free Culture}/ +provided a wide-ranging survey of how incumbent industries with old business +models — for recorded music, film, broadcasting, cable television — were (and +are) curbing traditional creative freedoms and technological innovations. +Drawing explicitly on the ideas of freedom developed by Richard Stallman in the +1980s, and upon legal history, politics, and colorful stories, Lessig argued +that industry protectionism poses a profound harm to creators, business, and +democratic culture — and that action needed to be taken. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Free Culture +2 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace | The Future of Ideas | CC licenses, and | law in contemporary context, and ; + Stallman, Richard : + influence of | freedom, and +} + +Although /{Free Culture}/ repeats many of the fundamental arguments made in his +earlier books, Lessig’s arguments this time did not sound like a law +professor’s or academic’s, but more like an activist trying to rally a social +movement. “This movement must begin in the streets,” he writes. “It must +recruit a significant number of parents, teachers, librarians, creators, +authors, musicians, filmmakers, scientists — all to tell their story in their +own words, and to tell their neighbors why this battle is so important. . . . +We will not reclaim a free culture by individual action alone. It will take +important reforms of laws. We have a long way to go before the politicians will +listen to these ideas and implement these reforms. But that also means that we +have time to build awareness around the changes that we need.”~{ Lawrence +Lessig, /{Free Culture}/ (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 275, 287. }~ The +preeminent challenge for this would-be movement, Lessig wrote, is “rebuilding +freedoms previously presumed” and “rebuilding free culture.” + +Lessig had reason to think that his analysis and exhortations would find +receptive ears. He was now a leading voice on copyright and Internet issues, +and well known through his earlier books, public speaking, and /{Eldred}/ +advocacy. The launch of the Creative Commons was thrusting him into the +spotlight again. Adoption of the CC licenses was steadily growing in 2003 and +2004 based on the most comprehensive sources at the time, search engines. Yahoo +was reporting in September 2004 that there were 4.7 million links to CC +licenses on the Web. This number shot up to 14 million only six months later, +and by August 2005 it had grown to 53 million.~{ CC license statistics, on CC +wiki page, at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_statistics. }~ These +numbers offer only a crude estimate of actual license usage, but they +nonetheless indicated a consistent trend. Usage was also being propelled by new +types of Web 2.0 sites featuring usergenerated content. For example, Flickr, +the photo-sharing site, had 4.1 million photos tagged with CC licenses at the +end of 2004, a number that has soared to an estimated 75 million by 2008. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and ; + Yahoo ; + Web 2.0 : + CC licenses, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + Web 2.0 environment, and +} + +The decisive choice, four years earlier, to build a suite of licenses that +could propagate themselves via open networks was bearing fruit. + +2~ Building the CC Machine +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + “machine”, as +22 +} + +It was a pleasant surprise for the organization to learn that a great deal of +individual usage of the CC licenses was fairly spontaneous. Persuading large +companies and respected institutions to use the CC licenses was a more +difficult proposition. Lessig therefore spent a fair amount of time trying to +get prominent institutions to adopt the licenses and give them some validation. +Among the early converts were MIT, Rice University, Stanford Law School, and +Sun Microsystems, supplemented by some relatively new organizations such as +Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive and the Public Library of Science, a +publisher of open-access journals. + +Personal diplomacy can accomplish only so much, however, and in any case the +Internet itself needed to be leveraged to disseminate the licenses and educate +the public. One challenge, for example, was to introduce the CC licenses — +which are not, after all, a self-evident need for most people — in a clear, +compelling way. Most authors and artists have little idea what licenses they +may want to choose, and their implications for how they might be able to sell +or share works in the future. People needed a quick and easy way to make +intelligent choices. It fell to Lisa Rein, the first technical director at CC, +in late 2001, to develop a license-generating interface for the Web site. The +quandary she faced was how to maximize user choice in selecting licenses while +minimizing complexity. +={ Rein, Lisa } + +The Web interface for the licenses has steadily improved over the years, but in +a sense, those improvements have been offset by a growing complexity and number +of CC licenses. Some critics have complained that the whole CC scheme can be a +bit daunting. Yes, the licenses can ensure certain freedoms without your having +to hire an attorney, which is clearly an improvement over relying on the fair +use doctrine. But that does not mean that anyone can immediately understand the +implications of using a NonCommercial or ShareAlike license for a given work. +Any lurker on a CC listserv soon encounters head-scratching questions like “Can +I use a BY-NC photo from Flickr on my blog if the blog is hosted by a company +whose terms of service require me to grant them a worldwide, nonexclusive +license to use any work hosted by their service, including for commercial use?” +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + complexity of | fair use, and ; + fair use doctrine : + CC licenses, and +} + +By far the more important vehicle for promoting usage of the CC licenses has +been software code. Lessig and the CC team realized that if the licenses could +become an embedded element of leading search engines, Web publishing tools, and +Web 2.0 platforms, it could powerfully promote license use. Integrating the +code into existing Web sites and software can pose some serious technical +challenges, however. Figuring out how to integrate the CC licenses with popular +software applications, Web services, and digital file formats has fallen +chiefly to Nathan Yergler, the chief technology officer of Creative Commons. +Over the years, he and other CC developers have come up with a variety of +applications to help make software infrastructures more friendly. One program +that was developed, ccHost, is a content management system that has licensing +and remix tracking built into its core. JsWidget is a simple javascript widget +that developers can easily integrate into their sites to enable users to choose +a license without leaving the site. Creative Commons has made it a standard +practice to coordinate its work with technology volunteers, startup companies, +and nonprofits with a stake in digitally enabling open licensing. It does this +work through a CC development wiki, the cc-devel mailing list, Internet Relay +Chat, World Wide Web Consortium working groups, and participation in Google’s +annual “Summer of Code” program for student programmers. +={ code : + CC licenses, and +7 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + software code, and +7 | Web 2.0 environment, and ; + Web 2.0 : + CC licenses, and ; + Google ; + software : + CC licenses, and +7 +} + +Lessig and top CC staff have worked hard at convincing executives at major +software enterprises to incorporate the CC licenses into a software application +or Web site. One early triumph came when the makers of Movable Type, a blogging +platform, agreed to make it easy for users to tack a CC license onto their +blogs. Two months later, the O’Reilly empire of software blogs adopted the CC +licenses. Then programmer Dave Winer embedded the licenses in his new Web log +software in 2003. Blogs may not be core infrastructure for the Internet, but +they are plentiful and popular, and have given Creative Commons enormous +visibility and a high adoption curve. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +6 ; + O’Reilly, Tim ; + blogging ; + Winer, Dave +} + +It had always been Lessig’s ambition that the major search engines would be +reengineered to help people find CC-tagged content. To help prove that it could +be done, Creative Commons built its own jerry-rigged search engine that +retrieved content tagged with CC metadata. Lessig and Brown, meanwhile, made +numerous diplomatic overtures to Google and Yahoo executives and software +engineers. After two years of off-and-on conversations, both search engine +companies agreed in 2005 to incorporate changes into their advanced searches so +that users could locate CC-licensed content. (The Google advanced search does +not use the Creative Commons name, but simply asks users if they want content +that is “free to use or share,” among other options.) The search engine +exposure was a serious breakthrough for Creative Commons’s visibility and +legitimacy. +={ Brown, Glenn Otis +2 ; + Google ; + Yahoo +} + +After a few years, the CC licenses were integrated into a number of other +software platforms. It became possible to search for CClicensed images +(Flickr), video programs (blip.tv), music (Owl), and old Web content (Internet +Archive, SpinXpress). With these search tools, Internet users had a practical +way to locate blues tunes that could be remixed, photos of the Eiffel Tower +that could be modified and sold, and articles about flower arrangements that +could be legally republished. Advertisers, publishers, and other companies +could search for images, songs, and text that could be licensed for commercial +use. + +Lessig and Brown worked hard to get other major Web and software companies to +make it easy for users to tag content with CC licenses. The ultimate goal was +to make it easy for users to automate their preferences. Joi Ito, a Japanese +venture capitalist and democratic reformer who became the chair of the Creative +Commons’s board of directors in 2006, put it this way: “Every input device that +you have, whether it’s a camera phone, a digital camera or PowerPoint software, +should allow you to automatically set it to the CC license that you want. And +the minute you take that picture, you’ve already expressed how you would want +that picture to be used.” +={ Ito, Joichi } + +Creative Commons also urged open-source software communities to incorporate +CC-made software into their applications so that users can more easily tag +content with the licenses or find licensed works. Firefox, for example, has +integrated a Creative Commons search function into the drop-down menu of its +browser search interface. It also has a plug-in module called MozCC that scans +for any CC metadata as you browse Web pages, and then reports on the browser +status bar how content is licensed. CC licenses have been integrated into other +software as well, such as Songbird, a free software media player, and Inkscape, +a free vector-graphics program similar to Adobe Illustrator. +={ open source software : + CC licenses, and +2 +} + +Application by application, Web site by Web site, the Creative Commons board +and staff have tried to insinuate the licenses into as many software +applications and Web services as they could, in a kind of behind-the-scenes +enactment of Lessig’s book /{Code}/. If code is law, then let’s write it +ourselves! The diffusion of the licenses has tended to occur through personal +connections of Lessig, CC board members, and friendly tech entrepreneurs and +programmers. Joi Ito used his contacts at Sony to persuade it to develop a +video remix Web site in Japan that uses CC licenses as the default choice. For +Sony, the licenses help the company avoid any whiff of legal impropriety +because users must stipulate whether their video remixes may be shared or not. +={ code : + as law ; + law : + code as ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ; + Ito, Joichi +} + +In 2006, Microsoft went so far as to come out with a plug-in module for its +Word program, enabling writers to tag their text documents with CC licenses. At +the time, many CC fans grumbled at the hypocrisy of Microsoft, the +five-hundred-pound gorilla of proprietary software, embracing the Creative +Commons, even in such a modest way. But for Lessig and CC board members, any +business that chooses to advance the reach of free culture — in this case, by +accessing the 400 million users of Microsoft Office — is welcomed. While this +ecumenical tolerance has made the Creative Commons a big-tent movement with an +eclectic assortment of players, it has also provoked bitter complaints in free +software and Wikipedia circles that the Creative Commons promotes a fuzzy, +incoherent vision of “freedom” in the digital world (an issue to which I return +in chapter 9). +={ Microsoft : + CC licenses, and +} + +One vexing problem that CC developers confronted was how to digitally tag +stand-alone files as CC-licensed work if they are not on the Web. How could one +tag an MP3 file, for example, to show that the music is under a CC license? One +problem with just inserting a CC tag onto the MP3 file is that anyone could +fraudulently mark the file as CC-licensed. To prevent scams, Neeru Paharia, +then CC assistant director, and other developers came up with a solution that +requires any stand-alone digital files that are embedded with CC licenses to +include a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that links to a Web page verifying the +assertions made on the file. +={ Paharia, Neeru } + +The practice of embedding CC license information on digital files has been +called /{digital rights expression}/ — a kind of benign analogue to digital +rights management. The purpose is to embed information about the copyright +status of a work /{in}/ the digital file. Unlike DRM, the goal is not to try to +build an infrastructure for enforcing those rights or controlling how people +may use a work. “Instead of using technology to ensure that the consumer can’t +do anything with it,” said Mike Linksvayer, CC vice president and former chief +technology officer, “we’re trying to use technology to ensure that people can +find a CC-licensed work. If they’re looking, for instance, for music that can +remixed, then this information will help a search engine locate that +information.”~{ Interview with Mike Linksvayer, February 7, 2007. }~ +={ Linksvayer, Mike ; + digital rights expression ; + digital rights management (DRM) +} + +Perhaps the neatest self-promotional trick that the Creative Commons has +devised is to rely upon companies whose very business plans revolve around CC +licenses. We will examine “open business” enterprises in chapter 10, but for +now it is worth noting that a number of innovative companies use the licenses +as a core element of their business strategy. These enterprises include Flickr +(photo sharing), Magnatune (an online record label), Jamendo (a +Luxembourg-based music site), and Revver (a video-sharing site that shares +advertising revenues with creators). + +Infrastructure grows old and occasionally needs to be updated and improved. The +CC licenses have been no exception. As users have incorporated them into one +medium after another, the unwitting omissions and infelicitous legal language +of some parts of the licenses needed revisiting. After many months of +discussions with many parts of the CC world, the Creative Commons issued a new +set of 2.0 licenses in May 2004.~{ Glenn Otis Brown, “Announcing (and +explaining) our new 2.0 licenses,” CC blog, May 25, 2004, at +http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4216. }~ They did not differ +substantially from the original ones, and in fact the changes would probably +bore most nonlawyers. For example, version 2.0 included a provision that allows +a licensor to require licensees to provide a link back to the licensor’s work. +The 2.0 licenses also clarify many complicated license options affecting music +rights, and make clear that licensors make no warranties of title, +merchantability, or fitness for use. Perhaps the biggest change in version 2.0 +was the elimination of the choice of Attribution licenses. Since nearly 98 +percent of all licensors chose Attribution, the Creative Commons decided to +drop licenses without the Attribution requirement, thereby reducing the number +of CC licenses from eleven to six. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + version 2.0 of +} + +Another set of major revisions to the licenses was taken up for discussion in +2006, and agreed upon in February 2007.~{ 7. Mia Garlick, “Version 3.0 +Launched,” CC blog, http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7249. }~ Once +again, the layperson would care little for the debates leading to the changes, +but considerable, sometimes heated discussion went into the revisions. In +general, the 3.0 tweaks sought to make the licenses clearer, more useful, and +more enforceable. The issue of “moral rights” under copyright law — an issue in +many European countries — is explicitly addressed, as are the complications of +the CC licenses and collecting societies. New legal language was introduced to +ensure that people who remix works under other licenses, such as the GNU Free +Documentation License (FDL), would be able to also use CC-licensed materials in +the same work — an important provision for preventing free culture from +devolving into “autistic islands” of legally incomptabile material. Besides +helping align the CC world with Wikipedia (which uses the GNU FDL license), the +3.0 revisions also made harmonizing legal changes to take account of MIT and +the Debian software development community. +={ GNU Project : + GNU FDL ; + copyright law : + moral rights, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + version 3.0 of +} + +By getting the CC licenses integrated into so many types of software and Web +services, and even leveraging market players to embrace the sharing ethic, +Creative Commons has managed to kill at least three birds with one stone. It +has enlarged the universe of shareable Internet content. It has educated people +to consider how copyright law affects them personally. And it has given +visibility to its larger vision of free culture. +={ copyright law : + CC licenses, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + copyright law, and ; + Internet : + communication system, as +1 ; + ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + growth of +2 +} + +In one sense, the CC “machine” composed of the licenses, the CC-developed +software, and the CC-friendly protocol was the engine for change. In another +sense, the influence that Creative Commons has acquired derives from the social +communities that gradually began to use its infrastructure. The social practice +infused power into the “machine” even as the machine expanded the social +practice. A virtuous cycle took hold, as the CC community used its self-devised +legal and technological infrastructure to advance their shared cultural agenda. +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + influence of +} + +Driving this cycle was an ever-growing staff and new managers working out of +offices in downtown San Francisco. Although Lessig has been the chief executive +officer and chairman of the board of Creative Commons for most of its +existence, most day-to-day operating responsibilities fell to executive +director Glenn Otis Brown until his departure in 2005, and then to general +counsel Mia Garlick, who left in 2007. (Both took jobs at Google.) Key +executives at Creative Commons in 2008 included Mike Linksvayer, vice +president; Eric Steuer, creative director; Diane Peters, general counsel; +Nathan Yergler, chief technology officer; and Jennifer Yip, operations manager. +The annual budget, which was $750,000 in 2003, had grown to $3.6 million in +2008 (a sum that included the Science Commons project). Much of this funding +came from foundations such as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur +Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Rockefeller +Foundation, and Omidyar Network. +={ Linksvayer, Mike ; + Brown, Glenn Otis : + executive director, as ; + Peters, Diane ; + Steuer, Eric ; + Yergler, Nathan ; + Yip, Jennifer ; + John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ; + Garlick, Mia ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +2 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + funding of ; + Omidyar Network ; + Rockefeller Foundation ; + William and Flora Hewlett Foundation +} + +Once the CC machine had secured its footing, Lessig and the CC staff paid close +attention to the movement — the social communities that find utility and +meaning through Creative Commons— and to developing new software and projects +that these early adopters would welcome. In 2006, the organization hit upon the +idea of hosting a series of “salons” in major cities. The gatherings have +become a big success, and are now replicated in cities throughout the world. +Artists talk about how they use CC licenses; entrepreneurs explain how their +business models work; remix artists perform their work. The events, free and +open to the public, combine testimonials about free culture, personal +networking, entrepreneurial idea-mongering, live performances, and partying. +The CC crowd seems to enjoy partying; they do it well. Every December, there +are gala anniversary parties in groovy San Francisco hot spots. There have been +virtual parties in the immersive online world, Second Life. Because CC users +tend to include some of the most adventurous artistic talent and eclectic +innovators around — people who know where the truly cool night spots are — CC +parties tend to be lively, good times. The parties in Rio and Dubrovnik, at the +iCommons Summits, were memorable international happenings, for example — +occasions, as one self-styled Lothario boasted to me, “where a guy could dance +with a woman from every continent of the world in a single evening.” +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + social movement, as +2 | CC Salons +} + +Add to the mix tech-oriented college students, another key sector of free +culture activism, and there is even more youthful energy. Hundreds of college +students participate in a nationwide student organization, FreeCulture.org, +later renamed Students for Free Culture. The group got its start in 2004 when +some students at Swarthmore College began investigating the reliability of +Diebold electronic voting machines; the company invoked copyright law in an +attempt to keep the problems secret, leading to a public confrontation that +Diebold lost. Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, who were also inspired by +Lessig’s advocacy, co-founded the group, which has since spawned over thirty +quasi-autonomous chapters on campuses across the United States and a few +foreign nations. The organization tries to be a grassroots force on Internet, +digital technology, and copyright issues. It has mounted protests against CDs +with digital rights management, for example, and hosted film remixing contests +and exhibits of CC-licensed art at NYU and Harvard. Students for Free Culture +also organized a “no-profit record company/recording collective,” the Antenna +Alliance, which gave bands free recording space and distributed their +CC-licensed music to college radio stations. +={ Pavlosky, Nelson ; + Smith, Luke ; + Students for Free Culture +} + +We have looked at the machine and many parts of the movement, but not at one of +the most significant forces fueling Creative Commons — the dozens of national +projects to adapt the licenses to legal systems around the world. The long-term +reverberations of this movement — which includes activists in Brazil, Croatia, +South Africa, Egypt, Peru, Scotland, and dozens of other countries — are only +beginning to be felt. + +2~ 8 FREE CULTURE GOES GLOBAL +={ Creative Commons International +79 } + +/{The commoners mount a transnational mobilization to build their own digital +commons.}/ + +It is a measure of Lessig’s ambition for Creative Commons that only five months +after the release of the licenses, in April 2003, he instigated a move to take +the idea global. Glenn Brown remembers objecting, “I don’t know how we’re going +to get this done! Larry was like, ‘We have no other choice. We /{have}/ to do +this. This needs to be an international organization.’”~{ Interview with Glenn +Otis Brown, June 9, 2006. }~ +={ Boyle, James : + CC International, and +1 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +1 +} + +Professor James Boyle, a board member, was aghast. “That’s the stupidest thing +I’ve ever heard,” he said upon hearing the idea. “I was practically foaming at +the mouth,” he recalled, noting that it was “just insane” to try to adapt the +licenses to the mind-boggling complexities of copyright laws in scores of +nations.~{ Interview with James Boyle, August 15, 2006. }~ But Lessig, +determined to make the Creative Commons an international project, proceeded to +hire Christiane Asschenfeldt (now Christiane Henckel von Donnersmarck), a +Berlin-based copyright lawyer whom he had met the previous summer at an iLaw +(Internet Law) conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He charged her with +helping project leaders in different countries adapt the licenses (or, in +computerese, “port” them) to their respective national legal codes. +={ Asschenfeldt, Christiane +1 ; + copyright law : + international +} + +Asschenfeldt set about inventing a system for gathering teams of volunteers, +usually associated with a law school or technology institute, to become CC +affiliates. Once an affiliate institution and project lead are chosen, the +project lead produces a first draft of the licenses, which then undergoes +public discussion, rewriting, and a final review by the new international arm +of Creative Commons, CC International.~{ The procedures for porting a CC +license to another jurisdiction are outlined in a document, “Welcome to +Creative Commons International,” undated, at +http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Worldwide_Overview. }~ (Confusingly, this +project was originally called “iCommons,” a name that in 2006 was reassigned to +a new CC spinoff group that convenes the international free culture movement.) +={ free culture : + international +} + +In a pre-Internet context, the whole idea of a creating a new international +license architecture and network of legal experts might seem ridiculously +unrealistic. But by 2003 there were enough examples of “distributed +intelligence” popping up that it no longer seemed so crazy to think that a +passionate corps of dispersed volunteers could collaborate as catalysts for +change. In any case, following the /{Eldred}/ defeat, Lessig and Brown came to +believe, as discussed earlier, that the Creative Commons needed to be both a +machine and a movement. +={ Brown, Glenn Otis : + CC as movement and “machine,”, and ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + “machine”, as | social movement, as ; + Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft : + effects of ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + Eldred v. Reno, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +1 +} + +Going international with the licenses offered an appealing way to grow both +simultaneously without forcing unpleasant trade-offs between the two, at least +initially. Drafting the licenses for a country, for example, helps convene top +lawyers committed to the idea of legal sharing and collaboration while also +mobilizing diverse constituencies who are the potential leaders of a movement. + +According to Jonathan Zittrain, an early collaborator on the project and a +board member, Creative Commons at the international level is more of a +“persuasive, communicative enterprise than a legal licensing one.”~{ Interview +with Jonathan Zittrain, September 28, 2006. }~ It is a vehicle for starting a +process for engaging public-spirited lawyers, law scholars, and all manner of +creators. The licenses do have specific legal meanings in their respective +legal jurisdictions, of course, or are believed to have legal application. +(Only three courts, in the Netherlands and Spain, have ever ruled on the legal +status of the CC licenses. In two instances the courts enforced the licenses; +in the other case, in which the defendant lost, the validity of the licenses +was not at issue.)~{ The most famous court case involving the CC licenses is +/{A. Curry v. Audax/Weekend}/, in which Adam Curry sued the publishers of a +Dutch tabloid magazine and two senior editors for using four photos of his +family on his Flickr account that had been licensed under a BY-NC-SA license. +See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5944 and +http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5823. A District Court of Amsterdam +upheld Curry’s usage of the CC licenses in a March 9, 2006, decision; see +http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/judgements/Curry-Audax-English.pdf. There +have been two Spanish cases involving CC licenses. In both cases, a collecting +society, the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), sued cafés for +playing “free music” licensed under CC licenses; SGAE claimed that it was owed +royalties for the public performance of music because artists cannot legally +apply a CC license to their work (or even release it online) without the +consent of their collecting society. In both instances, the cases turned on +evidentiary issues, not on the enforceability of CC licenses. See +http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5830 and +http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7228. }~ Apart from their legal +meaning, the licenses’ most important function may be as a social signaling +device. They let people announce, “I participate in and celebrate the sharing +economy.” The internationalization of the CC licenses has also been a way of +“localizing” the free culture movement. +={ Zittrain, Jonathan } + +The first nation to port the CC licenses was Japan. This was partly an +outgrowth of a five-month sabbatical that Lessig had spent in Tokyo, from late +2002 through early 2003. There were already stirrings of dissatisfaction with +copyright law in Japan. Koichiro Hayashi, a professor who had once worked for +the telecom giant NTT, had once proposed a so-called d-mark system to allow +copyright owners to forfeit the statutory term of copyright protection and +voluntarily declare a shorter term for their works. In the spring of 2003, a +team of Japanese lawyers associated with a technology research institute, the +Global Communications Center (GLOCOM), working with CC International in Berlin, +set about porting the licenses to Japanese law. +={ Creative Commons International : + Japan +2 ; + Global Communications Center (GLOCOM) ; + Hayashi, Koichiro +} + +Yuko Noguchi, a former Lessig student and lawyer who later became the legal +project lead, explained that the CC licenses are a culturally attractive way +for Japanese to address the structural problems of copyright law. Japan is a +country that prizes harmony and dislikes confrontation. The licenses offer a +way to promote legal sharing without forcing bitter public policy conflicts +with major content industries.~{ Interview with Yuko Noguchi, September 12, +2007. }~ (Partly for such reasons, CC Japan shifted its affiliation to the +University of Tokyo in 2006.) In a culture that enjoys the sharing of comics, +animation, haiku, and other works, the CC Japan licenses, launched in January +2004, have been used by a diverse range of artists and companies. +={ Noguchi, Yuko } + +During his sojourn in Japan, Lessig had a fateful meeting with Joichi Ito, who +in many ways embodies the tech sophistication, democratic zeal, and +cosmopolitan style of the international Creative Commons movement. Widely known +as Joi (pronounced “Joey”), Ito, forty-two, was born in Japan and educated in +the United States. Disaffected with formal education in the U.S., where he +studied computer science and physics, he dropped out and began his highly +unusual career in Japan as an activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. +He has worked as a nightclub disc jockey, and brought industrial music and the +rave scene to Japan, but he has also become a talented venture capitalist and +early stage investor in such companies as Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, +SocialText, Dopplr, and Rupture. Lessig and Ito became close friends; Ito later +joined the Creative Commons board. He was appointed chairman of the board in +2007 and then, in 2008, he became chief executive officer when Lessig left to +start a congressional reform project. Duke law professor James Boyle, a board +member, replaced Ito as chairman. +={ Ito, Joichi +1 ; + Boyle, James : + as chairman +} + +Once it went public, the very idea of Creative Commons attracted many other +people like Ito to its ranks: educated, tech-savvy, culturally fluent, +activist-minded. In fact, following the American launch of Creative Commons, +volunteers from many countries began to approach the organization, asking if +they could port the licenses to their own legal systems. Finland became the +second nation to adopt the licenses, in May 2004, followed a month later by +Germany. In Europe, the early adopters included Denmark, Hungary, Scotland, +Slovenia, Sweden, and Malta. In South America, CC licenses were introduced in +Argentina, Chile, and Peru. In Asia, Malaysia and China ported the licenses, as +did Australia. Israel was the first Middle Eastern country to port the +licenses. + +As each jurisdiction introduces its licenses, it typically hosts a gala public +event to celebrate and publicize free culture. News media and government +officials are invited. There are panel discussions about copyright law and +digital culture; performances by musicians who use the licenses; and +endorsements by prominent universities, cultural institutions, and authors. +Lessig has made it a practice to fly in and deliver an inspirational speech. +Few international launches of CC licenses have been more spectacular or +consequential than the one staged by Brazil in March 2004. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + public speaker, as | CC International, and +} + +2~ Brazil, the First Free Culture Nation +={ Brazil : + free culture in +23 ; + Creative Commons International : + Brazil +23 +} + +Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had just been elected president of Brazil, and he was +eager to stake out a new set of development policies to allow his nation to +plot its own economic and cultural future. His government, reflecting his +electoral mandate, resented the coercive effects of international copyright law +and patent law. To tackle some of these issues on the copyright front, +President Lula appointed Gilberto Gil, the renowned singer-songwriter, as his +minister of culture. +={ Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio ; + Gil, Gilberto +11 +} + +Gil became a revered cultural figure when he helped launch a new musical style, +/{tropicalismo}/, in the late 1960s, giving Brazil a fresh, international +cachet. The music blended national styles of music with pop culture and was +inflected with political and moral themes. As one commentator put it, +/{tropicalismo}/ was “a very ’60s attempt to capture the chaotic, swirling feel +of Brazil’s perennially uneven modernization, its jumble of wealth and poverty, +of rural and urban, of local and global. . . . They cut and pasted styles with +an abandon that, amid today’s sample-happy music scene, sounds +up-to-theminute.”~{ Wikipedia entry, “Tropicalismo,” at +http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropicalismo. }~ The military dictatorship then +running the government considered /{tropicalismo}/ sufficiently threatening +that it imprisoned Gil for several months before forcing him into exile, in +London. Gil continued writing and recording music, however, and eventually +returned to Brazil.~{ For a history of Gil, see his personal Web site at +http://www.gilbertogil.com.br/index.php?language=en; the Wikipedia entry on him +at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilberto_Gil; and Larry Rohter, “Gilberto Gil +Hears the Future, Some Rights Reserved,” /{New York Times}/, March 11, 2007. }~ + +This history matters, because when Gil was appointed culture minister, he +brought with him a rare political sophistication and public veneration. His +moral stature and joyous humanity allowed him to transcend politics as +conventionally practiced. “Gil wears shoulder-length dreadlocks and is apt to +show up at his ministerial offices dressed in the simple white linens that +identify him as a follower of the Afro-Brazilian religion /{candomblé}/,” wrote +American journalist Julian Dibbell in 2004. “Slouching in and out of the +elegant Barcelona chairs that furnish his office, taking the occasional sip +from a cup of pinkish herbal tea, he looks — and talks — less like an elder +statesman than the posthippie, multiculturalist, Taoist intellectual he is.”~{ +Julian Dibbell, “We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin,” /{Wired}/, November +2004, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/linux_pr.html. }~ +={ Dibbell, Julian +1 } + +As luck had it, Dibbell — author of the article on cyber-rape that had enticed +Lessig to investigate digital culture in the first place (see chapter 3) — was +living in Rio at the time. He was friendly with Hermano Vianna, a prominent +intellectual who knew Gil and was deeply into the music scene and digital +technology. Between Dibbell and Vianna, a flurry of introductions was made, and +within months Larry Lessig, John Perry Barlow, and Harvard law professor +William Fisher were sitting with Gil, Vianna, and Dibbell in Gil’s Rio de +Janeiro penthouse across from the beach.~{ Ibid. }~ Lessig’s mission was to +pitch the Creative Commons licenses to Gil, and in particular, get Gil’s +thoughts about a new CC Sampling license that would let musicians authorize +sampling of their songs. +={ Fisher, William (Terry) ; + Vianna, Hermano +1 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +3 ; + Barlow, John Perry : + CC International, and +} + +“Gil knew that sampling was a central driving power for contemporary creativity +well before digital instruments came along,” recalled Vianna. "/{Tropicalismo}/ +was all about sampling different ideas and different cultures. /{Tropicalismo}/ +was about juxtapositions, not fusions, and in this sense was heir to a long +tradition of Brazilian modern thought and art that began with the cultural +anthropology of the early modernists, in the 1920s and 1930s, and can be traced +back to all debates about Brazilian identity in the 20th century."~{ E-mail +from Hermano Vianna, January 8, 2007. }~ + +Lessig did not need to argue his case. Gil immediately understood what Creative +Commons was trying to accomplish culturally and politically. He was +enthusiastic about CC licenses, the proposed Sampling license, and the prospect +of using his ministry to advance a vision of free culture. + +By further coincidence, Ronaldo Lemos da Silva, then a Brazilian law student +who has been described as a “Lessig of the Southern Hemisphere,” had just +completed his studies at Harvard Law School. He was well acquainted with +Creative Commons and was considering his future when friends at the Fundação +Getulio Vargas (FGV), a Rio de Janeiro university, urged him to join them in +founding a new law school. The school would host a new Center for Technology +and Society to study law and technology from the perspective of developing +nations like Brazil. Lemos accepted, and the center soon became the host for CC +Brazil and myriad free culture projects. +={ Lemos da Silva, Ronaldo } + +This alignment of intellectual firepower, artistic authority, and political +clout was extraordinary — and a major coup for Creative Commons. The culture +minister of the world’s fifth-largest country and tenth-largest economy — whose +own forty-year career was based on a remix sensibility — became a spirited +champion of the CC licenses and free culture. Unlike most culture ministers, +who treat culture chiefly as an aesthetic amenity, Gil took the economic and +technological bases of creativity seriously. He wanted to show how creativity +can be a tool for political and cultural emancipation, and how government can +foster that goal. It turned out that Brazil, with its mix of African, +Portuguese, and indigenous cultures and its colorful mix of vernacular +traditions, was a perfect laboratory for such experimentation. + +One of the first collaborations between Creative Commons and the Brazilian +government involved the release of a special CC-GPL license in December 2003.~{ +Creative Commons press release, “Brazilian Government First to Adopt New +‘CC-GPL,’ ” December 2, 2003. }~ This license adapted the General Public +License for software by translating it into Portuguese and putting it into the +CC’s customary “three layers” — a plain-language version, a lawyers’ version +compatible with the national copyright law, and a machine-readable metadata +expression of the license. The CC-GPL license, released in conjunction with the +Free Software Foundation, was an important international event because it gave +the imprimatur of a major world government to free software and the social +ethic of sharing and reuse. Brazil has since become a champion of GNU/Linux and +free software in government agencies and the judiciary. It regards free +software and open standards as part of a larger fight for a “development +agenda” at the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade +Organization. In a related vein, Brazil has famously challenged patent and +trade policies that made HIV/AIDS drugs prohibitively expensive for thousands +of sick Brazilians. +={ free software : + international licensing, and +1 ; + GNU/Linux : + Brazil, in ; + World Trade Organization ; + World Intellectual Property Organization ; + open networks : + international +} + +When the full set of CC Brazil licenses was finally launched— at the Fifth +International Free Software Forum, in Port Alegre on June 4, 2004 — it was a +major national event. Brazilian celebrities, government officials, and an +enthusiastic crowd of nearly two thousand people showed up. Gil, flying in from +a cabinet meeting in Brasília, arrived late. When he walked into the +auditorium, the panel discussion under way immediately stopped, and there was a +spontaneous standing ovation.~{ A ten-minute video of the CC Brazil opening can +be seen at http://support.creativecommons.org/videos#brasil. }~ “It was like a +boxer entering the arena for a heavyweight match,” recalled Glenn Otis Brown. +“He had security guards on both sides of him as he walked up the middle aisle. +There were flashbulbs, and admirers trailing him, and this wave of people in +the audience cresting as he walked by.”~{ Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, +August 10, 2006. }~ +={ Brown, Glenn Otis, CC International, and +1 } + +Gil originally planned to release three of his songs under the new CC Sampling +license — dubbed the “Recombo” license — but his record label, Warner Bros., +balked. He eventually released one song, “Oslodum,” that he had recorded for an +indie label. “One way to think about it,” said Brown, “is that now, anybody in +the world can jam with Gilberto Gil.”~{ Film about CC Brazil launch, at +http://support.creativecommons.org/videos#brasil. }~ + +As culture minister, Gil released all materials from his agency under a CC +license, and persuaded the Ministry of Education as well as Radiobrás, the +government media agency, to do the same. He also initiated the Cultural Points +(Pontos de Cultura) program, which has given small grants to scores of +community centers in poor neighborhoods so that residents can learn how to +produce their own music and video works. Since industry concentration and +payola make it virtually impossible for newcomers to get radio play and +commercially distribute their CDs, according to many observers, the project has +been valuable in allowing a fresh wave of grassroots music to “go public” and +reach new audiences. + +For developing countries, the real challenge is finding ways to tap the latent +creativity of the “informal” economy operating on the periphery of formal +market systems. Brazil is rich with such creative communities, as exemplified +by the flourishing /{tecnobrega}/ music scene in the northeast and north +regions of Brazil. Ronaldo Lemos says that /{tecnobrega}/ — “a romantic sound +with a techno-beat and electronica sound”~{ Interview with Ronaldo Lemos da +Silva, September 15, 2006. }~ —arose on the fringes of the mainstream music +marketplace through “sound system parties” attended by thousands of people +every weekend. Local artists produce and sell about four hundred new CDs every +year, but both the production and distribution take place outside the +traditional music industry. The CDs can’t be found in retail stores but are +sold entirely by street vendors for only $1.50. The CDs serve as advertising +for the weekend parties. The music is “born free” in the sense that the +/{tecnobrega}/ scene doesn’t consider copyrights as part of its business model +and does not enforce copyrights on their CDs; it invites and authorizes people +to share and reuse the content.~{ The /{tecnobrega}/ scene is described by +Ronaldo Lemos in “From Legal Commons to Social Commons: Developing Countries +and the Cultural Industry in the 21st Century,” +http://icommons.org/banco/from-legal-commons-tosocial-commons-brazil-and-the-cultural-industry-1. +}~ (The /{tecnobrega}/ business model is discussed at greater length in chapter +10.) +={ Lemos da Silva, Ronaldo +6 } + +Lemos believes the CC licenses are an important tool for helping grassroots +creativity in Brazil to “go legitimate.” He explains, “Creative Commons +provides a simple, non-bureaucratic structure for intellectual property that +might help to integrate the massive marginal culture that is arising in the +peripheries, with the ‘official,’ ‘formal’ structures of the Brazilian +economy.”~{ Ibid. }~ Freed of the blockbuster imperatives of the current music +market, the CC licenses allow creativity in the informal “social commons” to +flow — yet not be appropriated by commercial vendors. People can experiment, +generate new works, and learn what resonates with music fans. All of this is a +predicate for building new types of open markets, says Lemos. /{Tecnobrega}/ is +just one of many open-business models that use the free circulation of music to +make money. + +Since its launch in June 2004, Lemos and the CC Brazil office have instigated a +number of projects to demonstrate how sharing and collaboration can spur +economic and cultural development. They have promoted free software and open +business models for music and film and started collaborations with allies in +other developing nations. Nigerian filmmakers inspired the People’s Cinema in +Brazil, a project to help people use audio-video technology to produce their +own films and develop audiences for them. The /{culture-livre}/ (free culture) +project, a joint effort of Creative Commons in Brazil and South Africa, is +using the ccMixter software to encourage young musicians to mix traditional +African instruments with contemporary sensibilities, and launch their +careers.~{ http://www.ccmixter.co.za. }~ + +In Brazil, there are open-publishing projects for scientific journals;~{ +http://www.scielo.br. }~ a Web site that brings together a repository of short +films;~{ http://www.portacurtas.comb.br. }~ and Overmundo,a popular site for +cultural commentary by Internet users.~{ http://www.overmundo.com.br }~ +TramaVirtual, an open-platform record label that lets musicians upload their +music and fans download it for free, now features more than thirty-five +thousand artists.~{ http://tramavirtual.uol.com.br. }~ (By contrast, the +largest commercial label in Brazil, Sony-BMG, released only twelve CDs of +Brazilian music in 2006, according to Lemos.) + +“Cultural production is becoming increasingly disconnected from traditional +media forms,” said Lemos, because mass media institutions “are failing to +provide the adequate incentives for culture to be produced and circulated. . . +. Cultural production is migrating to civil society and/or the peripheries, +which more or less already operate in a ‘social commons’ environment, and do +not depend on intellectual property within their business models.”~{ Ronaldo +Lemos, “From Legal Commons to Social Commons: Developing Countries and the +Cultural Industry in the 21st Century,” +http://icommons.org/banco/from-legal-commons-to-social-commons-brazil-and-the-culturalindustry-1. +}~ + +As more people have adopted legal modes of copying and sharing under CC +licenses, it is changing the social and political climate for copyright reform. +Now that CC Brazil can cite all sorts of successful free culture ventures, it +can more persuasively advocate for a Brazilian version of the fair use doctrine +and press for greater photocopying privileges in educational settings (which +are legally quite restrictive). +={ free culture : + international +2 +} + +Although the CC licenses are now familiar to many Brazilians, they have +encountered some resistance, mostly from lawyers. “Among all other audiences — +musicians, artists, writers — they were extremely well received,” said Lemos. +When he presented the CC licenses to an audience of three hundred lawyers, +however, he recalls that a famous law professor publicly scoffed: “You’re +saying this because you’re young, foolish, and communist.” Three years later, +Lemos discovered that the professor was using his intellectual property +textbook in her class. + +As a unique global ambassador of creative sharing, Gilberto Gil did a lot to +take the CC licenses to other nations and international forums such as the +World Intellectual Property Organization. The day before his 2004 benefit +concert for the Creative Commons in New York City with David Byrne, Gil +delivered a powerful speech explaining the political implications of free +culture: +={ Byrne, David ; + Gil, Gilberto +3 ; + World Intellectual Property Organization +} + +_1 A global movement has risen up in affirmation of digital culture. This +movement bears the banners of free software and digital inclusion, as well as +the banner of the endless expansion of the circulation of information and +creation, and it is the perfect model for a Latin-American developmental +cultural policy (other developments are possible) of the most anti-xenophobic, +anti-authoritarian, anti-bureaucratizing, anti-centralizing, and for the very +reason, profoundly democratic and transformative sort.~{ Gil remarks at New +York University, September 19, 2004, at +http://www.nyu.edu/fas/NewsEvents/Events/Minister_Gil_speech.pdf. }~ + +The Brazilian government was making digital culture “one of its strategic +public policies,” Gil said, because “the most important political battle that +is being fought today in the technological, economic, social and cultural +fields has to do with free software and with the method digital freedom has put +in place for the production of shared knowledge. This battle may even signify a +change in subjectivity, with critical consequences for the very concept of +civilization we shall be using in the near future.”~{ Ibid. }~ + +To advance this new paradigm, Gil, who left his post as culture minister in +2008, called for the rise of “new creative /{mestizo}/ [hybrid] industries” +that break with the entrenched habits of the past. Such businesses “have to be +flexible and dynamic; they have to be negotiated and re-negotiated, so that +they may contemplate the richness, the complexity, the dynamism and the speed +of reality itself and of society itself, without becoming impositions.”~{ Ibid. +}~ + +2~ National Variations of a Global Idea + +When it comes to free culture, Brazil is clearly a special case. But citizens +in more than seventy nations have stepped forward to build a CC presence in +their societies. Each has shown its own distinctive interests. + +Tomislav Medak, a philosopher by training and a copyfighter by circumstance, +runs the Multimedia Institute in Zagreb, Croatia, a cultural center that +consists mostly of a performance space, a lounge, and a café. The organization +survives on donations from the likes of George Soros’s Open Society Institute, +but it thrives because it is the gathering place for an avant-garde corps of +electronic musicmakers, publishers, performers, and hackers. Mainstream Croats +would probably describe the community as a bunch of +“cyberSerbian-gay-Communists,” said Medak, which he concedes is not +inaccurate.~{ Interview with Tomislav Medak, CC Croatia, June 25, 2006. }~ But +the institute is not just a coalition of minority interests; it is also +broad-spectrum champion of cultural freedom. It sees free software, civil +liberties, and artists’ rights as core elements of a democratic society that it +would like to build. +={ Creative Commons International : + Croatia +1 ; + Croatia : + CC licenses in +1 ; + Medak, Tomislav +2 ; + Open Society Institute ; + Soros, George +} + +The Multimedia Institute was understandably excited when it learned about +Creative Commons and Lessig’s vision of free culture. With help from some +lawyer friends, the institute in January 2004 ported the CC licenses to +Croatian law, primarily as a way to empower artists and counteract the +dominance of corporate media and expansive copyright laws. “We are a country +where the IP framework is very young, and most of the policies are +protection-driven. Most policies are dictated by official institutions that +just translate international documents into local legislation,” Medak said.~{ +Ibid. }~ This commercial/copyright regime tends to stifle the interests of +emerging artists, amateurs, consumers and local culture. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +} + +“In the post-socialist period,” said Medak, “our society has been hugely +depleted of the public domain, or commons. The privatization process and the +colonizing of cultural spaces have been blatant over the last couple of years, +especially in Zagreb. So the Creative Commons has fit into a larger effort to +try to recapture some of those public needs that were available, at least +ideologically, in socialist societies. Now they are for real.”~{ Ibid. }~ Medak +has since gone on to become a leader of iCommons and the host of the +international iCommons Summit in 2007, which brought several hundred commoners +from fifty nations to Dubrovnik. + +In Scotland, government and other public-sector institutions have been huge +fans of the CC licenses. In fact, museums, archives, and educational +repositories have been the primary advocates of the CC Scotland licenses, says +Andrés Guadamuz, a law professor at the Research Centre for Studies in +Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh. +“People who want to try to share information in the public sector are turning +to Creative Commons because they realize that here is a license that is already +made.”~{ Interview with Andrés Guadamuz of CC Scotland, December 19, 2006. }~ +={ Guadamuz, Andrés ; + Scotland : + CC licenses in ; + Creative Commons International : + Scotland +} + +The BBC was a pioneer in making its archived television and radio programs +available to the public for free. In 2003, inspired by the CC licenses, the BBC +drafted its own “Creative Archive” license as a way to open up its vast +collection of taxpayer-financed television and radio programs.~{ See +http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/4527506.stm, and interview with Paula Le Dieu, +joint director of the BBC Creative Archive project, May 28, 2004, at +http://digital-lifestyles.info/2004/05/28/exclusive-providing-the-fuel-fora-creative-nation-an-interview-with-paula-le-dieu-joint-director-on-the-bbccreative-archive. +}~ The license was later adopted by Channel 4, the Open University, the British +Film Institute, and the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council. Although the +Creative Archive license has similar goals as the CC licenses, it contains +several significant differences: it restricts use of video programs to United +Kingdom citizens only, and it prohibits use of materials for political or +charitable campaigns and for any derogatory purposes. +={ BBC } + +The CC licenses have proven useful, also, to the British Museum and National +Archives. In 2004, these and other British educational institutions were +pondering how they should make their publicly funded digital resources +available for reuse. A special government panel, the Common Information +Environment, recommended usage of the CC licenses because they were already +international in scope. The panel liked that the licenses allow Web links in +licensed materials, which could help users avoid the complications of formal +registration. The panel also cited the virtues of “human readable deeds” and +machine-readable metadata.~{ Intrallect Ltd and AHRC Research Centre for +Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law, University of Edinburgh, +“The Common Information Environment and Creative Commons,” October 10, 2005, at +http://www.intrallect.com/index.php/intrallect/content/download/632/2631/file/CIE +_CC_Final_Report.pdf. }~ + +As it happened, a team of Scottish legal scholars led by a private attorney, +Jonathan Mitchell, successfully ported the licenses and released them a few +months later, in December 2005. The Scottish effort had been initiated a year +earlier when Mitchell and his colleagues objected that the U.K. CC licenses +then being drafted were too rooted in English law and not sufficiently attuned +to Scottish law. Since the introduction of the CC Scotland licenses, +publicsector institutions have enthusiastically embraced them. Museums use the +licenses on MP3 files that contain audio tours, for example, as well as on Web +pages, exhibition materials, and photographs of artworks. Interestingly, in +England and Wales, individual artists and creative communities seem to be more +active than public-sector institutions in using the licenses. +={ Scotland : + CC licenses in ; + Creative Commons International : + Scotland ; + Mitchell, Jonathan +} + +The use of CC licenses for government information and publicly funded materials +is inspiring similar efforts in other countries. Governments are coming to +realize that they are one of the primary stewards of intellectual property, and +that the wide dissemination of their work — statistics, research, reports, +legislation, judicial decisions — can stimulate economic innovation, scientific +progress, education, and cultural development. Unfortunately, as Anne +Fitzgerald, Brian Fitzgerald, and Jessica Coates of Australia have pointed out, +“putting all such material into the public domain runs the risk that material +which is essentially a public and national asset will be appropriated by the +private sector, without any benefit to either the government or the +taxpayers.”~{ iCommons annual report, 2007, http://www.icommons.org/annual07. +}~ For example, the private sector may incorporate the public-domain material +into a value-added proprietary model and find other means to take the +information private. The classic instance of this is West Publishing’s +dominance in the republishing of U.S. federal court decisions. Open-content +licenses offer a solution by ensuring that taxpayerfinanced works will be +available to and benefit the general public. +={ Coates, Jessica ; + Fitzgerald, Anne ; + Fitzgerald, Brian ; + West Publishing +} + +In the United States, the National Institutes of Health has pursued a version +of this policy by requiring that federally funded research be placed in an +open-access archive or journal within twelve months of its commercial +publication. The European Commission announced in 2007 that it plans to build a +major open-access digital repository for publicly funded research.~{ Michael +Geist, “Push for Open Access to Research, BBC News, February 28, 2007, at +http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/~/2/hi/technology/6404429. }~ In Mexico, the +Sistema Internet de la Presidencia, or Presidency Internet System (SIP), +decided in 2006 to adopt CC licenses for all content generated by the Mexican +presidency on the Internet — chiefly the president’s various Web sites, +Internet radio station, and documents.~{ Creative Commons blog, Alex Roberts, +March 8, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/text/sip. }~ In Italy, CC Italy is +exploring legislation to open up national and local government archives. It +also wants new contract terms for those who develop publicly funded information +so that it will automatically be available in the future.~{ Interview with Juan +Carlos de Martin, CC Italy, July 17, 2007. }~ +={ Creative Commons International : + Italy | Mexico ; + Italy : + CC licenses in ; + Mexico : + CC licenses in +} + +2~ Laboratories of Free Culture +={ Creative Commons International : + laboratories for free culture, as +7 +} + +In 2005, about two years after the launch of CC International, twenty-one +jurisdictions around the world had adopted the licenses. (A legal jurisdiction +is not necessarily the same as a nation because places like Scotland, Puerto +Rico, and Catalonia — which have their own CC licenses — are not separate +nations.) Under a new director of CC International, copyright attorney +Catharina Maracke, who took over the license-porting project in 2006, the pace +of license adoption has continued. By August 2008, fortyseven jurisdictions had +ported the CC licenses, and a few dozen more had their projects under way. The +CC affiliates have now reached a sufficient critical mass that they represent a +new sort of international constituency for the sharing economy. The CC network +of legal scholars, public institutions, artistic sectors, and Internet users is +not just a motivated global community of talent, but a new sort of +transnational cultural movement: a digital republic of commoners. +={ Maracke, Catharina } + +To be sure, some nations have more institutional backing than others, and some +have more enthusiastic and active projects than others. CC Poland reported in +2006 that its biggest challenge was “a complete lack of financial and +organizational support, in particular from our partner organization.”~{ +iCommons ’06 conference booklet, p. 77. }~ (This was remedied in 2008 when CC +Poland entered into a partnership with an interdisciplinary center at the +University of Warsaw and with a law firm.) CC affiliates in smaller developing +countries with fewer resources — especially in Africa — often have to beg and +scrape to pull together resources to supplement the work of volunteers. + +Not surprisingly, the American CC licenses — a version of which was spun off as +a generic license, as opposed to jurisdictionspecific licenses — are the most +used. In a pioneering study of license usage in January 2007, Giorgos Cheliotis +of Singapore Management University and his co-authors conservatively estimated +that there were 60 million distinct items of CC content on the Internet — a sum +that rose to 90 million by the end of 2007. Over 80 percent of these items use +a license that is not jurisdiction-specific; the remaining 20 percent are +spread among the thirty-three nations included in the study.~{ Giorgos +Cheliotis, Warren Chik, Ankit Guglani, and Girl Kumar Tayi, “Taking Stock of +the Creative Commons Experiment: Monitoring the Use of Creative Commons +Licenses and Evaluating Its Implications for the Future of Creative Commons and +for Copyright Law,” paper presented at 35th Research Conference on +Communication, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC), September 28–30, 2007. +Paper dated August 15, 2007. }~ The highest volume of license usage per capita +can be found in European nations — particularly Spain, Germany, Belgium, +France, Italy, and Croatia — which were among the earliest adopters of the +licenses. In absolute terms, the heaviest usage can be seen in Spain, Germany, +France, South Korea, Italy, and Japan.~{ Cheliotis, “Taking Stock,” pp. 20–22. +}~ Overall, however, CC usage outside of the United States is still fairly new, +and usage and growth rates vary immensely from country to country. +={ Cheliotis, Giorgos +1 } + +As a fledgling network, the international CC community is a rudimentary +platform for change. Its members are still groping toward a shared +understanding of their work and devising new systems of communication and +collaboration. But a great deal of cross-border collaboration is occurring. A +variety of free culture advocates have constituted themselves as the Asia +Commons and met in Bangkok to collaborate on issues of free software, citizen +access to government information, and industry antipiracy propaganda. CC Italy +has invited leaders of neighboring countries— France, Switzerland, Austria, +Croatia, and Slovenia — to share their experiences and work together. A CC +Latin America project started /{Scripta}/, a new Spanish-language journal based +in Ecuador, to discuss free software and free culture issues affecting the +continent. +={ Creative Commons International : + cross-border collaboration +1 +} + +CC leaders in Finland, France, and Australia have published books about their +licensing projects.~{ The French book is Danièle Bourcier and Mélanie Dulong de +Rosnay, eds., /{International Commons at the Digital Age}/ (Paris: Romillat, +2004), at http://fr.creativecommons.org/icommons_book.htm. The Finnish book is +Herkko Hietanen et al., /{Community Created Content: Law, Business and Policy}/ +(Turre Publishing, 2007), at +http://www.turre.com/images/stories/books/webkirja_koko_optimoitu2.pdf. The +Australian book is Brian Fitzgerald, /{Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the +Creative Commons}/ (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2007). }~ CC Brazil and CC +South Africa have collaborated on a project about copyright and developing +nations. CC Canada is working with partners to develop an online, globally +searchable database of Canadian works in the Canadian public domain. CC Salons +have been held in Amsterdam, Toronto, Berlin, Beijing, London, Warsaw, Seoul, +Taipei, and Johannesburg. + +In the Netherlands, CC project lead Paul Keller engineered a breakthrough that +may overcome the persistent objections of European collecting societies to +CC-licensed content. Collecting societies in Europe generally insist that any +musician that they represent transfer all of their copyrights to the +collective. This means that professional musicians cannot distribute their +works under a CC license. Artists who are already using CC licenses cannot join +the collecting societies in order to receive royalties for commercial uses of +their works. In this manner, collecting societies in many European nations have +effectively prevented many musicians from using the CC licenses. +={ Keller, Paul ; + collecting societies +1 : + see also ASCAP +} + +In 2007, however, CC Netherlands negotiated a one-year pilot program with two +Dutch collecting societies, Buma and Stemra, to let artists use CC +NonCommercial licenses for parts of their repertoire.~{ Creative Commons +Netherlands press release, “Buma/Stemra and Creative Commons Netherlands Launch +a Pilot,” August 23, 2007; e-mail by Paul Keller, CC Netherlands, to CC +International listserv, August 23, 2007. }~ As a result, artists will have +greater choice in the release of their works and the ability to easily manage +their rights via a Web site. Other European CC affiliates hope that this Dutch +experiment will break the long stalemate on this issue and persuade their +collecting societies to be more flexible. + +2~ The Developing Nations License +={ Creative Commons International : + Developing Nations license +9 +} + +One of the boldest experiments in the CC world was the creation of the +Developing Nations license, launched in September 2004. A year earlier, Lessig +had approached James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International +(previously the Consumer Project on Technology), to ask him to craft a CC +license that might help developing countries. Love proposed that the CC offer a +“rider” at the end of its existing licenses so that people using the licenses +could exempt developing nations from, say, the NonCommercial or NoDerivatives +license restrictions. So, for example, if a textbook author wanted to let +developing nations copy her book for either commercial or noncommercial +purposes, she could add a rider authorizing this practice. +={ Love, James +3 ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +} + +Love was trying to do for books and journal articles what is already possible +for drugs — the legalization of a commercial market for generic equivalents. +Love had seen how generic drugs could reach people only because for-profit +companies were able to produce and sell the drugs; nonprofit or philanthropic +distribution is just not powerful enough. But the market for generic drugs is +possible only because of laws that authorize companies to make legal knockoffs +of proprietary drugs once the patent terms expire. Love hoped to do the same +via a Developing Nations license for copyrighted works: “It would create an +opportunity for the publishing equivalent of generic drug manufacturers who +make ‘generic’ books. In developing countries, you have whole libraries full of +photocopied books. You would not have libraries there if people didn’t engage +in these practices.”~{ Interview with James P. Love, June 13, 2006. }~ + +In the end, Creative Commons offered the Developing Nations license as a +separate license, not a rider. It had simple terms: “You must attribute the +work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that +suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)” — and the license was +valid only in non–high income nations, as determined by United Nations’ +statistics. Although the release of the license got considerable press +coverage, actual usage of the license was extremely small. The most prominent +use was totally unexpected — for architectural designs. Architecture for +Humanity, a California nonprofit, used the license for its designs of low-cost +housing and health centers. The organization wanted to give away its +architectural plans to poor countries while not letting its competitors in the +U.S. use them for free.~{ Creative Commons blog, Kathryn Frankel, “Commoners: +Architecture for Humanity,” June 30, 2006, at +http://creativecommons.org/education/architecture. }~ +={ United Nations } + +The expected uses of the Developing Nations license never materialized. In +2006, Love said, “The license is there, but people who might be willing to use +it are not really aware of it.” He worried that the license “hasn’t really been +explained in a way that would be obvious to them,” and ventured that there may +be “a need for a re-marketing campaign.” By this time, however, the license had +attracted the ire of Richard Stallman for its limitations on “freedom.”~{ See +Lessig on Creative Commons blog, December 7, 2005, at +http://creativecommons.org/weblog/archive/2005/12/page/3. }~ It prohibited +copying of a work in certain circumstances (in high-income countries) even for +noncommercial purposes, and so authorized only a partial grant of freedom, not +a universal one. “Well, the whole point was /{not}/ to be universal,” said +Love. “The license is for people that are unwilling to share with high-income +countries, but are willing to share with developing countries. So it actually +expands the commons, but only in developing countries.”~{ Interview with James +Love, June 13, 2006. }~ +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +1 ; + Stallman, Richard : + freedom, and +2 +} + +The controversy that grew up around the Developing Nations license illuminates +the different approaches to movement building that Lessig and Stallman +represent. Lessig’s advocacy for free culture has been an exploratory journey +in pragmatic idealism; Stallman’s advocacy for free software has been more of a +crusade of true believers in a core philosophy. For Stallman, the principles of +“freedom” are unitary and clear, and so the path forward is fairly self-evident +and unassailable. For Lessig, the principles of freedom are more situational +and evolving and subject to the consensus of key creative communities. The +flexibility has enabled a broad-spectrum movement to emerge, but it does not +have the ideological coherence of, say, the free software movement. +={ Richard : + free software, and ; + free software : + international licensing, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + freedom, and +} + +Several factors converged to make it attractive for Creative Commons to revoke +the Developing Nations license. Some people in the open-access publishing +movement disliked the license because it did not comply with its stated +standards of openness. In addition, Richard Stallman’s increasingly strident +objections to Creative Commons licenses were starting to alarm some segments of +the “free world.” What if Internet content became Balkanized through a series +of incompatible licenses, and the movement were riven with sectarian strife? +Stallman objected not only to the Developing Nations license, but to attempts +by Creative Commons to get Wikipedia to make its content, licensed under the +GNU Free Documentation license, compatible with the CC licenses. By 2007 this +dispute had been simmering for four years (see pages 212–217). +={ Wikipedia : + CC licenses, and ; + Stallman, Richard : + influence of +} + +Finally, many CC staff members regarded the Developing Nations and Sampling +licenses as misbegotten experiments. Fewer than 0.01 percent of uses of CC +licenses at the time involved the Developing Nations license, and the Sampling +license was used by a relatively small community of remix artists and +musicians. If eliminating two little-used niche licenses could neutralize +objections from the open access and free software movements and achieve a +greater philosophical and political solidarity in the “free world,” many CC +partisans regarded a rescission of the licenses as a modest sacrifice, if not a +net gain. +={ remix works +1 ; + music : + remixes ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + music, for +} + +In June 2007, Creative Commons announced that it was officially retiring the +two licenses.~{ Creative Commons “retired licenses page,” at +http://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses. }~ In a formal statement, Lessig +explained, “These licenses do not meet the minimum standards of the Open Access +movement. Because this movement is so important to the spread of science and +knowledge, we no longer believe it correct to promote a standalone version of +this license.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Retiring standalone DevNations and One +Sampling License,” message to CC International listserv, June 4, 2007. }~ The +Creative Commons also revoked the Sampling license because it “only permits the +remix of the licensed work, not the freedom to share it.” (Two other sampling +licenses that permit noncommercial sharing— SamplingPlus and NonCommercial +SamplingPlus — were retained.) +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +} + +Anyone could still use the Sampling or Developing Nations license if they +wished; they still exist, after all. It’s just that the Creative Commons no +longer supports them. While the actual impact of the license revocations was +minor, it did have major symbolic and political significance in the commons +world. It signaled that the Creative Commons was capitulating to objections by +free software advocates and the concerns of open access publishing activists. + +2~ The iCommons Network +={ iCommons +13 ; + Creative Commons International : + iCommons network +13 +} + +As an international network of CC affiliates grew, it naturally spawned new +pockets of activism. Lessig explained: “Once a country gets launched, it +becomes a cell of activism. Sometimes it is very traditional — Creative Commons +Korea is made up of a bunch of federal judges — and sometimes it is very +radical — Creative Commons Croatia is made of up a bunch of real activists who +want to change copyright. Creative Commons Poland, too, is a bunch of really +smart law graduates. But then there is the artist community, on the other side, +many of whom want to blow up copyright; they just think it is ridiculous. +={ Croatia : + CC licenses in ; + Korea : + CC licenses in ; + Creative Commons International : + Croatia | Korea | Poland ; + Poland : + CC licenses in ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC International, and +1 | iCommons, and +1 +} + +“So the opportunity and problem we faced at that point,” said Lessig, “was, +‘Well, what are we going to do with these activists?’ Because Creative Commons +wanted to facilitate activism, of course, but it wasn’t as if we could bring +activism into our core because it would make it more suspect.”~{ Interview with +Lawrence Lessig, March 20, 2006. }~ + +The first steps toward organizing this protocommunity of activists came in +March 2005, when eighty people from the various international licensing +projects convened in Boston to talk about their shared challenges.~{ +http://icommons.org/isummit05. }~ It quickly became clear that everyone wanted +a forum in which to learn from one another, coordinate their work, and see +themselves as something larger . . . perhaps a new sort of movement. +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + social movement, as +1 +} + +Here again was the tension between “the movement” and “the machine.” As neutral +stewards of the licenses, the CC affiliates could not become full-throated +advocates of a new international free culture movement. Their mission was +preserving the integrity and utility of the licenses for all users, not +advocacy. To avoid this problem, the Creative Commons, with an infusion of seed +money and CC leaders, in 2006 started a new nonprofit organization, iCommons. +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + “machine”, as +} + +iCommons, a registered charity in the United Kingdom, is led by Heather Ford, a +South African who met Lessig at Stanford and went back to her country to +evangelize the Creative Commons licenses. Working out of Johannesburg, Ford is +the activist counterpart to her Berlin licensing colleagues. She is a +gregarious, spirited organizer who keeps tabs on activist gambits in dozens of +nations and pulls together annual iCommons “summits.” +={ Ford, Heather } + +The iCommons conferences are something of a staging area for a new type of +global citizenship in the digital “free world.” The first conference, in Rio de +Janeiro in June 2006, attracted more than three hundred commoners from fifty +nations.~{ http://icommons.org/isummit06. }~ The second one, in Dubrovnik, +Croatia, drew a somewhat larger and still more diverse crowd, and a third was +held in Sapporo, Japan, in 2008. The free and open-source software community +and the Creative Commons network are two of the largest, most influential blocs +participating in iCommons, although Wikipedians represent a growing sector. But +there are many other factions. There are musicians from the indie music, +netlabels, and the remix scene. Filmmakers trying to reform fair use legal +norms and video artists who are into mashups. Bloggers and citizen-journalists +and social-networking fans. Gamers and participants in immersive environments +like Second Life and World of Warcraft. Open business entrepreneurs who regard +free software and CC licenses as key elements of their competitive, +profit-making strategies. +={ Wikipedia : + iCommons, and +} + +From Japan, there were anime artists who are into remixes. From South Africa, +print-on-demand research publishers. A bare-chested Brazilian guitarist traded +thoughts about copyright law with a Zagreb performer. An Amsterdam hacker with +a punk t-shirt shared a smoke with an American academic. From India, there was +Lawrence Liang, founder of the Alternative Law Forum, a leading intellectual +about copyright law and economic and social inequality. From Syria, there was +Anas Tawileh, who is working to produce the Arab Commons, a directory of Arabic +works released under any of the CC licenses. He hopes it will counteract “the +weak representation of the Arabic language on the Internet, the shallow nature +of Arabic content currently available and the consumption rather than the +production of knowledge.” From the United States, there was Michael Smolens, an +entrepreneur who started dotSUB, a captioning system to make any film available +in any language. +={ Liang, Lawrence ; + Tawileh, Anas ; + Smolens, Michael ; + Smolens, Michael +} + +The convergence of so many players in the nascent sharing economy, assembled in +the flesh, was a bracing glimpse into a new kind of cosmopolitan, democratic +sensibility. The program organizers stated their aspirations this way: “How do +we help one another to build a commons that nurtures local communities while +respecting the needs of others? How can we move towards the growth of a ‘Global +Commons Community’?”~{ iCommons Summit ’06 program. }~ + +Although most international commoners seem to be culturally progressive and +politically engaged, they cannot be situated along a left-right ideological +spectrum. This is because commoners tend to be more pragmatic and +improvisational than ideological. They are focused on building specific +projects to facilitate sharing and creativity, based on open-source principles. +Their enthusiasm is for cool software, effective legal interventions, and +activist innovations, not sectarian debate. + +It is not as if politics has been banished. For example, some critics have +questioned the “elite” origins and governance structure of iCommons, which was +hatched by CC board members and leaders. David Berry, a free culture advocate +who teaches at the University of Sussex, complained on a listserv that iCommons +was “creating a corporate machine rather than a democratic one.”~{ David Berry, +“The iCommons Lab Report,” sent to UK FreeCulture listserv, November 9, 2006. +}~ He cited ambiguity in the powers of the organization, the murky process by +which the iCommons code of conduct was adopted, and the board’s selection of +community council members. Still other critics have grumbled at the Creative +Commons’s collaboration with Microsoft in developing a licensing feature within +the Word application. +={ Berry, David ; + Microsoft : + CC licenses, and +} + +When pressed at the 2006 iCommons Summit to develop more formal organizational +structure, Lessig begged off for the time being, saying that “trust and faith +in each other” was a better approach than rigid rules and system. “We need a +recognition that we have a common purpose. Don’t tell me that I need to tell +you what that is, because we’ll never agree, but we do have a common +purpose.”~{ Becky Hogge, “What Moves a Movement,” OpenDemocracy.org, June 27, +2006, at www.opendemocracy.net/media-commons/movement_3686.jsp. }~ This +provoked Tom Chance, a free software and free culture advocate, to complain +that “Lessig’s call to base the organization on ‘trust and faith in each other’ +is too idealistic and undemocratic.” +={ Chance, Tom ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + iCommons, and +} + +The encounter nicely captures the quandaries of leadership and governance in +the networked environment. How can the effectiveness and clarity of leadership +be combined with networked participation and the legitimacy that it provides? +How should an organization draw philosophical boundaries to define itself while +remaining open to new ideas? How should participation in online collectives be +structured to generate collective wisdom and legitimacy and avoid collective +stupidity and bureaucratic paralysis? In this case, iCommons diversified its +governance in late 2007. It invited the Free Software Foundation Europe, +Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and Instituto Overmundo, a +Brazilian nonprofit dedicated to cultural diversity, to join Creative Commons +as full-fledged partners in managing the organization. Despite its broadened +leadership, iCommons remains more of a convener of annual forums and discussion +host than the democratically sanctioned voice of an international movement. + +This is not surprising. The international commons community is still a +fledgling enterprise trying to forge an identity and agenda. The resources for +many CC affiliates are quite modest and the bonds of cooperation remain +rudimentary. That said, the international explosion of free culture projects, +above and beyond the CC licenses themselves, is nothing short of remarkable. It +represents a “vast, transnational mobilization in favor of digital freedom,” as +Gilberto Gil put it. In the early stages of the viral spiral, no one could have +imagined that a corps of passionate, self-selected volunteers cooperating +through the Internet could accomplish so much. And it continues, unabated. +={ Gil, Gilberto ; + free culture : + international +} + +1~ 9 THE MANY FACES OF THE COMMONS + +/{As the “free world” grows and diversifies, so does debate over how to build +the commons.}/ + +As the Creative Commons insinuated itself into one creative sector after +another, and throughout dozens of nations, the variety of licenses +proliferated. By one count in 2006, there were once eighteen distinct CC +licenses, not counting version changes.~[* The eighteen licenses once offered +include the core six licenses; a nonattribution version of five of those six +licenses (now retired); three sampling licenses (one of which has been +retired); the Developing Nations license (now retired); and a public domain +dedication (which is otherwise not possible under copyright statutes). There +was also a “Music Sharing license,” which was just another name for the +Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license, and a “Founders’ Copyright,” +which is not a license but a contract between an author and Creative Commons to +place a particular work in the public domain after fourteen years (or +twenty-eight years, if the author opts for a fourteen-year extension)]~ In the +meantime, other parties were offering their own licenses. While the Creative +Commons licenses had become the most-used licenses on the Internet, many people +were choosing to use Free Software Foundation licenses for text (the GNU Free +Documentation License, or FDL), the European Art Libre license, and special +licenses that various institutions have devised for the arts, music, and +educational works. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + types of +6 +} + +In theory, a proliferation of licenses is not a bad thing. By the lights of +free-market economics and complexity theory, in fact, the best way to identify +the most useful licenses is to introduce a variety of them and then let them +compete for supremacy. Let natural selection in an ecosystem of licenses cull +the losers and elevate the most useful ones. + +Unfortunately, this libertarian vision of diverse licenses competing for +supremacy in the cultural ecosystem can run up against a harsh reality of the +Internet. Too many disparate licenses may make it /{harder}/ for people to +share content in an easy, interoperable way. It is not the proliferation of +licenses per se that is problematic, it is the absence of a mechanism to enable +differently licensed works to “play together” so that they can commingle and be +used to produce new things. If bodies of works released under a CC license +cannot be combined with works licensed under other licenses, it defeats one of +the key value propositions of the Internet, easy interoperability and facile +sharing and reuse. Despite its best intentions, license proliferation has the +effect of “fencing off the commons,” because the different license terms keep +different bodies of work in separate ghettos. + +Incompatibility is a problem both within the suite of CC licenses and between +CC licenses and other licenses. Within the CC suite of licenses, for example, a +work licensed under the AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA) +cannot legally be combined with a work licensed under the Attribution-No +Derivatives license (BY-ND) or an Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC). The former +license requires that any derivative works be licensed under the same license, +period. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + incompatibility of +3 +} + +Some observers are not disturbed by the internal incompatibilities of the CC +suite of licenses. They regard the different licenses as tools for various +communities to build their own “subeconomies” of content, based on their own +distinct needs and priorities. A scientist may not want his research articles +altered or combined with other material. A musician may want to promote +noncommercial usage on the Internet but retain commercial rights so that he can +benefit from any CD sales. Not all creative sectors want to distribute their +work in the same ways. + +The incompatibility between CC-licensed work and other freecontent licenses is +arguably more problematic. At a conference in Spain in the summer of 2005, +Lessig recalls having a “Homer Simpson moment” — /{D’oh!}/ — when he realized +where license proliferation was heading. The incompatibility of licenses, and +therefore bodies of content, could lead to an irretrievably fragmented universe +of content. Lessig saw license proliferation as analogous to the Balkanization +of technical standards that once plagued mainframe computing. IBM computers +couldn’t communicate with DEC, which couldn’t communicate with Data General.~{ +Ibid. }~ “The legal framework of the licensing world is basically a +pre-Internet framework,” said Lessig in 2007. “We don’t have interoperability +at the layer of legal infrastructure.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, +October 23, 2007. }~ +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +1 +} + +_1 In my view [said Lessig], there’s a critical need for the free culture +movement to achieve interoperability. And until it achieves interoperability, +there’s a huge problem — because we’re creating these kinds of autistic islands +of freedom. Basically, the stuff produced in the Wikimedia world is free, but +can only be used in the Wikimedia world; the stuff created in the Creative +Commons world is free, but can only be used in the Creative Commons world — and +never the two will meet. That’s very destructive, because what we want is a +kind of invisible platform of freedom that everybody can then build on. It’s +been my objective from the very beginning to find the way to assure that we +would get that platform.~{ Ibid. }~ + +A critic might call it “the revenge of choice” — the inevitable outcome of a +neoliberal philosophy that privileges individualism and choice, rather than a +collective concern for the commons. This is the view of Niva Elkin-Koren, a law +professor at the University of Haifa (which coincidentally is the host of CC +Israel). Elkin-Koren argues that the Creative Commons is replicating and +reinforcing property rights discourse and failing to advance the cause of +copyright reform. Because the Creative Commons is plagued by an “ideological +fuzziness” that does not adequately set forth a philosophical vision of freedom +or the commons, Elkin-Koren believes the CC project threatens to “spread and +strengthen the proprietary regime in information.”~{ Niva Elkin-Koren, +“Exploring Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit,” chapter XIV +in Lucie Guibault and P. Bernt Hugenholtz, editors, /{The Future of the Public +Domain: Identifying the Commons in Information Law}/ (Alphen aan den Rijn, +Netherlands: Kluwer Law International BV, 2006). }~ +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + critics of +5 +} + +This critique was at the heart of one of the most serious internecine squabbles +in the movement, the struggle to make Wikipedia content — licensed under the +Free Software Foundation’s GNU Free Documentation License — compatible with +CC-licensed content. The failure to find a solution, after four years of +negotiation, threatened to keep two great bodies of Internet content from +legally commingling and cause further fragmentation of open content. +={ Wikipedia : + CC licenses, and ; + GNU Project : + GNU FDL ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +There are other controversies. Anticapitalist leftists periodically take the +Creative Commons to task for being too politically respectable. Friendly voices +from underdeveloped nations of the Southern Hemisphere have raised alarms that +the public domain is just another excuse for corporate exploitation of their +resources. Others from the South argue that the informal, social commons +inhabited by poor people — the “nonlegal commons” — deserve respect, too. And +then there are copyright traditionalists, who believe that a redoubled effect +to fortify the fair use doctrine should be a top priority. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + public domain, and ; + public domain : + CC licenses, and +} + +For the most part, the general public is oblivious to these internecine +disputes. Who cares about the relative merits of using a GNU Free Documentation +License for Wikipedia entries instead of a Creative Commons license? The +layperson may not understand the long-term implications of vesting individual +authors with the choice of how to share a work (in the style of the Creative +Commons) as opposed to vesting communities of practice with those rights (in +the style of the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License). Yet tech +sophisticates realize that, in the context of the Internet, uninformed choices +today can have serious practical consequences tomorrow. The terms of a license +or the design of a software application or digital appliance can prevent people +from sharing or reusing works. Bodies of content may become legally +incompatible. Consumer freedoms to innovate and distribute may be limited. And +then there are second-order questions that have great symbolic importance +within the movement, such as, Whose vision of “freedom” in digital spaces shall +we endorse? What is philosophically desirable and consistent? +={ Wikipedia : + CC licenses, and ; + free culture : + sharing ethic of ; + Internet : + future of +} + +For a movement that aspires to simplify copyright law, the free culture +movement has gotten embroiled in knotty debates that might give lawyers +headaches. It is not easy to tell if the disputants are persnickety zealots who +have spent too much time in front of their screens or latter-day Jeffersons, +Madisons, and Hamiltons— brilliant thinkers who are astute enough to understand +the longterm implications of some difficult issues and passionate enough to +take a stand. One person’s arcana can be another person’s foundational +principle, and one person’s quest for intellectual clarity is another person’s +distraction from the messy challenges of building a movement. + +That is the basic problem of the crazy-quilt network that constitutes the free +world. There are, in fact, so many divergent, sometimes competing, sometimes +congruent agendas that it can be difficult to orchestrate them into a single, +harmonious song. For better or worse, the passions that animate culture +jammers, copyright reformers, hackers, law scholars, artists, scientists, and +countless others in seventy-plus countries are widely divergent. Although the +intramovement disagreements may sometimes seem gratuitous, sectarian, and +overblown, they are, in fact, understandable. The commoners tend to see their +projects as part of a larger, ennobling enterprise— the construction of a new +democratic polity and cultural ecology. It makes sense to fret about the +technical, legal, and philosophical details when so much is potentially at +stake. + +2~ Individual Choice Versus the Commons +={ commons : + individual choice vs. +8 +} + +It turns out that overcoming license incompatibilities is not such an easy +task. Any attempt to bridge differences immediately runs into mind-bending +legal complexities. Crafting new licensing language can trigger philosophical +disagreements, some of which may be proxies for turf issues and personal +control. One of the major philosophical disagreements involves the one raised +by Elkin-Koren: the merits of individual choice versus the commons. Should +individuals be allowed to choose how their work may circulate in the wider +world, or is such legal partitioning of culture an affront to the value +proposition of the commons and its sharing ethic? Why should the choices of +individual creators be privileged over the creative needs of the general +culture? +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + incompatibility of +4 +} + +The question is a divisive one. The answer that you give, Yochai Benkler of +Harvard Law School told me, “depends on whether you think that what you’re +doing is building a political movement or whether you’re building a commons +that has narrower appeal, but is potentially, more functionally unitary.”~{ +Interview with Yochai Benkler, February 7, 2006. }~ A movement is about +building a “big tent,” he said — a vision that accommodates many different +types of people with different preferences. If you are building a movement, +then you will use terminologies that are attractive to a very broad range of +liberal and illiberal conceptions of choice, he said. +={ Benkler, Yochai : + social movements, on ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + social movement, as +} + +But a commons — of the sort that Richard Stallman’s GPL enables for software +code — requires that its members honor a community’s social and moral +priorities. A commons does not cater to individual preferences; its first +priority is to advance the shared goals and relationships of the community. A +commons is not oblivious to the self-interest of individuals. It just fulfills +that self-interest in a different way. A commons does not confer benefits +through individual negotiations or transactions, but instead through an +individual’s good-faith participation in an ongoing, collective process. There +is no individual quid pro quo, in other words. A person’s contributions accrue +to the collective — and benefits flow from belonging to that collective. This +is not an exotic or communistic model; it more or less resembles a scientist’s +relationship with his research discipline. In the style of a gift economy, a +scientist’s articles and lectures are gifts to the discipline; in return, he +enjoys privileged access to his colleagues and their research. +={ Stallman, Richard : + GPL, and ; + General Public License (GPL) : + free software, and +3 ; + Internet : + gift economy +} + +It is worth noting that a commons does not necessarily preclude making money +from the fruit of the commons; it’s just that any commercial activity cannot +interfere with the integrity of social relationships within the commons. In the +case of GPL’d software, for example, Red Hat is able to sell its own versions +of GNU/Linux only because it does not “take private” any code or inhibit +sharing within the commons. The source code is always available to everyone. By +contrast, scientists who patent knowledge that they glean from their +participation in a scientific community may be seen as “stealing” community +knowledge for private gain. The quest for individual profit may also induce +ethical corner-cutting, which undermines the integrity of research in the +commons. +={ Red Hat ; + GNU/Linux : + Red Hat, and ; + code : + free access to ; + commoners : + sharing by +} + +Ironically, the Creative Commons is not itself a commons, nor do its licenses +necessarily produce a commons in the strict sense of the term. The licenses are +/{tools}/ for creating commons. But the tools do not require the creation of a +commons (unlike the GPL). In this sense, a commons of CC-licensed content may +be a “lesser” type of commons because it may have restrictions on what content +may be shared, and how. The choices of individual authors, not the preexisting +claims of the community, are considered paramount. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + tools for creating commons, as +3 +} + +Is one type of commons superior to the others? Does one offer a superior vision +of “freedom”? This philosophical issue has been a recurrent source of tension +between the Free Software Foundation, the steward of the GPL, and the Creative +Commons, whose licenses cater to individual choice. + +Strictly speaking, a commons essentially offers a binary choice, explained +Benkler: “You’re in the commons or you’re out of the commons.” By broadening +that binary choice, the CC licenses make the commons a more complicated and +ambiguous enterprise. This is precisely what some critics like Stallman have +found objectionable about certain CC licenses. They don’t necessarily help +forge a community of shared values and commitments. Or as two British critics, +David Berry and Giles Moss, have put it, the CC licenses create “commons +without commonality.”~{ David Berry and Giles Moss, “On the ‘Creative Commons’: +A Critique of the Commons without Commonality,” Free Software Magazine, July +15, 2005, at +http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/commons_without_commonality. }~ +={ Benkler, Yochai : + social movements, on ; + Berry, David ; + Moss, Giles ; + Stallman, Richard : + criticisms by +} + +Inviting authors to choose how their work may circulate can result in different +types of “commons economies” that may or may not be interoperable. ShareAlike +content is isolated from NoDerivatives content; NonCommercial content cannot be +used for commercial purposes without explicit permission; and so on. +CC-licensed works may themselves be incompatible with content licensed under +other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License. + +2~ Freedom, the Commons, and Movement Building +={ free culture +9 } + +The slightly confused layperson may ask, Why does all of this matter? The +answer may depend on your commitment to the commons as a different (better?) +way of creating value. Do you believe in individual freedom and choice, as +conceived by contemporary liberal societies? Or do you believe in the +/{different type of freedom}/ that comes through participation in a community +of shared values? +={ commons : + individual choice vs. +8 +} + +Does this state the choice too starkly, as an either/or proposition? Some +believe that it does. Perhaps a broader taxonomy of commons is possible. +Perhaps a commons can accommodate some measure of individual choice. Or is that +an oxymoron? + +These are pivotal questions. The answers point toward different visions of free +culture and different strategic ideas about movement building. Is it enough to +put forward a demanding, utopian ideal of the commons, and hope that it will +attract a corps of true believers willing to toil away in the face of general +indifference or hostility? This is essentially what Stallman has done. Or is it +better to build a “coalition of the reasonable,” so that a more accessible, +practical vision can gain widespread social acceptance and political traction +in a relatively short period of time? This is the vision that drives Larry +Lessig and his allies. +={ Stallman, Richard : + criticisms by | freedom, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + freedom, and ; + free culture : + differing visions of +3 +} + +Some critics accuse Creative Commons of betraying the full potential of the +commons because its licenses empower individual authors to decide how +“shareable” their works can be. The licenses do not place the needs of the +general culture or the commons first, as a matter of universal policy, and some +licenses restrict how a work may be used. The lamentable result, say critics +like Niva Elkin-Koren, is a segmented body of culture that encourages people to +think of cultural works as property. People internalize the norms, such as +“This is /{my work}/ and /{I’ll}/ decide how it shall be used by others.” +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + commoners : + sharing by +1 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + critics of +2 +} + +This can be seen in the actual choices that CC licensors tend to use. Some 67 +percent of CC-licensed works do not allow commercial usage.~{ Based on Yahoo +queries, June 13, 2006, at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_Statistics. +}~ Arguments go back and forth about whether the NC restriction enhances or +shrinks freedom. Many musicians and writers want to promote their works on the +Internet while retaining the possibility of commercial gain, however remote; +this would seem a strike for freedom. Yet critics note that the NC license is +often used indiscriminately, even when commercial sales are a remote +possibility. This precludes even modest commercial reuses of a work, such as +reposting of content on a blog with advertising.~{ Eric Muller, “The Case for +Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons–NC License,” at +http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC. }~ + +The larger point of criticism is that the Creative Commons licenses do not +“draw a line in the sand” about what types of freedoms are inherent to the +commons. In the interest of building a broad movement, Creative Commons does +not insist upon a clear standard of freedom or prescribe how a commons should +be structured. + +“While ideological diversity may be crucial for the successes of a social +movement,” observed Elkin-Koren, “it may impair attempts to make creative works +more accessible. The lack of a core perception of freedom in information, may +lead to ideological fuzziness. This could interfere with the goal of offering a +workable and sustainable alternative to copyright.”~{ Niva Elkin-Koren, +“Exploring Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit,” chapter 14 +in Lucie Guibault and P. Bernt Hugenholtz, editors, /{The Future of the Public +Domain: Identifying the Commons in Information Law}/ (The Netherlands: Kluwer +Law International BV, 2006), p. 326. }~ In an essay that offers “a skeptical +view of a worthy pursuit,” Elkin-Koren says that the CC regime encourages +narrow calculations of self-interest and the same attitudes toward property and +individual transactions as the market economy; it does not promote a coherent +vision of “freedom” that fortifies the commons as such. +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva +2 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + social movement, as +} + +“The normative message that we communicate by using Creative Commons licenses +is the strategy of choice,” Elkin-Koren told me. “You’re the owner, you’re the +author, and therefore, you are entitled to govern your work. . . . No one tells +you that maybe it’s wrong; maybe you should allow people to use your work.” By +using the CC licenses, she continued, we internalize these norms. “We are +teaching ourselves and others that our works are simply commodities, and like +every other commodity, everyone has to acquire a license in order to use it.”~{ +Interview with Niva Elkin-Koren, January 30, 2007. }~ +={ authorship : + control, and +} + +But champions of the Creative Commons licenses celebrate their approach as a +pragmatic and effective way to break free from the stifling “all rights +reserved” ethic of copyright law. Historically, of course, not much else has +been successful in challenging copyright norms — which is precisely why Lessig +and others find the CC strategy attractive. “If I believed that there was a +different discourse that had political purchase in someplace other than tiny +corners of law faculty commons rooms, I’d be willing to undertake it,” said +Lessig. He concedes that his viewpoint may be affected by his living in the +United States instead of Israel (where Elkin-Koren lives) but, in the end, he +considers the Creative Commons as “just my judgment about what’s going to be +effective.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, October 23, 2007. }~ +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +} + +2~ The Splintering of the Free World? +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + critics of +20 +} + +At one point, the philosophical disagreements between the Creative Commons and +its critics did not matter so much. There was enough shared purpose and common +history that everyone could agree to disagree. And since the project was still +young, the stakes were not so high. But then it became clear that the CC +licenses would be quite popular indeed. When the Creative Commons issued its +Developing Nations and Sampling licenses in 2003, it brought Richard Stallman’s +simmering dissatisfaction with the organization to a boil, threatening a +serious schism. Pointing to the “four freedoms” that define the free software +movement, Stallman criticized the new CC licenses as “not free” because they do +not allow universal copying of a work. +={ Stallman, Richard : + criticisms by +2 | freedom, and +2 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + popularity of ; + Creative Commons International : + Developing Nations license +} + +Stallman objected to the Sampling license because, while it allowed a remix of +a licensed work, it did not allow the freedom to share it. The Developing +Nations license was objectionable because its freedoms to copy are limited to +people in the developing world, and do not extend to everyone. Stallman also +disliked the fact that the CC tag that licensors affix to their works did not +specify /{which}/ license they were using. With no clear standard of “freedom” +and now a mix of licenses that included two “non-free” licenses, Stallman +regarded the CC tag as meaningless and the organization itself problematic. + +“I used to support Creative Commons,” said Stallman on his blog in July 2005, +“but then it adopted some additional licenses which do not give everyone that +minimum freedom, and now I no longer endorse it as an activity. I agree with +Mako Hill that they are taking the wrong approach by not insisting on any +specific freedoms for the public.”~{ Richard Stallman, “Fireworks in Montreal,” +at http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/entry-20050920.html. }~ + +Mako Hill is a brilliant young hacker and Stallman acolyte who wrote a 2005 +essay, “Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software +Movement,”~{ Benjamin Mako Hill, “Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative +Commons and the Free Software Movement,” /{Advogato}/, July 29, 2005, at +http://www.advogato.org/article/851.html. }~ a piece that shares Elkin-Koren’s +complaint about the CC’s “ideological fuzziness.” Then enrolled in a graduate +program at the MIT Media Lab, Hill has written a number of essays on the +philosophy and social values of free software. (When he was an undergraduate at +Hampshire College, I was an outside advisor for his senior thesis and remain +friends with him.) +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + Hill, Benjamin Mako +2 ; + free culture : + differing visions of +31 ; + free software : + social movement, as +31 +} + +In his “Freedom’s Standard” essay, Hill wrote: “[D]espite CC’s stated desire to +learn from and build upon the example of the free software movement, CC sets no +defined limits and promises no freedoms, no rights, and no fixed qualities. +Free software’s success is built on an ethical position. CC sets no such +standard.” While CC prides itself on its more open-minded “some rights +reserved” standard, Hill says that a real movement for freedom must make a +bolder commitment to the rights of the audience and other creators— namely, +that “essential rights are unreservable.”~{ Interview with Benjamin Mako Hill, +June 1, 2007. }~ + +By this, Hill means that certain essential freedoms should not be restricted by +copyright law or any license. The problem with the CC licenses, argued Hill, is +that they cannot commit to any "/{defined}/ spirit of sharing" (emphasis in +original). This is not the way to build a transformative, sustainable movement, +said Hill.~{ Ibid. See also Hill, “Freedom’s Standard Advanced?” /{Mute}/, +November 23, 2005, at http://www.metamute.org/en/node/5597. }~ + +But what, then, about the choice of authors? Doesn’t that freedom count for +anything? CC partisans have responded. Joi Ito, the chair of the Creative +Commons, wrote in 2007, “CC is about providing choice. FSF is mostly about +getting people to make /{their}/ choice. I realize it’s not THAT clear-cut, but +I think the point of CC is to provide a platform for choice. . . . I realize +that we are headed in the same general free culture direction and many of us +debate what choices should be allowed, but I think we are more ‘tolerant’ and +support more diverse views than the FSF.”~{ Joichi Ito, message on iCommons +listserv, June 1, 2007. }~ +={ Ito, Joichi } + +Lessig has argued many times that, just as the free software community decided +for itself how its content ought to be distributed, so other artistic sectors — +musicians, photographers, filmmakers, etc. — must make such decisions +themselves. If they can’t have certain choices, then they will have little +interest in joining a movement for free culture, said Lessig at the 23rd Chaos +Communication Congress in Berlin. “We don’t have the standing to tell +photographers or musicians what ‘freedom’ is.” Why should the Free Software +Foundation, or any other group, be able to dictate to an artistic community how +their works should circulate? +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + freedom, and ; + Free Software Foundation +} + +Elkin-Koren is not so sure we can segment the world according to creative +sectors and let each determine how works shall circulate. “I don’t think we can +separate the different sectors, as if we work in different sectors,” she told +me. “We all work in the production of information. My ideas on copyright are +really affected by the art that I use and the music that I listen to. . . . +Information is essential not only for creating something functional or for +selling a work of art, but for our citizenship and for our ability to +participate in society. So it’s not as if we can say, ‘Well, this sector can +decide for themselves.’”~{ Interview with Niva Elkin-Koren, January 30, 2007. +}~ +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva } + +As Wikipedia began to take off in popularity, what might have been an +unpleasant philosophical rift grew into a more serious fissure with potentially +significant consequences. All Wikipedia content is licensed under the Free +Software Foundation’s GNU Free Documentation License, or FDL,~{ Wikipedia entry +on GNU Free Documentation license, at +http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License. }~ largely because +the CC licenses did not exist when Wikipedia was launched in 2001. The FDL, +originally intended for the documentation manuals that explicate software +applications, is essentially the same as the CC ShareAlike license (any +derivative works must also be released under the same license granting the +freedom to share). But using the FDL can get cumbersome, especially as more +video, audio, and photos are incorporated into a text; each artifact would +require that the license be posted on it. As more content is shared, the +potential for misuse of the content, and lawsuits over violations of licensing +agreements, would grow.~{ Michael Fitzgerald, “Copyleft Hits a Snag,” +/{Technology Review}/, December 21, 2005. }~ +={ Free Documentation License +10 ; + GNU Project +10 ; + Wikipedia : + GNU FDL, and +10 | CC licenses, and +10 +} + +Unfortunately, as a legal matter, the FDL is incompatible with the CC licenses. +This means that all content on Wikipedia and its sister Wikimedia projects +(Wikispecies, Wikiquote, Wikinews, among other projects) cannot legally be +combined with works licensed under CC licenses. Angered by the two “non-free” +CC licenses, Stallman dug in his heels and defended Wikipedia’s use of the FDL. +He also made it clear that he would remain a critic of Creative Commons unless +it revoked or changed its licenses to conform with the Free Software +Foundation’s standards of “freedom.” +={ Free Software Foundation ; + Stallman, Richard : + criticisms by +5 | Wikipedia, and +5 +} + +Thus began a four-year search for a resolution. Lessig recalled, “We started to +think about a way that Wikimedia could migrate to a license that we would then +deem as compatible to a Creative Commons license. That took two years of +negotiation, basically.” One proposed solution was for Wikimedia projects to +offer both licenses, the FDL and CC BY-SA, for the same work. However, it was +determined that derivative works licensed under one license would still be +incompatible with dual-licensed works, resulting in “project bleed” (new works +would migrate away the existing corpus of works). Another approach was for a +“one-way compatibility” of licenses, so that people creating works under the +FDL could use CC-licensed content. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +4 | freedom, and +4 +} + +But Lessig realized that these solutions dealt only with the issue at hand; the +real challenge was finding a more systemic solution. As various players engaged +with the FDL/CC controversy, it grew from a licensing squabble into an +intertribal confrontation. It became a symbol for everything that Stallman +found politically unacceptable about the Creative Commons’s vision of freedom. + +From 2005 to 2007, the issue roiled many factions within the free culture/free +software communities. The debate and invective flew back and forth in various +venues, and there were proposals, negotiations, and political maneuvers. MIT +computer scientist (and CC board member) Hal Abelson rejoined the FSF board. +Lessig and other CC staff entered into talks with the FSF general counsel, Eben +Moglen. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales joined the Creative Commons board. Yet +Stallman continued to resist, and the Wikimedia board would not approve any +proposed solutions. +={ Abelson, Hal : + CC board, on | Free Software Foundation, and ; + Moglen, Eben ; + Wales, Jimmy +} + +The stalemate was broken in June 4, 2007, when Lessig made a surprise +announcement that the Creative Commons was “retiring” the Developing Nations +and Sampling licenses.~{ Lessig post to CC International listserv, June 4, +2007. More about the CC’s retired licenses can be seen at +http://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses. }~ One reason was a lack of +interest in the licenses: only 0.01 percent of CC licensors were using each +license. But, without alluding to the Free Software Foundation or Stallman, +Lessig also noted that the two licenses did not ensure a minimal freedom to +share a work noncommercially— a standard met by all other CC licenses. In +addition, Lessig pointed out to me, some publishers were beginning to see the +Developing Nations license as a subterfuge to avoid meeting open-access +publishing standards. +={ Free Software Foundation ; + Creative Commons International : + Developing Nations license +} + +For Creative Commons, the revocation of the two licenses was at least a shrewd +political move; it also affirmed a stricter standard of “freedom” in the +ability to use digital materials. In return for sacrificing two little-used +licenses, the organization gained Stallman’s eventual support for a deal that +would let the FDL be treated as compatible with the CC ShareAlike license. This +was a major triumph because it could avoid the contorted, legalistic solutions +that had been previously proposed and rejected. It was also a breakthrough +because it averted a major rift between two growing bodies of open content and +avoided a slow drift into a wider Balkanization of content across the Internet. +“I kind of thought that no matter what we did, Richard would find a reason to +object,” recalled Lessig, “but he didn’t. He stuck to his principles, so I give +credit to him.”~{ Interview with Lawrence Lessig, October 23, 2007. }~ +={ open networks : + license incompatibility, and +} + +The debates about “freedom” produced several specific results. In November +2006, when Creative Commons released an updated legal version of its licenses, +version 3.0, it formally recognized other licenses as legally compatible with +the ShareAlike license if they have the same purpose, meaning, and effect, and +if the other license recognizes the CC license. The move should help avoid +future strife over interoperability. + +A few months later, the Creative Commons also adopted a “Free Cultural Works” +definition and seal as a way to recognize works that are “free,” as understood +by the Free Software Foundation. The definition declares that works with either +the CC Attribution or Attribution-ShareAlike licenses should be considered +“free” because they give people the freedom to modify works without any +discrimination against specific uses or users. The definition and seal +/{exclude}/ the CC NonCommercial and NoDerivatives licenses, however, because +those licenses do not allow this sort of freedom. The purpose of the seal is +not to denigrate use of the NC and ND licenses, but to educate users about the +less restrictive licenses and to assert a philosophical solidarity with the +free software community. +={ Free Software Foundation } + +As part of this larger effort, the Creative Commons also issued a draft +statement in April 2008 declaring the special importance of the ShareAlike +license in the free culture movement and the organization’s intentions in its +stewardship of the license. The statement amounted to a diplomatic peace +treaty, to be finalized in the months ahead. +={ free culture : + sharing ethic of +1 +} + +By May 2008 the details of the agreement to make Wikipedia’s entries, licensed +under the FDL, legally compatible with materials licensed under the CC +ShareAlike license had not been consummated. But it was expected that the legal +technicalities would be ironed out, and two great bodies of open content would +no longer be legally off-limits to each other. + +2~ Criticism from the Left and from the South + +As the Creative Commons has grown in popularity, a longer line has formed to +take issue with some of its fundamental strategies. One line of criticism comes +from anticapitalist ideologues, another from scholars of the underdeveloped +nations of the South. + +British academics Berry and Moss apparently hanker for a more bracing +revolution in culture;they object to the commodification of culture in any form +and to the role that copyright law plays in this drama. To them, Lessig is +distressingly centrist. He is “always very keen to disassociate himself and the +Creative Commons from the (diabolical) insinuation that he is (God forbid!) +anti-market, anticapitalist, or communist,” Berry and Moss complain.~{ David +Berry and Giles Moss, “On the ‘Creative Commons’: A Critique of the Commons +Without Commonality,” /{Free Software Magazine}/, July 15, 2005, at +http://www.freesoftwaremagagine.com/articles/commons_without_commonality }~ The +gist of their objection: Why is Lessig collaborating with media corporations +and neoclassical economists when there is a larger, more profound revolution +that needs to be fought? A new social ethic and political struggle are needed, +they write, “not lawyers exercising their legal vernacular and skills on +complicated licenses, court cases and precedents.” +={ Berry, David ; + Moss, Giles ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +} + +Dense diatribes against the antirevolutionary character of Creative Commons can +be heard in various hacker venues and cultural blogs and Web sites. The +argument tends to go along the lines sketched here by Anna Nimus of Berlin, +Germany: +={ Nimus, Anna +1 } + +_1 Creative Commons preserves Romanticism’s ideas of originality, creativity +and property rights, and similarly considers “free culture” to be a separate +sphere existing in splendid isolation from the world of material production. +Ever since the 18th century, the ideas of “creativity” and “originality” have +been inextricably linked to an anti-commons of knowledge. Creative Commons is +no exception. There’s no doubt that Creative Commons can shed light on some of +the issues in the continuing struggle against intellectual property. But it is +insufficient at best, and, at its worst, it’s just another attempt by the +apologists of property to confuse the discourse, poison the well, and crowd out +any revolutionary analysis.~{ Anna Nimus, “Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative +Anti-Commons,” at http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html. }~ + +To ensure that her revolutionary analysis gets out, Nimus released her piece +under a self-styled “Anticopyright” notation, with the added phrase, “All +rights dispersed.” + +A more penetrating brand of criticism has come from the South, which fears that +the West’s newfound enthusiasm for the commons may not necessarily benefit the +people of developing nations; indeed, it could simply legitimate new thefts of +their shared resources. In an important 2004 law review article, “The Romance +of the Public Domain,” law professors Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder argue +that “public domain advocates seem to accept that because a resource is open to +all by force of law, that resource will indeed be exploited by all. In +practice, however, differing circumstances — including knowledge, wealth, power +and ability — render some better able than others to exploit a commons. We +describe this popular scholarly conception of the commons as ‘romantic.’ . . . +It is celebratory, even euphoric, about the emancipatory potential of the +commons. But it is also naïve, idealistic and removed from reality.”~{ Anupam +Chander and Madhavi Sunder, “The Romance of the Public Domain,” California Law +Review 92, no. 1131 (2004), p. 1341. }~ +={ Chander, Anupam +2 ; + Sunder, Madhavi +2 ; + free culture : + international +2 ; + public domain +3 : + commons, and +3 +} + +If genes, seeds, indigenous medicines, agricultural innovations, artistic +designs, music, and the various ecological and cultural resources of the South +are not treated as private property, but instead as elements of the public +domain, then anyone can exploit them freely. This can lead to serious +injustices, as powerful corporations swoop in to exploit resources that are +available to all in the public domain. + +Chander and Sunder write: “By presuming that leaving information and ideas in +the public domain enhances ‘semiotic democracy’ — a world in which all people, +not just the powerful, have the ability to make cultural meanings — law turns a +blind eye to the fact that for centuries the public domain has been a source +for exploiting the labor and bodies of the disempowered — namely, people of +color, the poor, women and people from the global South.”~{ Ibid., p. 1343. }~ +Chander and Sunder argue that the binary logic of copyright law — something is +either private property or in the public domain — “masks the ways in which the +commons often functions more in the interests of traditional property owners +than in the interests of commoners.” +={ democracy : + semiotic +} + +This critique makes clear why the distinction between the public domain and the +commons matters. The public domain is an open-access regime available to all; +it has no property rights or governance rules. The commons, however, is a legal +regime for ensuring that the fruits of collective efforts remain under the +control of that collective. The GPL, the CC licenses, databases of traditional +knowledge, and sui generis national statutes for protecting biological +diversity all represent innovative legal strategies for protecting the commons. +The powerful can exploit and overwhelm the public domain, but they are not +likely to overwhelm a commons that has a legal regime to protect a collective’s +shared resources. +={ commons : + protection of ; + General Public License (GPL) : + commons, and +} + +A more radical and profound critique of the commons came in an open letter to +“inhabitants of the ‘legal’ Commons” from “Denizens of Non Legal Commons, and +those who travel to and from them.” The three-page letter, drafted by +Shuddhabrata Sengupta, a filmmaker and writer with the Raqs Media Collective in +New Delhi, is a plea for recognizing the informal sharing economy that +flourishes beneath the oblivious gaze of mainstream society, and certainly +beyond the reach of property rights and law. +={ Sengupta, Shuddhabrata } + +“Greetings!” the letter opens. “This missive arrives at your threshold from the +proverbial Asiatic street, located in the shadow of an improvised bazaar, where +all manner of oriental pirates and other dodgy characters gather to trade in +what many amongst you consider to be stolen goods.” To this /{other}/ commons, +stolen goods are really “borrowed,” because nothing is really “owned” — and +therefore nothing can be “stolen.” This is the realm of “the great circulating +public library of the Asiatic street.” The letter continues: + +_1 We appreciate and admire the determination with which you nurture your +garden of licenses. The proliferation and variety of flowering contracts and +clauses in your hothouses is astounding. But we find the paradox of a space +that is called a commons and yet so fenced in, and in so many ways, somewhat +intriguing. The number of times we had to ask for permission, and the number of +security check posts we had to negotiate to enter even a corner of your commons +was impressive. . . . Sometimes we found that when people spoke of “Common +Property” it was hard to know where the commons ended and where property began +. . . + +_1 Strangely, the capacity to name something as “mine,” even if in order to +“share” it, requires a degree of attainments that is not in itself evenly +distributed. Not everyone comes into the world with the confidence that +anything is “theirs” to share. This means that the “commons,” in your parlance, +consists of an arrangement wherein only those who are in the magic circle of +confident owners effectively get a share in that which is essentially, still a +configuration of different bits of fenced in property. What they do is +basically effect a series of swaps, based on a mutual understanding of their +exclusive property rights. So I give you something of what I own, in exchange +for which, I get something of what you own. The good or item in question never +exits the circuit of property, even, paradoxically, when it is shared. Goods +that are not owned, or those that have been taken outside the circuit of +ownership, effectively cannot be shared, or even circulated.~{ “A Letter to the +Commons, from the participants of the ‘Shades of the Commons Workshop,’ ” in +/{In the Shade of the Commons:Towards a Culture of Open Networks}/ (Amsterdam, +Netherlands: Waag Society, 2006), at +http://www3.fis.utoronto.ca/research/iprp/cracin/publications/pdfs/final/werbin_InThe +Shade.pdf. }~ + +The letter invites a deeper consideration of how humans form commons. However +ingenious and useful the jerry-rigged legal mechanisms of the GPL and Creative +Commons, the disembodied voice of the Non Legal Commons speaks, as if through +the sewer grate, to remind us that the commons is about much more than law and +civil society. It is part of the human condition. Yet the chaotic Asiatic +street is not likely to yield conventional economic development without the +rule of law, civil institutions, and some forms of legal property. The question +posed by the informal commons remains a necessary one to ponder: What balance +of commons and property rights, and in what forms, is best for a society? + +2~ Fair Use and the Creative Commons +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + fair use, and +15 ; + fair use doctrine : + CC licenses, and +15 +} + +Walk through the blossoming schools of commons thought and it quickly becomes +clear that the commons is no monolithic ideal but a many-splendored mosaic of +perspectives. To the befuddlement of conventional observers, the perspectives +are not necessarily adversarial or mutually exclusive. More often than not, +they are fractal— interesting variations of familiar commons themes. In our +fascination with newfangled commons, it is easy to overlook a more +traditionally minded defender of the commons: the champion of fair use. It is +all well and good to promote works that are “born free” under CC licenses, say +these friendly critics. But the hard fact of the matter is that for the +foreseeable future, creators will still need access to copyrighted content — +and this requires a strong fair use doctrine and aggressive public education. + +It is a compelling argument, but in fact only an indirect criticism of Creative +Commons. For filmmakers who need to use film clips from existing films and +musicians who want to use a riff from another performer, the fair use doctrine +is indeed more important than any CC license. Peter Jaszi, the law professor at +American University’s Washington School of Law, believes that even with growing +bodies of CC-licensed content, “teachers, filmmakers, editors, freelance +critics and others need to do things with proprietary content.” As a practical +matter, they need a strong, clear set of fair use guidelines. +={ Jaszi, Peter +2 } + +Jaszi and his colleague Pat Aufderheide, a communications professor who runs +the Center for Social Media at American University, have dedicated themselves +to clarifying the scope and certainty of fair use. They have launched a major +fair use project to get specific creative communities to define their “best +practices in fair use.” If filmmakers, for example, can articulate their own +artistic needs and professional interests in copying and sharing, then the +courts are more likely to take those standards into consideration when they +rule what is protected under the fair use doctrine.~{ Center for Social Media, +at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse. See also Pat Aufderheide and +Peter Jaszi, “Fair Use and Best Practices: Surprising Success,” /{Intellectual +Property Today}/, October 2007, at +http://www.iptoday.com/articles/2007-10-aufderheide.asp; and Peter Jaszi, +“Copyright, Fair Use and Motion Pictures,” /{Utah Law Review}/ 3, no. 715 +(2007), and which also appeared in R. Kolker, ed., /{Oxford Handbook of Film +and Media Studies}/ (2007), at +http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/files/pdf/fairuse_motionpictures.pdf. }~ A +set of respectable standards for a given field can help stabilize and expand +the application of fair use. +={ Aufderheide, Pat +1 } + +Inspired in part by a professional code developed by news broadcasters, some of +the nation’s most respected filmmakers prepared the Documentary Filmmakers’ +Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, which was released in November 2005. +The guidelines have since been embraced by the film industry, television +programmers, and insurance companies (who insure against copyright violations) +as a default definition about what constitutes fair use in documentary +filmmaking.~{ Aufderheide and Jaszi, /{Intellectual Property Today}/, October +2007, at http://www.iptoday.com/articles/2007-10-aufderheide.asp. }~ +Aufderheide and Jaszi are currently exploring fair use projects for other +fields, such as teaching, as a way to make fair use a more reliable legal tool +for sharing and reuse of works. + +Lessig has been highly supportive of the fair use project and, indeed, he +oversees his own fair use law clinic at Stanford Law School, which litigates +cases frequently. “It’s not as if I don’t think fair use is important,” said +Lessig, “but I do think that if the movement focuses on fair use, we don’t +attract the people we need. . . . From my perspective, long-term success in +changing the fundamental perspectives around copyright depends on something +like Creative Commons as opposed to legal action, and even quasi-legal action, +like the Fair Use Project.” +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + fair use, on +5 +} + +For Lessig, fair use is deeply flawed as the basis for building a political +movement to reform copyright law. He argues that its advocates are dogged by +the (unfair) perception that they are “just a bunch of people who want to get +stuff for free, without paying for it. . . . It’s too easy to dismiss that +movement.” Lessig recalled the time that the head of a major record label +snorted, “Fair use is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Fair use defenders +obviously take issue with this characterization, but the accusation nonetheless +pushes fair use champions into a rhetorical corner from which it is difficult +to escape. + +A more appealing alternative, Lessig argues, is to use the credibility of +copyright ownership to argue the point in a different way. He cited the +successful campaign by European software engineers in the 1980s to fight +attempts to expand patent protection for software. Their campaign did not +resemble “a bunch of peer-to-peer downloaders who are saying, ‘Yeah, I want my +music for free,’” said Lessig. “It was a bunch of people who are the +/{beneficiaries}/ of patent rights saying, ‘Look, we /{don’t want}/ these +rights.’ That creates a kind of credibility.” From a moral and political +standpoint, Lessig argued, a movement based on copyright owners declaring that +they want to forfeit certain rights in order to /{share}/ and promote +creativity, has greater credibility than a campaign seeking to “balance” the +public’s rights against private copyright privileges. + +“I imagine a world where there are one hundred million Creative +Commons–licensed artists out there, creating works according to Creative +Commons views,” he said. Then, when Hollywood pressures Congress for stronger +copyright protections, he said, “there would be all these people out there who +are creating according to a radically different model. [Hollywood’s] claims +about extremism would just not be true for a large number of creators.” Instead +of a copyright debate that pits “creators” against “pirates,” Lessig said, “I +want to create this world where there is a third category of people who are +creators, but who create according to different values, values that emphasize +the importance of sharing and building upon the past.”~{ Interview with +Lawrence Lessig, October 23, 2007. }~ +={ piracy } + +In the larger scheme of things, the tensions between the fair use and free +culture advocates are not mutually exclusive. In the end, the two approaches +complement each other with different contributions. Both seek to promote +sharing and reuse, but the former works within the traditional framework of +copyright law; the latter is trying to build a whole new body of culture and +discourse. There is a kind of gentleman’s agreement between the fair use and +free culture communities to work on different sides of the street, while +traveling a parallel path down the same road. +={ free culture : + fair use vs. +2 ; + fair use doctrine : + copyright law, and ; + copyright law : + fair use doctrine, and +} + +For Lessig, there is little advantage in shirking the property rights discourse +of copyright law, as Elkin-Koren and the “Non Legal Commons” urge. Indeed, he +sees a distinct strategic advantage in /{embracing}/ that discourse — and then +trying to turn it to different ends. This, in a way, is what Stallman succeeded +in doing with the GPL, a license based on copyright law. Yet, while Stallman +attracted a somewhat homogeneous community of programmers to his movement, +Creative Commons has attracted a sprawling community of eclectic interests, +diverse priorities, and no agreed-upon philosophical core. +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + copyright law : + property rights, and ; + property rights : + copyright law, and ; + free software : + social movement, as +} + +By choosing a middle path that embraces but seeks to transform property +discourse, Creative Commons may avoid the marginalization of ardent leftists +and the modest agenda of fair use activism. It remains an open question whether +the ideological fuzziness at the core of Creative Commons, or the limitations +of its licenses, is offset by its success in popularizing a new cultural +vision. Yochai Benkler, the great commons theorist, understands the legal +criticisms, and agrees with them to an extent. But ultimately, the significance +of Creative Commons, he believes, has been “in galvanizing a movement, in +symbolizing it and in providing a place to organize around. From my +perspective, if I care about Creative Commons, it is as a cultural icon for a +movement, more than as a set of licenses. Which is why I am less bothered than +some, about the people who are beginning to criticize Creative Commons and how +good the licenses really are, and how compatible they are.”~{ Interview with +Yochai Benkler, February 7, 2006. }~ +={ Benkler, Yochai : + social movements, on ; + free culture : + social movement, as +4 +} + +For Cory Doctorow, the copyfighter and sci-fi writer, the eclectic viewpoints +within the free culture movement is a decisive strength: “The difference +between a movement and an organization,” he wrote on the iCommons listserv, “is +that an organization is a group of people who want the same thing for the same +reason. A movement is a collection of groups of people who want the same thing +for different reasons. Movements are infinitely more powerful than +organizations.” +={ Doctorow, Cory : + free culture movemement, and +1 +} + +The reason the environmental movement is so powerful, Doctorow continued, is +the very fact that it encompasses “anticapitalists, green investors, +spiritualists, scientists, hunters and fishers, parents worried about +environmental toxins, labor reformers, proglobalists, anti-globalists, etc. . . +. Denuding the ideological landscape of the environmental movement in a purge +to eliminate all those save the ones who support environmentalism /{qua}/ +environmentalism would be the worst setback environmentalism could suffer. +Likewise copyfighters: there are Marxists, anarchists, Ayn Rand objectivists, +economists, artists, free marketeers, libertarians, liberal democrats, etc., +who see copyright liberalization as serving their agenda. If we insist that +copyright reform is about copyright reform and nothing else, there will be no +copyright reform movement.”~{ Cory Doctorow, iCommons listserv [thread, “Andrew +Orlowski Attacks Lessig], June 1, 2007. }~ +={ Rand, Ayn } + +There is a price to be paid for all this diversity, however. Diversity means +constant debate. Debate can escalate into strife and sectarianism. And in the +free culture movement, where so many people are feverishly improvising and +inventing, nearly everything is open for debate. It turns out that this +business of inventing the commons is complicated stuff; there are many ways to +construct a commons. It is only natural for people to have their own ideas +about how to build the digital republic. + +The fundamental question may be whether the existing framework of copyright law +and property discourse can be adequately reformed — or whether its very +categories of thought are the problem. The late poet and activist Audre Lorde, +in the context of feminist struggle, declared that the prevailing discourse +must be overthrown, not reformed, because, in her words, “the master’s tools +will never dismantle the master’s house.” Within the free software and free +culture movements, however, there are those who believe that copyright law can +be sufficiently adapted to build a sharing economy, a more competitive +marketplace, and a more humane democratic culture. Others are convinced that +the legal discourse of property rights, however modified, will simply entrench +the very principles that they wish to transcend. As the movement grows and +diversifies, debates over what constitutes the most strategic, morally +honorable path forward are likely to intensify. +={ Lorde, Audre ; + copyright law : + property rights, and ; + property rights : + copyright law, and ; + free software : + social movement, as +} + +:B~ PART III + +:C~ A Viral Spiral of New Commons + +1~intro_iii [Intro] -# + +By 2008 the viral spiral had come a long way. Richard Stallman’s fringe +movement to build a commons for code became an enormous success, partly +inspiring Lawrence Lessig and his compatriots to develop the Creative Commons +licenses and a larger vision of free culture. Empowered by these tools, +ordinary people began to develop some exciting new models for creativity and +sharing. New types of commons arose. Soon there was a popular discourse about +the sharing economy, a politics of open networks, and a new international +social movement. The movement was so successful at diversifying itself that it +was able to engage in serious internecine squabbles. +={ Stallman, Richard : + influence of ; + code : + free access to ; + commons : + achievement of ; + free culture ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and ; + open networks +1 +} + +As the commons movement matured, and people came to understand the +sensibilities of open networks, the viral spiral seemed to acquire new speed +and powers. Over the past few years, it has advanced into all sorts of new +arenas. Part III examines three of the most exciting ones — business, science, +and education. Each has taken the tools and insights developed by the commons +movement — free software, CC licenses, collaborative models — and adapted them +to its own special needs. + +These spin-off movements of entrepreneurs, scientists, and educators recognize +their debt to the free software and CC licenses, but none feels confined by +that history or beholden to its leaders. Each is too intent on adapting the +tools to its own circumstances. Just as CC licenses have been used in some ways +by musicians, and in other ways by filmmakers, and in still other ways by +bloggers, so the commoners in the worlds of business, science, and education +are forging their own paths. Development requires differentiation. It is +fascinating to watch how the principles of the commons are being crafted to +meet the distinctive needs of the marketplace, the academy, the research lab, +and the classroom. + +What may be most notable about these developments is the blurring of these very +categories. On open platforms, social communities are becoming sites for market +activity. Scientists are increasingly collaborating with people outside their +disciplines, including amateurs. Formal education is becoming more focused on +learning, and learning is moving out of the classroom and into more informal +and practice-driven venues. + +If there is a common denominator in each of the domains examined in Part III, +it is the use of distributed networks, social community, and digital +technologies to enhance the goals at hand. The new open business models seek to +bring consumer and seller interests into closer alignment. The new science +commons seek to create more powerful types of research collaboration. The open +educational resources movement wants knowledge to circulate more freely and +students to direct their own learning. + +For the short term, the fledgling models in these fields are likely to be seen +as interesting novelties on the periphery of the mainstream. In time, however, +given what we know about network dynamics, the new models are likely to +supplant or significantly transform many basic parameters of business, science, +and education. The participatory practices that open networks enable are +showing that knowledge is more about socially dynamic relationships than about +fixed bodies of information. These relationships are also spawning new +challenges to institutional authority and expertise. If one looks closely +enough, the matrix for a very different order of knowledge, institutional life, +and personal engagement can be seen. + +1~ 10 THE NEW OPEN BUSINESS MODELS +={ open business models +79 } + +/{The commons and the market can be great partners if each shows respect for +the other and ingenuity in working together.}/ + +Entrepreneur John Buckman concedes that his Internet record label, Magnatune, +amounts to “building a business model on top of chaos.”~{ John Buckman +presentation at iCommons Summit, Dubrovnik, Croatia, June 15, 2007. }~ That is +to say, he makes money by honoring open networks and people’s natural social +inclinations. The company rejects the proprietary muscle games used by its +mainstream rivals, and instead holds itself to an ethical standard that verges +on the sanctimonious: “We are not evil.” In the music industry these days, a +straight shooter apparently has to be that blunt. +={ Buckman, John +4 ; + Magnatune +8 ; + music : + CC licenses for +8 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + music, for +8 +} + +Magnatune is a four-person enterprise based in Berkeley, California, that since +2003 has been pioneering a new open business model for identifying and +distributing high-quality new music. It does not lock up the music with +anticopying technology or digital rights management. It does not exploit its +artists with coercive, unfair contracts. It does not harass its customers for +making unauthorized copies. Internet users can in fact listen to all of +Magnatune’s music for free (not just music snippets) via online streaming.~{ +John Buckman entry in Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Buckman. +}~ + +Buckman, a former software programmer turned entrepreneur in his thirties, +previously founded and ran Lyris Technologies, an e-mail list management +company that he sold in 2005. In deciding to start Magnatune, he took note of +the obvious realities that the music industry has tried to ignore: radio is +boring, CDs cost too much, record labels exploit their artists, file sharing is +not going to go away, people love to share music, and listening to music on the +Internet is too much work. “I thought, why not make a record label that has a +clue?” said Buckman.~{ John Buckman at Magnatune home page, at +http://www.magnatune.com/info/why. }~ + +Well before the band Radiohead released its In /{Rainbows}/ album with a “pay +what you want” experiment, Magnatune was inviting its customers to choose the +amount they would be willing to pay, from $5 to $18, for any of Magnatune’s 547 +albums. Buckman explains that the arrangement signals a respect for customers +who, after all, have lots of free music choices. It also gives them a chance to +express their appreciation for artists, who receive 50 percent of the sales +price. “It turns out that people are quite generous and they pay on average +about $8.40, and they really don’t get anything more for paying more other than +feeling like they’re doing the right thing,” said Buckman.~{ John Buckman, +interview with Matthew Magee of Out-Law.com, radio podcast, September 13, 2007, +at http://www.out-law.com/page-8468. }~ About 20 percent pay more than $12.~{ +John Buckman at iCommons, June 15, 2007. For an extensive profile of Buckman +and Magnatune, see +http://www.openrightsgroup.org/creativebusiness/index.php/John_Buckman:_Magnatune. +}~ +={ Radiohead } + +“The reality is today nobody really needs to pay for music at all,” he +acknowledges. “If you choose to hit the ‘buy’ button at Magnatune then you’re +one of the people who has decided to actually pay for music. Shouldn’t we +reflect that honest behavior back and say, well, if you’re one of the honest +people how much do you want to pay?”~{ John Buckman, interview with Matthew +Magee, September 13, 2007. }~ The set-your-own-price approach is part of +Magnatune’s larger strategy of building the business by cultivating open, +interactive relationships with its customers and artists. “If you set up a +trusting world,” explains Buckman, “you can be rewarded.” + +Magnatune’s business model embraces the openness of the Internet and makes it a +virtue, rather than treating it as a bothersome liability that must be +elaborately suppressed. All of Magnatune’s music is released as MP3 files, with +no digital rights management, under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike +license. This means that customers can legally make their own remixes and +covers of songs, and take samples, so long as the uses are noncommercial and +carry the same CC license. Magnatune also invites customers to give free +downloads of purchased music to three friends. Podcasters have free access to +the entire Magnatune catalog. + +By using a CC license, Magnatune saves a bundle by not having to oversee +complex terms and conditions for usage of music. Nor does it have to maintain a +DRM system and police the behavior of its customers, both of which squander a +key marketing asset: consumer goodwill. Instead, the music circulates freely +and, in so doing, expands public awareness of Magnatune’s 244 artists. + +Two-thirds of Magnatune’s revenues comes from licensing its music to films, +ads, television, and shops. Like so many open business models, it has carved +out a mid-tier niche between “expensive and proprietary” and “cheap and +crummy.” Most mainstream music licensing involves either expensive, highly +lawyered deals with record labels or insipid stock music from royalty-free CDs. +Magnatune’s innovation is to offer high-quality music in multiple genres at +flatrate licenses for sixteen different usage scenarios. The deals can be +easily consummated via the Web; artists share in half the proceeds. No +accounting flimflam. To date, Magnatune has licensed its music to more than one +thousand indie films and many commercials. + +Magnatune is a small, fledgling enterprise in the $4 billion music industry. It +does not have all the answers, and it may be sideswiped by bigger players at +some point. But Magnatune is lean, nimble, profitable, and growing. It has +shown how innovative business models can flourish in the open environment of +the Internet. Unlike its bloated, besieged competitors, Magnatune is willing to +listen closely to its customers, artists, and licensing clients. It is +fair-minded and straightforward; it wants to share the wealth and let the music +flow. + +2~ Open Networks Spur New Business Models +={ open networks : + new business models in +16 ; + open business models : + open networks and +16 +} + +Openness does not come intuitively to many businesses. Competitive advantage +has long been associated with exclusive control and secrecy. But as the +Internet’s power expands, conventional businesses are feeling pressures to +rethink their “closed” business models. A new breed of “open businesses” is +demonstrating that a reliance on open-source software, open content, and an +ethic of transparency in dealings with all corporate stakeholders can be +tremendously competitive. +={ open business models : + transparency in ; + transparency ; + Internet : + rise of +} + +Open businesses understand the Great Value Shift discussed in chapter 5 — that +working through open networks and commons is likely to generate greater +consumer attention, engagement, and loyalty — and thus sales — and may +outperform a more exclusive regime of control. Working on an open network is +also the best way for a company to get smarter faster, and to stay alert to +changing market conditions. It bears noting that business models are not an +either/or choice — that is, all open or all closed. There is a continuum of +choices, as we will see below. Sometimes there are heated strategic and moral +debates about what level of openness to adopt, yet the general trend in +business today is clear: toward openness. +={ Great Value Shift ; + open business models : + Great Value Shift, and +} + +Even as broadcast networks decry the posting of copyrighted television programs +on YouTube, they clearly welcome the ratings spikes that ensue. Wireless +telephony is fragmented among many proprietary systems, but pressures are now +growing to make them compete on an open platform.~{ See,e.g., Walter +S.Mossberg, “Free My Phone,” /{Wall Street Journal}/, October 22, 2007, p. R1. +}~ European regulators are calling for “open document format” standards to +prevent Microsoft from abusing its proprietary standards in its Office suite of +software. There are even calls for open standards for avatars in virtual worlds +like Second Life, The Lounge, and Entropia Universe, so that our digital alter +egos can glide from one virtual community to another.~{ Steve Lohr, “Free the +Avatars,” New York Times, October 15, 2007. }~ +={ YouTube ; + Microsoft : + competition against ; + open business models : + interoperability of +1 +} + +Why this inexorable trend toward openness? Because on open networks, excessive +control can be counterproductive. The overall value that can be created through +interoperability is usually greater than the value that any single player may +reap from maintaining its own “walled network.”~{ See Elliot E. Maxwell, “Open +Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of +Openness,” /{Innovations:Technology, Governance, Globalization}/ 1, no. 3 +(Summer 2006), at http://www.emaxwell.net. }~ For a company to reap value from +interoperability, however, it must be willing to compete on an open platform +and it must be willing to share technical standards, infrastructure, or content +with others. Once this occurs, proprietary gains come from competing to find +more sophisticated ways to add value in the production chain, rather than +fighting to monopolize basic resources. Advantage also accrues to the company +that develops trusting relationships with a community of customers. +={ open business models : + value created in +9 ; + value : + creation of +9 +} + +Free software was one of the earliest demonstrations of the power of online +commons as a way to create value. In his classic 1997 essay “The Cathedral and +the Bazaar,” hacker Eric S. Raymond provided a seminal analysis explaining how +open networks make software development more cost-effective and innovative than +software developed by a single firm.~{ Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the +Bazaar,” May 1997, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar. The +essay has been translated into nineteen languages to date. }~ A wide-open +“bazaar” such as the global Linux community can construct a more versatile +operating system than one designed by a closed “cathedral” such as Microsoft. +“With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow,” Raymond famously declared. Yochai +Benkler gave a more formal economic reckoning of the value proposition of open +networks in his pioneering 2002 essay “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the +Nature of the Firm.”~{ Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the +Nature of the Firm,” /{Yale Law Journal}/ 112, no. 369 (2002), at +http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html. }~ The title is a puckish commentary +on how GNU/Linux, whose mascot is a penguin, poses an empirical challenge to +economist Ronald Coase’s celebrated “transaction cost” theory of the firm. In +1937, Coase stated that the economic rationale for forming a business +enterprise is its ability to assert clear property rights and manage employees +and production more efficiently than contracting out to the marketplace. +={ Benkler, Yochai : + open networks, on +3 ; + Raymond, Eric S. : + “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” ; + free software : + creation of value, and ; + Linux : + open business models, and ; + Microsoft : + competition against ; + Coase, Ronald ; + GNU/Linux : + open business models, and ; + transaction costs : + theory of ; + open business models : + “transaction cost” theory, and +} + +What is remarkable about peer production on open networks, said Benkler, is +that it undercuts the economic rationale for the firm; commons-based peer +production can perform certain tasks more efficiently than a corporation. Those +tasks must be modular and divisible into small components and capable of being +efficiently integrated, Benkler stipulated. The larger point is that value is +created on open networks in very different ways than in conventional markets. +Asserting proprietary control on network platforms may prevent huge numbers of +people from giving your work (free) social visibility, contributing new value +to it, or remixing it. “The only thing worse than being sampled on the +Internet,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, with apologies to Oscar Wilde, “is not +being sampled on the Internet.” +={ Vaidhyanathan, Siva } + +The /{New York Times}/'s experience with its paid subscription service, +TimesSelect, offers a great example. The /{Times}/ once charged about fifty +dollars a year for online access to its premier columnists and news archives. +Despite attracting more than 227,000 subscribers and generating about $10 +million a year in revenue, the /{Times}/ discontinued the service in 2007.~{ +Richard Pérez-Peña, “Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site,” /{New +York Times}/, September 18, 2007. }~ A /{Times}/ executive explained that lost +subscription revenues would be more than offset by advertising to a much larger +online readership with free access. The /{Financial Times}/ and the +/{Economist}/ have dropped their paywalls, and the /{Wall Street Journal}/ in +effect has done so by allowing free access via search engines and link sites. +From some leading citadels of capitalism, a rough consensus had emerged: +exclusivity can /{decrease}/ the value of online content.~{ Frank Ahrens, “Web +Sites, Tear Down That Wall,” /{Washington Post}/, November 16, 2007, p. D1. See +also Farhad Manjoo, “The Wall Street Journal’s Website Is Already (Secretly) +Free,” /{Salon}/, March 21, 2008, at +http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/03/21/wsj/index.html. }~ +={ New York Times } + +While enormous value can be created on open networks, it can take different +forms, notes David P. Reed, who studies information architectures.~{ David P. +Reed, “The Sneaky Exponential — Beyond Metcalfe’s Law to the Power of Community +Building,” at http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html. }~ One of the most +powerful types of network value is what Reed calls “Group-Forming Networks,” or +GFNs — or what Benkler might call commons-based peer production and I would +call, less precisely, the commons. Reed talks about “scale-driven value shifts” +that occur as a network grows in size. Greater value is created as a network +moves from a broadcast model (where “content is king”) to peer production +(where transactions dominate) and finally, to a group-forming network or +commons (where jointly constructed value is produced and shared). +={ Reed, David P. ; + Benkler, Yochai : + The Wealth of Networks ; + commons-based peer production +3 ; + group-forming networks (GFNs) +} + +It is unclear, as a theoretical matter, how to characterize the size and +behavior of various “value networks” on the Web today. For simplicity’s stake — +and because Web platforms are evolving so rapidly — I refer to two general +value propositions, Web 2.0 and the commons. Web 2.0 is about creating new +types of value through participation in distributed open networks; the commons +is a subset of Web 2.0 that describes fairly distinct, self-governed +communities that focus on their own interests, which usually do not involve +moneymaking. +={ Web 2.0 : + open business, and +4 +} + +The rise of Web 2.0 platforms and the commons clearly has some serious +implications for business strategy and organization. Just consider how +Craigslist is displacing millions of dollars of classified newspaper ads; how +open-access journals are threatening the economic base of commercial academic +journals; and how usergenerated content is competing with network television. +At the same time, activities that once occurred through informal social means +(finding a date, organizing a gathering, obtaining word-ofmouth +recommendations) are increasingly becoming commercial endeavors on the Web. +Especially when the commons has strong mechanisms to preserve its +value-creating capacity, such as the GPL, open networks are helping to convert +more market activity into commons-based activity, or at least shifting the +boundary between commodity markets and proprietary, high-value-added markets. +As this dynamic proceeds, the social and the commercial are blurring more than +ever before. + +Many “value chains” that have long sustained conventional businesses are being +disrupted. As described in chapter 5, more efficient types of distributed media +are disrupting the production/distribution chain that sustains Centralized +Media. The Long Tail lets online consumers “pull” niche products that they want +rather than enduring a relentless marketing “push” of products they don’t want. +Commons-based peer production is a nonmarket version of the Long Tail: +dispersed communities of people with niche interests can find one another, form +social communities, bypass the market, and collaborate to create the niche +resources that they want. +={ Long Tail ; + Centralized Media : + production/distribution chain of +} + +The question facing many businesses is how to develop stable, long-term +business models that can coexist with productive commons, if not leverage them +for market gain. Their goal is to find ingenious ways to “monetize” the social +relationships of online communities (by selling targeted advertising, personal +data, niche products, etc.). Open businesses aim to do this in a respectful, +public-spirited way; other, more traditional firms may have fewer scruples +because, for them, “it’s all about the money.” + +But here’s the rub: a company can go only so far in monetizing the +value-generating capacities of a commons without enclosing it or enraging the +commoners. A company may consider itself shrewd for acquiring the copyrights +for user-generated content, for example, or for blocking user access to +third-party widgets that it disapproves of.~{ See, e.g., Paula Lehman, “MySpace +Plays Chicken with Users,” BusinessWeek Online, April 12, 2007. }~ But +participants in Web 2.0 communities will protest or simply leave if a corporate +host starts to dictate obnoxious policies. A company can try to run its Web 2.0 +platform as a feudal fiefdom, but it risks inciting users to revolt and start +their own (nonmarket) online communities, reinventing themselves as commoners. +Although there is an implicit social ethic to Web 2.0 platforms, none is +necessarily “free” in the Stallman sense of “freedom.” +={ Stallman, Richard : + freedom, and +} + +Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus about how exactly to define an “open +business.” Accordingly, assessments of their social, political, or economic +virtue can be slippery. Some analysts such as Henry Chesbrough regard a +business as “open” if it relaxes or modifies its intellectual property +controls, or changes its organizational practices, as a way to reap value from +open networks.~{ Henry Chesbrough, /{Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the +New Innovation Landscape}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, +2006). }~ Others believe that an open business should use open-source software, +and support the copying and sharing of works through CC or other open-content +licenses. Sometimes the idea of open business is yoked to a vaguely defined +notion of “social responsibility.” It is not always clear whether this ethic is +a moral gloss or a structural feature, but in general open businesses strive to +practice a more open, accountable, and socially enlightened vision of commerce. +={ Chesbrough, Henry ; + open business models : + definition, no consensus +2 | social responsibility, and +} + +One champion of this vision is OpenBusiness, a Web site jointly created by +Creative Commons UK in partnership with CC Brazil and the FGV Law School in Rio +de Janeiro, Brazil. The mission of OpenBusiness is to “analyze and explain +models by which people can share their knowledge and creativity with others +whilst at the same time enjoying the more traditional incentives of profit, +individual success and societal advancement.”~{ http://www.openbusiness.org. }~ +By its lights, an open business is commons-friendly if it is committed to +“transparency,” “sustainable systems,” and to putting “the health and welfare +of people above everything else.” An open business also tries to generate as +many “positive externalities” as possible — knowledge, social relationships, +revenues — which it is willing to share with its stakeholders. +={ OpenBusiness ; + commoners : + sharing by ; + open business models : + international +} + +It is perhaps best to approach open businesses as an eclectic social phenomenon +in search of a theory. As it has been said about Wikipedia, “It works in +practice, but not in theory.”~{ From blog of Professor Karim Lakhani, Harvard +Business School, April 27, 2007. }~ It is risky to overtheorize phenomena that +are still fluid and emerging. Still, specific examples of open business can +help us understand some basic principles of open networks, and how some +businesses are using CC licenses to build innovative sorts of enterprises. +={ Wikipedia : + social movement, as +} + +2~ Share the Wealth, Grow a Commercial Ecosystem +={ open business models : + commercial ecosystem, as +5 +} + +The idea that a company can make money by giving away something for free seems +so counterintuitive, if not ridiculous, that conventional business people tend +to dismiss it. Sometimes they protesteth too much, as when Microsoft’s Steve +Ballmer compared the GNU GPL to a “cancer” and lambasted open-source software +as having “characteristics of communism.”~{ Joe Wilcox and Stephen Shankland, +“Why Microsoft is wary of open source,” CNET, June 18, 2001; and Lea, Graham, +“MS’ Ballmer: Linux is communism,” /{Register}/ (U.K.), July 31, 2000. }~ In +truth, “sharing the wealth” has become a familiar strategy for companies +seeking to develop new technology markets. The company that is the first mover +in an emerging commercial ecosystem is likely to become the dominant player, +which may enable it to extract a disproportionate share of future market rents. +Giving away one’s code or content can be a great way to become a dominant first +mover. +={ Ballmer, Steve ; + General Public License (GPL) : + critics of ; + open business models : + first movers +1 ; + Microsoft : + competition against +1 +} + +Netscape was one of the first to demonstrate the power of this model with its +release of its famous Navigator browser in 1994. The free distribution to +Internet users helped develop the Web as a social and technological ecosystem, +while helping fuel sales of Netscape’s Web server software. (This was before +Microsoft arrived on the scene with its Internet Explorer, but that’s another +story.) At a much larger scale, IBM saw enormous opportunities for building a +better product by using GNU/Linux. The system would let IBM leverage other +people’s talents at a fraction of the cost and strengthen its service +relationships with customers. The company now earns more than $2 billion a year +from Linux-related services.~{ Yochai Benkler, /{The Wealth of Networks}/ (Yale +University Press, 2006), Figure 2.1 on p. 47. }~ +={ GNU/Linux : + IBM, and ; + IBM : + GNU/Linux, and ; + Netscape ; + World Wide Web : + social activity on +} + +Today, sharing and openness are key to many business strategies. “Open Source: +Now It’s an Ecosystem,” wrote /{BusinessWeek}/ in 2005, describing the “gold +rush” of venture capital firms investing in startups with open-source products. +Most of them planned to give away their software via the Web and charge for +premium versions or for training, maintenance, and support.~{ “Open Source: Now +It’s an Ecosystem,” BusinessWeek Online, October 3, 2005. }~ + +The pioneers in using open platforms to develop commercial ecosystems on the +Internet are Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and eBay. Each has devised systems that let +third-party software developers and businesses extend their platform with new +applications and business synergies. Each uses systems that dynamically +leverage users’ social behaviors and so stimulate business — for example, +customer recommendations about books, search algorithms that identify the most +popular Web sites, and reputation systems that enhance consumer confidence in +sellers. Even Microsoft, eager to expand the ecology of developers using its +products, has released 150 of its source code distributions under three “Shared +Source” licenses, two of which meet the Free Software Foundation’s definition +of “free.”~{ Microsoft’s Shared Source Licenses, at +http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/licensingbasics/sharedsourcelicenses.mspx; +see also Lessig blog, “Microsoft Releases Under ShareAlike,” June 24, 2005, at +http://lessig.org/blog/2005/06/microsoft_releases_under_share.html. }~ +={ Amazon ; + eBay ; + Microsoft : + “Shared Source” licenses of ; + Yahoo ; + Google ; + World Wide Web : + social activity on +} + +More recently, Facebook has used its phenomenal reach — more than 80 million +active users worldwide — as a platform for growing a diversified ecology of +applications. The company allows software developers to create custom software +programs that do such things as let users share reviews of favorite books, play +Scrabble or poker with others online, or send virtual gifts to friends. Some +apps are just for fun; others are the infrastructure for independent businesses +that sell products and services or advertise. In September 2007, Facebook had +more than two thousand software applications being used by at least one hundred +people.~{ Vauhini Vara, “Facebook Gets Help from Its Friends,” Wall Street +Journal, June 22, 2007. See also Riva Richmond, “Why So Many Want to Create +Facebook Applications,” /{Wall Street Journal}/, September 4, 2007. }~ +={ Facebook } + +2~ Open Content as a Gateway to Commercial Opportunities + +Of course, not every business can own a major platform, as Google, eBay, and +Facebook do. Still, there are many other opportunities. One of the most popular +is to use open platforms to attract an audience, and then strike a deal with an +advertiser or commercial distributor, or sell premium services (“get +discovered”). Another approach is to use open content to forge a spirited +community to which things may be sold (“build a market on a commons”). +={ eBay ; + Facebook +1 ; + Google +} + +!{/{Get discovered.}/}! This dynamic has been played out countless times on +YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and other high-traffic social networking sites. An +unknown remix artist suddenly becomes famous when his track is discovered by a +network swarm: the story of DJ Danger Mouse that we saw in chapter 6. A band +attracts a huge following through viral word of mouth: the story of Jake +Shapiro and Two Ton Shoe’s stardom in South Korea. There are even calculated +scams to get discovered, like the lonelygirl15 series of videos purportedly +shot by a teenage girl in her bedroom, which became a huge Internet sensation +in 2006.~{ Joshua Davis, “The Secret World of Lonelygirl,” Wired, December +2006, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/lonelygirl.html. }~ +={ DJ Danger Mouse ; + MySpace ; + YouTube ; + Shapiro, Jake ; + Two Ton Shoe ; + Internet : + virtual word of mouth on ; + open business models : + using open platforms to get discovered +15 +} + +As any television network will tell you, the capacity to aggregate audiences is +worth a lot of money. The customary way of monetizing this talent is to sell +advertising. Or one can parlay newfound name recognition into side deals with +the mass media, which have always depended upon “star power” as a draw. Thus, +Ana Marie Cox was able to parley her notoriety as a political gossip on her +Wonkette blog into a job as Washington editor of /{Time}/ magazine. Perez +Hilton, a Hollywood blogger who attracted a following, was offered a lucrative +perch at the E! cable television channel. We saw in chapter 6 how producer +Samuli Torssonen’s /{Star Wreck}/ attracted millions of Internet viewers, +enabling him to strike a deal with Universal Studios to distribute a DVD +version. With the same visions of stardom, or at least paying gigs, in mind, +thousands of bands now have fan sites, music downloads, and banner ads on +MySpace and other sites to promote themselves.~{ Elizabeth Holmes, “Famous, +Online,” /{Wall Street Journal}/, August 8, 2006. }~ +={ Cox, Ana Marie ; + Hilton, Perez ; + MySpace ; + Star Wreck Studios ; + Torssonen, Samuli +} + +The CC NonCommercial license is one way to help pursue the “get discovered” +business strategy. The license allows authors to seek a global Internet +audience without having to cede rights to any commercial opportunities. It is +not, however, a terribly reliable way to make money, which is why some artists, +especially musicians, find fault with the implicit promise of the NC license. +Many serious artists regard the NC license as too speculative a mechanism to +get paid for one’s creative work. It is a fair complaint, as far as it goes. +The real problem is the closed, highly concentrated music industry, which has a +hammerlock on marketing, radio play, and distribution. Newcomers and mid-tier +talent cannot get past the corporate gatekeepers to reach an audience, let +alone make money. + +In an attempt to bridge the sharing economy with the market, and thereby open +up some new channels of commercial distribution for commoners, the Creative +Commons in late 2007 introduced a new protocol, CC+. The new project aims to +make it easier for the owners of NC-licensed content to signal that agreements, +products, or services beyond the scope of the CC licenses are on offer — for +example, commercial licensing, warranties, or higherquality copies. A +photographer who has hundreds of NC-licensed photos on Flickr would be able to +continue to let people use those photos for noncommercial purposes — but +through CC+, he could also sell licensing rights to those who want to use the +photos for commercial purposes. CC+ is a metadata architecture and standard +that allows third-party intermediaries to develop services for consummating +commercial transactions. People can use CC+ as a simple “click-through” +mechanism for acquiring commercial rights for music, photos, text, and other +content. +={ Creative Commons (CC) : + CC+, and +2 +} + +One of the earliest “copyright management” companies to take advantage of the +CC+ standard was RightsAgent, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company founded by +Rudy Rouhana. RightsAgent essentially acts as a go-between for people who +create NC-licensed works on the Web and those who wish to buy rights to use +them for commercial purposes. Just as PayPal facilitates the exchange of money +on the Internet, so RightsAgent aspires to be a paid intermediary for +facilitating the sale of user-generated content. +={ Rouhana, Rudy ; + RightsAgent +} + +The rise of CC+ and associated companies brings to mind Niva Elkin-Koren’s +warning that the Creative Commons licenses can be a slippery slope that merely +promotes a property-oriented, transactional mentality — the opposite of the +commons. On the other hand, many people operating in the noncommercial sharing +economy, such as musicians and photographers, have long complained that, as +much as they enjoy participating in the commons, they still need to earn a +livelihood. +={ Elkin-Koren, Niva ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + critics of +} + +Revver is another company that has developed an ingenious way to promote the +sharing of content, yet still monetize it based on the scale of its +circulation. Revver is a Los Angeles–based startup that hosts user-generated +video. All videos are embedded with a special tracking tag that displays an ad +at the end. Like Google’s AdWords system, which charges advertisers for user +“click-throughs” on ad links adjacent to Web content, Revver charges +advertisers for every time a viewer clicks on an ad. The number of ad views can +be tabulated, and Revver splits ad revenues 50-50 with video creators. Key to +the whole business model is the use of the CC AttributionNonCommercial-No +Derivatives license. The license allows the videos to be legally shared, but +prohibits anyone from modifying them or using them for commercial purposes. +={ Revver +2 ; + Google ; + videos and film +2 ; + Internet : + videos and films on +2 ; + World Wide Web : + videos and film on +2 +} + +One of the most-viewed videos on Revver sparked a minor pop trend. It showed +kids dropping Mentos candies into bottles of CocaCola, which produces an +explosive chemical reaction. The video is said to have generated around +$30,000.~{ Revver entry at Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revver. +}~ So is new media going to feature silly cat videos and stupid stunts? Steven +Starr, a co-founder of Revver, concedes the ubiquity of such videos, but is +quick to point to “budding auteurs like Goodnight Burbank, Happy Slip, Studio8 +and LoadingReadyRun, all building audiences.” He also notes that online, +creators “can take incredible risks with format and genre, can grow their own +audience at a fraction of network costs, can enjoy free syndication, hosting, +audience-building and ad services at their disposal.”~{ Interview with Steven +Starr, “Is Web TV a Threat to TV?” Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2007, at +http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118530221391976425.html. }~ +={ Starr, Steven } + +Blip.tv is another video content-sharing Web site that splits ad revenues with +video creators (although it is not automatic; users must “opt in”). Unlike many +videos on YouTube and Revver, blip.tv tends to feature more +professional-quality productions and serialized episodes, in part because its +founders grew out of the “videoblogging” community. Blip.tv espouses an open +business ethic, with shout-outs to “democratization, openness, and +sustainability.” While there is a tradition for companies to spout their +high-minded principles, blip.tv puts some bite into this claim by offering an +open platform that supports many video formats and open metadata standards. And +it allows content to be downloaded and shared on other sites. Users can also +apply Creative Commons licenses to their videos, which can then be identified +by CC-friendly search engines. For all these reasons, Lessig has singled out +blip.tv as a “true sharing site,” in contrast to YouTube, which he calls a +“faking sharing site” that “gives you tools to /{make}/ it seem as if there’s +sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single +site.”~{ Lessig blog post, “The Ethics of Web 2.0,” October 20, 2006, at +http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003570.shtml. }~ +={ blip.tv +1 ; + YouTube +1 ; + Web 2.0 : + open business, and +3 ; + open business models : + open networks and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + open business sites, and +4 +} + +Lessig’s blog post on blip.tv provoked a heated response from blogger Nicholas +Carr, a former executive editor of the /{Harvard Business Review}/. The +contretemps is worth a close look because it illuminates the tensions between +Web 2.0 as a business platform and Web 2.0 as a commons platform. In +castigating YouTube as a “fake sharing site,” Carr accused Lessig of sounding +like Chairman Mao trying to root out counterrevolutionary forces (that is, +capitalism) with “the ideology of digital communalism.” +={ Carr, Nicholas +2 ; + Web 2.0 : + commons platform, as +3 +} + +_1 Like Mao, Lessig and his comrades are not only on the wrong side of human +nature and the wrong side of culture; they’re also on the wrong side of +history. They fooled themselves into believing that Web 2.0 was introducing a +new economic system — a system of “social production” — that would serve as the +foundation of a democratic, utopian model of culture creation. They were wrong. +Web 2.0’s economic system has turned out to be, in effect if not intent, a +system of exploitation rather than a system of emancipation. By putting the +means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those +same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides an +incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor +provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, +very few. + +_1 The Cultural Revolution is over. It ended before it even began. The victors +are the counterrevolutionaries. And they have $1.65 billion [a reference to the +sale price of YouTube to Google] to prove it.~{ Nicholas G. Carr, “Web 2.0lier +than Thou,” Rough Type blog, October 23, 2006. Joichi Ito has a thoughtful +response in his blog, “Is YouTube Web 2.0?” October 22, 2006, at +http://joi.ito.com/archives/2006/10/22/is_youtube_web_20.html; and Lessig +responded to Carr in his blog, at +http://lessig.org/blog/2006/10/stuck_in_the_20th_century_or_t.html. The +“communism discourse” persists, and not just among critics of free culture. +Lawrence Liang of CC India used this epigraph in a book on open-content +licenses: “There is a specter haunting cultural production, the specter of open +content licensing.” which he attributes to “Karl Marx (reworked for the digital +era).” From Liang, /{Guide to Open Content Licenses}/ (Rotterdam, Netherlands: +Piet Zwart Institute, Institute for Postgraduate Studies and Research, Willem +de Kooning Academy Hogeschool, 2004). }~ + +Lessig’s response, a warm-up for a new book, /{Remix}/, released in late 2008, +pointed out that there are really /{three}/ different economies on the Internet +— commercial, sharing, and hybrid. The hybrid economy now emerging is difficult +to understand, he suggested, because it “neither gives away everything, nor +does it keep everything.” The challenge of open business models, Lessig argues, +is to discover the “golden mean.” +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Remix ; + Internet : + hybrid economy enabled by +1 | sharing economy of +1 | commercial economy of +1 +} + +It can be hard to conceptualize a “hybrid sector” when we are accustomed to +dividing the world into “private” and “public” sectors, and “profit-making” and +“nonprofit” enterprises. Open business models quickly run up against +deep-seated prejudices that associate property with “freedom” and sharing with +“communism.” How can there be a middle ground? Although some like Nicholas Carr +seem to hanker for the predatory enterprises of an earlier capitalism, only +this time on Web 2.0 platforms, that is not likely to happen in a world of +distributed computing. Power is too dispersed for predators to survive very +long, and besides, the commoners are too empowered. + +!{/{ Build a market on a commons.}/}! A number of online business models are +based on building communities of deep social affection and respect, and then +using the community as a platform for selling merchandise, advertising, or +products. Interestingly, some of the most successful “customer relationship” +models revolve around music. The Grateful Dead’s strategy of building a +business around a rabid fan base (discussed in chapter 6) occurred well before +the Internet became prevalent. It is paradigmatic of the digital age, +nonetheless. If the band had locked up its music and prohibited free taping of +its concert performances and sharing of homemade tapes, it would have +effectively weakened the fan base that sustained its business model. Sharing +concert tapes actually made Deadheads more inclined to buy t-shirts, official +music releases, and concert tickets because the tape sharing deepened the +community’s identity and quasi-spiritual ethic. The Grateful Dead’s focus on +touring as opposed to studio albums not only intensified the sharing ethic of +its fan base, it obliged the band to “keep on truckin’ ” in order to keep +earning money. +={ commons : + building a market on +11 ; + open business models : + building a market on a commons +11 ; + communities : + commons, and ; + Grateful Dead ; + music : + market building on a commons +11 +} + +The Brazilian /{tecnobrega}/ music scene discussed briefly in chapter 7 is +another example of artists making money through respectful, in-person +relationships with their fans. In the town of Belém, Brazil, /{tecnobrega}/ +artists release about four hundred CDs every year, but none are sold in stores; +street vendors sell them for $1.50 apiece. The CDs function mostly as +advertising for live “sound system” parties on the outskirts of town that +attract as many as five thousand people and use state-of-the-art audio +technology. Immediately following the performances, some artists also sell a +significant number of “instant CDs” that are of better quality (and more +expensive) than those sold in the streets. (Interestingly, street sales do not +compete with after-concert sales.) +={ Brazil : + tecnobrega music scene in +6 +} + +“In their live presentations, the tecnobrega DJ’s usually acknowledge the +presence of people from various neighborhoods, and this acknowledgement is of +great value to the audience, leading thousands of buy copies of the recorded +live presentation,” said Ronaldo Lemos of CC Brazil, who has studied Brazil’s +record industry.~{ Interview with Ronaldo Lemos, September 15, 2006. }~ The +same basic model is also at work in other grassroots musical genres in Brazil, +such as baile funk, which originated in the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. +={ Lemos da Silva, Ronaldo +4 } + +Artists make most of their money from these live performances, not from CDs, +said Lemos. Bands earn an average of $1,100 per solo performance at these +events, and $700 when playing with other bands — this, in a region where the +average monthly income is $350. Altogether, Lemos estimates that the sound +system parties as a business sector earn $1.5 million per month, on fixed +assets of $8 million. + +“The band Calypso has been approached several times by traditional record +labels,” said Lemos, “but they turned down all the offers. The reason is that +they make more money by means of the existing business model. In an interview +with the largest Brazilian newspaper, the singer of the band said, ‘We do not +fight the pirates. We have become big /{because}/ of piracy, which has taken +our music to cities where they would never have been.’ ” Calypso has sold more +than 5 million albums in Brazil and is known for attracting as many as fifty +thousand people to its concerts, Lemos said.~{ Ronaldo Lemos, “From Legal +Commons to Social Commons: Developing Countries and the Cultural Industry in +the 21st Century,” 2006, at +http://www.icommons.org/resources/from-legal-commons-to-social-commons-brazil-and-the-cultural-industry-1. +See Paula Martini post on iCommons blog, “Over the Top: The New (and Bigger) +Cultural Industry in Brazil,” September 28, 2007, at +http://www.icommons.org/articles/over-the-top-thenew-and-bigger-cultural-industry-in-brazil. +}~ +={ piracy } + +Another highly successful open business model in the Brazilian music scene is +TramaVirtual, an open platform on which more than 15,000 musicians have +uploaded some 35,000 albums. Fans can then download the music for free. While +this does not sound like a promising business proposition, it makes a lot of +sense in the context of Brazil’s music marketplace. Major record labels release +a minuscule number of new Brazilian music CDs each year, and they sell for +about $10 to $15.~{ Ibid. }~ Only the cultured elite can afford music CDs, and +the native musical talent — which is plentiful in Brazil — has no place to go. +With such a constricted marketplace, TramaVirtual has become hugely popular by +showcasing new and interesting music. +={ TramaVirtual +2 } + +TramaVirtual’s artistic and social cachet — itself the product of open sharing +in a commons — has enabled it to develop a highly respected brand identity. “By +exploiting the trademark,” said Lemos, “Trama has been able to create parallel +businesses that work with music, but not in the same way that a record label +does.”~{ Interview with Ronaldo Lemos, November 6, 2006. }~ For instance, Trama +created a business that sponsors free concerts at universities under its +trademark sponsorship. It then sells marketing rights at the concerts to +cosmetic makers and car companies. Musicians have gained wide public exposure +through Trama, and then used that association to negotiate international record +and marketing deals for themselves. CSS (Cansei de Ser Sexy) won a record +contract with the American label Sub Pop, for example. + +For the past five years, a related business model for music on an international +scale has been emerging in Luxembourg. In only three years, Jamendo has amassed +a huge international following in much the same way as TramaVirtual — by +attracting music fans to its open platform for free music sharing. (The name +/{Jamendo}/ is a mix of the words /{jam}/ and /{crescendo}/.) The site is not a +music retailer but a repository for free music — with a business model overlay +to pay the bills. Jamendo’s purpose is not to maximize returns to shareholders, +in other words, but to service musicians and fans in a self-sustaining way. It +makes most of its money from “tip jar” donations from fans and from advertising +on the Web pages and streamed music. Ad revenues are shared 50-50 with artists, +and any donations are passed along to individual artists, minus a small +transaction fee. +={ Jamendo +4 } + +The Jamendo community is sizable and growing. By 2008 it had more than 357,000 +active members from around the world. Part of the draw is the catalog of more +than 10,000 albums, all free. Unlike Magnatune, Jamendo does not select the +artists that are featured on its site; everyone is welcome to upload his or her +music. To help fans identify music they like, the site offers many +sophisticated tools. There are some 60,000 member-written reviews, custom +playlists, community ratings of albums, and “folksonomy” tags for albums and +songs.~[* Folksonomies, a cross of /{taxonomy}/ and /{folk}/, are essentially +user-generated tags attached to each song and album, which enables categories +of music to emerge from the “bottom up,” as fans regard the music, rather than +through top-down marketing categories.]~ Fans are /{urged}/ to download music +through peerto-peer networks such as BitTorrent and eMule because it reduces +Jamendo’s bandwidth expenses. +={ Magnatune ; + music : + “folksonomy” tags in +} + +“Users can listen, download, review, remix, and ‘widgetize,’” said Sylvain +Zimmer, the founder and chief technology officer of Jamendo. As part of its +commitment to musicians, the site has a forum for artists and listings of +concerts, as well as open APIs~[* An API is an “application programming +interface,” a set of protocols that enable a software application to operate on +a computer operating system, library, or service. Many companies use +proprietary APIs to retain control over who may develop applications that will +interoperate with their software. Other companies that wish to encourage +development of compatible applications— and thus promote a software ecosystem +entwined with the operating system or service — use open APIs.]~ so the Jamendo +ecosystem can be integrated into other software. +={ Zimmer, Sylvain +2 ; + APIs (application programming interfaces) +} + +What’s striking about Jamendo is its nonchalant international feel, as if it +were only natural to browse for “deathmetal,” “powerpop,” “hypnotique,” +“ambient,” “psytrance,” and “jazzrock” on the same site. (These are just a few +of the scores of folksonomy tags that can be used to browse the catalog.) “We +are a Babel, not a label,” said Zimmer, who reports that India and Japan are +heavy downloaders of Jamendo music. Complete, official versions of the site are +available in French, the original language for the site, and now English and +German. Incomplete versions of the site are available in Spanish, Polish, +Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Italian, Swedish, Czech, and Ukrainian. +={ music : + “folksonomy” tags in +} + +Virtually all the albums on Jamendo use one or more of the six basic CC +licenses. The CC ethic is a perfect match for the company’s community-driven +business model, said Zimmer. “The best way of detecting CC-incompatible content +and commercial uses of NC-licensed work is the community. The Creative Commons +makes the community feel more confident and active.”~{ Sylvain Zimmer of +Jamendo, presentation at iCommons Summit, Dubrovnik, Croatia, June 15, 2007. }~ +He adds that if the site’s managers run too many ads, “the community will tell +you.” + +2~ Commoners as Co-creators of Value +={ open business models : + value created in +13 ; + value : + creation of +13 +} + +For businesses operating on open networks, it is a mistake to regard people +merely as customers; they are collaborators and even coinvestors. As more +companies learn to interact closely with their customers, it is only natural +that conversations about the product or service become more intimate and +collaborative. The roles of the “consumer” and “producer” are starting to blur, +leading to what some business analysts call the “prosumer”~{ Don Tapscott and +Anthony D. Williams, /{Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything}/ +(New York Portfolio, 2006), chapter 5, “The Prosumers.” }~ and the +“decentralized co-creation of value.”~{ David Bollier, /{The Rise of Collective +Intelligence: Decentralized Co-creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce +and Culture}/ (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute Communications and Society +Program, 2008).}~ The basic idea is that online social communities are becoming +staging areas for the advancement of business objectives. Businesses see these +communities as cost-effective ways to identify promising innovations, +commercialize them more rapidly, tap into more reliable market intelligence, +and nurture customer goodwill. + +Amateurs who share with one another through a loose social commons have always +been a source of fresh ideas. Tech analyst Elliot Maxwell (citing Lessig) notes +how volunteers helped compile the /{Oxford English Dictionary}/ by contributing +examples of vernacular usage; how the Homebrew Computer Club in the San +Francisco Bay area developed many elements of the first successful personal +computer; and how sharing among auto enthusiasts helped generate many of the +most important early automotive innovations.~{ Elliot Maxwell, “Open Standards, +Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness,” +/{Innovations:Technology, Governance, Globalization}/ 1, no. 3 (Summer 2006), +at http://www.emaxwell.net, p. 150. }~ In our time, hackers were the ones who +developed ingenious ways to use unlicensed electromagnetic spectrum as a +commons, which we now know as Wi-Fi. They tinkered with the iPod to come up +with podcasts, a new genre of broadcasting that commercial broadcasters now +emulate.~{ Elliot E. Maxwell drew my attention to these examples in his +excellent essay “Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation.” }~ Numerous +self-organized commons have incubated profitable businesses. Two movie buffs +created the Internet Movie Database as separate Usenet newsgroups in 1989; six +years later they had grown so large that they had merged and converted into a +business that was later sold to Amazon.~{ Wikipedia entry, IMDB, at +http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Movie_Database. }~ The Compact Disc +Database was a free database of software applications that looks up information +about audio CDs via the Internet. It was originally developed by a community of +music fans as a shared database, but in 2000 it had grown big enough that it +was sold and renamed Gracenote.~{ Wikipedia entry, CDDB, at +http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB. }~ +={ Amazon ; + Gracenote ; + Homebrew Computer Club ; + iPod ; + Maxwell, Elliot ; + Oxford English Dictionary ; + Wi-Fi ; + hackers : + community of ; + commons : + sources of new ideas, as +11 +} + +A commons can be highly generative because its participants are tinkering and +innovating for their own sake — for fun, to meet a challenge, to help someone +out. Amateurs are not constrained by conventional business ideas about what may +be marketable and profitable. They do not have to meet the investment +expectations of venture capitalists and Wall Street. Yet once promising new +ideas do surface in the commons, market players can play a useful role in +supplying capital and management expertise to develop, improve, and +commercialize an invention. + +Because online commons are such a rich source of new ideas, the most farsighted +companies are trying to learn how they might be harnessed to help them innovate +and compete more effectively. MIT professor Eric von Hippel is one of the +foremost researchers of this process. His 2005 book /{Democratizing +Innovation}/ describes how the leading participants in high-performance sports +— extreme skiing, mountain biking, skateboarding, surfing, and hot-rodding — +are forming “innovation communities” that work closely with manufacturers.~{ +Eric von Hippel, /{Democratizing Innovation}/ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), +available at http://mitpress.mit.edu/democratizing_innovation_pdf. }~ The most +active practitioners of these sports are intimately familiar with the equipment +and have their own imaginative ideas about what types of innovations the sport +needs. Indeed, many of them have already jerry-rigged their own innovations — +better cockpit ventilation in sailplanes, improved boot and bindings on +snowboards, a method for cutting loose a trapped rope used by canyon climbers. +For companies willing to listen to and collaborate with users, says von Hippel, +“communities of interest are morphing into communities of creation and +communities of production.” +={ von Hippel, Eric +1 } + +“Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on +manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents,” von Hippel +writes. “Moreover, individuals users do not have to develop everything they +need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed and freely +shared by others.”~{ Ibid., p. 1 }~ Besides finding empirical examples of this +trend, von Hippel has developed a theoretical vocabulary for understanding how +collaborative innovation occurs. He probes the user motivations for “free +revealing” of their knowledge, the attractive economics that fuel “users’ +low-cost innovation niches,” and the public policies that sometimes thwart +user-driven innovation (patent rights for a field may be fragmented, +anticopying restrictions such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may +prevent user tinkering, etc.). +={ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) [1998] } + +User-driven innovation is not as esoteric as the “extreme sports” examples may +suggest. It is, in fact, a growing paradigm. In one of the more celebrated +examples, Lego, the Danish toymaker, invited some of its most fanatic users to +help it redesign its Mindstorms robotics kit. The kits are meant to let kids +(and adults) build a variety of customized robots out of a wild assortment of +plastic Lego pieces, programmable software, sensors, and motors.~{ Tapscott and +Williams, /{Wikinomics}/, pp. 130–31. }~ In 2004, when some Lego users +reverse-engineered the robotic “brain” for the Mindstorms kit and put their +findings on the Internet, Lego at first contemplated legal action. Upon +reflection, however, Lego realized that hackers could be a valuable source of +new ideas for making its forthcoming Mindstorms kit more interesting and cool. +={ Lego +1 ; + hackers : + innovations by +1 +} + +Lego decided to write a “right to hack” provision into the Mindstorms software +license, “giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run +wild,” as Brendan I. Koerner wrote in /{Wired}/ magazine. “Soon, dozens of Web +sites were hosting thirdparty programs that help Mindstorms users build robots +that Lego had never dreamed of: soda machines, blackjack dealers, even toilet +scrubbers. Hardware mavens designed sensors that were far more sophisticated +than the touch and light sensors included in the factory kit.”~{ Brendan I. +Koerner, “Geeks in Toyland,” /{Wired}/, February 2006. }~ It turns out that not +only are Lego fans happy to advise the company, the open process “engenders +goodwill and creates a buzz among the zealots, a critical asset for products +like Mindstorms that rely on word-of-mouth evangelism,” said Koerner. In the +end, he concluded, the Mindstorm community of fanatics has done “far more to +add value to Lego’s robotics kit than the company itself.” +={ Koerner, Brendan I. ; + Internet : + virtual word of mouth on +} + +Another improbable success in distributed, user-driven innovation is +Threadless, a Chicago-based t-shirt company. Threadless sells hundreds of +original t-shirt designs, each of which is selected by the user community from +among more than eight hundred designs submitted every week. The proposed +designs are rated on a scale of one to five by the Web site’s more than 600,000 +active users. Winners receive cash awards, recognition on the Web site, and +their names on the t-shirt label. Every week, Threadless offers six to ten new +t-shirts featuring the winning designs. +={ Threadless +1 } + +In 2006, the company sold more than 1.5 million t-shirts without any +traditional kind of marketing. Its business model is so rooted in the user +community that Threadless co-founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart have +declined offers to sell their t-shirts through conventional, big-name +retailers. Threadless’s business model has helped it overcome two major +challenges in the apparel industry, write Harvard Business School professor +Karim R. Lakhani and consultant Jill A. Panetta — the ability “to attract the +right design talent at the right time to create recurring fashion hits,” and +the ability “to forecast sales so as to be better able to match production +cycles with demand cycles.”~{ Karim R. Lakhani and Jill A. Panetta, “The +Principles of Distributed Innovation,” Research Publication No. 2007-7, Berkman +Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School, October 2007, at +http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract_id=1021034. See also Darren Dahl, “Nice +Threads,” /{Southwest Airlines Spirit}/, December 2006. }~ +={ DeHart, Jacob ; + Nickell, Jake ; + Lakhani, Karim R. ; + Panetta, Jill A. +} + +A number of companies have started successful enterprises based on the use of +wikis, the open Web platforms that allow anyone to contribute and edit content +and collaborate. Evan Prodromou, the founder of Wikitravel, a free set of +worldwide travel guides, has identified four major types of wiki businesses: +service providers who sell access to wikis (Wikispace, wetpaint, PBwiki); +content hosters of wikis (wikiHow, Wikitravel, Wikia); consultants who advise +companies how to run their own wikis (Socialtext); and content developers +(WikiBiz, an offshoot of Wikipedia). +={ Prodromou, Evan +1 ; + wikis +1 +} + +Since the success of a wiki-based business depends upon honoring the integrity +of wiki users, Prodromou scorns what he sees as the backhanded strategies of +business models based on “wikinomics” and “crowdsourcing.” He sees such models +as sly attempts to get “suckers” to do free work for the entrepreneur owning +the business. A sustainable commercial wiki, said Prodromou at a conference, +respects the community of users and does not try to exploit them. It strives to +fulfill a “noble purpose” for users and demonstrate in a transparent way that +it offers value. Any hint of trickery or calculation begins to sow distrust and +erode the community. Yet any wiki-based business must be able to set boundaries +that allow the owners to make responsible business decisions; those decisions, +however, must respect the wiki community’s values.~{ Evan Prodromou +presentation, “Commercialization of Wikis: Open Community that Pays the Bills,” +South by Southwest Interactive conference, March 10, 2007. }~ + +It is hard to predict what new models of “decentralized cocreation of value” +will take root and flourish, but the experiments are certainly proliferating. +Staples, the office supplies store, now hosts a contest inviting the public to +suggest inventions that Staples can develop and sell under the its brand +name.~{ William J. Bulkeley, “Got a Better Letter Opener?” /{Wall Street +Journal}/, July 13, 2006. }~ A number of massmarket advertisers have hosted +competitions inviting users to create ads for their products. One of the more +interesting frontiers in userdriven innovation is tapping the audience for +investment capital. +={ Staples } + +SellaBand (“You are the record company”) is a Web site that invites bands to +recruit five thousand “Believers” to invest $10 apiece in their favorite bands; +upon reaching the $50,000 mark, a band can make a professional recording, which +is then posted on the SellaBand site for free downloads. Bands and fans can +split advertising revenues with SellaBand.~{ http://www.sellaband.com. }~ +Robert Greenwald, the activist documentary filmmaker, used e-mail +solicitations, social networks, and the blogosphere to ask ordinary citizens to +help finance his 2006 film /{Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers}/.~{ William +Booth, “His Fans Greenlight the Project,” /{Washington Post}/, August 20, 2006. +}~ +={ Greenwald, Robert ; + SellaBand +} + +2~ Reintegrating the Sharing and Commercial Economies + +If there is persistent skepticism about the very idea of open business models, +from both business traditionalists focused on the bottom line and commoners +committed to sharing, it is because the commons and the commercial economy seem +to represent such divergent moral values and social orders. One depends upon +reciprocal exchanges of monetary value, with the help of individual property +rights and contracts; the other depends upon the informal social circulation of +value, without individual property rights or quid pro quos. A market is +impersonal, transactional, and oriented to a bottom line; a commons tends to be +personal and social and oriented to continuous relationships, shared values, +and identity. + +Yet, as the examples above show, the market and the commons interpenetrate each +other, yin/yang style. Each “adds value” to the other in synergistic ways. +Historically, this has always been true. Adam Smith, the author of /{The Wealth +of Nations}/, was also the author of /{The Theory of Moral Sentiments}/, about +the moral and social norms that undergird market activity. The market has +always depended upon the hidden subsidies of the commons (folk stories, +vernacular motifs, amateur creativity) to drive its engine of wealth creation. +And the commons builds its sharing regimes amid the material wealth produced by +the market (free software is developed on commercially produced computers). +={ Smith, Adam : + The Theory of Moral Sentiments +} + +What has changed in recent years is our perceptions. The actual role of the +commons in creative endeavors has become more culturally legible. For +businesses to function well on Web 2.0 platforms, they must more consciously +integrate social and market relationships in functional, sustainable ways. If +the results sometimes seem novel, if not bizarre, it is partly because +networking technologies are making us more aware that markets are not +ahistorical, universal entities; they are rooted in social relationships. Open +business models recognize this very elemental truth, and in this sense +represent a grand gambit to go back to the future. +={ open business models : + open networks and ; + Web 2.0 : + open business, and +} + +1~ 11 SCIENCE AS A COMMONS +={ Science Commons +90 } + +/{Web 2.0 tools, open access, and CC licenses are helping to accelerate +scientific discovery.}/ + +It was one of those embarrassing episodes in science: Two sets of researchers +published papers in a German organic chemistry journal, /{Angewandte Chemie}/, +announcing that they had synthesized a strange new substance with “12-membered +rings.” Then, as blogger and chemist Derek Lowe tells the story, “Professor +Manfred Cristl of Wurzburg, who apparently knows his pyridinium chemistry +pretty well, recognized this as an old way to make further pyridinium salts, +not funky twelve-membered rings. He recounts how over the last couple of months +he exchanged awkward emails with the two sets of authors, pointing out that +they seem to have rediscovered a 100-year-old reaction. . . .”~{ Derek Lowe, +“Neat! Wish It Were True!” /{In the Pipeline}/ [blog], November 29, 2007, at +http://pipeline.corante.com. See also, Donna Wentworth, “Why We Need to Figure +Out What We Already Know,” Science Commons blog, January 4, 2008, at +http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/01/04/why-we-need-to-figure-out-what-we-already-know. +}~ +={ Lowe, Derek } + +In the Internet age, people generally assume that these kinds of things can’t +happen. All you have to do is run a Web search for “pyridinium,” right? But as +scientists in every field are discovering, the existence of some shard of +highly specialized knowledge does not necessarily mean that it can be located +or understood. After all, a Google search for “pyridinium” turns up 393,000 +results. And even peer reviewers for journals (who may have been partly at +fault in this instance) have the same problem as any researcher: the +unfathomable vastness of the scientific and technical literature makes it +difficult to know what humankind has already discovered. + +Paradoxically, even though academic science played the central role in +incubating the Internet (in conjunction with the military), it has not fared +very well in developing it to advance research. Most search engines are too +crude. Journal articles can be expensive and inaccessible. They do not link to +relevant Web resources or invite reader comment. Nor do they contain metadata +to facilitate computer-based searches, collaborative filtering, and text +mining. Scientific databases are plentiful but often incompatible with one +another, preventing researchers from exploring new lines of inquiry. Lab +researchers who need to share physical specimens still have to shuffle papers +through a bureaucratic maze and negotiate with lawyers, without the help of +eBay- or Craigslist-like intermediaries. + +“The World Wide Web was designed in a scientific laboratory to facilitate +access to scientific knowledge,” observed Duke law professor James Boyle in +2007. “In every other area of life — commercial, social networking, pornography +— it has been a smashing success. But in the world of science itself? With the +virtues of the open Web all around us, we have proceeded to build an endless +set of walled gardens, something that looks a lot like Compuserv or Minitel and +very little like a world wide web for science.”~{ James Boyle, “The Irony of a +Web Without Science,” /{Financial Times}/, September 4, 2007, at +http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/39166e30-5a7f-11dc-9bcd0000779fd2ac.html. }~ +={ Boyle, James : + Science Commons, and ; + science : + scientific knowledge +2 +} + +Therein lies a fascinating, complicated story. To be sure, various scientific +bodies have made great progress in recent years in adapting the principles of +free software, free culture, and Web 2.0 applications to their research. +Open-access journals, institutional repositories, specialty wikis, new +platforms for collaborative research, new metatagging systems: all are moving +forward in different, fitful ways. Yet, for a field of inquiry that has long +honored the ethic of sharing and “standing on the shoulders of giants,” +academic science has lagged behind most other sectors. + +Part of the problem is the very nature of scientific knowledge. While the +conventional Web works fairly well for simple kinds of commerce and social +purposes, the Research Web for science requires a more fine-grained, +deliberately crafted structure.~{ John Wilbanks, director of the Science +Commons, introduced me to this term. }~ Science involves /{practices}/, after +all; it is not just about information. The “wisdom of the crowds” is not good +enough. Scientific knowledge tends to be significantly more specialized and +structured than cultural information or product recommendations. The Web +systems for organizing, manipulating, and accessing that knowledge, +accordingly, need to be more hierarchical and structured, often in quite +specific ways depending upon the discipline. A scientist cannot just type +“signal transduction genes in pyramidal neurons” into a search engine; she +needs to be able to locate specific genes and annotations of them. Data may be +strewn across dozens of different data systems, and those are not likely to be +interoperable. This means that technical standards need to be coordinated, or +some metasystem developed to allow different data reservoirs to communicate +with one another. A scientist must be able to use computers to browse and +organize a vast literature. And so on. + +Much as scientists would like to build new types of Internet-based commons, +they have quickly run up against a thicket of interrelated problems: overly +broad copyright and patent limitations; access and usage restrictions by +commercial journal publishers and database owners; and university rules that +limit how cell lines, test animals, bioassays, and other research tools may be +shared. In a sense, scientists and universities face a classic +collective-action problem. Everyone would clearly be better off if a more +efficient infrastructure and enlightened social ethic could be adopted — but +few single players have the resources, incentive, or stature to buck the +prevailing order. There is no critical mass for instigating a new platform for +scientific inquiry and “knowledge management.” +={ copyright law : + property rights, and +1 | science, in ; + property rights : + copyright law, and +1 ; + science : + copyright and patent restrictions in +1 +} + +Like so many other sectors confronting the Great Value Shift, science in the +late 1990s found itself caught in a riptide. The proprietarian ethic of +copyright and patent law was intensifying (as we saw in chapter 2), spurring +scientists and universities to claim private ownership in knowledge that was +previously treated as a shared resource.~{ See, e.g., Jennifer Washburn, +/{University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education}/ (New York: +Basic Books, 2005); Derek Bok, /{Universities in the Marketplace: The +Commercialization of Higher Education}/ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University +Press, 2003); Sheldon Krimsky, /{Science in the Private Interest: Has the Lure +of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research}/ (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, +2003); and Corynne McSherry, /{Who Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of +Intellectual Property}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). }~ Yet +at the same time the Internet was demonstrating the remarkable power of open +sharing and collaboration. Even as market players sought to turn data, genetic +knowledge, and much else into private property rights, a growing number of +scientists realized that the best ideals of science would be fulfilled by +recommitting itself to its core values of openness and sharing. Open platforms +could also strengthen the social relationships that are essential to so much +scientific inquiry.~{ John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, /{The Social Life of +Information}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Pulishing, 2000). See +also, e.g., Jane E. Fountain, “Social Capital: Its Relationship to Innovation +in Science and Technology,” /{Science and Public Policy}/ 25, no. 2 (April +1998), pp. 103–15. }~ +={ Great Value Shift } + +Perhaps the most salient example of the power of open science was the Human +Genome Project (HGP), a publicly funded research project to map the 3 billion +base pairs of the human genome. Many other scientific projects have been +attracted by the stunning efficacy and efficiency of the open research model. +For example, the HapMap project is a government-supported research effort to +map variations in the human genome that occur in certain clusters, or +haplotypes. There is also the SNP Consortium, a public-private partnership +seeking to identify single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that may be used to +identify genetic sources of disease. Both projects use licenses that put the +genomic data into the public domain. +={ Human Genome Project (HGP) ; + science : + Human Genome Project +} + +A 2008 report by the Committee for Economic Development identified a number of +other notable open research projects.~{ Committee for Economic Development, +/{Harnessing Openness to Transform American Health Care}/ (Washington, DC: CED, +2008). }~ There is the PubChem database, which amasses data on chemical +genomics from a network of researchers; the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, +a network of several dozen cancer research centers and other organizations that +shares data, research tools, and software applications; and TDR Targets a Web +clearinghouse sponsored by the World Health Organization that lets researchers +share genetic data on neglected diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness. +It is telling that Bill Gates, who in his commercial life is a staunch advocate +of proprietary control of information, has been a leader, through his Bill & +Melinda Gates Foundation, in requiring research grantees to share their data. +={ Gates, Bill } + +There has even been the emergence of open-source biotechnology, which is +applying the principles of free software development to agricultural biotech +and pharmaceutical development.~{ See, e.g., Rockefeller Foundation, “2005 +Bellagio Meeting on Open Source Models of Collaborative Innovation in the Life +Sciences” [report], Bellagio, Italy, September 2005. See also Janet Elizabeth +Hope, “Open Source Biotechnology,” Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, +December 2004. }~ Richard Jefferson, the founder of Cambia, a nonprofit +research institute in Australia, launched the “kernel” of what he calls the +first opensource biotech toolkit. It includes patented technologies such as +TransBacter, which is a method for transferring genes to plants, and GUSPlus, +which is a tool for visualizing genes and understanding their functions.~{ +Interview with Richard Jefferson, September 7, 2006. See also +http://www.cambia.org. }~ By licensing these patented research tools for open +use, Jefferson hopes to enable researchers anywhere in the world— not just at +large biotech companies or universities — to develop their own crop improvement +technologies. +={ Jefferson, Richard } + +2~ The Viral Spiral in Science + +Sociologist Robert Merton is often credited with identifying the social values +and norms that make science such a creative, productive enterprise. In a +notable 1942 essay, Merton described scientific knowledge as “common property” +that depends critically upon an open, ethical, peer-driven process.~{ Robert +Merton, “Science and Democratic Social Structure,” in /{Social Theory and +Social Structure}/, 3d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 604–15. }~ Science +is an engine of discovery precisely because research is available for all to +see and replicate. It has historically tried to keep some distance from the +marketplace for fear that corporate copyrights, patents, or contractual +agreements will lock up knowledge that should be available to everyone, +especially future scientists.~{ Richard R. Nelson, “The Market Economy and the +Scientific Commons,” /{Research Policy}/ 33, no. 3 (April 2004), pp. 455–71. +See also Karim R. Lakhani et al., “The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem +Solving,” Harvard Business School Working Paper 07-050, January 2007, at +http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-050.pdf. }~ Secrecy can also make it +difficult for the scientific community to verify research results. +={ Merton, Robert ; + science : + cientific knowledge +2 +} + +Although scientific knowledge eventually becomes publicly available, it usually +flows in semi-restricted ways, at least initially, because scientists usually +like to claim personal credit for their discoveries. They may refuse to share +their latest research lest a rival team of scientists gain a competitive +advantage. They may wish to claim patent rights in their discoveries. + +So scientific knowledge is not born into the public sphere, but there is a +strong presumption that it ought to be treated as a shared resource as quickly +as possible. As law scholar Robert Merges noted in 1996, “Science is not so +much given freely to the public as shared under a largely implicit code of +conduct among a more or less well identified circle of similarly situated +scientists. In other words . . . science is more like a limited-access commons +than a truly open public domain.”~{ Robert Merges, “Property Rights Theory and +the Commons: The Case of Scientific Research,” /{Social Philosophy and Policy}/ +13, no. 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 145–61. }~ In certain disciplines, especially +those involving large capital equipment such as telescopes and particle +accelerators, the sharing of research is regarded as a kind of membership rule +for belonging to a club. +={ Merges, Robert } + +As Web 2.0 innovations have demonstrated the power of the Great Value Shift, +the convergence of open source, open access, and open science has steadily +gained momentum.~{ John Willinsky, “The Unacknowledged Convergence of Open +Source, Open Access and Open Science,” /{First Monday}/ 10, no. 8 (August +2005), at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_8/willinsky/index.html. }~ +Creative Commons was mindful of this convergence from its beginnings, but it +faced formidable practical challenges in doing anything about it. “From the +very first meetings of Creative Commons,” recalled law professor James Boyle, a +CC board member, “we thought that science could be the killer app. We thought +that science could be the place where Creative Commons could really make a +difference, save lives, and have a dramatic impact on the world. There is +massive, unnecessary friction in science and we think we can deal with it. +Plus, there’s the Mertonian ideal of science, with which Creative Commons +couldn’t fit more perfectly.”~{ Interview with James Boyle, August 15, 2006. }~ +={ Merton, Robert ; + Boyle, James : + Science Commons, and +1 ; + Great Value Shift ; + Web 2.0 : + Great Value Shift, and +} + +But despite its early interest in making the Web more research-friendly, +Creative Commons realized that science is a special culture unto itself, one +that has so many major players and niche variations that it would be foolhardy +for an upstart nonprofit to try to engage with it. So in 2002 Creative Commons +shelved its ambitions to grapple with science as a commons, and focused instead +on artistic and cultural sectors. By January 2005, however, the success of the +CC licenses emboldened the organization to revisit its initial idea. As a +result of deep personal engagement by several Creative Commons board members — +computer scientist Hal Abelson, law professors James Boyle and Michael Carroll, +and film producer Eric Saltzman — Creative Commons decided to launch a spin-off +project, Science Commons. The new initiative would work closely with scientific +disciplines and organizations to try to build what it now calls “the Research +Web.” +={ Abelson, Hall : + CC board, on ; + Carroll, Michael W. ; + Saltzman, Eric ; + Science Commons : + CC Commons spinoff, and +5 +} + +Science Commons aims to redesign the “information space” — the technologies, +legal rules, institutional practices, and social norms — so that researchers +can more easily share their articles, datasets, and other resources. The idea +is to reimagine and reinvent the “cognitive infrastructures” that are so +critical to scientific inquiry. Dismayed by the pressures exerted by commercial +journal publishers, open-access publishing advocate Jean-Claude Guédon has +called on librarians to become “epistemological engineers.”~{ Jean-Claude +Guédon, “In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, +Publishers and the Control of Scientific Publishing,” at +http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/mmproceedings/138guedon.shtml. }~ They need +to design better systems (technical, institutional, legal, and social) for +identifying, organizing, and using knowledge. The payoff? Speedier research and +greater scientific discovery and innovation. It turns out that every scientific +discipline has its own special set of impediments to address. The recurring +problem is massive, unnecessary transaction costs. There is an enormous waste +of time, expense, bureaucracy, and logistics in acquiring journal articles, +datasets, presentations, and physical specimens. +={ Science Commons : + libraries, and +5 ; + science : + transaction costs in +1 ; + transaction costs : + in science +1 ; + libraries : + Science Commons, and +} + +If transaction costs could be overcome, scientists could vastly accelerate +their research cycles. They could seek answers in unfamiliar bodies of research +literature. They could avoid duplicating other people’s flawed research +strategies. They could formulate more imaginative hypotheses and test them more +rapidly. They could benefit from a broader, more robust conversation (as in +free software — “with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow”) and use computer +networks to augment and accelerate the entire scientific process. + +That is the vision of open science that Science Commons wanted to address in +2005. It recognized that science is a large, sprawling world of many +institutional stakeholders controlling vast sums of money driving +incommensurate agendas. In such a milieu, it is not easy to redesign some of +the most basic processes and norms for conducting research. Science Commons +nonetheless believed it could play a constructive role as a catalyst. + +It was fortunate to have some deep expertise not just from its board members, +but from two Nobel Prize winners on its scientific advisory panel (Sir John +Sulston and Joshua Lederberg) and several noted scholars (patent scholar Arti +Rai, innovation economist Paul David, and open-access publishing expert Michael +B. Eisen). The director of Science Commons, John Wilbanks, brought a rare mix +of talents and connections. He was once a software engineer at the World Wide +Web Consortium, specializing in the Semantic Web; he had founded and run a +company dealing in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence; he had worked +for a member of Congress; and he was formerly assistant director of the Berkman +Center at Harvard Law School. +={ David, Paul ; + Eisen, Michael B. ; + Lederberg, Joshua ; + Rai, Arti ; + Sulston, Sir John ; + Wilbanks, John +1 +} + +After obtaining free office space at MIT, Wilbanks set off to instigate change +within the scientific world — and then get out of the way. “We’re designing +Science Commons to outstrip ourselves,” Wilbanks told me. “We don’t want to +control any of this; we’re designing it to be decentralized. If we try to +control it, we’ll fail.” + +With a staff of seven and a budget of only $800,000 in 2008, Science Commons is +not an ocean liner like the National Academy of Science and the National +Science Foundation; it’s more of a tug-boat. Its strategic interventions try to +nudge the big players into new trajectories. It is unencumbered by bureaucracy +and entrenched stakeholders, yet it has the expertise, via Creative Commons, to +develop standard licensing agreements for disparate communities. It knows how +to craft legal solutions that can work with technology and be understood by +nonlawyers. + +In 2006, Science Commons embarked upon three “proof of concept” projects that +it hopes will be models for other scientific fields. The first initiative, the +Scholar’s Copyright Project, aspires to give scientists the “freedom to archive +and reuse scholarly works on the Internet.” It is also seeking to make the vast +quantities of data on computerized databases more accessible and interoperable, +as a way to advance scientific discovery and innovation. +={ Scholar’s Copyright Project ; + Science Commons : + Scholar’s Copyright Project, and +} + +A second project, the Neurocommons, is a bold experiment that aims to use the +Semantic Web to make a sprawling body of neurological research on the Web more +accessible. The project is developing a new kind of Internet platform so that +researchers will be able to do sophisticated searches of neuroscience-related +journal articles and explore datasets across multiple databases. +={ Neurocommons ; + Science Commons : + Neurocommons, and the +} + +Finally, Science Commons is trying to make it cheaper and easier for +researchers to share physical materials such as genes, proteins, chemicals, +tissues, model animals, and reagents, which is currently a cumbersome process. +The Biological Materials Transfer Project resembles an attempt to convert the +pony express into a kind of Federal Express, so that researchers can use an +integrated electronic data system to obtain lab materials with a minimum of +legal complications and logistical delays. +={ Biological Materials Transfer Project } + +In many instances, Science Commons has been a newcomer to reform initiatives +already under way to build open repositories of scientific literature or data. +One of the most significant is the openaccess publishing movement, which has +been a diverse, flourishing effort in academic circles since the 1990s. It is +useful to review the history of the open access (OA) movement because it has +been an important pacesetter and inspiration for the open-science ethic. +={ education : + open access movement ; + open access (OA) movement +22 ; + Science Commons : + open access movement, and +} + +2~ The Open-Access Movement +={ open access (OA) movement +19 ; + Science Commons : + open access movement, and +19 +} + +The open-access movement has a fairly simple goal: to get the scientific record +online and available to everyone. It regards this task as one of the most +fundamental challenges in science. Open-access publishing generally consists of +two modes of digital access — openaccess archives (or “repositories”) and +open-access journals. In both instances, the publisher or host institution pays +the upfront costs of putting material on the Web so that Internet users can +access the literature at no charge.~[* “Open access” can be a confusing term. +In the context of a rivalrous, depletable natural resource like timber or +grazing land, an open-access regime means that anyone can use and appropriate +the resource, resulting in its overexploitation and ruin. An /{open-access +regime}/ is not the same as a /{commons}/, however, because a commons does have +rules, boundaries, sanctions against free riders, etc., to govern the resource. +However, in the context of an infinite, nonrivalrous resource like information, +which can be copied and distributed at virtually no cost, an open-access regime +does not result in overexploitation of the resource. For this reason, open +access in an Internet context is often conflated with the commons — even though +“open access,” in a natural resource context, tends to produce very different +outcomes.]~ + +The appeal of OA publishing stems from the Great Value Shift described in +chapter 5. “OA owes its origin and part of its deep appeal to the fact that +publishing to the Internet permits both wider dissemination and lower costs +than any previous form of publishing,” writes Peter Suber, author of /{Open +Access News}/ and a leading champion of OA.~{ +http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html. }~ “The revolutionary +conjunction is too good to pass up. But even lower costs must be recovered if +OA is to be sustainable.” In most cases, publishing costs are met by scientific +and academic institutions and/or by subsidies folded into research grants. +Sometimes an OA journal will defray its publishing costs by charging authors +(or their grant funders) a processing fee for articles that they accept. +={ Great Value Shift ; + Suber, Peter +} + +Just as free software and music downloads have disrupted their respective +industries, so OA publishing has not been a welcome development among large +academic publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Kluwer, and Wiley. Online +publishing usually costs much less than traditional print publishing and it +allows authors to retain control over their copyrights. Both of these are a big +incentive for disciplines and universities to start up their own OA journals. +In addition, OA publishing makes it easier for research to circulate, and for +authors to reach larger readerships. This not only augments the practical goals +of science, it bolsters the reputation system and open ethic that science +depends upon. + +Commercial publishers have historically emphasized their shared interests with +scholars and scientists, and the system was amicable and symbiotic. Academics +would produce new work, validate its quality through peer review, and then, in +most cases, give the work to publishers at no charge. Publishers shouldered the +expense of editorial production, distribution, and marketing and reaped the +bulk of revenues generated. The arrangement worked fairly well for everyone +until journal prices began to rise in the early 1970s. Then, as subscription +rates continued to soar, placing unbearable burdens on university libraries in +the 1990s, the Internet facilitated an extremely attractive alternative: +open-access journals. Suddenly, conventional business models for scholarly +publishing had a serious rival, one that shifts the balance of power back to +scientists and their professional communities. + +Publishers have long insisted upon acquiring the copyright of journal articles +and treating them as “works for hire.” This transfer of ownership enables the +publisher, not the author, to determine how a work may circulate. Access to an +article can then be limited by the subscription price for a journal, the +licensing fees for online access, and pay-per-view fees for viewing an +individual article. Publishers may also limit the reuse, republication, and +general circulation of an article by charging high subscription or licensing +fees, or by using digital rights management. If a university cannot afford the +journal, or if a scholar cannot afford to buy individual articles, research +into a given topic is effectively stymied. + +Open-access champion John Willinsky notes, “The publishing economy of scholarly +journals is dominated by a rather perverse property relation, in which the last +investor in the research production chain — consisting of university, +researcher, funding agency and /{publisher}/ — owns the resulting work outright +through a very small investment in relation to the work’s overall cost and +value.”~{ Willinsky, “The Unacknowledged Convergence.” }~ Scientists and +scholars virtually never earn money from their journal articles, and only +occasionally from their books. Unlike commercial writers, this is no problem +for academics, whose salaries are intended to free them to study all sorts of +niche interests despite the lack of “market demand.” Their works are not so +much “intellectual property” that must yield maximum revenues as “royaltyfree +literature,” as Peter Suber calls it. Academics write and publish to contribute +to their fields and enhance their standing among their peers. +={ Suber, Peter ; + Willinsky, John +} + +Not surprisingly, many commercial publishers regard OA publishing as a +disruptive threat. It can, after all, subvert existing revenue models for +scholarly publishing. This does not mean that OA publishing cannot support a +viable business model. Much of OA publishing is sustained through “author-side +payments” to publishers. In certain fields that are funded by research grants, +such as biomedicine, grant makers fold publishing payments into their grants so +that the research can be made permanently available in open-access journals. A +leading commercial publisher, BioMed Central, now publishes over 140 OA +journals in this manner. Hindawi Publishing Corporation, based in Cairo, Egypt, +publishes more than one hundred OA journals and turns a profit. And Medknow +Publications, based in Mumbai, India, is also profitable as a publisher of more +than forty OA journals. + +It remains an open question whether the OA business model will work in fields +where little research is directly funded (and thus upfront payments are not +easily made). As Suber reports, “There are hundreds of OA journals in the +humanities, but very, very few of them charge a fee on the author’s side; most +of them have institutional subsidies from a university say, or a learned +society.”~{ Interview with Peter Suber, June 28, 2006. }~ Yet such subsidies, +in the overall scheme of things, may be more attractive to universities or +learned societies than paying high subscription fees for journals or online +access. +={ Suber, Peter +1 } + +The tension between commercial publishers and academic authors has intensified +over the past decade, fueling interest in OA alternatives. The most salient +point of tension is the so-called “serials crisis.” From 1986 to 2006, +libraries that belong to the Association of Research Libraries saw the cost of +serial journals rise 321 percent, or about 7.5 percent a year for twenty +consecutive years.~{ Association of Research Libraries, /{ARL Statistics}/ +2005–06, at http://www.arl.org/stats/annualsurveys/ar/stats/arlstats06.shtml. +}~ This rate is four times higher than the inflation rate for those years. Some +commercial journal publishers reap profits of nearly 40 percent a year.~{ Peter +Suber, “Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access,” in Charlotte +Hess and Elinor Ostrom, eds., /{Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From +Theory to Practice}/ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 175. }~ By 2000 +subscription rates were so crushing that the Association of American +Universities and the Association of Research Libraries issued a joint statement +that warned, “The current system of scholarly publishing has become too costly +for the academic community to sustain.”~{ Association of Research Libraries, +“Tempe Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing,” May 10, 2000, +at http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/tempe/index.shtml. }~ Three years later, +the high price of journals prompted Harvard, the University of California, +Cornell, MIT, Duke, and other elite research universities to cancel hundreds of +journal subscriptions — a conspicuous act of rebellion by the library +community. +={ libraries : + “serials crisis”, and | Science Commons, and ; + Science Commons : + libraries, and +} + +As journal prices have risen, the appeal of OA publishing has only intensified. +Unfortunately, migrating to OA journals is not simply an economic issue. Within +academia, the reputation of a journal is deeply entwined with promotion and +tenure decisions. A scientist who publishes an article in /{Cell}/ or +/{Nature}/ earns far more prestige than she might for publishing in a +little-known OA journal. + +So while publishing in OA journals may be economically attractive, it flouts +the institutional traditions and social habits that scientists have come to +rely on for evaluating scientific achievement. The OA movement’s challenge has +been to document how OA models can help a university, and so it has +collaborated with university administrators to showcase exemplary successes and +work out new revenue models. It is urging promotion and tenure committees, for +example, to modify their criteria to stop discriminating against new journals +just because they are new, and hence to stop discriminating against OA journals +(which are all new). Much of this work has fallen to key OA leaders like the +Open Society Institute, the Hewlett Foundation, Mellon Foundation and the +library-oriented SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) +as well as individuals such as John Willinsky, Jean-Claude Guédon, Stevan +Harnad, and Peter Suber. +={ Suber, Peter ; + Willinsky, John ; + Guédon, Jean-Claude ; + Harnad, Stevan +} + +One of the first major salvos of the movement came in 2000, when biomedical +scientists Harold E. Varmus, Patrick O. Brown, and Michael B. Eisen called on +scientific publishers to make their literature available through free online +public archives such as the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central. +Despite garnering support from nearly 34,000 scientists in 180 countries, the +measure did not stimulate the change sought. It did alert the scientific world, +governments, and publishers about the virtues of OA publishing, however, and +galvanized scientists to explore next steps. +={ Brown, Patrick O. ; + Varmus, Harold E. +} + +At the time, a number of free, online peer-reviewed journals and free online +archives were under way.~{ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm. }~ +But much of the momentum for organized OA movement began in 2001, when the Open +Society Institute convened a group of leading librarians, scientists, and other +academics in Hungary. In February 2002 the group released the Budapest Open +Access Initiative, a statement that formally describes “open access” as the +freedom of users to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to +the full texts of . . . articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to +software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal or +technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the +Internet itself.”~{ The Budapest Open Access Initiative can be found at +http://www.soros.org/openaccess. }~ Two subsequent statements, the Bethesda +Declaration and the Berlin Declaration, in June 2003 and October 2003, +respectively, expanded upon the definitions of open access and gave the idea +new prominence. (Suber calls the three documents the “BBB definition” of open +access.)~{ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm. }~ +={ Suber, Peter ; + Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) ; + libraries : + open access movement, and +} + +Creative Commons licenses have been critical tools in the evolution of OA +publishing because they enable scientists and scholars to authorize in advance +the sharing, copying, and reuse of their work, compatible with the BBB +definition. The Attribution (BY) and Attribution-Non-Commercial (BY-NC) +licenses are frequently used; many OA advocates regard the Attribution license +as the preferred choice. The protocols for “metadata harvesting” issued by the +Open Archives Initiative are another useful set of tools in OA publishing. When +adopted by an OA journal, these standardized protocols help users more easily +find research materials without knowing in advance which archives they reside +in, or what they contain. + +There is no question that OA is transforming the market for scholarly +publishing, especially as pioneering models develop. The Public Library of +Science announced its first two open-access journals in December 2002. The +journals represented a bold, high-profile challenge by highly respected +scientists to the subscription-based model that has long dominated scientific +publishing. Although Elsevier and other publishers scoffed at the economic +model, the project has expanded and now publishes seven OA journals, for +biology, computational biology, genetics, pathogens, and neglected tropical +diseases, among others. + +OA received another big boost in 2004 when the National Institutes for Health +proposed that all NIH-funded research be made available for free one year after +its publication in a commercial journal. The $28 billion that the NIH spends on +research each year (more than the domestic budget of 142 nations!) results in +about 65,000 peer-reviewed articles, or 178 every day. Unfortunately, +commercial journal publishers succeeded in making the proposed OA policy +voluntary. The battle continued in Congress, but it became clear that the +voluntary approach was not working. Only 4 percent of researchers published +their work under OA standards, largely because busy, working scientists did not +consider it a priority and their publishers were not especially eager to help. +So Congress in December 2007 required NIH to mandate open access for its +research within a year of publication.~{ Peter Suber has an excellent account +of the final OA legislation in /{SPARC Open Access Newsletter}/, no. 17, +January 2, 2008, at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-08.htm. +}~ +={ National Institutes for Health (NIH) } + +What may sound like an arcane policy battle in fact has serious implications +for ordinary Americans. The breast cancer patient seeking the best +peer-reviewed articles online, or the family of a person with Huntington’s +disease, can clearly benefit if they can acquire, for free, the latest medical +research. Scientists, journalists, health-care workers, physicians, patients, +and many others cannot access the vast literature of publicly funded scientific +knowledge because of high subscription rates or per-article fees. A freely +available body of online literature is the best, most efficient way to help +science generate more reliable answers, new discoveries, and commercial +innovations. + +While large publishers continue to dominate the journal market, OA publishing +has made significant advances in recent years. In June 2008, the Directory of +Open Access Journals listed more than 3,400 open-access journals containing +188,803 articles. In some fields such as biology and bioinformatics, OA +journals are among the top-cited journals. In fact, this is one of the great +advantages of OA literature. In the networked environment, articles published +in OA journals are more likely to be discovered by others and cited, which +enhances the so-called impact of an article and the reputation of an author. + +Although journals may or may not choose to honor OA principles, any scientist, +as the copyright holder of his articles, can choose to “self-archive” his work +under open-access terms. But commercial publishers generally don’t like to cede +certain rights, and authors usually don’t know what rights to ask for, how to +assert them in legal language, and how to negotiate with publishers. So it is +difficult for most academics to assert their real preferences for open access. +To help make things simpler, SPARC and MIT developed what is called an +“author’s addendum.” It is a standard legal contract that authors can attach to +their publishing contracts, in which they reserve certain key rights to publish +their works in OA-compliant ways. + +2~ The Scholar’s Copyright Project +={ Scholar’s Copyright Project +18 ; + Science Commons : + Scholar’s Copyright Project, and +18 +} + +In an attempt to help the open-access movement, Science Commons in 2007 +developed its own suite of amendments to publishing contracts. The goal has +been to ensure that “at a minimum, scholarly authors retain enough rights to +archive their work on the Web. Every Science Commons Addendum ensures the +freedom to use scholarly articles for educational purposes, conference +presentations, in other scholarly works or in professional activities.”~{ +Science Commons brochure [undated]. }~ The ultimate goal is to enable authors +“to have the clear and unambiguous freedom to engage in their normal everyday +scholarly activities without contending with complex technology, continuous +amendments to contracts or the need for a lawyer.”~{ Science Commons, +“Scholar’s Copyright Project — Background Briefing,” at +http://sciencecommons.org/literature/scholars_copyright.html. }~ +={ open access (OA) movement } + +To make the whole process easier for scientists, Science Commons developed the +Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine. This point-and-click Web-based tool lets +authors publish in traditional, subscription-based journals while retaining +their rights to post copies on the Internet for download, without most +copyright and financial restrictions. There are also options for “drag and +drop” self-archiving to repositories such as MIT’s DSpace and the National +Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central. Besides making selfarchiving easier and +more prevalent, Science Commons hopes to standardize the legal terms and +procedures for self-archiving to avoid a proliferation of incompatible rights +regimes and document formats. “The engine seems to be generating a dialogue +between authors and publishers that never existed,” said John Wilbanks. “It’s +not being rejected out of hand, which is really cool. To the extent that the +addendum becomes a norm, it will start to open up the [contractual] limitations +on self-archiving.”~{ Interview with John Wilbanks, November 19, 2007. }~ +={ Wilbanks, John } + +Harvard University gave self-archiving a big boost in February 2008 when its +faculty unanimously voted to require all faculty to distribute their +scholarship through an online, open-access repository operated by the Harvard +library unless a professor chooses to “opt out” and publish exclusively with a +commercial journal. Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard library, said, “In +place of a closed, privileged and costly system, [the open-access rule] will +help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn.”~{ Patricia +Cohen, “At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on the Web,” /{New York Times}/, +February 12, 2008. See also Peter Suber’s coverage of the decision in Open +Access News, at +http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/02/moreon-imminent-oa-mandate-at-harvard.html, +and subsequent days. }~ Harvard’s move was the first time that a university +faculty, and not just the administration, initiated action to take greater +control of its scholarly publishing. While some critics complain the new policy +does not go far enough, most OA advocates hailed the decision as a major step +toward developing alternative distribution models for academic scholarship. +={ Darnton, Robert ; + Harvard University ; + open access (OA) movement +} + +By far, the more ambitious aspect of the Scholar’s Copyright project is the +attempt to free databases from a confusing tangle of copyright claims. In every +imaginable field of science — from anthropology and marine biology to chemistry +and genetics — databases are vital tools for organizing and manipulating vast +collections of empirical data. The flood of data has vastly increased as +computers have become ubiquitous research tools and as new technologies are +deployed to generate entirely new sorts of digital data streams— measurements +from remote sensors, data streams from space, and much more. But the +incompatibility of databases — chiefly for technical and copyright reasons — is +needlessly Balkanizing research to the detriment of scientific progress. “There +is plenty of data out there,” says Richard Wallis of Talis, a company that has +built a Semantic Web technology platform for open data, “but it is often +trapped in silos or hidden behind logins, subscriptions or just plain difficult +to get hold of.” He added that there is a lot of data that is “just out there,” +but the terms of access may be dubious.~{ Donna Wentworth blog post, “Ensuring +the freedom to integrate — why we need an ‘open data’ protocol,” Science +Commons blog, December 20, 2007, at +http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2007/12/20/ensuring-thefreedom-to-integrate. +}~ +={ Wallis, Richard ; + science : + databases +14 ; + Science Commons : + ownership of data, and +14 +} + +Questions immediately arise: Can a database be legally used? Who owns it? Will +the database continue to be accessible? Will access require payment later on? +Since data now reside anywhere in the world, any potential user of data also +has to consider the wide variations of copyright protection for databases +around the world. + +The question of how data shall be owned, controlled, and shared is a profoundly +perplexing one. History has shown the virtue of sharing scientific data — yet +individual scientists, universities, and corporations frequently have their own +interests in limiting how databases may be used. Scientists want to ensure the +integrity of the data and any additions to it; they may want to ensure +preferential access to key researchers; companies may consider the data a +lucrative asset to be privately exploited. Indeed, if there is not some +mechanism of control, database producers worry that free riders will simply +appropriate useful compilations and perhaps sell it or use it for their own +competitive advantage. Or they may fail to properly credit the scientists who +compiled the data in the first place. Inadequate database protection could +discourage people from creating new databases in the future. + +A National Research Council report in 1999 described the problem this way: +“Currently many for-profit and not-for-profit database producers are concerned +about the possibility that significant portions of their databases will be +copied or used in substantial part by others to create ‘new’ derivative +databases. If an identical or substantially similar database is then either +re-disseminated broadly or sold and used in direct competition with the +original rights holder’s database, the rights holder’s revenues will be +undermined, or in extreme cases, the rights holder will be put out of +business.”~{ National Research Council, /{A Question of Balance: Private Rights +and the Public Interest in Scientific and Technical Databases}/ (Washington, +DC: National Academy Press, 1999), p. 14. }~ + +In the late 1990s, when the Human Genome Project and a private company, Celera, +were competing to map the human genome, the publicly funded researchers were +eager to publish the genome sequencing data as quickly as possible in order to +prevent Celera or any other company from claiming exclusive control over the +information. They wanted the data to be treated as “the common heritage of +humanity” so that it would remain openly accessible to everyone, including +commercial researchers. When Sir John Sulston of the Human Genome Project +broached the idea of putting his team’s research under a GPL-like license, it +provoked objections that ownership of the data would set a worrisome precedent. +A GPL for data amounts to a “reach-through” requirement on how data may be used +in the future. This might not only imply that data can be owned — flouting the +legal tradition that facts cannot be owned — it might discourage future data +producers from depositing their data into public databases.~{ John Sulston and +Georgina Ferry, /{The Common Threat: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and +the Human Genome}/ (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2002), pp. 212–13. }~ +={ Human Genome Project (HGP) ; + science : + Human Genome Project ; + Sulston, Sir John ; + General Public License (GPL) : + “reach-through” requirement +} + +The International HapMap Project attempted such a copyleft strategy with its +database of genotypes; its goal is to compare the genetic sequences of +different individuals to identify chromosomal regions where genetic variants +are shared.~{ http://www.hapmap.org. }~ The project initially required users to +register and agree to certain contract terms in order to use the database. One +key term prohibited users from patenting any genetic information from the +database or using patents to block usage of HapMap data.~{ Andrés Guadamuz +González, “Open Science: Open Source Licenses in Scientific Research,” /{North +Carolina Journal of Law & Technology}/ 7, no. 2 (Spring 2006), pp. 349–50. }~ +This viral, open-content license for data seemed to provide a solution to the +problem of how to keep data in the commons. But in time the HapMap Project +found that its license inhibited people’s willingness to integrate their own +data with the HapMap database. It therefore abandoned its license and now +places all of its data into the public domain; it is now available to be used +by anyone for any purpose, although it has issued guidelines for the +“responsible use and publication” of the data.~{ +http://www.hapmap.org/guidelines_hapmap_data.html.en. }~ +={ International HapMap Project } + +The basic problem with applying copyright law to databases is how to draw the +line between what is private property and what remains in the commons. “If you +try to impose a Creative Commons license or free-software-style licensing +regime on a database of uncopyrightable facts,” explained John Wilbanks, “you +create an enormous amount of confusion in the user about where the rights start +and stop.”~{ Interview with John Wilbanks, November 19, 2007. }~ It is not very +practical for a working scientist to determine whether copyright protection +applies only to the data itself, to the database model (the structure and +organization of the data), or to the data entry and output sheet. A scientist +might reasonably presume that his data are covered by copyright law, and then +use that right to apply a CC ShareAlike license to the data. But in fact, the +data could be ineligible for copyright protection and so the CC license would +be misleading; other scientists could ignore its terms with impunity. At the +other extreme, other scientists may be unwilling to share their data at all +lest the data circulate with no controls whatsoever. Data are either +overprotected or underprotected, but in either case there is great ambiguity +and confusion. +={ Wilbanks, John ; + copyright law : + science, in +1 ; + science : + copyright and patent restrictions in +1 ; + Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + applied to databases +} + +For two years, Science Commons wrestled with the challenge of applying the CC +licenses to databases. Ultimately, the project came to the conclusion that +“copyright licenses and contractual restrictions are simply the wrong tool, +even if those licenses are used with the best of intentions.” There is just too +much uncertainty about the scope and applicability of copyright — and thus +questions about any licenses based on it. For example, it is not entirely clear +what constitutes a “derivative work” in the context of databases. If one were +to query hundreds of databases using the Semantic Web, would the federated +results be considered a derivative work that requires copyright permissions +from each database owner? There is also the problem of “attribution stacking,” +in which a query made to multiple databases might require giving credit to +scores of databases. Different CC licenses for different databases could also +create legal incompatibilities among data. Data licensed under a CC ShareAlike +license, for example, cannot be legally combined with data licensed under a +different license. Segregating data into different “legal boxes” could turn out +to impede, not advance, the freedom to integrate data on the Web. +={ attribution stacking ; + copyright law : + attribution stacking in databases, and | derivative works, on ; + derivative works +} + +After meeting with a variety of experts in scientific databases, particularly +in the life sciences, biodiversity, and geospatial research, the Science +Commons came up with an ingenious solution to the gnarly difficulties. Instead +of relying on either copyright law or licenses, Science Commons in late 2007 +announced a new legal tool, CC0 (CC Zero), which creates a legal and technical +platform for a scientific community to develop its own reputation system for +sharing data. +={ CC Zero (CC0) +6 ; + Creative Commons (CC) : + CC0 (CC Zero), and +6 ; + Science Commons : + CC0 (CC Zero), and +6 +} + +CC0 is not a license but a set of protocols. The protocols require that a +database producer waive all rights to the data based on intellectual property +law — copyrights, patents, unfair competition claims, unfair infringement +rights — a “quitclaim” that covers everything. Then it requires that the +database producer affirmatively declare that it is not using contracts to +encumber future uses of the data. Once a database is certified as complying +with the protocols, as determined by Science Commons, it is entitled to use a +Science Commons trademark, “Open Access Data,” and CC0 metadata. The trademark +signals to other scientists that the database meets certain basic standards of +interoperability, legal certainty, ease of use, and low transaction costs. The +metadata is a functional software tool that enables different databases to +share their data. + +“What we are doing,” said John Wilbanks, “is reconstructing, contractually, the +public domain. The idea is that with any conforming implementation — any +licensed database — you have complete freedom to integrate with anything else. +It creates a zone of certainty for data integration.”~{ Ibid. }~ Unlike +public-domain data, the databases that Science Commons certifies as meeting +open-data protocols cannot be taken private or legally encumbered. To qualify +to use the Open Access Data mark, databases must be interoperable with other +databases licensed under the protocols. If someone falsely represents that his +data are covered by the license, Science Commons could pursue a trademark +infringement case. +={ Wilbanks, John ; + public domain : + reconstructing +4 +} + +To develop this scheme, Science Commons’s attorney Thinh Nguyen worked closely +with Talis, a company that has built a Semantic Web technology platform for +open data and developed its own open database license. Nguyen also worked with +the company’s legal team, Jordan Hatcher and Charlotte Waelde, and with the +Open Knowledge Foundation, which has developed the Open Knowledge Definition. +={ Nguyen, Thinh ; + Hatcher, Jordan ; + Waelde, Charlotte ; + Open Knowledge Definition +} + +The CC0 approach to data represents something of a breakthrough because it +avoids rigid, prescriptive legal standards for a type of content (data) that is +highly variable and governed by different community norms. CC0 abandons the +vision of crafting a single, all-purpose copyright license or contract for +thousands of different databases in different legal jurisdictions. Instead it +tries to create a legal framework that can honor a range of variable social +norms that converge on the public domain. Each research community can determine +for itself how to meet the CC0 protocols, based on its own distinctive research +needs and traditions. Different norms can agree to a equivalency of +public-domain standards without any one discipline constraining the behaviors +of another. +={ public domain : + social norms, and +} + +The system is clever because it provides legal reliability without being overly +prescriptive. It is simple to use but still able to accommodate complex +variations among disciplines. And it has low transaction costs for both +producers and users of data. Over time, the databases that comply with the CC0 +protocols are likely to grow into a large universe of interoperable open data. +={ science : + transaction costs in ; + transaction costs : + science, in +} + +It is still too early to judge how well the CC0 program is working, but initial +reactions have been positive. “The solution is at once obvious and radical,” +said Glyn Moody, a British journalist who writes about open-source software. +“It is this pragmatism, rooted in how science actually works, that makes the +current protocol particularly important.” Deepak Singh, the co-founder of +Bioscreencast, a free online video tutorial library for the scientific +community, said, “I consider just the announcement to be a monumental +moment.”~{ Moody and Singh quotations from Donna Wentworth, Science Commons +blog post, December 20, 2007. }~ +={ Moody, Glyn ; + Singh, Deepak +} + +2~ The Neurocommons + +Every day there is so much new scientific literature generated that it would +take a single person 106 years to read it all.~{ Brian Athey, University of +Michigan, presentation at Commons of Science conference, National Academy of +Science, Washington, DC, October 3, 2006. }~ In a single year, over twenty-four +thousand peer-reviewed journals publish about 2.5 million research articles.~{ +Stevan Harnad, “Maximizing Research Impact Through Institutional and National +Open-Access Self-Archiving Mandates,” /{Electronics & Computer Science E-Prints +Repository}/, May 2006, available at +http://eprints.ecs.soron.ac.uk/12093/02/harnad-crisrey.pdf. }~ Our ability to +generate content has far outstripped our ability to comprehend it. We are +suffering from a cognitive overload — one that can only be addressed by using +software and computer networks in innovative ways to organize, search, and +access information. For many years, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the celebrated +inventor of the World Wide Web, and his colleagues at the World Wide Web +Consortium (W3C), based at MIT, have been trying to solve the problem of +information overload by developing a “new layer” of code for the Web. +={ Berners-Lee, Tim ; + World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) +} + +This visionary project, the so-called Semantic Web, aspires to develop a +framework for integrating a variety of systems, so they can communicate with +one another, machine to machine. The goal is to enable computers to identify +and capture information from anywhere on the Web, and then organize the results +in sophisticated and customized ways. “If you search for ‘signal transduction +genes in parameter neurons,’ ” said John Wilbanks of Science Commons, “Google +sucks. It will get you 190,000 Web pages.” The goal of the Semantic Web is to +deliver a far more targeted and useful body of specialized information. +={ Semantic Web +6 ; + Science Commons : + Semantic Web, and the +6 ; + World Wide Web : + Semantic Web +6 ; + ilbanks, John +} + +A key tool is the Unique Resource Identifier, or URI, which is analogous to the +Unique Resource Locator, or URL, used by the Web. Affix a URI to any bit of +information on the Web, and the Semantic Web will (so it is hoped) let you mix +and match information tagged with that URI with countless other bits of +information tagged with other URIs. It would not matter if the bit of +information resides in a journal article, database, clinical image, statistical +analysis, or video; the point is that the URI would identify a precise bit of +information. By enabling cross-linking among different types of information, +the idea is that scientists will be able to make all sorts of unexpected and +serendipitous insights. +={ Unique Resource Identifier (URI) ; + Unique Resource Locator (URL) +} + +For example, geneticists studying Huntington’s disease, a rare +neurodegenerative disorder, and experts studying Alzheimer’s disease are both +exploring many of the same genes and proteins of the brain. But because of the +specialization of their disciplines, the chances are good that they read +entirely different scientific journals and attend different conferences. There +is no easy or systematic way for scientists in one specialty to explore the +knowledge that has developed in another specialty. The Semantic Web could +probably help. + +Unfortunately, for a grand dream that has been touted since the 1990s, very +little has developed. The W3C has been embroiled in the design challenges of +the Semantic Web for so long that many companies and computer experts now scoff +at the whole idea of the Semantic Web. There have been too many arcane, +inconclusive debates about computer syntax, ontology language, and +philosophical design choices that no one is holding their breath anymore, +waiting for the Semantic Web to arrive. (Wikipedia defines a computer ontology +as “a data model that represents a set of concepts within a domain and the +relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the objects +within that domain.”) The vision of the Semantic Web may have the potential to +revolutionize science, but few people have seen much practical value in it over +the near term, and so it has garnered little support. +={ World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) +1 } + +Wilbanks, who once worked at the W3C, was frustrated by this state of affairs. +Although he has long believed in the promise of the Semantic Web, he also +realized that it is not enough to extol its virtues. One must demonstrate its +practicality. “The way to herd cats is not to herd cats,” he said, citing a +colleague, “but to put a bowl of cream on your back stoop and run like hell.” +For Wilbanks, the bowl of cream is the Neurocommons knowledge base, a project +that seeks to integrate a huge amount of neuroscientific research using +Semantic Web protocols and is easy to use. +={ Neurocommons +5 ; + Science Commons : + Neurocommons, and the +5 ; + Wilbanks, John +4 +} + +“The way to overcome the inertia that the Semantic Web critics rightly point +out, is not to sit down and argue about ontologies,” said Wilbanks. “It’s to +release something that’s useful enough that it’s worth wiring your database +into the commons system. If I want to get precise answers to complicated +questions that might be found in my own database, among others, now I can do +that. I simply have to wire it into the Neurocommons. You don’t need to come to +some magical agreement about ontology; you just need to spend a couple of days +converting your database to RDF [Resource Description Framework, a set of +Semantic Web specifications], and then— boom! — I’ve got all of the other +databases integrated with mine.” By getting the ball rolling, Science Commons +is betting that enough neuroscience fields will integrate their literature to +the Neurocommons protocols and make the new commons a lively, sustainable, and +growing organism of knowledge. +={ RDF (Resource Description Framework) } + +Using the “open wiring” of the Semantic Web, the Neurocommons has already +integrated information from fifteen of the top twenty databases in the life +sciences and neuroscience. The data have been reformatted to conform to +Semantic Web protocols and the scientific literature, where possible, has been +tagged so that it can be “text-mined” (searched for specific information via +URI tags). “We have put all this stuff into a database that we give away,” said +Wilbanks. “It’s already been mirrored in Ireland, and more mirrors are going +up. It’s sort of like a ‘knowledge server,’ instead of a Web server.” +={ Unique Resource Identifier (URI) } + +Commercial journal publishers already recognize the potential power of owning +and controlling metadata in scientific literature and datasets. To leverage +this control many are starting to make copyright claims in certain kinds of +metadata, and to amend their contracts with libraries in order to limit how +they may retrieve electronic information. “There is a lot at stake here,” says +Villanova law professor Michael Carroll. “What Science Commons wants to do is +make sure that metadata is an open resource.”~{ Interview with Michael Carroll, +August 7, 2006. }~ +={ Carroll, Michael W. ; + libraries : + Science Commons, and ; + Science Commons : + libraries, and +} + +Wilbanks has high hopes that the Neurocommons project, by providing a useful +demonstration of Semantic Web tools, will hasten the interoperability of +specialized knowledge that is currently isolated from related fields. It comes +down to how to motivate a convergence of knowledge. Instead of arguing about +which discipline’s ontology of specialized knowledge is superior to another’s — +and making little headway toward a consensus — Wilbanks has a strategy to build +a knowledge tool that is useful. Period. His bet is that a useful “knowledge +server” of integrated neuroscientific information will be a powerful incentive +for adjacent disciplines to adapt their own literature and databases to be +compatible. The point is to get the commons going — while allowing the freedom +for it to evolve. Then, if people have disagreements or quibbles, they will be +free to change the ontologies as they see fit. “The version [of the +Neurocommons] that we are building is useful and it is free,” Wilbanks said. +“That means that if you want to integrate with it, you can. It means that if +you want to redo our work your way, you can— as long as you use the right +technical formats. You can reuse all of our software.” + +The problem with a field like neuroscience, which has so many exploding +frontiers, is that no single company or proprietary software platform can +adequately manage the knowledge. The information is simply too copious and +complex. Like so many other fields of knowledge that are large and complicated, +it appears that only an open-source model can successfully curate the relevant +information sources. A Web-based commons can be remarkably efficient, +effective, and scalable. This has been the lesson of free and open-source +software, wikis, and the Web itself. Although it is too early to tell how the +Neurocommons project will evolve, the initial signs are promising. A number of +foundations that support research for specific diseases — Alzheimer’s disease, +Parkinson’s, autism, epilepsy, Huntington’s disease — have already expressed +interest in the Neurocommons as a potential model for advancing research in +their respective fields. + +2~ Open Physical Tools +={ Science Commons : + open physical tools in +10 +} + +Science is not just about text and data, of course. It also involves lots of +tangible /{stuff}/ needed to conduct experiments. Typical materials include +cell lines, monoclonal antibodies, reagents, animal models, synthetic +materials, nano-materials, clones, laboratory equipment, and much else. Here, +too, sharing and collaboration are important to the advance of science. But +unlike digital bits, which are highly malleable, the physical materials needed +for experiments have to be located, approved for use, and shipped. Therein lies +another tale of high transaction costs impeding the progress of science. As +Thinh Nguyen, counsel for Science Commons, describes the problem: +={ Nguyen, Thinh +1 } + +_1 The ability to locate materials based on their descriptions in journal +articles is often limited by lack of sufficient information about origin and +availability, and there is no standard citation for such materials. In +addition, the process of legal negotiation that may follow can be lengthy and +unpredictable. This can have important implications for science policy, +especially when delays or inability to obtain research materials result in lost +time, productivity and research opportunities.~{ Thinh Nguyen, “Science +Commons: Material Transfer Agreement Project,” /{Innovations}/, Summer 2007, +pp. 137–43, at +http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/itgg.2007.2.3.137. }~ + +To the nonscientist, this transactional subculture is largely invisible. But to +scientists whose lab work requires access to certain physical materials, the +uncertainties, variations, and delays can be crippling. Normally, the transfer +of materials from one scientist to another occurs through a Material Transfer +Agreement, or MTA. The technology transfer office at one research university +will grant, or not grant, an MTA so that a cell line or tissue specimen can be +shipped to a researcher at another university. Typically, permission must be +granted for the researcher to publish, disseminate, or use research results, +and to license their use for commercialization. +={ Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs) +7 ; + science : + Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs) +7 +} + +While certain types of transactions involve material that could conceivably +generate high royalty revenues, a great many transactions are fairly low-value, +routine transfers of material for basic research. Paradoxically, that can make +it all the harder to obtain the material because consummating an MTA is not a +high priority for the tech transfer office. In other cases, sharing the +material is subject to special agreements whose terms are not known in advance. + +Corporations sometimes have MTAs with onerous terms that prevent academic +researchers from using a reagent or research tool. Individual scientists +sometimes balk at sharing a substance because of the time and effort needed to +ship it. Or they may wish to prevent another scientist from being the first to +publish research results. Whatever the motivation, MTAs can act as a serious +impediment to verification of scientific findings. They can also prevent new +types of exploratory research and innovation. + +Wilbanks describes the existing system as an inefficient, artisanal one that +needs to becomes more of a streamlined industrial system. Just as Creative +Commons sought to lower the transaction costs for sharing creative works, +through the use of standard public licenses, so Science Commons is now trying +to standardize the process for sharing research materials. The idea is to +reduce the transaction costs and legal risks by, in Nguyen’s words, “creating a +voluntary and scalable infrastructure for rights representation and +contracting.”~{ Ibid. }~ Like the CC licenses, the Science Commons MTAs will +consist of “three layers” of licenses — the standard legal agreement, the +machine-readable metadata version, and the “humanreadable deed” that nonlawyers +can understand. +={ Wilbanks, John ; + Nguyen, Thinh ; + science : + transaction costs in ; + transaction costs : + science, in +} + +There are already some successful systems in place for sharing research +materials, most notably the Uniform Biological Material Transfer Agreement +(UBMTA), which some 320 institutions have accepted, as well as a Simple Letter +Agreement developed by the National Institutes of Health. The problem with +these systems is that they cannot be used for transfers of materials between +academic and for-profit researchers. In addition, there are many instances in +which UBMTA signatories can opt out of the system to make modifications to the +UBMTA on a case-by-case basis. +={ National Institutes for Health (NIH) ; + Uniform Biological Material Transfer Agreement (UBMTA) +} + +To help standardize and streamline the whole system for sharing research +materials, Science Commons is working with a consortium of ten research +universities, the iBridge Network, to develop a prototype system. The hope is +that by introducing metadata to the system, and linking that information to +standard contracts and human-readable deeds, scientists will be able to acquire +research materials much more rapidly by avoiding bureaucratic and legal +hassles. Just as eBay, Amazon, and Federal Express use metadata to allow +customers to track the status of their orders, so the Science Commons MTA +project wants to develop a system that will allow searching, tracking, and +indexing of specific shipments. It is also hoped that metadata links will be +inserted into journal articles, enabling scientists to click on a given +research material in order to determine the legal and logistical terms for +obtaining the material. +={ iBridge Network ; + Science Commons : + iBridge Network, and +} + +Wilbanks envisions a new market of third-party intermediaries to facilitate +materials transfers: “There’s an emerging network of third parties — think of +them as ‘biology greenhouses’ — who are funded to take in copies of research +materials and manufacture them on demand — to grow a quantity and mail them +out. What Science Commons is trying to do with the Materials Transfer Project +is to put together a functional system where materials can go to greenhouses +under standard contracts, with digital identifiers, so that the materials can +be cross-linked into the digital information commons. Anytime you see a list of +genes, for example, you will be able to right-click and see the stuff that’s +available from the greenhouses under standard contract, and the cost of +manufacture and delivery in order to access the tool. Research materials need +to be available under a standard contract, discoverable with a digital +identifier, and fulfillable by a third party. And there needs to be some sort +of acknowledgment, like a citation system.” +={ Wilbanks, John } + +At one level, it is ironic that one of the oldest commons-based communities, +academic science, has taken so long to reengineer its digital infrastructure to +take advantage of the Internet and open digital systems. Yet academic +disciplines have always clung tightly to their special ways of knowing and +organizing themselves. The arrival of the Internet has been disruptive to this +tradition by blurring academic boundaries and inviting new types of +cross-boundary research and conversation. If only to improve the conversation, +more scientists are discovering the value of establishing working protocols to +let the diverse tribes of science communicate with one another more easily. Now +that the examples of networked collaboration are proliferating, demonstrating +the enormous power that can be unleashed through sharing and openness, the +momentum for change is only going to intensify. The resulting explosion of +knowledge and innovation should be quite a spectacle. + +1~ 12 OPEN EDUCATION AND LEARNING +={ education +44 } + +/{Managing educational resources as a commons can make learning more affordable +and exciting.}/ + +In the late 1990s, as Richard Baraniuk taught electrical engineering to +undergraduates at Rice University, the furthest thing from his mind was +revolutionizing learning. He just wanted to make digital signal processing a +more palatable subject for his students. Baraniuk, an affable professor with a +venturesome spirit, was frustrated that half of his undergraduate class would +glaze over when he taught signal processing, perhaps because it involves a lot +of math. But then he explained the social ramifications of signal processing — +for wiretapping, the Internet, the airwaves, radar, and much more. Students got +excited. +={ Baraniuk, Richard +13 ; + Rice University +13 +} + +“If I wanted to reach a broader class of people, outside of Rice University,” +Baraniuk said, “that would be very difficult. The standard thing is to write +your own book.” But he quickly realized that writing the 176th book ever +written on signal processing (he counted) would not be very efficient or +effective. It would take years to write, and then additional years to traverse +the editorial, production, and distribution process. And even if the book were +successful, it would reach only five thousand readers. Finally, it would be a +static artifact, lacking the timeliness and interactivity of online dialogue. A +book, Baraniuk ruefully observed, “redisconnects things.”~{ Interview with +Richard Baraniuk, January 21, 2008. }~ + +As chance had it, Baraniuk’s research group at Rice was just discovering +open-source software. “It was 1999, and we were moving all of our workstations +to Linux,” he recalled. “It was just so robust and high-quality, even at that +time, and it was being worked on by thousands of people.” Baraniuk remembers +having an epiphany: “What if we took books and ‘chunked them apart,’ just like +software? And what if we made the IP open so that the books would be free to +re-use and remix in different ways?’” +={ Linux : + education, and +} + +The vision was exciting, but the tools for realizing it were virtually +nonexistent. The technologies for collaborative authoring and the legal +licenses for sharing, not to mention the financing and outreach for the idea, +would all have to be developed. Fortunately, the Rice University administration +understood the huge potential and helped Baraniuk raise $1 million to put +together a skunk works of colleagues to devise a suitable software architecture +and nonprofit plan. A colleague, Don Johnson, dubbed the enterprise +“Connexions.” +={ Connexions +10 ; + education : + Connexions +10 ; + Johnson, Don +} + +The group made a number of choices that turned out to be remarkably shrewd. +Instead of organizing teaching materials into a “course” or a “textbook,” for +example, the Connexions planners decided to build an open ecosystem of shared +knowledge. Just as the Web is “small pieces loosely joined,” as David +Weinberger’s 2003 book put it, so Connexions decided that the best way to +structure its educational content was as discrete modules (such as “signal +processing”) that could be reused in any number of contexts. The planners also +decided to build a system on the open Semantic Web format rather than a simple +interlinking of PDF files. This choice meant that the system would not be +tethered to a proprietary or static way of displaying information, but could +adapt and scale in the networked environment. Modules of content could be more +easily identified and used for many different purposes, in flexible ways. +={ education : + Semantic Web, and ; + Semantic Web ; + World Wide Web : + Semantic Web ; + Weinberger, David +} + +By the summer of 2000, the first version of Connexions went live with two Rice +University courses, Fundamentals of Electronic Engineering and Introduction to +Physical Electronics. The goal was to let anyone create educational materials +and put them in the repository. Anyone could copy and customize material on the +site, or mix it with new material in order to create new books and courses. +Materials could even be used to make commercial products such as Web courses, +CD-ROMs, and printed books. By the end of 2000, two hundred course modules were +available on Connexions: a modest but promising start. + +It turned out to be an auspicious moment to launch an open platform for +sharing. A wave of Web 2.0 applications and tools was just beginning to appear +on the Internet. Innovators with the savvy to take advantage of open networks, +in the style of free and open software, could amass huge participatory +communities in very short order. For Connexions, the living proof was Kitty +Schmidt-Jones, a private piano teacher from Champaign, Illinois. She discovered +Connexions through her husband and posted a 276-page book on music theory to +the site. “Kitty is not the kind of person who would be a music textbook +author,” said Baraniuk, “but she thought that music education is important, and +said, ‘I can do this, too!’ By 2007 /{Understanding Basic Music Theory}/ had +been downloaded more than 7.5 million times from people around the world. A +Connexions staffer attending a conference in Lithuania met an educator from +Mongolia who lit up at the mention of Schmidt-Jones. “We use her work in our +schools!” he said. +={ education : + Web 2.0 applications, and ; + Web 2.0 : + applications : + education, and ; + Schmidt-Jones, Kitty +} + +Besides curating a collection of educational content, Connexions has developed +a variety of open-source applications to let authors create, remix, share, and +print content easily. The project has also developed systems to let users rate +the quality of materials. Professional societies, editorial boards of journals, +and even informal groups can use a customizable software “lens” to tag the +quality of Connexions modules, which can then be organized and retrieved +according to a given lens. + +It was a stroke of good fortune when Baraniuk and his associates learned, in +2002, that Lawrence Lessig was developing a new licensing project called +Creative Commons. As the CC team drafted its licenses, Connexions helped it +understand academic needs and then became one of the very first institutional +adopters of the CC licenses. Connexions decided to require that its +contributors license their works under the least restrictive CC license, CC-BY +(Attribution). This was a simple decision because most textbook authors write +to reach large readerships, not to make money. +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + CC licenses, and +} + +The real expansion of Connexions as a major international repository of +teaching materials did not occur until early 2004, when the software platform +had been sufficiently refined. Then, with virtually no publicity, global usage +of the Connexions site took off. It helped that Rice University has never +sought to “own” the project. Although it administers the project, the +university has deliberately encouraged grassroots participation from around the +world and across institutions. Electrical engineering faculty at ten major +universities are cooperating in developing curricula, for example, and diverse +communities of authors are adding to content collections in music, engineering, +physics, chemistry, bioinformatics, nanotechnology, and history. In 2008, +Connexions had 5,801 learning modules woven into 344 collections. More than 1 +million people from 194 countries are using the materials, many of which are +written in Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and other languages. + +One of Connexion’s neatest tricks is offering printed textbooks for a fraction +of the price of conventional textbooks. Because the content is drawn from the +commons, a 300-page hardback engineering textbook that normally sells for $125 +can be bought for $25, through a print-on-demand publishing partner, QOOP.com. +Ten percent of the purchase price is earmarked to support Connexions, and +another 10 percent helps disadvantaged students obtain textbooks for free. +Unlike conventional textbooks, which may be a year or two old, Connexions +materials are generally up-to-date. + +By providing an alternative to the spiraling costs of academic publishing, +Connexions’s publishing model may actually help a number of academic +disciplines pursue their scholarly missions. Over the past decade, some sixty +university presses have closed or downsized for economic reasons. “If you’re in +art history, anthropology, or the humanities, you get tenure based on your +monographs published by a university press,” Baraniuk said. “The problem is +that, as university presses shut down, there’s nowhere to publish books +anymore.” It is often financially prohibitive to publish art history books, for +example, because such books typically require highquality production and small +press runs. An overly expensive market structure is blocking the flow of new +scholarly publishing. +={ education : + university presses +1 +} + +One solution: a new all-digital hybrid business model for academic publishing. +As the Connexions platform has proved itself, Rice University saw the virtue of +reopening Rice University Press (RUP), which it had closed ten years earlier.~{ +Rice University Press homepage, at http://www.ricepress.rice.edu. }~ The new +RUP retains the editorial structure, high standards, and focus on special +fields of a conventional academic press, but it now works within a “branded +partition” of Connexions. RUP posts all of its books online as soon as the +manuscripts are finalized, and all books are licensed under a CC-BY +(Attribution) license. The press does not have to pay for any warehouse or +distribution costs because any physical copies of the books are printed on +demand. The sales price includes a mission-support fee for RUP and the author’s +royalty. “Because the RUP has eliminated all the back-end costs,” said +Baraniuk, “they figure they can run it from five to ten times more cheaply than +a regular university press.” + +The Connexions publishing model has inspired a group of more than twenty +community colleges to develop its own publicdomain textbooks to compete with +expensive commercial textbooks. The Community College Consortium for Open +Educational Resources~{ http://cccoer.pbwiki.com. }~ —led by Foothill–De Anza +Community College District in Los Altos, California — plans to publish the ten +most popular textbooks used in community colleges, and expand from there. The +consortium will make the books available for free online and sell hardcover +versions for less than thirty dollars. Even if the effort gains only a small +slice of the textbook market, it will help hold down the prices of commercial +textbooks and demonstrate the viability of a new publishing model. More to the +point, by slashing one of the biggest costs facing community college students, +the project will help thousands of lower-income students to stay in college. + +2~ MIT’s OpenCourseWare Initiative +={ MIT OpenCourseWare +8 ; + OpenCourseWare +8 ; + education : + OpenCourseWare +8 +} + +The other pioneering visionary in open education has been MIT. In April 2001, +MIT president Charles Vest shocked the world when he announced that MIT would +begin to put the materials for all two thousand of its courses online for +anyone to use, for free. The new initiative, called OpenCourseWare, would cover +a wide array of instructional materials: lecture notes, class assignments, +problem sets, syllabi, simulations, exams, and video lectures. Putting the +materials online in a searchable, consistent format was expected to take ten +years and cost tens of millions of dollars. (The Hewlett and Mellon foundations +initially stepped forward with two $5.5 million grants, supplemented by $1 +million from MIT.) +={ Vest, Charles +1 } + +The project had its origins two years earlier, in 1999, when President Vest +charged a study group with exploring how the university might develop online +educational modules for lifelong learning. The assumption was that it would +sell MIT-branded course materials to the budding “e-learning” market. At the +time, Columbia University was developing Fathom.com, a bold for-profit +co-venture with thirteen other institutions, to sell a wide variety of digital +content. Publishers and universities alike envisioned a lucrative new market +for academic and cultural materials. + +OpenCourseWare (OCW) was a startling move because it flatly rejected this +ambition, and appeared to be either a foolish or magnanimous giveaway of +extremely valuable information. Knowledge was assumed to be a species of +property that should be sold for as dear a price as possible; few people at the +time recognized that the Great Value Shift on the Internet was reversing this +logic. The idea that giving information away might actually yield greater +gains— by enhancing an institution’s visibility, respect, and influence on a +global scale — was not seen as credible. After all, where’s the money? +={ Great Value Shift ; + Internet : + Great Value Shift, and +} + +After studying the matter closely, MIT decided that the online market was not +likely to be a boon, and that posting course materials online would send a +strong message about MIT’s values. President Vest conceded that the plan “looks +counter-intuitive in a market-driven world.” But he stressed that +OpenCourseWare would combine “the traditional openness and outreach and +democratizing influence of American education and the ability of the Web to +make vast amounts of information instantly available.”~{ MIT press release, +“MIT to make nearly all course materials available free on the World Wide Web,” +April 4, 2001.}~ Professor Steven Lerman, one of the architects of the OCW +plan, told the /{New York Times}/, “Selling content for profit, or trying in +some ways to commercialize one of the core intellectual activities of the +university, seemed less attractive to people at a deep level than finding ways +to disseminate it as broadly as possible.”~{ Carey Goldberg, “Auditing Classes +at M.I.T., on the Web and Free,” /{New York Times}/, April 4, 2001, p. 1. }~ +={ Vest, Charles ; + Lerman, Steven +} + +MIT also realized the dangers of propertizing college courses and teaching +materials, said computer scientist Hal Abelson, another member of the OCW study +group (and a CC board member). Ownership, he said, “can be profoundly +destructive to the idea of a university community . . . The more people can +stop talking about property and start talking about the nature of a faculty +member’s commitment to the institution, the healthier the discussion will be. +It’s not really about what you own as a faculty member; it’s about what you do +as a faculty member.”~{ Interview with Hal Abelson, “OpenCourseWare and the +Mission of MIT,” /{Academe}/, September/October 2002, pp. 25–26. }~ +={ Abelson, Hal : + OpenCourseWare, and +} + +School officials stressed that using MIT courseware on the Web is not the same +as an MIT education. Indeed, the free materials underscore the fact that what +really distinguishes an MIT education is one’s participation in a learning +community. Unlike the Connexions content, MIT’s OpenCourseWare is a fairly +static set of course materials; they are not modular or constantly updated. In +addition, they are licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA +(AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike.) license. While this prevents businesses +from profiting from MIT course materials, it also prevents other educational +institutions from remixing them into new courses or textbooks. +={ communities : + learning ; + education : + learning community, in a +} + +Despite these limitations, MIT’s OCW materials have been profoundly +influential. The course Laboratory in Software Engineering, for example, has +been used by students in Karachi, Pakistan; the island of Mauritius; Vienna, +Austria; and Kansas City, Missouri, among scores of other places around the +world.~{ David Diamond, “MIT Everyware,” /{Wired}/, September 2003. }~ Ten of +the leading Chinese universities now use hundreds of MIT courses, leading three +noted OER experts, Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, to +conclude that MIT’s OCW “has had a major impact on Chinese education.”~{ Daniel +E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, “A Review of the Open +Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New +Opportunities,” February 2007, at +http://www.oerderves.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/a-review-of-the-open-educational-re +sources-oer-movement_final.pdf, p. 23. }~ Noting the life-changing impact that +OCW has had on students in rural villages in China and West Africa, Atkins and +his co-authors cite “the power of the OCW as a means for cross-cultural +engagement.” Over the course of four years, from October 2003 through 2007, the +OCW site received nearly 16 million visits; half were newcomers and half were +repeat visits. +={ Atkins, Daniel E. ; + Brown, John Seely ; + Hammond, Allen L. ; + education : + OER movement ; + Open Educational Resources (OER) movement +} + +OCW is becoming a more pervasive international ethic now that more than 120 +educational institutions in twenty nations have banded together to form the +OpenCourseWare Consortium. Its goal is to create “a broad and deep body of open +educational content using a shared model.”~{ OpenCourseWare Consortium, at +http://www.ocwconsortium.org. }~ Although plenty of universities are still +trying to make money from distance education courses, a growing number of +colleges and universities realize that OCW helps faculty connect with other +interested faculty around the world, build a college’s public recognition and +recruitment, and advance knowledge as a public good. + +2~ The Rise of the Open Educational Resources Movement +={ education : + OER movement +19 ; + Open Educational Resources (OER) movement +19 +} + +While Connexions and MIT’s OpenCourseWare have understandably garnered a great +deal of attention, all sorts of fascinating educational projects, big and +small, have popped up on the Internet as Web 2.0 innovations matured. Some of +these projects have become celebrated, such as Wikipedia, the Public Library of +Science, and the Internet Archive. Others, though less celebrated, represent a +dazzling mosaic of educational innovation and new possibilities. In a sense, +the Long Tail has come to education; even the most obscure subjects have a +sustainable niche on the Internet. The groundswell has even produced its own +theorists, conveners, and infrastructure builders. Utah State University hosts +the Center for Open Sustainable Learning, which is a clearinghouse for open +educational tools. Carnegie Mellon has an Open Learning Initiative that designs +educational courses. And so on. +={ Long Tail ; + Wikipedia +} + +While American institutions and educators have been the first movers in this +field, it has quickly taken on an international grassroots flavor. Thousands of +commoners from around the world have started their own projects. MathWorld has +become the Web’s most extensive mathematical resource. Curriki is a wiki that +offers lessons plans and guidance for teachers. The British Library’s Online +Gallery features digitized versions of Mozart’s musical diary and sketches by +Leonardo da Vinci. U.K. and Australian high school students can now use the +Internet to operate the Faulkes Telescope on the island of Maui, Hawaii. +Students around the world do much the same with Bugscope, a scanning electronic +microscope that can be operated remotely. + +It is hard to set a precise date when the practitioners in this area realized +that such wildly diverse projects might constitute a coherent movement with a +shared agenda. But as more grantees began to discover each other, the +movement-in-formation adopted a rather ungainly name to describe itself — “Open +Educational Resources,” or OER. + +Most OER projects share a simple and powerful idea — “that the world’s +knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the World Wide +Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, +use and reuse knowledge.” That is how Atkins and his co-authors define OER. It +consists of “teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the +public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that +permits their free use or re-purposing by others.”~{ Ibid. }~ +={ Atkins, Daniel E. ; + Brown +} + +The heart of the OER movement is, of course, open sharing and collaboration. +OER advocates regard learning as an intrinsically social process, and so they +believe that knowledge and learning tools ought to freely circulate. Inspired +by the GPL and the CC licenses, OER advocates believe they should be free to +copy, modify, and improve their learning tools and pass them forward to others. +There is a presumption that artificial barriers to the free flow of information +should be eliminated, and that teachers and learners should be empowered to +create their own knowledge commons. +={ Creative Commons (CC) licenses : + tools for creating commons, as +} + +The OER movement has a special importance for people who want to learn but +don’t have the money or resources, which is to say, people in developing +nations, low-income people, and people with specialized learning needs. For the +4 billion people who live in the developing world, schooling is a privilege, +textbooks are rare, and money is scarce. In many African nations, there would +not be libraries if books were not photocopied. The OER movement aspires to +address these needs. OER projects can provide important benefits in +industrialized nations, too, where subscriptions to research journals are often +prohibitively expensive and many community college students drop out because +textbooks cost more than tuition. + +The OER movement is currently in a formative stage, still trying to make sense +of the many players in the movement and understand the complex impediments to +its progress. Some of this could be seen at a “speed geeking” session at the +iCommons Summit in 2007 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Speed geeking, a puckish +variation on “speed dating,” consists of people listening to a short +presentation, asking questions and then moving on to the next presentation. +After five minutes, a moderator blows a whistle and shouts, “Everyone move — +now!” A speed geek can learn about twelve different projects, and meet twelve +interesting people, in a single hour. +={ Croatia } + +% added Croatia missing Croatia reference in source book index + +In this case, the speed geeking took place in a sweltering loft space without +air-conditioning, in a medieval building overlooking the Adriatic Sea. At the +first station, a group of participants marveled at a sturdy lime-green laptop +of a kind that was about to be distributed to millions of children around the +world. The One Laptop Per Child project, the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte +of MIT’s Media Lab, is an ambitious nonprofit initiative to build a sturdy, +kidfriendly laptop filled with open-source software and Wi-Fi capabilities for +$100.~{ See, e.g., John Markoff, “For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs a Big +Debate,” /{New York Times}/, November 30, 2006. }~ (The cost turned out to be +$188, but is expected to decline as production volume grows.) Hundreds of +thousands of the so-called XO laptops have now been distributed to kids in +Peru, Uruguay, Mexico and other poor nations. +={ Negroponte, Nicholas ; + One Laptop Per Child +} + +/{Tweet!}/ Next stop: the Free High School Science Textbooks project in South +Africa is developing a free set of science textbooks for students in grades ten +through twelve. The project depends on volunteers to write modules of text +about various physics, chemistry, and mathematical topics. Paid editors then +craft the text into a coherent, high-quality textbook; printing is funded by +donations. +={ Free High School Science Textbooks } + +Five minutes later, it was on to Educalibre, a Chilean project that is +installing free software on old computers so that they can be reused in +classrooms. Educalibre is also trying to integrate free software into high +school curricula, especially math. The project seeks to bring open-source +software principles into formal education. + +Next, Delia Browne of the National Education Access Licence for Schools, or +NEALS, explained that some ten thousand Australian schools pay millions of +dollars each year to collecting societies in order to reprint materials that +the Australian schools themselves have produced. NEALS wants to eliminate this +expense, as well as millions of dollars in photocopying expenses, by creating a +vast new commons of freely shareable educational materials. Its solution is to +persuade Australian schools, as copyright holders, to adopt a special license +so that participating schools can copy and share each other’s materials. +={ Browne, Delia ; + National Education Access Licence for Schools (NEALS) +} + +/{Tweet!}/ At the next station, Ed Bice of San Francisco explained how his +nonprofit group, Meedan.net, is developing a “virtual town square” for Arabic- +and English-speaking Internet users. Using realtime translation and social +networking tools, the site aspires to open up a new global conversation between +Arabs and the rest of the world. It plans to break down cultural barriers while +opening up educational opportunities to Arab populations. +={ Bice, Ed } + +/{Tweet! Tweet!}/ Neeru Paharia, a former executive director of the Creative +Commons, introduced her fledgling project, AcaWiki. Paharia is concerned that +too many academic articles are locked behind paywalls and are not readily +accessible to everyone. AcaWiki plans to recruit graduate students, academics, +and citizens to write summaries of academic papers. Since many grad students +make abstracts as part of their routine research, it would not be difficult to +pool thousands of summaries into a highly useful, searchable Web collection. +={ Paharia, Neeru } + +The speed geekers in Dubrovnik were sweaty and overstimulated at the end, but +gratified to learn that there are a great many OER projects under way +throughout the world; they just aren’t very well known or coordinated with one +another. Two of the participants — J. Philipp Schmidt of the University of the +Western Cape and Mark Surman of the Shuttleworth Foundation, both of South +Africa — conceded that “there is still a great deal of fuzziness about what +this movement includes,” and that “we don’t yet have a good ‘map’ of open +education.” But the significance of grassroots initiatives is unmistakable. +“There is a movement afoot here,” they concluded, “and it is movement with an +aim no less than making learning accessible and adaptable for all.”~{ J. +Philipp Schmidt and Mark Surman, “Open Sourcing Education: Learning and Wisdom +from the iSummit 2007,” September 2, 2007, at +http://icommons.org/download_banco/open-sourcing-education-learning-and-wisdom-from-isummit-2007. +}~ “Education,” another participant predicted, “will drive the future of the +Commons movement.” +={ Schmidt, J. Philipp ; + Surman, Mark +} + +In a sign that the OER movement is getting serious as a movement, thirty of its +leaders met in Cape Town, South Africa, and in January 2008 issued the Cape +Town Open Education Declaration.~{ http://www.capetowndeclaration.org. Schmidt +and Surman, “Open Sourcing Education.” }~ The declaration is a call to make +learning materials more freely available online, and to improve education and +learning by making them more collaborative, flexible, and locally relevant. The +declaration outlines the challenge: “Many educators remain unaware of the +growing pool of open educational resources. Many governments and educational +institutions are either unaware or unconvinced of the benefits of open +education. Differences among licensing schemes for open resources create +confusion and incompatibility. And, of course, the majority of the world does +not have access to the computers and networks that are integral to most current +open education efforts.” + +New funding support is materializing from foundations like the Open Society +Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation, and the Creative Commons has +instigated a new project, ccLearn, headed by Ahrash Bissell, to help coordinate +OER factions and tackle barriers to further progress. +={ Bissell, Ahrash } + +Despite the challenges it faces, the Open Educational Resources movement has a +promising future if only because it has such an appealing ethos and practical +value. It offers to lower the costs and increase the efficiencies of learning. +It helps to generate high-quality materials that address specific learning +needs. Where markets are too expensive or unresponsive, collective provisioning +through the commons can meet needs effectively and in socially convivial ways. + +Such intangible satisfactions may be one of the secrets of the OER movement’s +success to date. Institutions and individuals take pleasure in contributing to +the public good. There is pleasure in helping people who thirst for an +education, whether in Africa or in a community college, to acquire the +resources they need. For learners, the OER movement offers new, more flexible +styles of learning. Over time, it seems likely that OER projects will transform +the familiar “information transfer” models of formal education into more +informal and participatory learning communities. Passive students will more +easily become passionate, self-directed learners. + +Finally, at a time of great geopolitical rivalries and cultural animosities, +the OER movement holds itself forth as an arena of transnational cooperation. +It regards diversity as a strength and social inequity as a challenge to be +squarely met. It is a measure of the movement’s idealism that Schmidt and +Surman, the South African OER commoners, compare open education to “a flock of +migratory geese, moving back and forth between North and South. The flock +combines birds from all places. Each goose takes a turn leading the flock, +taking the strain, and then handing over to their peers. The flock is not +confined to just the North, or the South. It flourishes as a global movement.” +14 +={ Schmidt, J. Philipp ; + Surman, Mark +} + +1~ CONCLUSION: THE DIGITAL REPUBLIC AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRATIC CULTURE +={ free culture +56 } + +/{You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change +something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. —R. +Buckminster Fuller}/ +={ Fuller, R. Buckminster } + +Legend has it that, upon leaving Independence Hall on the final day of the +Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was approached by a woman, +who asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a Republic or a Monarchy?” +Franklin famously replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” The American +colonies had imagined and engineered a new constitutional order, but its +survival would depend on countless new struggles and innovations. An American +civic culture had to be invented. +={ Franklin, Benjamin +1 } + +The Franklin vignette might well be applied to the digital republic that the +commoners have built. Except that, instead of asking, “Well, Mr. Stallman and +Professor Lessig, what have we got — a free culture or a proprietary tyranny?” +the question might better be posed to the commoners themselves. Their very +existence answers the question, Tyranny or freedom? Free culture exists. It +exists to the extent that people practice its ideals. It is not pervasive; many +people have no idea what it is; it overlaps in fuzzy ways with the market. But +it is flourishing wherever online communities have devised satisfactory commons +structures — through law, software, and social norms — to capture the value +that they create. Or, as the American Framers put it, to secure the blessings +of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. +={ commoners : + influence of +3 +} + +As the preceding chapters make clear, the commoners are now a respected force +in culture, politics, and economics. Their influence can be felt in varying +degrees in the worlds of music, video, photography, and books; in software, Web +design, and Internet policies; in social networks and peer-to-peer communities; +in business, science, and education; and in scores of countries that have +ported the Creative Commons licenses and developed their own commons-based +projects. + +Thanks to the Internet, the commons is now a distinct sector of economic +production and social experience. It is a source of “value creation” that both +complements and competes with markets. It is an arena of social association, +self-governance, and collective provisioning that is responsive and trustworthy +in ways that government often is not. In a sense, the commons sector is a +recapitulation of civil society, as described by Alexis de Tocqueville, but +with different capacities. +={ Tocqueville, Alexis de ; + Internet : + socially created value of +} + +Yet even with the great advances that the commoners have made in building their +own shared platforms, tools, and content, the digital republic is not secure. +In most countries, the commoners have less conventional political power than +corporations, which means that the interests of citizens, consumers, and users +are scanted in the policies that govern market competition, intellectual +property, and life on the Internet.~{ For a nice overview of these policy +contests, see Yochai Benkler, /{The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production +Transforms Markets and Freedom}/ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), +chapter 11, “The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital +Environment,” pp. 383–459. }~ Faced with the Great Value Shift, mass-media and +entertainment corporations are not eager to surrender their historic market +franchises to newcomers without a fight; they are resisting competition from +open business models and the commons. +={ Great Value Shift ; + value ; + Centralized Media : + competition, and ; + Internet : + attempts to control +3 +} + +In the United States, cable broadcast operators and telephone carriers are +threatening the very future of the Internet as a commons infrastructure. They +wish to assert greater control over Web access and traffic, and so are +staunchly resisting “net neutrality” rules that would require them to act as +nondiscriminatory common carriers. They would like to leverage their roles as +oligopolistic gatekeepers to the Internet, and boost their revenues, by +choosing whose Web sites will receive superior transmission and whose +communications may be censored or put in the “slow lane.” +={ Internet : + net neutrality rules on | future of +} + +At a further extreme, authoritarian countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, +Egypt, and Singapore have shown that national governments still retain great +powers to censor and control Internet communications.~{ Shanthi Kalathil and +Taylor C. Boas, /{Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on +Authoritarian Rule}/ (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International +Peace, 2003). }~ Even the United States government is reportedly engaged in +extensive surveillance of Internet traffic, ostensibly for antiterrorism +purposes. Meanwhile, many poor nations, especially in Africa and Asia, are +struggling simply to get online and create their own digital commons. + +These battles are all part of a larger struggle over “the institutional ecology +of the digital environment,” in Yochai Benkler’s words — a struggle that is +likely to continue for many years. What powers and capabilities will the +commoners and their institutions have relative to business and government, and +how will they be able to protect and enhance the value created within the +commons? +={ Benkler, Yochai : + social movements, on +} + +2~ A New Species of Citizenship +={ citizenship : + new species of +22 ; + democracy : + new species of citizenship +22 ; + free culture : + new species of citizenship, as +22 +} + +Perhaps the most enduring contribution of the free software, free culture, and +other “open movements” has been their invention of a new species of +citizenship. Despite significant differences of philosophy and implementation, +these commons share some basic values about access, use, and reuse of creative +works and information. No matter their special passions, the commoners tend to +be improvisational, resourceful, self-directed, collaborative, and committed to +democratic ideals. They celebrate a diversity of aesthetics, viewpoints, and +cultures. They are egalitarian in spirit yet respectful of talent and +achievement. There is a strong predilection to share because the accrual of +digital contributions (code, content, metatags) will lead to a greater good for +all and perhaps even democratic change. But there is no hostility to commercial +activity — indeed, there is a lively admiration for entrepreneurialism — so +long as it does not violate basic creative and civic freedoms or core +principles of the Internet (openness, interoperability, sharing). The +disagreements that do exist center on how best to achieve those goals. +={ free culture : + sharing ethic of +} + +As this book has shown, the Internet is enabling a new species of citizenship +in modern life. It is not just a “nice thing.” It is a powerful force for +change. The new technologies have been instrumental in helping the commoners +imagine and build a digital republic of their own. Over the long term, this +citizenship and the culture that it is fostering are likely to be a politically +transformative force. They just might help real-world democracies restore a +measure of their waning legitimacy and competence.~{ David Bollier, /{The Rise +of Netpolitik: How the Internet Is Changing International Politics and +Diplomacy}/ (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute Communications and Society +Program, 2003). }~ +={ Internet : + mass participation in +} + +David R. Johnson, a lawyer and scholar, describes the citizen of the Internet — +the “netizen” — as a significant historical development because he or she can +potentially compete with government as a source of binding rule sets. In a +brilliant essay, “The Life of the Law Online,” Johnson writes that “we haven’t +had a real competition for survival among rule sets. The competition is only +between the rule of (our one) law and, presumably, anarchy. So the tendency of +all rule sets to become more complicated over time, especially when written by +people considering only parts of the system in analytical isolation, has not +been checked by evolutionary forces.”~{ David R. Johnson, “The Life of the Law +Online,” /{First Monday}/ 11, no. 2 (February 2006), at +http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_2/johnson/index.html. }~ Government has +an unchecked monopoly on lawmaking even though its relationship to the +governed, whose consent is vital, is now greatly attenuated. +={ Johnson, David R. +1 ; + commoners : + “netizens” +1 +} + +One evolutionary “competitor” to government-made law and to markets is the +netizen — or, in my terms, the commoner. For the most part, members of a +commons generate and maintain the rules that govern their collective. By +Johnson’s reckoning, the commons must be considered a new social metabolism for +creating law; it is a new type of “legal organism.” It is, in Johnson’s words, +“a selfcausing legal order composed of systems that adopt goals that serve the +values of those they regulate, without excessively imposing those goals on +others.” +={ commons : + new type of legal organism ; + law : + commons as new type of legal organism +} + +A commons is a kind of biological entity operating in a complex cultural +ecosystem. It has its own internal systems for managing its affairs, +interacting with its environment, repairing itself, and defining its own +persistent identity. It is a force by which ordinary people can express their +deepest interests and passions, directly and without institutional mediation, +on a global stage. This is an unprecedented capacity in communications, +culture, and, indeed, human history. +={ commons : + definition of +} + +To understand why the commoner represents a great leap forward in citizenship, +it helps to consider the history of citizenship in the oldest democracy in the +world, the United States. In his book /{The Good Citizen}/, sociologist Michael +Schudson describes the evolution of three distinct types of citizenship over +the past three centuries: +={ Schudson, Michael +2 ; + citizenship : + history-making +16 ; + Internet : + citizenship, and +16 +} + +_1 When the nation was founded, being a citizen meant little more than for +property-owning white males to delegate authority to a local gentleman — and +accept his complimentary glass of rum on election day. This “politics of +assent” gave way early in the nineteenth century to a “politics of parties.” +Parties conducted elaborate campaigns of torchlight processions and monster +meetings; voting day was filled with banter, banners, fighting and drinking. . +. . The third model of citizenship, ushered in by Progressive reformers, was a +“politics of information.” Campaigning became less emotional and more +educational. Voting was by secret ballot.~{ Michael Schudson, /{The Good +Citizen: A History of American Civic Life}/ (New York: Free Press, 1998), dust +jacket. }~ + +We are heirs to the “politics of information,” a model of citizenship that +presumes, as economics does, that we are rational actors who, if armed with +sufficient quantities of high-quality information, will make educated decisions +and optimize civic outcomes. But as Walter Lippmann noted and Schudson echoes, +“if democracy requires omnicompetence and omniscience from its citizens, it is +a lost cause.”~{ Ibid., p. 310. }~ Life is too busy, fast, and complex. A new +type of citizenship is needed. Schudson offers a fairly weak prescription — the +“monitorial citizen,” a watchdog who vigilantly monitors the behavior of power. +={ Lippmann, Walter } + +But it is precisely here that the Internet is offering up a new, more muscular +model of citizenship. I call it /{history-making citizenship}/. The rise of the +blogosphere over the past ten years is emblematic of this new paradigm of +citizenship. So is citizen-journalism, free software, Wikipedia, the Open +Educational Resources movement, open business models like Jamendo and Flickr, +and the Creative Commons and iCommons communities. In one sense, the +citizenship that these groups practice is “monitorial” in that their members +spend a great deal of time watching and discussing. But “monitoring” barely +begins to describe their activities. The commoners have the ability — rare in +pre-Internet civic life — to publish and incite others to action, and then +organize and follow through, using a growing variety of powerful tools. With +the advent of blogs, meetups, social networking, text messaging, and many other +digital systems, citizens are able to communicate, coordinate, organize, and +take timely action on a wide range of matters, including matters of public and +political concern. +={ commoners : + influence of +1 +} + +I call the new sorts of citizen behaviors “history-making” because ordinary +people are able to assert moral agency and participate in making change.~{ I am +inspired in this choice of terms by Charles Spinosa, Frnando Flores, and Hubert +L. Dreyfus in their book, /{Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic +Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity}/ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). +}~ This capacity is not reserved chiefly to large, impersonal institutions such +as corporations, government agencies, and other bureaucracies. It is not a mere +“participatory citizenship” in which people can volunteer their energies to a +larger a more influential leader, political party, or institution in order to +help out. It is a citizenship in which /{the commoners themselves}/ choose +projects that suit their talents and passions. Dispersed, unorganized groups of +strangers can build their own platforms and social norms for pursuing their +goals; instigate public action that would not otherwise occur (and that may +clash with the practices of existing institutions); and push forward their own +distinctive agenda. +={ commons : + political implications of +} + +These behaviors exist in some measure in offline realms, of course, but they +are a growing norm in the digital republic. A few examples will suffice to make +the point. The Web helped create and propel a handful of cause-oriented +candidacies — Howard Dean, Ron Paul, Ned Lamont~[* Lamont was an insurgent +candidate for U.S. Senate from Connecticut challenging Senator Joseph Lieberman +in a campaign that helped culturally validate opposition to the U.S. war in +Iraq.]~ — who rapidly raised enormous sums of money, galvanized large numbers +of passionate supporters, and altered mainstream political discourse. Although +none prevailed in their races, Barack Obama made a quantum leap in online +organizing in 2008, raising $50 million in a single month from supporters via +the Internet. Obama’s candidacy was buoyed by the rise of the “netroots” — Web +activists with a progressive political agenda— whose size and credibility +enable them to sway votes in Congress, raise significant amounts of campaign +funds, and influence local activism. The stories are now legion about blogs +affecting political life — from the resignation of Senate majority leader Trent +Lott after he praised the racist past of Senator Strom Thurmond at his +hundredth birthday party, to the electoral defeat of Senate candidate George +Allen after his uttering of an ethnic slur, /{macaca}/, was posted on YouTube. +={ Dean, Howard ; + Lamont, Ned ; + Obama, Barack ; + Paul, Ron ; + Internet : + political campaigns on ; + Allen, George ; + Lott, Trent ; + YouTube +} + +Citizens are now able to initiate their own policy initiatives without first +persuading the mainstream media or political parties to validate them as +worthy. For example, a handful of citizens troubled by evidence of “hackable” +electronic voting machines exposed the defects of the Diebold machines and the +company’s efforts to thwart public scrutiny and reforms.~{ See, e.g.,Yochai +Benkler, /{The Wealth of Networks}/, pp. 225–32. }~ (The effort has led to a +nationwide citizen effort, www.blackboxvoting.org, to expose security problems +with voting machines and vote counting.) An ad hoc group of activists, lawyers, +academics, and journalists spontaneously formed around a public wiki dealing +with the lethal side effects of a bestselling antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, and +the manufacturer’s allegedly illegal conduct in suppressing evidence of the +drug’s risks. (Prosecutors later sought a $1 billion fine against Eli Lilly.)~{ +Jonah Bossewitch, “The Zyprexa Kills Campaign: Peer Production and the +Frontiers of Radical Pedagogy,” /{Re-public}/, at +http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=144. }~ + +The Web is giving individuals extra-institutional public platforms for +articulating their own facts and interpretations of culture. It is enabling +them to go far beyond voting and citizen vigilance, to mount citizen-led +interventions in politics and governance. History-making citizens can compete +with the mass media as an arbiter of cultural and political reality. They can +expose the factual errors and lack of independence of /{New York Times}/ +reporters; reveal the editorial biases of the “MSM” — mainstream media — by +offering their own videotape snippets on YouTube; they can even be pacesetters +for the MSM, as the blog Firedoglake did in its relentless reporting of the +“Scooter” Libby trial (Libby, one of Vice President Cheney’s top aides, was +convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with press leaks +about CIA agent Valerie Plame.) Citizen-journalists, amateur videographers, +genuine experts who have created their own Web platforms, parodists, dirty +tricksters, and countless others are challenging elite control of the news +agenda. It is no wonder that commercial journalism is suffering an identity +crisis. Institutional authority is being trumped by the “social warranting” of +online communities, many of which function as a kind of participatory +meritocracy. +={ Libby, “Scooter” ; + YouTube +} + +History-making citizenship is not without its deficiencies. Rumors, +misinformation, and polarized debate are common in this more open, unmediated +environment. Its crowning virtue is its potential ability to mobilize the +energies and creativity of huge numbers of people. GNU/Linux improbably drew +upon the talents of tens of thousands of programmers; certainly our +contemporary world with its countless problems could use some of this elixir— +platforms that can elicit distributed creativity, specialized talent, +passionate commitment, and social legitimacy. In 2005 Joi Ito, then chairman of +the board of the Creative Commons, wrote: “Traditional forms of representative +democracy can barely manage the scale, complexity and speed of the issues in +the world today. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each +other in global dialog are limited in their ability to solve global issues. The +monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world +cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach informed, viable +consensus.”~{ Joichi Ito, “Emergent Democracy,” chapter 1 in John Lebkowsky and +Mitch Ratcliffe, eds., /{Extreme Democracy}/ (Durham, NC: Lulu.com, 2005), at +http://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20One-Ito.pdf. }~ Ito concluded +that a new, not-yetunderstood model of “emergent democracy” is likely to +materialize as the digital revolution proceeds. A civic order consisting of +“intentional blog communities, ad hoc advocacy coalitions and activist +networks” could begin to tackle many urgent problems. +={ Ito, Joichi ; + NU/Linux ; + democracy : + emergent +1 | traditional forms of +5 +} + +Clearly, the first imperative in developing a new framework to host +representative democracy is to ensure that the electronic commons be allowed to +exist in the first place. Without net neutrality, citizens could very well be +stifled in their ability to participate on their own terms, in their own +voices. If proprietary policies or technologies are allowed to override citizen +interests (Verizon Wireless in 2007 prevented the transmission of abortion +rights messages on its text-messaging system, for example~{ Adam Liptak, +“Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Messages,” /{New York Times}/, September +27, 2007, at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/business/27cnd-verizon.html. +}~), then any hope for historymaking citizenship will be stillborn. + +Beyond such near-term concerns, however, the emerging digital republic is +embroiled in a much larger structural tension with –terrestrial “real world” +governments. The commoner is likely to regard the rules forged in online +commons as more legitimate and appropriate than those mandated by government. +Again, David R. Johnson: +={ Johnson, David R. } + +_1 The goals of a successful legal organism must be agreed upon by those who +live within it, because a legal system is nothing more than a collective +conversation about shared values. When it ceases to be that kind of internally +entailed organism, the law becomes mere power, social “order” becomes tyranny, +and the only option, over the long term at least, is war. + +_1 Organisms can’t be repaired from the outside. But, with reference to +interactions that take place primarily online, among willing participants who +seek primarily to regulate their own affairs, that’s exactly where existing +governments are situated — outside the vibrant, self-regulating online spaces +they seek to regulate. Their efforts to engineer the Internet as if it were a +mechanism are not only fundamentally illegitimate but doomed by the very nature +of the thing they seek to regulate. They are trying to create social order, of +course. But they have not recognized . . . that order in complex systems +creates itself.~{ Johnson, “The Life of the Law Online.” }~ + +After all, he or she is likely to have had a more meaningful personal role in +crafting those rules. Now, of course, people live their lives in both online +and terrestrial environments; there is no strict division between the two. That +said, as people’s lives become more implicated in Internet spaces, citizens are +likely to prefer the freedoms and affordances of the open-networked environment +to the stunted correlates of offline politics, governance, and law. + +Indeed, this may be why so many activists and idealists are attracted to online +venues. There is a richer sense of possibility. Contemporary politics and +government have been captured by big money, professionals, and concentrated +power. By contrast, in the digital republic, the ethic of transparency deals +harshly with institutional manipulations, deceptions, and bad faith. They +literally become part of your “permanent record,” forever available via a +Google search. More fundamentally, the digital republic has a basic respect for +everyone’s ability to contribute. It respects the principle of open access for +all. The “consent of the governed” really matters. How sobering it is, then, to +return to the “real world” of the American polity — or most other national +governments — and realize that “money talks and bullshit walks.” How depressing +to realize that the system is highly resistant to ordinary citizen action, such +is the mismatch of resources. +={ transparency +1 ; + open business models : + transparency in +} + +The growing dissonance between the American system of governance, as practiced, +and the more open, meritocratic online world was surely a factor in Lessig’s +decision in 2007 to step down as CEO of Creative Commons, a move that +eventually took place in April 2008. Lessig’s crushing responsibilities as the +leader of Creative Commons — the international travel, the fund-raising, the +strategic planning, the public events and movement obligations — had surely +taken its toll. Feeling a personal need for new challenges as well as a +responsibility to let new leaders emerge within the CC world, Lessig announced +an ambitious new agenda for himself — tackling the “systemic corruption” of the +democratic process in Congress. He joined with Joe Trippi, the campaign manager +for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run, to launch a new organization, Change +Congress, which seeks to ban special-interest campaign contributions, secure +public financing for campaigns, and bring greater transparency to congressional +proceedings. In a shuffle of roles, longtime board member James Boyle — who had +been especially active on science and education initiatives — became the new +chairman of Creative Commons. Board member Joi Ito, who had been chairman for a +brief period, became CEO. +={ Boyle, James : + CC board, on | chairman, as ; + Change Congress (organization) ; + Dean, Howard ; + democracy : + corruption in | traditional forms of +1 ; + Trippi, Joe ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + political activity of +} + +If Lessig is going to succeed in using the tools of the digital republic to +reform and rejuvenate the American polity (and perhaps inspire other +governments as well), he will have to confront the rather deeply rooted +premises of the official constitutional order. The fast-paced, commons-based +governance of the digital republic is naturally going to clash with a system of +governance that revolves around bureaucratic hierarchies, a slow-moving system +of law, archaic types of political intermediaries, and electoral principles +designed for eighteenth-century life. Can the two be reconciled? The structural +tensions are likely to be a significant and persistent issue for many, many +years. + +2~ A Long-Term Power Shift? +={ free culture : + political nature of +23 +} + +It is hard to get a fix on this long-term transformation because the struggles +to actualize an emergent democracy, as envisioned by Ito, are strangely +apolitical and intensely political at the same time. They are apolitical in the +sense that commoners are chiefly focused on the pragmatic technical challenges +of their individual projects; they are not usually involved in official +policymaking in legislatures or before courts and government agencies. Yet free +software and free culture projects are highly political in the sense that +commons projects, taken together over time, represent a profound challenge to +the conventional market order and political culture. For example, Wikitravel, +Jamendo, and open-access journals arguably provide better value than the +commercial alternatives. The success of free software punctures the +foundational assumptions of copyright law, making it easier to challenge new +expansions of copyright law. Participatory commons are diverting viewer +“eyeballs” away from commercial media and its genres of culture, spurring the +growth of new hybrid forms of user-generated content. These kinds of effects, +which advance project by project, month by month, are likely to have a longterm +transformational impact. A new social ethic is taking root. +={ Ito, Joichi ; + free software : + FOSS/FLOSS +2 ; + FOSS/FLOSS +2 ; + copyright law : + assumptions of ; + democracy : + emergent +} + +Free culture, though culturally progressive, is fairly nonjudgmental about +ideological politics. When American conservatives decided they wanted to start +Conservapedia because they found Wikipedia too liberal, Wikipedia founder Jimmy +Wales was happy to bless it: “Free culture knows no bounds . . . We welcome the +reuse of our work to build variants. That’s directly in line with our +mission.”~{ Robert Mackey, “Conservapedia: The Word Says it All,” /{New York +Times}/, March 8, 2007, at +http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/conservapedia-the-word-says-it-all/?scp=1&sq=wales+conservapedia. +}~ Anthropology professor E. Gabriella Coleman has found a similar ecumenicism +in the free software movement, which is agnostic about conventional politics +but adamant about its own polity of freedom.~{ E. Gabriella Coleman, “The +Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent +Politics of Contrast,” /{Anthropology Quarterly}/ 77, no. 3 (Summer 2004), pp. +507–19. See also her Ph.D. dissertation, “The Social Construction of Freedom in +Free and Open Source Software: Hackers, Ethics and the Liberal Tradition,” +abstract at http://healthhacker.org/biella/coleman-abstract.pdf. }~ Thus, the +FOSS movement has no position with respect to social justice or globalization +issues, but it does demand a strict commitment to the “four freedoms” of +software development. Johan Söderberg makes much the same case in his book +/{Hacking Capitalism}/.~{ Johan Söderberg, /{Hacking Capitalism: The Free and +Open Source Software Movement}/ (New York: Routledge, 2007). }~ +={ Coleman, E. Gabriella ; + Wales, Jimmy ; + Söderberg, Johan +} + +As projects like GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, open courseware, open-access journals, +open databases, municipal Wi-Fi, collections of CC-licensed content, and other +commons begin to cross-link and coalesce, the commons paradigm is migrating +from the margins of culture to the center. The viral spiral, after years of +building its infrastructure and social networks, may be approaching a Cambrian +explosion, an evolutionary leap. +={ commons : + force for change, as +5 +} + +History suggests that any new style of politics and polity will arrive through +models developed /{from within}/ the edifice of existing law, markets, and +culture. A revolutionary coup or showdown with existing institutions will not +be necessary. Superior working models — running code and a healthy commons — +will trump polemics and exhortation. + +Ideological activists and political professionals are likely to scoff at this +scenario. After all, they are suspicious of distributed political power, if not +hostile to it. They prefer the levers of consolidated power (laws, court +rulings, police powers) that are within their sphere of influence to the +dispersed, sovereign powers of an online multitude. The latter is highly +resistant to capture and control, and in that sense, profoundly threatening to +the traditional configurations of political power. We have already seen how the +mandarins of journalism, politics, and business are quick to lash out at the +noncredentialed masses who dare to put forward their own interpretations of the +world. + +However necessary it is to engage in the official governance of a nation, +corrupted though it may be, the commoners have shown that building their own +functioning commons can be a powerful force for change as well. A commons of +technical standards for the Web — how mundane! — can achieve more than most +antitrust lawsuits. A common pool of information can prevent a company from +reaping easy monopoly rents from the control of a public good. Instead, the +company must “move upstream” to provide more specialized forms of value (for +example, sophisticated graphing of the information or data analysis). A commons +may also be affirmatively helpful to businesses, as Eric von Hippel has shown, +by aggregating a body of aficionados into a social community that can +articulate customer needs and preferences in highly efficient ways: the commons +as a cheap form of R & D and marketing. + +In either case, the rise of a commons can be disruptive not just because it +changes how market power is exercised, but because it may disperse power to a +broader community of participants. Recall Johnson’s observation that a commons +is a “self-causing legal order” that competes with other legal orders. +Individuals who affiliate with an online community may acquire the ability to +manage their own social relationships and group identity. +={ Johnson, David R. ; + commons : + new type of legal organism +1 ; + law : + commons as new type of legal organism +1 | political implications of +1 ; + democracy : + power of the commons in +1 +} + +This is not just a form of marketplace power, it is a form of /{political}/ +power. In effect, a group may be able to neutralize the power of corporations +to use brands to organize their identities. By developing its own discourse and +identity, an online community can reject their treatment as a demographic +cohort of consumers. They can assert their broader, nonmarket concerns. As a +group of commoners, they are less susceptible to propaganda, ideology, and +commercial journalism as tools for organizing their political allegiances. They +have greater civic sovereignty. + +“Free cooperation aims at distributing power,” argues Geert Lovink, a Dutch +media theorist: +={ Lovink, Geert +1 } + +_1 I am not saying that power as such disappears, but there is certainly a +shift, away from the formal into the informal, from accountable structures +towards a voluntary and temporal connection. We have to reconcile with the fact +that these structures undermine the establishment, but not through recognizable +forms of resistance. The “anti” element often misses. This is what makes +traditional, unreconstructed lefties so suspicious, as these networks just do +their thing and do not fit into this or that ideology, be it neoliberal or +autonomous Marxist. Their vagueness escapes any attempt to deconstruct their +intention either as proto-capitalist or subversive.~{ Geert Lovink, “Theses on +Wiki Politics,” an exchange with Pavlos Hatzopoulos, /{Re-public}/, at +http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=135. }~ + +This can be disorienting. Energies are not focused on resisting an oppressor, +but rather on building innovative, positive alternatives. In Buckminster +Fuller’s terms, free culture is mostly about building new models that make the +existing models obsolete. Instead of forging an identity in relation to an +adversary, the movement has built an identity around an affirmative vision and +the challenge of /{becoming}/. People feel fairly comfortable with a certain +level of ambiguity because the whole environment is so protean, diverse, +evolving, and dynamic. +={ Fuller, R. Buckminster } + +The GPL and the CC licenses are ingenious hacks because they navigate this +indeterminate ideological space with legally enforceable tools, while looking +to informal social practice and norms to provide stable governance. (“Order +without law,” in law professor Robert Ellickson’s formulation.)~{ Robert +Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, MA: +Harvard University Press, 2005). }~ The licenses use the existing legal order +to achieve their goals (the sharing of tools and content), and so the +strategies are not seen as politically provocative. Yet the licenses are +nonetheless politically transformative because they help new communities of +practice to organize themselves and do work that may question core premises of +copyright law, conventional economics, and government policy in general. +={ Ellickson, Robert } + +The beauty of this “ideological straddle” is that it enables a diverse array of +players into the same tent without inciting sectarian acrimony. (There is some, +of course, but mostly at the margins.) Ecumenical tolerance is the norm because +orthodoxies cannot take root at the periphery where innovation is constantly +being incubated. In any case, there is a widespread realization in the +networked world that shared goals are likely to require variable +implementations, depending on specific needs and contexts. + +It may appear that the free software hacker, blogger, tech entrepreneur, +celebrity musician, college professor, and biological researcher have nothing +in common. In truth, each is participating in social practices that are +incrementally and collectively bringing into being a new sort of democratic +polity. French sociologist Bruno Latour calls it the “pixellation of +politics,”~{ Bruno Latour, “We Are All Reactionaries Today,” Re-public, at +http://www.republic.gr/en/?p=129. }~ which conjures up a pointillist painting +slowly materializing. The new polity is more open, participatory, dynamically +responsive, and morally respected by “the governed” than the nominal +democracies of nation-states. The bureaucratic state tends to be too large and +remote to be responsive to local circumstances and complex issues; it is +ridiculed and endured. But who dares to aspire to transcend it? +={ Latour, Bruno } + +Sooner or later, history-making citizenship is likely to take up such a +challenge. It already has. What is the digital republic, after all, but a +federation of self-organized communities, each seeking to fulfill its members’ +dreams by developing its own indigenous set of tools, rules, and ethics? The +power of the commons stems from its role as an organizing template, and not an +ideology. Because it is able to host a diverse and robust ecosystem of talent +without squeezing it into an ideological straitjacket, the commons is flexible +and resilient. It is based on people’s sincerest passions, not on remote +institutional imperatives or ideological shibboleths. It therefore has a +foundational support and energy that can outperform “mainstream” institutions. +={ citizenship : + history-making +1 ; + commons : + political implications of +1 +} + +This, truly, is the animating force of the viral spiral: the capacity to build +one’s own world and participate on a public stage. (Cicero: “Freedom is +participation in power.”) When such energies are let loose in an open, +networked environment, all sorts of new and interesting innovations emerge. +Since an online commons does not have the burden of turning a profit or +supporting huge overhead, it can wait for serendipity, passion, and +idiosyncratic brilliance to surface, and then rely on the Internet to propagate +the fruits virally. +={ Cicero : + on freedom +} + +Oddly enough, entrenched commercial interests do not seem to be alarmed by the +disruptive long-term implications of free culture. If the users of CC licenses +genuflect before the altar of copyright law, it would appear, that is +sufficient. Due respect is being shown. Meanwhile, at the level of social +practice, the commoners are gradually building a very different moral economy +that converges, from different paths, on a new type of civic order. In +/{Code}/, Lessig called it “freedom without anarchy, control without +government, consensus without power.” +={ Lessig, Lawrence : + Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace | freedom, and +} + +It is not entirely clear how the special capacities of bottom-up networks — a +“non-totalizing system of structure that nonetheless acts as a whole,” in Mark +Taylor’s words — can be integrated with conventional government and +institutions of power. It is easy to imagine a future confrontation in the +political culture, however, as the citizens of the digital republic confront +the stodgy bureaucratic state (corporate and governmental). The latter will +have the advantages of constitutional authority and state and economic power, +but the former are likely to have the advantages of social legitimacy, superior +on-the-ground information, and creative energy. How the digital republic will +confront the old regime, or supplant it gradually as archaic institutions +collapse over time, is the stuff of future history. +={ Taylor, Mark ; + citizenship : + history-making +1 +} + +Theory has its limits. The building of the digital republic was in many ways +animated by theory, of course, chiefly the rejection of certain theories of +copyright law and the invention of new narratives about creativity and the +commons. But this project has not been an intellectual, theory-driven +enterprise so much as a vast, collective enterprise of history-making +citizenship. Using the affordances of digital technologies, individuals have +stepped out of their customary or assigned roles to invent entirely new +vehicles for creativity, social life, business, politics, science, and +education. Individuals have come together to make some remarkable new tools and +institutions to serve their needs and preferences. +={ commons : + sources of new ideas, as +3 +} + +The story of the commons is, in this sense, the story of a series of +public-spirited individuals who are determined to build new vehicles for +protecting shared wealth and social energies. It is the story of Richard +Stallman fighting the privatization of software and the disenfranchisement of +the hacker community. It is the story of Eric Eldred’s determination to go to +jail if necessary to defend his ability to build a Web site for great American +literature. The viral spiral, as I have called it, truly gained momentum when +Lawrence Lessig, as a boundary-breaking law professor, decided to mount a +constitutional test case and then to assemble a larger effort to imagine and +build a new licensing scheme for sharing. +={ Stallman, Richard ; + Eldred, Eric : + public domain, and ; + Lessig, Lawrence : + law in contemporary context, and ; + software : + proprietary +} + +The viral spiral then spins off in dozens of directions as newly empowered +people discover the freedoms and satisfactions that can accrue to them through +this ancient yet now rediscovered and refurbished social vessel. Taken +together, countless commons projects are validating some new models of human +aspiration. Instead of presuming that a society must revolve around competitive +individuals seeking private, material gain (the height of “rationality,” +economists tell us), the commons affirms a broader, more complex, and more +enlightened paradigm of human self-interest. If the Invisible Hand presumes to +align private interest and the public good, the commons has shown that +cooperation and sharing can also serve this goal with great versatility and +sophistication. +={ commoners : + sharing by +} + +Over the long term, the real meaning of the viral spiral may lie in our +discovery that the new platforms that we use to create and organize knowledge, +and relate to one another, is changing how we think and how we conceptualize +our place in the world. John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox PARC, +has said, “From my perspective, a key property of participatory cultures is +that they help to create both a culture of learning and a culture of doing. The +social basis of doing (e.g. networked communities of interest/ practice) that +you see emerging here actually form reflective practicum(s). This, in turn, +ends up grounding epistemology — ways of knowing — and provides a pathway back +to a kind of pragmatism that Dewey first talked about that is situated between +realism and idealism. This is the pathway to creating a learning society and a +culture that can embrace change by unleashing and affording productive inquiry +in powerful and exciting ways.”~{ John Seely Brown, personal communication, +January 26, 2008. }~ +={ Brown, John Seely ; + Dewey, John +} + +By empowering us to “step into history” and take greater responsibility for +more aspects of our lives, it is no exaggeration to say that the commons +encourages us to become more integrated human beings. We learn to integrate our +production with our consumption, our learning with our doing, and our ideals +with practical realities. This is surely why the viral spiral has been so +powerfully transformative. It has helped bring our personal needs and interests +into a closer, more congenial alignment with the institutions that serve us. We +may be caught in a messy transition, and there remains much to negotiate and +debate, but we should count our blessings. Few generations are as fortunate in +being able to imagine and build a new commons sector of such liberating +potential. +={ citizenship : + history-making +} + diff --git a/data/samples/wrapped/translation_languages b/data/samples/wrapped/translation_languages new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d84a94e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/samples/wrapped/translation_languages @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +de fr es ja ru zh diff --git a/man/man1/sisu-markup-samples.1 b/man/man1/sisu-markup-samples.1 index a7326e8..9efc632 100644 --- a/man/man1/sisu-markup-samples.1 +++ b/man/man1/sisu-markup-samples.1 @@ -45,6 +45,13 @@ democratizing_innovation.eric_von_hippel.sst .I Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel (2005) +.TP +don_quixote.miguel_de_cervates.sst +.BR +.I Don Quixote, +Miguel de Cervantes (1615) +(translator John Ormsby) + .TP down_and_out_in_the_magic_kingdom.cory_doctorow.sst .BR @@ -143,6 +150,13 @@ viral_spiral.david_bollier.sst .I Viral Spiral, David Bollier (2008) +.TP +war_and_peace.leo_tolstoy.sst +.BR +.I War and Peace, +Leo Tolstoy (1869) +(translator Aylmer Maude and Louise Shanks Maude) + .SH SEE ALSO \fIsisu\fR(1), -- cgit v1.2.3